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                            THE EXETER ROAD

                       WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR


           =THE BRIGHTON ROAD=: Old Times and New on a Classic Highway.

           =THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD=, and its Tributaries, To-day and in Days of
           Old.

           =THE DOVER ROAD=: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

           =THE BATH ROAD=: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

           =THE GREAT NORTH ROAD=:

      Vol. I. LONDON TO YORK.        [_In the Press._
          II. YORK TO EDINBURGH.



[Illustration: THE LIONESS ATTACKING THE EXETER MAIL, ‘WINTERSLOW HUT’
(AFTER JAMES POLLARD).]




                                  THE

                              EXETER ROAD

                             _THE STORY OF
                     THE WEST OF ENGLAND HIGHWAY_

                         BY CHARLES G. HARPER

         AUTHOR OF ‘THE BRIGHTON ROAD,’ ‘THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD,’
                 ‘THE DOVER ROAD,’ AND ‘THE BATH ROAD’

                       [Illustration: colophon]

             _Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time
                         Prints and Pictures_

                    LONDON: CHAPMAN & HALL, LIMITED

                                 1899

                         _All rights reserved_




[Illustration: PREFACE]


_This, the fifth volume in a series of works purporting to tell the
Story of the Great Roads, requires but few forewords; but occasion may
be taken to say that perhaps greater care has been exercised than in
preceding volumes to collect and put on record those anecdotes and
floating traditions of the country, which, the gossip of yesterday, will
be the history of to-morrow. These are precisely the things that are
neglected by the County Historians at one end of the scale of writers,
and the compilers of guide-books at the other; and it is just because
this gossip and these local anecdotes are generally passed by and often
lost that those which are gathered now will become more valuable as time
goes on._

_For the inclusion of these hitherto unconsidered trifles much
archæology and much purely guide-book description have been suppressed;
nor for this would it seem necessary to appear apologetic, even although
local patriotism is a militant force, and resents anything less than a
detailed and favourable description of every village, interesting or
not._

_How militant parochial patriots may be the writer already knows. You
may criticise the British Empire and prophesy its downfall if you feel
that way inclined, and welcome; but it is the Unpardonable Sin to say
that Little Pedlington is anything less than the cleanest, the neatest,
and the busiest for its size of all the Sweet Auburns in the land! Has
not the writer been promised a bad quarter of an hour by the local
press, should he revisit Crayford, after writing of that uncleanly place
in the_ DOVER ROAD? _and have the good folks of Chard still kept the tar
and feathers in readiness for him who, daring greatly, presumed to say
the place was so quiet that when the stranger appeared in its streets
every head was out of doors and windows?_

_Point of view is everything. The stranger finds a place charming
because everything in it is old, and quiet reigns supreme. Quietude and
antiquity, how eminently desirable and delightful when found, he thinks.
Not so the dweller in such a spot. He would welcome as a benefactor any
one who would rebuild his house in modern style, and would behold with
satisfaction the traffic of Cheapside thronging the grass-grown
market-place._

_No brief is held for such an one in these pages, nor is it likely that
the professional antiquary will find in them anything not already known
to him. The book, like all its predecessors, and like those that are to
follow it, is intended for those who journey down the roads either in
person or in imagination, and to their judgment it is left. In
conclusion, let me acknowledge the valuable information with regard to
Wiltshire afforded me by Cecil Simpson, Esq., than whom no one knows the
county better._

CHARLES G. HARPER.

PETERSHAM, SURREY,

_October 1899_.




[Illustration: _List of Illustrations_]


SEPARATE PLATES

                                                                    PAGE

1. THE LIONESS ATTACKING THE EXETER MAIL, ‘WINTERSLOW
HUT.’ (_After James Pollard_)                               Frontispiece.

2. THE ‘COMET’                                                        13

3. THE ‘REGULATOR’ ON HARTFORD BRIDGE FLATS                           19

4. THE ‘QUICKSILVER’ MAIL:--‘STOP, COACHMAN, I
HAVE LOST MY HAT AND WIG’                                             23

5. THE WEST COUNTRY MAILS STARTING FROM THE
GLOUCESTER COFFEE HOUSE, PICCADILLY. (_After
James Pollard_)                                                       35

6. THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S STATUE                                    39

7. THE WELLINGTON ARCH AND HYDE PARK CORNER,
1851                                                                  41

8. ST. GEORGE’S HOSPITAL, AND THE ROAD TO PIMLICO,
1780                                                                  43

9. KNIGHTSBRIDGE TOLL-GATE, 1854                                      45

10. KNIGHTSBRIDGE BARRACKS TOLL-GATE                                  49

11. BRENTFORD                                                         57

12. HOUNSLOW: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS                                 67

13. THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK                                           111

14. THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE                                        117

15. WHITCHURCH                                                       129

16. ‘WINTERSLOW HUT’                                                 159

17. SALISBURY CATHEDRAL. (_After Constable, R.A._)                   171

18. VIEW OF SALISBURY SPIRE FROM THE RAMPARTS
OF OLD SARUM                                                         189

19. OLD SARUM. (_After Constable, R.A._)                             193

20. THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER
‘TELEGRAPH,’ ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING
THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY. (_After
James Pollard_)                                                      197

21. STONEHENGE (_After Turner, R.A._)                                201

22. SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE                                            207

23. ANCIENT AND MODERN: MOTOR CARS AT STONEHENGE,
EASTER 1899                                                          213

24. COOMBE BISSETT                                                   235

25. THE EXETER ROAD, NEAR ‘WOODYATES INN’                            239

26. TARRANT HINTON                                                   243

27. BLANDFORD                                                        259

28. TOWN BRIDGE, BLANDFORD                                           263

29. THE ‘WHITE HART,’ DORCHESTER                                     269

30. DORCHESTER                                                       277

31. WINTERBOURNE ABBAS                                               281

32. ‘TRAVELLER’S REST’                                               287

33. ‘THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD’                            301

34. EXETER, FROM THE DUNSFORD ROAD                                   311




ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

                                                                    PAGE

Vignette                                                    (_Title-page_)

Preface (Stonehenge)                                                 vii

List of Illustrations (Hartford Bridge Flats)                         xi

The Exeter Road                                                        1

‘An Old Gentleman, a Cobbett-like Person’                             38

The Pikeman                                                           47

The ‘New Police’                                                      51

Tommy Atkins, 1838                                                    53

Old Kensington Church                                                 54

The Beadle                                                            56

The ‘Bell,’ Hounslow                                                  65

The ‘Green Man,’ Hatton                                               72

The Highwayman’s Retreat, the ‘Green Man’                             73

East Bedfont                                                          79

The Staines Stone                                                     84

The ‘Bells of Ouseley’                                                88

Bagshot                                                               97

Roadside Scene. (_After Rowlandson_)                                 103

Roadside Scene. (_After Rowlandson_)                                 104

Roadside Scene. (_After Rowlandson_)                                 105

Roadside Scene. (_After Rowlandson_)                                 107

Funeral Garland, Abbot’s Ann                                         154

St. Anne’s Gate, Salisbury                                           182

Highway Robbery Monument at Imber                                    231

Where the Robber fell Dead                                           233

Judge Jeffreys’ Chair                                                273

Kingston Russell                                                     284

Chilcombe Church                                                     285

Chideock                                                             293

Sign of the ‘Ship,’ Morecomblake                                     294

Interior of the ‘Queen’s Arms,’ Charmouth                            295

‘Copper Castle’                                                      298

The Exeter City Sword-bearer                                         307

‘Matty the Miller’                                                   313

The End                                                              314




                          THE ROAD TO EXETER


London (Hyde Park Corner) to--
                                                 MILES
Kensington--
  St. Mary Abbots                                    1¼
  Addison Road                                       2½

Hammersmith                                          3¼

Turnham Green                                        5

Brentford--
  Star and Garter                                    6
  Town Hall (cross River Brent and Grand
    Junction Canal)                                  7

Isleworth (Railway Station)                          8½

Hounslow (Trinity Church)                            9¾
  (Cross the Old River, a branch of the River Colne).

Baber Bridge (cross the New River, a branch of the
  River Colne)                                      11¾

East Bedfont                                        13¼

Staines Bridge (cross River Thames)                 16½

Egham                                               18

Virginia Water--
  ‘Wheatsheaf’                                      20¾

Sunningdale--
  Railway Station                                   22¾

Bagshot--
  ‘King’s Arms’                                     26¼
  ‘Jolly Farmer’                                    27¼

Camberley                                           29

York Town                                           29¾

Blackwater (cross River Blackwater)                 30¾

Hartford Bridge                                     35½

Hartley Row                                         36½

Hook                                                40

Water End (for Nately Scures)                       41¾

Mapledurwell Hatch (cross River Loddon)             43

Basingstoke--
  Market Place                                      45¾

Worting                                             47¾

Clerken Green, and Oakley--
  Railway Station                                   49¾

Dean                                                51¼

Overton                                             53½

Laverstoke, and Freefolk                            55½

Whitchurch--
  Market House                                      56¾

Hurstbourne Priors                                  58½

Andover--
  Market Place (cross River Anton)                  63½

Little Ann                                          65½

Little (or Middle) Wallop (cross River Wallop)      70½

Lobcombe Corner                                     73¾

‘Winterslow Hut’ (cross River Bourne)               75

Salisbury--
  Council House                                     81½

West Harnham (cross River Avon)                     82¼

Coombe Bissett (cross a branch of the River Avon)   84¼

‘Woodyates Inn’                                     91¼

‘Cashmoor Inn’                                      96¼

Tarrant Hinton (cross River Tarrant)                99

Pimperne                                           101½

Blandford--
  Market Place (cross River Stour)                 103¾

Winterbourne Whitchurch (cross River Winterbourne) 108¾

Milborne St. Andrews (cross River Milborne)        111½

Piddletown (cross River Piddle)                    115

Troy Town (cross River Frome)                      116¼

Dorchester--
Town Hall                                          120

Winterbourne Abbas (cross River Winterbourne)      124½

‘Traveller’s Rest’                                 131¼

Bridport--
Market House (cross River Brit)                    134½

Chideock                                           137¼

Morecomblake                                       138¾

Charmouth (cross River Char)                       141½

‘Hunter’s Lodge Inn’                               145

Axminster--
  Market Place (cross River Axe)                   147
    (Cross River Yart)

Kilmington                                         148¾

Wilmington (cross River Coly)                      153

Honiton                                            156½

Fenny Bridges (cross River Otter)                  159½

Fairmile                                           161½

Rockbeare                                          166

Honiton Clyst (cross River Clyst)                  168¼

Heavitree                                          171

Exeter                                             172¾




[Illustration: THE EXETER ROAD]




I


From Hyde Park Corner, whence it is measured, to the west end of
Hounslow town, the Exeter Road is identical with the road to Bath. At
that point the ways divide. The right-hand road leads to Bath, by way of
Maidenhead; the Exeter Road goes off to the left, through Staines, to
Basingstoke, Whitchurch, and Andover; where, at half a mile beyond that
town, there is a choice of routes.

The shortest way to Exeter, the ‘Queen City of the West,’ is by taking
the right-hand road at this last point and proceeding thence through
Weyhill, Mullen’s Pond, Park House, and Amesbury to Deptford Inn,
Hindon, Mere, Wincanton, Ilchester, Ilminster, and Honiton. This ‘short
cut,’ which is the hilliest and bleakest of all the bleak and hilly
routes to Exeter, is 165 miles, 6 furlongs in length. Another way, not
much more than 2¼ miles longer, is by turning to the left at this fork
just outside Andover, and going thence to Salisbury, Shaftesbury,
Sherborne, Yeovil, Crewkerne, and Chard, to meet the other route at
Honiton; at which point, in fact, all routes met. A third way, over 4½
miles longer than the last, instead of leaving Salisbury for
Shaftesbury, turns in a more southerly direction, and passing through
Blandford, Dorchester, Bridport, and Axminster, reaches Exeter by way of
the inevitable Honiton in 172 miles, 6 furlongs.

It is thus, by whichever way you elect to travel, a far cry to Exeter,
even in these days; whether you go by rail from Waterloo or
Paddington--171½ and 194 miles respectively, in three hours and
three-quarters--or whether you cycle, or drive in a motor car, along the
road, when the journey may be accomplished by the stalwart cyclist in a
day and a half, and by a swift car in, say, ten hours.

But hush! we are observed, as they say in the melodramas. Let us say
fourteen hours, and we shall be safe, and well within the legal limit
for motors of twelve miles an hour.

Compare these figures with the very finest performances of that crack
coach of the coaching age, the Exeter ‘Telegraph,’ going by Amesbury and
Ilchester, which, with the perfection of equipment, and the finest
teams, eventually cut down the time from seventeen to fourteen hours,
and was justly considered the wonder of that era; and it will
immediately be perceived that the century has well earned its reputation
for progress.

[Sidenote: _OLD ROUTES_]

It may be well to give a few particulars of the ‘Telegraph’ here before
proceeding. It was started in 1826 by Mrs. Nelson, of the ‘Bull,’
Aldgate, and originally took seventeen hours between Piccadilly and the
‘Half Moon,’ Exeter. It left Piccadilly at 5.30 A.M., and arrived at
Exeter at 10.30 P.M. Twenty minutes allowed for breakfast at Bagshot,
and thirty minutes for dinner at Deptford Inn. The ‘Telegraph,’ be it
said, was put on the road as a rival to the ‘Quicksilver’ Devonport
mail, which, leaving Piccadilly at 8 P.M., arrived at Exeter at 12.34
next day; time, sixteen hours, thirty-four minutes. Going on to
Devonport, it arrived at that place at 5.14 P.M., or twenty-one hours,
fourteen minutes from London. There were no fewer than twenty-three
changes in the 216 miles.




II


But those travellers who, in the early days of coaching, a century and a
half ago, desired the safest, speediest, and most comfortable journey to
Exeter, went by a very much longer route than any of those already
named. They went, in fact, by the Bath Road and thence through Somerset.
The Exeter Road beyond Basingstoke was at that period a miserable
waggon-track, without a single turnpike; while the road to Bath had,
under the management of numerous turnpike-trusts, already become a
comparatively fine highway. The Somersetshire squires were also
bestirring themselves to improve their roads, despite the strenuous
opposition encountered from the peasantry and others on the score of
their rights being invaded, and the anticipated ruin of local trade.

A writer of that period, advocating the setting up of turnpikes on the
direct road to Exeter, anticipated little trouble in converting that
‘waggon-track’ into a first-class highway. Four turnpikes, he
considered, would suffice very well from Salisbury to Exeter; nor would
the improvement of the way over the Downs demand much labour, for the
bottom was solid, and one general expense for pickaxe and spade work,
for levelling, and for widening at the approaches to the villages would
last a long while; experience proving so much, since those portions of
the road remained pretty much the same as they had been in the days of
Julius Cæsar.

‘It may be objected,’ continues this reformer, ‘that the peasantry will
demolish these turnpikes so soon as they are erected, but we will not
suppose this is in a well-governed happy state like ours. _Lex non
supponet odiosa._ If such terrors were to take place, the great
legislative power would lie at the mercy of the rabble. If the mob will
not hear reason they must be taught it.

[Sidenote: _A PLEA FOR GOOD ROADS_]

‘It may be urged that there are not passengers enough on the Western
Road to defray the expenses of erecting these turnpikes. To this I
answer by denying the fact; ’tis a road very much frequented, and the
natural demands from the West to London and all England on the one part,
and from all the eastern counties to Exeter, Plymouth, and Falmouth,
etc., on the other are very great, especially in war-time. Besides, were
the roads more practicable, the number of travellers would increase,
especially of those who make best for towns and inns--namely, such
people of fashion and fortune as make various tours in England for
pleasure, health, and curiosity. In picturesque counties, like Cornwall
and Devon, where the natural curiosities are innumerable, many gentlemen
of taste would be fond of making purchases, and spending their fortunes,
if with common ease they could readily go to and return from their
enchanted castles. Whereas, a family, as things now stand, or a party of
gentlemen and ladies, would sooner travel to the South of France and
back again than down to Falmouth or the Land’s End. And ’tis easier and
pleasanter--so that all beyond Sarum or Dorchester is to us _terra
incognita_, and the mapmakers might, if they pleased, fill the vacuities
of Devon and Cornwall with forests, sands, elephants, savages, or what
they please. Travellers of every denomination--the wealthy, the man of
taste, the idle, the valetudinary--would all, if the roads were good,
visit once at least the western parts of this island. Whereas, every man
and woman that has an hundred superfluous guineas must now turn bird of
passage, flit away across the ocean, and expose themselves to the
ridicule of the French. Now, what but the goodness of the roads can
tempt people to make such expensive and foolish excursions, since, out
of fifty knight-and lady-errants, not two, perhaps, can enounce half a
dozen French words. Their inns are infinitely worse than ours, the
aspect of the country less pleasing; men, manners, customs, laws are no
objects with these itinerants, since they can neither speak nor read the
language. I have known twelve at a time ready to starve at Paris and lie
in the streets, though their purses were well crammed with _louis
d’or_. When they wanted to go to bed, they yawned to the chambermaid, or
shut their eyes; when hunger attacked, they pointed to their mouths.
Even pretty Miss K., and Miss G., realised not the distortion of their
labial muscles, but cawed like unfledged birds for food. They paid
whatever the French demanded, and were laughed at (not before their
faces, indeed) most immeasurably. And yet simpletons of this class spent
near £100,000 last year in France.

‘But to return. A rich citizen in London, a gentleman of large fortune
eastwards, has, perhaps, some very valuable relations or friends in the
West. Half a dozen times in his lifetime he hears of their welfare by
the post, and once, perhaps, receives a token when the Western curate
posts up to town to be initiated into a benefice--and that is all. He
thinks no more of visiting them than of traversing the deserts of Nubia,
considering them as a sort of separate beings, which might as well be in
the moon, or in _Limbo Patrum_.

[Sidenote: _CONSERVATIVES_]

‘I hear the nobility and gentry of Somersetshire have exerted a laudable
spirit, and are now actually erecting turnpikes, which will give that
fruitful county a better intercourse with its neighbours, and bring an
accession of wealth into it; for every wise traveller who goes from
London to Exeter, etc. will surely take Bath in his way (as the
digression is a mere nothing). At least, all the expensive people with
coaches certainly will--and then the supine inhabitants of Wilts and
Dorset may repine in vain; for when a road once comes into repute, and
persons find a pleasant tour and good usage, they will never return to
that which is decried as out of vogue; unless, indeed, they should
reason as a Marlborough stage-coachman did when turnpikes were first
erected between London and Bath. A new road was planned out, but still
my honest man would go round by a miserable waggon-track called
“Ramsbury narrow way.” One by one, from little to less, he dawdled away
all his passengers, and when asked why he was such an obstinate idiot,
his answer was (in a grumbling tone) that he was now an aged man; that
he relished not new fantasies; that his grandfather and father had
driven the aforesaid way before him, and that he would continue in the
old track to _his_ death, though his four horses only drew a
passenger-fly. But the proprietor saw no wit in this: the old
_Automedon_ “resigned” (in the Court phrase), and was replaced by a
youth less conscientious. As a man of honour, I would not conclude
without consulting the most solemn-looking waggoner on the road. This
proved to be Jack Whipcord, of Blandford. Jack’s answer was, that roads
had but one object--namely, waggon-driving; that he required but 5 feet
width in a lane (which he resolved never to quit), and all the rest
might go to the devil. That the gentry ought to stay at home and be
damned, and not run gossiping up and down the country. No turnpikes, no
improvements of roads for him. The Scripture for him was Jeremiah vi.
16.[1] Thus, finding Jack an ill-natured brute and a profane country
wag, I left him, dissatisfied.’




III


In these pages, which purport to show the old West of England highway as
it was in days of old and as it is now, it is not proposed to follow
either of the two routes taken by the ‘Telegraph’ coach or the
‘Quicksilver’ Devonport mail, by Amesbury or by Shaftesbury, although
there will be occasion to mention those smart coaches from time to time.
We will take the third route instead, for the reasons that it is
practically identical with the course of the _Via Iceniana_, the old
Roman military way to Exeter and the West; and, besides being thus in
the fullest sense the Exeter Road, is the most picturesque and historic
route. This way went in 1826, according to _Cary_, those eminently safe
and reliable coaches, the ‘Regulator,’ in twenty-four hours; the ‘Royal
Mail,’ in twenty-two hours; and the ‘Sovereign,’ which, as no time is
specified, would seem to have journeyed down the road in a haphazard
fashion. Of these, the ‘Mail’ left that famous hostelry, the ‘Swan with
Two Necks’ (known familiarly as the ‘Wonderful Bird’), in Lad Lane,
City, at 7.30 every evening, and Piccadilly half an hour later, arriving
at the ‘New London Inn,’ Exeter, by six o’clock the following evening.

[Sidenote: _EARLY COACHING DAYS_]

But even these coaches, which jogged along in so leisurely a fashion,
went at a furious and breakneck--not to say daredevil--pace compared
with the time consumed by the stage coach advertised in the _Mercurius
Politicus_ of 1658 to start from the ‘George Inn,’ Aldersgate Without,
‘every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. To Salisbury in two days for xxs.
To Blandford and Dorchester in two days and a half for xxxs. To
Exminster, Nunnington, Axminster, Honiton, and Exeter in four days xls.’

The ‘Exeter Fly’ of a hundred years later than this, which staggered
down to Exeter in three days, under the best conditions, and was the
swiftest public conveyance down this road at that time, before the new
stages and mails were introduced, had been known, it is credibly
reported, to take six.

[Sidenote: _FARES_]

Palmer’s mail coaches, which were started on the Exeter Road in the
summer of 1785, rendered all this kind of meandering progress obsolete,
except for the poorest class of travellers, who had still for many a
long year (indeed, until road travel was killed by the railways) to
endure the miseries of a journey in the great hooded luggage waggons of
Russell and Company, which, with a team of eight horses, started from
Falmouth, and travelling at the rate of three miles an hour, reached
London in twelve days. A man on a pony rode beside the team, and with a
long whip touched them up when this surprising pace was not maintained.
The travellers walked, putting their belongings inside; and when night
was come either camped under the ample shelter of the lumbering waggon,
or, if it were winter, were accommodated for a trifle in the stable
lofts of the inns they halted at. Messrs. Russell and Company were in
business for many years as carriers between London and the West, and at
a later date--from the ’20’s until the close of the coaching era--were
the proprietors of an intermediate kind of vehicle between the waggon at
one extreme and the mail coaches at the other. This was the ‘Fly Van,’
of which, unlike their more ancient conveyances which set out only three
times a week, one started every week-day from either end. This
accommodated a class of travellers who did not disdain to travel among
the bales and bundles, or to fit themselves in between the knobbly
corners of heavy goods, but who would neither walk nor consent to the
journey from the Far West occupying the best part of a fortnight. So
they paid a trifle more and travelled the distance between Exeter and
London in two days, in times when the ‘Telegraph,’ according to Sir
William Knighton, conveyed the aristocratic passenger that distance in
seventeen hours. He writes, in his diary, under date of 23rd September
1832, that he started at five o’clock in the morning of that day from
Exeter in the ‘Telegraph’ coach for London. The fare, inside, was £3:
10s., and, in addition, four coachmen and one guard had to be paid the
usual fees which custom had rendered obligatory. They breakfasted at
Ilminster and dined at Andover. ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘can exceed the
rapidity with which everything is done. The journey of one hundred and
seventy-five miles was accomplished in seventeen hours[2]--breakfast and
dinner were so hurried that the cravings of appetite could hardly be
satisfied, and the horses were changed like lightning.’ The fare,
inside, was therefore practically 5d. a mile, to which must be added at
least fifteen shillings in tips to those four coachmen and that guard,
bringing the cost of the smartest travelling between London and Exeter
up to £4: 5s. for the single journey; while the fares by waggon and ‘Fly
Van’ would be at the rate of a halfpenny and twopence per mile
respectively, something like 7s. 6d. and 29s. 6d.; without, in those
cases, the necessity for tipping.

There were, however, more degrees than these in the accommodation and
fares for coach travellers. The proper mail coach fare was 4d. a mile,
but the mails were not the _ne plus ultra_ of speed and comfort even on
this road, where the ‘Quicksilver’ mail ran a famous course. Hence the
5d. a mile by the ‘Telegraph.’ But it was left to the ‘Waggon Coach’ to
present the greatest disparity of prices and places. This was a vehicle
which, under various names, was seen for a considerable period on most
of the roads, and can, with a little ingenuity, be looked upon as the
precursor of the three classes on railways. There were the first-class
‘insides,’ the second-class ‘outsides,’ and those very rank outsiders
indeed, the occupants of the shaky wickerwork basket hung on behind,
called the ‘crate’ or the ‘rumble-tumble,’ who were very often noisily
drunken sailors and people who did not mind a little jolting more or
less.

Some very fine turns-out were on this road at the end of the ’30’s.
Firstly, there was the ‘Royal Mail,’ between the ‘Swan with Two Necks,’
in Lad Lane, and the ‘New London Inn,’ Exeter, both in those days inns
of good solid feeding, with drinking to match. It was of the first-named
inn, and of another equally famous, that the poet (who must have been of
the fleshly and Bacchic order) wrote:--

    At the Swan with Two Throttles
    I tippled two bottles,
    And bothered the beef at the Bull and the Mouth.

One can readily imagine the sharp-set and shivering traveller, fresh
from the perils of the road, ‘bothering the beef’ with his huge
appetite, and tippling the generous liquor (which, of course, was port)
with loud appreciative smackings of the lips.

Then there were the ‘Sovereign,’ the ‘Regulator,’ and the ‘Eclipse,’
going by the Blandford and Dorchester route; the ‘Prince George,’
‘Herald,’ ‘Pilot,’ ‘Traveller,’ and ‘Quicksilver,’ by Crewkerne and
Yeovil; and the ‘Defiance,’ ‘Celerity,’ and ‘Subscription,’ by Amesbury
and Ilminster; to leave unnamed the short stages and the bye-road
coaches, all helping to swell the traffic in those old days, now utterly
forgotten.




IV


A very great authority on coaching--the famous ‘Nimrod,’ the mainstay of
the _Sporting Magazine_--writing in 1836, compares the exquisite
perfection to which coaching had attained at that time with the era

[Sidenote: _A RIP VAN WINKLE_]

[Illustration: THE ‘COMET.’]

of the old Exeter ‘Fly,’ and imagines a kind of Rip Van Winkle old
gentleman, who had been a traveller by that crazy conveyance in 1742,
waking up and journeying by the ‘Comet’ of 1836. Rousing from his long
sleep, he determines to go by the ‘Fly’ to Exeter. In the lapse of
ninety-four years, however, that vehicle has been relegated to the
things that were, and has been utterly forgotten. He waits in
Piccadilly. ‘What coach, your honour?’ asks a ruffianly-looking fellow.

‘I wish to go home to Exeter,’ replies the old gentleman.

‘Just in time, your honour, here she comes--them there gray horses;
where’s your luggage?’

But the turn-out is so different from those our Rip Van Winkle knew,
that he says, ‘Don’t be in a hurry, that’s a gentleman’s carriage.’

‘It ain’t, I tell you,’ replies the cad; ‘it’s the “Comet,” and you must
be as quick as lightning.’ Whereupon, vehemently protesting, the ‘cad’
and a fellow ruffian shove him forcibly into the coach, despite his
anxiety about his luggage.

The old fellow, impressed by the smartness of the Jehu--a smartness to
which coachmen had been entire strangers in his time--asks, ‘What
gentleman is going to drive us!’

‘He is no gentleman,’ replies the proprietor of the coach, who happens
to be sitting at his side; ‘but he has been on the “Comet” ever since
she started, and is a very steady young man.’

‘Pardon my ignorance,’ says our ancient, ‘from the cleanliness of his
person, the neatness of his apparel, and the language he made use of, I
mistook him for some enthusiastic bachelor of arts, wishing to become a
charioteer after the manner of the illustrious ancients.’

‘You must have been long in foreign parts, sir,’ observes the
proprietor.

Presently they come to Hyde Park Corner. ‘What!’ exclaims Rip, ‘off the
stones already?’

‘You have never been on the stones,’ says a fellow-passenger; ‘no stones
in London now, sir.’

The old gentleman is engaged upon digesting this information and does
not perceive for some time that the coach is a swift one. When he
discovers that fact, and mentions it, he is met with the rejoinder, ‘We
never go fast over this stage.’

So they pass through Brentford. ‘Old Brentford still here?’ he exclaims;
‘a national disgrace!’ Then Hounslow, in five minutes under the hour.
‘Wonderful travelling, but much too fast to be safe. However, thank
Heaven, we are arrived at a good-looking house; and now, waiter, I hope
you have got breakf----’

Before the last syllable, however, of the word can be pronounced, the
worthy old gentleman’s head strikes the back of the coach with a jerk,
and the waiter, the inn, and indeed Hounslow itself, disappear in the
twinkling of an eye. ‘My dear sir,’ exclaims he, in surprise, ‘you told
me we were to change horses at Hounslow. Surely they are not so inhuman
as to drive those poor animals another stage at this unmerciful rate!’

[Sidenote: _THE GALLOPING GROUND_]

‘Change horses, sir!’ says the proprietor; ‘why, we changed them while
you were putting on your spectacles and looking at your watch. Only one
minute allowed for it at Hounslow, and it is often done in fifty seconds
by those nimble-fingered horse-keepers.’

Then the coach goes fast and faster on the way to Staines. ‘We always
spring ’em over these six miles,’ says the proprietor, in reply to the
old gentleman’s remark that he really does not like to go so fast. ‘Not
a pebble as big as a nutmeg on the road, and so even that the
equilibrium of a spirit-level could not be disturbed.’

‘Bless me!’ exclaims the old man, ‘what improvements; and the roads!!!’

‘They are at perfection, sir,’ says the proprietor. ‘No horse walks a
yard in this coach between London and Exeter--all trotting-ground now.’

‘A little _galloping_ ground, I fear,’ whispers the senior to himself.
‘But who has effected all this improvement in your paving?’

‘An American of the name of M’Adam,’ is the reply; ‘but coachmen call
him the Colossus of Roads.’

‘And pray, my good sir, what sort of horses may you have over the next
stage?’

‘Oh, sir, no more bo-kickers. It is hilly and severe ground and requires
cattle strong and staid. You’ll see four as fine horses put to the coach
at Staines as ever you saw in a nobleman’s carriage in your life.’

‘Then we shall have no more galloping--no more springing them as you
term it?’

‘Not quite so fast over the next stage,’ replies the proprietor; ‘but
he will make good play over some part of it; for example, when he gets
three parts down a hill he lets them loose, and cheats them out of half
the one they have to ascend from the bottom of it. In short, they are
half-way up it before a horse touches his collar; and we _must_ take
every advantage with such a fast coach as this, and one that loads so
well, or we should never keep our time. We are now to a minute; in fact,
the country people no longer look to the _sun_ when they want to set
their clocks--they look only to the _Comet_.’

Determined to see the changing of the team at the next stage, the old
gentleman remarks one of the new horses being led to the coach with a
twitch fastened tightly to his nose. ‘Holloa, Mr. Horsekeeper!’ he says,
‘you are going to put an unruly horse in.’--‘What! this here _’oss_,’
growls the man; ‘the quietest hanimal alive, sir.’ But the good faith of
this pronouncement is somewhat discounted by the coachman’s caution,
‘Mind what you are about, Bob; don’t let him touch the roller-bolt.’
Then, ‘Let ’em go, and take care of yourselves,’ his next remark, seems
a little alarming. More alarming still the next happening. The near
leader rears right on end, the thoroughbred near-wheeler draws himself
back to the extent of his pole-chain, and then, darting forward, gives a
sudden start to the coach which nearly dislocates the passengers’ necks.

We will not follow every heart-beat of our old friend on this exciting
pilgrimage. He quits the coach at Bagshot, congratulating himself on
being still safe and sound, and rings the bell for the waiter.

[Sidenote: _THE ‘REGULATOR’_]

[Illustration: THE ‘REGULATOR’ ON HARTFORD BRIDGE FLATS.]

A well-dressed person appears, whom he takes for the landlord. ‘Pray,
_sir_,’ says he, ‘have you any _slow_ coach down this road
to-day?’--‘Why, yes, sir,’ replies the waiter. ‘We shall have the
“Regulator” down in an hour.’

He has breakfast, and at the appointed time the ‘Regulator’ appears at
the door. It is a strong, well-built _drag_, painted chocolate colour,
bedaubed all over with gilt letters--a Bull’s Head on the doors, a
Saracen’s Head on the hind boot, and drawn by four strapping horses; but
it wants the neatness of the other. The waiter announces that the
‘Regulator’ is full inside and in front; ‘but,’ he says, ‘you’ll have
the _gammon-board_ all to yourself, and your luggage is in the hind
boot.’

‘Gammon-board! Pray, what’s that? Do you not mean the _basket_?’

‘Oh no, sir,’ says John, smiling, ‘no such a thing on the road now. It’s
the hind-dickey, as some call it.’

Before ascending to his place, our friend has cast his eye on the team
that is about to convey him to Hartford Bridge, the next stage. It
consists of four moderate-sized horses, full of power, and still fuller
of condition, but with a fair sprinkling of blood; in short, the eye of
a judge would have found something about them not very unlike galloping.
‘All right!’ cries the guard, taking his key-bugle in his hand; and they
proceed up the village at a steady pace, to the tune of ‘Scots wha hae
wi’ Wallace bled,’ and continue at that pace for the first five miles.
The old gentleman again congratulates himself, but prematurely, for
they are about to enter upon Hartford Bridge Flats, which have the
reputation at this time of being the best five miles for a coach in all
England. The coachman now ‘springs’ his team and they break into a
gallop which does those five miles in twenty-three minutes. Half-way
across the Flats they meet the returning coachman of the ‘Comet,’ who
has a full view of his quondam passenger--and this is what he saw. He
was seated with his back to the horses--his arms extended to each
extremity of the guard-irons--his teeth set grim as death--his eyes cast
down towards the ground, thinking the less he saw of his danger the
better. There was what was called a top-heavy load, perhaps a ton of
luggage on the roof, and the horses were of unequal stride; so that the
lurches of the ‘Regulator’ were awful.

Strange to say, the coach arrives safely at Hartford Bridge, but the
antiquated passenger has had enough of it, and exclaims that he will
_walk_ into Devonshire. However, he thinks perhaps he will post down,
and asks the waiter, ‘What do you charge per mile, posting?’

‘One and sixpence, sir.’--‘Bless me! just double! Let me see--two
hundred miles at two shillings per mile, postboys, turnpikes, etc., £20.
This will never do. Have you no coach that does not carry luggage on the
top?’--‘Oh yes, sir,’ replies the waiter; ‘we shall have one to-night
that is not allowed to carry a bandbox on the roof.’--‘That’s the one
for me; pray, what do you call it?’--‘The “Quicksilver” Mail, sir; one
of the best out of London.’--‘Guarded and

[Sidenote: _THE ‘QUICKSILVER’ MAIL_]

[Illustration: THE ‘QUICKSILVER’ MAIL:--‘STOP, COACHMAN, I HAVE LOST MY
HAT AND WIG.’]

lighted?’--‘Both, sir; blunderbuss and pistols in the sword-case; a lamp
each side the coach, and one under the footboard--see to pick up a pin
the darkest night of the year.--‘Very fast?’--‘Oh no, sir, _just keeps
time, and that’s all_.’--‘That’s the ‘coach for me, then,’ says our
hero.

Unfortunately, the ‘Devonport’ (commonly called the ‘Quicksilver’) mail
is half a mile faster in the hour than most in England, and is, indeed,
one of the miracles of the road. Let us then picture this unfortunate
passenger seated in this mail on a pitch-dark night in November. It is
true she has no luggage on the roof, nor much to incommode her
elsewhere; but she is a mile in the hour faster than the ‘Comet,’ at
least three miles quicker than the ‘Regulator.’ and she performs more
than half her journey by lamplight. It is needless to say, then, our
senior soon finds out his mistake; but there is no remedy at hand, for
it is dead of night, and all the inns are shut up. The climax of his
misfortunes then approaches. He sleeps, and awakes on a stage called the
fastest on the journey--it is four miles of ground, and twelve minutes
is the time. The old gentleman starts from his seat, dreaming the horses
are running away. Determined to see if it is so, although the passengers
assure him it is ‘all right,’ and assure him he will lose his hat if he
looks out of window, he _does_ look out. The next moment he raises his
voice in a stentorian shout: ‘Stop, coachman, stop. I have lost my hat
and wig!’ The coachman hears him not--and in another second the broad
wheels of a road waggon have for ever demolished the lost headgear. And
so we leave him, hatless, wigless, to his fate.




V


The late Thomas Adolphus Trollope, brother of the better-known Anthony,
was never tired of writing voluminously about old times, and what he has
to say about the coaches on the Exeter Road is the more interesting and
valuable as coming from one who lived and travelled in the times of
which he speaks.

The coaches for the South and West of England, he says, started from the
‘White Horse Cellars,’ Piccadilly, which was one of the fashionable
hotels of 1820, the time he treats of.

[Sidenote: _COACH CONSTRUCTION_]

The ‘White Bear,’ Piccadilly, he adds, was looked upon with contempt, as
being the place whence only the slow coaches started. The mails and
stages moved off to the accompaniment of news-vendors pushing the sale
of the expensive and heavily taxed newspapers of the period, and the
cries of the Jew-boys who sold oranges and cedar pencils on the pavement
at sixpence a dozen. Once clear of town, his enthusiasm over the travel
of other days finds scope, and he begins: ‘What an infinite succession
of teams! What an endless vista of ever-changing miles of country! What
a delicious sense of belonging to some select and specially important
and adventurous section of humanity as we clattered through the streets
of quiet little country towns at midnight, or even at three or four
o’clock in the morning; ourselves the only souls awake in all the place.
What speculations as to the immediate bestowal and occupation of the
coachman as he “left you here, sir,” in the small hours!’

Then he goes on to give a kind of gossipy history of the smart mails put
on the road about 1820.

‘A new and accelerated mail-coach service was started under the title of
the “Devonport Mail,” at that time the fastest in England. Its
performances caused a sensation in the coaching world, and it was known
in such circles as the “Quicksilver Mail.” Its early days had chanced,
unfortunately, to be marked by two or three accidents, which naturally
gave it an increased celebrity.

‘And if it is considered what those men and horses were required to
perform, the wonder was, not that the “Quicksilver” should have come to
grief two or three times, but rather that it ever made its journey
without doing so. What does the railway traveller of the present day,
who sees a travelling Post Office and its huge tender, crammed with
postal matter, think of the idea of carrying all that mass on one, or
perhaps two, coaches? The guard, occupying his solitary post behind the
coach on the top of the receptacle called, with reference to the
constructions of still earlier days, the _hinder_-boot, sat on a little
seat made for one, with his pistol and blunderbuss in a box in front of
him. And the original notion of those who first planned the modern mail
coach was that the bags containing the letters should be carried in the
_hinder_-boot. The fore-boot, beneath the driver’s box, was considered
to be appropriated to the baggage of the three outside and four inside
passengers, which was the _Mail’s_ entire complement. One of the
outsiders shared the box with the driver, and two occupied the seat on
the roof behind him, their backs to the horses, and facing the guard,
who had a seat all to himself. The accommodation provided for these two
was not of a very comfortable description. They were not, indeed,
crowded, as the four who occupied a similar position on another coach
often were; but they had a mere board to sit on, whereas the seats on
the roof of an ordinary stage coach were provided with cushions. The
fares by the mail were nearly always somewhat higher than those by even
equally fast, or, in some cases, faster, coaches; and it seems
unreasonable, therefore, that the accommodation should have been
inferior. I can only suppose that the patrons of the mail were
understood to be compensated for its material imperfections by the
superior dignity of their position. The _box_-seat, however, was well
cushioned.

[Sidenote: _THE COACHING AGE_]

‘But if the despatches, which it was the mail’s business to carry, could
once upon a time be contained in the hinder-boot, such soon ceased to be
the case. The bulk of postal matter which had to be carried was
constantly and rapidly increasing, and often as many as nine enormous
sacks, which were as long as the coach was broad, were heaped upon the
roof. The huge heap, three or four tiers high, was piled to a height
which prevented the guard, even when standing, from seeing or
communicating with the coachman. If to these considerations the reader
will add the consideration of the Devon and Somerset roads, over which
this top-heavy load had to be carried at twelve miles an hour, it will
not seem strange that accidents should have occurred. Not that the roads
were bad. They, thanks to M’Adam, were good, hard, and smooth, but the
hills were numerous and steep.

‘The whole of the service was well done and admirable, and the drivers
of such a coach were masters of their profession. Work hard, but
remuneration good. There were fewer passengers by the mail to “remember”
the coachman, but it was more uniformly full, and somewhat more was
expected from a traveller by the mail. It was a splendid thing to see
the beautiful teams going over their short stage at twelve miles an
hour. None but good cattle in first-rate condition could do the work. A
saying of old Mrs. Mountain, for many years the well-known proprietress
of one of the large coaching inns in London, used to be quoted as having
been addressed by her to one of her drivers: “You find whip-cord, John,
and I’ll find oats.” And, as it used to be said, the measure of the corn
supplied to a coach-horse was--his stomach!

‘It was a pretty sight to see the changing of the horses. There stood
the fresh team, two on the off side, two on the near side, and the coach
was drawn up with the utmost exactitude between them. Four ostlers jump
to the splinter-bars and loose the traces; the reins have already been
thrown down. The driver retains his seat, and, within the minute (more
than once, within fifty seconds by the watch) the coach is again on its
onward journey.

‘Then how welcome was breakfast at an excellent old-world country
inn--twenty minutes allowed. The hot tea, after your night’s drive, the
fresh cream, butter, eggs, hot toast, and cold beef, and then, with your
cigar alight, back to the box and off again.

