tavern, the "Lord Nelson," one of those old houses that occupied, during
last century, and the first quarter of the nineteenth, a position between
the coaching inn and the mere beer-house. This type of tavern is still
very largely represented along the Dover Road, although the sailors who
chiefly supported them are no longer seen tramping the highways between
the seaports. They have, most of them, little arbours and trim gardens
with skittle- and bowling-alleys, and here the sailor would sit and drink,
spin yarns, or play at bowls; swearing strange oaths, and telling of many
a hard-fought fight. If he had kindred company, there would be, I promise
you, a riotous time; for no schoolboy so frolicsome as Jack ashore, and
hard-won wages and prize-money, got at the cost of blood and wounds, he
spent like water. Nothing was too expensive for him, nor, indeed,
expensive enough, and if he was sufficiently fortunate to leave his
landing-place with any money at all, he would very likely post up to town
with the best on the road, holding, very rightly, that life without
experiences was not worth the having. And of experiences he had plenty. He
lived like a lord so long as his money lasted, and when he went afloat
again he was shipped in a lordly state of drunkenness; but once the anchor
was weighed his was a slave's existence. Not that any word of his
hardships escaped him; he took them as inseparable from a seaman's life;
and, indeed, once the first rapture of his home-coming was over, the sea
unfailingly claimed him again. And when ashore all his talk was of battles
and storms; he damned Bonaparte, believed that one Englishman could thrash
three "darned parleyvoos," despised land-lubbers, and sang "Hearts of
Oak" with an unction that was truly admirable. His failings were only
those of a free and noble nature, and it is very largely owing to his
qualities of courage and tenacity that England stands where she is to-day.
Let us not, however, decry, either directly or by implication, the sailors
who now man our ships. They live in more peaceful times, and have neither
the discomforts nor the hard knocks that were distributed so largely years
ago; but they have approved themselves no whit less stalwart than their
ancestors who wore pigtails, fought like devils; talked of Rodney, Nelson,
Trafalgar, and the Nile, and finally disappeared somewhere about the time
of the Battle of Navarino.
[Illustration: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC. BANK HOLIDAY AT CHALK.]
It was for the delight and to secure the custom of these very full-blooded
heroes that these old taverns with signs so nautical and bowling-greens so
enticing were planted so frequently on this very sea-salty road, and now
that the humblest traveller finds it cheaper to pay a railway-fare than to
walk, they look, many of them, not a little forlorn. As for the "Lord
Nelson," at Chalk, I fear it lies too near London suburbs to last much
longer. Already, on Bank Holidays, when the Cockney comes to Gravesend,
literally in his thousands, riotous parties adventure thus far, and dance
in the dusty highway to sounds of concertina and penny whistle. Their
custom will doubtless enrich the place, and presently a gin-palace will be
made of what is now a very romantic and unusual inn, grey and
time-stained; its red roof-tiles thickly overgrown with moss and
house-leek, and its gables bent and bowed with years.
XVIII
[Sidenote: GAD'S HILL]
There is little to see or remark upon in the three miles between Chalk and
Gad's Hill. Two old roadside inns, each claiming to be a "half-way
house"; a lane that leads off to the right, towards the village of Shorne;
a windmill, without its sails, standing on the brow of a singular hill;
these, together with the great numbers of men and women working in the
fields, are all the noticeable features of the road until one comes up the
long, gradual ascent to the top of Gad's Hill.
Gad's Hill is at first distinctly disappointing; perhaps all places of
pilgrimage must on acquaintance be necessarily less satisfactory than a
lively fancy has painted them. How very often, indeed, does not one
exclaim on standing before world-famed sites, "Is this all?"
The stranger comes unawares upon Gad's Hill. The ascent is so gradual that
he is quite unprepared for the shock that awaits him when he comes in
sight of a house and two spreading cedars that can scarce be other than
Charles Dickens' home. He has seen them pictured so often that there can
surely be no mistake; and yet---- He feels cheated. Is this, then, the
famous hill where travellers were wont to be robbed? Is this the place
referred to by that seventeenth-century robber turned _litterateur_, John
Clavell, who, in his "Recantation of an Ill-led Life," speaks so
magniloquently of--
Gad's Hill, and those
Red tops of mountains, where good people lose
Their ill kept purses.
