The time is long past since a clean smock-frock, corded breeches, worsted stockings and well-greased lace-up boots formed the approved rural costume for Sundays or holidays, just as the same articles of apparel in a "second-best" condition made theworkaday wear. The Sunday costume of the agricultural labourer is now a cheap and clumsy travesty of the clothes worn by townsfolk, and in hideous contrast with his surroundings. Exactly what it is like may be seen on any advertisement hoarding in the outskirts of Chelmsford, Colchester and lesser towns, where pictorial posters bid Giles go to Shoddy's for cheap outfits. Sunday mornings find him flaunting his finery in the village street; his would-be stylish boots creaking, his every article of wear writ large with vulgarity. Often he carries gloves in those large hands of his, rough with honest week-day toil, and a pair may thus last him for years—for he dare not attempt to put them on. Would that he equally purchased his cheap cigars for show and refrained from smoking them!
But there the village dandy is. Often his pocket-handkerchief is scented; generally his hair is glossy with grease; and he would not consider himself fully equipped without watch and chain, scarf-pin, ring and walking stick. To grease his boots he would be ashamed.Theymust be brightly polished, even though his manners are not, and his language defiles the village street what time the bells are ringing to church. Such is Young England in the villages at the dawn of the Twentieth Century. These things may spell Progress, but they are rather pitiful.
It is a little difficult, in presenting a sketch of his ancestor of a hundred years or more ago, to avoid drawing too favourable a view of him; but the rustic in old times certainly seems to have matched much better with his surroundings than is the case nowadays.He made no attempts to dress up to town standards, and if he wanted to shine above his fellows did so by virtue of superior neatness only. Perhaps he had the finer instincts of the two, or more likely lacked the opportunities for bad taste that surround his descendants. Certainly, if we are to believe in the origin of the smock-frock, as put forward by some antiquaries, we must sorrowfully admit that the rustic's remote ancestor had as great a longing for unsuitable display in dress as can possibly be charged to the present generation. The smock-frock is, in fact, traced back by some to the ecclesiastical garments worn at Mass by deacons and sub-deacons, at the time when the Reformation swept vestments out of every village church in the land. Those who are familiar with genuine old smock-frocks have noticed the elaborate and often beautiful needlework on collar and breast. The devices appear to have a traditional likeness, all over the country, and consist either of Celtic-looking whorls, or of semi-decorative flower forms, or of lozenge patterns. The comparative simplicity or elaboration of this needlework depended solely upon the fancy, or the time at command, of the wearer's women-folk whose work it was. Whence came this tradition? It is thought from the tunicles of the minor clergy, which were certainly decorated in the same position, if not in similar patterns. When the minor belongings of the Church became the spoil of the villages, Hodge and Giles found themselves the proud possessors of the strange garments, for which they could find at first no better use than for Sunday wear. A strikingappearance they must have made in them, down the village street, the envy of their less fortunate fellows.
When the looted vestments grew shabby they must have been used for everyday wear, and so have set the fashions in smock-frocks, both in shape and decoration, for centuries to come. If it be thought that the costume was rather extravagant, it can only be asked, is not that of the modern Sunday morning yokel extravagant also?
The rustic of long ago was a man of dense ignorance and dark superstitions. No one county was then more guilty than another in that respect, but East Anglians, and perhaps especially the Essex bucolics, are still, despite their veneer of civilisation, sunk in uncanny beliefs. Witches still "overlook" folks in Essex hamlets, and spells are cast on cattle and horses, or unhappy fowls are blighted by the Evil Eye. Consequently the learned professions of Witch-Doctor and Wise Women are not yet extinct. Their existence is not likely to be discovered by the stranger, but they thrive, in limited numbers, even in these days of pills and patent medicines.
Board Schools are supposed to be educating Young England into a dead monotony of speech, but it will be long before they complete the horrid work. In Essex, indeed, we may not unreasonably think it a task beyond the power of teachers and inspectors, who if they have not succeeded, after thirty years working of the Elementary Education Act, in inducing the lower-class Londoners to say "yes" for "yuss," together with other linguistic enormities, are not likely to be successful in abolishing the verymarked and stubborn Essex shibboleths. It may not generally be known that much of the so-called "Cockney" talk derives from the Essex dialect. From Essex especially comes that curious perversity of the unruly member which in many cases insists upon pronouncing the letter A as I. The lower-class Londoner and the Essex peasant are unanimous in enunciating A as I in all words where that letter retains its open sound and its individuality. Thus, in the words "baby" "favourite," "made" and "native," for instance, the letter becomes I; and the Fleet Street newsboy, shouting his "spusshul uxtry piper," can legitimately call cousins, if he wishes it, with the Essex lad at the plough-tail.
Where A is sounded broadly, or in cases like the word "was," in which it masquerades as O, or where the letter is absolutely silent, or not fully pronounced, as in "beast" and "maternal," this peculiarity does not appear.
The effect is sometimes grotesque, as, for example, near Colchester, where the villages of Layer Marney, Layer Breton, and Layer de la Hay are always spoken of as Liyer, the last mentioned becoming Liyer de la High.
