Chapter 8

THE "GOOD WOMAN" SIGN.

Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change that is robbing places of all interest and distinction,the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer swings from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed inn opposite the "White Horse" has retired into private life. The picture sign is now housed inside the "White Horse."

XVIII

Widfordalmost immediately introduces the explorer to Moulsham (originally the "mole's home"), itself own brother—but a very out-at-elbows brother—to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the wind between our gentility and the somewhat fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we should turn to the left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of the town, and so, proceeding along the "new London road," come into Chelmsford, half way down the High Street. Being, however, intent rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en endure the half-mile length of shabby, untidy street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford, the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City of Calves, over the hunchbacked and narrow stone bridge across the Chelmer, the successor, at an interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original bridge built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That is a huge slice of time, but it was too late, even in Norman days, for the town to change its name from Chelmersfordto something more appropriate when the ford was thus superseded.

Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High Street of the town, the view closed by the Shire Hall and the church; the Norwich Road, however, turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and refusing to make acquaintance with the town. It is the Conduit that is seen in this illustration of the High Street, its architecture scarce improved by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be ornamental, over its cupola.

THE BRIDGE: ENTRANCE TO CHELMSFORD.

Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at the end of this view, spoil one another, the Hall almost entirely hiding the church when looking down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular exterior of the church putting the clumsy architecture of the Hall to shame, as a paganupstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some, but its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone concerns the passing stranger, who feels so concerned by sight of it that he accordingly passes the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the seated bronze effigy of a native, a bygone Lord Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like an old apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops green coppery stains over his nice stone pedestal) keep one another company in the open space fronting this building.

THE CONDUIT, CHELMSFORD.

The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal, whose career came to a close in 1806. The monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for all time the image of a judge whose administration of English law, directed by serene wisdom, assistedby purest love of justice, endeared by unwearied kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will be held by his country in undying remembrance." His birthplace could hardly have said more than that.

TINDAL'S STATUE.

Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways, being indeed very severely bitten with a taste for modernity. Is it not famous as the first town in the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have not its streets been resolutely swept clear of antiquity? The town, in short, is scarce picturesque. It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays, but on other occasions every house provokes a yawn, with perhaps the exception of the "Saracen's Head," an inn that, despite its modernised and stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old times. There was a "Saracen's Head" here certainly as far back as the fifteenth century, and probablymuch earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it derived from Crusading times, when the knights and men-at-arms, returning from Palestine with wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys, leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the Holy Land, found their fame come home before them, and the old inns they had known—the "Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine Wheel," and the like—often re-named in their honour. With little effort we can imagine the scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period, when exploits at Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were told and re-told, and gained wonderfully in the repetition over sack and malvoysie. What bloody fellows they were, and with what zest they slew the Soldan's soldiers over and over again as they sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has been rebuilt many times since then; but human nature remains the same though timber rot and brick perish, and again and again the same old talk has been heard in the bar-parlour of the inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Creçy; men of a later age who warred under Marlborough at Blenheim, Ramillies or Malplaquet; the lads of the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from the horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from a hundred fights on the burning South African veldt—all have had their circle of greedy listeners here.

The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek and stuccoed face to the street, and the house showssigns of extensive rebuilding and remodelling, undertaken in the full flush of the great days of coaching prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in the belief that coaching, and the road as an institution, would last for ever. Fond belief! Has anyone ever stopped to consider the fact that the great coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a great deal more to do with the pulling down of the old-fashioned galleried and timbered inns of country towns than ever railways have had? The average small country town felt in fullest measure the great increase in business incidental to the last years of the coaching age, and every innkeeper hastened to rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who had, from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding until the dawn of the Railway Age, on seeing that the road would decay and travellers be carried to their journeys' ends without halting for rest and refreshment, promptly gave up any such ideas and were thankful that they had not begun the work of reconstruction and enlargement. Those who had were ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared may yet be often met with, a world too large, in country towns where once the mails and the stage-coaches passed, like a procession, day by day. It is quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house like the "White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it is not too much to say that, had the Coaching Age lasted another ten years, it also would have been rebuilt.

An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its central figure, belongs to the "Saracen's Head" atChelmsford. For some years after he had won fame as a novelist he still retained his position in the General Post Office, of which he was a travelling inspector. On one of these official journeys he happened to be staying here, at the time when hisBarchester Towerswas being issued, after the then prevailing fashion, in parts. He was seated in the coffee-room when two clergymen entered, one of them with the newly-issued part of the story. The cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the trials of the Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs Proudie, who was rather a trial to Trollope's readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the clergyman put the book down. "Confound that Mrs Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish she were dead!"

Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he thanked the reader for thus accidentally telling him that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome, and undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen," said he, "she shall die in the next number;" and die she accordingly did. But in defence of Trollope's truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs Proudies may yet be found in a goodly proportion of the episcopal palaces of England.

XIX

Returningnow to the Conduit, and making for the open road once more, Chelmsford is left by way of Springfield, past the successor of Chelmsford's finest old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five centuries, and had been the halting-place of many famous travellers, among them a long line of Earls of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham and London; but none of these associations sufficed to save the house. Fragments of its carved beams are preserved in the local museum, but recall it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon bring back in his majesty that denizen of the earth in the dim æons of the past. Chelmsford would dearly like many of its old buildings—wantonly demolished years ago—back again; but what is done cannot be undone, and there's an end on't. The "Cross Keys" remains, in a restored condition.

THE "THREE CUPS" SIGN

The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of Chelmsford, carries varying significances. To the mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the American from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim Fathers and their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts; and to the gaol-bird it means a "stretch" of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building enlarged in recent years for the accommodation of the guests consigned to it at Assize time from the Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But,once past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing and cheerful. Its long miscellaneous street, where the quaint sign of the "Three Cups" stands out, gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of picturesqueness. That this has been the aim of their architects is abundantly manifest in examples where, under a single roof, one may experience the mingled romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle, a Tudor manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a "Queen Anne" mansion; all done in red brick, gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover, fitted with electric light and hot and cold water supply. To this end has castellated and domestic architecture unwound its long story during some five hundred years. It will be seen thereby that Williamof Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time architect did not live in vain.

