TRAMPS’ SIGNS
The truth is, tramping is a very old profession, and hereditary in a degree very few good people imagine.Unlettered, but highly organised, trampdom has alingua francaof its own, and its signs are to be read, chalked on the fences and gateposts of the Dover Road, as surely as one could read a French novel.
Theargotand the sign-language of the road are not difficult to acquire by those who have observant eyes and ears to hearken, but, like all languages, they are ever changing, and the accepted signs of yesteryear are constantly superseded by newer symbols. Little do the country-folk understand the significance of the chalk-marks on their gates and walls. Does the portly yeoman suspect that theλon his gatepost means “no good”? And how mixed would be the feelings of many a worthy lady were the inner meaning of⊕revealed to her—“Religious, but good on the whole.” Were the eloquence of that mark discovered to her, she would know at once how it was that the poor men, with their ragged beards and their toes peeping through their boots, were so unfailingly pious and thankful for the cold scran and the threepenny-piece with which she relieved their needs, asking a blessing on her and hers until they were out of sight, when they “stowed” the piety and threw the provisions into the nearest ditch, calling in at the next roadside pub to take the edge off their thirst with that threepenny-piece. It may safely be said that the tramp is not grateful. He is, indeed, altruistic, but his altruism he saves for his kind, and he exhibits it in the danger-signals he chalks up in places the brotherhood wot of. There are degrees of danger, as of luck. Some good-hearted people become soured by many calls on their generosity, and one can readily understand even the mildest-mannered of elderly ladies becoming restive when the sixth tramp appears at the close of the day. Other people, too, lose their generosity with the bedding-out plants which one of the fraternity has “sneaked” from the front garden under cover of night. In the first instance, the sign △ (which means “Spoilt by too many callers”) is likely to be found somewherehandy, and in the second that innocent-looking triangle is apt to become ☐, the English of which is “Likely to have you taken up,” even if it does not become☉== “Dangerous. Sure of being quodded.”
Passing many of these undesirable wayfarers, one comes, in a mile—fields and hedgerows and market-gardens on either side—to Shoulder of Mutton Green, a scrubby piece of common-ground shaped like South America—but smaller. Hence the peculiar eloquence of its name. The Kent County Council has set up a large and imposing notice-board at the corner of the green which bears its name and a portentous number of bye-laws, and when the sun is low and shadows slant (the board is so large and the green so small), the shade of it falls across the green and into the next field.
And now comes Belle Grove, spelled, as one may see on the stuccoed cottages by the wayside, with a pleasing diversity, Belle Grove, Bell Grove, and Belgrove; and one would pin one’s faith on the correct form being the second variety, because the place is not beautiful, nor ever could have been.
To Bell Grove, then, succeeds Welling, and Welling is a quite uninteresting and shabby hamlet fringing the road, ten-and-a-quarter miles from London Bridge. The new suburban railway from London to Bexley Heath crosses the road, and has a station—a waste of sand, stones, and white palings—here. The place, says Hasted, in his “History of Kent,” was called Well End, from the safe arrival of the traveller at it, after having escaped the danger of robbers through the hazardous road from Shooter’s Hill, which derivation, though regarded as a happy effort of the imagination, is considerably below the dignified level of a county historian. Indeed, I seem to see in this theirresponsible frivolity of the guards and coachmen of the Dover Mail. Why, the thing reeks of coaching wit, and how Hasted, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, could have included in his monumental work (which took him forty years to write) so obvious a witticism, is beyond my comprehension. Shall I be considered pedantic if I point out that the place-name, with its terminationing, carries with it evidence of being as old as Saxon times, and denotes that here was the settlement of an ancient tribe, or patriarchial family, the Wellings? I will dare the deed and record the fact, remarking, meanwhile, that if other county historians were as little learned as Hasted, and equally speculative, they would seem more human, and their deadly tomes become much more entertaining.
But, after this, it would not beseem me to do else than record the fact that the new suburban district springing up beside the road, half a mile past Welling, is called “Crook Log.” Why “Crook Log,” and whence came that singular name, are things “rop in mistry,” and I will run no risks of becoming fogged in rash endeavours to elucidate the origin of this place-name.
TO BEXLEY
Half a mile onward, and then begins Bexley Heath. “Once upon a time,” that is to say, before an Act of Parliament was obtained in 1817 for enclosing what was then a wide, wild tract of desolate heath-land, Bexley Heath was entirely innocent of buildings.
