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The
GREAT NORTH ROAD

The Old Mail Road to Scotland

By CHARLES G. HARPER

LONDON TO YORK

Illustrated by the Author, and from old-time
Prints and Pictures

London:
CECIL PALMER
Oakley House, Bloomsbury Street, W.C. 1

First published in 1901
Second and Revised edition, 1922

Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & Co., Ltd.,
53, Victoria Street, Liverpool
and 187, Fleet Street, London.

In Loving Memory
OF
Herman Moroney

“I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow-creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.”

Attributed to William Penn.

PREFACE.

When the original edition of the “Great North Road” was published—in 1901—the motorcar was yet a new thing. It had, in November, 1896, been given by Act of Parliament the freedom of the roads; but, so far, the character of the nation’s traffic had been comparatively little changed. People would still turn and gaze, interested, at a mechanically-propelled vehicle; and few were those folk who had journeyed the entire distance between London and Edinburgh in one of them. For motor-cars were still, really, in more or less of an experimental stage; and on any long journey you were never sure of finishing by car what you had begun. Also, the speed possible was not great enough to render such a long journey exhilarating to modern ideas. It is true that, the year before, the “Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland,” not yet become the “Royal Automobile Club,” had in its now forgotten role of a “Society of Encouragement” planned and carried out a “Thousand Miles Tour,” which had Edinburgh as its most northern point; but it was a very special effort. Those who took part in it are not likely to forget the occasion.

To-day, all that is changed. Every summer, every autumn, sees large numbers of touring automobiles on the way to Scotland and the moors, filled with those who prefer the road, on such terms, to the railway. From being something in the nature of a lonely highway, the Great North Road has thus become a very much travelled one. In this way, some of its circumstances have changed remarkably, and old-time comfortable wayside inns that seemed to have been ruined for all time with the coming of railways and the passing of the coaches have wakened to a newer life. Chief among these is the “Bell” on Barnby Moor, just north of Retford. The story of its revival is a romance. Closed about 1845, and converted into a farm-house, no one would have cared to predict its revival as an inn. But as such it was reopened, chiefly for the use of motorists, in 1906, and there it is to-day.

But, apart from the tarred and asphalted condition of the actual roadway in these times, the route, all the way between London, York and Edinburgh, looks much the same as it did. Only, where perhaps one person might then know it thoroughly, from end to end, a hundred are well acquainted with the way and its features. It is for those many who now know the Great North Road that this new edition is prepared, giving the story of the long highway between the two capitals.

CHARLES G. HARPER.

April, 1922.

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

LONDON TO YORK

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I.

There was once an American who, with cheap wit, expressed a fear of travelling in the little island of Great Britain, lest he should accidentally fall over the edge of so small a place. It is quite evident that he never travelled the road from London to York and Edinburgh.

You have to perform that journey to realise that this is, after all, not so very small an island. It is not enough to have been wafted between London and Edinburgh by express train—even although the wafting itself takes seven hours and a half—for one to gain a good idea of the distance. We will not take into consideration the total mileage between Dover and Cape Wrath, which tots up to the formidable figure of eight hundred miles or so, but will confine ourselves in these pages to the great road between London and Edinburgh: to the Great North Road, in fact, which measures, by way of York, three hundred and ninety-three miles.

There are a North Road and a Great North Road. Like different forms of religious belief, by which their several adherents all devoutly hope to win to that one place where we all would be, these two roads eventually lead to one goal, although they approach it by independent ways. The North Road is the oldest, based as it is partly on the old Roman Ermine Way which led to Lincoln. It is measured from Shoreditch Church, and goes by Kingsland to Tottenham and Enfield, and so by Waltham Cross to Cheshunt, Ware, and Royston, eventually meeting the Great North Road after passing through Caxton and climbing Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight miles from London.

The Great North Road takes a very different route out of London. It was measured from Hicks’s Hall, Smithfield, and, passing the “Angel” at Islington, pursued a straight and continually ascending course for Holloway and Highgate, going thence to Barnet, Hatfield, Welwyn, Stevenage, Biggleswade, and Buckden to Alconbury; where, as just remarked, the North Road merged into it. From London to Hadley Green, just beyond Barnet, the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road are identical.

In these volumes we shall consistently keep to the Great North Road; starting, however, as the record-making cyclists of late years have done, from the General Post-office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to or from which, or the neighbouring old inns, the coaches of the historic past came and went.

We travel with a light heart: our forbears with dismal forebodings, leaving duly-executed and attested wills behind them. In the comparatively settled times of from a hundred to two hundred years ago, they duly returned, after many days: in earlier periods the home-coming was not so sure a thing.

These considerations serve to explain to the tourist and the cyclist, who travel for the love of change and the desire for beautiful scenery, why no one in the Middle Ages travelled from choice. From the highest to the lowest, from the king in his palace to the peasant in his wattled hut, every one who could do so stayed at home, and only faced the roads from sheer necessity. No one appreciated scenery in those days; nor are our ancestors to be blamed for their shortcomings in this respect, for outside every man’s door lurked some danger or another, and when a man’s own fireside is the only safe place he knows of, it is apt to appear to him the most beautiful and the most desirable of spots.

We cannot say whether the Romans appreciated scenery. If a love of the wildly beautiful in nature is dependent upon the safety of those who behold it, and upon the ease with which those scenes are visited, perhaps only the later generations of Roman colonists could have possessed this sense. The earlier Romans who made their splendid system of roads were, doubtless, only military men, and, well aware of their dangers, found nothing beautiful in mountain ranges. Their successors, however, during four hundred years had leisure and plentiful opportunities of cultivating taste, and travel was highly organised among them. A milliare, or milestone, was placed at every Roman mile—4854 English feet—and “mansiones,” or posting-stations, at distances varying from seven to twenty miles.

Roman roads were scientifically constructed. The following was the formula:—

So thoroughly well was the work done that remains of these roads are even now discovered, in a perfect condition, although buried from six to fifteen feet, or even deeper, beneath the present surface of the land, owing to the hundreds of years of neglect which followed the abandonment of Britain, and the decay of Roman civilisation; a neglect which allowed storms and the gradual effects of the weather to accumulate deposits of earth upon these paved ways until they were made to disappear as effectually as Pompeii and Herculaneum under the hail of ashes and lava that hid those cities from view for eighteen hundred years.

When that great people, the Romans, perished off the face of the earth, and none succeeded them, their roads began to decay, their bridges and paved fords were broken down or carried away by floods, and the rulers of the nation were for over five hundred years too busily engaged in subduing rebellions at home or in prosecuting wars abroad to attend to the keeping of communications in proper repair. Social disorder, too, destroyed roads and bridges that had survived natural decay and the stress of the elements. Even those roads which existed in otherwise good condition were only fair-weather highways. They were innocent of culverts, and consequently the storm-water, which nowadays is carried off beneath them, swept across the surface, and either carried it away or remained in vast lakes on whose shores wayfarers shivered until the floods had abated. Thieves and murderers were the commonplaces of the roads, and signposts were not; so that guides—who at the best were expensive, and at the worst were the accomplices of cutthroats, and lured the traveller to their haunts—were absolutely necessary.

To the relief of travellers in those times came the Church, for the civil and secular power had not begun even to dream of road-making. The Church did some very important things for travellers, praying for them, and adjuring the devout to include them in their prayers for prisoners and captives, the sick, and others in any way distressed. The very word “travel” derives from travail, meaning labour or hardship. This alone shows how much to be pitied were those whose business took them from their own firesides.

But to pray for them alone would not perhaps have been so very admirable, and so the Church took the care of the roads on itself in a very special sense. It granted indulgences to those who by their gifts or their bodily labour helped to repair the highways, and licensed hermits to receive tolls and alms from travellers over roads and bridges constructed by the brethren, those revenues going towards the upkeep of the ways. Benefactors to the Church frequently left lands and houses, whose proceeds were to be applied for the same purpose; and for many years this trust was respected, and all the road and bridge building and repairing was done by the religious. By degrees, however, this trust was, if not betrayed, allowed to gradually fall into neglect. False hermits set up in remote places, away from the eyes of the bishops, and living idle and dissolute lives on the alms they received, allowed roads and bridges alike to fall into decay. These vicious, unlicensed hermits were great stumbling-blocks to the godly in those times. They were often peasants or workmen, who had observed how fat and idle a living was that gained by those among the licensed who had betrayed their trust and fared sumptuously on alms unearned, and so went and set up in the eremitical profession for themselves. They fared well on bacon, had “fat chekus,” toasted themselves before roaring fires in their too comfortable cells, and lived “in ydelnesse and ese,” frequenting ale-houses and even worse places. Accordingly many of them were eventually removed, or suffered various punishments, and the neighbouring monasteries placed others in their stead.

By this time, however, the bishops and abbots, whose broad acres had often come to them in trust for the welfare of the traveller, began to forget their obligations. It was, of course, a natural process: the possessions of the religious houses had grown enormously, but so also had their hospitality to all and sundry. Travellers had increased, and as it was a rule of conduct with the great abbeys to not only relieve the poor, but also to entertain the great in those days before the rise of the roadside hostelry, their resources must have been well exercised. Meanwhile the statutes of the country had gradually been imposing the care of the roads upon the laity, and at the time when the greater and lesser monasteries were dissolved, in the reign of Henry the Eighth, parishes and landowners were chiefly concerned in endeavouring to comply with their new and strange obligations in keeping their ways passable. Of course they did not succeed, and equally of course, because it was impossible that they could, the pains and penalties threatened for foul and dangerous roads were not enforced.

A curious pamphlet on the condition of the roads in the seventeenth century is that written by Thomas Mace, one of the “clerks” of Trinity College, Cambridge, and published in 1675. Mace, there is no doubt, was a man born out of his time. Had circumstances been propitious, he might have become another and an earlier Macadam. His pamphlet, written both in prose and verse, and addressed to the king, is styled The Profit, Conveniency, and Pleasure for the Whole Nation, and is “a Discourse lately presented to His Majesty concerning the Highways of England; their badness, the causes thereof, the reasons of these causes, the impossibility of ever having them well mended according to the old way of mending; but may most certainly be done, and for ever so maintained (according to this New Way) substantially, and with very much ease.”

We find here, as in other publications until the mid-eighteenth century was well past, that the country was for the most part unenclosed, so that when the traffic had worn the old tracks into deep ruts, or when mud had rendered them impassable, the wagons, carts, and laden horses were taken round by the nearest firm spots. “Much ground,” says our author, “is now spoiled and trampled down in all wide roads, where coaches and carts take liberty to pick and chuse for their best advantages; besides, such sprawling and straggling of coaches and carts utterly confound the road in all wide places, so that it is not only unpleasurable, but extremely perplexing and cumbersome both to themselves and to all horse travellers.”

These pickings and choosings were the original cause of the still existing twists and turns in many of our roads. When we see an old road winding snake-like through a flat country, with no hills or other obvious reasons for its circuitous course, we may, in most cases, safely attribute this apparent indecision and infirmity of purpose to these ancient difficulties, thus perpetuated.

This ancient state of things occasioned many disputes and even fatal affrays between the packhorse men, who carried goods slung across their horses’ backs from one part of the country to the other, and between the market-folk and those who travelled on horseback and coaches. Mace would himself seem to have experienced some of these contentions as to who should take the clean and who the muddy part of the road, for he writes with great bitterness about “these disturbances, daily committed by uncivil, refractory, and rude, Russianlike rake-shames, in contesting for the way.”

“Hundreds of pack-horses,” he continues, “panniers, whifflers, coaches, wagons, wains, carts, or whatsoever others,” fought and schemed for precedence; and a horseman, his horse already exhausted by a long and tedious journey, might, at the entrance to a town, especially on market day, be compelled to go out of his way twenty times in one mile, owing to the peevishness of these whifflers and market-folk. “I have often known many travellers,” he continues, “and myself very often, to have been necessitated to stand stock still behind a standing cart or wagon, on most beastly and unsufferable wet wayes, to the great endangering of our horses and neglect of public business: nor durst we adventure to stirr (for most imminent danger of those deep rutts and unreasonable ridges) till it has pleased Mr. Carter to jog on, which we have taken very kindly.”

His plan was to once get the roads in good repair, and then, he says, with the employment of “day men” to every five miles or so, they could be easily kept in order. The prospect induces him to rise to poetry:

“First, let the ways be regularly brought
To artificial form, and truly wrought;
So that we can suppose them firmly mended,
And in all needful points, the work well ended,
That not a stone’s amiss; but all complete,
All lying smooth, round, firm, and wondrous neat.”

So far good. But then comes the heavy traffic to destroy the good work:

“Then comes a gang of heavy-laden wains
Of carts and wagons, spoiling all our pains.”

But he is ready for this. His proposed “day men” by at once filling up the ruts would make the damage good. All these things he commends to the notice of his Majesty with the concluding lines:

“There’s only one thing yet worth thinking on,
Which is, to put this work in execution.”

That it was not “put into execution” is a matter of history.

We have seen that Mace calls the road to Scotland a “highway,” and the terms “highroad” or “highway” are common enough; but what really is a highroad? or rather, how did the term originate? Such a road is usually understood to be a main artery of traffic between important towns, but that was not precisely the original meaning, which indicated the physical character of the road rather than its geographical status. “High roads” were originally in fact, causeways constructed across, and above the level of, marshes and low-lying lands, and the term was therefore excellently descriptive. The changed meaning no doubt arose from the fact that, as it would scarcely ever have been worth while to build embanked roads for the purpose of connecting obscure villages out of the way of trade, consequently the “high ways” and the “high roads” only came into existence between important centres. But this highly specialised meaning was destroyed when Turnpike Acts and Highway Acts began to be passed. The first Turnpike Act, one relating to the road to the North, referred to the Shoreditch, Stamford Hill, Ware, and Royston route, which joined the Great North Road at Alconbury Hill. It was passed in 1663, and authorised a toll-gate at Stilton, among other places. In the preamble to this Act we find the road spoken of as “the ancient highway and post-road leading from London to York and so into Scotland.” Later Acts providing for the collection of tolls on the main roads and for the formation of Turnpike Trusts, whose business it was to collect those tolls and with them keep the “turnpike” roads in repair, named them “turnpike roads”; while other legislation, culminating in the General Highway Act of William the Fourth, perpetrated a delightful paradox by especially designating by-roads “highways.” The cardinal difference, in the eyes of the law, was that a turnpike road was a main line of communication, to be maintained in proper order throughout its length by taxes collected from the users of the road; while highways were only local roads for local use and to be maintained by the respective parishes in which they were situated. The ways in which these parish roads were kept in repair were sufficiently curious. “Statute labour” preceded highway rates, and was so called from a statute of Philip and Mary providing for parish road-surveyors, and for men, horses, carts, and materials to be supplied by the farmers at their orders, for repairs. “Statute labour” survived in a fashion until the passing of the General Highway Act of 1835, when it was wholly superseded by rates. In later days parishes united and formed Highway Boards, just as they formed Poor Law Unions; and choosing a surveyor, levied a common highway rate. These surveyors were not always, nor often, competent men. They were, in fact, generally elected by the Boards or the Vestries from some necessitous inhabitants little above the status of the broken-down old men who were paid a trifle to break or spread stones in order to keep them from being burdens to the parish in the workhouse. These surveyors were appointed and work done in fear of the parishes being indicted and heavily fined for the dangerous condition of their roads, but it is obvious that they must have been very badly repaired in those times. Nowadays the roads are all highways, since the turnpikes have been abolished, and their repair, outside the boroughs, is the business of the County Councils.

II

Before Macadam and Telford appeared upon the scene, the office of road-surveyor was very generally looked down upon. No self-respecting engineer, before the time of these great men, condescended to have anything to do with roads. It is true that a forerunner of Macadam and Telford had appeared in Yorkshire in 1765, when “Blind Jack of Knaresborough” began the construction of the Boroughbridge and Harrogate road, the first of the long series for which he contracted; but he was not an official road-surveyor, nor by profession an engineer. He was, in fact, an engineer born and wholly untaught.

John Metcalf, the famous blind roadmaker, was born in 1717, and lost his eyesight at six years of age. A native of Knaresborough, he filled in his time many parts; being fiddler, huckster, soldier, carrier, proprietor of the first stage-wagon between York and Knaresborough, and road and bridge maker and contractor by turns. The marvellous instinct which served him instead of sight is scarce credible, but is well authenticated. He joined Thornton’s company of Yorkshire volunteers raised at Boroughbridge to meet the Scots rebels in the ’45, and marched with them and played them into action at Falkirk. His marvellous adventures have no place here, but his solitary walk from London to Harrogate in 1741 concerns the Great North Road. Being in London, and returning at the same time, Colonel Liddell of Harrogate offered Blind Jack a seat behind his carriage, which Metcalf declined, saying that he could easily walk as far in a day as the colonel could go in his carriage with post-horses. This incidentally shows us how utterly vile the roads were at the time. Metcalf, although blind and unused to the road, having travelled up to London by sea, walked back, and easily reached Harrogate before the colonel, who posted all the way.

