next village, but it is all enclosed now, and cultivated fields
obscure that historic portion of the Heath where, in June 1647,
Cromwell's troops, victorious over the last struggles of the Royalists,
assembled and sent demands to the Parliament in London for their long
overdue pay. A striking position, this. The Parliament had levied war
upon the King and had brought him low, and now the hammer that had
shattered his power was being threatened against itself. Cromwell and a
military dictatorship loomed ominous before my lords and gentlemen of
Westminster, and they hastily sent down two months' pay, with promises
of more, to avert Cromwell's threat that he would seize the captive
King, and, placing him at the head of the army, march upon London. That
payment and those promises did not suffice, and how Cornet Joyce was
sent across country from this point, with a troop of horse, to seize
Charles from the custody of the Parliamentary Commissioners at Holmby
House is a matter of history, together with the military usurpation
that did actually follow.
Newton village itself has little interest, but a small hillside obelisk
on the right calls for passing notice. It marks the spot where two
friends were in the habit of meeting in the long ago. The one lived at
Newton and the other at Little Shelford. Every day for many years they
met at this spot, and when one died the survivor erected this memorial.
The left-hand hillside also has its interest, for the commonplace
brick building on the hilltop is all that remains of one of a line of
semaphore telegraph stations in use between London and Cambridge over
a hundred years ago. A descending road brings us from this point to a
junction with the Royston route to Cambridge, at Harston.
XVIII
THE Royston route to Cambridge now demands attention. Harking back to
Puckeridge, we have by this road certainly the most difficult way, for
eight of the eleven miles between Puckeridge and Royston lead, with few
and unimportant intervals, steadily uphill, from the deep valley of the
Rib up to the tremendous and awe-inspiring climax of Royston Downs;
from whose highest point, on Reed Hill, the road drops consistently for
three miles in a staggering descent into Royston town.
At West Mill, where the valley opens out on the left, the road
continues on the shoulder of the hill, with the village and the railway
lying down below; a sweetly pretty scene. West Mill is a name whose
sound is distinctly modern, but the place is of a venerable age,
vouched for by its ancient church, whose architecture dates back to the
early years of the thirteenth century. It is the fashion to spell the
place-name in one word--Westmill--an ugly and altogether objectionable
form.
[Illustration: WEST MILL.]
Buntingford succeeds to West Mill. A brick bridge crossing a little
river, an old red-brick chapel bulking large on the left hand, a
long, long street of rustic cottages and shops and buildings of more
urban pretensions, and over all a sleepy half-holiday air: that is
Buntingford. It is difficult to take Buntingford seriously, even though
its street be half a mile in length, for its name recalls that hero
of nursery rhyme, that Baby Bunting whose father went a-hunting, and
went to buy a rabbit-skin to put the Baby Bunting in. Buntingford,
for all the length of its long street and the very considerable age
of it, is but a hamlet of Layston, close upon a mile distant. That is
why Buntingford has no old parish church, and explains the building of
the red-brick chapel aforesaid in 1615, to the end that the ungodly
might have no excuse for not attending public worship and the pious
might exercise their piety without making unduly long pilgrimage.
"Domus Orationis" is inscribed on the gable-wall of the chapel, lest
perhaps it might be mistaken for some merely secular building; an easy
enough matter. Behind it, stands the little group of eight almshouses
built in 1684 by Dr. Seth Ward, "born in yis town," as the tablet
over the principal door declares; that Bishop of Salisbury who lent
his carriage-horses to King James's troops to drag the ordnance sent
against the Monmouth rebels on Sedgemoor.
Layston Church stands in a meadow, neglected, and with daylight peering
curiously through its roof; and the village itself has long disappeared.
The fifteen miles between Wade's Mill and Royston, forming the "Wade's
Mill Turnpike Trust," continued subject to toll long after the railway
was opened. With the succeeding trusts on through Royston to Kirby's
Hut and Caxton, on the Old North Road, and so on to Stilton, it was one
of the earliest undertakings under the general Turnpike Act of 1698,
and, like them, claimed direct descent from the first turnpike gates
erected in England in 1663, under the provisions of the special Act of
that year, which, describing this "ancient highway and post-road" to
the North as almost impassable, proceeded to give powers for toll-gates
to be erected at Stilton and other places.
