Colney, and St. Albans was always dreaded by coachmen in winter, for
when snow fell in conjunction with a driving north or north-east wind,
huge drifts resulted in this district. Ridge Hill formed a barrier
against which the snow-charged wind battled, with the result that a
flurry of snow-wreaths gathered in the levels. The great storm that
began with startling suddenness on the Christmas Day of 1836 was a great
deal more widespread than any other experienced during the coaching age.
Curiously enough, it had its exact counterpart precisely half a century
later, when the terrible snowstorm of Christmas night, 1886, fell,
equally without warning, from what had been a blue and sunshiny sky. The
storm of 1836 buried many coaches all over the country, particularly in
the neighbourhood of St. Albans and Dunstable. The Manchester down mail
of the 26th reached St. Albans, and, getting off the road into a hollow,
was upset, and left where it fell, the guard returning to London with
the bags and the passengers in a post-chaise. A mile distant from this
accident, on the London side, a “chariot”—that is to say, a family
carriage—was seen the next day without horses, and nearly covered with
snow; two ladies making frantic appeals from its windows for help,
saying their postboy, having left them two hours before to go to St.
Albans for fresh horses, had not returned. They could not be helped; and
so, still wildly gesticulating, we leave them for ever, without the
means of knowing whether that postboy ever _did_ return.
The up Birmingham mail, _viâ_ Aylesbury, also on the 26th, just managed
to get beyond that town when it ran into a drift and thus suddenly
ceased its journey. All attempts to force a way through were fruitless.
Accordingly, Price, the guard, mounted one of the horses and, tying the
mailbags on another, set out in this fashion for London. Joined a little
later by two postboys on other horses, with the bye-bags, all three
pushed on together, discovering now and again that they had wandered far
from the road when the hoof of a horse chanced to strike on the top bar
of a field-gate or stick in the summit of a hedge buried in the drifts.
By great good fortune they reached London at last, exhausted, but safe.
The passengers, who were quite a secondary consideration, were left
behind to be dug out by the country folk, and taken back, somehow, to
Aylesbury. The Chester and the Holyhead mails were embedded at the same
time at Hockliffe.
[Illustration:
THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE LIVERPOOL MAIL PASSING TWO
LADIES SNOWED UP ON RIDGE HILL IN THEIR CHARIOT, WITHOUT HORSES, THE
POSTBOY HAVING RIDDEN TO ST. ALBANS FOR FRESH ONES.
_From a Print after J. Pollard._
]
On leaving the old-world village of London Colney behind, a distant view
of St. Albans opens out, the Abbey first disclosing itself, and then the
clock-tower in the market-place, followed by an indiscriminate grouping
of roofs and chimneys. The Abbey—in recent years ennobled as a Cathedral
and by consequence of that and the creation of the See conferring the
dignified style of “city” upon the town—very rightly dominates all else.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ST. ALBANS.]
XV
We must penetrate very deeply into the past to reach the event that gave
the City and Cathedral of St. Alban their name. So dim have records and
traditions become, by reason of lapse of time, that it is not quite
certain whether the year A.D. 285 or A.D. 305 witnessed the martyrdom of
that saint. By all accounts it would seem that the proto-martyr of
Britain was a citizen of Verulamium, and a pagan, when the Diocletian
persecution of Christians broke out; but a strange thing happened to
turn him towards the Faith that already had made converts steadfast
throughout many dangers and trials. To him came one Amphibalus, a
Christian, seeking shelter from the fury of the persecutors; and,
whether from innate nobility of character or from long friendship with
the fugitive, Alban offered him the protection of his house. Sheltered
thus, Amphibalus expounded to him the tenets of this new creed that had
made enemies so bitter and so powerful, with the result that Alban
himself became a Christian. It was not long before the fugitive’s
hiding-place was discovered, but Alban, filled with the newborn zeal
that distinguishes the convert, secretly allowed his guest to depart,
and then, acknowledging as much, cursed the gods and announced himself a
Christian and prepared to suffer in his stead. Imprisonment and torture
availed nothing to shake his resolution, and it was not long before the
day dawned when he was led out from the gates of Verulam and beheaded
upon that hill beyond the Roman city, now and for eleven hundred years
past, the site of a succession of great churches set up in memory of
him. Vague stories of a very early church erected upon the scene of the
martyrdom may be met with, but the relics of Saint Alban (as in the