‘I once witnessed on that road--not quite _that_ road, for the
“Quicksilver” took a somewhat different line--the stage of four miles
between Ilchester and Ilminster done in _twenty_ minutes, and a trace
broken and mended on the road. The mending was effected by the guard
almost before the coach stopped. It is a level bit of road, four miles
only for the entire stage, and was performed at a full gallop. That was
done by a coach called the “Telegraph,” started some years after the
“Quicksilver,” to do the distance between Exeter and London in one day.
We started at 5 A.M. from Exeter and reached London between 9 and 10
that night, with time for breakfast and dinner on the road. I think the
performance of the Exeter “Telegraph” was the _ne plus ultra_ of
coach-travelling. One man drove fifty miles, and then meeting the other
coach on the road, changed from one box to another and drove the fifty
miles back. It was tremendously hard work. “Not much work for the whip
arm?” I asked a coachman. “Not much, sir; but just put your hand on my
left arm.” The muscle was swollen to its utmost, and as hard as iron.
Many people who have not tried it think it easier work to drive such a
coach and such a team as this than to have to flog a dull team up to
eight miles an hour.’

[Sidenote: _AN OLD MAIL-GUARD_]

Thomas Adolphus Trollope’s reminiscences may be fitly supplemented by
those of Moses James Nobbs, who died in June 1897, at the age of eighty
years, and was one of the last of the mail-guards on the Exeter Road. To
say that he was actually _the_ last would be rash, for coachmen,
postboys, and guards were a long-lived race, and it would not be at all
surprising to learn that some ancient veterans still survive. Nobbs
entered the service of the Post Office in 1836, and was transferred from
the Bristol and Portsmouth to the London, Yeovil, and Exeter Mail in
1837.

Retiring at the close of 1891, he therefore saw fifty-five years’
service, and vividly recollected the time when the mails were conveyed
in bags secured on the roof of the coach. At Christmas-time the load was
always heavy; but although the correspondence of that season sometimes
severely strained the capacity of the vehicle, it is not recorded that
the mail had to be duplicated, as had to be done sometimes in after
years when railways had superseded coaches.

When the Great Western Railway was opened through to Exeter in 1844 and
the last mail coach on this route had been withdrawn, Nobbs was given
the superintendence of the receiving and despatching of the mails from
Paddington, and often spoke of the extraordinary growth of the Post
Office business during the railway era. At one Christmas-tide he
despatched from Paddington in a single day no less than twenty tons of
letters and parcels.

He had not been without his adventures. ‘We had a very sad accident,’ he
says, ‘with that mail on one occasion, between Whitchurch and Andover.
The coach used to start from Piccadilly, where all the passengers and
baggage were taken up. On this occasion the bags were brought up in a
cart, as usual, and we were off in a few seconds. My coachman had been
having a drinking bout with a friend that day, and when we had got a few
miles on the road, I discovered that he was the worse for drink and that
it was not safe for him to drive. So when we reached Hounslow I made him
get off the box-seat; and after securing the mail-bags and putting him
in my seat and strapping him in, I took the ribbons. At Whitchurch the
coachman unstrapped himself and exchanged places with me, but we had not
proceeded more than three miles when, the coach giving a jolt over a
heap of stones, he fell between the horses, and the wheels of the coach
ran over him, killing him on the spot. The horses, having no driver,
broke into a full gallop, so, as there was no front passenger, I climbed
over the roof, to gather up the reins, when I found that they had fallen
among the horses’ feet and were trodden to bits. Returning over the
roof, I missed my hold and fell into the road, but fortunately with no
worse accident than some bruises and a sprained ankle. The horses kept
on till they reached Andover, where they pulled up at the usual spot.
Strange to say, no damage was done to the coach, though there was a very
steep hill to go down. The “Old Exeter Mail,” which came behind our
coach, found the body of my coachman on the road, and, a mile farther,
picked me up.’




VI


[Sidenote: _THE SHORT STAGES_]

Suppose, instead of taking one of the fast mails to Exeter, and
journeying straight away, we book a seat in one of the ‘short stages’
which were the only popular means of being conveyed between London and
the suburbs in the days before railways, omnibuses, and tramways
existed. We will take the stage to Brentford, because that is on our
way.

What year shall we imagine it to be? Say 1837, because that date marks
the accession of Her Majesty and the opening of the great Victorian Era,
in which everything except human nature (which is still pretty much what
it used to be) has been turned inside out, altered, and ‘improved.’

If, in the year 1837, we wished to reach Brentford and could not afford
to hire a trap or carriage, practically the only way, other than walking
the seven miles, would have been to take the stage; and as these stages,
starting from the City or the Strand, were comparatively few, it was
always advisable to go down to the starting-places and secure a seat,
rather than to chance finding one vacant at Hyde Park Corner.

‘How we hate the Putney and Brentford stages that draw up in a line in
Piccadilly, after the mails are gone,’ says Hazlitt, writing of the
romance of the Mail Coach. Well, it may be that their five or ten mile
journeys afforded no hold for the imagination, compared with the dashing
‘Quicksilver’ and the lightning ‘Telegraph’ to Exeter; but what on
earth the Londoner of modest means who desired to travel to Putney or to
Brentford would in those pre-omnibus times have done without those
stages it is impossible to conceive. We, in these days, might just as
well find romance in the majesty of the beautiful Great Western Express
locomotives that speed between Paddington and Penzance, and then turn to
the omnibuses that run to Hammersmith, and say, ‘How we hate the
’buses!’

All these suburban stages started from public-houses. There were quite a
number which went to Brentford and on to Hounslow, and they set out from
such forgotten houses as the ‘New Inn,’ Old Bailey; the ‘Goose and
Gridiron,’ St. Paul’s Churchyard; the ‘Old Bell,’ Holborn; the
‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly; the ‘White Hart,’ ‘Red Lion,’ and
‘Spotted Dog,’ Strand; and the ‘Bolt-in-Tun,’ Fleet Street. It is to be
feared that those stages were not ‘Swiftsures,’ ‘Hirondelles,’ or
‘Lightnings.’ Nor, indeed, were ‘popular prices’ known in those days.
Concessions had been made in this direction, it is true, some seven
years before, when the man with the extraordinary name--Mr.
Shillibeer--introduced the first omnibus, which ran between the
‘Yorkshire Stingo,’ in the New Road, Marylebone, and the City; and the
very name ‘omnibus’ was originally intended as a kind of finger-post to
point out the intended popularity of the new conveyance, but as the fare
to the City was one shilling, it may readily be supposed that Bill
Mortarmixer, Tom Tenon, and the whole of

[Sidenote: _THE ‘GOOSE AND GRIDIRON’_]

[Illustration: THE WEST COUNTRY MAILS STARTING FROM THE GLOUCESTER
COFFEE HOUSE, PICCADILLY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).]

their artisan brethren, who did not in those times aspire to
one-and-twopence per hour, preferred to walk. For the same reason, they
were only the comparatively affluent who could afford the eighteenpenny
fare, or the two-hours journey, to Brentford by the ‘stage.’

Let us suppose ourselves to be of that fortunate company, and, paying
our one-and-sixpence, set out from the ‘Goose and Gridiron.’

That old-fashioned hostelry, which stood modestly back from the roadway
on the north side of St. Paul’s Churchyard, was, unhappily, demolished
in 1894, after a good deal more than two centuries’ record for good
cheer. It was originally the ‘Swan and Harp,’ but some irreverent wag,
probably as far back as the building of the house in Wren’s time, found
the other name for it, and the effigies of the goose and the gridiron
remained even to our own time.

This year of our imaginary journey affords a strange contrast with the
appearance the streets will possess some sixty years later. Ludgate
Hill, in 1837 an exceedingly narrow thoroughfare, paved with rough
granite setts, will in the last decade of the century present a very
different aspect. Instead of the dingy brick warehouses there will be
handsome premises of some architectural pretensions, and the Hill will
be considerably widened. The setts will have disappeared, to be replaced
by wood pavement, and the traffic will have increased tenfold; until, in
fact, it has become a continuous stream. There will be strange vehicles,
too, unknown in 1837,--omnibuses, hansom-cabs, and motor cars, and
where Ludgate Hill joins Fleet Street there will be a Circus and an
obstructive railway-bridge.

[Illustration: ‘AN OLD GENTLEMAN, A COBBETT-LIKE PERSON.’]

We proceed in leisurely fashion down Ludgate Hill, and halt for
passengers and parcels at the ‘Bolt-in-Tun,’ Fleet Street, which is now
a railway receiving office. Thence by slow degrees, calling at the ‘Red
Lion,’ ‘Spotted Dog,’ and the ‘White Hart,’ we eventually reach the
‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly, re-built many years ago, and now
the ‘Berkeley Hotel.’ Beyond this point, progress is fortunately
speedier, and we reach Hyde Park Corner in, comparatively speaking, the
twinkling of an eye. Hyde Park Corner in 1837, this year of the Queen’s
accession, has begun to feel the great changes that are presently to
alter London so marvellously. We have among our fellow-travellers by the
stage an old gentleman, a Cobbett-like person, who wears a rustic,
semi-farmer kind of appearance, and recollects many improvements here;
who can ‘mind the time, look you,’ when the turnpike-gate (which was
removed in 1825) stood at the corner; when St. George’s Hospital was a
private mansion, the residence of Lord Lanesborough; and when the road
leading past it to Pimlico was quite wild country, as in the picture on
page 43, where sportsmen shot snipe in those marshes that were in future
years

[Illustration: THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON’S STATUE.]

to become the site of Belgrave Square and other aristocratic quarters.

At this spot Mr. Decimus Burton had already built the great Triumphal
Arch forming the entrance to Constitution Hill, together with the
Classic Screen at Hyde Park Corner. The Screen was built in 1828, and
the Arch, which is a copy of the Arch of Titus at Rome, in 1832.
Already, in 1820, Apsley House had become the residence of the Iron
Duke, but it was not until 1846 that what Thackeray justly names ‘the
hideous equestrian monster’ was placed on the summit of that Arch,
opposite the Duke’s windows. Here is an illustration of it, before it
was hoisted up to that height. Beside it you see the Duke himself, in
his characteristic white trousers, in company with several weirdly
dressed persons. Again, over page, may be seen the Arch, with the statue
on it, and the neighbourhood vastly changed from the appearance it wears
in the picture of the ‘North-East Prospect of St. George’s Hospital.’
Instead of the great hooded waggons starting for the West Country, the
road is occupied with very crowded traffic, and among the vehicles may
be noticed two omnibuses, one going to Chelsea, the other (for this is
the year 1851) to the Exhibition,--the first exhibition that ever was.
If, ladies and gentlemen, you will be pleased to look at those
omnibuses, you will see that they have neither knifeboards nor seats on
the roof, and that passengers are squatting up there in the most
supremely uncomfortable, not to say dangerous, positions. Also, in those
dark ages of London locomotion, the ascent to that uncomfortable roof
was of itself perilous, for no

[Illustration: THE WELLINGTON ARCH AND HYDE PARK CORNER, 1851.]

[Illustration: ST. GEORGE’S HOSPITAL, AND THE ROAD TO PIMLICO, 1780.]

one had as yet dreamed of the staircase. Other curious points will be
noticed by the observant, and among them the fact that ’buses then had
doors. The present historian vividly recollects a door being part of the
equipment of every ’bus, and of the full-flavoured odour of what Mr. W.
S. Gilbert calls ‘damp straw and squalid hay’ which assailed the
nostrils of the ‘insides’ when that door was shut; but in what
particular year did the door vanish altogether? Alas! the straw, with
the door, is gone for evermore, and passengers no longer lose their
small change in it to the great gain of the conductor, who, by the way,
used to be called ‘the cad,’ even although he commonly wore a ‘top hat’
and a frock coat, as per the picture. The word ‘cad’ has since then
acquired a much more offensive meaning, and if you addressed a conductor
by that name nowadays, he would probably express a desire to punch your
head.

The hideous statue of the Duke and his charger ‘Copenhagen,’ which the
French said ‘avenged Waterloo,’ was removed to Aldershot in 1884, when
the alterations were made at Hyde Park Corner.




VII


And now we come to the first toll-gate, which, removed to this spot in
1825, opposite where the Alexandra Hotel now stands, stood here until
1854.

There were many troublesome survivals in 1837 which have long since been
swept away. Toll-gates,

[Sidenote: _THE PIKEMEN_]

[Illustration: KNIGHTSBRIDGE TOLL-GATE, 1854.]

for instance. The toll or turnpike gate of sixty, fifty, forty years ago
was a very real grievance, both on country roads and in London itself,
or in those districts which we now call London. Many people objected to
pay toll then, and a favourite amusement of the young bloods was
fighting the pikeman for his halfpenny, his penny, or his sixpence, as
the case might be. Sometimes the pikeman won, sometimes those gay young
sparks; and the pikeman always took those terrific encounters as part of
the day’s work, and never summoned those sportsmen for assault and
battery. In fact, they were such sporting times that, whether the
pikeman or the Corinthian youth won, the latter would probably chuck his
antagonist a substantial coin of the realm, whereupon the pikeman would
say that ‘his honour was a gemman,’ and exeunt severally to purchase
beef-steaks for the reduction of black eyes.

[Illustration: THE PIKEMAN.]

The present generation has, of course, never seen a pikeman. He wore a
tall black glazed hat and corduroy breaches, with white stockings. But
the most distinctive part of his costume was his white linen apron. No
one knows why he wore an apron; neither did he, and the reason of it
must now needs be lost in the mists of history, because the last
pikeman, whom otherwise we might have asked, is dead, and gone to Hades,
where he probably is still going through a series of shadowy encounters
beside the shores of the Styx with the ghosts of the Toms and Jerrys of
long ago, and offering to fight Charon for the price of his ferry across
the stream.

But here we are at rural Knightsbridge, in 1837 as quiet a spot as you
could find round London, with scattered cottages of the rustic,
rose-embowered kind. Knightsbridge Green _was_ a green in those days,
and not, as it is now, a squalid paved court. Then, and for many years
afterwards, the soldiers from the neighbouring barracks would walk with
the nursemaids in the country lanes, and take tea in the tea-gardens
which stood away behind the highroad and were a feature of Brompton.
Where are those tea-gardens now, and where the toll-gate that barred the
road by the barracks? Gone, my friends; swept away like the gossamer
threads of the spiders that spun webs in the arbours of those gardens
and dropped in the nursemaids’ tea and the soldiers’ beer. Those
soldiers and those nursemaids are gone too, else it would be a pleasing,
a curious, and an instructive thing to take them, tottering in their old
age, by the hand and say: ‘Here, my gallant warrior of eighty years or
so,’ and ‘Here, my pretty maiden of four-score, is Knightsbridge, the
self-same Knightsbridge you knew, but with some new, and somewhat
larger, buildings.’ They would be as strangers in a strange land, and,
dazed by the din of the thronging traffic amid the sky-scraping
buildings, beg to be taken

[Sidenote: _THE ‘NEW POLICE’_]

[Illustration: KNIGHTSBRIDGE BARRACKS TOLL-GATE.]

away. But to bring back the policeman of that era, if that were
possible, and set him to control this traffic, would be more instructive
still. When the last years of the coaching age along this road were
still running their course, ‘Robert,’ the ‘Peeler,’ or the ‘New Police,’
as he was variously named, had an easy time of it here. Not so his
successors, who have to deal with an almost continual block, all day
long and every day.

[Illustration: THE ‘NEW POLICE.’]

The ‘New Police’ were a novel body of men in the early years of the
reign, having been introduced in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel. Hence the
brilliant appropriateness of those nicknames. There still, however,
lingered in various parts of the Metropolis that ancient institution,
the Watchman, who patrolled the streets at night and announced the hours
in a curious sing-song voice with remarks upon the state of the weather
added. Those who sat up late were familiar with the chant: ‘Twelve
o’clock, and a stormy night!’ and found comfort in the companionship of
that voice.

The watchmen, although scarce anyone now living can have seen one of
those many-caped, tottering old fellows, seem strangely familiar to us.
That is because we have read so much about them in the exploits of Tom
and Jerry, the Corinthian youth of the glorious days of George the
Fourth, when the most popular forms of sport were knocker-wrenching,
bilking a pikeman, and thrashing a Charley. A ‘Charley’ was, of course,
a watchman. The thrashing of a ‘Charley’ was not an heroic pursuit, but
(or, rather, therefore) it was extremely popular. They were generally
old men, and not capable of very serious reprisals upon the gangs of
muscular youths who thumped, whacked, larrupped, and beat them
unmercifully, and overturned their watch-boxes on to them, so that those
poor old men were imprisoned until some Samaritan came by and released
them. No one ever attempted that sort of thing with the ‘New Police,’
who were not old and decrepit men, but tall, lusty, upstanding fellows.
Perhaps that was why the ‘New Police’ were so violently objected to,
although the ostensible grounds of objection were founded on the
supposition that the continental system of a semi-military _gendarmerie_
was intended. The authorities were therefore at great pains to keep the
police a strictly citizen force, and although a uniform was, of course,
necessary, one as nearly as possible like civilian dress was chosen. The
present uniform of the police, and the police themselves, if they had
then worn a helmet, would have been howled out of existence by the
violent Radicals and Chartists who troubled the early years of the
Queen’s reign. They did not, therefore, wear a helmet at all, but a tall
glazed hat of the chimney-pot kind. A swallow-tailed coat, tightly
buttoned up, with a belt round the waist, a stiff stock under the chin,
and trousers of white duck gave him, altogether, a very respectable and
citizen-like aspect. It has been left to later years to alter this
uniform.




VIII


[Sidenote: _KENSINGTON_]

But we must not forget that we are travelling to Brentford sixty-two
years ago. Let us, therefore, whip up the horses, and, passing the first
milestone at the corner of the lane which a future generation to that of
1837 is to know by the name of the Exhibition Road, hurry on to
Kensington.

[Illustration: TOMMY ATKINS, 1838.]

Kensington in this year of the accession of Her Majesty Queen Victoria
is having an unusual amount of attention paid to it. Every one is
bursting with loyalty towards the girl of eighteen suddenly called upon
to rule over the nation, and crowds throng the old-fashioned High Street
of Kensington at the end by Palace Green, eager to see Her Majesty drive
forth from Kensington Palace. They are kept at a respectful distance by
a sentry in a dress which succeeding generations will think absurd.
White trousers, coatee, stiff stock, rigid cross-belts, and a shako like
the upper part of the funnel of a penny steamer were whimsical things to
go a-soldiering in, but the Tommy Atkins of that time had no other or
easier kind of uniform, and it will be left for the Crimean War,
seventeen years later, to prove the folly of it.

The palace is well guarded, for the Government, for their part, have not
yet learned to trust the people; nor, indeed, are the people at this
time altogether to be trusted. The long era of the Georges did not breed
loyalty, and for William the Fourth, just dead, the people had an amused
contempt. They called him ‘Silly Billy.’ At this time, also, aristocracy
drew its skirts daintily from any possible contact with the lower herd.
Alas! poor lower herd, and still more, alas! for aristocracy.

[Illustration: OLD KENSINGTON CHURCH.]

[Sidenote: _REMINISCENCES_]

Our fellow-traveller in the Brentford stage has a friend with him, and,
as we jolt from Kensington Gore into the High Street, points out the
palace, and tells how William the Third and Queen Mary lived and died
there, amid William’s stolid Hollanders. He tells a story which he heard
from his grandfather, of how Dr. Radcliffe, called in to look at the
King’s dropsical ankles, said, when asked what he thought of them, ‘Why,
truly, I would not have your Majesty’s two legs for your three
kingdoms.’ He tells the friend that the King procured a more courtly and
less blunt medical adviser; and we can well believe it. More stories
beguile the way: how Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark ended here
in the fulness of time; how their successor, George the First, furious
with Sir Robert Walpole, with his queen, with the servants, and anything
and everything, used to tear off his wig and jump on it, in transports
of rage. How he would gaze up at the vane on the clock-tower entrance to
the palace (which we can just glimpse as we pass), anxious for favouring
winds to waft his ships to England with despatches from his beloved
Hanover, and how he died suddenly at breakfast one morning after being
disappointed in those breezes.

These are hearsay stories. Our friend, however, has reminiscences of his
own, and can recollect the Princess Caroline, the eccentric wife of the
Prince Regent, living at the palace between the years 1810 and 1814--‘a
red-faced huzzy, sir, with yellow towzled hair, all spangles and scarlet
cloak, like a play-actress, making Haroun-al-Raschid visits among the
people, and bothering the house-agents in the neighbourhood for houses
to let.’ The old gentleman who says this is a Radical, and, like all of
that political creed, likes to see Royalty ‘behaving as sich, and not
like common people such as you an’ me.’ Whereupon another passenger in
the stage, on whom the speaker’s eye has fallen, audibly objects to
being called, or thought, or included among common persons; so that
relations among the ‘insides’ are strained, and so continue, past
Kensington Church, a very decrepit and nondescript kind of building;
past the Charity School, the Vestry Hall, where a gorgeous beadle in
plush breeches, white stockings, scarlet cloak trimmed with gold
bullion, a wonderful hat, and a wand of office, is standing, and so into
the country. Presently we come to the village of Hammersmith, innocent
as yet of whelk-stalls and fried-fish shops, and so at last, past
Turnham Green, to Brentford.

[Illustration: THE BEADLE.]




IX


Brentford was dismissed somewhat summarily in the pages of the BATH
ROAD, for which let me here apologise to the county town of Middlesex.
Not that I will renounce one jot as to the dirtiness of the place; for
what says Gay?--

    Brentford, tedious town,
    For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.

[Illustration: BRENTFORD.]

[Sidenote: ‘_BRENTFORD, TEDIOUS TOWN_’]

Now, if Brentford is certainly not tedious nowadays, it is
unquestionably as dirty as ever. If you would know the true, poignant,
inner meaning of tediousness, you must make acquaintance, say, with
Gower Street on a winter’s day; a typical street of suburban villas,
each ‘villa’ as like its neighbour as one new sixpence is to another; or
the Cromwell Road at any time or under any conditions. Then you will
have known tedium. At Brentford, however, all is life, movement, dirt,
and balmy odours from a quarter of a mile of roadside gasworks. The
bargees and lightermen of this riverside town are swearing picturesquely
at one another all day, while the gasmen, the hands at the waterworks,
and the railwaymen join in occasionally. Sometimes the profanity so
cheerfully bandied about leads to a fight, but not often, because when a
bargee addresses his dearest friend by a string of epithets that might
make a typical old-time stage-manager blush, it is all taken as a token
of friendship. These are the shibboleths of the place.

When, however, Gay alludes to the ‘white-legged chickens,’ for which, he
says, Brentford was known, we are at a loss to identify the breed. That
kind of chicken must long since have given up the attempt to be
white-legged, and have changed, by process of evolution, into some less
easily soiled variety. For the dirt of Brentford is always there. It
only varies in kind. In times of drought it makes itself obvious in
clouds of black dust, composed of powdered coals and clinkers; and when
a day of rain has laid this plague, it is forthwith re-incarnated in the
shape of seas of oily black mud. The poet Thomson might have written
yesterday--

    E’en so, through Brentford town, a town of mud;

while Dr. Johnson adds his weighty testimony, for when a contemporary, a
native of Glasgow, was praising Glasgow to him, the Doctor cut his
eloquence with the query: ‘Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?’
Here was sarcasm indeed! Happily, however, the Glaswegian had _not_ seen
Brentford, and so was not in a position to appreciate the retort. But
Boswell, who, ubiquitous man, was of course present, knew, and told the
Doctor this was shocking. ‘Why, then, sir,’ rejoined Johnson, ‘_you_
have never seen Brentford!’

Then, when we have all this delightful testimony as to Brentford’s dirt,
comes Shenstone, the melancholy poet who ‘found his warmest welcome at
an inn,’ to testify as to the character of its inhabitants. ‘No
persons,’ says he, ‘more solicitous about the preservation of rank than
those who have no rank at all. Observe the humours of a country
christening; and you will find no court in Christendom so ceremonious as
“the quality” of Brentford.’

[Sidenote: _ODD STREET-NAMES_]

Despite these criticisms, it must be acknowledged that Brentford is a
town of high interest. Its filthy gasworks, its waterworks, its docks
have not sufficed to sweep away the old-fashioned appearance of the
place. It may, in fact, be safely said that no other such truly
picturesque town as Brentford exists near London. This will not long
remain true of it, for, even now, new buildings are here and there
taking the place of the old. For one thing, Brentford has a quite
remarkable number of old inns, and the great stableyards and courtyards
of other old coaching hostelries which themselves have disappeared. This
was, in fact, the end of the first stage out of London in the coaching
era, and the beginning of the last stage in; and in consequence, as
befitted a town on the great highway to the West, had ample
accommodation, both for man and beast. One of these old yards,
indeed,--Red Lion Inn Yard--is historic, for it is traditionally the
spot where Edmund Ironside, the king, was murdered by the Danes in 1016,
after he had defeated them here. The most famous, however, of all the
Brentford inns, the _Three Pigeons_, was brutally demolished many years
ago, although it had associations with Shakespeare and ‘rare’ Ben
Jonson. The ‘Tumbledown Dick,’ another vanished hostelry, whose sign was
a satire on the nerveless rule and swift overthrow of the Protector’s
son, Richard Cromwell, was a well-known house; while the names of some
of the old yards--Green Dragon Yard and Catherine Wheel Yard--are
reminiscent of once-popular signs.

Then Brentford has the queerest of street names. What think you of ‘Half
Acre’ for the style and title of a thoroughfare? or ‘Town Meadow,’ which
is less a meadow than a slum? Then there are ‘The Butts,’ with some
fine, dignified Queen Anne and Georgian red-brick houses, situated in a
quiet spot behind the High Street; and ‘The Hollows,’ a thoroughfare
hollow no longer, if ever it was.

Fronting on to the High Street is the broad and massive old stone tower
of St. Lawrence’s Church, the parish church of the so-called ‘New’
Brentford, itself old beyond compute. The tower dates back four hundred
years or so, but the body of the church was rebuilt in Georgian days and
is very like, and only a little less hideous than, the gasworks up the
street.

[Sidenote: _SION_]

An extraordinary story is told by Cyrus Redding, in his _Fifty Years’
Recollections_, of a countryman’s adventures in London just before the
introduction of railways. The adventures began at Brentford: ‘I had a
relative,’ he says, ‘who, on stating his intention to come up to town,
was solicited to accept as his fellow-traveller a man of property, a
neighbour, who had never been thirty miles from home in his life. They
travelled by coach. All went well till they reached Brentford, where the
countryman supposed he was nearly come to his journey’s end. On seeing
the lamps mile after mile, he expressed more and more impatience,
exclaiming, “Are we not yet in London, and so many miles of lamps?” At
length, on reaching Hyde Park Corner, he was told they had arrived. His
impatience increased from thence to Lad Lane. He became overwhelmed with
astonishment, They entered the “Swan with Two Necks,” and my relative
bade his companion remain in the coffee-room until he returned. On
returning, he found the bird flown, and for six long weeks there were no
tidings of him. At length it was discovered that he was in the custody
of the constables at Sherborne in Dorsetshire, his mind alienated. He
was conveyed home, came partially to his reason for a short time, and
died. It was gathered from him that he had become more and more confused
at the lights and the long distances he was carried among them; it
seemed as if they could have no end. The idea that he could never be
extricated from such a labyrinth superseded every other. He could not
bear the thought. He went into the street, inquired his way westward,
and seemed to have got into Hyde Park, and then out again into the Great
Western Road, walking until he could walk no longer. He could relate
nothing more that occurred until he was secured. Neither his watch nor
money had been taken from him.’

The country-folks who now journey up to town do not behave in this
extraordinary fashion on coming to the infinitely greater and more
distracting London of to-day.

At the western end of Brentford, just removed from its muddy streets, is
Sion, the Duke of Northumberland’s suburban residence. The great square
embattled stone house stands in the midst of the park, screened from
observation from the road by great clusters of forest trees. Through the
ornamental classic stone screen and iron gateway, erected in the
well-known ‘Adam style’ by John Adam about 1780, the green sward may be
glimpsed; the fresher and more beautiful by contrast with the dusty
highroad. Above the arched stone entrance stands the Percy Lion,
_statant_, as heralds would say, with tail extended.

Sion is well named, for no fairer scene can be imagined than this in the
long days of summer, when the lovely gardens are at their best and the
Thames flows by the park with glittering golden ripples. The Daughters
of Sion, whose religious retreat this was, belonged to the Order of St.
Bridget. Their abbey, with its lands and great revenues, was suppressed
and confiscated by Henry the Eighth in 1532. Nine years later his Queen,
Katherine Howard, was imprisoned within the desecrated walls before
being handed over to the headsman, and in another seven years the body
of the King himself lay here a night on its journey to Windsor. There is
a horrid story that tells how the unwieldy corpse of the bloated royal
monster burst, and how the dogs drank his blood.

In the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary, Sion enjoyed a few years’
restitution of its rights and property, but when Elizabeth ascended the
throne, the ‘Daughters’ were finally dispossessed. They wandered to
Flanders, and thence, by devious ways, and with many hardships,
eventually to Lisbon. The Abbey of Sion yet exists there, and the
sisters are still solely Englishwomen. It is on record that they still
cherish the hope of returning to their lost home by the banks of the
Thames, and have to this day the keys of that abbey. Seventy years or so
since, the then Duke of Northumberland, travelling in Portugal, called
upon them, and was told of this fond belief. They even showed him the
keys. But he was equal to the occasion, and cynically remarked that the
locks had been altered since those days!




X


[Sidenote: _HOUNSLOW_]

[Illustration: THE ‘BELL,’ HOUNSLOW.]

Hounslow, to which we now come, being situated, like all the other
places between this and Hyde Park Corner, on the Bath Road, as well as
on the road to Exeter, has been referred to at some length in the book
on that highway. Coming to the place again, there seems no reason to
alter or add much to what was said in those pages. The long, long
uninteresting street is just as sordid as ever, and the very few houses
of any note facing it are fewer. There remains, it is true, that old
coaching inn, the ‘George,’ modernised with discretion, and at the
parting of the ways the gallows-like sign of the ‘Bell’ still keeps its
place on the footpath, with the old original bell still depending from
it, although, at the moment of writing, the house itself is being pulled
down. But the angle where the roads divide is under revision, and the
hoardings that now hide from sight the old shops and the red-brick
house, with high-pitched roof and dormer windows, that has stood here so
long, will give place shortly to some modern building with plate-glass
shop-fronts and a general air of aggressive modernity which will be
another link gone with the Hounslow of the past. Thus it is that an
illustration is shown here of the ‘parting of the ways’ before the
transformation is complete; for although the fork of the roads leading
to places so distant from this point, and from one another, as Bath and
Exeter must needs always lend something to the imagination, yet a
commonplace modern street building cannot, for another hundred years,
command respect or be worth sketching, even for the sake of the
significant spot on which it stands.

The would-be decorative gas-lamp that stands here in the centre of the
road bears two tin tablets inscribed respectively, ‘To Slough’ and ‘To
Staines,’ in a somewhat parochial fashion. They had no souls, those
people who inscribed these legends. Did they not know that we stand here
upon highways famed in song and story; not merely the flat and
uninteresting seven and ten miles respectively to Staines and Slough,
but the hundred and fifty-five miles to Exeter and the ninety-five miles
to Bath?

Here, then, we see the Bath Road going off to the

[Sidenote: _AN OLD COACHMAN_]

[Illustration: HOUNSLOW: THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.]

right and the Exeter Road to the left in semi-suburban fashion. Had it
not been for the winter fogs this level stretch would have invariably
been the delight of the old coachmen; but when the roads were wrapped in
obscurity they were hard put to it to keep on the highway. Sometimes
they did not even succeed in doing so, but drove instead into the
noisome ditches, filled with evil-smelling black mud, which at that time
divided the road from Hounslow Heath.

Charles Ward, whom the coaching critics of his age united to honour as
an artist with ‘the ribbons,’ drove the famous Exeter ‘Telegraph’ the
thirty miles to Bagshot, reaching that village usually at 11 P.M., and
taking the up coach from thence to London at four o’clock in the
morning. He tells how in the winter the mails had often to be escorted
out of London with flaring torches, seven or eight mails following one
another, the guard of the foremost lighting the one following, and so
on, travelling at a slow pace, like a funeral procession. ‘Many times,’
he says, ‘I have been three hours going from London to Hounslow. I
remember one very foggy night, instead of arriving at Bagshot at eleven
o’clock, I did not get there till one in the morning. On my way back to
town, when the fog was very bad, I was coming over Hounslow Heath, when
I reached the spot where the old powder-mills used to stand. I saw
several lights in the road and heard voices which induced me to stop.
The old Exeter mail, which left Bagshot thirty minutes before I did, had
met with a singular accident. It was driven by a man named Gambier; his
leaders had come in contact with a hay-cart on its way to London, which
caused them to suddenly turn round, break the pole, and blunder down a
steep embankment, at the bottom of which was a narrow deep ditch, filled
with water and mud. The mail coach pitched on the stump of a willow tree
that overhung the ditch; the coachman and the outside passengers were
thrown over into the meadow beyond, and the horses went into the ditch.
The unfortunate wheelers were drowned or smothered in the mud. There
were two inside passengers, who were extricated with some difficulty,
but fortunately no one was injured. I managed to take the passengers
with the guard and mail bags on to London, leaving the coachman to wait
for daylight before he could make an attempt to get the mail up the
embankment. They endeavoured to accomplish this with cart horses and
chains, and they had nearly reached the top of the bank when something
gave way, and the poor old mail went back into the ditch again. I shall
never forget the scene. There were about a dozen men from the
powder-mills trying to render assistance, and with their black faces,
each bearing a torch in his hand, they presented a curious spectacle.
This happened about 1840. Posts and rails were erected at the spot after
the accident. I passed the place in 1870, and they were there still, as
well as the old pollard willow stump.’

[Sidenote: _HIGHWAYMEN_]

The old-time associations of Hounslow Heath are almost forgotten now,
for, where Claude du Vall and Dick Turpin waited patiently for
travellers, there are nowadays long rows of suburban villas which have
long since changed the dreary scene. Nothing so romantic as the meeting
of the lawyer with the redoubtable Dick is likely to befall the
traveller in these times:--

    As Turpin was riding on Hounslow Heath,
    A lawyer there he chanced for to meet,
    Who said, ‘Kind sir, ain’t you afraid
    Of Turpin, that mischievous blade?’

    ‘Oh! no, sir,’ says Turpin, ‘I’ve been more acute,
    I’ve hidden my money all in my boot.’
    ‘And mine,’ says the lawyer, ‘the villain can’t find,
    For I have sewed it into my cape behind.’

    They rode till they came to the Powder Mill,
    When Turpin bid the lawyer for to stand still.
    ‘Good sir,’ quoth he, ‘that cape must come off,
    For my horse stands in need of a saddle-cloth.’

    ‘Ah, well,’ says the lawyer, ‘I’m very compliant,
    I’ll put it all right with my next coming client.’
    ‘Then,’ says Turpin, ‘we’re both of a trade, never doubt it,
    Only you rob by law, and I rob without it.’

The last vestige is gone of the bleak and barren aspect of the road, and
even the singular memorial of a murder, which, according to the writer
of a road-book published in 1802, stood near by, has vanished: ‘Upon a
spot of Hounslow Heath, about a stone’s throw from the road, on leaving
that village, a small wood monument is shockingly marked with a bloody
hand and knife, and the following inscription: “Buried with a stake
through his body here, the wicked murderer, John Pretor, who cut the
throat of his wife and child, and poisoned himself, July 6, 1765.”’




XI


It is a splendidly surfaced road that runs hence to Staines, and the
fact is sufficiently well known for it to be crowded on Saturday
afternoons and Sundays with cyclists of the ‘scorcher’ variety, members
of cycling clubs out for a holiday, and taking their pleasure at sixteen
miles an hour, Indian file, hanging on to one another’s back wheel, with
shoulders humped over handle-bars and eyes for nothing but the road
surface.

[Illustration: THE ‘GREEN MAN,’ HATTON.]

[Sidenote: _HATTON_]

But there are quiet, deserted bye-lanes where these highway crowds never
come. Just such a lane is that which leads off here, by the river Crane
and the Bedfont Powder Mills, to the right, and makes for
Hatton--‘Hatton-in-the-Hinterland,’ one might well call it.

Have you ever been to Hatton? Have you, indeed, ever even heard of it? I
suppose not, for Hatton is a remote hamlet, tucked away in that
triangular corner of Middlesex situated between the branching Bath and
Exeter Roads which is practically unexplored. Yet the place, after the
uninteresting, unrelieved flatness of the market gardens that stretch
for miles around, is almost pretty. It boasts a few isolated houses, and
has (what is more to the point in this connection) a neat and
cheerful-looking old inn, fronted by a large horse-pond.

The ‘Green Man’ at Hatton looks nowadays a guileless place, with no
secrets, and yet it possesses behind that innocent exterior a veritable
highwayman’s hiding-place. This retiring-place of modest worth, eager to
escape from the embarrassing attentions of the outer world, may be seen
by the curious traveller in the little bar-parlour on the left hand as
you enter the front door.

It is a narrow, low-ceiled room, with an old-fashioned fire-grate in it,
filling what was once a huge chimney-corner. At the back of this grate
is a hole leading to a passage which gives access to a cavernous nook in
the thickness of the wall. Through this hole, decently covered at most
times with an innocent-looking fire-back, crawled those exquisite
knights of the road, what time the Bow Street runners were questing
almost at their heels.

And here, it is related, one of these fine fellows nearly revealed his
presence while the officers of the law were refreshing themselves with
a dram in that room. What with a cold in the head, and the accumulated
soot and dust of his hiding-place, he could not help sneezing, although
his very life depended on the question ‘To sneeze or not to sneeze.’

[Illustration: THE HIGHWAYMAN’S RETREAT, THE ‘GREEN MAN.’]

The minions of the law were not so far gone in liquor but that they
heard the muffled sound of that sneeze, and it took all the landlord’s
eloquence to persuade them that it was the cat!

[Sidenote: _MARKET GARDENS_]

Where footpads and highwaymen lurked on the scrubby heath, and the
troopers of King James the Second, sent here to overawe London, lay
encamped, there stretch nowadays the broad market gardens, where in
spring-time the yellow daffodils, and in early summer the wallflowers,
are grown by the acre for Covent Garden and the delight of Londoners.
Orchards and vast fields of vegetables take up almost all the rest of
the reclaimed waste, and if the country for many miles be indeed as flat
as, or flatter than, your hand, and with never a tree but the scraggy
hedgerow elms that grow here in such fantastic shapes, why amends are
made in the scent of the blossoms, the bounteous promise of nature, and
in the free and open air that resounds with the gladsome shrilling of
the lark.

These market gardens that surround London have an interest all their
own. Such scenes as that of Millet’s ‘Angelus’--the rough toil, that is
to say, without the devotion--are the commonplaces of these wide fields,
stretching away, level, to the horizon. All day long the men, women, and
children are working, according to the season, in the damp, heavy clay,
or in the sun-baked rows of growing produce, digging, hoeing, sowing,
weeding, or gathering the cabbages, potatoes, peas, lettuces, and beans
that go to furnish the myriad tables of the ‘Wen of wens,’ as Cobbett
savagely calls London. He thought very little of Hounslow Heath, which
he describes as ‘a sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in
look. Yet,’ he says, writing in 1825, ‘all this is now enclosed, and
what they call “cultivated.”’

What they _call_ cultivated! That is indeed excellent. It would be well
if Cobbett could take a ‘Rural Ride’ over the Heath to-day and see this
cultivation, not merely so called, which raises some of the finest
market-garden produce ever seen, and supplies London with the most
beautiful spring blossoms. If it would not suffice to see the growing
crops, it would perhaps be better to watch the loading of the clumsy
market waggons with the gathered wealth of the soil. Tier upon tier of
cabbages, neatly packed to an alarming height; bundles of the finest
lettuces; bushels of peas; in short, a bounteous quantity of every
domestic vegetable you care to name, being packed for the lumbering,
rumbling, three-miles-an-hour journey overnight from the market gardens
to the early morning babel of Covent Garden.

The market waggons, going to London, or returning about eight o’clock in
the morning, form, in short, one of the most characteristic features of
the first fifteen miles of this road. The waggoners, more often than not
asleep, are jogged up to town by the philosophic horses who know the way
just as well as the blinking fellows who are supposed to drive them.
Drive them? One can just imagine the horse-laughs of those particularly
knowing animals, who move along quite independently of the reclining
figure above, stretched full length, face downwards, on the mountainous
pile of smelly cabbages, if the idea could be conveyed to them.

[Sidenote: _A REFORMATORY_]

There is an exquisite touch of appropriateness in the fact that on
converted Hounslow Heath, where these terrors of the peaceful traveller
formerly practised their unlicensed trade, reformatories should be
nowadays established. One of them, called by the prettier name of the
‘Feltham Industrial School,’ is placed just to the south of the road,
near East Bedfont. It houses and educates for honest careers the young
criminals and the waifs and strays brought before the Middlesex
magistrates. The neighbourhood of this huge institution is made evident
to the traveller across these wide-spreading levels by the strange sight
of a full-sized, fully-rigged ship on the horizon. The stranger who
journeys this way and has always supposed Hounslow Heath to be anything
rather than the neighbour to a seaport, feels in some doubt as to the
evidence of his senses or the accuracy of his geographical
recollections. Strange, he thinks, that he should have forgotten the sea
estuary on which the Heath borders, or the ship canal that traverses
these wilds. But if he inquires of any one with local knowledge whom he
may meet, he will learn that this is the model training-ship built in
the grounds of the Industrial School. The ‘Endeavour,’ as she is called,
if not registered A1 at Lloyd’s, or not at all a seaworthy craft, is at
any rate well found in the technical details of masts and spars, and the
rigging appropriate to a schooner-rigged Blackwall liner. Those among
the seven hundred or so of the young vagabonds who are being educated
here in the way they should go--those among them who think they would
like a life on the bounding main, are here taught to climb the rigging
with the agility of cats; to furl the sails or shake them free, or to
keep a sharp look-out for the iron reefs that lurk on the inhospitable
coasts of Hounslow Heath, lest all on board should be cast away and
utterly undone. It is an odd experience to walk around the great hull,
half submerged--half buried, that is to say--in the asphalt paths of the
parade ground, but the oddest experiences must be those of the boys who,
when they get aboard a floating ship, come to it thoroughly trained in
everything save ‘sea-legs’ and the keeping of an easy stomach when the
breezes blow and the surges rock the vessel.




