west end wall of the north aisle, which is pointed out as the window of
the cell occupied by the hermit who tended the ford. It commanded the
road; and no doubt the hermit was often knocked up at night by travellers
desiring to be guided over the river. In 1903 a charming picture in
stained glass was added, "The Hermit of the Ford," showing a bearded and
hooded man holding up a lantern. The ford was not superseded until 1461,
when the first bridge was built. This remained until the present bridge
replaced it, in 1754. On that occasion, the churchyard on the south side
of the church was curtailed, for widening the road, and an angle of the
church itself was in 1792 shaved off for the footpath, as can be seen to
this day.
[Sidenote: THE "BULL"]
The old inns of Dartford are very numerous. Most of them, unfortunately,
have been cut up into small beer-houses and tenements since the coaches
were run off the road by steam, but one fine old galleried inn, the
"Bull," remains to show what the coaching inns of long ago were like. The
courtyard is now roofed-in with glass, and the little bedrooms behind the
carved balusters of the gallery are largely given up to spiders and
lumber. But, fortunately for those who care to see what an old galleried
inn was like, the changes here have consisted only of additions instead,
as is only too usual, of destruction. There is a curious detail, too,
about the "Bull," and that is the whimsical position of its sign in a
place where ninety out of a hundred people never see it. The "bull in a
china-shop" is proverbial, but a bull among the chimney-pots is something
quite out of the common. It is here, though, that the effigy of a great
black bull may be seen, reared up aloft in a place between the
constellations and the beasts of the field.
[Illustration: THE "BULL" INN, DARTFORD.]
There is one modern incident in connection with the "Bull" at Dartford
which shows how inflamed were the passions of the working class in favour
of George the Fourth's silly and indiscreet wife, and this incident
happened while the monarch was changing horses here. It was a journeyman
currier who showed his sympathy with Queen Caroline, and he did so by
thrusting his head in at the carriage window, and roaring in the face of
startled majesty, "You are a murderer!" which can be taken neither as a
compliment nor a statement of fact--unless, indeed, we agree with that
mathematically inclined cynic who held that a "fact" was a lie and a half.
Pastor Moritz, in his account of a seven weeks' tour in England, tells us
how he passed through Dartford. He was by no means a distinguished person,
but what he has to say of his travels is interesting, as contributing to
show how others see us. He came into England by way of the Thames, May 31,
1782, and landed (he says) just below Dartford--probably at Greenhithe--to
which place he walked in company with some others, and there breakfasted.
He was fresh from the dreary, sandy Mark of Brandenburg, and this fair
county of Kent delighted him hugely. At Dartford he saw, for the first
time, an English soldier. That robust Tommy struck him with admiration,
both for the sake of his red coat and his martial bearing. "Here, too, I
first saw" (says he) "(what I deemed a true English sight) two boys boxing
in the street." The party separated at Dartford, and, taking two
post-chaises at the "Bull," drove to London, the Pastor "stunned," as it
were, by a constant rapid succession of interesting objects, arriving at
Greenwich nearly in a state of stupefaction.
[Sidenote: WAT TYLER]
Dartford will ever live in history as being the starting-point of Wat the
Tyler's rebellion of 1381. Tradition places the scene of Wat's murderous
attack on the tax-gatherer opposite the "Bull," where once was Dartford
Green. The Green has long since gone, but the story never stales of how
the Tyler dashed out the tax-gatherer's brains with his hammer. It is, for
one thing, a tale that appeals strongly to an over-taxed community,
sinking under burdens imposed chiefly for the support of imperial and
local bureaucracy; and I fear that if some modern tax-collector met a
similar fate, many worthy people, not ordinarily bloodthirsty, would say,
"Serve him right!"
The particular impost which caused the trouble five hundred years ago was
the odious Poll-tax, a hateful burden that had already caused wide
discontent throughout England, and needed only a more than usually
unpleasant incident to cause ill feelings to break out in ill deeds. That
incident was not lacking. At Dartford, one of the collectors had demanded
the tax for a young girl, daughter of he who is known to history as Wat
Tyler. Her mother maintained that she was under the age required by the
statute. The tax-collector grew insolent and overbearing, and, it seems,
was proceeding to a delicate investigation--like that which procured Mr.
