along them, would really like those old times back, when railways were
undreamt of, and travelling for the pleasure of it was unknown. It is
sufficient to read the old travellers’ tales, to realise what
discouragements from leaving one’s own fireside existed then. There was,
for instance, toward the close of the seventeenth century, and well on
into the eighteenth, an antiquary of repute who lived at Leeds, and
journeyed very frequently in the Midlands, Ralph Thoresby was his name.
He travelled much, and in all weathers, and knew the Great North Road
well. In his day the coaches were often, through the combined badness of
the roads and the severity of the weather, obliged to lay up in the
winter, like ships in Arctic seas. Like his much more illustrious
contemporary, Pepys, he not infrequently lost his way, owing to the roads
at that period having no boundary, and once, he tells us, he missed the
road between York and Doncaster, fervently thanking God for having found
it again. Indeed, all his journeys end with more or less hearty
thanksgivings for a safe return. On one occasion we find him missing his
pistols at an inn, and darkly suspecting the landlord to be in league
with thieves and murderers; but he finds them, after a nerve-shaking
search, and proceeds, thanking the Lord for all his mercies. At another
time, journeying to London, he passes, and notes the circumstance, “the
great common where Sir Ralph Wharton slew the highwayman.” This was
doubtless Witham Common, but, although he alludes to the subject as
though it were in his time a matter of great notoriety, all details of
this encounter are now sadly to seek, and Sir Ralph Wharton himself lives
only in Thoresby’s diary.
Thoresby was a very inaccurate person. He mentions “Stonegate Hole,
between Stamford and Grantham,” but he is out of his reckoning by forty
miles or so, Ogilby’s map of 1697 marking the spot near Sawtry.
Accordingly when we find him, going by coach, instead of by his usual
method, on horseback, in May 1714, and noting “we dined at Grantham: had
the usual solemnity (this being the first time the coach passed in May),
the coachman and horses being decked with ribbons and flowers, the town
music and young people in couples before us,” we shrewdly suspect he was
referring to the festivities of this kind held at Sutton-on-Trent,
twenty-three miles further north.
Witham Common passed, we come to the village of Colsterworth, built on a
rise, with fine views from it of the upland copses and gentle hills and
dales of this hunting country, where the Cottesmore, the Atherstone, and
the Quorn overrun one another’s boundaries. Colsterworth is the last of
the stone-built villages for many a mile to come, red brick reigning from
Grantham onwards, to far beyond York. It is a narrow-streeted village,
with an old church, closely elbowed by houses beside the road; the church
where Sir Isaac Newton and his ancestors worshipped, and where, on the
wall of the Newton Chapel, may yet be seen one of the sundials he carved
with a penknife when only nine years of age. In a secluded nook, nearly
two miles to the left of the highroad, lies Woolsthorpe Manor House, the
Newtons’ ancestral home, now a small farmhouse, with a tablet built into
the wall of the room where the philosopher was born. The famous
apple-tree whose falling fruit suggested the Law of Gravitation has long
since disappeared.
Lincolnshire now begins to thoroughly belie its reputation for flatness,
the road descending steeply from Colsterworth and rising sharply from
Easton Park to the park of Stoke Rochford, with another long sharp
descent beyond, and a further rise of some importance into Great Ponton,
another of the very small “Great” villages.
[Picture: Great Ponton]
Great Ponton, or Paunton Magna, as it was formerly called, was in early
days the site of a Roman camp, and of a turnpike gate in latter times.
Both have gone to a common oblivion. If the ascent to the tiny village
by the highroad is steep, the climb upwards to it by the country lanes
from the lowlands on the east, where the Great Northern Railway takes its
easeful course, is positively precipitous. Overlooking the pleasant vale
from its commanding eyrie stands the beautiful old church, in a by-way
off the main road; the church itself strikingly handsome, but the
pinnacled and battlemented tower its peculiar glory. It is distinctly of
the ornate Somersetshire type, and a very late example of Perpendicular
work. Having been built in 1519, when Gothic had reached its highest
development, and Renaissance ideals were slowly but surely obtaining a
hold in this country, we find in its lavish ornamentation and abundant
panelling an attempt to combine the florid alien Renaissance conventions
with that peculiarly insular phase of Gothic, the Perpendicular style.
