the site of the old house, which stood on the right hand, going
westwards. A table, much hacked and mutilated, standing in the parlour
of the ‘Jolly Farmer,’ came from the highwayman’s vanished home. A tall
obelisk that stood on the triangular green at the fork of the roads
here--where the signpost is standing nowadays--has long since
disappeared. It was a prominent landmark in the old coaching days, and
was inscribed with the distances of many towns from this spot. A still
existing link with the times of the highwaymen is the so-called ‘Claude
du Vail’s Cottage,’ which stands in the heathy solitudes at some
distance along Lightwater Lane, to the right-hand of the road. The
cottage, of which there is no doubt that it often formed a hiding-place
for that worthy, has lost its ancient thatch, and is now covered with
commonplace slates.
Almost immediately after leaving the ‘Jolly Farmer’ behind, the road
grows hateful, passing in succession the modern townships of Cambridge
Town Camberley, and York Town. The exact point where one of these modern
squatting-places of those who hang on to the skirts of Tommy Atkins
joins another may be left to local experts; to the traveller they
present the appearance of one long and profoundly depressing street.
Cobbett knew the road well, and liked this shabby line of military
settlements little. Coming up to ‘the Wen’ in 1821, and passing
Blackwater, he reached York Town, and thus he holds forth: ‘After
_pleasure_ comes _pain_’, says Solomon, and after the sight of Lady
Mildmay’s truly noble plantations (at Hartley Row) came that of the
clouts of the ‘gentleman cadets’ of the ‘_Royal Military College of
Sandhurst_!’ Here, close by the roadside, is the _drying ground_.
Sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were here spread upon lines
covering perhaps an acre of ground! We soon afterwards came to ‘_York_
Place’ on ‘_Osnaburg_ Hill.’ And is there never to be an _end_ of these
things? Away to the left we see that immense building which contains
children _breeding up to be military commanders_! Has this place cost so
little as two millions of pounds? I never see this place (and I have
seen it forty times during the last twenty years) without asking myself
this question, ‘Will this thing be suffered to go on; will this thing,
created by money _raised by loan_; will this thing be upheld by means of
taxes _while the interest of the Debt is reduced_, on the ground that
the nation is _unable to pay the interest in full_?’
It is painful to say that ‘this thing’ has gone on, and that ‘the sweet
simplicity of the Three per Cents’ has given place to very much reduced
interest. But one little ray of sunshine breaks on the gloomy picture.
If Cobbett could ride this way once more he would discover that the acre
of drying ‘sheets, shirts, and other things’ is no longer visible to
shock the susceptibilities of old-fashioned wayfarers, or of that new
feature of the road, the lady cyclist.
[Sidenote: _BLACKWATER_]
There is a great deal more of Cambridge Town, Camberley, and York Town
now than when Cobbett last journeyed along the road; there are more
‘children breeding up to be military commanders,’ more Tommies, more
drinking-shops, and an almost continuous line of ugly, and for the most
part out-at-elbows, houses for a space of two miles. It is with relief
that the traveller leaves behind the last of these wretched blots upon
the country and descends into Blackwater, where the river of that name,
so called from the sullen hue it obtains on running through the peaty
wastes of this wild, heathy country, flows beneath a bridge at the
entrance to the pretty village. Over this bridge we enter Hampshire,
that county of hogs and chalky downs, but no sign of the chalk is
reached yet, until coming upon the little stream in the level between
Hartley Row and Hook, called the Whitewater from the milky tinge it has
gained on coming down from the chalky heights of Alton and Odiham. This
tinge is, however, more imaginary than real, and the characteristically
chalky scenery of Hampshire is not seen by the traveller along the Great
Western Road until Basingstoke and its chalk downs are reached.
Blackwater until recently possessed a picturesque old coaching inn, the
‘White Hart,’ which has unhappily been rebuilt. But it remains, as ever,
a village of old inns. Climbing out of its one street we come to a wild
and peculiarly unprepossessing tableland known as Hartford Bridge Flats.
To the lover of scenery this is a quite detestable piece of road, but
the old coachmen simply revelled in it, for here was the best stretch
of galloping ground in England, and they ‘sprang’ their horses over it
for all they were worth, through Hartley Row and Hook, and well on
towards Basingstoke.