meanwhile he had become) had long been lost when, four hundred and
eighty-seven years later, Offa, King of Mercia, penitent for having
compassed the murder of Ethelbert, King of the East Angles, proposed to
absolve his soul by founding a church over the scene of the martyr’s
agony. Divine light and a ray of fire are said by the legend to have
conducted him to a certain spot called Holmhurst (that is to say “Holly
wood”) where the relics lay, and they were removed to the church he then
built, or, as some accounts will have it, enlarged. Of that edifice only
some doubtful fragments remain, for not only did Ealdred and Eadmer
alter it about A.D. 950, but Paul de Caen, the first Norman Abbot after
the Conquest, set himself to entirely rebuild it on a grander scale,
little more than a hundred years later. Again, in A.D. 1195, rebuildings
and enlargements were undertaken, and throughout the centuries very few
decades have passed without something, good or ill, being done to the
huge fabric. Huge it is, for it measures from end to end 550 feet, and
is only surpassed in this particular by Winchester Cathedral, the
longest in England; but only by seven feet. How great is the rise of the
Holyhead road from London may be gathered from the fact that the ground
on which the Cathedral of St. Alban stands is on a level with the cross
on the dome of St. Paul’s. The long story of the Abbey; how those slain
in the two battles of St. Albans are buried here and at St. Peter’s; how
it was sold to the people for a parish church for £400 after the
dissolution of the monastery in 1539; how it in modern times became a
Cathedral; and how Sir Gilbert Scott and Lord Grimthorpe successively
have wrought havoc with their “restorations,” at a total cost of over
£166,000, are matters for ecclesiologists, and not for telling in a book
on the road.
Far or near, the Abbey dominates the city, whose clustered roofs rise
gradually toward where it stands on its elevated plateau, overlooking
the quiet Hertfordshire meadows. Indeed, it stands on higher ground than
any abbey or cathedral in England, the floor level at the crossing being
340 feet above mean sea-level. Lichfield is next highest, standing at
286 feet, and Durham, placed though it be on a craggy cliff beside the
river Wear, comes only third, at 212 feet. St. Albans’ very bulk is
impressive, and, to the distant view, softened as it is by the smoke of
the town chimneys, not unlovely, despite that long outline which rivals
Winchester’s great span; and though the crudities of the wealthy
architectural amateur are insistent at close quarters they are
fortunately lost in great measure from a distance. For where bygone
abbots strove so greatly to build in ages past, it is happily difficult
for one man to largely alter the outline of their work.
[Illustration: ST. ALBANS CATHEDRAL.]
A cheerful old place is St. Albans, crowning its hill proudly with a
mural crown, and rich in all the traditional attributes of a cathedral
city—darkling nooks, quaint alleys, and ancient churches—satellites
attendant upon the central fane. Before the present main road from
London came into existence in 1794, the entrance was by Sopwell Lane,
still in use, branching off to the left at something more than half a
mile from the city. It is a steep and rugged way, leading down into the
meadows where Sopwell ruins stand, and so to Holywell Hill, where an
acute right-angle turn and a formidable climb used to bring the early
coaches staggering into the market-place by the aid of an extra pair of
horses. The Roman way, the famous “Watling Street,” avoided the site of
St. Albans altogether, and went considerably to the left of the Holyhead
Road, to the valley of the Ver, where the ruins of Verulamium may yet be
found below the hilly site of the monastery of St. Alban, founded by
King Offa of Mercia in 793. It was the monks who in mediæval times
diverted the Watling Street from its straight course to Verulam, and
made the road from St. Stephens into St. Albans, by the tremendous
descent and ascent of Holywell Hill. The travellers of those times came
from London chiefly by the Watling Street, _viâ_ Stanmore, Brockley
Hill, and Elstree, and it was not until later that the present route
came greatly into vogue.
This monkish interference with the road was by no means on behalf of
travellers, but rather from a highly developed sense of
self-preservation. Before they laid hands upon it, traffic went by in
the valley, and the town and monastery suffered from neglect. St. Albans
Monastery, like other religious houses, did not exist by grants of land
alone, but owned tolls and market-rights, and it was to increase the
value of these that this drastic plan was adopted. Drastic, indeed, it
was, for the paved Roman way was grubbed up and utterly destroyed from
St. Stephens to Verulam, so that it became impossible to travel by it,
and every one was then compelled to come into St. Albans by the
mountainous Holywell Hill.
