weak at the knees with apprehension of Russia’s advance in Asia was,
“Consult large maps.” We need not stop to consider how far that
overrated statesman, in consulting maps _too_ large, was the victim of
his own cynical advice; but we may apply it, frankly and without any
cynical meaning, here. Thus, referring to a large map of London and its
environs, you will soon perceive this restricted choice of roads between
London and Essex. The Lea and the broad marshes of West Ham, Stratford,
Hackney, Leyton, Walthamstow, and Tottenham have always offered great
obstacles to road-makers, and have stemmed the tide of London’s
expansion in this direction until quite recent years. Large maps of the
London districts, scored with a dark tint of streets, still show a long
strip of white, indicating ground still unbuilt upon, along the Lea
valley from Blackwall to Edmonton, where it merges into the country, and
in all those ten miles there are but three high roads leading from
Middlesex into Essex. One is that which conducts from Poplar to
Plaistow, and so on to Barking and Southend; another is the Norwich
Road, from Bow to Stratford and on to Norwich by way of Chelmsford and
Colchester; the third is our present route, through Clapton to the
crossing of the Lea at Lea Bridge Road. Other crossings are few, without
exception obscure and bad, and generally lead over roadways composed of
clinkers, scrap-iron, broken bottles, and tin-clippings to morasses, or
to the gates of soap factories, bone manure works, sewage-beds, and
other useful but objectionable institutions of like nature. The Lea
Bridge Road itself, although broad and straight and leading on to the
country, has perhaps the worst surface of any road in or near London,
not excepting even that monumentally bad roadway, the Victoria
Embankment. Before 1757, when the predecessor of the present Lea Bridge
was built and a roadway made, to open up communication between
Middlesex, Epping Forest, and the Essex villages, the Lea was spanned
only by an ancient and narrow bridge, and the roads leading up to it
were impossible for wheeled traffic. At that period the best way to
reach the Forest was by Stratford, West Ham, and Leytonstone, and a road
through Hackney and Clapton is shown in maps so late as 1756 leading to
the “World’s End,” which was apparently the significant name of the
track that then wandered across the marshes to the Lea.
The present line of the Lea Bridge Road owes its existence to the Lea
Bridge Turnpike Road Act of 1756, and is found duly set out on Rocque’s
map of 1763, where it is continued on to Walthamstow as “Butterfield’s
Lane”; but the first bridge was not built until 1772. By that time the
coaches had begun to run—or, as the advertisement of the time phrased
it, to “set forth”—but they, and the traffic to Newmarket generally,
went the Stratford and West Ham route until the early ’20’s
VI
THE Lea Bridge Road, although a broad and direct thoroughfare, makes a
bad beginning, and branches off narrowly and in an obscure manner from
the wide Lower Clapton Road. The present bridge was built in 1821. The
road itself is a singular combination of picturesqueness and sordid
vulgarity. Badly founded on the marshes that stretch, water-logged, on
either side of the river Lea, its two miles’ length of roadway is full
of ridges and depressions that no mere surface repairs will ever remedy,
and nothing less than reconstruction from its foundations will ever cure
the unequal subsidences of what should be the finest highway out of
London into Essex.
The Lea Bridge Road is in some ways an exceptional thoroughfare.
Although of urban character, it is largely a road without houses; for
the marshy fields through which it runs, elevated in the manner of a
causeway, have kept the builder at a wholesome distance, and from the
Lea Bridge and other points one looks over wide level tracts of green
meadows to where Upper Clapton, and Stamford Hill beyond, not
unpicturesquely crown the heights with villa roofs and church spires,
and seem with a superior air of riches and high-class villadom to look
down across the valley of the Lea on to the thronged wage-earning
populations of clerkly and artizan Walthamstow. You think, as you gaze
from this midway vantage-ground and consider these things, of the “great
gulf” set between Lazarus and Dives—with the essential difference that
here, at any rate, Dives had the advantage.
