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-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Norwich Road, by Charles G. Harper

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions

-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of

-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at

-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have

-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

-

-Title: The Norwich Road

-       An East Anglian Highway

-

-Author: Charles G. Harper

-

-Release Date: January 3, 2020 [EBook #61087]

-

-Language: English

-

-Character set encoding: UTF-8

-

-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NORWICH ROAD ***

-

-

-

-

-Produced by Chris Curnow, Alan and the Online Distributed

-Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was

-produced from images generously made available by The

-Internet Archive)

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration: SCOLE WHITE HART.]

-

-

-

-

-                             =THE NORWICH

-                            ROAD=: AN EAST

-                            ANGLIAN HIGHWAY

-

-                         By CHARLES G. HARPER

-

-           Author of "_The Brighton Road_," "_The Portsmouth

-            Road_," "_The Dover Road_," "_The Bath Road_,"

-         "_The Exeter Road_," _and_ "_The Great North Road_."

-

-                 _Illustrated by the Author, and from

-                    Old-Time Prints and Pictures._

-

-                            [Illustration]

-

-                   LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL LTD. 1901

-

-                       [_All Rights reserved._]

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration]

-

-

-

-

-PREFACE

-

-

-_The author of a little book published in 1818, called_ A JOURNEY TO

-LONDON, _which is nearly all "London" with very little "journey,"

-remarks that "it is as uncommon for a book to go into the world without

-a preface, as a man without a hat. They are both convenient coverings."

-Here, then, is the customary covering._

-

-_Introducing this, the seventh in a series of books telling the story

-of our great highways, it may perhaps be as well to re-state the

-methods used, and objects aimed at. The chief intention is to provide a

-readable book which shall avoid the style either of a Guide-Book or a

-History. It is the better fortune to be in the reader's hands than in

-the dusty seclusion of those formidable works, the County Histories;

-or disregarded among the guide-books of forgotten holidays. To the

-antiquary it will, of course, be obvious that this and other volumes

-of the series "contain many omissions," as the Irish reviewer said;

-but such things as find no place here have, as a general rule, been

-disregarded because they not only do not help the Story of the Road

-along, but rather hinder its progression._

-

-_The_ NORWICH ROAD, _in its one hundred and twelve miles, passes by

-many an historic site and through districts distinguished for their

-quiet pastoral beauty. In being historic it is not singular, for, as

-Oliver Wendell Holmes very truly said, "England is one vast museum,"

-and the old road would be remarkable indeed, that, like Canning's_

-"NEEDY KNIFE GRINDER," _had no story to tell. It is, however, in the

-especial characteristics of East Anglian scenery, speech, customs, and

-architecture that this road stands apart and is highly individualised.

-"East Anglia" is no merely arbitrary and meaningless term, as those who

-travel it, if only on the highway, will speedily find._

-

-_But this shall be no trumpet-blast; nor indeed do the charms of

-Eastern England require such a fanfare, for who has not yet heard

-of that lovely valley of the Stour, so widely known as "Constable's

-Country," by whose exquisite water-meadows and shady lanes the old

-turnpike passes? Scenery such as this; windmills, cornfields, tall

-elms, winding rivers, and commons populous with geese and turkeys, are

-typical of the_ NORWICH ROAD, _which may, with this introduction, now

-be left to recommend itself_.

-

-  CHARLES G. HARPER.

-

-  PETERSHAM, SURREY,

-  _October 1901_.

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration: LIST

-

-OF

-

-ILLUSTRATIONS]

-

-SEPARATE PLATES

-

-

-  SCOLE WHITE HART                                       _Frontispiece_

-

-                                                                   PAGE

-

-  ALDGATE PUMP. (_From a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_,

-  1854)                                                               9

-

-  ALDGATE, 1820                                                      21

-

-  THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT

-  MATTHEW KING. (_From a drawing by T. Hosmer

-  Shepherd_, 1854)                                                   59

-

-  WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE                               65

-

-  MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. (_After Rowlandson_)                      71

-

-  ROMFORD                                                            91

-

-  MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL                                             103

-

-  INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. (_From an Old Print_)               107

-

-  NEW HALL LODGES                                                   125

-

-  CHIPPING HILL                                                     133

-

-  "THREE BLIND 'UNS AND A BOLTER." (_From a Print

-  after H. Alken_)                                                  145

-

-  COLCHESTER                                                        215

-

-  THE VALE OF DEDHAM. (_After Constable_)                           219

-

-  SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. (_After Constable_)                  229

-

-  THE CORNFIELD. (_After Constable_)                                233

-

-  THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART                                  265

-

-  STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART"                                     269

-

-  DICKLEBURGH                                                       279

-

-  A DISPUTED PASTURAGE                                              289

-

-  LONG STRATTON                                                     293

-

-  NEWTON FLOTMAN                                                    299

-

-  NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH                                     311

-

-  NORWICH MARKET PLACE                                              315

-

-

-

-

-ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

-

-

-  Vignette                                                _Title Page_

-

-                                                                   PAGE

-

-  Preface                                                           vii

-

-  List of Illustrations: London Stone                                ix

-

-  The Runaway 'Prentice                                               1

-

-  Yard of the "Bull," Leadenhall Street. (_From a drawing

-  by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854)                                      12

-

-  Front of the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate: Present Day                14

-

-  Yard of the "Saracen's Head" in Coaching Days. (_From

-  a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854)                            16

-

-  Yard of the "Saracen's Head": Present Day                          18

-

-  The Yard of the "Bull," Whitechapel, in Coaching Days              27

-

-  The Norwich Coach at Christmastide. (_After Robert

-  Seymour_, 1835)                                                    38

-

-  Whitechapel Old Church                                             63

-

-  Bow                                                                76

-

-  Seven Kings                                                        84

-

-  Whalebone House                                                    87

-

-  Entrance to Romford                                                89

-

-  Old Toll-house, Puttels Bridge                                     93

-

-  The "Fleece," Brook Street                                         94

-

-  The Martyr's Tree, Brentwood                                       95

-

-  Yard of the "White Hart," Brentwood                                98

-

-  Shenfield                                                         100

-

-  Mountnessing Church                                               102

-

-  The Gatehouse, Ingatestone Hall                                   106

-

-  At Margaretting                                                   111

-

-  The "Good Woman" Sign                                             113

-

-  The Bridge: Entrance to Chelmsford                                115

-

-  The Conduit, Chelmsford                                           116

-

-  Tindal's Statue                                                   117

-

-  The "Three Cups" Sign                                             122

-

-  Springfield Church                                                123

-

-  Boreham                                                           128

-

-  The "Angel," Kelvedon                                             141

-

-  Birthplace of Spurgeon                                            151

-

-  Near Mark's Tey                                                   176

-

-  Lexden                                                            180

-

-  The Grand Staircase, Colchester Castle                            199

-

-  Old Man Trap, Colchester Castle                                   205

-

-  Colchester Castle                                                 207

-

-  Gun Hill                                                          221

-

-  Old Toll-house, Stratford Bridge                                  222

-

-  Wolsey's Gateway                                                  242

-

-  The "Lion and Lamb," Angel Lane                                   244

-

-  Sparrowe's House                                                  246

-

-  The "Great White Horse"                                           248

-

-  Mockbeggar Hall                                                   253

-

-  "Stonham Pie"                                                     256

-

-  Near Brockford                                                    257

-

-  "Thwaite Low House"                                               259

-

-  The "Cock," Thwaite                                               260

-

-  Long Stratton                                                     295

-

-  Tasburgh                                                          297

-

-  The Old Brick Pound                                               301

-

-  Caistor Camp                                                      303

-

-  Norwich Snap                                                      318

-

-  Norfolk Turkey, on his way to Leadenhall Market                   320

-

-

-

-

-THE ROAD TO NORWICH

-

-

-                                                                 MILES

-

-  London (Whitechapel Church) to Mile End                            1

-  Stratford-le-Bow (Bow Church)                                      2½

-        (Cross River Lea).

-  Stratford (Broadway)                                               4

-  Forest Gate                                                        5

-  Manor Park                                                         6

-  Ilford                                                             6½

-        (Cross River Roding).

-  Seven Kings                                                        7½

-        (Cross "Seven Kings' Watering," or Fillebrook).

-  Chadwell Heath                                                     9

-  Romford                                                           12

-  Hare Street                                                       13

-  Puttels Bridge                                                    15½

-        (Cross Weald Brook).

-  Brook Street                                                      16½

-  Brentwood                                                         18

-  Shenfield                                                         19

-  Mountnessing Street                                               21

-  Ingatestone                                                       23

-  Margaretting Street                                               25

-  Widford                                                           27½

-        (Cross River Wid or Ash).

-  Moulsham                                                          28¼

-        (Cross River Chelmer).

-

-  Chelmsford                                                        29

-  Springfield                                                       29½

-  Boreham                                                           32¾

-        (Cross River Ter).

-  Hatfield Peverel                                                  34¾

-        (Cross River Witham).

-  Witham                                                            37½

-  Rivenhall End                                                     39½

-  Kelvedon                                                          41

-        (Cross River Blackwater).

-  Gore Pit                                                          42

-  Mark's Tey                                                        45¾

-  Copford                                                           46¼

-  Stanway                                                           47

-  Lexden Heath                                                      48

-  Lexden                                                            49

-  Colchester                                                        51

-        (Cross River Colne).

-  Dilbridge                                                         52½

-  Stratford Bridge                                                  57¾

-        (Cross River Stour).

-  Stratford St Mary                                                 58½

-  Capel Railway Crossing. Capel Station. Capel

-      St Mary.                                                      63½

-  Copdock                                                           65½

-  Washbrook                                                         66

-        (Cross Wash Brook).

-  Ipswich                                                           69¼

-        (Cross River Orwell)

-  Whitton Street                                                    71¾

-  Claydon                                                           72¾

-  Creeting All Saints                                               76¾

-  Stonham Earls                                                     79

-  Little Stonham                                                    79¾

-  Brockford                                                         83¾

-  Thwaite                                                           84½

-  Stoke Ash                                                         86¼

-  Yaxley                                                            88¼

-  Brome                                                             90¼

-        (Cross River Waveney).

-  Scole                                                             92

-  Dickleburgh                                                       94½

-  Tivetshall Level Crossing                                         97¼

-  Wacton                                                           100

-  Long Stratton                                                    101½

-  Tasburgh                                                         102¾

-        (Cross River Tase).

-  Newton Flotman                                                   104½

-        (Cross River Tase).

-  Hartford Bridge                                                  109¼

-        (Cross River Yare).

-  Norwich (Market Place)                                           111½

-

-

-

-

-[Illustration: The NORWICH ROAD]

-

-

-I

-

-

-IN the days before railways came, robbing the exits from London of

-all dignity and purpose, the runaway 'prentice lads of the familiar

-legends, who were always half starved and continually beaten, revolting

-at length from their uncomfortable beds under the shop counters

-and their daily stripes and scorpions, were wont, according to the

-story-books, to steal at night out of their houses of bondage and make

-for the roads. Such an one, making in those days for Norwich, and

-standing at Aldgate in the grey of the morning, looking across the

-threshold of London, would have seen, in the long broad road stretching

-before him, the only means of escape. The shilling or so of which he

-would be the owner would scarce serve him for two or three days' keep;

-and so, although he might have longed for a place on the coach he

-could see starting from the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, at

-4 a.m., there would have been for such as he no choice but to start

-afoot, with as light a heart as possible, and chance the offer of a

-lift on some waggon returning into Essex. Had he, in leaving Aldgate

-behind, asked some passer-by the way to Norwich, he might have been

-seized for what he was, a runaway; but, if he escaped suspicion, would

-have been answered readily enough, for everyone in those times knew

-the way to lie along the Whitechapel Road and by Mile End Turnpike.

-Has anyone in these enlightened and highly-educated times courage

-sufficient to ask his way to Norwich from Aldgate? and, assuming that

-dauntless courage, is it conceivable that anyone in that crowded street

-could tell him?

-

-There are no apprentices and no tyrannical masters of the old kind left

-now, and the only runaways of these days are the bad boys of precocious

-wits who would not think of tramping the highway while they could raise

-a railway fare or "lift" a bicycle. But the way still lies open to the

-explorer from Aldgate, and the old Norwich Road yet follows the line of

-the Roman way into the country of the Iceni.

-

-Between the era of our imaginary truant and that of the Romans, who

-originally constructed this road, there yawns a vast gulf of time;

-certainly not less than eighteen hundred years. The history of the

-road during that space has largely been forgotten; but, worst of all,

-we know perhaps less of it and its life in the times of Charles the

-First, onward to those of William and Mary, than we can recover from

-Roman historians; and certainly its coaching history is in tatters and

-fragments, for those who made it did not live in the bright glow of

-publicity that surrounded the coachmen of roads north, south or west,

-and died unexploited by the sporting writers of the Coaching Age.

-

-

-II

-

-

-NEARLY seventeen centuries have passed since, in the great _Antonine

-Itinerary_ of the Roman Empire, the first guide-book to the roads was

-compiled, and almost eighty years since Cary and Paterson--the rival

-Bradshaws and A.B.C.'s of the Coaching Age--issued the last editions of

-their _Travellers Companions_, which now, instead of being constantly

-in the travellers' hands, are treasured on the shelves of collectors

-interested in relics of days before railways.

-

-The _Antonine Itinerary_ was compiled, A.D. 200-300. Among other roads

-of which it purports to give an account is the road to Venta Icenorum;

-the Norwich Road, as we should say. Its statement is brief and to the

-point, if requiring no little explanation after this lapse of time:--

-

-  Iter a Venta Icenorum Londinio _m.p._             cxxviii _sic._

-  Sitomago                                          xxxii

-  Combretonio                                       xxii

-  Ad Ansam                                          xv

-  Camuloduno                                        vii

-  Canonio                                           viiii

-  Cæsaromago                                        xii

-  Durolito                                          xvi

-  Londinio                                          xv

-

-A hundred and twenty-eight miles, that is to say, between Venta and

-London. The Romans, of course, calculated all their mileages in Britain

-from that hoary relic, the still existing "London Stone," which, from

-behind its modern iron grating in the wall of St Swithin's Church,

-still turns a battered face towards the heedless, hurrying crowds in

-Cannon Street, in the City of London.

-

-In coaching days the Norwich Road, in common with most East Anglian

-routes, was measured from Whitechapel Church, and the distance from

-that landmark to Norwich given as 111½ miles. The apparent wide

-difference between those measurements of classic and modern times is

-very nearly reconciled when we add a mile for the distance between

-London Stone and Whitechapel Church to the 111½ miles, and when we

-reduce the Roman miles to English. An English mile measures 5280 feet,

-while a Roman mile runs only to 4842 feet, this fact accounting, along

-the road to Norwich, for some 13 miles of the discrepancy, and bringing

-the difference to the insignificant one of 3½ miles; or, assuming the

-Roman ruins at Caistor, 3 miles short of Norwich, to mark the site of

-Venta Icenorum, 6½ miles; no very wide margin of error.

-

-The compiler of that ancient itinerary is unknown. He, or they (for

-a survey of the Roman Empire cannot have been made by one man), are

-quite hidden and lost to sight under the title of "Antonine," which

-was given in honour of the Emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla,

-father and son, who both owned the name Antoninus. By similarly

-honorary titles we are accustomed to christen our public buildings.

-Thus, in coming ages, when such earthworms as engineers and architects

-are forgotten, the "Victoria" Embankment, "Victoria" Station, the

-"Victoria and Albert" Museum, and the thousand and one other things

-thus entitled will serve to hand a Sovereign down to futurity, while

-the names of those who created them, good or ill, will have perished,

-like the leaves of autumn. Customs change, and fashions cease to be,

-but snobbery is more enduring than brass or marble, and outlasts the

-mummies of the Pharaohs.

-

-The compiler who drew up the list of places on the road between

-Londinium and Venta has chosen to reckon backwards. The "_m. p._" is

-the abbreviation for _mille passus_, or paced Roman miles; the figures

-after the first line giving the distance from the place last mentioned.

-Setting out from London, we find "Durolitum" to be identified with the

-Roman earthworks of Uphall, near Romford; "Cæsaromagus" to be identical

-with Writtle, near Chelmsford; "Canonium" to stand for Kelvedon;

-"Camulodunum" for Colchester; and "Ad Ansam" for Stratford St Mary;

-while "Combretonium" and "Sitomagus" still puzzle antiquaries, who are

-reduced to the extremity of suggesting the opposite alternatives of

-Brettenham or Burgh for the one, and Dunwich or Thetford for the other;

-names with a specious resemblance, and on circuitous routes east or

-west of the direct road which would more than account for the Roman

-surveyor's overplus of miles. The direct road, however, is unmistakably

-Roman, and those who will may seek for the elusive "Sitomagus" and

-"Combretonium" along it. Haply they may discover them at Scole,

-Dickleburgh or Long Stratton.

-

-But along the whole length of the road, from London to Norwich, the

-wayfarer receives impressions of its true Roman character, whether

-in its appearance or in the place-names on the way. Old Ford and

-Stratford-at-Bow, where the Roman paved fords crossed the River Lea;

-that other "old ford" at Ilford, across the River Roding, which was

-already ancient when the Saxons came and so named it, "Eald Ford,"

-leaving it for later times to corrupt the name into "Ilford" and

-for uninstructed historians to explain the meaning to have been

-that it was an "ill ford"; to which condition, indeed, many had

-descended in mediæval times: these are examples. Others are found at

-Ingatestone, the Saxon "Ing-atte-stone" = the "meadow at the stone,"

-a Roman milestone that stood by the wayside; in the names of Stanway,

-Colchester, Stratford St Mary. Little Stonham, Tivetshall, and Long

-Stratton, places to be more particularly mentioned later in these pages.

-

-It has been aptly pointed out by East Anglian antiquaries that the

-circuitous route eastward or westward of the straight road between

-Stratford St Mary and Norwich, on which Sitomagus and Combretonium

-may have been situated, may probably have been an early Roman way,

-constructed shortly after the conquest of the Iceni, along an old

-native trackway, and superseded in later and more settled times by

-the direct road, overlooked by the Antonine compilers who, working at

-Rome, the very centre of the Empire, may not have been fully informed

-of changes in countries like Britain, on the edge of the Unknown.

-This view, when we consider the long period stretching between the

-conquest of this part of the country and the final break up of the

-Romano-British civilisation, about A.D. 450, has much to recommend it.

-A period of some three hundred and eighty years of colonisation and

-development, equalling, for example, the great gulf of time between

-our own day and that of Henry the Eighth, the changes in its course

-must have rivalled, if not have surpassed, those in our roads between

-the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. During those eras, between the

-first and the fifth centuries, many of the original winding tracks

-must have been straightened, or left to the secondary position of

-byways, while new and straight roads were engineered across country

-formerly, for one reason or another, avoided. Meanwhile, the Antonine

-Itinerary-makers must have relied for their surveys upon old and

-out-of-date information, just as, in our own time, we find many recent

-maps, printed from the Ordnance Survey of a hundred years ago, still

-indicating winding roads that have been non-existent for generations,

-and ignoring the direct highways made by Telford and others just before

-the opening of the Railway Era.

-

-

-III

-

-

-LONDON made no remarkable growth between the Roman and mediæval

-periods, but this road had in that time slightly altered its course

-from its starting-point, and, instead of going from Cannon Street

-to Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Old Ford, left the City by way of

-Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, continuing down the Mile End and Bow

-Roads to Stratford.

-

-The traveller of Chaucer's day, coming to Ald Gate, in the City wall,

-had reached the country. That gate spanned the road at a point marked

-nowadays by the house, No 2 Aldgate High Street, standing at the

-boundary of the parishes of St Katharine Cree and St Botolph. In 1374

-Chaucer took from the Corporation of London a lease for the remainder

-of his life of the rooms in this gate, which was pulled down and

-succeeded by another, built in 1606, which in its turn disappeared in

-1761.

-

-From his windows commanding the road Chaucer must often have seen that

-dainty gentlewoman, the Prioress of St Leonard's, Stratford, riding to

-or from London, escorted by a numerous train, and from her must have

-drawn that portrait of the prioress who spoke French with a Cockney

-accent:--

-

-  "After the scole of Stratford-attè-Bowe,

-  For French of Parys was to hire unknowe."

-

-In Chaucer's day they probably taught French, of sorts, at the Priory

-schools.

-

-[Illustration: ALDGATE PUMP. _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_,

-1854.]

-

-At that time it was no little journey to Stratford, although by

-measurement less than four miles, and the lady went strongly escorted,

-as, indeed, did all of consequence, or those who had aught to lose.

-For the more common wayfarers who went alone on this desperate eastern

-trail there stood the Chapel and the Holy Well of St Michael the

-Archangel within the City, where the otherwise unprotected might seek

-the aid of the Saint's strong arm before leaving the walled City behind

-on their perilous faring. This chapel stood where Leadenhall Street,

-Fenchurch Street and Aldgate meet, on a site thrown into the roadway

-in 1876, when the street was widened. Until that year the crypt of

-this shrine had filled the prosaic functions of a cellar in the corner

-house, itself demolished, together with the beautiful Early English

-arches on which it stood. Adjoining was "Aldgate Pump," which had long

-before unromantically taken the place of the sanctified spring. That

-celebrated civic monument is seen in the accompanying illustration,

-taken in 1854. Many City wits have exercised their satirical powers

-upon it, and the expression long current of "a draft on Aldgate Pump,"

-a once popular mercantile phrase for a bad note, goes back so far as

-the days of Fielding. Oddly enough, the water of the pump retained some

-repute until 1876, when, on being analysed, it was found impure, and

-the supply closed. The pump, however, is still in existence, rebuilt

-of its original stones, a few feet away from the old site, and yields

-water again; not, however, from the old saintly source, but from the

-strictly secular filter-beds of the New River Water Company.

-

-[Illustration: YARD OF THE "BULL," LEADENHALL STREET. _From a Drawing

-by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854.]

-

-Having implored the protection of St Michael, travellers of old

-went, heartened, upon their way down what is now Whitechapel High

-Street, which Strype, writing in the time of James the First, calls

-a "spacious fair street," with "sweet and wholesome air." Past

-hedgerows of elm trees and rustic stiles and bridges, those old

-wayfarers went, and onward down the Whitechapel Road, where the

-country was a lovely solitude, with "nothing but the bounteous gifts

-of Nature and saint-like tokens of innocency," which, according to Sir

-Thomas More, in 1504, characterised the charming fields of Mile End,

-Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse. This, it will be allowed, is scarcely

-descriptive of those places to-day, whatever they may become when the

-People's Palace and the University Settlements have done their work.

-

-Thus far for sake of contrast. Let us return to Aldgate for a while,

-and, without following its fortunes throughout the centuries, glance at

-it in the Coaching Age, before the squalor of modern Whitechapel had

-invaded it from the east, or the extension of City business had come to

-destroy most of that picturesque assemblage of old inns and mediæval

-gabled houses, to replace them with the giant warehouses and "imposing"

-offices of modern London.

-

-

-IV

-

-

-ALTHOUGH, as we have seen, the East Anglian roads were, in coaching

-days, measured from Whitechapel Church, the great actual starting-place

-was Aldgate, where many of the old inns were situated, as, in like

-manner, the ancient hostelries of the Borough clustered at the

-beginning of the road to Canterbury and Dover. Aldgate occupies a

-position midway between London Stone, the Roman starting-point in

-Cannon Street, and Whitechapel Church, and to and from this spot came

-and went the stage-coaches, post-chaises and waggons in the palmy days

-of the road. The mail-coaches, of course, had a starting-point of their

-own, and set out from the old General Post-Office in Lombard Street,

-or, in the last years of coaching, from St Martin's-le-Grand.

-

-[Illustration: FRONT OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD," ALDGATE: PRESENT DAY.]

-

-It is true that one might have taken coach from many other and more

-central inns for Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich:--from the "Spread

-Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, a fine old galleried inn demolished at

-the close of 1865; from the "Cross Keys," in the same street; from the

-"Swan with Two Necks," in Lad Lane, anciently Lady Lane (that is to

-say, the Lane of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin), now Gresham Street;

-or from the "Bull," 151 Leadenhall Street, which must by no means be

-confounded with its namesake in Aldgate High Street. Exactly what

-that Leadenhall Street hostelry was like let the picture of its old

-galleried courtyard show.

-

-There was also "another way" to Norwich; out of Bishopsgate, by way

-of Newmarket, Bury and Thetford. Taking this route, which, although

-2½ miles shorter, no true sportsman considered to be the real Norwich

-Road, one started from the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross; from the

-"White Horse," in Fetter Lane (improved away in 1898); from the

-"Flower Pot," in Bishopsgate Street; from yet another "Bull," also in

-Bishopsgate Street; or from the "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand.

-But when all these places have been duly set forth, it is to Aldgate

-that we must turn as the real starting-point.

-

-[Illustration: YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD" IN COACHING DAYS. _From a

-Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854.]

-

-Aldgate in the days before railways was quite unlike the Aldgate of

-to-day. Certain of the old buildings remain, but the "note" of the

-place is entirely altered. It is now a noisy, distracting ante-room to

-the City, in which tinkling tram-cars and costermongers' barrows jostle

-with elephantine railway goods vans; where the Jewish second-hand

-clothes shop rubs a greasy shoulder with the "merchant tailor's" vulgar

-show of electric light, plate glass and wax models; and where the East

-End, in the person of the aproned, ringleted and ostrich-feathered

-factory girl, meets the West, in the shape of some City clerk strayed

-beyond his mercantile or financial frontiers, each regarding the other

-as a curiosity in these social marches. It is as the meeting of salt

-water and fresh, this mingling of the tides of City and East End, and

-to the observant not a little curious. Nothing like it--nothing so

-marked--is to be seen on any other of the borders of the City. There

-is, too, a smack of the sea, a certain air of romance, in the street,

-coming, perhaps, from the windows of the nautical instrument-makers,

-where the binoculars, the quadrants, the sextants and the sea-faring

-tackle in general hint of distant climes and the coral reefs of South

-Pacific isles.

-

-These mariners' emporia were here and in the Minories before railways

-came, and so also were many fine old inns. For Aldgate, difficult

-though it may be to realise it to-day, was not only the place whence

-many of the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches set out, but was also

-the resting-place of travellers to London; and its inns were quite

-as well-appointed as those of the more central ones in the City,

-or those of Charing Cross, or the West End. As travellers by rail

-to London in modern times resort to the railway hotels, so did our

-great-grandfathers find rest at the coaching inns at whose thresholds

-they were set down at their journey's end.

-

-[Illustration: YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD": PRESENT DAY.]

-

-The fragments merely of the last of Aldgate's old hostelries remain, in

-the bold front of Nos. 6 and 7, forming two-thirds of the old frontage

-of the "Saracen's Head." No. 5, the other third, has been destroyed,

-and so also has the old appearance of the galleried courtyard, still

-named "Saracen's Head Yard," but now surrounded by warehouses. The old

-coach archway remains, and the gables at the back of the buildings

-are quaint reminiscences of other times. Coaches plied between the

-"Saracen's Head" and Norwich so far back as 1681, and Strype, the

-antiquary, born in the neighbourhood, in a court whose name now flaunts

-the horrid travesty of "Tripe Court," referring to the inn, speaks of

-it as "very large and of a considerable trade." The existing fragment,

-with its handsome architectural elevation of richly-moulded plaster in

-the Renaissance style of the late seventeenth century, is part of the

-building mentioned by him. Small shops now occupy the ground floor,

-and the upper rooms are let as tenements.

-

-But the "Bull" was perhaps the most famous of these old inns. From it

-Mr Pickwick set out for Ipswich, and from Sam Weller's remark on that

-occasion, "Take care o' the archway, gen'l'men," as the coach started,

-it is evident that the "Bull" possessed a courtyard. At that palmy time

-of inns and coaches, the opening of the nineteenth century, the "Bull"

-was, and long had been, in the Nelson family, a noted race of inn and

-coach proprietors. At that particular time Mrs Ann Nelson, widow of the

-late host, who died about 1812, was the presiding genius. Associated

-with her was her son John. Another son, Robert, had a business of his

-own, and was long proprietor of the "Belle Sauvage," on Ludgate Hill,

-and partner with others in many coaches. A third son, George, drove the

-Exeter "Defiance," horsed by his mother out of London.

-

-But to return to the "Bull" and Mrs Nelson, who had, as her husband

-had, and his father before him, some sort of interest in many coaches

-running into Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, on main or bye-roads. She

-also at one time leased the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street,

-and extended her energies so far as to horse the Exeter "Telegraph"

-and the "Quicksilver" Devonport Mail out of London, together with

-the Exeter "Defiance" night coach, the Manchester "Telegraph," the

-Oxford "Defiance," Brighton "Red Rover," and the Leeds "Courier." In

-their coaching speculations the Nelson family were associated with

-a pastrycook whose little shop adjoined the gateway of the "Bull."

-Occasionally a new hand on one of the coaches would send his leaders'

-noses through the shop front, for that gateway was very narrow and Mrs

-Nelson's coachmen anything but deliberate. On the other side of the

-gateway was a whip-maker's shop, kept by one James Johnson, who throve

-mightily on the custom of the coachmen and others who frequented the

-"Bull."

-

-This most energetic of landladies and Napoleonic of coach proprietors

-developed and managed her extensive coaching interests long before her

-husband died. He, good, easy-going man, had been a fair whip in earlier

-days, but had long left the box, and had no head for business, although

-a very fine taste in wines and spirits: the lack of the first probably

-a corollary of the second. She spared neither herself nor her servants.

-Rising considerably before the lark, she saw the owls to bed, and was

-a martinet to her coachmen. Left a widow while in the prime of life,

-she still wore in old age the dress of her youth. The sketch of her in

-the picture of the "Bull" yard in coaching days shows exactly what her

-costume was like. A short skirt revealed high-heeled shoes with large

-buckles, the heels painted red. Black velvet was her winter wear, and

-fancy apron, lace neckerchief and frilled cap invariable items. Up to

-her seventieth year she was the last up at night, scouring the house

-to see that all was safe; and the first up in the morning, looking

-after the stable people and seeing that the horses had their feeds and

-were properly cared for. Inside and outside the house, and down the

-eastern roads, her influence was despotic and would brook no defiance.

-Her "Ipswich Blues" had long been famous when an opposition coach was

-started. Opposition could not be allowed to live, and so the fares

-were reduced from eight shillings inside and sixteen shillings out, by

-regular stages until the point was reached when passengers were not

-only carried for nothing, but were presented with an excellent dinner

-at Witham. At that point the rivals discreetly retired, when fares rose

-again to their old level.

-

-[Illustration: ALDGATE, 1820.]

-

-Mrs Nelson insisted on the most rigid punctuality. Did the coachman

-of one of her crack coaches or one of her still more famous

-"Oppositions" bring his team down her yard five minutes over time,

-he was reprimanded; ten minutes, and he was fined half-a-crown; a

-quarter of an hour, and he stood a good chance of being dismissed. She

-ran a Southend "Opposition" every afternoon by Romford, Brentwood,

-Billericay, Wickford, Raleigh and Rochford, along Essex roads of a

-feather-bed softness of mud; but time must be kept. She provided good

-horses and would not hear of excuses. One day, when the roads were

-particularly heavy, the "Opposition" came in half an hour late from

-Southend. The coachman, after the manner of his kind, on driving into

-the yard and pulling up at the coffee-room door, threw his whip across

-the wheelers' backs. Mrs Nelson had long been watching the clock, and,

-coming out, took the whip and hung it up, with the quiet remark, "That

-whip is no longer yours, Philpot--half an hour behind."

-

-"But the roads are so bad, ma'am," remonstrated poor Toby. "I'm sure,

-ma'am, the gentlemen knew I did my best; but I felt bound to spare the

-cattle."

-

-"_I_ find the cattle and employ you to drive them," replied the

-inexorable landlady; "_you_ have nothing to do but to keep time. Draw

-your wages and leave the yard."

-

-Under this iron rule it is no wonder that her coachmen were sometimes

-"pulled up" for furious driving. On one of these occasions she appeared

-in court in defence of her man. "I understand, Mrs Nelson," blandly

-remarked the Chairman of the Bench, "that you give your coachmen

-instructions to race the rival coach."

-

-"Not exactly," replied the lady; "my orders to them are simply that

-they are to get the road and keep it."

-

-But if a very dragon of strictness, she treated coachmen and guards

-very well. They had their especial room, and dined as well there, at

-reduced prices, as any of her coffee-room customers. This especial

-consideration reflected itself in those functionaries, who jealously

-preserved the privacy of their room; the amateur coachman who secured

-the invitation to join them (and to pay out of his own pocket for

-their wine and spirits) feeling himself greatly honoured.

-

-In other respects, the "Bull" was a model to other houses. No damp

-sheets in any one of its hundred and fifty beds, no drunken brawlers;

-nothing a minute out of time, or an inch out of place. Mrs Nelson's

-fine house was, indeed, nothing less than an institution. In later

-years her son John took more of the management upon his shoulders, and

-the business seemed likely to long outlast his time.

-

-

-V

-

-

-BUT a whisper of coming changes disturbed the air as early as 1830.

-Coachmen and travellers talked in the stableyard and the cosy rooms of

-the "Bull" of men with strange instruments encountered along the road;

-"chaps with telescopes on three sticks, and other chaps with chains

-and things, measuring the fields." It was thus that they described

-the surveyors, with their theodolites and their staff of men, who

-were setting out the proposed route of the projected Eastern Counties

-Railway that was to run all the way from London to Colchester, Norwich

-and Yarmouth.

-

-John Nelson was too confident in the existing order of things to

-believe that a few pounds of coal and some boiling water would ever

-be a match for his horses, or that a time would presently come when

-those passengers of his who now derided the railways would desert the

-coaches. The "Bull" had been in his family for more than a hundred and

-twelve years, as an inn and a coaching house, and he could as soon have

-imagined the end of the world as a day coming when the Essex, Suffolk

-and Norfolk coaches should no longer enter or leave his yard. It was a

-good joke for a while, when the coaches came in, to ask "How they were

-getting on with that railway?" but when the surveys were completed and

-the prospectus of the "Grand Eastern Counties Railway" was issued in

-1834, it was seen that the railway men meant business. The original

-proposal of the directors was to follow the road closely and to bring

-the line into Aldgate. When it was seen that the railway was really to

-be made, Nelson raised an opposition against the Aldgate terminus, and

-was successful in driving the Company into an out-of-the-way site in

-Shoreditch, where for many years that terminus remained.

-

-[Illustration: THE YARD OF THE "BULL," WHITECHAPEL, IN COACHING DAYS.]

-

-The Eastern Counties Railway was opened as far as Chelmsford in 1839,

-to Colchester in 1842, and communication to Norwich was opened up in

-1845. From the day of the first opening, the "Bull" declined. Old

-customers still found their way from the slums of Shoreditch to its

-hospitable door, but were not reinforced by the newer generation of

-travellers, to whom the road and its end in Aldgate were alike unknown.

-They went to the City inns, and later to the more central hotels,

-leaving the "Bull" to slowly sink into neglect. John Nelson made a big

-bid for success in another line, and ran the "Wellington" omnibuses

-with success from 1855 until his death, at the age of seventy-four, in

-June 1868. He had long resided in the West End, and was a man of ample

-fortune, so that the end of the "Bull's" coaching career hurt him only

-in sentiment. His mother, that most autocratic and business-like of

-women, had died ten years before, active almost to the last, although

-she had reached the age of eighty-five years. Towards the close of

-1868 the old inn ended its long career. Its substantial, old-fashioned

-silver-plate and massive furniture were sold by auction, with the stock

-of rare old wines, laid in many years before, for that old generation

-of travellers who delighted in port and sherry, and plenty of both.

-

-The very site of the "Bull" is now sought with pains and labour, and

-only to be discovered with difficulty by the present generation. It

-was numbered 25 Aldgate High Street, and stood where Aldgate Avenue, a

-modern alley rich in offices of "commission agents," and curious things

-of that kind, now cuts its way through where the old yard used to be.

-

-Close by the "Bull" was another old coaching inn, the "Blue Boar,"

-now quite vanished, kept for a time by John Thorogood. The Thorogoods

-were in those days, and in these times of amateur coaching are still,

-a family of coachmen. "Old John," who owned the "Norwich Times," and

-actually drove it for two years without missing a journey the whole of

-that time, clearly deserved his patronymic, in thus handling the reins

-along a hundred and twelve miles of road for seven hundred and thirty

-consecutive days.

-

-It was to the "Blue Boar" that little David Copperfield came, on his

-miserable journey from Yarmouth:--"We approached London by degrees, and

-got, in due time, to the inn, in the Whitechapel district, I forget

-whether it was the 'Blue Bull' or the 'Blue Boar,' but I know it was

-the Blue Something, and that its likeness was painted upon the back

-of the coach." The sculptured effigy of a boar, with gilded tusks and

-hoofs, built into the wall of a tobacco factory, marks the site of the

-inn.

-

-Among other noted inns, the "Three Nuns" must be named. From it set

-out the short stages to Ilford, Epping, Romford and Woodford, together

-with coaches for several of the Essex by-roads. The house owes its

-name to the Minoresses, or nuns, of St Clare, from whose religious

-establishment the Minories obtains its title. The inn was rebuilt in

-1877, and is now nothing more than a huge public-house.

-

-Many other inns of consequence in their day have left nothing but

-their yards behind them to show where they stood:--George Yard, Spread

-Eagle Yard, Black Horse Yard, Boar's Head Yard, White Swan Yard, Half

-Moon Passage, and Kent and Essex Yard are such relics, bordering High

-Street, Whitechapel, where one curious sign survives, that of an inn

-called the "Horse and Leaping Bar."

-

-

-VI

-

-

-ONE decided advantage the Chelmsford, Colchester and Ipswich route

-to Norwich possessed in old times over that by way of Newmarket and

-Thetford. Neither could have been considered safe in the bad old

-days, but while the traveller across the wild heaths of Newmarket and

-Thetford was almost certain to be "held up" on his lonely course, the

-other way, through Essex, passed by few such wildernesses, and had more

-towns and villages along its course, to give a sense of security.

-Briefly, robbery on one route was a probability, and on the other was

-regarded as certain. Margaret Paston, writing from Norfolk to her

-husband in London, so long ago as the fifteenth century, certainly

-gives even the way through Essex a bad name, for she asks him to pay

-a debt for one of their friends, because it was not safe, "on account

-of the robbers," to send money up from the country; but at the very

-same time the Thetford route had a much more sinister reputation, and

-travellers versed in the gossip of the road avoided it if possible,

-or went in company and well armed, for in that era a certain William

-Cratfield, Rector of Wrotham, "a common and notorious thief and lurker

-on the roads, and murderer and slayer," lurked and robbed and slew on

-Newmarket Heath, in company with a certain "Thomas Tapyrtone, hosyer."

-He was at last laid by the heels, in 1416, and charged with robbing

-a Londoner of £12. This distinguished ornament of the Church died in

-Newgate, but of the villainous hosier we hear no more. Perhaps he had

-realised a fortune in the business and retired to enjoy the fruits of

-his industry. With the disappearance of this worthy couple, travellers

-breathed more freely, but for surety's sake continued to patronise the

-Essex route, and so by way of Ipswich to come to the City of Orchards,

-as Norwich was called of old.

-

-As time went on, a certain degree of security was found in the

-coaches that began to make an appearance with the second half of the

-seventeenth century. They travelled at first no more quickly than

-a man could walk, but they provided company, which was, under the

-circumstances, highly desirable. Soon, however, they found it possible

-to do the journey in two days. Strype, we have already seen mentions

-the "Saracen's Head" in Aldgate as the centre of a considerable trade,

-and to it in 1681 a Norwich coach was running; an innovation which

-aroused the indignation of innkeepers on the way to almost as great a

-height as that of their descendants when, two hundred and forty years

-later, railways were depopulating the roads. When travellers began to

-go by coach instead of on horseback, and to reach London or Norwich in

-two days instead of three or four, those antique tapsters thought they

-saw their living going, and, strange to say, there were not wanting men

-who raised their voices against the innovation of being carried on a

-journey, instead of riding; although, for the most part, their outcry

-was the result only of innate conservatism.

-

-"Travelling in these coaches," said an anonymous pamphleteer, "can

-neither prove advantageous to men's health or business. For what

-advantage is it to men's health to be called out of their beds into

-these coaches an hour before day in the morning, to be hurried in

-them from place to place, till one hour, two, or three within night;

-insomuch that after sitting all day in the summer time stifled with

-heat, and choked with the dust, or the winter time starving and

-freezing with cold or choked with filthy fogs, they are often brought

-into their inns by torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get

-supper; and next morning they are forced into the coach so early that

-they can get no breakfast. What addition is this to men's health or

-business? to ride all day with strangers, oftentimes sick, ancient,

-diseased persons, or young children crying; to whose humours they are

-obliged to be subject, forced to bear with, and many times are poisoned

-with their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of the boxes and

-bundles."

-

-Yet "these coaches" (one can almost hear the intonation of contempt in

-that phrase) were from the first a success. The greater that success

-the louder for a time was the outcry against them. Taylor, the Water

-Poet, was one of those who wrote vehemently against the new methods

-of travel. To him a coach was "a close hypocrite; for it hath a cover

-for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow any wickedness. Besides,

-like a perpetual cheater, it wears two bootes, and no spurs, sometimes

-having two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes (against nature)

-it makes faire ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are

-carried back to back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in

-that miserable manner and thrown overboard into the sea. Moreover, it

-makes people imitate sea-crabs, in being drawn sideways as they are

-when they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a dangerous kind of

-carriage for the commonwealth, if it be considered."

-

-The boot of which he speaks so contemptuously, was a method of packing

-the "outsides," of which we still find a survival in the Irish

-jaunting-car. There are those who trace the origin of the term from the

-French "_boîte_," a box. Even now the coachman's seat is "the box," and

-the modern fore-boot is under it.

-

-Writers of that time seem almost unanimously to have taken sides

-against coaching; with, however, no effect; for, somewhat later than

-Taylor, that doughty Conservative, John Cresset, is found exclaiming

-furiously against the multitude of them. He favoured the suppression

-of all, or, at least--counsels of moderation prevailing--of most. They

-were, he said, mischievous to the public, destructive to trade and

-prejudicial to the land. Not only did they injure the breed of horses,

-but also that of watermen; which last objection goes further than the

-complaints of Taylor himself, who, writing at the same time, does not

-speak of his breed being debased, but only of his trade being crippled.

-Cresset thought the stage-coaches tempted the country gentry to London

-too often, and he accordingly proposed that these conveyances should be

-limited to one for every county town in England, to go backwards and

-forwards once a week.

-

-Vain hope! Coaches of sorts must already have appeared on the road to

-Norwich by the middle of the seventeenth century, for in a proclamation

-of July 20th in the plague year, 1665, when all places were dreading

-infected London, it is ordained, that "from this daie all ye passage

-coaches shall be prohibited to goe from ye city to London and come

-from thence hither, and also ye common carts and wagons." Already,

-in 1696, the "Confatharrat" coach was a well-known conveyance between

-London and Norwich, and the name of Suggate, the London and East

-Anglian carrier, a household word. Unhappily, nothing can be gathered

-as to when Suggate first began to jog along the road, or when the

-"Confatharrat" started to ply between Norwich and the "Four Swans,"

-Bishopsgate Street. All particulars are lost. The odd name of that

-coach was probably a seventeenth-century way of spelling the word

-"confederate," and the selection of such a name proves both that it was

-carried on by an alliance or co-partnership, and that "confederate" had

-not then acquired its sinister modern connotation. Besides these aids

-to travel, a stage-waggon began to ply from the "Popinjay," Tombland,

-Norwich, at an early date; and another from the "Angel," in the Market

-Place, to the "Blossoms" Inn, Laurence Lane, London, was advertised in

-the _Norwich Mercury_, of March 29th, 1729, to "now go regularly every

-Thursday night," setting out on the following Wednesday from London,

-on the return journey. It will thus be seen that it was a five or six

-days' journey for those primitive affairs, and that they apparently did

-not run at regular intervals until that year.

-

-A London and Beccles coach was running in 1707, but the first regular

-Norwich coach of which particulars remain was the "Norwich Machine,"

-which in 1762 set out for London three times a week from the "Maid's

-Head," according to the advertisement still extant. There is nothing

-in that old coaching bill to show that 1762 was the first season of

-the "Norwich Machine." It may have been established some years before

-that date.

-

-  _Norwich, March 26, 1762._

-

-  SUSAN NASMITH and JAMES KEITH,

-

-  Proprietors of the

-

-  NORWICH MACHINE,

-

-  Give Notice

-

- that their Machine will set out from the MAID'S HEAD Inn, in St

- Simon's Parish, in Norwich, on Monday, the 5th day of April next, at

- half-past eleven in the forenoon, and on the Wednesday and Friday in

- the same week, at the same time; and to be continued in like Manner,

- on those Days weekly, for the carrying four inside Passengers, at

- Twenty-five Shillings each, and outside at Twelve Shillings and

- Sixpence each. The inside Passengers to be allowed twenty pound

- Weight, and all above to be paid for at three half-pence per pound;

- and to be in London on the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Evenings

- weekly.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

- _N.B._--A Machine will set out on the same days, at the same time,

- from the GREEN DRAGON, in Bishopsgate Street, London, for Norwich.

-

-In the following year, the "Widow Nasmith" and James Keith advertised

-that they had built large and commodious machines, to carry six

-inside, and reduced the fares to twenty shillings and ten shillings

-respectively; but they had apparently not succeeded in performing the

-journey in less time than a day and a half, for no mention is made of

-speed being accelerated. But a remarkable feature in that announcement

-is the extraordinary cheapness of the fares, little over twopence and a

-penny a mile for inside and outside passengers, at a time when prices

-on other roads ruled from twenty-five to fifty per cent. higher. This

-tells a tale of competition; but Time, the thief, has robbed us of all

-knowledge of those competitors.

-

-A year later the London and Ipswich Post Coaches were advertised to

-set out every week-day, and to perform the 69¼ miles in ten hours, an

-average pace of almost 7 miles an hour; a marvellous turn of speed

-for that age. As to whether those Post Coaches ever _did_ cover that

-distance in ten hours, we may reasonably express a doubt; but there

-was the promise, and 011 the strength of it the proprietors charged

-threepence a mile. As will be seen by the advertisement, these coaches

-carried no outside passengers:--

-

-  _Ipswich, August 17th, 1764._

-

-  THE LONDON AND IPSWICH POST COACHES

-

- Set out on Monday, the 27th of August, at seven o'clock in the morning

- from the BLACK BULL, in Bishopsgate, London, and at the same time from

- the GREAT WHITE HORSE, in Ipswich, and continue every day (Sunday

- excepted), to be at the above places the same evening at five o'clock;

- each passenger to pay threepence per mile, and to be allowed eighteen

- pounds luggage; all above to pay one penny per pound, and so in

- proportion. The coaches, hung upon steel springs, are very easy, large

- and commodious, carry six inside but no outside passengers whatever;

- but have great conveniences for parcels or game (to keep them from the

- weather), which will be delivered at London and Ipswich the same night.

-

- As these coaches are sent out for the ease and expedition of

- gentlemen and ladies travelling, the proprietors humbly hope for their

- encouragement, and are determined to spare no pains to render it as

- agreeable as they can.

-

-  Performed (if God permits) by--

-

-  PET. SHELDON, at the Bull, Bishopsgate Street, London.

-  THOMAS ARCHER, at the White Hart, Brentwood.

-  CHARLES KERRY, at the Black Boy, Chelmsford.

-  GEO. REYNOLDS, at the Three Cups, Colchester; and

-  CHAS. HARRIS, at the Great White Horse, Ipswich.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

- _N.B._--The proprietors will not be answerable for any money, plate,

- jewels, or writings, unless entered and paid for as such.

-

-The reader will perhaps have observed that this advertisement

-especially mentions a convenience for carrying game, and, as a matter

-of fact, game and oysters were prominent from an early period in

-the history of Norwich Road conveyances, and, by the middle of the

-eighteenth century, the Norfolk and Suffolk coaches had already earned

-quite a distinctive character in two seasons of the year, Michaelmas

-and Christmas. East Anglia has always abounded in game, and its

-broad heaths and extensive commons have been the breeding-grounds

-of innumerable geese and turkeys whose careers have ended on London

-dinner-tables. In those two seasons it was often difficult to secure

-a seat on or in any of the "up" coaches from Norwich or Ipswich, for

-while every available inch of space on the mails was occupied by

-festoons of dead birds consigned by country cousins to friends in town,

-the whole of a stage-coach was frequently chartered for the purpose

-of despatching heavy consignments of these noble poultry to the London

-market. Christmas provided extraordinary sights along the Norfolk Road,

-in the swaying coaches, with parcels and geese and turkeys mountains

-high on the roof; with barrels of Colchester natives in the boot, and

-hampers swinging heavily between the axle-trees on a shelf called "the

-cellar"; while from every rail or projection to which they could be

-either safely or hazardously tied depended other turkeys or braces of

-fowls, booked at the last moment before starting. It was something

-in those days to be a turkey or a goose, before whose importance the

-claims of human passengers faded; but it was a fleeting elevation which

-the philosophic did not envy, thinking that here indeed the poet was

-justified in his sounding line--

-

-  "The paths of glory lead but to the grave."

-

-[Illustration: THE NORWICH COACH AT CHRISTMAS TIDE. _After Robert

-Seymour, 1835._]

-

-That unfortunate genius, Robert Seymour, has left us a picture of the

-Norwich coach nearing London at Christmas time, with its feathered

-load. The drawing was made in 1835, at the very height of the Coaching

-Age, and shows from his own observation with what ingenuity every rail

-and projection was used to hang the birds from.

-

-Another highly specialised branch of traffic, which only left the road

-on the opening of the railway, was the constant service of fish waggons

-running between Harwich, Colchester and London, at the then express

-speed of 8 miles an hour.

-

-

-VII

-

-

-BETWEEN the early days of coaching and the end of that period, many

-changes took place on the Norwich Road. So late as 1798, the Mail, the

-"Expedition," and the "Post Coach" were the only coaches to Norwich,

-supplemented by three road waggons; two of them doing the journey

-twice a week, the third setting out weekly. Later came the "Norwich

-Times," "Gurney's Original Day Coach," the "Phænomenon," as it was

-originally spelt; the "Magnet," the Ipswich "Shannon," and the Ipswich

-"Blue." With the object of serving as many places as possible, and,

-incidentally, securing heavier bookings, the "Times" and Gurney's

-coaches took a somewhat circuitous route, leaving the direct road

-at Chelmsford, and going through Braintree, Halstead, Sudbury, Long

-Melford and Bury St Edmunds, rejoining the Norwich Road at Scole.

-

-But the lord of the road was the Mail Coach, beside which the stages

-were very commonplace affairs.

-

-The first mail-coach that ever ran the road between London and Norwich

-started in March 1785, and the service was from the beginning continued

-daily. Before that time the mails had been carried by post-boys, who

-began in 1741 to go six days a week instead of three, as they formerly

-had done.

-

-Mail-coaches are entirely things of the past, for the modern coaching

-revival has only brought back the smart stages and drags of the last

-years of the Coaching Age. The mails were expensive and exclusive

-affairs, constructed to carry only nine persons; four inside and five

-out, including coachman and guard. For the higher fares passengers paid

-they had not always the satisfaction of travelling faster than on the

-stages; but perhaps there was some dignity attaching to a seat on the

-mail which was lacking on ordinary coaches. And certainly they were

-surrounded by pomp and circumstance. The guard wore a scarlet coat

-and went armed with pistol, sword and blunderbuss; not, of course,

-for the protection of the passengers, but for the safe-guarding of

-His Majesty's mails. And everything gave place, as a matter of right

-and not merely courtesy, to the mail. Surly pikemen swung open their

-gates and asked no toll, for it was one of the privileges of the mail

-to go toll-free, and the highwaymen, if they walked in the ways of

-caution, left the gorgeous conveyance severely alone, reserving their

-best attentions for the plebeian stages. It was a much more serious

-thing to rob the mail than an ordinary coach, for a conviction was more

-certain to end in death, judges having hints from the Government how

-undesirable it was that mails should be ransacked and the robbers live.

-The rewards usually offered by the Post-office, too, were tempting to

-those who could inform if they would. £200 was the sum generally to be

-had for this service, together with the £40 reward by Act of Parliament

-for the apprehension of a highwayman; and if the mail was robbed

-within five miles of London, another £100. Courage, recklessness, and

-desperation--whichever we like to call it--often nerved the night-hawks

-to brave even so heavy a handicap as this, as this very road bears

-witness, in the daring robbery of the Ipswich Mail in 1822, when

-notes to the value of no less than £31,198 were stolen. In addition

-to the usual rewards, a sum of £1000 was offered by the losing firms

-of bankers, as shown in the accompanying old handbill, but without

-avail. This sum was afterwards increased to £5000, and a notification

-given that, in order to prevent the notes being changed, the ink on all

-new ones had been altered from black to red. But the robbers had the

-impudence to ask £6000 for the return of the notes. They had already

-passed £3000 worth, and naively said, in the negotiations they opened

-up, that the trouble they had taken and the risks they had run did

-not make it worth while to accept a smaller "reward." The bankers,

-however, would not spring another thousand, for by that time everyone

-was too shy of an "Ipswich black note," and it was extremely unlikely

-that any more could be passed. Negotiations were broken off; but a

-month later notes to the value of £28,000 were returned. The thieves

-were never traced, and although the bulk of their booty was useless to

-them, made the very substantial haul of over £3000 by their lawless

-enterprise.

-

-  =£1000 Reward.=

-

-  =STOLEN=

-

-  =FROM THE IPSWICH MAIL,=

-

-  On its way from London, _on the Night

-  of the 11th Sept. Inst._ the following

-

-  =COUNTRY BANK NOTES:=

-

-  Ipswich Bank, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.

-  _ALEXANDERS & Co._ on _HOARE & Co._

-

-  Woodbridge Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.

-  _ALEXANDERS & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._

-

-  Manningtree Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.

-  _ALEXANDER & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._

-

-  Hadleigh Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.

-  _ALEXANDER & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._

-

-  Particulars of which will be furnished at the different Bankers.

-

-  Whoever will give Information, either at ALEXANDERS and Co.

-  or at FRYS and Co., _St Mildred's Court, Poultry_, so that the

-  Parties may be apprehended, shall on his or their Conviction,

-  and the Recovery of the Property, receive the above REWARD.

-

-We have said that mail-coaches were gorgeous. They were painted

-in black and red. Not a shy, unassuming red, but the familiar and

-traditional Post-office hue. Also they bore the Royal coat-of-arms

-emblazoned upon the door panels, and the insignia of the four principal

-orders of knighthood on the quarters. There was no mistaking a

-mail-coach.

-

-The Norwich Mail, which took fifteen and a half hours to do the journey

-so late as 1821, was greatly improved in later years; and finally, in

-the early forties, when the railway reached Norwich and superseded the

-roads, performed the journey in eleven hours, thirty-eight minutes, at

-the very respectable average speed of 9½ miles an hour. It was not the

-only mail on the road, but shared the way so far as Ipswich with the

-Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail. This coach was unfortunate on two occasions

-between 1835 and 1839. On September 28th in the first year, when the

-coachman was climbing on to his box in the yard of the "Swan with Two

-Necks," the horses started away on their own accord, tumbling the

-coachman off and knocking down the helper who had been holding their

-heads. Dashing into Cheapside, they flung themselves against the back

-of the Poole Mail with such force that the coachman of that mail was

-also thrown off. He was taken unconscious to the hospital. Continuing

-their furious rush, the horses of the Ipswich Mail at length ran the

-pole of the coach between the iron railings of a house, and so were

-stopped.

-

-The second happening, in 1839, was somewhat similar. The mail had

-arrived at Colchester, and the coachman, throwing down the reins, got

-off the box. No one was at the horses' heads, and they started away and

-galloped down the High Street, until the near leader fell and broke

-his neck, stopping the team.

-

-It was by the Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail that David Copperfield

-journeyed down to Yarmouth on his second visit to Mr Peggotty. In the

-ordinary course of things, he would have reached Ipswich at 3·12 a.m.

-But on this occasion the weather was a potent factor in causing delay.

-He occupied the box seat, and remarked upon the look of the sky to the

-coachman while yet on the first stage out of London.

-

-"Don't you think that a very remarkable sky?" he asked; "I don't

-remember to have seen one like it."

-

-"Nor I--not equal to it," said the coachman. "That's mist, sir.

-There'll be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long."

-

-The description of this stormy sky is very fine, and seems to have been

-drawn from observation; just as true and as effective in its way as Old

-Crome's billowy cloudscapes, in his _Mousehold Heath_, or as any of

-Constable's rain-surcharged Suffolk scenes.

-

-"It was a murky confusion--here and there blotted with a colour like

-the colour of the smoke from damp fuel--of flying clouds tossed up into

-most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than

-there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in

-the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as

-if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way

-and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising

-then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much

-increased, and the sky was more overcast, and it blew hard.

-

-"But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely

-overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow harder

-and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face

-the wind. Many times in the dark part of the night (it was then late in

-September, when the nights were not short) the leaders turned about,

-or came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious apprehension that

-the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before

-this storm, like showers of steel; and at those times, when there was

-any shelter of trees or lee-walls to be got, we were fain to stop,

-in a sheer impossibility of continuing the struggle.... We came to

-Ipswich very late, having had to fight every inch of ground since we

-were ten miles out of London; and found a cluster of people in the

-market-place, who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of

-falling chimneys. Some of these, congregating about the inn-yard while

-we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped

-off a high church tower and flung into a bye-street, which they then

-blocked up."

-

-At Ipswich the Yarmouth coaches left the Norwich Road, and so the

-further adventures of David Copperfield do not in this place concern

-us.

-

-

-VIII

-

-

-HERE, as on the other roads, the early advent of the Motor Car, in

-1826, caused much commotion. The steam coaches of that period never

-achieved any success on this route, but caricatures of what might be

-expected were plentiful, and pictures of the Colchester "Dreadful

-Vengeance," the Norwich "Buster," and other fanciful conveyances, in

-the act of exploding and distributing their passengers in little pieces

-over a wide stretch of country, were popular. The railway itself came

-in for much abuse, and misguided and fanatical coach proprietors wasted

-their substance in pitiful attempts to compete with it. Among these

-was Israel Alexander, that Jewish hero of the Brighton Road in the

-early forties, who, although a first-class whip, was perhaps chiefly

-associated with the many upsettings of the Brighton "Quicksilver." He

-fell out with his noble friends on that highway, and, coming to the

-Norwich Road, ran a well-appointed coach to Colchester for a little

-while, until even the Eastern Counties Railway, then the slowest on

-earth, made the pace too quick for him. His turn-out was given the

-extraordinary name of the "Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," and might

-have continued much longer to carry those who were prejudiced against

-railways, had it not met with so many accidents.

-

-One who was contemporary with the coaching age has ingeniously divided

-coaching accidents into three classes:--1. Accidents to the coach; 2.

-Accidents to the horses; 3. Accidents to the harness. The most common

-kind of mishap to the coach was, he says, the breaking of an axle.

-This was not, as a rule, due to any faulty construction of that most

-essential feature of a public conveyance, but to the overloading either

-of passengers or goods, to which coaches were continually subject. The

-sudden snapping of an axle at a high speed or on a down grade produced

-a tremendous crash which generally shot coachman, guard and "outsides"

-in all directions. Happy those who, in such a case, were received into

-the thorny arms of a quickset hedge or the soft embraces of a mud-heap.

-

-Another kind of mishap, not always accidental, was that of a wheel

-coming off; an incident often caused in early times, before the

-introduction of patent axle-boxes, by the mischievous removal of the

-lynch-pin by some unscrupulous rascal in the employ of the rival coach

-proprietor.

-

-The sudden snapping of a skid-chain while descending a hill, resulting

-in the coach running on to the horses and a general overthrow, in

-which horses' legs and passengers heads came into unwonted contact,

-was perhaps as uncomfortable a kind of disaster as could be imagined.

-Overloading, too, sometimes had the effect of rendering a coach

-top-heavy, when a slight lack of caution in running round curves would

-upset it.

-

-Accidents to the horses were:--casting a shoe, involving lameness, and

-perhaps a fall; tripping and stumbling on loose stones and rolling

-over; slipping up in frosty weather; and kicking over the traces or the

-splinter-bar.

-

-Accidents to the harness usually happened to the traces, which commonly

-snapped under an uneven strain. To cobble them up with twine, and so

-complete a stage, was a common practice. In such cases, the thoughts

-of passengers during the remaining miles were, like those of the poet,

-"too deep for words." Most nerve-shaking of all these varied and

-untoward happenings, however, was the breaking of the reins. Rotted

-by age, by the sun's heat and the winter's frosts, they would "come

-away" in the coachman's hands at that worst of moments;--when he was

-holding in his horses downhill. In that contingency, says our ancient,

-who, in the modern slang phrase, has "been there," it was the approved

-thing to say your prayers first and then take a flying leap (result, a

-broken neck, or fractured leg: the bone protruding over the top of the

-Blucher).

-

-"Then shrieked the timid and stood"--or, rather, sat--"still the

-brave;" who had this consolation, that if they fared no better than

-those who jumped, the odds were that they fared no worse.

-

-To be dragged at hurricane pace by four runaway horses (for in such

-a case they generally _did_ so run) with the broken reins trailing

-helplessly after them, was to acquire the knowledge of an inner meaning

-in the word "terror." In escapades of this kind the "insides" were in

-the most unenviable situation; for the "outsides," including coachman

-and guard, took the better, if unheroic, part of crawling over the roof

-and slipping down the back of the coach into the road. The wisdom of

-their doing so would, in most cases, be proved a few seconds later by

-the sound of a distant crash as the coach hurtled against some roadside

-tree and dissolved into matchwork, while the "insides" were stuck as

-full of splinters as a "fretful porcupine" of quills.

-

-The "human boy" was as much the terror of the old coachman as he is

-of the modern cyclist. The sight of a boy with a hoop reduced him to

-a state of purple indignation or of quivering anxiety, according to

-temperament. Many an one of our great-grandfathers, attired in the odd

-costume of boys in that period, and trundling a hoop along the road,

-has felt the lash of the coachman's whip. The following little story

-will show us why.

-

-"When a very little boy," says one of our forebears, "I once upset

-a four-horse coach by losing control over my hoop, which, to my

-consternation, bowled among the legs of the team. I shall never

-forget the horror with which I for an instant saw the spirited

-horses floundering about with that hateful hoop among them, or heard

-the execrations of the coachman and the shouts of the passengers.

-Abandoning the wretched plaything to its fate, I took to my heels down

-a bye-lane, the portentous crash that followed only accelerating my

-speed."

-

-Coach proprietors were favourite targets for Fate's worst shafts.

-They were a hard-working, much-enduring class of men; up early and to

-bed late, retiring in good circumstances and rising perhaps ruined

-through some unforeseen accident. They were "common carriers" in law,

-and bound under many Acts of Parliament to deliver goods uninjured at

-their destination. As carriers of passengers, it is true, they were

-only required to exercise all "due care and diligence" for the safety

-of their customers, and were exempt from liability in case of mishaps

-through the "act of God" or the unforeseen; but the observance of due

-precautions and a daily inspection of the coach had to be proved in

-case of injury to passengers, or in default they were held liable for

-damages.

-

-Thus, the carelessness of any one of his many servants might mean

-a very serious thing to a coach proprietor. In those days the old

-Anglo-Saxon Law of Deodand was not only in existence, but in a very

-nourishing and aggressive condition. Indeed, coaching had practically

-rescued it from neglect. It was a law which, in cases of fatal

-injuries, empowered the coroner's jury to levy a fine, which might vary

-from sixpence to a thousand pounds, upon the object that caused the

-mischief.

-

-The very multiplicity of tribunals before whom the personally

-unoffending coach proprietor was liable to be haled was in itself

-terrifying. There was the already-mentioned coroners jury; the jury on

-the criminal side in trials at the Assizes for manslaughter, and the

-other "twelve good men and true" who assessed damages in the Sheriff's

-Court.

-

-How even the most well-meaning of men might thus suffer is evident

-in the case of a proprietor who was cast in damages from excess of

-caution. For additional security, and in order to protect it from road

-grit, he had a part of an axle incased in wood. One day this axle broke

-and a serious accident happened, resulting in an action against him for

-damages. He lost the day; the judge ruling that, although no proof of a

-defective axle was adduced, a flaw _might_ have existed which a proper

-daily examination would have detected had the extra precaution for

-safety not been adopted.

-

-

-IX

-

-

-WHAT Aldgate might now have been had the original intention of the

-Eastern Counties directorate to place their terminus there been

-successful, we need not stop to inquire. But, as a good deal has

-already been said on the subject of coaches and coaching, it will be of

-interest to learn what were the views of the projectors of the Eastern

-Counties Railway. With their original prospectus was issued a map of

-the proposed railway from London to Norwich and Yarmouth, by which it

-appears that, instead of going to the left of the road from London, as

-far as Seven Kings and Chadwell Heath, it was originally intended to

-construct the line on the right of the road so far. Between Romford and

-Chelmsford the line has been made practically as first proposed, but

-onwards, from Chelmsford to Lexden, it is again on the other side of

-the highway; and, north of Colchester, goes wide of the original plan

-all the way to Norwich.

-

-In many ways this document is very much of a curiosity at this time,

-as also are the hopes and aspirations of the directors at the first

-General Meeting of the company. The chairman, for instance, confidently

-anticipated dividends of 22 per cent., upon which one of the confiding

-shareholders replied that the report was most satisfactory and the

-prospects held out by no means overcharged. "If this understanding,"

-said he, "fails in producing the dividend of 22 per cent., calculated

-upon in the report, then, I must say, human calculations and

-expectation can no longer be depended upon." O! most excellent man. But

-better is to come.

-

-"Should I live to see the completion of this and similar undertakings,"

-he resumed, "I do believe I shall live to see misery almost banished

-from the earth. From the love I bear my species, I trust that I may

-not be too sanguine, and that I may yet witness the happy end that I

-have pictured to myself." His was, you think, the faith that might

-have moved mountains; but it did not produce that promised 22 per

-cent., nor, although we now have many thousands more miles of railway

-than he ever dreamed of, has the millennium yet arrived. Even the most

-far-seeing have not yet discovered any heralds of its approach. Let

-us drop the tribute of a tear to the sorrows of this excellent person,

-whose love of his species and touching anticipation of 22 per cent.

-dividends were so beautifully blended, and so cruelly disappointed.

-

-For some years small (very small) dividends were paid. Hudson, the

-"Railway King," paid them out of capital. "It made things pleasant," he

-said, when charged with such financially immoral practices. Alas! poor

-Hudson, you lived before your time, and went to another world before

-such "dishonest" doings as yours were sanctified in principle by Acts

-of Parliament which authorise payments of dividends out of capital in

-the case of railways under construction.

-

-In 1848 the Eastern Counties Railway was in Chancery, and its very

-locomotives and carriages were seized for debt; while for years

-afterwards its name was a synonym for delay. The satirists of that

-period were as busy with the Eastern Counties as those of our own time

-are with the South-Eastern Railway. Every journey has an end; "even

-the Eastern Counties' trains come in at last," said Thackeray, very

-charitably.

-

-In 1862 it was amalgamated with several minor undertakings, and

-re-named the "Great Eastern Railway"; "great in nothing but the name,"

-as the spiteful said.

-

-When matters were at their worst, the Lord Cranborne of that time was

-invited to accept the position of chairman and to help extricate the

-company from its difficulties. He accepted the post in January 1868

-and held it until December 1871. In April 1868 he had succeeded to the

-title of Marquis of Salisbury. Thus the statesman and prime minister of

-later years was once a great figure in the railway world. His financial

-abilities helped to put the Great Eastern line on a firm basis, and

-when he left it the railway was already greatly improved in every

-respect. To-day, instead of being a "shocking example," it is a model

-to be copied by other lines.

-

-

-X

-

-

-ALTHOUGH the last of the old coaches was long ago broken up, and the

-Norwich Road is no longer lively with mail and stage travellers, it

-has, in common with several other roads out of London, witnessed a

-wholly unexpected revival, in the shape of the Parcel Mail service

-between London and Ipswich. When the Parcel Post came into being on the

-1st August 1883, it was speedily discovered by the General Post-office

-authorities that in paying, according to contract, 55 per cent. of

-the gross receipts to the railway companies for the mere carriage of

-parcels, they were paying too much. Accordingly, a system of Parcel

-Mail coaches was established on several of the old roads, commencing

-with the London to Brighton Parcel Mail, in June 1887. A London and

-Chelmsford four-horse mail was soon added, and this was shortly

-afterwards extended to Colchester, and thence to Ipswich by cart. This

-curious enterprise of the Post-office was immediately successful,

-and it has ever since been found to effect a large saving over the

-railway charges. Nor is time lost in delivery. The down mail leaves

-London at a quarter to ten o'clock every night and the parcels arrive

-at Colchester and Ipswich in time for the first delivery the next

-morning; while the country parcels come up to London by an equally

-early hour. The way in which the service is worked will be gathered

-from the accompanying official way-sheet of the down mails.

-

-  GENERAL POST OFFICE

-

-  THE MOST NOBLE THE MARQUIS OF LONDONDERRY

-  Postmaster-General

-

-  LONDON, CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER, & IPSWICH ROAD

-  PARCEL SERVICE.

-                                                                 This

-  Guard's Remarks as                          Proper  Actual    Column

-  to Delays, &c.                              Times   Times   to be left

-                         Date  190 .          H. M.   H. M.      blank

-

-  Coach Service          Mount Pleasant          P.M.

-  between      Distance  Parcel Office     dep.  9 45

-  London and     M.F.

-  Colchester.     3 0    Eastern District {arr. 10  8

-    Contractor--           P.O.           {dep. 10 10

-    C. Webster,

-  279 Whitechapel

-    Road, E.     11 3    Romford          {arr. 11 40

-                                          {dep. 11 42

-  Cart between                                   A.M.

-   Colchester &   6 2    Brentwood        {arr. 12 29

-   Ipswich.                               {dep. 12 31

-

-  Contractor--    5 0    Ingatestone      {arr. 1 9

-  F. W. Canham,                           {dep. 1 11

-  Ipswich.

-                  6 0    Chelmsford       {arr. 2 0

-                                          {dep. 2 5

-

-                  8 6    Witham           {arr. 3 13

-                                          {dep. 3 15

-

-                  3 2    Kelvedon         {arr. 3 41

-                                          {dep. 3 43

-

-                  9 6    Colchester       {arr. 5 0

-                                          {dep. 5 5

-

-                         Stratford St.    {arr. 5 58

-                           Mary           {dep. 6 0

-

-                 18 2    Ipswich           arr. 7 20

-  Signature

-  of Guard       71 5

-

-              T. E. SIFTON, Inspector-General of Mails.

-

-  The Guard in charge of the Coach must report the cause of any Delay.

-  He must enter all Remarks and Times in the proper Columns. This Bill

-  to be sent, as addressed, by First Post.

-

-  TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH

-  PARCEL MAIL.

-

-The up service, starting with the mail-cart from Ipswich at 7·9 p.m.

-and continued from Colchester by four-horse van at 9·30 p.m., brings

-the country parcels to Mount Pleasant at 4·30 a.m., throughout the

-year. Up and down mails meet at Ingatestone at 1·9 a.m. On this

-service, as on all others, the vans go through, but the drivers and

-guards exchange places; the London men changing on to the van from

-Colchester at Ingatestone, and returning to London; the Colchester men

-taking over the down van and similarly returning whence they came.

-

-It is a curious and unexpected revival of old methods, but an entirely

-successful one. No highwayman has ever attempted to "hold up" the

-Parcel Mail, for the last of that trade has for generations mouldered

-in his grave; but should any amateurs essay to complete this revival

-of old coaching days by waylaying the mail, the guards would be found

-well armed. Their virgin steel and untried pistols have for years been

-carried without any excuse for using them; but there need be no doubt

-that, were the occasion to arrive, they would defend their parcels--the

-pounds of country butter, the eggs, and wild flowers, or the

-miscellaneous consignment from London--with their hearts' blood. There

-are more romantic things in the world to die for than postal parcels

-of eggs, cheese and butter, but the ennobling word DUTY might glorify

-such a sacrifice for the sake of a pound's weight of "best fresh," or a

-dozen of "new laid."

-

-But although the possibility of attack is remote, a spice of danger and

-romance savours the conduct of the parcel mails.

-

-The up Colchester Parcel Mail had a mishap on the night of October 11,

-1890, when, owing to the prevailing fog, it was driven into a ditch

-near Margaretting. Happily, both coachman and guard escaped injury, the

-heavy vehicle resting against the hedge. The coachman, mounting one of

-his team, and hurrying back to Chelmsford, succeeded in overtaking the

-down coach, which, returning to the scene of the accident, unloaded and

-transferred the parcels, and continued to London, leaving the down mail

-to be forwarded with local help. It eventually arrived at Colchester

-four hours late.

-

-

-XI

-

-

-COACHING days, old and new, having now been disposed of, we might

-set off down the road at once, were it not that our steps are at

-once arrested by the sight of the "Red Lion" Inn, at the corner of

-Whitechapel Road and Leman Street, which, together with the "Old Red

-Lion," adjoining, stands on a site made historic by Dick Turpin's lurid

-career.

-

-It was in the yard of the old house that Turpin shot Matthew King

-in 1737. He had stolen a fine horse belonging to a Mr Major, near

-the "Green Man," Epping, and had been traced by means of the animal

-to the inn, where he was found by the Bow Street runners in company

-with Matthew and Robert King, birds of like feather with himself. The

-landlord endeavoured to arrest King, who fired at him without effect,

-calling to Turpin, "Dick! shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"

-

-Turpin had his usual extensive armoury on his person--three brace of

-pistols and a carbine slung across his back. He fired, and shot Matthew

-King, whether by accident or design is not known. King first exclaimed,

-"Dick! you have shot me; make off," but is said afterwards to have

-cursed him as he went, for a coward. King died a week later of his

-wounds, Turpin fleeing to a deserted mansion in Essex, and thence to a

-cave in Epping Forest. It is usually said that it was the more famous

-Tom King who met so dramatic an end, but original authorities give

-Matthew; and certainly we find _a_ Tom King, highwayman, decorously

-executed at Tyburn eighteen years later.

-

-[Illustration: THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT

-MATTHEW KING. _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854._]

-

-We have met Turpin before, notably at York, where he made an end, two

-years after this exploit. This especial hero of the Penny Dreadful and

-the romantic imagination of the average errand boy belongs especially

-to this road, for he was an Essex man, born at Hempstead in 1705.

-Apprenticed to a Whitechapel butcher in his youth, he commenced his

-career of low villainy by stealing some cattle from a Plaistow

-farmer, and then joined a band of smugglers and deer-stealers and

-housebreakers in Epping Forest, where they set up a storehouse of

-stolen goods in the cave just mentioned. This band became so notorious

-that a sum of fifty guineas was soon offered for their arrest; but it

-was not until the amount had been doubled that two of the ringleaders

-were caught and hanged. The gang thus broken up, Turpin was reduced

-to scouring the roads singly, and pursued a solitary career until one

-dreary February night in 1735, while patrolling the Cambridge Road,

-he saw a horseman approaching through the mist. At the time-honoured

-demand, "Your money or your life!" the stranger simply laughed.

-

-"What!" said he, "should dog eat dog? We are of a like trade."

-

-Thus Turpin and Tom King met, and struck up a partnership. If only one

-quarter of the deeds assigned to Turpin were true, his would be a very

-gallant, as well as phenomenally busy, figure on the roads of England.

-Although by no means a mythical person, the stories told of him nearly

-all belong to the regions of romance, and his true history shows him to

-have had few redeeming qualities. Many of the old knights of the road

-were courageous, and hand in hand with their courage went a humour not

-seldom kindly; but Turpin was a bloodthirsty ruffian whose courage is

-not an established fact, and whose humour, like the "tender mercies of

-the wicked," was cruel, not to say ferocious. It is quite hopeless to

-attempt to finally destroy the great Turpin myth after this lapse of

-time: Harrison Ainsworth's romance has enjoyed too great and too long a

-popularity for that; but let the attempt here be made to paint him as

-the cowardly ruffian he was.

-

-Whitechapel, quite apart from memories of Turpin, owns an unenviable

-repute, and its very name is a synonym for villainy. Its bad savour,

-however, goes back no greater distance in time than the first half

-of the eighteenth century, for until that period it was not built

-upon, and indeed "Whitechapel Common" was spoken of so late as 1761,

-maps proving the old church to have been quite rural at that date.

-Originally a chapel-of-ease to the great mother-parish of Stepney,

-the district was erected into a separate parish so far back as the

-fourteenth century and the original "white chapel"--doubtless so called

-from its mediæval coats of whitewash--made a church. But old names

-cling, and although it has been a church for over six hundred years, it

-has not been able to confer its more dignified title upon the parish

-itself. Thus the name of Whitechapel is doubly misleading nowadays, for

-it is no longer a chapelry and its stately church is in red brick; so

-that there is some force in the argument for re-christening the borough

-and dignifying it by a revival of the old name of Eastminster, owned by

-that not very fortunate Abbey of St Mary Grace, founded by Edward the

-Third in 1348, which formerly stood on the site of the Royal Mint.

-

-[Illustration: WHITECHAPEL OLD CHURCH.]

-

-St Mary's, Whitechapel, is a beautiful church, built in 1877, burnt

-August 20, 1880, and since restored. It replaced the ugly old building,

-which was "taken down for the simple reason that it would not stand

-up." The ancient wrangling over its full title of St Mary Matfelon is

-not yet done, and rash would be he who voted for any particular one

-among the rival derivatives of the name. Matfelon, holds one school,

-was the name of a forgotten benefactor, whose particular benefactions

-are not stated. Who, then, would found, since benefits are thus forgot?

-"_Mariæ, matri et filio_," an ancient dedication, say others; while yet

-different parties find its source in a Syriac word meaning "mother of a

-son" = the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the most entertaining legend, however,

-is that which tells how it originated in the killing of a murderer,

-in 1429, by the women of Whitechapel. "Between Estren and Witsontyd,

-a fals Breton mordred a wydewe in here bed, the which find hym for

-almasse withought Algate, in the suburbes of London, and bar away alle

-that sche hadde, and afterwards he toke socour of Holy Chirche in

-Suthwark; but at the last he took the crosse and forswore the kynge's

-land; and as he went hys waye, it happyd hym to come be the same place

-where he had don that cursed dede, and women of the same parysh comen

-out with stones and canell dong, and ther maden an ende of hym in the

-hyghe strete." These things seem quite in keeping with Whitechapel's

-evil fame.

-

-The old church, as it stood until well into the nineteenth century, is

-shown opposite this page, with one of the old road-waggons crawling

-past. In another view of the same date the High Street itself is

-seen, its long perspective fully bearing out the old description of

-spaciousness. At the same time, it is seen to be empty enough to

-resemble the street of a provincial town. The houses are exceedingly

-old, the road paved with knobbly stones, and the shop windows

-artfully constructed with the apparent object of obstructing instead

-of admitting the light. Very few of these old shop-fronts are now

-left, but a good specimen is that of a bell-founding firm at No. 34

-Whitechapel Road.

-

-[Illustration: WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE.]

-

-This old picture has long ceased to be representative of Whitechapel's

-everyday aspect. The coach has long ago whirled away into limbo,

-the elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to Abraham's, or

-another's, bosom, and Whitechapel knows their kind no more. Bustle,

-and a dismal overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers' barrows,

-tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic of to-day. Also, the

-Jewish element is very pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably

-dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names of Cohen, Abraham,

-Solomon and the like, and others ending in "baum," or "heim." But

-on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious street regains

-something of its old rural character, in the open-air hay and straw

-market held here, the largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad

-thoroughfare and overflows into the side streets: the countrymen

-who have come up on the great waggons by road from remote parts of

-Essex lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling hay or straw,

-attending to their horses, or refreshing in the old taverns. It is

-Arcady come again. The eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the

-hay-wains, and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic scent of their

-heaped-up loads. It is true that Central Londoners also have their

-so-called Haymarket, but hay is the least likely of articles to be

-purchased there in these days.

-

-What do they think, those countrymen, of the Whitechapel folks, the

-"chickaleary blokes," used, as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth

-century remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy," from

-robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe," and the selling of painted

-sparrows for canaries? Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr

-Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice neighbourhood," said

-Sam, as they rumbled along the crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery

-remarkable circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and oysters go

-together.... The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to

-be for oysters.... An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The

-street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think that ven a man's

-wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in regular

-desperation." Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper depth

-than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty; whelks and villainy foregather

-in Whitechapel at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.

-

-But the poverty and the villainy of Whitechapel must not be too greatly

-insisted upon. They may easily be overdone. Loyal hearts and brave

-lives--all the braver that they are not flaunted in the face of the

-world--exist in the cheerless and unromantic grey streets that lead

-off the main road. The domestic virtues flourish here as well as--if

-not better than--in the West End. The heroes and heroines of everyday

-life--the greater in their heroism that they do not know of it--live

-in hundreds of thousands in the dingy and unrelieved dulness of the

-streets to right and left of Whitechapel Road and of the Mile End Road,

-that go with so majestic a breadth and purposeful directness to Bow.

-

-

-XII

-

-

-LET the Londoner who has never been "down East," and so is given to

-speaking contemptuously of it, take a journey down the Whitechapel and

-Mile End Roads, and see with what an astonishing width, both in respect

-of roadway and foot-pavements, those noble thoroughfares are endowed.

-The London he has already known owns no streets so wide, save only in

-the isolated and unimportant instance of Langham Place; while, although

-it cannot be said that, taken individually, the houses of the great

-East-End thoroughfares are at all picturesque, yet there is a certain

-interesting quality in the roads as a whole, lacking elsewhere. This,

-doubtless, is partly explained by the strangeness of the East-ender's

-garb, and partly by the many Jewish and other foreigners who throng the

-pavements.

-

-A strangely-named public-house--the "Grave Maurice"--is one of the

-landmarks of the Whitechapel Road. Many have set themselves the task of

-finding the origin of that sign and its meaning; but their efforts have

-been baulked by the very multiplicity of historic Maurices, grave or

-otherwise. The sign may originally have been the "Graf Maurice," Prince

-Maurice of Bohemia, brother of the better-known Prince Rupert, the

-dashing cavalier, but a difficulty arises from the fact that there was

-another "Graf Maurice" at the same time, in the person of the equally

-well-known Prince Maurice of Nassau, who died of grief when the Spanish

-overran Holland and besieged Breda. Nor does the uncertainty end here,

-for Dekker uses the expression "grave maurice" in one of his plays,

-written at least thirty years before the time of those princes, in a

-passage which reads as though it were the usual nickname at that period

-for an officer.

-

-Beyond the house owning this perplexing sign we come to the beginning

-of the Mile End Road, one mile, as its name implies, from Aldgate, and

-for long the site of a turnpike-gate, only removed with the close of

-the Coaching Age. Rowlandson has left us an excellent view of Mile End

-Turnpike as it was in his time; with isolated blocks of houses, groups

-of rustic cottages and a background of trees, to show how rural were

-the surroundings towards the close of the eighteenth century; while

-maps of that period mark the road onwards, bordered by fields, with

-"Ducking Pond Row" standing solitary and the ducking-pond itself close

-behind, where the scolds and shrews of that age were soused.

-

-The Ducking-Pond as an institution is as obsolete as the rack, the

-thumb-screw, and other ingenious devices of the "good old times"; but

-most towns a hundred years ago still kept a cucking or ducking-stool;

-while, if they had no official pond for the purpose, any dirty pool

-would serve, and the dirtier it were the better it was esteemed.

-

-[Illustration: MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. _After Rowlandson._]

-

-"The Way of punishing scolding Women is pleasant enough," says an old

-traveller. "They fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve or

-fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so that these two Pieces

-of Wood, with their two Ends embrace the Chair, which hangs between

-them on a sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and always

-remains in the natural horizontal Position in which a Chair should be,

-that a Person may sit conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let

-it down. They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River, and over

-this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the two Pieces of Wood, at

-one End of which the Chair hangs just over the Water. They place the

-Woman in the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often as the

-Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate Heat."

-

-One has only to go and look at the average rural pond to imagine the

-horrors of this punishment. The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the

-clinging green duckwood, common to them, must have made a ducking the

-event of a lifetime.

-

-The difference here, at Mile End, between those times and these is

-emphasised by the close-packed streets on either side, and by the

-crowded tram-cars that ply back and forth.

-

-Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in the little

-old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn that stands by itself, in

-advance of the frontage of the houses, and takes up a goodly portion

-of the broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when land was not

-so valuable as now; when local authorities were easy-going, and when

-anyone who had the impudence to squat down upon the public paths could

-do so, and, remaining there undisturbed for a period of twenty-one

-years, could thus derive a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is

-an explanation of the existence of the "Vine" in this position.

-

-Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses, built in 1695, for the

-housing of old skippers and shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little

-houses and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle where the

-old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly while the curious passers-by

-linger to gaze at them from the pavement, as though they were some

-strange kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the pages of fiction

-as this quiet haven in midst of the roaring streets, screened from them

-by walls and gates of curious architecture surmounted by models of the

-gallant old galleons that have long ceased to rove the raging main.

-It is a spot alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by the

-towering breweries, which indeed would have bought the old place and

-destroyed it a few years ago, but for the indignation aroused when the

-proposal of the governing body of the almshouses to sell became known.

-

-There is nothing else to detain the explorer on his way into Essex.

-The People's Palace, it is true, is a remarkable place, the result of

-Sir Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the East who would

-get culture and find recreation, but it is a dream realised as an

-architectural nightmare, and is a very terrible example of what is done

-to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art and Philanthropy.

-

-

-XIII

-

-

-AT last, by this broadest of broad roads, we come to Stratford-le-Bow

-and its parish church. In these hurried times, and for some centuries

-past, the old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and as "Bow"

-alone it is familiar to all East-enders. The place is nowadays chiefly

-associated with Bryant & May and matches, but there yet remain many old

-Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by the roadside, telling of days

-long before "patent safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel

-and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.

-

-"Bow," says the _Ambulator_ of 1774, "is a village a little to the

-east of Mile End, inhabited by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here

-has been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little inferior to

-that of Chelsea." That description is now somewhat out of date. The

-manufactory of porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is scarce,

-and treasured accordingly. Whitsters--that is to say, bleachers of

-linen--and scarlet dyers, also, are to seek.

-

-Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound traveller in bold and

-rugged fashion; its time-worn tower standing midway of the road and

-challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little River Lea, just

-beyond, to Stratford and into Essex. Church and churchyard split the

-road up into two channels and thus destroy its width, which it never

-afterwards regains until the suburbs are passed and the open country

-reached. A modern touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in

-advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory attitude

-from its granite pedestal, and erected in his lifetime; recalling

-the fervent hero-worshipping days of the "People's William." The

-outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them that see statues raised

-to themselves, unless indeed they be made of finer clay than most

-mortals, kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years this bronze

-Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been made to preside, as it were,

-over an underground public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst

-he rises, absurdly eloquent.

-

-[Illustration: BOW.]

-

-Just how Stratford-le-Bow received its name is an interesting piece

-of history. Both here and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea was

-anciently crossed by a paved stone ford of Roman construction,

-continuing the highway into Essex; but when that river's many channels,

-swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward the Thames, the

-low-lying lands of what we now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were

-for long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For months together

-the approaches to the Lea were lost in floods, and the real channels of

-the river became so deep that those who valued their lives and goods

-dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor travellers thus

-waterlogged came the good and pious Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the

-First. "Having herself been well washed in the water," as old Leland

-says, she fully appreciated the necessity for bridges, and accordingly

-directed the raising of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the

-building of two stone structures, of which one was the original "Bow"

-Bridge; "a rare piece of work, for before that time the like had never

-been seen in England." It seems to have been the stone arch that gave

-its name of "Bow," and if an arched stone bridge was so remarkable in

-those times that it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular, or

-"bow" shape, it must have been either the first, or among the earliest,

-of stone bridges built, in times when others were constructed of timber.

-

-The original name of the village that afterwards sprang up here, on the

-hither or Middlesex shore, was thus singularly contradictory; meaning

-"the street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratford on the Essex

-side was in those days known as Stratford Langthorne.

-

-The good queen not only built the bridges and causeways, but endowed

-them with land and a water-mill, conveying those properties to the

-Abbess of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for the maintenance

-of the works. Having done all this, she died. Some years afterwards a

-Cistercian monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey Mills now

-stand, and the then Abbess of Barking, of opinion that the Abbot of

-that house, being near, would find it easier to look after the bridges

-than herself, reconveyed the property, together with its obligations,

-to him. The trust was kept for a time and then delegated to a certain

-Godfrey Pratt, who had a house built for him on the causeway and

-enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping the works in

-repair. Pratt did so well with his annual stipend and the alms given

-him by wayfarers that the Abbot at length discontinued the grant.

-Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite unauthorised toll-bar and

-levied "pontage" on all except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This

-went on for many years, until the scandal grew too great, and, in

-consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot dispossessed Godfrey

-Pratt of his toll-bar and resumed the control himself.

-

-Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the road had been so

-greatly worn down that the feet of travellers and those of the horses

-often went through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently, to undergo

-an extensive cobbling process; a treatment, by the way, continued

-through the centuries until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.

-

-In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork of all ages. The

-property for its maintenance had, of course, been lost in the

-confiscation of monastic estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair

-afterwards fell upon the local authorities, who always preferred to

-patch and tinker it so long as such a course was possible. On February

-14, 1839, the existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one

-seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.

-

-

-XIV

-

-

-"FAREWELL, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I heard say, honest

-Conscience was once drowned."

-

-Thus says Will Kemp, in his _Nine Days' Wonder_, the account of a

-dance he jigged from London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It

-is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that old joke about the

-drowning of conscience here, and so we will also without delay "have

-over" the modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy flour mills,

-and crossing another branch of the Lea by Channelsea Bridge, come to

-Stratford.

-

-Here, then, begins the county of calves, according to the popular

-jest that to be a native of Essex is to be an "Essex Calf." It is not

-generally regarded as a complimentary title, for of all young animals

-the calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward. To this day in

-rural England the contemptuous exclamation "you great calf!" is used

-of an awkward, overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings. Yet,

-if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer on this subject, the

-nickname had a complimentary origin, "for," said he, "this county

-produceth calves of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."

-

-We have already seen that the French spoken at Stratford-le-Bow in

-Chaucer's time was a scoff and a derision. To-day, neither on the

-Middlesex nor the Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages

-either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of every kind, the

-making of matches that strike only on the box, the varied work of the

-Stratford and West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations

-close at hand; while the business of covering the potato-fields, the

-celery-beds and the grounds of the old suburban mansions with endless

-rows of suburban dwellings is engrossing attention down the road.

-Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban, and Ilford far

-greater in these days than it ever was when its "great" prefix was

-never pretermitted. London, indeed, stretches far out along this road,

-and the country is reached only after many miles of that debatable

-land which belongs neither to country nor town. Heralds of the great

-metropolis appear to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far

-away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the dim presentiment of

-some vast capital," as De Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like

-a misgiving."

-

-Stratford has not improved since coaches left the road. It has grown

-greatly, and grown dirty, squalid and extremely trying to noses that

-have not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure factories and

-other odoriferous industries. But it is a place of great enterprises

-and great and useful markets, and when its introductory mean streets

-are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone Road branches off to

-the left, looks by contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton

-Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park in succession, past a

-building which, whether as an institution or an example of beautiful

-architecture, would well grace the West. The West Ham Public Library

-and Technical Institute is here referred to. "Irish Row," on the

-way, marked on old maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages

-inhabited until recent years by a turbulent colony of London-Irish

-market-gardening labourers, subsidised by Mrs Nelson in times of

-coaching competition to impede hated rivals as they came past the

-"Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of Manor Park; a house which,

-like the "Coach and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a legitimate

-coaching trade to something more in the gin-palace sort. This is not

-to say that the staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct

-negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish Row, but when the

-rival Ipswich "Umpire" or the "New Colchester" coaches developed much

-sporting competition and their coachmen evinced a dogged determination

-to be first over Bow Bridge on the way up to London, and, by

-consequence, the first to arrive at their destination, why, an obscure

-hint or two on the part of one of her numerous staff, accompanied by

-the wherewithal for a drink, produced wonders in the way of highway

-obstruction. But such recollections are become unsubstantial as the

-fabric of which dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions of

-tramways and interminable rows of suburban shops that conduct to Ilford

-Bridge.

-

-Great Ilford lies on the other side of the sullen Roding, that rolls

-a muddy tide in aimless loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking

-Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial been approached by a bridge

-replacing the "eald," or old, ford, whence its name derives and not

-from that crossing of the stream being an "ill" ford, as imaginative,

-but uninstructed, historians would have us believe; although the slimy

-black mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the exercise of fording

-an ill enough enterprise. Ilford is now in the throes of development

-and is fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere suburb. Let us

-leave it for places less sophisticated.

-

-The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving Ilford by moonshine, set

-forward "dauncing within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two

-strong Jades were beating and byting either of other." We take this

-to mean two women fighting on the road, until the context is reached,

-where he says that their hooves formed an arch over him and that he

-narrowly escaped being kicked on the head. It then becomes evident that

-he is talking of horses.

-

-Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and in more decorous

-fashion than that of Will Kemp, we come, past an inn oddly named

-the "Cauliflower"--probably as a subtle compliment to the abounding

-market-gardens of the neighbourhood--to the long, straight perspective

-of the road across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of new suburban

-"villa" streets now cover the waste on either side, so that the

-beginnings of the plain are not so much heath as modern suburb,

-created by the Great Eastern Railway's suburban stations and by the

-far-reaching enterprises of land corporations, which here carry on the

-usual speculations of the speculative builder on a gigantic scale. In

-acre upon acre of closely-packed streets, each one with a horrible

-similarity to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning

-clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty London live and lose their

-individuality, and pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman

-of a century ago waited impatiently behind the ragged thickets and

-storm-tossed thorn trees of Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there

-now rises the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway between

-Ilford station and that of Chadwell Heath, the recent enormous growth

-of population on this sometime waste has led to the erection of the

-new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes," while widened lines

-have been provided for the increased train services. "Seven Kings"

-is a romantic name, but who those monarchs were, and what they were

-ever doing on the Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable for

-cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is impossible to say. Many wits

-have been at work on the problem, but have been baffled. The natural

-assumption is that at this spot, marked on old maps as "Seven Kings

-Watering," the seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily

-records no such meeting, but there was no _Court Circular_ in those

-times, and so many royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked,

-except locally and in some fashion similar to this. So let us assume

-the kings met here and watered their horses at the "watering," which

-was a place where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash.

-The stream still crosses the highway, but civilisation has put it in a

-pipe and tucked it away underground.

-

-[Illustration: SEVEN KINGS.]

-

-A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway at this point, known as

-Stoup Lane ("stoup" meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of the

-Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish. Here it was, in 1794, on a

-night of December, that a King's messenger, James Martin by name, was

-shot by five footpads. The register of St Edmund's, Romford, records

-the burial of this unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.

-

-Let us not, however, in view of the more or less grisly dangers that

-still await belated wayfarers on this road, enlarge too greatly on

-the lawlessness of old times; for the homeward-bound resident making

-for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs towards the stroke

-of ten o'clock is not infrequently startled by the sinister figure

-of a footpad springing from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and

-demanding--_not_ his money or his life, as in the old formula, but--a

-halfpenny! This invariable demand of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath

-footpads, which argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is

-for half the price of a drink.

-

-"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?" asks the threatening

-tramp.

-

-"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning the long

-perspective of the road for the policeman who ought to be within

-sight--but is not; "w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"

-

-"I've walked all the way from Romford and only got half the price of a

-glass o' beer," says the rascal.

-

-The citizen is astonished and incredulous, and his astonishment gets

-the better of his fear. "Oh, come now," he rejoins, "no one walks three

-miles from Romford for a glass of beer; besides, all the houses here

-close at ten o'clock."

-

-"Oh, they do, do they?" replies the tramp, offensively. "'Ere, my

-mate Bill'll talk to you," and, whistling, the ominous bulk of Bill

-emerges aggressively from the darkling hedge, and together they proceed

-to wipe the road with that respectable ratepayer, and, rifling his

-pockets, leave him, bruised and bleeding, to reflect on the blessings

-of civilisation and to be thankful that he was not born a hundred years

-ago, when he might have been shot dead instead of being felled to the

-ground by the half-brick in a handkerchief which he finds beside him

-and takes home as a trophy.

-

-Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past Beacontree Heath,

-on the right, to an open country of disconsolate-looking contorted

-elms and battered windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and

-still airs of summer of the winter winds that race across the watery

-flats of Rippleside and Dagenham Marshes, out of the shivering east.

-Lonely, until quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House," beside the

-road, the two whalebones that even yet surmount its garden entrance

-the wonderment for more than two hundred years of chance travellers.

-Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded in the Thames in

-the year of Oliver Cromwell's death, and set up here in memory of him.

-However that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, when Ogilby's

-_Britannia_ was published, for the house is marked on his map as "Ye

-Whalebone."

-

-These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected, have little longer yet

-to remain, for though apparently proof against decay, the house and

-grounds are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale to the

-builders.

-

-[Illustration: WHALEBONE HOUSE.]

-

-The sole historic or other vestige remaining of the "Whalebone"

-turnpike-gate, once standing here, is an account to be found in the

-newspapers of the time of an attack made upon George Smith, the

-toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused in the darkness by a

-voice calling "Gate!" and, going to open it, was instantly knocked

-down, in a manner somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero

-of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:--

-

-  "Last night and the night before,

-  Three tom-cats came knocking at my door.

-  I went down to let them in,

-  And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin."

-

-The two men who felled the unfortunate George Smith, alarmed by his

-cries of "Murder!" threatened to shoot him if he were not quiet,

-and, going over his pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five

-shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting him over, a third

-confederate, ransacking the house, discovered three pounds. With this

-booty and a parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared as

-silently as they came.

-

-

-XV

-

-

-ROMFORD, now approached, is but twelve miles from London, and has

-frankly given up the impossible and ceased all pretence of being

-provincial. At the same time, building-land having only just (in the

-speculator's phrase) become "ripe for development," the townlet has not

-yet lost all individuality in suburban extension.

-

-The place, say some antiquaries, derives its name from the "Roman

-ford" on the Rom brook, but it is a great deal more likely that the

-origin is identical with that of the first syllable in the names of

-Ramsgate, Ramsey and Romney, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon "ruim" =

-a marsh. Time was when the town was celebrated for its manufacture

-of breeches; an industry which gave rise to a saying still current in

-the less polished nooks and corners of Essex--"Go to Romford and get

-your backsides new bottomed." Breeches have long ceased to be a noted

-product of the town, which for many years past has bulked large in the

-annals of Beer. Barricades, avenues, mountains and Alpine ranges of

-barrels, hogsheads, firkins and kilderkins of Romford ale and stout

-proclaim that the Englishman's preference for his "national drink" has

-not abated, and that

-

-  "Damn his eyes, whoever tries

-  To rob a poor man of his beer"

-

-is still a popular sentiment; as both the brewers of arsenical

-compounds and the more rabid among teetotallers are some day likely to

-discover.

-

-[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ROMFORD.]

-

-A French traveller in England some two hundred years ago wrote that

-"there are a hundred sorts of Beer made in England, and some are

-not bad: Art has well supplied Nature in this particular. Be that as

-it will, beer is Art and wine is Nature; I am for Nature against the

-world." That old fellow did not know how artful beer could be, and if

-he could re-visit his native France might discover that even wine is no

-longer the simple child of nature it once was.

-

-But although John Barleycorn is the tutelary deity of Romford, it is

-quite conceivable that the stranger bound for Norwich, and turning

-neither to right nor to left, might pass through the town without so

-much as a glimpse obtained of those Alpine ranges aforesaid. True,

-on entering Romford, he could scarce fail to observe certain weird

-structures ahead: odd towers like first cousins to lighthouses,

-springing into the sky line, with ranges of perpendicular pipes, like

-the disjointed fragments of some mammoth organ, beside them, the

-characteristic signs and portents of a great brewery; but the barrels

-are secluded, nor even are Romford's streets blocked, as might have

-been suspected, with brewers' drays. Romford, indeed, spells to the

-uninstructed stranger rather bullocks than beer; for the cattle-pens

-are the chief feature of its market-place, and sheep and hay and straw

-bulk more in the eye of the road-farer than the products of Ind, Coope

-& Co., which are to be seen in all their vastness beside the railway

-station and on the sidings constructed especially for the trade in ale

-and stout.

-

-[Illustration: ROMFORD.]

-

-The town in its most characteristic aspect is seen in the accompanying

-illustration taken from the doorway of that old inn, the "Windmill and

-Bells," the broad road margined with granite setts and the pavements

-fenced with posts and rails; the re-built parish church prominent

-across the market-place.

-

-[Illustration: OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PUTTELS BRIDGE.]

-

-Beyond Romford the road grows rural, and, by the same token, hilly.

-This, gentle reader, let it not be forgotten, is Essex, and we all

-know with what persistence that county is spoken of, and written of,

-as flat. If you would know what flatness is, try the Great North Road

-and its long levels between Baldock, Biggleswade and Alconbury, or

-search Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire or Hunts. _There_ is flatness, beside

-which that of Essex is the merest superstition, started probably by

-some tired traveller of inconstant purpose, who, essaying to explore

-the county, gave up the enterprise when he had reached Wanstead Flats.

-Surveying that not highly romantic expanse, he took it as an exemplar

-of the rest of the shire, and so returned home to start this immortal

-myth on its career. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex will

-subscribe to its flatness as an article of faith, and as such an one

-cycles from Romford, through the hamlet of Hare Street, over Puttels

-Bridge, where stands an old toll-house, to the other hamlet of Brook

-Street, the fact that he will actually have to _walk_ his machine up

-the steep hill that conducts into the town of Brentwood will cause him

-to think hard things of myth-makers.

-

-[Illustration: THE "FLEECE," BROOK STREET.]

-

-Brook Street Hill is the name of this eminence. Beside it stands a

-cemetery, convenient for brakeless cyclists who recklessly descend, and

-at its foot is a fine old inn, the "Fleece," a house of call for the

-fish-waggons that were once so great a feature of this road so far as

-Colchester and Harwich.

-

-[Illustration: THE MARTYR'S TREE, BRENTWOOD.]

-

-Brentwood, on the crest of this hill, occupies an elevated table-land,

-with sharp descents from it on every side. The "burnt wood" town,

-destroyed in some forgotten conflagration, is now a long-streeted,

-old-fashioned place, apparently in no haste to bid good-bye to the

-past. It keeps the old Assize House of Queen Elizabeth's time in

-repair, and carefully sees to it that the Martyr's Tree, decayed though

-the old elm stump be and hollow, is saved from perishing altogether.

-It was in 1555 that William Hunter, in his twentieth year, suffered

-in this place for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. That

-staunch upholder of the Protestant faith scarce needed the modern

-memorial, close by, while this shattered trunk remained, its gaping

-rents carefully bricked up by pious hands; but let the venerable relic

-be doubly safe-guarded in these times, when that candle lit by Latimer

-and Ridley, close upon three centuries and a half ago, burns dim, and

-lawless and forsworn clergy within the Church of England are working

-towards Rome and the return of the famous days of fire and stake; when

-the blood of the martyrs has ceased to inspire a generation which

-demands to be shown some tangible object before it can realise the

-significance of that sacrifice. Here, then, is something that can be

-seen and touched, to bring the least imaginative back in fancy to those

-terrible days, when brave hearts of every class gave up their lives in

-fire and smoke rather than abjure their faith. The Romanising clergy

-of to-day are made of coarser fabric than the martyrs. _They_ are not

-actuated by honesty, but take oaths they have no intention of observing

-to a Church whose bread they eat and whose trust they betray.

-

-Would you know something of that martyrdom at Brentwood? Then scan the

-inscription on the modern granite obelisk, and control, if you can, a

-righteous indignation when you perceive a modern Roman Catholic chapel

-standing, impudent in these days of an exaggerated tolerance, over

-against the Martyr's Tree itself, typifying the Scarlet Woman in midst

-of her blasphemies, exultant over the blood of the saints. "He being

-dead yet speaketh," quotes that inscription; but what avails it to

-speak in the ears of the deaf, or to talk of honour to the perjured?

-"Learn from his example," continue those momentous words, "to value

-the privilege of an open Bible, and be careful to maintain it"; but

-the world goes by unheeding, and only when the danger again becomes

-acute and liberty of conscience is passing away will indifference be

-conquered and the folly of it revealed.

-

-

-XVI

-

-

-BRENTWOOD still keeps a notable relic of coaching days in the old

-"White Hart" Inn, a curious specimen of the timbered and galleried

-type of hostelry familiar to our great-grandfathers. It turns a long

-plastered front to the street, but the great carved and panelled

-doorway leading into the coach-yard confirms the proud legend,

-"Established 1480." Full forty coaches passed through Brentwood in

-every twenty-four hours at the close of the Coaching Age, but the

-earlier days of coaching brought the "White Hart" more custom than

-came to it at the close of that era, when, in consequence of the roads

-being improved, travelling was quicker, and places once halted at were

-left behind without stopping. Innkeepers were considerable losers by

-this constant acceleration of coaches, and saw the smart, long-distance

-stages go dashing by where, years before, the old slow coaches stayed

-the night, or, at the very least, halted for meals.

-

-The "White Hart" remains typical of the earlier times, and still keeps

-the old-world comfort regretted in other places by De Quincey, who

-lived long enough to witness the beginnings of the great changes that

-have come over the hotels of town and country since coaches gave place

-to railways.

-

-[Illustration: YARD OF THE "WHITE HART," BRENTWOOD.]

-

-

-XVII

-

-

-BRENTWOOD is no sooner left behind than the road descends steeply

-over what was once a part of Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild

-and hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the place where, in

-November 1692, those seven jovial Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay

-were themselves, while hunting the hare, chased and at last run down

-by nine hunters of a different sort, who turned their pockets out and

-then bade them good-day and be damned. The original chronicler of

-this significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell, makes no

-especial feature of the event. He merely records it as having happened

-"near Ingerstone," and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings in

-the same sort along the several approaches to London. Little wonder,

-therefore, that Macaulay should have drawn the conclusion that at this

-time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest and most populous

-shires of England was as dangerous as a pilgrimage across the deserts

-of Arabia.

-

-From the descending road or from Shenfield Church the country is seen

-spread out, map-like, below, over the valley of the Thames, to where

-the river empties itself into the broad estuary at the Nore. At least,

-there is the vale, and the map vouchsafes the information that the

-river flows thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out the view of

-that imperial waterway. "I cannot see the Spanish fleet, because it's

-not in sight," says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in the

-poem, and it is precisely for the same reason that the Thames is not

-visible from Shenfield. But if one is denied a view of that imperial

-river, at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard, a prodigal

-riot of roses of every hue and habit, are worth seeing. The attenuated

-shingled spire, one of the characteristic features of Essex churches,

-beckons insistently from the road, and he who thereupon turns aside is

-well repaid, in a sight of the elaborately-carved timber columns of

-the interior, proving how in this county, where building stone is not

-found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders made excellent shift

-with heart of oak. This is, in fact, like so many other Essex churches,

-largely wooden, and its timber is as sound now as it was six or seven

-hundred years ago.

-

-[Illustration: SHENFIELD.]

-

-Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End" lies two miles distant

-from Shenfield. As in the case of so many other places near the

-great roads, a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name of

-the old village sprang up, to catch the custom of travellers; but an

-additionally curious fact is the utter extinction of the original

-village, which lay a mile distant from the highway, where the parish

-church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring farmstead. Explorers

-in the countryside are often astonished at the great distances

-between villages and their parish churches, and seek in vain in their

-guide-books or in talk with the "oldest inhabitant" an explanation of

-so curious a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the mystery is

-found in the enclosure of the surrounding common lands. The enclosure

-of commons has never been possible without the passing of special Acts,

-which have divided what should have been the heritage of the people

-for all time between the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their

-proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor and the tenants would

-each obtain their share of the plunder, in the form of freehold land,

-with the obvious result that the villagers, instead of paying rent for

-their cottages clustering round the church in the original village,

-built themselves new and rent-free cottages on their share of the spoil

-of the commons. The old cottages being pulled down, or allowed to

-decay, it was not long before the last trace of the original village

-disappeared.

-

-[Illustration: MOUNTNESSING CHURCH.]

-

-Mountnessing was once the seat of the Mounteneys, who have long since

-vanished from their old home. The old church, largely red brick without

-and timber within, still preserves the fossil rib-bone of an elephant,

-long regarded with reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant,

-and has for an additional curiosity the carving of a head on one of

-the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps by way of warning to Early English

-parishioners of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's bridle."

-The red-brick west front of the church, masking the wooden belfry-frame

-from the weather, still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick,

-but such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that without that

-evidence of age it would be difficult to credit it with so long an

-existence. The iron ties in the shape of the letter S give the view

-a singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in verse, beginning,

-"Reader, excuse the underwritten," is a curiosity of Mountnessing

-churchyard.

-

-[Illustration: MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL.]

-

-Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as the modern settlement is

-named, is seen clustering on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and

-a wayside pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting of a

-dozen cottages, two public-houses, a general "stores" (our grandfathers

-would have been content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a tin

-tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to walk a mile to

-church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and a windmill situated on a knoll;

-a windmill that for picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome

-or a Constable.

-

-From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims, two miles to

-"Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of customary spelling. The milestones

-are undoubtedly strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on

-the pedantic side, for that village derives its name from a settlement

-of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or meadow, at the Roman milestone

-they found here, but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone"

-they called their village, which lies in the little valley of the

-River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream of the smallest)

-hither and thither to give a perennial verdure to the meads along its

-course. "Ing" is, by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names

-successively met with along the River Wid. Mounteney's Ing we have

-already seen, and Fryerning, or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; while

-Margaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond Ingatestone.

-

-[Illustration: THE GATEHOUSE, INGATESTONE HALL.]

-

-Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad, is of the

-narrowest, and remains in almost every detail exactly as it is pictured

-in the old print reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the

-church still rising behind. It is a tower which by no means looks its

-age of over four hundred years, so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness

-of the brick. Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that Sir

-William Petre who, emulating the accommodating qualities of the famous

-Vicar of Bray, bowed before the religious storms of the reigns of Henry

-the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth. "Made of the willow

-and not of the oak," those tempests not only left him unscathed, but

-brought him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched with the manor

-of Ingatestone, plundered from the Abbey of Barking, together with

-much spoil elsewhere. How he managed to do it is a mystery, but during

-the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for such the Petres always

-have been) actually obtained a Papal Bull confirming him and his in

-these grants. One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy,

-recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble physiognomy could

-be so accomplished a time-server and truckler. His home, plundered

-from the nuns of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone

-Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the road, down a

-beautifully-timbered country lane. The entrance is by a gatehouse

-with the motto, "_Sans Dieu Rien_," situated at the end of an avenue

-and framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old red-brick

-turreted buildings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Lord

-Petre of to-day does not reside here, but the place is still in the

-family, and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use. Miss Braddon

-is perhaps scarce to be numbered among those novelists whose literary

-landmarks are followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone

-Hall that it is the scene of her _Lady Audley's Secret_. The

-fish-ponds of old monastic times, the well in which Lady Audley thrust

-her husband, the lime-walk he haunted, together with such romantic

-accessories as terraced walks and a priest's hiding-hole, form items

-which would require the business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer

-to fully enlarge upon. They _do_ say--the "they" in question being the

-gossips of Ingatestone--that the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail,

-passing at 1·15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the high road,

-once saw "a something" in white mysteriously sauntering beneath the

-trees, but whether it was the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one

-of the sisters thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely

-a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the Postmaster-General's

-regulations and time-sheets not allowing for time spent in psychical

-research.

-

-[Illustration: INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. _From an Old Print_]

-

-The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is visible on the right, soon

-after leaving Ingatestone. Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its

-timbered belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the village,

-standing solitary, save for the vicarage and a farmhouse, beside a

-railway crossing--if, indeed, any building adjoining the main-line of a

-great railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret thus honoured

-in the place-name is the Saint to whom the church is dedicated. Some

-traces of the "marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the old

-windows, in decorative allusion, remained until they were swept away

-for modern stained-glass in memory of a late vicar and his family;

-glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that, save for an

-inscription on one of the bells, she now remains unhonoured in her

-own church, deposed in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects

-kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art furnisher. The only

-remaining ancient glass is that of the east window, a magnificent

-fifteenth-century "tree of Jesse."

-

-[Illustration: AT MARGARETTING.]

-

-Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the twenty-fifth milestone,

-where a post-office and some few scattered cottages straggle

-picturesquely at the foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The

-odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially to spoil some

-two miles of this road is the park wall of Hylands, a large estate

-purchased about 1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster, who

-stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and raised this eyesore to

-enclose his new-made park. Almost as soon as the last brick was put

-in its place, the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by railway

-speculations, and his walled-in Eden was sold. Nature in the meanwhile

-has done her best, and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the

-ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River Wid crosses beneath

-the road, water-lilies gem the stream and the wind sounds in the

-luxuriant Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.

-

-If it were not for its church, which has been re-built and has a very

-fine and tall spire, one might easily pass Widford and not know it,

-for the very few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such as it

-is, it stands on the crest of something not quite so much as a hill

-and rather more than an incline, and beside its large church has an

-equally fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White Horse." Time was,

-and that until three years since, when Widford was celebrated for its

-one other inn, the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled, the

-"Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by the picture-sign of a

-headless woman, with the inscription, _Fort Bone_, on one side, and a

-portrait of Henry the Eighth on the other. "_Fort Bone_" was commonly

-Englished by slangy cyclists as "good business." The sign, of course,

-was a pictorial and satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an

-open question whether or not in their present form this and the several

-other "Quiet Woman" and "Good Woman" signs throughout the country are

-perversions of the original legend, "_la bonne fame_" displayed on old

-inns in the distant past; an inscription laudatory of the hostelry,

-and matching the self-recommendation of "_la bonne rénommée_," found

-in modern France, or the more familiar "noted house for--" and "good

-pull up" inscriptions on inns in modern England. Virgil's description

-of Fame, walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the clouds,

-may have originated the pictorial sign of the headless woman in days

-of ancient learning; and the classic allusion becoming lost and the

-supposedly incorrect spelling of "_fame_" being altered to "_femme_,"

-we thus obtain a very reasonable derivation. We may take it that many

-shrew-bitten folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily agreed to

-forget the original meaning in order to adopt one so exactly fitting

-their opinion that the only quiet or good women were headless ones.

-

-[Illustration: THE "GOOD WOMAN" SIGN.]

-

-Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change that is robbing places of

-all interest and distinction, the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer

-swings from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed inn opposite the

-"White Horse" has retired into private life. The picture sign is now

-housed inside the "White Horse."

-

-

-XVIII

-

-

-WIDFORD almost immediately introduces the explorer to Moulsham

-(originally the "mole's home"), itself own brother--but a very

-out-at-elbows brother--to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the wind

-between our gentility and the somewhat fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we

-should turn to the left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of

-the town, and so, proceeding along the "new London road," come into

-Chelmsford, half way down the High Street. Being, however, intent

-rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en endure the half-mile

-length of shabby, untidy street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford,

-the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City of Calves, over the

-hunchbacked and narrow stone bridge across the Chelmer, the successor,

-at an interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original bridge

-built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That is a huge slice of time, but

-it was too late, even in Norman days, for the town to change its name

-from Chelmers_ford_ to something more appropriate when the ford was

-thus superseded.

-

-Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High Street of the town,

-the view closed by the Shire Hall and the church; the Norwich Road,

-however, turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and refusing

-to make acquaintance with the town. It is the Conduit that is seen in

-this illustration of the High Street, its architecture scarce improved

-by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be ornamental, over its

-cupola.

-

-[Illustration: THE BRIDGE: ENTRANCE TO CHELMSFORD.]

-

-Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at the end of this view,

-spoil one another, the Hall almost entirely hiding the church when

-looking down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular exterior

-of the church putting the clumsy architecture of the Hall to shame,

-as a pagan upstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some, but

-its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone concerns the passing

-stranger, who feels so concerned by sight of it that he accordingly

-passes the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the seated bronze effigy

-of a native, a bygone Lord Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like

-an old apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops green coppery

-stains over his nice stone pedestal) keep one another company in the

-open space fronting this building.

-

-[Illustration: THE CONDUIT, CHELMSFORD.]

-

-The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal, whose career came to a

-close in 1806. The monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for all

-time the image of a judge whose administration of English law, directed

-by serene wisdom, assisted by purest love of justice, endeared by

-unwearied kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will be held by

-his country in undying remembrance." His birthplace could hardly have

-said more than that.

-

-[Illustration: TINDAL'S STATUE.]

-

-Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways, being indeed very severely

-bitten with a taste for modernity. Is it not famous as the first town

-in the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have not its streets

-been resolutely swept clear of antiquity? The town, in short, is

-scarce picturesque. It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays,

-but on other occasions every house provokes a yawn, with perhaps the

-exception of the "Saracen's Head," an inn that, despite its modernised

-and stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old times. There was a

-"Saracen's Head" here certainly as far back as the fifteenth century,

-and probably much earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it derived

-from Crusading times, when the knights and men-at-arms, returning

-from Palestine with wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys,

-leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the Holy Land, found

-their fame come home before them, and the old inns they had known--the

-"Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine Wheel," and the

-like--often re-named in their honour. With little effort we can imagine

-the scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period, when exploits at

-Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were told and re-told, and gained wonderfully

-in the repetition over sack and malvoysie. What bloody fellows they

-were, and with what zest they slew the Soldan's soldiers over and over

-again as they sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six

-hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has been rebuilt many times

-since then; but human nature remains the same though timber rot and

-brick perish, and again and again the same old talk has been heard in

-the bar-parlour of the inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Creçy;

-men of a later age who warred under Marlborough at Blenheim, Ramillies

-or Malplaquet; the lads of the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from

-the horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from a hundred fights on

-the burning South African veldt--all have had their circle of greedy

-listeners here.

-

-The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek and stuccoed face to

-the street, and the house shows signs of extensive rebuilding and

-remodelling, undertaken in the full flush of the great days of coaching

-prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in the belief that

-coaching, and the road as an institution, would last for ever. Fond

-belief! Has anyone ever stopped to consider the fact that the great

-coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a great deal more

-to do with the pulling down of the old-fashioned galleried and timbered

-inns of country towns than ever railways have had? The average small

-country town felt in fullest measure the great increase in business

-incidental to the last years of the coaching age, and every innkeeper

-hastened to rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who had,

-from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding until the dawn of

-the Railway Age, on seeing that the road would decay and travellers

-be carried to their journeys' ends without halting for rest and

-refreshment, promptly gave up any such ideas and were thankful that

-they had not begun the work of reconstruction and enlargement. Those

-who had were ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared may

-yet be often met with, a world too large, in country towns where once

-the mails and the stage-coaches passed, like a procession, day by day.

-It is quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house like the

-"White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it is not too much to say that,

-had the Coaching Age lasted another ten years, it also would have been

-rebuilt.

-

-An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its central figure, belongs

-to the "Saracen's Head" at Chelmsford. For some years after he had

-won fame as a novelist he still retained his position in the General

-Post Office, of which he was a travelling inspector. On one of these

-official journeys he happened to be staying here, at the time when

-his _Barchester Towers_ was being issued, after the then prevailing

-fashion, in parts. He was seated in the coffee-room when two clergymen

-entered, one of them with the newly-issued part of the story. The

-cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the trials of the

-Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs Proudie, who was rather a trial

-to Trollope's readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the clergyman

-put the book down. "Confound that Mrs Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish

-she were dead!"

-

-Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he thanked the reader for thus

-accidentally telling him that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome,

-and undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen," said he, "she shall

-die in the next number;" and die she accordingly did. But in defence

-of Trollope's truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the

-opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs Proudies may yet be

-found in a goodly proportion of the episcopal palaces of England.

-

-

-XIX

-

-

-RETURNING now to the Conduit, and making for the open road once more,

-Chelmsford is left by way of Springfield, past the successor of

-Chelmsford's finest old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The

-old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five centuries, and had

-been the halting-place of many famous travellers, among them a long

-line of Earls of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham

-and London; but none of these associations sufficed to save the house.

-Fragments of its carved beams are preserved in the local museum, but

-recall it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon bring back

-in his majesty that denizen of the earth in the dim æons of the past.

-Chelmsford would dearly like many of its old buildings--wantonly

-demolished years ago--back again; but what is done cannot be undone,

-and there's an end on't. The "Cross Keys" remains, in a restored

-condition.

-

-[Illustration: THE "THREE CUPS" SIGN]

-

-The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of Chelmsford, carries

-varying significances. To the mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the

-American from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim Fathers and

-their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts; and to the gaol-bird

-it means a "stretch" of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in

-fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building enlarged in recent

-years for the accommodation of the guests consigned to it at Assize

-time from the Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But, once

-past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing and cheerful. Its

-long miscellaneous street, where the quaint sign of the "Three Cups"

-stands out, gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive

-grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of picturesqueness.

-That this has been the aim of their architects is abundantly manifest

-in examples where, under a single roof, one may experience the

-mingled romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle, a Tudor

-manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a "Queen Anne" mansion; all done in

-red brick, gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover, fitted

-with electric light and hot and cold water supply. To this end has

-castellated and domestic architecture unwound its long story during

-some five hundred years. It will be seen thereby that William of

-Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time architect did not live

-in vain.

-

-But if Springfield be modern as a suburb, it is ancient as a village.

-To see old Springfield, it is necessary to turn off the road to the

-left, and to journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church, a

-noble building with mingled red brick and stone tower bearing the

-inscription, "Prayse God for al the good benefactors 1586." Oliver

-Goldsmith, it is quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model

-for his _Deserted Village_. He certainly visited at an old cottage

-opposite the church, but the real Sweet Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.

-

-[Illustration: SPRINGFIELD CHURCH.]

-

-Beyond the village and facing the high road are the strangely

-impressive lodges of the historic estate of New Hall; new at the end

-of the fifteenth century, but declined into a respectable age by

-now and cobwebbed with much history and many legends. The place, now

-and for a considerable number of years past an alien convent, has

-been owned during a period of four hundred years by an astonishing

-number of historic personages, who have succeeded one another like

-flitting phantoms. Here the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps

-out spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the handling of the

-historic kaleidoscope. Built by Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose

-daughter and heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother

-of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus eventually came into possession

-of Henry the Eighth, who occasionally resided here and re-named it

-"Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of

-Sussex. By this time it had resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners

-were George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, and Oliver

-Cromwell, who had it as a gift from Parliament and exchanged it so soon

-as he decently could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like

-residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him succeeded another Duke of

-Buckingham, and to him that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk,

-Duke of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and was visited

-here, when he was suffering from gout and dropsy, by that scribbling

-traveller, Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of historic

-owners may be said to end, but constant change has ever been the lot

-of New Hall, and a succession of lesser lights followed him until the

-nuns set up their secluded life here and bade farewell to a vain

-world. That world passes by; the road on one side, the railway midway

-in the grounds, and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as

-morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the vineyard.

-

-[Illustration: NEW HALL LODGES]

-

-No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road. All is emptiness,

-and the lichened brick and the crumbling stone vases of neighbouring

-boundary walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled

-aims characteristic of the place.

-

-There is an air of romance about Boreham House, as seen from the

-tree-embowered road at a little distance from New Hall; an altogether

-deceptive air, let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic

-building of white brick. It is its situation at the head of a formal

-lake, fringed with stately elms, that confers the illusory distinction,

-but the explorer of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing

-rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl squattering

-on the lake, can weave his own romance to fit the scene. And if the

-house, though stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest in

-the shape of the identical carriage used by the Duke of Wellington at

-the Battle of Waterloo. Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent

-years to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken to pieces in an

-accident. Restored now to its original condition, it will need to be a

-great occasion indeed that brings it forth again.

-

-[Illustration: BOREHAM.]

-

-Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its old gabled cottages

-clustering round the still older church, itself embowered in lime

-trees whose delightful scent weights the July air with an Arcadian

-languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham has every likelihood

-of having his nerves startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the

-road of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door open,

-and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of one of the inmates

-of the silent tomb making a hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High

-noon being an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying as

-to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on drawing nearer that

-the old tomb-house has been converted into a tool-house and general

-lumber-room, and that the figure seated within is the sexton enjoying

-his lunch, screened from the noonday heats. An inscription over the

-door of the ornate building--a copy of the Temple of the Winds at

-Athens--proclaims it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamianæ, Anno 1764";

-but the Walthams have disappeared, both from their mausoleum and the

-district. The body of the last appears to have been arrested for debt

-when on the road hither from Chelmsford. The sexton explains that the

-parish took over the Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing

-the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience hee-ar, years ago,"

-says this typical Essex rustic, and goes on to tell how the oil and

-coals and candles for church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe

-Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held. Three Radcliffes, Earls

-of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather, father, and son, lie in effigy side

-by side on an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers are to

-my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton calls them, and explains that

-their broken noses are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.

-

-Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called the "mine" road,

-Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the great red-brick Georgian mansion

-of Crix, standing in its meadows where the little River Ter comes

-down from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels of Hatfield

-Mill, and then hurries off, as though belated, for a rendezvous with

-the Chelmer, two miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road with

-whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing warranty of its age in the

-inscription, "A.A. 1715"; but if that evidence were lacking it could

-be found in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into an area

-with the raising of the road for the building of the bridge that long

-ago replaced the watersplash at this crossing of the stream.

-

-Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the heaths that once gave

-the place its original forename of "Heathfield," and the Peverels,

-identical with the Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly

-vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige of themselves

-in the church--that last resort of the antiquary in search of old

-manorial lords. It is true that on modern tablets built into the west

-front of the church the founding of a Benedictine Priory here in 1100

-by Ingelrica, mother of William Peverel, is alluded to, together with

-the rather scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things are

-decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of Latin and lichen-stains,

-so that both their monastic beneficence and their maternal origin are

-only dimly to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.

-

-It is the distance of half a mile from the high road to where Hatfield

-church lies secluded, adjoining the grounds of a mansion partly

-occupying the site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It is

-here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's original baptism

-must be sought, and accordingly some stretches of common-land may be

-discovered close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us, though

-there be little enough to say of it, beyond the note that its closeness

-to the railway station has caused a certain growth and a certain

-amount of rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the old

-plaster cottages that were once the invariable feature of its street,

-and admirably figured forth the Essex manner of decoratively treating

-plaster-work. There remain here but two such cottages, bearing the date

-1703, and the initials M.R., with _fleur-de-lis_.

-

-

-XX

-

-

-A ROAD of almost unvarying flatness conducts in something under three

-miles to Witham, entered nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by

-the Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates in no fewer than

-three separate and distinct names. As the River Witham, it confers a

-name upon the townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same sponsorial

-office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook it is endowed with a title

-that smacks rather of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in

-summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down upon the mere thread

-of water oozing and stewing in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the

-neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is not ill-named as the

-Podsbrook; but the Essex Council in bridging it so substantially think

-of it rather as the River Witham, which they have every right and cause

-to do, for the stream can avenge itself of those disfiguring potsherds

-and that contemptuous title in the most sardonic way when winter comes

-and the floods are out.

-

-The long street of Witham is remarkable for the number of large and

-handsome mansions dating from the time of Queen Anne, through the

-period of the four Georges. The greater number of the professional

-men of Essex would, from the number of those houses, appear to have

-settled in the little town and to have medically attended it and

-legally represented it to such an effect that it is only now beginning

-to recover from them and from the coming of the railway, which dealt a

-death-blow to the thriving coaching interest of the early part of the

-nineteenth century.

-

-For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place of Mrs Nelson's

-famous "Ipswich Blues," the crack coaches on the seventy miles of road,

-which started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary exertions

-made Ipswich in something under six hours. Such remarkable performances

-as these were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in place

-of the average ten miles on other roads, and by placing leaders in

-readiness at the foot of hills like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The

-"Blue Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some of the principal

-coaches drew up, is still in existence; its sign, a pierced effigy of

-that animal projecting from the front of the house and looming weirdly

-against the sky-line. There are many "White Harts" on the road to

-Norwich, the sign being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as that

-of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North Road; but of all the many

-examples to be met along these hundred and twelve miles this is the one

-that is most quaintly out of proportion, with a head and neck less

-than half the size demanded by body and legs, and a golden collar and

-chain of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was the favourite

-badge of Richard the Second, whose connection with East Anglia was

-too slight for assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially

-allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference on the part

-of innkeepers along the Norwich Road.

-

-[Illustration: CHIPPING HILL.]

-

-Those who would seek the site of the original Witham must turn aside

-from the high road the matter of half a mile, past the railway station,

-to Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a camp successively

-occupied and wrought upon by the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons,

-it will be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant valley of that

-triply-named river already mentioned, in 1749 described by Walpole as

-"the prettiest little winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows

-falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to this day, and as

-sweet, and the by-road that comes up from the gravelly hollow and cuts

-through the earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold climbs up

-romantically under the blossoming limes into as pretty a picture in

-the rural sort as you shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old

-England before railways came, or science and the ten thousand plagues

-of modern life, and the cheap builder of hideous new cottages were

-let loose upon the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in the

-picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old dwellings, flint-built

-church tower and red-brick rectory, set in, upon and around the

-swelling grassy banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had both their

-fortress and their market, as evidenced by the still surviving name of

-Chipping, or Market Hill.

-

-Old East Anglian cottages have their own special characteristics,

-arising from local conditions, but one feature they share in common

-with all old rustic dwellings; the great size and relative importance

-of their genial chimneys, suggesting warmth and the lavish laying on of

-logs. They tell the passer-by of old times when wood was the only fuel;

-when it was to be gathered for the mere labour of gathering, and plenty

-of it was piled upon the generous open hearth. Modern cottages, all

-over the kingdom, tell a different tale, in the look of their meagre

-chimney-pots--a tale of coal, dearly purchased, economised in tiny

-grates.

-

-But the special features of East Anglian cottage architecture? They are

-here, in the highways and byways, for all to see who will. It is a land

-without stone, this East of England, where timber and flint and brick

-play important constructional parts in church and hall and manor-house,

-and where timber framing, lath and plaster, parge-work, and a few

-bricks for the chimney stacks, are combined to build up the cottages.

-

-Out of their necessities our ancestors contrived dwellings that for

-durability, comfort and artistry put modern houses, whether halls or

-cottages, to shame. The stone cottages of Somersetshire, Rutland,

-Leicestershire; the cob and thatch of Devon, the granite of Cornwall;

-the timber and plaster, or timber and brick noggin of Cheshire and

-Herefordshire are all evidence to this day of how skilfully our

-forbears employed the materials to their hands; and here in Essex

-you shall find a something in the art of cottage building hardly to

-be discovered elsewhere. This is the frequent use of parge-work, or

-pargetting, as it is sometimes called, on old cottage exteriors.

-Parge-work is the ornamental filling or surfacing of walls with

-plaster. The term is just as often applied to the elaborately-moulded

-and panelled plaster ceilings of Elizabethan and Jacobean halls as

-to the exterior decoration that forms so remarkable and pleasing a

-feature of Essex rustic cottage architecture. Few Essex villages that

-can claim to preserve many relics of old times are without examples of

-this peculiarly local style; although, to be sure, an ignorant want of

-appreciation has been the cause of much destruction of late years. The

-commoner forms of this decoration are frequently seen, in the easily

-incised patterns that even the unskilful can make in the plaster while

-still wet, by the aid of anything from a trowel to the finger-tips;

-just as a cook ornaments the dough of her uncooked pies. Many of

-these patterns are traditional; as much a matter of tradition, for

-instance, as are the needlework patterns wrought on the breast of an

-old smock-frock. The commonest is one produced by a process of combing

-the plaster in repetitions of a device resembling an elongated figure 8

-laid flat, or perhaps more narrowly resembling a hank of worsted. Other

-patterns, of whorls or concentric circles, stars, triangles and the

-like, are produced by wooden stamps. But the really beautiful examples

-are not the products of to-day. These belong to the seventeenth and

-eighteenth centuries, and are lavish in decoration of a Renaissance

-character moulded in high relief. Architects with sufficient culture

-and understanding to enable them to appreciate local style have, in

-recent years, reintroduced decoration of this character when building

-residences in the country, but many a humble cottager lives within

-walls that display a profusion of artistic devices unapproached by the

-houses of the wealthy.

-

-Discoveries close by the church on Chipping Hill have led to the belief

-that the building stands on, or near, the site of a Temple of Diana,

-and certainly Roman bricks are still visible in great numbers in the

-walls of the tower. A memorial in the chancel to Sir Gilbert East,

-who died in 1828, reminds the historian of some strange survivals

-existing at that time. The Easts were owners of the tithes at Witham,

-and although they lived so far distant as Berkshire, always insisted

-on their right of being buried here. Sir Gilbert East's body was, by

-his express direction, buried beside his wife, with a band of brass

-encircling both, engraved with the words from the marriage service,

-"Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." His funeral

-was a three days' business, with knights bannerets accompanying, and

-much pomp and circumstance. In the family vault they laid him, wrapped

-in linen, returned to Berkshire for the reading of the will, when, to

-the dismay of the family, it was found that the knight had expressly

-wished to be buried in woollen. The family solicitor hurried back and,

-disinterring his defunct client, saw to it that he was comfortably

-tucked in as desired.

-

-Between Witham and Kelvedon, where the road runs level, there is but

-one hamlet, an offshoot of Rivenhall known as Rivenhall End, where a

-cottage close by the "Fox" inn, once a toll-house, bears its former

-history, plain to read, in the evidence of its windows commanding

-either approach, up or down the road. A mile and a half beyond begins

-Kelvedon, set down in the flats beside the River Blackwater; "Kelvedon

-Easterford, vulgo Keldon," as Ogilby calls it; "consisting," he

-continues, "chiefly of inns"; a description which remains strikingly

-true to this day. This pronunciation, "Keldon," throws some light upon

-the following remarks of an old traveller who kept a diary of his

-wayfaring, and, writing in 1744, says, "From Colchester in an hour or

-two, I came to an old Village call'd Kildane, where they tell you the

-famous Massacre of the Danes began; but the true Name of the Town is

-Kelvedon."

-

-How Kelvedon can ever have escaped being called "Long" Kelvedon is

-a mystery, for it straggles on and on and must be nearly a mile in

-length; a street of handsome old residences, of cottages and humble

-shops of all ages, and old broken-backed taverns where the Essex

-labourer gathers night by night and discusses the prospect of the

-carraway crop and the likelihood of the entire agricultural interest

-presently, going _en masse_ to the "work'us." After which, with

-the courage of despair, and to drown his troubles, he will call for

-"another pot o' thrup'ny, missus," and, when closing time comes,

-slouch home through the mud and mist until the following evening, when

-the same programme is repeated. It is the agricultural labourer who

-supports the little wayside "publics" whose existence in such numbers

-puzzles the mid-day stranger, who, seeing them empty and apparently

-lifeless, wonders how they can possibly live. Business practically only

-begins when work in the fields is done, and the rent is not so high but

-that a few pots of beer a night represent a sufficient profit.

-

-It must not be supposed that Kelvedon has not its exquisite

-architectural relics of a bygone time, or that its inns are all of the

-rural beer-house type. Not at all. Chief among the inns of Kelvedon

-is the "Angel," which indeed is a house not only of considerable size

-and outstanding character, but of historic interest, as having been

-the favourite resting-place of William the Third on his journeys along

-this road. Its projecting porch is the first thing the traveller sees

-on entering the town from the direction of London, where the road

-swerves violently to the left, and again as violently to the right,

-forming a very awkward corner. "Angel Corner," said Alexander, of the

-"Retaliator" coach, "is the very devil of a corner." This remark was

-drawn from him on the occasion of his nearly driving into the porch,

-when trying conclusions with a rival charioteer.

-

-Almost opposite the still-existing "Angel" stood the equally extensive

-"Red Lion," long since retired from business and remodelled as a row

-of cottages. The histories of both houses, and of many another fine

-old inn, which might once have been written from the recollections of

-those who knew the old days of the road, are now in great part lost,

-and the world so much the poorer. Had scribblers then abounded, and the

-"personal" note of the modern journalist been sounded in those days,

-we should have known how King William came to and set out from his

-inn; how he looked, what he ate and drank, how many long clay pipes

-he smoked, and what comparisons he drew in conversation with Bentinck

-between the flat lands on the way from Kelvedon to Harwich and the

-still flatter lands of his native Holland. And besides such records of

-the great, we should then have been better furnished with the early

-history of coaching, which, if not indeed a sealed book, is at least a

-very short and fragmentary one.

-

-[Illustration: THE "ANGEL," KELVEDON.]

-

-

-XXI

-

-

-EARLY coaching days are wrapped round with strange adventures and the

-oddest tales; some, doubtless, of the _ben trovato_, rather than the

-most truthful, nature. But those stories of coaching miseries and

-adventure that have been proved truthful are themselves so surprising

-and incredible to modern ears that even the most improbable of

-uncertified tales cannot be dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of

-the Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should, for instance,

-surely be picturesquely written up some day and included in some

-English (and therefore strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One

-Nights' Entertainments.

-

-The coach was nearing the outskirts of London. The rheumy air hung in

-dank and foggy vapours on the countryside and transformed innocent

-roadside trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing shapes. The guard

-let off his blunderbuss at a pollard willow that loomed suspiciously

-like a highwayman out of the reeking air, and the passengers all began

-to automatically turn their pockets out. It proved a false alarm, and

-purses and trinkets were returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One

-gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he carried, whereupon

-a lady advised him to hide the money in his boot. He had hardly done

-this when a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman to stop.

-When the unhappy insides had picked themselves up from the straw at the

-bottom of the coach, into which they had unceremoniously been thrown

-by the driver's prompt obedience to that behest, they found themselves

-covered with a pistol projected through the door, and were invited to

-deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who had little gave it and

-were thankful it was no more. The lady protested that she had nothing;

-"but," said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you will find

-ten guineas." There was nothing for it but to take off that boot and

-hand over the coin; but when the highwayman had gone it was another

-matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in no measured terms,

-of being the robber's accomplice. Bound to admit that appearances

-were against her, she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited

-the company to supper the following evening, when matters should be

-explained. They accepted, not, it is to be feared, very graciously.

-The time came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room, with a

-supper laid, they were re-introduced to their acquaintance of the night

-before. When the repast was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she

-said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in this book, which I

-had with me in the coach, are bank-notes to the amount of one thousand

-pounds. I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than for me to

-be robbed of this valuable property. As you have been the means of my

-saving it, I entreat your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred

-pounds."

-

-Much of the humour that went to lighten old road travelling was of an

-evanescent kind, and has not survived, but a few examples, preserved

-in contemporary literature, keep their flavour. Among them is the

-narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter." "I recollect," said

-the Jehu who told the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger,

-and nothing that was either said or done was at all to his mind. On

-that day I happened to have a very awkward team--three blind ones and

-a very shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times I lost my

-patience as well as temper. My near leader pulled to such a degree that

-I was obliged to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the top of

-the bit, and curb her enough to break her jaw. After starting again, I

-could deal with her very well for about a mile, when her mouth got dead

-again, and I was wicked enough to let drive a few hearty damns at her,

-my pious companion all the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be

-damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon which he bolted

-as if he had been galvanised.

-

-"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'

-

-"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I, 'but I won't have it;' so

-I answered, 'What coach does he drive?'

-

-"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up his hands, 'I fear you

-don't read your Bible; but I will tell you--he was the most patient man

-that ever existed.'

-

-"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three blind 'uns and a bolter?'

-

-"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a coachman.'

-

-"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever he had had four such

-horses to deal with as I have here, he would have had no more patience

-than myself.'"

-

-[Illustration: "THREE BLIND UNS AND A BOLTER." _From a Print after H.

-Alken._]

-

-Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen played a drunken trick

-that would have been impossible in the last years of coaching, when

-discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric than they had been. He

-had just driven the London stage from Ipswich, and having more by good

-luck than careful driving brought his passengers safely to dinner at

-the "Angel," turned into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink

-of coachmen--rum. Emerging, he perceived one of the Harwich to London

-fish-waggons, fully laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to

-the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the waggon round and dashed

-off at top speed on the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden

-Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and two tons weight of fish

-strewed the king's highway. The mad coachman survived to repent his

-escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder of his life.

-

-"Other times, other manners" is a saying that assumes an added

-force when contrasting the Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our

-fellow-travellers by railway, who glare at us, and we at them, like

-strange cats on a roof-top, have little idea of the chivalry that ruled

-on the road a hundred years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who

-may be the only other occupant of a railway carriage with you, and

-she wonders whether she had not better call the guard; but it was,

-in the days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden duty of

-the gentlemen to see that the ladies in whose company the chances of

-the road might place them lacked nothing that courtesy could supply;

-whether it were merely the aid of an arm in walking up one of those

-hills the coaches could only climb unladen, or the more material

-attention involved in seeing that the dear creatures were duly supplied

-with refreshments. It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom

-of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for the breakfasts and

-dinners of the unprotected ladies who might be travelling by the same

-conveyance. "I vow," says one of these old travellers, "'tis a pleasure

-in a cavalier to do so; but, the Lord save us, what a prodigious

-appetite does not the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the fair,

-whose lassitude and vapours at other times render them incapable of

-more than drinking a dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing

-which it is only fitting that the heathenish and phanatick peoples of

-the Indies should partake of. I protest that the ladies of the coach,

-when we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding they could not be

-suited with tay, went to it with a right good will and left as good an

-account of the claret and the beef as if they had been going empty for

-a week. Spare me, I do beg, from your languishing creatures who would

-die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, but compare with the most

-valiant of trenchermen abroad."

-

-This protesting gentleman might, had he thought of it, have exclaimed

-with Othello on the pity "that we can call these delicate creatures

-ours and not their appetites."

-

-He must have been particularly hard hit in the pocket by the robust

-appetites of his fellow-travellers, but did not, however, let his

-feelings appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as a toast, "the

-ladies, bless them, whose bright eyes," etc., etc.--a toast we have

-many times heard of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon having

-"made an impression." He, in fact, seems to have been like Constable,

-in a way; for it was said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in a

-stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner." "Then,"

-said one, hearing that praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"

-

-That is very significant. It was, then, only your very paragon among

-gentlemen who could sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner.

-His manners might survive the strain of the journey itself, and even

-the sight and sound of lovely Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring,

-unlovely to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating gurgles; but

-when after the tedious stage had been accomplished and the passengers

-had descended, irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner scarce to

-be eaten, even at express speed, in the short time allowed, then, ay

-_then_, my friends, came the test! No man so insensible to politeness

-as a starving man, and few attentions were paid to the ladies by

-strangers whose sole chance of obtaining the dinner for which they had

-paid was the resolute determination to attend only to their own wants.

-

-The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly outweighed the

-pleasures of that old-world method. A pleasant day and the open country

-made a seat on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not willingly

-to be exchanged for any other mode of conveyance then known; but, as

-little David Copperfield found on his first coach journey, _night_ on

-a coach was an experience once gained not willingly repeated. Being

-put between two gentlemen, to prevent his falling off, David found

-himself nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he could

-not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!" which they didn't like at

-all, because it woke them. With the rising of the sun David found his

-fellow-passengers sleeping easier than they had done during the night,

-when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed their midnight slumbers. As

-the sun rose higher, so their sleep became lighter and they gradually

-awoke, one by one, each one indignant when charged with having slept.

-During the rest of his career, David invariably observed "that of all

-human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least

-disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having

-gone to sleep in a coach."

-

-

-XXII

-

-

-[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF SPURGEON.]

-

-COACHING times and coaching inns have long kept us at the very

-threshold of Kelvedon, which has a modern claim to notice of which it

-is not a little proud. Spurgeon was born here. Although the figure of

-that great wielder of homely and untutored pulpit oratory is but one

-among several preachers in the same family, there is only one possible

-Spurgeon when that name is mentioned. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born

-in a house still pointed out, on June 19, 1834; the eldest son of the

-Rev. John Spurgeon. The old cottage is now the "Wheatsheaf" beer-house

-and has had a bay window and a brick frontage added since that time.

-Close by is a now highly respectable and not a little dignified private

-residence known still as the "Tommy shop," although almost seventy

-years have passed since it was used as a kind of restaurant and canteen

-for the navvies then working on the construction of the Great Eastern

-Railway, which runs at the rear.

-

-The oldest house in Kelvedon is doubtless the "Sun," which dates from

-the middle of the fifteenth century and has within recent years had its

-carved woodwork, long covered with plaster, once more exposed to view.

-It stands, almost the last house in the town, by the bridge over the

-Blackwater, on the way to Gore Pit.

-

-Gore Pit is generally said to be the site of a battle. _What_ battle,

-however, historians do not and cannot specify; and indeed this name,

-bloody though it may sound to modern ears, has, despite the popular

-legend of the derivation of Kelvedon from "Kildane," perhaps no such

-sanguinary association, and is probably a contraction of the old word

-"coneygore," or rabbit warren.

-

-It is, despite its name, a pretty and a peaceful hamlet, with a

-blacksmith's shop and a roadside horse-pond, and surrounded by the

-fruit-farms of a great jam-making company. The church of Feering can be

-seen across the flat fields, on the other side of the railway. Messing

-lies a mile away, in the other direction.

-

-Let the idle wayfarer, curious as to the name of Gore Pit, speak to the

-blacksmith on the subject, and he will be told, with the seriousness

-of implicit belief, of the fighting of a great battle here, and that

-the blood ran down into "that there horse-pond." Moreover, that at

-Kelvedon--"Killdane they used to call it--they killed the Danes; at

-Feering they feared 'em, and at Messing they made a mess of it"; which

-seems to very correctly reflect the views of the neighbourhood on local

-history in ancient times, as reflected in place-names!

-

-Rural Essex, in the aspect of its fields and meadows, is revealed along

-these miles in its most characteristic form. It is, in many respects,

-unlike other counties. In some ways the unhappy industry of farming has

-fared worse here than elsewhere, and many holdings have for years past

-gone uncultivated, and the dock, the thistle and other lusty weeds have

-resumed an evil possession of fields once kept clean and trim. But in

-the smaller operations of husbandry Essex has always been, and in some

-districts still is, remarkably successful; while, although the farmer

-protests that it does not pay to grow any kind of grain, the yellowing

-seas of autumnal cornfields are still a prominent feature of the

-landscapes of Essex and of its neighbouring Suffolk. Essex and Suffolk

-are old-world, far beyond the rest of England, and in growing wheat

-in these times, when a cornfield is a rare sight in other parts of

-the country and when "our daily bread" is chiefly compounded of grain

-grown in North America, Russia, or the Argentine, they maintain their

-singularity. It does the heart good to see the ripening wheatfields of

-East Anglia, to see the gathered stooks in the reaped perspectives,

-and to hear the hum of the threshing machine; for the sights and sound

-seem to carry us back to that England of a bygone age, when Constable

-painted such fields, and when they were numerous enough throughout the

-land to feed the population. Here and there one may still find fields

-of that famous grain, the "Essex Great Wheat," which grows at least

-two feet higher than the ordinary varieties, and is greatly prized for

-the length and stoutness of its straw; but it is a few miles to the

-north-eastward, in the light lands around Harwich, that the Great Wheat

-may be found. Seed and herb-growing are the most prominent industries

-between the Blackwater and the Colne, and the roadside fields are

-striped to wonderment in summer with the rainbow colours of the

-seedsman's trial-grounds. The heavy perfume of stocks and mignonette,

-the claret colour of that gorgeous flower, the "sops-in-wine," the

-gay and varied displays of asters, marguerites, marigolds and a

-hundred others make a midsummer fairyland of the levels that loom

-so drear and misty in the long months of winter. Nor is it only for

-the flower-garden that the Essex seedsman labours. With the sights

-and scents of the flaunting beauties of the garden are mingled the

-homelier ones of mint, grey-green sage and other dowdy kitchen herbs,

-together with the subtle beauty and piercing odour of wide-spreading,

-blue-grey lavender-fields. Even the unromantic mangold, running to seed

-in bush-like shape, sends forth a sweet and pleasing aroma, while the

-yellow mustard contributes its share.

-

-The byways of farming are now, as we have already said, the most--some

-would say the only--profitable kind of husbandry in Essex. Some forms

-of cultivation have largely migrated to other counties, but others

-remain. The growing of the clothiers' teasel was discontinued with

-the decay of the Colchester and Norwich baize industry, and is now

-carried on in other parts of the country, close to districts where

-textile fabrics are still manufactured; but there was a time when,

-along this road between Chelmsford and Colchester, the fields of

-teasels were quite as much a feature as those of mustard are even

-yet. The clothiers' teasel, greatly prized in the East Anglian baize

-manufacture, was nothing but a weed, found useful and cultivated

-accordingly. An aristocratic relation of the less spiky burrs that have

-not been rescued from the hedges and ditches and are still allowed to

-grow wild, the clothiers' teasel was cultivated so far back as the

-reign of Richard the First, but the "common" burr will have to be

-contented with its lowly estate to the end of time, unless something

-unexpected happens.

-

-To "stick like a burr" is proverbial, and the cultivated teasels have

-an even more pronounced clinging property. Furnished as they are with

-natural hooks, they were used in baize-making, and are still employed

-in the cloth trade for raising the nap of the material. The dried heads

-are fixed to cylinders, between which the fabric is passed, and their

-sharp spines, re-curved like so many minute fish-hooks, draw up the

-surface of the cloth. Thus the teasel was raised from its character

-of a worthless weed, and for many years Essex farmers devoted large

-portions of their holdings to its cultivation. It was hoed and kept

-clear of other vagrom weedlings; its heads were cut by hand and

-dried with every care, and eventually were eagerly competed for by

-manufacturers at £12 a load. When the old cloth manufacturers left East

-Anglia, a goodly portion of the Essex farmers' livelihood went with

-them.

-

-Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other weed, the colewort,

-for cole or rape-seed, which has the quadruple properties of feeding

-cage-birds, yielding rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring

-the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help to prop the

-husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and carraways are what "the faculty"

-knows as "carminatives," curative of flatulency; like the once popular

-"eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of the sea holly

-that grows by the estuaries of Essex rivers. Eringo root was once a

-favourite specific for lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last,

-and the preparation of it gradually died out and became extinct about

-1865, when the only manufacturer was an elderly spinster who supplied

-a chemist in High Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the

-making of kümmel and other liqueurs, and carraway seeds, which look

-like commas, are those familiar denizens of "seed cake" that stick in

-the teeth and refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of

-"carraway comfits."

-

-Farmers who do not occupy themselves with seed-growing have passed

-through evil times, but prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's

-well-tilled land, and fruit-farming has come to render cultivation

-profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer, who cannot adapt himself to

-new conditions, agricultural depression in Essex is a very real thing.

-Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one, a small cultivator, a

-son of the soil. He does not hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural

-Essex, in these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the Workhouse

-are said to close every vista? Besides, he has been hard at work in

-the fields, and much of that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like

-friskiness out of the limbs.

-

-A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very badly in need of repair,

-elicits the fact that he has just come away, worsted, from another

-bout in the eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict with

-wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce, for life or a

-livelihood, with weeds--the sorry heritage of the present occupier

-from the slovenly or bankrupt farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing

-upon the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily against the

-cultivator.

-

-"Farmin'?" says our rustic friend; "no great shakes, I tell 'ee. It

-don't pay to grow nawthen now, an' it gets wusser'n wusser. All the

-fields goin' under grass, for ship'n cattle. An' the land's fair

-pisoned with weeds. Yow see them 'ere beece, in that there close down

-along o' the chutch? There's a mort o' docks in that 'ere close. More

-docks'n grass, an' I thinks warsley o' the chanst of cattle gettin'

-a fair bite off'n it. Don't know what docks is? Wish I didden! I've

-bin a-pullin' of 'em till my back's pretty nigh broke, and I'm fair

-dunted with 'em. Last year there worn't ne'er a one: t'yen there's

-a mort on 'em. Where do they come from? God A'mighty knows. _They_

-don't want no cultivation, bless 'ee. There ain't no land so chice but

-what'll grow docks." Here he pulls out his "muckinger," that is to say,

-his handkerchief--the Essex dialect is not the most elegant form of

-speech--and, trumpeting on it like an elephant, with indignation, goes

-his way.

-

-The "chutch" in question is that of Feering, on the other side of

-the Great Eastern Railway, along whose embankment go the frequent

-Prussian-blue-painted locomotives with long trains at their tail, past

-Mark's Tey Junction, whose forest of signal-masts is visible ahead,

-into Colchester. With the raising of that embankment went the life of

-this highway, only now experiencing a revival.

-

-

-XXIII

-

-

-THE cyclists, the pedestrians, the motor-men, who adventure along the

-road rejoice at its smooth surface, and find little incident to mark

-their journey. A punctured tyre, a defective valve alone hinder those

-mechanical travellers; while the pedestrian finds a limit set to his

-progress only by his walking powers. Even so, he may obtain to Norwich

-long before the others, for the railway hugs the road closely for

-three parts of the distance, and stations are frequent.

-

-In any case, the curtain has long since been rung down upon the Romance

-of the Road. If this were the place to do it, that romance might be

-recounted at great length; sometimes rising to tragical height, again

-sinking to comedy or farce. But we must take our romance as it comes,

-and, reading as we run, be content to act a vicarious part in the long

-story. And we may well be so content, for to have essayed the journey

-in days of old often meant a "speaking with strangers in the gates"

-that entailed fighting on unequal terms, with the possibility of a

-roadside grave and the tolerable certainty of being robbed of anything

-and everything worth the taking.

-

-Nowadays, the trim suburbs of the towns stretch out on either side

-along the old highway and join hands with the villages; so that when

-travellers of the speedier sort spurn the dust from their flying

-wheels, they think the country is becoming one vast town, and are

-depressed and regretful accordingly. But when the road was the sole

-means of travelling and the towns were still girdled by their walls and

-entered only by fortified gates, the wayfarer welcomed the sight of a

-house in the lonely country between town and village. Even to the rich

-these perils came home, and in the more lawless times they were beset

-with troubles of their own.

-

-Royal progresses were not infrequent along the Norwich Road, and they

-have elsewhere been duly chronicled, but they are things apart and

-give no glimpse of old wayfaring life. If we are at all in the way of

-conjuring up that old-time traffic, we must certainly not forget the

-odd processions that trailed their slow length after my lord and my

-lady, changing residence from one castle or manor-house to another.

-My Lord Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth's time had an exquisite palace,

-of which Macaulay has told us, in Norwich, and the Earls of Oxford

-no doubt kept great state in their castle at Hedingham, but, for all

-their magnificence, they were obliged to take many of their household

-goods with them when flitting from place to place; for the very

-excellent reason that they did not, certainly up to less than three

-hundred years ago, possess more than one fully-equipped establishment.

-When the nobility of old left one of their manor-houses for another

-they commonly took their bedding and a good deal of their furniture

-with them. In even more remote days they removed the glass from their

-windows as well, and stored it carefully away until their return.

-_That_, of course, was a custom of very long ago, when even the most

-luxurious were content with--or, at any-rate, had to endure--things

-which nowadays would drive the inmates of a casual ward to rebellion;

-but, even when the Stuarts reigned, the great ones of the land moved

-from home to home with long baggage-trains and with their entire staff

-of domestics. No board-wages, then! The whole establishment took the

-road, down to the scullery-maids and the hangers-on of the kitchen who

-took charge of the domestic pots and pans. My lord's pages and the

-dignitaries of his household formed the advance-guard; the lowest in

-the scale, who travelled with the culinary utensils and even took the

-coals with them, were, appropriately enough, the "black guard." The

-black guard were probably a very rough lot indeed, at odds with soap

-and water, and on every count deserving of their name, which has in

-the course of centuries obtained a different application, as a term of

-reproach to individuals of moral rather than physical uncleanliness.

-

-Turning from general conditions of travelling to particular travellers,

-there comes tripping along the road an antic fellow, one Will Kemp, who

-danced from London to Norwich in the year 1600; a frolic he undertook

-for a wager, afterwards writing and publishing a book about it, which

-he called _Kemp's Nine Days' Wonder_. Will Kemp was accompanied by

-a drummer whose play upon parchment helped to sustain his flagging

-energies as he skipped it to Widford and thence by a route of his own

-through Braintree to Norwich.

-

-Sprightly, irresponsible Kemp, cracking weak jokes and playing the

-fool, is succeeded in the memories of the road, after an interval of

-some eighty years, by a very grave and responsible figure indeed;

-no less an one than that of King William the Third, on his frequent

-journeys between his dear Holland and his little-loved Kingdom of

-England. Burdened with the care of an alien realm, that saturnine

-little figure with the hooked nose was a familiar sight at Kelvedon,

-where, travelling to and from Harwich, he was wont to stay at the

-"Angel" inn, which still confronts the wayfarer on entering the village

-from London. When the "little gentleman in black" had done his work

-and King William of blessed Protestant memory was no more, the Norwich

-Road, so far as Colchester, was still graced with Royal travellers,

-for, with the coming of the Hanoverians, Harwich became more than ever

-a favourite port of entry and departure, and the choleric early Georges

-knew this Essex landscape well. This way, too, came the Schwellenburgs,

-the Keilmanseggs and the other vulgar and grotesque figures of that

-grotesque and vulgar Court.

-

-Among these figures comes that of the Princess Charlotte of

-Mecklenburg-Strelitz, arrived for the first time in England, in 1761,

-to marry George the Third. One German princess is very like another

-in the pages of history, and the likeness remains even when they

-become queens, so that it is not a little difficult to disentangle a

-Caroline from a Charlotte. Their virtues are of the same drab domestic

-order, and their faces partake of the common fund of unilluminated

-dulness distributed between the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the

-Sonderburg-Augustenburgs, and the dozens of other twopenny-halfpenny

-principalities made familiar by German princely marriages and

-intermarryings. On their mere merits, these personages would find no

-place here, though they travelled all their lives up and down the

-road; but in the circumstances of this particular Princess Charlotte's

-journey there are some incidents worth mentioning. She landed at

-Harwich, and comes into our road at Colchester, September 7, 1761. At

-Colchester she was presented with a box of eringo-root, the famous

-local production highly valued for the cure of pulmonary diseases,

-prepared from the root of the sea holly. Graciously receiving this in a

-box "parfumed and guilt," her carriage swept on towards Witham, where

-she stayed the night at a seat then owned by Lord Abercorn, supping

-with open doors so that all who would might gaze upon their future

-Queen. Next day the journey to London was resumed. The King's coach

-was in readiness at Romford, and into it she changed. At Mile End a

-squadron of Life Guards was in waiting as an escort, and from that

-point the procession was viewed by thousands. But by this time the

-September day was closing. The Duchess of Hamilton, who accompanied the

-Princess, looked at her watch. "We shall hardly have time to dress for

-the wedding," she said.

-

-"The wedding?"

-

-"Yes, madam; it is to be at twelve."

-

-On that the Princess fainted, as well she might. It really took place

-at 9 p.m., instead of three hours later. The King, it is upon record,

-was a little disappointed at the first sight of his bride; but that has

-generally been the way with our Royal marriages. The eldest son of this

-amiable pair, George the Fourth, similarly saw his bride for the first

-time practically on the steps of the altar, and his disappointment

-was keen. "No sooner," we read, "had he approached her than, as if to

-subdue the qualms of irrepressible disgust, he desired the dignified

-envoy to bring him a glass of brandy." The Princess, we are told,

-"expressed surprise," which statement requires no credulity for belief.

-Henry the Eighth's disappointment when he saw Anne of Cleves was

-reflected in the words in which he likened her to a "Flanders mare."

-

-Two years later, in 1763, we find Dr Johnson and his inevitable Boswell

-journeying down the road; Boswell on his way to Harwich for Utrecht,

-and the Doctor good-naturedly accompanying him as far as that seaport.

-They set out by coach on the 5th of August, early in the morning;

-among their fellow-travellers a fat, elderly gentlewoman and a young

-Dutchman, both inclined to conversation. Dining at an inn on the way,

-the lady remarked that she had done her best to educate her children,

-and particularly that she never suffered them to be a moment idle.

-

-"I wish, madam," said Johnson, "you would educate me too; for I have

-been an idle fellow all my life."

-

-"I am sure, sir," said she, "you have not been idle;" which was a

-mere empty compliment, for she had not the least idea whom she was

-addressing.

-

-"Nay, madam," rejoined the Doctor, "it is very true; and that gentleman

-there," pointing to Boswell, "has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh.

-His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then

-came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to

-Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever."

-

-At this, Boswell was very wroth, and asked Johnson, in an aside, how he

-could expose him so.

-

-"Pooh, pooh," retorted the immortal Samuel, "they know nothing about

-you, and will think of it no more." Nor, in all probability, did they.

-

-In this manner they travelled, the gentlewoman talking violently

-against the Roman Catholics and the horrors of the Inquisition;

-Johnson, to the astonishment of all the passengers, save Boswell, who

-knew his ways, defending the Inquisition and its methods with "false

-doctrines." This would appear to have annoyed the rest of the company,

-for Boswell relates that Johnson presently appeared to be very intent

-upon ancient geography. Not so intent, however, but that he noticed

-Boswell giving a shilling to the coachman at the end of one of the

-stages, when it was the custom to give only sixpence. The great man

-took Boswell aside and scolded him for it, saying that what he had

-done would make the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the

-passengers, who had given him no more than his due.

-

-They stopped at Colchester a night, at an inn unfortunately not

-specified, Johnson talking of the town with veneration for having stood

-a siege for Charles the First.

-

-The last great occasion on the road, before railways took its traffic

-away, was the funeral, in 1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline

-of Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven years before: her

-body was embarked for Brunswick on August 16, 1821, after a hurried

-three days' journey from Kensington. So many years have passed by

-since the stormy times when the nation was divided between partisans of

-the King on one side and the Queen on the other--both parties equally

-violent--that the long and bitter quarrels between the "First Gentleman

-in Europe" and the most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times

-have become historic, and no longer divide families, or cause fathers

-to cut their sons off with a shilling, as they did when the trial of

-the Queen was a recent event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no

-saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least odiously vulgar and

-utterly wanting in dignity and the commonest dictates of prudence. They

-were not worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken up by

-parties and made political missiles of, so that even the occasion of

-the Queen's funeral was made the excuse for a riot by her followers,

-who were indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the country,

-as they thought, without proper respect. The Queen died on the 7th of

-August, and it was decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent

-haste" was the expression used by the _Times_ of that day in describing

-the funeral arrangements for the 14th, but that journal was a most

-violent enemy of the then Government and had always supported the Queen

-and vilified the King as far as it could safely be done.

-

-It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty miles between

-Kensington and Harwich in two days, and the _Times_ furiously bellowed

-in its reports that the procession was hurried through London at a

-trot. However that may be, certainly the pace was decently slow when

-on the open road. Ilford was reached, for instance, at 6·15 that

-afternoon, but Romford, only five and a half miles further on, not

-until 7·45; an extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a

-funeral. At Romford the cortège was met by sympathisers with blazing

-torches, who stood on guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort

-and the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn.

-

-At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by the light of a full moon

-which shone in splendour from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the

-night they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock in the

-morning. Here the coffin was placed in the church until a start was

-made again, seven hours later. At last Colchester was reached, at

-five o'clock in the afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse

-unguarded in the High Street, while they took their fill at the "Three

-Cups." Thus, in its squalor and irreverence, the passing of this Queen

-of England resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or kin.

-

-It had been proposed to complete the journey to Harwich that day,

-but, after violent disputes in the street between opposing factions,

-it was agreed to defer the departure until the next morning, and to

-deposit the coffin meanwhile in St Peter's Church. Inside that sacred

-building, disputes broke out afresh, one party wishing to affix a plate

-on the coffin-lid, bearing the inscription, "Caroline of Brunswick, the

-injured Queen of England," while the other vehemently objected. The

-quarrel was finally settled by agreeing to postpone fixing the plate

-until after the embarkation.

-

-With the start made the following morning at half-past five, this

-melancholy procession leaves the Norwich Road, and history goes with

-it. The tale is done, the colophon reached.

-

-

-XXIV

-

-

-IF we seek some touchstone by which to test the progress of a century

-or so in civilisation, there is scarce a better than found in

-comparison between the condition of the roads in old and modern times.

-That Waller could, in all sincerity, speak of "vile Essexian roads"

-is not remarkable: he was a poet, dealt in superlatives and lived in

-the seventeenth century. But that Arthur Young, a hundred years later,

-could with equal sincerity, and in more emphatic language, describe

-Essex roads as "rocky lanes, with ruts of inconceivable depth," is

-startling. It was in 1768 he penned that indictment, adding that they

-were so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the sun, and strewn

-with stones "as big as a horse, and full of abominable holes." It were,

-he concludes, a misuse of language to call them turnpikes, for they

-were rich in ponds of liquid dirt; while loose flints and vile grips

-cut across to drain off the water made the traveller's pilgrimage a

-weariness.

-

-The modern reader, perusing all these manifold sins and wickednesses

-of the roads, rather wonders how they could all have been crowded

-on to such truly vile ways, and if a stone were as big as a horse,

-how room could have been found beside it for holes, ponds and other

-objectionable features. But Arthur Young was a truthful man in general.

-

-To-day the Essex high roads are as near perfection as any in the home

-counties, even though the byways be steep and rough and more than

-usually winding.

-

-It is in these byways that he who seeks rural Essex shall find. The

-dramatic suddenness and completeness with which, a few hundred yards

-from the high road, the sophisticated wayside towns and hamlets are

-exchanged for the unspoiled rusticity of the original villages is

-surprising. In these lanes the older rustics talk and think much as

-their grandfathers did, but the rising generation unhappily do not,

-and the Essex rustic in general, like his fellows elsewhere, has

-almost wholly discarded the old dress of the peasantry. Only the very

-old or the more remote yet wear the smock-frock--the "round frock,"

-or the "gaberdine," as they called it--that was once as honourable a

-distinction of the ploughmen, herds, or carters as are the uniforms of

-our soldiers and sailors.

-

-The time is long past since a clean smock-frock, corded breeches,

-worsted stockings and well-greased lace-up boots formed the approved

-rural costume for Sundays or holidays, just as the same articles of

-apparel in a "second-best" condition made the workaday wear. The

-Sunday costume of the agricultural labourer is now a cheap and clumsy

-travesty of the clothes worn by townsfolk, and in hideous contrast

-with his surroundings. Exactly what it is like may be seen on any

-advertisement hoarding in the outskirts of Chelmsford, Colchester and

-lesser towns, where pictorial posters bid Giles go to Shoddy's for

-cheap outfits. Sunday mornings find him flaunting his finery in the

-village street; his would-be stylish boots creaking, his every article

-of wear writ large with vulgarity. Often he carries gloves in those

-large hands of his, rough with honest week-day toil, and a pair may

-thus last him for years--for he dare not attempt to put them on. Would

-that he equally purchased his cheap cigars for show and refrained from

-smoking them!

-

-But there the village dandy is. Often his pocket-handkerchief is

-scented; generally his hair is glossy with grease; and he would not

-consider himself fully equipped without watch and chain, scarf-pin,

-ring and walking stick. To grease his boots he would be ashamed. _They_

-must be brightly polished, even though his manners are not, and his

-language defiles the village street what time the bells are ringing

-to church. Such is Young England in the villages at the dawn of the

-Twentieth Century. These things may spell Progress, but they are rather

-pitiful.

-

-It is a little difficult, in presenting a sketch of his ancestor of

-a hundred years or more ago, to avoid drawing too favourable a view

-of him; but the rustic in old times certainly seems to have matched

-much better with his surroundings than is the case nowadays. He made

-no attempts to dress up to town standards, and if he wanted to shine

-above his fellows did so by virtue of superior neatness only. Perhaps

-he had the finer instincts of the two, or more likely lacked the

-opportunities for bad taste that surround his descendants. Certainly,

-if we are to believe in the origin of the smock-frock, as put forward

-by some antiquaries, we must sorrowfully admit that the rustic's remote

-ancestor had as great a longing for unsuitable display in dress as

-can possibly be charged to the present generation. The smock-frock

-is, in fact, traced back by some to the ecclesiastical garments worn

-at Mass by deacons and sub-deacons, at the time when the Reformation

-swept vestments out of every village church in the land. Those who are

-familiar with genuine old smock-frocks have noticed the elaborate and

-often beautiful needlework on collar and breast. The devices appear to

-have a traditional likeness, all over the country, and consist either

-of Celtic-looking whorls, or of semi-decorative flower forms, or of

-lozenge patterns. The comparative simplicity or elaboration of this

-needlework depended solely upon the fancy, or the time at command, of

-the wearer's women-folk whose work it was. Whence came this tradition?

-It is thought from the tunicles of the minor clergy, which were

-certainly decorated in the same position, if not in similar patterns.

-When the minor belongings of the Church became the spoil of the

-villages, Hodge and Giles found themselves the proud possessors of the

-strange garments, for which they could find at first no better use than

-for Sunday wear. A striking appearance they must have made in them,

-down the village street, the envy of their less fortunate fellows.

-

-When the looted vestments grew shabby they must have been used for

-everyday wear, and so have set the fashions in smock-frocks, both in

-shape and decoration, for centuries to come. If it be thought that the

-costume was rather extravagant, it can only be asked, is not that of

-the modern Sunday morning yokel extravagant also?

-

-The rustic of long ago was a man of dense ignorance and dark

-superstitions. No one county was then more guilty than another in that

-respect, but East Anglians, and perhaps especially the Essex bucolics,

-are still, despite their veneer of civilisation, sunk in uncanny

-beliefs. Witches still "overlook" folks in Essex hamlets, and spells

-are cast on cattle and horses, or unhappy fowls are blighted by the

-Evil Eye. Consequently the learned professions of Witch-Doctor and

-Wise Women are not yet extinct. Their existence is not likely to be

-discovered by the stranger, but they thrive, in limited numbers, even

-in these days of pills and patent medicines.

-

-Board Schools are supposed to be educating Young England into a dead

-monotony of speech, but it will be long before they complete the horrid

-work. In Essex, indeed, we may not unreasonably think it a task beyond

-the power of teachers and inspectors, who if they have not succeeded,

-after thirty years working of the Elementary Education Act, in inducing

-the lower-class Londoners to say "yes" for "yuss," together with other

-linguistic enormities, are not likely to be successful in abolishing

-the very marked and stubborn Essex shibboleths. It may not generally

-be known that much of the so-called "Cockney" talk derives from the

-Essex dialect. From Essex especially comes that curious perversity

-of the unruly member which in many cases insists upon pronouncing

-the letter A as I. The lower-class Londoner and the Essex peasant

-are unanimous in enunciating A as I in all words where that letter

-retains its open sound and its individuality. Thus, in the words "baby"

-"favourite," "made" and "native," for instance, the letter becomes I;

-and the Fleet Street newsboy, shouting his "spusshul uxtry piper," can

-legitimately call cousins, if he wishes it, with the Essex lad at the

-plough-tail.

-

-Where A is sounded broadly, or in cases like the word "was," in which

-it masquerades as O, or where the letter is absolutely silent, or not

-fully pronounced, as in "beast" and "maternal," this peculiarity does

-not appear.

-

-The effect is sometimes grotesque, as, for example, near Colchester,

-where the villages of Layer Marney, Layer Breton, and Layer de la Hay

-are always spoken of as Liyer, the last mentioned becoming Liyer de la

-High.

-

-Nor is pronunciation the only singular feature of Essex talk, as

-those who keep their ears alert in these parts will soon find. The

-oddest phrases are matters of everyday use, and the Essex peasant can

-no more help using the word "together," in season and out, than he

-can help being hungry before meals or sleepy by bedtime. "Together,"

-as employed by the Essex peasant, is a word absolutely meaningless;

-a kind of linguistic excrescence which, like a wart or a boil, is

-neither useful nor beautiful. When a ploughman says he is going to

-plough "that there field together," he does not mean to imply that he

-is about to plough it together with some other land, or with a party

-of other ploughmen. He simply adds the word from force of habit, and

-from hearing his father and grandfather before him so use it, in almost

-every sentence, as a sort of verbal makeweight. The present writer has

-had the good fortune to hear a supremely ludicrous use of this Bœotian

-habit of speech. It was market-day at Colchester, and Stanway village

-had emptied itself in the direction of the town. A dog rolled dustily

-in the sunny road, and the historian of these things luxuriously

-quaffed his "large lemon" on the bench outside the village inn. As

-Artemus Ward might have said, "orl was peas," when there entered upon

-the scene a countryman, evidently known to the landlord. He walked into

-the bar, and, surprised to find mine host in solitary state, exclaimed,

-"What, all alone together, bor?"

-

-"Yes," replied the landlord, in no wise astonished at this

-extraordinary expression, "the missus has gone to Colchester together."

-

-"Did my missus go with her?" asked the rustic.

-

-"No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by herself."

-

-In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging more especially

-to Norfolk and Suffolk. This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for

-neighbour.

-

-

-XXV

-

-

-STANWAY is approached along a flat stretch, past Mark's Tey, which,

-without being itself quite on the road, has sent out modern and

-extremely ugly brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible

-distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's Tey church is

-visible, amid an inchoate mass of railway signal masts and puffs of

-smoke. Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings proceed from

-that direction, for this is a junction of the Great Eastern with the

-Colne Valley Railway, and the station, by the way, where the lady in

-Thackeray's _Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditch_ appeared

-with the baby which she eventually left behind her. It is this busy

-junction that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses along the

-road to render the village of the old De Marcas something new and

-strange. Mark's Tey is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for

-the road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in here.

-

-Copford's solitary houses by the way give scarce a hint of the village

-nearly a mile off, whose little church formerly owned a terrifying

-relic, in the shape of a human skin nailed on its door; a skin that

-had been the personal property of some unfortunate straggler from the

-hordes of marauding Danes that once infested the district, of whom we

-have already heard legends at Kelvedon and Gore Pit. His Saxon captors

-must have flayed him with a ferocious delight and nailed up his cuticle

-with precisely the same satisfaction as that of the gamekeeper who

-wages war upon stoats and weazels and other vermin, and hangs their

-bodies on the barn door. But there must have been a bitter day of

-reckoning for those Saxons when the sea-rovers came this way again and

-saw in what fashion that doorway was decorated.

-

-[Illustration: Near Mark's Tey.]

-

-Copford and its outlying houses lie at the crest of a gentle descent

-into the valley of a rivulet which finds its way into the Colne.

-It stands, as its name implies, overlooking some ford which, once

-important, has, in the gradual draining of the country and the

-shrinkage of streams, now lost all significance. Stanway adjoins it,

-and lies along the descent, in the hollow and up the corresponding

-rise on the other side, where its church stands in a forbidding

-loneliness. The name of Stanway is sufficient warranty of this being,

-thus far, the Roman road. It is, however, not so certain that the

-remaining four miles of the existing highway from this point into

-Colchester follow the course taken by the Romans; and, indeed, the

-later researches of archæologists go far to prove that the original

-way into Roman Colchester avoided the intervening village of Lexden

-altogether, and, curving eastwards, avoided what may then have been

-a marsh, to take the higher ground over a portion of Lexden Heath;

-bending westwards again and crossing the site of the present road

-between where the grammar school and the hospital now stand. From this

-point it seems to have crossed by where the Lordsland Nursery grounds

-stood until recently built over, to the ancient Roman gateway and

-bastion in the western wall of the town, long known as Colking's, or

-King Coel's Castle, but originally the Decuman Gate of Roman times.

-The course followed by this old Roman way is lined on either side with

-sepulchral remains, and seems to have once been a great cemetery.

-Wherever the ground is disturbed the relics of some soldier or citizen

-of Colonia are found, some dating back to the foundation of the colony,

-nearly nineteen centuries ago. The most remarkable among them are to be

-seen in the museum at Colchester Castle. There--the most human relic

-of them all--is the touching monument to M. Favonius, a Centurion of

-the Twentieth Legion, discovered in 1871 between the hospital and

-the grammar school, at a depth of 3 feet below the surface, and at a

-distance of 10 feet from the old Roman road. It is a sculptured stone,

-4 feet in height, with the figure of the Centurion himself carved on

-it, in high relief. It is evidently a portrait of him. He stands in

-full military costume, his cloak hanging from his shoulders, his sword

-and dagger by his side. The inscription, almost as sharp as on the day

-when it was cut, nearly nineteen hundred years ago, tells us that the

-monument was erected by two of his servants, Verecundus and Novicius.

-They call him "facilis," the "easy" or "good-natured." It is surely a

-sweet and touching thing that when all other record of that soldier has

-perished, we should yet know him to have been a kindly creature.

-

-But to return to Stanway, which keeps, as sole vestige of its heath,

-a little space of the greenest turf, perhaps half an acre in extent,

-beside the insignificant stream in the hollow, and opposite the "Swan"

-Inn. The heath that formerly spread out across the elevated but flat

-table-land between this village and the succeeding one of Lexden was,

-in its different parts, variously named after them. On Stanway Heath,

-in Ogilby's _Britannia_ of 1697, a picture map shows a beacon standing

-between the forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from London, on

-the right-hand side of the road. It appears to have been a post some

-30 feet in height, crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means of

-slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily lighted, was provided for

-the benefit of travellers going to or coming from Colchester across

-the desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from the existence of

-a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the comparative security of Lexden village.

-The heath by the highway is a thing of the past, for those portions

-not brought under cultivation by the farmer have been grabbed by the

-builder, and the so-called Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row

-of houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything complete and

-modern. At the forty-eighth milestone, amid all this modern upheaval,

-stands a disused toll-house, and, close by, something much more

-ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered in dense woods and

-shrubs, known as "King Cole's Kitchen," and now--figure to yourself the

-shame of it!--overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and named from it

-"King Cole's Cottage."

-

-Turning off to the right, the curious in things pre-historic may

-lose themselves in the solitudes of the real Lexden Heath, where the

-Devil, the Trinobantes, the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary

-General--according to varying legends--threw up the entrenchments,

-and delved the ditches, found there in plenty. The Devil, we say

-advisedly, for "Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to the dyke

-across the heath, was none other, in the minds of the Saxons. "Lexden

-Straight Road" follows for an unconscionable distance a line of Roman

-entrenchments, and is straight and dull beyond belief. Followed long

-enough, it leads to "Bottle End," which may originally have been

-"Battle End," the scene of some traditional legend of Boadicea's

-defeat at the hands of the Romans. Or, again, it perhaps marks some

-forgotten connection with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside

-Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced "Bottle" by

-Colcestrians. Anything is possible in a district where Beacon End, the

-site of the old beacon already mentioned, has become Bacon End.

-

-[Illustration: LEXDEN.]

-

-Lexden village now claims attention. It is a place in which one school

-of antiquaries finds the original Roman station of Camulodunum,

-established on the site of the royal city of Cunobelin, King of the

-Trinobantes; a finding strenuously contested by another following.

-Certainly, among the tall elms and rolling surface of Lexden Park there

-are remains in plenty of huge defensive earthworks, telling in no

-uncertain manner that this must have been a place of enormous strength,

-by whomsoever held. The surroundings are weird and impressive to a

-degree.

-

-The village skirting the road is one of the prettiest on the way. Going

-towards Colchester, the road drops down the hill, where old cottages

-stand high above the pathway, with steep little gardens in front, kept

-from sliding down into the road itself by lichened retaining-walls

-sprouting with house-leek and draped with climbing plants. Lower

-still, hard by the church whose carpenter-Gothic atrocities are hung

-about with ivy and creepers until they are transfigured into a dream

-of beauty, the grouping of the 'Sun' Inn and neighbouring houses

-is exquisite. Beyond this point begins the suburban approach to

-Colchester, a town it behoves the stranger to approach with a proper

-respect, for here was the first Roman colony in Britain. The history

-of Colchester, indeed, begins so far back as A.D. 44, and there was

-already a pre-historic native city in existence before then; the royal

-city of that ancient British king, Cunobelin, the monarch famous in the

-pages of Shakespeare as "Cymbeline."

-

-

-XXVI

-

-

-CUNOBELIN, Lord of the Trinobantes, ruler of that part of the

-country now divided into Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire,

-Hunts, Cambridgeshire and Essex, was the successor of his father

-Cassivelaunus, who had warred, not ingloriously, with Julius Cæsar. He

-transferred his capital from his native town on the site of St Albans

-to where Colchester now stands. He appears to have been a powerful

-ruler, and, if little is known of him, certainly he is no myth, for

-the vague legends that held the name of the Buckinghamshire villages

-of Great and Little Kimble to be a corrupted form of his own were

-strikingly proved correct some years ago, when a hoard of gold coins

-was ploughed up in their neighbourhood, bearing his title.

-

-We do not know by what name Colchester was then styled. After Cunobelin

-had died, full of years and worn by grief at the revolts of his sons,

-Caractacus, Adminius and Togodumnus, the end of the native State over

-which he had ruled speedily came. Adminius, in a fury against his

-brothers, fled from Britain to seek the aid of the Romans, and if no

-immediate result came, certainly his invitation must have revived

-the old Cæsarian dream of conquest. The real cause of the Roman

-invasion that took place shortly after the death of Cunobelin was the

-solicitation of a certain Bericus, a British Prince of whom nothing

-appears to be known beyond this one fact.

-

-The invasion took place in A.D. 43, under that able general, Aulus

-Plautius, who threw the Trinobantes back from Hertfordshire and

-Middlesex, across the Lea and into the Essex marshes, where for a time

-they could not be followed. This was the position at the close of the

-year. Detached portions of the invading forces had overrun the south of

-Britain as far as Gloucester and had defeated the tribes on the way;

-leaving a garrison in the west. But the island was little known and

-held many mysteries. None could tell the real strength of the natives,

-who disappeared in the forests and marshes that covered the face of the

-land, and by their irregular warfare disconcerted the Roman plans of

-campaign. Plautius was at last driven to act on the defensive on the

-Essex borders. His soldiers were dying in the ague-stricken morasses

-between the Thames and the Lea, and had the enemy possessed powers of

-combination and military skill, he might well have been cut off here,

-at the end of the known world. A retirement with his sick and dying was

-impossible. Nothing remained but to go into camp during the winter, and

-meanwhile to send for reinforcements. He accordingly sent for forces

-from Gaul. They came with commendable promptitude, commanded by the

-Emperor Claudius in person. With these new legions came an elephant

-corps, brought from Africa to carry the heavy baggage. But they acted

-a better part than this, for their strange appearance terrified the

-astonished Trinobantes a great deal more than any increase of the

-Roman soldiery could have done. We may imagine this corps, crashing

-irresistibly through the thickets, the forests and marshes on that

-march into the Unknown, along this line of country now traversed by the

-Norwich Road, and can readily understand little resistance being met

-with on the way. The tribes were dispersed and their territory occupied

-as far as the Stour, and a colony was founded in the opening of the new

-year, A.D. 44, on the site of Cunobelin's city--Colonia Camulodunum,

-the first Roman settlement in Britain.

-

-The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance of the natives that

-they were soon lulled into a feeling of security. For an uninterrupted

-space of sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It became a pleasant

-town, inhabited by veteran soldiers grown grey in the service of the

-Empire, and spending their later years in retirement. The Emperor

-Claudius, flushed with his success, had assumed the dignity of a god

-and had caused a Temple to be erected in the market-place to his

-honour, with attendant priests and altars. The governors and consuls

-were lesser gods, and treated with contempt and ill-judged severity

-the natives who had been overcome with such ease. The soldiery were

-uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and luxury flourished together with this

-attitude of oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences. It is not

-surprising that these colonists were bitterly hated by their vassals,

-who in especial looked upon the priests as so many harpies living upon

-their substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoods and

-all clergy have been from the beginning, and will be to the end. In

-this last respect these poor Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians,

-exhibited a quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the

-priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment that have since

-passed.

-

-These down-trodden natives were already ripe for revenge when a more

-than usually unjust proceeding of the Roman officials precipitated

-a rising. The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and whose

-frontiers marched with those of the conquered province, had been ruled

-over by a certain King Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate

-the goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast wealth he

-had accumulated, leaving one half to the Roman Emperor and the other

-moiety to his two daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his

-country was invaded. His widow, the famous Boadicea, resisted. She

-was publicly scourged, her daughters suffering the worst indignities,

-and her relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose in arms at

-these outrages, and their cousins, the Trinobantes, on the hither side

-of the Stour, joined them. The Romans saw their folly when too late.

-No more eloquent account is possible than that given by Tacitus of

-the premonitions of evil. The statue of Victory fell to the ground,

-and turned its back where the face had been, as if it fled before an

-enemy. Women were seen and heard singing mad, wild songs, prophesying

-disaster. Strange and unaccountable noises were heard in the house

-of assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. In the estuary of

-the river the buildings of the city appeared reflected upside down,

-and ghastly remains of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the

-tide ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and the strangest

-whisperings stirred the air. Many of the wealthier colonists, alarmed

-at these portents, discovered that their health needed a change of air,

-and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side of the Channel, and

-those who remained applied for military help. In answer to this appeal,

-a meagre force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately employed to

-fortify the Temple. But before these measures could be completed, the

-town was surrounded and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants all

-slain, the little garrison in the Temple meeting a like fate after a

-defence of two days.

-

-Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the Ninth Legion, which had

-been stationed on the Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now

-stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city. He, however, had moved

-too late, and met the victorious natives at Wormingford, where they

-almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences of that great

-disaster were discovered in 1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns,

-placed in order like streets, were unearthed, containing the bones

-of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the Roman sway had been

-reasserted.

-

-These events happened in A.D. 61. Suetonius Paulinus, the then

-Commander-in-Chief, was at that time vigorously prosecuting a war with

-the Druids in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of these disasters

-he hurried back through Verulamium and Londinium, collecting an army

-of ten thousand as he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and a

-numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman citizens of both those

-towns piteously begged for protection, but were left to their fate,

-which was not long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column passed

-than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed them. Seventy thousand

-citizens perished in that general massacre.

-

-It is uncertain where the Roman army met the hordes commanded by that

-heroic Amazon, Boadicea, whom we should perhaps more correctly style

-"Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull subject in the hands of

-the uninspired, who fail to render her "convincing." No one has done

-so well as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern writers of

-"personal paragraphs" in what recent slang would term his "actuality."

-He says, "she was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed,

-harsh-voiced, with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair falling below

-her waist" (her golden hair was hanging down her back!), "wearing a

-highly-embroidered tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a buckle over

-it."

-

-Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by two woods, on a

-site resembling a stretch of country at Haynes Green, near Messing; but

-the great fight must have raged on many miles of ground, and no doubt

-included Lexden Heath.

-

-The Britons were so sure of victory, that they had brought their women

-and children as spectators, and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a

-great semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman historian says

-they were an "innumerable multitude." The British Queen, addressing

-her warriors from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to die,

-resting her hopes on the strength of her forces and the justice of

-her cause; while Suetonius, on his part, urged his troops not to be

-dismayed either by the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts.

-The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining on the defensive.

-When the fury of the first onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers

-of the Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the cavalry closing

-in on the flanks, driving the speedily disorganised enemy back upon the

-semi-circle of waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in this

-way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in which eighty thousand

-Britons were slain, including the women and children who had come out

-to witness the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing all lost,

-poisoned herself.

-

-Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and Suffolk. From this time

-date the existing walls of Colchester. The conquerors were determined

-not to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first colony,

-and, choosing a new site, one mile to the east of the former city,

-they planted their walls on the ridge on which Colchester now stands,

-overlooking the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing an area

-of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain, after the passing of more than

-eighteen hundred years, the most perfect Roman fortifications in

-Britain. Even in that wide space of time the town of Colchester has not

-extended very greatly beyond them. In some directions, indeed--notably

-to the north and north-east and on the west--the ramparts still look

-out upon the open country. The walls have a thickness of from seven to

-eight feet, and are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses

-of stones, brought with great labour from the coast near Harwich;

-the neighbourhood of Colchester, and Essex in general, being quite

-innocent of stone of any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this

-day supply the boulders of limestone from which the building-stones of

-Colchester's walls were cut.

-

-Colchester was never again attacked during the period of more than

-three hundred years, in which the Romans ruled. In the events of A.D.

-61, they had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of treating

-a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In the period between these

-events and the year 410, when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from

-Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from ruin, conquered and

-conquerors had to live together, and made the best of the necessity.

-Roman colonists intermarried with the gradually Romanised British,

-and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during three centuries,

-gradually grew to look upon Britain as their home and themselves as

-a nation. Thus, towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority

-are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and civilised British

-princes treating on equal terms with Roman statesmen. In this way

-the British in some measure came into their own again, and to these

-circumstances we owe the wild legends of that mysterious monarch, "old

-King Cole," who is to Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall,

-the great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's walls, and

-the earthworks near Lexden known as "King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the

-very name of Colchester itself--"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive,

-according to legends, from this scarce more than mythical personage.

-Those stories make him one Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of

-semi-independent British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal

-sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman conquest. The story

-goes on to tell how, on the death of the usurper Carausius, in A.D.

-293, Coel surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius Chlorus,

-on that successor of the Cæsar's marrying his daughter Helena, who

-became the mother of Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer

-of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of Colchester still bear a

-ragged cross between four crowns, in allusion to this tale of the

-Empress Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction which

-Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy of her, holding a cross

-very plain to see, is newly set up on the very topmost point of the

-gorgeous new Town Hall, recently completed.

-

-To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the

-legend of Coel is chiefly traced. He may either have imagined it, or

-have woven the story out of existing legends, which had in turn derived

-from the Saxons, who, after the departure of the Romans, had wrested

-the country from the Romanised British. They captured and burnt the

-town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls, took them to have

-been the work of some great king, after whom the place had been named.

-Legends of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons themselves

-had been converted to Christianity he was fully provided with a history.

-

-"Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster, has been shabbily

-treated in modern times and made to figure merely as a jolly toper.

-That he was the most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically

-assures us.

-

- "He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called for his

- fiddlers three."

-

-Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house potentate! The

-author of that nursery rhyme has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain

-did the romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of vulgarity, _A

-Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_.

-

-

-XXVII

-

-

-THE entrance into Colchester is singular. From the straight, broad road

-leading past the trim modern villas and so into Crouch Street--the

-street outside the walls that takes its name from the vanished

-monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars--the wayfarer

-suddenly comes to the sharpest of angles, and, turning abruptly to the

-left, enters Colchester by what has every appearance of being the back

-door into the town.

-

-Historically considered, the entrance by crooked Head Street, as the

-continuation of Crouch Street is called, really is a back way, and was

-in Roman times the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and

-less important roads. But ever since Saxon days this has been the only

-way to or from London into the town.

-

-How it happened that the original road and the Decuman Gate in

-Colchester's west wall fell into disuse, none can tell. It was so many

-ages ago that not even a pathway leads along the ancient way, now

-quite obliterated by houses. But if the road be gone, the Gate itself

-remains, though in ruins. Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt

-to find it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our steps a

-little distance along Crouch Street, and, so doing, to take a turning

-to the right-hand, down Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome

-is seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands towering above

-a flight of steps leading up into the street beyond. There stands

-revealed a portion of the wall. The breach in it, through which the

-steps lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees, the freshness

-of whose spring foliage with every recurrent April forms a romantic

-contrast with the almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a

-place for thought. From the summit of that old defence, where once the

-legionaries lined the battlements in time of peril, or leaned gossiping

-in peaceful days, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley where

-the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary lifting of the veil and

-a glimpse of what the spot will be like in another eighteen hundred

-years. Close by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn

-courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman Gate. Three arches can

-be traced; the middle arch of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot

-passengers, less than half that width. Candour, however, compels the

-admission that of architectural character they have not the slightest

-trace. Over against this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in the

-Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and through that hole the

-most prominent object in all Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo"

-brutally dominates everything, and blasts the approach to Colchester

-far away on every road but that from London, for which small mercy

-thanks be given. Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he is

-very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and, unluckily, cannot fail

-to be seen. After him, even the Roman remains of Colchester pale their

-ineffectual efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable, although not

-very likely, that a stranger passing through Colchester might not

-notice its Roman antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There he

-is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless in brick of

-the most striking red and in attempts at decoration which, however

-well meant, only serve to render his hulking body more objectionable,

-with an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged face with

-pearl-powder.

-

-Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower of Colchester's

-waterworks. It was built in 1881, and cost close upon £10,500, and

-there are those who say it is the second largest of its kind in

-England. Where the largest may be we know not, but if it injures its

-surroundings as effectually as does Colchester's incubus, that unknown

-place has our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in his name,

-for, as the curious may see for themselves, his weather-vane bears the

-effigy of an elephant.

-

-Returning to Crouch Street, and so by Head Gate and along Head Street,

-the High Street is gained. It is one of the broadest and most spacious

-streets in the kingdom, as it had every occasion to be, for it was not

-only part of the great road leading into Suffolk, but in it was held

-the principal fair of the town. Here, too, close by where Colchester's

-new and gorgeous Town Hall stands, was the old Moot Hall, a building

-of Saxon, Norman and later periods, barbarously destroyed in 1843. In

-the Moot Hall the Mayor and justices dealt with offences of all kinds,

-from the selling of bad meat to charges of witchcraft, sorcery and

-heresy. Thus we may read in the borough records of things so diverse

-as the fining of Robert Barefot, butcher, in the sum of twelve pence

-for selling putrid meat, and may learn how William Chevelying, the

-first of the Colchester martyrs, was imprisoned here in the reign of

-Henry the Sixth until such time as it was convenient to burn him in

-front of Colkyng's Castle. Here the local Court of Pie Powder was held

-during the Corporation Fair Days, in October. Summary jurisdiction

-was the special feature of that Court, and it was needed, for in those

-times, when people of all sorts and conditions came from far and near,

-offences were many and various. In the legal jargon of the Middle Ages

-this tribunal is called the _Curia Regis Pedis Pulverizatis_, or, in

-the Norman-French then common, the "Cour Royal des Pieds Poudrés,"

-that is to say, the King's Court of Dusty Feet. Courts of Pie Powder

-obtained this eminently descriptive name from the original Fair

-Courts, held in the dusty streets long before buildings were erected

-for the purpose, and the name survived long after the necessity which

-originated it had disappeared. Imagine, therefore, the highwaymen, the

-cheats and thieves and those who came into disputation on the Fair Days

-being brought before the Mayor by the bailiffs, their cases arising and

-being heard, and judgments and sentences being delivered and executed,

-within the space of one day, amid the bleating of the flocks, the

-lowing of the herds, and all the noise and tumult of the Fair itself.

-We must not, however, suppose the High Street to have been absolutely

-clear of obstructions in days of old. In midst of it stood the Late

-Saxon or Early Norman church of that Saxon saint, St Runwald, which

-remained here until so recently as 1878, when it was pulled down and

-its site sold to the Corporation, to be thrown into the roadway.

-

-That Colchester stands on a considerably elevated site is evident to

-all who, having entered from the London road, turn out of Head Street

-into the High Street, and in doing so glimpse the long descent of

-North Hill at the corner. A further revelation is that of East Hill,

-which, in continuation of High Street, the traveller must long and

-steeply descend towards the Colne, on his way to Ipswich and Norwich.

-It was in High Street that Colchester's principal coaching inns were

-situated, and there yet remains--now the most picturesque feature of

-that thoroughfare--the "Red Lion," with old timber brackets supporting

-a projecting upper storey and a four-centred Tudor oak entrance

-curiously carved; its original and restored portions so thickly smeared

-with paint and varnish that all might be old, so far as the antiquary

-can tell, or all might be in the nature of Wardour Street antiques.

-The "Red Lion" figured as a rendezvous in the surrender of the town to

-Fairfax, after the siege of 1648. In its yard the vanquished laid down

-their swords.

-

-Another inn was the "White Hart," where Bank Passage leaves the High

-Street. The building, a highly respectable plaster-faced one, smug

-and Georgian, still stands, but it is an inn no longer. Another old

-inn, the "Three Cups," has been rebuilt. Older than any, but coyly

-hiding its antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint

-galleries from the crowd, is the "Angel," in West Stockwell Street,

-whose origin as a pilgrim's inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants to,

-or returning from, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away

-on the road through and past Norwich, housed here and misbehaved

-themselves in their mediæval way. It would be the gravest of mistakes

-to assume old pilgrims decorous. Modern Bank Holiday folks would,

-compared with them, seem to be of a severe monkish austerity. The

-shrine at Walsingham, second only in repute to that of the Blessed

-Thomas at Canterbury, drew crowds of every class, from king to beggar.

-The great Benedictine Abbey of St John at Colchester sheltered some

-in its guest-houses, while the late-comers inned at such hostelries

-as the "Angel," or, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods.

-Ill fared the unsuspecting citizen who met any of these sinners on

-the way to be plenarily indulged and lightened of their load of sin.

-They would murder him for twopence or cudgel him out of high spirits

-and for the fun of the thing; arguing, doubtless, that as they were

-presently to turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how black the old

-one was. Drunkenness and crime, immorality, obscenity and license of

-the grossest kind were in fact accompaniments of pilgrimage, and the

-sin-worn wanderers who prayed devoutly at the niche, now empty of its

-statue, in the east end of All Saints' Church in the High Street, on

-their journey to and from Walsingham, would resume their foul jests and

-their evil courses so soon as the last bead was told and the ultimate

-word of dog-Latin glibly pattered off.

-

-

-XXVIII

-

-

-REMOVED from all the noise and bustle of the High Street, in a quiet

-nook away from the modern life of the town, stands Colchester Castle,

-on the site of the Temple of Claudius. The Keep, built by Eudo,

-"Dapifer," or High Steward of Normandy, under William the Conqueror

-and his two successors, alone remains, and has lost its upper storey,

-destroyed by a speculator who bought the building in 1683, and half

-ruined himself in his attempts to demolish it. It is perhaps not

-generally known that this is by far the largest keep in England,

-measuring 155 ft. by 113 ft. The Tower of London, built at the same

-period, and the next largest, measures only 116 ft. by 96 ft. There

-have been those who, looking at its massive walls, 12 ft. thick, with

-courses of Roman tiles conspicuous in them, have believed this to be

-the original Roman temple, and antiquaries who should have known better

-have written long treatises to support their views. Those, however,

-were the days before comparative archæology had come into being to

-prove that the peculiarities in the planning, noticeable here, are

-partaken of by the undoubted Norman keeps of the Tower of London and

-of Rochester Castle, known to have been designed by Gundulf, Bishop of

-Rochester. Freeman was very severe in his time on those who labelled

-the interior of Colchester keep with such names as "podium" and

-"adytum," in their belief of its Roman character.

-

-[Illustration: THE GRAND STAIRCASE, COLCHESTER CASTLE.]

-

-If its lack of height prevents Colchester Castle from being impressive

-without, certainly its gloomy dungeons and mighty walls compel the

-respect and wonder of all who enter. They look not so much as though

-they had been built up, as though cells and passages had been carved

-and burrowed out of a solid mass; so small are those passages and

-staircases, so thick the walls. In the chapel and the corridors that

-still remain roofed, the collections of the Essex Archæological Society

-have a home, and from other and roofless walls that are broad enough

-to afford the safest of pathways one may gaze down upon the surrounding

-grassy enclosures and see that spot where those two Royalist

-commanders, Lucas and Lisle, who held Colchester for seventy-six days

-against the besieging army of the Parliament in 1648, were barbarously

-shot by order of Fairfax, after having surrendered.

-

-That siege of Colchester is the most romantic incident that has

-survived in the history of the town. It is the story of a last

-desperate attempt of the Royalists to contend with the Parliamentary

-forces that had everywhere overwhelmed the King's supporters after a

-bitter warfare of over six years. It was a gallant attempt, and the

-more so because Essex was not a county favourable to the King's cause.

-Sir Charles Lucas, at the head of this enterprise, was a younger

-member of the Lucas family, seated at Colchester. In the beginning of

-June 1648, a Royalist rising under Colonel Goring had been checked at

-Blackheath by the Parliamentary general, Fairfax. A portion of Goring's

-force crossed the Thames into Essex, and lay at Brentwood. This was

-an opportunity which Essex sympathisers could not let slip. Lucas and

-his friends, gathering a body of adherents, galloped down the road

-to Chelmsford, where the Committee of Parliament was in session, and

-seized them, afterwards continuing their progress to Brentwood, where

-they effected a junction with Goring's band. Their forces thus united,

-a counter-march was made upon Chelmsford again, and continued to

-Colchester; Lord Capel, Sir George Lisle, and many others joining on

-the way. On June 12, Goring, in command of this body of four thousand

-Royalists, approached Colchester, and found the Head Gate closed

-against him by the unsympathetic citizens, but a slight skirmish soon

-enabled him to force an entrance. He had not intended to remain at

-Colchester, but the swift pursuit that Fairfax organised from London

-gave the Royalists no time to continue their projected march into the

-Midlands. The day after Goring had entered Colchester, Fairfax had

-assembled his forces on Lexden Heath, and immediately sent a trumpeter

-to demand surrender. The inevitable refusal was the signal for a battle

-outside the town, on the London Road; a contest which resulted in the

-retirement of the Royalists within the walls. The Head Gate still

-existed, its bolts and bars in perfect order, but as the Royalists fell

-back through it into the town, two hundred or more of the Parliamentary

-troops dashed through in pursuit. Their ardour cost them their lives,

-for Lord Capel at the head of a determined band pushed back the gate

-upon the bulk of the enemy, thrusting his walking-stick through the

-staples as the door closed. The eager advance-guard, thus cooped up

-within the walls, were all slain.

-

-Preparations were now made on both sides for a siege. Fairfax had

-already lost many men, and dared not attempt to carry the town by

-storm. His plan was to surround Colchester and imprison the Royalists

-there until such time as his heavy ordnance or starvation should

-compel them to surrender. With his command of reinforcements from

-London, and his ability thus to enclose the town with a cordon of

-troops, the position of the Royalists was hopeless, and it is to their

-honour and credit that, in order to contain Fairfax's large army and

-so give opportunities to the organisers of Royalist movements in the

-Midlands, they continued the defence in the face of starvation and

-despite the easy terms of capitulation at first offered them. Their

-domestic position (so to call it) in the town was unenviable, for the

-inhabitants were wholly opposed to their cause. They had with them,

-it is true, the members of the Parliamentary Committee whom they had

-kidnapped from Chelmsford, but those gentlemen were a nuisance and

-had to be civilly treated and fed while the Royalists themselves went

-hungry. The unfortunate inhabitants, too, were starving, and many of

-their houses and churches destroyed by the besiegers' cannon shot;

-while suburbs were burnt down outside the walls.

-

-The end of this long agony came on August 27, when the town was

-surrendered; the officers "surrendering to mercy," the lesser officers

-and rank and file with an assurance that their lives and personal

-belongings should be spared. Seventy-five superior officers accordingly

-gave up their arms at the "King's Head" inn. Four of them were to be

-tried by court-martial. One escaped, one was pardoned, and two--Sir

-Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle--condemned to be shot without

-delay, on a disproved charge of having once broken their parole when

-formerly prisoners of war. In vain asking for time to make some final

-disposition of their affairs, these two officers were executed the

-same evening, on a grassy spot a few paces clear of the north wall of

-the old castle. Sir Charles Lucas was the first to be shot, and met his

-end as a brave, gallant gentleman should. "I have often faced death

-on the field of battle," he said, "and you shall now see how I dare

-to die." Then he knelt in prayer, and, rising, threw open his vest,

-exclaiming, "See, I am ready for you. Now, rebels, do your worst!" The

-firing-party then fired and shot him in four places, so that he fell

-dead on the instant.

-

-Sir George Lisle was then brought to the same place, and viewing the

-dead body of his friend as it lay on the ground, knelt down and kissed

-him, praising his unspotted honour. After bidding farewell to some

-friends, he turned to the spectators, saying, "Oh! how many of your

-lives here have I saved in hot blood, and must now myself be most

-barbarously murdered in cold blood? But what dare not they do that

-would willingly cut the throat of my dear King, whom they have already

-imprisoned, and for whose deliverance, and peace to this unfortunate

-country, I dedicate my last prayer to Heaven?" Then, looking in the

-faces of those who were to execute him, and thinking they stood at too

-great a distance, he desired them to come nearer, to which one of them

-said, "I'll warrant, sir, we hit you." "Friend," he answered, "I have

-been nearer you when you have missed me!" And so, after a short prayer

-upon his knees, he rose up and said, "Now, traitors, do your worst!"

-Whereupon they shot him dead.

-

-The stone covering the graves of these unhappy soldiers may yet be seen

-in St Giles's Church, with an inscription stating that they were "by

-the command of Thomas Fairfax, the general of the Parliament Army, in

-cold blood barbarously murdered." A legend may still be occasionally

-met with in old books, which has it that the Duke of Buckingham, who

-had married Fairfax's daughter, approached Charles the Second with the

-object of having the passage erased that reflected so severely on his

-father-in-law's memory. The King conferred on the subject with Lord

-Lucas, who said that he would with pleasure obey the Royal command, if

-only His Majesty would allow him to place in its stead the statement

-that "Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle were barbarously murdered

-for their loyalty to King Charles the First, and that his son, King

-Charles the Second, had ordered this memorial of their loyalty to be

-erased." The King then, we are told, commanded the already existing

-epitaph to be cut still deeper, and it will be readily observed by

-those who go to gaze upon it that the lettering is bolder and deeper

-than commonly is the case.

-

-The undertaking of Fairfax with respect to the surrendered soldiery

-was not respected. They were ruthlessly pillaged, and some sent to the

-plantations over seas. Lord Capel was eventually executed in London.

-For many years afterwards the spot where Lucas and Lisle fell was

-shown by the awe-struck people of Colchester, who told the legend

-that grass would not grow where that loyal blood had been spilled. In

-later times the story became an article of faith with one political

-party and a derision to the other. No grass grows there now; but for

-the commonplace reason that a well-kept gravel path occupies the site,

-which is duly marked by a small obelisk.

-

-[Illustration: OLD MAN-TRAP, COLCHESTER CASTLE.]

-

-Colchester was long in recovering itself after the rough treatment

-received during the siege; and in fact, it is only in recent years that

-the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall, battered down on that occasion,

-has been rebuilt; while the Norman minster of St Botolph remains the

-roofless ruin that cannonading and incendiarism left it. Evelyn in

-1656 found Colchester "a ragged and factious town, now swarming with

-sectaries," and if he had visited it nine years later would have

-witnessed a worse state, for the plague almost depopulated the place.

-

-"Sectaries"--that is to say, those who preferred to think for

-themselves on religious matters, and to worship in their own way--were

-treated with an unconscionable severity. One Parnell, a Quaker, was

-imprisoned in a cell within Colchester Castle, and died there, his

-story affording a sad example of barbarity in the authorities of that

-period.

-

-But the early nineteenth century was as savage in some ways as the late

-seventeenth, which so delighted in despitefully using Nonconformists.

-The antiquarian collections in the castle, for instance, include a

-particularly ferocious instrument devised for the protection of the

-squires' property and for the maiming of poachers. It is a man-trap;

-one of those devilish contrivances which, actuated by powerful springs

-and furnished with sharp steel teeth, would, when accidentally trodden

-on by the poacher, snap down upon his leg with force sufficient to

-injure the bone and probably mutilate him for life. It was thus the

-landed interests protected their rabbits, hares and pheasants. The

-existence of this man-trap, together with the spring guns also used at

-the same time, is a reproach to the England of the first quarter of the

-nineteenth century, just as its preservation here as a curiosity is a

-certificate of the progress achieved in humanity since then.

-

-The present prosperity of Colchester is reflected in many ways, but in

-none more strikingly than the condition of the castle, now a municipal

-property, and encircled with lawns and flower-beds, oddly at variance

-with its time-worn grandeur. The neatness of these surroundings and

-of the ornamental railings that fence off the enclosure is admirable

-from the everyday point of view, but the picturesque neglect and rural

-squalor of other years pointed the moral of the place and annotated

-its story, while present prettinesses blur the historic page. It

-is so everywhere throughout the land. When, a hundred years ago,

-Turner, Sandby, Prout and Girtin, our early water-colourists, roamed

-the country, making their picturesque sketches, they did not find

-themselves baulked by flower-beds, cursed by cast-iron fences, or

-requested not to walk on the grass. They had to pick their hazardous

-way through miry lanes, or adventure through the bottomless sloughs of

-farmyards. All these things were offensive to the wayfarer, but they

-generally meant picturesque compositions and exquisitely sketchable

-foregrounds. Nowadays the conscientious illustrator, unwilling to

-picturesquely exaggerate, and yet accursed with cast-iron railings new

-from Birmingham last week, is in a quandary.

-

-[Illustration: COLCHESTER CASTLE.]

-

-The once forlorn condition of Colchester Castle doubtless originated

-in 1726, when its then owner, Sir Isaac Rebow, left it by will to a

-detested grandson, on whom he thus conferred a useless encumbrance, a

-more exasperating bequest than even the proverbial cutting off with a

-shilling.

-

-A relic of those old days of picturesque neglect is found in the book

-of an auctioneer, who wrote an account of his "Professional Travels

-in England in the first half of the Nineteenth Century," modestly

-veiling his identity, and simply calling himself on his title-page, "An

-Auctioneer." Part One of his work was issued in 1843, but Part Two is

-yet to come, and as his first instalment shows little merit, the world

-can well afford to forego the second.

-

-Coming to the castle, he muses over its ruins, and weeps that cabbages

-and coriander employ the attention of the Colchester people, rather

-than the care of ancient fortresses. To him, thus contemplating "the

-sad remains of so many interesting scenes," enters from an adjoining

-farm one whom he is pleased to term "an Aborigine." By this he

-obviously names an Essex farm-labourer. It is an affectation, but

-he might have done worse. He _might_ have called him, seeing that

-Colchester is a place of oysters, a "native," in inverted commas,

-evidences of jocular intent, which would have been dreadful.

-

-"Ah! sir," says the Aborigine, "it was cruel work when them great

-Barons, as they call 'em, lived here."

-

-"True, my friend," replies the Auctioneer, "but it's a pity to see hogs

-and donkeys depasturing in their courts and gardens, and grubbing and

-kicking down their halls and chapels."

-

-"Lord! your honour," rejoins the son of the soil, "what's the use on

-'em in these days? I'd sooner see an acre of these 'ere swedes any day,

-than them there towers and dungeons. Them swedes afore you 'ool carry

-a score o' fine wethers any month in the year, and plaze ye to look at

-'em, but as for them flint walls, you may look at 'em for ever and a

-day 'fore you find enough o' green for a garnish"; which was indeed a

-practical rural way of looking at things.

-

-The summit of those old walls has nowadays a very charming green

-garnish of grass, rendered parti-coloured by wind- and bird-sown

-wallflowers and vigorous wildings; but more lusty than these are the

-young sycamores, that have struck deep roots into the walls and bid

-fair to grow into large trees.

-

-It is still possible to follow the greater part of Colchester's old

-walls along the queer alleys that run above or below them. Eld Lane,

-out of whose elevated course the steep descent of the old postern,

-now known as Scheregate Steps, goes, is situated along the summit

-of the south wall looking over towards St John's Green, where,

-facing a wilderness of scrubby grass, broken bottles, and the sordid

-house-sweepings of the modern town, the gatehouse stands, all that is

-left of the proud mitred Abbey of St John. By that green is the frowzy

-little church of St Giles, patched up in so atrocious a manner from the

-wreck it was after the siege of 1648 that to call its "architecture"

-merely "debased" is to deal kindly with it. A dilapidated boarded

-tower is a feature of the exterior; the interior provided with a flat

-plaster ceiling, like that of a dwelling-room, and filled with flimsy

-pine-wood pews, painted and grained. Dust and stuffiness reign within;

-dust and broken crockery without. And yet, although so unlovely, it is

-not altogether with satisfaction that an elaborate design is seen for

-rebuilding the church from its foundations, together with the notice,

-"It is earnestly hoped that contributions will be given toward the

-restoration fund." "Restoration" is not the word, for the design is

-alien and quite unlike anything that formerly stood on the ground.

-Rather let the place be repaired and cleansed and its unbeautiful

-details preserved as a characteristic and shocking example of how

-they looked upon ecclesiastical architecture in the dark days of

-churchwarden- and carpenter-Gothic. It is here, under the north aisle,

-that those two valiant captains, Lucas and Lisle, are laid.

-

-For the church-towers built of Roman bricks, and for other evidences

-of that ancient Empire, let the explorer seek, and, presently finding,

-think himself, if he will, an original investigator: it is a harmless

-attitude, if at the same time unwarranted by fact. Let us to other

-matters, and then, leaving the town, hie away for Ipswich.

-

-Colchester is, of course, famous for its oysters, and has been ever

-since the Roman occupation. In the estuary of the Colne, and the

-Crouch, and in the oozy creeks of the Essex shores, the Colchester

-"natives" still grow up from infancy to maturity and feed upon the

-semi-maritime slime, as they did close upon two thousand years ago, and

-doubtless long before that. If we may judge from the stupendous heaps

-of oyster-shells discovered on the sites of Roman towns and villas,

-near and far, to say merely that the Romans were fond of oysters would

-be far too mild a term. They must have almost lived on oysters, dreamt

-oysters, and thought oysters. No wonder Colchester, whence the finest

-and the largest supply came, was so prosperous a Roman colony.

-

-Although the fishery brings wealth to the town, it is more than a

-mile away and makes no sign. Those who might think that, because of

-it, Colchester should obtrude oysters at every turn and oyster-shells

-should strew every street, would be vastly disillusioned. But

-beside its oyster fishery, other Colchester trades are of secondary

-importance. Agricultural machinery is made here, and brewing and

-corn-milling carried on, but the once famed textile manufactures are

-gone. Among those old trades was the industry of baize-making, which

-left Colchester considerably over a century ago for other centres,

-after having given additional prosperity to the town for a period of

-a hundred and fifty years. It was shortly after 1570 that numbers

-of Dutch Protestants, fleeing from the Spanish persecutions in

-Holland, introduced the making of "bays and says," and, despite local

-jealousies, flourished amazingly for generations here.

-

-But Colchester will never be dull while it continues to be what it is

-now--a great military depôt. Those worthy representatives of the Roman

-legionaries at a distance in time of nineteen centuries or so, the

-Tommies and troopers of the British Army, are a prominent feature in

-every street, and bugles blow all round the clock, from _réveillé_ to

-the last post, when every good soldier goes home to his barracks down

-the Butt Road; while the King's bad bargains stay behind and fortify

-themselves against apprehensions of the morrow's "clink" with another

-glass, or, adventuring too rashly into the street, find themselves

-presently in charge of the military patrol that walks the town with

-measured step and slow.

-

-

-XXIX

-

-

-"FROM Colchester to Ipswitch is ten mile," says that

-seventeenth-century traveller, Celia Fiennes, in her diary. The

-milestones, however, tell quite a different tale and contradict the

-lady by making the distance between the two towns eighteen miles and a

-quarter.

-

-Seven miles of these bring the traveller from Colchester across the

-Stour and so into Suffolk. It is not an exciting seven miles. Passing

-the eastern outskirts of Colchester, where mud in the Colne and puddles

-beside the slattern streets offend the sense of propriety, as, having

-reversed their natural positions, the Fair Field is left on the right.

-"Left" is an expression used advisedly, for who would linger there?

-But the Fair Field cannot be passed unawares. If not seen, it will be

-heard, for on it camp the caravans, steam roundabouts and travelling

-circuses that still draw rustic crowds with their fat women, giants and

-dwarfs; or delight them with mechanical rides on wooden horses to the

-bellowing of a steam organ, whose music-hall airs follow the traveller

-in gusts of stentorian minstrelsy when the wind unkindly wills it so.

-The sounds nerve the cyclist to quickly put the miles between himself

-and those siren strains, and happily the road is a fast one, so that

-he need not be long about the business. It goes, as an old turnpike

-should, broad and straight and well-kept, for the matter of six miles,

-with little to vary the monotony of trim hedgerow and equi-distant

-telegraph poles.

-

-Let us therefore leave it awhile, and, journeying some three hundred

-yards along the Harwich Road, come across a railway level-crossing to

-the suburb of St Ann's, and the site of a spring and hermitage called

-Holy Well. The spring is now sealed up, but an inscription in the wall

-of a cottage still proclaims it to have been reopened in 1844. It seems

-strange that the Hermitage should have been placed, not on the main

-road where pilgrims were surely more plentiful, but on the seaward

-route. The explanation may probably be sought in the existence already

-of another establishment of the kind, long since forgotten. Here, then,

-the Hermitage of St Ann's was placed, and a holy well and an oratory

-made appeal to the piety or the superstition, as the case might be, of

-all who passed by. To these the hermit presented his leathern wallet,

-beseeching travellers, who would have gone without giving alms, to

-spare a trifle for the upkeep of the road, even though they valued not

-the Blessed Saints.

-

-For three hundred years the Hermitage lasted, and a long line of

-hermits lived here. Some were pious and industrious, keeping the road

-in repair; others had neither piety nor industry, spent their time

-in taverns, were smiters, and got drunk and fought, so that the road

-became scandalously neglected, and many Colchester worthies received

-apostolical black eyes from eremitical fists. Such an one must have

-been the hermit who lived here in the reign of Henry the Fifth, and

-was indicted in 1419 for having an unclean ditch. Finally, in 1535,

-when the dissolution of the monasteries took place, the Hermitage was

-closed, and the then occupant turned out, with a warning that if he

-solicited alms henceforward he would be regarded as a "sturdy beggar,"

-and dealt with accordingly.

-

-The road to Ipswich was the scene, in the second half of the

-seventeenth century, shortly after the first coaches had started

-running, of many highway robberies. The borough of Colchester was

-deeply concerned at this lawlessness, and in 1679 three men were

-rewarded with £6, 8s. between them "for apprehending those y^t robbed

-the Ipswich coach." Again, in September 1698, three men were rewarded

-"for pursuen hiewaymen," and for "going to Ardlegh" on that business;

-but as they received only two shillings each and an extra shilling for

-"drinck," it looks as though the pursuit was unsuccessful.

-

-[Illustration: COLCHESTER.]

-

-The high road, to which we have now returned, has already been

-described as an excellent highway, but Dilbridge, a hamlet, and a

-roadside inn on what was once Ardleigh Heath, alone break its solitude.

-It has, however, the advantage of commanding the best general view of

-Colchester, with the inevitable Jumbo prominent, and the new-risen Town

-Hall tower in rivalry with it.

-

-Suddenly, when six miles from Colchester, the road changes its

-character and drops sharply down by an almost precipitous descent, to

-where a lazy river is seen flowing picturesquely in loops and bends

-between the grey-green foliage of willows lining either bank. It flows

-through a land of rich green meadows and yellow cornfields; a land,

-too, of noble elms and oaks. In the far distance the waters of a salt

-estuary sparkle in the sun, while in between, from this Pisgah height,

-rises the tall tower of a church. The river is the Stour, dividing

-Essex and Suffolk, and the pleasant vale, the Vale of Dedham. The

-estuary is that of the Stour at Manningtree, and the church tower

-that of Dedham. This, indeed, is the Constable Country, and that fact

-explains the homelike and familiar look it wears, even to the stranger.

-Constable, born close by at East Bergholt, painted these scenes

-lovingly for over forty years, and remained constant to his native vale

-all his life. By the magic power that comes of sympathy, he transferred

-the spirit of these lanes and fields and trees to canvas as faithfully

-as he did their form and colour; with the result that the veriest

-stranger viewing them becomes reminiscent.

-

-Nor did Constable only _paint_ his native vale; he has described it in

-almost as masterly a way. To him it was "the most cultivated part of

-Suffolk, a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour, which

-river separates that county on the south from Essex. The beauty of the

-surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats

-sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated uplands, its woods

-and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms and

-picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular spot an amenity

-and excellence hardly anywhere else to be found. He tells an amusing

-story of travelling home by coach down this very hill. He shared the

-vehicle with two strangers. "In passing the Vale of Dedham, one of

-them remarked, on my saying it was very beautiful, 'Yes, sir, this is

-Constable's Country.' I then told him who I was lest he should spoil

-it."

-

-From this hill-top to the left of the road, and in what are now the

-woodlands of Langham Hall, Constable painted his best-known Vale

-of Dedham. In one respect the scene has changed. The willows still

-fringing the Stour, formerly "cobbed" or pollarded, are now allowed

-to grow as they will, and the river is not so visible as it was once.

-Otherwise the Constable Country is little altered. Even on this hill,

-close by Langham church, Church Farm, the original of his "Glebe Farm,"

-remains as it was, thatched and gabled, close by the church tower. Only

-the foliage has changed, and the little guttering stream been drained

-away.

-

-[Illustration: THE VALE OF DEDHAM. _After Constable._]

-

-[Illustration: GUN HILL.]

-

-This steep road, shelving so abruptly to the Stour, is Dedham Hill,

-more often locally known as Dedham Gun Hill, from the "Gun" inn at the

-summit, now unhappily rebuilt, but until recently a most picturesque

-old inn, with the painted sign of a cannon hanging over the road. The

-sign has gone, and a pretentious house, which proclaims "Accommodation

-for Lady Cyclists," arisen in its stead. At the foot of the hill the

-road, turning abruptly to the left, begins a lengthy crossing of the

-Stour and its marshes by a bridge over the channel and a long series of

-flood-water arches across the oozy valley. The old toll-house, taking

-tolls no longer, still stands, a quaint building on the Essex side, and

-bears a cast-iron tablet with the inscription,--

-

-  THE DUMB ANIMALS' HUMBLE PETITION.

-

-  Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,

-  Dumb beasts pray use with all good will;

-  Goad not, scourge not, with thongèd whips,

-  Let not one curse escape your lips,

-          God sees and hears.

-

-                             T. T. H., POSUIT.

-

-[Illustration: OLD TOLL-HOUSE, STRATFORD BRIDGE.]

-

-This is one of a number of similar tablets erected throughout the

-country in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the first

-glimmerings of humane treatment of animals began to show themselves.

-When drivers had perforce to halt here to pay toll, this was a notice

-they could scarce help seeing, but it only by rare chance attracts

-attention now.

-

-Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty. No picturesque

-building this, but a great hulking structure of that intolerable

-"white" Suffolk brick which is rather a grey-white than any other hue;

-a brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and crude, and by no

-chance ever helps the artist. The whole length of the Norwich Road is

-more or less bedevilled with it.

-

-This mill is the one blot on the beauty of Stratford St Mary, a village

-built along the flat road and continuing round the bend, and so up the

-hill to where the fine old church stands overlooking the highway. It

-is a remarkable church, built of black flint and stone, and covered on

-the side facing the road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the

-site of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy clothworkers

-of this place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps

-a little difficult to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other

-East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the weaving industry,

-just as there is a difficulty in realising that Sussex was once a

-grimy iron-mining country; but trades and places have their fates, and

-changes and romances of their own.

-

-From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors family were busy in

-giving to their church and in directing its new features; and the

-chief of the inscriptions in stone and flint that curiously decorate

-its exterior in old English characters record the facts and beseech

-the wayfarer to pray for their souls. Vain request! The work had not

-been completed five years when the long and troubled story of the

-Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no longer prayed for.

-

-The most prominent inscription is that enjoining prayers for Thomas

-Mors and his wife Margaret, who built the north aisle:--

-

- Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margarete uxoris ejus qui istam

- alam ffieri fecerunt anno dni mcccc^m lxxxxviiii

-

-Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together with his wife

-Alice, content with an English inscription. They are also a little less

-self-centred than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian

-souls" in addition to supplications for their own especial benefit:--

-

- Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alys hys wyfe and all

- crysten sowlys, Anno Domini 1530.

-

-Many other inscriptions and devices are seen, among them the letters,

-P B A E S, said to be the initials of an invocatory sentence,

-"_Propitiemini beati ad eternam salutem_," addressed to Saints Thomas

-and Margaret, the patron saints of Thomas and Margaret Mors. But,

-stranger than any, is the appearance of the entire alphabet on these

-walls. Many attempts have been made to explain the reason of this,

-among them the view that the object was to educate the villagers in the

-rudiments of spelling!

-

-

-XXX

-

-

-THE long rise out of Stratford on the way to Ipswich lies through a

-beautiful Gainsborough-like woodland, with ancient trees gripping sandy

-banks in a tenacious clutch of gnarled roots. It is a hollow road, and

-one in which, when the coaches were toiling up, the guards' hands went

-instinctively towards their blunderbusses and swordcases. One never

-knew what or who might be lurking in that shade.

-

-But if it was a chancy spot then, how very suspicious a place it must

-have been hundreds of years before. That it was so regarded may be

-learnt from the _Paston Letters_, the instructive correspondence of the

-Paston family in the fifteenth century. Therein we read how a rival of

-John Paston in the wardship of one of the Fastolf family, coming out

-of Suffolk to London, was escorted by a hundred retainers, all armed

-with bows and arrows in their hands, with saletts on their heads,

-well-padded jacks and rusty haubergeons on their bodies, and fear in

-their hearts of an ambush laid on the part of the Pastons in the hollow

-way where the trees meet overhead and a mid-day darkness broods under

-the dense foliage. This rival expressed himself as not being afraid of

-the Pastons or any of their friends; but if not, why did he go escorted

-with this motley crew, tricked out with all the ancient weapons and

-rusted armour they could find? Happily they were not attacked, but that

-it was possible for petty warfare of this kind to be plotted is proof

-that the Merry England of that period was no safe place for peaceful

-travellers.

-

-Now we are well within Suffolk, the "crack county of England," as

-Cobbett called it, the "sweet and civil county" of Bishop Hall; but a

-county to which the alliterative term "silly" has long been applied.

-It is probably by this time quite hopeless to scotch that nickname,

-for it is of a considerable age and has a specious and easy glibness

-that comes trippingly off the tongue. Suffolkers themselves--whom it

-most concerns--are at pains to explain that the real, and entirely

-flattering, solution of the phrase is found in "selig," the Anglo-Saxon

-for "holy" or "blissful;" a reference to the numerous and wealthy

-religious houses within the county, and to the East Anglian saints and

-the many places of pilgrimage. Another party advancing the theory that

-the epithet was originally "Sely Suffolk," observant of the seasons,

-would thus have us believe that Suffolk must have been more observant

-than other counties, which is not credible. True, Suffolkers still talk

-of the hay-harvest as "haysel," a survival of "hay sele," but this is

-not the only county that uses the phrase. It becomes evident that the

-nickname must go unexplained.

-

-Suffolk has its claims to recognition on other than historic grounds.

-"I'm told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there," said William,

-the coachman, to little David Copperfield. Perhaps they are, and

-certainly it was once the custom among the peasantry here, as indeed

-throughout England, to serve pudding, or "dumpling," before meat in

-order to take the edge off appetites with a kind of food cheaper than

-butcher's meat; but the improved circumstances of the peasantry scarce

-demand such a practice nowadays, and in any case, Norfolk is the county

-of dumplings, so Dickens was in error in putting that speech in the

-coachman's mouth. "Norfolk Dumplings," he should have known, are as

-proverbial as "Silly Suffolkers."

-

-Suffolk is deservedly esteemed all over the world for the "Suffolk

-Punch." This sounds convivial, but has no connection with punch-bowls;

-the reference being, as a matter of fact, to a breed of horses.

-

-"And the Punches! There's cattle!" said William, the Canterbury

-coachman, to David Copperfield. "A Suffolk Punch, when he's a good

-'un, is worth his weight in gold," he added; which is not a very great

-exaggeration. Keep an eye upon the fields or an observant glance

-along the road, and the Suffolk Punch will readily be noted in his

-native country, at plough, halted by the wayside inn, or dragging with

-indomitable spirit the heaviest loads that the stupidity of the most

-stupid of waggoners could put him to. If ever horse deserved the praise

-contained in the familiar copy-book maxim, that he is "a Noble Animal,

-the Friend of Man," it is to this breed that it most particularly

-applies. The Suffolk Punch is a sturdy and a willing brute, and will

-pull against a dead weight until exhausted. It has been said that the

-Suffolk Punch existed as a type of horse in early British times, and

-it has been supposed that his remote ancestors were the horses that

-drew Boadicea's war-chariots. If it were not that he is invariably

-a chestnut, it might be supposed that his fame in the county had

-originated the sign of the "Great White Horse" in Ipswich; but from

-chestnut the breed never varies. It may be of various shades, from the

-darkest mahogany to the lightest golden-brown, but never any other hue.

-It is, of course, not necessary to journey into East Anglia to see the

-Suffolk Punch. Many of his kind are at work in London, drawing heavy

-loads, and are to be seen expatriated to Russia, and on Canadian farms,

-thousand of miles away from their native claylands.

-

-The Suffolk dialect is kin to those of Essex and Norfolk, but the

-"Suffolk whine" is peculiar to the county; it is a rising inflection

-of the voice towards the end of words and sentences. In Suffolk speech

-"fowls" become "foals," and "foals," "fools"; and archaic words, heard

-occasionally in Essex, grow more common as the traveller advances.

-So also does an odd custom first noticed in the neighbourhood of

-Colchester--the custom of affixing the place-name to the sign of

-an inn in ordinary talk. The "Gun" inn at Dedham, for example, is

-always spoken of as "Dedham Gun," and here, at Bentley, the custom

-is emphasised by the sign of a roadside inn being inscribed "Bentley

-Tankard," and not merely "The Tankard."

-

-[Illustration: SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. _After Constable._]

-

-But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear Suffolk talk it is necessary

-to linger in the villages and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The

-agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide, when they give

-themselves up to play and gossip. Then, as the long summer day draws

-to its close, the children find romance in the lengthening shadows, in

-which their games of robbers and pirates seem much more convincing than

-they could be made to appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm

-labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of "bellywengins,"

-at the pub, and the coy mawthers find the twilight a seasonable time

-for nannicking with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning

-gibberish to those unacquainted with the peculiar dialect of East

-Anglia, merely signifies the girls flirting with the "other ones"--the

-young men, in short.

-

-But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl is a mawther, and so

-is a grandame. It is a curiosity of speech which is apt to startle

-the stranger who first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet

-learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be heard any day in any

-Suffolk village, "Yow come 'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll

-spank yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex, Suffolk and

-Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which a native of these parts may be

-immediately distinguished anywhere.

-

-When the labourers have trudged over to their "shants o' gatter,"

-or quarts and pots of beer--the "bellywengins," or belly vengeance,

-aforesaid; when the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers

-and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together in the gathering

-dusk, then is the gossiping time, both of the housewives and of the

-labourers. The women talk at the doors of the "housen": the men mostly

-in the village inns. Hear, passing stranger, what the mawthers are

-saying:--

-

-"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin' arn?"

-

-"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew or tree weeks sin'.

-The doctor say I fare to be on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi'

-me sure."

-

-"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm thinkin'; but there, 'taint so

-much yer aige, 'tis yer sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."

-

-"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group, "what be life wi'out

-sperrut? Nothin', in a manner o' speakin'."

-

-"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he lived to be ninety."

-

-"What a man that wor! I mind him when he come to mine arter he'd walked

-from Ipswich, an' that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun he

-ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were as spry as a mavish

-and fresher'n a paigle."

-

-A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East Bergholt, Constable's

-birthplace, and between it and the road still stretch in summer those

-golden cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that crowning

-achievement of English landscape, how exquisite a thing it is, radiant

-in colour on the walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually

-the inadequate medium of black and white attempts to translate it.

-

-[Illustration: THE CORNFIELD. _After Constable._]

-

-The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for his growls, poor fellow,

-is careful to explain his cornfields away. When asked why, if it

-does not pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he says he

-grows it for the straw. At any rate, times are changed from those when

-agricultural England was merry with high prices; those picturesque days

-when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed, as every traveller

-was hailed, at harvest-time by the reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo,

-largesse," the largesse going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the

-village inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the reaping-hook,

-and with it and many other things has gone the Lord of the Harvest,

-elected from among his fellow-reapers to preside over their labours and

-their harvest-supper in the great fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen.

-The line of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning with their

-sickles in the fierce sun upon the diminishing fields of standing

-wheat, with halts for levenses and bever, and so home by the light of

-the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines do the work

-instead. It was astonishing, and, in the haymaking fields, still is,

-what long and continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the

-intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say the eleven o'clock

-forenoon meal, and bever, the four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose

-name came through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin "bibere,"

-to drink, reduced the contents of the barrels placed in the shady

-hedgerows, but quarts imbibed under such conditions were harmless.

-Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life, the names of "bever"

-and "levenses" remain yet in the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk

-as those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and carter.

-

-Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent moments, of coaching

-and posting days here, when, near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green,

-and in a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes, leading from

-Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond, "Laddenford Stables" stood at the

-cross roads that went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four

-sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed to part here

-and went their several ways, but how they fared, or what was their

-social status, the story does not tell.

-

-Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing by Capel station, and so

-by Copdock, whose church tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape

-of King David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at the foot of

-its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and Washbrook in the hollow,

-together with the broad and still marshy valley of the little Wash

-Brook, tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days when Saxons

-and Danes contended on this coast, a navigable creek, an arm of the

-Orwell. The road, in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley,

-together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of bygone geographical

-conditions, leading as it does down to the place where a bridge now

-spans the stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of old, first

-fordable. Having thus crossed, the road went, and still goes, in a

-right-angle turn uphill, towards Ipswich.

-

-It was by no means necessary for travellers journeying between London

-and Norwich to touch Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial

-reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises commonly went from

-Washbrook, through Sproughton and Bramford, and joined the coach

-route again at Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead

-of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook who can still tell of

-the coaches that halted at "Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a

-toll-gate (the house still existing) stretched across the way at the

-foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks" who posted the long stage

-between "Stonham Pie" and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the

-"Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely up at the hill-top, but

-now a private residence with its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and

-can show the places, in what are now meadows, where many houses and

-cottages stood in those wayfaring days, when the high-lying road to

-Ipswich, across the uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the

-Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.

-

-

-XXXI

-

-

-THERE can be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings having thoroughly

-captured the heart of grumbling old Cobbett.

-

-"From the town itself," he says, "you can see nothing; but you can, in

-no direction, go from it a quarter of a mile without finding views

-that a painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable, for we do

-not generally attribute an artistic perception of scenic beauties to

-this practical farmer. Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom

-and his pictures he probably had never heard, although Constable had

-already for years been painting these very scenes.

-

-The practical farming mind appears in Cobbett's next remarks: "And

-then, the country round about is so well cultivated; the land in such

-a beautiful state, the farmhouses all white and all so much alike; the

-barns and everything about the homesteads so snug; the stock of turnips

-so abundant everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order; the

-wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the furrows, if a quarter

-of a mile long, as straight as a line, and laid as truly as if with

-a level; in short, here is everything to delight the eye and to make

-the people proud of their country; and this is the case throughout

-the whole of this county. I have always found Suffolk farmers great

-boasters of their superiority over others, and I must say that it is

-not without reason."

-

-Cobbett found the windmills on the hills round Ipswich so numerous

-that, while standing in one place, he counted no fewer than seventeen,

-all painted or washed white, with black sails. They are fewer to-day,

-and could Gainsborough, old Crome and Constable revisit the scenes of

-their artistic inspiration, they would sadly miss the picturesqueness

-they gave these woody scenes and fertile hills and vales. It is from

-the crest of one of these hills that Ipswich is first glimpsed. There

-it sprawls, prosperous, beside the broad Orwell; "doubtlesse one of

-the sweetest, most pleasant, well-built townes in England," as John

-Evelyn thought in 1656; but then swarming with "a new phanatic sect of

-dangerous principles." The reader will scarce guess aright who these

-fanatics were. They were neither sun-worshippers nor Mahometans, but

-merely Quakers.

-

-One obtains no glimpse of the broad estuary of the Orwell when

-descending into the town by the London road, and the crowded mass

-of the place rises confusedly up before the traveller as he steeply

-descends, and forms no picture. You must take Ipswich in detail to

-admire it, and the actual crossing of the river at the foot of the

-hill where the town begins is at a narrow canalised stretch before it

-widens out into the noble harbour that makes the fortune of the port.

-A sign of that accomplished fortune is the unlovely sight of the great

-railway sidings and goods yards spread out before the stranger's eye as

-he comes downhill. One may say that the town begins at the door of the

-"Ipswich Arms" inn, uninteresting in itself, but displaying the fine

-"old coat" of this famous seaport; a shield with a rampant golden lion

-on a red field on the sinister, and three golden demi-boats on blue on

-the dexter side.

-

-"A fine, populous, and beautiful place," says Cobbett, still harping on

-an unwonted string of praise. "The town is substantially built, well

-paved, everything good and solid, and no wretched dwellings to be

-seen on its outskirts." He knew no town to be compared with it, except

-it were Nottingham, which, after all, is not properly comparable,

-Nottingham standing high, while Ipswich is in a vale, and moreover,

-is situated on an arm of the sea. It is amusing to read Cobbett's

-remarks on the population of Ipswich, which stood in his time at twelve

-thousand. "Do you not," he asks, "think Ipswich was far larger and far

-more populous seven hundred years ago than it is at this hour?"--that

-hour being some time in March 1830. He remarked upon "the twelve large,

-lofty and magnificent churches," each of them seven hundred years old,

-one capable of holding from four to seven thousand persons, and came to

-the conclusion that, in fact, although he found Ipswich populous, it

-must, even thus, have been a mere ghost of its former self. That shrewd

-observer was right. Ipswich had grievously decayed even in Charles the

-Second's reign, when the Duke of Buckingham described it as "a town

-without inhabitants, a river without water, streets without names, and

-where the asses wore boots." The Duke, in speaking of "a river without

-water," was probably referring to the estuary of the Orwell at low

-tide, when mud-banks stretch vast, and the stream runs by comparison

-feeble and thread-like through them. In its then nameless streets,

-Ipswich was not singular, for many small provincial towns were in like

-case. The asses that wore boots were those employed in rolling the lawn

-of a neighbouring park, the object probably being to prevent their

-hoofs injuring the surface.

-

-"Yepysweche," as Margaret Paston, writing to her husband over

-four hundred years ago, spells the name, derives its title from

-the aboriginal Gippings, a tribe or clan who squatted down beside

-the Orwell, and not only established their primitive village of

-Gippingswick here, but contrived to foist their tribal name upon the

-non-tidal part of the river above the town, which therefore still

-generally bears this _alias_. The town probably saw its greatest

-prosperity in the time of Cardinal Wolsey, a native, and, according

-to legend, son of a butcher. This "butcher's dogge," as the envious

-nicknamed the great Cardinal, determined that his birthplace should

-be great in learning as well as in commerce, and to that end founded

-a College which he intended to be in some sort preparatory for his

-greater college of Christ Church at Oxford. That his foundation was

-reared on the spoliation of a religious house and its revenues,

-procured by him for the purpose, seemed but an ill omen for its

-prosperity to those who saw his buildings rising to completion, and the

-omen was speedily fulfilled, for the new-made abode of learning never

-sent forth a scholar, but was suppressed by Henry the Eighth almost

-before the mortar of its brick walls was dry; the buildings themselves

-torn down and the endowments confiscated. All that remains of Wolsey's

-College is one noble red-brick gateway in College Street.

-

-Daniel Defoe was a native of Ipswich and a curious contrast with

-Wolsey, his brother townsman of two hundred years before. In his day

-the old prosperity of the place had vanished, in the stress of Dutch

-competition and the virulence of the plague; but modern times have made

-amends for that temporary decay, and the town is now nearly four times

-larger than when, shortly after the first quarter of the nineteenth

-century had gone, Cobbett noted its many and empty churches and its

-scanty population. It numbers now over 58,000 souls, and its trades are

-numerous and prosperous. Whether it be in the making of agricultural

-and milling machinery, its corn markets, artificial manure making, or

-the manufacture of corsets, Ipswich is fortunate, with the good fortune

-of those who give heed to the ancient proverb and do not put all their

-eggs in one basket.

-

-[Illustration: WOLSEY'S GATEWAY.]

-

-Picturesqueness coyly hides itself from the traveller who merely

-passes through the chief streets. Not in the open square of Cornhill,

-where the cabs and flys stand on the site of the old Market Cross and

-the trams fly to and fro, and where the Post-office and the Town Hall

-rise, side by side, does it appear, nor in the long street beyond;

-but rather in the Butter Market and the lanes that conduct to the

-waterside. There be streets in that quarter with odd names, among them

-Silent Street; and almshouses, and churches, and the queerest inns.

-Among the almshouses are Smart's, on whose walls, unhappily rebuilt

-in modern times, the charitable Smart and his no less charitable

-coadjutor, Tooley, are commemorated:--

-

-  "Let gentle Smart sleep on in pious trust,

-  Behold his charity. Respect his dust."

-

-  "In peaceful silence lett great Toolie rest,

-  Whose charitable deeds bespeak him blest."

-

-It is to be feared that these eulogies raise a smile at the expense of

-great Tooley and gentle Smart.

-

-[Illustration: THE "LION AND LAMB," ANGEL LANE.]

-

-As to the inns, they include the odd conjunction of the "Lion and

-Lamb," pictured here, and the "Neptune" and the "Sea Horse," with a

-fine sound of the sea in their names. Some of these old hostelries yet

-retain their corner-posts: for example, that of the "Half Moon" in

-Foundation Street, where the post still keeps its mediæval carving of a

-fox, with uplifted sanctimonious eyes, preaching to three geese and a

-griffin; a satirical effort no doubt looked sourly upon by the clergy

-of St Mary Key Church, opposite, in days of old. A great gilt key

-serves as vane to that church and perpetuates the error in the name,

-which was originally, and rightly, St Mary-at-Quay: the custom-house

-quay and the harbour being close by, as the sight of certain

-corn-elevators, the rattling of chains and windlasses, and the sounds

-of throaty steam-sirens sufficiently proclaim. The custom-house stands

-in midst of coal-grit, laden steam vessels lying alongside the quay

-wall, bellowing steamily to be discharged, and railway-sidings, along

-whose maze of points and turn-tables fussy little locomotive engines,

-dragging jerky trucks, run, screaming intermittently, as though saying

-to the bellowing steam-vessels, "_You_ just wait; can't you see I'm

-coming as quick as I can?" It is a dignified custom-house, and seems,

-surrounded with dutiable goods, to be aristocratically sneering at

-the trade in whose midst it is necessarily placed, and with as great

-a consciousness of its Ionic peristyle as any high-born beauty of her

-Greek nose.

-

-Many of the old wool-staplers', clothiers' and merchants' fine mansions

-stood by the quay and in the by-lanes. They are mostly gone now, but

-traces of old doorways and stray fragments of stone and wood carvings

-remain, and here and there a courtyard, or a house that sheltered

-family circles in the amphibious half-mercantile, half-agricultural

-Ipswich of the sixteenth century.

-

-[Illustration: SPARROWE'S HOUSE.]

-

-Certainly one of the finest things Ipswich has to show is the wonderful

-old place in the old Butter Market, known still as "Sparrowe's House,"

-although the last of the Sparrowes who inhabited here has long since

-gone to his home in the family vault within the Church of St Lawrence,

-where, over their tomb-house, may yet be read the punning motto,

-_Nidus Passerum_, "a nest of sparrows." These Sparrowes seem to have

-been endowed with some of the attributes of the cuckoo, for _they_

-did not build the house that bears their name. It owes its origin to

-a certain George Copping, who built it in 1567, but alterations and

-additions made in the Jacobean period give its architectural history

-a span of over a century. The woodwork of the bay windows and the

-grandly-projecting eaves, together with that of the shop premises, was

-added at the time. But the great glory of "Sparrowe's House" is its

-decorative plaster-work in high relief, which profusely covers the

-exterior with garlands of flowers and fruits and with quaint devices

-emblematic of the four quarters of the globe. Here Europa, cornucopia

-in one hand, book and sceptre in the other, sits with her bull, who

-might be taken for an elephant with half his trunk shorn off; here,

-on another bay, a podgy plaster relief typifies Asia, with palm-tree

-and a building of Oriental character in the background; followed by

-Africa, a nude nigger holding an umbrella over his head and sitting

-on a shark, at which four tiny figures at a respectful distance

-express astonishment, while nearer at hand a wicked-looking bird of

-quite uncertain family roosts on a something that greatly resembles

-a battered meat tin. America is typified by an Indian in a feather

-head-dress which represents his entire wardrobe. He stands with bow

-and arrows, attended by a dog with a damaged smile. A very beautiful

-representation of the Royal Arms occupies one of the spaces between

-the windows, and other devices show the pelican in her piety; Atlas

-supporting the world; a classical scene in which a shepherd bows as

-gracefully as the artist in plaster could make him to a rural nymph; St

-George and the Dragon, and several smaller subjects.

-

-

-XXXII

-

-

-THE most famous thing in Ipswich is a thing neither ancient nor

-beautiful, yet it is an object to which most visitors to the town turn

-their first attention: it is the "Great White Horse." The "Great White

-Horse" is an hotel, of a size, in the merry days of the road, justly

-thought enormous. It has been left for the present age to build many

-hotels in town and country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more

-hostelries of the size of the "Great White Horse," but in its own

-especial era that house fully justified the adjective in its sign.

-Especially did its bulk strike the imagination of the reporter of the

-London _Morning Chronicle_ who was dispatched to Ipswich in 1830 for

-the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary election in the town. He was

-a very young, a very impressionable and a very bright reporter, and

-although we may be quite sure that the business on which he was come to

-Ipswich was an arduous piece of work, calculated to fully occupy his

-time and thoughts, he carried away with him so accurate an impression

-of the big inn where he stayed, that when, some time afterwards, he

-wrote about it the description was as exact as though it had been

-penned within sight of the house. That reporter was Charles Dickens,

-and it is his description in the _Pickwick Papers_ which has made the

-place famous.

-

-[Illustration: THE "GREAT WHITE HORSE."]

-

-It was not a flattering description. Few more severe things have ever

-been said of inns than those Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse."

-Indeed, if such things were nowadays printed of any inn or hotel, the

-writer might confidently expect to be made the defendant in an action

-for libel. Yet (such is the irony of time and circumstances) the house

-that Dickens so roundly abused is now eager in all its advertisements

-to quote the association; and the adventures of Mr Pickwick in the

-double-bedded room with the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers have

-brought many more visitors than the unfavourable notice of the

-"uncarpeted passages" and the "mouldy, ill-lighted rooms" has turned

-away. If, as has been thought, Dickens thus wrote of the house in order

-to be revenged for some slights and discomforts he may have experienced

-here, certainly fortune has played the cynic in converting his remarks

-into the best of all imaginable recommendations.

-

-The exterior of the house is much the same as it was when Dickens first

-saw it, "in the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the

-way, a short distance after you have passed through the open space

-fronting the Town Hall."

-

-It is the same plain, square building, constructed of a pallid kind of

-brick suggesting underdone pastry, and is still, although the coaches

-have disappeared and railways have supplanted them, "known far and

-wide by the appellation of the 'Great White Horse.'" Still, over the

-pillared entrance trots the effigy of the Great White Horse himself,

-perhaps the aboriginal ancestor of that famous breed of equines, the

-"Suffolk Punches," a very muscular race, more famous for their bulk

-and strength than for elegance, like those sturdy Flanders mares to

-which Henry the Eighth inelegantly likened his bride, Anne of Cleves.

