had a varied and adventurous career. When in his twelfth year, he ran
away from home and became a jockey. In the course of this employment he
was sent to Russia in charge of some horses presented by the Duke of
Northumberland to the Empress, and returning to London well supplied with
money, dissipated it all in evil courses. He then shipped as a sailor on
board the _Medway_ man-of-war, but after a short experience of fighting,
managed to desert. He had no sooner landed in England than he was seized
by one of the prowling pressgangs that then scoured the seaports, and was
shipped aboard the _Ariadne_, fitting out on an expedition to destroy the
pirate, Paul Jones. Succeeding in an attempt to escape when off
Yarmouth, he enlisted in the 13th Regiment of Foot, and deserting again,
near Chatham, set out to tramp through London to York, visiting
Huntingdon on the way. The 49th Regiment was then recruiting in the
district, and Matcham promptly enlisted in it.
From Huntingdon, on the 19th of August 1780, he was sent to Major
Reynolds at Diddington, to draw some subsistence-money, amounting to
between £6 and £7. With him was a drummer-boy, Benjamin Jones, aged
about sixteen years, the son of the recruiting sergeant. The boy having
drawn the money, they returned along the high road, Matcham drinking on
the way. Instead of turning off to Huntingdon, Matcham induced the boy
to go on with him in the direction of Alconbury, and picking a quarrel
with him at the bridge, seized him and cut his throat, making off with
the money. He then fled across country to the nearest seaport, and
shipped again to sea. For six years he continued in the Navy and saw
hard fighting under Rodney and Hood, being at last paid off H.M.S.
_Sampson_ at Plymouth, on June 15, 1786. From Plymouth he set out with a
messmate—one John Shepherd—to walk along the Exeter Road to London. Near
the “Woodyates Inn” they were overtaken one afternoon by a thunderstorm
in which Matcham startled his shipmate by his abject terror of some
unseen apparition. Eventually he confessed his crime to Shepherd, and
begged his companion to hand him over to the nearest magistrate, so that
Justice might be satisfied. He was accordingly committed at Salisbury,
and, inquiries as to the truth of his confession having been made, he was
brought to trial at Huntingdon, found guilty, and executed on the 2nd of
August 1786, his body being afterwards hanged in chains on Alconbury
Hill.
XX
THE summit of this convenient Golgotha is the place where the North Road
and the Great North Road adjust their differences, and proceed by one
route to the North. Not a very terrible hill, after all, despite the way
in which it figures in the letters and diaries of old travellers; but
nowadays a very lonely place, although it is the meeting-point of two
main roads and that of a branch one. It was once different indeed, and
the great “Wheatsheaf” inn and posting-house, which stood a hundred yards
or so away from the junction, used commonly to send out thirty pairs of
post-horses a day. This establishment was kept in its prime by John
Warsop, who lived long enough to see his business ruined by railways.
Let no one imagine the “Wheatsheaf” public-house, standing where the
roads meet, to be the representative of that old posting-house. Face
north, and you will see a private house of considerable size standing on
the east side of the road, behind a hedge and lawn. Not a beautiful
house; in fact, an ugly house of a dingy whitey-buff brick, the colour of
pastry taken out of the oven before it is properly baked. Approaching
nearer, it will be observed that this building is now divided into two
private residences. This was once the “Wheatsheaf.” In the bygone days
it possessed a semicircular approach from the road, and afforded all the
year round, and round the clock of every day and night, a busy scene;
with the postboys, whose next turn-out it was, sleeping with spur on
heel, ready to mount and away at a minute’s notice, north, south, east,
or west. Those times and manners are as absolutely vanished as though
they never had existed, and even although there are yet living those who
remember the old “Wheatsheaf” of their youthful days, perhaps not one
wayfarer in a hundred has any idea of that once busy era on Alconbury
Hill. How many of all those who pass this way have ever noticed that
pathetic relic of the “Wheatsheaf’s” bygone prosperity, the old post from
which its sign used to hang? It is still to be seen, by those who know
where to look for it, facing the road, a venerable and decrepit relic,
now thickly covered with ivy, and somewhat screened from the casual
glance by the shrubs and trees growing close beside it.