W. T. Stead three months' imprisonment some years ago--when the Tyler, who
had just returned from work, killed him with a stroke from his hammer.
How Wat the Tyler was appointed by popular acclamation leader of the
Commons in Kent; how, at the head of a hundred thousand insurgents, he
marched to Blackheath, are matters rather for the history of England than
for this _causerie_ along the Dover Road.
XIV
The old coachmen had an exciting time of it when either entering or
leaving Dartford. They skidded down West Hill, when coming from London, to
the imminent danger of their necks and those of their passengers, and they
painfully climbed the East Hill, on their way out of the town toward
Dover. When several accidents had occurred to prove how hazardous to life
and property were these roads, the turnpike-trustmongers reduced their
steepness by cutting through the hill-tops. This was about 1820. Although
the roads were thus lowered, they still have a remarkably abrupt rise and
fall, and the traveller in leaving the town for Dover can gain from
halfway up the slope of the East Hill quite an extended view over Dartford
roof-tops. He, however, remains to sketch at peril of some inconvenience,
for the tramps who frequent Dartford take a quite embarrassing interest in
art.
[Illustration: DARTFORD BRIDGE.]
[Sidenote: MARTYRS]
Somewhere at this end of the town stood the Chantry of St. Edmund the
Martyr, a halting-place at which pilgrims on their way to Canterbury
stopped to pray and to kiss the usual relics. The site was probably where
the Dartford Cemetery now stands beside the road, on the border of what is
now called Dartford Brent, a wide expanse of common land known in other
times as Brent, or Burnt Heath. This place came very near to being the
site of a battle between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, for here it
was that the rival armies first confronted one another; but, instead of
coming to blows, their leaders held a parley; and so, fair words on their
lips, but with deceit in their hearts, they went up to London. Many years
later, on July 19, 1555, to be precise, Dartford Brent reappears in
history as the place on which three Protestant martyrs, Christopher Wade,
Margaret Pollen, and Nicholas Hall, were burnt at the stake, and since
then the annals of the place have been quite uninteresting. The
gilt-crested spire of the memorial to them peers up on the skyline of the
road-cutting, on the way up to the Brent. It stands in the old cemetery,
on the left.
Donkin, the historian of Dartford, wrote in 1844:--"On the Brent are the
outlines of the 'Deserter's Grave,' cut in the turf, formerly frequented
by the scholars of Hall Place School: the sod of which is still continued
to be cut away by the country people in memory of the unknown,
traditionally said to have been shot in the adjoining pit."
Some light on this tradition is shed by an item in the churchwardens'
accounts:--
1679. Payed the coroner for setling on a soldier
that hanged himself 13_s._ 0_d._
Payd for a stake to drive through him 0_s._ 6_d._
Drink for the Jury 1_s._ 6_d._
Here the road branches--the Dover Road to the left, the Roman Watling
Street to the right; although, the Roman road being older and itself based
on an immeasurably more ancient British trackway, it would be more fitting
to say that it is the existing Dover Road which branches off from the
parent trunk road. From this point of departure on the Heath, until at the
north end of Strood High Street the ways again come to a meeting, over
eleven miles of the original route have been abandoned for what in
mediaeval times proved to be the more convenient route round by the
waterside at Greenhithe and Gravesend.
But although not for many centuries have these eleven miles or so of
abandoned Roman way been in use as a through route, they are not all lost.
The first three miles across the Heath form a good local road, which then
turns off to the right, leaving the Watling Street to climb the hill of
Swanscombe, steeply up, as a tangled lane amid the dense woods. It is a
very considerable elevation. Here and there the footpath deviates from the
original Roman line, and the ridges, banks and hollows of it can
occasionally be glimpsed amid the undergrowth; but in any case it seems
evident that the Watling Street in these eleven miles was not straight,
but re-aligned in some four limbs or individually straight stretches,
partly to avoid going over the extreme crest of Swanscombe Hill. On the
shoulder of that hill there was at the time of the road being made or
remodelled by the Romans a British village, established inland here away
from the Thames estuary probably as being a safer place than any
settlement by the riverside.
