Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

The cover was created by the transcriber and is placed within the public domain.

THE HASTINGS ROAD

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.

The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike.

The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.

The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.

Cycle Rides Round London.

A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.

Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.

The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”

The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.

The Dorset Coast.

The South Devon Coast. [In the Press.

ENTRANCE TO HASTINGS, BY MINNIS ROCK AND THE OLD LONDON ROAD.

THE
Hastings Road

AND
THE “HAPPY SPRINGS OF TUNBRIDGE”

By Charles G. Harper

ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR

London
Chapman & Hall, Ltd.
1906

[All rights reserved]

PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

PREFACE

The Road to Hastings is hilly. Not, perhaps, altogether so hilly as the Dover Road, and certainly never so dusty, nor so Cockneyfied; but the cyclist who explores it finds, or thinks he finds, an amazing amount of rising gradient in proportion to downhill, no matter which way he goes.

Sevenoaks town, the matter of twenty miles down the road, is certainly preceded by the long, swooping down-grades of Polhill; but the lengthiest descent, by mere measurement in rods, poles, and perches, is only an incident in descending, while the inevitable corresponding rise is, the climbing of it, a long-drawn experience. To the motorist, who changes from high-gear to lower, and then, as the gradient stiffens, to lowest, and so with labouring engine crawls uphill, like a bluebottle up a window-pane, the revulsion from charging along the levels at an illegal pace, raising veritable siroccos of dust, is heart-breaking.

Sevenoaks town crests the ramparted downs, and the hilly road goes up to it in steep lengths, with other lengths as near as may be flat, leading you to believe you are there, when in sheer cold fact you are not there, and still have other incredible gradients to climb. And yet, returning, you shall find the descent by no means so precipitous. River Hill by that time will have taken pride of place.

For the other hills, let them be taken on trust; they are surely there, as also are those long rises, insensible to the sight of the toiling cyclist, but patent to his feeling as he wearily pushes round his unwilling pedals. For the motor-cyclist, with disabled engine, the Hastings Road is more tragical than anything Shakespeare ever staged.

The Hastings Road is, in short, the pedestrian’s road. You would not say so much of the Bath Road or the Exeter Road between Hounslow and Taplow, and Staines; nor even of the great North Road where it runs flat through Bedfordshire and Hunts. There the way recedes ever into the infinite, and there, if anywhere, the hurtling motorist is to be excused of his illegality. Here, however, on the way to Hastings, you linger by hillside and valley, for the road goes through the most beautiful parts of Sussex and of Kent, and marches through much diverting social and national history, to the scene of the crowning tragedy of Battle. I am not of those who find the story of the Battle of Hastings sheer dry-as-dust. It is to me a living story, though over eight hundred years old, and it will live for you who explore that stricken field, if so be you explore it away from the perfunctory guides who parrot the half-holiday public through the grounds of Battle Abbey.

But they are not necessarily the larger happenings that interest me in these pages. I can find it easily possible—nay, effortless—to turn from catastrophic struggles, and take an absorbing interest in some one’s back garden: that is the way to keep boredom at arm’s length. The mediæval knight who swore by his “halidom,” and the modern hop-picker who says “blimy!” (and stronger things than that) are both entertaining persons; would that Time were bridged, and they could be introduced to one another! What the knight and the “caitiff” would severally think of either would be well worth the hearing.

For mere topography: let us maintain an invincible curiosity as to whence this river comes or whither it goes; as to what lies on the other side of yonder hill, or at the end of some alluring byway. Let us find entertainment in the manner in which the city, town, or village next on the map is different from those we have already passed; and with interests so varied the way will be all too short.

CHARLES G. HARPER.

Petersham,
Surrey.
April, 1906.

THE ROAD TO HASTINGS

List of Illustrations

The HASTINGS ROAD

I

The road to Hastings is measured from what, in these times, seems the unlikely starting-point of London Bridge, and is identical with the Dover Road as far as New Cross, where it turns to the right and goes through Lewisham, the Dover Road continuing by Deptford and Blackheath.

Few would now choose such a starting-point for a journey to Hastings, but there is reason in most things, and when this road was first travelled there was a very special reason for this choice. London Bridge was, until 1750, the only bridge that crossed the Thames between London and Putney, and the sole way to the southern counties therefore lay through Southwark.

But in those comparatively early times the historian finds no mention of the “Hastings” Road at all. Travellers very rarely wanted to journey from London to that fisher village; and it is the road to Rye for which the inquirer after these things must look in the classic seventeenth-century pages of Ogilby’s “Britannia.” In that very elaborate and accurate work, published in 1675, the Hastings Road appears as the “road to Rye,” and thus, after Flimwell, 44¾ miles down, where it makes as straight as may be for that once-busy port, the chance pilgrim for Hastings had to find his way across country as best he could by the directions of the country folk.

It is twenty miles from Flimwell to Hastings, and as I do not suppose the rustics were nearly so well informed then as now as to routes and distances, and as their knowledge on those matters is even now not profound, I think we shall do well to feel sorry for that wayfarer of long ago, thus left without a guide.

By the time the coaching age had arrived, and the road-books of Cary and Paterson and a host of others began to be published, the “Hastings” Road, rather than the road to Rye, had been invented, but still the way lay over London Bridge, and was measured from the south side of it, whence the distance is 63½ miles.

The traveller of to-day would probably find Westminster Bridge Road, St. George’s Road, and the New Kent Road the best way out of London, but it will be allowed that the best is bad.

As the imagination—whatever may be the facts—refuses to associate the Borough High Street and the Old Kent Road with the sylvan beauties of the road to Hastings, I do not propose here to recount the description of those beginnings, given already in the pages of the Dover Road; but will, as Astley of the Circus suggested to the mere dramatist, literally “cut the cackle and come to the ’osses,” i.e., a consideration of the coaching history of the road.

II

The history of coaching on the Hastings Road will never be fully written. There are too few materials for it. None of the great critics of coaching—men of the eminence of “Nimrod” or “Viator Junior”—ever wrote about the Hastings Road, for it was a road of many pair-horse coaches, and “pair-horse concerns” were considered beneath the notice of those lofty writers. Even the Royal Mail was a “pair-horse concern,” and was looked down upon accordingly.

It is as the road to Sevenoaks, to Tonbridge, and to the “Wells” that we first hear of this route in the coaching way; and, as ever, we hear first of the carriers and their waggons. Goods were conveyed on wheels long before travellers, and the heavy, cumbrous wains, drawn by eight or ten horses, and rarely going three miles an hour, carried heavy merchandise and the poorest kind of wayfarers quite a century before the horsemen, riding singly or with their ladies on a pillion behind them, took to what was at first considered the “effeminate” practice of riding in coaches.

Thus the early glimpses of the road reveal Nathaniel Field, carrier, plying in 1681 between Tonbridge and the “Queen’s Head” Inn, Southwark, once a week, together with another carrier, unnamed, a competitor in the business. In the same year “Richard Cockett’s Waggon” came twice weekly to the “Spur,” Southwark, from “Sunnock, in Kent”; and from “Brumly in Kent” came thrice a week “Widow Ingerham’s Waggon,” to the “King’s Arms in Barnaby Street, Southwark,” together with “William and Daniel Woolf’s Waggon,” on the same days.

There is sufficient evidence in the diary of Samuel Jeake, junior, of Rye, that there was no coach further than Tonbridge, or Tunbridge Wells, in 1682; for he tells us that, journeying from Rye to London on May 22nd of that year, “I rode with my wife and mother-in-law for diversion, and came thither on the 23rd; had hot and dry weather.” Returning on June 23rd, they went “from London in the stage-coach to Tonbridge; and on the 24th, Saturday, came to Rye at night.”

On January 23rd, 1686, he went to London by himself. Starting from Rye at 8.30 a.m., he rode the twenty-three miles to Lamberhurst by 2 p.m. Refreshing there for an hour, he resumed his journey, in company with others, for the security afforded by numbers, and between Woodgate and Tonbridge, in the moonlight, the tracks being very bad and uneven, he and another became separated from the party, and immediately lost themselves. It was freezing hard. He alighted and led his horse, until at last, coming to a pretty good track, he remounted, and by the grace of God and at a very late hour came into Tonbridge.

Whether this adventure was due partly to the good cheer of the “Chequers” at Lamberhurst, or wholly to the uncertainty of the track, it would be rash to say. But it is all very vivid to me: the brushwood alleys, the rimy branches of the shrouded woods, the clear, cold radiance of the frosty moon, the iron-hard ruts, and the breath arising like steam from Mr. Samuel Jeake and his horse; but most real to me his joy when he saw at last, at the foot of Somerhill, the lights of Tonbridge town.

Next morning he left Tonbridge for London, and—being by himself—rode horseback all the way, performing the journey of thirty miles in ten hours.

The stage-coach of 1682, in which the worthy Samuel Jeake brought his wife and mother-in-law, went no further than Tunbridge Wells. It was probably, even at that date, no new thing, for the “happy springs of Tunbridge” had long been known, and had for some years been gaining popularity among real or fancied invalids. We may well suppose it to have been started somewhere about 1650.

III

With the dawn of the nineteenth century the service of coaches between London and Hastings begins to take some definite shape. In 1807 Robert Gray, of the “Bolt-in-Tun,” Fleet Street, horsed the Hastings Mail, and continued for many years. In 1828 it was jointly run by Gray and by Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden Cross.” Being only a “pair-horse” mail, it was, like its fellows in the same category, very slow. The Brighton, Portsmouth, and Hastings mails were, in fact, the three slowest in the kingdom, and of these the Brighton was the worst laggard. The mails, it should be explained, to correct the impression created by the eloquence of De Quincey and Hazlitt, were not necessarily faster than the stage-coaches. In some instances they were: in others they were not. Everything depended upon individual cases, and much upon distance. Where great distances had to be covered the speed would be very high, as in the Bristol, Devonport (“Quicksilver”), and Birmingham mails, of which the first averaged considerably over ten miles an hour; but in cases such as these of Hastings, Portsmouth, and Brighton, all the night lay before them, and the short distance could be taken very easily with pair-horse teams; while the four-horse teams running to the West and North were always upon their mettle, to keep their time-bills. The speed of the Hastings Mail in 1837, its best period, averaged eight miles an hour; and that in itself was a great advance from 1828, when the pace was under seven miles an hour.