Nor is pronunciation the only singular feature of Essex talk, as those who keep their ears alert in these parts will soon find. The oddest phrases are matters of everyday use, and the Essex peasant can no more help using the word "together," in season and out, than he can help being hungry before meals or sleepy by bedtime. "Together," asemployed by the Essex peasant, is a word absolutely meaningless; a kind of linguistic excrescence which, like a wart or a boil, is neither useful nor beautiful. When a ploughman says he is going to plough "that there field together," he does not mean to imply that he is about to plough it together with some other land, or with a party of other ploughmen. He simply adds the word from force of habit, and from hearing his father and grandfather before him so use it, in almost every sentence, as a sort of verbal makeweight. The present writer has had the good fortune to hear a supremely ludicrous use of this Bœotian habit of speech. It was market-day at Colchester, and Stanway village had emptied itself in the direction of the town. A dog rolled dustily in the sunny road, and the historian of these things luxuriously quaffed his "large lemon" on the bench outside the village inn. As Artemus Ward might have said, "orl was peas," when there entered upon the scene a countryman, evidently known to the landlord. He walked into the bar, and, surprised to find mine host in solitary state, exclaimed, "What, all alone together, bor?"
"Yes," replied the landlord, in no wise astonished at this extraordinary expression, "the missus has gone to Colchester together."
"Did my missus go with her?" asked the rustic.
"No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by herself."
In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging more especially to Norfolk and Suffolk.This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for neighbour.
XXV
Stanwayis approached along a flat stretch, past Mark's Tey, which, without being itself quite on the road, has sent out modern and extremely ugly brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's Tey church is visible, amid an inchoate mass of railway signal masts and puffs of smoke. Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings proceed from that direction, for this is a junction of the Great Eastern with the Colne Valley Railway, and the station, by the way, where the lady in Thackeray'sLamentable Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditchappeared with the baby which she eventually left behind her. It is this busy junction that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses along the road to render the village of the old De Marcas something new and strange. Mark's Tey is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for the road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in here.
Copford's solitary houses by the way give scarce a hint of the village nearly a mile off, whose little church formerly owned a terrifying relic, in the shape of a human skin nailed on its door; a skin that had been the personal property of someunfortunate straggler from the hordes of marauding Danes that once infested the district, of whom we have already heard legends at Kelvedon and Gore Pit. His Saxon captors must have flayed him with a ferocious delight and nailed up his cuticle with precisely the same satisfaction as that of the gamekeeper who wages war upon stoats and weazels and other vermin, and hangs their bodies on the barn door. But there must have been a bitter day of reckoning for those Saxons when the sea-rovers came this way again and saw in what fashion that doorway was decorated.
Near Mark's Tey.
Near Mark's Tey.
Copford and its outlying houses lie at the crest of a gentle descent into the valley of a rivulet which finds its way into the Colne. It stands, as its name implies, overlooking some ford which, once important, has, in the gradual draining of the country and the shrinkage of streams, now lost all significance. Stanway adjoins it, and lies along the descent, in the hollow and up thecorresponding rise on the other side, where its church stands in a forbidding loneliness. The name of Stanway is sufficient warranty of this being, thus far, the Roman road. It is, however, not so certain that the remaining four miles of the existing highway from this point into Colchester follow the course taken by the Romans; and, indeed, the later researches of archæologists go far to prove that the original way into Roman Colchester avoided the intervening village of Lexden altogether, and, curving eastwards, avoided what may then have been a marsh, to take the higher ground over a portion of Lexden Heath; bending westwards again and crossing the site of the present road between where the grammar school and the hospital now stand. From this point it seems to have crossed by where the Lordsland Nursery grounds stood until recently built over, to the ancient Roman gateway and bastion in the western wall of the town, long known as Colking's, or King Coel's Castle, but originally the Decuman Gate of Roman times. The course followed by this old Roman way is lined on either side with sepulchral remains, and seems to have once been a great cemetery. Wherever the ground is disturbed the relics of some soldier or citizen of Colonia are found, some dating back to the foundation of the colony, nearly nineteen centuries ago. The most remarkable among them are to be seen in the museum at Colchester Castle. There—the most human relic of them all—is the touching monument to M. Favonius, a Centurion of the Twentieth Legion, discovered in 1871 between the hospital and thegrammar school, at a depth of 3 feet below the surface, and at a distance of 10 feet from the old Roman road. It is a sculptured stone, 4 feet in height, with the figure of the Centurion himself carved on it, in high relief. It is evidently a portrait of him. He stands in full military costume, his cloak hanging from his shoulders, his sword and dagger by his side. The inscription, almost as sharp as on the day when it was cut, nearly nineteen hundred years ago, tells us that the monument was erected by two of his servants, Verecundus and Novicius. They call him "facilis," the "easy" or "good-natured." It is surely a sweet and touching thing that when all other record of that soldier has perished, we should yet know him to have been a kindly creature.
