Transcriber’s Note:

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

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

THE “WONDER,” LONDON AND SHREWSBURY COACH.       From a Print after J. Pollard.

The Holyhead Road:/ THE MAIL-COACH ROAD TO DUBLIN

By Charles G. Harper

Author of “The Brighton Road,” “The Portsmouth Road,” “The Dover Road,” “The Bath Road,” “The Exeter Road,” “The Great North Road,” and “The Norwich Road”

Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time Prints and Pictures

Vol. I. LONDON TO BIRMINGHAM

London: Chapman & Hall

ltd. 1902

[All rights reserved]

Preface

“The olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be vanquished without toil”—those are the days mourned by Ruskin, who had little better acquaintance with them than afforded by his childish journeys, when his father, a prosperous wine-merchant, travelled the country in a carriage with a certain degree of style. Regrets are, under such circumstances, easily to be understood, just as were those of the old coach-proprietors, innkeepers, coachmen, postboys, and all who depended upon road-travel for their existence; but few among travellers who lived in the days when the change was made from road to rail had feelings of that kind, else railways would not have proved so immediately successful. It has been left for a later era to discover the charm and rosy glamour of old road-faring days, a charm not greatly insisted upon in the literature of those times, which, instead of being rich in praise of the road, is fruitful in accounts of the miseries of travel. Pepys, on the Portsmouth Road in 1668, fearful of losing his way at night, as had often happened to him before; Thoresby, in 1714 and later years, on the Great North Road, thanking God that he had reached home safely; Horace Walpole, on the Brighton Road in 1749, finding the roads almost impassable, therefore, and reasonably enough, “a great damper of curiosity”; Arthur Young for years exhausting the vocabulary of abuse on roads in general; and Jeffrey in 1831, at Grantham, looking dismally forward to being snowed up at Alconbury Hill—these are a few instances, among many, which go to prove, if proof were necessary, that travelling was regarded then as a wholly unmitigated evil.

But, quite apart from such considerations, there is a charm clinging about the bygone and the out-of-date wholly lacking in things contemporary. The Romans who constructed and travelled along their roads could not find in them the interest we discover, and the old posting-houses and inns frequented by our grandfathers must have seemed to them as matter-of-fact as we now think our own railway hotels. It is, indeed, just BECAUSE the old roads and the wayside inns are superseded by the rail and the modern hotel, and because they are altogether removed from the everyday vulgarity of use and competition, that they have assumed their romantic aspect, together with that which now surrounds the slow and inconvenient coaches and the harmful unnecessary highwayman, long since become genuine antiques and puppets for the historical novelist to play with.

The Holyhead Road, in its long course towards the Irish Sea, holds much of this old romance, and not a little of a newer sort. Cities whose history goes back to the era of the Saxons who first gave this highway the name of “Watling Street,” lie along these many miles; and other cities and towns there are whose fame and fortunes are of entirely modern growth. Some have decayed, more have sprung into vigorous life, and, in answer to the demand that arose, a hundred years ago, for improved roads, the old highway itself was remodelled, in the days that are already become distant.

But better than the cities and towns and villages along these two hundred and sixty miles is the scenery, ranging from the quiet pastoral beauties of the Home Counties to the rocks and torrents, the mountains and valleys of North Wales. This road and its story are a very epitome of our island’s scenery and history. History of the larger sort—that tells of the setting up and the putting down of Kings and Princes—has marched in footprints of blood down the road, and left a trail of fire and ashes; but it may well be thought, with one who has written the history of the English people, that the doings of such are not all the story: that the village church, the mill by the riverside, the drowsy old town, “the tolls of the market-place, the brasses of its burghers in the church, the names of its streets, the lingering memory of its guilds, the mace of its mayor, tell us more of the past of England than the spire of Sarum or the martyrdom of Canterbury.”

CHARLES G. HARPER.

Petersham,

Surrey,

April 1902.

List of Illustrations

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD

London to Birmingham

The Watling Street, from Weedon Beck to Oakengates and Ketley

[Click anywhere on map for high resolution image.]

SKETCH MAP OF THE HOLYHEAD ROAD, SHOWING ALSO THE ROMAN WATLING STREET FROM DOVER AND THE ROMAN STATIONS ON THE WAY.
HOLYHEAD ROAD ━━━━━━━━ WATLING STREET ────────
TELFORD’S NEW ROAD THROUGH ANGLESEY ╸╸╸╸╸╸╸╸

I

“Peace hath its victories, no less renowned than war;” and there is nothing more remarkable than the engineering triumphs that land the Irish Member of Parliament, fresh from the Division Lobby at Westminster, at North Wall, Dublin, spouting treason, in nine hours and a quarter, or bring the Irish peasant, with the reek of the peat-smoke still in his clothes, and the mud of his native bogs not yet dried on his boots, to Euston in the same space of time.

But a hundred years ago, when the peaceful labours of the engineer had not begun to annihilate space and time, and the Union of Great Britain and Ireland had only just been effected, no such ready transit was possible, and our great-grandfathers reckoned their journeys between the two capitals in days instead of hours. The Holyhead Road, known to our fathers and ourselves, was not in existence; and Liverpool (and even Parkgate, near Chester) was as often the point of embarkation for Ireland as Holyhead. The journey from London to Dublin was then of uncertain length, determined by such fluctuating conditions as the season of the year, the condition of the roads, and the winds of St. George’s Channel—sometimes smooth, but more often stormy.

What the road was, and what it became, shall be the business of these pages to relate.

Close upon two hundred years ago, then, when Queen Anne was just dead, and the Elector of Hanover had ascended the throne of England as George I., the way to Holyhead was, in great measure, an affair of individual taste and fancy. Some travellers went by way of Oxford and Worcester, others by Woburn, Northampton, Lutterworth, Stafford, Nantwich, and Chester; some kept the route now known as the Holyhead Road as far as Stonebridge, on the other side of Coventry, and thence by Castle Bromwich and Aldridge Heath; others followed it past Shrewsbury and turned off at Chirk for Wrexham; while others yet had their own preferences, and reached Holyhead goodness knows how—themselves, perhaps, least of all. Those were the times when, as Pennant tells us, the hardy country gentlemen rode horseback. Thickly wrapped in riding cloaks, and with jack-boots up to their hips, they splashed through mud and mire, making light of occasional falls, and so journeyed between London and Holyhead in perhaps six days, if they were both active and fortunate. Those travellers commonly rode post-horses, changing their mounts at well-known stages on the way. The system took its origin from the establishment of postmasters by the Post Office in 1635, when the charge for an able horse was 2½d. a mile. None but duly authorised persons were then permitted to supply horses. In 1658, according to an advertisement in the Mercurius Politicus, the mileage had become 3d. As time went on this monopoly was abolished, and most innkeepers supplied horses for those hardy riders who despised the newfangled coaches. The earliest mention of a coach on this road is found in the above-named paper, under date of April 9th, 1657: “For the convenient accommodation of passengers from and betwixt London and West Chester, there is provided several stage-coaches, which go from the George Inn, without Aldersgate, upon every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—to Coventry in two days, for twenty-five shillings; to Stone in three days, for thirty shillings; and to Chester in four days, for thirty-five shillings; and from thence do return upon the same days, which is performed with much ease to the passengers, having fresh horses once a day.”

It may shrewdly be surmised that, as the Chester coach of 1739, mentioned by Pennant, did not succeed in performing the journey under six days, the coach of 1657 did not find it possible to do it in four; and this suspicion seems warranted by an advertisement in the Mercurius Politicus of March 24th, 1659, probably emanating from the same persons:—

“These are to give notice, that from the George Inn, without Aldersgate, goes every Monday and Thursday a coach and four able horses, to carry passengers to Chester in five days, likewise to Coventry, Cosell (Coleshill), Cank, Litchfield, Stone, or to Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Newport, Whitchurch, and Holywell, at reasonable rates, by us, who have performed it two years.

“William Dunstan.

“Henry Earle.

“William Fowler.”

It will be observed that an alternative route, through Birmingham, is announced, probably to suit the wishes of those who might chance to book seats. The travelling was by no means comfortable, and in 1663 a young gentleman is found writing to his father: “I got to London on Saturday last; my journey was noe way pleasant, being forced to ride in the boote all the way. The company that came up with me were persons of greate qualitie, as knightes and ladyes. This travell hath soe indisposed mee, that I am resolved never to ride up again in the coatch.” He probably rode post ever afterwards.

In 1681 a coach was running (or crawling) between London and Shrewsbury, by way of Newport Pagnell. Sir William Dugdale, travelling by it from London to Coleshill, says: “The first night we stopped at Woburn, the second at Hill Morton, near Rugby, and on the third we proceeded to Coleshill.” Thence it went along the old Chester Road to Aldridge Heath and Brownhills, and by the Watling Street from that point to Wellington. This Shrewsbury stage was robbed on January 30th, 1703, in the neighbourhood of Brownhills, by a gang of men and women, who, after they had plundered the passengers, met three county attorneys, whom they also robbed. One of the attorneys had what is described as a “porte mantel.” In it, among other things, was a pair of shoes, in which the owner had hidden twenty guineas. The thieves threw the shoes away, and when they had departed he happily regained this most valuable portion of his luggage. Other wayfarers were not so fortunate on encountering this hybrid gang of desperadoes; for, ten days later, when two drovers, fresh from Newcastle Fair, with bags of money in their pockets, came jogging along the road, they were set upon and robbed. One was killed and the other dangerously wounded. Two days after this exploit, growing bolder, the gang attacked the High Sheriff of Staffordshire, with his lady and servants, coming from Lichfield Fair, took sixty guineas, and cut off one of the servants’ hands. This was too impudent: the country was scoured, and these murderous ruffians seized. They numbered nine in all, and of them three were women dressed in men’s clothes.

In 1702 the “Wolverhampton and Birmingham Flying Stage Coach” was announced, to go once a week to London, in three days, and set out on the return from the “Rose,” in Smithfield, every Thursday; but this enterprise seems to have been short-lived. Meanwhile, the Chester stage of 1657 and 1659 was still pursuing its steady way; proposing to go the journey in five days, but taking six. The difference between promise and performance is neatly illustrated by Pennant. “In March 1739,” he says, “I changed my Welsh school for one nearer the capital, and travelled in the Chester stage, then no despicable vehicle for country gentlemen. The first day, with much labour, we got from Chester to Whitchurch, 20 miles; the second day to the ‘Welsh Harp’; the third, to Coventry; the fourth, to Northampton; the fifth, to Dunstable; and, as a wondrous effort, on the last to London, before the commencement of night. The strain and labour of six good horses, sometimes eight, drew us through the sloughs of Mireden and other places. We were constantly out two hours before day, and as late at night; and in the depth of winter proportionally later. Families which travelled in their own carriages contracted with Benson & Co., and were dragged up in the same number of days by three sets of able horses.”

“The single gentlemen, then a hardy race, equipped in jack-boots and trousers up to their middle, rode post through thick and thin, and, guarded against the mire, defying the frequent stumble and fall, arose and pursued their journey with alacrity: while in these days their enervated posterity sleep away their rapid journeys in easy chaises, fitted for the conveyance of the soft inhabitants of Sybaris.”

The roads at this time were incredibly bad, no matter the route, and indeed these several ways had their differences originated and continually multiplied by certain lengths of road being impassable at one season, and others equally so on some other occasion. When they were all impassable at one and the same time—a not unusual occurrence—the traveller was indeed in evil case, and the highwayman suffered from great depression of trade. The chief fount of information for travellers at that time was Ogilby’s Britannia, first printed in 1675; a work of which much more will presently be said. This was a thick folio volume containing engraved plates and descriptions of every road in England. Every considerable inn kept a copy of “Ogilby” in those days, for the information of travellers; just as in the modern hotel one finds railway time-tables and county directories as a matter of course. Ogilby was in great request as a work of reference; so greatly indeed, that the early road travellers who thumbed his pages at meal-times and upset their wine over him, or now and again stole a particularly useful map, have rendered clean and perfect copies of early editions not a little difficult to come by. He was much too bulky for carrying about, and so the careful traveller made notes and extracts for use from day to day. Such an excerpt is the yellow and tattered sheet before the present writer, giving manuscript details of how to reach Coventry. But besides copied matter there is a good deal else drawn doubtless from first-hand observation. Coming for instance, to “ffinchley Comon, att y^e galowes keep to y^e right hande” is the direction, and the whole distance is punctuated with the remarks “bad waye,” “a slowe,” and other signs indicating depths of mud and ruggedness of road. “Galowes,” too, recurs with dreadful frequency, probably not because the person who wrote this wanted (like the Fat Boy in Pickwick) to “make yer flesh creep,” or because he was morbidly minded, but for the commonplace reason that gallows made excellent landmarks, and were as common objects of the road then as sign-posts are now.

Dean Swift is the great classic figure on the Holyhead Road at this period; although, to be sure, a very elusive and shadowy one, so far as records of his journeys are concerned. He, too, like Pennant’s hardy single gentlemen, commonly rode horseback, and has left traces of his presence here and there along the road, generally in witty and biting epigrams, written with a diamond ring on the windows of wayside inns. There could scarce, at this time, be anything more naïvely amusing than the pleased surprise he exhibits in a letter written to Pope in 1726, at “the quick change” he made in seven days from London to Dublin “through many nations and languages unknown to the civilised world,” when he had expected the enterprise, “with moderate fortune,” to occupy ten or eleven. “I have often reflected,” he adds, “in how few hours with a swift horse or a strong gale, a man may come among a people as unknown to him as the antipodes.”

II

The question, “How far to Holyhead?” had in old days been a difficult one to answer. It was not only in the uncertainty and variety of routes that the difficulty of accurately measuring the number of miles lay, but in the wild and conflicting ideas as to what really constituted a mile. This uncertainty lasted until the middle of the eighteenth century, when the first milestones since the days of the Romans were erected. It was, in fact, not before 1750, when, as part of their statutory obligations, the numerous Turnpike Trusts began to erect their milestones, that distances began to be publicly and correctly measured. It had already long been known that the mileages computed by the Post Office, in dealing with postmasters and the mails, were very inaccurate throughout the country, and for many years previously compilers of road-books had been accustomed to print two tables of distances; one the “computed” and Post Office mile, and the other the measured mile.

