of history. Both here and at the neighbouring Old Ford the Lea was
anciently crossed by a paved stone ford of Roman construction,
continuing the highway into Essex; but when that river's many channels,
swollen by winter's rains, rolled in freshets toward the Thames, the
low-lying lands of what we now call Hackney and West Ham marshes were
for long distances converted into a sluggish lake. For months together
the approaches to the Lea were lost in floods, and the real channels of
the river became so deep that those who valued their lives and goods
dared not attempt the passage. To the aid of poor travellers thus
waterlogged came the good and pious Queen Matilda, consort of Henry the
First. "Having herself been well washed in the water," as old Leland
says, she fully appreciated the necessity for bridges, and accordingly
directed the raising of a causeway on either side of the Lea and the
building of two stone structures, of which one was the original "Bow"
Bridge; "a rare piece of work, for before that time the like had never
been seen in England." It seems to have been the stone arch that gave
its name of "Bow," and if an arched stone bridge was so remarkable in
those times that it should thus derive a name for its semi-circular, or
"bow" shape, it must have been either the first, or among the earliest,
of stone bridges built, in times when others were constructed of timber.
The original name of the village that afterwards sprang up here, on the
hither or Middlesex shore, was thus singularly contradictory; meaning
"the street ford at the arched bridge." The Stratford on the Essex
side was in those days known as Stratford Langthorne.
The good queen not only built the bridges and causeways, but endowed
them with land and a water-mill, conveying those properties to the
Abbess of Barking, burdened with a perpetual charge for the maintenance
of the works. Having done all this, she died. Some years afterwards a
Cistercian monastery was founded close by, where the Abbey Mills now
stand, and the then Abbess of Barking, of opinion that the Abbot of
that house, being near, would find it easier to look after the bridges
than herself, reconveyed the property, together with its obligations,
to him. The trust was kept for a time and then delegated to a certain
Godfrey Pratt, who had a house built for him on the causeway and
enjoyed an annual grant, in consideration of keeping the works in
repair. Pratt did so well with his annual stipend and the alms given
him by wayfarers that the Abbot at length discontinued the grant.
Accordingly, the wily Pratt set up a quite unauthorised toll-bar and
levied "pontage" on all except the rich, of whom he was afraid. This
went on for many years, until the scandal grew too great, and, in
consequence of an inquisition held, the Abbot dispossessed Godfrey
Pratt of his toll-bar and resumed the control himself.
Meanwhile, no repairs had been effected, and the road had been so
greatly worn down that the feet of travellers and those of the horses
often went through the arches. Bow Bridge had, consequently, to undergo
an extensive cobbling process; a treatment, by the way, continued
through the centuries until 1835, when it was finally pulled down.
In its last state it was a nondescript patchwork of all ages. The
property for its maintenance had, of course, been lost in the
confiscation of monastic estates under Henry the Eighth, and its repair
afterwards fell upon the local authorities, who always preferred to
patch and tinker it so long as such a course was possible. On February
14, 1839, the existing bridge was opened, crossing the Lea in one
seventy-foot span, in place of the old three arches.
XIV
"FAREWELL, Bowe, have over the bridge, where, I heard say, honest
Conscience was once drowned."
Thus says Will Kemp, in his _Nine Days' Wonder_, the account of a
dance he jigged from London to Norwich in so many days, in 1600. It
is hopeless to recover the meaning hidden in that old joke about the
drowning of conscience here, and so we will also without delay "have
over" the modern bridge of Bow and into Essex, past dingy flour mills,
and crossing another branch of the Lea by Channelsea Bridge, come to
Stratford.
Here, then, begins the county of calves, according to the popular
jest that to be a native of Essex is to be an "Essex Calf." It is not
generally regarded as a complimentary title, for of all young animals
the calf is probably the clumsiest and most awkward. To this day in
rural England the contemptuous exclamation "you great calf!" is used
of an awkward, overgrown boy tied to his mother's apron-strings. Yet,
if we may believe a seventeenth-century writer on this subject, the
nickname had a complimentary origin, "for," said he, "this county
produceth calves of the fattest, fairest and finest flesh in England."