But if Springfield be modern as a suburb, it is ancient as a village. To see old Springfield, it is necessary to turn off the road to the left, and to journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church, a noble building with mingled red brick and stone tower bearing the inscription, "Prayse God for al the good benefactors 1586." Oliver Goldsmith, it is quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model for hisDeserted Village. He certainly visited at an old cottage opposite the church, but the real Sweet Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.

SPRINGFIELD CHURCH.

Beyond the village and facing the high road are the strangely impressive lodges of the historic estate of New Hall; new at the end of the fifteenth century,but declined into a respectable age by now and cobwebbed with much history and many legends. The place, now and for a considerable number of years past an alien convent, has been owned during a period of four hundred years by an astonishing number of historic personages, who have succeeded one another like flitting phantoms. Here the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps out spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the handling of the historic kaleidoscope. Built by Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose daughter and heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus eventually came into possession of Henry the Eighth, who occasionally resided here and re-named it "Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex. By this time it had resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners were George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, and Oliver Cromwell, who had it as a gift from Parliament and exchanged it so soon as he decently could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him succeeded another Duke of Buckingham, and to him that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and was visited here, when he was suffering from gout and dropsy, by that scribbling traveller, Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of historic owners may be said to end, but constant change has ever been the lot of New Hall, and a succession of lesser lights followed him until thenuns set up their secluded life here and bade farewell to a vain world. That world passes by; the road on one side, the railway midway in the grounds, and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the vineyard.

NEW HALL LODGES

No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road. All is emptiness, and the lichened brick and the crumbling stone vases of neighbouring boundary walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled aims characteristic of the place.

There is an air of romance about Boreham House, as seen from the tree-embowered road at a little distance from New Hall; an altogether deceptive air, let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic building of white brick. It is its situation at the head of a formal lake, fringed with stately elms, that confers the illusory distinction, but the explorer of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl squattering on the lake, can weave his own romance to fit the scene. And if the house, though stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest in the shape of the identical carriage used by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent years to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken to pieces in an accident. Restored now to its original condition, it will need to be a great occasion indeed that brings it forth again.

BOREHAM.

Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its old gabled cottages clustering round the still olderchurch, itself embowered in lime trees whose delightful scent weights the July air with an Arcadian languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham has every likelihood of having his nerves startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the road of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door open, and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of one of the inmates of the silent tomb making a hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High noon being an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying as to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on drawing nearer that the old tomb-house has been converted into a tool-house and general lumber-room, and that the figure seated within is the sexton enjoying his lunch, screened from the noonday heats.An inscription over the door of the ornate building—a copy of the Temple of the Winds at Athens—proclaims it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamianæ, Anno 1764"; but the Walthams have disappeared, both from their mausoleum and the district. The body of the last appears to have been arrested for debt when on the road hither from Chelmsford. The sexton explains that the parish took over the Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience hee-ar, years ago," says this typical Essex rustic, and goes on to tell how the oil and coals and candles for church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held. Three Radcliffes, Earls of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather, father, and son, lie in effigy side by side on an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers are to my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton calls them, and explains that their broken noses are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.

Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called the "mine" road, Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the great red-brick Georgian mansion of Crix, standing in its meadows where the little River Ter comes down from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels of Hatfield Mill, and then hurries off, as though belated, for a rendezvous with the Chelmer, two miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road with whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing warranty of its age in the inscription, "A.A. 1715"; but if that evidence were lacking it could be found in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk intoan area with the raising of the road for the building of the bridge that long ago replaced the watersplash at this crossing of the stream.

Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the heaths that once gave the place its original forename of "Heathfield," and the Peverels, identical with the Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige of themselves in the church—that last resort of the antiquary in search of old manorial lords. It is true that on modern tablets built into the west front of the church the founding of a Benedictine Priory here in 1100 by Ingelrica, mother of William Peverel, is alluded to, together with the rather scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things are decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of Latin and lichen-stains, so that both their monastic beneficence and their maternal origin are only dimly to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.

It is the distance of half a mile from the high road to where Hatfield church lies secluded, adjoining the grounds of a mansion partly occupying the site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It is here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's original baptism must be sought, and accordingly some stretches of common-land may be discovered close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us, though there be little enough to say of it, beyond the note that its closeness to the railway station has caused a certain growth and a certain amount of rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the old plaster cottages that were once the invariablefeature of its street, and admirably figured forth the Essex manner of decoratively treating plaster-work. There remain here but two such cottages, bearing the date 1703, and the initials M.R., withfleur-de-lis.

A roadof almost unvarying flatness conducts in something under three miles to Witham, entered nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by the Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates in no fewer than three separate and distinct names. As the River Witham, it confers a name upon the townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same sponsorial office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook it is endowed with a title that smacks rather of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down upon the mere thread of water oozing and stewing in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is not ill-named as the Podsbrook; but the Essex Council in bridging it so substantially think of it rather as the River Witham, which they have every right and cause to do, for the stream can avenge itself of those disfiguring potsherds and that contemptuous title in the most sardonic way when winter comes and the floods are out.

The long street of Witham is remarkable forthe number of large and handsome mansions dating from the time of Queen Anne, through the period of the four Georges. The greater number of the professional men of Essex would, from the number of those houses, appear to have settled in the little town and to have medically attended it and legally represented it to such an effect that it is only now beginning to recover from them and from the coming of the railway, which dealt a death-blow to the thriving coaching interest of the early part of the nineteenth century.