But to return to Stanway, which keeps, as sole vestige of its heath, a little space of the greenest turf, perhaps half an acre in extent, beside the insignificant stream in the hollow, and opposite the "Swan" Inn. The heath that formerly spread out across the elevated but flat table-land between this village and the succeeding one of Lexden was, in its different parts, variously named after them. On Stanway Heath, in Ogilby'sBritanniaof 1697, a picture map shows a beacon standing between the forty-seventh and forty-eighth milestones from London, on the right-hand side of the road. It appears to have been a post some 30 feet in height, crowned with a fire-bucket, and climbed by means of slats nailed across. The beacon, thus easily lighted, was provided for the benefit of travellersgoing to or coming from Colchester across the desolate heath, whose dangers may be guessed from the existence of a "Cut-throat Lane" even in the comparative security of Lexden village. The heath by the highway is a thing of the past, for those portions not brought under cultivation by the farmer have been grabbed by the builder, and the so-called Lexden Heath of to-day is a quite recent row of houses, with a post-office, and shops, and everything complete and modern. At the forty-eighth milestone, amid all this modern upheaval, stands a disused toll-house, and, close by, something much more ancient; the deep, pre-historic hollow, smothered in dense woods and shrubs, known as "King Cole's Kitchen," and now—figure to yourself the shame of it!—overshadowed by a cottage, new built, and named from it "King Cole's Cottage."
Turning off to the right, the curious in things pre-historic may lose themselves in the solitudes of the real Lexden Heath, where the Devil, the Trinobantes, the Romans, or Fairfax, the Parliamentary General—according to varying legends—threw up the entrenchments, and delved the ditches, found there in plenty. The Devil, we say advisedly, for "Gryme," or "Grim," whose name is attached to the dyke across the heath, was none other, in the minds of the Saxons. "Lexden Straight Road" follows for an unconscionable distance a line of Roman entrenchments, and is straight and dull beyond belief. Followed long enough, it leads to "Bottle End," which may originally have been "Battle End," the scene of some traditional legendof Boadicea's defeat at the hands of the Romans. Or, again, it perhaps marks some forgotten connection with St Botolph, whose ruined Abbey stands outside Colchester's walls, and whose honoured name is pronounced "Bottle" by Colcestrians. Anything is possible in a district where Beacon End, the site of the old beacon already mentioned, has become Bacon End.
LEXDEN.
LEXDEN.
Lexden village now claims attention. It is a place in which one school of antiquaries finds the original Roman station of Camulodunum, established on the site of the royal city of Cunobelin, King ofthe Trinobantes; a finding strenuously contested by another following. Certainly, among the tall elms and rolling surface of Lexden Park there are remains in plenty of huge defensive earthworks, telling in no uncertain manner that this must have been a place of enormous strength, by whomsoever held. The surroundings are weird and impressive to a degree.
The village skirting the road is one of the prettiest on the way. Going towards Colchester, the road drops down the hill, where old cottages stand high above the pathway, with steep little gardens in front, kept from sliding down into the road itself by lichened retaining-walls sprouting with house-leek and draped with climbing plants. Lower still, hard by the church whose carpenter-Gothic atrocities are hung about with ivy and creepers until they are transfigured into a dream of beauty, the grouping of the 'Sun' Inn and neighbouring houses is exquisite. Beyond this point begins the suburban approach to Colchester, a town it behoves the stranger to approach with a proper respect, for here was the first Roman colony in Britain. The history of Colchester, indeed, begins so far back asA.D.44, and there was already a pre-historic native city in existence before then; the royal city of that ancient British king, Cunobelin, the monarch famous in the pages of Shakespeare as "Cymbeline."
XXVI
Cunobelin, Lord of the Trinobantes, ruler of that part of the country now divided into Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hunts, Cambridgeshire and Essex, was the successor of his father Cassivelaunus, who had warred, not ingloriously, with Julius Cæsar. He transferred his capital from his native town on the site of St Albans to where Colchester now stands. He appears to have been a powerful ruler, and, if little is known of him, certainly he is no myth, for the vague legends that held the name of the Buckinghamshire villages of Great and Little Kimble to be a corrupted form of his own were strikingly proved correct some years ago, when a hoard of gold coins was ploughed up in their neighbourhood, bearing his title.
We do not know by what name Colchester was then styled. After Cunobelin had died, full of years and worn by grief at the revolts of his sons, Caractacus, Adminius and Togodumnus, the end of the native State over which he had ruled speedily came. Adminius, in a fury against his brothers, fled from Britain to seek the aid of the Romans, and if no immediate result came, certainly his invitation must have revived the old Cæsarian dream of conquest. The real cause of the Roman invasion that took place shortly after the death of Cunobelin was the solicitation of a certain Bericus, a British Prince of whom nothing appears to be known beyond this one fact.