The famous (or infamous let us rather call them) Hartford Bridge Flats
are fully as dreary as any of the desolate Californian mining flats of
which Bret Harte has written so eloquently. Salisbury Plain itself, save
that the Plain is more extensive, is no worse place in which to be
overtaken by bad weather. Excessively bleak and barren, the Flats are
well named, for they stretch absolutely level for four miles: a black,
open, unsheltered heath, with nothing but stunted gorse bushes for miles
on either side, and the distant horizon closed in by the solemn
battalions of sinister-looking pine-woods. The road runs, a straight and
sandy strip, through the midst of this wilderness, unfenced, its
monotony relieved only by a group of ragged firs about half-way. The
cyclist who toils along these miles against a head wind is as unlikely
to forget Hartford Bridge Flats as were the unfortunate ‘outsides’ on
the coaches when rain or storm made the passage miserable.
Hartford Bridge, at the foot of the hill below this nightmare country,
is a pretty hamlet of yellow sand and pine-woods, sand-martins and
rabbits uncountable. The place is interesting and unspoiled, because its
development was suddenly arrested when the Exeter Road became deserted
for the railway in the early ’40’s; and so it remains, in essentials, a
veritable old hamlet of the coaching days. Even more eloquent of old
times is the long, long street of
[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON)]
[Sidenote: _HARTLEY ROW_]
Hartley Row which adjoins. Hartley Row was absolutely called into
existence by the demand in the old days of road travel for stabling,
inns, and refreshments, and is one of the most thoroughly representative
of such roadside settlements. Half a mile to the south of the great
highway is the parent village of Hartley Wintney, unknown to and
undreamt of by travellers in those times, and probably much the same as
it was in the Middle Ages. The well-named ‘Row,’ on the other hand,
sprang lip, grew lengthy, and flourished exceedingly during the sixty
years of coaching prosperity, and then, at one stroke, was ruined. What
Brayley, the historian of Surrey, wrote of Bagshot in 1841, applies even
more eloquently to Hartley Row: ‘Its trade has been entirely ruined by
the opening of the Southampton and Great Western Railroads, and its
numerous inns and public-houses, which had long been profitably
occupied, are now almost destitute of business. Formerly thirty stage
coaches passed through the village, now every coach has been taken off
the road.’ The ‘Southampton Railroad,’ referred to here, is of course
the London and South-Western Railway, which has drained this part of the
road of its traffic, and whose Winchfield station lies two miles away.
[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]
Before the crash of the ’40’s Hartley Row possessed a thriving industry
in the manufacture of coaches, carried on by one Fagg, who was also
landlord of the ‘Bell Inn,’ Holborn, and in addition horsed several
stages out of London.
Some day the coming historian of the nineteenth century will, in his
chapter on travel, cite Hartley Row as the typical coaching village,
which was called into existence by coaching, lived on coaching, and with
the death of coaching was stranded high and dry in this dried-up channel
of life. All the houses
[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]
[Sidenote: _OLD TRAVELLERS_]
of a village like this, which lived on the needs of travellers, faced
the road in one long street, and almost every fourth or fifth house was
an inn, or ministered in some way to the requirements of those who
travelled. It is remarkable to find so many of these old inns still in
existence at Hartley Row. Here they still stand, ruddy-faced,
substantial but plain buildings, with, notwithstanding their plainness,
a certain air of distinction. The wayfarer, well read in the habits of
the times when they were bustling with business, can imagine untold
comforts behind those frontages; can reconstruct the scenes in the
public waiting-rooms, where travellers, passing the interval between
their being set down here by the ‘Defiance’ or the ‘Regulator’ Exeter
coach and the arrival of the Odiham and Alton bye-stage, could warm
themselves by the roaring fire; can sniff in imagination the coffee of
the breakfasts and the roast beef of the dinners; or perceive through
the old-fashioned window-frames the lordly posting parties, detained
here by stress of weather, making the best of it by drinking of the old
port or brown sherry which the cellars of every self-respecting coaching
inn could then produce. Not that these were the only travellers familiar
to the roadside village in those days. Not every one who fared from
London to Exeter could afford the luxuries of the mail or stage coach,
or of the good cheer and the lavender-scented beds just glimpsed. For
the poor traveller there were the lumbering so-called ‘Fly-vans’ of
Russell and Co., which jogged along at the average pace of three
miles[3] an hour--the pace decreed by Scotland Yard for the modern
policeman. The poor folk who travelled thus might perhaps have walked
with greater advantage, ‘save for the dignity of the thing,’ as the
Irishman said when the floor of his cab fell out and he was obliged to
run along with the bottomless vehicle. Certainly they paid more for the
misery of being conveyed thus than the railway traveller does nowadays
for comfort at thirty to fifty miles an hour. Numbers _did_ walk,
including the soldiers and the sailors going to rejoin their regiments
or their ships, who appear frequently in the roadside sketches of that
period by Rowlandson and others. The poor travellers probably rode
because of their--luggage I was about to write, let us more correctly
say bundles.
