half-Roman people called this road, and so "Gwyddelin" became "watling" on
their tongues, while "strata" was corrupted to "street." No new roads were
made now, and, indeed, not until the Turnpike Acts of George the Third's
time and the era of MacAdam was the art of road-making practised again in
England. For ages the "roads" of this country were a byword and a reproach
to us. By the middle of the twelfth century the Roman roads that had been
made and kept in repair for hundreds of years fell into ruin, and the
detritus and miscellaneous accumulations of twenty-five generations now
cover the greater portion of them. At a depth varying from five to
fourteen, and even eighteen, feet, excavators have come upon the hard
surface of the original Roman road, and mosaic pavements of villas found
at that extreme depth attest how the surface of a country may be altered
only by the gradual deposit of vegetable matter. The thickest deposits are
found in low-lying situations, where the flow of streams or rain-water
has brought liquid earth to settle upon the deserted sites of an ancient
civilisation. This has occurred notably at such places as Dartford,
Rochester, and Canterbury, all situated in deep valleys, where springs and
storms have united to bring mud, sand, and gravel down from the hillsides,
and thus to equalise in some measure the ancient irregularities of the
scenery. While the hollows have thus been rendered less profound, the
hill-tops and table-lands have remained very much as they were, and it is
in these elevated situations that the line of Watling Street can most
readily be traced, or _could_ have been had not the stone pavings that
composed the road been long ages ago abstracted.
This long neglect of the roads made country journeys exceedingly difficult
and dangerous. Travellers' tales in England during six or seven centuries
are concerned with two great evils; highway robbery and the shocking state
of the roads; and so deep and dangerous were some of the quagmires that,
rather than attempt to cross them, coachmen would drive through wayside
fields, and thus make a road for themselves. It was in this way that
ancient highways became diverted, and the pedestrian who finds the route
between two towns to be extraordinarily circuitous must often look to
these circumstances for an explanation. The southern counties bore a bad
reputation for impassable roads until about seventy years ago, and Kentish
miles were long linked with Essex stiles and Norfolk wiles as prime causes
of beguilement; while the fertility of Kentish soil is joined with the
muddy character of Kentish roads in two old county proverbs. Thus, "Bad
for the rider, good for the abider," expressed truths obvious enough to
those who came this way a hundred years ago; and "There is good land where
there is foul way" would have said much for the excellence of Kent, where
all the ways were foul. But if the traveller was not a landed gentleman,
except in the sense that he was generally covered with mud from head to
foot, the reflection that the county through which he waded deep in slush
must be singularly fertile could scarce have afforded him much consolation
for lost time and spoiled clothes. Here is a tale of an unfortunate
horseman bogged on these miscalled "roads" which is quite eloquent of what
old-time wayfaring was like. He comes to a suspicious-looking slough and
hesitates. "Is there a good bottom here, my man?" he asks of a country
joskin regarding him with a wide smile. "Oo-ah! yes, there's a good bottom
to un," replies the countryman, and the traveller urges on his way until,
within a yard or so, his horse sinks to the girth in liquid mud. "I
thought you said there was a good bottom to this road," shouts the
traveller. "Yes," rejoins the rustic, "soo there ees, but you a'n't coom
to un yit, master."
XX
Strood is one long street of miscellaneous houses, with fields and meadows
running up to the backyards; with engine-shops, mills, wheelwrights, and a
variety of other noisy trades clanging and clattering in the rear, and an
old church on the hillside to the left, appropriately dedicated to that
patron of thieves and sailor-men, Saint Nicholas. But whether or no "Saint
Nicholas' clerks" looked in here to pray the saint to send them "rick
franklins and great oneyers" across that "high old robbing hill," I should
not like to say; having though, the while, a shrewd suspicion that their
piety was somewhat to seek, and that the shrine of the saint profited but
little, if at all, from their ill-gotten gains upon the road.
