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THE DOVER ROAD
HISTORIES OF THE ROADS
BY CHARLES G. HARPER.
THE BRIGHTON ROAD: The Classic Highway to the South.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: London to York.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: York to Edinburgh.
THE DOVER ROAD: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
THE BATH ROAD: History, Fashion and Frivolity on an old Highway.
THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD: London to Manchester.
THE MANCHESTER ROAD: Manchester to Glasgow.
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: London to Birmingham.
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: Birmingham to Holyhead.
THE HASTINGS ROAD: And The "Happy Springs of Tunbridge."
THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: London to Gloucester.
THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: Gloucester to Milford
Haven.
THE NORWICH ROAD: An East Anglian Highway.
THE NEWMARKET, BURY, THETFORD AND CROMER ROAD.
THE EXETER ROAD: The West of England Highway.
THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD.
THE CAMBRIDGE, KING'S LYNN AND ELY ROAD.
[Illustration: MERCERY LANE, CANTERBURY.]
_The_ DOVER ROAD
Annals of an Ancient Turnpike
_By_ CHARLES G. HARPER
_Illustrated by the Author and from
Old Prints and Portraits_
[Illustration]
HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT
EDWIN VALENTINE MITCHELL
_First Published 1895._
_Second and Revised Edition 1922._
Manufactured in England by C. TINLING & CO., Ltd.
53, Victoria Street, Liverpool,
and 187, Fleet Street, London.
[Illustration: THE MILLER]
PREFACE
_It has been said, by whom I know not, that "prefaces to books are like
signs to public-houses; they are intended to give one an idea of the kind
of entertainment to be found within." But this preface is not to be like
those; for it would require an essay in itself to give a comprehensive
idea of the Dover Road, in all its implications. A road is not merely so
many miles of highway, more or less well-maintained. It is not only
something in the surveyor's way; but history as well. It is life, touched
at every point._
_The Dover Road--the highway between London and that most significant of
approaches to the Continent of Europe--would have been something much
more in its mere name had it not been for the accident of London: one of
the greatest accidents. It would have been considered a part of the great
road to Chester and to Holyhead: the route diagonally across England, from
sea to sea, which really in the first instance it was._
_For the Dover Road is actually the initial limb of the Watling Street:
that prehistoric British trackway adopted by the Romans and by them
engineered into a road; and it would seem that those Roman engineers,
instructed by the Imperial authorities, considered rather the military and
strategic needs of those times than those of_ LONDINIUM; _for London was
not on the direct road they made; and it was only at a later date, when it
was grown commercially, they constructed an alternative route that served
it._
_It would be rash to declare that more history has been enacted on this
road than on any other, although we may suspect it; but certainly history
is more spectacular along these miles. Those pageants and glittering
processions are of the past: they ended in 1840, when railways were about
to supplant the road; when the last distinguished traveller along these
miles, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, came up by carriage to wed
Queen Victoria._
CHARLES G. HARPER.
FEBRUARY, 1922.
THE ROAD TO DOVER
London Bridge (Surrey side) to--
MILES
Borough (St. George's Church) 1/2
Kent Street 3/4
Newington ("Bricklayers' Arms") 1
New Cross 3-1/4
Deptford 4-1/4
Blackheath 5
Shooter's Hill 8-1/4
Shoulder of Mutton Green 9-1/4
Belle Grove 9-1/2
Welling 10-1/4
Crook Log 10-3/4
Bexley Heath 11-1/4
Crayford (Cross River Cray) 13-1/4
Dartford (Cross River Darent) 15
John's Hole 16-1/4
Horn's Cross 17
Greenhithe 18
Northfleet 20-1/4
Gravesend (Jubilee Tower) 22
Milton 23
Chalk Street 23-1/2
Gad's Hill ("Falstaff" Inn) 26-1/4
Strood (Cross River Medway) 28-1/4
Rochester (Guildhall) 29
Chatham (Town Pier) 30
Rainham 34
Moor Street 34-1/4
Newington 36-3/4
Key Street 38
Chalk Well 39
Sittingbourne (Parish Church) 40
Bapchild 41-1/4
Radfield 41-3/4
Green Street 42-1/2
Ospringe 45-1/2
Preston 46-1/2
Boughton-under-Blean 49
Boughton Hill 50
Dunkirk 51-1/4
Harbledown 54
Canterbury (Cross River Stour) 55-1/4
Gutteridge Gate 57
Bridge (Cross River Stour) 58-1/4
Halfway House 62-3/4
Lydden 65-3/4
Temple Ewell 67-1/2
Buckland 69
Dover 70-3/4
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Mercery Lane, Canterbury Frontispiece
South Gateway, Old London Bridge 6
The "George" 7
Old Telegraph Tower, Tooley Street 10
The "Spur" Inn 15
Saturday Night in the Old Kent Road 21
Greenwich Observatory 26
Arms of Spielman and his first wife 52
Dartford Church 54
The "Bull" Inn, Dartford 56
Dartford Bridge 59
Riverside, Gravesend 69
Denton Chapel 80
Joe Gargery's Forge 81
Ancient Carving--Chalk 82
Sailors' Folly 83
Jack come home again 84
The Light Fantastic. Bank Holiday at Chalk 85
Gad's Hill Place. Residence of Charles Dickens 92
The "Falstaff," Gad's Hill 94
A Good Samaritan 111
Rochester Castle and the Medway 116
High Street, Rochester: Eastgate House 122
Jack in his Glory 123
The Invasion of England: England 127
The Invasion of England: France 131
Paid off at Chatham 135
Key Street 148
Yard of the "Lion" Hotel, Sittingbourne 160
Ospringe: a June hop-garden 167
"Sir William Courtenay" 177
"Courtenay" 180
Westgate, Canterbury 190
The Duc de Nivernais 193
The Black Prince's Arms and Badge 205
"A Gorgeous Creature" 215
William Clements 216
Bridge 218
"Old England's Hole" 223
Barham Downs 227
Watling Street: Moonrise 231
Floods at Alkham: The Drellingore Stream 239
St. Radigund's Abbey 241
Dover Castle, from the Folkestone Road: Sunrise 251
[Illustration: The Dover Road]
I
Of all the historic highways of England, the story of the old Road to
Dover is the most difficult to tell. No other road in all Christendom (or
Pagandom either, for that matter) has so long and continuous a history,
nor one so crowded in every age with incident and associations. The
writer, therefore, who has the telling of that story to accomplish is
weighted with a heavy sense of responsibility, and though (like a village
boy marching fearfully through a midnight churchyard) he whistles to keep
his courage warm, yet, for all his outward show of indifference, he keeps
an awed glance upon the shadows that beset his path, and is prepared to
take to his heels at any moment.
