* * * * *
At Copenhagen-house, the eye and the stomach may be satisfied together.
A walk to it through the fresh air creates an appetite, and the sight
must be allowed some time to take in the surrounding prospect. A seat
for an hour or two at the upstairs tea-room windows on a fine day is a
luxury. As the clouds intercept the sun’s rays, and as the winds
disperse or congregate the London atmosphere, the appearance of the
objects it hovers over continually varies. Masses of building in that
direction daily stretch out further and further across the fields, so
that the metropolis may be imagined a moving billow coming up the
heights to drown the country. Behind the house the
“Hedge-row elms, o’er hillocks green,”
is exquisitely beautiful, and the fine amphitheatre of wood, from
Primrose-hill to Highgate-archway and Hornsey, seems built up to meet
the skies. A stroll towards either of these places from
Copenhagen-house, is pleasant beyond imagination. Many residents in
London to whom walking would be eminently serviceable, cannot “take a
walk” without a motive; to such is recommended the “delightful task” of
endeavouring to trace Hagbush-lane.
Crossing the meadow west of Copenhagen-house, to the north-east corner,
there is a mud built cottage in the widest part of Hagbush-lane, as it
runs due north from the angle formed by its eastern direction. It stands
on the site of one still more rude, at which until destroyed, labouring
men and humble wayfarers, attracted by the sequestered and rural
beauties of the lane, stopped to recreate. It was just such a scene as
Morland would have coveted to sketch, and therefore Mr. Fussell with “an
eye for the picturesque,” and with a taste akin to Morland’s, made a
drawing of it while it was standing, and placed it on the wood whereon
it is engraven, to adorn the next page.
[Illustration: ~Cottage formerly in Hagbush-lane.~
“Why this cottage, sir, not three miles from London, is as secluded as
if it were in the weald of Kent.”]
This cottage stands no longer: its history is in the “simple annals of
the poor.” About seven years ago, an aged and almost decayed labouring
man, a native of Cheshunt, in Hertfordshire, with his wife and child,
lay out every night upon the road side of Hagbush-lane, under what of
bough and branch they could creep for shelter, till “winter’s cold” came
on, and then he erected this “mud edifice.” He had worked for some great
land-holders and owners in Islington, and still jobbed about. Like them,
he was, to this extent of building, a speculator; and to eke out his
insufficient means, he profited, in his humble abode, by the sale of
small beer to stragglers and rustic wayfarers. His cottage stood between
the lands of two rich men; not upon the land of either, but partly on
the disused road, and partly on the waste of the manor. Deeming him by
no means a respectable neighbour for their cattle, they “warned him
off;” he, not choosing to be houseless, nor conceiving that their
domains could be injured by his little enclosure between the banks of
the road, refused to accept this notice, and he remained. For this
offence, one of them caused his labourers to level the miserable
dwelling to the earth, and the “houseless child of want,” was compelled
by this wanton act to apply for his family and himself to be taken into
the workhouse. His application was refused, but he received advice to
build again, with information that his disturber was not justified in
disturbing him. In vain he pleaded incompetent power to resist; the
workhouse was shut against him, and he began to build another hut. He
had proceeded so far as to keep off the weather in one direction, when
wealth again made war upon poverty, and while away from his wife and
child, his scarcely half raised hut was pulled down during a heavy rain,
and his wife and child left in the lane shelterless. A second
application for a home in the workhouse was rejected, with still
stronger assurances that he had been illegally disturbed, and with
renewed advice to build again. The old man has built for the third time;
and on the site of the cottage represented in the engraving, erected
another, wherein he dwells, and sells his small beer to people who
choose to sit and drink it on the turf seat against the wall of his
cottage; it is chiefly in request, however, among the brickmakers in the
neighbourhood, and the labourers on the new road, cutting across
Hagbush-lane from Holloway to the Kentish-town road, which will
ultimately connect the Regent’s-park and the western suburb, with the
eastern extremity of this immensely growing metropolis. Though
immediately contiguous to Mr. Bath, the landlord of “Copenhagen-house,”
he has no way assisted in obstructing this poor creature’s endeavour to
get a morsel of bread. For the present he remains unmolested in his
almost sequestered nook, and the place and himself are worth seeing, for
they are perhaps the nearest specimens to London, of the old country
labourer and his dwelling.
* * * * *
From the many intelligent persons a stroller may meet among the thirty
thousand inhabitants of Islington, on his way along Hagbush-lane, he
will perhaps not find one to answer a question that will occur to him
during his walk. “Why is this place called Hagbush-lane?” Before giving
satisfaction here to the inquirer, he is informed that, if a Londoner,
Hagbush-lane is, or ought to be, to him, the most interesting way that
he can find to walk in; and presuming him to be influenced by the
feelings and motives that actuate his fellow-citizens to the improvement
and adornment of their city, by the making of a _new_ north road, he is
informed that Hagbush-lane, though now wholly disused, and in many parts
destroyed, was the _old_, or rather the _oldest_ north road, or ancient
bridle-way to and from London, and the northern parts of the kingdom.
