the Salopian proud? It may be doubted, however, if the phrase really
means more than that the Shropshireman has ever been high-spirited,
jealous of his own good name, and quick to wrath. But he has good cause
for pride in the fair shire that held out of old against the Welsh in
the hazardous centuries when this was part of the Marches, the Debatable
Land where the frontiers shifted hither and thither as the Lords
Marchers or the Welsh chieftains warred with varying fortunes, and where
the Englishman often sowed, and raiding Taffy came and reaped unbidden.
Shropshire bore its part well in those centuries of strife, when the
Welsh were continually striving to get back their own; for it should not
be forgotten that this also was Wales in the dim background of history.
More than eleven hundred years ago the Englishman threw the Welshman
back upon his rugged hills and out of these fertile plains, and this
became part of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Not only
politically a part of that realm, but socially, for war was not an
affair of kid gloves in those days, but an affair of race-hatred and
extermination, so that when the conquering King Offa had set his rule
over what is now Shropshire, those Welshmen who had not fled were slain,
and their land occupied by an alien race. So thorough was that change
that the very names of the towns and villages were altered, and are
either quite forgot or else only survive in the memories of antiquaries.
Take a map of England and its neighbouring Wales, and you will find a
mysterious earthwork called “Offa’s Dyke,” traced from near Prestatyn,
on the Flintshire coast, to Bridge Sollars, on the Wye in Herefordshire.
That was the boundary set up by Offa, “the Terrible.” The Shropshire
portion of it runs from Chirk, by Llanymynech, Welshpool, Montgomery,
and Clun, and to this day not only the place-names, but the people on
either side show a distinct cleavage between Saxon and Welsh. In the
heart of Shropshire it is difficult to find a trace of the old race. Who
but the antiquary knows that before Offa came and seized that town
Shrewsbury was “Pengwern”? Yet that was its name. Under the Saxon it
became “Scrobbesbyrig,” that is to say “Scrub-borough,” or the Town in
the Bush. Two hundred years after Offa and his kingdom had perished,
another fierce personage laid his heavy hand upon the Welsh in this
region. This was the Norman, Richard Fitz Scrob, to whom Edward the
Confessor granted what was not his to give, namely, all the land he
could seize from the Welsh on the Borders. The curious similarity of his
name to that of “Scrobbesbyrig” has often led to the supposition that he
built the first castle of Shrewsbury, and that the place took its name
from him. But he certainly built Richard’s castle, on the border, near
Ludlow, one of a chain of more than thirty fortresses designed to keep
the as yet unconquerable Welsh in check.
From “Scrobbesbyrig,” its capital, Shropshire derived its Saxon name of
“Scrobbescire” (pronounced “Shrobshire”), changed in after centuries to
its present form; and let it be noted by all who would not earn the
contempt of Salopians that the right pronunciation of Shrewsbury follows
the derivation, and that to name it as spelled is regarded by all
Salopians as a vulgarism. It is “Shrowsbury” to the elect, rhyming with
_blows_, not _news_.
The name of “Salop,” applied frequently both to shire and county
town—whence “Salopian”—is another matter, and difficult of derivation.
It comes, say philologists, from “the ancient Erse words, _sa_, a
stream, and _lub_, a loop,” describing the site of Shrewsbury, encircled
as it is by the strange windings of the Severn.
Shropshire remains one of the most exclusive and aristocratic counties
in England, as well as one of the wealthiest. It might well have
claimed, not so long since, to be the thirstiest also, the Squire as an
institution lived longer here than in most parts, and flourished most.
Two generations ago, Salopians of every class had the reputation of
being able to drink all others senseless, but that is one of the
obsolete virtues.
One topples over the edge of Staffordshire, as it were, into Salop, for
here the steep descent of a range of hills leads, by a dramatic
transition, from the waterless plateau around Wolverhampton to the
valley of the Severn. Summerhouse Hill is the joy of the cyclist bound
for Shrewsbury, and the bane of his return; with a mile run down in one
direction, and a steady heartbreaking climb in the other. Near the
summit is the “Summer House,” an inn where the flying “Wonder” of
seventy years ago changed horses punctually at 8.16 every morning, on
its journey from London to Shrewsbury; and at the foot of the hill, the
“Horns” of Boningale. Boningale itself may be sought on a slip road that
goes off to the left and returns in a semicircle of five hundred yards:
the tiniest village, with a very small church and one very large
black-and-white farmhouse, almost as ancient as the church itself. The
road onwards is quiet, and unmarked by any outstanding features, save a
house at Whiston Cross; Albrighton and other large villages lying a
little distance to one side.
