for Dunchurch, making for the “Lion” inn, the head-quarters of the
pretended hunting-party, where the young and handsome Sir Everard Digby
was in expectation of hearing other news than that which burst upon him
when the exhausted and dispirited band drew rein before the old gabled
house in the stormy night. The story of their further flight, of how
Catesby and Percy died together in the fighting at Holbeach House, does
not concern us here, but the old house does. An inn no longer, it still
stands, as a farmhouse, in midst of Dunchurch village: a long, low,
gabled building, with casement windows and timbered and plastered front;
low-ceiled and heavily raftered rooms within. In the rear, beyond the
farm-yard, may even yet be seen the remains of a moat, enclosing a
wooded patch of ground whose story is vague and formless: relics, these,
of times much more ancient than those of the Gunpowder Plot. The “Lion”
was an old “pack-horse” inn for many generations afterwards.
Dunchurch, in the old coaching days, was a place of many and good inns:
all of them, however, excelled by the “Dun Cow,” almost the sole
remaining member of the herd of “White Lions,” “Red Lions,” “Blue
Boars,” “Green Men,” and such-like zoological curiosities that once
thronged it. There was an excellent reason for such wealth of
accommodation, for the village was situated not only on the Holyhead
Road, but at the intersection of it by the Oxford and Leicester Road,
along which plied a goodly throng of traffic. On that road lies Rugby,
three miles away, and along it went, among other forgotten conveyances,
the “Regulator”—“young gents calls it the ‘Pig and Whistle,’” remarked
the guard of the coach that conveyed young Tom Brown from London to
Dunchurch.
Rugby and its famous school have made a vast difference to this village,
now postally “Dunchurch, near Rugby,” but formerly the post-town whence
the once insignificant village of Rugby—Rugby-under-Dunchurch was
served.
The “Dun Cow,” survivor and representative of the jolly days of old,
takes its name from the mythical monster of a cow slain, according to
confused and contradictory legends, upon Dunsmore by the almost equally
mythical Guy of Warwick.
[Illustration: DUNCHURCH.]
Steadfastly regarding the old inn, and with its back turned upon the
church, the white marble effigy of “the Right Honble. Lord John Douglas
Montagu Douglas Scott” cuts a ludicrous figure in the centre of the
village. The work of an Associate of the Royal Academy, it simply serves
to point to what depths the art of sculpture had descended in the early
Sixties, when it was wrought. The inscription states that Lord Douglas
Scott died in 1860, and that the statue “was erected by his tenantry in
affectionate memory of him.” The clothes worn at that period give, of
course, their own element of grotesqueness to the statue; but the heavy
mass of fringed drapery that Lord John is represented to be carrying
under his arm has occasioned the derisive query, “Who stole the
altar-cloth?”
[Illustration: LORD JOHN SCOTT’S STATUE.]
Dunchurch, besides being a sweetly pretty place, rejoices in a number of
minor curiosities. The beautiful church has one, in the eccentric
monument of Thomas Newcombe, King’s Printer in the reigns of Charles
II., James II., and William III. It is in the shape of folding-doors of
white marble. In the churchyard, too, he who searches in the right place
will discover the epitaph of Daniel Goode, who died in 1751, “A Ged year
25.” The advice given is better than the jingle to which it is set:—
To all young men
That me survive
Who dyed at less
Than twenty-five,
I do this Good
Advice declare:
That they live in
God’s faith and fear.
Other relics are grouped well in sight of one another. The battered
village cross, for instance, with a little marble slab fixed on its
shaft, bearing the arms of that Duchess of Buccleuch, who in 1810
restored it; and the village “cage,” or lock-up, under a spreading elm,
with the stocks close adjoining, for the accommodation or discomfort of
two. The lock-up was for the detention of such malefactors as might
trouble Dunchurch—the stocks for misdemeanants only. An Act of 1606
imposed six hours of the stocks and a fine of five shillings for
drunkenness; and from that time forward and until the opening years of
the nineteenth century this peculiar form of punishment was common
throughout England. His personal popularity, or the want of it, made all
the difference between misery and comparative comfort to the
misdemeanant undergoing six hours in the stocks. The jolly toper,
overcome in his cups and sent to penance by some Puritan maw-worm of a
justice, had both the moral and bodily support of his boon companions,
and left durance probably more drunken than he had been on the occasion
that led to his conviction: the sturdy vagrant, smiter, rapscallion, or
casual rogue who happened to be in ill-odour with the village endured
bitter things. Jibes, stones, cabbage-stalks, ancient eggs, and dead
dogs and cats, deceased weeks before, were hurled at the wretch, who was
lucky if he had not received severe personal injuries before his time
was up, and the beadle or the parish constable came to release him.