The first of English makers of road-books, John Ogilby, mentioned this discrepancy, so early as 1675, when he published his great work, Britannia. Ogilby who had been commissioned by Charles II. to survey the roads and measure them, did his work thoroughly. He claims to have travelled 40,000 miles in compiling his book, a folio volume of great typographical beauty and exquisitely engraved plans of the roads. In making his survey, he used what he calls a “wheel dimensurator.” Exactly what this was is shown in the beautifully etched title-page by Hollar, to his first edition, where Ogilby himself is seen on horseback, directing the course of two men; one wheeling the instrument, the other checking its measurements. It apparently was a wheel fitted with a handle and wound with a ten-mile length of tape. Trundled along, it unwound the tape, the intermediate distances being noted down by the assistant. Ogilby very soon discovered that although the Post Office gave the mileage to Birmingham and Holyhead respectively as 89 and 208 miles, it was then really 116 and 269 miles. The Post Office mile, which he calls the “vulgar computation,” was therefore practically a third larger than our so-called Statute Mile, dating from 1593 and constituted by a statute of the 35th year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, not so much for the purpose of creating a standard of measurement for the kingdom, as for defining certain limits. That Statute was passed by a Legislature dismayed by the rapid growth of London, and was an enactment forbidding persons to build within three miles of the capital. When it came to the point of defining a mile, it was found that no such measure had ever been officially fixed, and that English, Irish, Scottish, and local miles were of variable lengths. The mile was then taken to be eight “forty-longs,” or furlongs, of forty perches each; a perch to consist of 5½ yards.

That this extraordinary difference between actual distances and those computed by the Post Office should have arisen on all roads is inexplicable, and that it should have remained after Ogilby’s official measurements had proved the “computed” miles utterly wrong is an astonishing proof of the vitality of error. But the real trouble arose with the appearance of milestones along the turnpike roads. They were the cause of much bitterness and contention between postmasters and the Post Office, and between keepers of posting-houses and travellers.

Those who did business for the Post Office claimed extra mileage, and travellers posting to or from Birmingham and Holyhead found themselves charged in the aggregate for 27 or 62 miles extra, as the case might be; which, say at 1s. 3d. a mile for chaise and four horses, was a consideration. Travellers resented this difference and pointed out that, if posting establishments could always have afforded to do certain stages at certain prices, they could continue so to do; to which those men of horses and carriages replied by pointing out that the milestones were official and that they themselves paid more carriage duty on the extra mileage; a generally conclusive retort.

III

The earliest coaches made no pretence of taking the traveller to Holyhead. Chester was the ultima thule of wheeled conveyance when Sir William Dugdale and Pennant kept diaries, or when Swift wrote. We have already seen that the Chester stage took six days, and therefore the horrors of the journey described by Swift about the year 1700, were protracted as well as acute. Whether or not he ever really made the journey by coach is uncertain, but if so, he certainly for ever after rode horseback. But here is his picture of such an experience:—

Resolv’d to visit a far-distant-friend,

A Porter to the Bull and Gate I send,

And bid the man, at all events, engage

Some place or other in the Chester stage.

The man returns—“’Tis done as soon as said;

Your Honour’s sure when once the money’s paid.

My brother whip, impatient of delay,

Puts to at three and swears he cannot stay.”

(Four dismal hours before the break of day.)

Rous’d from sound sleep—thrice call’d—at length I rise,

Yawning, stretch out my arm, half-closed my eyes;

By steps and lanthorn enter the machine,

And take my place—how cordially!—between

Two aged matrons of excessive bulk,

To mend the matter, too, of meaner folk;

While in like mood, jamm’d in on t’other side,

A bullying captain and a fair one ride,

Foolish as fair, and in whose lap a boy—

Our plague eternal, but her only joy.

At last, the glorious number to complete,

Steps in my landlord for that bodkin seat;

When soon, by ev’ry hillock, rut, and stone,

Into each other’s face by turns we’re thrown.

This grandam scolds, that coughs, the captain swears,

The fair one screams and has a thousand fears;

While our plump landlord, train’d in other lore,

Slumbers at ease, nor yet asham’d to snore;

And Master Dicky, in his mother’s lap,

Squalling, at once brings up three meals of pap.

Sweet company! Next time, I do protest, Sir,

I’d walk to Dublin, ere I’d ride to Chester!

YARD OF THE “BULL AND MOUTH,” ST. MARTIN’S-LE-GRAND.       From an old Print.

This engine of torture was, however, well patronised.

The first stage-coach to ply between London and Holyhead was the conveyance promoted chiefly by that enterprising Shrewsbury innkeeper, Robert Lawrence. It started in 1780, and went through Coventry, Castle Bromwich, Birmingham, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Shrewsbury, Llangollen, Corwen, and Conway, thus keeping pretty closely to the course taken by the modern Holyhead Road. It lay the first night at Castle Bromwich, the second at Oswestry, and the third (if God permitted) at Holyhead. Five years later (in the summer of 1785) the first mail-coach to Chester and Holyhead was established, going by Northampton, Welford, Lutterworth, Hinckley, Atherstone, Tamworth, Lichfield, Wolseley Bridge, Stafford, Eccleshall, Woore, Nantwich, Tarporley, Chester, and St. Asaph. This, the only mail route to Holyhead until 1808, measured 278 miles 7 furlongs, and was the longest of all ways. Other roads for many years led by Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon, and were used by some of the smartest coaches to the end of the coaching age; but the shortest route, the great “Parliamentary” road to Holyhead, measures 260½ miles. In 1808 the London, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury Mail, through Oxford, was extended to Holyhead, going by Llangollen, Corwen, and Capel Curig. It ran thus until 1817, when it was transferred to the direct Coventry route. The Holyhead Road had then begun to be reformed, and the direct Mail took precedence over the old “Holyhead and Chester Mail,” still going by its old course.

The “New Holyhead Mail,” as it was officially named, then started from the “Swan with Two Necks,” in Lad Lane, every evening at 7.30, and took 38 hours about the business. In 1826, the year when the Menai Bridge was opened, the time was cut down to 32¾ hours, and in 1830 to 29 hours 17 minutes, the mail arriving at Holyhead at 1.17 on the second morning after it had left London. In 1836 and the last two years of its existence, the journey was performed in 26 hours 55 minutes; the arrival timed for 10.55 p.m.

Here is the time-bill for that last and best achievement:—

The man who made that achievement possible was Thomas Telford. Long before his aid was sought, the question of improving the communications between the two countries had become a burning one. The Irish members, meeting no longer on St. Stephen’s Green, had a grievance in the circumstance of their journeys to the Imperial Parliament at Westminster being both tedious and hazardous, and this question of road-reform was the first raised by them. The Government, in reply, appointed a Commission; Rennie, the foremost engineer of his day, was called in to advise upon the harbours of Holyhead and Howth, and Telford in 1810 to plan the road improvements.

Exactly what the road was like before it was improved under Telford, let the Report of the Commissioners on Holyhead Roads and Harbours tell:—“Many parts are extremely dangerous for a coach to travel upon. From Llangollen to Corwen the road is very narrow, long, and steep; has no side fence, except about a foot and a half of mould or dirt, thrown up to prevent carriages falling down three or four hundred feet into the river Dee. Stage-coaches have been frequently overturned and broken down from the badness of the road, and the mails have been overturned. Between Maerdy, Pont-y-Glyn, and Dinas Hill, there are a number of dangerous precipices, steep hills, and difficult narrow turnings. At Dinas Hill the width of the road is not more than twelve feet at the steepest part of the hill, and with a deep precipice on one side; two carriages cannot pass without the greatest danger. At Ogwen Pool there is a very dangerous place, where the water runs over the road; extremely difficult to pass at flooded times.” Arrived at Bangor there were the dangers of the ferry to be braved, and, after these, 26 miles of the perilous old road across Anglesey, even now to be traced by those curious in these things. What travelling to Holyhead and Dublin was like in those old times may best be shown by quoting an old diary of 1787, of an expedition from Grosvenor Square, London. The party consisted of a coach and four, a post-chaise and pair, and five outriders. They reached Holyhead in four days (expenses, so far, £77 1s. 3d.), and crossed St. George’s Channel at a further cost of £37 2s. 1d.; and cheap, too, as times then were.

The first idea of the Government towards improving the road was to indict twenty-one townships between Shrewsbury and Holyhead. It would have been an excellent notion, only for the fact that those places were quite unable to find the penalties actually recoverable at law, much less to reconstruct the road. A larger view of the necessities of the case had to be taken. The nation was already pledged to the construction of two harbours, and to the nation now fell the duty of making access to Holyhead Harbour moderately safe. The first practical result was the selection of Telford as engineer, to survey and report upon the 109 miles between Shrewsbury and Holyhead. Telford had already carried out many improvements for the Government in the Highlands, and had, years before, as Surveyor to the County of Salop and Engineer of the Ellesmere Canal, acquired a thorough knowledge of the road through North Wales. He made a survey in 1811, but it was not until 1815 that the Government finally adopted his report and that of the Commissioners, and the Treasury found the money for the work. It was then decided that improvements should be made along the whole length of road between London and Holyhead, but that the Shrewsbury to Holyhead portion being incomparably the worst, it should have the first attention. In the course of five years this first part of the work was completed. The general line of the old road was followed, along the valley of the Dee, and thence from Corwen, across the watershed to the Vale of Conway and to the summit-level at Ogwen Pool; descending from that point by the valley of Nant Ffrancon to Bangor and the Menai Straits. There a quarter of a mile of stormy water still separated the Isle of Anglesey from the mainland, and it was not until the January of 1826 that it was bridged. From the Anglesey side of the Straits an entirely new and direct road was made across the island to Holyhead, saving three miles, and giving a level route, instead of the precipitous old way.

In the result, the Holyhead Road through North Wales may, without hesitation, be pronounced the finest in the land. Passing though it does through the wildest scenery, nowhere is the gradient steeper than 1 in 20, while its width, from 28 to 34 feet, and its splendid surface render it safe and convenient. The old road, frequently as steep as 1 in 6½, and with its sides unprotected from the cliffs and torrents that terrified bygone generations, has almost wholly vanished under the new; but in those places where Telford did not merely remodel it, and took an entirely new line, its character may still be seen.

In 1820 the London to Shrewsbury portion of the work was begun, and the greater part completed by 1828. Minor improvements were made on it from time to time in after years, but it does not nearly compare with the more thorough work undertaken through North Wales. Parts remain rich in very steep hills, and powerful interests situated in the larger towns vetoed the cutting of new routes through crooked and awkward approaches, and so have left much to be desired. Telford himself died, in his seventy-seventh year, in 1834, but the Holyhead Road Commissioners were in existence for years afterwards, and continued to send forth Reports until 1851. For a long period, however, before that time those documents, containing as they do only the surveyors’ reports as to the condition of the road and bridges, have nothing of interest. The last paper of importance is the Parliamentary Return of 1839, giving the sum of the expenses incurred on the whole length of road, including improvement of the road from Bangor to Chester, and cost of building the Menai and Conway bridges. The total amount was £697,963 14s. 9d., of that sum £164,489 7s. 9d. was granted by Parliament towards the work as a national undertaking: the remaining £533,474 7s. 0d. lent by the Treasury, to be repaid by the Commissioners out of the tolls. In 1839, according to a return made to Parliament by the Office of Woods and Forests, £250,880 5s. 9¼d. had been thus repaid. That very little of the balance found its way back to the Treasury may confidently be asserted. But, however that matter stands, certainly the work was done with rigid economy and, considering its nature and extent, at a very small cost.

Some part of the cost of the improved road fell upon the letter writers of that day. The postage of a letter to Ireland was sixteen pence, made up of the following items:—

It made no difference that the direct Holyhead Mail went nowhere near the Conway Bridge: letters for Ireland were still charged that penny, until Penny Postage came in 1841 and treated all places in the United Kingdom alike.

IV

Meanwhile, stage-coaching had also been revolutionised. The growth of Birmingham and the great commercial industries of the Midlands had rendered the old methods too slow and cumbrous; and the ancient coaches, supported on leather straps, and with curtained windows, starting once, twice or thrice a week, according to distance travelled, performing their slow and toilsome pilgrimages by daylight and resting at sundown, gave place to the well-appointed vehicles, hung on steel springs, and with glazed windows, that ran from either end, every day, and continued their journeys throughout the night. No longer was it possible to drive the same wretched animals the whole length of the weary day, but changes at every ten or twelve miles came into vogue, and speed consequently increased. The greatest period of coaching on the Holyhead Road dawned in 1823, when the London and Birmingham “Tally-Ho” began to run. This was often called “Mountain’s Tally-Ho,” being horsed out of London by Mrs. Sarah Ann Mountain, of the “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill. It was a day coach, and one of the first to run “double,” that is to say, with up and down coaches every day. It left London at 7.45 a.m. and Birmingham at 7 a.m. Its popularity was very soon challenged by eager competitors, for in the following year the “Independent Tally-Ho” was put on the road by Horne, of the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, starting an hour and a quarter earlier from London, and a quarter of an hour earlier from Birmingham, with the idea of securing the “Tally-Ho’s” custom. From this time, coaches of this popular name multiplied until their number was quite bewildering. In 1830, the “Original Tally-Ho” was started, and in 1832, the “Real” and the “Patent Tally-Hoes.” A picture by J. Pollard of the “Tally-Ho” and “Independent” nearing London on a summer afternoon, about 1828, shows that if one did actually start before the other, they both reached London together. The scene is the “Crown,” Holloway Road, a house now numbered 622 in that thoroughfare, and rebuilt about 1865, but still bearing the same name, situated at the corner of Landseer Road.

