authority at Highgate, to the first roadmaker here, in 1364. A hermit,
William Phelippe by name, at that time lived in a little cell on the
lower slope of Highgate Hill, looking down upon London. From that remote
eyrie, had he been a man of imagination, he might have beheld prophetic
visions of London’s future sprawling greatness, when the tide of life
should rise to the crest of his hill and bring with it bricks and mortar,
wood-pavements, cable-tramways, and other things of equal use and beauty.
He foresaw none of these things, possibly because he did not sufficiently
mortify the flesh. Certainly he was a hermit not without wealth, and
perhaps therefore not one of your sad-eyed ascetics. He had a goodly
balance in some old earthenware crock under the floor, or at the bank—the
road bank of the Hollow Way, very old-established—and he had ample
leisure, unencroached upon by toilette requirements, for which hermits
had no use. Lazing in his cell commanding the road—it stood near where
the Whittington Stone stands now—he had often noticed how wet, miry, and
full of sloughs was the Hollow Way, and with what difficulty travellers
ascended by it. Accordingly he devised a scheme by which he conferred
benefits alike upon the travellers along the road and the farmers of
Highgate. He directed and paid for the digging of gravel and the laying
of it along the road, and in the work presently expended all his money.
But in so doing he had made an excellent investment; much better than
leaving it on deposit at the bank mentioned above, where, in the nature
of things, it accrued no interest; for he procured a decree from Edward
the Third, authorising “our well-beloved William Phelippe, the hermit,”
to set up a toll-bar, and licensing him to levy tolls and keep the road
in repair for “our people passing between Heghgate and Smethfelde.” Thus
were the first toll-bar and the first turnpike-keeper established, and we
may judge that the undertaking was profitable from the records that show
how very largely the roadside hermits throughout the country went into
the business of road and bridge making or mending shortly afterwards.
There were hermits of sorts: some authorised, and some not; some who did
good work in this wise and some who did nothing at all, and yet continued
to live substantially on the mistaken gifts of wayfarers. The profession
of the eremite was not without its jealousies. An industrious road-maker
might have a cell placed in a position outside a town favourable for the
collection of dues, when another would set up business, say a quarter of
a mile further out, and so intercept the money; so that travellers having
paid once, had nothing for the real Simon Pure. Having satisfied Codlin,
they disregarded Short; whereupon it not infrequently happened that if
Short were the more muscular of the two he would go and have it out with
his rival, while the world went by, scandalised at the apostolic blows
and knocks these holy men were dealing one another.
William Phelippe’s licence was renewed every year. His tariff of tolls
is still extant, and we read that for every cart carrying merchandise,
its wheels shod with iron, twopence per week was paid; if not shod with
iron, one penny. Every horse carrying merchandise was charged one
farthing per week. Pedestrians and horsemen without goods went free.
These charges seem absurdly small until we multiply them by twenty, which
gives results representing the present value of money, and then it will
be found that those ancient tolls were on much the same scale as those
which existed until July 1st, 1864, when all turnpikes on public highways
within fifty miles of London were abolished by Act of Parliament.
A great gap stretches between the time of our road-making hermit and that
of Telford—a gap of four hundred and fifty years. Yet, although Highway
Acts were from time to time devised for the betterment of the roads,
their condition remained bad, and there was always, since 1386, the crest
of Highgate Hill to surmount.
Unless we take this hill-top route to the left we shall not have seen
Highgate; nor, in truth, is there much to see, now that the old Gatehouse
Tavern is gone, and with it the last outward and visible connection with
the days of yore. The tavern marked the site of the old turnpike-gate
that stood here, the lineal successor of the hermit’s original pitch
lower down, when the old route to Barnet by Tallingdon Lane, Crouch End,
Hornsey Great Park, Muswell Hill, Friern Barnet, and Whetstone was
superseded by the new one through the Bishop of London’s estate, by
Finchley and Whetstone, in 1386. It is in the existence at that time of
the Bishop’s park that we may perhaps seek with success the origin of the
name of “Highgate,” which does not necessarily allude to the very
obviously “high” gate situated here—more than 350 feet above sea-level.
No; it was the “haigh” gate, the portal which gave access through the
enclosure (_haia_) with which my Lord Bishop’s domain was presumably
surrounded. Through his land all traffic passed until it emerged on the
other side of Whetstone, where, commanding the entrance to Barnet, stood
another gate in receipt of tolls, swelling the income of that very
business-like ecclesiastic and his successors for hundreds of years.