Was it here, then, upon this paltry pimple of a hill that Falstaff and
Prince Hal, Poins and the rest of them, robbed the merchants, the
franklins, and the flea-bitten carriers, who, Charles's Wain being over
the chimneys of their inn at Rochester, set out early in the morning for
London? Was this the spot where Falstaff, brave amid so many confederates,
added insult to injury of those travellers by calling them "gorbellied
knaves" and "caterpillars," and where Prince Henry, in his turn, alluded
to the knight as "fat guts"? Yes, this is the place, but how changed from
then! To see Gad's Hill as it was in those times it would be necessary to
sweep away the rows of mean cottages that form quite a hamlet here,
together with Gad's Hill Place, the hedges and enclosures, and to clothe
the hillsides with dense woodlands, coming close up to, and overshadowing
the highway, which should be full of ruts and sloughs of mud. Then we
should have some sort of an idea how terrible the hill could be o'nights
when the rogues[3] who lurked in the shadow of the trees pounced upon rich
travellers, and, tricked out in
vizards, hoods, disguise,
Masks, muzzles, mufflers, patches on their eyes;
Those beards, those heads of hair, and that great wen
Which is not natural,
relieved them of their gold.
And not only rogues of low estate, but others of birth and education,
pursued this hazardous industry, so that Shakespeare, when he made the
Prince of Wales and Sir John Falstaff appear as highwaymen on this scene,
was not altogether drawing upon his imagination. Thus, when the Danish
Ambassador was set upon and plundered here in 1656, they were not poor
illiterates who sent him a letter the next day in which they took occasion
to assure him that "the same necessity that enforc't ye Tartars to breake
ye wall of China compelled them to wait on him at Gad's Hill." But
travellers did not always tamely submit to be robbed and cudgelled, as you
shall see in these extracts from Gravesend registers--"1586, September
29th daye, was a thiefe yt was slayne, buryed;" and, again, "1590, Marche,
the 17th daie, was a theefe yt was at Gad'shill wounded to deathe, called
Robert Writs, buried."
[Sidenote: MURDER]
Gad's Hill is not only memorable for the robberies committed on its miry
ways. Its story rises to tragic heights with the murder, on the night of
October 15, 1661, of no less a person than a foreign Prince, Cossuma
Albertus, Prince of Transylvania. This unfortunate Prince, who was on a
visit to England to seek aid from Charles the Second against the Germans,
was approaching Rochester, apparently on his return to the Continent, when
his coach stuck fast in the October mud of Gad's Hill. He had already
experienced the villainous nature of our highways, and so, knowing that it
would be impossible to proceed further that evening, he resigned himself
to sleeping a night on the road. Having wrapped himself up as warmly as
possible, he fell off to sleep, whereupon his coachman, one Isaac Jacob, a
Jew, took his sword and stabbed him to the heart, and, calling upon the
footman, this precious pair completed the tragedy by dragging the body out
of the coach, and, cutting off the head, flinging the mutilated remains in
a neighbouring ditch.
The first tidings of this inhuman murder were brought to a Rochester
physician, who, riding past the spot some days afterwards, was horrified
by his dog bringing him a human arm in his mouth. Meanwhile the murderers
had possessed themselves of the Prince's clothes, together with a large
sum of money he had with him, and, dragging the coach out of the ruts, had
driven back to Greenhithe, where they left coach and horses to be called
for. Not long afterwards, they were arrested in London, and, being brought
before the Lord Mayor, the footman made a full confession. The trial took
place at Maidstone, where Isaac Jacob, coachman, and Casimirus Karsagi,
footman, were sentenced to death, the first being hanged in chains at the
scene of the crime. The body of the ill-fated Prince of Transylvania was
buried in the nave of Rochester Cathedral.
Sixteen years later, we come to the exploits of that ingenious highwayman,
Master Nicks, who, one morning in 1676, so early as four o'clock,
committed a robbery on this essentially "bad eminence," upon the person of
a gentleman, who, from some unexplained reason, was crossing the hill at
that unearthly hour. This, by the way, seems to disprove the wisdom of the
early worm, who, to be caught, must of necessity be up still earlier than
that ornithological Solon, the early bird. 'Tis a nice point.