XXXIX
It would be difficult nowadays to discover any one to agree with
Pennant, the antiquary, who in 1782 could find it possible to write of
the superbly wooded road across Dunsmore Heath as a “tedious avenue of
elms and firs.” The adjective is altogether indefensible. Six miles of
smooth and level highway, bordered here by noble pines, and there by
equally noble elms, invite the traveller to linger by the roadside from
Dunchurch to Ryton-on-Dunsmore. It is a stretch of country not only
beautiful but interesting, alike for its history and traditions. The
Heath, long since enclosed and under cultivation, but once the haunt of
fabled monsters, and, at a later period, of desperate highwaymen, is a
level tract of land dotted with villages that all add to their names the
title of “upon-Dunsmore,” as a kind of terrific dignity. Through the
midst of this sometime wilderness goes the high-road, beautiful always,
but singularly lovely in the eyes of the traveller who, advancing in a
north-westerly direction, sees the setting sun glaring redly between the
wizard arms of the pines. Many of those exquisite trees are of great
age. The avenue, in fact—the Ong Avenue, as it was originally called—was
planted in 1740, by John, second Duke of Montague. Some of the firs have
decayed, but happily their places will be taken in due course by the
saplings planted of late years. The elms are, most of them, in worse
case, and are being generally cut down to half their height by cautious
road surveyors. The elm, that, without warning, rots at the heart and
collapses in a moment, is the most treacherous of trees; and, some day,
those that are left here will suddenly fall and be the death of the
unhappy cyclist, farmer, or tramp who happens to be passing at the time.
[Illustration: DUNSMORE AVENUE.]
It was here, in 1686, that Jonathan Simpson robbed Lord Delamere of 350
guineas, and “innumerable drovers, pedlars, and market-people,” all the
way to Barnet. Jonathan was executed the followed September, aged
thirty-two.
Two famous posting-houses once stood beside this lonely road: the “Blue
Boar” and the “Black Dog.” Both have retired into private life. The old
“Blue Boar,” still giving the name of “Blue Boar Corner” to the
cross-roads, two miles out from Dunchurch, is a square building of
white-painted brick, and stands on the left hand, with a garden where
the coach-drive used to be. It must have been especially welcome to
travellers in the dreadful snowstorm of December, 1836, when no fewer
than seventeen coaches were snowed up on the Heath, near a spot named,
appropriately enough, “Cold Comfort.”
This also was the “lonely spot, with trees on either side for six
miles,” where the “Eclipse” coach, on its way from Birmingham to London,
was overpowered by convicts on a day in November, 1820. It seems that,
on the day before this occurrence, the deputy-governor of Chester Gaol
and two warders, in charge of twelve convicts, chained and locked
together in twos by padlocks, had set out from Birkenhead for London by
the “Albion” coach, and that during the confusion of an accident at
Walsall, when the deputy-governor was killed and the coachman and one of
the warders seriously injured, one of the prisoners, more enterprising
than his fellows, managed to steal the master-key from the dead
official’s body, and, with his fellows, plotted an escape from the long
journey to Botany Bay. Brought from Walsall to Birmingham by another
coach, they were lodged for the night in Moor Street prison, and the
following morning, still chained together, placed on the “Eclipse” coach
for London, in charge of the remaining warder and another from
Birmingham. This consignment of gaolbirds, together with their
guardians, formed the sole passengers by the “Eclipse.” In the “lonely
spot” aforesaid four of the convicts, having unlocked their fetters,
rose suddenly up, seized the coachman and guard, and stopped the coach,
while others overpowered their custodians. They explained that they had
no wish to harm any one, but were determined at all costs to make a dash
for liberty; and, securing coachman, guard, and the bewildered warders
with ropes and straps, unharnessed the horses, and, mounting them,
galloped across country. Coming upon a roadside blacksmith’s forge, they
compelled the smith to unloose the remaining portion of their fetters,
and then disappeared. All are said to have afterwards been recaptured,
with the exception of two “gentlemen” forgers, who were never again
heard of.
