Chapter IV: Preface (3)

The great pile of Audley End was not, however, reared in his time, and although when it arose it was given his name, which it still bears, it speedily, for lack of heirs of his blood, came into altogether alien hands. His daughter was sole heiress. She married, at the age of fourteen, Lord Henry Dudley, and when he died, became wife of the widowed fourth Duke of Norfolk. She died at the age of twenty-three, and the Duke then married for the third time, became for the third time a widower, and finally closed his career in the approved way by dabbling in conspiracy and getting beheaded for it. His son, that Lord Thomas Howard who so signally helped to destroy the Spanish Armada, was restored to the estates, made Lord High Treasurer and created successively Baron Howard de Walden and Earl of Suffolk. It was he who built the vastly spacious and vastly costly house of Audley End, of which the existing building, large though it be, is only a portion. In 1721, and again in 1749, great ranges of it were taken down by the then owners, unable to bear the enormous expense of maintaining so huge a place. The building and furnishing of Audley End are said to have cost the Lord High Treasurer not less than £200,000. He began the works in 1603, and not until thirteen years later were they completed. Well might James I., who visited the incomplete palace, declare, with sarcastic meaning, that “it was too much for a King, though it might do very well for a Lord Treasurer.” It was not an ill-founded belief that the treasury chests of the nation had been laid under contribution for the benefit of my Lord’s building extravagances. His wife, too, was credited in public opinion with receiving bribes from the Constable of Castile, and the saying thus arose that “Audley End was built with Spanish gold.” Whatever may be the truth of those charges, certainly this magnificent man rather overdid his magnificence, with the result that his descendants could not live in the place, and the third Earl sold it to Charles II. in 1666. At that time the King, who had already become a great patron of the Turf at Newmarket, had no adequate lodging there, and was easily persuaded to buy Audley End for £50,000. That easy-going monarch probably purchased Lord Suffolk’s white elephant more for the sake of relieving him of the burden of it than for any liking himself had taken to a place twenty miles away from Newmarket Heath, and therefore not in those times particularly convenient for seeing the races. Only £30,000 of the purchase money was ever paid: the rest remained on mortgage. For some few occasions Audley End was used by the Court, but chiefly by the more reputable section of it. Here, while Charles was housed at Newmarket with courtiers of an infamous stamp, the Queen and her household led a country life so remarkable for its dulness that on one occasion, in October, 1670, to save themselves from dying of _ennui_, they are found going in disguise to Saffron Walden fair. A curious contemporary letter tells of this interlude:—

“Last week there was a Faire neare Audley End, the Queen, the Dutchess of Richmond and the Dutchess of Buckingham had a frolick to disguise themselves like country-lasses, in red petticoates, wastcoates, etc., and soe goe see the Faire. Sir Bernard Gascoign, on a cart-jade, rode before the Queen, another stranger before Dutchesse of Buckingham, and M^{r.} Roper before Richmond. They all soe overdone it in their disguise, which look’d soe much more like the Antiques than Country volk, that as soon as they came to the Faire the people began to goe after them; but the Queen, going to a booth, to buy a pair of yellow stockings for her sweet hart, and Sir Bernard asking for a pair of gloves, stitcht with blue, for his sweet hart, they were soon, by their gebrish, found to be strangers, which drew a bigger flock about them. One amongst them had seen the Queen at dinner, knew her, and was proud of her knowledge: this soon brought all the Faire into a crowd, to stare at the Queen. But thus discovered, they, as soon as they could, got to their horses; but as many of the Faire as had horses got up with their wives, children, sweet harts, or neighbours behind them, to get as much gape as they could till they brought them to the Court gate. Thus, by ill conduct, was a merry frolick turned into a pennance.”

The Earl of Suffolk and his successors did not do so badly over this incompleted purchase, for to one of their kin was given the care of the place, together with the salaried post of Housekeeper and Keeper of the Wardrobe, and at last, in 1701, when it became evident that no King or Queen was ever likely to reside here, Audley End was reconveyed to the fifth Earl of Suffolk, on the easy terms of his undertaking to relinquish his claims to the outstanding £20,000. The Earls of Suffolk ended in 1745, when the tenth of that title died and was illegally succeeded in the property by his kinsman, the Earl of Effingham, from whom the Countess of Portsmouth, one of the two daughters and co-heiresses of Lord Griffin, who were the true but dispossessed owners, bought the house and estate. Her heir was her nephew, John Griffin Whitwell, who in 1788 became Baron Braybrooke. Again, on his death, childless, the property changed hands, coming into possession of the Nevilles, who still own it and the Braybrooke title.

That account tells something of the quick changes and varied fortunes of Audley End, but only a lengthy disquisition could describe its appearance and contents. Pepys in 1669 made something of an attempt, but the most convincing part of his discourse is that where he describes how the housekeeper “took us into the cellar, where we drank most admirable drink, a health to the King. Here I played on my flageolet, there being an excellent echo.” But the still more excellent echo seems to have been that echo of the first drink with which he refreshed himself after his flageolet-playing. He was here again, and once more in the cellars where it is not surprising that he found “much good liquors. And indeed the cellars are fine; and here my wife and I did sing, to my great content. And then to the garden, and there did eat many grapes, and took some with us.”