Mail-coaches were, therefore, not always the most dashing public equipages of the King’s Highway. From about 1825, when the “fast” day-coaches and the post-coaches began to set the pace, the mail on the Hastings Road was for a time left hopelessly behind. In 1826 the “Royal William,” starting from the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn, at 9 a.m., was at Hastings by 5 o’clock: speed rather more than eight miles an hour. Prodigious!

But that rate was very poor in comparison with the stage-coaches of almost every other road, and even in 1828, the Golden Age of coaching, proprietors, in announcing “Hastings to London in Eight Hours” appear to have considered themselves wonderful fellows. Indeed, on the old coaching bills of this period, discovered in 1893, during some alterations, on the walls of a building in Castle Street, Hastings, one coach-proprietor had the impudence (as we must think it) of setting forth “Hastings to London in 9 hours!” He did well to conclude with that exclamation-mark, although he placed it there in a different sense from that in which we read it.

There were then, among others, the Royal Mail, in 9¾ hours; the “Express” (a misnomer, indeed), in nine hours, from the “Golden Cross,” by Tunbridge Wells; “Paragon,” in eight hours, by Tunbridge Wells; and “Regulator,” by Tonbridge. Hastings, therefore, was always badly served, and must have grumbled quite as much in the coaching era as it does under the dilatory service of the South Eastern Railway.

The last years of the Hastings Mail, or, as it was known in its two ultimate decades, the “Hastings and St. Leonards,” were signalised by a successful attempt on the part of Horne and Gray and their country partners to screw an extra mileage rate out of the tight-fisted Post Office for carrying the mails. It seems that the Mail had not been keeping time, and that the partners had received some remonstrances on the subject from St. Martin’s-le-Grand. It was a fine opening for a revision, and accordingly, in December, 1841, they informed the Postmaster-General that they really could not keep strictly to the terms laid down by the contract they had signed in 1835, unless the mileage rate were raised from 1-3/8d. a mile to 3-3/8d. The extra allowance would permit of four horses being used instead of two: a thing not only desirable, they said, but really necessary on so hilly a road. In January, 1842, the Postmaster-General graciously acceded to this request, and for its expiring years the Mail rose to this unwonted dignity.

The “Bolt-in-Tun” coach-office in Fleet Street still stands at the corner of Bouverie Street, somewhat altered, and now the offices of Black and White. The walls are the same, and the archway depicted in the curious business-card, reproduced here, may yet be noticed.

BUSINESS-CARD OF THE “BOLT-IN-TUN” COACH OFFICE.

Of the coachmen on the road to Tunbridge Wells and Hastings we know as little as—nay even less than—of the coaches, and almost the only touch of character is that drawn by a writer in the Sporting Magazine of 1830, in describing one Stockdale, who drove some coach unnamed. He was, we are told, “a good whip.” He was also, like poor old Cross, on the King’s Lynn road, something of a literary character, and “beguiled the time on the road with Cockney slang and quotations from Pope!” He drove to London and back six days a week—the Sunday, he said, he spent at home studying the Greek Testament and translating Οἱ οἱ τυφοὶ ὁδηοί into “Wo, wo, ye blind leaders!”

But coaches were by no means the only public conveyances along this road. There were, indeed, in 1838, many vans and waggons to Tunbridge Wells and to Hastings. Bennett’s vans and waggons plied to Tunbridge Wells four times a week; those of Jarvis thrice, Diggen’s five times, Barnett’s four, Shepherd’s three, Young’s and Harris’s twice, and Wickin’s once: twenty-seven vans and waggons weekly to “the Wells.” To Hastings the waggons respectively of Moore & Co., Shepherd & Co., Stanbury & Co., and Richardson journeyed daily.

IV

The electric tramcars that nowadays take you all the way to Lewisham from Westminster Bridge for threepence, and occupy incidentally forty minutes in performing the journey of six miles, travel on the average at the same speed as those old coaches; but, of course, this not very brilliant rate of progression is determined by the crowded traffic of Walworth and Camberwell. When New Cross is reached, and the comparative solitudes of St. John’s, they bring you at a good twelve miles an hour along those switchback roads to the journey’s end. They are not looked upon with favour by that suburban neighbourhood, for, worse than the burglars’ “villainous centre-bits” in Maud they not only

Grind on the wakeful ear in the hush of the moonless night,

but noisily disturb every night.

It is a hilly district, revealed in these times by ascending and descending vistas of roads and roof-tops, instead of the grass and fields of yore; and Loampit Hill—the “Loam Pit Hole” of Rocque’s map of 1745—is just a little interlude in the commonplace, where an old retaining-wall in the hill-top sliced through in a bygone era serves to keep the banks and the houses now built hazardously on them from settling in the roadway. A number of old hollies give the spot something of an old-world look.

Here, then, having come through all the hazards and chances of New Cross and the Lewisham High Road, we are arrived at the Ravensbourne and Lewisham. The Ravensbourne, although not a stream of great size, and with a course of but twelve miles, from its fountain-head on Keston Common to its mouth amid the mud of Deptford Creek, is yet a river of considerable historic, or legendary, importance, and—more important still—it is due to the Ravensbourne that the last surviving beauties of Lewisham are so beautiful. Legends tell how the river obtained its distinguished name, and in the telling take us back to those very distant days of Cæsar’s second invasion, B.C. 54. The story seems to support the theory of one school of antiquaries, that the lost Roman station of Noviomagus was at Keston; for it declares that Cæsar’s legions were encamped on what we now call Keston Common, and suffered greatly from lack of water until the constant visits of a raven to one particular spot attracted attention and aroused the hope that it was water which attracted him. The expectation proved correct, for there they discovered the spring forming the source of the stream. A well, called “Cæsar’s,” on that common still serves to keep the tradition alive.

We may, therefore, well look upon the Ravensbourne with interest, although it is true that a glance into it, over the bridge which here carries the busy London street across, sadly disappoints romantic anticipations. Deposits of mud, vestiges of pails past their prime, and outworn boots which the veriest tramp would scorn to own, line a discoloured stream, and grimy backyards abut upon it. To such a pass has civilisation brought the lower reaches of this once silvery watercourse, which is not so small but that it has tributaries of its own. Such an one is the river Quaggy, which embouches hereabouts into it. “Hereabouts,” I say, because only the local sewer authority could readily point out the exact spot; the Quaggy being, in fact, at the actual confluence, embedded in an underground pipe. But if you may not see the actual meeting of the streams, you may at least see the Quaggy on the other side of the road, a little distance before it joins forces with the Ravensbourne. There you shall perceive how only a little lesser indignity than a pipe has befallen it. Its little trickle still flows on in the eye of day, but it is made to flow in a formal concrete bed, here and there spanned by long stretches of pavement. A little higher up “Lee Bridge” crosses it, and there be those lesser Stanleys and Livingstones who have traced it to its source, even as those great explorers sought the beginnings of the Nile. A certain disappointment seems, however, to await those who seek the origin of the Quaggy, for those who have essayed, and accomplished, the feat describe how it rises on Shooter’s Hill “at the back of the Police-station”! Shooter’s Hill is well enough, but that last little piece of particularity destroys any lingering shred of romance.

I should not be greatly surprised to find the Quaggy the object of police suspicion, for that name is merely an alias, its real ancient title being the Ket Brook, whence the district of Kidbrook derives its name. The “Quaggy” is a later title, conferred descriptively by those who observed the quags, or marshy places, through which it descended from Shooter’s Hill to these levels.

Here, as already remarked, we are come to Lewisham. Many thousands of people remember Lewisham as still something of a village; and yet so quick-presto are the suburban changes around London that they now behold it not merely a thronged town, but much less distinguished even than that—just a limb of great, sprawling London, and thus stripped of most of its old-time individuality.

The place changes while you look. You turn your back awhile upon the few surviving fields, the hedgerows, the ditches, and when you glance upon the scene again they are gone, and carts are delivering loads of slack-baked place-bricks for the foundations of little £25 houses that will begin to settle down unsteadily and crack all down their fronts almost before the roofs are on. Change is rampant here, and Lewisham, that was once “Lewisham Village,” is a village no longer. The proverbial saying, “Long, lazy, lousy Lewisham,” that once attached to the place—a saying which, I doubt not, owed its existence more to easy alliteration than to actual fact—is, in one respect at any rate, out of date, for it is now become a very strenuous place indeed, where tradesfolk hustle for business and crowds throng the pavements. Modernity marches all over the place in its hobnailed fashion, and scarifies the soul out of existence. It cannot survive in a modern populous suburb of wage-earners who go forth at unconscionable hours of the morning to earn the means of existence and come home to their brick boxes, exhausted, merely to sleep; and so come to their prime, joylessly, and decline greyly to an obscure end. The spectacle frightens and saddens the observer who goes beneath the surface of things. He wonders what lies in the lap of futurity for the race thus dissociated from nature, nurtured on the pavements, and condemned to lifelong comings and goings in the restricted outlook of streets; and, looking upon old representations of what Lewisham was like in what he is apt to think the halcyon days of the “20’s” of the nineteenth century, he grieves for the spacious rusticities of days gone by.

V

How many, or how few, of Lewisham’s myriads ever idly speculate whence came the name of the place? According to authorities who are now, in these more scientific times, largely discredited, it comes from Anglo-Saxon words meaning “the dwelling among the meadows,” or the leas—the “leas home”—and was anciently spelled Levesham and Lewesham. Just a few vestiges of this ancient rurality remain, in the strips of meadows—now converted into what are shaping as beautiful parks—that fringe the course of the Ravensbourne on either bank, from Catford Bridge to Ladywell; but we are now bidden disregard those meadows in any relationship with the name of Lewisham. The place is first mentioned in a charter of Ethelbert of Wessex, dated A.D. 862, in which it is called “Liofshema”; and fifty-six years later, in a charter granted by Ethelswitha, daughter of Alfred the Great, it assumes the form of “Lieuesham,” which gives us exactly the modern pronunciation. This, it has been remarked, has nothing to do with meadows, leas, or pastures, but means literally “dear son’s home.” But, having reached that point, we come to a full stop, for no one can tell us who was that “dear son”; and the theory that the name of Leveson similarly derives from Liof-or Leof-suna, seems to have little bearing upon the history of the place.

