explanation of their absence was that the 28th June was the Coronation
Day of our beloved Queen, and the crowd was so great in Birmingham that,
in paying attention to getting the horses through the streets, and
having lost considerable time in so doing, in the hurry to get the coach
off again the guard did not ascertain if the lamps were with the coach,
or not. The Manchester coach, at the time of the accident, was
attempting, when climbing the hill, to pass the Carlisle Mail, and was
ascending on the wrong side of the road. The horses dashed into each
other, with the result that one of the wheelers of the Holyhead Mail,
belonging to Mr. Wilson, of Daventry, was killed, and the others
injured, one seriously. The harness was old and snapped like chips, or
more serious would have been the consequences; and had not the horse
killed been old and worn out, the sudden concussion would have been more
violent, and might have deprived the passengers of life. As it was
difficult to decide which of the two coachmen was most in the wrong, it
was left to the two coachmasters to arrange affairs between themselves.”
In Telford’s reports mention is made of no fewer than seven hills cut
down and hollows filled on this stretch of road, with an aggregate
length of cutting and embanking of two and a half miles. Yet, even so,
this remains the most trying part of the route; so much so, that the two
hillsides past Foster’s Booth are laid with granite kerbs for the
purpose of easing the pull-up for horses drawing heavy-laden waggons.
The place oddly named Foster’s or Forster’s Booth is said, on the
authority of Pennant, to have derived that title from a wayside booth
established by “one Forster, a poor countryman.” It grew at length into
a scattered street of houses and carrier’s inns, and so remains.
Stowe Hill, the last of this hunchbacked company leading to Weedon,
acquires its name from the village of Stowe-Nine-Churches, whose
scattered houses and _one_ church lie on the hill-top, hid from the road
by lanes and windy coppices. The title of “Nine Churches” is rather
lamely said to arise from nine benefices having been included in the
lordship of the manor in ancient times, but a much more picturesque
origin is found in the legend of the triumphant diabolism that foiled
eight previous attempts to erect the church on other sites. Every night,
the stones of the eight ill-fated buildings set up in the daytime were
removed by a mysterious shape “summat bigger nor a hog,” but the
existing church, the ninth, was suffered to grow to completion. As it is
of Saxon origin, this fearful legend itself perhaps goes back to that
superstitious time.
Stowe Church is remarkable for the fine monuments it contains: those of
Sir Gerald de l’Isle, about 1250; Lady Carey, 1630; and Dr. Turner,
1714. The first is the Purbeck marble effigy of a cross-legged knight,
shield on arm, and clad in chain-mail. That of Lady Carey, “the most
elegant,” says Pennant, “that this or any other kingdom can boast of,”
is a white marble sleeping figure raised on a black and white marble
altar-tomb. This beautiful work of Renaissance art was by the “Master
Mason” of James I. and Charles I.—Nicholas Stone, who executed it and
set it up here “for my Lady,” as he says in his still-existing
correspondence, ten years before her death; “for the which,” he adds, “I
had £220.” Although of the most delicate workmanship, it remains,
strange to say, in perfect preservation; even the sharp beak of the very
savage-looking griffin at the foot of the effigy quite uninjured.
The monument to Dr. Turner, who does not lie here, but at Oxford, where
he was President of Corpus Christi College, is a huge mass, occupying a
great wall space. He was a non-juring pluralist, who, unlike his brother
non-jurors, held successfully to what he had gotten. An effigy of him,
very wiggy and gowny, stands in midst of alcoves, scrolls, and volutes,
representing him, like some reverend acrobat, standing on a globe and
holding a book in his hand. Religion, beside him, offers a cross and a
temple, which he seems disinclined to take, and an all-seeing eye—like
that blood-freezing eye in Martin’s “Belshazzar’s Feast”—radiates down
upon the group.
