The Holyhead Road; the mail-coach road to Dublin

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR.

The Brighton Road: Old Times and
New on a Classic Highway.

The Portsmouth Road: and its Tribu-
taries, To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road : Annals of an Ancient
Turnpike.

The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and
Frivolity on an old Highway.

The Exeter Road: The Story of the
West of England Highway.

The Great North Road : The Old Mail
Road to Scotland. 2 Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian
Highway.

The Oxford Gloucester, and Milford
Haven Road. [In the Press.

Cycle Rides Round London.

T

HE HOLYHEAD

ROAD: THE MAIL-
COACH ROAD TO DUBLIN

By CHARLES G. HARPER

Author of " The Brighton Road" " The Portsmouth

Road" « The Dover Road" « The Bath Road" " The

Exeter Road" " The Great North Road" and " The

Norwich Road "

Illustrated by the Author, and from
Old-Time Prints and Pictures

Vol. I. LONDO^ TO

LONDON : CHAPMAN & HALL

LTD. 1902

[All rights reserved}

D/
0

" CT^HE olden days of travelling, now to return
no more, in which distance could not be
vanquished without toil " — those are the days
mourned by Ruskin, who had little better acquaint-
ance with them than afforded by his childish
journeys, when his father, a prosperous wine-
merchant, travelled the country in a carriage with
a certain degree of style. Regrets are, under such
circumstances, easily to be understood, just as were
those of the old coach-proprietors, innkeepers,
coachmen, postboys, and all who depended upon
road-travel for their existence ; but few among
travellers who lived in the days when the change
was made from road to rail had feelings of that
kind, else railways would not have proved so
immediately successful. It has been left for a
later era to discover the charm and rosy glamour
of old road-faring days, a charm not greatly
insisted upon In the literature of those times,
which, instead of being rich in praise of the
road, is fruitful in accounts of the miseries

Vlll

PREFACE

of travel. Pepys, on the Portsmouth Road in
1668, fearful of losing his way at night, as
had often happened to him before; Thoresby, in
1714 and later years, on the Great North Road,
thanking God that he had reached home safely ;
Horace Walpole, on the Brighton Road in 1749,
finding the roads almost impassable^ therefore,
and reasonably enough, " a great damper of
curiosity " ; Arthur Young for years exhausting
the vocabulary of abuse on roads in general ;
and Jeffrey in 1831, at Grantham, looking
dismally forward to being snowed up at Alconbury
Hill — these are a few instances, among many,
which go to prove, if proof were necessary, that
travelling ivas regarded then as a wholly un-
mitigated evil.

Rut, quite apart from such considerations,
there is a charm clinging about the bygone and
the out-of-date ivholly lacking in things con-
temporary. The Romans who constructed and
travelled along their roads could not find in them
the interest we discover, and the old posting-
houses and inns frequented by our grandfathers
must have seemed to them as matter-of-fact as we
now think our own railway hotels. It is, indeed,
just BECAUSE the old roads and the wayside
inns are superseded by the rail and the modern
hotel, and because they are altogether removed
from the everyday vulgarity of use and competi-
tion, that they have assumed their romantic aspect,

PREFACE ix

together with that ivhich now surrounds the slow
and inconvenient coaches and the harmful un-
necessary highwayman) long since become genuine
antiques and puppets for the historical novelist
to play with.

The HOLYHEAD B.OAD, in its long course towards
the Irish Sea, holds much of this old romance,
and not a little of a newer sort. Cities whose
history goes back to the era of the Saxons wlio
Jirst gave this highivay the name of " Waiting
Street" lie along these many miles; and other
cities and towns there are whose fame and
fortunes are of entirely modern growth. Some
have decayed, more have sprung into vigorous
life, and, in answer to the demand that arose, a
hundred years ago, for improved roads, the old
highway itself was remodelled, in the days that
are already become distant.

But better than the cities and towns and
milages along these two hundred and sixty miles
is the scenery, ranging from the quiet pastoral
beauties of the Home Counties to the rocks and
torrents, the mountains and valleys of North
Wales. This road and its story are a very
epitome of our island's scenery and history.
History of the larger sort — that tells of the
setting up and the putting down of Kings and
Princes — has marched in footprints of blood
down the road, and left a trail of fire and
ashes; but it may ivell be thought, ivith one who

x PREFACE

has written the history of the English people,
that the doings of such are not all the story :
that the village church, the mill by the riverside,
the drowsy old town, " the tolls of the market-
place, the brasses of its burghers in the church,
the names of its streets, the lingering memory
of its guilds, the mace of its mayor, tell us
more of the past of England than the spire of
Sarum or the martyrdom of Canterbury."

CHARLES G. HARPER.

PETEESHAM,
SUBEEY,
April 1902.

ILLUSTRATIONS

SEPARATE PLATES

PAGE

THE " WONDER," LONDON AND SHREWSBURY COACH. (From

a Print after J. Pollard) . . . Frontispiece

SKETCH-MAP OF THE HOLYHEAD ROAD AND THE WATLING

STREET ...... xix

YARD OF THE "BULL AND MOUTH," ST. MARTIN'S-LE-

GRAND. (From an old Print) . . .13

" TALLY-HO " AND " INDEPENDENT TALLY-HO," LONDON AND
BIRMINGHAM COACHES, NEARING LONDON, 1828.
(From a Print after J. Pollard) . . .25

THE " ANGEL," ISLINGTON. MAIL COACHES AND ILLUMINA-
TIONS ON NIGHT OF THE KING'S BIRTHDAY, 1812.
(From a Print after J. Pollard) . . .41

HIGHGATE ARCHWAY AND THE TURNPIKE GATE, 1823.

(From an Old Print) .... 45

HIGHGATE ARCHWAY : MAIL COACH NEARING LONDON.

(From a Print after J. Pollard) . . .51

THE " WOODMAN," FINCHLEY, 1834 : COVENTRY AND
BIRMINGHAM COACH PASSING. (From a Print after
J. Pollard) ...... 55

HIGHGATE VILLAGE, 1826. (From an Old Print) . 59

xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

THE OLD ROAD, BARNET . 67

THE OLD ROAD, RIDGE HILL . 99

THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE LIVER-
POOL MAIL PASSING Two LADIES SNOWED UP ON
RIDGE HILL IN THEIR CHARIOT, WITHOUT HORSES,
THE POSTBOY HAVING RIDDEN TO ST. A LEANS FOR
FRESH ONES. (From a Print after J. Pollard) . 103
ST. ALBANS CATHEDRAL . . . . .109

ST. PETER'S STREET AND TOWN HALL, ST. ALBANS, 1826.

(From an Old Print) . . , .117

DUNSTABLE DOWNS . . . . .147

THE " WHITE HORSE," HOCKLIFFE . . .153

THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE BIRMING-
HAM MAIL FAST IN THE SNOW, WITH LITTLE CHANCE
OF A SPEEDY RELEASE : THE GUARD PROCEEDING TO

LONDON WITH THE LETTER-BAGS. (From a Print

after J. Pollard) . . . . .159

STONY STRATFORD . . . . .173

DAVENTRY MARKET-PLACE . . . 235

DUNCHURCH .... 255

FORD'S HOSPITAL ..... 275

THE OLD "KING'S HEAD," COVENTRY. (From a Print

after JRowlandson) . . . . 295

COVENTRY, FROM WINDMILL HILL. (After J. M. W.

Turner, R.A.) . . . . .299

THE LIVERPOOL MAIL, 1836. (From a Print after J.

Pollard) ... 309

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

PAGE

Vignette : Ogilby's Dimensurator . . . Title Page

Preface ....... vii

List of Illustrations ..... xi

The Holyhead Road : Ogilby's Survey ... 1

Clark's Steam Carriage, 1832. (From an Old Print) . 33
The New Highgate Archway . . . .48

James Ripley, Ostler of the "Red Lion" . . 76

Hadley Green: Winter ..... 80

South Mimms ...... 92

London Colney . . . ' . . . 101

Entrance to St. Albans . . . . .105

Market-place, St. Albans . . . . .114

The "George" . . . . .120

The " Fighting Cocks " . . . . .123

St. Michael's ...... 129

Mad Tom in Bedlam . . . . .132

Mad Tom at Liberty . . . . .133

Redbourne Church . . . . .134

Redbourne . . . . . . .135

Dunstable Priory Church . . . . .144

Little Brickhill . . . . . .165

Yard of the " George " . . . . .166

Queen's Oak . . . . . .176

Market-place, Stony Stratford . . . 181

The "Blue Ball" . . . . . .183

Lilbourne ....... 206

Cross-in-hand ...... 209

High Cross Monument . . . . .210

xiv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

The Watling Street, near Hammerwich . .219

The "Four Crosses," near Hatherton . . . 222

Boscobel and the " Royal Oak " . . . . 227

Town Seal, Daventry . .238

Braunston Hill ...... 239

Braunston ....... 240

Ashby St. Ledgers . . . . .243

The "Four Crosses," Willoughby (Demolished 1898) . 245
Lord John Scott's Statue . . . . .257

Dunsmore Avenue. ..... 260

Knightlow Cross ...... 264

The Three Spires ...... 269

Peeping Tom ...... 273

The "Old Ordinary" . . . . .285

The old " Bull's Head," Meriden . . . .304

Meriden Cross . . . 306

THE HOLYHEAD BOAD
LONDON TO BIRMINGHAM

MILES

London (General Post Office) to—

Islington (the "Angel") . . . 1J

Highgate Archway ..... 4J

East End, Finchley 5f

Brown's Wells, Finchley Common (" Green Man ") 7

North Finchley: "Tally-ho Corner" . . 7J

Whetstone ...... 9J

Greenhill Cross . . . . . 10J

Barnet . . . . . lljr

South Mimms . . . . 14 J

Ridge Hill . . . . .16

London Colney . . . . 17 J

(Cross River Colne.)

St. Albans (" Peahen ") . . . 20£
Redbourne . . . . . .25

Friar's Wash ..... 27J

Markyate ...... 29

Dunstable ...... 33J

Hockliffe . . . . . 37J

Sheep Lane . . . . . .41

Little Brickhill ..... 45

Fenny Stratford ..... 48

(Cross River Ousel.)

Stony Stratford ..... 52i

Old Stratford ..... 52|

(Cross River Ouse.)

xvi THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

MILKS

Potterspury .

Havencote Houses . 59

Towcester (" Pomfret Arms ") 60}

(Cross Eiver Towe.)
Foster's Booth . . 64

(Cross River Nen.)
Weedon Beck . 68

(Watling Street branches off from Holyhead
Road.)

Dodford 68}

Daventry ... . 72|

Brannston ..... . 75f

Willoughby 77

Dnnchurch . . . .80}

Ryton-on-Dunsmore . . . . 84J

(Cross River Avon.)
Willenhall 88}

(Cross River Sow.)

Coventry (« King's Head ") . . . 91}

Allesley ...... 93}

Meriden .... . .97

Stonebridge . . . . .100

(Cross River Tame.)

Bickenhill . . . . . . 101J

Elmdon . . . . . . . 102}

Wells Green ... 104

Yardley • • . . . .105}

Hay Mills . . . . . .106}

Small Heath . . .

Bordesley ...

Deritend -1081

Birmingham (General Post Office) . . 109}

THE WATLING STREET, FROM WEEDON BECK TO
OAKENGATES AND KETLEY

MILES

Weedon Beck to —

Watford Gap ..... 5J

Crick Hallway Station . 9

Lilbonrne . . . . . 12 J

Catthorpe Five Houses . . . . 12J

Cave's Inn . . . . . 14 J

Gibbet . . . . . .15

(Cross River Swift.)
Cross-in-Hand . . . . . 17J

Willey Railway-crossing . . . .18

Wibtoft ...... 20

High Cross ...... 21

Smockington . . . . .22

Caldecote . . . . . .30

Witherley . . . . . 3H

(Cross River Anker.)
Mancetter . . . . . .32

Atherstone ...... 32J

Baddesley Ensor ..... 36

Cordon . . . . . 36 J

Stony Delph . ... 39

Wilnecote ...... 39J

(Cross River Tame.)
Fazeley ...... 4UJ

Hints ...... 42f

Weeford 44i

xviii THE ROAD TO HOLY HE AD

MILES

(Cross-road, Lichfield to Coleshill) . 44}

(Cross-road, Lichfield to Birmingham) . 46£

Wall 4?i

Mnckley Corner . . 48£

Hammerwich .... 49J

Brownhills . . 51

Wyrley Bank . 54}
" Four Crosses," Hatherton . . .5?

Gailey Railway Station (L. & N. W. It.) . 59}

(Cross River Penk.)

Horsebrook and Stretton . . . 61 J

Ivetsey Bank (" Bradford Arms ") . . . 65
Weston-under-Lizard . . . .67

Crackley Bank ..... 69^

St. George's (Pain's Lane Chapel . . . ?2J

Oakengates ...... 73|

Ketley Railway Station .... 75^

" PEACE hath its victories, 110 less renowned
than war ; " and there is nothing more remark-
able than the engineering triumphs that land
the Irish Member of Parliament, fresh from the
Division Lobby at Westminster, at North Wall,
Dublin, spouting treason, in nine hours and a
quarter, or bring the Irish peasant, with the
reek of the peat-smoke still in his clothes, and
the mud of his native bogs not yet dried on his
boots, to Euston in the same space of time.

But a hundred years ago, when the peaceful
labours of the engineer had not begun to
annihilate space and time, and the Union of
Great Britain and Ireland had only just been
effected, no such ready transit was possible, and
our great-grandfathers reckoned their journeys
between the two capitals in days instead of hours.
The Holyhead Road, known to our fathers and
ourselves, was not in existence ; and Liverpool
(and even Parkgate, near Chester) was as often
VOL. i. 1

2 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

the point of embarkation for Ireland as Holyhead.
The journey from London to Dublin was then of
uncertain length, determined by such fluctuating
conditions as the season of the year, the condition
of the roads, and the winds of St. George's
Channel — sometimes smooth, but more often
stormy.

What the road was, and what it became, shall
be the business of these pages to relate.

Close upon two hundred years ago, then, when
Queen Anne was just dead, and the Elector of
Hanover had ascended the throne of England
as George I., the way to Holyhead was, in great
measure, an affair of individual taste and fancy.
Some travellers went by way of Oxford and
Worcester, others by Woburn, Northampton,
Lutterworth, Stafford, Nantwich, and Chester ;
some kept the route now known as the Holyhead
Road as far as Stonebridge, on the other side of
Coventry, and thence by Castle Bromwich and
Aldridge Heath; others followed it past Shrews-
bury and turned off at Chirk for Wrexham;
while others yet had their own preferences, and
reached Holyhead goodness knows how — them-
selves, perhaps, least of all. Those were the
times when, as Pennant tells us, the hardy
country gentlemen rode horseback. Thickly
wrapped in riding cloaks, and with jackboots,
up to their hips, they splashed through mud
and mire, making light of occasional falls, and
so journeyed between London and Holvhead in

THE FIRST COACH 3

perhaps six days, if they were both active and
fortunate. Those travellers commonly rode post-
horses, changing their mounts at well-known
stages on the way. The system took its origin
from the establishment of postmasters by the
Post Office in 1635, when the charge for an
able horse was 2^d. a mile. None but duly
authorised persons were then permitted to supply
horses. In 1658, according to an advertisement
in the Mercurius Politicus, the mileage had be-
come 3d. As time went on this monopoly was
abolished, and most innkeepers supplied horses
for those hardy riders who despised the new-
fangled coaches. The. earliest mention of a coach
on this road is found in the above-named paper,
under date of April 9th, 1657 : " For the con-
venient accommodation of passengers from and
betwixt London and West Chester, there is
provided several stage-coaches, which go from
the George Inn, without Aldersgate, upon every
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday — to Coventry in
two days, for twenty-five shillings ; to Stone in
three days, for thirty shillings ; and to Chester
in four days, for thirty-five shillings ; and from
thence do return upon the same days, which is
performed with much ease to the passengers,
having fresh horses once a day."

It may shrewdly be surmised that, as the
Chester coach of 1739, mentioned by Pennant,
did not succeed in performing the journey under
six days, the coach of 1657 did not find it pos-
sible to do it in four ; and this suspicion seems

4 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

warranted by an advertisement in the Her-
curius Politicus of March 24th, 1659, probably
emanating from the same persons:—

"These are to give notice, that from the
George Inn, without Aldersgate, goes every
Monday and Thursday a coach and four able
horses, to carry passengers to Chester in five
days, likewise to Coventry, Cosell (Coleshill),
Cank, Litchfield, Stone, or to Birmingham,
Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Newport, Whit-
church, and Holywell, at reasonable rates, by us,
who have performed it two years.

"WILLIAM DUNSTAN.
"HENRY EARLE.
"WILLIAM FOWLER."

It will be observed that an alternative route,
through Birmingham, is announced, probably to
suit the wishes of those who might chance to
book seats. The travelling was by no means
comfortable, and in 1663 a young gentleman is
found writing to his father : "I got to London
on Saturday last ; my journey was noe way
pleasant, being forced to ride in the boote all
the way. The company that came up with me
were persons of greate qualitie, as knightes and
ladyes. This travell hath soe indisposed mee,
that I am resolved never to ride up again in
the coatch." He probably rode post ever after-
wards.

In 1681 a coach was running (or crawling)

HIGHIVA Y ROBBER Y 5

between London and Shrewsbury, by way of
Newport Pagnell. Sir William Dugdale, travel-
ling by it from London to Coleshill, says : " The
first night we stopped at Woburn, the second at
Hill Morton, near Rugby, and on the third we
proceeded to Coleshill." Thence it went along
the old Chester Road to Aldridge Heath and
Brownhills, and by the Watling Street from
that point to Wellington. This Shrewsbury
stage was robbed on January 30th, 1703, in the
neighbourhood of Brownhills, by a gang of men
and women, who, after they had plundered the
passengers, met three county attorneys, whom
they also robbed. One of the attorneys had what
is described as a "porte mantel." In it, among
other things, was a pair of shoes, in which the
owner had hidden twenty guineas. The thieves
threw the shoes away, and when they had
departed he happily regained this most valuable
portion of his luggage. Other wayfarers were
not so fortunate on encountering this hybrid
gang of desperadoes; for, ten days later, when
two drovers, fresh from Newcastle Fair, with
bags of money in their pockets, came jogging
along the road, they were set upon and robbed.
One was killed and the other dangerously
wounded. Two days after this exploit, growing
bolder, the gang attacked the High Sheriff of
Staffordshire, with his lady and servants, coming
from Lichfield Pair, took sixty guineas, and cut
off one of the servants' hands. This was too
impudent : the country was scoured, and these

6 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

murderous ruffians seized. They numbered nine
in all, and of them three were women dressed in
men's clothes.

In 1702 the " Wolverhampton and Birmingham
Plying Stage Coach " was announced, to go once a
we*ek to London, in three days, and set out on the
return from the " Eose," in Smithfield, every
Thursday ; hut this enterprise seems to have been
short-lived. Meanwhile, the Chester stage of
1657 and 1659 was still pursuing its steady way ;
proposing to go the journey in five days, but
taking six. The difference between promise and
performance is neatly illustrated by Pennant.
"In March 1739," he says, " I changed my Welsh
school for one nearer the capital, and travelled in
the Chester stage, then no despicable vehicle for
country gentlemen. The first day, with much
labour, we got from Chester to Whitchurch, 20
miles ; the second day to the ' Welsh Harp ' ; the
third, to Coventry ; the fourth, to Northampton ;
the fifth, to Dunstable ; and, as a wondrous effort,
on the last to London, before the commencement of
night. The strain and labour of six good horses,
sometimes eight, drew us through the sloughs of
Mireden and other places. We were constantly
out two hours before day, and as late at night ;
and in the depth of winter proportionably later.
Pamilies which travelled in their own carriages
contracted with Benson & Co., and were dragged
up in the same number of days by three sets of
able horses."

"The single gentlemen, then a hardy race,

OGILBY' S "BRITANNIA" 7

equipped in jack-boots and trousers up to their
middle, rode post through thick and thin, and,
guarded against the mire, defying the frequent
stumble and fall, arose and pursued their journey
with alacrity : while in these days their enervated
posterity sleep away their rapid journeys in easy
chaises, fitted for the conveyance of the soft
inhabitants of Sybaris."

The roads at this time were incredibly bad, no
matter the route, and indeed these several ways
had their differences originated and continually
multiplied by certain lengths of road being
impassable at one season, and others equally so
on some other occasion. When they were all
impassable at one and the same time — a not
unusual occurrence — the traveller was indeed in
evil case, and the highwayman suffered from great
depression of trade. The chief fount of informa-
tion for travellers at that time was Ogilby's
Britannia, first printed in 1675 ; a work of which
much more will presently be said. This was a
thick folio volume containing engraved plates and
descriptions of every road in England. Every
considerable inn kept a copy of " Ogilby ' in
those days, for the information of travellers ;
just as in the modern hotel one finds railway
time-tables and county directories as a matter
of course. Ogilby was in great request as a
work of reference ; so greatly indeed, that the
early road travellers who thumbed his pages
at meal-times and upset their wine over him,
or now and again stole a particularly useful

8 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

map, have rendered clean and perfect copies
of early editions not a little difficult to come by.
He was much too bulky for carrying about, and so
the careful traveller made notes and extracts for
use from day to day. Such an excerpt is the
yellow and tattered sheet before the present writer,
giving manuscript details of how to reach Coventry.
But besides copied matter there is a good deal
else drawn doubtless from first-hand observation.
Coming for instance, to " ffinchley Comon, att ye
galowes keep to ye right hande " is the direction,
and the whole distance is punctuated with the
remarks " bad waye,"" " a slowe," and other signs
indicating depths of mud and ruggedness of road.
" Galowes," too, recurs with dreadful frequency,
probably not because the person who wrote this
wanted (like the Pat Boy in Pickwick) to . " make
yer flesh creep," or because he was morbidly
minded, but for the commonplace reason that
gallows made excellent landmarks, and were as
common objects of the road then as signposts
are now.

Dean Swift is the great classic figure on the
Holyhead Eoad at this period ; although, to be
sure, a very elusive and shadowy one, so far as
records of his journeys are concerned. He, too,
like Pennant's hardy single gentlemen, commonly
rode horseback, and has left traces of his presence
here and there along the road, generally in witty
and biting epigrams, written with a diamond
ring on the windows of wayside inns. There
could scarce, at this time, be anything more

HO IV FAR TO HOLYHEAD? 9

naively amusing than the pleased surprise he
exhibits in a letter written to Pope in 1726, at
" the quick change " he made in seven days-
from London to Dublin " through many nations,
and languages unknown to the civilised world,"
when he had expected the enterprise, " with
moderate fortune," to occupy ten or eleven. " I
have often reflected," he adds, " in how few
hours with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man
may come among a people as unknown to him
as the antipodes."

II

THE question, " How far to Holy head ? " had
in old days been a difficult one to answer. It
was not only in the uncertainty and variety of
routes that the difficulty of accurately measuring
the number of miles lay, but in the wild and
conflicting ideas as to what really constituted
a mile. This uncertainty lasted until the middle
of the eighteenth century, when the first mile-
stones since the days of the Romans were erected.
It was, in fact, not before 1750, when, as part
of their statutory obligations, the numerous
Turnpike Trusts began to erect their milestones,
that distances began to be publicly and correctly
measured. It had already long been known
that the mileages computed by the Post Office,
in dealing with postmasters and the mails, were

10

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

very inaccurate throughout the country, and for
many years previously compilers of road-books
had been accustomed to print two tables of
distances ; one the " computed " and Post Office
mile, and the other the measured mile.

The first of English makers of road-books,
John Ogilby, mentioned this discrepancy, so
early as 1675, when he published his great work,
Britannia. Ogilby who had been commissioned
by Charles II. to survey the roads and measure
them, did his work thoroughly. He claims
to have travelled 40,000 miles in compiling
his book, a folio volume of great typographical
beauty and exquisitely engraved plans of the
roads. In making his survey, he used what he
calls a " wheel dimensurator." Exactly what
this was is shown in the beautifully etched title-
page by Hollar, to his first edition, where Ogilby
himself is seen on horseback, directing the course
of two men; one wheeling the instrument, the
other checking its measurements. It apparently
was a wheel fitted with a handle and wound
with a ten-mile length of tape. Trundled along,
it unwound the tape, the intermediate distances
being noted down by the assistant. Ogilby very
soon discovered that although the Post Office
gave the mileage to Birmingham and Holyhead
respectively as 89 and 208 miles, it was then
really 116 and 269 miles. The Post Office mile,
which he calls the "vulgar computation," was
therefore practically a third larger than our
so-called Statute Mile, dating from 1593 and

MILES AND THEIR MEASUREMENTS n

constituted by a statute of the 35th year of Queen
Elizabeth's reign, not so much for the purpose
of creating a standard of measurement for the
kingdom, as for denning certain limits. That
Statute was passed by a Legislature dismayed by
the rapid growth of London, and was an enact-
ment forbidding persons to build within three
miles of the capital. When it came to the point
of defining a mile, it was found that no such
measure had ever been officially fixed, and that
English, Irish, Scottish, and local miles were of
variable lengths. The mile was then' taken to
be eight "forty-longs," or furlongs, of forty
perches each ; a perch to consist of 5^ yards.

That this extraordinary difference between
actual distances and those computed by the
Post Office should have arisen on all roads is
inexplicable, and that it should have remained
after Ogilby's official measurements had proved
the " computed " miles utterly wrong is an
astonishing proof of the vitality of error. But
the real trouble arose with the appearance of
milestones along the turnpike roads. They were
the cause of much bitterness and contention
between postmasters and the Post Office, and
between keepers of posting-houses and travellers.

Those who did business for the Post Office
claimed extra mileage, and travellers posting
to or from Birmingham and Holyhead found
themselves charged in the aggregate for 27 or
62 miles extra, as the case might be ; which,
say at Is. 3d. a mile for chaise and four horses,

12 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

was a consideration. Travellers resented this
difference and pointed out that, if posting
establishments could always have afforded to
do certain stages at certain prices, they could
continue so to do; to which those men of horses
and carriages replied by pointing out that the
milestones were official and that they themselves
paid more carriage duty on the extra mileage ;
a generally conclusive retort.

Ill

THE earliest coaches made no pretence of
taking the traveller to Holy head. Chester was
the ultima thule of wheeled conveyance when
Sir William Dugdale and Pennant kept diaries,
or when Swift wrote. We have already seen
that the Chester stage took six days, and there-
fore the horrors of the journey described by
Swift about the year 1700, were protracted as
well as acute. Whether or not he ever really
made the journey by coach is uncertain, but if
so, he certainly for ever after rode horseback.
But here is his picture of such an experience : —

Resolv'd to visit a far-distant friend,

A Porter to the Bull and Gate I send,

And bid the man, at all events, engage

Some place or other in the Chester stage.

The man returns—" 'Tis done as soon as said ;

Your Honour's sure when once the money's paid.

SWIFT ON COACHING 15

My brother whip, impatient of delay,

Puts to at three and swears he cannot stay."

(Four dismal hours before the break of day.)

Rous'd from sound sleep — thrice call'd — at length I rise,

Yawning, stretch out my arm, half-closed my eyes ;

By steps and lanthorn enter the machine,

And take my place — how cordially ! — between

Two aged matrons of excessive bulk,

To mend the matter, too, of meaner folk ;

While in like mood, jamm'd in on t'other side,

A bullying captain and a fair one ride,

Foolish as fair, and in whose lap a boy —

Our plague eternal, but her only joy.

At last, the glorious number to complete,

Steps in my landlord for that bodkin seat ;

When soon, by ev'ry hillock, rut, and stone,

Into each other's face by turns we're thrown.

This grandam scolds, that coughs, the captain swears,

The fair one screams and has a thousand fears ;

While our plump landlord, train'd in other lore,

Slumbers at ease, nor yet asham'd to snore ;

And Master Dicky, in his mother's lap,

Squalling, at once brings up three meals of pap.

Sweet company ! Next time, I do protest, Sir,

I'd walk to Dublin, ere I'd ride to Chester !

This engine of torture was, however, well
patronised.

The first stage-coach to ply between London
and Holyhead was the conveyance promoted
chiefly by that enterprising Shrewsbury inn-
keeper, Robert Lawrence. It started in 1780,
and went through Coventry, Castle Bromwich,
Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Shrews-
bury, Llangollen, Corwen, and Con way, thus
keeping pretty closely to the course taken by the
modern Holyhead Road. It lay the first night

T6 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

at Castle Bromwich, the second at Oswestry, and
the third (if God permitted) at Holyhead. Five
years later (in the summer of 1785) the first mail-
coach to Chester and Holyhead was established,
going by Northampton, Welford, Lutterworth,
Hinckley, Atherstone, Tamworth, Lichfield,
Wolseley Bridge, Stafford, Eccleshall, Woore,
Nantwich, Tarporley, Chester, and St. Asaph.
This, the only mail route to Holyhead until
1808, measured 278 miles 7 furlongs, and was
the longest of all ways. Other roads for many
years led by Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon, and
were used by some of the smartest coaches to
the end of the coaching age; but the shortest
route, the great " Parliamentary " road to Holy-
head, measures 260^ miles. In 1808 the London,
Birmingham, and Shrewsbury Mail, through
Oxford, was extended to Holyhead, going by
Llangollen, Corwen, and Capel Curig. It ran
thus until 1817, when it was transferred to the
direct Coventry route. The Holyhead Road had
then begun to be reformed, and the direct Mail
took precedence over the old " Holyhead and
Chester Mail," still going by its old course.

The " New Holyhead Mail," as it was officially
named, then started from the " Swan with Two
Necks," in Lad Lane, every evening at 7.30,
and took 38 hours about the business. In 1820,
the year when the Menai Bridge was opened,
the time was cut down to 32f hours, and in
1&30 to 29 hours 17 minutes, the mail arriving
at Holyhead at 1.17 on the second morning after it

THE MAIL 17

had left London. In 1836 and the last two years
of its existence, the journey was performed in 26
hours 55 minutes; the arrival timed for 10.55 p.m.
Here is the time-hill for that last and hest
achievement : —

MILES.

15
25
45

801

100

LONDON

South Mimms .
Redbourne
Little Brickhill.
Stony Stratford.
Towcester .
Daventry .
Dunchurch
Coventry .
Stonebridge

109| Birmingham

117| Wednesbury
122,| Wolverhampton
137! Shiffnal .
141! Haygate .

152 Shrewsbury

160! Nesscliff .
170 Oswestry .
182! Llangollen

192! Cor wen .

1981 Tynant .
205| Cernioge .
220 Capel Curig
228 Tyn-y-Maes

234 Bangor .

237 Menai Bridge .
247! Mona Inn

260! HOLYHEAD

VOL. I.

farr.

' tdep.

arr.

dep. 8.0 P.M.

arr. 9.40 „

10.44 „

12.32 A.M.

1.26 „

2.12 „

3.25 „

4.11 „

5.18 „

6.8 „

7.8 „

7.43 „

8.28 „

• „ 9.1 „,
. „ 10.14 „

• „ 10.59 „
/arr. 11.59 „

' \dep. 12.4 P.M.

. arr. 12.53 „

. „ 1.46 „

. „ 2.58 „

3.55 „

4.0 „

5.1 „
5.39 „

7.2 „
7.46 „
8.20 „
8.25 „
8.43 „
9.43 „

10.55 „
2

Jarr.

' tdep.

arr.

(arr.

' \dep.

arr.

i8 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

The man who made that achievement possible
was Thomas Telford. Long before his aid was
sought, the question of improving the com-
munications between the two countries had
become a burning one. The Irish members,
meeting no longer on St. Stephen's Green, had
a grievance in the circumstance of their journeys
to the Imperial Parliament at Westminster being
both tedious and hazardous, and this question of
road-reform was the first raised by them. The
Government, in reply, appointed a Commission ;
Eennie, the foremost engineer of his day, was
called in to advise upon the harbours of Holyhead
and Howth, and Telford in 1810 to plan the road
improvements.

Exactly what the road was like before it was
improved under Telford, let the Report of the
Commissioners on Holyhead Eoads and Harbours
tell : — " Many parts are extremely dangerous for
a coach to travel upon. Prom Llangollen to
Corwen the road is very narrow, long, and steep ;
has no side fence, except about a foot and a half
of mould or dirt, thrown up to prevent carriages
falling down three or four hundred feet into the
river Dee. Stage-coaches have been frequently
overturned and broken down from the badness
of the road, and the mails have been overturned.
Between Maerdy, Pont-y-Glyn, and Dinas Hill,
there are a number of dangerous precipices, steep
hills, and difficult narrow turnings. At Dinas
Hill the width of the road is not more than
twelve feet at the steepest part of the hill, and

THE OLD ROAD 19

with a deep precipice on one side ; two carriages
cannot pass without the greatest danger. At
Ogwen Pool there is a very dangerous place,
where the water runs over the road ; extremely
difficult to pass at flooded times." Arrived at
Bangor there were the dangers of the ferry to
he braved, and, after these, 26 miles of the
perilous old road across Anglesey, even now
to he traced by those curious in these things.
What travelling to Holyhead and Dublin was
like in those old times may best be shown by
quoting an old diary of 1787, of an expedition
from Grosvenor Square, London. The party
consisted of a coach and four, a post-chaise and
pair, and five outriders. They reached Holyhead
in four days (expenses, so far, £77 Is. 3d.), and
crossed St. George's Channel at a further cost
of £37 2s. Id. ; and cheap, too, as times then
were.

The first idea of the Government towards
improving the road was to indict twenty-one
townships between Shrewsbury and Holyhead.
It would have been an excellent notion, only for
the fact that those places were quite unable to
find the penalties actually recoverable at law,
much less to reconstruct the road. A larger
view of the necessities of the case had to be
taken. The nation was already pledged to the
construction of two harbours, and to the nation
now fell the duty of making access to Holyhead
Harbour moderately safe. The first practical
result was the selection of Telford as engineer,

20

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

to survey and report upon the 109 miles between
Shrewsbury and Holyhead. Telford had already
carried out many improvements for the Govern-
ment in the Highlands, and had, years before,
as Surveyor to the County of Salop and Engineer
of the Ellesmere Canal, acquired a thorough
knowledge of the road through North Wales.
He made a survey in 1811, but it was not until
1815 that the Government finally adopted his
report and that of the Commissioners, and the
Treasury found the money for the work. It
was then decided that improvements should be
made along the whole length of road between
London and Holyhead, but that the Shrewsbury
to Holyhead portion being incomparably the
worst, it should have the first attention. In the
course of five years this first part of the work
was completed. The general line of the old road
was followed, along the valley of the Dee, and
thence from Corwen, across the watershed to the
Vale of Conway and to the summit-level at
Ogwen Pool; descending from that point by the
valley of Nant Ffrancon to Bangor and the
Menai Straits. There a quarter of a mile of
stormy water still separated the Isle of Anglesey
from the mainland, and it was not until the
January of 1826 that it was bridged. From the
Anglesey side of the Straits an entirely new
and direct road was made across the island to
Holyhead, saving three miles, and giving a level
route, instead of the precipitous old way.

In the result, the Holyhead Road through

THE NEW ROAD 21

North Wales may, without hesitation, be pro-
nounced the. finest in the land. Passing though
it does through the wildest scenery, nowhere is
the gradient steeper than 1 in 20, while its
width, from 28 to 34 feet, and its splendid surface
render it safe and convenient. The old road,
frequently as steep as 1 in 6J, and with its sides
unprotected from the cliffs and torrents that
terrified bygone generations, has almost wholly
vanished under the new ; but in those places
where Telford did not merely remodel it, and
took an entirely new line, its character may still
be seen.

In 1820 the London to Shrewsbury portion of
the work was begun, and the greater part com-
pleted by 1828. Minor improvements were made
on it from time to time in after years, but it
does not nearly compare with the more thorough
work undertaken through North Wales. Parts
remain rich in very steep hills, and powerful
interests situated in the larger towns vetoed the
cutting of new routes through crooked and
awkward approaches, and so have left much to
be desired. Telford himself died, in his seventy-
seventh year, in 1834, but the Holyhead Road
Commissioners were in existence for years after-
wards, and continued to send forth Reports
until 1851. For a long period, however, before
that time those documents, containing as they
do only the surveyors' reports as to the condition
of the road and bridges, have nothing of interest.
The last paper of importance is the Parliamentary

22

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Return of 1839, giving the sum of the expenses
incurred on the whole length of road, including
improvement of the road from Bangor to Chester,
and cost of building the Menai and Conway
bridges. The total amount was £697,963 Us. 9d.,
of that sum £164,489 7s. 9d. was granted by
Parliament towards the work as a national
undertaking: the remaining £533,474 7s. Od.
lent by the Treasury, to be repaid by the Com-
missioners out of the tolls. In 1839, according
to a return made to Parliament by the Office of
Woods and Forests, £250,880 5s. 9%d. had been
thus repaid. That very little of the balance
found its way back to the Treasury may confi-
dently be asserted. But, however that matter
stands, certainly the work was done with rigid
economy and, considering its nature and extent,
at a very small cost.

Some part of the cost of the improved road
fell upon the letter writers of that day. The
postage of a letter to Ireland was sixteen pence,
made up of the following items :—

s. d.
Inland postage to Holyhead . . . .10

Conway Bridge 01

Menai „ 01

Sea postage . 02

It made no difference that the direct Holy-
head Mail went nowhere near the Conway
Bridge: letters for Ireland were still charged

THE COACHING AGE 25

that penny, until Penny Postage came in 1841
and treated all places in the United Kingdom
alike.

IV

Meanwhile, stage-coaching had also heen
revolutionised. The growth of Birmingham and
the srreat commercial industries of the Midlands

o

had rendered the old methods too slow and
cumhrous ; and the ancient coaches, supported
on leather straps, and Avith curtained windows,
starting once, twice or thrice a week, according
to distance travelled, performing their slow and
toilsome pilgrimages by daylight and resting
at sundown, gave place to the well-appointed
vehicles, hung on steel springs, and with glazed
windows, that ran from either end, every day,
and continued their journeys throughout the
night. No longer was it possible to drive the
same wretched animals the whole length of the
weary day, but changes at every ten or twelve
miles came into vogue, and speed consequently
increased. The greatest period of coaching on
the Holyhead Road dawned in 1823, when the
London and Birmingham " Tallv-Ho " beffan to

V

run. This was often called "Mountain's Tally-
Ho," being horsed out of London by Mrs. Sarah
Ann Mountain, of the " Saracen's Head," Snow

24 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Hill. It was a day coach, and one of the first
to run " double," that is to say, with up and down
coaches every day. It left London at 7.45 a.m.
and Birmingham at 7 a.m. Its popularity was
very soon challenged hy eager competitors, for in
the following year the " Independent Tally-Ho "
was put on the road by Home, of the " Golden
Cross," Charing Cross, starting an hour and a
quarter earlier from London, and a quarter of
an hour earlier from Birmingham, with the idea
of securing the " Tally-Ho's " custom. Prom
this time, coaches of this popular name multiplied
until their number was quite bewildering. In
1830, the " Original Tally-Ho " was started, and
in 1832, the "Eeal" and the "Patent Tally-Hoes."
A picture by J. Pollard of the " Tally-Ho " and
" Independent " nearing London on a summer
afternoon, about 1828, shows that if one did
actually start before the other, they both reached
London together. The scene is the " Crown,"
Holloway Eoad, a house now numbered 622 in
that thoroughfare, and rebuilt about 1865, but
still bearing the same name, situated at the
corner of Landseer Eoad.