“TALLY-HO” AND “INDEPENDENT TALLY-HO,” LONDON AND BIRMINGHAM COACHES, NEARING LONDON, 1828.
From a Print after J. Pollard.

In 1825 all previous efforts were eclipsed by the “Wonder” coach, between London and Shrewsbury, established in that year. It was the first to perform much over a hundred miles a day, and, starting from the “Bull and Mouth,” St. Martin’s-le-Grand, at 6.30 a.m., was in Shrewsbury, 154 miles distant, at 10.30 the same night. It aroused extraordinary competition. A “No Wonder,” running three days a week from Birmingham lasted a season, and is heard of no more; but a more thoroughgoing rival was the “Nimrod,” from Shrewsbury, put on the road in 1834. How the proprietors of the “Wonder” started the “Stag,” and successfully “nursed” the “Nimrod,” will be found recorded under Shrewsbury. There were at this competitive time more coaches on the Holyhead Road than on any other. So far as Barnet, there were eighteen mails and one hundred and seventy-six other coaches, besides road-waggons, post-chaises, and other vehicles. Some of them turned off at Hockliffe for Manchester and Liverpool, but the greater number continued to Birmingham. The London and Birmingham “Greyhound” was started in 1829, and ran light, with an imperial on the roof, to prevent luggage being placed there. Passengers’ luggage must be sent to the office in time to be forwarded by the “Economist.” So ran the notice. Both the “Greyhound” and the “Economist” were night coaches: the latter, the luggage-carrier, starting an hour earlier. It was at one time proposed to light the “Greyhound” with gas, but when it was found that the gas-tank would take up the space in the fore-boot wanted for parcels, the idea was relinquished. The down “Greyhound” was ingeniously robbed in March 1835 by a gang who set to work very cleverly. Two inside places were booked by the thieves at the “Swan with Two Necks,” and the two remaining places at the “Angel,” Islington. When the coach reached Hockliffe, two of the confederates alighted, and the other two left at Stony Stratford. Nothing was discovered until Coventry was reached, when the guard, feeling about inside, found that one of the parcels gave way. On his leaning against it, away it went into the boot, which had been cut open, and a bank parcel, containing 300 sovereigns and a bill of exchange for £120 extracted. There is no record of the thieves ever having been discovered. They disappeared, just as did those who walked with bank-notes to the value of £4002 from the Birmingham “Balloon Post Coach,” when standing in the yard of the “Swan with Two Necks,” December 12th, 1822. £1000 was offered for the discovery of the thieves, and the notes were stopped, but the results do not appear.

Horrified horse-owners, and old-fashioned persons with prejudices against invention and progress, raise outcries against the pace of motor-cars, and have succeeded in reducing the legal speed on roads from the original 14 miles an hour allowed by Act of Parliament to the 12 miles permitted by an order of the Local Government Board; but the pace attained toward the close of the coaching era by some of the crack coaches was much higher. The rival “Tally-Ho” and “Independent Tally-Ho” coaches, for instance, ran certain stages up to 18¾ miles an hour, and only on one stage did they drop down to 12 miles. “Furious driving,” indeed, and vouched for by the contemporary Coventry Chronicle, May 8th, 1830, which well heads its report, “Extraordinary Travelling”:—

“Saturday se’night, being May-day, the usual competition took place between the London Coaches. The “Independent Tally-ho,” running between Birmingham and London, performed a feat altogether unparalleled in the annals of Coaching, having travelled the distance of one-hundred-and-nine miles in seven hours and thirty-nine minutes.

“The following is a correct account of the time it took to perform the distance, horsed by the various proprietors:—Mr. Horne, from London to Colney, seventeen-and-quarter miles, in one-hour-and-six minutes;—Mr. Bowman, from Colney to Redbourne (where the passengers, stopped six minutes for breakfast), seven-and-half miles, in twenty-six minutes;—Mr. Morris, from Redbourne to Hockliffe, twelve-and-quarter miles, in one-hour-and-four minutes;—Mr. Warden, from Hockliffe to Shenley, eleven miles, in forty-seven minutes;—Mr. May, from Shenley to Daventry, twenty-four miles, in one-hour-and-forty-nine minutes;—Mr. Garner, from Daventry to Coventry, nineteen-and-quarter miles, in one-hour-and-twelve minutes;—Mr. Radenhurst, from Coventry to Birmingham, seventeen-and-three quarter miles, in one-hour-and-fifteen minutes.

“The ‘Original Tally-ho’ performed the same distance in seven-hours-and-fifty minutes.”

The extraordinary feat of the “Independent-Tally-ho” recorded above, excelled the performances of that famous coach, the “Quicksilver” Exeter mail; but that is nothing compared with the passengers’ feat of swallowing a breakfast in the six minutes allowed for that meal at Redbourne. It is probably no great hazard to guess that those unhappy passengers had no breakfast at all on that historic occasion.

It is not to be supposed that coaching was an altogether safe method of travelling, especially when feats of this kind were indulged in; but it must be acknowledged that comparatively few of the accidents happened when racing. Among the disasters that now and again occurred, besides those recorded elsewhere in these pages, the following specimens, from October 1834 to the close of 1837, are typical:—

1834, October.—Shrewsbury “Union” overturned at Overley Hill, near Wellington. The coach was heavily laden and one of the hind wheels collapsed. One of the outsides, a Mr. Newey, of Halesowen, jumped off, but not far enough, and the coach and luggage fell on him, killing him. He died the next morning, at the Haygate inn.

1834, October.—“Nimrod.” Coachman thrown off near Haygate, and killed on the spot.

1834, October.—Lichfield and Wolverhampton coach. A jockey, named Calloway, had his leg broken by being thrown off in an upset. In August 1835 he was awarded £210 damages.

1835, September.—“Emerald,” London and Birmingham coach, upset at 2 a.m. near Little Brickhill, owing to axle-tree of near fore-wheel breaking. The five outsides were pitched into a hedge, and not seriously hurt, but the coachman, John Webb, was entangled with the apron, and was crushed to death by the coach falling on him. His body was found to be terribly mangled when carried into the “Peacock and Sandhill Tavern.”

1836.—Sawyer, the beadle of Apothecaries’ Hall, returning from Birmingham on outside of coach (name not specified) fell asleep. A jerk flung him off, and he was killed.

1837, August.—“Emerald,” London and Birmingham coach. Horses dashed away up Plumb Park Hill, near Stony Stratford, and coach upset in the succeeding valley. Outside passengers thrown a distance of twenty feet, and two of them killed.

1837, October.—Birmingham and Shrewsbury Mail upset on entering Wolverhampton, and coach smashed to pieces. All passengers severely injured.

1837, December.—Holyhead Mail upset at Willenhall, owing to obstructions in the road during alterations. Coachman’s skull fractured, and one outside passenger injured. The “Swallow” coach had been upset on the same spot the day before.

Besides these instances, there was the sad case of Yates, a guard on the “Wonder,” who at Christmas time, in one year not particularised, was thrown off the coach at Wolverhampton. The coach was overloaded with game and Christmas hampers, and he occupied a makeshift perch over one of the hind wheels. The vehicle gave a lurch, and he fell out; his feet catching in the straps, he was dragged some distance on his head until the hind wheel caught him and crushed his thigh. He died the next day.

The very names of the coaches that ran in the last years of the road breathe an air of competition. The old “Gee-hoes,” “Caravans,” and “Diligences”; the “Originals” and their like, made way for the “Prince Regent,” “Royal Union,” “Sovereign,” and “John Bull”; and to them succeeded such suggestions of speed as the “Celerity,” “Antelope,” “Greyhound,” “Express,” “Rocket,” and “Swallow.” Moderate charges were hinted at in the names of the “Economist” and the “Liberal”; and a high courage, calculated to daunt opponents, in those of the “Triumph,” “Retaliator,” “Defiance,” and “Tartar.” The public largely benefited in those ultimate years by the competition, as also did the turnpike tolls; but it may be doubted whether many coach-proprietors then made much profit. For one thing, a stage-coach running every day throughout the year on the road as far as Birmingham paid in tolls alone £3 11s. 9d. a day, in addition to the duty of a penny a mile paid by all coaches for every four passengers they were licensed to carry, irrespective of the places being occupied or not. Turnpike gates encouraged Sabbatarian feeling by charging double on Sundays; so, on the assumption that a Birmingham coach ran 365 days in the year, it would have to pay something like £1400 in tolls alone, or to Holyhead £3400.

CLARK’S STEAM CARRIAGE, 1832.       From an Old Print.

Long before railways seriously threatened to drive coaches off the road, the steam carriages of the early motor-car period entered into a fleeting rivalry with horses. Of these, William Clark’s steam carriage was the most notable. It was put upon the road between London and Birmingham in June 1832, and was a huge three-wheeled conveyance, carrying 50 passengers, 28 inside. Little is known of this conveyance beyond the claims made for it, which included the statements that it could develop 100 horse-power and that the pace could be regulated at pleasure from 1 to 50 miles an hour. Another contrivance of this kind was Heaton’s steam carriage, of 1833, which is recorded to have made several journeys between Birmingham and Coventry, at a speed of 8 miles an hour, but soon faded into obscurity; probably crushed out of commercial existence by the extravagant tolls levied on all these mechanical inventions by road trustees, highly prejudiced against anything of the kind.

V

Such were the conditions of coaching when rumours of a projected London and Birmingham Railway began to be noised about in 1825, and then in 1830. “London and Birmingham” that railway was first named, although, if the original project be closely followed, it will be seen that not London, but Birmingham, took the initiative. London has ever lagged in the rear. When the early Birmingham, Shrewsbury, and Chester coaches plied between those towns and the metropolis, it was not from London that they originated, but from the provinces; and, just in same way, it was the Birmingham merchants to whom the idea of a railway to London occurred, as not merely a cheaper and more expeditious way of travelling to the capital, but an excellent means by which goods might be conveyed, and London, as a great market for them, duly exploited. The original organising committee was eventually joined by a body of London bankers and financiers, and a line of country surveyed by George and Robert Stephenson in face of a most determined opposition offered by landowners on the way. Robert Stephenson has left an account of his difficulties, and stated that he walked the whole distance between London and Birmingham no fewer than twenty times. The long story of the fight in Parliament for the Bill in 1832, of its first defeat, and of its eventual success in 1833, is not a matter for these pages. Only let it be noted that the opposition of the landed proprietors was bought off by the addition of half a million sterling to the estimates for the purchase of land along the route.

How enormous was the road and canal traffic at that time may be judged from the statement prepared by the projectors of the railway, who put the sum paid annually for travelling and conveyance of goods between London and Birmingham at £800,000.

The construction of the railway was begun in June, 1834. On July 20th, 1837, the first portion was opened to Boxmoor, a distance of 24½ miles, and on October 16th following to Tring. On April 9th, 1838, the railhead had reached a point just beyond Bletchley, and there it stopped for some months, owing to engineering difficulties at Roade and Kilsby. Meanwhile the works had been pushed on from the Birmingham end, and between that town and Rugby the line was complete. A temporary station, known as “Denbigh Hall,” was provided near Bletchley, where the railway crossed the Holyhead Road, and between this and Rugby the 38 miles break in the line was traversed by a service of coaches until the following September, when the London and Birmingham Railway was opened along its entire length.

No one was more pleased at this than Dr. Arnold, the great Headmaster of Rugby School, whose attitude was in strong contrast with that generally adopted by the classes. “I rejoice to see it,” he said, “and to think that feudality has gone for ever. It is so great a blessing to think that any one evil is really extinct.”

This event, of course, sounded the death-knell of coaching along the first half of the Holyhead Road, but there were those who thought the railway must soon show its inability to beat a well-appointed coach, and so they held on a little while longer, encouraged by some of the more irreconcileable among travellers. The “Greyhound” and the “Albion” were the last to go, in the early weeks of 1839, basely deserted even by those who had egged their proprietors to such foredoomed opposition. Edward Sherman, the great coach proprietor of the “Bull and Mouth,” who had nine coaches on this road, was a fanatical opponent of railways, and struggled to the last against them, losing thereby the important carrying and van business of the London and Birmingham, secured by the far-seeing policy of Chaplin and Horne, of the “Swan with Two Necks,” who abandoned coaching and threw in their interest with the new order of things. Sherman eventually saved himself by joining his interests with the Great Western Railway.

The opening of the London and Birmingham had a great effect upon the Irish mails and passenger traffic; for the Grand Junction Railway, between Birmingham and Liverpool, had already been in existence since July 1837, and thus a continuous route between London and Liverpool was available to Post Office and public, saving many hours and much expense. Both seized the opportunity, and everything went by train to the Lancashire port. It seemed as though not only the Holyhead Road but Holyhead itself was a thing of the past.

In 1846 the London and Birmingham and the Grand Junction Railways amalgamated, under the title of the London and North-Western Railway, and the Liverpool route might thus have been thought settled for all time; but in the meanwhile two separate lines had been authorised—one from Crewe to Chester, and another from Chester to Holyhead. By the completion of the second of these (in March 1850) Holyhead was brought back to its old importance, and is once more on the mail route between London and Dublin. Alterations on the main line have long since left Birmingham on one side, and the “Wild Irishman” now goes from Rugby by way of Nuneaton and Tamworth to Stafford, Crewe, and Chester.

VI

The Holyhead and the Great North Roads are identical as far as Barnet, and the first landmark on the way is the “Angel.” Every one knows the “Angel,” Islington. It is a great deal more than a public-house, and has attained the dignity of a geographical expression. Any teetotaller can afford to know the “Angel,” and the acquaintance is no more a stigma than an intimacy with the English Channel or the North Foreland. Five roads meet at this spot—for seventy years or so the meeting and starting point of omnibuses to and from all parts of North London. Nothing strikes the foreigner with greater astonishment than that our omnibus routes start from or end at some public-house, and that the “Angel,” the “Elephant and Castle,” the “Eyre Arms,” and the “Horns,” should be household names in different parts of London. The intelligent foreigner goes away and writes scathingly upon what he considers an evidence of drunkenness rampant in all classes of English society, and does not stop to enquire the origin of the custom, to be found far back in omnibus history, when many public-houses had convenient stables, and omnibus proprietors had none.

