To see old Springfield, it is necessary to turn off the road to the
left, and to journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church, a
noble building with mingled red brick and stone tower bearing the
inscription, "Prayse God for al the good benefactors 1586." Oliver
Goldsmith, it is quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model
for his _Deserted Village_. He certainly visited at an old cottage
opposite the church, but the real Sweet Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.
[Illustration: SPRINGFIELD CHURCH.]
Beyond the village and facing the high road are the strangely
impressive lodges of the historic estate of New Hall; new at the end
of the fifteenth century, but declined into a respectable age by
now and cobwebbed with much history and many legends. The place, now
and for a considerable number of years past an alien convent, has
been owned during a period of four hundred years by an astonishing
number of historic personages, who have succeeded one another like
flitting phantoms. Here the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps
out spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the handling of the
historic kaleidoscope. Built by Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose
daughter and heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother
of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus eventually came into possession
of Henry the Eighth, who occasionally resided here and re-named it
"Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of
Sussex. By this time it had resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners
were George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, and Oliver
Cromwell, who had it as a gift from Parliament and exchanged it so soon
as he decently could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like
residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him succeeded another Duke of
Buckingham, and to him that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk,
Duke of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and was visited
here, when he was suffering from gout and dropsy, by that scribbling
traveller, Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of historic
owners may be said to end, but constant change has ever been the lot
of New Hall, and a succession of lesser lights followed him until the
nuns set up their secluded life here and bade farewell to a vain
world. That world passes by; the road on one side, the railway midway
in the grounds, and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as
morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the vineyard.
[Illustration: NEW HALL LODGES]
No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road. All is emptiness,
and the lichened brick and the crumbling stone vases of neighbouring
boundary walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled
aims characteristic of the place.
There is an air of romance about Boreham House, as seen from the
tree-embowered road at a little distance from New Hall; an altogether
deceptive air, let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic
building of white brick. It is its situation at the head of a formal
lake, fringed with stately elms, that confers the illusory distinction,
but the explorer of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing
rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl squattering
on the lake, can weave his own romance to fit the scene. And if the
house, though stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest in
the shape of the identical carriage used by the Duke of Wellington at
the Battle of Waterloo. Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent
years to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken to pieces in an
accident. Restored now to its original condition, it will need to be a
great occasion indeed that brings it forth again.
[Illustration: BOREHAM.]
Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its old gabled cottages
clustering round the still older church, itself embowered in lime
trees whose delightful scent weights the July air with an Arcadian
languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham has every likelihood
of having his nerves startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the
road of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door open,
and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of one of the inmates
of the silent tomb making a hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High
noon being an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying as
to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on drawing nearer that
the old tomb-house has been converted into a tool-house and general
lumber-room, and that the figure seated within is the sexton enjoying
his lunch, screened from the noonday heats. An inscription over the
door of the ornate building--a copy of the Temple of the Winds at
Athens--proclaims it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamianæ, Anno 1764";
but the Walthams have disappeared, both from their mausoleum and the
district. The body of the last appears to have been arrested for debt
when on the road hither from Chelmsford. The sexton explains that the
parish took over the Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing
the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience hee-ar, years ago,"
says this typical Essex rustic, and goes on to tell how the oil and
coals and candles for church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe
Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held. Three Radcliffes, Earls
of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather, father, and son, lie in effigy side
by side on an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers are to
my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton calls them, and explains that
their broken noses are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.
Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called the "mine" road,
Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the great red-brick Georgian mansion
of Crix, standing in its meadows where the little River Ter comes
down from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels of Hatfield
Mill, and then hurries off, as though belated, for a rendezvous with
the Chelmer, two miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road with
whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing warranty of its age in the
inscription, "A.A. 1715"; but if that evidence were lacking it could
be found in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into an area
with the raising of the road for the building of the bridge that long
ago replaced the watersplash at this crossing of the stream.
Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the heaths that once gave
the place its original forename of "Heathfield," and the Peverels,
identical with the Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly
vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige of themselves
in the church--that last resort of the antiquary in search of old
manorial lords. It is true that on modern tablets built into the west
front of the church the founding of a Benedictine Priory here in 1100
by Ingelrica, mother of William Peverel, is alluded to, together with
the rather scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things are
decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of Latin and lichen-stains,
so that both their monastic beneficence and their maternal origin are
only dimly to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.
