strange sign, the “Ram Jam,” has puzzled many people. Its original name
was the “Winchilsea Arms,” and it bore no other sign than the armorial
shield of the Earls of Winchilsea until long after coaching days were
done; but in all that time it was known only as the “Ram Jam House,” and
thereby hangs a tale, or several tales, most of them untrue. All kinds
of wild legends of the house being so crammed with travellers that it was
called “Ram Jam,” from that circumstance, have been heard. But
travellers, as a matter of fact, never stayed there, for the inn never
had any accommodation for them. It was more a beer-house than anything
else. It’s fame began about 1740, when the landlord was an officer’s
servant, returned from India. He possessed the secret of compounding a
liqueur or spirit which he sold to travellers down the road, this
eventually becoming as well-known a delicacy as Cooper Thornhill’s
“Stilton” cheeses. He called this spirit “Ram Ján,” which seems to be an
Indian term for a table servant, and sold it in small bottles, either
singly, for consumption on the journey, or in cases of half-dozens or
dozens. The secret of this liqueur was imparted to his son, but
afterwards died out, and it is said that “Ram Jam” ceased to be sold
before the beginning of the nineteenth century.
[Picture: Interior of a Village Inn. (After Morland)]
Although the “Ram Jam” was never more than a tavern of a very humble
description, and probably never sheltered guests above the rank of
cattle-drovers, it is noted as having been the house where Molyneux, the
black, slept before his fight with Tom Cribb at Thistleton Gap, three and
a half miles away, on September 28, 1811. Cribb, who was easily the
victor, had his quarters at the “Blue Bull,” another small roadside
house, which stood, until the beginning of 1900, at the cross roads on
Witham Common, where roads go right and left to Bourn and Melton Mowbray.
It has now been demolished.
Here we have passed the little Rutlandshire village of Stretton on the
right, which obtained its name of “Street-town” from having been on the
ancient road called the Ermine Way. Here we come again into
Lincolnshire.
For some twenty miles the Great North Road runs through this broad
county, the land of the “yellow-bellies,” as Lincolnshire folk are named,
from the frogs and eels that inhabit their fens and marshes. North and
South Witham, giving a name to Witham Common, lie unseen, off to the
left, and the once famous old “Black Bull” stands, as it always has
stood, solitary beside the road, out of sight from any other house. It
consists of two separate buildings, at right angles to one another and
erected at different times. The original house is a structure of
rag-stone, placed a little way back from the road, and facing it. The
second building, which bears a more imposing architectural character, and
with its handsome elevation of red brick and stone, bears witness to the
once extensive business of the “Black Bull,” stands facing south, with
its gable-end to the road, thus forming two sides of a courtyard. Long
ranges of stables extend to the rear. The place is now in use as a
farmhouse and hunting-box, and a screen of laurels and other evergreen
shrubs is planted on the site of the old coach-drive. Sturtle, who kept
the house in the old days, is gathered to his fathers, and the railway
whistle sounds across country, where the guards’ horns once aroused the
echoes of Morkery Woods or Spittle Gorse.
How different the outlook now from the time when Sir Walter Scott made
entries in his _Journal_. “Old England,” he writes, from his hotel at
Grantham, “is no changeling. Things seem much the same. One race of
red-nosed innkeepers are gone, and their widows, eldest sons, or head
waiters exercise hospitality in their room, with the same bustle and
importance. The land, however, is much better ploughed; straight ridges
everywhere adopted in place of the old circumflex of twenty years ago.
Three horses, however, or even four, are often seen in a plough, yoked
one before the other. Ill habits do not go out at once.”
A few years later, and these things, which had changed so little, were
revolutionised. The railway carried all the traffic and the roads were
deserted, the “red-nosed innkeepers” so rarely seeing a guest, that when
a stray one arrived they almost fell on his shoulder and wept.
Agriculture, too, converted even Witham Common into a succession of
fertile fields, and thus banished wayfaring romance to the pages of
history or of sensation novels.