The invasion took place inA.D.43, under that able general, Aulus Plautius, who threw the Trinobantes back from Hertfordshire and Middlesex, across the Lea and into the Essex marshes, where for a time they could not be followed. This was the position at the close of the year. Detached portions of the invading forces had overrun the south of Britain as far as Gloucester and had defeated the tribes on the way; leaving a garrison in the west. But the island was little known and held many mysteries. None could tell the real strength of the natives, who disappeared in the forests and marshes that covered the face of the land, and by their irregular warfare disconcerted the Roman plans of campaign. Plautius was at last driven to act on the defensive on the Essex borders. His soldiers were dying in the ague-stricken morasses between the Thames and the Lea, and had the enemy possessed powers of combination and military skill, he might well have been cut off here, at the end of the known world. A retirement with his sick and dying was impossible. Nothing remained but to go into camp during the winter, and meanwhile to send for reinforcements. He accordingly sent for forces from Gaul. They came with commendable promptitude, commanded by the Emperor Claudius in person. With these new legions came an elephant corps, brought from Africa to carry the heavy baggage. But they acted a better part than this, for their strange appearance terrified the astonished Trinobantes a great deal more than any increase of the Roman soldiery couldhave done. We may imagine this corps, crashing irresistibly through the thickets, the forests and marshes on that march into the Unknown, along this line of country now traversed by the Norwich Road, and can readily understand little resistance being met with on the way. The tribes were dispersed and their territory occupied as far as the Stour, and a colony was founded in the opening of the new year,A.D.44, on the site of Cunobelin's city—Colonia Camulodunum, the first Roman settlement in Britain.
The Romans had so easily overcome the resistance of the natives that they were soon lulled into a feeling of security. For an uninterrupted space of sixteen years Colonia grew and prospered. It became a pleasant town, inhabited by veteran soldiers grown grey in the service of the Empire, and spending their later years in retirement. The Emperor Claudius, flushed with his success, had assumed the dignity of a god and had caused a Temple to be erected in the market-place to his honour, with attendant priests and altars. The governors and consuls were lesser gods, and treated with contempt and ill-judged severity the natives who had been overcome with such ease. The soldiery were uniformly brutal. Degeneracy and luxury flourished together with this attitude of oppression, and the town wholly lacked defences. It is not surprising that these colonists were bitterly hated by their vassals, who in especial looked upon the priests as so many harpies living upon their substance, and were so in fact, just as all priesthoodsand all clergy have been from the beginning, and will be to the end. In this last respect these poor Trinobantes, these wretched barbarians, exhibited a quite surprising discernment, not equalled by the priest-ridden centuries of culture and enlightenment that have since passed.
These down-trodden natives were already ripe for revenge when a more than usually unjust proceeding of the Roman officials precipitated a rising. The Iceni, who inhabited Norfolk and Suffolk, and whose frontiers marched with those of the conquered province, had been ruled over by a certain King Prasutagus. Dying, he had hoped to propitiate the goodwill of the Roman officials by dividing the vast wealth he had accumulated, leaving one half to the Roman Emperor and the other moiety to his two daughters. But he was no sooner dead than his country was invaded. His widow, the famous Boadicea, resisted. She was publicly scourged, her daughters suffering the worst indignities, and her relatives sold into slavery. The whole nation rose in arms at these outrages, and their cousins, the Trinobantes, on the hither side of the Stour, joined them. The Romans saw their folly when too late. No more eloquent account is possible than that given by Tacitus of the premonitions of evil. The statue of Victory fell to the ground, and turned its back where the face had been, as if it fled before an enemy. Women were seen and heard singing mad, wild songs, prophesying disaster. Strange and unaccountable noises were heard in the house of assembly, and loud howlings in the theatre. Inthe estuary of the river the buildings of the city appeared reflected upside down, and ghastly remains of human bodies were seen in the ooze when the tide ebbed. The sea assumed the colour of blood, and the strangest whisperings stirred the air. Many of the wealthier colonists, alarmed at these portents, discovered that their health needed a change of air, and went for a holiday into Gaul, on the other side of the Channel, and those who remained applied for military help. In answer to this appeal, a meagre force of two hundred men was sent, and immediately employed to fortify the Temple. But before these measures could be completed, the town was surrounded and taken; the houses burnt and the inhabitants all slain, the little garrison in the Temple meeting a like fate after a defence of two days.
Meanwhile, Petilius Cerealis, commanding the Ninth Legion, which had been stationed on the Icenian frontier near where Mount Bures now stands, advanced to the aid of the doomed city. He, however, had moved too late, and met the victorious natives at Wormingford, where they almost entirely annihilated his forces. The evidences of that great disaster were discovered in 1836, when parallel rows of funeral urns, placed in order like streets, were unearthed, containing the bones of the lost legion gathered and burnt after the Roman sway had been reasserted.
These events happened inA.D.61. Suetonius Paulinus, the then Commander-in-Chief, was at that time vigorously prosecuting a war with the Druids in the Isle of Anglesey, but on hearing of thesedisasters he hurried back through Verulamium and Londinium, collecting an army of ten thousand as he went. The whole of the south was aflame, and a numerous enemy hung on his flanks. The Roman citizens of both those towns piteously begged for protection, but were left to their fate, which was not long in doubt, for no sooner had the flying column passed than the tribes fell upon and utterly destroyed them. Seventy thousand citizens perished in that general massacre.
