message brought the highwayman down. The traveller had not come without
very potent persuaders to support his demand for his property. The one
was a threat to have both highwaymen arrested; the other was a pistol.
These inducements were successful, and his hundred guineas found their
way back to his pockets, together with a portion of his other property.
Then he made a similar call upon the other malefactor, who yielded up
the other moiety of the contents of the portmanteau, and (as we are told
by the contemporary historian of these things) another hundred guineas.
We need not believe in this epic completeness and overflowing measure of
justice and retribution. _There_ lurks the eighteenth-century moralist,
eager to cross the t’s and dot the i’s of every situation. But there is
no reason why, up to that point, the story should not be true.
Before the road was remodelled by Telford, in 1826, the way out of St.
Albans was past the “George” and down the steep descent of Romeland and
Fishpool Street, through the village of St. Michael’s, and diagonally
across a portion of Gorhambury Park, crossing the river Ver at Bow
Bridge, at a point one and a half miles from the city, just short of
Prae Mill. The present Holyhead Road, starting from the “Red Lion” in
the Market Place, was in 1828 an entirely new work. It is described by
Telford as a two miles’ length, extending from the “Red Lion” to “Pond
Yards,” a spot probably identical with Shefford Mill, half a mile beyond
Prae House, the site of the ancient hospital of St. Mary de la Pré, or
de Pratis (“St. Mary of the Meadows”) originally a retreat for women
lepers, founded in 1190, and afterwards a Priory of Benedictine nuns,
suppressed by Wolsey in 1528. Priory and mill are alike gone, but Prae
House is seen on the left of the road, dwarfed by the embankment with
which the roadway is raised securely above danger of flooding from the
river Ver.
When the new road was completed, the old route through Gorhambury became
private, and the entrance to it is now guarded, in the village of St.
Michael’s, by lodge gates. St. Michael’s, now lying on the road to
nowhere in particular, remains a sweetly old-world place, and the
breakneck descent to it is one of the quaintest corners of St. Albans.
Here old houses and quaint signs are the rule, and modern buildings the
exception. The “Jackdaw,” the “Cock and Flower Pot,” and many other old
names attract attention. Curiosities of the geological sort at St.
Michael’s are the huge masses of conglomerate rock, or “pudding-stone,”
found here and there in prominent positions, having been dug up at
different periods in the neighbourhood. The name of “pudding-stone” is
excellently descriptive, the rock consisting entirely of pebbles welded
together by some prehistoric force, and resembling, to the imaginative
mind, Cyclopean fossilised fragments of some antediluvian plum-pudding,
extraordinarily rich in plums.
[Illustration: ST. MICHAEL’S.]
St. Michael’s Church, standing as it does almost in the centre of the
site of old Verulamium, is largely built of Roman tiles. It is of many
periods, from Saxon to Scottian and Grimthorpian, and of an
extraordinary interest, somewhat blighted by the heavy hand of Sir
Gilbert Scott, who “thoroughly restored” it in 1867, and the
inconceivably heavier hand of Lord Grimthorpe, who pulled it about
shamefully in 1897, utterly demolishing its quaint old rough-cast tower,
and building a new one from his own amateur-architect design. The odd
architectural details would be ridiculous if they were not pitiful, in
view of the really interesting work they replace. One device, in
especial, resembles a cycling free-wheel clutch rather than anything
known in the whole range of Gothic design.
But greater than any other conceivable interest is the association of
the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, with
Gorhambury and St. Michael’s. Bacon, who in his sixty-five years of life
studied law, and rose to be Lord Chancellor, was a sufficiently
remarkable man. Not only was he a successful lawyer and a diligent
courtier, a philosopher, and the industrious author of essays,
historical works, and the _Advancement of Learning_, but wrote all the
plays attributed to Shakespeare, Greene, and Christopher Marlowe, as we
are asked by ingenious latter-day discoverers of cryptograms to believe.
Nay, not only so, but a rival Columbus on the stormy sea of cryptogamic
discovery has even found that Francis was not the son of Nicholas Bacon,
but the unacknowledged offspring of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of
Leicester! This is startling, and lends an altogether novel interest to
the statue of Bacon in the church, and the ruins of old Gorhambury House
in the park. “Thus he sat,” runs the inscription beneath the statue,
seated in philosophic abstraction in an arm-chair, and truly he looks
wise enough for anything; but it was not serious wisdom alone that went
towards the construction of Shakespeare’s plays.
