windy hillsides, and has left a great earthwork on them, ten acres in
extent. Maiden Bower they call it nowadays—as grotesquely unsuitable a
corruption of the original “Maghdune-burh” as may well be imagined. Its
wind-swept terraces, distinctly seen from this embankment, scarce give
the idea of a boudoir. Neolithic man was fond of these hillsides in a
purely negative way. He would have preferred the warmer valleys, only in
those remote times they were filled with dense and almost impenetrable
forests, and abounded in the fiercest and wildest of wild animals, that
came at night and preyed upon his family circle when the camp-fires
burnt low. And when those wild creatures were not to be dreaded, there
were always hostile tribes prowling in the thickets. So, on all counts,
the Downs were safest. Where that remote ancestor built his bee-hive
huts and banded together with his fellows to raise a fortified post,
others—Britons, Romans, and Saxons—came and added more and taller
earthworks, so that the tallest of them are sixteen feet high even now.
Shortly after leaving the embankment behind, a sign-post marks a lane to
the left, leading to Tilsworth, a dejected village, looking as though
agricultural depression had hit it hard. A deserted schoolhouse, by the
church, is falling to pieces. Just within the churchyard is a headstone,
standing remotely apart from the others. Its isolation invites scrutiny;
an attention rewarded by this epitaph:—
THIS STONE WAS ERECTED
BY SUBSCRIPTION
TO THE MEMORY OF
A FEMALE UNKNOWN
FOUND MURDER’D IN BLACKGROVE WOOD
AUG. 15^{th} 1821
Oh pause my friends and drop the silent tear
Attend and learn why I was buried here;
Perchance some distant earth had hid my clay
If I’d outliv’d the sad, the fatal day:
To you unknown, my case not understood;
From whence I came, or why in Blackgrove Wood.
This truth’s too clear; and nearly all that’s known—
I there was murder’d, and the villain’s flown.
May God, whose piercing eye pursues his flight,
Pardon the crime, but bring the deed to light.
That the deed was “brought to light” is obvious enough, but that is not
what the author of those lines meant. The perpetrator of the deed was
never discovered. Blackgrove Wood, a dark mass in a little hollow, is
easily seen from the road. In another two miles Hockliffe is reached.
XXI
“A dirty way leads you to Hockley, _alias_ Hockley-in-the-Hole,” said
Ogilby, in 1675; and it seems to have gradually become worse during the
next few years, for Celia Fiennes, confiding her adventures to her
diary, about 1695, tells of “seven mile over a sad road. Called Hockley
in y^e Hole, as full of deep slows in y^e winter it must be Empasable.”
It received, in fact, all the surface-water draining from Dunstable
Downs to the south and Brickhills to the north. It is not, however,
until he has left Hockliffe behind and started to climb out of it that,
the amateur of roads discovers how deeply in a hole Hockliffe is, for it
is approached from the Dunstable side by a level stretch that dims the
memory of the downs, and makes all those old tales of sloughs appear
like fantastic inventions. It is at this time perhaps the most perfectly
preserved example of Telford’s road-making. Surface, cross-drains,
ditches, and hedges are maintained in as good condition as when first
made. And why so more than in other places? For this very reason; that
it _is_ in a hole, and if not properly drained, would again become as
“empasable” as it was over two hundred years ago.
Hockliffe, originally a very small village, grew to great importance in
coaching times, for here is the junction of the Holyhead and Manchester
and Liverpool roads, both in those times of the greatest vogue and
highest importance. An after-glow of those radiant glories of the road
is seen in the long street. Hockliffe was in Pennant’s time, when
coaching had grown enormously in importance, “a long range of houses,
mostly inns.” It is so now, with the difference that the houses mostly
_have been_ inns, and are so no longer. In his day he observed “the
English rage for novelty” to be “strongly tempted by one sagacious
publican, who informs us, on his sign, of newspapers being to be seen at
his house _every day_ in the week.”
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HORSE,” HOCKLIFFE.]