XII


The village of East Bedfont, three miles from Hounslow, is a picturesque
surprise, after the long flat road. The highway suddenly broadens out
here, and gives place to a wide village green, with a pond, and real
ducks! and an even more real village church whose wooden extinguisher
spire peeps out from a surrounding cluster of trees, and from behind a
couple of fantastically clipped yews guarding the churchyard gate.

[Sidenote: _THE BEDFONT PEACOCKS_]

The ‘Bedfont Peacocks,’ as they are called, are not so perfect as they
were when first cut in 1704, for the trimming of them was long
neglected, and these curiously clipped evergreens require constant
attention. The date on one side, and the churchwardens’ initials of the
period on the other, once standing out boldly, are now only to be
discerned by the Eye of Faith. The story of the Peacocks is that they
were cut at the costs and charges of a former inhabitant of the
village, who, proposing in turn to two sisters also living here, was
scornfully refused by them. They were, says the legend, ‘as proud as
peacocks,’ and the mortified suitor chose this spiteful method of
typifying the fact. Of course, the story was retailed to travellers on
passing through Bedfont by every coachman and guard; nor, indeed, would
it be at all surprising to learn that they, in fact, really invented it,
for they were masters in the art of romancing. So the Fame of the
Peacocks grew. An old writer at once celebrates them, and the then
landlord of the ‘Black Dog,’ in the rather neat verse:--

    Harvey, whose inn commands a view
    Of Bedfont’s church and churchyard too,
    Where yew-trees into peacock’s shorn,
    In vegetable torture mourn.

[Illustration: EAST BEDFONT.]

At length they were immortalised by Hood, the elder, in a quite serious
poem:--

    Where erst two haughty maidens used to be,
      In pride of plume, where plumy Death hath trod,
    Trailing their gorgeous velvet wantonly,
      Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod;
    There, gentle stranger, thou may’st only see
      Two sombre peacocks. Age, with sapient nod,
    Marking the spot, still tarries to declare
      How once they lived, and wherefore they are there.

    Alas! that breathing vanity should go
      Where pride is buried; like its very ghost,
    Unrisen from the naked bones below,
      In novel flesh, clad in the silent boast
    Of gaudy silk that flutters to and fro,
      Shedding its chilling superstition most
    On young and ignorant natures as is wont
      To haunt the peaceful churchyard of Bedfont!

If any one can unravel the sense from the tangled lines of the second
verse,--as obscure as some of Browning’s poetry--let him account himself
clever.

The ‘Black Dog,’ once the halting-place of the long extinct ‘Driving
Club,’ of which the late Duke of Beaufort was a member, has recently
been demolished. A large villa stands on the site of it, at the corner
of the Green, as the village is left behind.

[Sidenote: _STAINES_]

The flattest of flat, and among the straightest of straight, roads is
this which runs from East Bedfont into Staines. That loyal bard, John
Taylor, the ‘Water Poet,’ was along this route on his way to the Isle of
Wight in 1647. He started from the ‘Rose,’ in Holborn, on Thursday,
19th October, in the Southampton coach:--

    We took one coach, two coachmen, and four horses,
    And merrily from London made our courses,
    We wheel’d the top of the heavy hill call’d Holborn
    (Up which hath been full many a sinful soul borne),
    And so along we jolted to St. Giles’s,
    Which place from Brentford six, or nearly seven, miles is,
    To Staines that night at five o’clock we coasted,
    Where, at the Bush, we had bak’d, boil’d, and roasted.




XIII


Staines, where the road leaves Middlesex and crosses the Thames into
Surrey, is almost as commonplace a little town as it is possible to find
within the home counties. Late Georgian and Early Victorian stuccoed
villas and square, box-like, quite uninteresting houses struggle for
numerical superiority over later buildings in the long High Street, and
the contest is not an exciting one. Staines, sixteen miles from London,
is, in fact, of that nondescript--‘neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good
red-herring’--character that belongs to places situated in the marches
of town and country. Almost everything of interest has vanished, and
although the railway has come to Staines, it has not brought with it the
life and bustle that are generally conferred by railways on places near
London. But, of course, Staines is on the London and South-Western
Railway, which explains everything.

Staines disputes with Colnbrook, on the Bath Road, the honour of having
been the Roman station of _Ad Pontes_, and has the best of it, according
to the views of the foremost authorities. ‘At the Bridges’ would
doubtless have been an excellently descriptive name for either place, in
view of the number of streams at both, and the bridges necessary to
cross them; but the very name of Staines should of itself be almost
sufficient to prove the Roman origin of the place, even if the Roman
remains found in and about it were not considered conclusive evidence.
There are those who derive ‘Staines’ from the ancient stone still
standing on the north bank of the Thames, above the bridge, marking the
historic boundary up-stream of the jurisdiction exercised over the river
by the City of London; but there can be no doubt of its real origin in
the paved Roman highway, a branch of the Akeman Street, on which this
former military station of _Ad Pontes_ stood. The stones of the old road
yet remained when the Saxons overran the country, and it was named ‘the
Stones’ by that people, from the fact of being on a paved highway. The
very many places in this county with the prefixes, Stain, Stone, Stan,
Street, Streat, and Stret, all, or nearly all, originate in the paved
Roman roads (or ‘streets’) and fords; and there is little to support
another theory, that the name of Staines came from a Roman _milliarium_,
or milestone, which may or may not have stood somewhere here on the
road.

[Sidenote: _STAINES STONE_]

The stone column, very like a Roman altar, standing on three steps and a
square panelled plinth, and placed in a meadow on the north bank of the
river, is known variously as ‘Staines Stone,’ and ‘London Stone.’ It
marks the place where the upper and lower Thames meet; is the boundary
line of Middlesex and Buckinghamshire; and is also the boundary mark of
the Metropolitan Police District. Besides these manifold and important
offices, it also delimits the western boundary of the area comprised
within the old London Coal and Wine Duties Acts, by which a tax, similar
to the _octroi_ still in force at the outskirts of many Continental
towns, was levied on all coals, coke, and cinders, and all wines,
entering London. Renewed from time to time, the imposts were finally
abolished in 1889, but the old posts with cast-iron inscriptions
detailing the number and date of the several Acts of Parliament under
which these dues were levied, are still to be found beside the roads,
rivers, and canals around London.

Much weather-worn and dilapidated, ‘London Stone’ still retains long
inscriptions giving the names of the Lord Mayors who have officially
visited the spot as _ex-officio_ chairmen of the Thames Conservancy;--

    Conservators of Thames from mead to mead,
    Great guardians of small sprites that swim the flood,
    Warders of London Stone,

as Tom Hood mock-heroically sings.

Above all is the deeply cut aspiration, ‘God Preserve the City of
London, A.D. 1280.’ The pious prayer has been answered, and six hundred
and twenty years later the City has been, like David, delivered out of
the hands of the spoiler and from the enemies that compassed it round
about; by which Royal Commissions and the London County Council may be
understood.

[Illustration: THE STAINES STONE.]

[Sidenote: _AD PONTES_]

If the Roman legionaries could return to _Ad Pontes_ and see Staines
Bridge and the hideous iron girder bridge by which the London and
South-Western Railway crosses the Thames they would be genuinely
astonished. The first-named, which is the stone bridge built by Rennie
in 1832, carries the Exeter Road over the river, and is of a severe
classic aspect which might find favour with the resurrected Romans; but
what _could_ they think of the other?

We may see an additional importance in this situation of _Ad Pontes_ in
the fact that between Staines Bridge and London Bridge there was
anciently no other passage across the river, save by the hazardous
expedient of fording it at certain points. The only way to the West of
England in mediæval times, it was then of wood, and zealously kept in
repair by the grant of trees from the Royal Forest of Windsor and by the
_pontage_, or bridge toll levied from passengers. Still, it was often
broken down by floods. The poet Gay, in his _Journey to Exeter_, says,
passing Hounslow:--

    Thence, o’er wide shrubby heaths, and furrowed lanes,
    We come, where Thames divides the meads of Staines.
    We ferried o’er; for late the Winter’s flood
    Shook her frail bridge, and tore her piles of wood.

That would probably have been about the year 1720. In 1791 an Act of
Parliament authorised the building of a new bridge, and accordingly a
stone structure was begun, and eventually opened in 1797. This had to be
demolished, almost immediately, owing to a failure of one of its piers,
and an iron bridge was built in its stead, presently to meet with much
the same fate. This, then, gave place to the existing bridge.

The ‘Vine Inn,’ which once stood by the bridge and was a welcome sight
to travellers, has disappeared, together with most of the old hostelries
that once rendered Staines a town of inns. Gone, too, is the ‘Bush,’
and others, although not demolished, have either retired into private
life, or are disguised as commonplace shops. The ‘Angel’ still remains,
but not the ‘Blue Boar,’ kept, according to Dean Swift, by the
quarrelsome couple, Phyllis and John. Phyllis had run away from home on
her wedding morn with John, who was her father’s groom, and a
good-for-naught. At the inn they were installed at last, John as the
drunken landlord, Phyllis as the kind landlady:--

    They keep at Staines the Old Blue Boar,
    Are cat and dog--

and other things unfitted for ears polite.

The church is without interest, but there lies in its churchyard, among
the other saints and sinners, Lady Letitia Lade, the foul-mouthed
cast-off _chère amie_ of the Prince Regent, who married her off to John
Lade, his coachman, whom he knighted for his complaisance.




XIV


[Sidenote: _RUNEMEDE_]

Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to Egham, once devoted
almost wholly to the coaching interest, then the scene of suburban
race-meetings, and now that those blackguardly orgies have been
suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb--dusty, uninteresting. The old
church has been modernised, and the old coaching inns either mere
beer-shops or else improved away altogether. The last one to remain in
its old form--the ‘Catherine Wheel’--has recently lost all its old
roadside character, and has become very much up-to-date.

Here we are upon the borders of Windsor Great Park, and a road turning
off to the right hand leads beside the Thames to Old Windsor, past
Cooper’s Hill and within sight of Runemede and Magna Charta island,
where the ‘Palladium of our English liberties’ was wrung from the
unwilling King John. A public reference to the ‘Palladium’ used
unfailingly to ‘bring down the house,’ but it has been left to the
present generation to view the very spot where it was granted, not only
without a quickening of the pulse, but with the suspicion of a yawn. You
cannot expect reverence from people who possibly saw King John as the
central and farcical figure of last year’s pantomime, with a low-comedy
nose and an expression of ludicrous terror, handing Magna Charta to
baronial supers armoured with polished metal dish-covers for
breastplates and saucepans for helmets. ‘Nothing is sacred to a sapper,’
is a saying that arose in Napoleon’s campaigns. Let us, in these piping
times of peace, change the figure, and say, ‘Nothing is sacred to a
librettist.’

Long years before Egham ever became a coaching village, in the dark ages
of road travel, when inns were scarce and travellers few, the ‘Bells of
Ouseley,’ the old-fashioned riverside inn along this bye-road, was a
place of greater note than it is now. Although forgotten by the crowds
who keep the high-road, it is an inn happier in its situation than
most, for it stands on the banks of the Thames at one of its most
picturesque points, just below Old Windsor.

[Illustration: THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY.’]

The sign, showing five bells on a blue ground, derives its name from the
once-famed bells of the long-demolished Oseney Abbey at Oxford,
celebrated, before the Reformation swept them away, for their silvery
tones, which are said to have surpassed even those

    Bells of Shandon
    Which sound so grand on
    The pleasant waters of the River Lea,

[Sidenote: _THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY’_]

of which ‘Father Prout’ sang some forty-five years ago. The abbey,
however, possessed _six_ bells. They were named Douce, Clement, Austin,
Hauctetor, Gabriel, and John.

The ‘Bells of Ouseley’ had at one time a reputation for a very much less
innocent thing than picturesqueness, for a hundred and fifty years ago,
or thereabouts, it was very popular with the worst class of footpads,
who were used to waylay travellers by the shore, or on the old Bath and
Exeter Roads, and, robbing them, were not content, but, practically
applying the axiom that ‘dead men tell no tales,’ gave their victims a
knock over the head, and, tying them in sacks, heaved them into the
river. These be legends, and legends are not always truthful, but it is
a fact that, some years ago, when the Thames Conservancy authorities
were dredging the bed of the river just here, they found the remains of
a sack and the perfect skeleton of a human being.




XV


Regarding the country through which the road passes, between Kensington,
Egham, Sunningdale, Virginia Water, and Bagshot, Cobbett has some
characteristic things to say. Between Hammersmith and Egham it is ‘as
flat as a pancake,’ and the soil ‘a nasty stony dirt upon a bed of
gravel.’ Sunninghill and Sunningdale, ‘all made into “grounds” and
gardens by tax-eaters,’ are at the end of a ‘blackguard heath,’ and are
‘not far distant from the Stock-jobbing crew. The roads are level, and
they are smooth. The wretches can go from the “‘Change” without any
danger to their worthless necks.’

There are now, sad to say, after the lapse of nearly eighty years, a
great many more of the ‘crew’ here, and they journey to and from Capel
Court with even less danger to their necks, bad luck to them!

Egham Hill surmounted, the Holloway College for Women is a prominent
object on the left-hand side of the road, the fad of Thomas Holloway,
whose thumping big fortune was derived from the advertising enterprise
which lasted wellnigh two generations, and during the most of that
period rendered the advertisement columns of London and provincial
papers hideous with beastly illustrations of suppurating limbs, and the
horrid big type inquiry, ‘Have you a Bad Leg?’ Pills and ointments, what
sovereign specifics you are--towards the accumulation of wealth!
All-powerful unguents, how beneficent--towards the higher education of
woman!

[Sidenote: _VIRGINIA WATER_]

No less a sum than £600,000 was expended on the building and equipment
of this enormous range of buildings, opened in 1887, and provided
royally with everything a college requires except students, whose number
yet falls far short of the three hundred and fifty the place is
calculated to house and teach. A fine collection of the works of modern
English painters is to be seen here, where study is made easy for the
‘girl graduates’ by the provision of luxuriously appointed class-rooms
and shady nooks where ‘every pretty domina can study the phenomena’ of
integral calculus and other domestic sciences. It seems a waste of good
money that, although a sum equal to £500 a year for each student is
expended on the higher education of women here, no prophetess has yet
issued from Egham with a message for the world; and that, consequently,
Mr. Thomas Holloway and his medicated grease have as yet missed that
posthumous fame for which so big a bid was made.

In two miles Virginia Water is reached, passing on the right hand the
plantations of Windsor Great Park. To this spot runs every day in
summer-time the ‘Old Times’ coach, which, first put on this road in the
spring of 1879, kept running every season until 1886, when it was
transferred to the Brighton Road, there to become famous through Selby’s
historic ‘record’ drive. Another coach, called the ‘Express,’ was put on
the Virginia Water trip in 1886 and 1887; but, following upon Selby’s
death in the November of the latter year, the ‘Old Times’ was reinstated
on this route, and has been running ever since, leaving the Hotel
Victoria, Northumberland Avenue, every week-day morning for the
‘Wheatsheaf,’ and returning in the evening.

This same ‘Wheatsheaf’ is probably one of the very ugliest houses that
ever bedevilled a country road, and looks like a great public-house
wrenched bodily from London streets and dropped down here at a venture.
But it is for all that a very popular place with the holiday-makers who
come here to explore the beauties and the curiosities of Virginia Water.

There are artificial lakes here, just within the Park of Windsor--lakes
which give the place its name, and made so long ago that Nature in her
kindly way has obliterated all traces of their artificiality. It is a
hundred years since this pleasance of Virginia Water was formed by
imprisoning the rivulets that run into this hollow, and banking up the
end of it; nearly a hundred years since the Ruined Temple was built as a
ready-made ruin; and there is no more, nor indeed any other such,
delightful spot near London. It is quite a pity to come by the knowledge
that the ruins were imported from Greece and Carthage, because without
that knowledge who knows what romance could not be weaved around those
graceful columns, amid the waters and the wilderness? Beyond Virginia
Water we come to Sunningdale.

[Sidenote: _ROMAN ROADS_]

From Turnham Green to Staines, and thence to Shrub’s Hill we are on the
old Roman Road to that famous town which has been known at different
periods of its existence as Aquae Solis, Akemanceaster, and Bath. The
Saxons called the road Akeman Street. Commencing at a junction with the
Roman Watling Street at the point where the Marble Arch now stands, it
proceeded along the Bayswater Road, and so by Notting Hill, past
Shepherd’s Bush, and along the Goldhawk Road, where, instead of turning
sharply to the left like the existing road that leads to Young’s Corner,
it continued its straight course through the district now occupied by
the modern artistic colony of Bedford Park, falling into the present
Chiswick High Road somewhere between Turnham Green and Gunnersbury.
Through Brentford, Hounslow, and Staines the last vestiges of the actual
Roman Road were lost in the alterations carried out for the improvement
of the highway under the provisions of the Hounslow and Basingstoke Road
Improvement Act of 1728, but there can be little doubt that the road
traffic of to-day from Hounslow to Shrub’s Hill follows in the tracks
of the pioneers who built the original road in A.D. 43; while as for
old-world Brentford, it would surprise no one if the veritable Roman
paving were found deep down below its High Street, long buried in the
silt and mud that have raised the level of the highway at the ford from
which the place-name derives.

The present West of England road turns off from the Akeman Street at the
bend in the highway at Shrub’s Hill, leaving the Roman way to continue
in an unfaltering straight line across the scrubby wastes and solitudes
of Broadmoor, to Finchampstead, Stratfieldsaye, and Silchester. It is
there known to the country folk as the ‘Nine Mile Ride’ and the ‘Devil’s
Highway.’ The prefix of the place-name ‘Stratfieldsaye,’ as a matter of
fact, derives from its situation on this ‘street.’ Silchester is the
site of the Roman city _Calleva Atrebatum_, and the excavated ruins of
this British Pompeii prove how important a place this was, standing as
it did at the fork of the roads leading respectively to _Aquae Solis_,
and to _Isca Damnoniorum_, the Exeter of a later age. Branching off here
to _Isca_, the Roman road was for the rest of the way to the West known
as the _Via Iceniana_, the Icen Way, and was perhaps regarded as a
continuation of what is now called the Icknield Street, the road which
runs diagonally to Norfolk and Suffolk, the country of the Iceni.

Very little of this old Roman road on its way to the West is identical
with any of the three existing routes to Exeter. There is that length
just named, from Gunnersbury to Shrub’s Hill; another piece, a mile or
so from Andover onward, by the Weyhill route; the crossing of the modern
highway between ‘Woodyates Inn’ and Thorney Down; and from Dorchester to
Bridport, where, as Gay says of his cavaliers’ journey to Exeter:--

    Now on true Roman way our horses sound,
    Graevius would kneel and kiss the sacred ground.

Onwards to Exeter the measurements of Antoninus and his fellows--those
literally ‘classic’ forerunners of Ogilby, Cary, Paterson, and Mogg--are
hazy in the extreme, and it is difficult to say how the Roman road
entered into the Queen City of the West.

Oh! for one hour with the author of the Antonine Itinerary, to settle
the vexed questions of routes and stations along this road to the
country of the Damnonii. ‘Here,’ one would say to him, ‘is your
starting-point, _Londinium_, which we call London. Very good; now kindly
tell us whether we are correct in giving Staines as the place you call
_Ad Pontes_; and is Egham the site of _Bibracte_? _Calleva_ we have
identified with Silchester, but where was your next station, _Vindomis_?
Was it St. Mary Bourne?’

[Sidenote: _THE HEATHS_]

In the meanwhile, until spiritualism becomes more of an exact science,
we must be content with our own deductions, and, with the aid of the
Ordnance map, trace the Roman _Via Iceniana_ by Quarley Hill and
Grateley to the hill of Old Sarum, which is readily identified as the
station of _Sorbiodunum_. Thence it goes by Stratford Toney to
‘Woodyates Inn’ and Gussage Cow Down, where the utterly vanished
_Vindogladia_ is supposed to have stood. Between this and Dorchester
there was another post whose name and position are alike unknown,
although the course of the road may yet be faintly traced past the
fortified hill of Badbury Rings, the _Mons Badonicus_ of King Arthur’s
defeat, to Tincleton and Stinsford, and so into Dorchester, the
_Durnovaria_ of the Romans, through what was the Eastgate of that city.
The names and sites of two more stations westward are lost, and the
situation of _Moridunum_, the next-named post, is so uncertain that such
widely sundered places as Seaton, on the Dorset coast, and Honiton, in
Devon, eighteen miles farther, are given for it. Morecomblake, a mile
from Seaton, is, however, the most likely site. Thence, on to Exeter,
this Roman military way is lost.




XVI


From Virginia Water up to the crest of Shrub’s Hill, Sunningdale, is a
distance of a mile and a quarter, and beyond, all the way into Bagshot,
is a region of sand and fir-trees and attempts at cultivation, varied by
newly-built villas, where considerable colonies of Cobbett’s detested
stock-jobbers and other business men from the ‘Wen of wens’ have set up
country quarters. And away to right and left, for miles upon miles,
stretches that wild country known variously as Bagshot and Ascot Heaths
and Chobham Ridges.

The extensive and dreary-looking tract of land, still wild and barren
for the most part, called Bagshot Heath, has during the last century
been the scene of many attempts made to bring it under cultivation.
These populous times are ill-disposed to the continued existence of
waste and unproductive lands, which, when near London, are especially
valuable, if they can be made to grow anything at all. One thing which,
above all others, has led to the beginning of the end of these old-time
wildernesses, formerly the haunts of highwaymen, is the modern discovery
of the country and of the benefits of fresh air. When the nineteenth
century was yet young the townsman still retained the old habits of
thought which regarded the heaths and the hills with aversion. He pigged
away his existence over his shop or warehouse in the City, and thought
the country fit only for the semi-savages who grew the fruit and
vegetables that helped to supply his table, or cultivated the wheat of
which his daily bread was compounded. It has been left to us, his
descendants, to love the wilds, and thus it is that villa homes are
springing up amid the heaths and the pines of this region, away from
Woking on the south to Ascot in the north.

[Sidenote: _BAGSHOT_]

One comes downhill into the large village or small (very small) town of
Bagshot, which gives a name to these surrounding wastes of scrubby
grass, gorse, and fir-trees. The now quiet street faces the road in the
hollow, across which runs the Bourne brook that perhaps originated the
place-name, ‘Beck-shot’ being the downhill rush of the stream or beck.
The many ‘shotts’ that terminate the names of places in Hants and Surrey
have this common origin, and are similarly situated in the little
hollows watered by descending brooks.

Bagshot has nearly forgotten the old coaching days in the growing
importance of its military surroundings, and most of its once celebrated
inns have retired into private life, all except the ‘King’s Arms.’

[Illustration: BAGSHOT.]

The ground to the north of the Exeter Road, on the west of Bagshot
village, was once a peat moor. Hazel-nuts and bog-oak were often dug up
there. Then began the usual illegal encroachments on what was really
common land, and stealthily the moor was enclosed and subsequently
converted into a nursery-ground for rhododendrons, which flourish
amazingly on this soil when it has once been trenched. Beneath the black
sand which usually covers this ground there frequently occurs a very
hard iron rust, or thin stratum of oxide of iron, which prevents
drainage of the soil, with a blue sandy clay underlying. This stratum of
iron rust requires to be broken through, and the blue clay subsoil
raised to the surface and mixed with the black sand, before anything
will grow here.

There is to be seen on the summit of the steep hill that leads out of
Bagshot an old inn called the ‘Jolly Farmer.’ This is the successor of a
still older house which stood at the side of the road, and was famous in
the annals of highway robbery, having been once the residence of William
Davis, the notorious ‘Golden Farmer,’ who lived here in the century
before last.

The agriculturist with this auriferous name was a man greatly respected
in the neighbourhood, and acquired the nickname from his invariable
practice of paying his bills in gold. He was never known to tender
cheques, bank-notes, or bills, and this fact was considered so
extraordinary that it excited much comment, while at the same time
increasing the respect due to so substantial a man. But respect at last
fell from Mr. William Davis like a cloak; for one night when a coach was
robbed (as every coach was robbed then) on Bagshot Heath by a peculiar
highwayman who had earned a great reputation from his invariable
practice of returning all the jewellery and notes and keeping only the
coin, the masked robber, departing with his plunder, was shot in the
back by a traveller who had managed to secrete a pistol.

[Sidenote: _THE ‘GOLDEN FARMER’_]

Bound hand and foot, the wounded highwayman was hauled into the lighted
space before the entrance to the ‘King’s Arms,’ when the gossips of the
place recognised in him the well-known features of the ‘Golden Farmer.’
A ferocious Government, which had no sympathy with highway robbery,
caused the ‘Golden Farmer’ to be hanged and afterwards gibbeted at his
own threshold.

The present inn, an ugly building facing down the road, does not occupy
the site of the old house, which stood on the right hand, going
westwards. A table, much hacked and mutilated, standing in the parlour
of the ‘Jolly Farmer,’ came from the highwayman’s vanished home. A tall
obelisk that stood on the triangular green at the fork of the roads
here--where the signpost is standing nowadays--has long since
disappeared. It was a prominent landmark in the old coaching days, and
was inscribed with the distances of many towns from this spot. A still
existing link with the times of the highwaymen is the so-called ‘Claude
du Vail’s Cottage,’ which stands in the heathy solitudes at some
distance along Lightwater Lane, to the right-hand of the road. The
cottage, of which there is no doubt that it often formed a hiding-place
for that worthy, has lost its ancient thatch, and is now covered with
commonplace slates.

Almost immediately after leaving the ‘Jolly Farmer’ behind, the road
grows hateful, passing in succession the modern townships of Cambridge
Town Camberley, and York Town. The exact point where one of these modern
squatting-places of those who hang on to the skirts of Tommy Atkins
joins another may be left to local experts; to the traveller they
present the appearance of one long and profoundly depressing street.

Cobbett knew the road well, and liked this shabby line of military
settlements little. Coming up to ‘the Wen’ in 1821, and passing
Blackwater, he reached York Town, and thus he holds forth: ‘After
_pleasure_ comes _pain_’, says Solomon, and after the sight of Lady
Mildmay’s truly noble plantations (at Hartley Row) came that of the
clouts of the ‘gentleman cadets’ of the ‘_Royal Military College of
Sandhurst_!’ Here, close by the roadside, is the _drying ground_.
Sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were here spread upon lines
covering perhaps an acre of ground! We soon afterwards came to ‘_York_
Place’ on ‘_Osnaburg_ Hill.’ And is there never to be an _end_ of these
things? Away to the left we see that immense building which contains
children _breeding up to be military commanders_! Has this place cost so
little as two millions of pounds? I never see this place (and I have
seen it forty times during the last twenty years) without asking myself
this question, ‘Will this thing be suffered to go on; will this thing,
created by money _raised by loan_; will this thing be upheld by means of
taxes _while the interest of the Debt is reduced_, on the ground that
the nation is _unable to pay the interest in full_?’

It is painful to say that ‘this thing’ has gone on, and that ‘the sweet
simplicity of the Three per Cents’ has given place to very much reduced
interest. But one little ray of sunshine breaks on the gloomy picture.
If Cobbett could ride this way once more he would discover that the acre
of drying ‘sheets, shirts, and other things’ is no longer visible to
shock the susceptibilities of old-fashioned wayfarers, or of that new
feature of the road, the lady cyclist.

[Sidenote: _BLACKWATER_]

There is a great deal more of Cambridge Town, Camberley, and York Town
now than when Cobbett last journeyed along the road; there are more
‘children breeding up to be military commanders,’ more Tommies, more
drinking-shops, and an almost continuous line of ugly, and for the most
part out-at-elbows, houses for a space of two miles. It is with relief
that the traveller leaves behind the last of these wretched blots upon
the country and descends into Blackwater, where the river of that name,
so called from the sullen hue it obtains on running through the peaty
wastes of this wild, heathy country, flows beneath a bridge at the
entrance to the pretty village. Over this bridge we enter Hampshire,
that county of hogs and chalky downs, but no sign of the chalk is
reached yet, until coming upon the little stream in the level between
Hartley Row and Hook, called the Whitewater from the milky tinge it has
gained on coming down from the chalky heights of Alton and Odiham. This
tinge is, however, more imaginary than real, and the characteristically
chalky scenery of Hampshire is not seen by the traveller along the Great
Western Road until Basingstoke and its chalk downs are reached.

Blackwater until recently possessed a picturesque old coaching inn, the
‘White Hart,’ which has unhappily been rebuilt. But it remains, as ever,
a village of old inns. Climbing out of its one street we come to a wild
and peculiarly unprepossessing tableland known as Hartford Bridge Flats.

To the lover of scenery this is a quite detestable piece of road, but
the old coachmen simply revelled in it, for here was the best stretch
of galloping ground in England, and they ‘sprang’ their horses over it
for all they were worth, through Hartley Row and Hook, and well on
towards Basingstoke.

The famous (or infamous let us rather call them) Hartford Bridge Flats
are fully as dreary as any of the desolate Californian mining flats of
which Bret Harte has written so eloquently. Salisbury Plain itself, save
that the Plain is more extensive, is no worse place in which to be
overtaken by bad weather. Excessively bleak and barren, the Flats are
well named, for they stretch absolutely level for four miles: a black,
open, unsheltered heath, with nothing but stunted gorse bushes for miles
on either side, and the distant horizon closed in by the solemn
battalions of sinister-looking pine-woods. The road runs, a straight and
sandy strip, through the midst of this wilderness, unfenced, its
monotony relieved only by a group of ragged firs about half-way. The
cyclist who toils along these miles against a head wind is as unlikely
to forget Hartford Bridge Flats as were the unfortunate ‘outsides’ on
the coaches when rain or storm made the passage miserable.

Hartford Bridge, at the foot of the hill below this nightmare country,
is a pretty hamlet of yellow sand and pine-woods, sand-martins and
rabbits uncountable. The place is interesting and unspoiled, because its
development was suddenly arrested when the Exeter Road became deserted
for the railway in the early ’40’s; and so it remains, in essentials, a
veritable old hamlet of the coaching days. Even more eloquent of old
times is the long, long street of

[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON)]

[Sidenote: _HARTLEY ROW_]

Hartley Row which adjoins. Hartley Row was absolutely called into
existence by the demand in the old days of road travel for stabling,
inns, and refreshments, and is one of the most thoroughly representative
of such roadside settlements. Half a mile to the south of the great
highway is the parent village of Hartley Wintney, unknown to and
undreamt of by travellers in those times, and probably much the same as
it was in the Middle Ages. The well-named ‘Row,’ on the other hand,
sprang lip, grew lengthy, and flourished exceedingly during the sixty
years of coaching prosperity, and then, at one stroke, was ruined. What
Brayley, the historian of Surrey, wrote of Bagshot in 1841, applies even
more eloquently to Hartley Row: ‘Its trade has been entirely ruined by
the opening of the Southampton and Great Western Railroads, and its
numerous inns and public-houses, which had long been profitably
occupied, are now almost destitute of business. Formerly thirty stage
coaches passed through the village, now every coach has been taken off
the road.’ The ‘Southampton Railroad,’ referred to here, is of course
the London and South-Western Railway, which has drained this part of the
road of its traffic, and whose Winchfield station lies two miles away.

[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]

Before the crash of the ’40’s Hartley Row possessed a thriving industry
in the manufacture of coaches, carried on by one Fagg, who was also
landlord of the ‘Bell Inn,’ Holborn, and in addition horsed several
stages out of London.

Some day the coming historian of the nineteenth century will, in his
chapter on travel, cite Hartley Row as the typical coaching village,
which was called into existence by coaching, lived on coaching, and with
the death of coaching was stranded high and dry in this dried-up channel
of life. All the houses

[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]

[Sidenote: _OLD TRAVELLERS_]

of a village like this, which lived on the needs of travellers, faced
the road in one long street, and almost every fourth or fifth house was
an inn, or ministered in some way to the requirements of those who
travelled. It is remarkable to find so many of these old inns still in
existence at Hartley Row. Here they still stand, ruddy-faced,
substantial but plain buildings, with, notwithstanding their plainness,
a certain air of distinction. The wayfarer, well read in the habits of
the times when they were bustling with business, can imagine untold
comforts behind those frontages; can reconstruct the scenes in the
public waiting-rooms, where travellers, passing the interval between
their being set down here by the ‘Defiance’ or the ‘Regulator’ Exeter
coach and the arrival of the Odiham and Alton bye-stage, could warm
themselves by the roaring fire; can sniff in imagination the coffee of
the breakfasts and the roast beef of the dinners; or perceive through
the old-fashioned window-frames the lordly posting parties, detained
here by stress of weather, making the best of it by drinking of the old
port or brown sherry which the cellars of every self-respecting coaching
inn could then produce. Not that these were the only travellers familiar
to the roadside village in those days. Not every one who fared from
London to Exeter could afford the luxuries of the mail or stage coach,
or of the good cheer and the lavender-scented beds just glimpsed. For
the poor traveller there were the lumbering so-called ‘Fly-vans’ of
Russell and Co., which jogged along at the average pace of three
miles[3] an hour--the pace decreed by Scotland Yard for the modern
policeman. The poor folk who travelled thus might perhaps have walked
with greater advantage, ‘save for the dignity of the thing,’ as the
Irishman said when the floor of his cab fell out and he was obliged to
run along with the bottomless vehicle. Certainly they paid more for the
misery of being conveyed thus than the railway traveller does nowadays
for comfort at thirty to fifty miles an hour. Numbers _did_ walk,
including the soldiers and the sailors going to rejoin their regiments
or their ships, who appear frequently in the roadside sketches of that
period by Rowlandson and others. The poor travellers probably rode
because of their--luggage I was about to write, let us more correctly
say bundles.

[Sidenote: _PICTURESQUE OLD DAYS_]

When they arrived at a village at nightfall, they camped under the
ample shelter of the great waggon; or, perhaps, if they had anything to
squander on mere luxuries, spent sixpence or ninepence on a supper of
cold boiled beef and bread, to be followed by a shake-down on straw or
hay in the stable-lofts, which were quite commonly put to this use among
the second- and third-rate inns of the old times.

[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]

Those were the days of the picturesque; if, indeed, Rowlandson and
Morland and the other delightfully romantic artists of the period did
not invent those roadside scenes. Here, for instance, is Rowlandson’s
charming group of three old topers boozing outside the ‘Half Moon.’ I
cannot tell you where this ‘Half Moon’ was. Probably the artist imagined
it; but at anyrate the _kind_ of place, and scenes of this description,
must have existed in his time. Here, you will observe, the landlord has
come out with a mug of ‘humming ale’ or ‘nut-brown October’ for the
thirsty driver of the curricle, who is apparently going to market, if
we may judge by the basket of fowls tied on to the back of the
conveyance.

Scenes so picturesque as this are not to be observed in our own time,
nor are the tramps who yet infest the road, singly or in families, of
the engaging appearance of this family party. The human form divine was
wondrously gnarled and twisted, or phenomenally fat, a hundred years
ago, according to Rowlandson and Gillray. Legs like the trunks of
contorted apple-trees, stomachs like terrestrial globes, mouths
resembling the mouths of horses, and noses like geographical features on
a large scale were the commonplaces of their practice, and this example
forms no exception to the general rule.




XVII


[Sidenote: _TREE-PLANTING_]

The ruin that descended upon Hartley Row in common with other coaching
towns and villages, nearly sixty years ago, has long since been lived
down, and the long street, although quiet, has much the same cheerful
appearance as it must have worn in the heyday of its prosperity. It is a
very wide street, fit for the evolutions of many coaches. Pleasant
strips of grass now occupy, more or less continuously, one side, and at
the western end forks the road to Odiham, through a pretty common with
the unusual feature of being planted with oak trees. These oak glades do
not look particularly old; but, as it happens, we can ascertain their
exact age and at the same time note how slow-growing is the oak tree by
a reference to Cobbett’s _Rural Rides_, where, in 1821, he notes their
being planted: ‘I perceive that they are planting oaks on the
“_wastes_,” as the _Agriculturasses_ call them, about _Hartley Row_;
which is very good, because the herbage, after the first year, is rather
increased than diminished by the operation; while, in time, the oaks
arrive at a timber state, and add to the beauty and the _real wealth_,
of the country, and to the real and solid wealth of the descendants of
the planter who, in every such case, merits unequivocal praise, because
he plants for his children’s children. The planter here is Lady Mildmay,
who is, it seems, Lady of the Manors about here.’

This planting was accomplished in days before any one so much as dreamt
of the time to come, when the navies of the world should be built like
tin kettles. Oaks were then planted with a view to being eventually
worked up into the ‘wooden walls of Old England,’ among other uses, and
the squires who laid out money on the work were animated by the glow of
self-satisfaction that warms the breasts of those who can combine
patriotism with the provision of a safe deferred investment. Unhappily,
the ‘wooden walls’ have long since become a dim memory before these
trees have attained their proper timber stage, and now stand, to those
who read these facts, as monuments to blighted hopes. But they render
this common extremely beautiful, and give it a character all its own.
All this is quite apart from the legal aspect of the case; whether, that
is to say, the lord of a manor has any right to make plantations of
common lands for his own or his descendants’ benefit. Cobbett, it will
be perceived, calls these lands ‘wastes,’ following the term conferred
upon them by the ‘Agriculturasses’--whoever they may have been. If
technically ‘wastes of the manors,’ then the landowner’s right to do as
he will is incontestable; but, with the contentious character of Cobbett
before one, is it not remarkable that he should praise this planting and
not question the right to call the land ‘wastes,’ instead of common? But
perhaps Cobbett the tree-planter was contending with Cobbett the
agitator, and the tree-planter got the best of it.

Hook, which succeeds Hartley Row, is a hamlet of the smallest size, but
that fact does not prevent its possessing two old coaching inns, the
‘White Hart’ and the ‘Old White Hart,’ both very large and very near to
one another. The Exeter Road certainly did not lack entertainment for
man and beast in those days, with fine hostelries every few miles,
either in the towns and villages, or else set down, solitary, amid the
downs, like Winterslow Hut.

Nately Scures, whose second name is supposed to derive from the
Anglo-Saxon _scora_, a shaw, or coppice (whence we get such place-names
as Shawford, near Winchester; Shaugh Prior on Dartmoor; Shaw, in
Berkshire, and many of the ‘scors’ forming the first syllables of
place-names all over the country), is a place even smaller than Hook,
with a tiny church, one of the many ‘smallest’ churches; standing in a
meadow, to which access is had through rick-yards.

[Illustration: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.]

[Sidenote: _OLD BASING_]

It is worth while halting a moment to gain a sight of the little church,
which is late Norman, and one of the few dedicated to that Norman
bishop, Saint Swithun.

Returning to the highway, and coming to the place known to the old
coachmen as Mapledurwell Hatch, where that fine old coaching inn, the
‘King’s Head,’ still stands, a road goes off to Old Basing, on the
right, while the highway continues in a straight line, rising toward the
town of Basingstoke.

The hasty traveller who knows nothing of the delights that await
explorers in the byeways, misses a great deal here by keeping strictly
to the highroad. If, instead of continuing direct to Basingstoke, this
turning to the right hand is taken, it brings one in half a mile to the
pretty village of Old Basing, celebrated for one of the most stubborn
and protracted defences recorded in history. It was here that the
equally crafty and courteous Sir William Paulet, first Marquis of
Winchester, and Lord Treasurer during the reigns of Henry the Eighth,
Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, built an immense palace on the
site of Basing Castle. There can be little doubt that this magnificent
person, who possessed no principles, and so kept place and power through
the troublous times that these reigns comprised, must have had his hands
in the Royal coffers to some purpose, or else have used his position for
the sale of preferments. ‘No oak, but an osier,’ as his contemporaries
said, he bowed before the tempests of religious persecution and the
whirlwinds of conspiracies which passed him harmlessly by and left him
still peculating. He had become a hoary-headed sinner by the time
Elizabeth reigned, or there is no knowing but that he might have become
a Prince Consort; for when he entertained Her Majesty here in 1560: ‘By
my troth,’ said she, ‘if my Lord Treasurer were but a young man, I could
find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in
England.’ But she had said this kind of thing of many another.

[Sidenote: _BASING HOUSE_]

The successors of this gorgeous nobleman--not being Lords
Treasurers--could not afford to keep up so immense a palace, and so
demolished a part of it, and found the remainder ample. To this place,
fitting alike by its situation at a strategic point on the Western Road,
and by the splendidly defensible nature of its site, crowded the King’s
Hampshire adherents who were not engaged at Winchester and Southampton
at the outbreak of the war between Charles and his Parliament. John,
fifth Marquis of Winchester, then ruled. ‘_Aimez Loyaulté_,’ he wrote
with his diamond ring on every window of his great mansion, and,
provisioning his cellars, awaited events. As ‘Loyalty’ the house
speedily became known to the flying bands of the King’s men who, pursued
through the country by the Roundheads, made for its shelter as birds do
for trees in a storm. The rebels might hold Basingstoke for a time, and
lay siege to Basing House, but troops from Royalist Oxford would come
and take the town and reprovision this stronghold. It was a mixed
company in this palace-fortress. My lord, loyalist, soldier, amateur of
the arts; reposing after the warlike fatigues of the day in a bed whose
gorgeous trappings made it worth £1300; witty and brave cavaliers; a
company of Roman Catholic priests; men-at-arms, drinking, dicing, and
fighting by turns and with equal zest; and such representatives of the
arts as Inigo Jones, the architect, and Hollar, the engraver. Gay and
careless though they were, they fought well, and slew and were slain to
the number of two thousand during this long siege. Sometimes this varied
garrison was hard pressed for food, when relief would come in whimsical
fashion, as when Colonel Gage and his thousand horsemen appeared with
sword in one hand and holding on to a bag of provisions with the other;
a fitting contrast with the typical Puritan, a Psalm-book in his left
hand and a pike in his right. Basing House, indeed, in the words of
Carlyle, ‘long infested the Parliament in these quarters, and was an
especial eye-sorrow to the trade of London with the Western parts. It
stood siege after siege for four years, ruining poor Colonel This and
then poor Colonel That, till the jubilant Royalists had given it the
name of _Basting_ House.’

But the end was at hand after Fairfax had reduced the garrisons in the
West and the Parliamentary troops could be spared from other places.
Cromwell himself was charged with the business of taking ‘Loyalty.’ It
was in September that he came to Basingstoke with horse and foot, and
established a post of observation on the summit of Winklebury, a hill
crowned with prehistoric earthworks that overlooks Worting and the
Exeter Road, two miles on the other side of the town.