We have already seen that the French spoken at Stratford-le-Bow in
Chaucer's time was a scoff and a derision. To-day, neither on the
Middlesex nor the Essex shores of the Lea is the teaching of languages
either a matter for praise or contempt. Mills of every kind, the
making of matches that strike only on the box, the varied work of the
Stratford and West Ham factories, fully occupy the vast populations
close at hand; while the business of covering the potato-fields, the
celery-beds and the grounds of the old suburban mansions with endless
rows of suburban dwellings is engrossing attention down the road.
Stratford and Maryland Point are now strictly urban, and Ilford far
greater in these days than it ever was when its "great" prefix was
never pretermitted. London, indeed, stretches far out along this road,
and the country is reached only after many miles of that debatable
land which belongs neither to country nor town. Heralds of the great
metropolis appear to the London-bound traveller while he is yet far
away, and even so far distant as Chelmsford "the dim presentiment of
some vast capital," as De Quincey remarks, "reaches you obscurely like
a misgiving."
Stratford has not improved since coaches left the road. It has grown
greatly, and grown dirty, squalid and extremely trying to noses that
have not been acclimatised to bone-boiling works, manure factories and
other odoriferous industries. But it is a place of great enterprises
and great and useful markets, and when its introductory mean streets
are passed, the Broadway, where the Leytonstone Road branches off to
the left, looks by contrast quite noble. This brings one to Upton
Park, Forest Gate, Woodgrange and Manor Park in succession, past a
building which, whether as an institution or an example of beautiful
architecture, would well grace the West. The West Ham Public Library
and Technical Institute is here referred to. "Irish Row," on the
way, marked on old maps, is a reference to old wayside cottages
inhabited until recent years by a turbulent colony of London-Irish
market-gardening labourers, subsidised by Mrs Nelson in times of
coaching competition to impede hated rivals as they came past the
"Rising Sun" at what is now the suburb of Manor Park; a house which,
like the "Coach and Horses" at Upton, has declined from a legitimate
coaching trade to something more in the gin-palace sort. This is not
to say that the staid and decorous Mrs Nelson entered into direct
negotiations with the Mikes and Patseys of Irish Row, but when the
rival Ipswich "Umpire" or the "New Colchester" coaches developed much
sporting competition and their coachmen evinced a dogged determination
to be first over Bow Bridge on the way up to London, and, by
consequence, the first to arrive at their destination, why, an obscure
hint or two on the part of one of her numerous staff, accompanied by
the wherewithal for a drink, produced wonders in the way of highway
obstruction. But such recollections are become unsubstantial as the
fabric of which dreams are made, and fade before the apparitions of
tramways and interminable rows of suburban shops that conduct to Ilford
Bridge.
Great Ilford lies on the other side of the sullen Roding, that rolls
a muddy tide in aimless loops to lazily join the Thames at Barking
Reach. The townlet has from time immemorial been approached by a bridge
replacing the "eald," or old, ford, whence its name derives and not
from that crossing of the stream being an "ill" ford, as imaginative,
but uninstructed, historians would have us believe; although the slimy
black mud of the river-bed would nowadays make the exercise of fording
an ill enough enterprise. Ilford is now in the throes of development
and is fast losing all individuality and becoming a mere suburb. Let us
leave it for places less sophisticated.
The morris-dancing Will Kemp of 1600, leaving Ilford by moonshine, set
forward "dauncing within a quarter of a mile of Romford, where two
strong Jades were beating and byting either of other." We take this
to mean two women fighting on the road, until the context is reached,
where he says that their hooves formed an arch over him and that he
narrowly escaped being kicked on the head. It then becomes evident that
he is talking of horses.
