Chapter 7

MILE END TURNPIKE, 1813.After Rowlandson.

"The Way of punishing scolding Women is pleasant enough," says an old traveller. "They fasten an Arm Chair to the End of two Beams, twelve or fifteen Foot long, and parallel to each other: so that these two Pieces of Wood, with their two Endsembrace the Chair, which hangs between them on a sort of Axel; by which Means it plays freely, and always remains in the natural horizontal Position in which a Chair should be, that a Person may sit conveniently in it, whether you raise it or let it down. They set up a Post upon the Bank of a Pond or River, and over this Post they lay, almost in Equilibrio, the two Pieces of Wood, at one End of which the Chair hangs just over the Water. They place the Woman in the Chair, and so plunge her into the Water as often as the Sentence directs, in order to cool her immoderate Heat."

One has only to go and look at the average rural pond to imagine the horrors of this punishment. The stagnant water, the slimy mud, the clinging green duckwood, common to them, must have made a ducking the event of a lifetime.

The difference here, at Mile End, between those times and these is emphasised by the close-packed streets on either side, and by the crowded tram-cars that ply back and forth.

Yet there are survivals. Here, for instance, in the little old-fashioned weather-boarded "Vine" Inn that stands by itself, in advance of the frontage of the houses, and takes up a goodly portion of the broad pavement, we see a relic of the time when land was not so valuable as now; when local authorities were easy-going, and when anyone who had the impudence to squat down upon the public paths could do so, and, remaining there undisturbed for a period of twenty-one years, could thus derive a legal title to the freehold. Here, then, is an explanation of the existence of the "Vine" in this position.

Close by are the quaint Trinity Almshouses, built in 1695, for the housing of old skippers and shellbacks. Wren designed the queer little houses and the chapel that still faces the grassy quadrangle where the old salts walk and gossip unconcernedly while the curious passers-by linger to gaze at them from the pavement, as though they were some strange kind of animal. Nothing so curious outside the pages of fiction as this quiet haven in midst of the roaring streets, screened from them by walls and gates of curious architecture surmounted by models of the gallant old galleons that have long ceased to rove the raging main. It is a spot alien from its surroundings, frowned down upon by the towering breweries, which indeed would have bought the old place and destroyed it a few years ago, but for the indignation aroused when the proposal of the governing body of the almshouses to sell became known.

There is nothing else to detain the explorer on his way into Essex. The People's Palace, it is true, is a remarkable place, the result of Sir Walter Besant's dream of a resort for those of the East who would get culture and find recreation, but it is a dream realised as an architectural nightmare, and is a very terrible example of what is done to this unhappy quarter in the names of Art and Philanthropy.

XIII

Atlast, by this broadest of broad roads, we come to Stratford-le-Bow and its parish church. In these hurried times, and for some centuries past, the old hyphenated place-name has been dropped, and as "Bow" alone it is familiar to all East-enders. The place is nowadays chiefly associated with Bryant & May and matches, but there yet remain many old Queen Anne, and even earlier, mansions by the roadside, telling of days long before "patent safeties" were thought of, and when flint and steel and timber were the sole means of obtaining a light.

"Bow," says theAmbulatorof 1774, "is a village a little to the east of Mile End, inhabited by many whitsters and scarlet dyers. Here has been set up a large manufactory of porcelain, little inferior to that of Chelsea." That description is now somewhat out of date. The manufactory of porcelain has long disappeared and Bow china is scarce, and treasured accordingly. Whitsters—that is to say, bleachers of linen—and scarlet dyers, also, are to seek.

Bow Church confronts the eastward-bound traveller in bold and rugged fashion; its time-worn tower standing midway of the road and challenging, as it were, the crossing of the little River Lea, just beyond, to Stratford and into Essex. Church and churchyard split the road up into two channels and thus destroy its width, which it never afterwards regains until the suburbs arepassed and the open country reached. A modern touch here is the bronze statue of Gladstone, in advance of the church, facing westwards in declamatory attitude from its granite pedestal, and erected in his lifetime; recalling the fervent hero-worshipping days of the "People's William." The outstretched hand is oddly crooked. Few be them that see statues raised to themselves, unless indeed they be made of finer clay than most mortals, kings and princes, and the like. Of recent years this bronze Gladstone has, in our vulgar way, been made to preside, as it were, over an underground public convenience, from whose too obtrusive midst he rises, absurdly eloquent.