Ladywell, just mentioned, is itself the name of a great crowded district, and it is thus curious to reflect that the name was utterly unknown until modern times. It arose from one of two closely neighbouring wells—one reputed to be medicinal—situated in what is now the road turning off the highway, past Lewisham old vicarage, to Ladywell railway-station and Brockley, which name itself—meaning, as it does, the “badger’s meadow”—enshrines the former rustic appearance of these parts. Ancient records and county histories may be searched in vain for mention of the “Lady Well,” which, oddly enough, seems to have acquired its name about the end of the eighteenth century. It was, about 1820, the subject of a published plate, showing it with a circular stone kerb, placed by the wayside of a pretty rustic road, embowered in trees. Thus it remained, amid ever deteriorating surroundings, until 1866, when it was destroyed in the course of sewer-making operations for the newly risen suburb that had grown around the South-Eastern railway-station of “Ladywell,” opened in January, 1857.

The well had long become a thing of the past, and its very site was merely a matter of vague tradition, when, in 1881, its stones were discovered in the course of repairs to the bridge over the railway. A signalman rescued them from being again covered over, and removed them to a position beside his cabin, where they remained until 1896, when the following notice appeared in a local paper: “It has now been decided by the Lewisham Baths Commissioners to re-erect the stones by the side of the public baths, where they will be used to surround a public fountain to which the youths and maidens of to-day may once more resort, and there whisper their hearts’ desire.” Accordingly, they may be seen to this day in the Ladywell Road.

It seems likely, under the circumstances thus recounted, that the well was given its name about a century ago by some forgotten fanciful local antiquary who, bethinking himself that the parish church of St. Mary, Lewisham, was but a hundred yards or so distant, dignified the hitherto unnamed spring by the name of Our Lady.

That parish church is a singular, and in general an unbeautiful, structure, built in 1777 on the site of an older, and enlarged at the east end, in the same hybrid “classic” style, in 1881. It has a great south porch, unmistakably Corinthian, though it would puzzle an architect to put a name to the rest. But the tower has a character all its own. Equally nondescript, it yet owns an engaging quaintness which one would with sorrow see improved away for the sake of something more pure in style. The lower stages of this tower are obviously the remains of the old Gothic building, for the buttresses, some of the windows, and a good deal of the old facing are left, while the upper part has either been rebuilt or re-cased in a style resembling the practice of the brothers Adam. Sculptured garlands in the famous manner of those architects give a daintily decorative effect, and, together with the four stone balls which occupy the places usually given to pinnacles, render Lewisham church-tower memorable and unmistakable among its fellows.

It is now, in short, with the neighbouring Colfe Almshouses, the most characteristic and distinctive thing left to Lewisham. The surrounding churchyard is very large, and the approach is made beautiful by a long arched yew walk, still charmingly rustic in appearance.

The almshouses, it seems, are doomed to destruction. They are relics of the times when it could yet be said with truth of Lewisham that “its convenient distance from the metropolis and its beautiful situation have rendered it a favourite place of residence, and the neighbourhood is thickly studded with gentlemen’s seats, many of which are splendid mansions, and with numerous handsome villas, the country residences of opulent merchants.”

Abraham Colfe, who founded these quaint old almshouses, was vicar of Lewisham about the middle of the seventeenth century. He died in 1657, and left property in trust for the purpose to the Leathersellers’ Company, who accordingly built them, as a tablet over the main entrance informs the passer-by, in 1664.

LEWISHAM.

Another survival is the handsome old late seventeenth-century vicarage, already mentioned, standing a little out of its element, as it were, beside the high road. It was built in 1692-3 by Dr. Stanhope, the then vicar, and, as his surviving accounts tell us, it cost him £739 13s. to build. Dr. Stanhope, if we may accept the estimate of his character given by his monument in the church, was one of the best, for (inter alia) his “piety was real and rational, his charity great and universal.... His learning was elegant and comprehensive, his conversation polite and delicate, Grave without Preciseness, Facetious without Levity. The good Christian and solid Divine and the fine gentleman in him were happily united.”

That, I think, is the ne plus ultra, the last word, in monumental eulogy. You cannot get better than the best, unless indeed you visit modern Lewisham and do your shopping at its popular “stores,” where a searching glance may discover “best fresh eggs” at one shilling and sixpence a dozen, and “superior” at two shillings.

For the rest, a few strips of garden here and there border the high road through modern urban Lewisham, sometimes owning elms that in the old days were tall wayside trees. Here a giant workhouse, neighbouring the Colfe Almshouses, serves by its presence to underline and emphasise the social distance travelled—whether it be upwards or downwards let those decide who will—between the seventeenth century and the twentieth, and a few scattered weather-boarded cottages are left, showing what manner of buildings were those that fringed the road in days for ever gone. Midway between the date of those humble old dwellings and the modern shops is one old-fashioned shop where they sell hay, corn, straw, beans, and sweet-smelling seeds of all kinds. The name over the fascia is “Shove,” singularly inapplicable to this quiet, unassuming frontage.[1] To gaze upon its small-paned windows, to see and scent the hay and the fragrant contents of its bins of beans, peas, and varied seeds, must surely, with the coming of every spring, set the prisoned wage-earners of Lewisham longing keenly for the banished country whose breath comes fragrant from within.

[1] Alas! since writing the above, the shop is closed, and the house to be demolished.

THE COLFE ALMSHOUSES.

VI

The streets of Lewisham the long end, in the present year of grace, a little beyond Rushey Green, where a side-road comes in from Forest Hill and Catford Bridge. Shall we pluck the rushes of Rushey Green, wander awhile in the groves of Forest Hill, or gather primroses by the river’s brim at Catford Bridge? God bless you, ye innocent, there are no forests but forests of chimneys at Forest Hill, and the rushes of Rushey Green have long been replaced by macadam and York stone pavements; and although, I doubt not, you can find primroses in their season at Catford Bridge, they are only those that are sold by the flower-girls outside the railway-station, at what they style, in their Cockney twang, “one punny a morky barnch,” a phrase which has been translated into English by the learned as meaning “one penny a market bunch.”

Although the road onwards from Rushey Green becomes in a little distance rural, or at the worst dotted only here and there sporadically with new houses, there are marked signs that the fields and the remaining hedgerows are doomed. Among these unmistakable portents is the new railway-station of Bellingham, placed at the present time lonely, in the midst of fields, near the solitary Bellingham Farm. No railway company builds a large station for the express purpose of serving one farmhouse, and this is simply another instance of that intelligent anticipation of events for which railway companies are now showing an unwonted aptitude. Time was when the companies would tardily provide station accommodation ten years or so after the appearance of a thronged suburb, and then only after being memorialised to do so; but a different policy now rules: it is the policy suggested by the depleted pocket.

If, however, the main road remains rural, things are far otherwise over to the eastward, between this and Burnt Ash, where the octopus arms of the Corbett Estate are spreading out and embracing the fields in a deadly grip. The long lines of streets and roofs, ascending the hillside, may be discerned from the highway, and it is abundantly evident that London is making a sly flank march that way, into Kent. The Corbett Estate is, it should be said, a building estate of cheap houses, chiefly for working men, and is administered on “temperance” lines, public-houses for the sale of drink being forbidden. Here, then, we see the working of one of those many fads for the making of a perfect community which distinguishes the present age. Here it is a Community of the Pump that is aimed at; there a Garden City, and elsewhere other nostrums are on trial, all directed towards the hastening of the millennium. But the wheels of progress towards perfection are not to be set rolling at anything above their normal speed by even the best intentioned, armed with the most exceptional opportunities, and this thirsty Sahara among suburbs irrigates itself just the same, albeit with considerable trouble.

D—n his eyes, whoever tries

To rob a poor man of his beer,

in effect says the working man of the Corbett Estate, and, to show his independence on those occasions when he journeys a weariful distance across the boundary of this drinkless district in order to get his supper beer, takes more than he ordinarily would, returning home a discredit to the good people who want to dragoon him into an avoidance of Bung and all his vats, in preparation for their new Heaven and new Earth.

The net result, and one wholly unlooked for, is that this prohibition policy has practically conferred an immense endowment upon the inns of Rushey Green, which, once modest enough, have blossomed forth as immense public-houses, doing a roaring trade with the unregenerate.

The road, coming to South End, comes really and truly to the end of London and its suburbs, and is at present prettily rural. Only those who know the district well are aware that, a short way off to the right hand, there is a little Erebus at Bell Green, where the gasworks are. If our old vituperative Cobbett were back again, taking his rural rides, I have no doubt he would call the place Hell Green, and he would not be altogether unjustified in doing so. But for my own part, I prefer to dwell rather upon South End, and feel inclined to curse the exploratory activity that led me to discover that awful place at the back of the road; so abject, so unutterably vile.

South End owes much—almost everything, in fact—to the beneficent Ravensbourne, which flows beside the road, and long ago was enlarged into a lake at this point. It is a pretty lake, the prettier because unexpected, and there are those who actually fish in it; not for the lordly salmon, nor even for grayling or dace. No, it is rather the humble “tiddler” who makes sport for the small boy with a twig, a piece of cotton and a pickle-bottle; and I declare that no fisherman in india-rubber waders, up to his thighs in the middle of a stream and at grips with a salmon, experiences a wilder ardour than that of these sportsmen of the neighbouring streets. I feel sorry, however, for the tiddlers, thus slain in their thousands. They do not long survive the water of the pickle-bottle, and presently, giving up the ghost, collapse and develop those extraordinary spikinesses which, I suppose, give them their proper name of “sticklebacks.”

VII

It is a long, long rise from South End to Bromley, which stands among the breezy heights near Keston and Hayes. Half way up it there are still traces of the deep dingle that gave the spot the name “Holloway,” by which it was known to the road-books of the coaching age.

ENTRANCE TO THE WIDOWS’ COLLEGE.