A halt on the Lea Bridge Road is certainly stimulating to the
imagination. On any summer midday that does not happen to be a Saturday,
a Sunday, or a Bank Holiday, the contemplative man has it all to
himself. Lazarus, from Walthamstow, in his many thousands of clerks and
workmen, has departed, long ago, for the counting-houses and workshops
of the city; and Dives from Clapton has, in more leisurely fashion,
followed them to his office, or meeting of directors. The dirty,
out-of-date tramcars that ply along the road, and seem never to be
washed, are no longer crowded, and the traffic consists chiefly of
costermongers’ carts and harrows, on their way to their daily
house-to-house calls in the countless streets of that sprawling
Walthamstow and that loose-limbed Leyton. The marshes, the distant
frontier of banked-up houses, and even the long railway viaducts that
stretch like monstrous centipedes across the levels, look interesting,
and the water-loving willows and graceful clumps of the bushy poplar are
not wanting to add something of beauty to the scene. There is, too, if
you do but choose to look for it, a kind of skulking romance to be found
on the Essex side of the Lea, where the rustic cottages come down to the
fringe of the marsh; their faces away from, their back gardens towards
it. Quite humble cottages, roofed with the old red pantiles, and
sometimes weatherboarded; the crazy wooden palings of their gardens
patched and mended with the oddest timber salvage, from the unnecessary
sturdiness of an odd post from a four-poster bedstead, to the
blue-painted staves of petroleum barrels and wrecked wheels of bygone
conveyances. The posts of clothes-lines are permanent features of these
gardens, and on good “drying days” the most intimate articles of
underwear flaunt a defiant challenge across the valley to the prim
susceptibilities of Upper Clapton and Stamford Hill—which put their
washing out. It is not, however, in the under-linen and the stockings,
very darny and limp, and lacking the interest of a shapely leg, that the
skulking romance, already alluded to, lies. No, not at all: in fact,
otherwise. You may perceive it in the varying lengths of those back
gardens, which in their yard or so of more or less infallibly register
the degree of courage or impudence possessed by the original squatters
and their immediate descendants upon this land. For the sites of these
cottages and their little pleasaunces were all originally stolen,
cabbaged, pinched, nicked—what you will—from the common land of the
marshes; and where you see a yard or two of extra length, there may be
observed, set down in concrete form, the measure of that courage
possessed by those squatters in times gone by. Such illegitimate intakes
are no longer possible, for publicity alone, even were it not for the
evidence of the Ordnance maps, would forbid, and the romance of them is
a fossil survival, rather than a living thing.
The engine-houses, pumping water and filter-beds of the East London
Water Company are the principal features of the Lea Bridge Road, and one
would not deny them under certain conditions, and at a certain distance,
a grandly impressive quality. At a distance, assuredly, for viewed close
at hand, with the giant machinery seen through the windows, slowly
pulsing up and down to the accompaniment of a warm scent of oil, and
with the lofty chimneys that in their specious ornamentation look afar
off _almost_ like Venetian _campanili_, seen really to be sooty
smokestacks, it is astonishing how commonplace they become. And when you
think of it, considering the matter on the basis of a wide acquaintance
with waterworks, how singularly dry, husky, coaly, and gritty, and void
of any suggestion of water these gigantic engine-houses of the great
water companies always are!
The Lea Bridge Road, and indeed Woodford also, and Epping Forest
generally, are to be avoided by quiet folks on Saturdays, Sundays, and
at times of public holiday, when the costermonger and his purple-faced
“missus” drive their cowhocked ponies and attendant traps recklessly to
the “Wake Arms,” to the “Robin Hood,” or to the pubs of Chingford, and
all the waggonettes and all the beanfeasters in the East End of London
are making merry in elephantine fashion.
The road finally leaves Walthamstow and the valley of the Lea at Knott’s
Green and Whip’s Cross—at the present time an abject, down-at-heel
compromise between a striving unsuccessful suburb and the open country.
But in these latter days, when the neighbourhood of London changes with
such startling rapidity, the true description of to-day may very
reasonably be the misleading record of to-morrow, and that squalid air
of failure which belongs to those places at the present time of writing
may already, ere these lines attain the dignity of print, have given
place to an era of substantial and prosperous expansion.
Nothing is more depressing than the unsuccessful suburb, created out of
nothing by the too sanguine builder in one of his inflated moments. It
brings disaster, not only upon the author of its being, who reaps the
harvest of his rashness in foreclosed mortgages and the Bankruptcy
Court, but upon those enterprising callow tradesfolk who, embarking upon
businesses of their own with insufficient resources, cannot tide over
the time of no trade, and leave a record of their failure in deserted
shops still proclaiming the virtues of the tea that no one ever bought
and the advantages of those “bargain sales” that failed to attract.
Whip’s Cross, as its name would imply, stands at a junction of roads. It
forms the entrance to Epping Forest, and is said to have obtained the
first part of its name from being the place whence the Forest
deer-stealers were formerly whipped at the cart’s tail; but such things
are now quite put out of sight and forgotten in these marchlands of town
and suburbs.
