travellers in the way they should go and to mark this supposed site of
the Roman station of _Vennonæ_. Nowadays the pillar is so completely
screened by a little groove of hollies, sycamores, firs, beeches, and
laburnums that, although it stands at an angle of the junction, none but
those who know exactly where to look are likely to find it. A little
wicket-gate leads up to it, in the centre of the grove—a nondescript
pile of moulded stones and red-brick, surmounted with what look like
fragments of Roman columns. The whole structure bears the appearance of
having been built of architectural fragments retrieved from some early
eighteenth-century rubbish heap. It is not improved, nor its Latin
inscriptions rendered any clearer, by the countless pocket-knives that
have been set to work upon it. High Cross is a lonely place, but its
loneliness is belied by this multitude of names and initials, some
dating back to 1733.
The story of how this pillar came to be erected here is told in the
Proceedings of the Warwickshire justices in the Easter Sessions of 1711.
As the Watling Street divides that county and Leicestershire, a
conference of the justices of the two shires was called, when it was
resolved to “build something memorable in stone” on this site, not only
to mark the whereabouts of _Vennonæ_ and to direct travellers, but “also
for that it was esteemed the centre of England.” The cost of this
“something memorable” was £83, contributed in equal shares by the two
shires. The inscriptions were composed by a Mr. Greenway, a schoolmaster
of Coventry. Englished, the principal one runs:—
Traveller, if you seek the footsteps of the ancient Romans, here you
may find them. Hence their most famous military ways, crossing one
another, proceed to the utmost limits of Britain. Here the Vennones
had their settlement, and at the first mile hence along the street,
Claudius, the commander of a cohort, had his camp, and at the same
distance along the Fosse, his tomb.
“Cleycester” the Saxons named the deserted Roman camp of _Vennonæ_, that
stretched along the road towards Wibtoft. Even yet the whistling
ploughman occasionally turns up relics of it, in the form of broken
pottery and defaced coins. The tomb of Claudius remained, until quite
modern times, along the Fosse Way. It was a tumulus, overgrown with
brambles, and known as “Cloudsley Bush.” No traces of it are now left.
Ahead, rather more than a mile off the road, the smoky chimneys of
Hinckley and Burbage make inky and fantastical wreaths in the sky.
Smockington is the name of a hamlet in a bottom, with some reminiscences
of a coaching age. Beyond is the “Three Pots” public-house; and again,
beyond that, a deserted Primitive Methodist Chapel, standing woe-begone
by a canal. Caldecote lies off to the left in another few miles,
opposite to the “Royal Red Gate” inn; its name inviting an exploration
of the place, for there are those who explain the frequently recurring
name of “Caldecote” along the line of Roman roads to mean “cold cot”—a
variant of “Coldharbour,” that equally common place-name in such
situations. The cold cots and the cold harbours had once been, according
to this theory, ruined and deserted Roman villas, in whose rootless and
chilly recesses the first people who dared to travel after Roman Britain
was ravaged by savage tribes took such cold comfort as they might; not
daring to light a warming fire, lest its blaze should bring lurking
bandits and murderers to their cheerless refuge.
From this point of view Caldecote is disappointing, for nothing Roman is
visible there. It is just a tiny village, with a modernised Hall, and in
the Park, less than a stone’s throw from the house, the little church.
But it is a place with a story; for it was here, on August 28th, 1642,
that an attack was made upon the Hall, then the residence of Colonel
Purefoy, a noted Republican. The Colonel was at Coventry, and the house
in charge of his wife, Dame Joan, and his son-in-law, Master George
Abbott, when a raiding-party, said to have been under the command of
Prince Rupert, appeared and demanded its surrender. Fortunately the
inmates had warning of their approach, and when they would have forced
an entrance, the soldiers found doors and windows barred. In the affray
that followed, Dame Joan fired first, bringing down her man, and the
garrison of men and women servants, headed by Master George, gave so
good an account of themselves that the Royalists drew off with a loss of
three officers and fifteen soldiers killed. Caldecote Hall was not
molested again. Memorials of Dame Joan and Master George still remain in
the little church.