Verulamium had from the earliest times of the Roman settlement of
Britain been the wealthiest of all the towns in this island. It
possessed a theatre and all the graces of civilisation, but no walls or
defences of any kind. Thus it was that when Boadicea, Queen of the
Iceni, revolted under oppression in A.D. 61, it became the easiest, as
well as the earliest prey of her avenging hosts. Verulamium and
Londinium fell before their onslaughts, and in the massacres following,
70,000 persons are said to have perished, in addition to those who fell
at Camulodunum.
Verulamium, in common with those other towns, was afterwards rebuilt,
and grew more prosperous than before; but it met a similar fate some 400
years later, when the Roman troops left Britain, and barbaric hordes
overwhelmed it in some obscure foray. The very obscurity that clings
about its end adds to the horror of those times. Those were wars of
extermination, and none were left to tell the tale of how the great town
and its people perished by fire and sword. Only when, in course of time,
civilisation touched the Saxons, and historians were produced, do we
hear anything of these long-ruined places, by that time become tinged
with mystery and regarded with shrinking aversion. Bede, writing about
A.D. 720, calls this “Waetlinga-ceaster,” the city of the Watlings. In
his time vast ruined walls and houses remained. Offa, when founding St.
Albans Abbey, some seventy years later, was probably dissuaded by fears
of the supernatural from drawing upon the ruins for building material.
It was not so with those who rebuilt and enlarged his Abbey from time to
time. They found and worked the ready mine of bricks and tiles, doubly
valuable in that district innocent of stone, and thus it is that so
little of ruined Verulam is left; but, gazing upon the Abbey, we see, in
the immense quantities of Roman brick and tile that have gone towards
its construction, that ancient Roman town in a manner re-incarnated.
[Illustration: MARKET-PLACE, ST. ALBANS.]
Towards the middle of the tenth century, those ruins in the valley were
a source of terror to the good folks of the rising town of St. Albans.
In them lurked those outlaws—robbers, murderers, and general
offscourings of society—for whom it would have been dangerous to appear
in the town, and who rendered it equally dangerous for law-abiding
burgesses to wander far from their domestic hearths when the sun had set
and darkness gathered. It was partly for this reason, perhaps quite as
much as for the use of the materials for building purposes, that so much
of the ruins was removed by Ealdred, the eighth Abbot. He warred with
the Verulam vagabonds, carting much of their harbourage away, and
explored a cave supposed to be inhabited by a dragon—who was not at home
on that occasion. The good Abbot, however, is said to have found traces
of the monster! His successor, Eadmer, was of the fiery sort. He, too,
removed much building material, but the “pagan altars” found during his
explorations he ground to powder—and so earns the maledictions of all
antiquaries.
And so it went on for centuries. Stukeley, about 1690, noticed a good
part of the walls standing, but, as he rode along, saw hundreds of loads
of Roman bricks being carted off, to mend the highway.
XVI
The old entrance by Holywell Hill is the most charming part of St.
Albans, with fine old red-brick mansions and old inns where the coaches
and the post-chaises used to come. Many of the inns are either mere
shadows of their former selves, or have been entirely altered to other
uses, but their coach-entrances and yards remain to toll of what they
once were. There stands a building now a girls’ school, but once the
“Old Crown,” and close by the “White Hart,” with “Saracen’s Head Yard”
beyond, but the “Saracen’s Head” itself is now divided into shops. In a
continuous line uphill were the “Angel,” “Horsehead,” “Dolphin,” “Seven
Stars,” “Woolpack,” “Peahen,” and “Key”; which last house stood squarely
on the site where the London road now enters the city. It was from the
“Keyfield,” at the back of this house, that the Yorkists burst into the
streets and fell upon the Lancastrians in the first Battle of St.
Albans, 1455. Another long-vanished inn was the “Castle,” made famous by
Shakespeare in a scene of _Henry VI._, where Richard Plantagenet kills
the Duke of Somerset, in this fight:—
So, lie thou there:—
For underneath an alehouse’ paltry sign,
The Castle in St. Albans, Somerset
Hath made the wizard famous in his death.