This is Leyton, twin sister of Walthamstow. Vast populations are
springing up, and interminable streets of little houses, the meaner and
more pitiful because so pretentious. A little while, and the
cheaply-built “villas” develop ominous cracks, the doors and windows
warp and refuse to shut, or when shut decline to be opened, and the
trivial brick gate-posts sink out of plumb. It would not be surprising
in a few years to find that most of their slack-baked bricks had
resolved into their native mud and road-scrapings.
For what do these huge populations exist? Life in the bulk must be very
grey to them, whose individualities are sunk in the mass, who live in
streets all precisely alike and in houses more kin to one another than
the proverbial two peas. They exist, if you consider it, for truly great
altruistic purposes; to be the _corpus vile_ for governments, imperial
or local, to experiment upon; and to be not only the milch-cow that
supplies the funds for such governments, but the poor, senseless voting
machine for whose support the candidates for Parliamentary and municipal
honours struggle and lie and cheat. On their domestic and other needs
thrive and wax fat the great trading companies that in their innumerable
local branches are ousting the private shopkeeper and sending him in his
old age to the Bankruptcy Court and the workhouse. For reasons such as
these the swarming hives of wage-earners that ring round London and all
the great cities make me melancholy. Let us away to the greenwood tree.
[Illustration: THE “EAGLE,” SNARESBROOK: THE NORWICH MAIL PASSING, 1832.
_From a print after J. Pollard._]
VII
THE entrance to Epping Forest, the greenwood tree aforesaid, is by way
of Snaresbrook, past the Eagle Pond, a pleasant lake which takes its
name from that old coaching-house, the “Eagle,” pictured here in the old
print after Pollard. It is more than seventy years since that Old Master
of coaching subjects painted this view of the Norwich Mail passing by,
but the old house still stands, not so very greatly altered. Pollard has
made it and its surrounding trees look more of the Noah’s Ark order of
architecture than ever they were.
Epping Forest is a glorious heritage, of which any city might well feel
proud, and the public-spirited act of the Corporation of the City of
London, by which it was secured in 1882 as a forest, for ever, for the
free enjoyment of all, has never been fully appreciated. These are the
days of popularly-elected bodies, dependent upon the votes of the
million, and every little thing they perform at the public expense is
trumpeted as though it were a benevolence. The Corporation of the City,
however, is not elected by a popular vote, and is accustomed to do
things without an eye upon the next election. It purchased Epping Forest
in a purely public spirit, and administers it in precisely the same way.
The thing was done none too soon, for nerveless and conflicting
interests had long permitted squatters to settle in the Forest lands,
and already the suburban builder had begun to make his mark. As we pass
the many Woodfords—Woodford, Woodford Green, and Woodford Wells—and come
to Buckhurst Hill, the patches and snippets of common, village greens,
and wayside selvedges of grass, saved with difficulty, show, outside the
Forest proper, how the rural character was going.
Beyond Woodford Wells the way divides, to rejoin in less than three
miles. To the right hand it leads through Loughton, and to the left past
the more sylvan stretch by High Beech Green. “Here,” one might say, with
Longfellow, “here is the Forest primeval”; and tangled glades, marshy
hollows, and secluded lawns are glimpsed by the traveller in passing,
between the massy boles of immemorial trees. Not yet, fortunately, has
the floor of the Forest been levelled and drained, and made like a
London park, and it is still possible to find places with uncanny names,
in an uncanny condition. Thus, Deadman’s Slade is still as slippery a
hollow as when it first obtained that name. Essex rustics have now
forgotten many old words, and people who fall on ice or grease now slip
because it is slippery; but not so long ago, throughout the whole of
East Anglia, folks “slumped” because it was “slade.”
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HART,” WOODFORD.
_From a drawing by P. Palfrey._]
It was most terrible, this woodland road in the old times, and the
nocturnal voices of the Forest had heart-shaking significances. The
pit-a-pat of heavy dewdrops from leafy boughs on to the dried leaves of
last autumn sounded for all the world like the stealthy footfalls of
some lurking footpad, and the rise of some couching deer or the scuttle
of a rabbit made the traveller stand still and face about, lest the
rushing attack of the imaginary assassin should take him in the rear.
Even the hooting of the owls, one against the other, were sounds of
dread, and for all the world like rallying calls of midnight prowlers on
their unholy errands
VIII
HIGHWAY-MEN early made their appearance on this road, and from very
remote times the great Forest of Epping was dreaded by travellers on
their account. But it was not until Newmarket’s fame as a racing and
gambling centre arose, in the time of James I., that these long miles
became so especially notorious. One of the very worst periods would seem
to have been that of Charles II., under whose ardent patronage of the
Turf the Court was frequently, and for long periods, in residence at
Newmarket. Not the Forest alone, but the road in general, together with
the several routes to this metropolis of racing, were thus infested.
