"Accommodation." She was not a road wagon, but a van driven by five
horses, three leaders abreast, and reaching London in sixteen hours. We
used to start from the "Globe Inn," Oyster Street, Portsmouth, and
finished the journey to London at the "New Inn," Old Change, or at the
"Castle and Falcon," Aldersgate Street. Yes, I took to the road pretty
early. I was only about sixteen or seventeen years of age when I took
charge of the London mail for my father. Father used to ride to Moushill
and back (that's seventy-two miles) every night for fifty years. He drove
the night "Nelson" for thirty-two years. That was a coach with a yellow
body, and about 1822 its name was altered to that of the "Star of
Brunswick." It ran from the "Fountain" and the "Blue Posts," Portsmouth,
to the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street. Its pace was about eight
miles per hour, including changes. We only changed once between Portsmouth
and Godalming, and that was at Petersfield, but the stages were terribly
long, and we afterwards used to get another team at Liphook. The night
coaches to London used to do the distance in about twelve hours, and the
day coaches did it in nine hours; but the mails were ten hours on the
road. The mail-coaches carried four inside and three out, with a "dickey"
seat for the guard, who never forgot to take his sword-case and
blunderbuss, though in my time we never had any trouble with highwaymen,
and I never heard much about them stopping coaches in this neighbourhood.
Of course every now and then a sailor would tumble off and break a leg, a
head, or an arm, but that was only what you might expect. There were
plenty of poachers and smugglers about, but no highwaymen. We did not have
key bugles, as the books often say; the horn served our turn. William
Balchin, who was guard with me as well as with father, was a good hand
with his horn. I was guard for twelve months to the night "Rocket," which
ran to the "Belle Sauvage," then kept by Mr. Nelson. It was established
for the benefit of the people of Portsea, and only ran for six or seven
years. The day "Rocket" was much older, and got a good share of the Isle
of Wight traffic. Both these "Rockets" were white-bodied coaches. Francis
Falconer, who died at Petersfield about 1874, drove the day "Rocket" all
the time it ran. Robert Nicholls was the only coachman that I ever knew to
save money. He was a post-boy with me, and when he died he left a nice
little fortune to each of his four daughters.
"'The "Independent" ran to the "Spread Eagle," and to the "Cross Keys,"
Wood Street. It was horsed by Mr. Andrew Nance as far as Petersfield,
after which the two coachmen, Durham and Parkinson, found horses over the
remaining stages. Yes, I knew old Sam Weller very well indeed. He drove
the "Defiance" from the "George" and the "Fountain" to the Blue Coach
Office, Brighton. The "Defiance" was painted a sort of mottled colour. Sam
was a lame man, with a good-humoured, merry face, fond of a bit of fun,
and always willing for a rubber. His partner was Neale, for whom I used
sometimes to drive. He afterwards became landlord of the "Royal Oak," in
Queen Street, Portsmouth. Do you see that scar, sir? I got that in 1841,
through the breaking of my near hind axle as we came down through
Guildford town. I was then driving the "Accommodation" between Ripley and
Portsmouth. One night we were an hour late in starting. I had the guard on
the box with me, and as we were going pretty hard down the High Street at
Guildford I heard the wheel "scroop." The axle broke, and the next thing I
remember was finding myself in bed at the "Ram" Hotel, where I had lain
without speaking for a week. Whilst I was ill my wife presented me with
twins, so that we had plenty of troubles at once. When I was driving the
"Wanderer," a pair-horse coach, my team bolted with me near the "Seven
Thorns," and on another occasion a dog-cart got in the way of the "Star of
Brunswick," and we capsized, and a lot of mackerel was spilt all over the
road. That was about half-a-mile this side of Horndean. When I was first
acting as post-boy my chaise got overturned, but on the whole I have been
pretty fortunate. Once during a deep snow there was a complete block of
coaches on the road at "Seven Thorns." My father undertook to lead the
way, and he succeeded in opening the road for the rest. My father's name
was James Carter. He was post-boy at the "Royal Anchor" Hotel, Liphook, at
the time that the unknown sailor was murdered at the Devil's Punch Bowl.
In fact, all my people belonged to Liphook. The names of the murderers
were Michael Casey, James Marshall, and Edward Lonegon. They were captured
the same day, in a public-house at Rake Hill, nearly opposite the present
"Flying Bull," where they were offering a blood-stained jacket for sale.
The poor fellow who was murdered was buried in Thursley churchyard.
"'I used to drive the "Tantivy,"--a day and night coach,--which afterwards
ran only by day. We drove from Portsmouth to Farnborough station, then put
the coach on the train, and drove into town from the terminus at Nine
Elms.