XVIII
Leaving the city of St. Alban, the river Ver is crossed at Prae House,
and continues companionable as far as Redbourne, where it disappears in
another direction, in deference to the rise on which Redbourne is built.
That old coaching village is a veritable jewel of quaintness in the
Queen Anne and Georgian sort. Red-brick houses of those reigns, and
wayside hostelries with elaborate signs of wrought iron that seem to
await the coming of the coaches again, are the chief of Redbourne’s
architectural features. Very conspicuous, although but the sign of a
humble beer-house, is the pictorial sign of the “Mad Tom.” Painted on a
large circular plate of copper, it hangs out from the frontage,
displaying a different picture on each of its two sides:—the first
showing “Mad Tom in Bedlam,” the second, “Mad Tom at Liberty.” A very
old sign, it represents one of those pauper lunatics who, in other ages,
were confined in Bethlem Hospital, and who, when sufficiently recovered
to be released, were provided with “briefs,” or licences to beg a
livelihood. These “Mad Toms,” as they were called, were once familiar
figures upon the roads.
[Illustration: MAD TOM IN BEDLAM]
In the first picture, Tom is seen in a barred cell, madly clutching his
hair: fetters load his arms and legs, and a loaf (a stale one, no doubt)
stands on a bracket, and looks anything but appetising. The second scene
shows him, gaily attired in white stockings and blue knee-breeches, with
a gorgeous red coat and a still more gorgeous turban, walking the road
and blowing a trumpet.
The more rural part of Redbourne is quite away from the road, across a
wide common traversed by a noble elm avenue. Beyond this, and in a
hollow where a quite unsuspected street of ancient cottages is found,
the exquisitely picturesque church stands. One may look in vain in the
guide-books for any mention of its beauties of colour and quaintness of
detail that instantly capture the affections of the artist. Long may the
restorer be kept at a proper distance, and the delicate silver-grey hues
of the old plastered tower, the crumbling “clunch” stone, the patches of
black flint and Roman tile and the unconventional beauty of the
sixteenth-century brickwork be suffered to remain untouched.
[Illustration: TOM AT LIBERTY]
[Illustration: REDBOURNE CHURCH.]
Redbourne seems to have found favour in the eyes of sturdy Cobbett; but
rather on negative than positive grounds, and on account of what it did
not possess. “No villainous things of the fir tribe here,” he observes,
looking upon the landscape with approval. He missed a point though, at
Friar’s Wash, where the recurrent Ver or Verlam is seen to cross the
road again, by the “Chequers” inn, where a hilly bye-lane goes off in a
north-easterly direction to Flamstead. But doubtless Cobbett missed the
name, else we might well have heard him characteristically lashing out,
something in this sort: “Friars’ Wash! indeed. Good God, when _did_
friars _wash_? Everybody knows, or _ought_ to know that they did nothing
of the sort, and counted personal uncleanliness as not merely next to
godliness, but a constituent part of it. They were as dirty physically
as Mr. Pitt and his stock-jobbing and funding, fawning and slavering
creatures are morally. Aye! and I tell you, poor down-trodden victims of
an arbitrary government,” etc., etc. Something of that kind Cobbett
would have written in his _Rural Rides_. Indeed, the “friars austere,
unwashed and unpleasantly yellow,” as they were, by all accounts, might
well have resented that naming of the ford as an unwarrantable aspersion
upon their well-earned reputation for an ancient and invincible
dirtiness.
[Illustration: REDBOURNE.]
Flamstead, let it be noted, having originally been Verlamstead, owes its
name directly to the river whose valley it overlooks from its hill-top.
Its church-tower and characteristic Hertfordshire dwarf extinguisher
spire may be glimpsed from the road, crowning a wooded ridge. The
succeeding mile on to Markyate Street—the “River Hill improvement,” as
it was called—was one of the last pieces of work undertaken in the long
series of Holyhead Road alterations, and was cut after 1830. The old
road, still visible on the right, goes for the length of a mile as a
steep and narrow lane, almost parallel with the improved highway, and
falls into it at the beginning of the village of Markyate, as it is
shortly named nowadays. The “street” has only of late years been
officially dropped by the General Post Office, in response to the
request of the inhabitants, to whom, and to strangers having business
here, the old address caused considerable trouble and misunderstanding;
those not familiar with the place not unnaturally thinking “Markyate
Street, Dunstable,” to be a thoroughfare in that town, instead of, as a
matter of fact, 4½ miles distant. Markyate is indeed merely a street of
houses fringing either side of the road, and what the old coachmen
called a “thoroughfare village”; a long street certainly, but nothing
else, and realising the Euclidian definition of a line, “length without
breadth.” It is an old-world place, drowsily conducting from
Hertfordshire into Beds, with too many inns for its present needs, and
one—the original “Sun” of coaching days—converted into a laundry and
looking with severity upon the house directly opposite, that has assumed
its old style and title.