At the Highgate end dues were collected on horned cattle, among other
things, and here originated the practice of being initiated into the
freedom of Highgate, a mock ceremonial founded upon Roman Catholic rites
at the time of the Reformation. For three hundred years this farcical
observance was continued at the tavern by the gate, and only fell into
disuse with the decay of coaching. Those who had not previously passed
this way were “sworn in on the horns,” a practice traced to the
unwillingness of the cattle drovers who frequented the tavern to allow
strangers to mix with them. This exclusiveness no doubt originated in
the fear of trade secrets being divulged, a feeling which may still be
met with among commercial travellers of the older school, who resent the
appearance of the mere tourist in their midst. The stranger who in olden
times happened upon these drovers at Highgate was discouraged from taking
bite or sup here, and only permitted to join them after having kissed the
horns of one of their beasts. This speedily became elevated (or
degraded, shall we say?) into a sort of blasphemous ritual parodying the
admission of a novice into the Church, and this again, with the lapse of
time and the dying of religious hatreds, developed into the merely
good-natured farce played during the last hundred years of the existence
of the custom.
When the coaches pulled up here, it was soon discovered, by judicious
questioning, who were the strangers who had not been made “free.” They
were made to alight, and, having removed their hats and kissed a pair of
horns mounted on a pole, “the oath” was administered by the landlord in
this wise:—“Upstanding and uncovered: silence. Take notice what I now
say to you, for _that_ is the first word of the oath; mind _that_. You
must acknowledge me to be your adopted father. I must acknowledge you to
be my adopted son. If you do not call me father you forfeit a bottle of
wine; if I do not call you son I forfeit the same. And now, my good son,
if you are travelling through this village of Highgate, and you have no
money in your pocket, go call for a bottle of wine at any house you may
think proper to enter and book it to your father’s score,” and so forth.
An initiate had to swear never to drink small beer when he could get
strong (unless he preferred small); never to eat brown bread when he
could get white (unless he preferred brown); never to kiss the maid when
he could kiss the mistress (unless he preferred the maid, and in case of
doubt he might kiss both); after which he had to kiss the horns or the
woman in the company who appeared the fairest, as seemed good to him, the
ceremony concluding with the declaration of his privileges as a freeman
of Highgate. Among the well-known privileges were—that if he felt tired
when passing through Highgate and saw a pig lying in a ditch, he might
kick the pig away and take its place, but if he saw three lying together
he must only kick away the middle one and lie between the other two!
X
IT was on Highgate Hill that the great Francis, Lord Bacon, whom some
believe to have written Shakespeare’s dramas, fell a martyr to his
scientific enthusiasm. Driving up this chilly eminence one winter’s day
when the snow lay on the ground, it occurred to him that, from its
chemical constituents, snow must possess admirable preservative
properties, and he accordingly resolved immediately to put this theory to
the proof. Stopping his carriage at a neighbouring farmhouse, he
purchased a fowl and stuffed it carefully with snow. Being in weak
health at the time, he took a chill, and before he could be driven home,
became so alarmingly ill that he was obliged to be carried to Lord
Arundel’s house at Highgate. There a damp bed aggravated his seizure, so
that in a few days he died, in 1626.
Farmhouses are far to seek from Highgate Hill nowadays, new roads and
streets of shops being more general. With the end of the eighteenth
century, Highgate became a populous little town, but its outskirts did
not altogether lose their terrors for travellers. Suburban villas had
begun to sparsely dot these northern heights of London with the coming of
the new era, but the New Police had not yet been brought into being; and
so belated dwellers in these wilds afforded fine sport for the footpads,
who, hunting in couples, and armed with horrible pitch-plasters, attacked
the mild citizen from behind, and, clapping a plaster over his mouth,
reduced him to an enforced silence, while they emptied his pockets at
leisure. It was late one night in 1807 that Grimaldi, the most famous of
all clowns, was robbed on Highgate Hill by two footpads. They spared him
the usual plaster, perhaps because there was no one else about, and so it
did not matter in the least how loudly he might shout for help. Among
minor articles of spoil, they secured a remarkable watch which had been
given him two years before as a testimonial by his many admirers. The
dial represented his face in character when singing his popular comic
song, “Me and my Neddy.” The robbers, seeing this, immediately
recognised him. Looking at one another, they could not make up their
minds to rob him of his treasure, and so they gave it back, Grimaldi
goggling and grinning at them the while, as on the stage. So, with a
vivid recollection of Sadler’s Wells, and bursting with laughter, they
left him.