At which of the two principal inns, the “White Hart” or the “White
Horse,” this enterprising publican carried on business he does not tell
us. Perhaps it was the “White Horse”; now certainly one of the most
interesting of inns, and then the chiefest in Hockliffe. Before its
hospitable door the “Holyhead Mail,” the Shrewsbury “Greyhound,” the
Manchester “Telegraph,” the Liverpool “Royal Umpire,” and many another
drew up, together with some of the many “Tally-Hoes” that spread a
fierce rivalry down the road. It was probably at Hockliffe and at the
hospitable door of the “White Horse,” that the “Birmingham Tally-Ho”
conveying Tom Brown to Rugby drew up at dawn “at the end of the fourth
stage.” We need not look for exact coaching data in that story; else,
among other things, we might cavil at the description of it as a
“little” roadside inn.
A bright fire gleaming through the red curtains of the bar window gave
promise of good refreshment, and so while the horses were changed, the
guard took Tom in to give him “a drop of something to keep the cold
out,” or rather to drive it out, for poor Tom’s feet were already so
cold that they might have been in the next world, for all he could feel
of them, and the guard had to pick him off the coach-top and set him in
the road. “Early purl” set that right, and warmed the cockles of his
heart.
There is no nonsense of the plate-glass and electric-bell kind about the
“White Horse.” If the old coachmen were to come back, and the passengers
they drove, they would find the old house much the same—the stables
docked perhaps of some of their old extent and a trifle ruinous, and the
house in these less palmy days crying out for some fresh paint and a few
minor repairs; but still the same well-remembered place. Even the
windows in the gables, blocked up over a century ago to escape Mr.
Pitt’s window-tax, have not been re-opened. There are low-browed old
rooms at the inn, with a cosy kitchen that is as much parlour; with
undisguised oaken beams running overhead, rich in pendant hams that by
due hanging have acquired artistic old-masterish tones, like mellow
Morlands and rich Gainsboroughs. There is a capacious hearth, there are
settles to sit easily in, and warming pans that have warmed many a bed
for old-time travellers; and there are memories, too, for them that care
to summon them. Will they come? Yes, I warrant you. They are memories
chiefly of moving accidents by flood and fell, for Hockliffe has had
more than its due share of coaching accidents. They happened chiefly on
the hills a mile out, where Battlesden Park skirts the road, and where,
although Telford did some embanking of the hollows and cutting of the
crests, they remain formidable to this day. Battlesden became an ominous
name in those days, and the “White Horse” and many another Hockliffe inn
very like hospitals. The year 1835 was an especially disastrous one. In
May, the “Hope” Halifax coach, on the way to London, was being driven
down hill at a furious pace, when the horses became unmanageable, and
the coach, overloaded with luggage piled up on the roof, after reeling
in several directions, fell on the off side. All the passengers were
injured more or less severely. The next happening was when the
Shrewsbury “Greyhound,” coming towards London, was overturned at a point
almost opposite Battlesden House. Again most of the passengers were
seriously injured, and the coachman had a leg broken. Two of the horses
suffered similar injuries. This accident was caused by the near-side
wheeler kicking over the pole and thus upsetting the coach while it was
running at high speed down hill. Of course, when the great Christmas
snowstorm of 1836 blocked nearly all the roads in England, Hockliffe was
a very special place for drifts, and the Birmingham, Manchester,
Holyhead, Chester and Holyhead, and Halifax mails were all snowed up. An
attempt made to drag the Chester mail out resulted in the fore-axle
giving way and the coach being abandoned. The boys went forward on
horseback. The Holyhead mail, with the Irish bags, was more fortunate.
When the horses suddenly floundered up to their necks in the snow, the
coachman dived off headlong, and was nearly suffocated; but with the aid
of the guard and the passengers he was pulled out by the legs, and, a
team of cart-horses being requisitioned, the coach itself dragged
through. These are examples of the perils His Majesty’s Mails
encountered in those times, and of the discomforts endured by the men
who carried them for little wage.
The Post Office has never been generous to the rank and file of its
staff. The secretarial staff, whose business it is to receive complaints
and to scientifically fob off the public with tardy promises of
enquiries never intended to be made, draw handsome salaries, but those
who do the actual work have always been paid something less than they
could obtain from other walks of life. The guards in Post Office
employment received half a guinea a week salary in the old mail-coach
days—as, in fact, a retaining fee—it being estimated by the Department
that they could make a good thing of it by the “tips” they would be
receiving from passengers. That they did make a good thing of it we
know, but the principle was a shabby one for a Government Department to
adopt, and really created a kind of indirect taxation. No traveller
could refuse to “tip” the guard as well as the coachman, unless very
hard-hearted or possessed of a moral courage quite beyond the ordinary.