Liddell, who had an escort of sixteen mounted servants, started an hour later than Metcalf. It had been arranged that they should meet that night at Welwyn, but, a little beyond Barnet, on Hadley Green, where the roads divide, Metcalf took the left hand, or Holyhead, road by mistake and went a long distance before he discovered his mistake. Still he arrived at Welwyn first. The next day he was balked at Biggleswade by the river, which was in flood, and with no bridge to cross by. Fortunately, after wandering some distance along the banks, he met a stranger who led the way across a plank bridge. When they had crossed, Metcalf offered him some pence for a glass of beer, which his guide declined, saying he was welcome. Metcalf, however, pressed it upon him.

“Pray, can you see very well?” asked the stranger.

“Not very well,” replied Blind Jack.

“God forbid I should tithe you,” said his guide. “I am the rector of this parish; so God bless you, and I wish you a good journey.”

In the end, Metcalf reached Harrogate two days before the colonel.

Metcalf made many roads around Knaresborough and in different parts of Yorkshire, but none actually on the Great North Road. He died, aged ninety-three, in 1810, five years before Macadam and Telford began their work upon the roads. Like them, he rather preferred boggy ground for road-making, and forestalled both them and Stephenson in adopting fagots as foundations over mires. At that time the ignorant surveyors of roads repaired them with dirt scraped from ditches and water-courses, in which they embedded the first cartloads of stones which came to hand; stone of all kinds and all sizes. This done, their “repairs” were completed, with the result that the roads were frequently as bad as ever and constantly in the most rugged condition. Roads—it may be news to the uninstructed—cannot be made with dirt. In fact, a good road through anything but rock is generally excavated, and the native earth being removed, its place is taken by coarse-broken granite or rock; this in its turn receiving a layer of “macadam,” or smaller broken granite or whinstone, which is finally bound together by a sprinkling of red gravel, of the kind known by builders as “hoggin,” whose binding qualities are caused by a slight natural admixture of clay. In his insistence upon broken stones, Macadam proved a power of observation not possessed by the generality of road-makers, whose method was the haphazard one of strewing any kind upon the road and trusting in the traffic to pack them. With rounded pebbles or gravel stones thus chafing against one another, they never packed into a solid mass, but remained for all time as unstable as a shingly beach. Generations of road-making had not taught wisdom, but Macadam perceived the readiness of the angularities in broken stones to unite and form a homogeneous mass, and in introducing his system proved himself unwittingly a man of science, for science has in these later days discovered that ice is compacted by the action of ice-crystals uniting in exactly this manner.

A great scheme for laying out the whole of the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh on a scientific basis was in progress when the successful trial of the competing locomotives at Rainhill, near Liverpool, cast a warning shadow over the arrangements, and finally led to the project being entirely abandoned. Had the work been done, it is quite possible that the railways to the north would have taken another direction; that, in fact, instead of land having to be surveyed and purchased for them, the new, straight, and level road would have been given up to and largely used by the railways. Telford was the engineer chosen by the Government to execute this work, of which the portion between Morpeth and Edinburgh was actually constructed. The survey of the road between London, York, and Morpeth was begun as early as 1825, and had been not only completed, but the works on the eve of being started, when the Rainhill trials in 1829 stopped them short, and caused the utter waste of the public money spent in the surveying.

III

It were vain, nowadays, to seek any of the old starting-points from London. The late Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson asked in 1896, “Are ‘The Bull and Mouth,’ ‘The Spread Eagle,’ The Swan with Two Necks,’ and ‘The Green Man and Still,’ yet in existence?” With some little research he would have discovered that—with the sole exception of the last-named—they are not. The “Bull and Mouth” in later years became the “Queen’s Hotel,” and was demolished only when the site was required for an extension of the General Post Office in 1887. At the same time as the “Queen’s” disappeared, the street at the side of it, called from the old inn “Bull and Mouth Street,” was stopped up. In this street was the entrance to the famous old coaching-stables which were in the last years of their existence used as a railway receiving-office for goods. On their being pulled down, the grotesque plaster sign, representing a giant face with yawning mouth in which stood a bull, was removed to the Guildhall Museum, where it may still be seen, together with the yet larger and more elaborate sign which decorated the frontage of the “Queen’s.” This also included a mouth and a bull, set amidst a frame of plaster fruits and flowers, with the inscription:—

“Milo the Cretonian,
An ox slew with his fist,
And ate it up at one meal,
Ye gods! what a glorious twist.”

The origin, however, of the curious sign had nothing to do with this hungry person. Precisely what was that origin is never likely to be known; for although the legend that it derived from the capture of “Boulogne Mouth”—i.e. Boulogne Harbour—in the reign of Henry the Eighth is in general acceptation, it has been shrewdly suspected that this was a tale wickedly invented by George Steevens, a literary practical joker, who palmed off many similar stories upon unsuspecting antiquaries at the end of last century. A perhaps more likely story is that the sign was originally the “Bowl and Mouth.”

Under Sherman’s rule the “Bull and Mouth” became a mighty resort of coaches to and from all parts, but more especially the north, and his underground stables formed one of the sights of London.

Edward Sherman was a man of many parts, and had a varied career. Originally a stockbroker, he followed Willans at the “Bull and Mouth” in 1823, and rebuilt it as the “Queen’s” in 1830, continuing the stables under the old name, and eventually reconstructing them. The money for these enterprises came from three old and wealthy ladies whom he married in succession. If the stranger, unversed in the build and colour of coaches, could not pick out the somewhat old-fashioned, bright-yellow vehicles as Sherman’s, he was helped in identifying them by the pictorial sign of the inn painted on the panels—rather a startling one, by the way, to the rustics. Sherman, however, had not the prescience of Chaplin or of Horne, who clearly foresaw the success of railways, and he kept his coaches on the roads for some time after they were opened to their destinations. He was sufficiently ill-advised not to come to terms with the railway companies, and actually attempted, with the “Red Rover,” to run the Manchester trains off. Of course this could not last very long, and Sherman withdrew after having lost seven thousand pounds in a gallant, but futile, competition with steam.

In its prime the “Bull and Mouth” sent forth the Edinburgh and Aberdeen Royal Mail by York; the Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen coach by Ferry-bridge to Newcastle, where the Glasgow passengers changed; the Glasgow and Carlisle Royal Mail; the Newcastle “Wellington”; Shrewsbury and Holyhead “Union” and “Oxonian”; Birmingham “Old Post Coach” and “Aurora”; Leeds Royal Mail and “Express”; and Leicester “Union Post Coach.”

The site of the “Swan with Two Necks” is now occupied by the London and North-Western and South-Western Joint Goods Depot, in Gresham Street. Modern sculptured keystones may be seen over the entrances, bearing the effigy of a double-headed swan. This sign, like that of the “Bull and Mouth,” is a corruption of a widely different term; originally, indeed, the “Swan with Two Nicks,” from the particular “nicks” with which the bills of the swans belonging to the Vintners’ Company on the Thames were marked. The City Companies each had their swans on the river, and even nowadays they are maintained on the upper reaches. The young cygnets were marked at the annual festival of “swan-upping,” at which the City magnates used hugely to enjoy themselves. The old and the new “nicks” of the Vintners’ Company are pictured here.

Lad Lane was until recent years the name by which this part of Gresham Street was known, while the inn itself was generally called by the coaching fraternity the “Wonderful Bird.”

Chaplin had in early days been a coachman himself. His career would have delighted that sturdy moralist, Hogarth, painter of the successful career of the Industrious Apprentice, for from that useful but humble position he rose to be the largest coach-proprietor in England, Deputy-Chairman of the London and Southampton (now London and South-Western) Railway, and Member of Parliament for Salisbury. He is said to have accumulated half a million of money. Twenty-seven mails left London every night, and of these Chaplin horsed fourteen for various distances. Very many stage-coaches were in his hands, and at the height of the coaching era he is said to have owned nearly two thousand horses. He was an entirely level-headed man, and, seeing at an early stage that railways must succeed, threw in his lot with them. Railway directors were exceedingly anxious to win over the coaching proprietors, and to induce them to withdraw from the road, so that with no coaches running the public should of necessity, whether they liked it or not, be compelled to travel by rail. Chaplin sold off his stock before the oncoming railways depreciated it, and, joining Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, founded the great carrying firm of Chaplin and Horne, which enjoyed the exclusive agency for the London and Birmingham Railway. There can be little doubt, although it was denied by the early officials of that line, that Chaplin and Horne were really bought off the road, and the sum of £10,000 has been mentioned as the price of their withdrawal. Before that time had come, coaches issued from Chaplin’s yard for many places on the north-western roads: the Carlisle Royal Mail; the Birmingham Royal Mail, “Courier,” and “Balloon Post Coach”; the Chester “New Coach”; Coventry “Light Post Coach”; Liverpool Royal Mail; Holyhead “New Mail” and a stage-coach without any particular name; and the Manchester Royal Mail, “Defiance,” “Regulator,” and “Prince Saxe-Cobourg.” The “Spread Eagle” in Gracechurch Street has also disappeared. It was at one time a house of Chaplin’s, and was afterwards owned in succession, together with the “Cross Keys” next door, by Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. Mountain.

The “Green Man and Still,” the last of the quartet of inns inquired after by Mr. Locker-Lampson, is the only one now standing, and may be seen at the corner of Oxford and Argyll Streets, close by Oxford Circus. It was not a coaching hostelry in the fullest sense, being only a place of call for the Oxford “Age,” and for the Harrow and other north-westerly “short stages,” running between London and the suburbs. It is now a railway receiving-office. This curious sign probably alludes to the old profession of the “herb-doctors,” who distilled medicines from wild or cultivated herbs. There were other inns whence Great North Road coaches set out, but they have all vanished. The “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn, whence the famous “Stamford Regent” started, has long since been pulled down, and the “Inns of Court Hotel” stood on its site. The hotel building remains, but about 1912 it ceased to be a hotel, and has since been converted into offices for an Insurance Company. The “Regent” originally left London at six o’clock in the evening, but in 1822 the hour was altered to six in the morning, an unearthly time for those who had to go some distance to reach Holborn, and necessitating, perhaps, getting up at three o’clock. The announcement by the proprietors that this alteration was for the “more perfect convenience” of their patrons seems ironical:—

SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
From London.

THE PROPRIETORS OF
THE REGENT COACH

Respectfully inform the public and their friends in particular, that, for their more perfect convenience, and to keep pace with the daily improvements in travelling, the hour of its leaving London will be altered on Monday, the 13th of May (and continued during the summer months),

TO SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING,
Instead of Night.

The arrangements that are forming in furtherance of this long-desired alteration will ensure a steady and punctual conveyance of Passengers to Stamford by a Quarter before Six o’clock, and to Melton by a Quarter before Nine o’clock in the Evening.

The hours of leaving Melton and Stamford will NOT be altered.

The proprietors take this opportunity to acknowledge their sense of the decided patronage shown to the Regent Coach under their several regulations, and to repeat their promise that no exertion shall be wanting to make it one of the most desirable conveyances to and from London.

Passengers and Parcels booked at Mr. Weldon’s, and the Bull and Swan Inn, Stamford; and at Mr. Sharp’s, Bell Inn, Melton.—Stamford, May 1, 1822.

The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, which must not he confounded with the other and equally celebrated “Saracen’s Head” in Aldgate High Street, was another very notable coaching establishment, and a galleried inn of picturesqueness and antiquity. Alas! that it has long since disappeared. Its history went back beyond the fifteenth century, and a reference made to it in 1522, when the suite of the Emperor Charles the Fifth lay here, speaks of the house as of some importance:—“The signe of the Sersyns hed: xxx beddes, a stable for xl horses.”

The sign, of course deriving from the Crusades, itself gives the inn a very high antiquity. It was a sign of a gruesome and savage aspect, and had its origin in the pictures the returning Crusaders drew of their adversaries. As Selden says:—“Our countrymen pictured them with huge, big, terrible faces, when in truth they were like other men. But this,” he adds slyly, “they did for their own credits.” The inn owed its later celebrity to Dickens, who made it the London inn of Mr. Squeers. Thus he describes it:—“Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield, on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastward seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney cabriolets going westward not unfrequently fall by accident, is the coachyard of the Saracen’s Head Inn; its portal guarded by two Saracens’ heads and shoulders frowning upon you from each side of the gateway. The inn itself, garnished with another Saracen’s head, frowns upon you from the top of the yard. When you walk up this yard you will see the booking-office on your left and the tower of St. Sepulchre’s Church darting abruptly up into the sky on your right, and a gallery of bedrooms upon both sides.”

There is a “Saracen’s Head” on Snow Hill to this day, but it is a modern building. From the old house went the “Lord Nelson,” York, Newcastle, and Edinburgh coach; the “Post,” despite its name, a slow-coach, for Carlisle and Penrith, by Doncaster, Ferrybridge, and Greta Bridge, doubtless the one by which Mr. Wackford Squeers took his “dear pupils” to Dotheboys Hall; and coaches to Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury, besides others for the western roads. The “Saracen’s Head” was kept by Mrs. Mountain, in succession to her husband and her husband’s father. Her son, Peter, managed the business for her, but it must not be supposed that she took no active part in it. To the contrary, Mrs. Sarah Ann Mountain, like her contemporary, Mrs. Nelson, of the “Bull,” Aldgate, possessed the most brilliant business capacity. She built coaches, as well as horsing them, and earned a profit by charging her partners down the road the mileage which in the usual course of business would have been paid over to a coach-builder. There was no more expressive sight in the London of the beginning of the nineteenth century than the simultaneous starting of the mails every evening from the General Post Office. Londoners and country-cousins alike were never weary of the spectacle of the smart coaches, the business-like coachmen, and the resplendent, scarlet-coated guards preparing to travel through the night, north, south, east, or west, with his Majesty’s mails. Even the passengers shone with a reflected glory, and felt important as, one after the other, the twenty-seven mails began at the stroke of eight o’clock to move off from the double file that lined the street.

That street was not the broad thoroughfare of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, but the narrow one of Lombard Street, in which the General Post Office was situated for many years, until 1829, when what is now called the “old” General Post Office, but was then the newly completed building of Smirke’s, was occupied. The old headquarters can still be seen, in the Lombard Street Post Office of to-day. It is from here that the picture of the mails starting, forming the frontispiece of this volume, was taken. To our eyes, accustomed to the crowded thoroughfare of modern times, the street appears supremely dull and desolate, but that is only a retrospective way of looking at it.

Here is a testimony to the beauty of the scene. It is eloquent testimony, for it is De Quincey’s:—“On any night the spectacle was beautiful. The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their beautiful simplicity—but, more than all, the royal magnificence of the horses—were what might first have fixed the attention. Every carriage, on every morning of the year, was taken down to an official inspector for examination—wheels, axles, linchpins, poles, glasses, lamps, were all critically probed and tested. Every part of every carriage had been cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much rigour as if they belonged to a private gentleman; and that part of the spectacle offered itself always. . . . Every moment are shouted aloud by the post-office servants, and summoned to draw up, the great ancestral names of cities known to history through a thousand years—Lincoln, Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen—expressing the grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate missions. Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the mail-bags. That sound to each individual mail is the signal for drawing off, which process is the finest part of the entire spectacle. Then came the horses into play. Horses! Can these be horses that bound off with the action and gestures of leopards? What stir! what sea-like ferment! what a thundering of wheels! what a trampling of hoofs! what a sounding of trumpets!”

IV

Now for Post Office history. Much has been made at the “old” General Post Office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand; and although the building was not in existence until 1829, it has sent forth and received many mail-coaches. Its disappearance in 1912, we say, therefore severs the last link by which this busy quarter was connected with the old days.

The story of the Post Office goes back long before the G.P.O. was situated either here or at Lombard Street. The original Post Office was off Eastcheap. When it was there, the course of post between London and Edinburgh took three days. The first regular service was established in 1635, when Charles the First, to end the inefficiency of the communications between the two capitals, inaugurated “a running post or two, to run night and day, between Edinburgh and London, to go thither and come back again in six days.” We may suppose that this did not work very well, for in 1649 we find the city of London establishing a post of its own with a regular staff of runners and postmasters between London and the North.

But with the Restoration came the establishment of the General Post Office and an instantaneous decline in the efficiency of the post, six days instead of three being taken for the single journey to or from Edinburgh. This roused the towns on the way to indignant protests, and the post was accelerated to “three and a half or four days,” the acceleration being slower than the original time.

But however keenly the intermediate towns may have felt this, it could not have mattered much to Edinburgh, whose mail-bag was very scanty. One day in 1745, we are told, the mail brought only one letter, for the British Linen Company; and on another day in the same year only one was despatched to London, for Sir William Pulteney, the banker.