BOW.

Just how Stratford-le-Bow received its name is an interesting piece of history. Both here and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea wasanciently crossed by a paved stone ford of Roman construction, continuing the highway into Essex; but when that river's many channels, swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward the Thames, the low-lying lands of what we now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were for long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For months together the approaches to the Lea were lost in floods, and the real channels of the river became so deep that those who valued their lives and goods dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor travellers thus waterlogged came the good and pious Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the First. "Having herself been well washed in the water," as old Leland says, she fully appreciated the necessity for bridges, and accordingly directed the raising of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the building of two stone structures, of which one was the original "Bow" Bridge; "a rare piece of work, for before that time the like had never been seen in England." It seems to have been the stone arch that gave its name of "Bow," and if an arched stone bridge was so remarkable in those times that it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular, or "bow" shape, it must have been either the first, or among the earliest, of stone bridges built, in times when others were constructed of timber.

The original name of the village that afterwards sprang up here, on the hither or Middlesex shore, was thus singularly contradictory; meaning "the street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratfordon the Essex side was in those days known as Stratford Langthorne.

The good queen not only built the bridges and causeways, but endowed them with land and a water-mill, conveying those properties to the Abbess of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for the maintenance of the works. Having done all this, she died. Some years afterwards a Cistercian monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey Mills now stand, and the then Abbess of Barking, of opinion that the Abbot of that house, being near, would find it easier to look after the bridges than herself, reconveyed the property, together with its obligations, to him. The trust was kept for a time and then delegated to a certain Godfrey Pratt, who had a house built for him on the causeway and enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping the works in repair. Pratt did so well with his annual stipend and the alms given him by wayfarers that the Abbot at length discontinued the grant. Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite unauthorised toll-bar and levied "pontage" on all except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This went on for many years, until the scandal grew too great, and, in consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot dispossessed Godfrey Pratt of his toll-bar and resumed the control himself.

Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the road had been so greatly worn down that the feet of travellers and those of the horses often went through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently, to undergo an extensive cobbling process; a treatment,by the way, continued through the centuries until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.

In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork of all ages. The property for its maintenance had, of course, been lost in the confiscation of monastic estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair afterwards fell upon the local authorities, who always preferred to patch and tinker it so long as such a course was possible. On February 14, 1839, the existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.

XIV

"Farewell, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I heard say, honest Conscience was once drowned."

Thus says Will Kemp, in hisNine Days' Wonder, the account of a dance he jigged from London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that old joke about the drowning of conscience here, and so we will also without delay "have over" the modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy flour mills, and crossing another branch of the Lea by Channelsea Bridge, come to Stratford.

Here, then, begins the county of calves, according to the popular jest that to be a native of Essex is to be an "Essex Calf." It is not generally regarded as a complimentary title, for of all young animalsthe calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward. To this day in rural England the contemptuous exclamation "you great calf!" is used of an awkward, overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings. Yet, if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer on this subject, the nickname had a complimentary origin, "for," said he, "this county produceth calves of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."

We have already seen that the French spoken at Stratford-le-Bow in Chaucer's time was a scoff and a derision. To-day, neither on the Middlesex nor the Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of every kind, the making of matches that strike only on the box, the varied work of the Stratford and West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations close at hand; while the business of covering the potato-fields, the celery-beds and the grounds of the old suburban mansions with endless rows of suburban dwellings is engrossing attention down the road. Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban, and Ilford far greater in these days than it ever was when its "great" prefix was never pretermitted. London, indeed, stretches far out along this road, and the country is reached only after many miles of that debatable land which belongs neither to country nor town. Heralds of the great metropolis appear to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the dim presentiment of some vast capital," as De Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like a misgiving."