Beyond his half-guinea a week, an annual suit of clothes, and a
superannuation allowance of seven shillings a week, a mail guard had no
official prospects. Occasionally some crusty passenger, whom the guard,
being extra busy with his letters and parcels, had perhaps no time to
humour, would refuse to tip, and would write to the Post Office to
complain; whereupon the Secretary would indite some humbug of this
kind:—
[Illustration:
THE GREAT SNOWSTORM, DEC. 26TH, 1836. THE BIRMINGHAM MAIL FAST IN THE
SNOW, WITH LITTLE CHANCE OF A SPEEDY RELEASE: THE GUARD PROCEEDING
TO LONDON WITH THE LETTER-BAGS.
_From a Print after J. Pollard._
]
“SIR,—I have the honour of your letter of the ——, to which I beg leave
to observe that neither coachman nor guard should claim anything of
‘vails’ as a right, having ten and sixpence per week each; but the
custom too much prevails of giving generally a shilling each at the end
of the ground, but as a courtesy, not a right; and it is the absolute
order of the office that they shall not use a word beyond solicitation.
This is particularly strong in respect of the guard—for, indeed, over
the coachman we have not much power; but if he drives less than thirty
miles, as your first did, they should think themselves well content with
sixpence from each passenger.”
In those times sixpence might have been enough, but when, in later days,
the coachman or the guard at the end of their respective journeys would
come round with the significant remark, “I leaves you here, gentlemen!”
he who offered sixpence would have been as daring as one who gave
nothing at all. The sixpence would have been returned with a sarcastic
courtesy, and a shilling not received with any remarks of gratitude.
This custom was known as “kicking the passengers.”
Very occasionally, and under pressure, the Post Office doled out an
extra half-guinea in seasons of extraordinary severity, when passengers
were few and tips scarce, and on occasions when the mails were so heavy
that the seats generally occupied by passengers were given up to the
bags, the guards had an allowance made them. Their zeal under
difficulties also received rare and grudging recognition, as when Thomas
Sweatman, guard of the Chester mail in the early part of 1795, was
awarded half a guinea for his labours at Hockliffe, where, in the middle
of the night and up to his waist in water, he helped to put on new
traces, travelling to town on his box with his wet clothes freezing to
him.
XXII
The red-brick face of the “White Horse” is set off and embellished by a
very wealth of elaborate old Renaissance wood-carving that decorates the
coach-entrance. It was obviously never intended for its present
position, and is said to have come from an old manor-house at Chalgrave,
demolished many years ago. Long exposure to the weather and generations
of neglect have wrought sad havoc with this old work. A fragment in the
kitchen gives the date 1566, and some strips under the archway, with the
inscription “John Havil dwiling in cars,” present a mystery not easy to
solve.
The ominous Battlesden Park, belonging to the Dukes of Bedford, with
jealously locked lodge-gates that hinder the harmless tourist from
inspecting the church within the demesne, is one of a vast chain of
Russell properties stretching for miles across country, from here to
Woburn and away to the Great North Road at Wansford. Battlesden is
without a tenant, except for those who tenant family vaults and
resting-places in the little churchyard: Duncombes within and nobodies
in particular without. It was one of these Duncombes of Battlesden—Sir
Samuel—who in 1624 introduced Sedan-chairs into England. Weeping marble
cherubs on Duncombe monuments, rubbing marble knuckles into marble eyes,
testify to grief overpast, but Nature, indifferent as ever, keeps a
cheerful face. It here becomes evident that we are on the borders of a
stone country, for the little church tower is partly built of that
ferruginous sandstone whose rusty red and yellow is for the next thirty
miles to become very noticeable.
