clever man, for its history is so confounded with legend that to say
where the one begins and the other ends is now impossible. The Bed is
a huge four-poster of black oak, elaborately carved with Renaissance
designs, and is now twelve feet square, having been shorn of three feet
of its length by a former landlord of the Saracen's Head. The date,
1463, painted on the head is an ancient and impudent forgery intended
to give verisimilitude to the legend of this monumental structure's
origin. This story tells how it was the work of one Jonas Fosbrooke, a
journeyman carpenter, who presented it to Edward the Fourth "for the
use of the royal family or the accommodation of princes, or nobles, or
for any great occasion." The King, we are told, was highly pleased with
this co-operative bedstead, and pensioned the ingenious Fosbrooke for
life; but history, curiously, fails to tell us of royal or any other
families herding together in this way. The legend then goes on to tell
how, not having been used for many years by any noble persons, it was
put to use when the town was very full of strangers. These unfortunate
plebeian persons found it anything but a bed of roses, for they were
tormented throughout the night by the snobbish and indignant ghost of
Jonas, who objected to anyone beneath the rank of a knight-bachelor
sleeping in his bed, and savagely pinched all who could not claim
gentility. This weird ghost-story was probably invented by the
landlords of the several inns in which the Bed has been housed to
account for a vigorous and hungry race of fleas that inhabited the old
four-poster, and must have been originated at a very early date, for
on it hangs the story of Harrison Saxby, Master of Horse to Henry the
Eighth. Saxby fell violently in love with the daughter of a miller near
Ware, and swore he would do anything to win her from her many other
suitors. The King, passing through the town, heard of this and promised
to give her (those were autocratic times!) to him who should sleep
in the Great Bed, and, daring all that the ferocious apparition of
Fosbrooke could do, should be found there in the morning. All save the
valorous Saxby held back, but he determined that no disembodied spirit
should come between him and his love, and, duly tucked in, was left to
sleep--no, not to sleep, for the powers of darkness were exalted to
considerable purpose in the night, and when day dawned the rash Saxby
was discovered on the floor, covered with bruises. If we seek rather
the practical joker than the supernatural visitant to poor Saxby, we
shall probably be on the right quest.
The Great Bed was not always housed at the Saracen's Head. Coming
originally from Ware Priory, it was next at the Crown, where it
remained until that old house was pulled down, in 1765, being in turn
transferred to the Bull.
Ware was always a place of great traffic in the long ago. Railways have
altered all that, and it is now a gracious old town, extraordinarily
rich in the antique entries of ancient hostelries disappeared so long
since that their very signs are forgot. As you go along its High Street
there are between twenty and thirty of these arched entries countable,
most of them relics of that crowded era of road-faring when Ware was a
thoroughfare town at the end of a day's journey from London on the main
road to the North. It was, in the words of an Elizabethan poet, "the
guested town of Ware," and so remained for centuries, even when day's
journeys grew longer and longer, and until the road became an obsolete
institution. Some of these entries, on the other hand, always were,
and others early became, features in the warehouse premises of the old
maltsters, for Ware has ever been a place dedicated to the service of
John Barleycorn.
Long centuries ago, ere railways were dreamt of, this was the great
warehousing place of the malt from five neighbouring counties. It came
in vast quantities by road and by river from up country, and was stored
here, over against the demands of the London brewers; being sent to
town chiefly by the river Lea. The Lea and its ready passage to London
built up this distinctive trade of Ware: the railway destroyed it, and
the maltsters' trade exists here nowadays only because it always has
been here and because to utterly kill its local habitation would be
perhaps impossible. But it is carried on with a difference, and malt is
not so much brought and warehoused here as made on the spot. Many of
the old houses in which the old-established maltsters reside, adjoining
their own warehouses, in the good old style absolutely obsolete in
other places, are of early eighteenth century date, and rich in
exquisite moulded plaster ceilings and carved oak panelling. One at
least dates back to 1625, and is nothing less in appearance than the
home of an old prince of commerce.
To have an opportunity of inspecting this is a privilege not lightly
to be valued. On one side of the entry, and over the archway, is the
residence, and on the other the old-world counting-house, with a
narrow roadway between for the waggons to and from the maltings at the
farther end. The maltings themselves are rebuilt and fitted with modern
appliances, but they strike the only note out of key with the general
harmony of the place, and, even so, they are not altogether unpleasing,
for they are earnest of trade still brisk and healthy, in direct
descent from days of old. Beyond the maltings are old walled gardens
where peaches ripen, and velvet lawns and queer pavilions overhanging
the river Lea: the whole, from the entry in the High Street, down the
long perspective to the river, embowered in flowers.
