evanescent kind, and has not survived, but a few examples, preserved
in contemporary literature, keep their flavour. Among them is the
narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter." "I recollect," said
the Jehu who told the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger,
and nothing that was either said or done was at all to his mind. On
that day I happened to have a very awkward team--three blind ones and
a very shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times I lost my
patience as well as temper. My near leader pulled to such a degree that
I was obliged to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the top of
the bit, and curb her enough to break her jaw. After starting again, I
could deal with her very well for about a mile, when her mouth got dead
again, and I was wicked enough to let drive a few hearty damns at her,
my pious companion all the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be
damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon which he bolted
as if he had been galvanised.
"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'
"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I, 'but I won't have it;' so
I answered, 'What coach does he drive?'
"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up his hands, 'I fear you
don't read your Bible; but I will tell you--he was the most patient man
that ever existed.'
"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three blind 'uns and a bolter?'
"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a coachman.'
"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever he had had four such
horses to deal with as I have here, he would have had no more patience
than myself.'"
[Illustration: "THREE BLIND UNS AND A BOLTER." _From a Print after H.
Alken._]
Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen played a drunken trick
that would have been impossible in the last years of coaching, when
discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric than they had been. He
had just driven the London stage from Ipswich, and having more by good
luck than careful driving brought his passengers safely to dinner at
the "Angel," turned into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink
of coachmen--rum. Emerging, he perceived one of the Harwich to London
fish-waggons, fully laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to
the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the waggon round and dashed
off at top speed on the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden
Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and two tons weight of fish
strewed the king's highway. The mad coachman survived to repent his
escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder of his life.
"Other times, other manners" is a saying that assumes an added
force when contrasting the Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our
fellow-travellers by railway, who glare at us, and we at them, like
strange cats on a roof-top, have little idea of the chivalry that ruled
on the road a hundred years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who
may be the only other occupant of a railway carriage with you, and
she wonders whether she had not better call the guard; but it was,
in the days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden duty of
the gentlemen to see that the ladies in whose company the chances of
the road might place them lacked nothing that courtesy could supply;
whether it were merely the aid of an arm in walking up one of those
hills the coaches could only climb unladen, or the more material
attention involved in seeing that the dear creatures were duly supplied
with refreshments. It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom
of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for the breakfasts and
dinners of the unprotected ladies who might be travelling by the same
conveyance. "I vow," says one of these old travellers, "'tis a pleasure
in a cavalier to do so; but, the Lord save us, what a prodigious
appetite does not the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the fair,
whose lassitude and vapours at other times render them incapable of
more than drinking a dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing
which it is only fitting that the heathenish and phanatick peoples of
the Indies should partake of. I protest that the ladies of the coach,
when we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding they could not be
suited with tay, went to it with a right good will and left as good an
account of the claret and the beef as if they had been going empty for
a week. Spare me, I do beg, from your languishing creatures who would
die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, but compare with the most
valiant of trenchermen abroad."
This protesting gentleman might, had he thought of it, have exclaimed
with Othello on the pity "that we can call these delicate creatures
ours and not their appetites."
He must have been particularly hard hit in the pocket by the robust
appetites of his fellow-travellers, but did not, however, let his
feelings appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as a toast, "the
ladies, bless them, whose bright eyes," etc., etc.--a toast we have
many times heard of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon having
"made an impression." He, in fact, seems to have been like Constable,
in a way; for it was said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in a
stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner." "Then,"
said one, hearing that praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"
That is very significant. It was, then, only your very paragon among
gentlemen who could sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner.
His manners might survive the strain of the journey itself, and even
the sight and sound of lovely Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring,
unlovely to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating gurgles; but
when after the tedious stage had been accomplished and the passengers
had descended, irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner scarce to
be eaten, even at express speed, in the short time allowed, then, ay
_then_, my friends, came the test! No man so insensible to politeness
as a starving man, and few attentions were paid to the ladies by
strangers whose sole chance of obtaining the dinner for which they had
paid was the resolute determination to attend only to their own wants.
The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly outweighed the
pleasures of that old-world method. A pleasant day and the open country
made a seat on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not willingly
to be exchanged for any other mode of conveyance then known; but, as
little David Copperfield found on his first coach journey, _night_ on
a coach was an experience once gained not willingly repeated. Being
put between two gentlemen, to prevent his falling off, David found
himself nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he could
not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!" which they didn't like at
all, because it woke them. With the rising of the sun David found his
fellow-passengers sleeping easier than they had done during the night,
when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed their midnight slumbers. As
the sun rose higher, so their sleep became lighter and they gradually
awoke, one by one, each one indignant when charged with having slept.
During the rest of his career, David invariably observed "that of all
human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least
disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having
gone to sleep in a coach."