[Picture: House, formerly the “Black Bull,” Witham Common]
XXIV
LET us rest awhile by this sunlit stretch of road, where the red roofs of
distant farmsteads alone hint of life; always excepting the humming
telegraph wires whispering messages to Edinburgh and the Far North, or
perhaps the summer breeze bringing across country the distant echo of a
train. If it does, why then the sound renders our solitude the more
complete, and gives flight to a lagging imagination. It reminds us that
it was here, and not there, three miles away over the meadows in a
railway cutting, that the traffic of two kingdoms went, sixty years ago.
These green selvedges of grass that border the highway so delightfully
were not then in existence. They were a part of the road itself, which
was, for all that, not too wide for the mail-coaches, the stages, the
fly-wagons, private chariots, post-chaises, and especially the runaway
couples _en route_ for Gretna Green, who travelled along it. “The
dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,” quoth Sir Walter
Scott, in his diary, when journeying to Abbotsford in 1826. Dull
scenically, but not historically. Had it been an unlettered cyclist who
had made this criticism, a thousand critical lashes had been his
portion—and serve him right; but what shall we say of the author of
_Waverley_? Dull! why, the road is thronged with company. One can—any
one can who has the will to it—call spirits from the vasty deep with
which to people the way. No need to ask, “Will they come?” They cannot
choose but do so; they are here.
A strange and motley crowd: the pale ghosts of the ages. From Ostorius
Scapula and the Emperors Hadrian, Severus, and Constantine the Great,
down through the Middle Ages, they come, mostly engaged in cutting one
another’s throats. York and Lancaster, as their fortunes ebbed or
flowed, setting up or taking down the heads of traitors; obscure
murderers despatching equally obscure victims by the way, and in later
times—the farcical mingling with the more tragic humours—we see James the
First journeying to his throne, confirmed in his good opinion of himself
as a second Solomon by a sycophantic crowd of courtiers; Lord Chancellor
Littleton, fleeing from Parliament to Charles the First at York, carrying
with him that precious symbol of Royal authority, the Great Seal (the
third Great Seal of that reign), made in the year the Long Parliament
began to sit; Charles the First, a few years later, conducted by the
victorious Parliament to London, and, at the interval of another century,
the Rebel Lords. “The ’45,” indeed, made much traffic on this road: the
British army going down, with Billy the Butcher at its head, to crush the
rebellion, and the prisoners coming up—their last journey, as they knew
full well. They were pinioned on the way, for their better custody, and
so that Hanoverian heads might sleep the sounder at St. James’s. The
Hanoverians themselves rarely came this way, nor would their coming have
added greatly to the romance of the road. George the Third passed once.
He was a stay-at-home king, and of roads knew little, save of those that
led from London to Windsor, or to that western _Ultima Thule_ of his,
Weymouth. Indeed, it is said, on what authority it is difficult to
determine, that the third George never voyaged out of the kingdom. Even
Hanover, beloved of his forbears, he never knew, although the Jacobites
ceased not with their brass tokens, to wish him there. {165} His
furthest journey is said to have been to York.
His son, afterwards George the Fourth, had occasion to remember this
road, for he was upset on it in 1789, when returning from a visit to Earl
Fitzwilliam at Wentworth Woodhouse. Two miles from Newark, a cart
overturned his carriage in a narrow part of the highway. It rolled over
three times down an incline, and fell to pieces like a box of tricks, but
the prince was unhurt.
Of bygone sporting figures with which, in imagination, to people the way
we have a crowd. There has always been something in the great length of
the road to York, and of its continuation to Edinburgh, that has appealed
to sportsmen and all those interested in the speeds of different methods
of progression. Pedestrians, horsemen, and coaches—and in recent times
cyclists—have competed in their several ways, from an early period until
our own day, and the rival railways even have had their races to
Edinburgh.
Of these feats, that of Sir Robert Cary, son of Lord Hunsdon, is not the
least remarkable. He carried the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death to
James at Edinburgh, and was the first to hail him King of England.
Riding in furious haste, and with fresh horses wherever he could obtain
them, he succeeded in covering the distance in the sixty hours between a
Thursday morning and a Saturday night. Again, a very few years later—in
May 1606—a certain esquire of James the First’s, John Lepton of York,
undertook for a wager to ride on six consecutive days between that city
and London. He started from Aldersgate on the 20th of May, and
accomplished his task every day before darkness had fallen; “to the
greater praise of his strength in acting than to his discretion in
undertaking it,” as Fuller remarks. He also, of course, had relays of
horses. Among the pedestrians is Ben Jonson, who walked to Scotland, on
his visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, starting in June 1618; but he
footed it less for sport than from necessity.
