been the Roman station of _Ad Pontes_, and has the best of it, according
to the views of the foremost authorities. ‘At the Bridges’ would
doubtless have been an excellently descriptive name for either place, in
view of the number of streams at both, and the bridges necessary to
cross them; but the very name of Staines should of itself be almost
sufficient to prove the Roman origin of the place, even if the Roman
remains found in and about it were not considered conclusive evidence.
There are those who derive ‘Staines’ from the ancient stone still
standing on the north bank of the Thames, above the bridge, marking the
historic boundary up-stream of the jurisdiction exercised over the river
by the City of London; but there can be no doubt of its real origin in
the paved Roman highway, a branch of the Akeman Street, on which this
former military station of _Ad Pontes_ stood. The stones of the old road
yet remained when the Saxons overran the country, and it was named ‘the
Stones’ by that people, from the fact of being on a paved highway. The
very many places in this county with the prefixes, Stain, Stone, Stan,
Street, Streat, and Stret, all, or nearly all, originate in the paved
Roman roads (or ‘streets’) and fords; and there is little to support
another theory, that the name of Staines came from a Roman _milliarium_,
or milestone, which may or may not have stood somewhere here on the
road.
[Sidenote: _STAINES STONE_]
The stone column, very like a Roman altar, standing on three steps and a
square panelled plinth, and placed in a meadow on the north bank of the
river, is known variously as ‘Staines Stone,’ and ‘London Stone.’ It
marks the place where the upper and lower Thames meet; is the boundary
line of Middlesex and Buckinghamshire; and is also the boundary mark of
the Metropolitan Police District. Besides these manifold and important
offices, it also delimits the western boundary of the area comprised
within the old London Coal and Wine Duties Acts, by which a tax, similar
to the _octroi_ still in force at the outskirts of many Continental
towns, was levied on all coals, coke, and cinders, and all wines,
entering London. Renewed from time to time, the imposts were finally
abolished in 1889, but the old posts with cast-iron inscriptions
detailing the number and date of the several Acts of Parliament under
which these dues were levied, are still to be found beside the roads,
rivers, and canals around London.
Much weather-worn and dilapidated, ‘London Stone’ still retains long
inscriptions giving the names of the Lord Mayors who have officially
visited the spot as _ex-officio_ chairmen of the Thames Conservancy;--
Conservators of Thames from mead to mead,
Great guardians of small sprites that swim the flood,
Warders of London Stone,
as Tom Hood mock-heroically sings.
Above all is the deeply cut aspiration, ‘God Preserve the City of
London, A.D. 1280.’ The pious prayer has been answered, and six hundred
and twenty years later the City has been, like David, delivered out of
the hands of the spoiler and from the enemies that compassed it round
about; by which Royal Commissions and the London County Council may be
understood.
[Illustration: THE STAINES STONE.]
[Sidenote: _AD PONTES_]
If the Roman legionaries could return to _Ad Pontes_ and see Staines
Bridge and the hideous iron girder bridge by which the London and
South-Western Railway crosses the Thames they would be genuinely
astonished. The first-named, which is the stone bridge built by Rennie
in 1832, carries the Exeter Road over the river, and is of a severe
classic aspect which might find favour with the resurrected Romans; but
what _could_ they think of the other?
We may see an additional importance in this situation of _Ad Pontes_ in
the fact that between Staines Bridge and London Bridge there was
anciently no other passage across the river, save by the hazardous
expedient of fording it at certain points. The only way to the West of
England in mediæval times, it was then of wood, and zealously kept in
repair by the grant of trees from the Royal Forest of Windsor and by the
_pontage_, or bridge toll levied from passengers. Still, it was often
broken down by floods. The poet Gay, in his _Journey to Exeter_, says,
passing Hounslow:--
Thence, o’er wide shrubby heaths, and furrowed lanes,
We come, where Thames divides the meads of Staines.
We ferried o’er; for late the Winter’s flood
Shook her frail bridge, and tore her piles of wood.
That would probably have been about the year 1720. In 1791 an Act of
Parliament authorised the building of a new bridge, and accordingly a
stone structure was begun, and eventually opened in 1797. This had to be
demolished, almost immediately, owing to a failure of one of its piers,
and an iron bridge was built in its stead, presently to meet with much
the same fate. This, then, gave place to the existing bridge.