For the rest, Ware commands much interest, not greatly to be enlarged
upon here. The church-tower, rising nobly above the roof-tops of
the town, amid a thickly clustered group of oast-house cowls, the
interior of the building, noble beyond the common run; the so-called
"John Gilpin's House"; the river scenery up the delightful valley to
Hertford: all these things are to be seen and not adequately written
about in this place.
XV
UPHILL goes the road out of Ware, passing the Royston Crow Inn and
some old cottages on the outskirts. The two miles between this and
Wade's Mill form the dividing-line between the valleys of the Lea
and the Rib, and consequently the way, after climbing upwards, has
to go steeply down again. The Sow and Pigs is the unusual name of an
inn standing on the crest of the hill before descending into Wade's
Mill. Who was Wade of the mill that stands to this day in the hollow
where the little stream called the Rib runs beneath the highway?
History, imperial, national, or parochial, has nothing to tell us on
this head. Perhaps--nay, probably--there never was a Wade, a person
so-named; the original mill, and now the hamlet that clusters in the
bottom, taking its name from the ford--the ford, or water-splash, or
"wade"--that was here before ever a bridge was built. The parish of St.
Nicholas-at-Wade, beside the channel that formerly divided the Isle of
Thanet from Kent, obtained its name from the ford at that point, and
in like manner derives the name of Iwade, overlooking the King's Ferry
entrance to Sheppey.
The hamlet of Wade's Mill is a product of the coaching age. Before
folks travelled in any large numbers there stood only the mill in
the hollow; but, as road-faring progressed, there at length rose the
Feathers Inn beside the way, and by degrees a dozen or so cottages
to keep it company. Here they are still; standing, all of them, in
the parish of Thundridge, whose old church, a mile distant, is now in
ruins. The new church is built on the height overlooking Wade's Mill,
and may be noticed in the illustration on the following page.
Steeply rising goes the road out of this sleepy hollow; passing,
when half-way up the hill, a mean little stone obelisk perched on
a grassy bank. This is a memorial to Thomas Clarkson, a native of
Wisbeach, and marks the spot where in his youth he knelt down and
vowed to dedicate his life to the abolition of the slave trade. It
was placed here in 1879 by Arthur Giles Puller, of Youngsbury, in the
neighbourhood. Clarkson was born in 1760, the son of the Rev. John
Clarkson, Headmaster of Wisbeach Free Grammar School. He graduated at
Cambridge in 1783, and two years later gained the first prize in the
Latin Essay competition on the subject of "Slavery and Commerce of the
Human Species, particularly the African." This success finally fixed
his choice of a career, and he forthwith set afoot an agitation against
the slave trade. In an introduction to the wealthy William Wilberforce,
he succeeded in enlisting the support of that philanthropist, to whom
the credit of abolishing the nefarious traffic is generally given.
A Committee was formed to obtain the passing of an Abolition Bill
through Parliament; an object secured after twenty years' continued
agitation and strenuous work on the platform. Clarkson's health and
substance were alike expended in the effort, but he was not eventually
without reward for his labours, a recompense in subscriptions to which
he seems to have looked forward in quite a business-like way; more
soothing than Wordsworth's pedestrian sonnet beginning--
"Clarkson, it was an obstinate hill to climb;
How toilsome, nay, how dire it was."
Doubtless he argued the labourer was worthy of his hire.
[Illustration: CLARKSON'S MONUMENT.]
Abolition in the West Indian Islands followed, and then the
Emancipation Act of 1833, liberating 800,000 slaves and placing the
sum of twenty millions sterling, as compensation, into the pockets of
Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow slave-owners. That sturdy beast of
burden, the British taxpayer, of course paid for this expensive burst
of sentiment. Clarkson, already an old man, and weary with his long
labours, received the Freedom of the City of London in 1839, and died
in his eighty-seventh year, in 1846.