In 1750 things were no better, but eight years later an Edinburgh merchant, George Chalmers, procured an improvement. Before 1758 the Great North Mail set out three times a week and took eighty-seven hours in going north, and not fewer than one hundred and thirty-one from Edinburgh to London. This last itinerary was lengthened so greatly in time on account of stoppages made at Berwick and at Newcastle, ranging from three hours at one to twenty-four at the other. These delays Chalmers, in corresponding with the officials, proved to be quite needless. He also induced them to avoid the old and longer route through Thorne and York and to take the alternative road by Boroughbridge, thus shortening the journey by twelve miles. The times were then fixed at eighty-two hours for the northward-bound mail, and eighty-five for the south. For his services the Government made Chalmers a grant of £600. Some years afterwards he induced the Post Office to run the mails six days a week.

But a greater than Chalmers was at hand in Palmer, the organiser of the mail-coach service. Palmer accomplished, according to De Quincey, “two things very hard to do on our little planet, the earth, however cheap they may be held by eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke. He was therefore just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or, which is the same thing, discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of speed and keeping time; but, on the other hand, who did not marry the daughter of a duke.” Palmer married, in point of fact, Lady Madeline Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, but De Quincey does not lay the stress he should have done on his having fought his postal scheme to success against the obstinacy and red-tapeism of the Post Office officials, itself an enterprise sufficient to daunt any but the stoutest heart. Government officials have a wonderful power of passive resistance and an insensibility to argument and proof which might be envied by a lamp-post. It was thought a brilliant rejoinder when one of these Post Office dunderheads replied to Palmer’s scheme for supplanting the slow and uncertain post-boys by fast coaches with the observation that there was no reason why the post should be the swiftest conveyance in England! No doubt this witty gentleman resigned in an access of mortification when Palmer actually succeeded in being appointed Controller-General of the Post Office, with a salary of £1,500 a year and a two and a-half per cent. commission on a rise of the income above the £240,000 at which it stood when he was placed at the head of affairs. The first mail-coach was put upon the Bath Road on the 8th of August 1784, and its success was so great and immediate that the chief towns of the kingdom presently began to petition for similar facilities to be accorded them. York was the first successful applicant, and a mail was put on the road between London, York, and Edinburgh in October of the same year, taking three nights and two days to perform the journey. This was not a very remarkable rate of speed, to be sure, but the times were not so hurried then. A greater speed was attained when the roads began to be reorganised by Telford and Macadam. Macadam’s method of metalling the existing roads and Telford’s reconstruction of steep and winding highways produced great results. To Macadam was due the greater speeds attained at last on the mail route between London and Edinburgh; for, although Telford’s improved road was begun in 1824, it was never completed owing to the introduction of railways. Government had, in fact, by this time recognised the necessity of good roads, and, fresh from the reorganisation of the mail route between London and Holyhead, had determined on an improved communication between England and Scotland. This road, already referred to, was to be straight and as flat as engineering science could contrive it, and a portion—that between Edinburgh and Morpeth—was constructed about 1824, going by way of Soutra Hill, Lauderdale, Coldstream, and Wooler. The route between London and Morpeth was also surveyed and authorised, and portions between London and York actually begun, when the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 convinced the authorities that the days of the road were numbered.

But although it was long apparent that a change was impending, coaches were not entirely run off the Great North Road for another twenty years, and Post Office surveyors were still busy expediting the mails over short cuts and roads of more favourable gradients. Thus in 1832 we find the Scotch mail going by way of Selby. Here is the official time-bill for that year:—

The “up” mail was timed considerably slower, 45 hours 39 minutes.

The punctuality of the mails was so great that the Glasgow and the Edinburgh mails, which went by Shoreditch and Islington respectively, and took different routes as far as Alconbury Hill, where their roads met, could always be depended upon to keep the official interval of four minutes which divided them at that point. Their route was identical between Alconbury Hill and Doncaster, where the Glasgow mail branched off to the left to Ferrybridge and Greta Bridge.

This was the ne plus ultra of Post Office enterprise on the Great North Road, and closes an era.

V

We have seen with what extraordinary speed letters were carried in the time of Charles the First between London and Edinburgh; but how did folk travel? They rode horseback, from kings, to nobles, and down to merchants; princesses, madam, or my lady riding pillion. Private carriages—“coaches,” they were called—had been introduced in 1553, when Queen Mary rode in one, as a novelty, from London to Westminster, drawn by six horses. In 1556 Sir Thomas Hoby had one of these strange machines, and just because the fact is expressly mentioned we see how rare they were. In fact, they went out of use altogether for a time, and were reintroduced by William Boonen, Queen Elizabeth’s Dutch coachman, in 1564. On this occasion they came into better favour, and their numbers must have greatly increased, for a Bill “to restrain their excessive use” was introduced to Parliament, and rejected, in 1601. But both their make and the fearful condition of the roads forbade them being used in the country. Moreover, they had only shutters in place of windows, the first “glass coach” being that used by the Duke of York in 1661.

It was in 1658 that the first stage-coach between London and Edinburgh was put on the road. It set out once a fortnight, but the length of the whole journey and just what kind of vehicle it was are unknown. Four days, however, and two pounds were consumed in travelling between London and York. The cost of the whole journey was four pounds.

In 1734 things do not seem to have been much better, John Dale advertising in the May of that year that a coach would take the road from Edinburgh for London “towards the end of each week, to be performed in nine days, or three days sooner than any coach that travels that road.” After this matters went from bad to worse, and speed was slower twenty years later than it had been for a long time.

The Edinburgh Courant of 1754 contained the following advertisement:—

THE EDINBURGH STAGE COACH,

for the better accommodation of passengers, will be altered to a new genteel, two-end, glass coach machine, being on steel springs, exceeding light, and easy to go in ten days in summer and twelve in winter; to set out the

First Tuesday in March,

and continue it from Hosea Eastgate’s, the Coach and Horses in Dean Street, Soho, London, and from John Somerville’s in the Canongate, Edinburgh, every other Tuesday, and meet at Burrow Bridge on Saturday night and set out from thence on Monday morning, and get to London and Edinburgh on Friday. In winter to set out from London to Edinburgh every other (alternate) Monday morning, and to go to Burrow Bridge on Saturday night. Passengers to pay as usual.

Performed, if God permits, by

Your dutiful servant,
Hosea Eastgate.

Even Hosea Eastgate’s conveyance stands forth as a miracle of swiftness and frequency when compared with the coach of 1763, which set out once a month and took a fortnight, if the weather was favourable! Probably this degeneracy of coaches was due to the practice of travellers clubbing together to hire a post-chaise for the journey. This was a plan eminently characteristic of the Scottish mind. It both secured quicker travelling and saved expense. The Edinburgh papers of that time often contained advertisements inquiring for a fellow-passenger to share these costs and charges.

Edinburgh, as a matter of fact, even now a far cry, was beyond the ken of most Londoners in those times, and London was to Edinburgh folks a place dimly heard of, and never to be visited, save perhaps once in a lifetime. York, half-way, was better known, and was well supplied with coaches. The “Black Swan” in Coney Street, York, received and sent forth a coach—in after years known as the “York Old Coach”—so early as 1698. This appears to have always laid up for the winter and come out again in April, like the cuckoo, as a harbinger of spring. One of these spring announcements was discovered, some years since, in an old drawer at the “Black Swan.” It runs:—

York Four Days

Stage-Coach.

Begins on Friday the 12th of April 1706.

All that are defirous to pafs from London to York, or from York to London, or any other Place on that Road; Let them Repair to the Black Swan in Holbourn in London, and to the Black Swan in Coney Street in York.

At both which Places they may be received in a Stage Coach every Monday, Wednefday, and Friday, which performs the whole Journey in Four Days (if God permits). And fets forth at Five in the Morning.

And returns from York to Stamford in two days, and from Stamford by Huntingdon to London in two days more. And the like Stages on their return.

Allowing each Paffenger 14lb. weight, and all above 3d. a Pound.

Performed By

Benjamin Kingman.
Henry Harrifon.
Walter Bayne’s.

Alfo this gives Notice that Newcaftle Stage Coach fets out from York every Monday and Friday, and from Newcaftle every Monday and Friday.

It is singular that this coach should have had a “Black Swan” at either end of its journey. The London house was in later years the well-known “Black Swan Distillery” in Holborn.

To display the many coaches, their names and times of arrival and departure in these pages would afford but dull reading. Besides, Paterson and Cary, those encyclopædic old road-books, contain lists of them in interminable array: the “Highflyers,” “Rockinghams,” “Unions,” “Amitys,” “Defiances,” “Wellingtons,” “Bluchers,” “Nelsons,” “Rodneys,” and what not. There was so extraordinary a run upon these popular names that they are often triplicated—and sometimes occur six times—on the local and byroad coaches; with the result that if the traveller desired to travel by the “Highflyer,” let us say, to Edinburgh, he had to carefully sort it out from other “Highflyers” which flew not only to Leeds but to all kinds of obscure places.

The early stage-coaches must have been terribly trying. They were, as Byron says of the “kibitka,” “a cursed kind of carriage without springs.” As time went on they were not only provided with glass windows, but—as duly set forth in the advertisements—were furnished with springs and cushions. The resources of civilisation were not exhausted at this point, for it was gravely announced that the guards were armed, and the coaches were bullet-proof!

The life of a coach-proprietor was all hard work, with no little anxiety attached. Up early and to bed late—for on however large a scale his business might be, it was one peculiarly dependent upon the master’s eye—he knew the inner meaning of the primeval curse, and earned his living by the sweat of his brow. And, lest that was not sufficient, the Government sweated him in a financial sense. The coaching business was the especial prey of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and yielded huge returns. If it be argued that coach-proprietors, unlike railway companies, had no parliamentary powers to obtain, and no enormous expenses for purchase of land and construction of lines, this can be met by setting forth the heavy duties and taxes, the great outlay on turnpike tolls, and the relatively high cost of haulage by horses. The initial expenses of a railway are immense, the upkeep of lines and buildings large; but the actual cost of steam-power as against horse-traction is absurdly little. Railways, of course, pay passenger duty, and immense sums in the aggregate for rates and taxes; but they are not burdened as the coaches were. If it cost from £3 10s. to £6 15s. to travel “outside” or “inside” by ordinary stage-coach between London and Edinburgh, those high figures were the necessary results of Government exactions and turnpike imposts. Duties and taxes varied from time to time, but a stage-coach licensed, about 1830, to carry fifteen passengers paid a duty of threepence a mile, whether the coach carried a full load or not. Thus, for every single journey, a coach licensed to that extent paid £4 19s. 3d. A coach could be licensed to carry a smaller number, when the duties would be proportionately lighter, and coaches licensed for fifteen or so during the summer would take out a licence for perhaps six or eight in winter, when travellers were few and far between.

Suppose, now, that we roughly add up the working expenses of a stage-coach to Edinburgh. We start with the passenger-duty of £4 19s. 3d. To this we add, say, £4 for hire of coach at the rate of 2½d. a mile; £4 19s. 3d. for horsing, at 3d. a mile; and £6 12s., turnpikes, at 4d. This gives a total of £20 10s. 6d. But we have not yet done with expenses, including wages for coachmen, guards, ostlers, and helpers; advertising, rent, oil for lamps, greasing, washing, etc.

There would be six, or perhaps seven, coachmen, one driving about sixty miles, when he would be relieved by another; and perhaps four guards, because guards, not having the physical exertion of driving, could go longer journeys. The proportion of their week’s wages must be added to the debit account for the one journey, together with the proportion of the £5 yearly tax payable for every coachman and guard employed, and a similar annual sum for the coach itself. Any more items? Oh yes! Office expenses, clerks, etc., and incidentals. If we lump all these items together, they will mean an additional £12 cost on every journey to or from Edinburgh, bringing the cost to the proprietors to over £32.

Now for the other side of the account. Our coach is licensed for fifteen, and if we carry our four insides and eleven outsides all the way, it holds £65 10s. at the fares named above—about 4d. and 2d. a mile respectively. But how often were those fifteen “through” passengers? Not more, perhaps, than half would be bound for Edinburgh. Others might alight at York, or even at Grantham or Stamford. Others, again, might go to Newcastle. For fares thus lost, the proprietors looked to chance passengers; but the shillings and perhaps the two shillings taken on the way for short distances went, by common consent, into the coachmen’s and guards’ pockets, and were never entered on the way-bill. In this manner, and by their “tips,” the men added to their somewhat meagre wages, which, rightly considered, were retaining-fees rather than full payment. This practice was generally known as “shouldering.” Some proprietors, however, were stricter than others, and did not allow it. Of course it went on all the same, and the standing toast which they were compelled to give at annual coaching dinners, “Success to shouldering,” with the proviso, “but don’t let me find you at it,” was a tacit acknowledgment of the custom. In later days, when proprietors paid slightly higher wages and tried to forbid tips, the coachmen were loth to give up these odd sums, for the diminution of tips was greater than the increase of wages. They then pocketed larger fares, and called the practice “swallowing.” A tale is told of a coach approaching town, and the coachman asking his box-seat passenger if he had any luggage. “No,” said the passenger. “Then,” rejoined the coachman, “do you mind getting down here, sir, because I mean to swallow you.” The passenger got down, and was “swallowed” accordingly.

The average takings of the coach would certainly never, at the best of it, come to more than £50 a journey, leaving a balance of £15 10s. profit. Now, taking a year of three hundred and thirteen days, and coaches “up” and “down,” this gives a profit of £9,702—not, be it borne in mind, going to one man. The “end men” had the greatest share, as they had also the heaviest expenses, and the “middle-ground men” got little beyond the mileage on which they horsed the coaches; but with twenty-five stages or so, and twenty-five participants in the profits, it will be seen that the individual earnings on one coach could not be classed very high.

VI

It was a costly as well as a lengthy business to travel from London to Edinburgh. Not so lengthy, of course, by mail as by stage-coach, but much more expensive. If you wished to take it comfortably during the forty-two hours and a-half or so of travelling, you went inside, especially if it happened to be in winter; but an inside place cost eleven guineas and a-half, which was thought a much larger sum in 1830 than it would be nowadays. Accordingly, the stalwart and the not particularly well-to-do, who at the same time wanted to travel quickly, went outside, whereby they saved no less than four guineas.

But let not the reader think that these respective sums of eleven and a-half and seven and a-half guineas comprised the whole of the traveller’s expenses in the old days. There were numerous people to tip, such as porters, waiters, and last, but certainly not the least of them, the coachmen and guards, who at the end of their respective journeys, when they left their seats to a new guard or a new Jehu, “kicked” the passengers, as the expressive phrase went, for their respective two shillings or so. To be kicked at intervals in this figurative manner, all the way between London and Edinburgh, was not physically painful, but it came expensive; and what with the necessary meals and refreshments during those forty-two hours or so, it could scarce have cost an “inside” less than fifteen guineas, or an “outside” less than eleven.

Now let us take the mazy “Bradshaw” or the simpler “A B C” railway guides, and see what it will cost us in time and pocket to reach the capital of Scotland. A vast difference, you may be sure. It is possible to go by three different routes, but the distance is much the same, and the times vary little, whether you go by Midland, London and North-Western, or by the Great Northern Railway. The last-named has, on the whole, the best of it, with a mileage of 395 miles, and a fast train performing the journey in seven hours and twenty-five minutes. It costs by any of these routes for first-class travelling, which answers to the “inside” of old times, fifty-seven shillings and sixpence, and thirty-two shillings and eightpence by third-class, equivalent to the “outside.” [40] You need not tip unless you like, and even then but once or twice, and assuredly no one will ask you for one. Whether you travel “first” or “third,” a dining-saloon and an excellent dinner are at your service for a moderate sum, and the sun scarce rises or sets with greater certainty than that the Scotch express or its London equivalent will set out or reach its destination at its appointed minute.

Accidents—when they happen—are beyond comparison more fearful on the railway than ever they were on the coaches; but they are rare indeed when it is considered how many trains are run. Coaching accidents were frequent, but just because they seldom ended fatally they do not figure so largely in coaching annals as might be expected. A dreadful accident, however, happened in 1805 to the Leeds “Union” coach, owing to the reins breaking and the horses dashing the vehicle against a tree. This occurred at a point about half a mile from Ferrybridge. William Hope, the coachman, and an outside passenger were killed, and many others seriously injured. The jury imposed a deodand of £5 on the coach and £10 on the horses.

In later years, an almost equally serious disaster happened to another Leeds coach, the “Express.” It was racing with the opposition “Courier,” which had been stopped at the bottom of the hill for the purpose of taking off the drag, and in the effort to pass was upset, with the result that a woman was killed on the spot, another was laid up for a year with a broken leg, and other passengers were more or less injured. Probably because of the evident recklessness displayed by the coachman, a deodand of £1,400 was laid on the coach. The mail-coaches were not so often involved in disasters as the stages. They had not the incentive to race, and smashes arising from this form of competition were infrequent. But other forms of accident threatened them and the stage-coaches alike. There were, for instance, fogs, and they were exceedingly dangerous. Penny, an old driver of the Edinburgh mail, was killed from this cause. Starting one foggy night, he grew nervous, and asked the guard, a younger and stronger man, to take the reins. He did so, and drove up a bank. The mail was upset, and Penny was killed.