The ‘Vine Inn,’ which once stood by the bridge and was a welcome sight
to travellers, has disappeared, together with most of the old hostelries
that once rendered Staines a town of inns. Gone, too, is the ‘Bush,’
and others, although not demolished, have either retired into private
life, or are disguised as commonplace shops. The ‘Angel’ still remains,
but not the ‘Blue Boar,’ kept, according to Dean Swift, by the
quarrelsome couple, Phyllis and John. Phyllis had run away from home on
her wedding morn with John, who was her father’s groom, and a
good-for-naught. At the inn they were installed at last, John as the
drunken landlord, Phyllis as the kind landlady:--
They keep at Staines the Old Blue Boar,
Are cat and dog--
and other things unfitted for ears polite.
The church is without interest, but there lies in its churchyard, among
the other saints and sinners, Lady Letitia Lade, the foul-mouthed
cast-off _chère amie_ of the Prince Regent, who married her off to John
Lade, his coachman, whom he knighted for his complaisance.
XIV
[Sidenote: _RUNEMEDE_]
Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to Egham, once devoted
almost wholly to the coaching interest, then the scene of suburban
race-meetings, and now that those blackguardly orgies have been
suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb--dusty, uninteresting. The old
church has been modernised, and the old coaching inns either mere
beer-shops or else improved away altogether. The last one to remain in
its old form--the ‘Catherine Wheel’--has recently lost all its old
roadside character, and has become very much up-to-date.
Here we are upon the borders of Windsor Great Park, and a road turning
off to the right hand leads beside the Thames to Old Windsor, past
Cooper’s Hill and within sight of Runemede and Magna Charta island,
where the ‘Palladium of our English liberties’ was wrung from the
unwilling King John. A public reference to the ‘Palladium’ used
unfailingly to ‘bring down the house,’ but it has been left to the
present generation to view the very spot where it was granted, not only
without a quickening of the pulse, but with the suspicion of a yawn. You
cannot expect reverence from people who possibly saw King John as the
central and farcical figure of last year’s pantomime, with a low-comedy
nose and an expression of ludicrous terror, handing Magna Charta to
baronial supers armoured with polished metal dish-covers for
breastplates and saucepans for helmets. ‘Nothing is sacred to a sapper,’
is a saying that arose in Napoleon’s campaigns. Let us, in these piping
times of peace, change the figure, and say, ‘Nothing is sacred to a
librettist.’
Long years before Egham ever became a coaching village, in the dark ages
of road travel, when inns were scarce and travellers few, the ‘Bells of
Ouseley,’ the old-fashioned riverside inn along this bye-road, was a
place of greater note than it is now. Although forgotten by the crowds
who keep the high-road, it is an inn happier in its situation than
most, for it stands on the banks of the Thames at one of its most
picturesque points, just below Old Windsor.
[Illustration: THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY.’]
The sign, showing five bells on a blue ground, derives its name from the
once-famed bells of the long-demolished Oseney Abbey at Oxford,
celebrated, before the Reformation swept them away, for their silvery
tones, which are said to have surpassed even those
Bells of Shandon
Which sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lea,
[Sidenote: _THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY’_]
of which ‘Father Prout’ sang some forty-five years ago. The abbey,
however, possessed _six_ bells. They were named Douce, Clement, Austin,
Hauctetor, Gabriel, and John.
The ‘Bells of Ouseley’ had at one time a reputation for a very much less
innocent thing than picturesqueness, for a hundred and fifty years ago,
or thereabouts, it was very popular with the worst class of footpads,
who were used to waylay travellers by the shore, or on the old Bath and
Exeter Roads, and, robbing them, were not content, but, practically
applying the axiom that ‘dead men tell no tales,’ gave their victims a
knock over the head, and, tying them in sacks, heaved them into the
river. These be legends, and legends are not always truthful, but it is
a fact that, some years ago, when the Thames Conservancy authorities
were dredging the bed of the river just here, they found the remains of
a sack and the perfect skeleton of a human being.