Gaining the summit of Sandhill, a house lying back from the road, on the
left, is seen, with traces of a slip-road to it and through its
grass-grown stable-yard. It is a noticeable red-brick house, with a
steep tiled roof crowned by a weather-vane. Once the “Peacock” inn, it
has for many years been a private residence. A short distance beyond,
past the cross-roads known as Sheep Lane, Bedfordshire is left behind
for the county of Buckingham, through which for the next twelve miles,
to the end of Stony Stratford, the Holyhead Road takes its way.
Buckinghamshire, on the map, is a quaintly shaped county, standing as it
were on end, washing its feet in the Thames at Staines, and with its
head in the Ouse, in the neighbourhood of Olney. Wags have compared it
with a cattle-goad, “because it sticks into Oxon and Herts.” The
glimmerings of possible similar verbal atrocities are apparent in the
fact that it is also bordered by Beds and Berks. Northants and Middlesex
also march with its frontiers. Its name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon
word “bucken,” alluding to the beech woods that spread over it, but more
particularly in the south, on the densely wooded Chiltern Hills. The
Welsh language, innocent of any word for the beech, bears out the
statement of Cæsar, that this tree was unknown in Britain at the time of
his invasion.
Little Brickhill is the first place that Buckinghamshire has to show,
and a charming old-world place it is, despite its name, which, together
with those of its brothers Great and Bow Brickhills near by, prepares
the traveller for—of course—bricks. But the greater number of houses
here are stone. It is difficult to imagine this little hillside village
an assize town; but so it once was, and the “Sessions House,” a small
Tudor building, one of the few in red brick, still stands as a memento
of the time when this was the scene of the General Gaol Delivery for the
county of Bucks, from 1433 to 1638. The chief reason for this old-time
judicial distinction appears in the fact that Aylesbury, the county
town, was practically unapproachable during three parts of the year,
owing to the infamously bad bye-roads.
[Illustration: LITTLE BRICKHILL.]
The old “George” inn, that stands directly opposite the Sessions House,
is not the only inn at Brickhill against whose name “_fuit_” must be
written. Others, now vanished, were the “White Lion,” now the Post
Office, with some delicate decorative carving on its front (the old sign
is still preserved upstairs); the “Swan,” the “Shoulder of Mutton,” and
the “Waggon.” The class of each one of these old houses may still be
traced. The “George” was beyond comparison the chief, and legends still
linger of how the old fighting Marquis of Anglesey came up and stayed
here as Lord Uxbridge with two legs, and returned after Waterloo as Lord
Anglesey with one. They say, too, that the Princess Victoria once halted
here the night. In the churchyard, that so steeply overlooks the road at
the hither end of the village, you may see stones to the memory of
William Ratcliffe, the last host of the “George,” his wife, his
relatives, and his servants. He died, aged eighty-two, in 1856; his wife
in 1842. Many years before, a servant, Charlotte Osborne, had died, aged
thirty-eight; the stone “erected by three sisters, as a tribute of their
regard for a faithful servant, and as a testimony to one who anxiously
endeavoured to alleviate the sufferings of a beloved and lamented parent
upon a dying bed.” Here also is the epitaph of Isaac Webb, “for more
than forty years a good and faithful servant to Mr. Ratcliffe of the
‘George Inn,’ during which he gained the esteem of all who knew him.” He
died, aged fifty-eight, in 1854.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “GEORGE.”]
The old “George” is now occupied—or partly occupied, for it is a very
large house—by a farm bailiff. Just what it and its old coach-yard are
like let these sketches tell.
Within the church a curious wooden-framed tablet records the death at
Little Brickhill of an old-time traveller when journeying from London to
Chester. This was “William Bennett, son of the Mayor of Chester. He died
March 19th, 1658.
But most curious of all is the stone in the churchyard to a certain
“True Blue,” who died in 1725, aged fifty-seven. Time has lost all count
of “True Blue,” who or what he was, and speculation is futile. If only
the vicar who entered his burial in the register had noted some
particulars of him, how grateful we should be for the unveiling of this
mystery! Those registers have, indeed, no little interest, containing as
they do the gruesome records of many criminals executed in the old gaol
deliveries, as well as of a woman who was wounded at the battle of Edge
Hill and died of her hurts.