The old village of Bexley lies a mile and a half to the right of the road, and is as rural, peaceful, and pleasant as Bexley Heath is mean and wretched. Between here and the village lies Hall Place, a Tudor mansion of great size and stately architecture, largely distinguished for its chequer-board patterning of flint and stone. The property was once that of the family called “At-hall,” from their residence here, in an earlier mansion. The Tudor flint-and-stone building we now see was built by Sir Justinian Champneis, a Lord Mayor of London, towards the middle of the sixteenth century. In less than a hundred years the Champneiswere succeeded by the Austens, who made alterations, until 1772, when it passed to Sir Francis Dashwood, in whose family it yet remains.
In the neighbourhood of Bexley Heath, and also at Crayford and places beside the Thames near Dartford are some singular shafts of unknown age or purpose, sunk into the soil, frequently to a depth of a hundred feet, through the chalk of which this district chiefly consists. “Danes’ Holes,” the country-folk call them, and they are traditionally supposed to have been constructed as hiding-places to which the old inhabitants of these parts could retire when the Northmen’s piratical fleets appeared in the estuary of the Thames. Antiquaries have a theory that these singular pits were sunk by our neolithic forbears in search of flints. The antiquaries, however, are most probably wrong, because flints were to be found readily enough by the men of the Stone Age, without going to the trouble of mining for them; and no one has yet arisen to show that neolithic man was more likely than we, his descendants, to give himself unnecessary labour.
We will, therefore, assume that the legendary name of “Danes’ Holes” shadows forth the purpose of these shafts a great deal more correctly than the ingenious theories of antiquaries, made to fit personal predilections; the more especially as legendary history is generally found to square with facts much more frequently than scientific pundits would have us believe.
These remarkable pits commence with a trumpet-shaped orifice which immediately contracts into a narrow shaft, broadening at the bottom into a bulb-like chamber, not unremotely resembling in shape the tube and bulb of a thermometer. “By a curious coincidence,” says one who has long been familiar with these strange survivals, “the shape of the Bexley shafts is exactly that of a local beer-measure which is held in great estimation.” In several houses may be seen an advertisement that “beer is sold by the yard.”
CRAYFORD
Leaving Bexley Heath, the road becomes suddenly beautiful, where it loses the last of the mean shops—the cats’-meat vendors, the tinkers, the marine stores—that give so distinct and unwholesome acachetto its long-drawn-out street. The highway goes down a hill overhung with tall trees, with chestnuts and hawthorns, whose blossoms fill the air in spring with sweet and heavy scents; but, in the hollow, gasworks contend with them, and generally, it is sad to say, come off easy victors. Follows then a nondescript bend of the road which brings one presently into Crayford, fifteen miles from London.
Antiquaries are divided in opinion over the ancient history of Crayford. While some incline to the belief that it is the site of the Roman Noviomagus, others are prone to select Keston Common as the locality of that shadowy camp and city. The question will probably never be settled beyond a doubt, but the weight of evidence is strong in favour of Keston Common, eight miles away to the south-west. Here still exist the traces of great earthworks, covering a space of a hundred acres, while numerous finds of Roman coins and pottery have been made from time to time. At Crayford, on the other hand, the only presumptive evidence is to be found in this having been that old Roman military way, Watling Street, and, in the very slender thread of allusion to the name of Noviomagus, supposed, on the authority of Hasted, to be extant in the title of the half-forgotten manor of Newbury.