There is little use describing the contents of Audley End at second-hand, which is the only way it can be done, for the Braybrookes have excluded the public. But there are exceptionally fine views of the exterior from the high road, and from the slip road into Saffron Walden. From this last the fine bridge over the Cam comes effectively into the picture, but seen from the high road, the great house not only stands nakedly disclosed, across bare pastures, with never an intervening hedge or tree, but looks coldly inhospitable and desolate, even although the extensive stone front is designed in the rich Jacobean style. The prominent, copper-covered cupolas are a bright green.

But if Audley End does by no means look homely, the scenery is delightful. The road passes through an open common on the left, planted with park-like clumps of trees, and with the pretty feature of green alleys cut through dense coppices. Ahead, down the road, the red-brick gabled stables of the mansion, older than the mansion itself, lend a ruddy and cheerful tone. Beyond them the lodge-gates are passed: modern additions, with the great stone bull’s heads of the Nevilles’ crest surmounting the piers, and on the roof-ridge of the lodge an heraldic griffin ramped up on his hinder part and holding two daggers in his paws. He is a would-be impressive griffin, but his singularly apologetic attitude, like that of a French poodle on his hind legs, begging for biscuits and conscious all the while that he is making a fool of himself, is only laughable.

XV

SAFFRON WALDEN lies a mile distant, on a ridge overlooking a wide stretch of country, and is one of the prettiest and neatest of rural corporate towns. To the whole countryside it is merely “Walden.” No local person would ever think of saying “Saffron” Walden; and really, now there is no longer any saffron grown here, why should he? Prominent, far and near, is the great Perpendicular church, bracketed with that of Thaxted as the finest in Essex. Not a little of its proud dominance over neighbouring hill and dale is due to the tall, tapering crocketed spire, added so late as 1831, and one of the earliest and most successful efforts of the Gothic revival. The very late Perpendicular clerestoried nave, with noble timbered roof, is singularly like the great Gothic Guildhall Library in London, which would almost seem to have been designed by its modern architect after this ancient model.

Walden is, and has always been, a great stronghold of the Friends, and the Friends’ Schools are among the most prominent of the public buildings in the town. It is a town of old and new in just proportions, and with a staid prosperity not pushful enough to be vulgar, nor so allied to modernity that it must needs sweep away its old relics. In Church Street, indeed, is to be found one of the most curious old plaster houses that any town or village can boast. This is the old “Sun” inn, an inn no longer, decorated with two gigantic armed figures in plastiferous relief. For whom they may be intended, only the designer of them could say, and he cannot tell us, for if we may believe the date of 1670 on the wall, he must have been gathered to his fathers quite two centuries ago. Another very old inn, the “Eight Bells,” still looks prosperous, at the corner of Castle Street, in which long thoroughfare the stranger, by dint of earnest enquiry, may find the shy retiring entrance to that delightful pleasaunce known as “Fry’s Garden.” I do not know who Fry was, but doubtless he was one of that famous Quaker family, and certainly not only loved gardens, but created one here that in all the quaint circumstances of the formal walks, lawns, and terraces fashionable in the gardener’s art of much more than a century ago, has now become a treasure to the people of Walden, to whom he gave it.

There is little left of the great castle of Walden, the chief fortress of those Magnavilles, Earls of Essex, of whom Geoffrey, lord of a hundred and seventeen manors in the troublous reigns of the Empress Maud and Stephen, was the third.

There is no more striking figure in the history of these East Anglian districts than that of this third Geoffrey. Not even Hereward, that earlier hero of the Fens, made a deeper impression; but while Hereward was a patriot, fighting the hopeless cause of his people, Geoffrey de Magnaville became a murderous bandit, whose hand was against every man. Succeeding to the family honours in 1130, he took up arms for the Empress Maud when England was plunged into Civil War between the rival claims of herself and Stephen, at the death of Henry I., in 1135; but he was arrested at St. Albans, his castles at Walden and Pleshey seized, and his high office of Constable of the Tower of London stripped from him.

Unfortunately for the welfare of this part of the kingdom, the mild policy of Stephen aimed at nothing more, and the broken Earl was set free. Some men take their misfortunes with a heroic calm, but Geoffrey de Magnaville was not of that kind. We are told how he “burst forth from the presence of the King like a riderless horse, kicking and biting,” and so made for the Fens, where during a series of years, to the ruin of the realm, he made his armed support of Maud an excuse for giving full rein to his native ferocity. As robber and bandit, he was probably as much feared by those with whom he sided as by his opponents. The trembling clergy and peasantry knew him well, and feared him with a deathly fear, for murder and sacrilege were his sport. By an easy twist of his name they came to know him as “Man-devil,” which is in itself a kind of backhanded and sinister testimonial to his character, and long before he met his death he was placed by the outraged Church outside the pale of salvation. It was at Burwell, whose church tower stands prominently in the view from Newmarket Heath, his furrow came to an end, in 1144. It was time. He had for so long been the scourge of these wilds that at length the King made a determined effort to keep him in check by building a castle at Burwell and holding it in force. By this plan he hoped to keep that strenuous evil-doer shut up in his chosen haunt among the swamps of the Cam, where he might mudlark at will, and it was in attacking this castle, in an attempt to break through, he was mortally wounded by a bolt in the head, and died the next day at Mildenhall, eight miles distant, whither his fellow-outlaws had carried him. He died, in the language of that time, “excommunicate and unabsolved, nor was the earth suffered to give a grave to the sacrilegious offender.” For twenty years, in fact, his body was unburied, remaining meanwhile soldered in lead, in an orchard belonging to the Templars in London. At the end of that time, upon some flimsy proof being given of his having in his last moments made some expressions of repentance, his spirit received absolution, and the body was buried beside that of his fathers in the Temple Church. There, on the pavement, in company with seven others, his effigy may yet be seen, cross-legged and mailed. He wears a more than usually dour expression of countenance. His head is represented encased in a helmet in shape something midway between a saucepan and a frying-pan: possibly a rendering in stone of that headgear he wore at Burwell, and removed in the midst of that fray, to get the air, when the missile struck him.

