street, is the extraordinary number of inns and places for all kinds of
refreshment. Of these the “Thatched House” is the most notable, but is
now no more thatched than is the “Thatched House Club” in London. There
is a baulking air of picturesqueness in the long view down Epping
street, but, taken in detail and analysed, it is evasive, and certainly
most elusive when sought to be transferred to paper.
[Illustration: AMBRESBURY BANKS.]
At Thornwood Common, some two miles onward, we encounter the uttermost
notice-board of the City Corporation, and bid good-bye to the Forest.
Thence, crossing a high ridge of quiet country, we come steeply down
hill, past the “Sun and Whalebone” inn, and across picturesque Potter
Street Common, with its avenues and modern church, to the
single-streeted hamlet of Potter Street. This again gives place to the
village of Harlow, with a sprinkling of plastered and gabled houses and
an exceedingly ugly Union Workhouse. Harlow is a village with a
preposterously urban air, and as much “side” as that of a hobbledehoy
who fancies himself a grown man. The reason of this attitude is found,
perhaps, in Harlow possessing, not only a railway station, but a busy
wharf as well, on the Stort Navigation. That wharf is nearly a mile away
down the road, and all that distance the highway is punctuated with the
coal-droppings from the carts that ply between that waterway and the
village.
[Illustration: “SAPSWORTH.”]
Beyond the wharf comes Sawbridgeworth, also owing its sustained
prosperity to the canalised Stort, and still not only a busy townlet,
but also a very old-fashioned one. It is still essentially a town of
malt, and the old wooden and cowled malt-houses remain to this day its
chief characteristic.
Until quite recently known to its natives as “Sapsworth,” Sawbridgeworth
has at last lost that archaic distinction. Now that every country lad is
taught to spell and read, and the yokel has the evidence of the
finger-posts, among other things, to tell him that it is
“Sawbridgeworth,” it is of no use to tell him that his father and mother
called it otherwise. “I kin read, cawnt I?” he asks, citing the
finger-post as a witness. It is quite certain that the stranger who
should nowadays ask for Sapsworth would be as little understood as were
the travellers of old who enquired for Sawbridgeworth.
At Harlow wharf the road left Essex and entered Hertfordshire, and so
runs through Sawbridgeworth and the hamlets of Spelbrook and Thorley
Street to Bishop’s Stortford. Just short of that town there is a choice
of ways. By bearing to the left, Bishop’s Stortford is entered direct;
by keeping to the right, along what was once known as “Queen Anne’s new
road,” the coaches bound for places beyond avoided Bishop’s Stortford
altogether, and set down passengers for it at the suburb of Hockerill.
Hockerill is on the hill, Bishop’s Stortford is in the hole, and, as its
name would imply, beside the river Stort, dividing the two counties of
Essex and Herts.
We will take the left-hand, and older, road, for the excellent reason
that along it, on the uttermost outskirts of the town, there stands a
house even already historic, and in years to come destined to be
something of a shrine. No saint, indeed, was born beneath its roof, but
a man whose memory is much more worshipful than that of the majority in
the hierarchy of the Blessed. If you love your country, you cannot
choose but be interested in this house, and cannot do aught but
reverence that man who was born here: the man who saved Central Africa
for the Empire. We are all Imperialists now, and patriotism is cheap
to-day, but it was a frame of mind entertained by few when Rhodes first
became an expansionist. Those were the days when Gladstone was the
wet-nurse of sucking alien ambitions, the friend of every country but
his own, and ready to surrender anything and everything in the sacred
cause of foreign nationalities. If Rhodes was an expansionist, may we
not with justice apply the term “contractionist” to the great demagogue,
that great master of phrases that sounded so full of meaning and were
really so empty, whose life was equally divided by the making of
speeches and the explaining of them away?
In this house, then—a very commonplace semi-detached stuccoed
house—Cecil John Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia, son of the Rev. F. W.
Rhodes, vicar of Stortford, was born, July 5th, 1853.
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF CECIL RHODES.]