It is peculiarly unfortunate for those who are uncertain about their
aspirates that London and its neighbourhood should abound in place-names
beginning with the letters “A” and “H.” Cockneys have ever—or ’ave
hever, shall we say?—been afflicted with this difficulty; but they are
overcoming the tendency of their forbears to speak of “’Ornsey,
’Ampstead, ’Igit, ’Arrow, ’Omerton, ’Ackney, ’Endon or ’Atfield.” The
classic anecdote in this connection is that of the City Alderman who
lived at Highgate, praising his locality to a distinguished guest at a
Mayoral banquet.
[Picture: Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897]
“Don’t you think ’Iget pretty?” he asked.
“Really,” the guest is supposed to have replied, “I haven’t known you
long enough to say.”
“I’m not talking of meself,” returned the Alderman, “but of ’Iget on the
’Ill.”
Until 1813 coaches and foot-passengers alike toiled over the Hill,
through Highgate village, and by a roundabout road into East End,
Finchley, which, with its adjoining hamlets, was until quite recently so
greatly cut off from London by these comparatively Alpine heights and the
lack of suburban railways, that it was, for all practical purposes, as
distant as many other places fifty or sixty miles away, but situated on
more level roads or on direct railway routes. To remedy this the Archway
Road was cut direct from the Upper Holloway Road to East End, saving half
a mile in the distance to be travelled and a hundred feet in the height
to be climbed.
The Archway and the Archway Road were constructed about 1813, following
upon the failure of the original idea of driving a tunnel through the
hill-top. The Hill is a great outstanding knob of London clay, a
substance both difficult and dangerous to pierce; but it was not until
the work was nearly completed that it fell in, one day in 1812, happily
before the labours of the day had been begun. The present open cutting
of the Archway Road, rather over a mile in length, took the place of the
projected tunnel, and the Archway was constructed for the purpose of
carrying Hornsey Lane across the gap. If an unlovely, it was in its way
an impressive, structure, even though the impression was, rather of the
nightmare sort. It was scarcely necessary, for Hornsey Lane has been at
no time a place of great resort, and the traffic along it could have been
diverted at small cost, and with little inconvenience made to cross the
Archway Road by a circuitous route. Highgate Archway has now
disappeared, giving place to a lighter structure, spanning the road
without the support of the cumbrous old piers which, until the summer of
1900, continued to block three-fourths of the way. It has gone because
the road-traffic has grown with the suburbs and the way was not wide
enough; but its disappearance removes a landmark proclaiming where town
and country met.
The making of the Archway and the road was no public-spirited act, but
the commercial undertaking of a Company, whose total expenses were very
large, and, by consequence, the tolls exacted extremely high.
Pedestrians were not chargeable at ordinary toll-gates, but here they had
to pay a penny, or go the tedious way over the Hill. Sixpence was levied
on every laden or draught horse.
It was not a profitable undertaking, even at these rates, and the tolls
had a very decided effect in stemming the advance of Suburbia in this
direction. In 1861, when the abolition of tolls within fifty miles of
London was a burning question, the Company owed the Consolidated Fund no
less than £13,000. The Government bought it out for £4,000, receiving
£9,000 by instalments spread over fifteen years, after which period the
road was to be declared free. It was accordingly opened free of toll in
1876. And thus it remained, as in the illustration, until 1897, when it
was demolished and the roadway widened. The present Archway was opened
in 1900.
XI
EAST End, Finchley, to which we now come, is one of the many straggling
settlements built upon Finchley Common. Stretches of fields alternate
with rows of new shops and tiny old-world cottages. Here stands the
“Bald-Faced Stag,” with the effigy of a stag surmounting the
appropriately bald elevation of that huge and ugly public-house. The
yards of monumental masons jostle it on either hand; a grim and
unpleasing conjunction, and a prelude to those vast townships of London’s
dead, the St. Marylebone, Islington, and St. Pancras Cemeteries, which
with other properties of the Cemetery Companies render the road dismal
and people these northern heights with a vast population of departed
citizens. The merry market-gardener has betaken himself and his cabbages
to other parts, and the builder builds but sparely.
Just where the Great Northern Railway bridge crosses over the road at
East End stands the “Old White Lion,” in a pretty wooded dip of the road.
The house was once known, and marked on the maps as the “Dirt House,”
from its having been the house of call of the market-wagons on the way to
London with produce, and on the way back with loads of dirt and manure.
The wood was also known as “Dirt House Wood.” It was here also that
Horne the coachmaster’s stables were situated.