"'Of course I remember the old "Coach and Horses," at Hilsea. It was
afterwards burnt down. There was formerly a guard-house and picket at
Hilsea Bridge, where the soldiers' passes were examined. Hilsea Green we
used to reckon the coldest spot between Portsmouth and London. Once some
body-snatchers started from the "Green Posts," at Hilsea, with the
officers in full cry after them, but the rascals had a famous mare, "Peg
Hollis" (oh! she was a good 'un to go!), and got clear off.
"'Yes, I knew Lord Adolphus Fitzclarence well; he was a good friend to me.
Many's the time he has sat beside me on the box, and at the end of the
stage slipped a crown-piece into my hand.'"
XXII
[Sidenote: _BY-WAYS_]
At the "Seven Thorns" Inn the three counties of Sussex, Surrey, and Hants
are supposed to meet; but, like so many of the picturesque legends of
county and parish boundaries that make one house stand in three or four
parishes, this particular legend is altogether unfounded, for the three
counties meet in a dell about two miles southward of the road, in Hammer
Bottom, where once stood a lonely beer-house called the "Sussex Bell."
We will not turn aside to visit the site of the "Sussex Bell," or the
remains of the Hammer Ponds that tell of the old iron-foundries and
furnaces that were wont to make the surrounding hills resound and
despoiled the dense woods of their noblest trees for the smelting of iron
ore. We have no present business so far from the road in a place that has
harboured no notorious evil-doer, nor has ever been the home of any
distinguished man.
But we may well turn aside after passing Cold Ash Hill to explore a
singular relic of monkish days that still exists, built into a
comparatively modern farm-house and forgotten by the world.
Some three miles south of the road, reached by a turning below the "Seven
Thorns" Inn, lies the little-visited village of Lynchmere, a rural parish,
embowered in foliage and picturesquely situated amid hills; and in the
immediate neighbourhood stand the remains of Shulbrede Priory, now chiefly
incorporated with farm-buildings. The place is well worthy a visit, for
the farm-house contains a room, called the Prior's Room, still decorated
with monkish frescoes of a singular kind. These probably date almost as
far back as the foundation of this Priory of Augustinian Canons, in the
time of Henry III., and are unfortunately very much defaced. But
sufficient can be discerned for the grasping of the idea, which seems to
be a representation of the Nativity. The design introduces the
inscription:--_Ecce virgo concipiet et pariet filium; et vocabitur nomen
Jesus_; while a number of birds and animals, rudely drawn and crudely
coloured, appear, with Latin legends issuing from their mouths. Uppermost
stands the cock, as in the act of crowing, while from his beak proceeds
the announcement, "_Christus natus est_." Next follows a duck, from whose
bill issues another label, inscribed "_Quando, quando?_" a query answered
appropriately by a raven, "_In hac nocte_." "_Ubi, ubi?_" asks a cow of a
lamb, which rejoins, bleating "_In Bethlems_."
[Sidenote: _PRIORS AND PORKERS_]
But few other relics of this secluded priory are visible. Some arcading; a
vaulted passage; fragments of Early English mouldings: these are all.
Somewhere underneath the pig-sties, cow-houses, and rick-yards of the farm
rest the forgotten priors and the nameless monks of that old foundation.
Haply this worn slab of stone has covered the remains of some jolly Friar
Tuck or ascetic Augustine; this battered crocket, maybe, belonged to the
tomb of some pious benefactor for whose benefit masses were enjoined to be
said or sung for ever and a day; and I dare swear this obscure stone
trough, filled with hog-wash, at which fat swine are greedily drinking,
was once a coffin. Imperial Caesar's remains had never so foul an insult
offered them.
I lean across the fence and moralize; a most unpardonable waste of time at
this _fin de siecle_, and I regret those old fellows whom Harry the Eighth
in his reforming zeal sent a-packing, to beg their bread from door to
door. I regret them, that is to say, from purely sentimental reasons,
being, all the while, ready to allow the policy and the state-craft that
drove them hence, and willing to acknowledge that the greasy cassocks and
filthy hair-shirts of the ultimate occupants of these cloistral shades
covered a multitude of sins.
I poke the porkers thoughtfully with a stick in the place where their ribs
should be, but they are of such an abbatical plumpness that my ferrule
fails to discover any "osseous structure." (I thank thee, Owen, for that
phrase!) They respond with piercing cries that recall the shrieks and the
yells of a witches' sabbath on the Brocken, as presented before a quailing
Lyceum audience,--and their horrid chorus brings the farmer on the scene.