Stratford has not improved since coaches left the road. It has grown greatly, and grown dirty, squalid and extremely trying to noses that have not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure factories and other odoriferous industries. But it is a place of great enterprises and great and useful markets, and when its introductory mean streets are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone Road branches off to the left, looks by contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park in succession, past a building which, whether as an institution or an example of beautiful architecture, would well grace the West. The West Ham Public Library and Technical Institute is here referred to. "Irish Row," on the way, marked on old maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages inhabited until recent years by a turbulent colony of London-Irish market-gardening labourers, subsidised by Mrs Nelson in times of coaching competition to impede hated rivals as they came past the "Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of Manor Park; a house which, like the "Coach and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a legitimate coaching trade to something more in the gin-palace sort. This is not to say that the staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish Row, but when the rival Ipswich "Umpire" or the "New Colchester" coaches developed much sporting competition and their coachmen evinced a dogged determination to be first over BowBridge on the way up to London, and, by consequence, the first to arrive at their destination, why, an obscure hint or two on the part of one of her numerous staff, accompanied by the wherewithal for a drink, produced wonders in the way of highway obstruction. But such recollections are become unsubstantial as the fabric of which dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions of tramways and interminable rows of suburban shops that conduct to Ilford Bridge.

Great Ilford lies on the other side of the sullen Roding, that rolls a muddy tide in aimless loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial been approached by a bridge replacing the "eald," or old, ford, whence its name derives and not from that crossing of the stream being an "ill" ford, as imaginative, but uninstructed, historians would have us believe; although the slimy black mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the exercise of fording an ill enough enterprise. Ilford is now in the throes of development and is fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere suburb. Let us leave it for places less sophisticated.

The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving Ilford by moonshine, set forward "dauncing within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two strong Jades were beating and byting either of other." We take this to mean two women fighting on the road, until the context is reached, where he says that their hooves formed an arch overhim and that he narrowly escaped being kicked on the head. It then becomes evident that he is talking of horses.

Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and in more decorous fashion than that of Will Kemp, we come, past an inn oddly named the "Cauliflower"—probably as a subtle compliment to the abounding market-gardens of the neighbourhood—to the long, straight perspective of the road across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of new suburban "villa" streets now cover the waste on either side, so that the beginnings of the plain are not so much heath as modern suburb, created by the Great Eastern Railway's suburban stations and by the far-reaching enterprises of land corporations, which here carry on the usual speculations of the speculative builder on a gigantic scale. In acre upon acre of closely-packed streets, each one with a horrible similarity to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty London live and lose their individuality, and pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman of a century ago waited impatiently behind the ragged thickets and storm-tossed thorn trees of Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there now rises the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway between Ilford station and that of Chadwell Heath, the recent enormous growth of population on this sometime waste has led to the erection of the new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes," while widened lines have been providedfor the increased train services. "Seven Kings" is a romantic name, but who those monarchs were, and what they were ever doing on the Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable for cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is impossible to say. Many wits have been at work on the problem, but have been baffled. The natural assumption is that at this spot, marked on old maps as "Seven Kings Watering," the seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily records no such meeting, but there was noCourt Circularin those times, and so many royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked, except locally and in some fashion similar to this. So let us assume the kings met here and watered their horses at the "watering," which was a place where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash. The stream still crosses the highway, butcivilisation has put it in a pipe and tucked it away underground.

SEVEN KINGS.

A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway at this point, known as Stoup Lane ("stoup" meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of the Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish. Here it was, in 1794, on a night of December, that a King's messenger, James Martin by name, was shot by five footpads. The register of St Edmund's, Romford, records the burial of this unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.

Let us not, however, in view of the more or less grisly dangers that still await belated wayfarers on this road, enlarge too greatly on the lawlessness of old times; for the homeward-bound resident making for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs towards the stroke of ten o'clock is not infrequently startled by the sinister figure of a footpad springing from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and demanding—nothis money or his life, as in the old formula, but—a halfpenny! This invariable demand of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath footpads, which argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is for half the price of a drink.

"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?" asks the threatening tramp.

"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning the long perspective of the road for the policeman who ought to be within sight—but is not; "w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"

"I've walked all the way from Romford and only got half the price of a glass o' beer," says the rascal.

The citizen is astonished and incredulous, and his astonishment gets the better of his fear. "Oh, come now," he rejoins, "no one walks three miles from Romford for a glass of beer; besides, all the houses here close at ten o'clock."