XXVIII
One mile from Weedon and half-way down Stowe Hill, a broad vale opens to
the view, the London and North-Western Railway shooting out below from
Stowe Hill Tunnel, with the Grand Junction Canal and the river Nen in
close company. Weedon Beck is seen while yet a great way off, its
neighbourhood fixed by an immense ugly block of yellow brick buildings
on a distant hillside. Nearing the place, these are found to be the
officers’ quarters of Weedon Barracks; but before that fact is
ascertained the stranger occupies the time between first glimpsing them
and arriving at the spot in speculating whether the hideous pile forms a
lunatic asylum, a workhouse, an infirmary, or a prison. Weedon, in fact,
is a large military depôt, originally established for the Ordnance
Department in 1803. Its situation here is due to one of the periodical
scares with which the fear of foreign invasion afflicts nervous
Governments once in every half-century or so. The scare that produced
Weedon Barracks, among other odd things, was a particularly severe and
craven one, for it assumed our being unable to hold our own upon the
sea-coast and in the capital, and selected this site as being as nearly
as possible in the centre of England, and the safest place for retiring
to in the event of a sudden descent upon our shores. So great was the
national terror of “Boney” a hundred years ago! Even the needs of the
Court were not forgotten, and a pavilion was provided for the use of
George III. over against the time when it should be necessary to flee
from Windsor Castle!
The name of Weedon “Beck” might not unreasonably be supposed to derive
its second half from the river Nen, that ripples not unpicturesquely
through the village, were it not that it has clearly been proved an
ancient manor of the Abbey of Bee, in Normandy. When Leland was pursuing
his antiquarian studies through England, in the time of Henry VIII., he
found it “a praty thoroughfare, sette on a playne grounde, and much
celebrated by cariars, bycause it stondeth hard by the famose way there
comunely caullid of the people Watheling Street.” It became a very busy
place in coaching times, and was then chiefly a street of inns. What
would have become of Weedon had the military depôt not been placed here
to keep it alive before the railway came, with the thoroughness of a new
besom, to sweep the long road clear of traffic from end to end, goodness
only knows. There is a Providence that shapes the ends of even old
thoroughfare villages; and undoubtedly Weedon believes in the
beneficence of that Providence, because, taking away with one hand, it
has given double with the other: that is to say, it has a railway
junction and a canal, so that when the officers become bored to death in
their ugly quarters they can either drown themselves in the canal, or
take leave of absence and train to some more lively spot. A third course
is to enjoy the billiards and society that the hotels of Weedon afford,
or the pleasures of the Grafton Hunt. Those hotels, chiefly of the old
coaching type, have all been restored and added to of recent years, and
a very large modern one, the “Globe,” taking the name of the old and
extinct “Globe” half a mile onward, has been built at that spot where
the Holyhead Road and the Watling Street part company for some
seventy-three miles: a spot quaintly called by Ogilby, in 1675, “Cross
o’ th’ Hand.” The “White Hart” stands next door, and opposite glares the
“Red Lion”; while the “New” inn—new in 1740, as a tablet over its
doorway tells—is trebled in size by two modern wings. “Cash Stores”
spell modernity, and the imposing branch of a Northamptonshire bank
speaks of business. In contrast with all this, the old “Bull” inn,
situated on the left hand, at the entrance to the village, is now a
farmhouse, and the road by which the carriages and post-chaises came to
it off the turnpike, though still traceable, has long been stopped at
either end.
There is a great deal more of Weedon than the hurried traveller along
the Holyhead Road would suspect. It lies down the turning by this same
old house and on the other side of the parallel embankments of railway
and canal; embankments so tall that they succeed in completely hiding
all but the upper stage of Weedon Church tower. “Here,” says that tower,
“is Weedon”; and there it is; barracks like model lodging-houses, with
children playing and clothes drying upon tier over tier of balconies;
women fresh from the washtub, with arms akimbo and rolled-up sleeves,
voluble in the entries; and soldiers “married on the strength,”
slatternly and listless, at the windows: all very domestic and
inglorious. The everyday aspect of the barracks is not inspiring. Only
occasionally, when on the neighbouring hillsides a sabre-scabbard
flashes by chance in the sun, and the eye thus startled discovers some
leisurely horseman scouting, visible to all the world, is the military
view of Weedon productive of a thrill.
Many soldiers lie in the crowded churchyard round the ugly church,
jammed in an angle between railway and canal: the trains rushing by on a
lofty viaduct that looks down upon the damp, sunless and melancholy
wedge of land. Among those soldiers lies “Charles Lockitt, who died
August 27th, 1877, in the fifty-third year of his age. Deceased was
formerly a sergeant in the 97th Regiment, and was present at the
storming of the Redan before Sebastopol, September 8th, 1855, where he
was severely wounded, from the effects of which he died.”