It was an ominous place, suitable for the footpad’s leap in the dark upon the traveller’s back, and those wayfarers who were obliged to pad the hoof alone through Holloway when night was come wished they had eyes in the back of the head, in addition to the usual pair. Near by stood, and still stands, Bromley Hill House, once the seat of Charles Long, afterwards Lord Farnborough. In the dairy at that place one John Clarke, gardener, murdered Elizabeth Mann, a dairy-maid, and over against Holloway there was erected a gallows, and on it John Clarke, brought in a cart from Maidstone gaol, in due time swung.

At the threshold of Bromley stands the College, not an educational establishment, but a superior kind of almshouse, whose purpose is explained by the inscription set up over the doorway:

Deo et Ecclesiæ
This College for Twenty poore
widowes (of orthodox and Loyall
Clergymen) & A Chaplin was
given by Iohn Warner late L^d.
Bishop of Rochester
1666

John Warner, Bishop of Rochester, was a staunch supporter of Church and King, in times when both the Establishment and the Monarchy were in a bad way. Charles the First was not wholly responsible for the troubles and tragedies of his reign. An acrid Puritanism was in the air, and had already manifested itself, very unpleasantly, in his father’s time. It was the inevitable reaction from the Renaissance gaieties under Elizabeth. The times were such that, even in the first year of Charles the First’s rule, Warner found it necessary to deliver a bitter sermon directed against the politico-religious activities of the Puritans, based upon the text, Matt. xxi. 38: “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance.” No one had in those early days of strife thought of beheading Charles, and we must therefore count Warner among the prophets.

The bishop came very near being impeached before Parliament for this exploit, and only escaped by the King stepping in and “pardoning” him in advance of Parliamentary action.

It is not surprising to find that, when the troubles culminated in war, the House was swift to sequestrate the bishop from his see, and even to seize his property. They proved the innuendo of his discourse at his own expense, he was forced to leave his palace at Bromley in disguise, fearing for his personal safety at the hands of the saints, and for years he wandered in poverty in the West Country. Like other survivors of the dispossessed clergy, high-placed and low, he came to his own again at the Restoration in 1661, but he was then an old man of eighty. Five years later he was dead.

IN THE FIRST QUADRANGLE, WIDOWS’ COLLEGE, BROMLEY.

A many-sided benefactor, he was not without his critics, who declared him mean. He seems to have somewhat keenly felt the charge, for he repelled it by remarking that he “did eat the scragg ends of the neck of mutton, that he might leave the poor the shoulder.” We do not learn whether those critics had the grace to be ashamed.

His College was a noble thought. He bequeathed £8,500 to establish it, and left a perpetual rent-charge of £450 per annum, secured upon his manor of Swayton, Lincolnshire, to provide pensions of £20 per annum for each of its twenty destined inmates, who were to be poor widows of clergymen, preferably, but not exclusively, of the see of Rochester. The odd £50 was for the chaplain’s stipend.

The College stands within six acres of beautifully wooded grounds, with lovely lawns and gardens, and is very thoroughly fenced off from the clatter of the outside world by an ancient brick wall, tall and thick. Through the wrought-iron gateway, dated 1666, flanked by piers surmounted with sculptured mitres, glimpses of the front are caught behind the blossoming horse-chestnuts.

The little houses surround the quadrangle, which has its lawn, its covered walk, like an up-to-date and domesticated cloister, and its climbing-plants twisting round the pillars of the Jacobean colonnade. They are very desirable little houses, with basement kitchens, a quaint little hall, a fine sitting-room, and, on the first and attic floors, from two to four bedrooms. Those fortunate enough to secure such a haven for life are fortunate indeed, and in this sheltered backwater of existence often live to be centenarians. But probably no one would resent being styled “poor” more than these collegians themselves. Poverty is a matter of comparison, and many would be content to “endure” it on terms of a dainty house, free of rent, repairs, and taxes, with from £38 to £44 a year thrown in—for many later bequests have rendered it possible to raise the pension to those sums. Moreover, to qualify for admission, a “poor” widow has now to be already rich enough to possess an income of at least £40, and probably most of them have much more.

Bromley College is therefore a kind of a minor Hampton Court, and great is the competition to win to it when a vacancy occurs. Well-dressed and well cared for in every way, the collegians are not to be pitied.

The occasional artist who comes to sketch the buildings finds the place delightful. There are pretty girls reading novels or presiding over dainty tea-tables: there are poverty-stricken widows in lace-caps, silk gowns, and gold chains—all well known stigmata of a plentiful lack of pence—and there is sometimes good music from soft-toned pianos.

The chapel provided for by the good bishop was rebuilt, at a cost of £6,000, in 1860, by the aid of subscriptions. The Jacobean building it replaces is said to have been extremely ugly, but that is easily said of anything already marked for destruction; and the ’60’s were scarce sufficiently well-disposed towards architecture of that period to be able to determine fairly what was ugly and that which was merely not at that time fashionable in bricks and mortar.

There are now forty widows in the College, and a second quadrangle was added and endowed about 1790, from funds provided jointly by William Pearce, brother of Bishop Zachary Pearce, and Mrs. Bettinson.

There has been in the past a good deal of nepotism in the government of the College, and father has succeeded son in the chaplaincy, often held by greedy pluralists, and often thrown in as a kind of extra sop for the vicar of Bromley. Things like these must surely vex the spirit of that truly pious benefactor, who, when raised to be bishop, could not endure to hold his many preferments, and accordingly resigned them, much against the spirit of his age.

An even later addition to this institution was made in 1840, when the “Sheppard College” was built in the grounds. It consists of five houses, endowed with £44 each per annum, for the benefit of daughters who have lived with and attended upon their mothers in the original College.

VIII

Bromley, in the days when it was only a small thing, was in the diocese of Rochester. It has long since been transferred to Canterbury, and the manor that had belonged to the Bishops of Rochester ever since the eighth century, when it was given to them by King Ethelbert, was sold with the palace into private hands in 1845. Those who will may see the exterior of it to this day, but it is not the palace that the Norman Gundulf built, nor even that whence Bishop Warner escaped, for it was several times rebuilt, lastly in 1775. The site of the once Holy Well of St. Blaise, the woolcombers’ saint, formerly much resorted to for its chalybeate waters, is still to be seen in the grounds.

There are pitfalls for the stranger on every road in the way of pronouncing place-names. Bromley-by-Bow is (or was until recently, but there is a constant flux in these things) “Brumley,” and accordingly this should have the like sound; but you will not hear this Kentish town so named. The natives will not change the “o” into “u.”

But aborigines are somewhat difficult to find here, for the Bromley that was a little market town with two fairs a year and a weekly market granted by Henry the Sixth is a thing of the buried past. Bromley is now suburban. It has grown from the little place of 1801, with 2,700 inhabitants, to a populous town which in 1901 numbered 27,358.

Much of the old town has vanished, but it will never be like an ordinary suburb that grew potatoes last year, and has within six months grown streets of houses “fitted with electric light, hot and cold water-supply, and drained in accordance with the latest improvements,” thus to quote advertisements. The town, in common with other places, has all those modern features, but it has also a surviving proportion of ancient houses, and even when they are gone it will still have its history. By virtue of that past it keeps to-day a larger air and a greater disunity than it could command merely as the dormitory of City men who leave early in the morning and return at night, and pay rent, rates, and taxes, but can have little of the sense of belonging to the place.

Bromley, precisely like an assertive person who has “got on” in the world, signalised its recent expansion by acquiring a coat-of-arms; but not the most magnificent parvenu would dare sport a display so elaborate and comprehensive as that which alone would serve Bromley. In the recondite terminology affected by heralds it is “quarterly, gules and azure; on a fesse wavy argent three ravens volant proper between, in the first quarter, two branches slipped of the third: in the second a sun in splendour; in the third an escallop shell or; and in the fourth a horse forcené, also argent: and for the crest, on a wreath of the colours, upon two bars wavy azure and argent, an escallop shell, as in the arms, between two branches of broom proper.”

It sounds like the description by a maniac of the contents of a shop-window, set up by a compositor who had misplaced the punctuation; but it is clear and pellucid reading to a herald. At any rate, there is no difficulty in discovering what it all means, for the device is proudly and abundantly displayed in Bromley itself.

These many charges are not without their significance. The escallop shell is in allusion to the time when the palace of the Bishops of Rochester was situated here; the broom refers to the planta genista, the broom that gave, in the long ago, its name to Bromley, and still flourishes in the district; the sun in splendour indicates Sundridge, whose name itself by no means alludes to the sun; and the white horse is, of course, the familiar unconquered horse of Kent. The ravens recall the legendary history of the Ravensbourne. Beneath all this display is a Latin motto, to the effect that “While I grow I hope.”

Gravely aloof from all these things, the old parish church of Bromley stands indeed in the centre of the town, but in a quiet lane leading to a pretty little public garden on the edge of a height overlooking all South London and its sea of roof-tops. It need scarcely be said that the long body and the apocalyptic towers of the Crystal Palace are prominent in the view. They brood like an obsession over all the southern suburbs.

The exterior of the church looks very venerable and rustic, and has even been improved by a tasteful new chancel built in recent times. In the churchyard, built into the south wall, is a small and modest tablet inscribed:

Here lyeth interred ye body of Martine French of this parish, with four of his wives and two daughters. He departed this life 12 January anno 1661, being aged 61, and his last wife died ye 13th of ye same month, leaving behind him one sonne Martine and two daughters, Sarah and Mary.

But Martin French is a very minor person beside the neighbouring

• ELIZABETH MONK
• who departed this Life on the 27^th Day of August 1753
• Aged 101
• She was the Widow of John Monk late of this Parish,
• Blacksmith,
• her second Husband,
• To whom she had been a Wife near 50 Years:
• By whom she had no Children:
• And of the Issue of her first Marriage none lived to the second.
• But Virtue
• would not suffer her to be childless:
• An infant to whom and to whose Father & Mother she had
• been Nurse
• (such is the uncertainty of temporal Prosperity)
• became dependent upon Strangers for the Necessaries of Life.
• To him she afforded the Protection of a Mother.
• This parental Charity was returned with filial Affection:
• And she was supported in the feebleness of Age
• By him whom she had cherished in the Helplessnesss of Infancy.
• Let it be Rememb’red
• That there is no Station in which Industry will not obtain
• Power to be Liberal:
• Nor any Character on which Liberality will not
• Confer Honour.
• She had been long prepared by a simple and unaffected Piety
• for that awful Moment, which however delayed
• is universally sure.
• How few are allowed an equal Time of Probation:
• How many by their Lives appear to presume upon more:
• To preserve the Memory of this Person,
• but yet more to perpetuate the Lesson of her Life,
• This Stone was erected by voluntary Contribution.