And see what portentous shadows crowd the long reaches of the Dover Road,
and demand attention! Caesar's presence haunts the weird plateau of Barham
Downs, and the alert imagination hears the tramp of the legionaries along
Watling Street on moonlit nights. Shades of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and
Normans people the streets of the old towns through which the highway
takes its course, or crowd in warlike array upon the hillsides. Kings and
queens, nobles, saints of different degrees of sanctity, great blackguards
of every degree of blackguardism, and ecclesiastics holy, haughty, proud,
or pitiful, rise up before one and terrify with thoughts of the space the
record of their doings would occupy; in fine, the wraiths and phantoms of
nigh upon two thousand years combine to intimidate the historian.
How rich, then, the road in material, and how embarrassing the accumulated
wealth of twenty centuries, and how impossible, too, to do it the barest
justice in this one volume! Many volumes and bulky should go toward the
telling of this story; and for the proper presentation of its pageantry,
for the due setting forth of the lives of high and low, rich or poor, upon
these seventy miles of highway, the rugged-wrought periods of Carlyle, the
fateful march of Thomas Hardy's rustic tragedies, the sly humour and the
felicitous phrases of a Stevenson, should be added to the whimsical
drolleries of Tom Ingoldsby. To these add the lucid arrangement of a
Macaulay shorn of rhetorical redundancies, and, with space to command one
might hope to give a glowing word-portraiture of the Dover Road; while,
with the aid of pictorial genius like that possessed by those masters of
their art, Morland and Rowlandson, illustrations might be fashioned that
would shadow forth the life and scenery of the wayside to the admiration
of all. Without these gifts of the gods, who shall say he has done all
this subject demands, nor how sufficiently narrate within the compass of
these covers the doings of sixty generations?
The Dover Road, then, to make a beginning with our journey, is measured
from the south side of London Bridge, and is seventy and three-quarters of
a mile long.
II
[Sidenote: THE COACHES]
If we had wished, in the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, to
proceed to Dover with the utmost expedition and despatch consistent with
coach-travelling, we should have booked seats in Mr. Benjamin Worthy
Horne's "Foreign Mail," which left the General Post-Office in Saint
Martin's-le-Grand every Tuesday and Friday nights, calling a few minutes
later at the "Cross Keys," Wood Street, and finally arriving at Dover in
time for the packets at 8.15 the following morning; thus beating by half
an hour the time of any other coach then running on this road.
If, on the other hand, we objected to night travel, we should have had to
sacrifice that half-hour, and go by either the "Express," which, starting
from the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross, at 10 a.m. every morning, did the
journey in nine hours; or else by the "Union" coach, which, travelling at
an equal speed, left the "White Bear," Piccadilly, at 9 a.m. Not that
these were the only choice. Coaches in plenty left town for Dover; the
"Eagle," the "Phoenix," Worthington's Safety Coaches, the "Telegraph,"
the "Defiance," the "Royal Mail," and the "Union Night Coach," starting
from all parts of London. The famous "Tally-ho Coach," too, between London
and Canterbury, left town every afternoon, and did the fifty-four miles in
the twinkling of an eye--that is to say (with greater particularity and
less vague figure of speech) in five hours and a half; while Stanbury and
Rutley's fly-vans and wagons conveyed goods and passengers who could not
afford the fares of the swifter coaches between the "George,"
Aldermanbury, and Dover at the rate of six miles an hour.
Besides these methods of conveyance, numerous coaches, vans, omnibuses and
carriers'-carts plied between the Borough and Chatham, Rochester and
Strood; or served the villages between London and Gravesend. Indeed, at
this period, we find the crack coaches, the long-distance mails, starting
from London city, leaving to the historic inns of Southwark only the
goods-wagons, the short-stages, and the carriers'-carts. In 1837, also,
you could vary the order of your going to Dover by taking boat from London
to Gravesend, Whitstable, or Herne Bay, and at any of those places waiting
for the coach. The voyage to Herne Bay took six hours, and the coach
journey from thence to Dover occupied another four, the whole costing but
ten shillings; which, considering that you could get horribly sea-sick in
the six hours between London and Herne Bay, and had four hours of jolting
in which to recover, was decidedly cheap, and not to be matched nowadays.