It is uncertain where the Roman army met the hordes commanded by that heroic Amazon, Boadicea, whom we should perhaps more correctly style "Boduoca." The British Queen is a deadly dull subject in the hands of the uninspired, who fail to render her "convincing." No one has done so well as Dion Cassius, who singularly resembles modern writers of "personal paragraphs" in what recent slang would term his "actuality." He says, "she was very tall, grim in appearance, keen-eyed, harsh-voiced, with a wealth of exceedingly yellow hair falling below her waist" (her golden hair was hanging down her back!), "wearing a highly-embroidered tunic and a thick cloak fastened with a buckle over it."
Tacitus describes the scene of battle as flanked by two woods, on a site resembling a stretch of country at Haynes Green, near Messing; but the great fight must have raged on many miles of ground, and no doubt included Lexden Heath.
The Britons were so sure of victory, that they had brought their women and children as spectators,and ranged them, seated in waggons, in a great semi-circle commanding the battlefield. The Roman historian says they were an "innumerable multitude." The British Queen, addressing her warriors from her chariot, called upon them to conquer or to die, resting her hopes on the strength of her forces and the justice of her cause; while Suetonius, on his part, urged his troops not to be dismayed either by the numbers of the enemy or their furious shouts. The British attacked, the Romans at first remaining on the defensive. When the fury of the first onslaught was exhausted, the foot soldiers of the Empire advanced in a wedge-like formation, the cavalry closing in on the flanks, driving the speedily disorganised enemy back upon the semi-circle of waggons, which cut off their retreat. Penned up in this way, the battle degenerated into a massacre, in which eighty thousand Britons were slain, including the women and children who had come out to witness the fortunes of the day. The unhappy queen, seeing all lost, poisoned herself.
Thus ended the British rule over Norfolk and Suffolk. From this time date the existing walls of Colchester. The conquerors were determined not to risk a repetition of the destruction of their first colony, and, choosing a new site, one mile to the east of the former city, they planted their walls on the ridge on which Colchester now stands, overlooking the valley of the Colne. These walls, enclosing an area of 1000 by 600 yards, still remain, after the passing of more than eighteen hundred years, the most perfect Roman fortifications inBritain. Even in that wide space of time the town of Colchester has not extended very greatly beyond them. In some directions, indeed—notably to the north and north-east and on the west—the ramparts still look out upon the open country. The walls have a thickness of from seven to eight feet, and are built of red Roman tiles, alternating with courses of stones, brought with great labour from the coast near Harwich; the neighbourhood of Colchester, and Essex in general, being quite innocent of stone of any kind. Harwich and the seashore even to this day supply the boulders of limestone from which the building-stones of Colchester's walls were cut.
Colchester was never again attacked during the period of more than three hundred years, in which the Romans ruled. In the events ofA.D.61, they had learnt the double lesson of being armed and of treating a foe, once conquered, with generosity. In the period between these events and the year 410, when the Imperial forces were withdrawn from Britain to help save the heart of the Empire from ruin, conquered and conquerors had to live together, and made the best of the necessity. Roman colonists intermarried with the gradually Romanised British, and the race of Romano-Britons thus created, during three centuries, gradually grew to look upon Britain as their home and themselves as a nation. Thus, towards the end, usurpers of the Imperial authority are found setting up as independent sovereigns, and civilised British princes treating on equal terms with Roman statesmen. In this way the British in some measure came into their own again, and to thesecircumstances we owe the wild legends of that mysterious monarch, "old King Cole," who is to Colchester what King Arthur is to Cornwall, the great local hero. "Colking's Castle," on Colchester's walls, and the earthworks near Lexden known as "King Cole's Kitchen"; nay, the very name of Colchester itself—"Cole's Chester," or castle, derive, according to legends, from this scarce more than mythical personage. Those stories make him one Coel, or Collius, the last of a line of semi-independent British kings who were allowed to retain a nominal sovereignty after Cunobelin's death and the Roman conquest. The story goes on to tell how, on the death of the usurper Carausius, inA.D.293, Coel surrendered the country to the Emperor Constantius Chlorus, on that successor of the Cæsar's marrying his daughter Helena, who became the mother of Constantine the Great, and was also the discoverer of the true Cross at Jerusalem. The arms of Colchester still bear a ragged cross between four crowns, in allusion to this tale of the Empress Helena; and in earnest that this is a distinction which Colchester will not willingly lose, an effigy of her, holding a cross very plain to see, is newly set up on the very topmost point of the gorgeous new Town Hall, recently completed.
To that most untruthful of chroniclers, Geoffrey of Monmouth, the legend of Coel is chiefly traced. He may either have imagined it, or have woven the story out of existing legends, which had in turn derived from the Saxons, who, after the departure of the Romans, had wrested the country from theRomanised British. They captured and burnt the town of Colonia, and wondering at its massive walls, took them to have been the work of some great king, after whom the place had been named. Legends of Cole soon sprang up, and by the time the Saxons themselves had been converted to Christianity he was fully provided with a history.
"Old King Cole," as the founder of Cole's-ceaster, has been shabbily treated in modern times and made to figure merely as a jolly toper. That he was the most convivial of monarchs the song most emphatically assures us.