[Sidenote: _PICTURESQUE OLD DAYS_]
When they arrived at a village at nightfall, they camped under the
ample shelter of the great waggon; or, perhaps, if they had anything to
squander on mere luxuries, spent sixpence or ninepence on a supper of
cold boiled beef and bread, to be followed by a shake-down on straw or
hay in the stable-lofts, which were quite commonly put to this use among
the second- and third-rate inns of the old times.
[Illustration: ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).]
Those were the days of the picturesque; if, indeed, Rowlandson and
Morland and the other delightfully romantic artists of the period did
not invent those roadside scenes. Here, for instance, is Rowlandson’s
charming group of three old topers boozing outside the ‘Half Moon.’ I
cannot tell you where this ‘Half Moon’ was. Probably the artist imagined
it; but at anyrate the _kind_ of place, and scenes of this description,
must have existed in his time. Here, you will observe, the landlord has
come out with a mug of ‘humming ale’ or ‘nut-brown October’ for the
thirsty driver of the curricle, who is apparently going to market, if
we may judge by the basket of fowls tied on to the back of the
conveyance.
Scenes so picturesque as this are not to be observed in our own time,
nor are the tramps who yet infest the road, singly or in families, of
the engaging appearance of this family party. The human form divine was
wondrously gnarled and twisted, or phenomenally fat, a hundred years
ago, according to Rowlandson and Gillray. Legs like the trunks of
contorted apple-trees, stomachs like terrestrial globes, mouths
resembling the mouths of horses, and noses like geographical features on
a large scale were the commonplaces of their practice, and this example
forms no exception to the general rule.
XVII
[Sidenote: _TREE-PLANTING_]
The ruin that descended upon Hartley Row in common with other coaching
towns and villages, nearly sixty years ago, has long since been lived
down, and the long street, although quiet, has much the same cheerful
appearance as it must have worn in the heyday of its prosperity. It is a
very wide street, fit for the evolutions of many coaches. Pleasant
strips of grass now occupy, more or less continuously, one side, and at
the western end forks the road to Odiham, through a pretty common with
the unusual feature of being planted with oak trees. These oak glades do
not look particularly old; but, as it happens, we can ascertain their
exact age and at the same time note how slow-growing is the oak tree by
a reference to Cobbett’s _Rural Rides_, where, in 1821, he notes their
being planted: ‘I perceive that they are planting oaks on the
“_wastes_,” as the _Agriculturasses_ call them, about _Hartley Row_;
which is very good, because the herbage, after the first year, is rather
increased than diminished by the operation; while, in time, the oaks
arrive at a timber state, and add to the beauty and the _real wealth_,
of the country, and to the real and solid wealth of the descendants of
the planter who, in every such case, merits unequivocal praise, because
he plants for his children’s children. The planter here is Lady Mildmay,
who is, it seems, Lady of the Manors about here.’
This planting was accomplished in days before any one so much as dreamt
of the time to come, when the navies of the world should be built like
tin kettles. Oaks were then planted with a view to being eventually
worked up into the ‘wooden walls of Old England,’ among other uses, and
the squires who laid out money on the work were animated by the glow of
self-satisfaction that warms the breasts of those who can combine
patriotism with the provision of a safe deferred investment. Unhappily,
the ‘wooden walls’ have long since become a dim memory before these
trees have attained their proper timber stage, and now stand, to those
who read these facts, as monuments to blighted hopes. But they render
this common extremely beautiful, and give it a character all its own.