In 1825 all previous efforts were eclipsed
by the " Wonder " coach, between London and
Shrewsbury, established in that year. It was
the first to perform much over a hundred miles
a day, and, starting from the " Bull and Mouth,"
St. Martin's-le- Grand, at 6.30 a.m., was in
Shrewsbury, 154 miles distant, at 10.30 the same
night. It aroused extraordinary competition. A

00 'g

gl

K

COACHING COMPETITION 27

" No Wonder," running three clays a week from
Birmingham lasted a season, and is heard of no
more ; but a more thoroughgoing rival was the
"Nimrod," from Shrewsbury, put on the road
in 1834. How the proprietors of the "Wonder"
started the " Stag," and successfully " nursed "
the " Nimrod," will be found recorded under
Shrewsbury. There were at this competitive
time more coaches on the Holyhead Road than
on any other. So far as Barnet, there were
eighteen mails and one hundred and seventy-six
other coaches, besides road -waggons, post-chaises,
and other vehicles. Some of them turned off at
Hockliffe for Manchester and Liverpool, but the
greater number continued to Birmingham. The
London and Birmingham " Greyhound " was
started in 1829, and ran light, with an imperial
on the roof, to prevent luggage being placed there.
Passengers' luggage must be sent to the office in
time to be forwarded by the "Economist." So
ran the notice. Both the " Greyhound " and the
" Economist " were night coaches : the latter,
the luggage-carrier, starting an hour earlier. It
was at one time proposed to light the "Greyhound"
with gas, but w^hen it was found that the gas-
tank would take up the space in the fore-boot
wanted for parcels, the idea was relinquished.
The down " Greyhound " was ingeniously robbed
in March 1835 by a gang who set to work very
cleverly. Two inside places were booked by the
thieves at the "Swan with Two Necks," and the
two remaining places at the " Angel," Islington.

28 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

"When the coach reached Hockliffe, two of the
confederates alighted, and the other two left at
Stony Stratford. Nothing was discovered until
Coventry was reached, when the guard, feeling
about inside, found that one of the parcels gave
way. On his leaning against it, away it went
into the hoot, which had been cut open, and a
bank parcel, containing 300 sovereigns and a bill
of exchange for £120 extracted. There is no
record of the thieves ever having been discovered.
They disappeared, just as did those who walked
off with bank-notes to the value of £4002 from
the Birmingham " Balloon Post Coach," when
standing in the yard of the " Swan with Two
Necks," December 12th, 1822. £1000 was offered
for the discovery of the thieves, and the notes
were stopped, but the results do not appear.

Horrified horse - owners, and old-fashioned
persons with prejudices against invention and
progress, raise outcries against the pace of motor-
cars, and have succeeded in reducing the legal
speed on roads from the original 14 miles an hour
allowed by Act of Parliament to the 12 miles
permitted by an order of the Local Government
Board; but the pace attained toward the close
of the coaching era by some of the crack coaches
was much higher. The rival " Tally-Ho " and
" Independent Tally-Ho" coaches, for instance,
ran certain stages up to 18} miles an hour,
and only on one stage did they drop down to
12 miles. " Furious driving," indeed, and vouched
for by the contemporary Coventry Chronicle,

AN OLD RECORD 29

May 8th, 1830, which well heads its report,
" Extraordinary Travelling " :—

" Saturday se'night, being May-day, the usual
competition took place between the London
Coaches. The " Independent Tally-ho," running
between Birmingham and London, performed a
feat altogether unparalleled in the annals of
Coaching, having travelled the distance of one-
hundred-and-nine miles in seven hours and
thirty-nine minutes.

" The following is a correct account of the
time it took to perform the distance, horsed by
the various proprietors : — Mr. Home, from London
to Colney, seventeen-and-quarter miles, in one-
hour-and-six minutes ; — Mr. Bowman, from
Colney to Redbourae (where the passengers,
stopped six minutes for breakfast), seven-and-
half miles, in twenty-six minutes ; — Mr. Morris,
from Redbourne to Hockliffe, twelve-and- quarter
miles, in one-hour-and-four minutes ; — Mr. War-
den, from Hockliffe to Shenley, eleven miles,,
in forty-seven minutes ; — Mr. May, from Shenley
to Daventry, twenty-four miles, in one-hour-and-
forty-nine minutes; — Mr. Garner, from Daventry
to Coventry, nineteen-and- quarter miles, in one-
hour-and -twelve minutes; — Mr. Radenhurst, from
Coventry to Birmingham, seventeen-and-three
quarter miles, in one-hour-and-fifteen minutes.

"The 'Original Tally-ho' performed the same
distance in seven-hours-and-fifty minutes."

The extraordinary feat of the " Independent
Tally-ho " recorded above, excelled the per-

3o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

formances of that famous coach, the "Quick-
silver " Exeter mail ; hut that is nothing com-
pared with the passengers' feat of swallowing
a hreakfast in the six minutes allowed for that
meal at Redbourne. It is probably no great
hazard to guess that those unhappy passengers
had no breakfast at all on that historic occasion.
It is not to be supposed that coaching was
an altogether safe method of travelling, especially
when feats of this kind were indulged in ; but
it must be acknowledged that comparatively few
of the accidents happened when racing. Among
the disasters that now and again occurred,
besides those recorded elsewhere in these pages,
the following specimens, from October 1834 to
the close of 1837, are typical :—

1834, October. — Shrewsbury " Union " over-
turned at Overley Hill, near Welling-
ton. The coach was heavily laden
and one of the hind wheels collapsed.
One of the outsides, a Mr. Newey,
of Halesowen, jumped off, but not
far enough, and the coach and luggage
fell on him, killing him. He died
the next morning, at the Haygate inn.
„ " Nimrod." Coachman thrown off near

Haygate, and killed on the spot.
„ Lichfield and Wolverhampton coach. A
jockey, named Galloway, had his leg
broken by being thrown off in an
upset. In August 1835 he was
awarded £210 damages.

COACHING ACCIDENTS 31

1835, September. — "Emerald," London and
Birmingham coach, upset at 2 a.m.
near Little Brickhill, owing to axle-
tree of near fore-wheel breaking.
The five outsides were pitched into
a hedge, and not seriously hurt, but
the coachman, John Webb, was en-
tangled with the apron, and was
crushed to death by the coach falling
on him. His body was found to be
terribly mangled when carried into
the " Peacock and Sandhill Tavern."

1836. — Sawyer, the beadle of Apothecaries' Hall,
returning from Birmingham on out-
side of coach (name not specified) fell
asleep. A jerk flung him off, and he
was killed.

1837, August.— "Emerald," London and Bir-
mingham coach. Horses dashed away
up Plumb Park Hill, near Stony
Stratford, and coach upset in the
succeeding valley. Outside passengers
thrown a distance of twenty feet, and
two of them killed.

,, October. — Birmingham and Shrewsbury
Mail upset on entering Wolverhamp-
ton, and coach smashed to pieces.
All passengers severely injured.
„ December. — Holyhead Mail upset at
Willenhall, owing to obstructions in
the road during alterations. Coach-
man's skull fractured, and one outside

3 2 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

passenger injured. The "Swallow"
coach had been upset on the same
spot the day before.

Besides these instances, there was the sad
case of Yates, a guard on the "Wonder," who
at Christmas time, in one year not particularised,
was thrown off the coach at Wolverhampton.
The coach was overloaded with game and
Christmas hampers, and he occupied a make-
shift perch over one of the hind wheels. The
vehicle gave a lurch, and he fell out; his feet
catching in the straps, he was dragged some
distance on his head until the hind wheel caught
him and crushed his thigh. He died the next
day.

The very names of the coaches that ran in
the last years of the road breathe an air of
competition. The old " Gee-hoes," " Caravans,"
and " Diligences " ; the " Originals " and their
like, made way for the " Prince Regent,"
" Royal Union," " Sovereign," and " John Bull " ;
and to them succeeded such suggestions of
speed as the "Celerity," "Antelope," "Grey-
hound," "Express," "Rocket," and "Swallow."
Moderate charges were hinted at in the names
of the " Economist " and the " Liberal " ; and a
high courage, calculated to daunt opponents, in
those of the "Triumph," " Retaliator," "De-
fiance," and "Tartar." The public largely
benefited in those ultimate years by the compe-
tition, as also did the turnpike tolls; but it

TOLLS

33

may be doubted whether many coach-proprietors
then made much profit. For one thing, a stage-
coach running every day throughout the year
on the road as far as Birmingham paid in tolls
alone £3 lls. 9d. a day, in addition to the duty
of a penny a mile paid by all coaches for every
four passengers they were licensed to carry,
irrespective of the places being occupied or not.

CLARK'S STEAM CARRIAGE, 1832. From an old Print.

Turnpike gates encouraged Sabbatarian feeling
by charging double on Sundays ; so, on the
assumption that a Birmingham coach ran 365
days in the year, it would have to pay some-
thing like £1100 in tolls alone, or to Holyhead
£3400.

Long before railways seriously threatened to
drive coaches off the road, the steam carriages
of the early motor-car period entered into a
VOL. i. 3

34 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

fleeting rivalry with horses. Of these, William
Clark's steam carriage was the most notable
It was put upon the road between London and
Birmingham in June 1832, and was a huge
three-wheeled conveyance, carrying 50 passen-
gers, 28 inside. Little is known of
conveyance beyond the claims made for it, which
included the statements that it could develop
100 horse-power and that the pace could be
regulated at pleasure from 1 to 50 miles
an hour. Another contrivance of this kind was
Heaton's steam carriage, of 1833, which is
recorded to have made several journeys between
Birmingham and Coventry, at a speed of 8
miles an hour, but soon faded into obscurity;
probably crushed out of commercial existence by
the extravagant tolls levied on all these mechani-
cal inventions by road trustees, highly prejudiced
against anything of the kind.

Y

SUCH were the conditions of coaching when

o

rumours of a projected London and Birmingham
Railway began to be noised about in 1825, and
then in 1830. " London and Birmingham " that
railway was first named, although, if the original
project be closely followed, it will be seen that
not London, but Birmingham, took the initiative.

THE RAILWAY 35

London has ever lagged in the rear. When the
early Birmingham, Shrewsbury, and Chester
coaches plied between those towns and the
metropolis, it was not from London that they
originated, but from the provinces; and, just in
same way, it was the Birmingham merchants to
whom the idea of a railway to London occurred,
as not merely a cheaper and more expeditious
way of travelling to the capital, but an excellent
means by which goods might be conveyed, and
London, as a great market for them, duly
exploited. The original organising committee
was eventually joined by a body of London
bankers and financiers, and a line of country
surveyed by George and Robert Stephenson in
face of a most determined opposition offered by
landowners on the way. Hobert Stephenson has
left an account of his difficulties, and stated that
he walked the whole distance between London
and Birmingham no fewer than twenty times.
The long story of the fight in Parliament for
the Bill in 1832, of its first defeat, and of its
eventual success in 1833, is not a matter for
these pages. Only let it be noted that the
opposition of the landed proprietors was bought
off by the addition of half a million sterling to
the estimates for the purchase of land along the
route.

How enormous was the road and canal traffic
at that time may be judged from the statement
prepared by the projectors of the railway, who
put the sum paid annually for travelling and

36 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

conveyance of goods between London and
Birmingham at £800,000.

The construction of the railway was begun
in June, 1834. On July 20th, 1837, the first
portion was opened to Boxmoor, a distance of
24£ miles, and on October 16th following to
Tring. On April 9th, 1838, the railhead had
reached a point just beyond Bletchley, and
there it stopped for some months, owing to
engineering difficulties at Roade and Kilsby.
Meanwhile the works had been pushed on from
the Birmingham end, and between that town
and Rugby the line was complete. A temporary
station, known as "Denbigh Hall," was provided
near Bletchley, where the railway crossed the
Holyhead Road, and between this and Rugby the
38 miles break in the line was traversed by a
service of coaches until the following September,
when the London and Birmingham Railway was
opened along its entire length.

No one was more pleased at this than Dr.
Arnold, the great Headmaster of Rugby School,
whose attitude was in strong contrast with that
generally adopted by the classes. " I rejoice to
see it," he said, "and to think that feudality
has gone for ever. It is so great a blessing to
think that any one evil is really extinct."

This event, of course, sounded the death-
knell of coaching along the first half of the
Holyhead Road, but there were those who
thought the railway must soon show its inability
to beat a well-appointed coach, and so they held

THE LAST OF THE COACHES 37

on a little while longer, encouraged by some of
the more irreconcileable among travellers. The
"Greyhound" and the "Albion" were the last
to go, in the early weeks of 1839, basely deserted
even by those who had egged their proprietors
to such foredoomed opposition. Edward Sherman,
the great coach proprietor of the " Bull and
Mouth," who had nine coaches on this road, was
a fanatical opponent of railways, and struggled
to the last against them, losing thereby the
important carrying and van business of the
London and Birmingham, secured by the far-
seeing policy of Chaplin and Home, of the
" Swan with Two Necks," who abandoned
coaching and threw in their interest with the
new order of things. Sherman eventually saved
himself by joining his interests with the Great
Western Railway.

The opening of the London and Birmingham
had a great effect upon the Irish mails and
passenger traffic; for the Grand Junction Bail-
way, between Birmingham and Liverpool, had
already been in existence since July 1837, and
thus a continuous route between London and
Liverpool was available to Post Office and public,
saving many hours and much expense. Both
seized the opportunity, and everything went
by train to the Lancashire port. It seemed as
though not only the Holyhead Boad but Holy-
head itself was a thing of the past.

In 1846 the London and Birmingham and the
Grand Junction Bailways amalgamated, under

38 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

the title of the London and North- Western
Railway, and the Liverpool route might thus
have been thought settled for all time; but in
the meanwhile two separate lines had been
authorised— one from Crewe to Chester, and
another from Chester to Holyhead. By the
completion of the second of these (in March
1850) Holyhead was brought back to its old
importance, and is once more on the mail route
between London and Dublin. Alterations on the
main line have long since left Birmingham on
one side, and the "Wild Irishman" now goes
from Rugby by way of Nuneaton and Tamworth
to Stafford, Crewe, and Chester.

YI

THE Holyhead and the Great North Roads are
identical as far as Barnet, and the first land-
mark on the way is the "Angel." Every one
knows the " Angel," Islington. It is a great
deal more than a public-house, and has attained
the dignity of a geographical expression. Any
teetotaller can afford to know the " Angel," and
the acquaintance is no more a stigma than an
intimacy with the English Channel or the North
Eoreland. live roads meet at this spot — for
seventy years or so the meeting and starting
point of omnibuses to and from all parts of

THE ANGEL, ISLINGTON 39

North London. Nothing strikes the foreigner
with greater astonishment than that our omnibus
routes start from or end at some public-house,
and that the " Angel," the " Elephant and
Castle," the "Eyre Arms," and the "Horns,"
should be household names in different parts of
London. The intelligent foreigner goes away
and writes scathingly upon what he considers
an evidence of drunkenness rampant in all
classes of English society, and does not stop to
enquire the origin of the custom, to be found
far back in omnibus history, when many public-
houses had convenient stables, and omnibus
proprietors had none.

The " Angel " is not in Islington at all, but
just within the parish of Clerkenwell. How it
came to be just inside the Clerkenwell boundary
is told in the legend of a pauper being found
dead in what was then called Back Road, now
the Liverpool Road, at that time in the great
parish of St. Mary, Islington (which by the way,
is the largest and most populous parish in
England, numbering over 350,000 souls), but
now, with the "Angel" in that of St. John's,
Clerkenwell. Islington refused to bury the
pauper and Clerkenwell performed that duty,
afterwards claiming the land.

The modern "Angel," built somewhere about
1870, before public-houses became Elizabethan,
Jacobean, or Queen Annean, is frankly a public-
house in appearance, like the rebuilt "Elephant
and Castle " and others, and carries in its aspect

40 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

no reminiscence of coaching times. It has been
left for the proprietors in recent years to grow
somewhat ashamed of that fact, for, painted on
tiles, there now appears on the wall of its
entrance lobby one of those quasi-historical
pictures, that have of late begun to decorate
the entrance walls of our otherwise unredeemed
gin palaces. By means of these tile-pictures
those patrons who are not too far gone in
intoxication may learn something of local or
national history and topography. In. the case
of the " Angel," the subject selected is that of
the starting of the Holyhead Mail from the old
house, whose frontage, pictured from old prints,
bears the inscription, " For Gentlemen and
Families," and at whose windows the gentlemen
and families are accordingly observed to be
sitting, enjoying the scene. It is not conceivable
that any one should now hope to find pleasure
in doing the like at these modern windows that
nowadays light billiard-rooms, and look down
upon a busy scene of omnibuses and tram-cars ;
but perhaps even what we rightly consider to
be a sordid confluence of traffic may come to
have a retrospective romance of its own in, say,
the twenty-first century. Exactly what the
"Angel" was like in 1812 may be seen from
the accompanying illustration by Pollard, of the
illuminations on the night of the King's birth-
day in that year. The Holyhead Mail is
prominent in front of two others drawn up
before the house.

s*

% ~

« •£

02 ^

EARLY MORNING COACHES 43

A few paces north stood the at one time
equally famous " Peacock," and the not alto-
gether obscure "White Lion"; coaching inns
both, but long since rebuilt as mere " publics."
"All coaches going anywhere north called at
the ' Peacock,' " says Colonel Birch- Reynardson.
" As they came up, the old hostler, or a man,
whoever he was, called out their names as they
arrived on the scene. Up they come through
the fog, but our old friend knows them all.
Now ' York Highflier,' now ' Leeds Union,' now
'York Express,' now ' Rockingham,' now 'Stam-
ford Regent,' now 'Truth and Daylight/ and
others which I forget, all with their lamps lit,
and all smoking and steaming, so that you
could hardly see the horses. Off they go. One
by one as they get their vacant places filled up,
the guard on one playing ' Off she goes ! ' on
another, ( Oh, dear, what can the matter be ? ' on
another, ' When from great Londonderry ' ; on
another, ' The flaxen-headed ploughboy ' ; in fact,
all playing different tunes almost at the same
time. The coaches rattling over the stones, or
rather pavement — for there was little or no
macadam in those days ; the horses' feet clattering
along to the sound of the merry-keyed bugles,
upon which many of the guards played remark-
ably well, altogether made such a noise as could
be heard nowhere except at the ( Peacock ' at
Islington, at half -past six in the morning. All
this it was curious to hear and see, though not
over pleasant in a dense fog, particularly if it

44 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

were very cold into the bargain, with heavy rain
or snow falling."

Half-past six in the morning! Yes; but
that was not by any means an early hour in
coaching days. If we turn to Tom Browns
Schooldays, we shall find that Tom, with his
father, come to see him off to Rugby by the
"Tally-Ho," stayed at the "Peacock " overnight,
to make sure of catching that conveyance, and
that in order to do so they were actually up
and breakfasting at ten minutes to three on a
winter's morning. And none too early, either;
for just as Tom was swallowing the last mouthful
of breakfast, winding his comforter round his
throat, and tucking the ends into the breast of
his overcoat, the horn sounded, Boots looked in,
with the fateful cry of "Tally-Ho, sir," and the
" Tally-Ho " itself appeared on the instant
outside. But what "Tally-Ho" this could have
been that passed through Rugby does not
appear. " Tell the young gent to look alive,"
said the guard ; "now then sir, jump up behind,"
and they were off. " Good-bye, father— my love
at home " ; and the coach whirls away in the
darkness.

London then ended at Islington. Where
does it now end ? At Highgate ; at Whetstone,
where the boundary of the Metropolitan Postal
District is crossed; or beyond South Minims,
where the frontiers of the Metropolitan Police
march with those of the Hertfordshire Constabu-
lary ? Highgate Archway was wont to be regarded

H

O

!,

Sl 5
fc ?

| I

HIGHGATE ARCHWAY 47

as the northern gate into London, and may now
be taken as dividing the far suburbs and the
near. Seventy years ago it was quite rural.

VII

IT is curious to look upon an old print like
that of the Archway road and its toll-gate,
reproduced here, and then, with a knowledge of
that busy spot, with its thronging omnibuses
and tramcars, to compare the old view with the
present-day aspect of the place. An Archway
Tavern is seen standing at the junction of the
roads, but it is quite unlike the flaunting gin-
palace of to-day. What, also, has become of the
horse and cattle pond in front ? The toll-gate,
we know, finally disappeared in 1876, but long
before then the ascending roadway had been
lined with buildings on either side. Only
recently the old and ugly archway has been
removed, to make way for the new and handsome
iron and steel viaduct, which bears the misleading
date of 1897, although the structure was not
opened until the summer of 1900. It may be
as well to put upon record that it is situated a
hundred yards to the north of where the old
Archway stood. Of late years, since the govern-
ment of London has been taken over by the
London County Council, the Archway has been

4g THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

more than ever a landmark, showing to where
the frontier of London extended, for the London
County Council's boundary ran half-way through
the structure, whose northern moiety lay within
the territory of the Middlesex Council.

The new viaduct, wholly in Middlesex, cost
£25,000. Its date, "1897," prominent in cast
iron' on the southern approach, together with

THE NEW HIGHGATE ARCHWAY.

the fact that the work was not completed until
midway through 1900, perpetuates the sinister
memory of the great engineering strike in
progress during that interval. Five authorities
—the London County Council, the Middlesex
County Council, the Islington Vestry, Hornsey
District Council, and the Ecclesiastical Com-
missioners (who are administrators of the Bishop

LONDON FROM HIGHGATE 49

of London's estates here) — contributed in varying
proportions to the cost. They may look with
'satisfaction at the result : a li^ht and handsome

O

bridge, that, vaulting across the roadway with a
clear flight of three times the span of the old arch,
renders it possible to widen the road to any con-
ceivable width, against that time which Mother
Shipton foresaw, when " England shall be undone
iincl Highgate Hill stand in the middle of
London."

Let us look back, on passing beneath this
triumph of engineering skill, and, seeing with
what grace the huddled mass of London is
framed by it, conceive the welcome it may seem
to extend to the wayfarer (if such there be)
coming to the capital to seek his fortunes. It
may, however, be readily supposed that the days
when ambitious youth resorting by road to
London, there to win fortune with the customary
half-crown, are done. The roads nowadays
have lost all possibilities of that endearing
romance of high ambition and courage, coupled
with slender resources and an uninstructed
belief that London's streets are paved with gold.
The precociously worldly - wise youngsters of
to-day, who resort to the Metropolis by rail,
have no such illusions.

On the fortune-seekers of old, who tramped
the weary miles to this gateway of their ambition,
the forbidding old Archway must needs have
exercised a dispiriting influence. It looked,
from its outer side, so like a fortress gate, and
VOL. i. 4

5o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

was alas ! too often a prison-gate when once
within. London, lying down helow them, vast
and unknown; how, they might have thought,
would it he possible to conquer that; to win
a place there ? Little hlame to such of them as
may have trembled at the prospect and retraced
their steps; and better perhaps had it been for
many of those who went forward that their
courage had thus failed them at the threshold ;
rather than that they had gone down into that
human whirlpool, to return broken in after
days, to leap to death from the footpath above
the lofty arch, into that roadway they had
trod so hopefully years before.

For old Highgate Archway was a veritable
Bridge of Sighs ; a favourite resort of London
suicides to whom a leap from Waterloo Bridge
into the river did not offer great attractions. It
was not until the Archway was opened toll-free
that the iron railings fencing the upper roadway
were erected. They were 7 feet in height, cost
£700, and were the cause of great disappoint-
ment to would-be suicides by leaping, who have
an illogical objection to falling one yard more
than necessary for the purpose of breaking their
necks. This explains the comparative disfavour
with which suicides regard the Golden Gallery
of St. Paul's Cathedral and other high places.

It remains uncertain whether those protective
railings were erected for the sake of the suicides,
or for that of the increased number of persons
who used the Archway Road when tolls were

•

SUICIDES 55

abolished, some of whom might have been
injured by those too anxious to shuffle off their
mortal coil,, to first ascertain whether or not the
road was clear. Certain, however, it is that it
mattered very much to the local authorities
from which side the suicides came down : the
territory of the Islington Vestry having been
on one side and that of the Hornsey Local
Board on the other. It is even related that
one authority proposing to the other that railings
should be erected, and meeting with a refusal
to share the cost, fenced in its own side and
thus left the self-murderers no choice. The
expense and trouble of the necessary inquests
falling on the other authority speedily brought
about the railing-in of that side also.

VIII

THE roadway of Highgate Archway is on a level
with the cross upon the dome of St. Paul's.
Prom what the perfervid preachers of our own
time — the Solomon Eagles of our day — call that
" sink of iniquity," the voice of London, inar-
ticulate, like the growl of a fierce beast, rises
continually, save for some sleepy hours between
midnight and the dawn. Prank Osbaldistone,
in Rob Hoy, journeying north, heard the hum
of London die awav on his ear when he

54 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

reached Highgate, the distant peal of her
steeples sounding their admonitory "turn again,"
just as they did to Whittington. Looking back
from the Hill upon the dusky magnificence
of the Metropolis, he felt as if he were
leaving behind comfort, opulence, the charms
of society, and all pleasures of cultivated life.
The modern wayfarer is not so easily rid of
the Great City, whose low-pitched roar not
only follows him to these northern heights, but
pursues him, clamant, onwards through Einchley,
and whose rising tide of houses now laps the
crest of Highgate Hill and spills over the brim,
in driblets of new suburban streets, like a brick -
and mortar Deluge.

Just half a mile past the Archway, which of
old was the ultima thule, the Hercules Pillars
of London in this direction, still stands the
"Woodman," inn, pictured in the coaching print
of the thirties, shown over page. It is the
original building that still stands here, but
carved and cut about and greatly altered, and
stands converted into an ordinary public-house.
The curious little summer-house, or look-out,
remains, little changed, but no visitors ascend
to it to admire the view with telescopes, as we
see them doing in the picture ; for the spreading
hill and dale towards London are covered with
houses — objects not so rare in the neighbourhood
of London that one needs to seek them with a
spy-glass.

Southwood Lane, opposite this old inn, leads

HIGHGATE 57

across from this branch of the high road
to Highgate village, which should be noticed
before the modern spirit seizes upon and trans-
forms it.

When Highgate Archway and the Archway
Road were completed, in 1813, and traffic, not-
withstanding the heavy tolls, began to come and
go this way, Highgate village was ruined. Pew
cared to painfully toil up Highgate Hill and
go through the once busy village down the
corresponding descent of North Hill. Ever since
then, while the suburbs round about have grown,
Highgate village has gradually decayed. Little
alteration has been made here in the broad
street — empty now, that was once so busy — and
Highgate remains preserved like a fly in amber,
testifying to the old-world appearance of a typical
coaching village near London. True it is that
its fine old houses are a thought shabby, while
the "Red Lion," though still standing, has
long been closed, and its elaborate sign-post
innocent these many years of its swinging sign.
The " Gatehouse Tavern," too, Avas rebuilt in
1896 ; but, for the rest, Highgate is the Highgate
of old.

"Established over five hundred years" was
the legend displayed by the old " Gatehouse
Tavern " pictured here. Many old clubs held
high revel in it — literary clubs and others
making their several ostensible objects the
excuse for holding high revel. Punch itself
was founded in a pot-house. Among the clubs

58 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

that foregathered here were the "Ash Sticks,"
the "Aged Pilgrims," and the "Ben Jonson " ;
while in the old low-ceilinged rooms the Sunday
ordinary that was long a favourite institution,
combined with some deservedly renowned port,
attracted George Cruickshank (before he found
grace and became a total abstainer) and his
brother Robert; Archibald Hemming, Punch's
first cartoonist ; and many an Early Victorian.

The steep descent of North Hill brings the
explorer from old Highgate to East Einchley,
where a modern suburb struggles bravely, but
with indifferent success, to live down the depress-
ing circumstance of being set in midst of some
half-dozen huge cemeteries, and on a road along
which every day and all day a continual stream
of funeral processions passes dismally along.
The chief gainer from this traffic appears to be
the " Old White Lion," where the mourners halt
and refresh on their return. Mourning should
seem, judging from the assemblage outside the
"Old White Lion" (which should surely, in
complimentary mourning, be the "Old Slack
Lion "), to be a thirsty business.

Beyond the cemeteries lies Brown's Wells, in
midst of what was once Einchley Common. At
Brown's Wells, if anywhere, memories of that
ill-omened waste should be most easily recalled;
for here, beside the road, in the grounds of
Hilton House, stands the massive trunk of
'Turpin's Oak," still putting forth leaves with
every recurrent spring. Did the conscience-

FINCH LEY COMMON 61

stricken spirits of the dead revisit the scenes of
their crimes, then the garden of Hilton House
might well he peopled o' nights with remorseful
spooks ; for many another heside Turpin lurked
here and snatched purses, or held up coaches
and horsemen crossing this one-time lonely waste.

Pennant, the antiquary, writing at the close
of the eighteenth century, talks of the great
Common not as an antiquity hut as a place he
was perfectly well acquainted with, travelling
as he did the Holyhead Road between Chester
and London. " Infamous for robberies," he calls
it, " and often planted with gibbets, the penalty
of murderers."

This aspect of Finchley Common was then
no new thing, and if Pennant had been minded
to write an antiquarian exercise on its evil
associations, he would have found much material
to his hand. But the most sinister period of the
Common's unsavoury history began at the close
of the long struggle between King and Parlia-
ment in the mid-seventeenth century, and for
long years afterwards robbery and murder were
to be feared by travellers in these wilds.

William Cady was early among the highway-
men who made this a place of dread. His was
a short and bloody career of four years on the
King's highway, ending in 1687, when, he was
hanged at Tyburn for the last of his exploits,
the murder of a groom on this then lonely
expanse. He had overtaken a lady riding for
the benefit of the air, and, ignoring the groom,

62 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

tore the diamond ring from her finger, snatched
a gold watch from her pocket, and, threatening
her with a pistol, secured a purse containing
eighty guineas. The groom, unarmed, could do
nothing hut ahuse the highwayman, who shot
him dead with two hullets through the brain
and was just about making off when two gentle-
men rode up with pistols in their hands. Cady
at once opened fire on them, and a lively
pistolling began, ending with the highwayman's
horse being shot and himself seized and bound,
and in due course taken to Newgate, whence he
only emerged for that last ride to Tyburn, which
was the usual ending of his kind. He did not
make an edifying exit but cursed, drank, and
scoffed to the last, dying with profanity on his
lips, at the early age of twenty- five.

Prom the unrelieved vulgarity and brutality
of- Cady's exploit it is a relief to turn to that of
a man of humour. Would that we knew his
name, so that it might be ranged with those of
Du Vail and Captain Hind, themselves spiced
with an airy wit that occasionally eased the loss
of a watch or a purse to those suddenly bereft
of them. This unknown worthy, whose exploit
is recorded in a contemporary newspaper, was
a humorist, if ever there was one. It was one
evening in 1732, when he was patrolling the
Common, that a chariot and four horses ap-
proached from the direction of London. Hope-
ful of a rich quarry, he spurred up and thrust
a pistol through the carriage window, demanding

A KINDL Y H1GHIVA YMAN 63

money and jewellery. Now, unhappily for the
highwayman's hope of plunder, this was the
carriage of a Yorkshire squire returning home
without him, and the person sitting within was-
but a countryman to whom the coachman had
given a lift.

" I am very poor," exclaimed the rustic,
terrified at sight of the pistol, " but here are
two shillings ; all I have got in the world."

Cady, doubtless, in his disappointment, would
have shot the yokel ; but this was a " highway
lawyer " of a different stamp. " Poor devil ! "
said that true Knight of the Road, withdrawing
his pistol and waving the proffered money
aside ; " here, take a shilling and drink my
health ! " And so, tossing him a coin, he
disappeared.

For accounts of other happenings upon this
sombre Common, let the curious refer to the
pages of the GREAT NORTH ROAD, where they
will be found, duly set forth.

Not until the first few years of the nine-
teenth century had passed was the place safe.
It was an Alsatia wherein the most craven of
footpads might rob with impunity. 'Strange to
say, there were those who did not think it right
to shoot highwaymen, and many of those who
did so, lost their nerve at the supreme moment
and fired wildly into space. The robbers' risks,
were therefore not overwhelming. Dr. Johnson
was undecided about this matter of right, as we
learn from one of those semi-philosophical dis-

64 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

cussions into which Boswell led him; discussions
the indefatigable " Bozzy ' has recorded at
length. Three of them— Johnson, Boswell, and
Taylor— were disputing the question. Tor
myself," said Taylor, " I would rather be robbed
than shoot highwaymen." Johnson— perhaps
because he generally took the opposite view,
from " cussedness " or a love of disputation-
argued that he would rather shoot the man on
the instant of his attempt than afterwards give
such evidence against him as would result in his
execution. " I may be mistaken," said the
great man, "as to him when I swear; I cannot
be mistaken if I shoot him in the act. Besides,
we feel less reluctance to take away a man's
life when we are heated by the injury, than to
do it at a distance of time by an oath after we
have cooled."

This seemed to Boswell rather as acting from
the motive of private vengeance than of public
advantage ; but Johnson maintained that in
acting thus he would be satisfying both. He
added, however, that it was a difficult point :
" one does not know what to say : one may
hang one's self a year afterwards from un-
easiness for having shot a highwayman. Few
minds are to be trusted with so great a thing."
And we may add, seeing how many highwaymen
were shot at, and how few hit, few hands either.

Half a mile beyond Turpin's Oak is North
Einchley, a recent suburb of smart shops, risen
on the site of those gibbets mentioned by

WHETSTONE 65

Pennant. Those who affect to be more genteel
and individualistic, name it Torrington Park,
and thus hope to be exquisitely distinguished
from the ruck of Einchleys that take their
names from the four points of the compass.
The Park Road Hotel, rising at the angle where
the road from Child's Hill joins the highway
we are travelling, actually stands on the site
of a gibbet. As " Tally-ho Corner," this is a
spot familiarly known to cyclists. Maps, how-
ever, know it as "Tallow Corner."

Whetstone succeeds to North Einchley. It
once groaned under the oppression of a toll-
gate — a gate that spanned the road by the
"Griffin" inn, where the old "whetstone" still
remains. This gate, abolished November 1st,
1863, was associated with a story of George
Morland, the artist, who, having received an
invitation to Barnet, was journeying to that
toAvn in company with two friends, when he
was stopped here by a cart containing two men,
who were disputing with the toll-keeper. One
was a chimney-sweep, and the other one Hooper,
a tinsmith and prize-fighter, scarcely higher in
the social scale ; but they knew Morland, who
had often caroused with them at the low way-
side taverns he affected. Now, however, he was
not in a mood for his old companions ; recent
success had turned him respectable for a time.
Accordingly, he endeavoured to pass, when the
tinsmith called out, " What, Mr. Morland, won't
you speak to a body ? "

VOL. i. 5

66

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

It was of no use trying to escape, for the
man began to roar out after him, so that he was
obliged to turn back and shake hands with his
old "crony; whereupon Hooper turned to the
chimney-sweep and said, "Why, Dick, don't you
know this here gentleman ? 'Tis my friend, Mr.
Morland." The man of soot, smiling a recog-
nition, forced his unwelcome black hand upon
his brother of the brush ; then they whipped the
horse up and went off, much to Morland's relief.
He used afterwards to declare that the sweep
was a stranger to him; but the dissolute artist's
habits made the story generally believed, and
" Sweeps, your honour," was a joke that followed
him all his days.

IX

BARNET lies two miles ahead, crowning a ridge.
Between this point and that town the road goes
sharply down Prickler's Hill, and, passing under
a railway bridge, climbs upwards again, along an
embanked road that, steep though it be, takes
the place of a very much steeper roadway. It
was constructed between 1823 and 1827, as a
part of the general remodelling of the Holyhead
Road. The deserted old way, now leading 110-
whither, may be seen meandering off to the left,
immediately past the railway bridge, down in the

BARNET FAIR 69

hollow. Passing the " Old Red Lion " and a row
of old houses that, fallen from their importance
in facing the high road, look dejectedly across
one-half of the Fair Ground, it comes to an end
at the last house, whose projecting bay proclaims
it to have once been a toll-house.

Barnet is famous for two things : for its
Battle and for its Pair. The Battle is a thing
of the dim and distant past : the Pair belongs to
the present — the poignant present, as you think
who venture within ear-shot of its Michaelmas
hurly-burly, what time the horse-copers are
rending the air with raucous cries, steam-organs
bellowing, and, in fact, " all the fun of the Pair "
in progress. It is, according to your taste and
to the condition of your nerves, a pleasure or a
martyrdom to be present at the great Pair of
Barnet : that three days' Pandemonium to which
come all the lowest of the low, whom, para-
doxically enough, that "noble animal, the friend
of man," attracts to himself. Por Barnet is,
above all other things, a Horse Pair. Por love
of the Horse, and with the hope of selling
horses — and incidentally swindling the purchasers
of them — such widely different characters as the
horsey East-ender, the sly and crafty Welshman,
the blarneying Irishman, and Sandy from Scot-
land, come greater or smaller distances with
droves of cart-horses, cobs, hunters, and, in fact,
every known variety of the Noble Animal ; and
to this nucleus of a Pair innumerable other
trades attach themselves, . like parasites. Barnet

7o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Pair dates back to the time of Henry II. It is,
therefore, of a very respectable antiquity. This
antiquity is, indeed, the only respectable thing
left to it. The rest is riot; and if the Barnet
people had their will, there is little doubt that
it would, in common with many other fairs, be
abolished. When originally established, by Royal
Charter, it lasted three weeks. From three weeks
it was successively whittled down, in course of
time, to sixteen days, and then to three days.
Prom it, in other times, the Lord of the Manor,
the Earl of Strafford, derived a splendid revenue ;
for his tolls, rigorously exacted by his stewards,
were eightpence for every bull or stallion enter-
ing the Pair; fourpence for every horse, ass, or
mule; and for every cow or calf, twopence.

The Pair Ground extends to either side of
the long embankment, on whose steep slope the
high road is carried up into Barnet Town; but
the chief part of it centres around High Barnet
station, on the right hand. The Pair begins on
the first Monday in September, but at least a
week before that date Barnet town and the roads
leading into it, usually so quiet, are thronged
with droves of horses and herds of cattle, and
with the caravans of the showmen who hope to
"make a good thing" out of the thousands of
visitors to the Pair. Whatever private residents
in Barnet may think of it, and however much
they would like to see it abolished, its lasting
success is assured as a popular holiday for
certain classes of Londoners. The typical 'Arry

HUMOURS OF THE FAIR ;r

of Henclon or of Epping would no more think
of not visiting Barnet Fair than he would
think of abstaining from deep drinking when
he reached the place. For, now that all other
fairs within reach of London have been sup-
pressed, this is pre-eminently the Cockney's
outing. To deprive him of it would savour not
a little of cruelty : it would certainly cut off
from the travelling showmen and the proprietors
of the giddy steam roundabouts a goodly portion
of their incomes, while the pickpockets would
miss one of the greatest chances in the year.

Let those who know of fairs only from
idyllic descriptions of such things in the
England of long ago, visit this of Barnet.
Nothing in it is poetic, unless indeed the
language common to those who attend upon
the Noble Animal may be so considered; and
certainly that is full of imagery, of sorts. It
is wonderful what a power of debauching
mankind the Horse possesses. Your ordinary
cattle-drover is no saint, but he is a Bayard
and a carpet-knight beside these fellows with
straws in their mouths, and novel and vivid
language on their tongues.