For lavish use of capital letters, adjectives, and copybook sentiments this would be difficult to beat.

IX

The interior of the church is injured by the galleries built round it, to accommodate a crowded congregation, and is otherwise of little interest; the tombs of the Bishops of Rochester consisting merely of a mangled relic of that supposed to be for Richard de Wendover, who died in 1350, and the slab and the tablet, respectively, to John Yonge, 1605, and Zachary Pearce, 1774.

But in the pavement near the font, covered with a mat, is the ledger-stone marking the resting-place of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s wife, who died in 1753. It bears, of course, a Latin epitaph, for that great literary giant of the eighteenth century was violently of opinion that the English language was no fitting medium for the conveyance of monumental honours. His arguments in support of that opinion are unfortunately not recorded. They would doubtless be amusing, but it would require a very robust argument to convince most people that an inscription in a foreign language, and that a dead one, not to be understood except by the comparatively few who are well versed in it, is the best vehicle for the purpose. There seems, however, to have been in Johnson’s time, and before, and for some while after it, an odd feeling that the mother-tongue of the Englishman was, applied to monuments, vulgar. To be classic, even at the risk of not being understood, was the only resort of those who at all risks desired to dissociate themselves from the vulgar herd. Johnson shared this feeling to the full, and thus the epitaph to his “Tetty” is couched in the language that Cæsar spoke. It extols the charms of her person and manners, and thus gives point to Macaulay’s description of Johnson’s singular infatuation for a woman twenty-one years older than himself. “Every eye makes its own beauty,” truly says the old proverb, and here is an instance. It was in 1736, when he was twenty-seven years of age, that Johnson met the widowed Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, fell in love with her, and married her. She was then forty-eight, and had children as old as himself. Macaulay, in his broad, expressive, rather cruel way, says: “To ordinary spectators the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those of the Queensberrys and Lepels.” She was, continues Macaulay, “a silly, vain old woman. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, and whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish cerise from natural bloom, his Tetty was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her sex. That his admiration of her was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for she was as poor as himself.”

There are many tablets on the walls of this much-galleried building: one to a Mr. Thomas Chase, of the Rookery, who was nearly swallowed up by the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755. He seems to have been born there in 1729, and after his nerve-shaking experience to have removed to this country. He died in 1788, aged fifty-nine.

One harrowing inscription meets the eye on leaving the building. It tells how, on Saturday, September 10th, 1904, a peal of grandsire triples of 5,040 changes was rung upon the bells. They took 3 hours 6 minutes, and then quiet came to the suffering town. Bromley has my respectful sympathy.

X

The way through Bromley is not straight and it is not broad. This is so much of a truism at Bromley that the statement is calculated to make its inhabitants smile indulgently, as do those good-natured people who are told what they already know. The early nineteenth-century roadmakers strove to remedy these defects, and did what they could to widen and straighten the way, and incidentally to abolish the picturesqueness of the place; but those “vested interests” that are a part of every civilisation forbade much alteration, and the road still trickles and meanders through the town and divides into two channels and unites again, like some sluggish, undecided river. It is an infirmity of purpose that can be carried back to a very remote origin: to the time, in fact, when Bromley was only beginning to be a settlement amid the then widespreading wastes; when the prehistoric tribesmen drove their herds across the broomy heaths to water at the Ravensbourne, and tracked deviously to avoid boulders, trees, or boggy places. These were the circumstances that fixed throughout the ages the windings of Bromley’s streets. One somewhat important change was, however, made under the Improvement Act of 1830. A new road was cut to one side of the Market Place, starting just beyond the “Bell” and ending just short of the “White Hart.”

The historian seeking something of the old coaching days at Bromley pities himself. He finds the “Swan” very gay and attractive in summer with displays of geraniums, calceolarias, and lobelia, but he does not find the old house, and when he has found the “Bell,” in the centre of the town, he has come to a very beautiful building; but it is modern. The alleged fact that its doorway is on a level with the cross of St. Paul’s Cathedral does not seem to have the significance it would possess were the old house standing.

The old inn is the subject of a slight reference in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” where she makes Lady Catherine say: “Where shall you change horses? Oh, Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at the ‘Bell’ you will be attended to.” The passage does not make my pulses leap.

Only the “White Hart” remains; appropriately enough white-faced, cool and clean-looking, with the white hart himself “couchant regardant, collared or,” as a herald might say, over the portico. Unhappily, gigantic modern red-brick buildings encompass the inn, rising to four times the height of it, and presently the old house itself will inevitably go.

Beyond this point is South Bromley, where the railway runs and modern expansion is most evident. You descend to it, and having descended immediately ascend again, up the not very Andean slope of Mason’s Hill.

At the time these lines are being written Mason’s Hill still remains old-fashioned. A few of its dignified Queen Anne mansions, standing with an old-world detachment behind their palisade of formal iron railings, are left; but they are to be sold for clearance and rebuilding, and so also are a group of ancient dormer-windowed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses of a humbler type. They have all the added importance that comes from being situated above a footpath which itself is in places raised more than head and shoulders above the road for wheeled traffic. Old wooden railings protect children, boozy wayfarers, and sheer wool-gathering, star-gazing folk from falling off the pavement into the hollow road.

Having wriggled its way through Bromley and climbed Mason’s Hill, the Hastings Road sets out across Bromley Common, broad and straight and forceful, in a splendid forthright manner, about its ultimate business of getting to the coast. Most other roads show plentiful evidences of having, like Topsy, grown; but this, you can see at a glance, was obviously made. It occupies a ridge. Villas front upon it on leaving the town behind: villas of every type since such things began to be, and a leisurely walk past them is therefore something in the nature of a generous education in the varying ideals in domestic architecture since the days of the Regency.

THE ROAD ACROSS BROMLEY COMMON.

But presently these are all left behind, and the fields on either side of this modern road with an ancient Roman inflexibility are broken only by the house and grounds of that most beautiful and noble early eighteenth-century mansion, the Rookery, built of the most exquisite red brick.

The Rookery belongs to a time before this fine road came into being: to that time when travellers came painfully up the hill to that open common much dwelt upon by old county historians. Opposite the mansion in those days stood the two polled elms known from time immemorial as Great and Little Beggars’ Bush, and known most unfavourably, for in the shade cast by them at night not merely beggars, but those highwaymen of the meaner sort called footpads, lurked.

Time has a sardonic trick of turning the matter-of-fact descriptions of the old topographers into absurdly misleading statements. Thus, reading Lysons’ description of Bromley, written in 1796, we smile at his remarks that “the Anglo-Saxon Brom-leag signifies a field, or heath, where broom grows,” and that “the great quantity of that plant on all the waste places near the town fully justifies this etymology.”

Bromley Common was in great part enclosed soon after the middle of the eighteenth century, and most of the remaining two hundred and fifty acres were cut up and partitioned in 1822, amid much local satisfaction. With it went the broom near the town; although, to be sure, it is still plentifully to be found on the further commons towards Keston.

A piece of beautiful common-land through which the road runs at the extremity of the parish is still called “Bromley Common.” Down below it, in a hollow, is Lock’s Bottom, a hamlet whose pretty scenery is rather vainly endeavouring to bear up, under the infliction of some commonplace houses and a prominent police-station. There are picturesque alders in front of the “White Lion,” but the blue lamp of the police-station spoils the sentiment of it all. Why, you ask yourself, that in a place by way of being so pretty and so rural? A few steps onward give the answer, in the great workhouse and the casual-ward, and the expectant tramps reclining, more pictorially than they know, by the pond under the tall fir-trees opposite.

XI

The road in the neighbourhood of Lock’s Bottom seems, in the old days, to have been particularly dangerous. It ran, in the middle of the seventeenth century and for long afterwards, through a wide district of unenclosed common-land, and was just one of those lonely highways where the footpads and highwaymen had matters very much their own way.

An unpleasant adventure of this sort happened just here, beside a vanished landmark once known to wayfarers as the “Procession Oak,” to John Evelyn, the diarist, on May 23rd, 1652.

Leaving his wife to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells, he set out on horseback for London. In his “Diary” we learn what befell him on the way:

“The weather being hot, and having sent my man on before me, I rode negligently under favour of the shade till within three miles of Bromley. At a place call’d the Procession Oake, two cut-throates started out, and striking with long staves at the horse and taking hold of the reines, threw me downe, took my sword, and haled me into a deepe thickett some quarter of a mile from the highway, where they might securely rob me, as they soone did. What they got of money was not considerable, but they took two rings, the one an emerald with diamonds, the other an onyx, and a pair of bouckles set with rubies and diamonds, which were of value, and, after all, bound my hands behind me, and my feete, having before pull’d off my bootes; they then set me up against an oake, with most bloudy threats to cutt my throat if I offer’d to crie out or make any noise, for they should be within hearing, I not being the person they looked for. I told them, if they had not basely surpriz’d me, they should not have had so easy a prize, and that it would teach me never to ride neere an hedge, since had I been in the mid-way they durst not have adventur’d on me; at which they cock’d their pistols, and told me they had long guns too, and were fourteen companions. I begg’d for my onyx, and told them it being engraven with my armes would betray them, but nothing prevail’d. My horse’s bridle they slipt, and search’d the saddle, which they pull’d off, but let the horse graze, and then, turning againe, bridled him and tied him to a tree, yet so as he might graze, and thus left me bound. My horse was perhaps not taken because he was mark’d and cropt on both eares, and well known on that roade.

“Left in this manner, grievously was I tormented with flies, ants, and the sunn, nor was my anxiety little how I should get loose in that solitary place, where I could neither heare nor see any creature but my poore horse and a few sheepe stragling in the copse. After neere two houres attempting, I got my hands to turn palm to palm, having been tied back to back, and then it was long before I could slip the cord over my wrists to my thumb, which at last I did, and then soone unbound my feete, and saddling my horse and roaming awhile about, I at last perceiv’d dust to rise, and soone after heard the rattling of a cart, towards which I made, and by the help of two country men I got back into the high way.

