the old-world comfort regretted in other places by De Quincey, who
lived long enough to witness the beginnings of the great changes that
have come over the hotels of town and country since coaches gave place
to railways.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE "WHITE HART," BRENTWOOD.]
XVII
BRENTWOOD is no sooner left behind than the road descends steeply
over what was once a part of Shenfield Common, an exceedingly wild
and hillocky spot in days gone by, and probably the place where, in
November 1692, those seven jovial Essex squires mentioned by Macaulay
were themselves, while hunting the hare, chased and at last run down
by nine hunters of a different sort, who turned their pockets out and
then bade them good-day and be damned. The original chronicler of
this significant incident, the diarist, Narcissus Luttrell, makes no
especial feature of the event. He merely records it as having happened
"near Ingerstone," and then proceeds to chronicle other happenings in
the same sort along the several approaches to London. Little wonder,
therefore, that Macaulay should have drawn the conclusion that at this
time a journey of fifty miles through the wealthiest and most populous
shires of England was as dangerous as a pilgrimage across the deserts
of Arabia.
From the descending road or from Shenfield Church the country is seen
spread out, map-like, below, over the valley of the Thames, to where
the river empties itself into the broad estuary at the Nore. At least,
there is the vale, and the map vouchsafes the information that the
river flows thereby; but the compacted woodlands shut out the view of
that imperial waterway. "I cannot see the Spanish fleet, because it's
not in sight," says the disappointed searcher of the horizon in the
poem, and it is precisely for the same reason that the Thames is not
visible from Shenfield. But if one is denied a view of that imperial
river, at least Shenfield Church itself and its churchyard, a prodigal
riot of roses of every hue and habit, are worth seeing. The attenuated
shingled spire, one of the characteristic features of Essex churches,
beckons insistently from the road, and he who thereupon turns aside is
well repaid, in a sight of the elaborately-carved timber columns of
the interior, proving how in this county, where building stone is not
found, thirteenth and fourteenth-century builders made excellent shift
with heart of oak. This is, in fact, like so many other Essex churches,
largely wooden, and its timber is as sound now as it was six or seven
hundred years ago.
[Illustration: SHENFIELD.]
Mountnessing, known locally as "Money's End" lies two miles distant
from Shenfield. As in the case of so many other places near the
great roads, a comparatively recent settlement bearing the name of
the old village sprang up, to catch the custom of travellers; but an
additionally curious fact is the utter extinction of the original
village, which lay a mile distant from the highway, where the parish
church now stands lonely, save for a neighbouring farmstead. Explorers
in the countryside are often astonished at the great distances
between villages and their parish churches, and seek in vain in their
guide-books or in talk with the "oldest inhabitant" an explanation of
so curious a thing. Here, as in many cases, the root of the mystery is
found in the enclosure of the surrounding common lands. The enclosure
of commons has never been possible without the passing of special Acts,
which have divided what should have been the heritage of the people
for all time between the lord of the manor and the villagers, in their
proper proportions. Thus the lord of the manor and the tenants would
each obtain their share of the plunder, in the form of freehold land,
with the obvious result that the villagers, instead of paying rent for
their cottages clustering round the church in the original village,
built themselves new and rent-free cottages on their share of the spoil
of the commons. The old cottages being pulled down, or allowed to
decay, it was not long before the last trace of the original village
disappeared.
[Illustration: MOUNTNESSING CHURCH.]
Mountnessing was once the seat of the Mounteneys, who have long since
vanished from their old home. The old church, largely red brick without
and timber within, still preserves the fossil rib-bone of an elephant,
long regarded with reverence by the country folk as the rib of a giant,
and has for an additional curiosity the carving of a head on one of
the pillars, a head fitted, perhaps by way of warning to Early English
parishioners of shrewish tendencies, with a brank, or "scold's bridle."
The red-brick west front of the church, masking the wooden belfry-frame
from the weather, still bears the date, 1653, carved in the brick,
but such is the fresh appearance of the brickwork that without that
evidence of age it would be difficult to credit it with so long an
existence. The iron ties in the shape of the letter S give the view
a singular appearance. An apologetic epitaph in verse, beginning,
"Reader, excuse the underwritten," is a curiosity of Mountnessing
churchyard.
[Illustration: MOUNTNESSING WINDMILL.]
Returning to the road, Mountnessing Street, as the modern settlement is
named, is seen clustering on a hill-top, around four cross-roads and
a wayside pond. The place may aptly be summarised as consisting of a
dozen cottages, two public-houses, a general "stores" (our grandfathers
would have been content with the less pretentious word "shop"), a tin
tabernacle to serve those too infirm or too lazy to walk a mile to
church; a sweep's shop, a tailor's, and a windmill situated on a knoll;
a windmill that for picturesqueness might win the enthusiasm of a Crome
or a Constable.