Leaving the centre of Great Ilford behind, and in more decorous
fashion than that of Will Kemp, we come, past an inn oddly named
the "Cauliflower"--probably as a subtle compliment to the abounding
market-gardens of the neighbourhood--to the long, straight perspective
of the road across Chadwell Heath. Unnumbered acres of new suburban
"villa" streets now cover the waste on either side, so that the
beginnings of the plain are not so much heath as modern suburb,
created by the Great Eastern Railway's suburban stations and by the
far-reaching enterprises of land corporations, which here carry on the
usual speculations of the speculative builder on a gigantic scale. In
acre upon acre of closely-packed streets, each one with a horrible
similarity to its neighbour, thousands of the weekly wage-earning
clerks, mechanics and artisans of mighty London live and lose their
individuality, and pay rent to limited companies. Where the highwayman
of a century ago waited impatiently behind the ragged thickets and
storm-tossed thorn trees of Chadwell Heath for the traveller, there
now rises the modern township of Seven Kings, and midway between
Ilford station and that of Chadwell Heath, the recent enormous growth
of population on this sometime waste has led to the erection of the
new stations of "Seven Kings" and "Goodmayes," while widened lines
have been provided for the increased train services. "Seven Kings"
is a romantic name, but who those monarchs were, and what they were
ever doing on the Heath, which of old was a place more remarkable for
cracked skulls than for crowned heads, is impossible to say. Many wits
have been at work on the problem, but have been baffled. The natural
assumption is that at this spot, marked on old maps as "Seven Kings
Watering," the seven monarchs of the Heptarchy met. History, unhappily
records no such meeting, but there was no _Court Circular_ in those
times, and so many royal foregatherings must have gone unremarked,
except locally and in some fashion similar to this. So let us assume
the kings met here and watered their horses at the "watering," which
was a place where a little stream crossed the road in a watersplash.
The stream still crosses the highway, but civilisation has put it in a
pipe and tucked it away underground.
[Illustration: SEVEN KINGS.]
A lane running across the Great Eastern Railway at this point, known as
Stoup Lane ("stoup" meaning a boundary-post) marks the boundary of the
Ilford and Chadwell wards of Barking parish. Here it was, in 1794, on a
night of December, that a King's messenger, James Martin by name, was
shot by five footpads. The register of St Edmund's, Romford, records
the burial of this unfortunate man on the 14th of that month.
Let us not, however, in view of the more or less grisly dangers that
still await belated wayfarers on this road, enlarge too greatly on
the lawlessness of old times; for the homeward-bound resident making
for his domestic hearth in these new-risen suburbs towards the stroke
of ten o'clock is not infrequently startled by the sinister figure
of a footpad springing from the ragged hedges of Chadwell Heath and
demanding--_not_ his money or his life, as in the old formula, but--a
halfpenny! This invariable demand of the nocturnal Chadwell Heath
footpads, which argues a pitiful lack of invention on their part, is
for half the price of a drink.
"You haven't got a ha'p'ny about you, guv'nor?" asks the threatening
tramp.
"No," says the peaceful citizen, anxiously scanning the long
perspective of the road for the policeman who ought to be within
sight--but is not; "w-what do you want a halfpenny for?"
"I've walked all the way from Romford and only got half the price of a
glass o' beer," says the rascal.
The citizen is astonished and incredulous, and his astonishment gets
the better of his fear. "Oh, come now," he rejoins, "no one walks three
miles from Romford for a glass of beer; besides, all the houses here
close at ten o'clock."
"Oh, they do, do they?" replies the tramp, offensively. "'Ere, my
mate Bill'll talk to you," and, whistling, the ominous bulk of Bill
emerges aggressively from the darkling hedge, and together they proceed
to wipe the road with that respectable ratepayer, and, rifling his
pockets, leave him, bruised and bleeding, to reflect on the blessings
of civilisation and to be thankful that he was not born a hundred years
ago, when he might have been shot dead instead of being felled to the
ground by the half-brick in a handkerchief which he finds beside him
and takes home as a trophy.
Chadwell Street, a wayside hamlet, conducts past Beacontree Heath,
on the right, to an open country of disconsolate-looking contorted
elms and battered windmills, telling even in the noontide heats and
still airs of summer of the winter winds that race across the watery
flats of Rippleside and Dagenham Marshes, out of the shivering east.
Lonely, until quite recent times, stood "Whalebone House," beside the
road, the two whalebones that even yet surmount its garden entrance
the wonderment for more than two hundred years of chance travellers.
Legends tell that they are relics of a whale stranded in the Thames in
the year of Oliver Cromwell's death, and set up here in memory of him.
However that may be, they certainly were here in 1698, when Ogilby's
_Britannia_ was published, for the house is marked on his map as "Ye
Whalebone."
These "rude ribs," it may shrewdly be suspected, have little longer yet
to remain, for though apparently proof against decay, the house and
grounds are, like those of the surrounding properties, for sale to the
builders.