The “Angel” is not in Islington at all, but just within the parish of Clerkenwell. How it came to be just inside the Clerkenwell boundary is told in the legend of a pauper being found dead in what was then called Back Road, now the Liverpool Road, at that time in the great parish of St. Mary, Islington (which by the way, is the largest and most populous parish in England, numbering over 350,000 souls), but now, with the “Angel” in that of St. John’s, Clerkenwell. Islington refused to bury the pauper and Clerkenwell performed that duty, afterwards claiming the land.

The modern “Angel,” built somewhere about 1870, before public-houses became Elizabethan, Jacobean, or Queen Annean, is frankly a public-house in appearance, like the rebuilt “Elephant and Castle” and others, and carries in its aspect no reminiscence of coaching times. It has been left for the proprietors in recent years to grow somewhat ashamed of that fact, for, painted on tiles, there now appears on the wall of its entrance lobby one of those quasi-historical pictures, that have of late begun to decorate the entrance walls of our otherwise unredeemed gin palaces. By means of these tile-pictures those patrons who are not too far gone in intoxication may learn something of local or national history and topography. In the case of the “Angel,” the subject selected is that of the starting of the Holyhead Mail from the old house, whose frontage, pictured from old prints, bears the inscription, “For Gentlemen and Families,” and at whose windows the gentlemen and families are accordingly observed to be sitting, enjoying the scene. It is not conceivable that any one should now hope to find pleasure in doing the like at these modern windows that nowadays light billiard-rooms, and look down upon a busy scene of omnibuses and tramcars; but perhaps even what we rightly consider to be a sordid confluence of traffic may come to have a retrospective romance of its own in, say, the twenty-first century. Exactly what the “Angel” was like in 1812 may be seen from the accompanying illustration by Pollard, of the illuminations on the night of the King’s birthday in that year. The Holyhead Mail is prominent in front of two others drawn up before the house.

THE “ANGEL,” ISLINGTON. MAIL COACHES AND ILLUMINATIONS ON NIGHT OF THE KING’S BIRTHDAY, 1812.
From a Print after J. Pollard.

A few paces north stood the at one time equally famous “Peacock,” and the not altogether obscure “White Lion”; coaching inns both, but long since rebuilt as mere “publics.” “All coaches going anywhere north called at the ‘Peacock,’” says Colonel Birch-Reynardson. “As they came up, the old hostler, or a man, whoever he was, called out their names as they arrived on the scene. Up they come through the fog, but our old friend knows them all. Now ‘York Highflier,’ now ‘Leeds Union,’ now ‘York Express,’ now ‘Rockingham,’ now ‘Stamford Regent,’ now ‘Truth and Daylight,’ and others which I forget, all with their lamps lit, and all smoking and steaming, so that you could hardly see the horses. Off they go. One by one as they get their vacant places filled up, the guard on one playing ‘Off she goes!’ on another, ‘Oh, dear, what can the matter be?’ on another, ‘When from great Londonderry’; on another, ‘The flaxen-headed ploughboy’; in fact, all playing different tunes almost at the same time. The coaches rattling over the stones, or rather pavement—for there was little or no macadam in those days; the horses’ feet clattering along to the sound of the merry-keyed bugles, upon which many of the guards played remarkably well, altogether made such a noise as could be heard nowhere except at the ‘Peacock’ at Islington, at half-past six in the morning. All this it was curious to hear and see, though not over pleasant in a dense fog, particularly if it were very cold into the bargain, with heavy rain or snow falling.”

Half-past six in the morning! Yes; but that was not by any means an early hour in coaching days. If we turn to Tom Brown’s Schooldays, we shall find that Tom, with his father, come to see him off to Rugby by the “Tally-Ho,” stayed at the “Peacock” overnight, to make sure of catching that conveyance, and that in order to do so they were actually up and breakfasting at ten minutes to three on a winter’s morning. And none too early, either; for just as Tom was swallowing the last mouthful of breakfast, winding his comforter round his throat, and tucking the ends into the breast of his overcoat, the horn sounded, Boots looked in, with the fateful cry of “Tally-Ho, sir,” and the “Tally-Ho” itself appeared on the instant outside. But what “Tally-Ho” this could have been that passed through Rugby does not appear. “Tell the young gent to look alive,” said the guard; “now then sir, jump up behind,” and they were off. “Good-bye, father—my love at home”; and the coach whirls away in the darkness.

London then ended at Islington. Where does it now end? At Highgate; at Whetstone, where the boundary of the Metropolitan Postal District is crossed; or beyond South Mimms, where the frontiers of the Metropolitan Police march with those of the Hertfordshire Constabulary? Highgate Archway was wont to be regarded as the northern gate into London, and may now be taken as dividing the far suburbs and the near. Seventy years ago it was quite rural.

THE HIGHGATE ARCHWAY FROM THE TURNPIKE GATE AT HOLLOWAY.
Published Nov. 9, 1813 by James Whittle & Rich^d. Holmes Laurie, 53 Fleet Street, London.
Published, 20th March 1823, by RICH. HOLMES LAURIE 3 Fleet Street, London

VII

It is curious to look upon an old print like that of the Archway road and its toll-gate, reproduced here, and then, with a knowledge of that busy spot, with its thronging omnibuses and tramcars, to compare the old view with the present-day aspect of the place. An Archway Tavern is seen standing at the junction of the roads, but it is quite unlike the flaunting gin-palace of to-day. What, also, has become of the horse and cattle pond in front? The toll-gate, we know, finally disappeared in 1876, but long before then the ascending roadway had been lined with buildings on either side. Only recently the old and ugly archway has been removed, to make way for the new and handsome iron and steel viaduct, which bears the misleading date of 1897, although the structure was not opened until the summer of 1900. It, may be as well to put upon record that it is situated a hundred yards to the north of where the old Archway stood. Of late years, since the government of London has been taken over by the London County Council, the Archway has been more than ever a landmark, showing to where the frontier of London extended, for the London County Council’s boundary ran half-way through the structure, whose northern moiety lay within the territory of the Middlesex Council.

THE NEW HIGHGATE ARCHWAY.

The new viaduct, wholly in Middlesex, cost £25,000. Its date, “1897,” prominent in cast iron on the southern approach, together with the fact that the work was not completed until midway through 1900, perpetuates the sinister memory of the great engineering strike in progress during that interval. Five authorities—the London County Council, the Middlesex County Council, the Islington Vestry, Hornsey District Council, and the Ecclesiastical Commissioners (who are administrators of the Bishop of London’s estates here)—contributed in varying proportions to the cost. They may look with satisfaction at the result: a light and handsome bridge, that, vaulting across the roadway with a clear flight of three times the span of the old arch, renders it possible to widen the road to any conceivable width, against that time which Mother Shipton foresaw, when “England shall be undone and Highgate Hill stand in the middle of London.”

Let us look back, on passing beneath this triumph of engineering skill, and, seeing with what grace the huddled mass of London is framed by it, conceive the welcome it may seem to extend to the wayfarer (if such there be) coming to the capital to seek his fortunes. It may, however, be readily supposed that the days when ambitious youth resorting by road to London, there to win fortune with the customary half-crown, are done. The roads nowadays have lost all possibilities of that endearing romance of high ambition and courage, coupled with slender resources and an uninstructed belief that London’s streets are paved with gold. The precociously worldly-wise youngsters of to-day, who resort to the Metropolis by rail, have no such illusions.

On the fortune-seekers of old, who tramped the weary miles to this gateway of their ambition, the forbidding old Archway must needs have exercised a dispiriting influence. It looked, from its outer side, so like a fortress gate, and was alas! too often a prison-gate when once within. London, lying down below them, vast and unknown; how, they might have thought, would it be possible to conquer that; to win a place there? Little blame to such of them as may have trembled at the prospect and retraced their steps; and better perhaps had it been for many of those who went forward that their courage had thus failed them at the threshold; rather than that they had gone down into that human whirlpool, to return broken in after days, to leap to death from the footpath above the lofty arch, into that roadway they had trod so hopefully years before.

For old Highgate Archway was a veritable Bridge of Sighs; a favourite resort of London suicides to whom a leap from Waterloo Bridge into the river did not offer great attractions. It was not until the Archway was opened toll-free that the iron railings fencing the upper roadway were erected. They were 7 feet in height, cost £700, and were the cause of great disappointment to would-be suicides by leaping, who have an illogical objection to falling one yard more than necessary for the purpose of breaking their necks. This explains the comparative disfavour with which suicides regard the Golden Gallery of St. Paul’s Cathedral and other high places.

HIGHGATE ARCHWAY: MAIL COACH NEARING LONDON.
From a Print after J. Pollard.

It remains uncertain whether those protective railings were erected for the sake of the suicides, or for that of the increased number of persons who used the Archway Road when tolls were abolished, some of whom might have been injured by those too anxious to shuffle off their mortal coil, to first ascertain whether or not the road was clear. Certain, however, it is that it mattered very much to the local authorities from which side the suicides came down: the territory of the Islington Vestry having been on one side and that of the Hornsey Local Board on the other. It is even related that one authority proposing to the other that railings should be erected, and meeting with a refusal to share the cost, fenced in its own side and thus left the self-murderers no choice. The expense and trouble of the necessary inquests falling on the other authority speedily brought about the railing-in of that side also.

VIII

The roadway of Highgate Archway is on a level with the cross upon the dome of St. Paul’s. From what the perfervid preachers of our own time—the Solomon Eagles of our day—call that “sink of iniquity,” the voice of London, inarticulate, like the growl of a fierce beast, rises continually, save for some sleepy hours between midnight and the dawn. Frank Osbaldistone, in Rob Roy, journeying north, heard the hum of London die away on his ear when he reached Highgate, the distant peal of her steeples sounding their admonitory “turn again,” just as they did to Whittington. Looking back from the Hill upon the dusky magnificence of the Metropolis, he felt as if he were leaving behind comfort, opulence, the charms of society, and all pleasures of cultivated life. The modern wayfarer is not so easily rid of the Great City, whose low-pitched roar not only follows him to these northern heights, but pursues him, clamant, onwards through Finchley, and whose rising tide of houses now laps the crest of Highgate Hill and spills over the brim, in driblets of new suburban streets, like a brick and mortar Deluge.

Just half a mile past the Archway, which of old was the ultima thule, the Hercules Pillars of London in this direction, still stands the “Woodman” inn, pictured in the coaching print of the thirties, shown over page. It is the original building that still stands here, but carved and cut about and greatly altered, and stands converted into an ordinary public-house. The curious little summer-house, or look-out, remains, little changed, but no visitors ascend to it to admire the view with telescopes, as we see them doing in the picture; for the spreading hill and dale towards London are covered with houses—objects not so rare in the neighbourhood of London that one needs to seek them with a spy-glass.

THE “WOODMAN,” FINCHLEY, 1834: COVENTRY AND BIRMINGHAM COACH PASSING.
From a Print after J. Pollard.

Southwood Lane, opposite this old inn, leads across from this branch of the high road to Highgate village, which should be noticed before the modern spirit seizes upon and transforms it.

“When Highgate Archway and the Archway Road were completed, in 1813, and traffic, notwithstanding the heavy tolls, began to come and go this way, Highgate village was ruined. Few cared to painfully toil up Highgate Hill and go through the once busy village down the corresponding descent of North Hill. Ever since then, while the suburbs round about have grown, Highgate village has gradually decayed. Little alteration has been made here in the broad street—empty now, that was once so busy—and Highgate remains preserved like a fly in amber, testifying to the old-world appearance of a typical coaching village near London. True it is that its fine old houses are a thought shabby, while the “Red Lion,” though still standing, has long been closed, and its elaborate sign-post innocent these many years of its swinging sign. The “Gatehouse Tavern,” too, was rebuilt in 1896; but, for the rest, Highgate is the Highgate of old.

“Established over five hundred years” was the legend displayed by the old “Gatehouse Tavern” pictured here. Many old clubs held high revel in it—literary clubs and others making their several ostensible objects the excuse for holding high revel. Punch itself was founded in a pot-house. Among the clubs that foregathered here were the “Ash Sticks,” the “Aged Pilgrims,” and the “Ben Jonson”; while in the old low-ceilinged rooms the Sunday ordinary that was long a favourite institution, combined with some deservedly renowned port, attracted George Cruickshank (before he found grace and became a total abstainer) and his brother Robert; Archibald Hemming, Punch’s first cartoonist; and many an Early Victorian.

The steep descent of North Hill brings the explorer from old Highgate to East Finchley, where a modern suburb struggles bravely, but with indifferent success, to live down the depressing circumstance of being set in midst of some half-dozen huge cemeteries, and on a road along which every day and all day a continual stream of funeral processions passes dismally along. The chief gainer from this traffic appears to be the “Old White Lion,” where the mourners halt and refresh on their return. Mourning should seem, judging from the assemblage outside the “Old White Lion” (which should surely, in complimentary mourning, be the “Old Black Lion”), to be a thirsty business.

Beyond the cemeteries lies Brown’s Wells, in midst of what was once Finchley Common. At Brown’s Wells, if anywhere, memories of that ill-omened waste should be most easily recalled; for here, beside the road, in the grounds of Hilton House, stands the massive trunk of “Turpin’s Oak,” still putting forth leaves with every recurrent spring. Did the conscience-stricken spirits of the dead revisit the scenes of their crimes, then the garden of Hilton House might well be peopled o’ nights with remorseful spooks; for many another beside Turpin lurked here and snatched purses, or held up coaches and horsemen crossing this one-time lonely waste.

HIGHGATE VILLAGE, 1826.
From an Old Print.