But, however vague may be the connection between Noviomagus and Crayford, certain it is that here, in 457, was fought that tremendous battle between the Saxons under Hengist, and the Britons commanded by Vortigern, a conflict in which four thousand of the Romanised Britons were slain. It was in 449 thatHengist and Horsa, brother-chiefs[1]of the Jutish-Saxons, landed at Ebbsfleet, in Thanet, at the invitation of Vortigern, who sought their aid against the Picts and the Sea-rovers. They came in three ships, and their original force could scarcely have numbered more than five hundred men. But, having warred for the Britons, and fought side by side with them against the Scots, they soon perceived how defenceless was the land. “They sent,” says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, “to the Angles, and bade them be told of the worthlessness of the Britons, and the richness of the land.” In response to this invitation, there came from over sea the men of the Old Saxons, the Jutes, and the Angles; and, six years after the landing of the two brothers, these treacherous allies, strengthened in number, felt strong enough to attempt the seizure of Kent. Pretexts for a quarrel were readily found, and, through the mists that hang about the scanty records of that time, we hear first of the Battle of Aylesford, fought in 455, in which the Britons experienced their first great defeat. Here, though, Horsa was slain, and to Hengist, with his son Esc, was left the foundation of the Saxon kingdom of Kent. The Battle of Crayford for a time left all this fertile corner of England to the Saxons. “The Britons,” says the chronicler, “forsook the land of Kent, and in great consternation fled to London.” But, though enervated by long years of luxury, and so greatly demoralised by defeats, the Britons had yet some force left. Vortigern, “the betrayer of Britain,” as he has come down to us in the pages of history, was overthrown by another enemy, a rival British prince, that doughty Romanisedchieftain, Aurelius Ambrosianus, who, after defeating that weak king, gathered up the scattered patriots, and fell upon the Saxons with such fury that they were driven back to that Isle of Thanet which had originally been given them for their services against the Scots of Strathclyde. “Falchions drank blood that day; the buzzard buried his horny beak in the carcases of the slain; the eagles feasted royally on the flesh of them that fell; and the whitening bones of the Northmen long afterwards strewed the fair land of Kent.”
Eight years later, the work of Aurelius began to be undone, and in another eight years the veteran Hengist and his son had completed the foundation of their kingdom.
Crayford, it will thus be seen, is a town of considerable historic interest; but, apart from this claim upon one’s attention, it has, I fear, no attraction whatever.
A QUAINT EPITAPH
But here is Crayford church, in whose yard is one of the quaintest epitaphs imaginable:—
“Here lies the body of Peter Isnell, thirty years clerk of this parish. He lived respected as a pious and mirthful man, and died on his way to church, to assist at a wedding, on the 31st of March, 1811, aged 70. The inhabitants of Crayford have raised this stone to his cheerful memory, and as a token of his long and faithful services.
The life of this Clerk was just three-score and ten,Nearly half of which time he chaunted Amen.In his youth he was married, like other young men;But his wife died one day, so he chaunted Amen.A second he married—she departed—what then?He married and buried a third, with Amen.Thus, his joys and his sorrows were treble; but thenHis voice was deep bass as he sung out Amen.On the horn he could blow, as well as most menSo his horn was exalted in sounding Amen.But he lost all his wind after three-score and tenAnd here, with three wives, he waits, till againThe trumpet shall rouse him to sing out Amen.
The distance between Crayford and Dartford is but two miles, past White Hill; and all the way are fruitgardens, tramps, and odious little terraces of brick cottages with tiny gardens in front, whose brilliant, old-fashioned flowers—sweet-williams, marigolds, and polyanthuses—put to shame these wretched efforts of the builder. There is, half a mile from Crayford, beside the road, an iron post with the City of London arms and the legend, “Act 24 & 25 Vict. cap. 42,” in relief. This wayside pillar marks at once the limits of the London Police District, and the boundary of the area affected by the London Coal and Wine Duties Continuance Act of 1861. The City of London has been entitled from time immemorial to levy dues on all coal entering the metropolis, and this privilege, regulated from time to time, was abolished only in 1889. Two separate duties of twelve pence and one penny per ton were confirmed by this act and authorised to be levied upon coals, culm, and cinders; while the acts dating from 1694, imposing a tax of four shillings per tun on all kinds of wine were at the same time confirmed and renewed, and the radius made identical with the London police jurisdiction, instead of the former limit of twenty miles. These boundary marks were ordered to be set up on turnpike and public roads, beside canals, inland navigations, and railways, and are frequently encountered by the cyclist and pedestrian, to whom their purpose is not a little mysterious.
The duty on coals entering London amounted in 1885 to no less than £449,343, and on wines to £8,488. By far the greater part of these amounts was, of course, collected on the railways and in the port of London. Originally imposed for the maintenance of London orphans, the wine dues became, like the coal duties, great sources of income, by which many notable London improvements, among them the Victoria Embankment, have been carried out.