Whiston Cross, situated 130¼ miles from London, can claim the
distinction of being exactly half-way between London and Holyhead. The
house was once an inn, but has long been the place where the Albrighton
Hounds are kenneled. In the old days of hard drinking, this and the
“Harp” inn at Albrighton were the resorts of a cobbler reputed to be the
greatest sot in the neighbourhood. He must have been exceptional, for he
scandalised even _these_ parts. He was once the victim, when in his
cups, of a joke whose echoes still linger mirthfully in the countryside.
Senselessly and helplessly drunk, he was driven over to a coalpit at
Lilleshall and lowered into its depths. When he came dimly to his
senses, he found himself surrounded by a circle of inquisitors, their
faces blackened, in an uncanny place, spectrally lighted, and was very
soon made to understand that he was dead and come to judgment before a
jury of fiends anxious to consign him to a warm corner.
“I don’t know why I was brought here,” he said miserably, addressing the
supposedly satanic tribunal, “and I can assure you, gentlemen, I was
once a respectable shoemaker, of Albrighton, in Shropshire.”
Beyond Whiston Cross, in Cosford Brook Dingle, the Wolverhampton
Waterworks raise their tall chimneys unexpectedly from the surrounding
woodlands of Halton Park; the engine houses humming with the machinery
that daily pumps more than three million gallons of water for the use of
that enterprising community. In another two miles across the Salopian
plain, Shiffnal is reached, and with it the first, and entirely lovable,
specimen of a Shropshire town.
XIV
Shiffnal is a little place, changed less in the course of three hundred
years than any along this road. Three centuries ago, when it was called
“Idsall” quite as often as by its other name, all the town, with the
exception of the church, was brand new, and its site with it; for the
fire that in 1591 had levelled it with the ground led to the new
township being erected a hundred yards or so to the east of the old one.
[Illustration: SHIFFNAL.]
No fires, however destructive, warned our Elizabethan forbears that
timber was a dangerous material to build with, and Shiffnal arose, one
mass of timbered houses, and by a happy chance they most of them remain
to this day; so that, whether one comes into the town by road, or is
swept swiftly over it by train on the Great Western Railway that looks
down from a lofty embankment upon the queer old Market-place, the effect
is charming indeed. But, lest this magpie architecture should, or ever
could, look monotonous, there have been introduced, from time to time,
buildings in other styles and materials. Down the street, and seen, in
fact, before one arrives at the Market-place itself, is, for example,
the “Jerningham Arms,” stucco-fronted and thrusting forth the elaborate
quarterings of the Jerninghams, Lords Stafford, and lords of the manor,
ensigned with the Bloody Hand of Ulster, which leads the ignorant to
suppose that Allsopp’s ales are obtainable within. The “Jerningham Arms”
was a coaching inn, and the “Star” (prominent in the illustration, with
a skylight on its roof) another, and a handsomer. Behind the fine old
red-brick front of that house, and through the archway, the stable yard
runs down; the beam over the arch rich in the badges of old fire
insurance offices, and above them the sculptured armorial shield of some
forgotten county family.
Shiffnal church stands a little apart: a fine red sandstone building
with a central tower crowned with a low pyramidical red-tiled roof that
only by a little overtops the battlements. Does that sound like a
depreciation of it? I hope not, for it is a type characteristically
English, and very lovable. One may trace many architectural periods in
Shiffnal church, from the Norman when they could not build too heavily,
to the Perpendicular, when lightness was coming in. Not that lightness
has part or lot here, for the church is stately rather in the massive
masculine way. Within a recess of the chancel wall lies the monumental
effigy of Thomas Forster, “sometime Prior of Wombridge, Warden of Tongue
and Vicar of Idsall,” 1526. In that inscription the old name of the
parish is preserved, as it is also on a tablet giving an account of a
much more interesting person; a certain William Wakley. It recounts how
he “was baptised at Idsall, otherwise Shiffnal, May 1st, 1590, and was
buried at Adbaston, November 28th, 1714. His age was 124 years and
upwards. He lived in the Reign of eight Kings and Queens.” But this
ancient’s record is surpassed, for the tablet goes on to tell of “Mary,
the wife of Joseph Yates, of Lizard Common,” who died August 7th, 1776,
aged 127 years. “She walked to London just after the fire in 1666, was
hearty and strong 120 years, and married a third husband at ninety-two.”