[Sidenote: "CRISPIN AND CRISPIANUS"]
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the old houses here and at
Rochester, and, indeed, along a great portion of the Dover Road, is the
great use of weather-boarding, chiefly on the upper storeys. An instance
of this is seen at Strood at an inn, the "Crispin and Crispianus,"
standing in the main street. A still more interesting point about this old
house is its pictorial swinging sign, overhanging the pathway--a
representation of the two shoemaker brothers, Crispin and Crispian, at
work, cobbling boots. The brothers were Christian martyrs who suffered
death at Soissons, A.D. 287. How they came to serve as the sign of an inn
is quite unknown. It has been suggested that, as Agincourt was fought on
Saint Crispin's Day, this old sign is of the warlike and patriotic order
to which belong the Waterloo, Wellington, Nelson, Alma, and Trafalgar
signs that are so plentiful on this road; but it is a great deal more
likely that it is a relic of the days when men made pilgrimages to
Becket's shrine, when innkeepers found their account to lie in calling
their houses after some popular saint or another.
A curious incident in connection with the "Crispin and Crispianus" must be
noted before we pass on. It happened in 1830. One night in September of
that year, a doctor who had only just then commenced practice in Strood
was called in to see a man lying at the point of death in an upper room of
the old inn. He hastened to the place, and found a man lying in bed who
told him that, although he was known only as an ostler, he was really the
Earl of Coleraine, nephew of that notorious Colonel Hanger who is chiefly
known as the riotous boon-companion of the Prince Regent in the early days
of Brighton and the Pavilion. Colonel Hanger was the fourth earl, and
succeeded his brother in the title, which he never assumed. He died,
childless, in 1824, and the earldom became extinct. As Colonel Hanger was
the youngest son of his father, and as no mention has ever been made of
any of his elder brothers leaving sons, the matter is not a little
mysterious, especially as the colonel's right to the title, had he chosen
to use it, was not disputed. However, the strange man who died on
September 20, 1830, at the "Crispin and Crispianus" apparently satisfied
Doctor Humphrey Wickham of the truth of his story, and that his real name
was Charles Parrott Hanger, instead of "Charley Roberts," by which he had
been known at Strood and the neighbourhood for twenty years. During this
time he had acted as ostler at the coaching inns of Rochester and Chatham;
had tramped the country, selling laces, thread, tape, and other small
wares; and on Sundays shaved labourers. He had deserted his wife years
before. She was long dead, and he had a son apprenticed to a firm of
ironmongers at Birmingham. To this son he left all he was possessed of,
making the doctor his executor. It will not be imagined that this
ex-ostler, dying in a room of the "Crispin and Crispianus," where he was
lodged by the landlady out of charity, had anything to bequeath; but the
doctor paid over, as executor, the sum of L1000 to Charles Henry Hanger,
the son of this eccentric.
XXI
[Sidenote: ROCHESTER]
And so, as Mr. Samuel Pepys might say, into Rochester.
Rochester was to Dickens variously "Mudfog," "Great Winglebury,"
"Dullborough," and "Cloisterham." It cannot be said that any of these
names form anything like an adequate word-picture of the place. As names,
they vary from good to indifferent, and very bad, but none of them shadow
forth the real Rochester, which is rather a busy place than otherwise:
none, for instance, are so happily descriptive as that under which a
waggish fellow introduced a wealthy distiller to an assemblage of Polish
notables--as "Count Caskowisky." I might pluck a feather from Dickens'
wing with which to furnish forth a wounding shaft, and say of Rochester,
under any of those pseudonyms, as Trabbs' boy said in another connection
(and yet not deserve the title of "unlimited miscreant,") "Don't know
yah!"
The somnolent place which Dickens drew--its High Street a narrow lane, its
houses abodes of gloom and mystery--has not much existence in fact. It is,
of course, heresy to say so (but it is none the less true), that although
no other place was probably so well known to Dickens, and that from his
youth upward, yet he never caught the true note of Rochester. That he
loved the place seems obvious enough, but his was not the Gothic, mediaeval
temperament that could really appreciate it aright. The test of this is
found in the fact that although Dickens has written many glowing pages on
Rochester, and apparently yielded to none in his admiration for the old
city, yet its appearance is far more beautiful to the stranger learned in
Dickens-lore than anything he is prepared to see.