DARTFORD
Dartford, to which we now come, is a queer little town, planted in a profound hollow, through which runs its wealth-giving Darent. Mills and factories meet the eye at every turn. Not smoking, grimy factories of the kinds that blast the Midland counties, but cleanly-looking boarded structures for the most part, own brothers to flour-mills in outward aspect; places where paper is manufactured, and nowadays drugs and chemicals. Dartford is industrial to-day, but there are old-fashioned nooks, and some of the street-names are intriguing: “Bullace Lane” and “Overy Street,” for example. Few people nowadays know what is a “bullace.” It is, or was, a small wild plum, of the damson kind.
And here is the traditional home of paper-making in England, for it was in Dartford, in the reign of Good Queen Bess, that John Spielman (majesty, in the person of Gloriana’s successor, James the First, knighted him for it in 1605) introduced the art of paper-making to these shores. What induced that man of gold and jewels and precious stones (he was jeweller to Her Majesty) to take up paper-making, I do not know; but he made a very good thing of it, commercially speaking, and no wonder, when he had sole license during ten years for collecting rags for making his paper withal. Besides introducing the manufacture of paper, Sir John Spielman added the lime-tree to our parks and gardens, for he brought over with him from his native place, Lindau, in Germany, two slips from someunter den lindenor another, and planted them in front of his Dartford home, where they flourished and became the progenitors of all the limes in England.
ARMS OF SPIELMAN AND HIS FIRST WIFE.
If you step into the quaint old church of Dartford, you will see, as soon as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, the tomb of Sir John Spielman and hiswife, with their effigies, properly carved, painted and gilt, while in various parts of the church may be found what is said to be his crest, the fool’s cap, which he used as a water-mark on a particular size of paper. “Foolscap” paper derives its name from that water-mark; and thus, though the term now indicates a size, it was originally a trade-mark. The mark may have been derived, not from any crest, but from the long cap worn by the figure on his wife’s shield of arms; although it was greatly changed in the process. At the same time, it is to be noted that the fool’s cap water-mark occurred on paper made in Germany in 1472.
The presence of the badge in the church shows that the paper-maker had a good deal to do with the reparation of the building.
In 1858 an association styling themselves the “Legal Society of Paper Makers,” of whom I know nothing, restored Spielman’s tomb. The strange heraldic coat-of-arms of Spielman will be noticed. It is, and looks, German, and is of an extravagant nature that would utterly discompose an English herald. Spielman’s coat exhibits a blue serpent with a red crest, standing on his tail on a gold background, between six golden lions on a red field, the whole of this singular device based on a green mount. His wife’s arms, impaled with his own, are a man clothed in a long black gown, with a long cap, holding in his hand an olive branch, and standing on a red mount inverted. The crest is: a savage, wreathed about the temples and loins with ivy. Motto:Arte et fortuna. The epitaph is in German. Spielman’s first wife died in 1607. In 1609 he married again, and deceased in 1626, leaving by the second wife three sons and one daughter.
THE SPIELMANS
The fortunes of the Spielmans were short-lived. His second wife was living in 1646, but seems to have had little interest in the business, which about 1686 was in possession of a Mr. Blackwell. Meanwhile the Spielman family had declined to poverty, and in 1690 “goody Spielman,” widow of his grandson George, was in receipt of 1s. 6d. weekly relief; and in 1696 the wife of a John Spielman was receiving 2s. The Spielman paper mill stood where the gas-mantle factory of Curtis and Harvey is now found.
There is a curious sundial actually in the church; oddly placed on a stone foundation on the splayed sill of the south-east window. It is dated 1820, and records the hours only from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.
A brass to John Donkin (1782-1846) shows him with head and shoulders. The inscription states it was placed here because it was not considered proper that onewho had placed ancient men and times on record should himself be forgotten.
DARTFORD CHURCH.
We may be thankful that Spielman did no more to the church, for, had he rebuilt it, we should have lost one of the finest and most picturesque churches on the Dover Road, whose tall tower, severely unornamental, with clock oddly placed on one side, is such a prominent feature of Dartford. Gundulf, that famous architect-bishop of Rochester, to whom Rochester Keep, Dover Castle, the White Tower of the Tower of London, portions of Rochester Cathedral, and a number of other buildings, civil, ecclesiastical and military, are ascribed with more or less show of authority, is supposed to have built Dartford tower, not so much for religious as for defensive uses. For hereby runs the Darent across the road, and no bridge spanned the ford when Gundulf’s tower was first built. It therefore guardedthe passage until the neighbouring hermit, who lived in a fine damp cell by the riverside, succeeded in collecting enough money wherewith to build a bridge whose successor forms an excellent leaning-stock on Sundays to the British workman waiting anxiously for the public-houses to open.