[Illustration: WHALEBONE HOUSE.]
The sole historic or other vestige remaining of the "Whalebone"
turnpike-gate, once standing here, is an account to be found in the
newspapers of the time of an attack made upon George Smith, the
toll-keeper, on a night in 1829. He was roused in the darkness by a
voice calling "Gate!" and, going to open it, was instantly knocked
down, in a manner somewhat similar to the treatment accorded the hero
of that touching nursery rhyme, who tells how:--
"Last night and the night before,
Three tom-cats came knocking at my door.
I went down to let them in,
And they knocked me down with a rolling-pin."
The two men who felled the unfortunate George Smith, alarmed by his
cries of "Murder!" threatened to shoot him if he were not quiet,
and, going over his pockets, were rewarded by a find of twenty-five
shillings. While they were thus engaged in sorting him over, a third
confederate, ransacking the house, discovered three pounds. With this
booty and a parting kick, they left their victim, and disappeared as
silently as they came.
XV
ROMFORD, now approached, is but twelve miles from London, and has
frankly given up the impossible and ceased all pretence of being
provincial. At the same time, building-land having only just (in the
speculator's phrase) become "ripe for development," the townlet has not
yet lost all individuality in suburban extension.
The place, say some antiquaries, derives its name from the "Roman
ford" on the Rom brook, but it is a great deal more likely that the
origin is identical with that of the first syllable in the names of
Ramsgate, Ramsey and Romney, and comes from the Anglo-Saxon "ruim" =
a marsh. Time was when the town was celebrated for its manufacture
of breeches; an industry which gave rise to a saying still current in
the less polished nooks and corners of Essex--"Go to Romford and get
your backsides new bottomed." Breeches have long ceased to be a noted
product of the town, which for many years past has bulked large in the
annals of Beer. Barricades, avenues, mountains and Alpine ranges of
barrels, hogsheads, firkins and kilderkins of Romford ale and stout
proclaim that the Englishman's preference for his "national drink" has
not abated, and that
"Damn his eyes, whoever tries
To rob a poor man of his beer"
is still a popular sentiment; as both the brewers of arsenical
compounds and the more rabid among teetotallers are some day likely to
discover.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO ROMFORD.]
A French traveller in England some two hundred years ago wrote that
"there are a hundred sorts of Beer made in England, and some are
not bad: Art has well supplied Nature in this particular. Be that as
it will, beer is Art and wine is Nature; I am for Nature against the
world." That old fellow did not know how artful beer could be, and if
he could re-visit his native France might discover that even wine is no
longer the simple child of nature it once was.
But although John Barleycorn is the tutelary deity of Romford, it is
quite conceivable that the stranger bound for Norwich, and turning
neither to right nor to left, might pass through the town without so
much as a glimpse obtained of those Alpine ranges aforesaid. True,
on entering Romford, he could scarce fail to observe certain weird
structures ahead: odd towers like first cousins to lighthouses,
springing into the sky line, with ranges of perpendicular pipes, like
the disjointed fragments of some mammoth organ, beside them, the
characteristic signs and portents of a great brewery; but the barrels
are secluded, nor even are Romford's streets blocked, as might have
been suspected, with brewers' drays. Romford, indeed, spells to the
uninstructed stranger rather bullocks than beer; for the cattle-pens
are the chief feature of its market-place, and sheep and hay and straw
bulk more in the eye of the road-farer than the products of Ind, Coope
& Co., which are to be seen in all their vastness beside the railway
station and on the sidings constructed especially for the trade in ale
and stout.
[Illustration: ROMFORD.]
The town in its most characteristic aspect is seen in the accompanying
illustration taken from the doorway of that old inn, the "Windmill and
Bells," the broad road margined with granite setts and the pavements
fenced with posts and rails; the re-built parish church prominent
across the market-place.
[Illustration: OLD TOLL-HOUSE, PUTTELS BRIDGE.]
Beyond Romford the road grows rural, and, by the same token, hilly.