From this point it is, as a milestone proclaims, two miles to
"Ingatstone," the "Ingatestone" of customary spelling. The milestones
are undoubtedly strictly correct in their orthography, if erring on
the pedantic side, for that village derives its name from a settlement
of the Anglo-Saxons by the "ing" or meadow, at the Roman milestone
they found here, but has long since disappeared. "Ing-atte-stone"
they called their village, which lies in the little valley of the
River Wid, or Ash, trickling (for it is a stream of the smallest)
hither and thither to give a perennial verdure to the meads along its
course. "Ing" is, by consequence, a marked feature of the place-names
successively met with along the River Wid. Mounteney's Ing we have
already seen, and Fryerning, or Friars' Meadow, is not far away; while
Margaretting, the prettiest name of all, lies beyond Ingatestone.
[Illustration: THE GATEHOUSE, INGATESTONE HALL.]
Ingatestone's one street, fronting on to the highroad, is of the
narrowest, and remains in almost every detail exactly as it is pictured
in the old print reproduced here, with the red-brick tower of the
church still rising behind. It is a tower which by no means looks its
age of over four hundred years, so deceptive is the cheery ruddiness
of the brick. Within, by the chancel, is the monument of that Sir
William Petre who, emulating the accommodating qualities of the famous
Vicar of Bray, bowed before the religious storms of the reigns of Henry
the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary and Elizabeth. "Made of the willow
and not of the oak," those tempests not only left him unscathed, but
brought him much plunder. Under Henry he was enriched with the manor
of Ingatestone, plundered from the Abbey of Barking, together with
much spoil elsewhere. How he managed to do it is a mystery, but during
the reign of Mary this ardent Catholic (for such the Petres always
have been) actually obtained a Papal Bull confirming him and his in
these grants. One marvels, when gazing upon his high-nosed effigy,
recumbent beside his wife, how one with that noble physiognomy could
be so accomplished a time-server and truckler. His home, plundered
from the nuns of Barking, and known for many years as Ingatestone
Hall, is yet to be seen at a short distance from the road, down a
beautifully-timbered country lane. The entrance is by a gatehouse
with the motto, "_Sans Dieu Rien_," situated at the end of an avenue
and framing in its archway a fine view of the romantic old red-brick
turreted buildings of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Lord
Petre of to-day does not reside here, but the place is still in the
family, and the Roman Catholic chapel is even now in use. Miss Braddon
is perhaps scarce to be numbered among those novelists whose literary
landmarks are followed with interest, but it is claimed for Ingatestone
Hall that it is the scene of her _Lady Audley's Secret_. The
fish-ponds of old monastic times, the well in which Lady Audley thrust
her husband, the lime-walk he haunted, together with such romantic
accessories as terraced walks and a priest's hiding-hole, form items
which would require the business enthusiasm of an eloquent auctioneer
to fully enlarge upon. They _do_ say--the "they" in question being the
gossips of Ingatestone--that the guard and driver of the Parcel Mail,
passing at 1·15 a.m. the head of the avenue leading from the high road,
once saw "a something" in white mysteriously sauntering beneath the
trees, but whether it was the shade of an Abbess of Barking or one
of the sisters thus bewailing the fate of their old home, or merely
a white cow, remains an unsolved mystery, the Postmaster-General's
regulations and time-sheets not allowing for time spent in psychical
research.
[Illustration: INGATESTONE IN COACHING DAYS. _From an Old Print_]
The shingled spire of Margaretting Church is visible on the right, soon
after leaving Ingatestone. Like the church of Mountnessing, it has its
timbered belfry-framing, and like it again, is remote from the village,
standing solitary, save for the vicarage and a farmhouse, beside a
railway crossing--if, indeed, any building adjoining the main-line of a
great railway may ever be called solitary. The Margaret thus honoured
in the place-name is the Saint to whom the church is dedicated. Some
traces of the "marguerite," or herbaceous daisy, painted on the old
windows, in decorative allusion, remained until they were swept away
for modern stained-glass in memory of a late vicar and his family;
glass in which Saint Margaret has no place; so that, save for an
inscription on one of the bells, she now remains unhonoured in her
own church, deposed in favour of Isaiah and Jeremiah and subjects
kept "in stock" by the modern ecclesiastical art furnisher. The only
remaining ancient glass is that of the east window, a magnificent
fifteenth-century "tree of Jesse."