To this succeeds North Finchley, beginning at the junction of a road from
Child’s Hill with the Great North Road, known as Tally Ho Corner. North
Finchley, called by the genteel “Torrington Park,” is yet another
settlement, filched, like the cemeteries, from Finchley Common by
successive iniquitous Acts of Parliament at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. Could the gay highwaymen who, a hundred years ago,
were gathered to their fathers at the end of a rope down Tyburn way
revisit Finchley, the poor fellows would sadly need a guide. Where,
alas! is Finchley Common, that wide-spreading expanse of evil omen on
which these jovial spirits were so thoroughly at home? Finchley Common,
once second only to the far-famed Hounslow Heath, has long since been
divided up between the many who, more than a hundred years ago, conspired
to cheat the people of their birthright in this once broad expanse of
open space. The representatives of the people at Westminster allowed it,
and my Lord Bishop of London profited by it, together with lesser folk,
each in their several degrees. The Common then extended to considerably
over two thousand acres. Of this vast tract only a few acres are left,
beyond North Finchley. The rest was sold quietly, and by degrees, for
absurdly small sums.
[Picture: The Great Common of Finchley: a parlous place]
Between 1700 and 1800 the great Common of Finchley was a parlous place,
and not one of the better-known highwaymen but had tried his hand at
“touching the mails” as they went across this waste; or patrolled the
darkest side of the road, ready to spring upon the solitary traveller.
Indeed, the childlike simplicity of the lonely travellers of those days
is absolutely contemptible, considering the well-known dangers of the
roads. For instance, on the night of the 28th August, 1720, a horseman
might have been observed in the act of crossing Finchley Common. He had
fifteen guineas in his pocket, and ambled along as though he had been in
Pall Mall instead of on perhaps the most dangerous road in England. At a
respectful distance behind him came his servant, and just in front of
him, midway of this howling wilderness, stood three figures. “There is
an eye that notes our coming,” says the poet, and three pairs of eyes had
perceived this wayfarer. They belonged to an enterprising individual
named Spiggott and to two other ruffians, whose names have not been
handed down to posterity. The weirdly named Spiggott was apparently
above disguising himself; his companions, however, might have stood for
stage brigands, for one of them had the cape of his coat buttoned over
his chin, and the other wore a slouched hat over his eyes. In addition
to this, he kept the ends of his long wig in his mouth—which seems rather
a comic opera touch. It is to be hoped, rather than expected, that the
traveller with the guineas saw the humour of it. In the twinkling of an
eye one brigand had seized his horse and made him dismount, while the
others covered him with their pistols. The servant also was secured, the
guineas transferred with the dexterity of a practised conjurer, the
horses turned loose, and then the three rode away, leaving the traveller
and his servant to get on as best they could. Spiggott eventually paid
the penalty of his rashness in not disguising himself in accordance with
the canons of the hightoby craft, for when, a little later in his career,
he was caught, with some others, in an attempt on the Wendover wagon at
Tyburn, he was identified by the Finchley traveller. The end of him was
the appointed end of all his kind. The moral of this story seems to be
“Wear a mask when engaged in crime.”
In 1774, Edmund Burke, travelling to Malton, in Yorkshire, was stopped
here by two highwaymen, who robbed him of ten guineas, and his servant of
his watch, in the most easy way. Some of these highwaymen were, indeed,
persons who took their calling in an earnest and whole-hearted manner,
and doubtless regarded Jack Sheppard as a mere scatterbrain, quite
unfitted to be in business for himself. Thoroughly business-like men
were Messrs. Everett and Williams, who entered into a duly drawn and
properly attested deed of partnership, by which it was agreed that they
should work together on Finchley Common and elsewhere and divide the
profits of their labours into equal shares. Their industry prospered,
and the common fund soon reached the very respectable total of £2,000.
But when required to render accounts and to pay over half this amount,
Mr. Williams refused; whereupon his partner brought an action-at-law
against him, in 1725. A verdict for £20 was actually obtained, and
appealed against by the defendant. The court then very properly found
the matter scandalous, and sentenced Everett to pay costs, the solicitors
engaged on either side being fined £50 each for their part in this
discreditable affair. One partner was executed, two years later, at
Maidstone, and the other at Tyburn, in 1730.
There still exists an ancient oak by the road at a place called Brown’s
Wells, at the corner of a lane nearly opposite the “Green Man,” and in
the trunk of this last survival of the “good old days” there have been
found, from time to time, quite a number of pistol bullets, said to have
been fired by passing travellers at the trunk to frighten the highwaymen
who might chance to be hiding behind it, under cover of the night. The
tree itself has long borne the name of Turpin’s Oak, no less celebrated a
person than the re-doubtable Dick himself having once frequented it.
