Few cyclists know how old-world the neglected county of Essex really
is. So unknown is this part of eastern England that its ill-earned
reputation for flatness and want of interest has lasted since the first
guide-book writer made the initial mis-statement until the present day.
A great gulf separates the West-Ender and the Central Londoner from
Essex; a gulf filled with crowded streets and rendered dangerous to the
cyclist by the granite setts and tram-lines that characterise the main
roads leading from Whitechapel to Bow, Stratford, Ilford, and Romford,
beyond which last town only can the country be said to commence. Nor
do railways afford so ready a means of intercourse between east and
west as could be desired. For the sake, however, of seeing what kind
of country this may be, let us, greatly daring, get on to the Great
Eastern Railway at Liverpool Street, and take train to Chadwell Heath,
following the course indicated by the sketch map. This gives a run of
a little over twenty miles, and shows Essex in its most characteristic
vein.
[Illustration: THE STOCKS, HAVERING-ATTE-BOWER.]
Gaining the main road to Romford from Chadwell Heath Station, we
follow it for three-quarters of a mile, turning off to the left
where a sign-post points the way to Havering-atte-Bower, along
a good-surfaced, sandy lane. Here we come immediately to pretty,
pastoral country, with spreading views in every direction across the
many-patterned fields. Away, four miles to the left, on its striking
hillside, is Claybury, the towers of its asylum rubricated in the warm
glow of the afternoon sun until they take on a glory like that of a
New Jerusalem. Along the road one comes to an old red brick barn, and
then to the first of the many old Essex wooden windmills. A gentle rise
leads up to the small hamlet of Collier Row, and thence the road goes
uphill all the way to Havering, turning to the left at a point duly
sign-posted. This is the first taste of the Essex hills. Notice, as you
ascend, a red brick house in a park on the right hand. This is the
so-called Bower House, the comparatively modern successor of the palace
built by Edward the Confessor. Here, in the surrounding park, it was,
according to the tradition, that the saintly king, disturbed in his
orisons by the song of the nightingales, prayed that they might never
sing again at Havering; and so it is (quite incorrectly) said that,
even now, the nightingale is a stranger to the surrounding woods. The
legend, true or not, does not raise our opinion of the Confessor. Does
not the poet finely say, “He prayeth best who loveth best all things,
both great and small”?
Although Havering has a long, long history as a royal domain and as the
dower-house of queens, little or nothing is left to show the tourist
its former importance. A few mounds near the rebuilt and uninteresting
church alone bespeak the site of the palace.
[Illustration: Map—GREENSTEAD to CHADWELL HEATH]
As you come up the hill to the tiny village and turn to the left by an
ancient elm, whose hollow trunk has been bricked up to help preserve
it, notice the old stocks on the green, designed for the accommodation
of two. Down a gently sloping road, take the first turning to the
right after passing the entrance to Pyrgo Park, and then the first
to the right again and past a red brick chapel. Two miles and a half
along a pleasant, sandy lane, and then the way divides left and right,
beside a pond. Across a broad common, away to the right, are seen the
houses of Navestock village; but the church lies half a mile onward,
down the left-hand road. This is one of the most curious and one of
the most prettily situated churches in Essex, standing on a hilltop
and surmounted by groups of graceful wych elms, with the waters of a
broad lake, belonging to an adjoining park, seen beyond. Essex is a
county entirely devoid of building-stone, and this fact very largely
influenced the building of its ancient churches, erected as they were
in times when to bring stone from great distances was practically
impossible. Flint, being found locally, was often made use of; but the
county having practically been one vast forest, timber was the readiest
building material, and so we find wood entering largely into the
construction of many Essex churches. That of Navestock is an instance,
and here it is the tower that is timbered. Massive oak beams form the
framing, and are as perfect now as they were when originally erected,
over four hundred years ago. The white-painted, weather-boarded
exterior is, of course, more recent. The whole is surmounted by a
slender shingled spire, and the effect is remarkably like that of a
Norwegian church. Patched and altered by many succeeding generations
since its first Norman and Early English days, the body of the building
is of many styles; and it is plain to see, from the fragments of
Norman mouldings and the blocked-up Early English lancets, how utterly
without reverence were the old men for the work of their forebears.