"Oh, they do, do they?" replies the tramp, offensively. "'Ere, my mate Bill'll talk to you," and, whistling, the ominous bulk of Bill emerges aggressively from the darkling hedge, and together they proceed to wipe the road with that respectable ratepayer, and, rifling his pockets, leave him, bruised and bleeding, to reflect on the blessings of civilisation and to be thankful that he was not born a hundred years ago, when he might have been shot dead instead of being felled to the ground by the half-brick in a handkerchief which he finds beside him and takes home as a trophy.

Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past Beacontree Heath, on the right, to an open country of disconsolate-looking contorted elms and battered windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and still airs of summer of the winter winds that race across the watery flats of Rippleside and Dagenham Marshes, out of the shivering east. Lonely, until quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House," beside the road, the two whalebones that even yet surmount its garden entrance the wonderment for more than two hundred years of chance travellers. Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded in the Thames in the year of Oliver Cromwell's death, and set up here in memory of him. However that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, whenOgilby'sBritanniawas published, for the house is marked on his map as "Ye Whalebone."

These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected, have little longer yet to remain, for though apparently proof against decay, the house and grounds are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale to the builders.

WHALEBONE HOUSE.

The sole historic or other vestige remaining of the "Whalebone" turnpike-gate, once standing here, is an account to be found in the newspapers of the time of an attack made upon George Smith, the toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused in the darkness by a voice calling "Gate!" and, going to open it, was instantly knocked down, in a manner somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:—

"Last night and the night before,Three tom-cats came knocking at my door.I went down to let them in,And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin."

The two men who felled the unfortunate George Smith, alarmed by his cries of "Murder!" threatened to shoot him if he were not quiet, and, going over his pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting him over, a third confederate, ransacking the house, discovered three pounds. With this booty and a parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared as silently as they came.

Romford, now approached, is but twelve miles from London, and has frankly given up the impossible and ceased all pretence of being provincial. At the same time, building-land having only just (in the speculator's phrase) become "ripe for development," the townlet has not yet lost all individuality in suburban extension.

The place, say some antiquaries, derives its name from the "Roman ford" on the Rom brook, but it is a great deal more likely that the origin is identical with that of the first syllable in the names of Ramsgate, Ramsey and Romney, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon "ruim" = a marsh. Time was when the townwas celebrated for its manufacture of breeches; an industry which gave rise to a saying still current in the less polished nooks and corners of Essex—"Go to Romford and get your backsides new bottomed." Breeches have long ceased to be a noted product of the town, which for many years past has bulked large in the annals of Beer. Barricades, avenues, mountains and Alpine ranges of barrels, hogsheads, firkins and kilderkins of Romford ale and stout proclaim that the Englishman's preference for his "national drink" has not abated, and that

"Damn his eyes, whoever triesTo rob a poor man of his beer"

is still a popular sentiment; as both the brewers of arsenical compounds and the more rabid among teetotallers are some day likely to discover.

ENTRANCE TO ROMFORD.

A French traveller in England some two hundred years ago wrote that "there are a hundred sorts ofBeer made in England, and some are not bad: Art has well supplied Nature in this particular. Be that as it will, beer is Art and wine is Nature; I am for Nature against the world." That old fellow did not know how artful beer could be, and if he could re-visit his native France might discover that even wine is no longer the simple child of nature it once was.

But although John Barleycorn is the tutelary deity of Romford, it is quite conceivable that the stranger bound for Norwich, and turning neither to right nor to left, might pass through the town without so much as a glimpse obtained of those Alpine ranges aforesaid. True, on entering Romford, he could scarce fail to observe certain weird structures ahead: odd towers like first cousins to lighthouses, springing into the sky line, with ranges of perpendicular pipes, like the disjointed fragments of some mammoth organ, beside them, the characteristic signs and portents of a great brewery; but the barrels are secluded, nor even are Romford's streets blocked, as might have been suspected, with brewers' drays. Romford, indeed, spells to the uninstructed stranger rather bullocks than beer; for the cattle-pens are the chief feature of its market-place, and sheep and hay and straw bulk more in the eye of the road-farer than the products of Ind, Coope & Co., which are to be seen in all their vastness beside the railway station and on the sidings constructed especially for the trade in ale and stout.

ROMFORD.