The traveller of this time would probably select the "Express" from the
"Golden Cross," because this was a convenient and central starting-point
from which that excellent coach started at an hour when the day was
well-aired. The coachman of that time was the ultimate product of the
coaching age, and we who travel by train do not see anything like him. He
owed something to heredity, for in those days son succeeded to father in
all kinds of trades and professions much more frequently than now; for the
rest of his somewhat alarming appearance he was indebted partly to the
rigours of the weather and partly to the rum-and-milk for which he called
at every tavern where the coach stopped--and at a good many where it had
no business to stop at all. As a result of these several causes, he
generally had cheeks like pulpit cushions, puffy, and of an apoplectic
hue, and a plum-coloured nose with red spots on it; he was, in fact, what
Shakespeare would call a "purple-hued malt-worm." He shaved scrupulously.
A rugged beaver hat with a curly brim and a coat of many capes would have
identified him as a coachman, even if the evidence of his face had failed,
and his talk, which consisted of "_Gee_-hups," biting repartees
administered to passing Jehus, and contemptuous references to the
railways, which were just beginning to be spoken of, was solely
professional.
Some of these latter-day coaches went direct from the West End, over
Westminster Bridge, and so to the Old Kent Road, but others had to call at
various inns on the way to the City, and so came over London Bridge in the
approved fashion.
III
[Sidenote: LONDON BRIDGE]
And the London Bridge by which they would cross in 1837 was a very
different structure from that driven over by their forbears of twenty
years previously.
[Illustration: South Gateway, Old London Bridge]
So late as 1831, Old London Bridge remained that, built in 1176, had thus
for nearly seven hundred years borne the traffic to and from London, and
had stood firmly centuries of storms and floods, and all the attacks of
rebels from Norman to late Tudor times. Its career was closed on the 1st
of August, 1831, when the new bridge, that had taken seven years in the
building, was opened. The old bridge crossed the Thames at a point about a
hundred feet to the eastward of the present one; the city approach leading
steeply down a narrow street by Monument Yard, and passing close under the
projecting clock of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The view was eminently
picturesque, with the many and irregular pointed arches of the bridge; the
rush of water in foaming cascades through the narrow openings; the
weathered stonework, and the curious old oil-lamps; and the soaring
Monument with the fantastic spire of St. Magnus, seen from Southwark, in
the background. This was the aspect of Old London Bridge at any time
between 1750, when the houses that had been for centuries standing on it
were removed, and 1831, when the bridge itself was destroyed with pick
and shovel. In previous ages there were gates both at the London and the
Southwark ends, and on these fortified gateways were stuck the heads of
many traitors to the State and martyrs to religious opinions. The heads of
Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Sir Thomas
More, and of many another, were once to be seen here; and in Queen
Elizabeth's time, when John Visscher made a drawing of London Bridge, so
many were the rotting skulls that the Southwark gate-house wore not so
much the appearance of an entry into the capital of a civilised kingdom as
that of a doorway to some Giant Blunderbore's bloodstained castle.
[Illustration: THE "GEORGE."]
[Sidenote: BRIDGE FOOT]
"Bridge Foot" was the name of the Southwark end of London Bridge. It was a
narrow lane leading to Southwark High Street, paved with knobbly stones
and walled in with tall houses. Bridge Foot is a thing of the past, and
London Bridge Station stands on the site of it. "High Street, Borough,"
too, is very different from not only mediaeval days, but even from coaching
times. The many old inns that used to front toward the street, dating
their prosperity back to the twelfth century, and their fabric to some
time subsequently to the fire of 1676, are nearly all either utterly
demolished, or are put to use as railway receiving offices. The "Queen's
Head" is gone; the "George," most interesting of all that remain here, is
threatened; the "Spur" is left, little changed; the "Half Moon" is still
the house for a good chop or steak and a tankard of ale; but the "White
Hart," where is it? Where the "Tabard," the "King's Head," the "Catherine
Wheel," the "Boar's Head," the "Old Pick my Toe," or the "Three Widows"?
In vain will the curious who pay pilgrimage to Southwark seek them. There
still are many cavernous doorways, stone-flagged passages, and great
courtyards; but nothing more romantic than railway vans is to be seen in
the most of them, and the yard where Sam Weller was first introduced to an
admiring public is quite gone.
The most romantically named of the Southwark inns now left is undoubtedly
the "Blue Eyed Maid," so named, possibly, in connection with Tamplin's
"Blue Eyed Maid" coach that used to run between Southwark and Rochester in
the twenties. The building, though, does not share the romanticism of its
name. Near it, let into the seventeenth-century brick frontage of No. 71,
High Street, is the old sign of the "Hare and Sun," the trade-mark of
Nicholas Hare; and this, together with the stone half-moon sign in the
yard of the "Half Moon Inn," is the sole relic of the many devices that
once decorated the street. The hop trade has taken almost undivided
possession of the place nowadays. The Hop Exchange is over the way, and
hop-factors are as frequently to be met with here as diamond-merchants in
Hatton Garden; and with their coming the old-fashioned appearance of
Southwark High Street is gone.