For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place of Mrs Nelson's famous "Ipswich Blues," the crack coaches on the seventy miles of road, which started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary exertions made Ipswich in something under six hours. Such remarkable performances as these were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in place of the average ten miles on other roads, and by placing leaders in readiness at the foot of hills like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The "Blue Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some of the principal coaches drew up, is still in existence; its sign, a pierced effigy of that animal projecting from the front of the house and looming weirdly against the sky-line. There are many "White Harts" on the road to Norwich, the sign being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as that of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North Road; but of all the many examples to be met along these hundred and twelve miles this is the one that is most quaintly out of proportion, witha head and neck less than half the size demanded by body and legs, and a golden collar and chain of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was the favourite badge of Richard the Second, whose connection with East Anglia was too slight for assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference on the part of innkeepers along the Norwich Road.

CHIPPING HILL.

Those who would seek the site of the original Witham must turn aside from the high road the matter of half a mile, past the railway station, to Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a camp successively occupied and wrought upon by the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons, it will be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant valley of that triply-named river already mentioned, in 1749 described by Walpole as "the prettiest little winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to this day, and as sweet, and the by-road that comes up from the gravelly hollow and cuts through the earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold climbs up romantically under the blossoming limes into as pretty a picture in the rural sort as you shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old England before railways came, or science and the ten thousand plagues of modern life, and the cheap builder of hideous new cottages were let loose upon the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in the picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old dwellings, flint-built church tower and red-brickrectory, set in, upon and around the swelling grassy banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had both their fortress and their market, as evidenced by the still surviving name of Chipping, or Market Hill.

Old East Anglian cottages have their own special characteristics, arising from local conditions, but one feature they share in common with all old rustic dwellings; the great size and relative importance of their genial chimneys, suggesting warmth and the lavish laying on of logs. They tell the passer-by of old times when wood was the only fuel; when it was to be gathered for the mere labour of gathering, and plenty of it was piled upon the generous open hearth. Modern cottages, all over the kingdom, tell a different tale, in the look of their meagre chimney-pots—a tale of coal, dearly purchased, economised in tiny grates.

But the special features of East Anglian cottage architecture? They are here, in the highways and byways, for all to see who will. It is a land without stone, this East of England, where timber and flint and brick play important constructional parts in church and hall and manor-house, and where timber framing, lath and plaster, parge-work, and a few bricks for the chimney stacks, are combined to build up the cottages.

Out of their necessities our ancestors contrived dwellings that for durability, comfort and artistry put modern houses, whether halls or cottages, to shame. The stone cottages of Somersetshire, Rutland, Leicestershire; the cob and thatch ofDevon, the granite of Cornwall; the timber and plaster, or timber and brick noggin of Cheshire and Herefordshire are all evidence to this day of how skilfully our forbears employed the materials to their hands; and here in Essex you shall find a something in the art of cottage building hardly to be discovered elsewhere. This is the frequent use of parge-work, or pargetting, as it is sometimes called, on old cottage exteriors. Parge-work is the ornamental filling or surfacing of walls with plaster. The term is just as often applied to the elaborately-moulded and panelled plaster ceilings of Elizabethan and Jacobean halls as to the exterior decoration that forms so remarkable and pleasing a feature of Essex rustic cottage architecture. Few Essex villages that can claim to preserve many relics of old times are without examples of this peculiarly local style; although, to be sure, an ignorant want of appreciation has been the cause of much destruction of late years. The commoner forms of this decoration are frequently seen, in the easily incised patterns that even the unskilful can make in the plaster while still wet, by the aid of anything from a trowel to the finger-tips; just as a cook ornaments the dough of her uncooked pies. Many of these patterns are traditional; as much a matter of tradition, for instance, as are the needlework patterns wrought on the breast of an old smock-frock. The commonest is one produced by a process of combing the plaster in repetitions of a device resembling an elongated figure 8 laid flat, or perhaps more narrowly resembling a hank of worsted. Other patterns, ofwhorls or concentric circles, stars, triangles and the like, are produced by wooden stamps. But the really beautiful examples are not the products of to-day. These belong to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and are lavish in decoration of a Renaissance character moulded in high relief. Architects with sufficient culture and understanding to enable them to appreciate local style have, in recent years, reintroduced decoration of this character when building residences in the country, but many a humble cottager lives within walls that display a profusion of artistic devices unapproached by the houses of the wealthy.

Discoveries close by the church on Chipping Hill have led to the belief that the building stands on, or near, the site of a Temple of Diana, and certainly Roman bricks are still visible in great numbers in the walls of the tower. A memorial in the chancel to Sir Gilbert East, who died in 1828, reminds the historian of some strange survivals existing at that time. The Easts were owners of the tithes at Witham, and although they lived so far distant as Berkshire, always insisted on their right of being buried here. Sir Gilbert East's body was, by his express direction, buried beside his wife, with a band of brass encircling both, engraved with the words from the marriage service, "Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." His funeral was a three days' business, with knights bannerets accompanying, and much pomp and circumstance. In the family vault they laid him, wrapped in linen, returned to Berkshire for thereading of the will, when, to the dismay of the family, it was found that the knight had expressly wished to be buried in woollen. The family solicitor hurried back and, disinterring his defunct client, saw to it that he was comfortably tucked in as desired.

Between Witham and Kelvedon, where the road runs level, there is but one hamlet, an offshoot of Rivenhall known as Rivenhall End, where a cottage close by the "Fox" inn, once a toll-house, bears its former history, plain to read, in the evidence of its windows commanding either approach, up or down the road. A mile and a half beyond begins Kelvedon, set down in the flats beside the River Blackwater; "Kelvedon Easterford, vulgo Keldon," as Ogilby calls it; "consisting," he continues, "chiefly of inns"; a description which remains strikingly true to this day. This pronunciation, "Keldon," throws some light upon the following remarks of an old traveller who kept a diary of his wayfaring, and, writing in 1744, says, "From Colchester in an hour or two, I came to an old Village call'd Kildane, where they tell you the famous Massacre of the Danes began; but the true Name of the Town is Kelvedon."