This full-blooded scoundrel’s keep, or robber’s hold, stood upon an eminence known as Bury Hill. The massive walls, long since robbed of all architectural features, still show how securely he built, even though they are at this day only shapeless lumps of rubble. In one corner the stocks and pillory of Walden are still preserved.

It is a castle without a history. No one knows who destroyed it, and no tale has ever been told of those great earthworks, once connected with the fortress, which now, emerald green with luxuriant grass and spangled in springtime with wild flowers, once defended his market-town of Walden against surprise. These serried ranks of rampart and ditch were probably, like the hill on which he built his stronghold, much older than his time, and merely strengthened for the occasion, but they remain mystic to this day, and own a very large selection of names, being “Battle,” “Repel,” “Peddle,” “Pell,” and “Paigle” Ditches in the mouths of the country folk.

Walden, which owned but that single style before it became in the long ago the seat of saffron culture, derives its name from “Weal-den,” the wooded hollow, or perhaps “the hollow in the woods,” and was anciently situated in the dense glades of the great Forest of Essex. When Geoffrey de Magnaville obtained the grant of a market for his town it became “Chipping,” or Market Walden, and it was not until the reign of Edward III. that this style and title was changed for the name it now bears. The seal of the borough, dating from the time of Elizabeth, still alludes to that much-prized plant, and perpetrates the lamentable pun of three saffron flowers “walled in” by a castle; while the badge of the mayor’s chain, made in 1873, repeats that hoary play upon words.

Saffron, long since disappeared from local ken, is said to have been introduced to England from Palestine so early as the times of the Crusaders, and to have been brought over, originally a single bulb, hidden in a palmer’s staff. Its name is a corruption of the Arabic “sahafaran,” but to botanists it is _Crocus sativus_, the cultivated, as opposed to _Crocus agrestis_, the wild crocus. It was the supposed medicinal virtues of the plant that made it so much in request and so largely cultivated here in the latter part of the sixteenth century, when Fuller, writing of the town, speaks of it as one “which saffron may seem to have coloured with the name thereof.” Those old curative properties are now quite disregarded, but they were once considered potent. The very least of the benefits it conferred was the exhilaration of the spirits, so that the old proverb for a merry fellow was “He hath slept in a bag of saffron,” and Gerard, in his herbal, says: “The moderate use of it is good for the head, maketh the sences more quicke and lively, shaketh off heavie and drowsie sleepe, and maketh a man merrie.” But other and more convivial things have long been found to produce the same results. While it was thought to relieve hysterical depression, it was good also for the small-pox. Placed in bags under the chins of sufferers from that fearful disease, it was supposed to bring on the eruptions, and so quickly relieve the patients. Fuller gives very emphatic testimony to its virtues. “Under God,” he says, “I owe my life, when sick of the small-pox, to the efficacy thereof.”

So beneficent a plant, of course, commanded a high price. In Fuller’s time saffron sold at £3 a pound, and in 1665, the year of the Great Plague of London, it rose to £4 1_s._ 10_d._ Those were, by consequence, the times of saffron adulteration.

“No precious drug,” he says, “is more adulterated with _cartamus_, the inward pilling of willow,” and suggests that dealers should look carefully into the matter.

Of its high qualities he was, as we have seen, fully convinced, but another proof he advances, is not, to a sceptical modern world, altogether conclusive. The Age of Faith is past, but it was current in Fuller’s era. _He_, at any rate, had the capacity for infinite belief, as we shall see. “In a word,” he sums up, “the sovereign power of genuine saffron is plainly proved, for the crocodile’s tears are never true, save when he is forced where saffron groweth (whence he hath his name of ‘croco-deilos,’ or the saffron-fearer), knowing himself to be all poison, and it all antidote.” The logical conclusion of this belief would have been that wholesale saffron-buyers should have kept a staff of crocodiles as (so to speak) tasters, and by their tears, or the want of them, have gauged the purity of those purchases.

Hollingshead, writing of saffron cultivation, calls the farmers of it “crokers.” It was a culture that must then have earned many a fortune, and so late as 1717 it was worth £1 6_s._ 6_d._ a pound; but, what with that curse of all industries, over-production, the carelessness of the growers, and shameless adulteration, price and quality declined. Then, too, the dependence of medicine upon the old herbalists began to decay, and the reputation of saffron fell off to such an extent that by 1790 it was no longer cultivated at Walden, and the “crokers” were in another sense justified of their name.

