Chapter III: Preface (2)

Whip’s Cross, as its name would imply, stands at a junction of roads. It forms the entrance to Epping Forest, and is said to have obtained the first part of its name from being the place whence the Forest deer-stealers were formerly whipped at the cart’s tail; but such things are now quite put out of sight and forgotten in these marchlands of town and suburbs.

This is Leyton, twin sister of Walthamstow. Vast populations are springing up, and interminable streets of little houses, the meaner and more pitiful because so pretentious. A little while, and the cheaply-built “villas” develop ominous cracks, the doors and windows warp and refuse to shut, or when shut decline to be opened, and the trivial brick gate-posts sink out of plumb. It would not be surprising in a few years to find that most of their slack-baked bricks had resolved into their native mud and road-scrapings.

For what do these huge populations exist? Life in the bulk must be very grey to them, whose individualities are sunk in the mass, who live in streets all precisely alike and in houses more kin to one another than the proverbial two peas. They exist, if you consider it, for truly great altruistic purposes; to be the _corpus vile_ for governments, imperial or local, to experiment upon; and to be not only the milch-cow that supplies the funds for such governments, but the poor, senseless voting machine for whose support the candidates for Parliamentary and municipal honours struggle and lie and cheat. On their domestic and other needs thrive and wax fat the great trading companies that in their innumerable local branches are ousting the private shopkeeper and sending him in his old age to the Bankruptcy Court and the workhouse. For reasons such as these the swarming hives of wage-earners that ring round London and all the great cities make me melancholy. Let us away to the greenwood tree.

VII

THE entrance to Epping Forest, the greenwood tree aforesaid, is by way of Snaresbrook, past the Eagle Pond, a pleasant lake which takes its name from that old coaching-house, the “Eagle,” pictured here in the old print after Pollard. It is more than seventy years since that Old Master of coaching subjects painted this view of the Norwich Mail passing by, but the old house still stands, not so very greatly altered. Pollard has made it and its surrounding trees look more of the Noah’s Ark order of architecture than ever they were.

Epping Forest is a glorious heritage, of which any city might well feel proud, and the public-spirited act of the Corporation of the City of London, by which it was secured in 1882 as a forest, for ever, for the free enjoyment of all, has never been fully appreciated. These are the days of popularly-elected bodies, dependent upon the votes of the million, and every little thing they perform at the public expense is trumpeted as though it were a benevolence. The Corporation of the City, however, is not elected by a popular vote, and is accustomed to do things without an eye upon the next election. It purchased Epping Forest in a purely public spirit, and administers it in precisely the same way. The thing was done none too soon, for nerveless and conflicting interests had long permitted squatters to settle in the Forest lands, and already the suburban builder had begun to make his mark. As we pass the many Woodfords—Woodford, Woodford Green, and Woodford Wells—and come to Buckhurst Hill, the patches and snippets of common, village greens, and wayside selvedges of grass, saved with difficulty, show, outside the Forest proper, how the rural character was going.

Beyond Woodford Wells the way divides, to rejoin in less than three miles. To the right hand it leads through Loughton, and to the left past the more sylvan stretch by High Beech Green. “Here,” one might say, with Longfellow, “here is the Forest primeval”; and tangled glades, marshy hollows, and secluded lawns are glimpsed by the traveller in passing, between the massy boles of immemorial trees. Not yet, fortunately, has the floor of the Forest been levelled and drained, and made like a London park, and it is still possible to find places with uncanny names, in an uncanny condition. Thus, Deadman’s Slade is still as slippery a hollow as when it first obtained that name. Essex rustics have now forgotten many old words, and people who fall on ice or grease now slip because it is slippery; but not so long ago, throughout the whole of East Anglia, folks “slumped” because it was “slade.”

It was most terrible, this woodland road in the old times, and the nocturnal voices of the Forest had heart-shaking significances. The pit-a-pat of heavy dewdrops from leafy boughs on to the dried leaves of last autumn sounded for all the world like the stealthy footfalls of some lurking footpad, and the rise of some couching deer or the scuttle of a rabbit made the traveller stand still and face about, lest the rushing attack of the imaginary assassin should take him in the rear. Even the hooting of the owls, one against the other, were sounds of dread, and for all the world like rallying calls of midnight prowlers on their unholy errands

VIII

HIGHWAY-MEN early made their appearance on this road, and from very remote times the great Forest of Epping was dreaded by travellers on their account. But it was not until Newmarket’s fame as a racing and gambling centre arose, in the time of James I., that these long miles became so especially notorious. One of the very worst periods would seem to have been that of Charles II., under whose ardent patronage of the Turf the Court was frequently, and for long periods, in residence at Newmarket. Not the Forest alone, but the road in general, together with the several routes to this metropolis of racing, were thus infested.

This scandalous condition of affairs attracted attention so early as 1617, when travellers went in fear, not only of the professional Highway-men, but of the gentlemanly amateurs as well, who, either for pure love of a roystering life, or from being ruined by losses on the turf or at the gaming-tables, lurked by the roadside, and, with terrible menaces, robbed all classes of wayfarers.