Busy, beautiful Rochester, and none the less beautiful because busy. The
traveller who first sees the old place, its castle and cathedral and the
turbid Medway, from Strood, is fortunate in his approach, and will never
forget the grand picture it makes. To his right stretches away for miles
the broad valley of the Medway, with bold hills crowned with windmills,
above, and the stream, diminishing in long perspective, below; with
jutting promontories where the factory-chimneys of Borstal and Wouldham
stand up, clustered like the stalks of monstrous vegetables, and the
red-sailed barges that drop down with wind and tide. Before him rise the
great keep, the cathedral, and the clustered red roofs of the city, with a
glimpse of the High Street, the Town Hall and its great vane--a
full-rigged ship--at the other end of the bridge. And all the while to his
left is the shrieking and the screaming of the trains, rolling in thunder
over the two railway bridges that absolutely shut out and ruin the view
down the stream. The bustle, roar, and rattle of the trains, the busy,
yet silent, traffic of the river, the smoke rising in wreaths from those
distant chimneys of Wouldham and Borstal, all bespeak labour and commerce,
and all these rumours of a busy community blend finely with the shattered
majesty of that ancient Castle, the solemnity of the Cathedral, and the
noisy, yet restful, cawing of the raucous rooks who circle round about
those lofty battlements, their outcry mingled with the sobbing, moaning
voices of the pigeons, and the shrill piping of querulous sea-birds.
The bridge over which Mr. Pickwick leaned and meditated while waiting for
breakfast has gone the way of many another old building referred to in
that book which will presently have a quite unique archaeological value, so
changed are the varied haunts of the Pickwickians. Necessity, they say,
the call of progress, demanded the removal of the fine stone bridge of
eleven arches that had spanned the Medway so efficiently for five
centuries, and it _was_ removed in 1856; but how cruel the necessity, and
how heavy a toll we pay for our progression perhaps only those who had
stood upon the ancient ways can tell. The masonry was so strong that it
was found necessary to blow it up.
Meanwhile, we must clear our minds from a very reasonable prejudice, and
acknowledge that, as an example of modern engineering, the new Rochester
Bridge is very fine. It is of iron, broad and graceful as its iron
construction will allow, and it spans the river in three great arches. It
cost L160,000, exclusive of approaches, to build, and was opened in 1856.
The old bridge had a protecting balustrade which more or less effectually
saved the lieges from being blown by furious winds into the water. Before
the balustrade there were high iron railings, which were fixed according
to the French Ambassador, the Duc de Nivernais, "so that drunkards, not
uncommon here, may not mix water with their wine."
That the balustrade was not very greatly to be relied upon, and that Mr.
Pickwick, bulky man as he was, ran a considerable risk when he leaned over
the parapet, may be gathered when we read that on a night in 1836 a storm
demolished a great stretch of it, and that the Princess Victoria, who was
coming up the road from Dover, was content to be advised to stay overnight
at the "Bull," rather than attempt to cross over to Strood. The riverside
wore a somewhat different aspect then. Low and broken cliffs picturesquely
shelved down to the water's edge where a neat embankment now runs, and the
balustrades of the old bridge serve their old purpose on this new
river-wall. The embankment is an improvement from an utilitarian point of
view, but its long straight line hurts the artistic sense.
The stranger should come into Rochester preferably on the evening of a
summer's day, and, as first impressions must ever remain the most
distinct, he should walk in over the bridge. At such times a golden haze
spreads over the city and the river, and renders both a dream of beauty.
The gilt ship on the Town Hall blazes like molten metal; the "moon-faced
clock" of the Corn Exchange is correspondingly calm, and the wide
entrance-halls of the older inns begin to glow with light. You should have
walked a good fifteen miles or more on the day of your first coming into
Rochester, and then you will appreciate aright the mellow comforts of its
old inns. But not at once will the connoisseur of antiquity and first
impressions who thus enters the old city repair him to his inn. He will
turn into the Cathedral precincts underneath the archway of Chertsey's
Gate, and I hope he will not already have read _Edwin Drood_, because an
acquaintance with that tale quite spoils one's Rochester, and leaves an
ineffaceable mark of a modern sordid tragedy upon the hoary stones of
Cathedral, Castle, and Close. It is as though one had come to the place
after reading the unrelieved brutality of a newspaper report. Rochester
demands a romance of the Ivanhoe type; chivalry or necessities of State
should have ennobled slaughter here, but a tale of secret murder for
private ends vulgarises and tarnishes the place, especially when it is
told with all Dickens' wealth of local allusion. He had no comprehension
of tragedy and romance other than those of the street and the
police-court; which is to say that he had better have left Rochester
alone, so far as the _Mystery of Edwin Drood_ is concerned.