The town in its most characteristic aspect is seen in the accompanying illustration taken from the doorway of that old inn, the "Windmill and Bells," thebroad road margined with granite setts and the pavements fenced with posts and rails; the re-built parish church prominent across the market-place.

OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PUTTELS BRIDGE.

Beyond Romford the road grows rural, and, by the same token, hilly. This, gentle reader, let it not be forgotten, is Essex, and we all know with what persistence that county is spoken of, and written of, as flat. If you would know what flatness is, try the Great North Road and its long levels between Baldock, Biggleswade and Alconbury, or search Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire or Hunts.Thereis flatness, beside which that of Essex is the merest superstition, started probably by some tired traveller of inconstant purpose, who, essaying to explore the county, gave up the enterprise when he had reached Wanstead Flats. Surveying that not highly romantic expanse, he took it as an exemplar of the rest of the shire, and so returned home to start this immortal myth on its career. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essexwill subscribe to its flatness as an article of faith, and as such an one cycles from Romford, through the hamlet of Hare Street, over Puttels Bridge, where stands an old toll-house, to the other hamlet of Brook Street, the fact that he will actually have towalkhis machine up the steep hill that conducts into the town of Brentwood will cause him to think hard things of myth-makers.

THE "FLEECE," BROOK STREET.

Brook Street Hill is the name of this eminence. Beside it stands a cemetery, convenient for brakeless cyclists who recklessly descend, and at its foot is a fine old inn, the "Fleece," a house of call for the fish-waggons that were once so great a feature of this road so far as Colchester and Harwich.

THE MARTYR'S TREE, BRENTWOOD.

Brentwood, on the crest of this hill, occupies an elevated table-land, with sharp descents from it on every side. The "burnt wood" town, destroyed in some forgotten conflagration, is now a long-streeted,old-fashioned place, apparently in no haste to bid good-bye to the past. It keeps the old Assize House of Queen Elizabeth's time in repair, and carefully sees to it that the Martyr's Tree, decayed though the old elm stump be and hollow, is saved from perishing altogether. It was in 1555 that William Hunter, in his twentieth year, suffered inthis place for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. That staunch upholder of the Protestant faith scarce needed the modern memorial, close by, while this shattered trunk remained, its gaping rents carefully bricked up by pious hands; but let the venerable relic be doubly safe-guarded in these times, when that candle lit by Latimer and Ridley, close upon three centuries and a half ago, burns dim, and lawless and forsworn clergy within the Church of England are working towards Rome and the return of the famous days of fire and stake; when the blood of the martyrs has ceased to inspire a generation which demands to be shown some tangible object before it can realise the significance of that sacrifice. Here, then, is something that can be seen and touched, to bring the least imaginative back in fancy to those terrible days, when brave hearts of every class gave up their lives in fire and smoke rather than abjure their faith. The Romanising clergy of to-day are made of coarser fabric than the martyrs.Theyare not actuated by honesty, but take oaths they have no intention of observing to a Church whose bread they eat and whose trust they betray.

Would you know something of that martyrdom at Brentwood? Then scan the inscription on the modern granite obelisk, and control, if you can, a righteous indignation when you perceive a modern Roman Catholic chapel standing, impudent in these days of an exaggerated tolerance, over against the Martyr's Tree itself, typifying the Scarlet Woman in midst of her blasphemies, exultant over the blood of the saints. "He being dead yet speaketh,"quotes that inscription; but what avails it to speak in the ears of the deaf, or to talk of honour to the perjured? "Learn from his example," continue those momentous words, "to value the privilege of an open Bible, and be careful to maintain it"; but the world goes by unheeding, and only when the danger again becomes acute and liberty of conscience is passing away will indifference be conquered and the folly of it revealed.

XVI

Brentwoodstill keeps a notable relic of coaching days in the old "White Hart" Inn, a curious specimen of the timbered and galleried type of hostelry familiar to our great-grandfathers. It turns a long plastered front to the street, but the great carved and panelled doorway leading into the coach-yard confirms the proud legend, "Established 1480." Full forty coaches passed through Brentwood in every twenty-four hours at the close of the Coaching Age, but the earlier days of coaching brought the "White Hart" more custom than came to it at the close of that era, when, in consequence of the roads being improved, travelling was quicker, and places once halted at were left behind without stopping. Innkeepers were considerable losers by this constant acceleration of coaches, and saw the smart, long-distance stages go dashing by where, years before,the old slow coaches stayed the night, or, at the very least, halted for meals.