How Kelvedon can ever have escaped being called "Long" Kelvedon is a mystery, for it straggles on and on and must be nearly a mile in length; a street of handsome old residences, of cottages and humble shops of all ages, and old broken-backed taverns where the Essex labourer gathers night by night and discusses the prospect of the carraway crop and the likelihood of the entire agricultural interest presently, goingen masseto the "work'us." Afterwhich, with the courage of despair, and to drown his troubles, he will call for "another pot o' thrup'ny, missus," and, when closing time comes, slouch home through the mud and mist until the following evening, when the same programme is repeated. It is the agricultural labourer who supports the little wayside "publics" whose existence in such numbers puzzles the mid-day stranger, who, seeing them empty and apparently lifeless, wonders how they can possibly live. Business practically only begins when work in the fields is done, and the rent is not so high but that a few pots of beer a night represent a sufficient profit.

It must not be supposed that Kelvedon has not its exquisite architectural relics of a bygone time, or that its inns are all of the rural beer-house type. Not at all. Chief among the inns of Kelvedon is the "Angel," which indeed is a house not only of considerable size and outstanding character, but of historic interest, as having been the favourite resting-place of William the Third on his journeys along this road. Its projecting porch is the first thing the traveller sees on entering the town from the direction of London, where the road swerves violently to the left, and again as violently to the right, forming a very awkward corner. "Angel Corner," said Alexander, of the "Retaliator" coach, "is the very devil of a corner." This remark was drawn from him on the occasion of his nearly driving into the porch, when trying conclusions with a rival charioteer.

Almost opposite the still-existing "Angel" stood the equally extensive "Red Lion," long since retiredfrom business and remodelled as a row of cottages. The histories of both houses, and of many another fine old inn, which might once have been written from the recollections of those who knew the old days of the road, are now in great part lost, and the world so much the poorer. Had scribblers then abounded, and the "personal" note of the modern journalist been sounded in those days, we should have known how King William came to and set out from his inn; how he looked, what he ate and drank, how many long clay pipes he smoked, and what comparisons he drew in conversation with Bentinck between the flat lands on the way from Kelvedon to Harwich and the still flatter lands of his native Holland. And besides such records of the great, we should then have been better furnished with the early history of coaching, which, if not indeed a sealed book, is at least a very short and fragmentary one.

THE "ANGEL," KELVEDON.

XXI

Earlycoaching days are wrapped round with strange adventures and the oddest tales; some, doubtless, of theben trovato, rather than the most truthful, nature. But those stories of coaching miseries and adventure that have been proved truthful are themselves so surprising and incredible to modern ears that even the most improbable of uncertified tales cannot be dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of the Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should, for instance, surely be picturesquely written up some day and included in some English (and therefore strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One Nights' Entertainments.

The coach was nearing the outskirts of London. The rheumy air hung in dank and foggy vapours on the countryside and transformed innocent roadside trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing shapes. The guard let off his blunderbuss at a pollard willow that loomed suspiciously like a highwayman out of the reeking air, and the passengers all began to automatically turn their pockets out. It proved a false alarm, and purses and trinkets were returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he carried, whereupon a lady advised him to hide the money in his boot. He had hardly done this when a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman to stop. When the unhappy insides had picked themselves up from the straw at the bottom of thecoach, into which they had unceremoniously been thrown by the driver's prompt obedience to that behest, they found themselves covered with a pistol projected through the door, and were invited to deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who had little gave it and were thankful it was no more. The lady protested that she had nothing; "but," said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you will find ten guineas." There was nothing for it but to take off that boot and hand over the coin; but when the highwayman had gone it was another matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in no measured terms, of being the robber's accomplice. Bound to admit that appearances were against her, she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited the company to supper the following evening, when matters should be explained. They accepted, not, it is to be feared, very graciously. The time came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room, with a supper laid, they were re-introduced to their acquaintance of the night before. When the repast was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in this book, which I had with me in the coach, are bank-notes to the amount of one thousand pounds. I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than for me to be robbed of this valuable property. As you have been the means of my saving it, I entreat your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred pounds."

Much of the humour that went to lighten old road travelling was of an evanescent kind, and hasnot survived, but a few examples, preserved in contemporary literature, keep their flavour. Among them is the narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter." "I recollect," said the Jehu who told the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger, and nothing that was either said or done was at all to his mind. On that day I happened to have a very awkward team—three blind ones and a very shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times I lost my patience as well as temper. My near leader pulled to such a degree that I was obliged to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the top of the bit, and curb her enough to break her jaw. After starting again, I could deal with her very well for about a mile, when her mouth got dead again, and I was wicked enough to let drive a few hearty damns at her, my pious companion all the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon which he bolted as if he had been galvanised.

"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'

"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I, 'but I won't have it;' so I answered, 'What coach does he drive?'

"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up his hands, 'I fear you don't read your Bible; but I will tell you—he was the most patient man that ever existed.'

"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three blind 'uns and a bolter?'

"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a coachman.'

"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever he had had four such horses to deal with as I have here, he would have had no more patience than myself.'"

"THREE BLIND UNS AND A BOLTER."From a Print after H. Alken.

Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen played a drunken trick that would have been impossible in the last years of coaching, when discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric than they had been. He had just driven the London stage from Ipswich, and having more by good luck than careful driving brought his passengers safely to dinner at the "Angel," turned into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink of coachmen—rum. Emerging, he perceived one of the Harwich to London fish-waggons, fully laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the waggon round and dashed off at top speed on the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and two tons weight of fish strewed the king's highway. The mad coachman survived to repent his escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder of his life.

"Other times, other manners" is a saying that assumes an added force when contrasting the Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our fellow-travellers by railway, who glare at us, and we at them, like strange cats on a roof-top, have little idea of the chivalry that ruled on the road a hundred years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who may be the only other occupant of a railwaycarriage with you, and she wonders whether she had not better call the guard; but it was, in the days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden duty of the gentlemen to see that the ladies in whose company the chances of the road might place them lacked nothing that courtesy could supply; whether it were merely the aid of an arm in walking up one of those hills the coaches could only climb unladen, or the more material attention involved in seeing that the dear creatures were duly supplied with refreshments. It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for the breakfasts and dinners of the unprotected ladies who might be travelling by the same conveyance. "I vow," says one of these old travellers, "'tis a pleasure in a cavalier to do so; but, the Lord save us, what a prodigious appetite does not the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the fair, whose lassitude and vapours at other times render them incapable of more than drinking a dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing which it is only fitting that the heathenish and phanatick peoples of the Indies should partake of. I protest that the ladies of the coach, when we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding they could not be suited with tay, went to it with a right good will and left as good an account of the claret and the beef as if they had been going empty for a week. Spare me, I do beg, from your languishing creatures who would die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, butcompare with the most valiant of trenchermen abroad."