It is the distance of half a mile from the high road to where Hatfield
church lies secluded, adjoining the grounds of a mansion partly
occupying the site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It is
here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's original baptism
must be sought, and accordingly some stretches of common-land may be
discovered close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us, though
there be little enough to say of it, beyond the note that its closeness
to the railway station has caused a certain growth and a certain
amount of rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the old
plaster cottages that were once the invariable feature of its street,
and admirably figured forth the Essex manner of decoratively treating
plaster-work. There remain here but two such cottages, bearing the date
1703, and the initials M.R., with _fleur-de-lis_.
XX
A ROAD of almost unvarying flatness conducts in something under three
miles to Witham, entered nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by
the Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates in no fewer than
three separate and distinct names. As the River Witham, it confers a
name upon the townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same sponsorial
office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook it is endowed with a title
that smacks rather of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in
summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down upon the mere thread
of water oozing and stewing in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the
neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is not ill-named as the
Podsbrook; but the Essex Council in bridging it so substantially think
of it rather as the River Witham, which they have every right and cause
to do, for the stream can avenge itself of those disfiguring potsherds
and that contemptuous title in the most sardonic way when winter comes
and the floods are out.
The long street of Witham is remarkable for the number of large and
handsome mansions dating from the time of Queen Anne, through the
period of the four Georges. The greater number of the professional
men of Essex would, from the number of those houses, appear to have
settled in the little town and to have medically attended it and
legally represented it to such an effect that it is only now beginning
to recover from them and from the coming of the railway, which dealt a
death-blow to the thriving coaching interest of the early part of the
nineteenth century.
For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place of Mrs Nelson's
famous "Ipswich Blues," the crack coaches on the seventy miles of road,
which started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary exertions
made Ipswich in something under six hours. Such remarkable performances
as these were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in place
of the average ten miles on other roads, and by placing leaders in
readiness at the foot of hills like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The
"Blue Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some of the principal
coaches drew up, is still in existence; its sign, a pierced effigy of
that animal projecting from the front of the house and looming weirdly
against the sky-line. There are many "White Harts" on the road to
Norwich, the sign being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as that
of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North Road; but of all the many
examples to be met along these hundred and twelve miles this is the one
that is most quaintly out of proportion, with a head and neck less
than half the size demanded by body and legs, and a golden collar and
chain of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was the favourite
badge of Richard the Second, whose connection with East Anglia was
too slight for assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially
allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference on the part
of innkeepers along the Norwich Road.
[Illustration: CHIPPING HILL.]
Those who would seek the site of the original Witham must turn aside
from the high road the matter of half a mile, past the railway station,
to Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a camp successively
occupied and wrought upon by the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons,
it will be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant valley of that
triply-named river already mentioned, in 1749 described by Walpole as
"the prettiest little winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows
falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to this day, and as
sweet, and the by-road that comes up from the gravelly hollow and cuts
through the earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold climbs up
romantically under the blossoming limes into as pretty a picture in
the rural sort as you shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old
England before railways came, or science and the ten thousand plagues
of modern life, and the cheap builder of hideous new cottages were
let loose upon the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in the
picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old dwellings, flint-built
church tower and red-brick rectory, set in, upon and around the
swelling grassy banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had both their
fortress and their market, as evidenced by the still surviving name of
Chipping, or Market Hill.
Old East Anglian cottages have their own special characteristics,
arising from local conditions, but one feature they share in common
with all old rustic dwellings; the great size and relative importance
of their genial chimneys, suggesting warmth and the lavish laying on of
logs. They tell the passer-by of old times when wood was the only fuel;
when it was to be gathered for the mere labour of gathering, and plenty
of it was piled upon the generous open hearth. Modern cottages, all
over the kingdom, tell a different tale, in the look of their meagre
chimney-pots--a tale of coal, dearly purchased, economised in tiny
grates.