Somerset had been warned by a witch to “shun castles”:—
Let him shun castles;
Safer shall he be upon the sandy plains,
Than where castles mounted stand.
He could scarce have interpreted the prophecy in the crooked way it was
verified.
[Illustration: ST. PETER’S STREET AND TOWN HALL, ST. ALBANS, 1826.
_From an Old Print._]
Holywell Hill still echoes to the sound of the coach-horn, as the modern
“Wonder,” with an extra pair of horses, dashes up from the hollow to the
“Peahen.” The “Wonder,” however, does not journey to and from St. Albans
by the Holyhead road. Leaving London from the Hotel Victoria,
Northumberland Avenue, at 10.50 a.m., it follows somewhat the line of
the Watling Street by Hendon, the “Welsh Harp,” Edgware, Great Stanmore,
Bushey, and Watford; reaching its destination at 1.50, and setting out
on the return journey at 3.45. The “Wonder” has run daily to and from
St. Albans, sometimes through the winter as well as summer, since 1882;
owned by that consistent amateur of coaching, Mr. P. J. Rumney,
familiarly known down the road and at Brighton as “Dr. Ridge,” from his
proprietorship of a certain world-famed “Food for Infants.” But, before
the “Wonder” came upon the scene, the modern coaching revival had
provided St. Albans with summer coaches from about 1872. The now famous
“Old Times” began to run, November 4th, 1878, and continued to St.
Albans until the following spring, when it was transferred to Virginia
Water.
The “Peahen,” standing at the meeting of Holywell Hill and the London
Road, has of late been rebuilt in a somewhat gorgeous and baronial
style, but is the lineal descendant of a house of the same name in
existence so far back as 1556. The name of the “Peahen” is thought to be
unique.
[Illustration: THE “GEORGE.”]
Continuing the line of hostelries past the “Peahen” and the “Key,” into
Chequer Street, there were the “Chequers,” the “Half Moon,” and the
“Bell”; and in French Row the “Fleur-de-Lis,” and the “Old Christopher,”
still remaining. The “Great Red Lion” in the market-place, has been
rebuilt. Near it, in George Street, on the old road out of St. Albans,
is the “George,” one of the pleasantest old places still left, with an
old red-brick front and a picturesque courtyard. There was an inn on
this site certainly as early as 1448, when it was mentioned as the
“George upon the Hupe”—whatever that may mean. In those times it was a
pilgrim’s inn, and had an oratory chapel. Nothing so interesting as that
survives, but the old house has its features. The room to the right of
the archway, used in old times, when a coach plied from the “George” to
London and back every day, as a booking-office and waiting-room, remains
in use as a parlour and rendezvous for the country-folk on market days,
and all the summer the courtyard is like a bower with flowers and vines.
Under the gable can be seen a spoil snatched from the destruction of old
Holywell House in 1837—the decorative carving from the pediment, a work
representing Ceres, surrounded with emblems of agriculture its products,
and attended by Cupids and shameless creatures of that sort.
To and from the “George” went daily the “Favourite” London coach, until
the first of the railways came in May 1858, and ran it off the road.
William Seymour, who used to drive it, then descended to the position of
driver of an omnibus plying between St. Albans and Hatfield, but even
that humble occupation was soon swept away by railway extension. He then
became landlord of the “King Harry” inn at St. Stephens, and died at
last, May 30th, 1869, in the Marlborough almshouses, St. Albans. Two
other coaches in those days plied between St. Albans and London,
generally taking three and a half hours. One came and went from the
“Woolpack,” and the other, the “Accommodation,” from the “Fleur-de-Lis,”
French Row.
A particularly haughty and exclusive establishment was the “Verulam
Arms.” No common fellow who travelled by public conveyances was
encouraged there. Only the lordly travellers who came in their own
family coaches, or posted, ever sheltered beneath that condescending
roof. The house remains, on the right-hand of Telford’s new road leaving
St. Albans, but had, as an hotel and posting-house, the shortest of
careers. Built between 1827 and 1828, another ten years saw the coming
of the railway. With that event vanished the trade of the “Verulam
Arms.” The house was soon closed, and has for fifty years past been a
private residence. It is an extremely plain and uncompromisingly formal
building in pallid brick, within railings enclosing a semicircular
drive. It is said that the Princess Victoria stayed here once. Some
portions of the once extensive stable-yards and coach-houses remain, but
the greater part of the grounds was taken, as long ago as 1848, as the
site for a Roman Catholic Church, an unfortunate building discontinued
and sold before completion, and finally purchased and finished as a
Church of England place of worship, as it still remains, with the title
of Christ Church. It would be difficult to find a more hideous building.