In the Decorated and Perpendicular periods they inserted the lovely
traceried windows whose mouldering mullions yet remain, and in order
to do so they cut away without the slightest compunction the narrow
slits of the Norman window-openings that merely rendered the darkness
of the interior more apparent, and did the same by the larger but
still inadequate Early English lights. Inadequate, that is to say,
for lighting the building; and it was just for this practical purpose
that the men of later periods ruthlessly swept the original work
away. That their own work was in the highest degree artistic is but
an accident; but this should afford no excuse to the purists among
restorers, who have wrought the most widespread havoc in old churches
like this by “restoring” buildings to the one uniform style in which
they were originally built, and tearing down the traces of all the
intervening periods, which, besides being worthy of preservation for
their artistry, are really an integral part of the history of such old
structures. It is to be hoped that the restorer will not be allowed to
wreak his will upon Navestock Church.
[Illustration: NAVESTOCK CHURCH.]
Retracing our course from here, and going up the road by which we
came, the way to Kelvedon Hatch—or Kelvedon Common, as it is sometimes
called—lies up a steep and stony, but happily short, rise, succeeded by
one of those prettily-wooded winding lanes so characteristic of Essex,
with sunlit peeps between the trees of sloping fields, golden-yellow
with waving corn. Very much has been heard of late years of
agricultural depression in Essex, and of the impossibility of growing
wheat at a profit anywhere in England; but they either achieve the
impossible here, or else (a thing inconceivable in a farmer) they grow
wheat for the mere pleasure of seeing it grow. As a matter of fact,
there is probably more wheat grown in Essex to-day than in any other
county of its size.
In one mile, take a turning to the right, then the first to the left,
and then the next two turnings to the right again, bringing the
explorer to the scattered village of Kelvedon Hatch, a thoroughly
Essex village, with the weather-boarded cottages and projecting red
brick chimney-breasts you will find scarce anywhere else than in this
county. Make straight through the long, flat village street, and then
to the left, where a sign-post marks the way to Blackmore. In something
like half a mile down this turning, notice the old stocks at “Stocks
Corner,” where a sign-post points right for Doddinghurst. Do not turn
here, but continue ahead until a post is observed indicating the road
to Blackmore to be down a turning to the left. In about two miles from
here, when you have been wheeling along a country lane until Blackmore
appears to be unattainable, and you have almost given up all hopes of
finding it, the spire of the village church is glimpsed across the
meadows to the right, and a pretty and easy run leads into the street
of this exceedingly beautiful and old-world place.
[Illustration: BLACKMORE CHURCH.]
At Navestock we saw one of the Essex timbered belfries, but at
Blackmore we discover the finest example in the county, three-staged,
and a very forest of timbering within. A fine old red brick mansion
facing the churchyard is known as “Jericho,” and, although its
appearance was greatly altered in the time of Queen Anne, really dates
back to the days of Henry the Eighth, whose secret retreat it was.
Here that Sultan carried on an intrigue with Lady Elizabeth Talbois,
who gave birth in 1519 to a son, named Henry Fitzroy, created by his
royal father Duke of Richmond and Somerset. Had that son lived, we
should doubtless have possessed one more great peerage, left-handedly
descended from Royalty, to keep company with those of the Duke of St.
Albans, the Duke of Grafton, the Duke of Richmond, the Earl of Munster,
and others. But he died, in his seventeenth year, in 1536.
The Court was pretty accurately informed of the King’s whereabouts
on those occasions when he secretly visited Blackmore, and whispered
that he had “gone to Jericho.” There is, indeed, little doubt of that
well-known phrase having originated in this manner. A stream running
through the village is still called the Jordan.
Leaving Blackmore for the twin villages of Willingale Spain and
Willingale Doe, cross the road at Blackmore, and, turning to the left,
pursue a level course along a country road until reaching a solitary
fork, which, of course, being solitary and puzzling, has no sign-post.