A much older, and somewhat curious epitaph, is that to “Alice Old,
widow, who lived in ye reigne of Queen Elizabeth, in ye reigne of Kinge
James ye 1st, in ye reigne of Kinge Charles ye 1st and Kinge Charles ye
2nd, and Kinge James ye 2nd, and deseased ye Second Day of Jany., ye 3rd
year of ye reigne of Kinge William and Queen Mary, 1691.”
XXIX
No wild geese, according to an ancient fable, ever again spoiled the
cornfields of Weedon after they had once been banished by the
miraculously successful prayers of the Princess Werburgh, a holy
daughter of Wulfere, King of Mercia, somewhere about A.D. 780. That
pious lady, afterwards raised to the hierarchy of saints, was abbess of
a religious house here. Her steward assembled the birds: the abbess
commanded them to depart, and they immediately took wing, but refused to
leave the neighbourhood until a missing one of the flock (killed, cooked
and eaten, as it happened) was restored to them. Nothing easier than
this to a Saxon saint, and the bird was restored alive to his friends
and relations! “The vulgar superstition,” says an old writer, “now
observes that no wild geese are ever seen to settle and graze in Weedon
field.” Nor in any other field nowadays, it may be added, in this modern
England of ours.
At Weedon the old Watling Street bids good-bye to the Holyhead Road for
71½ miles, and goes by itself in a route 75¼ miles long, rejoining the
modern road at Ketley, near Wellington.
The meaning of the name “Watling Street” is sought under many
difficulties, so many and so hazy are the derivations of it advanced.
The Britons, it is said, knew the rough track crossing the island before
the Romans came as the Sarn Gwyddelin, or Foreigners’ Road, along whose
uncertain course came and went the Phœnician merchants who traded with
Britain long before Cæsar had heard of this lonely isle; long, indeed,
before he was born. According to Stewkeley, the name “Gwyddelin” stood
for “wild men,” and this therefore was the Wild Men’s Road; the savages
so named being the wild Irishmen from across St. George’s Channel.
Camden and others boldly say the Romans named the road Via Vitellianus,
or Vitelliana, an easy Latin modification of “Gwyddelin,” the name by
which they heard the Britons call it. At any rate, it is to the Romans
that its transformation from a mere forest track to a broad,
well-engineered, and well-paved road was due. The work was not soon
done, but when completed it took rank among the greatest of military
ways.
The Romans engineered the road and did the skilled work; the Britons
performed the carrying and the hard labour, forced to it by a thousand
stripes and indignities. To them fell the clearing of the woods along
the route, and the digging of earth and stone, and to Roman workmen the
staking out of the way and the weaving together of those brushwood
wattles that compacted the foundations in moist and boggy places. Some
fanciful commentators find in those wattles the source of the name given
to the road. Completed at length as a military necessity, and with much
pagan ceremony committed to the care of the Lares Viales and the less
supernatural custody of the road-surveyors, the Via Vitelliana was for
over three hundred years a crowded highway, with busy towns and villages
along its course; the palatial villas of wealthy Roman citizens peeping
out from sheltered nooks. Then came disaster. The Roman garrisons
withdrawn, successive waves of savage invasions wrecked the civilisation
of that time, and only the burnt walls of towns and settlements remained
to tell of what had been. It was not until another four hundred years
had passed that the fierce Saxons, becoming tamed, began to rear a
civilisation of their own. To this great road they gave, according to
that monkish chronicler, Roger de Hoveden, the name “Waetlinga-street,”
the Way of the Sons of Waetla, a legendary king; and the Celtic British
whom they found in the country, talking what was to them a strange and
uncouth tongue, they called, with all the arrogance imaginable,
“Wealas,” or strangers, forgetting that they themselves were the
strangers and the others upon their native soil. But as “Wealas” they
remained, and as such they are still, for from that word sprang the name
of the Welsh people, who as a matter of fact, style themselves “Cymru.”