To this particular Trust fell the heavy task of lowering the road over
the London Road hill, the highest crest of the Downs; a work completed
in 1839, at a cost of £1723, plus £50 compensation paid to a nervous
passenger on one of the coaches who jumped off the roof while it was
crossing a temporary roadway and broke his leg. The tolls at this time
were let for £4350 per annum.
Reed Hill, to which we now come, passing on the way the hamlets of
Buckland and Chipping, commands the whole of Royston Downs, a tract
of country whose bold, rolling outlines are still impressive, even
though the land be enclosed and brought under cultivation in these
later years. This chalky range is a continuation of the Chiltern Hills,
and gives Royston, lying down below in the deep hollow, a curiously
isolated and remote appearance. Indeed, whether it be the engineering
difficulties in tunnelling these heights, or whether the deterrent
cause lies in rival railway politics, or in its not being worth while
to continue, the branch of the Great Eastern Railway to Buntingford
goes no farther, but comes ingloriously to a terminus in that little
town; while the Great Northern Railway reaches Royston circuitously, by
way of Hitchin and Baldock, and artfully avoids the heights.
A wayside inn--the Red Lion--crowns the summit of Reed Hill,
and looks out upon vast distances. The Red Lion himself, a very
fiercely-whiskered vermilion fellow projecting over the front door
of the house, and looking with an agonised expression of countenance
over his shoulder--_passant regardant_, as the heralds say--hails from
Royston itself, where he occupied a similar position in front of the
old coaching-inn of the same name. Alas! when old coaching days ended
and those of railways dawned, the Red Lion at Royston, ever in the
forefront of coaching affairs in the town, was doomed. The High Street
knows it no more, and the Bull reigns in its stead as the principal
house.
These windy downs, now robbed of much of their wildness of detail, but
losing nothing of their bold outline, long harboured two forms of wild
life not commonly found elsewhere. The Royston Crow, indeed, still
frequents this range of hills; and on some undisturbed slopes of turf
the wandering botanist is even yet rewarded in his Eastertide search
for the _Anemone Pulsatilla_, the Pasque Flower. The Royston Crow, the
_Corvus cornix_ of ornithologists, is a winter visitor from Sweden
and Norway, and is known in other parts of the country as the "hooded
crow." He is distinguished from his cousin corvi by his grey head and
back, giving him an ancient and venerable appearance. He is not a
sociable bird, and refuses to mix with the blackbirds, the thrushes,
and his kindred crows, who, for their part, are content to leave him
alone, and doubtless rejoice when in April he wings his way to northern
latitudes.
The Pasque Flower, so named from the paschal season of its blossoming,
affects the windiest and most unlikely situations in chalk and
limestone pastures, and thrives where it might be supposed only the
coarsest grasses would grow. In these exposed places its purple blooms
flourish. They nestle close to the ground, and are only to be easily
discovered by the expert. Do not attempt to transplant this wild beauty
of the downs. You may dig roots with the greatest care, and cherish
them as tenderly as possible; but, torn from its stern surroundings and
lapped in botanical luxury, the Pasque Flower droops and dies.
XIX
ROYSTON stands where the Ermine Street and the Icknield Way intersect
one another. To old Cobbett, travelling with a censorious eye upon men
and things and places in the early years of the nineteenth century, it
appeared to be "a common market-town. Not mean, but having nothing of
beauty about it." This is not a very shrewd or illuminating opinion,
because, while it is true that Royston is not beautiful on the one
hand, nor exactly mean on the other, this description is not quite
descriptive, and fails to explain where the town stops short of beauty
or of meanness. Royston, in fact, is a little grim, and belies the
preconceived notion of the expectant traveller, who, doubtless with
some wild idea of a connection between Royston and roystering, is
astonished at the grave, almost solemn, look of its narrow streets. The
grim shadow of the Downs is thrown over the little town, and the houses
huddle together as though for company and warmth.