Travellers coming south could have a choice of routes to London from
Alconbury Hill, as the elaborate old milestone still standing at the
parting of the ways indicates, showing sixty-four miles by way of
Huntingdon, Royston, and Ware, and four miles longer by the way we have
come. This monumental milestone, now somewhat dilapidated, railed round,
and with some forlorn-looking wall-flowers growing inside the enclosure,
is a striking object, situated at a peculiarly impressive spot, where the
left-hand route by Huntingdon is seen going off on the level to a
vanishing-point lost in the distant haze, rather than by any dip or curve
of the road to right or left; the right-hand road diving down the hill to
Alconbury Weston and Alconbury at its foot.
[Picture: Alconbury Hill Junction]
The descent, going north, is known as Stangate Hill, and leads past the
lonely churchyard of Sawtry St. Andrews, whose church has disappeared as
utterly as Sawtry Abbey, which, less wealthy than the great abbeys of
Ramsey, Thorney, Crowland, or Peterborough, stood beside the road, and
was besieged by mediæval tramps:
“Sawtry-by-the-Way, that old Abbaye,
Gave more alms in one day than all they.”
Thus ran the old rhyme. To-day, the only vestiges of that vanished
religious house are in the names of Monk’s Wood, to the right of the
road, descending the hill, and of the Abbey Farm.
The foot of Stangate Hill is no doubt the place called by Thoresby and
others “Stangate Hole,” where highwaymen were confidently to be expected.
De Foe, writing about 1720 of this road, says: “Some Parts are still
paved with stone, which strengthens the conjecture that the Name Stangate
was given it from thence. It traverses great woods between the Two
Saltries.”
In his spelling of “Sawtry,” in that last line, although he does not
follow the invariable form, he has hit upon the original. For “Sawtry”
was in the beginning “Salt Reeth.” Salt marshes and creeks crept inland
even as far as this, past Ely and Ramsey.
Stilton lies some three miles ahead, and, two miles before reaching it,
the old “Crown and Woolpack,” a very large red-brick posting-house, part
of it still occupied as an inn, the rest used as cottages, while the
stables are given over to spiders and lumber.
Passing this, the road presently begins to rise gently, and then, level
again, widens out to almost treble its usual width, where a long street
of mingled old houses and cottages, a medley of stone, brick, and
plaster, stands, strangely silent. This is Stilton, dreaming of bygone
busy times. Had the railway touched here, things would have worn a very
different aspect at Stilton to-day. Let us, therefore, thank the shades
of that Marquis of Exeter, and of the others who resisted the railway,
and by causing it to describe a wide loop instead of hugging the road,
unwittingly contributed to the preservation in a glass case, as it were,
of this old coaching centre.
Night and day the coaches kept Stilton awake, and if for a few minutes
there was no coach, the post-chaises at one end of the social scale, and
the fly-wagons at the other, kept the inns busy. Stilton buzzed with
activity then. From the far North came the drovers, doing twenty miles a
day, with their sheep and cattle, their pigs and geese; animal creation
marching, martyrs in their sort, to Smithfield. At Stilton they shod the
cattle, like horses, and one blacksmith’s business here consisted of
nothing else than this.
The glory of Stilton has departed, and the “Bell” and the “Angel” face
one another, dolefully wondering in what channels the tide of business
now flows. The “Bell” is more racy of the soil than the “Angel,” just as
it is also much older. We are here in a stone district, and the “Bell”
is a building of that warm yellowish stone characteristic of these parts.
Built at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, it was already of
a respectable age when the brick “Angel” opposite began to rise from its
foundations. The older house is the feature of Stilton, its great sign,
with the mazy quirks and curls of its wrought-iron supports, projecting
far out towards the road, and arresting the eye on first entering the
street. The sign itself is painted on copper, for the sake of lightness,
but has long been supported by a crutch, in the shape of a post. With
this ornamental iron-work, incomparably the finest sign on the road, it
was in the old days the subject of many wagers made by coachmen and
guards with unwary strangers who did not, like those artful ones, know
its measurements. It measures in fact 6 ft. 2¾ inches in height.
The old “Talbot” inn still has its coach gallery, or balcony, in front.
The “Angel,” in the best days of posting, became the principal house at
Stilton, and the little public-house of that name next door to the
commanding brick building which is now a private residence was only the
tap of the hotel. But the “Bell,” that has seen the beginning and the
end of the “Angel,” still survives, with memories of the days when the
delicacy which renders the name of Stilton world-famous had its origin.