No sketch is needed here of a career whose record is writ in the
politics of his time, and indelibly scored in the history of his
country. Like Moses, it was not given him actually to enter that
Promised Land of Empire he had seen afar, but when he died, in 1902, the
fruition of the idea was at least assured. He looked, like some Prophet,
upon South and Central Africa, and with the phrase, “English, all
English, that’s my dream!” made a comprehensive span upon the map. A
very pleasant dream too. Conceive what a nightmare the world would be if
predominance were given the brutal German, the frenzied Frenchman, or
the thinly veneered Russian savage! We are the salt of the earth, and
let us savour it as strongly as we can. Thinking thus, it behoves us to
honour this great Empire-builder in the bulk, even though we may
criticise him in detail.
X
BISHOP’S STORTFORD is a pleasant and an old-fashioned market-town, with
a great and fussy air of business, a long High Street running in the
valley near, and parallel with, the Stort, and a large parish church
perched on the shoulder of a precipitous street most picturesquely and
accurately named Windhill. Natives have long since dropped the first
half of the name and know it as “Stortford,” except indeed when they say
“Strawford,” as very often they do.
[Illustration: WINDHILL, BISHOP’S STORTFORD.]
There was, once upon a time, a fine strong and damp castle in the Stort
meadows, midway between the town and its suburb of Hockerill, a
stronghold of the Bishops of London from the time of William the
Conqueror, but it has long since disappeared and only a green,
tree-covered mound remains. Its name was Waytemore, a name with a
suspicion of grim humour about it, traditions still tell how the zealous
Bonner imprisoned many a heretic here, before burning them at the stake;
but the martyrs suffered and went to Heaven, and the Bishop to Hell, so
long since that it is difficult to probe the truth of the stories.
[Illustration: HENRY GILBEY.]
There are old and quaint inns in the town; the “Black Lion” the most
ancient, and certainly at this time the most picturesque of them, but
the “Boar’s Head,” on Windhill, is little less so; and, moreover,
grouping finely with that parish church already named, makes a picture.
It is a great church and a fine one, even though that tall spire be poor
Gothic and its four satellite pinnacles abjectly bad. Up to the present
the church contains no memorial to Rhodes, but students of coaching
history find interest in the polished Aberdeen granite stone in the
churchyard, in memory of Henry Gilbey, father of Sir Walter Gilbey,
Bart. The inscription runs:—
HENRY GILBEY
OF THIS TOWN, MANY YEARS COACH PROPRIETOR,
DIED SEPTEMBER 29TH, 1842,
AGED 52 YEARS.
There are even yet a few ancients in Bishop’s Stortford who remember
“old Harry Gilbey,” as they call him, and speak of him as in partnership
with one William Low, of Saffron Walden, in the coach running between
that place, Bishop’s Stortford, and London. This coach was taken over by
Henry Gilbey, as sole proprietor, shortly after 1824. Besides this—the
“Old Stortford Coach,” as it was called—he had another, running between
the “George,” Bishop’s Stortford, and London. Both called at the
“Crown,” Hockerill, a house demolished in 1903, and went to and returned
from the “Bull,” Aldgate, until 1841, when the railway was opened to
Bishop’s Stortford.
[Illustration: HOCKERILL.]
Henry Gilbey, who was son of Daniel Gilbey, proprietor of the “White
Bear,” Stansted, was born January 29th, 1789. He married, at the age of
25, in 1814. From 1829 he resided at the house, still standing, called
“The Links,” on Windhill, where the future Sir Walter Gilbey was born,
in 1831.
[Illustration: THE “CROWN,” HOCKERILL. DEMOLISHED 1903.