When Charles the First was at York, according to Clarendon, it was a
frequent occurrence for gentlemen couriers to ride with despatches
between that place and London, completing the double journey—400 miles—in
thirty-four hours. Thus, a letter sent by the Council in London on the
Saturday, midnight, was answered on its arrival at York by the king, and
the answer delivered in London at ten o’clock on the Monday morning.
Then there was Cooper Thornhill, landlord of the “Bell” at Stilton, who
for a wager rode to London and back again to Stilton, about 1740. The
distance, 154 miles in all, was done in eleven hours thirty-three minutes
and forty-six seconds. He had nineteen horses to carry him, and so is no
rival of Turpin’s mythical exploit in riding to York on his equally
mythical Black Bess; but he was evidently considered a wonderful person,
for there was a poem published about him in 1745, entitled “The Stilton
Hero: O Tempora! O Mores:” a sixpenny quarto of fourteen pages.
Foster Powell is easily first among the pedestrians. He was an
eighteenth century notability, a native of Horsforth, near Leeds, and
born in 1734. Articled to an attorney, he remained a solicitor’s clerk,
undistinguished in the law, but early famed for his walking powers. In
1764 he backed himself for any amount to walk fifty miles on the Bath
Road in seven hours, and having accomplished this, despite his wearing a
heavy greatcoat and leather breeches at the time, he visited France and
Switzerland, and fairly walked the natives off their legs. It was in
1773 that he performed his first walk from London to York and back, doing
the 400 miles in five days and eighteen hours. This was followed by a
walk of 100 miles, out and home, on the Bath Road, done in twenty-three
hours and a quarter. His three great pedestrian records on the Great
North Road in 1788 and twice in 1792 are his most remarkable
achievements. Although by this time he had long passed the age at which
athletics are commonly indulged in, he performed the London to York and
back walk of 1788 in five days twenty hours, and its repetitions of 1792
in five days eighteen hours and five days fifteen hours and a quarter,
respectively. The starting and turning-points were Shoreditch Church and
York Minster. This last effort probably cost him his life, for he died,
aged fifty-nine, early the following year. Powell figures—rightly
enough—as one of Wilson and Caulfield’s company of “Remarkable
Characters,” in which he is described as about five feet nine inches in
height, close-knit body, of a sallow complexion, and of a meagre habit.
He lived on a light and spare diet, and generally abstained from drink,
only on one of his expeditions partaking of brandy. He took but little
sleep, generally five hours.
[Picture: Foster Powell]
Robert Barclay of Ury, born 1731, died 1797, walked from London to Ury,
510 miles, in ten days. He is described as having been well over six
feet in height. He married, in 1776, Sarah Ann Allardice, and was the
father of the next notable pedestrian.
Captain Barclay of Ury, an eighteenth century stalwart, born in 1779 and
living until 1854, walked the whole way from Edinburgh to London and
back. He was at the time Member of Parliament for Kincardineshire.
Another of his feats of endurance was driving the mail for a wager from
London to Aberdeen. He then offered to drive it back for another wager,
but Lord Kennedy, who had already lost, was not inclined to renew.
Barclay started the “Defiance” coach between Edinburgh and Aberdeen in
July 1829. He only once upset it, and thus described the event:—“She
fell as easy as if she had fallen on a feather bed, and looking out for a
soft place, I alighted comfortably on my feet.” A favourite axiom with
him was that no man could claim to be a thoroughly qualified coachman
until he had “floored”—that is, upset—his coach; “for till he has done so
he cannot know how to get it up again.” Barclay was the claimant of the
Earldom of Monteith and Ayr, and it was a source of genuine anxiety with
him whether, in the event of his proving his claim, he would have to give
up the reins. He consulted his friend the Duke of Gordon on this point.
“Why,” replied his Grace, “there is not much difference between an earl
and a marquis, and as the Marquis of Waterford drives the Brighton
‘Defiance,’ I see no reason why you may not drive its Aberdeen namesake.
At all events, if there be any objection to your being the coachman,
there can be none to your being the guard.” Barclay was snubbed!