Little over a fortnight later Cromwell wrote that ‘Thank God he was able
to give a good account of Basing.’ The house was taken by storm on the
14th October, ‘while the garrison was card-playing,’ as the persistent
Hampshire legend would have us believe. ‘Clubs are trumps, as when
Basing House was taken,’ is still an expression often heard at Hampshire
card-parties, and some colour is lent to this story by the poor defence
with which the furious onrush of Cromwell’s troops was met. The
attacking force lost few men, but a hundred of the defenders were
killed, and three hundred more taken prisoners. Then the place caught
fire and was utterly burnt, many perishing miserably in the great brick
vaults of the house, where they were when the fire reached them. Fuller,
that quaint seventeenth-century historian, who had been staying here,
had, fortunately, left before the arrival of Cromwell’s expedition. The
continual fighting and the booming of the guns had distracted his
attention from his work! There were others not so fortunate. Thomas
Johnson, a peaceful botanist, was killed, and one Robinson, an actor and
unarmed, was slaughtered by Harrison, the fanatic. ‘Cursed is he that
doeth the Lord’s work negligently,’ exclaimed the Puritan, as he cut him
down. Other soldiers slew the daughter of Dr. Griffith who was charging
them with being violent to her father.

Fanaticism and cupidity were fully satisfied on this occasion, save that
there were those who grumbled because the lives of the Marquis of
Winchester and his lieutenant were spared. The sack of Basing House
yielded £200,000 worth of plunder, in objects

[Sidenote: _THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE_]

[Illustration: THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE.]

of art, gold and silver plate, coin, and provisions; and all partook of
it, from Cromwell to the rank and file. ‘One soldier had a hundred and
twenty pieces of gold for his share, others plate, others jewels.’ No
wonder they had, with this dazzling prospect before them, rushed to the
assault ‘like a fire-flood.’

They made a rare business of this pillage, taking away the valuables,
and selling the provisions to the country folks, who ‘loaded many
carts.’ The bricks and building materials were given away, probably
because they could not wait for the long business of selling them.
‘Whoever will come for brick or stone shall freely have the same for his
pains,’ ran the proclamation, and, considering this, it is quite
remarkable that even the existing scanty ruins of Basing House are left.

The area comprised within the defences measures fourteen and a half
acres, now a tumbled and tangled stretch of ground, a mass of grassy
mounds and hollows, overgrown in places with thickets. These ruins are
entered from the road by an old brick gateway, still bearing the ‘three
swords in pile’ on a shield, the arms of the Paulets, with ivy
overhanging and tall trees behind. A tall curtain wall of brick, with a
quaintly peaked-roofed tower at either end, now looks down upon the
Basingstoke Canal, which many strangers think is the moat, but though a
picturesque addition to the scene, it cannot claim any such historic
associations, for it was only constructed close upon a hundred years
ago.

Near by is Old Basing church, with square tower built of red brick,
similar to that seen in the ruins of the House. It is said to be of
foreign make. Bullets have up to recent years been extracted from the
south door of the church, the original oak door in use two hundred and
sixty years ago; and the flint and stone south walls and buttresses bear
vivid witness, in their patching of brick, to the ruin that befell this
part of the building in those troubled times. Strange to say, a
beautiful group of the Virgin and Child still occupies a tabernacle over
the west window, uninjured, although it can scarce have escaped the
notice of the fanatical soldiery. Within the church are memorials of the
loyal Paulets, Marquises of Winchester, and for a period Dukes of
Bolton. Their glory has departed with their great House, and although a
smaller residence was built in the meadows, close at hand, that has
vanished too.

[Sidenote: _THE ‘GREY LADY’_]

When Basing House was laid in ruins the Marquis of Winchester retired to
his hunting lodge of Hawk Wood, to the south of Basingstoke, and,
enlarging it, made the place his residence. His son, created Duke of
Bolton, employed Inigo Jones to build a new house on the site of the
lodge, and this is the present Hackwood Park. The existing house stands
in the midst of dense and tangled woodlands, and although imposing, is a
somewhat gloomy pile, with a ghost story. That bitter lawyer, Richard
Bethell, of whom it was said that he ‘dismissed Hell, with costs, and
took away from orthodox members of the Church of England their last hope
of everlasting damnation,’ when he became Lord Chancellor and was
created Baron Westbury, purchased Hackwood Park, and it was to one of
his friends that the ‘Grey Lady’ of the mansion presented herself. Lord
Westbury and a party of his friends had arrived from town soon after the
purchase, and at a late hour they retired to rest, saying good-night to
one another in the corridor. One of the guests woke up in the middle of
the night and found his room strangely illuminated, with the indistinct
outlines of a human figure visible in the midst of the uncanny glow.
Thinking this some practical joke, and feeling very drowsy, he turned
round and fell off to sleep again, to wake at a later hour and see the
figure of a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress. With more courage than
most people would probably have shown under the circumstances, he,
instead of putting his head under the bed-clothes, jumped out, whereupon
the lady modestly retired. Instead of going to bed again, he sat down
and wrote an account of the occurrence; but when at breakfast Lord
Westbury and his other friends kept continually asking him how he had
slept, his suspicions as to a practical joke having been played upon him
were renewed. He accordingly parried all these queries and said he had
slept excellently, until Lord Westbury said, ‘Now, look here, we saw
that lady dressed in grey follow you into your room last night, you
know!’ Explanations followed, but the story of the ‘Grey Lady’ remains
mysterious to this day.




XVIII


The whereabouts of Basingstoke may be noted from afar by the huge and
odd-looking clock-tower of the Town Hall, added to that building in
1887. Its windy height, visible from many miles around, is also
favourable to the hearing at a distance of its sweet-toned carillons,
modelled on the pattern of the famous peal of Bruges. When the shrieking
of the locomotives at the railway station is hushed, and the wind is
favourable, you may hear those tuneful bells far away over the
melancholy wolds that hem in Basingstoke to the north and west, or
listen to them by the waters of the Loddon eastward, or the undulating
farm-lands of the south.

[Sidenote: _HOLY GHOST CHAPEL_]

We have seen how Old Basing became of prime military importance from its
situation at the point where many roads from the south and west of
England converged and fell into one great highway to London; and from
the same cause is due the commercial prosperity of Basingstoke.
Basingstoke, with a record as a town going back to the time when the
Domesday Book was compiled, is yet a mere modern settlement compared
with the mother-parish of Old Basing; but it was an important place in
the sixteenth century, when silks and woollens were manufactured here.
At later periods this junction of the roads brought a great coaching
trade, and has finally made Basingstoke a railway junction. Silks and
woollens have given place to engineering works and machine-shops, and
the town, with its modern reputation for the manufacture of
agricultural machinery, bids fair at no distant date to become to
Hampshire what Colchester and Ipswich are to Essex and Suffolk.

When the Parliamentary Generals were engaged in the long business of
besieging Basing House, it may well be supposed that the town suffered
greatly at the hands of their soldiery. They, who were experts at
wrecking churches and cathedrals in a few hours, had ample opportunities
for destruction in the four years that business was about. Their
handiwork may be seen to this day--together with that of modern Toms,
Dicks, and Harrys, who have not the excuse of being fanatics--in the
ruined walls of Holy Ghost Chapel on the northern outskirts of the town.
Within the roofless walls of the chapel, unroofed by those Roundheads
for the sake of their leaden covering, are two recumbent effigies, sadly
mutilated. Perhaps Sergeant Humility-before-the-Lord Mawworm slashed
them with his pike in his hatred of worldly pomp; but his zeal did not
do the damage wrought on the marble by the recording penknives of the
past fifty years. A stained-glass window, pieced together from the
fragments of those destroyed here, is still to be seen in Basingstoke
Parish Church.

The Exeter Road leaves Basingstoke at its southwestern end, where a fork
of the highway gives a choice to the traveller of continuing to Andover
on the right, or making on the left to Winchester. The first village on
the way to Exeter is Worting, below the shoulder of Battle Down, a
village--nay, a hamlet, let us call it--of a Sundayfied stillness. Yet
Worting has had its bustling times, for here was one of the most famous
coaching inns on the road, the ‘White Hart.’ Another ‘White Hart,’ at
Whitchurch, is scarcely less celebrated in the annals of the road. In
fact, the ‘White Harts’ are so many and so notable on this road that the
historian of the highways becomes almost as ashamed of mentioning them
as of recounting the places which Cromwell stormed, or where Charles the
Second hid; the houses in which Queen Elizabeth slept, or the inns where
Pepys made merry.

[Sidenote: _OVERTON_]

Worting is followed in quick succession by the outskirts of Oakley,
Clerken Green, Deane, Ashe, and Overton. Except Overton, which is a
picturesque village lining the road, of the old coaching, or
‘thoroughfare’ type, these places are all shy and retiring, tucked away
up bye-lanes, with great parks on their borders, in whose midst are very
vast, very hideous country mansions where dwell the local J.P.’s, like
so many Rogers de Coverley in miniature, with churches rebuilt or
restored to their glory and the glory of God, and a general air of
patronage bestowed upon the villagers and wayfarers from the outside
world by those august partners. These parks, with their mile after mile
of palings bordering the road, and their dense foliage overhanging it,
are given over to solitude. An occasional gamekeeper, or a much more
than occasional rabbit or hare, are the only signs of life, with perhaps
the hoarse ‘crock’ of a pheasant’s call from the neighbouring coverts.
The air beneath the overarching trees along the road is stale and
stagnant, and typical of the life here, like the green damp on the
entrance lodges of Hall Place, where heraldic lions, sitting on their
rumps and holding what at a distance look like quart-pots from the
country inn opposite, scowl at one another across the gravelled drive.

It is a relief to emerge from this stifling atmosphere upon the open
road where Overton stands. We are fully entered here into the valley of
the Test, or Anton, a sparkling little stream whose course we follow
henceforward as far as Hurstbourne Priors. Fishermen love Overton and
this valley well, for there is royal sport here among the trout and
grayling, and in the village a choice of those old inns which the angler
appreciates as much as any one. Picturesque Overton is a doubly ruined
village, for it has lost its silk industry, together with the coaching
interest; but like the splendid bankrupts of modern high finance who
fail for millions and continue to live like princes, it continues
cheerful. Perhaps every one in the place made a competency before the
crash, and put it away where no one could touch it!

The valley broadens out delightfully beyond Overton, and the road,
reaching Laverstoke, commands beautiful views over the water-meadows,
and the open park in whose midst stands Laverstoke House, clearly seen
in passing. In this village, in the neat and clean paper-mill by the
road, is made the paper for Bank of England notes. It was so far back as
1719 that this industry was established here by the Portal family,
French Protestants emigrating from their country for conscience’ sake.
Cobbett, who hated paper-money as much as he did the ‘Wen’ in which it
is chiefly current, passed this spot in a fury. He says, with a sad lack
of the prophetic faculty, ‘We passed the mill where the Mother-Bank
paper is made! Thank God! this mill is likely soon to want employment.
Hard by is a pretty park and house, belonging to “_’Squire_” Portal, the
_paper-maker_. The country people, who seldom want for sarcastic
shrewdness, call it “Rag Hall!”’ And again, ‘I hope the time will come
when a monument will be erected where that mill stands, and when on that
monument will be inscribed “_the Curse of England_.” This spot ought to
be held accursed in all time henceforth and for evermore. It has been
the spot from which have sprung more and greater mischief than ever
plagued mankind before.’

Unhappily for Cobbett’s wishes and predictions, the mill is still in
existence and is busier than it was when he wrote in 1821. There are as
many as two hundred and fifty people now employed here in the making of
the ‘accursed’ paper.

Now comes Freefolk village, with a wayside drinking-fountain and a tall
cross, with stone seat, furnished with some pious inscription; the whole
erected by a Portal in 1870, and intended to further the honour and
glory of that family. There is plenty water everywhere around, in the
river and its many runlets amid the water-meadows, but the fountain is
dry. Passing tramps are properly sarcastic, and the dry fountain and its
texts, so far from leading in the paths of temperance and godliness, are
the occasion of much blasphemy. But the pious Portals have their
advertisement.

[Sidenote: _NEWMAN AT WHITCHURCH_]

Whitchurch, two miles down the road, is approached past the
much-quarried hills that rise on the right hand and shelter that decayed
little town from the buffetings of the north-easterly winds. If there be
those who are curious to learn what a decayed old coaching town is like,
let them journey to Whitchurch. After much tiresome railway travelling,
and changing at junctions, they will arrive in the fulness of time at
Whitchurch station, whence the omnibus of the ‘White Hart’ will drive
them, rumbling over the stone-pitched streets of the town, to the door
of that quaint inn, in one of whose rooms the future Cardinal Newman
wrote the beginning of the _Lyra Apostolica_:--

    Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?

2nd December 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth. He had come
from Oxford that morning by the Oxford-Southampton coach.

‘Here I am,’ he says, writing to his mother, ‘from one till eleven,’
waiting for the down Exeter mail. Think, modern railway traveller, what
would you say were it your lot to wait ten hours, say at Templecombe
Junction, for a connection! Moreover, a bore claiming to be the brother
of an acquaintance claimed to share his room and his society at the
‘White Hart,’ and eventually journeyed to Exeter with him. The future
Cardinal did not like this. He writes: ‘I am practising for the first
time the duty of a traveller, which is sorely against the grain, and
have been talkative and agreeable without end,’ adding (one can almost
imagine the sigh of the retiring scholar!), ‘Now that I have set up for
a man of the world, it is my vocation.’

The latter part of his journey was accomplished at night. Travelling
thus through Devonshire and Cornwall is, he remarks, ‘very striking for
its mysteriousness.’ It was a beautiful night, ‘clear, frosty, and
bright, with a full moon. Mere richness of vegetation is lost by night,
but bold features remain. As I came along, I had the whole train of
pictures so vividly upon my mind that I could have written a most
interesting account of it in the most approved picturesque style of
modern composition, but it has all gone from me now, like a dream.’

‘The night was enlivened by what Herodotus calls a “night engagement”
with a man, called by courtesy a gentleman, on the box. The first act
ended by his calling me a d----d fool. The second by his insisting on
two most hearty shakes of the hand, with the protest that he certainly
did think me very injudicious and ill-timed. I had opened by telling him
he was talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maidservant stuck
atop of the coach; so I had no reason to complain of his giving me the
retort uncourteous.’

There are corridors in the ‘White Hart’ with up and down twilight
passages, in which the guests of another day lost themselves with
promptitude and despatch. There is also a barbarically 
coffee-room, snug and comfortable, which looks as though Washington
Irving could have written an eloquent essay around it; and, more
essential than anything else in days of old, a capacious yard with huge
yawning stables. For Whitchurch is at the cross

[Sidenote: _BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION_]

[Illustration: WHITCHURCH.]

roads, along which in one direction went the Exeter mails, while at
right angles goes the road between Southampton, Winchester, Newbury,
Didcot, and Oxford, little used now, but once an important route.
Whitchurch, in the gay old times when few men had votes but every voter
had his price, used to send two members to Parliament. Horrid Reform and
Bribery Acts which, together with the extension of the franchise and the
adoption of secret voting, have brought about the disfranchising of
rotten boroughs and the decay of such home industries as electoral
corruption, personation, and the like, have taken away much of the
prosperity of the town, which, like Andover, used to live royally from
one election to another on the venality of the ‘free and independent.’
But the last visit of the ‘Man in the Moon’ was paid to Whitchurch very
many years ago, and not even the oldest inhabitant can recollect the
days when cash was given for votes and the electors, gloriously and
incapably drunk, were herded together to plump for the candidate with
the longest purse.

When it is said that Whitchurch is a tiny town of very steep, narrow,
and crooked streets, that it still boasts some vestiges of its old silk
industry, and that it is a ‘Borough by prescription,’ all its salient
points have been exhausted. Reform has not only reformed away the
Parliamentary representation of the town, but has also swept away the
municipal authority. Mayor and bailiff are both elected every year, but
the offices carry no power nowadays.

Leaving Whitchurch, the road presently comes to the village of
Hurstbourne Priors, which stands in a hollow on the Bourne, an affluent
of the Anton, and on the verge of the Ancient and Royal Forest of
Harewood. Not only does the village stand on the banks of the stream and
the edge of the woods, but it also derives the first of its two names
from these circumstances, ‘Hurstbourne’ being obviously descriptive of
woodlands and brooklet, while the ‘Priors’ is a relic of its old lords
of the manor, the abbots of Saint Swithun’s at Winchester. These
historic and geographical facts, however, are apt to be lost in the
local corruption of the place-name, and that of Hurstbourne Tarrant, a
few miles higher up the stream; for they are, according to Hampshire
speech, respectively ‘Up Husband’ and ‘Down Husband.’




XIX


[Sidenote: _ANDOVER_]

The road between this point and Andover, ascending the high ground
between the Ann and the Test, is utterly without interest, and brings
the traveller down into the town at the south side of the market square
without any inducement to linger on the way. Except on the Saturday
market-day, Andover is given over to a dreamy quiet. The butchers’ dogs
lie blinking sleepily on the thresholds, or on the kerbs, and regard
with a pained surprise, rather than with any active resentment, the
intrusive passage of a stray customer. Tradesmen’s assistants leisurely
open casual crates of goods on the pavements, with long intervals for
gossip between the drawing of each nail, and no one objects to the
blocking of the footpath. A chance cyclist manœuvres in the empty
void of the road in the midst of the square, and collides with no one,
for the simple reason that there is nobody to collide with, and one
acquaintance talks to another across the wide space and is distinctly
heard. Formal but not unpleasing houses front on to this square,
together with the usual Town Hall, and a great modern, highly
uninteresting Gothic church, erected after the model of Salisbury
Cathedral, on the site of the old building.

For fifty-one weeks of the fifty-two that comprise the year, this is the
weekly six-days aspect of the place, varied occasionally by the advent
of a travelling circus, or the arrival of a route-marching detachment of
the Royal Artillery, who park their guns in the square, and may be seen
in the stable-yards of the inns on which they are billeted, in various
stages of dishevelment, in shirt-sleeves rolled up to elbows, and braces
dangling at waists, littering down their horses, or smoking very short
and very foul pipes.

All this idyllic quiet is blown to the winds during the week of Weyhill
Fair, the October pandemonium held three and a half miles away. Then
hordes of cattle-and horse-jobbers, hop growers and buyers,
cheese-factors, and the travellers of firms dealing in machinery, seeds,
oil-cake, tarpaulins, and half a hundred other everyday agricultural
requisites, descend upon the town. Then are dragged out from mysterious
receptacles the most antiquated of ‘flys,’ and waggonettes, and
nondescript vehicles, to be pressed into the service of conveying
visitors to the Fair, some three and a half miles from the town. Whence
they come, and where they are hidden away afterwards, is more than the
stranger can tell, but it is quite certain that their retreat is in some
corner where spiders dwell, and earwigs and other weird insects have a
home. Add to these facts the all-important one that it is generally
possible to walk the distance in a shorter time, and you have a full
portraiture of the average Weyhill conveyance.

This sleepy old place, older by many more centuries than the oldest
house remaining here can give any hint of, was not always so quiet.
There were alarums and excursions (ending, however, with not so much as
a cut finger) when James the Second, falling back from Salisbury before
the advance of his son-in-law, William of Orange, halted here. There
might have been a battle in Andover’s streets, or under the shadow of
Bury Hill, had James put a bolder front on the business; but instead of
cutting up William’s Dutchmen, he just dined overnight, and hearing in
the morning that his other son-in-law, Prince George of Denmark, had
slunk off with Lords Ormond and Drumlanrig, went off himself,
strategically to the rear. He was an obstinate and ridiculous bigot, and
a quite unlovable monarch, but he had a power of sarcasm. ‘What,’ said
he, hearing of the Prince’s desertion, and bitterly mimicking the absurd
intonation of that recreant’s French catch-phrase, ‘is “_Est-il
possible?_” gone too? Truly, a good trooper would have been a greater
loss.’

[Sidenote: _OLD ELECTIONS_]

After these events, that era of bribery and corruption set in, which is
mistakenly supposed to have been brought to an end through the agency
of the several Reform Acts, passed by well-meaning Legislatures to
secure the purity of Parliamentary elections. As if treating, and the
crossing of horny hands with gold were the only ways of corrupting a
constituency that the wit of man, or the address of a candidate, could
discover! The palm no longer receives the coin; but who has not heard of
the modern art of ‘nursing a constituency,’ by which the candidate,
eager for Parliamentary honours, sits down before a town, or a county
division, subscribes liberally to hospitals and horticultural societies,
cricket and football clubs, opens bazaars, and presides at Young Men’s
Christian Associations, thereby winning the votes which would in other
days have been acquired by palming the men and kissing all the babies?
This tea-fight business gives us no picturesque situations like that in
which Charles James Fox figured. Fox was canvassing personally, and
called upon one of the bluff and blunt order of voters, who listened to
his eloquence, and remarked, ‘Sir, I admire your abilities, but damn
your principles!’ To which Fox supplied the obvious retort, ‘Sir, I
admire your sincerity, but damn your manners!’

Andover no longer sends a representative to Parliament, but in the brave
old days it elected two. With a knowledge of the wholesale purchasing of
votes that then went on, it will readily be perceived that Andover, with
two members to elect, must have been a place flowing with milk and
honey; or, less metaphorically, a happy hunting-ground for guineas and
free drinks. It was somewhere about a hundred and fifty years ago that
Sir Francis Blake Delaval, a prominent rake and practical humorist of
the period, was canvassing Andover. One voter amid the venal herd was,
to all appearance, proof against all temptations. Money, wine, place,
flattery had no seductions for this stoic. The baffled candidate was
beside himself in his endeavours to discover the man’s weak point; for
of course it was an age in which votes were so openly bought and sold
that the saying ‘Every man has his price’ was implicitly believed. Only
what _was_ this particular voter’s figure? Strange to say, he had no
weakness for money, but was possessed with an inordinate desire to see a
fire-eater, and doubted if there existed people endowed with that
remarkable power. ‘Off went Delaval to London, and returned with Angelo
in a post-chaise. Angelo exerted all his genius. Fire poured from his
mouth and nostrils--fire which melted that iron nature, and sent it off
cheerfully to poll for Delaval!’

This was that same Delaval whose attorney sent him the following bill of
costs after one of his contests:--

     To being thrown out of the window of the George Inn, Andover; to my
     leg being thereby broken; to surgeon’s bill, and loss of time and
     business; all in the service of Sir Francis Delaval, £500.

And cheap too.

[Sidenote: _PRACTICAL JOKING_]

They kept this sort of thing up for many years; not always, however,
throwing solicitors out of hotel windows; although rival political
factions often expressed their determination to throw one another’s
candidate in the Anton, after the fashion of the bills posted in the
town during a contest in the ’40’s, which announced in displayed type--

                      LORD HUNTINGTOWER FOR EVER!

                    SIR JOHN POLLEN IN THE RIVER!!

              CATCHING FISH FOR HIS LORDSHIP’S DINNER!!!

History does not satisfy us on the point whether or not those furious
partisans carried out their threat; or whether, if they did, their
victim afforded good bait.

This Lord Huntingtower was the eldest son of the late Earl of Dysart,
and a well-matched companion of the late Marquis of Waterford. Roaming
the country-side on dark nights, mounted on stilts, with sheets over
their clothes and hollowed turnips on their heads with scooped-out holes
for eyes and mouth, and lit with candles, they frightened many a timid
rustic out of his dull wits. In daytime they played practical jokes on
the tradesfolk of Andover. For example, entering a little general shop
in the town, Lord Huntingtower asked for a pound of treacle. ‘Where
shall I put it?’ asked the old woman who kept the shop, seeing that the
usual basin was not forthcoming.

‘P-pup-pup-put it in my hat,’ said my Lord, who stuttered in
yard-lengths, holding out his ‘topper.’ The pound of treacle was
accordingly poured into the Lincoln and Bennett, and the next instant it
was on the shopkeeper’s head.

This was the manner in which Lord Huntingtower endeared himself to the
people--those, that is to say, who were not the victims of his
pleasantries.

That kind of person is quite extinct now. They should have (but
unfortunately they have not) a stuffed specimen in the Natural History
Museum at South Kensington; because he is numbered with the Dodo, the
Plesiosaurus, and the Mastodon. The Marquis of Winchester who flourished
at the same period as my Lords Huntingtower and Waterford was of the
same stamp. He had the fiery Port Countenance which was the sign of the
three-bottle man, and his life and the deeds that he did are still
fondly remembered at Andover, for his country-house was at Amport, in
the immediate neighbourhood. He was the Premier Marquis of England, and
although up to his neck in mortgages and writs, an extremely Great
Personage. Let us, therefore, take our hats off as humbly as we know how
to do.

When he was at his country-place he worshipped at the little village
church of Amport. Sometimes he did not worship, but slept, lulled off to
the Land of Nod by the roaring fire he kept in his room-like pew. On one
occasion it chanced that he was wide awake, and, like the illustrious
Sir Roger de Coverley, leant upon the door of that pew, and gazed around
to satisfy himself that all his tenantry were present. Then an awful
thing happened, the hinges of the door broke, and it fell with a great
clatter to the ground, and the Marquis with it. He said ‘Damn!’ with
great fervour and unction, and everybody laughed. No one thought it--as
they should have done--shocking, which shows the depravity of the age.

[Sidenote: _THE MARQUIS AND THE SQUIRE_]

There is no doubt whatever about that depravity, which, like the worm in
the bud, has wrought ruin among our manners since then. How sad it is
that we are not now content to call upon Providence to

    Bless the squire and his relations
    And keep us in our proper stations;

but are all too intent upon ‘getting on,’ to defer to rank, or take a
spell at the delightful occupations of tuft-hunting and boot-licking!
Even in those days this horrid decadence had begun to manifest itself,
as you will see by the story of this same Marquis and Mr. Assheton Smith
of Tedworth Park. Mr. Smith could (as the saying goes) have ‘bought up’
the impoverished Marquis of Winchester several times over, and not have
felt any strain upon his resources. Moreover, he was a Squire of great
consideration in these parts, and as Master of the Tedworth Hunt,
something of a rival in importance. For which things, and more, the
Marquis hated him, and on one occasion took an opportunity of reproving
him publicly before the whole field, in the fine florid language of
which he had so ready a command. Possibly Mr. Smith had committed the
unpardonable indignity of showing my lord the way over a particularly
stiff fence he was hesitating at. At any rate the language of the
Premier Marquis was violent, and contained some reference to the
disparity between their respective ranks. But the Squire was ready with
his retort. He said, ‘Anyhow, I’d sooner be a rich Squire than a poor
Marquis!’ The field smiled, because the reduced circumstances of the
Marquis of Winchester had been notorious ever since his father had been
secretly buried at midnight in the family vault at Amport, for fear the
bailiffs should seize the body for debt.

There are, for good or ill, no such sportsmen nowadays as there were in
the times before railways came and brought more competition into
existence, making life a business and a struggle, instead of the
light-hearted and irresponsible game that the sporting squires at least
found it. Noble sportsmen do not nowadays, when detained by stress of
weather in a country inn, while away the tedium of the afternoon by
backing the raindrops racing down the window-panes and betting fortunes
on the result. No, that very real bogey, ‘agricultural depression,’ has
stopped that kind of full-blooded prank, and the titled in these
progressive times find their account on the ‘front page’ of
company-promoters’ swindles instead. They barter good names for gold,
and lick the boots of wealthy rogues, instead of kicking their bodies.
Where their fathers scorned to go the sons delight to be. Would the
fathers have done the like had ‘agricultural depression’ come earlier?

The noblemen and the sporting squires of old lived in one mad whirl of
excitement. They gambled on every incident in their lives, and sometimes
even on their death-beds; like the old gamester who, when the doctor
told him he would be dead the next morning, offered to bet him that he
would not! We are not told whether or not the medical man backed his
professional opinion.

[Sidenote: _OLD SPORTSMEN_]

One of the most illuminating side-lights on these truly Corinthian folk
is the story which tells how Lord Albert Conyngham and that classic
sportsman, Mr. George Payne, were travelling from London to Poole by
post-chaise in the last decade of the coaching days--that is to say,
between 1830 and 1840. They found the journey tedious, and so played
écarté, in which they grew so interested that they continued playing all
day and into the night, the chaise being lit with the aid of a patent
lamp which Mr. Payne always took with him on a long journey. The play
was high; £100 a game, with bets on knaves and sequences, and had been
continued with varying success, until when they were passing in the
darkness of night through the New Forest, Mr. Payne, who had been a
heavy loser for some time, had a run of luck. In midst of this exciting
play the post-boy, who, in the secluded glades of the Forest, had
managed to lose the road, stopped the chaise and, dismounting, tapped at
the window. But so engrossed were the two travellers in the cards that
they had not noticed that the conveyance was standing still, and the
post-boy stood tapping there for a long while before he was heard.

‘What on earth do you want?’ angrily asked the winning gambler,
indignant at this interruption.

‘Please, sir,’ replied the post-boy, ‘I’ve lost my way.’

‘Then,’ rejoined Mr. Payne, pulling up the window with a bang, ‘come and
tell us when you’ve found it, and be damned to you!’




XX


Cobbett, that sturdy Radical and consistent grumbler, had an adventure
at Andover, at the ‘George Inn.’ It was in October 1826, on returning
from Weyhill Fair, that he took occasion to dine here. Of course he had
no business or pleasure at the ‘George,’ for he had secured a lodging
elsewhere; but with that obsession of his for agitation he must needs
repair to the inn and dine at the ordinary; less we may be sure for the
sake of the meal than to embrace the opportunity of addressing the
farmers, the cattle-dealers, cheese and hop factors, and bankers whom he
knew would be dining there at Fair-time. It was an opportunity not to be
missed.

He must have been sadly disappointed at first, for there were only about
ten people dining; but when it was seen that this was the well-known
Cobbett, the diners increased, and, after the meal was over, the room
became inconveniently crowded; guests coming from other inns until at
length the room door was left open so that the crowd in the passage and
on the stairs, which were crammed from top to bottom, might listen to
the inevitable harangue on the sins of kings, and governments, and of
landowners, and the criminal stupidity of every one else.

[Sidenote: _COBBETT_]

At this stage of the proceedings, just as the dinner was done, one of
the two friends by whom he was accompanied gave Cobbett’s health. This,
naïvely adds the arch-agitator, ‘was of course followed by a _speech_;
and, as the reader will readily suppose, to have an opportunity of
making a speech was the main motive for my going to dine at _an inn_, at
any hour, and especially at _seven o’clock_ at night.’ That, at any
rate, is frank enough.

After he had been thus holding forth on ruin, past, present, and to
come, for half an hour or so, it seems to have occurred to the landlord
that the company upstairs were drinking very little for so large a
concourse, and he accordingly forced his way through the crowd, up the
staircase, and along the passage into the dining-room. Cobbett had
already cast an unfavourable eye upon that licensed victualler, and
describes him as ‘one Sutton, a rich old fellow, who wore a
round-skirted sleeved fustian waistcoat, with a dirty white apron tied
round his middle, and with no coat on; having a look the _eagerest_ and
the _sharpest_ that I ever saw in any set of features in my whole
lifetime; having an air of authority and of mastership, which, to a
stranger, as I was, seemed quite incompatible with the meanness of his
dress and the vulgarity of his manners: and there being, visible to
every beholder, constantly going on in him a pretty even contest between
the servility of avarice and the insolence of wealth.’

The person who called forth this severe description having forced his
way into the room, some one called out that he was causing an
interruption, to which he replied that that was, in fact, what he had
come to do, because all this speechifying injured the sale of his
liquor! Can it be doubted that this roused all the lion in Cobbett’s
breast? He first of all tells us that ‘the disgust and abhorrence which
such conduct could not fail to excite produced, at first, a desire to
quit the room and the house, and even a proposition to that effect. But,
after a minute or so, to reflect, the company resolved not to quit the
room, but to turn him out of it who had caused the interruption; and the
old fellow, finding himself _tackled_, saved the labour of shoving, or
kicking, him out of the room, by retreating out of the doorway, with all
the activity of which he was master.’

[Sidenote: _WEYHILL FAIR_]

The speech at last finished, the company began to settle down to what
Cobbett calls the ‘real business of the evening, namely, drinking,
smoking, and singing.’ It was a Saturday night, and as there was all the
Sunday morning to sleep in, and as the wives of the company were at a
convenient distance, the circumstances were favourable to an extensive
consumption of ‘neat’ and ‘genuine’ liquors. At this juncture the
landlord announced, through the waiter, that he declined to serve
anything so long as Mr. Cobbett remained in the room! This uncorked all
the vials of wrath of which Cobbett had so large and bitter a supply.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘born and bred, as you know I was, on the borders
of this county, and fond as I am of bacon, Hampshire hogs have with me
always been objects of admiration rather than of contempt; but that
which has just happened here induces me to observe that this feeling of
mine has been confined to hogs of four legs. For my part, I like your
company too well to quit it. I have paid this fellow six shillings for
the wing of a fowl, a bit of bread, and a pint of small beer. I have a
right to sit here; I want no drink, and those who do, being refused it
here, have a right to send to other houses for it, and to drink it
here.’

Mine host, alarmed at this declaration of independence, withdrew the
prohibition, and indeed brought up pipes, tobacco, and the desired
drinks himself; and soon after this entered the room with two gentlemen
who had inquired for Mr. Cobbett, and laying his hand on Cobbett’s knee,
smiled and said the gentlemen wished to be introduced. ‘Take away your
paw,’ thundered the agitator, shaking the strangers by the hand; ‘I am
happy to see you, even though introduced by this fellow.’ After which
they all indulged in the English equivalent of the Scotch ‘willie
waucht’ until half-past two in the morning.

‘But,’ remarks Cobbett, as a parting shot, ‘the next time this old
sharp-looking fellow gets _six shillings_ from me for a dinner, he
shall, if he choose, _cook me_, in any manner that he likes, and season
me with hand so unsparing as to produce in the feeders thirst
unquenchable.’




XXI


Weyhill Fair, which brought Cobbett and the people he harangued into
Andover, is a thoroughly old English institution, and although the old
custom of fairs is gradually dying out, and this, the Largest Fair in
England, is not so important as it was a hundred years ago, it is still
a place where much money changes hands once a year. Weyhill is supposed
to be one of the places mentioned in _Piers Plowman’s Vision_, in the
line:--

    At Wy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair,

and it is the ‘Weydon Priors’ of the _Mayor of Casterbridge_, where
Henchard sells his wife.

Weyhill Fair was once--in the fine fat days of agricultural prosperity,
when England was always at war with France, and corn was dear--a
six-days fair. As the ‘oldest inhabitant’ to be discovered nowadays at
Weyhill will complain, shaking his head sadly the while, ‘There warn’t
none o’ them ’ere ’sheenery fal-lals about in them days to do the wark
o’ men and harses so’s no-one can’t get no decent living like, d’ye
see?’ If by ‘’sheenery,’ you understand mechanical
appliances--‘machinery,’ in fact--to be meant, you will see how
distrustfully the agricultural mind still marches to the modern
quick-step of progress. There is always plenty of machinery on view at
Weyhill Fair: ploughs and harrows, and such like inanimate things, and
machinery in motion; steam threshers, winnowers, binders, and the like,
threshing, and winnowing, and binding the empty air.

[Sidenote: ‘_JOHNNY’S SO LONG AT THE FAIR_’]

There are special days set apart--and more or less rigorously
observed--for Hiring, for Pleasure, for the Hop Fair, and for the sale
of sheep. This great annual fixture begins on Old Michaelmas Eve, 10th
October, and lasts four days, as against the six days, that were all too
short in which to do the business, up to fifty years ago. Railways have
dealt the old English institution of fairs a deadly blow all over the
country, and before many more years have gone the majority of them will
be things of the past. Their reason for existing will then be quite
gone, even as it is now going. Before railways came into being the
farmer travelled little, and his men not at all. From one year’s end to
the other they probably never saw a town beyond their nearest marketing
centre, and they certainly never made the acquaintance of London. So,
since the farmer and his men, the mistress and her maids, could not get
about to buy, it follows that those who had goods to sell had need to
take all the advantage possible of that great and glorious institution,
the Fair.

Bitterly disappointed in the old days were those who, from some reason
or another, were prevented from coming to this Promised Land of gay and
glittering stalls and booths. Jolly and convivial, on the other hand,
were those who had the luck to be able to come. ‘Oh, dear! what can the
matter be? Johnny’s so long at the Fair,’ commences an old country song.
We can guess pretty well what the matter was, just as certainly as if we
had been there ourselves. Johnny, of course, had got too much cider, or
strong, home-brewed October ‘humming ale’ into him, and, as the rustics
would put it, ‘couldn’t stir a peg, were’t ever so.’ And so the girl he
left behind him at the farmhouse had need of all the patience at her
command while she waited for his return. She probably didn’t much
care--for Johnny’s sake; rather for another reason. As thus:--

    He promised he’d buy me a fairing to please me;
    A bunch of blue ribbons to tie up my bonny brown hair.

It was the blue ribbons she wanted, you see. Let us, dear friends, hope
she got them.

Many dangers threatened the Johnnies--the Colin Clouts of that time. The
fair was the happy hunting-ground of Sergeant Kite, who used to treat
the dull-witted fellows until they were stupid as owls, when, _hey
presto!_ the Queen’s Shilling was clapped into their nerveless palms,
and they woke the next morning to find themselves duly enlisted, with a
bunch of parti- ribbons fixed in their hats as a token and badge
of their military servitude. Then ‘what price’ those blue ribbons lying
forgotten in the pocket for the disconsolate fair one? Nothing under a
fine of twenty pounds sterling sufficed to release a recruit in those
days, and as few families could then afford that ransom, the fair was a
turning-point in the career of many a lusty fellow.

The recruiting sergeant still does a little business at Weyhill, but his
claws are nowadays cut very close.

Weyhill, as you approach it, is situated, much to your surprise, not on
a hill at all, but rather on the flat. It is a mere nothing of a
village, and beyond the parish church, the inevitable inn, and the
equally inevitable farmhouse, houses are very much to seek.

[Sidenote: _THE HORSE FAIR_]

The stranger who happens upon the place at any other than fair time is
astonished by the large numbers of open sheds and the numerous clusters
of long, low, thatched, and white-washed cottages, situated on a wide,
open, grassy common beside the road, all empty, and every one bearing
boldly-painted announcements, in black paint, of ‘Hot Dinners,’

‘Refreshments,’ and the like. The stranger might be excused if he
thought this some bankrupt settlement whose vanished inhabitants, like
the people of that mythical place who ‘eked out a precarious existence
by taking in one another’s washing,’ had lived on selling refreshments
to each other until they had finally all died of indigestion. He would
be very much mistaken, however, in his surmise, for this is Weyhill
Fair-ground in undress. If you wish to see it in full swing, you must
visit the spot between 10th and 13th October, when it is lively enough.

The first day is the Sheep Fair. As many as 150,000 sheep have been sold
here on this day. The Horse Fair is held every day; and an astonishing
number and variety of horses there are too. Irish horses, brought all
the way from Cork, Scotch horses, Welsh horses; every kind of horse,
from the Suffolk Punch to the New Forest Pony. Great lumbering young
cart-horses stand behind their pens with manes and tails plaited to
wonderment with straw, for all the world like beauties dressed for the
County Ball, and just as proud and self-conscious. Do you want to buy a
horse of any kind at the Fair? Then don’t!--unless, indeed, you know all
that is to be known about horses, and a bit over; otherwise the dealer
will ‘have’ you, for a dead certainty. To see them showing off a horse’s
good qualities and hiding his bad ones is a liberal education, but see
that you acquire your knowledge at some one else’s expense. With this
determination you can afford to be well amused with the waving of
 flags on long sticks, by which the horses are made to
pirouette before the eyes of likely purchasers, and can safely smile at
the wily dealer’s exclamations of ‘There’s blood!’ ‘Get up, my beauty!’
and ‘Here’s the quality!’

The very pick of the horseflesh, however, does not reach Weyhill. The
dealers bring their stock with them by road from Milford, Holyhead,
Scotland, at the rate of ten miles a day, and as they thus have to come
a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, the journey takes from ten days
to a fortnight. This would be a serious expense and loss of time were it
not for the fact that dealers always look to make sales along the road.

The second day of the Fair is known as Mop Fair, or Molls’ and Johns’
Day. Its official title is the Hiring, or Statute Fair. At twelve
o’clock, mid-day, farm-servants, men or women, ‘Molls’ or ‘Johns,’ leave
their employ, and, drawing their wages, offer themselves to be hired for
the coming twelvemonth. They stand in long lines, the carters with a
length of plaited whipcord in their hats, the shepherds with a lock of
wool, and wait while the farmers come and bargain with them. When they
have struck up an agreement, the men proceed to fix  ribbons in
their hats, and do their best to have a merry time with the wages they
have just received.

[Sidenote: _MINOR TRADES_]

There is certainly every opportunity of spending money on the spot.
Steam merry-go-rounds keep up a continual screeching and bellowing;
stalls with all manner of toys and nick-nacks of the most grotesque
shapes and hideous colouring; cake and sweetmeat stalls, loaded, as
Weyhill stalls have been from time immemorial, with Salisbury
gingerbread; Aunt Sallies; try-your-strength machines, and a hundred
others compete for the rustic’s coin. Then, if he wants a new suit of
clothes, here is the clothier’s stall, where Hodge can bespeak a suit,
wear it during the next twelve months, and pay for it next Fair, just as
his father and grandfather used to do before him. All the booths
visited, the horse medicines stall inspected, the latest improvements in
agricultural machinery gaped at, Hodge repairs to the refreshment
hovels, wherein certain crafty men who have come down for the occasion
from London are awaiting him, to treat the unsuspecting yokel to drinks,
to lure him on to play cards, and finally to cheat him and pick his
pockets in the most finished and approved fashion. For these gentry, and
for the disorderly in general, there is a police-station on the ground,
with cells all complete, and with local magistrates every morning to
hear cases, and to consign prisoners, if necessary, to Winchester Gaol,
sixteen miles away.

The third and fourth days are now given up to the Pleasure and Hop
Fairs. One of the smaller trades connected with the malting and general
agricultural industries is that of malt-shovel and barn-shovel making.
These are wooden shovels of a peculiar shape, and are sold only at one
stall. Another of the minor businesses is that of umbrella selling. The
umbrellas are very fine and large, and of a kind that would make a
marked man of any Londoner who should use one in town.