However, Master Nicks, who was mounted on a bay mare, effectually
despoiled the traveller and rode away, reaching York on the afternoon of
the same day. Dismounting there at an inn, he changed his riding-clothes
and repaired to the bowling-green, where he found the Lord Mayor of York
playing bowls with several other tradesmen. The artful rogue, in order to
fix himself, the date, and the hour in that magistrate's memory, made a
bet with him upon the game, took an opportunity to ask him the time, and
by some means contrived to give him occasion to bear in mind the day of
the month, in case he should chance to be arrested on suspicion of the
affair. Sure enough, he was apprehended some time later, and when put upon
his trial the jury acquitted him, as they held it impossible for a man to
be at two places so remote in one day. After his acquittal, all danger
being past, he confessed the truth of the matter to the judge, already
doubtful of the jury's wisdom, and the affair coming to the knowledge of
Charles the Second, his Majesty eke-named this speedy road-agent
"Swiftnicks." This name conceals the identity of John, or William,
Nevison, who was executed on Knavesmire, York, in 1685. His exploit in
thus riding from near Rochester to York is the original of the later,
inferior and wholly fictitious story of Dick Turpin's ride from London to
York, on Black Bess; an exploit never performed by him.
[Sidenote: MRS. LYNN LINTON]
One presently becomes more tolerant of Gad's Hill, for, coming to Charles
Dickens' house and the old "Falstaff" inn, almost opposite, there opens a
view over the surrounding country that is really fine, and the road goes
down, too, towards Strood, in a manner eminently picturesque. The story is
well known of how, even when but a "queer small boy," Dickens always had a
great desire to, some day, be the owner of the place, and how his father,
who would take him past here on country walks from Chatham, told him that
if he "were to be very persevering, and were to work hard," he might some
day come to live in it; but it is not equally a matter of common knowledge
that the house had been also the object of an equal affection, years
before, to the Reverend Mr. Lynn, father of Mrs. Lynn Linton, who tells us
how her early years were spent here, and how, when her father died, it was
she who sold the estate to the novelist. She gives also a most picturesque
account of Gad's Hill in those times. The coaches were still running when
Mrs. Lynn Linton, as a girl, lived here.
"Gad's Hill House stands a little way back from the road. The grand
highway between London and Dover, not to speak of between Gravesend and
Rochester, it was as gay as an approach to a metropolis. Ninety-two public
coaches and pleasure-vans used to pass in the day, not counting the
private carriages of the grandees posting luxuriously to Dover for Paris
and the grand tour. Soldiers marching or riding to or from Chatham and
Gravesend, to embark for India, or on their return journey home; ships'
companies paid off that morning, and cruising past the gates, shouting and
singing and comporting themselves in a generally terrifying manner, being,
for the most part, half-seas over, and a trifle beyond; gipsies and
travelling tinkers; sturdy beggars with stumps and crutches; savoyards
with white mice, and organ-men with a wonderful wax doll, two-headed and
superbly dressed, in front of their machines; chimney-sweepers, with a
couple of shivering, little, half-naked climbing boys carrying their bags
and brushes; and costermongers, whose small, flat carts were drawn by big
dogs, were also among the accidents and circumstances of the time.... Old
Mr. Weller[4] was a real person, and we knew him. He was 'Old Chumley' in
the flesh, and drove the stage daily from Rochester to London, and back
again."
[Illustration: GAD'S HILL PLACE. RESIDENCE OF CHARLES DICKENS.]
[Sidenote: DICKENS]
It was here, then, that Dickens lived from 1856 to his death, on June 9,
1870, and thus Gad's Hill is, for many, doubly a place of pilgrimage. And,
truly, the whole course of the Dover Road is rich in memories of him and
of the characters he drew with such a flow of sentimentality; and
sentiment is more to the Englishman than is generally supposed. Hence that
amazing popularity which is only just now being critically inquired into,
weighed and appraised. Dickens was a man of commanding genius. His
observation was acute, and he reproduced with so photographic a fidelity
the life and times of his early years that the "manners and customs of the
English," during the first third of the nineteenth century, find no such
luminous exponent as he. When, if indeed ever, the _Pickwick Papers_ cease
to amuse, they will still afford by far the most valuable evidence that
could possibly exist as to the ways and thoughts, the social life and the
conditions of travel, that immediately preceded the railway era.