There is in the church a small thirteenth century lancet window in the west end wall of the north aisle, which is pointed out as the window of the cell occupied by the hermit who tended the ford. It commanded the road; and no doubt the hermit was often knocked up at night by travellers desiring to be guided over the river. In 1903 a charming picture in stained glass was added, “The Hermit of the Ford,” showing a bearded and hooded man holding up a lantern. The ford was not superseded until 1461, when the first bridge was built. This remained until the present bridge replaced it, in 1754. On that occasion, the churchyard on the south side of the church was curtailed, for widening the road, and an angle of the church itself was in 1792 shaved off for the footpath, as can be seen to this day.
THE “BULL”
The old inns of Dartford are very numerous. Most of them, unfortunately, have been cut up into small beer-houses and tenements since the coaches were run off the road by steam, but one fine old galleried inn, the “Bull,” remains to show what the coaching inns of long ago were like. The courtyard is now roofed-in with glass, and the little bedrooms behind the carved balusters of the gallery are largely given up to spiders and lumber. But, fortunately for those who care to see what an old galleried inn was like, the changes here have consisted only of additions instead, as is only too usual, of destruction. There is a curious detail, too, about the “Bull,” and that is the whimsical position of its sign in a place where ninety out of a hundred people never see it. The “bull in a china-shop” is proverbial, but a bull among the chimney-pots is something quite out of the common. It is here, though, that the effigy of a great black bull may be seen, reared upaloft in a place between the constellations and the beasts of the field.
THE “BULL” INN, DARTFORD.
There is one modern incident in connection with the “Bull” at Dartford which shows how inflamed were the passions of the working class in favour of George the Fourth’s silly and indiscreet wife, and this incident happened while the monarch was changing horses here. It was a journeyman currier who showed his sympathy with Queen Caroline, and he did so by thrusting his head in at the carriage window, and roaring in the face of startled majesty, “You are a murderer!” which can be taken neither as a compliment nor a statement of fact—unless, indeed, we agree with that mathematically inclined cynic who held that a “fact” was a lie and a half.
Pastor Moritz, in his account of a seven weeks’ tourin England, tells us how he passed through Dartford. He was by no means a distinguished person, but what he has to say of his travels is interesting, as contributing to show how others see us. He came into England by way of the Thames, May 31, 1782, and landed (he says) just below Dartford—probably at Greenhithe—to which place he walked in company with some others, and there breakfasted. He was fresh from the dreary, sandy Mark of Brandenburg, and this fair county of Kent delighted him hugely. At Dartford he saw, for the first time, an English soldier. That robust Tommy struck him with admiration, both for the sake of his red coat and his martial bearing. “Here, too, I first saw” (says he) “(what I deemed a true English sight) two boys boxing in the street.” The party separated at Dartford, and, taking two post-chaises at the “Bull,” drove to London, the Pastor “stunned,” as it were, by a constant rapid succession of interesting objects, arriving at Greenwich nearly in a state of stupefaction.
WAT TYLER
Dartford will ever live in history as being the starting-point of Wat the Tyler’s rebellion of 1381. Tradition places the scene of Wat’s murderous attack on the tax-gatherer opposite the “Bull,” where once was Dartford Green. The Green has long since gone, but the story never stales of how the Tyler dashed out the tax-gatherer’s brains with his hammer. It is, for one thing, a tale that appeals strongly to an over-taxed community, sinking under burdens imposed chiefly for the support of imperial and local bureaucracy; and I fear that if some modern tax-collector met a similar fate, many worthy people, not ordinarily bloodthirsty, would say, “Serve him right!”
The particular impost which caused the trouble five hundred years ago was the odious Poll-tax, a hateful burden that had already caused wide discontent throughout England, and needed only a more than usually unpleasant incident to cause ill feelings to break out in ill deeds. That incident was not lacking.At Dartford, one of the collectors had demanded the tax for a young girl, daughter of he who is known to history as Wat Tyler. Her mother maintained that she was under the age required by the statute. The tax-collector grew insolent and overbearing, and, it seems, was proceeding to a delicate investigation—like that which procured Mr. W. T. Stead three months’ imprisonment some years ago—when the Tyler, who had just returned from work, killed him with a stroke from his hammer.