As for the many great people who were furiously driven back and forth, up
and down the road, the historian is dismayed at the prospect of
chronicling their whirling flight. Let us respectfully take the most of
their performances on trust. There was no occasion for all this haste,
save the spirit of the thing, as Byron hints:—
“Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits,
Leavening his blood as cayenne doth a curry,
As going at full speed—no matter where its
Direction be, so ’tis but in a hurry,
And merely for the sake of its own merits;
For the less cause there is for all this flurry,
The greater is the pleasure in arriving
At the great end of travel—which is driving.”
Thus there was Lord Londonderry, who made a speech in the House one
night, and the next evening was at his own place in Durham, 250 miles or
so away, having travelled down in his “chariot and four.”
There were those, however, who scorned these effeminate methods. Like
Barclay of Ury, they walked or rode horseback, long after the
introduction of coaches. Foul-mouthed old Lord Monboddo, for instance, a
once famous Scots Lord of Session, persisted in the use of the saddle.
He journeyed between the two capitals once a year, and continued to do so
until well past fourscore years of age. On his last journey to London he
could get no further than Dunbar, and when his nephew asked him why he
gave up, “Eh, George,” said he, “I find I am noo auchty-four.” He was,
in fact, suffering from the incurable disease of “Anno Domini.” He held
it unmanly “to sit in a box drawn by brutes.” Would that we could have
his shade for a companion on a ’bus ride from Charing Cross to the Bank!
At that period the stage-wagons performed the journey in fourteen days,
carrying passengers at a shilling a day.
XXV
THE list of equestrians is long and distinguished. Lord Mansfield rode
up from Scotland to London when a boy, on a pony, and took two months
over the enterprise. Dr. Skene, who left town in 1753 in the same
fashion, reached Edinburgh in nineteen days. His expenses, having sold
his mare on arrival for eight guineas—exactly the sum he had given for
her—amounted to only four guineas.
This, indeed, was the usual plan to purchase a horse for the journey and
to sell it on arrival; a method so canny that it must surely be of Scots
invention. It had the advantage that, if you found a good market for
your nag, it was often possible to make a profit on the transaction.
But it behoved the purchaser to make some inquiry as to the previous
owners, as no doubt the Scotsman, leaving London with one of these newly
bought mounts, discovered, after some embarrassing experiences. He went
gaily forth upon his way, and nothing befell him until Finchley Common
was reached. On that lonely waste, however, he met another horseman;
whereupon his horse began to edge up to the stranger, as though to
prevent him from proceeding. The Scotsman was at a loss to understand
this behaviour, but the other traveller, thinking him to be a highwayman,
was for handing over his purse forthwith. This little difficulty
explained away, our friend resumed his journey, presently meeting a
coach, when the performance was repeated. This time, however,
blunderbusses were aimed at him, and, the nervous passengers being in no
mood to hear or understand explanations, he had a rather narrow escape of
his life. At Barnet he sold this embarrassing horse for what he could
get, and continued his journey by coach.
It was in 1756 that Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness travelled to London from
Edinburgh in her own post-chaise, her sturdy serving-man, John Rattray,
riding beside the vehicle on horseback, armed with pistols and a
broadsword by his side. She set out from Edinburgh on the 3rd of June
and reached London on the evening of the 10th—an astonishing rapid
journey, it was thought. Let it not be supposed that the armed
serving-man, or the case of pistols the good dame carried with her inside
the vehicle, showed an excess of precaution. Not at all; as was
instanced near that suspicious place, Bawtry, in whose neighbourhood a
doubtful character whom they took to be a highwayman made his appearance.
However, when John Rattray began talking ostentatiously about powder and
ball to the post-boy, the supposed malefactor was nonplussed; and on John
Rattray furthermore “showing his whanger,” the fellow made off. And so
Cox—and Box—were satisfied. Strangest of all travellers, however, was
Peter Woulfe, chemist, mineralogist, and eccentric, whose specific for
illness was a journey by mail-coach. He indulged this whim for years,
riding from London to Edinburgh and back, until 1803, when the remedy
proved worse than the disease, for he caught cold on these bleak miles
and died.