XXIII
A long and steep descent into the valley of the Ouse conducts from
Little Brickhill into Fenny Stratford, seen in the distance, its roofs
glimmering redly amid foliage. The river, a canal, and the low-lying
flats illustrate very eloquently the “fenny” adjective in the
place-name, and it is in truth a very amphibious, bargee, wharfingery,
and mudlarky little town. Agriculture and canal-life mix oddly here.
Wharves, the “Navigation” inn, and hunchbacked canal-bridges admit into
the town; and the lazy, willow-fringed Ouzel, with pastures and
spreading cornfields on either side, bows one out of it at the other
end. The arms of Fenny Stratford, to be seen carved above the church
door, allude in their wavy lines to its riverain character, but, just as
Ipswich and some other ancient ports bear curiously dimidiated arms
showing monsters, half lions and half boats, so “Fenny” (as its
inhabitants shortly and fondly call it) should bear for arms half a
barge and half a plough, conjoined, with, for supporters, a bargee and a
ploughman.
The church just mentioned is exceedingly ugly, and of the
glorified-factory type common at the period when it was built. It owes
its present form to Browne Willis, the antiquary, who built it in 1726,
and, as an antiquary, ought to have known better. He dedicated it to St.
Martin, in memory of his father, who was born in St. Martin’s Lane, and
died on St. Martin’s Day. A kindly growth of ivy now screens the greater
part of Browne Willis’s egregious architecture. He lies buried beneath
the altar, but his memory is kept green by celebration of St. Martin’s
Day, November 11th, when the half-dozen small carronades he presented to
the town and now known as the “Fenny Poppers,” fire a _feu-de-joie_,
followed by morning service in the church and a dinner in the evening at
the “Bull” inn.
Bletchley and its important railway junction have caused much building
here in recent years, and bid fair to presently link up with “Fenny,”
just as Wolverton with “Stony.” The distance between the two Stratfords
is a little over four miles, the villages of Loughton and Shenley, away
from the road, in between, and the main line of the London and
North-Western Railway crossing the road on the skew-bridge described in
a rapturous railway-guide of 1838 as a “stupendous iron bridge, which
has a most noble appearance from below.” At the cross-roads between
these two retiring villages stands the “Talbot,” a red-brick coaching
inn, mournful in these days and descended to the lower status of a
wayside public. It lost its trade at the close of 1838, when the London
and Birmingham Railway was completed, but, with other neighbouring inns,
did a brisk business at the last, when the line was opened for traffic
only as far as “Denbigh Hall,” in the April of that year. The temporary
station of that name was situated at the spot where the railway touches
the road, at the skew-bridge just passed. Between this point and Rugby,
while Stephenson’s contractors were wrestling with the difficulties of
the great Roade cutting and the long drawn perils of Kilsby Tunnel,
coaches and conveyances of all kinds were run by the railway company, or
by William Chaplin, for meeting the trains and conveying passengers the
thirty-eight miles across the gap in the rail. From Rugby to Birmingham
the railway journey was resumed.
“Denbigh Hall” no longer figures in the time-tables, for the idea of a
“secondary station,” once proposed to be established here was abandoned.
But while the break in the line continued this was a busy place. It is
best described in the words of one who saw it then:—
“Denbigh Hall, _alias hovel_, bears much the appearance of a
race-course, where tents are in the place of horses—lots of horses, but
not much stabling; coachmen, postboys, post-horses, and a grand stand!
Here the trains must stop, for the very excellent reason that _they
can’t go any further_. On my arrival I was rather surprised to find all
the buildings belonging to the Railway Company of such a temporary
description; but this Station will become only a secondary one when the
line is opened to Wolverton. There is but one solitary public-house,
once rejoicing in the name of the ‘Pig and Whistle,’ but now dignified
by the title of ‘Denbigh Hall Inn,’ newly named by Mr. Calcraft, the
brewer, who has lately bought the house. Brewers are very fond of buying
up inns, to prevent, I suppose, other people supplying the public with
bad beer, wishing to have that privilege themselves. The unexpected
demands for accommodation at this now famed place obliged the
industrious landlord to immediately convert his parlour into a
coffee-room, the bar into a parlour, the kitchen into a bar, the stable
into a kitchen, the pig-sty into a stable, and tents into straw bedrooms
by night, and dining-rooms by day.”