Chapter XXVII

THE entrance into Colchester is singular. From the straight, broad road leading past the trim modern villas and so into Crouch Street--the street outside the walls that takes its name from the vanished monastery of the Crutched, Crossed or Crouched Friars--the wayfarer suddenly comes to the sharpest of angles, and, turning abruptly to the left, enters Colchester by what has every appearance of being the back door into the town.

Historically considered, the entrance by crooked Head Street, as the continuation of Crouch Street is called, really is a back way, and was in Roman times the site of a gate leading to one of the southern and less important roads. But ever since Saxon days this has been the only way to or from London into the town.

How it happened that the original road and the Decuman Gate in Colchester's west wall fell into disuse, none can tell. It was so many ages ago that not even a pathway leads along the ancient way, now quite obliterated by houses. But if the road be gone, the Gate itself remains, though in ruins. Let us, before entering Colchester, attempt to find it. To do so, it will be necessary to retrace our steps a little distance along Crouch Street, and, so doing, to take a turning to the right-hand, down Balkerne Lane. The first sign of ancient Rome is seen where the Church of St Mary-at-the-Wall stands towering above a flight of steps leading up into the street beyond. There stands revealed a portion of the wall. The breach in it, through which the steps lead, was once a postern gate. Overhung with trees, the freshness of whose spring foliage with every recurrent April forms a romantic contrast with the almost immeasurably old of the riven wall, this is a place for thought. From the summit of that old defence, where once the legionaries lined the battlements in time of peril, or leaned gossiping in peaceful days, one looks down over roof-tops into the valley where the railway runs, and wishes for a momentary lifting of the veil and a glimpse of what the spot will be like in another eighteen hundred years. Close by, a hoary mass of brick and tile and weather-worn courses of septaria are the remains of the Roman Gate. Three arches can be traced; the middle arch of eleven feet span, the side ones, for foot passengers, less than half that width. Candour, however, compels the admission that of architectural character they have not the slightest trace. Over against this relic stands an inn known as the "Hole in the Wall," although that is not its actual sign; and through that hole the most prominent object in all Colchester looms red and horrid. "Jumbo" brutally dominates everything, and blasts the approach to Colchester far away on every road but that from London, for which small mercy thanks be given. Who, you ask, is Jumbo? He is not Roman, but he is very big, very ugly, and very prominent; and, unluckily, cannot fail to be seen. After him, even the Roman remains of Colchester pale their ineffectual efforts at pre-eminence. It is conceivable, although not very likely, that a stranger passing through Colchester might not notice its Roman antiquities, but Jumbo will not be denied. There he is, crowning the highest point in the town, shameless in brick of the most striking red and in attempts at decoration which, however well meant, only serve to render his hulking body more objectionable, with an effect as though a navvy were to adorn his rugged face with pearl-powder.

Jumbo, let it be explained, is the modern water-tower of Colchester's waterworks. It was built in 1881, and cost close upon £10,500, and there are those who say it is the second largest of its kind in England. Where the largest may be we know not, but if it injures its surroundings as effectually as does Colchester's incubus, that unknown place has our sympathies. Jumbo is shameless and rejoices in his name, for, as the curious may see for themselves, his weather-vane bears the effigy of an elephant.