XV
Regarding the country through which the road passes, between Kensington,
Egham, Sunningdale, Virginia Water, and Bagshot, Cobbett has some
characteristic things to say. Between Hammersmith and Egham it is ‘as
flat as a pancake,’ and the soil ‘a nasty stony dirt upon a bed of
gravel.’ Sunninghill and Sunningdale, ‘all made into “grounds” and
gardens by tax-eaters,’ are at the end of a ‘blackguard heath,’ and are
‘not far distant from the Stock-jobbing crew. The roads are level, and
they are smooth. The wretches can go from the “‘Change” without any
danger to their worthless necks.’
There are now, sad to say, after the lapse of nearly eighty years, a
great many more of the ‘crew’ here, and they journey to and from Capel
Court with even less danger to their necks, bad luck to them!
Egham Hill surmounted, the Holloway College for Women is a prominent
object on the left-hand side of the road, the fad of Thomas Holloway,
whose thumping big fortune was derived from the advertising enterprise
which lasted wellnigh two generations, and during the most of that
period rendered the advertisement columns of London and provincial
papers hideous with beastly illustrations of suppurating limbs, and the
horrid big type inquiry, ‘Have you a Bad Leg?’ Pills and ointments, what
sovereign specifics you are--towards the accumulation of wealth!
All-powerful unguents, how beneficent--towards the higher education of
woman!
[Sidenote: _VIRGINIA WATER_]
No less a sum than £600,000 was expended on the building and equipment
of this enormous range of buildings, opened in 1887, and provided
royally with everything a college requires except students, whose number
yet falls far short of the three hundred and fifty the place is
calculated to house and teach. A fine collection of the works of modern
English painters is to be seen here, where study is made easy for the
‘girl graduates’ by the provision of luxuriously appointed class-rooms
and shady nooks where ‘every pretty domina can study the phenomena’ of
integral calculus and other domestic sciences. It seems a waste of good
money that, although a sum equal to £500 a year for each student is
expended on the higher education of women here, no prophetess has yet
issued from Egham with a message for the world; and that, consequently,
Mr. Thomas Holloway and his medicated grease have as yet missed that
posthumous fame for which so big a bid was made.
In two miles Virginia Water is reached, passing on the right hand the
plantations of Windsor Great Park. To this spot runs every day in
summer-time the ‘Old Times’ coach, which, first put on this road in the
spring of 1879, kept running every season until 1886, when it was
transferred to the Brighton Road, there to become famous through Selby’s
historic ‘record’ drive. Another coach, called the ‘Express,’ was put on
the Virginia Water trip in 1886 and 1887; but, following upon Selby’s
death in the November of the latter year, the ‘Old Times’ was reinstated
on this route, and has been running ever since, leaving the Hotel
Victoria, Northumberland Avenue, every week-day morning for the
‘Wheatsheaf,’ and returning in the evening.
This same ‘Wheatsheaf’ is probably one of the very ugliest houses that
ever bedevilled a country road, and looks like a great public-house
wrenched bodily from London streets and dropped down here at a venture.
But it is for all that a very popular place with the holiday-makers who
come here to explore the beauties and the curiosities of Virginia Water.
There are artificial lakes here, just within the Park of Windsor--lakes
which give the place its name, and made so long ago that Nature in her
kindly way has obliterated all traces of their artificiality. It is a
hundred years since this pleasance of Virginia Water was formed by
imprisoning the rivulets that run into this hollow, and banking up the
end of it; nearly a hundred years since the Ruined Temple was built as a
ready-made ruin; and there is no more, nor indeed any other such,
delightful spot near London. It is quite a pity to come by the knowledge
that the ruins were imported from Greece and Carthage, because without
that knowledge who knows what romance could not be weaved around those
graceful columns, amid the waters and the wilderness? Beyond Virginia
Water we come to Sunningdale.
[Sidenote: _ROMAN ROADS_]
From Turnham Green to Staines, and thence to Shrub’s Hill we are on the
old Roman Road to that famous town which has been known at different
periods of its existence as Aquae Solis, Akemanceaster, and Bath. The
Saxons called the road Akeman Street. Commencing at a junction with the
Roman Watling Street at the point where the Marble Arch now stands, it
proceeded along the Bayswater Road, and so by Notting Hill, past
Shepherd’s Bush, and along the Goldhawk Road, where, instead of turning
sharply to the left like the existing road that leads to Young’s Corner,
it continued its straight course through the district now occupied by
the modern artistic colony of Bedford Park, falling into the present
Chiswick High Road somewhere between Turnham Green and Gunnersbury.