[Illustration: THE “FIGHTING COCKS.”]
But a far higher antiquity than can be shown by any other house in St.
Albans belongs to a little inn called the “Fighting Cocks,” standing by
the river Ver, below the Abbey. Its origin goes back to early monastic
days, when the lower part of this curious little octagonal building was
a water-gate to the monastery, and known as St. Germain’s Gate. Here the
monks kept their nets, using the upper part as a fortification. That
embattled upper stage disappeared six hundred years ago, and in its
place the upper storey of the inn is reared, in brick and timber, upon
the stone substructure. The inn claims to be the oldest inhabited house
in the kingdom, and exhibited until recently the inscription:—
The Old Round House,
Rebuilt after the Flood.
Obviously, judging from that old sign, the distinction between an
eight-sided and a round house was too subtle to be noticed. The “Rebuilt
after the Flood” does not (seeing where the house stands, beside the
river Ver) necessarily mean the Deluge.
The hanging sign has of late years become pictorial. On one side the
Cocks are to be seen, a whirling mass of contention, and on the other
the victor stands proudly over the prostrate body of the vanquished, and
indulges in a triumphant crow.
XVII
We often read in romances of the villainous innkeepers of long ago, who
were in league with highwaymen, and we generally put those stories down
as rather wild and far-fetched illustrations of a bygone age. But there
were many such innkeepers in the old road-faring times, and they were
the highwaymen’s best sources of information. Such an one was the host
of an inn at St. Albans, who in 1718 was associated with Tom Garrett and
another “road agent” working the highway between St. Albans and London,
in an evil partnership. It is a pity that the sign of this inn is not
specified; we should have gazed upon it with interest.
To this inn came one evening a gentleman travelling to London on
horseback. The landlord himself helped him up to his bedroom with a
weighty portmanteau which promised good plunder, and while his guest was
preparing for supper, took the good news of a likely haul to Garrett and
his partner, who were staying in the house. A pretty scheme was arranged
on the instant, and the landlord, when his guest came downstairs,
introduced his two confederates to him in the guise of travellers, also
on their way to London the following morning, who would be glad of his
company. The unsuspecting stranger, nothing loth to spend an evening in
pleasant company, instead of sitting in solitary state, joined the other
“travellers” with a good will, and they had a convivial night; setting
out the next morning together. When they had reached a lonely part of
the road near London Colney, the one covered him with a pistol while the
other ransacked his portmanteau, taking all its contents, including a
hundred guineas from his person. Then they disappeared down a bye-road.
Our traveller sat mournfully by the roadside for a while, contemplating
his empty pack and the reins of his horse, which had been cut by the two
partners in crime. It was not long before he arrived at the very just
conclusion that the landlord of the inn was a party to this business,
and a very pretty little scheme occurred to him by which he saw the
possibility of getting his own again. He carefully refilled his
portmanteau with stones, and retracing his way to St. Albans, called
first at a saddler’s to have his reins mended, and then leaving the
horse behind him, went back to the inn. When the rascally landlord saw
him return with his baggage as heavy as before, he came to the natural
conclusion that his confederates had not robbed the stranger, and cursed
them under his breath for a pair of bungling fools. The returned
traveller himself confirmed this impression, accounting for his
reappearance by telling how an accident had happened to his nag. In the
meantime, he said, before starting out again, he must have dinner, and
only wished he could have had the pleasure of the company at that meal
of the good fellows his host had introduced him to the night before.
With much extravagant praise of their good and sociable qualities, he
declared that he must really not lose sight of such fine fellows. Did
mine host know where they lived in London?
That villainous tapster was quite deceived. He _did_ know the addresses,
and gave them. In due course, then, imagine our traveller once more on
his way, and finally arriving in town. The next morning he called upon
Garrett, in the guise of a “gentleman on important business.” Garrett
was still in bed, and could not be seen, having “just returned from a
journey in the country.”