[Sidenote: WATLING STREET]
Here, on the slope of the hill, the Watling Street is cut through by the
vastly deep and broad excavation in the chalk made by the activities of
the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers. The construction of it may
even thus be studied in section.
Below, in the levels of Springhead, where a lane takes up the line of the
ancient road, there may have been that Roman station called _Vagniacae_;
although it may possibly have been by the waterside at Northfleet or
Southfleet, for it is by no means certain that the Romans themselves had
no lesser riverside route along the line of the present Dover Road.
However, to lay down a dogma upon so uncertain a matter as the Roman
road-system in Britain proves to be would not commend itself to those best
qualified by study to judge.
From Springhead the Watling Street continued through Cobham Park, and so
at length to a junction with the Dover Road, as already noted, at Strood.
Meanwhile, the more or less modern highway goes on through a dusty
district where the builder is contending with the country, and, judging
from appearances, he seems likely to get the best of it. All around are
glimpses of the Heath, and problematical-looking settlements of houses and
institutions are grouped together on the sky-line, with weird, bottle-like
towers, extravagantly grotesque, like the architecture of a nightmare, or
"Alice in Wonderland." The City of London Lunatic Asylum is here beside
the road; penitentiaries and their like are grouped about; a huge black
windmill stands awfully on the Brent; while everywhere are puddles,
bricks, old boots, old hats, and fragments of umbrellas. Dartford Brent is
a singular place.
At the old hamlet of John's Hole, just past here, called often in coaching
days, "Jack-in-the-Hole," was one of the Dover Road turnpikes. The old
toll-house still remains beside the way. To this succeeds, at a distance
of three quarters of a mile, the melancholy roadside settlement of Horns
Cross, where a post-office, two inns, and a blasted oak look from one side
of the road, across great fields of barley, to the broad Thames, crowded
with shipping, below.
Stone Church, one of the most beautiful and interesting in Kent, stands on
a hill-top, a short distance from the left-hand side of the road, and
commands a wide view of the Thames. To architects and lovers of
architecture it is remarkable on account of the striking similarity its
rich details bear to those of Westminster Abbey, and it is generally
considered that the architect of the one designed the other. This is the
more remarkable since the Abbey, with this exception of Stone Church,
stands alone in England as a beautiful and peculiarly personal example of
Gothic thirteenth-century architecture as practised in France. The
architect of Westminster Abbey must have been of French nationality; and
so curiously similar, in little, are not only the details of both church
and Abbey, but also the varieties of stone of which they are built, that
they are most unlikely to have been the work of different men.
[Sidenote: THE QUARRIES]
Greenhithe lies off the road to the left hand, and fronts on to the
Thames. The road, all the way hence to Northfleet, is enclosed by high
walls with tall factory-chimneys on either side; or passes between long
rows of recent cottages alternating with cabbage-fields in the last stage
of agricultural exhaustion. Docks; huge and ancient chalk-pits; great
tanks of lime and whitening, and brickfields are everywhere about, for
Greenhithe and Northfleet are, and have been for many years, the chief
places of a great export trade in flints, chalk, and lime. The flints are
sent into Derbyshire, and even to China, where they are used in the making
of porcelain; and many thousands of tons are shipped annually. The
excavation of chalk and flints during so long a period has left its
mark--a very deep and ineffaceable mark, too--upon this part of the road,
and, to a stranger, the appearance presented by the scarred and deeply
quarried countryside is wild and wonderful. Spaces of many acres have been
quarried to a depth, in some places, of over a hundred and fifty feet, and
many of these great pits have been abandoned for centuries, accumulating
in that time a large and luxuriant growth of trees and bushes. Others are
still being extended, and present a busy scene with men in white duck,
corduroy, or canvas working clothes cutting away the chalk or loading it
into the long lines of trucks that run on tramways down to the water's
edge. Not the least remarkable things in these busy places are the great
bluffs of chalk left islanded amid the deepest quarries, and reaching to
the original level of the land. They rise abruptly from the quarry floors,
are generally quite inaccessible, and have been left thus by the
quarrymen, as containing an inferior quality of chalk, mixed with sand and
gravel, which is not worth their while to remove.