Here, as side-shows away from the horses,
are the boxing - booths, the swings, and the
trumpet-tongued merry-go-rounds, roaring like
Bulls of Bashan and glittering with Dutch
metal and cheap mirrors like Haroun - al -
Raschid's palace just come out of pawn and
much the worse for wear. Ladies clad in

72 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

purple velvet dresses, and with a yard and a
half of ostrich feather in their hats patronise
these delights; and lunch oleaginously on the
fried fish cooking on a stall near by (which
by the way, you may scent a quarter of a mile
off). Tor those with nicer tastes, an itinerant
confectioner makes sweets on the spot. For
those who are sportively inclined there are
several methods of dissipating their money : by
shooting at bottles; shying at cocoanuts (all
warranted milky ones) or by guessing under
which of three thimbles temporarily resides the
elusive pea. The furtive and nervous young
man who presides over this show is more than
itinerant. Ghostlike, he flits from group to
group, harangues them with a phenomenal
glibness and swiftness : discloses the pea under
the other thimble ; takes his gains, and so
departs : the tail of his eye seeking, and hoping
not to find, any one who may chance to be a
detective. An ancient — a million times exposed
—fraud, and still a very remunerative one !
For the rest, a very vulgar and disheartening
show to those who preach culture to whom the
cultured term " the masses." How to leaven
the lump in that direction when you find it
obstinately set upon such gross things of earth
as penny shows, including six-legged calves and
realistic scenes of the latest murders ? Sons
of Belial, indeed, are those who find delight
herein : and many are they who do so take
their pleasure.

BERGNET" 73

X

ON the crest of the steep ascent we come to
Barnet, crowning its " monticulus, or little hill,"
as the county historian has it. With the town
we have already made some acquaintance, in
the pages of the " GREAT NORTH ROAD."

It stands too well within the suburban
radius of London for it to escape modern
influences, and although, as Dickens said, in
Oliver Twist, every other house was a tavern,
inns are fewer nowadays and shops more
numerous ; and many of the surviving inns
have been rebuilt. The original " Green Man,"
a very much larger and altogether more important
house than the existing one, is no more. Sir
Robert Peel — the great Sir Robert, statesman
and originator of " Peelers " —often stayed there
from Saturday to Monday, and it was beneath
its roof that Lord Palmerston received the news
of his succession to the title. The " Mitre," one
of the most important of Barnet's inns at the
close of the seventeenth century, has wholly
disappeared, and the little house of that name,
at the London end of the town, does but stand
on a very small portion of its site ; the rest
of the ground being occupied by a large and
exceedingly hideous building belonging to a
firm of grocers. The disappearance of the
"Mitre" is the more to be regretted, because
it was a house of historic importance, General

74 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Monk, on his march up to London in 1660,
having rested there, while his army encamped
ahout the town. The country was tired of the
Commonwealth, and Monk at the head of
14,000 men, was master of the situation. No one
knew his intentions. Appointed by Parliament,
and yet with a commission from the King in
his pocket, his advance from the north was the
cause of the liveliest hopes and apprehensions
to both sides. Accompanying him were two
" Councellors of State and Abjurers of the
King's Family," a worthy pair named Scot and
Robinson, who were really acting as the spies
of the Parliament. Staying with him at the
" Mitre," they seciired a room adjoining his,
and either found or made a hole in the wainscot,
to see and hear anything that might pass. The
imagination readily pictures them peeping
through the chinks and the secretive Monk,
probably well aware of their doings, smiling
as he undressed and went to bed. How he
marched to London and thence, declaring for
Charles II., to Dover, belongs to other than
local history.

The " Red Lion " remains the most promi-
nent house. What has rightly been called a
"ghastly story" is that told of it in coaching
days. An officer and his daughter, on their
way to London to attend a funeral, only suc-
ceeded after a great deal of trouble in obtaining
accommodation here. On retiring to her room,
the young lady chanced to turn the handle of

AN EXCEPTIONAL OSTLER 75

a cupboard, when to her horror the door hurst
open and a corpse toppled out, almost felling
her to the floor. The "accommodation" had
been made by hastily removing the body from
the bed and placing it where it would not have
been found, except for that feminine mingled
curiosity and precautionary sense which impels
our womenkind to peer agitatedly under every
bed, to leave no cupboard unexplored, and no
drawer not scrutinised.

This Bluebeard kind of a story was long a
current anecdote in the posting days, and
implicitly believed. It is probably safe to
assume that it did the business of the 4< Red
Lion " enormous damage, and that those travel-
lers who subsequently stayed there approached
all cupboards with dread.

The " Red Lion " possessed a queer character
in the person of its ostler, James Ripley, who
in 1781 published a little book of Select Letters
on Various Subjects. On the title-page he states
that he was then, and had been " for thirty
years past," ostler, and in his dedication to
" the Hon. Col. Blaithwate and the rest of the
officers of the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards
Blue," after saying that this dedication is "a
grateful acknowledgement for the generous treat-
ment always received for his unmerited services
in the stable," proceeds to grovel in the most
abject manner. " I shall always esteem it an
honour," says he, i£to rub down your horses'
heels, so long as I am able to stoop to my feet."

76 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

This remarkable person, if we may judge
from the curious frontispiece to his Select
Letters, appears to have doubled the parts of
ostler at the "Red Lion" and Postmaster of

JAMES EIPLEY, OSTLEE OF THE "BED LION."

Barnet ; while he would also seem to have
embarked in the newspaper trade, according to
the little heaps of papers seen in the pigeon-
holes in the background, labelled "Whitehall
Evening Post," " Craftsman," and " Gazetteer."

IMPROVING LITERATURE 77

Here we perceive him, apparently inditing his
Letters ; a man with a decidedly Johnsonian
cast of features, and clad in what looks more
like a cast-oft' suit of an old Tower of London
headsman than an ostler's everyday clothes.
He is evidently at a loss for a word, or is
perhaps (and rightly) surprised at the gigantic
size of his quill, plucked from an ostrich, at the
very least of it. A sieve, a curry-comb, and
other articles of stable equipment, lie beside
him, or are more or less artistically displayed
in the foreground. If it were not for the title,
we might almost suppose this to be a representa-
tion of some notorious criminal writing his last
dying speech and confession in the condemned
hold of Newgate. The picture appears to have
been drawn from several points of view at once,
productive of results more curious than pleasing
to professors of perspective drawing.

Mr. James Ripley's letters range from
scathing denunciations of postboys and advice
to gentlemen how to treat such rascals, to the
humane treatment of horses, the construction of
stage waggons, and the villainous practice of
writing more or less offensive remarks on
window-panes. We are, in fact, after perusing
his improving literature, led to the belief that
he missed his vocation and ought to have been
a clergyman of evangelistic views, instead of an
ostler. But to let him speak for himself :—

" I can justly say that I am no mercenary
writer, and that all my views are centred in

78 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

reforming the vices, follies, and errors of this
depraved age. At present I shall confine my-
self to those nimble-fingered Gentlemen who
leave specimens of their wit or folly, in trying
the goodness of their diamonds upon the glass
windows of every place they visit, or lodge at ;
curiosity often draws the fair sex to the window
in expectation of meeting with some innocent
piece of wit, or quotation from some eminent
author ; hut how cruel the disappointment when
she finds some indecent allusion, or downright
obscenity. "

Thus the ostler-moralist of the " Red Lion."
What added terrors the roads would have
acquired for giddy travellers had there been
others like him !

Among other inns is the " Old Salisbury,"
familiarly known to cyclists of northern clubs
as the "Old Sal." It was originally a drovers'
and teamsters' house, and called the "Royal
Wagon." Many years ago, when the grasping
proprietors of the " Green Man " and the " Red
Lion" charged Is. 6d. a mile for posting, the
Lord Salisbury of that day, being a frugal
man, transferred his custom here and saved 3d.
a mile. Pepper, the then landlord, at once
changed his sign to its present style.

HADLEY GREEN 79

XI

THE modern Holy head Road, made in the
Twenties is seen midway in Barnet, branching off
to the left by what remains of the once-famous
" Green Man." Broad and well-engineered though
it be, it has little of interest in the three miles
between here and South Mimms ; its sole
features, indeed, being a fine view of Wrotham
Park, to the right, and a glimpse of the gateAvay
of Dyrham Park, on the left. It can scarce be
said that that heavy stone entrance — a classic
arch flanked by Tuscan columns — is beautiful,
but it has an interest all its own, for it was
originally the triumphal arch erected in 1660
in London Streets, to celebrate the " joyfull
Hestoracion " of Charles II.

Taking then, by preference, the old road,
the way lies across Hadley Green, where, among

the raffsed fir-trees that are scattered on its

~~

western side, stand the remains of the old stocks.
The stone obelisk, famous in all the country
round about as " Hadley Highstone," is presently
seen ahead, at a parting of the ways. To the
right hand goes the Great North Road : to the
left the old road to Holyhead. " Eight miles
to St. Albans " is the legend on the hither face
of the monument, whose other inscription we
halt to read :—

" Here was fought the Famous Battle
between Edward the Fourth and the Earl of

8o

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Warwick, April 14, Anno 1471, In which the
Earl was defeated And Slain. Stick no Bills."
Musing sadly on that unromantic injunction,
modern, but deeply carved, like the rest of the
inscription, in the stone, we prepare to depart,
when one, who is probably the "oldest inhabitant,"
approaches and volunteers the information that
the obelisk was formerly some thirty-two yards

HADLEY GREEN : WINTER.

forward, and opposite the inn called the "Two
Brewers." In 1842, it seems, it was removed
to its present position.

Leaving this elevated plateau, which Hall,
the old chronicler, treating of the Battle of
Barnet, calls "a fair place for two armies to
join together "-as though that were the chief
use for a plain— the old road begins its three
miles of fall and rise; down into pebbly dips

COACHING ACCIDENTS 81

and over hunchbacked little rustic bridges
spanning wandering watercourses ; up steep rises
and swerving round sharp corners, alternately
from left to right ; by the forgotten hamlet of
Kitt's End, down Dancer's Hill, and past the
suggestively named Minims Wash, where the old
coachmen, when the waters were out in winter-
time (as they generally were, at this plashy
corner) usually drove into the ditch, which,
concealed by the floods that already covered
the road and rose to the axle-trees, held a
dangerous depth of water.

This old road, in fact, and indeed the whole
of the eight miles between Barnet and St.
Albans, pulses with stirring incidents of the
old coaching days. It was, for example, in
1820 that what was described as an " accident "
to the Holy head Mail took place a mile short
of St. Albans. As a matter of plain fact, it was
not so much an accident as the almost inevitable
conclusion of a road race between the Holyhead
and the Chester Mails. The coachmen had
been driving furiously all the way from
Highgate, and striving to pass one another.
Through Barnet they clattered, and by some
miracle avoiding a smash on the old road, came
at last within sight of St. Albans, to where the
Old Mile House still stands by the way. Here,
with an inch or two to spare, the coachman of
the Holyhead Mail took the off side and was
coming past the Chester Mail, when the
coachman pulled his horses across the road. In
VOL. i. 6

82 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

the collision that followed, both coaches were
overturned, and one passenger, William Hunt
hy name, killed. At the inquest held at the
"Peahen," St. Alhans, both coachmen were,
very properly, found guilty of manslaughter,
and were committed for trial at the next
Hertford sessions, which did not open till six
months later. During the whole of that period
they were kept in irons at St. Albans. Eventu-
ally they received a further term of twelve
months imprisonment each.

With happenings such as these, becoming
more alarmingly frequent as the pace of coaches
and the rivalry between them increased,
travelling grew exceedingly dangerous, and
Lord Erskine, when counsel for a person who
had had the misfortune to be thrown off one
of the coaches from the "Swan with Two
Necks," and to receive a broken arm, was not
altogether unduly severe in his witty address
to the jury :—

" Gentlemen of the jury," he gravely began,
"the plaintiff in this case is Mr. Beverley, a
respectable merchant of Liverpool, and the
defendant is Mr. Chaplin, proprietor of the
' Swan with Two Necks,' in Lad Lane, — a sign
emblematical, I suppose, of the number of necks
people ought to possess Avho ride in his
vehicles."

A further development of coaching dangers
about 1820 was found in the growing mania of
the young bloods of that day for driving

AMATEUR COACHMEN 83

honours. Every young man about town
cherished an ambition to become an expert
coachman, but unhappily they took their lessons,
not on the box-seats of empty coaches, but laid
inexperienced hands upon the reins of well-filled
conveyances.

This driving ambition was a fine thing for
the sportively inclined, but staid and elderly
persons were apt to be greatly terrified by it.
An " Old Traveller," writing to the Sporting
Magazine in 1822, after having read the coach-
ing articles by " Nimrod," asks the Editor if he
will have the goodness to request his distinguished
contributor to inform the travelling public how
they are to travel fifty miles by coach without
having their necks broken, or their limbs
shattered and amputated. " In my younger
days," says he, " when I was on the eve of
setting out on a journey, my wife was in the
habit of giving me her parting blessing, con-
cluding with the words, ' God bless you, my
dear, I hope you will not be robbed.' But it
is now changed to, ' God bless you, my dear,
I hope you will not get your neck broke, and
that you will bring all your legs safe home
again.' Now, Mr. Editor, this neck-breaking
and leg-amputating is all because one daring
rascal wishes to show that he is a better coach-
man than another daring rascal ; or because one
proprietor on the road is determined not to be
outdone by another.

" Neither can I think, sir, that such writers

84 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

as Mr. Nimrod mend the matter much. By "a
lively and technical description of these galloping
coaches, he makes many a young man fancy
himself a coachman, from which cause many
an old man gets upset and hurt. For example :
a friend of mine coming up to town a short
time since hy one of these galloping coaches,
was upset and much injured. On going to
sympathise with his misfortune, he informed me
that the accident was occasioned hy the leaders
taking one road and the wheelers another; so
hetween them hoth, over they went. 'My
God ! ' said I, ' what was the coachman about ;
was he asleep, or drunk ? ' ' Neither,' replied
my friend, ' he had nothing to do with it ; a
young Oxonian was driving.' Now, Mr. Editor,
it is not at all improbable but that this Oxonian
had been reading your magazine the night
before, instead of his classics, and meant the
next day to put his theory into practice, by
which my friend, a very worthy man, the father
of a large family, nearly lost his life.

" Whoever takes up a newspaper in these
eventful times, it is even betting whether an
accident by coach, or a suicide, first meets the
eye. Now really, as the month of November is
fast approaching, when, from foggy weather and
dark nights, both these calamities are likely to
increase, I merely suggest the propriety of any
unfortunate gentleman, resolved on self-destruc-
tion, trying to avoid the disgrace attached to it,
by first taking a few journeys by some of these

DRINK AND DISASTER 85

Dreadnoughts, Highflyer, or Tally-ho coaches ;
as in all probability he may meet with as
instant death as if he had let off one of Joe
Manton's pistols in his mouth, or severed his
head from his body with one of Mr. Palmer's
best razors."

It was all very well to complain of these
sportsmen, but what about the professionals ?
How, for instance, would he have relished being
at the mercy of a man like the driver of one
of the Birmingham coaches on the home stretch
between London and Redbourne who, on one
occasion, full of port and claret, could just
manage to keep his seat, and in this condition
started for London ?

When " the drink was a-dying in him, like,"
and he felt more alive, he sprang his team at
this dangerous part of the road known as Minims
Wash, Here he met the Manchester " Coburg "
coming round a corner at a terrific pace. They
met, with a resounding crash ; the first coach-
man finding himself in the ditch and his leaders
charging over it into the gates of a neighbouring
park. The coach happily struck one of the
posts and stopped dead. No one was killed and
the worst that happened to the passengers was
that one of them who had jumped off in alarm,
sprained an ankle. He, very naturally, objected
to complete the journey on the coach and had
to be provided with a post-chaise at Barnet.
Some of the other passengers went with him.
Only one of the horses received any injury, and

86 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

that was the off-leader of the " Coburg," whose
shoulder was smashed. This affair cost the
tippling coachman £20, and he thought himself
lucky (as indeed he was) that it was not worse.
The same coachman, who by this time had
reformed, met the " Coburg " on another occasion
on this stretch of road. It was a moonlight
night and the driver of the " Coburg " was on
the wrong side in order to avoid some heaps
of gravel thrown down in repairing the road.
When he saw the other coach, the driver of
the " Coburg " tried to cross over to his proper
side, and in doing so, the heaped up gravel
turned his coach over. The passengers were
unhurt, and when they had righted the vehicle
and found a baby who had been flung out of his
mother's arms off the roof into a field, they
resumed their journey.

XII

ONE shudders to think what would become of
railway directors and shareholders if the old
Law of Deodand were still in existence. It was
an ancient enactment, going back to the days
of the Saxon kings, by which the object causing
the death of a person was forfeited for the
benefit of his representatives. At least, that
was originally the humane intention of the law,

DEODAND 87

which then really represented the etymology of
its name, making it a God-given compensation.
Sometimes the death-dealing object was valuable ;
occasionally it was practically valueless ; just as
might happen. But, like many another originally
just and equitable thing, the Law of Deodand
became perverted, and the inevitable Landowner
found his account in it. It is difficult to folloxv
the reasoning that, when the person killed left
no representatives, made the offending object
forfeit to the Lord of the Manor on whose land
the accident might happen ; but so it came about.
Deodand became limited after a time, and instead
of those interested receiving the full value of
the thing causing death, a jury would sit to
assess the damages due according to circum-
stances. Thus, when the Holyhead Mail ran
over and killed a boy on the road near South
Minims, the deodand on the coach and horses
was assessed by the coroner's jury at one
sovereign. Rightly considered, however, deo-
dand should not in this case have been levied
at all, for the accident was entirely due to a
group of three boys, of whom the deceased was
one, darting across the road under the horses'
heads to see how nearly they could come to the
coach without being run over : a common feat
with boys in those days, and one that ruined
many a coachman's nerves. In this case the
boy was killed, and clearly by his own fault.
Had the deodand not been limited, a curious
legal point might have arisen, as it had done

88 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

before, in the case of a man being killed by a
horse and loaded waggon running over him ;
when, the value of the horse and waggon being
claimed, the lawyers successfully raised the point
that it was not the horse that killed the man
but the waggon. In the result, the deodand was
lessened by the value of the horse. This law
was finally abolished before railways came into
existence, or we might have seen locomotives
and whole trains forfeited to relatives of the
accidentally killed ; or, failing these, to the
Lord of the Manor in the particular spot where
the accident happened.

A perhaps less sporting practice than that of
permitting amateurs to handle the ribbons, but
one certainly also less dangerous to the travelling
public, was the wholly unauthorised and alto-
gether illegitimate custom that began to obtain
in later years of admitting a third person upon
the box of the mails.

There was properly but one box seat beside
the coachman, and this proud eminence was
most ardently coveted by every man. In early
coaching days it was attainable by an early
appearance upon the scene and by tipping the
yard porter; but when competition had rendered
coach proprietors keener in their scent for fares,
this pride of place was valued by them at a
considerable advance upon the inglorious seats
away from the bright effulgent genius who
handled the ribbons, and diffused a strong
odour of rum around "the bench."

INFORMERS 89

There was a heavy penalty — £50, it has been
said — against admitting a third person upon the
box, the reason of this tremendous regulation
being that the driver, it was considered, could
not have sufficient room for doing his work
properly when encumbered with more than one
passenger on the box.

This heavy penalty, or part of it, was recover-
able by any informer, and the result was that
the roads were infested by such gentry, not only
on the look-out for a contravention of the rule,
but practising all manner of dodges to inveigle
a good-natured or greedy coachman into letting
a third man get up for "just a few miles."

But the game was so well known that such
an application was apt to be answered by a coil
of thong winding itself round the thighs of the
applicant. There was one particularly active
informer, Byers by name, who is referred to in
the Inyoldsby Legends as " the accusing Byers,
the Prince of Peripatetic Informers, and terror
of Stage-coachmen, when such things were.
Alack ! alack ! " says Barham, " the Railroads
have ruined his ' vested interest.' '

The interests, "vested" or not, of these
informers, were large and varied. Mail and
stage-coachmen, postboys, travellers with their
taxcarts, and waggoners, all contributed to their
income. Sometimes these lynx-eyed fellows
would find a coach carrying more passengers
than it was licensed for. The discrepancy could
be seen at a glance, for all stage-coaches were

9o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

bound to carry a conspicuous plate stating these
particulars. Perhaps the guard would artfully
hang a rug over it, and then the common
informer, hanging about at the changing place,
would lift it up and have a look; finding, after
all, that the coach was only carrying its legal
complement. Whereupon, the coachman and
guard, who had been lying in wait for him,
would duck him finely in the nearest horse-
trough for his pains.

Even the humble turnpike men were liable
to be informed against for not giving a ticket,
for taking too much toll, or for not having their
names displayed over their doorways.

There were at one time no fewer than five
turnpike-gates between London and St. Albans,
a distance of only just over twenty miles. The
series originally began with the gate on
Islington Green, removed afterwards to the
Holloway Road, and was continued by the one
at Highgate Archway, and others at Whetstone,
and South Mimms ; the fifth being at the
entrance to St. Albans itself. These numerous
gates within so comparatively short a distance,
gave excellent opportunities to the informing
gentry, who were wont to take little excursions
into the country along this route, returning with
memoranda that brought them a goodly return
on their enterprise. They cast their nets wide
and captured an astonishing diversity of fish.
But their memoranda had to be made with
discretion. It was a risky thing to be seen noting

POETIC JUSTICE 91

down the name of a " collector of tolls," as a
turnpike-man was officially styled. The present
writer has held converse with an old man who
once kept the toll-gate at South Minims. Age
had withered him, but custom had not staled
his reminiscences. He had an especially favourite
and Homeric story of an encounter with one of
these pests.

It was springtime, and our toll-keeping friend
had a mind to whitewash the exterior of his
house. To this end he not only took down the
climbing roses, that rendered his official residence
a fugitive glimpse of beauty to those who fared
the road by coach, but he also removed his
name-board. To him entered, while engaged in
wielding the whitewash brush, one of the
informing species, who, thinking himself un-
observed, made to examine the board, lying face
downwards, on the ground. Our friend, how-
ever, was not so intent upon his whitewashing
but that lie saAV with the tail of his eye what
was toward behind him. He must have been a
man of elemental passions, for he reached over,
his brush fully charged, and delivered a stagger-
ing sideways blow with it upon the face of the
unsuspecting note taker. " I gin him a good
'mi," he always used to say; "but he come up
for more, an' I punched his head and kicked

his " No matter what he kicked. Suffice

it to say that his language was forcible,
adjectival, and Saxon.

92

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

XIII

THE old road regains Telford's Holyhead Road
of the Twenties a little distance short of South
Minims, close by where the cast-iron plate of
the old milestone proclaims " Barnett " to he
three miles distant. It crosses the hroad high-
way at an acute angle and goes in an ascent,
and with many curves behind the village ;

*/ r^

SOUTH MIMMS.

descending again and almost returning upon
itself through the village street, as though a
circuitous course and the mounting of every hill
were things greatly to be desired by travellers
bound on a long and toilsome journey. South
Minims, village and church, is completely
islanded by these old and new roads.

SOUTH MIMMS 93

In the accompanying illustration, the church
with the houses behind it may be seen standing
on a knoll. It is a hillocky and picturesque
place, with a church unspoiled by the restoration
of 1868, and rustic cottages that might well be
fifty, instead of less than fifteen, miles from
London. The view is towards London, and the
road in the foreground is Telford's ; the old
road coming steeply down and crossing again.
There was an excellent reason for that ancient
way taking such high ground at this point. It
was for the accommodation of the village, and
continued to be the main road until the days of
a mere local intercourse between one parish and
its next neighbour gave place to the more
frequent and extended travel of later times,
when direct communication between distant
places became of much more importance than
the convenience of wayside hamlets. The black
despair that overtook the innkeepers and other
frontagers relegated by Telford from a position
in the midst of the traffic to a stagnant back-
water of life may readily be imagined, but they
received no compensation for this " worserment,"
which must have practically ruined many of
them ; nor did those more fortunate ones pay
for betterment who, in the making of new roads,
found themselves, from being in a bye-lane,
suddenly placed in the best of situations, on the
main road.

Mimms was not only infamous for its floods.
In days of yore it harboured highwaymen and

94 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

footpads in plenty, and for quite a long time.
It seems odd, nowadays, that a particular spot
should have heen of so evil a repute, and yet
that no efforts were made to secure the rascals.
A quaint document still preserved in the archives
of the House of Lords recounts what befell
William Symonds here in 1647. It is a petition
in which he, as a prisoner in the King's Bench
prison, prays for a new trial. It seems that he
was entrusted by Henry Fitzhugh and Richard
Wells with a sealed packet of money, for him
to carry from Bedford to London, and that Avhen
he reached Mimms at break of day he was set
upon and robbed by three or four thieves and
lost not only the money, but almost all the rest
of what he had to bring to London. He further
says that he was no common carrier, and that
he had not negligently lost the money. Yet
Fitzhugh and Wells prosecuted him, and,
obtaining judgment, laid him prisoner in the
King's Bench. He concludes by praying for a
new trial; but whether or not he ever obtained
it does not appear. In any case, coming from
Bedford to London, he had no business on this
road.

The strange story of unfortunate William
Symonds is followed by equally strange happen-
ings some forty years later; when, for example,
on November 9th, 1690, seven highwaymen not
only robbed the Manchester carrier near this
spot of £15,000, tax-money being conveyed from
the Midlands to London, but also killed or

MARLBOROUGH ROBBED 95

hamstrung eighteen horses of the escort, in order
to prevent pursuit. It was a leisurely business
and thoroughly well carried out ; all travellers
who were unlucky enough to he passing at the
time being robbed first and then tied to wayside
trees, where they were left to be released by
later wayfarers. Two Roman Catholics were
subsequently arrested on a charge of being con-
cerned in this affair, and committed for trial,
but it does not appear what happened to them.
At any rate, whatever their fate may have been,
it did not stop these outrages on the Holyhead
Road ; for, two years later, the most audacious
bands were still at work in this district, reaping
almost incredible plunder. On the night of
August 23rd, 1692, for instance, the great
Churchill, the terrible " Malbrouck," scourge of
the foreigner on many a stricken field, tamely
submitted to be robbed by the highwaymen who
lay wait for him near " Coney," as Narcissus
Luttrell calls London Colney, and plundered
him of 500 guineas; a loss "w^hich," says
Macaulay, alluding to that great captain's
miserly disposition, " he doubtless never ceased
to regret to the last moment of his Ions? career

O O

of prosperity and glory."

The plunder reaped by these daring highway-
men must have been immense, and inferior only
to that bagged by modern company promoters.
Three months later than their little parley with
Marlborough, a party of eight or nine made a
haul of between £1,500 and £2,000 out of a

96 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

waggon "near Barnet," and might have long
continued their career had it not been for the
King, who suspecting Roman Catholics and
Jacobites in all these marauding bands, took
measures that for a time effectually cleared the
roads near London. Detachments of a regiment
of Dragoons were posted some ten miles out,
along all the great roads, and formed patrols.
Captures were numerous, and executions almost
as many. Among their notable seizures was
that of Captain James Whitney, at some un-
specified spot " at Barnet." In this later Battle
of Barnet, between the soldiers and Whitney's
band, December 6th, 1692, in which one dragoon
was killed and several wounded, he was captured,
and afterwards promptly hauled off to Newgate,
amid great rejoicings, for he had been a terror
in many widely separated districts of England.
They hanged the "Captain," not at Tyburn but
in Smithfield, in the beginning of 1693, and the
roads knew an interval of peace.

The parish registers and church wardens'
accounts of South Minims throw a further and
a sombre light upon the history of the road,
with their entries of " strangers " buried and
"poor people" relieved. No fewer than seven
" strangers " were found dead on the road, within
the limits of the parish, in 1727, one of them
having been drowned in Minims Wash. Among
other items in the accounts is one of 1737, " To
a man that had the small-pox, to go forwards,
00 . 1 . OOd." Set down in this manner a

THE OLD ROAD 97

shilling looks a great deal, but what astonishes
the reader of these things more than anything
else is the heartless way in which the poor and
the sick were given a trifle and hurried off to the
next parish, to die on the way, if they would, in
order that some other community should have
the expense of them, or the infection, as the
case might be.

XIV

THE Holyhead Road goes broad and straight, and
with a long perspective of dust-clouds and tele-
graph-poles, up Ridge Hill, where the borders of
Middlesex are crossed and Hertfordshire entered ;
but the old way, after passing the "White Hart,"
crosses to the right hand and climbs up by itself
as a deserted track. Near the hill-top it crosses
again, and so descends on the left hand towards
St. Albans. It is quite a narrow way, measuring
at the most twelve feet across, against the
average twenty feet of the modern road ; and,
sunk between deep banks as it is, giving rise to
astonishment that a road such as this was, until
the first quarter of the nineteenth century had
nearly passed away, the chief means of com-
munication between the capitals of England and
Ireland. Nature, left to herself, has long since
resumed sway over the old road, here and there
scored with waggon-ruts through eighty years'
VOL. i. 7

98 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

deposit of leaf -mould, or, in other places, become
a green ride through the unchecked trees that
grow along it and interlace overhead. It is a
relic of Old England of the days before railways :
no museum specimen, but an open-air survival,
unnoted and un travelled ; discovered by the few
who, haply realising what it is, thread its winding
course and leave the modern well worn road to
the crowd.

Descending Ridge Hill, into the valley of
the Colne, London Colney is reached, skirting
the road by that insignificant stream, spanned
by a picturesque old red-brick bridge, whose
generous proportions seem to be much too large
for so unassuming a runlet. Such criticism,
however, is severely deprecated by those who
know the Colne throughout the year. They tell
wondrous stories of the things it is capable of.
London Colney's name is perhaps not a very
attractive one, but the place itself is exceedingly
picturesque. Quaint village inns, timber-and-
plaster gabled cottages, and old brick houses
with a certain air of refinement that conies of
chaste design and sound workmanship, are its
constituent features.

The stretch of road between the northern face
of Ridge Hill, London Colney, and St. Albans
was always dreaded by coachmen in winter, for
when snow fell in conjunction with a driving
north or north-east wind, huge drifts resulted
in this district. Ridge Hill formed a barrier
against which the snow- charged wind battled,

THE OLD EOAD, EIDGE HILL.

THE GREAT SNOWSTORM

101

with the result that a flurry of snow-wreaths
gathered in the levels. The great storm that
began with startling suddenness on the Christmas
Day of 1836 was a great deal more widespread
than any other experienced during the coaching
age. Curiously enough, it had its exact counter-
part precisely half a century later, when the
terrible snowstorm of Christmas night, 1886, fell,
equally without warning, from what had been
a blue and sunshiny sky. The storm of 1836

LONDON COLNEY.

buried many coaches all over the country, par-
ticularly in the neighbourhood of St. Albans
and Dunstable. The Manchester down mail of
the 26th reached St. Albans, and, getting off the
road into a hollow, was upset, and left where it
fell, the guard returning to London with the
bags and the passengers in a post-chaise. A
mile distant from this accident, on the London
side, a " chariot " —that is to say, a family
carriage — was seen the next day without horses,

102

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

and nearly covered with snow; two ladies
making frantic appeals from its windows for
help, saying their postboy, having left them
two hours before to go to St. Albans for fresh
horses, had not returned. They could not be
helped; and so, still wildly gesticulating, we
leave them for ever, without the means of
knowing whether that postboy ever did return.

The up Birmingham mail, via Aylesbury,
also on the 26th, just managed to get beyond
that town when it ran into a drift and thus
suddenly ceased its journey. All attempts to
force a way through were fruitless. Accord-
ingly, Price, the guard, mounted one of the
horses and, tying the mailbags on another, set
out in this fashion for London. Joined a little
later by two postboys on other horses, with
the bye-bags, all three pushed on together,
discovering now and again that they had
wandered far from the road when the hoof of
a horse chanced to strike on the top bar of a
field-gate or stick in the summit of a hedge
buried in the drifts. By great good fortune
they reached London at last, exhausted, but
safe. The passengers, who were quite a second-
ary consideration, were left behind to be dug
out by the country folk, and taken back,
somehow, to Aylesbury. The Chester and the
Holyhead mails were embedded at the same time
at Hockliffe.

On leaving the old-world village of London
Colney behind, a distant view of St. Albans

ST. ALLAN'S

opens out, the Abbey first disclosing itself,
and then the clock-tower in the market-place,
followed by an indiscriminate grouping of roofs
and chimneys. The Abbey— in recent years

ENTRANCE TO ST. ALBANS.

ennobled as a Cathedral and by consequence of
that and the creation of the See conferring the
dignified style of " city " upon the town — very
rightly dominates all else.

XV.

WE must penetrate very deeply into the past to
reach the event that gave the City and Cathedral
of St. Alban their name. So dim have records
and traditions become, by reason of lapse of time,
that it is not quite certain whether the year

I06 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

A.D. 285 or A.D. 305 witnessed the martyrdom
of that saint. By all accounts it would seem
that the proto-martyr of Britain was a citizen of
Verulamium, and a pagan, when the Diocletian
persecution of Christians broke out ; but a
strange thing happened to turn him towards
the Faith that already had made converts
steadfast throughout many dangers and trials.
To him came one Amphibalus, a Christian,
seeking shelter from the fury of the persecutors ;
and, whether from innate nobility of character
or from long friendship with the fugitive, Alban
offered him the protection of his house. Sheltered
thus, Amphibalus expounded to him the tenets
of this new creed that had made enemies so
bitter and so powerful, with the result that
Alban himself became a Christian. It was not
long before the fugitive's hiding-place was
discovered, but Alban, filled with the newborn
zeal that distinguishes the convert, secretly
allowed his guest to depart, and then, acknow-
ledging as much, cursed the gods and announced
himself a Christian and prepared to suffer in
his stead. Imprisonment and torture availed
nothing to shake his resolution, and it was not
long before the day dawned when he was led
out from the gates of Verulam and beheaded
upon that hill beyond the Roman city, now
arid for eleven hundred years past, the site of
a succession of great churches set up in memory
of him. Vague stories of a very early church
erected upon the scene of the martyrdom may

HISTORY OF THE CITY 107

be met with, but the relics of Saint Alban (as
in the meanwhile he had become) had long-
been lost when, four hundred and eighty-seven
years later, Offa, King of Mercia, penitent for
having compassed the murder of Ethelbert,
King of the East Angles, proposed to absolve
his soul by founding a church over the scene
of the martyr's agony. Divine light and a ray
of fire are said by the legend to have conducted
him to a certain spot called Holmhurst (that
is to say " Holly wood ") where the relics lay,
and they were removed to the church he then
built, or, as some accounts will have it, enlarged.
Of that edifice only some doubtful fragments
remain, for not only did Ealdred and Eadmer
alter it about A.D. 950, but Paul de Caen, the
first Norman Abbot after the Conquest, set
himself to entirely rebuild it on a grander scale,
little more than a hundred years later. Again,
in A.D. 1195, rebuildings and enlargements
were undertaken, and throughout the centuries
very few decades have passed without something,
good or ill, being done to the huge fabric.
Huge it is, for it measures from end to end
550 feet, and is only surpassed in this particular
by Winchester Cathedral, the longest in England ;
but only by seven feet. How great is the rise
of the Holyhead road from London may be
gathered from the fact that the ground on which
the Cathedral of St. Alban stands is on a level
with the cross on the dome of St. Paul's. The
long story of the Abbey ; how those slain in the

I08 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

two battles of St. Albans are buried here and
at St. Peter's; how it was sold to the people
for a parish church for £400 after the dissolution
of the monastery in 1539 ; how it in modern
times became a Cathedral ; and how Sir Gilbert
Scott and Lord Grimthorpe successively have

wrought havoc with their " restorations," at a

~

total cost of over £166,000, are matters for
ecclesiologists, and not for telling in a book
on the road.

Par or near, the Abbey dominates the city,
whose clustered roofs rise gradually toward where
it stands on its elevated plateau, overlooking the
quiet Hertfordshire meadows. Indeed, it stands
on higher ground than any abbey or cathedral
in England, the floor level at the crossing being
340 feet above mean sea-level. Lichfield is
next highest, standing at 286 feet, and Durham,
placed though it be on a craggy cliff beside the
river Wear, comes only third, at 212 feet. St.
Albans' very bulk is impressive, and, to the
distant view, softened as it is by the smoke
of the town chimneys, not unlovely, despite
that long outline which rivals Winchester's great
span ; and though the crudities of the wealthy
architectural amateur are insistent at close
quarters they are fortunately lost in great
measure from a distance. Por where by-gone
abbots strove so greatly to build in ages past,
it is happily difficult for one man to largely
alter the outline of their work.

A cheerful old place is St. Albans, crowning

^

ROADS ALTERED in

its hill proudly with a mural crown, and rich
in all the traditional attributes of a cathedral
city — darkling nooks, quaint alleys, and ancient
churches — satellites attendant upon the central
fane. Before the present main road from London
came into existence in 1794, the entrance was
by Sopwell Lane, still in use, branching oft' to
the left at something more than half a mile
from the city. It is a steep and rugged way,
leading down into the meadows where Sopwell
ruins stand, and so to Holywell Hill, where an
acute right-angle turn and a formidable climb
used to bring the early coaches staggering into
the market-place by the aid of an extra pair of
horses. The Roman way, the famous "Watling
Street," avoided the site of St. Albans altogether,
and went considerably to the left of the Holy-
head Road, to the valley of the Yer, where the
ruins of Verulamium may yet be found below
the hilly site of the monastery of St. Alban,
founded by King Off a of Mercia in 793. It was
the monks Avho in mediaeval times diverted the
Watling Street from its straight course to
Verulam, and made the road from St. Stephens
into St. Albans, by the tremendous descent and
ascent of Holywell Hill. The travellers of those
times came from London chiefly by the Watling
Street, via Stanmore, Brockley Hill, and Elstree,
and it was not until later that the present route
came greatly into vogue.

This monkish interference with the road was
by no means on behalf of travellers, but rather

II2 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

from a highly developed sense of self-preservation.
Before they laid hands upon it, traffic went by
in the valley, and the town and monastery
suffered from neglect. St. Albans Monastery,
like other religious houses, did not exist by
grants of land alone, but owned tolls and
market-rights, and it was to increase the value
of these that this drastic plan was adopted.
Drastic, indeed, it was, for the paved Roman
way was grubbed up and utterly destroyed from
St. Stephens to Yerulam, so that it became
impossible to travel by it, and every one was
then compelled to come into St. Albans by the
mountainous Holy well Hill.

Verulamium had from the earliest times of
the Roman settlement of Britain been the
wealthiest of all the towns in this island. It
possessed a theatre and all the graces of civilisa-
tion, but no walls or defences of any kind. Thus
it was that when Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni,
revolted under oppression in A.D. 61, it became
the easiest, as well as the earliest prey of her
avenging hosts. Verulamium and Londinium
fell before their onslaughts, and in the massacres
following, 70,000 persons are said to have perished,
in addition to those who fell at Camulodunum.

Verulamium, in common with those other
towns, was afterwards rebuilt, and grew more
prosperous than before ; but it met a similar
fate some 400 years later, when the Roman
troops left Britain, and barbaric hordes, over-
whelmed it in some obscure foray. The very

WAETLINGA-CEASTER 113

obscurity that clings about its end adds to the
horror of those times. Those were wars of
extermination, and none were left to tell the
tale of how the great town and its people
perished by fire and sword. Only when, in
course of time, civilisation touched the Saxons,
and historians were produced, do we hear any-
thing of these long-ruined places, by that time
become tinged with mystery and regarded with
shrinking aversion. Bede, writing about A.D. 720,
calls this " Waetlinga-ceaster," the city of the
Watlings. In his time vast ruined walls and
houses remained. Off a, when founding St. Albans
Abbey, some seventy years later, was probably
dissuaded by fears of the supernatural from
drawing upon the ruins for building material.
It was not so with those who rebuilt and enlarged
his Abbey from time to time. They found and
worked the ready mine of bricks and tiles,
doubly valuable in that district innocent of
stone, and thus it is that so little of ruined
Verulam is left; but, gazing upon the Abbey,
we see, in the immense quantities of Roman
brick and tile that have gone towards its con-
struction, that ancient Roman town in a manner
re-incarnated.