"He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called forhis fiddlers three."
"He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called forhis fiddlers three."
"He called for his pipe, he called for his glass, he called forhis fiddlers three."
Nothing, if you please, more than the veriest pot-house potentate! The author of that nursery rhyme has degraded Cole as much as Mark Twain did the romantic wielder of Excalibur in that monument of vulgarity,A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.
XXVII
Theentrance into Colchester is singular. From the straight, broad road leading past the trim modern villas and so into Crouch Street—the street outside the walls that takes its name from the vanished monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars—the wayfarer suddenly comes to the sharpest ofangles, and, turning abruptly to the left, enters Colchester by what has every appearance of being the back door into the town.
Historically considered, the entrance by crooked Head Street, as the continuation of Crouch Street is called, really is a back way, and was in Roman times the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and less important roads. But ever since Saxon days this has been the only way to or from London into the town.
How it happened that the original road and the Decuman Gate in Colchester's west wall fell into disuse, none can tell. It was so many ages ago that not even a pathway leads along the ancient way, now quite obliterated by houses. But if the road be gone, the Gate itself remains, though in ruins. Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt to find it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our steps a little distance along Crouch Street, and, so doing, to take a turning to the right-hand, down Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome is seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands towering above a flight of steps leading up into the street beyond. There stands revealed a portion of the wall. The breach in it, through which the steps lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees, the freshness of whose spring foliage with every recurrent April forms a romantic contrast with the almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a place for thought. From the summit of that old defence, where once the legionaries lined the battlements in time of peril, or leaned gossiping in peacefuldays, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley where the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary lifting of the veil and a glimpse of what the spot will be like in another eighteen hundred years. Close by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman Gate. Three arches can be traced; the middle arch of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot passengers, less than half that width. Candour, however, compels the admission that of architectural character they have not the slightest trace. Over against this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in the Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and through that hole the most prominent object in all Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo" brutally dominates everything, and blasts the approach to Colchester far away on every road but that from London, for which small mercy thanks be given. Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he is very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and, unluckily, cannot fail to be seen. After him, even the Roman remains of Colchester pale their ineffectual efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable, although not very likely, that a stranger passing through Colchester might not notice its Roman antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There he is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless in brick of the most striking red and in attempts at decoration which, however well meant, only serve to render his hulking body more objectionable, with an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged face with pearl-powder.
Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower of Colchester's waterworks. It was built in 1881, and cost close upon £10,500, and there are those who say it is the second largest of its kind in England. Where the largest may be we know not, but if it injures its surroundings as effectually as does Colchester's incubus, that unknown place has our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in his name, for, as the curious may see for themselves, his weather-vane bears the effigy of an elephant.
Returning to Crouch Street, and so by Head Gate and along Head Street, the High Street is gained. It is one of the broadest and most spacious streets in the kingdom, as it had every occasion to be, for it was not only part of the great road leading into Suffolk, but in it was held the principal fair of the town. Here, too, close by where Colchester's new and gorgeous Town Hall stands, was the old Moot Hall, a building of Saxon, Norman and later periods, barbarously destroyed in 1843. In the Moot Hall the Mayor and justices dealt with offences of all kinds, from the selling of bad meat to charges of witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. Thus we may read in the borough records of things so diverse as the fining of Robert Barefot, butcher, in the sum of twelve pence for selling putrid meat, and may learn how William Chevelying, the first of the Colchester martyrs, was imprisoned here in the reign of Henry the Sixth until such time as it was convenient to burn him in front of Colkyng's Castle. Here the local Court of Pie Powder was held during the Corporation Fair Days, in October. Summaryjurisdiction was the special feature of that Court, and it was needed, for in those times, when people of all sorts and conditions came from far and near, offences were many and various. In the legal jargon of the Middle Ages this tribunal is called theCuria Regis Pedis Pulverizatis, or, in the Norman-French then common, the "Cour Royal des Pieds Poudrés," that is to say, the King's Court of Dusty Feet. Courts of Pie Powder obtained this eminently descriptive name from the original Fair Courts, held in the dusty streets long before buildings were erected for the purpose, and the name survived long after the necessity which originated it had disappeared. Imagine, therefore, the highwaymen, the cheats and thieves and those who came into disputation on the Fair Days being brought before the Mayor by the bailiffs, their cases arising and being heard, and judgments and sentences being delivered and executed, within the space of one day, amid the bleating of the flocks, the lowing of the herds, and all the noise and tumult of the Fair itself. We must not, however, suppose the High Street to have been absolutely clear of obstructions in days of old. In midst of it stood the Late Saxon or Early Norman church of that Saxon saint, St Runwald, which remained here until so recently as 1878, when it was pulled down and its site sold to the Corporation, to be thrown into the roadway.