Beyond Markyate, where the land shelves steeply down from the road on
the right hand, is the lovely park of Markyate Cell, with a fine old
Elizabethan manor-house, turreted, terraced, and with noble clusters of
carved brick chimneys, once the site of a nunnery; and in a hollow—the
roof of its absurd little Georgian red-brick tower below the road
level—the toy-like church of this beautiful domain. The rest of the way
to Dunstable is lonely, Kensworth village hidden somewhere in the folds
of the hills, and its Post Office only visible. At one mile from
Dunstable remains an old toll-house, the first now met with on the
journey from London.
It was on this stretch of road, between St. Albans and Hockliffe, that
the gay and mercurial highwayman, “Gentleman Harry,” did his last stroke
of business, in the spring of 1747. Harry Simms had been highwayman,
rover, soldier, sailor on board a man o’ war, and, deserting and setting
foot ashore at Bristol, became highwayman again. Having, as himself
might have said, thus boxed the compass, his career was fully rounded
off, and the only things necessary to complete it were a rope and a
hangman. They were nearer than he thought, poor butterfly!
He had been a successful ruffler along the road in all his brief but
varied career, and although a man of peace, and never known to enforce
his demands for the turning out of pockets with anything worse than an
oath and a well-assumed air of truculence, had always enjoyed
exceptional fortune. It is scarce necessary to add that his gains were
spent as freely as they were made: few highwaymen ever put anything by
for a rainy day. On his return home, he amassed so great a store of gold
watches, diamonds, and guineas, in so short a time that, had they grown
wild in the hedges, he could scarce have gleaned more, or more speedily.
“_Jam satis_,” he exclaimed (for he had been a Cambridge undergrad in
his time, and loved a Latin tag) when coming out of Essex into Aldgate
with his pockets bursting with gold rings and chains; and, putting up at
the “Saracen’s Head,” determined to forswear the road and live cleanly
on his accumulated wealth. An incident he had witnessed in the dusk,
coming from Snaresbrook to Aldgate, had probably been the inducement to
“the quiet life” thus contemplated. At the turnpike gate he had observed
a gentleman arrested in mistake for himself!
So, leaving the “Saracen’s Head” early the next morning, he set out on
horseback on the long journey to Holyhead, proposing to voyage over to
Dublin and there dispose of his plunder. Good resolutions filled his
heart: he carolled as he went, in rivalry with the hedge-side warblers,
and in this manner left St. Albans behind, and so came into this broad
reach of the road near Redbourne. Unhappily for him, he had taken a
little too much port at St. Albans, and the port disguised his prudence
to that extent that, seeing three horsemen slowly ambling along the
highway, he must needs resume his old trade and bid them “stand and
deliver!”
“Gentleman Harry” had never been distinguished for his personal courage,
and those who dared to disregard him generally found themselves safe
enough. The first of the travellers said he would not be robbed, and
rode on; the second gave our friend a slash over the head with his
riding-whip; and all three went their way. “Blood and wounds!” thought
Simms, the wine fermenting in his brain; “shall I be scorned thus?
Never!” And, in a drunken fury, he titupped after them, and really did
secure a delivery. From one he received nine shillings, from another an
old watch and seven shillings, and from the third two guineas and
seventeen shillings.
Other spoil fell to him on the way, and when the Warrington stage hove
in sight, he held it up with dramatic completeness and much financial
success, spurring on to Dunstable in a tumult of port and professional
pride. At the “Bull” he called for brandy, and had but raised the glass
to his lips when the robbed coach came lumbering in, and the passengers
entered the room where he was. How he rushed out, and, mounting his
horse, dashed away, he never knew; but presently found himself at
Hockliffe, where, in the kitchen of the “Star,” with more brandy at his
elbow, he fell into a drunken stupor by the fire.