The Cheese Fair is now a small one, dealings generally being confined to
local folks, who delight in the Blackmore and ‘Blue Vinney’ cheeses of
this and the adjoining counties. London dealers still attend the Hop
Fair, in which many thousands of pounds’ worth of hops change hands to
the drinking of much champagne, brought on to the ground by the
cart-load, as in the brave days of yore. There are two distinct hop
markets, the Farnham Row and the Country Side. Hops from Farnham,
Bentley, Petersfield, Liphook, and other neighbouring places find a
ready market. They are sold more exclusively by sample than formerly,
and so only a few ‘pockets,’ as the tightly packed sacks are named, are
visible. Round them dealers may be seen, rubbing the hops in their hands
and smelling them with a knowing look, while the vendor cuts another
sample out of the pocket for the next likely customer. He does this with
a singular steel instrument called a ‘sample drawer.’ First a sharp and
long-bladed knife is thrust into the hard mass, and two sides cut, and
then the broad-bladed ‘drawer’ driven in and screwed tight, bringing out
a compact square of hops to be tested.

By nine o’clock every night all the booths and stalls have to be closed,
and stillness reigns over the scene, save for the cough of the sheep,
the occasional lowing of the cattle, or the fretful whinnying of a
wakeful horse. And when the last day of the Fair is done, the booths are
all shut up and deserted, and desolation reigns again for a year.




XXII


[Sidenote: _ABBOT’S ANN_]

The trail of the Romans is over all the surroundings of Andover, and
they must have loved this fishful and fertile valley well, for ample
relics of extensive settlements and gorgeous villas have been unearthed
by the plough. Some of the fine mosaic pavements discovered here are now
in the British Museum, and every now and again the shepherd or the
ploughman picks up a worn and battered coin of the Cæsars in the
neighbouring fields. One of the finest Roman pavements came from the
village of Abbot’s Ann, a short distance away, under the shadow of the
great bulk of Bury Hill, which, crowned with prehistoric earthworks of
cyclopean size, frowns down upon the valley. The whimsical name of this
village and that of Little Ann derive from the stream, the Ann, or
Anton, on whose banks they are situated.

In this village of Abbot’s Ann there still prevails a remarkable custom.
On the death of a young unmarried person of the parish, his or her
friends and relatives make a funeral garland, or chaplet, similar to the
one sketched overleaf, in paper, and hang it from the ceiling of the
church. The interior of the building now holds quite a number of these
singular mementoes, the oldest dating back to the last century. They are
fashioned of cardboard and white paper, something in the shape of a
crown, with elaborately cut rosettes and with five paper gloves
suspended, on two of which are recorded the name, the age, and the date
of death of the deceased whose memory is thus kept alive, while the
other three are inscribed with texts or verses from favourite hymns. The
particulars of age and death are repeated on a little wooden shield
above.

[Illustration: FUNERAL GARLAND, ABBOT’S ANN.]

During the last eight years three of these memorials have been added.
They are placed here after having been carried in front of the coffin on
the day of the funeral. On such occasions the garland is carried by two
girls, dressed in white, with curiously folded handkerchiefs on their
heads. There is now only one other place in England, at Matlock, in
Derbyshire, where this curious custom survives.

[Sidenote: _THE WALLOPS_]

These villages, together with Amport, Thruxton, Monxton, and East
Cholderton, lie in the triangular district between the branching of the
two great routes of the road to Exeter. Just out of Andover, on the
rising road, stands the old toll-house that commanded either route, with
the mileage to various towns still displayed prominently on its walls.
The right-hand road leads to the Weyhill and Amesbury branch of the
Exeter Road, while the left-hand fork is the main road to Salisbury.
Passing this toll-house, the old road runs through an inhospitable
succession of uplands which are for the most part a weariness alike to
mind and body, whether you walk, or cycle, or drive a horse, or urge
forth your wild career on a motor-car. Going westwards, the gradient is
chiefly a rising one for a long distance after leaving Andover behind,
and it is not until ‘the Wallops’ are reached, at Little (or Middle)
Wallop, lying in a hollow where a little stream trickles across the
road, that any relief is experienced.

It must be Little Wallop to which Mr. Thomas Hardy refers in the _Mayor
of Casterbridge_, where the ruined and broken-hearted Henchard, after
taking up his early occupation of hay-trusser, becomes employed at a
‘pastoral farm near the old western highway.... He had chosen the
neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at
a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare
was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.’

The Wallops are interesting places, despite their silly name. There are
Over, and Nether, and Middle, or, as they are otherwise styled, Upper,
Lower, and Little Wallop. According to one school of antiquaries (who
must by no means be suspected of joking), the Wallop district is to be
identified with the ‘Gualoppum’ described by an old chronicler, a
district, appropriately enough, the scene of a great battle in which
Vortigern was defeated by the Saxons. There are, of course, local
derivations of the meaning of this place-name, together with a belief
that to Sir John Wallop, an ancestor of the Earl of Portsmouth, who
‘walloped the French’ in one or other of our many mediæval battles with
that nation, we owe that very active, not to say slangy verb, ‘to
wallop.’ But, unhappily for unscientific theories, there is a little
stream, called the Wallop, flowing through these villages, to which they
owe their generic name; the name of the stream itself deriving from the
Anglo-Saxon ‘Weallan,’ to boil or bubble; the root of our English word
‘well.’

Of these villages, Little Wallop alone is on the road, and is merely an
offshoot of the others, called into existence by the traffic which
followed this course in the old coaching days. Since railways have left
the roads lonely it has simply slumbered, ‘far from the madding crowd’s
ignoble strife,’ and its inhabitants are presumably happy in their
retirement; although, when days are short and nights are long, and the
stormy winds do blow, it is quite conceivable that there are more
cheerful and warmer situations.

Three miles from here the road leaves Hampshire and enters Wilts, and
two miles onwards from that point, after passing ‘Lobcombe Corner,’ the
junction of the Stockbridge road, is seen that famous old coaching inn,
the ‘Pheasant,’ known much better under its other name, ‘Winterslow
Hut.’




XXIII


[Sidenote: _HAZLITT_]

There are few more desolate and cheerless places in England than the
spot where this old coaching inn stands beside the open road, with the
unenclosed downs stretching away to the far horizon, fold after fold.
Somewhere amid these hills and hollows, but quite hidden, is the village
of West Winterslow, from which the ‘Hut’ obtains its name. The place,
save for the periodical passing of the coaches, was as solitary in old
times as it is now, and its quiet as profound. The very name is
chilling, and as excellently descriptive as it is possible for a name to
be.

When, coming within sight of its isolated roof-tree from the summit of
the hills on either side, the coach-guards used to blow fanfares on
their bugles as a reminder for the ostler to have his fresh teams ready,
the inn and its surrounding stables woke into life, and when they were
gone their several ways, it dozed again. Save that it doubtless looked
more prosperous then, the present appearance of ‘Winterslow Hut’ is
identical with its aspect of sixty years ago. The same horse-pond by the
roadside, the same trees, only older and more decrepit, the same
prehistoric <DW18>s and tumuli on the unchanging downs; it must have been
capable of absorbing the fun and jollity of a fair, and still presenting
its characteristically dour and dreary aspect; but now that, sitting in
the bay window of the parlour that commands the road in either
direction, you may watch the highway by the half-hour and see no
traveller, the emptiness is appalling.

To this solitary outpost of civilisation came William Hazlitt, critic
and essayist, during several years, for quietude. For four years, from
1808 to 1812, he and his wife lived in a cottage at West Winterslow, on
the small income derived from her other cottage property there,
supplemented by the sums the wayward Hazlitt earned fitfully by the
practice of literature. Then they removed to London, where they
disagreed, Hazlitt retiring to the ‘Hut’ in 1819, and leaving his wife
in town. Nervous and irritable, he wanted quiet, nor can it be doubted
that in this spot he found what he sought. He was cursed, according to
the widely different beliefs of his friends, with ‘an ingrained
selfishness,’ or ‘a morbid self-consciousness,’ and oil the downs he
would walk, for the pleasure of having the neighbourhood all to himself,
from forty to fifty miles a day. He wrote his _Winterslow_ essays here,
and his _Napoleon_, for whom he had an almost insane reverence. The
‘diabolical scowl’ of Hazlitt when Napoleon or any other of his pet
susceptibilities were abused must have been worth seeing.

‘Now,’ says a literary hero-hunter, who has visited ‘Winterslow Hut,’ as
a place of pilgrimage,--‘now it is a desolate place, fallen into decay,
and tenanted by a labouring man and his family, cultivating a small farm
of some thirty acres, and barely able to make a living out of it. In
winter two or three weeks will sometimes elapse without even a beggar or
tramp or cart passing the door. On the ground floor, looking out upon a
horse-pond, flanked by two old lime-trees, is a little parlour, which
was the one probably used by Hazlitt as his sitting-room. At the other
end of the house is a large empty room, formerly devoted to
cock-fighting matches and singlestick combats. It was with a strange and
eerie feeling that I contemplated this little parlour, and pictured to
myself the many solitary evenings during which Hazlitt sat in it
enjoying copious libations of his favourite tea (for during the last
fifteen years of his life he never tasted alcoholic drinks of any kind)
perhaps reading _Tom Jones_ for the tenth time, or enjoying

[Sidenote: _A LITERARY RECLUSE_]

[Illustration: ‘WINTERSLOW HUT.’]

one of Congreve’s comedies, or Rousseau’s _Confessions_, or writing, in
his large flowing hand, a dozen pages of the essay on _Persons one would
Wish to have Seen_, or _On Living to One’s Self_. One cannot imagine any
retreat more consonant with the feelings of this lonely thinker, during
one of his periods of seclusion, than the out-of-the-world place in
which I stood. In winter time it must have been desolate beyond
description--on wild nights especially--“heaven’s chancel-vault” blind
with sleet--the fierce wind sweeping down from the bare wolds around,
and beating furiously against the doors and windows of the unsheltered
hostelry.’

It is not to be supposed that Hazlitt was insensible to the dreariness
of the spot. ‘Here, _even_ here,’ he says, as though the dolour of the
place had come home to him, ‘with a few old authors I can manage to get
through the summer or winter months without ever knowing what it is to
feel _ennui_. They sit with me at breakfast; they walk out with me
before dinner. After a long walk through unfrequented tracts, after
starting the hare from the fern, or hearing the wing of the raven
rustling above my head, or being greeted by the woodman’s “stern
good-night,” as he strikes into his narrow homeward path, I can “take
mine ease at mine inn,” beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with
Signor Orlando Friscobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance I have.’

His _Farewell to Essay Writing_ was written here 20th February 1828. He
had long given up the intemperance of former years, and cultivated
literature on copious tea-drinking. ‘As I quaff my libations of tea in
a morning,’ he says, ‘I love to watch the clouds sailing from the west,
and fancy that “the spring comes slowly up this way.” In this hope,
while “fields are dank, and ways are mire,” I follow the same direction
to a neighbouring wood, where, having gained the dry, level greensward,
I can see my way for a mile before me, closed in on each side by
copse-wood, and ending in a point of light more or less brilliant, as
the day is bright or cloudy.’ And so this harbinger of our own literary
neurotics continues, dropping into a morbid introspective strain,
pulling up his soul, like a plant, by the roots, to see how it is
growing, and babbling to the world, between the jewel-work of his
literature, of his follies and his unrest. Strange, that this wiry
pedestrian, this apostle of fresh air, should be of the same dough of
which the degenerates of our time are compounded.




XXIV


It was here, however, that one of the most thrilling episodes of the
road was enacted in the old days. The Mail from Exeter to London had
left Salisbury on the night of 20th October 1816, and proceeded in the
usual way for several miles, when what was thought to be a large calf
was seen trotting beside the horses in the darkness. The team soon
became extremely nervous and fidgety, and as the inn was approached they
could scarcely be kept under control.

[Sidenote: _AN ESCAPED LIONESS_]

At the moment when the coachman pulled up to deliver his bags, one of
the leading horses was suddenly seized by the supposed calf. The horses
kicked and plunged violently, and it was with difficulty the driver
could prevent the coach from being overturned. The guard drew his
blunderbuss and was about to shoot the mysterious assailant when several
men, accompanied by a large mastiff, appeared in sight. The foremost,
seeing that the guard was about to fire, pointed a pistol at his head,
swearing that he would be shot if the beast was killed.

Every one then perceived that this ferocious ‘calf’ was nothing less
than a lioness. The dog was set on to attack her, and she thereupon left
the horse and turned on him. He turned and ran, but the lioness caught
him and tore him to pieces, carrying the remains in her mouth under a
granary. The spot was then barricaded to prevent her escape, and a noose
being thrown over her neck, she was secured and marched off to captivity
again.

It is said that the horse when attacked fought with great spirit, and
would probably have beaten off his assailant with his fore-feet had he
been at liberty; but in his frantic plunges he became entangled in the
harness. The lioness, it seems, attacked him in front, springing at his
throat and fastening the claws of her fore-feet on either side of the
neck, while her hind-feet tore at his chest. The horse, although
fearfully mangled, survived. The showmen of the time were evidently
quite as enterprising as those of these latter days, for the menagerie
proprietor purchased the horse and exhibited him the next day at
Salisbury Fair, with excellent results in the shape of increased
gate-money.

The passengers on this extraordinary occasion were absolutely
terror-stricken. Bounding off the coach, they made a wild rush for the
inn, and, reaching the door, slammed it to and bolted it, to the
exclusion of one poor fellow who, not active enough, found himself shut
out in the road. The lioness, pursuing the dog, actually brushed against
him. When she was secured, the poltroons inside the house opened the
door and let the half-fainting traveller in. They gave him refreshments,
and he recovered sufficiently to be able to write an account of the
event for the local papers; but in a few days he became a raving maniac,
and was sent to an asylum at Laverstock. For over twenty-seven years he
lived there, incurable, and died in 1843.

The leader attacked by the lioness was a famous horse, even before that
affair. There were many such in the coaching age. Animals unmanageable
on the racecourse were frequently sold to coach-proprietors, and soon
learnt discipline on the roads. ‘Pomegranate’ was his name. A ‘thief’ on
the course, and a bad-tempered brute in the stable, he had worked on the
Exeter Mail for some time before this dramatic episode in his career
found him, for a time, a home in a menagerie.

[Sidenote: _SALISBURY_]

The fame of the affair was great and lasting. That coaching specialist,
James Pollard, drew, and R. Havell engraved, a plate showing the
dramatic scene, which was dedicated to Thomas Hasker, Superintendent of
His Majesty’s Mails. In it you see Joseph Pike, the guard, rising to
shoot the very heraldic-looking lioness, and the passengers encouraging
him in the background, from the safe retreat of the first-floor windows.
It will be observed that this is apparently the lioness’s first spring,
and yet those passengers are already upstairs: at once a striking
testimony to their agility and a warranty of the exquisite truth of the
saying that fear lends wings to the feet.




XXV


Salisbury spire and the distant city come with the welcome surprise of a
Promised Land after these bleak downs. Even three miles away the
unenclosed wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three Mile
Hill, down, down, down to the lowlands on a smooth and uninterrupted
road, to where the trees and the houses can be distinguished, nestling
around and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet ahead. It is
coming thus with that needle-pointed spire, so long and so prominently
in view, that the story of its having been built to its extraordinary
height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the strayed footsteps of
travellers across the solitudes of Salisbury Plain may readily be
believed.

Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance, and has an air of
modernity that quite belies its age. Few places in England have so
well-ascertained an origin. We can fix the very year, six hundred and
eighty years ago, when it began to be, and yet, although there is the
cathedral to prove its age, with the Poultry Cross, and very many
ancient houses happily still standing, it has a general air of anything
but mediævalism. This curious feeling that strikes every visitor is
really owing to the generous and well-ordered plan on which the city was
originally laid out; broad streets being planned in geometrical
precision, and the blocks of houses built in regular squares.

That phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom Pinch, thought Salisbury ‘a
very desperate sort of place; an exceedingly wild and dissipated
city’--a view of it which is not shared by any one else. I wish I could
tell you to which inn it was that he resorted to have dinner, and to
await the arrival of Martin. A coaching inn, of course, for Martin came
by coach from London. But whether it was the ‘White Hart,’ or the ‘Three
Swans’ (which, alas! is no longer an inn), or the ‘King’s Arms,’ or the
‘George,’ is more than I or any one else can determine.

[Sidenote: _NEW SARUM_]

Salisbury is by no means desperate or dissipated, even though it be
market-day, and although itinerant cutlery vendors may still sell
seven-bladed knives, with never a cut among them, to the unwary. It is
true that Mr. Thomas Hardy has given us, in _On the Western Circuit_, a
picture of blazing orgies at Melchester Fair, with steam-trumpeting
merry-go-rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women no better
than they ought to be, and an amorous young barrister much worse than he
should have been; and it is true that by ‘Melchester’ this fair city of
Salisbury is meant; but you can conjure up no very accurate picture of
this ancient place from those pages. The real Salisbury is extremely
urbane and polished, decorous and well-ordered. It is graceful and
sunny, and has, in fact, all the sweetness of mediævalism without its
sternness, and affords a thorough contrast with Winchester, which frowns
upon you where Salisbury smiles. One need not waver from one’s
allegiance to Winchester to admit so much.

Salisbury is still known in official documents as ‘New Sarum.’ It is,
nevertheless, of a quite respectable antiquity, its newness dating from
that day, 28th April 1220, when Bishop Poore laid the foundation-stone
of the still existing cathedral. There are romantic incidents in the
exodus from Old Sarum on its windy height upon the downs, a mile and a
half away, to these ‘rich champaign fields and fertile valleys,
abounding with the fruits of the earth, and watered by living streams,’
in this ‘sink of Salisbury Plain,’ where the Bourne, the Wylye, the
Avon, and the Nadder flow in innumerable runlets through the meads.

Old Sarum was old indeed. Its history strikes rootlets deep down into
the Unknown. A natural hillock upon the wild downs, its defensible
position rendered it a camp for the earliest aboriginal tribes, who,
always at war with one another, lived for safety’s sake in such bleak
and inhospitable places when they would much rather be hunting and
enjoying life generally in the sheltered wooded vales and fertile
plains. These tribes heaped up the first artificial earthworks that ever
strengthened this historic hill, and they were succeeded during the long
march of those dim centuries by Romans, Saxons, and Danes. The Romans,
with their unerring military instinct, saw the importance of the hill,
and added to the simple defences they found there. They called the place
_Sorbiodunum_, and made it a great strategic station. The Saxons
strengthened the fortifications in their turn, and at the time of the
Norman Conquest a city had grown up under the shelter of the citadel.

In its deserted state to-day, the site of Old Sarum vividly recalls the
appearance presented by an extinct volcano, the conical hill rising from
the downs with the suddenness of an upheaval, and the area enclosed
within the concentric rings of banks and ditches forming a hollow space
similar to a crater. The total area enclosed within these fortifications
is about 28 acres. Within this space was comprised that ancient city,
and in its very centre, overlooking everything else, and encompassed by
a circular fosse and bank, 100 feet in height, stood the citadel. The
site of this castle is now overgrown with dense thickets of shrubs and
brambles; the fragments of its flint and rubble walls, 12 feet thick,
and some remaining portions of its gateways affording evidence of its
old-time strength.

[Sidenote: _OLD SARUM_]

Within this city, enclosed for centuries by the ring-fence of these
fortifications, stood the cathedral, in a position just below the Castle
ward. Its exact site and size (although not a fragment of it is
standing) were discovered in the summer of 1834. That portion of the
vanished city had been laid down as pasture, and the drought of that
year revealed the plan of the cathedral, in a distinct brown outline
upon the grass. This building, completed in 1092 by Bishop Osmund,
furnished the stone in later years for the spire of Salisbury Cathedral
and for the walls of the Close, in which, by St. Anne’s Gate, many
sculptured fragments of these relics from Old Sarum may yet be seen.

A variety of circumstances brought about the removal of the cathedral
from Old Sarum. Water was lacking on that height, and winds raged so
furiously around it that the monks could not hear the priests say Mass;
and, worse than all, during the Papal Interdict, the King, in revenge
for many ecclesiastical annoyances, transferred the custody of the
Castle of Old Sarum from the bishops to his own creatures, who locked
the monks out of their monastery and church on one occasion when they
had gone on some religious procession. When the monks returned, they
found entrance denied them, and were forced to remain in the open air
during the whole of a frosty winter night. There was no end to the
hardships which those Men of Wrath brought upon the Church. No wonder
that Peter of Blois cried out, ‘What has the House of the Lord to do
with castles? It is the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple of Baalim. Let
us in God’s name descend into the plain.’

The removal decided upon, it remained to choose a site. Tradition tells
us that the Virgin Mary appeared to Bishop Poore in a vision, and told
him to build the church on a spot called Merryfield; and has it that the
site was chosen by the fall of an arrow shot from the ramparts of Old
Sarum. If that was the case, there must have been something miraculous
in that shot, for the place where Salisbury Cathedral is built is a mile
and a half away from those ramparts. But perhaps the bishop or the
legends used the long bow in a very special sense.

The cathedral was completed in sixty years, receiving its final
consecration in 1260; but the great spire was not finished until a
hundred years later. The city was an affair of rapid growth, receiving a
charter of incorporation seven years after being founded. Seventeen
years later, Bishop Bingham dealt a final blow at the now utterly ruined
city of Old Sarum by diverting the old Roman road to the West from its
course through Old Sarum, Bemerton, and Wilton, and making a highway
running directly to New Sarum, and crossing the Avon by the new bridge
which he had built at Harnham. Old Sarum could by this time make little
or no resistance, for it was deserted, save for a few who could not
bring themselves to leave the home of their forefathers. Wilton,
however, which was a thriving town, bitterly resented this diversion of
the roads, and petitioned against it, but without avail. From that date
Wilton’s decline set in, and the rise of New Sarum progressed at an even
greater speed. A clothing trade sprang up and prospered, and many Royal
visits gave the citizens an air of importance. They waxed rich and
arrogant, and were eternally

[Sidenote: _THE MARTYRS_]

[Illustration: SALISBURY CATHEDRAL (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).]

quarrelling with the bishops, one of whom they murdered in the turbulent
times that prevailed during Jack Cade’s rebellion. Bishop Ayscough was
that unfortunate prelate. He had cautiously retired to Edington, but a
furious body of Salisbury malcontents marched out across the Plain, and
dragging him from the altar of the church, where he was saying Mass,
took him to an adjacent hill-top, and slew him with the utmost
barbarity. It was for the benefit of these unruly citizens that one of
Jack Cade’s quarters was consigned from London to Salisbury and elevated
there on a pole, as a preliminary warning. Full punishment followed a
little later.




XXVI


It is really too great a task to follow the history of Salisbury through
the centuries to the present time; nor, indeed, since the city and the
cathedral are from our present point of view but incidents along the
Exeter Road, would it be desirable to dwell very long on their story,
which, as may have been judged from what has already been said, is an
exceedingly turbulent one. The fearful martyrdoms carried out in
Fisherton Fields by the bloody hell-hounds of the Marian Persecution
still stain the records of the Church; nor, although the very reading of
them turn brain and body sick, and make even the architectural
enthusiast almost turn away in disgust from that lovely cathedral, may
God grant that they ever be forgotten, as in the England of to-day they
would almost seem to be. Hellish ferocity, damnable frauds, how they
smirch those sculptured stones and cry insistently for remembrance!

Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop in the time of Henry the Eighth, was alive to
it all, and cleared away the false relics; the ‘stinking boots, mucky
combs, ragged rochetts, rotten girdles, pyled purses, great bullocks’
horns, locks of hair, filthy rags, and gobbets of wood,’ which he found
here; but, with less courage than others, he recanted in Mary’s reign.
Sherfield, Recorder of Salisbury, was another reformer, but he lived in
less dangerous times for such men. It was in 1629 that he smashed the
stained-glass window, representing the Creation, in St. Edmund’s Church.
In other times he would assuredly have been burnt for this act; as it
was, he was summoned before the Star Chamber. He pleaded that the window
did not contain a true history of the Creation, and objected that God
was represented as ‘a little old man in a long blue coat,’ which he held
was ‘an indignity offered to Almighty God.’ He was committed to the
Fleet Prison for this, fined £500, and required to apologise to the
Bishop of Salisbury. Fortunate Mr. Sherfield!

[Sidenote: _MURDER OF THE HARTGILLS_]

This fair city has been almost as much of a Golgotha as the settlements
of savage African kinglets are wont to be. Shakespeare has made mention
of the execution of the Duke of Buckingham here in 1484 by Richard the
Third, but many an one has suffered and left no such trace. That such
executions were generally unjust and almost always too severe is their
sufficient condemnation; but the hanging of Charles, Lord Stourton, in
1556, is an exception. The affair for which he was put to death was the
murder of the two Hartgills, father and son, at Kilmington, Somerset,
and it affords an unusually instructive glimpse into the manners of the
period. It seems that William Hartgill had long been steward to the
previous Lord Stourton, the father of Charles. Like most stewards, he
had profited by his stewardship, over and above his salary, to a
considerable extent. There was no friendship wasted between him and the
new lord, but the quarrels which had taken place between William
Hartgill and his son on the one side, and Charles, Lord Stourton, and
his servants on the other, finally came to a head when my lord demanded
a written undertaking from his mother that she would never marry again,
and that Hartgill should be bond for the undertaking being kept. The
widowed Lady Stourton was residing at the Hartgills’ house when this
demand was made. She refused to have anything to do with such a paper,
and Hartgill bluntly declined as well. Lord Stourton would then appear
to have determined on revenge for this defeat, and eventually, after the
Hartgills had been on several occasions waylaid, threatened, and
attacked by his servants, he conceived the devilish plan of a pretended
reconciliation over this and other disputes in the village churchyard of
Kilmington, the occasion to be used as a means of taking them off their
guard, and finally disposing of them. The two victims were suspicious of
this apparent friendliness; but, unhappily for them, eventually agreed
to meet in that God’s Acre, on 12th January 1556, there to settle all
accounts and differences. They met, and, at a previously arranged
signal, Lord Stourton’s servants rushed upon the Hartgills and stabbed
and battered them to death in a revoltingly cruel manner, while their
master looked on with approval. The details of this cold-blooded
atrocity are fully set forth in the trials of that period, for the
satisfaction of any one greedy of horrors.

[Sidenote: _THE DEVIL’S HEALTH_]

This was in the reign of Queen Mary, when Protestants were burned at the
stake with the approval of Roman Catholics; but not even in those brutal
times could this affair be hushed up. Lord Stourton was arrested,
brought to trial in London, and, together with four of his servants,
found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death. Justice was commendably
swift. The two Hartgills had been done to death on the 12th of January,
and on the second day of March in the same year my lord set out under
escort from the Tower of London for Salisbury, the place of execution.
The melancholy cavalcade came down the Exeter Road, the chief figure in
it set astride a horse, with legs and arms pinioned. The first night
they lay at Hounslow, the second at Staines, the third at Basingstoke,
and thence to Salisbury, where, in the Market Place, on the morning of
the 6th of March, they hanged him with a silken cord. His servants were
turned off at the end of quite common hempen ropes, which doubtless did
their business quite as neatly. The body of this prime malefactor, the
organiser of the crime, was buried with much ceremony in the cathedral,
but those of the lesser criminals were treated (we may suppose) with
less reverence, because you may search the building in vain for tomb or
epitaph to their memory. But--quaintest touch of all--the silken rope by
which Lord Stourton swung was suspended here, over his tomb, where it
remained for many a long year afterwards.

The next outstanding landmark in the way of executions is the hanging of
a prisoner who had just been awarded a sentence when he threw a brickbat
at the Chief Justice. His lordship was considerably damaged and for this
assault pronounced sentence of death upon him. The execution took place
at once, outside the Council House, the unfortunate man’s right hand
being first struck off.

The Civil War did not result in anything very tragical for Salisbury,
the operations in and around the city being quite unimportant. The
‘Catherine Wheel Inn,’ however, was the scene of much alarm among the
superstitious, when, according to a gruesome story, the Cavaliers
assembled there, having toasted the King and the Royal family, proceeded
to drink the health of the Devil,--and the Devil appeared, the room
becoming filled with ‘noisome fumes of sulphur, and a hideous monster,
which was the Devil, no doubt,’ entering, and grabbing the giver of the
toast, flying away with him out of the window.

Salisbury was the scene of Penruddocke’s rising for the King in 1655. He
was a county gentleman, of Compton Chamberlayne, and with some others
and a band of a hundred and fifty horsemen, rode into the city at four
o’clock in the morning of 14th March. They seized the Judges of Assize
in their beds, opened the doors of the prison, and imprisoned the judges
in the place of the released convicts. Then, finding the citizens too
timid to join them in their revolt against Cromwell, they sped across
country, into Devon, where they were captured.

Charles the Second was welcomed by Salisbury’s citizens, just as they
welcomed every one else; practising with much success St. Paul’s
admirable precept, to be ‘all things to all men.’ When James the Second
came here, on his way to meet, and fight, the Prince of Orange, he was
escorted, with every show of deference and respect, to his lodgings at
the Bishop’s Palace by the Mayor, and when he had slunk away, and the
Prince came, less than four weeks later, and was lodged in the same
house, the same Mayor did precisely the same thing.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century onward the citizens began
to dearly love kings and great personages, or, if they did not love
them, effectually pretended to do so. When plague ravaged the city of
London, no one coming from that direction was allowed to enter
Salisbury, and even Salisbury’s own citizens returning home from that
infected centre were obliged to remain outside for three months, while
goods were not permitted to be brought nearer than Three Mile Hill. But
Charles the Second and his Court, flying from London from the disease,
were welcomed all the same!




XXVII


[Sidenote: _BRUTAL SCENES_]

Coach passengers entering Salisbury even so late as 1835 were sometimes
witnesses of shocking scenes that, however picturesque they might have
rendered mediæval times, were brutalising and degrading in a civilised
era. Almost every year of the nineteenth century up to that date was
fruitful in executions. In 1801 there were ten: seven for the crime of
sheep-stealing, one for horse-stealing, one for stealing a calf, and one
for highway robbery. The practice of hanging criminals on the scenes of
their crimes afforded spectacles of the most extraordinary character, as
instanced in the procession that accompanied two murderers, George
Carpenter and George Ruddock, from Fisherton Gaol, on the north-west of
the city, to the place of their execution on Warminster Down, 15th March
1813. Such parades were senseless, since no one ever dreamed of a rescue
being attempted; but, all the same, the condemned men, placed in a cart
and accompanied by a clergyman preaching of Kingdom Come, preceded by
the hangman and followed by eight men carrying two coffins, were
escorted all the way by a troop of Wiltshire Yeomanry, followed by some
two hundred constables and local gentlemen, all walking and carrying
white staves; with bailiffs, sheriffs, under-sheriffs, magistrates, a
hundred mounted squires, a posse of ‘javelin men,’ more clergymen, the
gaoler and his assistants, more javelin men and sheriff’s officers, more
yeomanry, and, at last, bringing up the rear, a howling mob, numbering
many thousands. As for the central objects in this show, ‘they died
penitent,’ we are told; and indeed they could do nothing less, seeing to
what trouble they had thus put a goodly proportion of the county.

Executions for all manner of crimes were so many that it would be idle
to detail them; but some stand out prominently by reason of their
circumstances. For example, the hanging of Robert Turner Watkins in
1819, for a murder near Purton, presents a lurid scene. His wife had
died of a broken heart shortly after his arrest, and his mother was
among the spectators of his end. The same kind of procession accompanied
him across Salisbury Plain to the place of execution, and a similar mob
made the occasion a holiday. Mother and son were able to bid one another
farewell, owing to an unexpected halt on the road; and when they made a
halt for the refreshments which the long journey demanded, the condemned
man’s children were brought to him.

‘Mammy is dead,’ said one. ‘Ah!’ replied the man, ‘and so will your
daddy be, shortly.’ At the fatal spot he prayed with the chaplain, and
was allowed to read to the people a psalm which he had chosen. It was
Psalm 108, which, on reference, will not prove to be particularly
appropriate to the occasion. Then he blessed the fifteen thousand or so
present, felt the rope, and remarked that it could only kill the body,
and was turned off, amid the sudden and unexpected breaking of one of
the most terrific thunderstorms ever experienced on the Plain.

[Sidenote: _HUMANE JURIES_]

They hanged a gipsy, one Joshua Shemp, in 1801, for stealing a horse,
and afterwards discovered that he was innocent, according to a monument
still to be seen in Odstock churchyard. In 1802 John Everett suffered
death for uttering forged bank-notes, followed in 1820 by William Lee,
who died for the same offence. So late as 1835, two men were hanged for
arson; but public opinion had already been aroused against such
severity, judges and juries taking every advantage offered by faults in
the drawing up of indictments to acquit all those criminals not guilty
of murder whose crimes were then met by capital punishment. The statutes
left no choice but death for the convicted incendiary, the horse-or
sheep-stealer, and many another; and so many a guilty person was
acquitted by judges and juries horrified by the thought of incurring
blood-guiltiness by sending such men to the scaffold. The law allowed
loopholes for escape, and so when the _straw_-rick, to which a prisoner
was charged with setting fire, was proved to have been _hay_, he was
found ‘Not guilty.’ Blackstone called this action taken by juries ‘pious
perjury,’ and so it certainly was when, to avoid shedding blood, they
used to find £5 and £10 notes which prisoners sometimes were charged
with stealing, to be articles to the value of twelvepence or a few
shillings, according as the case required.

The last lawless scenes around Salisbury were enacted at the close of
1830, when the so-called ‘Machinery Riots,’ which had spread all over
the country, culminated here in fights between the Wiltshire Yeomanry
and the discontented agricultural labourers, who, fearing that steam
machinery, then

[Illustration: ST. ANNE’S GATE, SALISBURY.]

[Sidenote: _ALDERBURY_]

beginning to be adopted, was about to take away their livelihood,
scoured the country in bands, wrecking and burning farmsteads and barns.
The ‘Battle of Bishop Down,’ on the Exeter Road between ‘Winterslow Hut’
and Salisbury, was fought on 23rd November, and was caused by the
collision of a large body of rioters who were marching to the city with
the avowed object of pillaging it, and a mixed force of yeomanry and
special constables. All the coaches, together with every other kind of
traffic, were brought to a standstill. Stone-throwing on the part of the
rioters, and bludgeoning by the special constables were succeeded by
charges of the yeomanry, and the contest resulted in the capture of
twenty-two rioters, who were locked up in Fisherton Gaol. The next day a
number of rioters were surprised in the ‘Green Dragon Inn,’ Alderbury,
and marched off to prison; and the day after, twenty-five were taken in
a fight near Tisbury, after one of their number had been killed. There
were no fewer than three hundred and thirty prisoners awaiting trial
when the Special Commissioners arrived for that purpose on 27th
December. Many of the prisoners were transported, and others had short
terms of imprisonment; but a leader, called ‘Commander’ Coote, who was
captured by two constables at the Compasses, Rockbourn, was hanged at
Winchester.




XXVIII


And now for some little-known literary landmarks. Salisbury, of course,
is the scene of some passages in _Martin Chuzzlewit_; but it is outside
the city that we must go, on the road to Southampton, to find the
residence of that eminent architect, Mr. Pecksniff; or the ‘Blue
Dragon,’ where Tom Pinch’s friend, Mrs. Lupin, was landlady. St. Mary’s
Grange, four miles from Salisbury, is the real name of Mr. Pecksniff’s
home, but the house is only vaguely indicated in the novel. It is
different with the ‘Blue Dragon,’ which is an undoubted portrait of the
‘Green Dragon Inn,’ at Alderbury, despite the fact that the sign-board
has since disappeared. ‘A faded, and an ancient dragon he was; and many
a wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail had changed his colour
from a gaudy blue to a faint, lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he
hung; rearing in a state of monstrous imbecility on his hind legs;
waxing, with every month that passed, so much more dim and shapeless,
that as you gazed on him at one side of the sign-board, it seemed as if
he must be gradually melting through it, and coming out upon the other.’

The ‘Green Dragon’ is a quaint gabled village inn, standing back from
the road. It is even more ancient than any one, judging only from its
exterior, would suppose, for a fine fifteenth-century mantelpiece,
adorned with carved crockets and heraldic roses, yet remains in the
parlour, a relic of bygone importance.

As for Mrs. Lupin, the landlady, it is supposed that Dickens drew the
character from a real person. If so, how one would like to have known
that cheery woman. Do you remember how Tom Pinch left Salisbury to seek
his fortune in London? and how Mrs. Lupin met the coach on the London
road with his box in the trap, and a great basket of provisions, with a
bottle of sherry sticking out of it? and how the open-handed fellow
shared the cold roast fowl, the packet of ham in slices, the crusty
loaf, and the other half-dozen items--not forgetting the contents of the
bottle--with the coachman and guard as they drove along the old road to
London through the night?

[Sidenote: _A WORD-PICTURE_]

‘Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees; past cottages and barns, and
people going home from work. Yoho, past donkey-chaises, drawn aside into
the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses, whipped up at a bound
upon the little watercourse, and held by struggling carters close to the
five-barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow turning in the
road. Yoho, by churches dropped down by themselves in quiet nooks, with
rustic burial-grounds about them, where graves are green, and daisies
sleep--for it is evening--on the bosoms of the dead. Yoho, past streams
in which the cattle cool their feet, and where the rushes grow; past
paddock-fences, farms and rick-yards; past last year’s stacks, cut slice
by slice away, and showing in the waning light like ruined gables, old
and brown. Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry
water-splash, and up at a canter to the level road again. Yoho! Yoho!’

Quite so. And an excellent picture of the coaching age, although ‘Yoho!’
smacks too much of the sea for a coach. In his haste he wrote that word
when he surely meant ‘Tallyho!’ Nor is this a correct portrait of the
Exeter Road by any manner of means. Dickens, usually so precise in
topographical details, has generalised here. A true and stirring picture
of country roads in general, there are farms, and villages, and churches
all too many for this highway. It should have been ‘Yoho! across the
bleak and barren down. Yoho! by the blasted oak on the lonely common,’
and so forth, so far as Andover, at any rate. And what was that
water-splash doing on a main road in the flower of the coaching age,
when all the runnels and streams across the mail routes were duly
bridged? But it is not very odd that Dickens should have been so inexact
here, for he began _Martin Chuzzlewit_ in 1843, and it was not until
long after the book was published, in 1848, that he really explored the
Exeter Road. Forster tells us that Dickens, in company with himself,
Leech, and Lemon, stayed at Salisbury in the March of that year, and
‘passed a March day in riding over every part of the Plain; visiting
Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt’s “Hut” at Winterslow.’

It must be obvious how exquisitely fitted, both by reason of its
situation and circumstances, ‘Winterslow Hut’ is for the novelist’s use,
and that, had he explored it before, that wild spot would have found a
place in the pages of _Martin Chuzzlewit_, together with detailed
references to some of Salisbury’s old coaching inns, of which there were
many, this being a meeting-place of several roads, besides being on the
great highway to the West.

[Sidenote: _VANISHED INNS_]

So far back as 1786 there were three coaches passing through Salisbury
on their way from London to Exeter, daily. Firstly, the ‘Post Coach’
every morning at eight o’clock, with the up coach to London every
afternoon at four o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Secondly, a mail coach,
specially advertised as carrying a guard all the way, every morning at
ten o’clock, Sundays excepted, and the up mail every night at ten
o’clock, Saturdays excepted. Thirdly, a ‘Diligence,’ which passed
through every night about eight o’clock, the up coach at twelve,
midnight. All these coaches stopped, and were horsed, at the ‘White
Hart.’ In 1797 there were five coaches to and from London, daily, and
three on alternate days; and three waggons, two every day, the other on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.

In those times, when highwaymen were numerous and daring and travellers
appropriately anxious, stage-coach proprietors in Salisbury advertised
the fact of their conveyances being provided with an armed guard, and
that any one making an attempt at robbery would be handed over to
justice. But, notwithstanding such bold announcements, all the friends
and relatives of citizens daring the journey to London used to assemble
on the London road and tearfully watch the coaches as they toiled up
Bishop Down and over the crest of Three Mile Hill, into the Unknown. The
spot is still called ‘Weeping Cross.’

Of the old Salisbury coaching inns, a goodly number have been either
pulled down or converted to other purposes. The ‘King’s Head,’ the
‘Maidenhead,’ the ‘Sun,’ the ‘Vine,’ the ‘Three Tuns,’ and others have
entirely disappeared; and the ‘Spread Eagle,’ the ‘Lamb,’ ‘Three Cups,’
‘Antelope,’ and the ‘George’--where Pepys stayed and was
overcharged--have become shops or private residences; while the
beautiful old ‘Three Swans’ was converted into a Temperance Hotel five
years ago.

There is a passage in Sir William Knighton’s Diary under date of 1832,
which, although written without any special emphasis, is highly
picturesque and informative on the subject of travelling at that time.
It gives in one phrase a glimpse of the waiting-room which was a feature
of all-coaching inns, and in another shows that it was possible to
bargain for fares. Only in this instance the bargain was not struck.

He had come at half-past one in the morning into Salisbury by a
cross-country coach, and waiting for the arrival of the mail to Exeter,
‘sat quietly by the fire in the common dirty room appropriated to coach
passengers.’

For twenty minutes, he says, he had for companion a man who had just
disengaged himself from an irritable rencontre with the coachman of the
mail. He had waited from two o’clock in the afternoon to go on to
Bristol, but when the time arrived he quarrelled with the coachman about
whether he should pay nine shillings or twelve, the passenger insisting
upon nine, the whip three shillings more; upon which the traveller
decided not to go, returned to the coachroom, and ordered his bed. Sir
William asked him if it really was worth while to lose the time and to
pay for a bed at the inn over this unsuccessful negotiation, and to this
the man replied that it was not. ‘In fact,’ said he, ‘we have both been
taken in. The coachman thought I would pay, and I thought he would take
my offer.’