_From a drawing by P. Palfrey._]
XI
TRAVELLERS by road who fleet from Hockerill on to Newport, turning
neither to the right nor left, pass through Stansted Street and know
nothing of the ancient village of Stansted Mountfitchet, of which it is
an offshoot. It is a pity, for that village is a distinctly interesting
place. Turning to the right hand at the cross-roads, one arrives at the
centre of the old settlement in less than half a mile. It was originally
built in a deep hollow, under the heavy shadow of the giant earthworks
on whose shoulders the Gernons or Montfichets in early Norman times
built a tremendous Giant Blunderbore of a castle. Somewhere here, in
very remote times, stood a stone building, probably a ruined Roman
villa, whence the Saxon name of Stane Stead derived; but its site and
its history are alike unknown, and the knightly deeds of the Montfichets
are equally forgotten. That Norman family obtained its original name of
Gernon from some ancestor who especially distinguished himself by going
unshaven in times when (if we may believe the evidence of the
clean-shaven, or merely moustached, effigies of Norman warriors) it was
the fashion to shave. His comrades, like the vulgar boys of the present
day, who shout “there’s ’air!” after any inordinately hairy person, gave
him the nickname of “Les Gernons,” which means “Whiskers”; and, in a
manner common at that time, when family names derived from individual
peculiarities, it was as “Whiskers” that his descendants became known,
whether they went whiskered or whiskerless. They are found referred to
as “Gernon” and “Grenon,” but it was not very long before they dropped
the name for that of their castle, built on the ancient mound that was
here when they came, and named by them “Mont Fiché,” or “firm mount.”
[Illustration: THE “WHITE BEAR,” STANSTED.
_From a drawing by P. Palfrey._]
It is many years since these ancient lords of Stansted became extinct,
and even the famous family of De Veres, who succeeded to their property,
has followed them into oblivion. Their stout castle, too, has gone the
way of many another sturdy fortalice, and only the great mounds and
fosses that girdle and seam the hillside are left. “Only,” we say, but a
word with so depreciatory a sound is scarcely in order when used in
connection with these impressive earthworks that fire the imagination of
even the casual railway traveller. For it is from the railway those
castle mounds are most impressively seen, just as it is from the railway
station that Stansted village looks its best. In the hasty glance from
the passing train, the village roofs, rising one above the other up the
hillside, seem to be crowned by the dignified tower of some benignant
old church, richly pinnacled and turreted in the South Devon manner, and
it is only on closer acquaintance one discovers this to be no worshipful
old building, but the modern (1889) district church of St. John, built
to the joint honour and glory of God and one of the Pulteney family. It
is built of red brick, with Bath stone enrichments—_very_ rich and
sugary, and probably from the designs of a confectioner principally
engaged in the manufacture of ornamental Twelfth-cakes. The exterior of
the tower, prodigal in pinnacles, crockets, and mediæval fandanglums of
all sorts, and stuck about with blank windows that open upon nothing, is
surely the last word in the ready-made picturesque, and lacks the
reposeful dignity properly belonging to a church. The interior, where
there is less scope for riotous fancy, is better.
The old church is over a mile distant from the village, and stands in or
beside Stansted Park. Its situation, remote from the life of the place,
but closely adjoining the Hall, tells us that the ancient lords of
Stansted who built and maintained it held the welfare of their own souls
dear, and that of the people’s immortal part altogether too cheap.
Indeed, rightly considered, the building and maintenance of this and
many another church of its kind was in the nature of an insurance policy
against fire—the dreaded eternal fire.
It is a small Norman and Early English building, restored in 1889 and
rubbed up and carpeted in rather a drawing-room style of comfort, so
that the monumental effigies look somewhat second-hand and apologetic.
The battered, crusading, or, at any rate, cross-legged, effigy of one
Roger de Lancaster looks even tenth-hand, and, shoved into a dimly
lighted corner, with a bar of Windsor soap in his mouth, a mop and a
pail and other housewifely things disposed negligently about his mailed
person, is the picture of ancient dignity in reduced circumstances. The
tomb, with recumbent effigy, in the south wall of the chancel, is that
of Sir Thomas Middleton, 1631. With him lies his wife, killed by a stag
in Stansted Park.