Nowadays saffron is chiefly used as a colouring material for aromatic confections, for liqueurs and varnishes. Put in common cakes, that prove to have been made of something suspiciously like sawdust and paste, the yellow hue it gives produces a specious and illusory richness only discovered too late

XVI

WE regain the high road at Littlebury, a rural village whose church is said to be built within the lines of a Roman encampment. It may be so, but the Eye of Faith is required to perceive any relics of it, although the natural hillock it stands upon, overlooking the river Cam, must be the “little bury” of the Saxon, once guarding the passage of that stream, and whose title has now crystallised into the place-name. Littlebury was the birthplace of Winstanley, the cocksure and unfortunate designer of the Eddystone Lighthouse, who perished with the destruction of his building. The house where he was born was pulled down many years ago, and it is ill work questing for the site of it. Your ordinary villager is no hero-worshipper, and fails to understand such a search as this. His mind is evenly divided in speculating whether you be a fool or a rogue, and all he has to say is, “I’ve lived here arl me loife, and niver hard tell on’t. Pirraps they knaws him at the Post Orfice.” But they don’t.

The only person whom the present writer met at Littlebury who did know was stone deaf, and questions had to be put by the slow and cumbrous process of writing. The house stood on the right-hand side of the cross-road that goes from the church to the water-mill. Its site is now a little elm-covered mound in a meadow.

Passing from here along the river-bordered road, within sight of Little Chesterford, we leave Essex and come into Cambridgeshire, where the village of Great Chesterford is planted down on the further side of the river Cam. A gaunt fork of the roads here presents itself to the view, with an ugly inn at the parting of the ways, a shattered windmill to the left, on a hillside, and the railway running on to Cambridge through Great Chesterford station, with a forest of tall signal-posts outlined against the sky, and the puffings, snortings, and crashings of trains sounding continually, far into the night.

We do not merely leave the modern county of Essex and enter Cambridgeshire at this point, but change our soil as well, coming at once into a chalk country of bare and inhospitable downs, completely altering the nature of the road and keeping a forbidding solitude, without sign of the habitations of men, and only the occasional dull tinkle of a sheep-bell to hint even of farming interests.

Mark well this road onwards from Great Chesterford, for it is the line of the Icknield Way, and here, at the crossing of the Cam, we enter the one-time Icenian kingdom, the territory of that great people whom Cæsar himself, in the name “Cenimagni” he gave them, called great. This country of the Iceni, comprising (to use that favourite word of the auctioneers) what we now know as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, and Huntingdonshire, was a country pre-eminently distinguished from other parts of England by its ancient inaccessibility. We hear much in our own times of England’s “splendid isolation,” but within this island of Britain there was then, in this country of the Iceni, an isolation quite as thorough, if not so splendid; the river Stour and the oozy morasses spreading on its either banks dividing it most thoroughly from what we now call Essex, then a part of the nation of Trinobantes; and the whole of the western and north-western Icenian border was divided from the present Northants and Lincolnshire by the Ouse and the wide-spreading meres and morasses of the Fens. Only along the ridges of chalk downs stretching from Haverhill to Linton on the Essex border, or from Great Chesterford on to those other chalk downs of Royston was there any line of advance dryshod, and long lengths of those ridges were in those remote times covered with almost impenetrable woods. Thus the Icknield Way was the readiest, and almost only, route to or from the country of the Iceni, for friend or foe. It led, this “Icen hilde weg,” or _Via Iceniana_, out of the south-western parts of England, from the neighbourhood of Weymouth to Old Sarum, Marlborough, the Berkshire White Horse, East Ilsley, Dunstable, and Baldock, on to Royston and Ickleton, hard by this village of Great Chesterford we have now reached. It was never a made road, and in places branches out into several routes, but it was always the clearest of trackways, and owes its preservation over many miles to its course lying so greatly out of the way of agricultural operations, along the crests of the chalk hills, where the plough never comes and the faint footsteps of prehistoric man are undisturbed.

The existence of such a continuous track far out of the bounds of the Icenian realm, and the persistence among the peasantry of the different shires and counties of its old name under the transparent disguises of Hickling, Acheling, Hackney Way, and other variants, point not only to a considerable intercourse between the several peoples of this island, but also to the strong personality of the Iceni, who could thus imperishably impress their name on the long route, far from their own frontiers.

They were, however, at pains to protect themselves and that part of the Way which formed the entrance into their own country, and the traveller still sees, as he journeys on to Newmarket, the means they adopted to that end, in the various ditches and ramparts athwart the road. This was the weakest part of their frontier, and thus it is that along these sixteen miles to Newmarket we find the way to have been barred by three strong earthworks, stretching on the one hand to the primeval forests on the hill-tops and on the other to the impassable fens. These are the Brent, or Pampisford Ditch, over two miles in length, between Abington Park and Pampisford; the Fleam, or Balsham Dyke, from the heights of Balsham to Fulbourn Fen and the Cam at Fen Ditton, nine miles long as the crow flies, but from its winding course some two miles longer; and that most famous of them all, the “Devil’s Ditch,” on Newmarket Heath, a seven miles’ barrier stretching from Wood Ditton, or “Ditch End,” to the fens at Reach.

The Icknield Way was thus well defended. It ran from Great Chesterford, partly along the course of the present road, to the neighbourhood of Newmarket, and thence into the heart of Suffolk and Norfolk to Norwich, the _Venta Icenorum_ of the Romans. From Norwich its course is uncertain, but it is thought to have made for Yarmouth. Newmarket had not in those days come into existence, but the village of Exning, two miles from that town, marks the site of an ancient settlement. From Newmarket the Way becomes more difficult to trace, but it seems to have gone by Kentford, and to have crossed the Lark at Lackford. Thence over the high grounds of Icklingham Heath, by Old Elveden Gap, to Thetford, it is readily found, in a green track that may be followed for miles.