History fails to inform us who was the Brown after whom the Wells were
named. I suggest they should be, and were in the first place “Brent
Wells”; a source of the river Brent. Nor are those Wells—whatever they
may have been—now in existence, while the name itself is only perpetuated
by two or three old stuccoed villas beside the road.
[Picture: Turpin’s Oak] Turpin, of course, is the greatest of all the
rascals who made the name of the Great North Road a name of dread.
Before him, however, the redoubtable Jack Sheppard figured here, but not,
it is sad to relate, in an heroic manner. In fact that nimble-fingered
youth, after escaping from the Stone Jug (by which piece of classic slang
you are to understand Newgate to be meant) had the humiliation to be
apprehended on Finchley Common, disguised in drink and a butcher’s blue
smock. That was the worst of those roystering blades. The drink was the
undoing of them all. If only they had been Good Templars, and had
sported the blue ribbon, it is quite certain that they had not been cut
off untimely; and might, with reasonable luck, even have retired with a
modest competence in early years. It was in 1724 that Jack Sheppard was
arrested by Bow Street runners on the Common, and the fact somewhat
staggers one’s belief in the wild lawlessness of that place. To capture
a highwayman in his own peculiar territory! One might just as soon
expect to hear of the Chief Commissioner of Police being kidnapped from
Scotland Yard. And yet it is quite certain that Finchley was no safe
place for a good young man with five pounds in his pocket and a mere
walking-stick in his hand, whether he proposed to cross it by night or
day. Even sixty-six years later this evil reputation existed; for, in
1790, the Earl of Minto, travelling to London, wrote to his wife that
instead of pushing on to town at night, he would defer his entry until
morning, “for I shall not trust my throat on Finchley Common in the
dark.” Think of it! And Dick Turpin had been duly executed fifty years
before!
Of the many names in the long and distinguished roll of road agents who
figured here at some time or another in their meteoric careers, it is not
possible to say much. There was the courageous and resourceful Captain
Hind, the whimsically nicknamed “Old Mob,” burly Tom Cox, Neddy Wicks,
and Claud Duval. Duval’s proper territory is, however, the Bath Road.
The palmy days of the highwayman were before 1797, the year of Pitt’s Act
for Restricting Cash Payments. Before then, travellers carried nothing
but gold, and as they required plenty of that commodity on their long and
tedious journeys, the booty seized by these gentry was often
considerable. Bank notes then came into favour, and were issued for as
low a denomination as one pound. These would have been a perilous kind
of plunder, and accordingly as they grew popular, so did the certainty of
a good haul from coaches and post-chaises diminish, until panics came,
banks failed, and paper money became for a time a discredited form of
currency. By that time the roads were better patrolled, and coin was to
be conjured from the pockets of the lieges with less safety than before.
From these causes, and from the new law which made it penal to receive
stolen goods as well as to steal them, we may date the decadence of a
great industry, now utterly vanished from the roads.
XII
[Picture: “The Whetstone”] WHETSTONE, coming next after the Finchleys, is
held in local legends to have acquired its name from the battered old
stone still to be seen embedded in the ground by the signpost of the
“Griffin” inn. On it the men-at-arms are said to have whetted their
swords and spears before the battle of Barnet. The sceptical smile at
this antiquity, and for their benefit there is a rival legend which gives
the date as that of 1745, when King George’s army marched down to meet
Prince Charles and his Highlanders. Antiquaries have often demolished
this derivation of the place-name; but the hoary (and quite unveracious)
tale survives, and is doubtless immortal. You may explain it away, but
the stone is there, and your local patriot is ever a materialist in such
a resort.
It is a straggling, broad-streeted village, with a breadth implying the
originally small value of the land, and encroachments here and there upon
the old building-line proving both the implication and the fact that,
many years ago, there were those who, having the foreknowledge of a
coming betterment, and more daring than their neighbours, grabbed while
they might. Many inns, laundries, dairy-farms, great black-timbered
barns, and a few rotting hoardings and unfinished houses make up the long
street and tell alike of a vanished rusticity and of an arrested
development.
Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here, his first
stage out of London on the northern roads. They were placed here, rather
than at Barnet, in order to avoid expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated
down the road, near Greenhill Cross. Whetstone Gate gave travellers
going north the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed
Finchley Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society
of Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.