Through Brentford, Hounslow, and Staines the last vestiges of the actual
Roman Road were lost in the alterations carried out for the improvement
of the highway under the provisions of the Hounslow and Basingstoke Road
Improvement Act of 1728, but there can be little doubt that the road
traffic of to-day from Hounslow to Shrub’s Hill follows in the tracks
of the pioneers who built the original road in A.D. 43; while as for
old-world Brentford, it would surprise no one if the veritable Roman
paving were found deep down below its High Street, long buried in the
silt and mud that have raised the level of the highway at the ford from
which the place-name derives.
The present West of England road turns off from the Akeman Street at the
bend in the highway at Shrub’s Hill, leaving the Roman way to continue
in an unfaltering straight line across the scrubby wastes and solitudes
of Broadmoor, to Finchampstead, Stratfieldsaye, and Silchester. It is
there known to the country folk as the ‘Nine Mile Ride’ and the ‘Devil’s
Highway.’ The prefix of the place-name ‘Stratfieldsaye,’ as a matter of
fact, derives from its situation on this ‘street.’ Silchester is the
site of the Roman city _Calleva Atrebatum_, and the excavated ruins of
this British Pompeii prove how important a place this was, standing as
it did at the fork of the roads leading respectively to _Aquae Solis_,
and to _Isca Damnoniorum_, the Exeter of a later age. Branching off here
to _Isca_, the Roman road was for the rest of the way to the West known
as the _Via Iceniana_, the Icen Way, and was perhaps regarded as a
continuation of what is now called the Icknield Street, the road which
runs diagonally to Norfolk and Suffolk, the country of the Iceni.
Very little of this old Roman road on its way to the West is identical
with any of the three existing routes to Exeter. There is that length
just named, from Gunnersbury to Shrub’s Hill; another piece, a mile or
so from Andover onward, by the Weyhill route; the crossing of the modern
highway between ‘Woodyates Inn’ and Thorney Down; and from Dorchester to
Bridport, where, as Gay says of his cavaliers’ journey to Exeter:--
Now on true Roman way our horses sound,
Graevius would kneel and kiss the sacred ground.
Onwards to Exeter the measurements of Antoninus and his fellows--those
literally ‘classic’ forerunners of Ogilby, Cary, Paterson, and Mogg--are
hazy in the extreme, and it is difficult to say how the Roman road
entered into the Queen City of the West.
Oh! for one hour with the author of the Antonine Itinerary, to settle
the vexed questions of routes and stations along this road to the
country of the Damnonii. ‘Here,’ one would say to him, ‘is your
starting-point, _Londinium_, which we call London. Very good; now kindly
tell us whether we are correct in giving Staines as the place you call
_Ad Pontes_; and is Egham the site of _Bibracte_? _Calleva_ we have
identified with Silchester, but where was your next station, _Vindomis_?
Was it St. Mary Bourne?’
[Sidenote: _THE HEATHS_]
In the meanwhile, until spiritualism becomes more of an exact science,
we must be content with our own deductions, and, with the aid of the
Ordnance map, trace the Roman _Via Iceniana_ by Quarley Hill and
Grateley to the hill of Old Sarum, which is readily identified as the
station of _Sorbiodunum_. Thence it goes by Stratford Toney to
‘Woodyates Inn’ and Gussage Cow Down, where the utterly vanished
_Vindogladia_ is supposed to have stood. Between this and Dorchester
there was another post whose name and position are alike unknown,
although the course of the road may yet be faintly traced past the
fortified hill of Badbury Rings, the _Mons Badonicus_ of King Arthur’s
defeat, to Tincleton and Stinsford, and so into Dorchester, the
_Durnovaria_ of the Romans, through what was the Eastgate of that city.
The names and sites of two more stations westward are lost, and the
situation of _Moridunum_, the next-named post, is so uncertain that such
widely sundered places as Seaton, on the Dorset coast, and Honiton, in
Devon, eighteen miles farther, are given for it. Morecomblake, a mile
from Seaton, is, however, the most likely site. Thence, on to Exeter,
this Roman military way is lost.