-

-Dickens, using the usual licence of the novelist, describes this effigy

-as "a stone statue of some rampacious animal, with flowing mane and

-tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, elevated above the

-principal door." Quite apart from the fact that the word "rampacious"

-is unknown to the English language, and is probably meant for

-"rampageous," the horse is really represented in the act of beginning a

-gentle trot, and looks as mild as the mildest milk that ever dewed the

-whiskers of a new-born kitten. His off fore-leg, broken at some period,

-has been restored of a size that does not match with the other three.

-Never, in the whole of his existence, has the Great White Horse gone

-on the rampage, and, like all the truly great, his manners have always

-been distinguished by their unobtrusiveness.

-

-"The 'Great White Horse,'" writes Dickens, "is famous in the

-neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or county

-paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig--for its enormous size. Never

-were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy,

-ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or

-sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between

-the four walls of the 'Great White Horse' at Ipswich." Further, he

-describes it as "an overgrown tavern," at whose door, when Mr Pickwick

-descended from the coach, stood a waiter whose description quite

-takes one's desire for dinner away. He was "a corpulent man with a

-fortnight's napkin under his arm and coeval stockings on his legs."

-

-Although that must have been in the best and most prosperous days of

-the highway, this waiter does not appear to have had anything more

-pressing to do than "staring down the road," while the account of

-the internal arrangements of the house does not indicate flourishing

-business. The private room into which the guests were shown was a

-"large, badly-furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a

-small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast

-sinking under the dispiriting influence of the place." After this we

-are not surprised to read that it was only "after the lapse of an hour"

-that "a bit of fish and a steak," representing a dinner, appeared.

-When this was disposed of, Mr Pickwick and Mr Peter Magnus huddled up

-to the fire, and, "having ordered a bottle of the worst possible port

-wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank

-brandy-and-water for their own."

-

-Certainly Dickens must have had some very bitter grudge against the

-"Great White Horse."

-

-Then come allusions to "tortuous passages," and the difficulty of

-a stranger's finding his way about the interminable corridors, or

-distinguishing between one "mouldy room" and another; difficulties

-which led to Mr Pickwick's comical predicament in the middle of

-the night. The rooms, not so mouldy now, and the passages, just as

-perplexing, remain, structurally unaltered to this day; but certain

-alterations have been made downstairs in the courtyard, now roofed in

-with glass and made very attractive, without spoiling the old-style

-character of the house. If you be a literary pilgrim, or an American,

-they will show you Mr Pickwick's bedroom; and can meet any of Dickens's

-criticisms by telling how Nelson stayed here with--ahem!--Lady

-Hamilton, and how Admiral Hyde-Parker and others of world-wide fame

-have occupied the "mouldy rooms."

-

-

-XXXIII

-

-

-LEAVING Ipswich and passing through the dusty roadside fringe of

-Whitton village, known as Whitton Street, Claydon, nondescript, and

-neither very beautiful nor quite commonplace, is reached in two

-and a half miles. Just before entering the village, an old mansion

-is glimpsed from the road, embowered in trees, a mansion which, on

-inquiry, the ingenuous youth of Claydon declare to be "Mockbeggar

-Hall." Claydon Hall is its true title; but the popular name has been

-handed down since many, many years ago, when the old house (not old

-then) long remained tenantless. Like the many other places named

-"Mockbeggar," it stands well within view of passing travellers, and

-must have induced many a sturdy rogue and vagabond to trudge wearily

-up the long approach in search of alms, only to find the windows dark,

-the chimneys innocent of smoke, the place, in fact, deserted of all

-but fluttering bats and screeching owls, whose shrill notes must have

-sounded like jeers to the disappointed vagrants. Inhabited now, Claydon

-Hall is a handsome old house bearing the date 1635 on its Dutch-like

-gables. It will probably never lose its popular name. Behind the old

-Hall winds the willow-fringed Orwell, coyly approaching within view

-of the road, and then, as it were, timorously retreating again; its

-brimming stream, although seen only in such fleeting glimpses, potent

-in its effect upon at least three miles' length of the road, from

-Claydon to Creeting All Saints, in the loveliest stretch of woodland,

-where the fierce mid-day sun is baffled by over-arching foliage,

-and twilight comes early in the afternoon through the dense masses

-of leaves. These are the woodlands of Shrubland Park. The Hall lies

-secluded to the right hand, somewhere away beyond the rather terrible

-lodges that confront the traveller, who wonders where he has seen their

-like before; until, like a flash, the memory of certain great London

-cemeteries and their mortuary chapels comes upon him in desolating

-fashion and blights the cheerful rustic surroundings of forest trees

-and the scurryings of white-tailed rabbits and gorgeous blue and brown

-pheasants that inhabit this domain of Lord de Saumarez. The lodges,

-built like the Hall, from designs by Sir Charles Barry, are of white

-brick and stone, in the Italian Renaissance style.

-

-[Illustration: MOCKBEGGAR HALL.]

-

-At no great distance from the entrance to this lordly domain, and

-noticeable from the road, in an exquisitely damp situation by the

-river, eminently calculated to foster rheumatism in old bones, is the

-Barham Union-house--the "Work'us" of peasant speech. It is quite an

-old-world building, and one of the earliest built under the new Poor

-Law Act of the early nineteenth century, when outdoor relief gave place

-to retirement within these prison-like buildings. Hodge well named them

-"Bastilles." They say who should know of what they speak, that life

-in Barham Union is nowadays quite desirable, but the design of the

-building, a quadrangular structure enclosing a courtyard, with outer

-walls blank or only provided with windows at a height from the ground,

-closely follows the prison, or restraining, idea.

-

-The little roadside sign of the "Sorrel Horse," standing in midst

-of these leafy bowers, is in pleasing contrast with the Campo Santo

-pretentiousness of Shrubland lodges or the prison-like style of the

-Union, now left behind on a rising road, where the scarped side of

-the highway reveals a momentary change from the prevailing claylands

-to chalk; a change so sudden and so strictly confined to this

-hillside that it at once attracts the attention of even the least

-geologically-inclined. Here the campions bloom that love the chalk

-and refuse to grow on clay. Below this hilltop, in the deep hollow

-scoured out ages ago, when the now insignificant stream that crosses

-the road was a considerable force, is Creeting Bottom, and Creetings of

-several sorts are set about the countryside, all hiding from the road

-that goes now up hill and down dale with as lonely an air as though

-the little town of Needham Market and the larger town of Stowmarket

-were not almost within sight, over the shoulders of the hills, on the

-highway parallel with this, that runs to Bury St Edmunds. To be on "on

-the road to Needham" is an obvious Suffolk saying, applied to those who

-are badly off for worldly gear, and it is a little curious that Needham

-itself was for many years, and until quite recently, a place of fallen

-fortunes, lamenting the decay of its textile trades in empty houses

-and an "irreducible minimum" of rent for those that were so fortunate

-as to find occupants at all. The name of "Hungry-gut Hall" that still

-clings to a farmhouse marks that depressed period to all time; but in

-the spicy odours of the tanneries and the chemical manure stores and

-other thriving industries and businesses that cluster round the railway

-station, the explorer finds evidences enough that Needham is reviving.

-

-[Illustration: "STONHAM PIE."]

-

-Not a sign of those towns or of the railway is seen on the road to

-Norwich, where the cottage outposts of Stonham Earls and Stonham

-Aspall alone tell of the villages in the hinterland. In their gardens,

-spread on bushes or waving in the summer breeze, intimate articles of

-underclothing are prominently displayed, in the society of old hats

-and coats, not so much for the exhibition of the family wardrobe as in

-desperate attempts--bringing up all the reserves--at scaring away the

-hungry birds from currants, cherries and gooseberries. These contests,

-the only warring incidents on the way, in which the birds are generally

-the victors, bring one to a level road where Little Stonham stands,

-its chief feature the "Magpie" Inn. "Stonham Pie" owns one of those

-old gallows signs, stretching across the road, that were at one time a

-common feature. The picture-sign, with a painting of that saucy bird,

-has been hung below the cross-beam instead of in its old ironwork

-frame above, now that the piled-up coaches that once passed beneath

-are gone. Shortly before their going, and while turnpikes and tolls

-appeared likely to last for ever, the toll-gate that stood at the

-succeeding village of Brockford was removed two miles onward, to Stoke

-Ash, where, at the beginning of the pretty avenue at Stoke Chapel, the

-later toll-house remains, just as does the earlier one at Brockford.

-Brockford, the "badger's ford" of a tiny affluent of the Waveney, is

-preceded by Brockford Green, where the quiet road is made narrow by its

-sides being encroached upon by grass. It is here that the accompanying

-sketch of tall poplars and bushy willows was taken.

-

-[Illustration: NEAR BROCKFORD.]

-

-Off to the left hand, in strong contrast with this level stretch of

-road, the country is tumbled into combes and rounded hills, where the

-River Gipping takes its rise in the village of that name, springing

-from the hill where the church tower stands solemn and grim, as though

-it held inviolate the story of the place, away from those days when the

-Gippings first settled here and gave it a title.

-

-But let not the hurried seek Gipping, along the winding by-roads. The

-way, if not far, is not easy, and passengers are few. Scattered and

-infrequent farmhouses there be, at whose back doors to inquire the way,

-but rustic directions are apt to mislead. In any case, it is little

-use approaching the front door of a farmhouse. No one will hear you

-knocking, unless indeed it be a watchful and savage dog, trained to be

-on the alert for tramps; and you are like to hear him snuffling and

-gasping on the other side in a ferociously suggestive manner which will

-render you thankful that the door is closed and bolted. And not only

-bolted on this occasion, but always. The steps, and the space between

-the door and the threshold, where stray straws and wind-blown rubbish

-have collected, are evidence of the fact that the farmer and his family

-do not use the front door, but make their exits and entrances by way

-of the kitchen. It is an old East Anglian custom, and although many of

-the farmers nowadays pretend to culture and set up to be as up-to-date

-as the retired tradesfolk and small squires they are neighbourly with,

-many others would no more think of using the principal entrance to

-their homes than they would make use of the "parlour," where massive

-and sombre furniture, covered with antimacassars, is disposed with

-geometric accuracy around the room, in company with the family Bible

-and the prizes taken at school by the farmer's children; the stale and

-stuffy atmosphere proclaiming that this state apartment is only used

-on rare and solemn occasions. In fact, the "best room" and the front

-door only came into use in the old days on the occasion of a funeral.

-Perhaps it is a custom originating in a laudable idea of paying the

-greatest possible respect to the dead, but it is one which certainly

-gives a gruesome mortuary significance to both the entrance and the

-room.

-

-[Illustration: "THWAITE LOW HOUSE."]

-

-Thwaite or "Twaite," as East Anglians, incapable of pronouncing "th,"

-call it, less than a mile beyond Brockford, numbers few cottages.

-Beyond it, where the hitherto flat road makes a descent, is in

-local parlance, "Thwaite Low House," not so called on account of

-any disreputable character it may once have earned, but from its

-situation. The name obviously entails the existence of a "High House,"

-which was, like the other, a coaching and posting inn. The last named,

-now a farmstead, was in those days the "Cock," the other the "Queen's

-Head." While the "Low House" has fallen upon times so irredeemably evil

-that it has been long untenanted and is now a veritable scarecrow of

-a house, with gaping holes in its walls and windows battened up, the

-"Cock," save that its sign is gone, still remains much as it was, to

-show a later generation what manner of place the roadside inn was in

-days of yore.

-

-[Illustration: THE "COCK," THWAITE.]

-

-Stoke Ash, or "Aish," as Suffolkers pronounce it, like many another

-village, makes no sign from the road. Its church tower seen to the

-right, dimly, amid a hilltop screen of trees, a square, box-like

-red-brick chapel by the way, and that pretty inn, "Stoke White Horse,"

-are the only other evidences of its being. The remaining six miles to

-the Norfolk border lead through Yaxley and Brome: Yaxley, where a

-branch railway runs under the road, on its way to Eye, and narrowly

-misses the old church: Brome, where the "Swan" stands for all the

-village to those who look to neither side of the road; church and

-houses skulking down a by-road on the way to Hoxne. There, down that

-pretty road, where the thatched cottages nestle under tall trees

-and the blue wood-smoke from rustic hearths curls upwards into the

-boughs and makes the sparrows cough and sneeze--there is the Rectory,

-approached in lordly fashion past a fine brick entrance and exquisite

-avenue, and, at a little greater distance the old black flint,

-round-towered church, restored and titivated out of all antiquity

-of tone: the stone sand-papered, and the flints polished with a

-handkerchief. The only thing missing--and, under the circumstances,

-it is missed--is a glass case, so that no damp, nor lichen, nor any

-effects of weather may come to spoil the housewifely neatness.

-

-It was along this road to Hoxne that those who sought the revered head

-of St Edmund, King and Martyr, in the miraculous legend, were led to

-it by the voice calling, "Here, here, here;" at length finding the

-sainted relic in charge of a wolf, who allowed it to be taken from

-between his paws. But the voice thus calling was probably a much less

-supernatural manifestation, and was doubtless the hooting of owls in

-the woods. They still mock the belated traveller, only, to ears untuned

-to the miraculous, they simply seem to ask, "Who, who, who?" Ingenuity,

-however, vainly seeks the basis in nature of the wolf incident.

-

-

-XXXIV

-

-

-NOW, crossing the River Waveney, winding with tree-fringed banks

-through a flat country, the road enters Norfolk at Scole. Coming over

-the little bridge, the village is seen huddled together on either side

-of a narrow rising road; village and church alike wholly dominated by

-a great building of mellow red brick whose panelled chimney-stacks and

-long row of beautiful gables give the impression of an historic mansion

-having by some strange chance been taken from its park and set down

-beside the highway. This, however, was at no time a private residence,

-but was built as an inn; and an inn it remains, after the passing of

-nearly two centuries and a half. Scole, or "Schoale," as the name was

-often spelled in old times (when, indeed, the village was not called

-by its _alias_ of Osmundeston), was by reason of this inn quite a

-celebrated place in the days of long ago. Every traveller in Eastern

-England had then either seen or heard of "Scole White Hart" and its

-famous sign that stretched completely across the road, and as a great

-many coaches halted here for changing teams, passengers had plenty of

-time for examining what Sir Thomas Browne thought to be "the noblest

-sighne-post in England." Both house and sign were built in 1655, for

-James Peck, described as a "Norwich merchant," whose initials, together

-with the date, are yet to be seen on the centre gable. The elaborate

-sign alone cost £1057. It was of gigantic size and loaded with

-twenty-five carved figures of classic deities and others. Chaste Diana,

-with bow and arrow and two hounds, had a place on the cross-beam, in

-company with Time in the act of devouring an infant, Actæon and his

-dogs, a huntsman, and a White Hart _couchant_. On a pediment above

-the White Hart, supported by Justice and Temperance, was the effigy

-of an astronomer "seated on a Circumferenter," who by "some Chymical

-Preparation is so Affected that in fine Weather He faces the North and

-against bad Weather He faces that Quarter from whence it is about to

-come." On either side of the dizzy height occupied by the astronomer

-were figures of Fortitude and Prudence, a position suitable enough for

-the first-named of those two virtues, but certainly too perilous for

-the last.

-

-Further suggestions of Olympus, with references to Hades and Biblical

-history, adorned the other portions of this extraordinary work.

-Cerberus clawed one side of the supporting post, while Charon dragged

-a witch to Hell on the other; and Neptune bestriding a dolphin, and

-Bacchic figures seated across casks alternated with the arms of

-twelve East Anglian noble and landed families. Two angels supported

-respectively the arms of Mr Peck and his lady and two lions those of

-Norwich and Yarmouth. On the side nearest the inn appeared a huge

-carving of Jonah coming out of the whale's mouth, while, suspended in

-mid-air, and surrounded by a wreath, was another White Hart.

-

-Although, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Browne was impressed with this

-work, an early nineteenth-century tourist (so early indeed as 1801)

-curtly dismisses it as "a pompous sign, with ridiculous ornaments," and

-shortly after that it seems to have been taken down, for the reason

-that it cost the landlord more to keep it in repair than the trade of

-the house permitted. Together with this, the once celebrated Great Bed

-of the White Hart has also disappeared. It was a round bed capable of

-holding twenty couples, and was therefore a good deal larger than the

-famous Great Bed of Ware. Perhaps it was because guests did not relish

-this co-operative method of seeking repose, or maybe because sheets,

-blankets and coverlets of sufficient size were unobtainable, that the

-Scole Great Bed was chopped up for firewood; but did anyone _ever_

-suppose beds of this wholesale capacity would be desirable?

-

-The accompanying old view of the gigantic sign shows one of the

-peculiar basket coaches of the second half of the eighteenth century,

-on its way to London.

-

-[Illustration: THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART.]

-

-"Scole White Hart" must have been among the very finest of inns and

-posting-houses. Its wide staircases, of a width sufficient for the

-proverbial coach-and-four to drive up them, its large rooms and fine

-panelled doors, its great stone-flagged kitchen, all proclaim how great

-must have been its old prosperity; while the wide-spreading yard in

-the rear of the house, together with the outbuildings, gives some hint

-of how heavy the traffic was at this junction of the Lowestoft, Bungay,

-Diss and Thetford road with that from London to Norwich. Shrunken trade

-has caused portions of the inn to be let off; the stone and wooden

-porches seen in the old print have disappeared; the coach entrance has

-long since been blocked up and has become the bar-parlour, and the

-mullions of the windows have given place to sashes; but the building

-still retains a noble architectural character, and is perhaps more

-interesting in these latter days, now that its story is told, than ever

-it was when that story was in the making. Little or nothing is found in

-contemporary records of "Scole White Hart"; only one vivid flash in its

-later years, when indignant would-be coach passengers stood at the door

-on a day in October 1822 and saw the drivers of the "Norwich Times"

-and "Gurney's Original Day Coach," fired by rivalry, and reckless in

-their long race from Whitechapel, come pounding furiously down the road

-and over the bridge, pass the inn without stopping, and disappear in

-clouds of dust in the direction of Norwich. Do you know what it is to

-lose a train and to wait an hour for the next? You do? Then it will

-not be difficult to form some idea of the blind, stuttering fury that

-possessed those who had booked seats at Scole and saw the coaches dash

-away, to leave them with half a day's wait.

-

-Thorogood was driving the "Times." Both started from London at 5.30

-a.m. The "Day" coach reached Norwich at 5.20 p.m., and the "Times" ten

-minutes later, neither having stopped for changing horses during the

-last twenty-five miles. This was a "record" for that period, the usual

-time being fourteen hours.

-

-Probably the would-be passengers had to remain the night; a fate which

-no one who has done the like of late would be apt to complain of.

-The guest at the "White Hart," seated in solitary state in the lofty

-sitting-room, lit dimly by candles in antique plated candlesticks, and

-with two ox-eyed seventeenth-century beauties of the Lely type gazing

-down upon him from their sombre frames, presently feels oddly as though

-he were living in another era; a feeling that grows as he wanders

-upstairs to bed, almost losing himself in the roomy corridors. When

-he has closed the nail-studded bedroom door with a reverberant clang,

-and, creeping into the generous embraces of a damask-hung four-poster

-that may have been new a century and a half ago, gazes reflectively

-about the panelled room and on the curiously coffered ceiling, he drops

-off to sleep straightway into the times when the inn was new-built and

-dreams of how the news of the Restoration may have come to Scole in

-1661. Old times live again, faded flowers bloom once more, forgotten

-footsteps echo along the passages, and lo, the Has Been is enacted

-again, with all the convincing air of such visions. Post-chaises and

-chariots clatter up to the door and their noise wakens the sleeper

-to the consciousness that the sound is but that of a jolting rustic

-tumbril going down the road in the early morning; that this is the

-twentieth century, and the "White Hart" but a survival in a back

-eddy of life.

-

-[Illustration: STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART."]

-

-Besides the "White Hart," there is little else at Scole. The plain

-flint tower of the church stands by the roadside, on the ascent that

-leads from the village; and other two or three inns, a few rustic shops

-and cottages, and a private residence or so make up the tale. Scole,

-in fact, has not grown greatly since when it was a Roman station, and

-when the Roman soldiers whose remains have been found near the river

-occupied the military post on the long road to Venta Icenorum.

-

-The legionaries first stationed in these East Anglian wastes must

-often have longed for their native Italy. When the sky sank almost to

-the level of the land in the long winter's rains and fogs, and the

-biting winds blew out of the east across the sandy scrub; when agues

-or the lurking enemy accounted for many of their comrades, and when

-some favoured few were recalled to the capital, they must have thought

-wistfully of a more congenial clime than this, situated on the edge of

-the Unknown. Rome, either as Empire or Republic, was a hard taskmaster,

-and when no fighting was in prospect employed the troops ingloriously

-as road-makers. The advanced garrisons in the wilderness cleared the

-enemy out of the tangled brush and boggy marshes, and working parties

-built roads under the protection of guards, or improved the rude

-trackways they found already in existence. Some fell by the way, and

-their skeletons have been found in these latter days, the teeth still

-clenched on the obolus placed in the dead man's mouth to pay Charon

-for ferrying him across the cold and darkling Styx; or, where the coin

-has perished, still stained with the metal's long decay. They perished,

-those pioneers, to found a civilisation, just as countless thousands of

-our own blood have laid their bones on distant shores, under burning

-skies or in the Arctic night, to make England what she is. Respect

-their long sleep, antiquaries, nor, as you honour your own creeds, take

-from the dead men their passage-money across that mystic river.

-

-

-XXXV

-

-

-THIS, as Dr Jessop charmingly names Norfolk, is Arcady. The scene

-is pleasant, but the stage waits: where are the actors? Gone, where

-and for what reasons beyond the substitution of rail for road shall

-presently be considered. But if the merry days of old are done and

-population dwindled, at least in East Anglia, and especially in

-Norfolk, dialect flourishes among those who remain. The "Norfolk drant"

-or drawl, is still heard, just as the "Suffolk whine"--that rising

-inflection of the voice towards the end of sentences--is even yet a

-mark of the sister county. They are, indeed, said to have originated

-the Yankee combined drawl and twang, for Norfolk and Suffolk were

-largely represented among the Pilgrim Fathers, the first colonists of

-North America. With these survivals, some of the old rustic simplicity

-is still met with, although the extraordinary ignorance of sixty years

-ago has disappeared, and the Norfolk labourer no longer thinks it

-possible to emigrate to America by driving over in a farm cart. The

-story is an East Anglian classic, how a farm labourer "didn't fare

-rightly to knaw" by what route they were going to the United States,

-"but we'm gwine ter sleep t' Debenham the fust night, so's to kinder

-break t' jarney." When railways came, and access to London grew easy,

-these simplicities gradually faded away. The young men took to "gettin'

-up the road," as the saying ran--otherwise, going to London--to "better

-themselves," and old illusions were soon dispelled; but in Arcady the

-mavis may still be seen knapping a dodman; the children of the rustic

-hamlets may be observed by the passing stranger gleefully sporting at

-the old game of tittymatorterin; the cowslips that in springtime turn

-the meadows to living gold are yet "paigles"; a small field remains,

-as ever, a "pightle," and when a countryman throws anything into a

-ditch, he "hulls" (or hurls) "it in t' holl," just as his ancestors

-did hundreds of years ago. Let some of the archaic words just noted be

-explained before we proceed any further. "Mavis" is the idyllic name

-of the thrush, and the "dodman," which he may be observed "knapping,"

-or breaking, is a snail; called in Essex, by the way, a "hodmadod."

-"Tittymatorterin" is just the simple game of "see-sawing." Besides

-these fleeting instances there are many other peculiarities. The

-Norfolk peasant will never pronounce the letter E if it be possible

-to avoid it. It becomes I in his mouth, and a head becomes a "hid,"

-while hens are "hins." Throughout the whole of the eastern counties,

-too, the elision of the final in the present tense is a feature of

-rustic talk. Examples of this peculiarity are found not only in

-modern speech, but in old epitaphs and inscriptions, dating back some

-hundreds of years. Thus, a bridge across the River Wensum, at Norwich,

-bears the sculptured effigy of a dragon's head with the words, "When

-dragon drink, Heigham sink." The meaning is that when the river rises

-and touches, or "rise" and "touch," as a Norfolk man would say, the

-dragon's mouth, the neighbouring Heigham becomes flooded. An older

-example still is seen on an inscription at Kimberley, to John Jenkin,

-in the words:--

-

-  "Under this stone rare Jenkin lie,"

-

-while a comparatively modern one may be found in Stratford St Mary

-church, in the concluding lines of an epitaph dated 1739:--

-

-  'The Night is gone, ye Stars Remain,

-  So man that die shall Live again."

-

-Dickens has caught the East Anglian dialect readily enough in _David

-Copperfield_, where he makes Mr Peggotty say, "Cheer up, old mawther"

-to Mrs Grummidge, and speak of "a couple of mavishes," while Ham talks

-to David as "Mas'r Davy, bor." The willing Barkis, too, who asks "do

-she now?" and speaks of the "stage-cutch," is a true product of the

-soil.

-

-For the benefit of those not to the manner born, let it be repeated

-that a "mawther" is not necessarily a parent. It is the generic name

-for a female. A "mawther" may therefore be a girl infant or a grown

-woman. "Bor" is, of course, a corruption of "neighbour," but need

-not, in fact, specifically mean a neighbour, and is practically the

-masculine of "mawther," and applicable to any man; friend close at hand

-or stranger from distant parts.

-

-The Norfolk dialect has attained the distinction of being made the

-subject of study, and glossaries and collections of local words have

-long been made by enthusiasts in these matters. Perhaps the most

-interesting and amusing of the examples of Norfolk talk is found in the

-East Anglian version of the _Song of Solomon_, published many years ago

-by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte. It was taken down from a reading by a

-Norfolk peasant. A few verses will be instructive:--

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-1. The song o' songs, as is Sorlomun's.

-

-2. Lerr 'im kiss me wi' the kisses of his mouth; for yar love is better

-'an wine.

-

-3. Becaze o' the smell o' yar intements, yar name is as intements pored

-out, therefoor du the mawthers love yĕ.

-

-4. Dror mĕ, we'll run arter yĕ: the king he ha' browt me into his

-charmbers; we'll be glad and reījce in yĕ; we'll remahmber yar

-love more 'an wine: the right-up love yĕ.

-

-5. I em black, but tidy, O ye darters o' J'rusal'm, as the taents o'

-Kedar, as the cattins o' Sorlomun.

-

-6. Don't sin starrin' at me, cos I em black, 'ecos the sun t'have

-barnt mĕ; my mother's children wor snāsty wi' me; they made me

-keeper o' the winyerds, but m'own winyerd I han't kept.

-

-7. Tell onto me, yow hu my soul du love, where ye fade, where ye make

-yar flock to rest at nune: fur why shud I be as one tarn aside by yar

-cumrades' flock?

-

-8. If so bein' as yĕ don't know, O yow bootifullest o' women, go yer

-ways furth by the futtin' o' the flock, and feed yer kids 'eside the

-shepherds' taents.

-

-9. I ha' likened yow, O my love, to a taamer o' hosses in Pharer's

-charrits.

-

-10. Yar cheeks are right fine wi' ringes of jewiltry, yer neck wi'

-chanes o' gold.

-

-       *       *       *       *       *

-

-The full flavour of this vernacular is only to be obtained by reading

-the original verses side by side with the above.

-

-Among the sports that obtained on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk

-of old was "camping." "Camping" was an old East Anglian game that,

-could it be revived, would please the footballing maniacs of our own

-day. It was a wild kind of football, played on these commons, often

-with a hundred players aside, and we are told that the roughest kind

-of Rugby football was child's play compared with it. If stories of old

-camping contests be true, it might almost seem that in ascribing the

-thinly-populated condition of Norfolk and Suffolk to the long-standing

-effects of the Black Death, and to mediæval insurrections and their

-resulting butcheries, we do an injustice to pestilence and the sword,

-and fail to make count of the casualties received in play. As the

-wondering Frenchman said, in witnessing a camping-match, "If these

-savages be at play, what would they be in war?"

-

-"These contests," says a Norfolk historian, "were not infrequently

-fatal to many of the combatants. I have heard old persons speak of

-a celebrated camping, Norfolk against Suffolk, on Diss Common, with

-three hundred on each side. Before the ball was thrown up, the Norfolk

-men inquired tauntingly of the Suffolk men if they had brought their

-coffins. The Suffolk men, after fourteen hours, were the victors. Nine

-deaths were the result of the conflict in a fortnight." Camping went

-out of favour about 1810, and the coroners had an easier time.

-

-

-XXXVI

-

-

-DICKLEBURGH, the next village after Scole, is in its way as imposing a

-place, only not an inn, but a church, is its chief feature. The great

-church of Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced) charmingly

-screened from the street by a row of limes, but not so charmingly

-enclosed by a very long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to

-the road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims who once

-passed on their way to Our Lady of Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on

-either side of the east window, holding effigies of popular saints,

-and halting many a sinner for supplication. The saints are gone, torn

-down by Henry the Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing.

-They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond, or, broken up, serve

-the useful part of metalling the road. Adjoining the church stands the

-"King's Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of kings than

-intended as a portrait of any particular one. At any rate it resembles

-none of the long line of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time

-favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough to have been painted

-in the hey-day of his popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large

-for the present size of the place and for the empty country side; but

-there is a reason for the solitudes, and there was one for these huge

-buildings, ten times too large for the present needs of the shrunken

-villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most thickly-peopled

-of English counties, were practically depopulated in 1348 by that

-dreadful scourge, the Black Death. One-third of the total population

-of England perished under that terrible plague. The working classes

-were the worst sufferers, and the agriculturists, the weavers and

-labourers died in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground,

-industries decayed, and no man would work. When the pestilence was

-stayed, other parts of the country flourished in greater proportion,

-than this. Manufacturing industries arose elsewhere and attracted

-the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining consistently

-agricultural throughout the centuries, has never shared the increase;

-only the few and scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in

-the form of weaving in mediæval and later times, and in the manufacture

-of agricultural machinery nowadays. In the last two decades, with the

-decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry to London and the

-great centres of population, the country, and the eastern counties in

-especial, has become almost deserted.

-

-[Illustration: DICKLEBURGH.]

-

-The present state of agriculture in Eastern England is made manifest

-in deserted farms, in broken gates left hanging precariously on one

-hinge, in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted ploughs

-and decrepit waggons standing derelict in the once fertile fields, now

-overrun with foul weeds and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles;

-and farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely to remain

-tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible to grow seeds and flowers,

-and market-gardening is profitable only in the lands more immediately

-surrounding the great towns. With wheat at its present price of thirty

-shillings a quarter, it does not pay to grow corn for the market, and

-the land is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still struggles

-on, he lays down most of his holding in grass for sheep and cattle,

-and grows, grudgingly, as little wheat as possible, for sake of the

-straw. Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat was down to

-twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers fed their pigs on the harvest

-which cost them three pounds more per acre to grow than it would have

-brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it yields no profit.

-Agricultural England is, in short, ruined, and there seems no present

-hope of things becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful

-harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States, Russia and other

-wheat-producing countries can be cultivated, reaped, and carried to

-these shores at the prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders

-of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as advantageously, the

-English farmer must needs go without a living wage. As matters stand

-at present, we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat used

-in the country; the acreage under corn having gone down from 4,058,731

-acres in 1852, to about half that at the present day. Meanwhile the

-population has increased by thirteen millions; so that, with many

-more mouths to fill, we grow only half the staple food these islands

-produced then. There are, of course, those who reap the advantage of

-cheap corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling millions of the

-towns and cities thrive on those benefits; but what if, through war, or

-from any other cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what avail

-would have been this generation of cheapness if at last the nation must

-starve? Extinguish agriculture and the farmer, and you cannot recall

-them at need, nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a land

-which has long gone untilled.

-

-But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more than the walls of a

-house can be demolished and the roof yet left standing. It was the

-farmer who in prosperous times supported the country gentleman in one

-direction, and the agricultural labourer in the other. With wheat, as

-it was a generation ago, at seventy shillings a quarter, and other

-products of the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could

-afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms in those days were

-difficult to obtain, and there was great competition among farmers

-for holdings. To-day, even at a quarter of those rents, tenants are

-difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed proprietors has

-dwindled away. The results are painfully evident here, in the old

-families reduced or beggared, and their seats either in the market or

-let to stock-jobbers and successful business men, while the old owners

-have disappeared or live humbly in small houses once occupied by the

-steward or bailiff of the estate.

-

-While rents have thus, with the iron logic of circumstances, gone down

-to vanishing-point, and while farms have actually been offered rent

-free in order to prevent the disaster of the land being let go out

-of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances of the agricultural

-labourer have been, most illogically, improving. Instead of the

-miserable six to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the

-beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives thirteen or fourteen

-shillings, lives in a decent cottage, instead of a wretched hovel,

-and finds the cost of food and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than

-his grandfather ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers are as

-difficult to get now as they were immediately after the Black Death had

-swept away three quarters of the working class, five hundred and fifty

-years ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they have done of recent

-years in East Anglia--for lack of hands to gather them in. It was in

-1899 that standing crops at Tivitshall St Margaret's and adjacent

-parishes were sold by auction for a farmer who could find no labourer

-willing to be hired.

-

-What has been called the "rural exodus" is well named. London and

-the great towns have proved so attractive to the children of the

-middle-aged peasant that they despise the country. They can all read

-and write now, and at a pinch do simple sums in arithmetic; so off they

-go to the crowded streets. The ambitious aspire to a black coat and a

-stool in an office, and others become workmen of many kinds; but all

-are attracted by the higher wages to be earned in the towns, and by the

-excitement of living in the great centres of population, and only the

-aged and the aging will soon be left to till the fields.

-

-Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for the agricultural

-labourer's attempts to better himself. To them they are almost impious;

-but the farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of culture. He is

-a vastly different fellow from his grandfather, who actually helped to

-till the soil among his own men; whose wife and daughters were noted

-hands at milking and buttermaking; who lived in the kitchen, among

-the hams and the domestic utensils, and was not above eating the same

-food as, and at the same table with, his ploughmen and carters. He

-has, in fact, and so also have the landed proprietor and the labourer,

-undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process which had started

-certainly by 1825, when Cobbett noticed it.

-

-Hear him:--

-

- "When the old farmhouses are down (and down they must come in time)

- what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected

- are mere painted shells, with a mistress within who is stuck up in a

- place she calls the parlour, with, if she have children, the 'young

- ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy chairs and a sofa (a

- _sofa_ by all means); half-a-dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up;

- some swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner

- brought in by a girl that is perhaps better 'educated' than she;

- two or three nick-nacks to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a

- pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to

- come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder that

- there is here a constant anxiety to make a _show_ not warranted by

- the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too

- clever to _work;_ they are all to be _gentlefolks_. Go to _plough_!

- Good God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough! They become _clerks_,

- or some skimming-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty _work_

- as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What

- a mass of materials for proclaiming that general and _dreadful

- convulsion_ that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and

- jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms."

-

-The "convulsion" anticipated by Cobbett has not come about. This is

-not a country of earthquakes or of violent social upheavals. Free

-Trade has beggared the agricultural interests, but, on his way to

-the Bankruptcy Court, the farmer contrives to live in better style

-than possible three quarters of a century ago, while his pretensions

-to gentility certainly have not decreased. As for the "funding and

-jobbing," Cobbett could never, in his wildest dreams, have foreseen

-Limited Liability and the fungoid growth of Stock Exchange speculation,

-or the modern "enslaving and starving system" of the gigantic Trusts

-that, like vampires, feed on the blood of industry. We need look for

-no convulsions; not even, unhappily, for the hanging, or, at least,

-the taxing out of existence, of the millionaires. Our expectations of

-the future are quite different. The people will inhabit the towns, and

-the country will become a huge preserve of game for the sport of the

-millionaires aforesaid; a preserve broken here and there by the model

-farm or the training establishment of some colossus of wealth.

-

-

-XXXVII

-

-

-BEYOND Dickleburgh, past the solitary "Ram" inn, a fine, dignified

-house still lamenting its decadence from a posting-inn to a beerhouse,

-Tivetshall level-crossing marks where the railway runs to Bungay and

-Lowestoft. Maps make Pulham St Mary the Virgin quite near, with Pulham

-St Mary Magdalene close by; Tivetshalls of different dedications, and

-other villages dotted about like plums in a Christmas pudding, but no

-sign of them is evident. Only windmills, whirling furiously on distant

-ridges, break the pastoral solitudes. In this conflict of charts, a

-carter jogging along the road with his team is evidently the authority

-to be consulted.

-

-"Coom hather," says the carter to his sleek and intelligent horses; and

-they coom accordingly, with much jingling of harness, and stand in the

-shade of roadside trees while their lord takes his modest levenses and

-haffles and jaffles--gossips, that is to say--with the landlord of the

-"Ram."

-

-"Tivetshall?" asks the carter, echoing a question; "niver heerd of un."

-Then a light breaks in upon him. "Oh, ay! Tishell we allus call 'em;

-Tishell St Marget an' Tishell St Merry," and with, a sweep of the arm

-comprising the whole western horizon, "Theiy'm ower theer."

-

-"And Pulham St Mary the Virgin?"

-

-"Pulham St Merry the Wirgin? oh, yis! Pulham Maaket, yar mean, bor.

-Et edd'n on'y a moile, ower _theer_"--a comprehensive wave to the

-eastwards.

-

-And there, on a byroad, in an embrace of trees, it is found, a little

-forgotten town, the greater proportion of whose inhabitants appear

-to walk with two sticks. It is ranged round a green or market-place,

-with a great Perpendicular church, gorgeously frescoed within, and

-with a very good recent "Ascension" over the chancel arch, painted

-and stencilled timber roof, and elaborate stained-glass windows. The

-townlet and townsfolk sinking into decay, the church an object of such

-care and expense, afford a curious contrast.

-

-An old toll-house and the prison-like buildings of Depwade Union

-conspire to make desolate the road onwards. He who presses, hot-foot,

-along it, turning neither to the right nor to the left, may readily be

-excused a legitimate wonder as to what has become of the great feature

-of East Anglia, its spreading commons; for, strange to say, despite

-the fame they have long since attained, no vestige of them is glimpsed

-from the road itself. One has usually to turn aside to some of the

-villages lying near, but wholly hidden from the highway, to find the

-yet unenclosed common lands, the pasturage of geese, ducks and turkeys;

-but a striking exception to this now general rule is the huge common

-of Wacton lying off to the left of the road at the hundredth mile from

-London, where a cottage and a wayside inn, the "Duke's Head," alone

-represent Wacton village, a mile distant. Wacton Common, reputed to be

-the highest point in Norfolk, although of no less extent than three

-hundred and fifty acres, might perhaps be passed without being seen,

-for the reason that, although still wild and unenclosed, it is screened

-from the high road by a hedge and entered through an ordinary field

-gate. The inn and the cottage, obviously built on land fraudulently

-taken from the common in the long ago, serve with their gardens to hide

-that glorious expanse of grass and heather. Here roam those chartered

-vagabonds, the plump geese, that pick up a living on the grassy commons

-and wander, like free-booting bands of feathered moss-troopers upon the

-heaths, closing their careers with royal feasting in the August and

-September stubble, and a Michaelmas martyrdom.

-

-[Illustration: A DISPUTED PASTURAGE.]

-

-Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their geese, but those

-martyred fowls do not make their final journey to the London markets,

-between Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they once

-attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays in the seclusion of railway

-vans. Seventy years ago they journeyed by coach, and in state, for the

-Norfolk coaches in Christmas week often carried nothing save geese and

-turkeys, beside the coachman and guard. Full inside and out with such

-a freight, the proprietors of fast coaches made a great deal more by

-carrying them than they would have taken by a load of passengers; so

-the fowls had the preference, while travellers had to take their chance

-of finding a seat in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the

-turkeys conveyed from Norwich to London between a Saturday morning

-and Sunday night in December numbered one thousand seven hundred, and

-weighed 9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was £680. They were followed

-on the two succeeding days by half as many more.

-

-A Norfolk common without its screaming and hissing flocks of geese

-would seem strangely untenanted. They, the turkeys, the ducks, the

-donkeys ("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom fowls are

-among the only vestiges of the wild life that once made Norfolk famous

-to the naturalist and not a little eerie to the traveller of old, who,

-startled on the lonely way that stretched by heath and common and fen

-between the habitations of men, shrank appalled at the lumbering

-flight of the huge bustards, quivered with apprehension at the sudden

-hideous whirring of the night-jar as the day closed in, dismayed,

-heard the bittern booming among the reeds, or with misgivings of the

-supernatural saw the fantastical ruff stalking on long legs, with

-prodigious beak, red eyes and spreading circle of neck feathers, like

-the creation of some disordered imagination. Wild Norfolk, the home

-of these and of many another strange creature, is no more, and these

-species, now chiefly extinct, are to be seen only in museums of natural

-history.

-

-[Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]

-

-What Wacton lacks along the high road the village of Long Stratton

-has in superabundance. They named it well who affixed the adjective,

-for it measures a mile from end to end. Beginning with modern and (to

-speak kindly) uninteresting cottages, it ends in a broad street where

-almost every house is old and beautiful in lichened brick or soft-toned

-plaster. Midway of this lengthy thoroughfare stands the church, one of

-the Norfolk round-towered kind, in the usual black flint, and beyond

-it the Manor House, red brick, with Adam scrolls and neo-classical

-palm branches in plaster for trimmings, set back at some distance

-behind a very newty, froggy and tadpoley moat. Beyond this again, the

-village street broadens out. Looking back upon it, when one has finally

-climbed uphill on the way to Norwich, Long Stratton is a place entirely

-charming. Its name, of course, derives from its situation on the Roman

-Road, and Tasburgh, that now comes in sight, keeps yet its Roman camp

-strongly posted above the River Tase. Tasburgh--what little there is

-of a village--occupies an acclivity on the further side of that river,

-across whose wide and marshy valley the mists rise early, seeing the

-sun to bed dull and tarnished, and attending the rising of the moon

-with ghostly vapours. The old Roman camp is oddly and picturesquely

-occupied by the parish church, another round-towered example. Excepting

-it, the vicarage and the Dutch-like building of the "Bird in Hand" Inn,

-there is little else.

-

-[Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]

-

-But what mean these sounds of anger and lamentation that drown the

-soothing, distant rattle of reaping machines on the hillside: a voice

-raised in reproach, and another--a treble one--in gusty shrieks of

-combined pain, fear and peevishness? Coming round a corner, the cause

-of the disturbance is revealed in a wet and muddy infant rubbing dirty

-knuckles into streaming eyes, and being violently reproached by an

-indignant woman.

-

-"You're a pretty article, I must say; a fine spettacle. I'll give

-yow a good sowsin', my lord; coom arn;" and the malefactor is pulled

-suddenly inside the cottage, the door slammed, and muffled yells heard,

-alternating with thumps. The offender is receiving that sowsing, or

-being "yerked," "clipped over the ear-hole," getting a "siseraring,"

-being "whanged" or "clouted," the striking Norfolk phrases for

-varieties of assault and battery.

-

-

-XXXVIII

-

-

-THE Tase is met with again on surmounting the hilly road out of

-Tasburgh and coming down hill into Newton Flotman. Here it is

-broad enough to require a long and substantial bridge, grouping in

-unaccustomed rightness of composition with the mingled thatched, tiled

-and slated cottages and the church that stands on a commanding knoll

-in the background. When Newton was really new it would be impossible

-to say; perhaps its novelty may have been measured against the hoary

-antiquity of, say, Caistor yonder, down the valley. For what says the

-folk-rhyme:--

-

-  "Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,

-  And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"

-

-and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials, why not, in

-degree, Newton Flotman? But a whisper. Caistor was never more than a

-camp, and not at any time a place of houses, much less of stone ones.

-Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood, and flint only, of

-which Norwich is principally built, is available for building materials.

-

-[Illustration: TASBURGH.]

-

-One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the passing stranger is a

-little effigy of Bacchus fixed on the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn,

-so thickly covered with successive coats of paint that it is difficult

-to give it a period. Remains of Roman antiquities are so many in this

-district that it is often mistaken for a work of that classic age,

-when it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of the late

-eighteenth century, a time when figures of the kind were a usual

-decoration of inn signs. Such an one still swings from the wrought-iron

-sign of the "Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.

-

-In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton Flotman lies Dunston,

-trees casting a protecting and secretive shade over it, and the "Dun

-Cow" Inn its only roadside representative. That inn and the circular

-brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle redeem the last few miles into

-Norwich from absolute emptiness. When the pound last was used who shall

-say? The tramps have played havoc with it, and its wooden gate has

-gone. The ancient office of pound-keeper is here evidently fallen into

-disuse.

-

-Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on the level to the left,

-but Caistor, in like manner with Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage, half

-a mile or more away in the valley, its church tower rising like a grey

-beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious where its ancient camp

-may be found. Caistor St Edmunds, to give its full name, is the site of

-the great Roman camp established here to overawe the stronghold of the

-Iceni, four miles away on the banks of the Wensum, and now the site of

-Norwich.

-

-[Illustration: NEWTON FLOTMAN.]

-

-Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of a Roman fortified

-_castrum_. For one thing, it has the largest area of any known relic

-of its kind in England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its fragments

-of flint walls have neither the thickness nor the height of those at

-Portus Rutupiæ, the old Roman port in Thanet, now known as Richborough,

-its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the laggard imagination

-of the layman in matters archæological, which refuses to be stirred

-before mere undulations in the sward. Here is a ditch that can be

-rolled into, an embankment that can be climbed and paced on three

-sides of the camp, if necessary, to put to physical test both height,

-depth and extent. The fourth side of this great enclosure, now a

-turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase and was sufficiently

-defended by that stream, then a wide creek, so that no works are to be

-found there. How long it was before the Romans subdued the Iceni, whose

-great city is thought to have stood where Norwich does now, is not

-known. Nothing of that early time here, indeed, is _known_, and guesses

-are of the vaguest. Only it seems that the Roman advance into East

-Anglia, which had for its objective the principal stronghold of the

-tribes, here came to its military ending. To compare things so ancient

-and romantic with others modern and thought prosaic, the several Roman

-camps on the advance from London now to be sought at Uphall near

-Romford; Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and Tasburgh, are, with

-those that have disappeared, to be looked upon in the same light as the

-wayside stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which originally

-came to a terminus at that city, and was only at a later date continued

-northward.

-

-[Illustration: THE OLD BRICK POUND.]

-

-Where the Romans and the Romano-British citizens of Venta lived when

-the tribes were reduced--where the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really

-was, in fact--is a mystery, for, unlike most of our great cities,

-Norwich has furnished no relics of that age; while, beyond coins and

-odds and ends, Caistor camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of

-streets or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and Venta might,

-for all there is to show of it, have been a city of dreams. The fact

-that the original capital of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes

-when they came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the site of

-it having long been deserted; and that they called it after the North

-"wic" or creek, presupposes a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far.

-The position of that south creek is fixed by the ancient geography of

-these last few miles. In those times the ground on which Yarmouth, at

-the mouth of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the waves of

-the sea, which ran up in a long navigable creek--the "Gariensis" of

-the Romans and the "North Wic" of the Danes--from a Roman fortified

-port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site of Norwich, which

-indeed, centuries later, was still a port. Where the River Tase is

-now confluent with the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out

-a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running almost due south; the

-"South wic" of those northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where

-the navigation ceased.

-

-[Illustration: CAISTOR CAMP.]

-

-It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of the Tase still bears

-signs of those old conditions, and perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman

-citizens, together with other relics of the vanished city, still lie

-preserved deep down in the mud and silt that have filled up the old

-channel.

-

-The lie of the land, in accord with these views, is plain to see when,

-returning to the high road, the journey to Norwich is continued to

-Hartford Bridge; bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the

-right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several bridges, none of

-them sizeable, rivers, streams and runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and

-gurgle in their different ways through flat meadows, below the long

-rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins to grow suburban.

-It is on the summit that the Newmarket and Thetford route from London

-joins with this, and together they descend into the city.

-

-

-XXXIX

-

-

-THIS way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on her great "progress" of

-1578, by St Stephen's Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates and

-walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or even condemned the

-belated citizen to lodge the night without the precincts of the city,

-in suburbs not in those times to be reckoned safe.

-

-Norwich long ago swept away her defences and modernised her outskirts,

-for this is no Sleepy Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the

-Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing with industry and in

-every way in the forefront of modern life. To the entrance from London

-Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side. No general view of

-the city, lying in its hollow beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and

-the eye seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some difficulty,

-modestly peering over tangled modern roof-tops. It is from quite the

-opposite direction, from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that

-Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of cathedral, churches

-and houses, with trees and gardens, such as no other city can show,

-displayed within its bounds. Norwich does not jump instantly to the

-antiquarian eye, and its electric tramways that are the first to greet

-the traveller who enters from the old coach road are not a little

-forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the stranger in all its

-wealth of beauty and interest, and becomes more and more lovable the

-better he becomes acquainted with it.

-

-Until these railway times, in the old days of slow, difficult,

-dangerous and expensive travelling, the capital of East Anglia was in

-a very high degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its shipping

-trade and weaving industries, and the famous Norwich School of artists,

-brought this exclusive attitude down from mediæval times to modern;

-and Norfolk county families until the era of political reform had

-almost dawned, still had their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in

-bygone centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons, owned their

-town houses in Hungate and in what is now called King Street, formerly

-Conisford Street.

-

-The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the mazy streets to inns widely

-sundered. The original "Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater

-part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head," in Tombland. On

-the other hand, the Mails, the "Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to

-and started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street of the same name,

-standing not far from the beginnings of the city. The street is there

-still, but the oddly-named inn has given place to shops, and where

-the "Rampant Horse" ramped rampageously, in violent contrast with the

-mild-mannered "Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers' establishments

-now hold forth seductive announcements of "alarming sacrifices."

-

-Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day Coach" and the "Phenomenon"

-favoured the "Angel," in the Market Place, while the "Times" house was

-the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and that of the "Expedition" the

-"Swan" Inn. Other inns, many of them huddled together under the lee of

-the castle mound, were then to be found in the Market Place and the

-Haymarket and in the narrow alley in the rear that still goes by name

-of "Back of the Inns." Others yet, many of mediæval age, are to be

-sought in old nooks of the city. The Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary

-Tavern, like the "Old Barge," belongs to the fourteenth century, the

-last named still standing between King Street and the river, with

-a picturesque but battered entrance. The steep and winding lane of

-Elm Hill, where the slum population of Norwich stew and pig together

-down ancient courts and dirty alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but

-unrestored; and in the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully

-called Tombland, although it has not, nor ever had, anything to do

-with tombs, is the "Maid's Head," the one establishment in Norwich

-that stands pre-eminently for old times and good cheer. It is an

-"hotel" now, and has the modern conveniences of sanitation and electric

-light; but its restoration, effected through the enthusiasm of a

-local antiquary, with both the opportunity of purchasing the property

-and the means of doing so, has been carried through with taste and

-discrimination. The "Maid's Head" can with certainty claim a history

-of six hundred years, and is thought to have been built upon the site

-of a former Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered ceilings and masonry of

-evident antiquity may take parts of the present house back so far, or

-even a greater length, but the especial pride of the "Maid's Head" is

-its beautiful Jacobean woodwork. The old sign of the house was the

-"Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that antiquaries still boggle

-at. It was long a cherished legend that this strange and unlovely name

-was changed to the present sign in complimentary allusion to Queen

-Elizabeth when she first visited the city, but later researches have

-proved the change to have been made at least a century earlier, and so

-goes another belief!

-

-The "Music House," facing the now disreputable King Street, has not

-for so very long been an inn. Its name tells of a time when it was the

-meeting-place of the "city music," old-time ancestors of modern town

-bands, but its story goes back to the Norman period, when the crypt

-that bears up the thirteenth-century building above was part of the

-home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew. "Isaac's

-Hall," as it was known, was seized by King John and given to one of

-his creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they were allowed

-to live at all, finding cool quarters in the castle dungeons. A long

-succession of owners, including the Pastons, followed; last among them

-Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who resided here in 1633.

-

-It has already been hinted that the streets of Norwich are mazy. They

-are indeed the most perplexing of any town in England. Many roads

-run into the city, and from every direction. Glancing at a plan of

-it, these roads resemble the main strands of a spider's web, and the

-streets the cross webs. In midst of this maze is the great castle, like

-the spider himself; that cruel keep in whose dungeons old wrong-doing,

-religious and private spite, have immured many a wretched captive, like

-that unfortunate unknown "Bartholomew," who has left his name scratched

-on the walls, and the statement that he was here confined "saunz

-resun," a reason of the best in those times. Did he ever see the light

-of day again? Or did some midnight assassin murder him as many another

-had been done to death?

-

-"Blanchflower," that Bigod, Earl of Norwich who built the castle called

-his keep when it arose on its great mound, its stone new and white.

-He built upon the site of a castle thought to have been Saxon, and

-built so well that it became a fortress impregnable save to famine

-and treachery. It has, therefore, unlike weaker places that have been

-stormed again and again, little history, and even seven hundred years

-ago was little more than a prison. And a prison of sorts--for State

-captives first, and for common malefactors afterwards--it remained

-until so recently as 1883, when it was restored and then opened as the

-Museum and Art Gallery it now is.

-

-This is no place to speak at length of the cathedral that withdraws

-itself with such ecclesiastical reserve from the busy quarters of the

-city, and is approached decorously through ancient gateways in the

-walls of its surrounding close; the Ethelbert Gate, with that other,

-the Erpingham Gate, built in Harry the Fifth's time by Sir Thomas

-Erpingham, whose little kneeling effigy yet remains in its niche in

-the gable over the archway, and whose motto--variously held to be

-"Yenk," or "Think,"--"Denk," or "Thank"--is repeated many times on the

-stone work. Norman monastic gloom still broods over the close, for the

-cathedral, save the Decorated cloisters and the light and graceful

-spire in the same style, is almost wholly of that period, and the

-grammar school that was once a mediæval mortuary chapel and has its

-playground in the crypt, keeps a gravity of demeanour that, considering

-its history, is eminently proper.

-

-Through the Close lies the way to Bishop's Bridge and the steep road

-up to Mousehold Heath: the "Monk's Hold," or monastic property, of

-times gone by when it was common land of the manor belonging to the

-Benedictine priory.

-

-

-XL

-

-[Illustration: NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH.]

-

-HERE, on this famous Heath of Mousehold where the gorse and heather

-and the less common broom yet flourish, despite the electric tramways

-that bring up the crowds and the picnic parties, Nature, rugged and

-unconquerable, looks down upon the city, revealed as a whole. Even

-though the chimneys of great factories may intrude and smirch the sky

-when winds permit the smoke-wreaths to trail across the view, it is a

-view quite unspoilable. The cathedral, as is only proper, is the grand

-dominating feature, with its central tower and graceful crocketed spire

-rising to a height of 320 feet. Second to it, on its left hand, the

-huge bulk of the castle keep rears up; a time-ball on its battlements

-to give the time o' day to the busy citizens; those battlements where

-from a gibbet they hanged Robert Kett in 1549, when his rebellion was

-crushed and his army of 20,000 peasants who had encamped on Mousehold

-defeated. In similar fashion his brother William was hanged from

-Wymondham steeple. Between castle and cathedral the great tower of

-St Peter Mancroft looms up, and on the other side of the cathedral

-tower the twin spires of the Roman Catholic place of worship crown the

-sky-line. To the extreme right of the accompanying illustration is

-St Giles's, and on the extreme left, in company with the pinnacled

-tower of a modern church, the dark tower of St John-at-Sepulchre,

-Bracondale, which for shortness and simplicity the citizens call "Ber

-Street Church." For the rest, it is a mingling of town and country, of

-houses and gardens and churches in great number, that one sees down

-there; old Norwich, in short, exclusive of the modern suburbs that are

-flung everywhere around and cause the Norwich of to-day to outnumber

-the Norwich of coaching times by 80,000 inhabitants. It must be

-evident from those figures that the picturesque old Norwich numbering

-a population of only 30,000 has been in great degree improved away and

-borne under by that human deluge. It is delightful now, but what it

-was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Crome and De Wint

-and others sketched and painted its quaint bits, the picture-galleries

-of the Castle Museum can tell. Nay, even down to the mid-nineteenth

-century it was still very different, as a collection of early

-photographs in the castle proves. Then, before St Peter Mancroft was

-restored, before the old Fish Market was cleared away, Norwich had many

-more quaint nooks than now to show the stranger; even as, centuries

-before, it was yet more quaint and even more remarkable for its many

-churches than at the present time.

-

-"The nearer the church the further from God," says the old saw. How

-irreligious then should Norwich be, that has even yet a cathedral and

-thirty-four ancient churches, and modern places of worship fully as

-numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as old Fuller suggested, "make

-good use of their churches and cross that pestilent proverb." These

-churches bear a close resemblance to one another, having nearly all

-been rebuilt in the Perpendicular period, some five hundred years ago,

-and all built of the black flint that gives a character to East Anglian

-architecture quite distinct from that of other districts. The time when

-they were thus rebuilt was not only a great period of church-building

-throughout England, but a time of especial prosperity in mercantile

-and trading Norwich; a time when guilds grew powerful and merchants

-wealthy in the flourishing industry of cloth-weaving introduced some

-time earlier by Flamand and Hollander immigrants. English wool that

-before had gone across the narrow seas for manufacture into stuffs

-was now weaved in the land of its growth. "Many thousands," says

-Blomefield, "that before could not get their bread could now by this

-means live handsomely." In that age, to become rich and prosperous was

-to become also a founder and benefactor of churches; hence the great

-ecclesiastical buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor of

-an old writer, writing when there were no fewer than sixty-one churches

-in the city, "surrounded the cathedral as the stars do the moon."

-The old citizens sleep in the parish churches for which they did so

-much; their monuments in brass or marble, stone or alabaster curiously

-wrought, often with their "merchant's marks"--the distinctive signs

-with which they labelled their wares--engraved on them in lieu of coats

-of arms. It is as though a modern trader were to have the registered

-trade-mark of his speciality engraved on his tombstone. A typical

-memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of Thomas Sotherton, in the

-church of St John Maddermarket. He--

-

-  "Under this cold marbell sleeps,"

-

-and was no common fellow, mark you, but

-

-  "Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit,

-  Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt."

-

-[Illustration: NORWICH MARKET PLACE.]

-

-Although the calendar of saints is a long one and more than

-sufficiently lengthy to have provided each one of the Norwich churches

-with a patron, yet so popular were some saints, that several churches

-to the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also in the city of

-London. As in old London, it was in those cases necessary to confer

-surnames, so to speak, upon those churches.

-

-They are surnames of the geographical sort and not a little curious.

-The four St Peters are, for example, St Peter Mancroft, the largest

-and most important in the city, so called from the Magna Croft, or

-large field of the castle; St Peter per Mountergate, in King Street,

-named from the road by the "montem," the hill or mount, that runs

-ridge-like in its rear; St Peter Hungate, the "hundred gate," or

-road, reminiscent of the time when Norwich was a hundred of itself,

-even as it is now by itself a county; and St Peter Southgate. St

-Michael-at-Thorn has still thorn trees growing in its churchyard; St

-Michael Coslany, with St Mary's of identical surname, was built in

-Coast Lane; and St Michael-at-Plea was named from its neighbourhood to

-an ecclesiastical court. St John Maddermarket is thus distinguished

-from other St Johns--St John Timberhill and St John-at-Sepulchre.

-In the neighbourhood of the first-named, madder for the dyers'

-use was marketed; while at Timberhill was the market in wood. St

-Martin-at-Palace, by the old Bishop's Palace, and St-Martin-at-Oak take

-up the tale, which might be continued at great length.

-

-[Illustration: NORWICH SNAP.]

-

-The business life of modern Norwich centres in the Market Place and the

-streets that immediately lead out of it: the mouldering signs of old

-commerce peer in peaked gables, clustered chimneys and old red-brick

-and plastered walls in the lanes and along the wharves of the Wensum.

-

-There trade hustles and elbows to the front, in many-storeyed piles

-of brick, stone and stucco, with great show of goods in plate-glass

-windows and bold advertisement of gilt lettering. All those signs of

-prosperity may be seen, and on a larger scale, in London, but not even

-in London are the electric tram cars so great a menace to life and

-limb as in these narrow and winding streets, where they dash along at

-reckless speed.

-

-The Market Place is not yet wholly spoilt. The huge bulk of St

-Peter Mancroft and a row of queer old houses beside it still avert

-that disaster, and form a picture from one point of view; while the

-flint-faced Guildhall stands at another corner of the great open place

-and in its Council Chamber, in use five hundred years ago as a Court of

-Justice, and still so used, proves the continuity of "our rough island

-story." In a dark and dismal cell of the Guildhall once lay the heroic

-martyr, Thomas Bilney, who "testified" at the stake in the Lollards'

-Pit, where many another had already yielded up his life. He wondered,

-as others before and after him had done and were to do, whether the

-tortured body could pass steadfast through the fiery ordeal; and on the

-eve of his martyrdom put that doubt to the test by holding his finger

-in the flame of a candle. That test sufficed, and he suffered with

-unshaken constancy when the morrow dawned.

-

-The Guildhall has less tragical memories than this, and was indeed the

-scene of many old-time municipal revelries in times before Corporations

-became reformed. But old revels and frolics have been discontinued,

-and "Snap," the Norwich dragon, a fearsome beast of gilded wickerwork,

-who was wont to be paraded from the Guildhall at the annual mayoral

-election, and last frolicked with his attendant beadles and whifflers

-in 1835, now reposes in the Castle Museum.

-

-The Market Place on Saturday, when the wide open square is close-packed

-with stalls, is Norwich at its most characteristic time and in its most

-characteristic spot. In it the story of the Norwich Road may fitly end.

-The city itself, glanced at in the immediately foregoing pages, could

-not yield its story in less space than that occupied by that of the

-road itself.

-

-[Illustration]

-

-

-

-

-INDEX

-

-

-    Aldgate, 1, 8, 11, 13, 51

-

-    ---- Pump, 11

-

-

-    "Bacon End," 180

-

-    Boreham, 127-129

-

-    Bow, 6, 8, 75-80

-

-    ---- Bridge, 77-79

-

-    Brentwood, 23, 94-99, 132, 200

-

-    Brockford, 257

-

-    Brome, 261

-

-    Brook Street, 94

-

-    ---- Hill, 94, 132

-

-

-    Caistor St Edmunds, 4, 298, 301-303

-

-    Capel St Mary, 236

-

-    Chadwell Heath, 51, 83, 85, 86

-

-    ---- Street, 86

-

-    Chelmsford, 5, 40, 51, 52, 54, 57, 80, 114-121, 127, 167, 200

-

-    Chipping Hill, 133-139, 302

-

-    Claydon, 252

-

-    ---- Hall, 252

-

-    Coaches:--

-      "Confatharrat," 34

-      "Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," 46, 140

-      "Expedition," 39, 306

-      "Gurney's Original Day Coach," 39, 267, 306

-      "Ipswich Blues," 23, 39, 132

-      "---- and Yarmouth Mail," 41, 45

-      "---- Post Coaches," 36

-      "---- Shannon," 39

-      "---- Umpire," 81

-      "Magnet," 39, 306

-      "New Colchester," 81

-      "Norwich Machine," 34-36, 306

-      "---- Mail," 39, 40, 43

-      "---- Post Coach," 39

-      "---- Times," 28, 39, 267

-      "Parcel Mail," 54-57, 111

-      "Phænomenon," 39, 306

-      "Telegraph," 306

-

-    Coaching, 30-51, 54-57, 81, 82, 97, 132, 142-151, 267

-

-    Coaching Notabilities:--

-      Alexander, Israel, 46, 140

-      Nelson, Mrs Ann, 19-25, 27, 81, 132

-      ----, George, 19

-      ----, John, 19, 25-27

-      ----, Robert, 19

-      Suggate (Norwich carrier), 34

-      Thorogood, John, 28, 267

-

-    Colchester, 5, 6, 43, 54, 56, 94, 156, 163, 165, 167, 177, 179-212,

-                                                                    217

-

-    Constable, John, R.A., 149, 154, 217-219, 232, 238

-

-    Copdock, 236

-

-    Copford, 175, 176

-

-    _Copperfield, David_, 28, 44, 45, 150, 226, 274

-

-    Creeting, All Saints, 253

-

-    Creetings, The, 255

-

-

-    Dedham, 217-221

-

-    Deodand, Law of, 50

-

-    Dickleburgh, 6, 277-279

-

-    Dilbridge, 217

-

-    Dunston, 298

-

-

-    Feering, 152, 153, 158

-

-    Forest Gate, 81

-

-

-    Goodmayes, 83

-

-    Gore Pit, 152, 176

-

-    Great Eastern Railway, 25, 46, 51-54, 83, 152, 158, 175

-

-

-    Hare Street, 94

-

-    Hartford Bridge, 304

-

-    Hatfield Peverel, 129, 131

-

-    Highwaymen, 29, 30, 41, 58-62, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99, 142, 143, 214

-

-    Highwaymen:--

-      Cratfield, Rev. Wm., 30

-      King, Matthew, 58

-      ----, Robert, 58

-      ----, Tom, 58, 61

-      Tapyrtone, Thomas, 30

-      Turpin, Richard, 57-62

-

-

-    Ilford, 6, 29, 80, 82, 83, 167

-

-    Ingatestone, 6, 56, 99, 105-110

-

-    Inns (mentioned at length):--

-      "Angel," Colchester, 196, 197

-      ----, Kelvedon, 140, 141, 147, 148, 162

-      ----, Norwich, 34, 306

-      "Belle Sauvage," Ludgate Hill, 19

-      "Black Boy," Chelmsford, 121

-      "Blossoms," Laurence Lane, 34

-      "Blue Boar," Whitechapel, 28

-      "---- Posts," Witham, 132

-      "Bull," Bishopsgate Street, 15, 37

-      ----, Leadenhall Street, 12, 15

-      ----, Whitechapel, 15, 19-28

-      "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand, 15

-      "Cauliflower," Ilford, 83

-      "Coach and Horses," Upton, 81

-      "Cock," Thwaite, 260

-      "Cross Keys," Gresham Street, 15

-      "Duke's Head," Wacton, 288

-      "Fleece," Brook Street, 94

-      "Flower Pot," Bishopsgate Street, 15

-      "Four Swans," 34

-      "Golden Cross," Charing Cross, 15

-      "Good Woman," Widford, 111-114

-      "Grave Maurice," Whitechapel, 69

-      "Great White Horse," Ipswich, 36, 37, 228, 247-252, 306

-      "Gun," Dedham, 221, 228

-      "Half Moon," Ipswich, 243

-      "Horse and Leaping Bar," Whitechapel, 29

-      "King's Head," Dickleburgh, 278

-      "Lion and Lamb," Ipswich, 243, 244

-      "Magpie," Little Stonham, 256

-      "Maid's Head," Newton Flotman, 297

-      ---- ----, Norwich, 34, 35, 306, 307

-      "Music House," Norwich, 307

-      "Norfolk Hotel," Norwich, 306

-      "Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, 57

-      "Popinjay," Norwich, 34

-      "Queen's Head," Thwaite, 259, 260

-      "Rampant Horse," Norwich, 306

-      "Red Lion," Colchester, 196

-      ---- ----, Kelvedon, 140

-      ---- ----, Whitechapel, 57

-      "Rising Sun," Manor Park, 81

-      "Saracen's Head," Aldgate, 14, 16, 17, 18

-      ---- ----, Chelmsford, 117-120

-      "Spread Eagle," Gracechurch Street, 15-19

-      "Sun," Kelvedon, 152

-      "Swan," Washbrook, 237

-      "Swan-with-Two-Necks," Gresham Street, 15, 43

-      "Three Cups," Colchester, 37, 167, 196

-      ---- ----, Springfield, 122

-      "Three Nuns," Aldgate, 29

-      "Vine," Mile End, 73

-      "Wheatsheaf," Kelvedon, 152

-      "White Elm," Copdock, 237

-      "---- Hart," Brentwood, 37, 97, 98, 119

-      ---- ----, Colchester, 196

-      ---- ----, Scole, 262-271

-      ---- ----, Witham, 132

-      "White Horse," Fetter Lane, 15

-      ---- Horse, Widford, 112, 114

-

-    Ipswich, 54, 56, 132, 212, 237-252

-

-

-    Kelvedon, 5, 139-153, 162, 176

-

-

-    Langham, 218

-

-    Lexden, 52, 147, 177-181, 302

-

-    ---- Heath, 177-179, 187, 190, 201

-

-    Little Stonham, 6, 256

-

-    "London Stone," 4, 13

-

-    Long Stratton, 6, 292-295

-

-

-    Manor Park, 81

-

-    Margaretting, 57, 110, 111

-

-    Mark's Tey, 158, 175, 176

-

-    Martyr's Tree, 95, 96

-

-    Mile End, 70-74, 163

-

-    "Mockbeggar Hall," 252

-

-    Moulsham, 114

-

-    Mountnessing, 101-105

-

-

-    Needham Market, 255

-

-    New Hall, 123-127

-

-    Newton Flotman, 296-299

-

-    Norwich, 51, 52, 161, 301, 302-320

-

-

-    Old Ford, 6, 8, 76

-

-    Old-time travellers:--

-      Caroline of Brunswick, Princess, Queen of George IV., 165-168

-      Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess, Queen of George III.,

-                                                                162, 163

-      Kemp, Will, 79, 82, 161

-      Johnson, Samuel, 164, 165

-      Queen Elizabeth, 304, 307

-      William III., 140, 141, 161

-

-    Old-time travelling, 142-150, 159-168, 178, 225-237

-

-

-    Parcel Mail, 54-57, 111

-

-    Pulham St Mary Magdalene, 286, 287

-

-    ---- St Mary the Virgin, 286, 287

-

-    Puttels Bridge, 93, 94

-

-

-    Rivenhall End, 139

-

-    Romford, 5, 23, 29, 51, 82, 85, 88-93, 167

-

-

-    Scole, 6, 40, 262-272

-

-    Seven Kings, 51, 83-85

-

-    Shenfield, 99, 100

-

-    Shrubland Park, 253, 255

-

-    Springfield, 121-123

-

-    Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., 151

-

-    Stanway, 6, 174-178

-

-    Steam Coaches, 46

-

-    Stoke Ash, 257, 260

-

-    Stonham Aspall, 256

-

-    ---- Earls, 256

-

-    Stratford (Langthorne), 78, 80, 81

-

-    ----- -le-Bow, 6, 8, 75-80

-

-    ---- St Mary, 5, 6, 223-225, 274

-

-    Swainsthorpe, 298

-

-

-    Tasburgh, 292, 295, 296, 297, 302

-

-    Thwaite, 259

-

-    Tivetshall St Margaret, 6, 284, 287

-

-    ---- St Mary, 6, 287

-

-    Toll-gates, 40, 70, 71, 78, 87, 93, 94, 139, 179, 222, 237, 257, 288

-

-

-    Uphall, 5, 302

-

-    Upton Park, 81

-

-

-    Wacton, 288, 292

-

-    ---- Common, 288

-

-    Washbrook, 236

-

-    West Ham, 77, 81

-

-    Whalebone House, 86, 87

-

-    Whitechapel, 2, 12, 62-69

-

-    Whitton Street, 252

-

-    Widford, 111-114, 161

-

-    Witham, 23, 131-139, 163

-

-    Woodgrange, 81

-

-    Writtle, 5

-

-

-    Yaxley, 260

-

-

-

-

-  EDINBURGH

-  COLSTON AND COY, LTD.

-  PRINTERS

-

-

-

-

-         Transcriber's Notes:

-

-  Inconsistent hyphenation is retained.

-

-  Inconsistent punctuation is retained.

-

-  Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.

-

-  Bold is shown thus: =strong=.

-

-  Small capitals have been capitalised.

-

-

-

-

-

-

-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Norwich Road, by Charles G. Harper

-

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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 61087 ***
+
+[Illustration: SCOLE WHITE HART.]
+
+
+
+
+                             =THE NORWICH
+                            ROAD=: AN EAST
+                            ANGLIAN HIGHWAY
+
+                         By CHARLES G. HARPER
+
+           Author of "_The Brighton Road_," "_The Portsmouth
+            Road_," "_The Dover Road_," "_The Bath Road_,"
+         "_The Exeter Road_," _and_ "_The Great North Road_."
+
+                 _Illustrated by the Author, and from
+                    Old-Time Prints and Pictures._
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+                   LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL LTD. 1901
+
+                       [_All Rights reserved._]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_The author of a little book published in 1818, called_ A JOURNEY TO
+LONDON, _which is nearly all "London" with very little "journey,"
+remarks that "it is as uncommon for a book to go into the world without
+a preface, as a man without a hat. They are both convenient coverings."
+Here, then, is the customary covering._
+
+_Introducing this, the seventh in a series of books telling the story
+of our great highways, it may perhaps be as well to re-state the
+methods used, and objects aimed at. The chief intention is to provide a
+readable book which shall avoid the style either of a Guide-Book or a
+History. It is the better fortune to be in the reader's hands than in
+the dusty seclusion of those formidable works, the County Histories;
+or disregarded among the guide-books of forgotten holidays. To the
+antiquary it will, of course, be obvious that this and other volumes
+of the series "contain many omissions," as the Irish reviewer said;
+but such things as find no place here have, as a general rule, been
+disregarded because they not only do not help the Story of the Road
+along, but rather hinder its progression._
+
+_The_ NORWICH ROAD, _in its one hundred and twelve miles, passes by
+many an historic site and through districts distinguished for their
+quiet pastoral beauty. In being historic it is not singular, for, as
+Oliver Wendell Holmes very truly said, "England is one vast museum,"
+and the old road would be remarkable indeed, that, like Canning's_
+"NEEDY KNIFE GRINDER," _had no story to tell. It is, however, in the
+especial characteristics of East Anglian scenery, speech, customs, and
+architecture that this road stands apart and is highly individualised.
+"East Anglia" is no merely arbitrary and meaningless term, as those who
+travel it, if only on the highway, will speedily find._
+
+_But this shall be no trumpet-blast; nor indeed do the charms of
+Eastern England require such a fanfare, for who has not yet heard
+of that lovely valley of the Stour, so widely known as "Constable's
+Country," by whose exquisite water-meadows and shady lanes the old
+turnpike passes? Scenery such as this; windmills, cornfields, tall
+elms, winding rivers, and commons populous with geese and turkeys, are
+typical of the_ NORWICH ROAD, _which may, with this introduction, now
+be left to recommend itself_.
+
+  CHARLES G. HARPER.
+
+  PETERSHAM, SURREY,
+  _October 1901_.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: LIST
+
+OF
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS]
+
+SEPARATE PLATES
+
+
+  SCOLE WHITE HART                                       _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+  ALDGATE PUMP. (_From a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_,
+  1854)                                                               9
+
+  ALDGATE, 1820                                                      21
+
+  THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT
+  MATTHEW KING. (_From a drawing by T. Hosmer
+  Shepherd_, 1854)                                                   59
+
+  WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE                               65
+
+  MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. (_After Rowlandson_)                      71
+
+  ROMFORD                                                            91
+
+  MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL                                             103
+
+  INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. (_From an Old Print_)               107
+
+  NEW HALL LODGES                                                   125
+
+  CHIPPING HILL                                                     133
+
+  "THREE BLIND 'UNS AND A BOLTER." (_From a Print
+  after H. Alken_)                                                  145
+
+  COLCHESTER                                                        215
+
+  THE VALE OF DEDHAM. (_After Constable_)                           219
+
+  SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. (_After Constable_)                  229
+
+  THE CORNFIELD. (_After Constable_)                                233
+
+  THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART                                  265
+
+  STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART"                                     269
+
+  DICKLEBURGH                                                       279
+
+  A DISPUTED PASTURAGE                                              289
+
+  LONG STRATTON                                                     293
+
+  NEWTON FLOTMAN                                                    299
+
+  NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH                                     311
+
+  NORWICH MARKET PLACE                                              315
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
+
+
+  Vignette                                                _Title Page_
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+  Preface                                                           vii
+
+  List of Illustrations: London Stone                                ix
+
+  The Runaway 'Prentice                                               1
+
+  Yard of the "Bull," Leadenhall Street. (_From a drawing
+  by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854)                                      12
+
+  Front of the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate: Present Day                14
+
+  Yard of the "Saracen's Head" in Coaching Days. (_From
+  a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854)                            16
+
+  Yard of the "Saracen's Head": Present Day                          18
+
+  The Yard of the "Bull," Whitechapel, in Coaching Days              27
+
+  The Norwich Coach at Christmastide. (_After Robert
+  Seymour_, 1835)                                                    38
+
+  Whitechapel Old Church                                             63
+
+  Bow                                                                76
+
+  Seven Kings                                                        84
+
+  Whalebone House                                                    87
+
+  Entrance to Romford                                                89
+
+  Old Toll-house, Puttels Bridge                                     93
+
+  The "Fleece," Brook Street                                         94
+
+  The Martyr's Tree, Brentwood                                       95
+
+  Yard of the "White Hart," Brentwood                                98
+
+  Shenfield                                                         100
+
+  Mountnessing Church                                               102
+
+  The Gatehouse, Ingatestone Hall                                   106
+
+  At Margaretting                                                   111
+
+  The "Good Woman" Sign                                             113
+
+  The Bridge: Entrance to Chelmsford                                115
+
+  The Conduit, Chelmsford                                           116
+
+  Tindal's Statue                                                   117
+
+  The "Three Cups" Sign                                             122
+
+  Springfield Church                                                123
+
+  Boreham                                                           128
+
+  The "Angel," Kelvedon                                             141
+
+  Birthplace of Spurgeon                                            151
+
+  Near Mark's Tey                                                   176
+
+  Lexden                                                            180
+
+  The Grand Staircase, Colchester Castle                            199
+
+  Old Man Trap, Colchester Castle                                   205
+
+  Colchester Castle                                                 207
+
+  Gun Hill                                                          221
+
+  Old Toll-house, Stratford Bridge                                  222
+
+  Wolsey's Gateway                                                  242
+
+  The "Lion and Lamb," Angel Lane                                   244
+
+  Sparrowe's House                                                  246
+
+  The "Great White Horse"                                           248
+
+  Mockbeggar Hall                                                   253
+
+  "Stonham Pie"                                                     256
+
+  Near Brockford                                                    257
+
+  "Thwaite Low House"                                               259
+
+  The "Cock," Thwaite                                               260
+
+  Long Stratton                                                     295
+
+  Tasburgh                                                          297
+
+  The Old Brick Pound                                               301
+
+  Caistor Camp                                                      303
+
+  Norwich Snap                                                      318
+
+  Norfolk Turkey, on his way to Leadenhall Market                   320
+
+
+
+
+THE ROAD TO NORWICH
+
+
+                                                                 MILES
+
+  London (Whitechapel Church) to Mile End                            1
+  Stratford-le-Bow (Bow Church)                                      2½
+        (Cross River Lea).
+  Stratford (Broadway)                                               4
+  Forest Gate                                                        5
+  Manor Park                                                         6
+  Ilford                                                             6½
+        (Cross River Roding).
+  Seven Kings                                                        7½
+        (Cross "Seven Kings' Watering," or Fillebrook).
+  Chadwell Heath                                                     9
+  Romford                                                           12
+  Hare Street                                                       13
+  Puttels Bridge                                                    15½
+        (Cross Weald Brook).
+  Brook Street                                                      16½
+  Brentwood                                                         18
+  Shenfield                                                         19
+  Mountnessing Street                                               21
+  Ingatestone                                                       23
+  Margaretting Street                                               25
+  Widford                                                           27½
+        (Cross River Wid or Ash).
+  Moulsham                                                          28¼
+        (Cross River Chelmer).
+
+  Chelmsford                                                        29
+  Springfield                                                       29½
+  Boreham                                                           32¾
+        (Cross River Ter).
+  Hatfield Peverel                                                  34¾
+        (Cross River Witham).
+  Witham                                                            37½
+  Rivenhall End                                                     39½
+  Kelvedon                                                          41
+        (Cross River Blackwater).
+  Gore Pit                                                          42
+  Mark's Tey                                                        45¾
+  Copford                                                           46¼
+  Stanway                                                           47
+  Lexden Heath                                                      48
+  Lexden                                                            49
+  Colchester                                                        51
+        (Cross River Colne).
+  Dilbridge                                                         52½
+  Stratford Bridge                                                  57¾
+        (Cross River Stour).
+  Stratford St Mary                                                 58½
+  Capel Railway Crossing. Capel Station. Capel
+      St Mary.                                                      63½
+  Copdock                                                           65½
+  Washbrook                                                         66
+        (Cross Wash Brook).
+  Ipswich                                                           69¼
+        (Cross River Orwell)
+  Whitton Street                                                    71¾
+  Claydon                                                           72¾
+  Creeting All Saints                                               76¾
+  Stonham Earls                                                     79
+  Little Stonham                                                    79¾
+  Brockford                                                         83¾
+  Thwaite                                                           84½
+  Stoke Ash                                                         86¼
+  Yaxley                                                            88¼
+  Brome                                                             90¼
+        (Cross River Waveney).
+  Scole                                                             92
+  Dickleburgh                                                       94½
+  Tivetshall Level Crossing                                         97¼
+  Wacton                                                           100
+  Long Stratton                                                    101½
+  Tasburgh                                                         102¾
+        (Cross River Tase).
+  Newton Flotman                                                   104½
+        (Cross River Tase).
+  Hartford Bridge                                                  109¼
+        (Cross River Yare).
+  Norwich (Market Place)                                           111½
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: The NORWICH ROAD]
+
+
+I
+
+
+IN the days before railways came, robbing the exits from London of
+all dignity and purpose, the runaway 'prentice lads of the familiar
+legends, who were always half starved and continually beaten, revolting
+at length from their uncomfortable beds under the shop counters
+and their daily stripes and scorpions, were wont, according to the
+story-books, to steal at night out of their houses of bondage and make
+for the roads. Such an one, making in those days for Norwich, and
+standing at Aldgate in the grey of the morning, looking across the
+threshold of London, would have seen, in the long broad road stretching
+before him, the only means of escape. The shilling or so of which he
+would be the owner would scarce serve him for two or three days' keep;
+and so, although he might have longed for a place on the coach he
+could see starting from the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, at
+4 a.m., there would have been for such as he no choice but to start
+afoot, with as light a heart as possible, and chance the offer of a
+lift on some waggon returning into Essex. Had he, in leaving Aldgate
+behind, asked some passer-by the way to Norwich, he might have been
+seized for what he was, a runaway; but, if he escaped suspicion, would
+have been answered readily enough, for everyone in those times knew
+the way to lie along the Whitechapel Road and by Mile End Turnpike.
+Has anyone in these enlightened and highly-educated times courage
+sufficient to ask his way to Norwich from Aldgate? and, assuming that
+dauntless courage, is it conceivable that anyone in that crowded street
+could tell him?
+
+There are no apprentices and no tyrannical masters of the old kind left
+now, and the only runaways of these days are the bad boys of precocious
+wits who would not think of tramping the highway while they could raise
+a railway fare or "lift" a bicycle. But the way still lies open to the
+explorer from Aldgate, and the old Norwich Road yet follows the line of
+the Roman way into the country of the Iceni.
+
+Between the era of our imaginary truant and that of the Romans, who
+originally constructed this road, there yawns a vast gulf of time;
+certainly not less than eighteen hundred years. The history of the
+road during that space has largely been forgotten; but, worst of all,
+we know perhaps less of it and its life in the times of Charles the
+First, onward to those of William and Mary, than we can recover from
+Roman historians; and certainly its coaching history is in tatters and
+fragments, for those who made it did not live in the bright glow of
+publicity that surrounded the coachmen of roads north, south or west,
+and died unexploited by the sporting writers of the Coaching Age.
+
+
+II
+
+
+NEARLY seventeen centuries have passed since, in the great _Antonine
+Itinerary_ of the Roman Empire, the first guide-book to the roads was
+compiled, and almost eighty years since Cary and Paterson--the rival
+Bradshaws and A.B.C.'s of the Coaching Age--issued the last editions of
+their _Travellers Companions_, which now, instead of being constantly
+in the travellers' hands, are treasured on the shelves of collectors
+interested in relics of days before railways.
+
+The _Antonine Itinerary_ was compiled, A.D. 200-300. Among other roads
+of which it purports to give an account is the road to Venta Icenorum;
+the Norwich Road, as we should say. Its statement is brief and to the
+point, if requiring no little explanation after this lapse of time:--
+
+  Iter a Venta Icenorum Londinio _m.p._             cxxviii _sic._
+  Sitomago                                          xxxii
+  Combretonio                                       xxii
+  Ad Ansam                                          xv
+  Camuloduno                                        vii
+  Canonio                                           viiii
+  Cæsaromago                                        xii
+  Durolito                                          xvi
+  Londinio                                          xv
+
+A hundred and twenty-eight miles, that is to say, between Venta and
+London. The Romans, of course, calculated all their mileages in Britain
+from that hoary relic, the still existing "London Stone," which, from
+behind its modern iron grating in the wall of St Swithin's Church,
+still turns a battered face towards the heedless, hurrying crowds in
+Cannon Street, in the City of London.
+
+In coaching days the Norwich Road, in common with most East Anglian
+routes, was measured from Whitechapel Church, and the distance from
+that landmark to Norwich given as 111½ miles. The apparent wide
+difference between those measurements of classic and modern times is
+very nearly reconciled when we add a mile for the distance between
+London Stone and Whitechapel Church to the 111½ miles, and when we
+reduce the Roman miles to English. An English mile measures 5280 feet,
+while a Roman mile runs only to 4842 feet, this fact accounting, along
+the road to Norwich, for some 13 miles of the discrepancy, and bringing
+the difference to the insignificant one of 3½ miles; or, assuming the
+Roman ruins at Caistor, 3 miles short of Norwich, to mark the site of
+Venta Icenorum, 6½ miles; no very wide margin of error.
+
+The compiler of that ancient itinerary is unknown. He, or they (for
+a survey of the Roman Empire cannot have been made by one man), are
+quite hidden and lost to sight under the title of "Antonine," which
+was given in honour of the Emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla,
+father and son, who both owned the name Antoninus. By similarly
+honorary titles we are accustomed to christen our public buildings.
+Thus, in coming ages, when such earthworms as engineers and architects
+are forgotten, the "Victoria" Embankment, "Victoria" Station, the
+"Victoria and Albert" Museum, and the thousand and one other things
+thus entitled will serve to hand a Sovereign down to futurity, while
+the names of those who created them, good or ill, will have perished,
+like the leaves of autumn. Customs change, and fashions cease to be,
+but snobbery is more enduring than brass or marble, and outlasts the
+mummies of the Pharaohs.
+
+The compiler who drew up the list of places on the road between
+Londinium and Venta has chosen to reckon backwards. The "_m. p._" is
+the abbreviation for _mille passus_, or paced Roman miles; the figures
+after the first line giving the distance from the place last mentioned.
+Setting out from London, we find "Durolitum" to be identified with the
+Roman earthworks of Uphall, near Romford; "Cæsaromagus" to be identical
+with Writtle, near Chelmsford; "Canonium" to stand for Kelvedon;
+"Camulodunum" for Colchester; and "Ad Ansam" for Stratford St Mary;
+while "Combretonium" and "Sitomagus" still puzzle antiquaries, who are
+reduced to the extremity of suggesting the opposite alternatives of
+Brettenham or Burgh for the one, and Dunwich or Thetford for the other;
+names with a specious resemblance, and on circuitous routes east or
+west of the direct road which would more than account for the Roman
+surveyor's overplus of miles. The direct road, however, is unmistakably
+Roman, and those who will may seek for the elusive "Sitomagus" and
+"Combretonium" along it. Haply they may discover them at Scole,
+Dickleburgh or Long Stratton.
+
+But along the whole length of the road, from London to Norwich, the
+wayfarer receives impressions of its true Roman character, whether
+in its appearance or in the place-names on the way. Old Ford and
+Stratford-at-Bow, where the Roman paved fords crossed the River Lea;
+that other "old ford" at Ilford, across the River Roding, which was
+already ancient when the Saxons came and so named it, "Eald Ford,"
+leaving it for later times to corrupt the name into "Ilford" and
+for uninstructed historians to explain the meaning to have been
+that it was an "ill ford"; to which condition, indeed, many had
+descended in mediæval times: these are examples. Others are found at
+Ingatestone, the Saxon "Ing-atte-stone" = the "meadow at the stone,"
+a Roman milestone that stood by the wayside; in the names of Stanway,
+Colchester, Stratford St Mary. Little Stonham, Tivetshall, and Long
+Stratton, places to be more particularly mentioned later in these pages.
+
+It has been aptly pointed out by East Anglian antiquaries that the
+circuitous route eastward or westward of the straight road between
+Stratford St Mary and Norwich, on which Sitomagus and Combretonium
+may have been situated, may probably have been an early Roman way,
+constructed shortly after the conquest of the Iceni, along an old
+native trackway, and superseded in later and more settled times by
+the direct road, overlooked by the Antonine compilers who, working at
+Rome, the very centre of the Empire, may not have been fully informed
+of changes in countries like Britain, on the edge of the Unknown.
+This view, when we consider the long period stretching between the
+conquest of this part of the country and the final break up of the
+Romano-British civilisation, about A.D. 450, has much to recommend it.
+A period of some three hundred and eighty years of colonisation and
+development, equalling, for example, the great gulf of time between
+our own day and that of Henry the Eighth, the changes in its course
+must have rivalled, if not have surpassed, those in our roads between
+the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. During those eras, between the
+first and the fifth centuries, many of the original winding tracks
+must have been straightened, or left to the secondary position of
+byways, while new and straight roads were engineered across country
+formerly, for one reason or another, avoided. Meanwhile, the Antonine
+Itinerary-makers must have relied for their surveys upon old and
+out-of-date information, just as, in our own time, we find many recent
+maps, printed from the Ordnance Survey of a hundred years ago, still
+indicating winding roads that have been non-existent for generations,
+and ignoring the direct highways made by Telford and others just before
+the opening of the Railway Era.
+
+
+III
+
+
+LONDON made no remarkable growth between the Roman and mediæval
+periods, but this road had in that time slightly altered its course
+from its starting-point, and, instead of going from Cannon Street
+to Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Old Ford, left the City by way of
+Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, continuing down the Mile End and Bow
+Roads to Stratford.
+
+The traveller of Chaucer's day, coming to Ald Gate, in the City wall,
+had reached the country. That gate spanned the road at a point marked
+nowadays by the house, No 2 Aldgate High Street, standing at the
+boundary of the parishes of St Katharine Cree and St Botolph. In 1374
+Chaucer took from the Corporation of London a lease for the remainder
+of his life of the rooms in this gate, which was pulled down and
+succeeded by another, built in 1606, which in its turn disappeared in
+1761.
+
+From his windows commanding the road Chaucer must often have seen that
+dainty gentlewoman, the Prioress of St Leonard's, Stratford, riding to
+or from London, escorted by a numerous train, and from her must have
+drawn that portrait of the prioress who spoke French with a Cockney
+accent:--
+
+  "After the scole of Stratford-attè-Bowe,
+  For French of Parys was to hire unknowe."
+
+In Chaucer's day they probably taught French, of sorts, at the Priory
+schools.
+
+[Illustration: ALDGATE PUMP. _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_,
+1854.]
+
+At that time it was no little journey to Stratford, although by
+measurement less than four miles, and the lady went strongly escorted,
+as, indeed, did all of consequence, or those who had aught to lose.
+For the more common wayfarers who went alone on this desperate eastern
+trail there stood the Chapel and the Holy Well of St Michael the
+Archangel within the City, where the otherwise unprotected might seek
+the aid of the Saint's strong arm before leaving the walled City behind
+on their perilous faring. This chapel stood where Leadenhall Street,
+Fenchurch Street and Aldgate meet, on a site thrown into the roadway
+in 1876, when the street was widened. Until that year the crypt of
+this shrine had filled the prosaic functions of a cellar in the corner
+house, itself demolished, together with the beautiful Early English
+arches on which it stood. Adjoining was "Aldgate Pump," which had long
+before unromantically taken the place of the sanctified spring. That
+celebrated civic monument is seen in the accompanying illustration,
+taken in 1854. Many City wits have exercised their satirical powers
+upon it, and the expression long current of "a draft on Aldgate Pump,"
+a once popular mercantile phrase for a bad note, goes back so far as
+the days of Fielding. Oddly enough, the water of the pump retained some
+repute until 1876, when, on being analysed, it was found impure, and
+the supply closed. The pump, however, is still in existence, rebuilt
+of its original stones, a few feet away from the old site, and yields
+water again; not, however, from the old saintly source, but from the
+strictly secular filter-beds of the New River Water Company.
+
+[Illustration: YARD OF THE "BULL," LEADENHALL STREET. _From a Drawing
+by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854.]
+
+Having implored the protection of St Michael, travellers of old
+went, heartened, upon their way down what is now Whitechapel High
+Street, which Strype, writing in the time of James the First, calls
+a "spacious fair street," with "sweet and wholesome air." Past
+hedgerows of elm trees and rustic stiles and bridges, those old
+wayfarers went, and onward down the Whitechapel Road, where the
+country was a lovely solitude, with "nothing but the bounteous gifts
+of Nature and saint-like tokens of innocency," which, according to Sir
+Thomas More, in 1504, characterised the charming fields of Mile End,
+Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse. This, it will be allowed, is scarcely
+descriptive of those places to-day, whatever they may become when the
+People's Palace and the University Settlements have done their work.
+
+Thus far for sake of contrast. Let us return to Aldgate for a while,
+and, without following its fortunes throughout the centuries, glance at
+it in the Coaching Age, before the squalor of modern Whitechapel had
+invaded it from the east, or the extension of City business had come to
+destroy most of that picturesque assemblage of old inns and mediæval
+gabled houses, to replace them with the giant warehouses and "imposing"
+offices of modern London.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+ALTHOUGH, as we have seen, the East Anglian roads were, in coaching
+days, measured from Whitechapel Church, the great actual starting-place
+was Aldgate, where many of the old inns were situated, as, in like
+manner, the ancient hostelries of the Borough clustered at the
+beginning of the road to Canterbury and Dover. Aldgate occupies a
+position midway between London Stone, the Roman starting-point in
+Cannon Street, and Whitechapel Church, and to and from this spot came
+and went the stage-coaches, post-chaises and waggons in the palmy days
+of the road. The mail-coaches, of course, had a starting-point of their
+own, and set out from the old General Post-Office in Lombard Street,
+or, in the last years of coaching, from St Martin's-le-Grand.
+
+[Illustration: FRONT OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD," ALDGATE: PRESENT DAY.]
+
+It is true that one might have taken coach from many other and more
+central inns for Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich:--from the "Spread
+Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, a fine old galleried inn demolished at
+the close of 1865; from the "Cross Keys," in the same street; from the
+"Swan with Two Necks," in Lad Lane, anciently Lady Lane (that is to
+say, the Lane of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin), now Gresham Street;
+or from the "Bull," 151 Leadenhall Street, which must by no means be
+confounded with its namesake in Aldgate High Street. Exactly what
+that Leadenhall Street hostelry was like let the picture of its old
+galleried courtyard show.
+
+There was also "another way" to Norwich; out of Bishopsgate, by way
+of Newmarket, Bury and Thetford. Taking this route, which, although
+2½ miles shorter, no true sportsman considered to be the real Norwich
+Road, one started from the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross; from the
+"White Horse," in Fetter Lane (improved away in 1898); from the
+"Flower Pot," in Bishopsgate Street; from yet another "Bull," also in
+Bishopsgate Street; or from the "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand.
+But when all these places have been duly set forth, it is to Aldgate
+that we must turn as the real starting-point.
+
+[Illustration: YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD" IN COACHING DAYS. _From a
+Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854.]
+
+Aldgate in the days before railways was quite unlike the Aldgate of
+to-day. Certain of the old buildings remain, but the "note" of the
+place is entirely altered. It is now a noisy, distracting ante-room to
+the City, in which tinkling tram-cars and costermongers' barrows jostle
+with elephantine railway goods vans; where the Jewish second-hand
+clothes shop rubs a greasy shoulder with the "merchant tailor's" vulgar
+show of electric light, plate glass and wax models; and where the East
+End, in the person of the aproned, ringleted and ostrich-feathered
+factory girl, meets the West, in the shape of some City clerk strayed
+beyond his mercantile or financial frontiers, each regarding the other
+as a curiosity in these social marches. It is as the meeting of salt
+water and fresh, this mingling of the tides of City and East End, and
+to the observant not a little curious. Nothing like it--nothing so
+marked--is to be seen on any other of the borders of the City. There
+is, too, a smack of the sea, a certain air of romance, in the street,
+coming, perhaps, from the windows of the nautical instrument-makers,
+where the binoculars, the quadrants, the sextants and the sea-faring
+tackle in general hint of distant climes and the coral reefs of South
+Pacific isles.
+
+These mariners' emporia were here and in the Minories before railways
+came, and so also were many fine old inns. For Aldgate, difficult
+though it may be to realise it to-day, was not only the place whence
+many of the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches set out, but was also
+the resting-place of travellers to London; and its inns were quite
+as well-appointed as those of the more central ones in the City,
+or those of Charing Cross, or the West End. As travellers by rail
+to London in modern times resort to the railway hotels, so did our
+great-grandfathers find rest at the coaching inns at whose thresholds
+they were set down at their journey's end.
+
+[Illustration: YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD": PRESENT DAY.]
+
+The fragments merely of the last of Aldgate's old hostelries remain, in
+the bold front of Nos. 6 and 7, forming two-thirds of the old frontage
+of the "Saracen's Head." No. 5, the other third, has been destroyed,
+and so also has the old appearance of the galleried courtyard, still
+named "Saracen's Head Yard," but now surrounded by warehouses. The old
+coach archway remains, and the gables at the back of the buildings
+are quaint reminiscences of other times. Coaches plied between the
+"Saracen's Head" and Norwich so far back as 1681, and Strype, the
+antiquary, born in the neighbourhood, in a court whose name now flaunts
+the horrid travesty of "Tripe Court," referring to the inn, speaks of
+it as "very large and of a considerable trade." The existing fragment,
+with its handsome architectural elevation of richly-moulded plaster in
+the Renaissance style of the late seventeenth century, is part of the
+building mentioned by him. Small shops now occupy the ground floor,
+and the upper rooms are let as tenements.
+
+But the "Bull" was perhaps the most famous of these old inns. From it
+Mr Pickwick set out for Ipswich, and from Sam Weller's remark on that
+occasion, "Take care o' the archway, gen'l'men," as the coach started,
+it is evident that the "Bull" possessed a courtyard. At that palmy time
+of inns and coaches, the opening of the nineteenth century, the "Bull"
+was, and long had been, in the Nelson family, a noted race of inn and
+coach proprietors. At that particular time Mrs Ann Nelson, widow of the
+late host, who died about 1812, was the presiding genius. Associated
+with her was her son John. Another son, Robert, had a business of his
+own, and was long proprietor of the "Belle Sauvage," on Ludgate Hill,
+and partner with others in many coaches. A third son, George, drove the
+Exeter "Defiance," horsed by his mother out of London.
+
+But to return to the "Bull" and Mrs Nelson, who had, as her husband
+had, and his father before him, some sort of interest in many coaches
+running into Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, on main or bye-roads. She
+also at one time leased the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street,
+and extended her energies so far as to horse the Exeter "Telegraph"
+and the "Quicksilver" Devonport Mail out of London, together with
+the Exeter "Defiance" night coach, the Manchester "Telegraph," the
+Oxford "Defiance," Brighton "Red Rover," and the Leeds "Courier." In
+their coaching speculations the Nelson family were associated with
+a pastrycook whose little shop adjoined the gateway of the "Bull."
+Occasionally a new hand on one of the coaches would send his leaders'
+noses through the shop front, for that gateway was very narrow and Mrs
+Nelson's coachmen anything but deliberate. On the other side of the
+gateway was a whip-maker's shop, kept by one James Johnson, who throve
+mightily on the custom of the coachmen and others who frequented the
+"Bull."
+
+This most energetic of landladies and Napoleonic of coach proprietors
+developed and managed her extensive coaching interests long before her
+husband died. He, good, easy-going man, had been a fair whip in earlier
+days, but had long left the box, and had no head for business, although
+a very fine taste in wines and spirits: the lack of the first probably
+a corollary of the second. She spared neither herself nor her servants.
+Rising considerably before the lark, she saw the owls to bed, and was
+a martinet to her coachmen. Left a widow while in the prime of life,
+she still wore in old age the dress of her youth. The sketch of her in
+the picture of the "Bull" yard in coaching days shows exactly what her
+costume was like. A short skirt revealed high-heeled shoes with large
+buckles, the heels painted red. Black velvet was her winter wear, and
+fancy apron, lace neckerchief and frilled cap invariable items. Up to
+her seventieth year she was the last up at night, scouring the house
+to see that all was safe; and the first up in the morning, looking
+after the stable people and seeing that the horses had their feeds and
+were properly cared for. Inside and outside the house, and down the
+eastern roads, her influence was despotic and would brook no defiance.
+Her "Ipswich Blues" had long been famous when an opposition coach was
+started. Opposition could not be allowed to live, and so the fares
+were reduced from eight shillings inside and sixteen shillings out, by
+regular stages until the point was reached when passengers were not
+only carried for nothing, but were presented with an excellent dinner
+at Witham. At that point the rivals discreetly retired, when fares rose
+again to their old level.
+
+[Illustration: ALDGATE, 1820.]
+
+Mrs Nelson insisted on the most rigid punctuality. Did the coachman
+of one of her crack coaches or one of her still more famous
+"Oppositions" bring his team down her yard five minutes over time,
+he was reprimanded; ten minutes, and he was fined half-a-crown; a
+quarter of an hour, and he stood a good chance of being dismissed. She
+ran a Southend "Opposition" every afternoon by Romford, Brentwood,
+Billericay, Wickford, Raleigh and Rochford, along Essex roads of a
+feather-bed softness of mud; but time must be kept. She provided good
+horses and would not hear of excuses. One day, when the roads were
+particularly heavy, the "Opposition" came in half an hour late from
+Southend. The coachman, after the manner of his kind, on driving into
+the yard and pulling up at the coffee-room door, threw his whip across
+the wheelers' backs. Mrs Nelson had long been watching the clock, and,
+coming out, took the whip and hung it up, with the quiet remark, "That
+whip is no longer yours, Philpot--half an hour behind."
+
+"But the roads are so bad, ma'am," remonstrated poor Toby. "I'm sure,
+ma'am, the gentlemen knew I did my best; but I felt bound to spare the
+cattle."
+
+"_I_ find the cattle and employ you to drive them," replied the
+inexorable landlady; "_you_ have nothing to do but to keep time. Draw
+your wages and leave the yard."
+
+Under this iron rule it is no wonder that her coachmen were sometimes
+"pulled up" for furious driving. On one of these occasions she appeared
+in court in defence of her man. "I understand, Mrs Nelson," blandly
+remarked the Chairman of the Bench, "that you give your coachmen
+instructions to race the rival coach."
+
+"Not exactly," replied the lady; "my orders to them are simply that
+they are to get the road and keep it."
+
+But if a very dragon of strictness, she treated coachmen and guards
+very well. They had their especial room, and dined as well there, at
+reduced prices, as any of her coffee-room customers. This especial
+consideration reflected itself in those functionaries, who jealously
+preserved the privacy of their room; the amateur coachman who secured
+the invitation to join them (and to pay out of his own pocket for
+their wine and spirits) feeling himself greatly honoured.
+
+In other respects, the "Bull" was a model to other houses. No damp
+sheets in any one of its hundred and fifty beds, no drunken brawlers;
+nothing a minute out of time, or an inch out of place. Mrs Nelson's
+fine house was, indeed, nothing less than an institution. In later
+years her son John took more of the management upon his shoulders, and
+the business seemed likely to long outlast his time.
+
+
+V
+
+
+BUT a whisper of coming changes disturbed the air as early as 1830.
+Coachmen and travellers talked in the stableyard and the cosy rooms of
+the "Bull" of men with strange instruments encountered along the road;
+"chaps with telescopes on three sticks, and other chaps with chains
+and things, measuring the fields." It was thus that they described
+the surveyors, with their theodolites and their staff of men, who
+were setting out the proposed route of the projected Eastern Counties
+Railway that was to run all the way from London to Colchester, Norwich
+and Yarmouth.
+
+John Nelson was too confident in the existing order of things to
+believe that a few pounds of coal and some boiling water would ever
+be a match for his horses, or that a time would presently come when
+those passengers of his who now derided the railways would desert the
+coaches. The "Bull" had been in his family for more than a hundred and
+twelve years, as an inn and a coaching house, and he could as soon have
+imagined the end of the world as a day coming when the Essex, Suffolk
+and Norfolk coaches should no longer enter or leave his yard. It was a
+good joke for a while, when the coaches came in, to ask "How they were
+getting on with that railway?" but when the surveys were completed and
+the prospectus of the "Grand Eastern Counties Railway" was issued in
+1834, it was seen that the railway men meant business. The original
+proposal of the directors was to follow the road closely and to bring
+the line into Aldgate. When it was seen that the railway was really to
+be made, Nelson raised an opposition against the Aldgate terminus, and
+was successful in driving the Company into an out-of-the-way site in
+Shoreditch, where for many years that terminus remained.
+
+[Illustration: THE YARD OF THE "BULL," WHITECHAPEL, IN COACHING DAYS.]
+
+The Eastern Counties Railway was opened as far as Chelmsford in 1839,
+to Colchester in 1842, and communication to Norwich was opened up in
+1845. From the day of the first opening, the "Bull" declined. Old
+customers still found their way from the slums of Shoreditch to its
+hospitable door, but were not reinforced by the newer generation of
+travellers, to whom the road and its end in Aldgate were alike unknown.
+They went to the City inns, and later to the more central hotels,
+leaving the "Bull" to slowly sink into neglect. John Nelson made a big
+bid for success in another line, and ran the "Wellington" omnibuses
+with success from 1855 until his death, at the age of seventy-four, in
+June 1868. He had long resided in the West End, and was a man of ample
+fortune, so that the end of the "Bull's" coaching career hurt him only
+in sentiment. His mother, that most autocratic and business-like of
+women, had died ten years before, active almost to the last, although
+she had reached the age of eighty-five years. Towards the close of
+1868 the old inn ended its long career. Its substantial, old-fashioned
+silver-plate and massive furniture were sold by auction, with the stock
+of rare old wines, laid in many years before, for that old generation
+of travellers who delighted in port and sherry, and plenty of both.
+
+The very site of the "Bull" is now sought with pains and labour, and
+only to be discovered with difficulty by the present generation. It
+was numbered 25 Aldgate High Street, and stood where Aldgate Avenue, a
+modern alley rich in offices of "commission agents," and curious things
+of that kind, now cuts its way through where the old yard used to be.
+
+Close by the "Bull" was another old coaching inn, the "Blue Boar,"
+now quite vanished, kept for a time by John Thorogood. The Thorogoods
+were in those days, and in these times of amateur coaching are still,
+a family of coachmen. "Old John," who owned the "Norwich Times," and
+actually drove it for two years without missing a journey the whole of
+that time, clearly deserved his patronymic, in thus handling the reins
+along a hundred and twelve miles of road for seven hundred and thirty
+consecutive days.
+
+It was to the "Blue Boar" that little David Copperfield came, on his
+miserable journey from Yarmouth:--"We approached London by degrees, and
+got, in due time, to the inn, in the Whitechapel district, I forget
+whether it was the 'Blue Bull' or the 'Blue Boar,' but I know it was
+the Blue Something, and that its likeness was painted upon the back
+of the coach." The sculptured effigy of a boar, with gilded tusks and
+hoofs, built into the wall of a tobacco factory, marks the site of the
+inn.
+
+Among other noted inns, the "Three Nuns" must be named. From it set
+out the short stages to Ilford, Epping, Romford and Woodford, together
+with coaches for several of the Essex by-roads. The house owes its
+name to the Minoresses, or nuns, of St Clare, from whose religious
+establishment the Minories obtains its title. The inn was rebuilt in
+1877, and is now nothing more than a huge public-house.
+
+Many other inns of consequence in their day have left nothing but
+their yards behind them to show where they stood:--George Yard, Spread
+Eagle Yard, Black Horse Yard, Boar's Head Yard, White Swan Yard, Half
+Moon Passage, and Kent and Essex Yard are such relics, bordering High
+Street, Whitechapel, where one curious sign survives, that of an inn
+called the "Horse and Leaping Bar."
+
+
+VI
+
+
+ONE decided advantage the Chelmsford, Colchester and Ipswich route
+to Norwich possessed in old times over that by way of Newmarket and
+Thetford. Neither could have been considered safe in the bad old
+days, but while the traveller across the wild heaths of Newmarket and
+Thetford was almost certain to be "held up" on his lonely course, the
+other way, through Essex, passed by few such wildernesses, and had more
+towns and villages along its course, to give a sense of security.
+Briefly, robbery on one route was a probability, and on the other was
+regarded as certain. Margaret Paston, writing from Norfolk to her
+husband in London, so long ago as the fifteenth century, certainly
+gives even the way through Essex a bad name, for she asks him to pay
+a debt for one of their friends, because it was not safe, "on account
+of the robbers," to send money up from the country; but at the very
+same time the Thetford route had a much more sinister reputation, and
+travellers versed in the gossip of the road avoided it if possible,
+or went in company and well armed, for in that era a certain William
+Cratfield, Rector of Wrotham, "a common and notorious thief and lurker
+on the roads, and murderer and slayer," lurked and robbed and slew on
+Newmarket Heath, in company with a certain "Thomas Tapyrtone, hosyer."
+He was at last laid by the heels, in 1416, and charged with robbing
+a Londoner of £12. This distinguished ornament of the Church died in
+Newgate, but of the villainous hosier we hear no more. Perhaps he had
+realised a fortune in the business and retired to enjoy the fruits of
+his industry. With the disappearance of this worthy couple, travellers
+breathed more freely, but for surety's sake continued to patronise the
+Essex route, and so by way of Ipswich to come to the City of Orchards,
+as Norwich was called of old.
+
+As time went on, a certain degree of security was found in the
+coaches that began to make an appearance with the second half of the
+seventeenth century. They travelled at first no more quickly than
+a man could walk, but they provided company, which was, under the
+circumstances, highly desirable. Soon, however, they found it possible
+to do the journey in two days. Strype, we have already seen mentions
+the "Saracen's Head" in Aldgate as the centre of a considerable trade,
+and to it in 1681 a Norwich coach was running; an innovation which
+aroused the indignation of innkeepers on the way to almost as great a
+height as that of their descendants when, two hundred and forty years
+later, railways were depopulating the roads. When travellers began to
+go by coach instead of on horseback, and to reach London or Norwich in
+two days instead of three or four, those antique tapsters thought they
+saw their living going, and, strange to say, there were not wanting men
+who raised their voices against the innovation of being carried on a
+journey, instead of riding; although, for the most part, their outcry
+was the result only of innate conservatism.
+
+"Travelling in these coaches," said an anonymous pamphleteer, "can
+neither prove advantageous to men's health or business. For what
+advantage is it to men's health to be called out of their beds into
+these coaches an hour before day in the morning, to be hurried in
+them from place to place, till one hour, two, or three within night;
+insomuch that after sitting all day in the summer time stifled with
+heat, and choked with the dust, or the winter time starving and
+freezing with cold or choked with filthy fogs, they are often brought
+into their inns by torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get
+supper; and next morning they are forced into the coach so early that
+they can get no breakfast. What addition is this to men's health or
+business? to ride all day with strangers, oftentimes sick, ancient,
+diseased persons, or young children crying; to whose humours they are
+obliged to be subject, forced to bear with, and many times are poisoned
+with their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of the boxes and
+bundles."
+
+Yet "these coaches" (one can almost hear the intonation of contempt in
+that phrase) were from the first a success. The greater that success
+the louder for a time was the outcry against them. Taylor, the Water
+Poet, was one of those who wrote vehemently against the new methods
+of travel. To him a coach was "a close hypocrite; for it hath a cover
+for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow any wickedness. Besides,
+like a perpetual cheater, it wears two bootes, and no spurs, sometimes
+having two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes (against nature)
+it makes faire ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are
+carried back to back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in
+that miserable manner and thrown overboard into the sea. Moreover, it
+makes people imitate sea-crabs, in being drawn sideways as they are
+when they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a dangerous kind of
+carriage for the commonwealth, if it be considered."
+
+The boot of which he speaks so contemptuously, was a method of packing
+the "outsides," of which we still find a survival in the Irish
+jaunting-car. There are those who trace the origin of the term from the
+French "_boîte_," a box. Even now the coachman's seat is "the box," and
+the modern fore-boot is under it.
+
+Writers of that time seem almost unanimously to have taken sides
+against coaching; with, however, no effect; for, somewhat later than
+Taylor, that doughty Conservative, John Cresset, is found exclaiming
+furiously against the multitude of them. He favoured the suppression
+of all, or, at least--counsels of moderation prevailing--of most. They
+were, he said, mischievous to the public, destructive to trade and
+prejudicial to the land. Not only did they injure the breed of horses,
+but also that of watermen; which last objection goes further than the
+complaints of Taylor himself, who, writing at the same time, does not
+speak of his breed being debased, but only of his trade being crippled.
+Cresset thought the stage-coaches tempted the country gentry to London
+too often, and he accordingly proposed that these conveyances should be
+limited to one for every county town in England, to go backwards and
+forwards once a week.
+
+Vain hope! Coaches of sorts must already have appeared on the road to
+Norwich by the middle of the seventeenth century, for in a proclamation
+of July 20th in the plague year, 1665, when all places were dreading
+infected London, it is ordained, that "from this daie all ye passage
+coaches shall be prohibited to goe from ye city to London and come
+from thence hither, and also ye common carts and wagons." Already,
+in 1696, the "Confatharrat" coach was a well-known conveyance between
+London and Norwich, and the name of Suggate, the London and East
+Anglian carrier, a household word. Unhappily, nothing can be gathered
+as to when Suggate first began to jog along the road, or when the
+"Confatharrat" started to ply between Norwich and the "Four Swans,"
+Bishopsgate Street. All particulars are lost. The odd name of that
+coach was probably a seventeenth-century way of spelling the word
+"confederate," and the selection of such a name proves both that it was
+carried on by an alliance or co-partnership, and that "confederate" had
+not then acquired its sinister modern connotation. Besides these aids
+to travel, a stage-waggon began to ply from the "Popinjay," Tombland,
+Norwich, at an early date; and another from the "Angel," in the Market
+Place, to the "Blossoms" Inn, Laurence Lane, London, was advertised in
+the _Norwich Mercury_, of March 29th, 1729, to "now go regularly every
+Thursday night," setting out on the following Wednesday from London,
+on the return journey. It will thus be seen that it was a five or six
+days' journey for those primitive affairs, and that they apparently did
+not run at regular intervals until that year.
+
+A London and Beccles coach was running in 1707, but the first regular
+Norwich coach of which particulars remain was the "Norwich Machine,"
+which in 1762 set out for London three times a week from the "Maid's
+Head," according to the advertisement still extant. There is nothing
+in that old coaching bill to show that 1762 was the first season of
+the "Norwich Machine." It may have been established some years before
+that date.
+
+  _Norwich, March 26, 1762._
+
+  SUSAN NASMITH and JAMES KEITH,
+
+  Proprietors of the
+
+  NORWICH MACHINE,
+
+  Give Notice
+
+ that their Machine will set out from the MAID'S HEAD Inn, in St
+ Simon's Parish, in Norwich, on Monday, the 5th day of April next, at
+ half-past eleven in the forenoon, and on the Wednesday and Friday in
+ the same week, at the same time; and to be continued in like Manner,
+ on those Days weekly, for the carrying four inside Passengers, at
+ Twenty-five Shillings each, and outside at Twelve Shillings and
+ Sixpence each. The inside Passengers to be allowed twenty pound
+ Weight, and all above to be paid for at three half-pence per pound;
+ and to be in London on the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Evenings
+ weekly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ _N.B._--A Machine will set out on the same days, at the same time,
+ from the GREEN DRAGON, in Bishopsgate Street, London, for Norwich.
+
+In the following year, the "Widow Nasmith" and James Keith advertised
+that they had built large and commodious machines, to carry six
+inside, and reduced the fares to twenty shillings and ten shillings
+respectively; but they had apparently not succeeded in performing the
+journey in less time than a day and a half, for no mention is made of
+speed being accelerated. But a remarkable feature in that announcement
+is the extraordinary cheapness of the fares, little over twopence and a
+penny a mile for inside and outside passengers, at a time when prices
+on other roads ruled from twenty-five to fifty per cent. higher. This
+tells a tale of competition; but Time, the thief, has robbed us of all
+knowledge of those competitors.
+
+A year later the London and Ipswich Post Coaches were advertised to
+set out every week-day, and to perform the 69¼ miles in ten hours, an
+average pace of almost 7 miles an hour; a marvellous turn of speed
+for that age. As to whether those Post Coaches ever _did_ cover that
+distance in ten hours, we may reasonably express a doubt; but there
+was the promise, and 011 the strength of it the proprietors charged
+threepence a mile. As will be seen by the advertisement, these coaches
+carried no outside passengers:--
+
+  _Ipswich, August 17th, 1764._
+
+  THE LONDON AND IPSWICH POST COACHES
+
+ Set out on Monday, the 27th of August, at seven o'clock in the morning
+ from the BLACK BULL, in Bishopsgate, London, and at the same time from
+ the GREAT WHITE HORSE, in Ipswich, and continue every day (Sunday
+ excepted), to be at the above places the same evening at five o'clock;
+ each passenger to pay threepence per mile, and to be allowed eighteen
+ pounds luggage; all above to pay one penny per pound, and so in
+ proportion. The coaches, hung upon steel springs, are very easy, large
+ and commodious, carry six inside but no outside passengers whatever;
+ but have great conveniences for parcels or game (to keep them from the
+ weather), which will be delivered at London and Ipswich the same night.
+
+ As these coaches are sent out for the ease and expedition of
+ gentlemen and ladies travelling, the proprietors humbly hope for their
+ encouragement, and are determined to spare no pains to render it as
+ agreeable as they can.
+
+  Performed (if God permits) by--
+
+  PET. SHELDON, at the Bull, Bishopsgate Street, London.
+  THOMAS ARCHER, at the White Hart, Brentwood.
+  CHARLES KERRY, at the Black Boy, Chelmsford.
+  GEO. REYNOLDS, at the Three Cups, Colchester; and
+  CHAS. HARRIS, at the Great White Horse, Ipswich.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ _N.B._--The proprietors will not be answerable for any money, plate,
+ jewels, or writings, unless entered and paid for as such.
+
+The reader will perhaps have observed that this advertisement
+especially mentions a convenience for carrying game, and, as a matter
+of fact, game and oysters were prominent from an early period in
+the history of Norwich Road conveyances, and, by the middle of the
+eighteenth century, the Norfolk and Suffolk coaches had already earned
+quite a distinctive character in two seasons of the year, Michaelmas
+and Christmas. East Anglia has always abounded in game, and its
+broad heaths and extensive commons have been the breeding-grounds
+of innumerable geese and turkeys whose careers have ended on London
+dinner-tables. In those two seasons it was often difficult to secure
+a seat on or in any of the "up" coaches from Norwich or Ipswich, for
+while every available inch of space on the mails was occupied by
+festoons of dead birds consigned by country cousins to friends in town,
+the whole of a stage-coach was frequently chartered for the purpose
+of despatching heavy consignments of these noble poultry to the London
+market. Christmas provided extraordinary sights along the Norfolk Road,
+in the swaying coaches, with parcels and geese and turkeys mountains
+high on the roof; with barrels of Colchester natives in the boot, and
+hampers swinging heavily between the axle-trees on a shelf called "the
+cellar"; while from every rail or projection to which they could be
+either safely or hazardously tied depended other turkeys or braces of
+fowls, booked at the last moment before starting. It was something
+in those days to be a turkey or a goose, before whose importance the
+claims of human passengers faded; but it was a fleeting elevation which
+the philosophic did not envy, thinking that here indeed the poet was
+justified in his sounding line--
+
+  "The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
+
+[Illustration: THE NORWICH COACH AT CHRISTMAS TIDE. _After Robert
+Seymour, 1835._]
+
+That unfortunate genius, Robert Seymour, has left us a picture of the
+Norwich coach nearing London at Christmas time, with its feathered
+load. The drawing was made in 1835, at the very height of the Coaching
+Age, and shows from his own observation with what ingenuity every rail
+and projection was used to hang the birds from.
+
+Another highly specialised branch of traffic, which only left the road
+on the opening of the railway, was the constant service of fish waggons
+running between Harwich, Colchester and London, at the then express
+speed of 8 miles an hour.
+
+
+VII
+
+
+BETWEEN the early days of coaching and the end of that period, many
+changes took place on the Norwich Road. So late as 1798, the Mail, the
+"Expedition," and the "Post Coach" were the only coaches to Norwich,
+supplemented by three road waggons; two of them doing the journey
+twice a week, the third setting out weekly. Later came the "Norwich
+Times," "Gurney's Original Day Coach," the "Phænomenon," as it was
+originally spelt; the "Magnet," the Ipswich "Shannon," and the Ipswich
+"Blue." With the object of serving as many places as possible, and,
+incidentally, securing heavier bookings, the "Times" and Gurney's
+coaches took a somewhat circuitous route, leaving the direct road
+at Chelmsford, and going through Braintree, Halstead, Sudbury, Long
+Melford and Bury St Edmunds, rejoining the Norwich Road at Scole.
+
+But the lord of the road was the Mail Coach, beside which the stages
+were very commonplace affairs.
+
+The first mail-coach that ever ran the road between London and Norwich
+started in March 1785, and the service was from the beginning continued
+daily. Before that time the mails had been carried by post-boys, who
+began in 1741 to go six days a week instead of three, as they formerly
+had done.
+
+Mail-coaches are entirely things of the past, for the modern coaching
+revival has only brought back the smart stages and drags of the last
+years of the Coaching Age. The mails were expensive and exclusive
+affairs, constructed to carry only nine persons; four inside and five
+out, including coachman and guard. For the higher fares passengers paid
+they had not always the satisfaction of travelling faster than on the
+stages; but perhaps there was some dignity attaching to a seat on the
+mail which was lacking on ordinary coaches. And certainly they were
+surrounded by pomp and circumstance. The guard wore a scarlet coat
+and went armed with pistol, sword and blunderbuss; not, of course,
+for the protection of the passengers, but for the safe-guarding of
+His Majesty's mails. And everything gave place, as a matter of right
+and not merely courtesy, to the mail. Surly pikemen swung open their
+gates and asked no toll, for it was one of the privileges of the mail
+to go toll-free, and the highwaymen, if they walked in the ways of
+caution, left the gorgeous conveyance severely alone, reserving their
+best attentions for the plebeian stages. It was a much more serious
+thing to rob the mail than an ordinary coach, for a conviction was more
+certain to end in death, judges having hints from the Government how
+undesirable it was that mails should be ransacked and the robbers live.
+The rewards usually offered by the Post-office, too, were tempting to
+those who could inform if they would. £200 was the sum generally to be
+had for this service, together with the £40 reward by Act of Parliament
+for the apprehension of a highwayman; and if the mail was robbed
+within five miles of London, another £100. Courage, recklessness, and
+desperation--whichever we like to call it--often nerved the night-hawks
+to brave even so heavy a handicap as this, as this very road bears
+witness, in the daring robbery of the Ipswich Mail in 1822, when
+notes to the value of no less than £31,198 were stolen. In addition
+to the usual rewards, a sum of £1000 was offered by the losing firms
+of bankers, as shown in the accompanying old handbill, but without
+avail. This sum was afterwards increased to £5000, and a notification
+given that, in order to prevent the notes being changed, the ink on all
+new ones had been altered from black to red. But the robbers had the
+impudence to ask £6000 for the return of the notes. They had already
+passed £3000 worth, and naively said, in the negotiations they opened
+up, that the trouble they had taken and the risks they had run did
+not make it worth while to accept a smaller "reward." The bankers,
+however, would not spring another thousand, for by that time everyone
+was too shy of an "Ipswich black note," and it was extremely unlikely
+that any more could be passed. Negotiations were broken off; but a
+month later notes to the value of £28,000 were returned. The thieves
+were never traced, and although the bulk of their booty was useless to
+them, made the very substantial haul of over £3000 by their lawless
+enterprise.
+
+  =£1000 Reward.=
+
+  =STOLEN=
+
+  =FROM THE IPSWICH MAIL,=
+
+  On its way from London, _on the Night
+  of the 11th Sept. Inst._ the following
+
+  =COUNTRY BANK NOTES:=
+
+  Ipswich Bank, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.
+  _ALEXANDERS & Co._ on _HOARE & Co._
+
+  Woodbridge Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.
+  _ALEXANDERS & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._
+
+  Manningtree Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.
+  _ALEXANDER & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._
+
+  Hadleigh Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.
+  _ALEXANDER & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._
+
+  Particulars of which will be furnished at the different Bankers.
+
+  Whoever will give Information, either at ALEXANDERS and Co.
+  or at FRYS and Co., _St Mildred's Court, Poultry_, so that the
+  Parties may be apprehended, shall on his or their Conviction,
+  and the Recovery of the Property, receive the above REWARD.
+
+We have said that mail-coaches were gorgeous. They were painted
+in black and red. Not a shy, unassuming red, but the familiar and
+traditional Post-office hue. Also they bore the Royal coat-of-arms
+emblazoned upon the door panels, and the insignia of the four principal
+orders of knighthood on the quarters. There was no mistaking a
+mail-coach.
+
+The Norwich Mail, which took fifteen and a half hours to do the journey
+so late as 1821, was greatly improved in later years; and finally, in
+the early forties, when the railway reached Norwich and superseded the
+roads, performed the journey in eleven hours, thirty-eight minutes, at
+the very respectable average speed of 9½ miles an hour. It was not the
+only mail on the road, but shared the way so far as Ipswich with the
+Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail. This coach was unfortunate on two occasions
+between 1835 and 1839. On September 28th in the first year, when the
+coachman was climbing on to his box in the yard of the "Swan with Two
+Necks," the horses started away on their own accord, tumbling the
+coachman off and knocking down the helper who had been holding their
+heads. Dashing into Cheapside, they flung themselves against the back
+of the Poole Mail with such force that the coachman of that mail was
+also thrown off. He was taken unconscious to the hospital. Continuing
+their furious rush, the horses of the Ipswich Mail at length ran the
+pole of the coach between the iron railings of a house, and so were
+stopped.
+
+The second happening, in 1839, was somewhat similar. The mail had
+arrived at Colchester, and the coachman, throwing down the reins, got
+off the box. No one was at the horses' heads, and they started away and
+galloped down the High Street, until the near leader fell and broke
+his neck, stopping the team.
+
+It was by the Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail that David Copperfield
+journeyed down to Yarmouth on his second visit to Mr Peggotty. In the
+ordinary course of things, he would have reached Ipswich at 3·12 a.m.
+But on this occasion the weather was a potent factor in causing delay.
+He occupied the box seat, and remarked upon the look of the sky to the
+coachman while yet on the first stage out of London.
+
+"Don't you think that a very remarkable sky?" he asked; "I don't
+remember to have seen one like it."
+
+"Nor I--not equal to it," said the coachman. "That's mist, sir.
+There'll be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long."
+
+The description of this stormy sky is very fine, and seems to have been
+drawn from observation; just as true and as effective in its way as Old
+Crome's billowy cloudscapes, in his _Mousehold Heath_, or as any of
+Constable's rain-surcharged Suffolk scenes.
+
+"It was a murky confusion--here and there blotted with a colour like
+the colour of the smoke from damp fuel--of flying clouds tossed up into
+most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than
+there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in
+the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as
+if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way
+and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising
+then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much
+increased, and the sky was more overcast, and it blew hard.
+
+"But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely
+overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow harder
+and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face
+the wind. Many times in the dark part of the night (it was then late in
+September, when the nights were not short) the leaders turned about,
+or came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious apprehension that
+the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before
+this storm, like showers of steel; and at those times, when there was
+any shelter of trees or lee-walls to be got, we were fain to stop,
+in a sheer impossibility of continuing the struggle.... We came to
+Ipswich very late, having had to fight every inch of ground since we
+were ten miles out of London; and found a cluster of people in the
+market-place, who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of
+falling chimneys. Some of these, congregating about the inn-yard while
+we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped
+off a high church tower and flung into a bye-street, which they then
+blocked up."
+
+At Ipswich the Yarmouth coaches left the Norwich Road, and so the
+further adventures of David Copperfield do not in this place concern
+us.
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+HERE, as on the other roads, the early advent of the Motor Car, in
+1826, caused much commotion. The steam coaches of that period never
+achieved any success on this route, but caricatures of what might be
+expected were plentiful, and pictures of the Colchester "Dreadful
+Vengeance," the Norwich "Buster," and other fanciful conveyances, in
+the act of exploding and distributing their passengers in little pieces
+over a wide stretch of country, were popular. The railway itself came
+in for much abuse, and misguided and fanatical coach proprietors wasted
+their substance in pitiful attempts to compete with it. Among these
+was Israel Alexander, that Jewish hero of the Brighton Road in the
+early forties, who, although a first-class whip, was perhaps chiefly
+associated with the many upsettings of the Brighton "Quicksilver." He
+fell out with his noble friends on that highway, and, coming to the
+Norwich Road, ran a well-appointed coach to Colchester for a little
+while, until even the Eastern Counties Railway, then the slowest on
+earth, made the pace too quick for him. His turn-out was given the
+extraordinary name of the "Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," and might
+have continued much longer to carry those who were prejudiced against
+railways, had it not met with so many accidents.
+
+One who was contemporary with the coaching age has ingeniously divided
+coaching accidents into three classes:--1. Accidents to the coach; 2.
+Accidents to the horses; 3. Accidents to the harness. The most common
+kind of mishap to the coach was, he says, the breaking of an axle.
+This was not, as a rule, due to any faulty construction of that most
+essential feature of a public conveyance, but to the overloading either
+of passengers or goods, to which coaches were continually subject. The
+sudden snapping of an axle at a high speed or on a down grade produced
+a tremendous crash which generally shot coachman, guard and "outsides"
+in all directions. Happy those who, in such a case, were received into
+the thorny arms of a quickset hedge or the soft embraces of a mud-heap.
+
+Another kind of mishap, not always accidental, was that of a wheel
+coming off; an incident often caused in early times, before the
+introduction of patent axle-boxes, by the mischievous removal of the
+lynch-pin by some unscrupulous rascal in the employ of the rival coach
+proprietor.
+
+The sudden snapping of a skid-chain while descending a hill, resulting
+in the coach running on to the horses and a general overthrow, in
+which horses' legs and passengers heads came into unwonted contact,
+was perhaps as uncomfortable a kind of disaster as could be imagined.
+Overloading, too, sometimes had the effect of rendering a coach
+top-heavy, when a slight lack of caution in running round curves would
+upset it.
+
+Accidents to the horses were:--casting a shoe, involving lameness, and
+perhaps a fall; tripping and stumbling on loose stones and rolling
+over; slipping up in frosty weather; and kicking over the traces or the
+splinter-bar.
+
+Accidents to the harness usually happened to the traces, which commonly
+snapped under an uneven strain. To cobble them up with twine, and so
+complete a stage, was a common practice. In such cases, the thoughts
+of passengers during the remaining miles were, like those of the poet,
+"too deep for words." Most nerve-shaking of all these varied and
+untoward happenings, however, was the breaking of the reins. Rotted
+by age, by the sun's heat and the winter's frosts, they would "come
+away" in the coachman's hands at that worst of moments;--when he was
+holding in his horses downhill. In that contingency, says our ancient,
+who, in the modern slang phrase, has "been there," it was the approved
+thing to say your prayers first and then take a flying leap (result, a
+broken neck, or fractured leg: the bone protruding over the top of the
+Blucher).
+
+"Then shrieked the timid and stood"--or, rather, sat--"still the
+brave;" who had this consolation, that if they fared no better than
+those who jumped, the odds were that they fared no worse.
+
+To be dragged at hurricane pace by four runaway horses (for in such
+a case they generally _did_ so run) with the broken reins trailing
+helplessly after them, was to acquire the knowledge of an inner meaning
+in the word "terror." In escapades of this kind the "insides" were in
+the most unenviable situation; for the "outsides," including coachman
+and guard, took the better, if unheroic, part of crawling over the roof
+and slipping down the back of the coach into the road. The wisdom of
+their doing so would, in most cases, be proved a few seconds later by
+the sound of a distant crash as the coach hurtled against some roadside
+tree and dissolved into matchwork, while the "insides" were stuck as
+full of splinters as a "fretful porcupine" of quills.
+
+The "human boy" was as much the terror of the old coachman as he is
+of the modern cyclist. The sight of a boy with a hoop reduced him to
+a state of purple indignation or of quivering anxiety, according to
+temperament. Many an one of our great-grandfathers, attired in the odd
+costume of boys in that period, and trundling a hoop along the road,
+has felt the lash of the coachman's whip. The following little story
+will show us why.
+
+"When a very little boy," says one of our forebears, "I once upset
+a four-horse coach by losing control over my hoop, which, to my
+consternation, bowled among the legs of the team. I shall never
+forget the horror with which I for an instant saw the spirited
+horses floundering about with that hateful hoop among them, or heard
+the execrations of the coachman and the shouts of the passengers.
+Abandoning the wretched plaything to its fate, I took to my heels down
+a bye-lane, the portentous crash that followed only accelerating my
+speed."
+
+Coach proprietors were favourite targets for Fate's worst shafts.
+They were a hard-working, much-enduring class of men; up early and to
+bed late, retiring in good circumstances and rising perhaps ruined
+through some unforeseen accident. They were "common carriers" in law,
+and bound under many Acts of Parliament to deliver goods uninjured at
+their destination. As carriers of passengers, it is true, they were
+only required to exercise all "due care and diligence" for the safety
+of their customers, and were exempt from liability in case of mishaps
+through the "act of God" or the unforeseen; but the observance of due
+precautions and a daily inspection of the coach had to be proved in
+case of injury to passengers, or in default they were held liable for
+damages.
+
+Thus, the carelessness of any one of his many servants might mean
+a very serious thing to a coach proprietor. In those days the old
+Anglo-Saxon Law of Deodand was not only in existence, but in a very
+nourishing and aggressive condition. Indeed, coaching had practically
+rescued it from neglect. It was a law which, in cases of fatal
+injuries, empowered the coroner's jury to levy a fine, which might vary
+from sixpence to a thousand pounds, upon the object that caused the
+mischief.
+
+The very multiplicity of tribunals before whom the personally
+unoffending coach proprietor was liable to be haled was in itself
+terrifying. There was the already-mentioned coroners jury; the jury on
+the criminal side in trials at the Assizes for manslaughter, and the
+other "twelve good men and true" who assessed damages in the Sheriff's
+Court.
+
+How even the most well-meaning of men might thus suffer is evident
+in the case of a proprietor who was cast in damages from excess of
+caution. For additional security, and in order to protect it from road
+grit, he had a part of an axle incased in wood. One day this axle broke
+and a serious accident happened, resulting in an action against him for
+damages. He lost the day; the judge ruling that, although no proof of a
+defective axle was adduced, a flaw _might_ have existed which a proper
+daily examination would have detected had the extra precaution for
+safety not been adopted.
+
+
+IX
+
+
+WHAT Aldgate might now have been had the original intention of the
+Eastern Counties directorate to place their terminus there been
+successful, we need not stop to inquire. But, as a good deal has
+already been said on the subject of coaches and coaching, it will be of
+interest to learn what were the views of the projectors of the Eastern
+Counties Railway. With their original prospectus was issued a map of
+the proposed railway from London to Norwich and Yarmouth, by which it
+appears that, instead of going to the left of the road from London, as
+far as Seven Kings and Chadwell Heath, it was originally intended to
+construct the line on the right of the road so far. Between Romford and
+Chelmsford the line has been made practically as first proposed, but
+onwards, from Chelmsford to Lexden, it is again on the other side of
+the highway; and, north of Colchester, goes wide of the original plan
+all the way to Norwich.
+
+In many ways this document is very much of a curiosity at this time,
+as also are the hopes and aspirations of the directors at the first
+General Meeting of the company. The chairman, for instance, confidently
+anticipated dividends of 22 per cent., upon which one of the confiding
+shareholders replied that the report was most satisfactory and the
+prospects held out by no means overcharged. "If this understanding,"
+said he, "fails in producing the dividend of 22 per cent., calculated
+upon in the report, then, I must say, human calculations and
+expectation can no longer be depended upon." O! most excellent man. But
+better is to come.
+
+"Should I live to see the completion of this and similar undertakings,"
+he resumed, "I do believe I shall live to see misery almost banished
+from the earth. From the love I bear my species, I trust that I may
+not be too sanguine, and that I may yet witness the happy end that I
+have pictured to myself." His was, you think, the faith that might
+have moved mountains; but it did not produce that promised 22 per
+cent., nor, although we now have many thousands more miles of railway
+than he ever dreamed of, has the millennium yet arrived. Even the most
+far-seeing have not yet discovered any heralds of its approach. Let
+us drop the tribute of a tear to the sorrows of this excellent person,
+whose love of his species and touching anticipation of 22 per cent.
+dividends were so beautifully blended, and so cruelly disappointed.
+
+For some years small (very small) dividends were paid. Hudson, the
+"Railway King," paid them out of capital. "It made things pleasant," he
+said, when charged with such financially immoral practices. Alas! poor
+Hudson, you lived before your time, and went to another world before
+such "dishonest" doings as yours were sanctified in principle by Acts
+of Parliament which authorise payments of dividends out of capital in
+the case of railways under construction.
+
+In 1848 the Eastern Counties Railway was in Chancery, and its very
+locomotives and carriages were seized for debt; while for years
+afterwards its name was a synonym for delay. The satirists of that
+period were as busy with the Eastern Counties as those of our own time
+are with the South-Eastern Railway. Every journey has an end; "even
+the Eastern Counties' trains come in at last," said Thackeray, very
+charitably.
+
+In 1862 it was amalgamated with several minor undertakings, and
+re-named the "Great Eastern Railway"; "great in nothing but the name,"
+as the spiteful said.
+
+When matters were at their worst, the Lord Cranborne of that time was
+invited to accept the position of chairman and to help extricate the
+company from its difficulties. He accepted the post in January 1868
+and held it until December 1871. In April 1868 he had succeeded to the
+title of Marquis of Salisbury. Thus the statesman and prime minister of
+later years was once a great figure in the railway world. His financial
+abilities helped to put the Great Eastern line on a firm basis, and
+when he left it the railway was already greatly improved in every
+respect. To-day, instead of being a "shocking example," it is a model
+to be copied by other lines.
+
+
+X
+
+
+ALTHOUGH the last of the old coaches was long ago broken up, and the
+Norwich Road is no longer lively with mail and stage travellers, it
+has, in common with several other roads out of London, witnessed a
+wholly unexpected revival, in the shape of the Parcel Mail service
+between London and Ipswich. When the Parcel Post came into being on the
+1st August 1883, it was speedily discovered by the General Post-office
+authorities that in paying, according to contract, 55 per cent. of
+the gross receipts to the railway companies for the mere carriage of
+parcels, they were paying too much. Accordingly, a system of Parcel
+Mail coaches was established on several of the old roads, commencing
+with the London to Brighton Parcel Mail, in June 1887. A London and
+Chelmsford four-horse mail was soon added, and this was shortly
+afterwards extended to Colchester, and thence to Ipswich by cart. This
+curious enterprise of the Post-office was immediately successful,
+and it has ever since been found to effect a large saving over the
+railway charges. Nor is time lost in delivery. The down mail leaves
+London at a quarter to ten o'clock every night and the parcels arrive
+at Colchester and Ipswich in time for the first delivery the next
+morning; while the country parcels come up to London by an equally
+early hour. The way in which the service is worked will be gathered
+from the accompanying official way-sheet of the down mails.
+
+  GENERAL POST OFFICE
+
+  THE MOST NOBLE THE MARQUIS OF LONDONDERRY
+  Postmaster-General
+
+  LONDON, CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER, & IPSWICH ROAD
+  PARCEL SERVICE.
+                                                                 This
+  Guard's Remarks as                          Proper  Actual    Column
+  to Delays, &c.                              Times   Times   to be left
+                         Date  190 .          H. M.   H. M.      blank
+
+  Coach Service          Mount Pleasant          P.M.
+  between      Distance  Parcel Office     dep.  9 45
+  London and     M.F.
+  Colchester.     3 0    Eastern District {arr. 10  8
+    Contractor--           P.O.           {dep. 10 10
+    C. Webster,
+  279 Whitechapel
+    Road, E.     11 3    Romford          {arr. 11 40
+                                          {dep. 11 42
+  Cart between                                   A.M.
+   Colchester &   6 2    Brentwood        {arr. 12 29
+   Ipswich.                               {dep. 12 31
+
+  Contractor--    5 0    Ingatestone      {arr. 1 9
+  F. W. Canham,                           {dep. 1 11
+  Ipswich.
+                  6 0    Chelmsford       {arr. 2 0
+                                          {dep. 2 5
+
+                  8 6    Witham           {arr. 3 13
+                                          {dep. 3 15
+
+                  3 2    Kelvedon         {arr. 3 41
+                                          {dep. 3 43
+
+                  9 6    Colchester       {arr. 5 0
+                                          {dep. 5 5
+
+                         Stratford St.    {arr. 5 58
+                           Mary           {dep. 6 0
+
+                 18 2    Ipswich           arr. 7 20
+  Signature
+  of Guard       71 5
+
+              T. E. SIFTON, Inspector-General of Mails.
+
+  The Guard in charge of the Coach must report the cause of any Delay.
+  He must enter all Remarks and Times in the proper Columns. This Bill
+  to be sent, as addressed, by First Post.
+
+  TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH
+  PARCEL MAIL.
+
+The up service, starting with the mail-cart from Ipswich at 7·9 p.m.
+and continued from Colchester by four-horse van at 9·30 p.m., brings
+the country parcels to Mount Pleasant at 4·30 a.m., throughout the
+year. Up and down mails meet at Ingatestone at 1·9 a.m. On this
+service, as on all others, the vans go through, but the drivers and
+guards exchange places; the London men changing on to the van from
+Colchester at Ingatestone, and returning to London; the Colchester men
+taking over the down van and similarly returning whence they came.
+
+It is a curious and unexpected revival of old methods, but an entirely
+successful one. No highwayman has ever attempted to "hold up" the
+Parcel Mail, for the last of that trade has for generations mouldered
+in his grave; but should any amateurs essay to complete this revival
+of old coaching days by waylaying the mail, the guards would be found
+well armed. Their virgin steel and untried pistols have for years been
+carried without any excuse for using them; but there need be no doubt
+that, were the occasion to arrive, they would defend their parcels--the
+pounds of country butter, the eggs, and wild flowers, or the
+miscellaneous consignment from London--with their hearts' blood. There
+are more romantic things in the world to die for than postal parcels
+of eggs, cheese and butter, but the ennobling word DUTY might glorify
+such a sacrifice for the sake of a pound's weight of "best fresh," or a
+dozen of "new laid."
+
+But although the possibility of attack is remote, a spice of danger and
+romance savours the conduct of the parcel mails.
+
+The up Colchester Parcel Mail had a mishap on the night of October 11,
+1890, when, owing to the prevailing fog, it was driven into a ditch
+near Margaretting. Happily, both coachman and guard escaped injury, the
+heavy vehicle resting against the hedge. The coachman, mounting one of
+his team, and hurrying back to Chelmsford, succeeded in overtaking the
+down coach, which, returning to the scene of the accident, unloaded and
+transferred the parcels, and continued to London, leaving the down mail
+to be forwarded with local help. It eventually arrived at Colchester
+four hours late.
+
+
+XI
+
+
+COACHING days, old and new, having now been disposed of, we might
+set off down the road at once, were it not that our steps are at
+once arrested by the sight of the "Red Lion" Inn, at the corner of
+Whitechapel Road and Leman Street, which, together with the "Old Red
+Lion," adjoining, stands on a site made historic by Dick Turpin's lurid
+career.
+
+It was in the yard of the old house that Turpin shot Matthew King
+in 1737. He had stolen a fine horse belonging to a Mr Major, near
+the "Green Man," Epping, and had been traced by means of the animal
+to the inn, where he was found by the Bow Street runners in company
+with Matthew and Robert King, birds of like feather with himself. The
+landlord endeavoured to arrest King, who fired at him without effect,
+calling to Turpin, "Dick! shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"
+
+Turpin had his usual extensive armoury on his person--three brace of
+pistols and a carbine slung across his back. He fired, and shot Matthew
+King, whether by accident or design is not known. King first exclaimed,
+"Dick! you have shot me; make off," but is said afterwards to have
+cursed him as he went, for a coward. King died a week later of his
+wounds, Turpin fleeing to a deserted mansion in Essex, and thence to a
+cave in Epping Forest. It is usually said that it was the more famous
+Tom King who met so dramatic an end, but original authorities give
+Matthew; and certainly we find _a_ Tom King, highwayman, decorously
+executed at Tyburn eighteen years later.
+
+[Illustration: THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT
+MATTHEW KING. _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854._]
+
+We have met Turpin before, notably at York, where he made an end, two
+years after this exploit. This especial hero of the Penny Dreadful and
+the romantic imagination of the average errand boy belongs especially
+to this road, for he was an Essex man, born at Hempstead in 1705.
+Apprenticed to a Whitechapel butcher in his youth, he commenced his
+career of low villainy by stealing some cattle from a Plaistow
+farmer, and then joined a band of smugglers and deer-stealers and
+housebreakers in Epping Forest, where they set up a storehouse of
+stolen goods in the cave just mentioned. This band became so notorious
+that a sum of fifty guineas was soon offered for their arrest; but it
+was not until the amount had been doubled that two of the ringleaders
+were caught and hanged. The gang thus broken up, Turpin was reduced
+to scouring the roads singly, and pursued a solitary career until one
+dreary February night in 1735, while patrolling the Cambridge Road,
+he saw a horseman approaching through the mist. At the time-honoured
+demand, "Your money or your life!" the stranger simply laughed.
+
+"What!" said he, "should dog eat dog? We are of a like trade."
+
+Thus Turpin and Tom King met, and struck up a partnership. If only one
+quarter of the deeds assigned to Turpin were true, his would be a very
+gallant, as well as phenomenally busy, figure on the roads of England.
+Although by no means a mythical person, the stories told of him nearly
+all belong to the regions of romance, and his true history shows him to
+have had few redeeming qualities. Many of the old knights of the road
+were courageous, and hand in hand with their courage went a humour not
+seldom kindly; but Turpin was a bloodthirsty ruffian whose courage is
+not an established fact, and whose humour, like the "tender mercies of
+the wicked," was cruel, not to say ferocious. It is quite hopeless to
+attempt to finally destroy the great Turpin myth after this lapse of
+time: Harrison Ainsworth's romance has enjoyed too great and too long a
+popularity for that; but let the attempt here be made to paint him as
+the cowardly ruffian he was.
+
+Whitechapel, quite apart from memories of Turpin, owns an unenviable
+repute, and its very name is a synonym for villainy. Its bad savour,
+however, goes back no greater distance in time than the first half
+of the eighteenth century, for until that period it was not built
+upon, and indeed "Whitechapel Common" was spoken of so late as 1761,
+maps proving the old church to have been quite rural at that date.
+Originally a chapel-of-ease to the great mother-parish of Stepney,
+the district was erected into a separate parish so far back as the
+fourteenth century and the original "white chapel"--doubtless so called
+from its mediæval coats of whitewash--made a church. But old names
+cling, and although it has been a church for over six hundred years, it
+has not been able to confer its more dignified title upon the parish
+itself. Thus the name of Whitechapel is doubly misleading nowadays, for
+it is no longer a chapelry and its stately church is in red brick; so
+that there is some force in the argument for re-christening the borough
+and dignifying it by a revival of the old name of Eastminster, owned by
+that not very fortunate Abbey of St Mary Grace, founded by Edward the
+Third in 1348, which formerly stood on the site of the Royal Mint.
+
+[Illustration: WHITECHAPEL OLD CHURCH.]
+
+St Mary's, Whitechapel, is a beautiful church, built in 1877, burnt
+August 20, 1880, and since restored. It replaced the ugly old building,
+which was "taken down for the simple reason that it would not stand
+up." The ancient wrangling over its full title of St Mary Matfelon is
+not yet done, and rash would be he who voted for any particular one
+among the rival derivatives of the name. Matfelon, holds one school,
+was the name of a forgotten benefactor, whose particular benefactions
+are not stated. Who, then, would found, since benefits are thus forgot?
+"_Mariæ, matri et filio_," an ancient dedication, say others; while yet
+different parties find its source in a Syriac word meaning "mother of a
+son" = the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the most entertaining legend, however,
+is that which tells how it originated in the killing of a murderer,
+in 1429, by the women of Whitechapel. "Between Estren and Witsontyd,
+a fals Breton mordred a wydewe in here bed, the which find hym for
+almasse withought Algate, in the suburbes of London, and bar away alle
+that sche hadde, and afterwards he toke socour of Holy Chirche in
+Suthwark; but at the last he took the crosse and forswore the kynge's
+land; and as he went hys waye, it happyd hym to come be the same place
+where he had don that cursed dede, and women of the same parysh comen
+out with stones and canell dong, and ther maden an ende of hym in the
+hyghe strete." These things seem quite in keeping with Whitechapel's
+evil fame.
+
+The old church, as it stood until well into the nineteenth century, is
+shown opposite this page, with one of the old road-waggons crawling
+past. In another view of the same date the High Street itself is
+seen, its long perspective fully bearing out the old description of
+spaciousness. At the same time, it is seen to be empty enough to
+resemble the street of a provincial town. The houses are exceedingly
+old, the road paved with knobbly stones, and the shop windows
+artfully constructed with the apparent object of obstructing instead
+of admitting the light. Very few of these old shop-fronts are now
+left, but a good specimen is that of a bell-founding firm at No. 34
+Whitechapel Road.
+
+[Illustration: WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE.]
+
+This old picture has long ceased to be representative of Whitechapel's
+everyday aspect. The coach has long ago whirled away into limbo,
+the elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to Abraham's, or
+another's, bosom, and Whitechapel knows their kind no more. Bustle,
+and a dismal overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers' barrows,
+tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic of to-day. Also, the
+Jewish element is very pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably
+dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names of Cohen, Abraham,
+Solomon and the like, and others ending in "baum," or "heim." But
+on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious street regains
+something of its old rural character, in the open-air hay and straw
+market held here, the largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad
+thoroughfare and overflows into the side streets: the countrymen
+who have come up on the great waggons by road from remote parts of
+Essex lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling hay or straw,
+attending to their horses, or refreshing in the old taverns. It is
+Arcady come again. The eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the
+hay-wains, and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic scent of their
+heaped-up loads. It is true that Central Londoners also have their
+so-called Haymarket, but hay is the least likely of articles to be
+purchased there in these days.
+
+What do they think, those countrymen, of the Whitechapel folks, the
+"chickaleary blokes," used, as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth
+century remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy," from
+robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe," and the selling of painted
+sparrows for canaries? Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr
+Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice neighbourhood," said
+Sam, as they rumbled along the crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery
+remarkable circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and oysters go
+together.... The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to
+be for oysters.... An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The
+street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think that ven a man's
+wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in regular
+desperation." Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper depth
+than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty; whelks and villainy foregather
+in Whitechapel at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.
+
+But the poverty and the villainy of Whitechapel must not be too greatly
+insisted upon. They may easily be overdone. Loyal hearts and brave
+lives--all the braver that they are not flaunted in the face of the
+world--exist in the cheerless and unromantic grey streets that lead
+off the main road. The domestic virtues flourish here as well as--if
+not better than--in the West End. The heroes and heroines of everyday
+life--the greater in their heroism that they do not know of it--live
+in hundreds of thousands in the dingy and unrelieved dulness of the
+streets to right and left of Whitechapel Road and of the Mile End Road,
+that go with so majestic a breadth and purposeful directness to Bow.
+
+
+XII
+
+
+LET the Londoner who has never been "down East," and so is given to
+speaking contemptuously of it, take a journey down the Whitechapel and
+Mile End Roads, and see with what an astonishing width, both in respect
+of roadway and foot-pavements, those noble thoroughfares are endowed.
+The London he has already known owns no streets so wide, save only in
+the isolated and unimportant instance of Langham Place; while, although
+it cannot be said that, taken individually, the houses of the great
+East-End thoroughfares are at all picturesque, yet there is a certain
+interesting quality in the roads as a whole, lacking elsewhere. This,
+doubtless, is partly explained by the strangeness of the East-ender's
+garb, and partly by the many Jewish and other foreigners who throng the
+pavements.
+
+A strangely-named public-house--the "Grave Maurice"--is one of the
+landmarks of the Whitechapel Road. Many have set themselves the task of
+finding the origin of that sign and its meaning; but their efforts have
+been baulked by the very multiplicity of historic Maurices, grave or
+otherwise. The sign may originally have been the "Graf Maurice," Prince
+Maurice of Bohemia, brother of the better-known Prince Rupert, the
+dashing cavalier, but a difficulty arises from the fact that there was
+another "Graf Maurice" at the same time, in the person of the equally
+well-known Prince Maurice of Nassau, who died of grief when the Spanish
+overran Holland and besieged Breda. Nor does the uncertainty end here,
+for Dekker uses the expression "grave maurice" in one of his plays,
+written at least thirty years before the time of those princes, in a
+passage which reads as though it were the usual nickname at that period
+for an officer.
+
+Beyond the house owning this perplexing sign we come to the beginning
+of the Mile End Road, one mile, as its name implies, from Aldgate, and
+for long the site of a turnpike-gate, only removed with the close of
+the Coaching Age. Rowlandson has left us an excellent view of Mile End
+Turnpike as it was in his time; with isolated blocks of houses, groups
+of rustic cottages and a background of trees, to show how rural were
+the surroundings towards the close of the eighteenth century; while
+maps of that period mark the road onwards, bordered by fields, with
+"Ducking Pond Row" standing solitary and the ducking-pond itself close
+behind, where the scolds and shrews of that age were soused.
+
+The Ducking-Pond as an institution is as obsolete as the rack, the
+thumb-screw, and other ingenious devices of the "good old times"; but
+most towns a hundred years ago still kept a cucking or ducking-stool;
+while, if they had no official pond for the purpose, any dirty pool
+would serve, and the dirtier it were the better it was esteemed.
+
+[Illustration: MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. _After Rowlandson._]
+
+"The Way of punishing scolding Women is pleasant enough," says an old
+traveller. "They fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve or
+fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so that these two Pieces
+of Wood, with their two Ends embrace the Chair, which hangs between
+them on a sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and always
+remains in the natural horizontal Position in which a Chair should be,
+that a Person may sit conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let
+it down. They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River, and over
+this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the two Pieces of Wood, at
+one End of which the Chair hangs just over the Water. They place the
+Woman in the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often as the
+Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate Heat."
+
+One has only to go and look at the average rural pond to imagine the
+horrors of this punishment. The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the
+clinging green duckwood, common to them, must have made a ducking the
+event of a lifetime.
+
+The difference here, at Mile End, between those times and these is
+emphasised by the close-packed streets on either side, and by the
+crowded tram-cars that ply back and forth.
+
+Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in the little
+old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn that stands by itself, in
+advance of the frontage of the houses, and takes up a goodly portion
+of the broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when land was not
+so valuable as now; when local authorities were easy-going, and when
+anyone who had the impudence to squat down upon the public paths could
+do so, and, remaining there undisturbed for a period of twenty-one
+years, could thus derive a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is
+an explanation of the existence of the "Vine" in this position.
+
+Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses, built in 1695, for the
+housing of old skippers and shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little
+houses and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle where the
+old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly while the curious passers-by
+linger to gaze at them from the pavement, as though they were some
+strange kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the pages of fiction
+as this quiet haven in midst of the roaring streets, screened from them
+by walls and gates of curious architecture surmounted by models of the
+gallant old galleons that have long ceased to rove the raging main.
+It is a spot alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by the
+towering breweries, which indeed would have bought the old place and
+destroyed it a few years ago, but for the indignation aroused when the
+proposal of the governing body of the almshouses to sell became known.
+
+There is nothing else to detain the explorer on his way into Essex.
+The People's Palace, it is true, is a remarkable place, the result of
+Sir Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the East who would
+get culture and find recreation, but it is a dream realised as an
+architectural nightmare, and is a very terrible example of what is done
+to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art and Philanthropy.
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+AT last, by this broadest of broad roads, we come to Stratford-le-Bow
+and its parish church. In these hurried times, and for some centuries
+past, the old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and as "Bow"
+alone it is familiar to all East-enders. The place is nowadays chiefly
+associated with Bryant & May and matches, but there yet remain many old
+Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by the roadside, telling of days
+long before "patent safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel
+and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.
+
+"Bow," says the _Ambulator_ of 1774, "is a village a little to the
+east of Mile End, inhabited by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here
+has been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little inferior to
+that of Chelsea." That description is now somewhat out of date. The
+manufactory of porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is scarce,
+and treasured accordingly. Whitsters--that is to say, bleachers of
+linen--and scarlet dyers, also, are to seek.
+
+Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound traveller in bold and
+rugged fashion; its time-worn tower standing midway of the road and
+challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little River Lea, just
+beyond, to Stratford and into Essex. Church and churchyard split the
+road up into two channels and thus destroy its width, which it never
+afterwards regains until the suburbs are passed and the open country
+reached. A modern touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in
+advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory attitude
+from its granite pedestal, and erected in his lifetime; recalling
+the fervent hero-worshipping days of the "People's William." The
+outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them that see statues raised
+to themselves, unless indeed they be made of finer clay than most
+mortals, kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years this bronze
+Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been made to preside, as it were,
+over an underground public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst
+he rises, absurdly eloquent.
+
+[Illustration: BOW.]
+
+Just how Stratford-le-Bow received its name is an interesting piece
+of history. Both here and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea was
+anciently crossed by a paved stone ford of Roman construction,
+continuing the highway into Essex; but when that river's many channels,
+swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward the Thames, the
+low-lying lands of what we now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were
+for long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For months together
+the approaches to the Lea were lost in floods, and the real channels of
+the river became so deep that those who valued their lives and goods
+dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor travellers thus
+waterlogged came the good and pious Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the
+First. "Having herself been well washed in the water," as old Leland
+says, she fully appreciated the necessity for bridges, and accordingly
+directed the raising of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the
+building of two stone structures, of which one was the original "Bow"
+Bridge; "a rare piece of work, for before that time the like had never
+been seen in England." It seems to have been the stone arch that gave
+its name of "Bow," and if an arched stone bridge was so remarkable in
+those times that it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular, or
+"bow" shape, it must have been either the first, or among the earliest,
+of stone bridges built, in times when others were constructed of timber.
+
+The original name of the village that afterwards sprang up here, on the
+hither or Middlesex shore, was thus singularly contradictory; meaning
+"the street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratford on the Essex
+side was in those days known as Stratford Langthorne.
+
+The good queen not only built the bridges and causeways, but endowed
+them with land and a water-mill, conveying those properties to the
+Abbess of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for the maintenance
+of the works. Having done all this, she died. Some years afterwards a
+Cistercian monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey Mills now
+stand, and the then Abbess of Barking, of opinion that the Abbot of
+that house, being near, would find it easier to look after the bridges
+than herself, reconveyed the property, together with its obligations,
+to him. The trust was kept for a time and then delegated to a certain
+Godfrey Pratt, who had a house built for him on the causeway and
+enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping the works in
+repair. Pratt did so well with his annual stipend and the alms given
+him by wayfarers that the Abbot at length discontinued the grant.
+Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite unauthorised toll-bar and
+levied "pontage" on all except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This
+went on for many years, until the scandal grew too great, and, in
+consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot dispossessed Godfrey
+Pratt of his toll-bar and resumed the control himself.
+
+Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the road had been so
+greatly worn down that the feet of travellers and those of the horses
+often went through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently, to undergo
+an extensive cobbling process; a treatment, by the way, continued
+through the centuries until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.
+
+In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork of all ages. The
+property for its maintenance had, of course, been lost in the
+confiscation of monastic estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair
+afterwards fell upon the local authorities, who always preferred to
+patch and tinker it so long as such a course was possible. On February
+14, 1839, the existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one
+seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+"FAREWELL, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I heard say, honest
+Conscience was once drowned."
+
+Thus says Will Kemp, in his _Nine Days' Wonder_, the account of a
+dance he jigged from London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It
+is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that old joke about the
+drowning of conscience here, and so we will also without delay "have
+over" the modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy flour mills,
+and crossing another branch of the Lea by Channelsea Bridge, come to
+Stratford.
+
+Here, then, begins the county of calves, according to the popular
+jest that to be a native of Essex is to be an "Essex Calf." It is not
+generally regarded as a complimentary title, for of all young animals
+the calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward. To this day in
+rural England the contemptuous exclamation "you great calf!" is used
+of an awkward, overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings. Yet,
+if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer on this subject, the
+nickname had a complimentary origin, "for," said he, "this county
+produceth calves of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."
+
+We have already seen that the French spoken at Stratford-le-Bow in
+Chaucer's time was a scoff and a derision. To-day, neither on the
+Middlesex nor the Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages
+either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of every kind, the
+making of matches that strike only on the box, the varied work of the
+Stratford and West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations
+close at hand; while the business of covering the potato-fields, the
+celery-beds and the grounds of the old suburban mansions with endless
+rows of suburban dwellings is engrossing attention down the road.
+Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban, and Ilford far
+greater in these days than it ever was when its "great" prefix was
+never pretermitted. London, indeed, stretches far out along this road,
+and the country is reached only after many miles of that debatable
+land which belongs neither to country nor town. Heralds of the great
+metropolis appear to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far
+away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the dim presentiment of
+some vast capital," as De Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like
+a misgiving."
+
+Stratford has not improved since coaches left the road. It has grown
+greatly, and grown dirty, squalid and extremely trying to noses that
+have not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure factories and
+other odoriferous industries. But it is a place of great enterprises
+and great and useful markets, and when its introductory mean streets
+are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone Road branches off to
+the left, looks by contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton
+Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park in succession, past a
+building which, whether as an institution or an example of beautiful
+architecture, would well grace the West. The West Ham Public Library
+and Technical Institute is here referred to. "Irish Row," on the
+way, marked on old maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages
+inhabited until recent years by a turbulent colony of London-Irish
+market-gardening labourers, subsidised by Mrs Nelson in times of
+coaching competition to impede hated rivals as they came past the
+"Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of Manor Park; a house which,
+like the "Coach and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a legitimate
+coaching trade to something more in the gin-palace sort. This is not
+to say that the staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct
+negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish Row, but when the
+rival Ipswich "Umpire" or the "New Colchester" coaches developed much
+sporting competition and their coachmen evinced a dogged determination
+to be first over Bow Bridge on the way up to London, and, by
+consequence, the first to arrive at their destination, why, an obscure
+hint or two on the part of one of her numerous staff, accompanied by
+the wherewithal for a drink, produced wonders in the way of highway
+obstruction. But such recollections are become unsubstantial as the
+fabric of which dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions of
+tramways and interminable rows of suburban shops that conduct to Ilford
+Bridge.
+
+Great Ilford lies on the other side of the sullen Roding, that rolls
+a muddy tide in aimless loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking
+Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial been approached by a bridge
+replacing the "eald," or old, ford, whence its name derives and not
+from that crossing of the stream being an "ill" ford, as imaginative,
+but uninstructed, historians would have us believe; although the slimy
+black mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the exercise of fording
+an ill enough enterprise. Ilford is now in the throes of development
+and is fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere suburb. Let us
+leave it for places less sophisticated.
+
+The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving Ilford by moonshine, set
+forward "dauncing within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two
+strong Jades were beating and byting either of other." We take this
+to mean two women fighting on the road, until the context is reached,
+where he says that their hooves formed an arch over him and that he
+narrowly escaped being kicked on the head. It then becomes evident that
+he is talking of horses.
+
+Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and in more decorous
+fashion than that of Will Kemp, we come, past an inn oddly named
+the "Cauliflower"--probably as a subtle compliment to the abounding
+market-gardens of the neighbourhood--to the long, straight perspective
+of the road across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of new suburban
+"villa" streets now cover the waste on either side, so that the
+beginnings of the plain are not so much heath as modern suburb,
+created by the Great Eastern Railway's suburban stations and by the
+far-reaching enterprises of land corporations, which here carry on the
+usual speculations of the speculative builder on a gigantic scale. In
+acre upon acre of closely-packed streets, each one with a horrible
+similarity to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning
+clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty London live and lose their
+individuality, and pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman
+of a century ago waited impatiently behind the ragged thickets and
+storm-tossed thorn trees of Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there
+now rises the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway between
+Ilford station and that of Chadwell Heath, the recent enormous growth
+of population on this sometime waste has led to the erection of the
+new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes," while widened lines
+have been provided for the increased train services. "Seven Kings"
+is a romantic name, but who those monarchs were, and what they were
+ever doing on the Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable for
+cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is impossible to say. Many wits
+have been at work on the problem, but have been baffled. The natural
+assumption is that at this spot, marked on old maps as "Seven Kings
+Watering," the seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily
+records no such meeting, but there was no _Court Circular_ in those
+times, and so many royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked,
+except locally and in some fashion similar to this. So let us assume
+the kings met here and watered their horses at the "watering," which
+was a place where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash.
+The stream still crosses the highway, but civilisation has put it in a
+pipe and tucked it away underground.
+
+[Illustration: SEVEN KINGS.]
+
+A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway at this point, known as
+Stoup Lane ("stoup" meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of the
+Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish. Here it was, in 1794, on a
+night of December, that a King's messenger, James Martin by name, was
+shot by five footpads. The register of St Edmund's, Romford, records
+the burial of this unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.
+
+Let us not, however, in view of the more or less grisly dangers that
+still await belated wayfarers on this road, enlarge too greatly on
+the lawlessness of old times; for the homeward-bound resident making
+for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs towards the stroke
+of ten o'clock is not infrequently startled by the sinister figure
+of a footpad springing from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and
+demanding--_not_ his money or his life, as in the old formula, but--a
+halfpenny! This invariable demand of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath
+footpads, which argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is
+for half the price of a drink.
+
+"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?" asks the threatening
+tramp.
+
+"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning the long
+perspective of the road for the policeman who ought to be within
+sight--but is not; "w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"
+
+"I've walked all the way from Romford and only got half the price of a
+glass o' beer," says the rascal.
+
+The citizen is astonished and incredulous, and his astonishment gets
+the better of his fear. "Oh, come now," he rejoins, "no one walks three
+miles from Romford for a glass of beer; besides, all the houses here
+close at ten o'clock."
+
+"Oh, they do, do they?" replies the tramp, offensively. "'Ere, my
+mate Bill'll talk to you," and, whistling, the ominous bulk of Bill
+emerges aggressively from the darkling hedge, and together they proceed
+to wipe the road with that respectable ratepayer, and, rifling his
+pockets, leave him, bruised and bleeding, to reflect on the blessings
+of civilisation and to be thankful that he was not born a hundred years
+ago, when he might have been shot dead instead of being felled to the
+ground by the half-brick in a handkerchief which he finds beside him
+and takes home as a trophy.
+
+Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past Beacontree Heath,
+on the right, to an open country of disconsolate-looking contorted
+elms and battered windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and
+still airs of summer of the winter winds that race across the watery
+flats of Rippleside and Dagenham Marshes, out of the shivering east.
+Lonely, until quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House," beside the
+road, the two whalebones that even yet surmount its garden entrance
+the wonderment for more than two hundred years of chance travellers.
+Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded in the Thames in
+the year of Oliver Cromwell's death, and set up here in memory of him.
+However that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, when Ogilby's
+_Britannia_ was published, for the house is marked on his map as "Ye
+Whalebone."
+
+These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected, have little longer yet
+to remain, for though apparently proof against decay, the house and
+grounds are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale to the
+builders.
+
+[Illustration: WHALEBONE HOUSE.]
+
+The sole historic or other vestige remaining of the "Whalebone"
+turnpike-gate, once standing here, is an account to be found in the
+newspapers of the time of an attack made upon George Smith, the
+toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused in the darkness by a
+voice calling "Gate!" and, going to open it, was instantly knocked
+down, in a manner somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero
+of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:--
+
+  "Last night and the night before,
+  Three tom-cats came knocking at my door.
+  I went down to let them in,
+  And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin."
+
+The two men who felled the unfortunate George Smith, alarmed by his
+cries of "Murder!" threatened to shoot him if he were not quiet,
+and, going over his pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five
+shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting him over, a third
+confederate, ransacking the house, discovered three pounds. With this
+booty and a parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared as
+silently as they came.
+
+
+XV
+
+
+ROMFORD, now approached, is but twelve miles from London, and has
+frankly given up the impossible and ceased all pretence of being
+provincial. At the same time, building-land having only just (in the
+speculator's phrase) become "ripe for development," the townlet has not
+yet lost all individuality in suburban extension.
+
+The place, say some antiquaries, derives its name from the "Roman
+ford" on the Rom brook, but it is a great deal more likely that the
+origin is identical with that of the first syllable in the names of
+Ramsgate, Ramsey and Romney, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon "ruim" =
+a marsh. Time was when the town was celebrated for its manufacture
+of breeches; an industry which gave rise to a saying still current in
+the less polished nooks and corners of Essex--"Go to Romford and get
+your backsides new bottomed." Breeches have long ceased to be a noted
+product of the town, which for many years past has bulked large in the
+annals of Beer. Barricades, avenues, mountains and Alpine ranges of
+barrels, hogsheads, firkins and kilderkins of Romford ale and stout
+proclaim that the Englishman's preference for his "national drink" has
+not abated, and that
+
+  "Damn his eyes, whoever tries
+  To rob a poor man of his beer"
+
+is still a popular sentiment; as both the brewers of arsenical
+compounds and the more rabid among teetotallers are some day likely to
+discover.
+
+[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ROMFORD.]
+
+A French traveller in England some two hundred years ago wrote that
+"there are a hundred sorts of Beer made in England, and some are
+not bad: Art has well supplied Nature in this particular. Be that as
+it will, beer is Art and wine is Nature; I am for Nature against the
+world." That old fellow did not know how artful beer could be, and if
+he could re-visit his native France might discover that even wine is no
+longer the simple child of nature it once was.
+
+But although John Barleycorn is the tutelary deity of Romford, it is
+quite conceivable that the stranger bound for Norwich, and turning
+neither to right nor to left, might pass through the town without so
+much as a glimpse obtained of those Alpine ranges aforesaid. True,
+on entering Romford, he could scarce fail to observe certain weird
+structures ahead: odd towers like first cousins to lighthouses,
+springing into the sky line, with ranges of perpendicular pipes, like
+the disjointed fragments of some mammoth organ, beside them, the
+characteristic signs and portents of a great brewery; but the barrels
+are secluded, nor even are Romford's streets blocked, as might have
+been suspected, with brewers' drays. Romford, indeed, spells to the
+uninstructed stranger rather bullocks than beer; for the cattle-pens
+are the chief feature of its market-place, and sheep and hay and straw
+bulk more in the eye of the road-farer than the products of Ind, Coope
+& Co., which are to be seen in all their vastness beside the railway
+station and on the sidings constructed especially for the trade in ale
+and stout.
+
+[Illustration: ROMFORD.]
+
+The town in its most characteristic aspect is seen in the accompanying
+illustration taken from the doorway of that old inn, the "Windmill and
+Bells," the broad road margined with granite setts and the pavements
+fenced with posts and rails; the re-built parish church prominent
+across the market-place.
+
+[Illustration: OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PUTTELS BRIDGE.]
+
+Beyond Romford the road grows rural, and, by the same token, hilly.
+This, gentle reader, let it not be forgotten, is Essex, and we all
+know with what persistence that county is spoken of, and written of,
+as flat. If you would know what flatness is, try the Great North Road
+and its long levels between Baldock, Biggleswade and Alconbury, or
+search Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire or Hunts. _There_ is flatness, beside
+which that of Essex is the merest superstition, started probably by
+some tired traveller of inconstant purpose, who, essaying to explore
+the county, gave up the enterprise when he had reached Wanstead Flats.
+Surveying that not highly romantic expanse, he took it as an exemplar
+of the rest of the shire, and so returned home to start this immortal
+myth on its career. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex will
+subscribe to its flatness as an article of faith, and as such an one
+cycles from Romford, through the hamlet of Hare Street, over Puttels
+Bridge, where stands an old toll-house, to the other hamlet of Brook
+Street, the fact that he will actually have to _walk_ his machine up
+the steep hill that conducts into the town of Brentwood will cause him
+to think hard things of myth-makers.
+
+[Illustration: THE "FLEECE," BROOK STREET.]
+
+Brook Street Hill is the name of this eminence. Beside it stands a
+cemetery, convenient for brakeless cyclists who recklessly descend, and
+at its foot is a fine old inn, the "Fleece," a house of call for the
+fish-waggons that were once so great a feature of this road so far as
+Colchester and Harwich.
+
+[Illustration: THE MARTYR'S TREE, BRENTWOOD.]
+
+Brentwood, on the crest of this hill, occupies an elevated table-land,
+with sharp descents from it on every side. The "burnt wood" town,
+destroyed in some forgotten conflagration, is now a long-streeted,
+old-fashioned place, apparently in no haste to bid good-bye to the
+past. It keeps the old Assize House of Queen Elizabeth's time in
+repair, and carefully sees to it that the Martyr's Tree, decayed though
+the old elm stump be and hollow, is saved from perishing altogether.
+It was in 1555 that William Hunter, in his twentieth year, suffered
+in this place for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. That
+staunch upholder of the Protestant faith scarce needed the modern
+memorial, close by, while this shattered trunk remained, its gaping
+rents carefully bricked up by pious hands; but let the venerable relic
+be doubly safe-guarded in these times, when that candle lit by Latimer
+and Ridley, close upon three centuries and a half ago, burns dim, and
+lawless and forsworn clergy within the Church of England are working
+towards Rome and the return of the famous days of fire and stake; when
+the blood of the martyrs has ceased to inspire a generation which
+demands to be shown some tangible object before it can realise the
+significance of that sacrifice. Here, then, is something that can be
+seen and touched, to bring the least imaginative back in fancy to those
+terrible days, when brave hearts of every class gave up their lives in
+fire and smoke rather than abjure their faith. The Romanising clergy
+of to-day are made of coarser fabric than the martyrs. _They_ are not
+actuated by honesty, but take oaths they have no intention of observing
+to a Church whose bread they eat and whose trust they betray.
+
+Would you know something of that martyrdom at Brentwood? Then scan the
+inscription on the modern granite obelisk, and control, if you can, a
+righteous indignation when you perceive a modern Roman Catholic chapel
+standing, impudent in these days of an exaggerated tolerance, over
+against the Martyr's Tree itself, typifying the Scarlet Woman in midst
+of her blasphemies, exultant over the blood of the saints. "He being
+dead yet speaketh," quotes that inscription; but what avails it to
+speak in the ears of the deaf, or to talk of honour to the perjured?
+"Learn from his example," continue those momentous words, "to value
+the privilege of an open Bible, and be careful to maintain it"; but
+the world goes by unheeding, and only when the danger again becomes
+acute and liberty of conscience is passing away will indifference be
+conquered and the folly of it revealed.
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+BRENTWOOD still keeps a notable relic of coaching days in the old
+"White Hart" Inn, a curious specimen of the timbered and galleried
+type of hostelry familiar to our great-grandfathers. It turns a long
+plastered front to the street, but the great carved and panelled
+doorway leading into the coach-yard confirms the proud legend,
+"Established 1480." Full forty coaches passed through Brentwood in
+every twenty-four hours at the close of the Coaching Age, but the
+earlier days of coaching brought the "White Hart" more custom than
+came to it at the close of that era, when, in consequence of the roads
+being improved, travelling was quicker, and places once halted at were
+left behind without stopping. Innkeepers were considerable losers by
+this constant acceleration of coaches, and saw the smart, long-distance
+stages go dashing by where, years before, the old slow coaches stayed
+the night, or, at the very least, halted for meals.
+
+The "White Hart" remains typical of the earlier times, and still keeps
+the old-world comfort regretted in other places by De Quincey, who
+lived long enough to witness the beginnings of the great changes that
+have come over the hotels of town and country since coaches gave place
+to railways.
+
+[Illustration: YARD OF THE "WHITE HART," BRENTWOOD.]
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+BRENTWOOD is no sooner left behind than the road descends steeply
+over what was once a part of Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild
+and hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the place where, in
+November 1692, those seven jovial Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay
+were themselves, while hunting the hare, chased and at last run down
+by nine hunters of a different sort, who turned their pockets out and
+then bade them good-day and be damned. The original chronicler of
+this significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell, makes no
+especial feature of the event. He merely records it as having happened
+"near Ingerstone," and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings in
+the same sort along the several approaches to London. Little wonder,
+therefore, that Macaulay should have drawn the conclusion that at this
+time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest and most populous
+shires of England was as dangerous as a pilgrimage across the deserts
+of Arabia.
+
+From the descending road or from Shenfield Church the country is seen
+spread out, map-like, below, over the valley of the Thames, to where
+the river empties itself into the broad estuary at the Nore. At least,
+there is the vale, and the map vouchsafes the information that the
+river flows thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out the view of
+that imperial waterway. "I cannot see the Spanish fleet, because it's
+not in sight," says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in the
+poem, and it is precisely for the same reason that the Thames is not
+visible from Shenfield. But if one is denied a view of that imperial
+river, at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard, a prodigal
+riot of roses of every hue and habit, are worth seeing. The attenuated
+shingled spire, one of the characteristic features of Essex churches,
+beckons insistently from the road, and he who thereupon turns aside is
+well repaid, in a sight of the elaborately-carved timber columns of
+the interior, proving how in this county, where building stone is not
+found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders made excellent shift
+with heart of oak. This is, in fact, like so many other Essex churches,
+largely wooden, and its timber is as sound now as it was six or seven
+hundred years ago.
+
+[Illustration: SHENFIELD.]
+
+Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End" lies two miles distant
+from Shenfield. As in the case of so many other places near the
+great roads, a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name of
+the old village sprang up, to catch the custom of travellers; but an
+additionally curious fact is the utter extinction of the original
+village, which lay a mile distant from the highway, where the parish
+church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring farmstead. Explorers
+in the countryside are often astonished at the great distances
+between villages and their parish churches, and seek in vain in their
+guide-books or in talk with the "oldest inhabitant" an explanation of
+so curious a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the mystery is
+found in the enclosure of the surrounding common lands. The enclosure
+of commons has never been possible without the passing of special Acts,
+which have divided what should have been the heritage of the people
+for all time between the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their
+proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor and the tenants would
+each obtain their share of the plunder, in the form of freehold land,
+with the obvious result that the villagers, instead of paying rent for
+their cottages clustering round the church in the original village,
+built themselves new and rent-free cottages on their share of the spoil
+of the commons. The old cottages being pulled down, or allowed to
+decay, it was not long before the last trace of the original village
+disappeared.
+
+[Illustration: MOUNTNESSING CHURCH.]
+
+Mountnessing was once the seat of the Mounteneys, who have long since
+vanished from their old home. The old church, largely red brick without
+and timber within, still preserves the fossil rib-bone of an elephant,
+long regarded with reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant,
+and has for an additional curiosity the carving of a head on one of
+the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps by way of warning to Early English
+parishioners of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's bridle."
+The red-brick west front of the church, masking the wooden belfry-frame
+from the weather, still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick,
+but such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that without that
+evidence of age it would be difficult to credit it with so long an
+existence. The iron ties in the shape of the letter S give the view
+a singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in verse, beginning,
+"Reader, excuse the underwritten," is a curiosity of Mountnessing
+churchyard.
+
+[Illustration: MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL.]
+
+Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as the modern settlement is
+named, is seen clustering on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and
+a wayside pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting of a
+dozen cottages, two public-houses, a general "stores" (our grandfathers
+would have been content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a tin
+tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to walk a mile to
+church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and a windmill situated on a knoll;
+a windmill that for picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome
+or a Constable.
+
+From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims, two miles to
+"Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of customary spelling. The milestones
+are undoubtedly strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on
+the pedantic side, for that village derives its name from a settlement
+of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or meadow, at the Roman milestone
+they found here, but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone"
+they called their village, which lies in the little valley of the
+River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream of the smallest)
+hither and thither to give a perennial verdure to the meads along its
+course. "Ing" is, by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names
+successively met with along the River Wid. Mounteney's Ing we have
+already seen, and Fryerning, or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; while
+Margaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond Ingatestone.
+
+[Illustration: THE GATEHOUSE, INGATESTONE HALL.]
+
+Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad, is of the
+narrowest, and remains in almost every detail exactly as it is pictured
+in the old print reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the
+church still rising behind. It is a tower which by no means looks its
+age of over four hundred years, so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness
+of the brick. Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that Sir
+William Petre who, emulating the accommodating qualities of the famous
+Vicar of Bray, bowed before the religious storms of the reigns of Henry
+the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth. "Made of the willow
+and not of the oak," those tempests not only left him unscathed, but
+brought him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched with the manor
+of Ingatestone, plundered from the Abbey of Barking, together with
+much spoil elsewhere. How he managed to do it is a mystery, but during
+the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for such the Petres always
+have been) actually obtained a Papal Bull confirming him and his in
+these grants. One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy,
+recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble physiognomy could
+be so accomplished a time-server and truckler. His home, plundered
+from the nuns of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone
+Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the road, down a
+beautifully-timbered country lane. The entrance is by a gatehouse
+with the motto, "_Sans Dieu Rien_," situated at the end of an avenue
+and framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old red-brick
+turreted buildings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Lord
+Petre of to-day does not reside here, but the place is still in the
+family, and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use. Miss Braddon
+is perhaps scarce to be numbered among those novelists whose literary
+landmarks are followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone
+Hall that it is the scene of her _Lady Audley's Secret_. The
+fish-ponds of old monastic times, the well in which Lady Audley thrust
+her husband, the lime-walk he haunted, together with such romantic
+accessories as terraced walks and a priest's hiding-hole, form items
+which would require the business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer
+to fully enlarge upon. They _do_ say--the "they" in question being the
+gossips of Ingatestone--that the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail,
+passing at 1·15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the high road,
+once saw "a something" in white mysteriously sauntering beneath the
+trees, but whether it was the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one
+of the sisters thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely
+a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the Postmaster-General's
+regulations and time-sheets not allowing for time spent in psychical
+research.
+
+[Illustration: INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. _From an Old Print_]
+
+The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is visible on the right, soon
+after leaving Ingatestone. Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its
+timbered belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the village,
+standing solitary, save for the vicarage and a farmhouse, beside a
+railway crossing--if, indeed, any building adjoining the main-line of a
+great railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret thus honoured
+in the place-name is the Saint to whom the church is dedicated. Some
+traces of the "marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the old
+windows, in decorative allusion, remained until they were swept away
+for modern stained-glass in memory of a late vicar and his family;
+glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that, save for an
+inscription on one of the bells, she now remains unhonoured in her
+own church, deposed in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects
+kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art furnisher. The only
+remaining ancient glass is that of the east window, a magnificent
+fifteenth-century "tree of Jesse."
+
+[Illustration: AT MARGARETTING.]
+
+Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the twenty-fifth milestone,
+where a post-office and some few scattered cottages straggle
+picturesquely at the foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The
+odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially to spoil some
+two miles of this road is the park wall of Hylands, a large estate
+purchased about 1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster, who
+stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and raised this eyesore to
+enclose his new-made park. Almost as soon as the last brick was put
+in its place, the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by railway
+speculations, and his walled-in Eden was sold. Nature in the meanwhile
+has done her best, and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the
+ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River Wid crosses beneath
+the road, water-lilies gem the stream and the wind sounds in the
+luxuriant Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.
+
+If it were not for its church, which has been re-built and has a very
+fine and tall spire, one might easily pass Widford and not know it,
+for the very few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such as it
+is, it stands on the crest of something not quite so much as a hill
+and rather more than an incline, and beside its large church has an
+equally fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White Horse." Time was,
+and that until three years since, when Widford was celebrated for its
+one other inn, the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled, the
+"Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by the picture-sign of a
+headless woman, with the inscription, _Fort Bone_, on one side, and a
+portrait of Henry the Eighth on the other. "_Fort Bone_" was commonly
+Englished by slangy cyclists as "good business." The sign, of course,
+was a pictorial and satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an
+open question whether or not in their present form this and the several
+other "Quiet Woman" and "Good Woman" signs throughout the country are
+perversions of the original legend, "_la bonne fame_" displayed on old
+inns in the distant past; an inscription laudatory of the hostelry,
+and matching the self-recommendation of "_la bonne rénommée_," found
+in modern France, or the more familiar "noted house for--" and "good
+pull up" inscriptions on inns in modern England. Virgil's description
+of Fame, walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the clouds,
+may have originated the pictorial sign of the headless woman in days
+of ancient learning; and the classic allusion becoming lost and the
+supposedly incorrect spelling of "_fame_" being altered to "_femme_,"
+we thus obtain a very reasonable derivation. We may take it that many
+shrew-bitten folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily agreed to
+forget the original meaning in order to adopt one so exactly fitting
+their opinion that the only quiet or good women were headless ones.
+
+[Illustration: THE "GOOD WOMAN" SIGN.]
+
+Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change that is robbing places of
+all interest and distinction, the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer
+swings from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed inn opposite the
+"White Horse" has retired into private life. The picture sign is now
+housed inside the "White Horse."
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+WIDFORD almost immediately introduces the explorer to Moulsham
+(originally the "mole's home"), itself own brother--but a very
+out-at-elbows brother--to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the wind
+between our gentility and the somewhat fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we
+should turn to the left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of
+the town, and so, proceeding along the "new London road," come into
+Chelmsford, half way down the High Street. Being, however, intent
+rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en endure the half-mile
+length of shabby, untidy street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford,
+the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City of Calves, over the
+hunchbacked and narrow stone bridge across the Chelmer, the successor,
+at an interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original bridge
+built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That is a huge slice of time, but
+it was too late, even in Norman days, for the town to change its name
+from Chelmers_ford_ to something more appropriate when the ford was
+thus superseded.
+
+Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High Street of the town,
+the view closed by the Shire Hall and the church; the Norwich Road,
+however, turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and refusing
+to make acquaintance with the town. It is the Conduit that is seen in
+this illustration of the High Street, its architecture scarce improved
+by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be ornamental, over its
+cupola.
+
+[Illustration: THE BRIDGE: ENTRANCE TO CHELMSFORD.]
+
+Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at the end of this view,
+spoil one another, the Hall almost entirely hiding the church when
+looking down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular exterior
+of the church putting the clumsy architecture of the Hall to shame,
+as a pagan upstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some, but
+its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone concerns the passing
+stranger, who feels so concerned by sight of it that he accordingly
+passes the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the seated bronze effigy
+of a native, a bygone Lord Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like
+an old apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops green coppery
+stains over his nice stone pedestal) keep one another company in the
+open space fronting this building.
+
+[Illustration: THE CONDUIT, CHELMSFORD.]
+
+The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal, whose career came to a
+close in 1806. The monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for all
+time the image of a judge whose administration of English law, directed
+by serene wisdom, assisted by purest love of justice, endeared by
+unwearied kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will be held by
+his country in undying remembrance." His birthplace could hardly have
+said more than that.
+
+[Illustration: TINDAL'S STATUE.]
+
+Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways, being indeed very severely
+bitten with a taste for modernity. Is it not famous as the first town
+in the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have not its streets
+been resolutely swept clear of antiquity? The town, in short, is
+scarce picturesque. It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays,
+but on other occasions every house provokes a yawn, with perhaps the
+exception of the "Saracen's Head," an inn that, despite its modernised
+and stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old times. There was a
+"Saracen's Head" here certainly as far back as the fifteenth century,
+and probably much earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it derived
+from Crusading times, when the knights and men-at-arms, returning
+from Palestine with wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys,
+leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the Holy Land, found
+their fame come home before them, and the old inns they had known--the
+"Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine Wheel," and the
+like--often re-named in their honour. With little effort we can imagine
+the scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period, when exploits at
+Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were told and re-told, and gained wonderfully
+in the repetition over sack and malvoysie. What bloody fellows they
+were, and with what zest they slew the Soldan's soldiers over and over
+again as they sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six
+hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has been rebuilt many times
+since then; but human nature remains the same though timber rot and
+brick perish, and again and again the same old talk has been heard in
+the bar-parlour of the inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Creçy;
+men of a later age who warred under Marlborough at Blenheim, Ramillies
+or Malplaquet; the lads of the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from
+the horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from a hundred fights on
+the burning South African veldt--all have had their circle of greedy
+listeners here.
+
+The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek and stuccoed face to
+the street, and the house shows signs of extensive rebuilding and
+remodelling, undertaken in the full flush of the great days of coaching
+prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in the belief that
+coaching, and the road as an institution, would last for ever. Fond
+belief! Has anyone ever stopped to consider the fact that the great
+coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a great deal more
+to do with the pulling down of the old-fashioned galleried and timbered
+inns of country towns than ever railways have had? The average small
+country town felt in fullest measure the great increase in business
+incidental to the last years of the coaching age, and every innkeeper
+hastened to rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who had,
+from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding until the dawn of
+the Railway Age, on seeing that the road would decay and travellers
+be carried to their journeys' ends without halting for rest and
+refreshment, promptly gave up any such ideas and were thankful that
+they had not begun the work of reconstruction and enlargement. Those
+who had were ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared may
+yet be often met with, a world too large, in country towns where once
+the mails and the stage-coaches passed, like a procession, day by day.
+It is quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house like the
+"White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it is not too much to say that,
+had the Coaching Age lasted another ten years, it also would have been
+rebuilt.
+
+An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its central figure, belongs
+to the "Saracen's Head" at Chelmsford. For some years after he had
+won fame as a novelist he still retained his position in the General
+Post Office, of which he was a travelling inspector. On one of these
+official journeys he happened to be staying here, at the time when
+his _Barchester Towers_ was being issued, after the then prevailing
+fashion, in parts. He was seated in the coffee-room when two clergymen
+entered, one of them with the newly-issued part of the story. The
+cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the trials of the
+Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs Proudie, who was rather a trial
+to Trollope's readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the clergyman
+put the book down. "Confound that Mrs Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish
+she were dead!"
+
+Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he thanked the reader for thus
+accidentally telling him that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome,
+and undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen," said he, "she shall
+die in the next number;" and die she accordingly did. But in defence
+of Trollope's truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the
+opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs Proudies may yet be
+found in a goodly proportion of the episcopal palaces of England.
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+RETURNING now to the Conduit, and making for the open road once more,
+Chelmsford is left by way of Springfield, past the successor of
+Chelmsford's finest old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The
+old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five centuries, and had
+been the halting-place of many famous travellers, among them a long
+line of Earls of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham
+and London; but none of these associations sufficed to save the house.
+Fragments of its carved beams are preserved in the local museum, but
+recall it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon bring back
+in his majesty that denizen of the earth in the dim æons of the past.
+Chelmsford would dearly like many of its old buildings--wantonly
+demolished years ago--back again; but what is done cannot be undone,
+and there's an end on't. The "Cross Keys" remains, in a restored
+condition.
+
+[Illustration: THE "THREE CUPS" SIGN]
+
+The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of Chelmsford, carries
+varying significances. To the mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the
+American from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim Fathers and
+their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts; and to the gaol-bird
+it means a "stretch" of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in
+fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building enlarged in recent
+years for the accommodation of the guests consigned to it at Assize
+time from the Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But, once
+past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing and cheerful. Its
+long miscellaneous street, where the quaint sign of the "Three Cups"
+stands out, gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive
+grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of picturesqueness.
+That this has been the aim of their architects is abundantly manifest
+in examples where, under a single roof, one may experience the
+mingled romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle, a Tudor
+manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a "Queen Anne" mansion; all done in
+red brick, gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover, fitted
+with electric light and hot and cold water supply. To this end has
+castellated and domestic architecture unwound its long story during
+some five hundred years. It will be seen thereby that William of
+Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time architect did not live
+in vain.
+
+But if Springfield be modern as a suburb, it is ancient as a village.
+To see old Springfield, it is necessary to turn off the road to the
+left, and to journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church, a
+noble building with mingled red brick and stone tower bearing the
+inscription, "Prayse God for al the good benefactors 1586." Oliver
+Goldsmith, it is quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model
+for his _Deserted Village_. He certainly visited at an old cottage
+opposite the church, but the real Sweet Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.
+
+[Illustration: SPRINGFIELD CHURCH.]
+
+Beyond the village and facing the high road are the strangely
+impressive lodges of the historic estate of New Hall; new at the end
+of the fifteenth century, but declined into a respectable age by
+now and cobwebbed with much history and many legends. The place, now
+and for a considerable number of years past an alien convent, has
+been owned during a period of four hundred years by an astonishing
+number of historic personages, who have succeeded one another like
+flitting phantoms. Here the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps
+out spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the handling of the
+historic kaleidoscope. Built by Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose
+daughter and heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother
+of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus eventually came into possession
+of Henry the Eighth, who occasionally resided here and re-named it
+"Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of
+Sussex. By this time it had resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners
+were George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, and Oliver
+Cromwell, who had it as a gift from Parliament and exchanged it so soon
+as he decently could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like
+residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him succeeded another Duke of
+Buckingham, and to him that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk,
+Duke of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and was visited
+here, when he was suffering from gout and dropsy, by that scribbling
+traveller, Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of historic
+owners may be said to end, but constant change has ever been the lot
+of New Hall, and a succession of lesser lights followed him until the
+nuns set up their secluded life here and bade farewell to a vain
+world. That world passes by; the road on one side, the railway midway
+in the grounds, and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as
+morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the vineyard.
+
+[Illustration: NEW HALL LODGES]
+
+No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road. All is emptiness,
+and the lichened brick and the crumbling stone vases of neighbouring
+boundary walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled
+aims characteristic of the place.
+
+There is an air of romance about Boreham House, as seen from the
+tree-embowered road at a little distance from New Hall; an altogether
+deceptive air, let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic
+building of white brick. It is its situation at the head of a formal
+lake, fringed with stately elms, that confers the illusory distinction,
+but the explorer of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing
+rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl squattering
+on the lake, can weave his own romance to fit the scene. And if the
+house, though stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest in
+the shape of the identical carriage used by the Duke of Wellington at
+the Battle of Waterloo. Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent
+years to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken to pieces in an
+accident. Restored now to its original condition, it will need to be a
+great occasion indeed that brings it forth again.
+
+[Illustration: BOREHAM.]
+
+Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its old gabled cottages
+clustering round the still older church, itself embowered in lime
+trees whose delightful scent weights the July air with an Arcadian
+languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham has every likelihood
+of having his nerves startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the
+road of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door open,
+and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of one of the inmates
+of the silent tomb making a hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High
+noon being an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying as
+to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on drawing nearer that
+the old tomb-house has been converted into a tool-house and general
+lumber-room, and that the figure seated within is the sexton enjoying
+his lunch, screened from the noonday heats. An inscription over the
+door of the ornate building--a copy of the Temple of the Winds at
+Athens--proclaims it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamianæ, Anno 1764";
+but the Walthams have disappeared, both from their mausoleum and the
+district. The body of the last appears to have been arrested for debt
+when on the road hither from Chelmsford. The sexton explains that the
+parish took over the Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing
+the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience hee-ar, years ago,"
+says this typical Essex rustic, and goes on to tell how the oil and
+coals and candles for church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe
+Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held. Three Radcliffes, Earls
+of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather, father, and son, lie in effigy side
+by side on an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers are to
+my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton calls them, and explains that
+their broken noses are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.
+
+Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called the "mine" road,
+Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the great red-brick Georgian mansion
+of Crix, standing in its meadows where the little River Ter comes
+down from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels of Hatfield
+Mill, and then hurries off, as though belated, for a rendezvous with
+the Chelmer, two miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road with
+whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing warranty of its age in the
+inscription, "A.A. 1715"; but if that evidence were lacking it could
+be found in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into an area
+with the raising of the road for the building of the bridge that long
+ago replaced the watersplash at this crossing of the stream.
+
+Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the heaths that once gave
+the place its original forename of "Heathfield," and the Peverels,
+identical with the Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly
+vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige of themselves
+in the church--that last resort of the antiquary in search of old
+manorial lords. It is true that on modern tablets built into the west
+front of the church the founding of a Benedictine Priory here in 1100
+by Ingelrica, mother of William Peverel, is alluded to, together with
+the rather scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things are
+decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of Latin and lichen-stains,
+so that both their monastic beneficence and their maternal origin are
+only dimly to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.
+
+It is the distance of half a mile from the high road to where Hatfield
+church lies secluded, adjoining the grounds of a mansion partly
+occupying the site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It is
+here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's original baptism
+must be sought, and accordingly some stretches of common-land may be
+discovered close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us, though
+there be little enough to say of it, beyond the note that its closeness
+to the railway station has caused a certain growth and a certain
+amount of rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the old
+plaster cottages that were once the invariable feature of its street,
+and admirably figured forth the Essex manner of decoratively treating
+plaster-work. There remain here but two such cottages, bearing the date
+1703, and the initials M.R., with _fleur-de-lis_.
+
+
+XX
+
+
+A ROAD of almost unvarying flatness conducts in something under three
+miles to Witham, entered nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by
+the Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates in no fewer than
+three separate and distinct names. As the River Witham, it confers a
+name upon the townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same sponsorial
+office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook it is endowed with a title
+that smacks rather of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in
+summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down upon the mere thread
+of water oozing and stewing in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the
+neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is not ill-named as the
+Podsbrook; but the Essex Council in bridging it so substantially think
+of it rather as the River Witham, which they have every right and cause
+to do, for the stream can avenge itself of those disfiguring potsherds
+and that contemptuous title in the most sardonic way when winter comes
+and the floods are out.
+
+The long street of Witham is remarkable for the number of large and
+handsome mansions dating from the time of Queen Anne, through the
+period of the four Georges. The greater number of the professional
+men of Essex would, from the number of those houses, appear to have
+settled in the little town and to have medically attended it and
+legally represented it to such an effect that it is only now beginning
+to recover from them and from the coming of the railway, which dealt a
+death-blow to the thriving coaching interest of the early part of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place of Mrs Nelson's
+famous "Ipswich Blues," the crack coaches on the seventy miles of road,
+which started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary exertions
+made Ipswich in something under six hours. Such remarkable performances
+as these were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in place
+of the average ten miles on other roads, and by placing leaders in
+readiness at the foot of hills like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The
+"Blue Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some of the principal
+coaches drew up, is still in existence; its sign, a pierced effigy of
+that animal projecting from the front of the house and looming weirdly
+against the sky-line. There are many "White Harts" on the road to
+Norwich, the sign being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as that
+of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North Road; but of all the many
+examples to be met along these hundred and twelve miles this is the one
+that is most quaintly out of proportion, with a head and neck less
+than half the size demanded by body and legs, and a golden collar and
+chain of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was the favourite
+badge of Richard the Second, whose connection with East Anglia was
+too slight for assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially
+allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference on the part
+of innkeepers along the Norwich Road.
+
+[Illustration: CHIPPING HILL.]
+
+Those who would seek the site of the original Witham must turn aside
+from the high road the matter of half a mile, past the railway station,
+to Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a camp successively
+occupied and wrought upon by the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons,
+it will be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant valley of that
+triply-named river already mentioned, in 1749 described by Walpole as
+"the prettiest little winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows
+falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to this day, and as
+sweet, and the by-road that comes up from the gravelly hollow and cuts
+through the earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold climbs up
+romantically under the blossoming limes into as pretty a picture in
+the rural sort as you shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old
+England before railways came, or science and the ten thousand plagues
+of modern life, and the cheap builder of hideous new cottages were
+let loose upon the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in the
+picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old dwellings, flint-built
+church tower and red-brick rectory, set in, upon and around the
+swelling grassy banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had both their
+fortress and their market, as evidenced by the still surviving name of
+Chipping, or Market Hill.
+
+Old East Anglian cottages have their own special characteristics,
+arising from local conditions, but one feature they share in common
+with all old rustic dwellings; the great size and relative importance
+of their genial chimneys, suggesting warmth and the lavish laying on of
+logs. They tell the passer-by of old times when wood was the only fuel;
+when it was to be gathered for the mere labour of gathering, and plenty
+of it was piled upon the generous open hearth. Modern cottages, all
+over the kingdom, tell a different tale, in the look of their meagre
+chimney-pots--a tale of coal, dearly purchased, economised in tiny
+grates.
+
+But the special features of East Anglian cottage architecture? They are
+here, in the highways and byways, for all to see who will. It is a land
+without stone, this East of England, where timber and flint and brick
+play important constructional parts in church and hall and manor-house,
+and where timber framing, lath and plaster, parge-work, and a few
+bricks for the chimney stacks, are combined to build up the cottages.
+
+Out of their necessities our ancestors contrived dwellings that for
+durability, comfort and artistry put modern houses, whether halls or
+cottages, to shame. The stone cottages of Somersetshire, Rutland,
+Leicestershire; the cob and thatch of Devon, the granite of Cornwall;
+the timber and plaster, or timber and brick noggin of Cheshire and
+Herefordshire are all evidence to this day of how skilfully our
+forbears employed the materials to their hands; and here in Essex
+you shall find a something in the art of cottage building hardly to
+be discovered elsewhere. This is the frequent use of parge-work, or
+pargetting, as it is sometimes called, on old cottage exteriors.
+Parge-work is the ornamental filling or surfacing of walls with
+plaster. The term is just as often applied to the elaborately-moulded
+and panelled plaster ceilings of Elizabethan and Jacobean halls as
+to the exterior decoration that forms so remarkable and pleasing a
+feature of Essex rustic cottage architecture. Few Essex villages that
+can claim to preserve many relics of old times are without examples of
+this peculiarly local style; although, to be sure, an ignorant want of
+appreciation has been the cause of much destruction of late years. The
+commoner forms of this decoration are frequently seen, in the easily
+incised patterns that even the unskilful can make in the plaster while
+still wet, by the aid of anything from a trowel to the finger-tips;
+just as a cook ornaments the dough of her uncooked pies. Many of
+these patterns are traditional; as much a matter of tradition, for
+instance, as are the needlework patterns wrought on the breast of an
+old smock-frock. The commonest is one produced by a process of combing
+the plaster in repetitions of a device resembling an elongated figure 8
+laid flat, or perhaps more narrowly resembling a hank of worsted. Other
+patterns, of whorls or concentric circles, stars, triangles and the
+like, are produced by wooden stamps. But the really beautiful examples
+are not the products of to-day. These belong to the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries, and are lavish in decoration of a Renaissance
+character moulded in high relief. Architects with sufficient culture
+and understanding to enable them to appreciate local style have, in
+recent years, reintroduced decoration of this character when building
+residences in the country, but many a humble cottager lives within
+walls that display a profusion of artistic devices unapproached by the
+houses of the wealthy.
+
+Discoveries close by the church on Chipping Hill have led to the belief
+that the building stands on, or near, the site of a Temple of Diana,
+and certainly Roman bricks are still visible in great numbers in the
+walls of the tower. A memorial in the chancel to Sir Gilbert East,
+who died in 1828, reminds the historian of some strange survivals
+existing at that time. The Easts were owners of the tithes at Witham,
+and although they lived so far distant as Berkshire, always insisted
+on their right of being buried here. Sir Gilbert East's body was, by
+his express direction, buried beside his wife, with a band of brass
+encircling both, engraved with the words from the marriage service,
+"Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." His funeral
+was a three days' business, with knights bannerets accompanying, and
+much pomp and circumstance. In the family vault they laid him, wrapped
+in linen, returned to Berkshire for the reading of the will, when, to
+the dismay of the family, it was found that the knight had expressly
+wished to be buried in woollen. The family solicitor hurried back and,
+disinterring his defunct client, saw to it that he was comfortably
+tucked in as desired.
+
+Between Witham and Kelvedon, where the road runs level, there is but
+one hamlet, an offshoot of Rivenhall known as Rivenhall End, where a
+cottage close by the "Fox" inn, once a toll-house, bears its former
+history, plain to read, in the evidence of its windows commanding
+either approach, up or down the road. A mile and a half beyond begins
+Kelvedon, set down in the flats beside the River Blackwater; "Kelvedon
+Easterford, vulgo Keldon," as Ogilby calls it; "consisting," he
+continues, "chiefly of inns"; a description which remains strikingly
+true to this day. This pronunciation, "Keldon," throws some light upon
+the following remarks of an old traveller who kept a diary of his
+wayfaring, and, writing in 1744, says, "From Colchester in an hour or
+two, I came to an old Village call'd Kildane, where they tell you the
+famous Massacre of the Danes began; but the true Name of the Town is
+Kelvedon."
+
+How Kelvedon can ever have escaped being called "Long" Kelvedon is
+a mystery, for it straggles on and on and must be nearly a mile in
+length; a street of handsome old residences, of cottages and humble
+shops of all ages, and old broken-backed taverns where the Essex
+labourer gathers night by night and discusses the prospect of the
+carraway crop and the likelihood of the entire agricultural interest
+presently, going _en masse_ to the "work'us." After which, with
+the courage of despair, and to drown his troubles, he will call for
+"another pot o' thrup'ny, missus," and, when closing time comes,
+slouch home through the mud and mist until the following evening, when
+the same programme is repeated. It is the agricultural labourer who
+supports the little wayside "publics" whose existence in such numbers
+puzzles the mid-day stranger, who, seeing them empty and apparently
+lifeless, wonders how they can possibly live. Business practically only
+begins when work in the fields is done, and the rent is not so high but
+that a few pots of beer a night represent a sufficient profit.
+
+It must not be supposed that Kelvedon has not its exquisite
+architectural relics of a bygone time, or that its inns are all of the
+rural beer-house type. Not at all. Chief among the inns of Kelvedon
+is the "Angel," which indeed is a house not only of considerable size
+and outstanding character, but of historic interest, as having been
+the favourite resting-place of William the Third on his journeys along
+this road. Its projecting porch is the first thing the traveller sees
+on entering the town from the direction of London, where the road
+swerves violently to the left, and again as violently to the right,
+forming a very awkward corner. "Angel Corner," said Alexander, of the
+"Retaliator" coach, "is the very devil of a corner." This remark was
+drawn from him on the occasion of his nearly driving into the porch,
+when trying conclusions with a rival charioteer.
+
+Almost opposite the still-existing "Angel" stood the equally extensive
+"Red Lion," long since retired from business and remodelled as a row
+of cottages. The histories of both houses, and of many another fine
+old inn, which might once have been written from the recollections of
+those who knew the old days of the road, are now in great part lost,
+and the world so much the poorer. Had scribblers then abounded, and the
+"personal" note of the modern journalist been sounded in those days,
+we should have known how King William came to and set out from his
+inn; how he looked, what he ate and drank, how many long clay pipes
+he smoked, and what comparisons he drew in conversation with Bentinck
+between the flat lands on the way from Kelvedon to Harwich and the
+still flatter lands of his native Holland. And besides such records of
+the great, we should then have been better furnished with the early
+history of coaching, which, if not indeed a sealed book, is at least a
+very short and fragmentary one.
+
+[Illustration: THE "ANGEL," KELVEDON.]
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+EARLY coaching days are wrapped round with strange adventures and the
+oddest tales; some, doubtless, of the _ben trovato_, rather than the
+most truthful, nature. But those stories of coaching miseries and
+adventure that have been proved truthful are themselves so surprising
+and incredible to modern ears that even the most improbable of
+uncertified tales cannot be dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of
+the Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should, for instance,
+surely be picturesquely written up some day and included in some
+English (and therefore strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One
+Nights' Entertainments.
+
+The coach was nearing the outskirts of London. The rheumy air hung in
+dank and foggy vapours on the countryside and transformed innocent
+roadside trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing shapes. The guard
+let off his blunderbuss at a pollard willow that loomed suspiciously
+like a highwayman out of the reeking air, and the passengers all began
+to automatically turn their pockets out. It proved a false alarm, and
+purses and trinkets were returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One
+gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he carried, whereupon
+a lady advised him to hide the money in his boot. He had hardly done
+this when a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman to stop.
+When the unhappy insides had picked themselves up from the straw at the
+bottom of the coach, into which they had unceremoniously been thrown
+by the driver's prompt obedience to that behest, they found themselves
+covered with a pistol projected through the door, and were invited to
+deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who had little gave it and
+were thankful it was no more. The lady protested that she had nothing;
+"but," said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you will find
+ten guineas." There was nothing for it but to take off that boot and
+hand over the coin; but when the highwayman had gone it was another
+matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in no measured terms,
+of being the robber's accomplice. Bound to admit that appearances
+were against her, she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited
+the company to supper the following evening, when matters should be
+explained. They accepted, not, it is to be feared, very graciously.
+The time came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room, with a
+supper laid, they were re-introduced to their acquaintance of the night
+before. When the repast was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she
+said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in this book, which I
+had with me in the coach, are bank-notes to the amount of one thousand
+pounds. I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than for me to
+be robbed of this valuable property. As you have been the means of my
+saving it, I entreat your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred
+pounds."
+
+Much of the humour that went to lighten old road travelling was of an
+evanescent kind, and has not survived, but a few examples, preserved
+in contemporary literature, keep their flavour. Among them is the
+narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter." "I recollect," said
+the Jehu who told the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger,
+and nothing that was either said or done was at all to his mind. On
+that day I happened to have a very awkward team--three blind ones and
+a very shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times I lost my
+patience as well as temper. My near leader pulled to such a degree that
+I was obliged to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the top of
+the bit, and curb her enough to break her jaw. After starting again, I
+could deal with her very well for about a mile, when her mouth got dead
+again, and I was wicked enough to let drive a few hearty damns at her,
+my pious companion all the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be
+damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon which he bolted
+as if he had been galvanised.
+
+"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'
+
+"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I, 'but I won't have it;' so
+I answered, 'What coach does he drive?'
+
+"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up his hands, 'I fear you
+don't read your Bible; but I will tell you--he was the most patient man
+that ever existed.'
+
+"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three blind 'uns and a bolter?'
+
+"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a coachman.'
+
+"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever he had had four such
+horses to deal with as I have here, he would have had no more patience
+than myself.'"
+
+[Illustration: "THREE BLIND UNS AND A BOLTER." _From a Print after H.
+Alken._]
+
+Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen played a drunken trick
+that would have been impossible in the last years of coaching, when
+discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric than they had been. He
+had just driven the London stage from Ipswich, and having more by good
+luck than careful driving brought his passengers safely to dinner at
+the "Angel," turned into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink
+of coachmen--rum. Emerging, he perceived one of the Harwich to London
+fish-waggons, fully laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to
+the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the waggon round and dashed
+off at top speed on the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden
+Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and two tons weight of fish
+strewed the king's highway. The mad coachman survived to repent his
+escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder of his life.
+
+"Other times, other manners" is a saying that assumes an added
+force when contrasting the Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our
+fellow-travellers by railway, who glare at us, and we at them, like
+strange cats on a roof-top, have little idea of the chivalry that ruled
+on the road a hundred years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who
+may be the only other occupant of a railway carriage with you, and
+she wonders whether she had not better call the guard; but it was,
+in the days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden duty of
+the gentlemen to see that the ladies in whose company the chances of
+the road might place them lacked nothing that courtesy could supply;
+whether it were merely the aid of an arm in walking up one of those
+hills the coaches could only climb unladen, or the more material
+attention involved in seeing that the dear creatures were duly supplied
+with refreshments. It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom
+of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for the breakfasts and
+dinners of the unprotected ladies who might be travelling by the same
+conveyance. "I vow," says one of these old travellers, "'tis a pleasure
+in a cavalier to do so; but, the Lord save us, what a prodigious
+appetite does not the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the fair,
+whose lassitude and vapours at other times render them incapable of
+more than drinking a dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing
+which it is only fitting that the heathenish and phanatick peoples of
+the Indies should partake of. I protest that the ladies of the coach,
+when we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding they could not be
+suited with tay, went to it with a right good will and left as good an
+account of the claret and the beef as if they had been going empty for
+a week. Spare me, I do beg, from your languishing creatures who would
+die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, but compare with the most
+valiant of trenchermen abroad."
+
+This protesting gentleman might, had he thought of it, have exclaimed
+with Othello on the pity "that we can call these delicate creatures
+ours and not their appetites."
+
+He must have been particularly hard hit in the pocket by the robust
+appetites of his fellow-travellers, but did not, however, let his
+feelings appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as a toast, "the
+ladies, bless them, whose bright eyes," etc., etc.--a toast we have
+many times heard of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon having
+"made an impression." He, in fact, seems to have been like Constable,
+in a way; for it was said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in a
+stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner." "Then,"
+said one, hearing that praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"
+
+That is very significant. It was, then, only your very paragon among
+gentlemen who could sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner.
+His manners might survive the strain of the journey itself, and even
+the sight and sound of lovely Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring,
+unlovely to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating gurgles; but
+when after the tedious stage had been accomplished and the passengers
+had descended, irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner scarce to
+be eaten, even at express speed, in the short time allowed, then, ay
+_then_, my friends, came the test! No man so insensible to politeness
+as a starving man, and few attentions were paid to the ladies by
+strangers whose sole chance of obtaining the dinner for which they had
+paid was the resolute determination to attend only to their own wants.
+
+The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly outweighed the
+pleasures of that old-world method. A pleasant day and the open country
+made a seat on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not willingly
+to be exchanged for any other mode of conveyance then known; but, as
+little David Copperfield found on his first coach journey, _night_ on
+a coach was an experience once gained not willingly repeated. Being
+put between two gentlemen, to prevent his falling off, David found
+himself nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he could
+not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!" which they didn't like at
+all, because it woke them. With the rising of the sun David found his
+fellow-passengers sleeping easier than they had done during the night,
+when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed their midnight slumbers. As
+the sun rose higher, so their sleep became lighter and they gradually
+awoke, one by one, each one indignant when charged with having slept.
+During the rest of his career, David invariably observed "that of all
+human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least
+disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having
+gone to sleep in a coach."
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF SPURGEON.]
+
+COACHING times and coaching inns have long kept us at the very
+threshold of Kelvedon, which has a modern claim to notice of which it
+is not a little proud. Spurgeon was born here. Although the figure of
+that great wielder of homely and untutored pulpit oratory is but one
+among several preachers in the same family, there is only one possible
+Spurgeon when that name is mentioned. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born
+in a house still pointed out, on June 19, 1834; the eldest son of the
+Rev. John Spurgeon. The old cottage is now the "Wheatsheaf" beer-house
+and has had a bay window and a brick frontage added since that time.
+Close by is a now highly respectable and not a little dignified private
+residence known still as the "Tommy shop," although almost seventy
+years have passed since it was used as a kind of restaurant and canteen
+for the navvies then working on the construction of the Great Eastern
+Railway, which runs at the rear.
+
+The oldest house in Kelvedon is doubtless the "Sun," which dates from
+the middle of the fifteenth century and has within recent years had its
+carved woodwork, long covered with plaster, once more exposed to view.
+It stands, almost the last house in the town, by the bridge over the
+Blackwater, on the way to Gore Pit.
+
+Gore Pit is generally said to be the site of a battle. _What_ battle,
+however, historians do not and cannot specify; and indeed this name,
+bloody though it may sound to modern ears, has, despite the popular
+legend of the derivation of Kelvedon from "Kildane," perhaps no such
+sanguinary association, and is probably a contraction of the old word
+"coneygore," or rabbit warren.
+
+It is, despite its name, a pretty and a peaceful hamlet, with a
+blacksmith's shop and a roadside horse-pond, and surrounded by the
+fruit-farms of a great jam-making company. The church of Feering can be
+seen across the flat fields, on the other side of the railway. Messing
+lies a mile away, in the other direction.
+
+Let the idle wayfarer, curious as to the name of Gore Pit, speak to the
+blacksmith on the subject, and he will be told, with the seriousness
+of implicit belief, of the fighting of a great battle here, and that
+the blood ran down into "that there horse-pond." Moreover, that at
+Kelvedon--"Killdane they used to call it--they killed the Danes; at
+Feering they feared 'em, and at Messing they made a mess of it"; which
+seems to very correctly reflect the views of the neighbourhood on local
+history in ancient times, as reflected in place-names!
+
+Rural Essex, in the aspect of its fields and meadows, is revealed along
+these miles in its most characteristic form. It is, in many respects,
+unlike other counties. In some ways the unhappy industry of farming has
+fared worse here than elsewhere, and many holdings have for years past
+gone uncultivated, and the dock, the thistle and other lusty weeds have
+resumed an evil possession of fields once kept clean and trim. But in
+the smaller operations of husbandry Essex has always been, and in some
+districts still is, remarkably successful; while, although the farmer
+protests that it does not pay to grow any kind of grain, the yellowing
+seas of autumnal cornfields are still a prominent feature of the
+landscapes of Essex and of its neighbouring Suffolk. Essex and Suffolk
+are old-world, far beyond the rest of England, and in growing wheat
+in these times, when a cornfield is a rare sight in other parts of
+the country and when "our daily bread" is chiefly compounded of grain
+grown in North America, Russia, or the Argentine, they maintain their
+singularity. It does the heart good to see the ripening wheatfields of
+East Anglia, to see the gathered stooks in the reaped perspectives,
+and to hear the hum of the threshing machine; for the sights and sound
+seem to carry us back to that England of a bygone age, when Constable
+painted such fields, and when they were numerous enough throughout the
+land to feed the population. Here and there one may still find fields
+of that famous grain, the "Essex Great Wheat," which grows at least
+two feet higher than the ordinary varieties, and is greatly prized for
+the length and stoutness of its straw; but it is a few miles to the
+north-eastward, in the light lands around Harwich, that the Great Wheat
+may be found. Seed and herb-growing are the most prominent industries
+between the Blackwater and the Colne, and the roadside fields are
+striped to wonderment in summer with the rainbow colours of the
+seedsman's trial-grounds. The heavy perfume of stocks and mignonette,
+the claret colour of that gorgeous flower, the "sops-in-wine," the
+gay and varied displays of asters, marguerites, marigolds and a
+hundred others make a midsummer fairyland of the levels that loom
+so drear and misty in the long months of winter. Nor is it only for
+the flower-garden that the Essex seedsman labours. With the sights
+and scents of the flaunting beauties of the garden are mingled the
+homelier ones of mint, grey-green sage and other dowdy kitchen herbs,
+together with the subtle beauty and piercing odour of wide-spreading,
+blue-grey lavender-fields. Even the unromantic mangold, running to seed
+in bush-like shape, sends forth a sweet and pleasing aroma, while the
+yellow mustard contributes its share.
+
+The byways of farming are now, as we have already said, the most--some
+would say the only--profitable kind of husbandry in Essex. Some forms
+of cultivation have largely migrated to other counties, but others
+remain. The growing of the clothiers' teasel was discontinued with
+the decay of the Colchester and Norwich baize industry, and is now
+carried on in other parts of the country, close to districts where
+textile fabrics are still manufactured; but there was a time when,
+along this road between Chelmsford and Colchester, the fields of
+teasels were quite as much a feature as those of mustard are even
+yet. The clothiers' teasel, greatly prized in the East Anglian baize
+manufacture, was nothing but a weed, found useful and cultivated
+accordingly. An aristocratic relation of the less spiky burrs that have
+not been rescued from the hedges and ditches and are still allowed to
+grow wild, the clothiers' teasel was cultivated so far back as the
+reign of Richard the First, but the "common" burr will have to be
+contented with its lowly estate to the end of time, unless something
+unexpected happens.
+
+To "stick like a burr" is proverbial, and the cultivated teasels have
+an even more pronounced clinging property. Furnished as they are with
+natural hooks, they were used in baize-making, and are still employed
+in the cloth trade for raising the nap of the material. The dried heads
+are fixed to cylinders, between which the fabric is passed, and their
+sharp spines, re-curved like so many minute fish-hooks, draw up the
+surface of the cloth. Thus the teasel was raised from its character
+of a worthless weed, and for many years Essex farmers devoted large
+portions of their holdings to its cultivation. It was hoed and kept
+clear of other vagrom weedlings; its heads were cut by hand and
+dried with every care, and eventually were eagerly competed for by
+manufacturers at £12 a load. When the old cloth manufacturers left East
+Anglia, a goodly portion of the Essex farmers' livelihood went with
+them.
+
+Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other weed, the colewort,
+for cole or rape-seed, which has the quadruple properties of feeding
+cage-birds, yielding rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring
+the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help to prop the
+husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and carraways are what "the faculty"
+knows as "carminatives," curative of flatulency; like the once popular
+"eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of the sea holly
+that grows by the estuaries of Essex rivers. Eringo root was once a
+favourite specific for lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last,
+and the preparation of it gradually died out and became extinct about
+1865, when the only manufacturer was an elderly spinster who supplied
+a chemist in High Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the
+making of kümmel and other liqueurs, and carraway seeds, which look
+like commas, are those familiar denizens of "seed cake" that stick in
+the teeth and refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of
+"carraway comfits."
+
+Farmers who do not occupy themselves with seed-growing have passed
+through evil times, but prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's
+well-tilled land, and fruit-farming has come to render cultivation
+profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer, who cannot adapt himself to
+new conditions, agricultural depression in Essex is a very real thing.
+Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one, a small cultivator, a
+son of the soil. He does not hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural
+Essex, in these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the Workhouse
+are said to close every vista? Besides, he has been hard at work in
+the fields, and much of that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like
+friskiness out of the limbs.
+
+A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very badly in need of repair,
+elicits the fact that he has just come away, worsted, from another
+bout in the eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict with
+wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce, for life or a
+livelihood, with weeds--the sorry heritage of the present occupier
+from the slovenly or bankrupt farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing
+upon the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily against the
+cultivator.
+
+"Farmin'?" says our rustic friend; "no great shakes, I tell 'ee. It
+don't pay to grow nawthen now, an' it gets wusser'n wusser. All the
+fields goin' under grass, for ship'n cattle. An' the land's fair
+pisoned with weeds. Yow see them 'ere beece, in that there close down
+along o' the chutch? There's a mort o' docks in that 'ere close. More
+docks'n grass, an' I thinks warsley o' the chanst of cattle gettin'
+a fair bite off'n it. Don't know what docks is? Wish I didden! I've
+bin a-pullin' of 'em till my back's pretty nigh broke, and I'm fair
+dunted with 'em. Last year there worn't ne'er a one: t'yen there's
+a mort on 'em. Where do they come from? God A'mighty knows. _They_
+don't want no cultivation, bless 'ee. There ain't no land so chice but
+what'll grow docks." Here he pulls out his "muckinger," that is to say,
+his handkerchief--the Essex dialect is not the most elegant form of
+speech--and, trumpeting on it like an elephant, with indignation, goes
+his way.
+
+The "chutch" in question is that of Feering, on the other side of
+the Great Eastern Railway, along whose embankment go the frequent
+Prussian-blue-painted locomotives with long trains at their tail, past
+Mark's Tey Junction, whose forest of signal-masts is visible ahead,
+into Colchester. With the raising of that embankment went the life of
+this highway, only now experiencing a revival.
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+THE cyclists, the pedestrians, the motor-men, who adventure along the
+road rejoice at its smooth surface, and find little incident to mark
+their journey. A punctured tyre, a defective valve alone hinder those
+mechanical travellers; while the pedestrian finds a limit set to his
+progress only by his walking powers. Even so, he may obtain to Norwich
+long before the others, for the railway hugs the road closely for
+three parts of the distance, and stations are frequent.
+
+In any case, the curtain has long since been rung down upon the Romance
+of the Road. If this were the place to do it, that romance might be
+recounted at great length; sometimes rising to tragical height, again
+sinking to comedy or farce. But we must take our romance as it comes,
+and, reading as we run, be content to act a vicarious part in the long
+story. And we may well be so content, for to have essayed the journey
+in days of old often meant a "speaking with strangers in the gates"
+that entailed fighting on unequal terms, with the possibility of a
+roadside grave and the tolerable certainty of being robbed of anything
+and everything worth the taking.
+
+Nowadays, the trim suburbs of the towns stretch out on either side
+along the old highway and join hands with the villages; so that when
+travellers of the speedier sort spurn the dust from their flying
+wheels, they think the country is becoming one vast town, and are
+depressed and regretful accordingly. But when the road was the sole
+means of travelling and the towns were still girdled by their walls and
+entered only by fortified gates, the wayfarer welcomed the sight of a
+house in the lonely country between town and village. Even to the rich
+these perils came home, and in the more lawless times they were beset
+with troubles of their own.
+
+Royal progresses were not infrequent along the Norwich Road, and they
+have elsewhere been duly chronicled, but they are things apart and
+give no glimpse of old wayfaring life. If we are at all in the way of
+conjuring up that old-time traffic, we must certainly not forget the
+odd processions that trailed their slow length after my lord and my
+lady, changing residence from one castle or manor-house to another.
+My Lord Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth's time had an exquisite palace,
+of which Macaulay has told us, in Norwich, and the Earls of Oxford
+no doubt kept great state in their castle at Hedingham, but, for all
+their magnificence, they were obliged to take many of their household
+goods with them when flitting from place to place; for the very
+excellent reason that they did not, certainly up to less than three
+hundred years ago, possess more than one fully-equipped establishment.
+When the nobility of old left one of their manor-houses for another
+they commonly took their bedding and a good deal of their furniture
+with them. In even more remote days they removed the glass from their
+windows as well, and stored it carefully away until their return.
+_That_, of course, was a custom of very long ago, when even the most
+luxurious were content with--or, at any-rate, had to endure--things
+which nowadays would drive the inmates of a casual ward to rebellion;
+but, even when the Stuarts reigned, the great ones of the land moved
+from home to home with long baggage-trains and with their entire staff
+of domestics. No board-wages, then! The whole establishment took the
+road, down to the scullery-maids and the hangers-on of the kitchen who
+took charge of the domestic pots and pans. My lord's pages and the
+dignitaries of his household formed the advance-guard; the lowest in
+the scale, who travelled with the culinary utensils and even took the
+coals with them, were, appropriately enough, the "black guard." The
+black guard were probably a very rough lot indeed, at odds with soap
+and water, and on every count deserving of their name, which has in
+the course of centuries obtained a different application, as a term of
+reproach to individuals of moral rather than physical uncleanliness.
+
+Turning from general conditions of travelling to particular travellers,
+there comes tripping along the road an antic fellow, one Will Kemp, who
+danced from London to Norwich in the year 1600; a frolic he undertook
+for a wager, afterwards writing and publishing a book about it, which
+he called _Kemp's Nine Days' Wonder_. Will Kemp was accompanied by
+a drummer whose play upon parchment helped to sustain his flagging
+energies as he skipped it to Widford and thence by a route of his own
+through Braintree to Norwich.
+
+Sprightly, irresponsible Kemp, cracking weak jokes and playing the
+fool, is succeeded in the memories of the road, after an interval of
+some eighty years, by a very grave and responsible figure indeed;
+no less an one than that of King William the Third, on his frequent
+journeys between his dear Holland and his little-loved Kingdom of
+England. Burdened with the care of an alien realm, that saturnine
+little figure with the hooked nose was a familiar sight at Kelvedon,
+where, travelling to and from Harwich, he was wont to stay at the
+"Angel" inn, which still confronts the wayfarer on entering the village
+from London. When the "little gentleman in black" had done his work
+and King William of blessed Protestant memory was no more, the Norwich
+Road, so far as Colchester, was still graced with Royal travellers,
+for, with the coming of the Hanoverians, Harwich became more than ever
+a favourite port of entry and departure, and the choleric early Georges
+knew this Essex landscape well. This way, too, came the Schwellenburgs,
+the Keilmanseggs and the other vulgar and grotesque figures of that
+grotesque and vulgar Court.
+
+Among these figures comes that of the Princess Charlotte of
+Mecklenburg-Strelitz, arrived for the first time in England, in 1761,
+to marry George the Third. One German princess is very like another
+in the pages of history, and the likeness remains even when they
+become queens, so that it is not a little difficult to disentangle a
+Caroline from a Charlotte. Their virtues are of the same drab domestic
+order, and their faces partake of the common fund of unilluminated
+dulness distributed between the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the
+Sonderburg-Augustenburgs, and the dozens of other twopenny-halfpenny
+principalities made familiar by German princely marriages and
+intermarryings. On their mere merits, these personages would find no
+place here, though they travelled all their lives up and down the
+road; but in the circumstances of this particular Princess Charlotte's
+journey there are some incidents worth mentioning. She landed at
+Harwich, and comes into our road at Colchester, September 7, 1761. At
+Colchester she was presented with a box of eringo-root, the famous
+local production highly valued for the cure of pulmonary diseases,
+prepared from the root of the sea holly. Graciously receiving this in a
+box "parfumed and guilt," her carriage swept on towards Witham, where
+she stayed the night at a seat then owned by Lord Abercorn, supping
+with open doors so that all who would might gaze upon their future
+Queen. Next day the journey to London was resumed. The King's coach
+was in readiness at Romford, and into it she changed. At Mile End a
+squadron of Life Guards was in waiting as an escort, and from that
+point the procession was viewed by thousands. But by this time the
+September day was closing. The Duchess of Hamilton, who accompanied the
+Princess, looked at her watch. "We shall hardly have time to dress for
+the wedding," she said.
+
+"The wedding?"
+
+"Yes, madam; it is to be at twelve."
+
+On that the Princess fainted, as well she might. It really took place
+at 9 p.m., instead of three hours later. The King, it is upon record,
+was a little disappointed at the first sight of his bride; but that has
+generally been the way with our Royal marriages. The eldest son of this
+amiable pair, George the Fourth, similarly saw his bride for the first
+time practically on the steps of the altar, and his disappointment
+was keen. "No sooner," we read, "had he approached her than, as if to
+subdue the qualms of irrepressible disgust, he desired the dignified
+envoy to bring him a glass of brandy." The Princess, we are told,
+"expressed surprise," which statement requires no credulity for belief.
+Henry the Eighth's disappointment when he saw Anne of Cleves was
+reflected in the words in which he likened her to a "Flanders mare."
+
+Two years later, in 1763, we find Dr Johnson and his inevitable Boswell
+journeying down the road; Boswell on his way to Harwich for Utrecht,
+and the Doctor good-naturedly accompanying him as far as that seaport.
+They set out by coach on the 5th of August, early in the morning;
+among their fellow-travellers a fat, elderly gentlewoman and a young
+Dutchman, both inclined to conversation. Dining at an inn on the way,
+the lady remarked that she had done her best to educate her children,
+and particularly that she never suffered them to be a moment idle.
+
+"I wish, madam," said Johnson, "you would educate me too; for I have
+been an idle fellow all my life."
+
+"I am sure, sir," said she, "you have not been idle;" which was a
+mere empty compliment, for she had not the least idea whom she was
+addressing.
+
+"Nay, madam," rejoined the Doctor, "it is very true; and that gentleman
+there," pointing to Boswell, "has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh.
+His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then
+came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to
+Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever."
+
+At this, Boswell was very wroth, and asked Johnson, in an aside, how he
+could expose him so.
+
+"Pooh, pooh," retorted the immortal Samuel, "they know nothing about
+you, and will think of it no more." Nor, in all probability, did they.
+
+In this manner they travelled, the gentlewoman talking violently
+against the Roman Catholics and the horrors of the Inquisition;
+Johnson, to the astonishment of all the passengers, save Boswell, who
+knew his ways, defending the Inquisition and its methods with "false
+doctrines." This would appear to have annoyed the rest of the company,
+for Boswell relates that Johnson presently appeared to be very intent
+upon ancient geography. Not so intent, however, but that he noticed
+Boswell giving a shilling to the coachman at the end of one of the
+stages, when it was the custom to give only sixpence. The great man
+took Boswell aside and scolded him for it, saying that what he had
+done would make the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the
+passengers, who had given him no more than his due.
+
+They stopped at Colchester a night, at an inn unfortunately not
+specified, Johnson talking of the town with veneration for having stood
+a siege for Charles the First.
+
+The last great occasion on the road, before railways took its traffic
+away, was the funeral, in 1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline
+of Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven years before: her
+body was embarked for Brunswick on August 16, 1821, after a hurried
+three days' journey from Kensington. So many years have passed by
+since the stormy times when the nation was divided between partisans of
+the King on one side and the Queen on the other--both parties equally
+violent--that the long and bitter quarrels between the "First Gentleman
+in Europe" and the most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times
+have become historic, and no longer divide families, or cause fathers
+to cut their sons off with a shilling, as they did when the trial of
+the Queen was a recent event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no
+saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least odiously vulgar and
+utterly wanting in dignity and the commonest dictates of prudence. They
+were not worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken up by
+parties and made political missiles of, so that even the occasion of
+the Queen's funeral was made the excuse for a riot by her followers,
+who were indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the country,
+as they thought, without proper respect. The Queen died on the 7th of
+August, and it was decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent
+haste" was the expression used by the _Times_ of that day in describing
+the funeral arrangements for the 14th, but that journal was a most
+violent enemy of the then Government and had always supported the Queen
+and vilified the King as far as it could safely be done.
+
+It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty miles between
+Kensington and Harwich in two days, and the _Times_ furiously bellowed
+in its reports that the procession was hurried through London at a
+trot. However that may be, certainly the pace was decently slow when
+on the open road. Ilford was reached, for instance, at 6·15 that
+afternoon, but Romford, only five and a half miles further on, not
+until 7·45; an extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a
+funeral. At Romford the cortège was met by sympathisers with blazing
+torches, who stood on guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort
+and the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn.
+
+At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by the light of a full moon
+which shone in splendour from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the
+night they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock in the
+morning. Here the coffin was placed in the church until a start was
+made again, seven hours later. At last Colchester was reached, at
+five o'clock in the afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse
+unguarded in the High Street, while they took their fill at the "Three
+Cups." Thus, in its squalor and irreverence, the passing of this Queen
+of England resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or kin.
+
+It had been proposed to complete the journey to Harwich that day,
+but, after violent disputes in the street between opposing factions,
+it was agreed to defer the departure until the next morning, and to
+deposit the coffin meanwhile in St Peter's Church. Inside that sacred
+building, disputes broke out afresh, one party wishing to affix a plate
+on the coffin-lid, bearing the inscription, "Caroline of Brunswick, the
+injured Queen of England," while the other vehemently objected. The
+quarrel was finally settled by agreeing to postpone fixing the plate
+until after the embarkation.
+
+With the start made the following morning at half-past five, this
+melancholy procession leaves the Norwich Road, and history goes with
+it. The tale is done, the colophon reached.
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+IF we seek some touchstone by which to test the progress of a century
+or so in civilisation, there is scarce a better than found in
+comparison between the condition of the roads in old and modern times.
+That Waller could, in all sincerity, speak of "vile Essexian roads"
+is not remarkable: he was a poet, dealt in superlatives and lived in
+the seventeenth century. But that Arthur Young, a hundred years later,
+could with equal sincerity, and in more emphatic language, describe
+Essex roads as "rocky lanes, with ruts of inconceivable depth," is
+startling. It was in 1768 he penned that indictment, adding that they
+were so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the sun, and strewn
+with stones "as big as a horse, and full of abominable holes." It were,
+he concludes, a misuse of language to call them turnpikes, for they
+were rich in ponds of liquid dirt; while loose flints and vile grips
+cut across to drain off the water made the traveller's pilgrimage a
+weariness.
+
+The modern reader, perusing all these manifold sins and wickednesses
+of the roads, rather wonders how they could all have been crowded
+on to such truly vile ways, and if a stone were as big as a horse,
+how room could have been found beside it for holes, ponds and other
+objectionable features. But Arthur Young was a truthful man in general.
+
+To-day the Essex high roads are as near perfection as any in the home
+counties, even though the byways be steep and rough and more than
+usually winding.
+
+It is in these byways that he who seeks rural Essex shall find. The
+dramatic suddenness and completeness with which, a few hundred yards
+from the high road, the sophisticated wayside towns and hamlets are
+exchanged for the unspoiled rusticity of the original villages is
+surprising. In these lanes the older rustics talk and think much as
+their grandfathers did, but the rising generation unhappily do not,
+and the Essex rustic in general, like his fellows elsewhere, has
+almost wholly discarded the old dress of the peasantry. Only the very
+old or the more remote yet wear the smock-frock--the "round frock,"
+or the "gaberdine," as they called it--that was once as honourable a
+distinction of the ploughmen, herds, or carters as are the uniforms of
+our soldiers and sailors.
+
+The time is long past since a clean smock-frock, corded breeches,
+worsted stockings and well-greased lace-up boots formed the approved
+rural costume for Sundays or holidays, just as the same articles of
+apparel in a "second-best" condition made the workaday wear. The
+Sunday costume of the agricultural labourer is now a cheap and clumsy
+travesty of the clothes worn by townsfolk, and in hideous contrast
+with his surroundings. Exactly what it is like may be seen on any
+advertisement hoarding in the outskirts of Chelmsford, Colchester and
+lesser towns, where pictorial posters bid Giles go to Shoddy's for
+cheap outfits. Sunday mornings find him flaunting his finery in the
+village street; his would-be stylish boots creaking, his every article
+of wear writ large with vulgarity. Often he carries gloves in those
+large hands of his, rough with honest week-day toil, and a pair may
+thus last him for years--for he dare not attempt to put them on. Would
+that he equally purchased his cheap cigars for show and refrained from
+smoking them!
+
+But there the village dandy is. Often his pocket-handkerchief is
+scented; generally his hair is glossy with grease; and he would not
+consider himself fully equipped without watch and chain, scarf-pin,
+ring and walking stick. To grease his boots he would be ashamed. _They_
+must be brightly polished, even though his manners are not, and his
+language defiles the village street what time the bells are ringing
+to church. Such is Young England in the villages at the dawn of the
+Twentieth Century. These things may spell Progress, but they are rather
+pitiful.
+
+It is a little difficult, in presenting a sketch of his ancestor of
+a hundred years or more ago, to avoid drawing too favourable a view
+of him; but the rustic in old times certainly seems to have matched
+much better with his surroundings than is the case nowadays. He made
+no attempts to dress up to town standards, and if he wanted to shine
+above his fellows did so by virtue of superior neatness only. Perhaps
+he had the finer instincts of the two, or more likely lacked the
+opportunities for bad taste that surround his descendants. Certainly,
+if we are to believe in the origin of the smock-frock, as put forward
+by some antiquaries, we must sorrowfully admit that the rustic's remote
+ancestor had as great a longing for unsuitable display in dress as
+can possibly be charged to the present generation. The smock-frock
+is, in fact, traced back by some to the ecclesiastical garments worn
+at Mass by deacons and sub-deacons, at the time when the Reformation
+swept vestments out of every village church in the land. Those who are
+familiar with genuine old smock-frocks have noticed the elaborate and
+often beautiful needlework on collar and breast. The devices appear to
+have a traditional likeness, all over the country, and consist either
+of Celtic-looking whorls, or of semi-decorative flower forms, or of
+lozenge patterns. The comparative simplicity or elaboration of this
+needlework depended solely upon the fancy, or the time at command, of
+the wearer's women-folk whose work it was. Whence came this tradition?
+It is thought from the tunicles of the minor clergy, which were
+certainly decorated in the same position, if not in similar patterns.
+When the minor belongings of the Church became the spoil of the
+villages, Hodge and Giles found themselves the proud possessors of the
+strange garments, for which they could find at first no better use than
+for Sunday wear. A striking appearance they must have made in them,
+down the village street, the envy of their less fortunate fellows.
+
+When the looted vestments grew shabby they must have been used for
+everyday wear, and so have set the fashions in smock-frocks, both in
+shape and decoration, for centuries to come. If it be thought that the
+costume was rather extravagant, it can only be asked, is not that of
+the modern Sunday morning yokel extravagant also?
+
+The rustic of long ago was a man of dense ignorance and dark
+superstitions. No one county was then more guilty than another in that
+respect, but East Anglians, and perhaps especially the Essex bucolics,
+are still, despite their veneer of civilisation, sunk in uncanny
+beliefs. Witches still "overlook" folks in Essex hamlets, and spells
+are cast on cattle and horses, or unhappy fowls are blighted by the
+Evil Eye. Consequently the learned professions of Witch-Doctor and
+Wise Women are not yet extinct. Their existence is not likely to be
+discovered by the stranger, but they thrive, in limited numbers, even
+in these days of pills and patent medicines.
+
+Board Schools are supposed to be educating Young England into a dead
+monotony of speech, but it will be long before they complete the horrid
+work. In Essex, indeed, we may not unreasonably think it a task beyond
+the power of teachers and inspectors, who if they have not succeeded,
+after thirty years working of the Elementary Education Act, in inducing
+the lower-class Londoners to say "yes" for "yuss," together with other
+linguistic enormities, are not likely to be successful in abolishing
+the very marked and stubborn Essex shibboleths. It may not generally
+be known that much of the so-called "Cockney" talk derives from the
+Essex dialect. From Essex especially comes that curious perversity
+of the unruly member which in many cases insists upon pronouncing
+the letter A as I. The lower-class Londoner and the Essex peasant
+are unanimous in enunciating A as I in all words where that letter
+retains its open sound and its individuality. Thus, in the words "baby"
+"favourite," "made" and "native," for instance, the letter becomes I;
+and the Fleet Street newsboy, shouting his "spusshul uxtry piper," can
+legitimately call cousins, if he wishes it, with the Essex lad at the
+plough-tail.
+
+Where A is sounded broadly, or in cases like the word "was," in which
+it masquerades as O, or where the letter is absolutely silent, or not
+fully pronounced, as in "beast" and "maternal," this peculiarity does
+not appear.
+
+The effect is sometimes grotesque, as, for example, near Colchester,
+where the villages of Layer Marney, Layer Breton, and Layer de la Hay
+are always spoken of as Liyer, the last mentioned becoming Liyer de la
+High.
+
+Nor is pronunciation the only singular feature of Essex talk, as
+those who keep their ears alert in these parts will soon find. The
+oddest phrases are matters of everyday use, and the Essex peasant can
+no more help using the word "together," in season and out, than he
+can help being hungry before meals or sleepy by bedtime. "Together,"
+as employed by the Essex peasant, is a word absolutely meaningless;
+a kind of linguistic excrescence which, like a wart or a boil, is
+neither useful nor beautiful. When a ploughman says he is going to
+plough "that there field together," he does not mean to imply that he
+is about to plough it together with some other land, or with a party
+of other ploughmen. He simply adds the word from force of habit, and
+from hearing his father and grandfather before him so use it, in almost
+every sentence, as a sort of verbal makeweight. The present writer has
+had the good fortune to hear a supremely ludicrous use of this Bœotian
+habit of speech. It was market-day at Colchester, and Stanway village
+had emptied itself in the direction of the town. A dog rolled dustily
+in the sunny road, and the historian of these things luxuriously
+quaffed his "large lemon" on the bench outside the village inn. As
+Artemus Ward might have said, "orl was peas," when there entered upon
+the scene a countryman, evidently known to the landlord. He walked into
+the bar, and, surprised to find mine host in solitary state, exclaimed,
+"What, all alone together, bor?"
+
+"Yes," replied the landlord, in no wise astonished at this
+extraordinary expression, "the missus has gone to Colchester together."
+
+"Did my missus go with her?" asked the rustic.
+
+"No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by herself."
+
+In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging more especially
+to Norfolk and Suffolk. This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for
+neighbour.
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+STANWAY is approached along a flat stretch, past Mark's Tey, which,
+without being itself quite on the road, has sent out modern and
+extremely ugly brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible
+distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's Tey church is
+visible, amid an inchoate mass of railway signal masts and puffs of
+smoke. Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings proceed from
+that direction, for this is a junction of the Great Eastern with the
+Colne Valley Railway, and the station, by the way, where the lady in
+Thackeray's _Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditch_ appeared
+with the baby which she eventually left behind her. It is this busy
+junction that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses along the
+road to render the village of the old De Marcas something new and
+strange. Mark's Tey is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for
+the road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in here.
+
+Copford's solitary houses by the way give scarce a hint of the village
+nearly a mile off, whose little church formerly owned a terrifying
+relic, in the shape of a human skin nailed on its door; a skin that
+had been the personal property of some unfortunate straggler from the
+hordes of marauding Danes that once infested the district, of whom we
+have already heard legends at Kelvedon and Gore Pit. His Saxon captors
+must have flayed him with a ferocious delight and nailed up his cuticle
+with precisely the same satisfaction as that of the gamekeeper who
+wages war upon stoats and weazels and other vermin, and hangs their
+bodies on the barn door. But there must have been a bitter day of
+reckoning for those Saxons when the sea-rovers came this way again and
+saw in what fashion that doorway was decorated.
+
+[Illustration: Near Mark's Tey.]
+
+Copford and its outlying houses lie at the crest of a gentle descent
+into the valley of a rivulet which finds its way into the Colne.
+It stands, as its name implies, overlooking some ford which, once
+important, has, in the gradual draining of the country and the
+shrinkage of streams, now lost all significance. Stanway adjoins it,
+and lies along the descent, in the hollow and up the corresponding
+rise on the other side, where its church stands in a forbidding
+loneliness. The name of Stanway is sufficient warranty of this being,
+thus far, the Roman road. It is, however, not so certain that the
+remaining four miles of the existing highway from this point into
+Colchester follow the course taken by the Romans; and, indeed, the
+later researches of archæologists go far to prove that the original
+way into Roman Colchester avoided the intervening village of Lexden
+altogether, and, curving eastwards, avoided what may then have been
+a marsh, to take the higher ground over a portion of Lexden Heath;
+bending westwards again and crossing the site of the present road
+between where the grammar school and the hospital now stand. From this
+point it seems to have crossed by where the Lordsland Nursery grounds
+stood until recently built over, to the ancient Roman gateway and
+bastion in the western wall of the town, long known as Colking's, or
+King Coel's Castle, but originally the Decuman Gate of Roman times.
+The course followed by this old Roman way is lined on either side with
+sepulchral remains, and seems to have once been a great cemetery.
+Wherever the ground is disturbed the relics of some soldier or citizen
+of Colonia are found, some dating back to the foundation of the colony,
+nearly nineteen centuries ago. The most remarkable among them are to be
+seen in the museum at Colchester Castle. There--the most human relic
+of them all--is the touching monument to M. Favonius, a Centurion of
+the Twentieth Legion, discovered in 1871 between the hospital and
+the grammar school, at a depth of 3 feet below the surface, and at a
+distance of 10 feet from the old Roman road. It is a sculptured stone,
+4 feet in height, with the figure of the Centurion himself carved on
+it, in high relief. It is evidently a portrait of him. He stands in
+full military costume, his cloak hanging from his shoulders, his sword
+and dagger by his side. The inscription, almost as sharp as on the day
+when it was cut, nearly nineteen hundred years ago, tells us that the
+monument was erected by two of his servants, Verecundus and Novicius.
+They call him "facilis," the "easy" or "good-natured." It is surely a
+sweet and touching thing that when all other record of that soldier has
+perished, we should yet know him to have been a kindly creature.
+
+But to return to Stanway, which keeps, as sole vestige of its heath,
+a little space of the greenest turf, perhaps half an acre in extent,
+beside the insignificant stream in the hollow, and opposite the "Swan"
+Inn. The heath that formerly spread out across the elevated but flat
+table-land between this village and the succeeding one of Lexden was,
+in its different parts, variously named after them. On Stanway Heath,
+in Ogilby's _Britannia_ of 1697, a picture map shows a beacon standing
+between the forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from London, on
+the right-hand side of the road. It appears to have been a post some
+30 feet in height, crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means of
+slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily lighted, was provided for
+the benefit of travellers going to or coming from Colchester across
+the desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from the existence of
+a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the comparative security of Lexden village.
+The heath by the highway is a thing of the past, for those portions
+not brought under cultivation by the farmer have been grabbed by the
+builder, and the so-called Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row
+of houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything complete and
+modern. At the forty-eighth milestone, amid all this modern upheaval,
+stands a disused toll-house, and, close by, something much more
+ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered in dense woods and
+shrubs, known as "King Cole's Kitchen," and now--figure to yourself the
+shame of it!--overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and named from it
+"King Cole's Cottage."
+
+Turning off to the right, the curious in things pre-historic may
+lose themselves in the solitudes of the real Lexden Heath, where the
+Devil, the Trinobantes, the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary
+General--according to varying legends--threw up the entrenchments,
+and delved the ditches, found there in plenty. The Devil, we say
+advisedly, for "Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to the dyke
+across the heath, was none other, in the minds of the Saxons. "Lexden
+Straight Road" follows for an unconscionable distance a line of Roman
+entrenchments, and is straight and dull beyond belief. Followed long
+enough, it leads to "Bottle End," which may originally have been
+"Battle End," the scene of some traditional legend of Boadicea's
+defeat at the hands of the Romans. Or, again, it perhaps marks some
+forgotten connection with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside
+Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced "Bottle" by
+Colcestrians. Anything is possible in a district where Beacon End, the
+site of the old beacon already mentioned, has become Bacon End.
+
+[Illustration: LEXDEN.]
+
+Lexden village now claims attention. It is a place in which one school
+of antiquaries finds the original Roman station of Camulodunum,
+established on the site of the royal city of Cunobelin, King of the
+Trinobantes; a finding strenuously contested by another following.
+Certainly, among the tall elms and rolling surface of Lexden Park there
+are remains in plenty of huge defensive earthworks, telling in no
+uncertain manner that this must have been a place of enormous strength,
+by whomsoever held. The surroundings are weird and impressive to a
+degree.
+
+The village skirting the road is one of the prettiest on the way. Going
+towards Colchester, the road drops down the hill, where old cottages
+stand high above the pathway, with steep little gardens in front, kept
+from sliding down into the road itself by lichened retaining-walls
+sprouting with house-leek and draped with climbing plants. Lower
+still, hard by the church whose carpenter-Gothic atrocities are hung
+about with ivy and creepers until they are transfigured into a dream
+of beauty, the grouping of the 'Sun' Inn and neighbouring houses
+is exquisite. Beyond this point begins the suburban approach to
+Colchester, a town it behoves the stranger to approach with a proper
+respect, for here was the first Roman colony in Britain. The history
+of Colchester, indeed, begins so far back as A.D. 44, and there was
+already a pre-historic native city in existence before then; the royal
+city of that ancient British king, Cunobelin, the monarch famous in the
+pages of Shakespeare as "Cymbeline."
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+CUNOBELIN, Lord of the Trinobantes, ruler of that part of the
+country now divided into Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire,
+Hunts, Cambridgeshire and Essex, was the successor of his father
+Cassivelaunus, who had warred, not ingloriously, with Julius Cæsar. He
+transferred his capital from his native town on the site of St Albans
+to where Colchester now stands. He appears to have been a powerful
+ruler, and, if little is known of him, certainly he is no myth, for
+the vague legends that held the name of the Buckinghamshire villages
+of Great and Little Kimble to be a corrupted form of his own were
+strikingly proved correct some years ago, when a hoard of gold coins
+was ploughed up in their neighbourhood, bearing his title.
+
+We do not know by what name Colchester was then styled. After Cunobelin
+had died, full of years and worn by grief at the revolts of his sons,
+Caractacus, Adminius and Togodumnus, the end of the native State over
+which he had ruled speedily came. Adminius, in a fury against his
+brothers, fled from Britain to seek the aid of the Romans, and if no
+immediate result came, certainly his invitation must have revived
+the old Cæsarian dream of conquest. The real cause of the Roman
+invasion that took place shortly after the death of Cunobelin was the
+solicitation of a certain Bericus, a British Prince of whom nothing
+appears to be known beyond this one fact.
+
+The invasion took place in A.D. 43, under that able general, Aulus
+Plautius, who threw the Trinobantes back from Hertfordshire and
+Middlesex, across the Lea and into the Essex marshes, where for a time
+they could not be followed. This was the position at the close of the
+year. Detached portions of the invading forces had overrun the south of
+Britain as far as Gloucester and had defeated the tribes on the way;
+leaving a garrison in the west. But the island was little known and
+held many mysteries. None could tell the real strength of the natives,
+who disappeared in the forests and marshes that covered the face of the
+land, and by their irregular warfare disconcerted the Roman plans of
+campaign. Plautius was at last driven to act on the defensive on the
+Essex borders. His soldiers were dying in the ague-stricken morasses
+between the Thames and the Lea, and had the enemy possessed powers of
+combination and military skill, he might well have been cut off here,
+at the end of the known world. A retirement with his sick and dying was
+impossible. Nothing remained but to go into camp during the winter, and
+meanwhile to send for reinforcements. He accordingly sent for forces
+from Gaul. They came with commendable promptitude, commanded by the
+Emperor Claudius in person. With these new legions came an elephant
+corps, brought from Africa to carry the heavy baggage. But they acted
+a better part than this, for their strange appearance terrified the
+astonished Trinobantes a great deal more than any increase of the
+Roman soldiery could have done. We may imagine this corps, crashing
+irresistibly through the thickets, the forests and marshes on that
+march into the Unknown, along this line of country now traversed by the
+Norwich Road, and can readily understand little resistance being met
+with on the way. The tribes were dispersed and their territory occupied
+as far as the Stour, and a colony was founded in the opening of the new
+year, A.D. 44, on the site of Cunobelin's city--Colonia Camulodunum,
+the first Roman settlement in Britain.
+
+The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance of the natives that
+they were soon lulled into a feeling of security. For an uninterrupted
+space of sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It became a pleasant
+town, inhabited by veteran soldiers grown grey in the service of the
+Empire, and spending their later years in retirement. The Emperor
+Claudius, flushed with his success, had assumed the dignity of a god
+and had caused a Temple to be erected in the market-place to his
+honour, with attendant priests and altars. The governors and consuls
+were lesser gods, and treated with contempt and ill-judged severity
+the natives who had been overcome with such ease. The soldiery were
+uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and luxury flourished together with this
+attitude of oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences. It is not
+surprising that these colonists were bitterly hated by their vassals,
+who in especial looked upon the priests as so many harpies living upon
+their substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoods and
+all clergy have been from the beginning, and will be to the end. In
+this last respect these poor Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians,
+exhibited a quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the
+priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment that have since
+passed.
+
+These down-trodden natives were already ripe for revenge when a more
+than usually unjust proceeding of the Roman officials precipitated
+a rising. The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and whose
+frontiers marched with those of the conquered province, had been ruled
+over by a certain King Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate
+the goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast wealth he
+had accumulated, leaving one half to the Roman Emperor and the other
+moiety to his two daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his
+country was invaded. His widow, the famous Boadicea, resisted. She
+was publicly scourged, her daughters suffering the worst indignities,
+and her relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose in arms at
+these outrages, and their cousins, the Trinobantes, on the hither side
+of the Stour, joined them. The Romans saw their folly when too late.
+No more eloquent account is possible than that given by Tacitus of
+the premonitions of evil. The statue of Victory fell to the ground,
+and turned its back where the face had been, as if it fled before an
+enemy. Women were seen and heard singing mad, wild songs, prophesying
+disaster. Strange and unaccountable noises were heard in the house
+of assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. In the estuary of
+the river the buildings of the city appeared reflected upside down,
+and ghastly remains of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the
+tide ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and the strangest
+whisperings stirred the air. Many of the wealthier colonists, alarmed
+at these portents, discovered that their health needed a change of air,
+and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side of the Channel, and
+those who remained applied for military help. In answer to this appeal,
+a meagre force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately employed to
+fortify the Temple. But before these measures could be completed, the
+town was surrounded and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants all
+slain, the little garrison in the Temple meeting a like fate after a
+defence of two days.
+
+Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the Ninth Legion, which had
+been stationed on the Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now
+stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city. He, however, had moved
+too late, and met the victorious natives at Wormingford, where they
+almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences of that great
+disaster were discovered in 1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns,
+placed in order like streets, were unearthed, containing the bones
+of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the Roman sway had been
+reasserted.
+
+These events happened in A.D. 61. Suetonius Paulinus, the then
+Commander-in-Chief, was at that time vigorously prosecuting a war with
+the Druids in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of these disasters
+he hurried back through Verulamium and Londinium, collecting an army
+of ten thousand as he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and a
+numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman citizens of both those
+towns piteously begged for protection, but were left to their fate,
+which was not long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column passed
+than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed them. Seventy thousand
+citizens perished in that general massacre.
+
+It is uncertain where the Roman army met the hordes commanded by that
+heroic Amazon, Boadicea, whom we should perhaps more correctly style
+"Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull subject in the hands of
+the uninspired, who fail to render her "convincing." No one has done
+so well as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern writers of
+"personal paragraphs" in what recent slang would term his "actuality."
+He says, "she was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed,
+harsh-voiced, with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair falling below
+her waist" (her golden hair was hanging down her back!), "wearing a
+highly-embroidered tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a buckle over
+it."
+
+Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by two woods, on a
+site resembling a stretch of country at Haynes Green, near Messing; but
+the great fight must have raged on many miles of ground, and no doubt
+included Lexden Heath.
+
+The Britons were so sure of victory, that they had brought their women
+and children as spectators, and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a
+great semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman historian says
+they were an "innumerable multitude." The British Queen, addressing
+her warriors from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to die,
+resting her hopes on the strength of her forces and the justice of
+her cause; while Suetonius, on his part, urged his troops not to be
+dismayed either by the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts.
+The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining on the defensive.
+When the fury of the first onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers
+of the Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the cavalry closing
+in on the flanks, driving the speedily disorganised enemy back upon the
+semi-circle of waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in this
+way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in which eighty thousand
+Britons were slain, including the women and children who had come out
+to witness the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing all lost,
+poisoned herself.
+
+Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and Suffolk. From this time
+date the existing walls of Colchester. The conquerors were determined
+not to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first colony,
+and, choosing a new site, one mile to the east of the former city,
+they planted their walls on the ridge on which Colchester now stands,
+overlooking the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing an area
+of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain, after the passing of more than
+eighteen hundred years, the most perfect Roman fortifications in
+Britain. Even in that wide space of time the town of Colchester has not
+extended very greatly beyond them. In some directions, indeed--notably
+to the north and north-east and on the west--the ramparts still look
+out upon the open country. The walls have a thickness of from seven to
+eight feet, and are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses
+of stones, brought with great labour from the coast near Harwich;
+the neighbourhood of Colchester, and Essex in general, being quite
+innocent of stone of any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this
+day supply the boulders of limestone from which the building-stones of
+Colchester's walls were cut.
+
+Colchester was never again attacked during the period of more than
+three hundred years, in which the Romans ruled. In the events of A.D.
+61, they had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of treating
+a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In the period between these
+events and the year 410, when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from
+Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from ruin, conquered and
+conquerors had to live together, and made the best of the necessity.
+Roman colonists intermarried with the gradually Romanised British,
+and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during three centuries,
+gradually grew to look upon Britain as their home and themselves as
+a nation. Thus, towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority
+are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and civilised British
+princes treating on equal terms with Roman statesmen. In this way
+the British in some measure came into their own again, and to these
+circumstances we owe the wild legends of that mysterious monarch, "old
+King Cole," who is to Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall,
+the great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's walls, and
+the earthworks near Lexden known as "King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the
+very name of Colchester itself--"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive,
+according to legends, from this scarce more than mythical personage.
+Those stories make him one Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of
+semi-independent British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal
+sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman conquest. The story
+goes on to tell how, on the death of the usurper Carausius, in A.D.
+293, Coel surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius Chlorus,
+on that successor of the Cæsar's marrying his daughter Helena, who
+became the mother of Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer
+of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of Colchester still bear a
+ragged cross between four crowns, in allusion to this tale of the
+Empress Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction which
+Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy of her, holding a cross
+very plain to see, is newly set up on the very topmost point of the
+gorgeous new Town Hall, recently completed.
+
+To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the
+legend of Coel is chiefly traced. He may either have imagined it, or
+have woven the story out of existing legends, which had in turn derived
+from the Saxons, who, after the departure of the Romans, had wrested
+the country from the Romanised British. They captured and burnt the
+town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls, took them to have
+been the work of some great king, after whom the place had been named.
+Legends of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons themselves
+had been converted to Christianity he was fully provided with a history.
+
+"Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster, has been shabbily
+treated in modern times and made to figure merely as a jolly toper.
+That he was the most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically
+assures us.
+
+ "He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called for his
+ fiddlers three."
+
+Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house potentate! The
+author of that nursery rhyme has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain
+did the romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of vulgarity, _A
+Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_.
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+THE entrance into Colchester is singular. From the straight, broad road
+leading past the trim modern villas and so into Crouch Street--the
+street outside the walls that takes its name from the vanished
+monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars--the wayfarer
+suddenly comes to the sharpest of angles, and, turning abruptly to the
+left, enters Colchester by what has every appearance of being the back
+door into the town.
+
+Historically considered, the entrance by crooked Head Street, as the
+continuation of Crouch Street is called, really is a back way, and was
+in Roman times the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and
+less important roads. But ever since Saxon days this has been the only
+way to or from London into the town.
+
+How it happened that the original road and the Decuman Gate in
+Colchester's west wall fell into disuse, none can tell. It was so many
+ages ago that not even a pathway leads along the ancient way, now
+quite obliterated by houses. But if the road be gone, the Gate itself
+remains, though in ruins. Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt
+to find it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our steps a
+little distance along Crouch Street, and, so doing, to take a turning
+to the right-hand, down Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome
+is seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands towering above
+a flight of steps leading up into the street beyond. There stands
+revealed a portion of the wall. The breach in it, through which the
+steps lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees, the freshness
+of whose spring foliage with every recurrent April forms a romantic
+contrast with the almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a
+place for thought. From the summit of that old defence, where once the
+legionaries lined the battlements in time of peril, or leaned gossiping
+in peaceful days, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley where
+the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary lifting of the veil and
+a glimpse of what the spot will be like in another eighteen hundred
+years. Close by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn
+courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman Gate. Three arches can
+be traced; the middle arch of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot
+passengers, less than half that width. Candour, however, compels the
+admission that of architectural character they have not the slightest
+trace. Over against this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in the
+Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and through that hole the
+most prominent object in all Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo"
+brutally dominates everything, and blasts the approach to Colchester
+far away on every road but that from London, for which small mercy
+thanks be given. Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he is
+very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and, unluckily, cannot fail
+to be seen. After him, even the Roman remains of Colchester pale their
+ineffectual efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable, although not
+very likely, that a stranger passing through Colchester might not
+notice its Roman antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There he
+is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless in brick of
+the most striking red and in attempts at decoration which, however
+well meant, only serve to render his hulking body more objectionable,
+with an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged face with
+pearl-powder.
+
+Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower of Colchester's
+waterworks. It was built in 1881, and cost close upon £10,500, and
+there are those who say it is the second largest of its kind in
+England. Where the largest may be we know not, but if it injures its
+surroundings as effectually as does Colchester's incubus, that unknown
+place has our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in his name,
+for, as the curious may see for themselves, his weather-vane bears the
+effigy of an elephant.
+
+Returning to Crouch Street, and so by Head Gate and along Head Street,
+the High Street is gained. It is one of the broadest and most spacious
+streets in the kingdom, as it had every occasion to be, for it was not
+only part of the great road leading into Suffolk, but in it was held
+the principal fair of the town. Here, too, close by where Colchester's
+new and gorgeous Town Hall stands, was the old Moot Hall, a building
+of Saxon, Norman and later periods, barbarously destroyed in 1843. In
+the Moot Hall the Mayor and justices dealt with offences of all kinds,
+from the selling of bad meat to charges of witchcraft, sorcery and
+heresy. Thus we may read in the borough records of things so diverse
+as the fining of Robert Barefot, butcher, in the sum of twelve pence
+for selling putrid meat, and may learn how William Chevelying, the
+first of the Colchester martyrs, was imprisoned here in the reign of
+Henry the Sixth until such time as it was convenient to burn him in
+front of Colkyng's Castle. Here the local Court of Pie Powder was held
+during the Corporation Fair Days, in October. Summary jurisdiction
+was the special feature of that Court, and it was needed, for in those
+times, when people of all sorts and conditions came from far and near,
+offences were many and various. In the legal jargon of the Middle Ages
+this tribunal is called the _Curia Regis Pedis Pulverizatis_, or, in
+the Norman-French then common, the "Cour Royal des Pieds Poudrés,"
+that is to say, the King's Court of Dusty Feet. Courts of Pie Powder
+obtained this eminently descriptive name from the original Fair
+Courts, held in the dusty streets long before buildings were erected
+for the purpose, and the name survived long after the necessity which
+originated it had disappeared. Imagine, therefore, the highwaymen, the
+cheats and thieves and those who came into disputation on the Fair Days
+being brought before the Mayor by the bailiffs, their cases arising and
+being heard, and judgments and sentences being delivered and executed,
+within the space of one day, amid the bleating of the flocks, the
+lowing of the herds, and all the noise and tumult of the Fair itself.
+We must not, however, suppose the High Street to have been absolutely
+clear of obstructions in days of old. In midst of it stood the Late
+Saxon or Early Norman church of that Saxon saint, St Runwald, which
+remained here until so recently as 1878, when it was pulled down and
+its site sold to the Corporation, to be thrown into the roadway.
+
+That Colchester stands on a considerably elevated site is evident to
+all who, having entered from the London road, turn out of Head Street
+into the High Street, and in doing so glimpse the long descent of
+North Hill at the corner. A further revelation is that of East Hill,
+which, in continuation of High Street, the traveller must long and
+steeply descend towards the Colne, on his way to Ipswich and Norwich.
+It was in High Street that Colchester's principal coaching inns were
+situated, and there yet remains--now the most picturesque feature of
+that thoroughfare--the "Red Lion," with old timber brackets supporting
+a projecting upper storey and a four-centred Tudor oak entrance
+curiously carved; its original and restored portions so thickly smeared
+with paint and varnish that all might be old, so far as the antiquary
+can tell, or all might be in the nature of Wardour Street antiques.
+The "Red Lion" figured as a rendezvous in the surrender of the town to
+Fairfax, after the siege of 1648. In its yard the vanquished laid down
+their swords.
+
+Another inn was the "White Hart," where Bank Passage leaves the High
+Street. The building, a highly respectable plaster-faced one, smug
+and Georgian, still stands, but it is an inn no longer. Another old
+inn, the "Three Cups," has been rebuilt. Older than any, but coyly
+hiding its antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint
+galleries from the crowd, is the "Angel," in West Stockwell Street,
+whose origin as a pilgrim's inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants to,
+or returning from, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away
+on the road through and past Norwich, housed here and misbehaved
+themselves in their mediæval way. It would be the gravest of mistakes
+to assume old pilgrims decorous. Modern Bank Holiday folks would,
+compared with them, seem to be of a severe monkish austerity. The
+shrine at Walsingham, second only in repute to that of the Blessed
+Thomas at Canterbury, drew crowds of every class, from king to beggar.
+The great Benedictine Abbey of St John at Colchester sheltered some
+in its guest-houses, while the late-comers inned at such hostelries
+as the "Angel," or, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods.
+Ill fared the unsuspecting citizen who met any of these sinners on
+the way to be plenarily indulged and lightened of their load of sin.
+They would murder him for twopence or cudgel him out of high spirits
+and for the fun of the thing; arguing, doubtless, that as they were
+presently to turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how black the old
+one was. Drunkenness and crime, immorality, obscenity and license of
+the grossest kind were in fact accompaniments of pilgrimage, and the
+sin-worn wanderers who prayed devoutly at the niche, now empty of its
+statue, in the east end of All Saints' Church in the High Street, on
+their journey to and from Walsingham, would resume their foul jests and
+their evil courses so soon as the last bead was told and the ultimate
+word of dog-Latin glibly pattered off.
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+REMOVED from all the noise and bustle of the High Street, in a quiet
+nook away from the modern life of the town, stands Colchester Castle,
+on the site of the Temple of Claudius. The Keep, built by Eudo,
+"Dapifer," or High Steward of Normandy, under William the Conqueror
+and his two successors, alone remains, and has lost its upper storey,
+destroyed by a speculator who bought the building in 1683, and half
+ruined himself in his attempts to demolish it. It is perhaps not
+generally known that this is by far the largest keep in England,
+measuring 155 ft. by 113 ft. The Tower of London, built at the same
+period, and the next largest, measures only 116 ft. by 96 ft. There
+have been those who, looking at its massive walls, 12 ft. thick, with
+courses of Roman tiles conspicuous in them, have believed this to be
+the original Roman temple, and antiquaries who should have known better
+have written long treatises to support their views. Those, however,
+were the days before comparative archæology had come into being to
+prove that the peculiarities in the planning, noticeable here, are
+partaken of by the undoubted Norman keeps of the Tower of London and
+of Rochester Castle, known to have been designed by Gundulf, Bishop of
+Rochester. Freeman was very severe in his time on those who labelled
+the interior of Colchester keep with such names as "podium" and
+"adytum," in their belief of its Roman character.
+
+[Illustration: THE GRAND STAIRCASE, COLCHESTER CASTLE.]
+
+If its lack of height prevents Colchester Castle from being impressive
+without, certainly its gloomy dungeons and mighty walls compel the
+respect and wonder of all who enter. They look not so much as though
+they had been built up, as though cells and passages had been carved
+and burrowed out of a solid mass; so small are those passages and
+staircases, so thick the walls. In the chapel and the corridors that
+still remain roofed, the collections of the Essex Archæological Society
+have a home, and from other and roofless walls that are broad enough
+to afford the safest of pathways one may gaze down upon the surrounding
+grassy enclosures and see that spot where those two Royalist
+commanders, Lucas and Lisle, who held Colchester for seventy-six days
+against the besieging army of the Parliament in 1648, were barbarously
+shot by order of Fairfax, after having surrendered.
+
+That siege of Colchester is the most romantic incident that has
+survived in the history of the town. It is the story of a last
+desperate attempt of the Royalists to contend with the Parliamentary
+forces that had everywhere overwhelmed the King's supporters after a
+bitter warfare of over six years. It was a gallant attempt, and the
+more so because Essex was not a county favourable to the King's cause.
+Sir Charles Lucas, at the head of this enterprise, was a younger
+member of the Lucas family, seated at Colchester. In the beginning of
+June 1648, a Royalist rising under Colonel Goring had been checked at
+Blackheath by the Parliamentary general, Fairfax. A portion of Goring's
+force crossed the Thames into Essex, and lay at Brentwood. This was
+an opportunity which Essex sympathisers could not let slip. Lucas and
+his friends, gathering a body of adherents, galloped down the road
+to Chelmsford, where the Committee of Parliament was in session, and
+seized them, afterwards continuing their progress to Brentwood, where
+they effected a junction with Goring's band. Their forces thus united,
+a counter-march was made upon Chelmsford again, and continued to
+Colchester; Lord Capel, Sir George Lisle, and many others joining on
+the way. On June 12, Goring, in command of this body of four thousand
+Royalists, approached Colchester, and found the Head Gate closed
+against him by the unsympathetic citizens, but a slight skirmish soon
+enabled him to force an entrance. He had not intended to remain at
+Colchester, but the swift pursuit that Fairfax organised from London
+gave the Royalists no time to continue their projected march into the
+Midlands. The day after Goring had entered Colchester, Fairfax had
+assembled his forces on Lexden Heath, and immediately sent a trumpeter
+to demand surrender. The inevitable refusal was the signal for a battle
+outside the town, on the London Road; a contest which resulted in the
+retirement of the Royalists within the walls. The Head Gate still
+existed, its bolts and bars in perfect order, but as the Royalists fell
+back through it into the town, two hundred or more of the Parliamentary
+troops dashed through in pursuit. Their ardour cost them their lives,
+for Lord Capel at the head of a determined band pushed back the gate
+upon the bulk of the enemy, thrusting his walking-stick through the
+staples as the door closed. The eager advance-guard, thus cooped up
+within the walls, were all slain.
+
+Preparations were now made on both sides for a siege. Fairfax had
+already lost many men, and dared not attempt to carry the town by
+storm. His plan was to surround Colchester and imprison the Royalists
+there until such time as his heavy ordnance or starvation should
+compel them to surrender. With his command of reinforcements from
+London, and his ability thus to enclose the town with a cordon of
+troops, the position of the Royalists was hopeless, and it is to their
+honour and credit that, in order to contain Fairfax's large army and
+so give opportunities to the organisers of Royalist movements in the
+Midlands, they continued the defence in the face of starvation and
+despite the easy terms of capitulation at first offered them. Their
+domestic position (so to call it) in the town was unenviable, for the
+inhabitants were wholly opposed to their cause. They had with them,
+it is true, the members of the Parliamentary Committee whom they had
+kidnapped from Chelmsford, but those gentlemen were a nuisance and
+had to be civilly treated and fed while the Royalists themselves went
+hungry. The unfortunate inhabitants, too, were starving, and many of
+their houses and churches destroyed by the besiegers' cannon shot;
+while suburbs were burnt down outside the walls.
+
+The end of this long agony came on August 27, when the town was
+surrendered; the officers "surrendering to mercy," the lesser officers
+and rank and file with an assurance that their lives and personal
+belongings should be spared. Seventy-five superior officers accordingly
+gave up their arms at the "King's Head" inn. Four of them were to be
+tried by court-martial. One escaped, one was pardoned, and two--Sir
+Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle--condemned to be shot without
+delay, on a disproved charge of having once broken their parole when
+formerly prisoners of war. In vain asking for time to make some final
+disposition of their affairs, these two officers were executed the
+same evening, on a grassy spot a few paces clear of the north wall of
+the old castle. Sir Charles Lucas was the first to be shot, and met his
+end as a brave, gallant gentleman should. "I have often faced death
+on the field of battle," he said, "and you shall now see how I dare
+to die." Then he knelt in prayer, and, rising, threw open his vest,
+exclaiming, "See, I am ready for you. Now, rebels, do your worst!" The
+firing-party then fired and shot him in four places, so that he fell
+dead on the instant.
+
+Sir George Lisle was then brought to the same place, and viewing the
+dead body of his friend as it lay on the ground, knelt down and kissed
+him, praising his unspotted honour. After bidding farewell to some
+friends, he turned to the spectators, saying, "Oh! how many of your
+lives here have I saved in hot blood, and must now myself be most
+barbarously murdered in cold blood? But what dare not they do that
+would willingly cut the throat of my dear King, whom they have already
+imprisoned, and for whose deliverance, and peace to this unfortunate
+country, I dedicate my last prayer to Heaven?" Then, looking in the
+faces of those who were to execute him, and thinking they stood at too
+great a distance, he desired them to come nearer, to which one of them
+said, "I'll warrant, sir, we hit you." "Friend," he answered, "I have
+been nearer you when you have missed me!" And so, after a short prayer
+upon his knees, he rose up and said, "Now, traitors, do your worst!"
+Whereupon they shot him dead.
+
+The stone covering the graves of these unhappy soldiers may yet be seen
+in St Giles's Church, with an inscription stating that they were "by
+the command of Thomas Fairfax, the general of the Parliament Army, in
+cold blood barbarously murdered." A legend may still be occasionally
+met with in old books, which has it that the Duke of Buckingham, who
+had married Fairfax's daughter, approached Charles the Second with the
+object of having the passage erased that reflected so severely on his
+father-in-law's memory. The King conferred on the subject with Lord
+Lucas, who said that he would with pleasure obey the Royal command, if
+only His Majesty would allow him to place in its stead the statement
+that "Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle were barbarously murdered
+for their loyalty to King Charles the First, and that his son, King
+Charles the Second, had ordered this memorial of their loyalty to be
+erased." The King then, we are told, commanded the already existing
+epitaph to be cut still deeper, and it will be readily observed by
+those who go to gaze upon it that the lettering is bolder and deeper
+than commonly is the case.
+
+The undertaking of Fairfax with respect to the surrendered soldiery
+was not respected. They were ruthlessly pillaged, and some sent to the
+plantations over seas. Lord Capel was eventually executed in London.
+For many years afterwards the spot where Lucas and Lisle fell was
+shown by the awe-struck people of Colchester, who told the legend
+that grass would not grow where that loyal blood had been spilled. In
+later times the story became an article of faith with one political
+party and a derision to the other. No grass grows there now; but for
+the commonplace reason that a well-kept gravel path occupies the site,
+which is duly marked by a small obelisk.
+
+[Illustration: OLD MAN-TRAP, COLCHESTER CASTLE.]
+
+Colchester was long in recovering itself after the rough treatment
+received during the siege; and in fact, it is only in recent years that
+the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall, battered down on that occasion,
+has been rebuilt; while the Norman minster of St Botolph remains the
+roofless ruin that cannonading and incendiarism left it. Evelyn in
+1656 found Colchester "a ragged and factious town, now swarming with
+sectaries," and if he had visited it nine years later would have
+witnessed a worse state, for the plague almost depopulated the place.
+
+"Sectaries"--that is to say, those who preferred to think for
+themselves on religious matters, and to worship in their own way--were
+treated with an unconscionable severity. One Parnell, a Quaker, was
+imprisoned in a cell within Colchester Castle, and died there, his
+story affording a sad example of barbarity in the authorities of that
+period.
+
+But the early nineteenth century was as savage in some ways as the late
+seventeenth, which so delighted in despitefully using Nonconformists.
+The antiquarian collections in the castle, for instance, include a
+particularly ferocious instrument devised for the protection of the
+squires' property and for the maiming of poachers. It is a man-trap;
+one of those devilish contrivances which, actuated by powerful springs
+and furnished with sharp steel teeth, would, when accidentally trodden
+on by the poacher, snap down upon his leg with force sufficient to
+injure the bone and probably mutilate him for life. It was thus the
+landed interests protected their rabbits, hares and pheasants. The
+existence of this man-trap, together with the spring guns also used at
+the same time, is a reproach to the England of the first quarter of the
+nineteenth century, just as its preservation here as a curiosity is a
+certificate of the progress achieved in humanity since then.
+
+The present prosperity of Colchester is reflected in many ways, but in
+none more strikingly than the condition of the castle, now a municipal
+property, and encircled with lawns and flower-beds, oddly at variance
+with its time-worn grandeur. The neatness of these surroundings and
+of the ornamental railings that fence off the enclosure is admirable
+from the everyday point of view, but the picturesque neglect and rural
+squalor of other years pointed the moral of the place and annotated
+its story, while present prettinesses blur the historic page. It
+is so everywhere throughout the land. When, a hundred years ago,
+Turner, Sandby, Prout and Girtin, our early water-colourists, roamed
+the country, making their picturesque sketches, they did not find
+themselves baulked by flower-beds, cursed by cast-iron fences, or
+requested not to walk on the grass. They had to pick their hazardous
+way through miry lanes, or adventure through the bottomless sloughs of
+farmyards. All these things were offensive to the wayfarer, but they
+generally meant picturesque compositions and exquisitely sketchable
+foregrounds. Nowadays the conscientious illustrator, unwilling to
+picturesquely exaggerate, and yet accursed with cast-iron railings new
+from Birmingham last week, is in a quandary.
+
+[Illustration: COLCHESTER CASTLE.]
+
+The once forlorn condition of Colchester Castle doubtless originated
+in 1726, when its then owner, Sir Isaac Rebow, left it by will to a
+detested grandson, on whom he thus conferred a useless encumbrance, a
+more exasperating bequest than even the proverbial cutting off with a
+shilling.
+
+A relic of those old days of picturesque neglect is found in the book
+of an auctioneer, who wrote an account of his "Professional Travels
+in England in the first half of the Nineteenth Century," modestly
+veiling his identity, and simply calling himself on his title-page, "An
+Auctioneer." Part One of his work was issued in 1843, but Part Two is
+yet to come, and as his first instalment shows little merit, the world
+can well afford to forego the second.
+
+Coming to the castle, he muses over its ruins, and weeps that cabbages
+and coriander employ the attention of the Colchester people, rather
+than the care of ancient fortresses. To him, thus contemplating "the
+sad remains of so many interesting scenes," enters from an adjoining
+farm one whom he is pleased to term "an Aborigine." By this he
+obviously names an Essex farm-labourer. It is an affectation, but
+he might have done worse. He _might_ have called him, seeing that
+Colchester is a place of oysters, a "native," in inverted commas,
+evidences of jocular intent, which would have been dreadful.
+
+"Ah! sir," says the Aborigine, "it was cruel work when them great
+Barons, as they call 'em, lived here."
+
+"True, my friend," replies the Auctioneer, "but it's a pity to see hogs
+and donkeys depasturing in their courts and gardens, and grubbing and
+kicking down their halls and chapels."
+
+"Lord! your honour," rejoins the son of the soil, "what's the use on
+'em in these days? I'd sooner see an acre of these 'ere swedes any day,
+than them there towers and dungeons. Them swedes afore you 'ool carry
+a score o' fine wethers any month in the year, and plaze ye to look at
+'em, but as for them flint walls, you may look at 'em for ever and a
+day 'fore you find enough o' green for a garnish"; which was indeed a
+practical rural way of looking at things.
+
+The summit of those old walls has nowadays a very charming green
+garnish of grass, rendered parti-coloured by wind- and bird-sown
+wallflowers and vigorous wildings; but more lusty than these are the
+young sycamores, that have struck deep roots into the walls and bid
+fair to grow into large trees.
+
+It is still possible to follow the greater part of Colchester's old
+walls along the queer alleys that run above or below them. Eld Lane,
+out of whose elevated course the steep descent of the old postern,
+now known as Scheregate Steps, goes, is situated along the summit
+of the south wall looking over towards St John's Green, where,
+facing a wilderness of scrubby grass, broken bottles, and the sordid
+house-sweepings of the modern town, the gatehouse stands, all that is
+left of the proud mitred Abbey of St John. By that green is the frowzy
+little church of St Giles, patched up in so atrocious a manner from the
+wreck it was after the siege of 1648 that to call its "architecture"
+merely "debased" is to deal kindly with it. A dilapidated boarded
+tower is a feature of the exterior; the interior provided with a flat
+plaster ceiling, like that of a dwelling-room, and filled with flimsy
+pine-wood pews, painted and grained. Dust and stuffiness reign within;
+dust and broken crockery without. And yet, although so unlovely, it is
+not altogether with satisfaction that an elaborate design is seen for
+rebuilding the church from its foundations, together with the notice,
+"It is earnestly hoped that contributions will be given toward the
+restoration fund." "Restoration" is not the word, for the design is
+alien and quite unlike anything that formerly stood on the ground.
+Rather let the place be repaired and cleansed and its unbeautiful
+details preserved as a characteristic and shocking example of how
+they looked upon ecclesiastical architecture in the dark days of
+churchwarden- and carpenter-Gothic. It is here, under the north aisle,
+that those two valiant captains, Lucas and Lisle, are laid.
+
+For the church-towers built of Roman bricks, and for other evidences
+of that ancient Empire, let the explorer seek, and, presently finding,
+think himself, if he will, an original investigator: it is a harmless
+attitude, if at the same time unwarranted by fact. Let us to other
+matters, and then, leaving the town, hie away for Ipswich.
+
+Colchester is, of course, famous for its oysters, and has been ever
+since the Roman occupation. In the estuary of the Colne, and the
+Crouch, and in the oozy creeks of the Essex shores, the Colchester
+"natives" still grow up from infancy to maturity and feed upon the
+semi-maritime slime, as they did close upon two thousand years ago, and
+doubtless long before that. If we may judge from the stupendous heaps
+of oyster-shells discovered on the sites of Roman towns and villas,
+near and far, to say merely that the Romans were fond of oysters would
+be far too mild a term. They must have almost lived on oysters, dreamt
+oysters, and thought oysters. No wonder Colchester, whence the finest
+and the largest supply came, was so prosperous a Roman colony.
+
+Although the fishery brings wealth to the town, it is more than a
+mile away and makes no sign. Those who might think that, because of
+it, Colchester should obtrude oysters at every turn and oyster-shells
+should strew every street, would be vastly disillusioned. But
+beside its oyster fishery, other Colchester trades are of secondary
+importance. Agricultural machinery is made here, and brewing and
+corn-milling carried on, but the once famed textile manufactures are
+gone. Among those old trades was the industry of baize-making, which
+left Colchester considerably over a century ago for other centres,
+after having given additional prosperity to the town for a period of
+a hundred and fifty years. It was shortly after 1570 that numbers
+of Dutch Protestants, fleeing from the Spanish persecutions in
+Holland, introduced the making of "bays and says," and, despite local
+jealousies, flourished amazingly for generations here.
+
+But Colchester will never be dull while it continues to be what it is
+now--a great military depôt. Those worthy representatives of the Roman
+legionaries at a distance in time of nineteen centuries or so, the
+Tommies and troopers of the British Army, are a prominent feature in
+every street, and bugles blow all round the clock, from _réveillé_ to
+the last post, when every good soldier goes home to his barracks down
+the Butt Road; while the King's bad bargains stay behind and fortify
+themselves against apprehensions of the morrow's "clink" with another
+glass, or, adventuring too rashly into the street, find themselves
+presently in charge of the military patrol that walks the town with
+measured step and slow.
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+"FROM Colchester to Ipswitch is ten mile," says that
+seventeenth-century traveller, Celia Fiennes, in her diary. The
+milestones, however, tell quite a different tale and contradict the
+lady by making the distance between the two towns eighteen miles and a
+quarter.
+
+Seven miles of these bring the traveller from Colchester across the
+Stour and so into Suffolk. It is not an exciting seven miles. Passing
+the eastern outskirts of Colchester, where mud in the Colne and puddles
+beside the slattern streets offend the sense of propriety, as, having
+reversed their natural positions, the Fair Field is left on the right.
+"Left" is an expression used advisedly, for who would linger there?
+But the Fair Field cannot be passed unawares. If not seen, it will be
+heard, for on it camp the caravans, steam roundabouts and travelling
+circuses that still draw rustic crowds with their fat women, giants and
+dwarfs; or delight them with mechanical rides on wooden horses to the
+bellowing of a steam organ, whose music-hall airs follow the traveller
+in gusts of stentorian minstrelsy when the wind unkindly wills it so.
+The sounds nerve the cyclist to quickly put the miles between himself
+and those siren strains, and happily the road is a fast one, so that
+he need not be long about the business. It goes, as an old turnpike
+should, broad and straight and well-kept, for the matter of six miles,
+with little to vary the monotony of trim hedgerow and equi-distant
+telegraph poles.
+
+Let us therefore leave it awhile, and, journeying some three hundred
+yards along the Harwich Road, come across a railway level-crossing to
+the suburb of St Ann's, and the site of a spring and hermitage called
+Holy Well. The spring is now sealed up, but an inscription in the wall
+of a cottage still proclaims it to have been reopened in 1844. It seems
+strange that the Hermitage should have been placed, not on the main
+road where pilgrims were surely more plentiful, but on the seaward
+route. The explanation may probably be sought in the existence already
+of another establishment of the kind, long since forgotten. Here, then,
+the Hermitage of St Ann's was placed, and a holy well and an oratory
+made appeal to the piety or the superstition, as the case might be, of
+all who passed by. To these the hermit presented his leathern wallet,
+beseeching travellers, who would have gone without giving alms, to
+spare a trifle for the upkeep of the road, even though they valued not
+the Blessed Saints.
+
+For three hundred years the Hermitage lasted, and a long line of
+hermits lived here. Some were pious and industrious, keeping the road
+in repair; others had neither piety nor industry, spent their time
+in taverns, were smiters, and got drunk and fought, so that the road
+became scandalously neglected, and many Colchester worthies received
+apostolical black eyes from eremitical fists. Such an one must have
+been the hermit who lived here in the reign of Henry the Fifth, and
+was indicted in 1419 for having an unclean ditch. Finally, in 1535,
+when the dissolution of the monasteries took place, the Hermitage was
+closed, and the then occupant turned out, with a warning that if he
+solicited alms henceforward he would be regarded as a "sturdy beggar,"
+and dealt with accordingly.
+
+The road to Ipswich was the scene, in the second half of the
+seventeenth century, shortly after the first coaches had started
+running, of many highway robberies. The borough of Colchester was
+deeply concerned at this lawlessness, and in 1679 three men were
+rewarded with £6, 8s. between them "for apprehending those y^t robbed
+the Ipswich coach." Again, in September 1698, three men were rewarded
+"for pursuen hiewaymen," and for "going to Ardlegh" on that business;
+but as they received only two shillings each and an extra shilling for
+"drinck," it looks as though the pursuit was unsuccessful.
+
+[Illustration: COLCHESTER.]
+
+The high road, to which we have now returned, has already been
+described as an excellent highway, but Dilbridge, a hamlet, and a
+roadside inn on what was once Ardleigh Heath, alone break its solitude.
+It has, however, the advantage of commanding the best general view of
+Colchester, with the inevitable Jumbo prominent, and the new-risen Town
+Hall tower in rivalry with it.
+
+Suddenly, when six miles from Colchester, the road changes its
+character and drops sharply down by an almost precipitous descent, to
+where a lazy river is seen flowing picturesquely in loops and bends
+between the grey-green foliage of willows lining either bank. It flows
+through a land of rich green meadows and yellow cornfields; a land,
+too, of noble elms and oaks. In the far distance the waters of a salt
+estuary sparkle in the sun, while in between, from this Pisgah height,
+rises the tall tower of a church. The river is the Stour, dividing
+Essex and Suffolk, and the pleasant vale, the Vale of Dedham. The
+estuary is that of the Stour at Manningtree, and the church tower
+that of Dedham. This, indeed, is the Constable Country, and that fact
+explains the homelike and familiar look it wears, even to the stranger.
+Constable, born close by at East Bergholt, painted these scenes
+lovingly for over forty years, and remained constant to his native vale
+all his life. By the magic power that comes of sympathy, he transferred
+the spirit of these lanes and fields and trees to canvas as faithfully
+as he did their form and colour; with the result that the veriest
+stranger viewing them becomes reminiscent.
+
+Nor did Constable only _paint_ his native vale; he has described it in
+almost as masterly a way. To him it was "the most cultivated part of
+Suffolk, a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour, which
+river separates that county on the south from Essex. The beauty of the
+surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats
+sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated uplands, its woods
+and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms and
+picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular spot an amenity
+and excellence hardly anywhere else to be found. He tells an amusing
+story of travelling home by coach down this very hill. He shared the
+vehicle with two strangers. "In passing the Vale of Dedham, one of
+them remarked, on my saying it was very beautiful, 'Yes, sir, this is
+Constable's Country.' I then told him who I was lest he should spoil
+it."
+
+From this hill-top to the left of the road, and in what are now the
+woodlands of Langham Hall, Constable painted his best-known Vale
+of Dedham. In one respect the scene has changed. The willows still
+fringing the Stour, formerly "cobbed" or pollarded, are now allowed
+to grow as they will, and the river is not so visible as it was once.
+Otherwise the Constable Country is little altered. Even on this hill,
+close by Langham church, Church Farm, the original of his "Glebe Farm,"
+remains as it was, thatched and gabled, close by the church tower. Only
+the foliage has changed, and the little guttering stream been drained
+away.
+
+[Illustration: THE VALE OF DEDHAM. _After Constable._]
+
+[Illustration: GUN HILL.]
+
+This steep road, shelving so abruptly to the Stour, is Dedham Hill,
+more often locally known as Dedham Gun Hill, from the "Gun" inn at the
+summit, now unhappily rebuilt, but until recently a most picturesque
+old inn, with the painted sign of a cannon hanging over the road. The
+sign has gone, and a pretentious house, which proclaims "Accommodation
+for Lady Cyclists," arisen in its stead. At the foot of the hill the
+road, turning abruptly to the left, begins a lengthy crossing of the
+Stour and its marshes by a bridge over the channel and a long series of
+flood-water arches across the oozy valley. The old toll-house, taking
+tolls no longer, still stands, a quaint building on the Essex side, and
+bears a cast-iron tablet with the inscription,--
+
+  THE DUMB ANIMALS' HUMBLE PETITION.
+
+  Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,
+  Dumb beasts pray use with all good will;
+  Goad not, scourge not, with thongèd whips,
+  Let not one curse escape your lips,
+          God sees and hears.
+
+                             T. T. H., POSUIT.
+
+[Illustration: OLD TOLL-HOUSE, STRATFORD BRIDGE.]
+
+This is one of a number of similar tablets erected throughout the
+country in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the first
+glimmerings of humane treatment of animals began to show themselves.
+When drivers had perforce to halt here to pay toll, this was a notice
+they could scarce help seeing, but it only by rare chance attracts
+attention now.
+
+Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty. No picturesque
+building this, but a great hulking structure of that intolerable
+"white" Suffolk brick which is rather a grey-white than any other hue;
+a brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and crude, and by no
+chance ever helps the artist. The whole length of the Norwich Road is
+more or less bedevilled with it.
+
+This mill is the one blot on the beauty of Stratford St Mary, a village
+built along the flat road and continuing round the bend, and so up the
+hill to where the fine old church stands overlooking the highway. It
+is a remarkable church, built of black flint and stone, and covered on
+the side facing the road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the
+site of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy clothworkers
+of this place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps
+a little difficult to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other
+East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the weaving industry,
+just as there is a difficulty in realising that Sussex was once a
+grimy iron-mining country; but trades and places have their fates, and
+changes and romances of their own.
+
+From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors family were busy in
+giving to their church and in directing its new features; and the
+chief of the inscriptions in stone and flint that curiously decorate
+its exterior in old English characters record the facts and beseech
+the wayfarer to pray for their souls. Vain request! The work had not
+been completed five years when the long and troubled story of the
+Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no longer prayed for.
+
+The most prominent inscription is that enjoining prayers for Thomas
+Mors and his wife Margaret, who built the north aisle:--
+
+ Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margarete uxoris ejus qui istam
+ alam ffieri fecerunt anno dni mcccc^m lxxxxviiii
+
+Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together with his wife
+Alice, content with an English inscription. They are also a little less
+self-centred than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian
+souls" in addition to supplications for their own especial benefit:--
+
+ Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alys hys wyfe and all
+ crysten sowlys, Anno Domini 1530.
+
+Many other inscriptions and devices are seen, among them the letters,
+P B A E S, said to be the initials of an invocatory sentence,
+"_Propitiemini beati ad eternam salutem_," addressed to Saints Thomas
+and Margaret, the patron saints of Thomas and Margaret Mors. But,
+stranger than any, is the appearance of the entire alphabet on these
+walls. Many attempts have been made to explain the reason of this,
+among them the view that the object was to educate the villagers in the
+rudiments of spelling!
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+THE long rise out of Stratford on the way to Ipswich lies through a
+beautiful Gainsborough-like woodland, with ancient trees gripping sandy
+banks in a tenacious clutch of gnarled roots. It is a hollow road, and
+one in which, when the coaches were toiling up, the guards' hands went
+instinctively towards their blunderbusses and swordcases. One never
+knew what or who might be lurking in that shade.
+
+But if it was a chancy spot then, how very suspicious a place it must
+have been hundreds of years before. That it was so regarded may be
+learnt from the _Paston Letters_, the instructive correspondence of the
+Paston family in the fifteenth century. Therein we read how a rival of
+John Paston in the wardship of one of the Fastolf family, coming out
+of Suffolk to London, was escorted by a hundred retainers, all armed
+with bows and arrows in their hands, with saletts on their heads,
+well-padded jacks and rusty haubergeons on their bodies, and fear in
+their hearts of an ambush laid on the part of the Pastons in the hollow
+way where the trees meet overhead and a mid-day darkness broods under
+the dense foliage. This rival expressed himself as not being afraid of
+the Pastons or any of their friends; but if not, why did he go escorted
+with this motley crew, tricked out with all the ancient weapons and
+rusted armour they could find? Happily they were not attacked, but that
+it was possible for petty warfare of this kind to be plotted is proof
+that the Merry England of that period was no safe place for peaceful
+travellers.
+
+Now we are well within Suffolk, the "crack county of England," as
+Cobbett called it, the "sweet and civil county" of Bishop Hall; but a
+county to which the alliterative term "silly" has long been applied.
+It is probably by this time quite hopeless to scotch that nickname,
+for it is of a considerable age and has a specious and easy glibness
+that comes trippingly off the tongue. Suffolkers themselves--whom it
+most concerns--are at pains to explain that the real, and entirely
+flattering, solution of the phrase is found in "selig," the Anglo-Saxon
+for "holy" or "blissful;" a reference to the numerous and wealthy
+religious houses within the county, and to the East Anglian saints and
+the many places of pilgrimage. Another party advancing the theory that
+the epithet was originally "Sely Suffolk," observant of the seasons,
+would thus have us believe that Suffolk must have been more observant
+than other counties, which is not credible. True, Suffolkers still talk
+of the hay-harvest as "haysel," a survival of "hay sele," but this is
+not the only county that uses the phrase. It becomes evident that the
+nickname must go unexplained.
+
+Suffolk has its claims to recognition on other than historic grounds.
+"I'm told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there," said William,
+the coachman, to little David Copperfield. Perhaps they are, and
+certainly it was once the custom among the peasantry here, as indeed
+throughout England, to serve pudding, or "dumpling," before meat in
+order to take the edge off appetites with a kind of food cheaper than
+butcher's meat; but the improved circumstances of the peasantry scarce
+demand such a practice nowadays, and in any case, Norfolk is the county
+of dumplings, so Dickens was in error in putting that speech in the
+coachman's mouth. "Norfolk Dumplings," he should have known, are as
+proverbial as "Silly Suffolkers."
+
+Suffolk is deservedly esteemed all over the world for the "Suffolk
+Punch." This sounds convivial, but has no connection with punch-bowls;
+the reference being, as a matter of fact, to a breed of horses.
+
+"And the Punches! There's cattle!" said William, the Canterbury
+coachman, to David Copperfield. "A Suffolk Punch, when he's a good
+'un, is worth his weight in gold," he added; which is not a very great
+exaggeration. Keep an eye upon the fields or an observant glance
+along the road, and the Suffolk Punch will readily be noted in his
+native country, at plough, halted by the wayside inn, or dragging with
+indomitable spirit the heaviest loads that the stupidity of the most
+stupid of waggoners could put him to. If ever horse deserved the praise
+contained in the familiar copy-book maxim, that he is "a Noble Animal,
+the Friend of Man," it is to this breed that it most particularly
+applies. The Suffolk Punch is a sturdy and a willing brute, and will
+pull against a dead weight until exhausted. It has been said that the
+Suffolk Punch existed as a type of horse in early British times, and
+it has been supposed that his remote ancestors were the horses that
+drew Boadicea's war-chariots. If it were not that he is invariably
+a chestnut, it might be supposed that his fame in the county had
+originated the sign of the "Great White Horse" in Ipswich; but from
+chestnut the breed never varies. It may be of various shades, from the
+darkest mahogany to the lightest golden-brown, but never any other hue.
+It is, of course, not necessary to journey into East Anglia to see the
+Suffolk Punch. Many of his kind are at work in London, drawing heavy
+loads, and are to be seen expatriated to Russia, and on Canadian farms,
+thousand of miles away from their native claylands.
+
+The Suffolk dialect is kin to those of Essex and Norfolk, but the
+"Suffolk whine" is peculiar to the county; it is a rising inflection
+of the voice towards the end of words and sentences. In Suffolk speech
+"fowls" become "foals," and "foals," "fools"; and archaic words, heard
+occasionally in Essex, grow more common as the traveller advances.
+So also does an odd custom first noticed in the neighbourhood of
+Colchester--the custom of affixing the place-name to the sign of
+an inn in ordinary talk. The "Gun" inn at Dedham, for example, is
+always spoken of as "Dedham Gun," and here, at Bentley, the custom
+is emphasised by the sign of a roadside inn being inscribed "Bentley
+Tankard," and not merely "The Tankard."
+
+[Illustration: SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. _After Constable._]
+
+But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear Suffolk talk it is necessary
+to linger in the villages and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The
+agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide, when they give
+themselves up to play and gossip. Then, as the long summer day draws
+to its close, the children find romance in the lengthening shadows, in
+which their games of robbers and pirates seem much more convincing than
+they could be made to appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm
+labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of "bellywengins,"
+at the pub, and the coy mawthers find the twilight a seasonable time
+for nannicking with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning
+gibberish to those unacquainted with the peculiar dialect of East
+Anglia, merely signifies the girls flirting with the "other ones"--the
+young men, in short.
+
+But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl is a mawther, and so
+is a grandame. It is a curiosity of speech which is apt to startle
+the stranger who first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet
+learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be heard any day in any
+Suffolk village, "Yow come 'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll
+spank yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex, Suffolk and
+Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which a native of these parts may be
+immediately distinguished anywhere.
+
+When the labourers have trudged over to their "shants o' gatter,"
+or quarts and pots of beer--the "bellywengins," or belly vengeance,
+aforesaid; when the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers
+and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together in the gathering
+dusk, then is the gossiping time, both of the housewives and of the
+labourers. The women talk at the doors of the "housen": the men mostly
+in the village inns. Hear, passing stranger, what the mawthers are
+saying:--
+
+"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin' arn?"
+
+"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew or tree weeks sin'.
+The doctor say I fare to be on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi'
+me sure."
+
+"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm thinkin'; but there, 'taint so
+much yer aige, 'tis yer sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."
+
+"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group, "what be life wi'out
+sperrut? Nothin', in a manner o' speakin'."
+
+"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he lived to be ninety."
+
+"What a man that wor! I mind him when he come to mine arter he'd walked
+from Ipswich, an' that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun he
+ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were as spry as a mavish
+and fresher'n a paigle."
+
+A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East Bergholt, Constable's
+birthplace, and between it and the road still stretch in summer those
+golden cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that crowning
+achievement of English landscape, how exquisite a thing it is, radiant
+in colour on the walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually
+the inadequate medium of black and white attempts to translate it.
+
+[Illustration: THE CORNFIELD. _After Constable._]
+
+The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for his growls, poor fellow,
+is careful to explain his cornfields away. When asked why, if it
+does not pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he says he
+grows it for the straw. At any rate, times are changed from those when
+agricultural England was merry with high prices; those picturesque days
+when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed, as every traveller
+was hailed, at harvest-time by the reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo,
+largesse," the largesse going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the
+village inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the reaping-hook,
+and with it and many other things has gone the Lord of the Harvest,
+elected from among his fellow-reapers to preside over their labours and
+their harvest-supper in the great fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen.
+The line of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning with their
+sickles in the fierce sun upon the diminishing fields of standing
+wheat, with halts for levenses and bever, and so home by the light of
+the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines do the work
+instead. It was astonishing, and, in the haymaking fields, still is,
+what long and continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the
+intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say the eleven o'clock
+forenoon meal, and bever, the four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose
+name came through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin "bibere,"
+to drink, reduced the contents of the barrels placed in the shady
+hedgerows, but quarts imbibed under such conditions were harmless.
+Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life, the names of "bever"
+and "levenses" remain yet in the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk
+as those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and carter.
+
+Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent moments, of coaching
+and posting days here, when, near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green,
+and in a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes, leading from
+Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond, "Laddenford Stables" stood at the
+cross roads that went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four
+sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed to part here
+and went their several ways, but how they fared, or what was their
+social status, the story does not tell.
+
+Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing by Capel station, and so
+by Copdock, whose church tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape
+of King David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at the foot of
+its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and Washbrook in the hollow,
+together with the broad and still marshy valley of the little Wash
+Brook, tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days when Saxons
+and Danes contended on this coast, a navigable creek, an arm of the
+Orwell. The road, in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley,
+together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of bygone geographical
+conditions, leading as it does down to the place where a bridge now
+spans the stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of old, first
+fordable. Having thus crossed, the road went, and still goes, in a
+right-angle turn uphill, towards Ipswich.
+
+It was by no means necessary for travellers journeying between London
+and Norwich to touch Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial
+reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises commonly went from
+Washbrook, through Sproughton and Bramford, and joined the coach
+route again at Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead
+of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook who can still tell of
+the coaches that halted at "Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a
+toll-gate (the house still existing) stretched across the way at the
+foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks" who posted the long stage
+between "Stonham Pie" and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the
+"Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely up at the hill-top, but
+now a private residence with its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and
+can show the places, in what are now meadows, where many houses and
+cottages stood in those wayfaring days, when the high-lying road to
+Ipswich, across the uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the
+Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+THERE can be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings having thoroughly
+captured the heart of grumbling old Cobbett.
+
+"From the town itself," he says, "you can see nothing; but you can, in
+no direction, go from it a quarter of a mile without finding views
+that a painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable, for we do
+not generally attribute an artistic perception of scenic beauties to
+this practical farmer. Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom
+and his pictures he probably had never heard, although Constable had
+already for years been painting these very scenes.
+
+The practical farming mind appears in Cobbett's next remarks: "And
+then, the country round about is so well cultivated; the land in such
+a beautiful state, the farmhouses all white and all so much alike; the
+barns and everything about the homesteads so snug; the stock of turnips
+so abundant everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order; the
+wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the furrows, if a quarter
+of a mile long, as straight as a line, and laid as truly as if with
+a level; in short, here is everything to delight the eye and to make
+the people proud of their country; and this is the case throughout
+the whole of this county. I have always found Suffolk farmers great
+boasters of their superiority over others, and I must say that it is
+not without reason."
+
+Cobbett found the windmills on the hills round Ipswich so numerous
+that, while standing in one place, he counted no fewer than seventeen,
+all painted or washed white, with black sails. They are fewer to-day,
+and could Gainsborough, old Crome and Constable revisit the scenes of
+their artistic inspiration, they would sadly miss the picturesqueness
+they gave these woody scenes and fertile hills and vales. It is from
+the crest of one of these hills that Ipswich is first glimpsed. There
+it sprawls, prosperous, beside the broad Orwell; "doubtlesse one of
+the sweetest, most pleasant, well-built townes in England," as John
+Evelyn thought in 1656; but then swarming with "a new phanatic sect of
+dangerous principles." The reader will scarce guess aright who these
+fanatics were. They were neither sun-worshippers nor Mahometans, but
+merely Quakers.
+
+One obtains no glimpse of the broad estuary of the Orwell when
+descending into the town by the London road, and the crowded mass
+of the place rises confusedly up before the traveller as he steeply
+descends, and forms no picture. You must take Ipswich in detail to
+admire it, and the actual crossing of the river at the foot of the
+hill where the town begins is at a narrow canalised stretch before it
+widens out into the noble harbour that makes the fortune of the port.
+A sign of that accomplished fortune is the unlovely sight of the great
+railway sidings and goods yards spread out before the stranger's eye as
+he comes downhill. One may say that the town begins at the door of the
+"Ipswich Arms" inn, uninteresting in itself, but displaying the fine
+"old coat" of this famous seaport; a shield with a rampant golden lion
+on a red field on the sinister, and three golden demi-boats on blue on
+the dexter side.
+
+"A fine, populous, and beautiful place," says Cobbett, still harping on
+an unwonted string of praise. "The town is substantially built, well
+paved, everything good and solid, and no wretched dwellings to be
+seen on its outskirts." He knew no town to be compared with it, except
+it were Nottingham, which, after all, is not properly comparable,
+Nottingham standing high, while Ipswich is in a vale, and moreover,
+is situated on an arm of the sea. It is amusing to read Cobbett's
+remarks on the population of Ipswich, which stood in his time at twelve
+thousand. "Do you not," he asks, "think Ipswich was far larger and far
+more populous seven hundred years ago than it is at this hour?"--that
+hour being some time in March 1830. He remarked upon "the twelve large,
+lofty and magnificent churches," each of them seven hundred years old,
+one capable of holding from four to seven thousand persons, and came to
+the conclusion that, in fact, although he found Ipswich populous, it
+must, even thus, have been a mere ghost of its former self. That shrewd
+observer was right. Ipswich had grievously decayed even in Charles the
+Second's reign, when the Duke of Buckingham described it as "a town
+without inhabitants, a river without water, streets without names, and
+where the asses wore boots." The Duke, in speaking of "a river without
+water," was probably referring to the estuary of the Orwell at low
+tide, when mud-banks stretch vast, and the stream runs by comparison
+feeble and thread-like through them. In its then nameless streets,
+Ipswich was not singular, for many small provincial towns were in like
+case. The asses that wore boots were those employed in rolling the lawn
+of a neighbouring park, the object probably being to prevent their
+hoofs injuring the surface.
+
+"Yepysweche," as Margaret Paston, writing to her husband over
+four hundred years ago, spells the name, derives its title from
+the aboriginal Gippings, a tribe or clan who squatted down beside
+the Orwell, and not only established their primitive village of
+Gippingswick here, but contrived to foist their tribal name upon the
+non-tidal part of the river above the town, which therefore still
+generally bears this _alias_. The town probably saw its greatest
+prosperity in the time of Cardinal Wolsey, a native, and, according
+to legend, son of a butcher. This "butcher's dogge," as the envious
+nicknamed the great Cardinal, determined that his birthplace should
+be great in learning as well as in commerce, and to that end founded
+a College which he intended to be in some sort preparatory for his
+greater college of Christ Church at Oxford. That his foundation was
+reared on the spoliation of a religious house and its revenues,
+procured by him for the purpose, seemed but an ill omen for its
+prosperity to those who saw his buildings rising to completion, and the
+omen was speedily fulfilled, for the new-made abode of learning never
+sent forth a scholar, but was suppressed by Henry the Eighth almost
+before the mortar of its brick walls was dry; the buildings themselves
+torn down and the endowments confiscated. All that remains of Wolsey's
+College is one noble red-brick gateway in College Street.
+
+Daniel Defoe was a native of Ipswich and a curious contrast with
+Wolsey, his brother townsman of two hundred years before. In his day
+the old prosperity of the place had vanished, in the stress of Dutch
+competition and the virulence of the plague; but modern times have made
+amends for that temporary decay, and the town is now nearly four times
+larger than when, shortly after the first quarter of the nineteenth
+century had gone, Cobbett noted its many and empty churches and its
+scanty population. It numbers now over 58,000 souls, and its trades are
+numerous and prosperous. Whether it be in the making of agricultural
+and milling machinery, its corn markets, artificial manure making, or
+the manufacture of corsets, Ipswich is fortunate, with the good fortune
+of those who give heed to the ancient proverb and do not put all their
+eggs in one basket.
+
+[Illustration: WOLSEY'S GATEWAY.]
+
+Picturesqueness coyly hides itself from the traveller who merely
+passes through the chief streets. Not in the open square of Cornhill,
+where the cabs and flys stand on the site of the old Market Cross and
+the trams fly to and fro, and where the Post-office and the Town Hall
+rise, side by side, does it appear, nor in the long street beyond;
+but rather in the Butter Market and the lanes that conduct to the
+waterside. There be streets in that quarter with odd names, among them
+Silent Street; and almshouses, and churches, and the queerest inns.
+Among the almshouses are Smart's, on whose walls, unhappily rebuilt
+in modern times, the charitable Smart and his no less charitable
+coadjutor, Tooley, are commemorated:--
+
+  "Let gentle Smart sleep on in pious trust,
+  Behold his charity. Respect his dust."
+
+  "In peaceful silence lett great Toolie rest,
+  Whose charitable deeds bespeak him blest."
+
+It is to be feared that these eulogies raise a smile at the expense of
+great Tooley and gentle Smart.
+
+[Illustration: THE "LION AND LAMB," ANGEL LANE.]
+
+As to the inns, they include the odd conjunction of the "Lion and
+Lamb," pictured here, and the "Neptune" and the "Sea Horse," with a
+fine sound of the sea in their names. Some of these old hostelries yet
+retain their corner-posts: for example, that of the "Half Moon" in
+Foundation Street, where the post still keeps its mediæval carving of a
+fox, with uplifted sanctimonious eyes, preaching to three geese and a
+griffin; a satirical effort no doubt looked sourly upon by the clergy
+of St Mary Key Church, opposite, in days of old. A great gilt key
+serves as vane to that church and perpetuates the error in the name,
+which was originally, and rightly, St Mary-at-Quay: the custom-house
+quay and the harbour being close by, as the sight of certain
+corn-elevators, the rattling of chains and windlasses, and the sounds
+of throaty steam-sirens sufficiently proclaim. The custom-house stands
+in midst of coal-grit, laden steam vessels lying alongside the quay
+wall, bellowing steamily to be discharged, and railway-sidings, along
+whose maze of points and turn-tables fussy little locomotive engines,
+dragging jerky trucks, run, screaming intermittently, as though saying
+to the bellowing steam-vessels, "_You_ just wait; can't you see I'm
+coming as quick as I can?" It is a dignified custom-house, and seems,
+surrounded with dutiable goods, to be aristocratically sneering at
+the trade in whose midst it is necessarily placed, and with as great
+a consciousness of its Ionic peristyle as any high-born beauty of her
+Greek nose.
+
+Many of the old wool-staplers', clothiers' and merchants' fine mansions
+stood by the quay and in the by-lanes. They are mostly gone now, but
+traces of old doorways and stray fragments of stone and wood carvings
+remain, and here and there a courtyard, or a house that sheltered
+family circles in the amphibious half-mercantile, half-agricultural
+Ipswich of the sixteenth century.
+
+[Illustration: SPARROWE'S HOUSE.]
+
+Certainly one of the finest things Ipswich has to show is the wonderful
+old place in the old Butter Market, known still as "Sparrowe's House,"
+although the last of the Sparrowes who inhabited here has long since
+gone to his home in the family vault within the Church of St Lawrence,
+where, over their tomb-house, may yet be read the punning motto,
+_Nidus Passerum_, "a nest of sparrows." These Sparrowes seem to have
+been endowed with some of the attributes of the cuckoo, for _they_
+did not build the house that bears their name. It owes its origin to
+a certain George Copping, who built it in 1567, but alterations and
+additions made in the Jacobean period give its architectural history
+a span of over a century. The woodwork of the bay windows and the
+grandly-projecting eaves, together with that of the shop premises, was
+added at the time. But the great glory of "Sparrowe's House" is its
+decorative plaster-work in high relief, which profusely covers the
+exterior with garlands of flowers and fruits and with quaint devices
+emblematic of the four quarters of the globe. Here Europa, cornucopia
+in one hand, book and sceptre in the other, sits with her bull, who
+might be taken for an elephant with half his trunk shorn off; here,
+on another bay, a podgy plaster relief typifies Asia, with palm-tree
+and a building of Oriental character in the background; followed by
+Africa, a nude nigger holding an umbrella over his head and sitting
+on a shark, at which four tiny figures at a respectful distance
+express astonishment, while nearer at hand a wicked-looking bird of
+quite uncertain family roosts on a something that greatly resembles
+a battered meat tin. America is typified by an Indian in a feather
+head-dress which represents his entire wardrobe. He stands with bow
+and arrows, attended by a dog with a damaged smile. A very beautiful
+representation of the Royal Arms occupies one of the spaces between
+the windows, and other devices show the pelican in her piety; Atlas
+supporting the world; a classical scene in which a shepherd bows as
+gracefully as the artist in plaster could make him to a rural nymph; St
+George and the Dragon, and several smaller subjects.
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+THE most famous thing in Ipswich is a thing neither ancient nor
+beautiful, yet it is an object to which most visitors to the town turn
+their first attention: it is the "Great White Horse." The "Great White
+Horse" is an hotel, of a size, in the merry days of the road, justly
+thought enormous. It has been left for the present age to build many
+hotels in town and country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more
+hostelries of the size of the "Great White Horse," but in its own
+especial era that house fully justified the adjective in its sign.
+Especially did its bulk strike the imagination of the reporter of the
+London _Morning Chronicle_ who was dispatched to Ipswich in 1830 for
+the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary election in the town. He was
+a very young, a very impressionable and a very bright reporter, and
+although we may be quite sure that the business on which he was come to
+Ipswich was an arduous piece of work, calculated to fully occupy his
+time and thoughts, he carried away with him so accurate an impression
+of the big inn where he stayed, that when, some time afterwards, he
+wrote about it the description was as exact as though it had been
+penned within sight of the house. That reporter was Charles Dickens,
+and it is his description in the _Pickwick Papers_ which has made the
+place famous.
+
+[Illustration: THE "GREAT WHITE HORSE."]
+
+It was not a flattering description. Few more severe things have ever
+been said of inns than those Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse."
+Indeed, if such things were nowadays printed of any inn or hotel, the
+writer might confidently expect to be made the defendant in an action
+for libel. Yet (such is the irony of time and circumstances) the house
+that Dickens so roundly abused is now eager in all its advertisements
+to quote the association; and the adventures of Mr Pickwick in the
+double-bedded room with the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers have
+brought many more visitors than the unfavourable notice of the
+"uncarpeted passages" and the "mouldy, ill-lighted rooms" has turned
+away. If, as has been thought, Dickens thus wrote of the house in order
+to be revenged for some slights and discomforts he may have experienced
+here, certainly fortune has played the cynic in converting his remarks
+into the best of all imaginable recommendations.
+
+The exterior of the house is much the same as it was when Dickens first
+saw it, "in the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the
+way, a short distance after you have passed through the open space
+fronting the Town Hall."
+
+It is the same plain, square building, constructed of a pallid kind of
+brick suggesting underdone pastry, and is still, although the coaches
+have disappeared and railways have supplanted them, "known far and
+wide by the appellation of the 'Great White Horse.'" Still, over the
+pillared entrance trots the effigy of the Great White Horse himself,
+perhaps the aboriginal ancestor of that famous breed of equines, the
+"Suffolk Punches," a very muscular race, more famous for their bulk
+and strength than for elegance, like those sturdy Flanders mares to
+which Henry the Eighth inelegantly likened his bride, Anne of Cleves.
+
+Dickens, using the usual licence of the novelist, describes this effigy
+as "a stone statue of some rampacious animal, with flowing mane and
+tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, elevated above the
+principal door." Quite apart from the fact that the word "rampacious"
+is unknown to the English language, and is probably meant for
+"rampageous," the horse is really represented in the act of beginning a
+gentle trot, and looks as mild as the mildest milk that ever dewed the
+whiskers of a new-born kitten. His off fore-leg, broken at some period,
+has been restored of a size that does not match with the other three.
+Never, in the whole of his existence, has the Great White Horse gone
+on the rampage, and, like all the truly great, his manners have always
+been distinguished by their unobtrusiveness.
+
+"The 'Great White Horse,'" writes Dickens, "is famous in the
+neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or county
+paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig--for its enormous size. Never
+were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy,
+ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or
+sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between
+the four walls of the 'Great White Horse' at Ipswich." Further, he
+describes it as "an overgrown tavern," at whose door, when Mr Pickwick
+descended from the coach, stood a waiter whose description quite
+takes one's desire for dinner away. He was "a corpulent man with a
+fortnight's napkin under his arm and coeval stockings on his legs."
+
+Although that must have been in the best and most prosperous days of
+the highway, this waiter does not appear to have had anything more
+pressing to do than "staring down the road," while the account of
+the internal arrangements of the house does not indicate flourishing
+business. The private room into which the guests were shown was a
+"large, badly-furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a
+small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast
+sinking under the dispiriting influence of the place." After this we
+are not surprised to read that it was only "after the lapse of an hour"
+that "a bit of fish and a steak," representing a dinner, appeared.
+When this was disposed of, Mr Pickwick and Mr Peter Magnus huddled up
+to the fire, and, "having ordered a bottle of the worst possible port
+wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank
+brandy-and-water for their own."
+
+Certainly Dickens must have had some very bitter grudge against the
+"Great White Horse."
+
+Then come allusions to "tortuous passages," and the difficulty of
+a stranger's finding his way about the interminable corridors, or
+distinguishing between one "mouldy room" and another; difficulties
+which led to Mr Pickwick's comical predicament in the middle of
+the night. The rooms, not so mouldy now, and the passages, just as
+perplexing, remain, structurally unaltered to this day; but certain
+alterations have been made downstairs in the courtyard, now roofed in
+with glass and made very attractive, without spoiling the old-style
+character of the house. If you be a literary pilgrim, or an American,
+they will show you Mr Pickwick's bedroom; and can meet any of Dickens's
+criticisms by telling how Nelson stayed here with--ahem!--Lady
+Hamilton, and how Admiral Hyde-Parker and others of world-wide fame
+have occupied the "mouldy rooms."
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+LEAVING Ipswich and passing through the dusty roadside fringe of
+Whitton village, known as Whitton Street, Claydon, nondescript, and
+neither very beautiful nor quite commonplace, is reached in two
+and a half miles. Just before entering the village, an old mansion
+is glimpsed from the road, embowered in trees, a mansion which, on
+inquiry, the ingenuous youth of Claydon declare to be "Mockbeggar
+Hall." Claydon Hall is its true title; but the popular name has been
+handed down since many, many years ago, when the old house (not old
+then) long remained tenantless. Like the many other places named
+"Mockbeggar," it stands well within view of passing travellers, and
+must have induced many a sturdy rogue and vagabond to trudge wearily
+up the long approach in search of alms, only to find the windows dark,
+the chimneys innocent of smoke, the place, in fact, deserted of all
+but fluttering bats and screeching owls, whose shrill notes must have
+sounded like jeers to the disappointed vagrants. Inhabited now, Claydon
+Hall is a handsome old house bearing the date 1635 on its Dutch-like
+gables. It will probably never lose its popular name. Behind the old
+Hall winds the willow-fringed Orwell, coyly approaching within view
+of the road, and then, as it were, timorously retreating again; its
+brimming stream, although seen only in such fleeting glimpses, potent
+in its effect upon at least three miles' length of the road, from
+Claydon to Creeting All Saints, in the loveliest stretch of woodland,
+where the fierce mid-day sun is baffled by over-arching foliage,
+and twilight comes early in the afternoon through the dense masses
+of leaves. These are the woodlands of Shrubland Park. The Hall lies
+secluded to the right hand, somewhere away beyond the rather terrible
+lodges that confront the traveller, who wonders where he has seen their
+like before; until, like a flash, the memory of certain great London
+cemeteries and their mortuary chapels comes upon him in desolating
+fashion and blights the cheerful rustic surroundings of forest trees
+and the scurryings of white-tailed rabbits and gorgeous blue and brown
+pheasants that inhabit this domain of Lord de Saumarez. The lodges,
+built like the Hall, from designs by Sir Charles Barry, are of white
+brick and stone, in the Italian Renaissance style.
+
+[Illustration: MOCKBEGGAR HALL.]
+
+At no great distance from the entrance to this lordly domain, and
+noticeable from the road, in an exquisitely damp situation by the
+river, eminently calculated to foster rheumatism in old bones, is the
+Barham Union-house--the "Work'us" of peasant speech. It is quite an
+old-world building, and one of the earliest built under the new Poor
+Law Act of the early nineteenth century, when outdoor relief gave place
+to retirement within these prison-like buildings. Hodge well named them
+"Bastilles." They say who should know of what they speak, that life
+in Barham Union is nowadays quite desirable, but the design of the
+building, a quadrangular structure enclosing a courtyard, with outer
+walls blank or only provided with windows at a height from the ground,
+closely follows the prison, or restraining, idea.
+
+The little roadside sign of the "Sorrel Horse," standing in midst
+of these leafy bowers, is in pleasing contrast with the Campo Santo
+pretentiousness of Shrubland lodges or the prison-like style of the
+Union, now left behind on a rising road, where the scarped side of
+the highway reveals a momentary change from the prevailing claylands
+to chalk; a change so sudden and so strictly confined to this
+hillside that it at once attracts the attention of even the least
+geologically-inclined. Here the campions bloom that love the chalk
+and refuse to grow on clay. Below this hilltop, in the deep hollow
+scoured out ages ago, when the now insignificant stream that crosses
+the road was a considerable force, is Creeting Bottom, and Creetings of
+several sorts are set about the countryside, all hiding from the road
+that goes now up hill and down dale with as lonely an air as though
+the little town of Needham Market and the larger town of Stowmarket
+were not almost within sight, over the shoulders of the hills, on the
+highway parallel with this, that runs to Bury St Edmunds. To be on "on
+the road to Needham" is an obvious Suffolk saying, applied to those who
+are badly off for worldly gear, and it is a little curious that Needham
+itself was for many years, and until quite recently, a place of fallen
+fortunes, lamenting the decay of its textile trades in empty houses
+and an "irreducible minimum" of rent for those that were so fortunate
+as to find occupants at all. The name of "Hungry-gut Hall" that still
+clings to a farmhouse marks that depressed period to all time; but in
+the spicy odours of the tanneries and the chemical manure stores and
+other thriving industries and businesses that cluster round the railway
+station, the explorer finds evidences enough that Needham is reviving.
+
+[Illustration: "STONHAM PIE."]
+
+Not a sign of those towns or of the railway is seen on the road to
+Norwich, where the cottage outposts of Stonham Earls and Stonham
+Aspall alone tell of the villages in the hinterland. In their gardens,
+spread on bushes or waving in the summer breeze, intimate articles of
+underclothing are prominently displayed, in the society of old hats
+and coats, not so much for the exhibition of the family wardrobe as in
+desperate attempts--bringing up all the reserves--at scaring away the
+hungry birds from currants, cherries and gooseberries. These contests,
+the only warring incidents on the way, in which the birds are generally
+the victors, bring one to a level road where Little Stonham stands,
+its chief feature the "Magpie" Inn. "Stonham Pie" owns one of those
+old gallows signs, stretching across the road, that were at one time a
+common feature. The picture-sign, with a painting of that saucy bird,
+has been hung below the cross-beam instead of in its old ironwork
+frame above, now that the piled-up coaches that once passed beneath
+are gone. Shortly before their going, and while turnpikes and tolls
+appeared likely to last for ever, the toll-gate that stood at the
+succeeding village of Brockford was removed two miles onward, to Stoke
+Ash, where, at the beginning of the pretty avenue at Stoke Chapel, the
+later toll-house remains, just as does the earlier one at Brockford.
+Brockford, the "badger's ford" of a tiny affluent of the Waveney, is
+preceded by Brockford Green, where the quiet road is made narrow by its
+sides being encroached upon by grass. It is here that the accompanying
+sketch of tall poplars and bushy willows was taken.
+
+[Illustration: NEAR BROCKFORD.]
+
+Off to the left hand, in strong contrast with this level stretch of
+road, the country is tumbled into combes and rounded hills, where the
+River Gipping takes its rise in the village of that name, springing
+from the hill where the church tower stands solemn and grim, as though
+it held inviolate the story of the place, away from those days when the
+Gippings first settled here and gave it a title.
+
+But let not the hurried seek Gipping, along the winding by-roads. The
+way, if not far, is not easy, and passengers are few. Scattered and
+infrequent farmhouses there be, at whose back doors to inquire the way,
+but rustic directions are apt to mislead. In any case, it is little
+use approaching the front door of a farmhouse. No one will hear you
+knocking, unless indeed it be a watchful and savage dog, trained to be
+on the alert for tramps; and you are like to hear him snuffling and
+gasping on the other side in a ferociously suggestive manner which will
+render you thankful that the door is closed and bolted. And not only
+bolted on this occasion, but always. The steps, and the space between
+the door and the threshold, where stray straws and wind-blown rubbish
+have collected, are evidence of the fact that the farmer and his family
+do not use the front door, but make their exits and entrances by way
+of the kitchen. It is an old East Anglian custom, and although many of
+the farmers nowadays pretend to culture and set up to be as up-to-date
+as the retired tradesfolk and small squires they are neighbourly with,
+many others would no more think of using the principal entrance to
+their homes than they would make use of the "parlour," where massive
+and sombre furniture, covered with antimacassars, is disposed with
+geometric accuracy around the room, in company with the family Bible
+and the prizes taken at school by the farmer's children; the stale and
+stuffy atmosphere proclaiming that this state apartment is only used
+on rare and solemn occasions. In fact, the "best room" and the front
+door only came into use in the old days on the occasion of a funeral.
+Perhaps it is a custom originating in a laudable idea of paying the
+greatest possible respect to the dead, but it is one which certainly
+gives a gruesome mortuary significance to both the entrance and the
+room.
+
+[Illustration: "THWAITE LOW HOUSE."]
+
+Thwaite or "Twaite," as East Anglians, incapable of pronouncing "th,"
+call it, less than a mile beyond Brockford, numbers few cottages.
+Beyond it, where the hitherto flat road makes a descent, is in
+local parlance, "Thwaite Low House," not so called on account of
+any disreputable character it may once have earned, but from its
+situation. The name obviously entails the existence of a "High House,"
+which was, like the other, a coaching and posting inn. The last named,
+now a farmstead, was in those days the "Cock," the other the "Queen's
+Head." While the "Low House" has fallen upon times so irredeemably evil
+that it has been long untenanted and is now a veritable scarecrow of
+a house, with gaping holes in its walls and windows battened up, the
+"Cock," save that its sign is gone, still remains much as it was, to
+show a later generation what manner of place the roadside inn was in
+days of yore.
+
+[Illustration: THE "COCK," THWAITE.]
+
+Stoke Ash, or "Aish," as Suffolkers pronounce it, like many another
+village, makes no sign from the road. Its church tower seen to the
+right, dimly, amid a hilltop screen of trees, a square, box-like
+red-brick chapel by the way, and that pretty inn, "Stoke White Horse,"
+are the only other evidences of its being. The remaining six miles to
+the Norfolk border lead through Yaxley and Brome: Yaxley, where a
+branch railway runs under the road, on its way to Eye, and narrowly
+misses the old church: Brome, where the "Swan" stands for all the
+village to those who look to neither side of the road; church and
+houses skulking down a by-road on the way to Hoxne. There, down that
+pretty road, where the thatched cottages nestle under tall trees
+and the blue wood-smoke from rustic hearths curls upwards into the
+boughs and makes the sparrows cough and sneeze--there is the Rectory,
+approached in lordly fashion past a fine brick entrance and exquisite
+avenue, and, at a little greater distance the old black flint,
+round-towered church, restored and titivated out of all antiquity
+of tone: the stone sand-papered, and the flints polished with a
+handkerchief. The only thing missing--and, under the circumstances,
+it is missed--is a glass case, so that no damp, nor lichen, nor any
+effects of weather may come to spoil the housewifely neatness.
+
+It was along this road to Hoxne that those who sought the revered head
+of St Edmund, King and Martyr, in the miraculous legend, were led to
+it by the voice calling, "Here, here, here;" at length finding the
+sainted relic in charge of a wolf, who allowed it to be taken from
+between his paws. But the voice thus calling was probably a much less
+supernatural manifestation, and was doubtless the hooting of owls in
+the woods. They still mock the belated traveller, only, to ears untuned
+to the miraculous, they simply seem to ask, "Who, who, who?" Ingenuity,
+however, vainly seeks the basis in nature of the wolf incident.
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+NOW, crossing the River Waveney, winding with tree-fringed banks
+through a flat country, the road enters Norfolk at Scole. Coming over
+the little bridge, the village is seen huddled together on either side
+of a narrow rising road; village and church alike wholly dominated by
+a great building of mellow red brick whose panelled chimney-stacks and
+long row of beautiful gables give the impression of an historic mansion
+having by some strange chance been taken from its park and set down
+beside the highway. This, however, was at no time a private residence,
+but was built as an inn; and an inn it remains, after the passing of
+nearly two centuries and a half. Scole, or "Schoale," as the name was
+often spelled in old times (when, indeed, the village was not called
+by its _alias_ of Osmundeston), was by reason of this inn quite a
+celebrated place in the days of long ago. Every traveller in Eastern
+England had then either seen or heard of "Scole White Hart" and its
+famous sign that stretched completely across the road, and as a great
+many coaches halted here for changing teams, passengers had plenty of
+time for examining what Sir Thomas Browne thought to be "the noblest
+sighne-post in England." Both house and sign were built in 1655, for
+James Peck, described as a "Norwich merchant," whose initials, together
+with the date, are yet to be seen on the centre gable. The elaborate
+sign alone cost £1057. It was of gigantic size and loaded with
+twenty-five carved figures of classic deities and others. Chaste Diana,
+with bow and arrow and two hounds, had a place on the cross-beam, in
+company with Time in the act of devouring an infant, Actæon and his
+dogs, a huntsman, and a White Hart _couchant_. On a pediment above
+the White Hart, supported by Justice and Temperance, was the effigy
+of an astronomer "seated on a Circumferenter," who by "some Chymical
+Preparation is so Affected that in fine Weather He faces the North and
+against bad Weather He faces that Quarter from whence it is about to
+come." On either side of the dizzy height occupied by the astronomer
+were figures of Fortitude and Prudence, a position suitable enough for
+the first-named of those two virtues, but certainly too perilous for
+the last.
+
+Further suggestions of Olympus, with references to Hades and Biblical
+history, adorned the other portions of this extraordinary work.
+Cerberus clawed one side of the supporting post, while Charon dragged
+a witch to Hell on the other; and Neptune bestriding a dolphin, and
+Bacchic figures seated across casks alternated with the arms of
+twelve East Anglian noble and landed families. Two angels supported
+respectively the arms of Mr Peck and his lady and two lions those of
+Norwich and Yarmouth. On the side nearest the inn appeared a huge
+carving of Jonah coming out of the whale's mouth, while, suspended in
+mid-air, and surrounded by a wreath, was another White Hart.
+
+Although, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Browne was impressed with this
+work, an early nineteenth-century tourist (so early indeed as 1801)
+curtly dismisses it as "a pompous sign, with ridiculous ornaments," and
+shortly after that it seems to have been taken down, for the reason
+that it cost the landlord more to keep it in repair than the trade of
+the house permitted. Together with this, the once celebrated Great Bed
+of the White Hart has also disappeared. It was a round bed capable of
+holding twenty couples, and was therefore a good deal larger than the
+famous Great Bed of Ware. Perhaps it was because guests did not relish
+this co-operative method of seeking repose, or maybe because sheets,
+blankets and coverlets of sufficient size were unobtainable, that the
+Scole Great Bed was chopped up for firewood; but did anyone _ever_
+suppose beds of this wholesale capacity would be desirable?
+
+The accompanying old view of the gigantic sign shows one of the
+peculiar basket coaches of the second half of the eighteenth century,
+on its way to London.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART.]
+
+"Scole White Hart" must have been among the very finest of inns and
+posting-houses. Its wide staircases, of a width sufficient for the
+proverbial coach-and-four to drive up them, its large rooms and fine
+panelled doors, its great stone-flagged kitchen, all proclaim how great
+must have been its old prosperity; while the wide-spreading yard in
+the rear of the house, together with the outbuildings, gives some hint
+of how heavy the traffic was at this junction of the Lowestoft, Bungay,
+Diss and Thetford road with that from London to Norwich. Shrunken trade
+has caused portions of the inn to be let off; the stone and wooden
+porches seen in the old print have disappeared; the coach entrance has
+long since been blocked up and has become the bar-parlour, and the
+mullions of the windows have given place to sashes; but the building
+still retains a noble architectural character, and is perhaps more
+interesting in these latter days, now that its story is told, than ever
+it was when that story was in the making. Little or nothing is found in
+contemporary records of "Scole White Hart"; only one vivid flash in its
+later years, when indignant would-be coach passengers stood at the door
+on a day in October 1822 and saw the drivers of the "Norwich Times"
+and "Gurney's Original Day Coach," fired by rivalry, and reckless in
+their long race from Whitechapel, come pounding furiously down the road
+and over the bridge, pass the inn without stopping, and disappear in
+clouds of dust in the direction of Norwich. Do you know what it is to
+lose a train and to wait an hour for the next? You do? Then it will
+not be difficult to form some idea of the blind, stuttering fury that
+possessed those who had booked seats at Scole and saw the coaches dash
+away, to leave them with half a day's wait.
+
+Thorogood was driving the "Times." Both started from London at 5.30
+a.m. The "Day" coach reached Norwich at 5.20 p.m., and the "Times" ten
+minutes later, neither having stopped for changing horses during the
+last twenty-five miles. This was a "record" for that period, the usual
+time being fourteen hours.
+
+Probably the would-be passengers had to remain the night; a fate which
+no one who has done the like of late would be apt to complain of.
+The guest at the "White Hart," seated in solitary state in the lofty
+sitting-room, lit dimly by candles in antique plated candlesticks, and
+with two ox-eyed seventeenth-century beauties of the Lely type gazing
+down upon him from their sombre frames, presently feels oddly as though
+he were living in another era; a feeling that grows as he wanders
+upstairs to bed, almost losing himself in the roomy corridors. When
+he has closed the nail-studded bedroom door with a reverberant clang,
+and, creeping into the generous embraces of a damask-hung four-poster
+that may have been new a century and a half ago, gazes reflectively
+about the panelled room and on the curiously coffered ceiling, he drops
+off to sleep straightway into the times when the inn was new-built and
+dreams of how the news of the Restoration may have come to Scole in
+1661. Old times live again, faded flowers bloom once more, forgotten
+footsteps echo along the passages, and lo, the Has Been is enacted
+again, with all the convincing air of such visions. Post-chaises and
+chariots clatter up to the door and their noise wakens the sleeper
+to the consciousness that the sound is but that of a jolting rustic
+tumbril going down the road in the early morning; that this is the
+twentieth century, and the "White Hart" but a survival in a back
+eddy of life.
+
+[Illustration: STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART."]
+
+Besides the "White Hart," there is little else at Scole. The plain
+flint tower of the church stands by the roadside, on the ascent that
+leads from the village; and other two or three inns, a few rustic shops
+and cottages, and a private residence or so make up the tale. Scole,
+in fact, has not grown greatly since when it was a Roman station, and
+when the Roman soldiers whose remains have been found near the river
+occupied the military post on the long road to Venta Icenorum.
+
+The legionaries first stationed in these East Anglian wastes must
+often have longed for their native Italy. When the sky sank almost to
+the level of the land in the long winter's rains and fogs, and the
+biting winds blew out of the east across the sandy scrub; when agues
+or the lurking enemy accounted for many of their comrades, and when
+some favoured few were recalled to the capital, they must have thought
+wistfully of a more congenial clime than this, situated on the edge of
+the Unknown. Rome, either as Empire or Republic, was a hard taskmaster,
+and when no fighting was in prospect employed the troops ingloriously
+as road-makers. The advanced garrisons in the wilderness cleared the
+enemy out of the tangled brush and boggy marshes, and working parties
+built roads under the protection of guards, or improved the rude
+trackways they found already in existence. Some fell by the way, and
+their skeletons have been found in these latter days, the teeth still
+clenched on the obolus placed in the dead man's mouth to pay Charon
+for ferrying him across the cold and darkling Styx; or, where the coin
+has perished, still stained with the metal's long decay. They perished,
+those pioneers, to found a civilisation, just as countless thousands of
+our own blood have laid their bones on distant shores, under burning
+skies or in the Arctic night, to make England what she is. Respect
+their long sleep, antiquaries, nor, as you honour your own creeds, take
+from the dead men their passage-money across that mystic river.
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+THIS, as Dr Jessop charmingly names Norfolk, is Arcady. The scene
+is pleasant, but the stage waits: where are the actors? Gone, where
+and for what reasons beyond the substitution of rail for road shall
+presently be considered. But if the merry days of old are done and
+population dwindled, at least in East Anglia, and especially in
+Norfolk, dialect flourishes among those who remain. The "Norfolk drant"
+or drawl, is still heard, just as the "Suffolk whine"--that rising
+inflection of the voice towards the end of sentences--is even yet a
+mark of the sister county. They are, indeed, said to have originated
+the Yankee combined drawl and twang, for Norfolk and Suffolk were
+largely represented among the Pilgrim Fathers, the first colonists of
+North America. With these survivals, some of the old rustic simplicity
+is still met with, although the extraordinary ignorance of sixty years
+ago has disappeared, and the Norfolk labourer no longer thinks it
+possible to emigrate to America by driving over in a farm cart. The
+story is an East Anglian classic, how a farm labourer "didn't fare
+rightly to knaw" by what route they were going to the United States,
+"but we'm gwine ter sleep t' Debenham the fust night, so's to kinder
+break t' jarney." When railways came, and access to London grew easy,
+these simplicities gradually faded away. The young men took to "gettin'
+up the road," as the saying ran--otherwise, going to London--to "better
+themselves," and old illusions were soon dispelled; but in Arcady the
+mavis may still be seen knapping a dodman; the children of the rustic
+hamlets may be observed by the passing stranger gleefully sporting at
+the old game of tittymatorterin; the cowslips that in springtime turn
+the meadows to living gold are yet "paigles"; a small field remains,
+as ever, a "pightle," and when a countryman throws anything into a
+ditch, he "hulls" (or hurls) "it in t' holl," just as his ancestors
+did hundreds of years ago. Let some of the archaic words just noted be
+explained before we proceed any further. "Mavis" is the idyllic name
+of the thrush, and the "dodman," which he may be observed "knapping,"
+or breaking, is a snail; called in Essex, by the way, a "hodmadod."
+"Tittymatorterin" is just the simple game of "see-sawing." Besides
+these fleeting instances there are many other peculiarities. The
+Norfolk peasant will never pronounce the letter E if it be possible
+to avoid it. It becomes I in his mouth, and a head becomes a "hid,"
+while hens are "hins." Throughout the whole of the eastern counties,
+too, the elision of the final in the present tense is a feature of
+rustic talk. Examples of this peculiarity are found not only in
+modern speech, but in old epitaphs and inscriptions, dating back some
+hundreds of years. Thus, a bridge across the River Wensum, at Norwich,
+bears the sculptured effigy of a dragon's head with the words, "When
+dragon drink, Heigham sink." The meaning is that when the river rises
+and touches, or "rise" and "touch," as a Norfolk man would say, the
+dragon's mouth, the neighbouring Heigham becomes flooded. An older
+example still is seen on an inscription at Kimberley, to John Jenkin,
+in the words:--
+
+  "Under this stone rare Jenkin lie,"
+
+while a comparatively modern one may be found in Stratford St Mary
+church, in the concluding lines of an epitaph dated 1739:--
+
+  'The Night is gone, ye Stars Remain,
+  So man that die shall Live again."
+
+Dickens has caught the East Anglian dialect readily enough in _David
+Copperfield_, where he makes Mr Peggotty say, "Cheer up, old mawther"
+to Mrs Grummidge, and speak of "a couple of mavishes," while Ham talks
+to David as "Mas'r Davy, bor." The willing Barkis, too, who asks "do
+she now?" and speaks of the "stage-cutch," is a true product of the
+soil.
+
+For the benefit of those not to the manner born, let it be repeated
+that a "mawther" is not necessarily a parent. It is the generic name
+for a female. A "mawther" may therefore be a girl infant or a grown
+woman. "Bor" is, of course, a corruption of "neighbour," but need
+not, in fact, specifically mean a neighbour, and is practically the
+masculine of "mawther," and applicable to any man; friend close at hand
+or stranger from distant parts.
+
+The Norfolk dialect has attained the distinction of being made the
+subject of study, and glossaries and collections of local words have
+long been made by enthusiasts in these matters. Perhaps the most
+interesting and amusing of the examples of Norfolk talk is found in the
+East Anglian version of the _Song of Solomon_, published many years ago
+by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte. It was taken down from a reading by a
+Norfolk peasant. A few verses will be instructive:--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+1. The song o' songs, as is Sorlomun's.
+
+2. Lerr 'im kiss me wi' the kisses of his mouth; for yar love is better
+'an wine.
+
+3. Becaze o' the smell o' yar intements, yar name is as intements pored
+out, therefoor du the mawthers love yĕ.
+
+4. Dror mĕ, we'll run arter yĕ: the king he ha' browt me into his
+charmbers; we'll be glad and reījce in yĕ; we'll remahmber yar
+love more 'an wine: the right-up love yĕ.
+
+5. I em black, but tidy, O ye darters o' J'rusal'm, as the taents o'
+Kedar, as the cattins o' Sorlomun.
+
+6. Don't sin starrin' at me, cos I em black, 'ecos the sun t'have
+barnt mĕ; my mother's children wor snāsty wi' me; they made me
+keeper o' the winyerds, but m'own winyerd I han't kept.
+
+7. Tell onto me, yow hu my soul du love, where ye fade, where ye make
+yar flock to rest at nune: fur why shud I be as one tarn aside by yar
+cumrades' flock?
+
+8. If so bein' as yĕ don't know, O yow bootifullest o' women, go yer
+ways furth by the futtin' o' the flock, and feed yer kids 'eside the
+shepherds' taents.
+
+9. I ha' likened yow, O my love, to a taamer o' hosses in Pharer's
+charrits.
+
+10. Yar cheeks are right fine wi' ringes of jewiltry, yer neck wi'
+chanes o' gold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The full flavour of this vernacular is only to be obtained by reading
+the original verses side by side with the above.
+
+Among the sports that obtained on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk
+of old was "camping." "Camping" was an old East Anglian game that,
+could it be revived, would please the footballing maniacs of our own
+day. It was a wild kind of football, played on these commons, often
+with a hundred players aside, and we are told that the roughest kind
+of Rugby football was child's play compared with it. If stories of old
+camping contests be true, it might almost seem that in ascribing the
+thinly-populated condition of Norfolk and Suffolk to the long-standing
+effects of the Black Death, and to mediæval insurrections and their
+resulting butcheries, we do an injustice to pestilence and the sword,
+and fail to make count of the casualties received in play. As the
+wondering Frenchman said, in witnessing a camping-match, "If these
+savages be at play, what would they be in war?"
+
+"These contests," says a Norfolk historian, "were not infrequently
+fatal to many of the combatants. I have heard old persons speak of
+a celebrated camping, Norfolk against Suffolk, on Diss Common, with
+three hundred on each side. Before the ball was thrown up, the Norfolk
+men inquired tauntingly of the Suffolk men if they had brought their
+coffins. The Suffolk men, after fourteen hours, were the victors. Nine
+deaths were the result of the conflict in a fortnight." Camping went
+out of favour about 1810, and the coroners had an easier time.
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+DICKLEBURGH, the next village after Scole, is in its way as imposing a
+place, only not an inn, but a church, is its chief feature. The great
+church of Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced) charmingly
+screened from the street by a row of limes, but not so charmingly
+enclosed by a very long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to
+the road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims who once
+passed on their way to Our Lady of Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on
+either side of the east window, holding effigies of popular saints,
+and halting many a sinner for supplication. The saints are gone, torn
+down by Henry the Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing.
+They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond, or, broken up, serve
+the useful part of metalling the road. Adjoining the church stands the
+"King's Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of kings than
+intended as a portrait of any particular one. At any rate it resembles
+none of the long line of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time
+favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough to have been painted
+in the hey-day of his popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large
+for the present size of the place and for the empty country side; but
+there is a reason for the solitudes, and there was one for these huge
+buildings, ten times too large for the present needs of the shrunken
+villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most thickly-peopled
+of English counties, were practically depopulated in 1348 by that
+dreadful scourge, the Black Death. One-third of the total population
+of England perished under that terrible plague. The working classes
+were the worst sufferers, and the agriculturists, the weavers and
+labourers died in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground,
+industries decayed, and no man would work. When the pestilence was
+stayed, other parts of the country flourished in greater proportion,
+than this. Manufacturing industries arose elsewhere and attracted
+the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining consistently
+agricultural throughout the centuries, has never shared the increase;
+only the few and scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in
+the form of weaving in mediæval and later times, and in the manufacture
+of agricultural machinery nowadays. In the last two decades, with the
+decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry to London and the
+great centres of population, the country, and the eastern counties in
+especial, has become almost deserted.
+
+[Illustration: DICKLEBURGH.]
+
+The present state of agriculture in Eastern England is made manifest
+in deserted farms, in broken gates left hanging precariously on one
+hinge, in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted ploughs
+and decrepit waggons standing derelict in the once fertile fields, now
+overrun with foul weeds and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles;
+and farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely to remain
+tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible to grow seeds and flowers,
+and market-gardening is profitable only in the lands more immediately
+surrounding the great towns. With wheat at its present price of thirty
+shillings a quarter, it does not pay to grow corn for the market, and
+the land is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still struggles
+on, he lays down most of his holding in grass for sheep and cattle,
+and grows, grudgingly, as little wheat as possible, for sake of the
+straw. Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat was down to
+twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers fed their pigs on the harvest
+which cost them three pounds more per acre to grow than it would have
+brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it yields no profit.
+Agricultural England is, in short, ruined, and there seems no present
+hope of things becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful
+harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States, Russia and other
+wheat-producing countries can be cultivated, reaped, and carried to
+these shores at the prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders
+of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as advantageously, the
+English farmer must needs go without a living wage. As matters stand
+at present, we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat used
+in the country; the acreage under corn having gone down from 4,058,731
+acres in 1852, to about half that at the present day. Meanwhile the
+population has increased by thirteen millions; so that, with many
+more mouths to fill, we grow only half the staple food these islands
+produced then. There are, of course, those who reap the advantage of
+cheap corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling millions of the
+towns and cities thrive on those benefits; but what if, through war, or
+from any other cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what avail
+would have been this generation of cheapness if at last the nation must
+starve? Extinguish agriculture and the farmer, and you cannot recall
+them at need, nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a land
+which has long gone untilled.
+
+But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more than the walls of a
+house can be demolished and the roof yet left standing. It was the
+farmer who in prosperous times supported the country gentleman in one
+direction, and the agricultural labourer in the other. With wheat, as
+it was a generation ago, at seventy shillings a quarter, and other
+products of the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could
+afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms in those days were
+difficult to obtain, and there was great competition among farmers
+for holdings. To-day, even at a quarter of those rents, tenants are
+difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed proprietors has
+dwindled away. The results are painfully evident here, in the old
+families reduced or beggared, and their seats either in the market or
+let to stock-jobbers and successful business men, while the old owners
+have disappeared or live humbly in small houses once occupied by the
+steward or bailiff of the estate.
+
+While rents have thus, with the iron logic of circumstances, gone down
+to vanishing-point, and while farms have actually been offered rent
+free in order to prevent the disaster of the land being let go out
+of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances of the agricultural
+labourer have been, most illogically, improving. Instead of the
+miserable six to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives thirteen or fourteen
+shillings, lives in a decent cottage, instead of a wretched hovel,
+and finds the cost of food and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than
+his grandfather ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers are as
+difficult to get now as they were immediately after the Black Death had
+swept away three quarters of the working class, five hundred and fifty
+years ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they have done of recent
+years in East Anglia--for lack of hands to gather them in. It was in
+1899 that standing crops at Tivitshall St Margaret's and adjacent
+parishes were sold by auction for a farmer who could find no labourer
+willing to be hired.
+
+What has been called the "rural exodus" is well named. London and
+the great towns have proved so attractive to the children of the
+middle-aged peasant that they despise the country. They can all read
+and write now, and at a pinch do simple sums in arithmetic; so off they
+go to the crowded streets. The ambitious aspire to a black coat and a
+stool in an office, and others become workmen of many kinds; but all
+are attracted by the higher wages to be earned in the towns, and by the
+excitement of living in the great centres of population, and only the
+aged and the aging will soon be left to till the fields.
+
+Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for the agricultural
+labourer's attempts to better himself. To them they are almost impious;
+but the farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of culture. He is
+a vastly different fellow from his grandfather, who actually helped to
+till the soil among his own men; whose wife and daughters were noted
+hands at milking and buttermaking; who lived in the kitchen, among
+the hams and the domestic utensils, and was not above eating the same
+food as, and at the same table with, his ploughmen and carters. He
+has, in fact, and so also have the landed proprietor and the labourer,
+undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process which had started
+certainly by 1825, when Cobbett noticed it.
+
+Hear him:--
+
+ "When the old farmhouses are down (and down they must come in time)
+ what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected
+ are mere painted shells, with a mistress within who is stuck up in a
+ place she calls the parlour, with, if she have children, the 'young
+ ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy chairs and a sofa (a
+ _sofa_ by all means); half-a-dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up;
+ some swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner
+ brought in by a girl that is perhaps better 'educated' than she;
+ two or three nick-nacks to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a
+ pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to
+ come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder that
+ there is here a constant anxiety to make a _show_ not warranted by
+ the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too
+ clever to _work;_ they are all to be _gentlefolks_. Go to _plough_!
+ Good God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough! They become _clerks_,
+ or some skimming-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty _work_
+ as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What
+ a mass of materials for proclaiming that general and _dreadful
+ convulsion_ that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and
+ jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms."
+
+The "convulsion" anticipated by Cobbett has not come about. This is
+not a country of earthquakes or of violent social upheavals. Free
+Trade has beggared the agricultural interests, but, on his way to
+the Bankruptcy Court, the farmer contrives to live in better style
+than possible three quarters of a century ago, while his pretensions
+to gentility certainly have not decreased. As for the "funding and
+jobbing," Cobbett could never, in his wildest dreams, have foreseen
+Limited Liability and the fungoid growth of Stock Exchange speculation,
+or the modern "enslaving and starving system" of the gigantic Trusts
+that, like vampires, feed on the blood of industry. We need look for
+no convulsions; not even, unhappily, for the hanging, or, at least,
+the taxing out of existence, of the millionaires. Our expectations of
+the future are quite different. The people will inhabit the towns, and
+the country will become a huge preserve of game for the sport of the
+millionaires aforesaid; a preserve broken here and there by the model
+farm or the training establishment of some colossus of wealth.
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+BEYOND Dickleburgh, past the solitary "Ram" inn, a fine, dignified
+house still lamenting its decadence from a posting-inn to a beerhouse,
+Tivetshall level-crossing marks where the railway runs to Bungay and
+Lowestoft. Maps make Pulham St Mary the Virgin quite near, with Pulham
+St Mary Magdalene close by; Tivetshalls of different dedications, and
+other villages dotted about like plums in a Christmas pudding, but no
+sign of them is evident. Only windmills, whirling furiously on distant
+ridges, break the pastoral solitudes. In this conflict of charts, a
+carter jogging along the road with his team is evidently the authority
+to be consulted.
+
+"Coom hather," says the carter to his sleek and intelligent horses; and
+they coom accordingly, with much jingling of harness, and stand in the
+shade of roadside trees while their lord takes his modest levenses and
+haffles and jaffles--gossips, that is to say--with the landlord of the
+"Ram."
+
+"Tivetshall?" asks the carter, echoing a question; "niver heerd of un."
+Then a light breaks in upon him. "Oh, ay! Tishell we allus call 'em;
+Tishell St Marget an' Tishell St Merry," and with, a sweep of the arm
+comprising the whole western horizon, "Theiy'm ower theer."
+
+"And Pulham St Mary the Virgin?"
+
+"Pulham St Merry the Wirgin? oh, yis! Pulham Maaket, yar mean, bor.
+Et edd'n on'y a moile, ower _theer_"--a comprehensive wave to the
+eastwards.
+
+And there, on a byroad, in an embrace of trees, it is found, a little
+forgotten town, the greater proportion of whose inhabitants appear
+to walk with two sticks. It is ranged round a green or market-place,
+with a great Perpendicular church, gorgeously frescoed within, and
+with a very good recent "Ascension" over the chancel arch, painted
+and stencilled timber roof, and elaborate stained-glass windows. The
+townlet and townsfolk sinking into decay, the church an object of such
+care and expense, afford a curious contrast.
+
+An old toll-house and the prison-like buildings of Depwade Union
+conspire to make desolate the road onwards. He who presses, hot-foot,
+along it, turning neither to the right nor to the left, may readily be
+excused a legitimate wonder as to what has become of the great feature
+of East Anglia, its spreading commons; for, strange to say, despite
+the fame they have long since attained, no vestige of them is glimpsed
+from the road itself. One has usually to turn aside to some of the
+villages lying near, but wholly hidden from the highway, to find the
+yet unenclosed common lands, the pasturage of geese, ducks and turkeys;
+but a striking exception to this now general rule is the huge common
+of Wacton lying off to the left of the road at the hundredth mile from
+London, where a cottage and a wayside inn, the "Duke's Head," alone
+represent Wacton village, a mile distant. Wacton Common, reputed to be
+the highest point in Norfolk, although of no less extent than three
+hundred and fifty acres, might perhaps be passed without being seen,
+for the reason that, although still wild and unenclosed, it is screened
+from the high road by a hedge and entered through an ordinary field
+gate. The inn and the cottage, obviously built on land fraudulently
+taken from the common in the long ago, serve with their gardens to hide
+that glorious expanse of grass and heather. Here roam those chartered
+vagabonds, the plump geese, that pick up a living on the grassy commons
+and wander, like free-booting bands of feathered moss-troopers upon the
+heaths, closing their careers with royal feasting in the August and
+September stubble, and a Michaelmas martyrdom.
+
+[Illustration: A DISPUTED PASTURAGE.]
+
+Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their geese, but those
+martyred fowls do not make their final journey to the London markets,
+between Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they once
+attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays in the seclusion of railway
+vans. Seventy years ago they journeyed by coach, and in state, for the
+Norfolk coaches in Christmas week often carried nothing save geese and
+turkeys, beside the coachman and guard. Full inside and out with such
+a freight, the proprietors of fast coaches made a great deal more by
+carrying them than they would have taken by a load of passengers; so
+the fowls had the preference, while travellers had to take their chance
+of finding a seat in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the
+turkeys conveyed from Norwich to London between a Saturday morning
+and Sunday night in December numbered one thousand seven hundred, and
+weighed 9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was £680. They were followed
+on the two succeeding days by half as many more.
+
+A Norfolk common without its screaming and hissing flocks of geese
+would seem strangely untenanted. They, the turkeys, the ducks, the
+donkeys ("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom fowls are
+among the only vestiges of the wild life that once made Norfolk famous
+to the naturalist and not a little eerie to the traveller of old, who,
+startled on the lonely way that stretched by heath and common and fen
+between the habitations of men, shrank appalled at the lumbering
+flight of the huge bustards, quivered with apprehension at the sudden
+hideous whirring of the night-jar as the day closed in, dismayed,
+heard the bittern booming among the reeds, or with misgivings of the
+supernatural saw the fantastical ruff stalking on long legs, with
+prodigious beak, red eyes and spreading circle of neck feathers, like
+the creation of some disordered imagination. Wild Norfolk, the home
+of these and of many another strange creature, is no more, and these
+species, now chiefly extinct, are to be seen only in museums of natural
+history.
+
+[Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]
+
+What Wacton lacks along the high road the village of Long Stratton
+has in superabundance. They named it well who affixed the adjective,
+for it measures a mile from end to end. Beginning with modern and (to
+speak kindly) uninteresting cottages, it ends in a broad street where
+almost every house is old and beautiful in lichened brick or soft-toned
+plaster. Midway of this lengthy thoroughfare stands the church, one of
+the Norfolk round-towered kind, in the usual black flint, and beyond
+it the Manor House, red brick, with Adam scrolls and neo-classical
+palm branches in plaster for trimmings, set back at some distance
+behind a very newty, froggy and tadpoley moat. Beyond this again, the
+village street broadens out. Looking back upon it, when one has finally
+climbed uphill on the way to Norwich, Long Stratton is a place entirely
+charming. Its name, of course, derives from its situation on the Roman
+Road, and Tasburgh, that now comes in sight, keeps yet its Roman camp
+strongly posted above the River Tase. Tasburgh--what little there is
+of a village--occupies an acclivity on the further side of that river,
+across whose wide and marshy valley the mists rise early, seeing the
+sun to bed dull and tarnished, and attending the rising of the moon
+with ghostly vapours. The old Roman camp is oddly and picturesquely
+occupied by the parish church, another round-towered example. Excepting
+it, the vicarage and the Dutch-like building of the "Bird in Hand" Inn,
+there is little else.
+
+[Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]
+
+But what mean these sounds of anger and lamentation that drown the
+soothing, distant rattle of reaping machines on the hillside: a voice
+raised in reproach, and another--a treble one--in gusty shrieks of
+combined pain, fear and peevishness? Coming round a corner, the cause
+of the disturbance is revealed in a wet and muddy infant rubbing dirty
+knuckles into streaming eyes, and being violently reproached by an
+indignant woman.
+
+"You're a pretty article, I must say; a fine spettacle. I'll give
+yow a good sowsin', my lord; coom arn;" and the malefactor is pulled
+suddenly inside the cottage, the door slammed, and muffled yells heard,
+alternating with thumps. The offender is receiving that sowsing, or
+being "yerked," "clipped over the ear-hole," getting a "siseraring,"
+being "whanged" or "clouted," the striking Norfolk phrases for
+varieties of assault and battery.
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+THE Tase is met with again on surmounting the hilly road out of
+Tasburgh and coming down hill into Newton Flotman. Here it is
+broad enough to require a long and substantial bridge, grouping in
+unaccustomed rightness of composition with the mingled thatched, tiled
+and slated cottages and the church that stands on a commanding knoll
+in the background. When Newton was really new it would be impossible
+to say; perhaps its novelty may have been measured against the hoary
+antiquity of, say, Caistor yonder, down the valley. For what says the
+folk-rhyme:--
+
+  "Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,
+  And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"
+
+and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials, why not, in
+degree, Newton Flotman? But a whisper. Caistor was never more than a
+camp, and not at any time a place of houses, much less of stone ones.
+Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood, and flint only, of
+which Norwich is principally built, is available for building materials.
+
+[Illustration: TASBURGH.]
+
+One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the passing stranger is a
+little effigy of Bacchus fixed on the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn,
+so thickly covered with successive coats of paint that it is difficult
+to give it a period. Remains of Roman antiquities are so many in this
+district that it is often mistaken for a work of that classic age,
+when it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of the late
+eighteenth century, a time when figures of the kind were a usual
+decoration of inn signs. Such an one still swings from the wrought-iron
+sign of the "Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.
+
+In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton Flotman lies Dunston,
+trees casting a protecting and secretive shade over it, and the "Dun
+Cow" Inn its only roadside representative. That inn and the circular
+brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle redeem the last few miles into
+Norwich from absolute emptiness. When the pound last was used who shall
+say? The tramps have played havoc with it, and its wooden gate has
+gone. The ancient office of pound-keeper is here evidently fallen into
+disuse.
+
+Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on the level to the left,
+but Caistor, in like manner with Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage, half
+a mile or more away in the valley, its church tower rising like a grey
+beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious where its ancient camp
+may be found. Caistor St Edmunds, to give its full name, is the site of
+the great Roman camp established here to overawe the stronghold of the
+Iceni, four miles away on the banks of the Wensum, and now the site of
+Norwich.
+
+[Illustration: NEWTON FLOTMAN.]
+
+Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of a Roman fortified
+_castrum_. For one thing, it has the largest area of any known relic
+of its kind in England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its fragments
+of flint walls have neither the thickness nor the height of those at
+Portus Rutupiæ, the old Roman port in Thanet, now known as Richborough,
+its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the laggard imagination
+of the layman in matters archæological, which refuses to be stirred
+before mere undulations in the sward. Here is a ditch that can be
+rolled into, an embankment that can be climbed and paced on three
+sides of the camp, if necessary, to put to physical test both height,
+depth and extent. The fourth side of this great enclosure, now a
+turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase and was sufficiently
+defended by that stream, then a wide creek, so that no works are to be
+found there. How long it was before the Romans subdued the Iceni, whose
+great city is thought to have stood where Norwich does now, is not
+known. Nothing of that early time here, indeed, is _known_, and guesses
+are of the vaguest. Only it seems that the Roman advance into East
+Anglia, which had for its objective the principal stronghold of the
+tribes, here came to its military ending. To compare things so ancient
+and romantic with others modern and thought prosaic, the several Roman
+camps on the advance from London now to be sought at Uphall near
+Romford; Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and Tasburgh, are, with
+those that have disappeared, to be looked upon in the same light as the
+wayside stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which originally
+came to a terminus at that city, and was only at a later date continued
+northward.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD BRICK POUND.]
+
+Where the Romans and the Romano-British citizens of Venta lived when
+the tribes were reduced--where the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really
+was, in fact--is a mystery, for, unlike most of our great cities,
+Norwich has furnished no relics of that age; while, beyond coins and
+odds and ends, Caistor camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of
+streets or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and Venta might,
+for all there is to show of it, have been a city of dreams. The fact
+that the original capital of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes
+when they came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the site of
+it having long been deserted; and that they called it after the North
+"wic" or creek, presupposes a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far.
+The position of that south creek is fixed by the ancient geography of
+these last few miles. In those times the ground on which Yarmouth, at
+the mouth of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the waves of
+the sea, which ran up in a long navigable creek--the "Gariensis" of
+the Romans and the "North Wic" of the Danes--from a Roman fortified
+port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site of Norwich, which
+indeed, centuries later, was still a port. Where the River Tase is
+now confluent with the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out
+a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running almost due south; the
+"South wic" of those northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where
+the navigation ceased.
+
+[Illustration: CAISTOR CAMP.]
+
+It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of the Tase still bears
+signs of those old conditions, and perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman
+citizens, together with other relics of the vanished city, still lie
+preserved deep down in the mud and silt that have filled up the old
+channel.
+
+The lie of the land, in accord with these views, is plain to see when,
+returning to the high road, the journey to Norwich is continued to
+Hartford Bridge; bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the
+right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several bridges, none of
+them sizeable, rivers, streams and runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and
+gurgle in their different ways through flat meadows, below the long
+rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins to grow suburban.
+It is on the summit that the Newmarket and Thetford route from London
+joins with this, and together they descend into the city.
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+THIS way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on her great "progress" of
+1578, by St Stephen's Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates and
+walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or even condemned the
+belated citizen to lodge the night without the precincts of the city,
+in suburbs not in those times to be reckoned safe.
+
+Norwich long ago swept away her defences and modernised her outskirts,
+for this is no Sleepy Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the
+Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing with industry and in
+every way in the forefront of modern life. To the entrance from London
+Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side. No general view of
+the city, lying in its hollow beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and
+the eye seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some difficulty,
+modestly peering over tangled modern roof-tops. It is from quite the
+opposite direction, from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that
+Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of cathedral, churches
+and houses, with trees and gardens, such as no other city can show,
+displayed within its bounds. Norwich does not jump instantly to the
+antiquarian eye, and its electric tramways that are the first to greet
+the traveller who enters from the old coach road are not a little
+forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the stranger in all its
+wealth of beauty and interest, and becomes more and more lovable the
+better he becomes acquainted with it.
+
+Until these railway times, in the old days of slow, difficult,
+dangerous and expensive travelling, the capital of East Anglia was in
+a very high degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its shipping
+trade and weaving industries, and the famous Norwich School of artists,
+brought this exclusive attitude down from mediæval times to modern;
+and Norfolk county families until the era of political reform had
+almost dawned, still had their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in
+bygone centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons, owned their
+town houses in Hungate and in what is now called King Street, formerly
+Conisford Street.
+
+The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the mazy streets to inns widely
+sundered. The original "Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater
+part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head," in Tombland. On
+the other hand, the Mails, the "Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to
+and started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street of the same name,
+standing not far from the beginnings of the city. The street is there
+still, but the oddly-named inn has given place to shops, and where
+the "Rampant Horse" ramped rampageously, in violent contrast with the
+mild-mannered "Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers' establishments
+now hold forth seductive announcements of "alarming sacrifices."
+
+Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day Coach" and the "Phenomenon"
+favoured the "Angel," in the Market Place, while the "Times" house was
+the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and that of the "Expedition" the
+"Swan" Inn. Other inns, many of them huddled together under the lee of
+the castle mound, were then to be found in the Market Place and the
+Haymarket and in the narrow alley in the rear that still goes by name
+of "Back of the Inns." Others yet, many of mediæval age, are to be
+sought in old nooks of the city. The Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary
+Tavern, like the "Old Barge," belongs to the fourteenth century, the
+last named still standing between King Street and the river, with
+a picturesque but battered entrance. The steep and winding lane of
+Elm Hill, where the slum population of Norwich stew and pig together
+down ancient courts and dirty alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but
+unrestored; and in the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully
+called Tombland, although it has not, nor ever had, anything to do
+with tombs, is the "Maid's Head," the one establishment in Norwich
+that stands pre-eminently for old times and good cheer. It is an
+"hotel" now, and has the modern conveniences of sanitation and electric
+light; but its restoration, effected through the enthusiasm of a
+local antiquary, with both the opportunity of purchasing the property
+and the means of doing so, has been carried through with taste and
+discrimination. The "Maid's Head" can with certainty claim a history
+of six hundred years, and is thought to have been built upon the site
+of a former Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered ceilings and masonry of
+evident antiquity may take parts of the present house back so far, or
+even a greater length, but the especial pride of the "Maid's Head" is
+its beautiful Jacobean woodwork. The old sign of the house was the
+"Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that antiquaries still boggle
+at. It was long a cherished legend that this strange and unlovely name
+was changed to the present sign in complimentary allusion to Queen
+Elizabeth when she first visited the city, but later researches have
+proved the change to have been made at least a century earlier, and so
+goes another belief!
+
+The "Music House," facing the now disreputable King Street, has not
+for so very long been an inn. Its name tells of a time when it was the
+meeting-place of the "city music," old-time ancestors of modern town
+bands, but its story goes back to the Norman period, when the crypt
+that bears up the thirteenth-century building above was part of the
+home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew. "Isaac's
+Hall," as it was known, was seized by King John and given to one of
+his creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they were allowed
+to live at all, finding cool quarters in the castle dungeons. A long
+succession of owners, including the Pastons, followed; last among them
+Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who resided here in 1633.
+
+It has already been hinted that the streets of Norwich are mazy. They
+are indeed the most perplexing of any town in England. Many roads
+run into the city, and from every direction. Glancing at a plan of
+it, these roads resemble the main strands of a spider's web, and the
+streets the cross webs. In midst of this maze is the great castle, like
+the spider himself; that cruel keep in whose dungeons old wrong-doing,
+religious and private spite, have immured many a wretched captive, like
+that unfortunate unknown "Bartholomew," who has left his name scratched
+on the walls, and the statement that he was here confined "saunz
+resun," a reason of the best in those times. Did he ever see the light
+of day again? Or did some midnight assassin murder him as many another
+had been done to death?
+
+"Blanchflower," that Bigod, Earl of Norwich who built the castle called
+his keep when it arose on its great mound, its stone new and white.
+He built upon the site of a castle thought to have been Saxon, and
+built so well that it became a fortress impregnable save to famine
+and treachery. It has, therefore, unlike weaker places that have been
+stormed again and again, little history, and even seven hundred years
+ago was little more than a prison. And a prison of sorts--for State
+captives first, and for common malefactors afterwards--it remained
+until so recently as 1883, when it was restored and then opened as the
+Museum and Art Gallery it now is.
+
+This is no place to speak at length of the cathedral that withdraws
+itself with such ecclesiastical reserve from the busy quarters of the
+city, and is approached decorously through ancient gateways in the
+walls of its surrounding close; the Ethelbert Gate, with that other,
+the Erpingham Gate, built in Harry the Fifth's time by Sir Thomas
+Erpingham, whose little kneeling effigy yet remains in its niche in
+the gable over the archway, and whose motto--variously held to be
+"Yenk," or "Think,"--"Denk," or "Thank"--is repeated many times on the
+stone work. Norman monastic gloom still broods over the close, for the
+cathedral, save the Decorated cloisters and the light and graceful
+spire in the same style, is almost wholly of that period, and the
+grammar school that was once a mediæval mortuary chapel and has its
+playground in the crypt, keeps a gravity of demeanour that, considering
+its history, is eminently proper.
+
+Through the Close lies the way to Bishop's Bridge and the steep road
+up to Mousehold Heath: the "Monk's Hold," or monastic property, of
+times gone by when it was common land of the manor belonging to the
+Benedictine priory.
+
+
+XL
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH.]
+
+HERE, on this famous Heath of Mousehold where the gorse and heather
+and the less common broom yet flourish, despite the electric tramways
+that bring up the crowds and the picnic parties, Nature, rugged and
+unconquerable, looks down upon the city, revealed as a whole. Even
+though the chimneys of great factories may intrude and smirch the sky
+when winds permit the smoke-wreaths to trail across the view, it is a
+view quite unspoilable. The cathedral, as is only proper, is the grand
+dominating feature, with its central tower and graceful crocketed spire
+rising to a height of 320 feet. Second to it, on its left hand, the
+huge bulk of the castle keep rears up; a time-ball on its battlements
+to give the time o' day to the busy citizens; those battlements where
+from a gibbet they hanged Robert Kett in 1549, when his rebellion was
+crushed and his army of 20,000 peasants who had encamped on Mousehold
+defeated. In similar fashion his brother William was hanged from
+Wymondham steeple. Between castle and cathedral the great tower of
+St Peter Mancroft looms up, and on the other side of the cathedral
+tower the twin spires of the Roman Catholic place of worship crown the
+sky-line. To the extreme right of the accompanying illustration is
+St Giles's, and on the extreme left, in company with the pinnacled
+tower of a modern church, the dark tower of St John-at-Sepulchre,
+Bracondale, which for shortness and simplicity the citizens call "Ber
+Street Church." For the rest, it is a mingling of town and country, of
+houses and gardens and churches in great number, that one sees down
+there; old Norwich, in short, exclusive of the modern suburbs that are
+flung everywhere around and cause the Norwich of to-day to outnumber
+the Norwich of coaching times by 80,000 inhabitants. It must be
+evident from those figures that the picturesque old Norwich numbering
+a population of only 30,000 has been in great degree improved away and
+borne under by that human deluge. It is delightful now, but what it
+was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Crome and De Wint
+and others sketched and painted its quaint bits, the picture-galleries
+of the Castle Museum can tell. Nay, even down to the mid-nineteenth
+century it was still very different, as a collection of early
+photographs in the castle proves. Then, before St Peter Mancroft was
+restored, before the old Fish Market was cleared away, Norwich had many
+more quaint nooks than now to show the stranger; even as, centuries
+before, it was yet more quaint and even more remarkable for its many
+churches than at the present time.
+
+"The nearer the church the further from God," says the old saw. How
+irreligious then should Norwich be, that has even yet a cathedral and
+thirty-four ancient churches, and modern places of worship fully as
+numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as old Fuller suggested, "make
+good use of their churches and cross that pestilent proverb." These
+churches bear a close resemblance to one another, having nearly all
+been rebuilt in the Perpendicular period, some five hundred years ago,
+and all built of the black flint that gives a character to East Anglian
+architecture quite distinct from that of other districts. The time when
+they were thus rebuilt was not only a great period of church-building
+throughout England, but a time of especial prosperity in mercantile
+and trading Norwich; a time when guilds grew powerful and merchants
+wealthy in the flourishing industry of cloth-weaving introduced some
+time earlier by Flamand and Hollander immigrants. English wool that
+before had gone across the narrow seas for manufacture into stuffs
+was now weaved in the land of its growth. "Many thousands," says
+Blomefield, "that before could not get their bread could now by this
+means live handsomely." In that age, to become rich and prosperous was
+to become also a founder and benefactor of churches; hence the great
+ecclesiastical buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor of
+an old writer, writing when there were no fewer than sixty-one churches
+in the city, "surrounded the cathedral as the stars do the moon."
+The old citizens sleep in the parish churches for which they did so
+much; their monuments in brass or marble, stone or alabaster curiously
+wrought, often with their "merchant's marks"--the distinctive signs
+with which they labelled their wares--engraved on them in lieu of coats
+of arms. It is as though a modern trader were to have the registered
+trade-mark of his speciality engraved on his tombstone. A typical
+memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of Thomas Sotherton, in the
+church of St John Maddermarket. He--
+
+  "Under this cold marbell sleeps,"
+
+and was no common fellow, mark you, but
+
+  "Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit,
+  Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt."
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH MARKET PLACE.]
+
+Although the calendar of saints is a long one and more than
+sufficiently lengthy to have provided each one of the Norwich churches
+with a patron, yet so popular were some saints, that several churches
+to the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also in the city of
+London. As in old London, it was in those cases necessary to confer
+surnames, so to speak, upon those churches.
+
+They are surnames of the geographical sort and not a little curious.
+The four St Peters are, for example, St Peter Mancroft, the largest
+and most important in the city, so called from the Magna Croft, or
+large field of the castle; St Peter per Mountergate, in King Street,
+named from the road by the "montem," the hill or mount, that runs
+ridge-like in its rear; St Peter Hungate, the "hundred gate," or
+road, reminiscent of the time when Norwich was a hundred of itself,
+even as it is now by itself a county; and St Peter Southgate. St
+Michael-at-Thorn has still thorn trees growing in its churchyard; St
+Michael Coslany, with St Mary's of identical surname, was built in
+Coast Lane; and St Michael-at-Plea was named from its neighbourhood to
+an ecclesiastical court. St John Maddermarket is thus distinguished
+from other St Johns--St John Timberhill and St John-at-Sepulchre.
+In the neighbourhood of the first-named, madder for the dyers'
+use was marketed; while at Timberhill was the market in wood. St
+Martin-at-Palace, by the old Bishop's Palace, and St-Martin-at-Oak take
+up the tale, which might be continued at great length.
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH SNAP.]
+
+The business life of modern Norwich centres in the Market Place and the
+streets that immediately lead out of it: the mouldering signs of old
+commerce peer in peaked gables, clustered chimneys and old red-brick
+and plastered walls in the lanes and along the wharves of the Wensum.
+
+There trade hustles and elbows to the front, in many-storeyed piles
+of brick, stone and stucco, with great show of goods in plate-glass
+windows and bold advertisement of gilt lettering. All those signs of
+prosperity may be seen, and on a larger scale, in London, but not even
+in London are the electric tram cars so great a menace to life and
+limb as in these narrow and winding streets, where they dash along at
+reckless speed.
+
+The Market Place is not yet wholly spoilt. The huge bulk of St
+Peter Mancroft and a row of queer old houses beside it still avert
+that disaster, and form a picture from one point of view; while the
+flint-faced Guildhall stands at another corner of the great open place
+and in its Council Chamber, in use five hundred years ago as a Court of
+Justice, and still so used, proves the continuity of "our rough island
+story." In a dark and dismal cell of the Guildhall once lay the heroic
+martyr, Thomas Bilney, who "testified" at the stake in the Lollards'
+Pit, where many another had already yielded up his life. He wondered,
+as others before and after him had done and were to do, whether the
+tortured body could pass steadfast through the fiery ordeal; and on the
+eve of his martyrdom put that doubt to the test by holding his finger
+in the flame of a candle. That test sufficed, and he suffered with
+unshaken constancy when the morrow dawned.
+
+The Guildhall has less tragical memories than this, and was indeed the
+scene of many old-time municipal revelries in times before Corporations
+became reformed. But old revels and frolics have been discontinued,
+and "Snap," the Norwich dragon, a fearsome beast of gilded wickerwork,
+who was wont to be paraded from the Guildhall at the annual mayoral
+election, and last frolicked with his attendant beadles and whifflers
+in 1835, now reposes in the Castle Museum.
+
+The Market Place on Saturday, when the wide open square is close-packed
+with stalls, is Norwich at its most characteristic time and in its most
+characteristic spot. In it the story of the Norwich Road may fitly end.
+The city itself, glanced at in the immediately foregoing pages, could
+not yield its story in less space than that occupied by that of the
+road itself.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+    Aldgate, 1, 8, 11, 13, 51
+
+    ---- Pump, 11
+
+
+    "Bacon End," 180
+
+    Boreham, 127-129
+
+    Bow, 6, 8, 75-80
+
+    ---- Bridge, 77-79
+
+    Brentwood, 23, 94-99, 132, 200
+
+    Brockford, 257
+
+    Brome, 261
+
+    Brook Street, 94
+
+    ---- Hill, 94, 132
+
+
+    Caistor St Edmunds, 4, 298, 301-303
+
+    Capel St Mary, 236
+
+    Chadwell Heath, 51, 83, 85, 86
+
+    ---- Street, 86
+
+    Chelmsford, 5, 40, 51, 52, 54, 57, 80, 114-121, 127, 167, 200
+
+    Chipping Hill, 133-139, 302
+
+    Claydon, 252
+
+    ---- Hall, 252
+
+    Coaches:--
+      "Confatharrat," 34
+      "Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," 46, 140
+      "Expedition," 39, 306
+      "Gurney's Original Day Coach," 39, 267, 306
+      "Ipswich Blues," 23, 39, 132
+      "---- and Yarmouth Mail," 41, 45
+      "---- Post Coaches," 36
+      "---- Shannon," 39
+      "---- Umpire," 81
+      "Magnet," 39, 306
+      "New Colchester," 81
+      "Norwich Machine," 34-36, 306
+      "---- Mail," 39, 40, 43
+      "---- Post Coach," 39
+      "---- Times," 28, 39, 267
+      "Parcel Mail," 54-57, 111
+      "Phænomenon," 39, 306
+      "Telegraph," 306
+
+    Coaching, 30-51, 54-57, 81, 82, 97, 132, 142-151, 267
+
+    Coaching Notabilities:--
+      Alexander, Israel, 46, 140
+      Nelson, Mrs Ann, 19-25, 27, 81, 132
+      ----, George, 19
+      ----, John, 19, 25-27
+      ----, Robert, 19
+      Suggate (Norwich carrier), 34
+      Thorogood, John, 28, 267
+
+    Colchester, 5, 6, 43, 54, 56, 94, 156, 163, 165, 167, 177, 179-212,
+                                                                    217
+
+    Constable, John, R.A., 149, 154, 217-219, 232, 238
+
+    Copdock, 236
+
+    Copford, 175, 176
+
+    _Copperfield, David_, 28, 44, 45, 150, 226, 274
+
+    Creeting, All Saints, 253
+
+    Creetings, The, 255
+
+
+    Dedham, 217-221
+
+    Deodand, Law of, 50
+
+    Dickleburgh, 6, 277-279
+
+    Dilbridge, 217
+
+    Dunston, 298
+
+
+    Feering, 152, 153, 158
+
+    Forest Gate, 81
+
+
+    Goodmayes, 83
+
+    Gore Pit, 152, 176
+
+    Great Eastern Railway, 25, 46, 51-54, 83, 152, 158, 175
+
+
+    Hare Street, 94
+
+    Hartford Bridge, 304
+
+    Hatfield Peverel, 129, 131
+
+    Highwaymen, 29, 30, 41, 58-62, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99, 142, 143, 214
+
+    Highwaymen:--
+      Cratfield, Rev. Wm., 30
+      King, Matthew, 58
+      ----, Robert, 58
+      ----, Tom, 58, 61
+      Tapyrtone, Thomas, 30
+      Turpin, Richard, 57-62
+
+
+    Ilford, 6, 29, 80, 82, 83, 167
+
+    Ingatestone, 6, 56, 99, 105-110
+
+    Inns (mentioned at length):--
+      "Angel," Colchester, 196, 197
+      ----, Kelvedon, 140, 141, 147, 148, 162
+      ----, Norwich, 34, 306
+      "Belle Sauvage," Ludgate Hill, 19
+      "Black Boy," Chelmsford, 121
+      "Blossoms," Laurence Lane, 34
+      "Blue Boar," Whitechapel, 28
+      "---- Posts," Witham, 132
+      "Bull," Bishopsgate Street, 15, 37
+      ----, Leadenhall Street, 12, 15
+      ----, Whitechapel, 15, 19-28
+      "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand, 15
+      "Cauliflower," Ilford, 83
+      "Coach and Horses," Upton, 81
+      "Cock," Thwaite, 260
+      "Cross Keys," Gresham Street, 15
+      "Duke's Head," Wacton, 288
+      "Fleece," Brook Street, 94
+      "Flower Pot," Bishopsgate Street, 15
+      "Four Swans," 34
+      "Golden Cross," Charing Cross, 15
+      "Good Woman," Widford, 111-114
+      "Grave Maurice," Whitechapel, 69
+      "Great White Horse," Ipswich, 36, 37, 228, 247-252, 306
+      "Gun," Dedham, 221, 228
+      "Half Moon," Ipswich, 243
+      "Horse and Leaping Bar," Whitechapel, 29
+      "King's Head," Dickleburgh, 278
+      "Lion and Lamb," Ipswich, 243, 244
+      "Magpie," Little Stonham, 256
+      "Maid's Head," Newton Flotman, 297
+      ---- ----, Norwich, 34, 35, 306, 307
+      "Music House," Norwich, 307
+      "Norfolk Hotel," Norwich, 306
+      "Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, 57
+      "Popinjay," Norwich, 34
+      "Queen's Head," Thwaite, 259, 260
+      "Rampant Horse," Norwich, 306
+      "Red Lion," Colchester, 196
+      ---- ----, Kelvedon, 140
+      ---- ----, Whitechapel, 57
+      "Rising Sun," Manor Park, 81
+      "Saracen's Head," Aldgate, 14, 16, 17, 18
+      ---- ----, Chelmsford, 117-120
+      "Spread Eagle," Gracechurch Street, 15-19
+      "Sun," Kelvedon, 152
+      "Swan," Washbrook, 237
+      "Swan-with-Two-Necks," Gresham Street, 15, 43
+      "Three Cups," Colchester, 37, 167, 196
+      ---- ----, Springfield, 122
+      "Three Nuns," Aldgate, 29
+      "Vine," Mile End, 73
+      "Wheatsheaf," Kelvedon, 152
+      "White Elm," Copdock, 237
+      "---- Hart," Brentwood, 37, 97, 98, 119
+      ---- ----, Colchester, 196
+      ---- ----, Scole, 262-271
+      ---- ----, Witham, 132
+      "White Horse," Fetter Lane, 15
+      ---- Horse, Widford, 112, 114
+
+    Ipswich, 54, 56, 132, 212, 237-252
+
+
+    Kelvedon, 5, 139-153, 162, 176
+
+
+    Langham, 218
+
+    Lexden, 52, 147, 177-181, 302
+
+    ---- Heath, 177-179, 187, 190, 201
+
+    Little Stonham, 6, 256
+
+    "London Stone," 4, 13
+
+    Long Stratton, 6, 292-295
+
+
+    Manor Park, 81
+
+    Margaretting, 57, 110, 111
+
+    Mark's Tey, 158, 175, 176
+
+    Martyr's Tree, 95, 96
+
+    Mile End, 70-74, 163
+
+    "Mockbeggar Hall," 252
+
+    Moulsham, 114
+
+    Mountnessing, 101-105
+
+
+    Needham Market, 255
+
+    New Hall, 123-127
+
+    Newton Flotman, 296-299
+
+    Norwich, 51, 52, 161, 301, 302-320
+
+
+    Old Ford, 6, 8, 76
+
+    Old-time travellers:--
+      Caroline of Brunswick, Princess, Queen of George IV., 165-168
+      Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess, Queen of George III.,
+                                                                162, 163
+      Kemp, Will, 79, 82, 161
+      Johnson, Samuel, 164, 165
+      Queen Elizabeth, 304, 307
+      William III., 140, 141, 161
+
+    Old-time travelling, 142-150, 159-168, 178, 225-237
+
+
+    Parcel Mail, 54-57, 111
+
+    Pulham St Mary Magdalene, 286, 287
+
+    ---- St Mary the Virgin, 286, 287
+
+    Puttels Bridge, 93, 94
+
+
+    Rivenhall End, 139
+
+    Romford, 5, 23, 29, 51, 82, 85, 88-93, 167
+
+
+    Scole, 6, 40, 262-272
+
+    Seven Kings, 51, 83-85
+
+    Shenfield, 99, 100
+
+    Shrubland Park, 253, 255
+
+    Springfield, 121-123
+
+    Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., 151
+
+    Stanway, 6, 174-178
+
+    Steam Coaches, 46
+
+    Stoke Ash, 257, 260
+
+    Stonham Aspall, 256
+
+    ---- Earls, 256
+
+    Stratford (Langthorne), 78, 80, 81
+
+    ----- -le-Bow, 6, 8, 75-80
+
+    ---- St Mary, 5, 6, 223-225, 274
+
+    Swainsthorpe, 298
+
+
+    Tasburgh, 292, 295, 296, 297, 302
+
+    Thwaite, 259
+
+    Tivetshall St Margaret, 6, 284, 287
+
+    ---- St Mary, 6, 287
+
+    Toll-gates, 40, 70, 71, 78, 87, 93, 94, 139, 179, 222, 237, 257, 288
+
+
+    Uphall, 5, 302
+
+    Upton Park, 81
+
+
+    Wacton, 288, 292
+
+    ---- Common, 288
+
+    Washbrook, 236
+
+    West Ham, 77, 81
+
+    Whalebone House, 86, 87
+
+    Whitechapel, 2, 12, 62-69
+
+    Whitton Street, 252
+
+    Widford, 111-114, 161
+
+    Witham, 23, 131-139, 163
+
+    Woodgrange, 81
+
+    Writtle, 5
+
+
+    Yaxley, 260
+
+
+
+
+  EDINBURGH
+  COLSTON AND COY, LTD.
+  PRINTERS
+
+
+
+
+         Transcriber's Notes:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation is retained.
+
+  Inconsistent punctuation is retained.
+
+  Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
+
+  Bold is shown thus: =strong=.
+
+  Small capitals have been capitalised.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Norwich Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 61087 ***
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-