“I rode to Coll. Blount’s, a greate justiciarie of the times, who sent out hue and cry immediately. The next morning, sore as my wrists and armes were, I went to London and got 500 tickets printed and dispers’d by an officer of Goldsmiths Hall, and within two daies had tidings of all I had lost, except my sword, which had a silver hilt, and some trifles. The rogues had pawn’d one of my rings for a trifle to a goldsmith’s servant, before the tickets had come to the shop, by which meanes they scap’d; the other ring was bought by a victualler, who brought it to a goldsmith, but be, having seen the ticket, seiz’d the man. I afterwards discharg’d him, on his protestation of innocence. Thus,” he concludes, “did God deliver me from these villains, and not onely so, but restor’d what they tooke, as twice before He had graciously don, both at sea and land ... for which, and many, many signal preservations, I am extreamely oblig’d to give thanks to God my Saviour.”

This incident of impudent highway robbery in midday sufficiently illustrates the general insecurity of the times and the risks that travellers ran.

But let it not be thought that all highwaymen were brutal and lacking in bowels of compassion. We know, from the stirring annals of Hounslow Heath, that a Duval could act a courtly part when a lady was in the case; and here records tell of a very perfect, gentle knight of the road, who could be polite and considerate even to one of his own sex. But hear what the London newspapers of 1773 said: “Last night Mr. Delves, whalebone merchant, being taken ill at Hayes in Kent, and coming to town in a postchaise, was stopped by a highwayman, who robbed him of his money; but finding him greatly indisposed and not able to help himself, civilly wrapped him up warm, wished him better health and a good evening, gave the postboy a shilling, and ordered him to drive gently on.” We do not find that he returned the money. He doubtless thought it enough to rob with civility and to wish the invalid well again.

XII

Beyond this, one comes in a mile to the casual, disjointed, and scattered collection of houses called Farnborough, once a spruce and busy “thoroughfare” hamlet in the days of coaching: now a rather seedy place of resident market-gardeners and tramping hop-pickers. The old “George and Dragon” inn, that in the Queen Annean sort faces you on approach and, as it were, plants its considerable bulk half-way into the road, as though to dare your passing, has been furbished up in the public-house kind, and without difficulty stops the passage of most. It has a portico with pillars painted and grained to resemble real marble; but the veins are too preposterous, and the much more real compo underneath peeps out, like the obvious advertisement in a badly written puff.

If I were an amateur of ugly houses—which the Lord forbid—I would turn to the right-hand here and make for Downe, which is two miles distant. For there, by the pond of that pretty village, stands the hideous mansion in which Darwin lived, and where, in 1882, he died of a chill caught in prowling at night on the lawn with a dark lantern, studying earthworms. A carpenter near by preserves the coffin, with inscription all complete, in which the great naturalist was to have been laid (but for some reason was not), and strangely morbid people, with gruesome ideas of sight-seeing, go numerously to see it.

Keeping, however, to the main road and on to Green Street Green, we cannot altogether avoid the ugly, which appears, very large and brutal, in the Oak Brewery. I am told it is a famous brewing firm, but one willingly forgets their name, and only knows that their buildings are ugly and sooty, and look dry and make one feel thirsty. Perhaps there is more in that than meets the eye.

Green Street Green really has a green: a thing which in a world where New College, Oxford, and the numerous Newports throughout the country are among the oldest of institutions and places, and where villages with the prefix “Great” are almost inevitably among the smallest, was by no means to be counted upon as a certainty. And not only has Green Street Green a green, but it is rather a large and a not unbeautiful specimen. But perhaps its most striking feature is the extraordinary number of old City of London cast-iron posts, indicating the boundaries of the old Coal and Wine Dues area. It seems as though the City, having delimited those bounds in a fifteen-miles radius from London, and come at last, full circle, to Green Street Green, found itself with a surplus stock of posts, and so set them up here, rather than be at the trouble of taking them home again.

It was somewhere near here that, about 1783, a malefactor who had robbed the mail was hanged in chains, upon the scene of his crime. A house was formerly pointed out, with a window bricked up at that time in order to shut out the view of the blackened body of the robber swinging and circling on his gibbet.

Pratt’s Bottom, the next of the hamlets strung so numerously, like beads, upon this portion of the Hastings Road, is a mile and a half ahead.

It was here, on the night of August 27th, 1841, that the down Hastings Mail met with the first of the two misadventures that befell it on this occasion. The coach had passed through the toll-gate that then stood here, and was going at about eight miles an hour, when it ran over an old woman seated in the middle of the road, helplessly drunk. The apparent truth of the old saying that Providence especially looks after fools, drunkards, and children lost none of its point here, for the coach and horses, in some marvellous way, passed over her without doing her any injury except a slight bruise on the forehead, supposed to have been caused by the drag-chain. By some almost miraculous interposition, the horses seem to have dashed past on either side of her. The coach was stopped, and the passengers and guard, naturally thinking her days were ended by her being run over or kicked to death, got nervously down to remove what they thought was at least a dying, if not an already dead, creature, when they were assailed by a vigorous torrent of abuse. Somewhat relieved by this evidence that she could not be very seriously hurt, they picked her up, and, as she was much too drunk to walk, placed her on the grass by the roadside, out of the way of the traffic. Then the coach started again; but they had not gone beyond two miles when, through the clear air of a very beautiful night, the coachman saw a number of waggons ahead, approaching. He called to the guard to blow his horn, which the guard accordingly did, when the waggons drew off to one side. Unfortunately they were drawn to their off-side, directly into the path of the on-coming mail, which dashed into Barnett’s Tunbridge van, at the head of them. The van was hurled violently into the hedge, and the coach, going off at an angle from this terrific impact, then went full tilt into a hay-wain. The splinter-bar ran under the shafts of the wain and so, happily for the passengers, kept the coach from crashing over; but the shock of the encounter flung the coachman from his seat and the wheels went over his body. He rolled over and moaned piteously, but never spoke again. Carried into the “Polhill Arms,” he shortly expired there.

Rough-and-ready roadside repairs were effected and the coach went on to Riverhead, but the passengers, thoroughly unnerved by the chances and disasters of this ominous night, preferred to walk on to that village, three miles and a half away, where, at the “White Hart,” they rested.

The surviving toll-house at Pratt’s Bottom is neighboured by a signpost which directs to Knockholt, to Sevenoaks, to Chelsfield, and—to the Workhouse: i.e. the workhouse we have just passed at Lock’s Bottom. That way also leads to London, but that is merely an incidental matter.

THE OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PRATT’S BOTTOM.

The gently swelling hills at this point are composed of a stratum of pebbles, mixed with a proportion of flints: the product of vastly remote geological ages. These pebbles have given its Saxon name to the neighbouring village of Chelsfield, which is Cealch-field or Chesilfield = the field of pebbles; just as the not far distant Chelsham and Chiselhurst, with similar pebbles, are, in the same way, Pebble Home and Pebble Wood.

XIII

At Pratt’s Bottom there is an interesting parting of the ways. The straight road on to Sevenoaks, by way of Polhill, is modern, having been made in 1836. Before that time the route lay up along by the dangerously acute turning to the right, where the old toll-house stands, to the weary ascent of Rushmore, or Richmore Hill, and to Knockholt Pound. Ogilby, in his “Britannia” of 1675 shows a map of this road to “Nokeholt,” as he calls it, with “Ye Porcupine inne” on the right-hand, near the summit; and a “Porcupine” inn is there to this day.

At the foot of the rise stands the “Bull’s Head” inn, itself of a considerable age, picturesquely faced by a row of old elms, and just beyond you may notice in the hollow on the right hand, where the modern schools stand, an unreformed piece of the original old road, going very steeply and stonily in a loop, and rejoining the present route a quarter of a mile onwards. A white house, now a farmhouse, just before reaching the “Porcupine,” is still sometimes called by the older rustics “New Stables.” It was a posting-house in the old days. At Knockholt, where, having reached the topmost eyrie of the downs, the road turns left, the “Harrow” inn, that was once the house of call for the carriers and waggoners of the Sevenoaks road, still stands.

When the chronicler of these things has explored the old way to Sevenoaks and the new it remains more than ever a mystery why this circuitous way was ever followed, and why so many generations of travellers should have been content to continue along it when a considerable distance might have been saved, a less arduous climb encountered, and a much less dangerous descent made by following the line of country now covered by the modern road.

At Knockholt one has come to a very bleak and inhospitable place, as may be seen by that famous landmark, Knockholt Beeches, not far from the ancient route. The Beeches, it is well known, are situated on the loftiest view-point of the North Downs, and form as windy an outlook as it is possible to conceive; but in those days travellers did not travel for the sake of the views on the way.

KNOCKHOLT BEECHES.

It is de rigueur among the circles that frequent the site of the Beeches to call it “Knock’olt.” To pronounce the name in any other way would seem to them the sheerest affectation. The spot is, in fact, dedicated by common consent to the beanfeaster on week-days and to the sporting publican on Sundays, who drives his best barmaid out in a flashy trap, and has lunch at the neighbouring inn, known to the vulgar herd as the “Crahn.” Whether it be due to the strong liquors of the “Crown” or to the bracing quality of the breezes I do not know, but the sheer abandonment of the merry-making at the Beeches can excel even that of the ’Eath on a Bank Holiday. “The ’Eath?” you ask. Why, yes; there is only one possible ’Eath in this connection—that of ’Ampstead.

A PHYLLIS OF KNOCKHOLT.

From Knockholt Beeches the eye ranges to the Crystal Palace, the enormity of it a little excused by distance; and the Tower Bridge and the dome of St. Paul’s are easily to be identified. But those familiar objects soon pall, and the yearnful music of the concertina and the mazy dance commonly occupy the all-too-swiftly fading afternoon. ’Arry and ’Arriet exchange hats in the spirit of fellowship that has come down to them from the remote ages when semi-savage ancestors swapped headgear at their feasts to typify equality one with the other; although I suspect that if you told ’Arry and his “donah” that they do what they do because their ancient ancestors were accustomed to do it, they would promptly tell you to “shut it, guv’nor.” And they would properly be resentful, for every one prefers to think “I am I,” self-actuated, automobilous, self-contained, and patterned on no model.