But the special features of East Anglian cottage architecture? They are
here, in the highways and byways, for all to see who will. It is a land
without stone, this East of England, where timber and flint and brick
play important constructional parts in church and hall and manor-house,
and where timber framing, lath and plaster, parge-work, and a few
bricks for the chimney stacks, are combined to build up the cottages.
Out of their necessities our ancestors contrived dwellings that for
durability, comfort and artistry put modern houses, whether halls or
cottages, to shame. The stone cottages of Somersetshire, Rutland,
Leicestershire; the cob and thatch of Devon, the granite of Cornwall;
the timber and plaster, or timber and brick noggin of Cheshire and
Herefordshire are all evidence to this day of how skilfully our
forbears employed the materials to their hands; and here in Essex
you shall find a something in the art of cottage building hardly to
be discovered elsewhere. This is the frequent use of parge-work, or
pargetting, as it is sometimes called, on old cottage exteriors.
Parge-work is the ornamental filling or surfacing of walls with
plaster. The term is just as often applied to the elaborately-moulded
and panelled plaster ceilings of Elizabethan and Jacobean halls as
to the exterior decoration that forms so remarkable and pleasing a
feature of Essex rustic cottage architecture. Few Essex villages that
can claim to preserve many relics of old times are without examples of
this peculiarly local style; although, to be sure, an ignorant want of
appreciation has been the cause of much destruction of late years. The
commoner forms of this decoration are frequently seen, in the easily
incised patterns that even the unskilful can make in the plaster while
still wet, by the aid of anything from a trowel to the finger-tips;
just as a cook ornaments the dough of her uncooked pies. Many of
these patterns are traditional; as much a matter of tradition, for
instance, as are the needlework patterns wrought on the breast of an
old smock-frock. The commonest is one produced by a process of combing
the plaster in repetitions of a device resembling an elongated figure 8
laid flat, or perhaps more narrowly resembling a hank of worsted. Other
patterns, of whorls or concentric circles, stars, triangles and the
like, are produced by wooden stamps. But the really beautiful examples
are not the products of to-day. These belong to the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, and are lavish in decoration of a Renaissance
character moulded in high relief. Architects with sufficient culture
and understanding to enable them to appreciate local style have, in
recent years, reintroduced decoration of this character when building
residences in the country, but many a humble cottager lives within
walls that display a profusion of artistic devices unapproached by the
houses of the wealthy.
Discoveries close by the church on Chipping Hill have led to the belief
that the building stands on, or near, the site of a Temple of Diana,
and certainly Roman bricks are still visible in great numbers in the
walls of the tower. A memorial in the chancel to Sir Gilbert East,
who died in 1828, reminds the historian of some strange survivals
existing at that time. The Easts were owners of the tithes at Witham,
and although they lived so far distant as Berkshire, always insisted
on their right of being buried here. Sir Gilbert East's body was, by
his express direction, buried beside his wife, with a band of brass
encircling both, engraved with the words from the marriage service,
"Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder." His funeral
was a three days' business, with knights bannerets accompanying, and
much pomp and circumstance. In the family vault they laid him, wrapped
in linen, returned to Berkshire for the reading of the will, when, to
the dismay of the family, it was found that the knight had expressly
wished to be buried in woollen. The family solicitor hurried back and,
disinterring his defunct client, saw to it that he was comfortably
tucked in as desired.
Between Witham and Kelvedon, where the road runs level, there is but
one hamlet, an offshoot of Rivenhall known as Rivenhall End, where a
cottage close by the "Fox" inn, once a toll-house, bears its former
history, plain to read, in the evidence of its windows commanding
either approach, up or down the road. A mile and a half beyond begins
Kelvedon, set down in the flats beside the River Blackwater; "Kelvedon
Easterford, vulgo Keldon," as Ogilby calls it; "consisting," he
continues, "chiefly of inns"; a description which remains strikingly
true to this day. This pronunciation, "Keldon," throws some light upon
the following remarks of an old traveller who kept a diary of his
wayfaring, and, writing in 1744, says, "From Colchester in an hour or
two, I came to an old Village call'd Kildane, where they tell you the
famous Massacre of the Danes began; but the true Name of the Town is
Kelvedon."