Even when Hogarth painted his "Southwark Fair," in 1733, the street was
suburban, and in the distance, seen between the crowds gathered round old
St. George's Church, are the hills and dales of Kent. The church was
pulled down in the following year, and the present building put up in its
place. The fair was suppressed in 1762.
At that time, Kent Street was the only way to the Dover Road, and, even
then, the dirt and over-crowding in that notorious thoroughfare were
phenomenal. Englishmen were ashamed of this disgraceful entrance into
London, and one whose duty lay in bringing a representative foreigner from
Dover to London craftily contrived that he should enter the Metropolis at
night, when the dirty tenements of Kent Street, by which their carriage
would pass, would be hidden in darkness. When Newington Causeway was made,
and direct access gained to the Old Kent Road, the horrors of Kent Street
were no longer to be braved by travellers. The street is here still, but
somewhat civilised, and now called "Tabard Street"; but to "give a bit of
Kent Street" is yet understood to mean language for which Billingsgate has
also been long renowned.
[Sidenote: THE TELEGRAPH TOWER]
A singular structure standing in Tooley Street, and visible for a very
great distance up or down the river, was the so-called "Telegraph Tower,"
which was burned down in the great fire of August, 1843. It had at one
time been a shot-tower, and had always completely dwarfed its next-door
neighbour, St. Olave's Church. It was very ugly, and so its loss was a
distinct gain; but with its disappearance went all recollection of the old
system of signalling that had no rival before the electric telegraph was
introduced in 1838.
[Illustration: OLD TELEGRAPH TOWER, TOOLEY STREET.]
This system was introduced in 1795, at the suggestion of the Rev. Lord
George Murray, afterwards Bishop of Saint David's. He proposed to the
Admiralty to erect signal-posts or towers on the heights between London
and the coast, and upon experiments being made, it was found easily
practicable to send messages in this way to our ships in the Downs. That
year, then, witnessed the establishment of a line of telegraph-towers
between the Admiralty and Deal, with a branch to Sheerness. The original
apparatus of revolving shutters was in use until 1816, when it was
changed for a semaphore system, resembling very closely that in use upon
railways at the present day, the chief peculiarity being that, instead of
only two movements of the semaphore arms, each one could be made to assume
six different positions. Some old prints of the Admiralty buildings in
Whitehall show a telegraph-station of this kind upon the roof, with the
little wooden cabin in which were stationed the men (generally four) whose
duty it was to read through telescopes the signals from the nearest
station, and to work the shutters or semaphores above their own. One of
these stations has given the name of "Telegraph Hill" to that knoll at
Hatcham, by New Cross, which was opened as a public park so recently as
April, 1895. From hence was signalled news of Nelson and Trafalgar, of
Wellington and Waterloo; here worked the arms that carried orders from the
Admiralty to the admirals in the Downs to sail east or west; to proceed
home or fare forth to foreign stations; to summon Courts Martial, and to
put the sentences of those stern drum-head tribunals into execution.
IV
[Sidenote: SOUTHWARK]
The Southwark of Chaucer's time was a very different place. For one thing,
it was a great deal smaller. The year in which his Canterbury Pilgrims
were supposed to set out has generally been fixed at 1383, and at that
time the whole country had only recently been smitten with three great
pestilences, which had carried off nearly half the population of England.
London numbered probably no more than thirty thousand inhabitants.
Southwark was comparatively a village; a village, too, not with the odious
surroundings of later years, but a pleasant spot over the water from the
City, where great prelates had their palaces, and whence a short walk of
five minutes or so would bring you into the open country, and among the
fragrant hedgerows of the Kent Road. No picture exists of Southwark as
Chaucer saw it, but when an ingenious Dutchman--one Antony van der
Wyngrerde--made a drawing of Southwark and London Bridge, in 1546, this
historic part of the "Surrey side" was still distinctly rural. Orchards
and pleasant gardens are seen clustering round St. George's Church, and
stretching away to the site of the present Kent Street, and bosky woods
flourished where the tall wharves of Bankside are crowded together. Where
are those orchards, woods, and gardens now? Where is Winchester House, the
grand palace of the Bishops of Winchester, that looked upon the river?
Where its neighbour, Rochester House? Where, too, is Suffolk House, the
princely residence of the Dukes of Suffolk? Gone, all of them, like the
morning dew; and the only recognisable object in Van Wyngrerde's drawing
is the tower of St. Mary Overie's Church that still, as "St. Saviour's,"
rears its four pinnacles above the Southwark of to-day.
The most famous of all the inns of Southwark was the "Tabard," famous not
only as an ordinary house of good cheer, but as a hostelry immediately
under the protection of the Church, whereto resorted many good folk bent
on pilgrimage. The Abbot of Hyde Monastery at Winchester was the owner of
the ground upon which the original "Tabard" was built, and he built here
not only an inn (which it is to be supposed he let out) but also a
guest-house for the brethren of Hyde, and all others of the clergy who
resorted to London to wait on the Bishop of Winchester, whose grand palace
stood close by. In 1307 did the Abbot of Hyde build the "Tabard," and
Chaucer gave it immortality in 1383. At that time the landlord was the
Harry Bailly of the "Canterbury Tales"; a real person, probably an
intimate friend of Chaucer's, and Chaucer's description of him is most
likely to be a careful portraiture of the man, his appearance, his
speech, and his ways of thought.