The result is, as it chances, happy in this instance, the new methods
halting before that little further development which would have made this
a debased example. The building of this tower was the work of Anthony
Ellys, merchant of the staple, and of his wife, as a thank-offering for a
prosperous career, and of an escape from religious persecution; and his
motto, “Thynke and thanke God of all,” is still visible, carved on three
sides. His house, a crow-stepped old mansion next the church, is still
standing, and recalls the legend of his sending home a cask from his
warehouses in Calais, labelled “Calais sand.” Arriving home, he asked
his wife what she had done with the “sand.” She had put it in the
cellar. He then revealed the fact that it contained, not sand, but the
greater part of his wealth.
[Picture: Great Ponton Church]
Prominent on the south-east pinnacle of this tower is a curious vane in
the shape of a fiddle. The legend told of it says that, many years ago,
there wandered amid the fenland villages of Lincolnshire a poor fiddler
who gained a scanty livelihood by playing at fairs and weddings, and not
infrequently in the parlours of the village inns on Saturday nights.
After some years of this itinerant minstrelsy, he amassed a sufficient
sum of money wherewith to pay his fare as a steerage passenger to the
United States, to which country his relatives had emigrated some time
before. In course of time, this once almost poverty stricken fiddler
became rich through land speculation in the backwoods; and, revisiting
the scenes of his tuneful pilgrimages in the new character of a wealthy
man, offered to repair this then dilapidated church, as some sort of
recognition of the kindnesses shown him in bygone years. Only one
stipulation was made by him, that a vane representing his old fiddle
should take the place of the weathercock. This was agreed to, and, as we
see, that quaint emblem is there to this day.
Candour, however, compels the admission that this pretty legend has no
truth in it; but the story has frequently found its way into print, and
so is in a fair way to become a classic. The original fell in 1899 and
was broken. The then rector would have replaced it with another vane of
different character, but the old folk were attached to their fiddle, and
so a replica was made by subscription, and fixed; and there it is to-day:
the first fiddle, said the rector, that ever he heard of in the guise of
a wind-instrument!
Among the many curious inn-signs along the road, that of the “Blue
Horse,” at Great Ponton, is surely one of the most singular, and is a
zoological curiosity not readily explained.
XXVII
GRANTHAM, one hundred and ten and a quarter miles from London by road,
and five miles less by rail, is three miles and a half distant from Great
Ponton. Entered down the very long and steep descent of Spitalgate Hill,
the utterly modernised character of the town becomes at once apparent,
and all pleasurable anticipations based upon memories of the lettered
ease of Stamford are instantly dispelled. The expectant traveller comes
to Grantham hopeful of a fine old town with streets and buildings
befitting its historic dignity; but these hopes are soon dispelled by
grimy engine-shops and roads gritty with coal-dust, giving earnest of an
aggressive modernity fully unfolded when the level is reached and the
town entered at Spitalgate and St. Peter’s Hill. Grantham is a red-brick
town, and modern red brick at that. A cruelly vulgar Town Hall, all
variegated brick, iron crestings, and general spikiness, fondly believed
to be “Italian,” testifies at once to the expansive prosperity of
Grantham and to its artlessness. This monument of Grantham’s pride faces
the grass-plots that border the broad thoroughfare of St. Peter’s Hill
(which is flat, and not a hill at all) where stand bronze statues of Sir
Isaac Newton, Grantham’s great man, and of a certain Frederick James
Tollemache, M.P. for Grantham, who departed this life in 1888, after
having probably achieved some kind of local celebrity which, whatever it
may have been, has not sent the faintest echo to the outer world. It is
an odd effigy, representing the departed legislator in an Inverness
cloak, and holding in his right hand a something which looks curiously
like a billiard-cue, but is probably intended for some kind of official
wand. The untutored might be excused for thinking this a monument to a
champion billiard-player.