Two other curiosities, and we are done with Shiffnal church. The first
is the odd Christian name of a woman—“Kerenhapputh”—on a stone in the
churchyard: the second a Latin inscription of 1691 on the churchyard
wall. It may be Englished thus (the wall supposed to be speaking): “At
length I rise again, at the sole expense of William Walford, the kindest
of men.”
XV
Breasting a long incline of nearly three miles, the road comes to
Prior’s Lee and Snedshill, and, reaching a commanding crest, looks down
upon the industry and turmoil of Lilleshall on the one side, and the
equally busy and industrious Coalbrookdale on the other. The prettiness
of Prior’s Lee is in name alone. It and Snedshill are wastes of slag and
cinder-heaps—some a century old, others the still smoking refuse from
the blast-furnaces that roar and whizz and vomit smoke on the left.
[Illustration: SNEDSHILL FURNACES.]
But the great iron furnaces of Snedshill are seen at their most
impressive at night. The strange cyclist who has never before known the
road sees the reflection of their flames a long way off, and comes upon
the scene bewildered by the rising and falling of the lurid light that
glows intensely in one direction and sinks all other quarters in an
impenetrable obscurity. It is the weirdest of scenes, the surrounding
house-fronts and the tower of Prior’s Lee church standing out in the
radiated glare against the blackest of backgrounds: spouting flames an
angry red, turning the white light of arc-lamps down at the ironworks a
wicked and debauched-looking blue. Sighings of escaping steam, like the
groans of some weary Titan exhausted with labour, rise now and again,
and are succeeded by thunderous crashings and huge clouds of steam and
smoke, mingled with millions of sparks, as the molten metal is now and
again discharged.
To this is added the clattering of coal-waggons where Oakengates and the
collieries lie, deep down in the valley, brilliant at night with
constellations of lights. In strange contrast with all this, the
benighted wayfarer sees roadside cottages whose open doors disclose
housewives going about the business of their homes with all the world,
as it were, for a background. The sight enforces the thought—how great
the little home, how small the vast outside world!
Passing Ketley Station and rising Potter Bank, great banks loom
mystically on the left, and bars of light from wayside inns streak the
road. If it be summer night, sounds of glee-singing rise by the way, for
the colliers, although this is not Wales, have got musical culture.
But daylight strips Ketley of all possible mysticism, for the soaring
banks are then found to be just cinder-heaps, and the depth of the deep
valley on the right is not so appalling after all. Most of Ketley’s
mines are deserted now, but the cinder-heaps are gaunt as ever. Telford
drove a new road through the heaps and used vast quantities of the
cinders in ballasting and paving it, leaving a portion of the Watling
Street, diving down a hollow, on the right. It is still there, with the
disreputable roadside cottages beside it, as of old, and the same
semisavage class as ever inhabiting them.
Away in the distance, rising majestically over the miners’
rubbish-heaps, comes the whalelike outline of the Wrekin, shaggy and
blue-black with pines. Not a great hill, compared with the Stretton
Hills and the Welsh mountains presently to come in sight; but its
isolated position in the surrounding Shropshire plain gives it a
commanding appearance, and has made the Wrekin a centre to which all
Salopian hearts fondly turn in response to that old toast, honoured with
three times three, “To all friends round the Wrekin.” The toast has not
so limited an application as those who are not Salopians, or know not
Shropshire, might imagine, for the Wrekin is visible from incredible
distances, and the view _from_ it comprises not only the whole of
Shropshire, but a radius of distant hills sweeping the horizon round
from Malvern, the Warwickshire Edge Hill, the Peak in Derbyshire, the
mountains about Llangollen, the Berwyns, Cader Idris, and Plinlimmon, to
the Brecon Beacons.
The famous hill rises only 1,260 feet above the surrounding plain, but
just because it _is_ a plain, its Protean bulk looms larger and loftier
than many a taller eminence. Protean the Wrekin is because the outline
of it, viewed from different quarters, varies singularly. Whale-like
from Wellington, from the south-west it looks like a truncated
sugar-loaf, and seen from the road near Wroxeter resembles a huge and
shapely dome.
Wellington lies a mile distant from the road, but straggling outposts of
houses extend all the way, and at Cock Corner one may look down the
cross-road and clearly perceive the existence of the town and what
manner of town it is. To coaching travellers Wellington was but a name
and a distant mass of roofs; for, with but two minutes to change horses
at the “Cock”—or, if they travelled by the famous Shrewsbury “Wonder,” a
minute at Haygate inn, a mile onward—they were gone, and roofs and
chimneys sank, as though by magic, beyond the rounded fields and tall
hedgerows.