[Illustration: AT MARGARETTING.]
Margaretting Street fringes the wayside at the twenty-fifth milestone,
where a post-office and some few scattered cottages straggle
picturesquely at the foot of an incline leading up to Widford. The
odious wall of pallid brick that helps so materially to spoil some
two miles of this road is the park wall of Hylands, a large estate
purchased about 1847 by one John Attwood, a successful ironmaster, who
stopped up roads, pulled down cottages, and raised this eyesore to
enclose his new-made park. Almost as soon as the last brick was put
in its place, the autocratic Attwood became utterly ruined by railway
speculations, and his walled-in Eden was sold. Nature in the meanwhile
has done her best, and a continuous fringe of trees now overhangs the
ugly wall, while at a break in it, where the River Wid crosses beneath
the road, water-lilies gem the stream and the wind sounds in the
luxuriant Lombardy poplars with the sound of a waterfall.
If it were not for its church, which has been re-built and has a very
fine and tall spire, one might easily pass Widford and not know it,
for the very few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such as it
is, it stands on the crest of something not quite so much as a hill
and rather more than an incline, and beside its large church has an
equally fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White Horse." Time was,
and that until three years since, when Widford was celebrated for its
one other inn, the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled, the
"Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by the picture-sign of a
headless woman, with the inscription, _Fort Bone_, on one side, and a
portrait of Henry the Eighth on the other. "_Fort Bone_" was commonly
Englished by slangy cyclists as "good business." The sign, of course,
was a pictorial and satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an
open question whether or not in their present form this and the several
other "Quiet Woman" and "Good Woman" signs throughout the country are
perversions of the original legend, "_la bonne fame_" displayed on old
inns in the distant past; an inscription laudatory of the hostelry,
and matching the self-recommendation of "_la bonne rénommée_," found
in modern France, or the more familiar "noted house for--" and "good
pull up" inscriptions on inns in modern England. Virgil's description
of Fame, walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the clouds,
may have originated the pictorial sign of the headless woman in days
of ancient learning; and the classic allusion becoming lost and the
supposedly incorrect spelling of "_fame_" being altered to "_femme_,"
we thus obtain a very reasonable derivation. We may take it that many
shrew-bitten folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily agreed to
forget the original meaning in order to adopt one so exactly fitting
their opinion that the only quiet or good women were headless ones.
[Illustration: THE "GOOD WOMAN" SIGN.]
Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change that is robbing places of
all interest and distinction, the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer
swings from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed inn opposite the
"White Horse" has retired into private life. The picture sign is now
housed inside the "White Horse."
XVIII
WIDFORD almost immediately introduces the explorer to Moulsham
(originally the "mole's home"), itself own brother--but a very
out-at-elbows brother--to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the wind
between our gentility and the somewhat fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we
should turn to the left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of
the town, and so, proceeding along the "new London road," come into
Chelmsford, half way down the High Street. Being, however, intent
rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en endure the half-mile
length of shabby, untidy street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford,
the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City of Calves, over the
hunchbacked and narrow stone bridge across the Chelmer, the successor,
at an interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original bridge
built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That is a huge slice of time, but
it was too late, even in Norman days, for the town to change its name
from Chelmers_ford_ to something more appropriate when the ford was
thus superseded.
Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High Street of the town,
the view closed by the Shire Hall and the church; the Norwich Road,
however, turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and refusing
to make acquaintance with the town. It is the Conduit that is seen in
this illustration of the High Street, its architecture scarce improved
by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be ornamental, over its
cupola.
[Illustration: THE BRIDGE: ENTRANCE TO CHELMSFORD.]
Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at the end of this view,
spoil one another, the Hall almost entirely hiding the church when
looking down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular exterior
of the church putting the clumsy architecture of the Hall to shame,
as a pagan upstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some, but
its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone concerns the passing
stranger, who feels so concerned by sight of it that he accordingly
passes the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the seated bronze effigy
of a native, a bygone Lord Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like
an old apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops green coppery
stains over his nice stone pedestal) keep one another company in the
open space fronting this building.
[Illustration: THE CONDUIT, CHELMSFORD.]
The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal, whose career came to a
close in 1806. The monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for all
time the image of a judge whose administration of English law, directed
by serene wisdom, assisted by purest love of justice, endeared by
unwearied kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will be held by
his country in undying remembrance." His birthplace could hardly have
said more than that.
[Illustration: TINDAL'S STATUE.]
Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways, being indeed very severely
bitten with a taste for modernity. Is it not famous as the first town
in the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have not its streets
been resolutely swept clear of antiquity? The town, in short, is
scarce picturesque. It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays,
but on other occasions every house provokes a yawn, with perhaps the
exception of the "Saracen's Head," an inn that, despite its modernised
and stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old times. There was a
"Saracen's Head" here certainly as far back as the fifteenth century,
and probably much earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it derived
from Crusading times, when the knights and men-at-arms, returning
from Palestine with wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys,
leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the Holy Land, found
their fame come home before them, and the old inns they had known--the
"Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine Wheel," and the
like--often re-named in their honour. With little effort we can imagine
the scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period, when exploits at
Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were told and re-told, and gained wonderfully
in the repetition over sack and malvoysie. What bloody fellows they
were, and with what zest they slew the Soldan's soldiers over and over
again as they sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six
hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has been rebuilt many times
since then; but human nature remains the same though timber rot and
brick perish, and again and again the same old talk has been heard in
the bar-parlour of the inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Creçy;
men of a later age who warred under Marlborough at Blenheim, Ramillies
or Malplaquet; the lads of the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from
the horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from a hundred fights on
the burning South African veldt--all have had their circle of greedy
listeners here.
The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek and stuccoed face to
the street, and the house shows signs of extensive rebuilding and
remodelling, undertaken in the full flush of the great days of coaching
prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in the belief that
coaching, and the road as an institution, would last for ever. Fond
belief! Has anyone ever stopped to consider the fact that the great
coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a great deal more
to do with the pulling down of the old-fashioned galleried and timbered
inns of country towns than ever railways have had? The average small
country town felt in fullest measure the great increase in business
incidental to the last years of the coaching age, and every innkeeper
hastened to rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who had,
from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding until the dawn of
the Railway Age, on seeing that the road would decay and travellers
be carried to their journeys' ends without halting for rest and
refreshment, promptly gave up any such ideas and were thankful that
they had not begun the work of reconstruction and enlargement. Those
who had were ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared may
yet be often met with, a world too large, in country towns where once
the mails and the stage-coaches passed, like a procession, day by day.
It is quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house like the
"White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it is not too much to say that,
had the Coaching Age lasted another ten years, it also would have been
rebuilt.
An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its central figure, belongs
to the "Saracen's Head" at Chelmsford. For some years after he had
won fame as a novelist he still retained his position in the General
Post Office, of which he was a travelling inspector. On one of these
official journeys he happened to be staying here, at the time when
his _Barchester Towers_ was being issued, after the then prevailing
fashion, in parts. He was seated in the coffee-room when two clergymen
entered, one of them with the newly-issued part of the story. The
cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the trials of the
Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs Proudie, who was rather a trial
to Trollope's readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the clergyman
put the book down. "Confound that Mrs Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish
she were dead!"
Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he thanked the reader for thus
accidentally telling him that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome,
and undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen," said he, "she shall
die in the next number;" and die she accordingly did. But in defence
of Trollope's truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the
opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs Proudies may yet be
found in a goodly proportion of the episcopal palaces of England.
XIX
RETURNING now to the Conduit, and making for the open road once more,
Chelmsford is left by way of Springfield, past the successor of
Chelmsford's finest old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The
old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five centuries, and had
been the halting-place of many famous travellers, among them a long
line of Earls of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham
and London; but none of these associations sufficed to save the house.
Fragments of its carved beams are preserved in the local museum, but
recall it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon bring back
in his majesty that denizen of the earth in the dim æons of the past.
Chelmsford would dearly like many of its old buildings--wantonly
demolished years ago--back again; but what is done cannot be undone,
and there's an end on't. The "Cross Keys" remains, in a restored
condition.
[Illustration: THE "THREE CUPS" SIGN]
The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of Chelmsford, carries
varying significances. To the mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the
American from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim Fathers and
their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts; and to the gaol-bird
it means a "stretch" of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in
fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building enlarged in recent
years for the accommodation of the guests consigned to it at Assize
time from the Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But, once
past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing and cheerful. Its
long miscellaneous street, where the quaint sign of the "Three Cups"
stands out, gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive
grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of picturesqueness.
That this has been the aim of their architects is abundantly manifest
in examples where, under a single roof, one may experience the
mingled romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle, a Tudor
manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a "Queen Anne" mansion; all done in
red brick, gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover, fitted
with electric light and hot and cold water supply. To this end has
castellated and domestic architecture unwound its long story during
some five hundred years. It will be seen thereby that William of
Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time architect did not live
in vain.