There are those to whom the place-name suggests a Norman-French
derivation--Roy's ton, or the King's Town,--but although the name
arose in Norman times, it had a very different origin from anything
suggested by royal patronage. Eight hundred years ago, when this part
of the country remained little but the desolate tract the fury of the
Conqueror had made it, the Lady Rohesia, wife of the Norman lord of the
manor, set up a wayside cross where the roads met. The object of this
cross does not clearly appear, but it probably filled the combined
purpose of a signpost and wayside oratory, where those who fared the
roads might pray for a happy issue from the rigours of their journey.
At anyrate, the piety of the Lady Rohesia (or Roesia, for they were
very uncertain about their h's in those times) has kept her name from
being quite forgot, preserved as it is in Royston's designation; but
it is not to be supposed that the pilgrims, the franklins, and the
miscellaneous wayfarers along these roads tortured their tongues much
with this awkward word, and so Rohesia's Cross speedily became known
as "Roise's," just as to the London 'bus-conductors High Holborn
has become "'iobun." A town gathered in course of time round the
monastery--"Monasterium de Cruce Roesiæ"--founded here a century
after this pious lady had gone her way. Monastery and cross are alike
gone, but the parish church is the old priory church, purchased by
the inhabitants for public worship when the monastic establishment
was dissolved, and Royston Fair, held on 7th July in every year, is a
reminiscence of that old religious house, for that day is the day of
St. Thomas à Becket, in whose honour it was dedicated. As "Becket's
Fair" this annual celebration is still known.
For centuries afterwards Royston was a town and yet not a parish,
being situated in portions of the five adjoining parishes of Melbourn,
Bassingbourn, Therfield, Barley, and Reed; and for centuries more,
after it had attained parochial dignity, its chief cross street,
Melbourn Street, divided the place into two Roystons--Royston,
Hertfordshire, and Royston, Cambridgeshire. The doings of one with the
other afford amusing reading: how a separate workhouse was established
and separate assessments made for each parish, and how at length, in
1781, an Act was passed for consolidating the two for local government
purposes; all these inconvenient and absurdly conflicting jurisdictions
of parishes and counties being eventually swept away in 1895, when the
Cambridgeshire portion of Royston was transferred to Hertfordshire, the
whole of the town now being in that county.
They still cherish the memory of King James the First at Royston,
though the open Heath where he hunted the hare is a thing of the
past, and the races and all the ancient jollifications of that time
are now merely matters for the antiquary. Where the four roads from
the four quarters of the compass still meet in the middle of the town
stood the old Palace. Its remains, of no very palatial appearance, are
there even yet, and form private residences. Close by is that prime
curiosity, Royston Cave. James and his courtiers and all their gay
world at this corner never knew of the Cave, which was only discovered
in 1742. It is a bottle-shaped excavation in the chalk, situated
immediately under the roadway. Its age and original purpose are still
matters in dispute. Whether it was excavated to serve the purpose
of dust-bin to a Roman villa, or was a flint quarry, we shall never
know, but that it certainly was in use by some religious recluse in
the twelfth century is assured by the curious rough carvings in the
chalk, representing St. Catherine, the Crucifixion, mitred abbots,
and a variety of subjects of a devotional character. The hermit whose
singular piety led him to take up his abode in this dismal hole must
have had great difficulty in entering or leaving, for it was then only
to be approached by plunging as it were into the neck of the bottle.
The staircase by which visitors enter was only made in modern times.
[Illustration: A QUAINT CORNER IN ROYSTON.]
The old Red Lion at Royston has already been mentioned as having
ceased to be. It was kept for many years in the eighteenth century by
Mrs. Gatward, a widow, assisted in the posting and coaching business
attached to the house by her two sons. One of them came to a terribly
tragic end. What induced him to turn highwayman we shall never know;
but he took to the road, as many a roving blade in those times did.