XXII
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF SPURGEON.]
COACHING times and coaching inns have long kept us at the very
threshold of Kelvedon, which has a modern claim to notice of which it
is not a little proud. Spurgeon was born here. Although the figure of
that great wielder of homely and untutored pulpit oratory is but one
among several preachers in the same family, there is only one possible
Spurgeon when that name is mentioned. Charles Haddon Spurgeon was born
in a house still pointed out, on June 19, 1834; the eldest son of the
Rev. John Spurgeon. The old cottage is now the "Wheatsheaf" beer-house
and has had a bay window and a brick frontage added since that time.
Close by is a now highly respectable and not a little dignified private
residence known still as the "Tommy shop," although almost seventy
years have passed since it was used as a kind of restaurant and canteen
for the navvies then working on the construction of the Great Eastern
Railway, which runs at the rear.
The oldest house in Kelvedon is doubtless the "Sun," which dates from
the middle of the fifteenth century and has within recent years had its
carved woodwork, long covered with plaster, once more exposed to view.
It stands, almost the last house in the town, by the bridge over the
Blackwater, on the way to Gore Pit.
Gore Pit is generally said to be the site of a battle. _What_ battle,
however, historians do not and cannot specify; and indeed this name,
bloody though it may sound to modern ears, has, despite the popular
legend of the derivation of Kelvedon from "Kildane," perhaps no such
sanguinary association, and is probably a contraction of the old word
"coneygore," or rabbit warren.
It is, despite its name, a pretty and a peaceful hamlet, with a
blacksmith's shop and a roadside horse-pond, and surrounded by the
fruit-farms of a great jam-making company. The church of Feering can be
seen across the flat fields, on the other side of the railway. Messing
lies a mile away, in the other direction.
Let the idle wayfarer, curious as to the name of Gore Pit, speak to the
blacksmith on the subject, and he will be told, with the seriousness
of implicit belief, of the fighting of a great battle here, and that
the blood ran down into "that there horse-pond." Moreover, that at
Kelvedon--"Killdane they used to call it--they killed the Danes; at
Feering they feared 'em, and at Messing they made a mess of it"; which
seems to very correctly reflect the views of the neighbourhood on local
history in ancient times, as reflected in place-names!
Rural Essex, in the aspect of its fields and meadows, is revealed along
these miles in its most characteristic form. It is, in many respects,
unlike other counties. In some ways the unhappy industry of farming has
fared worse here than elsewhere, and many holdings have for years past
gone uncultivated, and the dock, the thistle and other lusty weeds have
resumed an evil possession of fields once kept clean and trim. But in
the smaller operations of husbandry Essex has always been, and in some
districts still is, remarkably successful; while, although the farmer
protests that it does not pay to grow any kind of grain, the yellowing
seas of autumnal cornfields are still a prominent feature of the
landscapes of Essex and of its neighbouring Suffolk. Essex and Suffolk
are old-world, far beyond the rest of England, and in growing wheat
in these times, when a cornfield is a rare sight in other parts of
the country and when "our daily bread" is chiefly compounded of grain
grown in North America, Russia, or the Argentine, they maintain their
singularity. It does the heart good to see the ripening wheatfields of
East Anglia, to see the gathered stooks in the reaped perspectives,
and to hear the hum of the threshing machine; for the sights and sound
seem to carry us back to that England of a bygone age, when Constable
painted such fields, and when they were numerous enough throughout the
land to feed the population. Here and there one may still find fields
of that famous grain, the "Essex Great Wheat," which grows at least
two feet higher than the ordinary varieties, and is greatly prized for
the length and stoutness of its straw; but it is a few miles to the
north-eastward, in the light lands around Harwich, that the Great Wheat
may be found. Seed and herb-growing are the most prominent industries
between the Blackwater and the Colne, and the roadside fields are
striped to wonderment in summer with the rainbow colours of the
seedsman's trial-grounds. The heavy perfume of stocks and mignonette,
the claret colour of that gorgeous flower, the "sops-in-wine," the
gay and varied displays of asters, marguerites, marigolds and a
hundred others make a midsummer fairyland of the levels that loom
so drear and misty in the long months of winter. Nor is it only for
the flower-garden that the Essex seedsman labours. With the sights
and scents of the flaunting beauties of the garden are mingled the
homelier ones of mint, grey-green sage and other dowdy kitchen herbs,
together with the subtle beauty and piercing odour of wide-spreading,
blue-grey lavender-fields. Even the unromantic mangold, running to seed
in bush-like shape, sends forth a sweet and pleasing aroma, while the
yellow mustard contributes its share.