All this is quite apart from the legal aspect of the case; whether, that
is to say, the lord of a manor has any right to make plantations of
common lands for his own or his descendants’ benefit. Cobbett, it will
be perceived, calls these lands ‘wastes,’ following the term conferred
upon them by the ‘Agriculturasses’--whoever they may have been. If
technically ‘wastes of the manors,’ then the landowner’s right to do as
he will is incontestable; but, with the contentious character of Cobbett
before one, is it not remarkable that he should praise this planting and
not question the right to call the land ‘wastes,’ instead of common? But
perhaps Cobbett the tree-planter was contending with Cobbett the
agitator, and the tree-planter got the best of it.
Hook, which succeeds Hartley Row, is a hamlet of the smallest size, but
that fact does not prevent its possessing two old coaching inns, the
‘White Hart’ and the ‘Old White Hart,’ both very large and very near to
one another. The Exeter Road certainly did not lack entertainment for
man and beast in those days, with fine hostelries every few miles,
either in the towns and villages, or else set down, solitary, amid the
downs, like Winterslow Hut.
Nately Scures, whose second name is supposed to derive from the
Anglo-Saxon _scora_, a shaw, or coppice (whence we get such place-names
as Shawford, near Winchester; Shaugh Prior on Dartmoor; Shaw, in
Berkshire, and many of the ‘scors’ forming the first syllables of
place-names all over the country), is a place even smaller than Hook,
with a tiny church, one of the many ‘smallest’ churches; standing in a
meadow, to which access is had through rick-yards.
[Illustration: THE ‘WHITE HART,’ HOOK.]
[Sidenote: _OLD BASING_]
It is worth while halting a moment to gain a sight of the little church,
which is late Norman, and one of the few dedicated to that Norman
bishop, Saint Swithun.
Returning to the highway, and coming to the place known to the old
coachmen as Mapledurwell Hatch, where that fine old coaching inn, the
‘King’s Head,’ still stands, a road goes off to Old Basing, on the
right, while the highway continues in a straight line, rising toward the
town of Basingstoke.
The hasty traveller who knows nothing of the delights that await
explorers in the byeways, misses a great deal here by keeping strictly
to the highroad. If, instead of continuing direct to Basingstoke, this
turning to the right hand is taken, it brings one in half a mile to the
pretty village of Old Basing, celebrated for one of the most stubborn
and protracted defences recorded in history. It was here that the
equally crafty and courteous Sir William Paulet, first Marquis of
Winchester, and Lord Treasurer during the reigns of Henry the Eighth,
Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, built an immense palace on the
site of Basing Castle. There can be little doubt that this magnificent
person, who possessed no principles, and so kept place and power through
the troublous times that these reigns comprised, must have had his hands
in the Royal coffers to some purpose, or else have used his position for
the sale of preferments. ‘No oak, but an osier,’ as his contemporaries
said, he bowed before the tempests of religious persecution and the
whirlwinds of conspiracies which passed him harmlessly by and left him
still peculating. He had become a hoary-headed sinner by the time
Elizabeth reigned, or there is no knowing but that he might have become
a Prince Consort; for when he entertained Her Majesty here in 1560: ‘By
my troth,’ said she, ‘if my Lord Treasurer were but a young man, I could
find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in
England.’ But she had said this kind of thing of many another.
[Sidenote: _BASING HOUSE_]
The successors of this gorgeous nobleman--not being Lords
Treasurers--could not afford to keep up so immense a palace, and so
demolished a part of it, and found the remainder ample. To this place,
fitting alike by its situation at a strategic point on the Western Road,
and by the splendidly defensible nature of its site, crowded the King’s
Hampshire adherents who were not engaged at Winchester and Southampton
at the outbreak of the war between Charles and his Parliament. John,
fifth Marquis of Winchester, then ruled. ‘_Aimez Loyaulté_,’ he wrote
with his diamond ring on every window of his great mansion, and,
provisioning his cellars, awaited events. As ‘Loyalty’ the house
speedily became known to the flying bands of the King’s men who, pursued
through the country by the Roundheads, made for its shelter as birds do
for trees in a storm. The rebels might hold Basingstoke for a time, and
lay siege to Basing House, but troops from Royalist Oxford would come
and take the town and reprovision this stronghold. It was a mixed
company in this palace-fortress. My lord, loyalist, soldier, amateur of
the arts; reposing after the warlike fatigues of the day in a bed whose
gorgeous trappings made it worth £1300; witty and brave cavaliers; a
company of Roman Catholic priests; men-at-arms, drinking, dicing, and
fighting by turns and with equal zest; and such representatives of the
arts as Inigo Jones, the architect, and Hollar, the engraver. Gay and
careless though they were, they fought well, and slew and were slain to
the number of two thousand during this long siege. Sometimes this varied
garrison was hard pressed for food, when relief would come in whimsical
fashion, as when Colonel Gage and his thousand horsemen appeared with
sword in one hand and holding on to a bag of provisions with the other;
a fitting contrast with the typical Puritan, a Psalm-book in his left
hand and a pike in his right. Basing House, indeed, in the words of
Carlyle, ‘long infested the Parliament in these quarters, and was an
especial eye-sorrow to the trade of London with the Western parts. It
stood siege after siege for four years, ruining poor Colonel This and
then poor Colonel That, till the jubilant Royalists had given it the
name of _Basting_ House.’