The whole district was, however, aroused, and the road being searched
while he lay in that condition. Three soldiers traced him to the “Star,”
and he awoke to find himself covered by their pistols. To them he
yielded all his varied wealth, with the exception of a few trifles
hidden in his neckcloth, and then staggered up to bed with the troopers
at his heels. There they watched him all night.
He was, as he says in his last account and confession of a wild career,
“a good deal chagrined” at this. How to escape? He thought of a plan.
Throwing the few remaining trinkets suddenly in the fire, the soldiers,
as he had expected, made a dash to save them, while he pounced upon the
pistols. He seized a couple, and, standing at the door, desperately
pulled the triggers. The soldiers would probably have been sent to
Kingdom Come but for the trifling circumstance that the weapons missed
fire. It was a mishap that cost Simms his life, for he was quickly
seized and more vigilantly guarded, and, when morning dawned, taken up
to London on the road he had so blithely travelled the day before. One
more journey followed—to Tyburn, where they hanged him in the following
June.
The pilgrim of the roads who looks for the “Bull” at Dunstable, or the
“Star” at Hockliffe, will not find those signs: the shrines of the
saints and the haunts of the highwaymen are alike the food of ravenous
Time.
XIX
Who shall say certainly how or when the phrase “Downright Dunstahle”
first arose, or what it originally meant. Not the present historian, who
merely sucks his wisdom from local legends as he goes. And when it
happens, as not infrequently is the case, they have no agreement, but
lead the questing toiler after truth into _culs-de-sac_ of falsehoods
and blind-alleys and mazes of contradictions, the labour were surely as
profitless as the mediæval search for the Philosopher’s Stone. Briefly,
then, “Downright Dunstable” is a figurative expression for either or
both of two things: a state of helpless intoxication, or for that kind
of candid speech often called “brutal frankness.” At any rate, it is ill
questing at Dunstable for light on the subject, and it is quite within
the usual run of things to find the old saying unknown nowadays in the
place that gave it birth.
There is no evidence in the long broad street of Dunstable town of the
age and ancient importance of the place. It looks entirely modern, and
the Priory church is hidden away on the right. When—in the course of a
century or so—the young limes, sycamores, and chestnuts, planted on
either side of that main thoroughfare, have grown to maturity, the view
coming into Dunstable from London will be a noble one. At present it is
merely neat and cheerful.
No mention is made of Dunstable in Doomsday Book. When that work was
compiled, the old Roman station of Durocobrivæ, occupied in turn by the
Saxons and burnt to the ground by marauding Danes, lay in a heap of
blackened ruins, the only living creatures in the neighbourhood the
fierce robbers who lay wait for travellers at this ancient crossing of
the Watling and the Icknield Streets. If any of the surveyors who took
notes for the making of Doomsday Book were so rash as to come here for
that purpose, certainly they must have perished in the doing. At that
period and until the beginning of Henry I.’s reign the road was bordered
by dense woodlands, affording a safe hiding-place for malefactors, chief
among whom, according to an absurd monkish legend, purporting to account
for the place-name, was a robber named Dun. The ruined town and the
impenetrable thickets were known, they said, as “Dun’s Stable.”
The first step towards reclaiming the road and the ruins from anarchy
and violence was the clearing of these woods. This was followed by the
building of a house—probably a hunting-lodge—for the King, and the
founding of the once powerful and stately Priory of Dunstable, portions
of whose noble church remain to day as the parish church of the town. To
the Augustine priors the town and its market rights were given, and the
place, new-risen from its ashes, throve under the combined patronage of
Church and State. Whatever the religious merits of those old monks may
have been, certainly they were business men, stock-raisers, and
wool-growers of the first order. Their flocks and herds covered those
downs that remain much the same now as eight hundred years ago, and
their Dunstable wool was prized as the best in the kingdom. But these
business-like monks were not altogether loved by the townsfolk, who
resented the taxes laid upon them by the Church, all-powerful here in
those days. It seemed to men unjust that fat priors and their crew
should command the best of both worlds: should wield the keys of heaven
and take heavy toll of goods in the market. The townsfolk, indeed, in
1229 made a bold stand, and protesting that they “would sooner go to
hell than be taxed,” vainly attempted to form a new settlement outside
the town. The sole results were that they were taxed rather more heavily
than before, and ecclesiastically cursed. To detail here the grandeur
and the pride of that great Priory would be to halt too long on the way.