This scandalous condition of affairs attracted attention so early as
1617, when travellers went in fear, not only of the professional
Highway-men, but of the gentlemanly amateurs as well, who, either for
pure love of a roystering life, or from being ruined by losses on the
turf or at the gaming-tables, lurked by the roadside, and, with terrible
menaces, robbed all classes of wayfarers.
A satirist of that period, one William Fennor, in the course of a
pamphlet he published in 1617, called the “Competers’ Common-Wealth,”
tells us much about those reckless blades. A “competer” was, of course,
one who gambled on the turf or at the tables. Fennor, describing how
ill-luck, sharpers, and money-lenders between them plucked the gamesters
clean, so that there was nothing for them but to retrieve their fortunes
on the road, says that Newmarket Heath, in especial, swarmed with such
Highway-men, who stooped to the meanness of robbing even the rustics of
their pence, and were such keen gleaners of small change that scarce any
money was left in the neighbourhood. “Poor Countrie people,” he says,
“cannot passe quietly to the Cottages, but some Gentlemen will borrow
all the money they have.” Fennor was a man of a grimly humorous nature,
and observed that these doings caused Tyburn Tree and Wapping Gibbets to
have “many hangers-on.” A good many, however, escaped; for they had a
very ingenious plan, when they had brought off successful robberies, and
the hue-and-cry grew too hot, of posting to London, where they arranged
to be arrested and thrown into prison for a small debt. By lying in such
seclusion until the matter cooled, they generally escaped, “for,”
concludes Fennor, “who would look in such a place for such offenders?”
But such paltry robberies were altogether thrown into the shade by that
of 1622, when a company of India and Muscovy merchants, going to
Newmarket to pay their respects to James I., were robbed of their papers
and a bag containing £200.
To quote all the accounts of such affairs would be to occupy many pages,
but some remarkable instances may be given. A London paper of March,
1680, tells how “A Gentleman with some of his family being in the coach
with six horses going to Newmarket, was set upon by some Highway-men,
and robbed of all his Money, Watch, Rings, Stone Buttons, and a pair of
Lac’d Sleeves. And about four hours after, two Coaches coming from
Cambridge, the persons in them were robb’d of several hundred pounds;
there were but five Highway-men, two of them setting upon one coach, and
three on the other; but at their departure they were so noble as to give
the two coachmen two Half-crowns, to drink their healths. The coaches
were within a mile of Newmarket when they were robb’d, at a place called
the Devil’s Ditch.”
A parlous place, this Devil’s Ditch. It was the scene of a pitched
battle between the Highway-men and the exasperated country folk in 1682.
According to the _Domestic Intelligence_ of August 24th, in that year,
five Highway-men robbed a coach on the Heath, and secured £59 and a very
considerable booty in the way of gold lace, silks, and linen. Before
they could make off with the plunder, the rustics had been roused, and
were stationed in a body in the cleft of that bank, impracticable for
horsemen, through which the road runs. The Highway-men were thus shut in
by this stoppage of the only exit from the Heath. Had they retreated,
they would have been captured in Newmarket town, and so they were forced
to make a desperate dash for liberty. “Knowing themselves Dead Men by
the Law, if they were taken, they charged through the Countrymen, and by
Firing upon them Wounded four, one of which we since understand is Dead
of his Wounds.” So these Knights of Industry got clear away, and the
liberal art of robbery upon the highway continued to flourish; for,
three weeks later, two gentlemen were duly reported to have been robbed
of seven guineas and their watches while riding over the Heath.
The professors of this art were so romantic in the eyes of youth that
many a stable-boy or ostler “borrowed” a horse and took the road in
admiring imitation. Daniel Wilkinson, advertised for in the _London
Gazette_ during March, 1683, was probably one of these. The
advertisement describes him as “a little short Man, about 26 years old,
with short light brown Hair, a hairy Mould near his Chin, in a grey Hat,
and Leather Breeches,” and goes on to state that he “Hired, on the 4th
Instant, at Newmarket, a bald Gelding, Wall-Eyed, above 14 hands high,
eight or nine Years old, of a Chesnut colour, a short Mane and short
Tail, and some white about his Feet, with a Hog-skin Saddle, and a white
Cotton Saddle-Cloth, to ride to Cambridge, but has not been since heard
of. Whosoever gives notice of the Horse or Man at the Green Dragon in
Bishop-Gate-street, or to Thomas Gambeling, at Newmarket, shall have
20_s/-._ and their Charges.”