But the end was at hand after Fairfax had reduced the garrisons in the
West and the Parliamentary troops could be spared from other places.
Cromwell himself was charged with the business of taking ‘Loyalty.’ It
was in September that he came to Basingstoke with horse and foot, and
established a post of observation on the summit of Winklebury, a hill
crowned with prehistoric earthworks that overlooks Worting and the
Exeter Road, two miles on the other side of the town.
Little over a fortnight later Cromwell wrote that ‘Thank God he was able
to give a good account of Basing.’ The house was taken by storm on the
14th October, ‘while the garrison was card-playing,’ as the persistent
Hampshire legend would have us believe. ‘Clubs are trumps, as when
Basing House was taken,’ is still an expression often heard at Hampshire
card-parties, and some colour is lent to this story by the poor defence
with which the furious onrush of Cromwell’s troops was met. The
attacking force lost few men, but a hundred of the defenders were
killed, and three hundred more taken prisoners. Then the place caught
fire and was utterly burnt, many perishing miserably in the great brick
vaults of the house, where they were when the fire reached them. Fuller,
that quaint seventeenth-century historian, who had been staying here,
had, fortunately, left before the arrival of Cromwell’s expedition. The
continual fighting and the booming of the guns had distracted his
attention from his work! There were others not so fortunate. Thomas
Johnson, a peaceful botanist, was killed, and one Robinson, an actor and
unarmed, was slaughtered by Harrison, the fanatic. ‘Cursed is he that
doeth the Lord’s work negligently,’ exclaimed the Puritan, as he cut him
down. Other soldiers slew the daughter of Dr. Griffith who was charging
them with being violent to her father.
Fanaticism and cupidity were fully satisfied on this occasion, save that
there were those who grumbled because the lives of the Marquis of
Winchester and his lieutenant were spared. The sack of Basing House
yielded £200,000 worth of plunder, in objects
[Sidenote: _THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE_]
[Illustration: THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE.]
of art, gold and silver plate, coin, and provisions; and all partook of
it, from Cromwell to the rank and file. ‘One soldier had a hundred and
twenty pieces of gold for his share, others plate, others jewels.’ No
wonder they had, with this dazzling prospect before them, rushed to the
assault ‘like a fire-flood.’
They made a rare business of this pillage, taking away the valuables,
and selling the provisions to the country folks, who ‘loaded many
carts.’ The bricks and building materials were given away, probably
because they could not wait for the long business of selling them.
‘Whoever will come for brick or stone shall freely have the same for his
pains,’ ran the proclamation, and, considering this, it is quite
remarkable that even the existing scanty ruins of Basing House are left.
The area comprised within the defences measures fourteen and a half
acres, now a tumbled and tangled stretch of ground, a mass of grassy
mounds and hollows, overgrown in places with thickets. These ruins are
entered from the road by an old brick gateway, still bearing the ‘three
swords in pile’ on a shield, the arms of the Paulets, with ivy
overhanging and tall trees behind. A tall curtain wall of brick, with a
quaintly peaked-roofed tower at either end, now looks down upon the
Basingstoke Canal, which many strangers think is the moat, but though a
picturesque addition to the scene, it cannot claim any such historic
associations, for it was only constructed close upon a hundred years
ago.