Towards the middle of the tenth century,
those ruins in the valley were a source of terror
to the good folks of the rising town of St.
Albans. In them lurked those outlaws —
robbers, murderers, and general offscourings of
society — for whom it would have been dangerous
VOL. i. 8

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

to appear in the town, and who ^rendered it
equally dangerous for law-abiding burgesses to
Tnder far from their domestic hearths when
the sun had set and darkness gathered.

MARKET-PLACE, ST. ALBANS.

partly for this reason, perhaps quite as much
as for the use of the materials for building
purposes, that so much of the ruins was
removed by Ealdred, the eighth Abbot. He
warred with the Verulam vagabonds, carting
much of their harbourage away, and explored

HOLY WELL HILL 115

a cave supposed to be inhabited by a dragon—
who was not at home on that occasion. The
good Abbot, however, is said to have found
traces of the monster ! His successor, Eadmer,
was of the fiery sort. He, too, removed much
building material, but the "pagan altars"
found during his explorations he ground to
powder — and so earns the maledictions of all
antiquaries.

And so it went on for centuries. Stukeley,
about 1690, noticed a good part of the walls
standing, but, as he rode along, saw hundreds
of loads of Roman bricks being carted off, to
mend the highway.

XVI

THE old entrance by Holywell Hill is the most
charming part of St. Albans, with fine old
red -brick mansions and old inns where the
coaches and the post-chaises used to come.
Many of the inns are either mere shadows of
their former selves, or have been entirely altered
to other uses, but their coach-entrances and
yards remain to tell of what they once were.
There stands a building now a girls' school,
but once the " Old Crown," and close by the
"White Hart," with "Saracen's Head Yard"
beyond, but the " Saracen's Head " itself is IIOAV

n6 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

divided into shops. In a continuous line up-hill
were the "Angel," "Horsehead," "Dolphin,"
"Seven Stars," " Woolpack," "Peahen," and
" Key " ; which last house stood squarely on the
site where the London road now enters the city.
It was from the "Keyfield," at the back of this
house, that the Yorkists burst into the streets
and fell upon the Lancastrians in the first
Battle of St. Albans, 1455. Another long-
vanished inn was the " Castle," made famous
by Shakespeare in a scene of Henry VI "., where
Richard Plantagenet kills the Duke of Somerset,
in this fight :—

So, lie thou there : —

For underneath an alehouse' paltry sign,

The Castle in St. Alban's, Somerset

Hath made the wizard famous in his death.

Somerset had been warned by a witch to
" shun castles " :—

Let him shun castles ;

Safer shall he be upon the sandy plains,

Than where castles mounted stand.

He could scarce have interpreted the
prophecy in the crooked way it was verified.

Holywell Hill still echoes to the sound of
the coach-horn, as the modern "Wonder,"
with an extra pair of horses, dashes up from
the hollow to the "Peahen." The "Wonder,''
however, does not journey to and from St.
Albans by the Holyhead road. Leaving London
from the Hotel Victoria, Northumberland Avenue,

OLD INNS 119

at 10.50 a.m., it follows somewhat the line of the
Watling Street by Hendon, the " Welsh Harp,"
Edgware, Great Stanmore, Bushey, and Watford ;
reaching its destination at 1.50, and setting
out on the return journey at 3.45. The
" Wonder " has run daily to and from St.
Alhans, sometimes through the winter as well
as summer, since 1882 ; owned hy that consistent
amateur of coaching, Mr. P. J. Rumney, familiarly
known down the road and at Brighton as " Dr.
Ridge," from his proprietorship of a certain
world -famed " Food for Infants." But, before
the " Wonder " came upon the scene, the
modern coaching revival had provided St.
Albans with summer coaches from about 1872.
The now famous " Old Times " began to run,
November 4th, 1878, and continued to St.
Albans until the following spring, when it was
transferred to Virginia Water.

The " Peahen," standing at the meeting of
Holywell Hill and the London Road, has of late
been rebuilt in a somewhat gorgeous and baronial
style, but is the lineal descendant of a house of
the same name in existence so far back as 1556.
The name of the " Peahen " is thought to be
unique.

Continuing the line of hostelries past the
"Peahen" and the "Key," into Chequer Street,
there were the "Chequers,*" the "Half Moon,"
and the " Bell " ; and in French Row the
"Fleur-de-Lis," and the "Old Christopher,"
still remaining. The " Great Red Lion " in

120

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

the market-place, has been rebuilt. Near it,
in George Street, on the old road out of St.
Albans, is the " George," one of the pleasant est
old places still left, with an old red-brick front

THE ''GEORGE."

and a picturesque courtyard. There was an
mn on this site certainly as early as 1448,
when it was mentioned as the "George upon
the Hupe " -whatever that may mean In
those times it was a pilgrim's inn, and had an

THE "GEORGE" 121

oratory cliapel. Nothing so interesting as that
survives, but the old house has its features.
The room to the right of the archway, used in
old times, when a coach plied from the
"George" to London and back every day, as
a booking-office and waiting-room, remains in
use as a parlour and rendezvous for the
country-folk on market days, and all the
summer the courtyard is like a bower with
flowers and vines. Under the gable can be
seen a spoil snatched from the destruction of
old Holywell House in 1837 — the decorative
carving from the pediment, a work representing
Ceres, surrounded with emblems of agriculture
its products, and attended by Cupids and
shameless creatures of that sort.

To and from the " George " went daily the
" Favourite " London coach, until the first of
the railways came in May 1858, and ran it off
the road. William Seymour, who used to drive
it, then descended to the position of driver of
an omnibus plying between St. Albans and
Hat field, but even that humble occupation was
soon swept away by railway extension. He
then became landlord of the " King Harry "
inn at St. Stephens, and died at last, May 30th,
1869, in the Marlborough almshouses, St. Albans.
Two other coaches in those days plied between
St. Albans and London, generally taking three
and a half hours. One came and went from
the "Woolpack," and the other, the "Accommo-
dation," from the " Meur-de-Lis," French Row.

122 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

A particularly haughty and exclusive establish-
ment was the "Verulam Arms." No common
fellow who travelled by public conveyances was
encouraged there. Only the lordly travellers who
came in their own family coaches, or posted,
ever sheltered beneath that condescending roof.
The house remains, on the right-hand of Telford's
new road leaving St. Albans, but had, as an
hotel and posting-house, the shortest of careers.
Built between 1827 and 1828, another ten years
saw the coming of the railway. With that event
vanished the trade of the " Verulam Arms."
The house was soon closed, and has for fifty years
past been a private residence. It is an extremely
plain and uncompromisingly formal building in
pallid brick, within railings enclosing a semi-
circular drive. It is said that the Princess
Victoria stayed here once. Some portions of
the once extensive stable-yards and coach-
houses remain, but the greater part of the
grounds was taken, as long ago as 1848, as the
site for a Roman Catholic Church, an unfortunate
building discontinued and sold before completion,
and finally purchased and finished as a Church
of England place of worship, as it still remains,
with the title of Christ Church. It would be
difficult to find a more hideous building.

But a far higher antiquity than can be shown
by any other house in St. Albans belongs to a
little inn called the " Fighting Cocks," standing
by the river Ver, below the Abbey. Its origin
goes back to early monastic days, when the lower

THE "FIGHTING COCKS"

123

part of this curious little octagonal building was
a water-gate to the monastery, and known as

THE "FIGHTING COCKS.'

St. Germain's Gate. Here the monks kept their
nets, using the upper part as a fortification.

,24 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

That embattled upper stage disappeared six hun-
dred years ago, and in its place the upper storey
of the inn is reared, in brick and timber, upon
the stone substructure. The inn claims to be
the oldest inhabited house in the kingdom, and
exhibited until recently the inscription :—

The Old Round House,
Rebuilt after the Flood.

Obviously, judging from that old sign, the
distinction between an eight-sided and a round
house was too subtle to be noticed. The "Re-
built after the Mood" does not (seeing where
the house stands, beside the river Ver) necessarily
mean the Deluge.

The hanging sign has of late years become
pictorial. On one side the Cocks are to be
seen, a whirling mass of contention, and on the
other the victor stands proudly over the prostrate
body of the vanquished, and indulges in a
triumphant crow.

XVII

WE often read in romances of the villainous
innkeepers of long ago, who were in league with
highwaymen, and we generally put those stories
down as rather wild and far-fetched illustrations

AN OLD STORY 125

of a bygone age. But there were many such
innkeepers in the old road-faring times, and
they were the highwaymen's best sources of
information. Such an one was the host of an
inn at St. Albans, who in 1718 was associated
with Tom Garrett and another "road agent"
working the highway between St. Albans and
London, in an evil partnership. It is a pity
that the sign of this inn is not specified ; we
should have gazed upon it with interest.

To this inn came one evening a gentleman
travelling to London on horseback. The land-
lord himself helped him up to his bedroom with
a weighty portmanteau Avhich promised good
plunder, and while his guest was preparing for
supper, took the good news of a likely haul ta
Garrett and his partner, who were staying in
the house. A pretty scheme was arranged on
the instant, and the landlord, when his guest
came downstairs, introduced his two confederates,
to him in the guise of travellers, also on their
way to London the following morning, who
would be glad of his company. The unsuspecting
stranger, nothing loth to spend an evening in
pleasant company, instead of sitting in solitary
state, joined the other " travellers " with a good
will, and they had a convivial night ; setting out
the next morning together. When they had
reached a lonely part of the road near London
Colney, the one covered him with a pistol while
the other ransacked his portmanteau, taking
all its contents, including a hundred guineas.

126 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

from his person. Then they disappeared down
a bye-road.

Our traveller sat mournfully by the roadside
for a while, contemplating his empty pack and
the reins of his horse, which had been cut by
the two partners in crime. It was not long
before he arrived at the very just conclusion
that the landlord of the inn was a party to this
business, and a very pretty little scheme occurred
to him by which he saw the possibility of
getting his own again. He carefully refilled
his portmanteau with stones, and retracing his
way to St. Albans, called first at a saddler's to
have his reins mended, and then leaving the
horse behind him, went back to the inn. When
the rascally landlord saw him return with his
baggage as heavy as before, he came to the
natural conclusion that his confederates had not
robbed the stranger, and cursed them under
his breath for a pair of bungling fools. The
returned traveller himself confirmed this im-
pression, accounting for his reappearance by
telling how an accident had happened to his
nag. In the meantime, he said, before starting
out again, he must have dinner, and only wished
he could have had the pleasure of the company
at that meal of the good fellows his host had
introduced him to the night before. With
much extravagant praise of their good and
sociable qualities, he declared that he must
really not lose sight of such fine fellows. Did
mine host know where they lived in London ?

RETRIBUTION 127

That villainous tapster was quite deceived.
He did know the addresses, and gave them. In
due course, then, imagine our traveller once
more on his way, and finally arriving in town.
The next morning he called upon Garrett, in
the guise of a " gentleman on important business."
Garrett was still in hed, and could not he seen,
having "just returned from a journey in the
country."

To this he replied that it was urgent and
important business, and this message brought
the highwayman down. The traveller had not
come without very potent persuaders to support
his demand for his property. The one was a
threat to have both highwaymen arrested ; the
other was a pistol. These inducements were
successful, and his hundred guineas found their
way back to his pockets, together with a portion
of his other property. Then he made a similar
call upon the other malefactor, who yielded up
the other moiety of the contents of the port-
manteau, and (as we are told by the contemporary
historian of these things) another hundred guineas.
We need not believe in this epic completeness
and overflowing measure of justice and retribu-
tion. There lurks the eighteenth-century moralist,
eager to cross the t's and dot the i's of every
situation. But there is no reason why, up to
that point, the story should not be true.

Before the road was remodelled by Telford,
in 182(5, the way out of St. Albans was past
the "George" and down the steep descent of

128 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Eomeland and Fishpool Street, through the
village of St. Michael's, and diagonally across a
portion of Gorhambury Park, crossing the river
Yer at Bow Bridge, at a point one and a half
miles from the city, just short of Prae Mill.
The present Holyhead Road, starting from the
"Red Lion" in the Market Place, was in 1828
an entirely new work. It is described hy Telford
as a two miles' length, extending from the " Red
Lion "to " Pond Yards," a spot prohahly identical
with Shefford Mill, half a mile heyond Prae
House, the site of the ancient hospital of
St. Mary de la Pre, or de Pratis ("St. Mary
of the Meadows ") originally a retreat for women
lepers, founded in 1190, and afterwards a Priory
of Benedictine nuns, suppressed by Wolsey in
1528. Priory and mill are alike gone, but Prae
House is seen on the left of the road, dwarfed
hy the embankment with which the roadway is
raised securely above danger of flooding from the
river Yer.

When the new road was completed, the old
route through Gorhambury became private, and
the entrance to it is now guarded, in the village
of St. Michael's, by lodge gates. St. Michael's,
now lying on the road to nowhere in particular,
remains a sweetly old-world place, and the break-
neck descent to it is one of the quaintest corners
of St. Albans. Here old houses and quaint signs
are the rule, and modern buildings the exception.
The "Jackdaw," the "Cock and Flower Pot,"
and many other old names attract attention.

PUDDING-STONE

129

Curiosities of the geological sort at St. Michael's
are the huge masses of conglomerate rock, or
"pudding-stone," found here and there in
prominent positions, having been dug up at
different periods in the neighbourhood. The
name of " pudding-stone " is excellently descrip-
tive, the rock consisting entirely of pebbles
welded together by some prehistoric force, and
resembling, to the imaginative mind, Cyclopean

ST. MICHAEL'S.

fossilised fragments of some antediluvian plum-
pudding, extraordinarily rich in plums.

St. Michael's Church, standing as it does
almost in the centre of the site of old Veru-
lamium, is largely built of Roman tiles. It is
of many periods, from Saxon to Scottian and
Grimthorpian, and of an extraordinary interest,
somewhat blighted by the heavy hand of Sir
Gilbert Scott, who "thoroughly restored" it in
1867, and the inconceivably heavier hand of Lord
Grimthorpe, who pulled it about shamefully in
VOL. i. 9

I3o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

1897, utterly demolishing its quaint old rough-
cast tower, and building a new one from his own
amateur-architect design. The odd architectural
details would be ridiculous if they were not
pitiful, in view of the really interesting work
they replace. One device, in especial, resembles
a cycling free-wheel clutch rather than anything
known in the whole range of Gothic design.

But greater than any other conceivable interest
is the association of the great Francis Bacon,
Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, with Gor-
hambury and St. Michael's. Bacon, who in his
sixty-five years of life studied law, and rose to
be Lord Chancellor, was a sufficiently remarkable
man. Not only was he a successful lawyer and
a diligent courtier, a philosopher, and the
industrious author of essays, historical works,
and the Advancement of Learning, but wrote all
the plays attributed to Shakespeare, Greene, and
Christopher Marlowe, as we are asked by in-
genious latter-day discoverers of cryptograms to
believe. Nay, not only so, but a rival Columbus
on the stormy sea of cryptogramic discovery
has even found that Francis was not the son
of Nicholas Bacon, but the unacknowledged
offspring of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of
Leicester ! This is startling, and lends an alto-
gether novel interest to the statue of Bacon in
the church, and the ruins of old Gorhambury
House in the park. "Thus he sat," runs the
inscription beneath the statue, seated in philo-
sophic abstraction in an arm-chair, and truly

MAD TOM 131

he looks wise enough for anything ; hut it was
not serious wisdom alone that went towards the
construction of Shakespeare's plays.

XVIII

LEAVING the city of St. Alban, the river Ver
is crossed at Prae House, and continues com-
panionable as far as Redbourne, where it
disappears in another direction, in deference
to the rise on which Redbourne is built. That
old coaching village is a veritable jewel of
quaintness in the Queen Anne and Georgian
sort. Red-brick houses of those reigns, and
wayside hostelries with elaborate signs of
wrought iron that seem to await the coming of
the coaches again, are the chief of Redbourne 's
architectural features. Very conspicuous, although
but the sign of a humble beer-house, is the
pictorial sign of the "Mad Tom." Painted on
a large circular plate of copper, it hangs out
from the frontage, displaying a different picture
on each of its two sides : — the first showing
"Mad Tom in Bedlam," the second, "Mad
Tom at Liberty." A very old sign, it represents
one of those pauper lunatics who, in other ages,
were confined in Bethlem Hospital, and who,
when sufficiently recovered to be released, were
provided with " briefs," or licences to beg a

I32 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

livelihood. These "Mad Toms," as they were
called, were once familiar figures upon the

roads.

In the first picture, Tom is seen in a barred
cell, madly clutching his hair: fetters load his
arms and legs, and a loaf (a stale one, no doubt)
stands on a bracket, and looks anything but
appetising. The second scene shows him, gaily
attired in white stockings and blue knee-

breeches, with a gorgeous red coat and a still
more gorgeous turban, walking the road and
blowing a trumpet.

The more rural part of Redbourne is quite
away from the road, across a wide common
traversed by a noble elm avenue. Beyond this,
and in a hollow where a quite unsuspected street
of ancient cottages is found, the exquisitely
picturesque church stands. One may look in
vain in the guide-books for any mention of its

COBBETT

beauties of colour and quaintness of detail that
instantly capture the affections of the artist.
Long may the restorer be kept at a proper
distance, and the delicate silver-grey hues of
the old plastered tower, the crumbling " clunch "
stone, the patches of black flint and Roman
tile and the unconventional beauty of the
sixteenth-century brickwork be suffered to remain
untouched.

Redbourne seems to have found favour in
the eyes of sturdy Cobbett; but rather on
negative than positive grounds, and on account
of what it did not possess. " No villainous
things of the fir tribe here," he observes, looking
upon the landscape with approval. He missed
a point though, at Friar's Wash, where the
recurrent Ver or Verlam is seen to cross the
road again, by the " Chequers " inn, where a
hilly bye-lane goes off in a north-easterly

I34 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

direction to Mamstead. But doubtless Cobbett
missed the name, else we might well have heard
him characteristically lashing out, something in
this sort: "Friars' Wash! indeed. Good God,
when did friars wash ? Everybody knows, or ought
to know that they did nothing of the sort, and
counted personal uncleanliness as not merely
next to godliness, but a constituent part of it.
They were as dirty physically as Mr. Pitt and

REDBOURNE CHURCH.

his stock-jobbing and funding, fawning and
slavering creatures are morally. Aye ! and I
tell you, poor down-trodden victims of an
arbitrary government," etc., etc. Something of
that kind Cobbett would have written in his
Rural Hides. Indeed, the " friars austere,
unwashed and unpleasantly yellow," as they
were, by all accounts, might well have resented
that naming of the ford as an unwarrantable

FLAMSTEAD

135

aspersion upon their well-earned reputation for
an ancient and invincible dirtiness.

Mamstead, let it be noted, having originally
been Verlamstead, owes its name directly to
the river whose valley it overlooks from its
hill-top. Its church-tower and characteristic
Hertfordshire dwarf extinguisher spire may be

EEDBOURNE.

glimpsed from the road, crowning a wooded
ridge. The succeeding mile on to Markyate
Street — the " River Hill improvement," as it
was called — was one of the last pieces of work
undertaken in the long series of Holyhead Road
alterations, and was cut after 1830. The old
road, still visible on the right, goes for the
length of a mile as a steep and narrow lane,

i36

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

almost parallel with the improved higliAvay,
and falls into it at the beginning of the village
of Markyate, as it is shortly named nowadays.
The " street " has only of late years been officially
dropped by the General Post Office, in response
to the request of the inhabitants, to whom, and
to strangers having business here, the old
address caused considerable trouble and mis-
understanding ; those not familiar with the place
not unnaturally thinking " Markyate Street,
Dunstable," to be a thoroughfare in that town,
instead of, as a matter of fact, 4| .miles
distant. Markyate is indeed merely a street
of houses fringing either side of the road, and
what the old coachmen called a "thoroughfare
village " ; a long street certainly, but nothing
else, and realising the Euclidian definition of a
line, " length without breadth." It is an old-
world place, drowsily conducting from Hertford-
shire into Beds, with too many inns for its
present needs, and one — the original " Sun " of
coaching days — converted into a laundry and
looking with severity upon the house directly
opposite, that has assumed its old style and
title.

Beyond Markyate, where the land shelves
steeply down from the road on the right hand,
is the lovely park of Markyate Cell, with a fine
old Elizabethan manor-house, turreted, terraced,
and with noble clusters of carved brick chimneys,
once the site of a nunnery ; and in a hollow—
the roof of its absurd little Georgian red-brick

" GENTLEMAN HARR Y" 1 3 7

tower below the road level — the toy-like church
of this beautiful domain. Tfye rest of the way
to D unstable is lonely, Kens worth village hidden
somewhere in the folds of the hills, and its Post
Office only visible. At one mile from Dunstable
remains an old toll-house, the first now met
with on the journey from London.

It was on this stretch of road, between
St. Albans and Hockliffe, that the gay and
mercurial highwayman, " Gentleman Harry," did
his last stroke of business, in the spring of
1747. Harry Simms had been highwayman,
rover, soldier, sailor on board a man o' war,
and, deserting and setting foot ashore at Bristol,
became highwayman again. Having, as himself
might have said, thus boxed the compass, his
career was fully rounded off, and the only things
necessary to complete it were a rope and a hang-
man. They were nearer than he thought, poor
butterfly! *

He had been a successful ruffler along the
road in all his brief but varied career, and
although a man of peace, and never known to
enforce his demands for the turning out of
pockets with anything worse than an oath and
a well-assumed air of truculence, had always
enjoyed exceptional fortune. It is scarce neces-
sary to add that his gains were spent as freely
as they were made : few highwaymen ever put
anything by for a rainy day. On his return
home, he amassed so great a store of gold
watches, diamonds, and guineas, in so short a

138 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

time that, had they grown wild in the hedges,
he could scarce have gleaned more, or more
speedily. "Jam satis" he exclaimed (for he
had been a Cambridge undergrad in his time,
and loved a Latin tag) when coming out of
Essex into Aldgate with his pockets bursting
with gold rings and chains ; and, putting up at
the " Saracen's Head," determined to forswear
the road and live cleanly on his accumulated
wealth. An incident he had witnessed in the
dusk, coming from Snaresbrook to Aldgate, had
probably been the inducement to " the quiet
life " thus contemplated. At the turnpike gate
he had observed a gentleman arrested in mistake
for himself!

So, leaving the " Saracen's Head " early the
next morning, he set out on horseback on the
long journey to Holyhead, proposing to voyage
over to Dublin and there dispose of his plunder.
Good resolutions filled his heart : he carolled as
he went, in rivalry with the hedgeside warblers,
and in this manner left St. Albans behind, and
so came into this broad reach of the road near
Redbourne. Unhappily for him, he had taken
a little too much port at St. Albans, and the
port disguised his prudence to that extent that,
seeing three horsemen slowly ambling along the
highway, he must needs resume his old trade
and bid them " stand and deliver ! "

" Gentleman Harry ' had never been dis-
tinguished for his personal courage, and those
who dared to disregard him generally found

"GENTLEMAN HARRY'S" EXIT 139

themselves safe enough. The first of the
travellers said he would not he robhed, and
rode on; the second gave our friend a slash
over the head with his riding- whip ; and all
three went their way. " Blood and wounds ! "
thought Simms, the wine fermenting in his
hrain ; "shall I be scorned thus? Never!"
And, in a drunken fury, he titupped after them,
and really did secure a delivery. From one he
received nine shillings, from another an old
watch and seven shillings, and from the third
two guineas and seventeen shillings.

Other spoil fell to him on the way, and
when the Warrington stage hove in sight, he
held it up with dramatic completeness and much
financial success, spurring on to Dunstable in a
tumult of port and professional pride. At the
"Bull" he called for brandy, and had but raised
the glass to his lips when the robbed coach
came lumbering in, and the passengers entered
the room where he was. How he rushed out,
and, mounting his horse, dashed away, he never
knew ; but presently found himself at Hocklift'e,
where, in the kitchen of the " Star," with more
brandy at his elbow, he fell into a drunken
stupor by the fire.

The whole district was, however, aroused,
and the road being searched while he lay in
that condition. Three soldiers traced him to the
" Star," and he aAvoke to find himself covered
by their pistols. To them he yielded all his
varied wealth, with the exception of a few trifles

i4o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

hidden in his neckcloth, and then staggered up
to hed with the troopers at his heels. There
they watched him all night.

He was, as he says in his last account and
confession of a wild career, " a good deal
chagrined " at this. How to escape ? He
thought of a plan. Throwing the few remain-
ing trinkets suddenly in the fire, the soldiers,
as he had expected, made a dash to save them,
while he pounced upon the pistols. He seized
a couple, and, standing at the door, desperately
pulled the triggers. The soldiers would probably
have been sent to Kingdom Come but for the
trifling circumstance that the weapons missed
fire. It was a mishap that cost Simms his life,
for he was quickly seized and more vigilantly
guarded, and, when morning dawned, taken up to
London on the road he had so blithely travelled
the day before. One more journey followed — to
Tyburn, where they hanged him in the following
June.

The pilgrim of the roads who looks for
the "Bull" at Dunstable, or the "Star" at
Hockliffe, will not find those signs : the shrines
of the saints and the haunts of the highwaymen
are alike the food of ravenous Time.

DUNSTABLE 141

XIX

WHO shall say certainly how or when the phrase
" Downright Dunstable " first arose, or what it
originally meant. Not the present historian,
who merely sucks his wisdom from local legends
as he goes. And when it happens, as not
infrequently is the case, they have no agreement,
hut lead the questing toiler after truth into
culs-de-sac of falsehoods and blind-alleys and
mazes of contradictions, the labour were surely
as profitless as the mediaeval search for the
Philosopher's Stone. Briefly, then, " Downright
Dunstable " is a figurative expression for either
or both of two things : a state of helpless
intoxication, or for that kind of candid speech
often called "brutal frankness." At any rate,
it is ill questing at Dunstable for light on the
subject, and it is quite within the usual run
of things to find the old saying unknown
nowadays in the place that gave it birth.

There is no evidence in the long broad street
of Dunstable town of the age and ancient
importance of the place. It looks entirely
modern, and the Priory church is hidden away
on the right. When — in the course of a century
or so — the young limes, sycamores, and chestnuts,
planted on either side of that main thoroughfare,
have grown to maturity, the view coming into
Dunstable from London will be a noble one.
At present it is merely neat and cheerful.

I42 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

No mention is made of Dunstable in Dooms-
day Book. When that work was compiled, the
old Roman station of Durocobrivae, occupied
in turn by the Saxons and burnt to the ground
by marauding Danes, lay in a heap of blackened
ruins, the only living creatures in the neighbour-
hood the fierce robbers who lay wait for travellers
at this ancient crossing of the Watling and the
Icknield Streets. If any of the surveyors who
took notes for the making of Doomsday Book
were so rash as to come here for that purpose,
certainly they must have perished in the doing.
At that period and until the beginning of
Henry I.'s reign the road was bordered by dense
woodlands, affording a safe hiding-place for
malefactors, chief among whom, according to
an absurd monkish legend, purporting to account
for the place-name, was a robber named Dun.
The ruined town and the impenetrable thickets
were known, they said, as " Dun's Stable."

The first step towards reclaiming the road
and the ruins from anarchy and violence was
the clearing of these woods. This was followed
by the building of a house — probably a hunting-
lodge — for the King, and the founding of the once
powerful and stately Priory of Dunstable, portions
of whose noble church remain to day as the parish
church of the town. To the Augustine priors
the town and its market rights were given, and
the place, new-risen from its ashes, throve under
the combined patronage of Church and State.
Whatever the religious merits of those old

PRIORY AND TOWN 143

monks may have been, certainly they were
business men, stock-raisers, and wool- growers
of the first order. Their flocks and herds covered
those downs that remain much the same now
as eight hundred years ago, and their Dunstable
wool was prized as the best in the kingdom.
But these business-like monks were not
altogether loved by the townsfolk, who resented
the taxes laid upon them by the Church, all-
powerful here in those days. It seemed to men
unjust that fat priors and their crew should
command the best of both worlds : should wield
the keys of heaven and take heavy toll of goods
in the market. The townsfolk, indeed, in 1229
made a bold stand, and protesting that they
"would sooner go to hell than be taxed," vainly
attempted to form a new settlement outside
the town. The sole results were that they were
taxed rather more heavily than before, and
ecclesiastically cursed. To detail here the
grandeur and the pride of that great Priory
would be to halt too long on the way. All who
had, in those ancient times, any business along
this great road were entertained by the Prior.
The common herd in those early days were
entertained at the guest house, a building facing
the main road, on a site now occupied by a
house called " The Priory." King John in
1202 had given his hunting-lodge to the Priory,
and from that time onward Kings and Queens
were lodged in the Priory itself. Here rested
—the next halting-place from Stony Stratford—

144

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

the body of Queen Eleanor on the way to
Westminster, in 1290; and one of the Ion-
series of Eleanor crosses remained
market-place until 1643, when it was destroyed
by the Parliamentary troops. In the

Chapel (lonS since swept away) °f the Pri°iy
Church, Cranmer promulgated the divorce of

DUNSTABLE PBIO11Y CHURCH.

Henry VIII. and Katherine of Arragon. Two
years later, the Priory itself was dissolved.
At first it seemed likely that Dunstable would
be made the seat of a Bishop and the great
church erected to the dignity of a Cathedral,
but the project came to nothing, and the sole
remaining portions of the old buildings are
the nave and the west front. Presbytery, choir,

VANDALS, ANCIENT AND MODERN 145

transepts, lady chapel, and aisles were torn
down. The aisles and east end of the church
are modern, the nave a majestic example of
Norman architecture, and the west front a
curiously picturesque mass of Transitional
Norman, Early English, and Perpendicular,
worthy the dexterous pencil of a Prout.

The spoliation of the Priory Church was a
long but thorough process. Many of its carved
stones are worked into houses and walls in and
around the town, hut it was left for modern
times to complete the vandalism ; when, for
example, great numbers of decorative pillars and
capitals were discovered, some put to use to
form an " ornamental rockery " in a neighbouring
garden, the remaining cartloads taken to a
secluded spot in the downs and buried ; when
the stone coffin of a prior was sold for use as
a horse-trough and afterwards broken up for road-
metal ; when a rector could find it possible to
destroy a holy-water stoup, the old font could be
thrown away, and the pulpit sold to a publican
for the decoration of a tea-garden. Among other
objects that have disappeared in modern times
is the life-size effigy of St. Fredemund, the sole
remaining portion of his shrine. Fredemund was
a son of King OfFa. His body had been
brought hither in ancient times, on the way
to Canterbury, but was, by some miraculous
interposition, prevented from leaving Dunstable.
No miracle saved his statue. The ancient
sanctus bell of the church, inscribed " Ave
VOL. i. 10

i46 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Maria, gracia plena," hangs on the wall of the
modern town-hall.

"Dunstable," says Ogilby, writing in 1675,
"is full of Inns for Accommodation, and noted
for good Larks." This would seem to hint at
an unwonted sprightliness in the hostelries and
town of Dunstable, were it not that larks bore
but one signification in Ogilby 's day. Slang had
not then stepped in to give the word a double
meaning. Of the notable old inns of Dunstable
the "Sugarloaf" remains, roomy and staid,
reprobating unseemliness. Larks, like Dunstable
wool in still older days, and straw-plaiting in
more recent times, no longer render the town
notable. Straw-plaiting and hat-making are, it
is true, yet carried on, but the industry is a
depressed one. A greater feature, perhaps, is
seen in the extensive printing works established
here in recent years by the great London firm
of Waterlow & Sons.

XX

EB.OM Dunstable the road enters a deep chalk
cutting through the Downs — similar to, but not
so great a work as, the chalky gash through
Butser Hill, on the Portsmouth Road, In this
mile-length of cutting the traveller stews on still
summer days, blinded by the chalky glare; or,
when it blows great autumnal guns and snow-
laden winter gales, whistling and roaring through

D UNSTABLE DOWNS 149

this exposed gullet with the sound of a railway
train, freezes to his very marrow. Before this
cutting was made, and the " spoil " from it
used in the making of the great embankment
that carries the road above the deep succeeding
valley, this was a precipitous ascent and descent,
and a cruel tax upon horses. Looking backwards,
the embankment is impressive, even in these days
of great engineering feats, and proves to the eye
how vigorously the question of road reform was
being grappled with just before the introduction of
railways. Prom this point the famous Dunstable
Downs are well seen, rising in bold terraces and
swelling hills from the hollow, and receding
in fold upon fold of treeless wastes where the
prehistoric Icknield Way runs and the stone
implements and flint arrows dropped by primitive
man for lack of reliable pockets, are found.

The neolithic ancestor seems to have been
particularly fond of these windy hillsides, and
has left a great earthwork on them, ten acres
in extent. Maiden Bower they call it nowa-
days— as grotesquely unsuitable a corruption of
the original " Maghdune-burh " as may well be
imagined. Its wind-swept terraces, distinctly
seen from this embankment, scarce give the idea
of a boudoir. Neolithic man was fond of these
hillsides in a purely negative way. He would
have preferred the warmer valleys, only in those
remote times they were filled with dense and
almost impenetrable forests, and abounded in the
fiercest and wildest of wild animals, that came

150 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

at night and preyed upon his family circle when
the camp-fires hurnt low. And when those wild
creatures were not to he dreaded, there were
always hostile tribes prowling in the thickets.
So, on all counts, the Downs were safest. Where
that remote ancestor huilt his hee-hive huts and
handed together with his fellows to raise a
fortified post, others — Britons, E-omans, and
Saxons — came and added more and taller earth-
works, so that the tallest of them are sixteen
feet high even now.

Shortly after leaving the embankment behind,
a signpost marks a lane to the left, leading to
Tils worth, a dejected village, looking as though
agricultural depression had hit it hard. A
deserted schoolhouse, by the church, is falling
to pieces. Just within the churchyard is a
headstone, standing remotely apart from the
others. Its isolation invites scrutiny ; an atten-
tion rewarded by this epitaph :—

THIS STONE WAS ERECTED

BY SUBSCRIPTION
TO THE MEMORY OF

A FEMALE UNKNOWN

FOUND MURDER'D IN BLACKGROVE WOOD

AUG. 15TH 1821

Oh pause my friends and drop the silent tear

Attend and learn why I was buried here ;

Perchance some distant earth had hid my clay

If I'd outliv'd the sad, the fatal day :

To you unknown, my case not understood ;

From whence I came, or why in Blackgrove Wood.

This truth's too clear ; and nearly all that's known—

I there was murder'd, and the villain's flown.

May God, whose piercing eye pursues his flight,

Pardon the crime, but bring the deed to light.

HOCKL1FFE 151

That the deed was " brought to light " is
ol)vious enough, but that is not what the author
of those lines meant. The perpetrator of the
deed was never discovered. Blackgrove Wood,
a dark mass in a little hollow, is easily seen
from the road. In another two miles Hockliffe
is reached.

XXI

" A DIRTY way leads you to Hockley, alias
Hockley-in-the-Hole," said Ogilby, in 1675 ;
and it seems to have gradually become worse
during the next few years, for Celia Eiennes,
confiding her adventures to her diary, about
1695, tells of " seven mile over a sad road.
Called Hockley in ye Hole, as full of deep slows
in ye winter it must be Empasable." It
received, in fact, all the surface-water draining
from Dunstable Downs to the south and Brick-
hills to the north. It is not, however, until
he has left Hockliffe behind and started to
climb out of it that the amateur of roads
discovers how deeply in a hole Hockliffe is,
for it is approached from the Dunstable side
by a level stretch that dims the memory of the
downs, and makes all those old tales of sloughs
appear like fantastic inventions. It is at this
time perhaps the most perfectly preserved
example of Telford's roadmaking. Surface,

152 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

cross-drains, ditches, and hedges are maintained
in as good condition as when first made. And
why so more than in other places ? For this
very reason ; that it is in a hole, and if not
properly drained, would again hecome as
" empasahle " as it was over two hundred
years ago.

Hockliffe, originally a very small village,
grew to great importance in coaching times,
for here is the junction of the Holy head and
Manchester and Liverpool roads, both in those
times of the greatest vogue and highest
importance. An after-glow of those radiant
glories of the road is seen in the long street.
Hockliffe was in Pennant's time, when coaching
had grown enormously in importance, "a long
range of houses, mostly inns." It is so now,
with the difference that the houses mostly have
been inns, and are so no longer. In his day he
observed "the English rage for novelty" to be
" strongly tempted by one sagacious publican,
who informs us, on his sign, of newspapers
being to be seen at his house every day in the
week."

At which of the two principal inns, the
"White Hart" or the "White Horse," this
enterprising publican carried on business he
does not tell us. Perhaps it was the "White
Horse"; now certainly one of the most interest-
ing of inns, and then the chief est in Hockliffe.
Before its hospitable door the " Holyhead
Mail," the Shrewsbury " Greyhound,"' the

THE "WHITE HORSE" 155

Manchester " Telegraph," the Liverpool " Royal
Umpire," and many another drew up, together
with some of the many " Tally-Hoes" that
spread a fierce rivalry down the road. It was
probably at Hockliffe and at the hospitable
door of' the "White Horse," that the "Birming-
ham Tally-Ho " conveying Tom Brown to
Rugby drew up at dawn " at the end of the
fourth stage." We need not look for exact
coaching data in that story ; else, among other
things, we might cavil at the description of
it as a "little" roadside inn.

A bright fire gleaming through the red
curtains of the bar window gave promise of
good refreshment, and so while the horses were
changed, the guard took Tom in to give him
"a drop of something to keep the cold out," or
rather to drive it out, for poor Tom's feet were
already so cold that they might have been in
the next world, for all he could feel of them,
and the guard had to pick him off the coach-
top and set him in the road. " Early purl "
set that right, and warmed the cockles of his
heart.

There is no nonsense of the plate-glass and
electric-bell kind about the " White Horse."
If the old coachmen were to come back, and
the passengers they drove, they would find the
old house much the same — the stables docked
perhaps of some of their old extent and a trifle
ruinous, and the house in these less palmy days
crying out for some fresh paint and a few minor

156 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

repairs ; but still the same well - remembered
place. Even the windows in the gables, blocked
up over a century ago to escape Mr. Pitt's
window-tax, have not been re-opened. There
are low-browed old rooms at the inn, with a
cosy kitchen that is as much parlour ; with
undisguised oaken beams running overhead,
rich in pendant hams that by due hanging
have acquired artistic old-masterish tones, like
mellow Morlands and rich Gainsboroughs. There
is a capacious hearth, there are settles to sit
easily in, and warming pans that have warmed
many a bed for old-time travellers ; and there
are memories, too, for them that care to
summon them. Will they come ? Yes, I
warrant you. They are memories chiefly of
moving accidents by flood and fell, for Hocklift'e
has had more than its due share of coaching
accidents. They happened chiefly on the hills
a mile out, where Battlesden Park skirts the
road, and where, although Telford did some
embanking of the hollows and cutting of the
crests, they remain formidable to this day.
Eattlesden became an ominous name in those
days, and the " White Horse " and many another
Hockliffe inn very like hospitals. The year
1835 was an especially disastrous one. In May,
the ;<Hope" Halifax coach, on the way to
London, was being driven down hill at a furious
pace, when the horses became unmanageable,
and the coach, overloaded with luggage piled
up on the roof, after reeling in several directions,

SNOWED UP 157

fell on the off side. All the passengers were
injured more or less severely. The next
happening was when the Shrewsbury " Grey-
hound," coming towards London, was overturned
at a point almost opposite Battlesden House.
Again most of the passengers were seriously
injured, and the coachman had a leg broken.
Two of the horses suffered similar injuries. This
accident was caused by the near-side wheeler
kicking over the pole and thus upsetting the
coach while it was running at high speed down
hill. Of course, when the great Christmas
snowstorm of 1836 blocked nearly all the roads
in England, Hockliffe was a very special place
for drifts, and the Birmingham, Manchester,
Holyhead, Chester and Holyhead, and Halifax
mails were all snowed up. An attempt made
to drag the Chester mail out resulted in the
fore-axle giving way and the coach being
abandoned. The boys went forward on horse-
back. The Holyhead mail, with the Irish bags,
was more fortunate. When the horses suddenly
floundered up to their necks in the snow, the
coachman dived off headlong, and was nearly
suffocated; but with the aid of the guard and
the passengers he was pulled out by the legs,
and, a team of cart-horses being requisitioned,
the coach itself dragged through. These are
examples of the perils His Majesty's Mails
encountered in those times, and of the dis-
comforts endured by the men who carried them
for little wage.

i58 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

The Post Office has never been generous to

the rank and file of its staff. The secretarial

staff, whose business it is to receive complaints

and to scientifically fob off the public with tardy

promises of enquiries never intended to be made,

draw handsome salaries, but those who do the

actual work have always been paid something

less than they could obtain from other walks of

life. The guards in Post Office employment

received half a guinea a week salary in the old

mail-coach days — as, in fact, a retaining fee — it

being estimated by the Department that they

could make a good thing of it by the "tips"

they would be receiving from passengers. That

they did make a good thing of it we know, but

the principle was a shabby one for a Government

Department to adopt, and really created a kind

of indirect taxation. No traveller could refuse

to "tip" the guard as well as the coachman,

unless very hard-hearted or possessed of a moral

courage quite beyond the ordinary.