Snow and frost were the especial foes of the mails on the northern stretches of the Great North Road, just as widespread floods were in the Huntingdonshire and Nottinghamshire levels, by Ouse and Trent; so that no mail-coach was completely equipped which did not in the winter months carry a snow-shovel.

But it was not always the north-country coaches that felt the fury of the snowstorms. The famous storm of December 1836 blocked all roads impartially. The Louth mail, which left the Great North Road at Norman Cross, had to be abandoned and the mails transferred to the lighter agency of a post-chaise, while numerous others were buried in the snow as far south as St. Albans.

The earlier and later periods of coaching were productive of accidents in equal degrees. Stage-coaches may be said to date, roughly, from 1698, and continued as lumbering, uncomfortable conveyances until competition with the mails began to smarten them up, soon after 1784, when their second period dawned. Stage-coachmen of the first period were well matched with their machines, and not often fit to be trusted with any other cattle than a team of tired plough-horses. Their want of skill generally caused the accidents in those days, and the efficiency of others was affected by the conditions of their employment. The “classic” age had not arrived, and bad roads, ill-made coaches, and poor horses, combined with long hours of driving to render travelling quite dangerous enough, without the highwaymen’s aid. Coachmen drove long distances in those days, and sometimes fell asleep from sheer weariness—a failing which did not conduce to the safety of the passengers. But the old coach-proprietors did not do the obvious thing—make the stages shorter and change the coachman more frequently. No; they contrived a hard, uncomfortable seat for him which rested on the bed of the axletree in such a manner as to shake every bone in his body, and to render repose quite out of the question.

To these clumsy or worn-out fellows succeeded the dashing charioteers of the palmy age of coaching, which we may say came into full being with the year 1800, and lasted for full thirty years. Many broken heads and limbs, and bruises and contusions innumerable, can be laid to the account of these gay sportsmen. Washington Irving has left us a portrait of the typical stage-coachman of this time, in this delightful literary jewel:—

“He cannot be mistaken for one of any other craft. He has commonly a broad full face, curiously mottled with red, as if the blood had been forced by hard feeding into every vessel of the skin; he is swelled into jolly dimensions by frequent potations of malt liquors, and his bulk is still further increased by a multiplicity of coats in which he is buried like a cauliflower, the upper one reaching to his heels. He wears a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, a huge roll of coloured handkerchief about his neck, knowingly knotted and tucked in at the bosom, and has in summer-time a large bouquet of flowers in his buttonhole—the present, most probably, of some enamoured country lass. His waistcoat is commonly of some bright colour, striped; and his small-clothes extend far below the knees, to meet a pair of jockey-boots which reach about half-way up his legs.

“All this costume is maintained with much precision; he has a pride in having his clothes of excellent materials, and, notwithstanding the seeming grossness of his appearance, there is still discernible that neatness and propriety of person which is almost inherent in an Englishman. He enjoys great confidence and consideration along the road; has frequent conferences with the village housewives, who look upon him as a man of great trust and dependence, and he seems to have a good understanding with every bright-eyed country lass. The moment he arrives where the horses are to be changed, he throws down the reins with something of an air, and abandons the cattle to the care of the ostler; his duty being merely to drive from one stage to another. When off the box, his hands are thrust into the pockets of his great-coat, and he rolls about the inn-yard with an air of the most absolute lordliness. Here he is generally surrounded by an admiring throng of ostlers, stable-boys, shoe-blacks, and those nameless hangers-on that infest inns and taverns, and run errands, and do all kinds of odd jobs for the privilege of battening on the drippings of the kitchen and the leakings of the tap-room. These all look up to him as an oracle, treasure up his cant phrases, echo his opinions about horses and other topics of jockey-lore, and, above all, endeavour to imitate his air and carriage. Every ragamuffin that has a coat to his back thrusts his hands in the pockets, rolls in his gait, talks slang, and is an embryo coachey.”

But how different the last years of this gorgeous figure! When railways were projected, the coachman laughed at the idea. He thought himself secure on his box-seat, and witnessed the preparations for laying the iron rails with an amused confidence that his horses could run the “tin-kettles” off the road with little trouble. He kept this frame of mind even until the opening of the line that competed with him; and even when it was proved to demonstration that railways could convey passengers at least three times as swiftly as coaches, and at about a quarter of the cost, he generally professed to believe that “it couldn’t last long.” His was the faith that should have moved mountains—to say nothing of blighting locomotives; but it was no use. His old passengers deserted him. They were not proof against the opportunities of saving time and money. Who is? Nor did they come back to him, as he fondly thought they would, half-choked with cinders and smoke. He was speedily run off the road. There were those who liked him well, and, unwilling to see him brought low, made interest with railway companies to secure him a post; but he indignantly refused it when obtained; and, finding a cross-country route to which the railway had not yet penetrated, drove the coachman’s horror—a pair-horse coach—along the by-ways. Gone by now was his lordly importance. He had not even a guard, and frequently was reduced to putting in the horses himself. He grew slovenly, and was maudlin in his drink. “Tips” were seldom bestowed upon him, and when he received an infrequent sixpenny-piece, he was known to burst into tears. The familiar figure of Belisarius begging an obolus is scarce more painful. The last of him was generally in the driving of the omnibus between the railway station and the hotel; a misanthropic figure, consistently disregarded by his passengers, lingering, resolutely old-fashioned in dress, and none too civil, superfluous on the stage.

VII

These long preliminaries over, we may duly start for the North from the General Post Office, coming to Islington by way of Goswell Road. Here, at the “Peacock” or the “Angel,” travellers of a century and a-half ago were one mile from London, or from Hicks’s Hall, which was the same thing. A milestone proclaimed the fact, and its successor, with a different legend, stood until quite recently opposite the Grand Theatre, on Islington Green. Here stood the first toll-gate as you went out of London. Here also was the village pound for strayed horses and cattle. Here again, according to those who do not know anything at all about it, the bailiff’s daughter of Islington might have met her lover; only, unhappily for this Islington, the old ballad refers to quite another Islington, away in Norfolk.

The usual suburban perils awaited wayfarers to Islington at any time during the eighteenth century, and those bound for it from the city were accustomed to wait at the Smithfield end of St. John Street until a number had collected, when they were convoyed outwards by the armed patrol stationed there for that purpose. But the footpads were quite equal to the occasion, and simply waited until those parties dispersed for their several homes, and then, like skilful generals, attacked them in detail. The Islington Vestry were obliged to make a standing offer of £10 to any one who should arrest a robber; but that this failed seems certain, for at a later period we find the inhabitants subscribing a fund for rewards to those who arrested evildoers.

Time has wrought sad havoc with Islington’s once rural aspect, and with its old coaching inns. That grand coaching centre, the “Peacock,” has utterly vanished, and so has the picturesque “Queen’s Head,”—gabled, Elizabethan—wantonly destroyed in 1829; while the “Angel,” pulled down in 1819 and rebuilt, and again rebuilt in 1900, has since retired from business as a public-house, and is now a tea and lunch place, in the hands of a popular firm of caterers. In early days, and well on into the nineteenth century, the Green was really a pleasant spot, with tall elms shading the footpaths, and a very rustic-looking pound for strayed cattle. Near by stood for many years a little hatter’s shop, bearing the legend in large characters, “Old Hats Beavered,” and it is curious to note how, in a long succession of old prints, this shop and its now curiously sounding notice kept their place while all else was changing.

Islington was once a Cockney paradise, and to it retired, as into the country, the good citizens and shopkeepers of London, setting up miniature parks and pleasances of their own. So favourite a practice was this that the witlings of that period, a hundred and fifty years ago, used to publish absurd notices supposed to have been found displayed at the entrances of these haunts. “The New Paradise,” ran one of them, “Gentlemen with Nails in their Boots not Admitted.” Perhaps also “Serpents Warned Off.” At that time, and long before, Islington was resorted to on account of some alleged mineral waters existing here. “Islington,” according to M. Henri Misson, who travelled in England, and wrote a book about us and our country in 1718, “is a large village, half a league from London, where you drink waters that do you neither good nor harm, provided you don’t take too much of them.” This is decidedly a “palpable hit,” and may be commended to those who take medicinal waters in our own time.

“It is not much flock’d to by People of Quality,” he goes on to observe. Here, at least, he is not out of date. People of Quality do not flock to Islington. The medicinal waters are all gone; and that Islington is, even now, not in any great degree a resort of fashion is an incontrovertible fact.

Between this and Highgate, the road leading to what the poets call the “true and tender North” is by no means happy. Any other of the classic highways of England begins better, and however delightful the Holloway Road may have been in the coaching age, it is in these crowded days a very commonplace thoroughfare indeed. The long reaches of mean streets and sordid bye-roads combine with the unutterably bad road surface to render the exit from London anything but pleasurable.

Sir Walter Scott, on his way down to Abbotsford in 1826, calls the Great North Road “the dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,” and the description, minus the convenience, might well stand for its suburban portion to-day. In Sir Walter’s time, however, these first few miles were only just emerging from a condition in which dulness could have had no part. In fact, it may well be supposed that the travellers, who up to that time went by coach to York, well armed, found the journey a thought too lively. Indeed, the Holloway Road, into which they came, from the last outposts of civilisation, was, as it were the ante-chamber into that direful territory of highwaymen and footpads, the veritable Alsatias of Finchley Common and Whetstone. In fact, a few years earlier still, when there were no houses at Holloway at all, and no district known by that name, what is now called the Holloway Road was a lonely track, full of mud and water, through which the coach route ran, infested all the while by the most villainous characters, compared with whom the gay highwayman in ruffles and lace, and mounted on a mettlesome horse, was a knight indeed—a chevalier without fear or reproach. This stretch of road lay then between high banks, and considerably below the level of the surrounding fields. It was a “hollow” road, as such roads are called wherever they exist in the country—the actual, original Hollow Way from which, in the course of time, a whole residential district has obtained its name. Such roads, worn down through the earth by constant traffic, are always very ancient, and though the story of the Holloway Road at a period from a hundred and fifty to eighty years ago was a disgraceful one, the inhabitants of that part can console themselves by the soothing thought that, although it cannot claim the Roman ancestry of the route by Shoreditch, Waltham Cross and Cheshunt, which was the Ermine Way, the road in question probably dates back to the respectable antiquity of mediæval times.

VIII

The road has been ascending ever since the General Post Office was left behind, and now we come to the beginning of Highgate Hill, where the old way over the hill-top, and the more recent one, dating from 1813, divide left and right. Here, at the junction of Salisbury Road with Highgate Hill, stands the Whittington Stone, marking the traditional spot where Dick rested on his flight, and heard the bells inviting him to

“Turn again, Whittington,
Thrice Lord Mayor of London.”

It is a pretty story, and one which, let us hope, will never be forgotten or popularly discredited; how the boy, running away from ill-treatment at his master’s house in the city, halted here in his four-miles’ flight, and resting on the slope of Highgate Hill, saw the clustered spires of London and the silvery Thames—it was silvery then—down below, and heard the prophetic message of Bow Bells inviting him to return. If we can believe that he had his favourite cat with him, let us believe with joy, because it goes far to complete the tender story which has always held captive the hearts of the children; and God forbid we should grow the less tender towards the beautiful legends of our forbears as we grow older.

Bow Bells fulfilled their prophecy in full measure and running over, for Dick Whittington was chosen to complete the year of Mayor—Adam Bamme—who died in 1397, and was Mayor on three separate occasions as well; in 1397, 1406, and 1420. He was knighted, of course, and, moreover, he became one of the richest men of his time. Perhaps the most dramatic thing recorded of his prosperous career as Mayor and a member of the Mercers’ Company, is that splendid entertainment which he gave to Henry the Fifth and his Queen at Guildhall in his last year of office, when he threw into the fire bonds equal to £60,000 of our money, due to him from the king—a generous, nay, a princely gift.

But he was not “Lord” Mayor. The tradition is wrong in that respect. There were “Mayors,” but no “Lord Mayor” until 1486.

Who was Richard Whittington? We know him well in his later career as a Mercer, and as a pious and patriotic citizen; but whence came he? Was he the poor and friendless lad of legend? Well, not quite that. Poor, perhaps, because he was the youngest of three brothers; but not friendless, for his family was of no mean descent. His father, Sir William Whittington, had an estate on which he lived, at Pauntley, in Gloucestershire, and other possessions of the family were at Sollers Hope, Herefordshire. Misfortunes fell upon Sir William, who seems to have died not long after Dick was born; but the family had friends in the FitzWarrens, of whom one, Sir John, was a prominent Mercer in London. Dick’s brothers had, as elder brothers have nowadays, the best chances, as it seemed, and remained in the country, enjoying the family property, or following rural employments. Dick we may readily picture as being sent to FitzWarren, to learn a trade. The great man probably took him for old acquaintance’ sake, and, having received the lad of thirteen, and turned him over to one of his many underlings, promptly forgot him. It is a way with the great, not yet obsolete. We may with a good conscience reject that part of the legend which tells how Dick was found, an obscure waif and stray, on FitzWarren’s doorstep, and taken, in compassion, to serve as a scullion. The pantomimes always insist on this, and on the ferocious cook’s ill-treatment of him; but pantomime librettists have many sins to answer for.

No; Dick was an apprentice, a poor one, and doubtless taken without a premium; but not scullion. There can be little doubt that the country lad, thus thrown into the midst of many other apprentices in FitzWarren’s house, must have been an object of sport. They would taunt him with his country ways, and, superior in their clothes of London cut, ridicule, with the cruel satire of boys, his homely duds. Possibly his flight had some such origin as this.

But it is chiefly on the legend of the cat that more or less learned antiquaries have so savagely fallen, with intent to explain it away. The cat, they assure us, was a fable, and they go on to say that it was from coal vessels called “cats,” in which Whittington embarked his money, that the story grew. Another school of commentators, eager to reduce the pretty tale to commonplace, tell us that it originated in the old French word for a purchase, achat. To what shifts will they not proceed in this hunt for an ignoble realism! Whittington is not known to have engaged in the ownership of colliers, or in the carrying of coal. A Mercer has no commerce with such things. Then, that derivation from the French does smell of the lamp, does it not?

Now for the truth of his embarking his favourite cat as a venture, to be sold at a profit in some foreign port. The story, regarded with a knowledge of those times, is by no means an improbable one. Indeed, to go further, it is quite likely. Cats were in that era comparatively rare. They had a high value at home; were even more valuable in Europe, and in the darkly-known countries on the confines of the known world—a small world, too, before the discovery of America—they were almost priceless.

Many childish searchings of heart have arisen over Dick’s parting with his cat for love of gain. Did Dick, like the Arab who sold his steed, repent with tears? Perhaps Dick was the happy possessor of two cats, and his favourite was a “tom.” If the other was a she-cat, and as prolific as are our own, no doubt Dick would have been glad to have got rid of her; except that the progeny themselves were marketable. To this, then, we are reduced: that Dick Whittington as a boy bred cats for exportation, and that his black-and-white Tom, as the progenitor of them all, was the founder of his fortunes. The legend tells us of only one cat, which, when the vessel was driven out of her course to the coast of Barbary, was sold for immense riches of gold and precious stones to the Sultan, whose palace was infested with mice. That may do for the pantomimes; but, unhappily, the ships that were so unfortunate in those times as to be driven on those shores were plundered and their crews slain. It was cheaper than buying.

But whatever the details, it is certain that Whittington owed his first successes to his cat. Several things, despite all destructive criticism, point to the essential truth of the popular story. Firstly, original portraits, painted from the life, testify to it by showing Whittington’s hand laid caressingly on a black and white cat. Then, Whittington was the rebuilder of the old New Gate, and his effigy, with a cat at his feet, stood in one of its niches until the building was pulled down hundreds of years afterwards. Finally, a very remarkable confirmation of the story came from Gloucester in 1862, when, on a house occupied by the Whittington family until 1460 being repaired, the fragment of a carved chimney-piece of that century was discovered, bearing the sculpture of a boy carrying a cat in his arms. It may reasonably be claimed that these evidences, together with the popular belief in the story, which can be traced back almost to Whittington’s own day, confound unbelievers.

The present Whittington Stone is the degenerate and highly unornamental descendant of quite a number of vanished memorials to the great Lord Mayor which have occupied this spot since his day. It is not by any means a romantic spot to the sight nowadays, but for those who can bring romance with them in their own minds, it matters little that the heights just here are crowned with suburban villa roads, that a public-house—the “Whittington Stone Tavern”—stands by, or that the whole neighbourhood reeks vulgarity. The present stone is dated 1821, and succeeded one which had disappeared shortly before, itself the successor in 1795 of a cross. The existing inscription was recut, and railings enclosing the stone put up in 1869; a public-house gas-lamp now crowning and desecrating the whole.