Pennant, the antiquary, writing at the close of the eighteenth century, talks of the great Common not as an antiquity but as a place he was perfectly well acquainted with, travelling as he did the Holyhead Road between Chester and London. “Infamous for robberies,” he calls it, “and often planted with gibbets, the penalty of murderers.”

This aspect of Finchley Common was then no new thing, and if Pennant had been minded to write an antiquarian exercise on its evil associations, he would have found much material to his hand. But the most sinister period of the Common’s unsavoury history began at the close of the long struggle between King and Parliament in the mid-seventeenth century, and for long years afterwards robbery and murder were to be feared by travellers in these wilds.

William Cady was early among the highwaymen who made this a place of dread. His was a short and bloody career of four years on the King’s highway, ending in 1687, when he was hanged at Tyburn for the last of his exploits, the murder of a groom on this then lonely expanse. He had overtaken a lady riding for the benefit of the air, and, ignoring the groom, tore the diamond ring from her finger, snatched a gold watch from her pocket, and, threatening her with a pistol, secured a purse containing eighty guineas. The groom, unarmed, could do nothing but abuse the highwayman, who shot him dead with two bullets through the brain and was just about making off when two gentlemen rode up with pistols in their hands. Cady at once opened fire on them, and a lively pistolling began, ending with the highwayman’s horse being shot and himself seized and bound, and in due course taken to Newgate, whence he only emerged for that last ride to Tyburn, which was the usual ending of his kind. He did not make an edifying exit but cursed, drank, and scoffed to the last, dying with profanity on his lips, at the early age of twenty-five.

From the unrelieved vulgarity and brutality of Cady’s exploit it is a relief to turn to that of a man of humour. Would that we knew his name, so that it might be ranged with those of Du Vall and Captain Hind, themselves spiced with an airy wit that occasionally eased the loss of a watch or a purse to those suddenly bereft of them. This unknown worthy, whose exploit is recorded in a contemporary newspaper, was a humorist, if ever there was one. It was one evening in 1732, when he was patrolling the Common, that a chariot and four horses approached from the direction of London. Hopeful of a rich quarry, he spurred up and thrust a pistol through the carriage window, demanding money and jewellery. Now, unhappily for the highwayman’s hope of plunder, this was the carriage of a Yorkshire squire returning home without him, and the person sitting within was but a countryman to whom the coachman had given a lift.

“I am very poor,” exclaimed the rustic, terrified at sight of the pistol, “but here are two shillings; all I have got in the world.”

Cady, doubtless, in his disappointment, would have shot the yokel; but this was a “highway lawyer” of a different stamp. “Poor devil!” said that true Knight of the Road, withdrawing his pistol and waving the proffered money aside; “here, take a shilling and drink my health!” And so, tossing him a coin, he disappeared.

For accounts of other happenings upon this sombre Common, let the curious refer to the pages of the Great North Road, where they will be found, duly set forth.

Not until the first few years of the nineteenth century had passed was the place safe. It was an Alsatia wherein the most craven of footpads might rob with impunity. Strange to say, there were those who did not think it right to shoot highwaymen, and many of those who did so, lost their nerve at the supreme moment and fired wildly into space. The robbers’ risks were therefore not overwhelming. Dr. Johnson was undecided about this matter of right, as we learn from one of those semi-philosophical discussions into which Boswell led him; discussions the indefatigable “Bozzy” has recorded at length. Three of them—Johnson, Boswell, and Taylor—were disputing the question. “For myself,” said Taylor, “I would rather be robbed than shoot highwaymen.” Johnson—perhaps because he generally took the opposite view, from “cussedness” or a love of disputation—argued that he would rather shoot the man on the instant of his attempt than afterwards give such evidence against him as would result in his execution. “I may be mistaken,” said the great man, “as to him when I swear; I cannot be mistaken if I shoot him in the act. Besides, we feel less reluctance to take away a man’s life when we are heated by the injury, than to do it at a distance of time by an oath after we have cooled.”

This seemed to Boswell rather as acting from the motive of private vengeance than of public advantage; but Johnson maintained that in acting thus he would be satisfying both. He added, however, that it was a difficult point: “one does not know what to say: one may hang one’s self a year afterwards from uneasiness for having shot a highwayman. Few minds are to be trusted with so great a thing.” And we may add, seeing how many highwaymen were shot at, and how few hit, few hands either.

Half a mile beyond Turpin’s Oak is North Finchley, a recent suburb of smart shops, risen on the site of those gibbets mentioned by Pennant. Those who affect to be more genteel and individualistic, name it Torrington Park, and thus hope to be exquisitely distinguished from the ruck of Finchleys that take their names from the four points of the compass. The Park Road Hotel, rising at the angle where the road from Child’s Hill joins the highway we are travelling, actually stands on the site of a gibbet. As “Tally-ho Corner,” this is a spot familiarly known to cyclists. Maps, however, know it as “Tallow Corner.”

Whetstone succeeds to North Finchley. It once groaned under the oppression of a toll-gate—a gate that spanned the road by the “Griffin” inn, where the old “whetstone” still remains. This gate, abolished November 1st, 1863, was associated with a story of George Morland, the artist, who, having received an invitation to Barnet, was journeying to that town in company with two friends, when he was stopped here by a cart containing two men, who were disputing with the toll-keeper. One was a chimney-sweep, and the other one Hooper, a tinsmith and prize-fighter, scarcely higher in the social scale; but they knew Morland, who had often caroused with them at the low wayside taverns he affected. Now, however, he was not in a mood for his old companions; recent success had turned him respectable for a time. Accordingly, he endeavoured to pass, when the tinsmith called out, “What, Mr. Morland, won’t you speak to a body?”

It was of no use trying to escape, for the man began to roar out after him, so that he was obliged to turn back and shake hands with his old crony; whereupon Hooper turned to the chimney-sweep and said, “Why, Dick, don’t you know this here gentleman? ’Tis my friend, Mr. Morland.” The man of soot, smiling a recognition, forced his unwelcome black hand upon his brother of the brush; then they whipped the horse up and went off, much to Morland’s relief. He used afterwards to declare that the sweep was a stranger to him; but the dissolute artist’s habits made the story generally believed, and “Sweeps, your honour,” was a joke that followed him all his days.

IX

Barnet lies two miles ahead, crowning a ridge. Between this point and that town the road goes sharply down Prickler’s Hill, and, passing under a railway bridge, climbs upwards again, along an embanked road that, steep though it be, takes the place of a very much steeper roadway. It was constructed between 1823 and 1827, as a part of the general remodelling of the Holyhead Road. The deserted old way, now leading no-whither, may be seen meandering off to the left, immediately past the railway bridge, down in the hollow. Passing the “Old Red Lion” and a row of old houses that, fallen from their importance in facing the high road, look dejectedly across one-half of the Fair Ground, it comes to an end at the last house, whose projecting bay proclaims it to have once been a toll-house.

THE OLD ROAD, BARNET.

Barnet is famous for two things: for its Battle and for its Fair. The Battle is a thing of the dim and distant past: the Fair belongs to the present—the poignant present, as you think who venture within ear-shot of its Michaelmas hurly-burly, what time the horse-copers are rending the air with raucous cries, steam-organs bellowing, and, in fact, “all the fun of the Fair” in progress. It is, according to your taste and to the condition of your nerves, a pleasure or a martyrdom to be present at the great Fair of Barnet: that three days’ Pandemonium to which come all the lowest of the low, whom, paradoxically enough, that “noble animal, the friend of man,” attracts to himself. For Barnet is, above all other things, a Horse Fair. For love of the Horse, and with the hope of selling horses—and incidentally swindling the purchasers of them—such widely different characters as the horsey East-ender, the sly and crafty Welshman, the blarneying Irishman, and Sandy from Scotland, come greater or smaller distances with droves of cart-horses, cobs, hunters, and, in fact, every known variety of the Noble Animal; and to this nucleus of a Fair innumerable other trades attach themselves, like parasites. Barnet Fair dates back to the time of Henry II. It is, therefore, of a very respectable antiquity. This antiquity is, indeed, the only respectable thing left to it. The rest is riot; and if the Barnet people had their will, there is little doubt that it would, in common with many other fairs, be abolished. When originally established, by Royal Charter, it lasted three weeks. From three weeks it was successively whittled down, in course of time, to sixteen days, and then to three days. From it, in other times, the Lord of the Manor, the Earl of Stratford, derived a splendid revenue; for his tolls, rigorously exacted by his stewards, were eightpence for every bull or stallion entering the Fair; fourpence for every horse, ass, or mule; and for every cow or calf, twopence.

The Fair Ground extends to either side of the long embankment, on whose steep slope the high road is carried up into Barnet Town; but the chief part of it centres around High Barnet station, on the right hand. The Fair begins on the first Monday in September, but at least a week before that date Barnet town and the roads leading into it, usually so quiet, are thronged with droves of horses and herds of cattle, and with the caravans of the showmen who hope to “make a good thing” out of the thousands of visitors to the Fair. Whatever private residents in Barnet may think of it, and however much they would like to see it abolished, its lasting success is assured as a popular holiday for certain classes of Londoners. The typical ’Arry of Hendon or of Epping would no more think of not visiting Barnet Fair than he would think of abstaining from deep drinking when he reached the place. For, now that all other fairs within reach of London have been suppressed, this is pre-eminently the Cockney’s outing. To deprive him of it would savour not a little of cruelty: it would certainly cut off from the travelling showmen and the proprietors of the giddy steam roundabouts a goodly portion of their incomes, while the pickpockets would miss one of the greatest chances in the year.

Let those who know of fairs only from idyllic descriptions of such things in the England of long ago, visit this of Barnet. Nothing in it is poetic, unless indeed the language common to those who attend upon the Noble Animal may be so considered; and certainly that is full of imagery, of sorts. It is wonderful what a power of debauching mankind the Horse possesses. Your ordinary cattle-drover is no saint, but he is a Bayard and a carpet-knight beside these fellows with straws in their mouths, and novel and vivid language on their tongues.

Here, as side-shows away from the horses, are the boxing-booths, the swings, and the trumpet-tongued merry-go-rounds, roaring like Bulls of Bashan and glittering with Dutch metal and cheap mirrors like Haroun-al-Raschid’s palace just come out of pawn and much the worse for wear. Ladies clad in purple velvet dresses, and with a yard and a half of ostrich feather in their hats patronise these delights; and lunch oleaginously on the fried fish cooking on a stall near by (which by the way, you may scent a quarter of a mile off). For those with nicer tastes, an itinerant confectioner makes sweets on the spot. For those who are sportively inclined there are several methods of dissipating their money: by shooting at bottles; shying at cocoanuts (all warranted milky ones) or by guessing under which of three thimbles temporarily resides the elusive pea. The furtive and nervous young man who presides over this show is more than itinerant. Ghostlike, he flits from group to group, harangues them with a phenomenal glibness and swiftness: discloses the pea under the other thimble; takes his gains, and so departs: the tail of his eye seeking, and hoping not to find, any one who may chance to be a detective. An ancient—a million times exposed—fraud, and still a very remunerative one!

For the rest, a very vulgar and disheartening show to those who preach culture to whom the cultured term “the masses.” How to leaven the lump in that direction when you find it obstinately set upon such gross things of earth as penny shows, including six-legged calves and realistic scenes of the latest murders? Sons of Belial, indeed, are those who find delight herein: and many are they who do so take their pleasure.

X

On the crest of the steep ascent we come to Barnet, crowning its “monticulus, or little hill,” as the county historian has it. With the town we have already made some acquaintance, in the pages of the “Great North Road.”

It stands too well within the suburban radius of London for it to escape modern influences, and although, as Dickens said, in Oliver Twist, every other house was a tavern, inns are fewer nowadays and shops more numerous; and many of the surviving inns have been rebuilt. The original “Green Man,” a very much larger and altogether more important house than the existing one, is no more. Sir Robert Peel—the great Sir Robert, statesman and originator of “Peelers”—often stayed there from Saturday to Monday, and it was beneath its roof that Lord Palmerston received the news of his succession to the title. The “Mitre,” one of the most important of Barnet’s inns at the close of the seventeenth century, has wholly disappeared, and the little house of that name, at the London end of the town, does but stand on a very small portion of its site; the rest of the ground being occupied by a large and exceedingly hideous building belonging to a firm of grocers. The disappearance of the “Mitre” is the more to be regretted, because it was a house of historic importance, General Monk, on his march up to London in 1660, having rested there, while his army encamped about the town. The country was tired of the Commonwealth, and Monk at the head of 14,000 men, was master of the situation. No one knew his intentions. Appointed by Parliament, and yet with a commission from the King in his pocket, his advance from the north was the cause of the liveliest hopes and apprehensions to both sides. Accompanying him were two “Councellors of State and Abjurers of the King’s Family,” a worthy pair named Scot and Robinson, who were really acting as the spies of the Parliament. Staying with him at the “Mitre,” they secured a room adjoining his, and either found or made a hole in the wainscot, to see and hear anything that might pass. The imagination readily pictures them peeping through the chinks and the secretive Monk, probably well aware of their doings, smiling as he undressed and went to bed. How he marched to London and thence, declaring for Charles II., to Dover, belongs to other than local history.

The “Red Lion” remains the most prominent house. What has rightly been called a “ghastly story” is that told of it in coaching days. An officer and his daughter, on their way to London to attend a funeral, only succeeded after a great deal of trouble in obtaining accommodation here. On retiring to her room, the young lady chanced to turn the handle of a cupboard, when to her horror the door burst open and a corpse toppled out, almost felling her to the floor. The “accommodation” had been made by hastily removing the body from the bed and placing it where it would not have been found, except for that feminine mingled curiosity and precautionary sense which impels our womenkind to peer agitatedly under every bed, to leave no cupboard unexplored, and no drawer not scrutinised.

This Bluebeard kind of a story was long a current anecdote in the posting days, and implicitly believed. It is probably safe to assume that it did the business of the “Red Lion” enormous damage, and that those travellers who subsequently stayed there approached all cupboards with dread.