The “Cock” has remained game to the present day, and has witnessed the
disappearance of its once prosperous neighbour, the “Hollybush.” That
picturesquely named inn was a coaching house of a humbler sort, and
carriers and coal-waggoners made it a house of call. Now a private
house, brilliantly whitewashed, it seems by that dazzling raiment to
have put away, as far as possible, all coaly memories.
XVI
Haygate inn stands, just as does the “Cock,” at the fork of a bye-road
leading to Wellington. The “Cock” caught the travellers from London, the
“Falcon” (which was really the sign of Haygate inn, although few knew it
by any other name than that already mentioned) those from Wales and
Shrewsbury. It was intimately connected with the Shrewsbury “Wonder,”
being kept by H. J. Taylor, a brother of Isaac Taylor of the “Lion” at
Shrewsbury, who put that famous coach upon the road in 1825. Another
brother kept the chief inn at Shiffnal, and so between them they kept
the hotel and coaching business in the family along the first eighteen
miles from Shrewsbury.
When the “Falcon” was rebuilt, in the flush of the coaching age, it was
built to outlast the requirements of rich and jovial posting and
coaching travellers for at least a century to come. So much is evident
at sight of the house, substantially constructed and designed with all
the dignity of a private mansion. Alas! for all such anticipations; the
first railway train rolled into Shrewsbury Station in 1839, and shortly
afterwards the house became what it is now—a farmstead.
[Illustration: HAYGATE INN.]
Hay gate derived its name from “the Haye of Wellington,” and was a gate
into the forest of the Wrekin in ancient times. Nothing remains of that
forest; the pine-trees that now clothe the Wrekin were planted on what
was then a bare hillside in the early years of the last century.
Down this road that once led into the forest glades in one direction,
and to Wellington in the other, the town is soon reached. Shropshire has
few places so uninteresting, and its modesty in thus secluding itself
from the old turnpike is therefore not misplaced. The narrow and devious
streets of the town are not excused by their houses, almost without
exception ugly and dull. A duller and uglier church, very “classic” and
grimy, fitly lords it over those secular buildings, and looks down upon
the railway station, placed in a cutting in the very centre of the town.
A portion of the churchyard, indeed, was cut away to form the site of
that station. A depressing monument, as pagan and as “classic” as the
church, stands prominent among the humbler tombs. It is black-painted
and gilt, like a jeweller’s show-case, and forms a canopy or shrine over
an urn that does _not_ contain the ashes of the Reverend John Eyton, who
died in 1823, and is commemorated in a very long epitaph. He lies below,
and the urn is merely decorative: just of a piece with the rest of the
pagan affectation around. The author of that epitaph was evidently not
one who “damned with faint praise.” But listen to the virtues of the
departed:—
“As a Christian Pastor he was vigilant, affectionate, and faithful;
unweariedly devoted to the concerns of the fold, gathering the lambs
with his arm, and daily feeding the flock committed to his charge. And
now, while the Chief Shepherd places upon his Head a crown of glory
that will never fade away——.”
And so forth. Another side of the monument takes up the tale, and tells
us what manner of cleric this was:
“A man of whose character and endowments it is difficult to speak in
any other language than that of admiration and reverence. His person
and appearance interesting and attractive. His deportment and manners
graceful and engaging. His intellectual and sacred attainments so
various, so extensive, and so captivating as to render him everywhere
the Desire and Delight of his edified associates.”
All these advantages and virtues did not avail him much for preferment,
for he never became a Right Reverend. And yet this surely would have
been the man for a Bishopric. Nay, Primates could be no more—and are
commonly less.
XVII
Regaining the old turnpike at Haygate Inn, the Wrekin broods monstrous
on the scene for miles to come, its central bulk reinforced by Ercall to
the left, and little attendant Wrekins, crowned with fir-trees, on the
right. In midst of this comes Burcot toll-house, situated on a lonely
rise, where cross-roads seem to butt up against the great hill on one
side and disappear into a valley on the other. This toll-house may well
compare for size and solidity with any on the way from London to
Holyhead; but why it should, and why a shield carved in stone, and
inscribed “W.T., 1835,” should especially distinguish it from its
fellows, are things now hid from mortal ken. Nor has “W.T.” achieved the
fame he evidently desired, for the initials—to whomsoever they really
belonged—are commonly and erroneously ascribed to Telford, whose
Christian name was Thomas.