The byways of farming are now, as we have already said, the most--some
would say the only--profitable kind of husbandry in Essex. Some forms
of cultivation have largely migrated to other counties, but others
remain. The growing of the clothiers' teasel was discontinued with
the decay of the Colchester and Norwich baize industry, and is now
carried on in other parts of the country, close to districts where
textile fabrics are still manufactured; but there was a time when,
along this road between Chelmsford and Colchester, the fields of
teasels were quite as much a feature as those of mustard are even
yet. The clothiers' teasel, greatly prized in the East Anglian baize
manufacture, was nothing but a weed, found useful and cultivated
accordingly. An aristocratic relation of the less spiky burrs that have
not been rescued from the hedges and ditches and are still allowed to
grow wild, the clothiers' teasel was cultivated so far back as the
reign of Richard the First, but the "common" burr will have to be
contented with its lowly estate to the end of time, unless something
unexpected happens.
To "stick like a burr" is proverbial, and the cultivated teasels have
an even more pronounced clinging property. Furnished as they are with
natural hooks, they were used in baize-making, and are still employed
in the cloth trade for raising the nap of the material. The dried heads
are fixed to cylinders, between which the fabric is passed, and their
sharp spines, re-curved like so many minute fish-hooks, draw up the
surface of the cloth. Thus the teasel was raised from its character
of a worthless weed, and for many years Essex farmers devoted large
portions of their holdings to its cultivation. It was hoed and kept
clear of other vagrom weedlings; its heads were cut by hand and
dried with every care, and eventually were eagerly competed for by
manufacturers at £12 a load. When the old cloth manufacturers left East
Anglia, a goodly portion of the Essex farmers' livelihood went with
them.
Around Colchester, too, is cultivated that other weed, the colewort,
for cole or rape-seed, which has the quadruple properties of feeding
cage-birds, yielding rape-oil, making cake for cattle, and of manuring
the fields. Coriander and carraway seeds, too, help to prop the
husbandman's fortunes. Corianders and carraways are what "the faculty"
knows as "carminatives," curative of flatulency; like the once popular
"eringo root," a candied preparation of the root of the sea holly
that grows by the estuaries of Essex rivers. Eringo root was once a
favourite specific for lung troubles, but its popularity waned at last,
and the preparation of it gradually died out and became extinct about
1865, when the only manufacturer was an elderly spinster who supplied
a chemist in High Street, Colchester. Corianders are still used in the
making of kümmel and other liqueurs, and carraway seeds, which look
like commas, are those familiar denizens of "seed cake" that stick in
the teeth and refuse to be dislodged, and are the central feature of
"carraway comfits."
Farmers who do not occupy themselves with seed-growing have passed
through evil times, but prosperity beams cheerfully from the seedsman's
well-tilled land, and fruit-farming has come to render cultivation
profitable. Still, to the shiftless farmer, who cannot adapt himself to
new conditions, agricultural depression in Essex is a very real thing.
Here, shambling along the road, comes such a one, a small cultivator, a
son of the soil. He does not hurry. Who, indeed, would hurry in rural
Essex, in these times, when the Bankruptcy Court and the Workhouse
are said to close every vista? Besides, he has been hard at work in
the fields, and much of that kind of labour takes all the lamb-like
friskiness out of the limbs.
A conversation, leaning over a field-gate very badly in need of repair,
elicits the fact that he has just come away, worsted, from another
bout in the eternal conflict between Man and Nature. No conflict with
wild beasts, but a struggle, really just as fierce, for life or a
livelihood, with weeds--the sorry heritage of the present occupier
from the slovenly or bankrupt farmer before him. A bookmaker, gazing
upon the weedy scene, would back Nature pretty heavily against the
cultivator.
"Farmin'?" says our rustic friend; "no great shakes, I tell 'ee. It
don't pay to grow nawthen now, an' it gets wusser'n wusser. All the
fields goin' under grass, for ship'n cattle. An' the land's fair
pisoned with weeds. Yow see them 'ere beece, in that there close down
along o' the chutch? There's a mort o' docks in that 'ere close. More
docks'n grass, an' I thinks warsley o' the chanst of cattle gettin'
a fair bite off'n it. Don't know what docks is? Wish I didden! I've
bin a-pullin' of 'em till my back's pretty nigh broke, and I'm fair
dunted with 'em. Last year there worn't ne'er a one: t'yen there's
a mort on 'em. Where do they come from? God A'mighty knows. _They_
don't want no cultivation, bless 'ee. There ain't no land so chice but
what'll grow docks." Here he pulls out his "muckinger," that is to say,
his handkerchief--the Essex dialect is not the most elegant form of
speech--and, trumpeting on it like an elephant, with indignation, goes
his way.
The "chutch" in question is that of Feering, on the other side of
the Great Eastern Railway, along whose embankment go the frequent
Prussian-blue-painted locomotives with long trains at their tail, past
Mark's Tey Junction, whose forest of signal-masts is visible ahead,
into Colchester. With the raising of that embankment went the life of
this highway, only now experiencing a revival.