Perhaps his life lacked excitement. If that were so, he took the
readiest means of adding variety to existence, for he waylaid the
postboy carrying His Majesty's Mails on the North Road, between Royston
and Huntingdon, and robbed the bags. There was in those times no
method of courting death with such success as robbing the mails, and
accordingly young Gatward presently found himself convicted and cast
for execution. They hanged him in due course and gibbeted his body,
pursuant to the grim old custom, near the scene of his crime. The story
of this unhappy amateur highwayman is told--and, a tale of horror it
is--by one Cole, a diligent antiquary on Cambridgeshire affairs, whose
manuscript collections are in the British Museum. Hear him: "About
1753-54, the son of Mrs. Gatward, who kept the Red Lion at Royston,
being convicted of robbing the mail, was hanged in chains on the Great
Road. I saw him hanging, in a scarlet coat, and after he had hung about
two or three months it is supposed that the screw was filed which
supported him, and that he fell in the first high wind after. Mr. Lord,
of Trinity, passed by as he lay on the ground, and, trying to open his
breast, to see what state his body was in, not being offensive, but
quite dry, a button of brass came off, which he preserves to this day,
as he told me at the Vice-Chancellor's, Thursday, June 30th, 1779. I
sold this Mr. Gatward, just as I left college in 1752, a pair of coach
horses, which was the only time I saw him. It was a great grief to his
mother, who bore a good character, and kept the inn for many years
after."
This account of how a malefactor's body might lie by the roadside, the
sport of any wayfarers idle curiosity, gives no very flattering glimpse
of this England of ours a hundred and fifty years ago. Yet these were
the "good old times."
[Illustration: CAXTON GIBBET.]
The story goes that the agonised mother of the gibbeted man secretly
conveyed his body to the inn and gave it decent, if unconsecrated,
burial in the cellar. His brother, James Gatward, was for many years
afterwards part proprietor of the London, Royston, and St. Ives coach,
running past the gibbet.
Caxton Gibbet, where Gatward's body hung in chains, is still marked
by a tall post standing on a mound by the wayside, on the North
Road, thirteen miles from Royston. It is a singularly lonely spot,
even though a public-house with the gruesome name of the Gibbet Inn
stands close by. A mile distant is the village of Caxton, with its old
coaching-inns converted into farmhouses; the only other places on the
twelve miles being the old Hardwicke Arms Posting House and the gates
of Wimpole Park at Arrington Bridge, and the solitary "Old North Road"
railway station.
Royston's old inns have lost much of their old-time air. Among them,
the George possessed one of those old "gallows" signs crossing the road
in a fashion similar to that of the Fox and Hounds at Barley, but,
somewhere towards the close of the eighteenth century, it fell at the
moment when a London-bound waggoner was passing beneath, and killed
him. Since then such signs have not been in favour in the town.
XX
ROYSTON has of late years spread out largely to the north, over those
grassy heaths where James hunted. Looking back when midway between the
town and Melbourn, this modern growth is readily noted, for the houses
of it are all of Cambridgeshire white brick. At this distance they give
a singularly close imitation of a tented military camp.
[Illustration: MELBOURN.]
Melbourn--why not spelled with a final 'e,' like other Melbournes, is
a mystery no inquiry can satisfy--is a large village of much thatch.
Especially is the grey-green velvety moss on the thatch of a row of
yellow plaster cottages beyond the church a thing of beauty, however
rotten the thatch itself may be. Melbourn has a beautiful church and
church-tower, seen in the accompanying picture, but its other glory,
the Great Elm that for many centuries spread a shade over the road by
the church, is now only a memory,--a memory kept green by the sign of
the inn opposite. Everyone in Melbourn lives on fruit. In other words,
this is a great fruit-growing district. This village and its neighbour,
Meldreth, specialise in greengages, and from the railway station that
serves the two, many hundreds of tons of that fruit are despatched
to London in the season. These terms are perhaps vague, but they are
reduced to a more definite idea of the importance of the greengage
harvest when some returns are noted. From Melbourn station, then,
thirty tons a day is an average consignment. Little wonder, then, that
when one has come down from the bleak downs and heaths of Royston to
these sheltered levels, the swelling contours of the windy pastures and
breezy cornfields give place to long lines of orchards.