[Illustration: THE WREKIN.]
From this point, for a distance of nearly two miles, Telford made what
were described in the published projects of that time as “sundry
valuable improvements.” He planned and carried out a new line of road
through the shoulder of Overley Hill, so that the coaches, instead of
toiling over its crest, went through a short piece of rocky cutting
below, and left so much of the old Roman road to solitude and decay.
Coming from Shrewsbury, even this improved road remains a weary drag;
the summit and its little group of villas gained with joy.
Below and beyond comes the Wrekin again, brooding vengefully over the
smiling vale, and in wind and storm spreading a greater blackness over
the scene: at all times giving a sombre cast to the long straight
reaches of the Watling Street. There it has sat, moodily reminiscent,
since time began to be. Geologists, who have their reasons for so doing,
describe it as “a mass of eruptive greenstone,” and say the Wrekin is
“the oldest mountain in England.” Therefore it may well be reminiscent.
It has seen mankind emerge from the primeval ooze and floating as
invertebrate jelly-fishes in the inland sea that washed its base, and
has watched the family history from that interesting era to the present
time; through the period of the arboreal ancestor, when the jelly-fishes
acquired backbones and prehensile tails and took, as monkeys, to
climbing trees; and unless some of the glorified monkeys come meanwhile
as engineers and quarry it off the face of the earth, or blast it away,
it will probably see the race itself follow the lead given by the
governments of this country during the last sixty years, and resume the
condition of invertebrata, wallowing in the slime.
The Wrekin has seen the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the coming of the
Romans and the going of them; saw the first clearings in the primeval
forest, the subjected Britons slaving under Roman taskmasters at the
making of the Watling Street, and the brief period, centuries later, of
coaching. It has looked down over the vale these last sixty years upon
the railway, and the time is ripe for another change. Perhaps we are on
the threshold of it.
It is very still and peaceful on the Roman road, and the traveller has
it and its memories wholly to himself. Among those memories is the sad
story of Robert Bolas, of Uppington, yonder where the church tower and
the hedgerow elms occupy the middle distance, with the Wrekin for
background.
Robert Bolas came of an old and respected family in Uppington, but that
fact did not serve to keep him honest, and it seems that he had long
made a practice of stealing wheat from a farm between his village and
Wroxeter. It all happened very long ago, but the tale is not likely to
be forgotten.
The gradual shrinkage of his grain made the owner, a farmer named
Witcomb, suspicious, and, with a man named Matthews, he kept a watch.
Bolas duly appeared, with an empty sack over his shoulder, which he was
proceeding to fill when Witcomb and Matthews made to seize him. Bolas
then picked up a bill-hook, and attacking them so furiously that
Matthews was killed and Witcomb left, for dead, made off. But it so
happened that Witcomb recovered, and the affair, that had in the
meanwhile created a great stir in the neighbourhood, was explained. For
some reason or another, Bolas was confident of an acquittal, and
cheerfully told his friends he would be home in time to harvest his
barley.
But they found him guilty, hanged him at Shrewsbury, and gibbeted his
body here by the roadside; and so, although, after a fashion, he came
home again, other hands reaped his bearded grain. The thing made so
strong an impression upon the countryside that the phrase, “Don’t make
so sure of your barley,” became proverbial.
All these things happened in 1722. Matthews was buried in Wellington
Churchyard, where his tombstone, stating that he was “barbarously
murdered,” stood until the railway came and swept it and others away.
“Bolas’s Gibbet” long remained a landmark beside the Holyhead Road, a
weatherworn stump bristling with the rusty fragments of nails that had
been driven into the post so that it should not be climbed and the body
removed. That “the evil that men do lives after them” was exemplified
shortly after the body of Bolas came home and was hung upon the gibbet.
There still stands, not a great way ahead, an old roadside “public,” the
“Horseshoes,” where the road forks to Wroxeter. Here, one dismal night,
several youths were drinking and joking, when the conversation turned
upon Bolas. Each dared the others to go in the dark to the lonely spot
and ask the dead man how he felt, and as no one was sufficiently
courageous to go alone, they set off a body. On the way, one more
mischievous than the rest drew off unperceived, and hid in the hedgerow
beneath the gruesome object.
“How are you to-night?” asked the little group, keeping very close
together, and sorry they had come.
“Very cold and chilly,” answered a pitiful voice; and immediately they
all took to their heels. One suffered such a shock that he became a
raving maniac.
XVIII