A curious point to be noted is that this is by no means the only
“Watling Street.” The name is found repeatedly in this country, applied
locally to ancient Roman roads; but _the_ Watling Street prominent above
all others is this great way, which traversed Britain from its extreme
south-eastern verge, over against Gaul, diagonally in a north-westerly
direction for 340 miles, until it touched the sea at Carnarvon and
Chester. From the three great fortified starting-points at _Dubris_,
_Portus Lemanis_, and _Portus Rutupis_—severally identified with Dover,
Lympne, and Richborough—it ran in triplicate to Canterbury, and thence,
chiefly along the existing Dover Road, to London. By way of that
thoroughfare still known as Watling Street, it traversed the City and
emerged at Newgate through the city wall, and so into what were then
swampy wildernesses on the line of the present Holborn and Oxford
Street. At the Marble Arch it turned abruptly to the right, and thence
went in a straight line along the course of the Edgware Road to the
great city of _Verulamium_, adjoining the St. Albans of our own day.
From this point the Watling Street and the Holyhead Road are practically
identical so far as Weedon Beck. Dunstable marks the site of the Roman
market-town of _Forum Dianæ_, or _Durocobrivæ_, as it was also named;
and Stony Stratford by its name proclaims its situation on the old
route. It was the Roman “_Magiovintum_.” Towcester was the
“_Lactodorum_” of the Itinerary. At Weedon the ancient road and the
modern part company for 71½ miles, to meet again at Ketley
railway-station, between Oakengates and Wellington.
XXX
It is this stretch of 75¼ miles that will now be explored. Bid farewell,
traveller who would trace the Roman way, to the company of your
fellow-men, for this is no frequented route, and towns and villages are
few along its course. It begins by climbing out of Weedon and up to a
gate, where those who will may trace it across a field. For those others
who will not, an ancient divergence, forming a kind of elbow, preserves
the continuity of roadway and brings the route over the Grand Junction
Canal to Welford Station and Watford Gap, where the old route of the
London and Coventry coach from Northampton to Hillmorton and Coventry,
travelled by Dugdale in the seventeenth century, crosses this Roman way.
The “New Inn” mentioned by him still stands here, but is now a
farmhouse. The name of “Gap,” as applied to cross-roads, is very
ancient. Curiously enough, a “Watford Gap” is to be found in
Staffordshire, on the Birmingham and Lichfield Road.
Few houses are glimpsed in these first nine miles of the Watling Street.
At a grim crossing of two high roads near Crick station, but with an
appearance as solitary as though many miles remote from villages or
railways, it suddenly ends, or continues only as a formidably rugged,
grass-grown track. Here the explorer either finds himself daunted, or
proves his mettle by plunging boldly forward, reckless of what may
betide. For one thing, the telegraph-poles are faithful to the track,
and where they lead who shall fear to follow? They conduct, in fact,
steadily downhill along this green alley, and in a mile and a half,
crossing two fields, bring one out to a flat and low-lying country, and
to what the country-folk call the “hard road” again. Three miles of
this, and a rise, with a cross-road to the right, leads to Dove Bridge,
spanning the Warwickshire Avon. All around, here, there, and
everywhere—at Lilbourne, Catthorpe, and Cave’s Inn—are speculative sites
of the Roman station of _Tripontium_. For the last three miles the
Watling Street has formed the boundary between Northants and
Warwickshire, and henceforward, for eighteen miles more, it performs the
same office for Warwickshire and Leicestershire. On the Leicestershire
side, where the ground rises steeply beyond the little river, is a
mysterious mound, called by the villagers of Lilbourne “Castle Hill”—an
odd, evidently artificial hill, with two beech trees growing on its
summit. Whether it be a Roman _speculum_, or look-out hill, or the
grave-mound of some tribal king, ancient even when the Romans came, who
shall say? “Tripontium” was named from three bridges that then crossed
the Avon somewhere here, but they and their sites have vanished.
Lilbourne itself lies down the right-hand lane, and is a village on the
hither hillside, with a very dilapidated church by the little river, and
a great huddled mass of grass-grown mounds in the water-meadows
opposite. Within sight is the wayside railway station of Lilbourne,
incongruous amid these forlorn relics of the past in this out-of-the-way
corner of the country. Let no one think these mounds „to be the remains
of a Roman camp: they are the only vestiges now left of the once proud
Norman castle of Lilbourne.
[Illustration: LILBOURNE.]
Uphill, steep and rugged, goes the road to the outlying fringe of
Catthorpe, that still continues to be known as “Catthorpe Five Houses,”
even though they are now, and have long been, but three. From this
hill-top the spires and roofs of Rugby are plainly visible by day, and
by night the great junction spreads its station and signal-lights in a
gorgeous illumination of white, red, and green.