Returning to Crouch Street, and so by Head Gate and along Head Street, the High Street is gained. It is one of the broadest and most spacious streets in the kingdom, as it had every occasion to be, for it was not only part of the great road leading into Suffolk, but in it was held the principal fair of the town. Here, too, close by where Colchester's new and gorgeous Town Hall stands, was the old Moot Hall, a building of Saxon, Norman and later periods, barbarously destroyed in 1843. In the Moot Hall the Mayor and justices dealt with offences of all kinds, from the selling of bad meat to charges of witchcraft, sorcery and heresy. Thus we may read in the borough records of things so diverse as the fining of Robert Barefot, butcher, in the sum of twelve pence for selling putrid meat, and may learn how William Chevelying, the first of the Colchester martyrs, was imprisoned here in the reign of Henry the Sixth until such time as it was convenient to burn him in front of Colkyng's Castle. Here the local Court of Pie Powder was held during the Corporation Fair Days, in October. Summary jurisdiction was the special feature of that Court, and it was needed, for in those times, when people of all sorts and conditions came from far and near, offences were many and various. In the legal jargon of the Middle Ages this tribunal is called the _Curia Regis Pedis Pulverizatis_, or, in the Norman-French then common, the "Cour Royal des Pieds Poudrés," that is to say, the King's Court of Dusty Feet. Courts of Pie Powder obtained this eminently descriptive name from the original Fair Courts, held in the dusty streets long before buildings were erected for the purpose, and the name survived long after the necessity which originated it had disappeared. Imagine, therefore, the highwaymen, the cheats and thieves and those who came into disputation on the Fair Days being brought before the Mayor by the bailiffs, their cases arising and being heard, and judgments and sentences being delivered and executed, within the space of one day, amid the bleating of the flocks, the lowing of the herds, and all the noise and tumult of the Fair itself. We must not, however, suppose the High Street to have been absolutely clear of obstructions in days of old. In midst of it stood the Late Saxon or Early Norman church of that Saxon saint, St Runwald, which remained here until so recently as 1878, when it was pulled down and its site sold to the Corporation, to be thrown into the roadway.

That Colchester stands on a considerably elevated site is evident to all who, having entered from the London road, turn out of Head Street into the High Street, and in doing so glimpse the long descent of North Hill at the corner. A further revelation is that of East Hill, which, in continuation of High Street, the traveller must long and steeply descend towards the Colne, on his way to Ipswich and Norwich. It was in High Street that Colchester's principal coaching inns were situated, and there yet remains--now the most picturesque feature of that thoroughfare--the "Red Lion," with old timber brackets supporting a projecting upper storey and a four-centred Tudor oak entrance curiously carved; its original and restored portions so thickly smeared with paint and varnish that all might be old, so far as the antiquary can tell, or all might be in the nature of Wardour Street antiques. The "Red Lion" figured as a rendezvous in the surrender of the town to Fairfax, after the siege of 1648. In its yard the vanquished laid down their swords.

Another inn was the "White Hart," where Bank Passage leaves the High Street. The building, a highly respectable plaster-faced one, smug and Georgian, still stands, but it is an inn no longer. Another old inn, the "Three Cups," has been rebuilt. Older than any, but coyly hiding its antiquarian virtues of chamfered oaken beams and quaint galleries from the crowd, is the "Angel," in West Stockwell Street, whose origin as a pilgrim's inn is vouched for. Weary suppliants to, or returning from, the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, far away on the road through and past Norwich, housed here and misbehaved themselves in their mediæval way. It would be the gravest of mistakes to assume old pilgrims decorous. Modern Bank Holiday folks would, compared with them, seem to be of a severe monkish austerity. The shrine at Walsingham, second only in repute to that of the Blessed Thomas at Canterbury, drew crowds of every class, from king to beggar. The great Benedictine Abbey of St John at Colchester sheltered some in its guest-houses, while the late-comers inned at such hostelries as the "Angel," or, if the weather were propitious, lay in the woods. Ill fared the unsuspecting citizen who met any of these sinners on the way to be plenarily indulged and lightened of their load of sin. They would murder him for twopence or cudgel him out of high spirits and for the fun of the thing; arguing, doubtless, that as they were presently to turn over a new leaf, it mattered little how black the old one was. Drunkenness and crime, immorality, obscenity and license of the grossest kind were in fact accompaniments of pilgrimage, and the sin-worn wanderers who prayed devoutly at the niche, now empty of its statue, in the east end of All Saints' Church in the High Street, on their journey to and from Walsingham, would resume their foul jests and their evil courses so soon as the last bead was told and the ultimate word of dog-Latin glibly pattered off.