IX

It is a far cry from the London County Council, the present highway authority at Highgate, to the first roadmaker here, in 1364. A hermit, William Phelippe by name, at that time lived in a little cell on the lower slope of Highgate Hill, looking down upon London. From that remote eyrie, had he been a man of imagination, he might have beheld prophetic visions of London’s future sprawling greatness, when the tide of life should rise to the crest of his hill and bring with it bricks and mortar, wood-pavements, cable-tramways, and other things of equal use and beauty. He foresaw none of these things, possibly because he did not sufficiently mortify the flesh. Certainly he was a hermit not without wealth, and perhaps therefore not one of your sad-eyed ascetics. He had a goodly balance in some old earthenware crock under the floor, or at the bank—the road bank of the Hollow Way, very old-established—and he had ample leisure, unencroached upon by toilette requirements, for which hermits had no use. Lazing in his cell commanding the road—it stood near where the Whittington Stone stands now—he had often noticed how wet, miry, and full of sloughs was the Hollow Way, and with what difficulty travellers ascended by it. Accordingly he devised a scheme by which he conferred benefits alike upon the travellers along the road and the farmers of Highgate. He directed and paid for the digging of gravel and the laying of it along the road, and in the work presently expended all his money. But in so doing he had made an excellent investment; much better than leaving it on deposit at the bank mentioned above, where, in the nature of things, it accrued no interest; for he procured a decree from Edward the Third, authorising “our well-beloved William Phelippe, the hermit,” to set up a toll-bar, and licensing him to levy tolls and keep the road in repair for “our people passing between Heghgate and Smethfelde.” Thus were the first toll-bar and the first turnpike-keeper established, and we may judge that the undertaking was profitable from the records that show how very largely the roadside hermits throughout the country went into the business of road and bridge making or mending shortly afterwards. There were hermits of sorts: some authorised, and some not; some who did good work in this wise and some who did nothing at all, and yet continued to live substantially on the mistaken gifts of wayfarers. The profession of the eremite was not without its jealousies. An industrious road-maker might have a cell placed in a position outside a town favourable for the collection of dues, when another would set up business, say a quarter of a mile further out, and so intercept the money; so that travellers having paid once, had nothing for the real Simon Pure. Having satisfied Codlin, they disregarded Short; whereupon it not infrequently happened that if Short were the more muscular of the two he would go and have it out with his rival, while the world went by, scandalised at the apostolic blows and knocks these holy men were dealing one another.

William Phelippe’s licence was renewed every year. His tariff of tolls is still extant, and we read that for every cart carrying merchandise, its wheels shod with iron, twopence per week was paid; if not shod with iron, one penny. Every horse carrying merchandise was charged one farthing per week. Pedestrians and horsemen without goods went free. These charges seem absurdly small until we multiply them by twenty, which gives results representing the present value of money, and then it will be found that those ancient tolls were on much the same scale as those which existed until July 1st, 1864, when all turnpikes on public highways within fifty miles of London were abolished by Act of Parliament.

A great gap stretches between the time of our road-making hermit and that of Telford—a gap of four hundred and fifty years. Yet, although Highway Acts were from time to time devised for the betterment of the roads, their condition remained bad, and there was always, since 1386, the crest of Highgate Hill to surmount.

Unless we take this hill-top route to the left we shall not have seen Highgate; nor, in truth, is there much to see, now that the old Gatehouse Tavern is gone, and with it the last outward and visible connection with the days of yore. The tavern marked the site of the old turnpike-gate that stood here, the lineal successor of the hermit’s original pitch lower down, when the old route to Barnet by Tallingdon Lane, Crouch End, Hornsey Great Park, Muswell Hill, Friern Barnet, and Whetstone was superseded by the new one through the Bishop of London’s estate, by Finchley and Whetstone, in 1386. It is in the existence at that time of the Bishop’s park that we may perhaps seek with success the origin of the name of “Highgate,” which does not necessarily allude to the very obviously “high” gate situated here—more than 350 feet above sea-level. No; it was the “haigh” gate, the portal which gave access through the enclosure (haia) with which my Lord Bishop’s domain was presumably surrounded. Through his land all traffic passed until it emerged on the other side of Whetstone, where, commanding the entrance to Barnet, stood another gate in receipt of tolls, swelling the income of that very business-like ecclesiastic and his successors for hundreds of years.

At the Highgate end dues were collected on horned cattle, among other things, and here originated the practice of being initiated into the freedom of Highgate, a mock ceremonial founded upon Roman Catholic rites at the time of the Reformation. For three hundred years this farcical observance was continued at the tavern by the gate, and only fell into disuse with the decay of coaching. Those who had not previously passed this way were “sworn in on the horns,” a practice traced to the unwillingness of the cattle drovers who frequented the tavern to allow strangers to mix with them. This exclusiveness no doubt originated in the fear of trade secrets being divulged, a feeling which may still be met with among commercial travellers of the older school, who resent the appearance of the mere tourist in their midst. The stranger who in olden times happened upon these drovers at Highgate was discouraged from taking bite or sup here, and only permitted to join them after having kissed the horns of one of their beasts. This speedily became elevated (or degraded, shall we say?) into a sort of blasphemous ritual parodying the admission of a novice into the Church, and this again, with the lapse of time and the dying of religious hatreds, developed into the merely good-natured farce played during the last hundred years of the existence of the custom.

When the coaches pulled up here, it was soon discovered, by judicious questioning, who were the strangers who had not been made “free.” They were made to alight, and, having removed their hats and kissed a pair of horns mounted on a pole, “the oath” was administered by the landlord in this wise:—“Upstanding and uncovered: silence. Take notice what I now say to you, for that is the first word of the oath; mind that. You must acknowledge me to be your adopted father. I must acknowledge you to be my adopted son. If you do not call me father you forfeit a bottle of wine; if I do not call you son I forfeit the same. And now, my good son, if you are travelling through this village of Highgate, and you have no money in your pocket, go call for a bottle of wine at any house you may think proper to enter and book it to your father’s score,” and so forth.

An initiate had to swear never to drink small beer when he could get strong (unless he preferred small); never to eat brown bread when he could get white (unless he preferred brown); never to kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress (unless he preferred the maid, and in case of doubt he might kiss both); after which he had to kiss the horns or the woman in the company who appeared the fairest, as seemed good to him, the ceremony concluding with the declaration of his privileges as a freeman of Highgate. Among the well-known privileges were—that if he felt tired when passing through Highgate and saw a pig lying in a ditch, he might kick the pig away and take its place, but if he saw three lying together he must only kick away the middle one and lie between the other two!

X

It was on Highgate Hill that the great Francis, Lord Bacon, whom some believe to have written Shakespeare’s dramas, fell a martyr to his scientific enthusiasm. Driving up this chilly eminence one winter’s day when the snow lay on the ground, it occurred to him that, from its chemical constituents, snow must possess admirable preservative properties, and he accordingly resolved immediately to put this theory to the proof. Stopping his carriage at a neighbouring farmhouse, he purchased a fowl and stuffed it carefully with snow. Being in weak health at the time, he took a chill, and before he could be driven home, became so alarmingly ill that he was obliged to be carried to Lord Arundel’s house at Highgate. There a damp bed aggravated his seizure, so that in a few days he died, in 1626.

Farmhouses are far to seek from Highgate Hill nowadays, new roads and streets of shops being more general. With the end of the eighteenth century, Highgate became a populous little town, but its outskirts did not altogether lose their terrors for travellers. Suburban villas had begun to sparsely dot these northern heights of London with the coming of the new era, but the New Police had not yet been brought into being; and so belated dwellers in these wilds afforded fine sport for the footpads, who, hunting in couples, and armed with horrible pitch-plasters, attacked the mild citizen from behind, and, clapping a plaster over his mouth, reduced him to an enforced silence, while they emptied his pockets at leisure. It was late one night in 1807 that Grimaldi, the most famous of all clowns, was robbed on Highgate Hill by two footpads. They spared him the usual plaster, perhaps because there was no one else about, and so it did not matter in the least how loudly he might shout for help. Among minor articles of spoil, they secured a remarkable watch which had been given him two years before as a testimonial by his many admirers. The dial represented his face in character when singing his popular comic song, “Me and my Neddy.” The robbers, seeing this, immediately recognised him. Looking at one another, they could not make up their minds to rob him of his treasure, and so they gave it back, Grimaldi goggling and grinning at them the while, as on the stage. So, with a vivid recollection of Sadler’s Wells, and bursting with laughter, they left him.

It is peculiarly unfortunate for those who are uncertain about their aspirates that London and its neighbourhood should abound in place-names beginning with the letters “A” and “H.” Cockneys have ever—or ’ave hever, shall we say?—been afflicted with this difficulty; but they are overcoming the tendency of their forbears to speak of “’Ornsey, ’Ampstead, ’Igit, ’Arrow, ’Omerton, ’Ackney, ’Endon or ’Atfield.” The classic anecdote in this connection is that of the City Alderman who lived at Highgate, praising his locality to a distinguished guest at a Mayoral banquet.

“Don’t you think ’Iget pretty?” he asked.

“Really,” the guest is supposed to have replied, “I haven’t known you long enough to say.”

“I’m not talking of meself,” returned the Alderman, “but of ’Iget on the ’Ill.”

Until 1813 coaches and foot-passengers alike toiled over the Hill, through Highgate village, and by a roundabout road into East End, Finchley, which, with its adjoining hamlets, was until quite recently so greatly cut off from London by these comparatively Alpine heights and the lack of suburban railways, that it was, for all practical purposes, as distant as many other places fifty or sixty miles away, but situated on more level roads or on direct railway routes. To remedy this the Archway Road was cut direct from the Upper Holloway Road to East End, saving half a mile in the distance to be travelled and a hundred feet in the height to be climbed.

The Archway and the Archway Road were constructed about 1813, following upon the failure of the original idea of driving a tunnel through the hill-top. The Hill is a great outstanding knob of London clay, a substance both difficult and dangerous to pierce; but it was not until the work was nearly completed that it fell in, one day in 1812, happily before the labours of the day had been begun. The present open cutting of the Archway Road, rather over a mile in length, took the place of the projected tunnel, and the Archway was constructed for the purpose of carrying Hornsey Lane across the gap. If an unlovely, it was in its way an impressive, structure, even though the impression was, rather of the nightmare sort. It was scarcely necessary, for Hornsey Lane has been at no time a place of great resort, and the traffic along it could have been diverted at small cost, and with little inconvenience made to cross the Archway Road by a circuitous route. Highgate Archway has now disappeared, giving place to a lighter structure, spanning the road without the support of the cumbrous old piers which, until the summer of 1900, continued to block three-fourths of the way. It has gone because the road-traffic has grown with the suburbs and the way was not wide enough; but its disappearance removes a landmark proclaiming where town and country met.

The making of the Archway and the road was no public-spirited act, but the commercial undertaking of a Company, whose total expenses were very large, and, by consequence, the tolls exacted extremely high. Pedestrians were not chargeable at ordinary toll-gates, but here they had to pay a penny, or go the tedious way over the Hill. Sixpence was levied on every laden or draught horse.

It was not a profitable undertaking, even at these rates, and the tolls had a very decided effect in stemming the advance of Suburbia in this direction. In 1861, when the abolition of tolls within fifty miles of London was a burning question, the Company owed the Consolidated Fund no less than £13,000. The Government bought it out for £4,000, receiving £9,000 by instalments spread over fifteen years, after which period the road was to be declared free. It was accordingly opened free of toll in 1876. And thus it remained, as in the illustration, until 1897, when it was demolished and the roadway widened. The present Archway was opened in 1900.

XI

East End, Finchley, to which we now come, is one of the many straggling settlements built upon Finchley Common. Stretches of fields alternate with rows of new shops and tiny old-world cottages. Here stands the “Bald-Faced Stag,” with the effigy of a stag surmounting the appropriately bald elevation of that huge and ugly public-house. The yards of monumental masons jostle it on either hand; a grim and unpleasing conjunction, and a prelude to those vast townships of London’s dead, the St. Marylebone, Islington, and St. Pancras Cemeteries, which with other properties of the Cemetery Companies render the road dismal and people these northern heights with a vast population of departed citizens. The merry market-gardener has betaken himself and his cabbages to other parts, and the builder builds but sparely.

Just where the Great Northern Railway bridge crosses over the road at East End stands the “Old White Lion,” in a pretty wooded dip of the road. The house was once known, and marked on the maps as the “Dirt House,” from its having been the house of call of the market-wagons on the way to London with produce, and on the way back with loads of dirt and manure. The wood was also known as “Dirt House Wood.” It was here also that Horne the coachmaster’s stables were situated.

To this succeeds North Finchley, beginning at the junction of a road from Child’s Hill with the Great North Road, known as Tally Ho Corner. North Finchley, called by the genteel “Torrington Park,” is yet another settlement, filched, like the cemeteries, from Finchley Common by successive iniquitous Acts of Parliament at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Could the gay highwaymen who, a hundred years ago, were gathered to their fathers at the end of a rope down Tyburn way revisit Finchley, the poor fellows would sadly need a guide. Where, alas! is Finchley Common, that wide-spreading expanse of evil omen on which these jovial spirits were so thoroughly at home? Finchley Common, once second only to the far-famed Hounslow Heath, has long since been divided up between the many who, more than a hundred years ago, conspired to cheat the people of their birthright in this once broad expanse of open space. The representatives of the people at Westminster allowed it, and my Lord Bishop of London profited by it, together with lesser folk, each in their several degrees. The Common then extended to considerably over two thousand acres. Of this vast tract only a few acres are left, beyond North Finchley. The rest was sold quietly, and by degrees, for absurdly small sums.

Between 1700 and 1800 the great Common of Finchley was a parlous place, and not one of the better-known highwaymen but had tried his hand at “touching the mails” as they went across this waste; or patrolled the darkest side of the road, ready to spring upon the solitary traveller. Indeed, the childlike simplicity of the lonely travellers of those days is absolutely contemptible, considering the well-known dangers of the roads. For instance, on the night of the 28th August, 1720, a horseman might have been observed in the act of crossing Finchley Common. He had fifteen guineas in his pocket, and ambled along as though he had been in Pall Mall instead of on perhaps the most dangerous road in England. At a respectful distance behind him came his servant, and just in front of him, midway of this howling wilderness, stood three figures. “There is an eye that notes our coming,” says the poet, and three pairs of eyes had perceived this wayfarer. They belonged to an enterprising individual named Spiggott and to two other ruffians, whose names have not been handed down to posterity. The weirdly named Spiggott was apparently above disguising himself; his companions, however, might have stood for stage brigands, for one of them had the cape of his coat buttoned over his chin, and the other wore a slouched hat over his eyes. In addition to this, he kept the ends of his long wig in his mouth—which seems rather a comic opera touch. It is to be hoped, rather than expected, that the traveller with the guineas saw the humour of it. In the twinkling of an eye one brigand had seized his horse and made him dismount, while the others covered him with their pistols. The servant also was secured, the guineas transferred with the dexterity of a practised conjurer, the horses turned loose, and then the three rode away, leaving the traveller and his servant to get on as best they could. Spiggott eventually paid the penalty of his rashness in not disguising himself in accordance with the canons of the hightoby craft, for when, a little later in his career, he was caught, with some others, in an attempt on the Wendover wagon at Tyburn, he was identified by the Finchley traveller. The end of him was the appointed end of all his kind. The moral of this story seems to be “Wear a mask when engaged in crime.”

In 1774, Edmund Burke, travelling to Malton, in Yorkshire, was stopped here by two highwaymen, who robbed him of ten guineas, and his servant of his watch, in the most easy way. Some of these highwaymen were, indeed, persons who took their calling in an earnest and whole-hearted manner, and doubtless regarded Jack Sheppard as a mere scatterbrain, quite unfitted to be in business for himself. Thoroughly business-like men were Messrs. Everett and Williams, who entered into a duly drawn and properly attested deed of partnership, by which it was agreed that they should work together on Finchley Common and elsewhere and divide the profits of their labours into equal shares. Their industry prospered, and the common fund soon reached the very respectable total of £2,000. But when required to render accounts and to pay over half this amount, Mr. Williams refused; whereupon his partner brought an action-at-law against him, in 1725. A verdict for £20 was actually obtained, and appealed against by the defendant. The court then very properly found the matter scandalous, and sentenced Everett to pay costs, the solicitors engaged on either side being fined £50 each for their part in this discreditable affair. One partner was executed, two years later, at Maidstone, and the other at Tyburn, in 1730.

There still exists an ancient oak by the road at a place called Brown’s Wells, at the corner of a lane nearly opposite the “Green Man,” and in the trunk of this last survival of the “good old days” there have been found, from time to time, quite a number of pistol bullets, said to have been fired by passing travellers at the trunk to frighten the highwaymen who might chance to be hiding behind it, under cover of the night. The tree itself has long borne the name of Turpin’s Oak, no less celebrated a person than the re-doubtable Dick himself having once frequented it. History fails to inform us who was the Brown after whom the Wells were named. I suggest they should be, and were in the first place “Brent Wells”; a source of the river Brent. Nor are those Wells—whatever they may have been—now in existence, while the name itself is only perpetuated by two or three old stuccoed villas beside the road.