Beyond his half-guinea a we,ek, an annual
suit of clothes, and a superannuation allowance
of seven shillings a week, a mail guard had
no official prospects. Occasionally some crusty
passenger, whom the guard, being extra busy
with his letters and parcels, had perhaps no time
to humour, would refuse to tip, and would write
to the Post Office to complain ; whereupon the

Secretary would indite some humbug of this
i . -i
kind : —

"Sin, — I have the honour of vour letter of

OLD POST-OFFICE SERVANTS 161

the - — , to which I beg leave to observe that
neither coachman nor guard should claim any-
thing of ' vails ' as a right, having ten and
sixpence per week each; but the custom too
much prevails of giving generally a shilling
each at the end of the ground, but as a
courtesy, not a right ; and it is the absolute
order of the office that they shall not use a
word beyond solicitation. This is particularly
strong in respect of the guard -for, indeed, over
the coachman we have not much power ; but if
he drives less than thirty miles, as your first
did, they should think themselves well content
Avith sixpence from each passenger."

In those times sixpence might have been
enough, but when, in later days, the coachman
or the guard at the end of their respective
journeys would come round with the significant
remark, " I leaves you here, gentlemen ! " he
who offered sixpence would have been as daring
as one who gave nothing at all. The sixpence
would have been returned with a sarcastic
courtesy, and a shilling not received with any
remarks of gratitude. This custom was known
a,s " kicking the passengers."

Very occasionally, and under pressure, the
Post Office doled out an extra half-guinea in
seasons of extraordinary severity, when passen-
gers were few and tips scarce, and on occasions
when the mails were so heavy that the seats
generally occupied by passengers were given up
to the bags, the guards had an allowance made
VOL. i. 11

!62 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

them. Their zeal under difficulties also received
rare and grudging recognition, as when Thomas
Sweatman, guard of the Chester mail in the early
part of 1795, was awarded half a guinea for his
labours at Hockliffe, where, in the middle of
the night and up to his waist in water, he helped
to put on new traces, travelling to town on his
hox with his wet clothes freezing to him.

XXII

THE red-brick face of the "White Horse" is
set off and embellished by a very wealth of
elaborate old Renaissance wood-carving that
decorates the coach-entrance. It was obviously
never intended for its present position, and is
said to have come from an old manor-house at
Chalgrave, demolished many years ago. Long
exposure to the weather and generations of
neglect have wrought sad havoc with this old
work. A fragment in the kitchen gives the
date 1566, and some strips under the archway,
with the inscription "John Havil dwiling in
cars," present a mystery not easy to solve.

The ominous Battlesden Park, belonging to
the Dukes of Bedford, with jealously locked
lodge-gates that hinder the harmless tourist from
inspecting the church within the demesne, is one
of a vast chain of Russell properties stretching
for miles across country, from here to Woburii

B UCKINGHAMSHIRE 1 63

and away to the Great 'North Road at Wansford.
Battlesden is without a tenant, except for those
who tenant family vaults and resting-places in
the little churchyard : Duncombes within and
nobodies in particular without. It was one of
these Duncombes of Battlesden — Sir Samuel —
who in 1624 introduced Sedan-chairs into Eng-
land. Weeping marble cherubs on Duncombe
monuments, rubbing marble knuckles into marble
eyes, testify to grief overpast, but Nature,
indifferent as ever, keeps a cheerful face. It
here becomes evident that we are on the borders
of a stone country, for the little church tower
is partly built of that ferruginous sandstone
whose rusty red and yellow is for the next
thirty miles to become very noticeable.

Gaining the summit of Sandhill, a house
lying back from the road, on the left, is seen,
with traces of a slip-road to it and through its
grass-grown stable-yard. It is a noticeable red-
brick house, with a steep tiled roof crowned by
a weather-vane. Once the " Peacock " inn, it
has for many years been a private residence. A
short distance beyond, past the cross-roads known
as Sheep Lane, Bedfordshire is left behind for
the county of Buckingham, through which for
the next twelve miles, to the end of Stony
Stratford, the Holyhead Road takes its way.

Buckinghamshire, on the map, is a quaintly
shaped county, standing as it were on end,
washing its feet in the Thames at Staines, and
with its head in the Ouse, in the neighbourhood

l64 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

of Olney. Wags have compared it with a cattle-
goad, "because it sticks into Oxon and Herts."
The glimmerings of possible similar verbal
atrocities are apparent in the fact that it is
also bordered by Beds and Berks. Northants
and Middlesex also march with its frontiers.
Its name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word
"bucken," alluding to the beech woods that
spread over it, but more particularly in the
south, on the densely wooded Chiltern Hills.
The Welsh language, innocent of any word for
the beech, bears out the statement of Caesar,
that this tree was unknown in Britain at the
time of his invasion.

Little Brickhill is the first place that Buck-
inghamshire has to show, and a charming
old-world place it is, despite its name, which,
together with those of its brothers Great and
Bow Brickhills near by, prepares the traveller
for — of course — bricks. But the greater number
of houses here are stone. It is difficult to
imagine this little hillside village an assize
town ; but so it once was, and the " Sessions
House," a small Tudor building, one of the few
in red brick, still stands as a memento of the
time when this was the scene of the General
Gaol Delivery for the county of Bucks, from
1433 to 1638. The chief reason for this old-
time judicial distinction appears in the fact that
Aylesbury, the county town, was practically
unapproachable during three parts of the year,
owing to the infamously bad bye-roads.

A RETIRED INN

'65

The old " George " inn, that stands directly
opposite the Sessions House, is not the only inn
at Brickhill against whose name "fuit" must
be written. Others, now vanished, were the
"White Lion," now the Post Office, with some
delicate decorative carving on its front (the old
sign is still preserved upstairs) ; the " Swan,"
the "Shoulder of Mutton," and the "Waggon."
The class of each one of these old houses may
still he traced. The " George " was beyond

LITTLE BEICKHILL.

comparison the chief, and legends still linger of
how the old fighting Marquis of Anglesey came
up and stayed here as Lord Uxbridge with two
legs, and returned after Waterloo as Lord
Anglesey with one. They say, too, that the
Princess Victoria once halted here the night.
In the churchyard, that so steeply overlooks
the road at the hither end of the village, you
may see stones to the memory of William Rat-
clift'e, the last host of the " George," his wife,

i66

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

his relatives, and his servants. He died, aged
eighty-two, in 1856; his wife in 1842. Many
years before, a servant, Charlotte Osborne, had
died, aged thirty-eight; the stone "erected by
three sisters, as a tribute of their regard for a
faithful servant, and as a testimony to one who
anxiously endeavoured to alleviate the sufferings
of a beloved and lamented parent upon a dying
bed." Here also is the epitaph of Isaac Webb,

YAED OF THE "GEORGE."

"for more than forty years a good and faithful
servant to Mr. Ratcliffe of the 'George Inn,'
during which, he gained the esteem of all who
knew him." He died, aged fifty-eight, in 1854.

The old " George " is now occupied— or partly
occupied, for it is a very large house— by a
farm bailiff. Just what it and its old coach-
yard are like let these sketches tell.

Within the church a curious wooden-framed
tablet records the death at Little Brickhill of
an old-time traveller when journeying from

FENNY STRATFORD 167

London to Chester. This was William Bennett,
son of the Mayor of Chester. He died March
19th, 1658.

But most curious of all is the stone in the
churchyard to a certain " True Blue," who
died in 1725, aged fifty-seven. Time has lost
all count of " True Blue," who or what he
was, and speculation is futile. If only the
vicar who entered his burial in the register
had noted some particulars of him, how grateful
we should be for the unveiling of this mystery !
Those registers have, indeed, no little interest,
containing as they do the gruesome records of
many criminals executed in the old gaol
deliveries, as 'well as of a woman who was
wounded at the battle of Ed£?e Hill and died

O

of her hurts.

XXIII

A LONG and steep descent into the valley of
the Ouse conducts from Little Brickhill into
Penny Stratford, seen in the distance, its roofs
glimmering redly amid foliage. The river, a
canal, and the low-lying flats illustrate very
eloquently the " fenny " adjective in the place-
name, and it is in truth a very amphibious,
bargee, wharfingery, and mudlarky little town.
Agriculture and canal-life mix oddly here.
Wharves, the " Navigation " inn, and hunch-
backed canal-bridges admit into the town ; and

168 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

the lazy, £ willow-fringed Ouzel, with pastures
and spreading cornfields on either side, bows
one out of it at the other end. The arms of
Penny Stratford, to he seen carved ahove the
church door, allude in their wavy lines to its
riverain character, hut, just as Ipswich and
some other ancient ports hear curiously dimi-
diated arms showing monsters, half lions and
half hoats, so " Fenny " (as its inhabitants
shortly and fondly call it) should bear for arms
half a barge and half a plough, conjoined, with,
for supporters, a bargee and a ploughman.

The church just mentioned is exceedingly
ugly, and of the giorified-factory type common
at the period when it was built. It owes its
present form to Browne Willis, the antiquary,
who built it in 1726, and, as an antiquary,
ought to have known better. He dedicated
it to St. Martin, in memory of his father, who
was born in St. Martin's Lane, and died on
St. Martin's Day. A kindly growth of ivy now
screens the greater part of Browne Willis's
egregious architecture. He lies buried beneath
the altar, but his memory is kept green by
celebration of St. Martin's Day, November llth,
when the half-dozen small carronades he pre-
sented to the town and now known as the
"Fenny Poppers," fire a feu-de-joie, followed
by morning service in the church and a dinner
in the evening at the " Bull " inn.

Bletchley and its important railway junction
have caused much building here in recent years,

"DENBIGH HALL" 165

and bid fair to presently link up with " Fenny,"
just as Wolverton with " Stony." The distance
between the two Stratfords is a little over four
miles, the villages of Loughton and Shenley,
away from the road, in between, and the main
line of the London and North-Western. Railway
crossing the road on the skew-bridge described
in a rapturous railway - guide of 1838 as a
" stupendous iron bridge, which has a most
noble appearance from below." At the cross-
roads between these two retiring villages stands
the " Talbot," a red-brick coaching inn, mournful
in these days and descended to the lower status
of a wayside public. It lost its trade at the
close of 1838, when the London and Birmingham
Railway was completed, but, with other neigh-
bouring inns, did a brisk business at the last,
when the line was opened for traffic only as
far as " Denbigh Hall," in the April of that
year. The temporary station of that name was
situated at the spot where the railway touches the
road, at the skew-bridge just passed. Between
this point and Rugby, while Stephenson's
contractors were wrestling with the difficulties
of the great Roade cutting and the long drawn
perils of Kilsby Tunnel, coaches and convey-
ances of all kinds were run by the railway
company, or by William Chaplin, for meeting
the trains and conveying passengers the thirty-
eight miles across the gap in the rail. From
Rugby to Birmingham the railway journey was
resumed.

17o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

" Denbigh Hall " no longer figures in the
time-tables, for the idea of a " secondary station,"
once proposed to be established here was
abandoned. But while the break in the line
continued this was a busy place. It is best
described in the words of one who saw it

then : —

"Denbigh Hall, alias hovel, bears much the
appearance of a race-course, where tents are in
the place of horses — lots of horses, but not
much stabling ; coachmen, postboys, post-horses,
and a grand stand! Here the trains must stop,
for the very excellent reason that they can't go
any further. On my arrival I was rather
surprised to find all the buildings belonging to
the Railway Company of such a temporary
description ; but this Station will become only
a secondary one when the line is opened to
Wolverton. There is but one solitary public-
house, once rejoicing in the name of the ' Pig
and Whistle,' but now dignified by the title
of * Denbigh Hall Inn,' newly named by Mr.
Calcraft, the brewer, who has lately bought the
house. Brewers are very fond of buying up
inns, to prevent, I suppose, other people
supplying the public with bad beer, wishing
to have that privilege themselves. The un-
expected demands for accommodation at this now
famed place obliged the industrious landlord
to immediately convert his parlour into a coffee-
room, the bar into a parlour, the kitchen into
a bar, the stable into a kitchen, the pig-sty

THE STORY OF "DENBIGH HALL" 171

into a stable, and tents into straw bedrooms
by night, and dining-rooms by day."

Another contemporary says : " The building
called ' Denbigh Hall,' respecting which the
reader may have formed the same conception
as ourselves, and imagined it to be the august
mansion of some illustrious grandee, is nothing
but a miserable hostelry of the lowest order, a
paltry public-house, or ' Tom and Jerry shop,'
as we heard an indignant fellow-traveller con-
temptuously style it, which has taken the
liberty of assuming this magnificent appellation."
Tradition described how this house, once called
the " Marquis of Granby," had been resorted
to by the Earl of Denbigh on one occasion when
his carriage had broken down, and that he
stayed the night under its roof, and was so
grateful for the attentions of the host that he
left some property to that fortunate man, who
thereupon changed the name of his sign to
the " Denbigh Hall." This, at any rate, was
the story told when the London and Birming-
ham Railway was first opened. There were
those who looked upon it as a myth invented
for the amusement of travellers, and perhaps
those sceptics were right, but let others who
are not unwilling to believe the story, hug
the apt reflection that so unusual a sign must
have had an unusual origin ; and, so much
being granted, let them go a little further and
accept the legend as it is told. The little inn
still stands by the wayside.

1 72 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

XXIV

STONY Stratford, a hundred years ago " princi-
pally inhabited by lace-makers, with women
and children at almost every door, industriously
employed in this manufacture," is now perhaps
best known for the famous non sequitur associated
with it. "You may well call it Stony Stratford,"
said the tormented traveller, " I was never so
bitten with fleas in my life ! " It would be ill
questing among the old inns of " Stony " to
discover which of them could claim the doubtful
honour of giving rise to that ancient jest.
There are many inns— the " Cock," the " Bull,"
"George," "White Swan," and numerous others
— but among them the " Cock " is easily first in
size and architectural dignity. The explorer,
entering the mile-long street of Stony Stratford
at " Tram-end," whence a hideous steam-tramcar
plies to Wolverton, a mile and a half away,
discovers no focus of interest in the long
thoroughfare stretching out before him, excepting
in the old red-brick frontage of the " Cock,"
with its handsome wrought - iron sign and
beautiful late seventeenth-century oak doorway,
brought, according to tradition, from some old
manor-house near Olney ; or " Ony," as they
choose to call it in the neighbourhood. It was
not always so undistinguished a street, for in
it stood one of the twelve crosses erected to
mark where the body of Queen Eleanor had

"QUEEN'S OAK" 175

rested on the way from Harby in Northants,
to Westminster. It was wrecked, with others,
in 1646.

Stony Stratford and its immediate neighbour-
hood are intimately concerned in the events
leading up to the tragedy of young King
Edward V. and his brother, murdered in the
Tower of London, in 1483. Scarce three miles
beyond the town, and distinctly seen from the
Holy head Road, there stands an ancient and
historic house known as Potterspury Lodge, at
the end of a long and majestic avenue of limes.
This was at one time a hunting-lodge, and
borders upon what is left of the sylvan glades
of Whittlebury Forest, once a Royal Chase of
the enormous extent of thirty-two square miles,
but shrunken for centuries past into woodlands
of not one quarter the original area. In times
long gone by, the Forest began at the very
end of Stony Stratford, and the timorous way-
farer plunged at once, after crossing the river
Ouse, into its dim and tangled alleys of oaks
and thick undergrowth.

It was when hunting in this wild resort of
deer in the short January days of 1464, that
Edward IV. met Elizabeth Woodville, not more
than two hundred yards to the rear of the spot
where the old hunting-lodge stands. The place
of meeting is still marked by the ancient and
gigantic tree known far and wide as the
" Queen's Oak," a gnarled and hollowed giant,
whose trunk measures thirty-one feet round

i76

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

and whose cavernous interior can, and constantly
does in summer-time, seat a tea-party of three
or four persons. It must have been a notable
tree when, four hundred and forty years ago,

QUEEN'S OAK.

Edward, a king peculiarly susceptible to female
loveliness, found here the beautiful young widow
of Sir John Grey of Groby, a knight who had
been killed in the second battle of St. Albans,
little more than two years before, on the

THE WOODVILLES 177

Lancastrian side, and whose estates had since
been confiscated by the Yorkists. The story
tells that the beautiful and distressed lady,
anxious to see the King and to obtain from
him the restoration of her lands, was waiting

' o

at the oak when he rode by, and that, not
recognising him, she asked where his Majesty
could be found. The probabilities are, however,
that she knew perfectly well to whom she
spoke. Edward declared himself to be the one
she sought, and, when she fell upon her knees,
raised her up and escorted her to her home at
Graf ton. It is a historic instance of calculating
ambition and of love at first sight. On May
1st, then, Edward was privately married to the
fair stranger at Grafton, the only others present
being her stepmother, the Dowager Duchess
of Bedford, two gentlemen, and "a young man
to help the priest sing." Not until the Michael-
mas following was the marriage disclosed.

The new-made Queen came of the old family
of Wydvil, Widville, or Woodville, as it is
variously spelled, settled at Grafton certainly
three hundred years before. They now rose at
once into favour, and her father, already Baron,
was then created Earl Rivers. It was, how-
ever, a bloody and fatal alliance. Securing the
allegiance of the family to the Yorkists, its
firstfruits were the capture and execution of her
father and brother at the obscure battle on
Danesmoor, when the King's adherents were
defeated by a rabble insurrection out of the

VOL. i. 12

I78 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

north. Taken to Northampton, Earl Rivers and
his son, Sir John Woodville, were beheaded
August 12th, 1469.

Edward IV. died early in 1483. His Queen
survived him, with two sons and five daughters.
The eldest, Edward, now hecome Edward V.,
was but twelve years of age, and he and his
brother, Richard, Duke of York, were under the
guardianship of their maternal uncle, the second
Earl Rivers. The news of his father's death
brought the young King, with an escort of two
thousand horse, from Ludlow Castle towards
London. That was the proudest moment in the
history of the Woodvilles. Disliked and feared
as they had been for nearly twenty years, of
family aggrandisement they had now secured
supreme power. But they reckoned without the
sinister figure of Richard of Gloucester, the late
King's brother, at that moment hasting south-
ward from warring with the Scots. The hurried
journeys of both parties toward London read like
moves in some bloody game of chess. Richard
of Gloucester, reaching York, had been the first
to swear allegiance to his nephew. That done,
he continued southward, receiving as he went,
tidings of popular discontent with the Woodville
faction. The news strengthened him in the
design, already forming in his mind, of seizing
the Crown for himself. He reached Northampton
simultaneously with the arrival of the young
King at Stony Stratford, sixteen miles away.
The next day saw him here, professing loyalty

AMBITION AND TRAGEDY 179

on bended knee, and at the same time dismissing
the King's attendants and disarming his escort.
It was a clever and a daring move, that, if
bungled in the doing, might have led to another
battle, to be counted among the many fought
on English soil.

Everything was now in the usurper's hands.
The boy-King, in tears, and virtually a prisoner,
was taken by him to Northampton, and thence
to London, where all might yet have been well
had public opinion disapproved of what had
already been done. But the past insolence and
selfishness of the Woodvilles had earned them a
bitter hatred.

The young King's maternal uncle and guardian
had in the meanwhile been seized and hurried
to Pontefract, where he was beheaded, no one
raising a voice in protest. The King himself
and his young brother, Richard, Duke of York,
were in custody in the Tower, and it was not
until Gloucester had been offered the Crown by
his creatures, and had with feigned reluctance
accepted it, that the nation woke up to an under-
standing of the crafty conspiracy in which it
had taken a passive hand. It was then too late,
and the horror with which the country soon
learnt that the young King and his brother had
been murdered in the Tower was without avail
to overthrow the sanguinary hunchback who
now ruled as Richard III.

Such was the tragedy that overwhelmed the
ambition of the Woodvilles, springing from that

!8o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

May-day marriage of 1464. The Queen, sorrow-
ing in the Sanctuary at Westminster, had seen
her father, her two brothers, and her two sons
cruelly put to death, as a direct consequence
of that alliance. She retired, forlorn, to the
seclusion of Bermondsey Ahbey ; seeing, it is
true, a gleam of happiness in the overthrow of
Richard two years later, and the marriage of
her eldest daughter, Elizabeth of York, to
Henry VII., but dying broken and disappointed,
leaving in her will to her daughters, "my
blessing, for worldly goods I have none to
bestow."

XXV

PROM " Stony's " mild annals the two fires that
in 1736 and 1742 destroyed great parts of the
town stand forth with appropriate luridity. The
second was the more destructive, and was caused
by the carelessness of a servant, who acci-
dentally set some sheets ablaze. The flaming
linen, alighting on a thatched roof, . brought
about, not only the destruction of many houses,
but also of one of the two churches. The tower,
the sole relic of that unfortunate building, yet
remains in the rear of the High Street, and
was for some years rendered conspicuous by an
elder-tree takin root and flourishin on the

STOJVY STRATFORD

181

battlements. The remaining church, rebuilt,
with the exception of the tower in 1776, is a
Aveird and wonderful eighteenth-century attempt
at Gothic. It is the tower of this church that
looks so picturesque from the Market Place, an
obscure square, hidden from those who hurry
along the High Street and so through the town

MARKET-PLACE, STONY STRATFORD.

and out at the other end, looking neither to
right nor left.

The town is left behind by Avay of a long
causeAvay and a bridge spanning the Ouse, in
succession to the " street ford " that once plunged
through it. Once across the river and the canal
that runs parallel, and so uphill into the not

1 82 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

unpicturesque village of Old Stratford and the
frontiers of Buckinghamshire — "the historic
county of Bucks," as Disraeli, posing as a Buck-
inghamshire farmer in one of his after-dinner
political speeches called it — are crossed and
Northamptonshire entered. Northants is tra-
ditionally the " county of squires and spires " ;
hut the squire as a political force and a great
social figure is extinct nowadays, and let it be
said at once that, in all the twenty-three miles
of Northants through which the Holyhead Road
takes its way, only one spire — that of Braunston—
is visible : the rest of the churches on the way
have towers, save indeed the freakish, classical
church of Daventry, rejoicing in a steeple.

Potterspury, succeeding to Old Stratford, is
a kind of brother village, as it were, to Paulers-
pury, a mile away. Potterspury, really owing
its name to an ancient pottery trade in common
ware of the kitchen utensil and flower-pot sort,
stands partly facing the old coach-road and
partly down a bye-lane, and is wholly old-world
and delightful. One comes into it under the
thickly interlacing branches of tall hedgerow
elms that conspire to cheer the traveller with a
perpetual triumphal arch of welcome. Through
this leafy bower one perceives the roadside
cottages dwindling away in perspective along a
gentle rise. Graceless the village looks awhile,
for no church meets the gaze. That, however,
is a long distance down the bye-lane, and in
the neighbourhood of a little inn with the odd

A CURIOUS SIGN

183

name of the " Blue Ball," and the still more
odd sign pictured in the accompanying sketch.
The blue ball, apparently representing the world,

THE "BLUE BALL."

is placed below a brown heart, the whole mysti-
cal composition semi-circled by the motto " Cor
supra mundiim" It is a representation of the
triumph of sentiment that would have caused

1 84 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

the Rev. Laurence Sterne to shed tears. " Heart
above the world." How idyllic!

It would be as vain to seek the old potteries
that gave its name to Potterspury as it would
be to enquire for any living representatives of
the Paveleys who provided Paulerspury with
style and title. The potteries vanished in times
beyond the memory of man, and the sole
relics of the Paveleys are the thirteenth- century
wooden effigies of Sir Laurence de Paveley and
his dame in Paulerspury Church.

At some little distance beyond Potterspury,
Potterspury Lodge and its lime avenue come
in sight, on the right side of the road. A
wonderfully picturesque old mansion it is, recently
restored by the retired tradesman who has pur-
chased the property. At the rear of the house
stands the historic " Queen's Oak," whose story
has already been told.

The remaining four miles into Towcester,
though hilly, had much of their difficulties
disposed of when Telford came this way with
theodolite, chain, and spirit-level. Plum!) Park
Hill is not what it was, thanks to this fifteen-
foot cutting and the forty-four foot high em-
bankment in the hollow of Cuttle Mill^ where
the road goes nowadays on a level with the
chimney-pots of old roadside cottages.

At the crest of one of these rises stand
Havencote Houses, which it pleased the com-
pilers of old road-books to name " Heathencott,"
and beyond come the lodges of Sir Thomas

ILLITERATE HERALDS " 185

Hesketh's domain — Easton Neston Park, an
originally fine, but now somewhat dreary parade
of classical stone columns forming an open
screen, with stone stags couchant, and a central
display of a coat-of-arms supported by weary-
looking lions. The motto, " Hora e Semper "
"Now and Always " —bids a futile defiance to
irresistible change.

The lodges on either side are deserted, and
their windows boarded up. Somewhere within
the park stand the " great house " and the
manorial church, with monuments of the Fermors,
successively Barons Lempster and Earls of
Pomfret, to whom the estates came so long ago
as 1527. Those titles, duly engrossed on their
original patents in that manner of spelling, derive
from the towns of Leominster and Pontefract,
and prove the local pronunciation to have been
the same then as now. They prove, in addition,
that there was no person then at the Heralds'
College who could correctly spell the names of
those places ; but my Lords Lempster and Pomfret
had to take and use the illiterate forms, just as
the Earl of Arlington, whose title, conferred in
1663, came from Harlington in Middlesex, was
made by those 'eralds to write himself with
every signature an 'Any.

!86 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

XXVI

WHERE the park-wall of Easton Neston ends,
Towcester— " vulgo Tosseter," as Ogilby says, on
the Towe, and once the Lactodorum of the Romans
— begins. It is not the best of beginnings, or one
calculated to favourably impress the stranger
with the town. On the left hand rises a terrace
of dingy brick houses, whose age is certified
by the inscription, " Jubilee Row, 1809 " ; their
height masked by the raising of the road in
front, in Telford's improvements of 1820, their
social status evident in the notice on their
frontages, "Lodgings for Travellers " —tramping
travellers being understood. Beyond, Towcester
unwinds its one long street of brick, stone, and
plaster, with roofs, tiled, slated, and thatched :
a very miscellaneous street. Among the houses,
ancient, modern, and middle-aged; among the
few dignified old stone mansions of golden
russet stone, and the older, but more familiar,
gabled plastered houses, that nod as though they
could tell a thing or two worth the hearing ;
among these and the less interesting brick
dwellings stand the Bickerstaif Almshouses,
" rebuilt in the year 1815," brick themselves
and wholly uninteresting, except for the tablet
preserved from the older buildings :—

Hee that earneth Wages By labour and
care By the Blessing of god may
Have Something to Spare. T. B.

1689.

THE "TALBOT" 187

Only when the Town Hall is reached, at a
considerable distance along this street, may we
fairly claim to have entered Towcester. All this
hitherward part is outside the pale, as it were,
and looked down upon, contemned, and sniffed
at. It can only be looked down upon in a
social, ungeographical sense, for Towcester from
end to end is flat ; but those who would sniff
corporeally as well as mentally will not go un-
rewarded, considering that the gas-works occupy
a very prominent position here. The Town Hall,
built in 1866, when the flighty and Mansard-roofy
French Renaissance was the architectural craze
of the moment, turns its back to this quarter and
shoulders the broad street into the semblance
of a narrow lane, emphasising the difference
between these social strata.

Emerging from this narrow way, a broad
street of inns and shops expands. On the left
is the " Talbot," an old inn with modern front,
and with a long perspective of stables vanishing
down its yard into the dim distance. The
" Talbot," it is thought, owes its present name
to that Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who fought
and died in the Battle of Northampton, eight miles
away, in 1460. As the " Tabard," it was pur-
chased in 1440 by Archdeacon Sponne, a charit-
able Rector of Towcester, who gave it to the
town, its rent to go in relief of taxation, toward
paving, " or for other uses." The good Arch-
deacon lies, under a gorgeous monument, in the
church, and a fragment of stained glass bearing

1 88 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

his shield of arms, with his name, "William
Sponne " underneath, still remains in one of the
windows of the " Talbot." In what was once,
in coaching days, the taproom, but now a store
for empty boxes and such lumber, a relic of old
times is left, in the wide stone chimney-piece
carved with the figure of that old English
hound, something between a foxhound and blood-
hound—the talbot. Beside it is the date, 1707,
together with the initials, " T.O." and " G.S."
The story that Dean Swift halted often at the
old house on his many journeys is likely enough,
and a chair, said to have been used by him, is
still a cherished relic.

But another, and equally famous, hostelry claims
attention. The " Pomfret Arms," as it is now
named, is the old coaching inn once known as the
"Saracen's Head," the inn where Mr. Pickwick
stayed the night after the wet postchaise journey
from Birmingham. " Dry postboys " and fresh
horses had been procured on the way, at the
usual stages at Dunchurch and Daventry; but
as, "at the end of each stage it rained harder
than it had done at the beginning," Mr. Pickwick
wisely decided to halt at Towcester, together with
those undesirable companions of his, Bob Sawyer
and Ben Allen.

" There's beds here," said Sam Weller,
"everything clean and comfortable. Wery good
little dinner, sir, they can get ready in half an
hour— pair of fowls, sir, and a weal cutlet;
French, beans, 'taturs, tarts, and tidiness. You'd

MR. PICKWICK AT TOIVCESTER 189

better stop vere you are, sir, if I might
recommend."

At the moment when this conference was
proceeding- in the rain, the landlord of the
" Saracen's Head " himself appeared, " to confirm
Mr. Weller's statement relative to the accommo-
dations of the establishment, and to back his
entreaties with a variety of dismal conjectures
regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of
fresh horses being to be had at the next stage,
the dead certainty of its raining all night, the
e'qually moral certainty of its clearing up in the
morning, and other topics of inducement familiar
to innkeepers."

When the decision to stay was arrived at,
" the landlord smiled his delight," and issued
orders to the waiter. " Lights in the Sun,
John ; make up the fire ; the gentlemen are
Avet," he cried anxiously ; although doubtless, if
the gentlemen had gone forward, they might
have been drowned for all he cared.

" This way, gentlemen," he continued ; " don't
trouble yourselves about the postboy " —who, poor
devil, must have been wet through several times
over — " I'll send him to you when you ring for
him, sir."

And so the scene changes, from the rain-
washed road to a cosy room, with a waiter laying
the cloth for dinner, a cheerful fire burning,
and the tables lit with wax candles; "everything
looked (as everything always does in all decent
English inns) as if the travellers had been

I9o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

expected, and their comforts prepared for, days
beforehand."

Upon this picture of ease at one's inn de-
scended the atrabilious rival editors of the
Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Indepen-
dent, the organs respectively of "blue" and
" buff " shades of political opinion. Both Pott
of the Gazette, and Slurk of the Independent
found the rival sheet lying on the tables of the
inn; but what either of the editors, or their
newspapers, were doing in Northamptonshire
(Eatanswill being an East Anglian town generally
identified as Ipswch) is not clearly specified.
Even in these days Suffolk newspapers are not
found at Towcester.

Slurk retired to the kitchen when the inn
was closed for the night, to drink his rum and
water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet
luxury of sneering at the rival print ; but as it
happened, Mr. Pickwick's party, accompanied by
Pott, also adjourned to that culinary shrine, to
smoke a cigar or so before bed. How the rival
editors — the "unmitigated viper" and the " un-
grammatical twaddler " — met and presently came
from oblique taunts to direct abuse of one another,
and thence to blows, let the pages of the Pickwick
Papers tell.

The inn itself stands the same as ever, at the
end of Towcester's long street ; but the sign,
long since changed, owes its present style to the
Earls of Pomfret, of whom the fifth and last died
in 1867. The somewhat severe frontage, in the

TOM BROWN AT TOWCESTER 191

golden-brown ferruginous local stone, is the same
as when Dickens knew it, and if the kitchen of
that time has now become the bar and the room
called the " Sun " cannot with certainty be
identified, the old coach-archway through the
centre of the building into the stable-yard re-
mains, as do the alcoves above, containing white
plaster statuettes of two very scantily draped
classic deities — Venus and Mars perhaps. They
still tell at Towcester the tale of an old land-
lady— Mrs. Popple — coming new to the house,
and asking the old ostler what " those disgraceful
things " were.

" They carls 'em Junus and "Wenus," he saidr
" but I don't rightly knaw the history on 'em ;
but there, mum, you'll find arl about 'em in
the Bible."

XXVII

WE shall not be far wrong if we identify
Towcester with the town at which the coach
with Tom Brown on board stopped for breakfast,
and the "well-known sporting house," famous
for its breakfasts, with the "Saracen's Head.':
A half-past seven breakfast, in a low, dark,
wainscoted room, hung with sporting prints; a
blazing fire, and a card of hunting fixtures
stuck in the mantel-glass. Twenty minutes

I92 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

for breakfast, with such a spread as pigeon-pie,
ham, cold boiled beef, kidneys and steak, bacon
and eggs, buttered toast and muffins, coffee and
tea, smoking hot — why, an irresolute man would
waste some of those precious minutes in con-
sidering where to begin. But the hungry are
not at such a loss, and certainly little Tom
Brown could not have been, for he ate kidney
and pigeon-pie and drank coffee till his skin
was as tight as a drum, and then had sufficient
time to pay the head waiter in leisurely manner
and to stroll calmly to the door, to see the
horses put to.

And then, all being ready, they are off again.
" Let 'em go, Dick ! " says the coachman, and
the ostlers fly back, drawing off the horse-cloths
like lightning. Along the High Street goes the
" Tally- Ho," with passing glimpses into first-
floor windows, where the burgesses are seen
shaving ; past shops and private houses, where
shopboys are cleaning windows and housemaids
doing the steps, and out of the town as the
clock strikes eight.

A very pretty glimpse, this, of the "good
old times," but the coaches did not always hark
away so triumphantly ; as, for example, when,
on a day in March, 1829, an axle of the
celebrated "Wonder" coach broke in Towcester
street, and the unfortunate coachman was killed
in the inevitable upset. The hilly eight miles
or so between Towcester and Weedon Beck
witnessed many thrilling escapades in the

COACHES COLLIDE 193

coaching sort. One eminence, rejoicing in the
name of Dirt House Hill, was the scene of a
violent collision, in which the Holyhead Mail
and the Manchester Mail came into disastrous
contact, June 29th, 1838. It was one of the
closing smashes of the Coaching Age. Here
is the official account :—

" Both coaches were in fault. The Holyhead
coach had no lamps, and the explanation of
their absence was that the 28th June was the
Coronation Day of our beloved Queen, and the
crowd was so great in Birmingham that, in
paying attention to getting the horses through
the streets, and having lost considerable time
in so doing, in the hurry to get the coach off
again the guard did not ascertain if the lamps
were with the coach, or not. The Manchester
coach, at the time of the accident, was
attempting, when climbing the hill, to pass
the Carlisle Mail, and was ascending on the
wrong side of the road. The horses dashed
into each other, with the result that one of the
wheelers of the Holyhead Mail, belonging to
Mr. Wilson, of Daventry, was killed, and the
others injured, one seriously. The harness
was old and snapped like chips, or more serious
would have been the consequences ; and had
not the horse killed been old and worn out,
the sudden concussion would have been more
violent, and might have deprived the passengers
of life. As it was difficult to decide which of
the two coachmen was most in the wrong, it
VOL. i. 13

I94 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

was left to the two coachmasters to arrange
affairs between themselves.

In Telford's reports mention is made of no
fewer than seven hills cut down and hollows
filled on this stretch of road, with an aggregate
length of cutting and embanking of two and
a half miles. Yet, even so, this remains the
most trying part of the route ; so much so,
that the two hillsides past Poster's Booth are
laid with granite kerbs for the purpose of
easing the pull-up for horses drawing heavy-
laden waggons. The place oddly named Poster's
or Porster's Booth is said, on the authority of
Pennant, to have derived that title from a
wayside booth established by " one Porster, a
poor countryman." It grew at length into a
scattered street of houses and carrier's inns,
and so remains.

Stowe Hill, the last of this hunchbacked
company leading to Weedon, acquires its name
from the village of Stowe - Nine - Churches,
whose scattered houses and one church lie on
the hill -top, hid from the road by lanes and
windy coppices. The title of " Nine Churches "
is rather lamely said to arise from nine
benefices having been included in the lordship
of the manor in ancient times, but a much more
picturesque origin is found in the legend of
the triumphant diabolism that foiled eight
previous attempts to erect the church on other
sites. Every night, the stones of the eight
ill-fated buildings set up in the daytime were

STO\VE CHURCH 195

removed by a mysterious shape " summat
bigger nor a hog," but the existing church,
the ninth, was suffered to grow to completion.
As it is of Saxon origin, this fearful legend
itself perhaps goes back to that superstitious
time.

Stowe Church is remarkable for the fine
monuments it contains : those of Sir Gerald de
1'Isle, about 1250; Lady Carey, 1630; and Dr.
Turner, 1714. The first is the Purbeck marble
effigy of a cross-legged knight, shield on arm,
and clad in chain-mail. That of Lady Carey,
"the most elegant," says Pennant, "that this or
any other kingdom can boast of," is a white
marble sleeping figure raised on a black and
white marble altar- tomb. This beautiful work of
Renaissance art was by the "Master Mason" of
James I. and Charles I. — Nicholas Stone, who
executed it and set it up here "for my Lady," as
he says in his still- existing correspondence, ten
years before her death; " for the which," he adds,
" I had £220." Although of the most delicate
workmanship, it remains, strange to say, in per-
fect preservation ; even the sharp beak of the
very savage-looking griffin at the foot of the
effigy quite uninjured.

The monument to Dr. Turner, who does not
lie here, but at Oxford, where he was President
of Corpus Christi College, is a huge mass, occupy-
ing a great wall space. He was a non-juring
pluralist, who, unlike his brother non- jurors,
held successfully to what he had gotten. An

I96 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

effigy of him, very wiggy and gowny, stands in
midst of alcoves, scrolls, and volutes, represent-
ing him, like some reverend acrobat, standing
on a globe and holding a book in his hand.
Religion, beside him, offers a cross and a temple,
which he seems disinclined to take, and an
all-seeing eye— like that blood-freezing eye in
Martin's " Belshazzar's Feast " —radiates down
upon the group.