That Colchester stands on a considerably elevated site is evident to all who, having entered from the London road, turn out of Head Street into the High Street, and in doing so glimpse the long descent ofNorth Hill at the corner. A further revelation is that of East Hill, which, in continuation of High Street, the traveller must long and steeply descend towards the Colne, on his way to Ipswich and Norwich. It was in High Street that Colchester's principal coaching inns were situated, and there yet remains—now the most picturesque feature of that thoroughfare—the "Red Lion," with old timber brackets supporting a projecting upper storey and a four-centred Tudor oak entrance curiously carved; its original and restored portions so thickly smeared with paint and varnish that all might be old, so far as the antiquary can tell, or all might be in the nature of Wardour Street antiques. The "Red Lion" figured as a rendezvous in the surrender of the town to Fairfax, after the siege of 1648. In its yard the vanquished laid down their swords.
Another inn was the "White Hart," where Bank Passage leaves the High Street. The building, a highly respectable plaster-faced one, smug and Georgian, still stands, but it is an inn no longer. Another old inn, the "Three Cups," has been rebuilt. Older than any, but coyly hiding its antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries from the crowd, is the "Angel," in West Stockwell Street, whose origin as a pilgrim's inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants to, or returning from, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the road through and past Norwich, housed here and misbehaved themselves in their mediæval way. It would be the gravest of mistakes to assume old pilgrims decorous. Modern Bank Holiday folkswould, compared with them, seem to be of a severe monkish austerity. The shrine at Walsingham, second only in repute to that of the Blessed Thomas at Canterbury, drew crowds of every class, from king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of St John at Colchester sheltered some in its guest-houses, while the late-comers inned at such hostelries as the "Angel," or, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods. Ill fared the unsuspecting citizen who met any of these sinners on the way to be plenarily indulged and lightened of their load of sin. They would murder him for twopence or cudgel him out of high spirits and for the fun of the thing; arguing, doubtless, that as they were presently to turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how black the old one was. Drunkenness and crime, immorality, obscenity and license of the grossest kind were in fact accompaniments of pilgrimage, and the sin-worn wanderers who prayed devoutly at the niche, now empty of its statue, in the east end of All Saints' Church in the High Street, on their journey to and from Walsingham, would resume their foul jests and their evil courses so soon as the last bead was told and the ultimate word of dog-Latin glibly pattered off.
XXVIII
Removedfrom all the noise and bustle of the High Street, in a quiet nook away from the modern life of the town, stands Colchester Castle, on the site of the Temple of Claudius. The Keep, built by Eudo, "Dapifer," or High Steward of Normandy, under William the Conqueror and his two successors, alone remains, and has lost its upper storey, destroyed by a speculator who bought the building in 1683, and half ruined himself in his attempts to demolish it. It is perhaps not generally known that this is by far the largest keep in England, measuring 155 ft. by 113 ft. The Tower of London, built at the same period, and the next largest, measures only 116 ft. by 96 ft. There have been those who, looking at its massive walls, 12 ft. thick, with courses of Roman tiles conspicuous in them, have believed this to be the original Roman temple, and antiquaries who should have known better have written long treatises to support their views. Those, however, were the days before comparative archæology had come into being to prove that the peculiarities in the planning, noticeable here, are partaken of by the undoubted Norman keeps of the Tower of London and of Rochester Castle, known to have been designed by Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester. Freeman was very severe in his time on those who labelled the interior of Colchester keep with such names as "podium" and "adytum," in their belief of its Roman character.
THE GRAND STAIRCASE, COLCHESTER CASTLE.
THE GRAND STAIRCASE, COLCHESTER CASTLE.
If its lack of height prevents Colchester Castlefrom being impressive without, certainly its gloomy dungeons and mighty walls compel the respect and wonder of all who enter. They look not so much as though they had been built up, as though cells and passages had been carved and burrowed out of a solid mass; so small are those passages and staircases, so thick the walls. In the chapel and the corridors that still remain roofed, the collections of the Essex Archæological Society have a home, and from otherand roofless walls that are broad enough to afford the safest of pathways one may gaze down upon the surrounding grassy enclosures and see that spot where those two Royalist commanders, Lucas and Lisle, who held Colchester for seventy-six days against the besieging army of the Parliament in 1648, were barbarously shot by order of Fairfax, after having surrendered.
That siege of Colchester is the most romantic incident that has survived in the history of the town. It is the story of a last desperate attempt of the Royalists to contend with the Parliamentary forces that had everywhere overwhelmed the King's supporters after a bitter warfare of over six years. It was a gallant attempt, and the more so because Essex was not a county favourable to the King's cause. Sir Charles Lucas, at the head of this enterprise, was a younger member of the Lucas family, seated at Colchester. In the beginning of June 1648, a Royalist rising under Colonel Goring had been checked at Blackheath by the Parliamentary general, Fairfax. A portion of Goring's force crossed the Thames into Essex, and lay at Brentwood. This was an opportunity which Essex sympathisers could not let slip. Lucas and his friends, gathering a body of adherents, galloped down the road to Chelmsford, where the Committee of Parliament was in session, and seized them, afterwards continuing their progress to Brentwood, where they effected a junction with Goring's band. Their forces thus united, a counter-march was made upon Chelmsford again, and continued to Colchester; Lord Capel, Sir George Lisle,and many others joining on the way. On June 12, Goring, in command of this body of four thousand Royalists, approached Colchester, and found the Head Gate closed against him by the unsympathetic citizens, but a slight skirmish soon enabled him to force an entrance. He had not intended to remain at Colchester, but the swift pursuit that Fairfax organised from London gave the Royalists no time to continue their projected march into the Midlands. The day after Goring had entered Colchester, Fairfax had assembled his forces on Lexden Heath, and immediately sent a trumpeter to demand surrender. The inevitable refusal was the signal for a battle outside the town, on the London Road; a contest which resulted in the retirement of the Royalists within the walls. The Head Gate still existed, its bolts and bars in perfect order, but as the Royalists fell back through it into the town, two hundred or more of the Parliamentary troops dashed through in pursuit. Their ardour cost them their lives, for Lord Capel at the head of a determined band pushed back the gate upon the bulk of the enemy, thrusting his walking-stick through the staples as the door closed. The eager advance-guard, thus cooped up within the walls, were all slain.