If my imaginary traveller comes to Rochester without having read that tale
he will be singularly fortunate. Otherwise he will have an uneasy feeling
as he stands and gazes a moment upon the west front of the Cathedral, or
peeps into the nave, that it ought to be re-consecrated. This, of course,
is a tribute to Dickens' descriptive and narrative powers that clothe the
doings of his characters with so great an air of reality; but how
unfortunate for those who like their murders to be decently old and
historical that he should have brought the atmosphere of the police-court
into the grave and reverend air of this ancient city.
My traveller, happily unversed in all this, will gaze upon the Cathedral
and the Castle Keep, where the rooks are circling to rest, and, coming
again into the High Street, will turn to his inn, where appetite,
sharpened by pedestrianism and fresh air, may be appeased as well now as
in those days of heavy drinking and no less heavy eating, when seventy-two
coaches passed through Rochester daily and the trains that thunder across
the Medway were undreamt of.
The inns of Rochester receive, as may well be supposed, many pilgrims who
for love of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens, come hither, not alone from
all parts of England, but from America, and even from foreign-speaking
countries, and the visitors' books testify not only to their opinions of
the place but also of each other. Thus at one inn I read the signatures of
a party of Germans, to which some prejudiced Briton, after sundry
offensive remarks about foreigners in general and Germans in particular,
adds, "They are everywhere, d----n them!" But I must confess that the
following surprised me, even after a long acquaintance with the inanities
of visitors' books. Some one had remarked "How like Rochester Cathedral
was to a Catholic Church," whereupon some other idiot adds, "Of course it
is Catholic, but not Roman Catholic." Really one scarcely knows whom to
pity most.
[Sidenote: THE "BULL"]
The "Bull" inn (how remarkably like its frontage is to that other "Bull"
at Dartford) is much the same now as when Dickens wrote of it; only there
are portraits of Dickens hanging on the staircase now, and the ball-room,
with its "elevated den," is a place of solitude. They still show you the
rooms where Winkle and Mr. Pickwick slept, as though they were real
people, and so great an affection do the members of the Pickwick Club
command, that, while pointing out where Tracy Tupman and Mr. Snodgrass
danced, the rooms occupied by the Princess Victoria are clean forgotten.
So literature scores a success for once; but I wish a too earnest loyalty
had not altered the sign from the "Bull Inn" to the "Victoria and Bull
Hotel"! The hall is still "a very grove of dead game and dangling joints
of mutton," and the "illustrious larder, with glass doors, developing cold
fowls and noble joints and tarts, wherein the raspberry jam coyly
withdraws itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a
lattice-work of pastry," still whets the appetites of incoming guests,
just as though England stood where she did, and as if our trades were not
ruined by foreign competition, our industries decayed, the army gone to
the dogs, the navy to Davy Jones, the farmer to the workhouse, and the
shopkeeper to the Bankruptcy Court, as we are told they have. No doubt all
these things have happened, or are in course of fulfilment, and I suppose
the hotel-keepers keep up their licences merely for the love of licensed
victualling, while the "commercials" still travel the roads for old
acquaintance's sake rather than for any business that may be doing. How
disinterested of them!
XXII
I notice that there is a great tendency among those who have to describe
Rochester Cathedral to dismiss it with the remarks that it is quite small,
and that it was "restored" in 1825 and 1875. These, of course, are the
merest ineptitudes of criticism, and if we allowed praise or censure to be
awarded according to the bulk, then that hideous elephantine conventicle,
Jezreel's Temple, on the summit of Chatham Hill, would easily bear away
the bell.
But size has little to do with a right appreciation of architecture.
Chasteness of proportion, the degree of artistry shown alike in details
and in the execution of the whole, are the sole considerations that shall
weigh with those who take any sort of an intelligent interest in the
architecture of cathedrals; and the admiration of a thing that "licks
creation" in the matter of measurement is senseless if it is not wedded to
a proper perception of the justness of the parts that go to make its bulk.