A satirist of that period, one William Fennor, in the course of a pamphlet he published in 1617, called the “Competers’ Common-Wealth,” tells us much about those reckless blades. A “competer” was, of course, one who gambled on the turf or at the tables. Fennor, describing how ill-luck, sharpers, and money-lenders between them plucked the gamesters clean, so that there was nothing for them but to retrieve their fortunes on the road, says that Newmarket Heath, in especial, swarmed with such Highway-men, who stooped to the meanness of robbing even the rustics of their pence, and were such keen gleaners of small change that scarce any money was left in the neighbourhood. “Poor Countrie people,” he says, “cannot passe quietly to the Cottages, but some Gentlemen will borrow all the money they have.” Fennor was a man of a grimly humorous nature, and observed that these doings caused Tyburn Tree and Wapping Gibbets to have “many hangers-on.” A good many, however, escaped; for they had a very ingenious plan, when they had brought off successful robberies, and the hue-and-cry grew too hot, of posting to London, where they arranged to be arrested and thrown into prison for a small debt. By lying in such seclusion until the matter cooled, they generally escaped, “for,” concludes Fennor, “who would look in such a place for such offenders?”

But such paltry robberies were altogether thrown into the shade by that of 1622, when a company of India and Muscovy merchants, going to Newmarket to pay their respects to James I., were robbed of their papers and a bag containing £200.

To quote all the accounts of such affairs would be to occupy many pages, but some remarkable instances may be given. A London paper of March, 1680, tells how “A Gentleman with some of his family being in the coach with six horses going to Newmarket, was set upon by some Highway-men, and robbed of all his Money, Watch, Rings, Stone Buttons, and a pair of Lac’d Sleeves. And about four hours after, two Coaches coming from Cambridge, the persons in them were robb’d of several hundred pounds; there were but five Highway-men, two of them setting upon one coach, and three on the other; but at their departure they were so noble as to give the two coachmen two Half-crowns, to drink their healths. The coaches were within a mile of Newmarket when they were robb’d, at a place called the Devil’s Ditch.”

A parlous place, this Devil’s Ditch. It was the scene of a pitched battle between the Highway-men and the exasperated country folk in 1682. According to the _Domestic Intelligence_ of August 24th, in that year, five Highway-men robbed a coach on the Heath, and secured £59 and a very considerable booty in the way of gold lace, silks, and linen. Before they could make off with the plunder, the rustics had been roused, and were stationed in a body in the cleft of that bank, impracticable for horsemen, through which the road runs. The Highway-men were thus shut in by this stoppage of the only exit from the Heath. Had they retreated, they would have been captured in Newmarket town, and so they were forced to make a desperate dash for liberty. “Knowing themselves Dead Men by the Law, if they were taken, they charged through the Countrymen, and by Firing upon them Wounded four, one of which we since understand is Dead of his Wounds.” So these Knights of Industry got clear away, and the liberal art of robbery upon the highway continued to flourish; for, three weeks later, two gentlemen were duly reported to have been robbed of seven guineas and their watches while riding over the Heath.

The professors of this art were so romantic in the eyes of youth that many a stable-boy or ostler “borrowed” a horse and took the road in admiring imitation. Daniel Wilkinson, advertised for in the _London Gazette_ during March, 1683, was probably one of these. The advertisement describes him as “a little short Man, about 26 years old, with short light brown Hair, a hairy Mould near his Chin, in a grey Hat, and Leather Breeches,” and goes on to state that he “Hired, on the 4th Instant, at Newmarket, a bald Gelding, Wall-Eyed, above 14 hands high, eight or nine Years old, of a Chesnut colour, a short Mane and short Tail, and some white about his Feet, with a Hog-skin Saddle, and a white Cotton Saddle-Cloth, to ride to Cambridge, but has not been since heard of. Whosoever gives notice of the Horse or Man at the Green Dragon in Bishop-Gate-street, or to Thomas Gambeling, at Newmarket, shall have 20_s/-._ and their Charges.”

I do not think the advertiser ever heard of Daniel Wilkinson or of his wall-eyed horse again; although it does not seem to have been a very desirable animal.

Horses of good points were duly noticed by the Highway-men of the Heath, and many an one was taken by force from the groom exercising them. An instance of this is found in an offer of a reward, appearing in the _London Gazette_, of March 15th, 1686, when a “Black Mare, 15 hands high, about 4 Years old, having all her paces,” was “taken away from a Gentleman’s Man upon Newmarket Heath, by several Highway-men.” Three guineas and expenses were offered as a reward, but we may readily suppose that no one ever qualified for it.

The dangers of the road became even more acute twelve years later, in the reign of William III., when the wars in which England had been engaged were brought for the while to a conclusion; and disbanded soldiers lacking civil employment, and probably not wanting any while “the Road,” as an institution, remained possible, made every highway as dangerous to travellers as an expedition into an enemy’s country would have been. Epping Forest formed a most convenient centre for such as these; for it was densely wooded, contained caves and natural harbourages for desperadoes, and commanded several roads. Here a fraternity of freebooters, to the number of thirty, sworn to stand by one another to the last extremity, found a home in the leafy coverts in the neighbourhood of High Beech and Waltham Cross. Never, since the romantic days of Robin Hood and Little John, in their refuge under the greenwood trees of Sherwood Forest, had England known the like. These brethren built huts and storehouses, and came forth when they thought fit, to plunder and to slay. The King, journeying to Newmarket with distinguished company, was safe only because well escorted; and others, not so strongly guarded, were attacked, with loss of life, soon after he had passed.