A grossly incorrect account of this happening is to be found in the
pages of Colonel Birch-Reynardson’s _Down the Road_. The coachman and
guard of the “Eclipse” were Robert Hassall and Peck. Hassall ended his
days as a hopeless lunatic. His affliction was caused by witnessing the
sudden death of his colleague and friend at Coventry. While the horses
were being changed at that city, Peck busied himself on the roof of the
coach, in unstrapping some luggage. The strap broke, and the unfortunate
man fell backwards on to the pavement, dashing his skull to pieces.
Hassall, who was seated on the box, fainted, and, on regaining
consciousness, became a raving lunatic.
A curious feature of the milestones across Dunsmore, a feature not met
with elsewhere, is their being cut into the shape of two or more steps,
resembling “louping-on” stones, or “upping-blocks,” for the convenience
of horsemen.
XL
It is here, five miles and a half from Dunchurch, that the famous
“Knightlow Cross” stands. Just past a group of cottages, and an inn
called Frog Hall, that mark the neighbourhood of Stretton-upon-Dunsmore,
and where Knightlow Hill begins to tip downwards, this mysterious relic
is found, in a meadow. The so-called “Knightlow Cross” is a square block
of red sandstone, standing on the summit of a prehistoric grassy
tumulus. It measures thirty inches square, and has a deep square cavity
sunk in it. From its appearance, the stone may once have been the socket
of a wayside or boundary cross, possibly marking the limits of the
parish of Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, extending thus far. Here, from time
immemorial, on the morning of St. Martin’s Day, November 11th, has been
collected the “wroth-money” annually due to the Lord of the Manor of
Knightlow Hundred: a district comprising some twenty-eight villages.
These tributary communities pay sums ranging from one penny to two
shillings and threepence-halfpenny each, with the exception of Ryton,
which pays nothing. The whole amounts to nine shillings and
threepence-halfpenny, the forfeit for non-payment in each case being
either one pound for every penny not forthcoming, or “a white bull with
pink nose and ears.” This tribute is said to be paid for the privilege
of using certain roads, but it probably was originally “rother money,”
or fees payable in very ancient days to the Lord of Manor for the
privilege of grazing cattle and swine in the great forests that then
overspread the district, and for having all such animals officially
branded by the Lord’s verderer; strange and unmarked beasts being liable
to confiscation.
[Illustration: KNIGHTLOW CROSS.]
At the beginning of last century the “Wroth Money” custom was
discontinued, but revived after some years. The Duke of Buccleuch, the
present Lord of the Manor, upholds what the villagers call “the old
charter”; and still with every recurring Martinmas, at the shivery hour
of sunrise, the Steward of the Manor attends and duly checks the coins
thrown into the hollow by the representatives of the subject parishes.
The tribute, and perhaps a good deal more, is expended in drinks of rum
and milk for the party, and breakfast at the “Oak,” at Stretton. The
“initiation of the colts” is a humorous contribution levied upon those
who have never before been present.
Of the four fir-trees that once guarded the tumulus, locally supposed to
mark the spot where four knights were buried, only one now remains;
sycamore saplings have taken the places of the others.
Through Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, and past pretty Willenhall, with the
Warwickshire Avon crossing under the road and seven tall poplars
fringing it, Coventry is reached, over Whitley Common, once a lonely
spot, horrific by reason of being Coventry’s place of execution. Old
maps give the picture of a structure like a football goal at this point,
ominously permanent, and labelled “Gallows.” It was not until shortly
after 1831, when Mary Anne Higgins was hanged here for poisoning her
uncle, that “Whitley Common” lost its old notoriety. Even so, the
present directions to the stranger enquiring the way into Coventry are
scarcely cheerful, the cemetery being the guiding landmark. Beyond that
evidence of the populous nature of Coventry, commence the outskirts of
that city; the road still with a kind of a furtive back door approach,
with many twists and turns and narrow passes through picturesque slums
as far as the very centre of the place. The entrance from London, in
fact, remains the most difficult and crooked of any town all the way to
Holyhead, and this although it stands as an improvement upon what had
been before 1827, when Telford cut a new length of road here. The only
good entrance to Coventry is from the railway station and along Hertford
Street, an improvement made in 1812 in place of Greyfriars Lane; a
steep, narrow, and cobble-stoned way that was once the only road in that
direction.