The "White Hart" remains typical of the earlier times, and still keeps the old-world comfort regretted in other places by De Quincey, who lived long enough to witness the beginnings of the great changes that have come over the hotels of town and country since coaches gave place to railways.

YARD OF THE "WHITE HART," BRENTWOOD.

XVII

Brentwoodis no sooner left behind than the road descends steeply over what was once a part of Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild and hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the place where, in November 1692, those seven jovial Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay were themselves, while hunting the hare, chased and at last run down by nine hunters of a different sort, who turned their pockets out and then bade them good-day and be damned. The original chronicler of this significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell, makes no especial feature of the event. He merely records it as having happened "near Ingerstone," and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings in the same sort along the several approaches to London. Little wonder, therefore, that Macaulay should have drawn the conclusion that at this time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest and most populous shires of England was as dangerous as a pilgrimage across the deserts of Arabia.

From the descending road or from Shenfield Church the country is seen spread out, map-like, below, over the valley of the Thames, to where the river empties itself into the broad estuary at the Nore. At least, there is the vale, and the map vouchsafes the information that the river flows thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out the view of that imperial waterway. "I cannot see the Spanish fleet, because it's not in sight,"says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in the poem, and it is precisely for the same reason that the Thames is not visible from Shenfield. But if one is denied a view of that imperial river, at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard, a prodigal riot of roses of every hue and habit, are worth seeing. The attenuated shingled spire, one of the characteristic features of Essex churches, beckons insistently from the road, and he who thereupon turns aside is well repaid, in a sight of the elaborately-carved timber columns of the interior, proving how in this county, where building stone is not found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders made excellent shift with heart of oak. This is, in fact, like so many other Essex churches, largelywooden, and its timber is as sound now as it was six or seven hundred years ago.

SHENFIELD.

Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End" lies two miles distant from Shenfield. As in the case of so many other places near the great roads, a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name of the old village sprang up, to catch the custom of travellers; but an additionally curious fact is the utter extinction of the original village, which lay a mile distant from the highway, where the parish church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring farmstead. Explorers in the countryside are often astonished at the great distances between villages and their parish churches, and seek in vain in their guide-books or in talk with the "oldest inhabitant" an explanation of so curious a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the mystery is found in the enclosure of the surrounding common lands. The enclosure of commons has never been possible without the passing of special Acts, which have divided what should have been the heritage of the people for all time between the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor and the tenants would each obtain their share of the plunder, in the form of freehold land, with the obvious result that the villagers, instead of paying rent for their cottages clustering round the church in the original village, built themselves new and rent-free cottages on their share of the spoil of the commons. The old cottages being pulled down, or allowed to decay, it was notlong before the last trace of the original village disappeared.

MOUNTNESSING CHURCH.

Mountnessing was once the seat of the Mounteneys, who have long since vanished from their old home. The old church, largely red brick without and timber within, still preserves the fossil rib-bone of an elephant, long regarded with reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant, and has for an additional curiosity the carving of a head on one of the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps by way of warning to Early English parishioners of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's bridle." The red-brick west front of the church, masking the wooden belfry-frame from the weather, still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick, but such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that without that evidence of age it would be difficult to credit it with so long an existence. The iron tiesin the shape of the letter S give the view a singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in verse, beginning, "Reader, excuse the underwritten," is a curiosity of Mountnessing churchyard.

MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL.

Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as the modern settlement is named, is seen clustering on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and a wayside pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting of a dozen cottages, two public-houses, a general "stores" (our grandfathers would have been content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a tin tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to walk a mile to church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and a windmill situated on a knoll; a windmill that for picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome or a Constable.

From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims, two miles to "Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of customary spelling. The milestones are undoubtedly strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on the pedantic side, for that village derives its name from a settlement of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or meadow, at the Roman milestone they found here, but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone" they called their village, which lies in the little valley of the River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream of the smallest) hither and thither to give a perennial verdure to the meads along its course. "Ing" is, by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names successively met with along the River Wid. Mounteney's Ing we have already seen, and Fryerning, or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; whileMargaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond Ingatestone.