John Scott, afterwards Earl of Eldon and created Lord Chancellor, left a
record of his early travels along this road—surely it were better named
the Road to Fortune! He left school at Newcastle in 1766 to proceed to
London on the way to Oxford, and travelled in a “fly,” so called because
it did the journey in the previously unheard-of time of three days and
four nights. This “fly” had probably once been a private carriage, for
it still bore the motto, “_Sat cito_, _si sat bene_”—that is to say,
“Quick enough, if well enough”—exquisitely appropriate, however, to that
slow pace. Young Scott had noticed this, and made an impudent remark to
a fellow-traveller, a Quaker, who, when they halted at Tuxford, had given
sixpence to a chamber-maid, telling her that he had forgotten to give it
her when he had slept at the inn two years before. “Friend,” said he to
the Quaker, “have you seen the motto on this coach?”
“No,” said his companion.
“Then look at it,” he rejoined, “for I think giving her sixpence now is
neither sat cito nor sat bene.”
It is astonishing, indeed, how many future Lord Chancellors came from the
North. Lord Chancellor Campbell, who as a boy came up to London from
Fife in 1798, was among the early arrivals by mail-coach. At that time
his father was the admiration of his Fifeshire village, for he was the
only one in the place who had been to London. Every one, accordingly,
looked up to, and consulted, so great a traveller. He had seen Garrick,
too, and was used to boast of the fact, although, it is to be supposed,
with discretion and amid the inner circle of his friends, for play-actors
were not yet favourites in the dour Scottish mind. Great was the
excitement when young Campbell left home. The speed of the coaches had
been accelerated, and they now began to reach London from Edinburgh in
two days and three nights. Friends advised him to stay in York and
recuperate for a day or two after a taste of this headlong speed, lest
he—as it was rumoured had happened to others—should be seized with
apoplexy from the rush of air at that rate of travelling. But, greatly
daring, he disregarded their advice, and came to town direct and in
safety.
When railways were introduced, they meant much more than cheap and speedy
travelling; they prefigured a social revolution and an absolute reversal
of manners and customs. The “great ones of the earth” were really great
in the old days; to-day no one is great in the old exclusive sense.
Every one can go everywhere—and every one does. Dukes travel in
omnibuses and go third-class by train because there is no fourth. If
there _were_, they would go by it, and save the difference.
The judges kept up the practice of going on circuit in their carriages
for some little while after railways had rendered it unnecessary; and
barristers who used to post to the assizes were for a few years unwilling
to be convinced that it was quite respectable and professional to go by
train. The juniors were the readiest converts, for the difference in
cost touched them nearly. The clergy soon embraced the opportunity of
travelling cheaply, for the cloth has ever had, at the least of it, a due
sense of the value of money.
Dignified and stately prelates therefore speedily began to look
ridiculous by contrast, and the old picture in _Punch_, once considered
exquisitely humorous, of a bishop carrying a carpet-bag, has lost its
point. Samuel Wilberforce, when elevated to the Bishopric of Oxford in
1845, was probably the first Bishop to give up his coach and four and his
gorgeous lackeys. He rode, unattended, on horseback, and scandalised
those who saw him. How much more scandalised would they have been to see
bishops ride bicycles: a sight not uncommon in our time.
In the vanished era, only those who could afford it travelled; in the
present, only those who _cannot_ afford it go “first.” Jack is as good
as his master—“and a d—d sight better,” as the Radical orator said.
Caste, happily, is breaking down, and their privileges are being stripped
from the governing cliques who for centuries have battened on the public
purse. Perhaps it was because they had a prophetic fore-knowledge of all
this that the titled and other landowners so strenuously withstood
railways at their beginning. They sometimes opposed railways so
successfully that great trunk routes, planned to go as direct as possible
between two points, were diverted and made circuitous. When the Great
Northern Railway was projected it was proposed to follow the highway to
the North as nearly as possible, and to go through Stamford; but the
Marquis of Exeter opposed the Bill as far as it concerned his own
property, and procured a deviation which sent the main line through
Grantham, with the results that Stamford languishes while Grantham is
made to flourish, and that the short-sightedness of the then Marquis has
wofully affected the value of his successor’s property. If the thing
were to do again, how eagerly would the Company be invited to take the
route it was once forbidden!
XXVI