Great are the Tollemaches in Lincolnshire, great territorially, that is
to say; for the Earls of Dysart, at the head of the family, own many
manors and broad acres; from Witham and Buckminster, away along the road
to Foston and Long Bennington, and so to where the Shire Dyke divides the
counties of Lincolnshire and Nottingham, on the marches of the Duke of
Newcastle’s estates.
To an Earl of Dysart, Grantham owes the ugly polished granite obelisk in
the market-place, with a lying inscription which purports to mark the
spot where the ancient Eleanor Cross formerly stood, before it was
utterly demolished by Puritan fanatics in 1645. That spot was really on
St. Peter’s Hill, at quite the other end of the town!
Grantham owes its name to the river on which it stands, now the Witham,
but once called the Granta, and its ancient prosperity to its position on
the road to the North. To this circumstance is due also its long
reputation as a town of many and excellent inns, from those early times
when the Church was the earliest inn-keeper, to those others when the
coaches were at their best and “entertainment for man and beast” a merely
secular business. The “Angel” and the “George” at Grantham have a long
history. The “Angel” still survives as a mediæval building, and, like
the equally famous “George” at Glastonbury, contrives to please alike the
antiquary and the guest whose desire for modern creature comforts takes
no account of Gothic architecture. Anciently a wayside house of the
Knights Templar, the existing building belongs to the mid-fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. On either side of its great archway now appear the
carved stone heads of Edward the Third and the heroic Queen Philippa, and
at the crown of the arch, serving the purpose of a supporting corbel to
the beautiful oriel window above, is an angel, supporting a shield of
arms; not the old sign, indeed, but an architectural adornment merely.
This, and all the numerous “Angels” and the several “Salutations” on the
road, derived from the religious picture-sign of the Annunciation, of
which the saluting angel in the “Hail Mary” group in course of time alone
remained.
[Picture: The “Angel,” Grantham]
Before coaches or carriages were, kings and courtiers on their way north
or south made the “Angel” their headquarters, coming to it, of necessity,
on horseback. Thus, John held his Court here in the February of 1213, in
the building which preceded even this old one, and Richard the Third
signed Buckingham’s death-warrant in 1483 in the great room, now divided
into three, and that once extended the whole length of the frontage on
the first floor. Perhaps it was in the bay of this oriel window that he
“off’d with his head!” in the familiar phrase mouthed by many generations
of gory tragedians and aspiring amateurs; and exclaiming “So much for
Buckingham!” turned on his heel, in the attitude of triumphant villainy
we know so well. But, unhappily for the truth of this and similar
striking situations, it is to be feared that Richard, unappreciative of
the situation—the “situation,” that is to say, in the theatrical
sense—signed the warrant in a businesslike way, and neither mouthed nor
struck attitudes. He left that scene to be exploited by Shakespeare or
Colley Cibber as authors, and by Charles Kean and many another as actors.
Between them, _they_ could have shown him how to play the part.
But let us to less dramatic—and safer—times. The “Angel” divided the
honours in coaching days with the “George,” a house with a history as
long, but not so distinguished, as this old haunt of bloody minded
monarchs. The old “George,” burnt down in 1780, was an equally beautiful
house, and was rebuilt in the prevailing Georgian taste—or want of
taste—that raised so many comfortable but ugly inns toward the close of
the eighteenth century. “One of the best inns in England,” says Dickens,
in describing the journey from London to Yorkshire in _Nicholas
Nickleby_, and there is not wanting other testimony to its old-time
excellence.
“At the sign of the ‘George’ you had a cleaner cloth, brighter plate,
higher polished glass, and a brisker fire, with more prompt attention and
civility than at most other places,” says one who had occasion to know;
and so the local proverb, current among towns and villages adjacent to
Grantham, “Grantham gruel; nine grots and a gallon of water,” was
evidently no reflection upon the quality of this inn. The “George” was
busy with the coaches, early and late. First to arrive was the Edinburgh
mail, at twenty-three minutes past seven in the morning. Three
lengthened blasts of the horn announced its arrival, and out stepped
night-capped passengers, half asleep and surly, but fresh water and good
spirits dispelled the gloomy faces, and down went, for the allotted
period of forty minutes, hot rolls, boiled eggs, and best Bohea; good
fare after weary wayfaring, and calculated to make the surliest
good-tempered.