How Kelvedon can ever have escaped being called "Long" Kelvedon is
a mystery, for it straggles on and on and must be nearly a mile in
length; a street of handsome old residences, of cottages and humble
shops of all ages, and old broken-backed taverns where the Essex
labourer gathers night by night and discusses the prospect of the
carraway crop and the likelihood of the entire agricultural interest
presently, going _en masse_ to the "work'us." After which, with
the courage of despair, and to drown his troubles, he will call for
"another pot o' thrup'ny, missus," and, when closing time comes,
slouch home through the mud and mist until the following evening, when
the same programme is repeated. It is the agricultural labourer who
supports the little wayside "publics" whose existence in such numbers
puzzles the mid-day stranger, who, seeing them empty and apparently
lifeless, wonders how they can possibly live. Business practically only
begins when work in the fields is done, and the rent is not so high but
that a few pots of beer a night represent a sufficient profit.
It must not be supposed that Kelvedon has not its exquisite
architectural relics of a bygone time, or that its inns are all of the
rural beer-house type. Not at all. Chief among the inns of Kelvedon
is the "Angel," which indeed is a house not only of considerable size
and outstanding character, but of historic interest, as having been
the favourite resting-place of William the Third on his journeys along
this road. Its projecting porch is the first thing the traveller sees
on entering the town from the direction of London, where the road
swerves violently to the left, and again as violently to the right,
forming a very awkward corner. "Angel Corner," said Alexander, of the
"Retaliator" coach, "is the very devil of a corner." This remark was
drawn from him on the occasion of his nearly driving into the porch,
when trying conclusions with a rival charioteer.
Almost opposite the still-existing "Angel" stood the equally extensive
"Red Lion," long since retired from business and remodelled as a row
of cottages. The histories of both houses, and of many another fine
old inn, which might once have been written from the recollections of
those who knew the old days of the road, are now in great part lost,
and the world so much the poorer. Had scribblers then abounded, and the
"personal" note of the modern journalist been sounded in those days,
we should have known how King William came to and set out from his
inn; how he looked, what he ate and drank, how many long clay pipes
he smoked, and what comparisons he drew in conversation with Bentinck
between the flat lands on the way from Kelvedon to Harwich and the
still flatter lands of his native Holland. And besides such records of
the great, we should then have been better furnished with the early
history of coaching, which, if not indeed a sealed book, is at least a
very short and fragmentary one.
[Illustration: THE "ANGEL," KELVEDON.]
XXI
EARLY coaching days are wrapped round with strange adventures and the
oddest tales; some, doubtless, of the _ben trovato_, rather than the
most truthful, nature. But those stories of coaching miseries and
adventure that have been proved truthful are themselves so surprising
and incredible to modern ears that even the most improbable of
uncertified tales cannot be dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of
the Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should, for instance,
surely be picturesquely written up some day and included in some
English (and therefore strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One
Nights' Entertainments.
The coach was nearing the outskirts of London. The rheumy air hung in
dank and foggy vapours on the countryside and transformed innocent
roadside trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing shapes. The guard
let off his blunderbuss at a pollard willow that loomed suspiciously
like a highwayman out of the reeking air, and the passengers all began
to automatically turn their pockets out. It proved a false alarm, and
purses and trinkets were returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One
gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he carried, whereupon
a lady advised him to hide the money in his boot. He had hardly done
this when a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman to stop.
When the unhappy insides had picked themselves up from the straw at the
bottom of the coach, into which they had unceremoniously been thrown
by the driver's prompt obedience to that behest, they found themselves
covered with a pistol projected through the door, and were invited to
deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who had little gave it and
were thankful it was no more. The lady protested that she had nothing;
"but," said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you will find
ten guineas." There was nothing for it but to take off that boot and
hand over the coin; but when the highwayman had gone it was another
matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in no measured terms,
of being the robber's accomplice. Bound to admit that appearances
were against her, she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited
the company to supper the following evening, when matters should be
explained. They accepted, not, it is to be feared, very graciously.
The time came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room, with a
supper laid, they were re-introduced to their acquaintance of the night
before. When the repast was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she
said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in this book, which I
had with me in the coach, are bank-notes to the amount of one thousand
pounds. I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than for me to
be robbed of this valuable property. As you have been the means of my
saving it, I entreat your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred
pounds."