This protesting gentleman might, had he thought of it, have exclaimed with Othello on the pity "that we can call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites."

He must have been particularly hard hit in the pocket by the robust appetites of his fellow-travellers, but did not, however, let his feelings appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as a toast, "the ladies, bless them, whose bright eyes," etc., etc.—a toast we have many times heard of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon having "made an impression." He, in fact, seems to have been like Constable, in a way; for it was said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in a stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner." "Then," said one, hearing that praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"

That is very significant. It was, then, only your very paragon among gentlemen who could sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner. His manners might survive the strain of the journey itself, and even the sight and sound of lovely Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring, unlovely to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating gurgles; but when after the tedious stage had been accomplished and the passengers had descended, irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner scarce to be eaten, even at express speed, in the short time allowed, then, aythen, my friends, came the test! No man so insensible to politenessas a starving man, and few attentions were paid to the ladies by strangers whose sole chance of obtaining the dinner for which they had paid was the resolute determination to attend only to their own wants.

The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly outweighed the pleasures of that old-world method. A pleasant day and the open country made a seat on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not willingly to be exchanged for any other mode of conveyance then known; but, as little David Copperfield found on his first coach journey,nighton a coach was an experience once gained not willingly repeated. Being put between two gentlemen, to prevent his falling off, David found himself nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he could not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!" which they didn't like at all, because it woke them. With the rising of the sun David found his fellow-passengers sleeping easier than they had done during the night, when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed their midnight slumbers. As the sun rose higher, so their sleep became lighter and they gradually awoke, one by one, each one indignant when charged with having slept. During the rest of his career, David invariably observed "that of all human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having gone to sleep in a coach."

XXII

BIRTHPLACE OF SPURGEON.

Coachingtimes and coaching inns have long kept us at the very threshold of Kelvedon, which has a modern claim to notice of which it is not a little proud. Spurgeon was born here. Although the figure of that great wielder of homely and untutored pulpit oratory is but one among several preachers in the same family, there is only one possible Spurgeon when that name is mentioned. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born in a house still pointed out, on June 19, 1834; the eldest son of the Rev. John Spurgeon. The old cottage is now the"Wheatsheaf" beer-house and has had a bay window and a brick frontage added since that time. Close by is a now highly respectable and not a little dignified private residence known still as the "Tommy shop," although almost seventy years have passed since it was used as a kind of restaurant and canteen for the navvies then working on the construction of the Great Eastern Railway, which runs at the rear.

The oldest house in Kelvedon is doubtless the "Sun," which dates from the middle of the fifteenth century and has within recent years had its carved woodwork, long covered with plaster, once more exposed to view. It stands, almost the last house in the town, by the bridge over the Blackwater, on the way to Gore Pit.

Gore Pit is generally said to be the site of a battle.Whatbattle, however, historians do not and cannot specify; and indeed this name, bloody though it may sound to modern ears, has, despite the popular legend of the derivation of Kelvedon from "Kildane," perhaps no such sanguinary association, and is probably a contraction of the old word "coneygore," or rabbit warren.

It is, despite its name, a pretty and a peaceful hamlet, with a blacksmith's shop and a roadside horse-pond, and surrounded by the fruit-farms of a great jam-making company. The church of Feering can be seen across the flat fields, on the other side of the railway. Messing lies a mile away, in the other direction.

Let the idle wayfarer, curious as to the name of Gore Pit, speak to the blacksmith on the subject,and he will be told, with the seriousness of implicit belief, of the fighting of a great battle here, and that the blood ran down into "that there horse-pond." Moreover, that at Kelvedon—"Killdane they used to call it—they killed the Danes; at Feering they feared 'em, and at Messing they made a mess of it"; which seems to very correctly reflect the views of the neighbourhood on local history in ancient times, as reflected in place-names!

Rural Essex, in the aspect of its fields and meadows, is revealed along these miles in its most characteristic form. It is, in many respects, unlike other counties. In some ways the unhappy industry of farming has fared worse here than elsewhere, and many holdings have for years past gone uncultivated, and the dock, the thistle and other lusty weeds have resumed an evil possession of fields once kept clean and trim. But in the smaller operations of husbandry Essex has always been, and in some districts still is, remarkably successful; while, although the farmer protests that it does not pay to grow any kind of grain, the yellowing seas of autumnal cornfields are still a prominent feature of the landscapes of Essex and of its neighbouring Suffolk. Essex and Suffolk are old-world, far beyond the rest of England, and in growing wheat in these times, when a cornfield is a rare sight in other parts of the country and when "our daily bread" is chiefly compounded of grain grown in North America, Russia, or the Argentine, they maintain their singularity. It does the heart good to see the ripening wheatfields of East Anglia, to see thegathered stooks in the reaped perspectives, and to hear the hum of the threshing machine; for the sights and sound seem to carry us back to that England of a bygone age, when Constable painted such fields, and when they were numerous enough throughout the land to feed the population. Here and there one may still find fields of that famous grain, the "Essex Great Wheat," which grows at least two feet higher than the ordinary varieties, and is greatly prized for the length and stoutness of its straw; but it is a few miles to the north-eastward, in the light lands around Harwich, that the Great Wheat may be found. Seed and herb-growing are the most prominent industries between the Blackwater and the Colne, and the roadside fields are striped to wonderment in summer with the rainbow colours of the seedsman's trial-grounds. The heavy perfume of stocks and mignonette, the claret colour of that gorgeous flower, the "sops-in-wine," the gay and varied displays of asters, marguerites, marigolds and a hundred others make a midsummer fairyland of the levels that loom so drear and misty in the long months of winter. Nor is it only for the flower-garden that the Essex seedsman labours. With the sights and scents of the flaunting beauties of the garden are mingled the homelier ones of mint, grey-green sage and other dowdy kitchen herbs, together with the subtle beauty and piercing odour of wide-spreading, blue-grey lavender-fields. Even the unromantic mangold, running to seed in bush-like shape, sends forth a sweet and pleasing aroma, while the yellow mustard contributes its share.