Francis, Lord Jeffrey, writing from his hotel (doubtless the “George”) at
Grantham, when journeying to London in January 1831, is not so
enthusiastic on old-time travel as he might have been, considering the
high character of Grantham’s inns. “Here we are,” says he, “on our way
to you; toiling up through snow and darkness, with this shattered carcase
and this reluctant and half-desponding spirit. You know how I hate early
rising; and here have I been for three days, up two hours before the sun,
and, blinking by a dull taper, haggling at my inflamed beard before a
little pimping inn looking-glass, and abstaining from suicide only from a
deep sense of religion and love to my country. To-night it snows and
blows, and there is good hope of our being blocked up at Wytham Corner or
Alconbury Hill, or some of these lonely retreats, for a week or so, or
fairly stuck in the drift and obliged to wade our way to some such hovel
as received poor Lear and his fool in some such season. Oh, dear, dear!
But in the meantime we are sipping weak black tea by the side of a
tolerable fire, and are in hopes of reaching the liberties of Westminster
before dark on Wednesday.” He was writing on Monday evening!
At any rate such as he could afford to take his ease and partake of the
best. Those who needed pity were the poor folk who had just enough for
the journey, and could not afford to stay at expensive inns, waiting
until better weather came. But, however much we may read in novels of
the charm of winter travelling in the old coaching days, if we turn to
contemporary accounts, by the travellers themselves, we shall always find
that even those who could afford the best did not like it.
Henry St. George Tucker, afterwards Chairman of the East India Company,
travelled from Edinburgh to London in 1816, in the depth of winter. He
wrote:—
“Throughout the whole journey, as far as Newcastle, we had a violent
storm of snow, rain and sleet; and the cold was more severe than I had
felt it before. The coach was not wind-tight at the bottom; and as I was
obliged to keep my window open to allow the escape of certain fumes, the
produce of whisky, rum, and brandy, I felt the cold so pinching that I
should have been glad of fur cap and worsted stockings. To aggravate the
evil, I had not a decent companion to converse with. We picked up sundry
vagabonds on the road, but there was only one, between Edinburgh and
York, who bore the ‘slightest appearance of being a gentleman.’” He,
however, we learn was “effeminate and affected.”
In Mozley’s _Reminiscences_ we find a horrid story of the endurance
practised by a woman travelling by coach from Edinburgh to London. “I
once travelled,” he says, “to London _vis-à-vis_ with a thin, pale,
elderly woman, ill-clad in black, who never once got down, or even moved
to shake off the snow that settled on her lap and shoulders. I spoke to
the guard about her. He said she had come from Edinburgh and had not
moved since changing coaches, which she would have to do once; she feared
that if she once got down she would not he able to get up again. She had
taken no food of any kind.”
There the picture ends, and this tragical figure is lost. Who was she
who endured so much? Had she come to London to purchase with her few
savings the discharge of an only son who had enlisted in the army? Had
she made this awful journey to bid good-bye to a husband condemned to
death or transportation? Surely some such story was hers, but we can
never know it, and so the gaunt figure, pathetic in its endurance, haunts
the memory and the baffled curiosity like an enigma.
Grantham, it is true, has few things more interesting than its inns.
This is not the confession of a _bon vivant_, suspicious though it
sounds, but is just another way of stating the baldness of Grantham’s
street. One of these few things is the tall steeple of the parish
church, which has a fame rivalling that of some cathedrals miles away.
