Chapter XVII

BRENTWOOD is no sooner left behind than the road descends steeply over what was once a part of Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild and hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the place where, in November 1692, those seven jovial Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay were themselves, while hunting the hare, chased and at last run down by nine hunters of a different sort, who turned their pockets out and then bade them good-day and be damned. The original chronicler of this significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell, makes no especial feature of the event. He merely records it as having happened "near Ingerstone," and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings in the same sort along the several approaches to London. Little wonder, therefore, that Macaulay should have drawn the conclusion that at this time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest and most populous shires of England was as dangerous as a pilgrimage across the deserts of Arabia.

From the descending road or from Shenfield Church the country is seen spread out, map-like, below, over the valley of the Thames, to where the river empties itself into the broad estuary at the Nore. At least, there is the vale, and the map vouchsafes the information that the river flows thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out the view of that imperial waterway. "I cannot see the Spanish fleet, because it's not in sight," says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in the poem, and it is precisely for the same reason that the Thames is not visible from Shenfield. But if one is denied a view of that imperial river, at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard, a prodigal riot of roses of every hue and habit, are worth seeing. The attenuated shingled spire, one of the characteristic features of Essex churches, beckons insistently from the road, and he who thereupon turns aside is well repaid, in a sight of the elaborately-carved timber columns of the interior, proving how in this county, where building stone is not found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders made excellent shift with heart of oak. This is, in fact, like so many other Essex churches, largely wooden, and its timber is as sound now as it was six or seven hundred years ago.

Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End" lies two miles distant from Shenfield. As in the case of so many other places near the great roads, a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name of the old village sprang up, to catch the custom of travellers; but an additionally curious fact is the utter extinction of the original village, which lay a mile distant from the highway, where the parish church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring farmstead. Explorers in the countryside are often astonished at the great distances between villages and their parish churches, and seek in vain in their guide-books or in talk with the "oldest inhabitant" an explanation of so curious a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the mystery is found in the enclosure of the surrounding common lands. The enclosure of commons has never been possible without the passing of special Acts, which have divided what should have been the heritage of the people for all time between the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor and the tenants would each obtain their share of the plunder, in the form of freehold land, with the obvious result that the villagers, instead of paying rent for their cottages clustering round the church in the original village, built themselves new and rent-free cottages on their share of the spoil of the commons. The old cottages being pulled down, or allowed to decay, it was not long before the last trace of the original village disappeared.

Mountnessing was once the seat of the Mounteneys, who have long since vanished from their old home. The old church, largely red brick without and timber within, still preserves the fossil rib-bone of an elephant, long regarded with reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant, and has for an additional curiosity the carving of a head on one of the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps by way of warning to Early English parishioners of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's bridle." The red-brick west front of the church, masking the wooden belfry-frame from the weather, still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick, but such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that without that evidence of age it would be difficult to credit it with so long an existence. The iron ties in the shape of the letter S give the view a singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in verse, beginning, "Reader, excuse the underwritten," is a curiosity of Mountnessing churchyard.

Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as the modern settlement is named, is seen clustering on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and a wayside pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting of a dozen cottages, two public-houses, a general "stores" (our grandfathers would have been content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a tin tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to walk a mile to church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and a windmill situated on a knoll; a windmill that for picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome or a Constable.

From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims, two miles to "Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of customary spelling. The milestones are undoubtedly strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on the pedantic side, for that village derives its name from a settlement of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or meadow, at the Roman milestone they found here, but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone" they called their village, which lies in the little valley of the River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream of the smallest) hither and thither to give a perennial verdure to the meads along its course. "Ing" is, by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names successively met with along the River Wid. Mounteney's Ing we have already seen, and Fryerning, or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; while Margaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond Ingatestone.

Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad, is of the narrowest, and remains in almost every detail exactly as it is pictured in the old print reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the church still rising behind. It is a tower which by no means looks its age of over four hundred years, so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness of the brick. Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that Sir William Petre who, emulating the accommodating qualities of the famous Vicar of Bray, bowed before the religious storms of the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth. "Made of the willow and not of the oak," those tempests not only left him unscathed, but brought him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched with the manor of Ingatestone, plundered from the Abbey of Barking, together with much spoil elsewhere. How he managed to do it is a mystery, but during the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for such the Petres always have been) actually obtained a Papal Bull confirming him and his in these grants. One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy, recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble physiognomy could be so accomplished a time-server and truckler. His home, plundered from the nuns of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the road, down a beautifully-timbered country lane. The entrance is by a gatehouse with the motto, "_Sans Dieu Rien_," situated at the end of an avenue and framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old red-brick turreted buildings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Lord Petre of to-day does not reside here, but the place is still in the family, and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use. Miss Braddon is perhaps scarce to be numbered among those novelists whose literary landmarks are followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone Hall that it is the scene of her _Lady Audley's Secret_. The fish-ponds of old monastic times, the well in which Lady Audley thrust her husband, the lime-walk he haunted, together with such romantic accessories as terraced walks and a priest's hiding-hole, form items which would require the business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer to fully enlarge upon. They _do_ say--the "they" in question being the gossips of Ingatestone--that the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail, passing at 1·15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the high road, once saw "a something" in white mysteriously sauntering beneath the trees, but whether it was the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one of the sisters thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the Postmaster-General's regulations and time-sheets not allowing for time spent in psychical research.

The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is visible on the right, soon after leaving Ingatestone. Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its timbered belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the village, standing solitary, save for the vicarage and a farmhouse, beside a railway crossing--if, indeed, any building adjoining the main-line of a great railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret thus honoured in the place-name is the Saint to whom the church is dedicated. Some traces of the "marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the old windows, in decorative allusion, remained until they were swept away for modern stained-glass in memory of a late vicar and his family; glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that, save for an inscription on one of the bells, she now remains unhonoured in her own church, deposed in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art furnisher. The only remaining ancient glass is that of the east window, a magnificent fifteenth-century "tree of Jesse."

Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the twenty-fifth milestone, where a post-office and some few scattered cottages straggle picturesquely at the foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially to spoil some two miles of this road is the park wall of Hylands, a large estate purchased about 1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster, who stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and raised this eyesore to enclose his new-made park. Almost as soon as the last brick was put in its place, the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by railway speculations, and his walled-in Eden was sold. Nature in the meanwhile has done her best, and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River Wid crosses beneath the road, water-lilies gem the stream and the wind sounds in the luxuriant Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.

If it were not for its church, which has been re-built and has a very fine and tall spire, one might easily pass Widford and not know it, for the very few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such as it is, it stands on the crest of something not quite so much as a hill and rather more than an incline, and beside its large church has an equally fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White Horse." Time was, and that until three years since, when Widford was celebrated for its one other inn, the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled, the "Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by the picture-sign of a headless woman, with the inscription, _Fort Bone_, on one side, and a portrait of Henry the Eighth on the other. "_Fort Bone_" was commonly Englished by slangy cyclists as "good business." The sign, of course, was a pictorial and satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an open question whether or not in their present form this and the several other "Quiet Woman" and "Good Woman" signs throughout the country are perversions of the original legend, "_la bonne fame_" displayed on old inns in the distant past; an inscription laudatory of the hostelry, and matching the self-recommendation of "_la bonne rénommée_," found in modern France, or the more familiar "noted house for--" and "good pull up" inscriptions on inns in modern England. Virgil's description of Fame, walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the clouds, may have originated the pictorial sign of the headless woman in days of ancient learning; and the classic allusion becoming lost and the supposedly incorrect spelling of "_fame_" being altered to "_femme_," we thus obtain a very reasonable derivation. We may take it that many shrew-bitten folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily agreed to forget the original meaning in order to adopt one so exactly fitting their opinion that the only quiet or good women were headless ones.

Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change that is robbing places of all interest and distinction, the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer swings from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed inn opposite the "White Horse" has retired into private life. The picture sign is now housed inside the "White Horse."