An armed force, cautiously advancing into these wilds, did at last succeed in destroying the houses of this gang of land buccaneers, but they soon assembled again, and were strong enough, or impudent enough, to send a written and signed challenge to the Government, to come and dislodge them; which the Government accordingly did, in its own good time, in 1692, when, by the heroic method of posting detachments of Dragoons at a distance of ten miles from London on all the great roads, and by forming a chain of patrols, the Highway-men were in some instances brought to battle, killed or captured, or driven out of the business for a time, until such unusually severe measures were withdrawn and the Gentlemen of the Road were again suffered to pursue their avocation in peace.

They flourished for many a long year after, and the newspapers continually teemed with accounts of coach and other robberies. On the morning of December 28th, 1729, the “Norwich and St. Edmund’s Bury coaches” were stripped by two Highway-men half a mile on the London side of Bishop’s Stortford, and they afterwards not only robbed three gentlemen on horseback, but made away with the bridles and drove the horses off. Fortunate, indeed, for the dismounted trio that the town was so near! Again, we read, under date of April 25th, 1730: “The Earl of Godolphin’s gentleman was robb’d last week in the Bury coach of £50 and a gold watch”; while the detailed account of another robbery, in 1731, affords some amusement: “About three o’clock in the afternoon of November 21st, the Norwich, Bury, and Cambridge stage-coaches were robbed by two Highway-men near the three-mile stump in Epping Forest. The passengers were robbed to the extent of £30. In the Norwich coach was a Clergyman and two Tradesmen who had been at Sir Robert Walpole’s house in Norfolk, to assist in the entertainment of the Duke of Lorraine, and a lad who was coming to town, to be put apprentice. The Clergyman saved his portmanteau, with a great deal of gold in it, by persuading the robbers that it contained nothing but a few sermons, but they took away the boy’s portmanteau, with all his clothes. While the coaches were under examination, two horsemen appeared near the wood, upon which the Highway-men rode up and dismounting them, forced them into the wood, and there bound them with their own belts and gaiters, and then rode off.”

IX

THE “Wake Arms” inn stands where the roads by High Beech Green and Loughton join again. In the old days it was a posting-house of some celebrity, and a prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and badger-drawing resort of a considerable notoriety. Near it, on the right side of the road towards Epping, are those prehistoric earthworks, largely overgrown with ancient trees, called Ambresbury Banks, and supposed to take their names from Ambrosius Aurelius, a half-legendary Romanised British chieftain who died about A.D. 500. This, too, is one of the very many sites found for Boadicea’s last battle.

Epping village, or townlet, is a particularly long one, heralded by a gigantic water-tower, of distinctly unlovely design, and neighboured by a modern church, built to render religious exercises easier than when the only place of worship was the old parish church, two miles away.

The most striking note of Epping, apart from the generous width of its street, is the extraordinary number of inns and places for all kinds of refreshment. Of these the “Thatched House” is the most notable, but is now no more thatched than is the “Thatched House Club” in London. There is a baulking air of picturesqueness in the long view down Epping street, but, taken in detail and analysed, it is evasive, and certainly most elusive when sought to be transferred to paper.

At Thornwood Common, some two miles onward, we encounter the uttermost notice-board of the City Corporation, and bid good-bye to the Forest. Thence, crossing a high ridge of quiet country, we come steeply down hill, past the “Sun and Whalebone” inn, and across picturesque Potter Street Common, with its avenues and modern church, to the single-streeted hamlet of Potter Street. This again gives place to the village of Harlow, with a sprinkling of plastered and gabled houses and an exceedingly ugly Union Workhouse. Harlow is a village with a preposterously urban air, and as much “side” as that of a hobbledehoy who fancies himself a grown man. The reason of this attitude is found, perhaps, in Harlow possessing, not only a railway station, but a busy wharf as well, on the Stort Navigation. That wharf is nearly a mile away down the road, and all that distance the highway is punctuated with the coal-droppings from the carts that ply between that waterway and the village.

Beyond the wharf comes Sawbridgeworth, also owing its sustained prosperity to the canalised Stort, and still not only a busy townlet, but also a very old-fashioned one. It is still essentially a town of malt, and the old wooden and cowled malt-houses remain to this day its chief characteristic.

Until quite recently known to its natives as “Sapsworth,” Sawbridgeworth has at last lost that archaic distinction. Now that every country lad is taught to spell and read, and the yokel has the evidence of the finger-posts, among other things, to tell him that it is “Sawbridgeworth,” it is of no use to tell him that his father and mother called it otherwise. “I kin read, cawnt I?” he asks, citing the finger-post as a witness. It is quite certain that the stranger who should nowadays ask for Sapsworth would be as little understood as were the travellers of old who enquired for Sawbridgeworth.

At Harlow wharf the road left Essex and entered Hertfordshire, and so runs through Sawbridgeworth and the hamlets of Spelbrook and Thorley Street to Bishop’s Stortford. Just short of that town there is a choice of ways. By bearing to the left, Bishop’s Stortford is entered direct; by keeping to the right, along what was once known as “Queen Anne’s new road,” the coaches bound for places beyond avoided Bishop’s Stortford altogether, and set down passengers for it at the suburb of Hockerill.

Hockerill is on the hill, Bishop’s Stortford is in the hole, and, as its name would imply, beside the river Stort, dividing the two counties of Essex and Herts.