In midst of scenery of this description, and surrounded by shops and
modern houses, stands Northfleet Church, beside the highway. It is a large
Gothic building of the Decorated period, and has been much patched and
repaired at different times without having been actually "restored." There
are some mildly interesting brasses in the chancel; but the massive
western embattled tower is of greatest interest to the student of other
times, for it was built, like many of the church towers in the Welsh
marches and along the Scots borders, chiefly as a means of defence. The
enemies who were thus to be guarded against at Northfleet were firstly
Saxon pirates, then the fierce and faithless Danes, and (much later) the
French. This defensible tower at Northfleet was largely rebuilt in 1628,
but a part of it belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, and it even
retains fragments of an earlier building, contemporary with the terrible
Sea-rovers who sailed up the estuary of the Thames, burning and destroying
everything as they passed.
A significant sign of the quasi-military uses of this extremely
interesting tower is the tall stone external staircase that runs up its
northern face from the churchyard to the first-floor level. The small
doorway that opens at the head of this staircase into the first floor was
originally the only entrance to the tower, and before the church could be
finally taken the enemy would have had to storm these stairs, exposed to a
fire of cloth-yard shafts from arrow-slits, and of heavy stones cast down
upon them from the roof.
XV
Northfleet adjoins, and is now continuous with, Gravesend. It is a busy
place, engaged in the excavation of chalk and flints, and in
ship-building. Here, too, were "Rosherville Gardens," or shortly,
"Rosherville." A suburb of that name is here now, but the Rosherville of
the Early and Middle Victorians is a thing of the past, and the place has
been sold to an oil company.
Jeremiah Rosher was the inventor and sponsor of those once-famed Gardens.
It was so far back as the 1830's that he conceived the grand idea of
building a new town between Northfleet and Gravesend, on an estate he
owned here, beside the Thames. The idea remained an idea only, for
although a pier was built and the Gardens formed, Rosher never lived to
see his "ville," in the sense of being a town. But his Gardens were a
hugely-compensating success. It is not given to many to make a success of
a hole (unless the hole is a mine), and the site of that celebrated
Cockney resort was, and is, nothing else; being in fact one of the oldest
and largest of the chalk-quarries, excavated to a depth of one hundred and
fifty feet in some parts.
[Sidenote: WATERCRESS]
There a curious kind of rusticity was tempered with an equally curious
urban flavour; there the succulent shrimp and the modest watercress ("Tea
ninepence; srimps and watercreases, one shilling"), were supplemented
romantically by the strains of husky bands. There art was represented by
broken-nosed plaster statues of Ceres and a variety of other heathen
goddesses, some supporting gas-lamps in sawdusty bars and restaurants;
others gracing lawns and flower-beds. To those who delighted in plaster
statues grown decrepit and minus a leg or an arm, like so many neo-classic
Chelsea pensioners, Rosherville was ideal.
"Where to spend a happy day," as the advertisements used to
invite--"Rosherville." The watercress consumed there, and at the other
popular places near by, came from Springhead, which will be found in the
country at the back of Gravesend. In 1907 died the last surviving daughter
of the man who "invented" watercress as an article of food. It was about
1815 that William Bradbery, of Springhead, began to cultivate from a green
weed that grew in the ditches this favourite addition to tea-tables.
He cultivated with care, and laid out extensive beds, then, when he had a
marketable crop, sold it locally. It soon became a famous table dainty,
and nothing would satisfy him but the patronage of London. He filled an
old tea-chest with cress, and, with this on his back, trudged off to the
metropolis, a score or more miles away. The sample was satisfactory, and
he quickly developed a London trade.