Not every East Anglian village whose name begins with Ick or Ix can claim to mark this principal line of communication. There are the twin villages of Icklingham St. James and Icklingham All Saints, and there are Ickworth, near Bury St. Edmunds, with Ixworth, Ixworth Thorpe, and Ickburgh in other parts of Norfolk and Suffolk, but they merely show those people to have been widely settled in the land, and that the Way, although their principal track, was by no means the only one.

Here, at Great Chesterford, where the bare swooping downs fall into the valley of the Cam—here, or at the neighbouring village of Ickleton—the Iceni would seem to have had a frontier town, and when the Romans so masterfully subjugated them, that conquering people established beside this little river their fortified post of _Iciani_, or, as some antiquaries would have it, _Camboritum_.

Whichever of those two places it really was, it is quite certain a post was established here. The adjoining fields have, time and again, yielded treasures in Roman coins and articles of bronze, gold, and brass, and skeletons, perhaps those of the owners of these finds, have been unearthed. Great Chesterford, perhaps once really great, is now quite a small place, but keeps its annual July fair, even though its market, dating from some time before Domesday Book, has long since decayed. The only sign of modern life in the village at this day is the new roller flour-mill by the Cam, using the electric light. Along the village street, a large, prominent red-brick house with an imposing portico, now in private occupation, is pointed out as the once important “Crown” coaching-inn and posting-house, and on the opposite side of the road another private house, formerly the “Waggon and Horses,” is shown by the villagers

XVII

IT is a fine road that leads from Great Chesterford to Newmarket, partly on the line of the old Icknield Way. Ickleton and Hinxton, two neighbouring villages, are seen down in the distance, on the left hand, as the road climbs steadily over the chalk downs: pleasant villages in the valley of the Cam, with brilliantly whitewashed cottages showing prominently from their setting in green pastures.

This is a no mere track over the downs, but a well-made highway, embanked in the hollow and cut through the rises. Where it has finally left the village of Great Chesterford and has begun the climb, at the several branching roads still known as “Stump Cross”—although that stump of a wayside cross has long since disappeared—you may look, on the left-hand road to Cambridge by way of Sawston, for the Deserted Railway. This is the abandoned line of the Newmarket and Chesterford Railway Company, incorporated in 1846 for the purpose of constructing a railway in double track from the Eastern Counties’ station at Great Chesterford to Newmarket. The undertaking was purchased and opened April 4th, 1848, by the Eastern Counties (now the Great Eastern), but abandoned in 1852, as between Great Chesterford and Six Mile Bottom, on the opening of the existing line from Six Mile Bottom to Cambridge. The result is that the present railway journey between Great Chesterford and Newmarket is necessarily through Cambridge, and describes two sides of a triangle, as you may readily discover by consulting a railway map. The abandoned railway forming the third side of the triangle, would have gone direct, but it was discovered, somewhat late in the day, that there was not sufficient traffic to support both routes, and so the rails of this particular one were torn up and the line abandoned. Twelve miles of deserted track have thus for over half a century borne witness to the otherwise incredible folly of those early railway projectors, who flung away close on £150,000 upon a line that was not wanted.

It begins at Great Chesterford as an embankment, overgrown with brambles and undergrowth, but presently sinks to the level at the crossing of the road to Sawston and Cambridge, and in the fields on either side has been ploughed out of existence. Where the trains once went, turnips and clover now grow; but the embankment rises again in the distance and looks remarkably like another, and an even more gigantic, earthwork of unknown age. It is singular, indeed, that in this district of prehistoric dykes a modern rival should be thus added for the confusion of antiquaries who may even yet, in the remote future, come to speculate learnedly upon it, to discuss by what tribe it was made or whose kingdom it divided. It is quite as impressive as the Devil’s Ditch, even although we know perfectly well that navvies, and not the Devil, made it. Neighbouring the road all the way to Six Mile Bottom, it sometimes drops into deep cuttings, with the bridges still spanning them, and again resumes as a lofty embankment, often shrouded in the fir plantations that in the course of half a century have developed into dense woods. It ends at last on the level at Six Mile Bottom

XVIII

THAT cyclist whose way lies in the eye of the wind along these miles to or from Newmarket is greatly to be pitied, for few sheltering plantations break the force of the howling gales that sweep the stark hillsides. But when the summer sun of a still July afternoon shines mellow upon this country of infinite distances—why, then the way of the pilgrim is made easy, and he can better appreciate a road whose bleakness, when overtaken by rain or night, or struggling against adverse winds, he remembers with horror.

Here we pass the Brent Ditch, going solitary across the unfenced, uncultivated grassy downs, and come to the equally solitary Cambridge and Haverhill Railway that runs in single track in a deep cutting across the road. You see Pampisford station down below as you pass by, and a railway inn, and that is all. If you linger on the bridge and await the coming of a train, you will see it stop, and the station-master and one porter, awakened out of their slumber, like Sleeping Beauties, come yawning on to the platform to meet the passengers who do not alight and to assist into the train those who do not put in an appearance.