XXXII
Beyond Caldecote comes Mancetter—the Roman Manduessedum—on the
Warwickshire side, and Witherley, in Leicestershire. Between the two, an
earthwork named “Castle Bank,” a rectangle measuring six hundred by four
hundred feet, seems to have been the site of the Roman camp. Across the
road flows the pretty river Anker, with trees densely overhanging it,
and framing with their boughs a charming view of Witherley’s graceful
crocketed spire. Mancetter—how nearly it escaped from being another
“Manchester”!—is thought to have derived the first syllable of its name
in Roman times from some historic or remarkable stone, “maen,” in the
British tongue; but, however that may be, no such stone has ever been
found. It is now a pretty village, a little distance retired from the
road, with a very fine old church, and a churchyard remarkable for its
illiterate tombstones and odd epitaphs, from the merely misspelt to the
quaintly conceived:—
Here lies the Wife of Joseph Grew, a Tender Parerent And a Vertious
Wife. She died February 1782.
Another, weirdly ungrammatical and savagely cynical, hides the identity
of those who lie beneath by initials, and by the omission of any date:—
HERE LIETH INTERR’D
THE BODY’S OF
H. I. M.
What E’re we was or am
it Matters not
To whome related,
or by whome begott.
We was but amnot:
Ask no more of me
’Tis all we are
And all that you must be.
Another, to Sarah and Mary Everitt, 1720, and others of that family,
puts a truth in a quaint guise:—
The World is a Caty Full of Crooked Streets Death is ye Markett
plass Whereall must meet if life Was merchandise That men Could Buy
ye Rich Would Allways live ye poor must Die.
Purchasable immortality would be a much more potent inducement to become
a multi-millionaire than any now existing. But what a terrible thing
that would be for the Diamond Kings, the Railway, Oil, Steel, and other
monarchs to become immortal. As it is, however, a live tramp has the
laugh of a dead millionaire—and a better chance of the Elysian Fields
than Dives.
The town of Atherstone, a mile long, breaks the loneliness of Watling
Street, half a mile beyond Mancetter. It is chiefly one long street, of
the miscellaneous character common to the small country town: not
unpleasing, nor highly interesting. The exit from the town is marked by
a railway level crossing, become famous of late years as a source of
contention between the local governing body and the London and
North-Western Railway. Beyond, the villages of Merevale and Baddesley
Ensor are seen to the left; and Dordon, a mushroom growth called into
unlovely existence by the new pits of the Hall End Colliery.
“Stony Delph” is the odd name of a village two miles onward, adjoining
Wilnecote. It is a name alluding to some quarry, or “stony digging,” now
forgotten. (Compare, “When Adam _delved_ and Eve span.”) Wilnecote, down
into whose street the road dips from Stony Delph, is a place of brick,
tile, and pottery kilns, with a railway-station, formerly called “Two
Gates.” Where Wilnecote ends and Fazeley begins is not easy to tell,
save perhaps by reference to the river Tame, here dividing Warwickshire
and Staffordshire. Fazeley has that maritime and Dutch-like appearance
belonging to all places settled beside some old canal, and the canal
here is one of the oldest, with long rows of wharves and equally long
rows of cottages opposite. Both have seen their best days.
Now, good-bye for awhile to level roads, for the Watling Street on
entering Staffordshire goes straight for the steepest hill in the
neighbourhood, and thereby proves its Roman ancestry. This is the hill
leading to Hints. When you have reached the top, another hill, abrupt
and entrenched, with gloomy woods on its brow, scowls down upon it from
the left hand. It had a history, without possibility of a doubt, but it
has not come down to us; and those who defended and those others who
attacked are alike gone to the shores of the Styx, without leaving any
other traces save those dumb and reticent earthworks that loom so
provokingly mysterious against the sky.
Beyond Weeford, the next landmark, the Watling Street goes straight for
three and a half miles, and then brings up against another dead end,
where it is crossed by the Lichfield and Birmingham road. A hedge and a
ploughed field forbid further progress, and it is only when armed with
large-scale maps, and by comparing antiquarian authorities, that the
course of the Watling Street can be traced, straight on to Wall. That
village is found by following the road to Lichfield until the first
left-hand turning is reached, leading, as a steep lane, uphill for a
mile. On the hill-top, Wall is found and the Watling Street regained.