Allusion is hereby made—need one explain it?—to “Stilton” cheese. They
say those old stagers who knew it when its local reputation first began
to be dispersed throughout the country—that Stilton cheese is not what it
was. What is? The “English Parmesan,” they called it then, when their
palates first became acquainted with it, but it deserved better of them
than that. It was a species of itself, and not justly comparable with
aught else. But Stilton cheese is not, nor ever was, made at Stilton, or
anywhere near it. It originated with Mrs. Paulet of Wymondham, near
Melton Mowbray, who first supplied it to Cooper Thornhill, the once
celebrated landlord of the “Bell,” for the use of the table provided for
the coach passengers and other travellers who dined there. Mrs. Paulet’s
cheeses immediately struck connoisseurs as a revelation, and they came
into demand, not only on Thornhill’s table, but were eagerly purchased
for themselves or friends by those who travelled this way. Thornhill was
too business-like a man to give away the secret of the make, and he did
very well for himself, charging as he did half-a-crown a pound. Then the
almost equally famous Miss Worthington, of the “Angel,” began to supply
“Stilton” cheeses, so that scarce any one came through the place but was
asked to buy one. Nor did travellers usually wait to be asked. If it
happened that they did not want any for themselves, they were usually
charged by friends with commissions to purchase as they passed through.
Smiling waiters and maidservants, Miss Worthington herself, rosy, plump,
benevolent-looking, asked travellers if they would not like to take away
with them a real Stilton cheese. Miss Worthington, the kindly, whose
lavender-scented beds were famed along the whole length of the Great
North Road—there she stood, declaring that they were real Stilton
cheeses! Nor were travellers for a long while any the wiser. Stilton
folks kept the secret well. But it gradually leaked out. A native of
those parts, too, was the traitor. “Pray, sir, would you like a nice
Stilton cheese to take away with you?” asked the unsuspecting landlady,
as the coach on whose outside he was seated drew up.
[Picture: The Bell, Stilton]
“Do you say they are made at Stilton?” he asked in reply.
“Oh, yes,” said she.
Then came the crushing rejoinder. “Why, Miss Worthington, you know
perfectly well that no Stilton cheese was ever made at Stilton; they’re
all made in Leicestershire, and as you say your cheeses are made at
Stilton, they cannot be good, and I won’t have one.” The secret was
then, of course, exploded.
Which of these two inns could it have been to which Mrs. Calderwood of
Coltness refers in her diary when, travelling from Scotland to London in
the middle of the eighteenth century, she mentions at Stilton a “fine
large inn,” where the linen was “as perfit rags as ever I saw: plain
linen with fifty holes in each towell.” It would be interesting to know,
but it is hopeless now to attempt to identify it.
XXI
UP-HILL from Stilton, three-quarters of a mile away, but well within
sight, stands the Norman Cross inn, where the Peterborough, Louth,
Lincoln, and Hull coaches turned off to the right.
[Picture: Norman Cross]
Norman Cross! how many have been those old-time cyclists who have
partaken of the hospitality of the inn here! Not always, though, has it
been a place of welcome memories. For years, indeed, during the long
struggles between England and France, this was the site of one of the
largest of the prisons in which captured French soldiers were
incarcerated. Over three thousand were placed here, officers and
privates, some remaining captive for more than ten years. Happy those
who, through influence or by mere luck, were selected to be exchanged for
our soldiers, prisoners in France.
It was a weary time for those poor fellows. Many of them died in the
great insanitary sheds in which they were confined, and others lost their
reason. Desperate men sometimes succeeded in escaping to the coast,
where friends were awaiting them. Others, wandering over the lonely
flats, perished miserably in the dykes and drains into which they fell
when the mists shrouded the countryside. There were, again, those who
stabbed the sentries and made off. Such an one was Charles François
Marie Bonchew, an officer, who had wounded, but had not killed, a sentry
named Alexander Halliday. Being captured, he was sentenced to death at
Huntingdon, and was brought back to Norman Cross to be executed,
September 1808. All the prisoners were turned out to witness the
execution, and the garrison was under arms.
But it was not all savagery and horror here among those military
captives, for they were often allowed out on parole, within certain hours
and well-defined bounds. It was understood that no prisoner out on
parole should leave the highroad, nor was he to be at large after sunset.