XXIX


It is a nine-miles journey, due north from Salisbury to Stonehenge, but
although it would, under

[Sidenote: _PEPYS AT OLD SARUM_]

[Illustration: VIEW OF SALISBURY SPIRE FROM THE RAMPARTS OF OLD
SARUM.]

other circumstances, be unduly extending the scope of this work to
travel so far from the highway, we need have no compunction in making
this trip, for it brings us to one of the most interesting places on the
Amesbury and Ilminster route to Exeter--to Stonehenge, in fact, and
passes by the wonderful terraced hill of Old Sarum. You can see Old
Sarum looming ahead immediately after passing the outlying houses of
Salisbury, and if you come upon it when a storm is impending, as in
Constable’s picture, the impression of size and strength created is one
not soon to be forgotten. As to coming upon it in the dark, as Pepys
did, the sight is awe-inspiring.

Time and place conspired to frighten him. ‘So over the Plain,’ he says,
‘by the sight of the steeple, to Salisbury by night; but before I came
to the town, I saw a great fortification, and there alighted, and to it,
and in it; and find it prodigious, so as to fright me to be in it all
alone at that time of night, it being dark. I understand since it to lie
that that is called Old Sarum.’

To climb the steep grassy ramparts, one after the other, and to descend
into and climb out of the successive yawning ditches is a tiring
exercise, but perhaps in no other way is it possible to gain anything
like a proper idea of the strength of the place. Nor in there any more
sure way of arriving at the relative scale of it than by observing the
stray cyclist standing on the topmost ramparts and gazing toward the
distant spire of Salisbury.

There are other things than ancient history that make Old Sarum
memorable. It was the head and front of the electoral scandals that
brought about the great Reform Act of 1832. Although it contained
neither a single house nor an inhabitant, Old Sarum survived as a
Parliamentary borough until that date, and regularly returned two
members. Lord John Russell, introducing the Reform Bill to the House of
Commons, remarked that Old Sarum was a green mound without a single
habitation upon it, and like Gatton, also an uninhabited borough,
returned two members, while great towns like Birmingham and Manchester
were entirely without Parliamentary representation. The two members sent
to Parliament were merely the nominees of the Lord of the Manor, elected
by two dummy electors who, shortly after each dissolution of Parliament,
were granted leases in the borough of Old Sarum--leases known as
‘burgage tenures.’ Their voting done, they quietly surrendered their
leases, which were not granted again until a like occasion arose. The
elections took place at the ‘Parliament Tree,’ which, until 1896 (when
it was blown down in a snowstorm), stood in a meadow between the mound
and the village of ‘Stratford-under-the-Castle.’ It was supposed to have
marked the site of the Town Hall of the vanished town. Cobbett, riding
horseback past the spot, anathematised this ‘rotten borough’ and the
system that allowed such things. He calls it ‘The Accursed Hill.’ The
only house standing near is the ‘Old Castle Inn.’

Beyond it the road dips steeply to the downs, and so continues, with
regular undulations, unsheltered from storms or frosts, or the fierce
heat of the summer sun, to Amesbury.

[Illustration: OLD SARUM (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).]

[Sidenote: _AMESBURY_]

Amesbury is a sheltered village, lying in a valley between these downs.
It was on the alternative coach route taken by the ‘Telegraph,’
‘Celerity,’ ‘Defiance,’ and ‘Subscription’ coaches, which, leaving
Andover, came by Weyhill, Mullen’s Pond, and ‘Park House Inn.’ This way
came the ‘Telegraph’ coach on its journey to London, 27th December 1836,
through the thick of that terrible snowstorm of which we find copious
mention on every one of the classic roads. It began when they reached
Wincanton, and from that place they struggled on up to the Plain, where
it was a white world of scurrying snowflakes, howling winds, and deep
drifts. Down into Amesbury, and to the hospitable ‘George’ there, was
but a momentary respite, for the determined coachman, although
immediately snowed up in the open country beyond the village, sent for
help and, assisted by a team of six fresh post-horses with a post-boy to
every pair, charged up the hills in the direction of Andover, with that
fortune which is said to favour the brave. That is to say, he and His
Majesty’s mails got through to London, where the story was duly
chronicled in the papers of the period.

Here, or hereabouts, it was that the up Exeter ‘Celerity’ coach came
into collision with the ‘Defiance’ at one o’clock in the morning of 25th
July 1827, resulting in the death of a gentleman who was thrown off the
roof of the ‘Celerity’ and instantly killed, and in serious injuries to
others. Both coaches were overturned. The ‘Celerity’ coachman, according
to the evidence at the subsequent trial, was to blame for reckless
driving, and for endeavouring to take too much of the road; but the
lawyers found a flaw in the indictment, which stated that he was driving
three geldings and a mare, and as it could not be proved that this
description was correct, the matter dropped.




XXX


And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up the steep road from
Amesbury taken by the coaches. Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an
awful thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it, or can come
upon the place at dead of night either by moonlight, or in the blackness
of a moonless midnight, you will fail to be impressed; unless you are a
literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment, not by thoughts of the
mythical human sacrifices offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by
the last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the place has an
immediate human interest which otherwise it lacks in the immeasurably
vast space of time dividing us from the period of its building and of
the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make a wide circle round
it on the Plain. Solitary, with nothing to give it scale, even the
brakes that convey irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on
the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this Mystery, sphinx-like,
offers an insoluble riddle to archæologists of all the ages.

No one, despite the affected archaisms and the

[Sidenote: _STONEHENGE_]

[Illustration: THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836; THE EXETER ‘TELEGRAPH,’
ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY
(AFTER JAMES POLLARD).]

sham archæology, has described Stonehenge so impressively as that
‘wondrous boy’ Chatterton:--

    A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes,
    Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie,
    It ne could be the worke of human handes,
    It ne was reared up by menne of claie.
    Here did the Britons adoration paye
    To the false god whom they did Tauran name,
    Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie,
    Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame;
    Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee,
    As they were met in council for to bee.

Stonehenge was probably standing when the Romans came to Britain, and
doubtless astonished them when they first saw it as much as any one
else. Its surroundings were not very different then from now. A
farmstead, with ugly blue-slated roof, which has appeared on the ridge
of the down of late years, and possibly a road which did not exist in
days of old: these alone have changed the aspect of the vast solitude in
which the hoary monument stands. No hedges, no gates, never a sheep upon
the meagre grass. As Ingoldsby says of Salisbury Plain, in general:--

    Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see;
    No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles,
    Much less a house or a cottage for miles.

This, saving that intrusive farmstead, still holds good here; and
although every one is inevitably disappointed with Stonehenge, as first
seen at a distance, looking _so small_ and insignificant in the vastness
of the bare downs in which it is set, the place, and not the great
stones merely, impresses by its sadness and utter detachment from the
living world, its loves and hates and interests. The birds forget to
sing in this loneliness, which is awful in winter and not less awful in
the emptiness visible under the blue sky and blazing sun of summer. Just
the situation in which Stonehenge is placed, you understand, not
Stonehenge itself, gives these feelings. ‘Do not we gaze with awe upon
these massive stones?’ asks the high-falutin guide-book compiler. No,
indeed we don’t. It is a pity, but it can’t be done, and the average
description of Stonehenge which sets forth the grandeur and stupendous
size of these stones, is pumped-up fudge and flapdoodle of the
damnablest kind, which takes in no one. It is not merely the Philistine
who thinks thus, but even the would-be marvellers, and those of light
and leading are disquieted by secret thoughts that, had we a mind to it,
and if there was money in it, we could build a better and a bigger
Stonehenge by a long way.

The earliest account of this mystic monument is found in the writings of
Nennius, who lived in the ninth century. The first-comer is entitled to
respect, and when Nennius tells us that Stonehenge was erected by the
surviving Britons, in memory of four hundred and sixty British nobles,
murdered here at a conference to which the Saxon chieftain, Hengist, had
invited King Vortigern and his Court, we are bound to pay some attention
to the statement, although to place implicit reliance upon it would be
rash, considering the fact that Nennius wrote four hundred years after
the event.

[Illustration: STONEHENGE (AFTER TURNER, R.A.).]

[Sidenote: _WHO BUILT STONEHENGE?_]

But there are, and have been, many theories which profess to give the
only true origin of these stone circles. An antiquary formerly living at
Amesbury went to the beginnings of creation and held that they were
erected by Adam. If so, it is to be hoped for Adam’s sake that he
finished the job in the summer, or that if it occupied him in winter
time, he had clothed himself with something warmer than the traditional
fig-leaf, in view of the rigours of these Wiltshire Downs. It would be
interesting also to have Adam’s opinion as to the comparative merits of
Salisbury Plain and the Garden of Eden.

Then a tradition existed that Merlin, the sorcerer, arranged the
circles. Those who do not think much of this view may take more kindly
to the legend of our old friends the Druids, who, according to Dr.
Stukeley and others, made this their chief temple; while, according to
other views, the Britons before and after the Roman occupation, and the
Romans themselves, were the builders. Then there are others who conceive
this to have been the crowning-place of the Danish kings. The Saxons,
indeed, appear to be the only people who have not been credited with the
work; although, curiously enough, its very name is of Saxon derivation,
and the earliest writers refer to it as ‘Stanenges,’ from Anglo-Saxon
words meaning ‘the hanging-stones.’ That the Saxons discovered
Stonehenge, and were puzzled by it as greatly as it must have excited
the wonder of the Romans, hundreds of years before, seems obvious from
this name they gave the lonely place. Ignorant as to its use, they
either saw in the upright stones and the imposts they carried a
resemblance to a gallows, or else, not being themselves expert builders,
marvelled that the great imposts should remain suspended in the air.

Much of the legitimate wonderment in respect of Stonehenge lies in the
mystery of how the forgotten builders could have quarried and shaped
these stones, and could have cut the tenons and mortice-holes that held
the tall columns, and the flat stones above them, together. Camden, the
old chronicler, has a ready way out of this puzzling question. Beginning
with a description of this ‘huge and monstrous piece of work,’ he goes
on to say that ‘some there are that think them to be no natural stones,
hewn out of the rock, but artificially made out of pure sand, and, by
some glue or unctuous matter, knit and incorporate together.’

[Sidenote: _THE ‘FRIAR’S HEEL’_]

Stonehenge is considered to have consisted, when perfect, of an outer
circle of thirty tall stones, three and a half feet apart, and connected
together by a line of imposts, in whose extremities mortice-holes were
cut, fitting into corresponding tenons projecting from the upright
stones. The height of this circular screen was sixteen feet. A second
and inner circle consisted of smaller and rougher stones, some forty in
number, and six feet in height. Within this circle, again, rose five
tall groups of stone placed in an ellipse, each group consisting of two
uprights, with an impost above. These stones were the largest of all,
the tallest reaching to a height of twenty-five feet. They were named by
Dr. Stukeley, impressively enough, the Great Trilithons. Each of these
five groups would appear to have been accompanied on the inner side by a
cluster of three small standing stones, while a black flat monolith,
called the ‘Altar Stone,’ occupied the innermost position. A smaller
trilithon seems to have once stood near its big brethren, but it and
three of the great five are in ruins. Only six imposts of the outer
circle are left in their place overhead, and but sixteen of its thirty
upright stones are now standing. The smaller circles and groups are
equally imperfect. Some of this ruin has befallen within the historical
period; one of the Great Trilithons having been wrecked in 1620, in the
absurd treasure-seeking expedition of the Duke of Buckingham, while
another fell on the 3rd of January 1797, during a thaw.

These circles seem to have been surrounded by an earthen bank, with an
avenue leading off towards the east. Very few traces of these enclosures
now remain. In midst of the avenue lies the flat so-called ‘Stone of
Sacrifice,’ with the rough obelisk of the ‘Friar’s Heel,’ as the most
easterly outpost of all, beyond. To the Friar’s Heel belongs a legend
which gives, by the way, an even more distinguished person than Adam as
the builder of Stonehenge. The Devil, according to this story, was the
architect, and when he had nearly finished his work, he chuckled to
himself that no one would be able to tell how it was done. A wandering
friar, however, who had been a witness of it all, remarked, ‘That’s more
than thee can tell,’ and thereupon ran away, the Devil flinging one of
the stones left over after him. It only just struck the friar on the
heel, and stuck there in the turf, where it stands to this day.

The various stones of which Stonehenge is constructed derive from
widely-sundered districts. The outer circle and the five Great
Trilithons are said to have been fashioned from stones that came from
Marlborough Downs, and the second circle and innermost ellipse belong to
a rock formation not known to exist nearer than South Wales. The ‘Altar
Stone’ is different from any of the others, and the circumstance lends
some colour to the theory that it, coming from some unknown region, was
the original stone fetish brought from a distance by the prehistoric
tribe that settled here, around which grew by degrees the subsequent
great temple. There are those who will have it that this was a temple of
serpent-worshippers; and an argument not altogether unsupported by facts
would have us believe that Stonehenge is really a Temple of the Sun. It
is a singular accident (if it _is_ an accident) that the ‘Friar’s Heel,’
as seen from the centre of the circle, is in exact orientation with the
rising sun on the morning of the Longest Day of the year, 21st June.
Every year, on this occasion, great crowds of people set out from
Salisbury to see sunrise at Stonehenge. There have frequently been as
many as three thousand persons present on this occasion. As the spot is
nine miles from that cathedral city, and as the sun rises on this date
at the early hour of 3.44 A.M., it requires some enthusiasm to rise
one’s self for the occasion, if indeed the more excellent way is not to
sit up all night. Great, therefore, is the disappointment when

[Sidenote: _SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE_]

[Illustration: SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE.]

the morning is misty. If this sunrise phenomenon is not an accident,
then Stonehenge, as the Temple of the Sun, is the earliest cathedral in
Britain. But, as we have already seen, in these multitudes of guesses at
the truth, no one can arrive at the facts, and all we can do is to say
frankly, with old Pepys, who was here in 1668, ‘God knows what its use
was.’

The present historian has waited for the sun to rise here. Arriving at
Amesbury village at half-past two in the morning, the street looked and
sounded lively with the clustered lights of bicycles and conveyances
gathered there; with the ringing of bicycle bells, the sounding of
coach-horns, and the talk of those who had come to pay their devoirs to
the rising luminary. The village inn was open all night for the needs of
travellers journeying to this shrine, and ten minutes was allowed for
each person, a policeman standing outside to see that they were duly
turned out at the end of that time.

To one who arrived early on the scene, while the Plain remained shrouded
in the grayness of the midsummer night, and the rugged stones of
Stonehenge yet loomed vague and formless, the scene looking down towards
Amesbury was an impressive one. Dimly the ascending white road up to the
stones could be discerned by much straining of tired eyes, and along it
twinkled brightly the lights of approaching vehicles, now dipping down
into a hollow of this miscalled ‘Plain,’ now toiling slowly and
painfully up a corresponding ascent. It is not to be supposed that it
was a reverent crowd assembled here. Reverence is not a characteristic
of the age, nor are cyclists as a rule, or agricultural folks, or
provincials generally, inclined greatly to worship the immeasurably old.
And of such this crowd was chiefly composed. It may very pertinently be
asked, ‘Why, if they don’t reverence the place, do they come here at
all?’ It is a question rather difficult to answer; but probably most
people visit it on this occasion as an excuse for being up all night.
There would seem to be an idea that there is something dashing and
eccentric about such a proceeding which must have its charm for those to
whom archæology, or those eternal and unsolvable questions, ‘Why was
Stonehenge built, and by whom?’ have no interest. There were, for
instance, two boys on the spot who had come over on their bicycles from
Marlborough School, over twenty miles away. Without leave, of course!
They hoped to get back as quietly as they had slipped away out of their
bedroom windows. Had they any archæological enthusiasm? Not a bit of it,
the more especially since it was evident they would have to hurry back
before the sun was due to rise.

[Sidenote: _TRIPPERS AT STONEHENGE_]

There were no fewer than fifteen police at Stonehenge, sent on account
of the disorderly scenes said to have taken place in previous years. But
this crowd was sufficiently quiet. Patiently the throng waited the
rising of the sun upon the horizon, and the coming of the shadow of the
gnomon-stone across the Stone of Sacrifice. The sky lightened, showing
up the tired faces, and transferring the Great Trilithons from the
realms of romance to those of commonplace reality. The larks began to
trill; puce-and purple- clouds floated overhead; the brutal
staccato notes of a banjo strummed to the air of a music-hall song stale
by some three or four seasons; a cyclist struck a match on a sarsen
stone; watches were consulted--and the sun refused to rise to the
occasion. That is to say, for the twelfth time or so consecutively,
according to local accounts, the morning was too cloudy for the sunrise
to be seen. So, tired and disappointed, all trooped back to Amesbury,
the snapshotters disgusted beyond measure, and breakfasted, or refreshed
in various ways, according to individual tastes, at the unholy hour of
half-past four o’clock in the morning.

Those who say that Stonehenge will remain a monument to all time speak
without a knowledge of the facts. In reality the larger stones are
disintegrating; slowly, perhaps, but none the less surely. They are
weather-worn, and some of them very decrepit. Frosts have chipped and
cracked them, and other extremes of climate have found out the soft
places in the sandstone. Also, modern facilities for reaching such
out-of-the-way spots as this used to be have brought so many visitors of
all kinds here that, in one way and another Stonehenge is bound to
suffer. It is now the proper thing for every one who visits Stonehenge
to be photographed by the photographer who sits there for that purpose
all day long and every day; and although there is no occasion for such
insane fury, the picnic parties generally contrive to smash beer and
lemonade bottles against the stones until the turf is thickly strewn
with broken glass. Modernity also likes to range itself beside the
unfathomably ancient, and so when the Automobile Club visited
Stonehenge, on Easter Saturday 1899, all the cars and their occupants
were photographed beside the stones, to mark so historic an occasion.




XXXI


Away beyond Stonehenge stretches Salisbury Plain, in future to be
vulgarised by military camps and manœuvres, and to become an
Aldershot on a larger scale, but hitherto a solitude as sublime in its
own way as Dartmoor and Exmoor. Dickens gives us his meed of
appreciation of this wild country, and finds the boundless prairies of
America tame by comparison.

‘Now,’ he says, writing when on his visit to America, ‘a prairie is
undoubtedly worth seeing, but more that one may say one _has_ seen it,
than for any sublimity it possesses in itself.... You stand upon the
prairie and see the unbroken horizon all round you. You are on a great
plain, which is like a sea without water. I am exceedingly fond of wild
and lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of being as much
impressed by it as any man living. But the prairie fell, by far, short
of my preconceived idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing
Salisbury Plain. The excessive flatness of the scene makes it dreary,
but tame. Grandeur is certainly not its characteristic ... to say that
the sight is a

[Sidenote: _SALISBURY PLAIN_]

[Illustration: ANCIENT AND MODERN: MOTOR CARS AT STONEHENGE, EASTER
1899.]

landmark in one’s existence, and awakens a new set of sensations, is
sheer gammon. I would say to every man who can’t see a prairie--go to
Salisbury Plain, Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open
lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as impressive; and Salisbury
Plain is _decidedly_ more so.’

Salisbury Plain is the very core and concentrated essence of the wild
bleak scenery so characteristic of Wiltshire. An elevated tract of
country measuring roughly twenty-four miles from east to west, and
sixteen from north to south, and comprising the district between
Ludgershall and Westbury, and Devizes and Old Sarum, it is by no means
the Plain pictured by strangers, who, misled by that geographical
expression, have a mind’s-eye picture of it as being quite flat. As a
matter of fact, Salisbury Plain is not a bit like that. It is a long
series of undulating chalky downs, ‘as flat as your hand’ if you like,
because the hand is anything but flat, and the simile is excellently
descriptive of a rolling country that resembles the swelling contours of
an outstretched palm. Unproductive, exposed, and lonely, Salisbury Plain
opposes even to this day a very effectual barrier against intercourse
between north and south or east and west Wiltshire, and was the
lurking-place, until even so late as 1839, of highwaymen and footpads,
who shared the solitudes with the bustards, and attacked and robbed
those travellers whose business called them across the dreary wastes.
Many a malefactor has tried his prentice hand and learned his business
in these wilds, and has, after robbing elsewhere, retired here from
pursuit. Salisbury Plain, in short, bred a race of highwaymen who
preyed upon the neighbourhood and levied contributions from all the rich
farmers and graziers who travelled between the Cathedral City and other
parts, and sometimes graduated with such honours that they became
Knights of the Road at whose name travellers along the whole length of
the Exeter Road would tremble.

Among them was William Davis, the ‘Golden Farmer,’ whom we have already
met at Bagshot. His career was a long one, and was continued, here and
in other parts of the country, for forty years. They hanged him, at the
age of sixty-nine, in 1689. His most famous exploit was on the borders
of the Plain, near Clarendon Park, when he attacked the Duchess of
Albemarle, single-handed, and, in the presence of her numerous
attendants, tore her diamond rings off her fingers, and would probably
have had her watch and money as well, despite her cursing and torrents
of full-flavoured abuse, had not the sound of approaching travellers
warned him to fly.

‘Captain’ James Whitney, too, was another desperado who at times made
the Plain his headquarters, and harried the Western roads, in the time
of William the Third. He was probably a son of the Reverend James
Whitney, Rector of Donhead St. Andrews. He raised a troop of highwaymen,
and was captured at the close of 1692 after his band had been defeated
in battle with the Dragoon Guards. He ‘met a most penitent end’ at
Smithfield.

[Sidenote: _THOMAS BOULTER_]

Then there was Biss, perhaps a descendant of the Reverend Walter Biss,
minister of Bishopstrow, near Salisbury, in the reign of Charles the
First. Biss the highwayman was hanged at Salisbury in 1695, and was not
succeeded by any very distinguished practitioner until Boulter appeared
on the scene.

The distinguished Mr. Thomas Boulter was born of poor but dishonest
parents at Poulshot, near Devizes, and ran a brief but brilliant and
busy course which ended on the gallows outside Winchester. Mr. Boulter’s
parentage and the deeds that he did form splendid evidence to help
bolster up the doctrine of heredity. He came of a very numerous clan of
Boulters and Bisses, whose names are even to this day common at
Chiverell and Market Lavington, on the Plain. His father rented a grist
mill at Poulshot, stole grain for years, and was publicly whipped in
Devizes market-place for stealing honey from an old woman’s garden.
Shortly after that unfortunate incident, in 1775, on returning from
Trowbridge, he stole a horse, the property of a Mr. Hall, and riding it
over to Andover sold it for £6, although worth at least £15. This
injudicious deal aroused the suspicions of the onlookers, so that he was
arrested, and being convicted was sentenced to death. But the Boulters
and the Bisses made interest for him, so that his sentence was commuted
to transportation for fourteen years.

Mrs. Boulter, the wife of this transported felon and the mother of the
greater hero, is said to have also suffered a public whipping at the
cart’s tail, and Isaac Blagden, his uncle, also did a little in the
footpad line on Salisbury Plain between the intervals of agricultural
labouring. He never attained eminence, having met in an early stage of
his career with a sad check while attempting to rob a gentleman near
Market Lavington. The traveller drew a pistol and lodged a couple of
slugs in his thigh, leaving him bleeding on the highway. Some humane
person passing by procured assistance, and had him conveyed to the
village. The wound was cured, but he remained a <DW36> ever afterwards,
and being unable to work was admitted into Lavington Workhouse. He was
never prosecuted for the attempted crime.

Thomas Boulter, junior, the daring outlaw who shared with Hawkes the
title of the ‘Flying Highwayman,’ and whose name for very many years
afterwards was used as a bogey to frighten refractory children, was born
in 1748. He worked with his father, the miller, in the grist-mill at
Poulshot until 1774, when, his sister having opened a millinery business
in the Isle of Wight, he joined her there, and embarked his small
capital in a grocery business.

[Sidenote: _THE BEGINNING OF A CAREER_]

But the business did not flourish. Perhaps it could not be expected to
do so in the hands of so roving a blade, for he only gave it a year’s
perfunctory trial, and then, being pressed for money, set out to find it
on the road. He went to Portsmouth, procured two brace of pistols,
casting-irons for slugs, and a powder-horn, and, lying by a little
while, started in the summer of 1775, on the pretence of paying his
mother a visit at Poulshot. Setting out from Southampton, mounted on
horseback, he made for the Exeter Road, near ‘Winterslow Hut.’ In less
than a quarter of an hour the Salisbury diligence rewarded his patience
and enterprise by coming in sight across the downs. The perspiration
oozed out of his every pore, and he was so timid that he rode past the
diligence two or three times before he could muster sufficient
resolution to pronounce the single word ‘Stand!’ But at length he found
courage in the thought that he must begin, or go home as poor as he came
out, and so, turning short round, he ordered the driver to stop, and in
less than two minutes had robbed the two passengers of their watches and
money, saying that he was much obliged to them, for he was in great
want; and so, wishing them a pleasant journey, departed in the direction
of Salisbury and Devizes. By the time he reached Poulshot he had robbed
three single travellers on horseback and two on foot, and had secured a
booty of nearly £40 and seven watches.

This filial visit coming to an end, he returned home to Newport, Isle of
Wight, by way of Andover, Winchester, and Southampton. On his way across
Salisbury Plain he stopped a post-chaise, several farmers on horseback,
one on foot, and two countrywomen returning from market, going in sight
of the last person into Andover, and putting up his horse at the ‘Swan,’
where he stayed for an hour.

This successful beginning fired our hero for more adventures, and the
autumn of the same year found him, equipped with new pistols, a fine
suit of clothes, and a horse stolen at Ringwood, making his way to
Salisbury, with the intention of riding into the neighbourhood of Exeter
before commencing business. But between Salisbury and Blandford he could
not resist the temptation of robbing a diligence and a gentleman on
horseback, resulting in the rather meagre booty of a gold watch, two
guineas, and some silver. He then pushed on through Blandford towards
Dorchester, robbing on the way; all in broad daylight. When night was
come he thought it prudent to break off from the Exeter Road and lie by
at Cerne Abbas until the next afternoon, when he regained the highway
near Bridport, very soon finding himself in company with a wealthy
grazier who was jogging home in the same direction. The grazier found
his companion so sociable that he not only expressed himself as glad of
his society, but gossiped at length upon the successful day he had
experienced at Salisbury market, where he had sold a number of cattle at
an advanced price. He was well known, he said, for carrying the finest
beasts to market, and could always command a better price than his
neighbours.

Boulter broke in upon this self-satisfied talk with the wish that he had
been so lucky in his way of business. Unhappily, repeated misfortunes
had at last reduced him to distress, and he had taken to the road for
relieving his distresses, and was glad he had had the fortune to fall in
with a gentleman who appeared so well able to assist him. Suiting the
action to his words, he pulled out a pistol, and begged he might have
the pleasure of easing his companion of some of the wealth he had
acquired at Salisbury market.

[Sidenote: _ROBBERY BY WHOLESALE_]

The grazier thought this was a joke and supposed that it was done to
frighten him; whereupon Boulter clapped the pistol close to his breast
and told him he should not advance a single step until he had delivered
his money. In a few minutes his trembling victim had handed over, in
bank-notes and cash, nearly £90. His watch, which he seemed to set a
value upon for its antiquity, together with some bills of exchange,
Boulter returned, and, wishing him good-day, and observing that he
should return to London, continued, instead, his journey to Exeter.
Altogether, in this trip, he secured a booty of £500, in money and
valuables, and spent the winter and these ill-gotten gains among his
relatives on Salisbury Plain.

He opened his next campaign in May 1776, having first provided himself
with a splendid mare named ‘Black Bess,’ which he stole from Mr. Peter
Delmé’s stables at Erle Stoke. This horse, scarce inferior to Turpin’s
mare of the same name, is indeed supposed to have been a descendant of
hers. Starting from Poulshot, he rode to Staines, reaching that place on
the second night out. Rising at four o’clock the next morning, he was on
the road, in wait for the Western coaches; but he was a prudent man, and
at the sight of blunderbusses on their roofs, he concluded that to
attack them would be a tempting of Providence. Accordingly, he confined
his attentions to the diligences and the post-chaises, and was so active
that day that he visited Maidenhead, Hurley, Wokingham, Hartley Row,
Whitchurch, and Eversley, reaching Poulshot again the same night with
nearly £200, and with the ‘Hue and Cry’ of five counties at his heels.
His exploits on this occasion would not shame the first masters of the
art of highway robbery, and the performances of his mare were worthy of
her distinguished ancestry. At Hartley Row he called for a bottle of
wine, drank a glass himself, and pouring the remainder over a large
toast, gave it to his steed, repeating it at Whitchurch and Eversley.

Two months’ retirement at Poulshot seemed advisable after this, but
during the latter part of the summer and through the autumn he was very
busy, his operations extending as far as Bath and Bristol. To give an
account of his many robberies would require a long and detailed
biography. He did not always meet with travellers willing to resign
their purses without a struggle, and on those occasions he generally
came off second best; as in the case of the butcher whom he met upon the
Plain. Although Boulter held a pistol at the heads of travellers, he
never really meant to use it, and it was his boast, at his last hour,
that he had never taken life. Perhaps the butcher knew this, for when
our friend presented his firearm at his head, and asked him to turn his
pockets out, he said, ‘I don’t get my money so easily as to part with it
in that foolish manner. If you rob me, I must go upon the highway myself
before I durst go home, and that I’d rather not do.’

What was a good young highwayman, with conscientious scruples about
shedding blood, to do under those circumstances? It was an undignified
situation, but he retreated from it as best he could, and with the
words: ‘Good-night, and remember that Boulter is your friend,’
disappeared.

[Sidenote: _BOULTER AND PARTNER_]

In 1777 he took a journey up to York, and was laid by the heels there,
escaping the hangman by enlisting, a course then left open to criminals
by the Government, which did not tend to bring the Army into better
repute. After three days in barracks he deserted, and made the best of
his way southwards. Reaching Bristol, he found a fellow-spirit in one
James Caldwell, landlord of the ‘Ship Inn,’ Milk Street, and with him
entered upon a new series of robberies. But, first of all, he paid a
visit to his relatives at Poulshot, doing some business on the way, and
scouring the country round about that convenient retreat. He stopped the
diligence again at ‘Winterslow Hut,’ emptying the pockets of all the
passengers, and robbed a Salisbury gentleman near Andover, who, after
surrendering his purse, lamented that he had nothing left to carry him
home.

‘How far have you to go home?’ asked Boulter.

‘To Salisbury,’ said the traveller.

‘Then,’ rejoined the highwayman, ‘here’s twopence, which is quite enough
for so short a journey.’

Boulter, according to his biographers, had the light hair and complexion
of the Saxon. ‘His _bonhomie_, not untinctured with a quiet humour,
fascinated and disarmed his victims, who felt that, had he been so
disposed, he could have descended upon them like the hammer of Thor.’
His companion henceforward, Caldwell, was of a dark complexion and
ferocious disposition. Together they visited the Midlands in 1777, and
with varying success brought that season to a close, Boulter returning
alone to Poulshot for a short holiday from professional cares. Riding on
the Plain early one morning, he was surprised to meet a
gentlemanly-looking horseman, who looked very hard at him, and who,
after passing him about a hundred yards, turned round and pursued him at
a gallop. ‘Well,’ thought Boulter, ‘this seems likely to prove a kind of
adventure on which I never calculated. I am about to be stopped myself
by a gentleman of the road. In what manner will it be necessary to
receive the attack.’

The stranger came up rapidly, and whatever his intentions were, merely
observed, ‘You ride a very fine horse; would you like to sell her?’

‘Oh yes,’ replied Boulter; ‘but for nothing less than fifty guineas.’

‘Can she trot and gallop well?’

‘She can trot sixteen miles an hour, and gallop twenty, or she would not
do for my business,’ said Boulter, with a significant look.

By this time the stranger, becoming uneasy, desired to see her paces,
probably thinking thus to rid himself of so mysterious a character.

‘With all my heart,’ rejoined the highwayman, ‘you shall see how she
goes, but I must first be rewarded for it,’ presenting his pistol with
the customary demand. That request having been complied with, Boulter
wished him good-morning, saying, ‘Now, sir, you have seen _my_
performance, you shall see the performance of my horse, which I doubt
not will perfectly satisfy you’; and putting spur to her, was soon but a
distant speck upon the Plain, leaving the stranger to bewail his foolish
curiosity.

[Sidenote: _A HUE AND CRY_]

The winter of 1777 and the spring of 1778 were employed by Boulter and
Caldwell in scouring Salisbury Plain and the neighbouring country. A
reward had long been offered for the apprehension of the robber who
infested the district, and the appearance of a confederate now alarmed
Salisbury so greatly that private persons began to advertise in the
local papers their readiness to supplement this sum. A public
subscription, amounting to twenty guineas, was also raised at Devizes,
so that there was every inducement to the peasantry to make a capture.
Yet, strange to say, no one, either private or official persons, laid a
hand on them, even though Boulter appears to have been identified with
the daring horseman who robbed every one crossing the Plain. The
following advertisement appeared 10th January 1778:--

     WHEREAS divers robberies have been lately committed on the road
     from Devizes to Salisbury, and also near the town of Devizes: and
     as it is strongly suspected that one Boulter, with an accomplice,
     are the persons concerned in these robberies, a reward of thirty
     guineas is offered for apprehending and bringing to justice the
     said Boulter, and ten guineas for his accomplice, over and above
     the reward allowed by Act of Parliament:--to be paid, on
     conviction, at the Bank in Devizes. If either of these persons are
     taken in any distant part of the country, reasonable charges will
     also be allowed. Boulter is about five feet eleven inches high,
     stout made, light hair, crooked nose, brownish complexion, and
     about thirty years of age. His accomplice, about five feet nine
     inches high, thin made, long favoured, black hair, and is said to
     be about twenty-five years of age.

This publicity did not hinder their enterprises, and speaking of
Boulter, a little later, the _Salisbury Journal_ says: ‘The robberies he
has committed about Salisbury, the Plain, Romsey, and Southampton, and
the several roads to London, are innumerable.’

[Sidenote: _CAPTURE OF BOULTER_]

But what local law and order could not accomplish was effected at
Birmingham, to which town the confederates had made a journey in the
spring of 1778, for the purpose of selling some of the jewellery and
watches they had accumulated. Boulter had approached a Jew dealer on the
subject, and was arrested, together with Caldwell, and thrown into
Birmingham Prison. They were sent thence to Clerkenwell, from which,
having already secured by bribery a jeweller’s saw and cut through his
irons, he escaped, with two other prisoners, carrying the irons away
with him, and hanging them in triumph on a whitethorn bush at St.
Pancras. With consummate impudence he took lodgings two doors away from
Clerkenwell Prison, and, procuring a new outfit, set off down to Dover,
to take ship across the Channel. But, unfortunately for him, the country
was on the eve of a war with France, and an embargo had been laid upon
all shipping. He could not even secure a small sailing-boat. Hurrying
off to Portsmouth, he found the same difficulty, and could not even get
across to the Isle of Wight. Thence to Bristol, haunted with a constant
fear of being arrested; but not a single vessel was leaving that port.
Then it occurred to him that the desolate Isle of Portland was the most
likely hiding-place. Setting out from Bristol, he reached Bridport, and
went to an inn to refresh himself and his horse. When he asked what he
could have for dinner, he was told there was a family ordinary just
ready. He accordingly sat down at table, beside the landlord and three
gentlemen, one of whom eyed him with a searching scrutiny, until,
becoming fully satisfied that this was none other than Boulter, the
escaped prisoner, he beckoned the landlord out of the room, and reminded
him of the duty and necessity which lay upon them of securing so
notorious an offender. The landlord then returned to the dining-room and
desired Boulter to accompany him to an adjoining parlour, where he
revealed to him the perilous state of affairs; but added, ‘As you have
never done me an injury, I wish you no harm, so just pay your reckoning,
and be off as quick as you can.’

Boulter bade him tell the strangers that they were totally mistaken,
that he was a London rider (that is to say, a commercial traveller), and
that his name was White; but having no wish to be the cause of a
disturbance in his house, he would take his advice and go on his way.

The landlord went back to his guests, and Boulter got on his horse with
all possible expedition. Once fairly seated in the saddle, a single
application of the spur would have launched him beyond the reach of
these hungry pursuers, nor in such an emergency as this would his pistol
be harmlessly pointed against those who thus sought to earn the rewards
offered for his capture. Alas! he had but placed his foot in the stirrup
when out rushed the false landlord and his guests. They secured him, and
being handed over to the authorities, he was lodged in Dorchester Gaol.
He was arraigned at Winchester with Caldwell (who had been removed from
London) on 31st July, and both being found guilty, they were hanged at
Winchester, 19th August 1778.




XXXII


Soon after those two comrades had met their end, there arose a
highway-woman to trouble the district. This was Mary Sandall, of
Baverstock, a young woman of twenty-four years of age, who had borrowed
a pair of pistols and a suit of his clothes from the blacksmith of
Quidhampton, and, bestriding a horse, set out one day in the spring of
1779, and meeting Mrs. Thring, of North Burcombe, robbed her of two
shillings and a black silk cloak. Mrs. Thring went home and raised an
alarm, with the result that Mary Sandall was captured, and committed for
trial at the next assizes. Although there seems to have been some idea
that this was a practical joke, the authorities were thick-headed
persons who had heard too much of the real thing to be patient with an
amateur highway-woman, and so they sentenced Mary Sandall to death in
due form, although she was afterwards respited as a matter of course.

[Sidenote: _WILLIAM PEARE_]

William Peare was the next notability of the roads, but it is not
certain that he was the one who stopped Mr. Jeffery, of Yateminster, on
his way home from Weyhill, 9th October 1780, and knocking him off his
horse, robbed him of £500 in bank-notes and £37 in coin. It was the same
unknown, doubtless, who during the same week robbed a Mrs. Turner, of
Upton Scudamore, of £45, in broad daylight. He was a ‘genteelly-dressed’
stranger. Making a low bow, he requested her money, and that within
sight of many people working in the fields, who concluded, from his
polite manners, that he was a friend of the lady.

William Peare was only twenty-three years of age when he was executed,
19th August 1783. His first important act was the robbing of the
Chippenham coach on the 2nd of February 1782. Captured, and lodged in
Gloucester Gaol, he escaped on the 19th of April, and began a series of
the most daring highway robberies. On the 8th of February 1783 he
stopped the Salisbury diligence just beyond St. Thomas’s Bridge, smashed
the window, and fired a shot into the coach, terrifying the lady and
gentleman who were the only two passengers, so that they at once gave up
their purses. He then went on to Stockbridge, where he stopped a
diligence full of military officers; but finding the occupants prepared
to fight for the military chest they were escorting, hurried off. After
many other crimes in the West, he was captured in the act of undermining
a bank at Stroud, in Gloucestershire. He was tried and sentenced at
Salisbury, and executed at Fisherton, going to the gallows with the
customary nosegay, which remained tightly held in his hand when his body
was cut down. A set of verses, purporting to be by his sweetheart, was
published that year, lamenting his untimely end:--

    For me he dared the dangerous road,
      My days with goodlier fare to bless;
    He took but from the miser’s hoard,
      From them whose station needed less.

Highwaymen continued numerous at the dawn of the nineteenth century, as
may be judged from the executions at Fisherton Gaol, or on the scenes of
their misdeeds, that continued to afford a spectacle for the mob. For
highway robbery alone one man was hanged in 1806, one in 1816, two in
1817, and two in 1824; while three were sentenced to fifteen years’
transportation in 1839 for a similar offence near Imber, in the very
centre of the Plain.

[Sidenote: _A TRAGEDY OF THE PLAIN_]

The spot was Gore Cross, a solitary waste; time and date, seven o’clock
on the evening of 21st October 1839. Upon this wilderness entered Mr.
Matthew Dean, of Imber, returning on horseback from Devizes Fair, when
he was suddenly set upon by four men, dragged off his horse, and robbed
of £20 in notes of the North Wilts Bank, and £3: 10s. in coin. The gang
then made off, but Mr. Dean followed them on foot. On the way he met Mr.
Morgan, of Chitterne; but being afraid that the men carried pistols they
decided to get more help before pursuing them farther. So they called on
a Mr. Hooper, who joined the chase on horseback, armed with a
double-barrelled gun. Meeting a Mr. Sainsbury, he accompanied the party,
and, pressing on, they presently came in sight of the men. One ran away
for some miles at a great pace, and they could not overtake him until
about midway between Tilshead and Imber, where he fell down and lay
still on

[Illustration: HIGHWAY ROBBERY MONUMENT AT IMBER.]

the grass. His pursuers thought this to be a feint, and were afraid to
seize him, so they continued the chase of the other three, who were
eventually captured. The next day the body of the unfortunate man was
found where he had fallen, quite dead. He had died from heart disease.
An inquest was held on him, and the curious verdict of _felo-de-se_
returned, according to the law which holds a person a suicide who
commits an unlawful act, the consequence of which is his death. Two
memorial stones mark the spot where the robbery took place and the spot,
two miles distant, where the man fell.

The times were still dangerous for wayfarers here, for a few weeks
later, on the night of 16th November, between nine and ten o’clock P.M.,
a Mr. Richard Brown, of Little Pannel, driving a horse and cart, was
attacked by two footpads near Gore Cross Farm. One seized the horse,
while the other gave him two tremendous blows on the head with a
bludgeon, which almost deprived him of his senses. Recovering, he
knocked the fellow down with his fist. Then the two jumped into the cart
and robbed him of ten shillings, running away when he called for help,
and leaving him with his purse containing £14 in notes and gold.

With this incident the story of highway robbery on Salisbury Plain comes
to an end, and a very good thing too.




XXXIII


[Sidenote: _A DREARY ROAD_]

If you want to know exactly what kind of a road the Exeter Road is
between Salisbury and Bridport, a distance of twenty-two miles, I think
the sketch facing page 238 will convey the information much better than
words alone. It is just a repetition of those bleak seventeen miles
between Andover and Salisbury--only ‘more so.’ More barren and hillier
than the Andover to Salisbury section, and less romantically wild than
the rugged stretches between Blandford, Dorchester, and Bridport, it is
a weariness to man and beast. Buffeted by the winds which shriek across
the rolling downs, or nipped by the keen airs of these altitudes,
old-time travellers up to London or down to Exeter dreaded the passage,
and prepared themselves, accordingly, at Bridport or at Salisbury, while
exhausted nature was recruited at the several inns which found their
existence abundantly justified in those old times.

[Illustration: WHERE THE ROBBER FELL DEAD.]

Passing through West Harnham, a suburb of Salisbury, the road
immediately begins to climb the downs, descending, however, in three
miles to the charming little village of Coombe Bissett, in the
water-meadows of the Wiltshire Avon, which runs prettily beside the
road. An ancient church, old thatched barns standing on stone staddles
whose feet are in the stream, bridges across the water, and the
inevitable downs closing in the view, make one of the rare picturesque
compositions to be found along this dreary stretch of country.