Superficial critics may hold that the most humorous book of the century is
but a succession of scenes, with little real sequence and no plot; they
may also say that Mr. Pickwick, Messrs. Tupman, Snodgrass, Winkle, and the
rest of that glorious company, were "idiots," but for genuine fun and
frolic that book is still pre-eminent, and none of the "new humorists,"
with their theories and criticisms of the "old humour," have approached
within a continent or so of it. Not that Dickens' methods were
irreproachable. It was his pleasure in all his books to give his
characters allusive names by which you were supposed to recognise their
attributes at once. It is thus upon the stage, in pantomime or farce, that
the clown's painted grin and the low-comedian's ill-fitting clothes, red
hair, and redder nose, proclaim their qualities before a word is spoken,
and when Dickens calls a pompous fraud "Pecksniff," a vulgar Cockney clerk
"Guppy," or a shifty, irresponsible, resourceful person "Swiveller," we
know at once, before we read any further, pretty much what their
characters will be like. This, of course, is not art; it is an entirely
indefeasible attempt to claim your sympathies or excite your aversions at
the outset, independently of the greater or less success with which the
author portrays their habits afterwards. We must, however, do Dickens the
justice both to allow that he needed no such adventitious aids to the
understanding of his characters, and to recognise that this kind of
nomenclature was not peculiarly his own, but very largely the literary
fashion of his time.
The pranks of Falstaff and Prince Hal, whose doings were to be "argument
for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest for ever," are
commemorated, in a fashion, by a large roadside inn, the "Falstaff,"
standing nearly opposite Gad's Hill Place, the successor, built in the
time of Queen Anne, of a lonely beerhouse, the resort of characters more
than questionable; more than kin to highwaymen, and much less than kind to
unprotected wayfarers.
[Illustration: THE "FALSTAFF," GAD'S HILL.]
From here the road goes steeply all the way to Strood, over Coach and
Horses' Hill, and through a deep cutting made by the Highway Board about
1830, in order to ease the heavy pull up from Rochester; a cutting known
at that time as "Davies' Straits," from the name of the chairman of the
Board, the Rev. George Davies. The view here, over house-tops toward the
Medway, framed in on either side by this hollow road, is particularly
fine, and I think I cannot come through Strood into Rochester without
quoting a certain lieutenant who, with a captain and an "ancient" (by
which last we understand "ensign" to be meant), travelled in these parts
in 1635. "I am to passe," says he, "to Rochester, and in the midway I
fear'd no robbing, although I passed that woody, and high old robbing Hill
(Gadds Hill), on which I alighted, and tooke a sweet and delightfull
prospect of that faire streame, with her pleasant meads she glides
through." The lieutenant's description is delightful, and if he drew the
sword to such good purpose as he wielded the pen, why, I think he must
have been a warrior of no little distinction. He says nothing of Strood;
and, indeed, I think Strood has through the centuries been entreated in
quite a shabby and inadequate manner. The reason of this, of course, is
that Strood is over the water and suburban to Rochester; a kind of poor
relation so to speak, and treated accordingly.
But the place is old and historic, and celebrated not only for the great
fight which the barons made in the thirteenth century against the king,
when they fought their way across the bridge, and, taking possession of
Rochester, sacked town, castle, and cathedral, but also for that exploit
of the townsfolk who cut off the tail of one of Becket's sumpter-mules,
whereupon that wrathful prelate cursed them, and caused them and their
descendants to go with tails for ever. Thus the story which accounts for
the county nickname of "Kentish long-tails," but I do not perceive that
the Strood folks are so unusually decorated. Perhaps they are at pains to
hide their shame.
XIX
[Sidenote: STROOD]
Strood, too, deserves some notice. The place-name has been thought to
derive from _strata_, "the street," standing as it does on that ancient
way, the Roman Watling Street. But, in the recent advance in the study of
place-names, it is held to be from the Anglo-Saxon "strode": a marshy
region.