[Sidenote: CHAUCER'S PILGRIMS]
He was a considerable person, this host. He was a Member of Parliament,
and his name is an index of his importance, for Bailiff of Southwark his
ancestor, Henry Tite, or Martin, had been made in 1231, and himself held
the position through so long a line of grandfathers and great-grandfathers
that their name had become merged in that of his civic office. So
Chaucer's description we know to be very truth, so far as his worth and
position are concerned:--
A seemly man our hoste was withal
For to have been a marshal in a hall.
A large man was he, with eyen steep,
A fairer burgess is there none in Chepe;
Bold of his speech, and wise, and well ytaught;
And of manhood lacked righte nought,
Eke thereto he was right a merry man.
This explains the host's sitting at supper with his guests, even with such
gentlefolk as the knight and his son, the squire, and with the Lady
Abbess. Thus is he able to take charge of and assume leadership over his
party on the road to Canterbury, and to reprove or praise each and all,
according to his mind.
The "Tabard" is, of course, only a memory now, and, indeed, so often had
it been patched and repaired, that but little of the original could have
been standing when the great fire of Southwark, in 1676, swept away many
of the old inns. But the "Talbot," as it was called in later times, stood
until 1870 on the site of the older building, and was itself so venerable
that many good folks were used to believe it to have been the veritable
house where those old-time pilgrims lay before setting out on their
journey.
To that shrine of St. Thomas crowds of pilgrims flocked from every part of
the Christian world. Rich and poor, high and low alike, left court and
camp, palace or hovel. The knight left his castle, the lady her bower; the
merchant his goods, the sailor his ship; and the ploughman forsook his
tillage to partake in the blessings that radiated from Becket's
resting-place in Canterbury Cathedral. From such varied ranks of society
are Chaucer's pilgrims drawn. A knight whose manhood had been spent in
battle at home or in Palestine is at their head. He had been present at
the taking of Alexandria; had fought with the Germans against Russia, and
had campaigned in Granada against the Moors. Yet his is a meek and
Christian-like deportment, and he is in truth a very perfect, gentle
knight. With him is his son, the squire, a boy of twenty, who had already
made one campaign against the French, and had borne himself well, both in
battle and in the tourney. Love deprives him of his sleep, and for love he
writes sonnets and attires himself in smart clothes, broidered over with
flowers like a May meadow. In attendance on this love-lorn swain is a
yeoman clad in Lincoln green and bristling with arms. Sword and buckler, a
dagger in his belt, with bow and arrows complete his equipment. Following
upon these comes firstly Madame Eglantine, a lady prioress whose noble
birth is seen both in her appearance and in the nicety with which she eats
and drinks. With a sweet, if rather nasal, tone she chants portions of the
Liturgy, and speaks French by preference; but it is the French, not of
Paris, but of "Stratford-atte-Bow." So high-strung is her sensibility that
she would weep if she was shown a mouse in a trap, or if her little dog
was beaten with a stick. She wears--somewhat inconsistently, considering
her religious profession--a brooch bearing the inscription, _Amor vincit
omnia_.
[Illustration: THE "SPUR" INN.]
Next this dainty lady comes a fat monk of the Benedictine Order, whose
shaven crown and red cheeks are as smooth as glass, and whose eyes shine
like burning coals, both by reason of lust and good living. He is dressed
in a fashion no holy monk should affect, for the sleeves of his robe are
trimmed with the finest fur, and a golden love-knot pin holds his hood in
place. Clearly ring the bells on his horse's bridle; hare-hunting and a
feast off a fat swan are more to him than the rule of St. Benedict and
all the holy books in his cell. Beside this disgrace to his religious
profession is a mendicant friar who is no whit better than his fellow, for
he can sing tender songs to his harp, treats the country-folk in the
taverns, and knows well how to please the women with timely gifts of
needles and knives. Follow these a merchant and two learned men. Well does
the merchant know the rate of exchange, and better still does he know how
to secure his own interest. Not so the clerk of Oxenford, hollow-cheeked
and lean, dressed in threadbare clothes and riding a bare-ribbed horse. As
yet he is unbeneficed; but his books are his only joy. His fellow is a law
serjeant in good practice, and at his heels comes the Franklin, a
representative of a very large class who held land of their own, but were
not of gentle birth.
A lower social stratum is represented by a haberdasher, a carpenter, a
weaver, a dyer, and a tapster; all of consideration in their own grade,
and likely to become aldermen some day. As wealthy as any is the miller, a
big-bodied fellow, with a spade beard, red, like a fox, and as cunning. He
well knows how to take a share of the corn his customers bring him to
grind. He wears a white coat and a blue hood; plays on the bagpipes, and
tells stories fitted to make the young and innocent blush. The wife of
Bath is every whit as indelicate. She has been married five times, and of
love, says Chaucer, "she knew the olde dance." Therefore she is
privileged. A shipman from Dartmouth has with him a bottle of Burgundy
stolen from his captain's cabin, from which he thinks it no sin to drink
when on pious pilgrimage. A doctor of physic, a cook, a poor parson, a
ploughman, a reeve, or estate agent, a manciple, and two disgraceful
characters--a summoner and a pardoner--make up the total of the company.
The summoner has a fiery face, which nothing but abstinence from drink
will assuage; and the pardoner is totally without conscience or morals of
any kind. He makes a good living by selling pardons from the Pope, and
gets more by the sale of relics in one day than the parson can earn in two
months.