-The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Norwich Road, by Charles G. Harper

-

-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most

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-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.

-

-Title: The Norwich Road

-       An East Anglian Highway

-

-Author: Charles G. Harper

-

-Release Date: January 3, 2020 [EBook #61087]

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-Language: English

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-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NORWICH ROAD ***

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-<div class="figcenter">

-<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<div class="figcenter1" id="pub">

-<img src="images/fig1.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">SCOLE WHITE HART.</p>

-</div>

-

-

-

-

-

-<h1><span class="redtext large">

-THE NORWICH<br />

-ROAD:</span> <span class="gesperrt">AN EAST<br />

-ANGLIAN HIGHWAY</span></h1>

-

-<p class="c xlarge">By <span class="smcap">Charles G. Harper</span></p>

-

-<p class="c">Author of "<i>The Brighton Road</i>," "<i>The Portsmouth

-Road</i>,"<br /> "<i>The Dover Road</i>," "<i>The Bath Road</i>,"<br />

-"<i>The Exeter Road</i>," <i>and</i> "<i>The Great North Road</i>."</p>

-

-<p class="c little"><i>Illustrated by the Author, and from<br />

-Old-Time Prints and Pictures.</i></p>

-

-

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus25">

-<img src="images/fig2.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<p class="c"><span class="smcap">London: <span class="redtext">Chapman &amp; Hall</span> ltd.</span> 1901</p>

-

-<p class="c little">[<i>All Rights reserved.</i>]

-</p>

-

-

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus26">

-<img src="images/fig3.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">PREFACE</p>

-</div></div>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<p><i><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE author of a little book published in 1818,

-called</i> <span class="smcap">A Journey to London</span>, <i>which is nearly

-all "London" with very little "journey," remarks

-that "it is as uncommon for a book to go into the

-world without a preface, as a man without a hat.

-They are both convenient coverings." Here, then, is

-the customary covering.</i></p>

-

-<p><i>Introducing this, the seventh in a series of books

-telling the story of our great highways, it may

-perhaps be as well to re-state the methods used, and

-objects aimed at. The chief intention is to provide

-a readable book which shall avoid the style either of

-a Guide-Book or a History. It is the better fortune

-to be in the reader's hands than in the dusty seclusion

-of those formidable works, the County Histories;

-or disregarded among the guide-books of forgotten

-holidays. To the antiquary it will, of course, be

-obvious that this and other volumes of the series

-"contain many omissions," as the Irish reviewer

-said; but such things as find no place here have, as

-a general rule, been disregarded because they not

-only do not help the Story of the Road along,

-but rather hinder its progression.</i></p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></p>

-

-<p><i>The</i> <span class="smcap">Norwich Road</span>, <i>in its one hundred and twelve

-miles, passes by many an historic site and through

-districts distinguished for their quiet pastoral

-beauty. In being historic it is not singular, for,

-as Oliver Wendell Holmes very truly said,

-"England is one vast museum," and the old road

-would be remarkable indeed, that, like Canning's</i>

-"<span class="smcap">Needy Knife Grinder</span>," <i>had no story to tell.

-It is, however, in the especial characteristics

-of East Anglian scenery, speech, customs, and

-architecture that this road stands apart and is

-highly individualised. "East Anglia" is no merely

-arbitrary and meaningless term, as those who travel

-it, if only on the highway, will speedily find.</i></p>

-

-<p><i>But this shall be no trumpet-blast; nor indeed do

-the charms of Eastern England require such a fanfare,

-for who has not yet heard of that lovely valley

-of the Stour, so widely known as "Constable's

-Country," by whose exquisite water-meadows and

-shady lanes the old turnpike passes? Scenery

-such as this; windmills, cornfields, tall elms,

-winding rivers, and commons populous with geese

-and turkeys, are typical of the</i> <span class="smcap">Norwich Road</span>,

-<i>which may, with this introduction, now be left to

-recommend itself</i>.</p>

-

-<p class="r large">

-CHARLES G. HARPER.</p>

-

-<p class="l"><span class="smcap">Petersham, Surrey</span>,</p>

-<p class="l3"><i>October</i> 1901.

-</p>

-

-

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus27">

-<img src="images/fig4.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium sans"><span class="smcap">List of Illustrations</span></p>

-</div></div>

-

-

-

-<p class="c large p2">SEPARATE PLATES</p>

-

-<table class="hang">

-

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Scole White Hart</span></td>

-  <td class= "tdr"><a href="#pub"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><span class="half">PAGE</span></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Aldgate Pump.</span> (<i>From a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854)</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus2">9</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Aldgate</span>, 1820</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus3">21</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">The "Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, where Turpin shot<br />

-Matthew King.</span> (<i>From a drawing by T. Hosmer</i><br />

-<i>Shepherd</i>, 1854)</td>

-  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus4">59</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Whitechapel Road in the Coaching Age</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus5">65</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Mile End Turnpike</span>, 1813. (<i>After Rowlandson</i>)</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus6">71</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Romford</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus7">91</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Mountnessing Windmill</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus8">103</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Ingatestone in Coaching Days.</span> (<i>From an Old Print</i>)</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus9">107</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">New Hall Lodges</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus10">125</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Chipping Hill</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus11">133</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>"<span class="smcap">Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter.</span>" (<i>From a Print<br />

-after H. Alken</i>)</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus12">145</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Colchester</span> </td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus13">215</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Vale of Dedham.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus14">219</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Spring: Suffolk Ploughlands.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus15">229</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">The Cornfield.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus16">233</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">The Old Sign of Scole White Hart</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus17">265</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Staircase in the "White Hart"</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus18">269</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Dickleburgh</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus19">279</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">A Disputed Pasturage</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus20">289</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Long Stratton</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus21">293</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Newton Flotman</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus22">299</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Norwich, from Mousehold Heath</span> </td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus23">311</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="smcap">Norwich Market Place</span></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus24">315</a></td>

-</tr>

-</table>

-

-

-<hr class="chap" />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>

-

-

-

-

-<p class="c large p2">ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT</p>

-

-<table class="hang">

-

-<tr>

-  <td>Vignette</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus25"><i>Title Page</i></a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="tdr"><span class="half">PAGE</span></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Preface</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus26">vii</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>List of Illustrations: London Stone</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus27">ix</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Runaway 'Prentice</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus28">1</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Yard of the "Bull," Leadenhall Street. (<i>From a drawing</i><br />

-<i>by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854</td>

-  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus29">12</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Front of the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate: Present Day</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus30">14</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Yard of the "Saracen's Head" in Coaching Days. (<i>From</i><br />

-<i>a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854</td>

-  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus31">16</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Yard of the "Saracen's Head": Present Day</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus32">18</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Yard of the "Bull," Whitechapel, in Coaching Days</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus33">27</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Norwich Coach at Christmastide. (<i>After Robert<br />

-Seymour</i>, 1835</td>

-  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus34">38</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Whitechapel Old Church</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus35">63</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Bow</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus36">76</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Seven Kings</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus37">84</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Whalebone House</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus38">87</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Entrance to Romford</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus39">89</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Old Toll-house, Puttels Bridge</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus40">93</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The "Fleece," Brook Street</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus41">94</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Martyr's Tree, Brentwood</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus42">95</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Yard of the "White Hart," Brentwood</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus43">98</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Shenfield</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus44">100</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Mountnessing Church</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus45">102</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Gatehouse, Ingatestone Hall</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus46">106</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>At Margaretting</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus47">111</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span>The "Good Woman" Sign</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus48">113</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Bridge: Entrance to Chelmsford</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus49">115</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Conduit, Chelmsford</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus50">116</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Tindal's Statue</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus51">117</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The "Three Cups" Sign</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus52">122</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Springfield Church</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus53">123</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Boreham</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus54">128</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The "Angel," Kelvedon</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus55">141</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Birthplace of Spurgeon</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus56">151</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Near Mark's Tey</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus57">176</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Lexden </td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus58">180</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Grand Staircase, Colchester Castle</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus59">199</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Old Man Trap, Colchester Castle</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus60">205</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Colchester Castle</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus61">207</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Gun Hill</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus62">221</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Old Toll-house, Stratford Bridge</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus63">222</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Wolsey's Gateway</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus64">242</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The "Lion and Lamb," Angel Lane</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus65">244</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Sparrowe's House</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus66">246</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The "Great White Horse"</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus67">248</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Mockbeggar Hall</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus68">253</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>"Stonham Pie"</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus69">256</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Near Brockford </td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus70">257</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>"Thwaite Low House"</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus71">259</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The "Cock," Thwaite</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus72">260</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Long Stratton</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus73">295</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Tasburgh</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus74">297</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>The Old Brick Pound</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus75">301</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Caistor Camp</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus76">303</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Norwich Snap</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus77">318</a></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td>Norfolk Turkey, on his way to Leadenhall Market</td>

-  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus78">320</a></td>

-</tr>

-

-

-</table>

-

-

-<hr class="chap" />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span></p>

-

-

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p class="c large p2">THE ROAD TO NORWICH</p></div>

-

-

-

-

-<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">

-<tr><td class="tdl"></td><td class="tdr"><span class="half">MILES</span></td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">London (Whitechapel Church) to Mile End</td><td class="tdr">1</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford-le-Bow (Bow Church)</td><td class="tdr">2</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Lea).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford (Broadway)</td><td class="tdr">4</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Forest Gate</td><td class="tdr">5</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Manor Park</td><td class="tdr">6</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Ilford</td><td class="tdr">6</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Roding).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Seven Kings</td><td class="tdr">7</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross "Seven Kings' Watering," or Fillebrook).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Chadwell Heath</td><td class="tdr">9</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Romford</td><td class="tdr">12</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Hare Street</td><td class="tdr">13</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Puttels Bridge</td><td class="tdr">15</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross Weald Brook).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Brook Street</td><td class="tdr">16</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Brentwood</td><td class="tdr">18</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Shenfield</td><td class="tdr">19</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Mountnessing Street</td><td class="tdr">21</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Ingatestone</td><td class="tdr">23</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Margaretting Street</td><td class="tdr">25</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Widford</td><td class="tdr">27</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Wid or Ash).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Moulsham</td><td class="tdr">28</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Chelmer).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Chelmsford</td><td class="tdr">29</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Springfield</td><td class="tdr">29</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Boreham</td><td class="tdr">32</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Ter).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Hatfield Peverel</td><td class="tdr">34</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Witham).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Witham</td><td class="tdr">37</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Rivenhall End</td><td class="tdr">39</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Kelvedon</td><td class="tdr">41</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Blackwater).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Gore Pit</td><td class="tdr">42</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Mark's Tey</td><td class="tdr">45</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Copford</td><td class="tdr">46</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Stanway</td><td class="tdr">47</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Lexden Heath</td><td class="tdr">48</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Lexden</td><td class="tdr">49</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Colchester</td><td class="tdr">51</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Colne).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Dilbridge</td><td class="tdr">52</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford Bridge</td><td class="tdr">57</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Stour).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford St Mary</td><td class="tdr">58</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Capel Railway Crossing. Capel Station. Capel St Mary.</td><td class="tdr">63</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Copdock</td><td class="tdr">65</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Washbrook</td><td class="tdr">66</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross Wash Brook).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Ipswich</td><td class="tdr">69</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Orwell)</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span>Whitton Street</td><td class="tdr">71</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Claydon</td><td class="tdr">72</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Creeting All Saints</td><td class="tdr">76</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Stonham Earls</td><td class="tdr">79</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Little Stonham</td><td class="tdr">79</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Brockford</td><td class="tdr">83</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Thwaite</td><td class="tdr">84</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Stoke Ash</td><td class="tdr">86</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Yaxley</td><td class="tdr">88</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Brome</td><td class="tdr">90</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Waveney).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Scole</td><td class="tdr">92</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Dickleburgh</td><td class="tdr">94</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Tivetshall Level Crossing</td><td class="tdr">97</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Wacton</td><td class="tdr">100</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Long Stratton</td><td class="tdr">101</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Tasburgh</td><td class="tdr">102</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Tase).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Newton Flotman</td><td class="tdr">104</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Tase).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Hartford Bridge</td><td class="tdr">109</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Yare).</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Norwich (Market Place)</td><td class="tdr">111</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>

-</table>

-

-<hr class="chap" />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[Pg xvi]</a><br /><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus28">

-<img src="images/fig5.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE NORWICH ROAD</p>

-</div></div>

-

-<p class="c large">I</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the days before railways came, robbing the exits

-from London of all dignity and purpose, the runaway

-'prentice lads of the familiar legends, who were

-always half starved and continually beaten, revolting

-at length from their uncomfortable beds under the

-shop counters and their daily stripes and scorpions,

-were wont, according to the story-books, to steal at

-night out of their houses of bondage and make for

-the roads. Such an one, making in those days for

-Norwich, and standing at Aldgate in the grey of the

-morning, looking across the threshold of London,

-would have seen, in the long broad road stretching

-before him, the only means of escape. The shilling

-or so of which he would be the owner would scarce

-serve him for two or three days' keep; and so, although

-he might have longed for a place on the coach

-he could see starting from the "Spread Eagle," in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>

-Gracechurch Street, at 4 a.m., there would have been

-for such as he no choice but to start afoot, with as

-light a heart as possible, and chance the offer of a

-lift on some waggon returning into Essex. Had he,

-in leaving Aldgate behind, asked some passer-by the

-way to Norwich, he might have been seized for what

-he was, a runaway; but, if he escaped suspicion,

-would have been answered readily enough, for everyone

-in those times knew the way to lie along the

-Whitechapel Road and by Mile End Turnpike. Has

-anyone in these enlightened and highly-educated

-times courage sufficient to ask his way to Norwich

-from Aldgate? and, assuming that dauntless courage,

-is it conceivable that anyone in that crowded street

-could tell him?</p>

-

-<p>There are no apprentices and no tyrannical

-masters of the old kind left now, and the only

-runaways of these days are the bad boys of precocious

-wits who would not think of tramping the

-highway while they could raise a railway fare or

-"lift" a bicycle. But the way still lies open to

-the explorer from Aldgate, and the old Norwich

-Road yet follows the line of the Roman way into

-the country of the Iceni.</p>

-

-<p>Between the era of our imaginary truant and

-that of the Romans, who originally constructed this

-road, there yawns a vast gulf of time; certainly not

-less than eighteen hundred years. The history of

-the road during that space has largely been forgotten;

-but, worst of all, we know perhaps less of

-it and its life in the times of Charles the First,

-onward to those of William and Mary, than we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>

-can recover from Roman historians; and certainly

-its coaching history is in tatters and fragments, for

-those who made it did not live in the bright glow

-of publicity that surrounded the coachmen of roads

-north, south or west, and died unexploited by the

-sporting writers of the Coaching Age.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">II</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Nearly</span> seventeen centuries have passed since, in

-the great <i>Antonine Itinerary</i> of the Roman Empire,

-the first guide-book to the roads was compiled, and

-almost eighty years since Cary and Paterson&mdash;the

-rival Bradshaws and A.B.C.'s of the Coaching Age&mdash;issued

-the last editions of their <i>Travellers Companions</i>,

-which now, instead of being constantly in

-the travellers' hands, are treasured on the shelves of

-collectors interested in relics of days before railways.</p>

-

-<p>The <i>Antonine Itinerary</i> was compiled, <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 200-300.

-Among other roads of which it purports to

-give an account is the road to Venta Icenorum;

-the Norwich Road, as we should say. Its statement

-is brief and to the point, if requiring no little explanation

-after this lapse of time:&mdash;</p>

-

-

-

-<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">

-<tr><td class="tdl">Iter a Venta Icenorum Londinio <i>m.p.</i>&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">cxxviii <i>sic.</i></td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Sitomago</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xxxii</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Combretonio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xxii</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Ad Ansam</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xv</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>Camuloduno</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">vii</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Canonio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">viiii</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">C�saromago</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xii</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Durolito</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xvi</td></tr>

-<tr><td class="tdl">Londinio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xv</td></tr>

-</table>

-

-

-<p>A hundred and twenty-eight miles, that is to

-say, between Venta and London. The Romans, of

-course, calculated all their mileages in Britain from

-that hoary relic, the still existing "London Stone,"

-which, from behind its modern iron grating in the

-wall of St Swithin's Church, still turns a battered

-face towards the heedless, hurrying crowds in

-Cannon Street, in the City of London.</p>

-

-<p>In coaching days the Norwich Road, in common

-with most East Anglian routes, was measured from

-Whitechapel Church, and the distance from that

-landmark to Norwich given as 111� miles. The

-apparent wide difference between those measurements

-of classic and modern times is very nearly reconciled

-when we add a mile for the distance between

-London Stone and Whitechapel Church to the 111�

-miles, and when we reduce the Roman miles to

-English. An English mile measures 5280 feet, while

-a Roman mile runs only to 4842 feet, this fact accounting,

-along the road to Norwich, for some 13

-miles of the discrepancy, and bringing the difference

-to the insignificant one of 3� miles; or, assuming

-the Roman ruins at Caistor, 3 miles short of Norwich,

-to mark the site of Venta Icenorum, 6� miles; no

-very wide margin of error.</p>

-

-<p>The compiler of that ancient itinerary is unknown.

-He, or they (for a survey of the Roman

-Empire cannot have been made by one man), are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>

-quite hidden and lost to sight under the title of

-"Antonine," which was given in honour of the

-Emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla, father

-and son, who both owned the name Antoninus. By

-similarly honorary titles we are accustomed to

-christen our public buildings. Thus, in coming ages,

-when such earthworms as engineers and architects

-are forgotten, the "Victoria" Embankment,

-"Victoria" Station, the "Victoria and Albert"

-Museum, and the thousand and one other things

-thus entitled will serve to hand a Sovereign down to

-futurity, while the names of those who created them,

-good or ill, will have perished, like the leaves of

-autumn. Customs change, and fashions cease to be,

-but snobbery is more enduring than brass or marble,

-and outlasts the mummies of the Pharaohs.</p>

-

-<p>The compiler who drew up the list of places on

-the road between Londinium and Venta has chosen

-to reckon backwards. The "<i>m. p.</i>" is the abbreviation

-for <i>mille passus</i>, or paced Roman miles; the

-figures after the first line giving the distance from

-the place last mentioned. Setting out from London,

-we find "Durolitum" to be identified with the

-Roman earthworks of Uphall, near Romford;

-"C�saromagus" to be identical with Writtle, near

-Chelmsford; "Canonium" to stand for Kelvedon;

-"Camulodunum" for Colchester; and "Ad Ansam"

-for Stratford St Mary; while "Combretonium" and

-"Sitomagus" still puzzle antiquaries, who are reduced

-to the extremity of suggesting the opposite

-alternatives of Brettenham or Burgh for the one, and

-Dunwich or Thetford for the other; names with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>

-specious resemblance, and on circuitous routes east or

-west of the direct road which would more than

-account for the Roman surveyor's overplus of miles.

-The direct road, however, is unmistakably Roman,

-and those who will may seek for the elusive "Sitomagus"

-and "Combretonium" along it. Haply they

-may discover them at Scole, Dickleburgh or Long

-Stratton.</p>

-

-<p>But along the whole length of the road, from

-London to Norwich, the wayfarer receives impressions

-of its true Roman character, whether in its appearance

-or in the place-names on the way. Old Ford

-and Stratford-at-Bow, where the Roman paved fords

-crossed the River Lea; that other "old ford" at

-Ilford, across the River Roding, which was already

-ancient when the Saxons came and so named it,

-"Eald Ford," leaving it for later times to corrupt the

-name into "Ilford" and for uninstructed historians

-to explain the meaning to have been that it was an

-"ill ford"; to which condition, indeed, many had

-descended in medi�val times: these are examples.

-Others are found at Ingatestone, the Saxon "Ing-atte-stone"

-= the "meadow at the stone," a Roman

-milestone that stood by the wayside; in the names

-of Stanway, Colchester, Stratford St Mary. Little

-Stonham, Tivetshall, and Long Stratton, places to be

-more particularly mentioned later in these pages.</p>

-

-<p>It has been aptly pointed out by East Anglian

-antiquaries that the circuitous route eastward or

-westward of the straight road between Stratford St

-Mary and Norwich, on which Sitomagus and Combretonium

-may have been situated, may probably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>

-have been an early Roman way, constructed shortly

-after the conquest of the Iceni, along an old native

-trackway, and superseded in later and more settled

-times by the direct road, overlooked by the Antonine

-compilers who, working at Rome, the very centre of

-the Empire, may not have been fully informed of

-changes in countries like Britain, on the edge of the

-Unknown. This view, when we consider the long

-period stretching between the conquest of this part

-of the country and the final break up of the Romano-British

-civilisation, about <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 450, has much to recommend

-it. A period of some three hundred and

-eighty years of colonisation and development, equalling,

-for example, the great gulf of time between our

-own day and that of Henry the Eighth, the changes

-in its course must have rivalled, if not have surpassed,

-those in our roads between the sixteenth and nineteenth

-centuries. During those eras, between the

-first and the fifth centuries, many of the original

-winding tracks must have been straightened, or left

-to the secondary position of byways, while new and

-straight roads were engineered across country

-formerly, for one reason or another, avoided. Meanwhile,

-the Antonine Itinerary-makers must have relied

-for their surveys upon old and out-of-date information,

-just as, in our own time, we find many recent

-maps, printed from the Ordnance Survey of a hundred

-years ago, still indicating winding roads that have

-been non-existent for generations, and ignoring the

-direct highways made by Telford and others just

-before the opening of the Railway Era.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">III</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">London</span> made no remarkable growth between the

-Roman and medi�val periods, but this road had in

-that time slightly altered its course from its starting-point,

-and, instead of going from Cannon Street to

-Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Old Ford, left the

-City by way of Leadenhall Street and Aldgate,

-continuing down the Mile End and Bow Roads to

-Stratford.</p>

-

-<p>The traveller of Chaucer's day, coming to Ald Gate,

-in the City wall, had reached the country. That

-gate spanned the road at a point marked nowadays

-by the house, No 2 Aldgate High Street, standing

-at the boundary of the parishes of St Katharine

-Cree and St Botolph. In 1374 Chaucer took from

-the Corporation of London a lease for the remainder

-of his life of the rooms in this gate, which was

-pulled down and succeeded by another, built in

-1606, which in its turn disappeared in 1761.</p>

-

-<p>From his windows commanding the road Chaucer

-must often have seen that dainty gentlewoman, the

-Prioress of St Leonard's, Stratford, riding to or from

-London, escorted by a numerous train, and from her

-must have drawn that portrait of the prioress who

-spoke French with a Cockney accent:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"After the scole of Stratford-att�-Bowe,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">For French of Parys was to hire unknowe."</span><br />

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>In Chaucer's day they probably taught French, of

-sorts, at the Priory schools.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus2">

-<img src="images/fig6.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">ALDGATE PUMP. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span>

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a><br /><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>

-<p>At that time it was no little journey to Stratford,

-although by measurement less than four miles, and

-the lady went strongly escorted, as, indeed, did all

-of consequence, or those who had aught to lose.

-For the more common wayfarers who went alone

-on this desperate eastern trail there stood the Chapel

-and the Holy Well of St Michael the Archangel

-within the City, where the otherwise unprotected

-might seek the aid of the Saint's strong arm before

-leaving the walled City behind on their perilous

-faring. This chapel stood where Leadenhall Street,

-Fenchurch Street and Aldgate meet, on a site

-thrown into the roadway in 1876, when the street

-was widened. Until that year the crypt of this

-shrine had filled the prosaic functions of a cellar

-in the corner house, itself demolished, together with

-the beautiful Early English arches on which it stood.

-Adjoining was "Aldgate Pump," which had long

-before unromantically taken the place of the sanctified

-spring. That celebrated civic monument is seen

-in the accompanying illustration, taken in 1854.

-Many City wits have exercised their satirical powers

-upon it, and the expression long current of "a

-draft on Aldgate Pump," a once popular mercantile

-phrase for a bad note, goes back so far as the days

-of Fielding. Oddly enough, the water of the pump

-retained some repute until 1876, when, on being

-analysed, it was found impure, and the supply

-closed. The pump, however, is still in existence,

-rebuilt of its original stones, a few feet away from

-the old site, and yields water again; not, however,

-from the old saintly source, but from the strictly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>

-secular filter-beds of the New River Water Company.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus29">

-<img src="images/fig7.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "BULL," LEADENHALL STREET. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span>

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Having implored the protection of St Michael,

-travellers of old went, heartened, upon their way

-down what is now Whitechapel High Street, which

-Strype, writing in the time of James the First, calls

-a "spacious fair street," with "sweet and wholesome

-air." Past hedgerows of elm trees and rustic

-stiles and bridges, those old wayfarers went, and

-onward down the Whitechapel Road, where the

-country was a lovely solitude, with "nothing but

-the bounteous gifts of Nature and saint-like tokens

-of innocency," which, according to Sir Thomas

-More, in 1504, characterised the charming fields of

-Mile End, Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse. This,

-it will be allowed, is scarcely descriptive of those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>

-places to-day, whatever they may become when the

-People's Palace and the University Settlements have

-done their work.</p>

-

-<p>Thus far for sake of contrast. Let us return to

-Aldgate for a while, and, without following its

-fortunes throughout the centuries, glance at it in

-the Coaching Age, before the squalor of modern

-Whitechapel had invaded it from the east, or the

-extension of City business had come to destroy

-most of that picturesque assemblage of old inns

-and medi�val gabled houses, to replace them with

-the giant warehouses and "imposing" offices of

-modern London.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">IV</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Although</span>, as we have seen, the East Anglian

-roads were, in coaching days, measured from Whitechapel

-Church, the great actual starting-place was

-Aldgate, where many of the old inns were situated,

-as, in like manner, the ancient hostelries of the

-Borough clustered at the beginning of the road

-to Canterbury and Dover. Aldgate occupies a

-position midway between London Stone, the Roman

-starting-point in Cannon Street, and Whitechapel

-Church, and to and from this spot came and went

-the stage-coaches, post-chaises and waggons in

-the palmy days of the road. The mail-coaches,

-of course, had a starting-point of their own, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>

-set out from the old General Post-Office in Lombard

-Street, or, in the last years of coaching, from St

-Martin's-le-Grand.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus30">

-<img src="images/fig9.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">FRONT OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD," ALDGATE: PRESENT DAY.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>It is true that one might have taken coach

-from many other and more central inns for Colchester,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>Ipswich and Norwich:&mdash;from the "Spread

-Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, a fine old galleried

-inn demolished at the close of 1865; from the

-"Cross Keys," in the same street; from the

-"Swan with Two Necks," in Lad Lane, anciently

-Lady Lane (that is to say, the Lane of Our Lady,

-the Blessed Virgin), now Gresham Street; or from

-the "Bull," 151 Leadenhall Street, which must

-by no means be confounded with its namesake

-in Aldgate High Street. Exactly what that

-Leadenhall Street hostelry was like let the

-picture of its old galleried courtyard show.</p>

-

-<p>There was also "another way" to Norwich;

-out of Bishopsgate, by way of Newmarket, Bury

-and Thetford. Taking this route, which, although

-2� miles shorter, no true sportsman considered

-to be the real Norwich Road, one started from

-the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross; from the

-"White Horse," in Fetter Lane (improved

-away in 1898); from the "Flower Pot," in

-Bishopsgate Street; from yet another "Bull," also

-in Bishopsgate Street; or from the "Bull and

-Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand. But when all

-these places have been duly set forth, it is to

-Aldgate that we must turn as the real starting-point.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus31">

-<img src="images/fig10.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD" IN COACHING DAYS. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span></p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Aldgate in the days before railways was quite

-unlike the Aldgate of to-day. Certain of the old

-buildings remain, but the "note" of the place is

-entirely altered. It is now a noisy, distracting

-ante-room to the City, in which tinkling tram-cars

-and costermongers' barrows jostle with elephantine

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>railway goods vans; where the Jewish second-hand

-clothes shop rubs a greasy shoulder with the

-"merchant tailor's" vulgar show of electric light,

-plate glass and wax models; and where the East

-End, in the person of the aproned, ringleted and

-ostrich-feathered factory girl, meets the West, in

-the shape of some City clerk strayed beyond his

-mercantile or financial frontiers, each regarding

-the other as a curiosity in these social marches.

-It is as the meeting of salt water and fresh, this

-mingling of the tides of City and East End, and

-to the observant not a little curious. Nothing

-like it&mdash;nothing so marked&mdash;is to be seen on any

-other of the borders of the City. There is, too,

-a smack of the sea, a certain air of romance, in

-the street, coming, perhaps, from the windows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>

-of the nautical instrument-makers, where the

-binoculars, the quadrants, the sextants and the

-sea-faring tackle in general hint of distant climes

-and the coral reefs of South Pacific isles.</p>

-

-<p>These mariners' emporia were here and in the

-Minories before railways came, and so also were

-many fine old inns. For Aldgate, difficult though

-it may be to realise it to-day, was not only the

-place whence many of the Essex, Suffolk and

-Norfolk coaches set out, but was also the resting-place

-of travellers to London; and its inns were

-quite as well-appointed as those of the more

-central ones in the City, or those of Charing Cross,

-or the West End. As travellers by rail to London

-in modern times resort to the railway hotels, so

-did our great-grandfathers find rest at the coaching

-inns at whose thresholds they were set down at

-their journey's end.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus32">

-<img src="images/fig8.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD": PRESENT DAY.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The fragments merely of the last of Aldgate's

-old hostelries remain, in the bold front of Nos.

-6 and 7, forming two-thirds of the old frontage

-of the "Saracen's Head." No. 5, the other third,

-has been destroyed, and so also has the old appearance

-of the galleried courtyard, still named

-"Saracen's Head Yard," but now surrounded by

-warehouses. The old coach archway remains, and

-the gables at the back of the buildings are quaint

-reminiscences of other times. Coaches plied

-between the "Saracen's Head" and Norwich so

-far back as 1681, and Strype, the antiquary,

-born in the neighbourhood, in a court whose

-name now flaunts the horrid travesty of "Tripe

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>Court," referring to the inn, speaks of it as "very

-large and of a considerable trade." The existing

-fragment, with its handsome architectural elevation

-of richly-moulded plaster in the Renaissance style

-of the late seventeenth century, is part of the

-building mentioned by him. Small shops now<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>

-occupy the ground floor, and the upper rooms

-are let as tenements.</p>

-

-<p>But the "Bull" was perhaps the most famous

-of these old inns. From it Mr Pickwick set out

-for Ipswich, and from Sam Weller's remark on that

-occasion, "Take care o' the archway, gen'l'men,"

-as the coach started, it is evident that the "Bull"

-possessed a courtyard. At that palmy time of

-inns and coaches, the opening of the nineteenth

-century, the "Bull" was, and long had been, in

-the Nelson family, a noted race of inn and coach

-proprietors. At that particular time Mrs Ann

-Nelson, widow of the late host, who died about

-1812, was the presiding genius. Associated with

-her was her son John. Another son, Robert, had

-a business of his own, and was long proprietor of

-the "Belle Sauvage," on Ludgate Hill, and partner

-with others in many coaches. A third son, George,

-drove the Exeter "Defiance," horsed by his mother

-out of London.</p>

-

-<p>But to return to the "Bull" and Mrs Nelson,

-who had, as her husband had, and his father

-before him, some sort of interest in many coaches

-running into Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, on main

-or bye-roads. She also at one time leased the

-"Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, and extended

-her energies so far as to horse the Exeter

-"Telegraph" and the "Quicksilver" Devonport

-Mail out of London, together with the Exeter

-"Defiance" night coach, the Manchester "Telegraph,"

-the Oxford "Defiance," Brighton "Red

-Rover," and the Leeds "Courier." In their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>

-coaching speculations the Nelson family were

-associated with a pastrycook whose little shop

-adjoined the gateway of the "Bull." Occasionally

-a new hand on one of the coaches would send

-his leaders' noses through the shop front, for that

-gateway was very narrow and Mrs Nelson's coachmen

-anything but deliberate. On the other side

-of the gateway was a whip-maker's shop, kept by

-one James Johnson, who throve mightily on the

-custom of the coachmen and others who frequented

-the "Bull."</p>

-

-<p>This most energetic of landladies and Napoleonic

-of coach proprietors developed and managed her

-extensive coaching interests long before her

-husband died. He, good, easy-going man, had

-been a fair whip in earlier days, but had long

-left the box, and had no head for business,

-although a very fine taste in wines and spirits:

-the lack of the first probably a corollary of the

-second. She spared neither herself nor her

-servants. Rising considerably before the lark,

-she saw the owls to bed, and was a martinet to

-her coachmen. Left a widow while in the prime

-of life, she still wore in old age the dress of her

-youth. The sketch of her in the picture of the

-"Bull" yard in coaching days shows exactly what

-her costume was like. A short skirt revealed high-heeled

-shoes with large buckles, the heels painted

-red. Black velvet was her winter wear, and fancy

-apron, lace neckerchief and frilled cap invariable

-items. Up to her seventieth year she was the

-last up at night, scouring the house to see that

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a><br /><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a><br /><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>all was safe; and the first up in the morning,

-looking after the stable people and seeing that the

-horses had their feeds and were properly cared

-for. Inside and outside the house, and down

-the eastern roads, her influence was despotic and

-would brook no defiance. Her "Ipswich Blues"

-had long been famous when an opposition coach

-was started. Opposition could not be allowed

-to live, and so the fares were reduced

-from eight shillings inside and sixteen shillings

-out, by regular stages until the point was

-reached when passengers were not only carried for

-nothing, but were presented with an excellent

-dinner at Witham. At that point the rivals discreetly

-retired, when fares rose again to their old

-level.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus3">

-<img src="images/fig11.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">ALDGATE, 1820.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Mrs Nelson insisted on the most rigid punctuality.

-Did the coachman of one of her crack

-coaches or one of her still more famous "Oppositions"

-bring his team down her yard five minutes

-over time, he was reprimanded; ten minutes, and

-he was fined half-a-crown; a quarter of an hour,

-and he stood a good chance of being dismissed.

-She ran a Southend "Opposition" every afternoon

-by Romford, Brentwood, Billericay, Wickford,

-Raleigh and Rochford, along Essex roads of a

-feather-bed softness of mud; but time must be

-kept. She provided good horses and would not

-hear of excuses. One day, when the roads were

-particularly heavy, the "Opposition" came in half

-an hour late from Southend. The coachman, after

-the manner of his kind, on driving into the yard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>

-and pulling up at the coffee-room door, threw his

-whip across the wheelers' backs. Mrs Nelson had

-long been watching the clock, and, coming out,

-took the whip and hung it up, with the quiet

-remark, "That whip is no longer yours, Philpot&mdash;half

-an hour behind."</p>

-

-<p>"But the roads are so bad, ma'am," remonstrated

-poor Toby. "I'm sure, ma'am, the

-gentlemen knew I did my best; but I felt bound

-to spare the cattle."</p>

-

-<p>"<i>I</i> find the cattle and employ you to drive

-them," replied the inexorable landlady; "<i>you</i>

-have nothing to do but to keep time. Draw

-your wages and leave the yard."</p>

-

-<p>Under this iron rule it is no wonder that her

-coachmen were sometimes "pulled up" for furious

-driving. On one of these occasions she appeared

-in court in defence of her man. "I understand,

-Mrs Nelson," blandly remarked the Chairman of

-the Bench, "that you give your coachmen instructions

-to race the rival coach."</p>

-

-<p>"Not exactly," replied the lady; "my orders

-to them are simply that they are to get the

-road and keep it."</p>

-

-<p>But if a very dragon of strictness, she treated

-coachmen and guards very well. They had their

-especial room, and dined as well there, at reduced

-prices, as any of her coffee-room customers. This

-especial consideration reflected itself in those functionaries,

-who jealously preserved the privacy of

-their room; the amateur coachman who secured

-the invitation to join them (and to pay out of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>

-own pocket for their wine and spirits) feeling

-himself greatly honoured.</p>

-

-<p>In other respects, the "Bull" was a model to

-other houses. No damp sheets in any one of

-its hundred and fifty beds, no drunken brawlers;

-nothing a minute out of time, or an inch out of

-place. Mrs Nelson's fine house was, indeed, nothing

-less than an institution. In later years her

-son John took more of the management upon his

-shoulders, and the business seemed likely to long

-outlast his time.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2">V</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">But</span> a whisper of coming changes disturbed the

-air as early as 1830. Coachmen and travellers

-talked in the stableyard and the cosy rooms of

-the "Bull" of men with strange instruments encountered

-along the road; "chaps with telescopes

-on three sticks, and other chaps with chains and

-things, measuring the fields." It was thus that

-they described the surveyors, with their theodolites

-and their staff of men, who were setting out the

-proposed route of the projected Eastern Counties

-Railway that was to run all the way from London

-to Colchester, Norwich and Yarmouth.</p>

-

-<p>John Nelson was too confident in the existing

-order of things to believe that a few pounds of

-coal and some boiling water would ever be a

-match for his horses, or that a time would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>

-presently come when those passengers of his who

-now derided the railways would desert the coaches.

-The "Bull" had been in his family for more than

-a hundred and twelve years, as an inn and a

-coaching house, and he could as soon have

-imagined the end of the world as a day coming

-when the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches

-should no longer enter or leave his yard. It was

-a good joke for a while, when the coaches came

-in, to ask "How they were getting on with that

-railway?" but when the surveys were completed

-and the prospectus of the "Grand Eastern Counties

-Railway" was issued in 1834, it was seen that

-the railway men meant business. The original

-proposal of the directors was to follow the road

-closely and to bring the line into Aldgate.

-When it was seen that the railway was really to

-be made, Nelson raised an opposition against the

-Aldgate terminus, and was successful in driving

-the Company into an out-of-the-way site in

-Shoreditch, where for many years that terminus

-remained.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus33">

-<img src="images/fig12.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE YARD OF THE "BULL," WHITECHAPEL, IN COACHING DAYS.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The Eastern Counties Railway was opened as

-far as Chelmsford in 1839, to Colchester in 1842,

-and communication to Norwich was opened up in

-1845. From the day of the first opening, the

-"Bull" declined. Old customers still found their

-way from the slums of Shoreditch to its hospitable

-door, but were not reinforced by the newer generation

-of travellers, to whom the road and its end

-in Aldgate were alike unknown. They went to the

-City inns, and later to the more central hotels,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>leaving the "Bull" to slowly sink into neglect.

-John Nelson made a big bid for success in another

-line, and ran the "Wellington" omnibuses with

-success from 1855 until his death, at the age of

-seventy-four, in June 1868. He had long resided

-in the West End, and was a man of ample fortune,

-so that the end of the "Bull's" coaching career

-hurt him only in sentiment. His mother, that most

-autocratic and business-like of women, had died ten

-years before, active almost to the last, although she

-had reached the age of eighty-five years. Towards

-the close of 1868 the old inn ended its long career.

-Its substantial, old-fashioned silver-plate and massive

-furniture were sold by auction, with the stock of

-rare old wines, laid in many years before, for that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>

-old generation of travellers who delighted in port

-and sherry, and plenty of both.</p>

-

-<p>The very site of the "Bull" is now sought with

-pains and labour, and only to be discovered with

-difficulty by the present generation. It was

-numbered 25 Aldgate High Street, and stood where

-Aldgate Avenue, a modern alley rich in offices of

-"commission agents," and curious things of that

-kind, now cuts its way through where the old

-yard used to be.</p>

-

-<p>Close by the "Bull" was another old coaching

-inn, the "Blue Boar," now quite vanished, kept for

-a time by John Thorogood. The Thorogoods were

-in those days, and in these times of amateur

-coaching are still, a family of coachmen. "Old

-John," who owned the "Norwich Times," and

-actually drove it for two years without missing a

-journey the whole of that time, clearly deserved

-his patronymic, in thus handling the reins along

-a hundred and twelve miles of road for seven

-hundred and thirty consecutive days.</p>

-

-<p>It was to the "Blue Boar" that little David

-Copperfield came, on his miserable journey from

-Yarmouth:&mdash;"We approached London by degrees,

-and got, in due time, to the inn, in the Whitechapel

-district, I forget whether it was the 'Blue Bull'

-or the 'Blue Boar,' but I know it was the Blue

-Something, and that its likeness was painted upon

-the back of the coach." The sculptured effigy of a

-boar, with gilded tusks and hoofs, built into the

-wall of a tobacco factory, marks the site of the

-inn.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>Among other noted inns, the "Three Nuns"

-must be named. From it set out the short stages

-to Ilford, Epping, Romford and Woodford, together

-with coaches for several of the Essex by-roads.

-The house owes its name to the Minoresses, or nuns,

-of St Clare, from whose religious establishment the

-Minories obtains its title. The inn was rebuilt

-in 1877, and is now nothing more than a huge

-public-house.</p>

-

-<p>Many other inns of consequence in their day

-have left nothing but their yards behind them to

-show where they stood:&mdash;George Yard, Spread

-Eagle Yard, Black Horse Yard, Boar's Head Yard,

-White Swan Yard, Half Moon Passage, and Kent

-and Essex Yard are such relics, bordering High

-Street, Whitechapel, where one curious sign survives,

-that of an inn called the "Horse and Leaping Bar."</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VI</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">One</span> decided advantage the Chelmsford, Colchester

-and Ipswich route to Norwich possessed in old times

-over that by way of Newmarket and Thetford.

-Neither could have been considered safe in the bad

-old days, but while the traveller across the wild

-heaths of Newmarket and Thetford was almost

-certain to be "held up" on his lonely course, the

-other way, through Essex, passed by few such

-wildernesses, and had more towns and villages along<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>

-its course, to give a sense of security. Briefly,

-robbery on one route was a probability, and on the

-other was regarded as certain. Margaret Paston,

-writing from Norfolk to her husband in London,

-so long ago as the fifteenth century, certainly gives

-even the way through Essex a bad name, for she

-asks him to pay a debt for one of their friends,

-because it was not safe, "on account of the robbers,"

-to send money up from the country; but at the

-very same time the Thetford route had a much

-more sinister reputation, and travellers versed in

-the gossip of the road avoided it if possible, or

-went in company and well armed, for in that era

-a certain William Cratfield, Rector of Wrotham, "a

-common and notorious thief and lurker on the roads,

-and murderer and slayer," lurked and robbed and

-slew on Newmarket Heath, in company with a

-certain "Thomas Tapyrtone, hosyer." He was at

-last laid by the heels, in 1416, and charged with

-robbing a Londoner of �12. This distinguished

-ornament of the Church died in Newgate, but of

-the villainous hosier we hear no more. Perhaps he

-had realised a fortune in the business and retired

-to enjoy the fruits of his industry. With the

-disappearance of this worthy couple, travellers

-breathed more freely, but for surety's sake continued

-to patronise the Essex route, and so by way

-of Ipswich to come to the City of Orchards, as

-Norwich was called of old.</p>

-

-<p>As time went on, a certain degree of security was

-found in the coaches that began to make an appearance

-with the second half of the seventeenth century.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>

-They travelled at first no more quickly than a man

-could walk, but they provided company, which was,

-under the circumstances, highly desirable. Soon,

-however, they found it possible to do the journey

-in two days. Strype, we have already seen

-mentions the "Saracen's Head" in Aldgate as the

-centre of a considerable trade, and to it in 1681 a

-Norwich coach was running; an innovation which

-aroused the indignation of innkeepers on the way

-to almost as great a height as that of their descendants

-when, two hundred and forty years later,

-railways were depopulating the roads. When

-travellers began to go by coach instead of on

-horseback, and to reach London or Norwich in two

-days instead of three or four, those antique tapsters

-thought they saw their living going, and, strange to

-say, there were not wanting men who raised their

-voices against the innovation of being carried on a

-journey, instead of riding; although, for the most

-part, their outcry was the result only of innate conservatism.</p>

-

-<p>"Travelling in these coaches," said an anonymous

-pamphleteer, "can neither prove advantageous

-to men's health or business. For what

-advantage is it to men's health to be called out of

-their beds into these coaches an hour before day in the

-morning, to be hurried in them from place to place, till

-one hour, two, or three within night; insomuch that

-after sitting all day in the summer time stifled with

-heat, and choked with the dust, or the winter time

-starving and freezing with cold or choked with

-filthy fogs, they are often brought into their inns by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>

-torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get

-supper; and next morning they are forced into the

-coach so early that they can get no breakfast. What

-addition is this to men's health or business? to ride

-all day with strangers, oftentimes sick, ancient,

-diseased persons, or young children crying; to

-whose humours they are obliged to be subject, forced

-to bear with, and many times are poisoned with

-their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of the

-boxes and bundles."</p>

-

-<p>Yet "these coaches" (one can almost hear the

-intonation of contempt in that phrase) were from

-the first a success. The greater that success the

-louder for a time was the outcry against them.

-Taylor, the Water Poet, was one of those who wrote

-vehemently against the new methods of travel.

-To him a coach was "a close hypocrite; for it hath

-a cover for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow

-any wickedness. Besides, like a perpetual cheater,

-it wears two bootes, and no spurs, sometimes having

-two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes

-(against nature) it makes faire ladies weare the

-boote; and if you note, they are carried back to

-back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in

-that miserable manner and thrown overboard into

-the sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate sea-crabs,

-in being drawn sideways as they are when

-they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a

-dangerous kind of carriage for the commonwealth,

-if it be considered."</p>

-

-<p>The boot of which he speaks so contemptuously,

-was a method of packing the "outsides," of which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>

-we still find a survival in the Irish jaunting-car.

-There are those who trace the origin of the term

-from the French "<i>bo�te</i>," a box. Even now the

-coachman's seat is "the box," and the modern fore-boot

-is under it.</p>

-

-<p>Writers of that time seem almost unanimously to

-have taken sides against coaching; with, however, no

-effect; for, somewhat later than Taylor, that doughty

-Conservative, John Cresset, is found exclaiming

-furiously against the multitude of them. He

-favoured the suppression of all, or, at least&mdash;counsels

-of moderation prevailing&mdash;of most. They were, he

-said, mischievous to the public, destructive to trade

-and prejudicial to the land. Not only did they

-injure the breed of horses, but also that of watermen;

-which last objection goes further than the

-complaints of Taylor himself, who, writing at the

-same time, does not speak of his breed being debased,

-but only of his trade being crippled. Cresset

-thought the stage-coaches tempted the country

-gentry to London too often, and he accordingly

-proposed that these conveyances should be limited

-to one for every county town in England, to go

-backwards and forwards once a week.</p>

-

-<p>Vain hope! Coaches of sorts must already have

-appeared on the road to Norwich by the middle of

-the seventeenth century, for in a proclamation of July

-20th in the plague year, 1665, when all places were

-dreading infected London, it is ordained, that "from

-this daie all ye passage coaches shall be prohibited

-to goe from ye city to London and come from thence

-hither, and also ye common carts and wagons."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>

-Already, in 1696, the "Confatharrat" coach was a

-well-known conveyance between London and

-Norwich, and the name of Suggate, the London and

-East Anglian carrier, a household word. Unhappily,

-nothing can be gathered as to when Suggate first

-began to jog along the road, or when the "Confatharrat"

-started to ply between Norwich and the

-"Four Swans," Bishopsgate Street. All particulars

-are lost. The odd name of that coach was probably

-a seventeenth-century way of spelling the word

-"confederate," and the selection of such a name

-proves both that it was carried on by an alliance

-or co-partnership, and that "confederate" had not

-then acquired its sinister modern connotation.

-Besides these aids to travel, a stage-waggon began

-to ply from the "Popinjay," Tombland, Norwich, at

-an early date; and another from the "Angel," in the

-Market Place, to the "Blossoms" Inn, Laurence

-Lane, London, was advertised in the <i>Norwich

-Mercury</i>, of March 29th, 1729, to "now go regularly

-every Thursday night," setting out on the following

-Wednesday from London, on the return journey.

-It will thus be seen that it was a five or six days'

-journey for those primitive affairs, and that they

-apparently did not run at regular intervals until

-that year.</p>

-

-<p>A London and Beccles coach was running in

-1707, but the first regular Norwich coach of which

-particulars remain was the "Norwich Machine,"

-which in 1762 set out for London three times a

-week from the "Maid's Head," according to the

-advertisement still extant. There is nothing in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>

-that old coaching bill to show that 1762 was the

-first season of the "Norwich Machine." It may

-have been established some years before that date.</p>

-

-<blockquote>

-<p class="r">

-<i>Norwich, March 26, 1762.</i></p>

-

-<p class="c">SUSAN NASMITH and JAMES KEITH,<br />

-<br />

-Proprietors of the<br />

-<br />

-NORWICH MACHINE,<br />

-<br />

-Give Notice

-</p>

-

-<p>that their Machine will set out from the <span class="smcap">Maid's Head</span> Inn,

-in St Simon's Parish, in Norwich, on Monday, the 5th day

-of April next, at half-past eleven in the forenoon, and on

-the Wednesday and Friday in the same week, at the same

-time; and to be continued in like Manner, on those Days

-weekly, for the carrying four inside Passengers, at

-Twenty-five Shillings each, and outside at Twelve

-Shillings and Sixpence each. The inside Passengers to be

-allowed twenty pound Weight, and all above to be paid

-for at three half-pence per pound; and to be in London on

-the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Evenings weekly.</p>

-

-

-<p class="p2"><i>N.B.</i>&mdash;A Machine will set out on the same days, at the

-same time, from the <span class="smcap">Green Dragon</span>, in Bishopsgate Street,

-London, for Norwich.</p></blockquote>

-

-<p>In the following year, the "Widow Nasmith"

-and James Keith advertised that they had built large

-and commodious machines, to carry six inside, and

-reduced the fares to twenty shillings and ten

-shillings respectively; but they had apparently not

-succeeded in performing the journey in less time than

-a day and a half, for no mention is made of speed

-being accelerated. But a remarkable feature in that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>

-announcement is the extraordinary cheapness of the

-fares, little over twopence and a penny a mile for

-inside and outside passengers, at a time when prices

-on other roads ruled from twenty-five to fifty per cent.

-higher. This tells a tale of competition; but Time,

-the thief, has robbed us of all knowledge of those

-competitors.</p>

-

-<p>A year later the London and Ipswich Post Coaches

-were advertised to set out every week-day, and to

-perform the 69� miles in ten hours, an average pace

-of almost 7 miles an hour; a marvellous turn of

-speed for that age. As to whether those Post

-Coaches ever <i>did</i> cover that distance in ten hours, we

-may reasonably express a doubt; but there was the

-promise, and 011 the strength of it the proprietors

-charged threepence a mile. As will be seen by the

-advertisement, these coaches carried no outside

-passengers:&mdash;</p>

-

-<blockquote>

-<p class="r">

-<i>Ipswich, August 17th, 1764.</i></p>

-

-<p class="c">THE LONDON AND IPSWICH POST COACHES

-</p>

-

-<p>Set out on Monday, the 27th of August, at seven o'clock

-in the morning from the <span class="smcap">Black Bull</span>, in Bishopsgate,

-London, and at the same time from the <span class="smcap">Great White Horse</span>,

-in Ipswich, and continue every day (Sunday excepted), to

-be at the above places the same evening at five o'clock;

-each passenger to pay threepence per mile, and to be

-allowed eighteen pounds luggage; all above to pay one

-penny per pound, and so in proportion. The coaches, hung

-upon steel springs, are very easy, large and commodious,

-carry six inside but no outside passengers whatever; but

-have great conveniences for parcels or game (to keep them

-from the weather), which will be delivered at London and

-Ipswich the same night.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>As these coaches are sent out for the ease and expedition

-of gentlemen and ladies travelling, the proprietors

-humbly hope for their encouragement, and are determined

-to spare no pains to render it as agreeable as they can.</p>

-

-<p class="c">

-Performed (if God permits) by&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Pet. Sheldon</span>, at the Bull, Bishopsgate Street, London.</span><br />

-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Thomas Archer</span>, at the White Hart, Brentwood.</span><br />

-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Charles Kerry</span>, at the Black Boy, Chelmsford.</span><br />

-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Geo. Reynolds</span>, at the Three Cups, Colchester; and</span><br />

-<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Chas. Harris</span>, at the Great White Horse, Ipswich.</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p><i>N.B.</i>&mdash;The proprietors will not be answerable for any

-money, plate, jewels, or writings, unless entered and paid

-for as such.</p></blockquote>

-

-<p>The reader will perhaps have observed that this

-advertisement especially mentions a convenience for

-carrying game, and, as a matter of fact, game and

-oysters were prominent from an early period in the

-history of Norwich Road conveyances, and, by the

-middle of the eighteenth century, the Norfolk and

-Suffolk coaches had already earned quite a distinctive

-character in two seasons of the year,

-Michaelmas and Christmas. East Anglia has always

-abounded in game, and its broad heaths and extensive

-commons have been the breeding-grounds

-of innumerable geese and turkeys whose careers

-have ended on London dinner-tables. In those two

-seasons it was often difficult to secure a seat on

-or in any of the "up" coaches from Norwich or

-Ipswich, for while every available inch of space on

-the mails was occupied by festoons of dead birds

-consigned by country cousins to friends in town, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>

-whole of a stage-coach was frequently chartered

-for the purpose of despatching heavy consignments

-of these noble poultry to the London market.

-Christmas provided extraordinary sights along the

-Norfolk Road, in the swaying coaches, with parcels

-and geese and turkeys mountains high on the roof;

-with barrels of Colchester natives in the boot, and

-hampers swinging heavily between the axle-trees

-on a shelf called "the cellar"; while from every

-rail or projection to which they could be either

-safely or hazardously tied depended other turkeys

-or braces of fowls, booked at the last moment before

-starting. It was something in those days to be a

-turkey or a goose, before whose importance the

-claims of human passengers faded; but it was a

-fleeting elevation which the philosophic did not

-envy, thinking that here indeed the poet was

-justified in his sounding line&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus34">

-<img src="images/fig13.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE NORWICH COACH AT CHRISTMAS TIDE. <span class="in5"><i>After Robert Seymour, </i>1835.</span></p>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>

-<p>That unfortunate genius, Robert Seymour, has

-left us a picture of the Norwich coach nearing

-London at Christmas time, with its feathered load.

-The drawing was made in 1835, at the very height

-of the Coaching Age, and shows from his own observation

-with what ingenuity every rail and projection

-was used to hang the birds from.</p>

-

-<p>Another highly specialised branch of traffic,

-which only left the road on the opening of the

-railway, was the constant service of fish waggons

-running between Harwich, Colchester and London,

-at the then express speed of 8 miles an hour.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Between</span> the early days of coaching and the end of

-that period, many changes took place on the Norwich

-Road. So late as 1798, the Mail, the "Expedition,"

-and the "Post Coach" were the only coaches to

-Norwich, supplemented by three road waggons; two

-of them doing the journey twice a week, the third

-setting out weekly. Later came the "Norwich

-Times," "Gurney's Original Day Coach," the

-"Ph�nomenon," as it was originally spelt; the

-"Magnet," the Ipswich "Shannon," and the

-Ipswich "Blue." With the object of serving as

-many places as possible, and, incidentally, securing

-heavier bookings, the "Times" and Gurney's

-coaches took a somewhat circuitous route, leaving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>

-the direct road at Chelmsford, and going through

-Braintree, Halstead, Sudbury, Long Melford and Bury

-St Edmunds, rejoining the Norwich Road at Scole.</p>

-

-<p>But the lord of the road was the Mail Coach,

-beside which the stages were very commonplace

-affairs.</p>

-

-<p>The first mail-coach that ever ran the road between

-London and Norwich started in March 1785,

-and the service was from the beginning continued

-daily. Before that time the mails had been carried

-by post-boys, who began in 1741 to go six days a

-week instead of three, as they formerly had done.</p>

-

-<p>Mail-coaches are entirely things of the past, for

-the modern coaching revival has only brought back

-the smart stages and drags of the last years of the

-Coaching Age. The mails were expensive and exclusive

-affairs, constructed to carry only nine

-persons; four inside and five out, including coachman

-and guard. For the higher fares passengers

-paid they had not always the satisfaction of travelling

-faster than on the stages; but perhaps there was

-some dignity attaching to a seat on the mail which

-was lacking on ordinary coaches. And certainly

-they were surrounded by pomp and circumstance.

-The guard wore a scarlet coat and went armed with

-pistol, sword and blunderbuss; not, of course, for

-the protection of the passengers, but for the safe-guarding

-of His Majesty's mails. And everything

-gave place, as a matter of right and not merely

-courtesy, to the mail. Surly pikemen swung open

-their gates and asked no toll, for it was one of the

-privileges of the mail to go toll-free, and the high<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>waymen,

-if they walked in the ways of caution, left

-the gorgeous conveyance severely alone, reserving

-their best attentions for the plebeian stages. It was

-a much more serious thing to rob the mail than an

-ordinary coach, for a conviction was more certain to

-end in death, judges having hints from the Government

-how undesirable it was that mails should be

-ransacked and the robbers live. The rewards usually

-offered by the Post-office, too, were tempting to

-those who could inform if they would. �200 was

-the sum generally to be had for this service, together

-with the �40 reward by Act of Parliament for the

-apprehension of a highwayman; and if the mail was

-robbed within five miles of London, another �100.

-Courage, recklessness, and desperation&mdash;whichever

-we like to call it&mdash;often nerved the night-hawks

-to brave even so heavy a handicap as this, as this

-very road bears witness, in the daring robbery of

-the Ipswich Mail in 1822, when notes to the value

-of no less than �31,198 were stolen. In addition

-to the usual rewards, a sum of �1000 was offered

-by the losing firms of bankers, as shown in the

-accompanying old handbill, but without avail.

-This sum was afterwards increased to �5000,

-and a notification given that, in order to prevent

-the notes being changed, the ink on all new

-ones had been altered from black to red. But the

-robbers had the impudence to ask �6000 for the

-return of the notes. They had already passed

-�3000 worth, and naively said, in the negotiations

-they opened up, that the trouble they had taken

-and the risks they had run did not make it worth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>

-while to accept a smaller "reward." The bankers,

-however, would not spring another thousand, for

-by that time everyone was too shy of an "Ipswich

-black note," and it was extremely unlikely that any

-more could be passed. Negotiations were broken

-off; but a month later notes to the value of �28,000

-were returned. The thieves were never traced, and

-although the bulk of their booty was useless to

-them, made the very substantial haul of over �3000

-by their lawless enterprise.</p>

-

-<p class="c b xxxlarge">�1000 Reward.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter">

-<img src="images/fig81.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<p class="c b p0 verybig">STOLEN</p>

-<p class="c b p0 xlarge">FROM THE IPSWICH MAIL</p>

-<p class="c p0">On its way from London, <i>on the Night<br />

-of the 11th Sept. Inst.</i> the following</p>

-<p class="c p0 b">COUNTRY BANK NOTES:</p>

-<p class="c p0 b large">Ipswich Bank, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.</p>

-<p class="c p0"><i>ALEXANDERS &amp; Co.</i> on <i>HOARE &amp; Co.</i></p>

-

-<div class="figcenter">

-<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<p class="c p0 b large">Woodbridge Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.</p>

-<p class="c p0"> <i>ALEXANDERS &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>

-

-<div class="figcenter">

-<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<p class="c p0">Manningtree Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.<br />

-<i>ALEXANDER &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>

-

-<div class="figcenter">

-<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<p class="c p0 medium">Hadleigh Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.<br />

-<i>ALEXANDER &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>

-<p class="c p0 little">Particulars of which will be furnished at the different Bankers.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter">

-<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<p class="c p0 little">Whoever will give Information, either at ALEXANDERS and Co.<br />

-or at FRYS and Co., <i>St Mildred's Court, Poultry</i>, so that the<br />

-Parties may be apprehended, shall on his or their Conviction,<br />

-and the Recovery of the Property, receive the above REWARD.</p>

-

-<p>We have said that mail-coaches were gorgeous.

-They were painted in black and red. Not a shy,

-unassuming red, but the familiar and traditional Post-office

-hue. Also they bore the Royal coat-of-arms

-emblazoned upon the door panels, and the

-insignia of the four principal orders of knight<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>hood

-on the quarters. There was no mistaking a

-mail-coach.</p>

-

-<p>The Norwich Mail, which took fifteen and a

-half hours to do the journey so late as 1821, was

-greatly improved in later years; and finally, in

-the early forties, when the railway reached

-Norwich and superseded the roads, performed the

-journey in eleven hours, thirty-eight minutes, at

-the very respectable average speed of 9� miles

-an hour. It was not the only mail on the road,

-but shared the way so far as Ipswich with the

-Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail. This coach was unfortunate

-on two occasions between 1835 and

-1839. On September 28th in the first year,

-when the coachman was climbing on to his box

-in the yard of the "Swan with Two Necks," the

-horses started away on their own accord, tumbling

-the coachman off and knocking down the helper

-who had been holding their heads. Dashing into

-Cheapside, they flung themselves against the back

-of the Poole Mail with such force that the coachman

-of that mail was also thrown off. He was

-taken unconscious to the hospital. Continuing

-their furious rush, the horses of the Ipswich

-Mail at length ran the pole of the coach between

-the iron railings of a house, and so were

-stopped.</p>

-

-<p>The second happening, in 1839, was somewhat

-similar. The mail had arrived at Colchester, and

-the coachman, throwing down the reins, got off

-the box. No one was at the horses' heads, and

-they started away and galloped down the High<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>

-Street, until the near leader fell and broke his

-neck, stopping the team.</p>

-

-<p>It was by the Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail

-that David Copperfield journeyed down to Yarmouth

-on his second visit to Mr Peggotty. In the

-ordinary course of things, he would have reached

-Ipswich at 3�12 a.m. But on this occasion the

-weather was a potent factor in causing delay.

-He occupied the box seat, and remarked upon the

-look of the sky to the coachman while yet on

-the first stage out of London.</p>

-

-<p>"Don't you think that a very remarkable

-sky?" he asked; "I don't remember to have seen

-one like it."</p>

-

-<p>"Nor I&mdash;not equal to it," said the coachman.

-"That's mist, sir. There'll be mischief done at

-sea, I expect, before long."</p>

-

-<p>The description of this stormy sky is very

-fine, and seems to have been drawn from observation;

-just as true and as effective in its way as

-Old Crome's billowy cloudscapes, in his <i>Mousehold

-Heath</i>, or as any of Constable's rain-surcharged

-Suffolk scenes.</p>

-

-<p>"It was a murky confusion&mdash;here and there

-blotted with a colour like the colour of the smoke

-from damp fuel&mdash;of flying clouds tossed up into

-most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights

-in the clouds than there were depths below them

-to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth,

-through which the wild moon seemed to plunge

-headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws

-of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>

-There had been a wind all day; and it was rising

-then, with an extraordinary great sound. In

-another hour it had much increased, and the sky

-was more overcast, and it blew hard.</p>

-

-<p>"But as the night advanced, the clouds closing

-in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then

-very dark, it came on to blow harder and harder.

-It still increased, until our horses could scarcely

-face the wind. Many times in the dark part of

-the night (it was then late in September, when

-the nights were not short) the leaders turned

-about, or came to a dead stop; and we were

-often in serious apprehension that the coach

-would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain

-came up before this storm, like showers of steel;

-and at those times, when there was any shelter

-of trees or lee-walls to be got, we were fain to

-stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing the

-struggle.... We came to Ipswich very late,

-having had to fight every inch of ground since

-we were ten miles out of London; and found a

-cluster of people in the market-place, who had

-risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling

-chimneys. Some of these, congregating about

-the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of

-great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high

-church tower and flung into a bye-street, which

-they then blocked up."</p>

-

-<p>At Ipswich the Yarmouth coaches left the

-Norwich Road, and so the further adventures of

-David Copperfield do not in this place concern us.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VIII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Here</span>, as on the other roads, the early advent

-of the Motor Car, in 1826, caused much commotion.

-The steam coaches of that period never achieved

-any success on this route, but caricatures of what

-might be expected were plentiful, and pictures of

-the Colchester "Dreadful Vengeance," the Norwich

-"Buster," and other fanciful conveyances, in the

-act of exploding and distributing their passengers

-in little pieces over a wide stretch of country,

-were popular. The railway itself came in for much

-abuse, and misguided and fanatical coach proprietors

-wasted their substance in pitiful attempts to

-compete with it. Among these was Israel Alexander,

-that Jewish hero of the Brighton Road in the early

-forties, who, although a first-class whip, was

-perhaps chiefly associated with the many upsettings

-of the Brighton "Quicksilver." He fell out with

-his noble friends on that highway, and, coming to

-the Norwich Road, ran a well-appointed coach to

-Colchester for a little while, until even the Eastern

-Counties Railway, then the slowest on earth, made

-the pace too quick for him. His turn-out was

-given the extraordinary name of the "Duke of

-Beaufort's Retaliator," and might have continued

-much longer to carry those who were prejudiced

-against railways, had it not met with so many

-accidents.</p>

-

-<p>One who was contemporary with the coaching

-age has ingeniously divided coaching accidents<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>

-into three classes:&mdash;1. Accidents to the coach;

-2. Accidents to the horses; 3. Accidents to the

-harness. The most common kind of mishap to

-the coach was, he says, the breaking of an axle.

-This was not, as a rule, due to any faulty construction

-of that most essential feature of a public

-conveyance, but to the overloading either of

-passengers or goods, to which coaches were continually

-subject. The sudden snapping of an axle

-at a high speed or on a down grade produced

-a tremendous crash which generally shot coachman,

-guard and "outsides" in all directions. Happy

-those who, in such a case, were received into the

-thorny arms of a quickset hedge or the soft

-embraces of a mud-heap.</p>

-

-<p>Another kind of mishap, not always accidental,

-was that of a wheel coming off; an incident often

-caused in early times, before the introduction of

-patent axle-boxes, by the mischievous removal of

-the lynch-pin by some unscrupulous rascal in the

-employ of the rival coach proprietor.</p>

-

-<p>The sudden snapping of a skid-chain while

-descending a hill, resulting in the coach running

-on to the horses and a general overthrow, in which

-horses' legs and passengers heads came into unwonted

-contact, was perhaps as uncomfortable a

-kind of disaster as could be imagined. Overloading,

-too, sometimes had the effect of rendering a coach

-top-heavy, when a slight lack of caution in running

-round curves would upset it.</p>

-

-<p>Accidents to the horses were:&mdash;casting a shoe,

-involving lameness, and perhaps a fall; tripping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>

-and stumbling on loose stones and rolling over;

-slipping up in frosty weather; and kicking over

-the traces or the splinter-bar.</p>

-

-<p>Accidents to the harness usually happened to

-the traces, which commonly snapped under an uneven

-strain. To cobble them up with twine, and

-so complete a stage, was a common practice. In

-such cases, the thoughts of passengers during the

-remaining miles were, like those of the poet, "too

-deep for words." Most nerve-shaking of all these

-varied and untoward happenings, however, was

-the breaking of the reins. Rotted by age, by the

-sun's heat and the winter's frosts, they would

-"come away" in the coachman's hands at that

-worst of moments;&mdash;when he was holding in his

-horses downhill. In that contingency, says our

-ancient, who, in the modern slang phrase, has

-"been there," it was the approved thing to say

-your prayers first and then take a flying leap

-(result, a broken neck, or fractured leg: the bone

-protruding over the top of the Blucher).</p>

-

-<p>"Then shrieked the timid and stood"&mdash;or,

-rather, sat&mdash;"still the brave;" who had this consolation,

-that if they fared no better than those

-who jumped, the odds were that they fared no

-worse.</p>

-

-<p>To be dragged at hurricane pace by four runaway

-horses (for in such a case they generally <i>did</i> so run)

-with the broken reins trailing helplessly after them,

-was to acquire the knowledge of an inner meaning in

-the word "terror." In escapades of this kind the

-"insides" were in the most unenviable situation;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>

-for the "outsides," including coachman and guard,

-took the better, if unheroic, part of crawling over the

-roof and slipping down the back of the coach into the

-road. The wisdom of their doing so would, in most

-cases, be proved a few seconds later by the sound of

-a distant crash as the coach hurtled against some

-roadside tree and dissolved into matchwork, while

-the "insides" were stuck as full of splinters as a

-"fretful porcupine" of quills.</p>

-

-<p>The "human boy" was as much the terror of the

-old coachman as he is of the modern cyclist. The

-sight of a boy with a hoop reduced him to a state of

-purple indignation or of quivering anxiety, according

-to temperament. Many an one of our great-grandfathers,

-attired in the odd costume of boys in that

-period, and trundling a hoop along the road, has felt

-the lash of the coachman's whip. The following little

-story will show us why.</p>

-

-<p>"When a very little boy," says one of our

-forebears, "I once upset a four-horse coach by losing

-control over my hoop, which, to my consternation,

-bowled among the legs of the team. I shall never

-forget the horror with which I for an instant saw

-the spirited horses floundering about with that

-hateful hoop among them, or heard the execrations

-of the coachman and the shouts of the passengers.

-Abandoning the wretched plaything to its fate, I

-took to my heels down a bye-lane, the portentous

-crash that followed only accelerating my speed."</p>

-

-<p>Coach proprietors were favourite targets for

-Fate's worst shafts. They were a hard-working,

-much-enduring class of men; up early and to bed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>

-late, retiring in good circumstances and rising

-perhaps ruined through some unforeseen accident.

-They were "common carriers" in law, and bound

-under many Acts of Parliament to deliver goods

-uninjured at their destination. As carriers of

-passengers, it is true, they were only required to

-exercise all "due care and diligence" for the safety

-of their customers, and were exempt from liability

-in case of mishaps through the "act of God" or the

-unforeseen; but the observance of due precautions

-and a daily inspection of the coach had to be proved

-in case of injury to passengers, or in default they

-were held liable for damages.</p>

-

-<p>Thus, the carelessness of any one of his many

-servants might mean a very serious thing to a coach

-proprietor. In those days the old Anglo-Saxon Law

-of Deodand was not only in existence, but in a very

-nourishing and aggressive condition. Indeed, coaching

-had practically rescued it from neglect. It was

-a law which, in cases of fatal injuries, empowered the

-coroner's jury to levy a fine, which might vary from

-sixpence to a thousand pounds, upon the object that

-caused the mischief.</p>

-

-<p>The very multiplicity of tribunals before whom

-the personally unoffending coach proprietor was

-liable to be haled was in itself terrifying. There

-was the already-mentioned coroners jury; the

-jury on the criminal side in trials at the Assizes

-for manslaughter, and the other "twelve good

-men and true" who assessed damages in the

-Sheriff's Court.</p>

-

-<p>How even the most well-meaning of men might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>

-thus suffer is evident in the case of a proprietor

-who was cast in damages from excess of caution.

-For additional security, and in order to protect

-it from road grit, he had a part of an axle incased

-in wood. One day this axle broke and a

-serious accident happened, resulting in an action

-against him for damages. He lost the day; the

-judge ruling that, although no proof of a defective

-axle was adduced, a flaw <i>might</i> have existed which

-a proper daily examination would have detected

-had the extra precaution for safety not been

-adopted.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">IX</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">What</span> Aldgate might now have been had the

-original intention of the Eastern Counties directorate

-to place their terminus there been successful,

-we need not stop to inquire. But, as a good deal

-has already been said on the subject of coaches

-and coaching, it will be of interest to learn what

-were the views of the projectors of the Eastern

-Counties Railway. With their original prospectus

-was issued a map of the proposed railway from

-London to Norwich and Yarmouth, by which it

-appears that, instead of going to the left of the

-road from London, as far as Seven Kings and

-Chadwell Heath, it was originally intended to

-construct the line on the right of the road so far.

-Between Romford and Chelmsford the line has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>

-been made practically as first proposed, but onwards,

-from Chelmsford to Lexden, it is again on

-the other side of the highway; and, north of

-Colchester, goes wide of the original plan all the

-way to Norwich.</p>

-

-<p>In many ways this document is very much of

-a curiosity at this time, as also are the hopes and

-aspirations of the directors at the first General

-Meeting of the company. The chairman, for

-instance, confidently anticipated dividends of 22

-per cent., upon which one of the confiding shareholders

-replied that the report was most satisfactory

-and the prospects held out by no means

-overcharged. "If this understanding," said he,

-"fails in producing the dividend of 22 per

-cent., calculated upon in the report, then, I must

-say, human calculations and expectation can no

-longer be depended upon." O! most excellent

-man. But better is to come.</p>

-

-<p>"Should I live to see the completion of this

-and similar undertakings," he resumed, "I do

-believe I shall live to see misery almost banished

-from the earth. From the love I bear my species,

-I trust that I may not be too sanguine, and that

-I may yet witness the happy end that I have

-pictured to myself." His was, you think, the

-faith that might have moved mountains; but it

-did not produce that promised 22 per cent., nor,

-although we now have many thousands more miles

-of railway than he ever dreamed of, has the

-millennium yet arrived. Even the most far-seeing

-have not yet discovered any heralds of its approach.

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>Let us drop the tribute of a tear to the

-sorrows of this excellent person, whose love of his

-species and touching anticipation of 22 per cent.

-dividends were so beautifully blended, and so

-cruelly disappointed.</p>

-

-<p>For some years small (very small) dividends

-were paid. Hudson, the "Railway King," paid

-them out of capital. "It made things pleasant,"

-he said, when charged with such financially immoral

-practices. Alas! poor Hudson, you lived

-before your time, and went to another world

-before such "dishonest" doings as yours were

-sanctified in principle by Acts of Parliament

-which authorise payments of dividends out of

-capital in the case of railways under construction.</p>

-

-<p>In 1848 the Eastern Counties Railway was in

-Chancery, and its very locomotives and carriages

-were seized for debt; while for years afterwards its

-name was a synonym for delay. The satirists of

-that period were as busy with the Eastern Counties

-as those of our own time are with the South-Eastern

-Railway. Every journey has an end; "even the

-Eastern Counties' trains come in at last," said

-Thackeray, very charitably.</p>

-

-<p>In 1862 it was amalgamated with several minor

-undertakings, and re-named the "Great Eastern

-Railway"; "great in nothing but the name," as the

-spiteful said.</p>

-

-<p>When matters were at their worst, the Lord

-Cranborne of that time was invited to accept the

-position of chairman and to help extricate the

-company from its difficulties. He accepted the post<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>

-in January 1868 and held it until December 1871.

-In April 1868 he had succeeded to the title of

-Marquis of Salisbury. Thus the statesman and

-prime minister of later years was once a great figure

-in the railway world. His financial abilities helped

-to put the Great Eastern line on a firm basis, and

-when he left it the railway was already greatly

-improved in every respect. To-day, instead of being

-a "shocking example," it is a model to be copied by

-other lines.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2">X</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Although</span> the last of the old coaches was long ago

-broken up, and the Norwich Road is no longer lively

-with mail and stage travellers, it has, in common

-with several other roads out of London, witnessed a

-wholly unexpected revival, in the shape of the Parcel

-Mail service between London and Ipswich. When

-the Parcel Post came into being on the 1st August

-1883, it was speedily discovered by the General

-Post-office authorities that in paying, according to

-contract, 55 per cent. of the gross receipts to the

-railway companies for the mere carriage of parcels,

-they were paying too much. Accordingly, a system

-of Parcel Mail coaches was established on several of

-the old roads, commencing with the London to

-Brighton Parcel Mail, in June 1887. A London and

-Chelmsford four-horse mail was soon added, and this

-was shortly afterwards extended to Colchester, and

-thence to Ipswich by cart. This curious enterprise

-of the Post-office was immediately successful, and it has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a><br /><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>

-ever since been found to effect a large saving over

-the railway charges. Nor is time lost in delivery.

-The down mail leaves London at a quarter to ten

-o'clock every night and the parcels arrive at

-Colchester and Ipswich in time for the first delivery

-the next morning; while the country parcels come

-up to London by an equally early hour. The way

-in which the service is worked will be gathered from

-the accompanying official way-sheet of the down mails.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter">

-<img src="images/fig15.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH<br /> PARCEL MAIL.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<hr class="full" />

-

-<div class="figleft">

-<img src="images/fig83.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<p class="c xlarge">GENERAL POST OFFICE</p>

-

-<p class="c large"><span class="smcap">The Most Noble the Marquis of Londonderry</span><br />

-Postmaster-General</p>

-

-<hr class="tb" />

-

-<p class="c large"><b>LONDON, CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER, &amp; IPSWICH ROAD<br />

-PARCEL SERVICE.</b></p>

-

-<table cellpadding="1">

-<tr>

- <td class="tdc bt br" colspan="3">Guard's Remarks as<br /> to Delays, &amp;c.</td>

- <td></td>

- <td></td>

- <td class="tdc bt bl" colspan="2">Proper<br /> Times</td>

- <td class="tdc bt bl" colspan="2">Actual<br /> Times</td>

- <td class="tdc bt bl">This Column<br /> to be left blank</td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="bb"></td>

-  <td class="bb"></td>

-  <td class="bb br"></td>

-  <td class="tdc">Date</td>

-  <td class="tdc">190 .</td>

-  <td class="tdcs bb bl">H.</td>

-  <td class="tdcs bb">M.</td>

-  <td class="tdcs bb bl">H.</td>

-  <td class="tdcs bb">M.</td>

-  <td class="bb bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="tdcs bl" colspan="2">P.M.</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdc br">Coach Service<br />between London<br />and Colchester.</td>

-  <td class="tdcs br" colspan="2">Distance</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Mount Pleasant<br />Parcel Office</td>

-  <td>dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">9</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">45</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdcs">M.</td>

-  <td class="tdcs br">F.</td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdc br">Contractor&mdash;<br />C. Webster,<br />279 Whitechapel<br />Road, E. </td>

-  <td class="tdr">3</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">0</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Eastern District P.O.</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">10</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">8</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">10</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">10</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">11</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">3</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Romford</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">11</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">40</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">11</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">42</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="tdcs bl" colspan="2">A.M.</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">6</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">2</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Brentwood</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">12</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">29</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">12</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">31</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">5</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">0</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Ingatestone</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">1</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">9</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">1</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">11</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdc br">Cart between<br />Colchester &amp;<br />Ipswich.</td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">6</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">0</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Chelmsford</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">2</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">0</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">2</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">5</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdc br">Contractor&mdash;<br />F. W. Canham,<br />Ipswich.</td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">8</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">6</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Witham</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">13</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">15</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">3</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">2</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Kelvedon</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">41</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">43</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">9</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">6</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Colchester</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">0</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">5</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Stratford St. Mary</td>

-  <td>{arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">58</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td>{dep.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">6</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">0</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">18</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">2</td>

-  <td class="tdlb">Ipswich</td>

-  <td class="tdr">arr.</td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl">7</td>

-  <td class="tdrl">20</td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="tdc br">Signature of Guard&nbsp;</td>

-  <td class="bb"></td>

-  <td class="br bb"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br"></td>

-  <td class="tdr">71</td>

-  <td class="tdr br">5</td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl"></td>

-</tr>

-<tr>

-  <td class="br">&nbsp;</td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="br">&nbsp;</td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>

-  <td></td>

-  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>

-</tr>

-</table>

-

-<hr class="fulla" />

-

-<blockquote>

-<p class="r little">T. E. SIFTON, Inspector-General of Mails.</p>

-

-<p class="little">The Guard in charge of the Coach must report the cause of any Delay.

-He must enter all Remarks and Times in the proper Columns. This Bill

-to be sent, as addressed, by First Post.</p>

-

-<p class="c little">TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH<br />PARCEL MAIL.</p>

-</blockquote>

-

-<hr class="fulla" />

-

-<p>The up service, starting with the mail-cart from

-Ipswich at 7�9 p.m. and continued from Colchester

-by four-horse van at 9�30 p.m., brings the country

-parcels to Mount Pleasant at 4�30 a.m., throughout

-the year. Up and down mails meet at Ingatestone

-at 1�9 a.m. On this service, as on all others, the

-vans go through, but the drivers and guards

-exchange places; the London men changing on to

-the van from Colchester at Ingatestone, and returning

-to London; the Colchester men taking over the

-down van and similarly returning whence they came.</p>

-

-<p>It is a curious and unexpected revival of old

-methods, but an entirely successful one. No highwayman

-has ever attempted to "hold up" the

-Parcel Mail, for the last of that trade has for

-generations mouldered in his grave; but should

-any amateurs essay to complete this revival of old

-coaching days by waylaying the mail, the guards

-would be found well armed. Their virgin steel and

-untried pistols have for years been carried without

-any excuse for using them; but there need be no

-doubt that, were the occasion to arrive, they would

-defend their parcels&mdash;the pounds of country butter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>

-the eggs, and wild flowers, or the miscellaneous

-consignment from London&mdash;with their hearts' blood.

-There are more romantic things in the world to die

-for than postal parcels of eggs, cheese and butter,

-but the ennobling word <span class="smcap">Duty</span> might glorify such a

-sacrifice for the sake of a pound's weight of "best

-fresh," or a dozen of "new laid."</p>

-

-<p>But although the possibility of attack is remote,

-a spice of danger and romance savours the conduct

-of the parcel mails.</p>

-

-<p>The up Colchester Parcel Mail had a mishap

-on the night of October 11, 1890, when, owing

-to the prevailing fog, it was driven into a ditch

-near Margaretting. Happily, both coachman and

-guard escaped injury, the heavy vehicle resting

-against the hedge. The coachman, mounting one

-of his team, and hurrying back to Chelmsford,

-succeeded in overtaking the down coach, which,

-returning to the scene of the accident, unloaded

-and transferred the parcels, and continued to London,

-leaving the down mail to be forwarded with local

-help. It eventually arrived at Colchester four hours

-late.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XI</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Coaching</span> days, old and new, having now been

-disposed of, we might set off down the road at

-once, were it not that our steps are at once arrested

-by the sight of the "Red Lion" Inn, at the corner

-of Whitechapel Road and Leman Street, which,

-together with the "Old Red Lion," adjoining, stands

-on a site made historic by Dick Turpin's lurid career.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>It was in the yard of the old house that Turpin

-shot Matthew King in 1737. He had stolen a fine

-horse belonging to a Mr Major, near the "Green

-Man," Epping, and had been traced by means of

-the animal to the inn, where he was found by the

-Bow Street runners in company with Matthew

-and Robert King, birds of like feather with himself.

-The landlord endeavoured to arrest King,

-who fired at him without effect, calling to Turpin,

-"Dick! shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"</p>

-

-<p>Turpin had his usual extensive armoury on

-his person&mdash;three brace of pistols and a carbine

-slung across his back. He fired, and shot Matthew

-King, whether by accident or design is not known.

-King first exclaimed, "Dick! you have shot me;

-make off," but is said afterwards to have cursed

-him as he went, for a coward. King died a week

-later of his wounds, Turpin fleeing to a deserted

-mansion in Essex, and thence to a cave in Epping

-Forest. It is usually said that it was the more

-famous Tom King who met so dramatic an end,

-but original authorities give Matthew; and certainly

-we find <i>a</i> Tom King, highwayman, decorously executed

-at Tyburn eighteen years later.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus4">

-<img src="images/fig16.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT MATTHEW KING.<br />

-<i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854.</i>

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>We have met Turpin before, notably at York,

-where he made an end, two years after this exploit.

-This especial hero of the Penny Dreadful and the

-romantic imagination of the average errand boy

-belongs especially to this road, for he was an

-Essex man, born at Hempstead in 1705. Apprenticed

-to a Whitechapel butcher in his youth, he

-commenced his career of low villainy by stealing

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a><br /><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a><br /><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>some cattle from a Plaistow farmer, and then

-joined a band of smugglers and deer-stealers and

-housebreakers in Epping Forest, where they set

-up a storehouse of stolen goods in the cave just

-mentioned. This band became so notorious that

-a sum of fifty guineas was soon offered for their

-arrest; but it was not until the amount had been

-doubled that two of the ringleaders were caught

-and hanged. The gang thus broken up, Turpin

-was reduced to scouring the roads singly, and

-pursued a solitary career until one dreary February

-night in 1735, while patrolling the Cambridge Road,

-he saw a horseman approaching through the mist.

-At the time-honoured demand, "Your money or

-your life!" the stranger simply laughed.</p>

-

-<p>"What!" said he, "should dog eat dog? We

-are of a like trade."</p>

-

-<p>Thus Turpin and Tom King met, and struck up

-a partnership. If only one quarter of the deeds

-assigned to Turpin were true, his would be a very

-gallant, as well as phenomenally busy, figure on

-the roads of England. Although by no means a

-mythical person, the stories told of him nearly all

-belong to the regions of romance, and his true

-history shows him to have had few redeeming

-qualities. Many of the old knights of the road

-were courageous, and hand in hand with their

-courage went a humour not seldom kindly; but

-Turpin was a bloodthirsty ruffian whose courage

-is not an established fact, and whose humour, like

-the "tender mercies of the wicked," was cruel, not

-to say ferocious. It is quite hopeless to attempt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>

-to finally destroy the great Turpin myth after

-this lapse of time: Harrison Ainsworth's romance

-has enjoyed too great and too long a popularity

-for that; but let the attempt here be made to paint

-him as the cowardly ruffian he was.</p>

-

-<p>Whitechapel, quite apart from memories of

-Turpin, owns an unenviable repute, and its very

-name is a synonym for villainy. Its bad savour,

-however, goes back no greater distance in time

-than the first half of the eighteenth century, for

-until that period it was not built upon, and indeed

-"Whitechapel Common" was spoken of so late as

-1761, maps proving the old church to have been

-quite rural at that date. Originally a chapel-of-ease

-to the great mother-parish of Stepney, the

-district was erected into a separate parish so far

-back as the fourteenth century and the original

-"white chapel"&mdash;doubtless so called from its

-medi�val coats of whitewash&mdash;made a church.

-But old names cling, and although it has been a

-church for over six hundred years, it has not been

-able to confer its more dignified title upon the parish

-itself. Thus the name of Whitechapel is doubly

-misleading nowadays, for it is no longer a chapelry

-and its stately church is in red brick; so that there

-is some force in the argument for re-christening the

-borough and dignifying it by a revival of the old

-name of Eastminster, owned by that not very

-fortunate Abbey of St Mary Grace, founded by

-Edward the Third in 1348, which formerly stood

-on the site of the Royal Mint.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus35">

-<img src="images/fig17.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">WHITECHAPEL OLD CHURCH.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>St Mary's, Whitechapel, is a beautiful church,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>built in 1877, burnt August 20, 1880, and since

-restored. It replaced the ugly old building, which

-was "taken down for the simple reason that it

-would not stand up." The ancient wrangling over

-its full title of St Mary Matfelon is not yet done,

-and rash would be he who voted for any particular

-one among the rival derivatives of the name.

-Matfelon, holds one school, was the name of a

-forgotten benefactor, whose particular benefactions

-are not stated. Who, then, would found, since

-benefits are thus forgot? "<i>Mari�, matri et filio</i>,"

-an ancient dedication, say others; while yet different

-parties find its source in a Syriac word meaning

-"mother of a son" = the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the

-most entertaining legend, however, is that which

-tells how it originated in the killing of a murderer,

-in 1429, by the women of Whitechapel. "Between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>

-Estren and Witsontyd, a fals Breton mordred a

-wydewe in here bed, the which find hym for almasse

-withought Algate, in the suburbes of London, and

-bar away alle that sche hadde, and afterwards he

-toke socour of Holy Chirche in Suthwark; but

-at the last he took the crosse and forswore the

-kynge's land; and as he went hys waye, it happyd

-hym to come be the same place where he had don

-that cursed dede, and women of the same parysh

-comen out with stones and canell dong, and ther

-maden an ende of hym in the hyghe strete." These

-things seem quite in keeping with Whitechapel's

-evil fame.</p>

-

-<p>The old church, as it stood until well into the

-nineteenth century, is shown opposite this page,

-with one of the old road-waggons crawling past.

-In another view of the same date the High Street

-itself is seen, its long perspective fully bearing out

-the old description of spaciousness. At the same

-time, it is seen to be empty enough to resemble the

-street of a provincial town. The houses are exceedingly

-old, the road paved with knobbly stones, and

-the shop windows artfully constructed with the

-apparent object of obstructing instead of admitting

-the light. Very few of these old shop-fronts are

-now left, but a good specimen is that of a bell-founding

-firm at No. 34 Whitechapel Road.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus5">

-<img src="images/fig18.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>This old picture has long ceased to be representative

-of Whitechapel's everyday aspect. The

-coach has long ago whirled away into limbo, the

-elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to

-Abraham's, or another's, bosom, and Whitechapel

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a><br /><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a><br /><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>knows their kind no more. Bustle, and a dismal

-overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers'

-barrows, tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic

-of to-day. Also, the Jewish element is very

-pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably

-dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names

-of Cohen, Abraham, Solomon and the like, and

-others ending in "baum," or "heim." But on

-Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious

-street regains something of its old rural character,

-in the open-air hay and straw market held here, the

-largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad thoroughfare

-and overflows into the side streets: the

-countrymen who have come up on the great

-waggons by road from remote parts of Essex

-lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling

-hay or straw, attending to their horses, or refreshing

-in the old taverns. It is Arcady come again. The

-eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the hay-wains,

-and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic

-scent of their heaped-up loads. It is true that

-Central Londoners also have their so-called Haymarket,

-but hay is the least likely of articles to

-be purchased there in these days.</p>

-

-<p>What do they think, those countrymen, of the

-Whitechapel folks, the "chickaleary blokes," used,

-as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth century

-remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy,"

-from robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe,"

-and the selling of painted sparrows for canaries?

-Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr

-Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>

-neighbourhood," said Sam, as they rumbled along the

-crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery remarkable

-circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and

-oysters go together.... The poorer a place is,

-the greater call there seems to be for oysters....

-An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The

-street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think

-that ven a man's wery poor, he rushes out of his

-lodgings and eats oysters in regular desperation."

-Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper

-depth than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty;

-whelks and villainy foregather in Whitechapel at

-the dawn of the Twentieth Century.</p>

-

-<p>But the poverty and the villainy of Whitechapel

-must not be too greatly insisted upon. They may

-easily be overdone. Loyal hearts and brave lives&mdash;all

-the braver that they are not flaunted in the face

-of the world&mdash;exist in the cheerless and unromantic

-grey streets that lead off the main road. The

-domestic virtues flourish here as well as&mdash;if not

-better than&mdash;in the West End. The heroes and

-heroines of everyday life&mdash;the greater in their

-heroism that they do not know of it&mdash;live in

-hundreds of thousands in the dingy and unrelieved

-dulness of the streets to right and left of Whitechapel

-Road and of the Mile End Road, that go with

-so majestic a breadth and purposeful directness to

-Bow.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Let</span> the Londoner who has never been "down East,"

-and so is given to speaking contemptuously of it,

-take a journey down the Whitechapel and Mile End

-Roads, and see with what an astonishing width, both

-in respect of roadway and foot-pavements, those

-noble thoroughfares are endowed. The London he

-has already known owns no streets so wide, save

-only in the isolated and unimportant instance of

-Langham Place; while, although it cannot be said

-that, taken individually, the houses of the great

-East-End thoroughfares are at all picturesque, yet

-there is a certain interesting quality in the roads as a

-whole, lacking elsewhere. This, doubtless, is partly

-explained by the strangeness of the East-ender's garb,

-and partly by the many Jewish and other foreigners

-who throng the pavements.</p>

-

-<p>A strangely-named public-house&mdash;the "Grave

-Maurice"&mdash;is one of the landmarks of the Whitechapel

-Road. Many have set themselves the task

-of finding the origin of that sign and its meaning;

-but their efforts have been baulked by the very

-multiplicity of historic Maurices, grave or otherwise.

-The sign may originally have been the "Graf Maurice,"

-Prince Maurice of Bohemia, brother of the better-known

-Prince Rupert, the dashing cavalier, but a

-difficulty arises from the fact that there was another

-"Graf Maurice" at the same time, in the person

-of the equally well-known Prince Maurice of Nassau,

-who died of grief when the Spanish overran Holland<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>

-and besieged Breda. Nor does the uncertainty end

-here, for Dekker uses the expression "grave maurice"

-in one of his plays, written at least thirty years

-before the time of those princes, in a passage which

-reads as though it were the usual nickname at that

-period for an officer.</p>

-

-<p>Beyond the house owning this perplexing sign

-we come to the beginning of the Mile End Road,

-one mile, as its name implies, from Aldgate, and

-for long the site of a turnpike-gate, only removed

-with the close of the Coaching Age. Rowlandson

-has left us an excellent view of Mile End Turnpike

-as it was in his time; with isolated blocks of houses,

-groups of rustic cottages and a background of trees,

-to show how rural were the surroundings towards

-the close of the eighteenth century; while maps

-of that period mark the road onwards, bordered by

-fields, with "Ducking Pond Row" standing solitary

-and the ducking-pond itself close behind, where the

-scolds and shrews of that age were soused.</p>

-

-<p>The Ducking-Pond as an institution is as obsolete

-as the rack, the thumb-screw, and other ingenious

-devices of the "good old times"; but most towns

-a hundred years ago still kept a cucking or ducking-stool;

-while, if they had no official pond for the

-purpose, any dirty pool would serve, and the dirtier

-it were the better it was esteemed.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus6">

-<img src="images/fig19.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. <span class="in5"><i>After Rowlandson.</i></span></p>

-</div>

-

-<p>"The Way of punishing scolding Women is

-pleasant enough," says an old traveller. "They

-fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve

-or fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so

-that these two Pieces of Wood, with their two Ends

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a><br /><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a><br /><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>embrace the Chair, which hangs between them on a

-sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and

-always remains in the natural horizontal Position in

-which a Chair should be, that a Person may sit conveniently

-in it, whether you raise it or let it down.

-They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River,

-and over this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the

-two Pieces of Wood, at one End of which the Chair

-hangs just over the Water. They place the Woman in

-the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often

-as the Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate

-Heat."</p>

-

-<p>One has only to go and look at the average rural

-pond to imagine the horrors of this punishment.

-The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the clinging

-green duckwood, common to them, must have made

-a ducking the event of a lifetime.</p>

-

-<p>The difference here, at Mile End, between those

-times and these is emphasised by the close-packed

-streets on either side, and by the crowded tram-cars

-that ply back and forth.</p>

-

-<p>Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in

-the little old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn

-that stands by itself, in advance of the frontage of

-the houses, and takes up a goodly portion of the

-broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when

-land was not so valuable as now; when local

-authorities were easy-going, and when anyone who

-had the impudence to squat down upon the public

-paths could do so, and, remaining there undisturbed

-for a period of twenty-one years, could thus derive

-a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is an ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>planation

-of the existence of the "Vine" in this

-position.</p>

-

-<p>Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses,

-built in 1695, for the housing of old skippers and

-shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little houses

-and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle

-where the old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly

-while the curious passers-by linger to gaze at them

-from the pavement, as though they were some strange

-kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the

-pages of fiction as this quiet haven in midst of

-the roaring streets, screened from them by walls

-and gates of curious architecture surmounted by

-models of the gallant old galleons that have long

-ceased to rove the raging main. It is a spot

-alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by

-the towering breweries, which indeed would have

-bought the old place and destroyed it a few years

-ago, but for the indignation aroused when the proposal

-of the governing body of the almshouses to

-sell became known.</p>

-

-<p>There is nothing else to detain the explorer

-on his way into Essex. The People's Palace, it

-is true, is a remarkable place, the result of Sir

-Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the

-East who would get culture and find recreation,

-but it is a dream realised as an architectural nightmare,

-and is a very terrible example of what is

-done to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art

-and Philanthropy.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">At</span> last, by this broadest of broad roads, we come

-to Stratford-le-Bow and its parish church. In these

-hurried times, and for some centuries past, the

-old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and

-as "Bow" alone it is familiar to all East-enders.

-The place is nowadays chiefly associated with Bryant

-&amp; May and matches, but there yet remain many

-old Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by

-the roadside, telling of days long before "patent

-safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel

-and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.</p>

-

-<p>"Bow," says the <i>Ambulator</i> of 1774, "is a

-village a little to the east of Mile End, inhabited

-by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here has

-been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little

-inferior to that of Chelsea." That description is

-now somewhat out of date. The manufactory of

-porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is

-scarce, and treasured accordingly. Whitsters&mdash;that

-is to say, bleachers of linen&mdash;and scarlet dyers, also,

-are to seek.</p>

-

-<p>Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound

-traveller in bold and rugged fashion; its time-worn

-tower standing midway of the road and

-challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little

-River Lea, just beyond, to Stratford and into Essex.

-Church and churchyard split the road up into

-two channels and thus destroy its width, which it

-never afterwards regains until the suburbs are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>

-passed and the open country reached. A modern

-touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in

-advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory

-attitude from its granite pedestal, and

-erected in his lifetime; recalling the fervent hero-worshipping

-days of the "People's William." The

-outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them

-that see statues raised to themselves, unless indeed

-they be made of finer clay than most mortals,

-kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years

-this bronze Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been

-made to preside, as it were, over an underground

-public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst

-he rises, absurdly eloquent.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus36">

-<img src="images/fig20.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">BOW.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Just how Stratford-le-Bow received its name

-is an interesting piece of history. Both here

-and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>

-anciently crossed by a paved stone ford of

-Roman construction, continuing the highway into

-Essex; but when that river's many channels,

-swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward

-the Thames, the low-lying lands of what we

-now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were for

-long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For

-months together the approaches to the Lea were lost

-in floods, and the real channels of the river became

-so deep that those who valued their lives and goods

-dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor

-travellers thus waterlogged came the good and pious

-Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the First. "Having

-herself been well washed in the water," as old

-Leland says, she fully appreciated the necessity

-for bridges, and accordingly directed the raising

-of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the

-building of two stone structures, of which one was

-the original "Bow" Bridge; "a rare piece of work,

-for before that time the like had never been seen

-in England." It seems to have been the stone

-arch that gave its name of "Bow," and if an arched

-stone bridge was so remarkable in those times that

-it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular,

-or "bow" shape, it must have been either the

-first, or among the earliest, of stone bridges

-built, in times when others were constructed of

-timber.</p>

-

-<p>The original name of the village that afterwards

-sprang up here, on the hither or Middlesex shore,

-was thus singularly contradictory; meaning "the

-street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratford<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>

-on the Essex side was in those days known as

-Stratford Langthorne.</p>

-

-<p>The good queen not only built the bridges and

-causeways, but endowed them with land and a

-water-mill, conveying those properties to the Abbess

-of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for

-the maintenance of the works. Having done all

-this, she died. Some years afterwards a Cistercian

-monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey

-Mills now stand, and the then Abbess of Barking,

-of opinion that the Abbot of that house, being near,

-would find it easier to look after the bridges than

-herself, reconveyed the property, together with its

-obligations, to him. The trust was kept for a time

-and then delegated to a certain Godfrey Pratt, who

-had a house built for him on the causeway and

-enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping

-the works in repair. Pratt did so well with his

-annual stipend and the alms given him by wayfarers

-that the Abbot at length discontinued the

-grant. Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite

-unauthorised toll-bar and levied "pontage" on all

-except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This went

-on for many years, until the scandal grew too great,

-and, in consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot

-dispossessed Godfrey Pratt of his toll-bar and

-resumed the control himself.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the

-road had been so greatly worn down that the feet

-of travellers and those of the horses often went

-through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently,

-to undergo an extensive cobbling process; a treatment,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>by the way, continued through the centuries

-until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.</p>

-

-<p>In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork

-of all ages. The property for its maintenance had,

-of course, been lost in the confiscation of monastic

-estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair afterwards

-fell upon the local authorities, who always

-preferred to patch and tinker it so long as such a

-course was possible. On February 14, 1839, the

-existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one

-seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIV</p>

-

-

-<p>"<span class="smcap">Farewell</span>, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I

-heard say, honest Conscience was once drowned."</p>

-

-<p>Thus says Will Kemp, in his <i>Nine Days'

-Wonder</i>, the account of a dance he jigged from

-London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It

-is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that

-old joke about the drowning of conscience here, and

-so we will also without delay "have over" the

-modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy

-flour mills, and crossing another branch of the Lea

-by Channelsea Bridge, come to Stratford.</p>

-

-<p>Here, then, begins the county of calves, according

-to the popular jest that to be a native of Essex is

-to be an "Essex Calf." It is not generally regarded

-as a complimentary title, for of all young animals<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>

-the calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward.

-To this day in rural England the contemptuous

-exclamation "you great calf!" is used of an awkward,

-overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings.

-Yet, if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer

-on this subject, the nickname had a complimentary

-origin, "for," said he, "this county produceth calves

-of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."</p>

-

-<p>We have already seen that the French spoken at

-Stratford-le-Bow in Chaucer's time was a scoff and a

-derision. To-day, neither on the Middlesex nor the

-Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages

-either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of

-every kind, the making of matches that strike only

-on the box, the varied work of the Stratford and

-West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations

-close at hand; while the business of covering the

-potato-fields, the celery-beds and the grounds of the

-old suburban mansions with endless rows of suburban

-dwellings is engrossing attention down the road.

-Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban,

-and Ilford far greater in these days than it ever was

-when its "great" prefix was never pretermitted.

-London, indeed, stretches far out along this road,

-and the country is reached only after many miles of

-that debatable land which belongs neither to country

-nor town. Heralds of the great metropolis appear

-to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far

-away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the

-dim presentiment of some vast capital," as De

-Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like a

-misgiving."</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>Stratford has not improved since coaches left

-the road. It has grown greatly, and grown dirty,

-squalid and extremely trying to noses that have

-not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure

-factories and other odoriferous industries. But it

-is a place of great enterprises and great and

-useful markets, and when its introductory mean

-streets are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone

-Road branches off to the left, looks by

-contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton

-Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park

-in succession, past a building which, whether as an

-institution or an example of beautiful architecture,

-would well grace the West. The West Ham Public

-Library and Technical Institute is here referred

-to. "Irish Row," on the way, marked on old

-maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages inhabited

-until recent years by a turbulent colony

-of London-Irish market-gardening labourers, subsidised

-by Mrs Nelson in times of coaching competition

-to impede hated rivals as they came past

-the "Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of

-Manor Park; a house which, like the "Coach

-and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a

-legitimate coaching trade to something more in

-the gin-palace sort. This is not to say that the

-staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct

-negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish

-Row, but when the rival Ipswich "Umpire" or

-the "New Colchester" coaches developed much

-sporting competition and their coachmen evinced

-a dogged determination to be first over Bow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>

-Bridge on the way up to London, and, by consequence,

-the first to arrive at their destination,

-why, an obscure hint or two on the part of one

-of her numerous staff, accompanied by the wherewithal

-for a drink, produced wonders in the way

-of highway obstruction. But such recollections

-are become unsubstantial as the fabric of which

-dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions

-of tramways and interminable rows of suburban

-shops that conduct to Ilford Bridge.</p>

-

-<p>Great Ilford lies on the other side of the

-sullen Roding, that rolls a muddy tide in aimless

-loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking

-Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial

-been approached by a bridge replacing the "eald,"

-or old, ford, whence its name derives and not

-from that crossing of the stream being an "ill"

-ford, as imaginative, but uninstructed, historians

-would have us believe; although the slimy black

-mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the

-exercise of fording an ill enough enterprise.

-Ilford is now in the throes of development and is

-fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere

-suburb. Let us leave it for places less sophisticated.</p>

-

-<p>The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving

-Ilford by moonshine, set forward "dauncing

-within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two

-strong Jades were beating and byting either of

-other." We take this to mean two women fighting

-on the road, until the context is reached, where

-he says that their hooves formed an arch over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>

-him and that he narrowly escaped being kicked

-on the head. It then becomes evident that he is

-talking of horses.</p>

-

-<p>Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and

-in more decorous fashion than that of Will Kemp,

-we come, past an inn oddly named the "Cauliflower"&mdash;probably

-as a subtle compliment to the

-abounding market-gardens of the neighbourhood&mdash;to

-the long, straight perspective of the road

-across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of

-new suburban "villa" streets now cover the

-waste on either side, so that the beginnings of

-the plain are not so much heath as modern

-suburb, created by the Great Eastern Railway's

-suburban stations and by the far-reaching enterprises

-of land corporations, which here carry on

-the usual speculations of the speculative builder

-on a gigantic scale. In acre upon acre of closely-packed

-streets, each one with a horrible similarity

-to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning

-clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty

-London live and lose their individuality, and

-pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman

-of a century ago waited impatiently behind

-the ragged thickets and storm-tossed thorn trees of

-Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there now rises

-the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway

-between Ilford station and that of Chadwell

-Heath, the recent enormous growth of population

-on this sometime waste has led to the erection of

-the new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes,"

-while widened lines have been provided

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>for the increased train services. "Seven Kings"

-is a romantic name, but who those monarchs

-were, and what they were ever doing on the

-Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable

-for cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is

-impossible to say. Many wits have been at work

-on the problem, but have been baffled. The

-natural assumption is that at this spot, marked

-on old maps as "Seven Kings Watering," the

-seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily

-records no such meeting, but there was

-no <i>Court Circular</i> in those times, and so many

-royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked,

-except locally and in some fashion similar to this.

-So let us assume the kings met here and watered

-their horses at the "watering," which was a place

-where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash.

-The stream still crosses the highway, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>

-civilisation has put it in a pipe and tucked it

-away underground.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus37">

-<img src="images/fig21.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">SEVEN KINGS.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway

-at this point, known as Stoup Lane ("stoup"

-meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of

-the Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish.

-Here it was, in 1794, on a night of December,

-that a King's messenger, James Martin by name,

-was shot by five footpads. The register of St

-Edmund's, Romford, records the burial of this

-unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.</p>

-

-<p>Let us not, however, in view of the more or less

-grisly dangers that still await belated wayfarers on

-this road, enlarge too greatly on the lawlessness of

-old times; for the homeward-bound resident making

-for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs

-towards the stroke of ten o'clock is not infrequently

-startled by the sinister figure of a footpad springing

-from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and demanding&mdash;<i>not</i>

-his money or his life, as in the old

-formula, but&mdash;a halfpenny! This invariable demand

-of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath footpads, which

-argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is

-for half the price of a drink.</p>

-

-<p>"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?"

-asks the threatening tramp.</p>

-

-<p>"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning

-the long perspective of the road for the policeman

-who ought to be within sight&mdash;but is not;

-"w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"</p>

-

-<p>"I've walked all the way from Romford and only

-got half the price of a glass o' beer," says the rascal.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>The citizen is astonished and incredulous, and his

-astonishment gets the better of his fear. "Oh, come

-now," he rejoins, "no one walks three miles from

-Romford for a glass of beer; besides, all the houses

-here close at ten o'clock."</p>

-

-<p>"Oh, they do, do they?" replies the tramp,

-offensively. "'Ere, my mate Bill'll talk to you,"

-and, whistling, the ominous bulk of Bill emerges

-aggressively from the darkling hedge, and together

-they proceed to wipe the road with that respectable

-ratepayer, and, rifling his pockets, leave him, bruised

-and bleeding, to reflect on the blessings of civilisation

-and to be thankful that he was not born a

-hundred years ago, when he might have been shot

-dead instead of being felled to the ground by the

-half-brick in a handkerchief which he finds beside

-him and takes home as a trophy.</p>

-

-<p>Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past

-Beacontree Heath, on the right, to an open country

-of disconsolate-looking contorted elms and battered

-windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and

-still airs of summer of the winter winds that race

-across the watery flats of Rippleside and Dagenham

-Marshes, out of the shivering east. Lonely, until

-quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House,"

-beside the road, the two whalebones that even yet

-surmount its garden entrance the wonderment for

-more than two hundred years of chance travellers.

-Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded

-in the Thames in the year of Oliver Cromwell's

-death, and set up here in memory of him. However

-that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>

-Ogilby's <i>Britannia</i> was published, for the house is

-marked on his map as "Ye Whalebone."</p>

-

-<p>These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected,

-have little longer yet to remain, for though apparently

-proof against decay, the house and grounds

-are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale

-to the builders.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus38">

-<img src="images/fig22.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">WHALEBONE HOUSE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The sole historic or other vestige remaining of

-the "Whalebone" turnpike-gate, once standing

-here, is an account to be found in the newspapers

-of the time of an attack made upon George Smith,

-the toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused

-in the darkness by a voice calling "Gate!" and, going

-to open it, was instantly knocked down, in a manner

-somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero

-of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"Last night and the night before,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">Three tom-cats came knocking at my door.</span><br />

-<span class="i0">I went down to let them in,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin."</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-<p>The two men who felled the unfortunate George

-Smith, alarmed by his cries of "Murder!" threatened

-to shoot him if he were not quiet, and, going over his

-pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five

-shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting

-him over, a third confederate, ransacking the house,

-discovered three pounds. With this booty and a

-parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared

-as silently as they came.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XV</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Romford</span>, now approached, is but twelve miles from

-London, and has frankly given up the impossible and

-ceased all pretence of being provincial. At the same

-time, building-land having only just (in the speculator's

-phrase) become "ripe for development," the

-townlet has not yet lost all individuality in suburban

-extension.</p>

-

-<p>The place, say some antiquaries, derives its name

-from the "Roman ford" on the Rom brook, but it is

-a great deal more likely that the origin is identical

-with that of the first syllable in the names of Ramsgate,

-Ramsey and Romney, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon

-"ruim" = a marsh. Time was when the town<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>

-was celebrated for its manufacture of breeches; an

-industry which gave rise to a saying still current in

-the less polished nooks and corners of Essex&mdash;"Go

-to Romford and get your backsides new bottomed."

-Breeches have long ceased to be a noted product of

-the town, which for many years past has bulked large

-in the annals of Beer. Barricades, avenues, mountains

-and Alpine ranges of barrels, hogsheads, firkins

-and kilderkins of Romford ale and stout proclaim

-that the Englishman's preference for his "national

-drink" has not abated, and that</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"Damn his eyes, whoever tries</span><br />

-<span class="i0">To rob a poor man of his beer"</span><br />

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>is still a popular sentiment; as both the brewers of

-arsenical compounds and the more rabid among teetotallers

-are some day likely to discover.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus39">

-<img src="images/fig23.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">ENTRANCE TO ROMFORD.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>A French traveller in England some two hundred

-years ago wrote that "there are a hundred sorts of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>

-Beer made in England, and some are not bad: Art

-has well supplied Nature in this particular. Be that

-as it will, beer is Art and wine is Nature; I am for

-Nature against the world." That old fellow did not

-know how artful beer could be, and if he could re-visit

-his native France might discover that even wine is no

-longer the simple child of nature it once was.</p>

-

-<p>But although John Barleycorn is the tutelary

-deity of Romford, it is quite conceivable that the

-stranger bound for Norwich, and turning neither to

-right nor to left, might pass through the town without

-so much as a glimpse obtained of those Alpine

-ranges aforesaid. True, on entering Romford, he

-could scarce fail to observe certain weird structures

-ahead: odd towers like first cousins to lighthouses,

-springing into the sky line, with ranges of perpendicular

-pipes, like the disjointed fragments of some

-mammoth organ, beside them, the characteristic signs

-and portents of a great brewery; but the barrels are

-secluded, nor even are Romford's streets blocked, as

-might have been suspected, with brewers' drays.

-Romford, indeed, spells to the uninstructed stranger

-rather bullocks than beer; for the cattle-pens are the

-chief feature of its market-place, and sheep and hay

-and straw bulk more in the eye of the road-farer than

-the products of Ind, Coope &amp; Co., which are to be

-seen in all their vastness beside the railway station

-and on the sidings constructed especially for the

-trade in ale and stout.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus7">

-<img src="images/fig24.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">ROMFORD.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The town in its most characteristic aspect is seen

-in the accompanying illustration taken from the doorway

-of that old inn, the "Windmill and Bells," the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a><br /><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a><br /><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>

-broad road margined with granite setts and the

-pavements fenced with posts and rails; the re-built

-parish church prominent across the market-place.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus40">

-<img src="images/fig25.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PUTTELS BRIDGE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Beyond Romford the road grows rural, and, by

-the same token, hilly. This, gentle reader, let it not

-be forgotten, is Essex, and we all know with what

-persistence that county is spoken of, and written of,

-as flat. If you would know what flatness is, try the

-Great North Road and its long levels between Baldock,

-Biggleswade and Alconbury, or search Bedfordshire,

-Lincolnshire or Hunts. <i>There</i> is flatness,

-beside which that of Essex is the merest superstition,

-started probably by some tired traveller of inconstant

-purpose, who, essaying to explore the county, gave

-up the enterprise when he had reached Wanstead

-Flats. Surveying that not highly romantic expanse,

-he took it as an exemplar of the rest of the shire, and

-so returned home to start this immortal myth on its

-career. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>

-will subscribe to its flatness as an article of faith, and

-as such an one cycles from Romford, through the

-hamlet of Hare Street, over Puttels Bridge, where

-stands an old toll-house, to the other hamlet of Brook

-Street, the fact that he will actually have to <i>walk</i> his

-machine up the steep hill that conducts into the town

-of Brentwood will cause him to think hard things of

-myth-makers.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus41">

-<img src="images/fig26.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE "FLEECE," BROOK STREET.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Brook Street Hill is the name of this eminence.

-Beside it stands a cemetery, convenient for brakeless

-cyclists who recklessly descend, and at its foot is a

-fine old inn, the "Fleece," a house of call for the fish-waggons

-that were once so great a feature of this

-road so far as Colchester and Harwich.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus42">

-<img src="images/fig27.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE MARTYR'S TREE, BRENTWOOD.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Brentwood, on the crest of this hill, occupies an

-elevated table-land, with sharp descents from it on

-every side. The "burnt wood" town, destroyed in

-some forgotten conflagration, is now a long-streeted,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>old-fashioned place, apparently in no haste

-to bid good-bye to the past. It keeps the old Assize

-House of Queen Elizabeth's time in repair, and

-carefully sees to it that the Martyr's Tree, decayed

-though the old elm stump be and hollow, is saved

-from perishing altogether. It was in 1555 that

-William Hunter, in his twentieth year, suffered in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>

-this place for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation.

-That staunch upholder of the Protestant faith

-scarce needed the modern memorial, close by, while

-this shattered trunk remained, its gaping rents

-carefully bricked up by pious hands; but let the

-venerable relic be doubly safe-guarded in these times,

-when that candle lit by Latimer and Ridley, close

-upon three centuries and a half ago, burns dim, and

-lawless and forsworn clergy within the Church of

-England are working towards Rome and the return

-of the famous days of fire and stake; when the blood

-of the martyrs has ceased to inspire a generation

-which demands to be shown some tangible object

-before it can realise the significance of that sacrifice.

-Here, then, is something that can be seen and

-touched, to bring the least imaginative back in fancy

-to those terrible days, when brave hearts of every

-class gave up their lives in fire and smoke rather

-than abjure their faith. The Romanising clergy of

-to-day are made of coarser fabric than the martyrs.

-<i>They</i> are not actuated by honesty, but take oaths

-they have no intention of observing to a Church

-whose bread they eat and whose trust they betray.</p>

-

-<p>Would you know something of that martyrdom

-at Brentwood? Then scan the inscription on the

-modern granite obelisk, and control, if you can, a

-righteous indignation when you perceive a modern

-Roman Catholic chapel standing, impudent in these

-days of an exaggerated tolerance, over against the

-Martyr's Tree itself, typifying the Scarlet Woman

-in midst of her blasphemies, exultant over the blood

-of the saints. "He being dead yet speaketh,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>

-quotes that inscription; but what avails it to speak

-in the ears of the deaf, or to talk of honour to the

-perjured? "Learn from his example," continue

-those momentous words, "to value the privilege of

-an open Bible, and be careful to maintain it"; but

-the world goes by unheeding, and only when the

-danger again becomes acute and liberty of conscience

-is passing away will indifference be conquered and

-the folly of it revealed.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVI</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Brentwood</span> still keeps a notable relic of coaching

-days in the old "White Hart" Inn, a curious

-specimen of the timbered and galleried type of

-hostelry familiar to our great-grandfathers. It turns

-a long plastered front to the street, but the great

-carved and panelled doorway leading into the coach-yard

-confirms the proud legend, "Established 1480."

-Full forty coaches passed through Brentwood in

-every twenty-four hours at the close of the Coaching

-Age, but the earlier days of coaching brought the

-"White Hart" more custom than came to it at the

-close of that era, when, in consequence of the roads

-being improved, travelling was quicker, and places

-once halted at were left behind without stopping.

-Innkeepers were considerable losers by this constant

-acceleration of coaches, and saw the smart, long-distance

-stages go dashing by where, years before,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>

-the old slow coaches stayed the night, or, at the very

-least, halted for meals.</p>

-

-<p>The "White Hart" remains typical of the earlier

-times, and still keeps the old-world comfort regretted

-in other places by De Quincey, who lived long

-enough to witness the beginnings of the great

-changes that have come over the hotels of town

-and country since coaches gave place to railways.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus43">

-<img src="images/fig28.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "WHITE HART," BRENTWOOD.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Brentwood</span> is no sooner left behind than the road

-descends steeply over what was once a part of

-Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild and

-hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the

-place where, in November 1692, those seven jovial

-Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay were themselves,

-while hunting the hare, chased and at last

-run down by nine hunters of a different sort, who

-turned their pockets out and then bade them good-day

-and be damned. The original chronicler of this

-significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell,

-makes no especial feature of the event. He merely

-records it as having happened "near Ingerstone,"

-and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings

-in the same sort along the several approaches to

-London. Little wonder, therefore, that Macaulay

-should have drawn the conclusion that at this

-time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest

-and most populous shires of England was as dangerous

-as a pilgrimage across the deserts of Arabia.</p>

-

-<p>From the descending road or from Shenfield

-Church the country is seen spread out, map-like,

-below, over the valley of the Thames, to where

-the river empties itself into the broad estuary at

-the Nore. At least, there is the vale, and the

-map vouchsafes the information that the river flows

-thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out

-the view of that imperial waterway. "I cannot

-see the Spanish fleet, because it's not in sight,"

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in

-the poem, and it is precisely for the same reason

-that the Thames is not visible from Shenfield.

-But if one is denied a view of that imperial river,

-at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard,

-a prodigal riot of roses of every hue and habit,

-are worth seeing. The attenuated shingled spire,

-one of the characteristic features of Essex churches,

-beckons insistently from the road, and he who

-thereupon turns aside is well repaid, in a sight of

-the elaborately-carved timber columns of the interior,

-proving how in this county, where building stone is

-not found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders

-made excellent shift with heart of oak. This is,

-in fact, like so many other Essex churches, largely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>

-wooden, and its timber is as sound now as it

-was six or seven hundred years ago.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus44">

-<img src="images/fig29.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">SHENFIELD.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End"

-lies two miles distant from Shenfield. As in the

-case of so many other places near the great roads,

-a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name

-of the old village sprang up, to catch the custom

-of travellers; but an additionally curious fact

-is the utter extinction of the original village, which

-lay a mile distant from the highway, where the

-parish church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring

-farmstead. Explorers in the countryside

-are often astonished at the great distances between

-villages and their parish churches, and seek in

-vain in their guide-books or in talk with the

-"oldest inhabitant" an explanation of so curious

-a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the

-mystery is found in the enclosure of the surrounding

-common lands. The enclosure of commons has

-never been possible without the passing of special

-Acts, which have divided what should have been

-the heritage of the people for all time between

-the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their

-proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor

-and the tenants would each obtain their share of

-the plunder, in the form of freehold land, with

-the obvious result that the villagers, instead of

-paying rent for their cottages clustering round the

-church in the original village, built themselves

-new and rent-free cottages on their share of the

-spoil of the commons. The old cottages being

-pulled down, or allowed to decay, it was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>

-long before the last trace of the original village

-disappeared.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus45">

-<img src="images/fig30.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">MOUNTNESSING CHURCH.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Mountnessing was once the seat of the

-Mounteneys, who have long since vanished from

-their old home. The old church, largely red brick

-without and timber within, still preserves the

-fossil rib-bone of an elephant, long regarded with

-reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant,

-and has for an additional curiosity the carving of

-a head on one of the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps

-by way of warning to Early English parishioners

-of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's

-bridle." The red-brick west front of the church,

-masking the wooden belfry-frame from the weather,

-still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick, but

-such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that

-without that evidence of age it would be difficult

-to credit it with so long an existence. The iron ties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a><br /><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a><br /><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>

-in the shape of the letter S give the view a

-singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in

-verse, beginning, "Reader, excuse the underwritten,"

-is a curiosity of Mountnessing churchyard.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus8">

-<img src="images/fig31.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as

-the modern settlement is named, is seen clustering

-on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and a wayside

-pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting

-of a dozen cottages, two public-houses, a

-general "stores" (our grandfathers would have been

-content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a

-tin tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to

-walk a mile to church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and

-a windmill situated on a knoll; a windmill that for

-picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome

-or a Constable.</p>

-

-<p>From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims,

-two miles to "Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of

-customary spelling. The milestones are undoubtedly

-strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on the

-pedantic side, for that village derives its name from

-a settlement of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or

-meadow, at the Roman milestone they found here,

-but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone"

-they called their village, which lies in the little valley

-of the River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream

-of the smallest) hither and thither to give a perennial

-verdure to the meads along its course. "Ing" is,

-by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names

-successively met with along the River Wid.

-Mounteney's Ing we have already seen, and Fryerning,

-or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>

-Margaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond

-Ingatestone.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus46">

-<img src="images/fig32.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE GATEHOUSE, INGATESTONE HALL.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad,

-is of the narrowest, and remains in almost

-every detail exactly as it is pictured in the old print

-reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the

-church still rising behind. It is a tower which by

-no means looks its age of over four hundred years,

-so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness of the brick.

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a><br /><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a><br /><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that

-Sir William Petre who, emulating the accommodating

-qualities of the famous Vicar of Bray, bowed before

-the religious storms of the reigns of Henry the

-Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth.

-"Made of the willow and not of the oak," those

-tempests not only left him unscathed, but brought

-him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched

-with the manor of Ingatestone, plundered from the

-Abbey of Barking, together with much spoil elsewhere.

-How he managed to do it is a mystery, but

-during the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for

-such the Petres always have been) actually obtained

-a Papal Bull confirming him and his in these grants.

-One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy,

-recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble

-physiognomy could be so accomplished a time-server

-and truckler. His home, plundered from the nuns

-of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone

-Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the

-road, down a beautifully-timbered country lane. The

-entrance is by a gatehouse with the motto, "<i>Sans

-Dieu Rien</i>," situated at the end of an avenue and

-framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old

-red-brick turreted buildings of the fifteenth and

-sixteenth centuries. The Lord Petre of to-day does

-not reside here, but the place is still in the family,

-and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use.

-Miss Braddon is perhaps scarce to be numbered

-among those novelists whose literary landmarks are

-followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone

-Hall that it is the scene of her <i>Lady Audley's Secret</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>

-The fish-ponds of old monastic times, the

-well in which Lady Audley thrust her husband,

-the lime-walk he haunted, together with such

-romantic accessories as terraced walks and a priest's

-hiding-hole, form items which would require the

-business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer to

-fully enlarge upon. They <i>do</i> say&mdash;the "they" in

-question being the gossips of Ingatestone&mdash;that

-the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail, passing at

-1�15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the

-high road, once saw "a something" in white mysteriously

-sauntering beneath the trees, but whether it was

-the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one of the sisters

-thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely

-a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the

-Postmaster-General's regulations and time-sheets not

-allowing for time spent in psychical research.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus9">

-<img src="images/fig33.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. <span class="in5"><i>From an Old Print</i></span></p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is

-visible on the right, soon after leaving Ingatestone.

-Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its timbered

-belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the

-village, standing solitary, save for the vicarage and

-a farmhouse, beside a railway crossing&mdash;if, indeed,

-any building adjoining the main-line of a great

-railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret

-thus honoured in the place-name is the Saint to

-whom the church is dedicated. Some traces of the

-"marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the

-old windows, in decorative allusion, remained

-until they were swept away for modern stained-glass

-in memory of a late vicar and his family;

-glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>

-save for an inscription on one of the bells, she now

-remains unhonoured in her own church, deposed

-in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects

-kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art

-furnisher. The only remaining ancient glass is that

-of the east window, a magnificent fifteenth-century

-"tree of Jesse."</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus47">

-<img src="images/fig34.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">AT MARGARETTING.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the

-twenty-fifth milestone, where a post-office and some

-few scattered cottages straggle picturesquely at the

-foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The

-odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially

-to spoil some two miles of this road is the park

-wall of Hylands, a large estate purchased about

-1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster,

-who stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and

-raised this eyesore to enclose his new-made park.

-Almost as soon as the last brick was put in its place,

-the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by

-railway speculations, and his walled-in Eden was

-sold. Nature in the meanwhile has done her best,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>

-and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the

-ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River

-Wid crosses beneath the road, water-lilies gem the

-stream and the wind sounds in the luxuriant

-Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.</p>

-

-<p>If it were not for its church, which has been

-re-built and has a very fine and tall spire, one might

-easily pass Widford and not know it, for the very

-few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such

-as it is, it stands on the crest of something not

-quite so much as a hill and rather more than an

-incline, and beside its large church has an equally

-fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White

-Horse." Time was, and that until three years since,

-when Widford was celebrated for its one other inn,

-the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled,

-the "Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by

-the picture-sign of a headless woman, with the

-inscription, <i>Fort Bone</i>, on one side, and a portrait

-of Henry the Eighth on the other. "<i>Fort Bone</i>"

-was commonly Englished by slangy cyclists as "good

-business." The sign, of course, was a pictorial and

-satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an

-open question whether or not in their present form

-this and the several other "Quiet Woman" and

-"Good Woman" signs throughout the country are

-perversions of the original legend, "<i>la bonne fame</i>"

-displayed on old inns in the distant past; an

-inscription laudatory of the hostelry, and matching

-the self-recommendation of "<i>la bonne r�nomm�e</i>,"

-found in modern France, or the more familiar "noted

-house for&mdash;" and "good pull up" inscriptions on inns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>

-in modern England. Virgil's description of Fame,

-walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the

-clouds, may have originated the pictorial sign of

-the headless woman in days of ancient learning;

-and the classic allusion becoming lost and the

-supposedly incorrect spelling of "<i>fame</i>" being

-altered to "<i>femme</i>," we thus obtain a very reasonable

-derivation. We may take it that many shrew-bitten

-folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily

-agreed to forget the original meaning in order to

-adopt one so exactly fitting their opinion that the

-only quiet or good women were headless ones.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus48">

-<img src="images/fig35.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE "GOOD WOMAN" SIGN.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change

-that is robbing places of all interest and distinction,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>

-the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer swings

-from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed

-inn opposite the "White Horse" has retired into

-private life. The picture sign is now housed inside

-the "White Horse."</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVIII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Widford</span> almost immediately introduces the explorer

-to Moulsham (originally the "mole's home"),

-itself own brother&mdash;but a very out-at-elbows

-brother&mdash;to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the

-wind between our gentility and the somewhat

-fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we should turn to the

-left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of

-the town, and so, proceeding along the "new

-London road," come into Chelmsford, half way

-down the High Street. Being, however, intent

-rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en

-endure the half-mile length of shabby, untidy

-street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford,

-the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City

-of Calves, over the hunchbacked and narrow stone

-bridge across the Chelmer, the successor, at an

-interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original

-bridge built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That

-is a huge slice of time, but it was too late, even

-in Norman days, for the town to change its

-name from Chelmers<i>ford</i> to something more appropriate

-when the ford was thus superseded.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High

-Street of the town, the view closed by the Shire

-Hall and the church; the Norwich Road, however,

-turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and

-refusing to make acquaintance with the town. It

-is the Conduit that is seen in this illustration of

-the High Street, its architecture scarce improved

-by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be

-ornamental, over its cupola.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus49">

-<img src="images/fig36.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE BRIDGE: ENTRANCE TO CHELMSFORD.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at

-the end of this view, spoil one another, the Hall

-almost entirely hiding the church when looking

-down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular

-exterior of the church putting the clumsy

-architecture of the Hall to shame, as a pagan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>

-upstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some,

-but its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone

-concerns the passing stranger, who feels so concerned

-by sight of it that he accordingly passes

-the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the

-seated bronze effigy of a native, a bygone Lord

-Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like an old

-apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops

-green coppery stains over his nice stone pedestal)

-keep one another company in the open space fronting

-this building.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus50">

-<img src="images/fig37.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE CONDUIT, CHELMSFORD.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal,

-whose career came to a close in 1806. The

-monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for

-all time the image of a judge whose administration

-of English law, directed by serene wisdom, assisted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>

-by purest love of justice, endeared by unwearied

-kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will

-be held by his country in undying remembrance."

-His birthplace could hardly have said more than

-that.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus51">

-<img src="images/fig38.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">TINDAL'S STATUE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways,

-being indeed very severely bitten with a taste for

-modernity. Is it not famous as the first town in

-the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have

-not its streets been resolutely swept clear of

-antiquity? The town, in short, is scarce picturesque.

-It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays, but

-on other occasions every house provokes a yawn,

-with perhaps the exception of the "Saracen's

-Head," an inn that, despite its modernised and

-stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old

-times. There was a "Saracen's Head" here certainly

-as far back as the fifteenth century, and probably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>

-much earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it

-derived from Crusading times, when the knights

-and men-at-arms, returning from Palestine with

-wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys,

-leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the

-Holy Land, found their fame come home before

-them, and the old inns they had known&mdash;the

-"Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine

-Wheel," and the like&mdash;often re-named in their

-honour. With little effort we can imagine the

-scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period,

-when exploits at Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were

-told and re-told, and gained wonderfully in the repetition

-over sack and malvoysie. What bloody

-fellows they were, and with what zest they slew

-the Soldan's soldiers over and over again as they

-sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six

-hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has

-been rebuilt many times since then; but human

-nature remains the same though timber rot and

-brick perish, and again and again the same old

-talk has been heard in the bar-parlour of the

-inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Cre�y;

-men of a later age who warred under Marlborough

-at Blenheim, Ramillies or Malplaquet; the lads of

-the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from the

-horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from

-a hundred fights on the burning South African

-veldt&mdash;all have had their circle of greedy listeners

-here.</p>

-

-<p>The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek

-and stuccoed face to the street, and the house shows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>

-signs of extensive rebuilding and remodelling, undertaken

-in the full flush of the great days of coaching

-prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in

-the belief that coaching, and the road as an institution,

-would last for ever. Fond belief! Has anyone

-ever stopped to consider the fact that the great

-coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a

-great deal more to do with the pulling down of the

-old-fashioned galleried and timbered inns of country

-towns than ever railways have had? The average

-small country town felt in fullest measure the great

-increase in business incidental to the last years of the

-coaching age, and every innkeeper hastened to

-rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who

-had, from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding

-until the dawn of the Railway Age, on seeing that

-the road would decay and travellers be carried to

-their journeys' ends without halting for rest and refreshment,

-promptly gave up any such ideas and were

-thankful that they had not begun the work of reconstruction

-and enlargement. Those who had were

-ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared

-may yet be often met with, a world too large, in

-country towns where once the mails and the stage-coaches

-passed, like a procession, day by day. It is

-quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house

-like the "White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it

-is not too much to say that, had the Coaching Age

-lasted another ten years, it also would have been

-rebuilt.</p>

-

-<p>An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its

-central figure, belongs to the "Saracen's Head" at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>

-Chelmsford. For some years after he had won fame

-as a novelist he still retained his position in the

-General Post Office, of which he was a travelling

-inspector. On one of these official journeys he

-happened to be staying here, at the time when his

-<i>Barchester Towers</i> was being issued, after the then

-prevailing fashion, in parts. He was seated in the

-coffee-room when two clergymen entered, one of

-them with the newly-issued part of the story. The

-cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the

-trials of the Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs

-Proudie, who was rather a trial to Trollope's

-readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the

-clergyman put the book down. "Confound that Mrs

-Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish she were dead!"</p>

-

-<p>Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he

-thanked the reader for thus accidentally telling him

-that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome, and

-undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen,"

-said he, "she shall die in the next number;" and die

-she accordingly did. But in defence of Trollope's

-truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the

-opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs

-Proudies may yet be found in a goodly proportion of

-the episcopal palaces of England.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIX</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Returning</span> now to the Conduit, and making for the

-open road once more, Chelmsford is left by way of

-Springfield, past the successor of Chelmsford's finest

-old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The

-old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five

-centuries, and had been the halting-place of many

-famous travellers, among them a long line of Earls

-of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham

-and London; but none of these associations

-sufficed to save the house. Fragments of its carved

-beams are preserved in the local museum, but recall

-it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon

-bring back in his majesty that denizen of the earth

-in the dim �ons of the past. Chelmsford would

-dearly like many of its old buildings&mdash;wantonly

-demolished years ago&mdash;back again; but what is done

-cannot be undone, and there's an end on't. The

-"Cross Keys" remains, in a restored condition.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus52">

-<img src="images/fig39.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE "THREE CUPS" SIGN

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of

-Chelmsford, carries varying significances. To the

-mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the American

-from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim

-Fathers and their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts;

-and to the gaol-bird it means a "stretch"

-of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in

-fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building

-enlarged in recent years for the accommodation of

-the guests consigned to it at Assize time from the

-Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>once past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing

-and cheerful. Its long miscellaneous street, where

-the quaint sign of the "Three Cups" stands out,

-gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive

-grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of

-picturesqueness. That this has been the aim of their

-architects is abundantly manifest in examples where,

-under a single roof, one may experience the mingled

-romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle,

-a Tudor manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a

-"Queen Anne" mansion; all done in red brick,

-gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover,

-fitted with electric light and hot and cold water

-supply. To this end has castellated and domestic

-architecture unwound its long story during some five

-hundred years. It will be seen thereby that William<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>

-of Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time

-architect did not live in vain.</p>

-

-<p>But if Springfield be modern as a suburb, it is

-ancient as a village. To see old Springfield, it is

-necessary to turn off the road to the left, and to

-journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church,

-a noble building with mingled red brick and stone

-tower bearing the inscription, "Prayse God for al

-the good benefactors 1586." Oliver Goldsmith, it is

-quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model

-for his <i>Deserted Village</i>. He certainly visited at an

-old cottage opposite the church, but the real Sweet

-Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus53">

-<img src="images/fig40.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">SPRINGFIELD CHURCH.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Beyond the village and facing the high road are

-the strangely impressive lodges of the historic estate

-of New Hall; new at the end of the fifteenth century,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>

-but declined into a respectable age by now and

-cobwebbed with much history and many legends.

-The place, now and for a considerable number of

-years past an alien convent, has been owned

-during a period of four hundred years by an

-astonishing number of historic personages, who have

-succeeded one another like flitting phantoms. Here

-the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps out

-spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the

-handling of the historic kaleidoscope. Built by

-Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose daughter and

-heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and

-mother of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus

-eventually came into possession of Henry the Eighth,

-who occasionally resided here and re-named it

-"Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas

-Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex. By this time it had

-resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners were

-George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham,

-and Oliver Cromwell, who had it as a gift from

-Parliament and exchanged it so soon as he decently

-could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like

-residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him

-succeeded another Duke of Buckingham, and to him

-that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk, Duke

-of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and

-was visited here, when he was suffering from gout

-and dropsy, by that scribbling traveller, Cosmo,

-Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of

-historic owners may be said to end, but constant

-change has ever been the lot of New Hall, and a

-succession of lesser lights followed him until the

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a><br /><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a><br /><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>nuns set up their secluded life here and bade

-farewell to a vain world. That world passes by; the

-road on one side, the railway midway in the grounds,

-and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as

-morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the

-vineyard.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus10">

-<img src="images/fig41.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">NEW HALL LODGES

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road.

-All is emptiness, and the lichened brick and the

-crumbling stone vases of neighbouring boundary

-walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled

-aims characteristic of the place.</p>

-

-<p>There is an air of romance about Boreham House,

-as seen from the tree-embowered road at a little

-distance from New Hall; an altogether deceptive air,

-let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic

-building of white brick. It is its situation at the

-head of a formal lake, fringed with stately elms,

-that confers the illusory distinction, but the explorer

-of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing

-rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl

-squattering on the lake, can weave his own

-romance to fit the scene. And if the house, though

-stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest

-in the shape of the identical carriage used by the

-Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.

-Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent years

-to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken

-to pieces in an accident. Restored now to its

-original condition, it will need to be a great occasion

-indeed that brings it forth again.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus54">

-<img src="images/fig42.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">BOREHAM.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its

-old gabled cottages clustering round the still older

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>church, itself embowered in lime trees whose delightful

-scent weights the July air with an Arcadian

-languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham

-has every likelihood of having his nerves

-startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the road

-of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door

-open, and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of

-one of the inmates of the silent tomb making a

-hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High noon being

-an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying

-as to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on

-drawing nearer that the old tomb-house has been

-converted into a tool-house and general lumber-room,

-and that the figure seated within is the sexton

-enjoying his lunch, screened from the noonday heats.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>

-An inscription over the door of the ornate building&mdash;a

-copy of the Temple of the Winds at Athens&mdash;proclaims

-it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamian�,

-Anno 1764"; but the Walthams have disappeared,

-both from their mausoleum and the district. The

-body of the last appears to have been arrested for

-debt when on the road hither from Chelmsford.

-The sexton explains that the parish took over the

-Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing

-the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience

-hee-ar, years ago," says this typical Essex rustic, and

-goes on to tell how the oil and coals and candles for

-church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe

-Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held.

-Three Radcliffes, Earls of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather,

-father, and son, lie in effigy side by side on

-an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers

-are to my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton

-calls them, and explains that their broken noses

-are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.</p>

-

-<p>Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called

-the "mine" road, Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the

-great red-brick Georgian mansion of Crix, standing

-in its meadows where the little River Ter comes down

-from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels

-of Hatfield Mill, and then hurries off, as though

-belated, for a rendezvous with the Chelmer, two

-miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road

-with whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing

-warranty of its age in the inscription, "A.A. 1715";

-but if that evidence were lacking it could be found

-in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>

-an area with the raising of the road for the building

-of the bridge that long ago replaced the watersplash

-at this crossing of the stream.</p>

-

-<p>Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the

-heaths that once gave the place its original forename

-of "Heathfield," and the Peverels, identical with the

-Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly

-vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige

-of themselves in the church&mdash;that last resort of the

-antiquary in search of old manorial lords. It is

-true that on modern tablets built into the west

-front of the church the founding of a Benedictine

-Priory here in 1100 by Ingelrica, mother of William

-Peverel, is alluded to, together with the rather

-scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things

-are decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of

-Latin and lichen-stains, so that both their monastic

-beneficence and their maternal origin are only dimly

-to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.</p>

-

-<p>It is the distance of half a mile from the high

-road to where Hatfield church lies secluded, adjoining

-the grounds of a mansion partly occupying the

-site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It

-is here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's

-original baptism must be sought, and accordingly

-some stretches of common-land may be discovered

-close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us,

-though there be little enough to say of it, beyond

-the note that its closeness to the railway station has

-caused a certain growth and a certain amount of

-rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the

-old plaster cottages that were once the invariable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>

-feature of its street, and admirably figured forth the

-Essex manner of decoratively treating plaster-work.

-There remain here but two such cottages, bearing

-the date 1703, and the initials M.R., with <i>fleur-de-lis</i>.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XX</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">A road</span> of almost unvarying flatness conducts in

-something under three miles to Witham, entered

-nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by the

-Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates

-in no fewer than three separate and distinct names.

-As the River Witham, it confers a name upon the

-townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same

-sponsorial office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook

-it is endowed with a title that smacks rather

-of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in

-summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down

-upon the mere thread of water oozing and stewing

-in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the

-neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is

-not ill-named as the Podsbrook; but the Essex

-Council in bridging it so substantially think of it

-rather as the River Witham, which they have every

-right and cause to do, for the stream can avenge

-itself of those disfiguring potsherds and that contemptuous

-title in the most sardonic way when

-winter comes and the floods are out.</p>

-

-<p>The long street of Witham is remarkable for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>

-the number of large and handsome mansions dating

-from the time of Queen Anne, through the period

-of the four Georges. The greater number of the

-professional men of Essex would, from the number

-of those houses, appear to have settled in the little

-town and to have medically attended it and legally

-represented it to such an effect that it is only now

-beginning to recover from them and from the

-coming of the railway, which dealt a death-blow

-to the thriving coaching interest of the early part

-of the nineteenth century.</p>

-

-<p>For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place

-of Mrs Nelson's famous "Ipswich Blues," the

-crack coaches on the seventy miles of road, which

-started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary

-exertions made Ipswich in something under six

-hours. Such remarkable performances as these

-were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in

-place of the average ten miles on other roads, and

-by placing leaders in readiness at the foot of hills

-like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The "Blue

-Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some

-of the principal coaches drew up, is still in existence;

-its sign, a pierced effigy of that animal

-projecting from the front of the house and looming

-weirdly against the sky-line. There are many

-"White Harts" on the road to Norwich, the sign

-being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as

-that of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North

-Road; but of all the many examples to be met

-along these hundred and twelve miles this is the

-one that is most quaintly out of proportion, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a><br /><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a><br /><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>

-a head and neck less than half the size demanded

-by body and legs, and a golden collar and chain

-of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was

-the favourite badge of Richard the Second, whose

-connection with East Anglia was too slight for

-assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially

-allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference

-on the part of innkeepers along the Norwich

-Road.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus11">

-<img src="images/fig43.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">CHIPPING HILL.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Those who would seek the site of the original

-Witham must turn aside from the high road the

-matter of half a mile, past the railway station, to

-Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a

-camp successively occupied and wrought upon by

-the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons, it will

-be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant

-valley of that triply-named river already mentioned,

-in 1749 described by Walpole as "the prettiest little

-winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows

-falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to

-this day, and as sweet, and the by-road that comes

-up from the gravelly hollow and cuts through the

-earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold

-climbs up romantically under the blossoming limes

-into as pretty a picture in the rural sort as you

-shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old England

-before railways came, or science and the ten

-thousand plagues of modern life, and the cheap

-builder of hideous new cottages were let loose upon

-the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in

-the picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old

-dwellings, flint-built church tower and red-brick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>

-rectory, set in, upon and around the swelling grassy

-banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had

-both their fortress and their market, as evidenced

-by the still surviving name of Chipping, or Market

-Hill.</p>

-

-<p>Old East Anglian cottages have their own

-special characteristics, arising from local conditions,

-but one feature they share in common with all old

-rustic dwellings; the great size and relative importance

-of their genial chimneys, suggesting warmth

-and the lavish laying on of logs. They tell the

-passer-by of old times when wood was the only fuel;

-when it was to be gathered for the mere labour of

-gathering, and plenty of it was piled upon the

-generous open hearth. Modern cottages, all over

-the kingdom, tell a different tale, in the look of their

-meagre chimney-pots&mdash;a tale of coal, dearly purchased,

-economised in tiny grates.</p>

-

-<p>But the special features of East Anglian cottage

-architecture? They are here, in the highways and

-byways, for all to see who will. It is a land without

-stone, this East of England, where timber and flint

-and brick play important constructional parts in

-church and hall and manor-house, and where timber

-framing, lath and plaster, parge-work, and a few

-bricks for the chimney stacks, are combined to build

-up the cottages.</p>

-

-<p>Out of their necessities our ancestors contrived

-dwellings that for durability, comfort and artistry

-put modern houses, whether halls or cottages, to

-shame. The stone cottages of Somersetshire,

-Rutland, Leicestershire; the cob and thatch of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>

-Devon, the granite of Cornwall; the timber and

-plaster, or timber and brick noggin of Cheshire and

-Herefordshire are all evidence to this day of how

-skilfully our forbears employed the materials to

-their hands; and here in Essex you shall find a

-something in the art of cottage building hardly to

-be discovered elsewhere. This is the frequent use

-of parge-work, or pargetting, as it is sometimes

-called, on old cottage exteriors. Parge-work is the

-ornamental filling or surfacing of walls with plaster.

-The term is just as often applied to the elaborately-moulded

-and panelled plaster ceilings of Elizabethan

-and Jacobean halls as to the exterior decoration that

-forms so remarkable and pleasing a feature of Essex

-rustic cottage architecture. Few Essex villages

-that can claim to preserve many relics of old

-times are without examples of this peculiarly local

-style; although, to be sure, an ignorant want of

-appreciation has been the cause of much destruction

-of late years. The commoner forms of this decoration

-are frequently seen, in the easily incised patterns

-that even the unskilful can make in the plaster while

-still wet, by the aid of anything from a trowel to the

-finger-tips; just as a cook ornaments the dough of

-her uncooked pies. Many of these patterns are

-traditional; as much a matter of tradition, for instance,

-as are the needlework patterns wrought on

-the breast of an old smock-frock. The commonest

-is one produced by a process of combing the plaster

-in repetitions of a device resembling an elongated

-figure 8 laid flat, or perhaps more narrowly resembling

-a hank of worsted. Other patterns, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>

-whorls or concentric circles, stars, triangles and the

-like, are produced by wooden stamps. But the really

-beautiful examples are not the products of to-day.

-These belong to the seventeenth and eighteenth

-centuries, and are lavish in decoration of a Renaissance

-character moulded in high relief. Architects

-with sufficient culture and understanding to enable

-them to appreciate local style have, in recent years,

-reintroduced decoration of this character when

-building residences in the country, but many a

-humble cottager lives within walls that display a

-profusion of artistic devices unapproached by the

-houses of the wealthy.</p>

-

-<p>Discoveries close by the church on Chipping

-Hill have led to the belief that the building stands

-on, or near, the site of a Temple of Diana, and

-certainly Roman bricks are still visible in great

-numbers in the walls of the tower. A memorial in

-the chancel to Sir Gilbert East, who died in 1828,

-reminds the historian of some strange survivals existing

-at that time. The Easts were owners of the

-tithes at Witham, and although they lived so far

-distant as Berkshire, always insisted on their right of

-being buried here. Sir Gilbert East's body was, by

-his express direction, buried beside his wife, with a

-band of brass encircling both, engraved with the

-words from the marriage service, "Whom God hath

-joined together let no man put asunder." His

-funeral was a three days' business, with knights

-bannerets accompanying, and much pomp and

-circumstance. In the family vault they laid him,

-wrapped in linen, returned to Berkshire for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>

-reading of the will, when, to the dismay of the

-family, it was found that the knight had expressly

-wished to be buried in woollen. The family solicitor

-hurried back and, disinterring his defunct client, saw

-to it that he was comfortably tucked in as desired.</p>

-

-<p>Between Witham and Kelvedon, where the road

-runs level, there is but one hamlet, an offshoot of

-Rivenhall known as Rivenhall End, where a cottage

-close by the "Fox" inn, once a toll-house, bears its

-former history, plain to read, in the evidence of its

-windows commanding either approach, up or down

-the road. A mile and a half beyond begins Kelvedon,

-set down in the flats beside the River Blackwater;

-"Kelvedon Easterford, vulgo Keldon," as Ogilby

-calls it; "consisting," he continues, "chiefly of inns";

-a description which remains strikingly true to this

-day. This pronunciation, "Keldon," throws some

-light upon the following remarks of an old traveller

-who kept a diary of his wayfaring, and, writing in

-1744, says, "From Colchester in an hour or two, I

-came to an old Village call'd Kildane, where they tell

-you the famous Massacre of the Danes began; but

-the true Name of the Town is Kelvedon."</p>

-

-<p>How Kelvedon can ever have escaped being called

-"Long" Kelvedon is a mystery, for it straggles on

-and on and must be nearly a mile in length; a

-street of handsome old residences, of cottages and

-humble shops of all ages, and old broken-backed

-taverns where the Essex labourer gathers night by

-night and discusses the prospect of the carraway crop

-and the likelihood of the entire agricultural interest

-presently, going <i>en masse</i> to the "work'us." After<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>

-which, with the courage of despair, and to drown his

-troubles, he will call for "another pot o' thrup'ny,

-missus," and, when closing time comes, slouch home

-through the mud and mist until the following evening,

-when the same programme is repeated. It is the

-agricultural labourer who supports the little wayside

-"publics" whose existence in such numbers puzzles

-the mid-day stranger, who, seeing them empty and

-apparently lifeless, wonders how they can possibly

-live. Business practically only begins when work in

-the fields is done, and the rent is not so high but

-that a few pots of beer a night represent a sufficient

-profit.</p>

-

-<p>It must not be supposed that Kelvedon has not its

-exquisite architectural relics of a bygone time, or that

-its inns are all of the rural beer-house type. Not at

-all. Chief among the inns of Kelvedon is the

-"Angel," which indeed is a house not only of considerable

-size and outstanding character, but of

-historic interest, as having been the favourite resting-place

-of William the Third on his journeys along this

-road. Its projecting porch is the first thing the

-traveller sees on entering the town from the direction

-of London, where the road swerves violently to the

-left, and again as violently to the right, forming a

-very awkward corner. "Angel Corner," said Alexander,

-of the "Retaliator" coach, "is the very devil

-of a corner." This remark was drawn from him on

-the occasion of his nearly driving into the porch,

-when trying conclusions with a rival charioteer.</p>

-

-<p>Almost opposite the still-existing "Angel" stood

-the equally extensive "Red Lion," long since retired<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>

-from business and remodelled as a row of cottages.

-The histories of both houses, and of many another

-fine old inn, which might once have been written

-from the recollections of those who knew the old days

-of the road, are now in great part lost, and the world

-so much the poorer. Had scribblers then abounded,

-and the "personal" note of the modern journalist

-been sounded in those days, we should have known

-how King William came to and set out from his inn;

-how he looked, what he ate and drank, how many

-long clay pipes he smoked, and what comparisons he

-drew in conversation with Bentinck between the flat

-lands on the way from Kelvedon to Harwich and the

-still flatter lands of his native Holland. And besides

-such records of the great, we should then have been

-better furnished with the early history of coaching,

-which, if not indeed a sealed book, is at least a very

-short and fragmentary one.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus55">

-<img src="images/fig44.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE "ANGEL," KELVEDON.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXI</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Early</span> coaching days are wrapped round with strange

-adventures and the oddest tales; some, doubtless, of

-the <i>ben trovato</i>, rather than the most truthful, nature.

-But those stories of coaching miseries and adventure

-that have been proved truthful are themselves so

-surprising and incredible to modern ears that even

-the most improbable of uncertified tales cannot be

-dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of the

-Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should,

-for instance, surely be picturesquely written up some

-day and included in some English (and therefore

-strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One Nights'

-Entertainments.</p>

-

-<p>The coach was nearing the outskirts of London.

-The rheumy air hung in dank and foggy vapours

-on the countryside and transformed innocent roadside

-trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing

-shapes. The guard let off his blunderbuss at a

-pollard willow that loomed suspiciously like a highwayman

-out of the reeking air, and the passengers

-all began to automatically turn their pockets out.

-It proved a false alarm, and purses and trinkets were

-returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One

-gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he

-carried, whereupon a lady advised him to hide the

-money in his boot. He had hardly done this when

-a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman

-to stop. When the unhappy insides had picked

-themselves up from the straw at the bottom of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>

-coach, into which they had unceremoniously been

-thrown by the driver's prompt obedience to that

-behest, they found themselves covered with a pistol

-projected through the door, and were invited to

-deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who

-had little gave it and were thankful it was no more.

-The lady protested that she had nothing; "but,"

-said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you

-will find ten guineas." There was nothing for it

-but to take off that boot and hand over the coin;

-but when the highwayman had gone it was another

-matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in

-no measured terms, of being the robber's accomplice.

-Bound to admit that appearances were against her,

-she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited

-the company to supper the following evening,

-when matters should be explained. They accepted,

-not, it is to be feared, very graciously. The time

-came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room,

-with a supper laid, they were re-introduced to their

-acquaintance of the night before. When the repast

-was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she

-said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in

-this book, which I had with me in the coach, are

-bank-notes to the amount of one thousand pounds.

-I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than

-for me to be robbed of this valuable property. As

-you have been the means of my saving it, I entreat

-your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred

-pounds."</p>

-

-<p>Much of the humour that went to lighten old

-road travelling was of an evanescent kind, and has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>

-not survived, but a few examples, preserved in contemporary

-literature, keep their flavour. Among

-them is the narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and

-a Bolter." "I recollect," said the Jehu who told

-the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger,

-and nothing that was either said or done was at all

-to his mind. On that day I happened to have a

-very awkward team&mdash;three blind ones and a very

-shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times

-I lost my patience as well as temper. My near

-leader pulled to such a degree that I was obliged

-to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the

-top of the bit, and curb her enough to break her

-jaw. After starting again, I could deal with her

-very well for about a mile, when her mouth got

-dead again, and I was wicked enough to let drive

-a few hearty damns at her, my pious companion all

-the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be

-damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon

-which he bolted as if he had been galvanised.</p>

-

-<p>"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'</p>

-

-<p>"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I,

-'but I won't have it;' so I answered, 'What coach

-does he drive?'</p>

-

-<p>"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up

-his hands, 'I fear you don't read your Bible; but

-I will tell you&mdash;he was the most patient man that

-ever existed.'</p>

-

-<p>"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three

-blind 'uns and a bolter?'</p>

-

-<p>"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a

-coachman.'</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a><br /><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a><br /><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever

-he had had four such horses to deal with as I

-have here, he would have had no more patience

-than myself.'"</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus12">

-<img src="images/fig45.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">"THREE BLIND UNS AND A BOLTER." <span class="in5"><i>From a Print after H. Alken.</i></span></p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen

-played a drunken trick that would have

-been impossible in the last years of coaching,

-when discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric

-than they had been. He had just driven the

-London stage from Ipswich, and having more by

-good luck than careful driving brought his

-passengers safely to dinner at the "Angel," turned

-into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink

-of coachmen&mdash;rum. Emerging, he perceived one

-of the Harwich to London fish-waggons, fully

-laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to

-the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the

-waggon round and dashed off at top speed on

-the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden

-Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and

-two tons weight of fish strewed the king's highway.

-The mad coachman survived to repent his

-escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder

-of his life.</p>

-

-<p>"Other times, other manners" is a saying that

-assumes an added force when contrasting the

-Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our fellow-travellers

-by railway, who glare at us, and we at

-them, like strange cats on a roof-top, have little

-idea of the chivalry that ruled on the road a hundred

-years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who

-may be the only other occupant of a railway<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>

-carriage with you, and she wonders whether she

-had not better call the guard; but it was, in the

-days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden

-duty of the gentlemen to see that the ladies in

-whose company the chances of the road might

-place them lacked nothing that courtesy could

-supply; whether it were merely the aid of an

-arm in walking up one of those hills the coaches

-could only climb unladen, or the more material

-attention involved in seeing that the dear

-creatures were duly supplied with refreshments.

-It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom

-of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for

-the breakfasts and dinners of the unprotected

-ladies who might be travelling by the same conveyance.

-"I vow," says one of these old travellers,

-"'tis a pleasure in a cavalier to do so; but, the

-Lord save us, what a prodigious appetite does not

-the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the

-fair, whose lassitude and vapours at other times

-render them incapable of more than drinking a

-dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing

-which it is only fitting that the heathenish and

-phanatick peoples of the Indies should partake

-of. I protest that the ladies of the coach, when

-we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding

-they could not be suited with tay, went to it

-with a right good will and left as good an

-account of the claret and the beef as if they had

-been going empty for a week. Spare me, I do

-beg, from your languishing creatures who would

-die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>

-compare with the most valiant of trenchermen

-abroad."</p>

-

-<p>This protesting gentleman might, had he thought

-of it, have exclaimed with Othello on the pity "that

-we can call these delicate creatures ours and not

-their appetites."</p>

-

-<p>He must have been particularly hard hit in

-the pocket by the robust appetites of his fellow-travellers,

-but did not, however, let his feelings

-appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as

-a toast, "the ladies, bless them, whose bright

-eyes," etc., etc.&mdash;a toast we have many times heard

-of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon

-having "made an impression." He, in fact, seems

-to have been like Constable, in a way; for it was

-said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in

-a stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach

-dinner." "Then," said one, hearing that

-praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"</p>

-

-<p>That is very significant. It was, then, only

-your very paragon among gentlemen who could

-sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner. His

-manners might survive the strain of the journey

-itself, and even the sight and sound of lovely

-Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring, unlovely

-to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating

-gurgles; but when after the tedious stage had

-been accomplished and the passengers had descended,

-irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner

-scarce to be eaten, even at express speed, in the

-short time allowed, then, ay <i>then</i>, my friends,

-came the test! No man so insensible to politeness

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>as a starving man, and few attentions were

-paid to the ladies by strangers whose sole chance

-of obtaining the dinner for which they had paid

-was the resolute determination to attend only to

-their own wants.</p>

-

-<p>The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly

-outweighed the pleasures of that old-world method.

-A pleasant day and the open country made a seat

-on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not

-willingly to be exchanged for any other mode of

-conveyance then known; but, as little David

-Copperfield found on his first coach journey, <i>night</i>

-on a coach was an experience once gained not

-willingly repeated. Being put between two gentlemen,

-to prevent his falling off, David found himself

-nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he

-could not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!"

-which they didn't like at all, because it woke them.

-With the rising of the sun David found his fellow-passengers

-sleeping easier than they had done during

-the night, when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed

-their midnight slumbers. As the sun rose higher, so

-their sleep became lighter and they gradually awoke,

-one by one, each one indignant when charged with

-having slept. During the rest of his career, David

-invariably observed "that of all human weaknesses,

-the one to which our common nature is the least disposed

-to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness

-of having gone to sleep in a coach."</p>

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXII</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus56">

-<img src="images/fig46.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">BIRTHPLACE OF SPURGEON.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Coaching</span> times and coaching inns have long kept

-us at the very threshold of Kelvedon, which has a

-modern claim to notice of which it is not a little

-proud. Spurgeon was born here. Although the

-figure of that great wielder of homely and untutored

-pulpit oratory is but one among several preachers

-in the same family, there is only one possible

-Spurgeon when that name is mentioned. Charles

-Haddon Spurgeon was born in a house still pointed

-out, on June 19, 1834; the eldest son of the Rev.

-John Spurgeon. The old cottage is now the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>

-"Wheatsheaf" beer-house and has had a bay window

-and a brick frontage added since that time. Close by

-is a now highly respectable and not a little dignified

-private residence known still as the "Tommy shop,"

-although almost seventy years have passed since it

-was used as a kind of restaurant and canteen for the

-navvies then working on the construction of the

-Great Eastern Railway, which runs at the rear.</p>

-

-<p>The oldest house in Kelvedon is doubtless the

-"Sun," which dates from the middle of the fifteenth

-century and has within recent years had its carved

-woodwork, long covered with plaster, once more

-exposed to view. It stands, almost the last house

-in the town, by the bridge over the Blackwater, on

-the way to Gore Pit.</p>

-

-<p>Gore Pit is generally said to be the site of a

-battle. <i>What</i> battle, however, historians do not

-and cannot specify; and indeed this name, bloody

-though it may sound to modern ears, has, despite

-the popular legend of the derivation of Kelvedon

-from "Kildane," perhaps no such sanguinary

-association, and is probably a contraction of the old

-word "coneygore," or rabbit warren.</p>

-

-<p>It is, despite its name, a pretty and a peaceful

-hamlet, with a blacksmith's shop and a roadside

-horse-pond, and surrounded by the fruit-farms of a

-great jam-making company. The church of Feering

-can be seen across the flat fields, on the other side of

-the railway. Messing lies a mile away, in the other

-direction.</p>

-

-<p>Let the idle wayfarer, curious as to the name of

-Gore Pit, speak to the blacksmith on the subject,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>

-and he will be told, with the seriousness of implicit

-belief, of the fighting of a great battle here, and

-that the blood ran down into "that there horse-pond."

-Moreover, that at Kelvedon&mdash;"Killdane they used

-to call it&mdash;they killed the Danes; at Feering they

-feared 'em, and at Messing they made a mess of it";

-which seems to very correctly reflect the views of the

-neighbourhood on local history in ancient times, as

-reflected in place-names!</p>

-

-<p>Rural Essex, in the aspect of its fields and

-meadows, is revealed along these miles in its most

-characteristic form. It is, in many respects, unlike

-other counties. In some ways the unhappy industry

-of farming has fared worse here than elsewhere, and

-many holdings have for years past gone uncultivated,

-and the dock, the thistle and other lusty weeds have

-resumed an evil possession of fields once kept clean

-and trim. But in the smaller operations of

-husbandry Essex has always been, and in some

-districts still is, remarkably successful; while,

-although the farmer protests that it does not pay

-to grow any kind of grain, the yellowing seas of

-autumnal cornfields are still a prominent feature

-of the landscapes of Essex and of its neighbouring

-Suffolk. Essex and Suffolk are old-world, far beyond

-the rest of England, and in growing wheat in these

-times, when a cornfield is a rare sight in other

-parts of the country and when "our daily bread"

-is chiefly compounded of grain grown in North

-America, Russia, or the Argentine, they maintain

-their singularity. It does the heart good to see the

-ripening wheatfields of East Anglia, to see the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>

-gathered stooks in the reaped perspectives, and to

-hear the hum of the threshing machine; for the

-sights and sound seem to carry us back to that

-England of a bygone age, when Constable painted

-such fields, and when they were numerous enough

-throughout the land to feed the population. Here

-and there one may still find fields of that famous

-grain, the "Essex Great Wheat," which grows at

-least two feet higher than the ordinary varieties,

-and is greatly prized for the length and stoutness of

-its straw; but it is a few miles to the north-eastward,

-in the light lands around Harwich, that the Great

-Wheat may be found. Seed and herb-growing are

-the most prominent industries between the Blackwater

-and the Colne, and the roadside fields are

-striped to wonderment in summer with the rainbow

-colours of the seedsman's trial-grounds. The heavy

-perfume of stocks and mignonette, the claret colour

-of that gorgeous flower, the "sops-in-wine," the gay

-and varied displays of asters, marguerites, marigolds

-and a hundred others make a midsummer fairyland

-of the levels that loom so drear and misty in the

-long months of winter. Nor is it only for the

-flower-garden that the Essex seedsman labours.

-With the sights and scents of the flaunting beauties

-of the garden are mingled the homelier ones of

-mint, grey-green sage and other dowdy kitchen

-herbs, together with the subtle beauty and piercing

-odour of wide-spreading, blue-grey lavender-fields.

-Even the unromantic mangold, running to seed in

-bush-like shape, sends forth a sweet and pleasing

-aroma, while the yellow mustard contributes its share.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>The byways of farming are now, as we have

-already said, the most&mdash;some would say the only&mdash;profitable

-kind of husbandry in Essex. Some forms

-of cultivation have largely migrated to other counties,

-but others remain. The growing of the clothiers'

-teasel was discontinued with the decay of the Colchester

-and Norwich baize industry, and is now

-carried on in other parts of the country, close to

-districts where textile fabrics are still manufactured;

-but there was a time when, along this road between

-Chelmsford and Colchester, the fields of teasels were

-quite as much a feature as those of mustard are even

-yet. The clothiers' teasel, greatly prized in the

-East Anglian baize manufacture, was nothing but

-a weed, found useful and cultivated accordingly. An

-aristocratic relation of the less spiky burrs that have

-not been rescued from the hedges and ditches and

-are still allowed to grow wild, the clothiers' teasel

-was cultivated so far back as the reign of Richard

-the First, but the "common" burr will have to be

-contented with its lowly estate to the end of time,

-unless something unexpected happens.</p>

-

-<p>To "stick like a burr" is proverbial, and the cultivated

-teasels have an even more pronounced clinging

-property. Furnished as they are with natural hooks,

-they were used in baize-making, and are still employed

-in the cloth trade for raising the nap of the

-material. The dried heads are fixed to cylinders,

-between which the fabric is passed, and their sharp

-spines, re-curved like so many minute fish-hooks, draw

-up the surface of the cloth. Thus the teasel was

-raised from its character of a worthless weed, and for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>

-many years Essex farmers devoted large portions of

-their holdings to its cultivation. It was hoed and

-kept clear of other vagrom weedlings; its heads were

-cut by hand and dried with every care, and eventually

-were eagerly competed for by manufacturers at �12

-a load. When the old cloth manufacturers left East

-Anglia, a goodly portion of the Essex farmers' livelihood

-went with them.</p>

-

-<p>Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other

-weed, the colewort, for cole or rape-seed, which has

-the quadruple properties of feeding cage-birds, yielding

-rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring

-the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help

-to prop the husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and

-carraways are what "the faculty" knows as "carminatives,"

-curative of flatulency; like the once popular

-"eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of

-the sea holly that grows by the estuaries of Essex

-rivers. Eringo root was once a favourite specific for

-lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last, and

-the preparation of it gradually died out and became

-extinct about 1865, when the only manufacturer was

-an elderly spinster who supplied a chemist in High

-Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the

-making of k�mmel and other liqueurs, and carraway

-seeds, which look like commas, are those familiar

-denizens of "seed cake" that stick in the teeth and

-refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of

-"carraway comfits."</p>

-

-<p>Farmers who do not occupy themselves with

-seed-growing have passed through evil times, but

-prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's well-tilled

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>land, and fruit-farming has come to render

-cultivation profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer,

-who cannot adapt himself to new conditions, agricultural

-depression in Essex is a very real thing.

-Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one,

-a small cultivator, a son of the soil. He does not

-hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural Essex, in

-these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the

-Workhouse are said to close every vista? Besides,

-he has been hard at work in the fields, and much of

-that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like friskiness

-out of the limbs.</p>

-

-<p>A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very

-badly in need of repair, elicits the fact that he has

-just come away, worsted, from another bout in the

-eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict

-with wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce,

-for life or a livelihood, with weeds&mdash;the sorry heritage

-of the present occupier from the slovenly or bankrupt

-farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing upon

-the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily

-against the cultivator.</p>

-

-<p>"Farmin'?" says our rustic friend; "no great

-shakes, I tell 'ee. It don't pay to grow nawthen now,

-an' it gets wusser'n wusser. All the fields goin'

-under grass, for ship'n cattle. An' the land's fair

-pisoned with weeds. Yow see them 'ere beece, in

-that there close down along o' the chutch? There's

-a mort o' docks in that 'ere close. More docks'n

-grass, an' I thinks warsley o' the chanst of cattle

-gettin' a fair bite off'n it. Don't know what docks

-is? Wish I didden! I've bin a-pullin' of 'em till<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>

-my back's pretty nigh broke, and I'm fair dunted

-with 'em. Last year there worn't ne'er a one: t'yen

-there's a mort on 'em. Where do they come from?

-God A'mighty knows. <i>They</i> don't want no cultivation,

-bless 'ee. There ain't no land so chice but

-what'll grow docks." Here he pulls out his "muckinger,"

-that is to say, his handkerchief&mdash;the Essex

-dialect is not the most elegant form of speech&mdash;and,

-trumpeting on it like an elephant, with indignation,

-goes his way.</p>

-

-<p>The "chutch" in question is that of Feering,

-on the other side of the Great Eastern Railway,

-along whose embankment go the frequent

-Prussian-blue-painted locomotives with long trains at

-their tail, past Mark's Tey Junction, whose forest of

-signal-masts is visible ahead, into Colchester. With

-the raising of that embankment went the life of this

-highway, only now experiencing a revival.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">The</span> cyclists, the pedestrians, the motor-men, who

-adventure along the road rejoice at its smooth

-surface, and find little incident to mark their

-journey. A punctured tyre, a defective valve alone

-hinder those mechanical travellers; while the pedestrian

-finds a limit set to his progress only by

-his walking powers. Even so, he may obtain to

-Norwich long before the others, for the railway<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>

-hugs the road closely for three parts of the distance,

-and stations are frequent.</p>

-

-<p>In any case, the curtain has long since been

-rung down upon the Romance of the Road. If this

-were the place to do it, that romance might be

-recounted at great length; sometimes rising to

-tragical height, again sinking to comedy or farce.

-But we must take our romance as it comes, and,

-reading as we run, be content to act a vicarious

-part in the long story. And we may well be so

-content, for to have essayed the journey in days

-of old often meant a "speaking with strangers in

-the gates" that entailed fighting on unequal terms,

-with the possibility of a roadside grave and the

-tolerable certainty of being robbed of anything and

-everything worth the taking.</p>

-

-<p>Nowadays, the trim suburbs of the towns

-stretch out on either side along the old highway

-and join hands with the villages; so that when

-travellers of the speedier sort spurn the dust from

-their flying wheels, they think the country is

-becoming one vast town, and are depressed and

-regretful accordingly. But when the road was the

-sole means of travelling and the towns were still

-girdled by their walls and entered only by fortified

-gates, the wayfarer welcomed the sight of a house

-in the lonely country between town and village.

-Even to the rich these perils came home, and in

-the more lawless times they were beset with

-troubles of their own.</p>

-

-<p>Royal progresses were not infrequent along the

-Norwich Road, and they have elsewhere been duly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>

-chronicled, but they are things apart and give no

-glimpse of old wayfaring life. If we are at all in

-the way of conjuring up that old-time traffic, we

-must certainly not forget the odd processions that

-trailed their slow length after my lord and my

-lady, changing residence from one castle or manor-house

-to another. My Lord Duke of Norfolk in

-Elizabeth's time had an exquisite palace, of which

-Macaulay has told us, in Norwich, and the Earls of

-Oxford no doubt kept great state in their castle at

-Hedingham, but, for all their magnificence, they

-were obliged to take many of their household goods

-with them when flitting from place to place; for

-the very excellent reason that they did not,

-certainly up to less than three hundred years

-ago, possess more than one fully-equipped establishment.

-When the nobility of old left one of their

-manor-houses for another they commonly took

-their bedding and a good deal of their furniture

-with them. In even more remote days they removed

-the glass from their windows as well, and

-stored it carefully away until their return. <i>That</i>,

-of course, was a custom of very long ago, when even

-the most luxurious were content with&mdash;or, at any-rate,

-had to endure&mdash;things which nowadays would

-drive the inmates of a casual ward to rebellion;

-but, even when the Stuarts reigned, the great ones

-of the land moved from home to home with long

-baggage-trains and with their entire staff of

-domestics. No board-wages, then! The whole

-establishment took the road, down to the scullery-maids

-and the hangers-on of the kitchen who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>

-took charge of the domestic pots and pans. My

-lord's pages and the dignitaries of his household

-formed the advance-guard; the lowest in the scale,

-who travelled with the culinary utensils and even

-took the coals with them, were, appropriately

-enough, the "black guard." The black guard were

-probably a very rough lot indeed, at odds with

-soap and water, and on every count deserving of

-their name, which has in the course of centuries

-obtained a different application, as a term of reproach

-to individuals of moral rather than physical

-uncleanliness.</p>

-

-<p>Turning from general conditions of travelling

-to particular travellers, there comes tripping along

-the road an antic fellow, one Will Kemp, who

-danced from London to Norwich in the year 1600;

-a frolic he undertook for a wager, afterwards

-writing and publishing a book about it, which he

-called <i>Kemp's Nine Days' Wonder</i>. Will Kemp

-was accompanied by a drummer whose play upon

-parchment helped to sustain his flagging energies

-as he skipped it to Widford and thence by a route

-of his own through Braintree to Norwich.</p>

-

-<p>Sprightly, irresponsible Kemp, cracking weak

-jokes and playing the fool, is succeeded in the

-memories of the road, after an interval of some

-eighty years, by a very grave and responsible figure

-indeed; no less an one than that of King William

-the Third, on his frequent journeys between his dear

-Holland and his little-loved Kingdom of England.

-Burdened with the care of an alien realm, that

-saturnine little figure with the hooked nose was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>

-familiar sight at Kelvedon, where, travelling to and

-from Harwich, he was wont to stay at the "Angel"

-inn, which still confronts the wayfarer on entering

-the village from London. When the "little gentleman

-in black" had done his work and King William

-of blessed Protestant memory was no more, the

-Norwich Road, so far as Colchester, was still graced

-with Royal travellers, for, with the coming of the

-Hanoverians, Harwich became more than ever a

-favourite port of entry and departure, and the

-choleric early Georges knew this Essex landscape

-well. This way, too, came the Schwellenburgs, the

-Keilmanseggs and the other vulgar and grotesque

-figures of that grotesque and vulgar Court.</p>

-

-<p>Among these figures comes that of the Princess

-Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, arrived for the first

-time in England, in 1761, to marry George the

-Third. One German princess is very like another

-in the pages of history, and the likeness remains

-even when they become queens, so that it is not

-a little difficult to disentangle a Caroline from a

-Charlotte. Their virtues are of the same drab

-domestic order, and their faces partake of the

-common fund of unilluminated dulness distributed

-between the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the Sonderburg-Augustenburgs,

-and the dozens of other twopenny-halfpenny

-principalities made familiar by German

-princely marriages and intermarryings. On their

-mere merits, these personages would find no place

-here, though they travelled all their lives up and

-down the road; but in the circumstances of this

-particular Princess Charlotte's journey there are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>

-some incidents worth mentioning. She landed at

-Harwich, and comes into our road at Colchester,

-September 7, 1761. At Colchester she was presented

-with a box of eringo-root, the famous local

-production highly valued for the cure of pulmonary

-diseases, prepared from the root of the sea holly.

-Graciously receiving this in a box "parfumed and

-guilt," her carriage swept on towards Witham, where

-she stayed the night at a seat then owned by Lord

-Abercorn, supping with open doors so that all who

-would might gaze upon their future Queen. Next

-day the journey to London was resumed. The

-King's coach was in readiness at Romford, and into

-it she changed. At Mile End a squadron of Life

-Guards was in waiting as an escort, and from that

-point the procession was viewed by thousands. But

-by this time the September day was closing. The

-Duchess of Hamilton, who accompanied the Princess,

-looked at her watch. "We shall hardly have time

-to dress for the wedding," she said.</p>

-

-<p>"The wedding?"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes, madam; it is to be at twelve."</p>

-

-<p>On that the Princess fainted, as well she might.

-It really took place at 9 p.m., instead of three hours

-later. The King, it is upon record, was a little

-disappointed at the first sight of his bride; but that

-has generally been the way with our Royal marriages.

-The eldest son of this amiable pair, George the Fourth,

-similarly saw his bride for the first time practically

-on the steps of the altar, and his disappointment was

-keen. "No sooner," we read, "had he approached

-her than, as if to subdue the qualms of irrepressible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>

-disgust, he desired the dignified envoy to bring him

-a glass of brandy." The Princess, we are told,

-"expressed surprise," which statement requires no

-credulity for belief. Henry the Eighth's disappointment

-when he saw Anne of Cleves was reflected in

-the words in which he likened her to a "Flanders

-mare."</p>

-

-<p>Two years later, in 1763, we find Dr Johnson

-and his inevitable Boswell journeying down the

-road; Boswell on his way to Harwich for Utrecht,

-and the Doctor good-naturedly accompanying him as

-far as that seaport. They set out by coach on the 5th

-of August, early in the morning; among their fellow-travellers

-a fat, elderly gentlewoman and a young

-Dutchman, both inclined to conversation. Dining

-at an inn on the way, the lady remarked that she

-had done her best to educate her children, and

-particularly that she never suffered them to be a

-moment idle.</p>

-

-<p>"I wish, madam," said Johnson, "you would

-educate me too; for I have been an idle fellow all

-my life."</p>

-

-<p>"I am sure, sir," said she, "you have not been

-idle;" which was a mere empty compliment, for she

-had not the least idea whom she was addressing.</p>

-

-<p>"Nay, madam," rejoined the Doctor, "it is very

-true; and that gentleman there," pointing to Boswell,

-"has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His

-father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to

-be idle. He then came to London, where he has

-been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht,

-where he will be as idle as ever."</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>At this, Boswell was very wroth, and asked

-Johnson, in an aside, how he could expose him so.</p>

-

-<p>"Pooh, pooh," retorted the immortal Samuel,

-"they know nothing about you, and will think of

-it no more." Nor, in all probability, did they.</p>

-

-<p>In this manner they travelled, the gentlewoman

-talking violently against the Roman Catholics and

-the horrors of the Inquisition; Johnson, to the

-astonishment of all the passengers, save Boswell, who

-knew his ways, defending the Inquisition and its

-methods with "false doctrines." This would appear

-to have annoyed the rest of the company, for

-Boswell relates that Johnson presently appeared

-to be very intent upon ancient geography. Not so

-intent, however, but that he noticed Boswell giving

-a shilling to the coachman at the end of one of the

-stages, when it was the custom to give only sixpence.

-The great man took Boswell aside and scolded him

-for it, saying that what he had done would make

-the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the

-passengers, who had given him no more than his

-due.</p>

-

-<p>They stopped at Colchester a night, at an inn

-unfortunately not specified, Johnson talking of the

-town with veneration for having stood a siege for

-Charles the First.</p>

-

-<p>The last great occasion on the road, before

-railways took its traffic away, was the funeral, in

-1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline of

-Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven

-years before: her body was embarked for Brunswick

-on August 16, 1821, after a hurried three days'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>

-journey from Kensington. So many years have

-passed by since the stormy times when the nation

-was divided between partisans of the King on one

-side and the Queen on the other&mdash;both parties

-equally violent&mdash;that the long and bitter quarrels

-between the "First Gentleman in Europe" and the

-most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times

-have become historic, and no longer divide families,

-or cause fathers to cut their sons off with a shilling,

-as they did when the trial of the Queen was a recent

-event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no

-saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least

-odiously vulgar and utterly wanting in dignity and

-the commonest dictates of prudence. They were not

-worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken

-up by parties and made political missiles of, so that

-even the occasion of the Queen's funeral was made

-the excuse for a riot by her followers, who were

-indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the

-country, as they thought, without proper respect.

-The Queen died on the 7th of August, and it was

-decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent

-haste" was the expression used by the <i>Times</i> of that

-day in describing the funeral arrangements for the

-14th, but that journal was a most violent enemy of

-the then Government and had always supported the

-Queen and vilified the King as far as it could safely

-be done.</p>

-

-<p>It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty

-miles between Kensington and Harwich in two days,

-and the <i>Times</i> furiously bellowed in its reports that

-the procession was hurried through London at a trot.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>

-However that may be, certainly the pace was decently

-slow when on the open road. Ilford was reached, for

-instance, at 6�15 that afternoon, but Romford, only

-five and a half miles further on, not until 7�45; an

-extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a

-funeral. At Romford the cort�ge was met by

-sympathisers with blazing torches, who stood on

-guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort and

-the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn.</p>

-

-<p>At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by

-the light of a full moon which shone in splendour

-from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the night

-they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock

-in the morning. Here the coffin was placed in the

-church until a start was made again, seven hours later.

-At last Colchester was reached, at five o'clock in the

-afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse

-unguarded in the High Street, while they took their

-fill at the "Three Cups." Thus, in its squalor and

-irreverence, the passing of this Queen of England

-resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or

-kin.</p>

-

-<p>It had been proposed to complete the journey to

-Harwich that day, but, after violent disputes in the

-street between opposing factions, it was agreed to

-defer the departure until the next morning, and to

-deposit the coffin meanwhile in St Peter's Church.

-Inside that sacred building, disputes broke out

-afresh, one party wishing to affix a plate on the

-coffin-lid, bearing the inscription, "Caroline of

-Brunswick, the injured Queen of England," while

-the other vehemently objected. The quarrel was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>

-finally settled by agreeing to postpone fixing the

-plate until after the embarkation.</p>

-

-<p>With the start made the following morning at

-half-past five, this melancholy procession leaves the

-Norwich Road, and history goes with it. The tale

-is done, the colophon reached.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIV</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">If</span> we seek some touchstone by which to test the

-progress of a century or so in civilisation, there is

-scarce a better than found in comparison between

-the condition of the roads in old and modern times.

-That Waller could, in all sincerity, speak of "vile

-Essexian roads" is not remarkable: he was a poet, dealt

-in superlatives and lived in the seventeenth century.

-But that Arthur Young, a hundred years later, could

-with equal sincerity, and in more emphatic language,

-describe Essex roads as "rocky lanes, with ruts of

-inconceivable depth," is startling. It was in 1768 he

-penned that indictment, adding that they were

-so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the

-sun, and strewn with stones "as big as a horse,

-and full of abominable holes." It were, he concludes,

-a misuse of language to call them turnpikes,

-for they were rich in ponds of liquid dirt; while

-loose flints and vile grips cut across to drain off

-the water made the traveller's pilgrimage a

-weariness.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>The modern reader, perusing all these manifold

-sins and wickednesses of the roads, rather wonders

-how they could all have been crowded on to such

-truly vile ways, and if a stone were as big as a

-horse, how room could have been found beside it

-for holes, ponds and other objectionable features.

-But Arthur Young was a truthful man in general.</p>

-

-<p>To-day the Essex high roads are as near perfection

-as any in the home counties, even though

-the byways be steep and rough and more than

-usually winding.</p>

-

-<p>It is in these byways that he who seeks rural

-Essex shall find. The dramatic suddenness and

-completeness with which, a few hundred yards from

-the high road, the sophisticated wayside towns and

-hamlets are exchanged for the unspoiled rusticity

-of the original villages is surprising. In these lanes

-the older rustics talk and think much as their grandfathers

-did, but the rising generation unhappily do

-not, and the Essex rustic in general, like his fellows

-elsewhere, has almost wholly discarded the old dress

-of the peasantry. Only the very old or the more

-remote yet wear the smock-frock&mdash;the "round frock,"

-or the "gaberdine," as they called it&mdash;that was

-once as honourable a distinction of the ploughmen,

-herds, or carters as are the uniforms of our soldiers

-and sailors.</p>

-

-<p>The time is long past since a clean smock-frock,

-corded breeches, worsted stockings and well-greased

-lace-up boots formed the approved rural costume for

-Sundays or holidays, just as the same articles of

-apparel in a "second-best" condition made the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>

-workaday wear. The Sunday costume of the agricultural

-labourer is now a cheap and clumsy travesty

-of the clothes worn by townsfolk, and in hideous

-contrast with his surroundings. Exactly what it is

-like may be seen on any advertisement hoarding in

-the outskirts of Chelmsford, Colchester and lesser

-towns, where pictorial posters bid Giles go to

-Shoddy's for cheap outfits. Sunday mornings find

-him flaunting his finery in the village street; his

-would-be stylish boots creaking, his every article of

-wear writ large with vulgarity. Often he carries

-gloves in those large hands of his, rough with

-honest week-day toil, and a pair may thus last him

-for years&mdash;for he dare not attempt to put them on.

-Would that he equally purchased his cheap cigars

-for show and refrained from smoking them!</p>

-

-<p>But there the village dandy is. Often his pocket-handkerchief

-is scented; generally his hair is glossy

-with grease; and he would not consider himself fully

-equipped without watch and chain, scarf-pin, ring

-and walking stick. To grease his boots he would

-be ashamed. <i>They</i> must be brightly polished, even

-though his manners are not, and his language defiles

-the village street what time the bells are ringing to

-church. Such is Young England in the villages at

-the dawn of the Twentieth Century. These things

-may spell Progress, but they are rather pitiful.</p>

-

-<p>It is a little difficult, in presenting a sketch of his

-ancestor of a hundred years or more ago, to avoid

-drawing too favourable a view of him; but the rustic

-in old times certainly seems to have matched much

-better with his surroundings than is the case nowadays.

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>He made no attempts to dress up to town

-standards, and if he wanted to shine above his

-fellows did so by virtue of superior neatness only.

-Perhaps he had the finer instincts of the two, or

-more likely lacked the opportunities for bad taste

-that surround his descendants. Certainly, if we are

-to believe in the origin of the smock-frock, as put

-forward by some antiquaries, we must sorrowfully

-admit that the rustic's remote ancestor had as great

-a longing for unsuitable display in dress as can

-possibly be charged to the present generation. The

-smock-frock is, in fact, traced back by some to the

-ecclesiastical garments worn at Mass by deacons and

-sub-deacons, at the time when the Reformation swept

-vestments out of every village church in the land.

-Those who are familiar with genuine old smock-frocks

-have noticed the elaborate and often beautiful needlework

-on collar and breast. The devices appear to

-have a traditional likeness, all over the country, and

-consist either of Celtic-looking whorls, or of semi-decorative

-flower forms, or of lozenge patterns. The

-comparative simplicity or elaboration of this needlework

-depended solely upon the fancy, or the time at

-command, of the wearer's women-folk whose work it

-was. Whence came this tradition? It is thought

-from the tunicles of the minor clergy, which were

-certainly decorated in the same position, if not in

-similar patterns. When the minor belongings of the

-Church became the spoil of the villages, Hodge and

-Giles found themselves the proud possessors of the

-strange garments, for which they could find at first

-no better use than for Sunday wear. A striking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>

-appearance they must have made in them, down the

-village street, the envy of their less fortunate fellows.</p>

-

-<p>When the looted vestments grew shabby they

-must have been used for everyday wear, and so have

-set the fashions in smock-frocks, both in shape and

-decoration, for centuries to come. If it be thought

-that the costume was rather extravagant, it can only

-be asked, is not that of the modern Sunday morning

-yokel extravagant also?</p>

-

-<p>The rustic of long ago was a man of dense ignorance

-and dark superstitions. No one county was

-then more guilty than another in that respect, but

-East Anglians, and perhaps especially the Essex

-bucolics, are still, despite their veneer of civilisation,

-sunk in uncanny beliefs. Witches still "overlook"

-folks in Essex hamlets, and spells are cast on cattle

-and horses, or unhappy fowls are blighted by the

-Evil Eye. Consequently the learned professions of

-Witch-Doctor and Wise Women are not yet extinct.

-Their existence is not likely to be discovered by the

-stranger, but they thrive, in limited numbers, even

-in these days of pills and patent medicines.</p>

-

-<p>Board Schools are supposed to be educating

-Young England into a dead monotony of speech,

-but it will be long before they complete the horrid

-work. In Essex, indeed, we may not unreasonably

-think it a task beyond the power of teachers and inspectors,

-who if they have not succeeded, after thirty

-years working of the Elementary Education Act, in

-inducing the lower-class Londoners to say "yes" for

-"yuss," together with other linguistic enormities, are

-not likely to be successful in abolishing the very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>

-marked and stubborn Essex shibboleths. It may

-not generally be known that much of the so-called

-"Cockney" talk derives from the Essex

-dialect. From Essex especially comes that curious

-perversity of the unruly member which in many

-cases insists upon pronouncing the letter A as I.

-The lower-class Londoner and the Essex peasant

-are unanimous in enunciating A as I in all words

-where that letter retains its open sound and its

-individuality. Thus, in the words "baby"

-"favourite," "made" and "native," for instance, the

-letter becomes I; and the Fleet Street newsboy,

-shouting his "spusshul uxtry piper," can legitimately

-call cousins, if he wishes it, with the Essex lad at the

-plough-tail.</p>

-

-<p>Where A is sounded broadly, or in cases like the

-word "was," in which it masquerades as O, or where

-the letter is absolutely silent, or not fully pronounced,

-as in "beast" and "maternal," this peculiarity does

-not appear.</p>

-

-<p>The effect is sometimes grotesque, as, for example,

-near Colchester, where the villages of Layer

-Marney, Layer Breton, and Layer de la Hay are

-always spoken of as Liyer, the last mentioned

-becoming Liyer de la High.</p>

-

-<p>Nor is pronunciation the only singular feature

-of Essex talk, as those who keep their ears alert

-in these parts will soon find. The oddest phrases

-are matters of everyday use, and the Essex peasant

-can no more help using the word "together," in

-season and out, than he can help being hungry

-before meals or sleepy by bedtime. "Together," as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>

-employed by the Essex peasant, is a word absolutely

-meaningless; a kind of linguistic excrescence which,

-like a wart or a boil, is neither useful nor beautiful.

-When a ploughman says he is going to plough

-"that there field together," he does not mean to

-imply that he is about to plough it together with

-some other land, or with a party of other ploughmen.

-He simply adds the word from force of habit, and

-from hearing his father and grandfather before him

-so use it, in almost every sentence, as a sort of

-verbal makeweight. The present writer has had

-the good fortune to hear a supremely ludicrous

-use of this B&oelig;otian habit of speech. It was market-day

-at Colchester, and Stanway village had emptied

-itself in the direction of the town. A dog rolled

-dustily in the sunny road, and the historian of

-these things luxuriously quaffed his "large lemon"

-on the bench outside the village inn. As Artemus

-Ward might have said, "orl was peas," when there

-entered upon the scene a countryman, evidently

-known to the landlord. He walked into the bar,

-and, surprised to find mine host in solitary state,

-exclaimed, "What, all alone together, bor?"</p>

-

-<p>"Yes," replied the landlord, in no wise astonished

-at this extraordinary expression, "the missus has

-gone to Colchester together."</p>

-

-<p>"Did my missus go with her?" asked the

-rustic.</p>

-

-<p>"No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by

-herself."</p>

-

-<p>In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging

-more especially to Norfolk and Suffolk.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>

-This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for

-neighbour.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXV</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Stanway</span> is approached along a flat stretch, past

-Mark's Tey, which, without being itself quite on

-the road, has sent out modern and extremely ugly

-brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible

-distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's

-Tey church is visible, amid an inchoate mass

-of railway signal masts and puffs of smoke.

-Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings

-proceed from that direction, for this is a junction

-of the Great Eastern with the Colne Valley Railway,

-and the station, by the way, where the lady in

-Thackeray's <i>Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling

-of Shoreditch</i> appeared with the baby which she

-eventually left behind her. It is this busy junction

-that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses

-along the road to render the village of the old De

-Marcas something new and strange. Mark's Tey

-is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for the

-road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in

-here.</p>

-

-<p>Copford's solitary houses by the way give scarce a

-hint of the village nearly a mile off, whose little

-church formerly owned a terrifying relic, in the

-shape of a human skin nailed on its door; a skin

-that had been the personal property of some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>

-unfortunate straggler from the hordes of marauding

-Danes that once infested the district, of

-whom we have already heard legends at Kelvedon

-and Gore Pit. His Saxon captors must have flayed

-him with a ferocious delight and nailed up his

-cuticle with precisely the same satisfaction as that

-of the gamekeeper who wages war upon stoats and

-weazels and other vermin, and hangs their bodies

-on the barn door. But there must have been a

-bitter day of reckoning for those Saxons when the

-sea-rovers came this way again and saw in what

-fashion that doorway was decorated.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus57">

-<img src="images/fig47.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">Near Mark's Tey.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Copford and its outlying houses lie at the crest

-of a gentle descent into the valley of a rivulet

-which finds its way into the Colne. It stands, as

-its name implies, overlooking some ford which,

-once important, has, in the gradual draining of

-the country and the shrinkage of streams, now

-lost all significance. Stanway adjoins it, and lies

-along the descent, in the hollow and up the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>

-corresponding rise on the other side, where its

-church stands in a forbidding loneliness. The name

-of Stanway is sufficient warranty of this being, thus

-far, the Roman road. It is, however, not so certain

-that the remaining four miles of the existing highway

-from this point into Colchester follow the course

-taken by the Romans; and, indeed, the later researches

-of arch�ologists go far to prove that the

-original way into Roman Colchester avoided the intervening

-village of Lexden altogether, and, curving

-eastwards, avoided what may then have been a

-marsh, to take the higher ground over a portion of

-Lexden Heath; bending westwards again and

-crossing the site of the present road between where

-the grammar school and the hospital now stand.

-From this point it seems to have crossed by where

-the Lordsland Nursery grounds stood until recently

-built over, to the ancient Roman gateway and

-bastion in the western wall of the town, long known

-as Colking's, or King Coel's Castle, but originally the

-Decuman Gate of Roman times. The course

-followed by this old Roman way is lined on either

-side with sepulchral remains, and seems to have

-once been a great cemetery. Wherever the ground

-is disturbed the relics of some soldier or citizen of

-Colonia are found, some dating back to the foundation

-of the colony, nearly nineteen centuries ago.

-The most remarkable among them are to be seen in

-the museum at Colchester Castle. There&mdash;the most

-human relic of them all&mdash;is the touching monument

-to M. Favonius, a Centurion of the Twentieth Legion,

-discovered in 1871 between the hospital and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>

-grammar school, at a depth of 3 feet below the

-surface, and at a distance of 10 feet from the old

-Roman road. It is a sculptured stone, 4 feet in

-height, with the figure of the Centurion himself

-carved on it, in high relief. It is evidently a

-portrait of him. He stands in full military costume,

-his cloak hanging from his shoulders, his sword and

-dagger by his side. The inscription, almost as sharp

-as on the day when it was cut, nearly nineteen

-hundred years ago, tells us that the monument was

-erected by two of his servants, Verecundus and

-Novicius. They call him "facilis," the "easy" or

-"good-natured." It is surely a sweet and touching

-thing that when all other record of that soldier has

-perished, we should yet know him to have been a

-kindly creature.</p>

-

-<p>But to return to Stanway, which keeps, as sole

-vestige of its heath, a little space of the greenest

-turf, perhaps half an acre in extent, beside the insignificant

-stream in the hollow, and opposite the

-"Swan" Inn. The heath that formerly spread out

-across the elevated but flat table-land between this

-village and the succeeding one of Lexden was, in its

-different parts, variously named after them. On

-Stanway Heath, in Ogilby's <i>Britannia</i> of 1697, a

-picture map shows a beacon standing between the

-forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from

-London, on the right-hand side of the road. It

-appears to have been a post some 30 feet in height,

-crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means

-of slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily

-lighted, was provided for the benefit of travellers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>

-going to or coming from Colchester across the

-desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from

-the existence of a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the

-comparative security of Lexden village. The heath

-by the highway is a thing of the past, for those

-portions not brought under cultivation by the farmer

-have been grabbed by the builder, and the so-called

-Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row of

-houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything

-complete and modern. At the forty-eighth milestone,

-amid all this modern upheaval, stands a

-disused toll-house, and, close by, something much

-more ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered

-in dense woods and shrubs, known as "King Cole's

-Kitchen," and now&mdash;figure to yourself the shame of

-it!&mdash;overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and

-named from it "King Cole's Cottage."</p>

-

-<p>Turning off to the right, the curious in things

-pre-historic may lose themselves in the solitudes of

-the real Lexden Heath, where the Devil, the Trinobantes,

-the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary

-General&mdash;according to varying legends&mdash;threw up

-the entrenchments, and delved the ditches, found

-there in plenty. The Devil, we say advisedly, for

-"Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to

-the dyke across the heath, was none other, in the

-minds of the Saxons. "Lexden Straight Road"

-follows for an unconscionable distance a line of

-Roman entrenchments, and is straight and dull

-beyond belief. Followed long enough, it leads to

-"Bottle End," which may originally have been

-"Battle End," the scene of some traditional legend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>

-of Boadicea's defeat at the hands of the Romans.

-Or, again, it perhaps marks some forgotten connection

-with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside

-Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced

-"Bottle" by Colcestrians. Anything is

-possible in a district where Beacon End, the site

-of the old beacon already mentioned, has become

-Bacon End.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus58">

-<img src="images/fig48.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">LEXDEN.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Lexden village now claims attention. It is a

-place in which one school of antiquaries finds the

-original Roman station of Camulodunum, established

-on the site of the royal city of Cunobelin, King of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>

-the Trinobantes; a finding strenuously contested by

-another following. Certainly, among the tall elms

-and rolling surface of Lexden Park there are remains

-in plenty of huge defensive earthworks, telling in no

-uncertain manner that this must have been a place of

-enormous strength, by whomsoever held. The surroundings

-are weird and impressive to a degree.</p>

-

-<p>The village skirting the road is one of the

-prettiest on the way. Going towards Colchester,

-the road drops down the hill, where old cottages

-stand high above the pathway, with steep little

-gardens in front, kept from sliding down into the

-road itself by lichened retaining-walls sprouting

-with house-leek and draped with climbing plants.

-Lower still, hard by the church whose carpenter-Gothic

-atrocities are hung about with ivy and

-creepers until they are transfigured into a dream

-of beauty, the grouping of the 'Sun' Inn and

-neighbouring houses is exquisite. Beyond this

-point begins the suburban approach to Colchester,

-a town it behoves the stranger to approach with a

-proper respect, for here was the first Roman colony

-in Britain. The history of Colchester, indeed,

-begins so far back as <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 44, and there was already

-a pre-historic native city in existence before then;

-the royal city of that ancient British king, Cunobelin,

-the monarch famous in the pages of Shakespeare as

-"Cymbeline."</p>

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVI</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Cunobelin</span>, Lord of the Trinobantes, ruler of that

-part of the country now divided into Middlesex,

-Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hunts, Cambridgeshire

-and Essex, was the successor of his father

-Cassivelaunus, who had warred, not ingloriously,

-with Julius C�sar. He transferred his capital from

-his native town on the site of St Albans to where

-Colchester now stands. He appears to have been a

-powerful ruler, and, if little is known of him,

-certainly he is no myth, for the vague legends

-that held the name of the Buckinghamshire villages

-of Great and Little Kimble to be a corrupted form

-of his own were strikingly proved correct some years

-ago, when a hoard of gold coins was ploughed up in

-their neighbourhood, bearing his title.</p>

-

-<p>We do not know by what name Colchester was

-then styled. After Cunobelin had died, full of

-years and worn by grief at the revolts of his sons,

-Caractacus, Adminius and Togodumnus, the end of

-the native State over which he had ruled speedily

-came. Adminius, in a fury against his brothers,

-fled from Britain to seek the aid of the Romans,

-and if no immediate result came, certainly his

-invitation must have revived the old C�sarian

-dream of conquest. The real cause of the Roman

-invasion that took place shortly after the death of

-Cunobelin was the solicitation of a certain Bericus,

-a British Prince of whom nothing appears to be

-known beyond this one fact.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>The invasion took place in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 43, under that

-able general, Aulus Plautius, who threw the Trinobantes

-back from Hertfordshire and Middlesex,

-across the Lea and into the Essex marshes, where

-for a time they could not be followed. This was

-the position at the close of the year. Detached

-portions of the invading forces had overrun the

-south of Britain as far as Gloucester and had

-defeated the tribes on the way; leaving a garrison

-in the west. But the island was little known and

-held many mysteries. None could tell the real

-strength of the natives, who disappeared in the

-forests and marshes that covered the face of the

-land, and by their irregular warfare disconcerted

-the Roman plans of campaign. Plautius was at

-last driven to act on the defensive on the Essex

-borders. His soldiers were dying in the ague-stricken

-morasses between the Thames and the Lea,

-and had the enemy possessed powers of combination

-and military skill, he might well have been cut off

-here, at the end of the known world. A retirement

-with his sick and dying was impossible. Nothing

-remained but to go into camp during the winter,

-and meanwhile to send for reinforcements. He

-accordingly sent for forces from Gaul. They came

-with commendable promptitude, commanded by the

-Emperor Claudius in person. With these new

-legions came an elephant corps, brought from

-Africa to carry the heavy baggage. But they acted

-a better part than this, for their strange appearance

-terrified the astonished Trinobantes a great deal

-more than any increase of the Roman soldiery could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>

-have done. We may imagine this corps, crashing

-irresistibly through the thickets, the forests and

-marshes on that march into the Unknown, along

-this line of country now traversed by the Norwich

-Road, and can readily understand little resistance

-being met with on the way. The tribes were dispersed

-and their territory occupied as far as the

-Stour, and a colony was founded in the opening of

-the new year, <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 44, on the site of Cunobelin's city&mdash;Colonia

-Camulodunum, the first Roman settlement

-in Britain.</p>

-

-<p>The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance

-of the natives that they were soon lulled into a

-feeling of security. For an uninterrupted space of

-sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It

-became a pleasant town, inhabited by veteran soldiers

-grown grey in the service of the Empire, and

-spending their later years in retirement. The

-Emperor Claudius, flushed with his success, had

-assumed the dignity of a god and had caused a

-Temple to be erected in the market-place to his

-honour, with attendant priests and altars. The

-governors and consuls were lesser gods, and treated

-with contempt and ill-judged severity the natives

-who had been overcome with such ease. The

-soldiery were uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and

-luxury flourished together with this attitude of

-oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences.

-It is not surprising that these colonists were bitterly

-hated by their vassals, who in especial looked upon

-the priests as so many harpies living upon their

-substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoods<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>

-and all clergy have been from the beginning, and

-will be to the end. In this last respect these poor

-Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians, exhibited a

-quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the

-priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment

-that have since passed.</p>

-

-<p>These down-trodden natives were already ripe

-for revenge when a more than usually unjust proceeding

-of the Roman officials precipitated a rising.

-The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and

-whose frontiers marched with those of the conquered

-province, had been ruled over by a certain King

-Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate the

-goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast

-wealth he had accumulated, leaving one half to the

-Roman Emperor and the other moiety to his two

-daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his

-country was invaded. His widow, the famous

-Boadicea, resisted. She was publicly scourged, her

-daughters suffering the worst indignities, and her

-relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose

-in arms at these outrages, and their cousins, the

-Trinobantes, on the hither side of the Stour, joined

-them. The Romans saw their folly when too late.

-No more eloquent account is possible than that

-given by Tacitus of the premonitions of evil. The

-statue of Victory fell to the ground, and turned its

-back where the face had been, as if it fled before

-an enemy. Women were seen and heard singing

-mad, wild songs, prophesying disaster. Strange and

-unaccountable noises were heard in the house of

-assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>

-the estuary of the river the buildings of the city

-appeared reflected upside down, and ghastly remains

-of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the tide

-ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and

-the strangest whisperings stirred the air. Many of

-the wealthier colonists, alarmed at these portents,

-discovered that their health needed a change of air,

-and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side

-of the Channel, and those who remained applied for

-military help. In answer to this appeal, a meagre

-force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately

-employed to fortify the Temple. But before these

-measures could be completed, the town was surrounded

-and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants

-all slain, the little garrison in the Temple

-meeting a like fate after a defence of two days.</p>

-

-<p>Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the

-Ninth Legion, which had been stationed on the

-Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now

-stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city.

-He, however, had moved too late, and met the

-victorious natives at Wormingford, where they

-almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences

-of that great disaster were discovered in

-1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns, placed in

-order like streets, were unearthed, containing the

-bones of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the

-Roman sway had been reasserted.</p>

-

-<p>These events happened in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 61. Suetonius

-Paulinus, the then Commander-in-Chief, was at that

-time vigorously prosecuting a war with the Druids

-in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>

-disasters he hurried back through Verulamium and

-Londinium, collecting an army of ten thousand as

-he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and

-a numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman

-citizens of both those towns piteously begged for

-protection, but were left to their fate, which was not

-long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column

-passed than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed

-them. Seventy thousand citizens perished

-in that general massacre.</p>

-

-<p>It is uncertain where the Roman army met the

-hordes commanded by that heroic Amazon, Boadicea,

-whom we should perhaps more correctly style

-"Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull

-subject in the hands of the uninspired, who fail to

-render her "convincing." No one has done so well

-as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern

-writers of "personal paragraphs" in what recent

-slang would term his "actuality." He says, "she

-was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed, harsh-voiced,

-with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair

-falling below her waist" (her golden hair was

-hanging down her back!), "wearing a highly-embroidered

-tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a

-buckle over it."</p>

-

-<p>Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by

-two woods, on a site resembling a stretch of country

-at Haynes Green, near Messing; but the great fight

-must have raged on many miles of ground, and no

-doubt included Lexden Heath.</p>

-

-<p>The Britons were so sure of victory, that they

-had brought their women and children as spectators,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>

-and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a great

-semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman

-historian says they were an "innumerable multitude."

-The British Queen, addressing her warriors

-from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to

-die, resting her hopes on the strength of her forces

-and the justice of her cause; while Suetonius, on his

-part, urged his troops not to be dismayed either by

-the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts.

-The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining

-on the defensive. When the fury of the first

-onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers of the

-Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the

-cavalry closing in on the flanks, driving the speedily

-disorganised enemy back upon the semi-circle of

-waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in

-this way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in

-which eighty thousand Britons were slain, including

-the women and children who had come out to witness

-the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing

-all lost, poisoned herself.</p>

-

-<p>Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and

-Suffolk. From this time date the existing walls

-of Colchester. The conquerors were determined not

-to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first

-colony, and, choosing a new site, one mile to the

-east of the former city, they planted their walls on

-the ridge on which Colchester now stands, overlooking

-the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing

-an area of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain,

-after the passing of more than eighteen hundred

-years, the most perfect Roman fortifications in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>

-Britain. Even in that wide space of time the town

-of Colchester has not extended very greatly beyond

-them. In some directions, indeed&mdash;notably to the

-north and north-east and on the west&mdash;the ramparts

-still look out upon the open country. The walls

-have a thickness of from seven to eight feet, and

-are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses

-of stones, brought with great labour from the coast

-near Harwich; the neighbourhood of Colchester, and

-Essex in general, being quite innocent of stone of

-any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this

-day supply the boulders of limestone from which

-the building-stones of Colchester's walls were cut.</p>

-

-<p>Colchester was never again attacked during the

-period of more than three hundred years, in which

-the Romans ruled. In the events of <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 61, they

-had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of

-treating a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In

-the period between these events and the year 410,

-when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from

-Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from

-ruin, conquered and conquerors had to live together,

-and made the best of the necessity. Roman colonists

-intermarried with the gradually Romanised British,

-and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during

-three centuries, gradually grew to look upon Britain

-as their home and themselves as a nation. Thus,

-towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority

-are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and

-civilised British princes treating on equal terms with

-Roman statesmen. In this way the British in some

-measure came into their own again, and to these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>

-circumstances we owe the wild legends of that

-mysterious monarch, "old King Cole," who is to

-Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall, the

-great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's

-walls, and the earthworks near Lexden known as

-"King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the very name of

-Colchester itself&mdash;"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive,

-according to legends, from this scarce more than

-mythical personage. Those stories make him one

-Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of semi-independent

-British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal

-sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman

-conquest. The story goes on to tell how, on the

-death of the usurper Carausius, in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 293, Coel

-surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius

-Chlorus, on that successor of the C�sar's marrying

-his daughter Helena, who became the mother of

-Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer

-of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of

-Colchester still bear a ragged cross between four

-crowns, in allusion to this tale of the Empress

-Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction

-which Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy

-of her, holding a cross very plain to see, is newly

-set up on the very topmost point of the gorgeous

-new Town Hall, recently completed.</p>

-

-<p>To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey

-of Monmouth, the legend of Coel is chiefly traced.

-He may either have imagined it, or have woven the

-story out of existing legends, which had in turn

-derived from the Saxons, who, after the departure

-of the Romans, had wrested the country from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>

-Romanised British. They captured and burnt the

-town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls,

-took them to have been the work of some great king,

-after whom the place had been named. Legends

-of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons

-themselves had been converted to Christianity he

-was fully provided with a history.</p>

-

-<p>"Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster,

-has been shabbily treated in modern times and made

-to figure merely as a jolly toper. That he was the

-most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically

-assures us.</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called for</span><br />

-<span class="i2m">his fiddlers three."</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house

-potentate! The author of that nursery rhyme

-has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain did the

-romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of

-vulgarity, <i>A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur</i>.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">The</span> entrance into Colchester is singular. From the

-straight, broad road leading past the trim modern

-villas and so into Crouch Street&mdash;the street outside

-the walls that takes its name from the vanished

-monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars&mdash;the

-wayfarer suddenly comes to the sharpest of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>

-angles, and, turning abruptly to the left, enters

-Colchester by what has every appearance of being

-the back door into the town.</p>

-

-<p>Historically considered, the entrance by crooked

-Head Street, as the continuation of Crouch Street is

-called, really is a back way, and was in Roman times

-the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and

-less important roads. But ever since Saxon days

-this has been the only way to or from London into

-the town.</p>

-

-<p>How it happened that the original road and the

-Decuman Gate in Colchester's west wall fell into

-disuse, none can tell. It was so many ages ago that

-not even a pathway leads along the ancient way,

-now quite obliterated by houses. But if the road

-be gone, the Gate itself remains, though in ruins.

-Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt to find

-it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our

-steps a little distance along Crouch Street, and, so

-doing, to take a turning to the right-hand, down

-Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome is

-seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands

-towering above a flight of steps leading up into the

-street beyond. There stands revealed a portion of

-the wall. The breach in it, through which the steps

-lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees,

-the freshness of whose spring foliage with every recurrent

-April forms a romantic contrast with the

-almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a

-place for thought. From the summit of that old

-defence, where once the legionaries lined the battlements

-in time of peril, or leaned gossiping in peaceful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>

-days, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley

-where the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary

-lifting of the veil and a glimpse of what the spot will

-be like in another eighteen hundred years. Close

-by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn

-courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman

-Gate. Three arches can be traced; the middle arch

-of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot passengers,

-less than half that width. Candour, however,

-compels the admission that of architectural character

-they have not the slightest trace. Over against

-this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in

-the Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and

-through that hole the most prominent object in all

-Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo" brutally

-dominates everything, and blasts the approach to

-Colchester far away on every road but that from

-London, for which small mercy thanks be given.

-Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he

-is very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and,

-unluckily, cannot fail to be seen. After him, even

-the Roman remains of Colchester pale their ineffectual

-efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable,

-although not very likely, that a stranger passing

-through Colchester might not notice its Roman

-antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There

-he is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless

-in brick of the most striking red and in attempts

-at decoration which, however well meant, only serve

-to render his hulking body more objectionable, with

-an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged

-face with pearl-powder.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower

-of Colchester's waterworks. It was built in

-1881, and cost close upon �10,500, and there are

-those who say it is the second largest of its kind in

-England. Where the largest may be we know not,

-but if it injures its surroundings as effectually as

-does Colchester's incubus, that unknown place has

-our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in

-his name, for, as the curious may see for themselves,

-his weather-vane bears the effigy of an elephant.</p>

-

-<p>Returning to Crouch Street, and so by Head

-Gate and along Head Street, the High Street is

-gained. It is one of the broadest and most spacious

-streets in the kingdom, as it had every occasion to

-be, for it was not only part of the great road leading

-into Suffolk, but in it was held the principal fair of

-the town. Here, too, close by where Colchester's

-new and gorgeous Town Hall stands, was the old

-Moot Hall, a building of Saxon, Norman and later

-periods, barbarously destroyed in 1843. In the

-Moot Hall the Mayor and justices dealt with offences

-of all kinds, from the selling of bad meat to charges

-of witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. Thus we may

-read in the borough records of things so diverse as

-the fining of Robert Barefot, butcher, in the sum of

-twelve pence for selling putrid meat, and may learn

-how William Chevelying, the first of the Colchester

-martyrs, was imprisoned here in the reign of Henry

-the Sixth until such time as it was convenient to

-burn him in front of Colkyng's Castle. Here the

-local Court of Pie Powder was held during the

-Corporation Fair Days, in October. Summary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>

-jurisdiction was the special feature of that Court,

-and it was needed, for in those times, when people

-of all sorts and conditions came from far and near,

-offences were many and various. In the legal jargon

-of the Middle Ages this tribunal is called the <i>Curia

-Regis Pedis Pulverizatis</i>, or, in the Norman-French

-then common, the "Cour Royal des Pieds Poudr�s,"

-that is to say, the King's Court of Dusty Feet.

-Courts of Pie Powder obtained this eminently descriptive

-name from the original Fair Courts, held in

-the dusty streets long before buildings were erected

-for the purpose, and the name survived long after

-the necessity which originated it had disappeared.

-Imagine, therefore, the highwaymen, the cheats and

-thieves and those who came into disputation on the

-Fair Days being brought before the Mayor by the

-bailiffs, their cases arising and being heard, and judgments

-and sentences being delivered and executed,

-within the space of one day, amid the bleating of the

-flocks, the lowing of the herds, and all the noise and

-tumult of the Fair itself. We must not, however,

-suppose the High Street to have been absolutely

-clear of obstructions in days of old. In midst of

-it stood the Late Saxon or Early Norman church of

-that Saxon saint, St Runwald, which remained here

-until so recently as 1878, when it was pulled down

-and its site sold to the Corporation, to be thrown

-into the roadway.</p>

-

-<p>That Colchester stands on a considerably elevated

-site is evident to all who, having entered from the

-London road, turn out of Head Street into the High

-Street, and in doing so glimpse the long descent of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>

-North Hill at the corner. A further revelation is

-that of East Hill, which, in continuation of High

-Street, the traveller must long and steeply descend

-towards the Colne, on his way to Ipswich and

-Norwich. It was in High Street that Colchester's

-principal coaching inns were situated, and there yet

-remains&mdash;now the most picturesque feature of that

-thoroughfare&mdash;the "Red Lion," with old timber

-brackets supporting a projecting upper storey and a

-four-centred Tudor oak entrance curiously carved; its

-original and restored portions so thickly smeared

-with paint and varnish that all might be old, so far

-as the antiquary can tell, or all might be in the

-nature of Wardour Street antiques. The "Red

-Lion" figured as a rendezvous in the surrender of

-the town to Fairfax, after the siege of 1648. In its

-yard the vanquished laid down their swords.</p>

-

-<p>Another inn was the "White Hart," where Bank

-Passage leaves the High Street. The building, a

-highly respectable plaster-faced one, smug and

-Georgian, still stands, but it is an inn no longer.

-Another old inn, the "Three Cups," has been rebuilt.

-Older than any, but coyly hiding its antiquarian

-virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries

-from the crowd, is the "Angel," in West Stockwell

-Street, whose origin as a pilgrim's inn is vouched

-for. Weary suppliants to, or returning from, the

-shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the

-road through and past Norwich, housed here and

-misbehaved themselves in their medi�val way. It

-would be the gravest of mistakes to assume old

-pilgrims decorous. Modern Bank Holiday folks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>

-would, compared with them, seem to be of a severe

-monkish austerity. The shrine at Walsingham,

-second only in repute to that of the Blessed Thomas

-at Canterbury, drew crowds of every class, from

-king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of

-St John at Colchester sheltered some in its guest-houses,

-while the late-comers inned at such hostelries

-as the "Angel," or, if the weather were propitious,

-lay in the woods. Ill fared the unsuspecting citizen

-who met any of these sinners on the way to be

-plenarily indulged and lightened of their load of sin.

-They would murder him for twopence or cudgel him

-out of high spirits and for the fun of the thing;

-arguing, doubtless, that as they were presently to

-turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how black

-the old one was. Drunkenness and crime, immorality,

-obscenity and license of the grossest kind

-were in fact accompaniments of pilgrimage, and the

-sin-worn wanderers who prayed devoutly at the

-niche, now empty of its statue, in the east end of

-All Saints' Church in the High Street, on their

-journey to and from Walsingham, would resume

-their foul jests and their evil courses so soon as

-the last bead was told and the ultimate word of

-dog-Latin glibly pattered off.</p>

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVIII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Removed</span> from all the noise and bustle of the High

-Street, in a quiet nook away from the modern life of

-the town, stands Colchester Castle, on the site of the

-Temple of Claudius. The Keep, built by Eudo,

-"Dapifer," or High Steward of Normandy, under

-William the Conqueror and his two successors, alone

-remains, and has lost its upper storey, destroyed by a

-speculator who bought the building in 1683, and half

-ruined himself in his attempts to demolish it. It is

-perhaps not generally known that this is by far the

-largest keep in England, measuring 155 ft. by 113 ft.

-The Tower of London, built at the same period, and

-the next largest, measures only 116 ft. by 96 ft.

-There have been those who, looking at its massive

-walls, 12 ft. thick, with courses of Roman tiles

-conspicuous in them, have believed this to be the

-original Roman temple, and antiquaries who should

-have known better have written long treatises to

-support their views. Those, however, were the days

-before comparative arch�ology had come into being

-to prove that the peculiarities in the planning, noticeable

-here, are partaken of by the undoubted Norman

-keeps of the Tower of London and of Rochester

-Castle, known to have been designed by Gundulf,

-Bishop of Rochester. Freeman was very severe in

-his time on those who labelled the interior of

-Colchester keep with such names as "podium" and

-"adytum," in their belief of its Roman character.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus59">

-<img src="images/fig49.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE GRAND STAIRCASE, COLCHESTER CASTLE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>If its lack of height prevents Colchester Castle

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>from being impressive without, certainly its gloomy

-dungeons and mighty walls compel the respect and

-wonder of all who enter. They look not so much as

-though they had been built up, as though cells and

-passages had been carved and burrowed out of a solid

-mass; so small are those passages and staircases, so

-thick the walls. In the chapel and the corridors that

-still remain roofed, the collections of the Essex

-Arch�ological Society have a home, and from other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>

-and roofless walls that are broad enough to afford the

-safest of pathways one may gaze down upon the

-surrounding grassy enclosures and see that spot

-where those two Royalist commanders, Lucas and

-Lisle, who held Colchester for seventy-six days

-against the besieging army of the Parliament in

-1648, were barbarously shot by order of Fairfax,

-after having surrendered.</p>

-

-<p>That siege of Colchester is the most romantic

-incident that has survived in the history of the

-town. It is the story of a last desperate attempt of

-the Royalists to contend with the Parliamentary

-forces that had everywhere overwhelmed the King's

-supporters after a bitter warfare of over six years.

-It was a gallant attempt, and the more so because

-Essex was not a county favourable to the King's

-cause. Sir Charles Lucas, at the head of this enterprise,

-was a younger member of the Lucas family,

-seated at Colchester. In the beginning of June

-1648, a Royalist rising under Colonel Goring had

-been checked at Blackheath by the Parliamentary

-general, Fairfax. A portion of Goring's force crossed

-the Thames into Essex, and lay at Brentwood. This

-was an opportunity which Essex sympathisers could

-not let slip. Lucas and his friends, gathering a body

-of adherents, galloped down the road to Chelmsford,

-where the Committee of Parliament was in session,

-and seized them, afterwards continuing their progress

-to Brentwood, where they effected a junction with

-Goring's band. Their forces thus united, a counter-march

-was made upon Chelmsford again, and continued

-to Colchester; Lord Capel, Sir George Lisle,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>

-and many others joining on the way. On June 12,

-Goring, in command of this body of four thousand

-Royalists, approached Colchester, and found the Head

-Gate closed against him by the unsympathetic

-citizens, but a slight skirmish soon enabled him to

-force an entrance. He had not intended to remain

-at Colchester, but the swift pursuit that Fairfax

-organised from London gave the Royalists no time

-to continue their projected march into the Midlands.

-The day after Goring had entered Colchester, Fairfax

-had assembled his forces on Lexden Heath, and

-immediately sent a trumpeter to demand surrender.

-The inevitable refusal was the signal for a battle outside

-the town, on the London Road; a contest which

-resulted in the retirement of the Royalists within the

-walls. The Head Gate still existed, its bolts and bars

-in perfect order, but as the Royalists fell back through

-it into the town, two hundred or more of the Parliamentary

-troops dashed through in pursuit. Their

-ardour cost them their lives, for Lord Capel at the

-head of a determined band pushed back the gate

-upon the bulk of the enemy, thrusting his walking-stick

-through the staples as the door closed. The

-eager advance-guard, thus cooped up within the

-walls, were all slain.</p>

-

-<p>Preparations were now made on both sides for a

-siege. Fairfax had already lost many men, and

-dared not attempt to carry the town by storm. His

-plan was to surround Colchester and imprison the

-Royalists there until such time as his heavy ordnance

-or starvation should compel them to surrender.

-With his command of reinforcements from London,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>

-and his ability thus to enclose the town with a

-cordon of troops, the position of the Royalists was

-hopeless, and it is to their honour and credit that,

-in order to contain Fairfax's large army and so

-give opportunities to the organisers of Royalist

-movements in the Midlands, they continued the

-defence in the face of starvation and despite the easy

-terms of capitulation at first offered them. Their

-domestic position (so to call it) in the town was

-unenviable, for the inhabitants were wholly opposed

-to their cause. They had with them, it is true, the

-members of the Parliamentary Committee whom

-they had kidnapped from Chelmsford, but those

-gentlemen were a nuisance and had to be civilly

-treated and fed while the Royalists themselves went

-hungry. The unfortunate inhabitants, too, were

-starving, and many of their houses and churches

-destroyed by the besiegers' cannon shot; while

-suburbs were burnt down outside the walls.</p>

-

-<p>The end of this long agony came on August

-27, when the town was surrendered; the officers

-"surrendering to mercy," the lesser officers and rank

-and file with an assurance that their lives and

-personal belongings should be spared. Seventy-five

-superior officers accordingly gave up their arms at

-the "King's Head" inn. Four of them were to be

-tried by court-martial. One escaped, one was

-pardoned, and two&mdash;Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George

-Lisle&mdash;condemned to be shot without delay, on a

-disproved charge of having once broken their parole

-when formerly prisoners of war. In vain asking for

-time to make some final disposition of their affairs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>

-these two officers were executed the same evening,

-on a grassy spot a few paces clear of the north wall

-of the old castle. Sir Charles Lucas was the first to

-be shot, and met his end as a brave, gallant gentleman

-should. "I have often faced death on the field

-of battle," he said, "and you shall now see how I dare

-to die." Then he knelt in prayer, and, rising, threw

-open his vest, exclaiming, "See, I am ready for you.

-Now, rebels, do your worst!" The firing-party then

-fired and shot him in four places, so that he fell dead

-on the instant.</p>

-

-<p>Sir George Lisle was then brought to the same

-place, and viewing the dead body of his friend as it

-lay on the ground, knelt down and kissed him,

-praising his unspotted honour. After bidding farewell

-to some friends, he turned to the spectators,

-saying, "Oh! how many of your lives here have

-I saved in hot blood, and must now myself be

-most barbarously murdered in cold blood? But

-what dare not they do that would willingly cut

-the throat of my dear King, whom they have already

-imprisoned, and for whose deliverance, and peace to

-this unfortunate country, I dedicate my last prayer

-to Heaven?" Then, looking in the faces of those

-who were to execute him, and thinking they stood at

-too great a distance, he desired them to come nearer,

-to which one of them said, "I'll warrant, sir, we hit

-you." "Friend," he answered, "I have been nearer

-you when you have missed me!" And so, after a

-short prayer upon his knees, he rose up and said,

-"Now, traitors, do your worst!" Whereupon they

-shot him dead.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>The stone covering the graves of these unhappy

-soldiers may yet be seen in St Giles's Church, with

-an inscription stating that they were "by the command

-of Thomas Fairfax, the general of the

-Parliament Army, in cold blood barbarously

-murdered." A legend may still be occasionally met

-with in old books, which has it that the Duke of

-Buckingham, who had married Fairfax's daughter,

-approached Charles the Second with the object of

-having the passage erased that reflected so severely

-on his father-in-law's memory. The King conferred

-on the subject with Lord Lucas, who said that he

-would with pleasure obey the Royal command, if

-only His Majesty would allow him to place in its

-stead the statement that "Sir Charles Lucas and Sir

-George Lisle were barbarously murdered for their

-loyalty to King Charles the First, and that his son,

-King Charles the Second, had ordered this memorial

-of their loyalty to be erased." The King then, we

-are told, commanded the already existing epitaph to

-be cut still deeper, and it will be readily observed

-by those who go to gaze upon it that the lettering is

-bolder and deeper than commonly is the case.</p>

-

-<p>The undertaking of Fairfax with respect to the

-surrendered soldiery was not respected. They were

-ruthlessly pillaged, and some sent to the plantations

-over seas. Lord Capel was eventually executed in

-London. For many years afterwards the spot where

-Lucas and Lisle fell was shown by the awe-struck

-people of Colchester, who told the legend that grass

-would not grow where that loyal blood had been

-spilled. In later times the story became an article<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>

-of faith with one political party and a derision to

-the other. No grass grows there now; but for the

-commonplace reason that a well-kept gravel path

-occupies the site, which is duly marked by a small

-obelisk.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus60">

-<img src="images/fig50.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">OLD MAN-TRAP, COLCHESTER CASTLE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Colchester was long in recovering itself after the

-rough treatment received during the siege; and in

-fact, it is only in recent years that the church of

-St Mary-at-the-Wall, battered down on that occasion,

-has been rebuilt; while the Norman minster of St

-Botolph remains the roofless ruin that cannonading

-and incendiarism left it. Evelyn in 1656 found

-Colchester "a ragged and factious town, now swarming

-with sectaries," and if he had visited it nine

-years later would have witnessed a worse state, for

-the plague almost depopulated the place.</p>

-

-<p>"Sectaries"&mdash;that is to say, those who preferred

-to think for themselves on religious matters, and to

-worship in their own way&mdash;were treated with an

-unconscionable severity. One Parnell, a Quaker,

-was imprisoned in a cell within Colchester Castle,

-and died there, his story affording a sad example of

-barbarity in the authorities of that period.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>But the early nineteenth century was as savage

-in some ways as the late seventeenth, which so

-delighted in despitefully using Nonconformists.

-The antiquarian collections in the castle, for instance,

-include a particularly ferocious instrument

-devised for the protection of the squires' property

-and for the maiming of poachers. It is a man-trap;

-one of those devilish contrivances which, actuated

-by powerful springs and furnished with sharp steel

-teeth, would, when accidentally trodden on by the

-poacher, snap down upon his leg with force sufficient

-to injure the bone and probably mutilate him for

-life. It was thus the landed interests protected their

-rabbits, hares and pheasants. The existence of this

-man-trap, together with the spring guns also used

-at the same time, is a reproach to the England of the

-first quarter of the nineteenth century, just as its

-preservation here as a curiosity is a certificate of the

-progress achieved in humanity since then.</p>

-

-<p>The present prosperity of Colchester is reflected

-in many ways, but in none more strikingly than the

-condition of the castle, now a municipal property,

-and encircled with lawns and flower-beds, oddly at

-variance with its time-worn grandeur. The neatness

-of these surroundings and of the ornamental railings

-that fence off the enclosure is admirable from the

-everyday point of view, but the picturesque neglect

-and rural squalor of other years pointed the moral of

-the place and annotated its story, while present

-prettinesses blur the historic page. It is so everywhere

-throughout the land. When, a hundred years

-ago, Turner, Sandby, Prout and Girtin, our early<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>

-water-colourists, roamed the country, making their

-picturesque sketches, they did not find themselves

-baulked by flower-beds, cursed by cast-iron fences,

-or requested not to walk on the grass. They had to

-pick their hazardous way through miry lanes, or

-adventure through the bottomless sloughs of farmyards.

-All these things were offensive to the

-wayfarer, but they generally meant picturesque

-compositions and exquisitely sketchable foregrounds.

-Nowadays the conscientious illustrator, unwilling to

-picturesquely exaggerate, and yet accursed with cast-iron

-railings new from Birmingham last week, is in a

-quandary.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus61">

-<img src="images/fig51.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">COLCHESTER CASTLE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The once forlorn condition of Colchester Castle

-doubtless originated in 1726, when its then owner,

-Sir Isaac Rebow, left it by will to a detested grandson,

-on whom he thus conferred a useless encumbrance,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>a more exasperating bequest than even the

-proverbial cutting off with a shilling.</p>

-

-<p>A relic of those old days of picturesque neglect

-is found in the book of an auctioneer, who wrote an

-account of his "Professional Travels in England in

-the first half of the Nineteenth Century," modestly

-veiling his identity, and simply calling himself on

-his title-page, "An Auctioneer." Part One of his

-work was issued in 1843, but Part Two is yet to

-come, and as his first instalment shows little merit,

-the world can well afford to forego the second.</p>

-

-<p>Coming to the castle, he muses over its ruins,

-and weeps that cabbages and coriander employ the

-attention of the Colchester people, rather than the

-care of ancient fortresses. To him, thus contemplating

-"the sad remains of so many interesting scenes,"

-enters from an adjoining farm one whom he is

-pleased to term "an Aborigine." By this he

-obviously names an Essex farm-labourer. It is an

-affectation, but he might have done worse. He

-<i>might</i> have called him, seeing that Colchester is a

-place of oysters, a "native," in inverted commas,

-evidences of jocular intent, which would have been

-dreadful.</p>

-

-<p>"Ah! sir," says the Aborigine, "it was cruel

-work when them great Barons, as they call 'em,

-lived here."</p>

-

-<p>"True, my friend," replies the Auctioneer, "but

-it's a pity to see hogs and donkeys depasturing in

-their courts and gardens, and grubbing and kicking

-down their halls and chapels."</p>

-

-<p>"Lord! your honour," rejoins the son of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>

-soil, "what's the use on 'em in these days? I'd

-sooner see an acre of these 'ere swedes any day,

-than them there towers and dungeons. Them

-swedes afore you 'ool carry a score o' fine wethers

-any month in the year, and plaze ye to look at 'em,

-but as for them flint walls, you may look at 'em for

-ever and a day 'fore you find enough o' green for a

-garnish"; which was indeed a practical rural way of

-looking at things.</p>

-

-<p>The summit of those old walls has nowadays a

-very charming green garnish of grass, rendered parti-coloured

-by wind- and bird-sown wallflowers and

-vigorous wildings; but more lusty than these are

-the young sycamores, that have struck deep roots

-into the walls and bid fair to grow into large trees.</p>

-

-<p>It is still possible to follow the greater part of

-Colchester's old walls along the queer alleys that

-run above or below them. Eld Lane, out of whose

-elevated course the steep descent of the old postern,

-now known as Scheregate Steps, goes, is situated

-along the summit of the south wall looking over

-towards St John's Green, where, facing a wilderness

-of scrubby grass, broken bottles, and the sordid

-house-sweepings of the modern town, the gatehouse

-stands, all that is left of the proud mitred Abbey of

-St John. By that green is the frowzy little church

-of St Giles, patched up in so atrocious a manner

-from the wreck it was after the siege of 1648 that

-to call its "architecture" merely "debased" is to deal

-kindly with it. A dilapidated boarded tower is a

-feature of the exterior; the interior provided with a

-flat plaster ceiling, like that of a dwelling-room, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>

-filled with flimsy pine-wood pews, painted and

-grained. Dust and stuffiness reign within; dust

-and broken crockery without. And yet, although

-so unlovely, it is not altogether with satisfaction

-that an elaborate design is seen for rebuilding the

-church from its foundations, together with the

-notice, "It is earnestly hoped that contributions

-will be given toward the restoration fund."

-"Restoration" is not the word, for the design is

-alien and quite unlike anything that formerly stood

-on the ground. Rather let the place be repaired

-and cleansed and its unbeautiful details preserved

-as a characteristic and shocking example of how

-they looked upon ecclesiastical architecture in the

-dark days of churchwarden- and carpenter-Gothic.

-It is here, under the north aisle, that those two

-valiant captains, Lucas and Lisle, are laid.</p>

-

-<p>For the church-towers built of Roman bricks,

-and for other evidences of that ancient Empire, let

-the explorer seek, and, presently finding, think

-himself, if he will, an original investigator: it is a

-harmless attitude, if at the same time unwarranted

-by fact. Let us to other matters, and then, leaving

-the town, hie away for Ipswich.</p>

-

-<p>Colchester is, of course, famous for its oysters,

-and has been ever since the Roman occupation.

-In the estuary of the Colne, and the Crouch, and in

-the oozy creeks of the Essex shores, the Colchester

-"natives" still grow up from infancy to maturity

-and feed upon the semi-maritime slime, as they did

-close upon two thousand years ago, and doubtless

-long before that. If we may judge from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>

-stupendous heaps of oyster-shells discovered on the

-sites of Roman towns and villas, near and far, to

-say merely that the Romans were fond of oysters

-would be far too mild a term. They must have

-almost lived on oysters, dreamt oysters, and thought

-oysters. No wonder Colchester, whence the finest

-and the largest supply came, was so prosperous a

-Roman colony.</p>

-

-<p>Although the fishery brings wealth to the town,

-it is more than a mile away and makes no sign.

-Those who might think that, because of it, Colchester

-should obtrude oysters at every turn and oyster-shells

-should strew every street, would be vastly

-disillusioned. But beside its oyster fishery, other

-Colchester trades are of secondary importance.

-Agricultural machinery is made here, and brewing

-and corn-milling carried on, but the once famed

-textile manufactures are gone. Among those old

-trades was the industry of baize-making, which left

-Colchester considerably over a century ago for other

-centres, after having given additional prosperity to

-the town for a period of a hundred and fifty years.

-It was shortly after 1570 that numbers of Dutch

-Protestants, fleeing from the Spanish persecutions

-in Holland, introduced the making of "bays and

-says," and, despite local jealousies, flourished

-amazingly for generations here.</p>

-

-<p>But Colchester will never be dull while it continues

-to be what it is now&mdash;a great military dep�t.

-Those worthy representatives of the Roman legionaries

-at a distance in time of nineteen centuries or

-so, the Tommies and troopers of the British Army,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>

-are a prominent feature in every street, and bugles

-blow all round the clock, from <i>r�veill�</i> to the last

-post, when every good soldier goes home to his

-barracks down the Butt Road; while the King's

-bad bargains stay behind and fortify themselves

-against apprehensions of the morrow's "clink" with

-another glass, or, adventuring too rashly into the

-street, find themselves presently in charge of the

-military patrol that walks the town with measured

-step and slow.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIX</p>

-

-

-<p>"<span class="smcap">From</span> Colchester to Ipswitch is ten mile," says

-that seventeenth-century traveller, Celia Fiennes,

-in her diary. The milestones, however, tell quite

-a different tale and contradict the lady by making

-the distance between the two towns eighteen miles

-and a quarter.</p>

-

-<p>Seven miles of these bring the traveller from

-Colchester across the Stour and so into Suffolk. It

-is not an exciting seven miles. Passing the eastern

-outskirts of Colchester, where mud in the Colne and

-puddles beside the slattern streets offend the sense

-of propriety, as, having reversed their natural

-positions, the Fair Field is left on the right.

-"Left" is an expression used advisedly, for who

-would linger there? But the Fair Field cannot be

-passed unawares. If not seen, it will be heard, for

-on it camp the caravans, steam roundabouts and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>

-travelling circuses that still draw rustic crowds with

-their fat women, giants and dwarfs; or delight them

-with mechanical rides on wooden horses to the

-bellowing of a steam organ, whose music-hall airs

-follow the traveller in gusts of stentorian minstrelsy

-when the wind unkindly wills it so. The sounds

-nerve the cyclist to quickly put the miles between

-himself and those siren strains, and happily the

-road is a fast one, so that he need not be long about

-the business. It goes, as an old turnpike should,

-broad and straight and well-kept, for the matter of

-six miles, with little to vary the monotony of trim

-hedgerow and equi-distant telegraph poles.</p>

-

-<p>Let us therefore leave it awhile, and, journeying

-some three hundred yards along the Harwich Road,

-come across a railway level-crossing to the suburb

-of St Ann's, and the site of a spring and hermitage

-called Holy Well. The spring is now sealed up,

-but an inscription in the wall of a cottage still

-proclaims it to have been reopened in 1844. It

-seems strange that the Hermitage should have been

-placed, not on the main road where pilgrims were

-surely more plentiful, but on the seaward route.

-The explanation may probably be sought in the

-existence already of another establishment of the

-kind, long since forgotten. Here, then, the

-Hermitage of St Ann's was placed, and a holy

-well and an oratory made appeal to the piety or

-the superstition, as the case might be, of all who

-passed by. To these the hermit presented his

-leathern wallet, beseeching travellers, who would

-have gone without giving alms, to spare a trifle for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>

-the upkeep of the road, even though they valued

-not the Blessed Saints.</p>

-

-<p>For three hundred years the Hermitage lasted,

-and a long line of hermits lived here. Some were

-pious and industrious, keeping the road in repair;

-others had neither piety nor industry, spent their

-time in taverns, were smiters, and got drunk and

-fought, so that the road became scandalously neglected,

-and many Colchester worthies received

-apostolical black eyes from eremitical fists. Such

-an one must have been the hermit who lived here

-in the reign of Henry the Fifth, and was indicted in

-1419 for having an unclean ditch. Finally, in

-1535, when the dissolution of the monasteries took

-place, the Hermitage was closed, and the then

-occupant turned out, with a warning that if he

-solicited alms henceforward he would be regarded

-as a "sturdy beggar," and dealt with accordingly.</p>

-

-<p>The road to Ipswich was the scene, in the

-second half of the seventeenth century, shortly

-after the first coaches had started running, of many

-highway robberies. The borough of Colchester was

-deeply concerned at this lawlessness, and in 1679

-three men were rewarded with �6, 8s. between them

-"for apprehending those y<sup>t</sup> robbed the Ipswich

-coach." Again, in September 1698, three men

-were rewarded "for pursuen hiewaymen," and for

-"going to Ardlegh" on that business; but as they

-received only two shillings each and an extra

-shilling for "drinck," it looks as though the

-pursuit was unsuccessful.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus13">

-<img src="images/fig52.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">COLCHESTER.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The high road, to which we have now returned,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a><br /><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a><br /><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>

-has already been described as an excellent highway,

-but Dilbridge, a hamlet, and a roadside inn on what

-was once Ardleigh Heath, alone break its solitude.

-It has, however, the advantage of commanding the

-best general view of Colchester, with the inevitable

-Jumbo prominent, and the new-risen Town Hall

-tower in rivalry with it.</p>

-

-<p>Suddenly, when six miles from Colchester, the

-road changes its character and drops sharply down

-by an almost precipitous descent, to where a lazy

-river is seen flowing picturesquely in loops and

-bends between the grey-green foliage of willows

-lining either bank. It flows through a land of rich

-green meadows and yellow cornfields; a land, too,

-of noble elms and oaks. In the far distance the

-waters of a salt estuary sparkle in the sun, while

-in between, from this Pisgah height, rises the tall

-tower of a church. The river is the Stour, dividing

-Essex and Suffolk, and the pleasant vale, the Vale

-of Dedham. The estuary is that of the Stour at

-Manningtree, and the church tower that of Dedham.

-This, indeed, is the Constable Country, and that

-fact explains the homelike and familiar look it

-wears, even to the stranger. Constable, born close

-by at East Bergholt, painted these scenes lovingly

-for over forty years, and remained constant to his

-native vale all his life. By the magic power that

-comes of sympathy, he transferred the spirit of these

-lanes and fields and trees to canvas as faithfully as

-he did their form and colour; with the result

-that the veriest stranger viewing them becomes

-reminiscent.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>Nor did Constable only <i>paint</i> his native vale;

-he has described it in almost as masterly a way.

-To him it was "the most cultivated part of Suffolk,

-a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the

-Stour, which river separates that county on the

-south from Essex. The beauty of the surrounding

-scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow

-flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated

-uplands, its woods and rivers, with

-numerous scattered villages and churches, farms

-and picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular

-spot an amenity and excellence hardly

-anywhere else to be found. He tells an amusing

-story of travelling home by coach down this very

-hill. He shared the vehicle with two strangers.

-"In passing the Vale of Dedham, one of them remarked,

-on my saying it was very beautiful, 'Yes,

-sir, this is Constable's Country.' I then told him

-who I was lest he should spoil it."</p>

-

-<p>From this hill-top to the left of the road, and

-in what are now the woodlands of Langham Hall,

-Constable painted his best-known Vale of Dedham.

-In one respect the scene has changed. The willows

-still fringing the Stour, formerly "cobbed" or

-pollarded, are now allowed to grow as they will,

-and the river is not so visible as it was once.

-Otherwise the Constable Country is little altered.

-Even on this hill, close by Langham church, Church

-Farm, the original of his "Glebe Farm," remains as

-it was, thatched and gabled, close by the church

-tower. Only the foliage has changed, and the little

-guttering stream been drained away.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus14">

-<img src="images/fig53.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE VALE OF DEDHAM. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a><br /><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus62">

-<img src="images/fig54.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">GUN HILL.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>This steep road, shelving so abruptly to the

-Stour, is Dedham Hill, more often locally known

-as Dedham Gun Hill, from the "Gun" inn at the

-summit, now unhappily rebuilt, but until recently

-a most picturesque old inn, with the painted sign of

-a cannon hanging over the road. The sign has gone,

-and a pretentious house, which proclaims "Accommodation

-for Lady Cyclists," arisen in its stead.

-At the foot of the hill the road, turning abruptly

-to the left, begins a lengthy crossing of the Stour and

-its marshes by a bridge over the channel and a long

-series of flood-water arches across the oozy valley.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>

-The old toll-house, taking tolls no longer, still

-stands, a quaint building on the Essex side, and

-bears a cast-iron tablet with the inscription,&mdash;</p>

-

-<p class="c">

-THE DUMB ANIMALS' HUMBLE PETITION.</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">Dumb beasts pray use with all good will;</span><br />

-<span class="i0">Goad not, scourge not, with thong�d whips,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">Let not one curse escape your lips,</span><br />

-<span class="i3">God sees and hears.</span><br />

-<span class="i12"><span class="smcap">T. T. H., Posuit.</span></span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus63">

-<img src="images/fig55.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">OLD TOLL-HOUSE, STRATFORD BRIDGE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>This is one of a number of similar tablets erected

-throughout the country in the early part of the

-nineteenth century, when the first glimmerings of

-humane treatment of animals began to show themselves.

-When drivers had perforce to halt here to

-pay toll, this was a notice they could scarce help<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>

-seeing, but it only by rare chance attracts attention

-now.</p>

-

-<p>Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty.

-No picturesque building this, but a great hulking

-structure of that intolerable "white" Suffolk brick

-which is rather a grey-white than any other hue; a

-brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and

-crude, and by no chance ever helps the artist. The

-whole length of the Norwich Road is more or less

-bedevilled with it.</p>

-

-<p>This mill is the one blot on the beauty of

-Stratford St Mary, a village built along the flat road

-and continuing round the bend, and so up the hill

-to where the fine old church stands overlooking the

-highway. It is a remarkable church, built of black

-flint and stone, and covered on the side facing the

-road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the site

-of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy

-clothworkers of this place in the fifteenth and

-sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps a little difficult

-to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other

-East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the

-weaving industry, just as there is a difficulty in

-realising that Sussex was once a grimy iron-mining

-country; but trades and places have their fates, and

-changes and romances of their own.</p>

-

-<p>From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors

-family were busy in giving to their church and in

-directing its new features; and the chief of the inscriptions

-in stone and flint that curiously decorate

-its exterior in old English characters record the facts

-and beseech the wayfarer to pray for their souls.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>

-Vain request! The work had not been completed

-five years when the long and troubled story of the

-Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no

-longer prayed for.</p>

-

-<p>The most prominent inscription is that enjoining

-prayers for Thomas Mors and his wife Margaret, who

-built the north aisle:&mdash;</p>

-

-<blockquote>

-

-<p class="oldeng hang xxlarge">Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margarete<br />

-uxoris ejus qui istam alam ffieri fecerunt<br />

-anno dni mcccc<sup>m</sup> lxxxxviiii</p></blockquote>

-

-<p>Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together

-with his wife Alice, content with an English

-inscription. They are also a little less self-centred

-than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian

-souls" in addition to supplications for their own

-especial benefit:&mdash;</p>

-

-<blockquote>

-

-<p class="oldeng hang xxlarge">Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alys<br />

-hys wyfe and all crysten sowlys, Anno<br />

-Domini 1530.</p></blockquote>

-

-<p>Many other inscriptions and devices are seen,

-among them the letters, <span class="large">P B A E S</span>, said to be the

-initials of an invocatory sentence, "<i>Propitiemini beati

-ad eternam salutem</i>," addressed to Saints Thomas

-and Margaret, the patron saints of Thomas and

-Margaret Mors. But, stranger than any, is the appearance

-of the entire alphabet on these walls. Many

-attempts have been made to explain the reason of

-this, among them the view that the object was to

-educate the villagers in the rudiments of spelling!</p>

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXX</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">The</span> long rise out of Stratford on the way to Ipswich

-lies through a beautiful Gainsborough-like woodland,

-with ancient trees gripping sandy banks in a tenacious

-clutch of gnarled roots. It is a hollow road,

-and one in which, when the coaches were toiling up,

-the guards' hands went instinctively towards their

-blunderbusses and swordcases. One never knew

-what or who might be lurking in that shade.</p>

-

-<p>But if it was a chancy spot then, how very

-suspicious a place it must have been hundreds of

-years before. That it was so regarded may be learnt

-from the <i>Paston Letters</i>, the instructive correspondence

-of the Paston family in the fifteenth century.

-Therein we read how a rival of John Paston in the

-wardship of one of the Fastolf family, coming out of

-Suffolk to London, was escorted by a hundred retainers,

-all armed with bows and arrows in their

-hands, with saletts on their heads, well-padded jacks

-and rusty haubergeons on their bodies, and fear in

-their hearts of an ambush laid on the part of the

-Pastons in the hollow way where the trees meet overhead

-and a mid-day darkness broods under the dense

-foliage. This rival expressed himself as not being

-afraid of the Pastons or any of their friends; but if

-not, why did he go escorted with this motley crew,

-tricked out with all the ancient weapons and rusted

-armour they could find? Happily they were not

-attacked, but that it was possible for petty warfare

-of this kind to be plotted is proof that the Merry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>

-England of that period was no safe place for peaceful

-travellers.</p>

-

-<p>Now we are well within Suffolk, the "crack

-county of England," as Cobbett called it, the "sweet

-and civil county" of Bishop Hall; but a county to

-which the alliterative term "silly" has long been

-applied. It is probably by this time quite hopeless

-to scotch that nickname, for it is of a considerable

-age and has a specious and easy glibness that comes

-trippingly off the tongue. Suffolkers themselves&mdash;whom

-it most concerns&mdash;are at pains to explain that

-the real, and entirely flattering, solution of the phrase

-is found in "selig," the Anglo-Saxon for "holy" or

-"blissful;" a reference to the numerous and wealthy

-religious houses within the county, and to the East

-Anglian saints and the many places of pilgrimage.

-Another party advancing the theory that the epithet

-was originally "Sely Suffolk," observant of the

-seasons, would thus have us believe that Suffolk

-must have been more observant than other counties,

-which is not credible. True, Suffolkers still talk of

-the hay-harvest as "haysel," a survival of "hay sele,"

-but this is not the only county that uses the phrase.

-It becomes evident that the nickname must go unexplained.</p>

-

-<p>Suffolk has its claims to recognition on other than

-historic grounds. "I'm told the dumplings is uncommon

-fine down there," said William, the coachman,

-to little David Copperfield. Perhaps they are, and

-certainly it was once the custom among the peasantry

-here, as indeed throughout England, to serve pudding,

-or "dumpling," before meat in order to take the edge<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>

-off appetites with a kind of food cheaper than

-butcher's meat; but the improved circumstances of

-the peasantry scarce demand such a practice nowadays,

-and in any case, Norfolk is the county of

-dumplings, so Dickens was in error in putting that

-speech in the coachman's mouth. "Norfolk Dumplings,"

-he should have known, are as proverbial as

-"Silly Suffolkers."</p>

-

-<p>Suffolk is deservedly esteemed all over the world

-for the "Suffolk Punch." This sounds convivial, but

-has no connection with punch-bowls; the reference

-being, as a matter of fact, to a breed of horses.</p>

-

-<p>"And the Punches! There's cattle!" said

-William, the Canterbury coachman, to David Copperfield.

-"A Suffolk Punch, when he's a good 'un, is

-worth his weight in gold," he added; which is not

-a very great exaggeration. Keep an eye upon the

-fields or an observant glance along the road, and the

-Suffolk Punch will readily be noted in his native

-country, at plough, halted by the wayside inn, or

-dragging with indomitable spirit the heaviest loads

-that the stupidity of the most stupid of waggoners

-could put him to. If ever horse deserved the praise

-contained in the familiar copy-book maxim, that he

-is "a Noble Animal, the Friend of Man," it is to this

-breed that it most particularly applies. The Suffolk

-Punch is a sturdy and a willing brute, and will pull

-against a dead weight until exhausted. It has been

-said that the Suffolk Punch existed as a type of horse

-in early British times, and it has been supposed that

-his remote ancestors were the horses that drew

-Boadicea's war-chariots. If it were not that he is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>

-invariably a chestnut, it might be supposed that his

-fame in the county had originated the sign of the

-"Great White Horse" in Ipswich; but from chestnut

-the breed never varies. It may be of various shades,

-from the darkest mahogany to the lightest golden-brown,

-but never any other hue. It is, of course,

-not necessary to journey into East Anglia to see the

-Suffolk Punch. Many of his kind are at work in

-London, drawing heavy loads, and are to be seen

-expatriated to Russia, and on Canadian farms,

-thousand of miles away from their native claylands.</p>

-

-<p>The Suffolk dialect is kin to those of Essex and

-Norfolk, but the "Suffolk whine" is peculiar to the

-county; it is a rising inflection of the voice towards

-the end of words and sentences. In Suffolk speech

-"fowls" become "foals," and "foals," "fools"; and

-archaic words, heard occasionally in Essex, grow

-more common as the traveller advances. So also

-does an odd custom first noticed in the neighbourhood

-of Colchester&mdash;the custom of affixing the place-name

-to the sign of an inn in ordinary talk. The

-"Gun" inn at Dedham, for example, is always

-spoken of as "Dedham Gun," and here, at Bentley,

-the custom is emphasised by the sign of a roadside

-inn being inscribed "Bentley Tankard," and not

-merely "The Tankard."</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus15">

-<img src="images/fig56.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>

-</div>

-

-<p>But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear

-Suffolk talk it is necessary to linger in the villages

-and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The

-agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide,

-when they give themselves up to play and gossip.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a><br /><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a><br /><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>

-Then, as the long summer day draws to its close, the

-children find romance in the lengthening shadows,

-in which their games of robbers and pirates seem

-much more convincing than they could be made to

-appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm

-labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of

-"bellywengins," at the pub, and the coy mawthers

-find the twilight a seasonable time for nannicking

-with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning

-gibberish to those unacquainted with the

-peculiar dialect of East Anglia, merely signifies the

-girls flirting with the "other ones"&mdash;the young

-men, in short.</p>

-

-<p>But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl

-is a mawther, and so is a grandame. It is a curiosity

-of speech which is apt to startle the stranger who

-first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet

-learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be

-heard any day in any Suffolk village, "Yow come

-'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll spank

-yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex,

-Suffolk and Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which

-a native of these parts may be immediately distinguished

-anywhere.</p>

-

-<p>When the labourers have trudged over to their

-"shants o' gatter," or quarts and pots of beer&mdash;the

-"bellywengins," or belly vengeance, aforesaid; when

-the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers

-and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together

-in the gathering dusk, then is the gossiping

-time, both of the housewives and of the labourers.

-The women talk at the doors of the "housen":<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>

-the men mostly in the village inns. Hear, passing

-stranger, what the mawthers are saying:&mdash;</p>

-

-<p>"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin'

-arn?"</p>

-

-<p>"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew

-or tree weeks sin'. The doctor say I fare to be

-on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi' me

-sure."</p>

-

-<p>"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm

-thinkin'; but there, 'taint so much yer aige, 'tis yer

-sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."</p>

-

-<p>"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group,

-"what be life wi'out sperrut? Nothin', in a

-manner o' speakin'."</p>

-

-<p>"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he

-lived to be ninety."</p>

-

-<p>"What a man that wor! I mind him when he

-come to mine arter he'd walked from Ipswich, an'

-that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun

-he ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were

-as spry as a mavish and fresher'n a paigle."</p>

-

-<p>A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East

-Bergholt, Constable's birthplace, and between it

-and the road still stretch in summer those golden

-cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that

-crowning achievement of English landscape, how

-exquisite a thing it is, radiant in colour on the

-walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually

-the inadequate medium of black and white

-attempts to translate it.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus16">

-<img src="images/fig57.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE CORNFIELD. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for

-his growls, poor fellow, is careful to explain his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a><br /><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a><br /><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>

-cornfields away. When asked why, if it does not

-pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he

-says he grows it for the straw. At any rate, times

-are changed from those when agricultural England

-was merry with high prices; those picturesque days

-when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed,

-as every traveller was hailed, at harvest-time by the

-reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo, largesse," the largesse

-going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the village

-inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the

-reaping-hook, and with it and many other things

-has gone the Lord of the Harvest, elected from

-among his fellow-reapers to preside over their

-labours and their harvest-supper in the great

-fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen. The line

-of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning

-with their sickles in the fierce sun upon the

-diminishing fields of standing wheat, with halts for

-levenses and bever, and so home by the light of

-the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines

-do the work instead. It was astonishing,

-and, in the haymaking fields, still is, what long and

-continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the

-intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say

-the eleven o'clock forenoon meal, and bever, the

-four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose name came

-through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin

-"bibere," to drink, reduced the contents of the

-barrels placed in the shady hedgerows, but quarts

-imbibed under such conditions were harmless.

-Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life,

-the names of "bever" and "levenses" remain yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>

-in the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk as

-those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and

-carter.</p>

-

-<p>Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent

-moments, of coaching and posting days here, when,

-near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green, and in

-a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes,

-leading from Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond,

-"Laddenford Stables" stood at the cross roads that

-went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four

-sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed

-to part here and went their several ways, but how

-they fared, or what was their social status, the story

-does not tell.</p>

-

-<p>Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing

-by Capel station, and so by Copdock, whose church

-tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape of King

-David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at

-the foot of its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and

-Washbrook in the hollow, together with the broad

-and still marshy valley of the little Wash Brook,

-tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days

-when Saxons and Danes contended on this coast, a

-navigable creek, an arm of the Orwell. The road,

-in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley,

-together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of

-bygone geographical conditions, leading as it does

-down to the place where a bridge now spans the

-stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of

-old, first fordable. Having thus crossed, the road

-went, and still goes, in a right-angle turn uphill,

-towards Ipswich.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>It was by no means necessary for travellers

-journeying between London and Norwich to touch

-Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial

-reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises

-commonly went from Washbrook, through Sproughton

-and Bramford, and joined the coach route again at

-Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead

-of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook

-who can still tell of the coaches that halted at

-"Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a toll-gate

-(the house still existing) stretched across the

-way at the foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks"

-who posted the long stage between "Stonham Pie"

-and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the

-"Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely

-up at the hill-top, but now a private residence with

-its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and can show

-the places, in what are now meadows, where many

-houses and cottages stood in those wayfaring days,

-when the high-lying road to Ipswich, across the

-uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the

-Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXI</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">There</span> can be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings

-having thoroughly captured the heart of

-grumbling old Cobbett.</p>

-

-<p>"From the town itself," he says, "you can see

-nothing; but you can, in no direction, go from it a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>

-quarter of a mile without finding views that a

-painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable,

-for we do not generally attribute an artistic

-perception of scenic beauties to this practical farmer.

-Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom

-and his pictures he probably had never heard,

-although Constable had already for years been

-painting these very scenes.</p>

-

-<p>The practical farming mind appears in Cobbett's

-next remarks: "And then, the country round about

-is so well cultivated; the land in such a beautiful

-state, the farmhouses all white and all so much

-alike; the barns and everything about the homesteads

-so snug; the stock of turnips so abundant

-everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order;

-the wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the

-furrows, if a quarter of a mile long, as straight as a

-line, and laid as truly as if with a level; in short,

-here is everything to delight the eye and to make

-the people proud of their country; and this is the

-case throughout the whole of this county. I have

-always found Suffolk farmers great boasters of their

-superiority over others, and I must say that it is not

-without reason."</p>

-

-<p>Cobbett found the windmills on the hills round

-Ipswich so numerous that, while standing in one

-place, he counted no fewer than seventeen, all

-painted or washed white, with black sails. They

-are fewer to-day, and could Gainsborough, old

-Crome and Constable revisit the scenes of their

-artistic inspiration, they would sadly miss the

-picturesqueness they gave these woody scenes and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>

-fertile hills and vales. It is from the crest of one

-of these hills that Ipswich is first glimpsed. There

-it sprawls, prosperous, beside the broad Orwell;

-"doubtlesse one of the sweetest, most pleasant, well-built

-townes in England," as John Evelyn thought in

-1656; but then swarming with "a new phanatic sect

-of dangerous principles." The reader will scarce guess

-aright who these fanatics were. They were neither

-sun-worshippers nor Mahometans, but merely Quakers.</p>

-

-<p>One obtains no glimpse of the broad estuary of

-the Orwell when descending into the town by the

-London road, and the crowded mass of the place rises

-confusedly up before the traveller as he steeply

-descends, and forms no picture. You must take

-Ipswich in detail to admire it, and the actual

-crossing of the river at the foot of the hill where

-the town begins is at a narrow canalised stretch

-before it widens out into the noble harbour that

-makes the fortune of the port. A sign of that

-accomplished fortune is the unlovely sight of the

-great railway sidings and goods yards spread out

-before the stranger's eye as he comes downhill. One

-may say that the town begins at the door of the

-"Ipswich Arms" inn, uninteresting in itself, but displaying

-the fine "old coat" of this famous seaport;

-a shield with a rampant golden lion on a red field on

-the sinister, and three golden demi-boats on blue on

-the dexter side.</p>

-

-<p>"A fine, populous, and beautiful place," says

-Cobbett, still harping on an unwonted string of

-praise. "The town is substantially built, well

-paved, everything good and solid, and no wretched<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>

-dwellings to be seen on its outskirts." He knew no

-town to be compared with it, except it were Nottingham,

-which, after all, is not properly comparable,

-Nottingham standing high, while Ipswich is in a

-vale, and moreover, is situated on an arm of the sea.

-It is amusing to read Cobbett's remarks on the

-population of Ipswich, which stood in his time at

-twelve thousand. "Do you not," he asks, "think

-Ipswich was far larger and far more populous seven

-hundred years ago than it is at this hour?"&mdash;that

-hour being some time in March 1830. He remarked

-upon "the twelve large, lofty and magnificent

-churches," each of them seven hundred years old,

-one capable of holding from four to seven thousand

-persons, and came to the conclusion that, in fact,

-although he found Ipswich populous, it must, even

-thus, have been a mere ghost of its former self.

-That shrewd observer was right. Ipswich had

-grievously decayed even in Charles the Second's

-reign, when the Duke of Buckingham described

-it as "a town without inhabitants, a river without

-water, streets without names, and where the asses

-wore boots." The Duke, in speaking of "a river

-without water," was probably referring to the

-estuary of the Orwell at low tide, when mud-banks

-stretch vast, and the stream runs by comparison

-feeble and thread-like through them. In its

-then nameless streets, Ipswich was not singular, for

-many small provincial towns were in like case. The

-asses that wore boots were those employed in rolling

-the lawn of a neighbouring park, the object probably

-being to prevent their hoofs injuring the surface.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>"Yepysweche," as Margaret Paston, writing to

-her husband over four hundred years ago, spells

-the name, derives its title from the aboriginal

-Gippings, a tribe or clan who squatted down

-beside the Orwell, and not only established their

-primitive village of Gippingswick here, but contrived

-to foist their tribal name upon the non-tidal

-part of the river above the town, which therefore

-still generally bears this <i>alias</i>. The town probably

-saw its greatest prosperity in the time of Cardinal

-Wolsey, a native, and, according to legend, son of a

-butcher. This "butcher's dogge," as the envious

-nicknamed the great Cardinal, determined that his

-birthplace should be great in learning as well as

-in commerce, and to that end founded a College

-which he intended to be in some sort preparatory

-for his greater college of Christ Church at Oxford.

-That his foundation was reared on the spoliation of

-a religious house and its revenues, procured by him

-for the purpose, seemed but an ill omen for its

-prosperity to those who saw his buildings rising to

-completion, and the omen was speedily fulfilled, for

-the new-made abode of learning never sent forth

-a scholar, but was suppressed by Henry the Eighth

-almost before the mortar of its brick walls was

-dry; the buildings themselves torn down and the

-endowments confiscated. All that remains of

-Wolsey's College is one noble red-brick gateway in

-College Street.</p>

-

-<p>Daniel Defoe was a native of Ipswich and a

-curious contrast with Wolsey, his brother townsman

-of two hundred years before. In his day the old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>

-prosperity of the place had vanished, in the stress

-of Dutch competition and the virulence of the plague;

-but modern times have made amends for that

-temporary decay, and the town is now nearly four

-times larger than when, shortly after the first

-quarter of the nineteenth century had gone, Cobbett

-noted its many and empty churches and its scanty

-population. It numbers now over 58,000 souls,

-and its trades are numerous and prosperous.

-Whether it be in the making of agricultural and

-milling machinery, its corn markets, artificial

-manure making, or the manufacture of corsets,

-Ipswich is fortunate, with the good fortune of those

-who give heed to the ancient proverb and do not

-put all their eggs in one basket.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus64">

-<img src="images/fig58.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">WOLSEY'S GATEWAY.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Picturesqueness coyly hides itself from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>

-traveller who merely passes through the chief streets.

-Not in the open square of Cornhill, where the cabs

-and flys stand on the site of the old Market Cross

-and the trams fly to and fro, and where the Post-office

-and the Town Hall rise, side by side, does

-it appear, nor in the long street beyond; but rather

-in the Butter Market and the lanes that conduct

-to the waterside. There be streets in that quarter

-with odd names, among them Silent Street; and

-almshouses, and churches, and the queerest inns.

-Among the almshouses are Smart's, on whose walls,

-unhappily rebuilt in modern times, the charitable

-Smart and his no less charitable coadjutor, Tooley,

-are commemorated:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"Let gentle Smart sleep on in pious trust,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">Behold his charity. Respect his dust."</span>

-</div>

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"In peaceful silence lett great Toolie rest,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">Whose charitable deeds bespeak him blest."</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>It is to be feared that these eulogies raise a smile

-at the expense of great Tooley and gentle Smart.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus65">

-<img src="images/fig59.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE "LION AND LAMB," ANGEL LANE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>As to the inns, they include the odd conjunction

-of the "Lion and Lamb," pictured here, and the

-"Neptune" and the "Sea Horse," with a fine sound

-of the sea in their names. Some of these old

-hostelries yet retain their corner-posts: for example,

-that of the "Half Moon" in Foundation Street,

-where the post still keeps its medi�val carving of

-a fox, with uplifted sanctimonious eyes, preaching

-to three geese and a griffin; a satirical effort no

-doubt looked sourly upon by the clergy of St Mary

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>Key Church, opposite, in days of old. A great gilt

-key serves as vane to that church and perpetuates

-the error in the name, which was originally, and

-rightly, St Mary-at-Quay: the custom-house quay

-and the harbour being close by, as the sight of

-certain corn-elevators, the rattling of chains and

-windlasses, and the sounds of throaty steam-sirens

-sufficiently proclaim. The custom-house stands in

-midst of coal-grit, laden steam vessels lying alongside

-the quay wall, bellowing steamily to be discharged,

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>and railway-sidings, along whose maze of

-points and turn-tables fussy little locomotive engines,

-dragging jerky trucks, run, screaming intermittently,

-as though saying to the bellowing steam-vessels,

-"<i>You</i> just wait; can't you see I'm coming as quick

-as I can?" It is a dignified custom-house, and

-seems, surrounded with dutiable goods, to be

-aristocratically sneering at the trade in whose midst

-it is necessarily placed, and with as great a consciousness

-of its Ionic peristyle as any high-born beauty

-of her Greek nose.</p>

-

-<p>Many of the old wool-staplers', clothiers' and

-merchants' fine mansions stood by the quay and in

-the by-lanes. They are mostly gone now, but traces

-of old doorways and stray fragments of stone and

-wood carvings remain, and here and there a courtyard,

-or a house that sheltered family circles in the

-amphibious half-mercantile, half-agricultural Ipswich

-of the sixteenth century.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus66">

-<img src="images/fig60.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">SPARROWE'S HOUSE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Certainly one of the finest things Ipswich has to

-show is the wonderful old place in the old Butter

-Market, known still as "Sparrowe's House," although

-the last of the Sparrowes who inhabited here has

-long since gone to his home in the family vault within

-the Church of St Lawrence, where, over their tomb-house,

-may yet be read the punning motto, <i>Nidus

-Passerum</i>, "a nest of sparrows." These Sparrowes

-seem to have been endowed with some of the attributes

-of the cuckoo, for <i>they</i> did not build the house

-that bears their name. It owes its origin to a

-certain George Copping, who built it in 1567, but

-alterations and additions made in the Jacobean

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>period give its architectural history a span of over a

-century. The woodwork of the bay windows and

-the grandly-projecting eaves, together with that of

-the shop premises, was added at the time. But the

-great glory of "Sparrowe's House" is its decorative

-plaster-work in high relief, which profusely covers the

-exterior with garlands of flowers and fruits and with

-quaint devices emblematic of the four quarters of the

-globe. Here Europa, cornucopia in one hand, book

-and sceptre in the other, sits with her bull, who

-might be taken for an elephant with half his trunk

-shorn off; here, on another bay, a podgy plaster

-relief typifies Asia, with palm-tree and a building of

-Oriental character in the background; followed by

-Africa, a nude nigger holding an umbrella over his

-head and sitting on a shark, at which four tiny<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>

-figures at a respectful distance express astonishment,

-while nearer at hand a wicked-looking bird of quite

-uncertain family roosts on a something that greatly

-resembles a battered meat tin. America is typified

-by an Indian in a feather head-dress which represents

-his entire wardrobe. He stands with bow and arrows,

-attended by a dog with a damaged smile. A very

-beautiful representation of the Royal Arms occupies

-one of the spaces between the windows, and other

-devices show the pelican in her piety; Atlas supporting

-the world; a classical scene in which a shepherd

-bows as gracefully as the artist in plaster could make

-him to a rural nymph; St George and the Dragon,

-and several smaller subjects.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">The</span> most famous thing in Ipswich is a thing neither

-ancient nor beautiful, yet it is an object to which

-most visitors to the town turn their first attention:

-it is the "Great White Horse." The "Great White

-Horse" is an hotel, of a size, in the merry days of the

-road, justly thought enormous. It has been left for

-the present age to build many hotels in town and

-country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more

-hostelries of the size of the "Great White Horse,"

-but in its own especial era that house fully justified

-the adjective in its sign. Especially did its bulk

-strike the imagination of the reporter of the London<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>

-<i>Morning Chronicle</i> who was dispatched to Ipswich

-in 1830 for the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary

-election in the town. He was a very young, a very impressionable

-and a very bright reporter, and although

-we may be quite sure that the business on which he

-was come to Ipswich was an arduous piece of work,

-calculated to fully occupy his time and thoughts, he

-carried away with him so accurate an impression of

-the big inn where he stayed, that when, some time

-afterwards, he wrote about it the description was as

-exact as though it had been penned within sight

-of the house. That reporter was Charles Dickens,

-and it is his description in the <i>Pickwick Papers</i>

-which has made the place famous.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus67">

-<img src="images/fig61.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE "GREAT WHITE HORSE."

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>It was not a flattering description. Few more

-severe things have ever been said of inns than those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>

-Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse." Indeed,

-if such things were nowadays printed of any inn or

-hotel, the writer might confidently expect to be made

-the defendant in an action for libel. Yet (such is the

-irony of time and circumstances) the house that

-Dickens so roundly abused is now eager in all its

-advertisements to quote the association; and the

-adventures of Mr Pickwick in the double-bedded

-room with the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers

-have brought many more visitors than the unfavourable

-notice of the "uncarpeted passages" and the

-"mouldy, ill-lighted rooms" has turned away. If, as

-has been thought, Dickens thus wrote of the house in

-order to be revenged for some slights and discomforts

-he may have experienced here, certainly fortune

-has played the cynic in converting his remarks into

-the best of all imaginable recommendations.</p>

-

-<p>The exterior of the house is much the same as it

-was when Dickens first saw it, "in the main street

-of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way, a short

-distance after you have passed through the open

-space fronting the Town Hall."</p>

-

-<p>It is the same plain, square building, constructed

-of a pallid kind of brick suggesting underdone

-pastry, and is still, although the coaches have disappeared

-and railways have supplanted them,

-"known far and wide by the appellation of the

-'Great White Horse.'" Still, over the pillared

-entrance trots the effigy of the Great White Horse

-himself, perhaps the aboriginal ancestor of that

-famous breed of equines, the "Suffolk Punches," a

-very muscular race, more famous for their bulk and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>

-strength than for elegance, like those sturdy Flanders

-mares to which Henry the Eighth inelegantly likened

-his bride, Anne of Cleves.</p>

-

-<p>Dickens, using the usual licence of the novelist,

-describes this effigy as "a stone statue of some

-rampacious animal, with flowing mane and tail,

-distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, elevated

-above the principal door." Quite apart from the

-fact that the word "rampacious" is unknown to the

-English language, and is probably meant for

-"rampageous," the horse is really represented in

-the act of beginning a gentle trot, and looks as mild

-as the mildest milk that ever dewed the whiskers of

-a new-born kitten. His off fore-leg, broken at some

-period, has been restored of a size that does not

-match with the other three. Never, in the whole

-of his existence, has the Great White Horse gone

-on the rampage, and, like all the truly great, his

-manners have always been distinguished by their

-unobtrusiveness.</p>

-

-<p>"The 'Great White Horse,'" writes Dickens, "is

-famous in the neighbourhood, in the same degree

-as a prize ox, or county paper-chronicled turnip, or

-unwieldy pig&mdash;for its enormous size. Never were

-such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters

-of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of

-small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one

-roof, as are collected together between the four walls

-of the 'Great White Horse' at Ipswich." Further,

-he describes it as "an overgrown tavern," at whose

-door, when Mr Pickwick descended from the coach,

-stood a waiter whose description quite takes one's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>

-desire for dinner away. He was "a corpulent man

-with a fortnight's napkin under his arm and coeval

-stockings on his legs."</p>

-

-<p>Although that must have been in the best and

-most prosperous days of the highway, this waiter

-does not appear to have had anything more pressing

-to do than "staring down the road," while the

-account of the internal arrangements of the house

-does not indicate flourishing business. The private

-room into which the guests were shown was a "large,

-badly-furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in

-which a small fire was making a wretched attempt

-to be cheerful, but was fast sinking under the dispiriting

-influence of the place." After this we are

-not surprised to read that it was only "after the

-lapse of an hour" that "a bit of fish and a steak,"

-representing a dinner, appeared. When this was disposed

-of, Mr Pickwick and Mr Peter Magnus huddled

-up to the fire, and, "having ordered a bottle of the

-worst possible port wine, at the highest possible price,

-for the good of the house, drank brandy-and-water

-for their own."</p>

-

-<p>Certainly Dickens must have had some very

-bitter grudge against the "Great White Horse."</p>

-

-<p>Then come allusions to "tortuous passages," and

-the difficulty of a stranger's finding his way about

-the interminable corridors, or distinguishing between

-one "mouldy room" and another; difficulties which

-led to Mr Pickwick's comical predicament in the

-middle of the night. The rooms, not so mouldy

-now, and the passages, just as perplexing, remain,

-structurally unaltered to this day; but certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>

-alterations have been made downstairs in the courtyard,

-now roofed in with glass and made very

-attractive, without spoiling the old-style character

-of the house. If you be a literary pilgrim, or an

-American, they will show you Mr Pickwick's bedroom;

-and can meet any of Dickens's criticisms

-by telling how Nelson stayed here with&mdash;ahem!&mdash;Lady

-Hamilton, and how Admiral Hyde-Parker and

-others of world-wide fame have occupied the

-"mouldy rooms."</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Leaving</span> Ipswich and passing through the dusty roadside

-fringe of Whitton village, known as Whitton Street,

-Claydon, nondescript, and neither very beautiful nor

-quite commonplace, is reached in two and a half miles.

-Just before entering the village, an old mansion is

-glimpsed from the road, embowered in trees, a mansion

-which, on inquiry, the ingenuous youth of Claydon

-declare to be "Mockbeggar Hall." Claydon Hall is

-its true title; but the popular name has been handed

-down since many, many years ago, when the old house

-(not old then) long remained tenantless. Like the

-many other places named "Mockbeggar," it stands

-well within view of passing travellers, and must have

-induced many a sturdy rogue and vagabond to trudge

-wearily up the long approach in search of alms, only

-to find the windows dark, the chimneys innocent of

-smoke, the place, in fact, deserted of all but flutter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>ing

-bats and screeching owls, whose shrill notes must

-have sounded like jeers to the disappointed vagrants.

-Inhabited now, Claydon Hall is a handsome old house

-bearing the date 1635 on its Dutch-like gables. It

-will probably never lose its popular name. Behind

-the old Hall winds the willow-fringed Orwell, coyly

-approaching within view of the road, and then, as it

-were, timorously retreating again; its brimming

-stream, although seen only in such fleeting glimpses,

-potent in its effect upon at least three miles' length

-of the road, from Claydon to Creeting All Saints, in

-the loveliest stretch of woodland, where the fierce

-mid-day sun is baffled by over-arching foliage, and

-twilight comes early in the afternoon through the

-dense masses of leaves. These are the woodlands of

-Shrubland Park. The Hall lies secluded to the right<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>

-hand, somewhere away beyond the rather terrible

-lodges that confront the traveller, who wonders where

-he has seen their like before; until, like a flash, the

-memory of certain great London cemeteries and their

-mortuary chapels comes upon him in desolating

-fashion and blights the cheerful rustic surroundings

-of forest trees and the scurryings of white-tailed

-rabbits and gorgeous blue and brown pheasants that

-inhabit this domain of Lord de Saumarez. The

-lodges, built like the Hall, from designs by Sir

-Charles Barry, are of white brick and stone, in the

-Italian Renaissance style.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus68">

-<img src="images/fig62.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">MOCKBEGGAR HALL.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>At no great distance from the entrance to this

-lordly domain, and noticeable from the road, in an

-exquisitely damp situation by the river, eminently

-calculated to foster rheumatism in old bones, is the

-Barham Union-house&mdash;the "Work'us" of peasant

-speech. It is quite an old-world building, and one

-of the earliest built under the new Poor Law Act of

-the early nineteenth century, when outdoor relief

-gave place to retirement within these prison-like

-buildings. Hodge well named them "Bastilles."

-They say who should know of what they speak, that

-life in Barham Union is nowadays quite desirable,

-but the design of the building, a quadrangular

-structure enclosing a courtyard, with outer walls

-blank or only provided with windows at a height

-from the ground, closely follows the prison, or restraining,

-idea.</p>

-

-<p>The little roadside sign of the "Sorrel Horse,"

-standing in midst of these leafy bowers, is in pleasing

-contrast with the Campo Santo pretentiousness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>

-Shrubland lodges or the prison-like style of the

-Union, now left behind on a rising road, where the

-scarped side of the highway reveals a momentary

-change from the prevailing claylands to chalk; a

-change so sudden and so strictly confined to this hillside

-that it at once attracts the attention of even the

-least geologically-inclined. Here the campions bloom

-that love the chalk and refuse to grow on clay.

-Below this hilltop, in the deep hollow scoured out

-ages ago, when the now insignificant stream that

-crosses the road was a considerable force, is Creeting

-Bottom, and Creetings of several sorts are set about

-the countryside, all hiding from the road that goes

-now up hill and down dale with as lonely an air as

-though the little town of Needham Market and the

-larger town of Stowmarket were not almost within

-sight, over the shoulders of the hills, on the highway

-parallel with this, that runs to Bury St Edmunds.

-To be on "on the road to Needham" is an obvious

-Suffolk saying, applied to those who are badly off for

-worldly gear, and it is a little curious that Needham

-itself was for many years, and until quite recently,

-a place of fallen fortunes, lamenting the decay of its

-textile trades in empty houses and an "irreducible

-minimum" of rent for those that were so fortunate as

-to find occupants at all. The name of "Hungry-gut

-Hall" that still clings to a farmhouse marks that

-depressed period to all time; but in the spicy odours

-of the tanneries and the chemical manure stores and

-other thriving industries and businesses that cluster

-round the railway station, the explorer finds evidences

-enough that Needham is reviving.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus69">

-<img src="images/fig63.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">"STONHAM PIE."

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Not a sign of those towns or of the railway is

-seen on the road to Norwich, where the cottage outposts

-of Stonham Earls and Stonham Aspall alone

-tell of the villages in the hinterland. In their

-gardens, spread on bushes or waving in the summer

-breeze, intimate articles of underclothing are prominently

-displayed, in the society of old hats and

-coats, not so much for the exhibition of the family

-wardrobe as in desperate attempts&mdash;bringing up all

-the reserves&mdash;at scaring away the hungry birds from

-currants, cherries and gooseberries. These contests,

-the only warring incidents on the way, in which the

-birds are generally the victors, bring one to a level

-road where Little Stonham stands, its chief feature

-the "Magpie" Inn. "Stonham Pie" owns one of

-those old gallows signs, stretching across the road,

-that were at one time a common feature. The

-picture-sign, with a painting of that saucy bird,

-has been hung below the cross-beam instead of in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>

-old ironwork frame above, now that the piled-up

-coaches that once passed beneath are gone. Shortly before

-their going, and while turnpikes and tolls appeared

-likely to last for ever, the toll-gate that stood at the

-succeeding village of Brockford was removed two miles

-onward, to Stoke Ash, where, at the beginning of the

-pretty avenue at Stoke Chapel, the later toll-house

-remains, just as does the earlier one at Brockford.

-Brockford, the "badger's ford" of a tiny affluent of

-the Waveney, is preceded by Brockford Green, where

-the quiet road is made narrow by its sides being encroached

-upon by grass. It is here that the accompanying

-sketch of tall poplars and bushy willows was

-taken.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus70">

-<img src="images/fig64.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">NEAR BROCKFORD.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Off to the left hand, in strong contrast with this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>

-level stretch of road, the country is tumbled into

-combes and rounded hills, where the River Gipping

-takes its rise in the village of that name, springing

-from the hill where the church tower stands solemn

-and grim, as though it held inviolate the story of the

-place, away from those days when the Gippings first

-settled here and gave it a title.</p>

-

-<p>But let not the hurried seek Gipping, along the

-winding by-roads. The way, if not far, is not

-easy, and passengers are few. Scattered and infrequent

-farmhouses there be, at whose back doors

-to inquire the way, but rustic directions are apt to

-mislead. In any case, it is little use approaching

-the front door of a farmhouse. No one will hear

-you knocking, unless indeed it be a watchful and

-savage dog, trained to be on the alert for tramps;

-and you are like to hear him snuffling and gasping

-on the other side in a ferociously suggestive manner

-which will render you thankful that the door is

-closed and bolted. And not only bolted on this

-occasion, but always. The steps, and the space

-between the door and the threshold, where stray

-straws and wind-blown rubbish have collected, are

-evidence of the fact that the farmer and his family

-do not use the front door, but make their exits and

-entrances by way of the kitchen. It is an old

-East Anglian custom, and although many of the

-farmers nowadays pretend to culture and set up

-to be as up-to-date as the retired tradesfolk and

-small squires they are neighbourly with, many

-others would no more think of using the principal

-entrance to their homes than they would make use of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>

-the "parlour," where massive and sombre furniture,

-covered with antimacassars, is disposed with geometric

-accuracy around the room, in company with

-the family Bible and the prizes taken at school by

-the farmer's children; the stale and stuffy atmosphere

-proclaiming that this state apartment is only

-used on rare and solemn occasions. In fact, the

-"best room" and the front door only came into use

-in the old days on the occasion of a funeral.

-Perhaps it is a custom originating in a laudable idea

-of paying the greatest possible respect to the dead,

-but it is one which certainly gives a gruesome mortuary

-significance to both the entrance and the room.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus71">

-<img src="images/fig65.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">"THWAITE LOW HOUSE."

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Thwaite or "Twaite," as East Anglians, incapable

-of pronouncing "th," call it, less than a mile beyond

-Brockford, numbers few cottages. Beyond it,

-where the hitherto flat road makes a descent, is

-in local parlance, "Thwaite Low House," not so

-called on account of any disreputable character it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>

-may once have earned, but from its situation. The

-name obviously entails the existence of a "High

-House," which was, like the other, a coaching and

-posting inn. The last named, now a farmstead,

-was in those days the "Cock," the other the

-"Queen's Head." While the "Low House" has

-fallen upon times so irredeemably evil that it has

-been long untenanted and is now a veritable scarecrow

-of a house, with gaping holes in its walls and

-windows battened up, the "Cock," save that its

-sign is gone, still remains much as it was, to show

-a later generation what manner of place the roadside

-inn was in days of yore.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus72">

-<img src="images/fig66.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE "COCK," THWAITE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Stoke Ash, or "Aish," as Suffolkers pronounce

-it, like many another village, makes no sign from

-the road. Its church tower seen to the right, dimly,

-amid a hilltop screen of trees, a square, box-like

-red-brick chapel by the way, and that pretty inn,

-"Stoke White Horse," are the only other evidences

-of its being. The remaining six miles to the

-Norfolk border lead through Yaxley and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>

-Brome: Yaxley, where a branch railway runs

-under the road, on its way to Eye, and narrowly

-misses the old church: Brome, where the "Swan"

-stands for all the village to those who look to

-neither side of the road; church and houses skulking

-down a by-road on the way to Hoxne. There,

-down that pretty road, where the thatched cottages

-nestle under tall trees and the blue wood-smoke

-from rustic hearths curls upwards into the boughs

-and makes the sparrows cough and sneeze&mdash;there

-is the Rectory, approached in lordly fashion past

-a fine brick entrance and exquisite avenue, and,

-at a little greater distance the old black flint,

-round-towered church, restored and titivated out

-of all antiquity of tone: the stone sand-papered, and

-the flints polished with a handkerchief. The only

-thing missing&mdash;and, under the circumstances, it

-is missed&mdash;is a glass case, so that no damp, nor

-lichen, nor any effects of weather may come to

-spoil the housewifely neatness.</p>

-

-<p>It was along this road to Hoxne that those

-who sought the revered head of St Edmund, King

-and Martyr, in the miraculous legend, were led

-to it by the voice calling, "Here, here, here;"

-at length finding the sainted relic in charge of

-a wolf, who allowed it to be taken from between

-his paws. But the voice thus calling was probably

-a much less supernatural manifestation, and

-was doubtless the hooting of owls in the woods.

-They still mock the belated traveller, only, to ears

-untuned to the miraculous, they simply seem to

-ask, "Who, who, who?" Ingenuity, however,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>

-vainly seeks the basis in nature of the wolf

-incident.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIV</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Now</span>, crossing the River Waveney, winding with tree-fringed

-banks through a flat country, the road enters

-Norfolk at Scole. Coming over the little bridge,

-the village is seen huddled together on either side

-of a narrow rising road; village and church alike

-wholly dominated by a great building of mellow

-red brick whose panelled chimney-stacks and long

-row of beautiful gables give the impression of an

-historic mansion having by some strange chance

-been taken from its park and set down beside the

-highway. This, however, was at no time a private

-residence, but was built as an inn; and an inn it

-remains, after the passing of nearly two centuries

-and a half. Scole, or "Schoale," as the name was

-often spelled in old times (when, indeed, the village

-was not called by its <i>alias</i> of Osmundeston), was by

-reason of this inn quite a celebrated place in the

-days of long ago. Every traveller in Eastern

-England had then either seen or heard of "Scole

-White Hart" and its famous sign that stretched

-completely across the road, and as a great many

-coaches halted here for changing teams, passengers

-had plenty of time for examining what Sir Thomas

-Browne thought to be "the noblest sighne-post in

-England." Both house and sign were built in 1655,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>

-for James Peck, described as a "Norwich merchant,"

-whose initials, together with the date, are yet to

-be seen on the centre gable. The elaborate sign

-alone cost �1057. It was of gigantic size and loaded

-with twenty-five carved figures of classic deities

-and others. Chaste Diana, with bow and arrow

-and two hounds, had a place on the cross-beam, in

-company with Time in the act of devouring an

-infant, Act�on and his dogs, a huntsman, and a

-White Hart <i>couchant</i>. On a pediment above the

-White Hart, supported by Justice and Temperance,

-was the effigy of an astronomer "seated on a

-Circumferenter," who by "some Chymical Preparation

-is so Affected that in fine Weather He faces

-the North and against bad Weather He faces that

-Quarter from whence it is about to come." On

-either side of the dizzy height occupied by the

-astronomer were figures of Fortitude and Prudence,

-a position suitable enough for the first-named of

-those two virtues, but certainly too perilous for

-the last.</p>

-

-<p>Further suggestions of Olympus, with references

-to Hades and Biblical history, adorned the other

-portions of this extraordinary work. Cerberus

-clawed one side of the supporting post, while Charon

-dragged a witch to Hell on the other; and Neptune

-bestriding a dolphin, and Bacchic figures seated

-across casks alternated with the arms of twelve

-East Anglian noble and landed families. Two angels

-supported respectively the arms of Mr Peck and

-his lady and two lions those of Norwich and

-Yarmouth. On the side nearest the inn appeared a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>

-huge carving of Jonah coming out of the whale's

-mouth, while, suspended in mid-air, and surrounded

-by a wreath, was another White Hart.</p>

-

-<p>Although, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Browne

-was impressed with this work, an early nineteenth-century

-tourist (so early indeed as 1801) curtly

-dismisses it as "a pompous sign, with ridiculous

-ornaments," and shortly after that it seems to have

-been taken down, for the reason that it cost the

-landlord more to keep it in repair than the trade of

-the house permitted. Together with this, the once

-celebrated Great Bed of the White Hart has also

-disappeared. It was a round bed capable of holding

-twenty couples, and was therefore a good deal larger

-than the famous Great Bed of Ware. Perhaps it

-was because guests did not relish this co-operative

-method of seeking repose, or maybe because sheets,

-blankets and coverlets of sufficient size were unobtainable,

-that the Scole Great Bed was chopped

-up for firewood; but did anyone <i>ever</i> suppose beds

-of this wholesale capacity would be desirable?</p>

-

-<p>The accompanying old view of the gigantic sign

-shows one of the peculiar basket coaches of the

-second half of the eighteenth century, on its way to

-London.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus17">

-<img src="images/fig67.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>"Scole White Hart" must have been among the

-very finest of inns and posting-houses. Its wide

-staircases, of a width sufficient for the proverbial

-coach-and-four to drive up them, its large rooms

-and fine panelled doors, its great stone-flagged

-kitchen, all proclaim how great must have been its

-old prosperity; while the wide-spreading yard in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a><br /><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a><br /><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>

-the rear of the house, together with the outbuildings,

-gives some hint of how heavy the traffic was at

-this junction of the Lowestoft, Bungay, Diss and

-Thetford road with that from London to Norwich.

-Shrunken trade has caused portions of the inn to be

-let off; the stone and wooden porches seen in the

-old print have disappeared; the coach entrance has

-long since been blocked up and has become the bar-parlour,

-and the mullions of the windows have given

-place to sashes; but the building still retains a noble

-architectural character, and is perhaps more interesting

-in these latter days, now that its story is told,

-than ever it was when that story was in the making.

-Little or nothing is found in contemporary records

-of "Scole White Hart"; only one vivid flash in its

-later years, when indignant would-be coach passengers

-stood at the door on a day in October 1822 and saw

-the drivers of the "Norwich Times" and "Gurney's

-Original Day Coach," fired by rivalry, and reckless

-in their long race from Whitechapel, come pounding

-furiously down the road and over the bridge, pass

-the inn without stopping, and disappear in clouds of

-dust in the direction of Norwich. Do you know

-what it is to lose a train and to wait an hour for

-the next? You do? Then it will not be difficult

-to form some idea of the blind, stuttering fury that

-possessed those who had booked seats at Scole and

-saw the coaches dash away, to leave them with half

-a day's wait.</p>

-

-<p>Thorogood was driving the "Times." Both

-started from London at 5.30 a.m. The "Day"

-coach reached Norwich at 5.20 p.m., and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>

-"Times" ten minutes later, neither having stopped

-for changing horses during the last twenty-five miles.

-This was a "record" for that period, the usual time

-being fourteen hours.</p>

-

-<p>Probably the would-be passengers had to remain

-the night; a fate which no one who has done the

-like of late would be apt to complain of. The guest

-at the "White Hart," seated in solitary state in

-the lofty sitting-room, lit dimly by candles in antique

-plated candlesticks, and with two ox-eyed seventeenth-century

-beauties of the Lely type gazing down upon

-him from their sombre frames, presently feels oddly

-as though he were living in another era; a feeling

-that grows as he wanders upstairs to bed, almost

-losing himself in the roomy corridors. When he has

-closed the nail-studded bedroom door with a reverberant

-clang, and, creeping into the generous

-embraces of a damask-hung four-poster that may

-have been new a century and a half ago, gazes

-reflectively about the panelled room and on the

-curiously coffered ceiling, he drops off to sleep

-straightway into the times when the inn was new-built

-and dreams of how the news of the Restoration

-may have come to Scole in 1661. Old times live

-again, faded flowers bloom once more, forgotten

-footsteps echo along the passages, and lo, the Has

-Been is enacted again, with all the convincing air

-of such visions. Post-chaises and chariots clatter

-up to the door and their noise wakens the sleeper

-to the consciousness that the sound is but that of

-a jolting rustic tumbril going down the road in the

-early morning; that this is the twentieth century,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a><br /><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a><br /><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>

-and the "White Hart" but a survival in a back eddy

-of life.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus18">

-<img src="images/fig68.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART."

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Besides the "White Hart," there is little else at

-Scole. The plain flint tower of the church stands

-by the roadside, on the ascent that leads from the

-village; and other two or three inns, a few rustic

-shops and cottages, and a private residence or so make

-up the tale. Scole, in fact, has not grown greatly

-since when it was a Roman station, and when the

-Roman soldiers whose remains have been found near

-the river occupied the military post on the long road

-to Venta Icenorum.</p>

-

-<p>The legionaries first stationed in these East

-Anglian wastes must often have longed for their

-native Italy. When the sky sank almost to the level

-of the land in the long winter's rains and fogs, and

-the biting winds blew out of the east across the sandy

-scrub; when agues or the lurking enemy accounted

-for many of their comrades, and when some favoured

-few were recalled to the capital, they must have

-thought wistfully of a more congenial clime than

-this, situated on the edge of the Unknown. Rome,

-either as Empire or Republic, was a hard taskmaster,

-and when no fighting was in prospect employed the

-troops ingloriously as road-makers. The advanced

-garrisons in the wilderness cleared the enemy out of

-the tangled brush and boggy marshes, and working

-parties built roads under the protection of guards, or

-improved the rude trackways they found already in

-existence. Some fell by the way, and their skeletons

-have been found in these latter days, the teeth still

-clenched on the obolus placed in the dead man's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>

-mouth to pay Charon for ferrying him across the cold

-and darkling Styx; or, where the coin has perished,

-still stained with the metal's long decay. They

-perished, those pioneers, to found a civilisation, just

-as countless thousands of our own blood have laid

-their bones on distant shores, under burning skies or

-in the Arctic night, to make England what she is.

-Respect their long sleep, antiquaries, nor, as you

-honour your own creeds, take from the dead men

-their passage-money across that mystic river.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXV</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">This</span>, as Dr Jessop charmingly names Norfolk, is

-Arcady. The scene is pleasant, but the stage waits:

-where are the actors? Gone, where and for what

-reasons beyond the substitution of rail for road shall

-presently be considered. But if the merry days of

-old are done and population dwindled, at least in

-East Anglia, and especially in Norfolk, dialect

-flourishes among those who remain. The "Norfolk

-drant" or drawl, is still heard, just as the "Suffolk

-whine"&mdash;that rising inflection of the voice towards

-the end of sentences&mdash;is even yet a mark of the sister

-county. They are, indeed, said to have originated

-the Yankee combined drawl and twang, for Norfolk

-and Suffolk were largely represented among the

-Pilgrim Fathers, the first colonists of North America.

-With these survivals, some of the old rustic simplicity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>

-is still met with, although the extraordinary ignorance

-of sixty years ago has disappeared, and the

-Norfolk labourer no longer thinks it possible to

-emigrate to America by driving over in a farm cart.

-The story is an East Anglian classic, how a farm

-labourer "didn't fare rightly to knaw" by what route

-they were going to the United States, "but we'm

-gwine ter sleep t' Debenham the fust night, so's to

-kinder break t' jarney." When railways came, and

-access to London grew easy, these simplicities gradually

-faded away. The young men took to "gettin'

-up the road," as the saying ran&mdash;otherwise, going to

-London&mdash;to "better themselves," and old illusions

-were soon dispelled; but in Arcady the mavis may

-still be seen knapping a dodman; the children of the

-rustic hamlets may be observed by the passing stranger

-gleefully sporting at the old game of tittymatorterin;

-the cowslips that in springtime turn the

-meadows to living gold are yet "paigles"; a small

-field remains, as ever, a "pightle," and when a countryman

-throws anything into a ditch, he "hulls" (or

-hurls) "it in t' holl," just as his ancestors did hundreds

-of years ago. Let some of the archaic words just

-noted be explained before we proceed any further.

-"Mavis" is the idyllic name of the thrush, and the

-"dodman," which he may be observed "knapping,"

-or breaking, is a snail; called in Essex, by the way,

-a "hodmadod." "Tittymatorterin" is just the simple

-game of "see-sawing." Besides these fleeting instances

-there are many other peculiarities. The Norfolk

-peasant will never pronounce the letter E if it be

-possible to avoid it. It becomes I in his mouth, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>

-a head becomes a "hid," while hens are "hins."

-Throughout the whole of the eastern counties, too,

-the elision of the final in the present tense is a

-feature of rustic talk. Examples of this peculiarity

-are found not only in modern speech, but in old

-epitaphs and inscriptions, dating back some hundreds

-of years. Thus, a bridge across the River Wensum,

-at Norwich, bears the sculptured effigy of a dragon's

-head with the words, "When dragon drink, Heigham

-sink." The meaning is that when the river rises and

-touches, or "rise" and "touch," as a Norfolk man

-would say, the dragon's mouth, the neighbouring

-Heigham becomes flooded. An older example still

-is seen on an inscription at Kimberley, to John

-Jenkin, in the words:&mdash;</p>

-

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"Under this stone rare Jenkin lie,"</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>while a comparatively modern one may be found in

-Stratford St Mary church, in the concluding lines of

-an epitaph dated 1739:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">'The Night is gone, ye Stars Remain,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">So man that die shall Live again."</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>Dickens has caught the East Anglian dialect

-readily enough in <i>David Copperfield</i>, where he

-makes Mr Peggotty say, "Cheer up, old mawther" to

-Mrs Grummidge, and speak of "a couple of mavishes,"

-while Ham talks to David as "Mas'r Davy, bor."

-The willing Barkis, too, who asks "do she now?"

-and speaks of the "stage-cutch," is a true product

-of the soil.</p>

-

-<p>For the benefit of those not to the manner born,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>

-let it be repeated that a "mawther" is not necessarily

-a parent. It is the generic name for a female. A

-"mawther" may therefore be a girl infant or a grown

-woman. "Bor" is, of course, a corruption of "neighbour,"

-but need not, in fact, specifically mean a

-neighbour, and is practically the masculine of

-"mawther," and applicable to any man; friend close

-at hand or stranger from distant parts.</p>

-

-<p>The Norfolk dialect has attained the distinction

-of being made the subject of study, and glossaries

-and collections of local words have long been made

-by enthusiasts in these matters. Perhaps the most

-interesting and amusing of the examples of Norfolk

-talk is found in the East Anglian version of the

-<i>Song of Solomon</i>, published many years ago by Prince

-Louis Lucien Bonaparte. It was taken down from a

-reading by a Norfolk peasant. A few verses will be

-instructive:&mdash;</p>

-

-<blockquote>

-

-<p>1. The song o' songs, as is Sorlomun's.</p>

-

-<p>2. Lerr 'im kiss me wi' the kisses of his mouth;

-for yar love is better 'an wine.</p>

-

-<p>3. Becaze o' the smell o' yar intements, yar

-name is as intements pored out, therefoor du the

-mawthers love y&#277;.</p>

-

-<p>4. Dror m&#277;, we'll run arter y&#277;: the king he ha'

-browt me into his charmbers; we'll be glad and re&#299;jce

-in y&#277;; we'll remahmber yar love more 'an wine: the

-right-up love y&#277;.</p>

-

-<p>5. I em black, but tidy, O ye darters o' J'rusal'm,

-as the taents o' Kedar, as the cattins o' Sorlomun.</p>

-

-<p>6. Don't sin starrin' at me, cos I em black, 'ecos<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>

-the sun t'have barnt m&#277;; my mother's children wor

-sn&#257;sty wi' me; they made me keeper o' the winyerds,

-but m'own winyerd I han't kept.</p>

-

-<p>7. Tell onto me, yow hu my soul du love, where ye

-fade, where ye make yar flock to rest at nune: fur why

-shud I be as one tarn aside by yar cumrades' flock?</p>

-

-<p>8. If so bein' as y&#277; don't know, O yow bootifullest

-o' women, go yer ways furth by the futtin' o' the

-flock, and feed yer kids 'eside the shepherds' taents.</p>

-

-<p>9. I ha' likened yow, O my love, to a taamer o'

-hosses in Pharer's charrits.</p>

-

-<p>10. Yar cheeks are right fine wi' ringes of jewiltry,

-yer neck wi' chanes o' gold.</p>

-

-</blockquote>

-

-<p>The full flavour of this vernacular is only to be

-obtained by reading the original verses side by side

-with the above.</p>

-

-<p>Among the sports that obtained on the borders of

-Norfolk and Suffolk of old was "camping." "Camping"

-was an old East Anglian game that, could it be revived,

-would please the footballing maniacs of our own

-day. It was a wild kind of football, played on these

-commons, often with a hundred players aside, and

-we are told that the roughest kind of Rugby football

-was child's play compared with it. If stories of

-old camping contests be true, it might almost seem

-that in ascribing the thinly-populated condition of

-Norfolk and Suffolk to the long-standing effects of

-the Black Death, and to medi�val insurrections and

-their resulting butcheries, we do an injustice to

-pestilence and the sword, and fail to make count

-of the casualties received in play. As the wondering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>

-Frenchman said, in witnessing a camping-match, "If

-these savages be at play, what would they be in

-war?"</p>

-

-<p>"These contests," says a Norfolk historian, "were

-not infrequently fatal to many of the combatants.

-I have heard old persons speak of a celebrated camping,

-Norfolk against Suffolk, on Diss Common, with

-three hundred on each side. Before the ball was

-thrown up, the Norfolk men inquired tauntingly of

-the Suffolk men if they had brought their coffins.

-The Suffolk men, after fourteen hours, were the

-victors. Nine deaths were the result of the conflict

-in a fortnight." Camping went out of favour about

-1810, and the coroners had an easier time.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVI</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Dickleburgh</span>, the next village after Scole, is in its

-way as imposing a place, only not an inn, but a

-church, is its chief feature. The great church of

-Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced)

-charmingly screened from the street by a row of

-limes, but not so charmingly enclosed by a very

-long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to the

-road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims

-who once passed on their way to Our Lady of

-Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on either side

-of the east window, holding effigies of popular

-saints, and halting many a sinner for supplication.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>

-The saints are gone, torn down by Henry the

-Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing.

-They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond,

-or, broken up, serve the useful part of metalling the

-road. Adjoining the church stands the "King's

-Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of

-kings than intended as a portrait of any particular

-one. At any rate it resembles none of the long line

-of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time

-favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough

-to have been painted in the hey-day of his

-popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large

-for the present size of the place and for the empty

-country side; but there is a reason for the solitudes,

-and there was one for these huge buildings, ten times

-too large for the present needs of the shrunken

-villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most

-thickly-peopled of English counties, were practically

-depopulated in 1348 by that dreadful scourge, the

-Black Death. One-third of the total population

-of England perished under that terrible plague.

-The working classes were the worst sufferers, and

-the agriculturists, the weavers and labourers died

-in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground,

-industries decayed, and no man would work. When

-the pestilence was stayed, other parts of the country

-flourished in greater proportion, than this. Manufacturing

-industries arose elsewhere and attracted

-the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining

-consistently agricultural throughout the centuries,

-has never shared the increase; only the few and

-scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a><br /><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a><br /><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>

-the form of weaving in medi�val and later times,

-and in the manufacture of agricultural machinery

-nowadays. In the last two decades, with the

-decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry

-to London and the great centres of population, the

-country, and the eastern counties in especial, has

-become almost deserted.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus19">

-<img src="images/fig69.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">DICKLEBURGH.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The present state of agriculture in Eastern

-England is made manifest in deserted farms, in

-broken gates left hanging precariously on one hinge,

-in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted

-ploughs and decrepit waggons standing derelict in

-the once fertile fields, now overrun with foul weeds

-and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles; and

-farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely

-to remain tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible

-to grow seeds and flowers, and market-gardening is

-profitable only in the lands more immediately surrounding

-the great towns. With wheat at its

-present price of thirty shillings a quarter, it does

-not pay to grow corn for the market, and the land

-is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still

-struggles on, he lays down most of his holding in

-grass for sheep and cattle, and grows, grudgingly,

-as little wheat as possible, for sake of the straw.

-Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat

-was down to twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers

-fed their pigs on the harvest which cost them three

-pounds more per acre to grow than it would have

-brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it

-yields no profit. Agricultural England is, in short,

-ruined, and there seems no present hope of things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>

-becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful

-harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States,

-Russia and other wheat-producing countries can be

-cultivated, reaped, and carried to these shores at the

-prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders

-of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as

-advantageously, the English farmer must needs go

-without a living wage. As matters stand at present,

-we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat

-used in the country; the acreage under corn having

-gone down from 4,058,731 acres in 1852, to about

-half that at the present day. Meanwhile the population

-has increased by thirteen millions; so that,

-with many more mouths to fill, we grow only half

-the staple food these islands produced then. There

-are, of course, those who reap the advantage of cheap

-corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling

-millions of the towns and cities thrive on those

-benefits; but what if, through war, or from any other

-cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what

-avail would have been this generation of cheapness if

-at last the nation must starve? Extinguish agriculture

-and the farmer, and you cannot recall them at need,

-nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a

-land which has long gone untilled.</p>

-

-<p>But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more

-than the walls of a house can be demolished and the

-roof yet left standing. It was the farmer who in

-prosperous times supported the country gentleman

-in one direction, and the agricultural labourer in

-the other. With wheat, as it was a generation ago,

-at seventy shillings a quarter, and other products of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>

-the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could

-afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms

-in those days were difficult to obtain, and there was

-great competition among farmers for holdings. To-day,

-even at a quarter of those rents, tenants are

-difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed

-proprietors has dwindled away. The results are

-painfully evident here, in the old families reduced or

-beggared, and their seats either in the market or let

-to stock-jobbers and successful business men, while

-the old owners have disappeared or live humbly in

-small houses once occupied by the steward or bailiff

-of the estate.</p>

-

-<p>While rents have thus, with the iron logic of

-circumstances, gone down to vanishing-point, and

-while farms have actually been offered rent free in

-order to prevent the disaster of the land being let

-go out of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances

-of the agricultural labourer have been, most

-illogically, improving. Instead of the miserable six

-to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the

-beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives

-thirteen or fourteen shillings, lives in a decent cottage,

-instead of a wretched hovel, and finds the cost of food

-and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than his grandfather

-ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers

-are as difficult to get now as they were immediately

-after the Black Death had swept away three quarters

-of the working class, five hundred and fifty years

-ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they

-have done of recent years in East Anglia&mdash;for

-lack of hands to gather them in. It was in 1899<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>

-that standing crops at Tivitshall St Margaret's and

-adjacent parishes were sold by auction for a farmer

-who could find no labourer willing to be hired.</p>

-

-<p>What has been called the "rural exodus" is well

-named. London and the great towns have proved

-so attractive to the children of the middle-aged

-peasant that they despise the country. They can

-all read and write now, and at a pinch do simple

-sums in arithmetic; so off they go to the crowded

-streets. The ambitious aspire to a black coat and a

-stool in an office, and others become workmen of

-many kinds; but all are attracted by the higher

-wages to be earned in the towns, and by the excitement

-of living in the great centres of population,

-and only the aged and the aging will soon be left

-to till the fields.</p>

-

-<p>Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for

-the agricultural labourer's attempts to better himself.

-To them they are almost impious; but the

-farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of

-culture. He is a vastly different fellow from his

-grandfather, who actually helped to till the soil

-among his own men; whose wife and daughters were

-noted hands at milking and buttermaking; who

-lived in the kitchen, among the hams and the

-domestic utensils, and was not above eating the

-same food as, and at the same table with, his

-ploughmen and carters. He has, in fact, and so

-also have the landed proprietor and the labourer,

-undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process

-which had started certainly by 1825, when Cobbett

-noticed it.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>Hear him:&mdash;</p>

-

-<blockquote>

-

-<p>"When the old farmhouses are down (and

-down they must come in time) what a miserable

-thing the country will be! Those that are now

-erected are mere painted shells, with a mistress

-within who is stuck up in a place she calls the

-parlour, with, if she have children, the 'young

-ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy

-chairs and a sofa (a <i>sofa</i> by all means); half-a-dozen

-prints in gilt frames hanging up; some

-swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon

-them; a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps

-better 'educated' than she; two or three nick-nacks

-to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a

-pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed

-carter to be allowed to come into; and everything

-proclaiming to every sensible beholder that there

-is here a constant anxiety to make a <i>show</i> not

-warranted by the reality. The children (which is

-the worst part of it) are all too clever to <i>work;</i>

-they are all to be <i>gentlefolks</i>. Go to <i>plough</i>! Good

-God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough!

-They become <i>clerks</i>, or some skimming-dish thing

-or other. They flee from the dirty <i>work</i> as cunning

-horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this!

-What a mass of materials for proclaiming that

-general and <i>dreadful convulsion</i> that must, first

-or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing

-and enslaving and starving system to atoms."</p></blockquote>

-

-<p>The "convulsion" anticipated by Cobbett has

-not come about. This is not a country of earthquakes

-or of violent social upheavals. Free Trade<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>

-has beggared the agricultural interests, but, on his

-way to the Bankruptcy Court, the farmer contrives

-to live in better style than possible three quarters

-of a century ago, while his pretensions to gentility

-certainly have not decreased. As for the "funding

-and jobbing," Cobbett could never, in his wildest

-dreams, have foreseen Limited Liability and the

-fungoid growth of Stock Exchange speculation, or

-the modern "enslaving and starving system" of

-the gigantic Trusts that, like vampires, feed on

-the blood of industry. We need look for no convulsions;

-not even, unhappily, for the hanging, or,

-at least, the taxing out of existence, of the

-millionaires. Our expectations of the future are

-quite different. The people will inhabit the towns,

-and the country will become a huge preserve of

-game for the sport of the millionaires aforesaid; a

-preserve broken here and there by the model farm

-or the training establishment of some colossus of

-wealth.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Beyond</span> Dickleburgh, past the solitary "Ram" inn,

-a fine, dignified house still lamenting its decadence

-from a posting-inn to a beerhouse, Tivetshall level-crossing

-marks where the railway runs to Bungay

-and Lowestoft. Maps make Pulham St Mary the

-Virgin quite near, with Pulham St Mary Magdalene

-close by; Tivetshalls of different dedications, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>

-other villages dotted about like plums in a Christmas

-pudding, but no sign of them is evident. Only

-windmills, whirling furiously on distant ridges,

-break the pastoral solitudes. In this conflict of

-charts, a carter jogging along the road with his team

-is evidently the authority to be consulted.</p>

-

-<p>"Coom hather," says the carter to his sleek and

-intelligent horses; and they coom accordingly, with

-much jingling of harness, and stand in the shade of

-roadside trees while their lord takes his modest

-levenses and haffles and jaffles&mdash;gossips, that is to

-say&mdash;with the landlord of the "Ram."</p>

-

-<p>"Tivetshall?" asks the carter, echoing a question;

-"niver heerd of un." Then a light breaks in upon

-him. "Oh, ay! Tishell we allus call 'em; Tishell

-St Marget an' Tishell St Merry," and with, a sweep

-of the arm comprising the whole western horizon,

-"Theiy'm ower theer."</p>

-

-<p>"And Pulham St Mary the Virgin?"</p>

-

-<p>"Pulham St Merry the Wirgin? oh, yis! Pulham

-Maaket, yar mean, bor. Et edd'n on'y a moile, ower

-<i>theer</i>"&mdash;a comprehensive wave to the eastwards.</p>

-

-<p>And there, on a byroad, in an embrace of trees, it

-is found, a little forgotten town, the greater proportion

-of whose inhabitants appear to walk with two sticks.

-It is ranged round a green or market-place, with a

-great Perpendicular church, gorgeously frescoed

-within, and with a very good recent "Ascension" over

-the chancel arch, painted and stencilled timber roof,

-and elaborate stained-glass windows. The townlet

-and townsfolk sinking into decay, the church an object

-of such care and expense, afford a curious contrast.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>An old toll-house and the prison-like buildings

-of Depwade Union conspire to make desolate the

-road onwards. He who presses, hot-foot, along it,

-turning neither to the right nor to the left, may

-readily be excused a legitimate wonder as to what

-has become of the great feature of East Anglia, its

-spreading commons; for, strange to say, despite the

-fame they have long since attained, no vestige of

-them is glimpsed from the road itself. One has

-usually to turn aside to some of the villages lying

-near, but wholly hidden from the highway, to find

-the yet unenclosed common lands, the pasturage of

-geese, ducks and turkeys; but a striking exception

-to this now general rule is the huge common of

-Wacton lying off to the left of the road at the

-hundredth mile from London, where a cottage and a

-wayside inn, the "Duke's Head," alone represent

-Wacton village, a mile distant. Wacton Common,

-reputed to be the highest point in Norfolk, although

-of no less extent than three hundred and fifty acres,

-might perhaps be passed without being seen, for the

-reason that, although still wild and unenclosed, it is

-screened from the high road by a hedge and entered

-through an ordinary field gate. The inn and the

-cottage, obviously built on land fraudulently taken

-from the common in the long ago, serve with their

-gardens to hide that glorious expanse of grass and

-heather. Here roam those chartered vagabonds,

-the plump geese, that pick up a living on the

-grassy commons and wander, like free-booting

-bands of feathered moss-troopers upon the heaths,

-closing their careers with royal feasting in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a><br /><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a><br /><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>

-August and September stubble, and a Michaelmas

-martyrdom.</p>

-

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus20">

-<img src="images/fig70.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">A DISPUTED PASTURAGE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their

-geese, but those martyred fowls do not make their

-final journey to the London markets, between

-Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they

-once attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays

-in the seclusion of railway vans. Seventy years ago

-they journeyed by coach, and in state, for the Norfolk

-coaches in Christmas week often carried nothing save

-geese and turkeys, beside the coachman and guard.

-Full inside and out with such a freight, the proprietors

-of fast coaches made a great deal more by

-carrying them than they would have taken by a load

-of passengers; so the fowls had the preference, while

-travellers had to take their chance of finding a seat

-in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the

-turkeys conveyed from Norwich to London between

-a Saturday morning and Sunday night in December

-numbered one thousand seven hundred, and weighed

-9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was �680. They

-were followed on the two succeeding days by half as

-many more.</p>

-

-<p>A Norfolk common without its screaming and

-hissing flocks of geese would seem strangely untenanted.

-They, the turkeys, the ducks, the donkeys

-("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom

-fowls are among the only vestiges of the wild life

-that once made Norfolk famous to the naturalist and

-not a little eerie to the traveller of old, who, startled

-on the lonely way that stretched by heath and

-common and fen between the habitations of men,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>

-shrank appalled at the lumbering flight of the huge

-bustards, quivered with apprehension at the sudden

-hideous whirring of the night-jar as the day closed

-in, dismayed, heard the bittern booming among the

-reeds, or with misgivings of the supernatural saw the

-fantastical ruff stalking on long legs, with prodigious

-beak, red eyes and spreading circle of neck feathers,

-like the creation of some disordered imagination.

-Wild Norfolk, the home of these and of many another

-strange creature, is no more, and these species, now

-chiefly extinct, are to be seen only in museums of

-natural history.</p>

-

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus73">

-<img src="images/fig71.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">LONG STRATTON.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>What Wacton lacks along the high road the

-village of Long Stratton has in superabundance.

-They named it well who affixed the adjective, for it

-measures a mile from end to end. Beginning

-with modern and (to speak kindly) uninteresting

-cottages, it ends in a broad street where almost every

-house is old and beautiful in lichened brick or soft-toned

-plaster. Midway of this lengthy thoroughfare

-stands the church, one of the Norfolk round-towered

-kind, in the usual black flint, and beyond it the

-Manor House, red brick, with Adam scrolls and

-neo-classical palm branches in plaster for trimmings,

-set back at some distance behind a very newty,

-froggy and tadpoley moat. Beyond this again, the

-village street broadens out. Looking back upon it,

-when one has finally climbed uphill on the way to

-Norwich, Long Stratton is a place entirely charming.

-Its name, of course, derives from its situation on the

-Roman Road, and Tasburgh, that now comes in

-sight, keeps yet its Roman camp strongly posted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a><br /><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a><br /><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>

-above the River Tase. Tasburgh&mdash;what little there

-is of a village&mdash;occupies an acclivity on the further

-side of that river, across whose wide and marshy valley

-the mists rise early, seeing the sun to bed dull and

-tarnished, and attending the rising of the moon with

-ghostly vapours. The old Roman camp is oddly and

-picturesquely occupied by the parish church, another

-round-towered example. Excepting it, the vicarage

-and the Dutch-like building of the "Bird in Hand"

-Inn, there is little else.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus21">

-<img src="images/fig72.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">LONG STRATTON.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>But what mean these sounds of anger and lamentation

-that drown the soothing, distant rattle of reaping

-machines on the hillside: a voice raised in

-reproach, and another&mdash;a treble one&mdash;in gusty

-shrieks of combined pain, fear and peevishness?

-Coming round a corner, the cause of the disturbance

-is revealed in a wet and muddy infant rubbing dirty

-knuckles into streaming eyes, and being violently reproached

-by an indignant woman.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>"You're a pretty article, I must say; a fine

-spettacle. I'll give yow a good sowsin', my lord;

-coom arn;" and the malefactor is pulled suddenly

-inside the cottage, the door slammed, and muffled

-yells heard, alternating with thumps. The offender

-is receiving that sowsing, or being "yerked,"

-"clipped over the ear-hole," getting a "siseraring,"

-being "whanged" or "clouted," the striking Norfolk

-phrases for varieties of assault and battery.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVIII</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Tase is met with again on surmounting the

-hilly road out of Tasburgh and coming down hill into

-Newton Flotman. Here it is broad enough to require

-a long and substantial bridge, grouping in unaccustomed

-rightness of composition with the mingled

-thatched, tiled and slated cottages and the church

-that stands on a commanding knoll in the background.

-When Newton was really new it would be

-impossible to say; perhaps its novelty may have been

-measured against the hoary antiquity of, say, Caistor

-yonder, down the valley. For what says the folk-rhyme:&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials,

-why not, in degree, Newton Flotman? But a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>

-whisper. Caistor was never more than a camp, and

-not at any time a place of houses, much less of stone

-ones. Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood,

-and flint only, of which Norwich is principally

-built, is available for building materials.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus74">

-<img src="images/fig73.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">TASBURGH.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the

-passing stranger is a little effigy of Bacchus fixed on

-the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn, so thickly

-covered with successive coats of paint that it is

-difficult to give it a period. Remains of Roman

-antiquities are so many in this district that it is

-often mistaken for a work of that classic age, when

-it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of

-the late eighteenth century, a time when figures of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>

-the kind were a usual decoration of inn signs. Such

-an one still swings from the wrought-iron sign of

-the "Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.</p>

-

-<p>In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton

-Flotman lies Dunston, trees casting a protecting and

-secretive shade over it, and the "Dun Cow" Inn its

-only roadside representative. That inn and the

-circular brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle

-redeem the last few miles into Norwich from

-absolute emptiness. When the pound last was used

-who shall say? The tramps have played havoc with

-it, and its wooden gate has gone. The ancient

-office of pound-keeper is here evidently fallen into

-disuse.</p>

-

-<p>Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on

-the level to the left, but Caistor, in like manner with

-Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage, half a mile or more

-away in the valley, its church tower rising like a

-grey beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious

-where its ancient camp may be found. Caistor St

-Edmunds, to give its full name, is the site of the

-great Roman camp established here to overawe the

-stronghold of the Iceni, four miles away on the

-banks of the Wensum, and now the site of Norwich.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus22">

-<img src="images/fig74.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">NEWTON FLOTMAN.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of

-a Roman fortified <i>castrum</i>. For one thing, it has

-the largest area of any known relic of its kind in

-England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its

-fragments of flint walls have neither the thickness

-nor the height of those at Portus Rutupi�, the old

-Roman port in Thanet, now known as Richborough,

-its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a><br /><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a><br /><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>laggard imagination of the layman in matters

-arch�ological, which refuses to be stirred before

-mere undulations in the sward. Here is a ditch

-that can be rolled into, an embankment that can be

-climbed and paced on three sides of the camp, if

-necessary, to put to physical test both height, depth

-and extent. The fourth side of this great enclosure,

-now a turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase

-and was sufficiently defended by that stream, then a

-wide creek, so that no works are to be found there.

-How long it was before the Romans subdued the

-Iceni, whose great city is thought to have stood

-where Norwich does now, is not known. Nothing

-of that early time here, indeed, is <i>known</i>, and guesses

-are of the vaguest. Only it seems that the Roman

-advance into East Anglia, which had for its objective<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>

-the principal stronghold of the tribes, here came to

-its military ending. To compare things so ancient

-and romantic with others modern and thought

-prosaic, the several Roman camps on the advance

-from London now to be sought at Uphall near

-Romford; Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and

-Tasburgh, are, with those that have disappeared, to

-be looked upon in the same light as the wayside

-stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which

-originally came to a terminus at that city, and was

-only at a later date continued northward.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus75">

-<img src="images/fig75.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">THE OLD BRICK POUND.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Where the Romans and the Romano-British

-citizens of Venta lived when the tribes were reduced&mdash;where

-the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really

-was, in fact&mdash;is a mystery, for, unlike most of our

-great cities, Norwich has furnished no relics of that

-age; while, beyond coins and odds and ends, Caistor

-camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of streets

-or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and

-Venta might, for all there is to show of it, have been

-a city of dreams. The fact that the original capital

-of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes when they

-came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the

-site of it having long been deserted; and that they

-called it after the North "wic" or creek, presupposes

-a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far.

-The position of that south creek is fixed by the

-ancient geography of these last few miles. In those

-times the ground on which Yarmouth, at the mouth

-of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the

-waves of the sea, which ran up in a long navigable

-creek&mdash;the "Gariensis" of the Romans and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>

-"North Wic" of the Danes&mdash;from a Roman fortified

-port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site

-of Norwich, which indeed, centuries later, was still

-a port. Where the River Tase is now confluent with

-the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out

-a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running

-almost due south; the "South wic" of those

-northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where

-the navigation ceased.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus76">

-<img src="images/fig76.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">CAISTOR CAMP.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of

-the Tase still bears signs of those old conditions, and

-perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman citizens, together

-with other relics of the vanished city, still lie preserved

-deep down in the mud and silt that have

-filled up the old channel.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>The lie of the land, in accord with these views,

-is plain to see when, returning to the high road, the

-journey to Norwich is continued to Hartford Bridge;

-bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the

-right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several

-bridges, none of them sizeable, rivers, streams and

-runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and gurgle in their

-different ways through flat meadows, below the long

-rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins

-to grow suburban. It is on the summit that the

-Newmarket and Thetford route from London joins

-with this, and together they descend into the city.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIX</p>

-

-

-<p><span class="smcap">This</span> way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on

-her great "progress" of 1578, by St Stephen's

-Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates and

-walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or

-even condemned the belated citizen to lodge the

-night without the precincts of the city, in suburbs

-not in those times to be reckoned safe.</p>

-

-<p>Norwich long ago swept away her defences and

-modernised her outskirts, for this is no Sleepy

-Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the

-Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing

-with industry and in every way in the forefront

-of modern life. To the entrance from London

-Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>

-No general view of the city, lying in its hollow

-beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and the eye

-seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some

-difficulty, modestly peering over tangled modern

-roof-tops. It is from quite the opposite direction,

-from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that

-Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of

-cathedral, churches and houses, with trees and

-gardens, such as no other city can show, displayed

-within its bounds. Norwich does not jump

-instantly to the antiquarian eye, and its electric

-tramways that are the first to greet the traveller

-who enters from the old coach road are not a little

-forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the

-stranger in all its wealth of beauty and interest,

-and becomes more and more lovable the better

-he becomes acquainted with it.</p>

-

-<p>Until these railway times, in the old days of

-slow, difficult, dangerous and expensive travelling,

-the capital of East Anglia was in a very high

-degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its

-shipping trade and weaving industries, and the

-famous Norwich School of artists, brought this

-exclusive attitude down from medi�val times to

-modern; and Norfolk county families until the era

-of political reform had almost dawned, still had

-their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in bygone

-centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons,

-owned their town houses in Hungate and in what

-is now called King Street, formerly Conisford

-Street.</p>

-

-<p>The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>

-mazy streets to inns widely sundered. The original

-"Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater

-part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head,"

-in Tombland. On the other hand, the Mails, the

-"Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to and

-started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street

-of the same name, standing not far from the

-beginnings of the city. The street is there still,

-but the oddly-named inn has given place to

-shops, and where the "Rampant Horse" ramped

-rampageously, in violent contrast with the mild-mannered

-"Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers'

-establishments now hold forth seductive announcements

-of "alarming sacrifices."</p>

-

-<p>Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day

-Coach" and the "Phenomenon" favoured the

-"Angel," in the Market Place, while the "Times"

-house was the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and

-that of the "Expedition" the "Swan" Inn. Other

-inns, many of them huddled together under the lee

-of the castle mound, were then to be found in the

-Market Place and the Haymarket and in the narrow

-alley in the rear that still goes by name of "Back

-of the Inns." Others yet, many of medi�val age,

-are to be sought in old nooks of the city. The

-Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary Tavern, like the

-"Old Barge," belongs to the fourteenth century,

-the last named still standing between King Street

-and the river, with a picturesque but battered

-entrance. The steep and winding lane of Elm

-Hill, where the slum population of Norwich stew

-and pig together down ancient courts and dirty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>

-alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but unrestored;

-and in the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully

-called Tombland, although it has not, nor ever

-had, anything to do with tombs, is the "Maid's

-Head," the one establishment in Norwich that stands

-pre-eminently for old times and good cheer. It is

-an "hotel" now, and has the modern conveniences

-of sanitation and electric light; but its restoration,

-effected through the enthusiasm of a local antiquary,

-with both the opportunity of purchasing the property

-and the means of doing so, has been carried

-through with taste and discrimination. The "Maid's

-Head" can with certainty claim a history of six

-hundred years, and is thought to have been built

-upon the site of a former Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered

-ceilings and masonry of evident antiquity

-may take parts of the present house back so far,

-or even a greater length, but the especial pride

-of the "Maid's Head" is its beautiful Jacobean

-woodwork. The old sign of the house was the

-"Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that

-antiquaries still boggle at. It was long a cherished

-legend that this strange and unlovely name was

-changed to the present sign in complimentary

-allusion to Queen Elizabeth when she first visited

-the city, but later researches have proved the

-change to have been made at least a century earlier,

-and so goes another belief!</p>

-

-<p>The "Music House," facing the now disreputable

-King Street, has not for so very long been an inn.

-Its name tells of a time when it was the meeting-place

-of the "city music," old-time ancestors of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>

-modern town bands, but its story goes back to the

-Norman period, when the crypt that bears up the

-thirteenth-century building above was part of the

-home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his

-nephew. "Isaac's Hall," as it was known, was

-seized by King John and given to one of his

-creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they

-were allowed to live at all, finding cool quarters in

-the castle dungeons. A long succession of owners,

-including the Pastons, followed; last among them

-Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who resided

-here in 1633.</p>

-

-<p>It has already been hinted that the streets of

-Norwich are mazy. They are indeed the most perplexing

-of any town in England. Many roads run

-into the city, and from every direction. Glancing at a

-plan of it, these roads resemble the main strands of

-a spider's web, and the streets the cross webs. In

-midst of this maze is the great castle, like the spider

-himself; that cruel keep in whose dungeons old

-wrong-doing, religious and private spite, have immured

-many a wretched captive, like that unfortunate

-unknown "Bartholomew," who has left his name

-scratched on the walls, and the statement that he

-was here confined "saunz resun," a reason of the

-best in those times. Did he ever see the light

-of day again? Or did some midnight assassin

-murder him as many another had been done to

-death?</p>

-

-<p>"Blanchflower," that Bigod, Earl of Norwich who

-built the castle called his keep when it arose on its

-great mound, its stone new and white. He built<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>

-upon the site of a castle thought to have been

-Saxon, and built so well that it became a fortress

-impregnable save to famine and treachery. It has,

-therefore, unlike weaker places that have been

-stormed again and again, little history, and even

-seven hundred years ago was little more than a

-prison. And a prison of sorts&mdash;for State captives

-first, and for common malefactors afterwards&mdash;it

-remained until so recently as 1883, when it was

-restored and then opened as the Museum and Art

-Gallery it now is.</p>

-

-<p>This is no place to speak at length of the cathedral

-that withdraws itself with such ecclesiastical reserve

-from the busy quarters of the city, and is approached

-decorously through ancient gateways in the walls of

-its surrounding close; the Ethelbert Gate, with that

-other, the Erpingham Gate, built in Harry the

-Fifth's time by Sir Thomas Erpingham, whose little

-kneeling effigy yet remains in its niche in the gable

-over the archway, and whose motto&mdash;variously held

-to be "Yenk," or "Think,"&mdash;"Denk," or "Thank"&mdash;is

-repeated many times on the stone work. Norman

-monastic gloom still broods over the close, for the

-cathedral, save the Decorated cloisters and the light

-and graceful spire in the same style, is almost

-wholly of that period, and the grammar school

-that was once a medi�val mortuary chapel and has

-its playground in the crypt, keeps a gravity of

-demeanour that, considering its history, is eminently

-proper.</p>

-

-<p>Through the Close lies the way to Bishop's Bridge

-and the steep road up to Mousehold Heath: the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>

-"Monk's Hold," or monastic property, of times gone

-by when it was common land of the manor belonging

-to the Benedictine priory.</p>

-

-

-<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XL</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus23">

-<img src="images/fig77.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p><span class="smcap">Here</span>, on this famous Heath of Mousehold where the

-gorse and heather and the less common broom yet

-flourish, despite the electric tramways that bring up

-the crowds and the picnic parties, Nature, rugged

-and unconquerable, looks down upon the city, revealed

-as a whole. Even though the chimneys of

-great factories may intrude and smirch the sky when

-winds permit the smoke-wreaths to trail across the

-view, it is a view quite unspoilable. The cathedral,

-as is only proper, is the grand dominating feature,

-with its central tower and graceful crocketed spire

-rising to a height of 320 feet. Second to it, on its

-left hand, the huge bulk of the castle keep rears up;

-a time-ball on its battlements to give the time o' day

-to the busy citizens; those battlements where from a

-gibbet they hanged Robert Kett in 1549, when his

-rebellion was crushed and his army of 20,000

-peasants who had encamped on Mousehold defeated.

-In similar fashion his brother William was

-hanged from Wymondham steeple. Between castle

-and cathedral the great tower of St Peter Mancroft

-looms up, and on the other side of the cathedral

-tower the twin spires of the Roman Catholic place of

-worship crown the sky-line. To the extreme right of

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a><br /><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a><br /><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>the accompanying illustration is St Giles's, and on the

-extreme left, in company with the pinnacled tower of

-a modern church, the dark tower of St John-at-Sepulchre,

-Bracondale, which for shortness and

-simplicity the citizens call "Ber Street Church." For

-the rest, it is a mingling of town and country, of

-houses and gardens and churches in great number,

-that one sees down there; old Norwich, in short,

-exclusive of the modern suburbs that are flung everywhere

-around and cause the Norwich of to-day to

-outnumber the Norwich of coaching times by 80,000

-inhabitants. It must be evident from those figures

-that the picturesque old Norwich numbering

-a population of only 30,000 has been in great

-degree improved away and borne under by that

-human deluge. It is delightful now, but what it was

-at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when

-Crome and De Wint and others sketched and painted

-its quaint bits, the picture-galleries of the Castle

-Museum can tell. Nay, even down to the mid-nineteenth

-century it was still very different, as a

-collection of early photographs in the castle proves.

-Then, before St Peter Mancroft was restored, before

-the old Fish Market was cleared away, Norwich had

-many more quaint nooks than now to show the

-stranger; even as, centuries before, it was yet more

-quaint and even more remarkable for its many

-churches than at the present time.</p>

-

-<p>"The nearer the church the further from God,"

-says the old saw. How irreligious then should

-Norwich be, that has even yet a cathedral and thirty-four

-ancient churches, and modern places of worship<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>

-fully as numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as

-old Fuller suggested, "make good use of their

-churches and cross that pestilent proverb." These

-churches bear a close resemblance to one another,

-having nearly all been rebuilt in the Perpendicular

-period, some five hundred years ago, and all built of

-the black flint that gives a character to East Anglian

-architecture quite distinct from that of other districts.

-The time when they were thus rebuilt was not only a

-great period of church-building throughout England,

-but a time of especial prosperity in mercantile and

-trading Norwich; a time when guilds grew powerful

-and merchants wealthy in the flourishing industry of

-cloth-weaving introduced some time earlier by

-Flamand and Hollander immigrants. English wool

-that before had gone across the narrow seas for

-manufacture into stuffs was now weaved in the land

-of its growth. "Many thousands," says Blomefield,

-"that before could not get their bread could now by

-this means live handsomely." In that age, to become

-rich and prosperous was to become also a founder and

-benefactor of churches; hence the great ecclesiastical

-buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor

-of an old writer, writing when there were no fewer

-than sixty-one churches in the city, "surrounded the

-cathedral as the stars do the moon." The old citizens

-sleep in the parish churches for which they did so

-much; their monuments in brass or marble, stone or

-alabaster curiously wrought, often with their

-"merchant's marks"&mdash;the distinctive signs with

-which they labelled their wares&mdash;engraved on them

-in lieu of coats of arms. It is as though a modern

-<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a><br /><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a><br /><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>trader were to have the registered trade-mark of his

-speciality engraved on his tombstone. A typical

-memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of

-Thomas Sotherton, in the church of St John

-Maddermarket. He&mdash;</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"Under this cold marbell sleeps,"</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<p>and was no common fellow, mark you, but</p>

-

-<div class="poem-container">

-<div class="poem">

-<div class="stanza">

-<span class="i0">"Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit,</span><br />

-<span class="i0">Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt."</span>

-</div>

-</div>

-</div>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus24">

-<img src="images/fig78.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH MARKET PLACE.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>Although the calendar of saints is a long one and

-more than sufficiently lengthy to have provided each

-one of the Norwich churches with a patron, yet so

-popular were some saints, that several churches to

-the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also in

-the city of London. As in old London, it was in

-those cases necessary to confer surnames, so to speak,

-upon those churches.</p>

-

-<p>They are surnames of the geographical sort and

-not a little curious. The four St Peters are, for

-example, St Peter Mancroft, the largest and most

-important in the city, so called from the Magna

-Croft, or large field of the castle; St Peter per

-Mountergate, in King Street, named from the road

-by the "montem," the hill or mount, that runs

-ridge-like in its rear; St Peter Hungate, the

-"hundred gate," or road, reminiscent of the time

-when Norwich was a hundred of itself, even as it is

-now by itself a county; and St Peter Southgate.

-St Michael-at-Thorn has still thorn trees growing in

-its churchyard; St Michael Coslany, with St Mary's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>

-of identical surname, was built in Coast Lane; and

-St Michael-at-Plea was named from its neighbourhood

-to an ecclesiastical court. St John Maddermarket

-is thus distinguished from other St Johns&mdash;St

-John Timberhill and St John-at-Sepulchre. In

-the neighbourhood of the first-named, madder for the

-dyers' use was marketed; while at Timberhill was

-the market in wood. St Martin-at-Palace, by the

-old Bishop's Palace, and St-Martin-at-Oak take up

-the tale, which might be continued at great length.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus77">

-<img src="images/fig79.jpg" alt="" />

-<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH SNAP.

-</p>

-</div>

-

-<p>The business life of modern Norwich centres in

-the Market Place and the streets that immediately

-lead out of it: the mouldering signs of old commerce

-peer in peaked gables, clustered chimneys and

-old red-brick and plastered walls in the lanes and

-along the wharves of the Wensum.</p>

-

-<p>There trade hustles and elbows to the front, in

-many-storeyed piles of brick, stone and stucco, with

-great show of goods in plate-glass windows and bold

-advertisement of gilt lettering. All those signs of

-prosperity may be seen, and on a larger scale, in

-London, but not even in London are the electric<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>

-tram cars so great a menace to life and limb as in

-these narrow and winding streets, where they dash

-along at reckless speed.</p>

-

-<p>The Market Place is not yet wholly spoilt. The

-huge bulk of St Peter Mancroft and a row of queer

-old houses beside it still avert that disaster, and form

-a picture from one point of view; while the flint-faced

-Guildhall stands at another corner of the great

-open place and in its Council Chamber, in use five

-hundred years ago as a Court of Justice, and still so

-used, proves the continuity of "our rough island

-story." In a dark and dismal cell of the Guildhall

-once lay the heroic martyr, Thomas Bilney, who

-"testified" at the stake in the Lollards' Pit, where

-many another had already yielded up his life. He

-wondered, as others before and after him had done

-and were to do, whether the tortured body could

-pass steadfast through the fiery ordeal; and on the

-eve of his martyrdom put that doubt to the test by

-holding his finger in the flame of a candle. That

-test sufficed, and he suffered with unshaken constancy

-when the morrow dawned.</p>

-

-<p>The Guildhall has less tragical memories than this,

-and was indeed the scene of many old-time municipal

-revelries in times before Corporations became reformed.