Preparations were now made on both sides for a siege. Fairfax had already lost many men, and dared not attempt to carry the town by storm. His plan was to surround Colchester and imprison the Royalists there until such time as his heavy ordnance or starvation should compel them to surrender. With his command of reinforcements from London,and his ability thus to enclose the town with a cordon of troops, the position of the Royalists was hopeless, and it is to their honour and credit that, in order to contain Fairfax's large army and so give opportunities to the organisers of Royalist movements in the Midlands, they continued the defence in the face of starvation and despite the easy terms of capitulation at first offered them. Their domestic position (so to call it) in the town was unenviable, for the inhabitants were wholly opposed to their cause. They had with them, it is true, the members of the Parliamentary Committee whom they had kidnapped from Chelmsford, but those gentlemen were a nuisance and had to be civilly treated and fed while the Royalists themselves went hungry. The unfortunate inhabitants, too, were starving, and many of their houses and churches destroyed by the besiegers' cannon shot; while suburbs were burnt down outside the walls.
The end of this long agony came on August 27, when the town was surrendered; the officers "surrendering to mercy," the lesser officers and rank and file with an assurance that their lives and personal belongings should be spared. Seventy-five superior officers accordingly gave up their arms at the "King's Head" inn. Four of them were to be tried by court-martial. One escaped, one was pardoned, and two—Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle—condemned to be shot without delay, on a disproved charge of having once broken their parole when formerly prisoners of war. In vain asking for time to make some final disposition of their affairs,these two officers were executed the same evening, on a grassy spot a few paces clear of the north wall of the old castle. Sir Charles Lucas was the first to be shot, and met his end as a brave, gallant gentleman should. "I have often faced death on the field of battle," he said, "and you shall now see how I dare to die." Then he knelt in prayer, and, rising, threw open his vest, exclaiming, "See, I am ready for you. Now, rebels, do your worst!" The firing-party then fired and shot him in four places, so that he fell dead on the instant.
Sir George Lisle was then brought to the same place, and viewing the dead body of his friend as it lay on the ground, knelt down and kissed him, praising his unspotted honour. After bidding farewell to some friends, he turned to the spectators, saying, "Oh! how many of your lives here have I saved in hot blood, and must now myself be most barbarously murdered in cold blood? But what dare not they do that would willingly cut the throat of my dear King, whom they have already imprisoned, and for whose deliverance, and peace to this unfortunate country, I dedicate my last prayer to Heaven?" Then, looking in the faces of those who were to execute him, and thinking they stood at too great a distance, he desired them to come nearer, to which one of them said, "I'll warrant, sir, we hit you." "Friend," he answered, "I have been nearer you when you have missed me!" And so, after a short prayer upon his knees, he rose up and said, "Now, traitors, do your worst!" Whereupon they shot him dead.
The stone covering the graves of these unhappy soldiers may yet be seen in St Giles's Church, with an inscription stating that they were "by the command of Thomas Fairfax, the general of the Parliament Army, in cold blood barbarously murdered." A legend may still be occasionally met with in old books, which has it that the Duke of Buckingham, who had married Fairfax's daughter, approached Charles the Second with the object of having the passage erased that reflected so severely on his father-in-law's memory. The King conferred on the subject with Lord Lucas, who said that he would with pleasure obey the Royal command, if only His Majesty would allow him to place in its stead the statement that "Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle were barbarously murdered for their loyalty to King Charles the First, and that his son, King Charles the Second, had ordered this memorial of their loyalty to be erased." The King then, we are told, commanded the already existing epitaph to be cut still deeper, and it will be readily observed by those who go to gaze upon it that the lettering is bolder and deeper than commonly is the case.
The undertaking of Fairfax with respect to the surrendered soldiery was not respected. They were ruthlessly pillaged, and some sent to the plantations over seas. Lord Capel was eventually executed in London. For many years afterwards the spot where Lucas and Lisle fell was shown by the awe-struck people of Colchester, who told the legend that grass would not grow where that loyal blood had been spilled. In later times the story became an articleof faith with one political party and a derision to the other. No grass grows there now; but for the commonplace reason that a well-kept gravel path occupies the site, which is duly marked by a small obelisk.