"Who drives fat oxen should himself be fat," to quote the famous
classical _non sequitur_; and how much more should it apply to him who
fattens pigs to unwieldy masses of unconverted lard and pork! To do
justice to the quotation, he is fleshy and of a full habit.
"Fine creeturs, them," says he. "Aye," say I. "Thirty score apiece, if
they're a pound," he continues. They might be a hundred score for all I
know; but no man likes to acknowledge agricultural ignorance, and so I
agree with him, heartily, and with much appearance of wisdom. "Pooty
creeturs, _I_ say," continues the farmer, smacking a broad-bellied beast,
with white bristles and pink flesh covered with black splotches. That
dreadful creature looks up a moment from the trough, with ringed snout
dripping liberally with hog-wash, and gazes pathetically at me for
acquiescence. "Yes: fine animals," I say, in a non-committal voice.
"Pictures, they are," says their owner decisively. That settles the
matter, and I am off, to seek the road to Liphook.
If the excellence of the great highways of England is remarkable, the
tangled lanes and absolute rusticity of the roads but a stone's throw from
the main routes call no less for remark. Here, just a little way from
Liphook, and in the immediate vicinity of a railway, I might have been in
the deepest wilds of Devon, so meandering were the lanes, so untamed the
country. An old pack-horse trail, still distinct, though unused these many
generations past, wandered along, amid gorse and bracken, and footpaths
led in perplexingly-different directions.
[Sidenote: _A STRANGE RENCOUNTER_]
Amid this profusion of wild life, with the dark foliage of the fir trees,
the lighter leaves of the beech, and the gaily-flowered hedgerows on
either hand, there appeared before me the most incongruous wayfarer: a
Jingle-like figure, tall and spare, with a tightly-buttoned frock-coat,
and a silk hat of another era than this, set well back upon his head--one
who might have wandered here from Piccadilly in the '50's and lost his way
back. I should not have been surprised had he asked news of the Great
Exhibition; of Prince Albert, or the Emperor of the French. However, he
merely said it was a fine day. "Yes, it was," I said; "but could he direct
me to Liphook?" "Liphook?" said he, as though he had never heard the name;
"I'm afraid I can't. I'm a stranger in these parts." And then he walked
away. I believe he was a ghost!
[Illustration: "CONSIDERING CAP."]
XXIII
And now the road brings us to the borders of Hants. It is no mere pose to
assert that every English county has its own especial characteristics, an
unmistakable and easily recognizable individuality: the fact has been so
often noted and commented upon that it is fast becoming a truism. But of a
county of the size of Hampshire, which ranks eighth in point of size among
the forty English divisions, it would be rash to generalize too widely.
One is apt to sum up this county as merely a slightly more gracious, and
generous variant of the forbidding downs and uplands of Wiltshire, but,
although quite three-quarters of the area of Hants is poor, waterless, and
inhospitable, yet there are fertile corners, nooks, and valleys, covered
with ancient alluvial soil, that yield nothing to any other part of
England.
Still, Fuller is a little more than just to Hampshire when he calls it "a
happy countrey in the foure elements, if culinary _fire_ in courtesie may
pass for one, with plenty of the best wood for the fuel thereof; most pure
and piercing the _aire_ of this shyre; and none in England hath more
plenty of clear and fresh rivulets of troutful _water_, not to speak of
the friendly sea, conveniently distanced from London. As for the _earth_,"
he continues, "it is both fair and fruitful, and may pass for an expedient
betwixt pleasure and profit, where by mutual consent they are moderately
accommodated."
[Sidenote: _HANTS_]
If old Fuller could revisit the scenes to which this description belongs,
he would indeed find profit but moderately accommodated, if at all; for as
the greater proportion of the soil of Hampshire has always been
notoriously poor, so now the farming of it has decayed from the moderately
profitable stage to a condition in which the tenant farmer sits down in
despair, and the landlord has to meet the changed conditions of the times
with heavier reductions of rents than his contemporaries of more fertile
counties are called upon to make. And even so, and despite the fifteen and
twenty-five per cent. deductions that are constantly being made,
innumerable farms have gone, or are going, out of cultivation in
Hampshire, whose bare chalk downs and unkindly levels of sand are growing
lonelier and more desolate year by year.
But a grateful and profitable feature of Hampshire are the water-meadows
that border the fishful streams of the Itchen, the Test, and the Avon.
They merit all the commendation that Fuller gives them, and more; but, so
far as the Portsmouth Road is concerned, Hampshire exhibits its most
barren, ill-watered, and flinty aspects; from the point where it enters
the county, near Liphook, past the chalky excrescence of Butser Hill,
through the bare and barren downs of Chalton, to Portsmouth itself.