XXIII
THE cyclists, the pedestrians, the motor-men, who adventure along the
road rejoice at its smooth surface, and find little incident to mark
their journey. A punctured tyre, a defective valve alone hinder those
mechanical travellers; while the pedestrian finds a limit set to his
progress only by his walking powers. Even so, he may obtain to Norwich
long before the others, for the railway hugs the road closely for
three parts of the distance, and stations are frequent.
In any case, the curtain has long since been rung down upon the Romance
of the Road. If this were the place to do it, that romance might be
recounted at great length; sometimes rising to tragical height, again
sinking to comedy or farce. But we must take our romance as it comes,
and, reading as we run, be content to act a vicarious part in the long
story. And we may well be so content, for to have essayed the journey
in days of old often meant a "speaking with strangers in the gates"
that entailed fighting on unequal terms, with the possibility of a
roadside grave and the tolerable certainty of being robbed of anything
and everything worth the taking.
Nowadays, the trim suburbs of the towns stretch out on either side
along the old highway and join hands with the villages; so that when
travellers of the speedier sort spurn the dust from their flying
wheels, they think the country is becoming one vast town, and are
depressed and regretful accordingly. But when the road was the sole
means of travelling and the towns were still girdled by their walls and
entered only by fortified gates, the wayfarer welcomed the sight of a
house in the lonely country between town and village. Even to the rich
these perils came home, and in the more lawless times they were beset
with troubles of their own.
Royal progresses were not infrequent along the Norwich Road, and they
have elsewhere been duly chronicled, but they are things apart and
give no glimpse of old wayfaring life. If we are at all in the way of
conjuring up that old-time traffic, we must certainly not forget the
odd processions that trailed their slow length after my lord and my
lady, changing residence from one castle or manor-house to another.
My Lord Duke of Norfolk in Elizabeth's time had an exquisite palace,
of which Macaulay has told us, in Norwich, and the Earls of Oxford
no doubt kept great state in their castle at Hedingham, but, for all
their magnificence, they were obliged to take many of their household
goods with them when flitting from place to place; for the very
excellent reason that they did not, certainly up to less than three
hundred years ago, possess more than one fully-equipped establishment.
When the nobility of old left one of their manor-houses for another
they commonly took their bedding and a good deal of their furniture
with them. In even more remote days they removed the glass from their
windows as well, and stored it carefully away until their return.
_That_, of course, was a custom of very long ago, when even the most
luxurious were content with--or, at any-rate, had to endure--things
which nowadays would drive the inmates of a casual ward to rebellion;
but, even when the Stuarts reigned, the great ones of the land moved
from home to home with long baggage-trains and with their entire staff
of domestics. No board-wages, then! The whole establishment took the
road, down to the scullery-maids and the hangers-on of the kitchen who
took charge of the domestic pots and pans. My lord's pages and the
dignitaries of his household formed the advance-guard; the lowest in
the scale, who travelled with the culinary utensils and even took the
coals with them, were, appropriately enough, the "black guard." The
black guard were probably a very rough lot indeed, at odds with soap
and water, and on every count deserving of their name, which has in
the course of centuries obtained a different application, as a term of
reproach to individuals of moral rather than physical uncleanliness.
Turning from general conditions of travelling to particular travellers,
there comes tripping along the road an antic fellow, one Will Kemp, who
danced from London to Norwich in the year 1600; a frolic he undertook
for a wager, afterwards writing and publishing a book about it, which
he called _Kemp's Nine Days' Wonder_. Will Kemp was accompanied by
a drummer whose play upon parchment helped to sustain his flagging
energies as he skipped it to Widford and thence by a route of his own
through Braintree to Norwich.
Sprightly, irresponsible Kemp, cracking weak jokes and playing the
fool, is succeeded in the memories of the road, after an interval of
some eighty years, by a very grave and responsible figure indeed;
no less an one than that of King William the Third, on his frequent
journeys between his dear Holland and his little-loved Kingdom of
England. Burdened with the care of an alien realm, that saturnine
little figure with the hooked nose was a familiar sight at Kelvedon,
where, travelling to and from Harwich, he was wont to stay at the
"Angel" inn, which still confronts the wayfarer on entering the village
from London. When the "little gentleman in black" had done his work
and King William of blessed Protestant memory was no more, the Norwich
Road, so far as Colchester, was still graced with Royal travellers,
for, with the coming of the Hanoverians, Harwich became more than ever
a favourite port of entry and departure, and the choleric early Georges
knew this Essex landscape well. This way, too, came the Schwellenburgs,
the Keilmanseggs and the other vulgar and grotesque figures of that
grotesque and vulgar Court.