Midway between the hamlets of High Cross and Collier's End, at the
second of the two left-hand turnings sign-posted for "Rowney Abbey and
the Mundens," is the other hamlet of Standon Green End--if the two
cottages and one farmhouse in a by-lane may so be dignified. Some three
hundred yards along this lane, in the centre of a meadow, stands the
singular monument known in all the country round about as the "Balloon
Stone," a rough block of sandstone, surrounded by an iron railing,
placed here to record the alighting on this spot of the first balloon
that ever ascended in England. Tradition still tells of the terror that
seized the rustics when they saw "a summat" dropping out of the sky,
and how they fled for their lives.
On lifting a hinged plate, the astonishing facts of this antique
æronautical adventure may be found duly set out in an amusingly
grandiloquent inscription, engraved on a bronze tablet let into the
upper part of the stone--
"Let Posterity Know
And Knowing be Astonished
That
On the 15 Day of September 1784
Vincent Lunardi of Lucca in Tuscany
The first Aerial Traveller in Britain
Mounting from the Artillery Ground
in London
And
Traversing the Regions of the Air
For Two Hours and Fifteen Minutes,
In this Spot
Revisited the Earth.
On this Rude Monument
For Ages be Recorded
That Wondrous Enterprise
Successfully atchieved
By the Powers of Chemistry
And the Fortitude of Man
That Improvement in Science
Which
The Great Author of all Knowledge
Patronising by His Providence
The Invention of Mankind
Hath graciously permitted
To their Benefit
And
His own Eternal glory."
* * * * *
"This Plate
A facsimile of the Original
One was placed here
in the month of November
1875 by Arthur Giles
Puller of Youngsbury."
Collier's End is a wayside hamlet of a few timber-framed and plaster
cottages, leading to Puckeridge, where the ways to Cambridge divide:
one going by Buntingford, Royston, and Melbourn; the other by
Braughing, Barkway, Barley, and Fowlmere, meeting again at Harston in
another nineteen miles. Away to the left, between Collier's End and
Puckeridge, is St Edmund's College, a Roman Catholic seminary.
Puckeridge itself, standing where the roads branch, grew in the old
road-faring days from a tiny hamlet to be considerably larger than its
mother-parish of Standon, a village nearly two miles distant, to the
right-hand. That it developed early is quite evident in its two old
inns, the fifteenth century Falcon, and the Old George, scarcely a
hundred years younger.
XVI
WE will first take the right-hand road to Cambridge, by Barkway, for
that would appear in early days to have been the favourite route.
Braughing, the first village on this route, is soon reached, lying down
below the highway beside the river Rib, with the usual roadside fringe
of houses. The local pronunciation of the place-name is "Braffing."
The road now begins to climb upwards to the crest of the Chilterns at
Barley, passing the small hamlets of Quinbury and Hare Street, and
through a bold country of rolling downs to Barkway, whose name, coming
from Saxon words meaning "a way over the hill," is descriptive of its
situation. Few signs of habitation are seen on the way, and those at
great distances; Great and Little Hormead and Ansty peering down upon
the road from distant hillsides.
Since the coaches left the road, Barkway has gone to sleep, and dreams
still of a bygone century. At the beginning of its broad street there
stands the old toll-house, with the clock even yet in its gable that
marked the flight of time when the Cambridge "Telegraph" passed by
every day, at two o'clock in the afternoon; and old houses that
once were inns still turn curiously gabled frontages to the street.
The Wheatsheaf, once the principal coaching house, still survives;
outside it a milestone of truly monumental proportions, marking the
thirty-fifth mile from London. It stands close upon six feet in height,
and besides bearing on its face a bold inscription, setting forth
that it is thirty-five miles from London and sixteen from Cambridge,
shows two shields of arms, one of them bearing a crescent, the other
so battered that it is not easily to be deciphered. This is one of a
series of milestones stretching between this point and Cambridge; a
series that has a history. It seems that Dr. William Mouse, Master of
Trinity Hall, and a Mr. Robert Hare, left between them in 1586 and 1599
the sum of £1600 in trust to Trinity Hall, the interest to be applied
to mending the highway along these sixteen miles; as the Latin of the
original document puts it, "_in et circa villam nostram Cantabrigiæ
præcipue versus Barkway_." Whatever Trinity Hall may have done for the
repair of the road in the hundred and twenty-six years following the
bequest, there were certainly no milestones along its course until
1725, when Dr. William Warren, the then Master, set up on October 20th
the first five, starting from the church of Great St. Mary in Cambridge
Market Square. On the 25th June, in the following year, another five
stones were placed in continuation, and the next year another five. The
sixteenth was not placed until 29th May 1728. Of this series the fifth,
tenth, and fifteenth were about six feet in height, with the Trinity
Hall arms carved on them; in heraldic jargon described as "sable, a
crescent in fess ermine, with a bordure engrailed of the second." The
others were originally small, with merely the number of miles engraved
on them, but were replaced between 1728 and 1732 by larger stones, each
bearing the black crescent; as may be seen to this day.