Now for its name--Hagbush-lane. _Hag_ is the old Saxon word _hæg_, which
became corrupted into _hawgh_, and afterwards into _haw_, and is the
name for the berry of the hawthorn; also the Saxon word _haga_
signified a hedge or any enclosure. _Hag_ afterwards signified a
bramble, and hence, for instance, the blackberry-bush, or any other
bramble, would be properly denominated a _hag_. Hagbush-lane, therefore,
may be taken to signify either Hawthornbush-lane, Bramble-lane, or
Hedgebush-lane; more probably the latter. Within recent recollection,
Whitcomb-street, near Charing-cross, was called _Hedge_-lane.
Supposing the reader to proceed from the old man’s mud-cottage in a
northerly direction, he will find that the widest part of Hagbush-lane
reaches, from that spot, to the road now cutting from Holloway. Crossing
immediately over the road, he comes again into the lane, which he will
there find so narrow as only to admit convenient passage to a man on
horseback. This was the general width of the road throughout, and the
usual width of all the English roads made in ancient times. They did not
travel in carriages, or carry their goods in carts, as we do, but rode
on horseback, and conveyed their wares or merchandise in pack-saddles or
packages on horses’ backs. They likewise conveyed their money in the
same way. In an objection raised in the reign of Elizabeth to a clause
in the Hue and Cry bill, then passing through parliament, it was urged,
regarding some travellers who had been robbed in open day within the
hundred of Beyntesh, in the county of Berks, that “they were clothiers,
and yet travailed not withe the great trope of clothiers; they also
carried their money openlye in wallets upon their saddles.”[200] The
customary width of their roads was either four feet or eight feet. Some
parts of Hagbush-lane are much lower than the meadows on each side; and
this defect is common to parts of every ancient way, as might be
exemplified, were it necessary, with reasons founded on their ignorance
of every essential connected with the formation, and perhaps the use, of
a road.
It is not intended to point out the tortuous directions of Hagbush-lane;
for the chief object of this notice is to excite the reader to one of
the pleasantest walks he can imagine, and to tax his ingenuity to the
discovery of the route the road takes. This, the _ancient_ north road,
comes into the _present_ north road, in Upper Holloway, at the foot of
Highgate-hill, and went in that direction to Hornsey. From the
mud-cottage towards London, it proceeded between Paradise-house, the
residence of Mr. Greig, the engraver, and the Adam and Eve public-house,
in the Holloway back-road, and by circuitous windings approached London,
at the distance of a few feet on the eastern side of the City Arms
public-house, in the City-road, and continued towards Old-street, St.
Luke’s. It no where communicated with the back-road, leading from
Battle-bridge to the top of Highgate-hill, called Maiden-lane.
Hagbush-lane is well known to every botanizing perambulator on the west
side of London. The wild onion, clowns-wound-wort, wake-robin, and
abundance of other simples, lovely in their form, and of high medicinal
repute in our old herbals and receipt-books, take root, and seed and
flower here in great variety. How long beneath the tall elms and pollard
oaks, and the luxuriant beauties on the banks, the infirm may be
suffered to seek health, and the healthy to recreate, who shall say?
Spoilers are abroad.
_Through_ Hagbush-lane every man has a right to ride and walk; _in_
Hagbush-lane no one man has even a shadow of right to an inch as private
property. It is a public road, and public property. The trees, as well
as the road, are public property; and the very form of the road is
public property. Yet bargains and sales have been made, and are said to
be now making, under which the trees are cut down and sold, and the
public road thrown, bit by bit, into private fields as pasture. Under no
conveyance or admission to land by any proprietor, whether freeholder
or lord of a manor, can any person legally dispossess the public of a
single foot of Hagbush-lane, or obstruct the passage of any individual
through it. All the people of London, and indeed all the people of
England, have a right in this road as a common highway. Hitherto, among
the inhabitants of Islington, many of whom are opulent, and all of whom
are the local guardians of the public rights in this road, not one has
been found with sufficient public virtue, or rather with enough of
common manly spirit, to compel the restoration of public plunder, and in
his own defence, and on the behalf of the public, arrest the _highway_
robber.
Building, or what may more properly be termed the tumbling up of
tumbledown houses, to the north of London, is so rapidly increasing,
that in a year or two there will scarcely be a green spot for the resort
of the inhabitants. Against covering of private ground in this way,
there is no resistance; but against its evil consequences to health,
some remedy should be provided by the setting apart of open spaces for
the exercise of walking in the fresh air. The preservation of
Hagbush-lane therefore is, in this point of view, an object of public
importance. Where it has not been thrown into private fields, from
whence, however, it is recoverable, it is one of the loveliest of our
green lanes; and though persons from the country smile at Londoners when
they talk of being “rural” at the distance of a few miles from town, a
countryman would find it difficult to name any lane in his own county,
more sequestered or of greater beauty.