The byways of farming are now, as we have already said, the most—some would say the only—profitable kind of husbandry in Essex. Some forms of cultivation have largely migrated to other counties, but others remain. The growing of the clothiers' teasel was discontinued with the decay of the Colchester and Norwich baize industry, and is now carried on in other parts of the country, close to districts where textile fabrics are still manufactured; but there was a time when, along this road between Chelmsford and Colchester, the fields of teasels were quite as much a feature as those of mustard are even yet. The clothiers' teasel, greatly prized in the East Anglian baize manufacture, was nothing but a weed, found useful and cultivated accordingly. An aristocratic relation of the less spiky burrs that have not been rescued from the hedges and ditches and are still allowed to grow wild, the clothiers' teasel was cultivated so far back as the reign of Richard the First, but the "common" burr will have to be contented with its lowly estate to the end of time, unless something unexpected happens.

To "stick like a burr" is proverbial, and the cultivated teasels have an even more pronounced clinging property. Furnished as they are with natural hooks, they were used in baize-making, and are still employed in the cloth trade for raising the nap of the material. The dried heads are fixed to cylinders, between which the fabric is passed, and their sharp spines, re-curved like so many minute fish-hooks, draw up the surface of the cloth. Thus the teasel was raised from its character of a worthless weed, and formany years Essex farmers devoted large portions of their holdings to its cultivation. It was hoed and kept clear of other vagrom weedlings; its heads were cut by hand and dried with every care, and eventually were eagerly competed for by manufacturers at £12 a load. When the old cloth manufacturers left East Anglia, a goodly portion of the Essex farmers' livelihood went with them.

Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other weed, the colewort, for cole or rape-seed, which has the quadruple properties of feeding cage-birds, yielding rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help to prop the husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and carraways are what "the faculty" knows as "carminatives," curative of flatulency; like the once popular "eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of the sea holly that grows by the estuaries of Essex rivers. Eringo root was once a favourite specific for lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last, and the preparation of it gradually died out and became extinct about 1865, when the only manufacturer was an elderly spinster who supplied a chemist in High Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the making of kümmel and other liqueurs, and carraway seeds, which look like commas, are those familiar denizens of "seed cake" that stick in the teeth and refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of "carraway comfits."

Farmers who do not occupy themselves with seed-growing have passed through evil times, but prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's well-tilledland, and fruit-farming has come to render cultivation profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer, who cannot adapt himself to new conditions, agricultural depression in Essex is a very real thing. Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one, a small cultivator, a son of the soil. He does not hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural Essex, in these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the Workhouse are said to close every vista? Besides, he has been hard at work in the fields, and much of that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like friskiness out of the limbs.

A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very badly in need of repair, elicits the fact that he has just come away, worsted, from another bout in the eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict with wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce, for life or a livelihood, with weeds—the sorry heritage of the present occupier from the slovenly or bankrupt farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing upon the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily against the cultivator.

"Farmin'?" says our rustic friend; "no great shakes, I tell 'ee. It don't pay to grow nawthen now, an' it gets wusser'n wusser. All the fields goin' under grass, for ship'n cattle. An' the land's fair pisoned with weeds. Yow see them 'ere beece, in that there close down along o' the chutch? There's a mort o' docks in that 'ere close. More docks'n grass, an' I thinks warsley o' the chanst of cattle gettin' a fair bite off'n it. Don't know what docks is? Wish I didden! I've bin a-pullin' of 'em tillmy back's pretty nigh broke, and I'm fair dunted with 'em. Last year there worn't ne'er a one: t'yen there's a mort on 'em. Where do they come from? God A'mighty knows.Theydon't want no cultivation, bless 'ee. There ain't no land so chice but what'll grow docks." Here he pulls out his "muckinger," that is to say, his handkerchief—the Essex dialect is not the most elegant form of speech—and, trumpeting on it like an elephant, with indignation, goes his way.

The "chutch" in question is that of Feering, on the other side of the Great Eastern Railway, along whose embankment go the frequent Prussian-blue-painted locomotives with long trains at their tail, past Mark's Tey Junction, whose forest of signal-masts is visible ahead, into Colchester. With the raising of that embankment went the life of this highway, only now experiencing a revival.

XXIII

Thecyclists, the pedestrians, the motor-men, who adventure along the road rejoice at its smooth surface, and find little incident to mark their journey. A punctured tyre, a defective valve alone hinder those mechanical travellers; while the pedestrian finds a limit set to his progress only by his walking powers. Even so, he may obtain to Norwich long before the others, for the railwayhugs the road closely for three parts of the distance, and stations are frequent.

In any case, the curtain has long since been rung down upon the Romance of the Road. If this were the place to do it, that romance might be recounted at great length; sometimes rising to tragical height, again sinking to comedy or farce. But we must take our romance as it comes, and, reading as we run, be content to act a vicarious part in the long story. And we may well be so content, for to have essayed the journey in days of old often meant a "speaking with strangers in the gates" that entailed fighting on unequal terms, with the possibility of a roadside grave and the tolerable certainty of being robbed of anything and everything worth the taking.

Nowadays, the trim suburbs of the towns stretch out on either side along the old highway and join hands with the villages; so that when travellers of the speedier sort spurn the dust from their flying wheels, they think the country is becoming one vast town, and are depressed and regretful accordingly. But when the road was the sole means of travelling and the towns were still girdled by their walls and entered only by fortified gates, the wayfarer welcomed the sight of a house in the lonely country between town and village. Even to the rich these perils came home, and in the more lawless times they were beset with troubles of their own.