These stones, very notable in themselves, and more so from the open
and exposed character of the road, have not only the interest of the
circumstances already narrated, but gain an additional notability in
the fact that, excluding those set up by the Romans, they are the
earliest milestones in England. Between Roman times and the date of
these examples the roads knew no measurement, and miles were a matter
of repute. It was not until the Turnpike Act of 1698 that, as part of
their statutory obligations, Turnpike Trusts were always bound not only
to maintain the roads on which they collected tolls, but to measure
them as well, and to set up a stone at every mile.
[Illustration: BARLEY.]
The road between Barkway and Barley is a constant succession of
hills; steep descents, and correspondingly sharp rises, with the folds
of the Chilterns, bare in places and in others heavily wooded, rising
and falling for great distances on either hand. It was while ascending
Barkway Hill on the up journey that the "Lynn Union," driven by Thomas
Cross, was involved in a somewhat serious affair. Three convicts were
being taken to London in charge of two warders, and the whole party
of five had seats on the roof. As the coach slowed to a walking pace
up the ascent, one of the gaol-birds quietly slipped off at the back,
and was being followed by the other two when attention was drawn to
their proceedings. The principal warder, who was on the box-seat, was
a man of decision. He drew a pistol from his pocket, and, cocking it,
said, "If you do not immediately get up I'll shoot you!" The one who
had already got down, thereupon, with a touching faith in the warder's
marksmanship, returned to his place, and the others remained quiet.
They finished the remainder of the journey handcuffed. It is, indeed,
surprising that they were not properly secured before.
The road on to Barley is of a switchback kind, finally rising to the
ridge where Barley is perched, overlooking a wild treeless country of
downs. Barley is a little village as thoroughly agricultural as its
name hints, and consists of but a few houses, mostly thatched, with a
not very interesting church on a by-way, and a very striking inn, the
Fox and Hounds, on the main road. It is the sign of the inn, rather
than the house itself, that is so notable, for it is one of those
gallows signs, stretching across the road, that are now becoming so
few. The illustration sufficiently describes its quaint procession of
fox, hounds, and huntsmen, said to have been placed here in allusion to
a fox that took refuge in a dog-kennel of the inn.
If the name of Barley hints strongly of agricultural pursuits, it does
not by any means derive it from that kind of grain. Its earliest Saxon
name is "Berle," coming from the words "beorh" and "lea," and meaning a
cleared space in a forest. Barley, in fact, stands on the final ridge
where the Chiltern Hills end and the East Anglian heights and the
forest of Essex begin, overlooking a valley between the two where the
trees fell back and permitted a way through the primeval woods.
The restored and largely rebuilt church contains little of interest,
but in the churchyard lies one whose career claims some notice. There
the passing stranger may see a simple stone cross, bearing the words,
"Heinrich, Count Arnim. Born May 10th, 1814. Died October 8th, 1883."
Beside him lies his wife, who died in 1875. The story of Count Arnim is
one of political enthusiasms and political and personal hatreds. One of
the greatest nobles in conservative Germany, he early developed Radical
ideas, and joined Kossuth in his struggle for Hungarian liberty,
refusing to desert that ill-fated cause, and disregarding the call
of his own country to arms. The neglect of this feudal duty rendered
his vast estates liable to forfeiture, and placed him in danger of
perpetual confinement in a military prison; a danger aggravated by the
personal and bitter animosity of the all-powerful Bismarck, and the
hatred of the relatives of two antagonists whom he had slain in duels.
To escape this threatened lifelong imprisonment he fled to England,
and, after much privation, established a school of fencing and physical
exercise, under the assumed name of Major Loeffler. In the meanwhile
he had married a German governess. His association with Barley arose
from the then Rector resorting to his school for a course of exercise,
and becoming in time a fast friend, to whom the Count disclosed his
identity. The Rector interested himself in Arnim's fortunes, and went
so far as to write to the German Emperor on behalf of his son, then
growing to manhood. As a result of these efforts young Arnim was
permitted to enter the German Army and to enjoy his father's estates.