Cobbett has not very much to say in praise of Hampshire soil, but he found
a considerable deal of prosperity within its bounds in his day, when
agricultural folk still delved, and rural housewives still kept house in
modest fashion. Still! Yes, but already modern luxury and progress had
appeared to leaven the homely life of the villager, when that indignant
political and social censor was riding about the country and addressing
the farmers on the State of Politics, the Price of Wheat, and the
advantages of American Stoves.
Cobbett, writing in 1825, was particularly severe upon the farmers of his
time, who were changing from the race he had known who sat with their
carters and labourers at table; who, with their families, dined at the
same board off fat bacon and boiled cabbage as a matter of course. "When
the old farm-houses are down," he says, "(and down they must come in
time), what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now
erected are mere painted shells, with a mistress within who is so stuck-up
in a place she calls the _parlour_" (note, by the way, the withering irony
of Cobbett's italics), "with, if she have children, the 'young ladies and
gentlemen' about her; some showy chairs and a sofa (a _sofa_ by all
means); half-a-dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up; some swinging
bookshelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner brought in by a
girl that is perhaps better 'educated' than she; two or three nick-nacks
to eat instead of a piece of bacon and a pudding; the house too neat for a
dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to come into; and everything proclaiming
to every sensible beholder that there is here a constant anxiety to make a
_show_ not warranted by the reality. The children (which is the worst part
of it) are all too clever to _work_; they are all to be _gentlefolks_. Go
to plough! Good God! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough! They become
_clerks_, or some skimmy-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty
_work_ as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What
a mass of materials for proclaiming that general and _dreadful convulsion_
that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing and
enslaving and starving system to atoms!"
One only wonders, after reading all this, what Cobbett would have said at
this time, when things have advanced another stage towards the millennium;
when nick-nackery is abundant in almost every farm-house; when every other
farmer's wife has her drawing-room ("parlour," by the way, being vulgar
and American), and every farmer's daughter reads,--not tracts, my friend
Cobbett,--but novelettes of the pseudo-Society brand.
Hampshire cottages remain practically the same, only the dear, delightful
old thatches are gone that afforded pasturage for all sorts of parasitic
plants and mosses; harboured earwigs and other insects too numerous to
mention, and divided the artist's admiration equally with the rich red
tiling of the more pretentious houses.
[Sidenote: _HAMPSHIRE ARCHITECTURE_]
Hampshire cottage architecture is peculiarly characteristic of the county.
The wayside villages and the scattered hamlets that nestle between the
folds of its chalky hills are made up of cottages built with chalk rubble,
or with black flints and red brick mixed. The flints being readily
obtained, they form by far the greater portion of Hampshire walls; the red
brick being used for dressings and for binding the long, flinty expanses
together, or occupying the place taken by stone quoins, in counties where
building-stone is freely found. Thus, the homely architecture of the
greater part of Hants is mean and uninteresting, for black flint is not
beautiful and has never been used with good effect in modern times,
although in ancient days the mediaeval builders and architects of East
Anglia--notably in Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds--contrived some remarkably
effective work in this unpromising material. Some old work in the larger
Hampshire towns, notably at Hyde Abbey, Winchester, shows an effective use
of black flint in squares alternating with squared stone,--a method known
as diaper work,--but the elaborate flint panelling of Norfolk and Suffolk
is unknown in Hampshire.
And this brings me to Liphook, a roadside village perhaps originally
sprung from the near neighbourhood of the old deer-forest of Woolmer, when
half-forgotten Saxon and Norman kings and queens, earls and thanes, hunted
here and made the echoes resound with the winding of their horns--"made
the welkin ring," in fact, as the fine romantic writers of some
generations ago said, in that free and fearless way which is, alas! so
discredited now-a-days. And this is so much more a pity, because along
this old road, upon whose every side the hallooing and the rumour of the
hunting-field were wont to be heard so often and so loudly, one could have
worked in that phrase about "the welkin" with such fine effect, had it not
been altogether so battered and worn-out a literary _cliche_. This it is
to be born a hundred years later than Sir Walter Scott!
[Sidenote: _FOREST FIRES_]
The Royal Forest of Woolmer lies partly in this parish. It is a tract of
land about seven miles in length by two and a half in breadth, running
nearly north and south. In the days of William and Mary the punishments of
whipping and confinement in a house of correction were awarded to all them
that should "burn on any waste land, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any
grig, ling, heath, and furze, goss or fern"; yet in this forest, about
March or April, according to the dryness of the season, such vast
heath-fires were lighted up that they frequently became quite
unmanageable, and burnt the hedges, woods, and coppices for miles around.