A little way beyond this lonely spot, at the cross-roads by Bourn Bridge, where the Bourn, or Linton River, flows across the highway, there stood a once well-known posting-house and coaching-inn, the “King’s Arms.” It was demolished, for lack of business, many years since, and only a row of cottages on the left hand, once forming part of the stables, now remains, with the embankment of the Deserted Railway, the cause of the inn’s decay, and itself long ago abandoned, at the rear.

Still lonelier grows the road as we proceed, attaining the height of detachment from the busy world at a point near the forty-eighth mile from London, where the road between Cambridge and Little Abington crosses our route. This is the Roman road known to antiquaries as the _Via Devana_, a name coined by them for it, to describe its course diagonally through England from Colchester to Chester, the _Deva_ of the Romans. It leads on the left hand to Cambridge, six miles away, over the Gog Magog Hills, the Cambridgeshire “mountains,” on whose not remarkably high crest the Roman camp of Vandlebury can still be traced. Ancient roads are the merest commonplaces of this route to Newmarket, and we have gone little more than another mile when another is reached, crossing again at right angles. This is a way, much more ancient than the Romans, known as “Worstead Street,” and thought to have been the “War-stead,” or path, of some ancient people, perhaps the Iceni. This also leads, as a made road, on the left, to Cambridge; but its continuation to the right hand is now nothing more than a grassy track.

This junction of roads is peculiarly impressive, and bites deeply into the imagination. A solitary farmhouse on one side of the cross-roads, an equally solitary cottage on the other, a long length of old malt-houses topping the rise, and the eerie bulk of “Mag’s Mount,” crowned with spindly firs, and with a deep cutting of the Deserted Railway scarring its chalky shoulder: all these combine to fix the spot in the recollection, although no story belongs to it and no one knows who was “Mag” of the Mount that bears his name.

In another two miles the Fleam Dyke, or Balsham Ditch, is reached, almost as perfect now as when first dug, but in places overgrown with trees, especially to the left hand, where a prehistoric _tumulus_ called Matlow Hill commands it. Ahead, along the rising and dipping road, the paltry wayside settlement of Six Mile Bottom comes in sight, distinguished by the very busy and scandalously dangerous level crossing at the railway station, where a frequent service of express trains dashing through at high speed is a menace to life and a hindrance to users of the highway.

Plantations in thick continuous fringes or belts here begin to shield the road from the tempestuous winds, and shut out the empty downs, whose inhospitable nature seems to be reflected in the name of Westley Waterless, a lonely village marked on the map in their midst.

At last, passing by outlying trainers’ establishments, the neighbourhood of Newmarket is heralded by the great grassy bank, some thirty feet in height, which looms before the wayfarer as he climbs a rise. The road, and a road coming from Cambridge, pass through a cleft in this great barrier, and under the lee of the opening nestles an old toll-house. To the left, across a breezy open space stretching away for miles, goes this grassy earthwork, rising and falling with the inequalities of the ground, and with a yawning ditch accompanying it into the dim perspective. A grey church tower is seen in the middle distance, and on the far horizon, gleaming white in occasional sunbursts, or looming blackly under cloud effects, is an architectural Something that dominates the whole scene. We are, in short, come to the Devil’s Ditch and Newmarket Heath. That is Burwell church, showing greyly amid surrounding clumps of trees, three miles away, and that architectural city of dream on the horizon, reflecting through the opalescent haze of the Fens, across the intervening marshes of Wicken and Soham, is St. Etheldreda’s own refuge of Ely, whose giant cathedral, islanded thirteen miles away amid the bogs and meres, shines from afar, like a good deed in a naughty world.

XIX

THE first mention of the Devil’s Ditch is found in the Saxon Chronicle, in the year 905, when this land of the East Angles was described as laid waste by the northmen between the “Dyke” and the Ouse. It was under the Saxons that it was first imputed to the Father of Lies, whose name it still bears, and to whose strenuous labour, in the open-mouthed astonishment of those simple people, amazed at the many such gigantic earthworks they found in the land, they ascribed almost every other such remarkable object. The Normans, in a later age, not so credulous, knew it as St. Edmund’s Dyke; the jurisdiction of the Abbots of St. Edmundsbury extending thus far westward.

But this famous line of defence—for such it is—had really a less distinguished authorship. The Iceni, who at the time of the Roman conquest were a very much more civilised people than the Saxons of five hundred years later, constructed it as the rearward and strongest of the several such ramparts and ditches they had thrown across this only easy line of advance of a possible enemy into their country. A popular idea of the Iceni is that they were like the Picts of North Britain, who painted themselves a sky-blue, and considered that full dress. But they were far more advanced than anything so nearly allied to the ideals of the Garden of Eden, and would no more have owned kin even with such earlier inhabitants of their own East Anglia as the neolithic men, than we would stoop to call cousins with the gorillas. They had advanced beyond the condition of patriarchal communities and roving tribes, and had passed the intermediate stage of barter, to enter the more civilised one of a nation with a money currency and coin of its own. Icenian coins, in gold and silver, are well known to numismatists, and although the design on them, said by experts to be intended to represent a horse, is difficult to be recognised, still they _are_ coins.

This figure of a horse occurring so constantly on these coins has sometimes led antiquaries to the ingenious conclusion that the neighbourhood of Newmarket, even thus early, was famous for horses, but that is a long shot, and very much in the dark.