Of the many names in the long and distinguished roll of road agents who figured here at some time or another in their meteoric careers, it is not possible to say much. There was the courageous and resourceful Captain Hind, the whimsically nicknamed “Old Mob,” burly Tom Cox, Neddy Wicks, and Claud Duval. Duval’s proper territory is, however, the Bath Road.

The palmy days of the highwayman were before 1797, the year of Pitt’s Act for Restricting Cash Payments. Before then, travellers carried nothing but gold, and as they required plenty of that commodity on their long and tedious journeys, the booty seized by these gentry was often considerable. Bank notes then came into favour, and were issued for as low a denomination as one pound. These would have been a perilous kind of plunder, and accordingly as they grew popular, so did the certainty of a good haul from coaches and post-chaises diminish, until panics came, banks failed, and paper money became for a time a discredited form of currency. By that time the roads were better patrolled, and coin was to be conjured from the pockets of the lieges with less safety than before. From these causes, and from the new law which made it penal to receive stolen goods as well as to steal them, we may date the decadence of a great industry, now utterly vanished from the roads.

XII

It is a straggling, broad-streeted village, with a breadth implying the originally small value of the land, and encroachments here and there upon the old building-line proving both the implication and the fact that, many years ago, there were those who, having the foreknowledge of a coming betterment, and more daring than their neighbours, grabbed while they might. Many inns, laundries, dairy-farms, great black-timbered barns, and a few rotting hoardings and unfinished houses make up the long street and tell alike of a vanished rusticity and of an arrested development.

Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here, his first stage out of London on the northern roads. They were placed here, rather than at Barnet, in order to avoid expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated down the road, near Greenhill Cross. Whetstone Gate gave travellers going north the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed Finchley Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society of Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.

The road across Finchley Common was in passive alliance with these gentry. When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly for sake of its now forgotten medicinal waters, he found the highway “torne, plowed, and digged up,” in consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long struggling teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had been a fairly good roadway. Progress was difficult, even in the best circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost impossible, the highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely at their leisure.

The road remained more or less in this condition up to the early years of the nineteenth century. This was partly owing to the mistaken local patriotism which had prevented the remodelling of it in 1754, when the rustics of Whetstone routed the surveyor and his labourers at the point of the pitchfork. Better counsels prevailed in the first decade of the new era, and the eight miles of highway under the control of the Whetstone and Highgate Turnpike Trust rose in 1810 to be considered as good as any in the kingdom. It then became possible, for the first time in its history, for the Barnet stage to leave for London and to reach its destination without the necessity of stopping on the way for tea. The Trustees were naturally pleased with their road, and so in 1823 received with some surprise, under the new Act for the improvement of the line of road from London to Holyhead, a demand for the reconstruction of the highway between Prickler’s Hill and the southern end of Barnet town. They pointed out how greatly superior their portion of the road was to others, but to no purpose. The Government admitted the excellence of the surface, but boggled at the severity of the gradient, and practically insisted on its being reduced.

The Trustees were dismayed. Telford and Macadam supplied rival plans, and both foreshadowed heavy expense. Telford’s idea was to slice off the top of Barnet Hill, and to run the road through a more or less deep cutting through the street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the houses and the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a cliff. Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by Macadam prevailed. It was for the partial filling up of the dip in the road between Prickler’s Hill and the excessively steep entrance into the town, an entrance even now by no means easily graded. What it must originally have been may readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked road to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where the old roadside houses still stand, among them the “Old Red Lion,” on the site of the inn where Pepys stayed. The end one of a row of ten or twelve cottages, at the corner of May’s Lane, was once a toll-house.

The work of making the new road, begun in 1823, was not completed until four years later, at a cost of £17,000. A large portion of this heavy sum went in compensation to the Sons of the Clergy Corporation, for land taken. The cost of these improvements came eventually, of course, out of the pockets of travellers along the road. On this Trust they were mulcted severely, for the Trustees, finding the existing tolls to be utterly inadequate to their expenses, obtained powers in 1830 to increase them. They considered themselves hardly treated in being obliged to undertake such costly works on the eve of the London and Birmingham Railway being constructed—a railway which would have the effect of withdrawing traffic from the road, and reducing receipts at the toll-gates to a minimum; but the end, although not far off, was not yet, and on the 3rd of July they succeeded in letting the tolls by auction for one year at the handsome sum of £7,530. Accordingly they commenced to pay off their debts, and succeeded in liquidating the whole of them by the beginning of 1842, notwithstanding two successive reductions of tolls in 1835 and 1841.

It was in 1833 that the London and Birmingham Railway obtained its Act, and it was opened throughout on September 7, 1838, the first of the railways which were to contribute to the ruin of Barnet’s great coaching and posting trade. The annual takings at Whetstone Gate immediately fell to £1,300, but it lingered on until the Trust expired, November 1, 1863.

It is interesting, as showing the growth of road traffic, to compare the figures still available, giving the annual sums at which the tolls at this gate were let in the old days. Thus, in Queen Elizabeth’s time, they were farmed at £40 per annum, and in 1794 they fetched only £150. But few vehicles passed then. Forty years later, no fewer than ninety coaches swept through Whetstone Gate every twenty-four hours!

XIII

Barnet, or Chipping Barnet, or High Barnet, as it is variously called, stands on the summit of a steep and high ridge running east and west. On the east the height of Muswell Hill, now suburban and crowned conspicuously with that unfortunate place of entertainment, the Alexandra Palace, is prominent; and on the west are Totteridge and the range of hills stretching away to Elstree. Other Barnets, old and new, are plentiful: East and Friern Barnet, and the modern suburb of New Barnet. Chipping Barnet derives the first part of its name from its ancient chepe, or weekly market, granted by Henry the Second, and its more common prefix of “High,” from its situation on the ridge just mentioned.

Barnet was, to many coaching proprietors, the first stage out of London, and the town prospered exceedingly on the coaching and posting traffic of those two great thoroughfares—the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road. When the Stamford “Regent,” the York “Highflyer,” and the early morning coaches for Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool arrived, the passengers, who had not found time for breakfast before starting, were generally very sharp-set indeed, and the viands already prepared and waiting in the cosy rooms of the old hostelries, disappeared before their onslaught “in less than no time.” The battle of Barnet was fought over again every morning, but they were not men-at-arms who contended together, nor was the subject of their contention the Crown of England. They were just famished travellers who struggled to get something to eat and drink before the guard made his appearance at the door, with the fateful cry, “Time’s up, gentlemen; take your seats please.” When the horn sounded in the yard, desperate men would rush forth with hands full of food, and finish their repasts as best they might on the coach.

The two principal inns were the “Red Lion” and the “Green Man.” It was, and is now in some degree, a town of inns, but these were the headquarters of the two great political parties. Neither was a “coaching” inn, for they despised trafficking with ordinary travellers, and devoted themselves wholly to the posting business. The “Red Lion” was originally the “Antelope.” Standing in the most favourable position for intercepting the stream of post-chaises from London, it generally secured the pick of business going that way, unless indeed the political bias of gentlemen going down into the country forbade them to hire post-horses at a Tory house. In that case, they went to the “Green Man,” further on, which was Whig. And perhaps, in sacrificing to politics, they got inferior horses! The “Green Man” placed in midst of the town, was in receipt of the up traffic, and was the largest establishment, keeping twenty-six pairs of horses and eleven postboys, against the eighteen pairs and eight postboys of the “Red Lion”; and it is recorded that between May 9th and 11th, when, on May 10th, 1808, two celebrated prizefighters, Gully and Gregson, fought at Beechwood Park, Sir John Sebright’s place down the road, near Flamstead, no fewer than one hundred and eighty-seven pairs were changed. Those three days formed a record time for the “Green Man,” according to these figures:—

The “boys” of the “Green Man” wore blue jackets; those of the “Red Lion,” yellow jackets and black hats.

An inn called the “Green Man” stands on the site of that busy house, but it is of more recent date than the old Whig headquarters. It may be seen at the fork of roads where the “new” road to St. Albans, driven through the yard of the old “Green Man” in 1826, branches off.

Thus the “Red Lion” remains, long after the eclipse of its rival. Its frontage is impressive by size rather than beauty. With a range of fifteen windows in line, and its fiercely-whiskered red lion balancing himself at the end of a prodigiously long wrought-iron sign, it is eloquent of the old days. The lion turns his head north, gazing away from the direction in which his chief customers came.

But this white-stuccoed frontage does not hide anything of antiquity, for this is not that original “Red Lion” to which Samuel Pepys resorted. The house he refers to in his diary is the “Old Red Lion”; down the hill, at the approach to Barnet. There he “lay” in 1667. “August 11th, Lord’s Day,” he writes: “Up by four o’clock . . . and got to the wells at Barnet by seven o’clock, and there found many people a-drinking.” After “drinking three glasses and the women nothing,” the party sojourned “to the Red Lion, where we ’light and went up into the great room, and there drank, and ate some of the best cheesecakes that ever I ate in my life.”

The keenness of the innkeepers who let post-horses during the last few years of the coaching age is scarcely credible. It was a fierce competition. The landlord of the “Red Lion” at Barnet thought nothing of forcibly taking out the post-horses from any private carriage passing his house, and putting in a pair of his own, to do the next stage to St. Albans. This, too, free of charge, in order to prevent the business going to the hated rival. Mine host of that hotel also had his little ways of drawing custom, and gave a glass of sherry and a sandwich, gratis, to the travellers changing there. But things did not end here. The landlord of the “Red Lion,” finding, perhaps, that the sherry and sandwich at the “Green Man” was more attractive than his method, engaged a gang of bruisers to pounce upon passing chaises, and even to haul them out of his rival’s stable-yard. Evidently a man of wrath, this licensed victualler! After several contests of this kind, the authorities interfered. The combatants were bound over to keep the peace, the punching of conks and bread-baskets, and the tapping of claret ceased, and people travelling down the road were actually allowed to decide for themselves which house they would patronise!

XIV

From Barnet the road runs across Hadley Green, a broad and picturesque expanse, cursed nowadays with the ubiquitous golfer. Here, where the road divides—the Great North Road to the right and the old Holyhead Road to the left—stands the obelisk known as Hadley Highstone, which serves both as a milestone and as a memorial of the great battle of Barnet, fought here on that cold and miserable Easter Day, April 14, 1471, when Edward the Fourth utterly defeated the Lancastrians under the Earl of Warwick, the “King Maker.” Warwick fell, and the Red Rose was finally crushed. Hadley Green was then a portion of a wide stretch of unenclosed country known as Gladsmoor Heath, extending up to Monken Hadley church, away on the right. The obelisk was erected by Sir Jeremy Sambrooke in 1740 on the spot where Warwick is said to have been slain. There is, however, another spot which aspires to the honour, at Rabley Park, near South Mimms. This also has its monumental pillar, but without inscription. Among the guileless youth of the neighbourhood it is said to mark “the place where a soldier was knocked down,” which is a commonplace way of stating the fact. But who knocked him down, or why, or when, is beyond them when questioned.

Past the lodge gates of Wrotham Park and by Ganwick Corner, where stands the “Duke of York” inn with its bust of that wonderful strategist. He is looking enquiringly south, from his alcove over the front door, as though wondering what has become of all the post-chaises and coaches of old. He is that great commander who managed, according to the well-known rhyme, to march his ten thousand men to the top of a hill and then down again—but he never otherwise distinguished himself—except by the magnitude of his debts.

Potter’s Bar marks where the counties of Middlesex and Hertford join. It is not a place of delirious delights, consisting of stuccoed villas fondly supposed to be Italian, and unfinished roads, and streets in a state of suspended animation. Until 1897, when it was pulled down, an old toll-house, the last in a long succession of toll-houses and toll-bars which had stood here from the earliest times and had given Potter’s Bar its name, occupied the fork of the roads at the north end of the village, commanding the high-road and the road on the right to Northaw.

Hatfield village touches the extremity of wretchedness, just as Hatfield House marks the apogee of late feudal splendour. And yet, amid its tumbledown hovels there are quaintly beautiful old-gabled cottages with bowed and broken-backed red-tiled roofs, delightful to the artistic eye, if from the builder’s and decorator’s point of view sadly out of repair. Motor repair-shops and garages, with their squalid advertisements, have helped to ruin Hatfield, and the railway does its share, running closely to the main road, and, with the station directly opposite the highly elaborate modern wrought-iron gates that lead to Hatfield House, detracting not a little from that state of dignified seclusion by which, as we have just seen, a former Marquis of Salisbury set such store. Let us hope his pale ghost does not revisit his old home. If it does, it must be sorely vexed.

But at any rate, that Marquis who was one of Queen Victoria’s Prime Ministers, sits there in bronze portrait-effigy. He gazes mournfully, directly at the railway booking-office, as one who has long been waiting, without hope, for a train. It is a fine statue, by Sir George Frampton, R.A., and bears the inscription:—

ROBERT ARTHUR TALBOT,
Marquess of Salisbury, K.G., G.C.V.O.,
Three times Prime Minister of
Great Britain and Ireland,
1830–1903.
Erected to his memory by his Hertfordshire friends
and neighbours in recognition of a great life devoted
to the welfare of his country.

Hatfield House, that great historical museum and ancient repository of State secrets, is little seen from the village, nor have we, as wayfarers along the road, much to do with it. It is by the parish church, its characteristic Hertfordshire extinguisher spire so prominent above the tumbled roofs of Hatfield, that we may glimpse the older parts of the house. In that church lies its builder, the great Robert Cecil, his effigy, with the Lord Treasurer’s wand of office, recumbent on a slab uplifted by statues emblematic of Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, and Temperance, and a skeleton below, to show that even Lord Treasurers, possessed though they be of all the virtues, are mortal, like less exalted and less virtuous men.

The house that he built seems sadly out of repair. The history of it is romantic to a degree. Originally the palace of the Bishops of Ely, whose delicate constitutions could not stand the fen-land vapours which enwrapped the neighbourhood of their glorious Cathedral (but perhaps were not harmful to the less dignified clergy!), it remained in their possession until it was coveted by Henry the Eighth, who gave some land at Ely in exchange. So the bishops had, doubtless with an ill grace, to go back to that fertile breeding-ground of agues and rheumatism, and one can well imagine the resident inferior clergy, between their aches and pains, chuckling secretly about this piece of poetic justice.

And so in Royal possession the old palace continued until James the First in his turn exchanged it for the estate of Sir Robert Cecil at Theobalds. Previously it had been the home—the prison, rather of the Princess Elizabeth during her sister Mary’s reign. The oak is still shown in the park under which she was sitting when the news of Mary’s death and the end, consequently, of the surveillance to which she was subjected, was brought her, November 17, 1588. (But is tradition truthful here? Would she have been sitting under an oak in November?) “It is the Lord’s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes,” she exclaimed, quoting from the Psalms. Three days later she held her first council in the old palace, and then on the 23rd set out for London.

There are relics of the great queen at Hatfield House: a pair of her stockings and the garden hat she was wearing when the great news came to her. But the house is nearly all of a later date, for when Sir Robert Cecil obtained it in exchange for Theobalds, he pulled down the greater part of the old palace and built the present striking Jacobean building, magnificent and impressive, and perhaps not the less impressive for being also somewhat gloomy. This is no place to recount the glories of its picture-galleries and its noble state-rooms, or of the long line of the exalted and the great who have been entertained here. Moreover, the great are not uncommonly the dullest of dull dogs. It is rather with those of less estate, and with travellers, that in these pages we shall find our account. Pepys, for instance, whom we need not object to call the natural man (for does not Scripture tell us that the human heart in a natural state is “desperately wicked”? and Samuel was no Puritan), who was here lusting to steal somebody’s dog, as he acknowledged in that very outspoken Diary of his:—“Would fain have stolen a pretty dog that followed me, but could not, which troubled me.”

There was a tragical happening at Hatfield, November 27, 1835, when the house was greatly injured by fire, and the old and eccentric Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury burnt to death, in her eighty-fifth year. The pious declared it to be a “judgment” for her playing cards on Sunday; but what a number of conflagrations we should have if that were true and Providence consistent in its vengeance!

XV

Leaving Hatfield and its memories behind, we come, past the tree-shaded hamlet of Stanborough, to the long gradual rise of Digswell Hill, beautifully engineered over the uplands rising from the marshy banks of the little river Lea. Off to the left, at the foot of the hill, goes the old road at a wide tangent, and with a decidedly abrupt plunge down into the water-meadows, crossing the Lea by Lemsford Mills, and rejoining the newer road on an equally abrupt and difficult rise half-way up the hill, by the wall of Brockett Hall Park. It was here that Brickwall turnpike gate was situated in the old days. The brick wall of the park that gave the gate its name is still there and a very old, substantial, and beautifully lichened red-brick wall it is—but the gate and the toll-board and the toll-house have all vanished. Digswell Hill is beautiful, and so is Ayot Green, at the summit, with its giant trees and humble cottages stretching away on the left to the Ayot villages. Not so the “Red Lion” close by. More beautiful still—and steeper—is the descent into Welwyn, beneath over-arching trees and rugged banks, down from which secluded rustic summer-houses look upon the traffic of the highway.