How Wat the Tyler was appointed by popular acclamation leader of the Commons in Kent; how, at the head of a hundred thousand insurgents, he marched to Blackheath, are matters rather for the history of England than for thiscauseriealong the Dover Road.
The old coachmen had an exciting time of it when either entering or leaving Dartford. They skidded down West Hill, when coming from London, to the imminent danger of their necks and those of their passengers, and they painfully climbed the East Hill, on their way out of the town toward Dover. When several accidents had occurred to prove how hazardous to life and property were these roads, the turnpike-trustmongers reduced their steepness by cutting through the hill-tops. This was about 1820. Although the roads were thus lowered, they still have a remarkably abrupt rise and fall, and the traveller in leaving the town for Dover can gain from halfway up the slope of the East Hill quite an extended view over Dartford roof-tops. He, however, remains to sketch at peril of some inconvenience, for the tramps who frequent Dartford take a quite embarrassing interest in art.
DARTFORD BRIDGE.
MARTYRS
Somewhere at this end of the town stood the Chantry of St. Edmund the Martyr, a halting-place at which pilgrims on their way to Canterbury stopped to pray and to kiss the usual relics. The site was probably where the Dartford Cemetery now stands beside the road, on the border of what is now called Dartford Brent, a wide expanse of common land known in other times as Brent, or Burnt Heath. This place came very near to being the site of a battle between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, for here it was that the rival armies first confronted one another; but, instead of coming to blows, their leaders held a parley; and so, fair words on their lips, but with deceit in their hearts, they went up to London. Many years later, on July 19, 1555, to be precise, Dartford Brent reappears in history as the place on which three Protestant martyrs, Christopher Wade, Margaret Pollen, and Nicholas Hall, were burnt at the stake, and since then the annals of the place have been quite uninteresting. The gilt-crested spire of the memorial to them peers up on the skyline of the road-cutting, onthe way up to the Brent. It stands in the old cemetery, on the left.
Donkin, the historian of Dartford, wrote in 1844:—“On the Brent are the outlines of the ‘Deserter’s Grave,’ cut in the turf, formerly frequented by the scholars of Hall Place School: the sod of which is still continued to be cut away by the country people in memory of the unknown, traditionally said to have been shot in the adjoining pit.”
Some light on this tradition is shed by an item in the churchwardens’ accounts:—
Here the road branches—the Dover Road to the left, the Roman Watling Street to the right; although, the Roman road being older and itself based on an immeasurably more ancient British trackway, it would be more fitting to say that it is the existing Dover Road which branches off from the parent trunk road. From this point of departure on the Heath, until at the north end of Strood High Street the ways again come to a meeting, over eleven miles of the original route have been abandoned for what in mediæval times proved to be the more convenient route round by the waterside at Greenhithe and Gravesend.
But although not for many centuries have these eleven miles or so of abandoned Roman way been in use as a through route, they are not all lost. The first three miles across the Heath form a good local road, which then turns off to the right, leaving the Watling Street to climb the hill of Swanscombe, steeply up, as a tangled lane amid the dense woods. It is a very considerable elevation. Here and there the footpath deviates from the original Roman line, and the ridges, banks and hollows of it can occasionally be glimpsed amid the undergrowth; but in any case it seems evident that the Watling Street in these eleven mileswas not straight, but re-aligned in some four limbs or individually straight stretches, partly to avoid going over the extreme crest of Swanscombe Hill. On the shoulder of that hill there was at the time of the road being made or remodelled by the Romans a British village, established inland here away from the Thames estuary probably as being a safer place than any settlement by the riverside.
WATLING STREET
Here, on the slope of the hill, the Watling Street is cut through by the vastly deep and broad excavation in the chalk made by the activities of the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers. The construction of it may even thus be studied in section.
Below, in the levels of Springhead, where a lane takes up the line of the ancient road, there may have been that Roman station calledVagniacæ; although it may possibly have been by the waterside at Northfleet or Southfleet, for it is by no means certain that the Romans themselves had no lesser riverside route along the line of the present Dover Road. However, to lay down a dogma upon so uncertain a matter as the Roman road-system in Britain proves to be would not commend itself to those best qualified by study to judge.