I do not think the advertiser ever heard of Daniel Wilkinson or of his
wall-eyed horse again; although it does not seem to have been a very
desirable animal.
Horses of good points were duly noticed by the Highway-men of the Heath,
and many an one was taken by force from the groom exercising them. An
instance of this is found in an offer of a reward, appearing in the
_London Gazette_, of March 15th, 1686, when a “Black Mare, 15 hands
high, about 4 Years old, having all her paces,” was “taken away from a
Gentleman’s Man upon Newmarket Heath, by several Highway-men.” Three
guineas and expenses were offered as a reward, but we may readily
suppose that no one ever qualified for it.
The dangers of the road became even more acute twelve years later, in
the reign of William III., when the wars in which England had been
engaged were brought for the while to a conclusion; and disbanded
soldiers lacking civil employment, and probably not wanting any while
“the Road,” as an institution, remained possible, made every highway as
dangerous to travellers as an expedition into an enemy’s country would
have been. Epping Forest formed a most convenient centre for such as
these; for it was densely wooded, contained caves and natural
harbourages for desperadoes, and commanded several roads. Here a
fraternity of freebooters, to the number of thirty, sworn to stand by
one another to the last extremity, found a home in the leafy coverts in
the neighbourhood of High Beech and Waltham Cross. Never, since the
romantic days of Robin Hood and Little John, in their refuge under the
greenwood trees of Sherwood Forest, had England known the like. These
brethren built huts and storehouses, and came forth when they thought
fit, to plunder and to slay. The King, journeying to Newmarket with
distinguished company, was safe only because well escorted; and others,
not so strongly guarded, were attacked, with loss of life, soon after he
had passed.
An armed force, cautiously advancing into these wilds, did at last
succeed in destroying the houses of this gang of land buccaneers, but
they soon assembled again, and were strong enough, or impudent enough,
to send a written and signed challenge to the Government, to come and
dislodge them; which the Government accordingly did, in its own good
time, in 1692, when, by the heroic method of posting detachments of
Dragoons at a distance of ten miles from London on all the great roads,
and by forming a chain of patrols, the Highway-men were in some
instances brought to battle, killed or captured, or driven out of the
business for a time, until such unusually severe measures were withdrawn
and the Gentlemen of the Road were again suffered to pursue their
avocation in peace.
They flourished for many a long year after, and the newspapers
continually teemed with accounts of coach and other robberies. On the
morning of December 28th, 1729, the “Norwich and St. Edmund’s Bury
coaches” were stripped by two Highway-men half a mile on the London side
of Bishop’s Stortford, and they afterwards not only robbed three
gentlemen on horseback, but made away with the bridles and drove the
horses off. Fortunate, indeed, for the dismounted trio that the town was
so near! Again, we read, under date of April 25th, 1730: “The Earl of
Godolphin’s gentleman was robb’d last week in the Bury coach of £50 and
a gold watch”; while the detailed account of another robbery, in 1731,
affords some amusement: “About three o’clock in the afternoon of
November 21st, the Norwich, Bury, and Cambridge stage-coaches were
robbed by two Highway-men near the three-mile stump in Epping Forest.
The passengers were robbed to the extent of £30. In the Norwich coach
was a Clergyman and two Tradesmen who had been at Sir Robert Walpole’s
house in Norfolk, to assist in the entertainment of the Duke of
Lorraine, and a lad who was coming to town, to be put apprentice. The
Clergyman saved his portmanteau, with a great deal of gold in it, by
persuading the robbers that it contained nothing but a few sermons, but
they took away the boy’s portmanteau, with all his clothes. While the
coaches were under examination, two horsemen appeared near the wood,
upon which the Highway-men rode up and dismounting them, forced them
into the wood, and there bound them with their own belts and gaiters,
and then rode off.”
IX
THE “Wake Arms” inn stands where the roads by High Beech Green and
Loughton join again. In the old days it was a posting-house of some
celebrity, and a prize-fighting, cock-fighting, and badger-drawing
resort of a considerable notoriety. Near it, on the right side of the
road towards Epping, are those prehistoric earthworks, largely overgrown
with ancient trees, called Ambresbury Banks, and supposed to take their
names from Ambrosius Aurelius, a half-legendary Romanised British
chieftain who died about A.D. 500. This, too, is one of the very many
sites found for Boadicea’s last battle.
Epping village, or townlet, is a particularly long one, heralded by a
gigantic water-tower, of distinctly unlovely design, and neighboured by
a modern church, built to render religious exercises easier than when
the only place of worship was the old parish church, two miles away.