Beyond, in the deep hollow where that latest of great trunk lines, the
Great Central Railway, crosses over the road on a blue-brick archway, is
“Cave’s Inn,” an inn no longer. “Cave’s Hole” they used to call it in
old times, from its situation in this hollow. The lone house was kept in
the long ago (that is to say, about 1680) by Edward Cave, grandfather of
that Edward who founded the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, and was the friend
of Johnson. His father, Joseph, was a younger son of the inn-keeping
Edward, and, the entail of the family estate being cut off, was reduced
to plying the cobbler’s trade at Rugby. The literary Edward was born in
1691 at the hamlet of Newton, a short distance off the Watling Street,
between this and Catthorpe Five Houses.
It is an obviously Roman way—straight and uncompromising—that leads
onward from Cave’s Inn to the cross-roads, at the suggestively lonely
spot called “Gibbet,” the site in the “good old days” of a gallows-tree
originally set up in 1687 for a certain Loseby who had “barbarously
murdered” a man named Bunbury, and, being caught almost red-handed, was
promptly executed. Nothing is left of “Loseby’s Gibbet,” as it is marked
on old Warwickshire maps. The remains of it, together with the
prehistoric tumulus on which it was erected, were swept away when the
cross-road from Banbury and Daventry to Lutterworth was made, in 1730. A
dense grove of trees at the fork of the roads to Lutterworth and Shawell
marks the neighbourhood of the spot.
Beyond this Golgotha, the road dips to the reedy river “Swift”; a lazy
little stream and not answerable to its name, as the traveller may see
for himself by halting and leaning over Brunsford Bridge. Another
solitary stretch conducts to Cross-in-Hand, where there are five roads,
two old toll-houses, a modern red-brick cottage, a very fine distant
view of Lutterworth church-tower—and not a mortal or immortal body or
soul in sight. Ordnance maps mark a “Blackenhall” off to the right, a
name that seems to fix the site of the deserted “aula,” or country seat,
of some Roman notable, whose notability, in the passing of fifteen
centuries, has vanished as though he had never been. “Willey Crossing,”
where a branch of the Midland Railway bars the cyclist’s progress, only
serves to emphasise the solitude, and the country girl, who in answer to
the summons of the bell, opens the gates, stares at the strange
spectacle of a wayfarer. Willey lies somewhere off to the left, but, so
far as it affects the road, might be non-existent.
[Illustration: CROSS-IN-HAND.]
Up the steep road that now lies before the explorer, with the little
church of Wibtoft peering over a shoulder of the hill on the left, and
suddenly you are at High Cross, the famous crossing of the Watling
Street and the Fosse Way—the great north-western road of the Romans and
their not quite so great way that led out of Somerset through
Gloucestershire, the shires of Worcester and Warwick, to Leicestershire
and Lincoln.
XXXI
[Illustration: HIGH CROSS MONUMENT.]
High Cross is among the oddest and most perplexing of places. A
multiplicity of roads and sign-posts are gathered together on the
hill-top and the traveller, bedevilled with their number, and the
shrubberies and the farmyards that mask them, is fain to halt and
unravel the tangled skein. The Watling Street here slightly changes
direction, so that its continuation to Atherstone, ten miles distant, is
hidden round an angle. Other roads all round the compass lead, according
to the testimony of the sign-posts, to Rugby, 10 miles; Coventry, 12;
Daventry, 18; Lutterworth, 6; and lastly, Leicester, 13 miles. The road
to Leicester—the Roman city of _Ratæ_—lies along the Fosse Way, and
_that_ is now not a road at all, but a meadow, with meadows beyond it;
traces of the old way only discoverable by the diligent antiquary.
Moreover, the field-gate, padlocked and bristling with the most barbaric
of barbed wire, emphasises “no road” and gives the sign-post the lie.
High Cross is no misnomer, so far as the adjective goes. It _is_ high:
very high. Illimitable vales, shading off from green foreground to
indigo distance, are unfolded below. Fifty-seven churches are said to be
visible from this vantage-point, and goodness only knows how many
counties. Fifty-seven churches! Say a hundred and fifty-seven, or more,
_if you knew on what particular pin-points in that view to look_.