When these pilgrims rode forth on that April morning--nine and twenty of
them--from the "Tabard," to seek Becket's shrine, they started from the
ultimate suburb of London. Picture that, Londoners of to-day, who find
streets unceasing until Blackheath is gained, and no true roadside country
this side of Gravesend! The thymy air then blew in at the casements of the
many inns of Southwark, and the views thence extended over fields and
meadows where countless chimneys now pollute the sky. Some way down the
Kent Road ran a little stream across the highway--"Saint Thomas a
Watering" the ford was called, and here the pilgrims made their first
halt--
And forth we riden a litel more than pas,
Unto the watering of Saint Thomas,
And then our host began his hors arrest.
Saint Thomas's Road marks the site of this stream, and the "Thomas a
Becket" inn perpetuates a house of call for wayfarers; but the fame of all
these things--of the heretics, the cutpurses, the varied thieves and
beggars who were executed here, with their quarters stuck on poles by the
ford by way of warning, is lost in the latter-day commonplace of the Old
Kent Road.
Yet, at this place, which was something more than a mere water-splash, and
the Golgotha of this road out of London, many met their end through being
born a little in advance of their time. This was, and is yet, a criminal
offence; but it is no longer capital. If, for example, the unfortunate
John Penry, Welsh scholar and graduate alike of Oxford and Cambridge,
religious reformer and prime mover in the "Martin Marprelate" tracts,
directed against the Episcopal bench, had but been born fifty years later,
he would have been honoured, instead of meeting here an ignominious end.
He was hanged at St. Thomas a Watering, May 29, 1593, and was a victim to
the vengeance of my lords spiritual in general, and of Archbishop Whitgift
in particular.
V
[Sidenote: MILESTONES]
There are milestones on the Dover Road. Of course. Mr. F's aunt, in
_Little Dorrit_, knew something about them, but not much. Her knowledge
was general, not particular. We read in Chapter XXIII:--
"A diversion was occasioned here by Mr. F.'s aunt, making the
following inexorable and awful statement: 'There's milestones on the
Dover Road.' Clennam was disconcerted by this. 'Let him deny it if he
can,' continued the venomous old lady. He could not deny it. There are
milestones on the Dover Road."
We will not grow excited about this incontrovertible fact. But not many
people can say where the first milestone from London on this highway is to
be found. Although, in fact, it is at the end of the first mile from the
south side of London Bridge, no one in these days would suspect such a
relic of surviving in London streets. It stands where the Old Kent Road
begins, on the left-hand side as you go south, with an iron plate on it,
proclaiming this to be "1 mile from London Bridge." The stone, greatly
battered, stands prominently, on an elevated kerb. Just because we
associate milestones with country roads and hedgerows, we look upon this,
standing in that crowded urban region, as curious; but when it was first
set up, this was on the very verge of the country.
We have heard much of the Old Kent Road in recent years. People who never
so much as suspected the existence of it, grew familiar with its name, in
the refrain of a comic song dealing with costermongers. The music-halls in
1891 reverberated with the name. But that is all done with. The Old Kent
Road is not to be described in a phrase, nor thought of as the coster's
paradise. It is in fact a road of many aspects.
But how to catalogue the kinds of them that dwell here? It cannot well be
done. Shopkeepers of every kind and degree; private residents of a more
than average decent respectability; publicans, the landlords of
public-houses of a prodigious bigness; family doctors--these are the more
salient classes of the Old Kent Road. The coster? you ask. Nay, but he
does not "inhabit" here. He (shall I phrase it thus?) pervades the
road--the "road," _bien entendu_, not the houses that line the road--and
it is only on Saturday nights, when frugal housewives fare forth,
cheapening necessary provisions, that you who seek shall find him, with
his booths and shallows, his barrows and crazy trestles; his naphtha-lamps
flaring gustily, his voice raucous, his goods striking both eye and nose
in no uncertain manner. At such times the kennel becomes a busy mart,
where you may purchase most articles of daily food at a price much below
the current quotations in shops. Here a shilling possesses the purchasing
power of a half-crown expended in the West End, and at this _bon marche_
the artisan's table is fully furnished forth for a sum which would give
the dwellers in mid-London pause.
[Sidenote: IN THE OLD KENT ROAD]
I have said that the Old Kent Road is eminently respectable; and so it is.
But it is also (the natural sequence of respectability) not less eminently
dull. It is only when Saturday evening comes, with its street-market
commencing as the light dies out of the sky, that this long road becomes
really interesting. Then it takes on an aspect of mystery, and is filled
with flickering lights and shadows from the yellow gas-lamps and the gusty
naphtha-flares that illuminate the dealings of Mr. 'Enery 'Awkins with his
clients; and I am quite sure that, if Rembrandt was living now, he would
choose such a time and place as the best subject for a picture in all
London. One spot in especial he would select. Taking a tramcar from the
"Elephant and Castle," he would ask the conductor to set him down by the
bridge that crosses the Grand Surrey Canal, where the great gasometers of
the South London Gas Company rear themselves high in air above mean houses
and third-rate shops. Arrived here, he would select, as the best point of
view, the broad entrance of a large public-house, outside of which the
omnibuses stop in their career between the Borough and New Cross; and it
is very likely that the thing which happened to me while sketching here
would also befall him; that is to say, some short-sighted or dull-witted
old lady would probably dig him in the ribs with the ferrule of her
umbrella, and say, "Young man, how long before your 'bus starts?" And,
after all, I suppose one must not be satirical at the expense of that very
worthy person the British matron; for, to a superficial glance, a
sketch-block may be not unlike an omnibus way-bill; and who but a mad
impressionist would see sketchable material in an ugly gasometer? And who
other than a reckless Bohemian would be so far indifferent to public
opinion as to sketch outside a gin-palace?