Coventry’s lanes possessing every possible disability and inconvenience
from the coachman’s point of view, it was, when the question of
reforming the Holyhead Road was being debated, seriously proposed that a
new route should be adopted, avoiding the city altogether. The
proposition failed, and resulted in a compromise that did little real
good, even though it cost £11,000. As an indignant writer of that period
remarks: “Individual interest was allowed to have its weight, and the
traveller is still jolted through the long and narrow streets, uttering
imprecations at every yard of his progress.” It is a thrilling picture
thus presented to the imagination, the traveller cursing as he goes, and
recalls Swift’s proposition for a Swearers’ Bank, enriched by funded
damns. If he could have estimated a good income from the number of good,
hearty oaths uttered in one day at a little Connaught fair, riches
surely beyond the dreams of avarice would have accrued to a branch of
the Bank at Coventry.
These “private interests” were, of course. those of the innkeepers and
the tradesmen, and they secured the continuance of the old route into
the city, while permitting the not so urgent alteration of the exit
toward Birmingham, where no trade would be disturbed by making what is
now the so-called “Holyhead Road,” and deserting the “Old Allesley
Road.”
The maze of Much Park Street, Earl Street, and High Street, brings one
to the centre of Coventry at the intersection of that last-named
thoroughfare with Hertford Street, Broadgate, and Smithford Street, and
directly opposite the “King’s Head,” once a famous old coaching inn, but
rebuilt these later years. The great Duke of Wellington breakfasted in
the old house, November 28th, 1823, on returning from a shooting party
at Beaudesert, the Staffordshire seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, with
whom he had been at shooting parties of a very different character, in
the Peninsula and at Waterloo.
XLI
One sees the city perhaps to best advantage from the Warwick road, or
from the rising ground at Stivichall, close by. There below lies
Coventry, the famous trinity whence comes the familiar name of the City
of the Three Spires, silhouetted against the calm evening sky. The view
recalls that eloquent passage where Ruskin, speaking with enthusiasm of
the old coaching age that he had known, paints the joy of the traveller
who from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the
causeway, saw for the first time the towers of some famed city, faint in
the rays of sunset, and came to his appointed inn after “hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in
the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent.”
[Illustration: THE THREE SPIRES.]
Those three spires still advise the stranger, to whose ears by some
strange chance the fame of ancient Coventry has not come, that he is
indeed about to enter, not merely the great home of the cycle-making
industry, but a city that has for centuries been famous for its
religious houses, and was indeed a place notable in this wise before
ever the Battle of Hastings was fought, to bring England under a Norman
domination. Its very name, whence the present form has been evolved, is
held by some to have been originally “Conventre,” or Convent Town, and
it came in after years to own, not three, but seven spires. The other
four went down in the days of spoliation that came in with Harry VIII.
Earl Leofric, the pious founder of the original Greyfriars monastery
around whose religious buildings secular Coventry first arose, must have
been a hard man, if legends tell truth, for his grinding taxation
aroused the pity of his Countess, the immortal Godiva. Those must have
been no slight hardships that could have earned the compassion of a
Saxon gentlewoman, whose times and training alike could only have made
her look upon the miseries of the lower orders as incidental to their
lot. They were chiefly churls; men and women of bondage, and mere
chattels, who had, it is true the accidental advantages of speech and a
modicum of understanding; but, for the rest, were of no account.
Tennyson has “shaped the city’s ancient legend” into verse, and reveals
the circumstances that led to his doing so, in the opening lines:—
I waited for the train at Coventry;
I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge.
Waiting for a railway train is so unpromising a prelude to a mediæval
legend that at the first blush a processional “train” is understood, and
certainly a practical man would wait on the platform, rather than the
bridge, for the train to London or Birmingham. But Tennyson actually
_did_ allude to the railway, and if he shaped the legend while he
waited, the train must have been very late, for the poem is a long one.