We will take the left-hand, and older, road, for the excellent reason that along it, on the uttermost outskirts of the town, there stands a house even already historic, and in years to come destined to be something of a shrine. No saint, indeed, was born beneath its roof, but a man whose memory is much more worshipful than that of the majority in the hierarchy of the Blessed. If you love your country, you cannot choose but be interested in this house, and cannot do aught but reverence that man who was born here: the man who saved Central Africa for the Empire. We are all Imperialists now, and patriotism is cheap to-day, but it was a frame of mind entertained by few when Rhodes first became an expansionist. Those were the days when Gladstone was the wet-nurse of sucking alien ambitions, the friend of every country but his own, and ready to surrender anything and everything in the sacred cause of foreign nationalities. If Rhodes was an expansionist, may we not with justice apply the term “contractionist” to the great demagogue, that great master of phrases that sounded so full of meaning and were really so empty, whose life was equally divided by the making of speeches and the explaining of them away?

In this house, then—a very commonplace semi-detached stuccoed house—Cecil John Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia, son of the Rev. F. W. Rhodes, vicar of Stortford, was born, July 5th, 1853.

No sketch is needed here of a career whose record is writ in the politics of his time, and indelibly scored in the history of his country. Like Moses, it was not given him actually to enter that Promised Land of Empire he had seen afar, but when he died, in 1902, the fruition of the idea was at least assured. He looked, like some Prophet, upon South and Central Africa, and with the phrase, “English, all English, that’s my dream!” made a comprehensive span upon the map. A very pleasant dream too. Conceive what a nightmare the world would be if predominance were given the brutal German, the frenzied Frenchman, or the thinly veneered Russian savage! We are the salt of the earth, and let us savour it as strongly as we can. Thinking thus, it behoves us to honour this great Empire-builder in the bulk, even though we may criticise him in detail.

X

BISHOP’S STORTFORD is a pleasant and an old-fashioned market-town, with a great and fussy air of business, a long High Street running in the valley near, and parallel with, the Stort, and a large parish church perched on the shoulder of a precipitous street most picturesquely and accurately named Windhill. Natives have long since dropped the first half of the name and know it as “Stortford,” except indeed when they say “Strawford,” as very often they do.

There was, once upon a time, a fine strong and damp castle in the Stort meadows, midway between the town and its suburb of Hockerill, a stronghold of the Bishops of London from the time of William the Conqueror, but it has long since disappeared and only a green, tree-covered mound remains. Its name was Waytemore, a name with a suspicion of grim humour about it, traditions still tell how the zealous Bonner imprisoned many a heretic here, before burning them at the stake; but the martyrs suffered and went to Heaven, and the Bishop to Hell, so long since that it is difficult to probe the truth of the stories.

There are old and quaint inns in the town; the “Black Lion” the most ancient, and certainly at this time the most picturesque of them, but the “Boar’s Head,” on Windhill, is little less so; and, moreover, grouping finely with that parish church already named, makes a picture. It is a great church and a fine one, even though that tall spire be poor Gothic and its four satellite pinnacles abjectly bad. Up to the present the church contains no memorial to Rhodes, but students of coaching history find interest in the polished Aberdeen granite stone in the churchyard, in memory of Henry Gilbey, father of Sir Walter Gilbey, Bart. The inscription runs:—

HENRY GILBEY
OF THIS TOWN, MANY YEARS COACH PROPRIETOR,
DIED SEPTEMBER 29TH, 1842,
AGED 52 YEARS.

There are even yet a few ancients in Bishop’s Stortford who remember “old Harry Gilbey,” as they call him, and speak of him as in partnership with one William Low, of Saffron Walden, in the coach running between that place, Bishop’s Stortford, and London. This coach was taken over by Henry Gilbey, as sole proprietor, shortly after 1824. Besides this—the “Old Stortford Coach,” as it was called—he had another, running between the “George,” Bishop’s Stortford, and London. Both called at the “Crown,” Hockerill, a house demolished in 1903, and went to and returned from the “Bull,” Aldgate, until 1841, when the railway was opened to Bishop’s Stortford.

Henry Gilbey, who was son of Daniel Gilbey, proprietor of the “White Bear,” Stansted, was born January 29th, 1789. He married, at the age of 25, in 1814. From 1829 he resided at the house, still standing, called “The Links,” on Windhill, where the future Sir Walter Gilbey was born, in 1831.

XI

TRAVELLERS by road who fleet from Hockerill on to Newport, turning neither to the right nor left, pass through Stansted Street and know nothing of the ancient village of Stansted Mountfitchet, of which it is an offshoot. It is a pity, for that village is a distinctly interesting place. Turning to the right hand at the cross-roads, one arrives at the centre of the old settlement in less than half a mile. It was originally built in a deep hollow, under the heavy shadow of the giant earthworks on whose shoulders the Gernons or Montfichets in early Norman times built a tremendous Giant Blunderbore of a castle. Somewhere here, in very remote times, stood a stone building, probably a ruined Roman villa, whence the Saxon name of Stane Stead derived; but its site and its history are alike unknown, and the knightly deeds of the Montfichets are equally forgotten. That Norman family obtained its original name of Gernon from some ancestor who especially distinguished himself by going unshaven in times when (if we may believe the evidence of the clean-shaven, or merely moustached, effigies of Norman warriors) it was the fashion to shave. His comrades, like the vulgar boys of the present day, who shout “there’s ’air!” after any inordinately hairy person, gave him the nickname of “Les Gernons,” which means “Whiskers”; and, in a manner common at that time, when family names derived from individual peculiarities, it was as “Whiskers” that his descendants became known, whether they went whiskered or whiskerless. They are found referred to as “Gernon” and “Grenon,” but it was not very long before they dropped the name for that of their castle, built on the ancient mound that was here when they came, and named by them “Mont Fiché,” or “firm mount.”