The Cathedral of Saint Andrew at Rochester is at least equally interesting
with that of Canterbury; and that this should be so is only natural, for
one is the complement of the other. Canterbury was the earliest Cathedral
in England; the See of Rochester was established immediately afterwards,
and was for many years not only intimately associated with that great
metropolitan church, but was actually dependent upon it. Then, the early
Norman Archbishops and Priors of Canterbury and the Bishops and Priors of
Rochester were often intimate personal friends who had come over together
from Normandy to England; and the close relations thus established lasted
for many years. The See of Rochester was founded by Saint Augustine about
A.D. 600, and by him the first Bishop was consecrated, four years later.
[Sidenote: ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL]
But when the Norman Conquest brought a new era of church building into
England, Rochester Cathedral was rebuilt. Gundulf, the second Norman
Bishop, the friend of Anselm and Lanfranc, the greatest military and
ecclesiastical architect of his time, prepared to erect a new and grander
edifice on the ruins of the Saxon church. The number and extent of this
great architect's works are simply prodigious. How he could have packed
into even _his_ lengthy life the duties of a Churchman, which we are told
by those who knew him he never missed for a single day; the cares of
statecraft which also fell to his lot; and the building, not only of his
Cathedral, but also of the Tower of London, Rochester Keep, Dartford
Church, Malling Abbey, and minor works, we are at a loss to conceive. He
was consecrated in 1077 and died in 1108, before he had completed his work
here. Ernulf, Prior of Canterbury, succeeded him, and finished the
building, which was consecrated in 1130, in the same year that witnessed
the completion and consecration of Ernulf's and Conrad's new Cathedral at
Canterbury. Here, then, we see at once the close connection between the
architectural history of these two neighbouring churches. Ernulf had a
hand in both; a very large share of the crypt, the west front, and a part
of the nave of Rochester was his; while at Canterbury the crypt and the
choir were built in collaboration with Prior Conrad. These facts partly
explain the unusual and beautiful feature of a choir raised many feet
above the level of the nave, which is characteristic both of Canterbury
and Rochester Cathedrals, and seen nowhere else in England. And not only
in these most prominent features of their architectural construction are
the two buildings alike; their stories run curiously parallel, both in
their building and in their destruction. Less than fifty years after their
simultaneous consecration, both churches were partly destroyed by fire,
and their ruined portions rebuilt in the Transitional Norman and Early
English styles, by those two architects who are supposed to be one and the
same person--William de Hoo, Bishop of Rochester, and that "William the
Englishman" who succeeded French William of Sens in rebuilding the choir
of Canterbury. At that time, allowing for the great difference in their
relative sizes, the two Cathedrals must have borne a strong likeness to
one another; and when we look upon Ernulf's nave here, we look upon the
likeness of the nave at Canterbury until that period, between 1390 and
1421, when Prior Chillendon replaced Lanfranc's work with the light and
lofty, but exceedingly uninteresting, Perpendicular nave that now forms
the western end of the Primate's Metropolitan Church.
Fortunately for ourselves, who think Norman work not the flower of
ecclesiastical architecture, but the most interesting and aesthetically
satisfying next to the incomparable grace of the Early English period,
Rochester was too poor a See to be able to embark on extensive schemes of
rebuilding, and we are spared the rather vulgar ostentation of skill and
wealth to which the Perpendicular style lends itself. Little could be
added to the dignity and solemn majesty, the right proportions and
impressive simplicity, of this massive Norman nave. Here came Cromwell,
whose soldiers quartered their horses in the aisles, leaving the building
so desecrated that a saw-pit sunk afterwards in the pavements seemed a
scarcely worse use of the House of God. Here also eighteenth-century
monumental masons have contrived monuments bad enough, even for the
surroundings of classic architecture, but no less than an affront in this
place; while the half-learnt Gothic restorations of Cottingham, whose
puerilities of seventy years ago were seen in the choir, are a sorrow to
behold.
[Illustration: A GOOD SAMARITAN.]
A long line of tombs and effigies, from Bishops down to a Good Samaritan
in seventeenth-century costume, carved grotesquely and all out of drawing,
on the pavement of the Lady Chapel, claim attention, and easily first
among them is the beautiful coloured effigy of Bishop John de Sheppey,
discovered, built up in his recess, in 1825. The plain tomb of Gundulf is
shown, and the resting-place of Bishop Walter de Merton, drowned while
crossing the Medway in a boat, 1277. The authorities of Merton College
have restored and beautified the tomb of their founder, and it lies,
painted and decorated, near the grave of St. William.
[Sidenote: ST. WILLIAM]