Make much, wayfarer, of Coombe Bissett. Linger there, soothe your soul
with its rural graces before proceeding; for the road immediately leaves
this valley of the Avon, and the next bend discloses the unfenced
rolling downs, going in a mile-long rise, and so continuing, with a
balance in the matter of gradients against the traveller going
westwards, all the way to Blandford.

At eight miles from Salisbury is situated the old ‘Woodyates Inn,’
placed in this lonely situation, far removed from any village, in the
days when the coaching traffic made the custom of travellers worth
obtaining. It was in those days thought that after travelling eight
miles the passengers by coach or post-chaise would want refreshments. It
was a happy and well-founded thought; and if all tales be true, the
prowess of our great-grandfathers as trenchermen left nothing to be
desired--nor anything remaining in the larder when they had done.

The curious, on the lookout for this old coaching inn, will scarcely
recognise it when seen, for it has

[Sidenote: _WOODYATES_]

[Illustration: COOMBE BISSETT.]

been garnished and painted, and rechristened of late years by the title
of the ‘Shaftesbury Arms.’ But there it is, and portions of it may be
found to date back to the old times.

It was given the name of ‘Woodyates’ from its position standing at the
entrance to the wooded district of Cranborne Chase; the name meaning
‘Wood-gates.’ It also stands on the border-line dividing the counties of
Wilts and Dorset.

Bokerley <DW18>, a prehistoric boundary consisting of a bank and ditch,
intersects the road as you approach the inn, and goes meandering over
the downs among the gorse and bracken. Built, no doubt, more than
fifteen hundred years ago by savages, solely with the aid of their hands
and pointed sticks, it has outlasted many monuments of costly stones and
marbles, and when civilisation comes to an end some day, like the
blown-out flame of a candle, it will still be there, with the existing,
but more recent, Roman road still beside it. That road goes across the
open country like a causeway, or a slightly raised railway embankment.

The <DW18> may have sheltered the fugitive Duke of Monmouth on his flight
in 1685. The reading of that melancholy story of how the handsome and
gay Duke of Monmouth, a haggard fugitive from Sedgemoor Fight,
accompanied by his friend, Lord Grey, and another, left their wearied
horses near this spot, and, disguising themselves as peasants, set out
for the safe hiding-places of the New Forest, only to fall prisoners to
James’s scouts, paints the road and the downs with an impasto of
tragedy. All the countryside was being searched for him, and watchers
were stationed on the hills, looking down upon this open country where
the movement of a rabbit almost might be noted from afar. So he
doubtless skulked along in the shadow of the <DW18> from the shelter of
Cranborne Chase down to Woodlands, where he was caught, under the shadow
of a tree still standing, called Monmouth Ash.

Scattered all around are the inevitable barrows. The industry of a
byegone generation of antiquaries has explored them all. Pick and shovel
have scattered the ashes and the cinerary urns of the Britons or Saxons
who were buried here, and the only relics likely to be found by any
other ghouls are the discs of lead deposited by Sir Richard Colt Hoare,
or W. Cunnington, with the initials ‘R. C. H. 1815,’ or some such date;
or, ‘Opened by W. Cunnington 1804’ on them.

George the Third always used to change horses at ‘Woodyates Inn’ when
journeying to or from Weymouth, and the room built for his use on those
occasions is still to be seen, with its outside flight of steps. When
the coaches were taken off the road, the inn became for a time the
training establishment of William Day.

The road near this old inn is the real scene of the Ingoldsby legend of
the _Dead Drummer_, and not Salisbury Plain, on ‘one of the rises’ where

        An old way-post shewed
        Where the Lavington road
    Branched off to the left from the one to Devizes.

[Illustration: THE EXETER ROAD, NEAR ‘WOODYATES INN.’]

[Sidenote: _A HIGHWAY MURDER_]

It was on Thursday, 15th June 1786, that two sailors, paid off from
H.M.S. _Sampson_, at Plymouth, and walking up to London, came to this
spot. Their names were Gervase (or Jarvis) Matcham, and John Shepherd.
Near the ‘Woodyates Inn’ they were overtaken by a thunderstorm, in which
Matcham startled his companion by showing extraordinary marks of horror
and distraction, running about, falling on his knees, and imploring
mercy of some invisible enemy. To his companion’s questions he answered
that he saw several strange and dismal spectres, particularly one in the
shape of a female, towards which he advanced, when it instantly sank
into the earth, and a large stone rose up in its place. Other large
stones also rolled upon the ground before him, and came dashing against
his feet. He confessed to Shepherd that, about seven years previously,
he had enlisted as a soldier at Huntingdon, and shortly afterwards was
sent out from that town in company with a drummer-boy, seventeen years
of age, named Jones, son of a sergeant in the regiment, who was in
charge of some money to be paid away. They quarrelled because the lad
refused to return and drink at a public-house on the Great North Road
which they had just passed, four miles from Huntingdon. Matcham knocked
him down, cut his throat, and taking the money (six guineas) made off to
London, leaving the body by the roadside. He now declared that, with
this exception, he had never in his life broken the law, and that,
before the moment of committing this crime, he had not the least design
of injuring the deceased, who had given him no other provocation than
ill-language. But from that hour he had been a stranger to peace of
mind; his crime was always present to his imagination, and existence
seemed at times an insupportable burden. He begged his companion to
deliver him into the hands of Justice in the next town they should
reach. That was Salisbury. He was imprisoned there, brought to trial,
found guilty, and hanged.

Barham in his legend of the _Dead Drummer_ has taken many liberties with
the facts of the case, both as regards place and names, and makes the
scene of the murderer’s terror identical with the site of the crime,
which he (for purely literary purposes) places on Salisbury Plain,
instead of the Great North Road, between Buckden and Alconbury.




XXXIV


Three more inns were situated beside the road between this point and
Blandford in the old days. Of them, two, the ‘Thorney Down Inn,’ and the
‘Thickthorn Inn’ (romantic and shuddery names!), have disappeared, while
the remaining one,--the ‘Cashmoor Inn’--formerly situated between the
other two, ekes out a much less important existence than of old, as a
wayside ‘public.’

Then comes a village--the first one since Coombe Bissett was passed,
fifteen miles behind, and so more than usually welcome. A pretty
village, too, Tarrant Hinton by name, lying in a hollow, with its
little

[Sidenote: _CRANBORNE CHASE_]

[Illustration: TARRANT HINTON.]

street of cottages, along a road running at right angles to the Exeter
highway, with its church tower peeping above the orchards and thick
coppices, and a sparkling stream flowing down from the hillside. In this
and other respects, it bears a striking similarity to Middle and Over
Wallop.

The quiet, not to say sleepy, Dorsetshire villager who, lounging at the
bend of the road, replies to your query by saying that this is ‘Tarnt
Hinton,’ is the peaceable descendant of very desperate and bloody-minded
men, and the like circumstances that, a mere hundred years ago, rendered
them savages, would do the same by him, were they revived. The peasantry
are what the law and social conditions make them. Oppress the sturdy
rustic and you render him a brutal and resentful rebel, who, having an
unbroken spirit, will give trouble. Treat him fairly, and he will live a
life of quiet industry, tempered by gossipy evenings in the village
‘pub.’; and although he will never rise to be the mincing Strephon
imagined by the eighteenth-century poets of rurality, he will raise
gigantic potatoes, and cultivate flowers for the local Horticultural
Society, and do nothing more tragical in all his life than the sticking
of the domestic porker, or the twisting of a fowl’s neck.

The civilising of the rustic in these parts dates from the
disfranchising of Cranborne Chase in 1830. The Chase, which took its
name from the town of Cranborne, eight miles distant from this spot, was
originally a vast deer-forest, extending far into Hants, Wilts, and
Dorset. The great western highway entered it at Salisbury and did not
pass out of its bounds until Blandford was reached; while Shaftesbury
to the north, and Wimborne to the south, marked its extent in another
direction. Belonging anciently to great feudal lords or to the
Sovereign, it was Crown property from the time of Edward the Fourth to
the reign of James the First. James delighted in killing the buck here,
but that Royal prig granted the Chase to the Earl of Pembroke, from
whom, shorn of its oppressive laws, it has descended to Lord Rivers;
while the Earl of Shaftesbury also owns great tracts of woodlands here.
But, singularly enough, that part of the Chase which still retains the
wildest and densest aspect lies quite away from Cranborne, and in the
county of Wilts, around Tollard Royal. The nature of the country and the
character of the soil must needs always keep this vast tract wild, and,
in an agricultural sense, unproductive. Game will always abound here in
the thickets, and indeed the weird-looking hill-top plantations, called
by the rustics ‘hats of trees,’ are especially planted as cover,
wherever the country is open and unsheltered.

[Sidenote: _DEER-STEALERS_]

The severity of the laws which governed a Chase and punished
deer-stealers was simply barbarous. Cranborne had its courts and Chase
Prison where offenders and deer-stealers were punished by mutilation,
imprisonment, or fine, according to the crime, the status of the
offender, or the comparative state of civilisation of the period in
which the offence was committed. But whether the punishment for stealing
deer was the striking off of a hand, or imprisonment in a noisome
dungeon, or merely being mulcted in a larger or smaller sum, there were
always those who unlawfully killed the buck in these romantic glades.
Sometimes, for the devilment of it, the dashing young blades of the
countryside--sons of the squires and others--would hunt the deer.

‘From four to twenty assembled in the evening, dressed in cap and jack
and quarter-staff, with dogs and nets. Having set the watchword for the
night and agreed whether they should stand or run if they should meet
the keepers, they proceeded to the Chase, set their nets, and let slip
their dogs to drive the deer into the nets; a man standing at each net,
to strangle the deer as soon as they were entangled. Frequent desperate
and bloody battles took place; the keepers, and sometimes the hunters,
were killed.’

Other law-breakers were of a humbler stamp, and ferocious enough to
murder keepers at sight. Thus, in 1738, a keeper named Tollerfield was
murdered on his way home from Fontmell Church; and another at Fernditch,
near ‘Woodyates Inn.’ For the latter crime a man named Wheeler was
convicted, and suffered the extreme penalty of the law; his body being
hanged in chains at the scene of the murder. His friends, however, in
the course of a few nights cut the body down, and threw it into a very
deep well, some distance away. The weight of the irons caused it to
sink, and it was not discovered until long afterwards.

One of the most exciting of these encounters between the deer-stealers
and the keepers took place on the night of 16th December 1781. Chettle
Common, away at the back of the ‘Cashmoor Inn,’ was the scene of this
battle. The stealers, assembling in disguise at Pimperne, marched up
the road through the night, and headed by a Sergeant of Dragoons, then
quartered at Blandford, poured through the Thickthorn Toll-gate, armed
with weapons called ‘swindgels,’ which appear to have been hinged
cudgels, like flails. It would seem that the object of this expedition
was the bludgeoning of a few keepers, rather than the stealing of deer.
At any rate, the keepers expected them, and armed with sticks and
hangers, awaited the attack. The fight was by no means a contemptible
one, for in the result one keeper was killed and several disabled, while
the stealers were so badly knocked about that the whole expedition
surrendered, together with the Sergeant of Dragoons, who had a hand
sliced off at the wrist by a hanger. The hand was subsequently buried,
with military honours, in Pimperne churchyard.

Leader and followers alike were committed to Dorchester Gaol, and were
eventually sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude, reduced to a
nominal term, in consideration of the severe wounds from which they were
suffering. One wonders how far mercy, and to what extent the wish not to
be at the expense of medically attending the prisoners, influenced this
decision. As for the Dr. Jameson of this raid, he retired from the
Dragoons on half-pay, and, coming to London, set up shop as a dealer in
game and poultry!

[Sidenote: _WILTSHIRE MOONRAKERS_]

Ten years later, a keeper killed a stealer, and another murderous
encounter took place on 7th December 1816 near Tarrant Gunville, at a
gate in the woods which the melodramatic instincts of the peasantry
have named ‘Bloody Shard,’ while the wood itself is known as ‘Blood-way
Coppice.’

Cranborne Chase was also at this time a haunt of smugglers, who found
its tangled recesses highly convenient for storing their ‘Free Trade’
merchandise on its way up from the sea-coast. Whether or not the
original ‘Wiltshire moonrakers’ belonged to the Wilts portion of the
Chase or to some other part of the county, tradition does not say.

That Wiltshire folk are called ‘moonrakers’ is generally known, and it
is usually supposed that they obtained this name for stupidity,
according to the story which tells how a party of travellers crossing a
bridge in this county observed a number of rustics raking in the stream
in which the great yellow harvest-moon was shining. Asked what they were
doing, the reply was that they were trying to rake ‘that cheese’ out of
the water. The travellers went on their way, laughing at the idiotcy of
the yokels. One tale, however, only holds good until the other is told.
The facts seem to be that the rustics were smugglers who were raking in
the river for the brandy-kegs they had deposited there in the gray of
the morning, and that the ‘travellers’ were really revenue-officers;
those ‘gaugers,’ or ‘preventive men’ who were employed to check the
smuggling which was rife a hundred years ago. It may be thought that the
seaside was the only place where smuggling could be carried on, but a
moment’s reflection will show that the goods had to be conveyed inshore
for inland customers. Smuggling, in fact, was so extensive, and brought
to such a perfection of system that forwarding agents were established
everywhere. Kegs of spirits, being bulky, were hidden for the day in
ponds and watercourses, wherever possible, and removed at night for
another stage towards their destination, being deposited in a similar
hiding-place at the break of day, and so forth until they reached their
consignees. Thus the ‘moonrakers’ by this explanation are acquitted of
being monumental simpletons, at the expense of losing their reputation
in another way. But everyone smuggled, or received or purchased smuggled
goods, in those times, and no one was thought the worse for it.




XXXV


At the distance of a mile up the bye-road from Tarrant Hinton, in
Eastbury Park, still stands in a lonely position the sole remaining wing
of the once-famed Eastbury House, one of those immense palaces which the
flamboyant noblemen and squires of a past era loved to build. Comparable
for size and style with Blenheim and Stowe, and built like them by the
ponderous Vanbrugh, the rise and fall of Eastbury were as dramatic as
the building and destruction of Canons, the seat of the ‘princely
Chandos’ at Edgware. Of Canons, however, no stone remains, while at
Eastbury a wing and colonnade are left, standing sinister, sundered and
riven, the melancholy relics of a once proud but hospitable mansion.

[Sidenote: _DODINGTON_]

Eastbury was begun on a scale of princely magnificence by George
Dodington, a former Lord of the Admiralty, who, having presumably made
some fine pickings in that capacity, determined to spend them on
becoming a patron of the Arts and an entertainer of literary men, after
the fashion of an age in which painters were made to fawn upon the
powerful, and poets to sing their praises in the blankest of blank
verse. Every rich person had his henchmen among the followers of the
Muses, and they were petted or scolded, indulged or kept on the chain,
just as the humour of the patron at the moment decreed. Unfortunately,
however, for this eminently eighteenth-century ambition of George
Dodington, he died before he could finish his building. All his worldly
goods went to his grand-nephew, George Bubb, son of his brother’s
daughter, who had married a Weymouth apothecary named Jeremias Bubb.
Already, under the patronage of his uncle, a member of Parliament, and
an influential person, George on coming into this property assumed the
name of Dodington; perhaps also because the obvious nickname of ‘Silly
Bubb’ by which he was known might thereby become obsolete.

George Bubb Dodington, as he was now known, immediately stopped the
works on his uncle’s palace, and thus the unfinished building remained
gaunt and untenanted from 1720 to 1738. Then, as suddenly as the
building was stopped, work was resumed again. The vast sum of £140,000
was spent on the completion. Tapestries, gilding, marbles, everything of
the most costly and ornate character was employed, and the grounds which
had been newly laid out eighteen years before, and in the interval
allowed to subside into a wilderness, were set in order again. The
reason of this sudden activity was that Dodington had become infected
with that same ‘Patron’ mania which had caused his uncle to lay the
foundation stones of these marble halls. He was at this period
forty-seven years of age, and in those years had filled many posts in
the Government, and about the rival Whig and Tory Courts of the King and
the Prince of Wales. Scheming and intriguing from one party to the
other, he had always been ambitious of influence, and now that even
greater accumulations of wealth had come to him, he set up as the host
of birth, beauty, and intellect in these Dorsetshire wilds.

The gossips of the time have left us a picture of the man. Fat,
ostentatious, extravagant, with the love of glitter and colour of a
barbarian, he was yet a wit of repute, and had undoubtedly some
learning. He possessed, besides, a considerable share of shrewdness. If
he lent £5000 to Frederick, Prince of Wales, and never got it back, we
are not to suppose that he ever expected to be repaid. That was, no
doubt, regarded as practically an entrance-fee to the exalted
companionship of a prince of whom it was written, when he came to an
untimely end:--

    But since it’s Fred who is dead, there’s no more to be said.

[Sidenote: _A WHIMSICAL FIGURE_]

That same Fred thought _himself_ the clever man when he remarked
‘Dodington is reckoned clever, but I have borrowed £5000 of him which he
will never see again’; but Dodington doubtless imagined the sum to have
been well laid out; which, indeed, would have been the case had not the
prince died early. Mæcenas was, in fact, working for a title, and this
was then regarded as the ready way to such a goal. They say the same
idea prevails in our own happy times; but that £5000 would not go far
towards the realisation of the object. But, be that as it may, Dodington
did not win to the Peerage as Lord Melcombe until 1761, and as he died
in the succeeding year, his enjoyment of the ermine was short. As,
however, the working towards an object and its anticipation are always
more enjoyable than the attainment of the end, he is perhaps not to be
regarded with pity, or thought a failure.

One who partook of his hospitality at Eastbury, and did not think the
kindness experienced there a sufficient reason for silence as to his
host’s eccentricities and failings, has given us some entertaining
stories. The State bed of the gross but witty Dodington at Eastbury was
covered with gold and silver embroidery; a gorgeous sight, but closer
inspection revealed the fact that this splendour had been contrived at
the expense of his old coats and breeches, whose finery had been so
clumsily converted that the remains of the pocket-holes were clearly
visible. ‘His vast figure,’ continues this reminiscencing friend, ‘was
always arrayed in gorgeous brocades, and when he paid his court at St.
James’s, he approached to kiss the Queen’s hand, decked in an
embroidered suit of silk, with lilac waistcoat and breeches; the latter
in the act of kneeling down, forgot their duty and broke loose from
their moorings in a very indecorous and uncourtly manner.’ That must
have been a sore blow to the dignity of one who possessed, as we are
told, ‘the courtly and profound devotion of a Spaniard towards women,
with the ease and gaiety of a Frenchman to men.’

Rolling down the Exeter Road, from his London mansion, or from his
suburban retreat of ‘La Trappe,’ at Hammersmith, in his gilded,
old-fashioned chariot, he gathered a variety of literary men at what
Young calls ‘Pierian Eastbury.’ Johnson, sick of the Chesterfields and
the whole gang of literary patrons, scornfully refused Dodington’s
proffered friendship; but Fielding, Thomson, Bentley, Cumberland, Young,
Voltaire, and others were not slow to revel in these more or less
Arcadian delights. Christopher Pitt wrote to Young, congratulating him
on his stay here:--

    Where with your Dodington retired you sit,
    Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit;
    Where a new Eden in the wild is found,
    And all the seasons in a spot of ground.

While Thomson, moved to it by the Burgundy or the more potent punch, has
celebrated palace and park in his _Autumn_.

[Sidenote: _RUINED EASTBURY_]

Dodington had either no stomach for fighting, or else was a good fellow
beyond the common run, as the following affair proves. Eastbury marches
with Cranborne Chase, and one day the Ranger found one of Dodington’s
keepers with his dogs in a part of the Chase called Burseystool Walk.
The keeper was warned that if he was found there again, his dogs would
be shot and himself prosecuted; but despite this warning he was found
near the same spot a few days later, when the Ranger, having a gun in
his hand, put his threat into execution and shot the three dogs as they
were drinking in a pool, with their heads close together, in one of the
Ridings. Dodington, in a first outburst of fury, sent a challenge to the
Ranger over this affair, and the Ranger bought a sword and sent a friend
to call on the challenger to fix time and place for the encounter; but
by that time Dodington had thought better of it, and instead of making
arrangements to shed the enemy’s gore, invited both him and his friend
to dinner. They met and had a jovial time together, and the sword
remained unspotted.

On Dodington’s death his estates passed to Earl Temple, who could not
afford to keep up the vast place. He accordingly offered an income of
£200 a year to anyone who would live at Eastbury and keep it in repair.
No one came forward to accept these terms; and so, after the pictures,
objects of art, and the furniture had been sold, the great house was
pulled down, piecemeal, in 1795, with the exception of this solitary
fragment.

There is room for much reflection in Eastbury Park to-day, by the
crumbling archway with the two large fir-trees growing between the
joints of its masonry; by the remaining wing, or the foundations of the
rest of the vanished house, which can still be distinctly traced in the
grass during dry summers. The stories of ‘Haunted Eastbury’ and of the
headless coachman and his four-in-hand are dying out, but the panelled
room in which Doggett, Earl Temple’s fraudulent steward, shot himself is
still to be seen. Doggett had embezzled money, and when discovered
found this the only way out of his trouble.

When the church of Tarrant Gunville, just outside the Park gates, was
rebuilt in 1845 the workmen found his body, the legs tied together with
a yellow silk ribbon which was as bright and fresh as the day it was
tied.




XXXVI


Returning to the road at Tarrant Hinton, a steep hill leads up to the
wild downs again, with a corresponding descent in three miles into the
village of Pimperne whose chief part is situated in the same manner,
along a byeway at a right angle to the coachroad. There is a battered
cross on an open space near the church, and the church itself has been
severely restored. Christopher Pitt was Rector of Pimperne, and it
requires no great stretch of imagination to conjure up a vision of him
pacing the road to Eastbury, and composing laudatory verses on Dodington
and his ‘flowing wit’; rendered, perhaps, the more eloquent by
anticipations of the flow of Burgundy already quoted. He died in 1748,
fourteen long years, alas! before the wine had ceased to flow at that
Pierian spot.

[Sidenote: _BLANDFORD_]

From this haunt of the Muses it is two miles to the town of Blandford
Forum, whose name it is sad to be obliged to record is nowadays
shamefully docked to ‘Blandford,’ although the market, whence the
distinctive appellation of ‘Forum’ derived, is still in existence.

One comes downhill into Blandford, all the way from Pimperne, and it
remains a standing wonder how the old coachmen managed to drive their
top-heavy conveyances through the steep and narrow streets by which the
town is entered from London, without upsetting and throwing the
‘outsides’ through the first-floor windows.

If the outskirts of Blandford town are of so mediæval a straitness, the
chief streets of it are spacious indeed and lined with houses of a
classic breadth and dignity, as classicism was understood in the days of
George the Second, when the greater part of the town was burnt down and
rebuilt. One needs not to be in love with classic, or debased classic,
architecture to love Blandford. The town is stately, and with a
thoroughly urban air, although its streets are so quiet, clean, and
well-ordered. Civilisation without its usual accompaniments of rush and
crowded pavements would seem to be the rule of Blandford. You can
actually stand in the street and admire the architectural details of its
houses without being run over or hustled off the pavement. In short,
Blandford can be _seen_, and not, like crowded towns, glimpsed with
intermittent and alternate glances at the place and at the traffic, for
fear of jostling or being jostled.

Who, for instance, really _sees_ London. You can stand in Hyde Park and
see that, or in St. Paul’s and observe all the details of it; but does
anyone ever really _see_ Cheapside, Fleet Street, or the Strand, when
walking? The only way to make acquaintance with these thoroughfares is
to ride on the outside of an omnibus, where it is possible to give an
undivided attention to anything else than the crowds that throng the
pavements.

The progress of Blandford seems to have been quietly arrested soon after
its rebuilding in 1731, and so it remains typical of that age, without
being actually decayed. So far, indeed, is it from decay that it is a
cheerful and prosperous, though not an increasing, town. Red moulded and
carved brick frontages to the houses prevail here, and dignity is
secured by the tall classic tower of the church, which, although not in
itself entirely admirable, and although the stone of it is of an
unhealthy green tinge, is not unpleasing, placed to advantage closing
the view at one end of the broad market-place, instead of being aligned
with the street.

Most things in Blandford date back to ‘the fire,’ which forms a
red-letter day in the story of the town. This may well be understood
when it is said that only forty houses were left when the flames had
done their worst, and that fourteen persons were burnt, while others
died from grief, or shock, or injuries received. Blandford has been
several times destroyed by fire. In Camden’s time it was burned down by
accident, but was rebuilt soon after in a handsome and substantial form.
Again in 1677 and in 1713 the place was devastated in the same manner.
The memorable fire of 1731 began at a soap-boiler’s shop in the centre
of the town.

A pump, placed in a kind of shrine under the

[Sidenote: _GIBBON_]

[Illustration: BLANDFORD.]

churchyard wall, bears an inscription recounting this terrible
happening:--

                            In remembrance
                 Of God’s dreadful visitation by Fire,
                Which broke out the 4th of June, 1731,
                and in a few Hours not only reduced the
             Church, but almost the whole Town, to Ashes,
                   Wherein 14 Inhabitants perished,
                    But also two adjacent Villages;
                                  And
                  In grateful Acknowledgement of the
                             Divine Mercy,
                   That has since raised this Town,
                    Like the Phœnix from its Ashes,
            To its present flourishing and beautiful State;
                            and to prevent,
                     By a timely Supply of Water,
                    (With God’s Blessing) the fatal
                    Consequences of Fire hereafter:
                             This Monument
                 Of that dire Disaster, and Provision
                  Against the like, is humbly erected
                                  By
                             John Bastard
                         A considerable Sharer
                        In the great Calamity,
                                 1760.

Between 1760 and 1762 Gibbon, the historian of the _Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire_, was constantly in the neighbourhood of Blandford,
camping on the downs which surround the town, and enjoying all the pomp
and circumstance which may have belonged to his position as a Captain of
Hants Militia.

Of these amateur soldierings he speaks as a ‘wandering life of military
service,’ a very amusing view of what everybody else but that pompous
historian regarded as mere picnics.

But Gibbon, although his person was not precisely that of an ideal
military commander, and although the awkward squads he accompanied were
not easily comparable with the legions of old Rome, affected to believe
that the military knowledge he thus acquired among the hills and
woodlands of Hants and Dorset was of the greatest use in helping him to
understand the strategic feats of Cæsar and Hannibal in Britain or
across the Alps. Let us smile!

In after years, when living at Lausanne, amid the eternal hills and
mountains of Switzerland, he looked back upon those days with regret,
alike for the good company of his brother officers, the jovial nights at
the ‘Crown’ in ‘pleasant, hospitable Blandford,’ and for the
interference those happy times caused to his studies; when,
instead of burning the midnight oil, he drank deeply of the
two-o’clock-in-the-morning punch-bowl.

Many of Blandford’s natives have risen to more than local eminence.
Latest among her distinguished sons is Alfred Stevens, that fine artist
who designed the Wellington Monument in St. Paul’s Cathedral, as yet,
unhappily, incomplete. He came into contact with governments and
red-tape, and broken in spirit and in health by disappointments, died in
1875. A tablet on the wall of his birthplace in Salisbury Street records
the fact that he was born in 1817.

[Illustration: TOWN BRIDGE, BLANDFORD.]




XXXVII


[Sidenote: _WINTERBORNE WHITCHURCH_]

Sixteen and a quarter miles of very varied road brought the old coachmen
with steaming horses clattering from Blandford into Dorchester, past the
villages of Winterborne Whitchurch, Milborne St. Andrew, and the village
of Piddletown, which is by no means a town, and never was.

It is a long, long rise out of Blandford, past tree-shaded Bryanstone
and over the Town Bridge, to the crest of Charlton Downs, a mile out;
where, looking back, the town is seen lying in a wooded hollow almost
surrounded by park-like trees in dense clumps--the woods of Bryanstone.
From this point of vantage it is clearly seen how Blandford is entered
downhill from east or west.

Very hilly, very open, very white and hot and dusty in summer, and
covered with loose stones and flints after any spell of dry weather, the
road goes hence steeply down into Winterborne Whitchurch, where the
‘bourne,’ from which the place takes the first half of its name, goes
across the road in a hollow, and the church stands, with its
neighbouring parsonage and cottages, in a lane running at right angles
to the high-road, for all the world like Tarrant Hinton and Little
Wallop. John Wesley, the grandfather of the founder of the
‘Wesleyans’--or the ‘Methodys,’ as the country people call
Methodists--was Vicar of Winterborne Whitchurch for a time during the
Commonwealth; but as he seems never to have been regularly ordained, he
was thrown out at the Restoration by ‘malignants’ and began a kind of
John the Baptist life amid the hills and valleys of Dorsetshire, an
exemplar for the imitation of his grandsons in later days. Itineracy and
a sturdy independence thus became a tradition and a duty with the
Wesleys. Thus are sects increased and multiplied, and no more sure way
exists of producing prophets than by the persecution and oppression of
those who, left judiciously alone, would live and die unknown to and
unhonoured by the world.

Milborne St. Andrew, close upon three miles onward, is placed in another
of these many deep hollows which, with streams running through them, are
so recurrent a feature of the Exeter Road; only the hollow here is a
broader one and better dignified with the title of valley. The stream of
the ‘mill-bourne,’ from which the original mill has long since vanished
(if, indeed, the name of the place is not, more correctly, ‘Melbourne,’
‘mell’ in Dorsetshire meaning, like the prefix of ‘lew’ in Devon, a warm
and sheltered spot), is a tributary of the river Piddle, which, a few
miles down the road gives name to Piddletown, and along its course to
Aff-Piddle, Piddletrenthide, Piddlehinton, Tolpiddle, and Turner’s
Piddle.

[Sidenote: _MILBORNE ST. ANDREW_]

Milborne St. Andrew is a pretty place, and those who know Normandy may
well think it, with its surrounding meads and feathery poplars, like a
village in that old-world French province. Almost midway along the
sixteen and a quarter miles between Blandford and Dorchester, it still
keeps the look of an old coaching and posting village, although the last
coach and the days of road-travel are beyond the recollection of the
oldest inhabitant. Here, in the midst of the village, the street widens
out, where the old ‘White Hart,’ now the Post Office, with a great
effigy of a White Hart, and a number of miniature cannons on the porch
roof, waits for the coaches that come no more, and for the dashing
carriages and post-chaises that were driven away with their drivers and
their gouty red-faced occupants to Hades, long, long ago. Is the ‘White
Hart,’ standing like so many of these old hostelries beside the highway,
waiting successfully for the revival of the roads, and will it live over
the brave old days again with the coming of the Motor Car?

Meanwhile, given fine weather, there are few pleasanter places to spend
a reminiscent afternoon in than Milborne St. Andrew.

The old church is up along the hillside, reached with the aid of a
bye-road. Its tower, like that of Winterborne Whitchurch, shows the
curious and rather pleasing local fashion of building followed four
hundred years or so back, consisting of four to six courses of nobbled
flints alternating with a course of ashlar. A stone in the east wall of
the chancel to the memory of William Rice, servant to two of the local
squires here for more than sixty years, ending in 1826, has the curious
particulars:--

     He superintended the Harriers, and was the first Man who hunted a
     Pack of Roebuck Hounds.

At a point a mile and a half farther used to stand Dewlish turnpike
gate, where the tolls were taken before coming down into Piddletown.

This large village is the ‘Weatherbury’ of some of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s
Wessex stories, and the Jacobean musicians’ gallery of the fine
unrestored church is vividly reminiscent of many humorous passages
between the village choir in _Under the Greenwood Tree_. An organ stands
there now, but the ‘serpent,’ the ‘clar’net,’ and the fiddles of Mr.
Hardy’s rustic choir would still seem more at home in that place.

Between this and Dorchester, past that end of Piddletown called ‘Troy
Town,’ is Yellowham--one had almost written ‘Yalbury’--Hill, crowned
with the lovely woodlands described so beautifully under the name of
‘Yalbury Woods’ in that story, and drawn again in the opening scene of
_Far from the Madding Crowd_, where Gabriel Oak, invisible in his leafy
eyrie above the road, perceives Bathsheba’s feminine vanities with the
looking-glass.

Descending the western side of the hill and passing the broad park-lands
of Kingston, we enter the town of Dorchester along the straight and
level road running through the water-meadows of the river Frome. Until a
few years ago this approach was shaded and rendered beautiful by an
avenue of stately old elms that enclosed the distant picture of the town
as in a frame; but they were cut down by the Duchy of Cornwall
officials, in whose hands much of the surrounding property is placed,
and only the pitiful stumps of them, shorn off close to the ground,
remain to tell of their existence. As Dorchester is approached the road
is seen in the distance becoming a street, and going, as straight as
ever, and with a continuous rise,

[Sidenote: ‘_CASTERBRIDGE_’]

[Illustration: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ DORCHESTER.]

through the town, with the square tower of St. Peter’s and the spiky
clock-tower of the Town Hall cresting the view in High West Street, and
in High East Street the modern Early English spire of All Saints nearer
at hand. The particular one among the many bridges and culverts that
carry the rivulets under the road here, mentioned by the novelist in his
_Mayor of Casterbridge_ as the spot where Henchard, the ruined mayor,
lounged in his aimless idleness, amid the wastrels and ne’er-do-weels of
Casterbridge, is the bridge that finally brings the road into the town,
by the old ‘White Hart Inn.’ It is the inevitable lounging-stock for
Dorchester’s failures, who mostly live near by at Fordington, the east
end of the town, where the ‘Mixen Lane’ of the story, ‘the mildewed leaf
in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant’ was situated.

It is a transfigured Dorchester that is painted by the novelist in that
story; or, perhaps more exactly, the Dorchester of fifty years ago. ‘It
is huddled all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees,
like a plot of garden-ground by a box-edging,’ is the not very apt
comparison with the tall chestnuts and sycamores of the surviving
avenues. ‘It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining,
clean-cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green tablecloth. The
farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the
window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to
acquaintances standing on the pavement corner; the red-robed judge, when
he condemned a sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa,
that floated in at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing
hard by.’

This peculiarity of Dorchester, a four-square clearly-defined _appliqué_
of town upon a pastoral country, has been gradually disappearing during
many years past, owing to an increase of population that has burst the
ancient bounds imposed by the town being almost completely surrounded by
the Duchy of Cornwall lands. This property, known by the name of
Fordington Field (and not the existence at any time of a ford on the
Frome), gives the eastern end of Dorchester its title. The land, let by
the Duchy in olden times, in quarters or ‘fourthings’ of a carucate,
gave the original name of ‘Fourthington.’ A great deal of this property
has now been sold or leased for building purposes, and so the avenues
that once clearly defined with their ramparts of greenery the bounds of
Dorchester are now of a more urban character.

[Sidenote: _THE BLOODY ASSIZE_]

Dorchester shares with Blandford and with Marlborough a solid
architectural character of a sober and responsible kind. As in those
towns, imaginative Gothic gables and quaint mediæval fancies are
somewhat to seek amid the overwhelming proportion of Renaissance, or
neo-classic, or merely Queen Anne and Georgian red-brick or stone
houses. The cause of this may be sought in the recurrent disastrous
fires that on four occasions practically swept the town out of
existence, as in the case of Marlborough and Blandford. The earliest of
these happened in 1613. Over three hundred houses were burnt on that
occasion, and property amounting to nearly a quarter of a million
sterling lost. This insistent scourge of the West of England thatched
houses visited the town again, nine years later, and also in 1725 and
1775. Little wonder, then, that mediæval Dorchester has to be sought for
in nooks and corners. But if like those other unfortunate towns in these
circumstances, it is very different in appearance, the streets being
comparatively narrow and the houses of a more stolid and heavy
character; so that only in sunny weather does Dorchester strike the
stranger as being at all a cheerful place.




XXXVIII


[Illustration: JUDGE JEFFREYS’ CHAIR.]

All the incidents in Dorchester’s history seem insignificant beside the
tremendous melodrama of the ‘Bloody Assize.’ The stranger has eyes and
ears for little else than the story of that terrible time, and longs to
see the Court where Jeffreys sat, mad with drink and disease, and
sentenced the unhappy prisoners to floggings, slavery, or death.
Unhappily, that historic room has disappeared, but ‘Judge Jeffreys’
chair’ is still to be seen in the modern Town Hall, and one can approach
in imagination nearer to that awful year of 1685 by gazing at ‘Judge
Jeffreys’ Lodgings,’ still standing in High West Street, over Dawes’
china shop.

It must have been with a ferocious satisfaction that Jeffreys arrived
here to open that Assize, for Dorchester had been a ‘malignant’ town and
a thorn in the side of the Royalists forty years before. A kind of wild
retribution was to fall upon it now, not only for the share that this
district of the West had in Monmouth’s Rebellion in this unhappy year,
but for the Puritanism of a bygone generation.

Jeffreys reached here on 2nd September and the Assize was opened on the
following day, lasting until the 8th. Macaulay has given a most
convincing picture of it:--

‘The Court was hung, by order of the Chief Justice, with scarlet; and
this innovation seemed to the multitude to indicate a bloody purpose. It
was also rumoured that when the clergyman, who preached the assize
sermon, enforced the duty of mercy, the ferocious mouth of the Judge was
distorted by an ominous grin. These things made men augur ill of what
was to follow.

[Sidenote: _GEORGE THE THIRD_]

‘More than three hundred prisoners were to be tried. The work seemed
heavy; but Jeffreys had a contrivance for making it light. He let it be
understood that the only chance of obtaining pardon or respite was to
plead guilty. Twenty-nine persons who put themselves on their country,
and were convicted, were ordered to be tied up without delay. The
remaining prisoners pleaded guilty by scores. Two hundred and ninety-two
received sentence of death. The whole number hanged in Dorsetshire
amounted to seventy-four.’

It is a relief to turn from such things to the less tragical coaching
era. The ‘King’s Arms,’ which was formerly the great coaching hostelry
of Dorchester, still keeps pride of place here, and its capacious
bay-windows of old-fashioned design yet look down upon the chief street.
Instead, however, of the kings and princes and the great ones of the
earth who used to be driven up in fine style in their ‘chariots’ a
hundred years ago, and in place of the weary coach-travellers who used
to alight at the hospitable doors of the ‘King’s Arms,’ the commercial
travellers of to-day are deposited here by the hotel omnibus from the
railway station with little or no remains of that pomp and circumstance
which accompanied arrivals in the olden time. King George the Third was
well acquainted with this capacious house, for his horses were changed
here on his numerous journeys through Dorchester between London,
Windsor, and Weymouth. He kept a commonplace Court in the summer at
Weymouth for many years, and thus made the fortune of that town, while
his son, the Prince of Wales, was similarly making Brighthelmstone
popular. If we are to believe the story of the Duchesse d’Abrantes,
Napoleon had conceived the very theatrical idea of kidnapping the King
on one of these journeys. The exploit was planned for execution in the
wild and lonely country between Dorchester and Weymouth: possibly
beneath the grim shadow of sullen Maumsbury, or of prehistoric Maiden
Castle. The King and his escort were to have been surprised by a party
of secretly-landed French sailors, and his Majesty forthwith hustled on
board an open boat which was then to be rowed across the Channel to
Cherbourg. According to this remarkable statement, the English
coastguards had been heavily bribed to assist in this affair. It was
magnificent, but it was not war--nor even business. As an elaborate
joke, the project has its distinctly humorous aspects, as one vividly
conjures up a picture of ‘Farmer George,’ helplessly sea-sick, leaning
on the gunwale of the row-boat, with the equally unhappy sailors toiling
away at rowing those seventy miles of salt water. Then, too, the thought
of that essentially unromantic King compelled to cut a ridiculous figure
as a kind of modern travesty of the imprisoned Richard Lionheart, raises
a smile. But, although Napoleon, who was not a gentleman, may very
possibly have entertained this rather characteristic notion, he
certainly never attempted to put it into execution, and the road to
Weymouth is by so much the poorer in incident.

But to return to the ‘King’s Arms,’ which figures in Mr. Thomas Hardy’s
story. Here it was, looking in with the crowd on the street, that Susan
saw her long-lost husband presiding as Mayor at the banquet, the
beginning of all his troubles.

Although the stranger who has no ties with Dorchester to help paint it
in such glowing colours as those used by that writer, who finds it ‘one
of the cleanest and prettiest towns in the West of England,’ cannot
subscribe to that description, the town is of a supreme interest to the
literary pilgrim, who can identify many spots hallowed by Mr. Hardy’s
genius.

[Sidenote: _THE ROMAN ROAD_]

[Illustration: DORCHESTER.]

There are those in Dorsetshire who bitterly resent the Tony Kytes, the
Car Darches, the Bathshebas, and in especial poor Tess, who flit through
his unconventional pages, and hold that he deprives the Dorset peasant
of his moral character; but if you hold no brief for the natives in
their relation to the Ten Commandments, why, it need matter little or
nothing to you whether his characters are intended as portraitures, or
are evolved wholly from a peculiar imagination. It remains only to say
that they are very real characters to the reader, who can follow their
loves and hatreds, their comedy and tragedy, and can trace their
footsteps with a great deal more personal interest than can be stirred
up over the doings of many historical personages.




XXXIX


The Exeter Road begins to rise immediately on leaving Dorchester.
Leaving the town by a fine avenue of ancient elms stretching for half a
mile, the highway runs, with all the directness characteristic of a
Roman road, on a gradual incline up the bare and open expanse of
Bradford Down, unsheltered as yet by the stripling trees newly planted
as a continuation of the dense avenue just left behind. The first four
miles of road from the town are identical with the Roman _Via Iceniana_,
the Icen Way or Icknield Street; and on the left rises, at the distance
of a mile away, the sombre Roman earthwork of Maiden Castle crowning a
hill forming with the earthen amphitheatre of Poundbury on the right
hand, evidence, if all else in Dorchester were wanting, of the
importance of the place at that remote period.

At the fourth milestone the Exeter Road leaves that ancient military
way, and, turning sharply to the left, goes down steeply, amid loose
gravel and rain-runnels, to Winterborne Abbas, with an exceedingly
awkward fork to the road to Weymouth on the left hand half-way down.
Bold and striking views of the sullen ridge of Blackdown, with Admiral
Hardy’s pillar on the ridge, are unfolded as one descends.