These unpromising circumstances perhaps account for its unequal merit,
and for the figure of fun that Leofric, “the grim Earl,” is
unintentionally made to represent, with “his beard a foot before him and
his hair a yard behind.” It is a tripping music-hall line, and the words
those of a comic song. Not even a Duke—nay, nor a King—in these days of
vulgar boys and popular songs, could dare defy the current prejudice in
favour of a close crop, and so the Tennysonian Leofric suffers
accordingly.
Leofric, so says the ancient legend, consented to remove the tax if his
Countess would ride unclothed through the streets of Coventry. This, as
he thought it a thing impossible for her to do, was his grimly humorous
way of refusing to satisfy her compassionate pleadings. But she took him
at his word, and thus, “clothed on with chastity,” rode the length of
the town, her hair, we are told, in competition with Leofric’s own
yard-length, falling about her in golden masses, shielding her person
from the shameless sun.
Coventry that day was a city of the dead. None stirred, or might stir,
out of doors while the pious Godiva rode her enfranchising pilgrimage,
and all faces were turned from curtained and shuttered windows. All,
that is to say, save one. A graceless tailor, whose name has been handed
down to us as “Peeping Tom,” looked out from a hole he had bored in a
shutter, and we are asked to believe that he was blinded by the wrath of
Heaven for his presumption. “The story of Peeping Tom is well known,”
says Wigstead, writing in 1797; adding, “This effigy is now to be seen
next door to the ‘King’s Head’ inn, said to be the very house from
whence he attempted to gratify his curiosity.” Peeping Tom, in fact, is
a personage whom Coventry will not willingly resign to oblivion.
Representations of that “low churl, compact of thankless earth,” have
been numerous in the city. Not so long since there were three, all
spying from their several positions down upon the streets, and certainly
the one Wigstead mentions is still in evidence, not now “next door” to
the “King’s Head,” but built into a blank window of that rebuilt
hostelry. If tailors dressed thus in Saxon days, they must have been
gorgeous persons. But the effigy, looking like that of an Admiral from
some comic opera, is not older than a century and a half, and is perhaps
a portion of a figure carried in the Godiva processions that at
intervals have paraded Coventry’s streets for many years past. They do
so now, but whether the obvious wig and the pink silk tights of the
music-hall woman, representing Godiva, commend themselves as realising
the old legend, is a matter of individual taste.
[Illustration: PEEPING TOM.]
To tell Coventry’s long story is not the purport of these pages. Much of
it is inseparable from the history of England. History in that more
spacious sort was making when, in the reign of Richard II., the Dukes of
Hereford and Norfolk fought their duel on Gosford Green, in 1398.
Richard banished both: Norfolk for life and Hereford for ten years; but
Hereford was back within a year and proclaimed King, and Richard deposed
and murdered in the dungeons of Pontefract.
A hundred years later, Coventry’s beautiful hospitals and the noble St.
Mary’s Hall, the home of the great trading guilds, began to rise. They
remain, in greater or less preservation, until the present time; and
perhaps there is nothing in the kingdom to surpass the exquisite beauty
of Ford’s Hospital—an almshouse built in 1529, whose tiny courtyard of
traceried woodwork should for its delicacy be under the protection of a
glass case. Six years after Ford’s beautiful almshouse was built, the
dissolution of the monasteries took place throughout the land; and
Coventry, fostered by the great religious houses of the Whitefriars and
the Greyfriars in its midst, shared in the ruin that befel them. Its
population fell from 15,000 to 3,000 in a few years. Yet it was in this
melancholy period that the great “Coventry Cross” arose. It was,
however, not a building erected by the city, but the gift of one of its
sons, who could find no other way of employing his superfluous wealth.
It rose in all the majesty of carved pinnacles, tabernacled statuary,
and gilded bannerets, in the market-place of Cross Cheaping: a sight to
dazzle the eyes of all who beheld it. The Cross was repaired and
re-gilded in 1669; but from that time, although the city was prosperous
again, it fell into decay and was removed in 1771.
[Illustration: FORD’S HOSPITAL.]