Bradbery (it is said) when he was building up his London connection, paid
a vocalist to go at night from one place of entertainment to another,
singing a song in praise of the famous brown cress from the waters of
Springhead.
Be that as it may, Bradbery made a fortune by cultivating his cress on the
extended area. He seized an opportunity where another man would not have
seen one.
Watercress is now cultivated largely, and in numerous districts. It is
known, botanically, as _nasturtium officinale_.
Electric tramcars now rush and rattle through Northfleet and Rosherville,
and no one contemplates journeying to these scenes with the object of
spending a "happy day." The great group of semi-ecclesiastical looking
buildings on the left is "Huggens' College." Almshouses continue to be
built, for the fountain of benevolence is not yet dried up. It was in 1847
that this foundation came into existence, pursuant to the will of John
Huggens (born 1776), who was a barge-owner and corn-merchant of
Sittingbourne. Looking upon a world rather astonishingly full of
almshouses for people of humble birth, he conceived the somewhat original
idea of founding what, with extreme delicacy, he termed a "College" for
gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. The establishment, strictly
secluded behind enclosing walls, in well-wooded grounds, houses fifty
collegians. Huggens himself, in stony effigy, is seen over the gateway,
seated in a frockcoat and an uncomfortable attitude, and displaying a
scroll or the charter of his "College." The bountiful gentleman is sadly
weatherworn, for the factory fumes of this industrial district have
wrought havoc with the Portland stone from which he is sculptured. Huggens
was wise among the generation of benefactors: he founded his charity in
his own lifetime, and personally supervised it. He died in 1865, and his
body lies in Northfleet churchyard.
We will now proceed to Gravesend, noting that in 1787 the slip road
between the "Leather Bottle" at Northfleet and the beginnings of Chalk,
two miles in length, was made. It would, in the language of to-day,
applied to incandescent gas-mantle burners and to avoiding roads alike, be
called a "by-pass."
[Sidenote: GRAVESEND]
Gravesend was at one time a place remarkable alike for its tilt-boats and
its waterside taverns. The one involved the other, for the boats brought
travellers here from London, and here, in the days of bad roads and worse
conveyances, they judged it prudent to stay overnight, commencing their
journey to Rochester the following morning. To the town of Gravesend
belonged the monopoly of conveying passengers to and from London by water,
and it was not until steamboats began to ply up and down the reaches of
the Thames that this privilege became obsolete. Thus it will be seen that,
besides being a place of call for ships, either outward bound or
proceeding home, Gravesend was in receipt of much local traffic. The
railway has, naturally, taken away a large proportion of this, but has
brought it back, tenfold, in the shape of holiday trippers, and the
continued growth of the town is sufficient evidence of its prosperity. One
first hears of Gravesend in the pages of Domesday Book, where it is called
"Gravesham"; but the difficulty of distinctly pronouncing the name led,
centuries ago, to the corrupted termination of "end" being adopted, first
in speech, and, by insensible degrees, in writing. It has an interesting
history, commencing from the time when the compilers of Domesday Book
found only a "hyhte," or landing-place, here, and progressing through the
centuries with records of growth, and burnings by the French; with tales
of Cabot's sailing hence in 1553, followed by Frobisher in 1576, to the
incorporation of the town in 1568, and the flight of James the Second, a
hundred and twenty years later.
Gravesend was not, in the sixteenth century, a model town. Its inhabitants
paved, lighted, and cleansed their streets, accordingly as individual
preferences, industry, or laziness dictated. Spouts, pipes, and projecting
eaves poured dirty water on pedestrians who were rash enough to walk
those streets in rainy weather, and people threw away out of window
anything they wished to get rid of, quite regardless of who might be
passing underneath; and so, whether fine or wet, those who picked their
way carefully along the unpaved thoroughfares, stood an excellent chance
of being drenched with something unpleasant. An open gutter ran down the
middle of the street, full of rotting refuse; every tradesman hung out
signs which sometimes fell down and killed people, and in the night, when
the wind blew strong, a concert of squeaking music filled, with sounds not
the most pleasant, the ears of people who wanted to go to sleep.