XXVIII

ONE mile from Weedon and halfway down Stowe
Hill, a broad vale opens to the view, the London
and North- Western Railway shooting out below
from Stowe Hill Tunnel, with the Grand Junc-
tion Canal and the river Nen in close company.
Weedon Beck is seen while yet a great way off,
its neighbourhood fixed by an immense ugly
block of yellow brick buildings on a distant
hillside, Nearing the place, these are found to
be the officers' quarters of Weedon Barracks ;
but before that fact is ascertained the stranger
occupies the time between first glimpsing them
and arriving at the spot in speculating whether
the hideous pile forms a lunatic asylum, a work-
house, an infirmary, or a prison. Weedon, in fact,
is a large military depot, originally established
for the Ordnance Department in 1803. Its situa-

WEEDON BECK 197

tion here is due to one of the periodical scares
with which the fear of foreign invasion afflicts
nervous Governments once in every half-century
or so. The scare that produced Weedon Barracks,
among other odd things, was a particularly severe
and craven one, for it assumed our being unable
to hold our own upon the sea-coast and in the
capital, and selected this site as being as nearly
as possible in the centre of England, and the
safest place for retiring to in the event of a
sudden descent upon our shores. So great was
the national terror of " Boney " a hundred years
ago ! Even the needs of the Court were not
forgotten, and a pavilion was provided for the
use of George III. over against the time when
it should be necessary to flee from Windsor
Castle !

The name of Weedon " Beck " might not
unreasonably be supposed to derive its second
half from the river Nen, that ripples not un-
picturesquely through the village, were it not
that it has clearly been proved an ancient
manor of the Abbey of Bee, in Normandy.
Wrhen Leland was pursuing his antiquarian
studies through England, in the time of Henry
VIII., he found it " a praty thoroughfare, sette
on a playne grounde, and much celebrated
by cariars, bycause it stondeth hard by the
famose way there comunely caullid of the people
AVatheling Street." It became a very busy place
in coaching times, and Avas then chiefly a street
of inns. What would have become of Weedon

198 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

had the military depot not been placed here to
keep it alive before the railway came, with the
thoroughness of a new besom, to sweep the long
road clear of traffic from end to end, goodness
only knows. There is a Providence that shapes
the ends of even old thoroughfare villages ; and
undoubtedly Weedon believes in the beneficence
of that Providence, because, taking away with
one hand, it has given double Avith the other :
that is to say, it has a railway junction and a
canal, so that when the officers become bored to
death in their ugly quarters they can either
drown themselves in the canal, or take leave of
absence and train to some more lively spot. A
third course is to enjoy the billiards and society
that the hotels of Weedon afford, or the pleasures
of the Grafton Hunt. Those hotels, chiefly of
the old coaching type, have all been restored
and added to of recent years, and a very large
modern one, the " Globe," taking the name of
the old and extinct " Globe " half a mile onward,
has been built at that spot where the Holyhead
Road and the Watling Street part company for
some seventy-three miles : a spot quaintly called
by Ogilby, in 1675, "Cross o' th' Hand/' The
"White Hart" stands next door, and opposite
glares the "Red Lion"; while the "New" inn
—new in 1740, as a tablet over its doorway
tells — is trebled in size by two modern wings.
" Cash Stores " spell modernity, and the im-
posing branch of a Northamptonshire bank
speaks of business. In contrast with all this,

MILITARY WEED ON 199

the old " Bull " inn, situated on the left hand,
at the entrance to the village, is now a farm-
house, and the road by which the carriages and
postchaises came to it off the turnpike, though
still traceable, has long been stopped at either end.

There is a great deal more of Weedon than
the hurried traveller along the Holyhead Road
would suspect. It lies down the turning by this
same old house and on the other side of the
parallel embankments of railway and canal ; em-
bankments so tall that they succeed in completely
hiding all but the upper stage of Weedon Church
tower. " Here," says that tower, " is Weedon " ;
and there it is ; barracks like model lodging-
houses, with children playing and clothes drying
upon tier over tier of balconies ; women fresh
from the washtub, with arms akimbo and rolled-
up sleeves, voluble in the entries ; and soldiers
" married on the strength," slatternly and listless,
at the windows : all very domestic and inglorious.
The everyday aspect of the barracks is not in-
spiring. Only occasionally, when on the neigh-
bouring hill-sides a sabre-scabbard flashes by
chance in the sun, and the eye thus startled
discovers some leisurely horseman scouting, visible
to all the world, is the military view of Weedon
productive of a thrill.

Many soldiers lie in the crowded churchyard
round the ugly church, jammed in an angle
between railway and canal : the trains rushing
by on a lofty viaduct that looks down upon the
damp, sunless and melancholy wedge of land.

200

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Among those soldiers lies " Charles Lockitt, who
died August 27th, 1877, in the fifty-third year of
his age. Deceased was formerly a sergeant in the
97th Regiment, and was present at the storming
of the Redan before Sebastopol, September 8th,
1855, where he was severely wounded, from the
effects of which he died."

A much older, and somewhat curious epitaph,
is that to "Alice Old, widow, who lived in ye reigne
of Queen Elizabeth, in ye reigne of Kinge James
ye 1st, in ye reigne of Kinge Charles ye 1st and
Kinge Charles ye 2nd, and Kinge James ye 2nd,
and deseased ye Second Day of Jany., ye 3rd year
of ye reigne of Kinge William and Queen Mary,
1691."

XXIX

No wild geese, according to an ancient fable,
ever again spoiled the cornfields of Weedon after
they had once been banished by the miraculously
successful prayers of the Princess Werburgh, a
holy daughter of Wulfere, King of Mercia, some-
where about A.D. 780 That pious lady, afterwards
raised to the hierarchy of saints, was abbess of a
religious house here. Her steward assembled the
birds : the abbess commanded them to depart, and
they immediately took wing, but refused to leave
the neighbourhood until a missing one of the

WATLING STREET 201

flock (killed, cooked and eaten, as it happened)
was restored to them. Nothing easier than this
to a Saxon saint, and the bird was restored alive
to his friends and relations ! " The vulgar super-
stition," says an old writer, " now observes that no
wild geese are ever seen to settle and graze in
Weedon field." Nor in any other field nowadays,
it may be added, in this modern England of ours.

At Weedon the old Watling Street bids good-
bye to the Holyhead E/oad for 71| miles, and goes
by itself in a route 75^ miles long, rejoining the
modern road at Ketley, near Wellington.

The meaning of the name " Watling Street " is
sought under many difficulties, so many and so
ha/y are the derivations of it advanced. The
Britons, it is said, knew the rough track crossing
the island before the Romans came as the Sam
Gwyddelin, or Foreigners' Road, along whose
uncertain course came and went the Phcenician
merchants who traded with Britain long before
Caesar had heard of this lonely isle ; long, indeed,
before he was born. According to Stewkeley, the
name " Gwyddelin " stood for "wild men," and
this therefore was the Wild Men's Road ; the
savages so named being the wild Irishmen from
across St. George's Channel. Camden and others
boldly say the Romans named the road Via
Vitellianus, or Vitelliana, an easy Latin modifi-
cation of "Gwyddelin," the name by which
they heard the Britons call it. At any rate, it is
to the Romans that its transformation from a
mere forest track to a broad, well-engineered, and

202 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

well-paved road was due. The work was not soon
done, but when completed it took rank among the
greatest of military ways.

The Eomans engineered the road and did the
skilled work ; the Britons performed the carrying
and the hard labour, forced to it by a thousand
stripes and indignities. To them fell the clearing
of the woods along the route, and the digging of
earth and stone, and to Roman workmen the staking
out of the way and the weaving together of those
brushwood wattles that compacted the foundations
in moist and boggy places. Some fanciful commen-
tators find in those wattles the source of the name
given to the road. Completed at length as a
military necessity, and with much pagan ceremony
committed to the care of the Lares Viales and the
less supernatural custody of the road-surveyors,
the Via Vitelliana was for over three hundred
years a crowded highway, with busy towns and
villages along its course ; the palatial villas of
wealthy Roman citizens peeping out from sheltered
nooks. Then came disaster. The Roman garrisons
withdrawn, successive waves of savage invasions
wrecked the civilisation of that time, and only
the burnt walls of towns and settlements remained
to tell of what 'had been. It was not until another
four hundred years had passed that the fierce
Saxons, becoming tamed, began to rear a civili-
sation of their own. To this great road they gave,
according to that monkish chronicler, Roger de
Hoveden, the name " Waetlinga-street, the Way
of the Sons of Waetla, a legendary king ; and the

COURSE OF THE WATLING STREET 203

Celtic British whom they found in the country,
talking what was to them a strange and uncouth
tongue, they called, with all the arrogance
imaginahle, " Wealas," or strangers, forgetting
that they themselves were the strangers and the
others upon their native soil. But as "Wealas"
they remained, and as such they are still, for
from that word sprang the name of the Welsh
people, who as a matter of fact, style themselves
" Cymru."

A curious point to be noted is that this is
by no means the only "W^atling Street." The
name is found repeatedly in this country, applied
locally to ancient Roman roads ; but the Wat ling
Street prominent above all others is this great
way, which traversed Britain from its extreme
south-eastern verge, over against Gaul, diagonally
in a north-westerly direction for 340 miles, Until
it touched the sea at Carnarvon and Chester.
Prom the three great fortified starting-points at
Dubris, Portus Z/emanis, and Portus Hutiqris —
severally identified with Dover, Lympne, and
Eichborough — it ran in triplicate to Canterbury,
and thence, chiefly along the existing Dover
Road, to London. By way of that thoroughfare
still known as Watling Street, it traversed the
City and emerged at Newgate through the city
wall, and so into what were then swampy
wildernesses on the line of the present Holborn
and Oxford Street. At the Marble Arch it
turned abruptly to the right, and thence went
in a straight line along the course of the

204 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Edgware Road to the great city of Verulamiwm,
adjoining the St. Albans of our own day.

Prom this point the Wat ling Street and the
Holyhead Road are practically identical so far
as Weedon Beck. D unstable marks the site of
the Roman market-town of Forum Diana, or
Durocobrwce, as it was also named ; and Stony
Stratford by its name proclaims its situation on
the old route. It was the Roman " Magio-
vintum." Towcester was the " Lactodorum " of
the Itinerary. At Weedon the ancient road and
the modern part company for 71J miles, to meet
again at Ketley rail way -station, between Oak en -
gates and Wellington.

XXX

IT is this stretch of 75^ miles that will now be
explored. Bid farewell, traveller who would
trace the Roman way, to the company of your
fellow-men, for this is no frequented route, and
towns and villages are few along its course.
It begins by climbing out of Weedon and up
to a gate, where those who will may trace it
across a field. For those others who will not,
an ancient divergence, forming a kind of elbow,
preserves the continuity of roadway and brings
the route over the Grand Junction Canal to
Welford Station and Watford Gap, where the

ALONG THE WAT LING STREET 20,5

old route of the London and Coventry coach
from Northampton to Hillmorton and Coventry,
travelled hy Dugdale in the seventeenth century,
crosses this Roman way. The " New Inn " men-
tioned hy him still stands here, but is now a
farmhouse. The name of "Gap," as applied to
cross-roads, is very ancient. Curiously enough,
a " Watford Gap " is to be found in Staffordshire,
on the Birmingham and Lichfield Road.

Eew houses are glimpsed in these first nine
miles of the Watling Street. At a grim crossing
of two high roads near Crick station, but with
an appearance as solitary as though many miles
remote from villages or railways, it suddenly
ends, or continues only as a formidably rugged,
grass-grown track. Here the explorer either
finds himself daunted, or proves his mettle by
plunging boldly forward, reckless of what may
betide. For one thing, the telegraph-poles are
faithful to the track, and where they lead who
shall fear to follow ? They conduct, in fact,
steadily downhill along this green alley, and in
a mile and a half, crossing two fields, bring one
out to a flat and low-lying country, and to Avhat
the country-folk call the "hard road" again.
Three miles of this, and a rise, with a cross-road
to the right, leads to Dove Bridge, spanning the
Warwickshire Avon. All around, here, there,
and everywhere — at Lilbourne, Catthorpe, and
Cave's Inn — are speculative sites of the Roman
station of Tripontium. For the last three miles
the Watling Street has formed the boundary

206

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

between Northants and Warwickshire, and hence-
forward, for eighteen miles more, it performs
the same office for Warwickshire and Leicester-
shire. On the Leicestershire side, where the
ground rises steeply hey on d the little river, is
a mysterious mound, called by the villagers of
Lilbourne "Castle Hill" -an odd, evidently
artificial hill, with two beech trees growing on
its summit. Whether it be a Roman speculum,
or look-out hill, or the grave-mound of some
tribal king, ancient even when the Eomans

LILBOURNE.

came, who shall say? "Tripontium " was
named from three bridges that then crossed the
Avon somewhere here, but they and their sites
have vanished. Lilbourne itself lies down the
right-hand lane, and is a village on the hither
hillside, with a very dilapidated church by the
little river, and a great huddled mass of grass-
grown mounds in the water-meadows opposite.
Within sight is the wayside railway station of
Lilbourne, incongruous amid these forlorn relics
of the past in this out-of-the-wav corner of the

CAVE OF CAVE'S INN 207

country. Let no one think these mounds to be
the remains of a Roman camp : they are the
only vestiges now left of the once proud Norman
castle of Lilbourne.

Uphill, steep and rugged, goes the road to
the outlying fringe of Catthorpe, that still con-
tinues to he known as " Catthorpe Five Houses,"
even though they are now, and have long been,
but three. Prom this hill-top the spires and
roofs of Rugby are plainly visible by day, and
by night the great junction spreads its station
and signal-lights in a gorgeous illumination of
white, red, and green.

Beyond, in the deep hollow where that
latest of great trunk lines, the Great Central
Railway, crosses over the road on a blue-brick
archway, is " Cave's Inn," an inn no longer.
" Cave's Hole " they used to call it in old
times, from its situation in this hollow. The
lone house was kept in the long ago (that
is to say, about 1680) by Edward Cave, grand-
father of that Edward who founded the
Gentleman's Magazine, and was the friend
of Johnson. His father, Joseph, was a younger
son of the inn -keeping Edward, and, the entail
of the family estate being cut off, was reduced
to plying the cobbler's trade at Rugby. The
literary Edward was born in 1691 at the hamlet
of Newton, a short distance off the Watling
Street, between this and Catthorpe Five
Houses.

It is an obviously Roman way — straight

208 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

and uncompromising — that leads onward from
Cave's Inn to the cross-roads, at the suggestively
lonely spot called " Gihbet," the site in the
"good old days" of a gallows-tree originally
set up in 1687 for a certain Loseby who had
"barbarously murdered" a man named Bunbury,
and, being caught almost red-handed, was
promptly executed. Nothing is left of "Loseby's
Gibbet," as it is marked on old Warwickshire
maps. The remains of it, together with the
prehistoric tumulus on which it was erected,
were swept away when the cross - road from
Banbury and Daventry to Lutterworth was
made, in 1730. A dense grove of trees at the
fork of the roads to Lutterworth and Shawell
marks the neighbourhood of the spot.

Beyond this Golgotha, the road dips to the
reedy river " Swift " ; a lazy little stream and
not answerable to its name, as the traveller
may see for himself by halting and leaning
over Brunsford Bridge. Another solitary stretch
conducts to Cross - in - Hand, where there are
five roads, two old toll-houses, a modern red-
brick cottage, a very fine distant view of
Lutterworth church-to wer — and not a mortal
or immortal body or soul in sight. Ordnance
maps mark a " Blackenhall " oft' to the right,
a name that seems to fix the site of the
deserted " aula," or country seat, of some
Roman notable, whose notability, in the passing
of fifteen centuries, has vanished as though he
had never been. " Willey Crossing," where

TO HIGH CROSS

209

a branch of the Midland Railway bars the
cyclist's progress, only serves to emphasise the
solitude, and the country girl, who in answer
to the summons of the bell, opens the gates,
stares at the strange spectacle of a wayfarer.
Willey lies somewhere off to the left, but, so
far as it affects the road, might be non-existent.
Up the steep road that now lies lief ore the

CROSS-IN-HAND.

explorer, with the little church of Wibtoft
peering over a shoulder of the hill on the left,
and suddenly you are at High Cross, the famous
crossing of the Watling Street and the Fosse
Way — the great north-western road of the
Romans and their not quite so great Avay that
led out of Somerset through Gloucestershire,
the shires of Worcester and Warwick, to
Leicestershire and Lincoln.

VOL. I.

2IO

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

XXXI

HIGH Cross is among the oddest and most per-
plexing of places. A multiplicity of roads and
sign-posts are gathered together on the hill-top
and the traveller, bedevilled with their number,
and the shrubberies and the farmyards that

HIGH CEOSS MONUMENT.

mask them, is fain to halt and unravel the
tangled skein. The Watling Street here slightly
changes direction, so that its continuation to
Atherstone, ten miles distant, is hidden round
an angle. Other roads all round the compass
lead, according to the testimony of the signposts,
to Rugby, 10 miles; Coventry, 12; Daventry,

HIGH CROSS 2ii

18 ; Lutterworth, 6 ; and lastly, Leicester, 13
miles. The road to Leicester — the Roman city
of Ratce — lies along the Fosse Way, and that
is now not a road at all, but a meadow, with
meadows beyond it ; traces of the old way only
discoverable by the diligent antiquary. More-
over, the field-gate, padlocked and bristling
with the most barbaric of barbed wire, emphasises
" no road " and gives the signpost the lie.

High Cross is no misnomer, so far as the
adjective goes. It is high : very high. Illimit-
able vales, shading off from green foreground
to indigo distance, are unfolded below. Fifty -
seven churches are said to be visible from this
vantage-point, and goodness only knows how
many counties. Fifty-seven churches ! Say a
hundred and fifty-seven, or more, if you knew
on what particular pin-points in that view to
look.

There is a monument at High Cross, erected
in 1712, both to direct travellers in the way
they should go and to mark this supposed site
of the Roman station of Vennonce. Nowadays
the pillar is so completely screened by a little
groove of hollies, sycamores, firs, beeches, and
laburnums that, although it stands at an angle
of the junction, none but those who know
exactly where to look are likely to find it. A
little wicket-gate leads up to it, in the centre
of the grove — a nondescript pile of moulded
stones and red-brick, surmounted with what look
like fragments of Roman columns. The whole

2i2 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

structure bears the appearance of having been
built of architectural fragments retrieved from
some early eighteenth-century rubbish heap.
It is not improved, nor its Latin inscriptions
rendered any clearer, by the countless pocket-
knives that have been set to work upon it.
High Cross is a lonely place, but its loneliness
is belied by this multitude of names and initials,
some dating back to 1733.

The story of how this pillar came to be
erected here is told in the Proceedings of the
Warwickshire justices in the Easter Sessions of
1711. As the Watling Street divides that county
and Leicestershire, a conference of the justices
of the two shires was called, Avheii it was resolved
to " build something memorable in stone " on
this site, not only to mark the whereabouts of
Yennonce and to direct travellers, but " also for
that it was esteemed the centre of England.
The cost of this " something memorable " was
£83, contributed in equal shares by the tAvo
shires. The inscriptions were composed by a
Mr. Green way, a schoolmaster of Coventry.
Englished, the principal one runs :—

Traveller, if you seek the footsteps of the ancient
Romans, here yon may find them. Hence their
most famous military ways, crossing one another,
proceed to the utmost limits of Britain. Here
the Vennones' had their settlement, and at the
first mile hence along the street, Claudius, the
commander of a cohort, had his camp, and at
the same distance along the Fosse, his tomb.

CALDECOTE 213

" Cleycester " the Saxons named the deserted
Roman camp of Vennonce, that stretched along
the road towards Wibtoft. Even yet the whistling
ploughman occasionally turns up relics of it, in
the form of broken pottery and defaced coins.
The tomb of Claudius remained, until quite
modern times, along the Posse Way. It was a
tumulus, overgrown with brambles, and known
as " Cloudsley Bush." No traces of it are now
left.

Ahead, rather more than a mile off the road,
the smoky chimneys of Hinckley and Burbage
make inky and fantastical wreaths in the sky.
Smockington is the name of a hamlet in a
bottom, Avith some reminiscences of a coaching
age. Beyond is the " Three Pots " public-house ;
and again, beyond that, a deserted Primitive
Methodist Chapel, standing woe-begone by a
canal. Caldecote lies off to the left in another
few miles, opposite to the " Royal Red Gate "
inn; its name inviting an exploration of the
place, for there are those who explain the
frequently recurring name of " Caldecote " along
the line of Roman roads to mean "cold cot " — a
variant of " Coldharbour," that equally common
place-name in such situations. The cold cots
and the cold harbours had once been, accord-
ing to this theory, ruined and deserted Roman
villas, in whose roofless and chilly recesses the
first people who dared to travel after Roman
Britain was ravaged by savage tribes took such
cold comfort as they might ; not daring to light

2i4 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

a warming fire, lest its blaze should bring
lurking- bandits and murderers to their cheerless
refuge.

Prom this point of view Caldecote is dis-
appointing, for nothing Roman is visible there.
It is just a tiny village, with a modernised
Hall, and in the Park, less than a stone's throw
from the house, the little church. But it is a
place with a story ; for it was here, on August
28th, 1642, that an attack was made upon the
Hall, then the residence of Colonel Purefoy, a
noted Republican. The Colonel was at Coventry,
and the house in charge of his wife, Dame
Joan, and his son-in-law, Master George Abbott,
when a raiding-party, said to have been under
the command of Prince Rupert, appeared and
demanded its surrender. Portunately the inmates
had warning of their approach, and when they
would have forced an entrance, the soldiers
found doors and windows barred. In the affray
that followed, Dame Joan fired first, bringing
down her man, and the garrison of men and
women servants, headed by Master George, gave
so good an account of themselves that the
Royalists drew off with a loss of three officers
and fifteen soldiers killed. Caldecote Hall was
not molested again. Memorials of Dame Joan
and Master George still remain in the little
church.

MANCETTER 215

XXXII

BEYOND Caldecote comes Mancetter — the Roman
Manduessedum — on the Warwickshire side, and
Witherley, in Leicestershire. Between the two,
an earthwork named " Castle Bank," a rectangle
measuring six hundred by four hundred feet,
seems to have been the site of the Roman camp.
Across the road flows the pretty river Anker,
with trees densely overhanging it, and framing
with their boughs a charming view of Witherley 's
graceful crocketed spire. Mancetter — how nearly
it escaped from being another " Manchester " !—
is thought to have derived the first syllable of
its name in Roman times from some historic
or remarkable stone, "maen," in the British
tongue ; but, however that may be, no such
stone has ever been found. It is now a pretty
village, a little distance retired from the road,
with a very fine old church, and a churchyard
remarkable for its illiterate tombstones and
odd epitaphs, from the merely misspelt to the
quaintly conceived :—

Here lies the Wife of Joseph Grew, a Tender
Parerent And a Vertious Wife. She died
February 1782.

Another, weirdly ungrammatical and savagely
cynical, hides the identity of those who lie

2l6 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

beneath by initials, and by the omission of any

date :—

HERE LIETH INTERRED

THE BODY'S OF

H. I. M.

What E're we was or am

it Matters not
To whome related,

or by whome begott.
We was but amnot :

Ask no more of me
;Tis all we are

And all that you must be.

Another, to Sarah and Mary Everitt, 1720, and
others of that family, puts a truth in a quaint
guise :—

The World is a Caty Full of Crooked Streets
Death is ye Markett plass Whereall must
meet if life Was merchandise That men
Could Buy ye Rich Would Allways live
ye poor must Die.

Purchasable immortality would be a much more
potent inducement to become a multi-millionaire
than any now existing. But what a terrible
thing that would be for the Diamond Kings,
the Railway, Oil, Steel, and other monarchs to
become immortal. As it is, however, a live
tramp has the laugh of a dead millionaire — and a
better chance of the Elysian Fields than Dives.
The town of Atherstone, a mile long, breaks
the loneliness of Wat ling Street, half a mile
beyond Mancetter. It is chiefly one long street,
of the miscellaneous character common to the

STONY DELPH 217

small country town : not unpleasing, nor highly
interesting. The exit from the town is marked
by a railway level crossing, become famous of
late years as a source of contention between
the local governing body and the London and
North-Western Railway. Beyond, the villages
of Merevale and Baddesley Ensor are seen to
the left ; and Dordon, a mushroom growth called
into unlovely existence by the new pits of the
Hall End Colliery.

"Stony Delph" is the odd name of a village
two miles onward, adjoining Wilnecote. It is a
name alluding to some quarry, or "stony digging,"
now forgotten. (Compare, " When Adam delved
and Eve span.") Wilnecote, down into whose
street the road dips from Stony Delph, is
a place of brick, tile, and pottery kilns, with a
railway-station, formerly called " Two Gates."
Where Wilnecote ends and Fazeley begins is not
easy to tell, save perhaps by reference to the
river Tame, here dividing Warwickshire and
Staffordshire. Fazeley has that maritime and
Dutch-like appearance belonging to all places
settled beside some old canal, and the canal
here is one of the oldest, with long rows of
wharves and equally long rows of cottages
opposite. Both have seen their best days.

Now, good-bye for awhile to level roads, for
the Watling Street on entering Staffordshire goes
straight for the steepest hill in the neighbour-
hood, and thereby proves its Roman ancestry.
This is the hill leading to Hints. When you

2i8 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

have reached the top, another hill, abrupt and
entrenched, with gloomy woods on its brow,
scowls down upon it from the left hand. It
had a history, without possibility of a doubt,
but it has not. come down to us ; and those who
defended and those others who attacked are alike
gone to the shores of the Styx, without leaving
any other traces save those dumb and reticent
earthworks that loom so provokingly mysterious
against the sky.

Beyond Weeford, the next landmark, the
Watling Street goes straight for three and a
half miles, and then brings up against another
dead end, where it is crossed by the Lichfield
and Birmingham road. A hedge and a ploughed
field forbid further progress, and it is only when
armed with large-scale maps, and by comparing
antiquarian authorities, that the course of the
Watling Street can be traced, straight on to
Wall. That village is found by following the
road to Lichfield until the first left-hand turn-
ing is reached, leading, as a steep lane, uphill
for a mile. On the hill-top, Wall is found and
the Watling Street regained. The tiny village
is built over the site of Etocetum, of whose
ruins some fragments were yet to be seen in
Pennant's time, including portions of the ancient
Roman wall giving a name to the place. These
have long since disappeared, but in 1887 some
excavations here laid bare many foundations
heaped with the ruins of Roman civilisation,
among • whose oddments were found roofing-

WALL 219

slates from Bangor and lime from Walsall. If
thorough search were made, much more might
be brought to light, for this was an important
station in those times, situated at the inter-
section of the Ickriield Street with Watling
Street. Below the hill, and on the line of the
Icknield Street, is the hamlet or farm called
Chesterfield — a significant name, telling of Roman
relics.

THE WATLING STREET, NEAR HAMMERWICH.

Muckley Corner, beyond Wall, is the meeting-
place of roads from Walsall to Lichfield and
Wolverhampton. The Watling Street still goes
unflinchingly ahead, and reaches the outskirts
of Hammerwich, uphill. At that nail-making
and coal-mining place, it becomes somewhat
confused, but is well-known, locally to every
man, woman, and child as the "Watling Street
Road." Here it has reached a very high-lying

220 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

tract, that abomination of desolation called
Brownhills. Words are ineffectually employed
to describe the hateful, blighted scene ; but
imagine a wide, dreary stretch of common land,
surrounded by the scattered, dirty, and decrepit
cottages of a semi-savage population of nail-makers
and pitmen, with here and there a school, a
woe-begone brick chapel, a tin tabernacle, and
a plentiful sprinkling of public-houses. Further,
imagine the grass of this wide-spreading common
to be as brown, wiry, and innutritions as it is
possible for grass to be, and with an extra-
ordinary wealth of scrap-iron, tin-clippings,
broken glass, and brickbats deposited over every
square yard, and all around it the ghastly
refuse-heaps of long-abandoned mines. Finally,
clap a railway embankment and station midway
across the common, and there you have a dim
adumbration of what Brownhills is like.

The Roman road makes a sudden change of
direction here, at a point opposite the " Rising
Sun," where the old Chester road falls in. It
is a change that would be inexplicable, were
it not for a strange relic that by chance has
survived for sixteen hundred years to explain it.
This is a mile's length of deserted road that
continues the straight line of Watling Street,
and then abruptly ends, as though the Romans
had abandoned some contemplated work. It is,
as a matter of fact, a monument to the incom-
petence of the surveyor who had the construction
of this division of the Watling Street in his

THE "FOVR CROSSES" 221

charge. The several changes of direction taken
here and there along the whole length of this
great military way — as, for example, at High
Cross and Gailey — are explained by the work
having heen in progress from both ends at once,
and the surveys being somewhat inaccurate ;
but the official entrusted with the road from
Etocetum seems to have lost his bearings very
badly indeed, and to have been road-making at
a wide angle from the correct line, when his
chief appeared and plotted out the direction
afresh from Brownhills.

The road now goes downhill again, past
a fine old inn, the " Fleur-de-Lis," and conies
to Wyrley Bank, a busy colliery district on
the verge of Cannock Chase. Bridgetown,
Great Wyrley, arid Churchbridge are lumped
together in this coal-getting neighbourhood,
and the crash of waggons, the shrieking of
engines, and coal-dust everywhere bedevil the
scene. But, with all these unlovely details,
it is far preferable to the stark and hopeless
barrennesss of Brownhills.

In little more than two miles this coalfield
is quite out of sight and sound, and the road
approaches the beautiful old " Four Crosses"
inn at Hatherton. Dean Swift is commonly
said to have visited this old house on his
journeys, and it is quite likely he did, but it
could not — for reasons shown elsewhere in these
pages-* — have been the house where he wrote

* Page 245.

222 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

his famous epigram on the landlady. But most
accounts continue to give this as the scene,
and locally it is firmly believed in.

The old house is of two distinct periods :
one dating back to the sixteenth century
and exquisite in black oak and white plastered
and gabled front; the other probably built
about 1710, in a handsome " Queen Anne " style.
A curious feature is the Latin couplet carved

THE "FOUR CROSSES," NEAR HATHERTOX.

in 1636, on an oak beam outside the older
portion of the house :—

Fleres si scires unum tu'a tempera me'sem,
Rides cum non sit forsitan una dies,

which has been translated :

Brief is your time : a month, perchance,

Nor even but a day,
Yet ignorant, poor foolish wight,

You laughing go your way.

MORE HIGHWAYMEN 223

Adjoining is a disused toll-house, and
opposite stands another old inn, the " Green
Dragon," the group forming a little oasis of
settlement in the surrounding desert of lonely
road. It was between this and the " Welsh
Harp " inn at Stonnal, on the Castle Bromwich
road, that the " Shrewsbury Caravan " was
halted and robbed on April 30th, 1751, by "a
single Highwayman, who behaved very civilly
to the Passengers, told them he was a Tradesman
in Distress, and hoped they would contribute
to his assistance." Whereupon, he handed
round his hat and each passenger gave him
something, making an involuntary contribution
of about £4, " with which he was mighty well
satisfied," as indeed he had every reason to be.
But he was not so distressed a tradesman that
he could condescend to accept coppers, and so
" returned some Halfpence to one of them,
saying he never took Copper." After this,
informing his victims that there were two other
" collectors " on the road (were they also
Distressed Tradesmen ? ) he rode with the
Caravan for some distance, until it was out of
danger and he almost in it, when he left with
much courtesy, begging the passengers that
they would not at their next inn mention the
affair, nor appear against him should he after-
wards be arrested.

224 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

XXXIII

THE gently undulating stretch of country
from "Four Crosses" to " Spread Eagle,"
once dreaded by the name of Calf Heath, is
now under cultivation, and the Watling Street,
crossing it, broad and well-kept, wears more
the look of a high-road. The spreading lakes
seen here and there, known as " Gailey Pools,"
are reservoirs of the old Staffordshire and
Worcestershire Canal that presently crosses
the road under a hunch-backed bridge and by
an old round-house, whose tower stands out
prominently for a long distance down the
straight perspective. The " Spread Eagle,"
an old coaching-inn, once gave a name to the
adjoining railway station of Gailey, but where
the village hides that now serves sponsor to
it is not readily discovered. A mile beyond
comes the river Penk, crossed at a pretty spot
by a substantial stone bridge, and across the
meadows by a red-brick one, where a mill-cut
froths and foams, and a cheerful old mill and
farmhouse stand. On the other side of the
river is the hamlet of Horsebrook, with Stretton
down a side lane, suppossed to have been the
Pennocrucium — the crossing of the Penk — of
Roman times.

The ubiquitous Thomas Telford is recalled
to mind at a little distance onward by his name
in cast-iron on the aqueduct of the Birmingham

BOSCOBEL 225

and Liverpool Canal. Near by is another
reservoir, rejoicing in the name of " Stinking
Lake." At that fine old inn, the " Bradford
Arms," Ivetsey Bank, the left-hand road leads
in less than two miles to Boscobel, one of the
most famous places in our history, for to that
hunting-lodge in the forests then thickly over-
spreading this part of the country came
Charles II. in 1651, as a hunted fugitive, after
the disastrous defeat at Worcester. Boscobel
had been built seventy years before, by the
Gift'arcls of Chillington, ostensibly as a hunting-
lodge where their guests might rest in the
intervals of the chase, and in a sense it was
so used, with officers of the law for hunters,
and fleeting Papists as quarry ; but in the other
sense it was a very transparent pretence, when
we consider that the family residence at
Chillington Hall stands not more than a mile
away. For many years it had been used as
a refuge for recusant Roman Catholic priests,
at a time when that religion was proscribed ;
for the Giffards were then, as they are still,
of that faith, and so were the yeomen Penderels
who occupied the house. It was built, too,
under the direction of a Jesuit lay-brother, one
Nicholas Owen, or " Little John " as his
intimates called him, a skilful deviser of
priest's-holes and such like hiding-places under
stairways or in the recesses of panellings. No
Roman Catholic gentleman's house was at that
time considered to be complete without some
VOL. i. 15

226 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

of " Little John's " darkling hutches and incon-
veniently cramped nooks secreted somewhere
between foundation and roof. Truth to tell,
however, these supposedly "secret" places are
fairly obvious, and, given a search - party
convinced that the fugitive was somewhere
near, they must have been dull-witted fellows
Avho did not light upon them.

When Worcester Eight ended so badly for
"the man Charles Stuart, that Son of Belial," as
the Republicans were pleased to call Charles II.,
he made at once for Boscobel, the place
where, only a feAV days before, the Earl of
Derby had secreted himself. Accompanied by
Colonel Carless, he threw himself upon the
assured loyalty of the five Penderel brothers
and their widowed mother, Dame Joan, Avho
then lived here and at ruined Whiteladies
Priory, half a mile away. "Will Jones," for
that was the name he adopted, could have found
no more loyal hearts had he searched the realm,
and the Penderels had already found the transi-
tion from secreting priests to Royalist fugitives
an easy one. But Boscobel had become suspect,
and the quarry wras now so important that
rigorous search was made, and Charles and
Carless, although hid respectively in the secret
recess behind the panelling in the Squire's
room, and in the pit beneath the cheese-loft
during the night, were in daytime for greater
security secreted in the bushy head of a pollard
oak growing in a meadow near the house : the

THE ROYAL OAK 22?

tree afterwards famous as the "Royal Oak."
In that leafy refuge Charles slept,' with his
head in the faithful Colonel's lap, and beneath
them quested the search-party of Cromwell's
dragoons. The story is well known, how that
tree effectually concealed them, and how, after
many wanderings, the King fled the country
from the sea shore at Brighthelmstone.

The original Royal Oak is gone; hacked to

BOSCOBEL AND THE " ROYAL OAK."

pieces for mementoes in a very short while after
the Restoration, and the youthful oak that
stands solitary in a field does but mark the
spot. But the house stands still, with its old
hiding-places, and many are those who come
to see ; so that the pile of visitors' books, all
closely filled, is a mighty and a groAving one.
Of the "bosco bello," the Fair Wood that gave
the old house its name, not a trace remains.
Downhill from Ivetsey Bank, the Watling

228 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Street presently crosses into Shropshire, and
comes to the village of Weston-under-Lizard—
or " Weston-subter-Liziard " as it was formerly
named— a cheerful little place, clinging like
some feudal dependant to the park and Hall,
the seat of the Earl of Bradford. The church
and mansion stand adjoining, at the end of a
short drive : in the church the cross-legged
effigies of Sir Hugh and Sir Hamo de Weston,
who flourished six or seven hundred years ago;
and in the exquisitely fitted Bradford Chapel
memorials of that family.

Burlington Pool, a reedy lake on the right
hand, is now passed, and Crackley Bank, leading
down -hill towards another scene of industry and
coal-mining, seen from afar by reason of its
smoky skies. Close by, at the place called Red
Hill, the Roman station of Uxaconium was
placed.

Before the pits and furnaces of the Lilies-
hall, Oakengates, and Ketley coal and iron
mines are reached, the long street of St.
George's has to be passed through. There was
a time, not so long since, when this was merely
the hamlet of " Pain's Lane," and its local
makeshift place of worship simply " Pain's
Lane Chapel." All this is changed, and though
its old prosperity has abated, the place now
possesses a fine Gothic church dedicated to
St. George, and has changed its name to
match. Oakengates also has seen its best days,
for many of the mines are exhausted. In these

IVEEDON AGAIN 229

latter 'circumstances, the neat little houses of
"Perseverance Place, 1848," and others with
similarly virtuous titles, look not a little
pathetic. Perseverance, indulged in continually,'
has stripped the district of its mineral wealth,
and the miners, living like maggots in a cheese,
have eaten their home away. The township, at
the very bottom of a steep descent, is husy,
hut dirty and slatternly, with a railway station
and level crossing, and huge cinder heaps,
likening it to some domestic dustbin in
Brobdingnag. Ascending out of it, Ketley is
reached, and with it the junction of Watling
Street with the Holyhead Road.

XXXIV

AND now to resume, at Weedon, the modern
road. It is a tiring pull up out of Weedon,
on the way to Daventry, and anything that
may excuse a rest is welcome. That excuse is
found in the contemplation of a substantial
stone-built farmhouse, with nine windows in a
row, half a mile out of the village, on the right
of the road, and fronted at this day with a
pleasant garden. This, now called the " Grange,"
was formerly the " Globe " coaching and posting
inn. Beyond it, opposite a group of Georgian
red-brick wayside houses, the old road goes

230 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

over what used to be a water-splash in the deep
hollow ; but Telford's road proceeds inflexibly
onward. The church in the meads to the right
is that of Dodford, the name of the water- splash
aforesaid. As for the derivation of that name,
Fuller, with some hesitancy, gives " ' Dods','
water- weeds, commonly called by children ' cat's-
tails,' growing thereabouts."

The rough cart-track by which alone Dodford
Church is reached, and the unusual jealousy
that keeps the building locked, combine to hide
much of interest from all wayfarers, save those
of the most determined type. The enterprising
and energetic who prevail have their reward,
for the interior — good Early English and
Decorated— has an unusually interesting col-
lection of monuments. Here, cross-legged and
mail-clad, lies the effigy of Sir William Keynes,
one of the last of his family, settled here — no,
not settled, because they were continually away,
warring for kings or against kings ; rather let
us say, who owned this manor — from the
Conqueror's time until that of Edward III.,
when the name was extinguished in the
marriage of an heiress, the last representative.
The true significance of the crossed legs of these
old knights is still in dispute, but the commonly
received idea is that the attitude proclaims a
Crusader. But it is scarce possible that Sir
William de Keynes (who died in 1344) ever
fought for the Cross in Palestine. Had he
done so, he must have been, in two senses, an

THE 'ARRY FAMILY 231

infant in arms, for the Crusades were over and
done with, and the Soldan had got his OAVH
again (or what was as good as his own) before
William could have relinquished his coral and
bells and taken to mace and broadsword. The
fact seems to be that the early Crusaders, who
adopted this mortuary symbolism, were followed
in it by many who had never warred against
the Infidel at all, and debased the original
significance into a mere fashion.