From Springhead the Watling Street continued through Cobham Park, and so at length to a junction with the Dover Road, as already noted, at Strood.
Meanwhile, the more or less modern highway goes on through a dusty district where the builder is contending with the country, and, judging from appearances, he seems likely to get the best of it. All around are glimpses of the Heath, and problematical-looking settlements of houses and institutions are grouped together on the sky-line, with weird, bottle-like towers, extravagantly grotesque, like the architecture of a nightmare, or “Alice in Wonderland.” The City of London Lunatic Asylum is here beside the road; penitentiaries and their like are grouped about; a huge black windmill stands awfully on the Brent;while everywhere are puddles, bricks, old boots, old hats, and fragments of umbrellas. Dartford Brent is a singular place.
At the old hamlet of John’s Hole, just past here, called often in coaching days, “Jack-in-the-Hole,” was one of the Dover Road turnpikes. The old toll-house still remains beside the way. To this succeeds, at a distance of three quarters of a mile, the melancholy roadside settlement of Horns Cross, where a post-office, two inns, and a blasted oak look from one side of the road, across great fields of barley, to the broad Thames, crowded with shipping, below.
Stone Church, one of the most beautiful and interesting in Kent, stands on a hill-top, a short distance from the left-hand side of the road, and commands a wide view of the Thames. To architects and lovers of architecture it is remarkable on account of the striking similarity its rich details bear to those of Westminster Abbey, and it is generally considered that the architect of the one designed the other. This is the more remarkable since the Abbey, with this exception of Stone Church, stands alone in England as a beautiful and peculiarly personal example of Gothic thirteenth-century architecture as practised in France. The architect of Westminster Abbey must have been of French nationality; and so curiously similar, in little, are not only the details of both church and Abbey, but also the varieties of stone of which they are built, that they are most unlikely to have been the work of different men.
THE QUARRIES
Greenhithe lies off the road to the left hand, and fronts on to the Thames. The road, all the way hence to Northfleet, is enclosed by high walls with tall factory-chimneys on either side; or passes between long rows of recent cottages alternating with cabbage-fields in the last stage of agricultural exhaustion. Docks; huge and ancient chalk-pits; great tanks of lime and whitening, and brickfields are everywhere about, for Greenhithe and Northfleet are, and havebeen for many years, the chief places of a great export trade in flints, chalk, and lime. The flints are sent into Derbyshire, and even to China, where they are used in the making of porcelain; and many thousands of tons are shipped annually. The excavation of chalk and flints during so long a period has left its mark—a very deep and ineffaceable mark, too—upon this part of the road, and, to a stranger, the appearance presented by the scarred and deeply quarried countryside is wild and wonderful. Spaces of many acres have been quarried to a depth, in some places, of over a hundred and fifty feet, and many of these great pits have been abandoned for centuries, accumulating in that time a large and luxuriant growth of trees and bushes. Others are still being extended, and present a busy scene with men in white duck, corduroy, or canvas working clothes cutting away the chalk or loading it into the long lines of trucks that run on tramways down to the water’s edge. Not the least remarkable things in these busy places are the great bluffs of chalk left islanded amid the deepest quarries, and reaching to the original level of the land. They rise abruptly from the quarry floors, are generally quite inaccessible, and have been left thus by the quarrymen, as containing an inferior quality of chalk, mixed with sand and gravel, which is not worth their while to remove.
In midst of scenery of this description, and surrounded by shops and modern houses, stands Northfleet Church, beside the highway. It is a large Gothic building of the Decorated period, and has been much patched and repaired at different times without having been actually “restored.” There are some mildly interesting brasses in the chancel; but the massive western embattled tower is of greatest interest to the student of other times, for it was built, like many of the church towers in the Welsh marches and along the Scots borders, chiefly as a means of defence. The enemies who were thus to be guarded against at Northfleet were firstly Saxon pirates, then the fierceand faithless Danes, and (much later) the French. This defensible tower at Northfleet was largely rebuilt in 1628, but a part of it belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, and it even retains fragments of an earlier building, contemporary with the terrible Sea-rovers who sailed up the estuary of the Thames, burning and destroying everything as they passed.