The “Red Lion” possessed a queer character in the person of its ostler, James Ripley, who in 1781 published a little book of Select Letters on Various Subjects. On the title-page he states that he was then, and had been “for thirty years past,” ostler, and in his dedication to “the Hon. Col. Blaithwate and the rest of the officers of the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards Blue,” after saying that this dedication is “a grateful acknowledgement for the generous treatment always received for his unmerited services in the stable,” proceeds to grovel in the most abject manner. “I shall always esteem it an honour,” says he, “to rub down your horses’ heels, so long as I am able to stoop to my feet.”

JAMES RIPLEY, OSTLER OF THE “RED LION.”

This remarkable person, if we may judge from the curious frontispiece to his Select Letters, appears to have doubled the parts of ostler at the “Red Lion” and Postmaster of Barnet; while he would also seem to have embarked in the newspaper trade, according to the little heaps of papers seen in the pigeonholes in the background, labelled “Whitehall Evening Post,” “Craftsman,” and “Gazetteer.” Here we perceive him, apparently inditing his Letters, a man with a decidedly Johnsonian cast of features, and clad in what looks more like a cast-off suit of an old Tower of London headsman than an ostler’s everyday clothes. He is evidently at a loss for a word, or is perhaps (and rightly) surprised at the gigantic size of his quill, plucked from an ostrich, at the very least of it. A sieve, a curry-comb, and other articles of stable equipment, lie beside him, or are more or less artistically displayed in the foreground. If it were not for the title, we might almost suppose this to be a representation of some notorious criminal writing his last dying speech and confession in the condemned hold of Newgate. The picture appears to have been drawn from several points of view at once, productive of results more curious than pleasing to professors of perspective drawing.

Mr. James Ripley’s letters range from scathing denunciations of postboys and advice to gentlemen how to treat such rascals, to the humane treatment of horses, the construction of stage waggons, and the villainous practice of writing more or less offensive remarks on window-panes. We are, in fact, after perusing his improving literature, led to the belief that he missed his vocation and ought to have been a clergyman of evangelistic views, instead of an ostler. But to let him speak for himself:—

“I can justly say that I am no mercenary writer, and that all my views are centred in reforming the vices, follies, and errors of this depraved age. At present I shall confine myself to those nimble-fingered Gentlemen who leave specimens of their wit or folly, in trying the goodness of their diamonds upon the glass windows of every place they visit, or lodge at; curiosity often draws the fair sex to the window in expectation of meeting with some innocent piece of wit, or quotation from some eminent author; but how cruel the disappointment when she finds some indecent allusion, or downright obscenity.”

Thus the ostler-moralist of the “Red Lion.” What added terrors the roads would have acquired for giddy travellers had there been others like him!

Among other inns is the “Old Salisbury,” familiarly known to cyclists of northern clubs as the “Old Sal.” It was originally a drovers’ and teamsters’ house, and called the “Royal Wagon.” Many years ago, when the grasping proprietors of the “Green Man” and the “Red Lion” charged 1s. 6d. a mile for posting, the Lord Salisbury of that day, being a frugal man, transferred his custom here and saved 3d. a mile. Pepper, the then landlord, at once changed his sign to its present style.

XI

The modern Holyhead Road, made in the Twenties is seen midway in Barnet, branching off to the left by what remains of the once-famous “Green Man.” Broad and well-engineered though it be, it has little of interest in the three miles between here and South Mimms; its sole features, indeed, being a fine view of Wrotham Park, to the right, and a glimpse of the gateway of Dyrham Park, on the left. It can scarce be said that that heavy stone entrance—a classic arch flanked by Tuscan columns—is beautiful, but it has an interest all its own, for it was originally the triumphal arch erected in 1660 in London Streets, to celebrate the “joyfull Restoracion” of Charles II.

Taking then, by preference, the old road, the way lies across Hadley Green, where, among the ragged fir-trees that are scattered on its western side, stand the remains of the old stocks. The stone obelisk, famous in all the country round about as “Hadley Highstone,” is presently seen ahead, at a parting of the ways. To the right hand goes the Great North Road: to the left the old road to Holyhead. “Eight miles to St. Albans” is the legend on the hither face of the monument, whose other inscription we halt to read:—

“Here was fought the Famous Battle between Edward the Fourth and the Earl of Warwick, April 14, Anno 1471, In which the Earl was defeated And Slain. Stick no Bills.”

HADLEY GREEN: WINTER.

Musing sadly on that unromantic injunction, modern, but deeply carved, like the rest of the inscription, in the stone, we prepare to depart, when one, who is probably the “oldest inhabitant,” approaches and volunteers the information that the obelisk was formerly some thirty-two yards forward, and opposite the inn called the “Two Brewers.” In 1842, it seems, it was removed to its present position.

Leaving this elevated plateau, which Hall, the old chronicler, treating of the Battle of Barnet, calls “a fair place for two armies to join together”—as though that were the chief use for a plain—the old road begins its three miles of fall and rise; down into pebbly dips and over hunchbacked little rustic bridges spanning wandering watercourses; up steep rises and swerving round sharp corners, alternately from left to right; by the forgotten hamlet of Kitt’s End, down Dancer’s Hill, and past the suggestively named Mimms Wash, where the old coachmen, when the waters were out in wintertime (as they generally were, at this plashy corner) usually drove into the ditch, which, concealed by the floods that already covered the road and rose to the axle-trees, held a dangerous depth of water.

This old road, in fact, and indeed the whole of the eight miles between Barnet and St. Albans, pulses with stirring incidents of the old coaching days. It was, for example, in 1820 that what was described as an “accident” to the Holyhead Mail took place a mile short of St. Albans. As a matter of plain fact, it was not so much an accident as the almost inevitable conclusion of a road race between the Holyhead and the Chester Mails. The coachmen had been driving furiously all the way from Highgate, and striving to pass one another. Through Barnet they clattered, and by some miracle avoiding a smash on the old road, came at last within sight of St. Albans, to where the Old Mile House still stands by the way. Here, with an inch or two to spare, the coachman of the Holyhead Mail took the off side and was coming past the Chester Mail, when the coachman pulled his horses across the road. In the collision that followed, both coaches were overturned, and one passenger, William Hunt by name, killed. At the inquest held at the “Peahen,” St. Albans, both coachmen were, very properly, found guilty of manslaughter, and were committed for trial at the next Hertford sessions, which did not open till six months later. During the whole of that period they were kept in irons at St. Albans. Eventually they received a further term of twelve months imprisonment each.

With happenings such as these, becoming more alarmingly frequent as the pace of coaches and the rivalry between them increased, travelling grew exceedingly dangerous, and Lord Erskine, when counsel for a person who had had the misfortune to be thrown off one of the coaches from the “Swan with Two Necks,” and to receive a broken arm, was not altogether unduly severe in his witty address to the jury:—

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he gravely began, “the plaintiff in this case is Mr. Beverley, a respectable merchant of Liverpool, and the defendant is Mr. Chaplin, proprietor of the ‘Swan with Two Necks,’ in Lad Lane,—a sign emblematical, I suppose, of the number of necks people ought to possess who ride in his vehicles.”

A further development of coaching dangers about 1820 was found in the growing mania of the young bloods of that day for driving honours. Every young man about town cherished an ambition to become an expert coachman, but unhappily they took their lessons, not on the box-seats of empty coaches, but laid inexperienced hands upon the reins of well-filled conveyances.

This driving ambition was a fine thing for the sportively inclined, but staid and elderly persons were apt to be greatly terrified by it. An “Old Traveller,” writing to the Sporting Magazine in 1822, after having read the coaching articles by “Nimrod,” asks the Editor if he will have the goodness to request his distinguished contributor to inform the travelling public how they are to travel fifty miles by coach without having their necks broken, or their limbs shattered and amputated. “In my younger days,” says he, “when I was on the eve of setting out on a journey, my wife was in the habit of giving me her parting blessing, concluding with the words, ‘God bless you, my dear, I hope you will not be robbed.’ But it is now changed to, ‘God bless you, my dear, I hope you will not get your neck broke, and that you will bring all your legs safe home again.’ Now, Mr. Editor, this neck-breaking and leg-amputating is all because one daring rascal wishes to show that he is a better coachman than another daring rascal; or because one proprietor on the road is determined not to be outdone by another.

“Neither can I think, sir, that such writers as Mr. Nimrod mend the matter much. By a lively and technical description of these galloping coaches, he makes many a young man fancy himself a coachman, from which cause many an old man gets upset and hurt. For example: a friend of mine coming up to town a short time since by one of these galloping coaches, was upset and much injured. On going to sympathise with his misfortune, he informed me that the accident was occasioned by the leaders taking one road and the wheelers another; so between them both, over they went. ‘My God!’ said I, ‘what was the coachman about; was he asleep, or drunk?’ ‘Neither,’ replied my friend, ‘he had nothing to do with it; a young Oxonian was driving.’ Now, Mr. Editor, it is not at all improbable but that this Oxonian had been reading your magazine the night before, instead of his classics, and meant the next day to put his theory into practice, by which my friend, a very worthy man, the father of a large family, nearly lost his life.

“Whoever takes up a newspaper in these eventful times, it is even betting whether an accident by coach, or a suicide, first meets the eye. Now really, as the month of November is fast approaching, when, from foggy weather and dark nights, both these calamities are likely to increase, I merely suggest the propriety of any unfortunate gentleman, resolved on self-destruction, trying to avoid the disgrace attached to it, by first taking a few journeys by some of these Dreadnoughts, Highflyer, or Tally-ho coaches; as in all probability he may meet with as instant death as if he had let off one of Joe Manton’s pistols in his mouth, or severed his head from his body with one of Mr. Palmer’s best razors.”

It was all very well to complain of these sportsmen, but what about the professionals? How, for instance, would he have relished being at the mercy of a man like the driver of one of the Birmingham coaches on the home stretch between London and Redbourne who, on one occasion, full of port and claret, could just manage to keep his seat, and in this condition started for London?

When “the drink was a-dying in him, like,” and he felt more alive, he sprang his team at this dangerous part of the road known as Mimms Wash. Here he met the Manchester “Coburg” coming round a corner at a terrific pace. They met, with a resounding crash; the first coachman finding himself in the ditch and his leaders charging over it into the gates of a neighbouring park. The coach happily struck one of the posts and stopped dead. No one was killed and the worst that happened to the passengers was that one of them who had jumped off in alarm, sprained an ankle. He, very naturally, objected to complete the journey on the coach and had to be provided with a post-chaise at Barnet. Some of the other passengers went with him. Only one of the horses received any injury, and that was the off-leader of the “Coburg,” whose shoulder was smashed. This affair cost the tippling coachman £20, and he thought himself lucky (as indeed he was) that it was not worse. The same coachman, who by this time had reformed, met the “Coburg” on another occasion on this stretch of road. It was a moonlight night and the driver of the “Coburg” was on the wrong side in order to avoid some heaps of gravel thrown down in repairing the road. When he saw the other coach, the driver of the “Coburg” tried to cross over to his proper side, and in doing so, the heaped up gravel turned his coach over. The passengers were unhurt, and when they had righted the vehicle and found a baby who had been flung out of his mother’s arms off the roof into a field, they resumed their journey.

XII

One shudders to think what would become of railway directors and shareholders if the old Law of Deodand were still in existence. It was an ancient enactment, going back to the days of the Saxon kings, by which the object causing the death of a person was forfeited for the benefit of his representatives. At least, that was originally the humane intention of the law, which then really represented the etymology of its name, making it a God-given compensation. Sometimes the death-dealing object was valuable; occasionally it was practically valueless; just as might happen. But, like many another originally just and equitable thing, the Law of Deodand became perverted, and the inevitable Landowner found his account in it. It is difficult to follow the reasoning that, when the person killed left no representatives, made the offending object forfeit to the Lord of the Manor on whose land the accident might happen; but so it came about. Deodand became limited after a time, and instead of those interested receiving the full value of the thing causing death, a jury would sit to assess the damages due according to circumstances. Thus, when the Holyhead Mail ran over and killed a boy on the road near South Mimms, the deodand on the coach and horses was assessed by the coroner’s jury at one sovereign. Rightly considered, however, deodand should not in this case have been levied at all, for the accident was entirely due to a group of three boys, of whom the deceased was one, darting across the road under the horses’ heads to see how nearly they could come to the coach without being run over: a common feat with boys in those days, and one that ruined many a coachman’s nerves. In this case the boy was killed, and clearly by his own fault. Had the deodand not been limited, a curious legal point might have arisen, as it had done before, in the case of a man being killed by a horse and loaded waggon running over him; when, the value of the horse and waggon being claimed, the lawyers successfully raised the point that it was not the horse that killed the man but the waggon. In the result, the deodand was lessened by the value of the horse. This law was finally abolished before railways came into existence, or we might have seen locomotives and whole trains forfeited to relatives of the accidentally killed; or, failing these, to the Lord of the Manor in the particular spot where the accident happened.

A perhaps less sporting practice than that of permitting amateurs to handle the ribbons, but one certainly also less dangerous to the travelling public, was the wholly unauthorised and altogether illegitimate custom that began to obtain in later years of admitting a third person upon the box of the mails.

There was properly but one box seat beside the coachman, and this proud eminence was most ardently coveted by every man. In early coaching days it was attainable by an early appearance upon the scene and by tipping the yard porter; but when competition had rendered coach proprietors keener in their scent for fares, this pride of place was valued by them at a considerable advance upon the inglorious seats away from the bright effulgent genius who handled the ribbons, and diffused a strong odour of rum around “the bench.”

There was a heavy penalty—£50, it has been said—against admitting a third person upon the box, the reason of this tremendous regulation being that the driver, it was considered, could not have sufficient room for doing his work properly when encumbered with more than one passenger on the box.