The tiny village is built over the site of _Etocetum_, of whose ruins
some fragments were yet to be seen in Pennant’s time, including portions
of the ancient Roman wall giving a name to the place. These have long
since disappeared, but in 1887 some excavations here laid bare many
foundations heaped with the ruins of Roman civilisation, among whose
oddments were found roofing-slates from Bangor and lime from Walsall. If
thorough search were made, much more might be brought to light, for this
was an important station in those times, situated at the intersection of
the Icknield Street with Watling Street. Below the hill, and on the line
of the Icknield Street, is the hamlet or farm called Chesterfield—a
significant name, telling of Roman relics.
[Illustration: THE WATLING STREET, NEAR HAMMERWICH.]
Muckley Corner, beyond Wall, is the meeting-place of roads from Walsall
to Lichfield and Wolverhampton. The Watling Street still goes
unflinchingly ahead, and reaches the outskirts of Hammerwich, uphill. At
that nail-making and coal-mining place, it becomes somewhat confused,
but is well-known locally to every man, woman, and child as the “Watling
Street Road.” Here it has reached a very high-lying tract, that
abomination of desolation called Brownhills. Words are ineffectually
employed to describe the hateful, blighted scene; but imagine a wide,
dreary stretch of common land, surrounded by the scattered, dirty, and
decrepit cottages of a semi-savage population of nail-makers and pitmen,
with here and there a school, a woe-begone brick chapel, a tin
tabernacle, and a plentiful sprinkling of public-houses. Further,
imagine the grass of this wide-spreading common to be as brown, wiry,
and innutritious as it is possible for grass to be, and with an
extraordinary wealth of scrap-iron, tin-clippings, broken glass, and
brickbats deposited over every square yard, and all around it the
ghastly refuse-heaps of long-abandoned mines. Finally, clap a railway
embankment and station midway across the common, and there you have a
dim adumbration of what Brownhills is like.
The Roman road makes a sudden change of direction here, at a point
opposite the “Rising Sun,” where the old Chester road falls in. It is a
change that would be inexplicable, were it not for a strange relic that
by chance has survived for sixteen hundred years to explain it. This is
a mile’s length of deserted road that continues the straight line of
Watling Street, and then abruptly ends, as though the Romans had
abandoned some contemplated work. It is, as a matter of fact, a monument
to the incompetence of the surveyor who had the construction of this
division of the Watling Street in his charge. The several changes of
direction taken here and there along the whole length of this great
military way—as, for example, at High Cross and Gailey—are explained by
the work having been in progress from both ends at once, and the surveys
being somewhat inaccurate; but the official entrusted with the road from
_Etocetum_ seems to have lost his bearings very badly indeed, and to
have been road-making at a wide angle from the correct line, when his
chief appeared and plotted out the direction afresh from Brownhills.
The road now goes downhill again, past a fine old inn, the
“Fleur-de-Lis,” and comes to Wyrley Bank, a busy colliery district on
the verge of Cannock Chase. Bridgetown, Great Wyrley, and Churchbridge
are lumped together in this coal-getting neighbourhood, and the crash of
waggons, the shrieking of engines, and coal-dust everywhere bedevil the
scene. But, with all these unlovely details, it is far preferable to the
stark and hopeless barrennesss of Brownhills.
In little more than two miles this coalfield is quite out of sight and
sound, and the road approaches the beautiful old “Four Crosses” inn at
Hatherton. Dean Swift is commonly said to have visited this old house on
his journeys, and it is quite likely he did, but it could not—for
reasons shown elsewhere in those pages[1]—have been the house where he
wrote his famous epigram on the landlady. But most accounts continue to
give this as the scene, and locally it is firmly believed in.
Footnote 1:
Page 245.
[Illustration: THE “FOUR CROSSES,” NEAR HATHERTON.]
The old house is of two distinct periods: one dating back to the
sixteenth century and exquisite in black oak and white plastered and
gabled front; the other probably built about 1710, in a handsome “Queen
Anne” style. A curious feature is the Latin couplet carved in 1636, on
an oak beam outside the older portion of the house:—
Fleres si scires unum tua tempora me’sem,
Rides cum non sit forsitan una dies,
which has been translated:
Brief is your time: a month, perchance,
Nor even but a day,
Yet ignorant, poor foolish wight,
You laughing go your way.