And at last, arms round waists, ’Arriet crowned with a bowler, and ’Arry’s cheeks swept by the “ostridge” feathers of her hat, they go back in the solemn twilight to the waggonettes, singing the latest songs of the Halls.

But to resume the old road, interrupted too long by this interlude.

A stark, forbidding plateau of swede and mangold-wurtzel fields follows from the hamlet of Knockholt Pound, through which the road runs, unfenced, like a footpath. Then it plunges, with little warning, down the southern face of the hills and goes hazardously corkscrewing to the levels, far below. Down there, on the right hand, through the hedges, is Chevening, and you look down, like the rooks and crows, upon the roofs of church and mansion, situated, as Mr. Thomas Hardy would say, in his sesquipedalian fashion, “as in an isometric drawing.”

This, indeed, is the well-known “Madamscourt” Hill, so styled from time immemorial, although the name derives from the estate of Morant’s Court, at the foot. There is, at any rate, no lady in this case, and the direction, cherchez la femme, is entirely out of order.

The cyclist passes in a flash a large white house on the left hand, half-way down, and is too engrossed upon the problem of whether he will succeed in reaching the bottom safely to notice it. The house, now a villa, was in the old days of the road a very fine inn, called the “Star,” and from it the hill is still known to many of the country-folk as “Star Hill.” The exceeding steepness of the hill gave the “Star” the excellent custom it enjoyed until the way was diverted, and thus abolished the jolly days of the old road.

The coaches wagged so slowly to the summit that the passengers commonly walked quicker to the hill-top, and were already enjoying the very choice fare provided when the weary team pulled up at the door. The horses had, of course, to be rested, and as no one in those hospitable days could think of not offering coachman and guard some liquid token of their esteem, it was often a considerable time before the journey was resumed.

Just below the old inn the “Pilgrim’s Way” from Winchester to Canterbury crossed the road, making for Otford, along the sunny southern slopes of the downs.

At last, gaining the level, the old coach-road joins the modern route at the “Rose and Crown,” Dunton Green.

XIV

The present road to Sevenoaks from Pratt’s Bottom is closely neighboured by the South Eastern Railway, running in a deep chalk cutting and then disappearing in the grim mouth of Polhill Tunnel, one and-a-half mile long. The mephitic breath of the tunnel, bellying sulphureously out and flying in noisome wisps over the road, would be a good converting agent for those who, believing in eternal punishment and the Pit, have not yet ordered their lives accordingly; and you who look down there think it rather surprising that railways with dreadful tunnels have not yet been pressed into missionary service by those who will not renounce the traditional Hell of sulphur and fire. Believers, convey your awful examples hither. Bring them to a belief in an Eternity of that, only hotter, and you shall have them instantaneously on their knees, earnestly making resolutions to turn from their wickedness, and live.

A station, now called “Knockholt,” is planted here. It was formerly styled “Halstead,” from the village of that name, half a mile away; but, to avoid any possibility of confusion with another Halstead, in Essex, it was given this name, although Knockholt is nearly three miles distant.

The felled trees, wooden shanties, and sawmills here beside the road, at May’s Farm, give the place rather the air of some scene of backwoods activity in America.

From here the road gradually rises to the crest of Polhill, on the commanding range of the North Downs. The “Polhill Arms,” standing on the left hand, marks the beginning of the long descent into the Weald, very thoroughly masked and the magnificent view down to Sevenoaks hidden by a dense screen of beeches and firs. Something else is masked by those trees: a great modern fort, with emplacements for heavy guns, built up here for the defence of London, as part of a scheme comprising some sixteen forts forming an irregular circle around the metropolis at a radius of about twenty miles, and designed to check a sudden descent of any possible enemy upon the capital.

London has been held by military experts to be peculiarly open to such a danger; hence the forts of Polhill, Farningham, Dartford, Merstham, Box Hill, Pewley Hill, Esher, and others. But Englishmen, official or otherwise, are so used to considering the likelihood of invasion remote that, although many of the sites for forts have been purchased, it has been found impracticable to obtain sufficient money from Parliament to complete the ring and to thoroughly fortify these approaches. Parliament looks with suspicion upon Service proposals, and since the scandals of the great Boer War those suspicions have been very generally shared by the nation at large, which looks upon the methods of the War Office as those of a war office in comic opera.

It is a tawny-coloured roadway that swoops down from the summit of Polhill, between the sandy banks of a wooded cutting, to Dunton Green. Half-way down, the trees and the cutting give place to open country, and the hill itself goes by another name: that of Sepham Hill.

Down by Dunton Green, looking backwards, the hills, those noble North Downs, are seen to go terracing away beautifully east and west, their great, green, rounded shoulders dimpled with folds and gullies, shaggy here and there with belts of trees, or scarred outrageously with great gashes of chalk-pits, where the lime-burners every day demolish yet another fragment of picturesque scenery and roast it in limekilns, to the end that it may go towards the making of mortar and mean streets. There goes Old England, in mortar, to feed the spreading tentacles of the towns.

Just such a chalk-pit is that huge scar, beside the hill we have just descended, where who shall say how many tons are excavated weekly? What would Ruskin have said of it? Something superlative, without doubt. I think I hear him: “accursed,” “damnable,” he says, and Dr. Samuel Johnson, in the spirit-world, discussing the question with him, decides magisterially, after his wont: “The point is, sir, whether you are to use the materials Nature has given us for the improvement of man’s condition in the world, or to neglect them in order to preserve the savage wastes of a desolate country-side, to gratify the diseased fancies of people who call themselves artists. Sir, let us take a walk down the Elysian equivalent of Fleet Street!”

AN OLD WAYSIDE COTTAGE, BELOW POLHILL.

Dunton Green, formerly Donington, is a rather Cockneyfied hamlet that is at present halting between expansion and a few regretful reminiscences of a past rural state. It is very populous, and the children live and have their playground in the open road.

LONGFORD.

At Longford, to which we come after Dunton Green, the river Darenth is crossed, at an early stage of its career, by a bridge that long ago superseded the ford. It is still a narrow bridge, with a roadway only twenty feet wide, but it has been already once widened and once renewed, as two tablets, built into the wall on either side, declare:

This Bridge was renewed by order of the Commissioners of Sevenoakes Turnpike.

William Covell, Mason.

And

This Bridge was Widen’d in March a.d. 1813 by order of the Seven Oaks Turnpike Road.

J. Smith, Archt.

The Darenth rises at Westerham, only five miles away; but there is already a sufficient head of water in the infant stream to serve the purpose of a large flour-mill standing here.

Beyond it, a dusty stretch leads into Riverhead, past a strange little outlying group of houses lying back from the road and fronted with the rows of lime-trees that give it the name of Linden Square. Local gossip declares the place to have once been a coaching inn, but exact information is utterly unprocurable.

XV

That the village of Riverhead belongs very largely to Lord Amherst is obvious enough, in the highly ornate terra-cotta tablets on the houses, bearing a gigantic A crowned with an earl’s coronet and ensigned with a shield charged with three spears. Also the “Amherst Arms,” with its sign exhibiting two Red Indians and the motto, “Constantia et Virtute,” proclaims the lordship.

Riverhead is a pretty little village, with a puzzling number of branching roads, situated at the foot of the long steep rises to Sevenoaks. Its name comes from the source of the Darenth being near at hand. The church that looks so picturesque in the illustration is, in fact, a piece of very bad early nineteenth-century Gothic, designed and built in 1831 by Decimus Burton, whose sympathies were entirely with the classic styles, as will be acknowledged when it is said that he it was who designed the Arch and screen at Hyde Park Corner and the lodges at the various gates of Hyde Park.

The corner of Riverhead selected for illustration here includes old and new. The gabled houses on the left are recent; the weathered wall on the right, with the curious little two-spouted fountain, is old; and very old and weather-worn is the almost entirely illegible notice-board declaring that something will be done to somebody doing something or other, followed by “£5.” It is very vague and terrifying.

“Montreal,” a beautiful park on the right hand of the ascent to Sevenoaks, is an historic place, the seat of Lord Amherst (Earl Amherst and Baron Holmesdale), descendant of that great soldier of the eighteenth century, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief.

The estate of Montreal came to this family in the seventeenth century, when a Jeffrey Amherst of that period, a barrister, acquired it. The place, then called “Brooks,” had been a seat of the ancient Colepepper family. The famous soldier was born here, and it is not a little curious to observe that his equally great contemporary, Wolfe, whose most renowned exploits were performed in the same series of campaigns in Canada, was born close at hand, at Westerham.

Amherst was born in 1717, and commenced his career as page to the first Duke of Dorset at Knole, afterwards learning the profession of arms in Germany, then, as now, the military school par excellence. How he fought in the victory of Dettingen or in the defeat of Fontenoy does not concern us here. His chance came when Pitt, alarmed at the policy of the French in Canada, gave him high command in those territories; and he justified the selection.

RIVERHEAD.

He was no kid-glove warrior. Sentiment was no portion of his equipment in the field, and if there were any in his composition he reserved it until his campaigns were fought to a finish.

To some of his doings or proposals the term “methods of barbarism,” shamefully applied by Little Englanders to the rosewater conduct of our modern campaigns in South Africa, might well have been attached. In warfare with the Indians he was so enraged with the atrocities committed by them upon captured officers that he contemplated employing bloodhounds and spreading smallpox among the redskins. That last horror was, fortunately, sternly vetoed, not only for the sake of humanity, but from the very reasonable fear that the scourge, once let loose, might destroy not merely the “noble red man,” but the white man as well.

Probably no one fully informed ever applied to Amherst the term of “dashing.” His methods as a general were calculating and deliberate; he was, indeed, the very antithesis of the meteoric, impulsive Wolfe. Those qualities served his country quite as well, and himself better; for although he was not idolised as a hero, he succeeded, on his return home, in obtaining the post of Commander-in-Chief.

To be regarded as a hero, it is generally considered necessary to be killed in the performance of the heroic deed, which does not seem altogether satisfactory, and is indeed rather discouraging.