Two others of the family are represented
here in effigies of women, thought to be Hawisa
tie Keynes (1330) and her great-granddaughter,
Wentiliana (1376). The earliest of the two is
wooden, and is represented in the nun-like head-
dress of her time.

But the finest monument is that of Sir John
Cressy, who died in 1444, across the seas in
Lorraine, in the service of Henry VI. He is
represented in plate-armour, and wears the
Lancastrian badge, the Collar of SS. On the
breastplate of the effigy is carved, very bold
and deep, " lohn Newell 1601." Who John
Newell was, except that he thus proves himself
of the great 'Arry family, it is hopeless to
inquire. " I. A. 1770 " has also proved on the
alabaster the barbarism of his nature and the
mettle of his penknife.

Besides these memorials, the church has
numerous brasses and tablets, while in the
churchyard a stone tells of a Major Campbell,
commanding the Royal Artillery at Weedon,

232 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

who died in 1809, after having lived "strictly
fulfilling the duties of the Soldier, Gentleman,
and Christian : not less lamented in death than
valued in life." In conclusion, an odd custom
prevailing here and in surrounding villages may
he noticed : epitaphs on stones erected hy widows
over their husbands giving the relationship, " the
hushand of." So complete a reversal of the
usual practice, placing the man in the subsidiary
place, is a novelty.

The remainder of the way to Dav entry, or
" Daintry," as old travellers always called it,
is hilly, but beautifully shaded by hedgerow
trees. Hills and vales in constant alternation
are seen on either hand; the frowning bulk of
Borough Hill on the right, crowned with British
earthworks, converted by the Romans into a
military camp, probably identical with the lost
station of Beneventa. Roman remains have
been discovered up there in great numbers in
days before the hill became enclosed, cultivated,
and hedged about with difficulties in the way of
exploring antiquaries. Down below, and near
the road, is the ruin-strewn field called " Burnt
Walls," known by that name at least six hundred
and fifty years ago, when it is mentioned as "ad
brende walles " in a deed relating to property.
On the eastern side of Borough Hill, near the
village of Norton, and adjoining the Watling
Street, another field, oddly named " Great Shaw-
ney," has yielded many traces of old Home.
The name, indeed, is thought to be a faint and

DAVENTRY 233

far echo of Isannavaria, another vanished Roman
camp.

It was on Borough Hill that Charles I.'s
army of ten thousand men, on a night in June,
1645, set a seventeenth-century example to the
eighteenth-century ten thousand under the "brave
old Duke of York," who were marched to the
top of a hill and then marched down again, as
a well-knoAvn rhyme tells us. Nothing happened
on either occasion. Charles's troops, occupying
Daventry and the surrounding villages for some
days before, were frightened to that night's hill-
top vigil by some skirmishing exploits on the
part of Fairfax. Before morning came, they
descended and went off in retreat to Naseby,
the King with them, reluctant to leave the
comfortable lodgings he had enjoyed for six
nights past at the " Wheatsheaf."

XXXV

THE first prominent object on approaching the
town is the "Wheatsheaf" itself, boasting of
being established in 1610, but rebuilt in the
coaching age, and just a white-painted, stucco-
fronted building with a courtyard and a general
Pickwickian and respectable Early Victorian air.
Opposite stands an " Independent Chapel, erected
1722," which, with its secular air and big gates,

234 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

looks like a converted inn. Continuing along
the narrow and unpicturesque Sheaf Street thus
entered, the unwary pilgrim, unobservant on
wheels, is downhill at the other end and out of
the town in the proverbial "jiffy," or the not
less proverbial " two-twos." But Sheaf Street,
lining the Holyhead Road, is a snare and a
delusion. That does not form the sum and
substance of Daventry, sprawling largely down
a street to the right and developing itself
astonishingly at the end in a mutton-chop-shaped
market-place, continued to the left hand again
as a High Street. It is as though Daventry had
long ago resolved to keep itself retired and select
from the throng that once went up and down
the Holyhead Road ; and very quiet and empty
the market-place looks to this day, with a church
rebuilt in 1752 and supposed to be Doric : the
exterior in a yellow sandstone rapidly crumbling
away, and the interior like a concert-hall. The
eye lights upon only one memorable thing, and
that an epitaph to a certain Susanna Pritchett
Godson, who died in 1809, aged twenty-five:—

She was

But room won't let me tell you what.
Name what a Wife should be,
And She was that.

Daventry Priory once stood hereby, but many
years have passed since its last fragments were
cleared away to provide a site for the town
gaol in front of this ugly church. The Priory

VENGEANCE 237

itself was, with others, suppressed by Wolsey,
that ambitious Cardinal, for the purpose of
seizing its funds, towards the endowment of his
colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He is charged
with having sent five of his creatures to pick a
quarrel with the house, and, causing the dispute
to l)e referred to himself, of having dissolved
it by fraud. The story of what happened to his
five emissaries and himself, and the moral drawn
from their fate, are quite in keeping with the
superstitious spirit of those times. Thus, one
learns that two of the five quarrelled, and
one slew the other, the survivor being hanged ;
that a third drowned himself in a well ; that a
fourth, formerly well-to-do, became penniless and
begged till his dying day ; and that the remain-
ing one " was cruelly maimed in Ireland." This
series of " judgments " is then carried on to the
Cardinal, whose miserable end is historic; to his
colleges, of which one was immediately pulled
down, and the other finished under other patron-
age ; and to the Pope who permitted Wolsey's
high-handed doings, and who was besieged and
long imprisoned. Unhappily, for the sake of
a poetic completeness of vengeance, Henry
VIII. — who dissolved more religious houses than
any one, and, moreover, appropriated their
revenues and lands to his own uses — flourished
amazingly for years afterwards. Like the wicked
whose good fortunes are bitterly lamented by
the Psalmist, his eyes swelled out with fatness,
and he was well filled.

238 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

The old pronunciation of " Daintry ' goes
back certainly to the sixteenth century, when it-
was probably responsible for the device of the
old town seal, adopted at that time, represent-
ing a figure intended to picture a Dane at odds
Avith an indeterminate kind of a tree. Pennant,
on the other hand, derives the name from
" Dwy — avon — tre," " the dwelling of the two
Avons " : and indeed the town is placed, as it

TOWN SEAL, DAVENTEY.

were, at the fork of the Nen, sometimes called
the Avon, and another insignificant stream ; but
this is looked upon with an almost equal con-
tempt, and mystery still enshrouds the real
origin and the significance of the name.

Whips were made at Daventry a hundred
years ago, but it is now a boot-making town,
not altogether unpicturesque, in the slatternly
sort. Besides its " Wheatsheaf," there are the
"Peacock," the " Euri Cow," the "Bear," and

THE "SARACEN'S HEAD" 239

the "Saracen's Head "—all old; but the palm
must be given to the last, containing much
black oak, and altogether a great deal more
interesting than a casual glance at its common-
place plastered front would disclose. Its court-
yard is especially quaint; in red brick, with
a large building to one side, now practically
disused, but once the busy dining-room of the
coaches. It was built probably about 1780 : the

BRAUNSTON HILL.

upper part ornamented with grotesque wooden
figures of Jacobean date, evidently the spoils of
some demolished building. The whole, overhung
with grape-vines, makes a very pretty picture.

One leaves Daventry steeply down hill, through
a trampish, out-at-elbows, dirty-children- wallow-
ing-in-the-dust-in - the - middle - of - the-road quarter.
Hills again rise to left and right : on the left
Catesby Abbey ; ahead, the exceedingly steep

24o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

descent of a mile down Braunston Hill, with
Braunston spire, a deserted and ruinated wind-
mill, and leagues upon leagues of distant country,
unfolded to the startled eye. The " steep and
dangerous descent " was to have been improved
by Telford, but the design was never put into

BRAUNSTON.

execution, and the hill still owns those
defects, and hurtling motor-cars and cycles
descending at extravagant speeds alarm' the
propriety of the neighbourhood. In the hollow,
197 feet below the hill-top, stands Braunston
Station, the " Old Ship " inn nestling beneath

BRAUNSTON 241

the thunderous girders of the railway-bridge
crossing over the road ; and on the next rise
over the Oxford Canal, a roadside forge and
the " Castle " inn, as old as Queen ^Elizabeth's
day. Here the rising road forks, presenting a
puzzle to the stranger, for either has the appear-
ance of a high road. The Holyhead Road,
however, bears to the left, that to the right
leading in an outrageously steep semi-circle to
the long, rustic, stone-built street of Braunston
village.

The tower and spire of the fine Decorated
church are imposing, but the interior is of little
interest — the body of the building, reconstructed
some fifty years ago, swept and garnished, and
cleared of everything but one old relic : the
mail-clad effigy of a splay-footed crusading
knight, in the act of violently drawing his
sword, thrust in an unobtrusive corner.

XXXVI

TWO-AND-A-HALF miles from this point, across
country and in the angle formed by the branch-
ing of the Watling Street and the Holyhead
Road from Weedon, lie the village and the
romantic manor-house of Ashby St. Ledgers,
the home of Robert Catesby, chief conspirator
in the Gunpowder Plot. From Braunston is by
VOL. i. 16

242 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

no means the best way to Ashby : reached by a
long, steep lane, and across six fields and two
cross-roads. The only guides on this solitary
way are the traveller's bump of location and a
battered sign-post in a cross-road, on one of
whose decrepit arms, pointing vaguely through
an impenetrable hedge into a ploughed field,
the words, " To Ashby St. Ledgers and Crick
Station," can, under favouring circumstances of
sunshine, be faintly spelled. A meditative rook,
perching on a deserted harrow, typical of soli-
tude, seemed, when the present historian came
this way, to hold and keep the secret of the
route, only discovered by diligent scouting at
the next field-gate.

But Ashby St. Ledgers is worth this effort.
At the end of the rather uninteresting village,
and closing the view, there suddenly comes the
beautiful grouping of old church, gate-house, and
ancient trees, leading to the manor-house itself,
glimpsed through the gato — a fine old Elizabethan
house, a picturesque pile of terraces, oriel windows
and gables, weather-stained and delightfully pic-
turing the orthodox character of a conspirator's
home.

They still show the " Gunpowder Plot Room "
over the gateway, and the memorials of Catesby's
ancestors can even now be seen in the church-
that Church of St. Leodegarius from whom the
place derives its name. There they lie on the
floor ; monumental brasses of Catesbys, with
their cognizance, a black lion, conspicuous where

CATESBYS

243

the fury of centuries ago has not hacked the
workmanship out of recognition. There lie Sir
\Villiam Catesby, 1470, and his son, Sir William,
taken prisoner at Bosworth Pield fifteen years
later, <\r parte Richard III., and beheaded
at Leicester ; great-great-great-grandfather of
the conspirator, Robert, and a warning, had he

ASH BY ST. LEDGERS.

lent an ear to the history of his family, against
too rashly entering into the bloody politics of
those times. That remote ancestor's fate carried
with it the forfeiture of his estates, soon restored
to his son ; but when Robert Catesby fell in his
attempt to destroy King and Parliament, and
to subvert the Protestant religion, the property,
forfeited again, was never restored.

244 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

XXXVII

RETRACING our steps to the Holyhead Road
again, the "dumpling hills of Northamptonshire,"
as Horace Walpole calls them, give place to
the long Warwickshire levels. Pour miles and
a half from Daventry, and just before reaching
Willoughby village, lying off the road, the Great
Central Railway comes from Rugby, and crosses
over on an embankment and a blue-brick-and-
iron-girder bridge ; a station labelled " Willoughby,
for Daventry," looking up and down the road.
Does any one, it may be asked, ever alight for
Daventry in this solitary road, four miles and a
half distant from that town, on the inducement
of that notice ? And when the innocent
traveller has thus alighted, what does he say
when he gets his bearings, and finds himself
thus marooned, far away from where he would
be?

Possibly he resorts, after being thus scurvily
tricked by the railway company, to the " Four
Crosses " Inn, a house with a history, standing
close by. The old inn of that name, demolished
in 1898, faced the bye-road to Willoughby
village; the new building fronts the highway.
The junction of roads at this point has only
three arms, hence the original sign of the
'Three Crosses," changed to four, according to
the received story, at the suggestion of Dean

THE "FOUR CROSSES

245

Swift, who was a frequent traveller along this
road between Dublin and London, riding horse-
back, with one attendant. The old inn, hardly
more than a wayside pot-house, was scarce a fit
stopping place for that dignitary ; but it is well
known that Swift delighted in such places and

THE "FOUR CROSSES," WILLOUGHBY (DEMOLISHED 1898).

the odd society to be met in them, and it may
have been in some ways more convenient than
the usual posting-houses at Daventry and
Dim church.

The story runs that on one of his journeys,
anxious for breakfast and to be off, he could not
hurry the landlady, who tartly told him " he must
wait, like other people." He waited, of necessity,

246 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

but employed the time in writing with his
diamond ring upon one of the panes:—

There are three

Crosses at your door :
Hang up -your Wife

And you'l count Four.

Swift, D., 1730.*

The landlord probably did not hang up his wife,
but he certainly seems to have altered his sign.

The window-pane disappeared from the old
inn very soon afterwards, and it is not at all
unlikely that the landlady herself saw to it
being removed. Certainly it had disappeared
in 1819, when some verses in the Gentlemen9 s
Magazine gave the misquotation of those lines
that has been the basis of every incorrect
rendering since then. Many years ago the late
Mr. Cropper, of Rugby, who was a native of
Willoughby, and whose father had kept the
" Four Crosses," purchased the pane of a cottager
in the village. It is of the old diamond shape,
of green glass, and bears the words quoted
above, scratched in a fine, bold style.

The distinction is wrongly claimed for the
" Pour Crosses " Inn at Hatherton, near Cahnock,
on the Watlirig Street; a very fine old coaching

* The date is worth notice. All who have ever written
on Swift give his last visit to England as 1727. But this
flatly contradicts them. Nor is it in order to suppose this
inscription a forgery, for it exhibits the characteristic hand-
writing of the Dean, as seen in his manuscript diary at
South Kensington.

IVILLOUGHBY 247

inn, under whose roof Swift must certainly often
have stayed ; Imt as the roads at that point
form a complete cross of four arms, the sign
must always have been what it is now, and
certainly all the evidence points to the
Willoughby claim being justified.

Willoughby may on some old maps be found
marked as a "spa," and a little handbook,
published in 1828, dealing with the merits of
the " New Sulphureous and Saline Baths " that
stood opposite the " Four Crosses," assured all
likely and unlikely scrofulous visitors that the
waters were just as unpleasing to taste and smell,
and inferentially as efficacious, as those of
Harrogate itself. Cropper was both proprietor
of the new baths and keeper of the inn, some-
what grandiloquently described as the " principal
house for the reception of company." The
little shop seen built out from the old " Four
Crosses " was a chemist's, added at that hopeful
time. But the Willoughby Spa, although so
conveniently situated on the great road, never
attracted much custom, and is now quite forgot.
The chemist gave up in despair, and his shop
was in use as a bar-parlour at the last : the old
drug draAvers, with their abbreviated Latin
labels, remaining until the house was pulled
down.

Willoughby legends still linger. They tell
even yet, of the cross that stood here in the
seventeenth century, and of Cromwell's soldiery,
retreating from Edge Hill, tying a rope round

248 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

the shaft to pull it down, only being dissuaded
bv the vicar, who diverted their attention with
a foaming beer-jug. It is gone now, however,
but the date of its disappearance is uncertain.
Gone too are the seventeen hundred acres of
common land that once belonged to the parish;
but their fate is a matter of precise information.
They were enclosed in 1758 and the plunder
divided, as by law enacted.

There was once a " New Inn " between
Willoughby and Dunchurch, but it no longer
tempts the wayfarer; just as there was a toll-
gate at Woolscot, not far beyond, that no longer
takes tolls. The toll-house remains, as do
certain legends of the ways of Rugby boys with
the pikeman ; boys and man alike long since
ferried across the inky Styx by the grim
boatmen.

Pikemen acquired a preternaturally acute
memory for faces. It is an acquirement that,
with the smile of recognition which costs
nothing, makes princes more popular and
beloved than the exercise of the most austere
virtues. Not that pikemen commonly smiled.
Suspicion and malevolence sat squarely on their
countenances, and when a something that might
by an effort be construed as a smile contorted
their countenances, it was like that of an
alligator who perceives a fine fat nigger within
reach of his jaws. A pikeman who took toll
of even a thousand persons in the course of a
day, might safely be counted upon to recognise

A TOLL-GATE STORY 249

each on his return and to pass him without the
formality of halting to show the ticket issued
in the morning ; hut let one who had not
already paid toll that day attempt to pass with
the customary nod of the returning traveller,
franked through by his morning's payment,
and he was certain to be stopped and asked
for his ticket. Those were the occasions when
the pikeman smiled in his most hateful manner.
The only places where this cold-blooded grin of
triumph may nowadays be seen off the melo-
dramatic stage, are the Old Bailey and other
criminal courts ; when prosecuting counsel have
forged the last link in a chain of conviction.

It was at Woolscot toll-gate that the pike-
man 011 one occasion was paid twice in one
day for a gig. Tom Pinner, a well-known
coachman who afterwards kept the " Five
Ways " tavern at Birmingham, was once visited
at Dunchurch by some friends who set out early
from Dav entry. They had a pleasant day and
wound up with dinner. The feast was good,
the wines potent, and the guests slept heavily.
As they lay thus, the jocular Pinner blacked
their faces, and when they had revived a little
started them home. When the gig drew up
in the flickering light of the toll-gate, they of
course could not find their tickets, and the
pikeman insisted on toll being paid : he was
quite sure no black men had passed that

day!

* Passing over the streamlet spanned by Rains

25o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Bridge, which is probahly the " stone bridge "
referred to by Ogilby in 1075, as situated at
the end of the twelve furlongs' length of
"Dunchurch Lane, bad way," the exquisite
half-mile avenue of majestic elms leading along
a gently curving road into Dunchurch is
entered. Branches and thick foliage meet
overhead and realise the oft-met similitude
drawn between cathedral aisles and avenues
such as this.

XXXVIII

DUNCHURCH and the surrounding Dunsmore—
at this time tamed somewhat from its ancient
Avildness and tickled into productiveness and
smiling fertility by plough and harrow- -were
associated, close upon three hundred years ago,
with a conspiracy that might well, had it been
successful, have added such a page to England's
story whose likeness for horror and ferocity it
would perhaps be impossible to match. Dun-
church, in short, has a scenic part in the
" Gunpowder Treason and Plot," that came near
to blowing up King, Lords, and Commons, in
Parliament assembled, on the famous Fifth of
November, 1605. "To blow the Scottish beggars
back to their native mountains " was Guy
Fawkes' savagely humorous explanation of the

GUNPOWDER TREASON AND PLOT 251

plot, when asked its object by a Scottish noble-
man ; but its real aim was the avenging of
Roman Catholic wrongs and disabilities upon
James I., and the Protestants. We have already
seen the home of Robert Catesby, the true and
original begetter of the plot : and here, at
Dunchurch, was to be assembled a great
gathering of Roman Catholic noblemen and
gentlemen, to take part in a rising to folloAv
upon the success of the blow to be struck in
London. Those were times when assemblages
of any kind were looked upon with suspicion,
and so it was given out that the great prepara-
tions being made along the road from London.
in providing relays of horses at every stage,
were in connection with an elaborate hunting-
party on Dunsmore, to which the squire of
Ashby St. Ledgers had bidden the whole
country-side. Never doubting the success of
their design to blow Parliament sky-high,
Catesby with three of his fellow-conspirators,
Percy, and John and Christopher Wright, left
London for Dunchurch on the eve of the fatal
Fifth. Pawkes, fanatically courageous, was
in his cellar, under the Parliament House : the
sinister figure that close upon three hundred
anniversary "Guy Pawkes Days" and innumer-
able ludicrous " guys " have not wholly succeeded
in robbing of its dramatic force. There he
lurked : booted and spurred, slouch-hatted and
cloaked; slow-matches in his pocket, and a
dark -lantern behind the door.

25 2 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

Two others of the conspirators remained in
town, to watch the success of the dark design.
They were Ambrose Rookwood and Thomas
Winter. But as the midnight of November 4th,
sounded from the clocks of London and ushered
in the opening hour of the Fifth, Fawkes Avas
arrested in his hiding-place, and the scheme
wrecked. Instantly, as though by magic, the
rumours of some calamity narrowly averted,
pervaded London, and warned Rook wood and
Winter to fly. Had they trusted to the staunch-
ness of Fawkes they and the others would have
been safe enough, for that unwilling sponsor
of all subsequent "guys" was as secret as the
grave, and even under torture made no disclosures
until by their own later acts the conspirators
had rendered concealment useless. But, panic-
stricken, Rookwood and Winter left London
behind in the forenoon ; Winter for hiding in
Worcestershire, Rookwood to overtake and warn
Catesby and his companions on the Holyhead
Road. He came up with them at Little
BriekhUl and with laboured breath — for he
had ridden headlong — told the tale of how the
plot had been discovered. They wasted no time
in discussion. If they had hasted before, they
journeyed frantically now. By six o'clock,
riding through a day of November rain, they
had gained Ashby St. Ledgers, casting away
their heavy cloaks as they went, together with
aught else that might hinder their mad flight.
Seventy-eight miles in seven hours was a mar-

THE "LION" INN 253

vellous ride in those times, and under such
conditions. Perhaps some modern cyclist, eager
to draw a parallel, will essay the feat under
like meteorological conditions.

That evening, after wild and gloomy con-
ference at Ashby, they set out for Dunchurch,
making for the "Lion" inn, the head-quart <M-S
of the pretended hunting-party, where the young
and handsome Sir Everard Digby was in ex-
pectation of hearing other news than that
which burst upon him when the exhausted and
dispirited band drew rein before the old gabled
house in the stormy night. The story of their
further flight, of how Catesby and Percy died
together in the fighting at Holbeach House, does
not concern us here, but the old house does.
An inn no longer, it still stands, as a farm-
house, in midst of Dunchurch. village : a long,
low, gabled building, with casement windows
and timbered and plastered front ; low-ceiled
and heavily raftered rooms within. In the rear,
beyond the farm-yard, may even yet be seen
the remains of a moat, enclosing a wooded
patch of ground whose story is vague and
formless : relics, these, of times much more
ancient than those of the Gunpowder Plot. The
" Lion " was an old " pack-horse " inn for many
generations afterwards.

Dunchurch, in the old coaching days, was a
place of many and good inns : all of them, how-
ever, excelled by the " Dun Cow," almost the sole
remaining member of the herd of " White Lions,"

254 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

"Red Lions," "Blue Boars," "Green Men,"
and such-like zoological curiosities that once
thronged it. There was an excellent reason for
such wealth of accommodation, for the village
was situated not only on the Holyhead Road,
hut at the intersection of it by the Oxford and
Leicester Road, along which plied a goodly
throng of traffic. On that road lies Rugby,
three miles away, and along it went, among
other forgotten conveyances, the " Regulator "
—"young gents calls it the i Pig and Whistle,' '
remarked the guard of the coach that conveyed
vomiff Tom Brown from London to Dunchurch.

•7

Rugby and its famous school have made a
vast difference to this village, now postally
" Dunchurch, near Rugby," but formerly the
post-town whence the once insignificant village
of Rugby — Rugby-under-Dunchurch was served.

The "Dun Cow," survivor and representative
of the jolly days of old, takes its name from
the mythical monster of a cow slain, according
to confused and contradictory legends, upon
Dunsmore by the almost equally mythical Guy
of Warwick.

Steadfastly regarding the old inn, and with
its back turned upon the church, the white
marble effigy of "the Right Honble. Lord John
Douglas Montagu Douglas Scott " cuts a
ludicrous figure in the centre of the village.
The work of an Associate of the Royal Academy,
it simply serves to point to what depths the art
of sculpture had descended in the early Sixties,

A GROTESQUE STATUE 257

when it was wrought. The inscription states
that Lord Douglas Scott died in 1860, and that
the statue " was erected by his tenantry in
affectionate memory of him." The clothes worn
at that period give, of course, their own element
of grotesqueness to the statue; but the heavy
mass of fringed drapery that Lord John is
represented to he carrying under his arm has

LORD JOHN SCOTT'S STATUE.

occasioned the derisive query, "Who stole the
altar-cloth ? "

Dunchurch, besides being a sweetly pretty
place, rejoices in a number of minor curiosities.
The beautiful church has one, in the eccentric
monument of Thomas Xewcombe, King's Printer
in the reigns of Charles II., James II., and
William III. It is in the shape of folding-
doors of white marble. In the churchyard, too,
he who searches in the right place will discover
the epitaph of Daniel Goode, who died in 17">1,
VOL. i. 17

258 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

"A Ged year 25." The advice given is better
than the jingle to which it is set :—

To all young men

That me survive
Who dyed at less

Than twenty-five,
I do this Good

Advice declare :
That they live in

God's faith and fear.

Other relics are grouped well in sight of one
another. The battered village cross, for instance,
with a little marble slab fixed on its shaft, bear-
ing the arms of that Duchess of Buccleuch, who
in 1810 restored it; and the village "cage," or
lock-up, under a spreading elm, with the stocks
close adjoining, for the accommodation or
discomfort of two. The lock-up was for the
detention of such malefactors as might trouble
Dun church — the stocks for misdemeanants only.
An Act of 1606 imposed six hours of the stocks
and a fine of five shillings for drunkenness ; and
from that time forward and until the opening
years of the nineteenth century this peculiar
form of punishment was common throughout
England. His personal popularity, or the want
of it, made all the difference between misery
and comparative comfort to the misdemeanant
undergoing six hours in the stocks. The jolly
toper, overcome in his cups and sent to penance
by some Puritan maw-worm of a justice, had
both the moral and bodily support of his boon

DUNSMORE AVENUE 259

companions, and left durance probably more
drunken than he had been on the occasion that
led to his conviction: the sturdy vagrant, smiter,
rapscallion, or casual rogue who happened to be
in ill-odour with the village endured bitter
things. Jibes, stones, cabbage-stalks, ancient
eggs, and dead dogs and cats, deceased weeks
before, were hurled at the wretch, who was
lucky if he had not received severe personal
injuries before his time was up, and the beadle
or the parish constable came to release him.

XXXIX

IT would be difficult nowadays to discover
any one to agree with Pennant, the antiquary,
who in 1782 could find it possible to write of
the superbly wooded road across Dunsmore Heath
as a "tedious avenue of elms and firs." The
adjective is altogether indefensible. Six miles of
smooth and level highway, bordered here by noble
pines, and there by equally noble elms, invite the
traveller to linger by the roadside from Dun-
church to Hyton-on-Dunsmore. It is a stretch
of country not only beautiful but interesting,
alike for its history and traditions. The Heath,
long since enclosed and under cultivation^ but
once the haunt of fabled monsters, and, at a
later period, of desperate highwaymen, is a level

260

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

tract of land dotted with villages that all add
to their names the title of " upon-Dunsmore,"
as a kind of terrific dignity. Through the midst
of this sometime wilderness goes the high-road,
heautiful always, hut singularly lovely in the
eyes of the traveller who, advancing in a north-
westerly direction, sees the setting sun glaring
redly between the wizard arms of the pines.

DUNSMORE AVENUE.

Many of those exquisite trees are of great age.
The avenue, in fact— the Ong Avenue, as it was
originally called— was planted in 1740, by John,
second Duke of Montague. Some of the firs
have decayed, but happily their places will be
taken in due course by the saplings planted of
late years. The elms are, most of them, in
worse case, and are being generally cut down

DUNSMORE 261

to half their height hy cautious road surveyors.
The elm, that, without warning, rots at the
heart and collapses in a moment, is the most
treacherous of trees ; and, some day, those that
are left here will suddenly fall and be the
death of the unhappy cyclist, farmer, or tramp
who happens to be passing at the time.

It was here, in 1686, that Jonathan Simpson
robbed Lord Delamere of 350 guineas, and "in-
numerable drovers, pedlars, and market-people,"
all the way to Barnet. Jonathan was executed
the followed September, aged thirty-two.

Two famous posting-houses once stood beside
this lonely road : the " Blue Boar " and the
" Black Dog." Both have retired into private
life. The old "Blue Boar," still giving the
name of " Blue Boar Corner " to the cross-roads,
two miles out from Dunchurch, is a square
building of white-painted brick, and stands on
the left hand, with a garden where the coach-
drive used to be. It must have been especially
welcome to travellers in the dreadful snowstorm
of December, 1836, when no fewer than seven-
teen coaches were snowed up on the Heath,
near a spot named, appropriately enough, " Cold
Comfort."

This also was the " lonely spot, with trees on
either side for six miles," where the "Eclipse"
coach, on its way from Birmingham to London,
was overpowered by convicts on a day in Novem-
ber, 1829. It seems that, on the day before this
occurrence, the deputy-governor of Chester Gaol

262 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

and two warders, in charge of twelve convicts,
chained and locked together in twos by padlocks,
had set out from Birkenhead for London by the
" Albion " coach, and that during the confusion
of an accident at Walsall, when the deputy-
governor was killed and the coachman and one
of the warders seriously injured, one of the
prisoners, more enterprising than his fellows,
managed to steal the master-key from the dead
official's body, and, with his fellows, plotted an
escape from the long journey to Botany Bay.
Brought from Walsall to Birmingham by another
coach, they were lodged for the night in Moor
Street prison, and the following morning, still
chained together, placed on the " Eclipse " coach
for London, in charge of the remaining warder
and another from Birmingham. This consign-
ment of gaolbirds, together with their guardians,
formed the sole passengers by the " Eclipse." In
the " lonely spot " aforesaid four of the convicts,
having unlocked their fetters, rose suddenly up,
seized the coachman and guard, and stopped the
coach, while others overpowered their custodians.
They explained that they had no wish to harm
any one, but were determined at all costs to
make a dash for liberty ; and, securing coachman,
guard, and the bewildered warders with ropes
and straps, unharnessed the horses, and, mounting
them, galloped across country. Coming upon a
roadside blacksmith's forge, they compelled the
smith to unloose the remaining portion of their
fetters, and then disappeared. All are said to

A COACHING]' TRAGEDY 263

have afterwards been recaptured, with the excep-
tion of two "gentlemen" forgers, who wciv
never again heard of.

.A grossly incorrect account of this happening
is to he found in the pages of Colonel Birch-
Eeynardson's Doicn the Road. The coachman
and guard of the "Eclipse" were Robert Hassall
and Peck. Hassall ended his days as a hopeless
lunatic. His affliction was caused by witnessing
the sudden death of his colleague and friend at
Coventry. While the horses were being changed
at that city, Peck busied himself on the roof of
the coach, in unstrapping some luggage. The
strap broke, and the unfortunate man fell back-
wards on to the pavement, dashing his skull to
pieces. Hassall, who was seated on the box,
fainted, and, on regaining consciousness, became
a raving lunatic.

A curious feature of the milestones across
Dunsmore, a feature not met with elsewhere,
is their being cut into the shape of two or
more steps, resembling " louping-on " stones, or
" upping-blocks," for the convenience of horse-
men.

XL

IT is here, five miles and a half from Dunchurch,
that the famous " Knightlow Cross", stands.
Just past a group of cottages, and an inn

264 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

called Frog Hall, that mark the neighbourhood
of Stretton-upon-Dunsmore, and where Knight-
low Hill begins to tip downwards, this mysterious
relic is found, in a meadow. The so-called
" Knightlow Cross " is a square block of red
sandstone, standing on the summit of a pre-

KNIGHTLOW CROSS.

historic grassy tumulus. It measures thirty
inches square, and has a deep square cavity
sunk in it. Prom its appearance, the stone
may once have been the socket of a Avayside or
boundary cross, possibly marking the limits of
the parish of Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, extending

" WROTH-MONEY

265

thus far. Here, from time immemorial, on the
morning of St. Martin's Day, November llth,
has heen collected the "wroth-money" annuallv
due to the Lord of the Manor of Knightlow
Hundred : a district comprising some twenty-
eight villages. These tributary communities
pay sums ranging from one penny to two
shillings and threepence-halfpenny each, with
the exception of Ryton, which pays nothing.
The whole amounts to nine shillings and three-
pence-halfpenny, the forfeit for non-payment in
each case being either one pound for every penny
not forthcoming, or " a white bull with pink nose
and ears." This tribute is said to be paid for
the privilege of using certain roads, but it
probably was originally " rother money," or fees
payable in very ancient days to the Lord of
Manor for the privilege of grazing cattle and
swine in the great forests that then overspread
the district, and for having all such animals
officially branded by the Lord's verderer ; strange
and unmarked beasts being liable to confiscation.
At the beginning of last century the "Wroth"
Money " custom was discontinued, but revived
after some years. The Duke of Buccleuch, the
present Lord of the Manor, upholds what the
villagers call " the old charter " ; and still with
every recurring Martinmas, at the shivery hour
of sunrise, the Steward of the Manor attends
and duly checks the coins thrown into the
hollow by the representatives of the subject
parishes. The tribute, and perhaps a good deal

266 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

more, is expended in drinks of rum and milk
for the party, and breakfast at the " Oak," at
Stretton. The " initiation of the colts " is a
humorous contribution levied upon those who
have never before been present.

Of the four fir-trees that once guarded the
tumulus, locally supposed to mark the spot
where four knights were buried, only one now
remains ; sycamore saplings have taken the
places of the others.

Through R/yton-upon-Dunsmore, and past
pretty Willenhall, with the Warwickshire Avon
crossing under the road and seven tall poplars
fringing it, Coventry is reached, over Whitley
Common, once a lonely spot, horrific by reason
of being Coventry's place of execution. Old
maps give the picture of a structure like a
football goal at this point, ominously permanent,
and labelled " Gallows." It was not until shortly
after 1831, when Mary Anne Higgins was
hanged here for poisoning her uncle, that
Whitley Common lost its old notoriety. Even
so, the present directions to the stranger enquiring
the way into Coventry are scarcely cheerful, the
cemetery being the guiding landmark. Beyond
that evidence of the populous nature of Coventry,
commence the outskirts of that city; the road
still with a kind of a furtive back door approach,
with many twists and turns and narrow passes
through picturesque slums as far as the very
centre of the place. The entrance from London,
in fact, remains the most difficult and crooked

COVENTRY'S LANES 267

of any town all the way to Holy head, and this
although it stands as an improvement upon
what had heen before 1827, when Telford cut
a new length of road here. The only good
entrance to Coventry is from the railway station
and along Hertford Street, an improvement
made in 1812 in place of Greyfriars Lane ;
a steep, narrow, and cobhle-stoned way that was
once the only road in that direction.

Coventry's lanes possessing every possible
disability and inconvenience from the coach-
man's point of view, it was, when the question
of reforming the Holyhead Road was being
debated, seriously proposed that a new route
should be adopted, avoiding the city altogether.
The proposition failed, and resulted in a com-
promise that did little real good, even though
it cost £11,000. As an indignant writer of
that period remarks: "Individual interest was
allowed to have its weight, and the traveller is
still jolted through the long and narrow streets,
uttering imprecations at every yard of his
progress." It is a thrilling picture thus pre-
sented to the imagination, the traveller cursing
as he goes, and recalls Swift's proposition for a
Swearers' Bank, enriched by funded damns. If
he could have estimated a good income from
the number of good, hearty oaths uttered in one
day at a little Connaught fair, riches surely
beyond the dreams of avarice would have
accrued to a branch of the Bank at Coventry.

These "private interests" were, of course,

268 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

those of the innkeepers and the tradesmen, and
they secured the continuance of the old route
into the city, while permitting the not so urgent
alteration of the exit toward Birmingham, where
no trade would be disturbed by making what
is now the so-called " Holy head Road," and
deserting the " Old Allesley Road."

The maze of Much Park Street, Earl Street,
and High Street, brings one to the centre of
Coventry at the intersection of that last-named
thoroughfare with Hertford Street, Broadgate,
and Smithford Street, and directly opposite the
" King's Head," once a famous old coaching
inn, but rebuilt these later years. The great
Duke of Wellington breakfasted in the old
house, November 28th, 1823, on returning from
a shooting party at Beaudesert, the Stafford-
shire seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, with
whom he had been at shooting parties of a
very different character, in the Peninsula and
at Waterloo.

XLI

ONE sees the city perhaps to best advantage
from the Warwick road, or from the rising
ground at Stivichall, close by. There below
lies Coventry, the famous trinity whence comes
the familiar name of the City of the Three

COVENTRY SPIRES

269

Spires, silhouetted against the calm evening
sky. The view recalls that eloquent passage
where Ruskin, speaking with enthusiasm of
the old coaching age that he had known, paints
the joy of the traveller " who from the long-
hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the
causeway, saw for the first time the towers of

THE THREE SPIRES.

some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset,
and came to his appointed inn after " hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which
the rush of the arrival in the railway station
is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent."

Those three spires still advise the stranger,
to whose ears bv some strange chance the fame

2 7o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

of ancient Coventry has not come, that ho is
indeed about to enter, not merely the great
home of the cycle-making industry, hut a city
that has for centuries been famous for its
religious houses, and was indeed a place notable
in this wise before ever the Battle of Hastings
was fought, to bring England under a Norman
domination. Its very name, whence the present
form has been evolved, is held by some to
have been originally " Conventre," or Convent
Town, and it came in after years to own, not
three, but seven spires. The other four went
down in the days of spoliation that came in
with Harry VIII.

Earl Leofric, the pious founder of the original
Greyfriars monastery around whose religious
buildings secular Coventry first arose, must
have been a hard man, if legends tell truth,
for his grinding taxation aroused the pity of
his Countess, the immortal Godiva. Those must
have been no slight hardships that could have
earned the compassion of a Saxon gentlewoman,
whose times and training alike could only
have made her look upon the miseries of the
lower orders as incidental to their lot. They
were chiefly churls ; men and women of
bondage, and mere chattels, who had, it is true
the accidental advantages of speech and a
modicum of understanding; but, for the rest,
were of no account.

Tennyson has " shaped the city's ancient
legend " into verse, and reveals the circum-

TENNYSON'S " GODIVA " 271

stances that led to his doing so, in the opening
lines :—

I waited for the train at Coventry ;

I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge.

Waiting for a railway train is so unpromising
a prelude to a mediaeval legend that at the
first blush a processional " train " is understood,
and certainly a practical man would wait on
the platform, rather than the bridge, for the
train to London or Birmingham But Tennyson
actually did allude to the railway, and if he
shaped the legend while he waited, the train
must have been very late, for the poem is a
long one. These unpromising circumstances
perhaps account for its unequal merit, and for
the figure of fun that Leofric, "the grim Earl,"
is unintentionally made to represent, with " his
beard a foot before him and his hair a yard
behind." It is a tripping music-hall line, and
the words those of a comic song. Not even a
Duke — nay, nor a King — in these days of vulgar
boys and popular songs, could dare defy
the current prejudice in favour of a close
crop, and so the Tennysonian Leofric suHVrs
accordingly.

Leofric, so says the ancient legend, consented
to remove the tax if his Countess would ride
unclothed through the streets of Coventry.
This, as he thought it a thing impossible for
her to do, was his grimly humorous way of
refusing to satisfy her compassionate pleadings.