Adjoining is a disused toll-house, and opposite stands another old inn,
the “Green Dragon,” the group forming a little oasis of settlement in
the surrounding desert of lonely road. It was between this and the
“Welsh Harp” inn at Stonnal, on the Castle Bromwich road, that the
“Shrewsbury Caravan” was halted and robbed on April 30th, 1751, by “a
single Highwayman, who behaved very civilly to the Passengers, told them
he was a Tradesman in Distress, and hoped they would contribute to his
assistance.” Whereupon, he handed round his hat and each passenger gave
him something, making an involuntary contribution of about £4, “with
which he was mighty well satisfied,” as indeed he had every reason to
be. But he was not so distressed a tradesman that he could condescend to
accept coppers, and so “returned some Halfpence to one of them, saying
he never took Copper.” After this, informing his victims that there were
two other “collectors” on the road (were they also Distressed
Tradesmen?) he rode with the Caravan for some distance, until it was out
of danger and he almost in it, when he left with much courtesy, begging
the passengers that they would not at their next inn mention the affair,
nor appear against him should he afterwards be arrested.
XXXIII
The gently undulating stretch of country from “Four Crosses” to “Spread
Eagle,” once dreaded by the name of Calf Heath, is now under
cultivation, and the Watling Street, crossing it, broad and well-kept,
wears more the look of a high-road. The spreading lakes seen here and
there, known as “Gailey Pools,” are reservoirs of the old Staffordshire
and Worcestershire Canal that presently crosses the road under a
hunchbacked bridge and by an old round-house, whose tower stands out
prominently for a long distance down the straight perspective. The
“Spread Eagle,” an old coaching-inn, once gave a name to the adjoining
railway station of Gailey, but where the village hides that now serves
sponsor to it is not readily discovered. A mile beyond comes the river
Penk, crossed at a pretty spot by a substantial stone bridge, and across
the meadows by a red-brick one, where a mill-cut froths and foams, and a
cheerful old mill and farmhouse stand. On the other side of the river is
the hamlet of Horsebrook, with Stretton down a side lane, supposed to
have been the _Pennocrucium_—the crossing of the Penk—of Roman times.
The ubiquitous Thomas Telford is recalled to mind at a little distance
onward by his name in cast-iron on the aqueduct of the Birmingham and
Liverpool Canal. Near by is another reservoir, rejoicing in the name of
“Stinking Lake.” At that fine old inn, the “Bradford Arms,” Ivetsey
Bank, the left-hand road leads in less than two miles to Boscobel, one
of the most famous places in our history, for to that hunting-lodge in
the forests then thickly overspreading this part of the country came
Charles II. in 1651, as a hunted fugitive, after the disastrous defeat
at Worcester. Boscobel had been built seventy years before, by the
Giffards of Chillington, ostensibly as a hunting-lodge where their
guests might rest in the intervals of the chase, and in a sense it was
so used, with officers of the law for hunters, and fleeting Papists as
quarry; but in the other sense it was a very transparent pretence, when
we consider that the family residence at Chillington Hall stands not
more than a mile away. For many years it had been used as a refuge for
recusant Roman Catholic priests, at a time when that religion was
proscribed; for the Giffards were then, as they are still, of that
faith, and so were the yeomen Penderels who occupied the house. It was
built, too, under the direction of a Jesuit lay-brother, one Nicholas
Owen, or “Little John” as his intimates called him, a skilful deviser of
priest’s-holes and such like hiding-places under stairways or in the
recesses of panellings. No Roman Catholic gentleman’s house was at that
time considered to be complete without some of “Little John’s” darkling
hutches and inconveniently cramped nooks secreted somewhere between
foundation and roof. Truth to tell, however, these supposedly “secret”
places are fairly obvious, and, given a search-party convinced that the
fugitive was somewhere near, they must have been dull-witted fellows who
did not light upon them.