A people of their calibre must have been quite capable of such military works as these dykes. This was their best effort and still speaks well for their energy. The ditch, on the western side, clearly showing that the work was a defence from dangers expected from that quarter, is twenty feet deep, and the bank, reared up in an acute angle, thirty feet above the level of the ground, thus presents a formidable climb, in all, of fifty feet. Add to these difficulties offered to an invader, the strong probability that the crest of the rampart was defended by a timber palisade, and we can clearly perceive that when these defences were manned by a determined people, the invasion of the Icenian country must have been a hazardous enterprise.

For seven miles the Ditch runs, from the waters of the Cam at Reach to the woods on the chalk hills of Wood Ditton. It is possible to walk along the summit of the bank most of the way, for, although rough and uneven pedestrian exercise, it is in general eighteen feet in breadth, and remarkably like an abandoned railway embankment. It is one of the many sites identified as the scene of Boadicea’s defeat by Suetonius Paulinus, but we are sceptical of this particular one, although the ancient tumulus on the outer face of the Ditch, still called the Two Captains, points to some forgotten conflict in which two leaders were slain and buried on the contested field.

Little is now left of this once prominent mound, once important enough to be marked on Ordnance maps, but now ploughed nearly flat. It stands in the third field from the road, on the right hand, a field now under corn, but until forty years ago a wood

XX

NEWMARKET HEATH is a large place. It is easily possible to ramble on it quite away from any sight or sound of the races and the race crowds, and to find a solitude in its midst while eight thousand people are shouting themselves hoarse in cheering a popular winner. While the October meetings are in progress on one side of the Heath, the July Course, on the other, under the shadow of the “Devil’s Ditch,” is a voiceless solitude. You would almost think that the Iceni, who dug the Ditch, had planned the Course, and built the Stand on it as well, so deserted of the world they look.

Nothing can be more dreary than the sight of this simple race-stand. Built to hold a thousand people, here it squats, an emptiness; the only sounds those in the long sombre belt of firs, whose branches sway with a sound of the sea in the airs that sweep the breezy Heath.

Newmarket is first mentioned in 1227, when it seems to have been established in consequence of an epidemic raging at the mother-parish of Exning, about two miles away. This “old market” of Exning, now a village, owes its name, say some, to the Iceni, but it is much more likely to have derived from the Celtic word “Exe,” for water, for the springs there are a feature of the place. That phenomenally pious lady, St. Etheldreda, one of the daughters of King Anna, and foundress of Ely Cathedral, was born at Exning, and there, we are asked to believe, was anciently a great horse-fair, to which Newmarket can trace its origin as Metropolis of the Turf.

But Newmarket did not come into prominence until the reign of James I., who loved its wild surroundings for the sake of the coursing they gave. It was for hunting the hare and the bustard, and for the sport of hawking, rather than for horse-racing, that Newmarket first became favoured. It was not long, however, before the sportsmen who surrounded James discovered that on the elastic turf of the Heath they had an ideal running-ground for horses, far better than that of the several places where matches were already being made, and racing very soon occupied the foremost place. King James was a frequent visitor, and was the first to establish a palace here, and here, in after-years, Charles I. was brought as a prisoner.

Newmarket was under a cloud of neglect during the Commonwealth, for under Puritan rule horse-racing was forbidden, but with the Restoration its fortunes grew bright. There was never a more ardent turfite than Charles II., who was continually visiting Newmarket, and maintained here a dissolute Court that shocked even some contemporaries.

Evelyn, the diarist, in 1671 “found the jolly blades racing, dancing, feasting, and revelling, more resembling a luxurious and abandoned rout than a Christian Court. The Duke of Buckingham was now in mighty favour, and had with him that impudent woman, the Countess of Shrewsbury, with his band of fiddlers.”

That was a very poor indictment. Much more might have been said of a Court which included Louise de la Quérouaille, afterwards created Duchess of Portsmouth, Nell Gwynne, and numerous others of their stamp. The wholesale and unblushing—nay, boastful—immorality of that Court is amazing; and still more amazing is the historical condonation of viciousness that has made Nell Gwynne a heroine. The origin of Nell, whose name popular usage has spelt as above, but which seems to have been originally written “Gwyn,” is almost as vague as that of Homer. Seven cities have claimed that old Greek as a native. Nell, whose name speaks her Welsh origin, was born in three places: Hereford, Oxford, and the Coalyard, Drury Lane. Reared in the foulest slums, and the common property of quite a number of persons, she yet became the favourite of a King, the mother of a Duke, and the grandmother of a Bishop. One feels sorry for that dignitary of the Church.

Charles, Lord Buckhurst, was the man who made her over to Charles II. It was quite a businesslike transaction, and his price was the step in the Peerage that made him Earl of Dorset. But that was not the first change of proprietors, for an earlier love had been Charles Hart, an actor. Her new protector, the King, she therefore spoke of as _her_ Charles the third. That is a well-known story, how she procured a title for her boy. “Come here, you little bastard!” she called the child in presence of his father, the King. Charles was shocked at the coarseness of the expression, but she was prepared with a retort. “That is the only name I have to give the poor boy,” she said. As a result of this, the boy was christened Charles Beauclerk, created Earl of Burford in 1676, and Duke of St. Albans 1684.

Newmarket, with a licentious and idle Court seeking only to be amused, was in the time of Charles II. as distinguished for eccentric wagers and sporting feats as Brighton in after-centuries under the protection of the Prince Regent. Lord Digby in 1670 staked £50 that he would walk five miles in an hour, stark naked and bare-foot, and had the mortification of losing by the narrow margin of half a minute. Charles and a great crowd of courtiers were present. They all had “something on,” as well as clothes, but whether they backed my Lord Digby or not we are not told.