-But old revels and frolics have been discontinued,

-and "Snap," the Norwich dragon, a fearsome

-beast of gilded wickerwork, who was wont to be

-paraded from the Guildhall at the annual mayoral

-election, and last frolicked with his attendant beadles

-and whifflers in 1835, now reposes in the Castle

-Museum.</p>

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>

-

-<p>The Market Place on Saturday, when the wide

-open square is close-packed with stalls, is Norwich

-at its most characteristic time and in its most

-characteristic spot. In it the story of the Norwich

-Road may fitly end. The city itself, glanced at in

-the immediately foregoing pages, could not yield its

-story in less space than that occupied by that of the

-road itself.</p>

-

-<div class="figcenter" id="illus78">

-<img src="images/fig80.jpg" alt="" />

-</div>

-

-<hr class="chap" />

-

-<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>

-

-

-

-<div class="chapter">

-<p class="c xlarge p2 gesperrt">INDEX</p></div>

-

-<ul class="index"><li class="ifrst">  Aldgate, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- Pump, <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  "Bacon End," <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Boreham, <a href="#Page_127">127-129</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Bow, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75-80</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- Bridge, <a href="#Page_77">77-79</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Brentwood, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94-99</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Brockford, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Brome, <a href="#Page_261">261</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Brook Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- Hill, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Caistor St Edmunds, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301-303</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Capel St Mary, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Chadwell Heath, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- Street, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114-121</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Chipping Hill, <a href="#Page_133">133-139</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Claydon, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- Hall, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Coaches:--</li>

-<li class="isub2">"Confatharrat," <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Expedition," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Gurney's Original Day Coach," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Ipswich Blues," <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- and Yarmouth Mail," <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- Post Coaches," <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- Shannon," <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- Umpire," <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Magnet," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"New Colchester," <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Norwich Machine," <a href="#Page_34">34-36</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- Mail," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- Post Coach," <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- Times," <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Parcel Mail," <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Ph�nomenon," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Telegraph," <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Coaching, <a href="#Page_30">30-51</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142-151</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Coaching Notabilities:--</li>

-<li class="isub2">Alexander, Israel, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Nelson, Mrs Ann, <a href="#Page_19">19-25</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, George, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, John, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25-27</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, Robert, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Suggate (Norwich carrier), <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Thorogood, John, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Colchester, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179-212</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Constable, John, R.A., <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217-219</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Copdock, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Copford, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  <i>Copperfield, David</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Creeting, All Saints, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Creetings, The, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Dedham, <a href="#Page_217">217-221</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Deodand, Law of, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Dickleburgh, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277-279</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Dilbridge, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Dunston, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Feering, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Forest Gate, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Goodmayes, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Gore Pit, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Great Eastern Railway, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51-54</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Hare Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Hartford Bridge, <a href="#Page_304">304</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Hatfield Peverel, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Highwaymen, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58-62</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Highwaymen:--</li>

-<li class="isub2">Cratfield, Rev. Wm., <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">King, Matthew, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, Robert, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, Tom, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Tapyrtone, Thomas, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Turpin, Richard, <a href="#Page_57">57-62</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Ilford, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Ingatestone, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105-110</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Inns (mentioned at length):--</li>

-<li class="isub2">"Angel," Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Belle Sauvage," Ludgate Hill, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Black Boy," Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Blossoms," Laurence Lane, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Blue Boar," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_28">28</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- Posts," Witham, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Bull," Bishopsgate Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, Leadenhall Street, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">----, Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19-28</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Cauliflower," Ilford, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Coach and Horses," Upton, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Cock," Thwaite, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Cross Keys," Gresham Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Duke's Head," Wacton, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Fleece," Brook Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Flower Pot," Bishopsgate Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Four Swans," <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Golden Cross," Charing Cross, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Good Woman," Widford, <a href="#Page_111">111-114</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Grave Maurice," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Great White Horse," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247-252</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Gun," Dedham, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Half Moon," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Horse and Leaping Bar," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"King's Head," Dickleburgh, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Lion and Lamb," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Magpie," Little Stonham, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Maid's Head," Newton Flotman, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- ----, Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Music House," Norwich, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Norfolk Hotel," Norwich, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Popinjay," Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Queen's Head," Thwaite, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Rampant Horse," Norwich, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Red Lion," Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- ----, Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- ----, Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Rising Sun," Manor Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Saracen's Head," Aldgate, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- ----, Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_117">117-120</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Spread Eagle," Gracechurch Street, <a href="#Page_15">15-19</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Sun," Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Swan," Washbrook, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Swan-with-Two-Necks," Gresham Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Three Cups," Colchester, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>,  <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- ----, Springfield, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Three Nuns," Aldgate, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Vine," Mile End, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"Wheatsheaf," Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"White Elm," Copdock, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"---- Hart," Brentwood, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- ----, Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- ----, Scole, <a href="#Page_262">262-271</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- ----, Witham, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">"White Horse," Fetter Lane, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">---- Horse, Widford, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Ipswich, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237-252</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139-153</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Langham, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Lexden, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177-181</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- Heath, <a href="#Page_177">177-179</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Little Stonham, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  "London Stone," <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Long Stratton, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292-295</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Manor Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Margaretting, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Mark's Tey, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Martyr's Tree, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Mile End, <a href="#Page_70">70-74</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  "Mockbeggar Hall," <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Moulsham, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Mountnessing, <a href="#Page_101">101-105</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Needham Market, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  New Hall, <a href="#Page_123">123-127</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Newton Flotman, <a href="#Page_296">296-299</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Norwich, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302-320</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Old Ford, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Old-time travellers:--</li>

-<li class="isub2">Caroline of Brunswick, Princess, Queen of George IV., <a href="#Page_165">165-168</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess, Queen of George III., <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Kemp, Will, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">Queen Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>

-<li class="isub2">William III., <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Old-time travelling, <a href="#Page_142">142-150</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159-168</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225-237</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Parcel Mail, <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Pulham St Mary Magdalene, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary the Virgin, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Puttels Bridge, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Rivenhall End, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Romford, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88-93</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Scole, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262-272</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Seven Kings, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83-85</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Shenfield, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Shrubland Park, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Springfield, <a href="#Page_121">121-123</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Stanway, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174-178</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Steam Coaches, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Stoke Ash, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Stonham Aspall, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- Earls, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Stratford (Langthorne), <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ----- -le-Bow, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75-80</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223-225</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Swainsthorpe, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Tasburgh, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Thwaite, <a href="#Page_259">259</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Tivetshall St Margaret, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Toll-gates, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Uphall, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Upton Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Wacton, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  ---- Common, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Washbrook, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  West Ham, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Whalebone House, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62-69</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Whitton Street, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Widford, <a href="#Page_111">111-114</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Witham, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131-139</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Woodgrange, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>

-

-<li class="indx">  Writtle, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>

-

-

-<li class="ifrst">  Yaxley, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li></ul>