Journeying by road or rail, that lofty spire is seen, even while Grantham
itself remains undisclosed. If this were a proper place for it much
might be said of the church and spire of St. Wulfran’s: how the tower
rises to a height of one hundred and forty feet, and the slim crocketed
spire to one hundred and forty feet more; being sixth in point of
measurement among the famed spires of England. Salisbury is first, with
its four hundred and four feet, followed by Norwich, three hundred and
fifteen feet, Chichester, and St. Michael’s, Coventry, three hundred
feet, and Louth, two hundred and ninety-two feet. But generalities must
serve our turn here. If the spire is only sixth in point of measurement
it is first in date, being earlier than Salisbury’s. Sir Gilbert Scott
held it to be second only to Salisbury in beauty, but Scott’s reputation
in matters of taste had slight foundations, and, beautiful though
Grantham’s spire is, there are others excelling it. The majesty of
Newark’s less lofty spire is greater than this of Grantham, and indeed it
may be questioned whether a Decorated spire, comparatively so attenuated
and with its purity of outline broken and worried by an endless array of
crockets is really more admirable as a thing of beauty, or as a daring
and successful exercise in the piling up of fretted stones in so
apparently frail a fashion.
[Picture: The “Wondrous Sign”]
We cannot get away from the inns, and even the church is connected with
them, the town being annually edified by the so-called “Drunken Sermon”
preached at it in the terms of a bequest left in the form of an annual
rent-charge of forty shillings on the “Angel” by one Michael Solomon.
But among the popular curiosities of Grantham, few things are more
notable than the unpretending inn at Castlegate known variously as the
“Beehive” or the “Living Sign.” Immediately in front of the house is a
small tree with a beehive fixed in its branches, and a board calling
attention to the fact in the lines:
“Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore,
And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er,
‘GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine,
A lofty Steeple and a living Sign.’”
It may fairly be advanced that the suggestion to “explore” an inhabited
beehive is an unfortunate choice of a word.
There is (unless it has lately been abolished) another curiosity at
Grantham. It is a custom. When the time-expired Mayor vacates his
office, what has aptly been called a “striking” ceremony takes place.
His robe is stripped off, his chain is removed from his shoulders, and
with a small wooden hammer the Town Clerk takes the ex-Chief Magistrate
on the head to typify the end of his authority. There is only one
possible method more derogatory than this humiliating treatment, but it
need not be specified.
XXVIII
IN history, Grantham and its immediate neighbourhood are notable as
having witnessed the rise of Oliver Cromwell. At the outbreak of
hostilities in March 1643, the town was taken and its fortifications
demolished by the Royalists, but was retaken shortly afterwards by the
Parliamentary troops under a hitherto undistinguished Cornet of Horse,
after some fighting at Gonerby. The rise of this cornet is picturesquely
described by De Foe. “About this time,” he says, “it was that we began
to hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud, rose
out of the East, and spread first into the North, until it shed down a
flood that overwhelmed the three kingdoms.” It was on May 22, 1643,
that, with twelve troops, Cromwell defeated at Gonerby twenty-four troops
of the opposing forces, and thus commenced this meteorological career.
The ascent of Gonerby Hill, where these events took place, is a part of
the journey to the North. It begins at the distance of a mile and a
quarter beyond Grantham, shortly before reaching the hundred and twelfth
milestone from London. For this part of the world it is a remarkable
eminence, but although a long continuous climb, it does not come up to
the impressive old descriptions of it, and cannot compare with such hills
as Reigate Hill, or with Boughton Hill on the Dover Road. The village of
Great Gonerby, a poor, out-at-elbows kind of a place, stands on the crest
of the hill, with its great spired church as a landmark, a wide, bare
street, a little inn with the curious sign of the “Recruiting Sergeant,”
and an old posting inn, the “Rutland Arms,” its principal features.
Passing through the cutting by which the gradient of the northern side of
the hill has been eased, a remarkable view is unfolded of that flat
region, fertile as a land of promise, the Vale of Belvoir.
We shall hear presently what Sir Walter Scott has to say of Gonerby Hill,
but in the meanwhile let us see how the view from it struck another
traveller, the Reverend Thomas Twining, an amiable clergyman of
Colchester, who in the eighteenth century was in the habit of taking
holidays along the roads, mounted on his horse “Poppet,” and writing
letters to his friends, describing what he saw. He was here in 1776.
“You have a view,” says he, “somewhat sublime and striking from its mere
extent and suddenness but it is flat as a pancake. The road is through
level, moorish, unpleasant ground from the bottom of that hill to Newark,
but, as road, excellent.” No guide-book ever pictured a view so vividly
as this description, which may stand unaltered to-day.