[Illustration: SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE OLD KENT ROAD.]
The Old Kent Road of from seventy to eighty years ago presented a very
different aspect from that with which those are familiar who travel
nowadays up and down its great length in tramcars. It was distinctly
rural. The few houses that were to be seen here in coaching days were
chiefly inns, with swinging signs creaking, and horse-troughs lining the
roadside, and the "Kentish Drovers," that now wears much the same
appearance as any other London public-house, was a veritable rustic house
of call for countrymen driving their sheep and cattle to London markets.
"The Bricklayers' Arms" (a 'scutcheon, needless to say, unknown to
heraldry), "The World Turned Upside Down," the "Thomas a Becket," and the
"Golden Cross," at New Cross, were scarcely less rural. It was at the
"Golden Cross" that Pitt and Dundas, overtaken on the road from Dover to
London by bad weather, put up for the night, and drank seven bottles of
port before they went to bed.
Imagine, though, the condition of the roads, and locomotion upon them,
when two Cabinet Ministers could think it not only convenient, but merely
prudent, to halt for the night when so near London as New Cross! The
Londoner who can take 'bus, tram, or train, and reach the City in less
than half-an-hour, can scarce picture the necessity which faced those
distinguished travellers.
VI
[Sidenote: DEPTFORD]
When the old coachmen had got through New Cross Gate, which stood where
the "Marquis of Granby" occupies the junction of the Deptford and Lewisham
roads, they found themselves in the country, with Deptford, a busy but
small and compact place, yet some distance ahead. Also, they had entered
the county of Kent. Nowadays, it is difficult for the uninstructed to tell
where New Cross ends or Deptford begins, for there is never a break in the
houses all the way, while the street presents no attractions whatever; and
even though the "good view of part of the Greenwich Railway, the carriages
of which may be seen in motion to and fro" (a view which the local
guide-book, published in 1837, considered worthy a visit from London),
remains to this day, together with several other railways to keep it
company, one does not find crowds of visitors hanging on the delirious
delights of the several New Cross stations.
The Deptford of to-day is no place for the pilgrim. Instead of
reminiscences of _Kenilworth_ and Queen Elizabeth, of Drake and Peter the
Great, it is rich in "stores" and "emporiums." A workhouse stands where
Sayes Court afforded shelter under its roof, and amusement in its gardens,
for the Czar; the Trinity House of Deptford Strond has been removed to
Tower Hill; and perhaps the most remarkable thing in modern Deptford is
the Foreign Cattle Market. And yet here Elizabeth knighted Francis Drake,
in 1581, on that good ship the _Golden Hind_, in which he had "compassed
the world"; and here, on a site now occupied by cattle and by business
premises, was the greatest dockyard in England at the most interesting
period of English naval history.
It was at Deptford, they say, in 1593, that Christopher Marlowe, that
bright particular star of poesy, was slain, while yet in his thirtieth
year. We know too little of him, and no portraiture has come down to show
us what manner of man this was who wrote divinely and lived (if we may
believe the scribes) sottishly, after the manner, indeed, of the
fraternity of his fellow-dramatists. It should seem, by some contemporary
accounts, that he was killed by a rival in the affections of some saucy
baggage; but there were not wanting those who asserted that the poet was
assassinated by some myrmidon of the Church, whose priests he lost no
opportunity of reviling. To lend some colour to this, there remains a
pamphlet, printed in 1618, entitled--_what_ a title!--"The Thunderbolt of
God's Wrath Against Hard-hearted and Stiff-necked Sinners." It says, "We
read of one Marlowe, a Cambridge Scholler, who was a poet and a filthy
play-maker; this wretch accounted that meeke servant of God, Moses, to be
but a conjuror, and our Sweet Saviour to be but a seducer and deceiver of
the people. But harken, ye brain-sicke and prophane poets and players,
that bewitch idle eares with foolish vanities, what fell upon this
prophane wretch; having a quarrell against one whom he met in the street
in London, and would have stab'd him; but the partie perceiving his
villany prevented him with catching his hands, and turning his own dagger
into his braines; and so blaspheming and cursing he yeelded up his
stinking breath. Marke this, ye players that live by making fools laugh at
sinne and wickedness."
VII
Leaving "dirty Deptford," that being the contumelious conjunction by which
the place has generally been known, any time these last hundred years or
so (and far be it from me to deprive any place of its well-merited title,
whether good or ill), the road ascends steeply to Blackheath, past some
fine old mansions which, having been built in the days of Queen Anne and
the earlier Georges, and having long housed the aristocracy who at one
time frequented the place, became afterwards the homes of rich City
merchants. Finally, when the "schools for young ladies" are gone which now
occupy them, and give so distinct a scholastic air to this suburb, they
will doubtless disappear amid a cloud of dust and the clinking of trowels,
while on their sites will rise the unchanging pattern of suburban shops!