It is many years since these ancient lords of Stansted became extinct, and even the famous family of De Veres, who succeeded to their property, has followed them into oblivion. Their stout castle, too, has gone the way of many another sturdy fortalice, and only the great mounds and fosses that girdle and seam the hillside are left. “Only,” we say, but a word with so depreciatory a sound is scarcely in order when used in connection with these impressive earthworks that fire the imagination of even the casual railway traveller. For it is from the railway those castle mounds are most impressively seen, just as it is from the railway station that Stansted village looks its best. In the hasty glance from the passing train, the village roofs, rising one above the other up the hillside, seem to be crowned by the dignified tower of some benignant old church, richly pinnacled and turreted in the South Devon manner, and it is only on closer acquaintance one discovers this to be no worshipful old building, but the modern (1889) district church of St. John, built to the joint honour and glory of God and one of the Pulteney family. It is built of red brick, with Bath stone enrichments—_very_ rich and sugary, and probably from the designs of a confectioner principally engaged in the manufacture of ornamental Twelfth-cakes. The exterior of the tower, prodigal in pinnacles, crockets, and mediæval fandanglums of all sorts, and stuck about with blank windows that open upon nothing, is surely the last word in the ready-made picturesque, and lacks the reposeful dignity properly belonging to a church. The interior, where there is less scope for riotous fancy, is better.

The old church is over a mile distant from the village, and stands in or beside Stansted Park. Its situation, remote from the life of the place, but closely adjoining the Hall, tells us that the ancient lords of Stansted who built and maintained it held the welfare of their own souls dear, and that of the people’s immortal part altogether too cheap. Indeed, rightly considered, the building and maintenance of this and many another church of its kind was in the nature of an insurance policy against fire—the dreaded eternal fire.

It is a small Norman and Early English building, restored in 1889 and rubbed up and carpeted in rather a drawing-room style of comfort, so that the monumental effigies look somewhat second-hand and apologetic. The battered, crusading, or, at any rate, cross-legged, effigy of one Roger de Lancaster looks even tenth-hand, and, shoved into a dimly lighted corner, with a bar of Windsor soap in his mouth, a mop and a pail and other housewifely things disposed negligently about his mailed person, is the picture of ancient dignity in reduced circumstances. The tomb, with recumbent effigy, in the south wall of the chancel, is that of Sir Thomas Middleton, 1631. With him lies his wife, killed by a stag in Stansted Park.

The alabaster tomb, with life-sized and coloured effigy of Esther Salusburye in the Lancaster Chapel, is found unexpectedly by the stranger, behind the organ. The full-length figure lying there, so naturally coloured and dressed in the height of fashion of that bygone year of 1604, when she died, is so extraordinarily lifelike that one almost shrieks with momentary fright; and indeed the work is so perfect, it rather resembles a human being masquerading as an effigy than a mere carved and painted mass of stone. Her high-heeled shoes, the black-painted Early Jacobean skirt and bodice, with the deep lace cuffs, generous ruff, and high-crowned hat, form a perfect picture of an English lady’s costume in the days when James I. was King.

Stansted Street, skirting the main road with its old-fashioned but nondescript houses, has lost much of its picturesqueness of late years. The “White Bear,” kept in old times by Daniel Gilbey, and the “Old Bell” have disappeared, and it rejoices in a very new and ornate white brick house, designed in the snoburban style of architecture. A horse at full stretch is carved over the door, together with the inscription, “Galloping Villa.” If you ask any of the admiring villagers for information about this astonishing house, and why “Galloping,” they tell you “it belongs to Mr. ——, of the roundabouts.” Immediately opposite is a house and shop, whose builder or owner appears to have been extraordinarily proud of his building, for it bears not only the date of the year, but even the day of the particular month when it was finished: “L.S.T., July y^e 25, 1759.”

The very handsome old red-brick house, standing high above the road on approaching Ugley, and attracting attention by its fine wrought-iron gates and general air of distinction, is Orford House, built by Admiral Edward Russell, who commanded the allied English and Dutch fleets in their victory over the French at La Hague in 1692. The Admiral was created Earl of Orford in 1727.

The country grows particularly pretty as we approach Ugley, fields giving place to dense plantations, with oak woods and almost impenetrable coverts, presenting a vivid picture to the mind’s eye of what the great Forest of Essex must have been like in the long ago. “What’s in a name?” asks Shakespeare. Not much here, if we take that of Ugley by its sound; but a good deal if we make due enquiry, for it is really “Oakley,” the “oak meadow,” and, as Oakley, we do actually now find certain upstart signposts and wayside parish marks naming it. Again, if we leave the road and take the footpath that leads across a meadow (? the original “oak lea”) to the church, we shall find in the little churchyard the tombstone of an incumbent, dead not long since, who is described as vicar of “Oakley.” He had probably been a lifelong sufferer from the old rhymed pleasantry:—

Ugly church, ugly steeple,
Ugly parson, ugly people.