The right-hand fork looks the most likely, but it is the left, as a
matter of fact, that should be taken. This leads past a hamlet where
the sign-post vouchsafes a whole gazetteer-full of information; after
which, in half a mile, turn to the right (the left turning lands you
in a farmyard, and into a duck-pond, very green and slimy). Then a
horribly loose, dusty, and stony stretch for a mile, and, turning left,
the two churches of Willingale Spain and Willingale Doe are seen,
standing in one churchyard. An absurd legend tells how they were built
by two sisters who could not agree as to the style of a church they had
proposed to build between them. One losing patience and saying that
she would build a church of her own, the other is supposed to have
answered, “If you’re willing, girl, do!” History, however, disproves
this ridiculous story and tells us that Willingale Doe obtained its
second name from the old lords of the manor, the family of D’Ou.
[Illustration: TWO CHURCHES IN ONE CHURCHYARD: THE SISTER CHURCHES OF
WILLINGALE SPAIN AND WILLINGALE DOE.]
There is a curious epitaph in Willingale Spain churchyard to one
Charles Davis, who was killed in his thirty-eighth year “by a fall from
the elm tree near which he is buried,” as the inscription says. He
lies, indeed, under the shadow of it.
But this is not the only thing worth note, for, just within the little
doorway that leads into the chancel of Willingale Spain Church, may be
noticed on the floor a curious monumental brass to Isaac Kello, who
died, aged nine years, in 1614, “son to Mr. Bartholomew Kello, Minister
of Christ’s Evangell”—
“This godly child knew his Originall
And though right young, did scorn base cells of earth,
His soule doth Flourish in Heaven’s Glistering Hall
Because it is a divine plant by birth.”
It is not very easy to discover precisely what Mr. Bartholomew Kello,
who presumably wrote this, meant by it, but its general tone sounds
pathetic enough.
From here a winding lane leads to Fyfield, whose rector has earned
some notice by holding cyclists’ parades and by entertaining passing
wheelmen. Thence to Chipping Ongar it is an excellent road. From here
it will be convenient to take train back to London; first, however,
paying a visit to Greenstead Church, a short distance beyond the town,
to the right of the road. It lies at the end of a long avenue, and is
remarkable for the walls of its nave being constructed of the trunks of
oak trees, set upright. The exterior still exhibits the rude rounded
surface of the original trunks, worn and furrowed by time; while the
adze-marks by which the inner sides have been planed down to something
like a flat surface are still visible, although the work dates back to
Saxon times. When the church was restored in 1848 the decayed lower
portions of these trunks were cut off—five inches of those forming
the south wall, and one inch from those on the north side—and the rest
preserved by being placed on a brick sill built to the ground level.
At the same time the logs were tongued together with strips of oak to
prevent dampness penetrating to the church.
The chancel is of late Perpendicular date, and is of red brick; but
the body of the church remains an eloquent survival of the ancient
steading in a clearing of the green woods that once spread densely over
old-world Essex.
The church is dedicated to that most famous of all East Anglian saints,
St. Edmund the King and Martyr, who was seized by the Danes in the
year 871 at Hoxne, and on his refusing to renounce Christianity, bound
by them to an oak, and shot to death with arrows. And not only is it
so dedicated, but it owes its very existence, in a curious way, to
him; having been originally built as a temporary shrine of logs for
his body to lie in on the journey, when it was transferred to London
from its gorgeous shrine at Bury St. Edmunds during the troubled years
immediately preceding the Conquest. A fragment of stained glass,
with a crowned head pictured on it, is let into a little window in
the weather-boarded tower, and a portion of the ancient Hoxne oak is
preserved at the Rectory, where there is an old painting representing
him. It is a singular coincidence that the oak—St. Edmund’s Oak, as
it was named—fell at the very time in 1848 when the little church was
being restored. The absolute truth of the legend was proved by an
ancient arrowhead being discovered almost in the heart of the famous
tree.