XVI
From Virginia Water up to the crest of Shrub’s Hill, Sunningdale, is a
distance of a mile and a quarter, and beyond, all the way into Bagshot,
is a region of sand and fir-trees and attempts at cultivation, varied by
newly-built villas, where considerable colonies of Cobbett’s detested
stock-jobbers and other business men from the ‘Wen of wens’ have set up
country quarters. And away to right and left, for miles upon miles,
stretches that wild country known variously as Bagshot and Ascot Heaths
and Chobham Ridges.
The extensive and dreary-looking tract of land, still wild and barren
for the most part, called Bagshot Heath, has during the last century
been the scene of many attempts made to bring it under cultivation.
These populous times are ill-disposed to the continued existence of
waste and unproductive lands, which, when near London, are especially
valuable, if they can be made to grow anything at all. One thing which,
above all others, has led to the beginning of the end of these old-time
wildernesses, formerly the haunts of highwaymen, is the modern discovery
of the country and of the benefits of fresh air. When the nineteenth
century was yet young the townsman still retained the old habits of
thought which regarded the heaths and the hills with aversion. He pigged
away his existence over his shop or warehouse in the City, and thought
the country fit only for the semi-savages who grew the fruit and
vegetables that helped to supply his table, or cultivated the wheat of
which his daily bread was compounded. It has been left to us, his
descendants, to love the wilds, and thus it is that villa homes are
springing up amid the heaths and the pines of this region, away from
Woking on the south to Ascot in the north.
[Sidenote: _BAGSHOT_]
One comes downhill into the large village or small (very small) town of
Bagshot, which gives a name to these surrounding wastes of scrubby
grass, gorse, and fir-trees. The now quiet street faces the road in the
hollow, across which runs the Bourne brook that perhaps originated the
place-name, ‘Beck-shot’ being the downhill rush of the stream or beck.
The many ‘shotts’ that terminate the names of places in Hants and Surrey
have this common origin, and are similarly situated in the little
hollows watered by descending brooks.
Bagshot has nearly forgotten the old coaching days in the growing
importance of its military surroundings, and most of its once celebrated
inns have retired into private life, all except the ‘King’s Arms.’
[Illustration: BAGSHOT.]
The ground to the north of the Exeter Road, on the west of Bagshot
village, was once a peat moor. Hazel-nuts and bog-oak were often dug up
there. Then began the usual illegal encroachments on what was really
common land, and stealthily the moor was enclosed and subsequently
converted into a nursery-ground for rhododendrons, which flourish
amazingly on this soil when it has once been trenched. Beneath the black
sand which usually covers this ground there frequently occurs a very
hard iron rust, or thin stratum of oxide of iron, which prevents
drainage of the soil, with a blue sandy clay underlying. This stratum of
iron rust requires to be broken through, and the blue clay subsoil
raised to the surface and mixed with the black sand, before anything
will grow here.
There is to be seen on the summit of the steep hill that leads out of
Bagshot an old inn called the ‘Jolly Farmer.’ This is the successor of a
still older house which stood at the side of the road, and was famous in
the annals of highway robbery, having been once the residence of William
Davis, the notorious ‘Golden Farmer,’ who lived here in the century
before last.
The agriculturist with this auriferous name was a man greatly respected
in the neighbourhood, and acquired the nickname from his invariable
practice of paying his bills in gold. He was never known to tender
cheques, bank-notes, or bills, and this fact was considered so
extraordinary that it excited much comment, while at the same time
increasing the respect due to so substantial a man. But respect at last
fell from Mr. William Davis like a cloak; for one night when a coach was
robbed (as every coach was robbed then) on Bagshot Heath by a peculiar
highwayman who had earned a great reputation from his invariable
practice of returning all the jewellery and notes and keeping only the
coin, the masked robber, departing with his plunder, was shot in the
back by a traveller who had managed to secrete a pistol.
[Sidenote: _THE ‘GOLDEN FARMER’_]
Bound hand and foot, the wounded highwayman was hauled into the lighted
space before the entrance to the ‘King’s Arms,’ when the gossips of the
place recognised in him the well-known features of the ‘Golden Farmer.’
A ferocious Government, which had no sympathy with highway robbery,
caused the ‘Golden Farmer’ to be hanged and afterwards gibbeted at his
own threshold.