This heavy penalty, or part of it, was recoverable by any informer, and the result was that the roads were infested by such gentry, not only on the look-out for a contravention of the rule, but practising all manner of dodges to inveigle a good-natured or greedy coachman into letting a third man get up for “just a few miles.”

But the game was so well known that such an application was apt to be answered by a coil of thong winding itself round the thighs of the applicant. There was one particularly active informer, Byers by name, who is referred to in the Ingoldsby legends as “the accusing Byers, the Prince of Peripatetic Informers, and terror of Stage-coachmen, when such things were. Alack! alack!” says Barham, “the Railroads have ruined his ‘vested interest.’”

The interests, “vested” or not, of these informers, were large and varied. Mail and stage-coachmen, postboys, travellers with their tax-carts, and waggoners, all contributed to their income. Sometimes these lynx-eyed fellows would find a coach carrying more passengers than it was licensed for. The discrepancy could be seen at a glance, for all stage-coaches were bound to carry a conspicuous plate stating these particulars. Perhaps the guard would artfully hang a rug over it, and then the common informer, hanging about at the changing place, would lift it up and have a look; finding, after all, that the coach was only carrying its legal complement. Whereupon, the coachman and guard, who had been lying in wait for him, would duck him finely in the nearest horse-trough for his pains.

Even the humble turnpike men were liable to be informed against for not giving a ticket, for taking too much toll, or for not having their names displayed over their doorways.

There were at one time no fewer than five turnpike-gates between London and St. Albans, a distance of only just over twenty miles. The series originally began with the gate on Islington Green, removed afterwards to the Holloway Road, and was continued by the one at Highgate Archway, and others at Whetstone, and South Mimms; the fifth being at the entrance to St. Albans itself. These numerous gates within so comparatively short a distance, gave excellent opportunities to the informing gentry, who were wont to take little excursions into the country along this route, returning with memoranda that brought them a goodly return on their enterprise. They cast their nets wide and captured an astonishing diversity of fish. But their memoranda had to be made with discretion. It was a risky thing to be seen noting down the name of a “collector of tolls,” as a turnpike-man was officially styled. The present writer has held converse with an old man who once kept the toll-gate at South Mimms. Age had withered him, but custom had not staled his reminiscences. He had an especially favourite and Homeric story of an encounter with one of these pests.

It was springtime, and our toll-keeping friend had a mind to whitewash the exterior of his house. To this end he not only took down the climbing roses, that rendered his official residence a fugitive glimpse of beauty to those who fared the road by coach, but he also removed his name-board. To him entered, while engaged in wielding the whitewash brush, one of the informing species, who, thinking himself unobserved, made to examine the board, lying face downwards, on the ground. Our friend, however, was not so intent upon his whitewashing but that he saw with the tail of his eye what was toward behind him. He must have been a man of elemental passions, for he reached over, his brush fully charged, and delivered a staggering sideways blow with it upon the face of the unsuspecting note taker. “I gin him a good ’un,” he always used to say; “but he come up for more, an’ I punched his head and kicked his ——” No matter what he kicked. Suffice it to say that his language was forcible, adjectival, and Saxon.

XIII

The old road regains Telford’s Holyhead Road of the Twenties a little distance short of South Mimms, close by where the cast-iron plate of the old milestone proclaims “Barnett” to be three miles distant. It crosses the broad highway at an acute angle and goes in an ascent, and with many curves behind the village; descending again and almost returning upon itself through the village street, as though a circuitous course and the mounting of every hill were things greatly to be desired by travellers bound on a long and toilsome journey. South Mimms, village and church, is completely islanded by these old and new roads.

SOUTH MIMMS.

In the accompanying illustration, the church with the houses behind it may be seen standing on a knoll. It is a hillocky and picturesque place, with a church unspoiled by the restoration of 1868, and rustic cottages that might well be fifty, instead of less than fifteen, miles from London. The view is towards London, and the road in the foreground is Telford’s; the old road coming steeply down and crossing again. There was an excellent reason for that ancient way taking such high ground at this point. It was for the accommodation of the village, and continued to be the main road until the days of a mere local intercourse between one parish and its next neighbour gave place to the more frequent and extended travel of later times, when direct communication between distant places became of much more importance than the convenience of wayside hamlets. The black despair that overtook the innkeepers and other frontagers relegated by Telford from a position in the midst of the traffic to a stagnant backwater of life may readily be imagined, but they received no compensation for this “worserment,” which must have practically ruined many of them; nor did those more fortunate ones pay for betterment who, in the making of new roads, found themselves, from being in a bye-lane, suddenly placed in the best of situations, on the main road.

Mimms was not only infamous for its floods. In days of yore it harboured highwaymen and footpads in plenty, and for quite a long time. It seems odd, nowadays, that a particular spot should have been of so evil a repute, and yet that no efforts were made to secure the rascals. A quaint document still preserved in the archives of the House of Lords recounts what befell William Symonds here in 1647. It is a petition in which he, as a prisoner in the King’s Bench prison, prays for a new trial. It seems that he was entrusted by Henry Fitzhugh and Richard Wells with a sealed packet of money, for him to carry from Bedford to London, and that when he reached Mimms at break of day he was set upon and robbed by three or four thieves and lost not only the money, but almost all the rest of what he had to bring to London. He further says that he was no common carrier, and that he had not negligently lost the money. Yet Fitzhugh and Wells prosecuted him, and, obtaining judgment, laid him prisoner in the King’s Bench. He concludes by praying for a new trial; but whether or not he ever obtained it does not appear. In any case, coming from Bedford to London, he had no business on this road.

The strange story of unfortunate William Symonds is followed by equally strange happenings some forty years later; when, for example, on November 9th. 1690, seven highwaymen not only robbed the Manchester carrier near this spot of £15,000, tax-money being conveyed from the Midlands to London, but also killed or hamstrung eighteen horses of the escort, in order to prevent pursuit. It was a leisurely business and thoroughly well carried out; all travellers who were unlucky enough to be passing at the time being robbed first and then tied to wayside trees, where they were left to be released by later wayfarers. Two Roman Catholics were subsequently arrested on a charge of being concerned in this affair, and committed for trial, but it does not appear what happened to them. At any rate, whatever their fate may have been, it did not stop these outrages on the Holyhead Road; for, two years later, the most audacious bands were still at work in this district, reaping almost incredible plunder. On the night of August 23rd, 1692, for instance, the great Churchill, the terrible “Malbrouck,” scourge of the foreigner on many a stricken field, tamely submitted to be robbed by the highwaymen who lay wait for him near “Coney,” as Narcissus Luttrell calls London Colney, and plundered him of 500 guineas; a loss “which,” says Macaulay, alluding to that great captain’s miserly disposition, “he doubtless never ceased to regret to the last moment of his long career of prosperity and glory.”

The plunder reaped by these daring highwaymen must have been immense, and inferior only to that bagged by modern company promoters. Three months later than their little parley with Marlborough, a party of eight or nine made a haul of between £1,500 and £2,000 out of a waggon “near Barnet,” and might have long continued their career had it not been for the King, who suspecting Roman Catholics and Jacobites in all these marauding bands, took measures that for a time effectually cleared the roads near London. Detachments of a regiment of Dragoons were posted some ten miles out, along all the great roads, and formed patrols. Captures were numerous, and executions almost as many. Among their notable seizures was that of Captain James Whitney, at some unspecified spot “at Barnet.” In this later Battle of Barnet, between the soldiers and Whitney’s band, December 6th, 1692, in which one dragoon was killed and several wounded, he was captured, and afterwards promptly hauled off to Newgate, amid great rejoicings, for he had been a terror in many widely separated districts of England. They hanged the “Captain,” not at Tyburn but in Smithfield, in the beginning of 1693, and the roads knew an interval of peace.

The parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts of South Mimms throw a further and a sombre light upon the history of the road, with their entries of “strangers” buried and “poor people” relieved. No fewer than seven “strangers” were found dead on the road, within the limits of the parish, in 1727, one of them having been drowned in Mimms Wash. Among other items in the accounts is one of 1737, “To a man that had the small-pox, to go forwards, 00 . 1 . 00d.” Set down in this manner a shilling looks a great deal, but what astonishes the reader of these things more than anything else is the heartless way in which the poor and the sick were given a trifle and hurried off to the next parish, to die on the way, if they would, in order that some other community should have the expense of them, or the infection, as the case might be.

XIV

The Holyhead Road goes broad and straight, and with a long perspective of dust-clouds and telegraph-poles, up Ridge Hill, where the borders of Middlesex are crossed and Hertfordshire entered; but the old way, after passing the “White Hart,” crosses to the right hand and climbs up by itself as a deserted track. Near the hill-top it crosses again, and so descends on the left hand towards St. Albans. It is quite a narrow way, measuring at the most twelve feet across, against the average twenty feet of the modern road; and, sunk between deep banks as it is, giving rise to astonishment that a road such as this was, until the first, quarter of the nineteenth century had nearly passed away, the chief means of communication between the capitals of England and Ireland. Nature, left to herself, has long since resumed sway over the old road, here and there scored with waggon-ruts through eighty years’ deposit of leaf-mould, or, in other places, become a green ride through the unchecked trees that grow along it and interlace overhead. It is a relic of Old England of the days before railways: no museum specimen, but an open-air survival, unnoted and untravelled; discovered by the few who, haply realising what it is, thread its winding course and leave the modern well worn road to the crowd.

Descending Ridge Hill, into the valley of the Colne, London Colney is reached, skirting the road by that insignificant stream, spanned by a picturesque old red-brick bridge, whose generous proportions seem to be much too large for so unassuming a runlet. Such criticism, however, is severely deprecated by those who know the Colne throughout the year. They tell wondrous stories of the things it is capable of. London Colney’s name is perhaps not a very attractive one, but the place itself is exceedingly picturesque. Quaint village inns, timber-and-plaster gabled cottages, and old brick houses with a certain air of refinement that comes of chaste design and sound workmanship, are its constituent features.

THE OLD ROAD, RIDGE HILL.

LONDON COLNEY.

The stretch of road between the northern face of Ridge Hill, London Colney, and St. Albans was always dreaded by coachmen in winter, for when snow fell in conjunction with a driving north or north-east wind, huge drifts resulted in this district. Ridge Hill formed a barrier against which the snow-charged wind battled, with the result that a flurry of snow-wreaths gathered in the levels. The great storm that began with startling suddenness on the Christmas Day of 1836 was a great deal more widespread than any other experienced during the coaching age. Curiously enough, it had its exact counterpart precisely half a century later, when the terrible snowstorm of Christmas night, 1886, fell, equally without warning, from what had been a blue and sunshiny sky. The storm of 1836 buried many coaches all over the country, particularly in the neighbourhood of St. Albans and Dunstable. The Manchester down mail of the 26th reached St. Albans, and, getting off the road into a hollow, was upset, and left where it fell, the guard returning to London with the bags and the passengers in a post-chaise. A mile distant from this accident, on the London side, a “chariot”—that is to say, a family carriage—was seen the next day without horses, and nearly covered with snow; two ladies making frantic appeals from its windows for help, saying their postboy, having left them two hours before to go to St. Albans for fresh horses, had not returned. They could not be helped; and so, still wildly gesticulating, we leave them for ever, without the means of knowing whether that postboy ever did return.

The up Birmingham mail, viâ Aylesbury, also on the 26th, just managed to get beyond that town when it ran into a drift and thus suddenly ceased its journey. All attempts to force a way through were fruitless. Accordingly, Price, the guard, mounted one of the horses and, tying the mailbags on another, set out in this fashion for London. Joined a little later by two postboys on other horses, with the bye-bags, all three pushed on together, discovering now and again that they had wandered far from the road when the hoof of a horse chanced to strike on the top bar of a field-gate or stick in the summit of a hedge buried in the drifts. By great good fortune they reached London at last, exhausted, but safe. The passengers, who were quite a secondary consideration, were left behind to be dug out by the country folk, and taken back, somehow, to Aylesbury. The Chester and the Holyhead mails were embedded at the same time at Hockliffe.

THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE LIVERPOOL MAIL PASSING TWO LADIES SNOWED UP ON RIDGE HILL IN THEIR CHARIOT, WITHOUT HORSES, THE POSTBOY HAVING RIDDEN TO ST. ALBANS FOR FRESH ONES.
From a Print after J. Pollard.

On leaving the old-world village of London Colney behind, a distant view of St. Albans opens out, the Abbey first disclosing itself, and then the clock-tower in the market-place, followed by an indiscriminate grouping of roofs and chimneys. The Abbey—in recent years ennobled as a Cathedral and by consequence of that and the creation of the See conferring the dignified style of “city” upon the town—very rightly dominates all else.

ENTRANCE TO ST. ALBANS.