-

-

-

-

-

-<p class="c medium">

-EDINBURGH<br />

-COLSTON AND COY, LTD.<br />

-PRINTERS

-</p>

-

-

-

-

-<div class="transnote">

-

-<p class="c">Transcriber's Notes:</p>

-

-<p>Inconsistent hyphenation is retained.</p>

-

-<p>Inconsistent punctuation is retained.</p>

-

-

-</div>

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-

-<pre>

-

-

-

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-

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+
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+/* Transcriber's notes */
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+  </head>
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 61087 ***</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter1" id="pub">
+<img src="images/fig1.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SCOLE WHITE HART.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1><span class="redtext large">
+THE NORWICH<br />
+ROAD:</span> <span class="gesperrt">AN EAST<br />
+ANGLIAN HIGHWAY</span></h1>
+
+<p class="c xlarge">By <span class="smcap">Charles G. Harper</span></p>
+
+<p class="c">Author of "<i>The Brighton Road</i>," "<i>The Portsmouth
+Road</i>,"<br /> "<i>The Dover Road</i>," "<i>The Bath Road</i>,"<br />
+"<i>The Exeter Road</i>," <i>and</i> "<i>The Great North Road</i>."</p>
+
+<p class="c little"><i>Illustrated by the Author, and from<br />
+Old-Time Prints and Pictures.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus25">
+<img src="images/fig2.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">London: <span class="redtext">Chapman &amp; Hall</span> ltd.</span> 1901</p>
+
+<p class="c little">[<i>All Rights reserved.</i>]
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus26">
+<img src="images/fig3.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">PREFACE</p>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<p><i><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE author of a little book published in 1818,
+called</i> <span class="smcap">A Journey to London</span>, <i>which is nearly
+all "London" with very little "journey," remarks
+that "it is as uncommon for a book to go into the
+world without a preface, as a man without a hat.
+They are both convenient coverings." Here, then, is
+the customary covering.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Introducing this, the seventh in a series of books
+telling the story of our great highways, it may
+perhaps be as well to re-state the methods used, and
+objects aimed at. The chief intention is to provide
+a readable book which shall avoid the style either of
+a Guide-Book or a History. It is the better fortune
+to be in the reader's hands than in the dusty seclusion
+of those formidable works, the County Histories;
+or disregarded among the guide-books of forgotten
+holidays. To the antiquary it will, of course, be
+obvious that this and other volumes of the series
+"contain many omissions," as the Irish reviewer
+said; but such things as find no place here have, as
+a general rule, been disregarded because they not
+only do not help the Story of the Road along,
+but rather hinder its progression.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>The</i> <span class="smcap">Norwich Road</span>, <i>in its one hundred and twelve
+miles, passes by many an historic site and through
+districts distinguished for their quiet pastoral
+beauty. In being historic it is not singular, for,
+as Oliver Wendell Holmes very truly said,
+"England is one vast museum," and the old road
+would be remarkable indeed, that, like Canning's</i>
+"<span class="smcap">Needy Knife Grinder</span>," <i>had no story to tell.
+It is, however, in the especial characteristics
+of East Anglian scenery, speech, customs, and
+architecture that this road stands apart and is
+highly individualised. "East Anglia" is no merely
+arbitrary and meaningless term, as those who travel
+it, if only on the highway, will speedily find.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>But this shall be no trumpet-blast; nor indeed do
+the charms of Eastern England require such a fanfare,
+for who has not yet heard of that lovely valley
+of the Stour, so widely known as "Constable's
+Country," by whose exquisite water-meadows and
+shady lanes the old turnpike passes? Scenery
+such as this; windmills, cornfields, tall elms,
+winding rivers, and commons populous with geese
+and turkeys, are typical of the</i> <span class="smcap">Norwich Road</span>,
+<i>which may, with this introduction, now be left to
+recommend itself</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="r large">
+CHARLES G. HARPER.</p>
+
+<p class="l"><span class="smcap">Petersham, Surrey</span>,</p>
+<p class="l3"><i>October</i> 1901.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus27">
+<img src="images/fig4.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium sans"><span class="smcap">List of Illustrations</span></p>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<p class="c large p2">SEPARATE PLATES</p>
+
+<table class="hang">
+
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Scole White Hart</span></td>
+  <td class= "tdr"><a href="#pub"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><span class="half">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Aldgate Pump.</span> (<i>From a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus2">9</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Aldgate</span>, 1820</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus3">21</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">The "Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, where Turpin shot<br />
+Matthew King.</span> (<i>From a drawing by T. Hosmer</i><br />
+<i>Shepherd</i>, 1854)</td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus4">59</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Whitechapel Road in the Coaching Age</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus5">65</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Mile End Turnpike</span>, 1813. (<i>After Rowlandson</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus6">71</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Romford</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus7">91</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Mountnessing Windmill</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus8">103</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Ingatestone in Coaching Days.</span> (<i>From an Old Print</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus9">107</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">New Hall Lodges</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus10">125</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Chipping Hill</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus11">133</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>"<span class="smcap">Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter.</span>" (<i>From a Print<br />
+after H. Alken</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus12">145</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Colchester</span> </td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus13">215</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Vale of Dedham.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus14">219</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Spring: Suffolk Ploughlands.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus15">229</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">The Cornfield.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus16">233</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">The Old Sign of Scole White Hart</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus17">265</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Staircase in the "White Hart"</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus18">269</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Dickleburgh</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus19">279</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">A Disputed Pasturage</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus20">289</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Long Stratton</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus21">293</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Newton Flotman</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus22">299</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Norwich, from Mousehold Heath</span> </td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus23">311</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Norwich Market Place</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus24">315</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="c large p2">ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT</p>
+
+<table class="hang">
+
+<tr>
+  <td>Vignette</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus25"><i>Title Page</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><span class="half">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Preface</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus26">vii</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>List of Illustrations: London Stone</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus27">ix</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Runaway 'Prentice</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus28">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Yard of the "Bull," Leadenhall Street. (<i>From a drawing</i><br />
+<i>by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854</td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus29">12</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Front of the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate: Present Day</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus30">14</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Yard of the "Saracen's Head" in Coaching Days. (<i>From</i><br />
+<i>a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854</td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus31">16</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Yard of the "Saracen's Head": Present Day</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus32">18</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Yard of the "Bull," Whitechapel, in Coaching Days</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus33">27</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Norwich Coach at Christmastide. (<i>After Robert<br />
+Seymour</i>, 1835</td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus34">38</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Whitechapel Old Church</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus35">63</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Bow</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus36">76</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Seven Kings</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus37">84</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Whalebone House</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus38">87</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Entrance to Romford</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus39">89</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Old Toll-house, Puttels Bridge</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus40">93</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Fleece," Brook Street</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus41">94</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Martyr's Tree, Brentwood</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus42">95</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Yard of the "White Hart," Brentwood</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus43">98</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Shenfield</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus44">100</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Mountnessing Church</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus45">102</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Gatehouse, Ingatestone Hall</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus46">106</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>At Margaretting</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus47">111</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span>The "Good Woman" Sign</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus48">113</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Bridge: Entrance to Chelmsford</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus49">115</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Conduit, Chelmsford</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus50">116</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Tindal's Statue</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus51">117</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Three Cups" Sign</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus52">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Springfield Church</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus53">123</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Boreham</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus54">128</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Angel," Kelvedon</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus55">141</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Birthplace of Spurgeon</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus56">151</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Near Mark's Tey</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus57">176</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Lexden </td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus58">180</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Grand Staircase, Colchester Castle</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus59">199</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Old Man Trap, Colchester Castle</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus60">205</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Colchester Castle</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus61">207</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Gun Hill</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus62">221</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Old Toll-house, Stratford Bridge</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus63">222</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Wolsey's Gateway</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus64">242</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Lion and Lamb," Angel Lane</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus65">244</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Sparrowe's House</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus66">246</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Great White Horse"</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus67">248</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Mockbeggar Hall</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus68">253</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>"Stonham Pie"</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus69">256</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Near Brockford </td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus70">257</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>"Thwaite Low House"</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus71">259</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Cock," Thwaite</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus72">260</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Long Stratton</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus73">295</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Tasburgh</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus74">297</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Old Brick Pound</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus75">301</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Caistor Camp</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus76">303</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Norwich Snap</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus77">318</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Norfolk Turkey, on his way to Leadenhall Market</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus78">320</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="c large p2">THE ROAD TO NORWICH</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td class="tdl"></td><td class="tdr"><span class="half">MILES</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">London (Whitechapel Church) to Mile End</td><td class="tdr">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford-le-Bow (Bow Church)</td><td class="tdr">2</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Lea).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford (Broadway)</td><td class="tdr">4</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Forest Gate</td><td class="tdr">5</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Manor Park</td><td class="tdr">6</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ilford</td><td class="tdr">6</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Roding).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Seven Kings</td><td class="tdr">7</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross "Seven Kings' Watering," or Fillebrook).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Chadwell Heath</td><td class="tdr">9</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Romford</td><td class="tdr">12</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Hare Street</td><td class="tdr">13</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Puttels Bridge</td><td class="tdr">15</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross Weald Brook).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Brook Street</td><td class="tdr">16</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Brentwood</td><td class="tdr">18</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Shenfield</td><td class="tdr">19</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Mountnessing Street</td><td class="tdr">21</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ingatestone</td><td class="tdr">23</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Margaretting Street</td><td class="tdr">25</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Widford</td><td class="tdr">27</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Wid or Ash).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Moulsham</td><td class="tdr">28</td><td class="tdl">¼</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Chelmer).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Chelmsford</td><td class="tdr">29</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Springfield</td><td class="tdr">29</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Boreham</td><td class="tdr">32</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Ter).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Hatfield Peverel</td><td class="tdr">34</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Witham).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Witham</td><td class="tdr">37</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Rivenhall End</td><td class="tdr">39</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Kelvedon</td><td class="tdr">41</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Blackwater).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Gore Pit</td><td class="tdr">42</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Mark's Tey</td><td class="tdr">45</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Copford</td><td class="tdr">46</td><td class="tdl">¼</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stanway</td><td class="tdr">47</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Lexden Heath</td><td class="tdr">48</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Lexden</td><td class="tdr">49</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Colchester</td><td class="tdr">51</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Colne).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Dilbridge</td><td class="tdr">52</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford Bridge</td><td class="tdr">57</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Stour).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford St Mary</td><td class="tdr">58</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Capel Railway Crossing. Capel Station. Capel St Mary.</td><td class="tdr">63</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Copdock</td><td class="tdr">65</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Washbrook</td><td class="tdr">66</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross Wash Brook).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ipswich</td><td class="tdr">69</td><td class="tdl">¼</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Orwell)</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span>Whitton Street</td><td class="tdr">71</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Claydon</td><td class="tdr">72</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Creeting All Saints</td><td class="tdr">76</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stonham Earls</td><td class="tdr">79</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Little Stonham</td><td class="tdr">79</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Brockford</td><td class="tdr">83</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Thwaite</td><td class="tdr">84</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stoke Ash</td><td class="tdr">86</td><td class="tdl">¼</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Yaxley</td><td class="tdr">88</td><td class="tdl">¼</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Brome</td><td class="tdr">90</td><td class="tdl">¼</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Waveney).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Scole</td><td class="tdr">92</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Dickleburgh</td><td class="tdr">94</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Tivetshall Level Crossing</td><td class="tdr">97</td><td class="tdl">¼</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Wacton</td><td class="tdr">100</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Long Stratton</td><td class="tdr">101</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Tasburgh</td><td class="tdr">102</td><td class="tdl">¾</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Tase).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Newton Flotman</td><td class="tdr">104</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Tase).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Hartford Bridge</td><td class="tdr">109</td><td class="tdl">¼</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Yare).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Norwich (Market Place)</td><td class="tdr">111</td><td class="tdl">½</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[Pg xvi]</a><br /><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus28">
+<img src="images/fig5.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE NORWICH ROAD</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="c large">I</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the days before railways came, robbing the exits
+from London of all dignity and purpose, the runaway
+'prentice lads of the familiar legends, who were
+always half starved and continually beaten, revolting
+at length from their uncomfortable beds under the
+shop counters and their daily stripes and scorpions,
+were wont, according to the story-books, to steal at
+night out of their houses of bondage and make for
+the roads. Such an one, making in those days for
+Norwich, and standing at Aldgate in the grey of the
+morning, looking across the threshold of London,
+would have seen, in the long broad road stretching
+before him, the only means of escape. The shilling
+or so of which he would be the owner would scarce
+serve him for two or three days' keep; and so, although
+he might have longed for a place on the coach
+he could see starting from the "Spread Eagle," in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+Gracechurch Street, at 4 a.m., there would have been
+for such as he no choice but to start afoot, with as
+light a heart as possible, and chance the offer of a
+lift on some waggon returning into Essex. Had he,
+in leaving Aldgate behind, asked some passer-by the
+way to Norwich, he might have been seized for what
+he was, a runaway; but, if he escaped suspicion,
+would have been answered readily enough, for everyone
+in those times knew the way to lie along the
+Whitechapel Road and by Mile End Turnpike. Has
+anyone in these enlightened and highly-educated
+times courage sufficient to ask his way to Norwich
+from Aldgate? and, assuming that dauntless courage,
+is it conceivable that anyone in that crowded street
+could tell him?</p>
+
+<p>There are no apprentices and no tyrannical
+masters of the old kind left now, and the only
+runaways of these days are the bad boys of precocious
+wits who would not think of tramping the
+highway while they could raise a railway fare or
+"lift" a bicycle. But the way still lies open to
+the explorer from Aldgate, and the old Norwich
+Road yet follows the line of the Roman way into
+the country of the Iceni.</p>
+
+<p>Between the era of our imaginary truant and
+that of the Romans, who originally constructed this
+road, there yawns a vast gulf of time; certainly not
+less than eighteen hundred years. The history of
+the road during that space has largely been forgotten;
+but, worst of all, we know perhaps less of
+it and its life in the times of Charles the First,
+onward to those of William and Mary, than we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+can recover from Roman historians; and certainly
+its coaching history is in tatters and fragments, for
+those who made it did not live in the bright glow
+of publicity that surrounded the coachmen of roads
+north, south or west, and died unexploited by the
+sporting writers of the Coaching Age.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">II</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Nearly</span> seventeen centuries have passed since, in
+the great <i>Antonine Itinerary</i> of the Roman Empire,
+the first guide-book to the roads was compiled, and
+almost eighty years since Cary and Paterson&mdash;the
+rival Bradshaws and A.B.C.'s of the Coaching Age&mdash;issued
+the last editions of their <i>Travellers Companions</i>,
+which now, instead of being constantly in
+the travellers' hands, are treasured on the shelves of
+collectors interested in relics of days before railways.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Antonine Itinerary</i> was compiled, <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 200-300.
+Among other roads of which it purports to
+give an account is the road to Venta Icenorum;
+the Norwich Road, as we should say. Its statement
+is brief and to the point, if requiring no little explanation
+after this lapse of time:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td class="tdl">Iter a Venta Icenorum Londinio <i>m.p.</i>&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">cxxviii <i>sic.</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Sitomago</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xxxii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Combretonio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xxii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ad Ansam</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xv</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>Camuloduno</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">vii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Canonio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">viiii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Cæsaromago</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Durolito</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xvi</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Londinio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xv</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<p>A hundred and twenty-eight miles, that is to
+say, between Venta and London. The Romans, of
+course, calculated all their mileages in Britain from
+that hoary relic, the still existing "London Stone,"
+which, from behind its modern iron grating in the
+wall of St Swithin's Church, still turns a battered
+face towards the heedless, hurrying crowds in
+Cannon Street, in the City of London.</p>
+
+<p>In coaching days the Norwich Road, in common
+with most East Anglian routes, was measured from
+Whitechapel Church, and the distance from that
+landmark to Norwich given as 111½ miles. The
+apparent wide difference between those measurements
+of classic and modern times is very nearly reconciled
+when we add a mile for the distance between
+London Stone and Whitechapel Church to the 111½
+miles, and when we reduce the Roman miles to
+English. An English mile measures 5280 feet, while
+a Roman mile runs only to 4842 feet, this fact accounting,
+along the road to Norwich, for some 13
+miles of the discrepancy, and bringing the difference
+to the insignificant one of 3½ miles; or, assuming
+the Roman ruins at Caistor, 3 miles short of Norwich,
+to mark the site of Venta Icenorum, 6½ miles; no
+very wide margin of error.</p>
+
+<p>The compiler of that ancient itinerary is unknown.
+He, or they (for a survey of the Roman
+Empire cannot have been made by one man), are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+quite hidden and lost to sight under the title of
+"Antonine," which was given in honour of the
+Emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla, father
+and son, who both owned the name Antoninus. By
+similarly honorary titles we are accustomed to
+christen our public buildings. Thus, in coming ages,
+when such earthworms as engineers and architects
+are forgotten, the "Victoria" Embankment,
+"Victoria" Station, the "Victoria and Albert"
+Museum, and the thousand and one other things
+thus entitled will serve to hand a Sovereign down to
+futurity, while the names of those who created them,
+good or ill, will have perished, like the leaves of
+autumn. Customs change, and fashions cease to be,
+but snobbery is more enduring than brass or marble,
+and outlasts the mummies of the Pharaohs.</p>
+
+<p>The compiler who drew up the list of places on
+the road between Londinium and Venta has chosen
+to reckon backwards. The "<i>m. p.</i>" is the abbreviation
+for <i>mille passus</i>, or paced Roman miles; the
+figures after the first line giving the distance from
+the place last mentioned. Setting out from London,
+we find "Durolitum" to be identified with the
+Roman earthworks of Uphall, near Romford;
+"Cæsaromagus" to be identical with Writtle, near
+Chelmsford; "Canonium" to stand for Kelvedon;
+"Camulodunum" for Colchester; and "Ad Ansam"
+for Stratford St Mary; while "Combretonium" and
+"Sitomagus" still puzzle antiquaries, who are reduced
+to the extremity of suggesting the opposite
+alternatives of Brettenham or Burgh for the one, and
+Dunwich or Thetford for the other; names with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+specious resemblance, and on circuitous routes east or
+west of the direct road which would more than
+account for the Roman surveyor's overplus of miles.
+The direct road, however, is unmistakably Roman,
+and those who will may seek for the elusive "Sitomagus"
+and "Combretonium" along it. Haply they
+may discover them at Scole, Dickleburgh or Long
+Stratton.</p>
+
+<p>But along the whole length of the road, from
+London to Norwich, the wayfarer receives impressions
+of its true Roman character, whether in its appearance
+or in the place-names on the way. Old Ford
+and Stratford-at-Bow, where the Roman paved fords
+crossed the River Lea; that other "old ford" at
+Ilford, across the River Roding, which was already
+ancient when the Saxons came and so named it,
+"Eald Ford," leaving it for later times to corrupt the
+name into "Ilford" and for uninstructed historians
+to explain the meaning to have been that it was an
+"ill ford"; to which condition, indeed, many had
+descended in mediæval times: these are examples.
+Others are found at Ingatestone, the Saxon "Ing-atte-stone"
+= the "meadow at the stone," a Roman
+milestone that stood by the wayside; in the names
+of Stanway, Colchester, Stratford St Mary. Little
+Stonham, Tivetshall, and Long Stratton, places to be
+more particularly mentioned later in these pages.</p>
+
+<p>It has been aptly pointed out by East Anglian
+antiquaries that the circuitous route eastward or
+westward of the straight road between Stratford St
+Mary and Norwich, on which Sitomagus and Combretonium
+may have been situated, may probably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+have been an early Roman way, constructed shortly
+after the conquest of the Iceni, along an old native
+trackway, and superseded in later and more settled
+times by the direct road, overlooked by the Antonine
+compilers who, working at Rome, the very centre of
+the Empire, may not have been fully informed of
+changes in countries like Britain, on the edge of the
+Unknown. This view, when we consider the long
+period stretching between the conquest of this part
+of the country and the final break up of the Romano-British
+civilisation, about <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 450, has much to recommend
+it. A period of some three hundred and
+eighty years of colonisation and development, equalling,
+for example, the great gulf of time between our
+own day and that of Henry the Eighth, the changes
+in its course must have rivalled, if not have surpassed,
+those in our roads between the sixteenth and nineteenth
+centuries. During those eras, between the
+first and the fifth centuries, many of the original
+winding tracks must have been straightened, or left
+to the secondary position of byways, while new and
+straight roads were engineered across country
+formerly, for one reason or another, avoided. Meanwhile,
+the Antonine Itinerary-makers must have relied
+for their surveys upon old and out-of-date information,
+just as, in our own time, we find many recent
+maps, printed from the Ordnance Survey of a hundred
+years ago, still indicating winding roads that have
+been non-existent for generations, and ignoring the
+direct highways made by Telford and others just
+before the opening of the Railway Era.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">III</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">London</span> made no remarkable growth between the
+Roman and mediæval periods, but this road had in
+that time slightly altered its course from its starting-point,
+and, instead of going from Cannon Street to
+Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Old Ford, left the
+City by way of Leadenhall Street and Aldgate,
+continuing down the Mile End and Bow Roads to
+Stratford.</p>
+
+<p>The traveller of Chaucer's day, coming to Ald Gate,
+in the City wall, had reached the country. That
+gate spanned the road at a point marked nowadays
+by the house, No 2 Aldgate High Street, standing
+at the boundary of the parishes of St Katharine
+Cree and St Botolph. In 1374 Chaucer took from
+the Corporation of London a lease for the remainder
+of his life of the rooms in this gate, which was
+pulled down and succeeded by another, built in
+1606, which in its turn disappeared in 1761.</p>
+
+<p>From his windows commanding the road Chaucer
+must often have seen that dainty gentlewoman, the
+Prioress of St Leonard's, Stratford, riding to or from
+London, escorted by a numerous train, and from her
+must have drawn that portrait of the prioress who
+spoke French with a Cockney accent:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"After the scole of Stratford-attè-Bowe,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">For French of Parys was to hire unknowe."</span><br />
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In Chaucer's day they probably taught French, of
+sorts, at the Priory schools.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus2">
+<img src="images/fig6.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">ALDGATE PUMP. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a><br /><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+<p>At that time it was no little journey to Stratford,
+although by measurement less than four miles, and
+the lady went strongly escorted, as, indeed, did all
+of consequence, or those who had aught to lose.
+For the more common wayfarers who went alone
+on this desperate eastern trail there stood the Chapel
+and the Holy Well of St Michael the Archangel
+within the City, where the otherwise unprotected
+might seek the aid of the Saint's strong arm before
+leaving the walled City behind on their perilous
+faring. This chapel stood where Leadenhall Street,
+Fenchurch Street and Aldgate meet, on a site
+thrown into the roadway in 1876, when the street
+was widened. Until that year the crypt of this
+shrine had filled the prosaic functions of a cellar
+in the corner house, itself demolished, together with
+the beautiful Early English arches on which it stood.
+Adjoining was "Aldgate Pump," which had long
+before unromantically taken the place of the sanctified
+spring. That celebrated civic monument is seen
+in the accompanying illustration, taken in 1854.
+Many City wits have exercised their satirical powers
+upon it, and the expression long current of "a
+draft on Aldgate Pump," a once popular mercantile
+phrase for a bad note, goes back so far as the days
+of Fielding. Oddly enough, the water of the pump
+retained some repute until 1876, when, on being
+analysed, it was found impure, and the supply
+closed. The pump, however, is still in existence,
+rebuilt of its original stones, a few feet away from
+the old site, and yields water again; not, however,
+from the old saintly source, but from the strictly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+secular filter-beds of the New River Water Company.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus29">
+<img src="images/fig7.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "BULL," LEADENHALL STREET. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Having implored the protection of St Michael,
+travellers of old went, heartened, upon their way
+down what is now Whitechapel High Street, which
+Strype, writing in the time of James the First, calls
+a "spacious fair street," with "sweet and wholesome
+air." Past hedgerows of elm trees and rustic
+stiles and bridges, those old wayfarers went, and
+onward down the Whitechapel Road, where the
+country was a lovely solitude, with "nothing but
+the bounteous gifts of Nature and saint-like tokens
+of innocency," which, according to Sir Thomas
+More, in 1504, characterised the charming fields of
+Mile End, Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse. This,
+it will be allowed, is scarcely descriptive of those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+places to-day, whatever they may become when the
+People's Palace and the University Settlements have
+done their work.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far for sake of contrast. Let us return to
+Aldgate for a while, and, without following its
+fortunes throughout the centuries, glance at it in
+the Coaching Age, before the squalor of modern
+Whitechapel had invaded it from the east, or the
+extension of City business had come to destroy
+most of that picturesque assemblage of old inns
+and mediæval gabled houses, to replace them with
+the giant warehouses and "imposing" offices of
+modern London.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">IV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Although</span>, as we have seen, the East Anglian
+roads were, in coaching days, measured from Whitechapel
+Church, the great actual starting-place was
+Aldgate, where many of the old inns were situated,
+as, in like manner, the ancient hostelries of the
+Borough clustered at the beginning of the road
+to Canterbury and Dover. Aldgate occupies a
+position midway between London Stone, the Roman
+starting-point in Cannon Street, and Whitechapel
+Church, and to and from this spot came and went
+the stage-coaches, post-chaises and waggons in
+the palmy days of the road. The mail-coaches,
+of course, had a starting-point of their own, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+set out from the old General Post-Office in Lombard
+Street, or, in the last years of coaching, from St
+Martin's-le-Grand.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus30">
+<img src="images/fig9.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">FRONT OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD," ALDGATE: PRESENT DAY.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is true that one might have taken coach
+from many other and more central inns for Colchester,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>Ipswich and Norwich:&mdash;from the "Spread
+Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, a fine old galleried
+inn demolished at the close of 1865; from the
+"Cross Keys," in the same street; from the
+"Swan with Two Necks," in Lad Lane, anciently
+Lady Lane (that is to say, the Lane of Our Lady,
+the Blessed Virgin), now Gresham Street; or from
+the "Bull," 151 Leadenhall Street, which must
+by no means be confounded with its namesake
+in Aldgate High Street. Exactly what that
+Leadenhall Street hostelry was like let the
+picture of its old galleried courtyard show.</p>
+
+<p>There was also "another way" to Norwich;
+out of Bishopsgate, by way of Newmarket, Bury
+and Thetford. Taking this route, which, although
+2½ miles shorter, no true sportsman considered
+to be the real Norwich Road, one started from
+the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross; from the
+"White Horse," in Fetter Lane (improved
+away in 1898); from the "Flower Pot," in
+Bishopsgate Street; from yet another "Bull," also
+in Bishopsgate Street; or from the "Bull and
+Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand. But when all
+these places have been duly set forth, it is to
+Aldgate that we must turn as the real starting-point.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus31">
+<img src="images/fig10.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD" IN COACHING DAYS. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Aldgate in the days before railways was quite
+unlike the Aldgate of to-day. Certain of the old
+buildings remain, but the "note" of the place is
+entirely altered. It is now a noisy, distracting
+ante-room to the City, in which tinkling tram-cars
+and costermongers' barrows jostle with elephantine
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>railway goods vans; where the Jewish second-hand
+clothes shop rubs a greasy shoulder with the
+"merchant tailor's" vulgar show of electric light,
+plate glass and wax models; and where the East
+End, in the person of the aproned, ringleted and
+ostrich-feathered factory girl, meets the West, in
+the shape of some City clerk strayed beyond his
+mercantile or financial frontiers, each regarding
+the other as a curiosity in these social marches.
+It is as the meeting of salt water and fresh, this
+mingling of the tides of City and East End, and
+to the observant not a little curious. Nothing
+like it&mdash;nothing so marked&mdash;is to be seen on any
+other of the borders of the City. There is, too,
+a smack of the sea, a certain air of romance, in
+the street, coming, perhaps, from the windows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+of the nautical instrument-makers, where the
+binoculars, the quadrants, the sextants and the
+sea-faring tackle in general hint of distant climes
+and the coral reefs of South Pacific isles.</p>
+
+<p>These mariners' emporia were here and in the
+Minories before railways came, and so also were
+many fine old inns. For Aldgate, difficult though
+it may be to realise it to-day, was not only the
+place whence many of the Essex, Suffolk and
+Norfolk coaches set out, but was also the resting-place
+of travellers to London; and its inns were
+quite as well-appointed as those of the more
+central ones in the City, or those of Charing Cross,
+or the West End. As travellers by rail to London
+in modern times resort to the railway hotels, so
+did our great-grandfathers find rest at the coaching
+inns at whose thresholds they were set down at
+their journey's end.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus32">
+<img src="images/fig8.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD": PRESENT DAY.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The fragments merely of the last of Aldgate's
+old hostelries remain, in the bold front of Nos.
+6 and 7, forming two-thirds of the old frontage
+of the "Saracen's Head." No. 5, the other third,
+has been destroyed, and so also has the old appearance
+of the galleried courtyard, still named
+"Saracen's Head Yard," but now surrounded by
+warehouses. The old coach archway remains, and
+the gables at the back of the buildings are quaint
+reminiscences of other times. Coaches plied
+between the "Saracen's Head" and Norwich so
+far back as 1681, and Strype, the antiquary,
+born in the neighbourhood, in a court whose
+name now flaunts the horrid travesty of "Tripe
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>Court," referring to the inn, speaks of it as "very
+large and of a considerable trade." The existing
+fragment, with its handsome architectural elevation
+of richly-moulded plaster in the Renaissance style
+of the late seventeenth century, is part of the
+building mentioned by him. Small shops now<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+occupy the ground floor, and the upper rooms
+are let as tenements.</p>
+
+<p>But the "Bull" was perhaps the most famous
+of these old inns. From it Mr Pickwick set out
+for Ipswich, and from Sam Weller's remark on that
+occasion, "Take care o' the archway, gen'l'men,"
+as the coach started, it is evident that the "Bull"
+possessed a courtyard. At that palmy time of
+inns and coaches, the opening of the nineteenth
+century, the "Bull" was, and long had been, in
+the Nelson family, a noted race of inn and coach
+proprietors. At that particular time Mrs Ann
+Nelson, widow of the late host, who died about
+1812, was the presiding genius. Associated with
+her was her son John. Another son, Robert, had
+a business of his own, and was long proprietor of
+the "Belle Sauvage," on Ludgate Hill, and partner
+with others in many coaches. A third son, George,
+drove the Exeter "Defiance," horsed by his mother
+out of London.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the "Bull" and Mrs Nelson,
+who had, as her husband had, and his father
+before him, some sort of interest in many coaches
+running into Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, on main
+or bye-roads. She also at one time leased the
+"Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, and extended
+her energies so far as to horse the Exeter
+"Telegraph" and the "Quicksilver" Devonport
+Mail out of London, together with the Exeter
+"Defiance" night coach, the Manchester "Telegraph,"
+the Oxford "Defiance," Brighton "Red
+Rover," and the Leeds "Courier." In their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+coaching speculations the Nelson family were
+associated with a pastrycook whose little shop
+adjoined the gateway of the "Bull." Occasionally
+a new hand on one of the coaches would send
+his leaders' noses through the shop front, for that
+gateway was very narrow and Mrs Nelson's coachmen
+anything but deliberate. On the other side
+of the gateway was a whip-maker's shop, kept by
+one James Johnson, who throve mightily on the
+custom of the coachmen and others who frequented
+the "Bull."</p>
+
+<p>This most energetic of landladies and Napoleonic
+of coach proprietors developed and managed her
+extensive coaching interests long before her
+husband died. He, good, easy-going man, had
+been a fair whip in earlier days, but had long
+left the box, and had no head for business,
+although a very fine taste in wines and spirits:
+the lack of the first probably a corollary of the
+second. She spared neither herself nor her
+servants. Rising considerably before the lark,
+she saw the owls to bed, and was a martinet to
+her coachmen. Left a widow while in the prime
+of life, she still wore in old age the dress of her
+youth. The sketch of her in the picture of the
+"Bull" yard in coaching days shows exactly what
+her costume was like. A short skirt revealed high-heeled
+shoes with large buckles, the heels painted
+red. Black velvet was her winter wear, and fancy
+apron, lace neckerchief and frilled cap invariable
+items. Up to her seventieth year she was the
+last up at night, scouring the house to see that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a><br /><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a><br /><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>all was safe; and the first up in the morning,
+looking after the stable people and seeing that the
+horses had their feeds and were properly cared
+for. Inside and outside the house, and down
+the eastern roads, her influence was despotic and
+would brook no defiance. Her "Ipswich Blues"
+had long been famous when an opposition coach
+was started. Opposition could not be allowed
+to live, and so the fares were reduced
+from eight shillings inside and sixteen shillings
+out, by regular stages until the point was
+reached when passengers were not only carried for
+nothing, but were presented with an excellent
+dinner at Witham. At that point the rivals discreetly
+retired, when fares rose again to their old
+level.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus3">
+<img src="images/fig11.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">ALDGATE, 1820.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mrs Nelson insisted on the most rigid punctuality.
+Did the coachman of one of her crack
+coaches or one of her still more famous "Oppositions"
+bring his team down her yard five minutes
+over time, he was reprimanded; ten minutes, and
+he was fined half-a-crown; a quarter of an hour,
+and he stood a good chance of being dismissed.
+She ran a Southend "Opposition" every afternoon
+by Romford, Brentwood, Billericay, Wickford,
+Raleigh and Rochford, along Essex roads of a
+feather-bed softness of mud; but time must be
+kept. She provided good horses and would not
+hear of excuses. One day, when the roads were
+particularly heavy, the "Opposition" came in half
+an hour late from Southend. The coachman, after
+the manner of his kind, on driving into the yard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+and pulling up at the coffee-room door, threw his
+whip across the wheelers' backs. Mrs Nelson had
+long been watching the clock, and, coming out,
+took the whip and hung it up, with the quiet
+remark, "That whip is no longer yours, Philpot&mdash;half
+an hour behind."</p>
+
+<p>"But the roads are so bad, ma'am," remonstrated
+poor Toby. "I'm sure, ma'am, the
+gentlemen knew I did my best; but I felt bound
+to spare the cattle."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> find the cattle and employ you to drive
+them," replied the inexorable landlady; "<i>you</i>
+have nothing to do but to keep time. Draw
+your wages and leave the yard."</p>
+
+<p>Under this iron rule it is no wonder that her
+coachmen were sometimes "pulled up" for furious
+driving. On one of these occasions she appeared
+in court in defence of her man. "I understand,
+Mrs Nelson," blandly remarked the Chairman of
+the Bench, "that you give your coachmen instructions
+to race the rival coach."</p>
+
+<p>"Not exactly," replied the lady; "my orders
+to them are simply that they are to get the
+road and keep it."</p>
+
+<p>But if a very dragon of strictness, she treated
+coachmen and guards very well. They had their
+especial room, and dined as well there, at reduced
+prices, as any of her coffee-room customers. This
+especial consideration reflected itself in those functionaries,
+who jealously preserved the privacy of
+their room; the amateur coachman who secured
+the invitation to join them (and to pay out of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+own pocket for their wine and spirits) feeling
+himself greatly honoured.</p>
+
+<p>In other respects, the "Bull" was a model to
+other houses. No damp sheets in any one of
+its hundred and fifty beds, no drunken brawlers;
+nothing a minute out of time, or an inch out of
+place. Mrs Nelson's fine house was, indeed, nothing
+less than an institution. In later years her
+son John took more of the management upon his
+shoulders, and the business seemed likely to long
+outlast his time.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2">V</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">But</span> a whisper of coming changes disturbed the
+air as early as 1830. Coachmen and travellers
+talked in the stableyard and the cosy rooms of
+the "Bull" of men with strange instruments encountered
+along the road; "chaps with telescopes
+on three sticks, and other chaps with chains and
+things, measuring the fields." It was thus that
+they described the surveyors, with their theodolites
+and their staff of men, who were setting out the
+proposed route of the projected Eastern Counties
+Railway that was to run all the way from London
+to Colchester, Norwich and Yarmouth.</p>
+
+<p>John Nelson was too confident in the existing
+order of things to believe that a few pounds of
+coal and some boiling water would ever be a
+match for his horses, or that a time would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+presently come when those passengers of his who
+now derided the railways would desert the coaches.
+The "Bull" had been in his family for more than
+a hundred and twelve years, as an inn and a
+coaching house, and he could as soon have
+imagined the end of the world as a day coming
+when the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches
+should no longer enter or leave his yard. It was
+a good joke for a while, when the coaches came
+in, to ask "How they were getting on with that
+railway?" but when the surveys were completed
+and the prospectus of the "Grand Eastern Counties
+Railway" was issued in 1834, it was seen that
+the railway men meant business. The original
+proposal of the directors was to follow the road
+closely and to bring the line into Aldgate.
+When it was seen that the railway was really to
+be made, Nelson raised an opposition against the
+Aldgate terminus, and was successful in driving
+the Company into an out-of-the-way site in
+Shoreditch, where for many years that terminus
+remained.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus33">
+<img src="images/fig12.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE YARD OF THE "BULL," WHITECHAPEL, IN COACHING DAYS.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Eastern Counties Railway was opened as
+far as Chelmsford in 1839, to Colchester in 1842,
+and communication to Norwich was opened up in
+1845. From the day of the first opening, the
+"Bull" declined. Old customers still found their
+way from the slums of Shoreditch to its hospitable
+door, but were not reinforced by the newer generation
+of travellers, to whom the road and its end
+in Aldgate were alike unknown. They went to the
+City inns, and later to the more central hotels,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>leaving the "Bull" to slowly sink into neglect.
+John Nelson made a big bid for success in another
+line, and ran the "Wellington" omnibuses with
+success from 1855 until his death, at the age of
+seventy-four, in June 1868. He had long resided
+in the West End, and was a man of ample fortune,
+so that the end of the "Bull's" coaching career
+hurt him only in sentiment. His mother, that most
+autocratic and business-like of women, had died ten
+years before, active almost to the last, although she
+had reached the age of eighty-five years. Towards
+the close of 1868 the old inn ended its long career.
+Its substantial, old-fashioned silver-plate and massive
+furniture were sold by auction, with the stock of
+rare old wines, laid in many years before, for that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+old generation of travellers who delighted in port
+and sherry, and plenty of both.</p>
+
+<p>The very site of the "Bull" is now sought with
+pains and labour, and only to be discovered with
+difficulty by the present generation. It was
+numbered 25 Aldgate High Street, and stood where
+Aldgate Avenue, a modern alley rich in offices of
+"commission agents," and curious things of that
+kind, now cuts its way through where the old
+yard used to be.</p>
+
+<p>Close by the "Bull" was another old coaching
+inn, the "Blue Boar," now quite vanished, kept for
+a time by John Thorogood. The Thorogoods were
+in those days, and in these times of amateur
+coaching are still, a family of coachmen. "Old
+John," who owned the "Norwich Times," and
+actually drove it for two years without missing a
+journey the whole of that time, clearly deserved
+his patronymic, in thus handling the reins along
+a hundred and twelve miles of road for seven
+hundred and thirty consecutive days.</p>
+
+<p>It was to the "Blue Boar" that little David
+Copperfield came, on his miserable journey from
+Yarmouth:&mdash;"We approached London by degrees,
+and got, in due time, to the inn, in the Whitechapel
+district, I forget whether it was the 'Blue Bull'
+or the 'Blue Boar,' but I know it was the Blue
+Something, and that its likeness was painted upon
+the back of the coach." The sculptured effigy of a
+boar, with gilded tusks and hoofs, built into the
+wall of a tobacco factory, marks the site of the
+inn.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Among other noted inns, the "Three Nuns"
+must be named. From it set out the short stages
+to Ilford, Epping, Romford and Woodford, together
+with coaches for several of the Essex by-roads.
+The house owes its name to the Minoresses, or nuns,
+of St Clare, from whose religious establishment the
+Minories obtains its title. The inn was rebuilt
+in 1877, and is now nothing more than a huge
+public-house.</p>
+
+<p>Many other inns of consequence in their day
+have left nothing but their yards behind them to
+show where they stood:&mdash;George Yard, Spread
+Eagle Yard, Black Horse Yard, Boar's Head Yard,
+White Swan Yard, Half Moon Passage, and Kent
+and Essex Yard are such relics, bordering High
+Street, Whitechapel, where one curious sign survives,
+that of an inn called the "Horse and Leaping Bar."</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> decided advantage the Chelmsford, Colchester
+and Ipswich route to Norwich possessed in old times
+over that by way of Newmarket and Thetford.
+Neither could have been considered safe in the bad
+old days, but while the traveller across the wild
+heaths of Newmarket and Thetford was almost
+certain to be "held up" on his lonely course, the
+other way, through Essex, passed by few such
+wildernesses, and had more towns and villages along<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+its course, to give a sense of security. Briefly,
+robbery on one route was a probability, and on the
+other was regarded as certain. Margaret Paston,
+writing from Norfolk to her husband in London,
+so long ago as the fifteenth century, certainly gives
+even the way through Essex a bad name, for she
+asks him to pay a debt for one of their friends,
+because it was not safe, "on account of the robbers,"
+to send money up from the country; but at the
+very same time the Thetford route had a much
+more sinister reputation, and travellers versed in
+the gossip of the road avoided it if possible, or
+went in company and well armed, for in that era
+a certain William Cratfield, Rector of Wrotham, "a
+common and notorious thief and lurker on the roads,
+and murderer and slayer," lurked and robbed and
+slew on Newmarket Heath, in company with a
+certain "Thomas Tapyrtone, hosyer." He was at
+last laid by the heels, in 1416, and charged with
+robbing a Londoner of £12. This distinguished
+ornament of the Church died in Newgate, but of
+the villainous hosier we hear no more. Perhaps he
+had realised a fortune in the business and retired
+to enjoy the fruits of his industry. With the
+disappearance of this worthy couple, travellers
+breathed more freely, but for surety's sake continued
+to patronise the Essex route, and so by way
+of Ipswich to come to the City of Orchards, as
+Norwich was called of old.</p>
+
+<p>As time went on, a certain degree of security was
+found in the coaches that began to make an appearance
+with the second half of the seventeenth century.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+They travelled at first no more quickly than a man
+could walk, but they provided company, which was,
+under the circumstances, highly desirable. Soon,
+however, they found it possible to do the journey
+in two days. Strype, we have already seen
+mentions the "Saracen's Head" in Aldgate as the
+centre of a considerable trade, and to it in 1681 a
+Norwich coach was running; an innovation which
+aroused the indignation of innkeepers on the way
+to almost as great a height as that of their descendants
+when, two hundred and forty years later,
+railways were depopulating the roads. When
+travellers began to go by coach instead of on
+horseback, and to reach London or Norwich in two
+days instead of three or four, those antique tapsters
+thought they saw their living going, and, strange to
+say, there were not wanting men who raised their
+voices against the innovation of being carried on a
+journey, instead of riding; although, for the most
+part, their outcry was the result only of innate conservatism.</p>
+
+<p>"Travelling in these coaches," said an anonymous
+pamphleteer, "can neither prove advantageous
+to men's health or business. For what
+advantage is it to men's health to be called out of
+their beds into these coaches an hour before day in the
+morning, to be hurried in them from place to place, till
+one hour, two, or three within night; insomuch that
+after sitting all day in the summer time stifled with
+heat, and choked with the dust, or the winter time
+starving and freezing with cold or choked with
+filthy fogs, they are often brought into their inns by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get
+supper; and next morning they are forced into the
+coach so early that they can get no breakfast. What
+addition is this to men's health or business? to ride
+all day with strangers, oftentimes sick, ancient,
+diseased persons, or young children crying; to
+whose humours they are obliged to be subject, forced
+to bear with, and many times are poisoned with
+their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of the
+boxes and bundles."</p>
+
+<p>Yet "these coaches" (one can almost hear the
+intonation of contempt in that phrase) were from
+the first a success. The greater that success the
+louder for a time was the outcry against them.
+Taylor, the Water Poet, was one of those who wrote
+vehemently against the new methods of travel.
+To him a coach was "a close hypocrite; for it hath
+a cover for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow
+any wickedness. Besides, like a perpetual cheater,
+it wears two bootes, and no spurs, sometimes having
+two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes
+(against nature) it makes faire ladies weare the
+boote; and if you note, they are carried back to
+back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in
+that miserable manner and thrown overboard into
+the sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate sea-crabs,
+in being drawn sideways as they are when
+they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a
+dangerous kind of carriage for the commonwealth,
+if it be considered."</p>
+
+<p>The boot of which he speaks so contemptuously,
+was a method of packing the "outsides," of which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+we still find a survival in the Irish jaunting-car.
+There are those who trace the origin of the term
+from the French "<i>boîte</i>," a box. Even now the
+coachman's seat is "the box," and the modern fore-boot
+is under it.</p>
+
+<p>Writers of that time seem almost unanimously to
+have taken sides against coaching; with, however, no
+effect; for, somewhat later than Taylor, that doughty
+Conservative, John Cresset, is found exclaiming
+furiously against the multitude of them. He
+favoured the suppression of all, or, at least&mdash;counsels
+of moderation prevailing&mdash;of most. They were, he
+said, mischievous to the public, destructive to trade
+and prejudicial to the land. Not only did they
+injure the breed of horses, but also that of watermen;
+which last objection goes further than the
+complaints of Taylor himself, who, writing at the
+same time, does not speak of his breed being debased,
+but only of his trade being crippled. Cresset
+thought the stage-coaches tempted the country
+gentry to London too often, and he accordingly
+proposed that these conveyances should be limited
+to one for every county town in England, to go
+backwards and forwards once a week.</p>
+
+<p>Vain hope! Coaches of sorts must already have
+appeared on the road to Norwich by the middle of
+the seventeenth century, for in a proclamation of July
+20th in the plague year, 1665, when all places were
+dreading infected London, it is ordained, that "from
+this daie all ye passage coaches shall be prohibited
+to goe from ye city to London and come from thence
+hither, and also ye common carts and wagons."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+Already, in 1696, the "Confatharrat" coach was a
+well-known conveyance between London and
+Norwich, and the name of Suggate, the London and
+East Anglian carrier, a household word. Unhappily,
+nothing can be gathered as to when Suggate first
+began to jog along the road, or when the "Confatharrat"
+started to ply between Norwich and the
+"Four Swans," Bishopsgate Street. All particulars
+are lost. The odd name of that coach was probably
+a seventeenth-century way of spelling the word
+"confederate," and the selection of such a name
+proves both that it was carried on by an alliance
+or co-partnership, and that "confederate" had not
+then acquired its sinister modern connotation.
+Besides these aids to travel, a stage-waggon began
+to ply from the "Popinjay," Tombland, Norwich, at
+an early date; and another from the "Angel," in the
+Market Place, to the "Blossoms" Inn, Laurence
+Lane, London, was advertised in the <i>Norwich
+Mercury</i>, of March 29th, 1729, to "now go regularly
+every Thursday night," setting out on the following
+Wednesday from London, on the return journey.
+It will thus be seen that it was a five or six days'
+journey for those primitive affairs, and that they
+apparently did not run at regular intervals until
+that year.</p>
+
+<p>A London and Beccles coach was running in
+1707, but the first regular Norwich coach of which
+particulars remain was the "Norwich Machine,"
+which in 1762 set out for London three times a
+week from the "Maid's Head," according to the
+advertisement still extant. There is nothing in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+that old coaching bill to show that 1762 was the
+first season of the "Norwich Machine." It may
+have been established some years before that date.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="r">
+<i>Norwich, March 26, 1762.</i></p>
+
+<p class="c">SUSAN NASMITH and JAMES KEITH,<br />
+<br />
+Proprietors of the<br />
+<br />
+NORWICH MACHINE,<br />
+<br />
+Give Notice
+</p>
+
+<p>that their Machine will set out from the <span class="smcap">Maid's Head</span> Inn,
+in St Simon's Parish, in Norwich, on Monday, the 5th day
+of April next, at half-past eleven in the forenoon, and on
+the Wednesday and Friday in the same week, at the same
+time; and to be continued in like Manner, on those Days
+weekly, for the carrying four inside Passengers, at
+Twenty-five Shillings each, and outside at Twelve
+Shillings and Sixpence each. The inside Passengers to be
+allowed twenty pound Weight, and all above to be paid
+for at three half-pence per pound; and to be in London on
+the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Evenings weekly.</p>
+
+
+<p class="p2"><i>N.B.</i>&mdash;A Machine will set out on the same days, at the
+same time, from the <span class="smcap">Green Dragon</span>, in Bishopsgate Street,
+London, for Norwich.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In the following year, the "Widow Nasmith"
+and James Keith advertised that they had built large
+and commodious machines, to carry six inside, and
+reduced the fares to twenty shillings and ten
+shillings respectively; but they had apparently not
+succeeded in performing the journey in less time than
+a day and a half, for no mention is made of speed
+being accelerated. But a remarkable feature in that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+announcement is the extraordinary cheapness of the
+fares, little over twopence and a penny a mile for
+inside and outside passengers, at a time when prices
+on other roads ruled from twenty-five to fifty per cent.
+higher. This tells a tale of competition; but Time,
+the thief, has robbed us of all knowledge of those
+competitors.</p>
+
+<p>A year later the London and Ipswich Post Coaches
+were advertised to set out every week-day, and to
+perform the 69¼ miles in ten hours, an average pace
+of almost 7 miles an hour; a marvellous turn of
+speed for that age. As to whether those Post
+Coaches ever <i>did</i> cover that distance in ten hours, we
+may reasonably express a doubt; but there was the
+promise, and 011 the strength of it the proprietors
+charged threepence a mile. As will be seen by the
+advertisement, these coaches carried no outside
+passengers:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="r">
+<i>Ipswich, August 17th, 1764.</i></p>
+
+<p class="c">THE LONDON AND IPSWICH POST COACHES
+</p>
+
+<p>Set out on Monday, the 27th of August, at seven o'clock
+in the morning from the <span class="smcap">Black Bull</span>, in Bishopsgate,
+London, and at the same time from the <span class="smcap">Great White Horse</span>,
+in Ipswich, and continue every day (Sunday excepted), to
+be at the above places the same evening at five o'clock;
+each passenger to pay threepence per mile, and to be
+allowed eighteen pounds luggage; all above to pay one
+penny per pound, and so in proportion. The coaches, hung
+upon steel springs, are very easy, large and commodious,
+carry six inside but no outside passengers whatever; but
+have great conveniences for parcels or game (to keep them
+from the weather), which will be delivered at London and
+Ipswich the same night.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As these coaches are sent out for the ease and expedition
+of gentlemen and ladies travelling, the proprietors
+humbly hope for their encouragement, and are determined
+to spare no pains to render it as agreeable as they can.</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+Performed (if God permits) by&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Pet. Sheldon</span>, at the Bull, Bishopsgate Street, London.</span><br />
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Thomas Archer</span>, at the White Hart, Brentwood.</span><br />
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Charles Kerry</span>, at the Black Boy, Chelmsford.</span><br />
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Geo. Reynolds</span>, at the Three Cups, Colchester; and</span><br />
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Chas. Harris</span>, at the Great White Horse, Ipswich.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>N.B.</i>&mdash;The proprietors will not be answerable for any
+money, plate, jewels, or writings, unless entered and paid
+for as such.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The reader will perhaps have observed that this
+advertisement especially mentions a convenience for
+carrying game, and, as a matter of fact, game and
+oysters were prominent from an early period in the
+history of Norwich Road conveyances, and, by the
+middle of the eighteenth century, the Norfolk and
+Suffolk coaches had already earned quite a distinctive
+character in two seasons of the year,
+Michaelmas and Christmas. East Anglia has always
+abounded in game, and its broad heaths and extensive
+commons have been the breeding-grounds
+of innumerable geese and turkeys whose careers
+have ended on London dinner-tables. In those two
+seasons it was often difficult to secure a seat on
+or in any of the "up" coaches from Norwich or
+Ipswich, for while every available inch of space on
+the mails was occupied by festoons of dead birds
+consigned by country cousins to friends in town, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+whole of a stage-coach was frequently chartered
+for the purpose of despatching heavy consignments
+of these noble poultry to the London market.
+Christmas provided extraordinary sights along the
+Norfolk Road, in the swaying coaches, with parcels
+and geese and turkeys mountains high on the roof;
+with barrels of Colchester natives in the boot, and
+hampers swinging heavily between the axle-trees
+on a shelf called "the cellar"; while from every
+rail or projection to which they could be either
+safely or hazardously tied depended other turkeys
+or braces of fowls, booked at the last moment before
+starting. It was something in those days to be a
+turkey or a goose, before whose importance the
+claims of human passengers faded; but it was a
+fleeting elevation which the philosophic did not
+envy, thinking that here indeed the poet was
+justified in his sounding line&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus34">
+<img src="images/fig13.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE NORWICH COACH AT CHRISTMAS TIDE. <span class="in5"><i>After Robert Seymour, </i>1835.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>
+<p>That unfortunate genius, Robert Seymour, has
+left us a picture of the Norwich coach nearing
+London at Christmas time, with its feathered load.
+The drawing was made in 1835, at the very height
+of the Coaching Age, and shows from his own observation
+with what ingenuity every rail and projection
+was used to hang the birds from.</p>
+
+<p>Another highly specialised branch of traffic,
+which only left the road on the opening of the
+railway, was the constant service of fish waggons
+running between Harwich, Colchester and London,
+at the then express speed of 8 miles an hour.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Between</span> the early days of coaching and the end of
+that period, many changes took place on the Norwich
+Road. So late as 1798, the Mail, the "Expedition,"
+and the "Post Coach" were the only coaches to
+Norwich, supplemented by three road waggons; two
+of them doing the journey twice a week, the third
+setting out weekly. Later came the "Norwich
+Times," "Gurney's Original Day Coach," the
+"Phænomenon," as it was originally spelt; the
+"Magnet," the Ipswich "Shannon," and the
+Ipswich "Blue." With the object of serving as
+many places as possible, and, incidentally, securing
+heavier bookings, the "Times" and Gurney's
+coaches took a somewhat circuitous route, leaving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+the direct road at Chelmsford, and going through
+Braintree, Halstead, Sudbury, Long Melford and Bury
+St Edmunds, rejoining the Norwich Road at Scole.</p>
+
+<p>But the lord of the road was the Mail Coach,
+beside which the stages were very commonplace
+affairs.</p>
+
+<p>The first mail-coach that ever ran the road between
+London and Norwich started in March 1785,
+and the service was from the beginning continued
+daily. Before that time the mails had been carried
+by post-boys, who began in 1741 to go six days a
+week instead of three, as they formerly had done.</p>
+
+<p>Mail-coaches are entirely things of the past, for
+the modern coaching revival has only brought back
+the smart stages and drags of the last years of the
+Coaching Age. The mails were expensive and exclusive
+affairs, constructed to carry only nine
+persons; four inside and five out, including coachman
+and guard. For the higher fares passengers
+paid they had not always the satisfaction of travelling
+faster than on the stages; but perhaps there was
+some dignity attaching to a seat on the mail which
+was lacking on ordinary coaches. And certainly
+they were surrounded by pomp and circumstance.
+The guard wore a scarlet coat and went armed with
+pistol, sword and blunderbuss; not, of course, for
+the protection of the passengers, but for the safe-guarding
+of His Majesty's mails. And everything
+gave place, as a matter of right and not merely
+courtesy, to the mail. Surly pikemen swung open
+their gates and asked no toll, for it was one of the
+privileges of the mail to go toll-free, and the high<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>waymen,
+if they walked in the ways of caution, left
+the gorgeous conveyance severely alone, reserving
+their best attentions for the plebeian stages. It was
+a much more serious thing to rob the mail than an
+ordinary coach, for a conviction was more certain to
+end in death, judges having hints from the Government
+how undesirable it was that mails should be
+ransacked and the robbers live. The rewards usually
+offered by the Post-office, too, were tempting to
+those who could inform if they would. £200 was
+the sum generally to be had for this service, together
+with the £40 reward by Act of Parliament for the
+apprehension of a highwayman; and if the mail was
+robbed within five miles of London, another £100.
+Courage, recklessness, and desperation&mdash;whichever
+we like to call it&mdash;often nerved the night-hawks
+to brave even so heavy a handicap as this, as this
+very road bears witness, in the daring robbery of
+the Ipswich Mail in 1822, when notes to the value
+of no less than £31,198 were stolen. In addition
+to the usual rewards, a sum of £1000 was offered
+by the losing firms of bankers, as shown in the
+accompanying old handbill, but without avail.
+This sum was afterwards increased to £5000,
+and a notification given that, in order to prevent
+the notes being changed, the ink on all new
+ones had been altered from black to red. But the
+robbers had the impudence to ask £6000 for the
+return of the notes. They had already passed
+£3000 worth, and naively said, in the negotiations
+they opened up, that the trouble they had taken
+and the risks they had run did not make it worth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+while to accept a smaller "reward." The bankers,
+however, would not spring another thousand, for
+by that time everyone was too shy of an "Ipswich
+black note," and it was extremely unlikely that any
+more could be passed. Negotiations were broken
+off; but a month later notes to the value of £28,000
+were returned. The thieves were never traced, and
+although the bulk of their booty was useless to
+them, made the very substantial haul of over £3000
+by their lawless enterprise.</p>
+
+<p class="c b xxxlarge">£1000 Reward.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig81.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c b p0 verybig">STOLEN</p>
+<p class="c b p0 xlarge">FROM THE IPSWICH MAIL</p>
+<p class="c p0">On its way from London, <i>on the Night<br />
+of the 11th Sept. Inst.</i> the following</p>
+<p class="c p0 b">COUNTRY BANK NOTES:</p>
+<p class="c p0 b large">Ipswich Bank, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.</p>
+<p class="c p0"><i>ALEXANDERS &amp; Co.</i> on <i>HOARE &amp; Co.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c p0 b large">Woodbridge Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.</p>
+<p class="c p0"> <i>ALEXANDERS &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c p0">Manningtree Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.<br />
+<i>ALEXANDER &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c p0 medium">Hadleigh Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.<br />
+<i>ALEXANDER &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>
+<p class="c p0 little">Particulars of which will be furnished at the different Bankers.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c p0 little">Whoever will give Information, either at ALEXANDERS and Co.<br />
+or at FRYS and Co., <i>St Mildred's Court, Poultry</i>, so that the<br />
+Parties may be apprehended, shall on his or their Conviction,<br />
+and the Recovery of the Property, receive the above REWARD.</p>
+
+<p>We have said that mail-coaches were gorgeous.
+They were painted in black and red. Not a shy,
+unassuming red, but the familiar and traditional Post-office
+hue. Also they bore the Royal coat-of-arms
+emblazoned upon the door panels, and the
+insignia of the four principal orders of knight<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>hood
+on the quarters. There was no mistaking a
+mail-coach.</p>
+
+<p>The Norwich Mail, which took fifteen and a
+half hours to do the journey so late as 1821, was
+greatly improved in later years; and finally, in
+the early forties, when the railway reached
+Norwich and superseded the roads, performed the
+journey in eleven hours, thirty-eight minutes, at
+the very respectable average speed of 9½ miles
+an hour. It was not the only mail on the road,
+but shared the way so far as Ipswich with the
+Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail. This coach was unfortunate
+on two occasions between 1835 and
+1839. On September 28th in the first year,
+when the coachman was climbing on to his box
+in the yard of the "Swan with Two Necks," the
+horses started away on their own accord, tumbling
+the coachman off and knocking down the helper
+who had been holding their heads. Dashing into
+Cheapside, they flung themselves against the back
+of the Poole Mail with such force that the coachman
+of that mail was also thrown off. He was
+taken unconscious to the hospital. Continuing
+their furious rush, the horses of the Ipswich
+Mail at length ran the pole of the coach between
+the iron railings of a house, and so were
+stopped.</p>
+
+<p>The second happening, in 1839, was somewhat
+similar. The mail had arrived at Colchester, and
+the coachman, throwing down the reins, got off
+the box. No one was at the horses' heads, and
+they started away and galloped down the High<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+Street, until the near leader fell and broke his
+neck, stopping the team.</p>
+
+<p>It was by the Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail
+that David Copperfield journeyed down to Yarmouth
+on his second visit to Mr Peggotty. In the
+ordinary course of things, he would have reached
+Ipswich at 3·12 a.m. But on this occasion the
+weather was a potent factor in causing delay.
+He occupied the box seat, and remarked upon the
+look of the sky to the coachman while yet on
+the first stage out of London.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think that a very remarkable
+sky?" he asked; "I don't remember to have seen
+one like it."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor I&mdash;not equal to it," said the coachman.
+"That's mist, sir. There'll be mischief done at
+sea, I expect, before long."</p>
+
+<p>The description of this stormy sky is very
+fine, and seems to have been drawn from observation;
+just as true and as effective in its way as
+Old Crome's billowy cloudscapes, in his <i>Mousehold
+Heath</i>, or as any of Constable's rain-surcharged
+Suffolk scenes.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a murky confusion&mdash;here and there
+blotted with a colour like the colour of the smoke
+from damp fuel&mdash;of flying clouds tossed up into
+most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights
+in the clouds than there were depths below them
+to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth,
+through which the wild moon seemed to plunge
+headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws
+of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+There had been a wind all day; and it was rising
+then, with an extraordinary great sound. In
+another hour it had much increased, and the sky
+was more overcast, and it blew hard.</p>
+
+<p>"But as the night advanced, the clouds closing
+in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then
+very dark, it came on to blow harder and harder.
+It still increased, until our horses could scarcely
+face the wind. Many times in the dark part of
+the night (it was then late in September, when
+the nights were not short) the leaders turned
+about, or came to a dead stop; and we were
+often in serious apprehension that the coach
+would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain
+came up before this storm, like showers of steel;
+and at those times, when there was any shelter
+of trees or lee-walls to be got, we were fain to
+stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing the
+struggle.... We came to Ipswich very late,
+having had to fight every inch of ground since
+we were ten miles out of London; and found a
+cluster of people in the market-place, who had
+risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling
+chimneys. Some of these, congregating about
+the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of
+great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high
+church tower and flung into a bye-street, which
+they then blocked up."</p>
+
+<p>At Ipswich the Yarmouth coaches left the
+Norwich Road, and so the further adventures of
+David Copperfield do not in this place concern us.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Here</span>, as on the other roads, the early advent
+of the Motor Car, in 1826, caused much commotion.
+The steam coaches of that period never achieved
+any success on this route, but caricatures of what
+might be expected were plentiful, and pictures of
+the Colchester "Dreadful Vengeance," the Norwich
+"Buster," and other fanciful conveyances, in the
+act of exploding and distributing their passengers
+in little pieces over a wide stretch of country,
+were popular. The railway itself came in for much
+abuse, and misguided and fanatical coach proprietors
+wasted their substance in pitiful attempts to
+compete with it. Among these was Israel Alexander,
+that Jewish hero of the Brighton Road in the early
+forties, who, although a first-class whip, was
+perhaps chiefly associated with the many upsettings
+of the Brighton "Quicksilver." He fell out with
+his noble friends on that highway, and, coming to
+the Norwich Road, ran a well-appointed coach to
+Colchester for a little while, until even the Eastern
+Counties Railway, then the slowest on earth, made
+the pace too quick for him. His turn-out was
+given the extraordinary name of the "Duke of
+Beaufort's Retaliator," and might have continued
+much longer to carry those who were prejudiced
+against railways, had it not met with so many
+accidents.</p>
+
+<p>One who was contemporary with the coaching
+age has ingeniously divided coaching accidents<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+into three classes:&mdash;1. Accidents to the coach;
+2. Accidents to the horses; 3. Accidents to the
+harness. The most common kind of mishap to
+the coach was, he says, the breaking of an axle.
+This was not, as a rule, due to any faulty construction
+of that most essential feature of a public
+conveyance, but to the overloading either of
+passengers or goods, to which coaches were continually
+subject. The sudden snapping of an axle
+at a high speed or on a down grade produced
+a tremendous crash which generally shot coachman,
+guard and "outsides" in all directions. Happy
+those who, in such a case, were received into the
+thorny arms of a quickset hedge or the soft
+embraces of a mud-heap.</p>
+
+<p>Another kind of mishap, not always accidental,
+was that of a wheel coming off; an incident often
+caused in early times, before the introduction of
+patent axle-boxes, by the mischievous removal of
+the lynch-pin by some unscrupulous rascal in the
+employ of the rival coach proprietor.</p>
+
+<p>The sudden snapping of a skid-chain while
+descending a hill, resulting in the coach running
+on to the horses and a general overthrow, in which
+horses' legs and passengers heads came into unwonted
+contact, was perhaps as uncomfortable a
+kind of disaster as could be imagined. Overloading,
+too, sometimes had the effect of rendering a coach
+top-heavy, when a slight lack of caution in running
+round curves would upset it.</p>
+
+<p>Accidents to the horses were:&mdash;casting a shoe,
+involving lameness, and perhaps a fall; tripping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+and stumbling on loose stones and rolling over;
+slipping up in frosty weather; and kicking over
+the traces or the splinter-bar.</p>
+
+<p>Accidents to the harness usually happened to
+the traces, which commonly snapped under an uneven
+strain. To cobble them up with twine, and
+so complete a stage, was a common practice. In
+such cases, the thoughts of passengers during the
+remaining miles were, like those of the poet, "too
+deep for words." Most nerve-shaking of all these
+varied and untoward happenings, however, was
+the breaking of the reins. Rotted by age, by the
+sun's heat and the winter's frosts, they would
+"come away" in the coachman's hands at that
+worst of moments;&mdash;when he was holding in his
+horses downhill. In that contingency, says our
+ancient, who, in the modern slang phrase, has
+"been there," it was the approved thing to say
+your prayers first and then take a flying leap
+(result, a broken neck, or fractured leg: the bone
+protruding over the top of the Blucher).</p>
+
+<p>"Then shrieked the timid and stood"&mdash;or,
+rather, sat&mdash;"still the brave;" who had this consolation,
+that if they fared no better than those
+who jumped, the odds were that they fared no
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>To be dragged at hurricane pace by four runaway
+horses (for in such a case they generally <i>did</i> so run)
+with the broken reins trailing helplessly after them,
+was to acquire the knowledge of an inner meaning in
+the word "terror." In escapades of this kind the
+"insides" were in the most unenviable situation;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+for the "outsides," including coachman and guard,
+took the better, if unheroic, part of crawling over the
+roof and slipping down the back of the coach into the
+road. The wisdom of their doing so would, in most
+cases, be proved a few seconds later by the sound of
+a distant crash as the coach hurtled against some
+roadside tree and dissolved into matchwork, while
+the "insides" were stuck as full of splinters as a
+"fretful porcupine" of quills.</p>
+
+<p>The "human boy" was as much the terror of the
+old coachman as he is of the modern cyclist. The
+sight of a boy with a hoop reduced him to a state of
+purple indignation or of quivering anxiety, according
+to temperament. Many an one of our great-grandfathers,
+attired in the odd costume of boys in that
+period, and trundling a hoop along the road, has felt
+the lash of the coachman's whip. The following little
+story will show us why.</p>
+
+<p>"When a very little boy," says one of our
+forebears, "I once upset a four-horse coach by losing
+control over my hoop, which, to my consternation,
+bowled among the legs of the team. I shall never
+forget the horror with which I for an instant saw
+the spirited horses floundering about with that
+hateful hoop among them, or heard the execrations
+of the coachman and the shouts of the passengers.
+Abandoning the wretched plaything to its fate, I
+took to my heels down a bye-lane, the portentous
+crash that followed only accelerating my speed."</p>
+
+<p>Coach proprietors were favourite targets for
+Fate's worst shafts. They were a hard-working,
+much-enduring class of men; up early and to bed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+late, retiring in good circumstances and rising
+perhaps ruined through some unforeseen accident.
+They were "common carriers" in law, and bound
+under many Acts of Parliament to deliver goods
+uninjured at their destination. As carriers of
+passengers, it is true, they were only required to
+exercise all "due care and diligence" for the safety
+of their customers, and were exempt from liability
+in case of mishaps through the "act of God" or the
+unforeseen; but the observance of due precautions
+and a daily inspection of the coach had to be proved
+in case of injury to passengers, or in default they
+were held liable for damages.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, the carelessness of any one of his many
+servants might mean a very serious thing to a coach
+proprietor. In those days the old Anglo-Saxon Law
+of Deodand was not only in existence, but in a very
+nourishing and aggressive condition. Indeed, coaching
+had practically rescued it from neglect. It was
+a law which, in cases of fatal injuries, empowered the
+coroner's jury to levy a fine, which might vary from
+sixpence to a thousand pounds, upon the object that
+caused the mischief.</p>
+
+<p>The very multiplicity of tribunals before whom
+the personally unoffending coach proprietor was
+liable to be haled was in itself terrifying. There
+was the already-mentioned coroners jury; the
+jury on the criminal side in trials at the Assizes
+for manslaughter, and the other "twelve good
+men and true" who assessed damages in the
+Sheriff's Court.</p>
+
+<p>How even the most well-meaning of men might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+thus suffer is evident in the case of a proprietor
+who was cast in damages from excess of caution.
+For additional security, and in order to protect
+it from road grit, he had a part of an axle incased
+in wood. One day this axle broke and a
+serious accident happened, resulting in an action
+against him for damages. He lost the day; the
+judge ruling that, although no proof of a defective
+axle was adduced, a flaw <i>might</i> have existed which
+a proper daily examination would have detected
+had the extra precaution for safety not been
+adopted.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">IX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">What</span> Aldgate might now have been had the
+original intention of the Eastern Counties directorate
+to place their terminus there been successful,
+we need not stop to inquire. But, as a good deal
+has already been said on the subject of coaches
+and coaching, it will be of interest to learn what
+were the views of the projectors of the Eastern
+Counties Railway. With their original prospectus
+was issued a map of the proposed railway from
+London to Norwich and Yarmouth, by which it
+appears that, instead of going to the left of the
+road from London, as far as Seven Kings and
+Chadwell Heath, it was originally intended to
+construct the line on the right of the road so far.
+Between Romford and Chelmsford the line has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+been made practically as first proposed, but onwards,
+from Chelmsford to Lexden, it is again on
+the other side of the highway; and, north of
+Colchester, goes wide of the original plan all the
+way to Norwich.</p>
+
+<p>In many ways this document is very much of
+a curiosity at this time, as also are the hopes and
+aspirations of the directors at the first General
+Meeting of the company. The chairman, for
+instance, confidently anticipated dividends of 22
+per cent., upon which one of the confiding shareholders
+replied that the report was most satisfactory
+and the prospects held out by no means
+overcharged. "If this understanding," said he,
+"fails in producing the dividend of 22 per
+cent., calculated upon in the report, then, I must
+say, human calculations and expectation can no
+longer be depended upon." O! most excellent
+man. But better is to come.</p>
+
+<p>"Should I live to see the completion of this
+and similar undertakings," he resumed, "I do
+believe I shall live to see misery almost banished
+from the earth. From the love I bear my species,
+I trust that I may not be too sanguine, and that
+I may yet witness the happy end that I have
+pictured to myself." His was, you think, the
+faith that might have moved mountains; but it
+did not produce that promised 22 per cent., nor,
+although we now have many thousands more miles
+of railway than he ever dreamed of, has the
+millennium yet arrived. Even the most far-seeing
+have not yet discovered any heralds of its approach.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>Let us drop the tribute of a tear to the
+sorrows of this excellent person, whose love of his
+species and touching anticipation of 22 per cent.
+dividends were so beautifully blended, and so
+cruelly disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>For some years small (very small) dividends
+were paid. Hudson, the "Railway King," paid
+them out of capital. "It made things pleasant,"
+he said, when charged with such financially immoral
+practices. Alas! poor Hudson, you lived
+before your time, and went to another world
+before such "dishonest" doings as yours were
+sanctified in principle by Acts of Parliament
+which authorise payments of dividends out of
+capital in the case of railways under construction.</p>
+
+<p>In 1848 the Eastern Counties Railway was in
+Chancery, and its very locomotives and carriages
+were seized for debt; while for years afterwards its
+name was a synonym for delay. The satirists of
+that period were as busy with the Eastern Counties
+as those of our own time are with the South-Eastern
+Railway. Every journey has an end; "even the
+Eastern Counties' trains come in at last," said
+Thackeray, very charitably.</p>
+
+<p>In 1862 it was amalgamated with several minor
+undertakings, and re-named the "Great Eastern
+Railway"; "great in nothing but the name," as the
+spiteful said.</p>
+
+<p>When matters were at their worst, the Lord
+Cranborne of that time was invited to accept the
+position of chairman and to help extricate the
+company from its difficulties. He accepted the post<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+in January 1868 and held it until December 1871.
+In April 1868 he had succeeded to the title of
+Marquis of Salisbury. Thus the statesman and
+prime minister of later years was once a great figure
+in the railway world. His financial abilities helped
+to put the Great Eastern line on a firm basis, and
+when he left it the railway was already greatly
+improved in every respect. To-day, instead of being
+a "shocking example," it is a model to be copied by
+other lines.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2">X</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Although</span> the last of the old coaches was long ago
+broken up, and the Norwich Road is no longer lively
+with mail and stage travellers, it has, in common
+with several other roads out of London, witnessed a
+wholly unexpected revival, in the shape of the Parcel
+Mail service between London and Ipswich. When
+the Parcel Post came into being on the 1st August
+1883, it was speedily discovered by the General
+Post-office authorities that in paying, according to
+contract, 55 per cent. of the gross receipts to the
+railway companies for the mere carriage of parcels,
+they were paying too much. Accordingly, a system
+of Parcel Mail coaches was established on several of
+the old roads, commencing with the London to
+Brighton Parcel Mail, in June 1887. A London and
+Chelmsford four-horse mail was soon added, and this
+was shortly afterwards extended to Colchester, and
+thence to Ipswich by cart. This curious enterprise
+of the Post-office was immediately successful, and it has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a><br /><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+ever since been found to effect a large saving over
+the railway charges. Nor is time lost in delivery.
+The down mail leaves London at a quarter to ten
+o'clock every night and the parcels arrive at
+Colchester and Ipswich in time for the first delivery
+the next morning; while the country parcels come
+up to London by an equally early hour. The way
+in which the service is worked will be gathered from
+the accompanying official way-sheet of the down mails.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig15.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH<br /> PARCEL MAIL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<div class="figleft">
+<img src="images/fig83.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c xlarge">GENERAL POST OFFICE</p>
+
+<p class="c large"><span class="smcap">The Most Noble the Marquis of Londonderry</span><br />
+Postmaster-General</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p class="c large"><b>LONDON, CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER, &amp; IPSWICH ROAD<br />
+PARCEL SERVICE.</b></p>
+
+<table cellpadding="1">
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdc bt br" colspan="3">Guard's Remarks as<br /> to Delays, &amp;c.</td>
+ <td></td>
+ <td></td>
+ <td class="tdc bt bl" colspan="2">Proper<br /> Times</td>
+ <td class="tdc bt bl" colspan="2">Actual<br /> Times</td>
+ <td class="tdc bt bl">This Column<br /> to be left blank</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="bb"></td>
+  <td class="bb"></td>
+  <td class="bb br"></td>
+  <td class="tdc">Date</td>
+  <td class="tdc">190 .</td>
+  <td class="tdcs bb bl">H.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs bb">M.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs bb bl">H.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs bb">M.</td>
+  <td class="bb bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdcs bl" colspan="2">P.M.</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Coach Service<br />between London<br />and Colchester.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs br" colspan="2">Distance</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Mount Pleasant<br />Parcel Office</td>
+  <td>dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">9</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">45</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdcs">M.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs br">F.</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Contractor&mdash;<br />C. Webster,<br />279 Whitechapel<br />Road, E. </td>
+  <td class="tdr">3</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">0</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Eastern District P.O.</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">10</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">8</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">10</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">10</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">11</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">3</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Romford</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">11</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">40</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">11</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">42</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdcs bl" colspan="2">A.M.</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">6</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">2</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Brentwood</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">12</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">29</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">12</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">31</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">5</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">0</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Ingatestone</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">1</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">9</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">1</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">11</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Cart between<br />Colchester &amp;<br />Ipswich.</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">6</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">0</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Chelmsford</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">2</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">0</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">2</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">5</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Contractor&mdash;<br />F. W. Canham,<br />Ipswich.</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">8</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">6</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Witham</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">13</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">15</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">3</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">2</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Kelvedon</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">41</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">43</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">9</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">6</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Colchester</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">0</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">5</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Stratford St. Mary</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">58</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">6</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">0</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">18</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">2</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Ipswich</td>
+  <td class="tdr">arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">7</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">20</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Signature of Guard&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="bb"></td>
+  <td class="br bb"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">71</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">5</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="fulla" />
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="r little">T. E. SIFTON, Inspector-General of Mails.</p>
+
+<p class="little">The Guard in charge of the Coach must report the cause of any Delay.
+He must enter all Remarks and Times in the proper Columns. This Bill
+to be sent, as addressed, by First Post.</p>
+
+<p class="c little">TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH<br />PARCEL MAIL.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<hr class="fulla" />
+
+<p>The up service, starting with the mail-cart from
+Ipswich at 7·9 p.m. and continued from Colchester
+by four-horse van at 9·30 p.m., brings the country
+parcels to Mount Pleasant at 4·30 a.m., throughout
+the year. Up and down mails meet at Ingatestone
+at 1·9 a.m. On this service, as on all others, the
+vans go through, but the drivers and guards
+exchange places; the London men changing on to
+the van from Colchester at Ingatestone, and returning
+to London; the Colchester men taking over the
+down van and similarly returning whence they came.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious and unexpected revival of old
+methods, but an entirely successful one. No highwayman
+has ever attempted to "hold up" the
+Parcel Mail, for the last of that trade has for
+generations mouldered in his grave; but should
+any amateurs essay to complete this revival of old
+coaching days by waylaying the mail, the guards
+would be found well armed. Their virgin steel and
+untried pistols have for years been carried without
+any excuse for using them; but there need be no
+doubt that, were the occasion to arrive, they would
+defend their parcels&mdash;the pounds of country butter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+the eggs, and wild flowers, or the miscellaneous
+consignment from London&mdash;with their hearts' blood.
+There are more romantic things in the world to die
+for than postal parcels of eggs, cheese and butter,
+but the ennobling word <span class="smcap">Duty</span> might glorify such a
+sacrifice for the sake of a pound's weight of "best
+fresh," or a dozen of "new laid."</p>
+
+<p>But although the possibility of attack is remote,
+a spice of danger and romance savours the conduct
+of the parcel mails.</p>
+
+<p>The up Colchester Parcel Mail had a mishap
+on the night of October 11, 1890, when, owing
+to the prevailing fog, it was driven into a ditch
+near Margaretting. Happily, both coachman and
+guard escaped injury, the heavy vehicle resting
+against the hedge. The coachman, mounting one
+of his team, and hurrying back to Chelmsford,
+succeeded in overtaking the down coach, which,
+returning to the scene of the accident, unloaded
+and transferred the parcels, and continued to London,
+leaving the down mail to be forwarded with local
+help. It eventually arrived at Colchester four hours
+late.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Coaching</span> days, old and new, having now been
+disposed of, we might set off down the road at
+once, were it not that our steps are at once arrested
+by the sight of the "Red Lion" Inn, at the corner
+of Whitechapel Road and Leman Street, which,
+together with the "Old Red Lion," adjoining, stands
+on a site made historic by Dick Turpin's lurid career.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was in the yard of the old house that Turpin
+shot Matthew King in 1737. He had stolen a fine
+horse belonging to a Mr Major, near the "Green
+Man," Epping, and had been traced by means of
+the animal to the inn, where he was found by the
+Bow Street runners in company with Matthew
+and Robert King, birds of like feather with himself.
+The landlord endeavoured to arrest King,
+who fired at him without effect, calling to Turpin,
+"Dick! shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"</p>
+
+<p>Turpin had his usual extensive armoury on
+his person&mdash;three brace of pistols and a carbine
+slung across his back. He fired, and shot Matthew
+King, whether by accident or design is not known.
+King first exclaimed, "Dick! you have shot me;
+make off," but is said afterwards to have cursed
+him as he went, for a coward. King died a week
+later of his wounds, Turpin fleeing to a deserted
+mansion in Essex, and thence to a cave in Epping
+Forest. It is usually said that it was the more
+famous Tom King who met so dramatic an end,
+but original authorities give Matthew; and certainly
+we find <i>a</i> Tom King, highwayman, decorously executed
+at Tyburn eighteen years later.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus4">
+<img src="images/fig16.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT MATTHEW KING.<br />
+<i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854.</i>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We have met Turpin before, notably at York,
+where he made an end, two years after this exploit.
+This especial hero of the Penny Dreadful and the
+romantic imagination of the average errand boy
+belongs especially to this road, for he was an
+Essex man, born at Hempstead in 1705. Apprenticed
+to a Whitechapel butcher in his youth, he
+commenced his career of low villainy by stealing
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a><br /><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a><br /><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>some cattle from a Plaistow farmer, and then
+joined a band of smugglers and deer-stealers and
+housebreakers in Epping Forest, where they set
+up a storehouse of stolen goods in the cave just
+mentioned. This band became so notorious that
+a sum of fifty guineas was soon offered for their
+arrest; but it was not until the amount had been
+doubled that two of the ringleaders were caught
+and hanged. The gang thus broken up, Turpin
+was reduced to scouring the roads singly, and
+pursued a solitary career until one dreary February
+night in 1735, while patrolling the Cambridge Road,
+he saw a horseman approaching through the mist.
+At the time-honoured demand, "Your money or
+your life!" the stranger simply laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"What!" said he, "should dog eat dog? We
+are of a like trade."</p>
+
+<p>Thus Turpin and Tom King met, and struck up
+a partnership. If only one quarter of the deeds
+assigned to Turpin were true, his would be a very
+gallant, as well as phenomenally busy, figure on
+the roads of England. Although by no means a
+mythical person, the stories told of him nearly all
+belong to the regions of romance, and his true
+history shows him to have had few redeeming
+qualities. Many of the old knights of the road
+were courageous, and hand in hand with their
+courage went a humour not seldom kindly; but
+Turpin was a bloodthirsty ruffian whose courage
+is not an established fact, and whose humour, like
+the "tender mercies of the wicked," was cruel, not
+to say ferocious. It is quite hopeless to attempt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+to finally destroy the great Turpin myth after
+this lapse of time: Harrison Ainsworth's romance
+has enjoyed too great and too long a popularity
+for that; but let the attempt here be made to paint
+him as the cowardly ruffian he was.</p>
+
+<p>Whitechapel, quite apart from memories of
+Turpin, owns an unenviable repute, and its very
+name is a synonym for villainy. Its bad savour,
+however, goes back no greater distance in time
+than the first half of the eighteenth century, for
+until that period it was not built upon, and indeed
+"Whitechapel Common" was spoken of so late as
+1761, maps proving the old church to have been
+quite rural at that date. Originally a chapel-of-ease
+to the great mother-parish of Stepney, the
+district was erected into a separate parish so far
+back as the fourteenth century and the original
+"white chapel"&mdash;doubtless so called from its
+mediæval coats of whitewash&mdash;made a church.
+But old names cling, and although it has been a
+church for over six hundred years, it has not been
+able to confer its more dignified title upon the parish
+itself. Thus the name of Whitechapel is doubly
+misleading nowadays, for it is no longer a chapelry
+and its stately church is in red brick; so that there
+is some force in the argument for re-christening the
+borough and dignifying it by a revival of the old
+name of Eastminster, owned by that not very
+fortunate Abbey of St Mary Grace, founded by
+Edward the Third in 1348, which formerly stood
+on the site of the Royal Mint.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus35">
+<img src="images/fig17.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">WHITECHAPEL OLD CHURCH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>St Mary's, Whitechapel, is a beautiful church,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>built in 1877, burnt August 20, 1880, and since
+restored. It replaced the ugly old building, which
+was "taken down for the simple reason that it
+would not stand up." The ancient wrangling over
+its full title of St Mary Matfelon is not yet done,
+and rash would be he who voted for any particular
+one among the rival derivatives of the name.
+Matfelon, holds one school, was the name of a
+forgotten benefactor, whose particular benefactions
+are not stated. Who, then, would found, since
+benefits are thus forgot? "<i>Mariæ, matri et filio</i>,"
+an ancient dedication, say others; while yet different
+parties find its source in a Syriac word meaning
+"mother of a son" = the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the
+most entertaining legend, however, is that which
+tells how it originated in the killing of a murderer,
+in 1429, by the women of Whitechapel. "Between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+Estren and Witsontyd, a fals Breton mordred a
+wydewe in here bed, the which find hym for almasse
+withought Algate, in the suburbes of London, and
+bar away alle that sche hadde, and afterwards he
+toke socour of Holy Chirche in Suthwark; but
+at the last he took the crosse and forswore the
+kynge's land; and as he went hys waye, it happyd
+hym to come be the same place where he had don
+that cursed dede, and women of the same parysh
+comen out with stones and canell dong, and ther
+maden an ende of hym in the hyghe strete." These
+things seem quite in keeping with Whitechapel's
+evil fame.</p>
+
+<p>The old church, as it stood until well into the
+nineteenth century, is shown opposite this page,
+with one of the old road-waggons crawling past.
+In another view of the same date the High Street
+itself is seen, its long perspective fully bearing out
+the old description of spaciousness. At the same
+time, it is seen to be empty enough to resemble the
+street of a provincial town. The houses are exceedingly
+old, the road paved with knobbly stones, and
+the shop windows artfully constructed with the
+apparent object of obstructing instead of admitting
+the light. Very few of these old shop-fronts are
+now left, but a good specimen is that of a bell-founding
+firm at No. 34 Whitechapel Road.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus5">
+<img src="images/fig18.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This old picture has long ceased to be representative
+of Whitechapel's everyday aspect. The
+coach has long ago whirled away into limbo, the
+elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to
+Abraham's, or another's, bosom, and Whitechapel
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a><br /><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a><br /><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>knows their kind no more. Bustle, and a dismal
+overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers'
+barrows, tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic
+of to-day. Also, the Jewish element is very
+pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably
+dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names
+of Cohen, Abraham, Solomon and the like, and
+others ending in "baum," or "heim." But on
+Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious
+street regains something of its old rural character,
+in the open-air hay and straw market held here, the
+largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad thoroughfare
+and overflows into the side streets: the
+countrymen who have come up on the great
+waggons by road from remote parts of Essex
+lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling
+hay or straw, attending to their horses, or refreshing
+in the old taverns. It is Arcady come again. The
+eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the hay-wains,
+and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic
+scent of their heaped-up loads. It is true that
+Central Londoners also have their so-called Haymarket,
+but hay is the least likely of articles to
+be purchased there in these days.</p>
+
+<p>What do they think, those countrymen, of the
+Whitechapel folks, the "chickaleary blokes," used,
+as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth century
+remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy,"
+from robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe,"
+and the selling of painted sparrows for canaries?
+Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr
+Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+neighbourhood," said Sam, as they rumbled along the
+crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery remarkable
+circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and
+oysters go together.... The poorer a place is,
+the greater call there seems to be for oysters....
+An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The
+street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think
+that ven a man's wery poor, he rushes out of his
+lodgings and eats oysters in regular desperation."
+Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper
+depth than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty;
+whelks and villainy foregather in Whitechapel at
+the dawn of the Twentieth Century.</p>
+
+<p>But the poverty and the villainy of Whitechapel
+must not be too greatly insisted upon. They may
+easily be overdone. Loyal hearts and brave lives&mdash;all
+the braver that they are not flaunted in the face
+of the world&mdash;exist in the cheerless and unromantic
+grey streets that lead off the main road. The
+domestic virtues flourish here as well as&mdash;if not
+better than&mdash;in the West End. The heroes and
+heroines of everyday life&mdash;the greater in their
+heroism that they do not know of it&mdash;live in
+hundreds of thousands in the dingy and unrelieved
+dulness of the streets to right and left of Whitechapel
+Road and of the Mile End Road, that go with
+so majestic a breadth and purposeful directness to
+Bow.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Let</span> the Londoner who has never been "down East,"
+and so is given to speaking contemptuously of it,
+take a journey down the Whitechapel and Mile End
+Roads, and see with what an astonishing width, both
+in respect of roadway and foot-pavements, those
+noble thoroughfares are endowed. The London he
+has already known owns no streets so wide, save
+only in the isolated and unimportant instance of
+Langham Place; while, although it cannot be said
+that, taken individually, the houses of the great
+East-End thoroughfares are at all picturesque, yet
+there is a certain interesting quality in the roads as a
+whole, lacking elsewhere. This, doubtless, is partly
+explained by the strangeness of the East-ender's garb,
+and partly by the many Jewish and other foreigners
+who throng the pavements.</p>
+
+<p>A strangely-named public-house&mdash;the "Grave
+Maurice"&mdash;is one of the landmarks of the Whitechapel
+Road. Many have set themselves the task
+of finding the origin of that sign and its meaning;
+but their efforts have been baulked by the very
+multiplicity of historic Maurices, grave or otherwise.
+The sign may originally have been the "Graf Maurice,"
+Prince Maurice of Bohemia, brother of the better-known
+Prince Rupert, the dashing cavalier, but a
+difficulty arises from the fact that there was another
+"Graf Maurice" at the same time, in the person
+of the equally well-known Prince Maurice of Nassau,
+who died of grief when the Spanish overran Holland<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+and besieged Breda. Nor does the uncertainty end
+here, for Dekker uses the expression "grave maurice"
+in one of his plays, written at least thirty years
+before the time of those princes, in a passage which
+reads as though it were the usual nickname at that
+period for an officer.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the house owning this perplexing sign
+we come to the beginning of the Mile End Road,
+one mile, as its name implies, from Aldgate, and
+for long the site of a turnpike-gate, only removed
+with the close of the Coaching Age. Rowlandson
+has left us an excellent view of Mile End Turnpike
+as it was in his time; with isolated blocks of houses,
+groups of rustic cottages and a background of trees,
+to show how rural were the surroundings towards
+the close of the eighteenth century; while maps
+of that period mark the road onwards, bordered by
+fields, with "Ducking Pond Row" standing solitary
+and the ducking-pond itself close behind, where the
+scolds and shrews of that age were soused.</p>
+
+<p>The Ducking-Pond as an institution is as obsolete
+as the rack, the thumb-screw, and other ingenious
+devices of the "good old times"; but most towns
+a hundred years ago still kept a cucking or ducking-stool;
+while, if they had no official pond for the
+purpose, any dirty pool would serve, and the dirtier
+it were the better it was esteemed.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus6">
+<img src="images/fig19.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. <span class="in5"><i>After Rowlandson.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"The Way of punishing scolding Women is
+pleasant enough," says an old traveller. "They
+fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve
+or fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so
+that these two Pieces of Wood, with their two Ends
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a><br /><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a><br /><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>embrace the Chair, which hangs between them on a
+sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and
+always remains in the natural horizontal Position in
+which a Chair should be, that a Person may sit conveniently
+in it, whether you raise it or let it down.
+They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River,
+and over this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the
+two Pieces of Wood, at one End of which the Chair
+hangs just over the Water. They place the Woman in
+the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often
+as the Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate
+Heat."</p>
+
+<p>One has only to go and look at the average rural
+pond to imagine the horrors of this punishment.
+The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the clinging
+green duckwood, common to them, must have made
+a ducking the event of a lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>The difference here, at Mile End, between those
+times and these is emphasised by the close-packed
+streets on either side, and by the crowded tram-cars
+that ply back and forth.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in
+the little old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn
+that stands by itself, in advance of the frontage of
+the houses, and takes up a goodly portion of the
+broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when
+land was not so valuable as now; when local
+authorities were easy-going, and when anyone who
+had the impudence to squat down upon the public
+paths could do so, and, remaining there undisturbed
+for a period of twenty-one years, could thus derive
+a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is an ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>planation
+of the existence of the "Vine" in this
+position.</p>
+
+<p>Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses,
+built in 1695, for the housing of old skippers and
+shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little houses
+and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle
+where the old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly
+while the curious passers-by linger to gaze at them
+from the pavement, as though they were some strange
+kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the
+pages of fiction as this quiet haven in midst of
+the roaring streets, screened from them by walls
+and gates of curious architecture surmounted by
+models of the gallant old galleons that have long
+ceased to rove the raging main. It is a spot
+alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by
+the towering breweries, which indeed would have
+bought the old place and destroyed it a few years
+ago, but for the indignation aroused when the proposal
+of the governing body of the almshouses to
+sell became known.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing else to detain the explorer
+on his way into Essex. The People's Palace, it
+is true, is a remarkable place, the result of Sir
+Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the
+East who would get culture and find recreation,
+but it is a dream realised as an architectural nightmare,
+and is a very terrible example of what is
+done to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art
+and Philanthropy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">At</span> last, by this broadest of broad roads, we come
+to Stratford-le-Bow and its parish church. In these
+hurried times, and for some centuries past, the
+old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and
+as "Bow" alone it is familiar to all East-enders.
+The place is nowadays chiefly associated with Bryant
+&amp; May and matches, but there yet remain many
+old Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by
+the roadside, telling of days long before "patent
+safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel
+and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.</p>
+
+<p>"Bow," says the <i>Ambulator</i> of 1774, "is a
+village a little to the east of Mile End, inhabited
+by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here has
+been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little
+inferior to that of Chelsea." That description is
+now somewhat out of date. The manufactory of
+porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is
+scarce, and treasured accordingly. Whitsters&mdash;that
+is to say, bleachers of linen&mdash;and scarlet dyers, also,
+are to seek.</p>
+
+<p>Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound
+traveller in bold and rugged fashion; its time-worn
+tower standing midway of the road and
+challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little
+River Lea, just beyond, to Stratford and into Essex.
+Church and churchyard split the road up into
+two channels and thus destroy its width, which it
+never afterwards regains until the suburbs are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+passed and the open country reached. A modern
+touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in
+advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory
+attitude from its granite pedestal, and
+erected in his lifetime; recalling the fervent hero-worshipping
+days of the "People's William." The
+outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them
+that see statues raised to themselves, unless indeed
+they be made of finer clay than most mortals,
+kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years
+this bronze Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been
+made to preside, as it were, over an underground
+public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst
+he rises, absurdly eloquent.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus36">
+<img src="images/fig20.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">BOW.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Just how Stratford-le-Bow received its name
+is an interesting piece of history. Both here
+and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+anciently crossed by a paved stone ford of
+Roman construction, continuing the highway into
+Essex; but when that river's many channels,
+swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward
+the Thames, the low-lying lands of what we
+now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were for
+long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For
+months together the approaches to the Lea were lost
+in floods, and the real channels of the river became
+so deep that those who valued their lives and goods
+dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor
+travellers thus waterlogged came the good and pious
+Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the First. "Having
+herself been well washed in the water," as old
+Leland says, she fully appreciated the necessity
+for bridges, and accordingly directed the raising
+of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the
+building of two stone structures, of which one was
+the original "Bow" Bridge; "a rare piece of work,
+for before that time the like had never been seen
+in England." It seems to have been the stone
+arch that gave its name of "Bow," and if an arched
+stone bridge was so remarkable in those times that
+it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular,
+or "bow" shape, it must have been either the
+first, or among the earliest, of stone bridges
+built, in times when others were constructed of
+timber.</p>
+
+<p>The original name of the village that afterwards
+sprang up here, on the hither or Middlesex shore,
+was thus singularly contradictory; meaning "the
+street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratford<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+on the Essex side was in those days known as
+Stratford Langthorne.</p>
+
+<p>The good queen not only built the bridges and
+causeways, but endowed them with land and a
+water-mill, conveying those properties to the Abbess
+of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for
+the maintenance of the works. Having done all
+this, she died. Some years afterwards a Cistercian
+monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey
+Mills now stand, and the then Abbess of Barking,
+of opinion that the Abbot of that house, being near,
+would find it easier to look after the bridges than
+herself, reconveyed the property, together with its
+obligations, to him. The trust was kept for a time
+and then delegated to a certain Godfrey Pratt, who
+had a house built for him on the causeway and
+enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping
+the works in repair. Pratt did so well with his
+annual stipend and the alms given him by wayfarers
+that the Abbot at length discontinued the
+grant. Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite
+unauthorised toll-bar and levied "pontage" on all
+except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This went
+on for many years, until the scandal grew too great,
+and, in consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot
+dispossessed Godfrey Pratt of his toll-bar and
+resumed the control himself.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the
+road had been so greatly worn down that the feet
+of travellers and those of the horses often went
+through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently,
+to undergo an extensive cobbling process; a treatment,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>by the way, continued through the centuries
+until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.</p>
+
+<p>In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork
+of all ages. The property for its maintenance had,
+of course, been lost in the confiscation of monastic
+estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair afterwards
+fell upon the local authorities, who always
+preferred to patch and tinker it so long as such a
+course was possible. On February 14, 1839, the
+existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one
+seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIV</p>
+
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Farewell</span>, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I
+heard say, honest Conscience was once drowned."</p>
+
+<p>Thus says Will Kemp, in his <i>Nine Days'
+Wonder</i>, the account of a dance he jigged from
+London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It
+is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that
+old joke about the drowning of conscience here, and
+so we will also without delay "have over" the
+modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy
+flour mills, and crossing another branch of the Lea
+by Channelsea Bridge, come to Stratford.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, begins the county of calves, according
+to the popular jest that to be a native of Essex is
+to be an "Essex Calf." It is not generally regarded
+as a complimentary title, for of all young animals<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+the calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward.
+To this day in rural England the contemptuous
+exclamation "you great calf!" is used of an awkward,
+overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings.
+Yet, if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer
+on this subject, the nickname had a complimentary
+origin, "for," said he, "this county produceth calves
+of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."</p>
+
+<p>We have already seen that the French spoken at
+Stratford-le-Bow in Chaucer's time was a scoff and a
+derision. To-day, neither on the Middlesex nor the
+Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages
+either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of
+every kind, the making of matches that strike only
+on the box, the varied work of the Stratford and
+West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations
+close at hand; while the business of covering the
+potato-fields, the celery-beds and the grounds of the
+old suburban mansions with endless rows of suburban
+dwellings is engrossing attention down the road.
+Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban,
+and Ilford far greater in these days than it ever was
+when its "great" prefix was never pretermitted.
+London, indeed, stretches far out along this road,
+and the country is reached only after many miles of
+that debatable land which belongs neither to country
+nor town. Heralds of the great metropolis appear
+to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far
+away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the
+dim presentiment of some vast capital," as De
+Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like a
+misgiving."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Stratford has not improved since coaches left
+the road. It has grown greatly, and grown dirty,
+squalid and extremely trying to noses that have
+not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure
+factories and other odoriferous industries. But it
+is a place of great enterprises and great and
+useful markets, and when its introductory mean
+streets are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone
+Road branches off to the left, looks by
+contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton
+Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park
+in succession, past a building which, whether as an
+institution or an example of beautiful architecture,
+would well grace the West. The West Ham Public
+Library and Technical Institute is here referred
+to. "Irish Row," on the way, marked on old
+maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages inhabited
+until recent years by a turbulent colony
+of London-Irish market-gardening labourers, subsidised
+by Mrs Nelson in times of coaching competition
+to impede hated rivals as they came past
+the "Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of
+Manor Park; a house which, like the "Coach
+and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a
+legitimate coaching trade to something more in
+the gin-palace sort. This is not to say that the
+staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct
+negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish
+Row, but when the rival Ipswich "Umpire" or
+the "New Colchester" coaches developed much
+sporting competition and their coachmen evinced
+a dogged determination to be first over Bow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+Bridge on the way up to London, and, by consequence,
+the first to arrive at their destination,
+why, an obscure hint or two on the part of one
+of her numerous staff, accompanied by the wherewithal
+for a drink, produced wonders in the way
+of highway obstruction. But such recollections
+are become unsubstantial as the fabric of which
+dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions
+of tramways and interminable rows of suburban
+shops that conduct to Ilford Bridge.</p>
+
+<p>Great Ilford lies on the other side of the
+sullen Roding, that rolls a muddy tide in aimless
+loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking
+Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial
+been approached by a bridge replacing the "eald,"
+or old, ford, whence its name derives and not
+from that crossing of the stream being an "ill"
+ford, as imaginative, but uninstructed, historians
+would have us believe; although the slimy black
+mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the
+exercise of fording an ill enough enterprise.
+Ilford is now in the throes of development and is
+fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere
+suburb. Let us leave it for places less sophisticated.</p>
+
+<p>The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving
+Ilford by moonshine, set forward "dauncing
+within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two
+strong Jades were beating and byting either of
+other." We take this to mean two women fighting
+on the road, until the context is reached, where
+he says that their hooves formed an arch over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+him and that he narrowly escaped being kicked
+on the head. It then becomes evident that he is
+talking of horses.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and
+in more decorous fashion than that of Will Kemp,
+we come, past an inn oddly named the "Cauliflower"&mdash;probably
+as a subtle compliment to the
+abounding market-gardens of the neighbourhood&mdash;to
+the long, straight perspective of the road
+across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of
+new suburban "villa" streets now cover the
+waste on either side, so that the beginnings of
+the plain are not so much heath as modern
+suburb, created by the Great Eastern Railway's
+suburban stations and by the far-reaching enterprises
+of land corporations, which here carry on
+the usual speculations of the speculative builder
+on a gigantic scale. In acre upon acre of closely-packed
+streets, each one with a horrible similarity
+to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning
+clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty
+London live and lose their individuality, and
+pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman
+of a century ago waited impatiently behind
+the ragged thickets and storm-tossed thorn trees of
+Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there now rises
+the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway
+between Ilford station and that of Chadwell
+Heath, the recent enormous growth of population
+on this sometime waste has led to the erection of
+the new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes,"
+while widened lines have been provided
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>for the increased train services. "Seven Kings"
+is a romantic name, but who those monarchs
+were, and what they were ever doing on the
+Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable
+for cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is
+impossible to say. Many wits have been at work
+on the problem, but have been baffled. The
+natural assumption is that at this spot, marked
+on old maps as "Seven Kings Watering," the
+seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily
+records no such meeting, but there was
+no <i>Court Circular</i> in those times, and so many
+royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked,
+except locally and in some fashion similar to this.
+So let us assume the kings met here and watered
+their horses at the "watering," which was a place
+where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash.
+The stream still crosses the highway, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+civilisation has put it in a pipe and tucked it
+away underground.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus37">
+<img src="images/fig21.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SEVEN KINGS.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway
+at this point, known as Stoup Lane ("stoup"
+meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of
+the Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish.
+Here it was, in 1794, on a night of December,
+that a King's messenger, James Martin by name,
+was shot by five footpads. The register of St
+Edmund's, Romford, records the burial of this
+unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.</p>
+
+<p>Let us not, however, in view of the more or less
+grisly dangers that still await belated wayfarers on
+this road, enlarge too greatly on the lawlessness of
+old times; for the homeward-bound resident making
+for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs
+towards the stroke of ten o'clock is not infrequently
+startled by the sinister figure of a footpad springing
+from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and demanding&mdash;<i>not</i>
+his money or his life, as in the old
+formula, but&mdash;a halfpenny! This invariable demand
+of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath footpads, which
+argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is
+for half the price of a drink.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?"
+asks the threatening tramp.</p>
+
+<p>"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning
+the long perspective of the road for the policeman
+who ought to be within sight&mdash;but is not;
+"w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've walked all the way from Romford and only
+got half the price of a glass o' beer," says the rascal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The citizen is astonished and incredulous, and his
+astonishment gets the better of his fear. "Oh, come
+now," he rejoins, "no one walks three miles from
+Romford for a glass of beer; besides, all the houses
+here close at ten o'clock."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, they do, do they?" replies the tramp,
+offensively. "'Ere, my mate Bill'll talk to you,"
+and, whistling, the ominous bulk of Bill emerges
+aggressively from the darkling hedge, and together
+they proceed to wipe the road with that respectable
+ratepayer, and, rifling his pockets, leave him, bruised
+and bleeding, to reflect on the blessings of civilisation
+and to be thankful that he was not born a
+hundred years ago, when he might have been shot
+dead instead of being felled to the ground by the
+half-brick in a handkerchief which he finds beside
+him and takes home as a trophy.</p>
+
+<p>Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past
+Beacontree Heath, on the right, to an open country
+of disconsolate-looking contorted elms and battered
+windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and
+still airs of summer of the winter winds that race
+across the watery flats of Rippleside and Dagenham
+Marshes, out of the shivering east. Lonely, until
+quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House,"
+beside the road, the two whalebones that even yet
+surmount its garden entrance the wonderment for
+more than two hundred years of chance travellers.
+Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded
+in the Thames in the year of Oliver Cromwell's
+death, and set up here in memory of him. However
+that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+Ogilby's <i>Britannia</i> was published, for the house is
+marked on his map as "Ye Whalebone."</p>
+
+<p>These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected,
+have little longer yet to remain, for though apparently
+proof against decay, the house and grounds
+are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale
+to the builders.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus38">
+<img src="images/fig22.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">WHALEBONE HOUSE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The sole historic or other vestige remaining of
+the "Whalebone" turnpike-gate, once standing
+here, is an account to be found in the newspapers
+of the time of an attack made upon George Smith,
+the toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused
+in the darkness by a voice calling "Gate!" and, going
+to open it, was instantly knocked down, in a manner
+somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero
+of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Last night and the night before,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Three tom-cats came knocking at my door.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">I went down to let them in,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>The two men who felled the unfortunate George
+Smith, alarmed by his cries of "Murder!" threatened
+to shoot him if he were not quiet, and, going over his
+pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five
+shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting
+him over, a third confederate, ransacking the house,
+discovered three pounds. With this booty and a
+parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared
+as silently as they came.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Romford</span>, now approached, is but twelve miles from
+London, and has frankly given up the impossible and
+ceased all pretence of being provincial. At the same
+time, building-land having only just (in the speculator's
+phrase) become "ripe for development," the
+townlet has not yet lost all individuality in suburban
+extension.</p>
+
+<p>The place, say some antiquaries, derives its name
+from the "Roman ford" on the Rom brook, but it is
+a great deal more likely that the origin is identical
+with that of the first syllable in the names of Ramsgate,
+Ramsey and Romney, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon
+"ruim" = a marsh. Time was when the town<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+was celebrated for its manufacture of breeches; an
+industry which gave rise to a saying still current in
+the less polished nooks and corners of Essex&mdash;"Go
+to Romford and get your backsides new bottomed."
+Breeches have long ceased to be a noted product of
+the town, which for many years past has bulked large
+in the annals of Beer. Barricades, avenues, mountains
+and Alpine ranges of barrels, hogsheads, firkins
+and kilderkins of Romford ale and stout proclaim
+that the Englishman's preference for his "national
+drink" has not abated, and that</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Damn his eyes, whoever tries</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To rob a poor man of his beer"</span><br />
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>is still a popular sentiment; as both the brewers of
+arsenical compounds and the more rabid among teetotallers
+are some day likely to discover.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus39">
+<img src="images/fig23.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">ENTRANCE TO ROMFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A French traveller in England some two hundred
+years ago wrote that "there are a hundred sorts of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+Beer made in England, and some are not bad: Art
+has well supplied Nature in this particular. Be that
+as it will, beer is Art and wine is Nature; I am for
+Nature against the world." That old fellow did not
+know how artful beer could be, and if he could re-visit
+his native France might discover that even wine is no
+longer the simple child of nature it once was.</p>
+
+<p>But although John Barleycorn is the tutelary
+deity of Romford, it is quite conceivable that the
+stranger bound for Norwich, and turning neither to
+right nor to left, might pass through the town without
+so much as a glimpse obtained of those Alpine
+ranges aforesaid. True, on entering Romford, he
+could scarce fail to observe certain weird structures
+ahead: odd towers like first cousins to lighthouses,
+springing into the sky line, with ranges of perpendicular
+pipes, like the disjointed fragments of some
+mammoth organ, beside them, the characteristic signs
+and portents of a great brewery; but the barrels are
+secluded, nor even are Romford's streets blocked, as
+might have been suspected, with brewers' drays.
+Romford, indeed, spells to the uninstructed stranger
+rather bullocks than beer; for the cattle-pens are the
+chief feature of its market-place, and sheep and hay
+and straw bulk more in the eye of the road-farer than
+the products of Ind, Coope &amp; Co., which are to be
+seen in all their vastness beside the railway station
+and on the sidings constructed especially for the
+trade in ale and stout.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus7">
+<img src="images/fig24.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">ROMFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The town in its most characteristic aspect is seen
+in the accompanying illustration taken from the doorway
+of that old inn, the "Windmill and Bells," the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a><br /><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a><br /><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+broad road margined with granite setts and the
+pavements fenced with posts and rails; the re-built
+parish church prominent across the market-place.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus40">
+<img src="images/fig25.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PUTTELS BRIDGE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Beyond Romford the road grows rural, and, by
+the same token, hilly. This, gentle reader, let it not
+be forgotten, is Essex, and we all know with what
+persistence that county is spoken of, and written of,
+as flat. If you would know what flatness is, try the
+Great North Road and its long levels between Baldock,
+Biggleswade and Alconbury, or search Bedfordshire,
+Lincolnshire or Hunts. <i>There</i> is flatness,
+beside which that of Essex is the merest superstition,
+started probably by some tired traveller of inconstant
+purpose, who, essaying to explore the county, gave
+up the enterprise when he had reached Wanstead
+Flats. Surveying that not highly romantic expanse,
+he took it as an exemplar of the rest of the shire, and
+so returned home to start this immortal myth on its
+career. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+will subscribe to its flatness as an article of faith, and
+as such an one cycles from Romford, through the
+hamlet of Hare Street, over Puttels Bridge, where
+stands an old toll-house, to the other hamlet of Brook
+Street, the fact that he will actually have to <i>walk</i> his
+machine up the steep hill that conducts into the town
+of Brentwood will cause him to think hard things of
+myth-makers.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus41">
+<img src="images/fig26.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "FLEECE," BROOK STREET.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Brook Street Hill is the name of this eminence.
+Beside it stands a cemetery, convenient for brakeless
+cyclists who recklessly descend, and at its foot is a
+fine old inn, the "Fleece," a house of call for the fish-waggons
+that were once so great a feature of this
+road so far as Colchester and Harwich.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus42">
+<img src="images/fig27.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE MARTYR'S TREE, BRENTWOOD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Brentwood, on the crest of this hill, occupies an
+elevated table-land, with sharp descents from it on
+every side. The "burnt wood" town, destroyed in
+some forgotten conflagration, is now a long-streeted,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>old-fashioned place, apparently in no haste
+to bid good-bye to the past. It keeps the old Assize
+House of Queen Elizabeth's time in repair, and
+carefully sees to it that the Martyr's Tree, decayed
+though the old elm stump be and hollow, is saved
+from perishing altogether. It was in 1555 that
+William Hunter, in his twentieth year, suffered in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+this place for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation.
+That staunch upholder of the Protestant faith
+scarce needed the modern memorial, close by, while
+this shattered trunk remained, its gaping rents
+carefully bricked up by pious hands; but let the
+venerable relic be doubly safe-guarded in these times,
+when that candle lit by Latimer and Ridley, close
+upon three centuries and a half ago, burns dim, and
+lawless and forsworn clergy within the Church of
+England are working towards Rome and the return
+of the famous days of fire and stake; when the blood
+of the martyrs has ceased to inspire a generation
+which demands to be shown some tangible object
+before it can realise the significance of that sacrifice.
+Here, then, is something that can be seen and
+touched, to bring the least imaginative back in fancy
+to those terrible days, when brave hearts of every
+class gave up their lives in fire and smoke rather
+than abjure their faith. The Romanising clergy of
+to-day are made of coarser fabric than the martyrs.
+<i>They</i> are not actuated by honesty, but take oaths
+they have no intention of observing to a Church
+whose bread they eat and whose trust they betray.</p>
+
+<p>Would you know something of that martyrdom
+at Brentwood? Then scan the inscription on the
+modern granite obelisk, and control, if you can, a
+righteous indignation when you perceive a modern
+Roman Catholic chapel standing, impudent in these
+days of an exaggerated tolerance, over against the
+Martyr's Tree itself, typifying the Scarlet Woman
+in midst of her blasphemies, exultant over the blood
+of the saints. "He being dead yet speaketh,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+quotes that inscription; but what avails it to speak
+in the ears of the deaf, or to talk of honour to the
+perjured? "Learn from his example," continue
+those momentous words, "to value the privilege of
+an open Bible, and be careful to maintain it"; but
+the world goes by unheeding, and only when the
+danger again becomes acute and liberty of conscience
+is passing away will indifference be conquered and
+the folly of it revealed.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Brentwood</span> still keeps a notable relic of coaching
+days in the old "White Hart" Inn, a curious
+specimen of the timbered and galleried type of
+hostelry familiar to our great-grandfathers. It turns
+a long plastered front to the street, but the great
+carved and panelled doorway leading into the coach-yard
+confirms the proud legend, "Established 1480."
+Full forty coaches passed through Brentwood in
+every twenty-four hours at the close of the Coaching
+Age, but the earlier days of coaching brought the
+"White Hart" more custom than came to it at the
+close of that era, when, in consequence of the roads
+being improved, travelling was quicker, and places
+once halted at were left behind without stopping.
+Innkeepers were considerable losers by this constant
+acceleration of coaches, and saw the smart, long-distance
+stages go dashing by where, years before,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+the old slow coaches stayed the night, or, at the very
+least, halted for meals.</p>
+
+<p>The "White Hart" remains typical of the earlier
+times, and still keeps the old-world comfort regretted
+in other places by De Quincey, who lived long
+enough to witness the beginnings of the great
+changes that have come over the hotels of town
+and country since coaches gave place to railways.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus43">
+<img src="images/fig28.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "WHITE HART," BRENTWOOD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Brentwood</span> is no sooner left behind than the road
+descends steeply over what was once a part of
+Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild and
+hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the
+place where, in November 1692, those seven jovial
+Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay were themselves,
+while hunting the hare, chased and at last
+run down by nine hunters of a different sort, who
+turned their pockets out and then bade them good-day
+and be damned. The original chronicler of this
+significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell,
+makes no especial feature of the event. He merely
+records it as having happened "near Ingerstone,"
+and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings
+in the same sort along the several approaches to
+London. Little wonder, therefore, that Macaulay
+should have drawn the conclusion that at this
+time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest
+and most populous shires of England was as dangerous
+as a pilgrimage across the deserts of Arabia.</p>
+
+<p>From the descending road or from Shenfield
+Church the country is seen spread out, map-like,
+below, over the valley of the Thames, to where
+the river empties itself into the broad estuary at
+the Nore. At least, there is the vale, and the
+map vouchsafes the information that the river flows
+thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out
+the view of that imperial waterway. "I cannot
+see the Spanish fleet, because it's not in sight,"
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in
+the poem, and it is precisely for the same reason
+that the Thames is not visible from Shenfield.
+But if one is denied a view of that imperial river,
+at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard,
+a prodigal riot of roses of every hue and habit,
+are worth seeing. The attenuated shingled spire,
+one of the characteristic features of Essex churches,
+beckons insistently from the road, and he who
+thereupon turns aside is well repaid, in a sight of
+the elaborately-carved timber columns of the interior,
+proving how in this county, where building stone is
+not found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders
+made excellent shift with heart of oak. This is,
+in fact, like so many other Essex churches, largely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+wooden, and its timber is as sound now as it
+was six or seven hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus44">
+<img src="images/fig29.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SHENFIELD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End"
+lies two miles distant from Shenfield. As in the
+case of so many other places near the great roads,
+a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name
+of the old village sprang up, to catch the custom
+of travellers; but an additionally curious fact
+is the utter extinction of the original village, which
+lay a mile distant from the highway, where the
+parish church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring
+farmstead. Explorers in the countryside
+are often astonished at the great distances between
+villages and their parish churches, and seek in
+vain in their guide-books or in talk with the
+"oldest inhabitant" an explanation of so curious
+a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the
+mystery is found in the enclosure of the surrounding
+common lands. The enclosure of commons has
+never been possible without the passing of special
+Acts, which have divided what should have been
+the heritage of the people for all time between
+the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their
+proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor
+and the tenants would each obtain their share of
+the plunder, in the form of freehold land, with
+the obvious result that the villagers, instead of
+paying rent for their cottages clustering round the
+church in the original village, built themselves
+new and rent-free cottages on their share of the
+spoil of the commons. The old cottages being
+pulled down, or allowed to decay, it was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+long before the last trace of the original village
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus45">
+<img src="images/fig30.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">MOUNTNESSING CHURCH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mountnessing was once the seat of the
+Mounteneys, who have long since vanished from
+their old home. The old church, largely red brick
+without and timber within, still preserves the
+fossil rib-bone of an elephant, long regarded with
+reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant,
+and has for an additional curiosity the carving of
+a head on one of the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps
+by way of warning to Early English parishioners
+of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's
+bridle." The red-brick west front of the church,
+masking the wooden belfry-frame from the weather,
+still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick, but
+such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that
+without that evidence of age it would be difficult
+to credit it with so long an existence. The iron ties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a><br /><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a><br /><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+in the shape of the letter S give the view a
+singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in
+verse, beginning, "Reader, excuse the underwritten,"
+is a curiosity of Mountnessing churchyard.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus8">
+<img src="images/fig31.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as
+the modern settlement is named, is seen clustering
+on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and a wayside
+pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting
+of a dozen cottages, two public-houses, a
+general "stores" (our grandfathers would have been
+content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a
+tin tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to
+walk a mile to church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and
+a windmill situated on a knoll; a windmill that for
+picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome
+or a Constable.</p>
+
+<p>From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims,
+two miles to "Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of
+customary spelling. The milestones are undoubtedly
+strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on the
+pedantic side, for that village derives its name from
+a settlement of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or
+meadow, at the Roman milestone they found here,
+but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone"
+they called their village, which lies in the little valley
+of the River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream
+of the smallest) hither and thither to give a perennial
+verdure to the meads along its course. "Ing" is,
+by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names
+successively met with along the River Wid.
+Mounteney's Ing we have already seen, and Fryerning,
+or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+Margaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond
+Ingatestone.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus46">
+<img src="images/fig32.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE GATEHOUSE, INGATESTONE HALL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad,
+is of the narrowest, and remains in almost
+every detail exactly as it is pictured in the old print
+reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the
+church still rising behind. It is a tower which by
+no means looks its age of over four hundred years,
+so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness of the brick.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a><br /><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a><br /><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that
+Sir William Petre who, emulating the accommodating
+qualities of the famous Vicar of Bray, bowed before
+the religious storms of the reigns of Henry the
+Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth.
+"Made of the willow and not of the oak," those
+tempests not only left him unscathed, but brought
+him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched
+with the manor of Ingatestone, plundered from the
+Abbey of Barking, together with much spoil elsewhere.
+How he managed to do it is a mystery, but
+during the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for
+such the Petres always have been) actually obtained
+a Papal Bull confirming him and his in these grants.
+One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy,
+recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble
+physiognomy could be so accomplished a time-server
+and truckler. His home, plundered from the nuns
+of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone
+Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the
+road, down a beautifully-timbered country lane. The
+entrance is by a gatehouse with the motto, "<i>Sans
+Dieu Rien</i>," situated at the end of an avenue and
+framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old
+red-brick turreted buildings of the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries. The Lord Petre of to-day does
+not reside here, but the place is still in the family,
+and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use.
+Miss Braddon is perhaps scarce to be numbered
+among those novelists whose literary landmarks are
+followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone
+Hall that it is the scene of her <i>Lady Audley's Secret</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+The fish-ponds of old monastic times, the
+well in which Lady Audley thrust her husband,
+the lime-walk he haunted, together with such
+romantic accessories as terraced walks and a priest's
+hiding-hole, form items which would require the
+business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer to
+fully enlarge upon. They <i>do</i> say&mdash;the "they" in
+question being the gossips of Ingatestone&mdash;that
+the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail, passing at
+1·15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the
+high road, once saw "a something" in white mysteriously
+sauntering beneath the trees, but whether it was
+the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one of the sisters
+thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely
+a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the
+Postmaster-General's regulations and time-sheets not
+allowing for time spent in psychical research.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus9">
+<img src="images/fig33.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. <span class="in5"><i>From an Old Print</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is
+visible on the right, soon after leaving Ingatestone.
+Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its timbered
+belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the
+village, standing solitary, save for the vicarage and
+a farmhouse, beside a railway crossing&mdash;if, indeed,
+any building adjoining the main-line of a great
+railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret
+thus honoured in the place-name is the Saint to
+whom the church is dedicated. Some traces of the
+"marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the
+old windows, in decorative allusion, remained
+until they were swept away for modern stained-glass
+in memory of a late vicar and his family;
+glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+save for an inscription on one of the bells, she now
+remains unhonoured in her own church, deposed
+in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects
+kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art
+furnisher. The only remaining ancient glass is that
+of the east window, a magnificent fifteenth-century
+"tree of Jesse."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus47">
+<img src="images/fig34.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">AT MARGARETTING.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the
+twenty-fifth milestone, where a post-office and some
+few scattered cottages straggle picturesquely at the
+foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The
+odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially
+to spoil some two miles of this road is the park
+wall of Hylands, a large estate purchased about
+1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster,
+who stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and
+raised this eyesore to enclose his new-made park.
+Almost as soon as the last brick was put in its place,
+the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by
+railway speculations, and his walled-in Eden was
+sold. Nature in the meanwhile has done her best,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the
+ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River
+Wid crosses beneath the road, water-lilies gem the
+stream and the wind sounds in the luxuriant
+Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.</p>
+
+<p>If it were not for its church, which has been
+re-built and has a very fine and tall spire, one might
+easily pass Widford and not know it, for the very
+few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such
+as it is, it stands on the crest of something not
+quite so much as a hill and rather more than an
+incline, and beside its large church has an equally
+fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White
+Horse." Time was, and that until three years since,
+when Widford was celebrated for its one other inn,
+the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled,
+the "Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by
+the picture-sign of a headless woman, with the
+inscription, <i>Fort Bone</i>, on one side, and a portrait
+of Henry the Eighth on the other. "<i>Fort Bone</i>"
+was commonly Englished by slangy cyclists as "good
+business." The sign, of course, was a pictorial and
+satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an
+open question whether or not in their present form
+this and the several other "Quiet Woman" and
+"Good Woman" signs throughout the country are
+perversions of the original legend, "<i>la bonne fame</i>"
+displayed on old inns in the distant past; an
+inscription laudatory of the hostelry, and matching
+the self-recommendation of "<i>la bonne rénommée</i>,"
+found in modern France, or the more familiar "noted
+house for&mdash;" and "good pull up" inscriptions on inns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+in modern England. Virgil's description of Fame,
+walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the
+clouds, may have originated the pictorial sign of
+the headless woman in days of ancient learning;
+and the classic allusion becoming lost and the
+supposedly incorrect spelling of "<i>fame</i>" being
+altered to "<i>femme</i>," we thus obtain a very reasonable
+derivation. We may take it that many shrew-bitten
+folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily
+agreed to forget the original meaning in order to
+adopt one so exactly fitting their opinion that the
+only quiet or good women were headless ones.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus48">
+<img src="images/fig35.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "GOOD WOMAN" SIGN.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change
+that is robbing places of all interest and distinction,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer swings
+from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed
+inn opposite the "White Horse" has retired into
+private life. The picture sign is now housed inside
+the "White Horse."</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Widford</span> almost immediately introduces the explorer
+to Moulsham (originally the "mole's home"),
+itself own brother&mdash;but a very out-at-elbows
+brother&mdash;to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the
+wind between our gentility and the somewhat
+fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we should turn to the
+left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of
+the town, and so, proceeding along the "new
+London road," come into Chelmsford, half way
+down the High Street. Being, however, intent
+rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en
+endure the half-mile length of shabby, untidy
+street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford,
+the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City
+of Calves, over the hunchbacked and narrow stone
+bridge across the Chelmer, the successor, at an
+interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original
+bridge built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That
+is a huge slice of time, but it was too late, even
+in Norman days, for the town to change its
+name from Chelmers<i>ford</i> to something more appropriate
+when the ford was thus superseded.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High
+Street of the town, the view closed by the Shire
+Hall and the church; the Norwich Road, however,
+turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and
+refusing to make acquaintance with the town. It
+is the Conduit that is seen in this illustration of
+the High Street, its architecture scarce improved
+by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be
+ornamental, over its cupola.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus49">
+<img src="images/fig36.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE BRIDGE: ENTRANCE TO CHELMSFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at
+the end of this view, spoil one another, the Hall
+almost entirely hiding the church when looking
+down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular
+exterior of the church putting the clumsy
+architecture of the Hall to shame, as a pagan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+upstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some,
+but its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone
+concerns the passing stranger, who feels so concerned
+by sight of it that he accordingly passes
+the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the
+seated bronze effigy of a native, a bygone Lord
+Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like an old
+apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops
+green coppery stains over his nice stone pedestal)
+keep one another company in the open space fronting
+this building.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus50">
+<img src="images/fig37.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE CONDUIT, CHELMSFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal,
+whose career came to a close in 1806. The
+monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for
+all time the image of a judge whose administration
+of English law, directed by serene wisdom, assisted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+by purest love of justice, endeared by unwearied
+kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will
+be held by his country in undying remembrance."
+His birthplace could hardly have said more than
+that.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus51">
+<img src="images/fig38.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">TINDAL'S STATUE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways,
+being indeed very severely bitten with a taste for
+modernity. Is it not famous as the first town in
+the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have
+not its streets been resolutely swept clear of
+antiquity? The town, in short, is scarce picturesque.
+It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays, but
+on other occasions every house provokes a yawn,
+with perhaps the exception of the "Saracen's
+Head," an inn that, despite its modernised and
+stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old
+times. There was a "Saracen's Head" here certainly
+as far back as the fifteenth century, and probably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+much earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it
+derived from Crusading times, when the knights
+and men-at-arms, returning from Palestine with
+wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys,
+leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the
+Holy Land, found their fame come home before
+them, and the old inns they had known&mdash;the
+"Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine
+Wheel," and the like&mdash;often re-named in their
+honour. With little effort we can imagine the
+scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period,
+when exploits at Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were
+told and re-told, and gained wonderfully in the repetition
+over sack and malvoysie. What bloody
+fellows they were, and with what zest they slew
+the Soldan's soldiers over and over again as they
+sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six
+hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has
+been rebuilt many times since then; but human
+nature remains the same though timber rot and
+brick perish, and again and again the same old
+talk has been heard in the bar-parlour of the
+inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Creçy;
+men of a later age who warred under Marlborough
+at Blenheim, Ramillies or Malplaquet; the lads of
+the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from the
+horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from
+a hundred fights on the burning South African
+veldt&mdash;all have had their circle of greedy listeners
+here.</p>
+
+<p>The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek
+and stuccoed face to the street, and the house shows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+signs of extensive rebuilding and remodelling, undertaken
+in the full flush of the great days of coaching
+prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in
+the belief that coaching, and the road as an institution,
+would last for ever. Fond belief! Has anyone
+ever stopped to consider the fact that the great
+coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a
+great deal more to do with the pulling down of the
+old-fashioned galleried and timbered inns of country
+towns than ever railways have had? The average
+small country town felt in fullest measure the great
+increase in business incidental to the last years of the
+coaching age, and every innkeeper hastened to
+rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who
+had, from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding
+until the dawn of the Railway Age, on seeing that
+the road would decay and travellers be carried to
+their journeys' ends without halting for rest and refreshment,
+promptly gave up any such ideas and were
+thankful that they had not begun the work of reconstruction
+and enlargement. Those who had were
+ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared
+may yet be often met with, a world too large, in
+country towns where once the mails and the stage-coaches
+passed, like a procession, day by day. It is
+quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house
+like the "White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it
+is not too much to say that, had the Coaching Age
+lasted another ten years, it also would have been
+rebuilt.</p>
+
+<p>An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its
+central figure, belongs to the "Saracen's Head" at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+Chelmsford. For some years after he had won fame
+as a novelist he still retained his position in the
+General Post Office, of which he was a travelling
+inspector. On one of these official journeys he
+happened to be staying here, at the time when his
+<i>Barchester Towers</i> was being issued, after the then
+prevailing fashion, in parts. He was seated in the
+coffee-room when two clergymen entered, one of
+them with the newly-issued part of the story. The
+cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the
+trials of the Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs
+Proudie, who was rather a trial to Trollope's
+readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the
+clergyman put the book down. "Confound that Mrs
+Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish she were dead!"</p>
+
+<p>Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he
+thanked the reader for thus accidentally telling him
+that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome, and
+undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen,"
+said he, "she shall die in the next number;" and die
+she accordingly did. But in defence of Trollope's
+truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the
+opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs
+Proudies may yet be found in a goodly proportion of
+the episcopal palaces of England.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Returning</span> now to the Conduit, and making for the
+open road once more, Chelmsford is left by way of
+Springfield, past the successor of Chelmsford's finest
+old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The
+old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five
+centuries, and had been the halting-place of many
+famous travellers, among them a long line of Earls
+of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham
+and London; but none of these associations
+sufficed to save the house. Fragments of its carved
+beams are preserved in the local museum, but recall
+it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon
+bring back in his majesty that denizen of the earth
+in the dim æons of the past. Chelmsford would
+dearly like many of its old buildings&mdash;wantonly
+demolished years ago&mdash;back again; but what is done
+cannot be undone, and there's an end on't. The
+"Cross Keys" remains, in a restored condition.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus52">
+<img src="images/fig39.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "THREE CUPS" SIGN
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of
+Chelmsford, carries varying significances. To the
+mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the American
+from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim
+Fathers and their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts;
+and to the gaol-bird it means a "stretch"
+of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in
+fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building
+enlarged in recent years for the accommodation of
+the guests consigned to it at Assize time from the
+Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>once past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing
+and cheerful. Its long miscellaneous street, where
+the quaint sign of the "Three Cups" stands out,
+gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive
+grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of
+picturesqueness. That this has been the aim of their
+architects is abundantly manifest in examples where,
+under a single roof, one may experience the mingled
+romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle,
+a Tudor manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a
+"Queen Anne" mansion; all done in red brick,
+gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover,
+fitted with electric light and hot and cold water
+supply. To this end has castellated and domestic
+architecture unwound its long story during some five
+hundred years. It will be seen thereby that William<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+of Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time
+architect did not live in vain.</p>
+
+<p>But if Springfield be modern as a suburb, it is
+ancient as a village. To see old Springfield, it is
+necessary to turn off the road to the left, and to
+journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church,
+a noble building with mingled red brick and stone
+tower bearing the inscription, "Prayse God for al
+the good benefactors 1586." Oliver Goldsmith, it is
+quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model
+for his <i>Deserted Village</i>. He certainly visited at an
+old cottage opposite the church, but the real Sweet
+Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus53">
+<img src="images/fig40.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SPRINGFIELD CHURCH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Beyond the village and facing the high road are
+the strangely impressive lodges of the historic estate
+of New Hall; new at the end of the fifteenth century,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+but declined into a respectable age by now and
+cobwebbed with much history and many legends.
+The place, now and for a considerable number of
+years past an alien convent, has been owned
+during a period of four hundred years by an
+astonishing number of historic personages, who have
+succeeded one another like flitting phantoms. Here
+the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps out
+spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the
+handling of the historic kaleidoscope. Built by
+Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose daughter and
+heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and
+mother of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus
+eventually came into possession of Henry the Eighth,
+who occasionally resided here and re-named it
+"Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas
+Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex. By this time it had
+resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners were
+George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham,
+and Oliver Cromwell, who had it as a gift from
+Parliament and exchanged it so soon as he decently
+could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like
+residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him
+succeeded another Duke of Buckingham, and to him
+that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk, Duke
+of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and
+was visited here, when he was suffering from gout
+and dropsy, by that scribbling traveller, Cosmo,
+Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of
+historic owners may be said to end, but constant
+change has ever been the lot of New Hall, and a
+succession of lesser lights followed him until the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a><br /><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a><br /><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>nuns set up their secluded life here and bade
+farewell to a vain world. That world passes by; the
+road on one side, the railway midway in the grounds,
+and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as
+morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the
+vineyard.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus10">
+<img src="images/fig41.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NEW HALL LODGES
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road.
+All is emptiness, and the lichened brick and the
+crumbling stone vases of neighbouring boundary
+walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled
+aims characteristic of the place.</p>
+
+<p>There is an air of romance about Boreham House,
+as seen from the tree-embowered road at a little
+distance from New Hall; an altogether deceptive air,
+let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic
+building of white brick. It is its situation at the
+head of a formal lake, fringed with stately elms,
+that confers the illusory distinction, but the explorer
+of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing
+rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl
+squattering on the lake, can weave his own
+romance to fit the scene. And if the house, though
+stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest
+in the shape of the identical carriage used by the
+Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.
+Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent years
+to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken
+to pieces in an accident. Restored now to its
+original condition, it will need to be a great occasion
+indeed that brings it forth again.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus54">
+<img src="images/fig42.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">BOREHAM.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its
+old gabled cottages clustering round the still older
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>church, itself embowered in lime trees whose delightful
+scent weights the July air with an Arcadian
+languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham
+has every likelihood of having his nerves
+startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the road
+of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door
+open, and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of
+one of the inmates of the silent tomb making a
+hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High noon being
+an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying
+as to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on
+drawing nearer that the old tomb-house has been
+converted into a tool-house and general lumber-room,
+and that the figure seated within is the sexton
+enjoying his lunch, screened from the noonday heats.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+An inscription over the door of the ornate building&mdash;a
+copy of the Temple of the Winds at Athens&mdash;proclaims
+it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamianæ,
+Anno 1764"; but the Walthams have disappeared,
+both from their mausoleum and the district. The
+body of the last appears to have been arrested for
+debt when on the road hither from Chelmsford.
+The sexton explains that the parish took over the
+Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing
+the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience
+hee-ar, years ago," says this typical Essex rustic, and
+goes on to tell how the oil and coals and candles for
+church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe
+Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held.
+Three Radcliffes, Earls of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather,
+father, and son, lie in effigy side by side on
+an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers
+are to my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton
+calls them, and explains that their broken noses
+are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called
+the "mine" road, Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the
+great red-brick Georgian mansion of Crix, standing
+in its meadows where the little River Ter comes down
+from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels
+of Hatfield Mill, and then hurries off, as though
+belated, for a rendezvous with the Chelmer, two
+miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road
+with whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing
+warranty of its age in the inscription, "A.A. 1715";
+but if that evidence were lacking it could be found
+in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+an area with the raising of the road for the building
+of the bridge that long ago replaced the watersplash
+at this crossing of the stream.</p>
+
+<p>Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the
+heaths that once gave the place its original forename
+of "Heathfield," and the Peverels, identical with the
+Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly
+vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige
+of themselves in the church&mdash;that last resort of the
+antiquary in search of old manorial lords. It is
+true that on modern tablets built into the west
+front of the church the founding of a Benedictine
+Priory here in 1100 by Ingelrica, mother of William
+Peverel, is alluded to, together with the rather
+scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things
+are decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of
+Latin and lichen-stains, so that both their monastic
+beneficence and their maternal origin are only dimly
+to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.</p>
+
+<p>It is the distance of half a mile from the high
+road to where Hatfield church lies secluded, adjoining
+the grounds of a mansion partly occupying the
+site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It
+is here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's
+original baptism must be sought, and accordingly
+some stretches of common-land may be discovered
+close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us,
+though there be little enough to say of it, beyond
+the note that its closeness to the railway station has
+caused a certain growth and a certain amount of
+rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the
+old plaster cottages that were once the invariable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+feature of its street, and admirably figured forth the
+Essex manner of decoratively treating plaster-work.
+There remain here but two such cottages, bearing
+the date 1703, and the initials M.R., with <i>fleur-de-lis</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A road</span> of almost unvarying flatness conducts in
+something under three miles to Witham, entered
+nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by the
+Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates
+in no fewer than three separate and distinct names.
+As the River Witham, it confers a name upon the
+townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same
+sponsorial office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook
+it is endowed with a title that smacks rather
+of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in
+summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down
+upon the mere thread of water oozing and stewing
+in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the
+neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is
+not ill-named as the Podsbrook; but the Essex
+Council in bridging it so substantially think of it
+rather as the River Witham, which they have every
+right and cause to do, for the stream can avenge
+itself of those disfiguring potsherds and that contemptuous
+title in the most sardonic way when
+winter comes and the floods are out.</p>
+
+<p>The long street of Witham is remarkable for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+the number of large and handsome mansions dating
+from the time of Queen Anne, through the period
+of the four Georges. The greater number of the
+professional men of Essex would, from the number
+of those houses, appear to have settled in the little
+town and to have medically attended it and legally
+represented it to such an effect that it is only now
+beginning to recover from them and from the
+coming of the railway, which dealt a death-blow
+to the thriving coaching interest of the early part
+of the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place
+of Mrs Nelson's famous "Ipswich Blues," the
+crack coaches on the seventy miles of road, which
+started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary
+exertions made Ipswich in something under six
+hours. Such remarkable performances as these
+were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in
+place of the average ten miles on other roads, and
+by placing leaders in readiness at the foot of hills
+like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The "Blue
+Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some
+of the principal coaches drew up, is still in existence;
+its sign, a pierced effigy of that animal
+projecting from the front of the house and looming
+weirdly against the sky-line. There are many
+"White Harts" on the road to Norwich, the sign
+being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as
+that of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North
+Road; but of all the many examples to be met
+along these hundred and twelve miles this is the
+one that is most quaintly out of proportion, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a><br /><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a><br /><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+a head and neck less than half the size demanded
+by body and legs, and a golden collar and chain
+of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was
+the favourite badge of Richard the Second, whose
+connection with East Anglia was too slight for
+assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially
+allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference
+on the part of innkeepers along the Norwich
+Road.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus11">
+<img src="images/fig43.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">CHIPPING HILL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Those who would seek the site of the original
+Witham must turn aside from the high road the
+matter of half a mile, past the railway station, to
+Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a
+camp successively occupied and wrought upon by
+the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons, it will
+be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant
+valley of that triply-named river already mentioned,
+in 1749 described by Walpole as "the prettiest little
+winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows
+falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to
+this day, and as sweet, and the by-road that comes
+up from the gravelly hollow and cuts through the
+earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold
+climbs up romantically under the blossoming limes
+into as pretty a picture in the rural sort as you
+shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old England
+before railways came, or science and the ten
+thousand plagues of modern life, and the cheap
+builder of hideous new cottages were let loose upon
+the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in
+the picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old
+dwellings, flint-built church tower and red-brick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+rectory, set in, upon and around the swelling grassy
+banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had
+both their fortress and their market, as evidenced
+by the still surviving name of Chipping, or Market
+Hill.</p>
+
+<p>Old East Anglian cottages have their own
+special characteristics, arising from local conditions,
+but one feature they share in common with all old
+rustic dwellings; the great size and relative importance
+of their genial chimneys, suggesting warmth
+and the lavish laying on of logs. They tell the
+passer-by of old times when wood was the only fuel;
+when it was to be gathered for the mere labour of
+gathering, and plenty of it was piled upon the
+generous open hearth. Modern cottages, all over
+the kingdom, tell a different tale, in the look of their
+meagre chimney-pots&mdash;a tale of coal, dearly purchased,
+economised in tiny grates.</p>
+
+<p>But the special features of East Anglian cottage
+architecture? They are here, in the highways and
+byways, for all to see who will. It is a land without
+stone, this East of England, where timber and flint
+and brick play important constructional parts in
+church and hall and manor-house, and where timber
+framing, lath and plaster, parge-work, and a few
+bricks for the chimney stacks, are combined to build
+up the cottages.</p>
+
+<p>Out of their necessities our ancestors contrived
+dwellings that for durability, comfort and artistry
+put modern houses, whether halls or cottages, to
+shame. The stone cottages of Somersetshire,
+Rutland, Leicestershire; the cob and thatch of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+Devon, the granite of Cornwall; the timber and
+plaster, or timber and brick noggin of Cheshire and
+Herefordshire are all evidence to this day of how
+skilfully our forbears employed the materials to
+their hands; and here in Essex you shall find a
+something in the art of cottage building hardly to
+be discovered elsewhere. This is the frequent use
+of parge-work, or pargetting, as it is sometimes
+called, on old cottage exteriors. Parge-work is the
+ornamental filling or surfacing of walls with plaster.
+The term is just as often applied to the elaborately-moulded
+and panelled plaster ceilings of Elizabethan
+and Jacobean halls as to the exterior decoration that
+forms so remarkable and pleasing a feature of Essex
+rustic cottage architecture. Few Essex villages
+that can claim to preserve many relics of old
+times are without examples of this peculiarly local
+style; although, to be sure, an ignorant want of
+appreciation has been the cause of much destruction
+of late years. The commoner forms of this decoration
+are frequently seen, in the easily incised patterns
+that even the unskilful can make in the plaster while
+still wet, by the aid of anything from a trowel to the
+finger-tips; just as a cook ornaments the dough of
+her uncooked pies. Many of these patterns are
+traditional; as much a matter of tradition, for instance,
+as are the needlework patterns wrought on
+the breast of an old smock-frock. The commonest
+is one produced by a process of combing the plaster
+in repetitions of a device resembling an elongated
+figure 8 laid flat, or perhaps more narrowly resembling
+a hank of worsted. Other patterns, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+whorls or concentric circles, stars, triangles and the
+like, are produced by wooden stamps. But the really
+beautiful examples are not the products of to-day.
+These belong to the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries, and are lavish in decoration of a Renaissance
+character moulded in high relief. Architects
+with sufficient culture and understanding to enable
+them to appreciate local style have, in recent years,
+reintroduced decoration of this character when
+building residences in the country, but many a
+humble cottager lives within walls that display a
+profusion of artistic devices unapproached by the
+houses of the wealthy.</p>
+
+<p>Discoveries close by the church on Chipping
+Hill have led to the belief that the building stands
+on, or near, the site of a Temple of Diana, and
+certainly Roman bricks are still visible in great
+numbers in the walls of the tower. A memorial in
+the chancel to Sir Gilbert East, who died in 1828,
+reminds the historian of some strange survivals existing
+at that time. The Easts were owners of the
+tithes at Witham, and although they lived so far
+distant as Berkshire, always insisted on their right of
+being buried here. Sir Gilbert East's body was, by
+his express direction, buried beside his wife, with a
+band of brass encircling both, engraved with the
+words from the marriage service, "Whom God hath
+joined together let no man put asunder." His
+funeral was a three days' business, with knights
+bannerets accompanying, and much pomp and
+circumstance. In the family vault they laid him,
+wrapped in linen, returned to Berkshire for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+reading of the will, when, to the dismay of the
+family, it was found that the knight had expressly
+wished to be buried in woollen. The family solicitor
+hurried back and, disinterring his defunct client, saw
+to it that he was comfortably tucked in as desired.</p>
+
+<p>Between Witham and Kelvedon, where the road
+runs level, there is but one hamlet, an offshoot of
+Rivenhall known as Rivenhall End, where a cottage
+close by the "Fox" inn, once a toll-house, bears its
+former history, plain to read, in the evidence of its
+windows commanding either approach, up or down
+the road. A mile and a half beyond begins Kelvedon,
+set down in the flats beside the River Blackwater;
+"Kelvedon Easterford, vulgo Keldon," as Ogilby
+calls it; "consisting," he continues, "chiefly of inns";
+a description which remains strikingly true to this
+day. This pronunciation, "Keldon," throws some
+light upon the following remarks of an old traveller
+who kept a diary of his wayfaring, and, writing in
+1744, says, "From Colchester in an hour or two, I
+came to an old Village call'd Kildane, where they tell
+you the famous Massacre of the Danes began; but
+the true Name of the Town is Kelvedon."</p>
+
+<p>How Kelvedon can ever have escaped being called
+"Long" Kelvedon is a mystery, for it straggles on
+and on and must be nearly a mile in length; a
+street of handsome old residences, of cottages and
+humble shops of all ages, and old broken-backed
+taverns where the Essex labourer gathers night by
+night and discusses the prospect of the carraway crop
+and the likelihood of the entire agricultural interest
+presently, going <i>en masse</i> to the "work'us." After<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+which, with the courage of despair, and to drown his
+troubles, he will call for "another pot o' thrup'ny,
+missus," and, when closing time comes, slouch home
+through the mud and mist until the following evening,
+when the same programme is repeated. It is the
+agricultural labourer who supports the little wayside
+"publics" whose existence in such numbers puzzles
+the mid-day stranger, who, seeing them empty and
+apparently lifeless, wonders how they can possibly
+live. Business practically only begins when work in
+the fields is done, and the rent is not so high but
+that a few pots of beer a night represent a sufficient
+profit.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be supposed that Kelvedon has not its
+exquisite architectural relics of a bygone time, or that
+its inns are all of the rural beer-house type. Not at
+all. Chief among the inns of Kelvedon is the
+"Angel," which indeed is a house not only of considerable
+size and outstanding character, but of
+historic interest, as having been the favourite resting-place
+of William the Third on his journeys along this
+road. Its projecting porch is the first thing the
+traveller sees on entering the town from the direction
+of London, where the road swerves violently to the
+left, and again as violently to the right, forming a
+very awkward corner. "Angel Corner," said Alexander,
+of the "Retaliator" coach, "is the very devil
+of a corner." This remark was drawn from him on
+the occasion of his nearly driving into the porch,
+when trying conclusions with a rival charioteer.</p>
+
+<p>Almost opposite the still-existing "Angel" stood
+the equally extensive "Red Lion," long since retired<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+from business and remodelled as a row of cottages.
+The histories of both houses, and of many another
+fine old inn, which might once have been written
+from the recollections of those who knew the old days
+of the road, are now in great part lost, and the world
+so much the poorer. Had scribblers then abounded,
+and the "personal" note of the modern journalist
+been sounded in those days, we should have known
+how King William came to and set out from his inn;
+how he looked, what he ate and drank, how many
+long clay pipes he smoked, and what comparisons he
+drew in conversation with Bentinck between the flat
+lands on the way from Kelvedon to Harwich and the
+still flatter lands of his native Holland. And besides
+such records of the great, we should then have been
+better furnished with the early history of coaching,
+which, if not indeed a sealed book, is at least a very
+short and fragmentary one.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus55">
+<img src="images/fig44.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "ANGEL," KELVEDON.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Early</span> coaching days are wrapped round with strange
+adventures and the oddest tales; some, doubtless, of
+the <i>ben trovato</i>, rather than the most truthful, nature.
+But those stories of coaching miseries and adventure
+that have been proved truthful are themselves so
+surprising and incredible to modern ears that even
+the most improbable of uncertified tales cannot be
+dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of the
+Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should,
+for instance, surely be picturesquely written up some
+day and included in some English (and therefore
+strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One Nights'
+Entertainments.</p>
+
+<p>The coach was nearing the outskirts of London.
+The rheumy air hung in dank and foggy vapours
+on the countryside and transformed innocent roadside
+trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing
+shapes. The guard let off his blunderbuss at a
+pollard willow that loomed suspiciously like a highwayman
+out of the reeking air, and the passengers
+all began to automatically turn their pockets out.
+It proved a false alarm, and purses and trinkets were
+returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One
+gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he
+carried, whereupon a lady advised him to hide the
+money in his boot. He had hardly done this when
+a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman
+to stop. When the unhappy insides had picked
+themselves up from the straw at the bottom of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+coach, into which they had unceremoniously been
+thrown by the driver's prompt obedience to that
+behest, they found themselves covered with a pistol
+projected through the door, and were invited to
+deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who
+had little gave it and were thankful it was no more.
+The lady protested that she had nothing; "but,"
+said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you
+will find ten guineas." There was nothing for it
+but to take off that boot and hand over the coin;
+but when the highwayman had gone it was another
+matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in
+no measured terms, of being the robber's accomplice.
+Bound to admit that appearances were against her,
+she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited
+the company to supper the following evening,
+when matters should be explained. They accepted,
+not, it is to be feared, very graciously. The time
+came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room,
+with a supper laid, they were re-introduced to their
+acquaintance of the night before. When the repast
+was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she
+said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in
+this book, which I had with me in the coach, are
+bank-notes to the amount of one thousand pounds.
+I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than
+for me to be robbed of this valuable property. As
+you have been the means of my saving it, I entreat
+your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred
+pounds."</p>
+
+<p>Much of the humour that went to lighten old
+road travelling was of an evanescent kind, and has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+not survived, but a few examples, preserved in contemporary
+literature, keep their flavour. Among
+them is the narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and
+a Bolter." "I recollect," said the Jehu who told
+the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger,
+and nothing that was either said or done was at all
+to his mind. On that day I happened to have a
+very awkward team&mdash;three blind ones and a very
+shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times
+I lost my patience as well as temper. My near
+leader pulled to such a degree that I was obliged
+to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the
+top of the bit, and curb her enough to break her
+jaw. After starting again, I could deal with her
+very well for about a mile, when her mouth got
+dead again, and I was wicked enough to let drive
+a few hearty damns at her, my pious companion all
+the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be
+damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon
+which he bolted as if he had been galvanised.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'</p>
+
+<p>"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I,
+'but I won't have it;' so I answered, 'What coach
+does he drive?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up
+his hands, 'I fear you don't read your Bible; but
+I will tell you&mdash;he was the most patient man that
+ever existed.'</p>
+
+<p>"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three
+blind 'uns and a bolter?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a
+coachman.'</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a><br /><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a><br /><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever
+he had had four such horses to deal with as I
+have here, he would have had no more patience
+than myself.'"</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus12">
+<img src="images/fig45.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">"THREE BLIND UNS AND A BOLTER." <span class="in5"><i>From a Print after H. Alken.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen
+played a drunken trick that would have
+been impossible in the last years of coaching,
+when discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric
+than they had been. He had just driven the
+London stage from Ipswich, and having more by
+good luck than careful driving brought his
+passengers safely to dinner at the "Angel," turned
+into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink
+of coachmen&mdash;rum. Emerging, he perceived one
+of the Harwich to London fish-waggons, fully
+laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to
+the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the
+waggon round and dashed off at top speed on
+the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden
+Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and
+two tons weight of fish strewed the king's highway.
+The mad coachman survived to repent his
+escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder
+of his life.</p>
+
+<p>"Other times, other manners" is a saying that
+assumes an added force when contrasting the
+Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our fellow-travellers
+by railway, who glare at us, and we at
+them, like strange cats on a roof-top, have little
+idea of the chivalry that ruled on the road a hundred
+years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who
+may be the only other occupant of a railway<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+carriage with you, and she wonders whether she
+had not better call the guard; but it was, in the
+days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden
+duty of the gentlemen to see that the ladies in
+whose company the chances of the road might
+place them lacked nothing that courtesy could
+supply; whether it were merely the aid of an
+arm in walking up one of those hills the coaches
+could only climb unladen, or the more material
+attention involved in seeing that the dear
+creatures were duly supplied with refreshments.
+It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom
+of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for
+the breakfasts and dinners of the unprotected
+ladies who might be travelling by the same conveyance.
+"I vow," says one of these old travellers,
+"'tis a pleasure in a cavalier to do so; but, the
+Lord save us, what a prodigious appetite does not
+the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the
+fair, whose lassitude and vapours at other times
+render them incapable of more than drinking a
+dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing
+which it is only fitting that the heathenish and
+phanatick peoples of the Indies should partake
+of. I protest that the ladies of the coach, when
+we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding
+they could not be suited with tay, went to it
+with a right good will and left as good an
+account of the claret and the beef as if they had
+been going empty for a week. Spare me, I do
+beg, from your languishing creatures who would
+die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+compare with the most valiant of trenchermen
+abroad."</p>
+
+<p>This protesting gentleman might, had he thought
+of it, have exclaimed with Othello on the pity "that
+we can call these delicate creatures ours and not
+their appetites."</p>
+
+<p>He must have been particularly hard hit in
+the pocket by the robust appetites of his fellow-travellers,
+but did not, however, let his feelings
+appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as
+a toast, "the ladies, bless them, whose bright
+eyes," etc., etc.&mdash;a toast we have many times heard
+of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon
+having "made an impression." He, in fact, seems
+to have been like Constable, in a way; for it was
+said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in
+a stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach
+dinner." "Then," said one, hearing that
+praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"</p>
+
+<p>That is very significant. It was, then, only
+your very paragon among gentlemen who could
+sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner. His
+manners might survive the strain of the journey
+itself, and even the sight and sound of lovely
+Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring, unlovely
+to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating
+gurgles; but when after the tedious stage had
+been accomplished and the passengers had descended,
+irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner
+scarce to be eaten, even at express speed, in the
+short time allowed, then, ay <i>then</i>, my friends,
+came the test! No man so insensible to politeness
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>as a starving man, and few attentions were
+paid to the ladies by strangers whose sole chance
+of obtaining the dinner for which they had paid
+was the resolute determination to attend only to
+their own wants.</p>
+
+<p>The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly
+outweighed the pleasures of that old-world method.
+A pleasant day and the open country made a seat
+on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not
+willingly to be exchanged for any other mode of
+conveyance then known; but, as little David
+Copperfield found on his first coach journey, <i>night</i>
+on a coach was an experience once gained not
+willingly repeated. Being put between two gentlemen,
+to prevent his falling off, David found himself
+nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he
+could not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!"
+which they didn't like at all, because it woke them.
+With the rising of the sun David found his fellow-passengers
+sleeping easier than they had done during
+the night, when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed
+their midnight slumbers. As the sun rose higher, so
+their sleep became lighter and they gradually awoke,
+one by one, each one indignant when charged with
+having slept. During the rest of his career, David
+invariably observed "that of all human weaknesses,
+the one to which our common nature is the least disposed
+to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness
+of having gone to sleep in a coach."</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXII</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus56">
+<img src="images/fig46.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">BIRTHPLACE OF SPURGEON.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Coaching</span> times and coaching inns have long kept
+us at the very threshold of Kelvedon, which has a
+modern claim to notice of which it is not a little
+proud. Spurgeon was born here. Although the
+figure of that great wielder of homely and untutored
+pulpit oratory is but one among several preachers
+in the same family, there is only one possible
+Spurgeon when that name is mentioned. Charles
+Haddon Spurgeon was born in a house still pointed
+out, on June 19, 1834; the eldest son of the Rev.
+John Spurgeon. The old cottage is now the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+"Wheatsheaf" beer-house and has had a bay window
+and a brick frontage added since that time. Close by
+is a now highly respectable and not a little dignified
+private residence known still as the "Tommy shop,"
+although almost seventy years have passed since it
+was used as a kind of restaurant and canteen for the
+navvies then working on the construction of the
+Great Eastern Railway, which runs at the rear.</p>
+
+<p>The oldest house in Kelvedon is doubtless the
+"Sun," which dates from the middle of the fifteenth
+century and has within recent years had its carved
+woodwork, long covered with plaster, once more
+exposed to view. It stands, almost the last house
+in the town, by the bridge over the Blackwater, on
+the way to Gore Pit.</p>
+
+<p>Gore Pit is generally said to be the site of a
+battle. <i>What</i> battle, however, historians do not
+and cannot specify; and indeed this name, bloody
+though it may sound to modern ears, has, despite
+the popular legend of the derivation of Kelvedon
+from "Kildane," perhaps no such sanguinary
+association, and is probably a contraction of the old
+word "coneygore," or rabbit warren.</p>
+
+<p>It is, despite its name, a pretty and a peaceful
+hamlet, with a blacksmith's shop and a roadside
+horse-pond, and surrounded by the fruit-farms of a
+great jam-making company. The church of Feering
+can be seen across the flat fields, on the other side of
+the railway. Messing lies a mile away, in the other
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>Let the idle wayfarer, curious as to the name of
+Gore Pit, speak to the blacksmith on the subject,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+and he will be told, with the seriousness of implicit
+belief, of the fighting of a great battle here, and
+that the blood ran down into "that there horse-pond."
+Moreover, that at Kelvedon&mdash;"Killdane they used
+to call it&mdash;they killed the Danes; at Feering they
+feared 'em, and at Messing they made a mess of it";
+which seems to very correctly reflect the views of the
+neighbourhood on local history in ancient times, as
+reflected in place-names!</p>
+
+<p>Rural Essex, in the aspect of its fields and
+meadows, is revealed along these miles in its most
+characteristic form. It is, in many respects, unlike
+other counties. In some ways the unhappy industry
+of farming has fared worse here than elsewhere, and
+many holdings have for years past gone uncultivated,
+and the dock, the thistle and other lusty weeds have
+resumed an evil possession of fields once kept clean
+and trim. But in the smaller operations of
+husbandry Essex has always been, and in some
+districts still is, remarkably successful; while,
+although the farmer protests that it does not pay
+to grow any kind of grain, the yellowing seas of
+autumnal cornfields are still a prominent feature
+of the landscapes of Essex and of its neighbouring
+Suffolk. Essex and Suffolk are old-world, far beyond
+the rest of England, and in growing wheat in these
+times, when a cornfield is a rare sight in other
+parts of the country and when "our daily bread"
+is chiefly compounded of grain grown in North
+America, Russia, or the Argentine, they maintain
+their singularity. It does the heart good to see the
+ripening wheatfields of East Anglia, to see the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+gathered stooks in the reaped perspectives, and to
+hear the hum of the threshing machine; for the
+sights and sound seem to carry us back to that
+England of a bygone age, when Constable painted
+such fields, and when they were numerous enough
+throughout the land to feed the population. Here
+and there one may still find fields of that famous
+grain, the "Essex Great Wheat," which grows at
+least two feet higher than the ordinary varieties,
+and is greatly prized for the length and stoutness of
+its straw; but it is a few miles to the north-eastward,
+in the light lands around Harwich, that the Great
+Wheat may be found. Seed and herb-growing are
+the most prominent industries between the Blackwater
+and the Colne, and the roadside fields are
+striped to wonderment in summer with the rainbow
+colours of the seedsman's trial-grounds. The heavy
+perfume of stocks and mignonette, the claret colour
+of that gorgeous flower, the "sops-in-wine," the gay
+and varied displays of asters, marguerites, marigolds
+and a hundred others make a midsummer fairyland
+of the levels that loom so drear and misty in the
+long months of winter. Nor is it only for the
+flower-garden that the Essex seedsman labours.
+With the sights and scents of the flaunting beauties
+of the garden are mingled the homelier ones of
+mint, grey-green sage and other dowdy kitchen
+herbs, together with the subtle beauty and piercing
+odour of wide-spreading, blue-grey lavender-fields.
+Even the unromantic mangold, running to seed in
+bush-like shape, sends forth a sweet and pleasing
+aroma, while the yellow mustard contributes its share.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The byways of farming are now, as we have
+already said, the most&mdash;some would say the only&mdash;profitable
+kind of husbandry in Essex. Some forms
+of cultivation have largely migrated to other counties,
+but others remain. The growing of the clothiers'
+teasel was discontinued with the decay of the Colchester
+and Norwich baize industry, and is now
+carried on in other parts of the country, close to
+districts where textile fabrics are still manufactured;
+but there was a time when, along this road between
+Chelmsford and Colchester, the fields of teasels were
+quite as much a feature as those of mustard are even
+yet. The clothiers' teasel, greatly prized in the
+East Anglian baize manufacture, was nothing but
+a weed, found useful and cultivated accordingly. An
+aristocratic relation of the less spiky burrs that have
+not been rescued from the hedges and ditches and
+are still allowed to grow wild, the clothiers' teasel
+was cultivated so far back as the reign of Richard
+the First, but the "common" burr will have to be
+contented with its lowly estate to the end of time,
+unless something unexpected happens.</p>
+
+<p>To "stick like a burr" is proverbial, and the cultivated
+teasels have an even more pronounced clinging
+property. Furnished as they are with natural hooks,
+they were used in baize-making, and are still employed
+in the cloth trade for raising the nap of the
+material. The dried heads are fixed to cylinders,
+between which the fabric is passed, and their sharp
+spines, re-curved like so many minute fish-hooks, draw
+up the surface of the cloth. Thus the teasel was
+raised from its character of a worthless weed, and for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+many years Essex farmers devoted large portions of
+their holdings to its cultivation. It was hoed and
+kept clear of other vagrom weedlings; its heads were
+cut by hand and dried with every care, and eventually
+were eagerly competed for by manufacturers at £12
+a load. When the old cloth manufacturers left East
+Anglia, a goodly portion of the Essex farmers' livelihood
+went with them.</p>
+
+<p>Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other
+weed, the colewort, for cole or rape-seed, which has
+the quadruple properties of feeding cage-birds, yielding
+rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring
+the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help
+to prop the husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and
+carraways are what "the faculty" knows as "carminatives,"
+curative of flatulency; like the once popular
+"eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of
+the sea holly that grows by the estuaries of Essex
+rivers. Eringo root was once a favourite specific for
+lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last, and
+the preparation of it gradually died out and became
+extinct about 1865, when the only manufacturer was
+an elderly spinster who supplied a chemist in High
+Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the
+making of kümmel and other liqueurs, and carraway
+seeds, which look like commas, are those familiar
+denizens of "seed cake" that stick in the teeth and
+refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of
+"carraway comfits."</p>
+
+<p>Farmers who do not occupy themselves with
+seed-growing have passed through evil times, but
+prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's well-tilled
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>land, and fruit-farming has come to render
+cultivation profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer,
+who cannot adapt himself to new conditions, agricultural
+depression in Essex is a very real thing.
+Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one,
+a small cultivator, a son of the soil. He does not
+hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural Essex, in
+these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the
+Workhouse are said to close every vista? Besides,
+he has been hard at work in the fields, and much of
+that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like friskiness
+out of the limbs.</p>
+
+<p>A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very
+badly in need of repair, elicits the fact that he has
+just come away, worsted, from another bout in the
+eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict
+with wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce,
+for life or a livelihood, with weeds&mdash;the sorry heritage
+of the present occupier from the slovenly or bankrupt
+farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing upon
+the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily
+against the cultivator.</p>
+
+<p>"Farmin'?" says our rustic friend; "no great
+shakes, I tell 'ee. It don't pay to grow nawthen now,
+an' it gets wusser'n wusser. All the fields goin'
+under grass, for ship'n cattle. An' the land's fair
+pisoned with weeds. Yow see them 'ere beece, in
+that there close down along o' the chutch? There's
+a mort o' docks in that 'ere close. More docks'n
+grass, an' I thinks warsley o' the chanst of cattle
+gettin' a fair bite off'n it. Don't know what docks
+is? Wish I didden! I've bin a-pullin' of 'em till<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+my back's pretty nigh broke, and I'm fair dunted
+with 'em. Last year there worn't ne'er a one: t'yen
+there's a mort on 'em. Where do they come from?
+God A'mighty knows. <i>They</i> don't want no cultivation,
+bless 'ee. There ain't no land so chice but
+what'll grow docks." Here he pulls out his "muckinger,"
+that is to say, his handkerchief&mdash;the Essex
+dialect is not the most elegant form of speech&mdash;and,
+trumpeting on it like an elephant, with indignation,
+goes his way.</p>
+
+<p>The "chutch" in question is that of Feering,
+on the other side of the Great Eastern Railway,
+along whose embankment go the frequent
+Prussian-blue-painted locomotives with long trains at
+their tail, past Mark's Tey Junction, whose forest of
+signal-masts is visible ahead, into Colchester. With
+the raising of that embankment went the life of this
+highway, only now experiencing a revival.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> cyclists, the pedestrians, the motor-men, who
+adventure along the road rejoice at its smooth
+surface, and find little incident to mark their
+journey. A punctured tyre, a defective valve alone
+hinder those mechanical travellers; while the pedestrian
+finds a limit set to his progress only by
+his walking powers. Even so, he may obtain to
+Norwich long before the others, for the railway<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+hugs the road closely for three parts of the distance,
+and stations are frequent.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, the curtain has long since been
+rung down upon the Romance of the Road. If this
+were the place to do it, that romance might be
+recounted at great length; sometimes rising to
+tragical height, again sinking to comedy or farce.
+But we must take our romance as it comes, and,
+reading as we run, be content to act a vicarious
+part in the long story. And we may well be so
+content, for to have essayed the journey in days
+of old often meant a "speaking with strangers in
+the gates" that entailed fighting on unequal terms,
+with the possibility of a roadside grave and the
+tolerable certainty of being robbed of anything and
+everything worth the taking.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays, the trim suburbs of the towns
+stretch out on either side along the old highway
+and join hands with the villages; so that when
+travellers of the speedier sort spurn the dust from
+their flying wheels, they think the country is
+becoming one vast town, and are depressed and
+regretful accordingly. But when the road was the
+sole means of travelling and the towns were still
+girdled by their walls and entered only by fortified
+gates, the wayfarer welcomed the sight of a house
+in the lonely country between town and village.
+Even to the rich these perils came home, and in
+the more lawless times they were beset with
+troubles of their own.</p>
+
+<p>Royal progresses were not infrequent along the
+Norwich Road, and they have elsewhere been duly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+chronicled, but they are things apart and give no
+glimpse of old wayfaring life. If we are at all in
+the way of conjuring up that old-time traffic, we
+must certainly not forget the odd processions that
+trailed their slow length after my lord and my
+lady, changing residence from one castle or manor-house
+to another. My Lord Duke of Norfolk in
+Elizabeth's time had an exquisite palace, of which
+Macaulay has told us, in Norwich, and the Earls of
+Oxford no doubt kept great state in their castle at
+Hedingham, but, for all their magnificence, they
+were obliged to take many of their household goods
+with them when flitting from place to place; for
+the very excellent reason that they did not,
+certainly up to less than three hundred years
+ago, possess more than one fully-equipped establishment.
+When the nobility of old left one of their
+manor-houses for another they commonly took
+their bedding and a good deal of their furniture
+with them. In even more remote days they removed
+the glass from their windows as well, and
+stored it carefully away until their return. <i>That</i>,
+of course, was a custom of very long ago, when even
+the most luxurious were content with&mdash;or, at any-rate,
+had to endure&mdash;things which nowadays would
+drive the inmates of a casual ward to rebellion;
+but, even when the Stuarts reigned, the great ones
+of the land moved from home to home with long
+baggage-trains and with their entire staff of
+domestics. No board-wages, then! The whole
+establishment took the road, down to the scullery-maids
+and the hangers-on of the kitchen who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+took charge of the domestic pots and pans. My
+lord's pages and the dignitaries of his household
+formed the advance-guard; the lowest in the scale,
+who travelled with the culinary utensils and even
+took the coals with them, were, appropriately
+enough, the "black guard." The black guard were
+probably a very rough lot indeed, at odds with
+soap and water, and on every count deserving of
+their name, which has in the course of centuries
+obtained a different application, as a term of reproach
+to individuals of moral rather than physical
+uncleanliness.</p>
+
+<p>Turning from general conditions of travelling
+to particular travellers, there comes tripping along
+the road an antic fellow, one Will Kemp, who
+danced from London to Norwich in the year 1600;
+a frolic he undertook for a wager, afterwards
+writing and publishing a book about it, which he
+called <i>Kemp's Nine Days' Wonder</i>. Will Kemp
+was accompanied by a drummer whose play upon
+parchment helped to sustain his flagging energies
+as he skipped it to Widford and thence by a route
+of his own through Braintree to Norwich.</p>
+
+<p>Sprightly, irresponsible Kemp, cracking weak
+jokes and playing the fool, is succeeded in the
+memories of the road, after an interval of some
+eighty years, by a very grave and responsible figure
+indeed; no less an one than that of King William
+the Third, on his frequent journeys between his dear
+Holland and his little-loved Kingdom of England.
+Burdened with the care of an alien realm, that
+saturnine little figure with the hooked nose was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+familiar sight at Kelvedon, where, travelling to and
+from Harwich, he was wont to stay at the "Angel"
+inn, which still confronts the wayfarer on entering
+the village from London. When the "little gentleman
+in black" had done his work and King William
+of blessed Protestant memory was no more, the
+Norwich Road, so far as Colchester, was still graced
+with Royal travellers, for, with the coming of the
+Hanoverians, Harwich became more than ever a
+favourite port of entry and departure, and the
+choleric early Georges knew this Essex landscape
+well. This way, too, came the Schwellenburgs, the
+Keilmanseggs and the other vulgar and grotesque
+figures of that grotesque and vulgar Court.</p>
+
+<p>Among these figures comes that of the Princess
+Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, arrived for the first
+time in England, in 1761, to marry George the
+Third. One German princess is very like another
+in the pages of history, and the likeness remains
+even when they become queens, so that it is not
+a little difficult to disentangle a Caroline from a
+Charlotte. Their virtues are of the same drab
+domestic order, and their faces partake of the
+common fund of unilluminated dulness distributed
+between the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the Sonderburg-Augustenburgs,
+and the dozens of other twopenny-halfpenny
+principalities made familiar by German
+princely marriages and intermarryings. On their
+mere merits, these personages would find no place
+here, though they travelled all their lives up and
+down the road; but in the circumstances of this
+particular Princess Charlotte's journey there are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+some incidents worth mentioning. She landed at
+Harwich, and comes into our road at Colchester,
+September 7, 1761. At Colchester she was presented
+with a box of eringo-root, the famous local
+production highly valued for the cure of pulmonary
+diseases, prepared from the root of the sea holly.
+Graciously receiving this in a box "parfumed and
+guilt," her carriage swept on towards Witham, where
+she stayed the night at a seat then owned by Lord
+Abercorn, supping with open doors so that all who
+would might gaze upon their future Queen. Next
+day the journey to London was resumed. The
+King's coach was in readiness at Romford, and into
+it she changed. At Mile End a squadron of Life
+Guards was in waiting as an escort, and from that
+point the procession was viewed by thousands. But
+by this time the September day was closing. The
+Duchess of Hamilton, who accompanied the Princess,
+looked at her watch. "We shall hardly have time
+to dress for the wedding," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"The wedding?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, madam; it is to be at twelve."</p>
+
+<p>On that the Princess fainted, as well she might.
+It really took place at 9 p.m., instead of three hours
+later. The King, it is upon record, was a little
+disappointed at the first sight of his bride; but that
+has generally been the way with our Royal marriages.
+The eldest son of this amiable pair, George the Fourth,
+similarly saw his bride for the first time practically
+on the steps of the altar, and his disappointment was
+keen. "No sooner," we read, "had he approached
+her than, as if to subdue the qualms of irrepressible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+disgust, he desired the dignified envoy to bring him
+a glass of brandy." The Princess, we are told,
+"expressed surprise," which statement requires no
+credulity for belief. Henry the Eighth's disappointment
+when he saw Anne of Cleves was reflected in
+the words in which he likened her to a "Flanders
+mare."</p>
+
+<p>Two years later, in 1763, we find Dr Johnson
+and his inevitable Boswell journeying down the
+road; Boswell on his way to Harwich for Utrecht,
+and the Doctor good-naturedly accompanying him as
+far as that seaport. They set out by coach on the 5th
+of August, early in the morning; among their fellow-travellers
+a fat, elderly gentlewoman and a young
+Dutchman, both inclined to conversation. Dining
+at an inn on the way, the lady remarked that she
+had done her best to educate her children, and
+particularly that she never suffered them to be a
+moment idle.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish, madam," said Johnson, "you would
+educate me too; for I have been an idle fellow all
+my life."</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure, sir," said she, "you have not been
+idle;" which was a mere empty compliment, for she
+had not the least idea whom she was addressing.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, madam," rejoined the Doctor, "it is very
+true; and that gentleman there," pointing to Boswell,
+"has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His
+father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to
+be idle. He then came to London, where he has
+been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht,
+where he will be as idle as ever."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At this, Boswell was very wroth, and asked
+Johnson, in an aside, how he could expose him so.</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh, pooh," retorted the immortal Samuel,
+"they know nothing about you, and will think of
+it no more." Nor, in all probability, did they.</p>
+
+<p>In this manner they travelled, the gentlewoman
+talking violently against the Roman Catholics and
+the horrors of the Inquisition; Johnson, to the
+astonishment of all the passengers, save Boswell, who
+knew his ways, defending the Inquisition and its
+methods with "false doctrines." This would appear
+to have annoyed the rest of the company, for
+Boswell relates that Johnson presently appeared
+to be very intent upon ancient geography. Not so
+intent, however, but that he noticed Boswell giving
+a shilling to the coachman at the end of one of the
+stages, when it was the custom to give only sixpence.
+The great man took Boswell aside and scolded him
+for it, saying that what he had done would make
+the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the
+passengers, who had given him no more than his
+due.</p>
+
+<p>They stopped at Colchester a night, at an inn
+unfortunately not specified, Johnson talking of the
+town with veneration for having stood a siege for
+Charles the First.</p>
+
+<p>The last great occasion on the road, before
+railways took its traffic away, was the funeral, in
+1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline of
+Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven
+years before: her body was embarked for Brunswick
+on August 16, 1821, after a hurried three days'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+journey from Kensington. So many years have
+passed by since the stormy times when the nation
+was divided between partisans of the King on one
+side and the Queen on the other&mdash;both parties
+equally violent&mdash;that the long and bitter quarrels
+between the "First Gentleman in Europe" and the
+most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times
+have become historic, and no longer divide families,
+or cause fathers to cut their sons off with a shilling,
+as they did when the trial of the Queen was a recent
+event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no
+saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least
+odiously vulgar and utterly wanting in dignity and
+the commonest dictates of prudence. They were not
+worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken
+up by parties and made political missiles of, so that
+even the occasion of the Queen's funeral was made
+the excuse for a riot by her followers, who were
+indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the
+country, as they thought, without proper respect.
+The Queen died on the 7th of August, and it was
+decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent
+haste" was the expression used by the <i>Times</i> of that
+day in describing the funeral arrangements for the
+14th, but that journal was a most violent enemy of
+the then Government and had always supported the
+Queen and vilified the King as far as it could safely
+be done.</p>
+
+<p>It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty
+miles between Kensington and Harwich in two days,
+and the <i>Times</i> furiously bellowed in its reports that
+the procession was hurried through London at a trot.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+However that may be, certainly the pace was decently
+slow when on the open road. Ilford was reached, for
+instance, at 6·15 that afternoon, but Romford, only
+five and a half miles further on, not until 7·45; an
+extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a
+funeral. At Romford the cortège was met by
+sympathisers with blazing torches, who stood on
+guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort and
+the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn.</p>
+
+<p>At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by
+the light of a full moon which shone in splendour
+from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the night
+they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock
+in the morning. Here the coffin was placed in the
+church until a start was made again, seven hours later.
+At last Colchester was reached, at five o'clock in the
+afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse
+unguarded in the High Street, while they took their
+fill at the "Three Cups." Thus, in its squalor and
+irreverence, the passing of this Queen of England
+resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or
+kin.</p>
+
+<p>It had been proposed to complete the journey to
+Harwich that day, but, after violent disputes in the
+street between opposing factions, it was agreed to
+defer the departure until the next morning, and to
+deposit the coffin meanwhile in St Peter's Church.
+Inside that sacred building, disputes broke out
+afresh, one party wishing to affix a plate on the
+coffin-lid, bearing the inscription, "Caroline of
+Brunswick, the injured Queen of England," while
+the other vehemently objected. The quarrel was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+finally settled by agreeing to postpone fixing the
+plate until after the embarkation.</p>
+
+<p>With the start made the following morning at
+half-past five, this melancholy procession leaves the
+Norwich Road, and history goes with it. The tale
+is done, the colophon reached.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">If</span> we seek some touchstone by which to test the
+progress of a century or so in civilisation, there is
+scarce a better than found in comparison between
+the condition of the roads in old and modern times.
+That Waller could, in all sincerity, speak of "vile
+Essexian roads" is not remarkable: he was a poet, dealt
+in superlatives and lived in the seventeenth century.
+But that Arthur Young, a hundred years later, could
+with equal sincerity, and in more emphatic language,
+describe Essex roads as "rocky lanes, with ruts of
+inconceivable depth," is startling. It was in 1768 he
+penned that indictment, adding that they were
+so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the
+sun, and strewn with stones "as big as a horse,
+and full of abominable holes." It were, he concludes,
+a misuse of language to call them turnpikes,
+for they were rich in ponds of liquid dirt; while
+loose flints and vile grips cut across to drain off
+the water made the traveller's pilgrimage a
+weariness.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The modern reader, perusing all these manifold
+sins and wickednesses of the roads, rather wonders
+how they could all have been crowded on to such
+truly vile ways, and if a stone were as big as a
+horse, how room could have been found beside it
+for holes, ponds and other objectionable features.
+But Arthur Young was a truthful man in general.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the Essex high roads are as near perfection
+as any in the home counties, even though
+the byways be steep and rough and more than
+usually winding.</p>
+
+<p>It is in these byways that he who seeks rural
+Essex shall find. The dramatic suddenness and
+completeness with which, a few hundred yards from
+the high road, the sophisticated wayside towns and
+hamlets are exchanged for the unspoiled rusticity
+of the original villages is surprising. In these lanes
+the older rustics talk and think much as their grandfathers
+did, but the rising generation unhappily do
+not, and the Essex rustic in general, like his fellows
+elsewhere, has almost wholly discarded the old dress
+of the peasantry. Only the very old or the more
+remote yet wear the smock-frock&mdash;the "round frock,"
+or the "gaberdine," as they called it&mdash;that was
+once as honourable a distinction of the ploughmen,
+herds, or carters as are the uniforms of our soldiers
+and sailors.</p>
+
+<p>The time is long past since a clean smock-frock,
+corded breeches, worsted stockings and well-greased
+lace-up boots formed the approved rural costume for
+Sundays or holidays, just as the same articles of
+apparel in a "second-best" condition made the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+workaday wear. The Sunday costume of the agricultural
+labourer is now a cheap and clumsy travesty
+of the clothes worn by townsfolk, and in hideous
+contrast with his surroundings. Exactly what it is
+like may be seen on any advertisement hoarding in
+the outskirts of Chelmsford, Colchester and lesser
+towns, where pictorial posters bid Giles go to
+Shoddy's for cheap outfits. Sunday mornings find
+him flaunting his finery in the village street; his
+would-be stylish boots creaking, his every article of
+wear writ large with vulgarity. Often he carries
+gloves in those large hands of his, rough with
+honest week-day toil, and a pair may thus last him
+for years&mdash;for he dare not attempt to put them on.
+Would that he equally purchased his cheap cigars
+for show and refrained from smoking them!</p>
+
+<p>But there the village dandy is. Often his pocket-handkerchief
+is scented; generally his hair is glossy
+with grease; and he would not consider himself fully
+equipped without watch and chain, scarf-pin, ring
+and walking stick. To grease his boots he would
+be ashamed. <i>They</i> must be brightly polished, even
+though his manners are not, and his language defiles
+the village street what time the bells are ringing to
+church. Such is Young England in the villages at
+the dawn of the Twentieth Century. These things
+may spell Progress, but they are rather pitiful.</p>
+
+<p>It is a little difficult, in presenting a sketch of his
+ancestor of a hundred years or more ago, to avoid
+drawing too favourable a view of him; but the rustic
+in old times certainly seems to have matched much
+better with his surroundings than is the case nowadays.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>He made no attempts to dress up to town
+standards, and if he wanted to shine above his
+fellows did so by virtue of superior neatness only.
+Perhaps he had the finer instincts of the two, or
+more likely lacked the opportunities for bad taste
+that surround his descendants. Certainly, if we are
+to believe in the origin of the smock-frock, as put
+forward by some antiquaries, we must sorrowfully
+admit that the rustic's remote ancestor had as great
+a longing for unsuitable display in dress as can
+possibly be charged to the present generation. The
+smock-frock is, in fact, traced back by some to the
+ecclesiastical garments worn at Mass by deacons and
+sub-deacons, at the time when the Reformation swept
+vestments out of every village church in the land.
+Those who are familiar with genuine old smock-frocks
+have noticed the elaborate and often beautiful needlework
+on collar and breast. The devices appear to
+have a traditional likeness, all over the country, and
+consist either of Celtic-looking whorls, or of semi-decorative
+flower forms, or of lozenge patterns. The
+comparative simplicity or elaboration of this needlework
+depended solely upon the fancy, or the time at
+command, of the wearer's women-folk whose work it
+was. Whence came this tradition? It is thought
+from the tunicles of the minor clergy, which were
+certainly decorated in the same position, if not in
+similar patterns. When the minor belongings of the
+Church became the spoil of the villages, Hodge and
+Giles found themselves the proud possessors of the
+strange garments, for which they could find at first
+no better use than for Sunday wear. A striking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+appearance they must have made in them, down the
+village street, the envy of their less fortunate fellows.</p>
+
+<p>When the looted vestments grew shabby they
+must have been used for everyday wear, and so have
+set the fashions in smock-frocks, both in shape and
+decoration, for centuries to come. If it be thought
+that the costume was rather extravagant, it can only
+be asked, is not that of the modern Sunday morning
+yokel extravagant also?</p>
+
+<p>The rustic of long ago was a man of dense ignorance
+and dark superstitions. No one county was
+then more guilty than another in that respect, but
+East Anglians, and perhaps especially the Essex
+bucolics, are still, despite their veneer of civilisation,
+sunk in uncanny beliefs. Witches still "overlook"
+folks in Essex hamlets, and spells are cast on cattle
+and horses, or unhappy fowls are blighted by the
+Evil Eye. Consequently the learned professions of
+Witch-Doctor and Wise Women are not yet extinct.
+Their existence is not likely to be discovered by the
+stranger, but they thrive, in limited numbers, even
+in these days of pills and patent medicines.</p>
+
+<p>Board Schools are supposed to be educating
+Young England into a dead monotony of speech,
+but it will be long before they complete the horrid
+work. In Essex, indeed, we may not unreasonably
+think it a task beyond the power of teachers and inspectors,
+who if they have not succeeded, after thirty
+years working of the Elementary Education Act, in
+inducing the lower-class Londoners to say "yes" for
+"yuss," together with other linguistic enormities, are
+not likely to be successful in abolishing the very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+marked and stubborn Essex shibboleths. It may
+not generally be known that much of the so-called
+"Cockney" talk derives from the Essex
+dialect. From Essex especially comes that curious
+perversity of the unruly member which in many
+cases insists upon pronouncing the letter A as I.
+The lower-class Londoner and the Essex peasant
+are unanimous in enunciating A as I in all words
+where that letter retains its open sound and its
+individuality. Thus, in the words "baby"
+"favourite," "made" and "native," for instance, the
+letter becomes I; and the Fleet Street newsboy,
+shouting his "spusshul uxtry piper," can legitimately
+call cousins, if he wishes it, with the Essex lad at the
+plough-tail.</p>
+
+<p>Where A is sounded broadly, or in cases like the
+word "was," in which it masquerades as O, or where
+the letter is absolutely silent, or not fully pronounced,
+as in "beast" and "maternal," this peculiarity does
+not appear.</p>
+
+<p>The effect is sometimes grotesque, as, for example,
+near Colchester, where the villages of Layer
+Marney, Layer Breton, and Layer de la Hay are
+always spoken of as Liyer, the last mentioned
+becoming Liyer de la High.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is pronunciation the only singular feature
+of Essex talk, as those who keep their ears alert
+in these parts will soon find. The oddest phrases
+are matters of everyday use, and the Essex peasant
+can no more help using the word "together," in
+season and out, than he can help being hungry
+before meals or sleepy by bedtime. "Together," as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+employed by the Essex peasant, is a word absolutely
+meaningless; a kind of linguistic excrescence which,
+like a wart or a boil, is neither useful nor beautiful.
+When a ploughman says he is going to plough
+"that there field together," he does not mean to
+imply that he is about to plough it together with
+some other land, or with a party of other ploughmen.
+He simply adds the word from force of habit, and
+from hearing his father and grandfather before him
+so use it, in almost every sentence, as a sort of
+verbal makeweight. The present writer has had
+the good fortune to hear a supremely ludicrous
+use of this B&oelig;otian habit of speech. It was market-day
+at Colchester, and Stanway village had emptied
+itself in the direction of the town. A dog rolled
+dustily in the sunny road, and the historian of
+these things luxuriously quaffed his "large lemon"
+on the bench outside the village inn. As Artemus
+Ward might have said, "orl was peas," when there
+entered upon the scene a countryman, evidently
+known to the landlord. He walked into the bar,
+and, surprised to find mine host in solitary state,
+exclaimed, "What, all alone together, bor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied the landlord, in no wise astonished
+at this extraordinary expression, "the missus has
+gone to Colchester together."</p>
+
+<p>"Did my missus go with her?" asked the
+rustic.</p>
+
+<p>"No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by
+herself."</p>
+
+<p>In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging
+more especially to Norfolk and Suffolk.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for
+neighbour.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Stanway</span> is approached along a flat stretch, past
+Mark's Tey, which, without being itself quite on
+the road, has sent out modern and extremely ugly
+brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible
+distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's
+Tey church is visible, amid an inchoate mass
+of railway signal masts and puffs of smoke.
+Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings
+proceed from that direction, for this is a junction
+of the Great Eastern with the Colne Valley Railway,
+and the station, by the way, where the lady in
+Thackeray's <i>Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling
+of Shoreditch</i> appeared with the baby which she
+eventually left behind her. It is this busy junction
+that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses
+along the road to render the village of the old De
+Marcas something new and strange. Mark's Tey
+is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for the
+road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in
+here.</p>
+
+<p>Copford's solitary houses by the way give scarce a
+hint of the village nearly a mile off, whose little
+church formerly owned a terrifying relic, in the
+shape of a human skin nailed on its door; a skin
+that had been the personal property of some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+unfortunate straggler from the hordes of marauding
+Danes that once infested the district, of
+whom we have already heard legends at Kelvedon
+and Gore Pit. His Saxon captors must have flayed
+him with a ferocious delight and nailed up his
+cuticle with precisely the same satisfaction as that
+of the gamekeeper who wages war upon stoats and
+weazels and other vermin, and hangs their bodies
+on the barn door. But there must have been a
+bitter day of reckoning for those Saxons when the
+sea-rovers came this way again and saw in what
+fashion that doorway was decorated.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus57">
+<img src="images/fig47.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">Near Mark's Tey.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Copford and its outlying houses lie at the crest
+of a gentle descent into the valley of a rivulet
+which finds its way into the Colne. It stands, as
+its name implies, overlooking some ford which,
+once important, has, in the gradual draining of
+the country and the shrinkage of streams, now
+lost all significance. Stanway adjoins it, and lies
+along the descent, in the hollow and up the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+corresponding rise on the other side, where its
+church stands in a forbidding loneliness. The name
+of Stanway is sufficient warranty of this being, thus
+far, the Roman road. It is, however, not so certain
+that the remaining four miles of the existing highway
+from this point into Colchester follow the course
+taken by the Romans; and, indeed, the later researches
+of archæologists go far to prove that the
+original way into Roman Colchester avoided the intervening
+village of Lexden altogether, and, curving
+eastwards, avoided what may then have been a
+marsh, to take the higher ground over a portion of
+Lexden Heath; bending westwards again and
+crossing the site of the present road between where
+the grammar school and the hospital now stand.
+From this point it seems to have crossed by where
+the Lordsland Nursery grounds stood until recently
+built over, to the ancient Roman gateway and
+bastion in the western wall of the town, long known
+as Colking's, or King Coel's Castle, but originally the
+Decuman Gate of Roman times. The course
+followed by this old Roman way is lined on either
+side with sepulchral remains, and seems to have
+once been a great cemetery. Wherever the ground
+is disturbed the relics of some soldier or citizen of
+Colonia are found, some dating back to the foundation
+of the colony, nearly nineteen centuries ago.
+The most remarkable among them are to be seen in
+the museum at Colchester Castle. There&mdash;the most
+human relic of them all&mdash;is the touching monument
+to M. Favonius, a Centurion of the Twentieth Legion,
+discovered in 1871 between the hospital and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+grammar school, at a depth of 3 feet below the
+surface, and at a distance of 10 feet from the old
+Roman road. It is a sculptured stone, 4 feet in
+height, with the figure of the Centurion himself
+carved on it, in high relief. It is evidently a
+portrait of him. He stands in full military costume,
+his cloak hanging from his shoulders, his sword and
+dagger by his side. The inscription, almost as sharp
+as on the day when it was cut, nearly nineteen
+hundred years ago, tells us that the monument was
+erected by two of his servants, Verecundus and
+Novicius. They call him "facilis," the "easy" or
+"good-natured." It is surely a sweet and touching
+thing that when all other record of that soldier has
+perished, we should yet know him to have been a
+kindly creature.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to Stanway, which keeps, as sole
+vestige of its heath, a little space of the greenest
+turf, perhaps half an acre in extent, beside the insignificant
+stream in the hollow, and opposite the
+"Swan" Inn. The heath that formerly spread out
+across the elevated but flat table-land between this
+village and the succeeding one of Lexden was, in its
+different parts, variously named after them. On
+Stanway Heath, in Ogilby's <i>Britannia</i> of 1697, a
+picture map shows a beacon standing between the
+forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from
+London, on the right-hand side of the road. It
+appears to have been a post some 30 feet in height,
+crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means
+of slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily
+lighted, was provided for the benefit of travellers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+going to or coming from Colchester across the
+desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from
+the existence of a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the
+comparative security of Lexden village. The heath
+by the highway is a thing of the past, for those
+portions not brought under cultivation by the farmer
+have been grabbed by the builder, and the so-called
+Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row of
+houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything
+complete and modern. At the forty-eighth milestone,
+amid all this modern upheaval, stands a
+disused toll-house, and, close by, something much
+more ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered
+in dense woods and shrubs, known as "King Cole's
+Kitchen," and now&mdash;figure to yourself the shame of
+it!&mdash;overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and
+named from it "King Cole's Cottage."</p>
+
+<p>Turning off to the right, the curious in things
+pre-historic may lose themselves in the solitudes of
+the real Lexden Heath, where the Devil, the Trinobantes,
+the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary
+General&mdash;according to varying legends&mdash;threw up
+the entrenchments, and delved the ditches, found
+there in plenty. The Devil, we say advisedly, for
+"Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to
+the dyke across the heath, was none other, in the
+minds of the Saxons. "Lexden Straight Road"
+follows for an unconscionable distance a line of
+Roman entrenchments, and is straight and dull
+beyond belief. Followed long enough, it leads to
+"Bottle End," which may originally have been
+"Battle End," the scene of some traditional legend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+of Boadicea's defeat at the hands of the Romans.
+Or, again, it perhaps marks some forgotten connection
+with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside
+Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced
+"Bottle" by Colcestrians. Anything is
+possible in a district where Beacon End, the site
+of the old beacon already mentioned, has become
+Bacon End.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus58">
+<img src="images/fig48.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">LEXDEN.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lexden village now claims attention. It is a
+place in which one school of antiquaries finds the
+original Roman station of Camulodunum, established
+on the site of the royal city of Cunobelin, King of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+the Trinobantes; a finding strenuously contested by
+another following. Certainly, among the tall elms
+and rolling surface of Lexden Park there are remains
+in plenty of huge defensive earthworks, telling in no
+uncertain manner that this must have been a place of
+enormous strength, by whomsoever held. The surroundings
+are weird and impressive to a degree.</p>
+
+<p>The village skirting the road is one of the
+prettiest on the way. Going towards Colchester,
+the road drops down the hill, where old cottages
+stand high above the pathway, with steep little
+gardens in front, kept from sliding down into the
+road itself by lichened retaining-walls sprouting
+with house-leek and draped with climbing plants.
+Lower still, hard by the church whose carpenter-Gothic
+atrocities are hung about with ivy and
+creepers until they are transfigured into a dream
+of beauty, the grouping of the 'Sun' Inn and
+neighbouring houses is exquisite. Beyond this
+point begins the suburban approach to Colchester,
+a town it behoves the stranger to approach with a
+proper respect, for here was the first Roman colony
+in Britain. The history of Colchester, indeed,
+begins so far back as <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 44, and there was already
+a pre-historic native city in existence before then;
+the royal city of that ancient British king, Cunobelin,
+the monarch famous in the pages of Shakespeare as
+"Cymbeline."</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Cunobelin</span>, Lord of the Trinobantes, ruler of that
+part of the country now divided into Middlesex,
+Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hunts, Cambridgeshire
+and Essex, was the successor of his father
+Cassivelaunus, who had warred, not ingloriously,
+with Julius Cæsar. He transferred his capital from
+his native town on the site of St Albans to where
+Colchester now stands. He appears to have been a
+powerful ruler, and, if little is known of him,
+certainly he is no myth, for the vague legends
+that held the name of the Buckinghamshire villages
+of Great and Little Kimble to be a corrupted form
+of his own were strikingly proved correct some years
+ago, when a hoard of gold coins was ploughed up in
+their neighbourhood, bearing his title.</p>
+
+<p>We do not know by what name Colchester was
+then styled. After Cunobelin had died, full of
+years and worn by grief at the revolts of his sons,
+Caractacus, Adminius and Togodumnus, the end of
+the native State over which he had ruled speedily
+came. Adminius, in a fury against his brothers,
+fled from Britain to seek the aid of the Romans,
+and if no immediate result came, certainly his
+invitation must have revived the old Cæsarian
+dream of conquest. The real cause of the Roman
+invasion that took place shortly after the death of
+Cunobelin was the solicitation of a certain Bericus,
+a British Prince of whom nothing appears to be
+known beyond this one fact.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The invasion took place in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 43, under that
+able general, Aulus Plautius, who threw the Trinobantes
+back from Hertfordshire and Middlesex,
+across the Lea and into the Essex marshes, where
+for a time they could not be followed. This was
+the position at the close of the year. Detached
+portions of the invading forces had overrun the
+south of Britain as far as Gloucester and had
+defeated the tribes on the way; leaving a garrison
+in the west. But the island was little known and
+held many mysteries. None could tell the real
+strength of the natives, who disappeared in the
+forests and marshes that covered the face of the
+land, and by their irregular warfare disconcerted
+the Roman plans of campaign. Plautius was at
+last driven to act on the defensive on the Essex
+borders. His soldiers were dying in the ague-stricken
+morasses between the Thames and the Lea,
+and had the enemy possessed powers of combination
+and military skill, he might well have been cut off
+here, at the end of the known world. A retirement
+with his sick and dying was impossible. Nothing
+remained but to go into camp during the winter,
+and meanwhile to send for reinforcements. He
+accordingly sent for forces from Gaul. They came
+with commendable promptitude, commanded by the
+Emperor Claudius in person. With these new
+legions came an elephant corps, brought from
+Africa to carry the heavy baggage. But they acted
+a better part than this, for their strange appearance
+terrified the astonished Trinobantes a great deal
+more than any increase of the Roman soldiery could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+have done. We may imagine this corps, crashing
+irresistibly through the thickets, the forests and
+marshes on that march into the Unknown, along
+this line of country now traversed by the Norwich
+Road, and can readily understand little resistance
+being met with on the way. The tribes were dispersed
+and their territory occupied as far as the
+Stour, and a colony was founded in the opening of
+the new year, <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 44, on the site of Cunobelin's city&mdash;Colonia
+Camulodunum, the first Roman settlement
+in Britain.</p>
+
+<p>The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance
+of the natives that they were soon lulled into a
+feeling of security. For an uninterrupted space of
+sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It
+became a pleasant town, inhabited by veteran soldiers
+grown grey in the service of the Empire, and
+spending their later years in retirement. The
+Emperor Claudius, flushed with his success, had
+assumed the dignity of a god and had caused a
+Temple to be erected in the market-place to his
+honour, with attendant priests and altars. The
+governors and consuls were lesser gods, and treated
+with contempt and ill-judged severity the natives
+who had been overcome with such ease. The
+soldiery were uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and
+luxury flourished together with this attitude of
+oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences.
+It is not surprising that these colonists were bitterly
+hated by their vassals, who in especial looked upon
+the priests as so many harpies living upon their
+substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoods<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+and all clergy have been from the beginning, and
+will be to the end. In this last respect these poor
+Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians, exhibited a
+quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the
+priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment
+that have since passed.</p>
+
+<p>These down-trodden natives were already ripe
+for revenge when a more than usually unjust proceeding
+of the Roman officials precipitated a rising.
+The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and
+whose frontiers marched with those of the conquered
+province, had been ruled over by a certain King
+Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate the
+goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast
+wealth he had accumulated, leaving one half to the
+Roman Emperor and the other moiety to his two
+daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his
+country was invaded. His widow, the famous
+Boadicea, resisted. She was publicly scourged, her
+daughters suffering the worst indignities, and her
+relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose
+in arms at these outrages, and their cousins, the
+Trinobantes, on the hither side of the Stour, joined
+them. The Romans saw their folly when too late.
+No more eloquent account is possible than that
+given by Tacitus of the premonitions of evil. The
+statue of Victory fell to the ground, and turned its
+back where the face had been, as if it fled before
+an enemy. Women were seen and heard singing
+mad, wild songs, prophesying disaster. Strange and
+unaccountable noises were heard in the house of
+assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+the estuary of the river the buildings of the city
+appeared reflected upside down, and ghastly remains
+of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the tide
+ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and
+the strangest whisperings stirred the air. Many of
+the wealthier colonists, alarmed at these portents,
+discovered that their health needed a change of air,
+and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side
+of the Channel, and those who remained applied for
+military help. In answer to this appeal, a meagre
+force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately
+employed to fortify the Temple. But before these
+measures could be completed, the town was surrounded
+and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants
+all slain, the little garrison in the Temple
+meeting a like fate after a defence of two days.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the
+Ninth Legion, which had been stationed on the
+Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now
+stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city.
+He, however, had moved too late, and met the
+victorious natives at Wormingford, where they
+almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences
+of that great disaster were discovered in
+1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns, placed in
+order like streets, were unearthed, containing the
+bones of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the
+Roman sway had been reasserted.</p>
+
+<p>These events happened in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 61. Suetonius
+Paulinus, the then Commander-in-Chief, was at that
+time vigorously prosecuting a war with the Druids
+in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+disasters he hurried back through Verulamium and
+Londinium, collecting an army of ten thousand as
+he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and
+a numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman
+citizens of both those towns piteously begged for
+protection, but were left to their fate, which was not
+long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column
+passed than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed
+them. Seventy thousand citizens perished
+in that general massacre.</p>
+
+<p>It is uncertain where the Roman army met the
+hordes commanded by that heroic Amazon, Boadicea,
+whom we should perhaps more correctly style
+"Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull
+subject in the hands of the uninspired, who fail to
+render her "convincing." No one has done so well
+as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern
+writers of "personal paragraphs" in what recent
+slang would term his "actuality." He says, "she
+was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed, harsh-voiced,
+with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair
+falling below her waist" (her golden hair was
+hanging down her back!), "wearing a highly-embroidered
+tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a
+buckle over it."</p>
+
+<p>Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by
+two woods, on a site resembling a stretch of country
+at Haynes Green, near Messing; but the great fight
+must have raged on many miles of ground, and no
+doubt included Lexden Heath.</p>
+
+<p>The Britons were so sure of victory, that they
+had brought their women and children as spectators,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a great
+semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman
+historian says they were an "innumerable multitude."
+The British Queen, addressing her warriors
+from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to
+die, resting her hopes on the strength of her forces
+and the justice of her cause; while Suetonius, on his
+part, urged his troops not to be dismayed either by
+the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts.
+The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining
+on the defensive. When the fury of the first
+onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers of the
+Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the
+cavalry closing in on the flanks, driving the speedily
+disorganised enemy back upon the semi-circle of
+waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in
+this way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in
+which eighty thousand Britons were slain, including
+the women and children who had come out to witness
+the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing
+all lost, poisoned herself.</p>
+
+<p>Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and
+Suffolk. From this time date the existing walls
+of Colchester. The conquerors were determined not
+to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first
+colony, and, choosing a new site, one mile to the
+east of the former city, they planted their walls on
+the ridge on which Colchester now stands, overlooking
+the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing
+an area of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain,
+after the passing of more than eighteen hundred
+years, the most perfect Roman fortifications in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+Britain. Even in that wide space of time the town
+of Colchester has not extended very greatly beyond
+them. In some directions, indeed&mdash;notably to the
+north and north-east and on the west&mdash;the ramparts
+still look out upon the open country. The walls
+have a thickness of from seven to eight feet, and
+are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses
+of stones, brought with great labour from the coast
+near Harwich; the neighbourhood of Colchester, and
+Essex in general, being quite innocent of stone of
+any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this
+day supply the boulders of limestone from which
+the building-stones of Colchester's walls were cut.</p>
+
+<p>Colchester was never again attacked during the
+period of more than three hundred years, in which
+the Romans ruled. In the events of <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 61, they
+had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of
+treating a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In
+the period between these events and the year 410,
+when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from
+Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from
+ruin, conquered and conquerors had to live together,
+and made the best of the necessity. Roman colonists
+intermarried with the gradually Romanised British,
+and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during
+three centuries, gradually grew to look upon Britain
+as their home and themselves as a nation. Thus,
+towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority
+are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and
+civilised British princes treating on equal terms with
+Roman statesmen. In this way the British in some
+measure came into their own again, and to these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+circumstances we owe the wild legends of that
+mysterious monarch, "old King Cole," who is to
+Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall, the
+great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's
+walls, and the earthworks near Lexden known as
+"King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the very name of
+Colchester itself&mdash;"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive,
+according to legends, from this scarce more than
+mythical personage. Those stories make him one
+Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of semi-independent
+British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal
+sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman
+conquest. The story goes on to tell how, on the
+death of the usurper Carausius, in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 293, Coel
+surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius
+Chlorus, on that successor of the Cæsar's marrying
+his daughter Helena, who became the mother of
+Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer
+of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of
+Colchester still bear a ragged cross between four
+crowns, in allusion to this tale of the Empress
+Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction
+which Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy
+of her, holding a cross very plain to see, is newly
+set up on the very topmost point of the gorgeous
+new Town Hall, recently completed.</p>
+
+<p>To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey
+of Monmouth, the legend of Coel is chiefly traced.
+He may either have imagined it, or have woven the
+story out of existing legends, which had in turn
+derived from the Saxons, who, after the departure
+of the Romans, had wrested the country from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+Romanised British. They captured and burnt the
+town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls,
+took them to have been the work of some great king,
+after whom the place had been named. Legends
+of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons
+themselves had been converted to Christianity he
+was fully provided with a history.</p>
+
+<p>"Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster,
+has been shabbily treated in modern times and made
+to figure merely as a jolly toper. That he was the
+most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically
+assures us.</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called for</span><br />
+<span class="i2m">his fiddlers three."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house
+potentate! The author of that nursery rhyme
+has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain did the
+romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of
+vulgarity, <i>A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> entrance into Colchester is singular. From the
+straight, broad road leading past the trim modern
+villas and so into Crouch Street&mdash;the street outside
+the walls that takes its name from the vanished
+monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars&mdash;the
+wayfarer suddenly comes to the sharpest of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+angles, and, turning abruptly to the left, enters
+Colchester by what has every appearance of being
+the back door into the town.</p>
+
+<p>Historically considered, the entrance by crooked
+Head Street, as the continuation of Crouch Street is
+called, really is a back way, and was in Roman times
+the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and
+less important roads. But ever since Saxon days
+this has been the only way to or from London into
+the town.</p>
+
+<p>How it happened that the original road and the
+Decuman Gate in Colchester's west wall fell into
+disuse, none can tell. It was so many ages ago that
+not even a pathway leads along the ancient way,
+now quite obliterated by houses. But if the road
+be gone, the Gate itself remains, though in ruins.
+Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt to find
+it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our
+steps a little distance along Crouch Street, and, so
+doing, to take a turning to the right-hand, down
+Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome is
+seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands
+towering above a flight of steps leading up into the
+street beyond. There stands revealed a portion of
+the wall. The breach in it, through which the steps
+lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees,
+the freshness of whose spring foliage with every recurrent
+April forms a romantic contrast with the
+almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a
+place for thought. From the summit of that old
+defence, where once the legionaries lined the battlements
+in time of peril, or leaned gossiping in peaceful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+days, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley
+where the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary
+lifting of the veil and a glimpse of what the spot will
+be like in another eighteen hundred years. Close
+by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn
+courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman
+Gate. Three arches can be traced; the middle arch
+of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot passengers,
+less than half that width. Candour, however,
+compels the admission that of architectural character
+they have not the slightest trace. Over against
+this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in
+the Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and
+through that hole the most prominent object in all
+Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo" brutally
+dominates everything, and blasts the approach to
+Colchester far away on every road but that from
+London, for which small mercy thanks be given.
+Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he
+is very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and,
+unluckily, cannot fail to be seen. After him, even
+the Roman remains of Colchester pale their ineffectual
+efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable,
+although not very likely, that a stranger passing
+through Colchester might not notice its Roman
+antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There
+he is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless
+in brick of the most striking red and in attempts
+at decoration which, however well meant, only serve
+to render his hulking body more objectionable, with
+an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged
+face with pearl-powder.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower
+of Colchester's waterworks. It was built in
+1881, and cost close upon £10,500, and there are
+those who say it is the second largest of its kind in
+England. Where the largest may be we know not,
+but if it injures its surroundings as effectually as
+does Colchester's incubus, that unknown place has
+our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in
+his name, for, as the curious may see for themselves,
+his weather-vane bears the effigy of an elephant.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to Crouch Street, and so by Head
+Gate and along Head Street, the High Street is
+gained. It is one of the broadest and most spacious
+streets in the kingdom, as it had every occasion to
+be, for it was not only part of the great road leading
+into Suffolk, but in it was held the principal fair of
+the town. Here, too, close by where Colchester's
+new and gorgeous Town Hall stands, was the old
+Moot Hall, a building of Saxon, Norman and later
+periods, barbarously destroyed in 1843. In the
+Moot Hall the Mayor and justices dealt with offences
+of all kinds, from the selling of bad meat to charges
+of witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. Thus we may
+read in the borough records of things so diverse as
+the fining of Robert Barefot, butcher, in the sum of
+twelve pence for selling putrid meat, and may learn
+how William Chevelying, the first of the Colchester
+martyrs, was imprisoned here in the reign of Henry
+the Sixth until such time as it was convenient to
+burn him in front of Colkyng's Castle. Here the
+local Court of Pie Powder was held during the
+Corporation Fair Days, in October. Summary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+jurisdiction was the special feature of that Court,
+and it was needed, for in those times, when people
+of all sorts and conditions came from far and near,
+offences were many and various. In the legal jargon
+of the Middle Ages this tribunal is called the <i>Curia
+Regis Pedis Pulverizatis</i>, or, in the Norman-French
+then common, the "Cour Royal des Pieds Poudrés,"
+that is to say, the King's Court of Dusty Feet.
+Courts of Pie Powder obtained this eminently descriptive
+name from the original Fair Courts, held in
+the dusty streets long before buildings were erected
+for the purpose, and the name survived long after
+the necessity which originated it had disappeared.
+Imagine, therefore, the highwaymen, the cheats and
+thieves and those who came into disputation on the
+Fair Days being brought before the Mayor by the
+bailiffs, their cases arising and being heard, and judgments
+and sentences being delivered and executed,
+within the space of one day, amid the bleating of the
+flocks, the lowing of the herds, and all the noise and
+tumult of the Fair itself. We must not, however,
+suppose the High Street to have been absolutely
+clear of obstructions in days of old. In midst of
+it stood the Late Saxon or Early Norman church of
+that Saxon saint, St Runwald, which remained here
+until so recently as 1878, when it was pulled down
+and its site sold to the Corporation, to be thrown
+into the roadway.</p>
+
+<p>That Colchester stands on a considerably elevated
+site is evident to all who, having entered from the
+London road, turn out of Head Street into the High
+Street, and in doing so glimpse the long descent of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+North Hill at the corner. A further revelation is
+that of East Hill, which, in continuation of High
+Street, the traveller must long and steeply descend
+towards the Colne, on his way to Ipswich and
+Norwich. It was in High Street that Colchester's
+principal coaching inns were situated, and there yet
+remains&mdash;now the most picturesque feature of that
+thoroughfare&mdash;the "Red Lion," with old timber
+brackets supporting a projecting upper storey and a
+four-centred Tudor oak entrance curiously carved; its
+original and restored portions so thickly smeared
+with paint and varnish that all might be old, so far
+as the antiquary can tell, or all might be in the
+nature of Wardour Street antiques. The "Red
+Lion" figured as a rendezvous in the surrender of
+the town to Fairfax, after the siege of 1648. In its
+yard the vanquished laid down their swords.</p>
+
+<p>Another inn was the "White Hart," where Bank
+Passage leaves the High Street. The building, a
+highly respectable plaster-faced one, smug and
+Georgian, still stands, but it is an inn no longer.
+Another old inn, the "Three Cups," has been rebuilt.
+Older than any, but coyly hiding its antiquarian
+virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries
+from the crowd, is the "Angel," in West Stockwell
+Street, whose origin as a pilgrim's inn is vouched
+for. Weary suppliants to, or returning from, the
+shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the
+road through and past Norwich, housed here and
+misbehaved themselves in their mediæval way. It
+would be the gravest of mistakes to assume old
+pilgrims decorous. Modern Bank Holiday folks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+would, compared with them, seem to be of a severe
+monkish austerity. The shrine at Walsingham,
+second only in repute to that of the Blessed Thomas
+at Canterbury, drew crowds of every class, from
+king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of
+St John at Colchester sheltered some in its guest-houses,
+while the late-comers inned at such hostelries
+as the "Angel," or, if the weather were propitious,
+lay in the woods. Ill fared the unsuspecting citizen
+who met any of these sinners on the way to be
+plenarily indulged and lightened of their load of sin.
+They would murder him for twopence or cudgel him
+out of high spirits and for the fun of the thing;
+arguing, doubtless, that as they were presently to
+turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how black
+the old one was. Drunkenness and crime, immorality,
+obscenity and license of the grossest kind
+were in fact accompaniments of pilgrimage, and the
+sin-worn wanderers who prayed devoutly at the
+niche, now empty of its statue, in the east end of
+All Saints' Church in the High Street, on their
+journey to and from Walsingham, would resume
+their foul jests and their evil courses so soon as
+the last bead was told and the ultimate word of
+dog-Latin glibly pattered off.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Removed</span> from all the noise and bustle of the High
+Street, in a quiet nook away from the modern life of
+the town, stands Colchester Castle, on the site of the
+Temple of Claudius. The Keep, built by Eudo,
+"Dapifer," or High Steward of Normandy, under
+William the Conqueror and his two successors, alone
+remains, and has lost its upper storey, destroyed by a
+speculator who bought the building in 1683, and half
+ruined himself in his attempts to demolish it. It is
+perhaps not generally known that this is by far the
+largest keep in England, measuring 155 ft. by 113 ft.
+The Tower of London, built at the same period, and
+the next largest, measures only 116 ft. by 96 ft.
+There have been those who, looking at its massive
+walls, 12 ft. thick, with courses of Roman tiles
+conspicuous in them, have believed this to be the
+original Roman temple, and antiquaries who should
+have known better have written long treatises to
+support their views. Those, however, were the days
+before comparative archæology had come into being
+to prove that the peculiarities in the planning, noticeable
+here, are partaken of by the undoubted Norman
+keeps of the Tower of London and of Rochester
+Castle, known to have been designed by Gundulf,
+Bishop of Rochester. Freeman was very severe in
+his time on those who labelled the interior of
+Colchester keep with such names as "podium" and
+"adytum," in their belief of its Roman character.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus59">
+<img src="images/fig49.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE GRAND STAIRCASE, COLCHESTER CASTLE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If its lack of height prevents Colchester Castle
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>from being impressive without, certainly its gloomy
+dungeons and mighty walls compel the respect and
+wonder of all who enter. They look not so much as
+though they had been built up, as though cells and
+passages had been carved and burrowed out of a solid
+mass; so small are those passages and staircases, so
+thick the walls. In the chapel and the corridors that
+still remain roofed, the collections of the Essex
+Archæological Society have a home, and from other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+and roofless walls that are broad enough to afford the
+safest of pathways one may gaze down upon the
+surrounding grassy enclosures and see that spot
+where those two Royalist commanders, Lucas and
+Lisle, who held Colchester for seventy-six days
+against the besieging army of the Parliament in
+1648, were barbarously shot by order of Fairfax,
+after having surrendered.</p>
+
+<p>That siege of Colchester is the most romantic
+incident that has survived in the history of the
+town. It is the story of a last desperate attempt of
+the Royalists to contend with the Parliamentary
+forces that had everywhere overwhelmed the King's
+supporters after a bitter warfare of over six years.
+It was a gallant attempt, and the more so because
+Essex was not a county favourable to the King's
+cause. Sir Charles Lucas, at the head of this enterprise,
+was a younger member of the Lucas family,
+seated at Colchester. In the beginning of June
+1648, a Royalist rising under Colonel Goring had
+been checked at Blackheath by the Parliamentary
+general, Fairfax. A portion of Goring's force crossed
+the Thames into Essex, and lay at Brentwood. This
+was an opportunity which Essex sympathisers could
+not let slip. Lucas and his friends, gathering a body
+of adherents, galloped down the road to Chelmsford,
+where the Committee of Parliament was in session,
+and seized them, afterwards continuing their progress
+to Brentwood, where they effected a junction with
+Goring's band. Their forces thus united, a counter-march
+was made upon Chelmsford again, and continued
+to Colchester; Lord Capel, Sir George Lisle,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+and many others joining on the way. On June 12,
+Goring, in command of this body of four thousand
+Royalists, approached Colchester, and found the Head
+Gate closed against him by the unsympathetic
+citizens, but a slight skirmish soon enabled him to
+force an entrance. He had not intended to remain
+at Colchester, but the swift pursuit that Fairfax
+organised from London gave the Royalists no time
+to continue their projected march into the Midlands.
+The day after Goring had entered Colchester, Fairfax
+had assembled his forces on Lexden Heath, and
+immediately sent a trumpeter to demand surrender.
+The inevitable refusal was the signal for a battle outside
+the town, on the London Road; a contest which
+resulted in the retirement of the Royalists within the
+walls. The Head Gate still existed, its bolts and bars
+in perfect order, but as the Royalists fell back through
+it into the town, two hundred or more of the Parliamentary
+troops dashed through in pursuit. Their
+ardour cost them their lives, for Lord Capel at the
+head of a determined band pushed back the gate
+upon the bulk of the enemy, thrusting his walking-stick
+through the staples as the door closed. The
+eager advance-guard, thus cooped up within the
+walls, were all slain.</p>
+
+<p>Preparations were now made on both sides for a
+siege. Fairfax had already lost many men, and
+dared not attempt to carry the town by storm. His
+plan was to surround Colchester and imprison the
+Royalists there until such time as his heavy ordnance
+or starvation should compel them to surrender.
+With his command of reinforcements from London,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+and his ability thus to enclose the town with a
+cordon of troops, the position of the Royalists was
+hopeless, and it is to their honour and credit that,
+in order to contain Fairfax's large army and so
+give opportunities to the organisers of Royalist
+movements in the Midlands, they continued the
+defence in the face of starvation and despite the easy
+terms of capitulation at first offered them. Their
+domestic position (so to call it) in the town was
+unenviable, for the inhabitants were wholly opposed
+to their cause. They had with them, it is true, the
+members of the Parliamentary Committee whom
+they had kidnapped from Chelmsford, but those
+gentlemen were a nuisance and had to be civilly
+treated and fed while the Royalists themselves went
+hungry. The unfortunate inhabitants, too, were
+starving, and many of their houses and churches
+destroyed by the besiegers' cannon shot; while
+suburbs were burnt down outside the walls.</p>
+
+<p>The end of this long agony came on August
+27, when the town was surrendered; the officers
+"surrendering to mercy," the lesser officers and rank
+and file with an assurance that their lives and
+personal belongings should be spared. Seventy-five
+superior officers accordingly gave up their arms at
+the "King's Head" inn. Four of them were to be
+tried by court-martial. One escaped, one was
+pardoned, and two&mdash;Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George
+Lisle&mdash;condemned to be shot without delay, on a
+disproved charge of having once broken their parole
+when formerly prisoners of war. In vain asking for
+time to make some final disposition of their affairs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+these two officers were executed the same evening,
+on a grassy spot a few paces clear of the north wall
+of the old castle. Sir Charles Lucas was the first to
+be shot, and met his end as a brave, gallant gentleman
+should. "I have often faced death on the field
+of battle," he said, "and you shall now see how I dare
+to die." Then he knelt in prayer, and, rising, threw
+open his vest, exclaiming, "See, I am ready for you.
+Now, rebels, do your worst!" The firing-party then
+fired and shot him in four places, so that he fell dead
+on the instant.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George Lisle was then brought to the same
+place, and viewing the dead body of his friend as it
+lay on the ground, knelt down and kissed him,
+praising his unspotted honour. After bidding farewell
+to some friends, he turned to the spectators,
+saying, "Oh! how many of your lives here have
+I saved in hot blood, and must now myself be
+most barbarously murdered in cold blood? But
+what dare not they do that would willingly cut
+the throat of my dear King, whom they have already
+imprisoned, and for whose deliverance, and peace to
+this unfortunate country, I dedicate my last prayer
+to Heaven?" Then, looking in the faces of those
+who were to execute him, and thinking they stood at
+too great a distance, he desired them to come nearer,
+to which one of them said, "I'll warrant, sir, we hit
+you." "Friend," he answered, "I have been nearer
+you when you have missed me!" And so, after a
+short prayer upon his knees, he rose up and said,
+"Now, traitors, do your worst!" Whereupon they
+shot him dead.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The stone covering the graves of these unhappy
+soldiers may yet be seen in St Giles's Church, with
+an inscription stating that they were "by the command
+of Thomas Fairfax, the general of the
+Parliament Army, in cold blood barbarously
+murdered." A legend may still be occasionally met
+with in old books, which has it that the Duke of
+Buckingham, who had married Fairfax's daughter,
+approached Charles the Second with the object of
+having the passage erased that reflected so severely
+on his father-in-law's memory. The King conferred
+on the subject with Lord Lucas, who said that he
+would with pleasure obey the Royal command, if
+only His Majesty would allow him to place in its
+stead the statement that "Sir Charles Lucas and Sir
+George Lisle were barbarously murdered for their
+loyalty to King Charles the First, and that his son,
+King Charles the Second, had ordered this memorial
+of their loyalty to be erased." The King then, we
+are told, commanded the already existing epitaph to
+be cut still deeper, and it will be readily observed
+by those who go to gaze upon it that the lettering is
+bolder and deeper than commonly is the case.</p>
+
+<p>The undertaking of Fairfax with respect to the
+surrendered soldiery was not respected. They were
+ruthlessly pillaged, and some sent to the plantations
+over seas. Lord Capel was eventually executed in
+London. For many years afterwards the spot where
+Lucas and Lisle fell was shown by the awe-struck
+people of Colchester, who told the legend that grass
+would not grow where that loyal blood had been
+spilled. In later times the story became an article<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+of faith with one political party and a derision to
+the other. No grass grows there now; but for the
+commonplace reason that a well-kept gravel path
+occupies the site, which is duly marked by a small
+obelisk.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus60">
+<img src="images/fig50.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">OLD MAN-TRAP, COLCHESTER CASTLE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Colchester was long in recovering itself after the
+rough treatment received during the siege; and in
+fact, it is only in recent years that the church of
+St Mary-at-the-Wall, battered down on that occasion,
+has been rebuilt; while the Norman minster of St
+Botolph remains the roofless ruin that cannonading
+and incendiarism left it. Evelyn in 1656 found
+Colchester "a ragged and factious town, now swarming
+with sectaries," and if he had visited it nine
+years later would have witnessed a worse state, for
+the plague almost depopulated the place.</p>
+
+<p>"Sectaries"&mdash;that is to say, those who preferred
+to think for themselves on religious matters, and to
+worship in their own way&mdash;were treated with an
+unconscionable severity. One Parnell, a Quaker,
+was imprisoned in a cell within Colchester Castle,
+and died there, his story affording a sad example of
+barbarity in the authorities of that period.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But the early nineteenth century was as savage
+in some ways as the late seventeenth, which so
+delighted in despitefully using Nonconformists.
+The antiquarian collections in the castle, for instance,
+include a particularly ferocious instrument
+devised for the protection of the squires' property
+and for the maiming of poachers. It is a man-trap;
+one of those devilish contrivances which, actuated
+by powerful springs and furnished with sharp steel
+teeth, would, when accidentally trodden on by the
+poacher, snap down upon his leg with force sufficient
+to injure the bone and probably mutilate him for
+life. It was thus the landed interests protected their
+rabbits, hares and pheasants. The existence of this
+man-trap, together with the spring guns also used
+at the same time, is a reproach to the England of the
+first quarter of the nineteenth century, just as its
+preservation here as a curiosity is a certificate of the
+progress achieved in humanity since then.</p>
+
+<p>The present prosperity of Colchester is reflected
+in many ways, but in none more strikingly than the
+condition of the castle, now a municipal property,
+and encircled with lawns and flower-beds, oddly at
+variance with its time-worn grandeur. The neatness
+of these surroundings and of the ornamental railings
+that fence off the enclosure is admirable from the
+everyday point of view, but the picturesque neglect
+and rural squalor of other years pointed the moral of
+the place and annotated its story, while present
+prettinesses blur the historic page. It is so everywhere
+throughout the land. When, a hundred years
+ago, Turner, Sandby, Prout and Girtin, our early<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+water-colourists, roamed the country, making their
+picturesque sketches, they did not find themselves
+baulked by flower-beds, cursed by cast-iron fences,
+or requested not to walk on the grass. They had to
+pick their hazardous way through miry lanes, or
+adventure through the bottomless sloughs of farmyards.
+All these things were offensive to the
+wayfarer, but they generally meant picturesque
+compositions and exquisitely sketchable foregrounds.
+Nowadays the conscientious illustrator, unwilling to
+picturesquely exaggerate, and yet accursed with cast-iron
+railings new from Birmingham last week, is in a
+quandary.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus61">
+<img src="images/fig51.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">COLCHESTER CASTLE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The once forlorn condition of Colchester Castle
+doubtless originated in 1726, when its then owner,
+Sir Isaac Rebow, left it by will to a detested grandson,
+on whom he thus conferred a useless encumbrance,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>a more exasperating bequest than even the
+proverbial cutting off with a shilling.</p>
+
+<p>A relic of those old days of picturesque neglect
+is found in the book of an auctioneer, who wrote an
+account of his "Professional Travels in England in
+the first half of the Nineteenth Century," modestly
+veiling his identity, and simply calling himself on
+his title-page, "An Auctioneer." Part One of his
+work was issued in 1843, but Part Two is yet to
+come, and as his first instalment shows little merit,
+the world can well afford to forego the second.</p>
+
+<p>Coming to the castle, he muses over its ruins,
+and weeps that cabbages and coriander employ the
+attention of the Colchester people, rather than the
+care of ancient fortresses. To him, thus contemplating
+"the sad remains of so many interesting scenes,"
+enters from an adjoining farm one whom he is
+pleased to term "an Aborigine." By this he
+obviously names an Essex farm-labourer. It is an
+affectation, but he might have done worse. He
+<i>might</i> have called him, seeing that Colchester is a
+place of oysters, a "native," in inverted commas,
+evidences of jocular intent, which would have been
+dreadful.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! sir," says the Aborigine, "it was cruel
+work when them great Barons, as they call 'em,
+lived here."</p>
+
+<p>"True, my friend," replies the Auctioneer, "but
+it's a pity to see hogs and donkeys depasturing in
+their courts and gardens, and grubbing and kicking
+down their halls and chapels."</p>
+
+<p>"Lord! your honour," rejoins the son of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+soil, "what's the use on 'em in these days? I'd
+sooner see an acre of these 'ere swedes any day,
+than them there towers and dungeons. Them
+swedes afore you 'ool carry a score o' fine wethers
+any month in the year, and plaze ye to look at 'em,
+but as for them flint walls, you may look at 'em for
+ever and a day 'fore you find enough o' green for a
+garnish"; which was indeed a practical rural way of
+looking at things.</p>
+
+<p>The summit of those old walls has nowadays a
+very charming green garnish of grass, rendered parti-coloured
+by wind- and bird-sown wallflowers and
+vigorous wildings; but more lusty than these are
+the young sycamores, that have struck deep roots
+into the walls and bid fair to grow into large trees.</p>
+
+<p>It is still possible to follow the greater part of
+Colchester's old walls along the queer alleys that
+run above or below them. Eld Lane, out of whose
+elevated course the steep descent of the old postern,
+now known as Scheregate Steps, goes, is situated
+along the summit of the south wall looking over
+towards St John's Green, where, facing a wilderness
+of scrubby grass, broken bottles, and the sordid
+house-sweepings of the modern town, the gatehouse
+stands, all that is left of the proud mitred Abbey of
+St John. By that green is the frowzy little church
+of St Giles, patched up in so atrocious a manner
+from the wreck it was after the siege of 1648 that
+to call its "architecture" merely "debased" is to deal
+kindly with it. A dilapidated boarded tower is a
+feature of the exterior; the interior provided with a
+flat plaster ceiling, like that of a dwelling-room, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+filled with flimsy pine-wood pews, painted and
+grained. Dust and stuffiness reign within; dust
+and broken crockery without. And yet, although
+so unlovely, it is not altogether with satisfaction
+that an elaborate design is seen for rebuilding the
+church from its foundations, together with the
+notice, "It is earnestly hoped that contributions
+will be given toward the restoration fund."
+"Restoration" is not the word, for the design is
+alien and quite unlike anything that formerly stood
+on the ground. Rather let the place be repaired
+and cleansed and its unbeautiful details preserved
+as a characteristic and shocking example of how
+they looked upon ecclesiastical architecture in the
+dark days of churchwarden- and carpenter-Gothic.
+It is here, under the north aisle, that those two
+valiant captains, Lucas and Lisle, are laid.</p>
+
+<p>For the church-towers built of Roman bricks,
+and for other evidences of that ancient Empire, let
+the explorer seek, and, presently finding, think
+himself, if he will, an original investigator: it is a
+harmless attitude, if at the same time unwarranted
+by fact. Let us to other matters, and then, leaving
+the town, hie away for Ipswich.</p>
+
+<p>Colchester is, of course, famous for its oysters,
+and has been ever since the Roman occupation.
+In the estuary of the Colne, and the Crouch, and in
+the oozy creeks of the Essex shores, the Colchester
+"natives" still grow up from infancy to maturity
+and feed upon the semi-maritime slime, as they did
+close upon two thousand years ago, and doubtless
+long before that. If we may judge from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+stupendous heaps of oyster-shells discovered on the
+sites of Roman towns and villas, near and far, to
+say merely that the Romans were fond of oysters
+would be far too mild a term. They must have
+almost lived on oysters, dreamt oysters, and thought
+oysters. No wonder Colchester, whence the finest
+and the largest supply came, was so prosperous a
+Roman colony.</p>
+
+<p>Although the fishery brings wealth to the town,
+it is more than a mile away and makes no sign.
+Those who might think that, because of it, Colchester
+should obtrude oysters at every turn and oyster-shells
+should strew every street, would be vastly
+disillusioned. But beside its oyster fishery, other
+Colchester trades are of secondary importance.
+Agricultural machinery is made here, and brewing
+and corn-milling carried on, but the once famed
+textile manufactures are gone. Among those old
+trades was the industry of baize-making, which left
+Colchester considerably over a century ago for other
+centres, after having given additional prosperity to
+the town for a period of a hundred and fifty years.
+It was shortly after 1570 that numbers of Dutch
+Protestants, fleeing from the Spanish persecutions
+in Holland, introduced the making of "bays and
+says," and, despite local jealousies, flourished
+amazingly for generations here.</p>
+
+<p>But Colchester will never be dull while it continues
+to be what it is now&mdash;a great military depôt.
+Those worthy representatives of the Roman legionaries
+at a distance in time of nineteen centuries or
+so, the Tommies and troopers of the British Army,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+are a prominent feature in every street, and bugles
+blow all round the clock, from <i>réveillé</i> to the last
+post, when every good soldier goes home to his
+barracks down the Butt Road; while the King's
+bad bargains stay behind and fortify themselves
+against apprehensions of the morrow's "clink" with
+another glass, or, adventuring too rashly into the
+street, find themselves presently in charge of the
+military patrol that walks the town with measured
+step and slow.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIX</p>
+
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">From</span> Colchester to Ipswitch is ten mile," says
+that seventeenth-century traveller, Celia Fiennes,
+in her diary. The milestones, however, tell quite
+a different tale and contradict the lady by making
+the distance between the two towns eighteen miles
+and a quarter.</p>
+
+<p>Seven miles of these bring the traveller from
+Colchester across the Stour and so into Suffolk. It
+is not an exciting seven miles. Passing the eastern
+outskirts of Colchester, where mud in the Colne and
+puddles beside the slattern streets offend the sense
+of propriety, as, having reversed their natural
+positions, the Fair Field is left on the right.
+"Left" is an expression used advisedly, for who
+would linger there? But the Fair Field cannot be
+passed unawares. If not seen, it will be heard, for
+on it camp the caravans, steam roundabouts and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+travelling circuses that still draw rustic crowds with
+their fat women, giants and dwarfs; or delight them
+with mechanical rides on wooden horses to the
+bellowing of a steam organ, whose music-hall airs
+follow the traveller in gusts of stentorian minstrelsy
+when the wind unkindly wills it so. The sounds
+nerve the cyclist to quickly put the miles between
+himself and those siren strains, and happily the
+road is a fast one, so that he need not be long about
+the business. It goes, as an old turnpike should,
+broad and straight and well-kept, for the matter of
+six miles, with little to vary the monotony of trim
+hedgerow and equi-distant telegraph poles.</p>
+
+<p>Let us therefore leave it awhile, and, journeying
+some three hundred yards along the Harwich Road,
+come across a railway level-crossing to the suburb
+of St Ann's, and the site of a spring and hermitage
+called Holy Well. The spring is now sealed up,
+but an inscription in the wall of a cottage still
+proclaims it to have been reopened in 1844. It
+seems strange that the Hermitage should have been
+placed, not on the main road where pilgrims were
+surely more plentiful, but on the seaward route.
+The explanation may probably be sought in the
+existence already of another establishment of the
+kind, long since forgotten. Here, then, the
+Hermitage of St Ann's was placed, and a holy
+well and an oratory made appeal to the piety or
+the superstition, as the case might be, of all who
+passed by. To these the hermit presented his
+leathern wallet, beseeching travellers, who would
+have gone without giving alms, to spare a trifle for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+the upkeep of the road, even though they valued
+not the Blessed Saints.</p>
+
+<p>For three hundred years the Hermitage lasted,
+and a long line of hermits lived here. Some were
+pious and industrious, keeping the road in repair;
+others had neither piety nor industry, spent their
+time in taverns, were smiters, and got drunk and
+fought, so that the road became scandalously neglected,
+and many Colchester worthies received
+apostolical black eyes from eremitical fists. Such
+an one must have been the hermit who lived here
+in the reign of Henry the Fifth, and was indicted in
+1419 for having an unclean ditch. Finally, in
+1535, when the dissolution of the monasteries took
+place, the Hermitage was closed, and the then
+occupant turned out, with a warning that if he
+solicited alms henceforward he would be regarded
+as a "sturdy beggar," and dealt with accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>The road to Ipswich was the scene, in the
+second half of the seventeenth century, shortly
+after the first coaches had started running, of many
+highway robberies. The borough of Colchester was
+deeply concerned at this lawlessness, and in 1679
+three men were rewarded with £6, 8s. between them
+"for apprehending those y<sup>t</sup> robbed the Ipswich
+coach." Again, in September 1698, three men
+were rewarded "for pursuen hiewaymen," and for
+"going to Ardlegh" on that business; but as they
+received only two shillings each and an extra
+shilling for "drinck," it looks as though the
+pursuit was unsuccessful.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus13">
+<img src="images/fig52.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">COLCHESTER.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The high road, to which we have now returned,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a><br /><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a><br /><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+has already been described as an excellent highway,
+but Dilbridge, a hamlet, and a roadside inn on what
+was once Ardleigh Heath, alone break its solitude.
+It has, however, the advantage of commanding the
+best general view of Colchester, with the inevitable
+Jumbo prominent, and the new-risen Town Hall
+tower in rivalry with it.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, when six miles from Colchester, the
+road changes its character and drops sharply down
+by an almost precipitous descent, to where a lazy
+river is seen flowing picturesquely in loops and
+bends between the grey-green foliage of willows
+lining either bank. It flows through a land of rich
+green meadows and yellow cornfields; a land, too,
+of noble elms and oaks. In the far distance the
+waters of a salt estuary sparkle in the sun, while
+in between, from this Pisgah height, rises the tall
+tower of a church. The river is the Stour, dividing
+Essex and Suffolk, and the pleasant vale, the Vale
+of Dedham. The estuary is that of the Stour at
+Manningtree, and the church tower that of Dedham.
+This, indeed, is the Constable Country, and that
+fact explains the homelike and familiar look it
+wears, even to the stranger. Constable, born close
+by at East Bergholt, painted these scenes lovingly
+for over forty years, and remained constant to his
+native vale all his life. By the magic power that
+comes of sympathy, he transferred the spirit of these
+lanes and fields and trees to canvas as faithfully as
+he did their form and colour; with the result
+that the veriest stranger viewing them becomes
+reminiscent.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nor did Constable only <i>paint</i> his native vale;
+he has described it in almost as masterly a way.
+To him it was "the most cultivated part of Suffolk,
+a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the
+Stour, which river separates that county on the
+south from Essex. The beauty of the surrounding
+scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow
+flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated
+uplands, its woods and rivers, with
+numerous scattered villages and churches, farms
+and picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular
+spot an amenity and excellence hardly
+anywhere else to be found. He tells an amusing
+story of travelling home by coach down this very
+hill. He shared the vehicle with two strangers.
+"In passing the Vale of Dedham, one of them remarked,
+on my saying it was very beautiful, 'Yes,
+sir, this is Constable's Country.' I then told him
+who I was lest he should spoil it."</p>
+
+<p>From this hill-top to the left of the road, and
+in what are now the woodlands of Langham Hall,
+Constable painted his best-known Vale of Dedham.
+In one respect the scene has changed. The willows
+still fringing the Stour, formerly "cobbed" or
+pollarded, are now allowed to grow as they will,
+and the river is not so visible as it was once.
+Otherwise the Constable Country is little altered.
+Even on this hill, close by Langham church, Church
+Farm, the original of his "Glebe Farm," remains as
+it was, thatched and gabled, close by the church
+tower. Only the foliage has changed, and the little
+guttering stream been drained away.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus14">
+<img src="images/fig53.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE VALE OF DEDHAM. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a><br /><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus62">
+<img src="images/fig54.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">GUN HILL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This steep road, shelving so abruptly to the
+Stour, is Dedham Hill, more often locally known
+as Dedham Gun Hill, from the "Gun" inn at the
+summit, now unhappily rebuilt, but until recently
+a most picturesque old inn, with the painted sign of
+a cannon hanging over the road. The sign has gone,
+and a pretentious house, which proclaims "Accommodation
+for Lady Cyclists," arisen in its stead.
+At the foot of the hill the road, turning abruptly
+to the left, begins a lengthy crossing of the Stour and
+its marshes by a bridge over the channel and a long
+series of flood-water arches across the oozy valley.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+The old toll-house, taking tolls no longer, still
+stands, a quaint building on the Essex side, and
+bears a cast-iron tablet with the inscription,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+THE DUMB ANIMALS' HUMBLE PETITION.</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Dumb beasts pray use with all good will;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Goad not, scourge not, with thongèd whips,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Let not one curse escape your lips,</span><br />
+<span class="i3">God sees and hears.</span><br />
+<span class="i12"><span class="smcap">T. T. H., Posuit.</span></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus63">
+<img src="images/fig55.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">OLD TOLL-HOUSE, STRATFORD BRIDGE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is one of a number of similar tablets erected
+throughout the country in the early part of the
+nineteenth century, when the first glimmerings of
+humane treatment of animals began to show themselves.
+When drivers had perforce to halt here to
+pay toll, this was a notice they could scarce help<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+seeing, but it only by rare chance attracts attention
+now.</p>
+
+<p>Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty.
+No picturesque building this, but a great hulking
+structure of that intolerable "white" Suffolk brick
+which is rather a grey-white than any other hue; a
+brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and
+crude, and by no chance ever helps the artist. The
+whole length of the Norwich Road is more or less
+bedevilled with it.</p>
+
+<p>This mill is the one blot on the beauty of
+Stratford St Mary, a village built along the flat road
+and continuing round the bend, and so up the hill
+to where the fine old church stands overlooking the
+highway. It is a remarkable church, built of black
+flint and stone, and covered on the side facing the
+road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the site
+of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy
+clothworkers of this place in the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps a little difficult
+to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other
+East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the
+weaving industry, just as there is a difficulty in
+realising that Sussex was once a grimy iron-mining
+country; but trades and places have their fates, and
+changes and romances of their own.</p>
+
+<p>From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors
+family were busy in giving to their church and in
+directing its new features; and the chief of the inscriptions
+in stone and flint that curiously decorate
+its exterior in old English characters record the facts
+and beseech the wayfarer to pray for their souls.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+Vain request! The work had not been completed
+five years when the long and troubled story of the
+Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no
+longer prayed for.</p>
+
+<p>The most prominent inscription is that enjoining
+prayers for Thomas Mors and his wife Margaret, who
+built the north aisle:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p class="oldeng hang xxlarge">Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margarete<br />
+uxoris ejus qui istam alam ffieri fecerunt<br />
+anno dni mcccc<sup>m</sup> lxxxxviiii</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together
+with his wife Alice, content with an English
+inscription. They are also a little less self-centred
+than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian
+souls" in addition to supplications for their own
+especial benefit:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p class="oldeng hang xxlarge">Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alys<br />
+hys wyfe and all crysten sowlys, Anno<br />
+Domini 1530.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Many other inscriptions and devices are seen,
+among them the letters, <span class="large">P B A E S</span>, said to be the
+initials of an invocatory sentence, "<i>Propitiemini beati
+ad eternam salutem</i>," addressed to Saints Thomas
+and Margaret, the patron saints of Thomas and
+Margaret Mors. But, stranger than any, is the appearance
+of the entire alphabet on these walls. Many
+attempts have been made to explain the reason of
+this, among them the view that the object was to
+educate the villagers in the rudiments of spelling!</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> long rise out of Stratford on the way to Ipswich
+lies through a beautiful Gainsborough-like woodland,
+with ancient trees gripping sandy banks in a tenacious
+clutch of gnarled roots. It is a hollow road,
+and one in which, when the coaches were toiling up,
+the guards' hands went instinctively towards their
+blunderbusses and swordcases. One never knew
+what or who might be lurking in that shade.</p>
+
+<p>But if it was a chancy spot then, how very
+suspicious a place it must have been hundreds of
+years before. That it was so regarded may be learnt
+from the <i>Paston Letters</i>, the instructive correspondence
+of the Paston family in the fifteenth century.
+Therein we read how a rival of John Paston in the
+wardship of one of the Fastolf family, coming out of
+Suffolk to London, was escorted by a hundred retainers,
+all armed with bows and arrows in their
+hands, with saletts on their heads, well-padded jacks
+and rusty haubergeons on their bodies, and fear in
+their hearts of an ambush laid on the part of the
+Pastons in the hollow way where the trees meet overhead
+and a mid-day darkness broods under the dense
+foliage. This rival expressed himself as not being
+afraid of the Pastons or any of their friends; but if
+not, why did he go escorted with this motley crew,
+tricked out with all the ancient weapons and rusted
+armour they could find? Happily they were not
+attacked, but that it was possible for petty warfare
+of this kind to be plotted is proof that the Merry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+England of that period was no safe place for peaceful
+travellers.</p>
+
+<p>Now we are well within Suffolk, the "crack
+county of England," as Cobbett called it, the "sweet
+and civil county" of Bishop Hall; but a county to
+which the alliterative term "silly" has long been
+applied. It is probably by this time quite hopeless
+to scotch that nickname, for it is of a considerable
+age and has a specious and easy glibness that comes
+trippingly off the tongue. Suffolkers themselves&mdash;whom
+it most concerns&mdash;are at pains to explain that
+the real, and entirely flattering, solution of the phrase
+is found in "selig," the Anglo-Saxon for "holy" or
+"blissful;" a reference to the numerous and wealthy
+religious houses within the county, and to the East
+Anglian saints and the many places of pilgrimage.
+Another party advancing the theory that the epithet
+was originally "Sely Suffolk," observant of the
+seasons, would thus have us believe that Suffolk
+must have been more observant than other counties,
+which is not credible. True, Suffolkers still talk of
+the hay-harvest as "haysel," a survival of "hay sele,"
+but this is not the only county that uses the phrase.
+It becomes evident that the nickname must go unexplained.</p>
+
+<p>Suffolk has its claims to recognition on other than
+historic grounds. "I'm told the dumplings is uncommon
+fine down there," said William, the coachman,
+to little David Copperfield. Perhaps they are, and
+certainly it was once the custom among the peasantry
+here, as indeed throughout England, to serve pudding,
+or "dumpling," before meat in order to take the edge<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+off appetites with a kind of food cheaper than
+butcher's meat; but the improved circumstances of
+the peasantry scarce demand such a practice nowadays,
+and in any case, Norfolk is the county of
+dumplings, so Dickens was in error in putting that
+speech in the coachman's mouth. "Norfolk Dumplings,"
+he should have known, are as proverbial as
+"Silly Suffolkers."</p>
+
+<p>Suffolk is deservedly esteemed all over the world
+for the "Suffolk Punch." This sounds convivial, but
+has no connection with punch-bowls; the reference
+being, as a matter of fact, to a breed of horses.</p>
+
+<p>"And the Punches! There's cattle!" said
+William, the Canterbury coachman, to David Copperfield.
+"A Suffolk Punch, when he's a good 'un, is
+worth his weight in gold," he added; which is not
+a very great exaggeration. Keep an eye upon the
+fields or an observant glance along the road, and the
+Suffolk Punch will readily be noted in his native
+country, at plough, halted by the wayside inn, or
+dragging with indomitable spirit the heaviest loads
+that the stupidity of the most stupid of waggoners
+could put him to. If ever horse deserved the praise
+contained in the familiar copy-book maxim, that he
+is "a Noble Animal, the Friend of Man," it is to this
+breed that it most particularly applies. The Suffolk
+Punch is a sturdy and a willing brute, and will pull
+against a dead weight until exhausted. It has been
+said that the Suffolk Punch existed as a type of horse
+in early British times, and it has been supposed that
+his remote ancestors were the horses that drew
+Boadicea's war-chariots. If it were not that he is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+invariably a chestnut, it might be supposed that his
+fame in the county had originated the sign of the
+"Great White Horse" in Ipswich; but from chestnut
+the breed never varies. It may be of various shades,
+from the darkest mahogany to the lightest golden-brown,
+but never any other hue. It is, of course,
+not necessary to journey into East Anglia to see the
+Suffolk Punch. Many of his kind are at work in
+London, drawing heavy loads, and are to be seen
+expatriated to Russia, and on Canadian farms,
+thousand of miles away from their native claylands.</p>
+
+<p>The Suffolk dialect is kin to those of Essex and
+Norfolk, but the "Suffolk whine" is peculiar to the
+county; it is a rising inflection of the voice towards
+the end of words and sentences. In Suffolk speech
+"fowls" become "foals," and "foals," "fools"; and
+archaic words, heard occasionally in Essex, grow
+more common as the traveller advances. So also
+does an odd custom first noticed in the neighbourhood
+of Colchester&mdash;the custom of affixing the place-name
+to the sign of an inn in ordinary talk. The
+"Gun" inn at Dedham, for example, is always
+spoken of as "Dedham Gun," and here, at Bentley,
+the custom is emphasised by the sign of a roadside
+inn being inscribed "Bentley Tankard," and not
+merely "The Tankard."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus15">
+<img src="images/fig56.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear
+Suffolk talk it is necessary to linger in the villages
+and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The
+agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide,
+when they give themselves up to play and gossip.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a><br /><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a><br /><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+Then, as the long summer day draws to its close, the
+children find romance in the lengthening shadows,
+in which their games of robbers and pirates seem
+much more convincing than they could be made to
+appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm
+labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of
+"bellywengins," at the pub, and the coy mawthers
+find the twilight a seasonable time for nannicking
+with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning
+gibberish to those unacquainted with the
+peculiar dialect of East Anglia, merely signifies the
+girls flirting with the "other ones"&mdash;the young
+men, in short.</p>
+
+<p>But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl
+is a mawther, and so is a grandame. It is a curiosity
+of speech which is apt to startle the stranger who
+first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet
+learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be
+heard any day in any Suffolk village, "Yow come
+'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll spank
+yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex,
+Suffolk and Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which
+a native of these parts may be immediately distinguished
+anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>When the labourers have trudged over to their
+"shants o' gatter," or quarts and pots of beer&mdash;the
+"bellywengins," or belly vengeance, aforesaid; when
+the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers
+and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together
+in the gathering dusk, then is the gossiping
+time, both of the housewives and of the labourers.
+The women talk at the doors of the "housen":<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+the men mostly in the village inns. Hear, passing
+stranger, what the mawthers are saying:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin'
+arn?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew
+or tree weeks sin'. The doctor say I fare to be
+on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi' me
+sure."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm
+thinkin'; but there, 'taint so much yer aige, 'tis yer
+sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group,
+"what be life wi'out sperrut? Nothin', in a
+manner o' speakin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he
+lived to be ninety."</p>
+
+<p>"What a man that wor! I mind him when he
+come to mine arter he'd walked from Ipswich, an'
+that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun
+he ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were
+as spry as a mavish and fresher'n a paigle."</p>
+
+<p>A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East
+Bergholt, Constable's birthplace, and between it
+and the road still stretch in summer those golden
+cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that
+crowning achievement of English landscape, how
+exquisite a thing it is, radiant in colour on the
+walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually
+the inadequate medium of black and white
+attempts to translate it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus16">
+<img src="images/fig57.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE CORNFIELD. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for
+his growls, poor fellow, is careful to explain his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a><br /><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a><br /><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+cornfields away. When asked why, if it does not
+pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he
+says he grows it for the straw. At any rate, times
+are changed from those when agricultural England
+was merry with high prices; those picturesque days
+when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed,
+as every traveller was hailed, at harvest-time by the
+reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo, largesse," the largesse
+going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the village
+inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the
+reaping-hook, and with it and many other things
+has gone the Lord of the Harvest, elected from
+among his fellow-reapers to preside over their
+labours and their harvest-supper in the great
+fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen. The line
+of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning
+with their sickles in the fierce sun upon the
+diminishing fields of standing wheat, with halts for
+levenses and bever, and so home by the light of
+the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines
+do the work instead. It was astonishing,
+and, in the haymaking fields, still is, what long and
+continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the
+intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say
+the eleven o'clock forenoon meal, and bever, the
+four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose name came
+through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin
+"bibere," to drink, reduced the contents of the
+barrels placed in the shady hedgerows, but quarts
+imbibed under such conditions were harmless.
+Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life,
+the names of "bever" and "levenses" remain yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+in the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk as
+those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and
+carter.</p>
+
+<p>Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent
+moments, of coaching and posting days here, when,
+near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green, and in
+a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes,
+leading from Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond,
+"Laddenford Stables" stood at the cross roads that
+went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four
+sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed
+to part here and went their several ways, but how
+they fared, or what was their social status, the story
+does not tell.</p>
+
+<p>Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing
+by Capel station, and so by Copdock, whose church
+tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape of King
+David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at
+the foot of its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and
+Washbrook in the hollow, together with the broad
+and still marshy valley of the little Wash Brook,
+tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days
+when Saxons and Danes contended on this coast, a
+navigable creek, an arm of the Orwell. The road,
+in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley,
+together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of
+bygone geographical conditions, leading as it does
+down to the place where a bridge now spans the
+stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of
+old, first fordable. Having thus crossed, the road
+went, and still goes, in a right-angle turn uphill,
+towards Ipswich.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was by no means necessary for travellers
+journeying between London and Norwich to touch
+Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial
+reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises
+commonly went from Washbrook, through Sproughton
+and Bramford, and joined the coach route again at
+Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead
+of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook
+who can still tell of the coaches that halted at
+"Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a toll-gate
+(the house still existing) stretched across the
+way at the foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks"
+who posted the long stage between "Stonham Pie"
+and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the
+"Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely
+up at the hill-top, but now a private residence with
+its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and can show
+the places, in what are now meadows, where many
+houses and cottages stood in those wayfaring days,
+when the high-lying road to Ipswich, across the
+uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the
+Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> can be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings
+having thoroughly captured the heart of
+grumbling old Cobbett.</p>
+
+<p>"From the town itself," he says, "you can see
+nothing; but you can, in no direction, go from it a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+quarter of a mile without finding views that a
+painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable,
+for we do not generally attribute an artistic
+perception of scenic beauties to this practical farmer.
+Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom
+and his pictures he probably had never heard,
+although Constable had already for years been
+painting these very scenes.</p>
+
+<p>The practical farming mind appears in Cobbett's
+next remarks: "And then, the country round about
+is so well cultivated; the land in such a beautiful
+state, the farmhouses all white and all so much
+alike; the barns and everything about the homesteads
+so snug; the stock of turnips so abundant
+everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order;
+the wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the
+furrows, if a quarter of a mile long, as straight as a
+line, and laid as truly as if with a level; in short,
+here is everything to delight the eye and to make
+the people proud of their country; and this is the
+case throughout the whole of this county. I have
+always found Suffolk farmers great boasters of their
+superiority over others, and I must say that it is not
+without reason."</p>
+
+<p>Cobbett found the windmills on the hills round
+Ipswich so numerous that, while standing in one
+place, he counted no fewer than seventeen, all
+painted or washed white, with black sails. They
+are fewer to-day, and could Gainsborough, old
+Crome and Constable revisit the scenes of their
+artistic inspiration, they would sadly miss the
+picturesqueness they gave these woody scenes and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+fertile hills and vales. It is from the crest of one
+of these hills that Ipswich is first glimpsed. There
+it sprawls, prosperous, beside the broad Orwell;
+"doubtlesse one of the sweetest, most pleasant, well-built
+townes in England," as John Evelyn thought in
+1656; but then swarming with "a new phanatic sect
+of dangerous principles." The reader will scarce guess
+aright who these fanatics were. They were neither
+sun-worshippers nor Mahometans, but merely Quakers.</p>
+
+<p>One obtains no glimpse of the broad estuary of
+the Orwell when descending into the town by the
+London road, and the crowded mass of the place rises
+confusedly up before the traveller as he steeply
+descends, and forms no picture. You must take
+Ipswich in detail to admire it, and the actual
+crossing of the river at the foot of the hill where
+the town begins is at a narrow canalised stretch
+before it widens out into the noble harbour that
+makes the fortune of the port. A sign of that
+accomplished fortune is the unlovely sight of the
+great railway sidings and goods yards spread out
+before the stranger's eye as he comes downhill. One
+may say that the town begins at the door of the
+"Ipswich Arms" inn, uninteresting in itself, but displaying
+the fine "old coat" of this famous seaport;
+a shield with a rampant golden lion on a red field on
+the sinister, and three golden demi-boats on blue on
+the dexter side.</p>
+
+<p>"A fine, populous, and beautiful place," says
+Cobbett, still harping on an unwonted string of
+praise. "The town is substantially built, well
+paved, everything good and solid, and no wretched<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+dwellings to be seen on its outskirts." He knew no
+town to be compared with it, except it were Nottingham,
+which, after all, is not properly comparable,
+Nottingham standing high, while Ipswich is in a
+vale, and moreover, is situated on an arm of the sea.
+It is amusing to read Cobbett's remarks on the
+population of Ipswich, which stood in his time at
+twelve thousand. "Do you not," he asks, "think
+Ipswich was far larger and far more populous seven
+hundred years ago than it is at this hour?"&mdash;that
+hour being some time in March 1830. He remarked
+upon "the twelve large, lofty and magnificent
+churches," each of them seven hundred years old,
+one capable of holding from four to seven thousand
+persons, and came to the conclusion that, in fact,
+although he found Ipswich populous, it must, even
+thus, have been a mere ghost of its former self.
+That shrewd observer was right. Ipswich had
+grievously decayed even in Charles the Second's
+reign, when the Duke of Buckingham described
+it as "a town without inhabitants, a river without
+water, streets without names, and where the asses
+wore boots." The Duke, in speaking of "a river
+without water," was probably referring to the
+estuary of the Orwell at low tide, when mud-banks
+stretch vast, and the stream runs by comparison
+feeble and thread-like through them. In its
+then nameless streets, Ipswich was not singular, for
+many small provincial towns were in like case. The
+asses that wore boots were those employed in rolling
+the lawn of a neighbouring park, the object probably
+being to prevent their hoofs injuring the surface.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yepysweche," as Margaret Paston, writing to
+her husband over four hundred years ago, spells
+the name, derives its title from the aboriginal
+Gippings, a tribe or clan who squatted down
+beside the Orwell, and not only established their
+primitive village of Gippingswick here, but contrived
+to foist their tribal name upon the non-tidal
+part of the river above the town, which therefore
+still generally bears this <i>alias</i>. The town probably
+saw its greatest prosperity in the time of Cardinal
+Wolsey, a native, and, according to legend, son of a
+butcher. This "butcher's dogge," as the envious
+nicknamed the great Cardinal, determined that his
+birthplace should be great in learning as well as
+in commerce, and to that end founded a College
+which he intended to be in some sort preparatory
+for his greater college of Christ Church at Oxford.
+That his foundation was reared on the spoliation of
+a religious house and its revenues, procured by him
+for the purpose, seemed but an ill omen for its
+prosperity to those who saw his buildings rising to
+completion, and the omen was speedily fulfilled, for
+the new-made abode of learning never sent forth
+a scholar, but was suppressed by Henry the Eighth
+almost before the mortar of its brick walls was
+dry; the buildings themselves torn down and the
+endowments confiscated. All that remains of
+Wolsey's College is one noble red-brick gateway in
+College Street.</p>
+
+<p>Daniel Defoe was a native of Ipswich and a
+curious contrast with Wolsey, his brother townsman
+of two hundred years before. In his day the old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+prosperity of the place had vanished, in the stress
+of Dutch competition and the virulence of the plague;
+but modern times have made amends for that
+temporary decay, and the town is now nearly four
+times larger than when, shortly after the first
+quarter of the nineteenth century had gone, Cobbett
+noted its many and empty churches and its scanty
+population. It numbers now over 58,000 souls,
+and its trades are numerous and prosperous.
+Whether it be in the making of agricultural and
+milling machinery, its corn markets, artificial
+manure making, or the manufacture of corsets,
+Ipswich is fortunate, with the good fortune of those
+who give heed to the ancient proverb and do not
+put all their eggs in one basket.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus64">
+<img src="images/fig58.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">WOLSEY'S GATEWAY.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Picturesqueness coyly hides itself from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+traveller who merely passes through the chief streets.
+Not in the open square of Cornhill, where the cabs
+and flys stand on the site of the old Market Cross
+and the trams fly to and fro, and where the Post-office
+and the Town Hall rise, side by side, does
+it appear, nor in the long street beyond; but rather
+in the Butter Market and the lanes that conduct
+to the waterside. There be streets in that quarter
+with odd names, among them Silent Street; and
+almshouses, and churches, and the queerest inns.
+Among the almshouses are Smart's, on whose walls,
+unhappily rebuilt in modern times, the charitable
+Smart and his no less charitable coadjutor, Tooley,
+are commemorated:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Let gentle Smart sleep on in pious trust,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Behold his charity. Respect his dust."</span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"In peaceful silence lett great Toolie rest,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Whose charitable deeds bespeak him blest."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is to be feared that these eulogies raise a smile
+at the expense of great Tooley and gentle Smart.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus65">
+<img src="images/fig59.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "LION AND LAMB," ANGEL LANE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As to the inns, they include the odd conjunction
+of the "Lion and Lamb," pictured here, and the
+"Neptune" and the "Sea Horse," with a fine sound
+of the sea in their names. Some of these old
+hostelries yet retain their corner-posts: for example,
+that of the "Half Moon" in Foundation Street,
+where the post still keeps its mediæval carving of
+a fox, with uplifted sanctimonious eyes, preaching
+to three geese and a griffin; a satirical effort no
+doubt looked sourly upon by the clergy of St Mary
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>Key Church, opposite, in days of old. A great gilt
+key serves as vane to that church and perpetuates
+the error in the name, which was originally, and
+rightly, St Mary-at-Quay: the custom-house quay
+and the harbour being close by, as the sight of
+certain corn-elevators, the rattling of chains and
+windlasses, and the sounds of throaty steam-sirens
+sufficiently proclaim. The custom-house stands in
+midst of coal-grit, laden steam vessels lying alongside
+the quay wall, bellowing steamily to be discharged,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>and railway-sidings, along whose maze of
+points and turn-tables fussy little locomotive engines,
+dragging jerky trucks, run, screaming intermittently,
+as though saying to the bellowing steam-vessels,
+"<i>You</i> just wait; can't you see I'm coming as quick
+as I can?" It is a dignified custom-house, and
+seems, surrounded with dutiable goods, to be
+aristocratically sneering at the trade in whose midst
+it is necessarily placed, and with as great a consciousness
+of its Ionic peristyle as any high-born beauty
+of her Greek nose.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the old wool-staplers', clothiers' and
+merchants' fine mansions stood by the quay and in
+the by-lanes. They are mostly gone now, but traces
+of old doorways and stray fragments of stone and
+wood carvings remain, and here and there a courtyard,
+or a house that sheltered family circles in the
+amphibious half-mercantile, half-agricultural Ipswich
+of the sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus66">
+<img src="images/fig60.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SPARROWE'S HOUSE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Certainly one of the finest things Ipswich has to
+show is the wonderful old place in the old Butter
+Market, known still as "Sparrowe's House," although
+the last of the Sparrowes who inhabited here has
+long since gone to his home in the family vault within
+the Church of St Lawrence, where, over their tomb-house,
+may yet be read the punning motto, <i>Nidus
+Passerum</i>, "a nest of sparrows." These Sparrowes
+seem to have been endowed with some of the attributes
+of the cuckoo, for <i>they</i> did not build the house
+that bears their name. It owes its origin to a
+certain George Copping, who built it in 1567, but
+alterations and additions made in the Jacobean
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>period give its architectural history a span of over a
+century. The woodwork of the bay windows and
+the grandly-projecting eaves, together with that of
+the shop premises, was added at the time. But the
+great glory of "Sparrowe's House" is its decorative
+plaster-work in high relief, which profusely covers the
+exterior with garlands of flowers and fruits and with
+quaint devices emblematic of the four quarters of the
+globe. Here Europa, cornucopia in one hand, book
+and sceptre in the other, sits with her bull, who
+might be taken for an elephant with half his trunk
+shorn off; here, on another bay, a podgy plaster
+relief typifies Asia, with palm-tree and a building of
+Oriental character in the background; followed by
+Africa, a nude nigger holding an umbrella over his
+head and sitting on a shark, at which four tiny<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+figures at a respectful distance express astonishment,
+while nearer at hand a wicked-looking bird of quite
+uncertain family roosts on a something that greatly
+resembles a battered meat tin. America is typified
+by an Indian in a feather head-dress which represents
+his entire wardrobe. He stands with bow and arrows,
+attended by a dog with a damaged smile. A very
+beautiful representation of the Royal Arms occupies
+one of the spaces between the windows, and other
+devices show the pelican in her piety; Atlas supporting
+the world; a classical scene in which a shepherd
+bows as gracefully as the artist in plaster could make
+him to a rural nymph; St George and the Dragon,
+and several smaller subjects.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> most famous thing in Ipswich is a thing neither
+ancient nor beautiful, yet it is an object to which
+most visitors to the town turn their first attention:
+it is the "Great White Horse." The "Great White
+Horse" is an hotel, of a size, in the merry days of the
+road, justly thought enormous. It has been left for
+the present age to build many hotels in town and
+country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more
+hostelries of the size of the "Great White Horse,"
+but in its own especial era that house fully justified
+the adjective in its sign. Especially did its bulk
+strike the imagination of the reporter of the London<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+<i>Morning Chronicle</i> who was dispatched to Ipswich
+in 1830 for the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary
+election in the town. He was a very young, a very impressionable
+and a very bright reporter, and although
+we may be quite sure that the business on which he
+was come to Ipswich was an arduous piece of work,
+calculated to fully occupy his time and thoughts, he
+carried away with him so accurate an impression of
+the big inn where he stayed, that when, some time
+afterwards, he wrote about it the description was as
+exact as though it had been penned within sight
+of the house. That reporter was Charles Dickens,
+and it is his description in the <i>Pickwick Papers</i>
+which has made the place famous.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus67">
+<img src="images/fig61.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "GREAT WHITE HORSE."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was not a flattering description. Few more
+severe things have ever been said of inns than those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse." Indeed,
+if such things were nowadays printed of any inn or
+hotel, the writer might confidently expect to be made
+the defendant in an action for libel. Yet (such is the
+irony of time and circumstances) the house that
+Dickens so roundly abused is now eager in all its
+advertisements to quote the association; and the
+adventures of Mr Pickwick in the double-bedded
+room with the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers
+have brought many more visitors than the unfavourable
+notice of the "uncarpeted passages" and the
+"mouldy, ill-lighted rooms" has turned away. If, as
+has been thought, Dickens thus wrote of the house in
+order to be revenged for some slights and discomforts
+he may have experienced here, certainly fortune
+has played the cynic in converting his remarks into
+the best of all imaginable recommendations.</p>
+
+<p>The exterior of the house is much the same as it
+was when Dickens first saw it, "in the main street
+of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way, a short
+distance after you have passed through the open
+space fronting the Town Hall."</p>
+
+<p>It is the same plain, square building, constructed
+of a pallid kind of brick suggesting underdone
+pastry, and is still, although the coaches have disappeared
+and railways have supplanted them,
+"known far and wide by the appellation of the
+'Great White Horse.'" Still, over the pillared
+entrance trots the effigy of the Great White Horse
+himself, perhaps the aboriginal ancestor of that
+famous breed of equines, the "Suffolk Punches," a
+very muscular race, more famous for their bulk and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+strength than for elegance, like those sturdy Flanders
+mares to which Henry the Eighth inelegantly likened
+his bride, Anne of Cleves.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens, using the usual licence of the novelist,
+describes this effigy as "a stone statue of some
+rampacious animal, with flowing mane and tail,
+distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, elevated
+above the principal door." Quite apart from the
+fact that the word "rampacious" is unknown to the
+English language, and is probably meant for
+"rampageous," the horse is really represented in
+the act of beginning a gentle trot, and looks as mild
+as the mildest milk that ever dewed the whiskers of
+a new-born kitten. His off fore-leg, broken at some
+period, has been restored of a size that does not
+match with the other three. Never, in the whole
+of his existence, has the Great White Horse gone
+on the rampage, and, like all the truly great, his
+manners have always been distinguished by their
+unobtrusiveness.</p>
+
+<p>"The 'Great White Horse,'" writes Dickens, "is
+famous in the neighbourhood, in the same degree
+as a prize ox, or county paper-chronicled turnip, or
+unwieldy pig&mdash;for its enormous size. Never were
+such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters
+of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of
+small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one
+roof, as are collected together between the four walls
+of the 'Great White Horse' at Ipswich." Further,
+he describes it as "an overgrown tavern," at whose
+door, when Mr Pickwick descended from the coach,
+stood a waiter whose description quite takes one's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+desire for dinner away. He was "a corpulent man
+with a fortnight's napkin under his arm and coeval
+stockings on his legs."</p>
+
+<p>Although that must have been in the best and
+most prosperous days of the highway, this waiter
+does not appear to have had anything more pressing
+to do than "staring down the road," while the
+account of the internal arrangements of the house
+does not indicate flourishing business. The private
+room into which the guests were shown was a "large,
+badly-furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in
+which a small fire was making a wretched attempt
+to be cheerful, but was fast sinking under the dispiriting
+influence of the place." After this we are
+not surprised to read that it was only "after the
+lapse of an hour" that "a bit of fish and a steak,"
+representing a dinner, appeared. When this was disposed
+of, Mr Pickwick and Mr Peter Magnus huddled
+up to the fire, and, "having ordered a bottle of the
+worst possible port wine, at the highest possible price,
+for the good of the house, drank brandy-and-water
+for their own."</p>
+
+<p>Certainly Dickens must have had some very
+bitter grudge against the "Great White Horse."</p>
+
+<p>Then come allusions to "tortuous passages," and
+the difficulty of a stranger's finding his way about
+the interminable corridors, or distinguishing between
+one "mouldy room" and another; difficulties which
+led to Mr Pickwick's comical predicament in the
+middle of the night. The rooms, not so mouldy
+now, and the passages, just as perplexing, remain,
+structurally unaltered to this day; but certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
+alterations have been made downstairs in the courtyard,
+now roofed in with glass and made very
+attractive, without spoiling the old-style character
+of the house. If you be a literary pilgrim, or an
+American, they will show you Mr Pickwick's bedroom;
+and can meet any of Dickens's criticisms
+by telling how Nelson stayed here with&mdash;ahem!&mdash;Lady
+Hamilton, and how Admiral Hyde-Parker and
+others of world-wide fame have occupied the
+"mouldy rooms."</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leaving</span> Ipswich and passing through the dusty roadside
+fringe of Whitton village, known as Whitton Street,
+Claydon, nondescript, and neither very beautiful nor
+quite commonplace, is reached in two and a half miles.
+Just before entering the village, an old mansion is
+glimpsed from the road, embowered in trees, a mansion
+which, on inquiry, the ingenuous youth of Claydon
+declare to be "Mockbeggar Hall." Claydon Hall is
+its true title; but the popular name has been handed
+down since many, many years ago, when the old house
+(not old then) long remained tenantless. Like the
+many other places named "Mockbeggar," it stands
+well within view of passing travellers, and must have
+induced many a sturdy rogue and vagabond to trudge
+wearily up the long approach in search of alms, only
+to find the windows dark, the chimneys innocent of
+smoke, the place, in fact, deserted of all but flutter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>ing
+bats and screeching owls, whose shrill notes must
+have sounded like jeers to the disappointed vagrants.
+Inhabited now, Claydon Hall is a handsome old house
+bearing the date 1635 on its Dutch-like gables. It
+will probably never lose its popular name. Behind
+the old Hall winds the willow-fringed Orwell, coyly
+approaching within view of the road, and then, as it
+were, timorously retreating again; its brimming
+stream, although seen only in such fleeting glimpses,
+potent in its effect upon at least three miles' length
+of the road, from Claydon to Creeting All Saints, in
+the loveliest stretch of woodland, where the fierce
+mid-day sun is baffled by over-arching foliage, and
+twilight comes early in the afternoon through the
+dense masses of leaves. These are the woodlands of
+Shrubland Park. The Hall lies secluded to the right<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+hand, somewhere away beyond the rather terrible
+lodges that confront the traveller, who wonders where
+he has seen their like before; until, like a flash, the
+memory of certain great London cemeteries and their
+mortuary chapels comes upon him in desolating
+fashion and blights the cheerful rustic surroundings
+of forest trees and the scurryings of white-tailed
+rabbits and gorgeous blue and brown pheasants that
+inhabit this domain of Lord de Saumarez. The
+lodges, built like the Hall, from designs by Sir
+Charles Barry, are of white brick and stone, in the
+Italian Renaissance style.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus68">
+<img src="images/fig62.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">MOCKBEGGAR HALL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>At no great distance from the entrance to this
+lordly domain, and noticeable from the road, in an
+exquisitely damp situation by the river, eminently
+calculated to foster rheumatism in old bones, is the
+Barham Union-house&mdash;the "Work'us" of peasant
+speech. It is quite an old-world building, and one
+of the earliest built under the new Poor Law Act of
+the early nineteenth century, when outdoor relief
+gave place to retirement within these prison-like
+buildings. Hodge well named them "Bastilles."
+They say who should know of what they speak, that
+life in Barham Union is nowadays quite desirable,
+but the design of the building, a quadrangular
+structure enclosing a courtyard, with outer walls
+blank or only provided with windows at a height
+from the ground, closely follows the prison, or restraining,
+idea.</p>
+
+<p>The little roadside sign of the "Sorrel Horse,"
+standing in midst of these leafy bowers, is in pleasing
+contrast with the Campo Santo pretentiousness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+Shrubland lodges or the prison-like style of the
+Union, now left behind on a rising road, where the
+scarped side of the highway reveals a momentary
+change from the prevailing claylands to chalk; a
+change so sudden and so strictly confined to this hillside
+that it at once attracts the attention of even the
+least geologically-inclined. Here the campions bloom
+that love the chalk and refuse to grow on clay.
+Below this hilltop, in the deep hollow scoured out
+ages ago, when the now insignificant stream that
+crosses the road was a considerable force, is Creeting
+Bottom, and Creetings of several sorts are set about
+the countryside, all hiding from the road that goes
+now up hill and down dale with as lonely an air as
+though the little town of Needham Market and the
+larger town of Stowmarket were not almost within
+sight, over the shoulders of the hills, on the highway
+parallel with this, that runs to Bury St Edmunds.
+To be on "on the road to Needham" is an obvious
+Suffolk saying, applied to those who are badly off for
+worldly gear, and it is a little curious that Needham
+itself was for many years, and until quite recently,
+a place of fallen fortunes, lamenting the decay of its
+textile trades in empty houses and an "irreducible
+minimum" of rent for those that were so fortunate as
+to find occupants at all. The name of "Hungry-gut
+Hall" that still clings to a farmhouse marks that
+depressed period to all time; but in the spicy odours
+of the tanneries and the chemical manure stores and
+other thriving industries and businesses that cluster
+round the railway station, the explorer finds evidences
+enough that Needham is reviving.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus69">
+<img src="images/fig63.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">"STONHAM PIE."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Not a sign of those towns or of the railway is
+seen on the road to Norwich, where the cottage outposts
+of Stonham Earls and Stonham Aspall alone
+tell of the villages in the hinterland. In their
+gardens, spread on bushes or waving in the summer
+breeze, intimate articles of underclothing are prominently
+displayed, in the society of old hats and
+coats, not so much for the exhibition of the family
+wardrobe as in desperate attempts&mdash;bringing up all
+the reserves&mdash;at scaring away the hungry birds from
+currants, cherries and gooseberries. These contests,
+the only warring incidents on the way, in which the
+birds are generally the victors, bring one to a level
+road where Little Stonham stands, its chief feature
+the "Magpie" Inn. "Stonham Pie" owns one of
+those old gallows signs, stretching across the road,
+that were at one time a common feature. The
+picture-sign, with a painting of that saucy bird,
+has been hung below the cross-beam instead of in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+old ironwork frame above, now that the piled-up
+coaches that once passed beneath are gone. Shortly before
+their going, and while turnpikes and tolls appeared
+likely to last for ever, the toll-gate that stood at the
+succeeding village of Brockford was removed two miles
+onward, to Stoke Ash, where, at the beginning of the
+pretty avenue at Stoke Chapel, the later toll-house
+remains, just as does the earlier one at Brockford.
+Brockford, the "badger's ford" of a tiny affluent of
+the Waveney, is preceded by Brockford Green, where
+the quiet road is made narrow by its sides being encroached
+upon by grass. It is here that the accompanying
+sketch of tall poplars and bushy willows was
+taken.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus70">
+<img src="images/fig64.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NEAR BROCKFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Off to the left hand, in strong contrast with this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+level stretch of road, the country is tumbled into
+combes and rounded hills, where the River Gipping
+takes its rise in the village of that name, springing
+from the hill where the church tower stands solemn
+and grim, as though it held inviolate the story of the
+place, away from those days when the Gippings first
+settled here and gave it a title.</p>
+
+<p>But let not the hurried seek Gipping, along the
+winding by-roads. The way, if not far, is not
+easy, and passengers are few. Scattered and infrequent
+farmhouses there be, at whose back doors
+to inquire the way, but rustic directions are apt to
+mislead. In any case, it is little use approaching
+the front door of a farmhouse. No one will hear
+you knocking, unless indeed it be a watchful and
+savage dog, trained to be on the alert for tramps;
+and you are like to hear him snuffling and gasping
+on the other side in a ferociously suggestive manner
+which will render you thankful that the door is
+closed and bolted. And not only bolted on this
+occasion, but always. The steps, and the space
+between the door and the threshold, where stray
+straws and wind-blown rubbish have collected, are
+evidence of the fact that the farmer and his family
+do not use the front door, but make their exits and
+entrances by way of the kitchen. It is an old
+East Anglian custom, and although many of the
+farmers nowadays pretend to culture and set up
+to be as up-to-date as the retired tradesfolk and
+small squires they are neighbourly with, many
+others would no more think of using the principal
+entrance to their homes than they would make use of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+the "parlour," where massive and sombre furniture,
+covered with antimacassars, is disposed with geometric
+accuracy around the room, in company with
+the family Bible and the prizes taken at school by
+the farmer's children; the stale and stuffy atmosphere
+proclaiming that this state apartment is only
+used on rare and solemn occasions. In fact, the
+"best room" and the front door only came into use
+in the old days on the occasion of a funeral.
+Perhaps it is a custom originating in a laudable idea
+of paying the greatest possible respect to the dead,
+but it is one which certainly gives a gruesome mortuary
+significance to both the entrance and the room.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus71">
+<img src="images/fig65.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">"THWAITE LOW HOUSE."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thwaite or "Twaite," as East Anglians, incapable
+of pronouncing "th," call it, less than a mile beyond
+Brockford, numbers few cottages. Beyond it,
+where the hitherto flat road makes a descent, is
+in local parlance, "Thwaite Low House," not so
+called on account of any disreputable character it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+may once have earned, but from its situation. The
+name obviously entails the existence of a "High
+House," which was, like the other, a coaching and
+posting inn. The last named, now a farmstead,
+was in those days the "Cock," the other the
+"Queen's Head." While the "Low House" has
+fallen upon times so irredeemably evil that it has
+been long untenanted and is now a veritable scarecrow
+of a house, with gaping holes in its walls and
+windows battened up, the "Cock," save that its
+sign is gone, still remains much as it was, to show
+a later generation what manner of place the roadside
+inn was in days of yore.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus72">
+<img src="images/fig66.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "COCK," THWAITE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Stoke Ash, or "Aish," as Suffolkers pronounce
+it, like many another village, makes no sign from
+the road. Its church tower seen to the right, dimly,
+amid a hilltop screen of trees, a square, box-like
+red-brick chapel by the way, and that pretty inn,
+"Stoke White Horse," are the only other evidences
+of its being. The remaining six miles to the
+Norfolk border lead through Yaxley and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+Brome: Yaxley, where a branch railway runs
+under the road, on its way to Eye, and narrowly
+misses the old church: Brome, where the "Swan"
+stands for all the village to those who look to
+neither side of the road; church and houses skulking
+down a by-road on the way to Hoxne. There,
+down that pretty road, where the thatched cottages
+nestle under tall trees and the blue wood-smoke
+from rustic hearths curls upwards into the boughs
+and makes the sparrows cough and sneeze&mdash;there
+is the Rectory, approached in lordly fashion past
+a fine brick entrance and exquisite avenue, and,
+at a little greater distance the old black flint,
+round-towered church, restored and titivated out
+of all antiquity of tone: the stone sand-papered, and
+the flints polished with a handkerchief. The only
+thing missing&mdash;and, under the circumstances, it
+is missed&mdash;is a glass case, so that no damp, nor
+lichen, nor any effects of weather may come to
+spoil the housewifely neatness.</p>
+
+<p>It was along this road to Hoxne that those
+who sought the revered head of St Edmund, King
+and Martyr, in the miraculous legend, were led
+to it by the voice calling, "Here, here, here;"
+at length finding the sainted relic in charge of
+a wolf, who allowed it to be taken from between
+his paws. But the voice thus calling was probably
+a much less supernatural manifestation, and
+was doubtless the hooting of owls in the woods.
+They still mock the belated traveller, only, to ears
+untuned to the miraculous, they simply seem to
+ask, "Who, who, who?" Ingenuity, however,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+vainly seeks the basis in nature of the wolf
+incident.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Now</span>, crossing the River Waveney, winding with tree-fringed
+banks through a flat country, the road enters
+Norfolk at Scole. Coming over the little bridge,
+the village is seen huddled together on either side
+of a narrow rising road; village and church alike
+wholly dominated by a great building of mellow
+red brick whose panelled chimney-stacks and long
+row of beautiful gables give the impression of an
+historic mansion having by some strange chance
+been taken from its park and set down beside the
+highway. This, however, was at no time a private
+residence, but was built as an inn; and an inn it
+remains, after the passing of nearly two centuries
+and a half. Scole, or "Schoale," as the name was
+often spelled in old times (when, indeed, the village
+was not called by its <i>alias</i> of Osmundeston), was by
+reason of this inn quite a celebrated place in the
+days of long ago. Every traveller in Eastern
+England had then either seen or heard of "Scole
+White Hart" and its famous sign that stretched
+completely across the road, and as a great many
+coaches halted here for changing teams, passengers
+had plenty of time for examining what Sir Thomas
+Browne thought to be "the noblest sighne-post in
+England." Both house and sign were built in 1655,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+for James Peck, described as a "Norwich merchant,"
+whose initials, together with the date, are yet to
+be seen on the centre gable. The elaborate sign
+alone cost £1057. It was of gigantic size and loaded
+with twenty-five carved figures of classic deities
+and others. Chaste Diana, with bow and arrow
+and two hounds, had a place on the cross-beam, in
+company with Time in the act of devouring an
+infant, Actæon and his dogs, a huntsman, and a
+White Hart <i>couchant</i>. On a pediment above the
+White Hart, supported by Justice and Temperance,
+was the effigy of an astronomer "seated on a
+Circumferenter," who by "some Chymical Preparation
+is so Affected that in fine Weather He faces
+the North and against bad Weather He faces that
+Quarter from whence it is about to come." On
+either side of the dizzy height occupied by the
+astronomer were figures of Fortitude and Prudence,
+a position suitable enough for the first-named of
+those two virtues, but certainly too perilous for
+the last.</p>
+
+<p>Further suggestions of Olympus, with references
+to Hades and Biblical history, adorned the other
+portions of this extraordinary work. Cerberus
+clawed one side of the supporting post, while Charon
+dragged a witch to Hell on the other; and Neptune
+bestriding a dolphin, and Bacchic figures seated
+across casks alternated with the arms of twelve
+East Anglian noble and landed families. Two angels
+supported respectively the arms of Mr Peck and
+his lady and two lions those of Norwich and
+Yarmouth. On the side nearest the inn appeared a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+huge carving of Jonah coming out of the whale's
+mouth, while, suspended in mid-air, and surrounded
+by a wreath, was another White Hart.</p>
+
+<p>Although, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Browne
+was impressed with this work, an early nineteenth-century
+tourist (so early indeed as 1801) curtly
+dismisses it as "a pompous sign, with ridiculous
+ornaments," and shortly after that it seems to have
+been taken down, for the reason that it cost the
+landlord more to keep it in repair than the trade of
+the house permitted. Together with this, the once
+celebrated Great Bed of the White Hart has also
+disappeared. It was a round bed capable of holding
+twenty couples, and was therefore a good deal larger
+than the famous Great Bed of Ware. Perhaps it
+was because guests did not relish this co-operative
+method of seeking repose, or maybe because sheets,
+blankets and coverlets of sufficient size were unobtainable,
+that the Scole Great Bed was chopped
+up for firewood; but did anyone <i>ever</i> suppose beds
+of this wholesale capacity would be desirable?</p>
+
+<p>The accompanying old view of the gigantic sign
+shows one of the peculiar basket coaches of the
+second half of the eighteenth century, on its way to
+London.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus17">
+<img src="images/fig67.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Scole White Hart" must have been among the
+very finest of inns and posting-houses. Its wide
+staircases, of a width sufficient for the proverbial
+coach-and-four to drive up them, its large rooms
+and fine panelled doors, its great stone-flagged
+kitchen, all proclaim how great must have been its
+old prosperity; while the wide-spreading yard in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a><br /><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a><br /><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+the rear of the house, together with the outbuildings,
+gives some hint of how heavy the traffic was at
+this junction of the Lowestoft, Bungay, Diss and
+Thetford road with that from London to Norwich.
+Shrunken trade has caused portions of the inn to be
+let off; the stone and wooden porches seen in the
+old print have disappeared; the coach entrance has
+long since been blocked up and has become the bar-parlour,
+and the mullions of the windows have given
+place to sashes; but the building still retains a noble
+architectural character, and is perhaps more interesting
+in these latter days, now that its story is told,
+than ever it was when that story was in the making.
+Little or nothing is found in contemporary records
+of "Scole White Hart"; only one vivid flash in its
+later years, when indignant would-be coach passengers
+stood at the door on a day in October 1822 and saw
+the drivers of the "Norwich Times" and "Gurney's
+Original Day Coach," fired by rivalry, and reckless
+in their long race from Whitechapel, come pounding
+furiously down the road and over the bridge, pass
+the inn without stopping, and disappear in clouds of
+dust in the direction of Norwich. Do you know
+what it is to lose a train and to wait an hour for
+the next? You do? Then it will not be difficult
+to form some idea of the blind, stuttering fury that
+possessed those who had booked seats at Scole and
+saw the coaches dash away, to leave them with half
+a day's wait.</p>
+
+<p>Thorogood was driving the "Times." Both
+started from London at 5.30 a.m. The "Day"
+coach reached Norwich at 5.20 p.m., and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>
+"Times" ten minutes later, neither having stopped
+for changing horses during the last twenty-five miles.
+This was a "record" for that period, the usual time
+being fourteen hours.</p>
+
+<p>Probably the would-be passengers had to remain
+the night; a fate which no one who has done the
+like of late would be apt to complain of. The guest
+at the "White Hart," seated in solitary state in
+the lofty sitting-room, lit dimly by candles in antique
+plated candlesticks, and with two ox-eyed seventeenth-century
+beauties of the Lely type gazing down upon
+him from their sombre frames, presently feels oddly
+as though he were living in another era; a feeling
+that grows as he wanders upstairs to bed, almost
+losing himself in the roomy corridors. When he has
+closed the nail-studded bedroom door with a reverberant
+clang, and, creeping into the generous
+embraces of a damask-hung four-poster that may
+have been new a century and a half ago, gazes
+reflectively about the panelled room and on the
+curiously coffered ceiling, he drops off to sleep
+straightway into the times when the inn was new-built
+and dreams of how the news of the Restoration
+may have come to Scole in 1661. Old times live
+again, faded flowers bloom once more, forgotten
+footsteps echo along the passages, and lo, the Has
+Been is enacted again, with all the convincing air
+of such visions. Post-chaises and chariots clatter
+up to the door and their noise wakens the sleeper
+to the consciousness that the sound is but that of
+a jolting rustic tumbril going down the road in the
+early morning; that this is the twentieth century,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a><br /><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a><br /><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+and the "White Hart" but a survival in a back eddy
+of life.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus18">
+<img src="images/fig68.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Besides the "White Hart," there is little else at
+Scole. The plain flint tower of the church stands
+by the roadside, on the ascent that leads from the
+village; and other two or three inns, a few rustic
+shops and cottages, and a private residence or so make
+up the tale. Scole, in fact, has not grown greatly
+since when it was a Roman station, and when the
+Roman soldiers whose remains have been found near
+the river occupied the military post on the long road
+to Venta Icenorum.</p>
+
+<p>The legionaries first stationed in these East
+Anglian wastes must often have longed for their
+native Italy. When the sky sank almost to the level
+of the land in the long winter's rains and fogs, and
+the biting winds blew out of the east across the sandy
+scrub; when agues or the lurking enemy accounted
+for many of their comrades, and when some favoured
+few were recalled to the capital, they must have
+thought wistfully of a more congenial clime than
+this, situated on the edge of the Unknown. Rome,
+either as Empire or Republic, was a hard taskmaster,
+and when no fighting was in prospect employed the
+troops ingloriously as road-makers. The advanced
+garrisons in the wilderness cleared the enemy out of
+the tangled brush and boggy marshes, and working
+parties built roads under the protection of guards, or
+improved the rude trackways they found already in
+existence. Some fell by the way, and their skeletons
+have been found in these latter days, the teeth still
+clenched on the obolus placed in the dead man's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+mouth to pay Charon for ferrying him across the cold
+and darkling Styx; or, where the coin has perished,
+still stained with the metal's long decay. They
+perished, those pioneers, to found a civilisation, just
+as countless thousands of our own blood have laid
+their bones on distant shores, under burning skies or
+in the Arctic night, to make England what she is.
+Respect their long sleep, antiquaries, nor, as you
+honour your own creeds, take from the dead men
+their passage-money across that mystic river.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">This</span>, as Dr Jessop charmingly names Norfolk, is
+Arcady. The scene is pleasant, but the stage waits:
+where are the actors? Gone, where and for what
+reasons beyond the substitution of rail for road shall
+presently be considered. But if the merry days of
+old are done and population dwindled, at least in
+East Anglia, and especially in Norfolk, dialect
+flourishes among those who remain. The "Norfolk
+drant" or drawl, is still heard, just as the "Suffolk
+whine"&mdash;that rising inflection of the voice towards
+the end of sentences&mdash;is even yet a mark of the sister
+county. They are, indeed, said to have originated
+the Yankee combined drawl and twang, for Norfolk
+and Suffolk were largely represented among the
+Pilgrim Fathers, the first colonists of North America.
+With these survivals, some of the old rustic simplicity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+is still met with, although the extraordinary ignorance
+of sixty years ago has disappeared, and the
+Norfolk labourer no longer thinks it possible to
+emigrate to America by driving over in a farm cart.
+The story is an East Anglian classic, how a farm
+labourer "didn't fare rightly to knaw" by what route
+they were going to the United States, "but we'm
+gwine ter sleep t' Debenham the fust night, so's to
+kinder break t' jarney." When railways came, and
+access to London grew easy, these simplicities gradually
+faded away. The young men took to "gettin'
+up the road," as the saying ran&mdash;otherwise, going to
+London&mdash;to "better themselves," and old illusions
+were soon dispelled; but in Arcady the mavis may
+still be seen knapping a dodman; the children of the
+rustic hamlets may be observed by the passing stranger
+gleefully sporting at the old game of tittymatorterin;
+the cowslips that in springtime turn the
+meadows to living gold are yet "paigles"; a small
+field remains, as ever, a "pightle," and when a countryman
+throws anything into a ditch, he "hulls" (or
+hurls) "it in t' holl," just as his ancestors did hundreds
+of years ago. Let some of the archaic words just
+noted be explained before we proceed any further.
+"Mavis" is the idyllic name of the thrush, and the
+"dodman," which he may be observed "knapping,"
+or breaking, is a snail; called in Essex, by the way,
+a "hodmadod." "Tittymatorterin" is just the simple
+game of "see-sawing." Besides these fleeting instances
+there are many other peculiarities. The Norfolk
+peasant will never pronounce the letter E if it be
+possible to avoid it. It becomes I in his mouth, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+a head becomes a "hid," while hens are "hins."
+Throughout the whole of the eastern counties, too,
+the elision of the final in the present tense is a
+feature of rustic talk. Examples of this peculiarity
+are found not only in modern speech, but in old
+epitaphs and inscriptions, dating back some hundreds
+of years. Thus, a bridge across the River Wensum,
+at Norwich, bears the sculptured effigy of a dragon's
+head with the words, "When dragon drink, Heigham
+sink." The meaning is that when the river rises and
+touches, or "rise" and "touch," as a Norfolk man
+would say, the dragon's mouth, the neighbouring
+Heigham becomes flooded. An older example still
+is seen on an inscription at Kimberley, to John
+Jenkin, in the words:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Under this stone rare Jenkin lie,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>while a comparatively modern one may be found in
+Stratford St Mary church, in the concluding lines of
+an epitaph dated 1739:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The Night is gone, ye Stars Remain,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">So man that die shall Live again."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Dickens has caught the East Anglian dialect
+readily enough in <i>David Copperfield</i>, where he
+makes Mr Peggotty say, "Cheer up, old mawther" to
+Mrs Grummidge, and speak of "a couple of mavishes,"
+while Ham talks to David as "Mas'r Davy, bor."
+The willing Barkis, too, who asks "do she now?"
+and speaks of the "stage-cutch," is a true product
+of the soil.</p>
+
+<p>For the benefit of those not to the manner born,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+let it be repeated that a "mawther" is not necessarily
+a parent. It is the generic name for a female. A
+"mawther" may therefore be a girl infant or a grown
+woman. "Bor" is, of course, a corruption of "neighbour,"
+but need not, in fact, specifically mean a
+neighbour, and is practically the masculine of
+"mawther," and applicable to any man; friend close
+at hand or stranger from distant parts.</p>
+
+<p>The Norfolk dialect has attained the distinction
+of being made the subject of study, and glossaries
+and collections of local words have long been made
+by enthusiasts in these matters. Perhaps the most
+interesting and amusing of the examples of Norfolk
+talk is found in the East Anglian version of the
+<i>Song of Solomon</i>, published many years ago by Prince
+Louis Lucien Bonaparte. It was taken down from a
+reading by a Norfolk peasant. A few verses will be
+instructive:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>1. The song o' songs, as is Sorlomun's.</p>
+
+<p>2. Lerr 'im kiss me wi' the kisses of his mouth;
+for yar love is better 'an wine.</p>
+
+<p>3. Becaze o' the smell o' yar intements, yar
+name is as intements pored out, therefoor du the
+mawthers love y&#277;.</p>
+
+<p>4. Dror m&#277;, we'll run arter y&#277;: the king he ha'
+browt me into his charmbers; we'll be glad and re&#299;jce
+in y&#277;; we'll remahmber yar love more 'an wine: the
+right-up love y&#277;.</p>
+
+<p>5. I em black, but tidy, O ye darters o' J'rusal'm,
+as the taents o' Kedar, as the cattins o' Sorlomun.</p>
+
+<p>6. Don't sin starrin' at me, cos I em black, 'ecos<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+the sun t'have barnt m&#277;; my mother's children wor
+sn&#257;sty wi' me; they made me keeper o' the winyerds,
+but m'own winyerd I han't kept.</p>
+
+<p>7. Tell onto me, yow hu my soul du love, where ye
+fade, where ye make yar flock to rest at nune: fur why
+shud I be as one tarn aside by yar cumrades' flock?</p>
+
+<p>8. If so bein' as y&#277; don't know, O yow bootifullest
+o' women, go yer ways furth by the futtin' o' the
+flock, and feed yer kids 'eside the shepherds' taents.</p>
+
+<p>9. I ha' likened yow, O my love, to a taamer o'
+hosses in Pharer's charrits.</p>
+
+<p>10. Yar cheeks are right fine wi' ringes of jewiltry,
+yer neck wi' chanes o' gold.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The full flavour of this vernacular is only to be
+obtained by reading the original verses side by side
+with the above.</p>
+
+<p>Among the sports that obtained on the borders of
+Norfolk and Suffolk of old was "camping." "Camping"
+was an old East Anglian game that, could it be revived,
+would please the footballing maniacs of our own
+day. It was a wild kind of football, played on these
+commons, often with a hundred players aside, and
+we are told that the roughest kind of Rugby football
+was child's play compared with it. If stories of
+old camping contests be true, it might almost seem
+that in ascribing the thinly-populated condition of
+Norfolk and Suffolk to the long-standing effects of
+the Black Death, and to mediæval insurrections and
+their resulting butcheries, we do an injustice to
+pestilence and the sword, and fail to make count
+of the casualties received in play. As the wondering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+Frenchman said, in witnessing a camping-match, "If
+these savages be at play, what would they be in
+war?"</p>
+
+<p>"These contests," says a Norfolk historian, "were
+not infrequently fatal to many of the combatants.
+I have heard old persons speak of a celebrated camping,
+Norfolk against Suffolk, on Diss Common, with
+three hundred on each side. Before the ball was
+thrown up, the Norfolk men inquired tauntingly of
+the Suffolk men if they had brought their coffins.
+The Suffolk men, after fourteen hours, were the
+victors. Nine deaths were the result of the conflict
+in a fortnight." Camping went out of favour about
+1810, and the coroners had an easier time.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dickleburgh</span>, the next village after Scole, is in its
+way as imposing a place, only not an inn, but a
+church, is its chief feature. The great church of
+Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced)
+charmingly screened from the street by a row of
+limes, but not so charmingly enclosed by a very
+long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to the
+road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims
+who once passed on their way to Our Lady of
+Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on either side
+of the east window, holding effigies of popular
+saints, and halting many a sinner for supplication.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+The saints are gone, torn down by Henry the
+Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing.
+They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond,
+or, broken up, serve the useful part of metalling the
+road. Adjoining the church stands the "King's
+Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of
+kings than intended as a portrait of any particular
+one. At any rate it resembles none of the long line
+of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time
+favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough
+to have been painted in the hey-day of his
+popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large
+for the present size of the place and for the empty
+country side; but there is a reason for the solitudes,
+and there was one for these huge buildings, ten times
+too large for the present needs of the shrunken
+villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most
+thickly-peopled of English counties, were practically
+depopulated in 1348 by that dreadful scourge, the
+Black Death. One-third of the total population
+of England perished under that terrible plague.
+The working classes were the worst sufferers, and
+the agriculturists, the weavers and labourers died
+in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground,
+industries decayed, and no man would work. When
+the pestilence was stayed, other parts of the country
+flourished in greater proportion, than this. Manufacturing
+industries arose elsewhere and attracted
+the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining
+consistently agricultural throughout the centuries,
+has never shared the increase; only the few and
+scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a><br /><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a><br /><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+the form of weaving in mediæval and later times,
+and in the manufacture of agricultural machinery
+nowadays. In the last two decades, with the
+decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry
+to London and the great centres of population, the
+country, and the eastern counties in especial, has
+become almost deserted.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus19">
+<img src="images/fig69.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">DICKLEBURGH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The present state of agriculture in Eastern
+England is made manifest in deserted farms, in
+broken gates left hanging precariously on one hinge,
+in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted
+ploughs and decrepit waggons standing derelict in
+the once fertile fields, now overrun with foul weeds
+and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles; and
+farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely
+to remain tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible
+to grow seeds and flowers, and market-gardening is
+profitable only in the lands more immediately surrounding
+the great towns. With wheat at its
+present price of thirty shillings a quarter, it does
+not pay to grow corn for the market, and the land
+is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still
+struggles on, he lays down most of his holding in
+grass for sheep and cattle, and grows, grudgingly,
+as little wheat as possible, for sake of the straw.
+Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat
+was down to twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers
+fed their pigs on the harvest which cost them three
+pounds more per acre to grow than it would have
+brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it
+yields no profit. Agricultural England is, in short,
+ruined, and there seems no present hope of things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful
+harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States,
+Russia and other wheat-producing countries can be
+cultivated, reaped, and carried to these shores at the
+prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders
+of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as
+advantageously, the English farmer must needs go
+without a living wage. As matters stand at present,
+we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat
+used in the country; the acreage under corn having
+gone down from 4,058,731 acres in 1852, to about
+half that at the present day. Meanwhile the population
+has increased by thirteen millions; so that,
+with many more mouths to fill, we grow only half
+the staple food these islands produced then. There
+are, of course, those who reap the advantage of cheap
+corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling
+millions of the towns and cities thrive on those
+benefits; but what if, through war, or from any other
+cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what
+avail would have been this generation of cheapness if
+at last the nation must starve? Extinguish agriculture
+and the farmer, and you cannot recall them at need,
+nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a
+land which has long gone untilled.</p>
+
+<p>But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more
+than the walls of a house can be demolished and the
+roof yet left standing. It was the farmer who in
+prosperous times supported the country gentleman
+in one direction, and the agricultural labourer in
+the other. With wheat, as it was a generation ago,
+at seventy shillings a quarter, and other products of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could
+afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms
+in those days were difficult to obtain, and there was
+great competition among farmers for holdings. To-day,
+even at a quarter of those rents, tenants are
+difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed
+proprietors has dwindled away. The results are
+painfully evident here, in the old families reduced or
+beggared, and their seats either in the market or let
+to stock-jobbers and successful business men, while
+the old owners have disappeared or live humbly in
+small houses once occupied by the steward or bailiff
+of the estate.</p>
+
+<p>While rents have thus, with the iron logic of
+circumstances, gone down to vanishing-point, and
+while farms have actually been offered rent free in
+order to prevent the disaster of the land being let
+go out of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances
+of the agricultural labourer have been, most
+illogically, improving. Instead of the miserable six
+to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives
+thirteen or fourteen shillings, lives in a decent cottage,
+instead of a wretched hovel, and finds the cost of food
+and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than his grandfather
+ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers
+are as difficult to get now as they were immediately
+after the Black Death had swept away three quarters
+of the working class, five hundred and fifty years
+ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they
+have done of recent years in East Anglia&mdash;for
+lack of hands to gather them in. It was in 1899<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+that standing crops at Tivitshall St Margaret's and
+adjacent parishes were sold by auction for a farmer
+who could find no labourer willing to be hired.</p>
+
+<p>What has been called the "rural exodus" is well
+named. London and the great towns have proved
+so attractive to the children of the middle-aged
+peasant that they despise the country. They can
+all read and write now, and at a pinch do simple
+sums in arithmetic; so off they go to the crowded
+streets. The ambitious aspire to a black coat and a
+stool in an office, and others become workmen of
+many kinds; but all are attracted by the higher
+wages to be earned in the towns, and by the excitement
+of living in the great centres of population,
+and only the aged and the aging will soon be left
+to till the fields.</p>
+
+<p>Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for
+the agricultural labourer's attempts to better himself.
+To them they are almost impious; but the
+farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of
+culture. He is a vastly different fellow from his
+grandfather, who actually helped to till the soil
+among his own men; whose wife and daughters were
+noted hands at milking and buttermaking; who
+lived in the kitchen, among the hams and the
+domestic utensils, and was not above eating the
+same food as, and at the same table with, his
+ploughmen and carters. He has, in fact, and so
+also have the landed proprietor and the labourer,
+undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process
+which had started certainly by 1825, when Cobbett
+noticed it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Hear him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>"When the old farmhouses are down (and
+down they must come in time) what a miserable
+thing the country will be! Those that are now
+erected are mere painted shells, with a mistress
+within who is stuck up in a place she calls the
+parlour, with, if she have children, the 'young
+ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy
+chairs and a sofa (a <i>sofa</i> by all means); half-a-dozen
+prints in gilt frames hanging up; some
+swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon
+them; a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps
+better 'educated' than she; two or three nick-nacks
+to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a
+pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed
+carter to be allowed to come into; and everything
+proclaiming to every sensible beholder that there
+is here a constant anxiety to make a <i>show</i> not
+warranted by the reality. The children (which is
+the worst part of it) are all too clever to <i>work;</i>
+they are all to be <i>gentlefolks</i>. Go to <i>plough</i>! Good
+God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough!
+They become <i>clerks</i>, or some skimming-dish thing
+or other. They flee from the dirty <i>work</i> as cunning
+horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this!
+What a mass of materials for proclaiming that
+general and <i>dreadful convulsion</i> that must, first
+or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing
+and enslaving and starving system to atoms."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The "convulsion" anticipated by Cobbett has
+not come about. This is not a country of earthquakes
+or of violent social upheavals. Free Trade<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+has beggared the agricultural interests, but, on his
+way to the Bankruptcy Court, the farmer contrives
+to live in better style than possible three quarters
+of a century ago, while his pretensions to gentility
+certainly have not decreased. As for the "funding
+and jobbing," Cobbett could never, in his wildest
+dreams, have foreseen Limited Liability and the
+fungoid growth of Stock Exchange speculation, or
+the modern "enslaving and starving system" of
+the gigantic Trusts that, like vampires, feed on
+the blood of industry. We need look for no convulsions;
+not even, unhappily, for the hanging, or,
+at least, the taxing out of existence, of the
+millionaires. Our expectations of the future are
+quite different. The people will inhabit the towns,
+and the country will become a huge preserve of
+game for the sport of the millionaires aforesaid; a
+preserve broken here and there by the model farm
+or the training establishment of some colossus of
+wealth.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Beyond</span> Dickleburgh, past the solitary "Ram" inn,
+a fine, dignified house still lamenting its decadence
+from a posting-inn to a beerhouse, Tivetshall level-crossing
+marks where the railway runs to Bungay
+and Lowestoft. Maps make Pulham St Mary the
+Virgin quite near, with Pulham St Mary Magdalene
+close by; Tivetshalls of different dedications, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+other villages dotted about like plums in a Christmas
+pudding, but no sign of them is evident. Only
+windmills, whirling furiously on distant ridges,
+break the pastoral solitudes. In this conflict of
+charts, a carter jogging along the road with his team
+is evidently the authority to be consulted.</p>
+
+<p>"Coom hather," says the carter to his sleek and
+intelligent horses; and they coom accordingly, with
+much jingling of harness, and stand in the shade of
+roadside trees while their lord takes his modest
+levenses and haffles and jaffles&mdash;gossips, that is to
+say&mdash;with the landlord of the "Ram."</p>
+
+<p>"Tivetshall?" asks the carter, echoing a question;
+"niver heerd of un." Then a light breaks in upon
+him. "Oh, ay! Tishell we allus call 'em; Tishell
+St Marget an' Tishell St Merry," and with, a sweep
+of the arm comprising the whole western horizon,
+"Theiy'm ower theer."</p>
+
+<p>"And Pulham St Mary the Virgin?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pulham St Merry the Wirgin? oh, yis! Pulham
+Maaket, yar mean, bor. Et edd'n on'y a moile, ower
+<i>theer</i>"&mdash;a comprehensive wave to the eastwards.</p>
+
+<p>And there, on a byroad, in an embrace of trees, it
+is found, a little forgotten town, the greater proportion
+of whose inhabitants appear to walk with two sticks.
+It is ranged round a green or market-place, with a
+great Perpendicular church, gorgeously frescoed
+within, and with a very good recent "Ascension" over
+the chancel arch, painted and stencilled timber roof,
+and elaborate stained-glass windows. The townlet
+and townsfolk sinking into decay, the church an object
+of such care and expense, afford a curious contrast.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>An old toll-house and the prison-like buildings
+of Depwade Union conspire to make desolate the
+road onwards. He who presses, hot-foot, along it,
+turning neither to the right nor to the left, may
+readily be excused a legitimate wonder as to what
+has become of the great feature of East Anglia, its
+spreading commons; for, strange to say, despite the
+fame they have long since attained, no vestige of
+them is glimpsed from the road itself. One has
+usually to turn aside to some of the villages lying
+near, but wholly hidden from the highway, to find
+the yet unenclosed common lands, the pasturage of
+geese, ducks and turkeys; but a striking exception
+to this now general rule is the huge common of
+Wacton lying off to the left of the road at the
+hundredth mile from London, where a cottage and a
+wayside inn, the "Duke's Head," alone represent
+Wacton village, a mile distant. Wacton Common,
+reputed to be the highest point in Norfolk, although
+of no less extent than three hundred and fifty acres,
+might perhaps be passed without being seen, for the
+reason that, although still wild and unenclosed, it is
+screened from the high road by a hedge and entered
+through an ordinary field gate. The inn and the
+cottage, obviously built on land fraudulently taken
+from the common in the long ago, serve with their
+gardens to hide that glorious expanse of grass and
+heather. Here roam those chartered vagabonds,
+the plump geese, that pick up a living on the
+grassy commons and wander, like free-booting
+bands of feathered moss-troopers upon the heaths,
+closing their careers with royal feasting in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a><br /><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a><br /><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+August and September stubble, and a Michaelmas
+martyrdom.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus20">
+<img src="images/fig70.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">A DISPUTED PASTURAGE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their
+geese, but those martyred fowls do not make their
+final journey to the London markets, between
+Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they
+once attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays
+in the seclusion of railway vans. Seventy years ago
+they journeyed by coach, and in state, for the Norfolk
+coaches in Christmas week often carried nothing save
+geese and turkeys, beside the coachman and guard.
+Full inside and out with such a freight, the proprietors
+of fast coaches made a great deal more by
+carrying them than they would have taken by a load
+of passengers; so the fowls had the preference, while
+travellers had to take their chance of finding a seat
+in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the
+turkeys conveyed from Norwich to London between
+a Saturday morning and Sunday night in December
+numbered one thousand seven hundred, and weighed
+9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was £680. They
+were followed on the two succeeding days by half as
+many more.</p>
+
+<p>A Norfolk common without its screaming and
+hissing flocks of geese would seem strangely untenanted.
+They, the turkeys, the ducks, the donkeys
+("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom
+fowls are among the only vestiges of the wild life
+that once made Norfolk famous to the naturalist and
+not a little eerie to the traveller of old, who, startled
+on the lonely way that stretched by heath and
+common and fen between the habitations of men,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+shrank appalled at the lumbering flight of the huge
+bustards, quivered with apprehension at the sudden
+hideous whirring of the night-jar as the day closed
+in, dismayed, heard the bittern booming among the
+reeds, or with misgivings of the supernatural saw the
+fantastical ruff stalking on long legs, with prodigious
+beak, red eyes and spreading circle of neck feathers,
+like the creation of some disordered imagination.
+Wild Norfolk, the home of these and of many another
+strange creature, is no more, and these species, now
+chiefly extinct, are to be seen only in museums of
+natural history.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus73">
+<img src="images/fig71.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">LONG STRATTON.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>What Wacton lacks along the high road the
+village of Long Stratton has in superabundance.
+They named it well who affixed the adjective, for it
+measures a mile from end to end. Beginning
+with modern and (to speak kindly) uninteresting
+cottages, it ends in a broad street where almost every
+house is old and beautiful in lichened brick or soft-toned
+plaster. Midway of this lengthy thoroughfare
+stands the church, one of the Norfolk round-towered
+kind, in the usual black flint, and beyond it the
+Manor House, red brick, with Adam scrolls and
+neo-classical palm branches in plaster for trimmings,
+set back at some distance behind a very newty,
+froggy and tadpoley moat. Beyond this again, the
+village street broadens out. Looking back upon it,
+when one has finally climbed uphill on the way to
+Norwich, Long Stratton is a place entirely charming.
+Its name, of course, derives from its situation on the
+Roman Road, and Tasburgh, that now comes in
+sight, keeps yet its Roman camp strongly posted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a><br /><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a><br /><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+above the River Tase. Tasburgh&mdash;what little there
+is of a village&mdash;occupies an acclivity on the further
+side of that river, across whose wide and marshy valley
+the mists rise early, seeing the sun to bed dull and
+tarnished, and attending the rising of the moon with
+ghostly vapours. The old Roman camp is oddly and
+picturesquely occupied by the parish church, another
+round-towered example. Excepting it, the vicarage
+and the Dutch-like building of the "Bird in Hand"
+Inn, there is little else.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus21">
+<img src="images/fig72.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">LONG STRATTON.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But what mean these sounds of anger and lamentation
+that drown the soothing, distant rattle of reaping
+machines on the hillside: a voice raised in
+reproach, and another&mdash;a treble one&mdash;in gusty
+shrieks of combined pain, fear and peevishness?
+Coming round a corner, the cause of the disturbance
+is revealed in a wet and muddy infant rubbing dirty
+knuckles into streaming eyes, and being violently reproached
+by an indignant woman.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You're a pretty article, I must say; a fine
+spettacle. I'll give yow a good sowsin', my lord;
+coom arn;" and the malefactor is pulled suddenly
+inside the cottage, the door slammed, and muffled
+yells heard, alternating with thumps. The offender
+is receiving that sowsing, or being "yerked,"
+"clipped over the ear-hole," getting a "siseraring,"
+being "whanged" or "clouted," the striking Norfolk
+phrases for varieties of assault and battery.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Tase is met with again on surmounting the
+hilly road out of Tasburgh and coming down hill into
+Newton Flotman. Here it is broad enough to require
+a long and substantial bridge, grouping in unaccustomed
+rightness of composition with the mingled
+thatched, tiled and slated cottages and the church
+that stands on a commanding knoll in the background.
+When Newton was really new it would be
+impossible to say; perhaps its novelty may have been
+measured against the hoary antiquity of, say, Caistor
+yonder, down the valley. For what says the folk-rhyme:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials,
+why not, in degree, Newton Flotman? But a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+whisper. Caistor was never more than a camp, and
+not at any time a place of houses, much less of stone
+ones. Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood,
+and flint only, of which Norwich is principally
+built, is available for building materials.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus74">
+<img src="images/fig73.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">TASBURGH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the
+passing stranger is a little effigy of Bacchus fixed on
+the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn, so thickly
+covered with successive coats of paint that it is
+difficult to give it a period. Remains of Roman
+antiquities are so many in this district that it is
+often mistaken for a work of that classic age, when
+it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of
+the late eighteenth century, a time when figures of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+the kind were a usual decoration of inn signs. Such
+an one still swings from the wrought-iron sign of
+the "Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.</p>
+
+<p>In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton
+Flotman lies Dunston, trees casting a protecting and
+secretive shade over it, and the "Dun Cow" Inn its
+only roadside representative. That inn and the
+circular brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle
+redeem the last few miles into Norwich from
+absolute emptiness. When the pound last was used
+who shall say? The tramps have played havoc with
+it, and its wooden gate has gone. The ancient
+office of pound-keeper is here evidently fallen into
+disuse.</p>
+
+<p>Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on
+the level to the left, but Caistor, in like manner with
+Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage, half a mile or more
+away in the valley, its church tower rising like a
+grey beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious
+where its ancient camp may be found. Caistor St
+Edmunds, to give its full name, is the site of the
+great Roman camp established here to overawe the
+stronghold of the Iceni, four miles away on the
+banks of the Wensum, and now the site of Norwich.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus22">
+<img src="images/fig74.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NEWTON FLOTMAN.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of
+a Roman fortified <i>castrum</i>. For one thing, it has
+the largest area of any known relic of its kind in
+England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its
+fragments of flint walls have neither the thickness
+nor the height of those at Portus Rutupiæ, the old
+Roman port in Thanet, now known as Richborough,
+its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a><br /><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a><br /><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>laggard imagination of the layman in matters
+archæological, which refuses to be stirred before
+mere undulations in the sward. Here is a ditch
+that can be rolled into, an embankment that can be
+climbed and paced on three sides of the camp, if
+necessary, to put to physical test both height, depth
+and extent. The fourth side of this great enclosure,
+now a turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase
+and was sufficiently defended by that stream, then a
+wide creek, so that no works are to be found there.
+How long it was before the Romans subdued the
+Iceni, whose great city is thought to have stood
+where Norwich does now, is not known. Nothing
+of that early time here, indeed, is <i>known</i>, and guesses
+are of the vaguest. Only it seems that the Roman
+advance into East Anglia, which had for its objective<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+the principal stronghold of the tribes, here came to
+its military ending. To compare things so ancient
+and romantic with others modern and thought
+prosaic, the several Roman camps on the advance
+from London now to be sought at Uphall near
+Romford; Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and
+Tasburgh, are, with those that have disappeared, to
+be looked upon in the same light as the wayside
+stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which
+originally came to a terminus at that city, and was
+only at a later date continued northward.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus75">
+<img src="images/fig75.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE OLD BRICK POUND.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Where the Romans and the Romano-British
+citizens of Venta lived when the tribes were reduced&mdash;where
+the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really
+was, in fact&mdash;is a mystery, for, unlike most of our
+great cities, Norwich has furnished no relics of that
+age; while, beyond coins and odds and ends, Caistor
+camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of streets
+or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and
+Venta might, for all there is to show of it, have been
+a city of dreams. The fact that the original capital
+of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes when they
+came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the
+site of it having long been deserted; and that they
+called it after the North "wic" or creek, presupposes
+a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far.
+The position of that south creek is fixed by the
+ancient geography of these last few miles. In those
+times the ground on which Yarmouth, at the mouth
+of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the
+waves of the sea, which ran up in a long navigable
+creek&mdash;the "Gariensis" of the Romans and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+"North Wic" of the Danes&mdash;from a Roman fortified
+port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site
+of Norwich, which indeed, centuries later, was still
+a port. Where the River Tase is now confluent with
+the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out
+a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running
+almost due south; the "South wic" of those
+northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where
+the navigation ceased.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus76">
+<img src="images/fig76.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">CAISTOR CAMP.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of
+the Tase still bears signs of those old conditions, and
+perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman citizens, together
+with other relics of the vanished city, still lie preserved
+deep down in the mud and silt that have
+filled up the old channel.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The lie of the land, in accord with these views,
+is plain to see when, returning to the high road, the
+journey to Norwich is continued to Hartford Bridge;
+bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the
+right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several
+bridges, none of them sizeable, rivers, streams and
+runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and gurgle in their
+different ways through flat meadows, below the long
+rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins
+to grow suburban. It is on the summit that the
+Newmarket and Thetford route from London joins
+with this, and together they descend into the city.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">This</span> way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on
+her great "progress" of 1578, by St Stephen's
+Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates and
+walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or
+even condemned the belated citizen to lodge the
+night without the precincts of the city, in suburbs
+not in those times to be reckoned safe.</p>
+
+<p>Norwich long ago swept away her defences and
+modernised her outskirts, for this is no Sleepy
+Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the
+Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing
+with industry and in every way in the forefront
+of modern life. To the entrance from London
+Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+No general view of the city, lying in its hollow
+beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and the eye
+seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some
+difficulty, modestly peering over tangled modern
+roof-tops. It is from quite the opposite direction,
+from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that
+Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of
+cathedral, churches and houses, with trees and
+gardens, such as no other city can show, displayed
+within its bounds. Norwich does not jump
+instantly to the antiquarian eye, and its electric
+tramways that are the first to greet the traveller
+who enters from the old coach road are not a little
+forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the
+stranger in all its wealth of beauty and interest,
+and becomes more and more lovable the better
+he becomes acquainted with it.</p>
+
+<p>Until these railway times, in the old days of
+slow, difficult, dangerous and expensive travelling,
+the capital of East Anglia was in a very high
+degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its
+shipping trade and weaving industries, and the
+famous Norwich School of artists, brought this
+exclusive attitude down from mediæval times to
+modern; and Norfolk county families until the era
+of political reform had almost dawned, still had
+their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in bygone
+centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons,
+owned their town houses in Hungate and in what
+is now called King Street, formerly Conisford
+Street.</p>
+
+<p>The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+mazy streets to inns widely sundered. The original
+"Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater
+part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head,"
+in Tombland. On the other hand, the Mails, the
+"Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to and
+started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street
+of the same name, standing not far from the
+beginnings of the city. The street is there still,
+but the oddly-named inn has given place to
+shops, and where the "Rampant Horse" ramped
+rampageously, in violent contrast with the mild-mannered
+"Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers'
+establishments now hold forth seductive announcements
+of "alarming sacrifices."</p>
+
+<p>Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day
+Coach" and the "Phenomenon" favoured the
+"Angel," in the Market Place, while the "Times"
+house was the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and
+that of the "Expedition" the "Swan" Inn. Other
+inns, many of them huddled together under the lee
+of the castle mound, were then to be found in the
+Market Place and the Haymarket and in the narrow
+alley in the rear that still goes by name of "Back
+of the Inns." Others yet, many of mediæval age,
+are to be sought in old nooks of the city. The
+Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary Tavern, like the
+"Old Barge," belongs to the fourteenth century,
+the last named still standing between King Street
+and the river, with a picturesque but battered
+entrance. The steep and winding lane of Elm
+Hill, where the slum population of Norwich stew
+and pig together down ancient courts and dirty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but unrestored;
+and in the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully
+called Tombland, although it has not, nor ever
+had, anything to do with tombs, is the "Maid's
+Head," the one establishment in Norwich that stands
+pre-eminently for old times and good cheer. It is
+an "hotel" now, and has the modern conveniences
+of sanitation and electric light; but its restoration,
+effected through the enthusiasm of a local antiquary,
+with both the opportunity of purchasing the property
+and the means of doing so, has been carried
+through with taste and discrimination. The "Maid's
+Head" can with certainty claim a history of six
+hundred years, and is thought to have been built
+upon the site of a former Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered
+ceilings and masonry of evident antiquity
+may take parts of the present house back so far,
+or even a greater length, but the especial pride
+of the "Maid's Head" is its beautiful Jacobean
+woodwork. The old sign of the house was the
+"Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that
+antiquaries still boggle at. It was long a cherished
+legend that this strange and unlovely name was
+changed to the present sign in complimentary
+allusion to Queen Elizabeth when she first visited
+the city, but later researches have proved the
+change to have been made at least a century earlier,
+and so goes another belief!</p>
+
+<p>The "Music House," facing the now disreputable
+King Street, has not for so very long been an inn.
+Its name tells of a time when it was the meeting-place
+of the "city music," old-time ancestors of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+modern town bands, but its story goes back to the
+Norman period, when the crypt that bears up the
+thirteenth-century building above was part of the
+home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his
+nephew. "Isaac's Hall," as it was known, was
+seized by King John and given to one of his
+creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they
+were allowed to live at all, finding cool quarters in
+the castle dungeons. A long succession of owners,
+including the Pastons, followed; last among them
+Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who resided
+here in 1633.</p>
+
+<p>It has already been hinted that the streets of
+Norwich are mazy. They are indeed the most perplexing
+of any town in England. Many roads run
+into the city, and from every direction. Glancing at a
+plan of it, these roads resemble the main strands of
+a spider's web, and the streets the cross webs. In
+midst of this maze is the great castle, like the spider
+himself; that cruel keep in whose dungeons old
+wrong-doing, religious and private spite, have immured
+many a wretched captive, like that unfortunate
+unknown "Bartholomew," who has left his name
+scratched on the walls, and the statement that he
+was here confined "saunz resun," a reason of the
+best in those times. Did he ever see the light
+of day again? Or did some midnight assassin
+murder him as many another had been done to
+death?</p>
+
+<p>"Blanchflower," that Bigod, Earl of Norwich who
+built the castle called his keep when it arose on its
+great mound, its stone new and white. He built<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+upon the site of a castle thought to have been
+Saxon, and built so well that it became a fortress
+impregnable save to famine and treachery. It has,
+therefore, unlike weaker places that have been
+stormed again and again, little history, and even
+seven hundred years ago was little more than a
+prison. And a prison of sorts&mdash;for State captives
+first, and for common malefactors afterwards&mdash;it
+remained until so recently as 1883, when it was
+restored and then opened as the Museum and Art
+Gallery it now is.</p>
+
+<p>This is no place to speak at length of the cathedral
+that withdraws itself with such ecclesiastical reserve
+from the busy quarters of the city, and is approached
+decorously through ancient gateways in the walls of
+its surrounding close; the Ethelbert Gate, with that
+other, the Erpingham Gate, built in Harry the
+Fifth's time by Sir Thomas Erpingham, whose little
+kneeling effigy yet remains in its niche in the gable
+over the archway, and whose motto&mdash;variously held
+to be "Yenk," or "Think,"&mdash;"Denk," or "Thank"&mdash;is
+repeated many times on the stone work. Norman
+monastic gloom still broods over the close, for the
+cathedral, save the Decorated cloisters and the light
+and graceful spire in the same style, is almost
+wholly of that period, and the grammar school
+that was once a mediæval mortuary chapel and has
+its playground in the crypt, keeps a gravity of
+demeanour that, considering its history, is eminently
+proper.</p>
+
+<p>Through the Close lies the way to Bishop's Bridge
+and the steep road up to Mousehold Heath: the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+"Monk's Hold," or monastic property, of times gone
+by when it was common land of the manor belonging
+to the Benedictine priory.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XL</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus23">
+<img src="images/fig77.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Here</span>, on this famous Heath of Mousehold where the
+gorse and heather and the less common broom yet
+flourish, despite the electric tramways that bring up
+the crowds and the picnic parties, Nature, rugged
+and unconquerable, looks down upon the city, revealed
+as a whole. Even though the chimneys of
+great factories may intrude and smirch the sky when
+winds permit the smoke-wreaths to trail across the
+view, it is a view quite unspoilable. The cathedral,
+as is only proper, is the grand dominating feature,
+with its central tower and graceful crocketed spire
+rising to a height of 320 feet. Second to it, on its
+left hand, the huge bulk of the castle keep rears up;
+a time-ball on its battlements to give the time o' day
+to the busy citizens; those battlements where from a
+gibbet they hanged Robert Kett in 1549, when his
+rebellion was crushed and his army of 20,000
+peasants who had encamped on Mousehold defeated.
+In similar fashion his brother William was
+hanged from Wymondham steeple. Between castle
+and cathedral the great tower of St Peter Mancroft
+looms up, and on the other side of the cathedral
+tower the twin spires of the Roman Catholic place of
+worship crown the sky-line. To the extreme right of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a><br /><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a><br /><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>the accompanying illustration is St Giles's, and on the
+extreme left, in company with the pinnacled tower of
+a modern church, the dark tower of St John-at-Sepulchre,
+Bracondale, which for shortness and
+simplicity the citizens call "Ber Street Church." For
+the rest, it is a mingling of town and country, of
+houses and gardens and churches in great number,
+that one sees down there; old Norwich, in short,
+exclusive of the modern suburbs that are flung everywhere
+around and cause the Norwich of to-day to
+outnumber the Norwich of coaching times by 80,000
+inhabitants. It must be evident from those figures
+that the picturesque old Norwich numbering
+a population of only 30,000 has been in great
+degree improved away and borne under by that
+human deluge. It is delightful now, but what it was
+at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
+Crome and De Wint and others sketched and painted
+its quaint bits, the picture-galleries of the Castle
+Museum can tell. Nay, even down to the mid-nineteenth
+century it was still very different, as a
+collection of early photographs in the castle proves.
+Then, before St Peter Mancroft was restored, before
+the old Fish Market was cleared away, Norwich had
+many more quaint nooks than now to show the
+stranger; even as, centuries before, it was yet more
+quaint and even more remarkable for its many
+churches than at the present time.</p>
+
+<p>"The nearer the church the further from God,"
+says the old saw. How irreligious then should
+Norwich be, that has even yet a cathedral and thirty-four
+ancient churches, and modern places of worship<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+fully as numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as
+old Fuller suggested, "make good use of their
+churches and cross that pestilent proverb." These
+churches bear a close resemblance to one another,
+having nearly all been rebuilt in the Perpendicular
+period, some five hundred years ago, and all built of
+the black flint that gives a character to East Anglian
+architecture quite distinct from that of other districts.
+The time when they were thus rebuilt was not only a
+great period of church-building throughout England,
+but a time of especial prosperity in mercantile and
+trading Norwich; a time when guilds grew powerful
+and merchants wealthy in the flourishing industry of
+cloth-weaving introduced some time earlier by
+Flamand and Hollander immigrants. English wool
+that before had gone across the narrow seas for
+manufacture into stuffs was now weaved in the land
+of its growth. "Many thousands," says Blomefield,
+"that before could not get their bread could now by
+this means live handsomely." In that age, to become
+rich and prosperous was to become also a founder and
+benefactor of churches; hence the great ecclesiastical
+buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor
+of an old writer, writing when there were no fewer
+than sixty-one churches in the city, "surrounded the
+cathedral as the stars do the moon." The old citizens
+sleep in the parish churches for which they did so
+much; their monuments in brass or marble, stone or
+alabaster curiously wrought, often with their
+"merchant's marks"&mdash;the distinctive signs with
+which they labelled their wares&mdash;engraved on them
+in lieu of coats of arms. It is as though a modern
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a><br /><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a><br /><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>trader were to have the registered trade-mark of his
+speciality engraved on his tombstone. A typical
+memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of
+Thomas Sotherton, in the church of St John
+Maddermarket. He&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Under this cold marbell sleeps,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>and was no common fellow, mark you, but</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus24">
+<img src="images/fig78.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH MARKET PLACE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Although the calendar of saints is a long one and
+more than sufficiently lengthy to have provided each
+one of the Norwich churches with a patron, yet so
+popular were some saints, that several churches to
+the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also in
+the city of London. As in old London, it was in
+those cases necessary to confer surnames, so to speak,
+upon those churches.</p>
+
+<p>They are surnames of the geographical sort and
+not a little curious. The four St Peters are, for
+example, St Peter Mancroft, the largest and most
+important in the city, so called from the Magna
+Croft, or large field of the castle; St Peter per
+Mountergate, in King Street, named from the road
+by the "montem," the hill or mount, that runs
+ridge-like in its rear; St Peter Hungate, the
+"hundred gate," or road, reminiscent of the time
+when Norwich was a hundred of itself, even as it is
+now by itself a county; and St Peter Southgate.
+St Michael-at-Thorn has still thorn trees growing in
+its churchyard; St Michael Coslany, with St Mary's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+of identical surname, was built in Coast Lane; and
+St Michael-at-Plea was named from its neighbourhood
+to an ecclesiastical court. St John Maddermarket
+is thus distinguished from other St Johns&mdash;St
+John Timberhill and St John-at-Sepulchre. In
+the neighbourhood of the first-named, madder for the
+dyers' use was marketed; while at Timberhill was
+the market in wood. St Martin-at-Palace, by the
+old Bishop's Palace, and St-Martin-at-Oak take up
+the tale, which might be continued at great length.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus77">
+<img src="images/fig79.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH SNAP.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The business life of modern Norwich centres in
+the Market Place and the streets that immediately
+lead out of it: the mouldering signs of old commerce
+peer in peaked gables, clustered chimneys and
+old red-brick and plastered walls in the lanes and
+along the wharves of the Wensum.</p>
+
+<p>There trade hustles and elbows to the front, in
+many-storeyed piles of brick, stone and stucco, with
+great show of goods in plate-glass windows and bold
+advertisement of gilt lettering. All those signs of
+prosperity may be seen, and on a larger scale, in
+London, but not even in London are the electric<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+tram cars so great a menace to life and limb as in
+these narrow and winding streets, where they dash
+along at reckless speed.</p>
+
+<p>The Market Place is not yet wholly spoilt. The
+huge bulk of St Peter Mancroft and a row of queer
+old houses beside it still avert that disaster, and form
+a picture from one point of view; while the flint-faced
+Guildhall stands at another corner of the great
+open place and in its Council Chamber, in use five
+hundred years ago as a Court of Justice, and still so
+used, proves the continuity of "our rough island
+story." In a dark and dismal cell of the Guildhall
+once lay the heroic martyr, Thomas Bilney, who
+"testified" at the stake in the Lollards' Pit, where
+many another had already yielded up his life. He
+wondered, as others before and after him had done
+and were to do, whether the tortured body could
+pass steadfast through the fiery ordeal; and on the
+eve of his martyrdom put that doubt to the test by
+holding his finger in the flame of a candle. That
+test sufficed, and he suffered with unshaken constancy
+when the morrow dawned.</p>
+
+<p>The Guildhall has less tragical memories than this,
+and was indeed the scene of many old-time municipal
+revelries in times before Corporations became reformed.
+But old revels and frolics have been discontinued,
+and "Snap," the Norwich dragon, a fearsome
+beast of gilded wickerwork, who was wont to be
+paraded from the Guildhall at the annual mayoral
+election, and last frolicked with his attendant beadles
+and whifflers in 1835, now reposes in the Castle
+Museum.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Market Place on Saturday, when the wide
+open square is close-packed with stalls, is Norwich
+at its most characteristic time and in its most