Then there was Captain John Gibbs, a gambler and racing-man of the same period, who laid a wager of £500 that he would drive his light chaise and four horses up and down the steepest part of the Devil’s Ditch, and won it, “to the surprise of all the spectators.” He performed the feat by making a very light chaise with a jointed perch and without any pole. The hero of that occasion lies buried in Attleborough Church, with a long set of eulogistic verses over him, which do not, however, refer to any of his sporting exploits. He died, it seems, October 22nd, 1695, forty-eight years of age.

A sporting event of much later date and not quite so extravagant a nature was Captain Robert Barclay of Ury’s sixty-four-miles’ walk from Suffolk Street, Pall Mall, to Newmarket, on a hot July day in 1803. He accomplished that feat in ten hours. This famous pedestrian, son of another Robert Barclay, who once walked the 510 miles from London to Ury in ten days, was the hero of many such sporting performances, and in 1809 walked 1,000 miles on the Heath in 1,000 consecutive hours. He was thirty years of age at the time. On Wednesday, May 31st, he began what was then regarded as “the most remarkable feat ever recorded in the annals of pedestrianism,” concluding it on Wednesday, July 12th, at 3.37 p.m., in the presence of 10,000 spectators, with twenty-three minutes to spare. The wager (for no one in those days did anything without wagering) was for 1,000 guineas a side. It was supposed that not less than 100,000 guineas changed hands among those 10,000 onlookers. His mile average the first week was 14 min. 54 sec. During the last week it fell to 21 min. 4 sec., and his weight was reduced from 13 stone 4 lb. to 11 stone. This performance was undertaken without any training, and so does not compare on even terms with those of Edward Payson Weston, the American pedestrian, who, at the beginning of 1878, walked 1,000 miles in 398 hrs. 19 min., at the Cricket Ground, Newcastle-on-Tyne, and out of those 398 hours rested altogether 150 hrs. 38½ min. Weston, who improved even on this by walking 1,977½ miles in 1,000 hours along the roads, at the beginning of 1879, trained continually.

Another famous sporting item of this period was Abraham Wood’s forty miles running match on Newmarket Heath, on April 16th, 1807. The stake was 500 guineas, and the performance was to be concluded in five hours. Wood, who was a native of Mildrew, in Lancashire, and considered, as an athlete, second only to Captain Barclay, completed the forty miles in four minutes under the five hours. He ran the first eight miles in 48 minutes, and the first twenty in 2 hours 7 minutes.

The Palace built by James I., and rebuilt by Charles II., long continued in use. James II. was too busy striving to dragoon the nation into Roman Catholicism, to take much interest in the races, but William III. was often here.

That grim and silent monarch does not bulk largely as a sportsman in the minds of most people, yet he was a supporter of Newmarket, and we actually find him in October, 1689, the year after his accession, performing the extraordinarily quick journey of Hampton Court to Newmarket in one day, a feat then rightly considered surprising. He figures on one occasion as a reckless, unlucky, and infuriated plunger at cards. It was in 1689 that he lost 4,000 guineas overnight at basset, at one sitting. The next morning, still chafing at the loss, he gave a gentleman a stroke with his horsewhip for riding before him on the race-ground. It was rather an unfortunate outburst of temper, for from it arose the sarcasm that it was the only blow he had struck for supremacy in his kingdoms.

Anne and the first two Georges were familiar with the place, but towards the close of George III.’s reign the Palace was sold. The Prince Regent, however, took a keen interest in racing, and ran a rather crooked course on the Turf, for he was practically warned off the Heath by the Jockey Club, that autocratic body of racing law-givers whose rules no one, from a jockey to a king, dare transgress. In such a world as that of racing, which it would be mere affectation to contend is followed in the main for purely sporting reasons, unmixed with the hope of gain, stringent and inflexible laws and exemplary punishments are necessary for the protection of all concerned.

Like many another institution with small beginnings and unexpected growth, the Jockey Club emerges only in dim fashion from the past, and historians can only say that it was established somewhere in the reign of George II., between 1727 and 1760. Nowadays that body is all-powerful, not alone at Newmarket, but in the whole world of racing, whose events are conducted under its rules. The Heath itself is the Club’s unchallenged domain, for it is rented of the freeholder, the Duke of Portland, and its gallops are opened or closed just as the officials will it. The revenue of the Club, too, is enormous, for every jockey pays for a licence, and the fees exacted from owners at every turn, and the money taken for admission to the betting-rings and enclosures, total an income more than princely. The headquarters of the Club and Tattersall’s Rooms combined face the High Street in no very imposing manner, and the pavement in front of them becomes on race-days the Rialto of owners and trainers

XXI

THE history of the Jockey Club and that of “Tattersalls” are inseparable. Richard, the first Tattersall, born in 1724, and originally stud-groom to the Duke of Kingston, founded the well-known business of horse-auctioneering in London in 1766, and prospered from the beginning of that enterprise; but his fortune was made rather in horse-breeding, and “Old Tatt” had his first great success in 1779, when he bought Highflyer, Lord Bolingbroke’s famous racehorse, for £2,500, and put him to the stud. It is a proof of his tried and proved integrity that he purchased Highflyer on credit.