THE GATEHOUSE, INGATESTONE HALL.

Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad, is of the narrowest, and remains in almost every detail exactly as it is pictured in the old print reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the church still rising behind. It is a tower which by no means looks its age of over four hundred years, so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness of the brick.Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that Sir William Petre who, emulating the accommodating qualities of the famous Vicar of Bray, bowed before the religious storms of the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth. "Made of the willow and not of the oak," those tempests not only left him unscathed, but brought him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched with the manor of Ingatestone, plundered from the Abbey of Barking, together with much spoil elsewhere. How he managed to do it is a mystery, but during the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for such the Petres always have been) actually obtained a Papal Bull confirming him and his in these grants. One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy, recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble physiognomy could be so accomplished a time-server and truckler. His home, plundered from the nuns of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the road, down a beautifully-timbered country lane. The entrance is by a gatehouse with the motto, "Sans Dieu Rien," situated at the end of an avenue and framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old red-brick turreted buildings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Lord Petre of to-day does not reside here, but the place is still in the family, and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use. Miss Braddon is perhaps scarce to be numbered among those novelists whose literary landmarks are followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone Hall that it is the scene of herLady Audley's Secret.The fish-ponds of old monastic times, the well in which Lady Audley thrust her husband, the lime-walk he haunted, together with such romantic accessories as terraced walks and a priest's hiding-hole, form items which would require the business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer to fully enlarge upon. Theydosay—the "they" in question being the gossips of Ingatestone—that the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail, passing at 1·15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the high road, once saw "a something" in white mysteriously sauntering beneath the trees, but whether it was the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one of the sisters thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the Postmaster-General's regulations and time-sheets not allowing for time spent in psychical research.

INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS.From an Old Print

The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is visible on the right, soon after leaving Ingatestone. Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its timbered belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the village, standing solitary, save for the vicarage and a farmhouse, beside a railway crossing—if, indeed, any building adjoining the main-line of a great railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret thus honoured in the place-name is the Saint to whom the church is dedicated. Some traces of the "marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the old windows, in decorative allusion, remained until they were swept away for modern stained-glass in memory of a late vicar and his family; glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that,save for an inscription on one of the bells, she now remains unhonoured in her own church, deposed in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art furnisher. The only remaining ancient glass is that of the east window, a magnificent fifteenth-century "tree of Jesse."

AT MARGARETTING.

Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the twenty-fifth milestone, where a post-office and some few scattered cottages straggle picturesquely at the foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially to spoil some two miles of this road is the park wall of Hylands, a large estate purchased about 1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster, who stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and raised this eyesore to enclose his new-made park. Almost as soon as the last brick was put in its place, the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by railway speculations, and his walled-in Eden was sold. Nature in the meanwhile has done her best,and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River Wid crosses beneath the road, water-lilies gem the stream and the wind sounds in the luxuriant Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.

If it were not for its church, which has been re-built and has a very fine and tall spire, one might easily pass Widford and not know it, for the very few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such as it is, it stands on the crest of something not quite so much as a hill and rather more than an incline, and beside its large church has an equally fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White Horse." Time was, and that until three years since, when Widford was celebrated for its one other inn, the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled, the "Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by the picture-sign of a headless woman, with the inscription,Fort Bone, on one side, and a portrait of Henry the Eighth on the other. "Fort Bone" was commonly Englished by slangy cyclists as "good business." The sign, of course, was a pictorial and satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an open question whether or not in their present form this and the several other "Quiet Woman" and "Good Woman" signs throughout the country are perversions of the original legend, "la bonne fame" displayed on old inns in the distant past; an inscription laudatory of the hostelry, and matching the self-recommendation of "la bonne rénommée," found in modern France, or the more familiar "noted house for—" and "good pull up" inscriptions on innsin modern England. Virgil's description of Fame, walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the clouds, may have originated the pictorial sign of the headless woman in days of ancient learning; and the classic allusion becoming lost and the supposedly incorrect spelling of "fame" being altered to "femme," we thus obtain a very reasonable derivation. We may take it that many shrew-bitten folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily agreed to forget the original meaning in order to adopt one so exactly fitting their opinion that the only quiet or good women were headless ones.

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