[Sidenote: BLACKHEATH]
Blackheath is one of the finest suburbs of London; a town girt round with
many particularly beautiful outskirts. Strange to say, it has not been
spoiled, and though thickly surrounded with houses, remains as breezy and
healthful as ever; perhaps, indeed, since highwayman and footpad have
disappeared, and now that duels are unknown, Blackheath may be regarded as
even more healthy a spot than it was a hundred years ago.
The air which gave Bleak Heath its original name, and nipped the ears and
made red the noses of the "outsides" who journeyed across it on their way
to Dover in the winter months, is healthful and bracing, and is not so
bleak as balmy in the days of June, when the sun shines brilliantly, and
makes a generous heat to radiate from the old mellow brick wall of
Greenwich Park that skirts the heath on its northern side. Outside the
gate of that steepest of all parks stood Montagu House, whence the Earl of
Chesterfield wrote those famous letters to his son--letters whose
precepts, if carefully and consistently followed, would have infallibly
sent their recipient to the Devil. Montagu House is gone now, pulled down
long ago, and the site where the worldly Dormer wrote, pointing out to his
son the way to perdition, is now a part of the Heath. Gone, too, is the
garden where the phenomenally vulgar and undignified Princess Caroline of
Wales, who lived here from 1797 to 1814, might have been seen, and _was_
seen one morning, sitting in the grounds in a gorgeous dress, looped up
to the knees, to show the stars with which her petticoats were spangled:
with silver wings on her shoulders, and drinking from a pewter pot of
porter, after the use and wont, between the acts, of the pantomime fairies
of Drury Lane.
[Illustration: GREENWICH OBSERVATORY.]
With this _Princesse au cafe chantant_ disappears the last vestige of
royalty hereabouts, and Greenwich, lying down beyond the Park, has only
dim memories of Henry the Eighth, and Queen Elizabeth, who was born in the
palace of Placentia beside the Thames. If you venture into the Park, and
stand upon Observatory Hill, you can at once glimpse London and gain an
idea of how plebeian Greenwich has become. But its history is not yet
done, and on this very spot, in 1893, a chapter of it was made by a
foreign Anarchist who blew himself up in the making; and when the park
keepers came and gleaned little pieces of him from the November boughs,
the incident shaped more picturesquely than any other happening on this
spot that I can think of.
[Sidenote: ON THE HEATH]
As for Blackheath, it seems that when, in older days, people had
assignations on the Dover Road, they generally selected this place for the
purpose; whether they were kings and emperors that met; or ambassadors,
archbishops, rebels, or rival pretenders to the crown, they each and all
came here to shake hands and interchange courtesies, or to speak with
their enemies in the gate. It is very impressive to find Blackheath thus
and so frequently honoured by the great ones of the earth; but it is also
not a little embarrassing to the historian who wants to be getting along
down the road, and yet desires to tell of all the pageants that here
befell, and how the high contending parties variously saluted or sliced
one another, as the case might be. Indeed, to write the history of
Blackheath would be to despair of ever seeing Dover, and so, instead of
beginning with Aulus Plautius, or any of the masterful Roman generals who
doubtless had something to say to those cerulean Britons on this spot, I
will skip the centuries, and only note the more outstanding and
interesting occasions on which the heath has figured largely. Hie we then
from the first to the fourteenth century, when, in 1381, Wat, the Tiler of
Dartford, encamped here as leader of a hundred thousand insurgents. The
fount and origin of this famous rebellion has ever been popularly sought
in the historic incident of Dartford, in which the tax-gatherer lost his
life; but a discontent had long been smouldering among the people, which
needed only an eloquent happening of this nature to be fanned into a
flame. The Poll Tax was one of the greatest grievances of the time, and
the high rent of land was even more burdensome. The price of land might,
perhaps, have been borne with, for it was of gradual growth, and regulated
more or less by the law of supply and demand, but the Poll Tax was a new
burden, and one exacted harshly from the people by the nobles among whom
the Government had farmed it. Then, too, the state of serfdom in which the
_villeins_ existed was odious to them at this lapse of time, when men
began to aspire to something better than to be the mere pawns of kings and
nobles, sent to fight for feudalism on foreign battlefields, or in
fratricidal conflicts at home. The days were drawing to a close when it
was possible for kings to issue prescriptions for the seizing of artisans
to be set to work on the building of royal palaces and castles; documents
couched in this wise: "To our trusty and well-beloved Richard, Earl of
Essex: Know ye that it is our pleasure that you do take and seize as many
masons, carpenters, braziers, and all kinds of artificers necessary to the
reparation of our Castle of Windsor, and that this shall be your warrant
for detaining them so long as may be necessary to the completion of the
work."
With grievances old and new, it wanted but little to set the home counties
in revolt, and so we find the cause of the Dartford tiler to have been
warmly taken up, not only throughout his native Kent, but also, across the
river, in Essex. The tiler's neighbours swore they would protect him from
punishment, and, marching to Maidstone, appointed him leader of the
commons in Kent. The Canterbury citizens, less enthusiastic, were overawed
by the number of the rebels, and several of them slain; five hundred
joining in the march to London, while a dissolute itinerant priest, that
famous demagogue John Ball, was enlarged from prison and appointed
preacher to the throng, rousing them to fury by the rough eloquence and
apt illustration with which he enlarged upon his text--
When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
[Sidenote: REBELS]