272 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

But she took him at his word, and thus,
"clothed on with chastity/' rode the length
of the toivn, her hair, we are told, in compe-
tition with Leofric's own yard -length, falling
ahout her in golden masses, shielding her
person from the shameless sun.

Coventry that day was a city of the dead.
None stirred, or might stir, out of doors while
the pious Godiva rode her enfranchising pilgrim-
age, and all faces were turned from curtained
and shuttered windows. All, that is to say,
save one. A graceless tailor, whose name has
been handed down to us as "Peeping Tom,"
looked out from a hole he had bored in a
shutter, and we are asked to believe that he
was blinded by the wrath of Heaven for his
presumption. "The story of Peeping Tom is
well known," says Wigstead, writing in 1797 ;
adding, " This effigy is now to be seen next door
to the ' King's Head ' inn, said to be the very
house from whence he attempted to gratify his
curiosity." Peeping Tom, in fact, is a personage
whom Coventry will not willingly resign to
oblivion. Representations of that " low churl,
compact of thankless earth," have been numerous
in the city. Not so long since there were three,
all spying from their several positions down
upon the streets, and certainly the one Wigstead
mentions is still in evidence, not now " next
door" to the "King's Head," but built into a
blank window of that rebuilt hostelry. If
tailors dressed thus in Saxon days, they must

PEEPING TOM 273

have been gorgeous persons. But the effigy,
looking like that of an Admiral from some
comic opera, is not older than a century and
a half, and is perhaps a portion of a figure
carried in the Godiva processions that at intervals

PEEPING TOM.

have paraded Coventry's streets for many
years past. They do so now, but whether the
obvious wig and the pink silk tights of the
music-hall woman, representing Godiva, commend
themselves as realising the old legend, is a
matter of individual taste.

VOL. i. 18

2 74 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

To tell Coventry's long story is not the pur-
port of these pages. Much of it is inseparable
from the history of England. History in that
more spacious sort was making when, in the
reign of Richard II., the Dukes of Hereford
and Norfolk fought their duel on Gosford
Green, in 1398. Richard banished both: Norfolk
for life and Hereford for ten years ; but Hereford
was back within a year and proclaimed King,
and Richard deposed and murdered in the
dungeons of Pontefract.

A hundred years later, Coventry's beautiful
hospitals and the noble St. Mary's Hall, the
home of the great trading guilds, began to rise.
They remain, in greater or less preservation,
until the present time ; and perhaps there is
nothing in the kingdom to surpass the exquisite
beauty of Ford's Hospital — an almshouse built
in 1529, whose tiny courtyard of traceried wood-
work should for its delicacy be under the
protection of a glass case. Six years after Ford's
beautiful almshouse was built, the dissolution of
the monasteries took place throughout the land ;
and Coventry, fostered by the great religious
houses of the Whitefriars and the Greyfriars in
its midst, shared in the ruin that befel them.
Its population fell from 15,000 to 3,000 in a
few years. Yet it was in this melancholy period
that the great " Coventry Cross " arose. It was,
however, not a building erected by the city, but
the gift of one of its sons, who could find no
other way of employing his superfluous wealth.

FORD'S HOSPITAL.

"SENT TO COVENTRY" 277

It rose in all the majesty of carved pinnacles,
tabernacled statuary, and gilded bannerets, in
the market-place of Cross Cheaping : a sight to
dazzle the eyes of all who beheld it. The Cross
was repaired and re-gilded in 1669; but from
that time, although the city was prosperous
again, it fell into decay and was removed in 1771.
Coventry is a city by ancient right of the
time when there were Bishops of Coventry and
Lichfield. The style of the See was afterwards
reversed, and the scanty ruins of Coventry's
Abbey Church or Cathedral alone tell of that
ancient dignity. The encircling walls, too, of
Coventry are gone. They kept out many unwel-
come visitors in their existence of three hundred
years, and behind them the citizens withstood
the Royalists of 1642 with such effect that the
memory of it rankled twenty years later, when
the Restoration brought the Stuarts back again,
and Charles II. ordered the fortifications to
be destroyed. It was to the Civil War that
the expression of " sending to Coventry " any
objectionable person owes its origin. Every one
knows that this means the social ostracism—
the " cutting " — of those thus punished ; but its
original meaning is not so commonly understood.
It derives from Birmingham, where the towns-
people took up a hostile attitude towards the
Royalists, overwhelming scattered parties and
sending them prisoners to Coventry. A very
excellent reason for not keeping them at Bir-
mingham was that the town had no defences

2?8 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

and no prisons, while Coventry was a fortress-city
and had both.

" True as Coventry blue " would, in view of
this old attitude, seem a saying ill-applied to
a place of Puritan politics ; but it referred to a
dye then used here. When Ogilby came to
Coventry in the compilation of his great road-
book, he noted its position " on the little river
Sherborne, whose water is peculiar for the Blue
Dye." Even then, it will be seen, the city was
beginning to recover from the decay of a hundred
vears before.

XLII

ROMANCE did not leave Coventry with the passing
of mediaeval days. It merely changed its aspect;
doffed the " armour bright " the romancists love
to tell of, and went clad instead in russet ; put
away helm and pike and broadsword, and sat
the livelong day at the loom ; changed indeed
the Romance of Warfare for that of Industry,
so that it was possible for old travellers to
remark " the noise of the looms assails the
passengers' ears in every direction." Coming in
later years upon its discarded old warlike panoply
of steel, Coventry has fashioned it anew, in the
form of bicycles, for the needs of a peaceful age.

THE BICYCLE 2?9

Tennyson, in Godiva, writing —

We, the latest seed of Time,
New men, that in the flying of a wheel
Cry down the past,

seems to foreshadow the bicycle, but the early
period at which that poem was produced forbids
any such allusion. We must needs, therefore,
look upon those lines as prophetic, especially
since, regarded in any other way, the phrase
" the flying of a wheel " appears meaningless.
But, even in the light of a prophetic inspiration,
is not the cut at the "new .men" who "cry
down the past " an ill description of the typical
cyclist, who uses his flying wheel as a means of
communing with Nature and antiquity P

Coventry became earnestly industrial when
jousts ceased; and its industries, in their rise
and fall, have had their own romance. There
were, of course, Coventry makers of woollens ;
pinners and needlers ; girdlers, loriners, and
many other tradespeople in the days of chivalry ;
but it was only in modern times that the in-
dustries of silk-weaving and dyeing, ribbon-
making and watch-making arose, to give a
fugitive prosperity to the place before the cycle
industry came to confer upon it a greater boon.
Those trades have gone elsewhere ; but ask even
the most ignorant for what Coventry is famous
nowadays, and you get for answer " cycle
manufacturing." Yet before 18G9 that industry
was unborn, and the trade of Coventry at the

280 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

lowest ebb. Silk-weaving and ribbon-making
had then been dealt a deadly blow by the removal
of the duty from foreign goods of that nature,
and French ribbons and silks of new designs, and
at low prices, poured in. Coventry weavers and
dyers were ruined. At the same time, cheap
Swiss watches had cut out the local watch-,
making trade, so that work grew scarce and
starvation presently began to stalk the streets.
That was a dark hour in Coventry's modern
chapter of romance, an hour brightened by the
efforts of one man in particular — James Marriott
—to establish a new industry. Those were the
first days of a new invention — the sewing machine
— and Marriott thought he saw means of setting
afoot a great manufacture of that labour-saving
device. He contributed £500 to the formation of
a business, and was joined by others, and together
they establised the Coventry Sewing Machine
Company, an enterprise that failed to realise
the hopes centred in it. But in that failure,
unknown to those gallant pioneers, lay the seed
of success. Their plant was lying idle, and
might have been dispersed but for a happy
providence : the appearance in Prance of the
velocipede.

The velocipede was by no means the first
attempt of the kind to aid locomotion on high-
ways. Indeed, in Boswell's Life of Johnson
there may be found a reference, under date of
1769, to a " new-invented machine " that went
without horses. A man sat in it and turned a

THE "HOBBY HORSE" 281

handle, which worked a spring, which drove
the machine forward. The criticism Johnson
levelled against this device was one that
will prohahly appeal powerfully to all cyclists
who have stored up in their memories horrid
experiences of hill-climbing and head -winds.
" What is gained," said the learned Doctor, " is
the man has the choice whether he Avill move
himself alone, or himself and the machine too."
Nothing came of that invention, and it was not
until 1816 that the " Hohhy Horse," as it after-
wards became known, was devised in Paris by a
M. Niepce He named it a " Celeripede." This
machine, improved by a Baron von Drais, of
Mannheim, does not appear to have found its
way to England until the autumn of 1818, when
a coach-maker of Long Acre, one Dennis Johnson
by name, introduced it as a "Pedestrian Curricle."
From 1819 to 1830 this machine -the popularly-
named "Hobby Horse" — enjoyed a certain favour,
although on country roads it could but seldom
have been seen, for no one could ride it twenty
miles and remain in an able-bodied condition.
Its mere weight was appalling, constructed as it
was of two heavy wooden wheels shod witli iron,
and held together by a stout bar of timber.
For saddle, the rider had a cushion, and leant
his chest against another cushion, supported by
ironwork. Bestriding this fearsome contrivance.
the adventurous rider's feet easily reached the
ground. As the Hobby Horse had no cranks
or pedals, the method of propulsion was that

2g2 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

of running in this straddling position until a
sufficient impetus had been gained, when the
lumbering machine would carry its owner a
short distance on the flat. It was, of course,
impossible to ride up even the slightest rise;
but, considering the momentum likely to be
accumulated by a mass of iron and wood,
scaling considerably over a hundredweight, the
pace down hill must have been furious enough.

By 1830 the Hobby Horse had disappeared,
and it was not until 1839-40 that the first
machine with cranks was invented by a Scots
blacksmith, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, who produced
a rear-driving dwarf bicycle that foreshadowed
the type now popular. Several machines of this
kind were made and sold by Macmillan, but
they did not attain a lasting vogue ; and it was
not until a French mechanic — one Pierre Lalle-
mont — in 1865 or 1866 designed the front-driving
velocipede in the workshops of Michaux & Cie,
of Paris, that the second era of cycling began.
It was this machine that Michaux exhibited at
the Paris Exhibition of 1867. It was seen either
then or the following year in Paris by Mr.
R. B. Turner, agent in that city for the Coventry
Sewing Machine Company. He, together with
Charles Spencer and John May all, junior, became
a pioneer of cycling in this country. In the
pages of the BRIGHTON Bo AD, details of their
first long-distance ride, February 17th, 1869,
may be found.

But Turner not only became an enthusiastic

THE "BONESHAKER" 2&3

cyclist: he drew the attention of his firm to
what at once proved to be a profitable manu-
facture, supplementing, and eventually taking the
place of, the declining sewing-machine business.
The style of the firm was altered to the
"Coventry Machinists Company," and "bone-
shakers," as Velocipedes were speedily nicknamed,
began to be turned out in considerable numbers.
The " boneshaker " was well named. It had a
solid iron frame, and wooden wheels with iron
tyres, and was only a degree less weighty than the
Hobby Horse itself, of ponderous memory. Its
front wheel was the larger, and was the driving-
wheel, fitted with "treadles," as pedals were then
named. The machine turned the scale at 93 Ib.

Thus, in 1869, the pastime of cycling and the
industry of cycle manufacture found a beginning
on these shores. In that year the actual word
" bicycle " was first introduced, to eventually
render " Velocipede " obsolete. When the first
syllable of " bicycle " and " bicycling " was
dropped is a more difficult matter to determine.
The present use grew gradually, as one by
one the different bicycling and tricycling clubs
sloughed off those cumbrous prefatory distinc-
tions, as unnecessary and unwieldy ; but certainly
the modern use was known by 1879, when the
'Cyclist was established, with the half -apologetic '
that may even yet be seen on its engraved title-
page. Two years earlier, when the l*/V//r//////
News was founded, the elision of the distinguish-
in^ syllable was evidently not foreseen.

284 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

In the years following the introduction of
the " honeshaker," this new industry prospered
and increased in an eminently solid way. Bone-
shaking was not a pastime for the many, and
it was not until the old " ordinary," as it is
still called, was introduced that the youth of
that period went bicycling in any great numbers.
The "ordinary," or high bicycle, long since
become extraordinary by supersession in favour of
the dwarf "safety," was gradually evolved through
the middle Seventies to 1880. It was probably
an early example of this build that so terribly
frightened the rustic in Punch, who, going home
in the dark, was scared by an " awful summat "
he declared to be "a man a-ridin' on nawthin'."

It was a graceful, albeit exceedingly dangerous
type, and from its height of fifty-eight inches
a rider surveyed the world as he went at a
lordly altitude. The reverse of that commanding
eminence was found when he was thrown : a
happening that recurred with remarkable fre-
quency and a nerve-shaking unexpectedness.
Little in the shape of ruts or stones was required
to upset the "ordinary," and few long rides were
ever made without a "spill." To be shot off
suddenly in mid-air was in fact so to be looked
for, that riders studied how to fall, and prac-
tised the art so well that, although involuntary
flights were many, serious injuries were few.
The height of this art or science was to fall
clear of the machine — an object attained, down
hill, by riding with the legs over the handle-

THE "OLD ORDINARY

285

bars, when, in the event of an accident, one fell
a greater or shorter distance, according to the
speed or the force of the shock.

The "ordinary" was at its height, in
measurement and popularity, in 1880, a year
that also marked the palmiest period of cycling

THE "OLD ORDINARY."

clubs. The cyclist of that era. made a brave
show. Arrayed in a tight-fitting uniform, that
in its frogged patrol- jacket and gauntlet gloves
aped military costume, and in its tight breeches
made the sudden strain of a fall the utter dis-
solution of those garments, his was a wonderful
figure as he wended his uncertain way, ga/iny;
from his point of vantage over the countryside.

286 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

But as his first youth waned, and his agility
with it, rendering the exercise of vaulting into
the saddle increasingly more of an enterprise,
the cyclist yearned for a less giddy height
than that of the " ordinary," and his growing
infirmities, more than any other consideration,
eventually brought about the modern geared-up,
rear-driving, dwarf bicycle the " safety " ; but
Time, the cynic, that has robbed the term
"ordinary" of its meaning, has brought about
many more fatal cycling accidents in these
" safety " days than occurred in the era of the
high bicycle.

XLIII

IT was the late J. K. Starley's "Rover" of
1885 that opened the way for cycling's modern
development. It was a design rightly claimed
to have " set the fashion to the world," and the
difference between it and patterns of the current
season is only in detail. Already, before Starley,
attempts had been made to produce a " safety,"
as shown by Lawson's patent of 1876 and his
" bicyclette " of 1880, together with the designs
by Shergold and Bate in 1876 and later, in
which 26- to 30-inch wheels, provided with gear,
were to do the work of the 56- and 58-inch

THE "SAFETY" 287

ungeared wheel. But none of these designs
attained any commercial success.

The " Rover " brought many thousands more
into the ranks of cyclists, and gave an added
prosperity to Coventry, but what has been called
the " great boom " was yet to come. A con-
tributory cause of that event, although ante-
dating it by some six years, was the introduction
of the pneumatic tyre. So long ago as 1845 a
pneumatic rubber tyre for carriages had been
invented by Thompson, and forgotten, and it was
not until 1888 that Mr. J. B. Dunlop designed
the first pattern of the tyre bearing his name.
Like many another epoch-making invention, its
importance was originally not so much as
guessed at, and it was only as a home-made
device for securing the easy running of his
children's cycles that it first came into being.
It began to be manufactured in 1889, and
certainly since 1891 pneumatic tyres for cycles
have been universal. They practically first
rendered it possible for ladies to adopt the
pastime, and first made cycling luxurious, rather
than necessarily an athletic exercise. The result
was the "boom" that began in the early
summer of 1895.

Suddenly, from being looked down upon by
all who pretended to any culture or social con-
sideration, cycling became fashionable. Cyclists,
who had cycled ever since the days when
Edmund Yates in the World, speaking for
Society, had bitterly called them "cads on

288 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

castors," smiled sardonically when they saw all
Mayt'air and St. James's cycling in Hyde or
Battersea Parks, and submitted to be knocked
down by wobbling novices — Earls and Countesses
— upon the road with an ill grace. It is a mad
world, and time brings strange revenges in it.

No one, least of all the cycle manufacturers
of Coventry, had any prevision of the great
" boom." In former years business had eased
off with the coming of summer. " Previously to
1895," said a representative of the trade, " business
was sound, and all the best houses did well,
but were more or less subject to a very dull
period, lasting from the beginning of August
until the end of November. This period began
slowly, and, reaching its dullest point about the
end of October, caused much distress among the
more improvident workers. There Avas no slack
time in 1895, and you know what '96 was"

Toil how they might through the twenty-four
hours, the factories of Coventry could not keep
pace with the demand. Orders came in quicker
than cycles were despatched, and every little
metal- working firm went into cycle-making,
while thousands upon thousands of mechanics
flocked into the " city of the boom." Any one
could find work and good wages in Coventry,
but the rush was so great that many could find
no lodgings, and payment was frequently offered
for shelter in the local workhouse, offers that, of
course, could not be entertained. In some cases
cycle manufacturers provided their new hands

THE "BOOM" AND Till- CRASH 2!§

with temporary accommodation in their works.
The population, numbering in 1SD1 58,50:5, rose
at once hy 10,000. To meet this influx, building
operations were feverishly begun, and street
upon street of entirely new suburbs began to
rise.

And for a time the "boom" continued.
Newer and immensely large factories were built,
on the strength of it, and during 1897 the
output of cycles rose to an extraordinary height.

It was the Company Promoter who killed
all this prosperity. Unscrupulous men, versed
in all the dark ways of the financial world,
found their opportunity in those palmy days,
and, purchasing and amalgamating, converted
prosperous private firms into unwieldy and over-
capitalised public companies. In the thick of
all this juggling with millions, and snatching of
commissions and vendors' profits, the bubble
burst, and an honourable and highly prosperous
industry was wrecked, and became a bye- word
and a reproach all the world over. The events
of 1898 make a painful retrospect. Noblemen
who bore ancient and honourable titles were
publicly accused as common touts and commission
agents engaged in hoodwinking the public, and
even ready, when opportunity ottered, to cheat
one another. The scandal struck the heaviest
blow to the House of Lords and hereditary
legislation that that House and that principle
of government have ever suffered.

The professional Company Promoter we have
VOL. i. 19

29o THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

had with us ever since Limited Liability
brought him into being, and bitter experience
during a generation and a half has enabled the
public to at last gain a just view of him and
his methods ; but the public, at that time, still
looked upon a nobleman as, almost of necessity,
a man of honour. The revelations that followed
this sudden crash dispelled that fond belief,
and poisoned confidence at its very spring-head.
The Society "boom" had already ended, and
the bursting of the financial bubble left the
once flourishing industry disorganised. Ever
since that unhappy year of 1898 Coventry has
witnessed a melancholy succession of failures,
and has seen factory after factory closed. Only
recently has cycle manufacturing begun to
recover from that staggering blow. Yet, apart
from such considerations as the waxing and
waning fortunes of financiers, or of manu-
facturers and their hirelings among professional
racing cyclists, cycling as a pastime has been
steadily progressive. Where one person rode a
" bone-shaker," twenty bestrode the high bicycle ;
and, nowadays, for every twenty who perched on
the perilous eminence of the old " ordinary,"
two hundred are found upon the modern cycle.
The industry is thus endowed with elasticity and
strong recuperative powers, so that in this saner
period Coventry is doing a great deal more than
merely holding its own, even though many other
towns have secured a share in the business of
cycle production.

THE MOTOR-CAR 291

Here, then, for the present, ends Coventry's
romance. There be those who look fonvard to
a new and stirring chapter of it, in a wished-
for manufacture of motor-cars ; but the future
lies on the knees of the gods, to order as they
will.

XLIV

COACHING history at Coventry begins in
1658, with the establishment of a stage-coach
between London, Lichfield, and Chester. This
pioneer, starting from the " George " Inn,
Holborn Bridge, reached Coventry in three
days, or professed to do so. Suspicions that
this was only a profession, not often put into
practice, are aroused by the title of a new
coach, put on the road in 1739. This was the
"London, Birmingham, and Lichfield Flying
Coach," that took just the same time to reach
Coventry, and yet arrogated the term " flying "
to itself, as a superior recommendation above
all earlier conveyances. The fare between
London and Coventry was 25s. In 1773 a
wonderful thing happened, for in that year the
"Coventry Flying Machine" winged its way in
one day. Later coaches belong to the road in
general, and Coventry Avas but an incident
on the Avay ; but there Avere many short

292 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

distances covered by local coaches, such as the
"Peeping Tom" and the "Manchester Hero,"
between this and Manchester, and numerous
others to Birmingham, Lichfield, WarAvick,
Leamington, Cheltenham, and Stratford-on-Avon.
A " Little Wonder " Coventry and Birmingham
stage ran in the last years of coaching. Tom
Pinner, its driver, was an expert with the whip,
and could snatch the pipe out of a wayfarer's
mouth with it, and not touch him, as he drove
along. One quite expects, in reading Tom
Pinner's career, to light upon the record of one
of the victims of these little pleasantries waiting
for their author and pounding him into a jelly ;
but no one ever seems to have had sufficient
spirit.

Besides the " King's Arms," there were the
"Queen's Head," the "Bull," and the "White
Bear " prominent among Coventry inns. The
" Bull " stood where the Barracks are now
situated, in Smithford Street, The "White
Bear," in High Street, changed its sign in 1811
to the " Craven Arms " ; a name it still retains.
rlhe change was made out of compliment to the
third Earl of Craven, who had then returned
to live at Combe Abbey, a family seat near
Coventry that had long been closed. His
residence there brought much custom to the
city and to the house.

The old inn remains just as it was in coach-
ing days. There are the long yard, with stables
of Elizabethan date, and the solid red-brick

THE "LAST POSTBOY

293

portions of the house, rebuilt in the time
when George III. was King, facing the
narrow passage. Fronting on the street, the
building is of old white-painted plaster. It
was in front of the " Craven Arms " that the
fatal accident, already recounted, to Tom Peck,
the guard of the " Eclipse " coach, happened.
Opposite was one of the many coach offices ;
the scene, perhaps, of that story of the little
girl being booked over-night at half-price, as
the custom was. Her elder sister took the seat
in the morning, when the book-keeper remarked
to her mother, "Your little girl has grown
in the night."

One of the last relics of old times went,
unhonoured, in 1872, when the turnpike-gates
on either side of Coventry were abolished ; and
a long-enduring link was broken when Thomas
Clarke died, in Coventry Hospital, April, 1899.
Clarke was, according to the newspapers
chronicling the event, the " oldest postboy in
England." Not a few, also, proclaimed him to
be "the last"; but last postboys have been
dying in considerable numbers since then, and
modest paragraphs in the daily papers still
appear, now and again, recording the passing
of another. The Last Postboy, indeed, is not
yet, and those paragraphs are not uncommonly
followed by letters from survivors, who are
always found to write and claim the honour for
themselves. They are as inexhaustible as the
widoAv's cruise of oil, pieces of the True Cross,

294 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

or relics of the saints in Roman Catholic
churches. When the traveller of experience
has seen the skull of St. Jerome in one place,
he is not surprised to be shown another some-
where else, for he has already seen five thigh
bones of some other saint at different shrines,
and knows that, if he perseveres, he will
probably find some more. Just in the same
way, there is always another postboy when the
last has died. They were — or are, we must
perhaps say — a long-lived race, all bone and
gristle ; without a spare ounce of flesh for
disease to fasten upon, and, inured for long
years to hard work in all weathers, little affected
in old age by the chills and bitter winds that
carry off the less hardy among elderly folks.
The coachman was of another kind. He sat on
his box all the time, and grew fat in fingering
the ribbons ; while the postboy bumped his
flesh away on horseback. Did any one ever see
a fat postboy? And was it not the exception
for a coachman to be lean? His fatness long
since carried off the last coachman of the old
days, but the

Three jolly postboys, drinking at the Dragon,

who, in the words of the old chorus, " determined
to finish off the flagon," are probably still
living, in a hale and lean old age, although
coaches, and chaises, and all the old life of the
road have gone, and the " Dragon " itself no
longer looks down the dusty highway.

MR. PICKWICK AT COVENTRY 297

Sixty years before, Clarke liad seen the
railway come to Coventry, and bring many
changes in its wake, among them the rebuilding-
of the comfortable old inns. He was old enough
to have driven Mr. Pickwick, or Mr. Pickwick's
originator, on that remarkably wet journey from
Birmingham to Towcester. It was probably at
the old " King's Head " that the postchaise
team was changed that night. When they
stopped, the steam ascended from the horses in
such clouds as wholly to obscure the ostler,
whose A*oice was, however, heard to declare
from the mist that he expected the first Gold
Medal from the Humane Society, on their next
distribution of awards, for taking the postboy's
hat off; the water descending from the brim
of which, the invisible gentleman declared, must
inevitably have drowned him (the postboy) but
for his great presence of mind in tearing-
it promptly from his head, and drying the
gasping man's countenance with a wisp of
straw.

Here it was that Sam Weller, "lowering
his voice to a mysterious whisper," asked Bob
Sawyer if he had ever " know'd a churchyard
where there was a postboy's tombstone," or
had ever seen a dead postboy."

"No!" rejoined Bob, "I never did."

"No!" rejoined Sam, triumphantly, "nor
never will ; and there's another thing that
no man never see, and that's a dead donkey.
No man never see a dead donkey " ; adding

298 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

that, " without goin' so far as to as-sert, as
some wery sensible people do, that postboys
and donkeys is both immortal, wot I say is
this ; that wenever they feels theirselves gettin'
stiff and past their work, they just rides off
together, wun postboy to a pair in the usual
way; wot becomes on 'em nobody knows, but
its werry probable as they starts away to take
their pleasure in some other vorld, for there
ain't a man alive as ever see either a donkey
or a postboy a-taking his pleasure in this ! "

The " King's Head," as already hinted,
has been rebuilt in the stained glass and glitter
style, and is quite uninteresting, save for the
effigy of " Peeping Tom," moved from the
frontage of a neighbouring old house, peering
curiously from an upper storey.

XLV

CROSSING the intersection of Hertford Street
and Broad Gate at this point, the Holyhead
Road leads out of Coventry by way of Smithford
Street and Fleet Street. Before the revolution-
ary time of Telford, it continued through Spoil
End and Spon Gate and reached Allesley along
the winding route now known as the " Old
Allesley Road, passing two toll-gates on the
way. The "new" road branches off to the

TURNER'S COVENTRY >?0i

right immediately after passing St. John's
church and, passing a long factory-like* row of
old weavers' houses, and climbing uphill at
first, goes afterwards flat and straight to
Allesley, in two miles. "Windmill Hill," as
it was called, was not a very exalted height,
but from it in the old days a quite panoramic
view of Coventry was obtainable. It is the
view, now blotted out by intervening houses,
seen in Turner's noble picture of the city. In
it you see the hollow road, with St. John's
tower at the bottom, and coaches toiling up,
on the way to Birmingham ; in the distance the
neighbouring spires of Trinity and St. Michael's,
with Christ Church aloof, on the right. Turner
took his stand on the hill-crest, where Meriden
Street branches off to the right; but where
the grassy banks then sloped steeply to the
road, and the sheep roamed free, suburban
villas now cover the hillside, the retaining walls
of their gardens masking the rugged old earth -
banks.

A red-brick toll-gate marks the junction of
old and new roads at the entrance of Allesley,
a pretty roadside village on a hillside. There
were at one time two very large and busy
coaching inns here, the " Windmill " and the
" White Lion," and here they stand even now ;
not as inns, it is true, but structurally unaltered.
Very handsome red-brick buildings they are.
belonging to the Georgian and Queen Anne
periods: the "White Lion," once famed for its

3o2 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

cheesecakes and home-brewed ale, prominent
as the largest building in the village street,
and now divided into two houses; the "Wind-
mill" half a mile away, standing back in a
meadow and used as a farmhouse.

Meriden, the next item upon the way, is
heralded by a steeply descending hill ; the
village below, the church solitary upon the
hill -top. Meriden church is quite a little
museum of antiquities, and a well-kept one,
with everything carefully labelled for the infor-
mation of the chance visitor — and the door
unlocked. Here one finds the effigies of two
worthy Warwickshire knights of the fifteenth
century, a chained Prayer Book, and the pro-
cessional staves of a bygone village club,
together with a curious old oak alms-chest,
dated 1627 and inscribed :

This chest is God's exchequer, paye in then
Your almes accepted both of God and men.

" Mireden," as it was invariably called by old-
time travellers, is situated on an " uncommonly
deep " bed of clay in the hole at the foot of
this hill. Pennant, the antiquary, is respon-
sible for the statement that the village was
named Alspath until the time of Henry VI.,
" about which time, becoming a great thorough-
fare, it got the name of Myreden — ' den '
signifying a bottom, and ' myre ' dirt ; and
I can well vouch for the propriety of the
appellation before the institution of turnpikes."

MERIDEN ,03

In his time, between 1739 and 1782, the
road at Meriden had been so far improved that
travellers no longer stuck in the clay. It had
become a turnpike, and, on the testimony of
Pennant, " excellent." But the crest of the hill
had still to be climbed, and the depth of the
valley to be descended into, before the advent
of Telford, some forty years later, when the
cutting on the hill-top and the embankment in
the hollow were made. The old road — a steep
and narrow track — is seen down below, on the
right hand, in descending Meriden Hill, and
beside it the old " Queen's Head," with frontage
rebuilt in recent years. Meriden village lies in
the succeeding level, with rural cottages on one
side of the road, and the ponds and lilied water-
courses of Meriden Park on the other; a village
green beyond. The houses are still, as in
Pennant's day " pretty " ; but in the course of
a hundred and twenty years the " magnificent
inn, famed from time immemorial for its ex-
cellent malt liquor," has retired into private
occupation, and the " various embellishments
made by the old innkeeper, Reynolds — little
ponds, statues, and other whims," that used to
enliven the spot, have been swept away by
Time, like old Reynolds himself.

There were in coaching days no fewer than
eight inns and posting-houses of different degrees in
Meriden. There are now but two inns : the " Bu 1 1's
Head," formerly a farm-house, and the "Queen's
Head," already mentioned. Among the vanished

3°4

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

signs are the "Nag's Head," -Malt Shovel,"
"Crown," and "Swan" (now a butcher's shop).
The magnificent inn spoken of by Pennant was
the old " Bull's Head '' ; whence the licence
was transferred to the smaller house, now so
named, at the time when coaching ceased to be.
The old house is seen on the right hand, a very
large, white-plastered building of good architec-
tural character, now secluded from the road bv

THE OLD "BULL'S HEAD," MEKIDEX.

a wall and iron palisade, standing where the
drive up to the inn was formerly placed. One
of the entrances to and exits from the house in
coaching and posting times was by the first-floor
window, above where the portico, a later addition,
is seen. The " Bull's Head " was an exclusive
and aristocratic house, and preferred the top-
saAvyers, who posted in their own " chariots," to
those who travelled in hired chaises ; while for
the mere passengers by mail or stage-coach it

MKRIDEN CROSS 305

had, at the hest, but a contemptuous tolerance.
And, indeed, it must have been a lordly place,
and, with its surrounding gardens, stables, and
picturesque turretted clock-tower, more like a
private mansion than a place of public resort.
There is still in the turret a dilapidated set of
chimes that can, with care and patience, be
induced to hammer out a few scattered notes
of a tune alleged to be that of " God Save the
King," or Queen, as the case may be.

XLVI

MERIDEN is one of the many reputed " centres
of England." Measure a straight line from the
North Foreland to Holy head, and another from
the Lizard to the mouth of the Humber, and
their intersection will be at Meriden. With an
irregularly shaped country like England, this is
a somewhat empirical method, and the other
reputed centres are evidently obtained by measur-
ing from various places dictated by individual
taste and fancy.

The very hub of the country is held to be
the ancient cross standing upon the village
green — shattered now, and bound together by
iron bands. A modern legend that it was
originally placed here to mark the centre has
VOL. i. 20

306 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

grown up, and by consequence it is sketched and
photographed times without number throughout
the year.

The " Forest of Arden Archers," or the
"Woodmen of Arden," as they sometimes style
themselves, an ancient guild revived in 1785,
and holding meetings at Forest Hall, near by,
remind the forgetful traveller that, like Touch-

MERIDEN CROSS.

stone, he is in Arden, or, at any rate, on the
outskirts of it, in passing through Meriden.
Henley-in-Arden lies to the left, served by a
station, bald of any poetic or romantic suggestion
in the title of " Henley Junction."

There remained, not so many years ago, an
old inn called the " Up and Down Post," on the
road between Meriden and Stonebridge. Its
picture-sign, showing two posts, one standing,

STONEBRIDGE 307

the other fallen, quite misrepresented the true
meaning of the name, which referred to the old
system of posting along the roads. Probably the
original sign was a picture showing the up and
the down postboys meeting.

The road now grows to a noble width ; a
quiet road too, at any time but Saturdays and
Sundays, when Birmingham and Coventry's all
sorts of the cycling kind are let loose upon their
eighteen miles between the two cities, and motor
cars from afar whiten the hedgerows with dust.
The old " Stonebridge " inn, at the crossing o!
the Lichfielel and Leamington roads, has been
gorgeously rebuilt, chiefly to meet the require-
ments of these, and is now the " Stonebriduv
Hotel." The "stone bridge" itself carries the
road across a little stream called the Tame.
Another inn, the "Malt Shovel," stands with its
old stables in refreshing contrast with that
ornate modern hostelry.

A very little exertion will suffice to put the
quiet man out of sight and hearing of the crowd.
He has only to turn up the lane by the " Clock "
inn and make for Eickenhill spire, less than a
quarter of a mile away, and he will have the
surroundings entirely to himself.

Bickenhill church is very beautiful, but
perhaps the most memorable thing connected
with it is the notice exposed in the porch :—

It having been decided by the Court of
Queen's Bench, and by the Court of Appeal,
that artificial wreaths and glass cases placed

3o8 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

upon graves without sanction is an illegal act ;
notice is hereby given that such must not be
placed upon graves without first obtaining
permission, and such will be regarded as
Memorial Tablets, and the customary fees will
be charged.

The vicar's grammar would not have found
favour with Lindley Murray; but speculations
as to how an artificial wreath or a glass case
can be made an act, illegal or otherwise, do not
form the real interest of this notice. That is
discovered in the spectacle of two judicial
tribunals assuming the role of arbiters of taste,
and elevating the placing of jampots, enamelled
tin wreaths, and the like abominations on graves
to illegality. No one can, without mingled feel-
ings of disgust and pity, see the marmalade jars
that have held water for flowers, or any artificial
things displayed in places with such sacred and
melancholy associations, but this would seem to
be a question of taste, or the want of it, alone.
It would not be a much greater stride for courts
of law to determine in what kind of clothes
parishioners should attend service. And-
another matter. Without defending artificial
flowers, are the decayed natural blossoms,
shrivelled with heat, and soddened into an
obscene and hideous pulp by rains, a pleasing
sight? Is it not possible, after all, that the
sense of permanency in a glass case or a glass
chaplet is a soothing feeling to many a poor
mourner who lacks "culture," but whose instincts

THE SQUIRE OF PACKINGTON 311

revolt from the rotting lilies and stephanotis
of the hereaved rich ?

Returning to Stonehri<l-e. the road to Coles-
hill, and to Castle Bromwich and Lichneld will
he seen branching off from the Holyhead Road.
Here, until the middle of the eighteenth century,
the traffic for Shrewsbury and Chester commonly
turned off. After that date, not only Avere the
roads through Birmingham and \VoIverlmmpton
improved, but the places themselves grew into
greater importance, and the old Chester Road,
by consequence, decayed. By 1802 all the
Chester coaches had deserted it, but the Liver-
pool Mail came this way until the last, l.'p to
1761 this was not the way to Coleshill at all.
Until that year the road branched off at a point
half a mile from Meriden, and lay through
Packington Park. It was a straight and Hat
road, and convenient for Coleshill, but offensive
to Sir Clement Fisher, who then was the squire
at Packington Hall. It passed within si^ht of
his windows, and he relaxed no effort until an
Act of Parliament was passed, stopping it up,
and making the present hilly and eireuitons
road in its stead. The preamble of the Act,
stating that the old road was inconvenient and
dangerous, is one of the most audacious false-
hoods ever publicly stated. The old road ean
still be traced in the Park, and standing beside
it is an old tombstone, recording the fate ol' a
London tailor struck by liglitninir when travelling
this way.

3i2 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

XLVII

BUT enough of Packington. Let us on to
Birmingham, now but nine miles distant, by
Elmdon, Wells Green, and Yardley.

Elmdon, were it not for that pretty roadside
timber-framed inn, the ' Cock,' would be but
a name and nothing else, so far as the road
could show. Passing it, bid a long farewell,
O traveller along the Holyhead Road, to the
country, for in less than another two miles
Wells Green is reached and Birmingham within
hail. Thereafter, in nothing less than eighteen
miles shall you see the hedgerows, the fields,
and the quiet road again. Birmingham and the
Black Country intervene, and not until, having
gained and overpassed Wolverhampton, you
ascend the heights of Tettenhall, will the sun
be seen shining in a clear sky once more.
Meanwhile, here is Wells Green, the last
approach to the likeness of the country on this
side of Birmingham, and by consequence a
place of great half -holiday and Sunday resort.
Midland cyclists are its chief patrons. Eor
them the "Old Original" tea-house caters, for
their custom also the "Ship," the "Lighthouse,"
and many more compete frantically among each
other, attracting attention by large and elaborate
models of ships, lighthouses, and other objects
displayed beside the road. The two old roadside
inns— the "Wheatsheaf" and the "Crown"—

TO BIRMINGHAM 3,3

have been ornately rebuilt; the "Crown"
vulgarly.

Beyond Wells Green the road enters an
outlying portion of Worcestershire and comes
to Yardley, a new-built Birmingham suburb,
whose shops, dotted here and there by the
wayside, alternate with barns, cow-houses and
hedges, presently to give place to suburban
streets and so provide those shops with customers.
In the hollow succeeding Yardley, at Hay
Mills, where a little stream runs, not yet
completely polluted and decently buried from
sight in a drain pipe, the mile's length of
Worcestershire ends. Hay Mills now belies
its idyllic name, for it is here that modern
Birmingham definitely begins, and the smoke-
cloud and traffic of that great city grow in
density.

Small Heath, Bordesley, Deritend, and Dig-
beth, that are all comprised in the next two and
a half miles, are now but the various names
distinguishing what would otherwise be one
long street, growing gradually more grimy and
crowded : a hilly street, where hideous steam tram-
ways, belching smoke and smuts, run noisily, like
armoured trains, and where the few old gabled
cottages that are left, to tell of times when
this was a country road, are closely beset by
modern houses, already hung with soot, like
the cobwebs on bottles of old port. A dramatic
change indeed from what Leland saw. when

O

he journeyed to Birmingham in 1538, and came

3i4 THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

"through as pretty a street as ever I en t red,
into Bermingham towne. This street, as I
remember, is called Dirtey." He meant Derit-
end, which, if called " Dirtey " to-day would
by no means be libelled. " Dirty End " would
l)e an easy change from the real name of the
squalid street, and equally descriptive of it.

Wigstead in 1797 tells a tale very different
from that of Leland. Instead of a " pretty
street," he found an entrance "by no means
prepossessing the traveller in its favour — a
confused mass of brick and tile rubbish piled
together." Birmingham he thought to be an
objectionable place. " Enveloped in an almost
impenetrable smoky atmosphere," he says, " it
is by no means an agreeable object to a
picturesque eye."

END OF VOL. I.

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