When Worcester Fight ended so badly for “the man Charles Stuart, that
Son of Belial,” as the Republicans were pleased to call Charles II., he
made at once for Boscobel, the place where, only a few days before, the
Earl of Derby had secreted himself. Accompanied by Colonel Carless, he
threw himself upon the assured loyalty of the five Penderel brothers and
their widowed mother, Dame Joan, who then lived here and at ruined
Whiteladies Priory, half a mile away. “Will Jones,” for that was the
name he adopted, could have found no more loyal hearts had he searched
the realm, and the Penderels had already found the transition from
secreting priests to Royalist fugitives an easy one. But Boscobel had
become suspect, and the quarry was now so important that rigorous search
was made, and Charles and Carless, although hid respectively in the
secret recess behind the panelling in the Squire’s room, and in the pit
beneath the cheese-loft during the night, were in daytime for greater
security secreted in the bushy head of a pollard oak growing in a meadow
near the house: the tree afterwards famous as the “Royal Oak.” In that
leafy refuge Charles slept, with his head in the faithful Colonel’s lap,
and beneath them quested the search-party of Cromwell’s dragoons. The
story is well known, how that tree effectually concealed them, and how,
after many wanderings, the King fled the country from the sea shore at
Brighthelmstone.
[Illustration: BOSCOBEL AND THE “ROYAL OAK.”]
The original Royal Oak is gone; hacked to pieces for mementoes in a very
short while after the Restoration, and the youthful oak that stands
solitary in a field does but mark the spot. But the house stands still,
with its old hiding-places, and many are those who come to see; so that
the pile of visitors’ books, all closely filled, is a mighty and a
growing one. Of the “bosco bello,” the Fair Wood that gave the old house
its name, not a trace remains.
Downhill from Ivetsey Bank, the Watling Street presently crosses into
Shropshire, and comes to the village of Weston-under-Lizard—or
“Weston-subter-Liziard” as it was formerly named—a cheerful little
place, clinging like some feudal dependant to the park and Hall, the
seat of the Earl of Bradford. The church and mansion stand adjoining, at
the end of a short drive: in the church the cross-legged effigies of Sir
Hugh and Sir Hamo de Weston, who flourished six or seven hundred years
ago; and in the exquisitely fitted Bradford Chapel memorials of that
family.
Burlington Pool, a reedy lake on the right hand, is now passed, and
Crackley Bank, leading downhill towards another scene of industry and
coal-mining, seen from afar by reason of its smoky skies. Close by, at
the place called Red Hill, the Roman station of _Uxaconium_ was placed.
Before the pits and furnaces of the Lilleshall, Oakengates, and Ketley
coal and iron mines are reached, the long street of St. George’s has to
be passed through. There was a time, not so long since, when this was
merely the hamlet of “Pain’s Lane,” and its local makeshift place of
worship simply “Pain’s Lane Chapel.” All this is changed, and though its
old prosperity has abated, the place now possesses a fine Gothic church
dedicated to St. George, and has changed its name to match. Oakengates
also has seen its best days, for many of the mines are exhausted. In
these latter circumstances, the neat little houses of “Perseverance
Place, 1848,” and others with similarly virtuous titles, look not a
little pathetic. Perseverance, indulged in continually, has stripped the
district of its mineral wealth, and the miners, living like maggots in a
cheese, have eaten their home away. The township, at the very bottom of
a steep descent, is busy, but dirty and slatternly, with a railway
station and level crossing, and huge cinder heaps, likening it to some
domestic dustbin in Brobdingnag. Ascending out of it, Ketley is reached,
and with it the junction of Watling Street with the Holyhead Road.
XXXIV
And now to resume, at Weedon, the modern road. It is a tiring pull up
out of Weedon, on the way to Daventry, and anything that may excuse a
rest is welcome. That excuse is found in the contemplation of a
substantial stone-built farmhouse, with nine windows in a row, half a
mile out of the village, on the right of the road, and fronted at this
day with a pleasant garden. This, now called the “Grange,” was formerly
the “Globe” coaching and posting inn. Beyond it, opposite a group of
Georgian red-brick wayside houses, the old road goes over what used to
be a water-splash in the deep hollow; but Telford’s road proceeds
inflexibly onward. The church in the meads to the right is that of
Dodford, the name of the water-splash aforesaid. As for the derivation
of that name, Fuller, with some hesitancy, gives “‘Dods,’ water-weeds,
commonly called by children ‘cat’s-tails,’ growing thereabouts.”