XL


Winterborne Abbas, one of the twenty-five Winterbornes that plentifully
dot the map of Wilts and Dorset, lies on the level at the bottom of this
treacherous descent: a small village of thatched cottages with a church
too large for it, overhung by fir trees, and a remodelled old coaching
inn, apparently also too large, with its sign swinging picturesquely
from a tree-trunk on the opposite side of the road which, like the
majority of Dorsetshire roads, is rich in loose flints.

Half a mile beyond the village, a railed enclosure on the strip of grass
on the left-hand side of the road attracts the wayfarer’s notice. This
serves to protect from the attentions of the stone-breaker a group of
eight prehistoric stones called the ‘Broad Stone.’

[Sidenote: _THE RUSSELLS_]

[Illustration: WINTERBORNE ABBAS.]

The largest is 10 feet long by 5 feet, and 2 feet thick, lying down. A
notice informs all who care to know that this group is constituted by
the owner, according to the Act of Parliament, an ‘Ancient Monument.’
The cynically-minded might well say that the hundreds of similar
‘ancient monuments’ with which the neighbouring downs are peppered might
also be railed off, to give a welcome fillip to the trade in iron
fencing, and certainly this caretaking of every misshapen stone without
a story is the New Idolatry.

Just beyond this point is the castellated lodge of the park of
Bridehead, embowered amid trees. The place obtains its name from the
little river Bride or Bredy which rises in the grounds and flows away to
enter the sea at Burton (= ‘Bride-town’) Bradstock, eight miles away;
passing in its course the two other places named from it, Little Bredy
and Long Bredy.

Now the road rises again, and ascends wild unenclosed downs which
gradually assume a stern, and even mountainous, character. Amid this
panorama, in the deep hollows below these stone-strewn heights, are
gracious wooded dells, doubly beautiful by contrast. In the still and
sheltered nooks of these sequestered spots the primrose blooms early,
and frosts come seldom, while the uplands are covered with snow or swept
with bleak winds that freeze the traveller’s very marrow. One of these
gardens in the wilderness is Kingston Russell, the spot whence the
Russells, now Dukes of Bedford, sprang from obscurity into wealth and
power. Deep down in their retirement, the world (or such small
proportion of it as travelled in those days) passed unobserved, though
not far removed. For generations the Russells had inhabited their old
manor-house here, and might have done so, in undistinguished fashion,
for many years more, had it not been for the chance which brought John
Russell into prominence and preferment in 1502. He was the Founder of
the House and died an Earl, with vast estates, the spoil of the Church,
showered upon him. He was the first of all the Russells to exhibit that
gift of ‘getting on’ which his descendants have almost uniformly
inherited. Unlike him, however, they have rarely commanded affection,
and the Dukes of Bedford, with much reason, figure in the public eye as
paragons of meanness and parsimony.

[Illustration: KINGSTON RUSSELL.]

At the cross roads, where on the left the bye-path leads steeply down
the sides of these immemorial hills to Long Bredy, and on the right in
the direction of Maiden Newton, used to stand Long Bredy Gate and the
‘Hut Inn.’ Here the high-road is continued

[Illustration: CHILCOMBE CHURCH.]

[Sidenote: _CHILCOMBE_]

along the very backbone of the ridge, exposed to all the rigours of the
elements. To add to the weird aspect of the scene, barrows and tumuli
are scattered about in profusion. We now come to a turning on the left
hand called ‘Cuckold’s Corner,’ why, no legend survives to tell us.
Steeply this lane leads to the downs that roll away boldly to the sea,
coming in little over a mile to ‘chilly Chilcombe,’ a tiny hamlet with a
correspondingly tiny church tucked away among the great rounded
shoulders of the hills, but not so securely sheltered but that the eager
winds find their way to it and render both name and epithet eminently
descriptive. The population of Chilcombe, according to the latest
census, is twenty-four, and the houses six; and it is, accordingly,
quite in order that the church should be regarded as the smallest in
England. There are many of these ‘smallest churches,’ and the question
as to which really deserves the title is not likely to be determined
until an expedition is fitted out to visit all these rival claimants,
and to accurately measure them. Of course the remaining portions of a
church are not eligible for inclusion in this category. Chilcombe,
however, is a complete example. The hamlet was never, in all
probability, more populous than it is now, and the church certainly was
never larger. Originally Norman, it underwent some alterations in the
late Perpendicular period. The measurements are: nave 22 feet in length,
chancel 13 feet. It is a picturesque though unassuming little building,
without a tower, but provided instead with a quaint old stone bell-cote
on the west gable. This gives the old church the appearance of some
ancient ecclesiastical pigeon-house. The bell within is dated 1656. The
very fine and unusual altar-piece of dark walnut wood, with scenes from
the life of Christ, is credibly reported to have been brought here from
one of the ships of the ‘Invincible Armada,’ known to have been wrecked
on the beach at Burton Bradstock, some three miles away.

Returning to the highway at ‘Cuckold’s Corner,’ we come to ‘Traveller’s
Rest,’ now a wayside inn on the left hand, situated on the tremendous
descent which commences a mile beyond Long Bredy turnpike, and goes
practically down into Bridport’s long street; a distance of five miles,
with a fall from 702 feet above the sea, to 253 feet at ‘Traveller’s
Rest,’ two miles farther on, and eventually to sea-level at

[Sidenote: _HILLS ROUND BRIDPORT_]

[Illustration: ‘TRAVELLER’S REST.’]

Bridport, with several curves in the road and an intermediate ascent or
two between this point and the town. The cyclist who cares to take his
courage in both hands, and has no desire to linger over perhaps one of
the most magnificent scenic panoramas in England, can coast down this
long stretch with the speed of the wind, and chance the result. But it
is better to loiter here, for none of the great high-roads has anything
like this scenery to show. From away up the road the eye ranges over a
vast stretch of country westwards. South-west lies the Channel, dazzling
like a burnished mirror if you come here at the psychological moment for
this view--that is to say, the late afternoon of a summer’s day; with
the strangely contorted shapes of the hills round about suggesting
volcanic origin, and casting cool shadows far down into the sheltered
coombes that have been baking in the sun all day long. Near at hand is
Shipton Beacon, rising almost immediately beyond ‘Traveller’s Rest,’ and
looking oddly from some points of view like some gigantic ship’s hull
lying keel uppermost. Beyond are Puncknoll and Hammerdon, and away in
the distance, with the Channel sparkling behind it, and the sun making a
halo for its head, overlooking the sea at a height of 615 feet, the
grand crest of Golden Cap, which some hold to be so named from this
circumstance, while others have it that the picturesque title derives
from the yellow gorse that grows on its summit. To the right hand rises
the natural rampart of Eggardon, additionally fortified by art, a
thousand years ago, whether by Briton, Dane, or Saxon, let those
determine who will, with the village of Askerswell lying deep down,
immediately under this ridge on which the road goes, the roof of its
village church tower apparently so near that you could drop a stone
neatly on to its leads. But ‘one trial will suffice,’ as the
advertisements of much-puffed articles say, for the stone goes no nearer
than about a quarter of a mile.

Very charming, this panorama, on a summer’s day; but how about the
winters’ nights, in the times when the ‘Traveller’s Rest’ was better
named than now; when the coaches halted here, and coachmen, guards, and
passengers alike, half-frozen and breathless from the blusterous heights
of Long Bredy, tumbled out for something warming? For this hillside was
reputed to be the coldest part of the journey between London and Exeter,
and it may be readily enough supposed by all who have seen the spot,
that this was indeed the fact.




XLI


The last mile into Bridport has none of these terrify-descents,
although, to be sure, there are sudden curves in the road which it
behoves the cyclist to take slowly, for they may develop anything in the
way of traffic, from a traction engine to the elephantine advance-guard
of a travelling circus.

[Sidenote: _BRIDPORT_]

At Bridport, nine miles from the Devon border, the country already
begins to lose something of the Dorset character, and to look like the
county of junket and clotted cream. As for the town, it is difficult to
say what character it possesses, for its featureless High Street is
redeemed only from tediousness by the belfry of the Town Hall which,
with the fine westward view, including the conical height of Colmer’s
Hill and the high table-land of Eype to the left, serves to compose the
whole into something remotely resembling an effect.

Bridport is a town which would very much like to be on the sea, but is,
as a matter of fact, situated rather over a mile from it. Just where the
little river Bredy runs out and the sea comes banging furiously in, is a
forlorn concourse of houses sheltering abjectly one behind the other,
called variously Bridport Harbour and West Bay. This is the real port,
but it matters little, or nothing at all, by what name you call the
place; it remains more like a Port Desolation.

Bridport almost distinguished itself in 1651 by the fugitive Charles the
Second having been nearly captured at the ‘George Inn’ by the Harbour,
an ostler recognising his face, which, it must be conceded, was one that
once seen could scarce have been mistaken when again met with. Charles
was then trying to reach the coast after the disastrous battle of
Worcester, and it is quite certain that if Cromwell’s troopers had laid
their hands on him, there would never have been any Charles the Second
in English history.

The tragical comedy of the Stuarts throws a glamour over the Exeter Road
to its very end. The fugitive Charles, fleeing before the inquisitive
stare of the ostler, is a striking picture; and so, thirty-four years
later, is the coming of his partly acknowledged son, the Duke of
Monmouth, to upset James the Second. Bridport was seized, and one of
the ‘Monmouth men’ slew Edward Coker, gentleman, of Mappowder, on the
14th of June 1685, as the memorial tablet to that slaughtered worthy in
Bridport parish church duly recounts. For their share in the rebellion,
a round dozen of Bridport men were hanged before the eyes of their
neighbours, ‘stabbed,’ as the ancient slang phrase has it, ‘with a
Bridport dagger.’ The ghastly imagery of this saying derives from the
old-time local manufacture of rope, twine, and string, and the
cultivation of hemp in the surrounding country. Rope-and twine-walks
still remain in the town.

Leaving Bridport behind, the coach passengers by this route presently
came to its most wildly romantic part; only it is sad to reflect that
the travellers of a hundred years ago had not the slightest appreciation
of this kind of thing.

    Through Bridport’s stony lanes our way we take,
    And the proud steep descend to Morcombe’s lake.

Thus the poet Gay, but he writes from the horseman’s point of view, and
if he had bruised his bones along this road in the lurching Exeter Fly,
his tone would probably have been less breezy. Travellers, indeed,
looked upon hills with loathing, and upon solitude (notwithstanding the
poets of the time) with disgust; therefore it may well be supposed that
when they came to the rugged scenery around Morecomblake, and the next
village Chideock (called locally ‘Chiddick’), they did not enjoy
themselves.

[Sidenote: _A ROYAL FUGITIVE_]

Here Stonebarrow Hill and Golden Cap, with many lesser eminences, frown
down upon the steep highway on every side, and render the scenery
nothing less than mountainous, so that strangers in these parts,
overcome with ‘terrour’ and apprehensions of worse to come, wished
themselves safe housed in the roadside inn of Morecomblake, whose
hospitable sign gave, and still gives, promise of good entertainment.

[Illustration: CHIDEOCK.]

The run down into Charmouth from this point is a breakneck one. At this
remote seaside place, in that same year, 1651, Charles the Second had
another narrow escape. Travelling in bye-ways from the disastrous field
of Worcester on horseback, with his staunch friends, Lord Wilmot and
Colonel Wyndham, arrangements had been made with the master of a trading
vessel hailing from Lyme, to put in at Charmouth with a boat in the
stillness of the night. But they had reckoned without taking into
account either the simplicity of the sailor, or the inquisitiveness of
his wife, who wormed the secret out of him, of his being engaged in this
mysterious affair with a party of strangers. All the country was ringing
with the escape of Charles from Worcester and the hue and cry after him,
and the woman rightly guessed whom these people might be. She
effectually prevented her husband from putting in an appearance by the
threat that if he made any such attempt she would inform the magistrate.

[Illustration: SIGN OF THE ‘SHIP,’ MORECOMBLAKE.]

Wearied with watching for the promised boat, the King’s companions
reluctantly had to make Charmouth the resting-place of the party for the
night. In the morning it was found that the King’s horse had cast a
shoe. When it was taken to the blacksmith, that worthy remarked the
quaint circumstance that the three others had been replaced in three
different counties, and one of these three in Worcestershire.

[Sidenote: _ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS_]

When Charles heard that awkward discovery he was off in haste, for if a
rural blacksmith was clever enough to discover so much, it was quite
possible that he might apply his knowledge in a very embarrassing
manner.

The little band had not hurried away a moment too soon, for the ostler
of the inn (what Sherlock Holmes’s all these Dorsetshire folks were, to
be sure!) who had already arrived independently at the conclusion that
this was King Charles, had in the meanwhile gone to the Rev. Bartholomew
Wesley, a local Roundhead divine, and told him his thoughts. Thence to
the inn, where legends tell us the landlady gave Mr. Wesley a fine
full-flavoured piece of her mind, and so eventually to the ears of a
captain of horse, this wondrous news spread. Horsemen scoured the
country; clergyman returned home to think over the loyal landlady’s
abuse; ostler, probably dismissed, had leisure to curse his
officiousness; while King and companions were off, whip and spur, to
Bridport, whence, after that alarming recognition at the Harbour, to
Broadwinsor.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE ‘QUEEN’S ARMS,’ CHARMOUTH.]

This historic Charmouth inn is still existing. The ‘Anchor,’ as it is
now known, was for many years the ‘Queen’s Arms,’ but although the sign
has thus been altered and half of the building partitioned off as a
separate house, the interior remains very much the same as it was then,
and the original rough, stone-flagged passages, dark panelling, and
deep-embrasured windows add a convincing touch to the story of the
King’s flight through England with a price on his head.

For the rest, Charmouth, which stands where the tiny river Char empties
itself into the sea, consists of one long street of mutually
antagonistic houses, of all shapes, sizes, and materials, and is the
very exemplar of a fishing village turned into an inchoate seaside
resort. But a sunny, sheltered, and pleasing spot.

On leaving Charmouth, the road begins to ascend again, and leaves
Dorsetshire for Devon through a tunnel cut in the hillside, called the
‘New Passage,’ coming in four miles to ‘Hunter’s Lodge Inn,’
picturesquely set amid a forest of pine trees. From this point it is two
and a half miles on to Axminster, a town which still gives a name to a
particular make of carpets, although since 1835 the local factories have
been closed and the industry transferred to Wilton, in Wiltshire. It was
in 1755 that the industry was started here.

[Sidenote: _SHUTE HILL_]

There is one fine old coaching inn, the ‘George,’ at Axminster, with
huge rambling stables and interminable corridors, in which one ought to
meet the ghosts of departed travellers on the Exeter Road. But they are
shy. There should, in fact, be many ghosts in this old town of many
memories; and so there are, to that clairvoyant optic, the ‘mind’s eye.’
But they refuse to materialise to the physical organ, and it is only to
a vivid imagination that the streets are repeopled with the excited
peasantry who, in that fatal summer of 1685, flocked to the standard of
the Duke of Monmouth, whom ‘the Lord raised vp’ as the still existing
manuscript narrative of an Axminster dissenting minister says, to
champion the Protestant religion--with what results we already know.

Pleasant meadow-lands lead by flat and shaded roads from Axminster by
the river Axe to Axmouth, Seaton, and the sea, but our way continues
inland.




XLII


There are steep ups and downs on the nine miles and a half between
Axminster, the byegone home of carpets, and Honiton, once the seat of
the lace industry, where all routes from London to Exeter meet. ‘Honiton
lace’ is made now in the surrounding villages, but not in the town
itself.

The first hill is soon met with, on passing over the river Yart. This is
Shute Hill, where the coaches generally were upset, if either the
coachman or the horses were at all ‘fresh.’ Then it is a long run down
to Kilmington, where the travellers, having recovered their hearts from
their boots or their throats, according to their temperaments, and found
their breath, promptly cursed those coachmen and threatened them with
all manner of pains and penalties for reckless driving. Thence, by way
of Wilmington, to Honiton.

A quarter of a mile before reaching that town the traveller comes upon a
singular debased Gothic toll-house. If he walks or cycles he may pass
freely, but all carts and cattle have still to pay toll. This queer
survival is known as King’s Road Gate, or by the more popular name of
‘Copper Castle,’ from its once having a peaked copper roof above its
carpenter-gothic battlements.

[Illustration: ‘COPPER CASTLE.’]

[Sidenote: _THE LAST COACH_]

Honiton, whose name is locally ‘Honeyton,’ is a singularly uninteresting
town, with its mother-parish church half a mile away from the one broad
street that forms practically the whole of the place. Clean, quiet, and
neither very old nor very new, so far as outward appearance goes,
Honiton must be of a positively deadly dulness to the tourist on a rainy
day; when to go out of doors is to get wet, and to remain in, thrown on
the slender resources for amusement afforded by the local papers and the
ten-years-old county directory in the hotel coffee-room, is a
weariness.

Once a year, during Honiton Great Fair, this long, empty street is not
too wide; but all the year round, and every year, the broad highway
hence on to Exeter is a world too spacious for its shrunken traffic.
Broad selvedges of grass encroach as slyly as a land-grabbing, enclosing
country gentleman upon this generous width of macadamised surface, and
are allowed their will of all but a narrow strip sufficient for the
present needs of the traffic. It is fifty-five years since the Great
Western Railway was opened through to Exeter, and during that more than
half a century these long reaches of the road have been deserted. Do
belated cyclists, wheeling on moonlit nights along this tree-shaded
road, ever conjure up a picture of the last mail down; the farewells at
the inns, the cottagers standing at their doors, or leaning out of their
windows, to see the visible passing away of an epoch; the flashing of
the lamps past the hedgerows, and the last faint echoes of the horn
sounding in melancholy fashion a mile away? If they do not, why then
they must be sadly lacking in imagination, or ill-read in the Story of
the Roads.

Where the roads branch in puzzling fashion, four and a half miles from
Honiton, and all ways seem to lead to Exeter, there stands on the grassy
plot at the fork a roadside monument to a missionary bishop, Dr.
Patteson, who, born 1st April 1827, met martyrdom, together with two
other workers in the missionfield, in New Zealand, in 1871. He was the
eldest son of Sir John Patteson, of Feniton Court, near by, hence the
placing of this brick and stone column here, surmounted by a cross, and
plentifully inscribed with texts. The story of his and his friends’
death is set forth as having been ‘in vengeance for wrongs suffered at
the hands of Europeans by savage men whom he loved and for whose sake he
gave up home and country and friends dearer than his life.’

This memorial also serves the turn of finger-post, for directions are
carved on its four sides; and very necessary too, for where two roads go
to Exeter, the one by Ottery St. Mary some two miles longer than the
other, the passing rustic is not wholly to be depended upon for clear
and concise information. Cobbett in his day found that exasperating
direction of the rustics to the inquiring wayfarer, to ‘keep straight
on,’ just as great a delusion as the tourist now discovers it to be. The
formula, according to him, was a little different in his time, being
‘keep _right_ on.’

‘Aye,’ says he, ‘but in ten minutes, perhaps, you come to a [Y] or a
[T], or to a [X]. A fellow once told me, in my way from Chertsey to
Guildford, “keep _right on_, you can’t miss your way.” I was in the
perpendicular part of the [T], and the top part was only a few yards
from me. “_Right on_,” said I, “what, over _that bank_ into the
wheat?”--“No, no,” said he, “I mean _that road_, to be sure,” pointing
to the road that went off to the _left_.’

Here a branch of the river Otter crosses the road in the wooded dell of
Fenny Bridges, and in the course of another mile, on the banks of
another stream, stands the ‘Fair Mile Inn,’ the last stage into

[Sidenote: _EXETER_]

[Illustration: ‘THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD.’]

Exeter in coaching times. Lonely the road remains, passing the scattered
cottages of Rockbeare, and the depressing outlying houses of Honiton
Clyst, situated on the little river Clyst, with the first of the
characteristic old red sandstone church-towers of the South Devon
looking down upon the road from the midst of embowering foliage. Then
the squalid east end of Exeter and the long street of Heavitree, where
Exeter burnt her martyrs, come into view, and there, away in front, with
its skyline of towers and spires, is Exeter, displayed in profile for
the admiration of all who have journeyed these many miles to where she
sits in regal grandeur upon her hill that descends until its feet are
bathed in the waters of her godmother, the Exe. Her streets are steep
and her site dignified, although it is partly the level range of the
surrounding country, rather than an intrinsic height, which confers that
look of majesty which all travellers have noticed. The ancient city
rises impressive in contrast with the water-meadows, rather than by
reason of actual measurement. Wayfarers approaching from any direction
brace themselves and draw deep breaths preparatory to scaling the
streets, which, at a distance, assume abrupt vistas. Villas, with
spacious gardens, and snug, prebendal-looking houses, eloquent of a
thousand a year and cellars full of old port, clothe the lower <DW72>s of
this rising ground, to give place, by degrees, to streets which, as the
traveller advances, grow narrower and more crooked, their lines of
houses becoming ever older, more picturesque, and loftier as they near
the heart of the city. Modernity inhabits the environs, antiquity is
seated, impressive, in the centre, where, on a plateau, closely hemmed
in from the bustling, secular life of the streets, rises the sombre mass
of the cathedral, the pride of this western land.




XLIII


Exeter is called by those who know her best and love her most the ‘Queen
City of the West.’ To historians she is perhaps better epithetically
remembranced as the ‘Ever Faithful,’ loyal and staunch through the good
fortune or adversity of the causes for which she has, with closed and
guarded gates, held fast the Key of the West. She has suffered much at
different periods of her history for this loyalty; from the time when,
declaring against the usurpation of Stephen, her citizens fought and
starved within the walls; through the centuries to the time of Perkin
Warbeck, the impostor, and so on to the Civil War between King and
Parliament, when the citizens were more loyal than their rulers and were
disarmed and kept under surveillance until the Royalists came and took
the place, themselves to be dispossessed a few years later.

[Sidenote: _THE KEY OF THE WEST_]

Loyalty, tried for so many centuries at so great a cost, broke down
finally in 1688, and the city gates were opened to the Prince of Orange.
Had James been less of a bigot, and had his hell-hounds, Jeffreys and
Kirke, been animated with less zeal, who knows what these Devonshire men
would have done? Possibly it may be said that William’s fleet would,
under such circumstances, never have found its way into Tor Bay, nor
that historic landing have been consummated at Brixham. True enough; but
granting the landing, the proclamation at Newton Abbot, and the advance
to the gates of Exeter, how then if James had been less of the stubborn
oak and more of the complaisant willow? Can it be supposed that they
would have welcomed this frigid, hawk-nosed foreigner of the cold eye
and silent tongue? And if the Dutchman and his mynheers had been
ill-received at Exeter, what then? Take the map and study it for answer.
You will see that the ‘Ever Faithful’ stands at the Gates of the West.
The traveller always has had to enter these portals if he would go in
either direction, and the more imperative was this necessity to those
coming from West to East. Even now the traveller by railway passes
through Exeter to reach further Devon and Cornwall, equally with him who
fares the high-road.

What chance, then, of success would a foreign expedition command were
its progress barred at this point? Less mobile than a single traveller,
or party of mere travellers, it could not well evade the struggle for a
passage by taking another route. William and his following might, in
such an event, have at great risk forced the passage of the treacherous
Exe estuary, but even supposing that feat achieved, there is difficult
country beyond, before the road to London is reached. To the northwards
of his march from Brixham lies Dartmoor and its outlying hills, and let
those who have explored those inhospitable wastes weigh the chances of
a force marching through the hostile countryside in the depth of winter
to outflank Exeter.

But all hope for James’s cause was gone, and although the spirits of the
ambitious William sank when, on entering the streets of Exeter, he was
only received with a chilly curiosity, he was not to know--for how could
that most stony of champions read into the hearts of these people?--that
their generous enthusiasm for faith and freedom was quite crushed out of
existence by the bloody work of three years before, when the peasantry
saw with horror the progress of the fiendish Jeffreys marked by a line
of gibbets; when they could not fare forth upon the highways and byeways
without presently arriving at some Golgotha rubricated with the
dishonoured remains of one or other of their fellows; and when many a
cottage had its empty chair, the occupants dead or sold into a slavery
worse than death.

The people received William with a well-simulated lack of interest,
because they knew what would be their portion were he defeated and James
again triumphant. They could not have cherished any personal affection
for the Prince of Orange, but can only, at the best of it, have had an
impersonal regard for him as a champion of their liberties; and of
helping such champions they had already acquired a bitter surfeit. Thus
it was that the back of loyalty was broken, and Exeter, for once in her
story, belied her motto, _Semper Fidelis_, the gift of Queen Elizabeth.

[Sidenote: _THE CITY SWORD-BEARER_]

The gifts that loyalty has brought Exeter may soon be enumerated, for
they comprise just a number of charters conferred by a long line of
sovereigns; an Elizabethan motto; a portrait of his sister, presented by
Charles the Second; a Sword of Honour, and an old hat, the gifts of
Henry the Seventh in recognition of Exeter’s stand against Perkin
Warbeck in 1497. Against these parchments, this picture, and the
miscellaneous items of motto, sword, and old hat, there are centuries of
lighting and of spoliation on account of loyalty to be named. It seems a
very one-sided affair, even though the old hat be a Cap of Maintenance
and heraldically notable. Among the maces and the loving-cups, and all
the civic regalia of Exeter, these objects are yet to be seen. Old
headgear will wear out, and so the Cap, in its present form, dates back
only to the time of James the First. It is by no means a gossamer,
weighing, as it does, seven pounds. As may be seen by the accompanying
illustration, it is a broad-brimmer of the most pronounced type.

The crown fixed upon the point of the sword-sheath belongs to the same
period, while a guinea of the same reign may be seen let into the metal
of the pommel. On occasions of State, at Exeter, this sword is carried
before the Mayor and Corporation by their official Sword-Bearer.

[Illustration: THE EXETER CITY SWORD-BEARER.]

The dignified effect of the affair, however, is generally spoiled by
the commonplace black kid gloves worn by him, and by his everyday
clothes visible under the official robes, which can be seen in the
illustration.

Of late the Cap has been replaced by one built on the lines of those
worn by the Yeomen of the Guard in the Tower of London, the old Cap
being thought too historical to be any longer exposed to the danger of
being worn, while possibly some feelings of humanity towards the
Sword-Bearer may have dictated the replacing of the seven-pound hat by
something lighter. It is now preserved in the Guildhall, where it may be
seen by curious visitors.




XLIV


It is a relief to turn from the thronging streets to the absolute quiet
of the cathedral precincts, shaded by tall elms and green with trim
lawns.

Externally, the cathedral is of the grimiest and sootiest aspect--black
as your hat, but comely. Not even the blackest corners of St. Paul’s
Cathedral, in London, show a deeper hue than the west front of St.
Peter’s, at Exeter. The battered, time-worn array of effigies of saints,
kings, crusaders, and bishops that range along the screen in mutilated
array under Bishop Grandison’s great west window are black, too, and so
are the gargoyles that leer with stony grimaces down upon you from the
ridges and string-courses of the transepts, where they lurk in an
enduring crepuscule.

[Sidenote: _A COACHING STRONGHOLD_]

The sonorous note of Great Peter, the great bell of the cathedral,
sounding from the south transept tower is in admirable keeping with the
black-browed gravity of the close, and keeps the gaiety of the
surrounding hotels within the limits of a canonical sobriety.

Elsewhere are ancient hostelries innumerable, with yawning archways
under which the coaches entered in the byegone days. The ‘Elephant,’ the
‘Mermaid,’ and the ‘Half Moon’ are the chief among these, and have the
true Pickwickian air, which is the outstanding note of all inns of the
Augustan age of coaching. It must have been worth the journey to be so
worthily housed at the end of the alarums and excursions which more or
less cheerfully enlivened the way.

Exeter and the far West of England were the last strongholds of the
coaching interest. The Great Western Railway was opened to Exeter on 1st
May 1844, and up to that time over seventy coaches left that city daily
for London and the cross-country routes. Nor did coaching languish
towards the close. On the contrary, it died game, and, until finally
extinguished by the opening of the railway, coaching on the old road
between London and Exeter was a matter of the utmost science and the
best speed ever attained by the aid of four horses on a turnpike road.
Charles Ward, the best-known driver of the old ‘Telegraph’ Exeter coach,
driven from his old route, retreated westwards and took the road between
Exeter and Devonport, retiring into Cornwall when the railway was opened
to Plymouth on 1st May 1848; but not before he had brought the time of
the ‘Telegraph’ between London and Exeter down to fifteen hours.

The ‘Half Moon’ is the inn from which the ‘Telegraph’ started at 6.30 in
the morning, breakfasting at Ilminster, dining at Andover, and stopping
for no other meal, reaching Hyde Park Corner at 9.30 P.M. It was kept in
1777 by a landlord named Hemming, who had a very good understanding with
the highwaymen Boulter and Caldwell, and doubtless with many another.
There is a record of those two knights of the road being here, one of
them with a stolen horse, when a Mr. Harding, of Bristol, being in the
yard, recognised it. ‘Why, Mr. Hemming,’ said he, ‘that is the very mare
my father-in-law, Mr. James, lost a few months ago; how came she here?’
To which the landlord replied, ‘She has been my own mare these twelve
months, and how should she be your father-in-law’s?’

‘Well,’ replied Harding, ‘if I had seen her in any other hands, or met
her on the road, I could have sworn to her.’ Boulter and Caldwell were
at that moment in the house at dinner, so the landlord took the first
opportunity of warning them.

For the rest, Exeter is still picturesque. It possesses many quaint and
interesting churches, placed in the strangest positions; while that of
St. Mary Steps has a queer old clock with grotesque figures that strike
the hours and chime the quarters. The seated figure is intended to
represent Henry the Eighth, and those on either side of him men-at-arms,
but the local people have a rhyming legend which

[Sidenote: _EXETER CASTLE_]

[Illustration: EXETER, FROM THE DUNSFORD ROAD.]

would have it that the King is a certain ‘Matty the Miller’:--

    The people around would not believe
    That Matty the Miller was dead;
    For every hour on Westgate tower,
    Matty still nods his head.

And, in fact, the King kicks his heels against the bell and nods with
every stroke. The Jacobean Guildhall of Exeter, too, is among the most
striking relics of this old-world city; while away from the High Street,
but near the continual clashing of a great railway station, there stand
the remains of Exeter Castle, the appropriately named Rougemont, that
cruel Blunderbore, drunken in the long ago with the blood of many a
gallant gentleman. At the end of a long line of those who suffered were
Colonel John Penruddocke and Hugh Grove, captured at South Molton after
that ineffectual Salisbury rising. Executed in the Castle Yard, in the
very heart of this loyal city of Exeter, many a heart must have ached on
that fatal morning for these unhappy men. ‘This, I hope,’ said
Penruddocke, ascending the scaffold, ‘will prove like Jacob’s Ladder;
though the feet of it rest upon the earth, yet I doubt not but the top
of it reaches to Heaven. The crime for which I am now to die is Loyalty,
in this age called High Treason.’

[Illustration: ‘MATTY THE MILLER.’]

They knew both how to fight and how to die, those dauntless Cavaliers.
The Earl of Derby, who suffered at Bolton, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir
George Lisle, barbarously shot at the taking of Colchester; gray-haired
Sir Nicholas Kemys at Chepstow, and many another died as valiantly as
their master--

    Who nothing little did, nor mean,
    But bowed his shapely head
    Down, as upon a bed.

It is away through the city and across the Exe, to where the road rises
in the direction of Dartmoor, that one of the finest views back upon the
streets and the cathedral is obtained. Exeter from the Dunsford road,
glimpsed by the ancient and decrepit elm pictured here, is worth seeing
and the view itself is worth preserving, for elm and old-world
foreground, with the inevitable changes which the growth of Exeter is
bringing about, will not long remain. Like many another relic of a past
era along this old highway, they are vanishing even while the busy
chronicler of byegone days is hastening to record them.

[Illustration: THE END]




INDEX


Abbot’s Ann, 153

Alderbury, 183

Amesbury, 1, 2, 8, 12, 154, 195, 209

Andover, 1, 94, 123, 132-145, 217, 219

Ashe, 124

Automobile Club, 212

Axminster, 2, 9, 296


Bagshot, 3, 18, 69, 89, 96-98, 103

Bagshot Heath, 95-98

Basing House, siege of, 114-120, 123

Basing, Old, 113, 122

Basingstoke, 101, 113, 122

Bedfont, East, 78-80

Bedford Park, 92

Blackwater, 100, 101

Blandford, 2, 7, 9, 12, 242-216, 256-265

‘Bloody Assize,’ 273-275

Bokerley <DW18>, 237

Bredy, Little, 283

Bredy, Long, 283, 284, 286, 289

Brentford, 16, 33, 34, 53, 56-63, 92, 93

Bridehead, 283

Bridport, 2, 94, 220, 280, 290-292, 295

‘Broad Stone,’ the, 280

Bryanstone, 265


Camberley, 99, 101

Cambridge Town, 99, 101

Charlton Downs, 265

Charmouth, 293-296

Chettle Common, 247

Chideock, 292

Chilcombe, 285

Chiswick High Road, 92

Clerken Green, 124

Coaches--
  ‘Celerity,’ 12, 195
  ‘Comet,’ 15, 18, 25
  ‘Defiance,’ 12, 105, 195
  Devonport Mail (_see_ ‘Quicksilver’)
  ‘Diligence,’ 186
  ‘Exeter Fly,’ 2, 9, 15, 292
  ‘Express,’ 91
  ‘Fly Vans,’ 10, 106
  ‘Herald,’ 12
  ‘Old Times,’ 91
  ‘Pilot,’ 12
  ‘Post Coach,’ 186
  ‘Prince George,’ 12
  ‘Quicksilver,’ 3, 8, 11, 12, 22, 25, 27, 30, 33
  ‘Regulator,’ 8, 12, 21, 25, 105
  ‘Royal Mail,’ 8, 9, 11, 32, 69, 162-165, 186
  Short Stages, 33
  ‘Sovereign,’ 8, 12
  Stage Waggons, 11, 106
  ‘Subscription,’ 12, 195
  ‘Telegraph,’ 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 30, 33, 69, 195, 309, 310
  ‘Traveller,’ 12

Coaching, 2, 7-31, 62, 69, 81, 91, 102-108, 127, 141,
          157, 162-165, 184-188, 195, 309

Coaching Notabilities--
  Mountain, Mrs., 29
  Nelson, Mrs., 2
  ‘Nimrod,’ 12
  Nobbs, Moses James, 31
  Ward, Charles, 69, 309

Coombe Bissett, 234, 242

Cranborne Chase, 237, 238, 245-250, 254

Cuckold’s Corner, 285, 286


_Dead Drummer_, the, 238-242

Deane, 124

Deer-stealers, 246-248

Dickens, Charles, 184-186, 212-215

Dodington, George Bubb, 250-255

Dorchester, 2, 12, 94, 95, 227, 268-279


Eastbury Park, 250-256

Egham, 86, 89-91, 94

Exeter, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 30, 31, 33, 93, 94, 95, 303-314


Fares, 11, 22, 28, 106

Feltham Industrial School, 77

Fenny Bridges, 300

Fordington, 271, 272

Freefolk, 126


Gay, John, 59, 85, 292

Gibbon, Edward, 261

Great Western Railway, 31, 299, 309

Gunnersbury, 92, 93


Hammersmith, 56, 89, 254

Hardy, Thomas, 155, 166, 268, 276

Hartford Bridge, 21, 22, 102-110

Hartford Bridge Flats, 22, 101

Hartley Row, 100, 101, 221, 222

Hatton, 73

Hazlitt, William, 73, 157-162, 186

Highwaymen, 70, 74, 98, 187, 215-232
  Biss, 216, 310
  Blagden, Isaac, 217
  Boulter, Thomas, 217
  Boulter, Thomas, junr., 218-228, 310
  Caldwell, James, 223-228, 310
  Davis, William, 98, 216
  Du Vail, Claude, 70, 99
  ‘Golden Farmer,’ the (_see_ Davis, William)
  Peare, William, 228
  Turpin, Richard, 70
  Whitney, Capt. James, 216

Highwaywoman (Mary Sandall), 228

Holloway College, 90

Honiton, 1, 2, 95, 297-299

Hook, 101, 110

Hounslow, 16, 17, 32, 65, 69, 92

Hounslow Heath, 69-71, 75-78

Hurstbourne Priors, 125, 131

Hurstbourne Tarrant, 132

Hyde Park Corner, 1, 16, 33, 38, 40, 62


Inns (mentioned at length)--
  ‘Anchor,’ Charmouth, 295
  ‘Bell,’ Hounslow, 65
  ‘Bells of Ouseley,’ Old Windsor, 87-89
  ‘Black Dog,’ East Bedfont, 79
  ‘Bull,’ Aldgate, 2
  ‘Bull and Mouth,’ St. Martin-le-Grand, 12
  ‘Cashmoor,’ 242, 247
  ‘Deptford,’ Wilton, 13
  ‘Elephant,’ Exeter, 309
  ‘Fair Mile,’ 300
  ‘George,’ Andover, 136, 142-145
  ‘George,’ Axminster, 296
  ‘Gloucester Coffee House,’ Piccadilly, 34, 38
  ‘Goose and Gridiron,’ St. Paul’s Churchyard, 37
  ‘Green Dragon,’ Alderbury, 183
  ‘Green Man,’ Hatton, 74
  ‘Half Moon,’ Exeter, 2, 310
  ‘Hotel Victoria,’ Northumberland Avenue, 91
  ‘Jolly Farmer,’ Bagshot, 99
  ‘King’s Arms,’ Bagshot, 97, 98
  ‘King’s Arms,’ Dorchester, 275, 276
  ‘Mermaid,’ Exeter, 310
  ‘New London,’ Exeter, 8, 12
  ‘Old White Hart,’ Hook, 110
  ‘Park House,’ Amesbury, 1, 195
  ‘Queen’s Arms,’ Charmouth, 295
  ‘Ship,’ Morecomblake, 294
  ‘Swan-with-Two-Necks,’ Lad Lane, 8, 11, 12, 62
  ‘Thickthorn,’ 242
  ‘Thorney Down,’ 242
  ‘Traveller’s Rest, 286-289, 290
  ‘Wheatsheaf,’ Virginia Water, 91
  ‘White Bear,’ Piccadilly, 26
  ‘White Hart,’ Hook, 110
  ‘White Hart,’ Milborne St. Andrew, 267
  ‘White Hart,’ Whitchurch, 127, 123
  ‘White Horse Cellars,’ Piccadilly, 26
  ‘Winterslow Hut,’ 110, 156-165, 186, 218, 223
  ‘Woodyates,’ 94, 234-241, 247


Jeffreys, Judge, 273


Kensington, 53-56, 89

Kilmington, 297

Kingston Russell, 283

Knightsbridge, 48


Laverstoke, 125

Lioness attacks Mail, 162-165

Little Ann, 153

Little Bredy, 283, 289

Little Wallop, 155, 265

Lobcombe Corner, 156

Long Bredy, 283, 284


M’Adam, John Loudon, 17, 29

Mail coaches established, 9

Mapledurwell Hatch, 113

Market-gardens, 73-76

_Martin Chuzzlewit_, 183-186

Matcham, Jarvis, 241

_Mayor of Casterbridge_, 146, 155, 271, 276

Middle Wallop, 155

Milborne St. Andrew, 266

Monmouth’s Rebellion, 237, 273, 291, 297

Morecomblake, 95, 292-294

Mullen’s Pond, 1, 195


Nately Scures, 110

Nether Wallop, 154-156

New Sarum, 167, 170


Oakley, 124

Old Basing, 113, 122

Old Sarum, 94, 167-170, 191

Old Windsor, 87

Old-time travellers--
  Charles II., 291, 293-296
  Cobbett, Richard, 75, 89, 90-101, 109, 110, 125, 142-145, 192, 300
  Conyngham, Lord Albert, 140
  George III., 238, 275
  Knighton, Sir William, 10, 187
  Monmouth, Duke of, 237, 291, 297
  Newman, Cardinal, 127
  Payne, George, 141
  Pepys, Samuel, 187, 19
  Taylor, John (the ‘Water Poet’), 80
  Trollope, Thomas Adolphus, 26-30

Omnibuses, 34, 40

Overton, 124, 125

Over Wallop, 154-156


Patteson, Dr., 299

Piccadilly, 2

Piddletown, 265, 267

Pimperne, 248, 256

Police, the, 51


Roman Roads, 8, 82-85, 92-95, 279

Russells, the, 283


St. George’s Hospital, 38, 40

St. Mary Bourne, 94

Salisbury, 1, 4, 9, 165-183, 313

Salisbury Plain, 102, 191, 195-199, 203, 209, 212-217, 230-232, 238, 242

Sarum, New, 167, 170

Sarum, Old, 94, 167-170, 191

Shrub’s Hill, 92, 93, 95

Shute Hill, 297

Staines, 1, 17, 72, 81-86, 92

Staines Stone, 82-84

Stevens, Alfred, 262

Stonehenge, 188, 196-212

Sunningdale, 89, 95

Sunninghill, 89


Tarrant Gunville, 248, 256

Tarrant Hinton, 242, 256, 265

Thorney Down, 94, 242

Troy Town, 268

Turnham Green, 56, 92

Turnpike Gates, 44-48, 154, 267, 298


Upper Wallop, 154-156


Virginia Water, 89, 91, 95


Wallops, the, 154-156, 265

Watchmen, the old, 51

Wesley, Rev. Bartholomew, 295

Wesley, John, 265

West Harnham, 234

Weyhill, 1, 94, 154

Weyhill Fair, 133, 142, 145-152

Whitchurch, 1, 32, 124, 127-131, 221

Wilmington, 297

Windsor, Old, 87

Winterborne Abbas, 280

Winterborne Whitchurch, 265, 267

Worting, 115, 123


Yellowham Hill, 268

Yeovil, 1, 12

York Town, 99, 100, 101

Young’s Corner, 92


           _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.


FOOTNOTES:

 [1] ‘Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where
 is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your
 souls.’

 [2] Yes, but the time was cut down to fourteen hours a few years later.

 [3] Waggons travelling at the rate of not more than four miles an hour
 were exempt from excise duty.








End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Exeter Road, by Charles G. Harper

*** 