However that may be, a grateful country, in the person of George the Third, eventually offered Amherst an earldom. He refused it, and accepted a barony instead. He held the post of Commander-in-Chief for many years, and only resigned, under pressure, in 1795 in favour of the Duke of York, the king’s son, whose military exploits are summed up in the once-popular lines:

The brave old Duke of York,

He had ten thousand men:

He marched them up to the top of a hill,

And marched them down again;

a specimen of minstrelsy which concludes with the obvious statements that—

When they were up, they were up,

And when they were down, they were down,

And when they were half-way up

They were neither up nor down.

Amherst lived but two years after the close of his public career, dying in 1797, at the age of eighty-one.

He it was who, demolishing the old house at Riverhead, built the present exceedingly plain stone mansion, and re-named house and park “Montreal.” There was, in fact, something in the scenery around Sevenoaks that reminded him vividly of those great northern pine-clad territories of America, where he had warred with such distinction against the French and the redskins; and there is a spot on the road from Sevenoaks to Ightham, where the red-stemmed pines grow thick and a mysterious woodland hush enshrouds the place, so keenly reminiscent of the scene of his action at Crown Point in 1759, that he rechristened it by that name. The spot—in the woodlands of Seal Chart—may readily be found to-day, for it is marked by the Crown Point inn, whose sign, the “Sir Jeffrey Amherst,” exhibiting a picture of the warrior himself brooding over the scene of his exploit, depends picturesquely from a tree-trunk.

A tall obelisk, built rather precariously of rubble, stands on a rabbit-infested mound in the park of “Montreal,” in a vista opening from the house, and is itself surrounded by weird pine-trees. It bears long inscriptions reviewing those military operations. One side is dedicated to a “most able statesman” (by whom William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, is indicated), and another commemorates the meeting here of Amherst with his two younger brothers—John, Admiral of the Blue, and William, Lieutenant-General.

It was an era when England was fighting all the world, and had need of such commanders.

The long list of military successes is stupendous:

• Dedicated
• to that most able
• Statesman
• during whose Administration
• Cape Breton and Canada were conquered,
• and from whose Influence
• the British Arms derived
• a Degree of Lustre
• unparallell’d in past Ages.
• Fort Levi surrendered 25^th August 1760
• Isle au Noix abandoned 28^th August 1760
• Montreal surrendered
• and with it all Canada and
• Ten French Battalions lay’d
• down their Arms 8^th Sept. 1760
• S^t. John’s, Newfoundland
• retaken 18^th Sept. 1762.
• Louisbourg surrendered
• and Six French Battalions
• Prisoners of War, 26^th July 1758
• Port du Quesne taken possession of 24^th Nov. 1758
• Niagara surrendered 25^th July 1759
• Tonderoga[2] taken possession of 26^th July 1759
• Crown Point taken possession of 4^th August 1759
• Quebec capitulated 18^th Sept. 1759.
• To commemorate
• the providential and happy meeting
• of three Brothers
• on this, their Paternal Ground
• on the 25^th January 1764
• after a six Years glorious War
• in which the three were successfully engaged
• in various Climes, Seasons and Services.

[2] I.e. Ticonderoga.

XVI

The long, long ascent to Sevenoaks, which crowns a ridge seven hundred feet above the sea-level, does not lack beauty, lined as it is for a considerable distance with hedgerow elms. But it puts on another kind of beauty at night, for as you come past the railway-station, and look down in the darkness upon the galaxy of red and green signal lights, it seems like a lavish Arabian Nights display of rubies and emeralds spread out there, in the black cutting.

The name of the railway-station, on the other hand, is vulgarity itself. It is known as “Tub’s Hill,” to distinguish it from the other Sevenoaks station known (from the public-house outside) as “Bat and Ball.”

Sevenoaks is greatly indebted to the South Eastern Railway for a matter quite outside railway accommodation. The town had long and vainly been seeking a good water-supply, and was still upon that quest when this branch of the South-Eastern was under construction in 1867. What the town wished to find, and could not, the contractors for the Riverhead Tunnel found, very much against their will. They struck a spring which for a time drowned them out and cost enormous sums to divert; but it gave to the town its present abundant supply.

There can be no place with more divergent roads than those at the entrance to Sevenoaks. They branch off singly, in pairs and triply, acutely and gradually, and all with a specious artfulness leading the unwary anywhere but into the town, and by choice into suburban roads that presently end in wastes of shingle, heaps of building materials, and uncompleted houses.

The old Sevenoaks of coaching days is mostly gone, or disguised out of recognition. There was then a “cage,” or lock-up, in the town, with a pond in front of it and a ducking-stool for nagging wives or scolding neighbours. There was also a toll-gate and a weigh-bridge, where heavy waggons paid according to their showing in tare and tret. Sevenoaks was, in short, fully equipped with the engines of civilisation as understood at that period.

SIGN OF THE “BLACKBOY” INN.

The “Chequers” inn, which still projects a somewhat old-fashioned front beyond the general building line, is a kind of “Jack o’ Both Sides,” for it has another, and quite different, frontage on to the parallel street. It was in those days the starting and arrival point of a coach to and from London, supported by a select few who had business in the metropolis, and from that circumstance was called the “United Friends.” Peacock, the coachman, was said to bear a striking resemblance to Tony Weller, which is not remarkable when we consider that Dickens constructed that plethoric, red-cheeked person from the typical stage-coachman of his age. There were then, in fact, “Tony Wellers,” like “Samivel’s” father, on every road. The coach was jointly owned by Benjamin Worthy Horne, John Stephens, and John Newman.

The “Wheatsheaf” has long since been transformed into offices, and the “Crown,” that once owned a gallows-sign stretching across the road, has been given a modernised grey stucco front, and looks rather like a banking establishment. Among minor inns, the “Blackboy,” displaying the effigy of a little nigger, is of considerable age, and takes its name from the now extinct local Blackboy family who flourished greatly in Sevenoaks during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The more modern inns include the “Bricklayers’ Arms,” whose device—not granted by the College of Arms—is an ingenious arrangement of plumb-board and trowel.

SIGN OF THE “BRICKLAYERS’ ARMS.”

But all Sevenoaks inns, past or present, yield in interest to the fine old mansion facing the high road near the church, and known as “The Old House.” All details of its history have been lost, and it is only known that it was once the “Three Cats”—probably “The Cats”—inn, celebrated by that late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century poet, Tom Durfey, who was kept by his patron, the sixth Earl of Dorset, at Knole as a mirth-maker and general bacchanalian laureate. You cannot imagine a poet with the Christian name of Tom being other than a bard of the barrel; and as for Tom Durfey, he was the most bacchic songster, and the dirtiest rhymester of all the dirty dogs of his age: which is why he is so reprobated by the good—and so read.

In his song in praise of the “Incomparable Strong Beer of Knoll,” he says:

There’s Adams, in hoping to pleasure his town,

Declares the best French wine is sold at the “Crown,”

And well it may be, for he takes good rates,

And so does my jolly sleek friend at the “Cats.”

But to strong beer my praises must come,

Leave them to isinglass, egg-whites, and stum.

Beer, fine as Burgundy, lifts high my soul

When Joudrain perks up for the honour of Knoll.

The “Cats” of course derived its sign from the arms of the lords of the manor, the Sackvilles of Knole, whose “supporters” are two leopards argent spotted sable, easily to be mistaken by the rustics of a land where leopards are not among the native fauna, for cats. It must have been an aristocrat among inns, for it remains still one of the noblest houses in Sevenoaks, with handsome red brick frontage of the time of William the Third or Queen Anne, with beautiful gardens in the rear, and others, equally beautiful, in front, on the opposite side of the road. It must have ceased to be an inn shortly after Tom Durfey wrote, for it has been in occupation as a private residence of the Austen family since about the middle of the eighteenth century.

Opposite is the very beautiful, characteristically “Queen Anne”-style house, “The Chantry,” standing next the church and on the site of a demolished ecclesiastical building. It has lately been most exquisitely restored.

The church itself, a large building with a tall tower, is of a somewhat uninteresting Perpendicular design. The curious may notice in the churchyard a stone to “Milenda,” wife of one Joseph Kennard.

A monument in the north aisle to William Lambarde, who wrote the “Perambulation of Kent,” and died in 1601, was removed from Greenwich. Among the others, there are singularly modest tablets to the Amhersts. The most important is that to the charitable Lady Boswell, who died 1692, aged apparently thirty-seven, for the inscription says: “During xxxvii years she conversed amõg us mortals.” She left sums for “fifteen of the poorest Children to be instructed in y^e Catechism of ye Church of England,” and for the much more practical purpose of teaching them to “write and cast accompts” and to apprentice them to “handycraft trades or employments.” Her school is a prominent, and very grim, object on entering the town.

OLD MANSION, FORMERLY THE “CATS” INN.

The most famous native of Sevenoaks is undoubtedly the mediæval Sir William Sevenoke, whose career was remarkably romantic. According to all received accounts, he was a foundling, discovered as a baby in the hollow of a tree in the immediate neighbourhood of the town by one Sir William Rumpstede, who named him “William” after himself, and “Sevenoke,” or “Sevenoaks,” after the town; brought him up, and apprenticed him to Hugh de Bois, citizen and ferrer (or ironmonger), of London.

Let us linger a moment to consider how popular in ancient times was this finding of neglected children in casual places by charitable knights. The frequency of it is a little suspicious. The most famous foundling incident (after that of Moses) is the finding, early in the fourteenth century, of one of the ancestors of the Stanleys. According to the legend, Sir Thomas de Latham was walking with his lady, who was childless, in his park, when they drew near to a wild and lonely spot where they found a baby boy, dressed in rich swaddling clothes, in an eagle’s nest. The knight acted astonishment; the good unsuspecting lady looked upon the baby as a present from heaven. It was adopted and educated in the name of Latham, eventually succeeding to his father’s and his adopted mother’s property. In the course of years this foundling’s daughter Isabel married Sir John Stanley, who adopted the Eagle and Child crest still borne by the Earls of Derby.

But to return to William Sevenoke. He became a grocer, and eventually, in 1418, Lord Mayor of London, became Member of Parliament, was knighted, and was granted for coat of arms seven acorns. To him Sevenoaks owes its endowed Grammar School and almshouses. Whether they were descendants of his whose name became corrupted into Sennocke is not quite clear, but it is quite certain that the unlovely name of Snooks derives from a further debasement of it.