This, gentle reader, let it not be forgotten, is Essex, and we all
know with what persistence that county is spoken of, and written of,
as flat. If you would know what flatness is, try the Great North Road
and its long levels between Baldock, Biggleswade and Alconbury, or
search Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire or Hunts. _There_ is flatness, beside
which that of Essex is the merest superstition, started probably by
some tired traveller of inconstant purpose, who, essaying to explore
the county, gave up the enterprise when he had reached Wanstead Flats.
Surveying that not highly romantic expanse, he took it as an exemplar
of the rest of the shire, and so returned home to start this immortal
myth on its career. Certainly no cyclist who knows his Essex will
subscribe to its flatness as an article of faith, and as such an one
cycles from Romford, through the hamlet of Hare Street, over Puttels
Bridge, where stands an old toll-house, to the other hamlet of Brook
Street, the fact that he will actually have to _walk_ his machine up
the steep hill that conducts into the town of Brentwood will cause him
to think hard things of myth-makers.
[Illustration: THE "FLEECE," BROOK STREET.]
Brook Street Hill is the name of this eminence. Beside it stands a
cemetery, convenient for brakeless cyclists who recklessly descend, and
at its foot is a fine old inn, the "Fleece," a house of call for the
fish-waggons that were once so great a feature of this road so far as
Colchester and Harwich.
[Illustration: THE MARTYR'S TREE, BRENTWOOD.]
Brentwood, on the crest of this hill, occupies an elevated table-land,
with sharp descents from it on every side. The "burnt wood" town,
destroyed in some forgotten conflagration, is now a long-streeted,
old-fashioned place, apparently in no haste to bid good-bye to the
past. It keeps the old Assize House of Queen Elizabeth's time in
repair, and carefully sees to it that the Martyr's Tree, decayed though
the old elm stump be and hollow, is saved from perishing altogether.
It was in 1555 that William Hunter, in his twentieth year, suffered
in this place for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. That
staunch upholder of the Protestant faith scarce needed the modern
memorial, close by, while this shattered trunk remained, its gaping
rents carefully bricked up by pious hands; but let the venerable relic
be doubly safe-guarded in these times, when that candle lit by Latimer
and Ridley, close upon three centuries and a half ago, burns dim, and
lawless and forsworn clergy within the Church of England are working
towards Rome and the return of the famous days of fire and stake; when
the blood of the martyrs has ceased to inspire a generation which
demands to be shown some tangible object before it can realise the
significance of that sacrifice. Here, then, is something that can be
seen and touched, to bring the least imaginative back in fancy to those
terrible days, when brave hearts of every class gave up their lives in
fire and smoke rather than abjure their faith. The Romanising clergy
of to-day are made of coarser fabric than the martyrs. _They_ are not
actuated by honesty, but take oaths they have no intention of observing
to a Church whose bread they eat and whose trust they betray.
Would you know something of that martyrdom at Brentwood? Then scan the
inscription on the modern granite obelisk, and control, if you can, a
righteous indignation when you perceive a modern Roman Catholic chapel
standing, impudent in these days of an exaggerated tolerance, over
against the Martyr's Tree itself, typifying the Scarlet Woman in midst
of her blasphemies, exultant over the blood of the saints. "He being
dead yet speaketh," quotes that inscription; but what avails it to
speak in the ears of the deaf, or to talk of honour to the perjured?
"Learn from his example," continue those momentous words, "to value
the privilege of an open Bible, and be careful to maintain it"; but
the world goes by unheeding, and only when the danger again becomes
acute and liberty of conscience is passing away will indifference be
conquered and the folly of it revealed.
XVI
BRENTWOOD still keeps a notable relic of coaching days in the old
"White Hart" Inn, a curious specimen of the timbered and galleried
type of hostelry familiar to our great-grandfathers. It turns a long
plastered front to the street, but the great carved and panelled
doorway leading into the coach-yard confirms the proud legend,
"Established 1480." Full forty coaches passed through Brentwood in
every twenty-four hours at the close of the Coaching Age, but the
earlier days of coaching brought the "White Hart" more custom than
came to it at the close of that era, when, in consequence of the roads
being improved, travelling was quicker, and places once halted at were
left behind without stopping. Innkeepers were considerable losers by
this constant acceleration of coaches, and saw the smart, long-distance
stages go dashing by where, years before, the old slow coaches stayed
the night, or, at the very least, halted for meals.