All who had, in those ancient times, any business along this great road
were entertained by the Prior. The common herd in those early days were
entertained at the guest house, a building facing the main road, on a
site now occupied by a house called “The Priory.” King John in 1202 had
given his hunting-lodge to the Priory, and from that time onward Kings
and Queens were lodged in the Priory itself. Here rested—the next
halting-place from Stony Stratford the body of Queen Eleanor on the way
to Westminster, in 1290; and one of the long series of Eleanor crosses
remained in the market-place until 1643, when it was destroyed by the
Parliamentary troops. In the Lady Chapel (long since swept away) of the
Priory Church, Cranmer promulgated the divorce of Henry VIII. and
Katherine of Arragon. Two years later, the Priory itself was dissolved.
At first it seemed likely that Dunstable would be made the seat of a
Bishop and the great church erected to the dignity of a Cathedral, but
the project came to nothing, and the sole remaining portions of the old
buildings are the nave and the west front. Presbytery, choir, transepts,
lady chapel, and aisles were torn down. The aisles and east end of the
church are modern, the nave a majestic example of Norman architecture,
and the west front a curiously picturesque mass of Transitional Norman,
Early English, and Perpendicular, worthy the dexterous pencil of a
Prout.
[Illustration: DUNSTABLE PRIORY CHURCH.]
The spoliation of the Priory Church was a long but thorough process.
Many of its carved stones are worked into houses and walls in and around
the town, but it was left for modern times to complete the vandalism;
when, for example, great numbers of decorative pillars and capitals were
discovered, some put to use to form an “ornamental rockery” in a
neighbouring garden, the remaining cartloads taken to a secluded spot in
the downs and buried; when the stone coffin of a prior was sold for use
as a horse-trough and afterwards broken up for road-metal; when a rector
could find it possible to destroy a holy-water stoup, the old font could
be thrown away, and the pulpit sold to a publican for the decoration of
a tea-garden. Among other objects that have disappeared in modern times
is the life-size effigy of St. Fredemund, the sole remaining portion of
his shrine. Fredemund was a son of King Offa. His body had been brought
hither in ancient times, on the way to Canterbury, but was, by some
miraculous interposition, prevented from leaving Dunstable. No miracle
saved his statue. The ancient sanctus bell of the church, inscribed “Ave
Maria, gracia plena,” hangs on the wall of the modern town-hall.
“Dunstable,” says Ogilby, writing in 1675, “is full of Inns for
Accommodation, and noted for good Larks.” This would seem to hint at an
unwonted sprightliness in the hostelries and town of Dunstable, were it
not that larks bore but one signification in Ogilby’s day. Slang had not
then stepped in to give the word a double meaning. Of the notable old
inns of Dunstable the “Sugarloaf” remains, roomy and staid, reprobating
unseemliness. Larks, like Dunstable wool in still older days, and
straw-plaiting in more recent times, no longer render the town notable.
Straw-plaiting and hat-making are, it is true, yet carried on, but the
industry is a depressed one. A greater feature, perhaps, is seen in the
extensive printing works established here in recent years by the great
London firm of Waterlow & Sons.
XX
From Dunstable the road enters a deep chalk cutting through the
Downs—similar to, but not so great a work as, the chalky gash through
Butser Hill, on the Portsmouth Road. In this mile-length of cutting the
traveller stews on still summer days, blinded by the chalky glare; or,
when it blows great autumnal guns and snow-laden winter gales, whistling
and roaring through this exposed gullet with the sound of a railway
train, freezes to his very marrow. Before this cutting was made, and the
“spoil” from it used in the making of the great embankment that carries
the road above the deep succeeding valley, this was a precipitous ascent
and descent, and a cruel tax upon horses. Looking backwards, the
embankment is impressive, even in these days of great engineering feats,
and proves to the eye how vigorously the question of road reform was
being grappled with just before the introduction of railways. From this
point the famous Dunstable Downs are well seen, rising in bold terraces
and swelling hills from the hollow, and receding in fold upon fold of
treeless wastes where the prehistoric Icknield Way runs and the stone
implements and flint arrows dropped by primitive man for lack of
reliable pockets, are found.
[Illustration: DUNSTABLE DOWNS.]