Royal progresses were not infrequent along the Norwich Road, and they have elsewhere been dulychronicled, but they are things apart and give no glimpse of old wayfaring life. If we are at all in the way of conjuring up that old-time traffic, we must certainly not forget the odd processions that trailed their slow length after my lord and my lady, changing residence from one castle or manor-house to another. My Lord Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth's time had an exquisite palace, of which Macaulay has told us, in Norwich, and the Earls of Oxford no doubt kept great state in their castle at Hedingham, but, for all their magnificence, they were obliged to take many of their household goods with them when flitting from place to place; for the very excellent reason that they did not, certainly up to less than three hundred years ago, possess more than one fully-equipped establishment. When the nobility of old left one of their manor-houses for another they commonly took their bedding and a good deal of their furniture with them. In even more remote days they removed the glass from their windows as well, and stored it carefully away until their return.That, of course, was a custom of very long ago, when even the most luxurious were content with—or, at any-rate, had to endure—things which nowadays would drive the inmates of a casual ward to rebellion; but, even when the Stuarts reigned, the great ones of the land moved from home to home with long baggage-trains and with their entire staff of domestics. No board-wages, then! The whole establishment took the road, down to the scullery-maids and the hangers-on of the kitchen whotook charge of the domestic pots and pans. My lord's pages and the dignitaries of his household formed the advance-guard; the lowest in the scale, who travelled with the culinary utensils and even took the coals with them, were, appropriately enough, the "black guard." The black guard were probably a very rough lot indeed, at odds with soap and water, and on every count deserving of their name, which has in the course of centuries obtained a different application, as a term of reproach to individuals of moral rather than physical uncleanliness.

Turning from general conditions of travelling to particular travellers, there comes tripping along the road an antic fellow, one Will Kemp, who danced from London to Norwich in the year 1600; a frolic he undertook for a wager, afterwards writing and publishing a book about it, which he calledKemp's Nine Days' Wonder. Will Kemp was accompanied by a drummer whose play upon parchment helped to sustain his flagging energies as he skipped it to Widford and thence by a route of his own through Braintree to Norwich.

Sprightly, irresponsible Kemp, cracking weak jokes and playing the fool, is succeeded in the memories of the road, after an interval of some eighty years, by a very grave and responsible figure indeed; no less an one than that of King William the Third, on his frequent journeys between his dear Holland and his little-loved Kingdom of England. Burdened with the care of an alien realm, that saturnine little figure with the hooked nose was afamiliar sight at Kelvedon, where, travelling to and from Harwich, he was wont to stay at the "Angel" inn, which still confronts the wayfarer on entering the village from London. When the "little gentleman in black" had done his work and King William of blessed Protestant memory was no more, the Norwich Road, so far as Colchester, was still graced with Royal travellers, for, with the coming of the Hanoverians, Harwich became more than ever a favourite port of entry and departure, and the choleric early Georges knew this Essex landscape well. This way, too, came the Schwellenburgs, the Keilmanseggs and the other vulgar and grotesque figures of that grotesque and vulgar Court.

Among these figures comes that of the Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, arrived for the first time in England, in 1761, to marry George the Third. One German princess is very like another in the pages of history, and the likeness remains even when they become queens, so that it is not a little difficult to disentangle a Caroline from a Charlotte. Their virtues are of the same drab domestic order, and their faces partake of the common fund of unilluminated dulness distributed between the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the Sonderburg-Augustenburgs, and the dozens of other twopenny-halfpenny principalities made familiar by German princely marriages and intermarryings. On their mere merits, these personages would find no place here, though they travelled all their lives up and down the road; but in the circumstances of this particular Princess Charlotte's journey there aresome incidents worth mentioning. She landed at Harwich, and comes into our road at Colchester, September 7, 1761. At Colchester she was presented with a box of eringo-root, the famous local production highly valued for the cure of pulmonary diseases, prepared from the root of the sea holly. Graciously receiving this in a box "parfumed and guilt," her carriage swept on towards Witham, where she stayed the night at a seat then owned by Lord Abercorn, supping with open doors so that all who would might gaze upon their future Queen. Next day the journey to London was resumed. The King's coach was in readiness at Romford, and into it she changed. At Mile End a squadron of Life Guards was in waiting as an escort, and from that point the procession was viewed by thousands. But by this time the September day was closing. The Duchess of Hamilton, who accompanied the Princess, looked at her watch. "We shall hardly have time to dress for the wedding," she said.

"The wedding?"

"Yes, madam; it is to be at twelve."

On that the Princess fainted, as well she might. It really took place at 9 p.m., instead of three hours later. The King, it is upon record, was a little disappointed at the first sight of his bride; but that has generally been the way with our Royal marriages. The eldest son of this amiable pair, George the Fourth, similarly saw his bride for the first time practically on the steps of the altar, and his disappointment was keen. "No sooner," we read, "had he approached her than, as if to subdue the qualms of irrepressibledisgust, he desired the dignified envoy to bring him a glass of brandy." The Princess, we are told, "expressed surprise," which statement requires no credulity for belief. Henry the Eighth's disappointment when he saw Anne of Cleves was reflected in the words in which he likened her to a "Flanders mare."

Two years later, in 1763, we find Dr Johnson and his inevitable Boswell journeying down the road; Boswell on his way to Harwich for Utrecht, and the Doctor good-naturedly accompanying him as far as that seaport. They set out by coach on the 5th of August, early in the morning; among their fellow-travellers a fat, elderly gentlewoman and a young Dutchman, both inclined to conversation. Dining at an inn on the way, the lady remarked that she had done her best to educate her children, and particularly that she never suffered them to be a moment idle.

"I wish, madam," said Johnson, "you would educate me too; for I have been an idle fellow all my life."

"I am sure, sir," said she, "you have not been idle;" which was a mere empty compliment, for she had not the least idea whom she was addressing.