+characteristic spot. In it the story of the Norwich
+Road may fitly end. The city itself, glanced at in
+the immediately foregoing pages, could not yield its
+story in less space than that occupied by that of the
+road itself.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus78">
+<img src="images/fig80.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="c xlarge p2 gesperrt">INDEX</p></div>
+
+<ul class="index"><li class="ifrst">  Aldgate, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Pump, <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  "Bacon End," <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Boreham, <a href="#Page_127">127-129</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Bow, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75-80</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Bridge, <a href="#Page_77">77-79</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Brentwood, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94-99</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Brockford, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Brome, <a href="#Page_261">261</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Brook Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Hill, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Caistor St Edmunds, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301-303</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Capel St Mary, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Chadwell Heath, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Street, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114-121</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Chipping Hill, <a href="#Page_133">133-139</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Claydon, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Hall, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Coaches:--</li>
+<li class="isub2">"Confatharrat," <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Expedition," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Gurney's Original Day Coach," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Ipswich Blues," <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- and Yarmouth Mail," <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Post Coaches," <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Shannon," <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Umpire," <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Magnet," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"New Colchester," <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Norwich Machine," <a href="#Page_34">34-36</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Mail," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Post Coach," <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Times," <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Parcel Mail," <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Phænomenon," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Telegraph," <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Coaching, <a href="#Page_30">30-51</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142-151</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Coaching Notabilities:--</li>
+<li class="isub2">Alexander, Israel, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Nelson, Mrs Ann, <a href="#Page_19">19-25</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, George, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, John, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25-27</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Robert, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Suggate (Norwich carrier), <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Thorogood, John, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Colchester, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179-212</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Constable, John, R.A., <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217-219</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Copdock, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Copford, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  <i>Copperfield, David</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Creeting, All Saints, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Creetings, The, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Dedham, <a href="#Page_217">217-221</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Deodand, Law of, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Dickleburgh, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277-279</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Dilbridge, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Dunston, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Feering, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Forest Gate, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Goodmayes, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Gore Pit, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Great Eastern Railway, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51-54</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Hare Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Hartford Bridge, <a href="#Page_304">304</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Hatfield Peverel, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Highwaymen, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58-62</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Highwaymen:--</li>
+<li class="isub2">Cratfield, Rev. Wm., <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">King, Matthew, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Robert, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Tom, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Tapyrtone, Thomas, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Turpin, Richard, <a href="#Page_57">57-62</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Ilford, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Ingatestone, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105-110</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Inns (mentioned at length):--</li>
+<li class="isub2">"Angel," Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Belle Sauvage," Ludgate Hill, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Black Boy," Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Blossoms," Laurence Lane, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Blue Boar," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_28">28</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Posts," Witham, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Bull," Bishopsgate Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Leadenhall Street, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19-28</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Cauliflower," Ilford, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Coach and Horses," Upton, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Cock," Thwaite, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Cross Keys," Gresham Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Duke's Head," Wacton, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Fleece," Brook Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Flower Pot," Bishopsgate Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Four Swans," <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Golden Cross," Charing Cross, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Good Woman," Widford, <a href="#Page_111">111-114</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Grave Maurice," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Great White Horse," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247-252</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Gun," Dedham, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Half Moon," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Horse and Leaping Bar," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"King's Head," Dickleburgh, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Lion and Lamb," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Magpie," Little Stonham, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Maid's Head," Newton Flotman, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Music House," Norwich, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Norfolk Hotel," Norwich, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Popinjay," Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Queen's Head," Thwaite, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Rampant Horse," Norwich, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Red Lion," Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Rising Sun," Manor Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Saracen's Head," Aldgate, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_117">117-120</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Spread Eagle," Gracechurch Street, <a href="#Page_15">15-19</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Sun," Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Swan," Washbrook, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Swan-with-Two-Necks," Gresham Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Three Cups," Colchester, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>,  <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Springfield, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Three Nuns," Aldgate, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Vine," Mile End, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Wheatsheaf," Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"White Elm," Copdock, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Hart," Brentwood, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Scole, <a href="#Page_262">262-271</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Witham, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"White Horse," Fetter Lane, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- Horse, Widford, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Ipswich, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237-252</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139-153</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Langham, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Lexden, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177-181</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Heath, <a href="#Page_177">177-179</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Little Stonham, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  "London Stone," <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Long Stratton, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292-295</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Manor Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Margaretting, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Mark's Tey, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Martyr's Tree, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Mile End, <a href="#Page_70">70-74</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  "Mockbeggar Hall," <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Moulsham, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Mountnessing, <a href="#Page_101">101-105</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Needham Market, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  New Hall, <a href="#Page_123">123-127</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Newton Flotman, <a href="#Page_296">296-299</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Norwich, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302-320</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Old Ford, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Old-time travellers:--</li>
+<li class="isub2">Caroline of Brunswick, Princess, Queen of George IV., <a href="#Page_165">165-168</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess, Queen of George III., <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Kemp, Will, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Queen Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">William III., <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Old-time travelling, <a href="#Page_142">142-150</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159-168</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225-237</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Parcel Mail, <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Pulham St Mary Magdalene, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary the Virgin, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Puttels Bridge, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Rivenhall End, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Romford, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88-93</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Scole, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262-272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Seven Kings, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83-85</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Shenfield, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Shrubland Park, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Springfield, <a href="#Page_121">121-123</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Stanway, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174-178</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Steam Coaches, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Stoke Ash, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Stonham Aspall, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Earls, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Stratford (Langthorne), <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ----- -le-Bow, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75-80</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223-225</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Swainsthorpe, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Tasburgh, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Thwaite, <a href="#Page_259">259</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Tivetshall St Margaret, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Toll-gates, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Uphall, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Upton Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Wacton, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Common, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Washbrook, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  West Ham, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Whalebone House, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62-69</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Whitton Street, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Widford, <a href="#Page_111">111-114</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Witham, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131-139</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Woodgrange, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Writtle, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Yaxley, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+
+<p class="c medium">
+EDINBURGH<br />
+COLSTON AND COY, LTD.<br />
+PRINTERS
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+
+<p class="c">Transcriber's Notes:</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistent hyphenation is retained.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistent punctuation is retained.</p>
+
+
+</div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 61087 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/61087-0.txt b/old/61087-0.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Norwich Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: The Norwich Road
+       An East Anglian Highway
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+Release Date: January 3, 2020 [EBook #61087]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NORWICH ROAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Alan and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: SCOLE WHITE HART.]
+
+
+
+
+                             =THE NORWICH
+                            ROAD=: AN EAST
+                            ANGLIAN HIGHWAY
+
+                         By CHARLES G. HARPER
+
+           Author of "_The Brighton Road_," "_The Portsmouth
+            Road_," "_The Dover Road_," "_The Bath Road_,"
+         "_The Exeter Road_," _and_ "_The Great North Road_."
+
+                 _Illustrated by the Author, and from
+                    Old-Time Prints and Pictures._
+
+                            [Illustration]
+
+                   LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL LTD. 1901
+
+                       [_All Rights reserved._]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_The author of a little book published in 1818, called_ A JOURNEY TO
+LONDON, _which is nearly all "London" with very little "journey,"
+remarks that "it is as uncommon for a book to go into the world without
+a preface, as a man without a hat. They are both convenient coverings."
+Here, then, is the customary covering._
+
+_Introducing this, the seventh in a series of books telling the story
+of our great highways, it may perhaps be as well to re-state the
+methods used, and objects aimed at. The chief intention is to provide a
+readable book which shall avoid the style either of a Guide-Book or a
+History. It is the better fortune to be in the reader's hands than in
+the dusty seclusion of those formidable works, the County Histories;
+or disregarded among the guide-books of forgotten holidays. To the
+antiquary it will, of course, be obvious that this and other volumes
+of the series "contain many omissions," as the Irish reviewer said;
+but such things as find no place here have, as a general rule, been
+disregarded because they not only do not help the Story of the Road
+along, but rather hinder its progression._
+
+_The_ NORWICH ROAD, _in its one hundred and twelve miles, passes by
+many an historic site and through districts distinguished for their
+quiet pastoral beauty. In being historic it is not singular, for, as
+Oliver Wendell Holmes very truly said, "England is one vast museum,"
+and the old road would be remarkable indeed, that, like Canning's_
+"NEEDY KNIFE GRINDER," _had no story to tell. It is, however, in the
+especial characteristics of East Anglian scenery, speech, customs, and
+architecture that this road stands apart and is highly individualised.
+"East Anglia" is no merely arbitrary and meaningless term, as those who
+travel it, if only on the highway, will speedily find._
+
+_But this shall be no trumpet-blast; nor indeed do the charms of
+Eastern England require such a fanfare, for who has not yet heard
+of that lovely valley of the Stour, so widely known as "Constable's
+Country," by whose exquisite water-meadows and shady lanes the old
+turnpike passes? Scenery such as this; windmills, cornfields, tall
+elms, winding rivers, and commons populous with geese and turkeys, are
+typical of the_ NORWICH ROAD, _which may, with this introduction, now
+be left to recommend itself_.
+
+  CHARLES G. HARPER.
+
+  PETERSHAM, SURREY,
+  _October 1901_.
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: LIST
+
+OF
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS]
+
+SEPARATE PLATES
+
+
+  SCOLE WHITE HART                                       _Frontispiece_
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+  ALDGATE PUMP. (_From a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_,
+  1854)                                                               9
+
+  ALDGATE, 1820                                                      21
+
+  THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT
+  MATTHEW KING. (_From a drawing by T. Hosmer
+  Shepherd_, 1854)                                                   59
+
+  WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE                               65
+
+  MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. (_After Rowlandson_)                      71
+
+  ROMFORD                                                            91
+
+  MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL                                             103
+
+  INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. (_From an Old Print_)               107
+
+  NEW HALL LODGES                                                   125
+
+  CHIPPING HILL                                                     133
+
+  "THREE BLIND 'UNS AND A BOLTER." (_From a Print
+  after H. Alken_)                                                  145
+
+  COLCHESTER                                                        215
+
+  THE VALE OF DEDHAM. (_After Constable_)                           219
+
+  SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. (_After Constable_)                  229
+
+  THE CORNFIELD. (_After Constable_)                                233
+
+  THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART                                  265
+
+  STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART"                                     269
+
+  DICKLEBURGH                                                       279
+
+  A DISPUTED PASTURAGE                                              289
+
+  LONG STRATTON                                                     293
+
+  NEWTON FLOTMAN                                                    299
+
+  NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH                                     311
+
+  NORWICH MARKET PLACE                                              315
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT
+
+
+  Vignette                                                _Title Page_
+
+                                                                   PAGE
+
+  Preface                                                           vii
+
+  List of Illustrations: London Stone                                ix
+
+  The Runaway 'Prentice                                               1
+
+  Yard of the "Bull," Leadenhall Street. (_From a drawing
+  by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854)                                      12
+
+  Front of the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate: Present Day                14
+
+  Yard of the "Saracen's Head" in Coaching Days. (_From
+  a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854)                            16
+
+  Yard of the "Saracen's Head": Present Day                          18
+
+  The Yard of the "Bull," Whitechapel, in Coaching Days              27
+
+  The Norwich Coach at Christmastide. (_After Robert
+  Seymour_, 1835)                                                    38
+
+  Whitechapel Old Church                                             63
+
+  Bow                                                                76
+
+  Seven Kings                                                        84
+
+  Whalebone House                                                    87
+
+  Entrance to Romford                                                89
+
+  Old Toll-house, Puttels Bridge                                     93
+
+  The "Fleece," Brook Street                                         94
+
+  The Martyr's Tree, Brentwood                                       95
+
+  Yard of the "White Hart," Brentwood                                98
+
+  Shenfield                                                         100
+
+  Mountnessing Church                                               102
+
+  The Gatehouse, Ingatestone Hall                                   106
+
+  At Margaretting                                                   111
+
+  The "Good Woman" Sign                                             113
+
+  The Bridge: Entrance to Chelmsford                                115
+
+  The Conduit, Chelmsford                                           116
+
+  Tindal's Statue                                                   117
+
+  The "Three Cups" Sign                                             122
+
+  Springfield Church                                                123
+
+  Boreham                                                           128
+
+  The "Angel," Kelvedon                                             141
+
+  Birthplace of Spurgeon                                            151
+
+  Near Mark's Tey                                                   176
+
+  Lexden                                                            180
+
+  The Grand Staircase, Colchester Castle                            199
+
+  Old Man Trap, Colchester Castle                                   205
+
+  Colchester Castle                                                 207
+
+  Gun Hill                                                          221
+
+  Old Toll-house, Stratford Bridge                                  222
+
+  Wolsey's Gateway                                                  242
+
+  The "Lion and Lamb," Angel Lane                                   244
+
+  Sparrowe's House                                                  246
+
+  The "Great White Horse"                                           248
+
+  Mockbeggar Hall                                                   253
+
+  "Stonham Pie"                                                     256
+
+  Near Brockford                                                    257
+
+  "Thwaite Low House"                                               259
+
+  The "Cock," Thwaite                                               260
+
+  Long Stratton                                                     295
+
+  Tasburgh                                                          297
+
+  The Old Brick Pound                                               301
+
+  Caistor Camp                                                      303
+
+  Norwich Snap                                                      318
+
+  Norfolk Turkey, on his way to Leadenhall Market                   320
+
+
+
+
+THE ROAD TO NORWICH
+
+
+                                                                 MILES
+
+  London (Whitechapel Church) to Mile End                            1
+  Stratford-le-Bow (Bow Church)                                      2½
+        (Cross River Lea).
+  Stratford (Broadway)                                               4
+  Forest Gate                                                        5
+  Manor Park                                                         6
+  Ilford                                                             6½
+        (Cross River Roding).
+  Seven Kings                                                        7½
+        (Cross "Seven Kings' Watering," or Fillebrook).
+  Chadwell Heath                                                     9
+  Romford                                                           12
+  Hare Street                                                       13
+  Puttels Bridge                                                    15½
+        (Cross Weald Brook).
+  Brook Street                                                      16½
+  Brentwood                                                         18
+  Shenfield                                                         19
+  Mountnessing Street                                               21
+  Ingatestone                                                       23
+  Margaretting Street                                               25
+  Widford                                                           27½
+        (Cross River Wid or Ash).
+  Moulsham                                                          28¼
+        (Cross River Chelmer).
+
+  Chelmsford                                                        29
+  Springfield                                                       29½
+  Boreham                                                           32¾
+        (Cross River Ter).
+  Hatfield Peverel                                                  34¾
+        (Cross River Witham).
+  Witham                                                            37½
+  Rivenhall End                                                     39½
+  Kelvedon                                                          41
+        (Cross River Blackwater).
+  Gore Pit                                                          42
+  Mark's Tey                                                        45¾
+  Copford                                                           46¼
+  Stanway                                                           47
+  Lexden Heath                                                      48
+  Lexden                                                            49
+  Colchester                                                        51
+        (Cross River Colne).
+  Dilbridge                                                         52½
+  Stratford Bridge                                                  57¾
+        (Cross River Stour).
+  Stratford St Mary                                                 58½
+  Capel Railway Crossing. Capel Station. Capel
+      St Mary.                                                      63½
+  Copdock                                                           65½
+  Washbrook                                                         66
+        (Cross Wash Brook).
+  Ipswich                                                           69¼
+        (Cross River Orwell)
+  Whitton Street                                                    71¾
+  Claydon                                                           72¾
+  Creeting All Saints                                               76¾
+  Stonham Earls                                                     79
+  Little Stonham                                                    79¾
+  Brockford                                                         83¾
+  Thwaite                                                           84½
+  Stoke Ash                                                         86¼
+  Yaxley                                                            88¼
+  Brome                                                             90¼
+        (Cross River Waveney).
+  Scole                                                             92
+  Dickleburgh                                                       94½
+  Tivetshall Level Crossing                                         97¼
+  Wacton                                                           100
+  Long Stratton                                                    101½
+  Tasburgh                                                         102¾
+        (Cross River Tase).
+  Newton Flotman                                                   104½
+        (Cross River Tase).
+  Hartford Bridge                                                  109¼
+        (Cross River Yare).
+  Norwich (Market Place)                                           111½
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: The NORWICH ROAD]
+
+
+I
+
+
+IN the days before railways came, robbing the exits from London of
+all dignity and purpose, the runaway 'prentice lads of the familiar
+legends, who were always half starved and continually beaten, revolting
+at length from their uncomfortable beds under the shop counters
+and their daily stripes and scorpions, were wont, according to the
+story-books, to steal at night out of their houses of bondage and make
+for the roads. Such an one, making in those days for Norwich, and
+standing at Aldgate in the grey of the morning, looking across the
+threshold of London, would have seen, in the long broad road stretching
+before him, the only means of escape. The shilling or so of which he
+would be the owner would scarce serve him for two or three days' keep;
+and so, although he might have longed for a place on the coach he
+could see starting from the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, at
+4 a.m., there would have been for such as he no choice but to start
+afoot, with as light a heart as possible, and chance the offer of a
+lift on some waggon returning into Essex. Had he, in leaving Aldgate
+behind, asked some passer-by the way to Norwich, he might have been
+seized for what he was, a runaway; but, if he escaped suspicion, would
+have been answered readily enough, for everyone in those times knew
+the way to lie along the Whitechapel Road and by Mile End Turnpike.
+Has anyone in these enlightened and highly-educated times courage
+sufficient to ask his way to Norwich from Aldgate? and, assuming that
+dauntless courage, is it conceivable that anyone in that crowded street
+could tell him?
+
+There are no apprentices and no tyrannical masters of the old kind left
+now, and the only runaways of these days are the bad boys of precocious
+wits who would not think of tramping the highway while they could raise
+a railway fare or "lift" a bicycle. But the way still lies open to the
+explorer from Aldgate, and the old Norwich Road yet follows the line of
+the Roman way into the country of the Iceni.
+
+Between the era of our imaginary truant and that of the Romans, who
+originally constructed this road, there yawns a vast gulf of time;
+certainly not less than eighteen hundred years. The history of the
+road during that space has largely been forgotten; but, worst of all,
+we know perhaps less of it and its life in the times of Charles the
+First, onward to those of William and Mary, than we can recover from
+Roman historians; and certainly its coaching history is in tatters and
+fragments, for those who made it did not live in the bright glow of
+publicity that surrounded the coachmen of roads north, south or west,
+and died unexploited by the sporting writers of the Coaching Age.
+
+
+II
+
+
+NEARLY seventeen centuries have passed since, in the great _Antonine
+Itinerary_ of the Roman Empire, the first guide-book to the roads was
+compiled, and almost eighty years since Cary and Paterson--the rival
+Bradshaws and A.B.C.'s of the Coaching Age--issued the last editions of
+their _Travellers Companions_, which now, instead of being constantly
+in the travellers' hands, are treasured on the shelves of collectors
+interested in relics of days before railways.
+
+The _Antonine Itinerary_ was compiled, A.D. 200-300. Among other roads
+of which it purports to give an account is the road to Venta Icenorum;
+the Norwich Road, as we should say. Its statement is brief and to the
+point, if requiring no little explanation after this lapse of time:--
+
+  Iter a Venta Icenorum Londinio _m.p._             cxxviii _sic._
+  Sitomago                                          xxxii
+  Combretonio                                       xxii
+  Ad Ansam                                          xv
+  Camuloduno                                        vii
+  Canonio                                           viiii
+  Cæsaromago                                        xii
+  Durolito                                          xvi
+  Londinio                                          xv
+
+A hundred and twenty-eight miles, that is to say, between Venta and
+London. The Romans, of course, calculated all their mileages in Britain
+from that hoary relic, the still existing "London Stone," which, from
+behind its modern iron grating in the wall of St Swithin's Church,
+still turns a battered face towards the heedless, hurrying crowds in
+Cannon Street, in the City of London.
+
+In coaching days the Norwich Road, in common with most East Anglian
+routes, was measured from Whitechapel Church, and the distance from
+that landmark to Norwich given as 111½ miles. The apparent wide
+difference between those measurements of classic and modern times is
+very nearly reconciled when we add a mile for the distance between
+London Stone and Whitechapel Church to the 111½ miles, and when we
+reduce the Roman miles to English. An English mile measures 5280 feet,
+while a Roman mile runs only to 4842 feet, this fact accounting, along
+the road to Norwich, for some 13 miles of the discrepancy, and bringing
+the difference to the insignificant one of 3½ miles; or, assuming the
+Roman ruins at Caistor, 3 miles short of Norwich, to mark the site of
+Venta Icenorum, 6½ miles; no very wide margin of error.
+
+The compiler of that ancient itinerary is unknown. He, or they (for
+a survey of the Roman Empire cannot have been made by one man), are
+quite hidden and lost to sight under the title of "Antonine," which
+was given in honour of the Emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla,
+father and son, who both owned the name Antoninus. By similarly
+honorary titles we are accustomed to christen our public buildings.
+Thus, in coming ages, when such earthworms as engineers and architects
+are forgotten, the "Victoria" Embankment, "Victoria" Station, the
+"Victoria and Albert" Museum, and the thousand and one other things
+thus entitled will serve to hand a Sovereign down to futurity, while
+the names of those who created them, good or ill, will have perished,
+like the leaves of autumn. Customs change, and fashions cease to be,
+but snobbery is more enduring than brass or marble, and outlasts the
+mummies of the Pharaohs.
+
+The compiler who drew up the list of places on the road between
+Londinium and Venta has chosen to reckon backwards. The "_m. p._" is
+the abbreviation for _mille passus_, or paced Roman miles; the figures
+after the first line giving the distance from the place last mentioned.
+Setting out from London, we find "Durolitum" to be identified with the
+Roman earthworks of Uphall, near Romford; "Cæsaromagus" to be identical
+with Writtle, near Chelmsford; "Canonium" to stand for Kelvedon;
+"Camulodunum" for Colchester; and "Ad Ansam" for Stratford St Mary;
+while "Combretonium" and "Sitomagus" still puzzle antiquaries, who are
+reduced to the extremity of suggesting the opposite alternatives of
+Brettenham or Burgh for the one, and Dunwich or Thetford for the other;
+names with a specious resemblance, and on circuitous routes east or
+west of the direct road which would more than account for the Roman
+surveyor's overplus of miles. The direct road, however, is unmistakably
+Roman, and those who will may seek for the elusive "Sitomagus" and
+"Combretonium" along it. Haply they may discover them at Scole,
+Dickleburgh or Long Stratton.
+
+But along the whole length of the road, from London to Norwich, the
+wayfarer receives impressions of its true Roman character, whether
+in its appearance or in the place-names on the way. Old Ford and
+Stratford-at-Bow, where the Roman paved fords crossed the River Lea;
+that other "old ford" at Ilford, across the River Roding, which was
+already ancient when the Saxons came and so named it, "Eald Ford,"
+leaving it for later times to corrupt the name into "Ilford" and
+for uninstructed historians to explain the meaning to have been
+that it was an "ill ford"; to which condition, indeed, many had
+descended in mediæval times: these are examples. Others are found at
+Ingatestone, the Saxon "Ing-atte-stone" = the "meadow at the stone,"
+a Roman milestone that stood by the wayside; in the names of Stanway,
+Colchester, Stratford St Mary. Little Stonham, Tivetshall, and Long
+Stratton, places to be more particularly mentioned later in these pages.
+
+It has been aptly pointed out by East Anglian antiquaries that the
+circuitous route eastward or westward of the straight road between
+Stratford St Mary and Norwich, on which Sitomagus and Combretonium
+may have been situated, may probably have been an early Roman way,
+constructed shortly after the conquest of the Iceni, along an old
+native trackway, and superseded in later and more settled times by
+the direct road, overlooked by the Antonine compilers who, working at
+Rome, the very centre of the Empire, may not have been fully informed
+of changes in countries like Britain, on the edge of the Unknown.
+This view, when we consider the long period stretching between the
+conquest of this part of the country and the final break up of the
+Romano-British civilisation, about A.D. 450, has much to recommend it.
+A period of some three hundred and eighty years of colonisation and
+development, equalling, for example, the great gulf of time between
+our own day and that of Henry the Eighth, the changes in its course
+must have rivalled, if not have surpassed, those in our roads between
+the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. During those eras, between the
+first and the fifth centuries, many of the original winding tracks
+must have been straightened, or left to the secondary position of
+byways, while new and straight roads were engineered across country
+formerly, for one reason or another, avoided. Meanwhile, the Antonine
+Itinerary-makers must have relied for their surveys upon old and
+out-of-date information, just as, in our own time, we find many recent
+maps, printed from the Ordnance Survey of a hundred years ago, still
+indicating winding roads that have been non-existent for generations,
+and ignoring the direct highways made by Telford and others just before
+the opening of the Railway Era.
+
+
+III
+
+
+LONDON made no remarkable growth between the Roman and mediæval
+periods, but this road had in that time slightly altered its course
+from its starting-point, and, instead of going from Cannon Street
+to Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Old Ford, left the City by way of
+Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, continuing down the Mile End and Bow
+Roads to Stratford.
+
+The traveller of Chaucer's day, coming to Ald Gate, in the City wall,
+had reached the country. That gate spanned the road at a point marked
+nowadays by the house, No 2 Aldgate High Street, standing at the
+boundary of the parishes of St Katharine Cree and St Botolph. In 1374
+Chaucer took from the Corporation of London a lease for the remainder
+of his life of the rooms in this gate, which was pulled down and
+succeeded by another, built in 1606, which in its turn disappeared in
+1761.
+
+From his windows commanding the road Chaucer must often have seen that
+dainty gentlewoman, the Prioress of St Leonard's, Stratford, riding to
+or from London, escorted by a numerous train, and from her must have
+drawn that portrait of the prioress who spoke French with a Cockney
+accent:--
+
+  "After the scole of Stratford-attè-Bowe,
+  For French of Parys was to hire unknowe."
+
+In Chaucer's day they probably taught French, of sorts, at the Priory
+schools.
+
+[Illustration: ALDGATE PUMP. _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_,
+1854.]
+
+At that time it was no little journey to Stratford, although by
+measurement less than four miles, and the lady went strongly escorted,
+as, indeed, did all of consequence, or those who had aught to lose.
+For the more common wayfarers who went alone on this desperate eastern
+trail there stood the Chapel and the Holy Well of St Michael the
+Archangel within the City, where the otherwise unprotected might seek
+the aid of the Saint's strong arm before leaving the walled City behind
+on their perilous faring. This chapel stood where Leadenhall Street,
+Fenchurch Street and Aldgate meet, on a site thrown into the roadway
+in 1876, when the street was widened. Until that year the crypt of
+this shrine had filled the prosaic functions of a cellar in the corner
+house, itself demolished, together with the beautiful Early English
+arches on which it stood. Adjoining was "Aldgate Pump," which had long
+before unromantically taken the place of the sanctified spring. That
+celebrated civic monument is seen in the accompanying illustration,
+taken in 1854. Many City wits have exercised their satirical powers
+upon it, and the expression long current of "a draft on Aldgate Pump,"
+a once popular mercantile phrase for a bad note, goes back so far as
+the days of Fielding. Oddly enough, the water of the pump retained some
+repute until 1876, when, on being analysed, it was found impure, and
+the supply closed. The pump, however, is still in existence, rebuilt
+of its original stones, a few feet away from the old site, and yields
+water again; not, however, from the old saintly source, but from the
+strictly secular filter-beds of the New River Water Company.
+
+[Illustration: YARD OF THE "BULL," LEADENHALL STREET. _From a Drawing
+by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854.]
+
+Having implored the protection of St Michael, travellers of old
+went, heartened, upon their way down what is now Whitechapel High
+Street, which Strype, writing in the time of James the First, calls
+a "spacious fair street," with "sweet and wholesome air." Past
+hedgerows of elm trees and rustic stiles and bridges, those old
+wayfarers went, and onward down the Whitechapel Road, where the
+country was a lovely solitude, with "nothing but the bounteous gifts
+of Nature and saint-like tokens of innocency," which, according to Sir
+Thomas More, in 1504, characterised the charming fields of Mile End,
+Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse. This, it will be allowed, is scarcely
+descriptive of those places to-day, whatever they may become when the
+People's Palace and the University Settlements have done their work.
+
+Thus far for sake of contrast. Let us return to Aldgate for a while,
+and, without following its fortunes throughout the centuries, glance at
+it in the Coaching Age, before the squalor of modern Whitechapel had
+invaded it from the east, or the extension of City business had come to
+destroy most of that picturesque assemblage of old inns and mediæval
+gabled houses, to replace them with the giant warehouses and "imposing"
+offices of modern London.
+
+
+IV
+
+
+ALTHOUGH, as we have seen, the East Anglian roads were, in coaching
+days, measured from Whitechapel Church, the great actual starting-place
+was Aldgate, where many of the old inns were situated, as, in like
+manner, the ancient hostelries of the Borough clustered at the
+beginning of the road to Canterbury and Dover. Aldgate occupies a
+position midway between London Stone, the Roman starting-point in
+Cannon Street, and Whitechapel Church, and to and from this spot came
+and went the stage-coaches, post-chaises and waggons in the palmy days
+of the road. The mail-coaches, of course, had a starting-point of their
+own, and set out from the old General Post-Office in Lombard Street,
+or, in the last years of coaching, from St Martin's-le-Grand.
+
+[Illustration: FRONT OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD," ALDGATE: PRESENT DAY.]
+
+It is true that one might have taken coach from many other and more
+central inns for Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich:--from the "Spread
+Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, a fine old galleried inn demolished at
+the close of 1865; from the "Cross Keys," in the same street; from the
+"Swan with Two Necks," in Lad Lane, anciently Lady Lane (that is to
+say, the Lane of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin), now Gresham Street;
+or from the "Bull," 151 Leadenhall Street, which must by no means be
+confounded with its namesake in Aldgate High Street. Exactly what
+that Leadenhall Street hostelry was like let the picture of its old
+galleried courtyard show.
+
+There was also "another way" to Norwich; out of Bishopsgate, by way
+of Newmarket, Bury and Thetford. Taking this route, which, although
+2½ miles shorter, no true sportsman considered to be the real Norwich
+Road, one started from the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross; from the
+"White Horse," in Fetter Lane (improved away in 1898); from the
+"Flower Pot," in Bishopsgate Street; from yet another "Bull," also in
+Bishopsgate Street; or from the "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand.
+But when all these places have been duly set forth, it is to Aldgate
+that we must turn as the real starting-point.
+
+[Illustration: YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD" IN COACHING DAYS. _From a
+Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd_, 1854.]
+
+Aldgate in the days before railways was quite unlike the Aldgate of
+to-day. Certain of the old buildings remain, but the "note" of the
+place is entirely altered. It is now a noisy, distracting ante-room to
+the City, in which tinkling tram-cars and costermongers' barrows jostle
+with elephantine railway goods vans; where the Jewish second-hand
+clothes shop rubs a greasy shoulder with the "merchant tailor's" vulgar
+show of electric light, plate glass and wax models; and where the East
+End, in the person of the aproned, ringleted and ostrich-feathered
+factory girl, meets the West, in the shape of some City clerk strayed
+beyond his mercantile or financial frontiers, each regarding the other
+as a curiosity in these social marches. It is as the meeting of salt
+water and fresh, this mingling of the tides of City and East End, and
+to the observant not a little curious. Nothing like it--nothing so
+marked--is to be seen on any other of the borders of the City. There
+is, too, a smack of the sea, a certain air of romance, in the street,
+coming, perhaps, from the windows of the nautical instrument-makers,
+where the binoculars, the quadrants, the sextants and the sea-faring
+tackle in general hint of distant climes and the coral reefs of South
+Pacific isles.
+
+These mariners' emporia were here and in the Minories before railways
+came, and so also were many fine old inns. For Aldgate, difficult
+though it may be to realise it to-day, was not only the place whence
+many of the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches set out, but was also
+the resting-place of travellers to London; and its inns were quite
+as well-appointed as those of the more central ones in the City,
+or those of Charing Cross, or the West End. As travellers by rail
+to London in modern times resort to the railway hotels, so did our
+great-grandfathers find rest at the coaching inns at whose thresholds
+they were set down at their journey's end.
+
+[Illustration: YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD": PRESENT DAY.]
+
+The fragments merely of the last of Aldgate's old hostelries remain, in
+the bold front of Nos. 6 and 7, forming two-thirds of the old frontage
+of the "Saracen's Head." No. 5, the other third, has been destroyed,
+and so also has the old appearance of the galleried courtyard, still
+named "Saracen's Head Yard," but now surrounded by warehouses. The old
+coach archway remains, and the gables at the back of the buildings
+are quaint reminiscences of other times. Coaches plied between the
+"Saracen's Head" and Norwich so far back as 1681, and Strype, the
+antiquary, born in the neighbourhood, in a court whose name now flaunts
+the horrid travesty of "Tripe Court," referring to the inn, speaks of
+it as "very large and of a considerable trade." The existing fragment,
+with its handsome architectural elevation of richly-moulded plaster in
+the Renaissance style of the late seventeenth century, is part of the
+building mentioned by him. Small shops now occupy the ground floor,
+and the upper rooms are let as tenements.
+
+But the "Bull" was perhaps the most famous of these old inns. From it
+Mr Pickwick set out for Ipswich, and from Sam Weller's remark on that
+occasion, "Take care o' the archway, gen'l'men," as the coach started,
+it is evident that the "Bull" possessed a courtyard. At that palmy time
+of inns and coaches, the opening of the nineteenth century, the "Bull"
+was, and long had been, in the Nelson family, a noted race of inn and
+coach proprietors. At that particular time Mrs Ann Nelson, widow of the
+late host, who died about 1812, was the presiding genius. Associated
+with her was her son John. Another son, Robert, had a business of his
+own, and was long proprietor of the "Belle Sauvage," on Ludgate Hill,
+and partner with others in many coaches. A third son, George, drove the
+Exeter "Defiance," horsed by his mother out of London.
+
+But to return to the "Bull" and Mrs Nelson, who had, as her husband
+had, and his father before him, some sort of interest in many coaches
+running into Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, on main or bye-roads. She
+also at one time leased the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street,
+and extended her energies so far as to horse the Exeter "Telegraph"
+and the "Quicksilver" Devonport Mail out of London, together with
+the Exeter "Defiance" night coach, the Manchester "Telegraph," the
+Oxford "Defiance," Brighton "Red Rover," and the Leeds "Courier." In
+their coaching speculations the Nelson family were associated with
+a pastrycook whose little shop adjoined the gateway of the "Bull."
+Occasionally a new hand on one of the coaches would send his leaders'
+noses through the shop front, for that gateway was very narrow and Mrs
+Nelson's coachmen anything but deliberate. On the other side of the
+gateway was a whip-maker's shop, kept by one James Johnson, who throve
+mightily on the custom of the coachmen and others who frequented the
+"Bull."
+
+This most energetic of landladies and Napoleonic of coach proprietors
+developed and managed her extensive coaching interests long before her
+husband died. He, good, easy-going man, had been a fair whip in earlier
+days, but had long left the box, and had no head for business, although
+a very fine taste in wines and spirits: the lack of the first probably
+a corollary of the second. She spared neither herself nor her servants.
+Rising considerably before the lark, she saw the owls to bed, and was
+a martinet to her coachmen. Left a widow while in the prime of life,
+she still wore in old age the dress of her youth. The sketch of her in
+the picture of the "Bull" yard in coaching days shows exactly what her
+costume was like. A short skirt revealed high-heeled shoes with large
+buckles, the heels painted red. Black velvet was her winter wear, and
+fancy apron, lace neckerchief and frilled cap invariable items. Up to
+her seventieth year she was the last up at night, scouring the house
+to see that all was safe; and the first up in the morning, looking
+after the stable people and seeing that the horses had their feeds and
+were properly cared for. Inside and outside the house, and down the
+eastern roads, her influence was despotic and would brook no defiance.
+Her "Ipswich Blues" had long been famous when an opposition coach was
+started. Opposition could not be allowed to live, and so the fares
+were reduced from eight shillings inside and sixteen shillings out, by
+regular stages until the point was reached when passengers were not
+only carried for nothing, but were presented with an excellent dinner
+at Witham. At that point the rivals discreetly retired, when fares rose
+again to their old level.
+
+[Illustration: ALDGATE, 1820.]
+
+Mrs Nelson insisted on the most rigid punctuality. Did the coachman
+of one of her crack coaches or one of her still more famous
+"Oppositions" bring his team down her yard five minutes over time,
+he was reprimanded; ten minutes, and he was fined half-a-crown; a
+quarter of an hour, and he stood a good chance of being dismissed. She
+ran a Southend "Opposition" every afternoon by Romford, Brentwood,
+Billericay, Wickford, Raleigh and Rochford, along Essex roads of a
+feather-bed softness of mud; but time must be kept. She provided good
+horses and would not hear of excuses. One day, when the roads were
+particularly heavy, the "Opposition" came in half an hour late from
+Southend. The coachman, after the manner of his kind, on driving into
+the yard and pulling up at the coffee-room door, threw his whip across
+the wheelers' backs. Mrs Nelson had long been watching the clock, and,
+coming out, took the whip and hung it up, with the quiet remark, "That
+whip is no longer yours, Philpot--half an hour behind."
+
+"But the roads are so bad, ma'am," remonstrated poor Toby. "I'm sure,
+ma'am, the gentlemen knew I did my best; but I felt bound to spare the
+cattle."
+
+"_I_ find the cattle and employ you to drive them," replied the
+inexorable landlady; "_you_ have nothing to do but to keep time. Draw
+your wages and leave the yard."
+
+Under this iron rule it is no wonder that her coachmen were sometimes
+"pulled up" for furious driving. On one of these occasions she appeared
+in court in defence of her man. "I understand, Mrs Nelson," blandly
+remarked the Chairman of the Bench, "that you give your coachmen
+instructions to race the rival coach."
+
+"Not exactly," replied the lady; "my orders to them are simply that
+they are to get the road and keep it."
+
+But if a very dragon of strictness, she treated coachmen and guards
+very well. They had their especial room, and dined as well there, at
+reduced prices, as any of her coffee-room customers. This especial
+consideration reflected itself in those functionaries, who jealously
+preserved the privacy of their room; the amateur coachman who secured
+the invitation to join them (and to pay out of his own pocket for
+their wine and spirits) feeling himself greatly honoured.
+
+In other respects, the "Bull" was a model to other houses. No damp
+sheets in any one of its hundred and fifty beds, no drunken brawlers;
+nothing a minute out of time, or an inch out of place. Mrs Nelson's
+fine house was, indeed, nothing less than an institution. In later
+years her son John took more of the management upon his shoulders, and
+the business seemed likely to long outlast his time.
+
+
+V
+
+
+BUT a whisper of coming changes disturbed the air as early as 1830.
+Coachmen and travellers talked in the stableyard and the cosy rooms of
+the "Bull" of men with strange instruments encountered along the road;
+"chaps with telescopes on three sticks, and other chaps with chains
+and things, measuring the fields." It was thus that they described
+the surveyors, with their theodolites and their staff of men, who
+were setting out the proposed route of the projected Eastern Counties
+Railway that was to run all the way from London to Colchester, Norwich
+and Yarmouth.
+
+John Nelson was too confident in the existing order of things to
+believe that a few pounds of coal and some boiling water would ever
+be a match for his horses, or that a time would presently come when
+those passengers of his who now derided the railways would desert the
+coaches. The "Bull" had been in his family for more than a hundred and
+twelve years, as an inn and a coaching house, and he could as soon have
+imagined the end of the world as a day coming when the Essex, Suffolk
+and Norfolk coaches should no longer enter or leave his yard. It was a
+good joke for a while, when the coaches came in, to ask "How they were
+getting on with that railway?" but when the surveys were completed and
+the prospectus of the "Grand Eastern Counties Railway" was issued in
+1834, it was seen that the railway men meant business. The original
+proposal of the directors was to follow the road closely and to bring
+the line into Aldgate. When it was seen that the railway was really to
+be made, Nelson raised an opposition against the Aldgate terminus, and
+was successful in driving the Company into an out-of-the-way site in
+Shoreditch, where for many years that terminus remained.
+
+[Illustration: THE YARD OF THE "BULL," WHITECHAPEL, IN COACHING DAYS.]
+
+The Eastern Counties Railway was opened as far as Chelmsford in 1839,
+to Colchester in 1842, and communication to Norwich was opened up in
+1845. From the day of the first opening, the "Bull" declined. Old
+customers still found their way from the slums of Shoreditch to its
+hospitable door, but were not reinforced by the newer generation of
+travellers, to whom the road and its end in Aldgate were alike unknown.
+They went to the City inns, and later to the more central hotels,
+leaving the "Bull" to slowly sink into neglect. John Nelson made a big
+bid for success in another line, and ran the "Wellington" omnibuses
+with success from 1855 until his death, at the age of seventy-four, in
+June 1868. He had long resided in the West End, and was a man of ample
+fortune, so that the end of the "Bull's" coaching career hurt him only
+in sentiment. His mother, that most autocratic and business-like of
+women, had died ten years before, active almost to the last, although
+she had reached the age of eighty-five years. Towards the close of
+1868 the old inn ended its long career. Its substantial, old-fashioned
+silver-plate and massive furniture were sold by auction, with the stock
+of rare old wines, laid in many years before, for that old generation
+of travellers who delighted in port and sherry, and plenty of both.
+
+The very site of the "Bull" is now sought with pains and labour, and
+only to be discovered with difficulty by the present generation. It
+was numbered 25 Aldgate High Street, and stood where Aldgate Avenue, a
+modern alley rich in offices of "commission agents," and curious things
+of that kind, now cuts its way through where the old yard used to be.
+
+Close by the "Bull" was another old coaching inn, the "Blue Boar,"
+now quite vanished, kept for a time by John Thorogood. The Thorogoods
+were in those days, and in these times of amateur coaching are still,
+a family of coachmen. "Old John," who owned the "Norwich Times," and
+actually drove it for two years without missing a journey the whole of
+that time, clearly deserved his patronymic, in thus handling the reins
+along a hundred and twelve miles of road for seven hundred and thirty
+consecutive days.
+
+It was to the "Blue Boar" that little David Copperfield came, on his
+miserable journey from Yarmouth:--"We approached London by degrees, and
+got, in due time, to the inn, in the Whitechapel district, I forget
+whether it was the 'Blue Bull' or the 'Blue Boar,' but I know it was
+the Blue Something, and that its likeness was painted upon the back
+of the coach." The sculptured effigy of a boar, with gilded tusks and
+hoofs, built into the wall of a tobacco factory, marks the site of the
+inn.
+
+Among other noted inns, the "Three Nuns" must be named. From it set
+out the short stages to Ilford, Epping, Romford and Woodford, together
+with coaches for several of the Essex by-roads. The house owes its
+name to the Minoresses, or nuns, of St Clare, from whose religious
+establishment the Minories obtains its title. The inn was rebuilt in
+1877, and is now nothing more than a huge public-house.
+
+Many other inns of consequence in their day have left nothing but
+their yards behind them to show where they stood:--George Yard, Spread
+Eagle Yard, Black Horse Yard, Boar's Head Yard, White Swan Yard, Half
+Moon Passage, and Kent and Essex Yard are such relics, bordering High
+Street, Whitechapel, where one curious sign survives, that of an inn
+called the "Horse and Leaping Bar."
+
+
+VI
+
+
+ONE decided advantage the Chelmsford, Colchester and Ipswich route
+to Norwich possessed in old times over that by way of Newmarket and
+Thetford. Neither could have been considered safe in the bad old
+days, but while the traveller across the wild heaths of Newmarket and
+Thetford was almost certain to be "held up" on his lonely course, the
+other way, through Essex, passed by few such wildernesses, and had more
+towns and villages along its course, to give a sense of security.
+Briefly, robbery on one route was a probability, and on the other was
+regarded as certain. Margaret Paston, writing from Norfolk to her
+husband in London, so long ago as the fifteenth century, certainly
+gives even the way through Essex a bad name, for she asks him to pay
+a debt for one of their friends, because it was not safe, "on account
+of the robbers," to send money up from the country; but at the very
+same time the Thetford route had a much more sinister reputation, and
+travellers versed in the gossip of the road avoided it if possible,
+or went in company and well armed, for in that era a certain William
+Cratfield, Rector of Wrotham, "a common and notorious thief and lurker
+on the roads, and murderer and slayer," lurked and robbed and slew on
+Newmarket Heath, in company with a certain "Thomas Tapyrtone, hosyer."
+He was at last laid by the heels, in 1416, and charged with robbing
+a Londoner of £12. This distinguished ornament of the Church died in
+Newgate, but of the villainous hosier we hear no more. Perhaps he had
+realised a fortune in the business and retired to enjoy the fruits of
+his industry. With the disappearance of this worthy couple, travellers
+breathed more freely, but for surety's sake continued to patronise the
+Essex route, and so by way of Ipswich to come to the City of Orchards,
+as Norwich was called of old.
+
+As time went on, a certain degree of security was found in the
+coaches that began to make an appearance with the second half of the
+seventeenth century. They travelled at first no more quickly than
+a man could walk, but they provided company, which was, under the
+circumstances, highly desirable. Soon, however, they found it possible
+to do the journey in two days. Strype, we have already seen mentions
+the "Saracen's Head" in Aldgate as the centre of a considerable trade,
+and to it in 1681 a Norwich coach was running; an innovation which
+aroused the indignation of innkeepers on the way to almost as great a
+height as that of their descendants when, two hundred and forty years
+later, railways were depopulating the roads. When travellers began to
+go by coach instead of on horseback, and to reach London or Norwich in
+two days instead of three or four, those antique tapsters thought they
+saw their living going, and, strange to say, there were not wanting men
+who raised their voices against the innovation of being carried on a
+journey, instead of riding; although, for the most part, their outcry
+was the result only of innate conservatism.
+
+"Travelling in these coaches," said an anonymous pamphleteer, "can
+neither prove advantageous to men's health or business. For what
+advantage is it to men's health to be called out of their beds into
+these coaches an hour before day in the morning, to be hurried in
+them from place to place, till one hour, two, or three within night;
+insomuch that after sitting all day in the summer time stifled with
+heat, and choked with the dust, or the winter time starving and
+freezing with cold or choked with filthy fogs, they are often brought
+into their inns by torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get
+supper; and next morning they are forced into the coach so early that
+they can get no breakfast. What addition is this to men's health or
+business? to ride all day with strangers, oftentimes sick, ancient,
+diseased persons, or young children crying; to whose humours they are
+obliged to be subject, forced to bear with, and many times are poisoned
+with their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of the boxes and
+bundles."
+
+Yet "these coaches" (one can almost hear the intonation of contempt in
+that phrase) were from the first a success. The greater that success
+the louder for a time was the outcry against them. Taylor, the Water
+Poet, was one of those who wrote vehemently against the new methods
+of travel. To him a coach was "a close hypocrite; for it hath a cover
+for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow any wickedness. Besides,
+like a perpetual cheater, it wears two bootes, and no spurs, sometimes
+having two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes (against nature)
+it makes faire ladies weare the boote; and if you note, they are
+carried back to back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in
+that miserable manner and thrown overboard into the sea. Moreover, it
+makes people imitate sea-crabs, in being drawn sideways as they are
+when they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a dangerous kind of
+carriage for the commonwealth, if it be considered."
+
+The boot of which he speaks so contemptuously, was a method of packing
+the "outsides," of which we still find a survival in the Irish
+jaunting-car. There are those who trace the origin of the term from the
+French "_boîte_," a box. Even now the coachman's seat is "the box," and
+the modern fore-boot is under it.
+
+Writers of that time seem almost unanimously to have taken sides
+against coaching; with, however, no effect; for, somewhat later than
+Taylor, that doughty Conservative, John Cresset, is found exclaiming
+furiously against the multitude of them. He favoured the suppression
+of all, or, at least--counsels of moderation prevailing--of most. They
+were, he said, mischievous to the public, destructive to trade and
+prejudicial to the land. Not only did they injure the breed of horses,
+but also that of watermen; which last objection goes further than the
+complaints of Taylor himself, who, writing at the same time, does not
+speak of his breed being debased, but only of his trade being crippled.
+Cresset thought the stage-coaches tempted the country gentry to London
+too often, and he accordingly proposed that these conveyances should be
+limited to one for every county town in England, to go backwards and
+forwards once a week.
+
+Vain hope! Coaches of sorts must already have appeared on the road to
+Norwich by the middle of the seventeenth century, for in a proclamation
+of July 20th in the plague year, 1665, when all places were dreading
+infected London, it is ordained, that "from this daie all ye passage
+coaches shall be prohibited to goe from ye city to London and come
+from thence hither, and also ye common carts and wagons." Already,
+in 1696, the "Confatharrat" coach was a well-known conveyance between
+London and Norwich, and the name of Suggate, the London and East
+Anglian carrier, a household word. Unhappily, nothing can be gathered
+as to when Suggate first began to jog along the road, or when the
+"Confatharrat" started to ply between Norwich and the "Four Swans,"
+Bishopsgate Street. All particulars are lost. The odd name of that
+coach was probably a seventeenth-century way of spelling the word
+"confederate," and the selection of such a name proves both that it was
+carried on by an alliance or co-partnership, and that "confederate" had
+not then acquired its sinister modern connotation. Besides these aids
+to travel, a stage-waggon began to ply from the "Popinjay," Tombland,
+Norwich, at an early date; and another from the "Angel," in the Market
+Place, to the "Blossoms" Inn, Laurence Lane, London, was advertised in
+the _Norwich Mercury_, of March 29th, 1729, to "now go regularly every
+Thursday night," setting out on the following Wednesday from London,
+on the return journey. It will thus be seen that it was a five or six
+days' journey for those primitive affairs, and that they apparently did
+not run at regular intervals until that year.
+
+A London and Beccles coach was running in 1707, but the first regular
+Norwich coach of which particulars remain was the "Norwich Machine,"
+which in 1762 set out for London three times a week from the "Maid's
+Head," according to the advertisement still extant. There is nothing
+in that old coaching bill to show that 1762 was the first season of
+the "Norwich Machine." It may have been established some years before
+that date.
+
+  _Norwich, March 26, 1762._
+
+  SUSAN NASMITH and JAMES KEITH,
+
+  Proprietors of the
+
+  NORWICH MACHINE,
+
+  Give Notice
+
+ that their Machine will set out from the MAID'S HEAD Inn, in St
+ Simon's Parish, in Norwich, on Monday, the 5th day of April next, at
+ half-past eleven in the forenoon, and on the Wednesday and Friday in
+ the same week, at the same time; and to be continued in like Manner,
+ on those Days weekly, for the carrying four inside Passengers, at
+ Twenty-five Shillings each, and outside at Twelve Shillings and
+ Sixpence each. The inside Passengers to be allowed twenty pound
+ Weight, and all above to be paid for at three half-pence per pound;
+ and to be in London on the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Evenings
+ weekly.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ _N.B._--A Machine will set out on the same days, at the same time,
+ from the GREEN DRAGON, in Bishopsgate Street, London, for Norwich.
+
+In the following year, the "Widow Nasmith" and James Keith advertised
+that they had built large and commodious machines, to carry six
+inside, and reduced the fares to twenty shillings and ten shillings
+respectively; but they had apparently not succeeded in performing the
+journey in less time than a day and a half, for no mention is made of
+speed being accelerated. But a remarkable feature in that announcement
+is the extraordinary cheapness of the fares, little over twopence and a
+penny a mile for inside and outside passengers, at a time when prices
+on other roads ruled from twenty-five to fifty per cent. higher. This
+tells a tale of competition; but Time, the thief, has robbed us of all
+knowledge of those competitors.
+
+A year later the London and Ipswich Post Coaches were advertised to
+set out every week-day, and to perform the 69¼ miles in ten hours, an
+average pace of almost 7 miles an hour; a marvellous turn of speed
+for that age. As to whether those Post Coaches ever _did_ cover that
+distance in ten hours, we may reasonably express a doubt; but there
+was the promise, and 011 the strength of it the proprietors charged
+threepence a mile. As will be seen by the advertisement, these coaches
+carried no outside passengers:--
+
+  _Ipswich, August 17th, 1764._
+
+  THE LONDON AND IPSWICH POST COACHES
+
+ Set out on Monday, the 27th of August, at seven o'clock in the morning
+ from the BLACK BULL, in Bishopsgate, London, and at the same time from
+ the GREAT WHITE HORSE, in Ipswich, and continue every day (Sunday
+ excepted), to be at the above places the same evening at five o'clock;
+ each passenger to pay threepence per mile, and to be allowed eighteen
+ pounds luggage; all above to pay one penny per pound, and so in
+ proportion. The coaches, hung upon steel springs, are very easy, large
+ and commodious, carry six inside but no outside passengers whatever;
+ but have great conveniences for parcels or game (to keep them from the
+ weather), which will be delivered at London and Ipswich the same night.
+
+ As these coaches are sent out for the ease and expedition of
+ gentlemen and ladies travelling, the proprietors humbly hope for their
+ encouragement, and are determined to spare no pains to render it as
+ agreeable as they can.
+
+  Performed (if God permits) by--
+
+  PET. SHELDON, at the Bull, Bishopsgate Street, London.
+  THOMAS ARCHER, at the White Hart, Brentwood.
+  CHARLES KERRY, at the Black Boy, Chelmsford.
+  GEO. REYNOLDS, at the Three Cups, Colchester; and
+  CHAS. HARRIS, at the Great White Horse, Ipswich.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ _N.B._--The proprietors will not be answerable for any money, plate,
+ jewels, or writings, unless entered and paid for as such.
+
+The reader will perhaps have observed that this advertisement
+especially mentions a convenience for carrying game, and, as a matter
+of fact, game and oysters were prominent from an early period in
+the history of Norwich Road conveyances, and, by the middle of the
+eighteenth century, the Norfolk and Suffolk coaches had already earned
+quite a distinctive character in two seasons of the year, Michaelmas
+and Christmas. East Anglia has always abounded in game, and its
+broad heaths and extensive commons have been the breeding-grounds
+of innumerable geese and turkeys whose careers have ended on London
+dinner-tables. In those two seasons it was often difficult to secure
+a seat on or in any of the "up" coaches from Norwich or Ipswich, for
+while every available inch of space on the mails was occupied by
+festoons of dead birds consigned by country cousins to friends in town,
+the whole of a stage-coach was frequently chartered for the purpose
+of despatching heavy consignments of these noble poultry to the London
+market. Christmas provided extraordinary sights along the Norfolk Road,
+in the swaying coaches, with parcels and geese and turkeys mountains
+high on the roof; with barrels of Colchester natives in the boot, and
+hampers swinging heavily between the axle-trees on a shelf called "the
+cellar"; while from every rail or projection to which they could be
+either safely or hazardously tied depended other turkeys or braces of
+fowls, booked at the last moment before starting. It was something
+in those days to be a turkey or a goose, before whose importance the
+claims of human passengers faded; but it was a fleeting elevation which
+the philosophic did not envy, thinking that here indeed the poet was
+justified in his sounding line--
+
+  "The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
+
+[Illustration: THE NORWICH COACH AT CHRISTMAS TIDE. _After Robert
+Seymour, 1835._]
+
+That unfortunate genius, Robert Seymour, has left us a picture of the
+Norwich coach nearing London at Christmas time, with its feathered
+load. The drawing was made in 1835, at the very height of the Coaching
+Age, and shows from his own observation with what ingenuity every rail
+and projection was used to hang the birds from.
+
+Another highly specialised branch of traffic, which only left the road
+on the opening of the railway, was the constant service of fish waggons
+running between Harwich, Colchester and London, at the then express
+speed of 8 miles an hour.
+
+
+VII
+
+
+BETWEEN the early days of coaching and the end of that period, many
+changes took place on the Norwich Road. So late as 1798, the Mail, the
+"Expedition," and the "Post Coach" were the only coaches to Norwich,
+supplemented by three road waggons; two of them doing the journey
+twice a week, the third setting out weekly. Later came the "Norwich
+Times," "Gurney's Original Day Coach," the "Phænomenon," as it was
+originally spelt; the "Magnet," the Ipswich "Shannon," and the Ipswich
+"Blue." With the object of serving as many places as possible, and,
+incidentally, securing heavier bookings, the "Times" and Gurney's
+coaches took a somewhat circuitous route, leaving the direct road
+at Chelmsford, and going through Braintree, Halstead, Sudbury, Long
+Melford and Bury St Edmunds, rejoining the Norwich Road at Scole.
+
+But the lord of the road was the Mail Coach, beside which the stages
+were very commonplace affairs.
+
+The first mail-coach that ever ran the road between London and Norwich
+started in March 1785, and the service was from the beginning continued
+daily. Before that time the mails had been carried by post-boys, who
+began in 1741 to go six days a week instead of three, as they formerly
+had done.
+
+Mail-coaches are entirely things of the past, for the modern coaching
+revival has only brought back the smart stages and drags of the last
+years of the Coaching Age. The mails were expensive and exclusive
+affairs, constructed to carry only nine persons; four inside and five
+out, including coachman and guard. For the higher fares passengers paid
+they had not always the satisfaction of travelling faster than on the
+stages; but perhaps there was some dignity attaching to a seat on the
+mail which was lacking on ordinary coaches. And certainly they were
+surrounded by pomp and circumstance. The guard wore a scarlet coat
+and went armed with pistol, sword and blunderbuss; not, of course,
+for the protection of the passengers, but for the safe-guarding of
+His Majesty's mails. And everything gave place, as a matter of right
+and not merely courtesy, to the mail. Surly pikemen swung open their
+gates and asked no toll, for it was one of the privileges of the mail
+to go toll-free, and the highwaymen, if they walked in the ways of
+caution, left the gorgeous conveyance severely alone, reserving their
+best attentions for the plebeian stages. It was a much more serious
+thing to rob the mail than an ordinary coach, for a conviction was more
+certain to end in death, judges having hints from the Government how
+undesirable it was that mails should be ransacked and the robbers live.
+The rewards usually offered by the Post-office, too, were tempting to
+those who could inform if they would. £200 was the sum generally to be
+had for this service, together with the £40 reward by Act of Parliament
+for the apprehension of a highwayman; and if the mail was robbed
+within five miles of London, another £100. Courage, recklessness, and
+desperation--whichever we like to call it--often nerved the night-hawks
+to brave even so heavy a handicap as this, as this very road bears
+witness, in the daring robbery of the Ipswich Mail in 1822, when
+notes to the value of no less than £31,198 were stolen. In addition
+to the usual rewards, a sum of £1000 was offered by the losing firms
+of bankers, as shown in the accompanying old handbill, but without
+avail. This sum was afterwards increased to £5000, and a notification
+given that, in order to prevent the notes being changed, the ink on all
+new ones had been altered from black to red. But the robbers had the
+impudence to ask £6000 for the return of the notes. They had already
+passed £3000 worth, and naively said, in the negotiations they opened
+up, that the trouble they had taken and the risks they had run did
+not make it worth while to accept a smaller "reward." The bankers,
+however, would not spring another thousand, for by that time everyone
+was too shy of an "Ipswich black note," and it was extremely unlikely
+that any more could be passed. Negotiations were broken off; but a
+month later notes to the value of £28,000 were returned. The thieves
+were never traced, and although the bulk of their booty was useless to
+them, made the very substantial haul of over £3000 by their lawless
+enterprise.
+
+  =£1000 Reward.=
+
+  =STOLEN=
+
+  =FROM THE IPSWICH MAIL,=
+
+  On its way from London, _on the Night
+  of the 11th Sept. Inst._ the following
+
+  =COUNTRY BANK NOTES:=
+
+  Ipswich Bank, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.
+  _ALEXANDERS & Co._ on _HOARE & Co._
+
+  Woodbridge Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.
+  _ALEXANDERS & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._
+
+  Manningtree Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.
+  _ALEXANDER & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._
+
+  Hadleigh Bank, 1, 5, & 10_l._ Notes.
+  _ALEXANDER & Co._ on _FRYS & Co._
+
+  Particulars of which will be furnished at the different Bankers.
+
+  Whoever will give Information, either at ALEXANDERS and Co.
+  or at FRYS and Co., _St Mildred's Court, Poultry_, so that the
+  Parties may be apprehended, shall on his or their Conviction,
+  and the Recovery of the Property, receive the above REWARD.
+
+We have said that mail-coaches were gorgeous. They were painted
+in black and red. Not a shy, unassuming red, but the familiar and
+traditional Post-office hue. Also they bore the Royal coat-of-arms
+emblazoned upon the door panels, and the insignia of the four principal
+orders of knighthood on the quarters. There was no mistaking a
+mail-coach.
+
+The Norwich Mail, which took fifteen and a half hours to do the journey
+so late as 1821, was greatly improved in later years; and finally, in
+the early forties, when the railway reached Norwich and superseded the
+roads, performed the journey in eleven hours, thirty-eight minutes, at
+the very respectable average speed of 9½ miles an hour. It was not the
+only mail on the road, but shared the way so far as Ipswich with the
+Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail. This coach was unfortunate on two occasions
+between 1835 and 1839. On September 28th in the first year, when the
+coachman was climbing on to his box in the yard of the "Swan with Two
+Necks," the horses started away on their own accord, tumbling the
+coachman off and knocking down the helper who had been holding their
+heads. Dashing into Cheapside, they flung themselves against the back
+of the Poole Mail with such force that the coachman of that mail was
+also thrown off. He was taken unconscious to the hospital. Continuing
+their furious rush, the horses of the Ipswich Mail at length ran the
+pole of the coach between the iron railings of a house, and so were
+stopped.
+
+The second happening, in 1839, was somewhat similar. The mail had
+arrived at Colchester, and the coachman, throwing down the reins, got
+off the box. No one was at the horses' heads, and they started away and
+galloped down the High Street, until the near leader fell and broke
+his neck, stopping the team.
+
+It was by the Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail that David Copperfield
+journeyed down to Yarmouth on his second visit to Mr Peggotty. In the
+ordinary course of things, he would have reached Ipswich at 3·12 a.m.
+But on this occasion the weather was a potent factor in causing delay.
+He occupied the box seat, and remarked upon the look of the sky to the
+coachman while yet on the first stage out of London.
+
+"Don't you think that a very remarkable sky?" he asked; "I don't
+remember to have seen one like it."
+
+"Nor I--not equal to it," said the coachman. "That's mist, sir.
+There'll be mischief done at sea, I expect, before long."
+
+The description of this stormy sky is very fine, and seems to have been
+drawn from observation; just as true and as effective in its way as Old
+Crome's billowy cloudscapes, in his _Mousehold Heath_, or as any of
+Constable's rain-surcharged Suffolk scenes.
+
+"It was a murky confusion--here and there blotted with a colour like
+the colour of the smoke from damp fuel--of flying clouds tossed up into
+most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights in the clouds than
+there were depths below them to the bottom of the deepest hollows in
+the earth, through which the wild moon seemed to plunge headlong, as
+if, in a dread disturbance of the laws of nature, she had lost her way
+and were frightened. There had been a wind all day; and it was rising
+then, with an extraordinary great sound. In another hour it had much
+increased, and the sky was more overcast, and it blew hard.
+
+"But as the night advanced, the clouds closing in and densely
+overspreading the whole sky, then very dark, it came on to blow harder
+and harder. It still increased, until our horses could scarcely face
+the wind. Many times in the dark part of the night (it was then late in
+September, when the nights were not short) the leaders turned about,
+or came to a dead stop; and we were often in serious apprehension that
+the coach would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain came up before
+this storm, like showers of steel; and at those times, when there was
+any shelter of trees or lee-walls to be got, we were fain to stop,
+in a sheer impossibility of continuing the struggle.... We came to
+Ipswich very late, having had to fight every inch of ground since we
+were ten miles out of London; and found a cluster of people in the
+market-place, who had risen from their beds in the night, fearful of
+falling chimneys. Some of these, congregating about the inn-yard while
+we changed horses, told us of great sheets of lead having been ripped
+off a high church tower and flung into a bye-street, which they then
+blocked up."
+
+At Ipswich the Yarmouth coaches left the Norwich Road, and so the
+further adventures of David Copperfield do not in this place concern
+us.
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+HERE, as on the other roads, the early advent of the Motor Car, in
+1826, caused much commotion. The steam coaches of that period never
+achieved any success on this route, but caricatures of what might be
+expected were plentiful, and pictures of the Colchester "Dreadful
+Vengeance," the Norwich "Buster," and other fanciful conveyances, in
+the act of exploding and distributing their passengers in little pieces
+over a wide stretch of country, were popular. The railway itself came
+in for much abuse, and misguided and fanatical coach proprietors wasted
+their substance in pitiful attempts to compete with it. Among these
+was Israel Alexander, that Jewish hero of the Brighton Road in the
+early forties, who, although a first-class whip, was perhaps chiefly
+associated with the many upsettings of the Brighton "Quicksilver." He
+fell out with his noble friends on that highway, and, coming to the
+Norwich Road, ran a well-appointed coach to Colchester for a little
+while, until even the Eastern Counties Railway, then the slowest on
+earth, made the pace too quick for him. His turn-out was given the
+extraordinary name of the "Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," and might
+have continued much longer to carry those who were prejudiced against
+railways, had it not met with so many accidents.
+
+One who was contemporary with the coaching age has ingeniously divided
+coaching accidents into three classes:--1. Accidents to the coach; 2.
+Accidents to the horses; 3. Accidents to the harness. The most common
+kind of mishap to the coach was, he says, the breaking of an axle.
+This was not, as a rule, due to any faulty construction of that most
+essential feature of a public conveyance, but to the overloading either
+of passengers or goods, to which coaches were continually subject. The
+sudden snapping of an axle at a high speed or on a down grade produced
+a tremendous crash which generally shot coachman, guard and "outsides"
+in all directions. Happy those who, in such a case, were received into
+the thorny arms of a quickset hedge or the soft embraces of a mud-heap.
+
+Another kind of mishap, not always accidental, was that of a wheel
+coming off; an incident often caused in early times, before the
+introduction of patent axle-boxes, by the mischievous removal of the
+lynch-pin by some unscrupulous rascal in the employ of the rival coach
+proprietor.
+
+The sudden snapping of a skid-chain while descending a hill, resulting
+in the coach running on to the horses and a general overthrow, in
+which horses' legs and passengers heads came into unwonted contact,
+was perhaps as uncomfortable a kind of disaster as could be imagined.
+Overloading, too, sometimes had the effect of rendering a coach
+top-heavy, when a slight lack of caution in running round curves would
+upset it.
+
+Accidents to the horses were:--casting a shoe, involving lameness, and
+perhaps a fall; tripping and stumbling on loose stones and rolling
+over; slipping up in frosty weather; and kicking over the traces or the
+splinter-bar.
+
+Accidents to the harness usually happened to the traces, which commonly
+snapped under an uneven strain. To cobble them up with twine, and so
+complete a stage, was a common practice. In such cases, the thoughts
+of passengers during the remaining miles were, like those of the poet,
+"too deep for words." Most nerve-shaking of all these varied and
+untoward happenings, however, was the breaking of the reins. Rotted
+by age, by the sun's heat and the winter's frosts, they would "come
+away" in the coachman's hands at that worst of moments;--when he was
+holding in his horses downhill. In that contingency, says our ancient,
+who, in the modern slang phrase, has "been there," it was the approved
+thing to say your prayers first and then take a flying leap (result, a
+broken neck, or fractured leg: the bone protruding over the top of the
+Blucher).
+
+"Then shrieked the timid and stood"--or, rather, sat--"still the
+brave;" who had this consolation, that if they fared no better than
+those who jumped, the odds were that they fared no worse.
+
+To be dragged at hurricane pace by four runaway horses (for in such
+a case they generally _did_ so run) with the broken reins trailing
+helplessly after them, was to acquire the knowledge of an inner meaning
+in the word "terror." In escapades of this kind the "insides" were in
+the most unenviable situation; for the "outsides," including coachman
+and guard, took the better, if unheroic, part of crawling over the roof
+and slipping down the back of the coach into the road. The wisdom of
+their doing so would, in most cases, be proved a few seconds later by
+the sound of a distant crash as the coach hurtled against some roadside
+tree and dissolved into matchwork, while the "insides" were stuck as
+full of splinters as a "fretful porcupine" of quills.
+
+The "human boy" was as much the terror of the old coachman as he is
+of the modern cyclist. The sight of a boy with a hoop reduced him to
+a state of purple indignation or of quivering anxiety, according to
+temperament. Many an one of our great-grandfathers, attired in the odd
+costume of boys in that period, and trundling a hoop along the road,
+has felt the lash of the coachman's whip. The following little story
+will show us why.
+
+"When a very little boy," says one of our forebears, "I once upset
+a four-horse coach by losing control over my hoop, which, to my
+consternation, bowled among the legs of the team. I shall never
+forget the horror with which I for an instant saw the spirited
+horses floundering about with that hateful hoop among them, or heard
+the execrations of the coachman and the shouts of the passengers.
+Abandoning the wretched plaything to its fate, I took to my heels down
+a bye-lane, the portentous crash that followed only accelerating my
+speed."
+
+Coach proprietors were favourite targets for Fate's worst shafts.
+They were a hard-working, much-enduring class of men; up early and to
+bed late, retiring in good circumstances and rising perhaps ruined
+through some unforeseen accident. They were "common carriers" in law,
+and bound under many Acts of Parliament to deliver goods uninjured at
+their destination. As carriers of passengers, it is true, they were
+only required to exercise all "due care and diligence" for the safety
+of their customers, and were exempt from liability in case of mishaps
+through the "act of God" or the unforeseen; but the observance of due
+precautions and a daily inspection of the coach had to be proved in
+case of injury to passengers, or in default they were held liable for
+damages.
+
+Thus, the carelessness of any one of his many servants might mean
+a very serious thing to a coach proprietor. In those days the old
+Anglo-Saxon Law of Deodand was not only in existence, but in a very
+nourishing and aggressive condition. Indeed, coaching had practically
+rescued it from neglect. It was a law which, in cases of fatal
+injuries, empowered the coroner's jury to levy a fine, which might vary
+from sixpence to a thousand pounds, upon the object that caused the
+mischief.
+
+The very multiplicity of tribunals before whom the personally
+unoffending coach proprietor was liable to be haled was in itself
+terrifying. There was the already-mentioned coroners jury; the jury on
+the criminal side in trials at the Assizes for manslaughter, and the
+other "twelve good men and true" who assessed damages in the Sheriff's
+Court.
+
+How even the most well-meaning of men might thus suffer is evident
+in the case of a proprietor who was cast in damages from excess of
+caution. For additional security, and in order to protect it from road
+grit, he had a part of an axle incased in wood. One day this axle broke
+and a serious accident happened, resulting in an action against him for
+damages. He lost the day; the judge ruling that, although no proof of a
+defective axle was adduced, a flaw _might_ have existed which a proper
+daily examination would have detected had the extra precaution for
+safety not been adopted.
+
+
+IX
+
+
+WHAT Aldgate might now have been had the original intention of the
+Eastern Counties directorate to place their terminus there been
+successful, we need not stop to inquire. But, as a good deal has
+already been said on the subject of coaches and coaching, it will be of
+interest to learn what were the views of the projectors of the Eastern
+Counties Railway. With their original prospectus was issued a map of
+the proposed railway from London to Norwich and Yarmouth, by which it
+appears that, instead of going to the left of the road from London, as
+far as Seven Kings and Chadwell Heath, it was originally intended to
+construct the line on the right of the road so far. Between Romford and
+Chelmsford the line has been made practically as first proposed, but
+onwards, from Chelmsford to Lexden, it is again on the other side of
+the highway; and, north of Colchester, goes wide of the original plan
+all the way to Norwich.
+
+In many ways this document is very much of a curiosity at this time,
+as also are the hopes and aspirations of the directors at the first
+General Meeting of the company. The chairman, for instance, confidently
+anticipated dividends of 22 per cent., upon which one of the confiding
+shareholders replied that the report was most satisfactory and the
+prospects held out by no means overcharged. "If this understanding,"
+said he, "fails in producing the dividend of 22 per cent., calculated
+upon in the report, then, I must say, human calculations and
+expectation can no longer be depended upon." O! most excellent man. But
+better is to come.
+
+"Should I live to see the completion of this and similar undertakings,"
+he resumed, "I do believe I shall live to see misery almost banished
+from the earth. From the love I bear my species, I trust that I may
+not be too sanguine, and that I may yet witness the happy end that I
+have pictured to myself." His was, you think, the faith that might
+have moved mountains; but it did not produce that promised 22 per
+cent., nor, although we now have many thousands more miles of railway
+than he ever dreamed of, has the millennium yet arrived. Even the most
+far-seeing have not yet discovered any heralds of its approach. Let
+us drop the tribute of a tear to the sorrows of this excellent person,
+whose love of his species and touching anticipation of 22 per cent.
+dividends were so beautifully blended, and so cruelly disappointed.
+
+For some years small (very small) dividends were paid. Hudson, the
+"Railway King," paid them out of capital. "It made things pleasant," he
+said, when charged with such financially immoral practices. Alas! poor
+Hudson, you lived before your time, and went to another world before
+such "dishonest" doings as yours were sanctified in principle by Acts
+of Parliament which authorise payments of dividends out of capital in
+the case of railways under construction.
+
+In 1848 the Eastern Counties Railway was in Chancery, and its very
+locomotives and carriages were seized for debt; while for years
+afterwards its name was a synonym for delay. The satirists of that
+period were as busy with the Eastern Counties as those of our own time
+are with the South-Eastern Railway. Every journey has an end; "even
+the Eastern Counties' trains come in at last," said Thackeray, very
+charitably.
+
+In 1862 it was amalgamated with several minor undertakings, and
+re-named the "Great Eastern Railway"; "great in nothing but the name,"
+as the spiteful said.
+
+When matters were at their worst, the Lord Cranborne of that time was
+invited to accept the position of chairman and to help extricate the
+company from its difficulties. He accepted the post in January 1868
+and held it until December 1871. In April 1868 he had succeeded to the
+title of Marquis of Salisbury. Thus the statesman and prime minister of
+later years was once a great figure in the railway world. His financial
+abilities helped to put the Great Eastern line on a firm basis, and
+when he left it the railway was already greatly improved in every
+respect. To-day, instead of being a "shocking example," it is a model
+to be copied by other lines.
+
+
+X
+
+
+ALTHOUGH the last of the old coaches was long ago broken up, and the
+Norwich Road is no longer lively with mail and stage travellers, it
+has, in common with several other roads out of London, witnessed a
+wholly unexpected revival, in the shape of the Parcel Mail service
+between London and Ipswich. When the Parcel Post came into being on the
+1st August 1883, it was speedily discovered by the General Post-office
+authorities that in paying, according to contract, 55 per cent. of
+the gross receipts to the railway companies for the mere carriage of
+parcels, they were paying too much. Accordingly, a system of Parcel
+Mail coaches was established on several of the old roads, commencing
+with the London to Brighton Parcel Mail, in June 1887. A London and
+Chelmsford four-horse mail was soon added, and this was shortly
+afterwards extended to Colchester, and thence to Ipswich by cart. This
+curious enterprise of the Post-office was immediately successful,
+and it has ever since been found to effect a large saving over the
+railway charges. Nor is time lost in delivery. The down mail leaves
+London at a quarter to ten o'clock every night and the parcels arrive
+at Colchester and Ipswich in time for the first delivery the next
+morning; while the country parcels come up to London by an equally
+early hour. The way in which the service is worked will be gathered
+from the accompanying official way-sheet of the down mails.
+
+  GENERAL POST OFFICE
+
+  THE MOST NOBLE THE MARQUIS OF LONDONDERRY
+  Postmaster-General
+
+  LONDON, CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER, & IPSWICH ROAD
+  PARCEL SERVICE.
+                                                                 This
+  Guard's Remarks as                          Proper  Actual    Column
+  to Delays, &c.                              Times   Times   to be left
+                         Date  190 .          H. M.   H. M.      blank
+
+  Coach Service          Mount Pleasant          P.M.
+  between      Distance  Parcel Office     dep.  9 45
+  London and     M.F.
+  Colchester.     3 0    Eastern District {arr. 10  8
+    Contractor--           P.O.           {dep. 10 10
+    C. Webster,
+  279 Whitechapel
+    Road, E.     11 3    Romford          {arr. 11 40
+                                          {dep. 11 42
+  Cart between                                   A.M.
+   Colchester &   6 2    Brentwood        {arr. 12 29
+   Ipswich.                               {dep. 12 31
+
+  Contractor--    5 0    Ingatestone      {arr. 1 9
+  F. W. Canham,                           {dep. 1 11
+  Ipswich.
+                  6 0    Chelmsford       {arr. 2 0
+                                          {dep. 2 5
+
+                  8 6    Witham           {arr. 3 13
+                                          {dep. 3 15
+
+                  3 2    Kelvedon         {arr. 3 41
+                                          {dep. 3 43
+
+                  9 6    Colchester       {arr. 5 0
+                                          {dep. 5 5
+
+                         Stratford St.    {arr. 5 58
+                           Mary           {dep. 6 0
+
+                 18 2    Ipswich           arr. 7 20
+  Signature
+  of Guard       71 5
+
+              T. E. SIFTON, Inspector-General of Mails.
+
+  The Guard in charge of the Coach must report the cause of any Delay.
+  He must enter all Remarks and Times in the proper Columns. This Bill
+  to be sent, as addressed, by First Post.
+
+  TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH
+  PARCEL MAIL.
+
+The up service, starting with the mail-cart from Ipswich at 7·9 p.m.
+and continued from Colchester by four-horse van at 9·30 p.m., brings
+the country parcels to Mount Pleasant at 4·30 a.m., throughout the
+year. Up and down mails meet at Ingatestone at 1·9 a.m. On this
+service, as on all others, the vans go through, but the drivers and
+guards exchange places; the London men changing on to the van from
+Colchester at Ingatestone, and returning to London; the Colchester men
+taking over the down van and similarly returning whence they came.
+
+It is a curious and unexpected revival of old methods, but an entirely
+successful one. No highwayman has ever attempted to "hold up" the
+Parcel Mail, for the last of that trade has for generations mouldered
+in his grave; but should any amateurs essay to complete this revival
+of old coaching days by waylaying the mail, the guards would be found
+well armed. Their virgin steel and untried pistols have for years been
+carried without any excuse for using them; but there need be no doubt
+that, were the occasion to arrive, they would defend their parcels--the
+pounds of country butter, the eggs, and wild flowers, or the
+miscellaneous consignment from London--with their hearts' blood. There
+are more romantic things in the world to die for than postal parcels
+of eggs, cheese and butter, but the ennobling word DUTY might glorify
+such a sacrifice for the sake of a pound's weight of "best fresh," or a
+dozen of "new laid."
+
+But although the possibility of attack is remote, a spice of danger and
+romance savours the conduct of the parcel mails.
+
+The up Colchester Parcel Mail had a mishap on the night of October 11,
+1890, when, owing to the prevailing fog, it was driven into a ditch
+near Margaretting. Happily, both coachman and guard escaped injury, the
+heavy vehicle resting against the hedge. The coachman, mounting one of
+his team, and hurrying back to Chelmsford, succeeded in overtaking the
+down coach, which, returning to the scene of the accident, unloaded and
+transferred the parcels, and continued to London, leaving the down mail
+to be forwarded with local help. It eventually arrived at Colchester
+four hours late.
+
+
+XI
+
+
+COACHING days, old and new, having now been disposed of, we might
+set off down the road at once, were it not that our steps are at
+once arrested by the sight of the "Red Lion" Inn, at the corner of
+Whitechapel Road and Leman Street, which, together with the "Old Red
+Lion," adjoining, stands on a site made historic by Dick Turpin's lurid
+career.
+
+It was in the yard of the old house that Turpin shot Matthew King
+in 1737. He had stolen a fine horse belonging to a Mr Major, near
+the "Green Man," Epping, and had been traced by means of the animal
+to the inn, where he was found by the Bow Street runners in company
+with Matthew and Robert King, birds of like feather with himself. The
+landlord endeavoured to arrest King, who fired at him without effect,
+calling to Turpin, "Dick! shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"
+
+Turpin had his usual extensive armoury on his person--three brace of
+pistols and a carbine slung across his back. He fired, and shot Matthew
+King, whether by accident or design is not known. King first exclaimed,
+"Dick! you have shot me; make off," but is said afterwards to have
+cursed him as he went, for a coward. King died a week later of his
+wounds, Turpin fleeing to a deserted mansion in Essex, and thence to a
+cave in Epping Forest. It is usually said that it was the more famous
+Tom King who met so dramatic an end, but original authorities give
+Matthew; and certainly we find _a_ Tom King, highwayman, decorously
+executed at Tyburn eighteen years later.
+
+[Illustration: THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT
+MATTHEW KING. _From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854._]
+
+We have met Turpin before, notably at York, where he made an end, two
+years after this exploit. This especial hero of the Penny Dreadful and
+the romantic imagination of the average errand boy belongs especially
+to this road, for he was an Essex man, born at Hempstead in 1705.
+Apprenticed to a Whitechapel butcher in his youth, he commenced his
+career of low villainy by stealing some cattle from a Plaistow
+farmer, and then joined a band of smugglers and deer-stealers and
+housebreakers in Epping Forest, where they set up a storehouse of
+stolen goods in the cave just mentioned. This band became so notorious
+that a sum of fifty guineas was soon offered for their arrest; but it
+was not until the amount had been doubled that two of the ringleaders
+were caught and hanged. The gang thus broken up, Turpin was reduced
+to scouring the roads singly, and pursued a solitary career until one
+dreary February night in 1735, while patrolling the Cambridge Road,
+he saw a horseman approaching through the mist. At the time-honoured
+demand, "Your money or your life!" the stranger simply laughed.
+
+"What!" said he, "should dog eat dog? We are of a like trade."
+
+Thus Turpin and Tom King met, and struck up a partnership. If only one
+quarter of the deeds assigned to Turpin were true, his would be a very
+gallant, as well as phenomenally busy, figure on the roads of England.
+Although by no means a mythical person, the stories told of him nearly
+all belong to the regions of romance, and his true history shows him to
+have had few redeeming qualities. Many of the old knights of the road
+were courageous, and hand in hand with their courage went a humour not
+seldom kindly; but Turpin was a bloodthirsty ruffian whose courage is
+not an established fact, and whose humour, like the "tender mercies of
+the wicked," was cruel, not to say ferocious. It is quite hopeless to
+attempt to finally destroy the great Turpin myth after this lapse of
+time: Harrison Ainsworth's romance has enjoyed too great and too long a
+popularity for that; but let the attempt here be made to paint him as
+the cowardly ruffian he was.
+
+Whitechapel, quite apart from memories of Turpin, owns an unenviable
+repute, and its very name is a synonym for villainy. Its bad savour,
+however, goes back no greater distance in time than the first half
+of the eighteenth century, for until that period it was not built
+upon, and indeed "Whitechapel Common" was spoken of so late as 1761,
+maps proving the old church to have been quite rural at that date.
+Originally a chapel-of-ease to the great mother-parish of Stepney,
+the district was erected into a separate parish so far back as the
+fourteenth century and the original "white chapel"--doubtless so called
+from its mediæval coats of whitewash--made a church. But old names
+cling, and although it has been a church for over six hundred years, it
+has not been able to confer its more dignified title upon the parish
+itself. Thus the name of Whitechapel is doubly misleading nowadays, for
+it is no longer a chapelry and its stately church is in red brick; so
+that there is some force in the argument for re-christening the borough
+and dignifying it by a revival of the old name of Eastminster, owned by
+that not very fortunate Abbey of St Mary Grace, founded by Edward the
+Third in 1348, which formerly stood on the site of the Royal Mint.
+
+[Illustration: WHITECHAPEL OLD CHURCH.]
+
+St Mary's, Whitechapel, is a beautiful church, built in 1877, burnt
+August 20, 1880, and since restored. It replaced the ugly old building,
+which was "taken down for the simple reason that it would not stand
+up." The ancient wrangling over its full title of St Mary Matfelon is
+not yet done, and rash would be he who voted for any particular one
+among the rival derivatives of the name. Matfelon, holds one school,
+was the name of a forgotten benefactor, whose particular benefactions
+are not stated. Who, then, would found, since benefits are thus forgot?
+"_Mariæ, matri et filio_," an ancient dedication, say others; while yet
+different parties find its source in a Syriac word meaning "mother of a
+son" = the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the most entertaining legend, however,
+is that which tells how it originated in the killing of a murderer,
+in 1429, by the women of Whitechapel. "Between Estren and Witsontyd,
+a fals Breton mordred a wydewe in here bed, the which find hym for
+almasse withought Algate, in the suburbes of London, and bar away alle
+that sche hadde, and afterwards he toke socour of Holy Chirche in
+Suthwark; but at the last he took the crosse and forswore the kynge's
+land; and as he went hys waye, it happyd hym to come be the same place
+where he had don that cursed dede, and women of the same parysh comen
+out with stones and canell dong, and ther maden an ende of hym in the
+hyghe strete." These things seem quite in keeping with Whitechapel's
+evil fame.
+
+The old church, as it stood until well into the nineteenth century, is
+shown opposite this page, with one of the old road-waggons crawling
+past. In another view of the same date the High Street itself is
+seen, its long perspective fully bearing out the old description of
+spaciousness. At the same time, it is seen to be empty enough to
+resemble the street of a provincial town. The houses are exceedingly
+old, the road paved with knobbly stones, and the shop windows
+artfully constructed with the apparent object of obstructing instead
+of admitting the light. Very few of these old shop-fronts are now
+left, but a good specimen is that of a bell-founding firm at No. 34
+Whitechapel Road.
+
+[Illustration: WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE.]
+
+This old picture has long ceased to be representative of Whitechapel's
+everyday aspect. The coach has long ago whirled away into limbo,
+the elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to Abraham's, or
+another's, bosom, and Whitechapel knows their kind no more. Bustle,
+and a dismal overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers' barrows,
+tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic of to-day. Also, the
+Jewish element is very pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably
+dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names of Cohen, Abraham,
+Solomon and the like, and others ending in "baum," or "heim." But
+on Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious street regains
+something of its old rural character, in the open-air hay and straw
+market held here, the largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad
+thoroughfare and overflows into the side streets: the countrymen
+who have come up on the great waggons by road from remote parts of
+Essex lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling hay or straw,
+attending to their horses, or refreshing in the old taverns. It is
+Arcady come again. The eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the
+hay-wains, and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic scent of their
+heaped-up loads. It is true that Central Londoners also have their
+so-called Haymarket, but hay is the least likely of articles to be
+purchased there in these days.
+
+What do they think, those countrymen, of the Whitechapel folks, the
+"chickaleary blokes," used, as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth
+century remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy," from
+robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe," and the selling of painted
+sparrows for canaries? Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr
+Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice neighbourhood," said
+Sam, as they rumbled along the crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery
+remarkable circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and oysters go
+together.... The poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to
+be for oysters.... An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The
+street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think that ven a man's
+wery poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in regular
+desperation." Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper depth
+than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty; whelks and villainy foregather
+in Whitechapel at the dawn of the Twentieth Century.
+
+But the poverty and the villainy of Whitechapel must not be too greatly
+insisted upon. They may easily be overdone. Loyal hearts and brave
+lives--all the braver that they are not flaunted in the face of the
+world--exist in the cheerless and unromantic grey streets that lead
+off the main road. The domestic virtues flourish here as well as--if
+not better than--in the West End. The heroes and heroines of everyday
+life--the greater in their heroism that they do not know of it--live
+in hundreds of thousands in the dingy and unrelieved dulness of the
+streets to right and left of Whitechapel Road and of the Mile End Road,
+that go with so majestic a breadth and purposeful directness to Bow.
+
+
+XII
+
+
+LET the Londoner who has never been "down East," and so is given to
+speaking contemptuously of it, take a journey down the Whitechapel and
+Mile End Roads, and see with what an astonishing width, both in respect
+of roadway and foot-pavements, those noble thoroughfares are endowed.
+The London he has already known owns no streets so wide, save only in
+the isolated and unimportant instance of Langham Place; while, although
+it cannot be said that, taken individually, the houses of the great
+East-End thoroughfares are at all picturesque, yet there is a certain
+interesting quality in the roads as a whole, lacking elsewhere. This,
+doubtless, is partly explained by the strangeness of the East-ender's
+garb, and partly by the many Jewish and other foreigners who throng the
+pavements.
+
+A strangely-named public-house--the "Grave Maurice"--is one of the
+landmarks of the Whitechapel Road. Many have set themselves the task of
+finding the origin of that sign and its meaning; but their efforts have
+been baulked by the very multiplicity of historic Maurices, grave or
+otherwise. The sign may originally have been the "Graf Maurice," Prince
+Maurice of Bohemia, brother of the better-known Prince Rupert, the
+dashing cavalier, but a difficulty arises from the fact that there was
+another "Graf Maurice" at the same time, in the person of the equally
+well-known Prince Maurice of Nassau, who died of grief when the Spanish
+overran Holland and besieged Breda. Nor does the uncertainty end here,
+for Dekker uses the expression "grave maurice" in one of his plays,
+written at least thirty years before the time of those princes, in a
+passage which reads as though it were the usual nickname at that period
+for an officer.
+
+Beyond the house owning this perplexing sign we come to the beginning
+of the Mile End Road, one mile, as its name implies, from Aldgate, and
+for long the site of a turnpike-gate, only removed with the close of
+the Coaching Age. Rowlandson has left us an excellent view of Mile End
+Turnpike as it was in his time; with isolated blocks of houses, groups
+of rustic cottages and a background of trees, to show how rural were
+the surroundings towards the close of the eighteenth century; while
+maps of that period mark the road onwards, bordered by fields, with
+"Ducking Pond Row" standing solitary and the ducking-pond itself close
+behind, where the scolds and shrews of that age were soused.
+
+The Ducking-Pond as an institution is as obsolete as the rack, the
+thumb-screw, and other ingenious devices of the "good old times"; but
+most towns a hundred years ago still kept a cucking or ducking-stool;
+while, if they had no official pond for the purpose, any dirty pool
+would serve, and the dirtier it were the better it was esteemed.
+
+[Illustration: MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. _After Rowlandson._]
+
+"The Way of punishing scolding Women is pleasant enough," says an old
+traveller. "They fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve or
+fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so that these two Pieces
+of Wood, with their two Ends embrace the Chair, which hangs between
+them on a sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and always
+remains in the natural horizontal Position in which a Chair should be,
+that a Person may sit conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let
+it down. They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River, and over
+this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the two Pieces of Wood, at
+one End of which the Chair hangs just over the Water. They place the
+Woman in the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often as the
+Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate Heat."
+
+One has only to go and look at the average rural pond to imagine the
+horrors of this punishment. The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the
+clinging green duckwood, common to them, must have made a ducking the
+event of a lifetime.
+
+The difference here, at Mile End, between those times and these is
+emphasised by the close-packed streets on either side, and by the
+crowded tram-cars that ply back and forth.
+
+Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in the little
+old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn that stands by itself, in
+advance of the frontage of the houses, and takes up a goodly portion
+of the broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when land was not
+so valuable as now; when local authorities were easy-going, and when
+anyone who had the impudence to squat down upon the public paths could
+do so, and, remaining there undisturbed for a period of twenty-one
+years, could thus derive a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is
+an explanation of the existence of the "Vine" in this position.
+
+Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses, built in 1695, for the
+housing of old skippers and shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little
+houses and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle where the
+old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly while the curious passers-by
+linger to gaze at them from the pavement, as though they were some
+strange kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the pages of fiction
+as this quiet haven in midst of the roaring streets, screened from them
+by walls and gates of curious architecture surmounted by models of the
+gallant old galleons that have long ceased to rove the raging main.
+It is a spot alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by the
+towering breweries, which indeed would have bought the old place and
+destroyed it a few years ago, but for the indignation aroused when the
+proposal of the governing body of the almshouses to sell became known.
+
+There is nothing else to detain the explorer on his way into Essex.
+The People's Palace, it is true, is a remarkable place, the result of
+Sir Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the East who would
+get culture and find recreation, but it is a dream realised as an
+architectural nightmare, and is a very terrible example of what is done
+to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art and Philanthropy.
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+AT last, by this broadest of broad roads, we come to Stratford-le-Bow
+and its parish church. In these hurried times, and for some centuries
+past, the old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and as "Bow"
+alone it is familiar to all East-enders. The place is nowadays chiefly
+associated with Bryant & May and matches, but there yet remain many old
+Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by the roadside, telling of days
+long before "patent safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel
+and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.
+
+"Bow," says the _Ambulator_ of 1774, "is a village a little to the
+east of Mile End, inhabited by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here
+has been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little inferior to
+that of Chelsea." That description is now somewhat out of date. The
+manufactory of porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is scarce,
+and treasured accordingly. Whitsters--that is to say, bleachers of
+linen--and scarlet dyers, also, are to seek.
+
+Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound traveller in bold and
+rugged fashion; its time-worn tower standing midway of the road and
+challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little River Lea, just
+beyond, to Stratford and into Essex. Church and churchyard split the
+road up into two channels and thus destroy its width, which it never
+afterwards regains until the suburbs are passed and the open country
+reached. A modern touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in
+advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory attitude
+from its granite pedestal, and erected in his lifetime; recalling
+the fervent hero-worshipping days of the "People's William." The
+outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them that see statues raised
+to themselves, unless indeed they be made of finer clay than most
+mortals, kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years this bronze
+Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been made to preside, as it were,
+over an underground public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst
+he rises, absurdly eloquent.
+
+[Illustration: BOW.]
+
+Just how Stratford-le-Bow received its name is an interesting piece
+of history. Both here and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea was
+anciently crossed by a paved stone ford of Roman construction,
+continuing the highway into Essex; but when that river's many channels,
+swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward the Thames, the
+low-lying lands of what we now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were
+for long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For months together
+the approaches to the Lea were lost in floods, and the real channels of
+the river became so deep that those who valued their lives and goods
+dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor travellers thus
+waterlogged came the good and pious Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the
+First. "Having herself been well washed in the water," as old Leland
+says, she fully appreciated the necessity for bridges, and accordingly
+directed the raising of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the
+building of two stone structures, of which one was the original "Bow"
+Bridge; "a rare piece of work, for before that time the like had never
+been seen in England." It seems to have been the stone arch that gave
+its name of "Bow," and if an arched stone bridge was so remarkable in
+those times that it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular, or
+"bow" shape, it must have been either the first, or among the earliest,
+of stone bridges built, in times when others were constructed of timber.
+
+The original name of the village that afterwards sprang up here, on the
+hither or Middlesex shore, was thus singularly contradictory; meaning
+"the street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratford on the Essex
+side was in those days known as Stratford Langthorne.
+
+The good queen not only built the bridges and causeways, but endowed
+them with land and a water-mill, conveying those properties to the
+Abbess of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for the maintenance
+of the works. Having done all this, she died. Some years afterwards a
+Cistercian monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey Mills now
+stand, and the then Abbess of Barking, of opinion that the Abbot of
+that house, being near, would find it easier to look after the bridges
+than herself, reconveyed the property, together with its obligations,
+to him. The trust was kept for a time and then delegated to a certain
+Godfrey Pratt, who had a house built for him on the causeway and
+enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping the works in
+repair. Pratt did so well with his annual stipend and the alms given
+him by wayfarers that the Abbot at length discontinued the grant.
+Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite unauthorised toll-bar and
+levied "pontage" on all except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This
+went on for many years, until the scandal grew too great, and, in
+consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot dispossessed Godfrey
+Pratt of his toll-bar and resumed the control himself.
+
+Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the road had been so
+greatly worn down that the feet of travellers and those of the horses
+often went through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently, to undergo
+an extensive cobbling process; a treatment, by the way, continued
+through the centuries until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.
+
+In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork of all ages. The
+property for its maintenance had, of course, been lost in the
+confiscation of monastic estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair
+afterwards fell upon the local authorities, who always preferred to
+patch and tinker it so long as such a course was possible. On February
+14, 1839, the existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one
+seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+"FAREWELL, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I heard say, honest
+Conscience was once drowned."
+
+Thus says Will Kemp, in his _Nine Days' Wonder_, the account of a
+dance he jigged from London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It
+is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that old joke about the
+drowning of conscience here, and so we will also without delay "have
+over" the modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy flour mills,
+and crossing another branch of the Lea by Channelsea Bridge, come to
+Stratford.
+
+Here, then, begins the county of calves, according to the popular
+jest that to be a native of Essex is to be an "Essex Calf." It is not
+generally regarded as a complimentary title, for of all young animals
+the calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward. To this day in
+rural England the contemptuous exclamation "you great calf!" is used
+of an awkward, overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings. Yet,
+if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer on this subject, the
+nickname had a complimentary origin, "for," said he, "this county
+produceth calves of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."
+
+We have already seen that the French spoken at Stratford-le-Bow in
+Chaucer's time was a scoff and a derision. To-day, neither on the
+Middlesex nor the Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages
+either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of every kind, the
+making of matches that strike only on the box, the varied work of the
+Stratford and West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations
+close at hand; while the business of covering the potato-fields, the
+celery-beds and the grounds of the old suburban mansions with endless
+rows of suburban dwellings is engrossing attention down the road.
+Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban, and Ilford far
+greater in these days than it ever was when its "great" prefix was
+never pretermitted. London, indeed, stretches far out along this road,
+and the country is reached only after many miles of that debatable
+land which belongs neither to country nor town. Heralds of the great
+metropolis appear to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far
+away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the dim presentiment of
+some vast capital," as De Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like
+a misgiving."
+
+Stratford has not improved since coaches left the road. It has grown
+greatly, and grown dirty, squalid and extremely trying to noses that
+have not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure factories and
+other odoriferous industries. But it is a place of great enterprises
+and great and useful markets, and when its introductory mean streets
+are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone Road branches off to
+the left, looks by contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton
+Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park in succession, past a
+building which, whether as an institution or an example of beautiful
+architecture, would well grace the West. The West Ham Public Library
+and Technical Institute is here referred to. "Irish Row," on the
+way, marked on old maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages
+inhabited until recent years by a turbulent colony of London-Irish
+market-gardening labourers, subsidised by Mrs Nelson in times of
+coaching competition to impede hated rivals as they came past the
+"Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of Manor Park; a house which,
+like the "Coach and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a legitimate
+coaching trade to something more in the gin-palace sort. This is not
+to say that the staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct
+negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish Row, but when the
+rival Ipswich "Umpire" or the "New Colchester" coaches developed much
+sporting competition and their coachmen evinced a dogged determination
+to be first over Bow Bridge on the way up to London, and, by
+consequence, the first to arrive at their destination, why, an obscure
+hint or two on the part of one of her numerous staff, accompanied by
+the wherewithal for a drink, produced wonders in the way of highway
+obstruction. But such recollections are become unsubstantial as the
+fabric of which dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions of
+tramways and interminable rows of suburban shops that conduct to Ilford
+Bridge.
+
+Great Ilford lies on the other side of the sullen Roding, that rolls
+a muddy tide in aimless loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking
+Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial been approached by a bridge
+replacing the "eald," or old, ford, whence its name derives and not
+from that crossing of the stream being an "ill" ford, as imaginative,
+but uninstructed, historians would have us believe; although the slimy
+black mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the exercise of fording
+an ill enough enterprise. Ilford is now in the throes of development
+and is fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere suburb. Let us
+leave it for places less sophisticated.
+
+The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving Ilford by moonshine, set
+forward "dauncing within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two
+strong Jades were beating and byting either of other." We take this
+to mean two women fighting on the road, until the context is reached,
+where he says that their hooves formed an arch over him and that he
+narrowly escaped being kicked on the head. It then becomes evident that
+he is talking of horses.
+
+Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and in more decorous
+fashion than that of Will Kemp, we come, past an inn oddly named
+the "Cauliflower"--probably as a subtle compliment to the abounding
+market-gardens of the neighbourhood--to the long, straight perspective
+of the road across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of new suburban
+"villa" streets now cover the waste on either side, so that the
+beginnings of the plain are not so much heath as modern suburb,
+created by the Great Eastern Railway's suburban stations and by the
+far-reaching enterprises of land corporations, which here carry on the
+usual speculations of the speculative builder on a gigantic scale. In
+acre upon acre of closely-packed streets, each one with a horrible
+similarity to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning
+clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty London live and lose their
+individuality, and pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman
+of a century ago waited impatiently behind the ragged thickets and
+storm-tossed thorn trees of Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there
+now rises the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway between
+Ilford station and that of Chadwell Heath, the recent enormous growth
+of population on this sometime waste has led to the erection of the
+new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes," while widened lines
+have been provided for the increased train services. "Seven Kings"
+is a romantic name, but who those monarchs were, and what they were
+ever doing on the Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable for
+cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is impossible to say. Many wits
+have been at work on the problem, but have been baffled. The natural
+assumption is that at this spot, marked on old maps as "Seven Kings
+Watering," the seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily
+records no such meeting, but there was no _Court Circular_ in those
+times, and so many royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked,
+except locally and in some fashion similar to this. So let us assume
+the kings met here and watered their horses at the "watering," which
+was a place where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash.
+The stream still crosses the highway, but civilisation has put it in a
+pipe and tucked it away underground.
+
+[Illustration: SEVEN KINGS.]
+
+A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway at this point, known as
+Stoup Lane ("stoup" meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of the
+Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish. Here it was, in 1794, on a
+night of December, that a King's messenger, James Martin by name, was
+shot by five footpads. The register of St Edmund's, Romford, records
+the burial of this unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.
+
+Let us not, however, in view of the more or less grisly dangers that
+still await belated wayfarers on this road, enlarge too greatly on
+the lawlessness of old times; for the homeward-bound resident making
+for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs towards the stroke
+of ten o'clock is not infrequently startled by the sinister figure
+of a footpad springing from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and
+demanding--_not_ his money or his life, as in the old formula, but--a
+halfpenny! This invariable demand of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath
+footpads, which argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is
+for half the price of a drink.
+
+"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?" asks the threatening
+tramp.
+
+"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning the long
+perspective of the road for the policeman who ought to be within
+sight--but is not; "w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"
+
+"I've walked all the way from Romford and only got half the price of a
+glass o' beer," says the rascal.
+
+The citizen is astonished and incredulous, and his astonishment gets
+the better of his fear. "Oh, come now," he rejoins, "no one walks three
+miles from Romford for a glass of beer; besides, all the houses here
+close at ten o'clock."
+
+"Oh, they do, do they?" replies the tramp, offensively. "'Ere, my
+mate Bill'll talk to you," and, whistling, the ominous bulk of Bill
+emerges aggressively from the darkling hedge, and together they proceed
+to wipe the road with that respectable ratepayer, and, rifling his
+pockets, leave him, bruised and bleeding, to reflect on the blessings
+of civilisation and to be thankful that he was not born a hundred years
+ago, when he might have been shot dead instead of being felled to the
+ground by the half-brick in a handkerchief which he finds beside him
+and takes home as a trophy.
+
+Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past Beacontree Heath,
+on the right, to an open country of disconsolate-looking contorted
+elms and battered windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and
+still airs of summer of the winter winds that race across the watery
+flats of Rippleside and Dagenham Marshes, out of the shivering east.
+Lonely, until quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House," beside the
+road, the two whalebones that even yet surmount its garden entrance
+the wonderment for more than two hundred years of chance travellers.
+Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded in the Thames in
+the year of Oliver Cromwell's death, and set up here in memory of him.
+However that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, when Ogilby's
+_Britannia_ was published, for the house is marked on his map as "Ye
+Whalebone."
+
+These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected, have little longer yet
+to remain, for though apparently proof against decay, the house and
+grounds are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale to the
+builders.
+
+[Illustration: WHALEBONE HOUSE.]
+
+The sole historic or other vestige remaining of the "Whalebone"
+turnpike-gate, once standing here, is an account to be found in the
+newspapers of the time of an attack made upon George Smith, the
+toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused in the darkness by a
+voice calling "Gate!" and, going to open it, was instantly knocked
+down, in a manner somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero
+of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:--
+
+  "Last night and the night before,
+  Three tom-cats came knocking at my door.
+  I went down to let them in,
+  And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin."
+
+The two men who felled the unfortunate George Smith, alarmed by his
+cries of "Murder!" threatened to shoot him if he were not quiet,
+and, going over his pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five
+shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting him over, a third
+confederate, ransacking the house, discovered three pounds. With this
+booty and a parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared as
+silently as they came.
+
+
+XV
+
+
+ROMFORD, now approached, is but twelve miles from London, and has
+frankly given up the impossible and ceased all pretence of being
+provincial. At the same time, building-land having only just (in the
+speculator's phrase) become "ripe for development," the townlet has not
+yet lost all individuality in suburban extension.
+
+The place, say some antiquaries, derives its name from the "Roman
+ford" on the Rom brook, but it is a great deal more likely that the
+origin is identical with that of the first syllable in the names of
+Ramsgate, Ramsey and Romney, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon "ruim" =
+a marsh. Time was when the town was celebrated for its manufacture
+of breeches; an industry which gave rise to a saying still current in
+the less polished nooks and corners of Essex--"Go to Romford and get
+your backsides new bottomed." Breeches have long ceased to be a noted
+product of the town, which for many years past has bulked large in the
+annals of Beer. Barricades, avenues, mountains and Alpine ranges of
+barrels, hogsheads, firkins and kilderkins of Romford ale and stout
+proclaim that the Englishman's preference for his "national drink" has
+not abated, and that
+
+  "Damn his eyes, whoever tries
+  To rob a poor man of his beer"
+
+is still a popular sentiment; as both the brewers of arsenical
+compounds and the more rabid among teetotallers are some day likely to
+discover.
+
+[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ROMFORD.]
+
+A French traveller in England some two hundred years ago wrote that
+"there are a hundred sorts of Beer made in England, and some are
+not bad: Art has well supplied Nature in this particular. Be that as
+it will, beer is Art and wine is Nature; I am for Nature against the
+world." That old fellow did not know how artful beer could be, and if
+he could re-visit his native France might discover that even wine is no
+longer the simple child of nature it once was.
+
+But although John Barleycorn is the tutelary deity of Romford, it is
+quite conceivable that the stranger bound for Norwich, and turning
+neither to right nor to left, might pass through the town without so
+much as a glimpse obtained of those Alpine ranges aforesaid. True,
+on entering Romford, he could scarce fail to observe certain weird
+structures ahead: odd towers like first cousins to lighthouses,
+springing into the sky line, with ranges of perpendicular pipes, like
+the disjointed fragments of some mammoth organ, beside them, the
+characteristic signs and portents of a great brewery; but the barrels
+are secluded, nor even are Romford's streets blocked, as might have
+been suspected, with brewers' drays. Romford, indeed, spells to the
+uninstructed stranger rather bullocks than beer; for the cattle-pens
+are the chief feature of its market-place, and sheep and hay and straw
+bulk more in the eye of the road-farer than the products of Ind, Coope
+& Co., which are to be seen in all their vastness beside the railway
+station and on the sidings constructed especially for the trade in ale
+and stout.
+
+[Illustration: ROMFORD.]
+
+The town in its most characteristic aspect is seen in the accompanying
+illustration taken from the doorway of that old inn, the "Windmill and
+Bells," the broad road margined with granite setts and the pavements
+fenced with posts and rails; the re-built parish church prominent
+across the market-place.
+
+[Illustration: OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PUTTELS BRIDGE.]
+
+Beyond Romford the road grows rural, and, by the same token, hilly.
+This, gentle reader, let it not be forgotten, is Essex, and we all
+know with what persistence that county is spoken of, and written of,
+as flat. If you would know what flatness is, try the Great North Road
+and its long levels between Baldock, Biggleswade and Alconbury, or
+search Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire or Hunts. _There_ is flatness, beside
+which that of Essex is the merest superstition, started probably by
+some tired traveller of inconstant purpose, who, essaying to explore
+the county, gave up the enterprise when he had reached Wanstead Flats.
+Surveying that not highly romantic expanse, he took it as an exemplar
+of the rest of the shire, and so returned home to start this immortal
+myth on its career. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex will
+subscribe to its flatness as an article of faith, and as such an one
+cycles from Romford, through the hamlet of Hare Street, over Puttels
+Bridge, where stands an old toll-house, to the other hamlet of Brook
+Street, the fact that he will actually have to _walk_ his machine up
+the steep hill that conducts into the town of Brentwood will cause him
+to think hard things of myth-makers.
+
+[Illustration: THE "FLEECE," BROOK STREET.]
+
+Brook Street Hill is the name of this eminence. Beside it stands a
+cemetery, convenient for brakeless cyclists who recklessly descend, and
+at its foot is a fine old inn, the "Fleece," a house of call for the
+fish-waggons that were once so great a feature of this road so far as
+Colchester and Harwich.
+
+[Illustration: THE MARTYR'S TREE, BRENTWOOD.]
+
+Brentwood, on the crest of this hill, occupies an elevated table-land,
+with sharp descents from it on every side. The "burnt wood" town,
+destroyed in some forgotten conflagration, is now a long-streeted,
+old-fashioned place, apparently in no haste to bid good-bye to the
+past. It keeps the old Assize House of Queen Elizabeth's time in
+repair, and carefully sees to it that the Martyr's Tree, decayed though
+the old elm stump be and hollow, is saved from perishing altogether.
+It was in 1555 that William Hunter, in his twentieth year, suffered
+in this place for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. That
+staunch upholder of the Protestant faith scarce needed the modern
+memorial, close by, while this shattered trunk remained, its gaping
+rents carefully bricked up by pious hands; but let the venerable relic
+be doubly safe-guarded in these times, when that candle lit by Latimer
+and Ridley, close upon three centuries and a half ago, burns dim, and
+lawless and forsworn clergy within the Church of England are working
+towards Rome and the return of the famous days of fire and stake; when
+the blood of the martyrs has ceased to inspire a generation which
+demands to be shown some tangible object before it can realise the
+significance of that sacrifice. Here, then, is something that can be
+seen and touched, to bring the least imaginative back in fancy to those
+terrible days, when brave hearts of every class gave up their lives in
+fire and smoke rather than abjure their faith. The Romanising clergy
+of to-day are made of coarser fabric than the martyrs. _They_ are not
+actuated by honesty, but take oaths they have no intention of observing
+to a Church whose bread they eat and whose trust they betray.
+
+Would you know something of that martyrdom at Brentwood? Then scan the
+inscription on the modern granite obelisk, and control, if you can, a
+righteous indignation when you perceive a modern Roman Catholic chapel
+standing, impudent in these days of an exaggerated tolerance, over
+against the Martyr's Tree itself, typifying the Scarlet Woman in midst
+of her blasphemies, exultant over the blood of the saints. "He being
+dead yet speaketh," quotes that inscription; but what avails it to
+speak in the ears of the deaf, or to talk of honour to the perjured?
+"Learn from his example," continue those momentous words, "to value
+the privilege of an open Bible, and be careful to maintain it"; but
+the world goes by unheeding, and only when the danger again becomes
+acute and liberty of conscience is passing away will indifference be
+conquered and the folly of it revealed.
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+BRENTWOOD still keeps a notable relic of coaching days in the old
+"White Hart" Inn, a curious specimen of the timbered and galleried
+type of hostelry familiar to our great-grandfathers. It turns a long
+plastered front to the street, but the great carved and panelled
+doorway leading into the coach-yard confirms the proud legend,
+"Established 1480." Full forty coaches passed through Brentwood in
+every twenty-four hours at the close of the Coaching Age, but the
+earlier days of coaching brought the "White Hart" more custom than
+came to it at the close of that era, when, in consequence of the roads
+being improved, travelling was quicker, and places once halted at were
+left behind without stopping. Innkeepers were considerable losers by
+this constant acceleration of coaches, and saw the smart, long-distance
+stages go dashing by where, years before, the old slow coaches stayed
+the night, or, at the very least, halted for meals.
+
+The "White Hart" remains typical of the earlier times, and still keeps
+the old-world comfort regretted in other places by De Quincey, who
+lived long enough to witness the beginnings of the great changes that
+have come over the hotels of town and country since coaches gave place
+to railways.
+
+[Illustration: YARD OF THE "WHITE HART," BRENTWOOD.]
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+BRENTWOOD is no sooner left behind than the road descends steeply
+over what was once a part of Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild
+and hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the place where, in
+November 1692, those seven jovial Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay
+were themselves, while hunting the hare, chased and at last run down
+by nine hunters of a different sort, who turned their pockets out and
+then bade them good-day and be damned. The original chronicler of
+this significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell, makes no
+especial feature of the event. He merely records it as having happened
+"near Ingerstone," and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings in
+the same sort along the several approaches to London. Little wonder,
+therefore, that Macaulay should have drawn the conclusion that at this
+time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest and most populous
+shires of England was as dangerous as a pilgrimage across the deserts
+of Arabia.
+
+From the descending road or from Shenfield Church the country is seen
+spread out, map-like, below, over the valley of the Thames, to where
+the river empties itself into the broad estuary at the Nore. At least,
+there is the vale, and the map vouchsafes the information that the
+river flows thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out the view of
+that imperial waterway. "I cannot see the Spanish fleet, because it's
+not in sight," says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in the
+poem, and it is precisely for the same reason that the Thames is not
+visible from Shenfield. But if one is denied a view of that imperial
+river, at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard, a prodigal
+riot of roses of every hue and habit, are worth seeing. The attenuated
+shingled spire, one of the characteristic features of Essex churches,
+beckons insistently from the road, and he who thereupon turns aside is
+well repaid, in a sight of the elaborately-carved timber columns of
+the interior, proving how in this county, where building stone is not
+found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders made excellent shift
+with heart of oak. This is, in fact, like so many other Essex churches,
+largely wooden, and its timber is as sound now as it was six or seven
+hundred years ago.
+
+[Illustration: SHENFIELD.]
+
+Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End" lies two miles distant
+from Shenfield. As in the case of so many other places near the
+great roads, a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name of
+the old village sprang up, to catch the custom of travellers; but an
+additionally curious fact is the utter extinction of the original
+village, which lay a mile distant from the highway, where the parish
+church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring farmstead. Explorers
+in the countryside are often astonished at the great distances
+between villages and their parish churches, and seek in vain in their
+guide-books or in talk with the "oldest inhabitant" an explanation of
+so curious a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the mystery is
+found in the enclosure of the surrounding common lands. The enclosure
+of commons has never been possible without the passing of special Acts,
+which have divided what should have been the heritage of the people
+for all time between the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their
+proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor and the tenants would
+each obtain their share of the plunder, in the form of freehold land,
+with the obvious result that the villagers, instead of paying rent for
+their cottages clustering round the church in the original village,
+built themselves new and rent-free cottages on their share of the spoil
+of the commons. The old cottages being pulled down, or allowed to
+decay, it was not long before the last trace of the original village
+disappeared.
+
+[Illustration: MOUNTNESSING CHURCH.]
+
+Mountnessing was once the seat of the Mounteneys, who have long since
+vanished from their old home. The old church, largely red brick without
+and timber within, still preserves the fossil rib-bone of an elephant,
+long regarded with reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant,
+and has for an additional curiosity the carving of a head on one of
+the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps by way of warning to Early English
+parishioners of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's bridle."
+The red-brick west front of the church, masking the wooden belfry-frame
+from the weather, still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick,
+but such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that without that
+evidence of age it would be difficult to credit it with so long an
+existence. The iron ties in the shape of the letter S give the view
+a singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in verse, beginning,
+"Reader, excuse the underwritten," is a curiosity of Mountnessing
+churchyard.
+
+[Illustration: MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL.]
+
+Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as the modern settlement is
+named, is seen clustering on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and
+a wayside pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting of a
+dozen cottages, two public-houses, a general "stores" (our grandfathers
+would have been content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a tin
+tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to walk a mile to
+church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and a windmill situated on a knoll;
+a windmill that for picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome
+or a Constable.
+
+From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims, two miles to
+"Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of customary spelling. The milestones
+are undoubtedly strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on
+the pedantic side, for that village derives its name from a settlement
+of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or meadow, at the Roman milestone
+they found here, but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone"
+they called their village, which lies in the little valley of the
+River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream of the smallest)
+hither and thither to give a perennial verdure to the meads along its
+course. "Ing" is, by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names
+successively met with along the River Wid. Mounteney's Ing we have
+already seen, and Fryerning, or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; while
+Margaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond Ingatestone.
+
+[Illustration: THE GATEHOUSE, INGATESTONE HALL.]
+
+Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad, is of the
+narrowest, and remains in almost every detail exactly as it is pictured
+in the old print reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the
+church still rising behind. It is a tower which by no means looks its
+age of over four hundred years, so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness
+of the brick. Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that Sir
+William Petre who, emulating the accommodating qualities of the famous
+Vicar of Bray, bowed before the religious storms of the reigns of Henry
+the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth. "Made of the willow
+and not of the oak," those tempests not only left him unscathed, but
+brought him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched with the manor
+of Ingatestone, plundered from the Abbey of Barking, together with
+much spoil elsewhere. How he managed to do it is a mystery, but during
+the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for such the Petres always
+have been) actually obtained a Papal Bull confirming him and his in
+these grants. One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy,
+recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble physiognomy could
+be so accomplished a time-server and truckler. His home, plundered
+from the nuns of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone
+Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the road, down a
+beautifully-timbered country lane. The entrance is by a gatehouse
+with the motto, "_Sans Dieu Rien_," situated at the end of an avenue
+and framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old red-brick
+turreted buildings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Lord
+Petre of to-day does not reside here, but the place is still in the
+family, and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use. Miss Braddon
+is perhaps scarce to be numbered among those novelists whose literary
+landmarks are followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone
+Hall that it is the scene of her _Lady Audley's Secret_. The
+fish-ponds of old monastic times, the well in which Lady Audley thrust
+her husband, the lime-walk he haunted, together with such romantic
+accessories as terraced walks and a priest's hiding-hole, form items
+which would require the business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer
+to fully enlarge upon. They _do_ say--the "they" in question being the
+gossips of Ingatestone--that the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail,
+passing at 1·15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the high road,
+once saw "a something" in white mysteriously sauntering beneath the
+trees, but whether it was the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one
+of the sisters thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely
+a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the Postmaster-General's
+regulations and time-sheets not allowing for time spent in psychical
+research.
+
+[Illustration: INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. _From an Old Print_]
+
+The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is visible on the right, soon
+after leaving Ingatestone. Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its
+timbered belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the village,
+standing solitary, save for the vicarage and a farmhouse, beside a
+railway crossing--if, indeed, any building adjoining the main-line of a
+great railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret thus honoured
+in the place-name is the Saint to whom the church is dedicated. Some
+traces of the "marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the old
+windows, in decorative allusion, remained until they were swept away
+for modern stained-glass in memory of a late vicar and his family;
+glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that, save for an
+inscription on one of the bells, she now remains unhonoured in her
+own church, deposed in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects
+kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art furnisher. The only
+remaining ancient glass is that of the east window, a magnificent
+fifteenth-century "tree of Jesse."
+
+[Illustration: AT MARGARETTING.]
+
+Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the twenty-fifth milestone,
+where a post-office and some few scattered cottages straggle
+picturesquely at the foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The
+odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially to spoil some
+two miles of this road is the park wall of Hylands, a large estate
+purchased about 1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster, who
+stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and raised this eyesore to
+enclose his new-made park. Almost as soon as the last brick was put
+in its place, the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by railway
+speculations, and his walled-in Eden was sold. Nature in the meanwhile
+has done her best, and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the
+ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River Wid crosses beneath
+the road, water-lilies gem the stream and the wind sounds in the
+luxuriant Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.
+
+If it were not for its church, which has been re-built and has a very
+fine and tall spire, one might easily pass Widford and not know it,
+for the very few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such as it
+is, it stands on the crest of something not quite so much as a hill
+and rather more than an incline, and beside its large church has an
+equally fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White Horse." Time was,
+and that until three years since, when Widford was celebrated for its
+one other inn, the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled, the
+"Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by the picture-sign of a
+headless woman, with the inscription, _Fort Bone_, on one side, and a
+portrait of Henry the Eighth on the other. "_Fort Bone_" was commonly
+Englished by slangy cyclists as "good business." The sign, of course,
+was a pictorial and satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an
+open question whether or not in their present form this and the several
+other "Quiet Woman" and "Good Woman" signs throughout the country are
+perversions of the original legend, "_la bonne fame_" displayed on old
+inns in the distant past; an inscription laudatory of the hostelry,
+and matching the self-recommendation of "_la bonne rénommée_," found
+in modern France, or the more familiar "noted house for--" and "good
+pull up" inscriptions on inns in modern England. Virgil's description
+of Fame, walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the clouds,
+may have originated the pictorial sign of the headless woman in days
+of ancient learning; and the classic allusion becoming lost and the
+supposedly incorrect spelling of "_fame_" being altered to "_femme_,"
+we thus obtain a very reasonable derivation. We may take it that many
+shrew-bitten folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily agreed to
+forget the original meaning in order to adopt one so exactly fitting
+their opinion that the only quiet or good women were headless ones.
+
+[Illustration: THE "GOOD WOMAN" SIGN.]
+
+Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change that is robbing places of
+all interest and distinction, the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer
+swings from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed inn opposite the
+"White Horse" has retired into private life. The picture sign is now
+housed inside the "White Horse."
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+WIDFORD almost immediately introduces the explorer to Moulsham
+(originally the "mole's home"), itself own brother--but a very
+out-at-elbows brother--to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the wind
+between our gentility and the somewhat fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we
+should turn to the left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of
+the town, and so, proceeding along the "new London road," come into
+Chelmsford, half way down the High Street. Being, however, intent
+rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en endure the half-mile
+length of shabby, untidy street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford,
+the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City of Calves, over the
+hunchbacked and narrow stone bridge across the Chelmer, the successor,
+at an interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original bridge
+built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That is a huge slice of time, but
+it was too late, even in Norman days, for the town to change its name
+from Chelmers_ford_ to something more appropriate when the ford was
+thus superseded.
+
+Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High Street of the town,
+the view closed by the Shire Hall and the church; the Norwich Road,
+however, turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and refusing
+to make acquaintance with the town. It is the Conduit that is seen in
+this illustration of the High Street, its architecture scarce improved
+by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be ornamental, over its
+cupola.
+
+[Illustration: THE BRIDGE: ENTRANCE TO CHELMSFORD.]
+
+Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at the end of this view,
+spoil one another, the Hall almost entirely hiding the church when
+looking down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular exterior
+of the church putting the clumsy architecture of the Hall to shame,
+as a pagan upstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some, but
+its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone concerns the passing
+stranger, who feels so concerned by sight of it that he accordingly
+passes the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the seated bronze effigy
+of a native, a bygone Lord Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like
+an old apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops green coppery
+stains over his nice stone pedestal) keep one another company in the
+open space fronting this building.
+
+[Illustration: THE CONDUIT, CHELMSFORD.]
+
+The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal, whose career came to a
+close in 1806. The monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for all
+time the image of a judge whose administration of English law, directed
+by serene wisdom, assisted by purest love of justice, endeared by
+unwearied kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will be held by
+his country in undying remembrance." His birthplace could hardly have
+said more than that.
+
+[Illustration: TINDAL'S STATUE.]
+
+Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways, being indeed very severely
+bitten with a taste for modernity. Is it not famous as the first town
+in the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have not its streets
+been resolutely swept clear of antiquity? The town, in short, is
+scarce picturesque. It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays,
+but on other occasions every house provokes a yawn, with perhaps the
+exception of the "Saracen's Head," an inn that, despite its modernised
+and stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old times. There was a
+"Saracen's Head" here certainly as far back as the fifteenth century,
+and probably much earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it derived
+from Crusading times, when the knights and men-at-arms, returning
+from Palestine with wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys,
+leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the Holy Land, found
+their fame come home before them, and the old inns they had known--the
+"Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine Wheel," and the
+like--often re-named in their honour. With little effort we can imagine
+the scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period, when exploits at
+Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were told and re-told, and gained wonderfully
+in the repetition over sack and malvoysie. What bloody fellows they
+were, and with what zest they slew the Soldan's soldiers over and over
+again as they sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six
+hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has been rebuilt many times
+since then; but human nature remains the same though timber rot and
+brick perish, and again and again the same old talk has been heard in
+the bar-parlour of the inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Creçy;
+men of a later age who warred under Marlborough at Blenheim, Ramillies
+or Malplaquet; the lads of the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from
+the horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from a hundred fights on
+the burning South African veldt--all have had their circle of greedy
+listeners here.
+
+The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek and stuccoed face to
+the street, and the house shows signs of extensive rebuilding and
+remodelling, undertaken in the full flush of the great days of coaching
+prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in the belief that
+coaching, and the road as an institution, would last for ever. Fond
+belief! Has anyone ever stopped to consider the fact that the great
+coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a great deal more
+to do with the pulling down of the old-fashioned galleried and timbered
+inns of country towns than ever railways have had? The average small
+country town felt in fullest measure the great increase in business
+incidental to the last years of the coaching age, and every innkeeper
+hastened to rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who had,
+from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding until the dawn of
+the Railway Age, on seeing that the road would decay and travellers
+be carried to their journeys' ends without halting for rest and
+refreshment, promptly gave up any such ideas and were thankful that
+they had not begun the work of reconstruction and enlargement. Those
+who had were ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared may
+yet be often met with, a world too large, in country towns where once
+the mails and the stage-coaches passed, like a procession, day by day.
+It is quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house like the
+"White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it is not too much to say that,
+had the Coaching Age lasted another ten years, it also would have been
+rebuilt.
+
+An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its central figure, belongs
+to the "Saracen's Head" at Chelmsford. For some years after he had
+won fame as a novelist he still retained his position in the General
+Post Office, of which he was a travelling inspector. On one of these
+official journeys he happened to be staying here, at the time when
+his _Barchester Towers_ was being issued, after the then prevailing
+fashion, in parts. He was seated in the coffee-room when two clergymen
+entered, one of them with the newly-issued part of the story. The
+cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the trials of the
+Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs Proudie, who was rather a trial
+to Trollope's readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the clergyman
+put the book down. "Confound that Mrs Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish
+she were dead!"
+
+Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he thanked the reader for thus
+accidentally telling him that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome,
+and undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen," said he, "she shall
+die in the next number;" and die she accordingly did. But in defence
+of Trollope's truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the
+opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs Proudies may yet be
+found in a goodly proportion of the episcopal palaces of England.
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+RETURNING now to the Conduit, and making for the open road once more,
+Chelmsford is left by way of Springfield, past the successor of
+Chelmsford's finest old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The
+old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five centuries, and had
+been the halting-place of many famous travellers, among them a long
+line of Earls of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham
+and London; but none of these associations sufficed to save the house.
+Fragments of its carved beams are preserved in the local museum, but
+recall it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon bring back
+in his majesty that denizen of the earth in the dim æons of the past.
+Chelmsford would dearly like many of its old buildings--wantonly
+demolished years ago--back again; but what is done cannot be undone,
+and there's an end on't. The "Cross Keys" remains, in a restored
+condition.
+
+[Illustration: THE "THREE CUPS" SIGN]
+
+The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of Chelmsford, carries
+varying significances. To the mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the
+American from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim Fathers and
+their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts; and to the gaol-bird
+it means a "stretch" of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in
+fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building enlarged in recent
+years for the accommodation of the guests consigned to it at Assize
+time from the Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But, once
+past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing and cheerful. Its
+long miscellaneous street, where the quaint sign of the "Three Cups"
+stands out, gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive
+grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of picturesqueness.
+That this has been the aim of their architects is abundantly manifest
+in examples where, under a single roof, one may experience the
+mingled romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle, a Tudor
+manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a "Queen Anne" mansion; all done in
+red brick, gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover, fitted
+with electric light and hot and cold water supply. To this end has
+castellated and domestic architecture unwound its long story during
+some five hundred years. It will be seen thereby that William of
+Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time architect did not live
+in vain.
+
+But if Springfield be modern as a suburb, it is ancient as a village.
+To see old Springfield, it is necessary to turn off the road to the
+left, and to journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church, a
+noble building with mingled red brick and stone tower bearing the
+inscription, "Prayse God for al the good benefactors 1586." Oliver
+Goldsmith, it is quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model
+for his _Deserted Village_. He certainly visited at an old cottage
+opposite the church, but the real Sweet Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.
+
+[Illustration: SPRINGFIELD CHURCH.]
+
+Beyond the village and facing the high road are the strangely
+impressive lodges of the historic estate of New Hall; new at the end
+of the fifteenth century, but declined into a respectable age by
+now and cobwebbed with much history and many legends. The place, now
+and for a considerable number of years past an alien convent, has
+been owned during a period of four hundred years by an astonishing
+number of historic personages, who have succeeded one another like
+flitting phantoms. Here the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps
+out spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the handling of the
+historic kaleidoscope. Built by Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose
+daughter and heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother
+of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus eventually came into possession
+of Henry the Eighth, who occasionally resided here and re-named it
+"Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of
+Sussex. By this time it had resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners
+were George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, and Oliver
+Cromwell, who had it as a gift from Parliament and exchanged it so soon
+as he decently could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like
+residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him succeeded another Duke of
+Buckingham, and to him that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk,
+Duke of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and was visited
+here, when he was suffering from gout and dropsy, by that scribbling
+traveller, Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of historic
+owners may be said to end, but constant change has ever been the lot
+of New Hall, and a succession of lesser lights followed him until the
+nuns set up their secluded life here and bade farewell to a vain
+world. That world passes by; the road on one side, the railway midway
+in the grounds, and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as
+morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the vineyard.
+
+[Illustration: NEW HALL LODGES]
+
+No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road. All is emptiness,
+and the lichened brick and the crumbling stone vases of neighbouring
+boundary walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled
+aims characteristic of the place.
+
+There is an air of romance about Boreham House, as seen from the
+tree-embowered road at a little distance from New Hall; an altogether
+deceptive air, let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic
+building of white brick. It is its situation at the head of a formal
+lake, fringed with stately elms, that confers the illusory distinction,
+but the explorer of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing
+rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl squattering
+on the lake, can weave his own romance to fit the scene. And if the
+house, though stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest in
+the shape of the identical carriage used by the Duke of Wellington at
+the Battle of Waterloo. Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent
+years to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken to pieces in an
+accident. Restored now to its original condition, it will need to be a
+great occasion indeed that brings it forth again.
+
+[Illustration: BOREHAM.]
+
+Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its old gabled cottages
+clustering round the still older church, itself embowered in lime
+trees whose delightful scent weights the July air with an Arcadian
+languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham has every likelihood
+of having his nerves startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the
+road of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door open,
+and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of one of the inmates
+of the silent tomb making a hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High
+noon being an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying as
+to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on drawing nearer that
+the old tomb-house has been converted into a tool-house and general
+lumber-room, and that the figure seated within is the sexton enjoying
+his lunch, screened from the noonday heats. An inscription over the
+door of the ornate building--a copy of the Temple of the Winds at
+Athens--proclaims it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamianæ, Anno 1764";
+but the Walthams have disappeared, both from their mausoleum and the
+district. The body of the last appears to have been arrested for debt
+when on the road hither from Chelmsford. The sexton explains that the
+parish took over the Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing
+the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience hee-ar, years ago,"
+says this typical Essex rustic, and goes on to tell how the oil and
+coals and candles for church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe
+Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held. Three Radcliffes, Earls
+of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather, father, and son, lie in effigy side
+by side on an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers are to
+my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton calls them, and explains that
+their broken noses are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.
+
+Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called the "mine" road,
+Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the great red-brick Georgian mansion
+of Crix, standing in its meadows where the little River Ter comes
+down from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels of Hatfield
+Mill, and then hurries off, as though belated, for a rendezvous with
+the Chelmer, two miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road with
+whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing warranty of its age in the
+inscription, "A.A. 1715"; but if that evidence were lacking it could
+be found in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into an area
+with the raising of the road for the building of the bridge that long
+ago replaced the watersplash at this crossing of the stream.
+
+Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the heaths that once gave
+the place its original forename of "Heathfield," and the Peverels,
+identical with the Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly
+vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige of themselves
+in the church--that last resort of the antiquary in search of old
+manorial lords. It is true that on modern tablets built into the west
+front of the church the founding of a Benedictine Priory here in 1100
+by Ingelrica, mother of William Peverel, is alluded to, together with
+the rather scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things are
+decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of Latin and lichen-stains,
+so that both their monastic beneficence and their maternal origin are
+only dimly to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.
+
+It is the distance of half a mile from the high road to where Hatfield
+church lies secluded, adjoining the grounds of a mansion partly
+occupying the site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It is
+here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's original baptism
+must be sought, and accordingly some stretches of common-land may be
+discovered close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us, though
+there be little enough to say of it, beyond the note that its closeness
+to the railway station has caused a certain growth and a certain
+amount of rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the old
+plaster cottages that were once the invariable feature of its street,
+and admirably figured forth the Essex manner of decoratively treating
+plaster-work. There remain here but two such cottages, bearing the date
+1703, and the initials M.R., with _fleur-de-lis_.
+
+
+XX
+
+
+A ROAD of almost unvarying flatness conducts in something under three
+miles to Witham, entered nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by
+the Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates in no fewer than
+three separate and distinct names. As the River Witham, it confers a
+name upon the townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same sponsorial
+office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook it is endowed with a title
+that smacks rather of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in
+summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down upon the mere thread
+of water oozing and stewing in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the
+neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is not ill-named as the
+Podsbrook; but the Essex Council in bridging it so substantially think
+of it rather as the River Witham, which they have every right and cause
+to do, for the stream can avenge itself of those disfiguring potsherds
+and that contemptuous title in the most sardonic way when winter comes
+and the floods are out.
+
+The long street of Witham is remarkable for the number of large and
+handsome mansions dating from the time of Queen Anne, through the
+period of the four Georges. The greater number of the professional
+men of Essex would, from the number of those houses, appear to have
+settled in the little town and to have medically attended it and
+legally represented it to such an effect that it is only now beginning
+to recover from them and from the coming of the railway, which dealt a
+death-blow to the thriving coaching interest of the early part of the
+nineteenth century.
+
+For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place of Mrs Nelson's
+famous "Ipswich Blues," the crack coaches on the seventy miles of road,
+which started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary exertions
+made Ipswich in something under six hours. Such remarkable performances
+as these were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in place
+of the average ten miles on other roads, and by placing leaders in
+readiness at the foot of hills like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The
+"Blue Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some of the principal
+coaches drew up, is still in existence; its sign, a pierced effigy of
+that animal projecting from the front of the house and looming weirdly
+against the sky-line. There are many "White Harts" on the road to
+Norwich, the sign being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as that
+of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North Road; but of all the many
+examples to be met along these hundred and twelve miles this is the one
+that is most quaintly out of proportion, with a head and neck less
+than half the size demanded by body and legs, and a golden collar and
+chain of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was the favourite
+badge of Richard the Second, whose connection with East Anglia was
+too slight for assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially
+allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference on the part
+of innkeepers along the Norwich Road.
+
+[Illustration: CHIPPING HILL.]
+
+Those who would seek the site of the original Witham must turn aside
+from the high road the matter of half a mile, past the railway station,
+to Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a camp successively
+occupied and wrought upon by the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons,
+it will be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant valley of that
+triply-named river already mentioned, in 1749 described by Walpole as
+"the prettiest little winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows
+falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to this day, and as
+sweet, and the by-road that comes up from the gravelly hollow and cuts
+through the earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold climbs up
+romantically under the blossoming limes into as pretty a picture in
+the rural sort as you shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old
+England before railways came, or science and the ten thousand plagues
+of modern life, and the cheap builder of hideous new cottages were
+let loose upon the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in the
+picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old dwellings, flint-built
+church tower and red-brick rectory, set in, upon and around the
+swelling grassy banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had both their
+fortress and their market, as evidenced by the still surviving name of
+Chipping, or Market Hill.
+
+Old East Anglian cottages have their own special characteristics,
+arising from local conditions, but one feature they share in common
+with all old rustic dwellings; the great size and relative importance
+of their genial chimneys, suggesting warmth and the lavish laying on of
+logs. They tell the passer-by of old times when wood was the only fuel;
+when it was to be gathered for the mere labour of gathering, and plenty
+of it was piled upon the generous open hearth. Modern cottages, all
+over the kingdom, tell a different tale, in the look of their meagre
+chimney-pots--a tale of coal, dearly purchased, economised in tiny
+grates.
+
+But the special features of East Anglian cottage architecture? They are
+here, in the highways and byways, for all to see who will. It is a land
+without stone, this East of England, where timber and flint and brick
+play important constructional parts in church and hall and manor-house,
+and where timber framing, lath and plaster, parge-work, and a few
+bricks for the chimney stacks, are combined to build up the cottages.
+
+Out of their necessities our ancestors contrived dwellings that for
+durability, comfort and artistry put modern houses, whether halls or
+cottages, to shame. The stone cottages of Somersetshire, Rutland,
+Leicestershire; the cob and thatch of Devon, the granite of Cornwall;
+the timber and plaster, or timber and brick noggin of Cheshire and
+Herefordshire are all evidence to this day of how skilfully our
+forbears employed the materials to their hands; and here in Essex
+you shall find a something in the art of cottage building hardly to
+be discovered elsewhere. This is the frequent use of parge-work, or
+pargetting, as it is sometimes called, on old cottage exteriors.
+Parge-work is the ornamental filling or surfacing of walls with
+plaster. The term is just as often applied to the elaborately-moulded
+and panelled plaster ceilings of Elizabethan and Jacobean halls as
+to the exterior decoration that forms so remarkable and pleasing a
+feature of Essex rustic cottage architecture. Few Essex villages that
+can claim to preserve many relics of old times are without examples of
+this peculiarly local style; although, to be sure, an ignorant want of
+appreciation has been the cause of much destruction of late years. The
+commoner forms of this decoration are frequently seen, in the easily
+incised patterns that even the unskilful can make in the plaster while
+still wet, by the aid of anything from a trowel to the finger-tips;
+just as a cook ornaments the dough of her uncooked pies. Many of
+these patterns are traditional; as much a matter of tradition, for
+instance, as are the needlework patterns wrought on the breast of an
+old smock-frock. The commonest is one produced by a process of combing
+the plaster in repetitions of a device resembling an elongated figure 8
+laid flat, or perhaps more narrowly resembling a hank of worsted. Other
+patterns, of whorls or concentric circles, stars, triangles and the
+like, are produced by wooden stamps. But the really beautiful examples
+are not the products of to-day. These belong to the seventeenth and
+eighteenth centuries, and are lavish in decoration of a Renaissance
+character moulded in high relief. Architects with sufficient culture
+and understanding to enable them to appreciate local style have, in
+recent years, reintroduced decoration of this character when building
+residences in the country, but many a humble cottager lives within
+walls that display a profusion of artistic devices unapproached by the
+houses of the wealthy.
+
+Discoveries close by the church on Chipping Hill have led to the belief
+that the building stands on, or near, the site of a Temple of Diana,
+and certainly Roman bricks are still visible in great numbers in the
+walls of the tower. A memorial in the chancel to Sir Gilbert East,
+who died in 1828, reminds the historian of some strange survivals
+existing at that time. The Easts were owners of the tithes at Witham,
+and although they lived so far distant as Berkshire, always insisted
+on their right of being buried here. Sir Gilbert East's body was, by
+his express direction, buried beside his wife, with a band of brass
+encircling both, engraved with the words from the marriage service,
+"Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." His funeral
+was a three days' business, with knights bannerets accompanying, and
+much pomp and circumstance. In the family vault they laid him, wrapped
+in linen, returned to Berkshire for the reading of the will, when, to
+the dismay of the family, it was found that the knight had expressly
+wished to be buried in woollen. The family solicitor hurried back and,
+disinterring his defunct client, saw to it that he was comfortably
+tucked in as desired.
+
+Between Witham and Kelvedon, where the road runs level, there is but
+one hamlet, an offshoot of Rivenhall known as Rivenhall End, where a
+cottage close by the "Fox" inn, once a toll-house, bears its former
+history, plain to read, in the evidence of its windows commanding
+either approach, up or down the road. A mile and a half beyond begins
+Kelvedon, set down in the flats beside the River Blackwater; "Kelvedon
+Easterford, vulgo Keldon," as Ogilby calls it; "consisting," he
+continues, "chiefly of inns"; a description which remains strikingly
+true to this day. This pronunciation, "Keldon," throws some light upon
+the following remarks of an old traveller who kept a diary of his
+wayfaring, and, writing in 1744, says, "From Colchester in an hour or
+two, I came to an old Village call'd Kildane, where they tell you the
+famous Massacre of the Danes began; but the true Name of the Town is
+Kelvedon."
+
+How Kelvedon can ever have escaped being called "Long" Kelvedon is
+a mystery, for it straggles on and on and must be nearly a mile in
+length; a street of handsome old residences, of cottages and humble
+shops of all ages, and old broken-backed taverns where the Essex
+labourer gathers night by night and discusses the prospect of the
+carraway crop and the likelihood of the entire agricultural interest
+presently, going _en masse_ to the "work'us." After which, with
+the courage of despair, and to drown his troubles, he will call for
+"another pot o' thrup'ny, missus," and, when closing time comes,
+slouch home through the mud and mist until the following evening, when
+the same programme is repeated. It is the agricultural labourer who
+supports the little wayside "publics" whose existence in such numbers
+puzzles the mid-day stranger, who, seeing them empty and apparently
+lifeless, wonders how they can possibly live. Business practically only
+begins when work in the fields is done, and the rent is not so high but
+that a few pots of beer a night represent a sufficient profit.
+
+It must not be supposed that Kelvedon has not its exquisite
+architectural relics of a bygone time, or that its inns are all of the
+rural beer-house type. Not at all. Chief among the inns of Kelvedon
+is the "Angel," which indeed is a house not only of considerable size
+and outstanding character, but of historic interest, as having been
+the favourite resting-place of William the Third on his journeys along
+this road. Its projecting porch is the first thing the traveller sees
+on entering the town from the direction of London, where the road
+swerves violently to the left, and again as violently to the right,
+forming a very awkward corner. "Angel Corner," said Alexander, of the
+"Retaliator" coach, "is the very devil of a corner." This remark was
+drawn from him on the occasion of his nearly driving into the porch,
+when trying conclusions with a rival charioteer.
+
+Almost opposite the still-existing "Angel" stood the equally extensive
+"Red Lion," long since retired from business and remodelled as a row
+of cottages. The histories of both houses, and of many another fine
+old inn, which might once have been written from the recollections of
+those who knew the old days of the road, are now in great part lost,
+and the world so much the poorer. Had scribblers then abounded, and the
+"personal" note of the modern journalist been sounded in those days,
+we should have known how King William came to and set out from his
+inn; how he looked, what he ate and drank, how many long clay pipes
+he smoked, and what comparisons he drew in conversation with Bentinck
+between the flat lands on the way from Kelvedon to Harwich and the
+still flatter lands of his native Holland. And besides such records of
+the great, we should then have been better furnished with the early
+history of coaching, which, if not indeed a sealed book, is at least a
+very short and fragmentary one.
+
+[Illustration: THE "ANGEL," KELVEDON.]
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+EARLY coaching days are wrapped round with strange adventures and the
+oddest tales; some, doubtless, of the _ben trovato_, rather than the
+most truthful, nature. But those stories of coaching miseries and
+adventure that have been proved truthful are themselves so surprising
+and incredible to modern ears that even the most improbable of
+uncertified tales cannot be dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of
+the Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should, for instance,
+surely be picturesquely written up some day and included in some
+English (and therefore strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One
+Nights' Entertainments.
+
+The coach was nearing the outskirts of London. The rheumy air hung in
+dank and foggy vapours on the countryside and transformed innocent
+roadside trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing shapes. The guard
+let off his blunderbuss at a pollard willow that loomed suspiciously
+like a highwayman out of the reeking air, and the passengers all began
+to automatically turn their pockets out. It proved a false alarm, and
+purses and trinkets were returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One
+gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he carried, whereupon
+a lady advised him to hide the money in his boot. He had hardly done
+this when a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman to stop.
+When the unhappy insides had picked themselves up from the straw at the
+bottom of the coach, into which they had unceremoniously been thrown
+by the driver's prompt obedience to that behest, they found themselves
+covered with a pistol projected through the door, and were invited to
+deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who had little gave it and
+were thankful it was no more. The lady protested that she had nothing;
+"but," said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you will find
+ten guineas." There was nothing for it but to take off that boot and
+hand over the coin; but when the highwayman had gone it was another
+matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in no measured terms,
+of being the robber's accomplice. Bound to admit that appearances
+were against her, she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited
+the company to supper the following evening, when matters should be
+explained. They accepted, not, it is to be feared, very graciously.
+The time came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room, with a
+supper laid, they were re-introduced to their acquaintance of the night
+before. When the repast was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she
+said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in this book, which I
+had with me in the coach, are bank-notes to the amount of one thousand
+pounds. I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than for me to
+be robbed of this valuable property. As you have been the means of my
+saving it, I entreat your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred
+pounds."
+
+Much of the humour that went to lighten old road travelling was of an
+evanescent kind, and has not survived, but a few examples, preserved
+in contemporary literature, keep their flavour. Among them is the
+narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter." "I recollect," said
+the Jehu who told the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger,
+and nothing that was either said or done was at all to his mind. On
+that day I happened to have a very awkward team--three blind ones and
+a very shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times I lost my
+patience as well as temper. My near leader pulled to such a degree that
+I was obliged to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the top of
+the bit, and curb her enough to break her jaw. After starting again, I
+could deal with her very well for about a mile, when her mouth got dead
+again, and I was wicked enough to let drive a few hearty damns at her,
+my pious companion all the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be
+damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon which he bolted
+as if he had been galvanised.
+
+"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'
+
+"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I, 'but I won't have it;' so
+I answered, 'What coach does he drive?'
+
+"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up his hands, 'I fear you
+don't read your Bible; but I will tell you--he was the most patient man
+that ever existed.'
+
+"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three blind 'uns and a bolter?'
+
+"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a coachman.'
+
+"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever he had had four such
+horses to deal with as I have here, he would have had no more patience
+than myself.'"
+
+[Illustration: "THREE BLIND UNS AND A BOLTER." _From a Print after H.
+Alken._]
+
+Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen played a drunken trick
+that would have been impossible in the last years of coaching, when
+discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric than they had been. He
+had just driven the London stage from Ipswich, and having more by good
+luck than careful driving brought his passengers safely to dinner at
+the "Angel," turned into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink
+of coachmen--rum. Emerging, he perceived one of the Harwich to London
+fish-waggons, fully laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to
+the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the waggon round and dashed
+off at top speed on the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden
+Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and two tons weight of fish
+strewed the king's highway. The mad coachman survived to repent his
+escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder of his life.
+
+"Other times, other manners" is a saying that assumes an added
+force when contrasting the Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our
+fellow-travellers by railway, who glare at us, and we at them, like
+strange cats on a roof-top, have little idea of the chivalry that ruled
+on the road a hundred years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who
+may be the only other occupant of a railway carriage with you, and
+she wonders whether she had not better call the guard; but it was,
+in the days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden duty of
+the gentlemen to see that the ladies in whose company the chances of
+the road might place them lacked nothing that courtesy could supply;
+whether it were merely the aid of an arm in walking up one of those
+hills the coaches could only climb unladen, or the more material
+attention involved in seeing that the dear creatures were duly supplied
+with refreshments. It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom
+of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for the breakfasts and
+dinners of the unprotected ladies who might be travelling by the same
+conveyance. "I vow," says one of these old travellers, "'tis a pleasure
+in a cavalier to do so; but, the Lord save us, what a prodigious
+appetite does not the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the fair,
+whose lassitude and vapours at other times render them incapable of
+more than drinking a dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing
+which it is only fitting that the heathenish and phanatick peoples of
+the Indies should partake of. I protest that the ladies of the coach,
+when we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding they could not be
+suited with tay, went to it with a right good will and left as good an
+account of the claret and the beef as if they had been going empty for
+a week. Spare me, I do beg, from your languishing creatures who would
+die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, but compare with the most
+valiant of trenchermen abroad."
+
+This protesting gentleman might, had he thought of it, have exclaimed
+with Othello on the pity "that we can call these delicate creatures
+ours and not their appetites."
+
+He must have been particularly hard hit in the pocket by the robust
+appetites of his fellow-travellers, but did not, however, let his
+feelings appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as a toast, "the
+ladies, bless them, whose bright eyes," etc., etc.--a toast we have
+many times heard of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon having
+"made an impression." He, in fact, seems to have been like Constable,
+in a way; for it was said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in a
+stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner." "Then,"
+said one, hearing that praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"
+
+That is very significant. It was, then, only your very paragon among
+gentlemen who could sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner.
+His manners might survive the strain of the journey itself, and even
+the sight and sound of lovely Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring,
+unlovely to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating gurgles; but
+when after the tedious stage had been accomplished and the passengers
+had descended, irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner scarce to
+be eaten, even at express speed, in the short time allowed, then, ay
+_then_, my friends, came the test! No man so insensible to politeness
+as a starving man, and few attentions were paid to the ladies by
+strangers whose sole chance of obtaining the dinner for which they had
+paid was the resolute determination to attend only to their own wants.
+
+The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly outweighed the
+pleasures of that old-world method. A pleasant day and the open country
+made a seat on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not willingly
+to be exchanged for any other mode of conveyance then known; but, as
+little David Copperfield found on his first coach journey, _night_ on
+a coach was an experience once gained not willingly repeated. Being
+put between two gentlemen, to prevent his falling off, David found
+himself nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he could
+not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!" which they didn't like at
+all, because it woke them. With the rising of the sun David found his
+fellow-passengers sleeping easier than they had done during the night,
+when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed their midnight slumbers. As
+the sun rose higher, so their sleep became lighter and they gradually
+awoke, one by one, each one indignant when charged with having slept.
+During the rest of his career, David invariably observed "that of all
+human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least
+disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having
+gone to sleep in a coach."
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF SPURGEON.]
+
+COACHING times and coaching inns have long kept us at the very
+threshold of Kelvedon, which has a modern claim to notice of which it
+is not a little proud. Spurgeon was born here. Although the figure of
+that great wielder of homely and untutored pulpit oratory is but one
+among several preachers in the same family, there is only one possible
+Spurgeon when that name is mentioned. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born
+in a house still pointed out, on June 19, 1834; the eldest son of the
+Rev. John Spurgeon. The old cottage is now the "Wheatsheaf" beer-house
+and has had a bay window and a brick frontage added since that time.
+Close by is a now highly respectable and not a little dignified private
+residence known still as the "Tommy shop," although almost seventy
+years have passed since it was used as a kind of restaurant and canteen
+for the navvies then working on the construction of the Great Eastern
+Railway, which runs at the rear.
+
+The oldest house in Kelvedon is doubtless the "Sun," which dates from
+the middle of the fifteenth century and has within recent years had its
+carved woodwork, long covered with plaster, once more exposed to view.
+It stands, almost the last house in the town, by the bridge over the
+Blackwater, on the way to Gore Pit.
+
+Gore Pit is generally said to be the site of a battle. _What_ battle,
+however, historians do not and cannot specify; and indeed this name,
+bloody though it may sound to modern ears, has, despite the popular
+legend of the derivation of Kelvedon from "Kildane," perhaps no such
+sanguinary association, and is probably a contraction of the old word
+"coneygore," or rabbit warren.
+
+It is, despite its name, a pretty and a peaceful hamlet, with a
+blacksmith's shop and a roadside horse-pond, and surrounded by the
+fruit-farms of a great jam-making company. The church of Feering can be
+seen across the flat fields, on the other side of the railway. Messing
+lies a mile away, in the other direction.
+
+Let the idle wayfarer, curious as to the name of Gore Pit, speak to the
+blacksmith on the subject, and he will be told, with the seriousness
+of implicit belief, of the fighting of a great battle here, and that
+the blood ran down into "that there horse-pond." Moreover, that at
+Kelvedon--"Killdane they used to call it--they killed the Danes; at
+Feering they feared 'em, and at Messing they made a mess of it"; which
+seems to very correctly reflect the views of the neighbourhood on local
+history in ancient times, as reflected in place-names!
+
+Rural Essex, in the aspect of its fields and meadows, is revealed along
+these miles in its most characteristic form. It is, in many respects,
+unlike other counties. In some ways the unhappy industry of farming has
+fared worse here than elsewhere, and many holdings have for years past
+gone uncultivated, and the dock, the thistle and other lusty weeds have
+resumed an evil possession of fields once kept clean and trim. But in
+the smaller operations of husbandry Essex has always been, and in some
+districts still is, remarkably successful; while, although the farmer
+protests that it does not pay to grow any kind of grain, the yellowing
+seas of autumnal cornfields are still a prominent feature of the
+landscapes of Essex and of its neighbouring Suffolk. Essex and Suffolk
+are old-world, far beyond the rest of England, and in growing wheat
+in these times, when a cornfield is a rare sight in other parts of
+the country and when "our daily bread" is chiefly compounded of grain
+grown in North America, Russia, or the Argentine, they maintain their
+singularity. It does the heart good to see the ripening wheatfields of
+East Anglia, to see the gathered stooks in the reaped perspectives,
+and to hear the hum of the threshing machine; for the sights and sound
+seem to carry us back to that England of a bygone age, when Constable
+painted such fields, and when they were numerous enough throughout the
+land to feed the population. Here and there one may still find fields
+of that famous grain, the "Essex Great Wheat," which grows at least
+two feet higher than the ordinary varieties, and is greatly prized for
+the length and stoutness of its straw; but it is a few miles to the
+north-eastward, in the light lands around Harwich, that the Great Wheat
+may be found. Seed and herb-growing are the most prominent industries
+between the Blackwater and the Colne, and the roadside fields are
+striped to wonderment in summer with the rainbow colours of the
+seedsman's trial-grounds. The heavy perfume of stocks and mignonette,
+the claret colour of that gorgeous flower, the "sops-in-wine," the
+gay and varied displays of asters, marguerites, marigolds and a
+hundred others make a midsummer fairyland of the levels that loom
+so drear and misty in the long months of winter. Nor is it only for
+the flower-garden that the Essex seedsman labours. With the sights
+and scents of the flaunting beauties of the garden are mingled the
+homelier ones of mint, grey-green sage and other dowdy kitchen herbs,
+together with the subtle beauty and piercing odour of wide-spreading,
+blue-grey lavender-fields. Even the unromantic mangold, running to seed
+in bush-like shape, sends forth a sweet and pleasing aroma, while the
+yellow mustard contributes its share.
+
+The byways of farming are now, as we have already said, the most--some
+would say the only--profitable kind of husbandry in Essex. Some forms
+of cultivation have largely migrated to other counties, but others
+remain. The growing of the clothiers' teasel was discontinued with
+the decay of the Colchester and Norwich baize industry, and is now
+carried on in other parts of the country, close to districts where
+textile fabrics are still manufactured; but there was a time when,
+along this road between Chelmsford and Colchester, the fields of
+teasels were quite as much a feature as those of mustard are even
+yet. The clothiers' teasel, greatly prized in the East Anglian baize
+manufacture, was nothing but a weed, found useful and cultivated
+accordingly. An aristocratic relation of the less spiky burrs that have
+not been rescued from the hedges and ditches and are still allowed to
+grow wild, the clothiers' teasel was cultivated so far back as the
+reign of Richard the First, but the "common" burr will have to be
+contented with its lowly estate to the end of time, unless something
+unexpected happens.
+
+To "stick like a burr" is proverbial, and the cultivated teasels have
+an even more pronounced clinging property. Furnished as they are with
+natural hooks, they were used in baize-making, and are still employed
+in the cloth trade for raising the nap of the material. The dried heads
+are fixed to cylinders, between which the fabric is passed, and their
+sharp spines, re-curved like so many minute fish-hooks, draw up the
+surface of the cloth. Thus the teasel was raised from its character
+of a worthless weed, and for many years Essex farmers devoted large
+portions of their holdings to its cultivation. It was hoed and kept
+clear of other vagrom weedlings; its heads were cut by hand and
+dried with every care, and eventually were eagerly competed for by
+manufacturers at £12 a load. When the old cloth manufacturers left East
+Anglia, a goodly portion of the Essex farmers' livelihood went with
+them.
+
+Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other weed, the colewort,
+for cole or rape-seed, which has the quadruple properties of feeding
+cage-birds, yielding rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring
+the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help to prop the
+husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and carraways are what "the faculty"
+knows as "carminatives," curative of flatulency; like the once popular
+"eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of the sea holly
+that grows by the estuaries of Essex rivers. Eringo root was once a
+favourite specific for lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last,
+and the preparation of it gradually died out and became extinct about
+1865, when the only manufacturer was an elderly spinster who supplied
+a chemist in High Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the
+making of kümmel and other liqueurs, and carraway seeds, which look
+like commas, are those familiar denizens of "seed cake" that stick in
+the teeth and refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of
+"carraway comfits."
+
+Farmers who do not occupy themselves with seed-growing have passed
+through evil times, but prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's
+well-tilled land, and fruit-farming has come to render cultivation
+profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer, who cannot adapt himself to
+new conditions, agricultural depression in Essex is a very real thing.
+Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one, a small cultivator, a
+son of the soil. He does not hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural
+Essex, in these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the Workhouse
+are said to close every vista? Besides, he has been hard at work in
+the fields, and much of that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like
+friskiness out of the limbs.
+
+A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very badly in need of repair,
+elicits the fact that he has just come away, worsted, from another
+bout in the eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict with
+wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce, for life or a
+livelihood, with weeds--the sorry heritage of the present occupier
+from the slovenly or bankrupt farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing
+upon the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily against the
+cultivator.
+
+"Farmin'?" says our rustic friend; "no great shakes, I tell 'ee. It
+don't pay to grow nawthen now, an' it gets wusser'n wusser. All the
+fields goin' under grass, for ship'n cattle. An' the land's fair
+pisoned with weeds. Yow see them 'ere beece, in that there close down
+along o' the chutch? There's a mort o' docks in that 'ere close. More
+docks'n grass, an' I thinks warsley o' the chanst of cattle gettin'
+a fair bite off'n it. Don't know what docks is? Wish I didden! I've
+bin a-pullin' of 'em till my back's pretty nigh broke, and I'm fair
+dunted with 'em. Last year there worn't ne'er a one: t'yen there's
+a mort on 'em. Where do they come from? God A'mighty knows. _They_
+don't want no cultivation, bless 'ee. There ain't no land so chice but
+what'll grow docks." Here he pulls out his "muckinger," that is to say,
+his handkerchief--the Essex dialect is not the most elegant form of
+speech--and, trumpeting on it like an elephant, with indignation, goes
+his way.
+
+The "chutch" in question is that of Feering, on the other side of
+the Great Eastern Railway, along whose embankment go the frequent
+Prussian-blue-painted locomotives with long trains at their tail, past
+Mark's Tey Junction, whose forest of signal-masts is visible ahead,
+into Colchester. With the raising of that embankment went the life of
+this highway, only now experiencing a revival.
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+THE cyclists, the pedestrians, the motor-men, who adventure along the
+road rejoice at its smooth surface, and find little incident to mark
+their journey. A punctured tyre, a defective valve alone hinder those
+mechanical travellers; while the pedestrian finds a limit set to his
+progress only by his walking powers. Even so, he may obtain to Norwich
+long before the others, for the railway hugs the road closely for
+three parts of the distance, and stations are frequent.
+
+In any case, the curtain has long since been rung down upon the Romance
+of the Road. If this were the place to do it, that romance might be
+recounted at great length; sometimes rising to tragical height, again
+sinking to comedy or farce. But we must take our romance as it comes,
+and, reading as we run, be content to act a vicarious part in the long
+story. And we may well be so content, for to have essayed the journey
+in days of old often meant a "speaking with strangers in the gates"
+that entailed fighting on unequal terms, with the possibility of a
+roadside grave and the tolerable certainty of being robbed of anything
+and everything worth the taking.
+
+Nowadays, the trim suburbs of the towns stretch out on either side
+along the old highway and join hands with the villages; so that when
+travellers of the speedier sort spurn the dust from their flying
+wheels, they think the country is becoming one vast town, and are
+depressed and regretful accordingly. But when the road was the sole
+means of travelling and the towns were still girdled by their walls and
+entered only by fortified gates, the wayfarer welcomed the sight of a
+house in the lonely country between town and village. Even to the rich
+these perils came home, and in the more lawless times they were beset
+with troubles of their own.
+
+Royal progresses were not infrequent along the Norwich Road, and they
+have elsewhere been duly chronicled, but they are things apart and
+give no glimpse of old wayfaring life. If we are at all in the way of
+conjuring up that old-time traffic, we must certainly not forget the
+odd processions that trailed their slow length after my lord and my
+lady, changing residence from one castle or manor-house to another.
+My Lord Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth's time had an exquisite palace,
+of which Macaulay has told us, in Norwich, and the Earls of Oxford
+no doubt kept great state in their castle at Hedingham, but, for all
+their magnificence, they were obliged to take many of their household
+goods with them when flitting from place to place; for the very
+excellent reason that they did not, certainly up to less than three
+hundred years ago, possess more than one fully-equipped establishment.
+When the nobility of old left one of their manor-houses for another
+they commonly took their bedding and a good deal of their furniture
+with them. In even more remote days they removed the glass from their
+windows as well, and stored it carefully away until their return.
+_That_, of course, was a custom of very long ago, when even the most
+luxurious were content with--or, at any-rate, had to endure--things
+which nowadays would drive the inmates of a casual ward to rebellion;
+but, even when the Stuarts reigned, the great ones of the land moved
+from home to home with long baggage-trains and with their entire staff
+of domestics. No board-wages, then! The whole establishment took the
+road, down to the scullery-maids and the hangers-on of the kitchen who
+took charge of the domestic pots and pans. My lord's pages and the
+dignitaries of his household formed the advance-guard; the lowest in
+the scale, who travelled with the culinary utensils and even took the
+coals with them, were, appropriately enough, the "black guard." The
+black guard were probably a very rough lot indeed, at odds with soap
+and water, and on every count deserving of their name, which has in
+the course of centuries obtained a different application, as a term of
+reproach to individuals of moral rather than physical uncleanliness.
+
+Turning from general conditions of travelling to particular travellers,
+there comes tripping along the road an antic fellow, one Will Kemp, who
+danced from London to Norwich in the year 1600; a frolic he undertook
+for a wager, afterwards writing and publishing a book about it, which
+he called _Kemp's Nine Days' Wonder_. Will Kemp was accompanied by
+a drummer whose play upon parchment helped to sustain his flagging
+energies as he skipped it to Widford and thence by a route of his own
+through Braintree to Norwich.
+
+Sprightly, irresponsible Kemp, cracking weak jokes and playing the
+fool, is succeeded in the memories of the road, after an interval of
+some eighty years, by a very grave and responsible figure indeed;
+no less an one than that of King William the Third, on his frequent
+journeys between his dear Holland and his little-loved Kingdom of
+England. Burdened with the care of an alien realm, that saturnine
+little figure with the hooked nose was a familiar sight at Kelvedon,
+where, travelling to and from Harwich, he was wont to stay at the
+"Angel" inn, which still confronts the wayfarer on entering the village
+from London. When the "little gentleman in black" had done his work
+and King William of blessed Protestant memory was no more, the Norwich
+Road, so far as Colchester, was still graced with Royal travellers,
+for, with the coming of the Hanoverians, Harwich became more than ever
+a favourite port of entry and departure, and the choleric early Georges
+knew this Essex landscape well. This way, too, came the Schwellenburgs,
+the Keilmanseggs and the other vulgar and grotesque figures of that
+grotesque and vulgar Court.
+
+Among these figures comes that of the Princess Charlotte of
+Mecklenburg-Strelitz, arrived for the first time in England, in 1761,
+to marry George the Third. One German princess is very like another
+in the pages of history, and the likeness remains even when they
+become queens, so that it is not a little difficult to disentangle a
+Caroline from a Charlotte. Their virtues are of the same drab domestic
+order, and their faces partake of the common fund of unilluminated
+dulness distributed between the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the
+Sonderburg-Augustenburgs, and the dozens of other twopenny-halfpenny
+principalities made familiar by German princely marriages and
+intermarryings. On their mere merits, these personages would find no
+place here, though they travelled all their lives up and down the
+road; but in the circumstances of this particular Princess Charlotte's
+journey there are some incidents worth mentioning. She landed at
+Harwich, and comes into our road at Colchester, September 7, 1761. At
+Colchester she was presented with a box of eringo-root, the famous
+local production highly valued for the cure of pulmonary diseases,
+prepared from the root of the sea holly. Graciously receiving this in a
+box "parfumed and guilt," her carriage swept on towards Witham, where
+she stayed the night at a seat then owned by Lord Abercorn, supping
+with open doors so that all who would might gaze upon their future
+Queen. Next day the journey to London was resumed. The King's coach
+was in readiness at Romford, and into it she changed. At Mile End a
+squadron of Life Guards was in waiting as an escort, and from that
+point the procession was viewed by thousands. But by this time the
+September day was closing. The Duchess of Hamilton, who accompanied the
+Princess, looked at her watch. "We shall hardly have time to dress for
+the wedding," she said.
+
+"The wedding?"
+
+"Yes, madam; it is to be at twelve."
+
+On that the Princess fainted, as well she might. It really took place
+at 9 p.m., instead of three hours later. The King, it is upon record,
+was a little disappointed at the first sight of his bride; but that has
+generally been the way with our Royal marriages. The eldest son of this
+amiable pair, George the Fourth, similarly saw his bride for the first
+time practically on the steps of the altar, and his disappointment
+was keen. "No sooner," we read, "had he approached her than, as if to
+subdue the qualms of irrepressible disgust, he desired the dignified
+envoy to bring him a glass of brandy." The Princess, we are told,
+"expressed surprise," which statement requires no credulity for belief.
+Henry the Eighth's disappointment when he saw Anne of Cleves was
+reflected in the words in which he likened her to a "Flanders mare."
+
+Two years later, in 1763, we find Dr Johnson and his inevitable Boswell
+journeying down the road; Boswell on his way to Harwich for Utrecht,
+and the Doctor good-naturedly accompanying him as far as that seaport.
+They set out by coach on the 5th of August, early in the morning;
+among their fellow-travellers a fat, elderly gentlewoman and a young
+Dutchman, both inclined to conversation. Dining at an inn on the way,
+the lady remarked that she had done her best to educate her children,
+and particularly that she never suffered them to be a moment idle.
+
+"I wish, madam," said Johnson, "you would educate me too; for I have
+been an idle fellow all my life."
+
+"I am sure, sir," said she, "you have not been idle;" which was a
+mere empty compliment, for she had not the least idea whom she was
+addressing.
+
+"Nay, madam," rejoined the Doctor, "it is very true; and that gentleman
+there," pointing to Boswell, "has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh.
+His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then
+came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to
+Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever."
+
+At this, Boswell was very wroth, and asked Johnson, in an aside, how he
+could expose him so.
+
+"Pooh, pooh," retorted the immortal Samuel, "they know nothing about
+you, and will think of it no more." Nor, in all probability, did they.
+
+In this manner they travelled, the gentlewoman talking violently
+against the Roman Catholics and the horrors of the Inquisition;
+Johnson, to the astonishment of all the passengers, save Boswell, who
+knew his ways, defending the Inquisition and its methods with "false
+doctrines." This would appear to have annoyed the rest of the company,
+for Boswell relates that Johnson presently appeared to be very intent
+upon ancient geography. Not so intent, however, but that he noticed
+Boswell giving a shilling to the coachman at the end of one of the
+stages, when it was the custom to give only sixpence. The great man
+took Boswell aside and scolded him for it, saying that what he had
+done would make the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the
+passengers, who had given him no more than his due.
+
+They stopped at Colchester a night, at an inn unfortunately not
+specified, Johnson talking of the town with veneration for having stood
+a siege for Charles the First.
+
+The last great occasion on the road, before railways took its traffic
+away, was the funeral, in 1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline
+of Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven years before: her
+body was embarked for Brunswick on August 16, 1821, after a hurried
+three days' journey from Kensington. So many years have passed by
+since the stormy times when the nation was divided between partisans of
+the King on one side and the Queen on the other--both parties equally
+violent--that the long and bitter quarrels between the "First Gentleman
+in Europe" and the most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times
+have become historic, and no longer divide families, or cause fathers
+to cut their sons off with a shilling, as they did when the trial of
+the Queen was a recent event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no
+saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least odiously vulgar and
+utterly wanting in dignity and the commonest dictates of prudence. They
+were not worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken up by
+parties and made political missiles of, so that even the occasion of
+the Queen's funeral was made the excuse for a riot by her followers,
+who were indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the country,
+as they thought, without proper respect. The Queen died on the 7th of
+August, and it was decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent
+haste" was the expression used by the _Times_ of that day in describing
+the funeral arrangements for the 14th, but that journal was a most
+violent enemy of the then Government and had always supported the Queen
+and vilified the King as far as it could safely be done.
+
+It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty miles between
+Kensington and Harwich in two days, and the _Times_ furiously bellowed
+in its reports that the procession was hurried through London at a
+trot. However that may be, certainly the pace was decently slow when
+on the open road. Ilford was reached, for instance, at 6·15 that
+afternoon, but Romford, only five and a half miles further on, not
+until 7·45; an extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a
+funeral. At Romford the cortège was met by sympathisers with blazing
+torches, who stood on guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort
+and the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn.
+
+At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by the light of a full moon
+which shone in splendour from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the
+night they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock in the
+morning. Here the coffin was placed in the church until a start was
+made again, seven hours later. At last Colchester was reached, at
+five o'clock in the afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse
+unguarded in the High Street, while they took their fill at the "Three
+Cups." Thus, in its squalor and irreverence, the passing of this Queen
+of England resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or kin.
+
+It had been proposed to complete the journey to Harwich that day,
+but, after violent disputes in the street between opposing factions,
+it was agreed to defer the departure until the next morning, and to
+deposit the coffin meanwhile in St Peter's Church. Inside that sacred
+building, disputes broke out afresh, one party wishing to affix a plate
+on the coffin-lid, bearing the inscription, "Caroline of Brunswick, the
+injured Queen of England," while the other vehemently objected. The
+quarrel was finally settled by agreeing to postpone fixing the plate
+until after the embarkation.
+
+With the start made the following morning at half-past five, this
+melancholy procession leaves the Norwich Road, and history goes with
+it. The tale is done, the colophon reached.
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+IF we seek some touchstone by which to test the progress of a century
+or so in civilisation, there is scarce a better than found in
+comparison between the condition of the roads in old and modern times.
+That Waller could, in all sincerity, speak of "vile Essexian roads"
+is not remarkable: he was a poet, dealt in superlatives and lived in
+the seventeenth century. But that Arthur Young, a hundred years later,
+could with equal sincerity, and in more emphatic language, describe
+Essex roads as "rocky lanes, with ruts of inconceivable depth," is
+startling. It was in 1768 he penned that indictment, adding that they
+were so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the sun, and strewn
+with stones "as big as a horse, and full of abominable holes." It were,
+he concludes, a misuse of language to call them turnpikes, for they
+were rich in ponds of liquid dirt; while loose flints and vile grips
+cut across to drain off the water made the traveller's pilgrimage a
+weariness.
+
+The modern reader, perusing all these manifold sins and wickednesses
+of the roads, rather wonders how they could all have been crowded
+on to such truly vile ways, and if a stone were as big as a horse,
+how room could have been found beside it for holes, ponds and other
+objectionable features. But Arthur Young was a truthful man in general.
+
+To-day the Essex high roads are as near perfection as any in the home
+counties, even though the byways be steep and rough and more than
+usually winding.
+
+It is in these byways that he who seeks rural Essex shall find. The
+dramatic suddenness and completeness with which, a few hundred yards
+from the high road, the sophisticated wayside towns and hamlets are
+exchanged for the unspoiled rusticity of the original villages is
+surprising. In these lanes the older rustics talk and think much as
+their grandfathers did, but the rising generation unhappily do not,
+and the Essex rustic in general, like his fellows elsewhere, has
+almost wholly discarded the old dress of the peasantry. Only the very
+old or the more remote yet wear the smock-frock--the "round frock,"
+or the "gaberdine," as they called it--that was once as honourable a
+distinction of the ploughmen, herds, or carters as are the uniforms of
+our soldiers and sailors.
+
+The time is long past since a clean smock-frock, corded breeches,
+worsted stockings and well-greased lace-up boots formed the approved
+rural costume for Sundays or holidays, just as the same articles of
+apparel in a "second-best" condition made the workaday wear. The
+Sunday costume of the agricultural labourer is now a cheap and clumsy
+travesty of the clothes worn by townsfolk, and in hideous contrast
+with his surroundings. Exactly what it is like may be seen on any
+advertisement hoarding in the outskirts of Chelmsford, Colchester and
+lesser towns, where pictorial posters bid Giles go to Shoddy's for
+cheap outfits. Sunday mornings find him flaunting his finery in the
+village street; his would-be stylish boots creaking, his every article
+of wear writ large with vulgarity. Often he carries gloves in those
+large hands of his, rough with honest week-day toil, and a pair may
+thus last him for years--for he dare not attempt to put them on. Would
+that he equally purchased his cheap cigars for show and refrained from
+smoking them!
+
+But there the village dandy is. Often his pocket-handkerchief is
+scented; generally his hair is glossy with grease; and he would not
+consider himself fully equipped without watch and chain, scarf-pin,
+ring and walking stick. To grease his boots he would be ashamed. _They_
+must be brightly polished, even though his manners are not, and his
+language defiles the village street what time the bells are ringing
+to church. Such is Young England in the villages at the dawn of the
+Twentieth Century. These things may spell Progress, but they are rather
+pitiful.
+
+It is a little difficult, in presenting a sketch of his ancestor of
+a hundred years or more ago, to avoid drawing too favourable a view
+of him; but the rustic in old times certainly seems to have matched
+much better with his surroundings than is the case nowadays. He made
+no attempts to dress up to town standards, and if he wanted to shine
+above his fellows did so by virtue of superior neatness only. Perhaps
+he had the finer instincts of the two, or more likely lacked the
+opportunities for bad taste that surround his descendants. Certainly,
+if we are to believe in the origin of the smock-frock, as put forward
+by some antiquaries, we must sorrowfully admit that the rustic's remote
+ancestor had as great a longing for unsuitable display in dress as
+can possibly be charged to the present generation. The smock-frock
+is, in fact, traced back by some to the ecclesiastical garments worn
+at Mass by deacons and sub-deacons, at the time when the Reformation
+swept vestments out of every village church in the land. Those who are
+familiar with genuine old smock-frocks have noticed the elaborate and
+often beautiful needlework on collar and breast. The devices appear to
+have a traditional likeness, all over the country, and consist either
+of Celtic-looking whorls, or of semi-decorative flower forms, or of
+lozenge patterns. The comparative simplicity or elaboration of this
+needlework depended solely upon the fancy, or the time at command, of
+the wearer's women-folk whose work it was. Whence came this tradition?
+It is thought from the tunicles of the minor clergy, which were
+certainly decorated in the same position, if not in similar patterns.
+When the minor belongings of the Church became the spoil of the
+villages, Hodge and Giles found themselves the proud possessors of the
+strange garments, for which they could find at first no better use than
+for Sunday wear. A striking appearance they must have made in them,
+down the village street, the envy of their less fortunate fellows.
+
+When the looted vestments grew shabby they must have been used for
+everyday wear, and so have set the fashions in smock-frocks, both in
+shape and decoration, for centuries to come. If it be thought that the
+costume was rather extravagant, it can only be asked, is not that of
+the modern Sunday morning yokel extravagant also?
+
+The rustic of long ago was a man of dense ignorance and dark
+superstitions. No one county was then more guilty than another in that
+respect, but East Anglians, and perhaps especially the Essex bucolics,
+are still, despite their veneer of civilisation, sunk in uncanny
+beliefs. Witches still "overlook" folks in Essex hamlets, and spells
+are cast on cattle and horses, or unhappy fowls are blighted by the
+Evil Eye. Consequently the learned professions of Witch-Doctor and
+Wise Women are not yet extinct. Their existence is not likely to be
+discovered by the stranger, but they thrive, in limited numbers, even
+in these days of pills and patent medicines.
+
+Board Schools are supposed to be educating Young England into a dead
+monotony of speech, but it will be long before they complete the horrid
+work. In Essex, indeed, we may not unreasonably think it a task beyond
+the power of teachers and inspectors, who if they have not succeeded,
+after thirty years working of the Elementary Education Act, in inducing
+the lower-class Londoners to say "yes" for "yuss," together with other
+linguistic enormities, are not likely to be successful in abolishing
+the very marked and stubborn Essex shibboleths. It may not generally
+be known that much of the so-called "Cockney" talk derives from the
+Essex dialect. From Essex especially comes that curious perversity
+of the unruly member which in many cases insists upon pronouncing
+the letter A as I. The lower-class Londoner and the Essex peasant
+are unanimous in enunciating A as I in all words where that letter
+retains its open sound and its individuality. Thus, in the words "baby"
+"favourite," "made" and "native," for instance, the letter becomes I;
+and the Fleet Street newsboy, shouting his "spusshul uxtry piper," can
+legitimately call cousins, if he wishes it, with the Essex lad at the
+plough-tail.
+
+Where A is sounded broadly, or in cases like the word "was," in which
+it masquerades as O, or where the letter is absolutely silent, or not
+fully pronounced, as in "beast" and "maternal," this peculiarity does
+not appear.
+
+The effect is sometimes grotesque, as, for example, near Colchester,
+where the villages of Layer Marney, Layer Breton, and Layer de la Hay
+are always spoken of as Liyer, the last mentioned becoming Liyer de la
+High.
+
+Nor is pronunciation the only singular feature of Essex talk, as
+those who keep their ears alert in these parts will soon find. The
+oddest phrases are matters of everyday use, and the Essex peasant can
+no more help using the word "together," in season and out, than he
+can help being hungry before meals or sleepy by bedtime. "Together,"
+as employed by the Essex peasant, is a word absolutely meaningless;
+a kind of linguistic excrescence which, like a wart or a boil, is
+neither useful nor beautiful. When a ploughman says he is going to
+plough "that there field together," he does not mean to imply that he
+is about to plough it together with some other land, or with a party
+of other ploughmen. He simply adds the word from force of habit, and
+from hearing his father and grandfather before him so use it, in almost
+every sentence, as a sort of verbal makeweight. The present writer has
+had the good fortune to hear a supremely ludicrous use of this Bœotian
+habit of speech. It was market-day at Colchester, and Stanway village
+had emptied itself in the direction of the town. A dog rolled dustily
+in the sunny road, and the historian of these things luxuriously
+quaffed his "large lemon" on the bench outside the village inn. As
+Artemus Ward might have said, "orl was peas," when there entered upon
+the scene a countryman, evidently known to the landlord. He walked into
+the bar, and, surprised to find mine host in solitary state, exclaimed,
+"What, all alone together, bor?"
+
+"Yes," replied the landlord, in no wise astonished at this
+extraordinary expression, "the missus has gone to Colchester together."
+
+"Did my missus go with her?" asked the rustic.
+
+"No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by herself."
+
+In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging more especially
+to Norfolk and Suffolk. This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for
+neighbour.
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+STANWAY is approached along a flat stretch, past Mark's Tey, which,
+without being itself quite on the road, has sent out modern and
+extremely ugly brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible
+distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's Tey church is
+visible, amid an inchoate mass of railway signal masts and puffs of
+smoke. Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings proceed from
+that direction, for this is a junction of the Great Eastern with the
+Colne Valley Railway, and the station, by the way, where the lady in
+Thackeray's _Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditch_ appeared
+with the baby which she eventually left behind her. It is this busy
+junction that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses along the
+road to render the village of the old De Marcas something new and
+strange. Mark's Tey is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for
+the road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in here.
+
+Copford's solitary houses by the way give scarce a hint of the village
+nearly a mile off, whose little church formerly owned a terrifying
+relic, in the shape of a human skin nailed on its door; a skin that
+had been the personal property of some unfortunate straggler from the
+hordes of marauding Danes that once infested the district, of whom we
+have already heard legends at Kelvedon and Gore Pit. His Saxon captors
+must have flayed him with a ferocious delight and nailed up his cuticle
+with precisely the same satisfaction as that of the gamekeeper who
+wages war upon stoats and weazels and other vermin, and hangs their
+bodies on the barn door. But there must have been a bitter day of
+reckoning for those Saxons when the sea-rovers came this way again and
+saw in what fashion that doorway was decorated.
+
+[Illustration: Near Mark's Tey.]
+
+Copford and its outlying houses lie at the crest of a gentle descent
+into the valley of a rivulet which finds its way into the Colne.
+It stands, as its name implies, overlooking some ford which, once
+important, has, in the gradual draining of the country and the
+shrinkage of streams, now lost all significance. Stanway adjoins it,
+and lies along the descent, in the hollow and up the corresponding
+rise on the other side, where its church stands in a forbidding
+loneliness. The name of Stanway is sufficient warranty of this being,
+thus far, the Roman road. It is, however, not so certain that the
+remaining four miles of the existing highway from this point into
+Colchester follow the course taken by the Romans; and, indeed, the
+later researches of archæologists go far to prove that the original
+way into Roman Colchester avoided the intervening village of Lexden
+altogether, and, curving eastwards, avoided what may then have been
+a marsh, to take the higher ground over a portion of Lexden Heath;
+bending westwards again and crossing the site of the present road
+between where the grammar school and the hospital now stand. From this
+point it seems to have crossed by where the Lordsland Nursery grounds
+stood until recently built over, to the ancient Roman gateway and
+bastion in the western wall of the town, long known as Colking's, or
+King Coel's Castle, but originally the Decuman Gate of Roman times.
+The course followed by this old Roman way is lined on either side with
+sepulchral remains, and seems to have once been a great cemetery.
+Wherever the ground is disturbed the relics of some soldier or citizen
+of Colonia are found, some dating back to the foundation of the colony,
+nearly nineteen centuries ago. The most remarkable among them are to be
+seen in the museum at Colchester Castle. There--the most human relic
+of them all--is the touching monument to M. Favonius, a Centurion of
+the Twentieth Legion, discovered in 1871 between the hospital and
+the grammar school, at a depth of 3 feet below the surface, and at a
+distance of 10 feet from the old Roman road. It is a sculptured stone,
+4 feet in height, with the figure of the Centurion himself carved on
+it, in high relief. It is evidently a portrait of him. He stands in
+full military costume, his cloak hanging from his shoulders, his sword
+and dagger by his side. The inscription, almost as sharp as on the day
+when it was cut, nearly nineteen hundred years ago, tells us that the
+monument was erected by two of his servants, Verecundus and Novicius.
+They call him "facilis," the "easy" or "good-natured." It is surely a
+sweet and touching thing that when all other record of that soldier has
+perished, we should yet know him to have been a kindly creature.
+
+But to return to Stanway, which keeps, as sole vestige of its heath,
+a little space of the greenest turf, perhaps half an acre in extent,
+beside the insignificant stream in the hollow, and opposite the "Swan"
+Inn. The heath that formerly spread out across the elevated but flat
+table-land between this village and the succeeding one of Lexden was,
+in its different parts, variously named after them. On Stanway Heath,
+in Ogilby's _Britannia_ of 1697, a picture map shows a beacon standing
+between the forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from London, on
+the right-hand side of the road. It appears to have been a post some
+30 feet in height, crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means of
+slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily lighted, was provided for
+the benefit of travellers going to or coming from Colchester across
+the desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from the existence of
+a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the comparative security of Lexden village.
+The heath by the highway is a thing of the past, for those portions
+not brought under cultivation by the farmer have been grabbed by the
+builder, and the so-called Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row
+of houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything complete and
+modern. At the forty-eighth milestone, amid all this modern upheaval,
+stands a disused toll-house, and, close by, something much more
+ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered in dense woods and
+shrubs, known as "King Cole's Kitchen," and now--figure to yourself the
+shame of it!--overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and named from it
+"King Cole's Cottage."
+
+Turning off to the right, the curious in things pre-historic may
+lose themselves in the solitudes of the real Lexden Heath, where the
+Devil, the Trinobantes, the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary
+General--according to varying legends--threw up the entrenchments,
+and delved the ditches, found there in plenty. The Devil, we say
+advisedly, for "Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to the dyke
+across the heath, was none other, in the minds of the Saxons. "Lexden
+Straight Road" follows for an unconscionable distance a line of Roman
+entrenchments, and is straight and dull beyond belief. Followed long
+enough, it leads to "Bottle End," which may originally have been
+"Battle End," the scene of some traditional legend of Boadicea's
+defeat at the hands of the Romans. Or, again, it perhaps marks some
+forgotten connection with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside
+Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced "Bottle" by
+Colcestrians. Anything is possible in a district where Beacon End, the
+site of the old beacon already mentioned, has become Bacon End.
+
+[Illustration: LEXDEN.]
+
+Lexden village now claims attention. It is a place in which one school
+of antiquaries finds the original Roman station of Camulodunum,
+established on the site of the royal city of Cunobelin, King of the
+Trinobantes; a finding strenuously contested by another following.
+Certainly, among the tall elms and rolling surface of Lexden Park there
+are remains in plenty of huge defensive earthworks, telling in no
+uncertain manner that this must have been a place of enormous strength,
+by whomsoever held. The surroundings are weird and impressive to a
+degree.
+
+The village skirting the road is one of the prettiest on the way. Going
+towards Colchester, the road drops down the hill, where old cottages
+stand high above the pathway, with steep little gardens in front, kept
+from sliding down into the road itself by lichened retaining-walls
+sprouting with house-leek and draped with climbing plants. Lower
+still, hard by the church whose carpenter-Gothic atrocities are hung
+about with ivy and creepers until they are transfigured into a dream
+of beauty, the grouping of the 'Sun' Inn and neighbouring houses
+is exquisite. Beyond this point begins the suburban approach to
+Colchester, a town it behoves the stranger to approach with a proper
+respect, for here was the first Roman colony in Britain. The history
+of Colchester, indeed, begins so far back as A.D. 44, and there was
+already a pre-historic native city in existence before then; the royal
+city of that ancient British king, Cunobelin, the monarch famous in the
+pages of Shakespeare as "Cymbeline."
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+CUNOBELIN, Lord of the Trinobantes, ruler of that part of the
+country now divided into Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire,
+Hunts, Cambridgeshire and Essex, was the successor of his father
+Cassivelaunus, who had warred, not ingloriously, with Julius Cæsar. He
+transferred his capital from his native town on the site of St Albans
+to where Colchester now stands. He appears to have been a powerful
+ruler, and, if little is known of him, certainly he is no myth, for
+the vague legends that held the name of the Buckinghamshire villages
+of Great and Little Kimble to be a corrupted form of his own were
+strikingly proved correct some years ago, when a hoard of gold coins
+was ploughed up in their neighbourhood, bearing his title.
+
+We do not know by what name Colchester was then styled. After Cunobelin
+had died, full of years and worn by grief at the revolts of his sons,
+Caractacus, Adminius and Togodumnus, the end of the native State over
+which he had ruled speedily came. Adminius, in a fury against his
+brothers, fled from Britain to seek the aid of the Romans, and if no
+immediate result came, certainly his invitation must have revived
+the old Cæsarian dream of conquest. The real cause of the Roman
+invasion that took place shortly after the death of Cunobelin was the
+solicitation of a certain Bericus, a British Prince of whom nothing
+appears to be known beyond this one fact.
+
+The invasion took place in A.D. 43, under that able general, Aulus
+Plautius, who threw the Trinobantes back from Hertfordshire and
+Middlesex, across the Lea and into the Essex marshes, where for a time
+they could not be followed. This was the position at the close of the
+year. Detached portions of the invading forces had overrun the south of
+Britain as far as Gloucester and had defeated the tribes on the way;
+leaving a garrison in the west. But the island was little known and
+held many mysteries. None could tell the real strength of the natives,
+who disappeared in the forests and marshes that covered the face of the
+land, and by their irregular warfare disconcerted the Roman plans of
+campaign. Plautius was at last driven to act on the defensive on the
+Essex borders. His soldiers were dying in the ague-stricken morasses
+between the Thames and the Lea, and had the enemy possessed powers of
+combination and military skill, he might well have been cut off here,
+at the end of the known world. A retirement with his sick and dying was
+impossible. Nothing remained but to go into camp during the winter, and
+meanwhile to send for reinforcements. He accordingly sent for forces
+from Gaul. They came with commendable promptitude, commanded by the
+Emperor Claudius in person. With these new legions came an elephant
+corps, brought from Africa to carry the heavy baggage. But they acted
+a better part than this, for their strange appearance terrified the
+astonished Trinobantes a great deal more than any increase of the
+Roman soldiery could have done. We may imagine this corps, crashing
+irresistibly through the thickets, the forests and marshes on that
+march into the Unknown, along this line of country now traversed by the
+Norwich Road, and can readily understand little resistance being met
+with on the way. The tribes were dispersed and their territory occupied
+as far as the Stour, and a colony was founded in the opening of the new
+year, A.D. 44, on the site of Cunobelin's city--Colonia Camulodunum,
+the first Roman settlement in Britain.
+
+The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance of the natives that
+they were soon lulled into a feeling of security. For an uninterrupted
+space of sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It became a pleasant
+town, inhabited by veteran soldiers grown grey in the service of the
+Empire, and spending their later years in retirement. The Emperor
+Claudius, flushed with his success, had assumed the dignity of a god
+and had caused a Temple to be erected in the market-place to his
+honour, with attendant priests and altars. The governors and consuls
+were lesser gods, and treated with contempt and ill-judged severity
+the natives who had been overcome with such ease. The soldiery were
+uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and luxury flourished together with this
+attitude of oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences. It is not
+surprising that these colonists were bitterly hated by their vassals,
+who in especial looked upon the priests as so many harpies living upon
+their substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoods and
+all clergy have been from the beginning, and will be to the end. In
+this last respect these poor Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians,
+exhibited a quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the
+priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment that have since
+passed.
+
+These down-trodden natives were already ripe for revenge when a more
+than usually unjust proceeding of the Roman officials precipitated
+a rising. The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and whose
+frontiers marched with those of the conquered province, had been ruled
+over by a certain King Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate
+the goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast wealth he
+had accumulated, leaving one half to the Roman Emperor and the other
+moiety to his two daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his
+country was invaded. His widow, the famous Boadicea, resisted. She
+was publicly scourged, her daughters suffering the worst indignities,
+and her relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose in arms at
+these outrages, and their cousins, the Trinobantes, on the hither side
+of the Stour, joined them. The Romans saw their folly when too late.
+No more eloquent account is possible than that given by Tacitus of
+the premonitions of evil. The statue of Victory fell to the ground,
+and turned its back where the face had been, as if it fled before an
+enemy. Women were seen and heard singing mad, wild songs, prophesying
+disaster. Strange and unaccountable noises were heard in the house
+of assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. In the estuary of
+the river the buildings of the city appeared reflected upside down,
+and ghastly remains of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the
+tide ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and the strangest
+whisperings stirred the air. Many of the wealthier colonists, alarmed
+at these portents, discovered that their health needed a change of air,
+and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side of the Channel, and
+those who remained applied for military help. In answer to this appeal,
+a meagre force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately employed to
+fortify the Temple. But before these measures could be completed, the
+town was surrounded and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants all
+slain, the little garrison in the Temple meeting a like fate after a
+defence of two days.
+
+Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the Ninth Legion, which had
+been stationed on the Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now
+stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city. He, however, had moved
+too late, and met the victorious natives at Wormingford, where they
+almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences of that great
+disaster were discovered in 1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns,
+placed in order like streets, were unearthed, containing the bones
+of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the Roman sway had been
+reasserted.
+
+These events happened in A.D. 61. Suetonius Paulinus, the then
+Commander-in-Chief, was at that time vigorously prosecuting a war with
+the Druids in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of these disasters
+he hurried back through Verulamium and Londinium, collecting an army
+of ten thousand as he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and a
+numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman citizens of both those
+towns piteously begged for protection, but were left to their fate,
+which was not long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column passed
+than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed them. Seventy thousand
+citizens perished in that general massacre.
+
+It is uncertain where the Roman army met the hordes commanded by that
+heroic Amazon, Boadicea, whom we should perhaps more correctly style
+"Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull subject in the hands of
+the uninspired, who fail to render her "convincing." No one has done
+so well as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern writers of
+"personal paragraphs" in what recent slang would term his "actuality."
+He says, "she was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed,
+harsh-voiced, with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair falling below
+her waist" (her golden hair was hanging down her back!), "wearing a
+highly-embroidered tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a buckle over
+it."
+
+Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by two woods, on a
+site resembling a stretch of country at Haynes Green, near Messing; but
+the great fight must have raged on many miles of ground, and no doubt
+included Lexden Heath.
+
+The Britons were so sure of victory, that they had brought their women
+and children as spectators, and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a
+great semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman historian says
+they were an "innumerable multitude." The British Queen, addressing
+her warriors from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to die,
+resting her hopes on the strength of her forces and the justice of
+her cause; while Suetonius, on his part, urged his troops not to be
+dismayed either by the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts.
+The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining on the defensive.
+When the fury of the first onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers
+of the Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the cavalry closing
+in on the flanks, driving the speedily disorganised enemy back upon the
+semi-circle of waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in this
+way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in which eighty thousand
+Britons were slain, including the women and children who had come out
+to witness the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing all lost,
+poisoned herself.
+
+Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and Suffolk. From this time
+date the existing walls of Colchester. The conquerors were determined
+not to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first colony,
+and, choosing a new site, one mile to the east of the former city,
+they planted their walls on the ridge on which Colchester now stands,
+overlooking the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing an area
+of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain, after the passing of more than
+eighteen hundred years, the most perfect Roman fortifications in
+Britain. Even in that wide space of time the town of Colchester has not
+extended very greatly beyond them. In some directions, indeed--notably
+to the north and north-east and on the west--the ramparts still look
+out upon the open country. The walls have a thickness of from seven to
+eight feet, and are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses
+of stones, brought with great labour from the coast near Harwich;
+the neighbourhood of Colchester, and Essex in general, being quite
+innocent of stone of any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this
+day supply the boulders of limestone from which the building-stones of
+Colchester's walls were cut.
+
+Colchester was never again attacked during the period of more than
+three hundred years, in which the Romans ruled. In the events of A.D.
+61, they had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of treating
+a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In the period between these
+events and the year 410, when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from
+Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from ruin, conquered and
+conquerors had to live together, and made the best of the necessity.
+Roman colonists intermarried with the gradually Romanised British,
+and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during three centuries,
+gradually grew to look upon Britain as their home and themselves as
+a nation. Thus, towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority
+are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and civilised British
+princes treating on equal terms with Roman statesmen. In this way
+the British in some measure came into their own again, and to these
+circumstances we owe the wild legends of that mysterious monarch, "old
+King Cole," who is to Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall,
+the great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's walls, and
+the earthworks near Lexden known as "King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the
+very name of Colchester itself--"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive,
+according to legends, from this scarce more than mythical personage.
+Those stories make him one Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of
+semi-independent British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal
+sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman conquest. The story
+goes on to tell how, on the death of the usurper Carausius, in A.D.
+293, Coel surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius Chlorus,
+on that successor of the Cæsar's marrying his daughter Helena, who
+became the mother of Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer
+of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of Colchester still bear a
+ragged cross between four crowns, in allusion to this tale of the
+Empress Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction which
+Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy of her, holding a cross
+very plain to see, is newly set up on the very topmost point of the
+gorgeous new Town Hall, recently completed.
+
+To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the
+legend of Coel is chiefly traced. He may either have imagined it, or
+have woven the story out of existing legends, which had in turn derived
+from the Saxons, who, after the departure of the Romans, had wrested
+the country from the Romanised British. They captured and burnt the
+town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls, took them to have
+been the work of some great king, after whom the place had been named.
+Legends of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons themselves
+had been converted to Christianity he was fully provided with a history.
+
+"Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster, has been shabbily
+treated in modern times and made to figure merely as a jolly toper.
+That he was the most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically
+assures us.
+
+ "He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called for his
+ fiddlers three."
+
+Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house potentate! The
+author of that nursery rhyme has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain
+did the romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of vulgarity, _A
+Yankee at the Court of King Arthur_.
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+THE entrance into Colchester is singular. From the straight, broad road
+leading past the trim modern villas and so into Crouch Street--the
+street outside the walls that takes its name from the vanished
+monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars--the wayfarer
+suddenly comes to the sharpest of angles, and, turning abruptly to the
+left, enters Colchester by what has every appearance of being the back
+door into the town.
+
+Historically considered, the entrance by crooked Head Street, as the
+continuation of Crouch Street is called, really is a back way, and was
+in Roman times the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and
+less important roads. But ever since Saxon days this has been the only
+way to or from London into the town.
+
+How it happened that the original road and the Decuman Gate in
+Colchester's west wall fell into disuse, none can tell. It was so many
+ages ago that not even a pathway leads along the ancient way, now
+quite obliterated by houses. But if the road be gone, the Gate itself
+remains, though in ruins. Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt
+to find it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our steps a
+little distance along Crouch Street, and, so doing, to take a turning
+to the right-hand, down Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome
+is seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands towering above
+a flight of steps leading up into the street beyond. There stands
+revealed a portion of the wall. The breach in it, through which the
+steps lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees, the freshness
+of whose spring foliage with every recurrent April forms a romantic
+contrast with the almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a
+place for thought. From the summit of that old defence, where once the
+legionaries lined the battlements in time of peril, or leaned gossiping
+in peaceful days, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley where
+the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary lifting of the veil and
+a glimpse of what the spot will be like in another eighteen hundred
+years. Close by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn
+courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman Gate. Three arches can
+be traced; the middle arch of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot
+passengers, less than half that width. Candour, however, compels the
+admission that of architectural character they have not the slightest
+trace. Over against this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in the
+Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and through that hole the
+most prominent object in all Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo"
+brutally dominates everything, and blasts the approach to Colchester
+far away on every road but that from London, for which small mercy
+thanks be given. Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he is
+very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and, unluckily, cannot fail
+to be seen. After him, even the Roman remains of Colchester pale their
+ineffectual efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable, although not
+very likely, that a stranger passing through Colchester might not
+notice its Roman antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There he
+is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless in brick of
+the most striking red and in attempts at decoration which, however
+well meant, only serve to render his hulking body more objectionable,
+with an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged face with
+pearl-powder.
+
+Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower of Colchester's
+waterworks. It was built in 1881, and cost close upon £10,500, and
+there are those who say it is the second largest of its kind in
+England. Where the largest may be we know not, but if it injures its
+surroundings as effectually as does Colchester's incubus, that unknown
+place has our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in his name,
+for, as the curious may see for themselves, his weather-vane bears the
+effigy of an elephant.
+
+Returning to Crouch Street, and so by Head Gate and along Head Street,
+the High Street is gained. It is one of the broadest and most spacious
+streets in the kingdom, as it had every occasion to be, for it was not
+only part of the great road leading into Suffolk, but in it was held
+the principal fair of the town. Here, too, close by where Colchester's
+new and gorgeous Town Hall stands, was the old Moot Hall, a building
+of Saxon, Norman and later periods, barbarously destroyed in 1843. In
+the Moot Hall the Mayor and justices dealt with offences of all kinds,
+from the selling of bad meat to charges of witchcraft, sorcery and
+heresy. Thus we may read in the borough records of things so diverse
+as the fining of Robert Barefot, butcher, in the sum of twelve pence
+for selling putrid meat, and may learn how William Chevelying, the
+first of the Colchester martyrs, was imprisoned here in the reign of
+Henry the Sixth until such time as it was convenient to burn him in
+front of Colkyng's Castle. Here the local Court of Pie Powder was held
+during the Corporation Fair Days, in October. Summary jurisdiction
+was the special feature of that Court, and it was needed, for in those
+times, when people of all sorts and conditions came from far and near,
+offences were many and various. In the legal jargon of the Middle Ages
+this tribunal is called the _Curia Regis Pedis Pulverizatis_, or, in
+the Norman-French then common, the "Cour Royal des Pieds Poudrés,"
+that is to say, the King's Court of Dusty Feet. Courts of Pie Powder
+obtained this eminently descriptive name from the original Fair
+Courts, held in the dusty streets long before buildings were erected
+for the purpose, and the name survived long after the necessity which
+originated it had disappeared. Imagine, therefore, the highwaymen, the
+cheats and thieves and those who came into disputation on the Fair Days
+being brought before the Mayor by the bailiffs, their cases arising and
+being heard, and judgments and sentences being delivered and executed,
+within the space of one day, amid the bleating of the flocks, the
+lowing of the herds, and all the noise and tumult of the Fair itself.
+We must not, however, suppose the High Street to have been absolutely
+clear of obstructions in days of old. In midst of it stood the Late
+Saxon or Early Norman church of that Saxon saint, St Runwald, which
+remained here until so recently as 1878, when it was pulled down and
+its site sold to the Corporation, to be thrown into the roadway.
+
+That Colchester stands on a considerably elevated site is evident to
+all who, having entered from the London road, turn out of Head Street
+into the High Street, and in doing so glimpse the long descent of
+North Hill at the corner. A further revelation is that of East Hill,
+which, in continuation of High Street, the traveller must long and
+steeply descend towards the Colne, on his way to Ipswich and Norwich.
+It was in High Street that Colchester's principal coaching inns were
+situated, and there yet remains--now the most picturesque feature of
+that thoroughfare--the "Red Lion," with old timber brackets supporting
+a projecting upper storey and a four-centred Tudor oak entrance
+curiously carved; its original and restored portions so thickly smeared
+with paint and varnish that all might be old, so far as the antiquary
+can tell, or all might be in the nature of Wardour Street antiques.
+The "Red Lion" figured as a rendezvous in the surrender of the town to
+Fairfax, after the siege of 1648. In its yard the vanquished laid down
+their swords.
+
+Another inn was the "White Hart," where Bank Passage leaves the High
+Street. The building, a highly respectable plaster-faced one, smug
+and Georgian, still stands, but it is an inn no longer. Another old
+inn, the "Three Cups," has been rebuilt. Older than any, but coyly
+hiding its antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint
+galleries from the crowd, is the "Angel," in West Stockwell Street,
+whose origin as a pilgrim's inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants to,
+or returning from, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away
+on the road through and past Norwich, housed here and misbehaved
+themselves in their mediæval way. It would be the gravest of mistakes
+to assume old pilgrims decorous. Modern Bank Holiday folks would,
+compared with them, seem to be of a severe monkish austerity. The
+shrine at Walsingham, second only in repute to that of the Blessed
+Thomas at Canterbury, drew crowds of every class, from king to beggar.
+The great Benedictine Abbey of St John at Colchester sheltered some
+in its guest-houses, while the late-comers inned at such hostelries
+as the "Angel," or, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods.
+Ill fared the unsuspecting citizen who met any of these sinners on
+the way to be plenarily indulged and lightened of their load of sin.
+They would murder him for twopence or cudgel him out of high spirits
+and for the fun of the thing; arguing, doubtless, that as they were
+presently to turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how black the old
+one was. Drunkenness and crime, immorality, obscenity and license of
+the grossest kind were in fact accompaniments of pilgrimage, and the
+sin-worn wanderers who prayed devoutly at the niche, now empty of its
+statue, in the east end of All Saints' Church in the High Street, on
+their journey to and from Walsingham, would resume their foul jests and
+their evil courses so soon as the last bead was told and the ultimate
+word of dog-Latin glibly pattered off.
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+REMOVED from all the noise and bustle of the High Street, in a quiet
+nook away from the modern life of the town, stands Colchester Castle,
+on the site of the Temple of Claudius. The Keep, built by Eudo,
+"Dapifer," or High Steward of Normandy, under William the Conqueror
+and his two successors, alone remains, and has lost its upper storey,
+destroyed by a speculator who bought the building in 1683, and half
+ruined himself in his attempts to demolish it. It is perhaps not
+generally known that this is by far the largest keep in England,
+measuring 155 ft. by 113 ft. The Tower of London, built at the same
+period, and the next largest, measures only 116 ft. by 96 ft. There
+have been those who, looking at its massive walls, 12 ft. thick, with
+courses of Roman tiles conspicuous in them, have believed this to be
+the original Roman temple, and antiquaries who should have known better
+have written long treatises to support their views. Those, however,
+were the days before comparative archæology had come into being to
+prove that the peculiarities in the planning, noticeable here, are
+partaken of by the undoubted Norman keeps of the Tower of London and
+of Rochester Castle, known to have been designed by Gundulf, Bishop of
+Rochester. Freeman was very severe in his time on those who labelled
+the interior of Colchester keep with such names as "podium" and
+"adytum," in their belief of its Roman character.
+
+[Illustration: THE GRAND STAIRCASE, COLCHESTER CASTLE.]
+
+If its lack of height prevents Colchester Castle from being impressive
+without, certainly its gloomy dungeons and mighty walls compel the
+respect and wonder of all who enter. They look not so much as though
+they had been built up, as though cells and passages had been carved
+and burrowed out of a solid mass; so small are those passages and
+staircases, so thick the walls. In the chapel and the corridors that
+still remain roofed, the collections of the Essex Archæological Society
+have a home, and from other and roofless walls that are broad enough
+to afford the safest of pathways one may gaze down upon the surrounding
+grassy enclosures and see that spot where those two Royalist
+commanders, Lucas and Lisle, who held Colchester for seventy-six days
+against the besieging army of the Parliament in 1648, were barbarously
+shot by order of Fairfax, after having surrendered.
+
+That siege of Colchester is the most romantic incident that has
+survived in the history of the town. It is the story of a last
+desperate attempt of the Royalists to contend with the Parliamentary
+forces that had everywhere overwhelmed the King's supporters after a
+bitter warfare of over six years. It was a gallant attempt, and the
+more so because Essex was not a county favourable to the King's cause.
+Sir Charles Lucas, at the head of this enterprise, was a younger
+member of the Lucas family, seated at Colchester. In the beginning of
+June 1648, a Royalist rising under Colonel Goring had been checked at
+Blackheath by the Parliamentary general, Fairfax. A portion of Goring's
+force crossed the Thames into Essex, and lay at Brentwood. This was
+an opportunity which Essex sympathisers could not let slip. Lucas and
+his friends, gathering a body of adherents, galloped down the road
+to Chelmsford, where the Committee of Parliament was in session, and
+seized them, afterwards continuing their progress to Brentwood, where
+they effected a junction with Goring's band. Their forces thus united,
+a counter-march was made upon Chelmsford again, and continued to
+Colchester; Lord Capel, Sir George Lisle, and many others joining on
+the way. On June 12, Goring, in command of this body of four thousand
+Royalists, approached Colchester, and found the Head Gate closed
+against him by the unsympathetic citizens, but a slight skirmish soon
+enabled him to force an entrance. He had not intended to remain at
+Colchester, but the swift pursuit that Fairfax organised from London
+gave the Royalists no time to continue their projected march into the
+Midlands. The day after Goring had entered Colchester, Fairfax had
+assembled his forces on Lexden Heath, and immediately sent a trumpeter
+to demand surrender. The inevitable refusal was the signal for a battle
+outside the town, on the London Road; a contest which resulted in the
+retirement of the Royalists within the walls. The Head Gate still
+existed, its bolts and bars in perfect order, but as the Royalists fell
+back through it into the town, two hundred or more of the Parliamentary
+troops dashed through in pursuit. Their ardour cost them their lives,
+for Lord Capel at the head of a determined band pushed back the gate
+upon the bulk of the enemy, thrusting his walking-stick through the
+staples as the door closed. The eager advance-guard, thus cooped up
+within the walls, were all slain.
+
+Preparations were now made on both sides for a siege. Fairfax had
+already lost many men, and dared not attempt to carry the town by
+storm. His plan was to surround Colchester and imprison the Royalists
+there until such time as his heavy ordnance or starvation should
+compel them to surrender. With his command of reinforcements from
+London, and his ability thus to enclose the town with a cordon of
+troops, the position of the Royalists was hopeless, and it is to their
+honour and credit that, in order to contain Fairfax's large army and
+so give opportunities to the organisers of Royalist movements in the
+Midlands, they continued the defence in the face of starvation and
+despite the easy terms of capitulation at first offered them. Their
+domestic position (so to call it) in the town was unenviable, for the
+inhabitants were wholly opposed to their cause. They had with them,
+it is true, the members of the Parliamentary Committee whom they had
+kidnapped from Chelmsford, but those gentlemen were a nuisance and
+had to be civilly treated and fed while the Royalists themselves went
+hungry. The unfortunate inhabitants, too, were starving, and many of
+their houses and churches destroyed by the besiegers' cannon shot;
+while suburbs were burnt down outside the walls.
+
+The end of this long agony came on August 27, when the town was
+surrendered; the officers "surrendering to mercy," the lesser officers
+and rank and file with an assurance that their lives and personal
+belongings should be spared. Seventy-five superior officers accordingly
+gave up their arms at the "King's Head" inn. Four of them were to be
+tried by court-martial. One escaped, one was pardoned, and two--Sir
+Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle--condemned to be shot without
+delay, on a disproved charge of having once broken their parole when
+formerly prisoners of war. In vain asking for time to make some final
+disposition of their affairs, these two officers were executed the
+same evening, on a grassy spot a few paces clear of the north wall of
+the old castle. Sir Charles Lucas was the first to be shot, and met his
+end as a brave, gallant gentleman should. "I have often faced death
+on the field of battle," he said, "and you shall now see how I dare
+to die." Then he knelt in prayer, and, rising, threw open his vest,
+exclaiming, "See, I am ready for you. Now, rebels, do your worst!" The
+firing-party then fired and shot him in four places, so that he fell
+dead on the instant.
+
+Sir George Lisle was then brought to the same place, and viewing the
+dead body of his friend as it lay on the ground, knelt down and kissed
+him, praising his unspotted honour. After bidding farewell to some
+friends, he turned to the spectators, saying, "Oh! how many of your
+lives here have I saved in hot blood, and must now myself be most
+barbarously murdered in cold blood? But what dare not they do that
+would willingly cut the throat of my dear King, whom they have already
+imprisoned, and for whose deliverance, and peace to this unfortunate
+country, I dedicate my last prayer to Heaven?" Then, looking in the
+faces of those who were to execute him, and thinking they stood at too
+great a distance, he desired them to come nearer, to which one of them
+said, "I'll warrant, sir, we hit you." "Friend," he answered, "I have
+been nearer you when you have missed me!" And so, after a short prayer
+upon his knees, he rose up and said, "Now, traitors, do your worst!"
+Whereupon they shot him dead.
+
+The stone covering the graves of these unhappy soldiers may yet be seen
+in St Giles's Church, with an inscription stating that they were "by
+the command of Thomas Fairfax, the general of the Parliament Army, in
+cold blood barbarously murdered." A legend may still be occasionally
+met with in old books, which has it that the Duke of Buckingham, who
+had married Fairfax's daughter, approached Charles the Second with the
+object of having the passage erased that reflected so severely on his
+father-in-law's memory. The King conferred on the subject with Lord
+Lucas, who said that he would with pleasure obey the Royal command, if
+only His Majesty would allow him to place in its stead the statement
+that "Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle were barbarously murdered
+for their loyalty to King Charles the First, and that his son, King
+Charles the Second, had ordered this memorial of their loyalty to be
+erased." The King then, we are told, commanded the already existing
+epitaph to be cut still deeper, and it will be readily observed by
+those who go to gaze upon it that the lettering is bolder and deeper
+than commonly is the case.
+
+The undertaking of Fairfax with respect to the surrendered soldiery
+was not respected. They were ruthlessly pillaged, and some sent to the
+plantations over seas. Lord Capel was eventually executed in London.
+For many years afterwards the spot where Lucas and Lisle fell was
+shown by the awe-struck people of Colchester, who told the legend
+that grass would not grow where that loyal blood had been spilled. In
+later times the story became an article of faith with one political
+party and a derision to the other. No grass grows there now; but for
+the commonplace reason that a well-kept gravel path occupies the site,
+which is duly marked by a small obelisk.
+
+[Illustration: OLD MAN-TRAP, COLCHESTER CASTLE.]
+
+Colchester was long in recovering itself after the rough treatment
+received during the siege; and in fact, it is only in recent years that
+the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall, battered down on that occasion,
+has been rebuilt; while the Norman minster of St Botolph remains the
+roofless ruin that cannonading and incendiarism left it. Evelyn in
+1656 found Colchester "a ragged and factious town, now swarming with
+sectaries," and if he had visited it nine years later would have
+witnessed a worse state, for the plague almost depopulated the place.
+
+"Sectaries"--that is to say, those who preferred to think for
+themselves on religious matters, and to worship in their own way--were
+treated with an unconscionable severity. One Parnell, a Quaker, was
+imprisoned in a cell within Colchester Castle, and died there, his
+story affording a sad example of barbarity in the authorities of that
+period.
+
+But the early nineteenth century was as savage in some ways as the late
+seventeenth, which so delighted in despitefully using Nonconformists.
+The antiquarian collections in the castle, for instance, include a
+particularly ferocious instrument devised for the protection of the
+squires' property and for the maiming of poachers. It is a man-trap;
+one of those devilish contrivances which, actuated by powerful springs
+and furnished with sharp steel teeth, would, when accidentally trodden
+on by the poacher, snap down upon his leg with force sufficient to
+injure the bone and probably mutilate him for life. It was thus the
+landed interests protected their rabbits, hares and pheasants. The
+existence of this man-trap, together with the spring guns also used at
+the same time, is a reproach to the England of the first quarter of the
+nineteenth century, just as its preservation here as a curiosity is a
+certificate of the progress achieved in humanity since then.
+
+The present prosperity of Colchester is reflected in many ways, but in
+none more strikingly than the condition of the castle, now a municipal
+property, and encircled with lawns and flower-beds, oddly at variance
+with its time-worn grandeur. The neatness of these surroundings and
+of the ornamental railings that fence off the enclosure is admirable
+from the everyday point of view, but the picturesque neglect and rural
+squalor of other years pointed the moral of the place and annotated
+its story, while present prettinesses blur the historic page. It
+is so everywhere throughout the land. When, a hundred years ago,
+Turner, Sandby, Prout and Girtin, our early water-colourists, roamed
+the country, making their picturesque sketches, they did not find
+themselves baulked by flower-beds, cursed by cast-iron fences, or
+requested not to walk on the grass. They had to pick their hazardous
+way through miry lanes, or adventure through the bottomless sloughs of
+farmyards. All these things were offensive to the wayfarer, but they
+generally meant picturesque compositions and exquisitely sketchable
+foregrounds. Nowadays the conscientious illustrator, unwilling to
+picturesquely exaggerate, and yet accursed with cast-iron railings new
+from Birmingham last week, is in a quandary.
+
+[Illustration: COLCHESTER CASTLE.]
+
+The once forlorn condition of Colchester Castle doubtless originated
+in 1726, when its then owner, Sir Isaac Rebow, left it by will to a
+detested grandson, on whom he thus conferred a useless encumbrance, a
+more exasperating bequest than even the proverbial cutting off with a
+shilling.
+
+A relic of those old days of picturesque neglect is found in the book
+of an auctioneer, who wrote an account of his "Professional Travels
+in England in the first half of the Nineteenth Century," modestly
+veiling his identity, and simply calling himself on his title-page, "An
+Auctioneer." Part One of his work was issued in 1843, but Part Two is
+yet to come, and as his first instalment shows little merit, the world
+can well afford to forego the second.
+
+Coming to the castle, he muses over its ruins, and weeps that cabbages
+and coriander employ the attention of the Colchester people, rather
+than the care of ancient fortresses. To him, thus contemplating "the
+sad remains of so many interesting scenes," enters from an adjoining
+farm one whom he is pleased to term "an Aborigine." By this he
+obviously names an Essex farm-labourer. It is an affectation, but
+he might have done worse. He _might_ have called him, seeing that
+Colchester is a place of oysters, a "native," in inverted commas,
+evidences of jocular intent, which would have been dreadful.
+
+"Ah! sir," says the Aborigine, "it was cruel work when them great
+Barons, as they call 'em, lived here."
+
+"True, my friend," replies the Auctioneer, "but it's a pity to see hogs
+and donkeys depasturing in their courts and gardens, and grubbing and
+kicking down their halls and chapels."
+
+"Lord! your honour," rejoins the son of the soil, "what's the use on
+'em in these days? I'd sooner see an acre of these 'ere swedes any day,
+than them there towers and dungeons. Them swedes afore you 'ool carry
+a score o' fine wethers any month in the year, and plaze ye to look at
+'em, but as for them flint walls, you may look at 'em for ever and a
+day 'fore you find enough o' green for a garnish"; which was indeed a
+practical rural way of looking at things.
+
+The summit of those old walls has nowadays a very charming green
+garnish of grass, rendered parti-coloured by wind- and bird-sown
+wallflowers and vigorous wildings; but more lusty than these are the
+young sycamores, that have struck deep roots into the walls and bid
+fair to grow into large trees.
+
+It is still possible to follow the greater part of Colchester's old
+walls along the queer alleys that run above or below them. Eld Lane,
+out of whose elevated course the steep descent of the old postern,
+now known as Scheregate Steps, goes, is situated along the summit
+of the south wall looking over towards St John's Green, where,
+facing a wilderness of scrubby grass, broken bottles, and the sordid
+house-sweepings of the modern town, the gatehouse stands, all that is
+left of the proud mitred Abbey of St John. By that green is the frowzy
+little church of St Giles, patched up in so atrocious a manner from the
+wreck it was after the siege of 1648 that to call its "architecture"
+merely "debased" is to deal kindly with it. A dilapidated boarded
+tower is a feature of the exterior; the interior provided with a flat
+plaster ceiling, like that of a dwelling-room, and filled with flimsy
+pine-wood pews, painted and grained. Dust and stuffiness reign within;
+dust and broken crockery without. And yet, although so unlovely, it is
+not altogether with satisfaction that an elaborate design is seen for
+rebuilding the church from its foundations, together with the notice,
+"It is earnestly hoped that contributions will be given toward the
+restoration fund." "Restoration" is not the word, for the design is
+alien and quite unlike anything that formerly stood on the ground.
+Rather let the place be repaired and cleansed and its unbeautiful
+details preserved as a characteristic and shocking example of how
+they looked upon ecclesiastical architecture in the dark days of
+churchwarden- and carpenter-Gothic. It is here, under the north aisle,
+that those two valiant captains, Lucas and Lisle, are laid.
+
+For the church-towers built of Roman bricks, and for other evidences
+of that ancient Empire, let the explorer seek, and, presently finding,
+think himself, if he will, an original investigator: it is a harmless
+attitude, if at the same time unwarranted by fact. Let us to other
+matters, and then, leaving the town, hie away for Ipswich.
+
+Colchester is, of course, famous for its oysters, and has been ever
+since the Roman occupation. In the estuary of the Colne, and the
+Crouch, and in the oozy creeks of the Essex shores, the Colchester
+"natives" still grow up from infancy to maturity and feed upon the
+semi-maritime slime, as they did close upon two thousand years ago, and
+doubtless long before that. If we may judge from the stupendous heaps
+of oyster-shells discovered on the sites of Roman towns and villas,
+near and far, to say merely that the Romans were fond of oysters would
+be far too mild a term. They must have almost lived on oysters, dreamt
+oysters, and thought oysters. No wonder Colchester, whence the finest
+and the largest supply came, was so prosperous a Roman colony.
+
+Although the fishery brings wealth to the town, it is more than a
+mile away and makes no sign. Those who might think that, because of
+it, Colchester should obtrude oysters at every turn and oyster-shells
+should strew every street, would be vastly disillusioned. But
+beside its oyster fishery, other Colchester trades are of secondary
+importance. Agricultural machinery is made here, and brewing and
+corn-milling carried on, but the once famed textile manufactures are
+gone. Among those old trades was the industry of baize-making, which
+left Colchester considerably over a century ago for other centres,
+after having given additional prosperity to the town for a period of
+a hundred and fifty years. It was shortly after 1570 that numbers
+of Dutch Protestants, fleeing from the Spanish persecutions in
+Holland, introduced the making of "bays and says," and, despite local
+jealousies, flourished amazingly for generations here.
+
+But Colchester will never be dull while it continues to be what it is
+now--a great military depôt. Those worthy representatives of the Roman
+legionaries at a distance in time of nineteen centuries or so, the
+Tommies and troopers of the British Army, are a prominent feature in
+every street, and bugles blow all round the clock, from _réveillé_ to
+the last post, when every good soldier goes home to his barracks down
+the Butt Road; while the King's bad bargains stay behind and fortify
+themselves against apprehensions of the morrow's "clink" with another
+glass, or, adventuring too rashly into the street, find themselves
+presently in charge of the military patrol that walks the town with
+measured step and slow.
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+"FROM Colchester to Ipswitch is ten mile," says that
+seventeenth-century traveller, Celia Fiennes, in her diary. The
+milestones, however, tell quite a different tale and contradict the
+lady by making the distance between the two towns eighteen miles and a
+quarter.
+
+Seven miles of these bring the traveller from Colchester across the
+Stour and so into Suffolk. It is not an exciting seven miles. Passing
+the eastern outskirts of Colchester, where mud in the Colne and puddles
+beside the slattern streets offend the sense of propriety, as, having
+reversed their natural positions, the Fair Field is left on the right.
+"Left" is an expression used advisedly, for who would linger there?
+But the Fair Field cannot be passed unawares. If not seen, it will be
+heard, for on it camp the caravans, steam roundabouts and travelling
+circuses that still draw rustic crowds with their fat women, giants and
+dwarfs; or delight them with mechanical rides on wooden horses to the
+bellowing of a steam organ, whose music-hall airs follow the traveller
+in gusts of stentorian minstrelsy when the wind unkindly wills it so.
+The sounds nerve the cyclist to quickly put the miles between himself
+and those siren strains, and happily the road is a fast one, so that
+he need not be long about the business. It goes, as an old turnpike
+should, broad and straight and well-kept, for the matter of six miles,
+with little to vary the monotony of trim hedgerow and equi-distant
+telegraph poles.
+
+Let us therefore leave it awhile, and, journeying some three hundred
+yards along the Harwich Road, come across a railway level-crossing to
+the suburb of St Ann's, and the site of a spring and hermitage called
+Holy Well. The spring is now sealed up, but an inscription in the wall
+of a cottage still proclaims it to have been reopened in 1844. It seems
+strange that the Hermitage should have been placed, not on the main
+road where pilgrims were surely more plentiful, but on the seaward
+route. The explanation may probably be sought in the existence already
+of another establishment of the kind, long since forgotten. Here, then,
+the Hermitage of St Ann's was placed, and a holy well and an oratory
+made appeal to the piety or the superstition, as the case might be, of
+all who passed by. To these the hermit presented his leathern wallet,
+beseeching travellers, who would have gone without giving alms, to
+spare a trifle for the upkeep of the road, even though they valued not
+the Blessed Saints.
+
+For three hundred years the Hermitage lasted, and a long line of
+hermits lived here. Some were pious and industrious, keeping the road
+in repair; others had neither piety nor industry, spent their time
+in taverns, were smiters, and got drunk and fought, so that the road
+became scandalously neglected, and many Colchester worthies received
+apostolical black eyes from eremitical fists. Such an one must have
+been the hermit who lived here in the reign of Henry the Fifth, and
+was indicted in 1419 for having an unclean ditch. Finally, in 1535,
+when the dissolution of the monasteries took place, the Hermitage was
+closed, and the then occupant turned out, with a warning that if he
+solicited alms henceforward he would be regarded as a "sturdy beggar,"
+and dealt with accordingly.
+
+The road to Ipswich was the scene, in the second half of the
+seventeenth century, shortly after the first coaches had started
+running, of many highway robberies. The borough of Colchester was
+deeply concerned at this lawlessness, and in 1679 three men were
+rewarded with £6, 8s. between them "for apprehending those y^t robbed
+the Ipswich coach." Again, in September 1698, three men were rewarded
+"for pursuen hiewaymen," and for "going to Ardlegh" on that business;
+but as they received only two shillings each and an extra shilling for
+"drinck," it looks as though the pursuit was unsuccessful.
+
+[Illustration: COLCHESTER.]
+
+The high road, to which we have now returned, has already been
+described as an excellent highway, but Dilbridge, a hamlet, and a
+roadside inn on what was once Ardleigh Heath, alone break its solitude.
+It has, however, the advantage of commanding the best general view of
+Colchester, with the inevitable Jumbo prominent, and the new-risen Town
+Hall tower in rivalry with it.
+
+Suddenly, when six miles from Colchester, the road changes its
+character and drops sharply down by an almost precipitous descent, to
+where a lazy river is seen flowing picturesquely in loops and bends
+between the grey-green foliage of willows lining either bank. It flows
+through a land of rich green meadows and yellow cornfields; a land,
+too, of noble elms and oaks. In the far distance the waters of a salt
+estuary sparkle in the sun, while in between, from this Pisgah height,
+rises the tall tower of a church. The river is the Stour, dividing
+Essex and Suffolk, and the pleasant vale, the Vale of Dedham. The
+estuary is that of the Stour at Manningtree, and the church tower
+that of Dedham. This, indeed, is the Constable Country, and that fact
+explains the homelike and familiar look it wears, even to the stranger.
+Constable, born close by at East Bergholt, painted these scenes
+lovingly for over forty years, and remained constant to his native vale
+all his life. By the magic power that comes of sympathy, he transferred
+the spirit of these lanes and fields and trees to canvas as faithfully
+as he did their form and colour; with the result that the veriest
+stranger viewing them becomes reminiscent.
+
+Nor did Constable only _paint_ his native vale; he has described it in
+almost as masterly a way. To him it was "the most cultivated part of
+Suffolk, a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the Stour, which
+river separates that county on the south from Essex. The beauty of the
+surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats
+sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated uplands, its woods
+and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms and
+picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular spot an amenity
+and excellence hardly anywhere else to be found. He tells an amusing
+story of travelling home by coach down this very hill. He shared the
+vehicle with two strangers. "In passing the Vale of Dedham, one of
+them remarked, on my saying it was very beautiful, 'Yes, sir, this is
+Constable's Country.' I then told him who I was lest he should spoil
+it."
+
+From this hill-top to the left of the road, and in what are now the
+woodlands of Langham Hall, Constable painted his best-known Vale
+of Dedham. In one respect the scene has changed. The willows still
+fringing the Stour, formerly "cobbed" or pollarded, are now allowed
+to grow as they will, and the river is not so visible as it was once.
+Otherwise the Constable Country is little altered. Even on this hill,
+close by Langham church, Church Farm, the original of his "Glebe Farm,"
+remains as it was, thatched and gabled, close by the church tower. Only
+the foliage has changed, and the little guttering stream been drained
+away.
+
+[Illustration: THE VALE OF DEDHAM. _After Constable._]
+
+[Illustration: GUN HILL.]
+
+This steep road, shelving so abruptly to the Stour, is Dedham Hill,
+more often locally known as Dedham Gun Hill, from the "Gun" inn at the
+summit, now unhappily rebuilt, but until recently a most picturesque
+old inn, with the painted sign of a cannon hanging over the road. The
+sign has gone, and a pretentious house, which proclaims "Accommodation
+for Lady Cyclists," arisen in its stead. At the foot of the hill the
+road, turning abruptly to the left, begins a lengthy crossing of the
+Stour and its marshes by a bridge over the channel and a long series of
+flood-water arches across the oozy valley. The old toll-house, taking
+tolls no longer, still stands, a quaint building on the Essex side, and
+bears a cast-iron tablet with the inscription,--
+
+  THE DUMB ANIMALS' HUMBLE PETITION.
+
+  Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,
+  Dumb beasts pray use with all good will;
+  Goad not, scourge not, with thongèd whips,
+  Let not one curse escape your lips,
+          God sees and hears.
+
+                             T. T. H., POSUIT.
+
+[Illustration: OLD TOLL-HOUSE, STRATFORD BRIDGE.]
+
+This is one of a number of similar tablets erected throughout the
+country in the early part of the nineteenth century, when the first
+glimmerings of humane treatment of animals began to show themselves.
+When drivers had perforce to halt here to pay toll, this was a notice
+they could scarce help seeing, but it only by rare chance attracts
+attention now.
+
+Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty. No picturesque
+building this, but a great hulking structure of that intolerable
+"white" Suffolk brick which is rather a grey-white than any other hue;
+a brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and crude, and by no
+chance ever helps the artist. The whole length of the Norwich Road is
+more or less bedevilled with it.
+
+This mill is the one blot on the beauty of Stratford St Mary, a village
+built along the flat road and continuing round the bend, and so up the
+hill to where the fine old church stands overlooking the highway. It
+is a remarkable church, built of black flint and stone, and covered on
+the side facing the road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the
+site of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy clothworkers
+of this place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps
+a little difficult to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other
+East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the weaving industry,
+just as there is a difficulty in realising that Sussex was once a
+grimy iron-mining country; but trades and places have their fates, and
+changes and romances of their own.
+
+From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors family were busy in
+giving to their church and in directing its new features; and the
+chief of the inscriptions in stone and flint that curiously decorate
+its exterior in old English characters record the facts and beseech
+the wayfarer to pray for their souls. Vain request! The work had not
+been completed five years when the long and troubled story of the
+Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no longer prayed for.
+
+The most prominent inscription is that enjoining prayers for Thomas
+Mors and his wife Margaret, who built the north aisle:--
+
+ Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margarete uxoris ejus qui istam
+ alam ffieri fecerunt anno dni mcccc^m lxxxxviiii
+
+Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together with his wife
+Alice, content with an English inscription. They are also a little less
+self-centred than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian
+souls" in addition to supplications for their own especial benefit:--
+
+ Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alys hys wyfe and all
+ crysten sowlys, Anno Domini 1530.
+
+Many other inscriptions and devices are seen, among them the letters,
+P B A E S, said to be the initials of an invocatory sentence,
+"_Propitiemini beati ad eternam salutem_," addressed to Saints Thomas
+and Margaret, the patron saints of Thomas and Margaret Mors. But,
+stranger than any, is the appearance of the entire alphabet on these
+walls. Many attempts have been made to explain the reason of this,
+among them the view that the object was to educate the villagers in the
+rudiments of spelling!
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+THE long rise out of Stratford on the way to Ipswich lies through a
+beautiful Gainsborough-like woodland, with ancient trees gripping sandy
+banks in a tenacious clutch of gnarled roots. It is a hollow road, and
+one in which, when the coaches were toiling up, the guards' hands went
+instinctively towards their blunderbusses and swordcases. One never
+knew what or who might be lurking in that shade.
+
+But if it was a chancy spot then, how very suspicious a place it must
+have been hundreds of years before. That it was so regarded may be
+learnt from the _Paston Letters_, the instructive correspondence of the
+Paston family in the fifteenth century. Therein we read how a rival of
+John Paston in the wardship of one of the Fastolf family, coming out
+of Suffolk to London, was escorted by a hundred retainers, all armed
+with bows and arrows in their hands, with saletts on their heads,
+well-padded jacks and rusty haubergeons on their bodies, and fear in
+their hearts of an ambush laid on the part of the Pastons in the hollow
+way where the trees meet overhead and a mid-day darkness broods under
+the dense foliage. This rival expressed himself as not being afraid of
+the Pastons or any of their friends; but if not, why did he go escorted
+with this motley crew, tricked out with all the ancient weapons and
+rusted armour they could find? Happily they were not attacked, but that
+it was possible for petty warfare of this kind to be plotted is proof
+that the Merry England of that period was no safe place for peaceful
+travellers.
+
+Now we are well within Suffolk, the "crack county of England," as
+Cobbett called it, the "sweet and civil county" of Bishop Hall; but a
+county to which the alliterative term "silly" has long been applied.
+It is probably by this time quite hopeless to scotch that nickname,
+for it is of a considerable age and has a specious and easy glibness
+that comes trippingly off the tongue. Suffolkers themselves--whom it
+most concerns--are at pains to explain that the real, and entirely
+flattering, solution of the phrase is found in "selig," the Anglo-Saxon
+for "holy" or "blissful;" a reference to the numerous and wealthy
+religious houses within the county, and to the East Anglian saints and
+the many places of pilgrimage. Another party advancing the theory that
+the epithet was originally "Sely Suffolk," observant of the seasons,
+would thus have us believe that Suffolk must have been more observant
+than other counties, which is not credible. True, Suffolkers still talk
+of the hay-harvest as "haysel," a survival of "hay sele," but this is
+not the only county that uses the phrase. It becomes evident that the
+nickname must go unexplained.
+
+Suffolk has its claims to recognition on other than historic grounds.
+"I'm told the dumplings is uncommon fine down there," said William,
+the coachman, to little David Copperfield. Perhaps they are, and
+certainly it was once the custom among the peasantry here, as indeed
+throughout England, to serve pudding, or "dumpling," before meat in
+order to take the edge off appetites with a kind of food cheaper than
+butcher's meat; but the improved circumstances of the peasantry scarce
+demand such a practice nowadays, and in any case, Norfolk is the county
+of dumplings, so Dickens was in error in putting that speech in the
+coachman's mouth. "Norfolk Dumplings," he should have known, are as
+proverbial as "Silly Suffolkers."
+
+Suffolk is deservedly esteemed all over the world for the "Suffolk
+Punch." This sounds convivial, but has no connection with punch-bowls;
+the reference being, as a matter of fact, to a breed of horses.
+
+"And the Punches! There's cattle!" said William, the Canterbury
+coachman, to David Copperfield. "A Suffolk Punch, when he's a good
+'un, is worth his weight in gold," he added; which is not a very great
+exaggeration. Keep an eye upon the fields or an observant glance
+along the road, and the Suffolk Punch will readily be noted in his
+native country, at plough, halted by the wayside inn, or dragging with
+indomitable spirit the heaviest loads that the stupidity of the most
+stupid of waggoners could put him to. If ever horse deserved the praise
+contained in the familiar copy-book maxim, that he is "a Noble Animal,
+the Friend of Man," it is to this breed that it most particularly
+applies. The Suffolk Punch is a sturdy and a willing brute, and will
+pull against a dead weight until exhausted. It has been said that the
+Suffolk Punch existed as a type of horse in early British times, and
+it has been supposed that his remote ancestors were the horses that
+drew Boadicea's war-chariots. If it were not that he is invariably
+a chestnut, it might be supposed that his fame in the county had
+originated the sign of the "Great White Horse" in Ipswich; but from
+chestnut the breed never varies. It may be of various shades, from the
+darkest mahogany to the lightest golden-brown, but never any other hue.
+It is, of course, not necessary to journey into East Anglia to see the
+Suffolk Punch. Many of his kind are at work in London, drawing heavy
+loads, and are to be seen expatriated to Russia, and on Canadian farms,
+thousand of miles away from their native claylands.
+
+The Suffolk dialect is kin to those of Essex and Norfolk, but the
+"Suffolk whine" is peculiar to the county; it is a rising inflection
+of the voice towards the end of words and sentences. In Suffolk speech
+"fowls" become "foals," and "foals," "fools"; and archaic words, heard
+occasionally in Essex, grow more common as the traveller advances.
+So also does an odd custom first noticed in the neighbourhood of
+Colchester--the custom of affixing the place-name to the sign of
+an inn in ordinary talk. The "Gun" inn at Dedham, for example, is
+always spoken of as "Dedham Gun," and here, at Bentley, the custom
+is emphasised by the sign of a roadside inn being inscribed "Bentley
+Tankard," and not merely "The Tankard."
+
+[Illustration: SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. _After Constable._]
+
+But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear Suffolk talk it is necessary
+to linger in the villages and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The
+agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide, when they give
+themselves up to play and gossip. Then, as the long summer day draws
+to its close, the children find romance in the lengthening shadows, in
+which their games of robbers and pirates seem much more convincing than
+they could be made to appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm
+labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of "bellywengins,"
+at the pub, and the coy mawthers find the twilight a seasonable time
+for nannicking with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning
+gibberish to those unacquainted with the peculiar dialect of East
+Anglia, merely signifies the girls flirting with the "other ones"--the
+young men, in short.
+
+But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl is a mawther, and so
+is a grandame. It is a curiosity of speech which is apt to startle
+the stranger who first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet
+learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be heard any day in any
+Suffolk village, "Yow come 'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll
+spank yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex, Suffolk and
+Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which a native of these parts may be
+immediately distinguished anywhere.
+
+When the labourers have trudged over to their "shants o' gatter,"
+or quarts and pots of beer--the "bellywengins," or belly vengeance,
+aforesaid; when the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers
+and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together in the gathering
+dusk, then is the gossiping time, both of the housewives and of the
+labourers. The women talk at the doors of the "housen": the men mostly
+in the village inns. Hear, passing stranger, what the mawthers are
+saying:--
+
+"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin' arn?"
+
+"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew or tree weeks sin'.
+The doctor say I fare to be on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi'
+me sure."
+
+"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm thinkin'; but there, 'taint so
+much yer aige, 'tis yer sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."
+
+"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group, "what be life wi'out
+sperrut? Nothin', in a manner o' speakin'."
+
+"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he lived to be ninety."
+
+"What a man that wor! I mind him when he come to mine arter he'd walked
+from Ipswich, an' that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun he
+ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were as spry as a mavish
+and fresher'n a paigle."
+
+A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East Bergholt, Constable's
+birthplace, and between it and the road still stretch in summer those
+golden cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that crowning
+achievement of English landscape, how exquisite a thing it is, radiant
+in colour on the walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually
+the inadequate medium of black and white attempts to translate it.
+
+[Illustration: THE CORNFIELD. _After Constable._]
+
+The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for his growls, poor fellow,
+is careful to explain his cornfields away. When asked why, if it
+does not pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he says he
+grows it for the straw. At any rate, times are changed from those when
+agricultural England was merry with high prices; those picturesque days
+when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed, as every traveller
+was hailed, at harvest-time by the reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo,
+largesse," the largesse going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the
+village inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the reaping-hook,
+and with it and many other things has gone the Lord of the Harvest,
+elected from among his fellow-reapers to preside over their labours and
+their harvest-supper in the great fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen.
+The line of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning with their
+sickles in the fierce sun upon the diminishing fields of standing
+wheat, with halts for levenses and bever, and so home by the light of
+the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines do the work
+instead. It was astonishing, and, in the haymaking fields, still is,
+what long and continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the
+intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say the eleven o'clock
+forenoon meal, and bever, the four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose
+name came through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin "bibere,"
+to drink, reduced the contents of the barrels placed in the shady
+hedgerows, but quarts imbibed under such conditions were harmless.
+Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life, the names of "bever"
+and "levenses" remain yet in the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk
+as those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and carter.
+
+Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent moments, of coaching
+and posting days here, when, near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green,
+and in a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes, leading from
+Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond, "Laddenford Stables" stood at the
+cross roads that went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four
+sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed to part here
+and went their several ways, but how they fared, or what was their
+social status, the story does not tell.
+
+Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing by Capel station, and so
+by Copdock, whose church tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape
+of King David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at the foot of
+its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and Washbrook in the hollow,
+together with the broad and still marshy valley of the little Wash
+Brook, tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days when Saxons
+and Danes contended on this coast, a navigable creek, an arm of the
+Orwell. The road, in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley,
+together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of bygone geographical
+conditions, leading as it does down to the place where a bridge now
+spans the stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of old, first
+fordable. Having thus crossed, the road went, and still goes, in a
+right-angle turn uphill, towards Ipswich.
+
+It was by no means necessary for travellers journeying between London
+and Norwich to touch Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial
+reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises commonly went from
+Washbrook, through Sproughton and Bramford, and joined the coach
+route again at Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead
+of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook who can still tell of
+the coaches that halted at "Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a
+toll-gate (the house still existing) stretched across the way at the
+foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks" who posted the long stage
+between "Stonham Pie" and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the
+"Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely up at the hill-top, but
+now a private residence with its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and
+can show the places, in what are now meadows, where many houses and
+cottages stood in those wayfaring days, when the high-lying road to
+Ipswich, across the uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the
+Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+THERE can be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings having thoroughly
+captured the heart of grumbling old Cobbett.
+
+"From the town itself," he says, "you can see nothing; but you can, in
+no direction, go from it a quarter of a mile without finding views
+that a painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable, for we do
+not generally attribute an artistic perception of scenic beauties to
+this practical farmer. Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom
+and his pictures he probably had never heard, although Constable had
+already for years been painting these very scenes.
+
+The practical farming mind appears in Cobbett's next remarks: "And
+then, the country round about is so well cultivated; the land in such
+a beautiful state, the farmhouses all white and all so much alike; the
+barns and everything about the homesteads so snug; the stock of turnips
+so abundant everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order; the
+wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the furrows, if a quarter
+of a mile long, as straight as a line, and laid as truly as if with
+a level; in short, here is everything to delight the eye and to make
+the people proud of their country; and this is the case throughout
+the whole of this county. I have always found Suffolk farmers great
+boasters of their superiority over others, and I must say that it is
+not without reason."
+
+Cobbett found the windmills on the hills round Ipswich so numerous
+that, while standing in one place, he counted no fewer than seventeen,
+all painted or washed white, with black sails. They are fewer to-day,
+and could Gainsborough, old Crome and Constable revisit the scenes of
+their artistic inspiration, they would sadly miss the picturesqueness
+they gave these woody scenes and fertile hills and vales. It is from
+the crest of one of these hills that Ipswich is first glimpsed. There
+it sprawls, prosperous, beside the broad Orwell; "doubtlesse one of
+the sweetest, most pleasant, well-built townes in England," as John
+Evelyn thought in 1656; but then swarming with "a new phanatic sect of
+dangerous principles." The reader will scarce guess aright who these
+fanatics were. They were neither sun-worshippers nor Mahometans, but
+merely Quakers.
+
+One obtains no glimpse of the broad estuary of the Orwell when
+descending into the town by the London road, and the crowded mass
+of the place rises confusedly up before the traveller as he steeply
+descends, and forms no picture. You must take Ipswich in detail to
+admire it, and the actual crossing of the river at the foot of the
+hill where the town begins is at a narrow canalised stretch before it
+widens out into the noble harbour that makes the fortune of the port.
+A sign of that accomplished fortune is the unlovely sight of the great
+railway sidings and goods yards spread out before the stranger's eye as
+he comes downhill. One may say that the town begins at the door of the
+"Ipswich Arms" inn, uninteresting in itself, but displaying the fine
+"old coat" of this famous seaport; a shield with a rampant golden lion
+on a red field on the sinister, and three golden demi-boats on blue on
+the dexter side.
+
+"A fine, populous, and beautiful place," says Cobbett, still harping on
+an unwonted string of praise. "The town is substantially built, well
+paved, everything good and solid, and no wretched dwellings to be
+seen on its outskirts." He knew no town to be compared with it, except
+it were Nottingham, which, after all, is not properly comparable,
+Nottingham standing high, while Ipswich is in a vale, and moreover,
+is situated on an arm of the sea. It is amusing to read Cobbett's
+remarks on the population of Ipswich, which stood in his time at twelve
+thousand. "Do you not," he asks, "think Ipswich was far larger and far
+more populous seven hundred years ago than it is at this hour?"--that
+hour being some time in March 1830. He remarked upon "the twelve large,
+lofty and magnificent churches," each of them seven hundred years old,
+one capable of holding from four to seven thousand persons, and came to
+the conclusion that, in fact, although he found Ipswich populous, it
+must, even thus, have been a mere ghost of its former self. That shrewd
+observer was right. Ipswich had grievously decayed even in Charles the
+Second's reign, when the Duke of Buckingham described it as "a town
+without inhabitants, a river without water, streets without names, and
+where the asses wore boots." The Duke, in speaking of "a river without
+water," was probably referring to the estuary of the Orwell at low
+tide, when mud-banks stretch vast, and the stream runs by comparison
+feeble and thread-like through them. In its then nameless streets,
+Ipswich was not singular, for many small provincial towns were in like
+case. The asses that wore boots were those employed in rolling the lawn
+of a neighbouring park, the object probably being to prevent their
+hoofs injuring the surface.
+
+"Yepysweche," as Margaret Paston, writing to her husband over
+four hundred years ago, spells the name, derives its title from
+the aboriginal Gippings, a tribe or clan who squatted down beside
+the Orwell, and not only established their primitive village of
+Gippingswick here, but contrived to foist their tribal name upon the
+non-tidal part of the river above the town, which therefore still
+generally bears this _alias_. The town probably saw its greatest
+prosperity in the time of Cardinal Wolsey, a native, and, according
+to legend, son of a butcher. This "butcher's dogge," as the envious
+nicknamed the great Cardinal, determined that his birthplace should
+be great in learning as well as in commerce, and to that end founded
+a College which he intended to be in some sort preparatory for his
+greater college of Christ Church at Oxford. That his foundation was
+reared on the spoliation of a religious house and its revenues,
+procured by him for the purpose, seemed but an ill omen for its
+prosperity to those who saw his buildings rising to completion, and the
+omen was speedily fulfilled, for the new-made abode of learning never
+sent forth a scholar, but was suppressed by Henry the Eighth almost
+before the mortar of its brick walls was dry; the buildings themselves
+torn down and the endowments confiscated. All that remains of Wolsey's
+College is one noble red-brick gateway in College Street.
+
+Daniel Defoe was a native of Ipswich and a curious contrast with
+Wolsey, his brother townsman of two hundred years before. In his day
+the old prosperity of the place had vanished, in the stress of Dutch
+competition and the virulence of the plague; but modern times have made
+amends for that temporary decay, and the town is now nearly four times
+larger than when, shortly after the first quarter of the nineteenth
+century had gone, Cobbett noted its many and empty churches and its
+scanty population. It numbers now over 58,000 souls, and its trades are
+numerous and prosperous. Whether it be in the making of agricultural
+and milling machinery, its corn markets, artificial manure making, or
+the manufacture of corsets, Ipswich is fortunate, with the good fortune
+of those who give heed to the ancient proverb and do not put all their
+eggs in one basket.
+
+[Illustration: WOLSEY'S GATEWAY.]
+
+Picturesqueness coyly hides itself from the traveller who merely
+passes through the chief streets. Not in the open square of Cornhill,
+where the cabs and flys stand on the site of the old Market Cross and
+the trams fly to and fro, and where the Post-office and the Town Hall
+rise, side by side, does it appear, nor in the long street beyond;
+but rather in the Butter Market and the lanes that conduct to the
+waterside. There be streets in that quarter with odd names, among them
+Silent Street; and almshouses, and churches, and the queerest inns.
+Among the almshouses are Smart's, on whose walls, unhappily rebuilt
+in modern times, the charitable Smart and his no less charitable
+coadjutor, Tooley, are commemorated:--
+
+  "Let gentle Smart sleep on in pious trust,
+  Behold his charity. Respect his dust."
+
+  "In peaceful silence lett great Toolie rest,
+  Whose charitable deeds bespeak him blest."
+
+It is to be feared that these eulogies raise a smile at the expense of
+great Tooley and gentle Smart.
+
+[Illustration: THE "LION AND LAMB," ANGEL LANE.]
+
+As to the inns, they include the odd conjunction of the "Lion and
+Lamb," pictured here, and the "Neptune" and the "Sea Horse," with a
+fine sound of the sea in their names. Some of these old hostelries yet
+retain their corner-posts: for example, that of the "Half Moon" in
+Foundation Street, where the post still keeps its mediæval carving of a
+fox, with uplifted sanctimonious eyes, preaching to three geese and a
+griffin; a satirical effort no doubt looked sourly upon by the clergy
+of St Mary Key Church, opposite, in days of old. A great gilt key
+serves as vane to that church and perpetuates the error in the name,
+which was originally, and rightly, St Mary-at-Quay: the custom-house
+quay and the harbour being close by, as the sight of certain
+corn-elevators, the rattling of chains and windlasses, and the sounds
+of throaty steam-sirens sufficiently proclaim. The custom-house stands
+in midst of coal-grit, laden steam vessels lying alongside the quay
+wall, bellowing steamily to be discharged, and railway-sidings, along
+whose maze of points and turn-tables fussy little locomotive engines,
+dragging jerky trucks, run, screaming intermittently, as though saying
+to the bellowing steam-vessels, "_You_ just wait; can't you see I'm
+coming as quick as I can?" It is a dignified custom-house, and seems,
+surrounded with dutiable goods, to be aristocratically sneering at
+the trade in whose midst it is necessarily placed, and with as great
+a consciousness of its Ionic peristyle as any high-born beauty of her
+Greek nose.
+
+Many of the old wool-staplers', clothiers' and merchants' fine mansions
+stood by the quay and in the by-lanes. They are mostly gone now, but
+traces of old doorways and stray fragments of stone and wood carvings
+remain, and here and there a courtyard, or a house that sheltered
+family circles in the amphibious half-mercantile, half-agricultural
+Ipswich of the sixteenth century.
+
+[Illustration: SPARROWE'S HOUSE.]
+
+Certainly one of the finest things Ipswich has to show is the wonderful
+old place in the old Butter Market, known still as "Sparrowe's House,"
+although the last of the Sparrowes who inhabited here has long since
+gone to his home in the family vault within the Church of St Lawrence,
+where, over their tomb-house, may yet be read the punning motto,
+_Nidus Passerum_, "a nest of sparrows." These Sparrowes seem to have
+been endowed with some of the attributes of the cuckoo, for _they_
+did not build the house that bears their name. It owes its origin to
+a certain George Copping, who built it in 1567, but alterations and
+additions made in the Jacobean period give its architectural history
+a span of over a century. The woodwork of the bay windows and the
+grandly-projecting eaves, together with that of the shop premises, was
+added at the time. But the great glory of "Sparrowe's House" is its
+decorative plaster-work in high relief, which profusely covers the
+exterior with garlands of flowers and fruits and with quaint devices
+emblematic of the four quarters of the globe. Here Europa, cornucopia
+in one hand, book and sceptre in the other, sits with her bull, who
+might be taken for an elephant with half his trunk shorn off; here,
+on another bay, a podgy plaster relief typifies Asia, with palm-tree
+and a building of Oriental character in the background; followed by
+Africa, a nude nigger holding an umbrella over his head and sitting
+on a shark, at which four tiny figures at a respectful distance
+express astonishment, while nearer at hand a wicked-looking bird of
+quite uncertain family roosts on a something that greatly resembles
+a battered meat tin. America is typified by an Indian in a feather
+head-dress which represents his entire wardrobe. He stands with bow
+and arrows, attended by a dog with a damaged smile. A very beautiful
+representation of the Royal Arms occupies one of the spaces between
+the windows, and other devices show the pelican in her piety; Atlas
+supporting the world; a classical scene in which a shepherd bows as
+gracefully as the artist in plaster could make him to a rural nymph; St
+George and the Dragon, and several smaller subjects.
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+THE most famous thing in Ipswich is a thing neither ancient nor
+beautiful, yet it is an object to which most visitors to the town turn
+their first attention: it is the "Great White Horse." The "Great White
+Horse" is an hotel, of a size, in the merry days of the road, justly
+thought enormous. It has been left for the present age to build many
+hotels in town and country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more
+hostelries of the size of the "Great White Horse," but in its own
+especial era that house fully justified the adjective in its sign.
+Especially did its bulk strike the imagination of the reporter of the
+London _Morning Chronicle_ who was dispatched to Ipswich in 1830 for
+the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary election in the town. He was
+a very young, a very impressionable and a very bright reporter, and
+although we may be quite sure that the business on which he was come to
+Ipswich was an arduous piece of work, calculated to fully occupy his
+time and thoughts, he carried away with him so accurate an impression
+of the big inn where he stayed, that when, some time afterwards, he
+wrote about it the description was as exact as though it had been
+penned within sight of the house. That reporter was Charles Dickens,
+and it is his description in the _Pickwick Papers_ which has made the
+place famous.
+
+[Illustration: THE "GREAT WHITE HORSE."]
+
+It was not a flattering description. Few more severe things have ever
+been said of inns than those Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse."
+Indeed, if such things were nowadays printed of any inn or hotel, the
+writer might confidently expect to be made the defendant in an action
+for libel. Yet (such is the irony of time and circumstances) the house
+that Dickens so roundly abused is now eager in all its advertisements
+to quote the association; and the adventures of Mr Pickwick in the
+double-bedded room with the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers have
+brought many more visitors than the unfavourable notice of the
+"uncarpeted passages" and the "mouldy, ill-lighted rooms" has turned
+away. If, as has been thought, Dickens thus wrote of the house in order
+to be revenged for some slights and discomforts he may have experienced
+here, certainly fortune has played the cynic in converting his remarks
+into the best of all imaginable recommendations.
+
+The exterior of the house is much the same as it was when Dickens first
+saw it, "in the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the
+way, a short distance after you have passed through the open space
+fronting the Town Hall."
+
+It is the same plain, square building, constructed of a pallid kind of
+brick suggesting underdone pastry, and is still, although the coaches
+have disappeared and railways have supplanted them, "known far and
+wide by the appellation of the 'Great White Horse.'" Still, over the
+pillared entrance trots the effigy of the Great White Horse himself,
+perhaps the aboriginal ancestor of that famous breed of equines, the
+"Suffolk Punches," a very muscular race, more famous for their bulk
+and strength than for elegance, like those sturdy Flanders mares to
+which Henry the Eighth inelegantly likened his bride, Anne of Cleves.
+
+Dickens, using the usual licence of the novelist, describes this effigy
+as "a stone statue of some rampacious animal, with flowing mane and
+tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, elevated above the
+principal door." Quite apart from the fact that the word "rampacious"
+is unknown to the English language, and is probably meant for
+"rampageous," the horse is really represented in the act of beginning a
+gentle trot, and looks as mild as the mildest milk that ever dewed the
+whiskers of a new-born kitten. His off fore-leg, broken at some period,
+has been restored of a size that does not match with the other three.
+Never, in the whole of his existence, has the Great White Horse gone
+on the rampage, and, like all the truly great, his manners have always
+been distinguished by their unobtrusiveness.
+
+"The 'Great White Horse,'" writes Dickens, "is famous in the
+neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or county
+paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig--for its enormous size. Never
+were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy,
+ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or
+sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between
+the four walls of the 'Great White Horse' at Ipswich." Further, he
+describes it as "an overgrown tavern," at whose door, when Mr Pickwick
+descended from the coach, stood a waiter whose description quite
+takes one's desire for dinner away. He was "a corpulent man with a
+fortnight's napkin under his arm and coeval stockings on his legs."
+
+Although that must have been in the best and most prosperous days of
+the highway, this waiter does not appear to have had anything more
+pressing to do than "staring down the road," while the account of
+the internal arrangements of the house does not indicate flourishing
+business. The private room into which the guests were shown was a
+"large, badly-furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a
+small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast
+sinking under the dispiriting influence of the place." After this we
+are not surprised to read that it was only "after the lapse of an hour"
+that "a bit of fish and a steak," representing a dinner, appeared.
+When this was disposed of, Mr Pickwick and Mr Peter Magnus huddled up
+to the fire, and, "having ordered a bottle of the worst possible port
+wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank
+brandy-and-water for their own."
+
+Certainly Dickens must have had some very bitter grudge against the
+"Great White Horse."
+
+Then come allusions to "tortuous passages," and the difficulty of
+a stranger's finding his way about the interminable corridors, or
+distinguishing between one "mouldy room" and another; difficulties
+which led to Mr Pickwick's comical predicament in the middle of
+the night. The rooms, not so mouldy now, and the passages, just as
+perplexing, remain, structurally unaltered to this day; but certain
+alterations have been made downstairs in the courtyard, now roofed in
+with glass and made very attractive, without spoiling the old-style
+character of the house. If you be a literary pilgrim, or an American,
+they will show you Mr Pickwick's bedroom; and can meet any of Dickens's
+criticisms by telling how Nelson stayed here with--ahem!--Lady
+Hamilton, and how Admiral Hyde-Parker and others of world-wide fame
+have occupied the "mouldy rooms."
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+LEAVING Ipswich and passing through the dusty roadside fringe of
+Whitton village, known as Whitton Street, Claydon, nondescript, and
+neither very beautiful nor quite commonplace, is reached in two
+and a half miles. Just before entering the village, an old mansion
+is glimpsed from the road, embowered in trees, a mansion which, on
+inquiry, the ingenuous youth of Claydon declare to be "Mockbeggar
+Hall." Claydon Hall is its true title; but the popular name has been
+handed down since many, many years ago, when the old house (not old
+then) long remained tenantless. Like the many other places named
+"Mockbeggar," it stands well within view of passing travellers, and
+must have induced many a sturdy rogue and vagabond to trudge wearily
+up the long approach in search of alms, only to find the windows dark,
+the chimneys innocent of smoke, the place, in fact, deserted of all
+but fluttering bats and screeching owls, whose shrill notes must have
+sounded like jeers to the disappointed vagrants. Inhabited now, Claydon
+Hall is a handsome old house bearing the date 1635 on its Dutch-like
+gables. It will probably never lose its popular name. Behind the old
+Hall winds the willow-fringed Orwell, coyly approaching within view
+of the road, and then, as it were, timorously retreating again; its
+brimming stream, although seen only in such fleeting glimpses, potent
+in its effect upon at least three miles' length of the road, from
+Claydon to Creeting All Saints, in the loveliest stretch of woodland,
+where the fierce mid-day sun is baffled by over-arching foliage,
+and twilight comes early in the afternoon through the dense masses
+of leaves. These are the woodlands of Shrubland Park. The Hall lies
+secluded to the right hand, somewhere away beyond the rather terrible
+lodges that confront the traveller, who wonders where he has seen their
+like before; until, like a flash, the memory of certain great London
+cemeteries and their mortuary chapels comes upon him in desolating
+fashion and blights the cheerful rustic surroundings of forest trees
+and the scurryings of white-tailed rabbits and gorgeous blue and brown
+pheasants that inhabit this domain of Lord de Saumarez. The lodges,
+built like the Hall, from designs by Sir Charles Barry, are of white
+brick and stone, in the Italian Renaissance style.
+
+[Illustration: MOCKBEGGAR HALL.]
+
+At no great distance from the entrance to this lordly domain, and
+noticeable from the road, in an exquisitely damp situation by the
+river, eminently calculated to foster rheumatism in old bones, is the
+Barham Union-house--the "Work'us" of peasant speech. It is quite an
+old-world building, and one of the earliest built under the new Poor
+Law Act of the early nineteenth century, when outdoor relief gave place
+to retirement within these prison-like buildings. Hodge well named them
+"Bastilles." They say who should know of what they speak, that life
+in Barham Union is nowadays quite desirable, but the design of the
+building, a quadrangular structure enclosing a courtyard, with outer
+walls blank or only provided with windows at a height from the ground,
+closely follows the prison, or restraining, idea.
+
+The little roadside sign of the "Sorrel Horse," standing in midst
+of these leafy bowers, is in pleasing contrast with the Campo Santo
+pretentiousness of Shrubland lodges or the prison-like style of the
+Union, now left behind on a rising road, where the scarped side of
+the highway reveals a momentary change from the prevailing claylands
+to chalk; a change so sudden and so strictly confined to this
+hillside that it at once attracts the attention of even the least
+geologically-inclined. Here the campions bloom that love the chalk
+and refuse to grow on clay. Below this hilltop, in the deep hollow
+scoured out ages ago, when the now insignificant stream that crosses
+the road was a considerable force, is Creeting Bottom, and Creetings of
+several sorts are set about the countryside, all hiding from the road
+that goes now up hill and down dale with as lonely an air as though
+the little town of Needham Market and the larger town of Stowmarket
+were not almost within sight, over the shoulders of the hills, on the
+highway parallel with this, that runs to Bury St Edmunds. To be on "on
+the road to Needham" is an obvious Suffolk saying, applied to those who
+are badly off for worldly gear, and it is a little curious that Needham
+itself was for many years, and until quite recently, a place of fallen
+fortunes, lamenting the decay of its textile trades in empty houses
+and an "irreducible minimum" of rent for those that were so fortunate
+as to find occupants at all. The name of "Hungry-gut Hall" that still
+clings to a farmhouse marks that depressed period to all time; but in
+the spicy odours of the tanneries and the chemical manure stores and
+other thriving industries and businesses that cluster round the railway
+station, the explorer finds evidences enough that Needham is reviving.
+
+[Illustration: "STONHAM PIE."]
+
+Not a sign of those towns or of the railway is seen on the road to
+Norwich, where the cottage outposts of Stonham Earls and Stonham
+Aspall alone tell of the villages in the hinterland. In their gardens,
+spread on bushes or waving in the summer breeze, intimate articles of
+underclothing are prominently displayed, in the society of old hats
+and coats, not so much for the exhibition of the family wardrobe as in
+desperate attempts--bringing up all the reserves--at scaring away the
+hungry birds from currants, cherries and gooseberries. These contests,
+the only warring incidents on the way, in which the birds are generally
+the victors, bring one to a level road where Little Stonham stands,
+its chief feature the "Magpie" Inn. "Stonham Pie" owns one of those
+old gallows signs, stretching across the road, that were at one time a
+common feature. The picture-sign, with a painting of that saucy bird,
+has been hung below the cross-beam instead of in its old ironwork
+frame above, now that the piled-up coaches that once passed beneath
+are gone. Shortly before their going, and while turnpikes and tolls
+appeared likely to last for ever, the toll-gate that stood at the
+succeeding village of Brockford was removed two miles onward, to Stoke
+Ash, where, at the beginning of the pretty avenue at Stoke Chapel, the
+later toll-house remains, just as does the earlier one at Brockford.
+Brockford, the "badger's ford" of a tiny affluent of the Waveney, is
+preceded by Brockford Green, where the quiet road is made narrow by its
+sides being encroached upon by grass. It is here that the accompanying
+sketch of tall poplars and bushy willows was taken.
+
+[Illustration: NEAR BROCKFORD.]
+
+Off to the left hand, in strong contrast with this level stretch of
+road, the country is tumbled into combes and rounded hills, where the
+River Gipping takes its rise in the village of that name, springing
+from the hill where the church tower stands solemn and grim, as though
+it held inviolate the story of the place, away from those days when the
+Gippings first settled here and gave it a title.
+
+But let not the hurried seek Gipping, along the winding by-roads. The
+way, if not far, is not easy, and passengers are few. Scattered and
+infrequent farmhouses there be, at whose back doors to inquire the way,
+but rustic directions are apt to mislead. In any case, it is little
+use approaching the front door of a farmhouse. No one will hear you
+knocking, unless indeed it be a watchful and savage dog, trained to be
+on the alert for tramps; and you are like to hear him snuffling and
+gasping on the other side in a ferociously suggestive manner which will
+render you thankful that the door is closed and bolted. And not only
+bolted on this occasion, but always. The steps, and the space between
+the door and the threshold, where stray straws and wind-blown rubbish
+have collected, are evidence of the fact that the farmer and his family
+do not use the front door, but make their exits and entrances by way
+of the kitchen. It is an old East Anglian custom, and although many of
+the farmers nowadays pretend to culture and set up to be as up-to-date
+as the retired tradesfolk and small squires they are neighbourly with,
+many others would no more think of using the principal entrance to
+their homes than they would make use of the "parlour," where massive
+and sombre furniture, covered with antimacassars, is disposed with
+geometric accuracy around the room, in company with the family Bible
+and the prizes taken at school by the farmer's children; the stale and
+stuffy atmosphere proclaiming that this state apartment is only used
+on rare and solemn occasions. In fact, the "best room" and the front
+door only came into use in the old days on the occasion of a funeral.
+Perhaps it is a custom originating in a laudable idea of paying the
+greatest possible respect to the dead, but it is one which certainly
+gives a gruesome mortuary significance to both the entrance and the
+room.
+
+[Illustration: "THWAITE LOW HOUSE."]
+
+Thwaite or "Twaite," as East Anglians, incapable of pronouncing "th,"
+call it, less than a mile beyond Brockford, numbers few cottages.
+Beyond it, where the hitherto flat road makes a descent, is in
+local parlance, "Thwaite Low House," not so called on account of
+any disreputable character it may once have earned, but from its
+situation. The name obviously entails the existence of a "High House,"
+which was, like the other, a coaching and posting inn. The last named,
+now a farmstead, was in those days the "Cock," the other the "Queen's
+Head." While the "Low House" has fallen upon times so irredeemably evil
+that it has been long untenanted and is now a veritable scarecrow of
+a house, with gaping holes in its walls and windows battened up, the
+"Cock," save that its sign is gone, still remains much as it was, to
+show a later generation what manner of place the roadside inn was in
+days of yore.
+
+[Illustration: THE "COCK," THWAITE.]
+
+Stoke Ash, or "Aish," as Suffolkers pronounce it, like many another
+village, makes no sign from the road. Its church tower seen to the
+right, dimly, amid a hilltop screen of trees, a square, box-like
+red-brick chapel by the way, and that pretty inn, "Stoke White Horse,"
+are the only other evidences of its being. The remaining six miles to
+the Norfolk border lead through Yaxley and Brome: Yaxley, where a
+branch railway runs under the road, on its way to Eye, and narrowly
+misses the old church: Brome, where the "Swan" stands for all the
+village to those who look to neither side of the road; church and
+houses skulking down a by-road on the way to Hoxne. There, down that
+pretty road, where the thatched cottages nestle under tall trees
+and the blue wood-smoke from rustic hearths curls upwards into the
+boughs and makes the sparrows cough and sneeze--there is the Rectory,
+approached in lordly fashion past a fine brick entrance and exquisite
+avenue, and, at a little greater distance the old black flint,
+round-towered church, restored and titivated out of all antiquity
+of tone: the stone sand-papered, and the flints polished with a
+handkerchief. The only thing missing--and, under the circumstances,
+it is missed--is a glass case, so that no damp, nor lichen, nor any
+effects of weather may come to spoil the housewifely neatness.
+
+It was along this road to Hoxne that those who sought the revered head
+of St Edmund, King and Martyr, in the miraculous legend, were led to
+it by the voice calling, "Here, here, here;" at length finding the
+sainted relic in charge of a wolf, who allowed it to be taken from
+between his paws. But the voice thus calling was probably a much less
+supernatural manifestation, and was doubtless the hooting of owls in
+the woods. They still mock the belated traveller, only, to ears untuned
+to the miraculous, they simply seem to ask, "Who, who, who?" Ingenuity,
+however, vainly seeks the basis in nature of the wolf incident.
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+NOW, crossing the River Waveney, winding with tree-fringed banks
+through a flat country, the road enters Norfolk at Scole. Coming over
+the little bridge, the village is seen huddled together on either side
+of a narrow rising road; village and church alike wholly dominated by
+a great building of mellow red brick whose panelled chimney-stacks and
+long row of beautiful gables give the impression of an historic mansion
+having by some strange chance been taken from its park and set down
+beside the highway. This, however, was at no time a private residence,
+but was built as an inn; and an inn it remains, after the passing of
+nearly two centuries and a half. Scole, or "Schoale," as the name was
+often spelled in old times (when, indeed, the village was not called
+by its _alias_ of Osmundeston), was by reason of this inn quite a
+celebrated place in the days of long ago. Every traveller in Eastern
+England had then either seen or heard of "Scole White Hart" and its
+famous sign that stretched completely across the road, and as a great
+many coaches halted here for changing teams, passengers had plenty of
+time for examining what Sir Thomas Browne thought to be "the noblest
+sighne-post in England." Both house and sign were built in 1655, for
+James Peck, described as a "Norwich merchant," whose initials, together
+with the date, are yet to be seen on the centre gable. The elaborate
+sign alone cost £1057. It was of gigantic size and loaded with
+twenty-five carved figures of classic deities and others. Chaste Diana,
+with bow and arrow and two hounds, had a place on the cross-beam, in
+company with Time in the act of devouring an infant, Actæon and his
+dogs, a huntsman, and a White Hart _couchant_. On a pediment above
+the White Hart, supported by Justice and Temperance, was the effigy
+of an astronomer "seated on a Circumferenter," who by "some Chymical
+Preparation is so Affected that in fine Weather He faces the North and
+against bad Weather He faces that Quarter from whence it is about to
+come." On either side of the dizzy height occupied by the astronomer
+were figures of Fortitude and Prudence, a position suitable enough for
+the first-named of those two virtues, but certainly too perilous for
+the last.
+
+Further suggestions of Olympus, with references to Hades and Biblical
+history, adorned the other portions of this extraordinary work.
+Cerberus clawed one side of the supporting post, while Charon dragged
+a witch to Hell on the other; and Neptune bestriding a dolphin, and
+Bacchic figures seated across casks alternated with the arms of
+twelve East Anglian noble and landed families. Two angels supported
+respectively the arms of Mr Peck and his lady and two lions those of
+Norwich and Yarmouth. On the side nearest the inn appeared a huge
+carving of Jonah coming out of the whale's mouth, while, suspended in
+mid-air, and surrounded by a wreath, was another White Hart.
+
+Although, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Browne was impressed with this
+work, an early nineteenth-century tourist (so early indeed as 1801)
+curtly dismisses it as "a pompous sign, with ridiculous ornaments," and
+shortly after that it seems to have been taken down, for the reason
+that it cost the landlord more to keep it in repair than the trade of
+the house permitted. Together with this, the once celebrated Great Bed
+of the White Hart has also disappeared. It was a round bed capable of
+holding twenty couples, and was therefore a good deal larger than the
+famous Great Bed of Ware. Perhaps it was because guests did not relish
+this co-operative method of seeking repose, or maybe because sheets,
+blankets and coverlets of sufficient size were unobtainable, that the
+Scole Great Bed was chopped up for firewood; but did anyone _ever_
+suppose beds of this wholesale capacity would be desirable?
+
+The accompanying old view of the gigantic sign shows one of the
+peculiar basket coaches of the second half of the eighteenth century,
+on its way to London.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART.]
+
+"Scole White Hart" must have been among the very finest of inns and
+posting-houses. Its wide staircases, of a width sufficient for the
+proverbial coach-and-four to drive up them, its large rooms and fine
+panelled doors, its great stone-flagged kitchen, all proclaim how great
+must have been its old prosperity; while the wide-spreading yard in
+the rear of the house, together with the outbuildings, gives some hint
+of how heavy the traffic was at this junction of the Lowestoft, Bungay,
+Diss and Thetford road with that from London to Norwich. Shrunken trade
+has caused portions of the inn to be let off; the stone and wooden
+porches seen in the old print have disappeared; the coach entrance has
+long since been blocked up and has become the bar-parlour, and the
+mullions of the windows have given place to sashes; but the building
+still retains a noble architectural character, and is perhaps more
+interesting in these latter days, now that its story is told, than ever
+it was when that story was in the making. Little or nothing is found in
+contemporary records of "Scole White Hart"; only one vivid flash in its
+later years, when indignant would-be coach passengers stood at the door
+on a day in October 1822 and saw the drivers of the "Norwich Times"
+and "Gurney's Original Day Coach," fired by rivalry, and reckless in
+their long race from Whitechapel, come pounding furiously down the road
+and over the bridge, pass the inn without stopping, and disappear in
+clouds of dust in the direction of Norwich. Do you know what it is to
+lose a train and to wait an hour for the next? You do? Then it will
+not be difficult to form some idea of the blind, stuttering fury that
+possessed those who had booked seats at Scole and saw the coaches dash
+away, to leave them with half a day's wait.
+
+Thorogood was driving the "Times." Both started from London at 5.30
+a.m. The "Day" coach reached Norwich at 5.20 p.m., and the "Times" ten
+minutes later, neither having stopped for changing horses during the
+last twenty-five miles. This was a "record" for that period, the usual
+time being fourteen hours.
+
+Probably the would-be passengers had to remain the night; a fate which
+no one who has done the like of late would be apt to complain of.
+The guest at the "White Hart," seated in solitary state in the lofty
+sitting-room, lit dimly by candles in antique plated candlesticks, and
+with two ox-eyed seventeenth-century beauties of the Lely type gazing
+down upon him from their sombre frames, presently feels oddly as though
+he were living in another era; a feeling that grows as he wanders
+upstairs to bed, almost losing himself in the roomy corridors. When
+he has closed the nail-studded bedroom door with a reverberant clang,
+and, creeping into the generous embraces of a damask-hung four-poster
+that may have been new a century and a half ago, gazes reflectively
+about the panelled room and on the curiously coffered ceiling, he drops
+off to sleep straightway into the times when the inn was new-built and
+dreams of how the news of the Restoration may have come to Scole in
+1661. Old times live again, faded flowers bloom once more, forgotten
+footsteps echo along the passages, and lo, the Has Been is enacted
+again, with all the convincing air of such visions. Post-chaises and
+chariots clatter up to the door and their noise wakens the sleeper
+to the consciousness that the sound is but that of a jolting rustic
+tumbril going down the road in the early morning; that this is the
+twentieth century, and the "White Hart" but a survival in a back
+eddy of life.
+
+[Illustration: STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART."]
+
+Besides the "White Hart," there is little else at Scole. The plain
+flint tower of the church stands by the roadside, on the ascent that
+leads from the village; and other two or three inns, a few rustic shops
+and cottages, and a private residence or so make up the tale. Scole,
+in fact, has not grown greatly since when it was a Roman station, and
+when the Roman soldiers whose remains have been found near the river
+occupied the military post on the long road to Venta Icenorum.
+
+The legionaries first stationed in these East Anglian wastes must
+often have longed for their native Italy. When the sky sank almost to
+the level of the land in the long winter's rains and fogs, and the
+biting winds blew out of the east across the sandy scrub; when agues
+or the lurking enemy accounted for many of their comrades, and when
+some favoured few were recalled to the capital, they must have thought
+wistfully of a more congenial clime than this, situated on the edge of
+the Unknown. Rome, either as Empire or Republic, was a hard taskmaster,
+and when no fighting was in prospect employed the troops ingloriously
+as road-makers. The advanced garrisons in the wilderness cleared the
+enemy out of the tangled brush and boggy marshes, and working parties
+built roads under the protection of guards, or improved the rude
+trackways they found already in existence. Some fell by the way, and
+their skeletons have been found in these latter days, the teeth still
+clenched on the obolus placed in the dead man's mouth to pay Charon
+for ferrying him across the cold and darkling Styx; or, where the coin
+has perished, still stained with the metal's long decay. They perished,
+those pioneers, to found a civilisation, just as countless thousands of
+our own blood have laid their bones on distant shores, under burning
+skies or in the Arctic night, to make England what she is. Respect
+their long sleep, antiquaries, nor, as you honour your own creeds, take
+from the dead men their passage-money across that mystic river.
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+THIS, as Dr Jessop charmingly names Norfolk, is Arcady. The scene
+is pleasant, but the stage waits: where are the actors? Gone, where
+and for what reasons beyond the substitution of rail for road shall
+presently be considered. But if the merry days of old are done and
+population dwindled, at least in East Anglia, and especially in
+Norfolk, dialect flourishes among those who remain. The "Norfolk drant"
+or drawl, is still heard, just as the "Suffolk whine"--that rising
+inflection of the voice towards the end of sentences--is even yet a
+mark of the sister county. They are, indeed, said to have originated
+the Yankee combined drawl and twang, for Norfolk and Suffolk were
+largely represented among the Pilgrim Fathers, the first colonists of
+North America. With these survivals, some of the old rustic simplicity
+is still met with, although the extraordinary ignorance of sixty years
+ago has disappeared, and the Norfolk labourer no longer thinks it
+possible to emigrate to America by driving over in a farm cart. The
+story is an East Anglian classic, how a farm labourer "didn't fare
+rightly to knaw" by what route they were going to the United States,
+"but we'm gwine ter sleep t' Debenham the fust night, so's to kinder
+break t' jarney." When railways came, and access to London grew easy,
+these simplicities gradually faded away. The young men took to "gettin'
+up the road," as the saying ran--otherwise, going to London--to "better
+themselves," and old illusions were soon dispelled; but in Arcady the
+mavis may still be seen knapping a dodman; the children of the rustic
+hamlets may be observed by the passing stranger gleefully sporting at
+the old game of tittymatorterin; the cowslips that in springtime turn
+the meadows to living gold are yet "paigles"; a small field remains,
+as ever, a "pightle," and when a countryman throws anything into a
+ditch, he "hulls" (or hurls) "it in t' holl," just as his ancestors
+did hundreds of years ago. Let some of the archaic words just noted be
+explained before we proceed any further. "Mavis" is the idyllic name
+of the thrush, and the "dodman," which he may be observed "knapping,"
+or breaking, is a snail; called in Essex, by the way, a "hodmadod."
+"Tittymatorterin" is just the simple game of "see-sawing." Besides
+these fleeting instances there are many other peculiarities. The
+Norfolk peasant will never pronounce the letter E if it be possible
+to avoid it. It becomes I in his mouth, and a head becomes a "hid,"
+while hens are "hins." Throughout the whole of the eastern counties,
+too, the elision of the final in the present tense is a feature of
+rustic talk. Examples of this peculiarity are found not only in
+modern speech, but in old epitaphs and inscriptions, dating back some
+hundreds of years. Thus, a bridge across the River Wensum, at Norwich,
+bears the sculptured effigy of a dragon's head with the words, "When
+dragon drink, Heigham sink." The meaning is that when the river rises
+and touches, or "rise" and "touch," as a Norfolk man would say, the
+dragon's mouth, the neighbouring Heigham becomes flooded. An older
+example still is seen on an inscription at Kimberley, to John Jenkin,
+in the words:--
+
+  "Under this stone rare Jenkin lie,"
+
+while a comparatively modern one may be found in Stratford St Mary
+church, in the concluding lines of an epitaph dated 1739:--
+
+  'The Night is gone, ye Stars Remain,
+  So man that die shall Live again."
+
+Dickens has caught the East Anglian dialect readily enough in _David
+Copperfield_, where he makes Mr Peggotty say, "Cheer up, old mawther"
+to Mrs Grummidge, and speak of "a couple of mavishes," while Ham talks
+to David as "Mas'r Davy, bor." The willing Barkis, too, who asks "do
+she now?" and speaks of the "stage-cutch," is a true product of the
+soil.
+
+For the benefit of those not to the manner born, let it be repeated
+that a "mawther" is not necessarily a parent. It is the generic name
+for a female. A "mawther" may therefore be a girl infant or a grown
+woman. "Bor" is, of course, a corruption of "neighbour," but need
+not, in fact, specifically mean a neighbour, and is practically the
+masculine of "mawther," and applicable to any man; friend close at hand
+or stranger from distant parts.
+
+The Norfolk dialect has attained the distinction of being made the
+subject of study, and glossaries and collections of local words have
+long been made by enthusiasts in these matters. Perhaps the most
+interesting and amusing of the examples of Norfolk talk is found in the
+East Anglian version of the _Song of Solomon_, published many years ago
+by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte. It was taken down from a reading by a
+Norfolk peasant. A few verses will be instructive:--
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+1. The song o' songs, as is Sorlomun's.
+
+2. Lerr 'im kiss me wi' the kisses of his mouth; for yar love is better
+'an wine.
+
+3. Becaze o' the smell o' yar intements, yar name is as intements pored
+out, therefoor du the mawthers love yĕ.
+
+4. Dror mĕ, we'll run arter yĕ: the king he ha' browt me into his
+charmbers; we'll be glad and reījce in yĕ; we'll remahmber yar
+love more 'an wine: the right-up love yĕ.
+
+5. I em black, but tidy, O ye darters o' J'rusal'm, as the taents o'
+Kedar, as the cattins o' Sorlomun.
+
+6. Don't sin starrin' at me, cos I em black, 'ecos the sun t'have
+barnt mĕ; my mother's children wor snāsty wi' me; they made me
+keeper o' the winyerds, but m'own winyerd I han't kept.
+
+7. Tell onto me, yow hu my soul du love, where ye fade, where ye make
+yar flock to rest at nune: fur why shud I be as one tarn aside by yar
+cumrades' flock?
+
+8. If so bein' as yĕ don't know, O yow bootifullest o' women, go yer
+ways furth by the futtin' o' the flock, and feed yer kids 'eside the
+shepherds' taents.
+
+9. I ha' likened yow, O my love, to a taamer o' hosses in Pharer's
+charrits.
+
+10. Yar cheeks are right fine wi' ringes of jewiltry, yer neck wi'
+chanes o' gold.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The full flavour of this vernacular is only to be obtained by reading
+the original verses side by side with the above.
+
+Among the sports that obtained on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk
+of old was "camping." "Camping" was an old East Anglian game that,
+could it be revived, would please the footballing maniacs of our own
+day. It was a wild kind of football, played on these commons, often
+with a hundred players aside, and we are told that the roughest kind
+of Rugby football was child's play compared with it. If stories of old
+camping contests be true, it might almost seem that in ascribing the
+thinly-populated condition of Norfolk and Suffolk to the long-standing
+effects of the Black Death, and to mediæval insurrections and their
+resulting butcheries, we do an injustice to pestilence and the sword,
+and fail to make count of the casualties received in play. As the
+wondering Frenchman said, in witnessing a camping-match, "If these
+savages be at play, what would they be in war?"
+
+"These contests," says a Norfolk historian, "were not infrequently
+fatal to many of the combatants. I have heard old persons speak of
+a celebrated camping, Norfolk against Suffolk, on Diss Common, with
+three hundred on each side. Before the ball was thrown up, the Norfolk
+men inquired tauntingly of the Suffolk men if they had brought their
+coffins. The Suffolk men, after fourteen hours, were the victors. Nine
+deaths were the result of the conflict in a fortnight." Camping went
+out of favour about 1810, and the coroners had an easier time.
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+DICKLEBURGH, the next village after Scole, is in its way as imposing a
+place, only not an inn, but a church, is its chief feature. The great
+church of Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced) charmingly
+screened from the street by a row of limes, but not so charmingly
+enclosed by a very long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to
+the road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims who once
+passed on their way to Our Lady of Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on
+either side of the east window, holding effigies of popular saints,
+and halting many a sinner for supplication. The saints are gone, torn
+down by Henry the Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing.
+They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond, or, broken up, serve
+the useful part of metalling the road. Adjoining the church stands the
+"King's Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of kings than
+intended as a portrait of any particular one. At any rate it resembles
+none of the long line of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time
+favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough to have been painted
+in the hey-day of his popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large
+for the present size of the place and for the empty country side; but
+there is a reason for the solitudes, and there was one for these huge
+buildings, ten times too large for the present needs of the shrunken
+villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most thickly-peopled
+of English counties, were practically depopulated in 1348 by that
+dreadful scourge, the Black Death. One-third of the total population
+of England perished under that terrible plague. The working classes
+were the worst sufferers, and the agriculturists, the weavers and
+labourers died in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground,
+industries decayed, and no man would work. When the pestilence was
+stayed, other parts of the country flourished in greater proportion,
+than this. Manufacturing industries arose elsewhere and attracted
+the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining consistently
+agricultural throughout the centuries, has never shared the increase;
+only the few and scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in
+the form of weaving in mediæval and later times, and in the manufacture
+of agricultural machinery nowadays. In the last two decades, with the
+decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry to London and the
+great centres of population, the country, and the eastern counties in
+especial, has become almost deserted.
+
+[Illustration: DICKLEBURGH.]
+
+The present state of agriculture in Eastern England is made manifest
+in deserted farms, in broken gates left hanging precariously on one
+hinge, in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted ploughs
+and decrepit waggons standing derelict in the once fertile fields, now
+overrun with foul weeds and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles;
+and farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely to remain
+tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible to grow seeds and flowers,
+and market-gardening is profitable only in the lands more immediately
+surrounding the great towns. With wheat at its present price of thirty
+shillings a quarter, it does not pay to grow corn for the market, and
+the land is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still struggles
+on, he lays down most of his holding in grass for sheep and cattle,
+and grows, grudgingly, as little wheat as possible, for sake of the
+straw. Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat was down to
+twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers fed their pigs on the harvest
+which cost them three pounds more per acre to grow than it would have
+brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it yields no profit.
+Agricultural England is, in short, ruined, and there seems no present
+hope of things becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful
+harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States, Russia and other
+wheat-producing countries can be cultivated, reaped, and carried to
+these shores at the prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders
+of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as advantageously, the
+English farmer must needs go without a living wage. As matters stand
+at present, we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat used
+in the country; the acreage under corn having gone down from 4,058,731
+acres in 1852, to about half that at the present day. Meanwhile the
+population has increased by thirteen millions; so that, with many
+more mouths to fill, we grow only half the staple food these islands
+produced then. There are, of course, those who reap the advantage of
+cheap corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling millions of the
+towns and cities thrive on those benefits; but what if, through war, or
+from any other cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what avail
+would have been this generation of cheapness if at last the nation must
+starve? Extinguish agriculture and the farmer, and you cannot recall
+them at need, nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a land
+which has long gone untilled.
+
+But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more than the walls of a
+house can be demolished and the roof yet left standing. It was the
+farmer who in prosperous times supported the country gentleman in one
+direction, and the agricultural labourer in the other. With wheat, as
+it was a generation ago, at seventy shillings a quarter, and other
+products of the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could
+afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms in those days were
+difficult to obtain, and there was great competition among farmers
+for holdings. To-day, even at a quarter of those rents, tenants are
+difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed proprietors has
+dwindled away. The results are painfully evident here, in the old
+families reduced or beggared, and their seats either in the market or
+let to stock-jobbers and successful business men, while the old owners
+have disappeared or live humbly in small houses once occupied by the
+steward or bailiff of the estate.
+
+While rents have thus, with the iron logic of circumstances, gone down
+to vanishing-point, and while farms have actually been offered rent
+free in order to prevent the disaster of the land being let go out
+of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances of the agricultural
+labourer have been, most illogically, improving. Instead of the
+miserable six to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives thirteen or fourteen
+shillings, lives in a decent cottage, instead of a wretched hovel,
+and finds the cost of food and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than
+his grandfather ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers are as
+difficult to get now as they were immediately after the Black Death had
+swept away three quarters of the working class, five hundred and fifty
+years ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they have done of recent
+years in East Anglia--for lack of hands to gather them in. It was in
+1899 that standing crops at Tivitshall St Margaret's and adjacent
+parishes were sold by auction for a farmer who could find no labourer
+willing to be hired.
+
+What has been called the "rural exodus" is well named. London and
+the great towns have proved so attractive to the children of the
+middle-aged peasant that they despise the country. They can all read
+and write now, and at a pinch do simple sums in arithmetic; so off they
+go to the crowded streets. The ambitious aspire to a black coat and a
+stool in an office, and others become workmen of many kinds; but all
+are attracted by the higher wages to be earned in the towns, and by the
+excitement of living in the great centres of population, and only the
+aged and the aging will soon be left to till the fields.
+
+Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for the agricultural
+labourer's attempts to better himself. To them they are almost impious;
+but the farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of culture. He is
+a vastly different fellow from his grandfather, who actually helped to
+till the soil among his own men; whose wife and daughters were noted
+hands at milking and buttermaking; who lived in the kitchen, among
+the hams and the domestic utensils, and was not above eating the same
+food as, and at the same table with, his ploughmen and carters. He
+has, in fact, and so also have the landed proprietor and the labourer,
+undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process which had started
+certainly by 1825, when Cobbett noticed it.
+
+Hear him:--
+
+ "When the old farmhouses are down (and down they must come in time)
+ what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected
+ are mere painted shells, with a mistress within who is stuck up in a
+ place she calls the parlour, with, if she have children, the 'young
+ ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy chairs and a sofa (a
+ _sofa_ by all means); half-a-dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up;
+ some swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner
+ brought in by a girl that is perhaps better 'educated' than she;
+ two or three nick-nacks to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a
+ pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to
+ come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder that
+ there is here a constant anxiety to make a _show_ not warranted by
+ the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too
+ clever to _work;_ they are all to be _gentlefolks_. Go to _plough_!
+ Good God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough! They become _clerks_,
+ or some skimming-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty _work_
+ as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What
+ a mass of materials for proclaiming that general and _dreadful
+ convulsion_ that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and
+ jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms."
+
+The "convulsion" anticipated by Cobbett has not come about. This is
+not a country of earthquakes or of violent social upheavals. Free
+Trade has beggared the agricultural interests, but, on his way to
+the Bankruptcy Court, the farmer contrives to live in better style
+than possible three quarters of a century ago, while his pretensions
+to gentility certainly have not decreased. As for the "funding and
+jobbing," Cobbett could never, in his wildest dreams, have foreseen
+Limited Liability and the fungoid growth of Stock Exchange speculation,
+or the modern "enslaving and starving system" of the gigantic Trusts
+that, like vampires, feed on the blood of industry. We need look for
+no convulsions; not even, unhappily, for the hanging, or, at least,
+the taxing out of existence, of the millionaires. Our expectations of
+the future are quite different. The people will inhabit the towns, and
+the country will become a huge preserve of game for the sport of the
+millionaires aforesaid; a preserve broken here and there by the model
+farm or the training establishment of some colossus of wealth.
+
+
+XXXVII
+
+
+BEYOND Dickleburgh, past the solitary "Ram" inn, a fine, dignified
+house still lamenting its decadence from a posting-inn to a beerhouse,
+Tivetshall level-crossing marks where the railway runs to Bungay and
+Lowestoft. Maps make Pulham St Mary the Virgin quite near, with Pulham
+St Mary Magdalene close by; Tivetshalls of different dedications, and
+other villages dotted about like plums in a Christmas pudding, but no
+sign of them is evident. Only windmills, whirling furiously on distant
+ridges, break the pastoral solitudes. In this conflict of charts, a
+carter jogging along the road with his team is evidently the authority
+to be consulted.
+
+"Coom hather," says the carter to his sleek and intelligent horses; and
+they coom accordingly, with much jingling of harness, and stand in the
+shade of roadside trees while their lord takes his modest levenses and
+haffles and jaffles--gossips, that is to say--with the landlord of the
+"Ram."
+
+"Tivetshall?" asks the carter, echoing a question; "niver heerd of un."
+Then a light breaks in upon him. "Oh, ay! Tishell we allus call 'em;
+Tishell St Marget an' Tishell St Merry," and with, a sweep of the arm
+comprising the whole western horizon, "Theiy'm ower theer."
+
+"And Pulham St Mary the Virgin?"
+
+"Pulham St Merry the Wirgin? oh, yis! Pulham Maaket, yar mean, bor.
+Et edd'n on'y a moile, ower _theer_"--a comprehensive wave to the
+eastwards.
+
+And there, on a byroad, in an embrace of trees, it is found, a little
+forgotten town, the greater proportion of whose inhabitants appear
+to walk with two sticks. It is ranged round a green or market-place,
+with a great Perpendicular church, gorgeously frescoed within, and
+with a very good recent "Ascension" over the chancel arch, painted
+and stencilled timber roof, and elaborate stained-glass windows. The
+townlet and townsfolk sinking into decay, the church an object of such
+care and expense, afford a curious contrast.
+
+An old toll-house and the prison-like buildings of Depwade Union
+conspire to make desolate the road onwards. He who presses, hot-foot,
+along it, turning neither to the right nor to the left, may readily be
+excused a legitimate wonder as to what has become of the great feature
+of East Anglia, its spreading commons; for, strange to say, despite
+the fame they have long since attained, no vestige of them is glimpsed
+from the road itself. One has usually to turn aside to some of the
+villages lying near, but wholly hidden from the highway, to find the
+yet unenclosed common lands, the pasturage of geese, ducks and turkeys;
+but a striking exception to this now general rule is the huge common
+of Wacton lying off to the left of the road at the hundredth mile from
+London, where a cottage and a wayside inn, the "Duke's Head," alone
+represent Wacton village, a mile distant. Wacton Common, reputed to be
+the highest point in Norfolk, although of no less extent than three
+hundred and fifty acres, might perhaps be passed without being seen,
+for the reason that, although still wild and unenclosed, it is screened
+from the high road by a hedge and entered through an ordinary field
+gate. The inn and the cottage, obviously built on land fraudulently
+taken from the common in the long ago, serve with their gardens to hide
+that glorious expanse of grass and heather. Here roam those chartered
+vagabonds, the plump geese, that pick up a living on the grassy commons
+and wander, like free-booting bands of feathered moss-troopers upon the
+heaths, closing their careers with royal feasting in the August and
+September stubble, and a Michaelmas martyrdom.
+
+[Illustration: A DISPUTED PASTURAGE.]
+
+Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their geese, but those
+martyred fowls do not make their final journey to the London markets,
+between Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they once
+attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays in the seclusion of railway
+vans. Seventy years ago they journeyed by coach, and in state, for the
+Norfolk coaches in Christmas week often carried nothing save geese and
+turkeys, beside the coachman and guard. Full inside and out with such
+a freight, the proprietors of fast coaches made a great deal more by
+carrying them than they would have taken by a load of passengers; so
+the fowls had the preference, while travellers had to take their chance
+of finding a seat in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the
+turkeys conveyed from Norwich to London between a Saturday morning
+and Sunday night in December numbered one thousand seven hundred, and
+weighed 9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was £680. They were followed
+on the two succeeding days by half as many more.
+
+A Norfolk common without its screaming and hissing flocks of geese
+would seem strangely untenanted. They, the turkeys, the ducks, the
+donkeys ("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom fowls are
+among the only vestiges of the wild life that once made Norfolk famous
+to the naturalist and not a little eerie to the traveller of old, who,
+startled on the lonely way that stretched by heath and common and fen
+between the habitations of men, shrank appalled at the lumbering
+flight of the huge bustards, quivered with apprehension at the sudden
+hideous whirring of the night-jar as the day closed in, dismayed,
+heard the bittern booming among the reeds, or with misgivings of the
+supernatural saw the fantastical ruff stalking on long legs, with
+prodigious beak, red eyes and spreading circle of neck feathers, like
+the creation of some disordered imagination. Wild Norfolk, the home
+of these and of many another strange creature, is no more, and these
+species, now chiefly extinct, are to be seen only in museums of natural
+history.
+
+[Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]
+
+What Wacton lacks along the high road the village of Long Stratton
+has in superabundance. They named it well who affixed the adjective,
+for it measures a mile from end to end. Beginning with modern and (to
+speak kindly) uninteresting cottages, it ends in a broad street where
+almost every house is old and beautiful in lichened brick or soft-toned
+plaster. Midway of this lengthy thoroughfare stands the church, one of
+the Norfolk round-towered kind, in the usual black flint, and beyond
+it the Manor House, red brick, with Adam scrolls and neo-classical
+palm branches in plaster for trimmings, set back at some distance
+behind a very newty, froggy and tadpoley moat. Beyond this again, the
+village street broadens out. Looking back upon it, when one has finally
+climbed uphill on the way to Norwich, Long Stratton is a place entirely
+charming. Its name, of course, derives from its situation on the Roman
+Road, and Tasburgh, that now comes in sight, keeps yet its Roman camp
+strongly posted above the River Tase. Tasburgh--what little there is
+of a village--occupies an acclivity on the further side of that river,
+across whose wide and marshy valley the mists rise early, seeing the
+sun to bed dull and tarnished, and attending the rising of the moon
+with ghostly vapours. The old Roman camp is oddly and picturesquely
+occupied by the parish church, another round-towered example. Excepting
+it, the vicarage and the Dutch-like building of the "Bird in Hand" Inn,
+there is little else.
+
+[Illustration: LONG STRATTON.]
+
+But what mean these sounds of anger and lamentation that drown the
+soothing, distant rattle of reaping machines on the hillside: a voice
+raised in reproach, and another--a treble one--in gusty shrieks of
+combined pain, fear and peevishness? Coming round a corner, the cause
+of the disturbance is revealed in a wet and muddy infant rubbing dirty
+knuckles into streaming eyes, and being violently reproached by an
+indignant woman.
+
+"You're a pretty article, I must say; a fine spettacle. I'll give
+yow a good sowsin', my lord; coom arn;" and the malefactor is pulled
+suddenly inside the cottage, the door slammed, and muffled yells heard,
+alternating with thumps. The offender is receiving that sowsing, or
+being "yerked," "clipped over the ear-hole," getting a "siseraring,"
+being "whanged" or "clouted," the striking Norfolk phrases for
+varieties of assault and battery.
+
+
+XXXVIII
+
+
+THE Tase is met with again on surmounting the hilly road out of
+Tasburgh and coming down hill into Newton Flotman. Here it is
+broad enough to require a long and substantial bridge, grouping in
+unaccustomed rightness of composition with the mingled thatched, tiled
+and slated cottages and the church that stands on a commanding knoll
+in the background. When Newton was really new it would be impossible
+to say; perhaps its novelty may have been measured against the hoary
+antiquity of, say, Caistor yonder, down the valley. For what says the
+folk-rhyme:--
+
+  "Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,
+  And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"
+
+and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials, why not, in
+degree, Newton Flotman? But a whisper. Caistor was never more than a
+camp, and not at any time a place of houses, much less of stone ones.
+Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood, and flint only, of
+which Norwich is principally built, is available for building materials.
+
+[Illustration: TASBURGH.]
+
+One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the passing stranger is a
+little effigy of Bacchus fixed on the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn,
+so thickly covered with successive coats of paint that it is difficult
+to give it a period. Remains of Roman antiquities are so many in this
+district that it is often mistaken for a work of that classic age,
+when it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of the late
+eighteenth century, a time when figures of the kind were a usual
+decoration of inn signs. Such an one still swings from the wrought-iron
+sign of the "Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.
+
+In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton Flotman lies Dunston,
+trees casting a protecting and secretive shade over it, and the "Dun
+Cow" Inn its only roadside representative. That inn and the circular
+brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle redeem the last few miles into
+Norwich from absolute emptiness. When the pound last was used who shall
+say? The tramps have played havoc with it, and its wooden gate has
+gone. The ancient office of pound-keeper is here evidently fallen into
+disuse.
+
+Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on the level to the left,
+but Caistor, in like manner with Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage, half
+a mile or more away in the valley, its church tower rising like a grey
+beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious where its ancient camp
+may be found. Caistor St Edmunds, to give its full name, is the site of
+the great Roman camp established here to overawe the stronghold of the
+Iceni, four miles away on the banks of the Wensum, and now the site of
+Norwich.
+
+[Illustration: NEWTON FLOTMAN.]
+
+Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of a Roman fortified
+_castrum_. For one thing, it has the largest area of any known relic
+of its kind in England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its fragments
+of flint walls have neither the thickness nor the height of those at
+Portus Rutupiæ, the old Roman port in Thanet, now known as Richborough,
+its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the laggard imagination
+of the layman in matters archæological, which refuses to be stirred
+before mere undulations in the sward. Here is a ditch that can be
+rolled into, an embankment that can be climbed and paced on three
+sides of the camp, if necessary, to put to physical test both height,
+depth and extent. The fourth side of this great enclosure, now a
+turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase and was sufficiently
+defended by that stream, then a wide creek, so that no works are to be
+found there. How long it was before the Romans subdued the Iceni, whose
+great city is thought to have stood where Norwich does now, is not
+known. Nothing of that early time here, indeed, is _known_, and guesses
+are of the vaguest. Only it seems that the Roman advance into East
+Anglia, which had for its objective the principal stronghold of the
+tribes, here came to its military ending. To compare things so ancient
+and romantic with others modern and thought prosaic, the several Roman
+camps on the advance from London now to be sought at Uphall near
+Romford; Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and Tasburgh, are, with
+those that have disappeared, to be looked upon in the same light as the
+wayside stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which originally
+came to a terminus at that city, and was only at a later date continued
+northward.
+
+[Illustration: THE OLD BRICK POUND.]
+
+Where the Romans and the Romano-British citizens of Venta lived when
+the tribes were reduced--where the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really
+was, in fact--is a mystery, for, unlike most of our great cities,
+Norwich has furnished no relics of that age; while, beyond coins and
+odds and ends, Caistor camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of
+streets or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and Venta might,
+for all there is to show of it, have been a city of dreams. The fact
+that the original capital of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes
+when they came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the site of
+it having long been deserted; and that they called it after the North
+"wic" or creek, presupposes a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far.
+The position of that south creek is fixed by the ancient geography of
+these last few miles. In those times the ground on which Yarmouth, at
+the mouth of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the waves of
+the sea, which ran up in a long navigable creek--the "Gariensis" of
+the Romans and the "North Wic" of the Danes--from a Roman fortified
+port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site of Norwich, which
+indeed, centuries later, was still a port. Where the River Tase is
+now confluent with the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out
+a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running almost due south; the
+"South wic" of those northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where
+the navigation ceased.
+
+[Illustration: CAISTOR CAMP.]
+
+It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of the Tase still bears
+signs of those old conditions, and perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman
+citizens, together with other relics of the vanished city, still lie
+preserved deep down in the mud and silt that have filled up the old
+channel.
+
+The lie of the land, in accord with these views, is plain to see when,
+returning to the high road, the journey to Norwich is continued to
+Hartford Bridge; bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the
+right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several bridges, none of
+them sizeable, rivers, streams and runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and
+gurgle in their different ways through flat meadows, below the long
+rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins to grow suburban.
+It is on the summit that the Newmarket and Thetford route from London
+joins with this, and together they descend into the city.
+
+
+XXXIX
+
+
+THIS way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on her great "progress" of
+1578, by St Stephen's Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates and
+walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or even condemned the
+belated citizen to lodge the night without the precincts of the city,
+in suburbs not in those times to be reckoned safe.
+
+Norwich long ago swept away her defences and modernised her outskirts,
+for this is no Sleepy Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the
+Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing with industry and in
+every way in the forefront of modern life. To the entrance from London
+Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side. No general view of
+the city, lying in its hollow beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and
+the eye seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some difficulty,
+modestly peering over tangled modern roof-tops. It is from quite the
+opposite direction, from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that
+Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of cathedral, churches
+and houses, with trees and gardens, such as no other city can show,
+displayed within its bounds. Norwich does not jump instantly to the
+antiquarian eye, and its electric tramways that are the first to greet
+the traveller who enters from the old coach road are not a little
+forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the stranger in all its
+wealth of beauty and interest, and becomes more and more lovable the
+better he becomes acquainted with it.
+
+Until these railway times, in the old days of slow, difficult,
+dangerous and expensive travelling, the capital of East Anglia was in
+a very high degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its shipping
+trade and weaving industries, and the famous Norwich School of artists,
+brought this exclusive attitude down from mediæval times to modern;
+and Norfolk county families until the era of political reform had
+almost dawned, still had their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in
+bygone centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons, owned their
+town houses in Hungate and in what is now called King Street, formerly
+Conisford Street.
+
+The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the mazy streets to inns widely
+sundered. The original "Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater
+part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head," in Tombland. On
+the other hand, the Mails, the "Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to
+and started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street of the same name,
+standing not far from the beginnings of the city. The street is there
+still, but the oddly-named inn has given place to shops, and where
+the "Rampant Horse" ramped rampageously, in violent contrast with the
+mild-mannered "Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers' establishments
+now hold forth seductive announcements of "alarming sacrifices."
+
+Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day Coach" and the "Phenomenon"
+favoured the "Angel," in the Market Place, while the "Times" house was
+the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and that of the "Expedition" the
+"Swan" Inn. Other inns, many of them huddled together under the lee of
+the castle mound, were then to be found in the Market Place and the
+Haymarket and in the narrow alley in the rear that still goes by name
+of "Back of the Inns." Others yet, many of mediæval age, are to be
+sought in old nooks of the city. The Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary
+Tavern, like the "Old Barge," belongs to the fourteenth century, the
+last named still standing between King Street and the river, with
+a picturesque but battered entrance. The steep and winding lane of
+Elm Hill, where the slum population of Norwich stew and pig together
+down ancient courts and dirty alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but
+unrestored; and in the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully
+called Tombland, although it has not, nor ever had, anything to do
+with tombs, is the "Maid's Head," the one establishment in Norwich
+that stands pre-eminently for old times and good cheer. It is an
+"hotel" now, and has the modern conveniences of sanitation and electric
+light; but its restoration, effected through the enthusiasm of a
+local antiquary, with both the opportunity of purchasing the property
+and the means of doing so, has been carried through with taste and
+discrimination. The "Maid's Head" can with certainty claim a history
+of six hundred years, and is thought to have been built upon the site
+of a former Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered ceilings and masonry of
+evident antiquity may take parts of the present house back so far, or
+even a greater length, but the especial pride of the "Maid's Head" is
+its beautiful Jacobean woodwork. The old sign of the house was the
+"Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that antiquaries still boggle
+at. It was long a cherished legend that this strange and unlovely name
+was changed to the present sign in complimentary allusion to Queen
+Elizabeth when she first visited the city, but later researches have
+proved the change to have been made at least a century earlier, and so
+goes another belief!
+
+The "Music House," facing the now disreputable King Street, has not
+for so very long been an inn. Its name tells of a time when it was the
+meeting-place of the "city music," old-time ancestors of modern town
+bands, but its story goes back to the Norman period, when the crypt
+that bears up the thirteenth-century building above was part of the
+home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his nephew. "Isaac's
+Hall," as it was known, was seized by King John and given to one of
+his creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they were allowed
+to live at all, finding cool quarters in the castle dungeons. A long
+succession of owners, including the Pastons, followed; last among them
+Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who resided here in 1633.
+
+It has already been hinted that the streets of Norwich are mazy. They
+are indeed the most perplexing of any town in England. Many roads
+run into the city, and from every direction. Glancing at a plan of
+it, these roads resemble the main strands of a spider's web, and the
+streets the cross webs. In midst of this maze is the great castle, like
+the spider himself; that cruel keep in whose dungeons old wrong-doing,
+religious and private spite, have immured many a wretched captive, like
+that unfortunate unknown "Bartholomew," who has left his name scratched
+on the walls, and the statement that he was here confined "saunz
+resun," a reason of the best in those times. Did he ever see the light
+of day again? Or did some midnight assassin murder him as many another
+had been done to death?
+
+"Blanchflower," that Bigod, Earl of Norwich who built the castle called
+his keep when it arose on its great mound, its stone new and white.
+He built upon the site of a castle thought to have been Saxon, and
+built so well that it became a fortress impregnable save to famine
+and treachery. It has, therefore, unlike weaker places that have been
+stormed again and again, little history, and even seven hundred years
+ago was little more than a prison. And a prison of sorts--for State
+captives first, and for common malefactors afterwards--it remained
+until so recently as 1883, when it was restored and then opened as the
+Museum and Art Gallery it now is.
+
+This is no place to speak at length of the cathedral that withdraws
+itself with such ecclesiastical reserve from the busy quarters of the
+city, and is approached decorously through ancient gateways in the
+walls of its surrounding close; the Ethelbert Gate, with that other,
+the Erpingham Gate, built in Harry the Fifth's time by Sir Thomas
+Erpingham, whose little kneeling effigy yet remains in its niche in
+the gable over the archway, and whose motto--variously held to be
+"Yenk," or "Think,"--"Denk," or "Thank"--is repeated many times on the
+stone work. Norman monastic gloom still broods over the close, for the
+cathedral, save the Decorated cloisters and the light and graceful
+spire in the same style, is almost wholly of that period, and the
+grammar school that was once a mediæval mortuary chapel and has its
+playground in the crypt, keeps a gravity of demeanour that, considering
+its history, is eminently proper.
+
+Through the Close lies the way to Bishop's Bridge and the steep road
+up to Mousehold Heath: the "Monk's Hold," or monastic property, of
+times gone by when it was common land of the manor belonging to the
+Benedictine priory.
+
+
+XL
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH.]
+
+HERE, on this famous Heath of Mousehold where the gorse and heather
+and the less common broom yet flourish, despite the electric tramways
+that bring up the crowds and the picnic parties, Nature, rugged and
+unconquerable, looks down upon the city, revealed as a whole. Even
+though the chimneys of great factories may intrude and smirch the sky
+when winds permit the smoke-wreaths to trail across the view, it is a
+view quite unspoilable. The cathedral, as is only proper, is the grand
+dominating feature, with its central tower and graceful crocketed spire
+rising to a height of 320 feet. Second to it, on its left hand, the
+huge bulk of the castle keep rears up; a time-ball on its battlements
+to give the time o' day to the busy citizens; those battlements where
+from a gibbet they hanged Robert Kett in 1549, when his rebellion was
+crushed and his army of 20,000 peasants who had encamped on Mousehold
+defeated. In similar fashion his brother William was hanged from
+Wymondham steeple. Between castle and cathedral the great tower of
+St Peter Mancroft looms up, and on the other side of the cathedral
+tower the twin spires of the Roman Catholic place of worship crown the
+sky-line. To the extreme right of the accompanying illustration is
+St Giles's, and on the extreme left, in company with the pinnacled
+tower of a modern church, the dark tower of St John-at-Sepulchre,
+Bracondale, which for shortness and simplicity the citizens call "Ber
+Street Church." For the rest, it is a mingling of town and country, of
+houses and gardens and churches in great number, that one sees down
+there; old Norwich, in short, exclusive of the modern suburbs that are
+flung everywhere around and cause the Norwich of to-day to outnumber
+the Norwich of coaching times by 80,000 inhabitants. It must be
+evident from those figures that the picturesque old Norwich numbering
+a population of only 30,000 has been in great degree improved away and
+borne under by that human deluge. It is delightful now, but what it
+was at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Crome and De Wint
+and others sketched and painted its quaint bits, the picture-galleries
+of the Castle Museum can tell. Nay, even down to the mid-nineteenth
+century it was still very different, as a collection of early
+photographs in the castle proves. Then, before St Peter Mancroft was
+restored, before the old Fish Market was cleared away, Norwich had many
+more quaint nooks than now to show the stranger; even as, centuries
+before, it was yet more quaint and even more remarkable for its many
+churches than at the present time.
+
+"The nearer the church the further from God," says the old saw. How
+irreligious then should Norwich be, that has even yet a cathedral and
+thirty-four ancient churches, and modern places of worship fully as
+numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as old Fuller suggested, "make
+good use of their churches and cross that pestilent proverb." These
+churches bear a close resemblance to one another, having nearly all
+been rebuilt in the Perpendicular period, some five hundred years ago,
+and all built of the black flint that gives a character to East Anglian
+architecture quite distinct from that of other districts. The time when
+they were thus rebuilt was not only a great period of church-building
+throughout England, but a time of especial prosperity in mercantile
+and trading Norwich; a time when guilds grew powerful and merchants
+wealthy in the flourishing industry of cloth-weaving introduced some
+time earlier by Flamand and Hollander immigrants. English wool that
+before had gone across the narrow seas for manufacture into stuffs
+was now weaved in the land of its growth. "Many thousands," says
+Blomefield, "that before could not get their bread could now by this
+means live handsomely." In that age, to become rich and prosperous was
+to become also a founder and benefactor of churches; hence the great
+ecclesiastical buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor of
+an old writer, writing when there were no fewer than sixty-one churches
+in the city, "surrounded the cathedral as the stars do the moon."
+The old citizens sleep in the parish churches for which they did so
+much; their monuments in brass or marble, stone or alabaster curiously
+wrought, often with their "merchant's marks"--the distinctive signs
+with which they labelled their wares--engraved on them in lieu of coats
+of arms. It is as though a modern trader were to have the registered
+trade-mark of his speciality engraved on his tombstone. A typical
+memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of Thomas Sotherton, in the
+church of St John Maddermarket. He--
+
+  "Under this cold marbell sleeps,"
+
+and was no common fellow, mark you, but
+
+  "Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit,
+  Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt."
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH MARKET PLACE.]
+
+Although the calendar of saints is a long one and more than
+sufficiently lengthy to have provided each one of the Norwich churches
+with a patron, yet so popular were some saints, that several churches
+to the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also in the city of
+London. As in old London, it was in those cases necessary to confer
+surnames, so to speak, upon those churches.
+
+They are surnames of the geographical sort and not a little curious.
+The four St Peters are, for example, St Peter Mancroft, the largest
+and most important in the city, so called from the Magna Croft, or
+large field of the castle; St Peter per Mountergate, in King Street,
+named from the road by the "montem," the hill or mount, that runs
+ridge-like in its rear; St Peter Hungate, the "hundred gate," or
+road, reminiscent of the time when Norwich was a hundred of itself,
+even as it is now by itself a county; and St Peter Southgate. St
+Michael-at-Thorn has still thorn trees growing in its churchyard; St
+Michael Coslany, with St Mary's of identical surname, was built in
+Coast Lane; and St Michael-at-Plea was named from its neighbourhood to
+an ecclesiastical court. St John Maddermarket is thus distinguished
+from other St Johns--St John Timberhill and St John-at-Sepulchre.
+In the neighbourhood of the first-named, madder for the dyers'
+use was marketed; while at Timberhill was the market in wood. St
+Martin-at-Palace, by the old Bishop's Palace, and St-Martin-at-Oak take
+up the tale, which might be continued at great length.
+
+[Illustration: NORWICH SNAP.]
+
+The business life of modern Norwich centres in the Market Place and the
+streets that immediately lead out of it: the mouldering signs of old
+commerce peer in peaked gables, clustered chimneys and old red-brick
+and plastered walls in the lanes and along the wharves of the Wensum.
+
+There trade hustles and elbows to the front, in many-storeyed piles
+of brick, stone and stucco, with great show of goods in plate-glass
+windows and bold advertisement of gilt lettering. All those signs of
+prosperity may be seen, and on a larger scale, in London, but not even
+in London are the electric tram cars so great a menace to life and
+limb as in these narrow and winding streets, where they dash along at
+reckless speed.
+
+The Market Place is not yet wholly spoilt. The huge bulk of St
+Peter Mancroft and a row of queer old houses beside it still avert
+that disaster, and form a picture from one point of view; while the
+flint-faced Guildhall stands at another corner of the great open place
+and in its Council Chamber, in use five hundred years ago as a Court of
+Justice, and still so used, proves the continuity of "our rough island
+story." In a dark and dismal cell of the Guildhall once lay the heroic
+martyr, Thomas Bilney, who "testified" at the stake in the Lollards'
+Pit, where many another had already yielded up his life. He wondered,
+as others before and after him had done and were to do, whether the
+tortured body could pass steadfast through the fiery ordeal; and on the
+eve of his martyrdom put that doubt to the test by holding his finger
+in the flame of a candle. That test sufficed, and he suffered with
+unshaken constancy when the morrow dawned.
+
+The Guildhall has less tragical memories than this, and was indeed the
+scene of many old-time municipal revelries in times before Corporations
+became reformed. But old revels and frolics have been discontinued,
+and "Snap," the Norwich dragon, a fearsome beast of gilded wickerwork,
+who was wont to be paraded from the Guildhall at the annual mayoral
+election, and last frolicked with his attendant beadles and whifflers
+in 1835, now reposes in the Castle Museum.
+
+The Market Place on Saturday, when the wide open square is close-packed
+with stalls, is Norwich at its most characteristic time and in its most
+characteristic spot. In it the story of the Norwich Road may fitly end.
+The city itself, glanced at in the immediately foregoing pages, could
+not yield its story in less space than that occupied by that of the
+road itself.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+    Aldgate, 1, 8, 11, 13, 51
+
+    ---- Pump, 11
+
+
+    "Bacon End," 180
+
+    Boreham, 127-129
+
+    Bow, 6, 8, 75-80
+
+    ---- Bridge, 77-79
+
+    Brentwood, 23, 94-99, 132, 200
+
+    Brockford, 257
+
+    Brome, 261
+
+    Brook Street, 94
+
+    ---- Hill, 94, 132
+
+
+    Caistor St Edmunds, 4, 298, 301-303
+
+    Capel St Mary, 236
+
+    Chadwell Heath, 51, 83, 85, 86
+
+    ---- Street, 86
+
+    Chelmsford, 5, 40, 51, 52, 54, 57, 80, 114-121, 127, 167, 200
+
+    Chipping Hill, 133-139, 302
+
+    Claydon, 252
+
+    ---- Hall, 252
+
+    Coaches:--
+      "Confatharrat," 34
+      "Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," 46, 140
+      "Expedition," 39, 306
+      "Gurney's Original Day Coach," 39, 267, 306
+      "Ipswich Blues," 23, 39, 132
+      "---- and Yarmouth Mail," 41, 45
+      "---- Post Coaches," 36
+      "---- Shannon," 39
+      "---- Umpire," 81
+      "Magnet," 39, 306
+      "New Colchester," 81
+      "Norwich Machine," 34-36, 306
+      "---- Mail," 39, 40, 43
+      "---- Post Coach," 39
+      "---- Times," 28, 39, 267
+      "Parcel Mail," 54-57, 111
+      "Phænomenon," 39, 306
+      "Telegraph," 306
+
+    Coaching, 30-51, 54-57, 81, 82, 97, 132, 142-151, 267
+
+    Coaching Notabilities:--
+      Alexander, Israel, 46, 140
+      Nelson, Mrs Ann, 19-25, 27, 81, 132
+      ----, George, 19
+      ----, John, 19, 25-27
+      ----, Robert, 19
+      Suggate (Norwich carrier), 34
+      Thorogood, John, 28, 267
+
+    Colchester, 5, 6, 43, 54, 56, 94, 156, 163, 165, 167, 177, 179-212,
+                                                                    217
+
+    Constable, John, R.A., 149, 154, 217-219, 232, 238
+
+    Copdock, 236
+
+    Copford, 175, 176
+
+    _Copperfield, David_, 28, 44, 45, 150, 226, 274
+
+    Creeting, All Saints, 253
+
+    Creetings, The, 255
+
+
+    Dedham, 217-221
+
+    Deodand, Law of, 50
+
+    Dickleburgh, 6, 277-279
+
+    Dilbridge, 217
+
+    Dunston, 298
+
+
+    Feering, 152, 153, 158
+
+    Forest Gate, 81
+
+
+    Goodmayes, 83
+
+    Gore Pit, 152, 176
+
+    Great Eastern Railway, 25, 46, 51-54, 83, 152, 158, 175
+
+
+    Hare Street, 94
+
+    Hartford Bridge, 304
+
+    Hatfield Peverel, 129, 131
+
+    Highwaymen, 29, 30, 41, 58-62, 85, 86, 87, 88, 99, 142, 143, 214
+
+    Highwaymen:--
+      Cratfield, Rev. Wm., 30
+      King, Matthew, 58
+      ----, Robert, 58
+      ----, Tom, 58, 61
+      Tapyrtone, Thomas, 30
+      Turpin, Richard, 57-62
+
+
+    Ilford, 6, 29, 80, 82, 83, 167
+
+    Ingatestone, 6, 56, 99, 105-110
+
+    Inns (mentioned at length):--
+      "Angel," Colchester, 196, 197
+      ----, Kelvedon, 140, 141, 147, 148, 162
+      ----, Norwich, 34, 306
+      "Belle Sauvage," Ludgate Hill, 19
+      "Black Boy," Chelmsford, 121
+      "Blossoms," Laurence Lane, 34
+      "Blue Boar," Whitechapel, 28
+      "---- Posts," Witham, 132
+      "Bull," Bishopsgate Street, 15, 37
+      ----, Leadenhall Street, 12, 15
+      ----, Whitechapel, 15, 19-28
+      "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand, 15
+      "Cauliflower," Ilford, 83
+      "Coach and Horses," Upton, 81
+      "Cock," Thwaite, 260
+      "Cross Keys," Gresham Street, 15
+      "Duke's Head," Wacton, 288
+      "Fleece," Brook Street, 94
+      "Flower Pot," Bishopsgate Street, 15
+      "Four Swans," 34
+      "Golden Cross," Charing Cross, 15
+      "Good Woman," Widford, 111-114
+      "Grave Maurice," Whitechapel, 69
+      "Great White Horse," Ipswich, 36, 37, 228, 247-252, 306
+      "Gun," Dedham, 221, 228
+      "Half Moon," Ipswich, 243
+      "Horse and Leaping Bar," Whitechapel, 29
+      "King's Head," Dickleburgh, 278
+      "Lion and Lamb," Ipswich, 243, 244
+      "Magpie," Little Stonham, 256
+      "Maid's Head," Newton Flotman, 297
+      ---- ----, Norwich, 34, 35, 306, 307
+      "Music House," Norwich, 307
+      "Norfolk Hotel," Norwich, 306
+      "Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, 57
+      "Popinjay," Norwich, 34
+      "Queen's Head," Thwaite, 259, 260
+      "Rampant Horse," Norwich, 306
+      "Red Lion," Colchester, 196
+      ---- ----, Kelvedon, 140
+      ---- ----, Whitechapel, 57
+      "Rising Sun," Manor Park, 81
+      "Saracen's Head," Aldgate, 14, 16, 17, 18
+      ---- ----, Chelmsford, 117-120
+      "Spread Eagle," Gracechurch Street, 15-19
+      "Sun," Kelvedon, 152
+      "Swan," Washbrook, 237
+      "Swan-with-Two-Necks," Gresham Street, 15, 43
+      "Three Cups," Colchester, 37, 167, 196
+      ---- ----, Springfield, 122
+      "Three Nuns," Aldgate, 29
+      "Vine," Mile End, 73
+      "Wheatsheaf," Kelvedon, 152
+      "White Elm," Copdock, 237
+      "---- Hart," Brentwood, 37, 97, 98, 119
+      ---- ----, Colchester, 196
+      ---- ----, Scole, 262-271
+      ---- ----, Witham, 132
+      "White Horse," Fetter Lane, 15
+      ---- Horse, Widford, 112, 114
+
+    Ipswich, 54, 56, 132, 212, 237-252
+
+
+    Kelvedon, 5, 139-153, 162, 176
+
+
+    Langham, 218
+
+    Lexden, 52, 147, 177-181, 302
+
+    ---- Heath, 177-179, 187, 190, 201
+
+    Little Stonham, 6, 256
+
+    "London Stone," 4, 13
+
+    Long Stratton, 6, 292-295
+
+
+    Manor Park, 81
+
+    Margaretting, 57, 110, 111
+
+    Mark's Tey, 158, 175, 176
+
+    Martyr's Tree, 95, 96
+
+    Mile End, 70-74, 163
+
+    "Mockbeggar Hall," 252
+
+    Moulsham, 114
+
+    Mountnessing, 101-105
+
+
+    Needham Market, 255
+
+    New Hall, 123-127
+
+    Newton Flotman, 296-299
+
+    Norwich, 51, 52, 161, 301, 302-320
+
+
+    Old Ford, 6, 8, 76
+
+    Old-time travellers:--
+      Caroline of Brunswick, Princess, Queen of George IV., 165-168
+      Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess, Queen of George III.,
+                                                                162, 163
+      Kemp, Will, 79, 82, 161
+      Johnson, Samuel, 164, 165
+      Queen Elizabeth, 304, 307
+      William III., 140, 141, 161
+
+    Old-time travelling, 142-150, 159-168, 178, 225-237
+
+
+    Parcel Mail, 54-57, 111
+
+    Pulham St Mary Magdalene, 286, 287
+
+    ---- St Mary the Virgin, 286, 287
+
+    Puttels Bridge, 93, 94
+
+
+    Rivenhall End, 139
+
+    Romford, 5, 23, 29, 51, 82, 85, 88-93, 167
+
+
+    Scole, 6, 40, 262-272
+
+    Seven Kings, 51, 83-85
+
+    Shenfield, 99, 100
+
+    Shrubland Park, 253, 255
+
+    Springfield, 121-123
+
+    Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., 151
+
+    Stanway, 6, 174-178
+
+    Steam Coaches, 46
+
+    Stoke Ash, 257, 260
+
+    Stonham Aspall, 256
+
+    ---- Earls, 256
+
+    Stratford (Langthorne), 78, 80, 81
+
+    ----- -le-Bow, 6, 8, 75-80
+
+    ---- St Mary, 5, 6, 223-225, 274
+
+    Swainsthorpe, 298
+
+
+    Tasburgh, 292, 295, 296, 297, 302
+
+    Thwaite, 259
+
+    Tivetshall St Margaret, 6, 284, 287
+
+    ---- St Mary, 6, 287
+
+    Toll-gates, 40, 70, 71, 78, 87, 93, 94, 139, 179, 222, 237, 257, 288
+
+
+    Uphall, 5, 302
+
+    Upton Park, 81
+
+
+    Wacton, 288, 292
+
+    ---- Common, 288
+
+    Washbrook, 236
+
+    West Ham, 77, 81
+
+    Whalebone House, 86, 87
+
+    Whitechapel, 2, 12, 62-69
+
+    Whitton Street, 252
+
+    Widford, 111-114, 161
+
+    Witham, 23, 131-139, 163
+
+    Woodgrange, 81
+
+    Writtle, 5
+
+
+    Yaxley, 260
+
+
+
+
+  EDINBURGH
+  COLSTON AND COY, LTD.
+  PRINTERS
+
+
+
+
+         Transcriber's Notes:
+
+  Inconsistent hyphenation is retained.
+
+  Inconsistent punctuation is retained.
+
+  Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
+
+  Bold is shown thus: =strong=.
+
+  Small capitals have been capitalised.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Norwich Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
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+      The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Norwich Road: an East Anglian Highway, by Charles G. Harper.
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Norwich Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+Title: The Norwich Road
+       An East Anglian Highway
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+Release Date: January 3, 2020 [EBook #61087]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NORWICH ROAD ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Chris Curnow, Alan and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter1" id="pub">
+<img src="images/fig1.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SCOLE WHITE HART.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1><span class="redtext large">
+THE NORWICH<br />
+ROAD:</span> <span class="gesperrt">AN EAST<br />
+ANGLIAN HIGHWAY</span></h1>
+
+<p class="c xlarge">By <span class="smcap">Charles G. Harper</span></p>
+
+<p class="c">Author of "<i>The Brighton Road</i>," "<i>The Portsmouth
+Road</i>,"<br /> "<i>The Dover Road</i>," "<i>The Bath Road</i>,"<br />
+"<i>The Exeter Road</i>," <i>and</i> "<i>The Great North Road</i>."</p>
+
+<p class="c little"><i>Illustrated by the Author, and from<br />
+Old-Time Prints and Pictures.</i></p>
+
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus25">
+<img src="images/fig2.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c"><span class="smcap">London: <span class="redtext">Chapman &amp; Hall</span> ltd.</span> 1901</p>
+
+<p class="c little">[<i>All Rights reserved.</i>]
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus26">
+<img src="images/fig3.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">PREFACE</p>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<p><i><span class="dropcap">T</span>HE author of a little book published in 1818,
+called</i> <span class="smcap">A Journey to London</span>, <i>which is nearly
+all "London" with very little "journey," remarks
+that "it is as uncommon for a book to go into the
+world without a preface, as a man without a hat.
+They are both convenient coverings." Here, then, is
+the customary covering.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>Introducing this, the seventh in a series of books
+telling the story of our great highways, it may
+perhaps be as well to re-state the methods used, and
+objects aimed at. The chief intention is to provide
+a readable book which shall avoid the style either of
+a Guide-Book or a History. It is the better fortune
+to be in the reader's hands than in the dusty seclusion
+of those formidable works, the County Histories;
+or disregarded among the guide-books of forgotten
+holidays. To the antiquary it will, of course, be
+obvious that this and other volumes of the series
+"contain many omissions," as the Irish reviewer
+said; but such things as find no place here have, as
+a general rule, been disregarded because they not
+only do not help the Story of the Road along,
+but rather hinder its progression.</i></p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span></p>
+
+<p><i>The</i> <span class="smcap">Norwich Road</span>, <i>in its one hundred and twelve
+miles, passes by many an historic site and through
+districts distinguished for their quiet pastoral
+beauty. In being historic it is not singular, for,
+as Oliver Wendell Holmes very truly said,
+"England is one vast museum," and the old road
+would be remarkable indeed, that, like Canning's</i>
+"<span class="smcap">Needy Knife Grinder</span>," <i>had no story to tell.
+It is, however, in the especial characteristics
+of East Anglian scenery, speech, customs, and
+architecture that this road stands apart and is
+highly individualised. "East Anglia" is no merely
+arbitrary and meaningless term, as those who travel
+it, if only on the highway, will speedily find.</i></p>
+
+<p><i>But this shall be no trumpet-blast; nor indeed do
+the charms of Eastern England require such a fanfare,
+for who has not yet heard of that lovely valley
+of the Stour, so widely known as "Constable's
+Country," by whose exquisite water-meadows and
+shady lanes the old turnpike passes? Scenery
+such as this; windmills, cornfields, tall elms,
+winding rivers, and commons populous with geese
+and turkeys, are typical of the</i> <span class="smcap">Norwich Road</span>,
+<i>which may, with this introduction, now be left to
+recommend itself</i>.</p>
+
+<p class="r large">
+CHARLES G. HARPER.</p>
+
+<p class="l"><span class="smcap">Petersham, Surrey</span>,</p>
+<p class="l3"><i>October</i> 1901.
+</p>
+
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus27">
+<img src="images/fig4.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium sans"><span class="smcap">List of Illustrations</span></p>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<p class="c large p2">SEPARATE PLATES</p>
+
+<table class="hang">
+
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Scole White Hart</span></td>
+  <td class= "tdr"><a href="#pub"><i>Frontispiece</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><span class="half">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Aldgate Pump.</span> (<i>From a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus2">9</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Aldgate</span>, 1820</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus3">21</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">The "Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, where Turpin shot<br />
+Matthew King.</span> (<i>From a drawing by T. Hosmer</i><br />
+<i>Shepherd</i>, 1854)</td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus4">59</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Whitechapel Road in the Coaching Age</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus5">65</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Mile End Turnpike</span>, 1813. (<i>After Rowlandson</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus6">71</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Romford</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus7">91</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Mountnessing Windmill</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus8">103</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Ingatestone in Coaching Days.</span> (<i>From an Old Print</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus9">107</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">New Hall Lodges</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus10">125</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Chipping Hill</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus11">133</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>"<span class="smcap">Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter.</span>" (<i>From a Print<br />
+after H. Alken</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus12">145</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Colchester</span> </td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus13">215</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span><span class="smcap">The Vale of Dedham.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus14">219</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Spring: Suffolk Ploughlands.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus15">229</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">The Cornfield.</span> (<i>After Constable</i>)</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus16">233</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">The Old Sign of Scole White Hart</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus17">265</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Staircase in the "White Hart"</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus18">269</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Dickleburgh</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus19">279</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">A Disputed Pasturage</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus20">289</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Long Stratton</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus21">293</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Newton Flotman</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus22">299</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Norwich, from Mousehold Heath</span> </td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus23">311</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="smcap">Norwich Market Place</span></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus24">315</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+
+<p class="c large p2">ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT</p>
+
+<table class="hang">
+
+<tr>
+  <td>Vignette</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus25"><i>Title Page</i></a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdr"><span class="half">PAGE</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Preface</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus26">vii</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>List of Illustrations: London Stone</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus27">ix</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Runaway 'Prentice</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus28">1</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Yard of the "Bull," Leadenhall Street. (<i>From a drawing</i><br />
+<i>by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854</td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus29">12</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Front of the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate: Present Day</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus30">14</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Yard of the "Saracen's Head" in Coaching Days. (<i>From</i><br />
+<i>a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854</td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus31">16</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Yard of the "Saracen's Head": Present Day</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus32">18</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Yard of the "Bull," Whitechapel, in Coaching Days</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus33">27</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Norwich Coach at Christmastide. (<i>After Robert<br />
+Seymour</i>, 1835</td>
+  <td class="tdrb"><a href="#illus34">38</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Whitechapel Old Church</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus35">63</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Bow</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus36">76</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Seven Kings</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus37">84</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Whalebone House</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus38">87</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Entrance to Romford</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus39">89</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Old Toll-house, Puttels Bridge</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus40">93</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Fleece," Brook Street</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus41">94</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Martyr's Tree, Brentwood</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus42">95</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Yard of the "White Hart," Brentwood</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus43">98</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Shenfield</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus44">100</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Mountnessing Church</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus45">102</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Gatehouse, Ingatestone Hall</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus46">106</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>At Margaretting</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus47">111</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span>The "Good Woman" Sign</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus48">113</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Bridge: Entrance to Chelmsford</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus49">115</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Conduit, Chelmsford</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus50">116</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Tindal's Statue</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus51">117</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Three Cups" Sign</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus52">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Springfield Church</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus53">123</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Boreham</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus54">128</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Angel," Kelvedon</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus55">141</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Birthplace of Spurgeon</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus56">151</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Near Mark's Tey</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus57">176</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Lexden </td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus58">180</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Grand Staircase, Colchester Castle</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus59">199</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Old Man Trap, Colchester Castle</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus60">205</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Colchester Castle</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus61">207</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Gun Hill</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus62">221</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Old Toll-house, Stratford Bridge</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus63">222</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Wolsey's Gateway</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus64">242</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Lion and Lamb," Angel Lane</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus65">244</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Sparrowe's House</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus66">246</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Great White Horse"</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus67">248</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Mockbeggar Hall</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus68">253</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>"Stonham Pie"</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus69">256</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Near Brockford </td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus70">257</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>"Thwaite Low House"</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus71">259</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The "Cock," Thwaite</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus72">260</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Long Stratton</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus73">295</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Tasburgh</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus74">297</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>The Old Brick Pound</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus75">301</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Caistor Camp</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus76">303</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Norwich Snap</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus77">318</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>Norfolk Turkey, on his way to Leadenhall Market</td>
+  <td class="tdr"><a href="#illus78">320</a></td>
+</tr>
+
+
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiii" id="Page_xiii">[Pg xiii]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="c large p2">THE ROAD TO NORWICH</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td class="tdl"></td><td class="tdr"><span class="half">MILES</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">London (Whitechapel Church) to Mile End</td><td class="tdr">1</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford-le-Bow (Bow Church)</td><td class="tdr">2</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Lea).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford (Broadway)</td><td class="tdr">4</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Forest Gate</td><td class="tdr">5</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Manor Park</td><td class="tdr">6</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ilford</td><td class="tdr">6</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Roding).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Seven Kings</td><td class="tdr">7</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross "Seven Kings' Watering," or Fillebrook).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Chadwell Heath</td><td class="tdr">9</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Romford</td><td class="tdr">12</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Hare Street</td><td class="tdr">13</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Puttels Bridge</td><td class="tdr">15</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross Weald Brook).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Brook Street</td><td class="tdr">16</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Brentwood</td><td class="tdr">18</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Shenfield</td><td class="tdr">19</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Mountnessing Street</td><td class="tdr">21</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ingatestone</td><td class="tdr">23</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Margaretting Street</td><td class="tdr">25</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Widford</td><td class="tdr">27</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Wid or Ash).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Moulsham</td><td class="tdr">28</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xiv" id="Page_xiv">[Pg xiv]</a></span>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Chelmer).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Chelmsford</td><td class="tdr">29</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Springfield</td><td class="tdr">29</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Boreham</td><td class="tdr">32</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Ter).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Hatfield Peverel</td><td class="tdr">34</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Witham).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Witham</td><td class="tdr">37</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Rivenhall End</td><td class="tdr">39</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Kelvedon</td><td class="tdr">41</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Blackwater).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Gore Pit</td><td class="tdr">42</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Mark's Tey</td><td class="tdr">45</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Copford</td><td class="tdr">46</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stanway</td><td class="tdr">47</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Lexden Heath</td><td class="tdr">48</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Lexden</td><td class="tdr">49</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Colchester</td><td class="tdr">51</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Colne).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Dilbridge</td><td class="tdr">52</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford Bridge</td><td class="tdr">57</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Stour).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stratford St Mary</td><td class="tdr">58</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Capel Railway Crossing. Capel Station. Capel St Mary.</td><td class="tdr">63</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Copdock</td><td class="tdr">65</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Washbrook</td><td class="tdr">66</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross Wash Brook).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ipswich</td><td class="tdr">69</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Orwell)</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xv" id="Page_xv">[Pg xv]</a></span>Whitton Street</td><td class="tdr">71</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Claydon</td><td class="tdr">72</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Creeting All Saints</td><td class="tdr">76</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stonham Earls</td><td class="tdr">79</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Little Stonham</td><td class="tdr">79</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Brockford</td><td class="tdr">83</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Thwaite</td><td class="tdr">84</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Stoke Ash</td><td class="tdr">86</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Yaxley</td><td class="tdr">88</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Brome</td><td class="tdr">90</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Waveney).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Scole</td><td class="tdr">92</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Dickleburgh</td><td class="tdr">94</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Tivetshall Level Crossing</td><td class="tdr">97</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Wacton</td><td class="tdr">100</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Long Stratton</td><td class="tdr">101</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Tasburgh</td><td class="tdr">102</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Tase).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Newton Flotman</td><td class="tdr">104</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Tase).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Hartford Bridge</td><td class="tdr">109</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;(Cross River Yare).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Norwich (Market Place)</td><td class="tdr">111</td><td class="tdl">�</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_xvi" id="Page_xvi">[Pg xvi]</a><br /><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus28">
+<img src="images/fig5.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE NORWICH ROAD</p>