Cambridgeshire very soon develops its flat and fenny character along
this route, and Melbourn left behind, the road on to Cambridge is a
dead level. The low church-tower just visible to a keen eye, away to
the left, among some clustered trees, is that of Shepreth. Shepreth
hides its modest self from the road: let us take the winding by-way
that leads to it and see what a purely agricultural Cambridgeshire
village, set down in this level plain, and utterly out of touch with
the road, may be like. It needs no great exercise of the deductive
faculty to discover, on the way to Shepreth, that it is not a place
of great or polite resort, for the lane is a narrow and winding way,
half muddy ruts and half loose stones. Beside it crawls imperceptibly
in its deep, ditch-like bed, overhung by pollard willows, a stream that
takes its rise in the bogs of Fowlmere. By what lazy, snakish windings
it ultimately finds its way into the Cam does not concern us. Here and
there old mud-walled cottages, brilliantly white-washed and heavily
thatched, dot the way; the sum total of the village, saving indeed the
church, standing adjoining a farmyard churned into a sea of mud.
The appearance of Shepreth Church is not altogether prepossessing.
The south aisle has been rebuilt in white brick, in a style rivalling
the worst efforts of the old-time chapel-builder; and the old tower,
whose upper stages have long fallen in ruin, shows in the contorted
courses of its stonework how the building has sunk and settled in the
waterlogged soil.
Beyond this soddened village, coming to the highroad again, the
station and level-crossing of Foxton are reached; the situation of
Foxton itself clearly fixed by the church-tower, rising from the flat
fields on the right, half a mile away. There is something of a story
belonging to this line of railway from Royston to Shepreth, Foxton,
Shelford, and Cambridge. As far as Shepreth it is a branch of the Great
Northern, anxious in the long ago to find a way into Cambridge and so
cut up the Great Eastern's trade. The Great Eastern could not defeat
the scheme altogether, but stopped it at Shepreth, to which point
that line was opened in 1848. This was awkward for the Great Northern,
brought to a halt seven miles from Cambridge, at a point which may,
without disrespect to Shepreth, well be called "nowhere in particular."
But the Great Northern people found a way out of the difficulty.
Parliament, in the interests of the Great Eastern, would not permit
them to build a railway into Cambridge, but no one could forbid them
conveying passengers by coach along these last few miles. And so, for
close upon four years, Great Northern passengers left the trains at
Shepreth and were conveyed by a forty minutes' coach journey the rest
of the way. Thus, along these few miles at anyrate, coaching survived
on the Cambridge road until 1851, when the Great Eastern built a short
line from Shelford to Foxton and Shepreth, to join the Great Northern
branch, allowing running-powers to that Company into Cambridge station.
Harston village succeeds to Foxton. Its present name is a corruption of
"Harleston," which itself was a contraction of "Hardeliston." It stands
at a bend of the road, with a very small village green and a very large
church to the left, and the long village street of small cottages and
large gardens following the high road, and bringing the traveller
presently to an inn--the Old English Gentleman--where the Barkway route
to Cambridge meets this; both thenceforward joining forces for the
remaining four miles and a half. Hauxton Church starts up on the right,
by the Granta, which comes down from Audley End and is crossed here,
over a little bridge, the only striking object in what has now become a
very desolate road, so lonely and empty that an occasional thorn-tree,
rising from the dwarf hedges of the immense flat fields, becomes quite
companionable, and a distant clump of leafy elms a landmark. Those
distant trees mark where Trumpington village church lies hid, and, if
the horizon ahead be closely scanned, the long line of King's College
Chapel will presently be seen. We are coming at last into Cambridge.
XXI