In short, only the handsomest of men with the most amiable of natures can possibly afford to take the living of Ugly, for should the parson be plain, the obvious remarks as to his peculiar fitness for the place would become a burden to him, and unless of an angelic disposition, his “ugly temper” might be commented upon. Fortunately Ugley is among the smallest of places, and therefore the Ugley girls with feelings to be scarified by such a description are few. But, on the other hand, how easy the way to a most ingratiating compliment, in the exclamation of surprise:—

“You come from Ugley? Impossible!”

“Why impossible?”

“Because——”

But here you fill the hiatus to your own individual taste in flattery.

The embarrassments of such a place-name are many, and are not so easily surmounted as those of the Scilly Islanders, who are “Scillonians,” rather than Scilly people. Ugley, however, has a near neighbour in misfortune, in the hamlet of Nasty, to be found by the curious, scarce more than ten miles away, between Great Munden and Braughing, in Hertfordshire.

Ugley is said to have been the “Quercetum” of the Romans, so named by them “from the locality abounding in oaks.” In Domesday Book it is “Uggheley,” and it is even found written by some ancient vulgarian as “Huggele,” a really h’odious variant.

Ugley church is situated, as I have here made effort to show, in a very pretty setting of trees. They are not oaks, as they should be; but that would be to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” of allusion, and we must not expect such fitness and completeness. It is a small church, placed just outside a farmyard, but stands otherwise solitary and unheeded by those who keep the main road. It might be thought the Georgian red-brick tower was built on to the ancient body by some one concerned to make it fit the place-name—for it is not beautiful—did we not know that Georgian towers, and churches too, were commonly hideous, and this, therefore, by no means exceptional. But the kindly aid of Nature has done much here, and “that rare old plant, the ivy green,” has mantled the stark design to such purpose that it now gives the ideal rustic effect presented by the literary efforts of Gray’s “Elegy,” and the artistic convention of Birket Foster’s drawings. Its note is one with the Christmas cards of our youth, when no one was ashamed of such pictures as that of the old parish church in the snow, or the Robin Redbreast on his spray of holly.

XII

QUENDON, a scattered little village prettily situated where the road broadens out and curves slightly, with broad margins of grass, bears a resemblance to Trumpington, on the Cambridge Road. In advance of the cottages stands a picturesque modern well-house and fountain, with a beautifully designed horse-trough, “given to Quendon and Pickling in memory of Caroline Mary Cranmer-Byng,” as an inscription states. Quite at the end of the village is the “Coach and Horses” inn, a survival of posting and coaching days, very much in its old condition. Beyond it the open road leads into Newport.

Newport, whose name has nothing whatever to do with a water port, derives that title from its situation on a new road—a new gate, or door, or portal—made at some unrecorded time through the Forest of Essex. It is now nothing but a village, as picturesque and delightful as any on the road, but fallen from its ancient importance, and overshadowed by Saffron Walden, only three miles away. Time was—a very long while ago—when Newport had a market and Saffron Walden had none. At that time Newport was one of the many manors belonging to Harold, and it continued to be a Royal manor for some time after the Conquest; coming afterwards into the hands of the Magnavilles. There was a castle at Newport in those days, and a lake, whence the old name for this place of “Newport Pond.” Tradition tells that the pond or lake was situated where the railway station is now, but of it and of that castle no traces have survived. The fortunes of Newport fell, and those of Saffron Walden began to rise, when the Empress Maud, somewhere about 1142, authorised Geoffrey de Magnaville to transfer the market to Walden, and although, some sixty years later, in 1203, King John granted Newport the right to hold an annual fair, this stricken town never recovered from the blow inflicted by the loss of its market privileges. A century later the Manor of Newport belonged to an historical character—that Piers Gaveston, the favourite of Edward II., who was executed, murdered, or done to death in 1310 on Blacklow Hill, near Warwick, by insurgent Barons, jealous of his influence over the King. The fate of Gaveston seems to prove how dangerous was the stinging gift of satire in the early part of the fourteenth century. That unfortunate man, raised by the King to the highest offices of State, of course became hateful to others not so successful, and his splendour, his arrogance, and, above all, the wittily offensive nicknames he showered upon that baronial crew, aggravated the original offence beyond endurance, so that they finally seized and beheaded him. It will be allowed that this eminently practical retort was even more stinging than the original satire, and certainly forbade a rejoinder.

Later lords of the manor of Newport have been more fortunate, or have been such comparatively obscure persons that their misfortunes are scarcely historic. Indeed, with the passing of Gaveston, the annals of the place are purely domestic, but none the less interesting; Newport is, in fact, singularly full of interest. Prominent in its broad street stands the beautiful old house of timbered frame and brick nogging known locally as “Monks’ Barns,” and said to have once been used by the monastery of St. Martin-in-the-Fields as a country sanatorium, but much more likely to have been a Priest’s House at the time when Newport church was under the joint control of Westminster Abbey and St. Martin’s, and served from them. However that may be, this fine relic of the fifteenth century is now in secular occupation, and divided into two cottages. The interior is without interest; and its most beautiful and interesting feature the one most easily seen by the wayfarer—the fine old oak-framed oriel window looking upon the road and decorated with an elaborate and curious carving of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

It was at Newport the route often taken Charles II. to Newmarket, by way of Rye House, passing Rickling Church End and Wicken Bonant, fell into the existing highway. It is still known as “London Lane”; the junction of roads remaining the most old-world corner of the village. The church, dominating the view at this point, looks almost cathedral-like, and its tower is strongly reminiscent of Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge; but the interior proves less imposing, and the bare nave and wide chancel, built in the later and less refined style of Gothic, disappointing.