+</div></div>
+
+<p class="c large">I</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> the days before railways came, robbing the exits
+from London of all dignity and purpose, the runaway
+'prentice lads of the familiar legends, who were
+always half starved and continually beaten, revolting
+at length from their uncomfortable beds under the
+shop counters and their daily stripes and scorpions,
+were wont, according to the story-books, to steal at
+night out of their houses of bondage and make for
+the roads. Such an one, making in those days for
+Norwich, and standing at Aldgate in the grey of the
+morning, looking across the threshold of London,
+would have seen, in the long broad road stretching
+before him, the only means of escape. The shilling
+or so of which he would be the owner would scarce
+serve him for two or three days' keep; and so, although
+he might have longed for a place on the coach
+he could see starting from the "Spread Eagle," in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_2" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</a></span>
+Gracechurch Street, at 4 a.m., there would have been
+for such as he no choice but to start afoot, with as
+light a heart as possible, and chance the offer of a
+lift on some waggon returning into Essex. Had he,
+in leaving Aldgate behind, asked some passer-by the
+way to Norwich, he might have been seized for what
+he was, a runaway; but, if he escaped suspicion,
+would have been answered readily enough, for everyone
+in those times knew the way to lie along the
+Whitechapel Road and by Mile End Turnpike. Has
+anyone in these enlightened and highly-educated
+times courage sufficient to ask his way to Norwich
+from Aldgate? and, assuming that dauntless courage,
+is it conceivable that anyone in that crowded street
+could tell him?</p>
+
+<p>There are no apprentices and no tyrannical
+masters of the old kind left now, and the only
+runaways of these days are the bad boys of precocious
+wits who would not think of tramping the
+highway while they could raise a railway fare or
+"lift" a bicycle. But the way still lies open to
+the explorer from Aldgate, and the old Norwich
+Road yet follows the line of the Roman way into
+the country of the Iceni.</p>
+
+<p>Between the era of our imaginary truant and
+that of the Romans, who originally constructed this
+road, there yawns a vast gulf of time; certainly not
+less than eighteen hundred years. The history of
+the road during that space has largely been forgotten;
+but, worst of all, we know perhaps less of
+it and its life in the times of Charles the First,
+onward to those of William and Mary, than we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span>
+can recover from Roman historians; and certainly
+its coaching history is in tatters and fragments, for
+those who made it did not live in the bright glow
+of publicity that surrounded the coachmen of roads
+north, south or west, and died unexploited by the
+sporting writers of the Coaching Age.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">II</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Nearly</span> seventeen centuries have passed since, in
+the great <i>Antonine Itinerary</i> of the Roman Empire,
+the first guide-book to the roads was compiled, and
+almost eighty years since Cary and Paterson&mdash;the
+rival Bradshaws and A.B.C.'s of the Coaching Age&mdash;issued
+the last editions of their <i>Travellers Companions</i>,
+which now, instead of being constantly in
+the travellers' hands, are treasured on the shelves of
+collectors interested in relics of days before railways.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Antonine Itinerary</i> was compiled, <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 200-300.
+Among other roads of which it purports to
+give an account is the road to Venta Icenorum;
+the Norwich Road, as we should say. Its statement
+is brief and to the point, if requiring no little explanation
+after this lapse of time:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+
+<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" summary="">
+<tr><td class="tdl">Iter a Venta Icenorum Londinio <i>m.p.</i>&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">cxxviii <i>sic.</i></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Sitomago</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xxxii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Combretonio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xxii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Ad Ansam</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xv</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>Camuloduno</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">vii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Canonio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">viiii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">C�saromago</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xii</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Durolito</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xvi</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="tdl">Londinio</td><td class="tdl">&nbsp;</td><td class="tdl">xv</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<p>A hundred and twenty-eight miles, that is to
+say, between Venta and London. The Romans, of
+course, calculated all their mileages in Britain from
+that hoary relic, the still existing "London Stone,"
+which, from behind its modern iron grating in the
+wall of St Swithin's Church, still turns a battered
+face towards the heedless, hurrying crowds in
+Cannon Street, in the City of London.</p>
+
+<p>In coaching days the Norwich Road, in common
+with most East Anglian routes, was measured from
+Whitechapel Church, and the distance from that
+landmark to Norwich given as 111� miles. The
+apparent wide difference between those measurements
+of classic and modern times is very nearly reconciled
+when we add a mile for the distance between
+London Stone and Whitechapel Church to the 111�
+miles, and when we reduce the Roman miles to
+English. An English mile measures 5280 feet, while
+a Roman mile runs only to 4842 feet, this fact accounting,
+along the road to Norwich, for some 13
+miles of the discrepancy, and bringing the difference
+to the insignificant one of 3� miles; or, assuming
+the Roman ruins at Caistor, 3 miles short of Norwich,
+to mark the site of Venta Icenorum, 6� miles; no
+very wide margin of error.</p>
+
+<p>The compiler of that ancient itinerary is unknown.
+He, or they (for a survey of the Roman
+Empire cannot have been made by one man), are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span>
+quite hidden and lost to sight under the title of
+"Antonine," which was given in honour of the
+Emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla, father
+and son, who both owned the name Antoninus. By
+similarly honorary titles we are accustomed to
+christen our public buildings. Thus, in coming ages,
+when such earthworms as engineers and architects
+are forgotten, the "Victoria" Embankment,
+"Victoria" Station, the "Victoria and Albert"
+Museum, and the thousand and one other things
+thus entitled will serve to hand a Sovereign down to
+futurity, while the names of those who created them,
+good or ill, will have perished, like the leaves of
+autumn. Customs change, and fashions cease to be,
+but snobbery is more enduring than brass or marble,
+and outlasts the mummies of the Pharaohs.</p>
+
+<p>The compiler who drew up the list of places on
+the road between Londinium and Venta has chosen
+to reckon backwards. The "<i>m. p.</i>" is the abbreviation
+for <i>mille passus</i>, or paced Roman miles; the
+figures after the first line giving the distance from
+the place last mentioned. Setting out from London,
+we find "Durolitum" to be identified with the
+Roman earthworks of Uphall, near Romford;
+"C�saromagus" to be identical with Writtle, near
+Chelmsford; "Canonium" to stand for Kelvedon;
+"Camulodunum" for Colchester; and "Ad Ansam"
+for Stratford St Mary; while "Combretonium" and
+"Sitomagus" still puzzle antiquaries, who are reduced
+to the extremity of suggesting the opposite
+alternatives of Brettenham or Burgh for the one, and
+Dunwich or Thetford for the other; names with a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span>
+specious resemblance, and on circuitous routes east or
+west of the direct road which would more than
+account for the Roman surveyor's overplus of miles.
+The direct road, however, is unmistakably Roman,
+and those who will may seek for the elusive "Sitomagus"
+and "Combretonium" along it. Haply they
+may discover them at Scole, Dickleburgh or Long
+Stratton.</p>
+
+<p>But along the whole length of the road, from
+London to Norwich, the wayfarer receives impressions
+of its true Roman character, whether in its appearance
+or in the place-names on the way. Old Ford
+and Stratford-at-Bow, where the Roman paved fords
+crossed the River Lea; that other "old ford" at
+Ilford, across the River Roding, which was already
+ancient when the Saxons came and so named it,
+"Eald Ford," leaving it for later times to corrupt the
+name into "Ilford" and for uninstructed historians
+to explain the meaning to have been that it was an
+"ill ford"; to which condition, indeed, many had
+descended in medi�val times: these are examples.
+Others are found at Ingatestone, the Saxon "Ing-atte-stone"
+= the "meadow at the stone," a Roman
+milestone that stood by the wayside; in the names
+of Stanway, Colchester, Stratford St Mary. Little
+Stonham, Tivetshall, and Long Stratton, places to be
+more particularly mentioned later in these pages.</p>
+
+<p>It has been aptly pointed out by East Anglian
+antiquaries that the circuitous route eastward or
+westward of the straight road between Stratford St
+Mary and Norwich, on which Sitomagus and Combretonium
+may have been situated, may probably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>
+have been an early Roman way, constructed shortly
+after the conquest of the Iceni, along an old native
+trackway, and superseded in later and more settled
+times by the direct road, overlooked by the Antonine
+compilers who, working at Rome, the very centre of
+the Empire, may not have been fully informed of
+changes in countries like Britain, on the edge of the
+Unknown. This view, when we consider the long
+period stretching between the conquest of this part
+of the country and the final break up of the Romano-British
+civilisation, about <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 450, has much to recommend
+it. A period of some three hundred and
+eighty years of colonisation and development, equalling,
+for example, the great gulf of time between our
+own day and that of Henry the Eighth, the changes
+in its course must have rivalled, if not have surpassed,
+those in our roads between the sixteenth and nineteenth
+centuries. During those eras, between the
+first and the fifth centuries, many of the original
+winding tracks must have been straightened, or left
+to the secondary position of byways, while new and
+straight roads were engineered across country
+formerly, for one reason or another, avoided. Meanwhile,
+the Antonine Itinerary-makers must have relied
+for their surveys upon old and out-of-date information,
+just as, in our own time, we find many recent
+maps, printed from the Ordnance Survey of a hundred
+years ago, still indicating winding roads that have
+been non-existent for generations, and ignoring the
+direct highways made by Telford and others just
+before the opening of the Railway Era.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">III</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">London</span> made no remarkable growth between the
+Roman and medi�val periods, but this road had in
+that time slightly altered its course from its starting-point,
+and, instead of going from Cannon Street to
+Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Old Ford, left the
+City by way of Leadenhall Street and Aldgate,
+continuing down the Mile End and Bow Roads to
+Stratford.</p>
+
+<p>The traveller of Chaucer's day, coming to Ald Gate,
+in the City wall, had reached the country. That
+gate spanned the road at a point marked nowadays
+by the house, No 2 Aldgate High Street, standing
+at the boundary of the parishes of St Katharine
+Cree and St Botolph. In 1374 Chaucer took from
+the Corporation of London a lease for the remainder
+of his life of the rooms in this gate, which was
+pulled down and succeeded by another, built in
+1606, which in its turn disappeared in 1761.</p>
+
+<p>From his windows commanding the road Chaucer
+must often have seen that dainty gentlewoman, the
+Prioress of St Leonard's, Stratford, riding to or from
+London, escorted by a numerous train, and from her
+must have drawn that portrait of the prioress who
+spoke French with a Cockney accent:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"After the scole of Stratford-att�-Bowe,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">For French of Parys was to hire unknowe."</span><br />
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>In Chaucer's day they probably taught French, of
+sorts, at the Priory schools.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus2">
+<img src="images/fig6.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">ALDGATE PUMP. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a><br /><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span></p>
+<p>At that time it was no little journey to Stratford,
+although by measurement less than four miles, and
+the lady went strongly escorted, as, indeed, did all
+of consequence, or those who had aught to lose.
+For the more common wayfarers who went alone
+on this desperate eastern trail there stood the Chapel
+and the Holy Well of St Michael the Archangel
+within the City, where the otherwise unprotected
+might seek the aid of the Saint's strong arm before
+leaving the walled City behind on their perilous
+faring. This chapel stood where Leadenhall Street,
+Fenchurch Street and Aldgate meet, on a site
+thrown into the roadway in 1876, when the street
+was widened. Until that year the crypt of this
+shrine had filled the prosaic functions of a cellar
+in the corner house, itself demolished, together with
+the beautiful Early English arches on which it stood.
+Adjoining was "Aldgate Pump," which had long
+before unromantically taken the place of the sanctified
+spring. That celebrated civic monument is seen
+in the accompanying illustration, taken in 1854.
+Many City wits have exercised their satirical powers
+upon it, and the expression long current of "a
+draft on Aldgate Pump," a once popular mercantile
+phrase for a bad note, goes back so far as the days
+of Fielding. Oddly enough, the water of the pump
+retained some repute until 1876, when, on being
+analysed, it was found impure, and the supply
+closed. The pump, however, is still in existence,
+rebuilt of its original stones, a few feet away from
+the old site, and yields water again; not, however,
+from the old saintly source, but from the strictly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>
+secular filter-beds of the New River Water Company.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus29">
+<img src="images/fig7.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "BULL," LEADENHALL STREET. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Having implored the protection of St Michael,
+travellers of old went, heartened, upon their way
+down what is now Whitechapel High Street, which
+Strype, writing in the time of James the First, calls
+a "spacious fair street," with "sweet and wholesome
+air." Past hedgerows of elm trees and rustic
+stiles and bridges, those old wayfarers went, and
+onward down the Whitechapel Road, where the
+country was a lovely solitude, with "nothing but
+the bounteous gifts of Nature and saint-like tokens
+of innocency," which, according to Sir Thomas
+More, in 1504, characterised the charming fields of
+Mile End, Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse. This,
+it will be allowed, is scarcely descriptive of those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span>
+places to-day, whatever they may become when the
+People's Palace and the University Settlements have
+done their work.</p>
+
+<p>Thus far for sake of contrast. Let us return to
+Aldgate for a while, and, without following its
+fortunes throughout the centuries, glance at it in
+the Coaching Age, before the squalor of modern
+Whitechapel had invaded it from the east, or the
+extension of City business had come to destroy
+most of that picturesque assemblage of old inns
+and medi�val gabled houses, to replace them with
+the giant warehouses and "imposing" offices of
+modern London.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">IV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Although</span>, as we have seen, the East Anglian
+roads were, in coaching days, measured from Whitechapel
+Church, the great actual starting-place was
+Aldgate, where many of the old inns were situated,
+as, in like manner, the ancient hostelries of the
+Borough clustered at the beginning of the road
+to Canterbury and Dover. Aldgate occupies a
+position midway between London Stone, the Roman
+starting-point in Cannon Street, and Whitechapel
+Church, and to and from this spot came and went
+the stage-coaches, post-chaises and waggons in
+the palmy days of the road. The mail-coaches,
+of course, had a starting-point of their own, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span>
+set out from the old General Post-Office in Lombard
+Street, or, in the last years of coaching, from St
+Martin's-le-Grand.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus30">
+<img src="images/fig9.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">FRONT OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD," ALDGATE: PRESENT DAY.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is true that one might have taken coach
+from many other and more central inns for Colchester,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span>Ipswich and Norwich:&mdash;from the "Spread
+Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, a fine old galleried
+inn demolished at the close of 1865; from the
+"Cross Keys," in the same street; from the
+"Swan with Two Necks," in Lad Lane, anciently
+Lady Lane (that is to say, the Lane of Our Lady,
+the Blessed Virgin), now Gresham Street; or from
+the "Bull," 151 Leadenhall Street, which must
+by no means be confounded with its namesake
+in Aldgate High Street. Exactly what that
+Leadenhall Street hostelry was like let the
+picture of its old galleried courtyard show.</p>
+
+<p>There was also "another way" to Norwich;
+out of Bishopsgate, by way of Newmarket, Bury
+and Thetford. Taking this route, which, although
+2� miles shorter, no true sportsman considered
+to be the real Norwich Road, one started from
+the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross; from the
+"White Horse," in Fetter Lane (improved
+away in 1898); from the "Flower Pot," in
+Bishopsgate Street; from yet another "Bull," also
+in Bishopsgate Street; or from the "Bull and
+Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand. But when all
+these places have been duly set forth, it is to
+Aldgate that we must turn as the real starting-point.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus31">
+<img src="images/fig10.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD" IN COACHING DAYS. <span class="in5"><i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd</i>, 1854.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Aldgate in the days before railways was quite
+unlike the Aldgate of to-day. Certain of the old
+buildings remain, but the "note" of the place is
+entirely altered. It is now a noisy, distracting
+ante-room to the City, in which tinkling tram-cars
+and costermongers' barrows jostle with elephantine
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>railway goods vans; where the Jewish second-hand
+clothes shop rubs a greasy shoulder with the
+"merchant tailor's" vulgar show of electric light,
+plate glass and wax models; and where the East
+End, in the person of the aproned, ringleted and
+ostrich-feathered factory girl, meets the West, in
+the shape of some City clerk strayed beyond his
+mercantile or financial frontiers, each regarding
+the other as a curiosity in these social marches.
+It is as the meeting of salt water and fresh, this
+mingling of the tides of City and East End, and
+to the observant not a little curious. Nothing
+like it&mdash;nothing so marked&mdash;is to be seen on any
+other of the borders of the City. There is, too,
+a smack of the sea, a certain air of romance, in
+the street, coming, perhaps, from the windows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>
+of the nautical instrument-makers, where the
+binoculars, the quadrants, the sextants and the
+sea-faring tackle in general hint of distant climes
+and the coral reefs of South Pacific isles.</p>
+
+<p>These mariners' emporia were here and in the
+Minories before railways came, and so also were
+many fine old inns. For Aldgate, difficult though
+it may be to realise it to-day, was not only the
+place whence many of the Essex, Suffolk and
+Norfolk coaches set out, but was also the resting-place
+of travellers to London; and its inns were
+quite as well-appointed as those of the more
+central ones in the City, or those of Charing Cross,
+or the West End. As travellers by rail to London
+in modern times resort to the railway hotels, so
+did our great-grandfathers find rest at the coaching
+inns at whose thresholds they were set down at
+their journey's end.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus32">
+<img src="images/fig8.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD": PRESENT DAY.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The fragments merely of the last of Aldgate's
+old hostelries remain, in the bold front of Nos.
+6 and 7, forming two-thirds of the old frontage
+of the "Saracen's Head." No. 5, the other third,
+has been destroyed, and so also has the old appearance
+of the galleried courtyard, still named
+"Saracen's Head Yard," but now surrounded by
+warehouses. The old coach archway remains, and
+the gables at the back of the buildings are quaint
+reminiscences of other times. Coaches plied
+between the "Saracen's Head" and Norwich so
+far back as 1681, and Strype, the antiquary,
+born in the neighbourhood, in a court whose
+name now flaunts the horrid travesty of "Tripe
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span>Court," referring to the inn, speaks of it as "very
+large and of a considerable trade." The existing
+fragment, with its handsome architectural elevation
+of richly-moulded plaster in the Renaissance style
+of the late seventeenth century, is part of the
+building mentioned by him. Small shops now<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>
+occupy the ground floor, and the upper rooms
+are let as tenements.</p>
+
+<p>But the "Bull" was perhaps the most famous
+of these old inns. From it Mr Pickwick set out
+for Ipswich, and from Sam Weller's remark on that
+occasion, "Take care o' the archway, gen'l'men,"
+as the coach started, it is evident that the "Bull"
+possessed a courtyard. At that palmy time of
+inns and coaches, the opening of the nineteenth
+century, the "Bull" was, and long had been, in
+the Nelson family, a noted race of inn and coach
+proprietors. At that particular time Mrs Ann
+Nelson, widow of the late host, who died about
+1812, was the presiding genius. Associated with
+her was her son John. Another son, Robert, had
+a business of his own, and was long proprietor of
+the "Belle Sauvage," on Ludgate Hill, and partner
+with others in many coaches. A third son, George,
+drove the Exeter "Defiance," horsed by his mother
+out of London.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to the "Bull" and Mrs Nelson,
+who had, as her husband had, and his father
+before him, some sort of interest in many coaches
+running into Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, on main
+or bye-roads. She also at one time leased the
+"Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, and extended
+her energies so far as to horse the Exeter
+"Telegraph" and the "Quicksilver" Devonport
+Mail out of London, together with the Exeter
+"Defiance" night coach, the Manchester "Telegraph,"
+the Oxford "Defiance," Brighton "Red
+Rover," and the Leeds "Courier." In their<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span>
+coaching speculations the Nelson family were
+associated with a pastrycook whose little shop
+adjoined the gateway of the "Bull." Occasionally
+a new hand on one of the coaches would send
+his leaders' noses through the shop front, for that
+gateway was very narrow and Mrs Nelson's coachmen
+anything but deliberate. On the other side
+of the gateway was a whip-maker's shop, kept by
+one James Johnson, who throve mightily on the
+custom of the coachmen and others who frequented
+the "Bull."</p>
+
+<p>This most energetic of landladies and Napoleonic
+of coach proprietors developed and managed her
+extensive coaching interests long before her
+husband died. He, good, easy-going man, had
+been a fair whip in earlier days, but had long
+left the box, and had no head for business,
+although a very fine taste in wines and spirits:
+the lack of the first probably a corollary of the
+second. She spared neither herself nor her
+servants. Rising considerably before the lark,
+she saw the owls to bed, and was a martinet to
+her coachmen. Left a widow while in the prime
+of life, she still wore in old age the dress of her
+youth. The sketch of her in the picture of the
+"Bull" yard in coaching days shows exactly what
+her costume was like. A short skirt revealed high-heeled
+shoes with large buckles, the heels painted
+red. Black velvet was her winter wear, and fancy
+apron, lace neckerchief and frilled cap invariable
+items. Up to her seventieth year she was the
+last up at night, scouring the house to see that
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a><br /><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a><br /><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span>all was safe; and the first up in the morning,
+looking after the stable people and seeing that the
+horses had their feeds and were properly cared
+for. Inside and outside the house, and down
+the eastern roads, her influence was despotic and
+would brook no defiance. Her "Ipswich Blues"
+had long been famous when an opposition coach
+was started. Opposition could not be allowed
+to live, and so the fares were reduced
+from eight shillings inside and sixteen shillings
+out, by regular stages until the point was
+reached when passengers were not only carried for
+nothing, but were presented with an excellent
+dinner at Witham. At that point the rivals discreetly
+retired, when fares rose again to their old
+level.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus3">
+<img src="images/fig11.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">ALDGATE, 1820.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mrs Nelson insisted on the most rigid punctuality.
+Did the coachman of one of her crack
+coaches or one of her still more famous "Oppositions"
+bring his team down her yard five minutes
+over time, he was reprimanded; ten minutes, and
+he was fined half-a-crown; a quarter of an hour,
+and he stood a good chance of being dismissed.
+She ran a Southend "Opposition" every afternoon
+by Romford, Brentwood, Billericay, Wickford,
+Raleigh and Rochford, along Essex roads of a
+feather-bed softness of mud; but time must be
+kept. She provided good horses and would not
+hear of excuses. One day, when the roads were
+particularly heavy, the "Opposition" came in half
+an hour late from Southend. The coachman, after
+the manner of his kind, on driving into the yard<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>
+and pulling up at the coffee-room door, threw his
+whip across the wheelers' backs. Mrs Nelson had
+long been watching the clock, and, coming out,
+took the whip and hung it up, with the quiet
+remark, "That whip is no longer yours, Philpot&mdash;half
+an hour behind."</p>
+
+<p>"But the roads are so bad, ma'am," remonstrated
+poor Toby. "I'm sure, ma'am, the
+gentlemen knew I did my best; but I felt bound
+to spare the cattle."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> find the cattle and employ you to drive
+them," replied the inexorable landlady; "<i>you</i>
+have nothing to do but to keep time. Draw
+your wages and leave the yard."</p>
+
+<p>Under this iron rule it is no wonder that her
+coachmen were sometimes "pulled up" for furious
+driving. On one of these occasions she appeared
+in court in defence of her man. "I understand,
+Mrs Nelson," blandly remarked the Chairman of
+the Bench, "that you give your coachmen instructions
+to race the rival coach."</p>
+
+<p>"Not exactly," replied the lady; "my orders
+to them are simply that they are to get the
+road and keep it."</p>
+
+<p>But if a very dragon of strictness, she treated
+coachmen and guards very well. They had their
+especial room, and dined as well there, at reduced
+prices, as any of her coffee-room customers. This
+especial consideration reflected itself in those functionaries,
+who jealously preserved the privacy of
+their room; the amateur coachman who secured
+the invitation to join them (and to pay out of his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>
+own pocket for their wine and spirits) feeling
+himself greatly honoured.</p>
+
+<p>In other respects, the "Bull" was a model to
+other houses. No damp sheets in any one of
+its hundred and fifty beds, no drunken brawlers;
+nothing a minute out of time, or an inch out of
+place. Mrs Nelson's fine house was, indeed, nothing
+less than an institution. In later years her
+son John took more of the management upon his
+shoulders, and the business seemed likely to long
+outlast his time.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2">V</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">But</span> a whisper of coming changes disturbed the
+air as early as 1830. Coachmen and travellers
+talked in the stableyard and the cosy rooms of
+the "Bull" of men with strange instruments encountered
+along the road; "chaps with telescopes
+on three sticks, and other chaps with chains and
+things, measuring the fields." It was thus that
+they described the surveyors, with their theodolites
+and their staff of men, who were setting out the
+proposed route of the projected Eastern Counties
+Railway that was to run all the way from London
+to Colchester, Norwich and Yarmouth.</p>
+
+<p>John Nelson was too confident in the existing
+order of things to believe that a few pounds of
+coal and some boiling water would ever be a
+match for his horses, or that a time would<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>
+presently come when those passengers of his who
+now derided the railways would desert the coaches.
+The "Bull" had been in his family for more than
+a hundred and twelve years, as an inn and a
+coaching house, and he could as soon have
+imagined the end of the world as a day coming
+when the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches
+should no longer enter or leave his yard. It was
+a good joke for a while, when the coaches came
+in, to ask "How they were getting on with that
+railway?" but when the surveys were completed
+and the prospectus of the "Grand Eastern Counties
+Railway" was issued in 1834, it was seen that
+the railway men meant business. The original
+proposal of the directors was to follow the road
+closely and to bring the line into Aldgate.
+When it was seen that the railway was really to
+be made, Nelson raised an opposition against the
+Aldgate terminus, and was successful in driving
+the Company into an out-of-the-way site in
+Shoreditch, where for many years that terminus
+remained.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus33">
+<img src="images/fig12.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE YARD OF THE "BULL," WHITECHAPEL, IN COACHING DAYS.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The Eastern Counties Railway was opened as
+far as Chelmsford in 1839, to Colchester in 1842,
+and communication to Norwich was opened up in
+1845. From the day of the first opening, the
+"Bull" declined. Old customers still found their
+way from the slums of Shoreditch to its hospitable
+door, but were not reinforced by the newer generation
+of travellers, to whom the road and its end
+in Aldgate were alike unknown. They went to the
+City inns, and later to the more central hotels,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span>leaving the "Bull" to slowly sink into neglect.
+John Nelson made a big bid for success in another
+line, and ran the "Wellington" omnibuses with
+success from 1855 until his death, at the age of
+seventy-four, in June 1868. He had long resided
+in the West End, and was a man of ample fortune,
+so that the end of the "Bull's" coaching career
+hurt him only in sentiment. His mother, that most
+autocratic and business-like of women, had died ten
+years before, active almost to the last, although she
+had reached the age of eighty-five years. Towards
+the close of 1868 the old inn ended its long career.
+Its substantial, old-fashioned silver-plate and massive
+furniture were sold by auction, with the stock of
+rare old wines, laid in many years before, for that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span>
+old generation of travellers who delighted in port
+and sherry, and plenty of both.</p>
+
+<p>The very site of the "Bull" is now sought with
+pains and labour, and only to be discovered with
+difficulty by the present generation. It was
+numbered 25 Aldgate High Street, and stood where
+Aldgate Avenue, a modern alley rich in offices of
+"commission agents," and curious things of that
+kind, now cuts its way through where the old
+yard used to be.</p>
+
+<p>Close by the "Bull" was another old coaching
+inn, the "Blue Boar," now quite vanished, kept for
+a time by John Thorogood. The Thorogoods were
+in those days, and in these times of amateur
+coaching are still, a family of coachmen. "Old
+John," who owned the "Norwich Times," and
+actually drove it for two years without missing a
+journey the whole of that time, clearly deserved
+his patronymic, in thus handling the reins along
+a hundred and twelve miles of road for seven
+hundred and thirty consecutive days.</p>
+
+<p>It was to the "Blue Boar" that little David
+Copperfield came, on his miserable journey from
+Yarmouth:&mdash;"We approached London by degrees,
+and got, in due time, to the inn, in the Whitechapel
+district, I forget whether it was the 'Blue Bull'
+or the 'Blue Boar,' but I know it was the Blue
+Something, and that its likeness was painted upon
+the back of the coach." The sculptured effigy of a
+boar, with gilded tusks and hoofs, built into the
+wall of a tobacco factory, marks the site of the
+inn.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Among other noted inns, the "Three Nuns"
+must be named. From it set out the short stages
+to Ilford, Epping, Romford and Woodford, together
+with coaches for several of the Essex by-roads.
+The house owes its name to the Minoresses, or nuns,
+of St Clare, from whose religious establishment the
+Minories obtains its title. The inn was rebuilt
+in 1877, and is now nothing more than a huge
+public-house.</p>
+
+<p>Many other inns of consequence in their day
+have left nothing but their yards behind them to
+show where they stood:&mdash;George Yard, Spread
+Eagle Yard, Black Horse Yard, Boar's Head Yard,
+White Swan Yard, Half Moon Passage, and Kent
+and Essex Yard are such relics, bordering High
+Street, Whitechapel, where one curious sign survives,
+that of an inn called the "Horse and Leaping Bar."</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> decided advantage the Chelmsford, Colchester
+and Ipswich route to Norwich possessed in old times
+over that by way of Newmarket and Thetford.
+Neither could have been considered safe in the bad
+old days, but while the traveller across the wild
+heaths of Newmarket and Thetford was almost
+certain to be "held up" on his lonely course, the
+other way, through Essex, passed by few such
+wildernesses, and had more towns and villages along<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>
+its course, to give a sense of security. Briefly,
+robbery on one route was a probability, and on the
+other was regarded as certain. Margaret Paston,
+writing from Norfolk to her husband in London,
+so long ago as the fifteenth century, certainly gives
+even the way through Essex a bad name, for she
+asks him to pay a debt for one of their friends,
+because it was not safe, "on account of the robbers,"
+to send money up from the country; but at the
+very same time the Thetford route had a much
+more sinister reputation, and travellers versed in
+the gossip of the road avoided it if possible, or
+went in company and well armed, for in that era
+a certain William Cratfield, Rector of Wrotham, "a
+common and notorious thief and lurker on the roads,
+and murderer and slayer," lurked and robbed and
+slew on Newmarket Heath, in company with a
+certain "Thomas Tapyrtone, hosyer." He was at
+last laid by the heels, in 1416, and charged with
+robbing a Londoner of �12. This distinguished
+ornament of the Church died in Newgate, but of
+the villainous hosier we hear no more. Perhaps he
+had realised a fortune in the business and retired
+to enjoy the fruits of his industry. With the
+disappearance of this worthy couple, travellers
+breathed more freely, but for surety's sake continued
+to patronise the Essex route, and so by way
+of Ipswich to come to the City of Orchards, as
+Norwich was called of old.</p>
+
+<p>As time went on, a certain degree of security was
+found in the coaches that began to make an appearance
+with the second half of the seventeenth century.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>
+They travelled at first no more quickly than a man
+could walk, but they provided company, which was,
+under the circumstances, highly desirable. Soon,
+however, they found it possible to do the journey
+in two days. Strype, we have already seen
+mentions the "Saracen's Head" in Aldgate as the
+centre of a considerable trade, and to it in 1681 a
+Norwich coach was running; an innovation which
+aroused the indignation of innkeepers on the way
+to almost as great a height as that of their descendants
+when, two hundred and forty years later,
+railways were depopulating the roads. When
+travellers began to go by coach instead of on
+horseback, and to reach London or Norwich in two
+days instead of three or four, those antique tapsters
+thought they saw their living going, and, strange to
+say, there were not wanting men who raised their
+voices against the innovation of being carried on a
+journey, instead of riding; although, for the most
+part, their outcry was the result only of innate conservatism.</p>
+
+<p>"Travelling in these coaches," said an anonymous
+pamphleteer, "can neither prove advantageous
+to men's health or business. For what
+advantage is it to men's health to be called out of
+their beds into these coaches an hour before day in the
+morning, to be hurried in them from place to place, till
+one hour, two, or three within night; insomuch that
+after sitting all day in the summer time stifled with
+heat, and choked with the dust, or the winter time
+starving and freezing with cold or choked with
+filthy fogs, they are often brought into their inns by<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span>
+torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get
+supper; and next morning they are forced into the
+coach so early that they can get no breakfast. What
+addition is this to men's health or business? to ride
+all day with strangers, oftentimes sick, ancient,
+diseased persons, or young children crying; to
+whose humours they are obliged to be subject, forced
+to bear with, and many times are poisoned with
+their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of the
+boxes and bundles."</p>
+
+<p>Yet "these coaches" (one can almost hear the
+intonation of contempt in that phrase) were from
+the first a success. The greater that success the
+louder for a time was the outcry against them.
+Taylor, the Water Poet, was one of those who wrote
+vehemently against the new methods of travel.
+To him a coach was "a close hypocrite; for it hath
+a cover for knavery and curtains to vaile and shadow
+any wickedness. Besides, like a perpetual cheater,
+it wears two bootes, and no spurs, sometimes having
+two pairs of legs to one boote, and oftentimes
+(against nature) it makes faire ladies weare the
+boote; and if you note, they are carried back to
+back, like people surprised by pyrats, to be tyed in
+that miserable manner and thrown overboard into
+the sea. Moreover, it makes people imitate sea-crabs,
+in being drawn sideways as they are when
+they sit in the boot of the coach; and it is a
+dangerous kind of carriage for the commonwealth,
+if it be considered."</p>
+
+<p>The boot of which he speaks so contemptuously,
+was a method of packing the "outsides," of which<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>
+we still find a survival in the Irish jaunting-car.
+There are those who trace the origin of the term
+from the French "<i>bo�te</i>," a box. Even now the
+coachman's seat is "the box," and the modern fore-boot
+is under it.</p>
+
+<p>Writers of that time seem almost unanimously to
+have taken sides against coaching; with, however, no
+effect; for, somewhat later than Taylor, that doughty
+Conservative, John Cresset, is found exclaiming
+furiously against the multitude of them. He
+favoured the suppression of all, or, at least&mdash;counsels
+of moderation prevailing&mdash;of most. They were, he
+said, mischievous to the public, destructive to trade
+and prejudicial to the land. Not only did they
+injure the breed of horses, but also that of watermen;
+which last objection goes further than the
+complaints of Taylor himself, who, writing at the
+same time, does not speak of his breed being debased,
+but only of his trade being crippled. Cresset
+thought the stage-coaches tempted the country
+gentry to London too often, and he accordingly
+proposed that these conveyances should be limited
+to one for every county town in England, to go
+backwards and forwards once a week.</p>
+
+<p>Vain hope! Coaches of sorts must already have
+appeared on the road to Norwich by the middle of
+the seventeenth century, for in a proclamation of July
+20th in the plague year, 1665, when all places were
+dreading infected London, it is ordained, that "from
+this daie all ye passage coaches shall be prohibited
+to goe from ye city to London and come from thence
+hither, and also ye common carts and wagons."<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span>
+Already, in 1696, the "Confatharrat" coach was a
+well-known conveyance between London and
+Norwich, and the name of Suggate, the London and
+East Anglian carrier, a household word. Unhappily,
+nothing can be gathered as to when Suggate first
+began to jog along the road, or when the "Confatharrat"
+started to ply between Norwich and the
+"Four Swans," Bishopsgate Street. All particulars
+are lost. The odd name of that coach was probably
+a seventeenth-century way of spelling the word
+"confederate," and the selection of such a name
+proves both that it was carried on by an alliance
+or co-partnership, and that "confederate" had not
+then acquired its sinister modern connotation.
+Besides these aids to travel, a stage-waggon began
+to ply from the "Popinjay," Tombland, Norwich, at
+an early date; and another from the "Angel," in the
+Market Place, to the "Blossoms" Inn, Laurence
+Lane, London, was advertised in the <i>Norwich
+Mercury</i>, of March 29th, 1729, to "now go regularly
+every Thursday night," setting out on the following
+Wednesday from London, on the return journey.
+It will thus be seen that it was a five or six days'
+journey for those primitive affairs, and that they
+apparently did not run at regular intervals until
+that year.</p>
+
+<p>A London and Beccles coach was running in
+1707, but the first regular Norwich coach of which
+particulars remain was the "Norwich Machine,"
+which in 1762 set out for London three times a
+week from the "Maid's Head," according to the
+advertisement still extant. There is nothing in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span>
+that old coaching bill to show that 1762 was the
+first season of the "Norwich Machine." It may
+have been established some years before that date.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="r">
+<i>Norwich, March 26, 1762.</i></p>
+
+<p class="c">SUSAN NASMITH and JAMES KEITH,<br />
+<br />
+Proprietors of the<br />
+<br />
+NORWICH MACHINE,<br />
+<br />
+Give Notice
+</p>
+
+<p>that their Machine will set out from the <span class="smcap">Maid's Head</span> Inn,
+in St Simon's Parish, in Norwich, on Monday, the 5th day
+of April next, at half-past eleven in the forenoon, and on
+the Wednesday and Friday in the same week, at the same
+time; and to be continued in like Manner, on those Days
+weekly, for the carrying four inside Passengers, at
+Twenty-five Shillings each, and outside at Twelve
+Shillings and Sixpence each. The inside Passengers to be
+allowed twenty pound Weight, and all above to be paid
+for at three half-pence per pound; and to be in London on
+the Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday Evenings weekly.</p>
+
+
+<p class="p2"><i>N.B.</i>&mdash;A Machine will set out on the same days, at the
+same time, from the <span class="smcap">Green Dragon</span>, in Bishopsgate Street,
+London, for Norwich.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>In the following year, the "Widow Nasmith"
+and James Keith advertised that they had built large
+and commodious machines, to carry six inside, and
+reduced the fares to twenty shillings and ten
+shillings respectively; but they had apparently not
+succeeded in performing the journey in less time than
+a day and a half, for no mention is made of speed
+being accelerated. But a remarkable feature in that<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>
+announcement is the extraordinary cheapness of the
+fares, little over twopence and a penny a mile for
+inside and outside passengers, at a time when prices
+on other roads ruled from twenty-five to fifty per cent.
+higher. This tells a tale of competition; but Time,
+the thief, has robbed us of all knowledge of those
+competitors.</p>
+
+<p>A year later the London and Ipswich Post Coaches
+were advertised to set out every week-day, and to
+perform the 69� miles in ten hours, an average pace
+of almost 7 miles an hour; a marvellous turn of
+speed for that age. As to whether those Post
+Coaches ever <i>did</i> cover that distance in ten hours, we
+may reasonably express a doubt; but there was the
+promise, and 011 the strength of it the proprietors
+charged threepence a mile. As will be seen by the
+advertisement, these coaches carried no outside
+passengers:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="r">
+<i>Ipswich, August 17th, 1764.</i></p>
+
+<p class="c">THE LONDON AND IPSWICH POST COACHES
+</p>
+
+<p>Set out on Monday, the 27th of August, at seven o'clock
+in the morning from the <span class="smcap">Black Bull</span>, in Bishopsgate,
+London, and at the same time from the <span class="smcap">Great White Horse</span>,
+in Ipswich, and continue every day (Sunday excepted), to
+be at the above places the same evening at five o'clock;
+each passenger to pay threepence per mile, and to be
+allowed eighteen pounds luggage; all above to pay one
+penny per pound, and so in proportion. The coaches, hung
+upon steel springs, are very easy, large and commodious,
+carry six inside but no outside passengers whatever; but
+have great conveniences for parcels or game (to keep them
+from the weather), which will be delivered at London and
+Ipswich the same night.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>As these coaches are sent out for the ease and expedition
+of gentlemen and ladies travelling, the proprietors
+humbly hope for their encouragement, and are determined
+to spare no pains to render it as agreeable as they can.</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+Performed (if God permits) by&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Pet. Sheldon</span>, at the Bull, Bishopsgate Street, London.</span><br />
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Thomas Archer</span>, at the White Hart, Brentwood.</span><br />
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Charles Kerry</span>, at the Black Boy, Chelmsford.</span><br />
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Geo. Reynolds</span>, at the Three Cups, Colchester; and</span><br />
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Chas. Harris</span>, at the Great White Horse, Ipswich.</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p><i>N.B.</i>&mdash;The proprietors will not be answerable for any
+money, plate, jewels, or writings, unless entered and paid
+for as such.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The reader will perhaps have observed that this
+advertisement especially mentions a convenience for
+carrying game, and, as a matter of fact, game and
+oysters were prominent from an early period in the
+history of Norwich Road conveyances, and, by the
+middle of the eighteenth century, the Norfolk and
+Suffolk coaches had already earned quite a distinctive
+character in two seasons of the year,
+Michaelmas and Christmas. East Anglia has always
+abounded in game, and its broad heaths and extensive
+commons have been the breeding-grounds
+of innumerable geese and turkeys whose careers
+have ended on London dinner-tables. In those two
+seasons it was often difficult to secure a seat on
+or in any of the "up" coaches from Norwich or
+Ipswich, for while every available inch of space on
+the mails was occupied by festoons of dead birds
+consigned by country cousins to friends in town, the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>
+whole of a stage-coach was frequently chartered
+for the purpose of despatching heavy consignments
+of these noble poultry to the London market.
+Christmas provided extraordinary sights along the
+Norfolk Road, in the swaying coaches, with parcels
+and geese and turkeys mountains high on the roof;
+with barrels of Colchester natives in the boot, and
+hampers swinging heavily between the axle-trees
+on a shelf called "the cellar"; while from every
+rail or projection to which they could be either
+safely or hazardously tied depended other turkeys
+or braces of fowls, booked at the last moment before
+starting. It was something in those days to be a
+turkey or a goose, before whose importance the
+claims of human passengers faded; but it was a
+fleeting elevation which the philosophic did not
+envy, thinking that here indeed the poet was
+justified in his sounding line&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus34">
+<img src="images/fig13.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE NORWICH COACH AT CHRISTMAS TIDE. <span class="in5"><i>After Robert Seymour, </i>1835.</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p>
+<p>That unfortunate genius, Robert Seymour, has
+left us a picture of the Norwich coach nearing
+London at Christmas time, with its feathered load.
+The drawing was made in 1835, at the very height
+of the Coaching Age, and shows from his own observation
+with what ingenuity every rail and projection
+was used to hang the birds from.</p>
+
+<p>Another highly specialised branch of traffic,
+which only left the road on the opening of the
+railway, was the constant service of fish waggons
+running between Harwich, Colchester and London,
+at the then express speed of 8 miles an hour.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Between</span> the early days of coaching and the end of
+that period, many changes took place on the Norwich
+Road. So late as 1798, the Mail, the "Expedition,"
+and the "Post Coach" were the only coaches to
+Norwich, supplemented by three road waggons; two
+of them doing the journey twice a week, the third
+setting out weekly. Later came the "Norwich
+Times," "Gurney's Original Day Coach," the
+"Ph�nomenon," as it was originally spelt; the
+"Magnet," the Ipswich "Shannon," and the
+Ipswich "Blue." With the object of serving as
+many places as possible, and, incidentally, securing
+heavier bookings, the "Times" and Gurney's
+coaches took a somewhat circuitous route, leaving<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>
+the direct road at Chelmsford, and going through
+Braintree, Halstead, Sudbury, Long Melford and Bury
+St Edmunds, rejoining the Norwich Road at Scole.</p>
+
+<p>But the lord of the road was the Mail Coach,
+beside which the stages were very commonplace
+affairs.</p>
+
+<p>The first mail-coach that ever ran the road between
+London and Norwich started in March 1785,
+and the service was from the beginning continued
+daily. Before that time the mails had been carried
+by post-boys, who began in 1741 to go six days a
+week instead of three, as they formerly had done.</p>
+
+<p>Mail-coaches are entirely things of the past, for
+the modern coaching revival has only brought back
+the smart stages and drags of the last years of the
+Coaching Age. The mails were expensive and exclusive
+affairs, constructed to carry only nine
+persons; four inside and five out, including coachman
+and guard. For the higher fares passengers
+paid they had not always the satisfaction of travelling
+faster than on the stages; but perhaps there was
+some dignity attaching to a seat on the mail which
+was lacking on ordinary coaches. And certainly
+they were surrounded by pomp and circumstance.
+The guard wore a scarlet coat and went armed with
+pistol, sword and blunderbuss; not, of course, for
+the protection of the passengers, but for the safe-guarding
+of His Majesty's mails. And everything
+gave place, as a matter of right and not merely
+courtesy, to the mail. Surly pikemen swung open
+their gates and asked no toll, for it was one of the
+privileges of the mail to go toll-free, and the high<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span>waymen,
+if they walked in the ways of caution, left
+the gorgeous conveyance severely alone, reserving
+their best attentions for the plebeian stages. It was
+a much more serious thing to rob the mail than an
+ordinary coach, for a conviction was more certain to
+end in death, judges having hints from the Government
+how undesirable it was that mails should be
+ransacked and the robbers live. The rewards usually
+offered by the Post-office, too, were tempting to
+those who could inform if they would. �200 was
+the sum generally to be had for this service, together
+with the �40 reward by Act of Parliament for the
+apprehension of a highwayman; and if the mail was
+robbed within five miles of London, another �100.
+Courage, recklessness, and desperation&mdash;whichever
+we like to call it&mdash;often nerved the night-hawks
+to brave even so heavy a handicap as this, as this
+very road bears witness, in the daring robbery of
+the Ipswich Mail in 1822, when notes to the value
+of no less than �31,198 were stolen. In addition
+to the usual rewards, a sum of �1000 was offered
+by the losing firms of bankers, as shown in the
+accompanying old handbill, but without avail.
+This sum was afterwards increased to �5000,
+and a notification given that, in order to prevent
+the notes being changed, the ink on all new
+ones had been altered from black to red. But the
+robbers had the impudence to ask �6000 for the
+return of the notes. They had already passed
+�3000 worth, and naively said, in the negotiations
+they opened up, that the trouble they had taken
+and the risks they had run did not make it worth<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>
+while to accept a smaller "reward." The bankers,
+however, would not spring another thousand, for
+by that time everyone was too shy of an "Ipswich
+black note," and it was extremely unlikely that any
+more could be passed. Negotiations were broken
+off; but a month later notes to the value of �28,000
+were returned. The thieves were never traced, and
+although the bulk of their booty was useless to
+them, made the very substantial haul of over �3000
+by their lawless enterprise.</p>
+
+<p class="c b xxxlarge">�1000 Reward.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig81.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c b p0 verybig">STOLEN</p>
+<p class="c b p0 xlarge">FROM THE IPSWICH MAIL</p>
+<p class="c p0">On its way from London, <i>on the Night<br />
+of the 11th Sept. Inst.</i> the following</p>
+<p class="c p0 b">COUNTRY BANK NOTES:</p>
+<p class="c p0 b large">Ipswich Bank, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.</p>
+<p class="c p0"><i>ALEXANDERS &amp; Co.</i> on <i>HOARE &amp; Co.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c p0 b large">Woodbridge Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.</p>
+<p class="c p0"> <i>ALEXANDERS &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c p0">Manningtree Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.<br />
+<i>ALEXANDER &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c p0 medium">Hadleigh Bank, 1, 5, &amp; 10<i>l.</i> Notes.<br />
+<i>ALEXANDER &amp; Co.</i> on <i>FRYS &amp; Co.</i></p>
+<p class="c p0 little">Particulars of which will be furnished at the different Bankers.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig82.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c p0 little">Whoever will give Information, either at ALEXANDERS and Co.<br />
+or at FRYS and Co., <i>St Mildred's Court, Poultry</i>, so that the<br />
+Parties may be apprehended, shall on his or their Conviction,<br />
+and the Recovery of the Property, receive the above REWARD.</p>
+
+<p>We have said that mail-coaches were gorgeous.
+They were painted in black and red. Not a shy,
+unassuming red, but the familiar and traditional Post-office
+hue. Also they bore the Royal coat-of-arms
+emblazoned upon the door panels, and the
+insignia of the four principal orders of knight<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>hood
+on the quarters. There was no mistaking a
+mail-coach.</p>
+
+<p>The Norwich Mail, which took fifteen and a
+half hours to do the journey so late as 1821, was
+greatly improved in later years; and finally, in
+the early forties, when the railway reached
+Norwich and superseded the roads, performed the
+journey in eleven hours, thirty-eight minutes, at
+the very respectable average speed of 9� miles
+an hour. It was not the only mail on the road,
+but shared the way so far as Ipswich with the
+Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail. This coach was unfortunate
+on two occasions between 1835 and
+1839. On September 28th in the first year,
+when the coachman was climbing on to his box
+in the yard of the "Swan with Two Necks," the
+horses started away on their own accord, tumbling
+the coachman off and knocking down the helper
+who had been holding their heads. Dashing into
+Cheapside, they flung themselves against the back
+of the Poole Mail with such force that the coachman
+of that mail was also thrown off. He was
+taken unconscious to the hospital. Continuing
+their furious rush, the horses of the Ipswich
+Mail at length ran the pole of the coach between
+the iron railings of a house, and so were
+stopped.</p>
+
+<p>The second happening, in 1839, was somewhat
+similar. The mail had arrived at Colchester, and
+the coachman, throwing down the reins, got off
+the box. No one was at the horses' heads, and
+they started away and galloped down the High<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>
+Street, until the near leader fell and broke his
+neck, stopping the team.</p>
+
+<p>It was by the Ipswich and Yarmouth Mail
+that David Copperfield journeyed down to Yarmouth
+on his second visit to Mr Peggotty. In the
+ordinary course of things, he would have reached
+Ipswich at 3�12 a.m. But on this occasion the
+weather was a potent factor in causing delay.
+He occupied the box seat, and remarked upon the
+look of the sky to the coachman while yet on
+the first stage out of London.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't you think that a very remarkable
+sky?" he asked; "I don't remember to have seen
+one like it."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor I&mdash;not equal to it," said the coachman.
+"That's mist, sir. There'll be mischief done at
+sea, I expect, before long."</p>
+
+<p>The description of this stormy sky is very
+fine, and seems to have been drawn from observation;
+just as true and as effective in its way as
+Old Crome's billowy cloudscapes, in his <i>Mousehold
+Heath</i>, or as any of Constable's rain-surcharged
+Suffolk scenes.</p>
+
+<p>"It was a murky confusion&mdash;here and there
+blotted with a colour like the colour of the smoke
+from damp fuel&mdash;of flying clouds tossed up into
+most remarkable heaps, suggesting greater heights
+in the clouds than there were depths below them
+to the bottom of the deepest hollows in the earth,
+through which the wild moon seemed to plunge
+headlong, as if, in a dread disturbance of the laws
+of nature, she had lost her way and were frightened.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span>
+There had been a wind all day; and it was rising
+then, with an extraordinary great sound. In
+another hour it had much increased, and the sky
+was more overcast, and it blew hard.</p>
+
+<p>"But as the night advanced, the clouds closing
+in and densely overspreading the whole sky, then
+very dark, it came on to blow harder and harder.
+It still increased, until our horses could scarcely
+face the wind. Many times in the dark part of
+the night (it was then late in September, when
+the nights were not short) the leaders turned
+about, or came to a dead stop; and we were
+often in serious apprehension that the coach
+would be blown over. Sweeping gusts of rain
+came up before this storm, like showers of steel;
+and at those times, when there was any shelter
+of trees or lee-walls to be got, we were fain to
+stop, in a sheer impossibility of continuing the
+struggle.... We came to Ipswich very late,
+having had to fight every inch of ground since
+we were ten miles out of London; and found a
+cluster of people in the market-place, who had
+risen from their beds in the night, fearful of falling
+chimneys. Some of these, congregating about
+the inn-yard while we changed horses, told us of
+great sheets of lead having been ripped off a high
+church tower and flung into a bye-street, which
+they then blocked up."</p>
+
+<p>At Ipswich the Yarmouth coaches left the
+Norwich Road, and so the further adventures of
+David Copperfield do not in this place concern us.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">VIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Here</span>, as on the other roads, the early advent
+of the Motor Car, in 1826, caused much commotion.
+The steam coaches of that period never achieved
+any success on this route, but caricatures of what
+might be expected were plentiful, and pictures of
+the Colchester "Dreadful Vengeance," the Norwich
+"Buster," and other fanciful conveyances, in the
+act of exploding and distributing their passengers
+in little pieces over a wide stretch of country,
+were popular. The railway itself came in for much
+abuse, and misguided and fanatical coach proprietors
+wasted their substance in pitiful attempts to
+compete with it. Among these was Israel Alexander,
+that Jewish hero of the Brighton Road in the early
+forties, who, although a first-class whip, was
+perhaps chiefly associated with the many upsettings
+of the Brighton "Quicksilver." He fell out with
+his noble friends on that highway, and, coming to
+the Norwich Road, ran a well-appointed coach to
+Colchester for a little while, until even the Eastern
+Counties Railway, then the slowest on earth, made
+the pace too quick for him. His turn-out was
+given the extraordinary name of the "Duke of
+Beaufort's Retaliator," and might have continued
+much longer to carry those who were prejudiced
+against railways, had it not met with so many
+accidents.</p>
+
+<p>One who was contemporary with the coaching
+age has ingeniously divided coaching accidents<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span>
+into three classes:&mdash;1. Accidents to the coach;
+2. Accidents to the horses; 3. Accidents to the
+harness. The most common kind of mishap to
+the coach was, he says, the breaking of an axle.
+This was not, as a rule, due to any faulty construction
+of that most essential feature of a public
+conveyance, but to the overloading either of
+passengers or goods, to which coaches were continually
+subject. The sudden snapping of an axle
+at a high speed or on a down grade produced
+a tremendous crash which generally shot coachman,
+guard and "outsides" in all directions. Happy
+those who, in such a case, were received into the
+thorny arms of a quickset hedge or the soft
+embraces of a mud-heap.</p>
+
+<p>Another kind of mishap, not always accidental,
+was that of a wheel coming off; an incident often
+caused in early times, before the introduction of
+patent axle-boxes, by the mischievous removal of
+the lynch-pin by some unscrupulous rascal in the
+employ of the rival coach proprietor.</p>
+
+<p>The sudden snapping of a skid-chain while
+descending a hill, resulting in the coach running
+on to the horses and a general overthrow, in which
+horses' legs and passengers heads came into unwonted
+contact, was perhaps as uncomfortable a
+kind of disaster as could be imagined. Overloading,
+too, sometimes had the effect of rendering a coach
+top-heavy, when a slight lack of caution in running
+round curves would upset it.</p>
+
+<p>Accidents to the horses were:&mdash;casting a shoe,
+involving lameness, and perhaps a fall; tripping<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span>
+and stumbling on loose stones and rolling over;
+slipping up in frosty weather; and kicking over
+the traces or the splinter-bar.</p>
+
+<p>Accidents to the harness usually happened to
+the traces, which commonly snapped under an uneven
+strain. To cobble them up with twine, and
+so complete a stage, was a common practice. In
+such cases, the thoughts of passengers during the
+remaining miles were, like those of the poet, "too
+deep for words." Most nerve-shaking of all these
+varied and untoward happenings, however, was
+the breaking of the reins. Rotted by age, by the
+sun's heat and the winter's frosts, they would
+"come away" in the coachman's hands at that
+worst of moments;&mdash;when he was holding in his
+horses downhill. In that contingency, says our
+ancient, who, in the modern slang phrase, has
+"been there," it was the approved thing to say
+your prayers first and then take a flying leap
+(result, a broken neck, or fractured leg: the bone
+protruding over the top of the Blucher).</p>
+
+<p>"Then shrieked the timid and stood"&mdash;or,
+rather, sat&mdash;"still the brave;" who had this consolation,
+that if they fared no better than those
+who jumped, the odds were that they fared no
+worse.</p>
+
+<p>To be dragged at hurricane pace by four runaway
+horses (for in such a case they generally <i>did</i> so run)
+with the broken reins trailing helplessly after them,
+was to acquire the knowledge of an inner meaning in
+the word "terror." In escapades of this kind the
+"insides" were in the most unenviable situation;<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>
+for the "outsides," including coachman and guard,
+took the better, if unheroic, part of crawling over the
+roof and slipping down the back of the coach into the
+road. The wisdom of their doing so would, in most
+cases, be proved a few seconds later by the sound of
+a distant crash as the coach hurtled against some
+roadside tree and dissolved into matchwork, while
+the "insides" were stuck as full of splinters as a
+"fretful porcupine" of quills.</p>
+
+<p>The "human boy" was as much the terror of the
+old coachman as he is of the modern cyclist. The
+sight of a boy with a hoop reduced him to a state of
+purple indignation or of quivering anxiety, according
+to temperament. Many an one of our great-grandfathers,
+attired in the odd costume of boys in that
+period, and trundling a hoop along the road, has felt
+the lash of the coachman's whip. The following little
+story will show us why.</p>
+
+<p>"When a very little boy," says one of our
+forebears, "I once upset a four-horse coach by losing
+control over my hoop, which, to my consternation,
+bowled among the legs of the team. I shall never
+forget the horror with which I for an instant saw
+the spirited horses floundering about with that
+hateful hoop among them, or heard the execrations
+of the coachman and the shouts of the passengers.
+Abandoning the wretched plaything to its fate, I
+took to my heels down a bye-lane, the portentous
+crash that followed only accelerating my speed."</p>
+
+<p>Coach proprietors were favourite targets for
+Fate's worst shafts. They were a hard-working,
+much-enduring class of men; up early and to bed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>
+late, retiring in good circumstances and rising
+perhaps ruined through some unforeseen accident.
+They were "common carriers" in law, and bound
+under many Acts of Parliament to deliver goods
+uninjured at their destination. As carriers of
+passengers, it is true, they were only required to
+exercise all "due care and diligence" for the safety
+of their customers, and were exempt from liability
+in case of mishaps through the "act of God" or the
+unforeseen; but the observance of due precautions
+and a daily inspection of the coach had to be proved
+in case of injury to passengers, or in default they
+were held liable for damages.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, the carelessness of any one of his many
+servants might mean a very serious thing to a coach
+proprietor. In those days the old Anglo-Saxon Law
+of Deodand was not only in existence, but in a very
+nourishing and aggressive condition. Indeed, coaching
+had practically rescued it from neglect. It was
+a law which, in cases of fatal injuries, empowered the
+coroner's jury to levy a fine, which might vary from
+sixpence to a thousand pounds, upon the object that
+caused the mischief.</p>
+
+<p>The very multiplicity of tribunals before whom
+the personally unoffending coach proprietor was
+liable to be haled was in itself terrifying. There
+was the already-mentioned coroners jury; the
+jury on the criminal side in trials at the Assizes
+for manslaughter, and the other "twelve good
+men and true" who assessed damages in the
+Sheriff's Court.</p>
+
+<p>How even the most well-meaning of men might<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>
+thus suffer is evident in the case of a proprietor
+who was cast in damages from excess of caution.
+For additional security, and in order to protect
+it from road grit, he had a part of an axle incased
+in wood. One day this axle broke and a
+serious accident happened, resulting in an action
+against him for damages. He lost the day; the
+judge ruling that, although no proof of a defective
+axle was adduced, a flaw <i>might</i> have existed which
+a proper daily examination would have detected
+had the extra precaution for safety not been
+adopted.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">IX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">What</span> Aldgate might now have been had the
+original intention of the Eastern Counties directorate
+to place their terminus there been successful,
+we need not stop to inquire. But, as a good deal
+has already been said on the subject of coaches
+and coaching, it will be of interest to learn what
+were the views of the projectors of the Eastern
+Counties Railway. With their original prospectus
+was issued a map of the proposed railway from
+London to Norwich and Yarmouth, by which it
+appears that, instead of going to the left of the
+road from London, as far as Seven Kings and
+Chadwell Heath, it was originally intended to
+construct the line on the right of the road so far.
+Between Romford and Chelmsford the line has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>
+been made practically as first proposed, but onwards,
+from Chelmsford to Lexden, it is again on
+the other side of the highway; and, north of
+Colchester, goes wide of the original plan all the
+way to Norwich.</p>
+
+<p>In many ways this document is very much of
+a curiosity at this time, as also are the hopes and
+aspirations of the directors at the first General
+Meeting of the company. The chairman, for
+instance, confidently anticipated dividends of 22
+per cent., upon which one of the confiding shareholders
+replied that the report was most satisfactory
+and the prospects held out by no means
+overcharged. "If this understanding," said he,
+"fails in producing the dividend of 22 per
+cent., calculated upon in the report, then, I must
+say, human calculations and expectation can no
+longer be depended upon." O! most excellent
+man. But better is to come.</p>
+
+<p>"Should I live to see the completion of this
+and similar undertakings," he resumed, "I do
+believe I shall live to see misery almost banished
+from the earth. From the love I bear my species,
+I trust that I may not be too sanguine, and that
+I may yet witness the happy end that I have
+pictured to myself." His was, you think, the
+faith that might have moved mountains; but it
+did not produce that promised 22 per cent., nor,
+although we now have many thousands more miles
+of railway than he ever dreamed of, has the
+millennium yet arrived. Even the most far-seeing
+have not yet discovered any heralds of its approach.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>Let us drop the tribute of a tear to the
+sorrows of this excellent person, whose love of his
+species and touching anticipation of 22 per cent.
+dividends were so beautifully blended, and so
+cruelly disappointed.</p>
+
+<p>For some years small (very small) dividends
+were paid. Hudson, the "Railway King," paid
+them out of capital. "It made things pleasant,"
+he said, when charged with such financially immoral
+practices. Alas! poor Hudson, you lived
+before your time, and went to another world
+before such "dishonest" doings as yours were
+sanctified in principle by Acts of Parliament
+which authorise payments of dividends out of
+capital in the case of railways under construction.</p>
+
+<p>In 1848 the Eastern Counties Railway was in
+Chancery, and its very locomotives and carriages
+were seized for debt; while for years afterwards its
+name was a synonym for delay. The satirists of
+that period were as busy with the Eastern Counties
+as those of our own time are with the South-Eastern
+Railway. Every journey has an end; "even the
+Eastern Counties' trains come in at last," said
+Thackeray, very charitably.</p>
+
+<p>In 1862 it was amalgamated with several minor
+undertakings, and re-named the "Great Eastern
+Railway"; "great in nothing but the name," as the
+spiteful said.</p>
+
+<p>When matters were at their worst, the Lord
+Cranborne of that time was invited to accept the
+position of chairman and to help extricate the
+company from its difficulties. He accepted the post<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>
+in January 1868 and held it until December 1871.
+In April 1868 he had succeeded to the title of
+Marquis of Salisbury. Thus the statesman and
+prime minister of later years was once a great figure
+in the railway world. His financial abilities helped
+to put the Great Eastern line on a firm basis, and
+when he left it the railway was already greatly
+improved in every respect. To-day, instead of being
+a "shocking example," it is a model to be copied by
+other lines.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2">X</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Although</span> the last of the old coaches was long ago
+broken up, and the Norwich Road is no longer lively
+with mail and stage travellers, it has, in common
+with several other roads out of London, witnessed a
+wholly unexpected revival, in the shape of the Parcel
+Mail service between London and Ipswich. When
+the Parcel Post came into being on the 1st August
+1883, it was speedily discovered by the General
+Post-office authorities that in paying, according to
+contract, 55 per cent. of the gross receipts to the
+railway companies for the mere carriage of parcels,
+they were paying too much. Accordingly, a system
+of Parcel Mail coaches was established on several of
+the old roads, commencing with the London to
+Brighton Parcel Mail, in June 1887. A London and
+Chelmsford four-horse mail was soon added, and this
+was shortly afterwards extended to Colchester, and
+thence to Ipswich by cart. This curious enterprise
+of the Post-office was immediately successful, and it has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a><br /><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>
+ever since been found to effect a large saving over
+the railway charges. Nor is time lost in delivery.
+The down mail leaves London at a quarter to ten
+o'clock every night and the parcels arrive at
+Colchester and Ipswich in time for the first delivery
+the next morning; while the country parcels come
+up to London by an equally early hour. The way
+in which the service is worked will be gathered from
+the accompanying official way-sheet of the down mails.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter">
+<img src="images/fig15.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH<br /> PARCEL MAIL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="full" />
+
+<div class="figleft">
+<img src="images/fig83.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<p class="c xlarge">GENERAL POST OFFICE</p>
+
+<p class="c large"><span class="smcap">The Most Noble the Marquis of Londonderry</span><br />
+Postmaster-General</p>
+
+<hr class="tb" />
+
+<p class="c large"><b>LONDON, CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER, &amp; IPSWICH ROAD<br />
+PARCEL SERVICE.</b></p>
+
+<table cellpadding="1">
+<tr>
+ <td class="tdc bt br" colspan="3">Guard's Remarks as<br /> to Delays, &amp;c.</td>
+ <td></td>
+ <td></td>
+ <td class="tdc bt bl" colspan="2">Proper<br /> Times</td>
+ <td class="tdc bt bl" colspan="2">Actual<br /> Times</td>
+ <td class="tdc bt bl">This Column<br /> to be left blank</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="bb"></td>
+  <td class="bb"></td>
+  <td class="bb br"></td>
+  <td class="tdc">Date</td>
+  <td class="tdc">190 .</td>
+  <td class="tdcs bb bl">H.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs bb">M.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs bb bl">H.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs bb">M.</td>
+  <td class="bb bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdcs bl" colspan="2">P.M.</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Coach Service<br />between London<br />and Colchester.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs br" colspan="2">Distance</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Mount Pleasant<br />Parcel Office</td>
+  <td>dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">9</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">45</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdcs">M.</td>
+  <td class="tdcs br">F.</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Contractor&mdash;<br />C. Webster,<br />279 Whitechapel<br />Road, E. </td>
+  <td class="tdr">3</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">0</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Eastern District P.O.</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">10</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">8</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">10</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">10</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">11</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">3</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Romford</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">11</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">40</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">11</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">42</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdcs bl" colspan="2">A.M.</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">6</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">2</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Brentwood</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">12</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">29</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">12</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">31</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">5</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">0</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Ingatestone</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">1</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">9</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">1</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">11</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Cart between<br />Colchester &amp;<br />Ipswich.</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">6</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">0</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Chelmsford</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">2</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">0</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">2</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">5</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Contractor&mdash;<br />F. W. Canham,<br />Ipswich.</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">8</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">6</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Witham</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">13</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">15</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">3</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">2</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Kelvedon</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">41</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">3</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">43</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">9</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">6</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Colchester</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">0</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">5</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Stratford St. Mary</td>
+  <td>{arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">5</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">58</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td>{dep.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">6</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">0</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">18</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">2</td>
+  <td class="tdlb">Ipswich</td>
+  <td class="tdr">arr.</td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl">7</td>
+  <td class="tdrl">20</td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdc br">Signature of Guard&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="bb"></td>
+  <td class="br bb"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="tdrl bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br"></td>
+  <td class="tdr">71</td>
+  <td class="tdr br">5</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl"></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="br">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="br">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>
+  <td></td>
+  <td class="bl">&nbsp;</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+<hr class="fulla" />
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class="r little">T. E. SIFTON, Inspector-General of Mails.</p>
+
+<p class="little">The Guard in charge of the Coach must report the cause of any Delay.
+He must enter all Remarks and Times in the proper Columns. This Bill
+to be sent, as addressed, by First Post.</p>
+
+<p class="c little">TIME-BILL OF THE CHELMSFORD, COLCHESTER AND IPSWICH<br />PARCEL MAIL.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<hr class="fulla" />
+
+<p>The up service, starting with the mail-cart from
+Ipswich at 7�9 p.m. and continued from Colchester
+by four-horse van at 9�30 p.m., brings the country
+parcels to Mount Pleasant at 4�30 a.m., throughout
+the year. Up and down mails meet at Ingatestone
+at 1�9 a.m. On this service, as on all others, the
+vans go through, but the drivers and guards
+exchange places; the London men changing on to
+the van from Colchester at Ingatestone, and returning
+to London; the Colchester men taking over the
+down van and similarly returning whence they came.</p>
+
+<p>It is a curious and unexpected revival of old
+methods, but an entirely successful one. No highwayman
+has ever attempted to "hold up" the
+Parcel Mail, for the last of that trade has for
+generations mouldered in his grave; but should
+any amateurs essay to complete this revival of old
+coaching days by waylaying the mail, the guards
+would be found well armed. Their virgin steel and
+untried pistols have for years been carried without
+any excuse for using them; but there need be no
+doubt that, were the occasion to arrive, they would
+defend their parcels&mdash;the pounds of country butter,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span>
+the eggs, and wild flowers, or the miscellaneous
+consignment from London&mdash;with their hearts' blood.
+There are more romantic things in the world to die
+for than postal parcels of eggs, cheese and butter,
+but the ennobling word <span class="smcap">Duty</span> might glorify such a
+sacrifice for the sake of a pound's weight of "best
+fresh," or a dozen of "new laid."</p>
+
+<p>But although the possibility of attack is remote,
+a spice of danger and romance savours the conduct
+of the parcel mails.</p>
+
+<p>The up Colchester Parcel Mail had a mishap
+on the night of October 11, 1890, when, owing
+to the prevailing fog, it was driven into a ditch
+near Margaretting. Happily, both coachman and
+guard escaped injury, the heavy vehicle resting
+against the hedge. The coachman, mounting one
+of his team, and hurrying back to Chelmsford,
+succeeded in overtaking the down coach, which,
+returning to the scene of the accident, unloaded
+and transferred the parcels, and continued to London,
+leaving the down mail to be forwarded with local
+help. It eventually arrived at Colchester four hours
+late.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Coaching</span> days, old and new, having now been
+disposed of, we might set off down the road at
+once, were it not that our steps are at once arrested
+by the sight of the "Red Lion" Inn, at the corner
+of Whitechapel Road and Leman Street, which,
+together with the "Old Red Lion," adjoining, stands
+on a site made historic by Dick Turpin's lurid career.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was in the yard of the old house that Turpin
+shot Matthew King in 1737. He had stolen a fine
+horse belonging to a Mr Major, near the "Green
+Man," Epping, and had been traced by means of
+the animal to the inn, where he was found by the
+Bow Street runners in company with Matthew
+and Robert King, birds of like feather with himself.
+The landlord endeavoured to arrest King,
+who fired at him without effect, calling to Turpin,
+"Dick! shoot him, or we are taken, by God!"</p>
+
+<p>Turpin had his usual extensive armoury on
+his person&mdash;three brace of pistols and a carbine
+slung across his back. He fired, and shot Matthew
+King, whether by accident or design is not known.
+King first exclaimed, "Dick! you have shot me;
+make off," but is said afterwards to have cursed
+him as he went, for a coward. King died a week
+later of his wounds, Turpin fleeing to a deserted
+mansion in Essex, and thence to a cave in Epping
+Forest. It is usually said that it was the more
+famous Tom King who met so dramatic an end,
+but original authorities give Matthew; and certainly
+we find <i>a</i> Tom King, highwayman, decorously executed
+at Tyburn eighteen years later.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus4">
+<img src="images/fig16.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "OLD RED LION," WHITECHAPEL, WHERE TURPIN SHOT MATTHEW KING.<br />
+<i>From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854.</i>
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>We have met Turpin before, notably at York,
+where he made an end, two years after this exploit.
+This especial hero of the Penny Dreadful and the
+romantic imagination of the average errand boy
+belongs especially to this road, for he was an
+Essex man, born at Hempstead in 1705. Apprenticed
+to a Whitechapel butcher in his youth, he
+commenced his career of low villainy by stealing
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a><br /><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a><br /><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span>some cattle from a Plaistow farmer, and then
+joined a band of smugglers and deer-stealers and
+housebreakers in Epping Forest, where they set
+up a storehouse of stolen goods in the cave just
+mentioned. This band became so notorious that
+a sum of fifty guineas was soon offered for their
+arrest; but it was not until the amount had been
+doubled that two of the ringleaders were caught
+and hanged. The gang thus broken up, Turpin
+was reduced to scouring the roads singly, and
+pursued a solitary career until one dreary February
+night in 1735, while patrolling the Cambridge Road,
+he saw a horseman approaching through the mist.
+At the time-honoured demand, "Your money or
+your life!" the stranger simply laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"What!" said he, "should dog eat dog? We
+are of a like trade."</p>
+
+<p>Thus Turpin and Tom King met, and struck up
+a partnership. If only one quarter of the deeds
+assigned to Turpin were true, his would be a very
+gallant, as well as phenomenally busy, figure on
+the roads of England. Although by no means a
+mythical person, the stories told of him nearly all
+belong to the regions of romance, and his true
+history shows him to have had few redeeming
+qualities. Many of the old knights of the road
+were courageous, and hand in hand with their
+courage went a humour not seldom kindly; but
+Turpin was a bloodthirsty ruffian whose courage
+is not an established fact, and whose humour, like
+the "tender mercies of the wicked," was cruel, not
+to say ferocious. It is quite hopeless to attempt<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span>
+to finally destroy the great Turpin myth after
+this lapse of time: Harrison Ainsworth's romance
+has enjoyed too great and too long a popularity
+for that; but let the attempt here be made to paint
+him as the cowardly ruffian he was.</p>
+
+<p>Whitechapel, quite apart from memories of
+Turpin, owns an unenviable repute, and its very
+name is a synonym for villainy. Its bad savour,
+however, goes back no greater distance in time
+than the first half of the eighteenth century, for
+until that period it was not built upon, and indeed
+"Whitechapel Common" was spoken of so late as
+1761, maps proving the old church to have been
+quite rural at that date. Originally a chapel-of-ease
+to the great mother-parish of Stepney, the
+district was erected into a separate parish so far
+back as the fourteenth century and the original
+"white chapel"&mdash;doubtless so called from its
+medi�val coats of whitewash&mdash;made a church.
+But old names cling, and although it has been a
+church for over six hundred years, it has not been
+able to confer its more dignified title upon the parish
+itself. Thus the name of Whitechapel is doubly
+misleading nowadays, for it is no longer a chapelry
+and its stately church is in red brick; so that there
+is some force in the argument for re-christening the
+borough and dignifying it by a revival of the old
+name of Eastminster, owned by that not very
+fortunate Abbey of St Mary Grace, founded by
+Edward the Third in 1348, which formerly stood
+on the site of the Royal Mint.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus35">
+<img src="images/fig17.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">WHITECHAPEL OLD CHURCH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>St Mary's, Whitechapel, is a beautiful church,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>built in 1877, burnt August 20, 1880, and since
+restored. It replaced the ugly old building, which
+was "taken down for the simple reason that it
+would not stand up." The ancient wrangling over
+its full title of St Mary Matfelon is not yet done,
+and rash would be he who voted for any particular
+one among the rival derivatives of the name.
+Matfelon, holds one school, was the name of a
+forgotten benefactor, whose particular benefactions
+are not stated. Who, then, would found, since
+benefits are thus forgot? "<i>Mari�, matri et filio</i>,"
+an ancient dedication, say others; while yet different
+parties find its source in a Syriac word meaning
+"mother of a son" = the Virgin Mary. Perhaps the
+most entertaining legend, however, is that which
+tells how it originated in the killing of a murderer,
+in 1429, by the women of Whitechapel. "Between<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>
+Estren and Witsontyd, a fals Breton mordred a
+wydewe in here bed, the which find hym for almasse
+withought Algate, in the suburbes of London, and
+bar away alle that sche hadde, and afterwards he
+toke socour of Holy Chirche in Suthwark; but
+at the last he took the crosse and forswore the
+kynge's land; and as he went hys waye, it happyd
+hym to come be the same place where he had don
+that cursed dede, and women of the same parysh
+comen out with stones and canell dong, and ther
+maden an ende of hym in the hyghe strete." These
+things seem quite in keeping with Whitechapel's
+evil fame.</p>
+
+<p>The old church, as it stood until well into the
+nineteenth century, is shown opposite this page,
+with one of the old road-waggons crawling past.
+In another view of the same date the High Street
+itself is seen, its long perspective fully bearing out
+the old description of spaciousness. At the same
+time, it is seen to be empty enough to resemble the
+street of a provincial town. The houses are exceedingly
+old, the road paved with knobbly stones, and
+the shop windows artfully constructed with the
+apparent object of obstructing instead of admitting
+the light. Very few of these old shop-fronts are
+now left, but a good specimen is that of a bell-founding
+firm at No. 34 Whitechapel Road.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus5">
+<img src="images/fig18.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">WHITECHAPEL ROAD IN THE COACHING AGE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This old picture has long ceased to be representative
+of Whitechapel's everyday aspect. The
+coach has long ago whirled away into limbo, the
+elegantly-dressed groups have been gathered to
+Abraham's, or another's, bosom, and Whitechapel
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a><br /><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a><br /><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>knows their kind no more. Bustle, and a dismal
+overcrowding of carts, waggons, costermongers'
+barrows, tram-cars and omnibuses are more characteristic
+of to-day. Also, the Jewish element is very
+pronounced; chiefly foreign Jews, inconceivably
+dirty. Many of the shop-fronts bear the names
+of Cohen, Abraham, Solomon and the like, and
+others ending in "baum," or "heim." But on
+Tuesdays and Thursdays of every week the spacious
+street regains something of its old rural character,
+in the open-air hay and straw market held here, the
+largest in the kingdom. It fills the broad thoroughfare
+and overflows into the side streets: the
+countrymen who have come up on the great
+waggons by road from remote parts of Essex
+lounging picturesquely against the sweet-smelling
+hay or straw, attending to their horses, or refreshing
+in the old taverns. It is Arcady come again. The
+eyes are gladdened by the long vista of the hay-wains,
+and the nose gratefully inhales the rustic
+scent of their heaped-up loads. It is true that
+Central Londoners also have their so-called Haymarket,
+but hay is the least likely of articles to
+be purchased there in these days.</p>
+
+<p>What do they think, those countrymen, of the
+Whitechapel folks, the "chickaleary blokes," used,
+as a writer in the middle of the nineteenth century
+remarked, to "all sorts of high and low villainy,"
+from robbery with violence to "prigging a wipe,"
+and the selling of painted sparrows for canaries?
+Nor was Whitechapel a desirable place when Mr
+Pickwick travelled to Ipswich. "Not a wery nice<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>
+neighbourhood," said Sam, as they rumbled along the
+crowded and filthy street. "It's a wery remarkable
+circumstance," he continued, "that poverty and
+oysters go together.... The poorer a place is,
+the greater call there seems to be for oysters....
+An oyster-stall to every half-dozen houses. The
+street's lined vith 'em. Blessed if I don't think
+that ven a man's wery poor, he rushes out of his
+lodgings and eats oysters in regular desperation."
+Sam was a keen observer; but there is now a deeper
+depth than oysters. Periwinkles and poverty;
+whelks and villainy foregather in Whitechapel at
+the dawn of the Twentieth Century.</p>
+
+<p>But the poverty and the villainy of Whitechapel
+must not be too greatly insisted upon. They may
+easily be overdone. Loyal hearts and brave lives&mdash;all
+the braver that they are not flaunted in the face
+of the world&mdash;exist in the cheerless and unromantic
+grey streets that lead off the main road. The
+domestic virtues flourish here as well as&mdash;if not
+better than&mdash;in the West End. The heroes and
+heroines of everyday life&mdash;the greater in their
+heroism that they do not know of it&mdash;live in
+hundreds of thousands in the dingy and unrelieved
+dulness of the streets to right and left of Whitechapel
+Road and of the Mile End Road, that go with
+so majestic a breadth and purposeful directness to
+Bow.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Let</span> the Londoner who has never been "down East,"
+and so is given to speaking contemptuously of it,
+take a journey down the Whitechapel and Mile End
+Roads, and see with what an astonishing width, both
+in respect of roadway and foot-pavements, those
+noble thoroughfares are endowed. The London he
+has already known owns no streets so wide, save
+only in the isolated and unimportant instance of
+Langham Place; while, although it cannot be said
+that, taken individually, the houses of the great
+East-End thoroughfares are at all picturesque, yet
+there is a certain interesting quality in the roads as a
+whole, lacking elsewhere. This, doubtless, is partly
+explained by the strangeness of the East-ender's garb,
+and partly by the many Jewish and other foreigners
+who throng the pavements.</p>
+
+<p>A strangely-named public-house&mdash;the "Grave
+Maurice"&mdash;is one of the landmarks of the Whitechapel
+Road. Many have set themselves the task
+of finding the origin of that sign and its meaning;
+but their efforts have been baulked by the very
+multiplicity of historic Maurices, grave or otherwise.
+The sign may originally have been the "Graf Maurice,"
+Prince Maurice of Bohemia, brother of the better-known
+Prince Rupert, the dashing cavalier, but a
+difficulty arises from the fact that there was another
+"Graf Maurice" at the same time, in the person
+of the equally well-known Prince Maurice of Nassau,
+who died of grief when the Spanish overran Holland<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>
+and besieged Breda. Nor does the uncertainty end
+here, for Dekker uses the expression "grave maurice"
+in one of his plays, written at least thirty years
+before the time of those princes, in a passage which
+reads as though it were the usual nickname at that
+period for an officer.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the house owning this perplexing sign
+we come to the beginning of the Mile End Road,
+one mile, as its name implies, from Aldgate, and
+for long the site of a turnpike-gate, only removed
+with the close of the Coaching Age. Rowlandson
+has left us an excellent view of Mile End Turnpike
+as it was in his time; with isolated blocks of houses,
+groups of rustic cottages and a background of trees,
+to show how rural were the surroundings towards
+the close of the eighteenth century; while maps
+of that period mark the road onwards, bordered by
+fields, with "Ducking Pond Row" standing solitary
+and the ducking-pond itself close behind, where the
+scolds and shrews of that age were soused.</p>
+
+<p>The Ducking-Pond as an institution is as obsolete
+as the rack, the thumb-screw, and other ingenious
+devices of the "good old times"; but most towns
+a hundred years ago still kept a cucking or ducking-stool;
+while, if they had no official pond for the
+purpose, any dirty pool would serve, and the dirtier
+it were the better it was esteemed.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus6">
+<img src="images/fig19.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813. <span class="in5"><i>After Rowlandson.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"The Way of punishing scolding Women is
+pleasant enough," says an old traveller. "They
+fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve
+or fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so
+that these two Pieces of Wood, with their two Ends
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a><br /><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a><br /><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>embrace the Chair, which hangs between them on a
+sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and
+always remains in the natural horizontal Position in
+which a Chair should be, that a Person may sit conveniently
+in it, whether you raise it or let it down.
+They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River,
+and over this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the
+two Pieces of Wood, at one End of which the Chair
+hangs just over the Water. They place the Woman in
+the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often
+as the Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate
+Heat."</p>
+
+<p>One has only to go and look at the average rural
+pond to imagine the horrors of this punishment.
+The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the clinging
+green duckwood, common to them, must have made
+a ducking the event of a lifetime.</p>
+
+<p>The difference here, at Mile End, between those
+times and these is emphasised by the close-packed
+streets on either side, and by the crowded tram-cars
+that ply back and forth.</p>
+
+<p>Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in
+the little old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn
+that stands by itself, in advance of the frontage of
+the houses, and takes up a goodly portion of the
+broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when
+land was not so valuable as now; when local
+authorities were easy-going, and when anyone who
+had the impudence to squat down upon the public
+paths could do so, and, remaining there undisturbed
+for a period of twenty-one years, could thus derive
+a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is an ex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>planation
+of the existence of the "Vine" in this
+position.</p>
+
+<p>Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses,
+built in 1695, for the housing of old skippers and
+shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little houses
+and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle
+where the old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly
+while the curious passers-by linger to gaze at them
+from the pavement, as though they were some strange
+kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the
+pages of fiction as this quiet haven in midst of
+the roaring streets, screened from them by walls
+and gates of curious architecture surmounted by
+models of the gallant old galleons that have long
+ceased to rove the raging main. It is a spot
+alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by
+the towering breweries, which indeed would have
+bought the old place and destroyed it a few years
+ago, but for the indignation aroused when the proposal
+of the governing body of the almshouses to
+sell became known.</p>
+
+<p>There is nothing else to detain the explorer
+on his way into Essex. The People's Palace, it
+is true, is a remarkable place, the result of Sir
+Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the
+East who would get culture and find recreation,
+but it is a dream realised as an architectural nightmare,
+and is a very terrible example of what is
+done to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art
+and Philanthropy.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">At</span> last, by this broadest of broad roads, we come
+to Stratford-le-Bow and its parish church. In these
+hurried times, and for some centuries past, the
+old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and
+as "Bow" alone it is familiar to all East-enders.
+The place is nowadays chiefly associated with Bryant
+&amp; May and matches, but there yet remain many
+old Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by
+the roadside, telling of days long before "patent
+safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel
+and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.</p>
+
+<p>"Bow," says the <i>Ambulator</i> of 1774, "is a
+village a little to the east of Mile End, inhabited
+by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here has
+been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little
+inferior to that of Chelsea." That description is
+now somewhat out of date. The manufactory of
+porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is
+scarce, and treasured accordingly. Whitsters&mdash;that
+is to say, bleachers of linen&mdash;and scarlet dyers, also,
+are to seek.</p>
+
+<p>Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound
+traveller in bold and rugged fashion; its time-worn
+tower standing midway of the road and
+challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little
+River Lea, just beyond, to Stratford and into Essex.
+Church and churchyard split the road up into
+two channels and thus destroy its width, which it
+never afterwards regains until the suburbs are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>
+passed and the open country reached. A modern
+touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in
+advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory
+attitude from its granite pedestal, and
+erected in his lifetime; recalling the fervent hero-worshipping
+days of the "People's William." The
+outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them
+that see statues raised to themselves, unless indeed
+they be made of finer clay than most mortals,
+kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years
+this bronze Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been
+made to preside, as it were, over an underground
+public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst
+he rises, absurdly eloquent.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus36">
+<img src="images/fig20.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">BOW.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Just how Stratford-le-Bow received its name
+is an interesting piece of history. Both here
+and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>
+anciently crossed by a paved stone ford of
+Roman construction, continuing the highway into
+Essex; but when that river's many channels,
+swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward
+the Thames, the low-lying lands of what we
+now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were for
+long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For
+months together the approaches to the Lea were lost
+in floods, and the real channels of the river became
+so deep that those who valued their lives and goods
+dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor
+travellers thus waterlogged came the good and pious
+Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the First. "Having
+herself been well washed in the water," as old
+Leland says, she fully appreciated the necessity
+for bridges, and accordingly directed the raising
+of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the
+building of two stone structures, of which one was
+the original "Bow" Bridge; "a rare piece of work,
+for before that time the like had never been seen
+in England." It seems to have been the stone
+arch that gave its name of "Bow," and if an arched
+stone bridge was so remarkable in those times that
+it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular,
+or "bow" shape, it must have been either the
+first, or among the earliest, of stone bridges
+built, in times when others were constructed of
+timber.</p>
+
+<p>The original name of the village that afterwards
+sprang up here, on the hither or Middlesex shore,
+was thus singularly contradictory; meaning "the
+street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratford<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>
+on the Essex side was in those days known as
+Stratford Langthorne.</p>
+
+<p>The good queen not only built the bridges and
+causeways, but endowed them with land and a
+water-mill, conveying those properties to the Abbess
+of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for
+the maintenance of the works. Having done all
+this, she died. Some years afterwards a Cistercian
+monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey
+Mills now stand, and the then Abbess of Barking,
+of opinion that the Abbot of that house, being near,
+would find it easier to look after the bridges than
+herself, reconveyed the property, together with its
+obligations, to him. The trust was kept for a time
+and then delegated to a certain Godfrey Pratt, who
+had a house built for him on the causeway and
+enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping
+the works in repair. Pratt did so well with his
+annual stipend and the alms given him by wayfarers
+that the Abbot at length discontinued the
+grant. Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite
+unauthorised toll-bar and levied "pontage" on all
+except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This went
+on for many years, until the scandal grew too great,
+and, in consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot
+dispossessed Godfrey Pratt of his toll-bar and
+resumed the control himself.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the
+road had been so greatly worn down that the feet
+of travellers and those of the horses often went
+through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently,
+to undergo an extensive cobbling process; a treatment,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>by the way, continued through the centuries
+until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.</p>
+
+<p>In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork
+of all ages. The property for its maintenance had,
+of course, been lost in the confiscation of monastic
+estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair afterwards
+fell upon the local authorities, who always
+preferred to patch and tinker it so long as such a
+course was possible. On February 14, 1839, the
+existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one
+seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIV</p>
+
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">Farewell</span>, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I
+heard say, honest Conscience was once drowned."</p>
+
+<p>Thus says Will Kemp, in his <i>Nine Days'
+Wonder</i>, the account of a dance he jigged from
+London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It
+is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that
+old joke about the drowning of conscience here, and
+so we will also without delay "have over" the
+modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy
+flour mills, and crossing another branch of the Lea
+by Channelsea Bridge, come to Stratford.</p>
+
+<p>Here, then, begins the county of calves, according
+to the popular jest that to be a native of Essex is
+to be an "Essex Calf." It is not generally regarded
+as a complimentary title, for of all young animals<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span>
+the calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward.
+To this day in rural England the contemptuous
+exclamation "you great calf!" is used of an awkward,
+overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings.
+Yet, if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer
+on this subject, the nickname had a complimentary
+origin, "for," said he, "this county produceth calves
+of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."</p>
+
+<p>We have already seen that the French spoken at
+Stratford-le-Bow in Chaucer's time was a scoff and a
+derision. To-day, neither on the Middlesex nor the
+Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages
+either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of
+every kind, the making of matches that strike only
+on the box, the varied work of the Stratford and
+West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations
+close at hand; while the business of covering the
+potato-fields, the celery-beds and the grounds of the
+old suburban mansions with endless rows of suburban
+dwellings is engrossing attention down the road.
+Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban,
+and Ilford far greater in these days than it ever was
+when its "great" prefix was never pretermitted.
+London, indeed, stretches far out along this road,
+and the country is reached only after many miles of
+that debatable land which belongs neither to country
+nor town. Heralds of the great metropolis appear
+to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far
+away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the
+dim presentiment of some vast capital," as De
+Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like a
+misgiving."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Stratford has not improved since coaches left
+the road. It has grown greatly, and grown dirty,
+squalid and extremely trying to noses that have
+not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure
+factories and other odoriferous industries. But it
+is a place of great enterprises and great and
+useful markets, and when its introductory mean
+streets are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone
+Road branches off to the left, looks by
+contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton
+Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park
+in succession, past a building which, whether as an
+institution or an example of beautiful architecture,
+would well grace the West. The West Ham Public
+Library and Technical Institute is here referred
+to. "Irish Row," on the way, marked on old
+maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages inhabited
+until recent years by a turbulent colony
+of London-Irish market-gardening labourers, subsidised
+by Mrs Nelson in times of coaching competition
+to impede hated rivals as they came past
+the "Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of
+Manor Park; a house which, like the "Coach
+and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a
+legitimate coaching trade to something more in
+the gin-palace sort. This is not to say that the
+staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct
+negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish
+Row, but when the rival Ipswich "Umpire" or
+the "New Colchester" coaches developed much
+sporting competition and their coachmen evinced
+a dogged determination to be first over Bow<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>
+Bridge on the way up to London, and, by consequence,
+the first to arrive at their destination,
+why, an obscure hint or two on the part of one
+of her numerous staff, accompanied by the wherewithal
+for a drink, produced wonders in the way
+of highway obstruction. But such recollections
+are become unsubstantial as the fabric of which
+dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions
+of tramways and interminable rows of suburban
+shops that conduct to Ilford Bridge.</p>
+
+<p>Great Ilford lies on the other side of the
+sullen Roding, that rolls a muddy tide in aimless
+loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking
+Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial
+been approached by a bridge replacing the "eald,"
+or old, ford, whence its name derives and not
+from that crossing of the stream being an "ill"
+ford, as imaginative, but uninstructed, historians
+would have us believe; although the slimy black
+mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the
+exercise of fording an ill enough enterprise.
+Ilford is now in the throes of development and is
+fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere
+suburb. Let us leave it for places less sophisticated.</p>
+
+<p>The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving
+Ilford by moonshine, set forward "dauncing
+within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two
+strong Jades were beating and byting either of
+other." We take this to mean two women fighting
+on the road, until the context is reached, where
+he says that their hooves formed an arch over<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>
+him and that he narrowly escaped being kicked
+on the head. It then becomes evident that he is
+talking of horses.</p>
+
+<p>Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and
+in more decorous fashion than that of Will Kemp,
+we come, past an inn oddly named the "Cauliflower"&mdash;probably
+as a subtle compliment to the
+abounding market-gardens of the neighbourhood&mdash;to
+the long, straight perspective of the road
+across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of
+new suburban "villa" streets now cover the
+waste on either side, so that the beginnings of
+the plain are not so much heath as modern
+suburb, created by the Great Eastern Railway's
+suburban stations and by the far-reaching enterprises
+of land corporations, which here carry on
+the usual speculations of the speculative builder
+on a gigantic scale. In acre upon acre of closely-packed
+streets, each one with a horrible similarity
+to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning
+clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty
+London live and lose their individuality, and
+pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman
+of a century ago waited impatiently behind
+the ragged thickets and storm-tossed thorn trees of
+Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there now rises
+the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway
+between Ilford station and that of Chadwell
+Heath, the recent enormous growth of population
+on this sometime waste has led to the erection of
+the new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes,"
+while widened lines have been provided
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>for the increased train services. "Seven Kings"
+is a romantic name, but who those monarchs
+were, and what they were ever doing on the
+Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable
+for cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is
+impossible to say. Many wits have been at work
+on the problem, but have been baffled. The
+natural assumption is that at this spot, marked
+on old maps as "Seven Kings Watering," the
+seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily
+records no such meeting, but there was
+no <i>Court Circular</i> in those times, and so many
+royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked,
+except locally and in some fashion similar to this.
+So let us assume the kings met here and watered
+their horses at the "watering," which was a place
+where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash.
+The stream still crosses the highway, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span>
+civilisation has put it in a pipe and tucked it
+away underground.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus37">
+<img src="images/fig21.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SEVEN KINGS.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway
+at this point, known as Stoup Lane ("stoup"
+meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of
+the Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish.
+Here it was, in 1794, on a night of December,
+that a King's messenger, James Martin by name,
+was shot by five footpads. The register of St
+Edmund's, Romford, records the burial of this
+unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.</p>
+
+<p>Let us not, however, in view of the more or less
+grisly dangers that still await belated wayfarers on
+this road, enlarge too greatly on the lawlessness of
+old times; for the homeward-bound resident making
+for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs
+towards the stroke of ten o'clock is not infrequently
+startled by the sinister figure of a footpad springing
+from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and demanding&mdash;<i>not</i>
+his money or his life, as in the old
+formula, but&mdash;a halfpenny! This invariable demand
+of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath footpads, which
+argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is
+for half the price of a drink.</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?"
+asks the threatening tramp.</p>
+
+<p>"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning
+the long perspective of the road for the policeman
+who ought to be within sight&mdash;but is not;
+"w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've walked all the way from Romford and only
+got half the price of a glass o' beer," says the rascal.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The citizen is astonished and incredulous, and his
+astonishment gets the better of his fear. "Oh, come
+now," he rejoins, "no one walks three miles from
+Romford for a glass of beer; besides, all the houses
+here close at ten o'clock."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, they do, do they?" replies the tramp,
+offensively. "'Ere, my mate Bill'll talk to you,"
+and, whistling, the ominous bulk of Bill emerges
+aggressively from the darkling hedge, and together
+they proceed to wipe the road with that respectable
+ratepayer, and, rifling his pockets, leave him, bruised
+and bleeding, to reflect on the blessings of civilisation
+and to be thankful that he was not born a
+hundred years ago, when he might have been shot
+dead instead of being felled to the ground by the
+half-brick in a handkerchief which he finds beside
+him and takes home as a trophy.</p>
+
+<p>Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past
+Beacontree Heath, on the right, to an open country
+of disconsolate-looking contorted elms and battered
+windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and
+still airs of summer of the winter winds that race
+across the watery flats of Rippleside and Dagenham
+Marshes, out of the shivering east. Lonely, until
+quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House,"
+beside the road, the two whalebones that even yet
+surmount its garden entrance the wonderment for
+more than two hundred years of chance travellers.
+Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded
+in the Thames in the year of Oliver Cromwell's
+death, and set up here in memory of him. However
+that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, when<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>
+Ogilby's <i>Britannia</i> was published, for the house is
+marked on his map as "Ye Whalebone."</p>
+
+<p>These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected,
+have little longer yet to remain, for though apparently
+proof against decay, the house and grounds
+are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale
+to the builders.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus38">
+<img src="images/fig22.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">WHALEBONE HOUSE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The sole historic or other vestige remaining of
+the "Whalebone" turnpike-gate, once standing
+here, is an account to be found in the newspapers
+of the time of an attack made upon George Smith,
+the toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused
+in the darkness by a voice calling "Gate!" and, going
+to open it, was instantly knocked down, in a manner
+somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero
+of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Last night and the night before,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Three tom-cats came knocking at my door.</span><br />
+<span class="i0">I went down to let them in,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+<p>The two men who felled the unfortunate George
+Smith, alarmed by his cries of "Murder!" threatened
+to shoot him if he were not quiet, and, going over his
+pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five
+shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting
+him over, a third confederate, ransacking the house,
+discovered three pounds. With this booty and a
+parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared
+as silently as they came.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Romford</span>, now approached, is but twelve miles from
+London, and has frankly given up the impossible and
+ceased all pretence of being provincial. At the same
+time, building-land having only just (in the speculator's
+phrase) become "ripe for development," the
+townlet has not yet lost all individuality in suburban
+extension.</p>
+
+<p>The place, say some antiquaries, derives its name
+from the "Roman ford" on the Rom brook, but it is
+a great deal more likely that the origin is identical
+with that of the first syllable in the names of Ramsgate,
+Ramsey and Romney, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon
+"ruim" = a marsh. Time was when the town<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span>
+was celebrated for its manufacture of breeches; an
+industry which gave rise to a saying still current in
+the less polished nooks and corners of Essex&mdash;"Go
+to Romford and get your backsides new bottomed."
+Breeches have long ceased to be a noted product of
+the town, which for many years past has bulked large
+in the annals of Beer. Barricades, avenues, mountains
+and Alpine ranges of barrels, hogsheads, firkins
+and kilderkins of Romford ale and stout proclaim
+that the Englishman's preference for his "national
+drink" has not abated, and that</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Damn his eyes, whoever tries</span><br />
+<span class="i0">To rob a poor man of his beer"</span><br />
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>is still a popular sentiment; as both the brewers of
+arsenical compounds and the more rabid among teetotallers
+are some day likely to discover.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus39">
+<img src="images/fig23.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">ENTRANCE TO ROMFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>A French traveller in England some two hundred
+years ago wrote that "there are a hundred sorts of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>
+Beer made in England, and some are not bad: Art
+has well supplied Nature in this particular. Be that
+as it will, beer is Art and wine is Nature; I am for
+Nature against the world." That old fellow did not
+know how artful beer could be, and if he could re-visit
+his native France might discover that even wine is no
+longer the simple child of nature it once was.</p>
+
+<p>But although John Barleycorn is the tutelary
+deity of Romford, it is quite conceivable that the
+stranger bound for Norwich, and turning neither to
+right nor to left, might pass through the town without
+so much as a glimpse obtained of those Alpine
+ranges aforesaid. True, on entering Romford, he
+could scarce fail to observe certain weird structures
+ahead: odd towers like first cousins to lighthouses,
+springing into the sky line, with ranges of perpendicular
+pipes, like the disjointed fragments of some
+mammoth organ, beside them, the characteristic signs
+and portents of a great brewery; but the barrels are
+secluded, nor even are Romford's streets blocked, as
+might have been suspected, with brewers' drays.
+Romford, indeed, spells to the uninstructed stranger
+rather bullocks than beer; for the cattle-pens are the
+chief feature of its market-place, and sheep and hay
+and straw bulk more in the eye of the road-farer than
+the products of Ind, Coope &amp; Co., which are to be
+seen in all their vastness beside the railway station
+and on the sidings constructed especially for the
+trade in ale and stout.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus7">
+<img src="images/fig24.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">ROMFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The town in its most characteristic aspect is seen
+in the accompanying illustration taken from the doorway
+of that old inn, the "Windmill and Bells," the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a><br /><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a><br /><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span>
+broad road margined with granite setts and the
+pavements fenced with posts and rails; the re-built
+parish church prominent across the market-place.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus40">
+<img src="images/fig25.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PUTTELS BRIDGE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Beyond Romford the road grows rural, and, by
+the same token, hilly. This, gentle reader, let it not
+be forgotten, is Essex, and we all know with what
+persistence that county is spoken of, and written of,
+as flat. If you would know what flatness is, try the
+Great North Road and its long levels between Baldock,
+Biggleswade and Alconbury, or search Bedfordshire,
+Lincolnshire or Hunts. <i>There</i> is flatness,
+beside which that of Essex is the merest superstition,
+started probably by some tired traveller of inconstant
+purpose, who, essaying to explore the county, gave
+up the enterprise when he had reached Wanstead
+Flats. Surveying that not highly romantic expanse,
+he took it as an exemplar of the rest of the shire, and
+so returned home to start this immortal myth on its
+career. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>
+will subscribe to its flatness as an article of faith, and
+as such an one cycles from Romford, through the
+hamlet of Hare Street, over Puttels Bridge, where
+stands an old toll-house, to the other hamlet of Brook
+Street, the fact that he will actually have to <i>walk</i> his
+machine up the steep hill that conducts into the town
+of Brentwood will cause him to think hard things of
+myth-makers.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus41">
+<img src="images/fig26.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "FLEECE," BROOK STREET.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Brook Street Hill is the name of this eminence.
+Beside it stands a cemetery, convenient for brakeless
+cyclists who recklessly descend, and at its foot is a
+fine old inn, the "Fleece," a house of call for the fish-waggons
+that were once so great a feature of this
+road so far as Colchester and Harwich.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus42">
+<img src="images/fig27.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE MARTYR'S TREE, BRENTWOOD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Brentwood, on the crest of this hill, occupies an
+elevated table-land, with sharp descents from it on
+every side. The "burnt wood" town, destroyed in
+some forgotten conflagration, is now a long-streeted,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>old-fashioned place, apparently in no haste
+to bid good-bye to the past. It keeps the old Assize
+House of Queen Elizabeth's time in repair, and
+carefully sees to it that the Martyr's Tree, decayed
+though the old elm stump be and hollow, is saved
+from perishing altogether. It was in 1555 that
+William Hunter, in his twentieth year, suffered in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>
+this place for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation.
+That staunch upholder of the Protestant faith
+scarce needed the modern memorial, close by, while
+this shattered trunk remained, its gaping rents
+carefully bricked up by pious hands; but let the
+venerable relic be doubly safe-guarded in these times,
+when that candle lit by Latimer and Ridley, close
+upon three centuries and a half ago, burns dim, and
+lawless and forsworn clergy within the Church of
+England are working towards Rome and the return
+of the famous days of fire and stake; when the blood
+of the martyrs has ceased to inspire a generation
+which demands to be shown some tangible object
+before it can realise the significance of that sacrifice.
+Here, then, is something that can be seen and
+touched, to bring the least imaginative back in fancy
+to those terrible days, when brave hearts of every
+class gave up their lives in fire and smoke rather
+than abjure their faith. The Romanising clergy of
+to-day are made of coarser fabric than the martyrs.
+<i>They</i> are not actuated by honesty, but take oaths
+they have no intention of observing to a Church
+whose bread they eat and whose trust they betray.</p>
+
+<p>Would you know something of that martyrdom
+at Brentwood? Then scan the inscription on the
+modern granite obelisk, and control, if you can, a
+righteous indignation when you perceive a modern
+Roman Catholic chapel standing, impudent in these
+days of an exaggerated tolerance, over against the
+Martyr's Tree itself, typifying the Scarlet Woman
+in midst of her blasphemies, exultant over the blood
+of the saints. "He being dead yet speaketh,"<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>
+quotes that inscription; but what avails it to speak
+in the ears of the deaf, or to talk of honour to the
+perjured? "Learn from his example," continue
+those momentous words, "to value the privilege of
+an open Bible, and be careful to maintain it"; but
+the world goes by unheeding, and only when the
+danger again becomes acute and liberty of conscience
+is passing away will indifference be conquered and
+the folly of it revealed.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Brentwood</span> still keeps a notable relic of coaching
+days in the old "White Hart" Inn, a curious
+specimen of the timbered and galleried type of
+hostelry familiar to our great-grandfathers. It turns
+a long plastered front to the street, but the great
+carved and panelled doorway leading into the coach-yard
+confirms the proud legend, "Established 1480."
+Full forty coaches passed through Brentwood in
+every twenty-four hours at the close of the Coaching
+Age, but the earlier days of coaching brought the
+"White Hart" more custom than came to it at the
+close of that era, when, in consequence of the roads
+being improved, travelling was quicker, and places
+once halted at were left behind without stopping.
+Innkeepers were considerable losers by this constant
+acceleration of coaches, and saw the smart, long-distance
+stages go dashing by where, years before,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>
+the old slow coaches stayed the night, or, at the very
+least, halted for meals.</p>
+
+<p>The "White Hart" remains typical of the earlier
+times, and still keeps the old-world comfort regretted
+in other places by De Quincey, who lived long
+enough to witness the beginnings of the great
+changes that have come over the hotels of town
+and country since coaches gave place to railways.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus43">
+<img src="images/fig28.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">YARD OF THE "WHITE HART," BRENTWOOD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Brentwood</span> is no sooner left behind than the road
+descends steeply over what was once a part of
+Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild and
+hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the
+place where, in November 1692, those seven jovial
+Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay were themselves,
+while hunting the hare, chased and at last
+run down by nine hunters of a different sort, who
+turned their pockets out and then bade them good-day
+and be damned. The original chronicler of this
+significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell,
+makes no especial feature of the event. He merely
+records it as having happened "near Ingerstone,"
+and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings
+in the same sort along the several approaches to
+London. Little wonder, therefore, that Macaulay
+should have drawn the conclusion that at this
+time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest
+and most populous shires of England was as dangerous
+as a pilgrimage across the deserts of Arabia.</p>
+
+<p>From the descending road or from Shenfield
+Church the country is seen spread out, map-like,
+below, over the valley of the Thames, to where
+the river empties itself into the broad estuary at
+the Nore. At least, there is the vale, and the
+map vouchsafes the information that the river flows
+thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out
+the view of that imperial waterway. "I cannot
+see the Spanish fleet, because it's not in sight,"
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in
+the poem, and it is precisely for the same reason
+that the Thames is not visible from Shenfield.
+But if one is denied a view of that imperial river,
+at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard,
+a prodigal riot of roses of every hue and habit,
+are worth seeing. The attenuated shingled spire,
+one of the characteristic features of Essex churches,
+beckons insistently from the road, and he who
+thereupon turns aside is well repaid, in a sight of
+the elaborately-carved timber columns of the interior,
+proving how in this county, where building stone is
+not found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders
+made excellent shift with heart of oak. This is,
+in fact, like so many other Essex churches, largely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>
+wooden, and its timber is as sound now as it
+was six or seven hundred years ago.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus44">
+<img src="images/fig29.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SHENFIELD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End"
+lies two miles distant from Shenfield. As in the
+case of so many other places near the great roads,
+a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name
+of the old village sprang up, to catch the custom
+of travellers; but an additionally curious fact
+is the utter extinction of the original village, which
+lay a mile distant from the highway, where the
+parish church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring
+farmstead. Explorers in the countryside
+are often astonished at the great distances between
+villages and their parish churches, and seek in
+vain in their guide-books or in talk with the
+"oldest inhabitant" an explanation of so curious
+a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the
+mystery is found in the enclosure of the surrounding
+common lands. The enclosure of commons has
+never been possible without the passing of special
+Acts, which have divided what should have been
+the heritage of the people for all time between
+the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their
+proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor
+and the tenants would each obtain their share of
+the plunder, in the form of freehold land, with
+the obvious result that the villagers, instead of
+paying rent for their cottages clustering round the
+church in the original village, built themselves
+new and rent-free cottages on their share of the
+spoil of the commons. The old cottages being
+pulled down, or allowed to decay, it was not<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span>
+long before the last trace of the original village
+disappeared.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus45">
+<img src="images/fig30.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">MOUNTNESSING CHURCH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Mountnessing was once the seat of the
+Mounteneys, who have long since vanished from
+their old home. The old church, largely red brick
+without and timber within, still preserves the
+fossil rib-bone of an elephant, long regarded with
+reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant,
+and has for an additional curiosity the carving of
+a head on one of the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps
+by way of warning to Early English parishioners
+of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's
+bridle." The red-brick west front of the church,
+masking the wooden belfry-frame from the weather,
+still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick, but
+such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that
+without that evidence of age it would be difficult
+to credit it with so long an existence. The iron ties<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a><br /><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a><br /><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>
+in the shape of the letter S give the view a
+singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in
+verse, beginning, "Reader, excuse the underwritten,"
+is a curiosity of Mountnessing churchyard.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus8">
+<img src="images/fig31.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as
+the modern settlement is named, is seen clustering
+on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and a wayside
+pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting
+of a dozen cottages, two public-houses, a
+general "stores" (our grandfathers would have been
+content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a
+tin tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to
+walk a mile to church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and
+a windmill situated on a knoll; a windmill that for
+picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome
+or a Constable.</p>
+
+<p>From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims,
+two miles to "Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of
+customary spelling. The milestones are undoubtedly
+strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on the
+pedantic side, for that village derives its name from
+a settlement of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or
+meadow, at the Roman milestone they found here,
+but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone"
+they called their village, which lies in the little valley
+of the River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream
+of the smallest) hither and thither to give a perennial
+verdure to the meads along its course. "Ing" is,
+by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names
+successively met with along the River Wid.
+Mounteney's Ing we have already seen, and Fryerning,
+or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; while<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>
+Margaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond
+Ingatestone.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus46">
+<img src="images/fig32.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE GATEHOUSE, INGATESTONE HALL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad,
+is of the narrowest, and remains in almost
+every detail exactly as it is pictured in the old print
+reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the
+church still rising behind. It is a tower which by
+no means looks its age of over four hundred years,
+so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness of the brick.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a><br /><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a><br /><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span>Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that
+Sir William Petre who, emulating the accommodating
+qualities of the famous Vicar of Bray, bowed before
+the religious storms of the reigns of Henry the
+Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth.
+"Made of the willow and not of the oak," those
+tempests not only left him unscathed, but brought
+him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched
+with the manor of Ingatestone, plundered from the
+Abbey of Barking, together with much spoil elsewhere.
+How he managed to do it is a mystery, but
+during the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for
+such the Petres always have been) actually obtained
+a Papal Bull confirming him and his in these grants.
+One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy,
+recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble
+physiognomy could be so accomplished a time-server
+and truckler. His home, plundered from the nuns
+of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone
+Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the
+road, down a beautifully-timbered country lane. The
+entrance is by a gatehouse with the motto, "<i>Sans
+Dieu Rien</i>," situated at the end of an avenue and
+framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old
+red-brick turreted buildings of the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries. The Lord Petre of to-day does
+not reside here, but the place is still in the family,
+and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use.
+Miss Braddon is perhaps scarce to be numbered
+among those novelists whose literary landmarks are
+followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone
+Hall that it is the scene of her <i>Lady Audley's Secret</i>.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span>
+The fish-ponds of old monastic times, the
+well in which Lady Audley thrust her husband,
+the lime-walk he haunted, together with such
+romantic accessories as terraced walks and a priest's
+hiding-hole, form items which would require the
+business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer to
+fully enlarge upon. They <i>do</i> say&mdash;the "they" in
+question being the gossips of Ingatestone&mdash;that
+the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail, passing at
+1�15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the
+high road, once saw "a something" in white mysteriously
+sauntering beneath the trees, but whether it was
+the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one of the sisters
+thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely
+a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the
+Postmaster-General's regulations and time-sheets not
+allowing for time spent in psychical research.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus9">
+<img src="images/fig33.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. <span class="in5"><i>From an Old Print</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is
+visible on the right, soon after leaving Ingatestone.
+Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its timbered
+belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the
+village, standing solitary, save for the vicarage and
+a farmhouse, beside a railway crossing&mdash;if, indeed,
+any building adjoining the main-line of a great
+railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret
+thus honoured in the place-name is the Saint to
+whom the church is dedicated. Some traces of the
+"marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the
+old windows, in decorative allusion, remained
+until they were swept away for modern stained-glass
+in memory of a late vicar and his family;
+glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>
+save for an inscription on one of the bells, she now
+remains unhonoured in her own church, deposed
+in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects
+kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art
+furnisher. The only remaining ancient glass is that
+of the east window, a magnificent fifteenth-century
+"tree of Jesse."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus47">
+<img src="images/fig34.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">AT MARGARETTING.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the
+twenty-fifth milestone, where a post-office and some
+few scattered cottages straggle picturesquely at the
+foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The
+odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially
+to spoil some two miles of this road is the park
+wall of Hylands, a large estate purchased about
+1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster,
+who stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and
+raised this eyesore to enclose his new-made park.
+Almost as soon as the last brick was put in its place,
+the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by
+railway speculations, and his walled-in Eden was
+sold. Nature in the meanwhile has done her best,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span>
+and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the
+ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River
+Wid crosses beneath the road, water-lilies gem the
+stream and the wind sounds in the luxuriant
+Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.</p>
+
+<p>If it were not for its church, which has been
+re-built and has a very fine and tall spire, one might
+easily pass Widford and not know it, for the very
+few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such
+as it is, it stands on the crest of something not
+quite so much as a hill and rather more than an
+incline, and beside its large church has an equally
+fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White
+Horse." Time was, and that until three years since,
+when Widford was celebrated for its one other inn,
+the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled,
+the "Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by
+the picture-sign of a headless woman, with the
+inscription, <i>Fort Bone</i>, on one side, and a portrait
+of Henry the Eighth on the other. "<i>Fort Bone</i>"
+was commonly Englished by slangy cyclists as "good
+business." The sign, of course, was a pictorial and
+satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an
+open question whether or not in their present form
+this and the several other "Quiet Woman" and
+"Good Woman" signs throughout the country are
+perversions of the original legend, "<i>la bonne fame</i>"
+displayed on old inns in the distant past; an
+inscription laudatory of the hostelry, and matching
+the self-recommendation of "<i>la bonne r�nomm�e</i>,"
+found in modern France, or the more familiar "noted
+house for&mdash;" and "good pull up" inscriptions on inns<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>
+in modern England. Virgil's description of Fame,
+walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the
+clouds, may have originated the pictorial sign of
+the headless woman in days of ancient learning;
+and the classic allusion becoming lost and the
+supposedly incorrect spelling of "<i>fame</i>" being
+altered to "<i>femme</i>," we thus obtain a very reasonable
+derivation. We may take it that many shrew-bitten
+folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily
+agreed to forget the original meaning in order to
+adopt one so exactly fitting their opinion that the
+only quiet or good women were headless ones.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus48">
+<img src="images/fig35.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "GOOD WOMAN" SIGN.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change
+that is robbing places of all interest and distinction,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span>
+the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer swings
+from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed
+inn opposite the "White Horse" has retired into
+private life. The picture sign is now housed inside
+the "White Horse."</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XVIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Widford</span> almost immediately introduces the explorer
+to Moulsham (originally the "mole's home"),
+itself own brother&mdash;but a very out-at-elbows
+brother&mdash;to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the
+wind between our gentility and the somewhat
+fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we should turn to the
+left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of
+the town, and so, proceeding along the "new
+London road," come into Chelmsford, half way
+down the High Street. Being, however, intent
+rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en
+endure the half-mile length of shabby, untidy
+street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford,
+the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City
+of Calves, over the hunchbacked and narrow stone
+bridge across the Chelmer, the successor, at an
+interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original
+bridge built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That
+is a huge slice of time, but it was too late, even
+in Norman days, for the town to change its
+name from Chelmers<i>ford</i> to something more appropriate
+when the ford was thus superseded.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High
+Street of the town, the view closed by the Shire
+Hall and the church; the Norwich Road, however,
+turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and
+refusing to make acquaintance with the town. It
+is the Conduit that is seen in this illustration of
+the High Street, its architecture scarce improved
+by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be
+ornamental, over its cupola.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus49">
+<img src="images/fig36.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE BRIDGE: ENTRANCE TO CHELMSFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at
+the end of this view, spoil one another, the Hall
+almost entirely hiding the church when looking
+down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular
+exterior of the church putting the clumsy
+architecture of the Hall to shame, as a pagan<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>
+upstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some,
+but its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone
+concerns the passing stranger, who feels so concerned
+by sight of it that he accordingly passes
+the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the
+seated bronze effigy of a native, a bygone Lord
+Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like an old
+apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops
+green coppery stains over his nice stone pedestal)
+keep one another company in the open space fronting
+this building.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus50">
+<img src="images/fig37.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE CONDUIT, CHELMSFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal,
+whose career came to a close in 1806. The
+monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for
+all time the image of a judge whose administration
+of English law, directed by serene wisdom, assisted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span>
+by purest love of justice, endeared by unwearied
+kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will
+be held by his country in undying remembrance."
+His birthplace could hardly have said more than
+that.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus51">
+<img src="images/fig38.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">TINDAL'S STATUE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways,
+being indeed very severely bitten with a taste for
+modernity. Is it not famous as the first town in
+the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have
+not its streets been resolutely swept clear of
+antiquity? The town, in short, is scarce picturesque.
+It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays, but
+on other occasions every house provokes a yawn,
+with perhaps the exception of the "Saracen's
+Head," an inn that, despite its modernised and
+stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old
+times. There was a "Saracen's Head" here certainly
+as far back as the fifteenth century, and probably<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>
+much earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it
+derived from Crusading times, when the knights
+and men-at-arms, returning from Palestine with
+wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys,
+leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the
+Holy Land, found their fame come home before
+them, and the old inns they had known&mdash;the
+"Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine
+Wheel," and the like&mdash;often re-named in their
+honour. With little effort we can imagine the
+scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period,
+when exploits at Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were
+told and re-told, and gained wonderfully in the repetition
+over sack and malvoysie. What bloody
+fellows they were, and with what zest they slew
+the Soldan's soldiers over and over again as they
+sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six
+hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has
+been rebuilt many times since then; but human
+nature remains the same though timber rot and
+brick perish, and again and again the same old
+talk has been heard in the bar-parlour of the
+inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Cre�y;
+men of a later age who warred under Marlborough
+at Blenheim, Ramillies or Malplaquet; the lads of
+the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from the
+horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from
+a hundred fights on the burning South African
+veldt&mdash;all have had their circle of greedy listeners
+here.</p>
+
+<p>The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek
+and stuccoed face to the street, and the house shows<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span>
+signs of extensive rebuilding and remodelling, undertaken
+in the full flush of the great days of coaching
+prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in
+the belief that coaching, and the road as an institution,
+would last for ever. Fond belief! Has anyone
+ever stopped to consider the fact that the great
+coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a
+great deal more to do with the pulling down of the
+old-fashioned galleried and timbered inns of country
+towns than ever railways have had? The average
+small country town felt in fullest measure the great
+increase in business incidental to the last years of the
+coaching age, and every innkeeper hastened to
+rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who
+had, from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding
+until the dawn of the Railway Age, on seeing that
+the road would decay and travellers be carried to
+their journeys' ends without halting for rest and refreshment,
+promptly gave up any such ideas and were
+thankful that they had not begun the work of reconstruction
+and enlargement. Those who had were
+ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared
+may yet be often met with, a world too large, in
+country towns where once the mails and the stage-coaches
+passed, like a procession, day by day. It is
+quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house
+like the "White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it
+is not too much to say that, had the Coaching Age
+lasted another ten years, it also would have been
+rebuilt.</p>
+
+<p>An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its
+central figure, belongs to the "Saracen's Head" at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span>
+Chelmsford. For some years after he had won fame
+as a novelist he still retained his position in the
+General Post Office, of which he was a travelling
+inspector. On one of these official journeys he
+happened to be staying here, at the time when his
+<i>Barchester Towers</i> was being issued, after the then
+prevailing fashion, in parts. He was seated in the
+coffee-room when two clergymen entered, one of
+them with the newly-issued part of the story. The
+cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the
+trials of the Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs
+Proudie, who was rather a trial to Trollope's
+readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the
+clergyman put the book down. "Confound that Mrs
+Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish she were dead!"</p>
+
+<p>Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he
+thanked the reader for thus accidentally telling him
+that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome, and
+undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen,"
+said he, "she shall die in the next number;" and die
+she accordingly did. But in defence of Trollope's
+truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the
+opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs
+Proudies may yet be found in a goodly proportion of
+the episcopal palaces of England.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XIX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Returning</span> now to the Conduit, and making for the
+open road once more, Chelmsford is left by way of
+Springfield, past the successor of Chelmsford's finest
+old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The
+old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five
+centuries, and had been the halting-place of many
+famous travellers, among them a long line of Earls
+of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham
+and London; but none of these associations
+sufficed to save the house. Fragments of its carved
+beams are preserved in the local museum, but recall
+it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon
+bring back in his majesty that denizen of the earth
+in the dim �ons of the past. Chelmsford would
+dearly like many of its old buildings&mdash;wantonly
+demolished years ago&mdash;back again; but what is done
+cannot be undone, and there's an end on't. The
+"Cross Keys" remains, in a restored condition.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus52">
+<img src="images/fig39.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "THREE CUPS" SIGN
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of
+Chelmsford, carries varying significances. To the
+mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the American
+from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim
+Fathers and their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts;
+and to the gaol-bird it means a "stretch"
+of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in
+fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building
+enlarged in recent years for the accommodation of
+the guests consigned to it at Assize time from the
+Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>once past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing
+and cheerful. Its long miscellaneous street, where
+the quaint sign of the "Three Cups" stands out,
+gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive
+grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of
+picturesqueness. That this has been the aim of their
+architects is abundantly manifest in examples where,
+under a single roof, one may experience the mingled
+romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle,
+a Tudor manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a
+"Queen Anne" mansion; all done in red brick,
+gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover,
+fitted with electric light and hot and cold water
+supply. To this end has castellated and domestic
+architecture unwound its long story during some five
+hundred years. It will be seen thereby that William<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>
+of Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time
+architect did not live in vain.</p>
+
+<p>But if Springfield be modern as a suburb, it is
+ancient as a village. To see old Springfield, it is
+necessary to turn off the road to the left, and to
+journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church,
+a noble building with mingled red brick and stone
+tower bearing the inscription, "Prayse God for al
+the good benefactors 1586." Oliver Goldsmith, it is
+quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model
+for his <i>Deserted Village</i>. He certainly visited at an
+old cottage opposite the church, but the real Sweet
+Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus53">
+<img src="images/fig40.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SPRINGFIELD CHURCH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Beyond the village and facing the high road are
+the strangely impressive lodges of the historic estate
+of New Hall; new at the end of the fifteenth century,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span>
+but declined into a respectable age by now and
+cobwebbed with much history and many legends.
+The place, now and for a considerable number of
+years past an alien convent, has been owned
+during a period of four hundred years by an
+astonishing number of historic personages, who have
+succeeded one another like flitting phantoms. Here
+the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps out
+spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the
+handling of the historic kaleidoscope. Built by
+Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose daughter and
+heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and
+mother of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus
+eventually came into possession of Henry the Eighth,
+who occasionally resided here and re-named it
+"Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas
+Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex. By this time it had
+resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners were
+George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham,
+and Oliver Cromwell, who had it as a gift from
+Parliament and exchanged it so soon as he decently
+could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like
+residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him
+succeeded another Duke of Buckingham, and to him
+that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk, Duke
+of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and
+was visited here, when he was suffering from gout
+and dropsy, by that scribbling traveller, Cosmo,
+Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of
+historic owners may be said to end, but constant
+change has ever been the lot of New Hall, and a
+succession of lesser lights followed him until the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a><br /><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a><br /><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span>nuns set up their secluded life here and bade
+farewell to a vain world. That world passes by; the
+road on one side, the railway midway in the grounds,
+and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as
+morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the
+vineyard.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus10">
+<img src="images/fig41.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NEW HALL LODGES
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road.
+All is emptiness, and the lichened brick and the
+crumbling stone vases of neighbouring boundary
+walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled
+aims characteristic of the place.</p>
+
+<p>There is an air of romance about Boreham House,
+as seen from the tree-embowered road at a little
+distance from New Hall; an altogether deceptive air,
+let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic
+building of white brick. It is its situation at the
+head of a formal lake, fringed with stately elms,
+that confers the illusory distinction, but the explorer
+of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing
+rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl
+squattering on the lake, can weave his own
+romance to fit the scene. And if the house, though
+stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest
+in the shape of the identical carriage used by the
+Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo.
+Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent years
+to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken
+to pieces in an accident. Restored now to its
+original condition, it will need to be a great occasion
+indeed that brings it forth again.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus54">
+<img src="images/fig42.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">BOREHAM.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its
+old gabled cottages clustering round the still older
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>church, itself embowered in lime trees whose delightful
+scent weights the July air with an Arcadian
+languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham
+has every likelihood of having his nerves
+startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the road
+of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door
+open, and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of
+one of the inmates of the silent tomb making a
+hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High noon being
+an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying
+as to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on
+drawing nearer that the old tomb-house has been
+converted into a tool-house and general lumber-room,
+and that the figure seated within is the sexton
+enjoying his lunch, screened from the noonday heats.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>
+An inscription over the door of the ornate building&mdash;a
+copy of the Temple of the Winds at Athens&mdash;proclaims
+it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamian�,
+Anno 1764"; but the Walthams have disappeared,
+both from their mausoleum and the district. The
+body of the last appears to have been arrested for
+debt when on the road hither from Chelmsford.
+The sexton explains that the parish took over the
+Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing
+the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience
+hee-ar, years ago," says this typical Essex rustic, and
+goes on to tell how the oil and coals and candles for
+church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe
+Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held.
+Three Radcliffes, Earls of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather,
+father, and son, lie in effigy side by side on
+an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers
+are to my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton
+calls them, and explains that their broken noses
+are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called
+the "mine" road, Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the
+great red-brick Georgian mansion of Crix, standing
+in its meadows where the little River Ter comes down
+from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels
+of Hatfield Mill, and then hurries off, as though
+belated, for a rendezvous with the Chelmer, two
+miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road
+with whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing
+warranty of its age in the inscription, "A.A. 1715";
+but if that evidence were lacking it could be found
+in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>
+an area with the raising of the road for the building
+of the bridge that long ago replaced the watersplash
+at this crossing of the stream.</p>
+
+<p>Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the
+heaths that once gave the place its original forename
+of "Heathfield," and the Peverels, identical with the
+Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly
+vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige
+of themselves in the church&mdash;that last resort of the
+antiquary in search of old manorial lords. It is
+true that on modern tablets built into the west
+front of the church the founding of a Benedictine
+Priory here in 1100 by Ingelrica, mother of William
+Peverel, is alluded to, together with the rather
+scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things
+are decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of
+Latin and lichen-stains, so that both their monastic
+beneficence and their maternal origin are only dimly
+to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.</p>
+
+<p>It is the distance of half a mile from the high
+road to where Hatfield church lies secluded, adjoining
+the grounds of a mansion partly occupying the
+site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It
+is here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's
+original baptism must be sought, and accordingly
+some stretches of common-land may be discovered
+close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us,
+though there be little enough to say of it, beyond
+the note that its closeness to the railway station has
+caused a certain growth and a certain amount of
+rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the
+old plaster cottages that were once the invariable<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>
+feature of its street, and admirably figured forth the
+Essex manner of decoratively treating plaster-work.
+There remain here but two such cottages, bearing
+the date 1703, and the initials M.R., with <i>fleur-de-lis</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">A road</span> of almost unvarying flatness conducts in
+something under three miles to Witham, entered
+nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by the
+Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates
+in no fewer than three separate and distinct names.
+As the River Witham, it confers a name upon the
+townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same
+sponsorial office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook
+it is endowed with a title that smacks rather
+of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in
+summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down
+upon the mere thread of water oozing and stewing
+in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the
+neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is
+not ill-named as the Podsbrook; but the Essex
+Council in bridging it so substantially think of it
+rather as the River Witham, which they have every
+right and cause to do, for the stream can avenge
+itself of those disfiguring potsherds and that contemptuous
+title in the most sardonic way when
+winter comes and the floods are out.</p>
+
+<p>The long street of Witham is remarkable for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span>
+the number of large and handsome mansions dating
+from the time of Queen Anne, through the period
+of the four Georges. The greater number of the
+professional men of Essex would, from the number
+of those houses, appear to have settled in the little
+town and to have medically attended it and legally
+represented it to such an effect that it is only now
+beginning to recover from them and from the
+coming of the railway, which dealt a death-blow
+to the thriving coaching interest of the early part
+of the nineteenth century.</p>
+
+<p>For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place
+of Mrs Nelson's famous "Ipswich Blues," the
+crack coaches on the seventy miles of road, which
+started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary
+exertions made Ipswich in something under six
+hours. Such remarkable performances as these
+were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in
+place of the average ten miles on other roads, and
+by placing leaders in readiness at the foot of hills
+like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The "Blue
+Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some
+of the principal coaches drew up, is still in existence;
+its sign, a pierced effigy of that animal
+projecting from the front of the house and looming
+weirdly against the sky-line. There are many
+"White Harts" on the road to Norwich, the sign
+being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as
+that of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North
+Road; but of all the many examples to be met
+along these hundred and twelve miles this is the
+one that is most quaintly out of proportion, with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a><br /><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a><br /><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>
+a head and neck less than half the size demanded
+by body and legs, and a golden collar and chain
+of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was
+the favourite badge of Richard the Second, whose
+connection with East Anglia was too slight for
+assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially
+allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference
+on the part of innkeepers along the Norwich
+Road.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus11">
+<img src="images/fig43.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">CHIPPING HILL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Those who would seek the site of the original
+Witham must turn aside from the high road the
+matter of half a mile, past the railway station, to
+Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a
+camp successively occupied and wrought upon by
+the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons, it will
+be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant
+valley of that triply-named river already mentioned,
+in 1749 described by Walpole as "the prettiest little
+winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows
+falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to
+this day, and as sweet, and the by-road that comes
+up from the gravelly hollow and cuts through the
+earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold
+climbs up romantically under the blossoming limes
+into as pretty a picture in the rural sort as you
+shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old England
+before railways came, or science and the ten
+thousand plagues of modern life, and the cheap
+builder of hideous new cottages were let loose upon
+the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in
+the picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old
+dwellings, flint-built church tower and red-brick<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>
+rectory, set in, upon and around the swelling grassy
+banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had
+both their fortress and their market, as evidenced
+by the still surviving name of Chipping, or Market
+Hill.</p>
+
+<p>Old East Anglian cottages have their own
+special characteristics, arising from local conditions,
+but one feature they share in common with all old
+rustic dwellings; the great size and relative importance
+of their genial chimneys, suggesting warmth
+and the lavish laying on of logs. They tell the
+passer-by of old times when wood was the only fuel;
+when it was to be gathered for the mere labour of
+gathering, and plenty of it was piled upon the
+generous open hearth. Modern cottages, all over
+the kingdom, tell a different tale, in the look of their
+meagre chimney-pots&mdash;a tale of coal, dearly purchased,
+economised in tiny grates.</p>
+
+<p>But the special features of East Anglian cottage
+architecture? They are here, in the highways and
+byways, for all to see who will. It is a land without
+stone, this East of England, where timber and flint
+and brick play important constructional parts in
+church and hall and manor-house, and where timber
+framing, lath and plaster, parge-work, and a few
+bricks for the chimney stacks, are combined to build
+up the cottages.</p>
+
+<p>Out of their necessities our ancestors contrived
+dwellings that for durability, comfort and artistry
+put modern houses, whether halls or cottages, to
+shame. The stone cottages of Somersetshire,
+Rutland, Leicestershire; the cob and thatch of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span>
+Devon, the granite of Cornwall; the timber and
+plaster, or timber and brick noggin of Cheshire and
+Herefordshire are all evidence to this day of how
+skilfully our forbears employed the materials to
+their hands; and here in Essex you shall find a
+something in the art of cottage building hardly to
+be discovered elsewhere. This is the frequent use
+of parge-work, or pargetting, as it is sometimes
+called, on old cottage exteriors. Parge-work is the
+ornamental filling or surfacing of walls with plaster.
+The term is just as often applied to the elaborately-moulded
+and panelled plaster ceilings of Elizabethan
+and Jacobean halls as to the exterior decoration that
+forms so remarkable and pleasing a feature of Essex
+rustic cottage architecture. Few Essex villages
+that can claim to preserve many relics of old
+times are without examples of this peculiarly local
+style; although, to be sure, an ignorant want of
+appreciation has been the cause of much destruction
+of late years. The commoner forms of this decoration
+are frequently seen, in the easily incised patterns
+that even the unskilful can make in the plaster while
+still wet, by the aid of anything from a trowel to the
+finger-tips; just as a cook ornaments the dough of
+her uncooked pies. Many of these patterns are
+traditional; as much a matter of tradition, for instance,
+as are the needlework patterns wrought on
+the breast of an old smock-frock. The commonest
+is one produced by a process of combing the plaster
+in repetitions of a device resembling an elongated
+figure 8 laid flat, or perhaps more narrowly resembling
+a hank of worsted. Other patterns, of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span>
+whorls or concentric circles, stars, triangles and the
+like, are produced by wooden stamps. But the really
+beautiful examples are not the products of to-day.
+These belong to the seventeenth and eighteenth
+centuries, and are lavish in decoration of a Renaissance
+character moulded in high relief. Architects
+with sufficient culture and understanding to enable
+them to appreciate local style have, in recent years,
+reintroduced decoration of this character when
+building residences in the country, but many a
+humble cottager lives within walls that display a
+profusion of artistic devices unapproached by the
+houses of the wealthy.</p>
+
+<p>Discoveries close by the church on Chipping
+Hill have led to the belief that the building stands
+on, or near, the site of a Temple of Diana, and
+certainly Roman bricks are still visible in great
+numbers in the walls of the tower. A memorial in
+the chancel to Sir Gilbert East, who died in 1828,
+reminds the historian of some strange survivals existing
+at that time. The Easts were owners of the
+tithes at Witham, and although they lived so far
+distant as Berkshire, always insisted on their right of
+being buried here. Sir Gilbert East's body was, by
+his express direction, buried beside his wife, with a
+band of brass encircling both, engraved with the
+words from the marriage service, "Whom God hath
+joined together let no man put asunder." His
+funeral was a three days' business, with knights
+bannerets accompanying, and much pomp and
+circumstance. In the family vault they laid him,
+wrapped in linen, returned to Berkshire for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>
+reading of the will, when, to the dismay of the
+family, it was found that the knight had expressly
+wished to be buried in woollen. The family solicitor
+hurried back and, disinterring his defunct client, saw
+to it that he was comfortably tucked in as desired.</p>
+
+<p>Between Witham and Kelvedon, where the road
+runs level, there is but one hamlet, an offshoot of
+Rivenhall known as Rivenhall End, where a cottage
+close by the "Fox" inn, once a toll-house, bears its
+former history, plain to read, in the evidence of its
+windows commanding either approach, up or down
+the road. A mile and a half beyond begins Kelvedon,
+set down in the flats beside the River Blackwater;
+"Kelvedon Easterford, vulgo Keldon," as Ogilby
+calls it; "consisting," he continues, "chiefly of inns";
+a description which remains strikingly true to this
+day. This pronunciation, "Keldon," throws some
+light upon the following remarks of an old traveller
+who kept a diary of his wayfaring, and, writing in
+1744, says, "From Colchester in an hour or two, I
+came to an old Village call'd Kildane, where they tell
+you the famous Massacre of the Danes began; but
+the true Name of the Town is Kelvedon."</p>
+
+<p>How Kelvedon can ever have escaped being called
+"Long" Kelvedon is a mystery, for it straggles on
+and on and must be nearly a mile in length; a
+street of handsome old residences, of cottages and
+humble shops of all ages, and old broken-backed
+taverns where the Essex labourer gathers night by
+night and discusses the prospect of the carraway crop
+and the likelihood of the entire agricultural interest
+presently, going <i>en masse</i> to the "work'us." After<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>
+which, with the courage of despair, and to drown his
+troubles, he will call for "another pot o' thrup'ny,
+missus," and, when closing time comes, slouch home
+through the mud and mist until the following evening,
+when the same programme is repeated. It is the
+agricultural labourer who supports the little wayside
+"publics" whose existence in such numbers puzzles
+the mid-day stranger, who, seeing them empty and
+apparently lifeless, wonders how they can possibly
+live. Business practically only begins when work in
+the fields is done, and the rent is not so high but
+that a few pots of beer a night represent a sufficient
+profit.</p>
+
+<p>It must not be supposed that Kelvedon has not its
+exquisite architectural relics of a bygone time, or that
+its inns are all of the rural beer-house type. Not at
+all. Chief among the inns of Kelvedon is the
+"Angel," which indeed is a house not only of considerable
+size and outstanding character, but of
+historic interest, as having been the favourite resting-place
+of William the Third on his journeys along this
+road. Its projecting porch is the first thing the
+traveller sees on entering the town from the direction
+of London, where the road swerves violently to the
+left, and again as violently to the right, forming a
+very awkward corner. "Angel Corner," said Alexander,
+of the "Retaliator" coach, "is the very devil
+of a corner." This remark was drawn from him on
+the occasion of his nearly driving into the porch,
+when trying conclusions with a rival charioteer.</p>
+
+<p>Almost opposite the still-existing "Angel" stood
+the equally extensive "Red Lion," long since retired<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span>
+from business and remodelled as a row of cottages.
+The histories of both houses, and of many another
+fine old inn, which might once have been written
+from the recollections of those who knew the old days
+of the road, are now in great part lost, and the world
+so much the poorer. Had scribblers then abounded,
+and the "personal" note of the modern journalist
+been sounded in those days, we should have known
+how King William came to and set out from his inn;
+how he looked, what he ate and drank, how many
+long clay pipes he smoked, and what comparisons he
+drew in conversation with Bentinck between the flat
+lands on the way from Kelvedon to Harwich and the
+still flatter lands of his native Holland. And besides
+such records of the great, we should then have been
+better furnished with the early history of coaching,
+which, if not indeed a sealed book, is at least a very
+short and fragmentary one.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus55">
+<img src="images/fig44.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "ANGEL," KELVEDON.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Early</span> coaching days are wrapped round with strange
+adventures and the oddest tales; some, doubtless, of
+the <i>ben trovato</i>, rather than the most truthful, nature.
+But those stories of coaching miseries and adventure
+that have been proved truthful are themselves so
+surprising and incredible to modern ears that even
+the most improbable of uncertified tales cannot be
+dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of the
+Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should,
+for instance, surely be picturesquely written up some
+day and included in some English (and therefore
+strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One Nights'
+Entertainments.</p>
+
+<p>The coach was nearing the outskirts of London.
+The rheumy air hung in dank and foggy vapours
+on the countryside and transformed innocent roadside
+trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing
+shapes. The guard let off his blunderbuss at a
+pollard willow that loomed suspiciously like a highwayman
+out of the reeking air, and the passengers
+all began to automatically turn their pockets out.
+It proved a false alarm, and purses and trinkets were
+returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One
+gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he
+carried, whereupon a lady advised him to hide the
+money in his boot. He had hardly done this when
+a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman
+to stop. When the unhappy insides had picked
+themselves up from the straw at the bottom of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span>
+coach, into which they had unceremoniously been
+thrown by the driver's prompt obedience to that
+behest, they found themselves covered with a pistol
+projected through the door, and were invited to
+deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who
+had little gave it and were thankful it was no more.
+The lady protested that she had nothing; "but,"
+said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you
+will find ten guineas." There was nothing for it
+but to take off that boot and hand over the coin;
+but when the highwayman had gone it was another
+matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in
+no measured terms, of being the robber's accomplice.
+Bound to admit that appearances were against her,
+she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited
+the company to supper the following evening,
+when matters should be explained. They accepted,
+not, it is to be feared, very graciously. The time
+came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room,
+with a supper laid, they were re-introduced to their
+acquaintance of the night before. When the repast
+was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she
+said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in
+this book, which I had with me in the coach, are
+bank-notes to the amount of one thousand pounds.
+I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than
+for me to be robbed of this valuable property. As
+you have been the means of my saving it, I entreat
+your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred
+pounds."</p>
+
+<p>Much of the humour that went to lighten old
+road travelling was of an evanescent kind, and has<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span>
+not survived, but a few examples, preserved in contemporary
+literature, keep their flavour. Among
+them is the narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and
+a Bolter." "I recollect," said the Jehu who told
+the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger,
+and nothing that was either said or done was at all
+to his mind. On that day I happened to have a
+very awkward team&mdash;three blind ones and a very
+shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times
+I lost my patience as well as temper. My near
+leader pulled to such a degree that I was obliged
+to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the
+top of the bit, and curb her enough to break her
+jaw. After starting again, I could deal with her
+very well for about a mile, when her mouth got
+dead again, and I was wicked enough to let drive
+a few hearty damns at her, my pious companion all
+the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be
+damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon
+which he bolted as if he had been galvanised.</p>
+
+<p>"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'</p>
+
+<p>"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I,
+'but I won't have it;' so I answered, 'What coach
+does he drive?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up
+his hands, 'I fear you don't read your Bible; but
+I will tell you&mdash;he was the most patient man that
+ever existed.'</p>
+
+<p>"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three
+blind 'uns and a bolter?'</p>
+
+<p>"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a
+coachman.'</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a><br /><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a><br /><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever
+he had had four such horses to deal with as I
+have here, he would have had no more patience
+than myself.'"</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus12">
+<img src="images/fig45.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">"THREE BLIND UNS AND A BOLTER." <span class="in5"><i>From a Print after H. Alken.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen
+played a drunken trick that would have
+been impossible in the last years of coaching,
+when discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric
+than they had been. He had just driven the
+London stage from Ipswich, and having more by
+good luck than careful driving brought his
+passengers safely to dinner at the "Angel," turned
+into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink
+of coachmen&mdash;rum. Emerging, he perceived one
+of the Harwich to London fish-waggons, fully
+laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to
+the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the
+waggon round and dashed off at top speed on
+the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden
+Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and
+two tons weight of fish strewed the king's highway.
+The mad coachman survived to repent his
+escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder
+of his life.</p>
+
+<p>"Other times, other manners" is a saying that
+assumes an added force when contrasting the
+Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our fellow-travellers
+by railway, who glare at us, and we at
+them, like strange cats on a roof-top, have little
+idea of the chivalry that ruled on the road a hundred
+years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who
+may be the only other occupant of a railway<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span>
+carriage with you, and she wonders whether she
+had not better call the guard; but it was, in the
+days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden
+duty of the gentlemen to see that the ladies in
+whose company the chances of the road might
+place them lacked nothing that courtesy could
+supply; whether it were merely the aid of an
+arm in walking up one of those hills the coaches
+could only climb unladen, or the more material
+attention involved in seeing that the dear
+creatures were duly supplied with refreshments.
+It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom
+of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for
+the breakfasts and dinners of the unprotected
+ladies who might be travelling by the same conveyance.
+"I vow," says one of these old travellers,
+"'tis a pleasure in a cavalier to do so; but, the
+Lord save us, what a prodigious appetite does not
+the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the
+fair, whose lassitude and vapours at other times
+render them incapable of more than drinking a
+dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing
+which it is only fitting that the heathenish and
+phanatick peoples of the Indies should partake
+of. I protest that the ladies of the coach, when
+we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding
+they could not be suited with tay, went to it
+with a right good will and left as good an
+account of the claret and the beef as if they had
+been going empty for a week. Spare me, I do
+beg, from your languishing creatures who would
+die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span>
+compare with the most valiant of trenchermen
+abroad."</p>
+
+<p>This protesting gentleman might, had he thought
+of it, have exclaimed with Othello on the pity "that
+we can call these delicate creatures ours and not
+their appetites."</p>
+
+<p>He must have been particularly hard hit in
+the pocket by the robust appetites of his fellow-travellers,
+but did not, however, let his feelings
+appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as
+a toast, "the ladies, bless them, whose bright
+eyes," etc., etc.&mdash;a toast we have many times heard
+of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon
+having "made an impression." He, in fact, seems
+to have been like Constable, in a way; for it was
+said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in
+a stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach
+dinner." "Then," said one, hearing that
+praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"</p>
+
+<p>That is very significant. It was, then, only
+your very paragon among gentlemen who could
+sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner. His
+manners might survive the strain of the journey
+itself, and even the sight and sound of lovely
+Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring, unlovely
+to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating
+gurgles; but when after the tedious stage had
+been accomplished and the passengers had descended,
+irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner
+scarce to be eaten, even at express speed, in the
+short time allowed, then, ay <i>then</i>, my friends,
+came the test! No man so insensible to politeness
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>as a starving man, and few attentions were
+paid to the ladies by strangers whose sole chance
+of obtaining the dinner for which they had paid
+was the resolute determination to attend only to
+their own wants.</p>
+
+<p>The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly
+outweighed the pleasures of that old-world method.
+A pleasant day and the open country made a seat
+on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not
+willingly to be exchanged for any other mode of
+conveyance then known; but, as little David
+Copperfield found on his first coach journey, <i>night</i>
+on a coach was an experience once gained not
+willingly repeated. Being put between two gentlemen,
+to prevent his falling off, David found himself
+nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he
+could not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!"
+which they didn't like at all, because it woke them.
+With the rising of the sun David found his fellow-passengers
+sleeping easier than they had done during
+the night, when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed
+their midnight slumbers. As the sun rose higher, so
+their sleep became lighter and they gradually awoke,
+one by one, each one indignant when charged with
+having slept. During the rest of his career, David
+invariably observed "that of all human weaknesses,
+the one to which our common nature is the least disposed
+to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness
+of having gone to sleep in a coach."</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXII</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus56">
+<img src="images/fig46.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">BIRTHPLACE OF SPURGEON.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Coaching</span> times and coaching inns have long kept
+us at the very threshold of Kelvedon, which has a
+modern claim to notice of which it is not a little
+proud. Spurgeon was born here. Although the
+figure of that great wielder of homely and untutored
+pulpit oratory is but one among several preachers
+in the same family, there is only one possible
+Spurgeon when that name is mentioned. Charles
+Haddon Spurgeon was born in a house still pointed
+out, on June 19, 1834; the eldest son of the Rev.
+John Spurgeon. The old cottage is now the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>
+"Wheatsheaf" beer-house and has had a bay window
+and a brick frontage added since that time. Close by
+is a now highly respectable and not a little dignified
+private residence known still as the "Tommy shop,"
+although almost seventy years have passed since it
+was used as a kind of restaurant and canteen for the
+navvies then working on the construction of the
+Great Eastern Railway, which runs at the rear.</p>
+
+<p>The oldest house in Kelvedon is doubtless the
+"Sun," which dates from the middle of the fifteenth
+century and has within recent years had its carved
+woodwork, long covered with plaster, once more
+exposed to view. It stands, almost the last house
+in the town, by the bridge over the Blackwater, on
+the way to Gore Pit.</p>
+
+<p>Gore Pit is generally said to be the site of a
+battle. <i>What</i> battle, however, historians do not
+and cannot specify; and indeed this name, bloody
+though it may sound to modern ears, has, despite
+the popular legend of the derivation of Kelvedon
+from "Kildane," perhaps no such sanguinary
+association, and is probably a contraction of the old
+word "coneygore," or rabbit warren.</p>
+
+<p>It is, despite its name, a pretty and a peaceful
+hamlet, with a blacksmith's shop and a roadside
+horse-pond, and surrounded by the fruit-farms of a
+great jam-making company. The church of Feering
+can be seen across the flat fields, on the other side of
+the railway. Messing lies a mile away, in the other
+direction.</p>
+
+<p>Let the idle wayfarer, curious as to the name of
+Gore Pit, speak to the blacksmith on the subject,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>
+and he will be told, with the seriousness of implicit
+belief, of the fighting of a great battle here, and
+that the blood ran down into "that there horse-pond."
+Moreover, that at Kelvedon&mdash;"Killdane they used
+to call it&mdash;they killed the Danes; at Feering they
+feared 'em, and at Messing they made a mess of it";
+which seems to very correctly reflect the views of the
+neighbourhood on local history in ancient times, as
+reflected in place-names!</p>
+
+<p>Rural Essex, in the aspect of its fields and
+meadows, is revealed along these miles in its most
+characteristic form. It is, in many respects, unlike
+other counties. In some ways the unhappy industry
+of farming has fared worse here than elsewhere, and
+many holdings have for years past gone uncultivated,
+and the dock, the thistle and other lusty weeds have
+resumed an evil possession of fields once kept clean
+and trim. But in the smaller operations of
+husbandry Essex has always been, and in some
+districts still is, remarkably successful; while,
+although the farmer protests that it does not pay
+to grow any kind of grain, the yellowing seas of
+autumnal cornfields are still a prominent feature
+of the landscapes of Essex and of its neighbouring
+Suffolk. Essex and Suffolk are old-world, far beyond
+the rest of England, and in growing wheat in these
+times, when a cornfield is a rare sight in other
+parts of the country and when "our daily bread"
+is chiefly compounded of grain grown in North
+America, Russia, or the Argentine, they maintain
+their singularity. It does the heart good to see the
+ripening wheatfields of East Anglia, to see the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>
+gathered stooks in the reaped perspectives, and to
+hear the hum of the threshing machine; for the
+sights and sound seem to carry us back to that
+England of a bygone age, when Constable painted
+such fields, and when they were numerous enough
+throughout the land to feed the population. Here
+and there one may still find fields of that famous
+grain, the "Essex Great Wheat," which grows at
+least two feet higher than the ordinary varieties,
+and is greatly prized for the length and stoutness of
+its straw; but it is a few miles to the north-eastward,
+in the light lands around Harwich, that the Great
+Wheat may be found. Seed and herb-growing are
+the most prominent industries between the Blackwater
+and the Colne, and the roadside fields are
+striped to wonderment in summer with the rainbow
+colours of the seedsman's trial-grounds. The heavy
+perfume of stocks and mignonette, the claret colour
+of that gorgeous flower, the "sops-in-wine," the gay
+and varied displays of asters, marguerites, marigolds
+and a hundred others make a midsummer fairyland
+of the levels that loom so drear and misty in the
+long months of winter. Nor is it only for the
+flower-garden that the Essex seedsman labours.
+With the sights and scents of the flaunting beauties
+of the garden are mingled the homelier ones of
+mint, grey-green sage and other dowdy kitchen
+herbs, together with the subtle beauty and piercing
+odour of wide-spreading, blue-grey lavender-fields.
+Even the unromantic mangold, running to seed in
+bush-like shape, sends forth a sweet and pleasing
+aroma, while the yellow mustard contributes its share.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The byways of farming are now, as we have
+already said, the most&mdash;some would say the only&mdash;profitable
+kind of husbandry in Essex. Some forms
+of cultivation have largely migrated to other counties,
+but others remain. The growing of the clothiers'
+teasel was discontinued with the decay of the Colchester
+and Norwich baize industry, and is now
+carried on in other parts of the country, close to
+districts where textile fabrics are still manufactured;
+but there was a time when, along this road between
+Chelmsford and Colchester, the fields of teasels were
+quite as much a feature as those of mustard are even
+yet. The clothiers' teasel, greatly prized in the
+East Anglian baize manufacture, was nothing but
+a weed, found useful and cultivated accordingly. An
+aristocratic relation of the less spiky burrs that have
+not been rescued from the hedges and ditches and
+are still allowed to grow wild, the clothiers' teasel
+was cultivated so far back as the reign of Richard
+the First, but the "common" burr will have to be
+contented with its lowly estate to the end of time,
+unless something unexpected happens.</p>
+
+<p>To "stick like a burr" is proverbial, and the cultivated
+teasels have an even more pronounced clinging
+property. Furnished as they are with natural hooks,
+they were used in baize-making, and are still employed
+in the cloth trade for raising the nap of the
+material. The dried heads are fixed to cylinders,
+between which the fabric is passed, and their sharp
+spines, re-curved like so many minute fish-hooks, draw
+up the surface of the cloth. Thus the teasel was
+raised from its character of a worthless weed, and for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span>
+many years Essex farmers devoted large portions of
+their holdings to its cultivation. It was hoed and
+kept clear of other vagrom weedlings; its heads were
+cut by hand and dried with every care, and eventually
+were eagerly competed for by manufacturers at �12
+a load. When the old cloth manufacturers left East
+Anglia, a goodly portion of the Essex farmers' livelihood
+went with them.</p>
+
+<p>Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other
+weed, the colewort, for cole or rape-seed, which has
+the quadruple properties of feeding cage-birds, yielding
+rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring
+the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help
+to prop the husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and
+carraways are what "the faculty" knows as "carminatives,"
+curative of flatulency; like the once popular
+"eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of
+the sea holly that grows by the estuaries of Essex
+rivers. Eringo root was once a favourite specific for
+lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last, and
+the preparation of it gradually died out and became
+extinct about 1865, when the only manufacturer was
+an elderly spinster who supplied a chemist in High
+Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the
+making of k�mmel and other liqueurs, and carraway
+seeds, which look like commas, are those familiar
+denizens of "seed cake" that stick in the teeth and
+refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of
+"carraway comfits."</p>
+
+<p>Farmers who do not occupy themselves with
+seed-growing have passed through evil times, but
+prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's well-tilled
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span>land, and fruit-farming has come to render
+cultivation profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer,
+who cannot adapt himself to new conditions, agricultural
+depression in Essex is a very real thing.
+Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one,
+a small cultivator, a son of the soil. He does not
+hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural Essex, in
+these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the
+Workhouse are said to close every vista? Besides,
+he has been hard at work in the fields, and much of
+that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like friskiness
+out of the limbs.</p>
+
+<p>A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very
+badly in need of repair, elicits the fact that he has
+just come away, worsted, from another bout in the
+eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict
+with wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce,
+for life or a livelihood, with weeds&mdash;the sorry heritage
+of the present occupier from the slovenly or bankrupt
+farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing upon
+the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily
+against the cultivator.</p>
+
+<p>"Farmin'?" says our rustic friend; "no great
+shakes, I tell 'ee. It don't pay to grow nawthen now,
+an' it gets wusser'n wusser. All the fields goin'
+under grass, for ship'n cattle. An' the land's fair
+pisoned with weeds. Yow see them 'ere beece, in
+that there close down along o' the chutch? There's
+a mort o' docks in that 'ere close. More docks'n
+grass, an' I thinks warsley o' the chanst of cattle
+gettin' a fair bite off'n it. Don't know what docks
+is? Wish I didden! I've bin a-pullin' of 'em till<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span>
+my back's pretty nigh broke, and I'm fair dunted
+with 'em. Last year there worn't ne'er a one: t'yen
+there's a mort on 'em. Where do they come from?
+God A'mighty knows. <i>They</i> don't want no cultivation,
+bless 'ee. There ain't no land so chice but
+what'll grow docks." Here he pulls out his "muckinger,"
+that is to say, his handkerchief&mdash;the Essex
+dialect is not the most elegant form of speech&mdash;and,
+trumpeting on it like an elephant, with indignation,
+goes his way.</p>
+
+<p>The "chutch" in question is that of Feering,
+on the other side of the Great Eastern Railway,
+along whose embankment go the frequent
+Prussian-blue-painted locomotives with long trains at
+their tail, past Mark's Tey Junction, whose forest of
+signal-masts is visible ahead, into Colchester. With
+the raising of that embankment went the life of this
+highway, only now experiencing a revival.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> cyclists, the pedestrians, the motor-men, who
+adventure along the road rejoice at its smooth
+surface, and find little incident to mark their
+journey. A punctured tyre, a defective valve alone
+hinder those mechanical travellers; while the pedestrian
+finds a limit set to his progress only by
+his walking powers. Even so, he may obtain to
+Norwich long before the others, for the railway<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>
+hugs the road closely for three parts of the distance,
+and stations are frequent.</p>
+
+<p>In any case, the curtain has long since been
+rung down upon the Romance of the Road. If this
+were the place to do it, that romance might be
+recounted at great length; sometimes rising to
+tragical height, again sinking to comedy or farce.
+But we must take our romance as it comes, and,
+reading as we run, be content to act a vicarious
+part in the long story. And we may well be so
+content, for to have essayed the journey in days
+of old often meant a "speaking with strangers in
+the gates" that entailed fighting on unequal terms,
+with the possibility of a roadside grave and the
+tolerable certainty of being robbed of anything and
+everything worth the taking.</p>
+
+<p>Nowadays, the trim suburbs of the towns
+stretch out on either side along the old highway
+and join hands with the villages; so that when
+travellers of the speedier sort spurn the dust from
+their flying wheels, they think the country is
+becoming one vast town, and are depressed and
+regretful accordingly. But when the road was the
+sole means of travelling and the towns were still
+girdled by their walls and entered only by fortified
+gates, the wayfarer welcomed the sight of a house
+in the lonely country between town and village.
+Even to the rich these perils came home, and in
+the more lawless times they were beset with
+troubles of their own.</p>
+
+<p>Royal progresses were not infrequent along the
+Norwich Road, and they have elsewhere been duly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span>
+chronicled, but they are things apart and give no
+glimpse of old wayfaring life. If we are at all in
+the way of conjuring up that old-time traffic, we
+must certainly not forget the odd processions that
+trailed their slow length after my lord and my
+lady, changing residence from one castle or manor-house
+to another. My Lord Duke of Norfolk in
+Elizabeth's time had an exquisite palace, of which
+Macaulay has told us, in Norwich, and the Earls of
+Oxford no doubt kept great state in their castle at
+Hedingham, but, for all their magnificence, they
+were obliged to take many of their household goods
+with them when flitting from place to place; for
+the very excellent reason that they did not,
+certainly up to less than three hundred years
+ago, possess more than one fully-equipped establishment.
+When the nobility of old left one of their
+manor-houses for another they commonly took
+their bedding and a good deal of their furniture
+with them. In even more remote days they removed
+the glass from their windows as well, and
+stored it carefully away until their return. <i>That</i>,
+of course, was a custom of very long ago, when even
+the most luxurious were content with&mdash;or, at any-rate,
+had to endure&mdash;things which nowadays would
+drive the inmates of a casual ward to rebellion;
+but, even when the Stuarts reigned, the great ones
+of the land moved from home to home with long
+baggage-trains and with their entire staff of
+domestics. No board-wages, then! The whole
+establishment took the road, down to the scullery-maids
+and the hangers-on of the kitchen who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span>
+took charge of the domestic pots and pans. My
+lord's pages and the dignitaries of his household
+formed the advance-guard; the lowest in the scale,
+who travelled with the culinary utensils and even
+took the coals with them, were, appropriately
+enough, the "black guard." The black guard were
+probably a very rough lot indeed, at odds with
+soap and water, and on every count deserving of
+their name, which has in the course of centuries
+obtained a different application, as a term of reproach
+to individuals of moral rather than physical
+uncleanliness.</p>
+
+<p>Turning from general conditions of travelling
+to particular travellers, there comes tripping along
+the road an antic fellow, one Will Kemp, who
+danced from London to Norwich in the year 1600;
+a frolic he undertook for a wager, afterwards
+writing and publishing a book about it, which he
+called <i>Kemp's Nine Days' Wonder</i>. Will Kemp
+was accompanied by a drummer whose play upon
+parchment helped to sustain his flagging energies
+as he skipped it to Widford and thence by a route
+of his own through Braintree to Norwich.</p>
+
+<p>Sprightly, irresponsible Kemp, cracking weak
+jokes and playing the fool, is succeeded in the
+memories of the road, after an interval of some
+eighty years, by a very grave and responsible figure
+indeed; no less an one than that of King William
+the Third, on his frequent journeys between his dear
+Holland and his little-loved Kingdom of England.
+Burdened with the care of an alien realm, that
+saturnine little figure with the hooked nose was a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span>
+familiar sight at Kelvedon, where, travelling to and
+from Harwich, he was wont to stay at the "Angel"
+inn, which still confronts the wayfarer on entering
+the village from London. When the "little gentleman
+in black" had done his work and King William
+of blessed Protestant memory was no more, the
+Norwich Road, so far as Colchester, was still graced
+with Royal travellers, for, with the coming of the
+Hanoverians, Harwich became more than ever a
+favourite port of entry and departure, and the
+choleric early Georges knew this Essex landscape
+well. This way, too, came the Schwellenburgs, the
+Keilmanseggs and the other vulgar and grotesque
+figures of that grotesque and vulgar Court.</p>
+
+<p>Among these figures comes that of the Princess
+Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, arrived for the first
+time in England, in 1761, to marry George the
+Third. One German princess is very like another
+in the pages of history, and the likeness remains
+even when they become queens, so that it is not
+a little difficult to disentangle a Caroline from a
+Charlotte. Their virtues are of the same drab
+domestic order, and their faces partake of the
+common fund of unilluminated dulness distributed
+between the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the Sonderburg-Augustenburgs,
+and the dozens of other twopenny-halfpenny
+principalities made familiar by German
+princely marriages and intermarryings. On their
+mere merits, these personages would find no place
+here, though they travelled all their lives up and
+down the road; but in the circumstances of this
+particular Princess Charlotte's journey there are<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span>
+some incidents worth mentioning. She landed at
+Harwich, and comes into our road at Colchester,
+September 7, 1761. At Colchester she was presented
+with a box of eringo-root, the famous local
+production highly valued for the cure of pulmonary
+diseases, prepared from the root of the sea holly.
+Graciously receiving this in a box "parfumed and
+guilt," her carriage swept on towards Witham, where
+she stayed the night at a seat then owned by Lord
+Abercorn, supping with open doors so that all who
+would might gaze upon their future Queen. Next
+day the journey to London was resumed. The
+King's coach was in readiness at Romford, and into
+it she changed. At Mile End a squadron of Life
+Guards was in waiting as an escort, and from that
+point the procession was viewed by thousands. But
+by this time the September day was closing. The
+Duchess of Hamilton, who accompanied the Princess,
+looked at her watch. "We shall hardly have time
+to dress for the wedding," she said.</p>
+
+<p>"The wedding?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, madam; it is to be at twelve."</p>
+
+<p>On that the Princess fainted, as well she might.
+It really took place at 9 p.m., instead of three hours
+later. The King, it is upon record, was a little
+disappointed at the first sight of his bride; but that
+has generally been the way with our Royal marriages.
+The eldest son of this amiable pair, George the Fourth,
+similarly saw his bride for the first time practically
+on the steps of the altar, and his disappointment was
+keen. "No sooner," we read, "had he approached
+her than, as if to subdue the qualms of irrepressible<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span>
+disgust, he desired the dignified envoy to bring him
+a glass of brandy." The Princess, we are told,
+"expressed surprise," which statement requires no
+credulity for belief. Henry the Eighth's disappointment
+when he saw Anne of Cleves was reflected in
+the words in which he likened her to a "Flanders
+mare."</p>
+
+<p>Two years later, in 1763, we find Dr Johnson
+and his inevitable Boswell journeying down the
+road; Boswell on his way to Harwich for Utrecht,
+and the Doctor good-naturedly accompanying him as
+far as that seaport. They set out by coach on the 5th
+of August, early in the morning; among their fellow-travellers
+a fat, elderly gentlewoman and a young
+Dutchman, both inclined to conversation. Dining
+at an inn on the way, the lady remarked that she
+had done her best to educate her children, and
+particularly that she never suffered them to be a
+moment idle.</p>
+
+<p>"I wish, madam," said Johnson, "you would
+educate me too; for I have been an idle fellow all
+my life."</p>
+
+<p>"I am sure, sir," said she, "you have not been
+idle;" which was a mere empty compliment, for she
+had not the least idea whom she was addressing.</p>
+
+<p>"Nay, madam," rejoined the Doctor, "it is very
+true; and that gentleman there," pointing to Boswell,
+"has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His
+father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to
+be idle. He then came to London, where he has
+been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht,
+where he will be as idle as ever."</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>At this, Boswell was very wroth, and asked
+Johnson, in an aside, how he could expose him so.</p>
+
+<p>"Pooh, pooh," retorted the immortal Samuel,
+"they know nothing about you, and will think of
+it no more." Nor, in all probability, did they.</p>
+
+<p>In this manner they travelled, the gentlewoman
+talking violently against the Roman Catholics and
+the horrors of the Inquisition; Johnson, to the
+astonishment of all the passengers, save Boswell, who
+knew his ways, defending the Inquisition and its
+methods with "false doctrines." This would appear
+to have annoyed the rest of the company, for
+Boswell relates that Johnson presently appeared
+to be very intent upon ancient geography. Not so
+intent, however, but that he noticed Boswell giving
+a shilling to the coachman at the end of one of the
+stages, when it was the custom to give only sixpence.
+The great man took Boswell aside and scolded him
+for it, saying that what he had done would make
+the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the
+passengers, who had given him no more than his
+due.</p>
+
+<p>They stopped at Colchester a night, at an inn
+unfortunately not specified, Johnson talking of the
+town with veneration for having stood a siege for
+Charles the First.</p>
+
+<p>The last great occasion on the road, before
+railways took its traffic away, was the funeral, in
+1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline of
+Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven
+years before: her body was embarked for Brunswick
+on August 16, 1821, after a hurried three days'<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span>
+journey from Kensington. So many years have
+passed by since the stormy times when the nation
+was divided between partisans of the King on one
+side and the Queen on the other&mdash;both parties
+equally violent&mdash;that the long and bitter quarrels
+between the "First Gentleman in Europe" and the
+most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times
+have become historic, and no longer divide families,
+or cause fathers to cut their sons off with a shilling,
+as they did when the trial of the Queen was a recent
+event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no
+saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least
+odiously vulgar and utterly wanting in dignity and
+the commonest dictates of prudence. They were not
+worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken
+up by parties and made political missiles of, so that
+even the occasion of the Queen's funeral was made
+the excuse for a riot by her followers, who were
+indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the
+country, as they thought, without proper respect.
+The Queen died on the 7th of August, and it was
+decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent
+haste" was the expression used by the <i>Times</i> of that
+day in describing the funeral arrangements for the
+14th, but that journal was a most violent enemy of
+the then Government and had always supported the
+Queen and vilified the King as far as it could safely
+be done.</p>
+
+<p>It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty
+miles between Kensington and Harwich in two days,
+and the <i>Times</i> furiously bellowed in its reports that
+the procession was hurried through London at a trot.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span>
+However that may be, certainly the pace was decently
+slow when on the open road. Ilford was reached, for
+instance, at 6�15 that afternoon, but Romford, only
+five and a half miles further on, not until 7�45; an
+extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a
+funeral. At Romford the cort�ge was met by
+sympathisers with blazing torches, who stood on
+guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort and
+the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn.</p>
+
+<p>At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by
+the light of a full moon which shone in splendour
+from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the night
+they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock
+in the morning. Here the coffin was placed in the
+church until a start was made again, seven hours later.
+At last Colchester was reached, at five o'clock in the
+afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse
+unguarded in the High Street, while they took their
+fill at the "Three Cups." Thus, in its squalor and
+irreverence, the passing of this Queen of England
+resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or
+kin.</p>
+
+<p>It had been proposed to complete the journey to
+Harwich that day, but, after violent disputes in the
+street between opposing factions, it was agreed to
+defer the departure until the next morning, and to
+deposit the coffin meanwhile in St Peter's Church.
+Inside that sacred building, disputes broke out
+afresh, one party wishing to affix a plate on the
+coffin-lid, bearing the inscription, "Caroline of
+Brunswick, the injured Queen of England," while
+the other vehemently objected. The quarrel was<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span>
+finally settled by agreeing to postpone fixing the
+plate until after the embarkation.</p>
+
+<p>With the start made the following morning at
+half-past five, this melancholy procession leaves the
+Norwich Road, and history goes with it. The tale
+is done, the colophon reached.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">If</span> we seek some touchstone by which to test the
+progress of a century or so in civilisation, there is
+scarce a better than found in comparison between
+the condition of the roads in old and modern times.
+That Waller could, in all sincerity, speak of "vile
+Essexian roads" is not remarkable: he was a poet, dealt
+in superlatives and lived in the seventeenth century.
+But that Arthur Young, a hundred years later, could
+with equal sincerity, and in more emphatic language,
+describe Essex roads as "rocky lanes, with ruts of
+inconceivable depth," is startling. It was in 1768 he
+penned that indictment, adding that they were
+so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the
+sun, and strewn with stones "as big as a horse,
+and full of abominable holes." It were, he concludes,
+a misuse of language to call them turnpikes,
+for they were rich in ponds of liquid dirt; while
+loose flints and vile grips cut across to drain off
+the water made the traveller's pilgrimage a
+weariness.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The modern reader, perusing all these manifold
+sins and wickednesses of the roads, rather wonders
+how they could all have been crowded on to such
+truly vile ways, and if a stone were as big as a
+horse, how room could have been found beside it
+for holes, ponds and other objectionable features.
+But Arthur Young was a truthful man in general.</p>
+
+<p>To-day the Essex high roads are as near perfection
+as any in the home counties, even though
+the byways be steep and rough and more than
+usually winding.</p>
+
+<p>It is in these byways that he who seeks rural
+Essex shall find. The dramatic suddenness and
+completeness with which, a few hundred yards from
+the high road, the sophisticated wayside towns and
+hamlets are exchanged for the unspoiled rusticity
+of the original villages is surprising. In these lanes
+the older rustics talk and think much as their grandfathers
+did, but the rising generation unhappily do
+not, and the Essex rustic in general, like his fellows
+elsewhere, has almost wholly discarded the old dress
+of the peasantry. Only the very old or the more
+remote yet wear the smock-frock&mdash;the "round frock,"
+or the "gaberdine," as they called it&mdash;that was
+once as honourable a distinction of the ploughmen,
+herds, or carters as are the uniforms of our soldiers
+and sailors.</p>
+
+<p>The time is long past since a clean smock-frock,
+corded breeches, worsted stockings and well-greased
+lace-up boots formed the approved rural costume for
+Sundays or holidays, just as the same articles of
+apparel in a "second-best" condition made the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span>
+workaday wear. The Sunday costume of the agricultural
+labourer is now a cheap and clumsy travesty
+of the clothes worn by townsfolk, and in hideous
+contrast with his surroundings. Exactly what it is
+like may be seen on any advertisement hoarding in
+the outskirts of Chelmsford, Colchester and lesser
+towns, where pictorial posters bid Giles go to
+Shoddy's for cheap outfits. Sunday mornings find
+him flaunting his finery in the village street; his
+would-be stylish boots creaking, his every article of
+wear writ large with vulgarity. Often he carries
+gloves in those large hands of his, rough with
+honest week-day toil, and a pair may thus last him
+for years&mdash;for he dare not attempt to put them on.
+Would that he equally purchased his cheap cigars
+for show and refrained from smoking them!</p>
+
+<p>But there the village dandy is. Often his pocket-handkerchief
+is scented; generally his hair is glossy
+with grease; and he would not consider himself fully
+equipped without watch and chain, scarf-pin, ring
+and walking stick. To grease his boots he would
+be ashamed. <i>They</i> must be brightly polished, even
+though his manners are not, and his language defiles
+the village street what time the bells are ringing to
+church. Such is Young England in the villages at
+the dawn of the Twentieth Century. These things
+may spell Progress, but they are rather pitiful.</p>
+
+<p>It is a little difficult, in presenting a sketch of his
+ancestor of a hundred years or more ago, to avoid
+drawing too favourable a view of him; but the rustic
+in old times certainly seems to have matched much
+better with his surroundings than is the case nowadays.
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>He made no attempts to dress up to town
+standards, and if he wanted to shine above his
+fellows did so by virtue of superior neatness only.
+Perhaps he had the finer instincts of the two, or
+more likely lacked the opportunities for bad taste
+that surround his descendants. Certainly, if we are
+to believe in the origin of the smock-frock, as put
+forward by some antiquaries, we must sorrowfully
+admit that the rustic's remote ancestor had as great
+a longing for unsuitable display in dress as can
+possibly be charged to the present generation. The
+smock-frock is, in fact, traced back by some to the
+ecclesiastical garments worn at Mass by deacons and
+sub-deacons, at the time when the Reformation swept
+vestments out of every village church in the land.
+Those who are familiar with genuine old smock-frocks
+have noticed the elaborate and often beautiful needlework
+on collar and breast. The devices appear to
+have a traditional likeness, all over the country, and
+consist either of Celtic-looking whorls, or of semi-decorative
+flower forms, or of lozenge patterns. The
+comparative simplicity or elaboration of this needlework
+depended solely upon the fancy, or the time at
+command, of the wearer's women-folk whose work it
+was. Whence came this tradition? It is thought
+from the tunicles of the minor clergy, which were
+certainly decorated in the same position, if not in
+similar patterns. When the minor belongings of the
+Church became the spoil of the villages, Hodge and
+Giles found themselves the proud possessors of the
+strange garments, for which they could find at first
+no better use than for Sunday wear. A striking<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>
+appearance they must have made in them, down the
+village street, the envy of their less fortunate fellows.</p>
+
+<p>When the looted vestments grew shabby they
+must have been used for everyday wear, and so have
+set the fashions in smock-frocks, both in shape and
+decoration, for centuries to come. If it be thought
+that the costume was rather extravagant, it can only
+be asked, is not that of the modern Sunday morning
+yokel extravagant also?</p>
+
+<p>The rustic of long ago was a man of dense ignorance
+and dark superstitions. No one county was
+then more guilty than another in that respect, but
+East Anglians, and perhaps especially the Essex
+bucolics, are still, despite their veneer of civilisation,
+sunk in uncanny beliefs. Witches still "overlook"
+folks in Essex hamlets, and spells are cast on cattle
+and horses, or unhappy fowls are blighted by the
+Evil Eye. Consequently the learned professions of
+Witch-Doctor and Wise Women are not yet extinct.
+Their existence is not likely to be discovered by the
+stranger, but they thrive, in limited numbers, even
+in these days of pills and patent medicines.</p>
+
+<p>Board Schools are supposed to be educating
+Young England into a dead monotony of speech,
+but it will be long before they complete the horrid
+work. In Essex, indeed, we may not unreasonably
+think it a task beyond the power of teachers and inspectors,
+who if they have not succeeded, after thirty
+years working of the Elementary Education Act, in
+inducing the lower-class Londoners to say "yes" for
+"yuss," together with other linguistic enormities, are
+not likely to be successful in abolishing the very<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>
+marked and stubborn Essex shibboleths. It may
+not generally be known that much of the so-called
+"Cockney" talk derives from the Essex
+dialect. From Essex especially comes that curious
+perversity of the unruly member which in many
+cases insists upon pronouncing the letter A as I.
+The lower-class Londoner and the Essex peasant
+are unanimous in enunciating A as I in all words
+where that letter retains its open sound and its
+individuality. Thus, in the words "baby"
+"favourite," "made" and "native," for instance, the
+letter becomes I; and the Fleet Street newsboy,
+shouting his "spusshul uxtry piper," can legitimately
+call cousins, if he wishes it, with the Essex lad at the
+plough-tail.</p>
+
+<p>Where A is sounded broadly, or in cases like the
+word "was," in which it masquerades as O, or where
+the letter is absolutely silent, or not fully pronounced,
+as in "beast" and "maternal," this peculiarity does
+not appear.</p>
+
+<p>The effect is sometimes grotesque, as, for example,
+near Colchester, where the villages of Layer
+Marney, Layer Breton, and Layer de la Hay are
+always spoken of as Liyer, the last mentioned
+becoming Liyer de la High.</p>
+
+<p>Nor is pronunciation the only singular feature
+of Essex talk, as those who keep their ears alert
+in these parts will soon find. The oddest phrases
+are matters of everyday use, and the Essex peasant
+can no more help using the word "together," in
+season and out, than he can help being hungry
+before meals or sleepy by bedtime. "Together," as<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>
+employed by the Essex peasant, is a word absolutely
+meaningless; a kind of linguistic excrescence which,
+like a wart or a boil, is neither useful nor beautiful.
+When a ploughman says he is going to plough
+"that there field together," he does not mean to
+imply that he is about to plough it together with
+some other land, or with a party of other ploughmen.
+He simply adds the word from force of habit, and
+from hearing his father and grandfather before him
+so use it, in almost every sentence, as a sort of
+verbal makeweight. The present writer has had
+the good fortune to hear a supremely ludicrous
+use of this B&oelig;otian habit of speech. It was market-day
+at Colchester, and Stanway village had emptied
+itself in the direction of the town. A dog rolled
+dustily in the sunny road, and the historian of
+these things luxuriously quaffed his "large lemon"
+on the bench outside the village inn. As Artemus
+Ward might have said, "orl was peas," when there
+entered upon the scene a countryman, evidently
+known to the landlord. He walked into the bar,
+and, surprised to find mine host in solitary state,
+exclaimed, "What, all alone together, bor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," replied the landlord, in no wise astonished
+at this extraordinary expression, "the missus has
+gone to Colchester together."</p>
+
+<p>"Did my missus go with her?" asked the
+rustic.</p>
+
+<p>"No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by
+herself."</p>
+
+<p>In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging
+more especially to Norfolk and Suffolk.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span>
+This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for
+neighbour.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Stanway</span> is approached along a flat stretch, past
+Mark's Tey, which, without being itself quite on
+the road, has sent out modern and extremely ugly
+brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible
+distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's
+Tey church is visible, amid an inchoate mass
+of railway signal masts and puffs of smoke.
+Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings
+proceed from that direction, for this is a junction
+of the Great Eastern with the Colne Valley Railway,
+and the station, by the way, where the lady in
+Thackeray's <i>Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling
+of Shoreditch</i> appeared with the baby which she
+eventually left behind her. It is this busy junction
+that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses
+along the road to render the village of the old De
+Marcas something new and strange. Mark's Tey
+is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for the
+road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in
+here.</p>
+
+<p>Copford's solitary houses by the way give scarce a
+hint of the village nearly a mile off, whose little
+church formerly owned a terrifying relic, in the
+shape of a human skin nailed on its door; a skin
+that had been the personal property of some<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>
+unfortunate straggler from the hordes of marauding
+Danes that once infested the district, of
+whom we have already heard legends at Kelvedon
+and Gore Pit. His Saxon captors must have flayed
+him with a ferocious delight and nailed up his
+cuticle with precisely the same satisfaction as that
+of the gamekeeper who wages war upon stoats and
+weazels and other vermin, and hangs their bodies
+on the barn door. But there must have been a
+bitter day of reckoning for those Saxons when the
+sea-rovers came this way again and saw in what
+fashion that doorway was decorated.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus57">
+<img src="images/fig47.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">Near Mark's Tey.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Copford and its outlying houses lie at the crest
+of a gentle descent into the valley of a rivulet
+which finds its way into the Colne. It stands, as
+its name implies, overlooking some ford which,
+once important, has, in the gradual draining of
+the country and the shrinkage of streams, now
+lost all significance. Stanway adjoins it, and lies
+along the descent, in the hollow and up the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span>
+corresponding rise on the other side, where its
+church stands in a forbidding loneliness. The name
+of Stanway is sufficient warranty of this being, thus
+far, the Roman road. It is, however, not so certain
+that the remaining four miles of the existing highway
+from this point into Colchester follow the course
+taken by the Romans; and, indeed, the later researches
+of arch�ologists go far to prove that the
+original way into Roman Colchester avoided the intervening
+village of Lexden altogether, and, curving
+eastwards, avoided what may then have been a
+marsh, to take the higher ground over a portion of
+Lexden Heath; bending westwards again and
+crossing the site of the present road between where
+the grammar school and the hospital now stand.
+From this point it seems to have crossed by where
+the Lordsland Nursery grounds stood until recently
+built over, to the ancient Roman gateway and
+bastion in the western wall of the town, long known
+as Colking's, or King Coel's Castle, but originally the
+Decuman Gate of Roman times. The course
+followed by this old Roman way is lined on either
+side with sepulchral remains, and seems to have
+once been a great cemetery. Wherever the ground
+is disturbed the relics of some soldier or citizen of
+Colonia are found, some dating back to the foundation
+of the colony, nearly nineteen centuries ago.
+The most remarkable among them are to be seen in
+the museum at Colchester Castle. There&mdash;the most
+human relic of them all&mdash;is the touching monument
+to M. Favonius, a Centurion of the Twentieth Legion,
+discovered in 1871 between the hospital and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>
+grammar school, at a depth of 3 feet below the
+surface, and at a distance of 10 feet from the old
+Roman road. It is a sculptured stone, 4 feet in
+height, with the figure of the Centurion himself
+carved on it, in high relief. It is evidently a
+portrait of him. He stands in full military costume,
+his cloak hanging from his shoulders, his sword and
+dagger by his side. The inscription, almost as sharp
+as on the day when it was cut, nearly nineteen
+hundred years ago, tells us that the monument was
+erected by two of his servants, Verecundus and
+Novicius. They call him "facilis," the "easy" or
+"good-natured." It is surely a sweet and touching
+thing that when all other record of that soldier has
+perished, we should yet know him to have been a
+kindly creature.</p>
+
+<p>But to return to Stanway, which keeps, as sole
+vestige of its heath, a little space of the greenest
+turf, perhaps half an acre in extent, beside the insignificant
+stream in the hollow, and opposite the
+"Swan" Inn. The heath that formerly spread out
+across the elevated but flat table-land between this
+village and the succeeding one of Lexden was, in its
+different parts, variously named after them. On
+Stanway Heath, in Ogilby's <i>Britannia</i> of 1697, a
+picture map shows a beacon standing between the
+forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from
+London, on the right-hand side of the road. It
+appears to have been a post some 30 feet in height,
+crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means
+of slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily
+lighted, was provided for the benefit of travellers<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span>
+going to or coming from Colchester across the
+desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from
+the existence of a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the
+comparative security of Lexden village. The heath
+by the highway is a thing of the past, for those
+portions not brought under cultivation by the farmer
+have been grabbed by the builder, and the so-called
+Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row of
+houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything
+complete and modern. At the forty-eighth milestone,
+amid all this modern upheaval, stands a
+disused toll-house, and, close by, something much
+more ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered
+in dense woods and shrubs, known as "King Cole's
+Kitchen," and now&mdash;figure to yourself the shame of
+it!&mdash;overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and
+named from it "King Cole's Cottage."</p>
+
+<p>Turning off to the right, the curious in things
+pre-historic may lose themselves in the solitudes of
+the real Lexden Heath, where the Devil, the Trinobantes,
+the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary
+General&mdash;according to varying legends&mdash;threw up
+the entrenchments, and delved the ditches, found
+there in plenty. The Devil, we say advisedly, for
+"Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to
+the dyke across the heath, was none other, in the
+minds of the Saxons. "Lexden Straight Road"
+follows for an unconscionable distance a line of
+Roman entrenchments, and is straight and dull
+beyond belief. Followed long enough, it leads to
+"Bottle End," which may originally have been
+"Battle End," the scene of some traditional legend<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span>
+of Boadicea's defeat at the hands of the Romans.
+Or, again, it perhaps marks some forgotten connection
+with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside
+Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced
+"Bottle" by Colcestrians. Anything is
+possible in a district where Beacon End, the site
+of the old beacon already mentioned, has become
+Bacon End.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus58">
+<img src="images/fig48.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">LEXDEN.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Lexden village now claims attention. It is a
+place in which one school of antiquaries finds the
+original Roman station of Camulodunum, established
+on the site of the royal city of Cunobelin, King of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span>
+the Trinobantes; a finding strenuously contested by
+another following. Certainly, among the tall elms
+and rolling surface of Lexden Park there are remains
+in plenty of huge defensive earthworks, telling in no
+uncertain manner that this must have been a place of
+enormous strength, by whomsoever held. The surroundings
+are weird and impressive to a degree.</p>
+
+<p>The village skirting the road is one of the
+prettiest on the way. Going towards Colchester,
+the road drops down the hill, where old cottages
+stand high above the pathway, with steep little
+gardens in front, kept from sliding down into the
+road itself by lichened retaining-walls sprouting
+with house-leek and draped with climbing plants.
+Lower still, hard by the church whose carpenter-Gothic
+atrocities are hung about with ivy and
+creepers until they are transfigured into a dream
+of beauty, the grouping of the 'Sun' Inn and
+neighbouring houses is exquisite. Beyond this
+point begins the suburban approach to Colchester,
+a town it behoves the stranger to approach with a
+proper respect, for here was the first Roman colony
+in Britain. The history of Colchester, indeed,
+begins so far back as <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 44, and there was already
+a pre-historic native city in existence before then;
+the royal city of that ancient British king, Cunobelin,
+the monarch famous in the pages of Shakespeare as
+"Cymbeline."</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Cunobelin</span>, Lord of the Trinobantes, ruler of that
+part of the country now divided into Middlesex,
+Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hunts, Cambridgeshire
+and Essex, was the successor of his father
+Cassivelaunus, who had warred, not ingloriously,
+with Julius C�sar. He transferred his capital from
+his native town on the site of St Albans to where
+Colchester now stands. He appears to have been a
+powerful ruler, and, if little is known of him,
+certainly he is no myth, for the vague legends
+that held the name of the Buckinghamshire villages
+of Great and Little Kimble to be a corrupted form
+of his own were strikingly proved correct some years
+ago, when a hoard of gold coins was ploughed up in
+their neighbourhood, bearing his title.</p>
+
+<p>We do not know by what name Colchester was
+then styled. After Cunobelin had died, full of
+years and worn by grief at the revolts of his sons,
+Caractacus, Adminius and Togodumnus, the end of
+the native State over which he had ruled speedily
+came. Adminius, in a fury against his brothers,
+fled from Britain to seek the aid of the Romans,
+and if no immediate result came, certainly his
+invitation must have revived the old C�sarian
+dream of conquest. The real cause of the Roman
+invasion that took place shortly after the death of
+Cunobelin was the solicitation of a certain Bericus,
+a British Prince of whom nothing appears to be
+known beyond this one fact.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The invasion took place in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 43, under that
+able general, Aulus Plautius, who threw the Trinobantes
+back from Hertfordshire and Middlesex,
+across the Lea and into the Essex marshes, where
+for a time they could not be followed. This was
+the position at the close of the year. Detached
+portions of the invading forces had overrun the
+south of Britain as far as Gloucester and had
+defeated the tribes on the way; leaving a garrison
+in the west. But the island was little known and
+held many mysteries. None could tell the real
+strength of the natives, who disappeared in the
+forests and marshes that covered the face of the
+land, and by their irregular warfare disconcerted
+the Roman plans of campaign. Plautius was at
+last driven to act on the defensive on the Essex
+borders. His soldiers were dying in the ague-stricken
+morasses between the Thames and the Lea,
+and had the enemy possessed powers of combination
+and military skill, he might well have been cut off
+here, at the end of the known world. A retirement
+with his sick and dying was impossible. Nothing
+remained but to go into camp during the winter,
+and meanwhile to send for reinforcements. He
+accordingly sent for forces from Gaul. They came
+with commendable promptitude, commanded by the
+Emperor Claudius in person. With these new
+legions came an elephant corps, brought from
+Africa to carry the heavy baggage. But they acted
+a better part than this, for their strange appearance
+terrified the astonished Trinobantes a great deal
+more than any increase of the Roman soldiery could<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>
+have done. We may imagine this corps, crashing
+irresistibly through the thickets, the forests and
+marshes on that march into the Unknown, along
+this line of country now traversed by the Norwich
+Road, and can readily understand little resistance
+being met with on the way. The tribes were dispersed
+and their territory occupied as far as the
+Stour, and a colony was founded in the opening of
+the new year, <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 44, on the site of Cunobelin's city&mdash;Colonia
+Camulodunum, the first Roman settlement
+in Britain.</p>
+
+<p>The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance
+of the natives that they were soon lulled into a
+feeling of security. For an uninterrupted space of
+sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It
+became a pleasant town, inhabited by veteran soldiers
+grown grey in the service of the Empire, and
+spending their later years in retirement. The
+Emperor Claudius, flushed with his success, had
+assumed the dignity of a god and had caused a
+Temple to be erected in the market-place to his
+honour, with attendant priests and altars. The
+governors and consuls were lesser gods, and treated
+with contempt and ill-judged severity the natives
+who had been overcome with such ease. The
+soldiery were uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and
+luxury flourished together with this attitude of
+oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences.
+It is not surprising that these colonists were bitterly
+hated by their vassals, who in especial looked upon
+the priests as so many harpies living upon their
+substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoods<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>
+and all clergy have been from the beginning, and
+will be to the end. In this last respect these poor
+Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians, exhibited a
+quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the
+priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment
+that have since passed.</p>
+
+<p>These down-trodden natives were already ripe
+for revenge when a more than usually unjust proceeding
+of the Roman officials precipitated a rising.
+The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and
+whose frontiers marched with those of the conquered
+province, had been ruled over by a certain King
+Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate the
+goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast
+wealth he had accumulated, leaving one half to the
+Roman Emperor and the other moiety to his two
+daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his
+country was invaded. His widow, the famous
+Boadicea, resisted. She was publicly scourged, her
+daughters suffering the worst indignities, and her
+relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose
+in arms at these outrages, and their cousins, the
+Trinobantes, on the hither side of the Stour, joined
+them. The Romans saw their folly when too late.
+No more eloquent account is possible than that
+given by Tacitus of the premonitions of evil. The
+statue of Victory fell to the ground, and turned its
+back where the face had been, as if it fled before
+an enemy. Women were seen and heard singing
+mad, wild songs, prophesying disaster. Strange and
+unaccountable noises were heard in the house of
+assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. In<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span>
+the estuary of the river the buildings of the city
+appeared reflected upside down, and ghastly remains
+of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the tide
+ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and
+the strangest whisperings stirred the air. Many of
+the wealthier colonists, alarmed at these portents,
+discovered that their health needed a change of air,
+and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side
+of the Channel, and those who remained applied for
+military help. In answer to this appeal, a meagre
+force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately
+employed to fortify the Temple. But before these
+measures could be completed, the town was surrounded
+and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants
+all slain, the little garrison in the Temple
+meeting a like fate after a defence of two days.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the
+Ninth Legion, which had been stationed on the
+Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now
+stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city.
+He, however, had moved too late, and met the
+victorious natives at Wormingford, where they
+almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences
+of that great disaster were discovered in
+1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns, placed in
+order like streets, were unearthed, containing the
+bones of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the
+Roman sway had been reasserted.</p>
+
+<p>These events happened in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 61. Suetonius
+Paulinus, the then Commander-in-Chief, was at that
+time vigorously prosecuting a war with the Druids
+in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span>
+disasters he hurried back through Verulamium and
+Londinium, collecting an army of ten thousand as
+he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and
+a numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman
+citizens of both those towns piteously begged for
+protection, but were left to their fate, which was not
+long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column
+passed than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed
+them. Seventy thousand citizens perished
+in that general massacre.</p>
+
+<p>It is uncertain where the Roman army met the
+hordes commanded by that heroic Amazon, Boadicea,
+whom we should perhaps more correctly style
+"Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull
+subject in the hands of the uninspired, who fail to
+render her "convincing." No one has done so well
+as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern
+writers of "personal paragraphs" in what recent
+slang would term his "actuality." He says, "she
+was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed, harsh-voiced,
+with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair
+falling below her waist" (her golden hair was
+hanging down her back!), "wearing a highly-embroidered
+tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a
+buckle over it."</p>
+
+<p>Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by
+two woods, on a site resembling a stretch of country
+at Haynes Green, near Messing; but the great fight
+must have raged on many miles of ground, and no
+doubt included Lexden Heath.</p>
+
+<p>The Britons were so sure of victory, that they
+had brought their women and children as spectators,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span>
+and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a great
+semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman
+historian says they were an "innumerable multitude."
+The British Queen, addressing her warriors
+from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to
+die, resting her hopes on the strength of her forces
+and the justice of her cause; while Suetonius, on his
+part, urged his troops not to be dismayed either by
+the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts.
+The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining
+on the defensive. When the fury of the first
+onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers of the
+Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the
+cavalry closing in on the flanks, driving the speedily
+disorganised enemy back upon the semi-circle of
+waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in
+this way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in
+which eighty thousand Britons were slain, including
+the women and children who had come out to witness
+the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing
+all lost, poisoned herself.</p>
+
+<p>Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and
+Suffolk. From this time date the existing walls
+of Colchester. The conquerors were determined not
+to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first
+colony, and, choosing a new site, one mile to the
+east of the former city, they planted their walls on
+the ridge on which Colchester now stands, overlooking
+the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing
+an area of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain,
+after the passing of more than eighteen hundred
+years, the most perfect Roman fortifications in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>
+Britain. Even in that wide space of time the town
+of Colchester has not extended very greatly beyond
+them. In some directions, indeed&mdash;notably to the
+north and north-east and on the west&mdash;the ramparts
+still look out upon the open country. The walls
+have a thickness of from seven to eight feet, and
+are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses
+of stones, brought with great labour from the coast
+near Harwich; the neighbourhood of Colchester, and
+Essex in general, being quite innocent of stone of
+any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this
+day supply the boulders of limestone from which
+the building-stones of Colchester's walls were cut.</p>
+
+<p>Colchester was never again attacked during the
+period of more than three hundred years, in which
+the Romans ruled. In the events of <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 61, they
+had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of
+treating a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In
+the period between these events and the year 410,
+when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from
+Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from
+ruin, conquered and conquerors had to live together,
+and made the best of the necessity. Roman colonists
+intermarried with the gradually Romanised British,
+and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during
+three centuries, gradually grew to look upon Britain
+as their home and themselves as a nation. Thus,
+towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority
+are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and
+civilised British princes treating on equal terms with
+Roman statesmen. In this way the British in some
+measure came into their own again, and to these<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>
+circumstances we owe the wild legends of that
+mysterious monarch, "old King Cole," who is to
+Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall, the
+great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's
+walls, and the earthworks near Lexden known as
+"King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the very name of
+Colchester itself&mdash;"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive,
+according to legends, from this scarce more than
+mythical personage. Those stories make him one
+Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of semi-independent
+British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal
+sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman
+conquest. The story goes on to tell how, on the
+death of the usurper Carausius, in <span class="smcap">A.D.</span> 293, Coel
+surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius
+Chlorus, on that successor of the C�sar's marrying
+his daughter Helena, who became the mother of
+Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer
+of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of
+Colchester still bear a ragged cross between four
+crowns, in allusion to this tale of the Empress
+Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction
+which Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy
+of her, holding a cross very plain to see, is newly
+set up on the very topmost point of the gorgeous
+new Town Hall, recently completed.</p>
+
+<p>To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey
+of Monmouth, the legend of Coel is chiefly traced.
+He may either have imagined it, or have woven the
+story out of existing legends, which had in turn
+derived from the Saxons, who, after the departure
+of the Romans, had wrested the country from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>
+Romanised British. They captured and burnt the
+town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls,
+took them to have been the work of some great king,
+after whom the place had been named. Legends
+of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons
+themselves had been converted to Christianity he
+was fully provided with a history.</p>
+
+<p>"Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster,
+has been shabbily treated in modern times and made
+to figure merely as a jolly toper. That he was the
+most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically
+assures us.</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called for</span><br />
+<span class="i2m">his fiddlers three."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house
+potentate! The author of that nursery rhyme
+has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain did the
+romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of
+vulgarity, <i>A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur</i>.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> entrance into Colchester is singular. From the
+straight, broad road leading past the trim modern
+villas and so into Crouch Street&mdash;the street outside
+the walls that takes its name from the vanished
+monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars&mdash;the
+wayfarer suddenly comes to the sharpest of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span>
+angles, and, turning abruptly to the left, enters
+Colchester by what has every appearance of being
+the back door into the town.</p>
+
+<p>Historically considered, the entrance by crooked
+Head Street, as the continuation of Crouch Street is
+called, really is a back way, and was in Roman times
+the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and
+less important roads. But ever since Saxon days
+this has been the only way to or from London into
+the town.</p>
+
+<p>How it happened that the original road and the
+Decuman Gate in Colchester's west wall fell into
+disuse, none can tell. It was so many ages ago that
+not even a pathway leads along the ancient way,
+now quite obliterated by houses. But if the road
+be gone, the Gate itself remains, though in ruins.
+Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt to find
+it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our
+steps a little distance along Crouch Street, and, so
+doing, to take a turning to the right-hand, down
+Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome is
+seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands
+towering above a flight of steps leading up into the
+street beyond. There stands revealed a portion of
+the wall. The breach in it, through which the steps
+lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees,
+the freshness of whose spring foliage with every recurrent
+April forms a romantic contrast with the
+almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a
+place for thought. From the summit of that old
+defence, where once the legionaries lined the battlements
+in time of peril, or leaned gossiping in peaceful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>
+days, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley
+where the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary
+lifting of the veil and a glimpse of what the spot will
+be like in another eighteen hundred years. Close
+by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn
+courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman
+Gate. Three arches can be traced; the middle arch
+of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot passengers,
+less than half that width. Candour, however,
+compels the admission that of architectural character
+they have not the slightest trace. Over against
+this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in
+the Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and
+through that hole the most prominent object in all
+Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo" brutally
+dominates everything, and blasts the approach to
+Colchester far away on every road but that from
+London, for which small mercy thanks be given.
+Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he
+is very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and,
+unluckily, cannot fail to be seen. After him, even
+the Roman remains of Colchester pale their ineffectual
+efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable,
+although not very likely, that a stranger passing
+through Colchester might not notice its Roman
+antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There
+he is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless
+in brick of the most striking red and in attempts
+at decoration which, however well meant, only serve
+to render his hulking body more objectionable, with
+an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged
+face with pearl-powder.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower
+of Colchester's waterworks. It was built in
+1881, and cost close upon �10,500, and there are
+those who say it is the second largest of its kind in
+England. Where the largest may be we know not,
+but if it injures its surroundings as effectually as
+does Colchester's incubus, that unknown place has
+our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in
+his name, for, as the curious may see for themselves,
+his weather-vane bears the effigy of an elephant.</p>
+
+<p>Returning to Crouch Street, and so by Head
+Gate and along Head Street, the High Street is
+gained. It is one of the broadest and most spacious
+streets in the kingdom, as it had every occasion to
+be, for it was not only part of the great road leading
+into Suffolk, but in it was held the principal fair of
+the town. Here, too, close by where Colchester's
+new and gorgeous Town Hall stands, was the old
+Moot Hall, a building of Saxon, Norman and later
+periods, barbarously destroyed in 1843. In the
+Moot Hall the Mayor and justices dealt with offences
+of all kinds, from the selling of bad meat to charges
+of witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. Thus we may
+read in the borough records of things so diverse as
+the fining of Robert Barefot, butcher, in the sum of
+twelve pence for selling putrid meat, and may learn
+how William Chevelying, the first of the Colchester
+martyrs, was imprisoned here in the reign of Henry
+the Sixth until such time as it was convenient to
+burn him in front of Colkyng's Castle. Here the
+local Court of Pie Powder was held during the
+Corporation Fair Days, in October. Summary<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>
+jurisdiction was the special feature of that Court,
+and it was needed, for in those times, when people
+of all sorts and conditions came from far and near,
+offences were many and various. In the legal jargon
+of the Middle Ages this tribunal is called the <i>Curia
+Regis Pedis Pulverizatis</i>, or, in the Norman-French
+then common, the "Cour Royal des Pieds Poudr�s,"
+that is to say, the King's Court of Dusty Feet.
+Courts of Pie Powder obtained this eminently descriptive
+name from the original Fair Courts, held in
+the dusty streets long before buildings were erected
+for the purpose, and the name survived long after
+the necessity which originated it had disappeared.
+Imagine, therefore, the highwaymen, the cheats and
+thieves and those who came into disputation on the
+Fair Days being brought before the Mayor by the
+bailiffs, their cases arising and being heard, and judgments
+and sentences being delivered and executed,
+within the space of one day, amid the bleating of the
+flocks, the lowing of the herds, and all the noise and
+tumult of the Fair itself. We must not, however,
+suppose the High Street to have been absolutely
+clear of obstructions in days of old. In midst of
+it stood the Late Saxon or Early Norman church of
+that Saxon saint, St Runwald, which remained here
+until so recently as 1878, when it was pulled down
+and its site sold to the Corporation, to be thrown
+into the roadway.</p>
+
+<p>That Colchester stands on a considerably elevated
+site is evident to all who, having entered from the
+London road, turn out of Head Street into the High
+Street, and in doing so glimpse the long descent of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[Pg 196]</a></span>
+North Hill at the corner. A further revelation is
+that of East Hill, which, in continuation of High
+Street, the traveller must long and steeply descend
+towards the Colne, on his way to Ipswich and
+Norwich. It was in High Street that Colchester's
+principal coaching inns were situated, and there yet
+remains&mdash;now the most picturesque feature of that
+thoroughfare&mdash;the "Red Lion," with old timber
+brackets supporting a projecting upper storey and a
+four-centred Tudor oak entrance curiously carved; its
+original and restored portions so thickly smeared
+with paint and varnish that all might be old, so far
+as the antiquary can tell, or all might be in the
+nature of Wardour Street antiques. The "Red
+Lion" figured as a rendezvous in the surrender of
+the town to Fairfax, after the siege of 1648. In its
+yard the vanquished laid down their swords.</p>
+
+<p>Another inn was the "White Hart," where Bank
+Passage leaves the High Street. The building, a
+highly respectable plaster-faced one, smug and
+Georgian, still stands, but it is an inn no longer.
+Another old inn, the "Three Cups," has been rebuilt.
+Older than any, but coyly hiding its antiquarian
+virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries
+from the crowd, is the "Angel," in West Stockwell
+Street, whose origin as a pilgrim's inn is vouched
+for. Weary suppliants to, or returning from, the
+shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the
+road through and past Norwich, housed here and
+misbehaved themselves in their medi�val way. It
+would be the gravest of mistakes to assume old
+pilgrims decorous. Modern Bank Holiday folks<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span>
+would, compared with them, seem to be of a severe
+monkish austerity. The shrine at Walsingham,
+second only in repute to that of the Blessed Thomas
+at Canterbury, drew crowds of every class, from
+king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of
+St John at Colchester sheltered some in its guest-houses,
+while the late-comers inned at such hostelries
+as the "Angel," or, if the weather were propitious,
+lay in the woods. Ill fared the unsuspecting citizen
+who met any of these sinners on the way to be
+plenarily indulged and lightened of their load of sin.
+They would murder him for twopence or cudgel him
+out of high spirits and for the fun of the thing;
+arguing, doubtless, that as they were presently to
+turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how black
+the old one was. Drunkenness and crime, immorality,
+obscenity and license of the grossest kind
+were in fact accompaniments of pilgrimage, and the
+sin-worn wanderers who prayed devoutly at the
+niche, now empty of its statue, in the east end of
+All Saints' Church in the High Street, on their
+journey to and from Walsingham, would resume
+their foul jests and their evil courses so soon as
+the last bead was told and the ultimate word of
+dog-Latin glibly pattered off.</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[Pg 198]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXVIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Removed</span> from all the noise and bustle of the High
+Street, in a quiet nook away from the modern life of
+the town, stands Colchester Castle, on the site of the
+Temple of Claudius. The Keep, built by Eudo,
+"Dapifer," or High Steward of Normandy, under
+William the Conqueror and his two successors, alone
+remains, and has lost its upper storey, destroyed by a
+speculator who bought the building in 1683, and half
+ruined himself in his attempts to demolish it. It is
+perhaps not generally known that this is by far the
+largest keep in England, measuring 155 ft. by 113 ft.
+The Tower of London, built at the same period, and
+the next largest, measures only 116 ft. by 96 ft.
+There have been those who, looking at its massive
+walls, 12 ft. thick, with courses of Roman tiles
+conspicuous in them, have believed this to be the
+original Roman temple, and antiquaries who should
+have known better have written long treatises to
+support their views. Those, however, were the days
+before comparative arch�ology had come into being
+to prove that the peculiarities in the planning, noticeable
+here, are partaken of by the undoubted Norman
+keeps of the Tower of London and of Rochester
+Castle, known to have been designed by Gundulf,
+Bishop of Rochester. Freeman was very severe in
+his time on those who labelled the interior of
+Colchester keep with such names as "podium" and
+"adytum," in their belief of its Roman character.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus59">
+<img src="images/fig49.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE GRAND STAIRCASE, COLCHESTER CASTLE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>If its lack of height prevents Colchester Castle
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span>from being impressive without, certainly its gloomy
+dungeons and mighty walls compel the respect and
+wonder of all who enter. They look not so much as
+though they had been built up, as though cells and
+passages had been carved and burrowed out of a solid
+mass; so small are those passages and staircases, so
+thick the walls. In the chapel and the corridors that
+still remain roofed, the collections of the Essex
+Arch�ological Society have a home, and from other<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>
+and roofless walls that are broad enough to afford the
+safest of pathways one may gaze down upon the
+surrounding grassy enclosures and see that spot
+where those two Royalist commanders, Lucas and
+Lisle, who held Colchester for seventy-six days
+against the besieging army of the Parliament in
+1648, were barbarously shot by order of Fairfax,
+after having surrendered.</p>
+
+<p>That siege of Colchester is the most romantic
+incident that has survived in the history of the
+town. It is the story of a last desperate attempt of
+the Royalists to contend with the Parliamentary
+forces that had everywhere overwhelmed the King's
+supporters after a bitter warfare of over six years.
+It was a gallant attempt, and the more so because
+Essex was not a county favourable to the King's
+cause. Sir Charles Lucas, at the head of this enterprise,
+was a younger member of the Lucas family,
+seated at Colchester. In the beginning of June
+1648, a Royalist rising under Colonel Goring had
+been checked at Blackheath by the Parliamentary
+general, Fairfax. A portion of Goring's force crossed
+the Thames into Essex, and lay at Brentwood. This
+was an opportunity which Essex sympathisers could
+not let slip. Lucas and his friends, gathering a body
+of adherents, galloped down the road to Chelmsford,
+where the Committee of Parliament was in session,
+and seized them, afterwards continuing their progress
+to Brentwood, where they effected a junction with
+Goring's band. Their forces thus united, a counter-march
+was made upon Chelmsford again, and continued
+to Colchester; Lord Capel, Sir George Lisle,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>
+and many others joining on the way. On June 12,
+Goring, in command of this body of four thousand
+Royalists, approached Colchester, and found the Head
+Gate closed against him by the unsympathetic
+citizens, but a slight skirmish soon enabled him to
+force an entrance. He had not intended to remain
+at Colchester, but the swift pursuit that Fairfax
+organised from London gave the Royalists no time
+to continue their projected march into the Midlands.
+The day after Goring had entered Colchester, Fairfax
+had assembled his forces on Lexden Heath, and
+immediately sent a trumpeter to demand surrender.
+The inevitable refusal was the signal for a battle outside
+the town, on the London Road; a contest which
+resulted in the retirement of the Royalists within the
+walls. The Head Gate still existed, its bolts and bars
+in perfect order, but as the Royalists fell back through
+it into the town, two hundred or more of the Parliamentary
+troops dashed through in pursuit. Their
+ardour cost them their lives, for Lord Capel at the
+head of a determined band pushed back the gate
+upon the bulk of the enemy, thrusting his walking-stick
+through the staples as the door closed. The
+eager advance-guard, thus cooped up within the
+walls, were all slain.</p>
+
+<p>Preparations were now made on both sides for a
+siege. Fairfax had already lost many men, and
+dared not attempt to carry the town by storm. His
+plan was to surround Colchester and imprison the
+Royalists there until such time as his heavy ordnance
+or starvation should compel them to surrender.
+With his command of reinforcements from London,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span>
+and his ability thus to enclose the town with a
+cordon of troops, the position of the Royalists was
+hopeless, and it is to their honour and credit that,
+in order to contain Fairfax's large army and so
+give opportunities to the organisers of Royalist
+movements in the Midlands, they continued the
+defence in the face of starvation and despite the easy
+terms of capitulation at first offered them. Their
+domestic position (so to call it) in the town was
+unenviable, for the inhabitants were wholly opposed
+to their cause. They had with them, it is true, the
+members of the Parliamentary Committee whom
+they had kidnapped from Chelmsford, but those
+gentlemen were a nuisance and had to be civilly
+treated and fed while the Royalists themselves went
+hungry. The unfortunate inhabitants, too, were
+starving, and many of their houses and churches
+destroyed by the besiegers' cannon shot; while
+suburbs were burnt down outside the walls.</p>
+
+<p>The end of this long agony came on August
+27, when the town was surrendered; the officers
+"surrendering to mercy," the lesser officers and rank
+and file with an assurance that their lives and
+personal belongings should be spared. Seventy-five
+superior officers accordingly gave up their arms at
+the "King's Head" inn. Four of them were to be
+tried by court-martial. One escaped, one was
+pardoned, and two&mdash;Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George
+Lisle&mdash;condemned to be shot without delay, on a
+disproved charge of having once broken their parole
+when formerly prisoners of war. In vain asking for
+time to make some final disposition of their affairs,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>
+these two officers were executed the same evening,
+on a grassy spot a few paces clear of the north wall
+of the old castle. Sir Charles Lucas was the first to
+be shot, and met his end as a brave, gallant gentleman
+should. "I have often faced death on the field
+of battle," he said, "and you shall now see how I dare
+to die." Then he knelt in prayer, and, rising, threw
+open his vest, exclaiming, "See, I am ready for you.
+Now, rebels, do your worst!" The firing-party then
+fired and shot him in four places, so that he fell dead
+on the instant.</p>
+
+<p>Sir George Lisle was then brought to the same
+place, and viewing the dead body of his friend as it
+lay on the ground, knelt down and kissed him,
+praising his unspotted honour. After bidding farewell
+to some friends, he turned to the spectators,
+saying, "Oh! how many of your lives here have
+I saved in hot blood, and must now myself be
+most barbarously murdered in cold blood? But
+what dare not they do that would willingly cut
+the throat of my dear King, whom they have already
+imprisoned, and for whose deliverance, and peace to
+this unfortunate country, I dedicate my last prayer
+to Heaven?" Then, looking in the faces of those
+who were to execute him, and thinking they stood at
+too great a distance, he desired them to come nearer,
+to which one of them said, "I'll warrant, sir, we hit
+you." "Friend," he answered, "I have been nearer
+you when you have missed me!" And so, after a
+short prayer upon his knees, he rose up and said,
+"Now, traitors, do your worst!" Whereupon they
+shot him dead.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The stone covering the graves of these unhappy
+soldiers may yet be seen in St Giles's Church, with
+an inscription stating that they were "by the command
+of Thomas Fairfax, the general of the
+Parliament Army, in cold blood barbarously
+murdered." A legend may still be occasionally met
+with in old books, which has it that the Duke of
+Buckingham, who had married Fairfax's daughter,
+approached Charles the Second with the object of
+having the passage erased that reflected so severely
+on his father-in-law's memory. The King conferred
+on the subject with Lord Lucas, who said that he
+would with pleasure obey the Royal command, if
+only His Majesty would allow him to place in its
+stead the statement that "Sir Charles Lucas and Sir
+George Lisle were barbarously murdered for their
+loyalty to King Charles the First, and that his son,
+King Charles the Second, had ordered this memorial
+of their loyalty to be erased." The King then, we
+are told, commanded the already existing epitaph to
+be cut still deeper, and it will be readily observed
+by those who go to gaze upon it that the lettering is
+bolder and deeper than commonly is the case.</p>
+
+<p>The undertaking of Fairfax with respect to the
+surrendered soldiery was not respected. They were
+ruthlessly pillaged, and some sent to the plantations
+over seas. Lord Capel was eventually executed in
+London. For many years afterwards the spot where
+Lucas and Lisle fell was shown by the awe-struck
+people of Colchester, who told the legend that grass
+would not grow where that loyal blood had been
+spilled. In later times the story became an article<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>
+of faith with one political party and a derision to
+the other. No grass grows there now; but for the
+commonplace reason that a well-kept gravel path
+occupies the site, which is duly marked by a small
+obelisk.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus60">
+<img src="images/fig50.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">OLD MAN-TRAP, COLCHESTER CASTLE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Colchester was long in recovering itself after the
+rough treatment received during the siege; and in
+fact, it is only in recent years that the church of
+St Mary-at-the-Wall, battered down on that occasion,
+has been rebuilt; while the Norman minster of St
+Botolph remains the roofless ruin that cannonading
+and incendiarism left it. Evelyn in 1656 found
+Colchester "a ragged and factious town, now swarming
+with sectaries," and if he had visited it nine
+years later would have witnessed a worse state, for
+the plague almost depopulated the place.</p>
+
+<p>"Sectaries"&mdash;that is to say, those who preferred
+to think for themselves on religious matters, and to
+worship in their own way&mdash;were treated with an
+unconscionable severity. One Parnell, a Quaker,
+was imprisoned in a cell within Colchester Castle,
+and died there, his story affording a sad example of
+barbarity in the authorities of that period.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But the early nineteenth century was as savage
+in some ways as the late seventeenth, which so
+delighted in despitefully using Nonconformists.
+The antiquarian collections in the castle, for instance,
+include a particularly ferocious instrument
+devised for the protection of the squires' property
+and for the maiming of poachers. It is a man-trap;
+one of those devilish contrivances which, actuated
+by powerful springs and furnished with sharp steel
+teeth, would, when accidentally trodden on by the
+poacher, snap down upon his leg with force sufficient
+to injure the bone and probably mutilate him for
+life. It was thus the landed interests protected their
+rabbits, hares and pheasants. The existence of this
+man-trap, together with the spring guns also used
+at the same time, is a reproach to the England of the
+first quarter of the nineteenth century, just as its
+preservation here as a curiosity is a certificate of the
+progress achieved in humanity since then.</p>
+
+<p>The present prosperity of Colchester is reflected
+in many ways, but in none more strikingly than the
+condition of the castle, now a municipal property,
+and encircled with lawns and flower-beds, oddly at
+variance with its time-worn grandeur. The neatness
+of these surroundings and of the ornamental railings
+that fence off the enclosure is admirable from the
+everyday point of view, but the picturesque neglect
+and rural squalor of other years pointed the moral of
+the place and annotated its story, while present
+prettinesses blur the historic page. It is so everywhere
+throughout the land. When, a hundred years
+ago, Turner, Sandby, Prout and Girtin, our early<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>
+water-colourists, roamed the country, making their
+picturesque sketches, they did not find themselves
+baulked by flower-beds, cursed by cast-iron fences,
+or requested not to walk on the grass. They had to
+pick their hazardous way through miry lanes, or
+adventure through the bottomless sloughs of farmyards.
+All these things were offensive to the
+wayfarer, but they generally meant picturesque
+compositions and exquisitely sketchable foregrounds.
+Nowadays the conscientious illustrator, unwilling to
+picturesquely exaggerate, and yet accursed with cast-iron
+railings new from Birmingham last week, is in a
+quandary.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus61">
+<img src="images/fig51.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">COLCHESTER CASTLE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The once forlorn condition of Colchester Castle
+doubtless originated in 1726, when its then owner,
+Sir Isaac Rebow, left it by will to a detested grandson,
+on whom he thus conferred a useless encumbrance,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span>a more exasperating bequest than even the
+proverbial cutting off with a shilling.</p>
+
+<p>A relic of those old days of picturesque neglect
+is found in the book of an auctioneer, who wrote an
+account of his "Professional Travels in England in
+the first half of the Nineteenth Century," modestly
+veiling his identity, and simply calling himself on
+his title-page, "An Auctioneer." Part One of his
+work was issued in 1843, but Part Two is yet to
+come, and as his first instalment shows little merit,
+the world can well afford to forego the second.</p>
+
+<p>Coming to the castle, he muses over its ruins,
+and weeps that cabbages and coriander employ the
+attention of the Colchester people, rather than the
+care of ancient fortresses. To him, thus contemplating
+"the sad remains of so many interesting scenes,"
+enters from an adjoining farm one whom he is
+pleased to term "an Aborigine." By this he
+obviously names an Essex farm-labourer. It is an
+affectation, but he might have done worse. He
+<i>might</i> have called him, seeing that Colchester is a
+place of oysters, a "native," in inverted commas,
+evidences of jocular intent, which would have been
+dreadful.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! sir," says the Aborigine, "it was cruel
+work when them great Barons, as they call 'em,
+lived here."</p>
+
+<p>"True, my friend," replies the Auctioneer, "but
+it's a pity to see hogs and donkeys depasturing in
+their courts and gardens, and grubbing and kicking
+down their halls and chapels."</p>
+
+<p>"Lord! your honour," rejoins the son of the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span>
+soil, "what's the use on 'em in these days? I'd
+sooner see an acre of these 'ere swedes any day,
+than them there towers and dungeons. Them
+swedes afore you 'ool carry a score o' fine wethers
+any month in the year, and plaze ye to look at 'em,
+but as for them flint walls, you may look at 'em for
+ever and a day 'fore you find enough o' green for a
+garnish"; which was indeed a practical rural way of
+looking at things.</p>
+
+<p>The summit of those old walls has nowadays a
+very charming green garnish of grass, rendered parti-coloured
+by wind- and bird-sown wallflowers and
+vigorous wildings; but more lusty than these are
+the young sycamores, that have struck deep roots
+into the walls and bid fair to grow into large trees.</p>
+
+<p>It is still possible to follow the greater part of
+Colchester's old walls along the queer alleys that
+run above or below them. Eld Lane, out of whose
+elevated course the steep descent of the old postern,
+now known as Scheregate Steps, goes, is situated
+along the summit of the south wall looking over
+towards St John's Green, where, facing a wilderness
+of scrubby grass, broken bottles, and the sordid
+house-sweepings of the modern town, the gatehouse
+stands, all that is left of the proud mitred Abbey of
+St John. By that green is the frowzy little church
+of St Giles, patched up in so atrocious a manner
+from the wreck it was after the siege of 1648 that
+to call its "architecture" merely "debased" is to deal
+kindly with it. A dilapidated boarded tower is a
+feature of the exterior; the interior provided with a
+flat plaster ceiling, like that of a dwelling-room, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>
+filled with flimsy pine-wood pews, painted and
+grained. Dust and stuffiness reign within; dust
+and broken crockery without. And yet, although
+so unlovely, it is not altogether with satisfaction
+that an elaborate design is seen for rebuilding the
+church from its foundations, together with the
+notice, "It is earnestly hoped that contributions
+will be given toward the restoration fund."
+"Restoration" is not the word, for the design is
+alien and quite unlike anything that formerly stood
+on the ground. Rather let the place be repaired
+and cleansed and its unbeautiful details preserved
+as a characteristic and shocking example of how
+they looked upon ecclesiastical architecture in the
+dark days of churchwarden- and carpenter-Gothic.
+It is here, under the north aisle, that those two
+valiant captains, Lucas and Lisle, are laid.</p>
+
+<p>For the church-towers built of Roman bricks,
+and for other evidences of that ancient Empire, let
+the explorer seek, and, presently finding, think
+himself, if he will, an original investigator: it is a
+harmless attitude, if at the same time unwarranted
+by fact. Let us to other matters, and then, leaving
+the town, hie away for Ipswich.</p>
+
+<p>Colchester is, of course, famous for its oysters,
+and has been ever since the Roman occupation.
+In the estuary of the Colne, and the Crouch, and in
+the oozy creeks of the Essex shores, the Colchester
+"natives" still grow up from infancy to maturity
+and feed upon the semi-maritime slime, as they did
+close upon two thousand years ago, and doubtless
+long before that. If we may judge from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>
+stupendous heaps of oyster-shells discovered on the
+sites of Roman towns and villas, near and far, to
+say merely that the Romans were fond of oysters
+would be far too mild a term. They must have
+almost lived on oysters, dreamt oysters, and thought
+oysters. No wonder Colchester, whence the finest
+and the largest supply came, was so prosperous a
+Roman colony.</p>
+
+<p>Although the fishery brings wealth to the town,
+it is more than a mile away and makes no sign.
+Those who might think that, because of it, Colchester
+should obtrude oysters at every turn and oyster-shells
+should strew every street, would be vastly
+disillusioned. But beside its oyster fishery, other
+Colchester trades are of secondary importance.
+Agricultural machinery is made here, and brewing
+and corn-milling carried on, but the once famed
+textile manufactures are gone. Among those old
+trades was the industry of baize-making, which left
+Colchester considerably over a century ago for other
+centres, after having given additional prosperity to
+the town for a period of a hundred and fifty years.
+It was shortly after 1570 that numbers of Dutch
+Protestants, fleeing from the Spanish persecutions
+in Holland, introduced the making of "bays and
+says," and, despite local jealousies, flourished
+amazingly for generations here.</p>
+
+<p>But Colchester will never be dull while it continues
+to be what it is now&mdash;a great military dep�t.
+Those worthy representatives of the Roman legionaries
+at a distance in time of nineteen centuries or
+so, the Tommies and troopers of the British Army,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>
+are a prominent feature in every street, and bugles
+blow all round the clock, from <i>r�veill�</i> to the last
+post, when every good soldier goes home to his
+barracks down the Butt Road; while the King's
+bad bargains stay behind and fortify themselves
+against apprehensions of the morrow's "clink" with
+another glass, or, adventuring too rashly into the
+street, find themselves presently in charge of the
+military patrol that walks the town with measured
+step and slow.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXIX</p>
+
+
+<p>"<span class="smcap">From</span> Colchester to Ipswitch is ten mile," says
+that seventeenth-century traveller, Celia Fiennes,
+in her diary. The milestones, however, tell quite
+a different tale and contradict the lady by making
+the distance between the two towns eighteen miles
+and a quarter.</p>
+
+<p>Seven miles of these bring the traveller from
+Colchester across the Stour and so into Suffolk. It
+is not an exciting seven miles. Passing the eastern
+outskirts of Colchester, where mud in the Colne and
+puddles beside the slattern streets offend the sense
+of propriety, as, having reversed their natural
+positions, the Fair Field is left on the right.
+"Left" is an expression used advisedly, for who
+would linger there? But the Fair Field cannot be
+passed unawares. If not seen, it will be heard, for
+on it camp the caravans, steam roundabouts and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span>
+travelling circuses that still draw rustic crowds with
+their fat women, giants and dwarfs; or delight them
+with mechanical rides on wooden horses to the
+bellowing of a steam organ, whose music-hall airs
+follow the traveller in gusts of stentorian minstrelsy
+when the wind unkindly wills it so. The sounds
+nerve the cyclist to quickly put the miles between
+himself and those siren strains, and happily the
+road is a fast one, so that he need not be long about
+the business. It goes, as an old turnpike should,
+broad and straight and well-kept, for the matter of
+six miles, with little to vary the monotony of trim
+hedgerow and equi-distant telegraph poles.</p>
+
+<p>Let us therefore leave it awhile, and, journeying
+some three hundred yards along the Harwich Road,
+come across a railway level-crossing to the suburb
+of St Ann's, and the site of a spring and hermitage
+called Holy Well. The spring is now sealed up,
+but an inscription in the wall of a cottage still
+proclaims it to have been reopened in 1844. It
+seems strange that the Hermitage should have been
+placed, not on the main road where pilgrims were
+surely more plentiful, but on the seaward route.
+The explanation may probably be sought in the
+existence already of another establishment of the
+kind, long since forgotten. Here, then, the
+Hermitage of St Ann's was placed, and a holy
+well and an oratory made appeal to the piety or
+the superstition, as the case might be, of all who
+passed by. To these the hermit presented his
+leathern wallet, beseeching travellers, who would
+have gone without giving alms, to spare a trifle for<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span>
+the upkeep of the road, even though they valued
+not the Blessed Saints.</p>
+
+<p>For three hundred years the Hermitage lasted,
+and a long line of hermits lived here. Some were
+pious and industrious, keeping the road in repair;
+others had neither piety nor industry, spent their
+time in taverns, were smiters, and got drunk and
+fought, so that the road became scandalously neglected,
+and many Colchester worthies received
+apostolical black eyes from eremitical fists. Such
+an one must have been the hermit who lived here
+in the reign of Henry the Fifth, and was indicted in
+1419 for having an unclean ditch. Finally, in
+1535, when the dissolution of the monasteries took
+place, the Hermitage was closed, and the then
+occupant turned out, with a warning that if he
+solicited alms henceforward he would be regarded
+as a "sturdy beggar," and dealt with accordingly.</p>
+
+<p>The road to Ipswich was the scene, in the
+second half of the seventeenth century, shortly
+after the first coaches had started running, of many
+highway robberies. The borough of Colchester was
+deeply concerned at this lawlessness, and in 1679
+three men were rewarded with �6, 8s. between them
+"for apprehending those y<sup>t</sup> robbed the Ipswich
+coach." Again, in September 1698, three men
+were rewarded "for pursuen hiewaymen," and for
+"going to Ardlegh" on that business; but as they
+received only two shillings each and an extra
+shilling for "drinck," it looks as though the
+pursuit was unsuccessful.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus13">
+<img src="images/fig52.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">COLCHESTER.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The high road, to which we have now returned,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a><br /><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a><br /><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>
+has already been described as an excellent highway,
+but Dilbridge, a hamlet, and a roadside inn on what
+was once Ardleigh Heath, alone break its solitude.
+It has, however, the advantage of commanding the
+best general view of Colchester, with the inevitable
+Jumbo prominent, and the new-risen Town Hall
+tower in rivalry with it.</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly, when six miles from Colchester, the
+road changes its character and drops sharply down
+by an almost precipitous descent, to where a lazy
+river is seen flowing picturesquely in loops and
+bends between the grey-green foliage of willows
+lining either bank. It flows through a land of rich
+green meadows and yellow cornfields; a land, too,
+of noble elms and oaks. In the far distance the
+waters of a salt estuary sparkle in the sun, while
+in between, from this Pisgah height, rises the tall
+tower of a church. The river is the Stour, dividing
+Essex and Suffolk, and the pleasant vale, the Vale
+of Dedham. The estuary is that of the Stour at
+Manningtree, and the church tower that of Dedham.
+This, indeed, is the Constable Country, and that
+fact explains the homelike and familiar look it
+wears, even to the stranger. Constable, born close
+by at East Bergholt, painted these scenes lovingly
+for over forty years, and remained constant to his
+native vale all his life. By the magic power that
+comes of sympathy, he transferred the spirit of these
+lanes and fields and trees to canvas as faithfully as
+he did their form and colour; with the result
+that the veriest stranger viewing them becomes
+reminiscent.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Nor did Constable only <i>paint</i> his native vale;
+he has described it in almost as masterly a way.
+To him it was "the most cultivated part of Suffolk,
+a spot which overlooks the fertile valley of the
+Stour, which river separates that county on the
+south from Essex. The beauty of the surrounding
+scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow
+flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated
+uplands, its woods and rivers, with
+numerous scattered villages and churches, farms
+and picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular
+spot an amenity and excellence hardly
+anywhere else to be found. He tells an amusing
+story of travelling home by coach down this very
+hill. He shared the vehicle with two strangers.
+"In passing the Vale of Dedham, one of them remarked,
+on my saying it was very beautiful, 'Yes,
+sir, this is Constable's Country.' I then told him
+who I was lest he should spoil it."</p>
+
+<p>From this hill-top to the left of the road, and
+in what are now the woodlands of Langham Hall,
+Constable painted his best-known Vale of Dedham.
+In one respect the scene has changed. The willows
+still fringing the Stour, formerly "cobbed" or
+pollarded, are now allowed to grow as they will,
+and the river is not so visible as it was once.
+Otherwise the Constable Country is little altered.
+Even on this hill, close by Langham church, Church
+Farm, the original of his "Glebe Farm," remains as
+it was, thatched and gabled, close by the church
+tower. Only the foliage has changed, and the little
+guttering stream been drained away.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus14">
+<img src="images/fig53.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE VALE OF DEDHAM. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a><br /><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus62">
+<img src="images/fig54.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">GUN HILL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This steep road, shelving so abruptly to the
+Stour, is Dedham Hill, more often locally known
+as Dedham Gun Hill, from the "Gun" inn at the
+summit, now unhappily rebuilt, but until recently
+a most picturesque old inn, with the painted sign of
+a cannon hanging over the road. The sign has gone,
+and a pretentious house, which proclaims "Accommodation
+for Lady Cyclists," arisen in its stead.
+At the foot of the hill the road, turning abruptly
+to the left, begins a lengthy crossing of the Stour and
+its marshes by a bridge over the channel and a long
+series of flood-water arches across the oozy valley.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span>
+The old toll-house, taking tolls no longer, still
+stands, a quaint building on the Essex side, and
+bears a cast-iron tablet with the inscription,&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="c">
+THE DUMB ANIMALS' HUMBLE PETITION.</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Rest, drivers, rest, on this steep hill,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Dumb beasts pray use with all good will;</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Goad not, scourge not, with thong�d whips,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Let not one curse escape your lips,</span><br />
+<span class="i3">God sees and hears.</span><br />
+<span class="i12"><span class="smcap">T. T. H., Posuit.</span></span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus63">
+<img src="images/fig55.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">OLD TOLL-HOUSE, STRATFORD BRIDGE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>This is one of a number of similar tablets erected
+throughout the country in the early part of the
+nineteenth century, when the first glimmerings of
+humane treatment of animals began to show themselves.
+When drivers had perforce to halt here to
+pay toll, this was a notice they could scarce help<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>
+seeing, but it only by rare chance attracts attention
+now.</p>
+
+<p>Across the bridge is the mill, long idle and empty.
+No picturesque building this, but a great hulking
+structure of that intolerable "white" Suffolk brick
+which is rather a grey-white than any other hue; a
+brick which, the older it is looks more shabby and
+crude, and by no chance ever helps the artist. The
+whole length of the Norwich Road is more or less
+bedevilled with it.</p>
+
+<p>This mill is the one blot on the beauty of
+Stratford St Mary, a village built along the flat road
+and continuing round the bend, and so up the hill
+to where the fine old church stands overlooking the
+highway. It is a remarkable church, built of black
+flint and stone, and covered on the side facing the
+road with inscriptions. It owed its rise, on the site
+of an older building, to the Mors family, wealthy
+clothworkers of this place in the fifteenth and
+sixteenth centuries. It is perhaps a little difficult
+to imagine Stratford St Mary, in common with other
+East Anglian towns and villages, a busy seat of the
+weaving industry, just as there is a difficulty in
+realising that Sussex was once a grimy iron-mining
+country; but trades and places have their fates, and
+changes and romances of their own.</p>
+
+<p>From 1499 to 1530 two generations of the Mors
+family were busy in giving to their church and in
+directing its new features; and the chief of the inscriptions
+in stone and flint that curiously decorate
+its exterior in old English characters record the facts
+and beseech the wayfarer to pray for their souls.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>
+Vain request! The work had not been completed
+five years when the long and troubled story of the
+Reformation began and the souls of the dead were no
+longer prayed for.</p>
+
+<p>The most prominent inscription is that enjoining
+prayers for Thomas Mors and his wife Margaret, who
+built the north aisle:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p class="oldeng hang xxlarge">Orate pro animabus Thome Mors et Margarete<br />
+uxoris ejus qui istam alam ffieri fecerunt<br />
+anno dni mcccc<sup>m</sup> lxxxxviiii</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Edward Mors, son of Thomas and Margaret, is, together
+with his wife Alice, content with an English
+inscription. They are also a little less self-centred
+than their forbears, desiring prayers for "all Christian
+souls" in addition to supplications for their own
+especial benefit:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p class="oldeng hang xxlarge">Praye for the soullys of Edward Mors and Alys<br />
+hys wyfe and all crysten sowlys, Anno<br />
+Domini 1530.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>Many other inscriptions and devices are seen,
+among them the letters, <span class="large">P B A E S</span>, said to be the
+initials of an invocatory sentence, "<i>Propitiemini beati
+ad eternam salutem</i>," addressed to Saints Thomas
+and Margaret, the patron saints of Thomas and
+Margaret Mors. But, stranger than any, is the appearance
+of the entire alphabet on these walls. Many
+attempts have been made to explain the reason of
+this, among them the view that the object was to
+educate the villagers in the rudiments of spelling!</p>
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span></p>
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> long rise out of Stratford on the way to Ipswich
+lies through a beautiful Gainsborough-like woodland,
+with ancient trees gripping sandy banks in a tenacious
+clutch of gnarled roots. It is a hollow road,
+and one in which, when the coaches were toiling up,
+the guards' hands went instinctively towards their
+blunderbusses and swordcases. One never knew
+what or who might be lurking in that shade.</p>
+
+<p>But if it was a chancy spot then, how very
+suspicious a place it must have been hundreds of
+years before. That it was so regarded may be learnt
+from the <i>Paston Letters</i>, the instructive correspondence
+of the Paston family in the fifteenth century.
+Therein we read how a rival of John Paston in the
+wardship of one of the Fastolf family, coming out of
+Suffolk to London, was escorted by a hundred retainers,
+all armed with bows and arrows in their
+hands, with saletts on their heads, well-padded jacks
+and rusty haubergeons on their bodies, and fear in
+their hearts of an ambush laid on the part of the
+Pastons in the hollow way where the trees meet overhead
+and a mid-day darkness broods under the dense
+foliage. This rival expressed himself as not being
+afraid of the Pastons or any of their friends; but if
+not, why did he go escorted with this motley crew,
+tricked out with all the ancient weapons and rusted
+armour they could find? Happily they were not
+attacked, but that it was possible for petty warfare
+of this kind to be plotted is proof that the Merry<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>
+England of that period was no safe place for peaceful
+travellers.</p>
+
+<p>Now we are well within Suffolk, the "crack
+county of England," as Cobbett called it, the "sweet
+and civil county" of Bishop Hall; but a county to
+which the alliterative term "silly" has long been
+applied. It is probably by this time quite hopeless
+to scotch that nickname, for it is of a considerable
+age and has a specious and easy glibness that comes
+trippingly off the tongue. Suffolkers themselves&mdash;whom
+it most concerns&mdash;are at pains to explain that
+the real, and entirely flattering, solution of the phrase
+is found in "selig," the Anglo-Saxon for "holy" or
+"blissful;" a reference to the numerous and wealthy
+religious houses within the county, and to the East
+Anglian saints and the many places of pilgrimage.
+Another party advancing the theory that the epithet
+was originally "Sely Suffolk," observant of the
+seasons, would thus have us believe that Suffolk
+must have been more observant than other counties,
+which is not credible. True, Suffolkers still talk of
+the hay-harvest as "haysel," a survival of "hay sele,"
+but this is not the only county that uses the phrase.
+It becomes evident that the nickname must go unexplained.</p>
+
+<p>Suffolk has its claims to recognition on other than
+historic grounds. "I'm told the dumplings is uncommon
+fine down there," said William, the coachman,
+to little David Copperfield. Perhaps they are, and
+certainly it was once the custom among the peasantry
+here, as indeed throughout England, to serve pudding,
+or "dumpling," before meat in order to take the edge<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>
+off appetites with a kind of food cheaper than
+butcher's meat; but the improved circumstances of
+the peasantry scarce demand such a practice nowadays,
+and in any case, Norfolk is the county of
+dumplings, so Dickens was in error in putting that
+speech in the coachman's mouth. "Norfolk Dumplings,"
+he should have known, are as proverbial as
+"Silly Suffolkers."</p>
+
+<p>Suffolk is deservedly esteemed all over the world
+for the "Suffolk Punch." This sounds convivial, but
+has no connection with punch-bowls; the reference
+being, as a matter of fact, to a breed of horses.</p>
+
+<p>"And the Punches! There's cattle!" said
+William, the Canterbury coachman, to David Copperfield.
+"A Suffolk Punch, when he's a good 'un, is
+worth his weight in gold," he added; which is not
+a very great exaggeration. Keep an eye upon the
+fields or an observant glance along the road, and the
+Suffolk Punch will readily be noted in his native
+country, at plough, halted by the wayside inn, or
+dragging with indomitable spirit the heaviest loads
+that the stupidity of the most stupid of waggoners
+could put him to. If ever horse deserved the praise
+contained in the familiar copy-book maxim, that he
+is "a Noble Animal, the Friend of Man," it is to this
+breed that it most particularly applies. The Suffolk
+Punch is a sturdy and a willing brute, and will pull
+against a dead weight until exhausted. It has been
+said that the Suffolk Punch existed as a type of horse
+in early British times, and it has been supposed that
+his remote ancestors were the horses that drew
+Boadicea's war-chariots. If it were not that he is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>
+invariably a chestnut, it might be supposed that his
+fame in the county had originated the sign of the
+"Great White Horse" in Ipswich; but from chestnut
+the breed never varies. It may be of various shades,
+from the darkest mahogany to the lightest golden-brown,
+but never any other hue. It is, of course,
+not necessary to journey into East Anglia to see the
+Suffolk Punch. Many of his kind are at work in
+London, drawing heavy loads, and are to be seen
+expatriated to Russia, and on Canadian farms,
+thousand of miles away from their native claylands.</p>
+
+<p>The Suffolk dialect is kin to those of Essex and
+Norfolk, but the "Suffolk whine" is peculiar to the
+county; it is a rising inflection of the voice towards
+the end of words and sentences. In Suffolk speech
+"fowls" become "foals," and "foals," "fools"; and
+archaic words, heard occasionally in Essex, grow
+more common as the traveller advances. So also
+does an odd custom first noticed in the neighbourhood
+of Colchester&mdash;the custom of affixing the place-name
+to the sign of an inn in ordinary talk. The
+"Gun" inn at Dedham, for example, is always
+spoken of as "Dedham Gun," and here, at Bentley,
+the custom is emphasised by the sign of a roadside
+inn being inscribed "Bentley Tankard," and not
+merely "The Tankard."</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus15">
+<img src="images/fig56.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SPRING: SUFFOLK PLOUGHLANDS. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But to understand Suffolk ways and to hear
+Suffolk talk it is necessary to linger in the villages
+and to gossip with the sons of the soil. The
+agricultural villages are only articulate at eventide,
+when they give themselves up to play and gossip.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a><br /><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a><br /><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>
+Then, as the long summer day draws to its close, the
+children find romance in the lengthening shadows,
+in which their games of robbers and pirates seem
+much more convincing than they could be made to
+appear in the glare of the midday sun; the farm
+labourers slouch off to their evening, over quarts of
+"bellywengins," at the pub, and the coy mawthers
+find the twilight a seasonable time for nannicking
+with the hudderens. This, which may seem unmeaning
+gibberish to those unacquainted with the
+peculiar dialect of East Anglia, merely signifies the
+girls flirting with the "other ones"&mdash;the young
+men, in short.</p>
+
+<p>But a mawther may be of any age. A baby girl
+is a mawther, and so is a grandame. It is a curiosity
+of speech which is apt to startle the stranger who
+first hears it applied to a girl who has hardly yet
+learned to toddle, in the maternal threat, to be
+heard any day in any Suffolk village, "Yow come
+'ere, mawther, this instant moment, or I'll spank
+yow, so I 'ool." "Yow," of course, is the Essex,
+Suffolk and Norfolk shibboleth for "you," by which
+a native of these parts may be immediately distinguished
+anywhere.</p>
+
+<p>When the labourers have trudged over to their
+"shants o' gatter," or quarts and pots of beer&mdash;the
+"bellywengins," or belly vengeance, aforesaid; when
+the children have been put to bed, and the mawthers
+and the hudderens have gone nannicking off together
+in the gathering dusk, then is the gossiping
+time, both of the housewives and of the labourers.
+The women talk at the doors of the "housen":<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>
+the men mostly in the village inns. Hear, passing
+stranger, what the mawthers are saying:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Good daa to 'ee, Mrs Potter, how are ye a-gettin'
+arn?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm a-doin' good-tidily, thank'ee, better'n tew
+or tree weeks sin'. The doctor say I fare to be
+on the mend; but it hev bin a bad time wi' me
+sure."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay; owd bones 'on't be young agen, I'm
+thinkin'; but there, 'taint so much yer aige, 'tis yer
+sperrut what keep ye up or let ye down."</p>
+
+<p>"Ay, that be trew," says one of the group,
+"what be life wi'out sperrut? Nothin', in a
+manner o' speakin'."</p>
+
+<p>"Yar father, Mrs Cobbold, he had it, and he
+lived to be ninety."</p>
+
+<p>"What a man that wor! I mind him when he
+come to mine arter he'd walked from Ipswich, an'
+that's a good ten mile. He come to paiy a shullun
+he ew my ole man, and, barrin' a bit tirsty, he were
+as spry as a mavish and fresher'n a paigle."</p>
+
+<p>A mile distant, to the right hand, lies East
+Bergholt, Constable's birthplace, and between it
+and the road still stretch in summer those golden
+cornfields he loved so well. "The Cornfield," that
+crowning achievement of English landscape, how
+exquisite a thing it is, radiant in colour on the
+walls of the National Gallery, and how ineffectually
+the inadequate medium of black and white
+attempts to translate it.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus16">
+<img src="images/fig57.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE CORNFIELD. <span class="in5"><i>After Constable.</i></span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The grumbling farmer, who has good cause for
+his growls, poor fellow, is careful to explain his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a><br /><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a><br /><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span>
+cornfields away. When asked why, if it does not
+pay to grow wheat, he still continues to do so, he
+says he grows it for the straw. At any rate, times
+are changed from those when agricultural England
+was merry with high prices; those picturesque days
+when the Ipswich and Norwich coaches were hailed,
+as every traveller was hailed, at harvest-time by the
+reapers' cry of "Halloo, halloo, largesse," the largesse
+going at harvest-home in a saturnalia at the village
+inn. "Largesse" has gone with the going of the
+reaping-hook, and with it and many other things
+has gone the Lord of the Harvest, elected from
+among his fellow-reapers to preside over their
+labours and their harvest-supper in the great
+fragrant barn or in the farm kitchen. The line
+of red-cheeked peasants, working from early morning
+with their sickles in the fierce sun upon the
+diminishing fields of standing wheat, with halts for
+levenses and bever, and so home by the light of
+the harvest moon, is no more to be seen: reaping-machines
+do the work instead. It was astonishing,
+and, in the haymaking fields, still is, what long and
+continual draughts of beer can be disposed of in the
+intervals of such labour. Levenses, that is to say
+the eleven o'clock forenoon meal, and bever, the
+four o'clock in the afternoon halt, whose name came
+through the Norman-French "bevre" from the Latin
+"bibere," to drink, reduced the contents of the
+barrels placed in the shady hedgerows, but quarts
+imbibed under such conditions were harmless.
+Almost solitary survivals of the old peasant life,
+the names of "bever" and "levenses" remain yet<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span>
+in the common speech of Norfolk and Suffolk as
+those of the hedgeside meals of ploughman and
+carter.</p>
+
+<p>Old country folk still talk, in their reminiscent
+moments, of coaching and posting days here, when,
+near the tiny hamlet known as Cross Green, and in
+a deep dip of the high road, where a byway goes,
+leading from Manningtree to Hadleigh and beyond,
+"Laddenford Stables" stood at the cross roads that
+went then by the name of the "Four Sisters." Four
+sisters, if one likes to accept the rustic belief, agreed
+to part here and went their several ways, but how
+they fared, or what was their social status, the story
+does not tell.</p>
+
+<p>Passing Capel St Mary and the level-crossing
+by Capel station, and so by Copdock, whose church
+tower has an odd weather-vane in the shape of King
+David playing his harp, Washbrook is reached at
+the foot of its steep hill. Copdock on the hill and
+Washbrook in the hollow, together with the broad
+and still marshy valley of the little Wash Brook,
+tell how that rivulet was once, in the far-off days
+when Saxons and Danes contended on this coast, a
+navigable creek, an arm of the Orwell. The road,
+in its sharp descent into and rise out of the valley,
+together with its acute bend, is also eloquent of
+bygone geographical conditions, leading as it does
+down to the place where a bridge now spans the
+stream on the spot where the creek was, in days of
+old, first fordable. Having thus crossed, the road
+went, and still goes, in a right-angle turn uphill,
+towards Ipswich.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>It was by no means necessary for travellers
+journeying between London and Norwich to touch
+Ipswich. The coaches did, for obvious commercial
+reasons, but the "chariots" and the post-chaises
+commonly went from Washbrook, through Sproughton
+and Bramford, and joined the coach route again at
+Claydon, thus taking the base of a triangle, instead
+of its two sides. There are those at Washbrook
+who can still tell of the coaches that halted at
+"Copdock White Elm"; of the time when a toll-gate
+(the house still existing) stretched across the
+way at the foot of the hill, and of the "aristocracks"
+who posted the long stage between "Stonham Pie"
+and "Washbrook Swan." They can point out the
+"Swan," facing up the road and looking squarely
+up at the hill-top, but now a private residence with
+its stables chiefly put to alien uses; and can show
+the places, in what are now meadows, where many
+houses and cottages stood in those wayfaring days,
+when the high-lying road to Ipswich, across the
+uplands between the valleys of the Stour and the
+Orwell, was not so unfrequented as now.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> can be no doubt of Ipswich and its surroundings
+having thoroughly captured the heart of
+grumbling old Cobbett.</p>
+
+<p>"From the town itself," he says, "you can see
+nothing; but you can, in no direction, go from it a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>
+quarter of a mile without finding views that a
+painter might crave." This is not a little remarkable,
+for we do not generally attribute an artistic
+perception of scenic beauties to this practical farmer.
+Yet he was of one mind with Constable, of whom
+and his pictures he probably had never heard,
+although Constable had already for years been
+painting these very scenes.</p>
+
+<p>The practical farming mind appears in Cobbett's
+next remarks: "And then, the country round about
+is so well cultivated; the land in such a beautiful
+state, the farmhouses all white and all so much
+alike; the barns and everything about the homesteads
+so snug; the stock of turnips so abundant
+everywhere; the sheep and cattle in such fine order;
+the wheat all drilled; the ploughman so expert; the
+furrows, if a quarter of a mile long, as straight as a
+line, and laid as truly as if with a level; in short,
+here is everything to delight the eye and to make
+the people proud of their country; and this is the
+case throughout the whole of this county. I have
+always found Suffolk farmers great boasters of their
+superiority over others, and I must say that it is not
+without reason."</p>
+
+<p>Cobbett found the windmills on the hills round
+Ipswich so numerous that, while standing in one
+place, he counted no fewer than seventeen, all
+painted or washed white, with black sails. They
+are fewer to-day, and could Gainsborough, old
+Crome and Constable revisit the scenes of their
+artistic inspiration, they would sadly miss the
+picturesqueness they gave these woody scenes and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span>
+fertile hills and vales. It is from the crest of one
+of these hills that Ipswich is first glimpsed. There
+it sprawls, prosperous, beside the broad Orwell;
+"doubtlesse one of the sweetest, most pleasant, well-built
+townes in England," as John Evelyn thought in
+1656; but then swarming with "a new phanatic sect
+of dangerous principles." The reader will scarce guess
+aright who these fanatics were. They were neither
+sun-worshippers nor Mahometans, but merely Quakers.</p>
+
+<p>One obtains no glimpse of the broad estuary of
+the Orwell when descending into the town by the
+London road, and the crowded mass of the place rises
+confusedly up before the traveller as he steeply
+descends, and forms no picture. You must take
+Ipswich in detail to admire it, and the actual
+crossing of the river at the foot of the hill where
+the town begins is at a narrow canalised stretch
+before it widens out into the noble harbour that
+makes the fortune of the port. A sign of that
+accomplished fortune is the unlovely sight of the
+great railway sidings and goods yards spread out
+before the stranger's eye as he comes downhill. One
+may say that the town begins at the door of the
+"Ipswich Arms" inn, uninteresting in itself, but displaying
+the fine "old coat" of this famous seaport;
+a shield with a rampant golden lion on a red field on
+the sinister, and three golden demi-boats on blue on
+the dexter side.</p>
+
+<p>"A fine, populous, and beautiful place," says
+Cobbett, still harping on an unwonted string of
+praise. "The town is substantially built, well
+paved, everything good and solid, and no wretched<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span>
+dwellings to be seen on its outskirts." He knew no
+town to be compared with it, except it were Nottingham,
+which, after all, is not properly comparable,
+Nottingham standing high, while Ipswich is in a
+vale, and moreover, is situated on an arm of the sea.
+It is amusing to read Cobbett's remarks on the
+population of Ipswich, which stood in his time at
+twelve thousand. "Do you not," he asks, "think
+Ipswich was far larger and far more populous seven
+hundred years ago than it is at this hour?"&mdash;that
+hour being some time in March 1830. He remarked
+upon "the twelve large, lofty and magnificent
+churches," each of them seven hundred years old,
+one capable of holding from four to seven thousand
+persons, and came to the conclusion that, in fact,
+although he found Ipswich populous, it must, even
+thus, have been a mere ghost of its former self.
+That shrewd observer was right. Ipswich had
+grievously decayed even in Charles the Second's
+reign, when the Duke of Buckingham described
+it as "a town without inhabitants, a river without
+water, streets without names, and where the asses
+wore boots." The Duke, in speaking of "a river
+without water," was probably referring to the
+estuary of the Orwell at low tide, when mud-banks
+stretch vast, and the stream runs by comparison
+feeble and thread-like through them. In its
+then nameless streets, Ipswich was not singular, for
+many small provincial towns were in like case. The
+asses that wore boots were those employed in rolling
+the lawn of a neighbouring park, the object probably
+being to prevent their hoofs injuring the surface.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"Yepysweche," as Margaret Paston, writing to
+her husband over four hundred years ago, spells
+the name, derives its title from the aboriginal
+Gippings, a tribe or clan who squatted down
+beside the Orwell, and not only established their
+primitive village of Gippingswick here, but contrived
+to foist their tribal name upon the non-tidal
+part of the river above the town, which therefore
+still generally bears this <i>alias</i>. The town probably
+saw its greatest prosperity in the time of Cardinal
+Wolsey, a native, and, according to legend, son of a
+butcher. This "butcher's dogge," as the envious
+nicknamed the great Cardinal, determined that his
+birthplace should be great in learning as well as
+in commerce, and to that end founded a College
+which he intended to be in some sort preparatory
+for his greater college of Christ Church at Oxford.
+That his foundation was reared on the spoliation of
+a religious house and its revenues, procured by him
+for the purpose, seemed but an ill omen for its
+prosperity to those who saw his buildings rising to
+completion, and the omen was speedily fulfilled, for
+the new-made abode of learning never sent forth
+a scholar, but was suppressed by Henry the Eighth
+almost before the mortar of its brick walls was
+dry; the buildings themselves torn down and the
+endowments confiscated. All that remains of
+Wolsey's College is one noble red-brick gateway in
+College Street.</p>
+
+<p>Daniel Defoe was a native of Ipswich and a
+curious contrast with Wolsey, his brother townsman
+of two hundred years before. In his day the old<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span>
+prosperity of the place had vanished, in the stress
+of Dutch competition and the virulence of the plague;
+but modern times have made amends for that
+temporary decay, and the town is now nearly four
+times larger than when, shortly after the first
+quarter of the nineteenth century had gone, Cobbett
+noted its many and empty churches and its scanty
+population. It numbers now over 58,000 souls,
+and its trades are numerous and prosperous.
+Whether it be in the making of agricultural and
+milling machinery, its corn markets, artificial
+manure making, or the manufacture of corsets,
+Ipswich is fortunate, with the good fortune of those
+who give heed to the ancient proverb and do not
+put all their eggs in one basket.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus64">
+<img src="images/fig58.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">WOLSEY'S GATEWAY.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Picturesqueness coyly hides itself from the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span>
+traveller who merely passes through the chief streets.
+Not in the open square of Cornhill, where the cabs
+and flys stand on the site of the old Market Cross
+and the trams fly to and fro, and where the Post-office
+and the Town Hall rise, side by side, does
+it appear, nor in the long street beyond; but rather
+in the Butter Market and the lanes that conduct
+to the waterside. There be streets in that quarter
+with odd names, among them Silent Street; and
+almshouses, and churches, and the queerest inns.
+Among the almshouses are Smart's, on whose walls,
+unhappily rebuilt in modern times, the charitable
+Smart and his no less charitable coadjutor, Tooley,
+are commemorated:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Let gentle Smart sleep on in pious trust,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Behold his charity. Respect his dust."</span>
+</div>
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"In peaceful silence lett great Toolie rest,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Whose charitable deeds bespeak him blest."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is to be feared that these eulogies raise a smile
+at the expense of great Tooley and gentle Smart.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus65">
+<img src="images/fig59.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "LION AND LAMB," ANGEL LANE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>As to the inns, they include the odd conjunction
+of the "Lion and Lamb," pictured here, and the
+"Neptune" and the "Sea Horse," with a fine sound
+of the sea in their names. Some of these old
+hostelries yet retain their corner-posts: for example,
+that of the "Half Moon" in Foundation Street,
+where the post still keeps its medi�val carving of
+a fox, with uplifted sanctimonious eyes, preaching
+to three geese and a griffin; a satirical effort no
+doubt looked sourly upon by the clergy of St Mary
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[Pg 244]</a></span>Key Church, opposite, in days of old. A great gilt
+key serves as vane to that church and perpetuates
+the error in the name, which was originally, and
+rightly, St Mary-at-Quay: the custom-house quay
+and the harbour being close by, as the sight of
+certain corn-elevators, the rattling of chains and
+windlasses, and the sounds of throaty steam-sirens
+sufficiently proclaim. The custom-house stands in
+midst of coal-grit, laden steam vessels lying alongside
+the quay wall, bellowing steamily to be discharged,
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span>and railway-sidings, along whose maze of
+points and turn-tables fussy little locomotive engines,
+dragging jerky trucks, run, screaming intermittently,
+as though saying to the bellowing steam-vessels,
+"<i>You</i> just wait; can't you see I'm coming as quick
+as I can?" It is a dignified custom-house, and
+seems, surrounded with dutiable goods, to be
+aristocratically sneering at the trade in whose midst
+it is necessarily placed, and with as great a consciousness
+of its Ionic peristyle as any high-born beauty
+of her Greek nose.</p>
+
+<p>Many of the old wool-staplers', clothiers' and
+merchants' fine mansions stood by the quay and in
+the by-lanes. They are mostly gone now, but traces
+of old doorways and stray fragments of stone and
+wood carvings remain, and here and there a courtyard,
+or a house that sheltered family circles in the
+amphibious half-mercantile, half-agricultural Ipswich
+of the sixteenth century.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus66">
+<img src="images/fig60.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">SPARROWE'S HOUSE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Certainly one of the finest things Ipswich has to
+show is the wonderful old place in the old Butter
+Market, known still as "Sparrowe's House," although
+the last of the Sparrowes who inhabited here has
+long since gone to his home in the family vault within
+the Church of St Lawrence, where, over their tomb-house,
+may yet be read the punning motto, <i>Nidus
+Passerum</i>, "a nest of sparrows." These Sparrowes
+seem to have been endowed with some of the attributes
+of the cuckoo, for <i>they</i> did not build the house
+that bears their name. It owes its origin to a
+certain George Copping, who built it in 1567, but
+alterations and additions made in the Jacobean
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>period give its architectural history a span of over a
+century. The woodwork of the bay windows and
+the grandly-projecting eaves, together with that of
+the shop premises, was added at the time. But the
+great glory of "Sparrowe's House" is its decorative
+plaster-work in high relief, which profusely covers the
+exterior with garlands of flowers and fruits and with
+quaint devices emblematic of the four quarters of the
+globe. Here Europa, cornucopia in one hand, book
+and sceptre in the other, sits with her bull, who
+might be taken for an elephant with half his trunk
+shorn off; here, on another bay, a podgy plaster
+relief typifies Asia, with palm-tree and a building of
+Oriental character in the background; followed by
+Africa, a nude nigger holding an umbrella over his
+head and sitting on a shark, at which four tiny<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span>
+figures at a respectful distance express astonishment,
+while nearer at hand a wicked-looking bird of quite
+uncertain family roosts on a something that greatly
+resembles a battered meat tin. America is typified
+by an Indian in a feather head-dress which represents
+his entire wardrobe. He stands with bow and arrows,
+attended by a dog with a damaged smile. A very
+beautiful representation of the Royal Arms occupies
+one of the spaces between the windows, and other
+devices show the pelican in her piety; Atlas supporting
+the world; a classical scene in which a shepherd
+bows as gracefully as the artist in plaster could make
+him to a rural nymph; St George and the Dragon,
+and several smaller subjects.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> most famous thing in Ipswich is a thing neither
+ancient nor beautiful, yet it is an object to which
+most visitors to the town turn their first attention:
+it is the "Great White Horse." The "Great White
+Horse" is an hotel, of a size, in the merry days of the
+road, justly thought enormous. It has been left for
+the present age to build many hotels in town and
+country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more
+hostelries of the size of the "Great White Horse,"
+but in its own especial era that house fully justified
+the adjective in its sign. Especially did its bulk
+strike the imagination of the reporter of the London<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>
+<i>Morning Chronicle</i> who was dispatched to Ipswich
+in 1830 for the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary
+election in the town. He was a very young, a very impressionable
+and a very bright reporter, and although
+we may be quite sure that the business on which he
+was come to Ipswich was an arduous piece of work,
+calculated to fully occupy his time and thoughts, he
+carried away with him so accurate an impression of
+the big inn where he stayed, that when, some time
+afterwards, he wrote about it the description was as
+exact as though it had been penned within sight
+of the house. That reporter was Charles Dickens,
+and it is his description in the <i>Pickwick Papers</i>
+which has made the place famous.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus67">
+<img src="images/fig61.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "GREAT WHITE HORSE."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It was not a flattering description. Few more
+severe things have ever been said of inns than those<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>
+Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse." Indeed,
+if such things were nowadays printed of any inn or
+hotel, the writer might confidently expect to be made
+the defendant in an action for libel. Yet (such is the
+irony of time and circumstances) the house that
+Dickens so roundly abused is now eager in all its
+advertisements to quote the association; and the
+adventures of Mr Pickwick in the double-bedded
+room with the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers
+have brought many more visitors than the unfavourable
+notice of the "uncarpeted passages" and the
+"mouldy, ill-lighted rooms" has turned away. If, as
+has been thought, Dickens thus wrote of the house in
+order to be revenged for some slights and discomforts
+he may have experienced here, certainly fortune
+has played the cynic in converting his remarks into
+the best of all imaginable recommendations.</p>
+
+<p>The exterior of the house is much the same as it
+was when Dickens first saw it, "in the main street
+of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way, a short
+distance after you have passed through the open
+space fronting the Town Hall."</p>
+
+<p>It is the same plain, square building, constructed
+of a pallid kind of brick suggesting underdone
+pastry, and is still, although the coaches have disappeared
+and railways have supplanted them,
+"known far and wide by the appellation of the
+'Great White Horse.'" Still, over the pillared
+entrance trots the effigy of the Great White Horse
+himself, perhaps the aboriginal ancestor of that
+famous breed of equines, the "Suffolk Punches," a
+very muscular race, more famous for their bulk and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span>
+strength than for elegance, like those sturdy Flanders
+mares to which Henry the Eighth inelegantly likened
+his bride, Anne of Cleves.</p>
+
+<p>Dickens, using the usual licence of the novelist,
+describes this effigy as "a stone statue of some
+rampacious animal, with flowing mane and tail,
+distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, elevated
+above the principal door." Quite apart from the
+fact that the word "rampacious" is unknown to the
+English language, and is probably meant for
+"rampageous," the horse is really represented in
+the act of beginning a gentle trot, and looks as mild
+as the mildest milk that ever dewed the whiskers of
+a new-born kitten. His off fore-leg, broken at some
+period, has been restored of a size that does not
+match with the other three. Never, in the whole
+of his existence, has the Great White Horse gone
+on the rampage, and, like all the truly great, his
+manners have always been distinguished by their
+unobtrusiveness.</p>
+
+<p>"The 'Great White Horse,'" writes Dickens, "is
+famous in the neighbourhood, in the same degree
+as a prize ox, or county paper-chronicled turnip, or
+unwieldy pig&mdash;for its enormous size. Never were
+such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters
+of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of
+small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one
+roof, as are collected together between the four walls
+of the 'Great White Horse' at Ipswich." Further,
+he describes it as "an overgrown tavern," at whose
+door, when Mr Pickwick descended from the coach,
+stood a waiter whose description quite takes one's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>
+desire for dinner away. He was "a corpulent man
+with a fortnight's napkin under his arm and coeval
+stockings on his legs."</p>
+
+<p>Although that must have been in the best and
+most prosperous days of the highway, this waiter
+does not appear to have had anything more pressing
+to do than "staring down the road," while the
+account of the internal arrangements of the house
+does not indicate flourishing business. The private
+room into which the guests were shown was a "large,
+badly-furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in
+which a small fire was making a wretched attempt
+to be cheerful, but was fast sinking under the dispiriting
+influence of the place." After this we are
+not surprised to read that it was only "after the
+lapse of an hour" that "a bit of fish and a steak,"
+representing a dinner, appeared. When this was disposed
+of, Mr Pickwick and Mr Peter Magnus huddled
+up to the fire, and, "having ordered a bottle of the
+worst possible port wine, at the highest possible price,
+for the good of the house, drank brandy-and-water
+for their own."</p>
+
+<p>Certainly Dickens must have had some very
+bitter grudge against the "Great White Horse."</p>
+
+<p>Then come allusions to "tortuous passages," and
+the difficulty of a stranger's finding his way about
+the interminable corridors, or distinguishing between
+one "mouldy room" and another; difficulties which
+led to Mr Pickwick's comical predicament in the
+middle of the night. The rooms, not so mouldy
+now, and the passages, just as perplexing, remain,
+structurally unaltered to this day; but certain<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span>
+alterations have been made downstairs in the courtyard,
+now roofed in with glass and made very
+attractive, without spoiling the old-style character
+of the house. If you be a literary pilgrim, or an
+American, they will show you Mr Pickwick's bedroom;
+and can meet any of Dickens's criticisms
+by telling how Nelson stayed here with&mdash;ahem!&mdash;Lady
+Hamilton, and how Admiral Hyde-Parker and
+others of world-wide fame have occupied the
+"mouldy rooms."</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Leaving</span> Ipswich and passing through the dusty roadside
+fringe of Whitton village, known as Whitton Street,
+Claydon, nondescript, and neither very beautiful nor
+quite commonplace, is reached in two and a half miles.
+Just before entering the village, an old mansion is
+glimpsed from the road, embowered in trees, a mansion
+which, on inquiry, the ingenuous youth of Claydon
+declare to be "Mockbeggar Hall." Claydon Hall is
+its true title; but the popular name has been handed
+down since many, many years ago, when the old house
+(not old then) long remained tenantless. Like the
+many other places named "Mockbeggar," it stands
+well within view of passing travellers, and must have
+induced many a sturdy rogue and vagabond to trudge
+wearily up the long approach in search of alms, only
+to find the windows dark, the chimneys innocent of
+smoke, the place, in fact, deserted of all but flutter<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span>ing
+bats and screeching owls, whose shrill notes must
+have sounded like jeers to the disappointed vagrants.
+Inhabited now, Claydon Hall is a handsome old house
+bearing the date 1635 on its Dutch-like gables. It
+will probably never lose its popular name. Behind
+the old Hall winds the willow-fringed Orwell, coyly
+approaching within view of the road, and then, as it
+were, timorously retreating again; its brimming
+stream, although seen only in such fleeting glimpses,
+potent in its effect upon at least three miles' length
+of the road, from Claydon to Creeting All Saints, in
+the loveliest stretch of woodland, where the fierce
+mid-day sun is baffled by over-arching foliage, and
+twilight comes early in the afternoon through the
+dense masses of leaves. These are the woodlands of
+Shrubland Park. The Hall lies secluded to the right<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>
+hand, somewhere away beyond the rather terrible
+lodges that confront the traveller, who wonders where
+he has seen their like before; until, like a flash, the
+memory of certain great London cemeteries and their
+mortuary chapels comes upon him in desolating
+fashion and blights the cheerful rustic surroundings
+of forest trees and the scurryings of white-tailed
+rabbits and gorgeous blue and brown pheasants that
+inhabit this domain of Lord de Saumarez. The
+lodges, built like the Hall, from designs by Sir
+Charles Barry, are of white brick and stone, in the
+Italian Renaissance style.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus68">
+<img src="images/fig62.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">MOCKBEGGAR HALL.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>At no great distance from the entrance to this
+lordly domain, and noticeable from the road, in an
+exquisitely damp situation by the river, eminently
+calculated to foster rheumatism in old bones, is the
+Barham Union-house&mdash;the "Work'us" of peasant
+speech. It is quite an old-world building, and one
+of the earliest built under the new Poor Law Act of
+the early nineteenth century, when outdoor relief
+gave place to retirement within these prison-like
+buildings. Hodge well named them "Bastilles."
+They say who should know of what they speak, that
+life in Barham Union is nowadays quite desirable,
+but the design of the building, a quadrangular
+structure enclosing a courtyard, with outer walls
+blank or only provided with windows at a height
+from the ground, closely follows the prison, or restraining,
+idea.</p>
+
+<p>The little roadside sign of the "Sorrel Horse,"
+standing in midst of these leafy bowers, is in pleasing
+contrast with the Campo Santo pretentiousness of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>
+Shrubland lodges or the prison-like style of the
+Union, now left behind on a rising road, where the
+scarped side of the highway reveals a momentary
+change from the prevailing claylands to chalk; a
+change so sudden and so strictly confined to this hillside
+that it at once attracts the attention of even the
+least geologically-inclined. Here the campions bloom
+that love the chalk and refuse to grow on clay.
+Below this hilltop, in the deep hollow scoured out
+ages ago, when the now insignificant stream that
+crosses the road was a considerable force, is Creeting
+Bottom, and Creetings of several sorts are set about
+the countryside, all hiding from the road that goes
+now up hill and down dale with as lonely an air as
+though the little town of Needham Market and the
+larger town of Stowmarket were not almost within
+sight, over the shoulders of the hills, on the highway
+parallel with this, that runs to Bury St Edmunds.
+To be on "on the road to Needham" is an obvious
+Suffolk saying, applied to those who are badly off for
+worldly gear, and it is a little curious that Needham
+itself was for many years, and until quite recently,
+a place of fallen fortunes, lamenting the decay of its
+textile trades in empty houses and an "irreducible
+minimum" of rent for those that were so fortunate as
+to find occupants at all. The name of "Hungry-gut
+Hall" that still clings to a farmhouse marks that
+depressed period to all time; but in the spicy odours
+of the tanneries and the chemical manure stores and
+other thriving industries and businesses that cluster
+round the railway station, the explorer finds evidences
+enough that Needham is reviving.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus69">
+<img src="images/fig63.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">"STONHAM PIE."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Not a sign of those towns or of the railway is
+seen on the road to Norwich, where the cottage outposts
+of Stonham Earls and Stonham Aspall alone
+tell of the villages in the hinterland. In their
+gardens, spread on bushes or waving in the summer
+breeze, intimate articles of underclothing are prominently
+displayed, in the society of old hats and
+coats, not so much for the exhibition of the family
+wardrobe as in desperate attempts&mdash;bringing up all
+the reserves&mdash;at scaring away the hungry birds from
+currants, cherries and gooseberries. These contests,
+the only warring incidents on the way, in which the
+birds are generally the victors, bring one to a level
+road where Little Stonham stands, its chief feature
+the "Magpie" Inn. "Stonham Pie" owns one of
+those old gallows signs, stretching across the road,
+that were at one time a common feature. The
+picture-sign, with a painting of that saucy bird,
+has been hung below the cross-beam instead of in its<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>
+old ironwork frame above, now that the piled-up
+coaches that once passed beneath are gone. Shortly before
+their going, and while turnpikes and tolls appeared
+likely to last for ever, the toll-gate that stood at the
+succeeding village of Brockford was removed two miles
+onward, to Stoke Ash, where, at the beginning of the
+pretty avenue at Stoke Chapel, the later toll-house
+remains, just as does the earlier one at Brockford.
+Brockford, the "badger's ford" of a tiny affluent of
+the Waveney, is preceded by Brockford Green, where
+the quiet road is made narrow by its sides being encroached
+upon by grass. It is here that the accompanying
+sketch of tall poplars and bushy willows was
+taken.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus70">
+<img src="images/fig64.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NEAR BROCKFORD.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Off to the left hand, in strong contrast with this<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span>
+level stretch of road, the country is tumbled into
+combes and rounded hills, where the River Gipping
+takes its rise in the village of that name, springing
+from the hill where the church tower stands solemn
+and grim, as though it held inviolate the story of the
+place, away from those days when the Gippings first
+settled here and gave it a title.</p>
+
+<p>But let not the hurried seek Gipping, along the
+winding by-roads. The way, if not far, is not
+easy, and passengers are few. Scattered and infrequent
+farmhouses there be, at whose back doors
+to inquire the way, but rustic directions are apt to
+mislead. In any case, it is little use approaching
+the front door of a farmhouse. No one will hear
+you knocking, unless indeed it be a watchful and
+savage dog, trained to be on the alert for tramps;
+and you are like to hear him snuffling and gasping
+on the other side in a ferociously suggestive manner
+which will render you thankful that the door is
+closed and bolted. And not only bolted on this
+occasion, but always. The steps, and the space
+between the door and the threshold, where stray
+straws and wind-blown rubbish have collected, are
+evidence of the fact that the farmer and his family
+do not use the front door, but make their exits and
+entrances by way of the kitchen. It is an old
+East Anglian custom, and although many of the
+farmers nowadays pretend to culture and set up
+to be as up-to-date as the retired tradesfolk and
+small squires they are neighbourly with, many
+others would no more think of using the principal
+entrance to their homes than they would make use of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>
+the "parlour," where massive and sombre furniture,
+covered with antimacassars, is disposed with geometric
+accuracy around the room, in company with
+the family Bible and the prizes taken at school by
+the farmer's children; the stale and stuffy atmosphere
+proclaiming that this state apartment is only
+used on rare and solemn occasions. In fact, the
+"best room" and the front door only came into use
+in the old days on the occasion of a funeral.
+Perhaps it is a custom originating in a laudable idea
+of paying the greatest possible respect to the dead,
+but it is one which certainly gives a gruesome mortuary
+significance to both the entrance and the room.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus71">
+<img src="images/fig65.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">"THWAITE LOW HOUSE."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Thwaite or "Twaite," as East Anglians, incapable
+of pronouncing "th," call it, less than a mile beyond
+Brockford, numbers few cottages. Beyond it,
+where the hitherto flat road makes a descent, is
+in local parlance, "Thwaite Low House," not so
+called on account of any disreputable character it<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>
+may once have earned, but from its situation. The
+name obviously entails the existence of a "High
+House," which was, like the other, a coaching and
+posting inn. The last named, now a farmstead,
+was in those days the "Cock," the other the
+"Queen's Head." While the "Low House" has
+fallen upon times so irredeemably evil that it has
+been long untenanted and is now a veritable scarecrow
+of a house, with gaping holes in its walls and
+windows battened up, the "Cock," save that its
+sign is gone, still remains much as it was, to show
+a later generation what manner of place the roadside
+inn was in days of yore.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus72">
+<img src="images/fig66.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE "COCK," THWAITE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Stoke Ash, or "Aish," as Suffolkers pronounce
+it, like many another village, makes no sign from
+the road. Its church tower seen to the right, dimly,
+amid a hilltop screen of trees, a square, box-like
+red-brick chapel by the way, and that pretty inn,
+"Stoke White Horse," are the only other evidences
+of its being. The remaining six miles to the
+Norfolk border lead through Yaxley and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>
+Brome: Yaxley, where a branch railway runs
+under the road, on its way to Eye, and narrowly
+misses the old church: Brome, where the "Swan"
+stands for all the village to those who look to
+neither side of the road; church and houses skulking
+down a by-road on the way to Hoxne. There,
+down that pretty road, where the thatched cottages
+nestle under tall trees and the blue wood-smoke
+from rustic hearths curls upwards into the boughs
+and makes the sparrows cough and sneeze&mdash;there
+is the Rectory, approached in lordly fashion past
+a fine brick entrance and exquisite avenue, and,
+at a little greater distance the old black flint,
+round-towered church, restored and titivated out
+of all antiquity of tone: the stone sand-papered, and
+the flints polished with a handkerchief. The only
+thing missing&mdash;and, under the circumstances, it
+is missed&mdash;is a glass case, so that no damp, nor
+lichen, nor any effects of weather may come to
+spoil the housewifely neatness.</p>
+
+<p>It was along this road to Hoxne that those
+who sought the revered head of St Edmund, King
+and Martyr, in the miraculous legend, were led
+to it by the voice calling, "Here, here, here;"
+at length finding the sainted relic in charge of
+a wolf, who allowed it to be taken from between
+his paws. But the voice thus calling was probably
+a much less supernatural manifestation, and
+was doubtless the hooting of owls in the woods.
+They still mock the belated traveller, only, to ears
+untuned to the miraculous, they simply seem to
+ask, "Who, who, who?" Ingenuity, however,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>
+vainly seeks the basis in nature of the wolf
+incident.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Now</span>, crossing the River Waveney, winding with tree-fringed
+banks through a flat country, the road enters
+Norfolk at Scole. Coming over the little bridge,
+the village is seen huddled together on either side
+of a narrow rising road; village and church alike
+wholly dominated by a great building of mellow
+red brick whose panelled chimney-stacks and long
+row of beautiful gables give the impression of an
+historic mansion having by some strange chance
+been taken from its park and set down beside the
+highway. This, however, was at no time a private
+residence, but was built as an inn; and an inn it
+remains, after the passing of nearly two centuries
+and a half. Scole, or "Schoale," as the name was
+often spelled in old times (when, indeed, the village
+was not called by its <i>alias</i> of Osmundeston), was by
+reason of this inn quite a celebrated place in the
+days of long ago. Every traveller in Eastern
+England had then either seen or heard of "Scole
+White Hart" and its famous sign that stretched
+completely across the road, and as a great many
+coaches halted here for changing teams, passengers
+had plenty of time for examining what Sir Thomas
+Browne thought to be "the noblest sighne-post in
+England." Both house and sign were built in 1655,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span>
+for James Peck, described as a "Norwich merchant,"
+whose initials, together with the date, are yet to
+be seen on the centre gable. The elaborate sign
+alone cost �1057. It was of gigantic size and loaded
+with twenty-five carved figures of classic deities
+and others. Chaste Diana, with bow and arrow
+and two hounds, had a place on the cross-beam, in
+company with Time in the act of devouring an
+infant, Act�on and his dogs, a huntsman, and a
+White Hart <i>couchant</i>. On a pediment above the
+White Hart, supported by Justice and Temperance,
+was the effigy of an astronomer "seated on a
+Circumferenter," who by "some Chymical Preparation
+is so Affected that in fine Weather He faces
+the North and against bad Weather He faces that
+Quarter from whence it is about to come." On
+either side of the dizzy height occupied by the
+astronomer were figures of Fortitude and Prudence,
+a position suitable enough for the first-named of
+those two virtues, but certainly too perilous for
+the last.</p>
+
+<p>Further suggestions of Olympus, with references
+to Hades and Biblical history, adorned the other
+portions of this extraordinary work. Cerberus
+clawed one side of the supporting post, while Charon
+dragged a witch to Hell on the other; and Neptune
+bestriding a dolphin, and Bacchic figures seated
+across casks alternated with the arms of twelve
+East Anglian noble and landed families. Two angels
+supported respectively the arms of Mr Peck and
+his lady and two lions those of Norwich and
+Yarmouth. On the side nearest the inn appeared a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span>
+huge carving of Jonah coming out of the whale's
+mouth, while, suspended in mid-air, and surrounded
+by a wreath, was another White Hart.</p>
+
+<p>Although, as we have seen, Sir Thomas Browne
+was impressed with this work, an early nineteenth-century
+tourist (so early indeed as 1801) curtly
+dismisses it as "a pompous sign, with ridiculous
+ornaments," and shortly after that it seems to have
+been taken down, for the reason that it cost the
+landlord more to keep it in repair than the trade of
+the house permitted. Together with this, the once
+celebrated Great Bed of the White Hart has also
+disappeared. It was a round bed capable of holding
+twenty couples, and was therefore a good deal larger
+than the famous Great Bed of Ware. Perhaps it
+was because guests did not relish this co-operative
+method of seeking repose, or maybe because sheets,
+blankets and coverlets of sufficient size were unobtainable,
+that the Scole Great Bed was chopped
+up for firewood; but did anyone <i>ever</i> suppose beds
+of this wholesale capacity would be desirable?</p>
+
+<p>The accompanying old view of the gigantic sign
+shows one of the peculiar basket coaches of the
+second half of the eighteenth century, on its way to
+London.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus17">
+<img src="images/fig67.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE OLD SIGN OF SCOLE WHITE HART.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>"Scole White Hart" must have been among the
+very finest of inns and posting-houses. Its wide
+staircases, of a width sufficient for the proverbial
+coach-and-four to drive up them, its large rooms
+and fine panelled doors, its great stone-flagged
+kitchen, all proclaim how great must have been its
+old prosperity; while the wide-spreading yard in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a><br /><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a><br /><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>
+the rear of the house, together with the outbuildings,
+gives some hint of how heavy the traffic was at
+this junction of the Lowestoft, Bungay, Diss and
+Thetford road with that from London to Norwich.
+Shrunken trade has caused portions of the inn to be
+let off; the stone and wooden porches seen in the
+old print have disappeared; the coach entrance has
+long since been blocked up and has become the bar-parlour,
+and the mullions of the windows have given
+place to sashes; but the building still retains a noble
+architectural character, and is perhaps more interesting
+in these latter days, now that its story is told,
+than ever it was when that story was in the making.
+Little or nothing is found in contemporary records
+of "Scole White Hart"; only one vivid flash in its
+later years, when indignant would-be coach passengers
+stood at the door on a day in October 1822 and saw
+the drivers of the "Norwich Times" and "Gurney's
+Original Day Coach," fired by rivalry, and reckless
+in their long race from Whitechapel, come pounding
+furiously down the road and over the bridge, pass
+the inn without stopping, and disappear in clouds of
+dust in the direction of Norwich. Do you know
+what it is to lose a train and to wait an hour for
+the next? You do? Then it will not be difficult
+to form some idea of the blind, stuttering fury that
+possessed those who had booked seats at Scole and
+saw the coaches dash away, to leave them with half
+a day's wait.</p>
+
+<p>Thorogood was driving the "Times." Both
+started from London at 5.30 a.m. The "Day"
+coach reached Norwich at 5.20 p.m., and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span>
+"Times" ten minutes later, neither having stopped
+for changing horses during the last twenty-five miles.
+This was a "record" for that period, the usual time
+being fourteen hours.</p>
+
+<p>Probably the would-be passengers had to remain
+the night; a fate which no one who has done the
+like of late would be apt to complain of. The guest
+at the "White Hart," seated in solitary state in
+the lofty sitting-room, lit dimly by candles in antique
+plated candlesticks, and with two ox-eyed seventeenth-century
+beauties of the Lely type gazing down upon
+him from their sombre frames, presently feels oddly
+as though he were living in another era; a feeling
+that grows as he wanders upstairs to bed, almost
+losing himself in the roomy corridors. When he has
+closed the nail-studded bedroom door with a reverberant
+clang, and, creeping into the generous
+embraces of a damask-hung four-poster that may
+have been new a century and a half ago, gazes
+reflectively about the panelled room and on the
+curiously coffered ceiling, he drops off to sleep
+straightway into the times when the inn was new-built
+and dreams of how the news of the Restoration
+may have come to Scole in 1661. Old times live
+again, faded flowers bloom once more, forgotten
+footsteps echo along the passages, and lo, the Has
+Been is enacted again, with all the convincing air
+of such visions. Post-chaises and chariots clatter
+up to the door and their noise wakens the sleeper
+to the consciousness that the sound is but that of
+a jolting rustic tumbril going down the road in the
+early morning; that this is the twentieth century,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a><br /><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a><br /><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span>
+and the "White Hart" but a survival in a back eddy
+of life.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus18">
+<img src="images/fig68.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">STAIRCASE IN THE "WHITE HART."
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Besides the "White Hart," there is little else at
+Scole. The plain flint tower of the church stands
+by the roadside, on the ascent that leads from the
+village; and other two or three inns, a few rustic
+shops and cottages, and a private residence or so make
+up the tale. Scole, in fact, has not grown greatly
+since when it was a Roman station, and when the
+Roman soldiers whose remains have been found near
+the river occupied the military post on the long road
+to Venta Icenorum.</p>
+
+<p>The legionaries first stationed in these East
+Anglian wastes must often have longed for their
+native Italy. When the sky sank almost to the level
+of the land in the long winter's rains and fogs, and
+the biting winds blew out of the east across the sandy
+scrub; when agues or the lurking enemy accounted
+for many of their comrades, and when some favoured
+few were recalled to the capital, they must have
+thought wistfully of a more congenial clime than
+this, situated on the edge of the Unknown. Rome,
+either as Empire or Republic, was a hard taskmaster,
+and when no fighting was in prospect employed the
+troops ingloriously as road-makers. The advanced
+garrisons in the wilderness cleared the enemy out of
+the tangled brush and boggy marshes, and working
+parties built roads under the protection of guards, or
+improved the rude trackways they found already in
+existence. Some fell by the way, and their skeletons
+have been found in these latter days, the teeth still
+clenched on the obolus placed in the dead man's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>
+mouth to pay Charon for ferrying him across the cold
+and darkling Styx; or, where the coin has perished,
+still stained with the metal's long decay. They
+perished, those pioneers, to found a civilisation, just
+as countless thousands of our own blood have laid
+their bones on distant shores, under burning skies or
+in the Arctic night, to make England what she is.
+Respect their long sleep, antiquaries, nor, as you
+honour your own creeds, take from the dead men
+their passage-money across that mystic river.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXV</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">This</span>, as Dr Jessop charmingly names Norfolk, is
+Arcady. The scene is pleasant, but the stage waits:
+where are the actors? Gone, where and for what
+reasons beyond the substitution of rail for road shall
+presently be considered. But if the merry days of
+old are done and population dwindled, at least in
+East Anglia, and especially in Norfolk, dialect
+flourishes among those who remain. The "Norfolk
+drant" or drawl, is still heard, just as the "Suffolk
+whine"&mdash;that rising inflection of the voice towards
+the end of sentences&mdash;is even yet a mark of the sister
+county. They are, indeed, said to have originated
+the Yankee combined drawl and twang, for Norfolk
+and Suffolk were largely represented among the
+Pilgrim Fathers, the first colonists of North America.
+With these survivals, some of the old rustic simplicity<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span>
+is still met with, although the extraordinary ignorance
+of sixty years ago has disappeared, and the
+Norfolk labourer no longer thinks it possible to
+emigrate to America by driving over in a farm cart.
+The story is an East Anglian classic, how a farm
+labourer "didn't fare rightly to knaw" by what route
+they were going to the United States, "but we'm
+gwine ter sleep t' Debenham the fust night, so's to
+kinder break t' jarney." When railways came, and
+access to London grew easy, these simplicities gradually
+faded away. The young men took to "gettin'
+up the road," as the saying ran&mdash;otherwise, going to
+London&mdash;to "better themselves," and old illusions
+were soon dispelled; but in Arcady the mavis may
+still be seen knapping a dodman; the children of the
+rustic hamlets may be observed by the passing stranger
+gleefully sporting at the old game of tittymatorterin;
+the cowslips that in springtime turn the
+meadows to living gold are yet "paigles"; a small
+field remains, as ever, a "pightle," and when a countryman
+throws anything into a ditch, he "hulls" (or
+hurls) "it in t' holl," just as his ancestors did hundreds
+of years ago. Let some of the archaic words just
+noted be explained before we proceed any further.
+"Mavis" is the idyllic name of the thrush, and the
+"dodman," which he may be observed "knapping,"
+or breaking, is a snail; called in Essex, by the way,
+a "hodmadod." "Tittymatorterin" is just the simple
+game of "see-sawing." Besides these fleeting instances
+there are many other peculiarities. The Norfolk
+peasant will never pronounce the letter E if it be
+possible to avoid it. It becomes I in his mouth, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[Pg 274]</a></span>
+a head becomes a "hid," while hens are "hins."
+Throughout the whole of the eastern counties, too,
+the elision of the final in the present tense is a
+feature of rustic talk. Examples of this peculiarity
+are found not only in modern speech, but in old
+epitaphs and inscriptions, dating back some hundreds
+of years. Thus, a bridge across the River Wensum,
+at Norwich, bears the sculptured effigy of a dragon's
+head with the words, "When dragon drink, Heigham
+sink." The meaning is that when the river rises and
+touches, or "rise" and "touch," as a Norfolk man
+would say, the dragon's mouth, the neighbouring
+Heigham becomes flooded. An older example still
+is seen on an inscription at Kimberley, to John
+Jenkin, in the words:&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Under this stone rare Jenkin lie,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>while a comparatively modern one may be found in
+Stratford St Mary church, in the concluding lines of
+an epitaph dated 1739:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'The Night is gone, ye Stars Remain,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">So man that die shall Live again."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Dickens has caught the East Anglian dialect
+readily enough in <i>David Copperfield</i>, where he
+makes Mr Peggotty say, "Cheer up, old mawther" to
+Mrs Grummidge, and speak of "a couple of mavishes,"
+while Ham talks to David as "Mas'r Davy, bor."
+The willing Barkis, too, who asks "do she now?"
+and speaks of the "stage-cutch," is a true product
+of the soil.</p>
+
+<p>For the benefit of those not to the manner born,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span>
+let it be repeated that a "mawther" is not necessarily
+a parent. It is the generic name for a female. A
+"mawther" may therefore be a girl infant or a grown
+woman. "Bor" is, of course, a corruption of "neighbour,"
+but need not, in fact, specifically mean a
+neighbour, and is practically the masculine of
+"mawther," and applicable to any man; friend close
+at hand or stranger from distant parts.</p>
+
+<p>The Norfolk dialect has attained the distinction
+of being made the subject of study, and glossaries
+and collections of local words have long been made
+by enthusiasts in these matters. Perhaps the most
+interesting and amusing of the examples of Norfolk
+talk is found in the East Anglian version of the
+<i>Song of Solomon</i>, published many years ago by Prince
+Louis Lucien Bonaparte. It was taken down from a
+reading by a Norfolk peasant. A few verses will be
+instructive:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>1. The song o' songs, as is Sorlomun's.</p>
+
+<p>2. Lerr 'im kiss me wi' the kisses of his mouth;
+for yar love is better 'an wine.</p>
+
+<p>3. Becaze o' the smell o' yar intements, yar
+name is as intements pored out, therefoor du the
+mawthers love y&#277;.</p>
+
+<p>4. Dror m&#277;, we'll run arter y&#277;: the king he ha'
+browt me into his charmbers; we'll be glad and re&#299;jce
+in y&#277;; we'll remahmber yar love more 'an wine: the
+right-up love y&#277;.</p>
+
+<p>5. I em black, but tidy, O ye darters o' J'rusal'm,
+as the taents o' Kedar, as the cattins o' Sorlomun.</p>
+
+<p>6. Don't sin starrin' at me, cos I em black, 'ecos<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[Pg 276]</a></span>
+the sun t'have barnt m&#277;; my mother's children wor
+sn&#257;sty wi' me; they made me keeper o' the winyerds,
+but m'own winyerd I han't kept.</p>
+
+<p>7. Tell onto me, yow hu my soul du love, where ye
+fade, where ye make yar flock to rest at nune: fur why
+shud I be as one tarn aside by yar cumrades' flock?</p>
+
+<p>8. If so bein' as y&#277; don't know, O yow bootifullest
+o' women, go yer ways furth by the futtin' o' the
+flock, and feed yer kids 'eside the shepherds' taents.</p>
+
+<p>9. I ha' likened yow, O my love, to a taamer o'
+hosses in Pharer's charrits.</p>
+
+<p>10. Yar cheeks are right fine wi' ringes of jewiltry,
+yer neck wi' chanes o' gold.</p>
+
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The full flavour of this vernacular is only to be
+obtained by reading the original verses side by side
+with the above.</p>
+
+<p>Among the sports that obtained on the borders of
+Norfolk and Suffolk of old was "camping." "Camping"
+was an old East Anglian game that, could it be revived,
+would please the footballing maniacs of our own
+day. It was a wild kind of football, played on these
+commons, often with a hundred players aside, and
+we are told that the roughest kind of Rugby football
+was child's play compared with it. If stories of
+old camping contests be true, it might almost seem
+that in ascribing the thinly-populated condition of
+Norfolk and Suffolk to the long-standing effects of
+the Black Death, and to medi�val insurrections and
+their resulting butcheries, we do an injustice to
+pestilence and the sword, and fail to make count
+of the casualties received in play. As the wondering<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span>
+Frenchman said, in witnessing a camping-match, "If
+these savages be at play, what would they be in
+war?"</p>
+
+<p>"These contests," says a Norfolk historian, "were
+not infrequently fatal to many of the combatants.
+I have heard old persons speak of a celebrated camping,
+Norfolk against Suffolk, on Diss Common, with
+three hundred on each side. Before the ball was
+thrown up, the Norfolk men inquired tauntingly of
+the Suffolk men if they had brought their coffins.
+The Suffolk men, after fourteen hours, were the
+victors. Nine deaths were the result of the conflict
+in a fortnight." Camping went out of favour about
+1810, and the coroners had an easier time.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVI</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Dickleburgh</span>, the next village after Scole, is in its
+way as imposing a place, only not an inn, but a
+church, is its chief feature. The great church of
+Dickleborough (as the name should be pronounced)
+charmingly screened from the street by a row of
+limes, but not so charmingly enclosed by a very
+long and very tall iron railing, stands end on to the
+road, its eastern wall looking down upon the pilgrims
+who once passed on their way to Our Lady of
+Walsingham; two tabernacles, one on either side
+of the east window, holding effigies of popular
+saints, and halting many a sinner for supplication.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span>
+The saints are gone, torn down by Henry the
+Eighth's commissioners, or by the fanatical Dowsing.
+They lie, perhaps, in the mud of some horse-pond,
+or, broken up, serve the useful part of metalling the
+road. Adjoining the church stands the "King's
+Head," the sign perhaps rather a general idea of
+kings than intended as a portrait of any particular
+one. At any rate it resembles none of the long line
+of English sovereigns, nor even that one-time
+favourite, the King of Prussia, though old enough
+to have been painted in the hey-day of his
+popularity. Dickleburgh Church is absurdly large
+for the present size of the place and for the empty
+country side; but there is a reason for the solitudes,
+and there was one for these huge buildings, ten times
+too large for the present needs of the shrunken
+villages. Norfolk and Suffolk, once among the most
+thickly-peopled of English counties, were practically
+depopulated in 1348 by that dreadful scourge, the
+Black Death. One-third of the total population
+of England perished under that terrible plague.
+The working classes were the worst sufferers, and
+the agriculturists, the weavers and labourers died
+in such numbers that the crops rotted on the ground,
+industries decayed, and no man would work. When
+the pestilence was stayed, other parts of the country
+flourished in greater proportion, than this. Manufacturing
+industries arose elsewhere and attracted
+the large populations; while East Anglia, remaining
+consistently agricultural throughout the centuries,
+has never shared the increase; only the few and
+scattered towns showing industrial enterprise, in<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a><br /><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a><br /><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>
+the form of weaving in medi�val and later times,
+and in the manufacture of agricultural machinery
+nowadays. In the last two decades, with the
+decay of agriculture and the rush of the peasantry
+to London and the great centres of population, the
+country, and the eastern counties in especial, has
+become almost deserted.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus19">
+<img src="images/fig69.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">DICKLEBURGH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The present state of agriculture in Eastern
+England is made manifest in deserted farms, in
+broken gates left hanging precariously on one hinge,
+in decaying barns and cart-sheds left to rot; rusted
+ploughs and decrepit waggons standing derelict in
+the once fertile fields, now overrun with foul weeds
+and rank with docks, charlock, and thistles; and
+farms, long advertised "to let," remaining and likely
+to remain tenantless. Not to everyone is it possible
+to grow seeds and flowers, and market-gardening is
+profitable only in the lands more immediately surrounding
+the great towns. With wheat at its
+present price of thirty shillings a quarter, it does
+not pay to grow corn for the market, and the land
+is going out of cultivation. Where the farmer still
+struggles on, he lays down most of his holding in
+grass for sheep and cattle, and grows, grudgingly,
+as little wheat as possible, for sake of the straw.
+Things are not quite so bad as in 1894, when wheat
+was down to twenty shillings a quarter, and farmers
+fed their pigs on the harvest which cost them three
+pounds more per acre to grow than it would have
+brought in the market; but at thirty shillings it
+yields no profit. Agricultural England is, in short,
+ruined, and there seems no present hope of things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span>
+becoming better. While the boundless, bountiful
+harvests of Argentina, of Canada, the United States,
+Russia and other wheat-producing countries can be
+cultivated, reaped, and carried to these shores at the
+prices that now rule, and while the stock-breeders
+of those lands can raise sheep and cattle just as
+advantageously, the English farmer must needs go
+without a living wage. As matters stand at present,
+we import fully seventy-five per cent. of the wheat
+used in the country; the acreage under corn having
+gone down from 4,058,731 acres in 1852, to about
+half that at the present day. Meanwhile the population
+has increased by thirteen millions; so that,
+with many more mouths to fill, we grow only half
+the staple food these islands produced then. There
+are, of course, those who reap the advantage of cheap
+corn and cheap meat from over seas. The toiling
+millions of the towns and cities thrive on those
+benefits; but what if, through war, or from any other
+cause, those sea-borne supplies ceased? Of what
+avail would have been this generation of cheapness if
+at last the nation must starve? Extinguish agriculture
+and the farmer, and you cannot recall them at need,
+nor with magic wand bring back to cultivation a
+land which has long gone untilled.</p>
+
+<p>But the farmer cannot alone be ruined, any more
+than the walls of a house can be demolished and the
+roof yet left standing. It was the farmer who in
+prosperous times supported the country gentleman
+in one direction, and the agricultural labourer in
+the other. With wheat, as it was a generation ago,
+at seventy shillings a quarter, and other products of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span>
+the land proportionately profitable, the farmer could
+afford to pay both high rent and good wages. Farms
+in those days were difficult to obtain, and there was
+great competition among farmers for holdings. To-day,
+even at a quarter of those rents, tenants are
+difficult to obtain, and the income of the landed
+proprietors has dwindled away. The results are
+painfully evident here, in the old families reduced or
+beggared, and their seats either in the market or let
+to stock-jobbers and successful business men, while
+the old owners have disappeared or live humbly in
+small houses once occupied by the steward or bailiff
+of the estate.</p>
+
+<p>While rents have thus, with the iron logic of
+circumstances, gone down to vanishing-point, and
+while farms have actually been offered rent free in
+order to prevent the disaster of the land being let
+go out of cultivation, the wages and the circumstances
+of the agricultural labourer have been, most
+illogically, improving. Instead of the miserable six
+to nine shillings a week he existed upon, at the
+beginning of the nineteenth century, he receives
+thirteen or fourteen shillings, lives in a decent cottage,
+instead of a wretched hovel, and finds the cost of food
+and clothing fifty per cent. cheaper than his grandfather
+ever knew it to be. Yet agricultural labourers
+are as difficult to get now as they were immediately
+after the Black Death had swept away three quarters
+of the working class, five hundred and fifty years
+ago. The crops went ungarnered then, as they
+have done of recent years in East Anglia&mdash;for
+lack of hands to gather them in. It was in 1899<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span>
+that standing crops at Tivitshall St Margaret's and
+adjacent parishes were sold by auction for a farmer
+who could find no labourer willing to be hired.</p>
+
+<p>What has been called the "rural exodus" is well
+named. London and the great towns have proved
+so attractive to the children of the middle-aged
+peasant that they despise the country. They can
+all read and write now, and at a pinch do simple
+sums in arithmetic; so off they go to the crowded
+streets. The ambitious aspire to a black coat and a
+stool in an office, and others become workmen of
+many kinds; but all are attracted by the higher
+wages to be earned in the towns, and by the excitement
+of living in the great centres of population,
+and only the aged and the aging will soon be left
+to till the fields.</p>
+
+<p>Farmers entertain the supremest contempt for
+the agricultural labourer's attempts to better himself.
+To them they are almost impious; but the
+farmer is himself tarred with the same brush of
+culture. He is a vastly different fellow from his
+grandfather, who actually helped to till the soil
+among his own men; whose wife and daughters were
+noted hands at milking and buttermaking; who
+lived in the kitchen, among the hams and the
+domestic utensils, and was not above eating the
+same food as, and at the same table with, his
+ploughmen and carters. He has, in fact, and so
+also have the landed proprietor and the labourer,
+undergone a process of levelling up. It is a process
+which had started certainly by 1825, when Cobbett
+noticed it.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Hear him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+
+<p>"When the old farmhouses are down (and
+down they must come in time) what a miserable
+thing the country will be! Those that are now
+erected are mere painted shells, with a mistress
+within who is stuck up in a place she calls the
+parlour, with, if she have children, the 'young
+ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy
+chairs and a sofa (a <i>sofa</i> by all means); half-a-dozen
+prints in gilt frames hanging up; some
+swinging book-shelves with novels and tracts upon
+them; a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps
+better 'educated' than she; two or three nick-nacks
+to eat, instead of a piece of bacon and a
+pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed
+carter to be allowed to come into; and everything
+proclaiming to every sensible beholder that there
+is here a constant anxiety to make a <i>show</i> not
+warranted by the reality. The children (which is
+the worst part of it) are all too clever to <i>work;</i>
+they are all to be <i>gentlefolks</i>. Go to <i>plough</i>! Good
+God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough!
+They become <i>clerks</i>, or some skimming-dish thing
+or other. They flee from the dirty <i>work</i> as cunning
+horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this!
+What a mass of materials for proclaiming that
+general and <i>dreadful convulsion</i> that must, first
+or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing
+and enslaving and starving system to atoms."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>The "convulsion" anticipated by Cobbett has
+not come about. This is not a country of earthquakes
+or of violent social upheavals. Free Trade<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span>
+has beggared the agricultural interests, but, on his
+way to the Bankruptcy Court, the farmer contrives
+to live in better style than possible three quarters
+of a century ago, while his pretensions to gentility
+certainly have not decreased. As for the "funding
+and jobbing," Cobbett could never, in his wildest
+dreams, have foreseen Limited Liability and the
+fungoid growth of Stock Exchange speculation, or
+the modern "enslaving and starving system" of
+the gigantic Trusts that, like vampires, feed on
+the blood of industry. We need look for no convulsions;
+not even, unhappily, for the hanging, or,
+at least, the taxing out of existence, of the
+millionaires. Our expectations of the future are
+quite different. The people will inhabit the towns,
+and the country will become a huge preserve of
+game for the sport of the millionaires aforesaid; a
+preserve broken here and there by the model farm
+or the training establishment of some colossus of
+wealth.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Beyond</span> Dickleburgh, past the solitary "Ram" inn,
+a fine, dignified house still lamenting its decadence
+from a posting-inn to a beerhouse, Tivetshall level-crossing
+marks where the railway runs to Bungay
+and Lowestoft. Maps make Pulham St Mary the
+Virgin quite near, with Pulham St Mary Magdalene
+close by; Tivetshalls of different dedications, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>
+other villages dotted about like plums in a Christmas
+pudding, but no sign of them is evident. Only
+windmills, whirling furiously on distant ridges,
+break the pastoral solitudes. In this conflict of
+charts, a carter jogging along the road with his team
+is evidently the authority to be consulted.</p>
+
+<p>"Coom hather," says the carter to his sleek and
+intelligent horses; and they coom accordingly, with
+much jingling of harness, and stand in the shade of
+roadside trees while their lord takes his modest
+levenses and haffles and jaffles&mdash;gossips, that is to
+say&mdash;with the landlord of the "Ram."</p>
+
+<p>"Tivetshall?" asks the carter, echoing a question;
+"niver heerd of un." Then a light breaks in upon
+him. "Oh, ay! Tishell we allus call 'em; Tishell
+St Marget an' Tishell St Merry," and with, a sweep
+of the arm comprising the whole western horizon,
+"Theiy'm ower theer."</p>
+
+<p>"And Pulham St Mary the Virgin?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pulham St Merry the Wirgin? oh, yis! Pulham
+Maaket, yar mean, bor. Et edd'n on'y a moile, ower
+<i>theer</i>"&mdash;a comprehensive wave to the eastwards.</p>
+
+<p>And there, on a byroad, in an embrace of trees, it
+is found, a little forgotten town, the greater proportion
+of whose inhabitants appear to walk with two sticks.
+It is ranged round a green or market-place, with a
+great Perpendicular church, gorgeously frescoed
+within, and with a very good recent "Ascension" over
+the chancel arch, painted and stencilled timber roof,
+and elaborate stained-glass windows. The townlet
+and townsfolk sinking into decay, the church an object
+of such care and expense, afford a curious contrast.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>An old toll-house and the prison-like buildings
+of Depwade Union conspire to make desolate the
+road onwards. He who presses, hot-foot, along it,
+turning neither to the right nor to the left, may
+readily be excused a legitimate wonder as to what
+has become of the great feature of East Anglia, its
+spreading commons; for, strange to say, despite the
+fame they have long since attained, no vestige of
+them is glimpsed from the road itself. One has
+usually to turn aside to some of the villages lying
+near, but wholly hidden from the highway, to find
+the yet unenclosed common lands, the pasturage of
+geese, ducks and turkeys; but a striking exception
+to this now general rule is the huge common of
+Wacton lying off to the left of the road at the
+hundredth mile from London, where a cottage and a
+wayside inn, the "Duke's Head," alone represent
+Wacton village, a mile distant. Wacton Common,
+reputed to be the highest point in Norfolk, although
+of no less extent than three hundred and fifty acres,
+might perhaps be passed without being seen, for the
+reason that, although still wild and unenclosed, it is
+screened from the high road by a hedge and entered
+through an ordinary field gate. The inn and the
+cottage, obviously built on land fraudulently taken
+from the common in the long ago, serve with their
+gardens to hide that glorious expanse of grass and
+heather. Here roam those chartered vagabonds,
+the plump geese, that pick up a living on the
+grassy commons and wander, like free-booting
+bands of feathered moss-troopers upon the heaths,
+closing their careers with royal feasting in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a><br /><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a><br /><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>
+August and September stubble, and a Michaelmas
+martyrdom.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus20">
+<img src="images/fig70.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">A DISPUTED PASTURAGE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Norfolk and Suffolk are still famous for their
+geese, but those martyred fowls do not make their
+final journey to the London markets, between
+Michaelmas and Christmas, with the publicity they
+once attained. They go up to Leadenhall nowadays
+in the seclusion of railway vans. Seventy years ago
+they journeyed by coach, and in state, for the Norfolk
+coaches in Christmas week often carried nothing save
+geese and turkeys, beside the coachman and guard.
+Full inside and out with such a freight, the proprietors
+of fast coaches made a great deal more by
+carrying them than they would have taken by a load
+of passengers; so the fowls had the preference, while
+travellers had to take their chance of finding a seat
+in the slower conveyances. So long ago as 1793 the
+turkeys conveyed from Norwich to London between
+a Saturday morning and Sunday night in December
+numbered one thousand seven hundred, and weighed
+9 tons, 2 cwt. 2 lbs. Their value was �680. They
+were followed on the two succeeding days by half as
+many more.</p>
+
+<p>A Norfolk common without its screaming and
+hissing flocks of geese would seem strangely untenanted.
+They, the turkeys, the ducks, the donkeys
+("dickies" they call them in Norfolk) and the vagrom
+fowls are among the only vestiges of the wild life
+that once made Norfolk famous to the naturalist and
+not a little eerie to the traveller of old, who, startled
+on the lonely way that stretched by heath and
+common and fen between the habitations of men,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span>
+shrank appalled at the lumbering flight of the huge
+bustards, quivered with apprehension at the sudden
+hideous whirring of the night-jar as the day closed
+in, dismayed, heard the bittern booming among the
+reeds, or with misgivings of the supernatural saw the
+fantastical ruff stalking on long legs, with prodigious
+beak, red eyes and spreading circle of neck feathers,
+like the creation of some disordered imagination.
+Wild Norfolk, the home of these and of many another
+strange creature, is no more, and these species, now
+chiefly extinct, are to be seen only in museums of
+natural history.</p>
+
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus73">
+<img src="images/fig71.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">LONG STRATTON.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>What Wacton lacks along the high road the
+village of Long Stratton has in superabundance.
+They named it well who affixed the adjective, for it
+measures a mile from end to end. Beginning
+with modern and (to speak kindly) uninteresting
+cottages, it ends in a broad street where almost every
+house is old and beautiful in lichened brick or soft-toned
+plaster. Midway of this lengthy thoroughfare
+stands the church, one of the Norfolk round-towered
+kind, in the usual black flint, and beyond it the
+Manor House, red brick, with Adam scrolls and
+neo-classical palm branches in plaster for trimmings,
+set back at some distance behind a very newty,
+froggy and tadpoley moat. Beyond this again, the
+village street broadens out. Looking back upon it,
+when one has finally climbed uphill on the way to
+Norwich, Long Stratton is a place entirely charming.
+Its name, of course, derives from its situation on the
+Roman Road, and Tasburgh, that now comes in
+sight, keeps yet its Roman camp strongly posted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a><br /><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a><br /><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>
+above the River Tase. Tasburgh&mdash;what little there
+is of a village&mdash;occupies an acclivity on the further
+side of that river, across whose wide and marshy valley
+the mists rise early, seeing the sun to bed dull and
+tarnished, and attending the rising of the moon with
+ghostly vapours. The old Roman camp is oddly and
+picturesquely occupied by the parish church, another
+round-towered example. Excepting it, the vicarage
+and the Dutch-like building of the "Bird in Hand"
+Inn, there is little else.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus21">
+<img src="images/fig72.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">LONG STRATTON.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>But what mean these sounds of anger and lamentation
+that drown the soothing, distant rattle of reaping
+machines on the hillside: a voice raised in
+reproach, and another&mdash;a treble one&mdash;in gusty
+shrieks of combined pain, fear and peevishness?
+Coming round a corner, the cause of the disturbance
+is revealed in a wet and muddy infant rubbing dirty
+knuckles into streaming eyes, and being violently reproached
+by an indignant woman.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>"You're a pretty article, I must say; a fine
+spettacle. I'll give yow a good sowsin', my lord;
+coom arn;" and the malefactor is pulled suddenly
+inside the cottage, the door slammed, and muffled
+yells heard, alternating with thumps. The offender
+is receiving that sowsing, or being "yerked,"
+"clipped over the ear-hole," getting a "siseraring,"
+being "whanged" or "clouted," the striking Norfolk
+phrases for varieties of assault and battery.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXVIII</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Tase is met with again on surmounting the
+hilly road out of Tasburgh and coming down hill into
+Newton Flotman. Here it is broad enough to require
+a long and substantial bridge, grouping in unaccustomed
+rightness of composition with the mingled
+thatched, tiled and slated cottages and the church
+that stands on a commanding knoll in the background.
+When Newton was really new it would be
+impossible to say; perhaps its novelty may have been
+measured against the hoary antiquity of, say, Caistor
+yonder, down the valley. For what says the folk-rhyme:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">And Norwich was built of Caistor stone,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>and if Norwich partook of Caistor's building materials,
+why not, in degree, Newton Flotman? But a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>
+whisper. Caistor was never more than a camp, and
+not at any time a place of houses, much less of stone
+ones. Stone is not to be found in this neighbourhood,
+and flint only, of which Norwich is principally
+built, is available for building materials.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus74">
+<img src="images/fig73.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">TASBURGH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>One object in Newton Flotman that puzzles the
+passing stranger is a little effigy of Bacchus fixed on
+the wall of the "Maid's Head" Inn, so thickly
+covered with successive coats of paint that it is
+difficult to give it a period. Remains of Roman
+antiquities are so many in this district that it is
+often mistaken for a work of that classic age, when
+it can really claim no higher antiquity than that of
+the late eighteenth century, a time when figures of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span>
+the kind were a usual decoration of inn signs. Such
+an one still swings from the wrought-iron sign of
+the "Angel" at Woolhampton, on the Bath Road.</p>
+
+<p>In the woody valley of the Tase beyond Newton
+Flotman lies Dunston, trees casting a protecting and
+secretive shade over it, and the "Dun Cow" Inn its
+only roadside representative. That inn and the
+circular brick pound for strayed sheep and cattle
+redeem the last few miles into Norwich from
+absolute emptiness. When the pound last was used
+who shall say? The tramps have played havoc with
+it, and its wooden gate has gone. The ancient
+office of pound-keeper is here evidently fallen into
+disuse.</p>
+
+<p>Swainsthorpe's octagonal church tower is seen on
+the level to the left, but Caistor, in like manner with
+Dunston, is sunk deep in foliage, half a mile or more
+away in the valley, its church tower rising like a
+grey beacon from amid the trees, to tell the curious
+where its ancient camp may be found. Caistor St
+Edmunds, to give its full name, is the site of the
+great Roman camp established here to overawe the
+stronghold of the Iceni, four miles away on the
+banks of the Wensum, and now the site of Norwich.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus22">
+<img src="images/fig74.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NEWTON FLOTMAN.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Caistor camp is a really satisfactory example of
+a Roman fortified <i>castrum</i>. For one thing, it has
+the largest area of any known relic of its kind in
+England, enclosing thirty-seven acres. If its
+fragments of flint walls have neither the thickness
+nor the height of those at Portus Rutupi�, the old
+Roman port in Thanet, now known as Richborough,
+its deep ditch and massive embankment assist the
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a><br /><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a><br /><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>laggard imagination of the layman in matters
+arch�ological, which refuses to be stirred before
+mere undulations in the sward. Here is a ditch
+that can be rolled into, an embankment that can be
+climbed and paced on three sides of the camp, if
+necessary, to put to physical test both height, depth
+and extent. The fourth side of this great enclosure,
+now a turnip-field, was bounded by the River Tase
+and was sufficiently defended by that stream, then a
+wide creek, so that no works are to be found there.
+How long it was before the Romans subdued the
+Iceni, whose great city is thought to have stood
+where Norwich does now, is not known. Nothing
+of that early time here, indeed, is <i>known</i>, and guesses
+are of the vaguest. Only it seems that the Roman
+advance into East Anglia, which had for its objective<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span>
+the principal stronghold of the tribes, here came to
+its military ending. To compare things so ancient
+and romantic with others modern and thought
+prosaic, the several Roman camps on the advance
+from London now to be sought at Uphall near
+Romford; Chipping Hill, near Witham, Lexden, and
+Tasburgh, are, with those that have disappeared, to
+be looked upon in the same light as the wayside
+stations on the railway to Norwich, a railway which
+originally came to a terminus at that city, and was
+only at a later date continued northward.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus75">
+<img src="images/fig75.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">THE OLD BRICK POUND.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Where the Romans and the Romano-British
+citizens of Venta lived when the tribes were reduced&mdash;where
+the Venta Icenorum of Roman rule really
+was, in fact&mdash;is a mystery, for, unlike most of our
+great cities, Norwich has furnished no relics of that
+age; while, beyond coins and odds and ends, Caistor
+camp has produced nothing. No vestiges of streets
+or houses have been found, here or elsewhere, and
+Venta might, for all there is to show of it, have been
+a city of dreams. The fact that the original capital
+of the Iceni was re-settled by the Danes when they
+came in a conquering flood, seems to point to the
+site of it having long been deserted; and that they
+called it after the North "wic" or creek, presupposes
+a "South wic" somewhere else, near or far.
+The position of that south creek is fixed by the
+ancient geography of these last few miles. In those
+times the ground on which Yarmouth, at the mouth
+of the Yare estuary, is now built, was under the
+waves of the sea, which ran up in a long navigable
+creek&mdash;the "Gariensis" of the Romans and the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>
+"North Wic" of the Danes&mdash;from a Roman fortified
+port where Caistor-by-Yarmouth stands, to the site
+of Norwich, which indeed, centuries later, was still
+a port. Where the River Tase is now confluent with
+the Yare and the Wensum, there then branched out
+a shorter and perhaps shallower creek, running
+almost due south; the "South wic" of those
+northern pirates. At its head stood Caistor, where
+the navigation ceased.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus76">
+<img src="images/fig76.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">CAISTOR CAMP.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>It is far inland now, but the marshy valley of
+the Tase still bears signs of those old conditions, and
+perhaps the villas of wealthy Roman citizens, together
+with other relics of the vanished city, still lie preserved
+deep down in the mud and silt that have
+filled up the old channel.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The lie of the land, in accord with these views,
+is plain to see when, returning to the high road, the
+journey to Norwich is continued to Hartford Bridge;
+bird's-eye views unfolding across the valley to the
+right. At Hartford Bridge, where there are several
+bridges, none of them sizeable, rivers, streams and
+runlets of sorts trickle, flow, and gurgle in their
+different ways through flat meadows, below the long
+rise where, two miles from Norwich, the road begins
+to grow suburban. It is on the summit that the
+Newmarket and Thetford route from London joins
+with this, and together they descend into the city.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XXXIX</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="smcap">This</span> way came Queen Elizabeth into Norwich on
+her great "progress" of 1578, by St Stephen's
+Plain and through St Stephen's Gate. Gates and
+walls are gone that once kept out the turbulent, or
+even condemned the belated citizen to lodge the
+night without the precincts of the city, in suburbs
+not in those times to be reckoned safe.</p>
+
+<p>Norwich long ago swept away her defences and
+modernised her outskirts, for this is no Sleepy
+Hollow, this cathedral city in the valley of the
+Wensum, but the capital of East Anglia, throbbing
+with industry and in every way in the forefront
+of modern life. To the entrance from London
+Norwich turns perhaps its most unattractive side.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span>
+No general view of the city, lying in its hollow
+beside the winding Wensum, opens out, and the eye
+seeks the cathedral spire and finds it with some
+difficulty, modestly peering over tangled modern
+roof-tops. It is from quite the opposite direction,
+from the noble height of Mousehold Heath, that
+Norwich unfolds itself in a majestic picture of
+cathedral, churches and houses, with trees and
+gardens, such as no other city can show, displayed
+within its bounds. Norwich does not jump
+instantly to the antiquarian eye, and its electric
+tramways that are the first to greet the traveller
+who enters from the old coach road are not a little
+forbidding. The city grows gradually upon the
+stranger in all its wealth of beauty and interest,
+and becomes more and more lovable the better
+he becomes acquainted with it.</p>
+
+<p>Until these railway times, in the old days of
+slow, difficult, dangerous and expensive travelling,
+the capital of East Anglia was in a very high
+degree a capital, and sufficient to itself. Its
+shipping trade and weaving industries, and the
+famous Norwich School of artists, brought this
+exclusive attitude down from medi�val times to
+modern; and Norfolk county families until the era
+of political reform had almost dawned, still had
+their "town houses" in Norwich, just as, in bygone
+centuries, that typical old family, the Pastons,
+owned their town houses in Hungate and in what
+is now called King Street, formerly Conisford
+Street.</p>
+
+<p>The coaches coming to Norwich threaded the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span>
+mazy streets to inns widely sundered. The original
+"Norwich Machine" of 1762 traversed the greater
+part of the city, to draw up at the "Maid's Head,"
+in Tombland. On the other hand, the Mails, the
+"Telegraph" and the "Magnet," came to and
+started from the "Rampant Horse" in the street
+of the same name, standing not far from the
+beginnings of the city. The street is there still,
+but the oddly-named inn has given place to
+shops, and where the "Rampant Horse" ramped
+rampageously, in violent contrast with the mild-mannered
+"Great White Horse" of Ipswich, drapers'
+establishments now hold forth seductive announcements
+of "alarming sacrifices."</p>
+
+<p>Among other coaches, "Gurney's Original Day
+Coach" and the "Phenomenon" favoured the
+"Angel," in the Market Place, while the "Times"
+house was the "Norfolk Hotel," in St Giles's, and
+that of the "Expedition" the "Swan" Inn. Other
+inns, many of them huddled together under the lee
+of the castle mound, were then to be found in the
+Market Place and the Haymarket and in the narrow
+alley in the rear that still goes by name of "Back
+of the Inns." Others yet, many of medi�val age,
+are to be sought in old nooks of the city. The
+Pilgrim's Hostel, now the Rosemary Tavern, like the
+"Old Barge," belongs to the fourteenth century,
+the last named still standing between King Street
+and the river, with a picturesque but battered
+entrance. The steep and winding lane of Elm
+Hill, where the slum population of Norwich stew
+and pig together down ancient courts and dirty<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span>
+alleys, has more inns, ramshackle but unrestored;
+and in the wide open space by the cathedral, dolefully
+called Tombland, although it has not, nor ever
+had, anything to do with tombs, is the "Maid's
+Head," the one establishment in Norwich that stands
+pre-eminently for old times and good cheer. It is
+an "hotel" now, and has the modern conveniences
+of sanitation and electric light; but its restoration,
+effected through the enthusiasm of a local antiquary,
+with both the opportunity of purchasing the property
+and the means of doing so, has been carried
+through with taste and discrimination. The "Maid's
+Head" can with certainty claim a history of six
+hundred years, and is thought to have been built
+upon the site of a former Bishop's Palace. Heavily-raftered
+ceilings and masonry of evident antiquity
+may take parts of the present house back so far,
+or even a greater length, but the especial pride
+of the "Maid's Head" is its beautiful Jacobean
+woodwork. The old sign of the house was the
+"Molde Fish," or "Murtel Fish," a name that
+antiquaries still boggle at. It was long a cherished
+legend that this strange and unlovely name was
+changed to the present sign in complimentary
+allusion to Queen Elizabeth when she first visited
+the city, but later researches have proved the
+change to have been made at least a century earlier,
+and so goes another belief!</p>
+
+<p>The "Music House," facing the now disreputable
+King Street, has not for so very long been an inn.
+Its name tells of a time when it was the meeting-place
+of the "city music," old-time ancestors of<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>
+modern town bands, but its story goes back to the
+Norman period, when the crypt that bears up the
+thirteenth-century building above was part of the
+home of Moyses, a Jew, and afterwards of Isaac, his
+nephew. "Isaac's Hall," as it was known, was
+seized by King John and given to one of his
+creatures; the unhappy Israelites doubtless, if they
+were allowed to live at all, finding cool quarters in
+the castle dungeons. A long succession of owners,
+including the Pastons, followed; last among them
+Coke, afterwards Lord Chief Justice, who resided
+here in 1633.</p>
+
+<p>It has already been hinted that the streets of
+Norwich are mazy. They are indeed the most perplexing
+of any town in England. Many roads run
+into the city, and from every direction. Glancing at a
+plan of it, these roads resemble the main strands of
+a spider's web, and the streets the cross webs. In
+midst of this maze is the great castle, like the spider
+himself; that cruel keep in whose dungeons old
+wrong-doing, religious and private spite, have immured
+many a wretched captive, like that unfortunate
+unknown "Bartholomew," who has left his name
+scratched on the walls, and the statement that he
+was here confined "saunz resun," a reason of the
+best in those times. Did he ever see the light
+of day again? Or did some midnight assassin
+murder him as many another had been done to
+death?</p>
+
+<p>"Blanchflower," that Bigod, Earl of Norwich who
+built the castle called his keep when it arose on its
+great mound, its stone new and white. He built<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>
+upon the site of a castle thought to have been
+Saxon, and built so well that it became a fortress
+impregnable save to famine and treachery. It has,
+therefore, unlike weaker places that have been
+stormed again and again, little history, and even
+seven hundred years ago was little more than a
+prison. And a prison of sorts&mdash;for State captives
+first, and for common malefactors afterwards&mdash;it
+remained until so recently as 1883, when it was
+restored and then opened as the Museum and Art
+Gallery it now is.</p>
+
+<p>This is no place to speak at length of the cathedral
+that withdraws itself with such ecclesiastical reserve
+from the busy quarters of the city, and is approached
+decorously through ancient gateways in the walls of
+its surrounding close; the Ethelbert Gate, with that
+other, the Erpingham Gate, built in Harry the
+Fifth's time by Sir Thomas Erpingham, whose little
+kneeling effigy yet remains in its niche in the gable
+over the archway, and whose motto&mdash;variously held
+to be "Yenk," or "Think,"&mdash;"Denk," or "Thank"&mdash;is
+repeated many times on the stone work. Norman
+monastic gloom still broods over the close, for the
+cathedral, save the Decorated cloisters and the light
+and graceful spire in the same style, is almost
+wholly of that period, and the grammar school
+that was once a medi�val mortuary chapel and has
+its playground in the crypt, keeps a gravity of
+demeanour that, considering its history, is eminently
+proper.</p>
+
+<p>Through the Close lies the way to Bishop's Bridge
+and the steep road up to Mousehold Heath: the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>
+"Monk's Hold," or monastic property, of times gone
+by when it was common land of the manor belonging
+to the Benedictine priory.</p>
+
+
+<p class="c large p2 gesperrt">XL</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus23">
+<img src="images/fig77.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH, FROM MOUSEHOLD HEATH.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Here</span>, on this famous Heath of Mousehold where the
+gorse and heather and the less common broom yet
+flourish, despite the electric tramways that bring up
+the crowds and the picnic parties, Nature, rugged
+and unconquerable, looks down upon the city, revealed
+as a whole. Even though the chimneys of
+great factories may intrude and smirch the sky when
+winds permit the smoke-wreaths to trail across the
+view, it is a view quite unspoilable. The cathedral,
+as is only proper, is the grand dominating feature,
+with its central tower and graceful crocketed spire
+rising to a height of 320 feet. Second to it, on its
+left hand, the huge bulk of the castle keep rears up;
+a time-ball on its battlements to give the time o' day
+to the busy citizens; those battlements where from a
+gibbet they hanged Robert Kett in 1549, when his
+rebellion was crushed and his army of 20,000
+peasants who had encamped on Mousehold defeated.
+In similar fashion his brother William was
+hanged from Wymondham steeple. Between castle
+and cathedral the great tower of St Peter Mancroft
+looms up, and on the other side of the cathedral
+tower the twin spires of the Roman Catholic place of
+worship crown the sky-line. To the extreme right of
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a><br /><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a><br /><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>the accompanying illustration is St Giles's, and on the
+extreme left, in company with the pinnacled tower of
+a modern church, the dark tower of St John-at-Sepulchre,
+Bracondale, which for shortness and
+simplicity the citizens call "Ber Street Church." For
+the rest, it is a mingling of town and country, of
+houses and gardens and churches in great number,
+that one sees down there; old Norwich, in short,
+exclusive of the modern suburbs that are flung everywhere
+around and cause the Norwich of to-day to
+outnumber the Norwich of coaching times by 80,000
+inhabitants. It must be evident from those figures
+that the picturesque old Norwich numbering
+a population of only 30,000 has been in great
+degree improved away and borne under by that
+human deluge. It is delightful now, but what it was
+at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
+Crome and De Wint and others sketched and painted
+its quaint bits, the picture-galleries of the Castle
+Museum can tell. Nay, even down to the mid-nineteenth
+century it was still very different, as a
+collection of early photographs in the castle proves.
+Then, before St Peter Mancroft was restored, before
+the old Fish Market was cleared away, Norwich had
+many more quaint nooks than now to show the
+stranger; even as, centuries before, it was yet more
+quaint and even more remarkable for its many
+churches than at the present time.</p>
+
+<p>"The nearer the church the further from God,"
+says the old saw. How irreligious then should
+Norwich be, that has even yet a cathedral and thirty-four
+ancient churches, and modern places of worship<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span>
+fully as numerous! Let the citizens, therefore, as
+old Fuller suggested, "make good use of their
+churches and cross that pestilent proverb." These
+churches bear a close resemblance to one another,
+having nearly all been rebuilt in the Perpendicular
+period, some five hundred years ago, and all built of
+the black flint that gives a character to East Anglian
+architecture quite distinct from that of other districts.
+The time when they were thus rebuilt was not only a
+great period of church-building throughout England,
+but a time of especial prosperity in mercantile and
+trading Norwich; a time when guilds grew powerful
+and merchants wealthy in the flourishing industry of
+cloth-weaving introduced some time earlier by
+Flamand and Hollander immigrants. English wool
+that before had gone across the narrow seas for
+manufacture into stuffs was now weaved in the land
+of its growth. "Many thousands," says Blomefield,
+"that before could not get their bread could now by
+this means live handsomely." In that age, to become
+rich and prosperous was to become also a founder and
+benefactor of churches; hence the great ecclesiastical
+buildings that, according to the picturesque metaphor
+of an old writer, writing when there were no fewer
+than sixty-one churches in the city, "surrounded the
+cathedral as the stars do the moon." The old citizens
+sleep in the parish churches for which they did so
+much; their monuments in brass or marble, stone or
+alabaster curiously wrought, often with their
+"merchant's marks"&mdash;the distinctive signs with
+which they labelled their wares&mdash;engraved on them
+in lieu of coats of arms. It is as though a modern
+<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a><br /><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a><br /><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span>trader were to have the registered trade-mark of his
+speciality engraved on his tombstone. A typical
+memorial of an old Norwich trader is that of
+Thomas Sotherton, in the church of St John
+Maddermarket. He&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Under this cold marbell sleeps,"</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<p>and was no common fellow, mark you, but</p>
+
+<div class="poem-container">
+<div class="poem">
+<div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Of gentell blood, more worthy merrit,</span><br />
+<span class="i0">Whose brest enclosed an humble sperryt."</span>
+</div>
+</div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus24">
+<img src="images/fig78.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH MARKET PLACE.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Although the calendar of saints is a long one and
+more than sufficiently lengthy to have provided each
+one of the Norwich churches with a patron, yet so
+popular were some saints, that several churches to
+the same one are found in Norwich, as seen also in
+the city of London. As in old London, it was in
+those cases necessary to confer surnames, so to speak,
+upon those churches.</p>
+
+<p>They are surnames of the geographical sort and
+not a little curious. The four St Peters are, for
+example, St Peter Mancroft, the largest and most
+important in the city, so called from the Magna
+Croft, or large field of the castle; St Peter per
+Mountergate, in King Street, named from the road
+by the "montem," the hill or mount, that runs
+ridge-like in its rear; St Peter Hungate, the
+"hundred gate," or road, reminiscent of the time
+when Norwich was a hundred of itself, even as it is
+now by itself a county; and St Peter Southgate.
+St Michael-at-Thorn has still thorn trees growing in
+its churchyard; St Michael Coslany, with St Mary's<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>
+of identical surname, was built in Coast Lane; and
+St Michael-at-Plea was named from its neighbourhood
+to an ecclesiastical court. St John Maddermarket
+is thus distinguished from other St Johns&mdash;St
+John Timberhill and St John-at-Sepulchre. In
+the neighbourhood of the first-named, madder for the
+dyers' use was marketed; while at Timberhill was
+the market in wood. St Martin-at-Palace, by the
+old Bishop's Palace, and St-Martin-at-Oak take up
+the tale, which might be continued at great length.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus77">
+<img src="images/fig79.jpg" alt="" />
+<p class="caption center medium">NORWICH SNAP.
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The business life of modern Norwich centres in
+the Market Place and the streets that immediately
+lead out of it: the mouldering signs of old commerce
+peer in peaked gables, clustered chimneys and
+old red-brick and plastered walls in the lanes and
+along the wharves of the Wensum.</p>
+
+<p>There trade hustles and elbows to the front, in
+many-storeyed piles of brick, stone and stucco, with
+great show of goods in plate-glass windows and bold
+advertisement of gilt lettering. All those signs of
+prosperity may be seen, and on a larger scale, in
+London, but not even in London are the electric<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span>
+tram cars so great a menace to life and limb as in
+these narrow and winding streets, where they dash
+along at reckless speed.</p>
+
+<p>The Market Place is not yet wholly spoilt. The
+huge bulk of St Peter Mancroft and a row of queer
+old houses beside it still avert that disaster, and form
+a picture from one point of view; while the flint-faced
+Guildhall stands at another corner of the great
+open place and in its Council Chamber, in use five
+hundred years ago as a Court of Justice, and still so
+used, proves the continuity of "our rough island
+story." In a dark and dismal cell of the Guildhall
+once lay the heroic martyr, Thomas Bilney, who
+"testified" at the stake in the Lollards' Pit, where
+many another had already yielded up his life. He
+wondered, as others before and after him had done
+and were to do, whether the tortured body could
+pass steadfast through the fiery ordeal; and on the
+eve of his martyrdom put that doubt to the test by
+holding his finger in the flame of a candle. That
+test sufficed, and he suffered with unshaken constancy
+when the morrow dawned.</p>
+
+<p>The Guildhall has less tragical memories than this,
+and was indeed the scene of many old-time municipal
+revelries in times before Corporations became reformed.
+But old revels and frolics have been discontinued,
+and "Snap," the Norwich dragon, a fearsome
+beast of gilded wickerwork, who was wont to be
+paraded from the Guildhall at the annual mayoral
+election, and last frolicked with his attendant beadles
+and whifflers in 1835, now reposes in the Castle
+Museum.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Market Place on Saturday, when the wide
+open square is close-packed with stalls, is Norwich
+at its most characteristic time and in its most
+characteristic spot. In it the story of the Norwich
+Road may fitly end. The city itself, glanced at in
+the immediately foregoing pages, could not yield its
+story in less space than that occupied by that of the
+road itself.</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" id="illus78">
+<img src="images/fig80.jpg" alt="" />
+</div>
+
+<hr class="chap" />
+
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span></p>
+
+
+
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="c xlarge p2 gesperrt">INDEX</p></div>
+
+<ul class="index"><li class="ifrst">  Aldgate, <a href="#Page_1">1</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_11">11</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Pump, <a href="#Page_11">11</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  "Bacon End," <a href="#Page_180">180</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Boreham, <a href="#Page_127">127-129</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Bow, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75-80</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Bridge, <a href="#Page_77">77-79</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Brentwood, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94-99</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Brockford, <a href="#Page_257">257</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Brome, <a href="#Page_261">261</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Brook Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Hill, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Caistor St Edmunds, <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_298">298</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301-303</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Capel St Mary, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Chadwell Heath, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Street, <a href="#Page_86">86</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114-121</a>, <a href="#Page_127">127</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_200">200</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Chipping Hill, <a href="#Page_133">133-139</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Claydon, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Hall, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Coaches:--</li>
+<li class="isub2">"Confatharrat," <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Duke of Beaufort's Retaliator," <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Expedition," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Gurney's Original Day Coach," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Ipswich Blues," <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- and Yarmouth Mail," <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Post Coaches," <a href="#Page_36">36</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Shannon," <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Umpire," <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Magnet," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"New Colchester," <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Norwich Machine," <a href="#Page_34">34-36</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Mail," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Post Coach," <a href="#Page_39">39</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Times," <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Parcel Mail," <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Ph�nomenon," <a href="#Page_39">39</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Telegraph," <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Coaching, <a href="#Page_30">30-51</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142-151</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Coaching Notabilities:--</li>
+<li class="isub2">Alexander, Israel, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Nelson, Mrs Ann, <a href="#Page_19">19-25</a>, <a href="#Page_27">27</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, George, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, John, <a href="#Page_19">19</a>, <a href="#Page_25">25-27</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Robert, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Suggate (Norwich carrier), <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Thorogood, John, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_267">267</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Colchester, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a>, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_156">156</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179-212</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Constable, John, R.A., <a href="#Page_149">149</a>, <a href="#Page_154">154</a>, <a href="#Page_217">217-219</a>, <a href="#Page_232">232</a>, <a href="#Page_238">238</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Copdock, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Copford, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  <i>Copperfield, David</i>, <a href="#Page_28">28</a>, <a href="#Page_44">44</a>, <a href="#Page_45">45</a>, <a href="#Page_150">150</a>, <a href="#Page_226">226</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Creeting, All Saints, <a href="#Page_253">253</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Creetings, The, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Dedham, <a href="#Page_217">217-221</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Deodand, Law of, <a href="#Page_50">50</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Dickleburgh, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_277">277-279</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Dilbridge, <a href="#Page_217">217</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Dunston, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Feering, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_153">153</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Forest Gate, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Goodmayes, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Gore Pit, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Great Eastern Railway, <a href="#Page_25">25</a>, <a href="#Page_46">46</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51-54</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_152">152</a>, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Hare Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Hartford Bridge, <a href="#Page_304">304</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Hatfield Peverel, <a href="#Page_129">129</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Highwaymen, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_30">30</a>, <a href="#Page_41">41</a>, <a href="#Page_58">58-62</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_142">142</a>, <a href="#Page_143">143</a>, <a href="#Page_214">214</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Highwaymen:--</li>
+<li class="isub2">Cratfield, Rev. Wm., <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">King, Matthew, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Robert, <a href="#Page_58">58</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Tom, <a href="#Page_58">58</a>, <a href="#Page_61">61</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Tapyrtone, Thomas, <a href="#Page_30">30</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Turpin, Richard, <a href="#Page_57">57-62</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Ilford, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Ingatestone, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_105">105-110</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Inns (mentioned at length):--</li>
+<li class="isub2">"Angel," Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a>, <a href="#Page_197">197</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_148">148</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Belle Sauvage," Ludgate Hill, <a href="#Page_19">19</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Black Boy," Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_121">121</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Blossoms," Laurence Lane, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Blue Boar," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_28">28</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Posts," Witham, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Bull," Bishopsgate Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Leadenhall Street, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">----, Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_19">19-28</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Cauliflower," Ilford, <a href="#Page_83">83</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Coach and Horses," Upton, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Cock," Thwaite, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Cross Keys," Gresham Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Duke's Head," Wacton, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Fleece," Brook Street, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Flower Pot," Bishopsgate Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Four Swans," <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Golden Cross," Charing Cross, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Good Woman," Widford, <a href="#Page_111">111-114</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Grave Maurice," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_69">69</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Great White Horse," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_36">36</a>, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a>, <a href="#Page_247">247-252</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Gun," Dedham, <a href="#Page_221">221</a>, <a href="#Page_228">228</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Half Moon," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_243">243</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Horse and Leaping Bar," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"King's Head," Dickleburgh, <a href="#Page_278">278</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Lion and Lamb," Ipswich, <a href="#Page_243">243</a>, <a href="#Page_244">244</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Magpie," Little Stonham, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Maid's Head," Newton Flotman, <a href="#Page_297">297</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a>, <a href="#Page_35">35</a>, <a href="#Page_306">306</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Music House," Norwich, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Norfolk Hotel," Norwich, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Old Red Lion," Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Popinjay," Norwich, <a href="#Page_34">34</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Queen's Head," Thwaite, <a href="#Page_259">259</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Rampant Horse," Norwich, <a href="#Page_306">306</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Red Lion," Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_140">140</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_57">57</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Rising Sun," Manor Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Saracen's Head," Aldgate, <a href="#Page_14">14</a>, <a href="#Page_16">16</a>, <a href="#Page_17">17</a>, <a href="#Page_18">18</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Chelmsford, <a href="#Page_117">117-120</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Spread Eagle," Gracechurch Street, <a href="#Page_15">15-19</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Sun," Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Swan," Washbrook, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Swan-with-Two-Necks," Gresham Street, <a href="#Page_15">15</a>, <a href="#Page_43">43</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Three Cups," Colchester, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a>,  <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Springfield, <a href="#Page_122">122</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Three Nuns," Aldgate, <a href="#Page_29">29</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Vine," Mile End, <a href="#Page_73">73</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"Wheatsheaf," Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_152">152</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"White Elm," Copdock, <a href="#Page_237">237</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"---- Hart," Brentwood, <a href="#Page_37">37</a>, <a href="#Page_97">97</a>, <a href="#Page_98">98</a>, <a href="#Page_119">119</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Colchester, <a href="#Page_196">196</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Scole, <a href="#Page_262">262-271</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- ----, Witham, <a href="#Page_132">132</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">"White Horse," Fetter Lane, <a href="#Page_15">15</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">---- Horse, Widford, <a href="#Page_112">112</a>, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Ipswich, <a href="#Page_54">54</a>, <a href="#Page_56">56</a>, <a href="#Page_132">132</a>, <a href="#Page_212">212</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237-252</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Kelvedon, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139-153</a>, <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Langham, <a href="#Page_218">218</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Lexden, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_147">147</a>, <a href="#Page_177">177-181</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Heath, <a href="#Page_177">177-179</a>, <a href="#Page_187">187</a>, <a href="#Page_190">190</a>, <a href="#Page_201">201</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Little Stonham, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  "London Stone," <a href="#Page_4">4</a>, <a href="#Page_13">13</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Long Stratton, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292-295</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Manor Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Margaretting, <a href="#Page_57">57</a>, <a href="#Page_110">110</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Mark's Tey, <a href="#Page_158">158</a>, <a href="#Page_175">175</a>, <a href="#Page_176">176</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Martyr's Tree, <a href="#Page_95">95</a>, <a href="#Page_96">96</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Mile End, <a href="#Page_70">70-74</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  "Mockbeggar Hall," <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Moulsham, <a href="#Page_114">114</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Mountnessing, <a href="#Page_101">101-105</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Needham Market, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  New Hall, <a href="#Page_123">123-127</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Newton Flotman, <a href="#Page_296">296-299</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Norwich, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_52">52</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a>, <a href="#Page_301">301</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302-320</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Old Ford, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_76">76</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Old-time travellers:--</li>
+<li class="isub2">Caroline of Brunswick, Princess, Queen of George IV., <a href="#Page_165">165-168</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Princess, Queen of George III., <a href="#Page_162">162</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Kemp, Will, <a href="#Page_79">79</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Johnson, Samuel, <a href="#Page_164">164</a>, <a href="#Page_165">165</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">Queen Elizabeth, <a href="#Page_304">304</a>, <a href="#Page_307">307</a></li>
+<li class="isub2">William III., <a href="#Page_140">140</a>, <a href="#Page_141">141</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Old-time travelling, <a href="#Page_142">142-150</a>, <a href="#Page_159">159-168</a>, <a href="#Page_178">178</a>, <a href="#Page_225">225-237</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Parcel Mail, <a href="#Page_54">54-57</a>, <a href="#Page_111">111</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Pulham St Mary Magdalene, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary the Virgin, <a href="#Page_286">286</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Puttels Bridge, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Rivenhall End, <a href="#Page_139">139</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Romford, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_29">29</a>, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_82">82</a>, <a href="#Page_85">85</a>, <a href="#Page_88">88-93</a>, <a href="#Page_167">167</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Scole, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_262">262-272</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Seven Kings, <a href="#Page_51">51</a>, <a href="#Page_83">83-85</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Shenfield, <a href="#Page_99">99</a>, <a href="#Page_100">100</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Shrubland Park, <a href="#Page_253">253</a>, <a href="#Page_255">255</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Springfield, <a href="#Page_121">121-123</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Spurgeon, Rev. C. H., <a href="#Page_151">151</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Stanway, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_174">174-178</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Steam Coaches, <a href="#Page_46">46</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Stoke Ash, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Stonham Aspall, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Earls, <a href="#Page_256">256</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Stratford (Langthorne), <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_80">80</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ----- -le-Bow, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_8">8</a>, <a href="#Page_75">75-80</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_223">223-225</a>, <a href="#Page_274">274</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Swainsthorpe, <a href="#Page_298">298</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Tasburgh, <a href="#Page_292">292</a>, <a href="#Page_295">295</a>, <a href="#Page_296">296</a>, <a href="#Page_297">297</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Thwaite, <a href="#Page_259">259</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Tivetshall St Margaret, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_284">284</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- St Mary, <a href="#Page_6">6</a>, <a href="#Page_287">287</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Toll-gates, <a href="#Page_40">40</a>, <a href="#Page_70">70</a>, <a href="#Page_71">71</a>, <a href="#Page_78">78</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a>, <a href="#Page_93">93</a>, <a href="#Page_94">94</a>, <a href="#Page_139">139</a>, <a href="#Page_179">179</a>, <a href="#Page_222">222</a>, <a href="#Page_237">237</a>, <a href="#Page_257">257</a>, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Uphall, <a href="#Page_5">5</a>, <a href="#Page_302">302</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Upton Park, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Wacton, <a href="#Page_288">288</a>, <a href="#Page_292">292</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  ---- Common, <a href="#Page_288">288</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Washbrook, <a href="#Page_236">236</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  West Ham, <a href="#Page_77">77</a>, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Whalebone House, <a href="#Page_86">86</a>, <a href="#Page_87">87</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Whitechapel, <a href="#Page_2">2</a>, <a href="#Page_12">12</a>, <a href="#Page_62">62-69</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Whitton Street, <a href="#Page_252">252</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Widford, <a href="#Page_111">111-114</a>, <a href="#Page_161">161</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Witham, <a href="#Page_23">23</a>, <a href="#Page_131">131-139</a>, <a href="#Page_163">163</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Woodgrange, <a href="#Page_81">81</a></li>
+
+<li class="indx">  Writtle, <a href="#Page_5">5</a></li>
+
+
+<li class="ifrst">  Yaxley, <a href="#Page_260">260</a></li></ul>
+
+
+
+
+
+<p class="c medium">
+EDINBURGH<br />
+COLSTON AND COY, LTD.<br />
+PRINTERS
+</p>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="transnote">
+
+<p class="c">Transcriber's Notes:</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistent hyphenation is retained.</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistent punctuation is retained.</p>
+
+
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Norwich Road, by Charles G. Harper
+
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+</body>
+</html>
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