[Sidenote: WATLING STREET]
The original meaning of "Watling Street" is never likely to be determined
to the satisfaction of all antiquaries, and its age is equally a contested
point. But that a street or a trackway of some kind, of an identical route
with the present highway, ran between London and Dover long before Caesar
landed can scarce be matter for doubt. That the Britons were barbaric and
unused to commerce or intercourse with the Continent can scarcely be
supposed, for Britain was the Sacred Island of the Druidical religion, and
to it came the youth of Gaul for instruction at the hands of those high
priests whose Holy of Holies lay, across the land, in remote Anglesey.
Those priests were the instructors, both in religion and secular
knowledge, of the Gaulish youth; and, outside the civilisations of Greece
and Rome, Britain was even then the best place to acquire a "liberal
education." Up the rugged trackway of the Sarn Gwyddelin == the
Foreigners' Road, from Dover to London, and diagonally across the island,
came these youths; and down it, to voyage across the Channel, and to take
part with their Gaulish friends in any fighting that might be going, went
those tall British warriors whose strength and fierceness surprised Caesar
in his Gallic War.
Imports and exports, too, passed along this rough way; skins and gold,
British hunting-dogs and slaves were shipped to Gaul and Rome by merchants
who, to keep the trade unspoiled, magnified the dangers of the
sea-crossing and the fierceness of the people. Pottery, glass-beads, and
cutlery they imported in return; and this primitive "road" must have
presented a busy scene long before it could have deserved the actual name.
When Caesar, eager for spoil and conquest, marched across country from
Deal, and first saw the Sarn Gwyddelin from the summit of Barham Downs, it
could have been but a track, never _built_, but gradually brought into
existence by the tramping of students and fighting-men, and widened by the
commerce of those exclusive merchants. Thus it remained for _at least_
ninety-eight years longer; rough, full of holes, mires, and swamps, and
crossed by many streams. Caesar came and went; and not until Aulus Plautius
and Claudius had overrun Britain, and probably not before many successive
Roman governors had served here, and reduced this province of Britannia
Prima to the condition of a settled and prosperous colony, was the
Foreigners' Road made a _via strata_, a paved Roman Military Way.
Its date might be anything from the landing of Aulus Plautius, in A.D. 45,
to the time of Hadrian, the greatest of all road-builders, A.D. 120. Then
it became a true "street," made in the thorough manner described by
Vitruvius, and paved throughout with stone blocks; the "_strata_" from
which the word "street" is derived.
Engineered with all that road-making science which, not less than their
victories, has rendered the Romans famous for all time, the Watling
Street, as the Romans left it, stretched from sea to sea. Starting from
their three great harbour fortresses on the Kentish coast--from _Rutupiae_,
_Portus dubris_, and _Lemanis_, Englished now as Richborough, Dover, and
Lympne--it converged in three branches upon their first inland camp and
city of _Durovernum_, where Canterbury now stands. Proceeding
thenceforward on the lines of the present Dover Road, the Roman road came
to their next station of _Durolevum_, whose site no antiquary has fixed
convincingly, but which might have been at either Sittingbourne, Ospringe,
Davington, or Key Street. Thence it reached _Durobrivae_, which was
certainly on the site of Rochester. Crossing the Medway by a _trajectus_,
or perhaps even by a bridge of either stone or wood, the road passed
through Strood, and branched off through Cobham, coming again to the
modern highway at Dartford Brent. Perhaps it even had two branches here,
one touching the river at _Vagniacae_, probably both Northfleet and
Southfleet; and the other keeping, as we have seen, inland until a
junction was effected near Dartford. But with its proximity to London, the
story and the geography of Watling Street grow not a little confused.
Where, for instance, the succeeding station of _Noviomagus_ was situated
no one can say with certainty. It might have been at Keston; it probably
was at Crayford; or there _might_ have been two branches again, as some
antiquaries suggest. Through London, the Watling Street went across
England, past St. Albans and Wroxeter, and finally to _Segontium_, or the
hither side of the Menai Straits, throwing off a branch to _Deva_,
Chester.
This and other great roads grew gradually to perfection throughout the
country for four hundred years. Towns and military stations dotted them at
intervals, and in between the abodes of men the way was lined, after the
custom of the Roman people, with tombs and cemeteries. This explains the
many "finds" of sepulchral urns and various relics beside the road.
[Sidenote: THE OLD ROADS]