These burnings were defended on the plea that when the old and coarse
coating of heath was consumed, young and tender growths would spring up
and afford excellent browsing for cattle; but where the furze is very
large and old, the fire, penetrating to the very roots, burns the ground
itself; so that when an old common or ancient underwoods are burnt,
nothing is to be seen for hundreds of acres but smother and desolation,
the whole extent of the clearance looking like the cinders of an active
volcano.
One of these great fires broke out on May 22, 1881, and consumed over 670
acres. It was originated by the keepers of the Aldershot Game Preserving
Association, for the purpose of obtaining a belt of burnt land around the
Forest, to prevent the straying of the pheasants; but the fire, fanned by
a wind, grew entirely out of hand and quite uncontrollable. Great damage
was occasioned by this outbreak, and the Earl of Selborne's plantations
were destroyed, together with those of the vicar, whose very house and
stabling had a narrow escape. The Forest was the picture of desolation for
a long time afterwards. The oaks were either dead or dying, and the whole
district had an inexpressibly blasted and weird appearance.
"I remember," says Gilbert White, of a fire that occurred in his time,
"that a gentleman who lives beyond Andover, coming to my house, when he
got on the downs between that and Winchester, at twenty-five miles
distance, was surprised with much smoke, and a hot smell of fire, and
concluded that Alresford was in flames, but when he came to that town, he
then had apprehensions for the next village, and so on to the end of his
journey."
When the forest was enclosed, in 1858, about one thousand acres were
allotted to the Crown.
XXIV
[Sidenote: _LOCAL CELEBRITIES_]
Liphook is the centre of a tract of country thickly settled with "men of
light and leading." From Hindhead and Haslemere on one side, to Rake and
Petersfield on the other, are the country homes of men well known to fame.
Away towards Haslemere, on the breezy heights of Blackdown, stands the
picturesque modern house of Aldworth, the home, in his later years, of
Tennyson; and on the very ridge of Hindhead is the obtrusive and still
more modern house built by the late Professor Tyndall, with his hideous
screens of turf and woodwork, set up by the Professor with the object of
shielding his privacy from the curious gaze of the vulgar herd. Near by is
a house lately built by Mr. Grant Allen, while Professor Williamson, the
well-known professor of chemistry, resides close at hand, and conducts
experiments with chemical fertilizers over some forty acres of wilderness
and common land, which his care and long-enduring patience have at last
made to "blossom like the rose." At Blackmoor, towards Selborne, Sir
Roundell Palmer, Q.C., afterwards Lord Chancellor and Earl of Selborne
("the mildest-mannered man that ever helped to pass a Reform Bill or
disestablish a Church"), has created a fine estate out of a waste of
furze-bushes and heather; while he had for many years a neighbour at
Bramshott in that eminent lawyer, Sir William Erle, who died at the Grange
in 1880. Professor Bell, a natural historian after Gilbert White's own
heart, and the editor of a scholarly edition of the "Natural History of
Selborne," lived for many years at that village, in White's old home, the
Wakes; and at Hollycombe, down the road, Sir John Hawkshaw, the well-known
engineer and designer of the Victoria Embankment, had a beautiful demesne.
Artists in plenty, including Vicat Cole, R.A., Mr. Birket Foster, and Mr.
J. S. Hodgson, have delighted to make their home where these three
counties of Sussex, Surrey, and Hampshire meet; and among literary men,
the names of G. P. R. James and of Anthony Trollope occur. Some years ago,
one who was familiar with the country-side said, while standing on the
tower of Milland new church:--"Within a circle of twelve miles from here
there are more brains than within any other country district in England,"
and if we read _quality_ for quantity, I think he was right.
[Sidenote: _THE 'ROYAL ANCHOR'_]
But if the neighbourhood of Liphook is the favoured home of so many
distinguished men of our own time, the annals of that famous old hostelry,
the "Royal Anchor," in Liphook village, can boast quite a concourse of
royal visitors, from the first dawn of its history until the childhood of
Queen Victoria; while as for historic people of less degree (although very
great folk indeed in their own way), why, they are to be counted in
battalions. In fact, had I time to write it, and you sufficient patience
to read, I might readily produce a big book of bigwigs who, posting, or
travelling by stage or mail to Portsmouth, have slept over-night under
this hospitable roof. As for the royalties, one scarce knows where to
begin: indeed, almost every English sovereign within the era of history
has had occasion to travel to Portsmouth, and most of them appear to have
been lodged at the "Anchor," as it was called before Mr. Peake very
rightly, considering the distinguished history of his house, affixed the
"Royal" to his old sign.