"Nay, madam," rejoined the Doctor, "it is very true; and that gentleman there," pointing to Boswell, "has been idle. He was idle at Edinburgh. His father sent him to Glasgow, where he continued to be idle. He then came to London, where he has been very idle; and now he is going to Utrecht, where he will be as idle as ever."

At this, Boswell was very wroth, and asked Johnson, in an aside, how he could expose him so.

"Pooh, pooh," retorted the immortal Samuel, "they know nothing about you, and will think of it no more." Nor, in all probability, did they.

In this manner they travelled, the gentlewoman talking violently against the Roman Catholics and the horrors of the Inquisition; Johnson, to the astonishment of all the passengers, save Boswell, who knew his ways, defending the Inquisition and its methods with "false doctrines." This would appear to have annoyed the rest of the company, for Boswell relates that Johnson presently appeared to be very intent upon ancient geography. Not so intent, however, but that he noticed Boswell giving a shilling to the coachman at the end of one of the stages, when it was the custom to give only sixpence. The great man took Boswell aside and scolded him for it, saying that what he had done would make the coachman dissatisfied with all the rest of the passengers, who had given him no more than his due.

They stopped at Colchester a night, at an inn unfortunately not specified, Johnson talking of the town with veneration for having stood a siege for Charles the First.

The last great occasion on the road, before railways took its traffic away, was the funeral, in 1821, of George the Fourth's Queen. Caroline of Brunswick had landed at Greenwich twenty-seven years before: her body was embarked for Brunswick on August 16, 1821, after a hurried three days'journey from Kensington. So many years have passed by since the stormy times when the nation was divided between partisans of the King on one side and the Queen on the other—both parties equally violent—that the long and bitter quarrels between the "First Gentleman in Europe" and the most vulgar and indiscreet princess of modern times have become historic, and no longer divide families, or cause fathers to cut their sons off with a shilling, as they did when the trial of the Queen was a recent event. George, Prince Regent and King, was no saint; Caroline, Princess and Queen, was at least odiously vulgar and utterly wanting in dignity and the commonest dictates of prudence. They were not worth quarrelling about, but their feuds were taken up by parties and made political missiles of, so that even the occasion of the Queen's funeral was made the excuse for a riot by her followers, who were indignant at seeing her remains hurried out of the country, as they thought, without proper respect. The Queen died on the 7th of August, and it was decided to take her body to Brunswick. "Indecent haste" was the expression used by theTimesof that day in describing the funeral arrangements for the 14th, but that journal was a most violent enemy of the then Government and had always supported the Queen and vilified the King as far as it could safely be done.

It was proposed to complete the journey of eighty miles between Kensington and Harwich in two days, and theTimesfuriously bellowed in its reports that the procession was hurried through London at a trot.However that may be, certainly the pace was decently slow when on the open road. Ilford was reached, for instance, at 6·15 that afternoon, but Romford, only five and a half miles further on, not until 7·45; an extravagantly slow rate of progression, even for a funeral. At Romford the cortège was met by sympathisers with blazing torches, who stood on guard round the coffin, while the wearied escort and the few mourners refreshed at a roadside inn.

At eleven o'clock the journey was resumed by the light of a full moon which shone in splendour from a cloudless summer sky. Throughout the night they travelled, coming into Chelmsford at four o'clock in the morning. Here the coffin was placed in the church until a start was made again, seven hours later. At last Colchester was reached, at five o'clock in the afternoon, the famished escort leaving the hearse unguarded in the High Street, while they took their fill at the "Three Cups." Thus, in its squalor and irreverence, the passing of this Queen of England resembled the funeral of a pauper, without kith or kin.

It had been proposed to complete the journey to Harwich that day, but, after violent disputes in the street between opposing factions, it was agreed to defer the departure until the next morning, and to deposit the coffin meanwhile in St Peter's Church. Inside that sacred building, disputes broke out afresh, one party wishing to affix a plate on the coffin-lid, bearing the inscription, "Caroline of Brunswick, the injured Queen of England," while the other vehemently objected. The quarrel wasfinally settled by agreeing to postpone fixing the plate until after the embarkation.

With the start made the following morning at half-past five, this melancholy procession leaves the Norwich Road, and history goes with it. The tale is done, the colophon reached.

XXIV

Ifwe seek some touchstone by which to test the progress of a century or so in civilisation, there is scarce a better than found in comparison between the condition of the roads in old and modern times. That Waller could, in all sincerity, speak of "vile Essexian roads" is not remarkable: he was a poet, dealt in superlatives and lived in the seventeenth century. But that Arthur Young, a hundred years later, could with equal sincerity, and in more emphatic language, describe Essex roads as "rocky lanes, with ruts of inconceivable depth," is startling. It was in 1768 he penned that indictment, adding that they were so overgrown with trees as to be impervious to the sun, and strewn with stones "as big as a horse, and full of abominable holes." It were, he concludes, a misuse of language to call them turnpikes, for they were rich in ponds of liquid dirt; while loose flints and vile grips cut across to drain off the water made the traveller's pilgrimage a weariness.

The modern reader, perusing all these manifold sins and wickednesses of the roads, rather wonders how they could all have been crowded on to such truly vile ways, and if a stone were as big as a horse, how room could have been found beside it for holes, ponds and other objectionable features. But Arthur Young was a truthful man in general.

To-day the Essex high roads are as near perfection as any in the home counties, even though the byways be steep and rough and more than usually winding.

It is in these byways that he who seeks rural Essex shall find. The dramatic suddenness and completeness with which, a few hundred yards from the high road, the sophisticated wayside towns and hamlets are exchanged for the unspoiled rusticity of the original villages is surprising. In these lanes the older rustics talk and think much as their grandfathers did, but the rising generation unhappily do not, and the Essex rustic in general, like his fellows elsewhere, has almost wholly discarded the old dress of the peasantry. Only the very old or the more remote yet wear the smock-frock—the "round frock," or the "gaberdine," as they called it—that was once as honourable a distinction of the ploughmen, herds, or carters as are the uniforms of our soldiers and sailors.

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