Unfortunately his mother accompanied him, and as, according to the
savage notions of German society, she was not of noble birth and not
ennobled by marriage, she was restricted to the servants' hall at every
place her son visited, while he was received in the highest circles.
Count Arnim had, in his long residence in England, adopted the sensible
views prevailing here, and indignantly recalled his son. "I would
rather," he said in a noble passage, "I would rather have my son grow
up a poor man in England, in the service of his adopted country, than
as a rich man in the service of his Fatherland, where he would have to
be ashamed of his mother."
It was his friendship with the Rector that made the Count choose this
as the resting-place of his wife and himself. His body was brought by
train to Buntingford, and thence by road, being buried by the light of
torches at midnight, after the old German custom.
XVII
A MILE beyond Barley the road leaves Hertfordshire and enters Essex,
but passes out of that county again and enters Cambridgeshire in
another two miles. Midway, amid the solemn emptiness of the bare
downs, the Icknield Way runs as a rugged chalk-and-grass track
athwart the road, neighboured by prehistoric tumuli. Amidst all these
reminders of the dead-and-gone Iceni, at the cross-roads to Royston
and Whittlesford, and just inside the Cambridgeshire border, stands
a lonely inn once known as the Flint House. Beside it is one of the
Trinity Hall milestones, with the crescent badge of the college, and
hands with fingers like sausages pointing down the weirdly straight and
empty roads.
The two miles of road through Essex long bore the name of the
"Recorder's Road." It seems that when in 1725 an Act of Parliament
was obtained for mending the then notoriously bad way from Cambridge
to Fowlmere and Barley "in the counties of Cambridgeshire and
Hertfordshire," the fact that two miles lay in Essex was overlooked. In
consequence of this omission nothing was done to the Essex portion,
which became almost impassable for carriages until the then Recorder of
Cambridge, Samuel Pont, obtained the help of several of the colleges,
and at last mended it.
[Illustration: A MONUMENTAL MILESTONE.]
It is a good enough road now, though passing through very exposed and
open country, with tumuli, the solemn relics of a prehistoric race,
forming striking objects on the bare hillsides and the skyline. In
cosy and sheltered contrast with these comes the village of Fowlmere,
snugly nestled amid the elms and poplars aptly named "Crows' Parlour."
Fowlmere is a very Proteus in the spelling of its name. In Domesday
Book it is set down as "Fugelesmare," and has at any time since then
been written in half a dozen different ways, in which "Foulmere" and
"Fowlmere" are the most prominent. Old-time travellers, who found the
road inexpressibly bad, adopted the first of these two styles, and
thought the place well suited with a name: others--and among them local
patriots--adopted the variant less expressive of mud and mire. In so
doing they were correct, for the village takes its name from a marshy
lake or mere, thickly overgrown with reeds in ancient times, in whose
recesses myriads of wild-fowl found a safe harbourage. Even when the
nineteenth century had dawned the mere was still in existence, and
wild-fowl frequented it in some numbers. To-day it is but a spot where
watercress grows and the grass springs a thought more luxuriant than
elsewhere.
[Illustration: FOWLMERE: A TYPICAL CAMBRIDGESHIRE VILLAGE.]
Here we are on the track of Samuel Pepys, who makes in his Diary but
a fleeting appearance on this road,--a strange circumstance when we
consider that he was a Cantab. It is, however, an appearance of some
interest. In February 1660, then, behold him rising early, taking
horse from London, and setting out for Cambridge, in company with a
Mr. Pierce, at seven o'clock in the morning, intending to make that
town by night. They rode twenty-seven miles before they drew rein,
baiting at Puckeridge,--doubtless at that old house the Falcon,--the
way "exceeding bad" from Ware. "Then up again and as far as Fowlmere,
within six miles of Cambridge, my mare almost tired."
[Illustration: THE CHEQUERS, FOWLMERE.]
Almost! Good Heavens! he had ridden the poor beast forty-six miles.
At anyrate, if the mare was not quite tired, Samuel at least was, and
at Fowlmere he and Mr. Pierce stayed the night, at the Chequers. An
indubitable Chequers still stands in the village street, but it is not
the house under whose roof the old diarist lay, as the inscription,
"W.T., Ano Dom. 1675," on the yellow-plastered front sufficiently
informs us. The next morning Samuel was up betimes, and at Cambridge by
eight o'clock.