Welwyn lies in a deep hollow on the little river—or, more correctly speaking, the streamlet—of the Mimram. Street and houses face you alarmingly as you descend the steep hillside, wondering (if you cycle) if the sharp corner can safely be rounded, or if you must needs dash through door or window of the “White Hart,” once one of the two coaching inns of the village.

The “White Hart” at Welwyn was kept in the “twenties” by “old Barker,” who horsed the Stamford “Regent” a stage on the road, and was, in the language of the coachmen, a “three-cornered old beggar.” That is to say, he kept a tight hand over the doings of coachmen and guards, did not approve of “shouldering,” and objected to the coachmen giving lessons to gentlemen coachmen, or allowing amateurs to “take the ribbons.” From the passengers’ point of view this was entirely admirable of “old Barker,” for many an inoffensive traveller’s life had been jeopardised by the driving of unqualified persons. Colonel Birch Reynardson tells a story of him and of Tom Hennesy, the best known of the “Regent” coachmen—one who could whistle louder, hit a horse harder, and tell a bigger lie than any of his contemporaries. Hennesy had resigned the reins to him one day between London and Hatfield, but when they neared Welwyn, the accomplished Tom thought he had better resume them. “It would never do for old Barker to see you driving,” said he. The words were scarcely out of his mouth before the “three-cornered old beggar” himself appeared, walking up the hill, with the double object of taking a constitutional and of seeing if any “shouldering” was going on.

“Don’t look as if you seed him,” said Tom. “We’ll make the best of it we can.”

Down they went to the inn door, where the fresh team was standing. By the time the horses had been got out of the coach, old Barker, who had turned back, looking anything but pleasant, was upon them.

“Good morning, Mr. Barker, sir,” said Tom, with all the impudence he could command. “Did you ever see a young gentleman take a coach steadier down a hill? ’Pon my word, sir, he could not have done it better. He’s a pupil of mine, sir, and I’m blessed if he did not do it capital; don’t you think he did, sir, for you seed him?” “Hum,” said old Barker; “you know it’s all against the laws. Supposing anything happened, what then?” “Well, sir, I did not expect anything would happen, with such horses as these of yours; there’s no better four horses, sir, betwixt London and Stamford; and as for those wheelers, why, they’ll hold anything.” This, of course, was pouring balm into old Barker’s wounds, which seemed to heal pretty quickly, and he put on a pleasanter face, and said, “Well, Hennesy, you know I don’t like ‘gentlemen coachmen,’ and, above all things, very young ones. Don’t you do it again.”

Was Hennesy grateful? Not at all; for, when they had driven away, he said, “Well, he was wonderful civil for him,” and added that if he could only catch him lying drunk in the road, he would run over his neck and kill him, “blessed if he wouldn’t!”

This bold and independent fellow, like many another coachman, came down in the world when railways drove the coaches off the main roads, and was reduced to driving a pair-horse coach between Cambridge and Huntingdon.

More picturesque than the “White Hart” is the “Wellington,” which composes so finely with the red-brick tower of the church, at the further end of the village street, where the road abruptly forks. It is a street of all kinds and sizes of houses, mostly old and pleasingly grouped.

But Welwyn has other claims upon the tourist. It was the home for many years of Young, author of the once-popular Night Thoughts. Who reads that sombre work now? He was rector here from 1730 until 1765, when he died, but lives as a warning to those who inevitably identify an author with his books. His work, The Complaint, or, Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, is dour reading, but he was so little of a sombre man that we find him not infrequently in the company of, and a fellow spirit among, the convivial men of his time. This was only a product of his “sensibility,” that curious quality peculiar to the eighteenth century, and did not necessarily prove him a weeping philosopher. He had, indeed, a mental agility which could with ease fly from the most depressing disquisitions on the silent tomb, to the proper compounding of a stiff jorum of punch. Young, on his appointment to Welwyn, married Lady Elizabeth (“Betty”) Lee, daughter of the Earl of Lichfield. He found the rectory too small (or perhaps not good enough for her ladyship), and so purchased a more imposing house called the “Guessons”—anciently the “Guest House” of some abbey. With it he bought land, and planted the lime-tree avenue which still remains a memorial of him. There is a votive urn here, erected by Mr. Johnes-Knight, a succeeding rector; but probably the most enduring memorial of Young is the very first line of the Night Thoughts, the fine expression:—

“Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.”

No one reads Young nowadays, and so every one who sees this, one of the most hackneyed of quotations, ascribes it to Shakespeare. Alas, poor Young!

Young erected a sundial in his garden here, with the motto, “Eheu, fugaces!” “Alas, how fleeting!” It was not long before some midnight robbers came, and, carrying it off, justified the inscription. Nowadays, besides the avenue and the votive urn, all that remains to tell of him is the tablet to his memory on the south wall of the aisle.

Knebworth Park, with mansion and an ancient parish church full of monuments to Strodes, Robinsons and Lyttons, is just off to the left. There is no Lytton blood in the Earls “of” Lytton, who are not of Litton, near Tideswell, in Derbyshire, whence came the now extinct Lytton family. The whole assumption is romantic rather than warranted by facts.

Knebworth is a place of much combined beauty and historic interest, together with a great deal of vulgar and uninteresting sham. It has been described as “a sham-old house, with a sham lake, sham heraldic monsters, and sham-ancient portraits.” Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton—“Bulwig,” as someone, to his intense annoyance, called him—was intensely fond of Gothic architecture and ornamentation; fond of it in an undiscriminating, Early Victorian, uninstructed way, and he stuck his house of Knebworth all over with gimcrackery that he fondly thought to be mediæval. Crockets, tourelles, pinnacles and grotesque gargoyles were added in wholesale fashion, and in a very carpenterish way. One might almost say they were wafered on. They were not carved out of stone, but moulded cheaply in plaster, and in his son’s time were always falling. As they fell, they were relegated to the nearest dustheap, and their places remained vacant. A visitor to the second Lord Lytton tells, apropos of these things, how he was walking on the terrace with his host, when the gardener came up and said, “If you please, my lord, another of them bloody monkeys has fallen down in the night.” It was, of course, one more of “Bulwig’s” quasi-Gothic abominations come to its doom.

The Earls Lytton are neither baronial Bulwers nor ancient lordly Lyttons. Their real name is the very much more plebian one of Wiggett. So far back as 1756, William Wiggett assumed the name of Bulwer on his marriage with a Sarah of that ilk. His youngest son, the novelist, the child of another wife, who had been an Elizabeth Warburton, added the name of Lytton to his own on succeeding to his mother’s property of Knebworth.

But that does not at once bring us to the Lytton connection. For that, we must quote the late Augustus J. C. Hare, who was an adept at relationships to the remotest degree. He had hundreds of cousins of his own, and knew who was everybody else’s twentieth or thirtieth cousin. He tells us that this Elizabeth Warburton’s very remote connection with the real Lyttons lay in the fact that “her grandfather, John Robinson, was cousin (maternally) to Lytton Strode, who was great-nephew of a Sir William Lytton, who died childless in 1704.” It will be allowed that the connection is remote; practically indeed, non-existent.

Nor is the name of Bulwer as distinguished as the novelist wished it to appear. He sought to range it with Bölver, one of the war-titles of the Norse god, Odin; but it really derived from some plebian cattle-driver, or Bullward.

The road rises steeply out of Welwyn, in the direction of Stevenage. Here some of the coaches had a narrow escape from destruction at the hands of unknown miscreants, ancestors of the criminal lunatics who place obstacles upon the railways in our times. Our murderous larrikins had their counterparts in the old days, in those who placed gates across the roads, so that the coaches should run into them in the darkness. An incident of this kind happened here on the night of June 5, 1805, when two gates were found set up in the main road, and another at Welwyn Green. Fortunately, no accident resulted, and the ruffians, who doubtless were waiting the result of their work, must have gone home disappointed.

From the beautiful expanse of gorsy and wooded hillside common above the village may be glimpsed the great red-brick viaduct of Welwyn, carrying the main line of the Great Northern Railway across the wide and deep valley of the Mimram, an insignificant stream for such a channel. Woolmer Green and Broadwater, between this point and Stevenage, are modern and uninteresting hamlets, created out of nothingness by the speculative builder and the handy situation of Knebworth station, beside the road, which now begins to give another example of its flatness.

Leisurely wayfarers will notice the old half-timbered cottage at the entrance to the churchyard. On its side wall are hung two stout long poles with formidable hooks attached. These are old fire-appliances, used in the days of thatched roofs, for pulling off the whole of the blazing thatch. Travellers, leisured or otherwise, will scarce be able to miss seeing the great and offensive boards hereabouts, advertising a new suburban or “Garden Suburb” settlement in course of building away to the right, since 1920; blessed and boomed by Lord Northcliffe, and apparently to be given the name of “Daily Mail.” Horrible!

The entrance to Stevenage is signalised by a group of new and commonplace cottages elbowing the famous Six Hills, a series of sepulchral barrows of prehistoric date, beside the highway. These six grassy mounds might not unreasonably be passed unthinkingly by the uninstructed, or taken for grass-grown heaps of refuse. Centuries of wear and weather have had their effect, and they do not look very monumental now; but they were once remarkable enough to give the place its name, Stevenage deriving from the Saxon “stigenhaght,” or “hills by the highway.”

To coachmen, who were adepts in the art of what the slangy call “spoofing,” and were always ready—in earlier slang phrase—to “take a rise out of” strangers, the Six Hills afforded an excellent opportunity of practising a diluted form of wit, and often brought them a glass of brandy or rum-and-milk at the next pull-up, in payment of the bets they would make with the most innocent-looking passenger, that he could not tell which two of the hills were furthest apart. They are, as nearly as possible, equi-distant; but strangers would select one couple or another, according to their fancy; whereupon the coachman would triumphantly point out that the first and the last were, as a matter of fact, the most widely divided. This perhaps does not exhibit coaching wit in a strikingly robust light; but a very weak kind of jocularity served to pass the weary hours of travel in our grandfathers’ days.

XVI

Stevenage is the first of the many wide-streeted towns and villages whose emptiness proclaims the something missing that was provided for by all this vast roominess. Its one street, lining the old road, was originally laid out so spaciously for the purpose of affording room for the traffic for which, once upon a time, it was not too spacious. It is all too wide now that the intercourse of two nations proceeds by rail, and many of the old inns that once did so famous a trade are converted into private residences. Prominent among them was the “Swan,” which may now be sought in the large red-brick house on the right-hand side of the forking roads, as the town is left for Baldock. It may readily be identified by its archway, which formerly led to the spacious stables.

The “Swan” at Stevenage, kept in pre-railway days by a postmaster named Cass, was one of those exclusive houses which, like the “Red Lion” and the “Green Man” at Barnet, did not condescend to the ordinary coach-traveller. Cass kept post-horses only, and his customers ranged from princes and dukes down to baronets and wealthy knights.

“Posting in all its branches,” as the postmasters used to say in the announcements outside their establishments, was at the beginning of the nineteenth century essentially aristocratic; but it had many changes, from its beginning, about the dawn of the seventeenth century, to its end, before the middle of the nineteenth. Originally “posting” meant the hire of horses only, and the traveller rode horseback himself, accompanied perhaps by a mounted guide. Thus Fynes Morison, in his Itinerary, published in 1617, speaks of the early days of posting:—“In England, towards the south, and in the west parts, and from London to Barwick upon the confines of Scotland, post-horses are established at every ten miles or thereabouts, which they ride a false gallop after some ten miles an hour sometimes, and that makes their hire the greater; for with a commission from the chief postmaster or chiefe lords of the councell (given either upon publike businesse, or at least pretence thereof), a passenger shall pay twopence halfpenny each mile for his horse, and as much for his guide’s horse; but one guide will serve the whole company, though many ride together, who may easily bring back the horses, driving them before him, who ‘know the waye as well as a beggar knowes his dishe.’ This extraordinary charge of horses’ hire may well be recompensed with the speede of the journey, whereby greater expences in the innes are avoided; all the difficultie is, to have a body able to endure the toyle. For these horses the passenger is at no charge to give them meat onely at the ten miles, and the boy that carries them backe will expect some few pence in gift.”

When carriages were introduced, the very great personages of the realm “progressed” in them, and had their love of display gratified thereby. But what they gained in pomp they lost in speed, for at the best of it they rarely travelled at a greater pace than seven miles an hour.

An odd institution with the noble and the wealthy families of that bygone age was the “running footman.” It has sometimes been supposed that these deer-footed servitors were for town service, perhaps because “old Q,” the profligate Marquis of Queensberry, who was the last to keep one, lived in town during his last years and necessarily kept his lackey running London streets. The unique sign of the “running footman,” with the portrait of such an one in costume, is also in London, and may be seen any day on a little public-house, still chiefly frequented by men-servants, in Charles Street, Berkeley Square. He wears a uniform consisting of blue coat and breeches, trimmed with gold lace. Round his waist is a red sash, on his head a cap with a nodding plume, and in his hand the long staff carried by all his tribe. This is an outfit somewhat different from that usually worn, for we are told that they wore no breeches, but a short silk petticoat kept down by a deep gold fringe.

The function of a running footman was to run ahead of his employer’s carriage, to point out the proper turnings to take, or to arrange for his reception at the inns; but as time went on and accommodation increased, he was not of any practical use, and became simply a kind of unnecessary fore-runner, who by his appearance advertised the coming of my lord and upheld my lord’s dignity. It is said that these ministers to senseless pomp and vanity usually ran at the rate of seven miles an hour, and frequently did sixty miles a day. The long and highly ornamented staff they carried had a hollow silver ball at the end containing white wine. Unscrewing it, the footman could refresh himself. More white wine, mixed with eggs, was given him at the end of his journey, and he must have needed it! Over the bad and hilly roads of a hundred and fifty years ago, the running footman could readily keep ahead of a carriage; on the flat the horses, of course, had the advantage.

Post-chaises were unknown in England until after the middle of the eighteenth century had come and gone. Thus we find Horace Walpole and Gray, taking the “grand tour” together in 1739, astonished to laughter at the post-chaises which conveyed them from Boulogne towards Paris. This French vehicle, the father of all post-chaises, was two-wheeled, and not very unlike our present hansom-cab, the door being in front and the body hung in much the same way, only a little more forward from the wheels. The French chaise de-poste was invented in 1664, and the first used in England were of this type; but they proved unsuitable for use in this country, and English carriage-builders at length evolved the well-known post-chaise, which went out only with the coaching age. But it was long before it began to supplant the post-horses and the feminine pillion.

Every one is familiar with the appearance of the old post-chaise, which, according to the painters and the print-sellers, appears to have been used principally for the purpose of spiriting love-lorn couples with the speed of the wind away from all restrictions of home and the Court of Chancery. A post-chaise was (so it seems nowadays) a rather cumbrous affair, four-wheeled, high, and insecurely hung, with a glass front and a seat to hold three, facing the horses. The original designers evidently had no prophetic visions as to this especial popularity of post-chaises with errant lovers, nor did they ponder the proverb, “Two’s company, three’s none,” else they would have restricted their accommodation to two, or have enlarged it to four.

It was an expensive as well as a pleasant method of travelling, costing as it did at least a shilling a mile, and, in times when forage was dear, one shilling and threepence. The usual rates were chaise, nine-pence a mile, pair of post-horses, sixpence; four horses and chaise, supposing you desired to travel speedily—say at twelve miles an hour—one-and-ninepence. But these costs and charges did not frank the traveller through. The post-boy’s tip was as inevitable as night and morning. Likewise there were the “gates” to pay every now and again. One shudders to contemplate the total cost of posting from London to Edinburgh, even with only the ordinary equipment of two horses. There were thirty post-stages between the two capitals, according to the books published for the use of travellers a hundred years ago. Those books were very necessary to any one who did not desire to be charged for perhaps a mile more on each stage than it really measured, which was one of those artful postmasters’ little ways. Here is a list of these stages with the measurements, to which travellers drew the attention of those postmasters who commonly endeavoured to overcharge:—

Nearly four hundred miles by these measurements. This, at a shilling a mile for the posting, gives £20; but, including the postboys’ tips, “gates,” and expenses at the inns on the road, the journey could not have been done in this way under £30, at the most modest calculation. This list of post-stages was one drawn up for distances chiefly between the towns, but nothing is more remarkable along the Great North Road than the number of old posting-houses which still exist (although of course their business is gone) in wild and lonely spots, far removed from either town or village.