A significant sign of the quasi-military uses of this extremely interesting tower is the tall stone external staircase that runs up its northern face from the churchyard to the first-floor level. The small doorway that opens at the head of this staircase into the first floor was originally the only entrance to the tower, and before the church could be finally taken the enemy would have had to storm these stairs, exposed to a fire of cloth-yard shafts from arrow-slits, and of heavy stones cast down upon them from the roof.
Northfleet adjoins, and is now continuous with, Gravesend. It is a busy place, engaged in the excavation of chalk and flints, and in ship-building. Here, too, were “Rosherville Gardens,” or shortly, “Rosherville.” A suburb of that name is here now, but the Rosherville of the Early and Middle Victorians is a thing of the past, and the place has been sold to an oil company.
Jeremiah Rosher was the inventor and sponsor of those once-famed Gardens. It was so far back as the 1830’s that he conceived the grand idea of building a new town between Northfleet and Gravesend, on an estate he owned here, beside the Thames. The idea remained an idea only, for although a pier was built and the Gardens formed, Rosher never lived to see his “ville,” in the sense of being a town. But his Gardens were a hugely-compensating success. It is not givento many to make a success of a hole (unless the hole is a mine), and the site of that celebrated Cockney resort was, and is, nothing else; being in fact one of the oldest and largest of the chalk-quarries, excavated to a depth of one hundred and fifty feet in some parts.
WATERCRESS
There a curious kind of rusticity was tempered with an equally curious urban flavour; there the succulent shrimp and the modest watercress (“Tea ninepence; srimps and watercreases, one shilling”), were supplemented romantically by the strains of husky bands. There art was represented by broken-nosed plaster statues of Ceres and a variety of other heathen goddesses, some supporting gas-lamps in sawdusty bars and restaurants; others gracing lawns and flower-beds. To those who delighted in plaster statues grown decrepit and minus a leg or an arm, like so many neo-classic Chelsea pensioners, Rosherville was ideal.
“Where to spend a happy day,” as the advertisements used to invite—“Rosherville.” The watercress consumed there, and at the other popular places near by, came from Springhead, which will be found in the country at the back of Gravesend. In 1907 died the last surviving daughter of the man who “invented” watercress as an article of food. It was about 1815 that William Bradbery, of Springhead, began to cultivate from a green weed that grew in the ditches this favourite addition to tea-tables.
He cultivated with care, and laid out extensive beds, then, when he had a marketable crop, sold it locally. It soon became a famous table dainty, and nothing would satisfy him but the patronage of London. He filled an old tea-chest with cress, and, with this on his back, trudged off to the metropolis, a score or more miles away. The sample was satisfactory, and he quickly developed a London trade.
Bradbery (it is said) when he was building up his London connection, paid a vocalist to go at night from one place of entertainment to another, singing a song inpraise of the famous brown cress from the waters of Springhead.
Be that as it may, Bradbery made a fortune by cultivating his cress on the extended area. He seized an opportunity where another man would not have seen one.
Watercress is now cultivated largely, and in numerous districts. It is known, botanically, asnasturtium officinale.
Electric tramcars now rush and rattle through Northfleet and Rosherville, and no one contemplates journeying to these scenes with the object of spending a “happy day.” The great group of semi-ecclesiastical looking buildings on the left is “Huggens’ College.” Almshouses continue to be built, for the fountain of benevolence is not yet dried up. It was in 1847 that this foundation came into existence, pursuant to the will of John Huggens (born 1776), who was a barge-owner and corn-merchant of Sittingbourne. Looking upon a world rather astonishingly full of almshouses for people of humble birth, he conceived the somewhat original idea of founding what, with extreme delicacy, he termed a “College” for gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. The establishment, strictly secluded behind enclosing walls, in well-wooded grounds, houses fifty collegians. Huggens himself, in stony effigy, is seen over the gateway, seated in a frockcoat and an uncomfortable attitude, and displaying a scroll or the charter of his “College.” The bountiful gentleman is sadly weatherworn, for the factory fumes of this industrial district have wrought havoc with the Portland stone from which he is sculptured. Huggens was wise among the generation of benefactors: he founded his charity in his own lifetime, and personally supervised it. He died in 1865, and his body lies in Northfleet churchyard.
We will now proceed to Gravesend, noting that in 1787 the slip road between the “Leather Bottle” at Northfleet and the beginnings of Chalk, two miles inlength, was made. It would, in the language of to-day, applied to incandescent gas-mantle burners and to avoiding roads alike, be called a “by-pass.”