XV

We must penetrate very deeply into the past to reach the event that gave the City and Cathedral of St. Alban their name. So dim have records and traditions become, by reason of lapse of time, that it is not quite certain whether the year A.D. 285 or A.D. 305 witnessed the martyrdom of that saint. By all accounts it would seem that the proto-martyr of Britain was a citizen of Verulamium, and a pagan, when the Diocletian persecution of Christians broke out; but a strange thing happened to turn him towards the Faith that already had made converts steadfast throughout many dangers and trials. To him came one Amphibalus, a Christian, seeking shelter from the fury of the persecutors; and, whether from innate nobility of character or from long friendship with the fugitive, Alban offered him the protection of his house. Sheltered thus, Amphibalus expounded to him the tenets of this new creed that had made enemies so bitter and so powerful, with the result that Alban himself became a Christian. It was not long before the fugitive’s hiding-place was discovered, but Alban, filled with the newborn zeal that distinguishes the convert, secretly allowed his guest to depart, and then, acknowledging as much, cursed the gods and announced himself a Christian and prepared to suffer in his stead. Imprisonment and torture availed nothing to shake his resolution, and it was not long before the day dawned when he was led out from the gates of Verulam and beheaded upon that hill beyond the Roman city, now and for eleven hundred years past, the site of a succession of great churches set up in memory of him. Vague stories of a very early church erected upon the scene of the martyrdom may be met with, but the relics of Saint Alban (as in the meanwhile he had become) had long been lost when, four hundred and eighty-seven years later, Offa, King of Mercia, penitent for having compassed the murder of Ethelbert, King of the East Angles, proposed to absolve his soul by founding a church over the scene of the martyr’s agony. Divine light and a ray of fire are said by the legend to have conducted him to a certain spot called Holmhurst (that is to say “Holly wood”) where the relics lay, and they were removed to the church he then built, or, as some accounts will have it, enlarged. Of that edifice only some doubtful fragments remain, for not only did Ealdred and Eadmer alter it about A.D. 950, but Paul de Caen, the first Norman Abbot after the Conquest, set himself to entirely rebuild it on a grander scale, little more than a hundred years later. Again, in A.D. 1195, rebuildings and enlargements were undertaken, and throughout the centuries very few decades have passed without something, good or ill, being done to the huge fabric. Huge it is, for it measures from end to end 550 feet, and is only surpassed in this particular by Winchester Cathedral, the longest in England; but only by seven feet. How great is the rise of the Holyhead road from London may be gathered from the fact that the ground on which the Cathedral of St. Alban stands is on a level with the cross on the dome of St. Paul’s. The long story of the Abbey; how those slain in the two battles of St. Albans are buried here and at St. Peter’s; how it was sold to the people for a parish church for £400 after the dissolution of the monastery in 1539; how it in modern times became a Cathedral; and how Sir Gilbert Scott and Lord Grimthorpe successively have wrought havoc with their “restorations,” at a total cost of over £166,000, are matters for ecclesiologists, and not for telling in a book on the road.

Far or near, the Abbey dominates the city, whose clustered roofs rise gradually toward where it stands on its elevated plateau, overlooking the quiet Hertfordshire meadows. Indeed, it stands on higher ground than any abbey or cathedral in England, the floor level at the crossing being 340 feet above mean sea-level. Lichfield is next highest, standing at 286 feet, and Durham, placed though it be on a craggy cliff beside the river Wear, comes only third, at 212 feet. St. Albans’ very bulk is impressive, and, to the distant view, softened as it is by the smoke of the town chimneys, not unlovely, despite that long outline which rivals Winchester’s great span; and though the crudities of the wealthy architectural amateur are insistent at close quarters they are fortunately lost in great measure from a distance. For where bygone abbots strove so greatly to build in ages past, it is happily difficult for one man to largely alter the outline of their work.

ST. ALBANS CATHEDRAL.

A cheerful old place is St. Albans, crowning its hill proudly with a mural crown, and rich in all the traditional attributes of a cathedral city—darkling nooks, quaint alleys, and ancient churches—satellites attendant upon the central fane. Before the present main road from London came into existence in 1794, the entrance was by Sopwell Lane, still in use, branching off to the left at something more than half a mile from the city. It is a steep and rugged way, leading down into the meadows where Sopwell ruins stand, and so to Holywell Hill, where an acute right-angle turn and a formidable climb used to bring the early coaches staggering into the market-place by the aid of an extra pair of horses. The Roman way, the famous “Watling Street,” avoided the site of St. Albans altogether, and went considerably to the left of the Holyhead Road, to the valley of the Ver, where the ruins of Verulamium may yet be found below the hilly site of the monastery of St. Alban, founded by King Offa of Mercia in 793. It was the monks who in mediæval times diverted the Watling Street from its straight course to Verulam, and made the road from St. Stephens into St. Albans, by the tremendous descent and ascent of Holywell Hill. The travellers of those times came from London chiefly by the Watling Street, viâ Stanmore, Brockley Hill, and Elstree, and it was not until later that the present route came greatly into vogue.

This monkish interference with the road was by no means on behalf of travellers, but rather from a highly developed sense of self-preservation. Before they laid hands upon it, traffic went by in the valley, and the town and monastery suffered from neglect. St. Albans Monastery, like other religious houses, did not exist by grants of land alone, but owned tolls and market-rights, and it was to increase the value of these that this drastic plan was adopted. Drastic, indeed, it was, for the paved Roman way was grubbed up and utterly destroyed from St. Stephens to Verulam, so that it became impossible to travel by it, and every one was then compelled to come into St. Albans by the mountainous Holywell Hill.

Verulamium had from the earliest times of the Roman settlement of Britain been the wealthiest of all the towns in this island. It possessed a theatre and all the graces of civilisation, but no walls or defences of any kind. Thus it was that when Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, revolted under oppression in A.D. 61, it became the easiest, as well as the earliest prey of her avenging hosts. Verulamium and Londinium fell before their onslaughts, and in the massacres following, 70,000 persons are said to have perished, in addition to those who fell at Camulodunum.

Verulamium, in common with those other towns, was afterwards rebuilt, and grew more prosperous than before; but it met a similar fate some 400 years later, when the Roman troops left Britain, and barbaric hordes overwhelmed it in some obscure foray. The very obscurity that clings about its end adds to the horror of those times. Those were wars of extermination, and none were left to tell the tale of how the great town and its people perished by fire and sword. Only when, in course of time, civilisation touched the Saxons, and historians were produced, do we hear anything of these long-ruined places, by that time become tinged with mystery and regarded with shrinking aversion. Bede, writing about A.D. 720, calls this “Waetlinga-ceaster,” the city of the Watlings. In his time vast ruined walls and houses remained. Offa, when founding St. Albans Abbey, some seventy years later, was probably dissuaded by fears of the supernatural from drawing upon the ruins for building material. It was not so with those who rebuilt and enlarged his Abbey from time to time. They found and worked the ready mine of bricks and tiles, doubly valuable in that district innocent of stone, and thus it is that so little of ruined Verulam is left; but, gazing upon the Abbey, we see, in the immense quantities of Roman brick and tile that have gone towards its construction, that ancient Roman town in a manner re-incarnated.

MARKET-PLACE, ST. ALBANS.

Towards the middle of the tenth century, those ruins in the valley were a source of terror to the good folks of the rising town of St. Albans. In them lurked those outlaws—robbers, murderers, and general offscourings of society—for whom it would have been dangerous to appear in the town, and who rendered it equally dangerous for law-abiding burgesses to wander far from their domestic hearths when the sun had set and darkness gathered. It was partly for this reason, perhaps quite as much as for the use of the materials for building purposes, that so much of the ruins was removed by Ealdred, the eighth Abbot. He warred with the Verulam vagabonds, carting much of their harbourage away, and explored a cave supposed to be inhabited by a dragon—who was not at home on that occasion. The good Abbot, however, is said to have found traces of the monster! His successor, Eadmer, was of the fiery sort. He, too, removed much building material, but the “pagan altars” found during his explorations he ground to powder—and so earns the maledictions of all antiquaries.

And so it went on for centuries. Stukeley, about 1690, noticed a good part of the walls standing, but, as he rode along, saw hundreds of loads of Roman bricks being carted off, to mend the highway.

XVI

The old entrance by Holywell Hill is the most charming part of St. Albans, with fine old red-brick mansions and old inns where the coaches and the post-chaises used to come. Many of the inns are either mere shadows of their former selves, or have been entirely altered to other uses, but their coach-entrances and yards remain to toll of what they once were. There stands a building now a girls’ school, but once the “Old Crown,” and close by the “White Hart,” with “Saracen’s Head Yard” beyond, but the “Saracen’s Head” itself is now divided into shops. In a continuous line uphill were the “Angel,” “Horsehead,” “Dolphin,” “Seven Stars,” “Woolpack,” “Peahen,” and “Key”; which last house stood squarely on the site where the London road now enters the city. It was from the “Keyfield,” at the back of this house, that the Yorkists burst into the streets and fell upon the Lancastrians in the first Battle of St. Albans, 1455. Another long-vanished inn was the “Castle,” made famous by Shakespeare in a scene of Henry VI., where Richard Plantagenet kills the Duke of Somerset, in this fight:—

So, lie thou there:—

For underneath an alehouse’ paltry sign,

The Castle in St. Albans, Somerset

Hath made the wizard famous in his death.

Somerset had been warned by a witch to “shun castles”:—

Let him shun castles;

Safer shall he be upon the sandy plains,

Than where castles mounted stand.

He could scarce have interpreted the prophecy in the crooked way it was verified.

ST. PETER’S STREET AND TOWN HALL, ST. ALBANS, 1826.       From an Old Print.

Holywell Hill still echoes to the sound of the coach-horn, as the modern “Wonder,” with an extra pair of horses, dashes up from the hollow to the “Peahen.” The “Wonder,” however, does not journey to and from St. Albans by the Holyhead road. Leaving London from the Hotel Victoria, Northumberland Avenue, at 10.50 a.m., it follows somewhat the line of the Watling Street by Hendon, the “Welsh Harp,” Edgware, Great Stanmore, Bushey, and Watford; reaching its destination at 1.50, and setting out on the return journey at 3.45. The “Wonder” has run daily to and from St. Albans, sometimes through the winter as well as summer, since 1882; owned by that consistent amateur of coaching, Mr. P. J. Rumney, familiarly known down the road and at Brighton as “Dr. Ridge,” from his proprietorship of a certain world-famed “Food for Infants.” But, before the “Wonder” came upon the scene, the modern coaching revival had provided St. Albans with summer coaches from about 1872. The now famous “Old Times” began to run, November 4th, 1878, and continued to St. Albans until the following spring, when it was transferred to Virginia Water.

The “Peahen,” standing at the meeting of Holywell Hill and the London Road, has of late been rebuilt in a somewhat gorgeous and baronial style, but is the lineal descendant of a house of the same name in existence so far back as 1556. The name of the “Peahen” is thought to be unique.

THE “GEORGE.”

Continuing the line of hostelries past the “Peahen” and the “Key,” into Chequer Street, there were the “Chequers,” the “Half Moon,” and the “Bell”; and in French Row the “Fleur-de-Lis,” and the “Old Christopher,” still remaining. The “Great Red Lion” in the market-place, has been rebuilt. Near it, in George Street, on the old road out of St. Albans, is the “George,” one of the pleasantest old places still left, with an old red-brick front and a picturesque courtyard. There was an inn on this site certainly as early as 1448, when it was mentioned as the “George upon the Hupe”—whatever that may mean. In those times it was a pilgrim’s inn, and had an oratory chapel. Nothing so interesting as that survives, but the old house has its features. The room to the right of the archway, used in old times, when a coach plied from the “George” to London and back every day, as a booking-office and waiting-room, remains in use as a parlour and rendezvous for the country-folk on market days, and all the summer the courtyard is like a bower with flowers and vines. Under the gable can be seen a spoil snatched from the destruction of old Holywell House in 1837—the decorative carving from the pediment, a work representing Ceres, surrounded with emblems of agriculture its products, and attended by Cupids and shameless creatures of that sort.

To and from the “George” went daily the “Favourite” London coach, until the first of the railways came in May 1858, and ran it off the road. William Seymour, who used to drive it, then descended to the position of driver of an omnibus plying between St. Albans and Hatfield, but even that humble occupation was soon swept away by railway extension. He then became landlord of the “King Harry” inn at St. Stephens, and died at last, May 30th, 1869, in the Marlborough almshouses, St. Albans. Two other coaches in those days plied between St. Albans and London, generally taking three and a half hours. One came and went from the “Woolpack,” and the other, the “Accommodation,” from the “Fleur-de-Lis,” French Row.

A particularly haughty and exclusive establishment was the “Verulam Arms.” No common fellow who travelled by public conveyances was encouraged there. Only the lordly travellers who came in their own family coaches, or posted, ever sheltered beneath that condescending roof. The house remains, on the right-hand of Telford’s new road leaving St. Albans, but had, as an hotel and posting-house, the shortest of careers. Built between 1827 and 1828, another ten years saw the coming of the railway. With that event vanished the trade of the “Verulam Arms.” The house was soon closed, and has for fifty years past been a private residence. It is an extremely plain and uncompromisingly formal building in pallid brick, within railings enclosing a semicircular drive. It is said that the Princess Victoria stayed here once. Some portions of the once extensive stable-yards and coach-houses remain, but the greater part of the grounds was taken, as long ago as 1848, as the site for a Roman Catholic Church, an unfortunate building discontinued and sold before completion, and finally purchased and finished as a Church of England place of worship, as it still remains, with the title of Christ Church. It would be difficult to find a more hideous building.

THE “FIGHTING COCKS.”

But a far higher antiquity than can be shown by any other house in St. Albans belongs to a little inn called the “Fighting Cocks,” standing by the river Ver, below the Abbey. Its origin goes back to early monastic days, when the lower part of this curious little octagonal building was a water-gate to the monastery, and known as St. Germain’s Gate. Here the monks kept their nets, using the upper part as a fortification. That embattled upper stage disappeared six hundred years ago, and in its place the upper storey of the inn is reared, in brick and timber, upon the stone substructure. The inn claims to be the oldest inhabited house in the kingdom, and exhibited until recently the inscription:—

The Old Round House,

Rebuilt after the Flood.

Obviously, judging from that old sign, the distinction between an eight-sided and a round house was too subtle to be noticed. The “Rebuilt after the Flood” does not (seeing where the house stands, beside the river Ver) necessarily mean the Deluge.

The hanging sign has of late years become pictorial. On one side the Cocks are to be seen, a whirling mass of contention, and on the other the victor stands proudly over the prostrate body of the vanquished, and indulges in a triumphant crow.

XVII

We often read in romances of the villainous innkeepers of long ago, who were in league with highwaymen, and we generally put those stories down as rather wild and far-fetched illustrations of a bygone age. But there were many such innkeepers in the old road-faring times, and they were the highwaymen’s best sources of information. Such an one was the host of an inn at St. Albans, who in 1718 was associated with Tom Garrett and another “road agent” working the highway between St. Albans and London, in an evil partnership. It is a pity that the sign of this inn is not specified; we should have gazed upon it with interest.