Another “branch” of posting was the horsing alone, by which a private carriage could be taken to or from town by hiring posters at every stage. This was a favourite practice with the gentry of the shires, who thus had all the éclat of travelling in private state, without the expense and trouble of providing their own horses. It is probably of this method that De Quincey speaks in the following passage:—

“In my childhood,” says he, “standing with one or two of my brothers and sisters at the front window of my mother’s carriage, I remember one unvarying set of images before us. The postillion (for so were all carriages then driven) was employed, not by fits and starts, but always and eternally, in quartering, i.e. in crossing from side to side, according to the casualties of the ground. Before you stretched a wintry length of lane, with ruts deep enough to fracture the leg of a horse, filled to the brim with standing pools of rain-water; and the collateral chambers of these ruts kept from becoming confluent by thin ridges, such as the Romans called lirae, to maintain the footing upon which lirae, so as not to swerve (or as the Romans would say, delirare), was a trial of some skill, both for the horses and their postillion. It was, indeed, next to impossible for any horse, on such a narrow crust of separation, not to grow delirious in the Roman metaphor; and the nervous anxiety which haunted me when a child was much fed by this image so often before my eyes, and the sympathy with which I followed the motion of the docile creatures’ legs. Go to sleep at the beginning of a stage, and the last thing you saw—wake up, and the first thing you saw—was the line of wintry pools, the poor off-horse planting his steps with care, and the cautious postillion gently applying his spur whilst manoeuvring across the system of grooves with some sort of science that looked like a gipsy’s palmistry—so equally unintelligible to me were his motions in what he sought and in what he avoided.”

XVII

Before we leave Stevenage, we must pay a visit to the “Old Castle” inn, in whose stable the body of the eccentric Henry Trigg is deposited, in a coffin amid the rafters, plain for all to see; somewhat dilapidated and battered in the lapse of two centuries, and with a patch of tin over the hole cut in it by some riotous blades long ago, but doubtless still containing his bones. His Will sufficiently explains the circumstances.

IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN.

I, Henry Trigg, of Stevenage, in the County of Hertford, Grocer, being very infirm and weak in body, but of perfect sound mind and memory, God be praised for it, calling into mind the mortality of my body, do now make and ordain this my last Will and Testament, in writing, hereafter following: that is to say:—Principally I recommend my soul into the merciful hands of Almighty God that first gave me it, assuredly believing and only expecting free pardon and forgiveness of all my sins, and eternal life in and through the only merits, death, and passion of Jesus Christ my Saviour; and as to my body I commit it to the West end of my Hovel, to be decently laid there upon a floor erected by my Executor, upon the purlin, for the same purpose; nothing doubting but at the general Resurrection I shall receive the same again by the mighty power of God; and as for and concerning such worldly substance as it hath pleased God to bless me with in this world, I do devise and dispose of the same in manner and form here following.

Imprimis. I give and devise unto my loving brother Thomas Trigg, of Letchworth, in the County of Hertford, Clerk, and to his Heirs and Assigns for ever, all those my Freehold Lands lying dispersedly in the several common fields in the parish of Stevenage aforesaid, and also all my Copyhold Lands, upon condition that he shall lay my body upon the place before mentioned; and also all that Messuage, Cottage, or Tenement at Redcoats Green in the Parish of Much Wymondly, together with those Nine Acres of Land (more or less) purchased of William Hale and Thomas Hale, Jun.; and also my Cottage, Orchard, and barn, with four acres of Land (more or less) belonging, lying, and being in the Parish of Little Wymondly, and now in the possession of Samuel Kitchener, labourer; and all my Cottages, Messuages, or Tenements situate and being in Stevenage, aforesaid: or, upon condition that he shall pay my brother, George Trigg, the sum of Ten Pounds per annum for life: but if my brother shall neglect or refuse to lay my body where I desire it should be laid, then, upon that condition, I will and bequeath all that which I have already bequeathed to my brother Thomas Trigg, unto my brother George Trigg, and to his heirs for ever; and if my brother George Trigg should refuse to lay my body under my Hovel, then what I have bequeathed unto him, as all my Lands and Tenements, I lastly bequeath them unto my nephew William Trigg and his heirs for ever, upon his seeing that my body is decently laid up there as aforesaid.

Item. I give and bequeath unto my nephew William Trigg, the sum of Five Pounds, at the age of Thirty years; to his sister Sarah the sum of Twenty Pounds; to his sister Rose the sum of Twenty Pounds; and lastly to his sister Ann the sum of Twenty Pounds; all at the age of Thirty Years: to John Spencer, of London, Butcher, the sum of One Guinea; and to Solomon Spencer, of Stevenage, the sum of One Guinea, Three Years next after my decease; to my cousin Henry Kimpton, One Guinea, One Year next after my decease, and another Guinea Two Years after my decease; to William Waby, Five Shillings; and to Joseph Priest, Two Shillings and Sixpence, Two Years after my decease; to my tenant Robert Wright the sum of Five Shillings, Two years next after my decease; and to Ralph Lowd and John Reeves, One Shilling each, Two Years next after my decease.

Item. All the rest of my Goods and Chattels, and personal Estate, and Ready Money, I do hereby give and devise unto my brother Thomas Trigg, paying my debts and laying my body where I would have it laid; whom I likewise make and ordain my full and sole Executor of this my last Will and Testament, or else to them before mentioned; ratifying and confirming this and no other to be my last Will and Testament, in witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this Twenty-eighth day of September, in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Twenty-four

Henry Trigg.

Read, signed, sealed, and declared by the said Henry Trigg, the Testator, to be his last Will and Testament, in the presence of us who have subscribed our names as witnesses hereto, in the presence of the said Testator.

John Hawkins, Sen.
John Hawkins, Jun.
× The mark of William Sexton.

Proved in the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon, the 15th day of October, 1724, by the Executor Thomas Trigg.

The inn-signs of Stevenage afford some exercise for the contemplative mind. As the town is approached from London, the sign of “Our Mutual Friend” appears, nearly opposite a domestic Gothic building of red and white brick, originally a home for decayed authors, founded by Charles Dickens and the first Lord Lytton. The decayed authors did not take kindly to the scheme. Perhaps they did not like being patronised by authors of better fortunes than their own. The institution was a failure, and the building is now put to other uses. No doubt the sign of “Our Mutual Friend” derives from those times when Dickens and Lytton foregathered here and at Knebworth. At quite the other end of the town appears the obviously new sign of the “Lord Kitchener,” almost opposite that of another military hero, the “Marquis of Granby.”

Passing through the little old-world village of Graveley, succeeded by the beautifully graded rise and fall of Lannock Hill, we come into the town of Baldock, with its great church prominent in front, and its empty streets running in puzzling directions. It was at Baldock that Charles the First, being conducted as a prisoner to London, was offered wine in one of the sacramental vessels by the vicar, Josias Byrd, and it was on the road outside the town, near where the old turnpike gate stood, that the Newcastle wagon, on its way to London, was plundered of £500 in coin by three mounted highwaymen, on a February morning in 1737.

Our old friend Mr. Samuel Pepys, journeying on August 6th, 1661, from Brampton, came into Baldock, and stayed the night, at some inn not specified. He says, “Took horse for London, and with much ado got to Baldwick. There lay, and had a good supper by myself. The landlady being a pretty woman, but I durst not take notice of her, her husband being there.”

Always some spoil-sport in the way!

Baldock, from its stunted extinguisher spire to its fine old brick houses and nodding plaster cottages, is characteristically Hertfordshire. Among other things of general interest, it has a row of almshouses, duly inscribed:—

“Theis Almes Howses are
the gieft of Mr. John Wynne
cittezen of London, Latelye
Deceased, who hath left a
Yeareley stipend to everey
poore of either howses to
the Worldes End. September
Anno Domini 1621.”

The worthy citizen reckoned without the Charity Commissioners, who may confidently be expected to propound a “scheme” some day long anterior to the final crash, by which his wishes will be entirely disregarded.

Away to the left of Baldock will be noticed a new town, and the factory chimneys of it. This is Letchworth, the “Garden City,” developed out of Letchworth, the little village of old. This “First Garden City,” founded in 1902, on a nominal capital of £300,000 actual £125,000, by the Garden City Association, itself founded in June, 1899, with a capital of about thirty shillings, represents a passionate quest of the ideal life on a 5 per cent. basis of profit. The problem of how to create an earthly paradise (plus industrial factories) was here to be tackled. The beginnings of such things are always the most charming; and Letchworth began ideally. But the factories and the five per cent. always have a way of overcoming ideals; and we shall see.

The stone outside Baldock, marking the thirty-ninth mile is milestone and upping-block as well.

Midway between Baldock and Biggleswade, at Topler’s Hill, the Bedfordshire border is crossed. We may perhaps be excused if we pass Topler’s Hill unwittingly, for the rises called “hills” on the Great North Road would generally pass unnoticed elsewhere. Biggleswade town and neighbourhood are interested wholly in cabbages and potatoes and other highly necessary, but essentially unromantic, vegetables. The surrounding country is in spring and summer one vast market-garden; at other times it is generally a lake of equal vastness, for the Ivel and the Ouse, that run so sluggishly through the flat lands, arise then in their might and submerge fields and roads for miles around.

As for Biggleswade itself, it is a town with an extraordinarily broad and empty market-place, a church with a spire of the Hertfordshire type, and two old coaching inns—the “White Swan” and the “Crown”—facing one another in an aggressive rivalry at a narrow outlet of the market-place. The “White Swan” was the inn at which the up “Regent” coach dined. It was kept at that time by a man named Crouch, “that long, sour old beggar,” in the words of Tom Hennesy. Here “the process of dining on a really cold day in winter,” to quote Colonel Birch Reynardson, “was carried on under no small amount of difficulty. Your hands were frozen, your feet were frozen, your very mouth felt frozen, and in fact you felt frozen all over. Sometimes, with all this cold, you were also wet through, your hat wet through, your coat wet through, the large wrapper that was meant to keep your neck warm and dry wet through, and, in fact, you were wet through yourself to your very bones. Only twenty minutes were allowed for dinner; and by the time you had got your hands warm enough to be able to untie your neck wrapper, and had got out of your great-coat, which, being wet, clung tenaciously to you, the time for feeding was half gone. By the time you had got one quarter of what you could have consumed, had your mouth been in eating trim and your hands warm enough to handle your knife and fork, the coachman would put his head in, and say: “Now, gentlemen, if you please; the coach is ready.” After this summons, having struggled into your wet greatcoat, bound your miserable wet wrapper round your miserable cold throat, having paid your two and sixpence for the dinner that you had the will, but not the time, to eat, with sixpence for the waiter, you wished the worthy Mr. Crouch good day, grudged him the half-crown he had pocketed for having dined so miserably, and again mounted your seat, to be rained and snowed upon, and almost frozen to death before you reached London.”

Leaving Biggleswade, the Ivel is crossed and Tingey’s Corner passed. Tingey’s Corner marks the junction of the old alternative route from Welwyn, by Hitchin to Lower Codicote, the route adopted by record-breaking cyclists. The hamlets of Lower Codicote and Beeston Green open up a view of Sandy, away to the right, with its range of yellow sand-hills running for some three miles parallel with the road, and seeming the more impressive by reason of the dead level on which they look. The canal-like, bare banks of the Ivel are passed again at Girtford, and the roadside cottages of Tempsford reached; the village and church lying off to the left, where the Ouse and the Ivel come to their sluggish confluence, and form a waterway which once afforded marauding Danes an excellent route from the coast up to Bedford. Even now the remains of a fortification they constructed to command this strategic point are visible, and bear the name of the “Dannicke”; that is to say, the “Danes’ work,” or perhaps the “Danes’ wick,” “wick” meaning “village.”

An infinitely later work—Tempsford turnpike-gate, to wit—has disappeared a great deal more effectively than those ancient entrenchments, and the way is clear and flat, not to say featureless, over the Ouse, past the outlying houses of Wyboston, and so into Little End, the most southerly limit of Eaton Socon.

XVIII

Past Tempsford some of the coaches, notably the Stamford “Regent,” turned off into the loop road by St. Neots and Huntingdon. In the winter time, or when the spring rains were falling, they did this at some risk, for the low-lying land by the river Ouse was often awash. Two old ladies were on one occasion given a terrible fright, the road being deeply flooded and the water coming into the coach, so that they had to stand on the seats. They quite thought they were going to be drowned, and perhaps they would have been had the “Regent” been driven by one unused to the road. Had the coachman driven into a ditch—as he might easily have done with the floods covering all the landmarks—it would have been “all up” with the “insides” for certain and perhaps for the “outsides” as well.

The most prudent coachmen in winter time kept to the main road, which lies somewhat higher, and passed through Eaton Socon. Once—to judge by its name—a place of importance, this is now only a long village of one straggling street. At some undetermined period the head of a “soke,” or separate legal jurisdiction, all memories of the dignity implied are gone, save only the empty title, which Dickens makes fun of by calling the village in Nicholas Nickleby “Eton Slocomb.” The “White Horse,” a picturesque roadside inn, may be looked upon with interest by those keen on identifying Dickens landmarks. In later days it became a favourite resort of the North Road Cycling Club, and witnessed the beginning and ending of many a road race in the “eighties” and early “nineties,” when such things were.

The story of the London to York cycling record is fitly to be told in this page. It is not so long a tale as that of the famous one from London to Brighton and back, but it stands for greater efforts and for a vast amount of pluck and endurance. There have been those unsportsmanlike souls who, not finding sport an end in itself, have questioned the use of record making and breaking. But it has had its use, and even from this point of view has amply justified itself, for the continually increasing speed required out of cycles for these purposes has led to the perfecting of them within what is, after all, a comparatively short time; so that the sporting clubman has, after all, while strictly occupied within the range of his own ambitions, contributed to the general good by bringing about the manufacture of a vehicle which, used by many hundreds of thousands of people who never raced in their lives, and are probably incapable of a speed of more than twelve miles an hour, has brought the roads and lanes of the country within the knowledge of many to whom rural life was something new and strange.

The first recorded cycle ride to York in which speed was an object was that of C. Wheaton, September 1872. That pioneer took two days to perform the journey, making Stamford, a distance of eighty-nine miles, the end of his first day’s adventure, in 15½ hours, and on the second day reaching York in a further 26 hours 40 minutes: total, 42 hours 10 minutes. This, with the front-driving low cycle of those days, was an achievement. Wooden wheels and iron tyres did not conduce to either speed or ease, and that now historic figure, painfully crawling (as we should now think his progress) to York is heroic.

Perhaps this tale of hardship was calculated to deter others from trying their mettle, but at any rate it was not until July 9, 1874, that two others, Ian Keith-Falconer and J. H. Stanley Thorpe, followed, and they failed in the effort. After another two years had almost passed, on June 5, 1876, Thorpe made another attempt. Leaving Highgate Archway at 11.10 P.M., he arrived the next day at York at 9.40 P.M. = 22 hours 30 minutes; chiefly, of course, by favour of that then “improved” form of bicycle, the tall “ordinary.”

Thirteen years passed before this record was lowered, and the one that replaced it was not a remarkable performance, considering the further great improvements in cycles. This ride, in the summer of 1889, performed on a solid-tyred “safety,” took 21 hours 10 minutes, and was beaten in the same year by six minutes by H. R. Pope, riding a tricycle; himself displaced, shortly after, by F. T. Bidlake, also mounted on a tricycle, who did the 197 miles in 18 hours 28 minutes.

In 1890, and for several years following, records came and went with increasing rapidity. In 1890 J. M. James put the safety record at 16 hours 52 minutes, and T. A. Edge soon followed, reducing it to 14 hours 33 minutes, James regaining the record again in 1891 by a bare thirteen minutes. In the following year, S. F. Edge, on a front-driving safety, made a splendid record of 12 hours 49 minutes, but had the mortification to see it beaten the next day, June 27, by F. W. Shorland, in 39 minutes less. In this year there were several rival tricycle records: that of W. J. A. Butterfield, of 18 hours 9 minutes being lowered by F. T. Bidlake by nearly three hours, and beaten again, on September 29, Bidlake’s figures on this occasion being 13 hours 19 minutes. On the same day M. A. Holbein and F. W. Shorland rode to York on a tandem tricycle in exactly the same time.

C. C. Fontaine went for the safety record on August 29, 1894, when he put the figures down to 11 hours 51 minutes. Fontaine lowered his own record in the following year, on October 18, by 21 minutes 45 seconds, and this was disposed of by George Hunt on May 7, 1896, when he got well within the eleven hours, at 10 hours 48 minutes.

This was lowered by F. R. Goodwin on July 19, 1899, his time being 10 hours 16 minutes; the speed on this occasion averaging rather over nineteen miles an hour. Even this could not have been accomplished without the aid of the most perfect motor pace-making arrangements. Goodwin smashed all these previous records on his way to establish the London to Edinburgh record of 25 hours 26 minutes, in which the average was somewhat higher; nearly twenty miles an hour.

The next, and latest, safety cycle record to York was made, unpaced, in 1900; when H. Green performed the journey in 10 hours 19 minutes.

The tandem safety London to York records should be mentioned. The first two were set up on July 24, 1895, and October 2, 1896, respectively: by G. P. Mills and T. A. Edge; and T. Hobson and H. E. Wilson, the times being 12 hours 33 minutes, and 11 hours 35 minutes.

These were followed by:—

The London to Edinburgh records are:

SAFETY BICYCLE.