A memorial tablet on the chancel wall, plain in design, but grotesquely ornate in the epitaph of the person it praises, hands down to us the memory of the many virtues of “Joseph Smith, M.A., of Shortgrove Hall.” It appears that the worthy Smith, who died in 1822, was private secretary to William Pitt. It would be easier to recount the few virtues he was _not_ possessed of than to recite a list of those that, according to his executors, rendered him such a Phœnix. He—or they for him—wholly lacked humility.

Tragical memories are revived by the memorial window in the south aisle to the son of the vicar, one of the 130 who perished in the destruction by fire of the Theatre Royal, Exeter. An inscription tells how “This window was erected by loving friends in memory of Robert Morgan Tamplin, B.A., of Keble College, Oxford, who entered into his rest at Exeter, in the great fire, Monday, September 5th, 1887, aged 23 years.”

The church has a treasure of sorts in the musty, dusty old theological library, stored away in the parvise chamber, over the porch. It is a treasure not likely to be greatly coveted, nor are its constituent volumes frequently read, consisting, as they do, of dull black-letter discourses on just those religious matters in which the learned are of necessity as ignorant as the veriest clod. Not even the best-equipped of those disputants could pierce the veil that hides from us the other world, and now they are gone hence and acquired that knowledge, or just become extinct, they cannot enlighten ourselves. All they could do was to raise cloudy disputations, and the dust one bangs out of their ponderous folios is typical of their useless labours.

A more desirable treasure is the ancient muniment-chest kept jealously under lock and key in the vestry. It is a weighty affair, covered with gilt lead, in perforated patterns, and secured with five locks. Inside the heavy lid are barbarically coloured paintings of the Crucifixion, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul.

An early morning bell-ringing custom of immemorial antiquity is still maintained at Newport, but happily not with all its old-time severity. It was not until 1875 that the local revolt broke out, and the four o’clock-in-the-morning bell-ringing during the winter was modified, and replaced by an eight in the morning peal in the months between Michaelmas and Lady Day. Bell-ringing at Newport was wont to be greatly favoured, for there was a nightly curfew, followed by a number of strokes corresponding with the day of the month. Then there was the “gleaners’ bell,” at harvest-time, rung to tell the poor the corn had been carried and they might go into the fields and glean. But modern agricultural machinery leaves nothing to be gathered up, and so gleaning is a lost chance

XIII

AMONG the many points of interest in Newport, the still-surviving “Newport Toll” is certainly not least. In these latter days, when traffic fares the road unhindered, all public roads are toll-free—except the road through Newport. Pedestrians and cyclists in general, and the whole of the traffic from certain specified neighbouring villages are exempt; but waggons from elsewhere pay 2_d._ each, forwards and backwards; higglers’ horses, ½_d._ each; and sheep and all other cattle, 4_d._ per score. The exempted places are: Newport, Wicken, Saffron Walden, Great and Little Chesterford, the Wendens, Quendon, and Widdington.

How comes it, then, that this one toll survives when others have been abolished? That is a long story, but one that may readily be summarised here. It seems, then, up to some two hundred years ago the little stream which even now runs across the highway, and is known variously as Wicken Water and the Granta, was unbridged, and crossed only by a ford. Neither the county nor the parish would be at the expense of building a bridge, and at last the lord of the manor obtained an Act of Parliament which conferred upon him the right of building, and authorised the levying of those tolls which are collected to this day. The tolls are still vested in the lord of the manor, but are not very strictly enforced, and as the gate has not, for many years past, been closed, and is, indeed, half buried in the ground and nearly rotted away, a good many waggons and many cattle must, especially at night, escape paying. It was a Smith, of Shortgrove, who obtained the Act and built the bridge, and, although Shortgrove Park has been let, these rights are still in the family. The toll has often been disputed, and was once, indeed, some thirty years since, the subject of a law-suit, when the uncle of the present Smith asserted his rights, and won.

Before railways had come, to clear the roads of most of the cattle and the waggons, the income of this toll-gate was considerable, but in these days it is not worth the while of the owner of these petty rights to collect the small gains, and the toll-house has been let as an ordinary cottage, but, in consideration of the tolls, at a rent slightly above its value as a dwelling. The occupier is, therefore, in a rather sporting position, and, by strict attention to business and by keeping sleepless vigils, might stand to gain quite a respectable trifle of pocket-money out of sheep that pass in the night, or from waggons that creak and rumble by in the early hours of morn, before the day is well aired. But it is an elderly occupant, and many a fourpence and a twopence go unchallenged into the darkness. Only the slow-going vehicles and the flocks and herds of daytime find themselves intercepted. One of the most humorous things in connection with this quaint survival was an incident that came under the notice of the present writer, when a huge furniture-removing van—one of the kind that goes at a two-and-a-half miles an hour pace—was stopped, and, much to the amazement of the driver (who, in common with the world at large, thought all tolls to be things of the past), made to pay.

It is the most insignificant of streams that causes all this pother, and the smallest of bridges, but it can still be seen, where the road dips, how awkward the old ford must have been.

Near by stands the starkly ugly old gaol, put to other uses since the police business was transferred to Saffron Walden, and now, on account of the imitation fetters that still distinguish its frontage, known as “the Links.”