If he disregarded these rules he was liable to be shot at sight by any
one who had a gun handy. He was an Ishmael against whom every hand was
turned, and, indeed, the Post Office offered a reward of £5 to any mail
guard who, seeing a prisoner breaking parole, should shoot him. After
several inoffensive farm-labourers, going home after dusk, had been
peppered with shot in mistake by guards anxious to secure this reward,
the village streets and roads adjacent became singularly desolate when a
coach was heard approaching.
There were exceptions to these strict rules, and officers of high
rank—and consequently assumed to have a nicer sense of honour than that
obtaining among subalterns and the rank and file—were permitted to take
private lodgings at Stilton. Those were the fortunate ones. Most of the
prisoners, unhappily, were penniless, and after a time even their own
Government refused supplies for their maintenance. Accordingly, they
obtained some few little luxuries, and employed the time that hung so
heavily on their hands, by carving toys and artistic nick-nacks out of
fragments of wood, or from the bones left from their rations, and selling
them to the crowds of country folks who came to gaze at them on certain
days. Straw-plaiting, too, was a prisoners’ industry, until it was
stopped by some of the military in charge.
In March, 1812, Sergeant Ives, of the West Essex Militia, was stopped on
the highway between Stilton and Norman Cross by a number of persons
unknown, who, after having knocked him down and robbed him of his money
and watch, wrenched open his jaws, and with savage cruelty, cut off a
piece of his tongue. It was supposed that this outrage was in revenge
for his having been concerned in suppressing the plait trade at Norman
Cross barracks.
The prisoners were not entirely without spiritual consolation, for the
good Bishop de Moulines appointed himself their chaplain, and, of his own
free will leaving France, took up residence at Stilton. He attended them
in sickness, and helped them out of his own resources.
The officers in charge of these prisoners were often brutal, but that
there were some who sympathised with their sorrows is evident from the
tablet still to be seen in Yaxley Church, a mile distant, which tells of
the gratitude of the prisoners for the kindness shown them by Captain
John Draper, R.N., who died after being in charge of the prison for only
eighteen months.
Norman Cross Prison, or “Yaxley Barracks”—Norman Cross being in the
parish of Yaxley—built in 1796; was demolished in 1816, and no vestige of
it is left.
And so all recollection of these things might in time have faded away had
it not been for the monument erected by the wayside in the fateful year
1914. Let us pause to consider that moment. Events were hurrying
towards the beginning of the Great War of 1914–18, and the nation in
general was wholly ignorant of what was coming. Stupidly ignorant, for
there were many omens. It was at this moment, afterwards seen to be so
full of tragedy, that the memorial pillar on, or near, the site of Yaxley
Barracks, to the memory of those French prisoners of war, was unveiled,
July 28th, 1914, by Lord Weardale. A gilded bronze French Imperial eagle
stoops on the crest of a handsome pillar, and on the plinth is a tablet
stating that this is a memorial to 1770 French prisoners who died in
captivity.
[Picture: French Prisoners of War Monument, Norman Cross]
These incidents, “picked from the wormholes of long vanished days,” give
romance to the otherwise featureless road onwards to Kate’s Cabin and
Water Newton. The “Kate’s Cabin” inn is mentioned by every road-book of
coaching-times, but no one ever condescended to explain the origin of
this curious sign, and the inn itself, once standing in the receipt of
custom at the cross-roads, three miles and a half from Norman Cross, is
now a pretty cottage.
[Picture: Sculptured figure, Water Newton Church] Nearly two miles
onward, Water Newton comes in sight, standing, dry and secure, on its
knoll above the water-meadows on the river Nene. On the western face of
its church tower, which originally, before Wansford bridge was built and
the road diverted, faced the highway, may yet be seen a tabernacle
containing an ancient effigy of a man in semi-ecclesiastical attire, his
hands clasped in prayer. An inscription in Norman French may with some
difficulty be deciphered beneath it, inviting the passer-by to pray for
the soul of Thomas Purden:—
“VOVS KE PAR
ISSI PASSEZ
POVR LE ALME
TOMAS PVR
DEN PRIEZ.”
Read aloud, we perceive this to be intended for rhyme.
No one prays for the soul of Thomas Purden nowadays, for these two very
excellent and individually sufficient reasons—that prayers for the dead
are not customary in the Church of England, and that, since the road has
been diverted, there are no passers-by.