Directly the bridge is crossed the road forks; the old road going downward in a curve to the right, along what must once have been a particularly wet and marshy course, the newer route continuing straight ahead, at a higher level. Both unite again in little over a hundred yards. Between the two, and at a higher level than either, on road-bridges, arches, and embankments, goes the railway; the rail-level somewhat above the roofs of the very picturesque line of ancient farms, inns, and cottages that front the older route.

We have not even yet done with Newport, for it is beside this old road that one of the most interesting houses of the village stands. This is the so-styled “Crown House,” formerly the “Horns” inn, traditionally said to have been a posting-house or halting-place on the road, used by Charles II., Nell Gwynne, the dissolute George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, and the profligate Earl of Rochester. It displays an elaborately decorated frontage of moulded plaster, and takes its name from the crown in high relief over the door. Criticism has sought to destroy the tradition by pointing out that the date of 1692 over the doorway is five years later than the death of Nell, who died, aged thirty-seven, in 1687, and three later than the death of Charles; but traditions very often enshrine truths, and it is permissible to suppose the date merely records some old-time restorations or additions in honour of that exalted patronage and those patrons then so recently passed away. The “Crown House” is not interesting within, and except the hall, paved with black and white marble, it has no outstanding features. The house has long been untenanted. Attempts have recently been made to transfer these traditions to the “Coach and Horses” inn, near by; but although that is a very old house, its appearance does not quite support the dignity thus thrust upon it.

The very last of Newport’s many notable features is the picturesque old farmhouse standing by itself, looking upon the road as one leaves for Audley End. This is “Hospital Farm,” and its isolated position is thoroughly warranted, for it stands on the site of the ancient Leper Hospital of Saints Mary and Leonard, founded here in the reign of King John by Richard de Newport. The garden wall still displays some fragments of stone said to have come from the chapel. Let us look on them with what veneration we may, even though they might equally well have come from the kitchen. It is with much more, and a very genuine, respect one gazes upon the Big Stone between that wall and the road. It is very properly spelled with capital letters, for it is as “Newport Big Stone” the Essex folk know it, and besides, it has a history going back to many uncounted centuries before Richard de Newport and his lepers came here—a history no one can narrate, because it opened in those abysmal voids of time before history began to be. Passing farmhands volunteer the information that it has been here all _their_ time, which is fairly obvious, for it is, in fact, a glacial boulder, and was left here by some expiring glacier in the beginning of things, before the men of the Stone Age came upon the scene; nay, even before the protoplasmal common ancestral jelly-fish began to crawl in the lifeless ooze. _Whence_ it was brought on the shoulders of that sliding ice-pack perhaps not even the most cocksure geologist could say; but it is, of course, wholly alien from Essex, which has no stone of any kind. A ruddy sandstone, it might have come from Devonshire, from Worcestershire, or from Midland districts, where red sandstone is a native formation; but it would be a matter of speculation to attempt to fix its origin. It is very large, must needs be enormously weighty, and must in years past have been sorely tempting to road surveyors hungering in this stoneless county for road metal. But having escaped destruction in those bygone years, we may suppose Newport Big Stone is now pretty safe on that score. Its presence here may, for all we know, have influenced the founder of that thirteenth-century hospital to place his buildings at this particular spot; for in after-years it became known as the “Leper Stone,” and was the rough-and-ready table on which old-time passers-by deposited their alms for the afflicted.

XIV

PASSING by Shortgrove Park and Uttlesford Bridge, the dirty and dismal station of Audley End is noticed, down the left-hand road we take, on the way to discover what manner of place “Wendens Ambo” may be. To the present historian nothing is more attractive than a place with an odd name, and he has gone unconscionable distances out of his way, often to find the most unusual names enshrining the most commonplace towns and villages. But not always. Here, for example, Wendens Ambo is a quaint, old-world place, characteristically Essexian. In the churchyard is a tombstone to William Nicholson, who died, aged 104, in 1886. He had been midshipman on Nelson’s _Vanguard_.

There are, or were, it seems, two Wendens—Great and Little. Their name derives from that Anglo-Saxon deity, Woden, who gives us the name of our Wednesday, _i.e._, “Woden’s day.” In 1662 the ruined church of Little Wenden was cleared away and the two parishes united. Great Wenden swallowed Little Wenden, and altered its name to the present Latinised form, thus proclaiming that the present church does for the two: Wendens Ambo meaning, when properly Englished, Both Wendens, and incorrectly written “Wenden’s” in the possessive case, as though the place were Ambo, belonging to some manorial Wenden:—Wenden, his Ambo.

Audley End Station takes its name from that great palace a mile distant, whose site was given to Lord Chancellor Audley by Henry VIII. in 1538. The Abbey of Walden then stood here; an ancient foundation built, like most monastic establishments, in a pleasant vale, beside a fishful stream. It was a noble piece of spoil, and probably the richest of all the plundered monastic tit-bits that came the artful Chancellor’s way. He was thus a great receiver of stolen property, but put a portion of his gains, at least, to good use, for he founded Magdalene College, Cambridge, as the epitaph on his tomb, in the course of surely one of the most shockingly bad puns in existence, tells us. The founder of “M—audley—n” College lies, indeed, in the beautiful church of Saffron Walden, within sight of Audley End, and there you shall read how—

The stroke of Death’s inevitable dart
Hath now, alas! of lyfe beraft the hart
Of Syr Thomas Audeley, of the Garter Knight,
Late Chancellor of England under owr Prince of might
Henry Theight, wyrthy high renowne,
And made by him Lord Audeley of this towne.