This brings us to the reason why Thomas Purden should have expected
wayfarers to intercede for his soul. That he expected them to do this
out of gratitude seems obvious; but it is not at first evident for what
they should be so grateful. We are, however, to bear in mind that a road
passed down beside this church tower in those days, where no road—only a
meadow—exists to-day. The meadow slopes steeply to the river, and
doubtless a ford, a ferry, or some primitive bridge was established here
by Thomas Purden long before even a wooden bridge existed at Wansford.
In providing some safe method by which travellers might pass this river,
even now subject to dangerous floods, Purden would have been a benefactor
in the eyes alike of men and of Holy Church, and fully entitled to the
prayers and intercessions of all.
[Picture: Water Newton Church]
For many years the head of the figure had disappeared, but when the
church was restored, some years since, an ingenious mason fitted him with
another which had, in the usual careless fashion of restorers, been
knocked off something else. And it is a simple truth that since its
“restoration,” Water Newton church is sadly bare.
By the wayside, on the left, against the wall of a farm-house residence,
will be noticed an old milestone and horseman’s upping-block combined.
It marks the 81st mile from London, and bears the initials “E. B.,”
together with the date, 1708. This is perhaps the only survivor of a
series which, according to De Foe, in his “Tour through the Whole Island
of Great Britain,” a Mr. Boulter was projecting “to London, for the
general benefit.”
[Picture: Edmund Boulter’s Milestone]
Edmund Boulter was one of the family who were then seated at Gawthorp
Hall, near Leeds, and who, not much later, sold that property to Henry
Lascelles, father of the first Lord Harewood.
At the hamlet of Sibson, on the left hand in descending toward the
level-crossing at Wansford station, may still be seen the stocks and
whipping-post beside the road. To the right flows the winding Nene,
through illimitable oozy meadows, its course marked in the far distance
by the pollard willows that line its banks. The Nene here divides the
counties of Huntingdonshire and Northants, Wansford itself lying in the
last-mentioned county and Stibbington on the hither side of the river.
The famous Wansford Bridge joins the two, and helps to render Wansford
and Stibbington one place in the eyes of strangers. Both places belong
to the Duke of Bedford, Stibbington bearing the mark of its ownership
distinctly visible in its severe and uncomfortable-looking “model”
modern-gothic stone houses, with the coroneted “B” on their gables. In
this manner the accursed Russells have bedevilled many of the villages
and townlets unhappily owned by them, and the feelings of all who live in
their earmarked houses must be akin to those of paupers who inhabit
workhouses and infirmaries, with the important exception that the Duke’s
tenants pay rent and taxes. Wansford, fortunately, has not been rebuilt,
and it is possible for the villagers to live without an uncomfortable
sense of belonging, body and soul, to the Dukes of Bedford.
The famous “Haycock” inn, usually spoken of as at Wansford, is, in fact,
on the Huntingdonshire side of the bridge, and in Stibbington. Its sign
alludes to the supposed origin of the curious nick-name of
“Wansford-in-England,” first mentioned in that scarce little early
eighteenth-century book, _Drunken Barnaby’s Four Journeys to the North of
England_. In its pages he describes being carried off by a flood:—
“On a haycock sleeping soundly,
Th’ River rose and took me roundly
Down the current: People cry’d;
Sleeping, down the Stream I hy’d:
‘Where away,’ quoth they, ‘from Greenland?’
‘No, from Wansforth-brigs in England.’”
This “in England” has puzzled many. It really refers to the situation of
Wansford in Northamptonshire, near, but not in, “Holland”—the Holland
division of Lincolnshire.
[Picture: The “Haycock,” Wansford]
Wansford’s peculiar fame is thus more than local. Perhaps the queer
picture-sign of the grand old inn, representing Drunken Barnaby on his
haycock, helped to disperse it over England in days when it could not
fail to be seen by every passing traveller. The “Haycock” ceased to be
an inn, and is now occupied as a hunting-box. It affords a pleasing
relief from the Duke of Bedford’s almshouse-looking cottages, and is a
building not only of considerable age, but of dignified architectural
character. Stone-built, with handsome windows and steep slated roof, and
carefully designed, even to its chimneys, it is, architecturally
speaking, among the very finest of the houses ever used as inns in
England, and has more the appearance of having been originally designed
as a private mansion than as a house of public entertainment. The sign
is now hung in the hall of the house, the corbels it rested on being
still visible beside the present door, replacing the old archway by which
the coaches and post-chaises entered and left the courtyard of the inn of
old.