The alabaster tomb, with life-sized and coloured effigy of Esther
Salusburye in the Lancaster Chapel, is found unexpectedly by the
stranger, behind the organ. The full-length figure lying there, so
naturally coloured and dressed in the height of fashion of that bygone
year of 1604, when she died, is so extraordinarily lifelike that one
almost shrieks with momentary fright; and indeed the work is so perfect,
it rather resembles a human being masquerading as an effigy than a mere
carved and painted mass of stone. Her high-heeled shoes, the
black-painted Early Jacobean skirt and bodice, with the deep lace cuffs,
generous ruff, and high-crowned hat, form a perfect picture of an
English lady’s costume in the days when James I. was King.
[Illustration: THE “OLD BELL,” STANSTED.
_From a drawing by P. Palfrey._]
Stansted Street, skirting the main road with its old-fashioned but
nondescript houses, has lost much of its picturesqueness of late years.
The “White Bear,” kept in old times by Daniel Gilbey, and the “Old Bell”
have disappeared, and it rejoices in a very new and ornate white brick
house, designed in the snoburban style of architecture. A horse at full
stretch is carved over the door, together with the inscription,
“Galloping Villa.” If you ask any of the admiring villagers for
information about this astonishing house, and why “Galloping,” they tell
you “it belongs to Mr. ——, of the roundabouts.” Immediately opposite is
a house and shop, whose builder or owner appears to have been
extraordinarily proud of his building, for it bears not only the date of
the year, but even the day of the particular month when it was finished:
“L.S.T., July y^e 25, 1759.”
The very handsome old red-brick house, standing high above the road on
approaching Ugley, and attracting attention by its fine wrought-iron
gates and general air of distinction, is Orford House, built by Admiral
Edward Russell, who commanded the allied English and Dutch fleets in
their victory over the French at La Hague in 1692. The Admiral was
created Earl of Orford in 1727.
The country grows particularly pretty as we approach Ugley, fields
giving place to dense plantations, with oak woods and almost
impenetrable coverts, presenting a vivid picture to the mind’s eye of
what the great Forest of Essex must have been like in the long ago.
“What’s in a name?” asks Shakespeare. Not much here, if we take that of
Ugley by its sound; but a good deal if we make due enquiry, for it is
really “Oakley,” the “oak meadow,” and, as Oakley, we do actually now
find certain upstart signposts and wayside parish marks naming it.
Again, if we leave the road and take the footpath that leads across a
meadow (? the original “oak lea”) to the church, we shall find in the
little churchyard the tombstone of an incumbent, dead not long since,
who is described as vicar of “Oakley.” He had probably been a lifelong
sufferer from the old rhymed pleasantry:—
Ugly church, ugly steeple,
Ugly parson, ugly people.
In short, only the handsomest of men with the most amiable of natures
can possibly afford to take the living of Ugly, for should the parson be
plain, the obvious remarks as to his peculiar fitness for the place
would become a burden to him, and unless of an angelic disposition, his
“ugly temper” might be commented upon. Fortunately Ugley is among the
smallest of places, and therefore the Ugley girls with feelings to be
scarified by such a description are few. But, on the other hand, how
easy the way to a most ingratiating compliment, in the exclamation of
surprise:—
“You come from Ugley? Impossible!”
“Why impossible?”
“Because——”
But here you fill the hiatus to your own individual taste in flattery.
The embarrassments of such a place-name are many, and are not so easily
surmounted as those of the Scilly Islanders, who are “Scillonians,”
rather than Scilly people. Ugley, however, has a near neighbour in
misfortune, in the hamlet of Nasty, to be found by the curious, scarce
more than ten miles away, between Great Munden and Braughing, in
Hertfordshire.
Ugley is said to have been the “Quercetum” of the Romans, so named by
them “from the locality abounding in oaks.” In Domesday Book it is
“Uggheley,” and it is even found written by some ancient vulgarian as
“Huggele,” a really h’odious variant.
[Illustration: UGLEY CHURCH.]
Ugley church is situated, as I have here made effort to show, in a very
pretty setting of trees. They are not oaks, as they should be; but that
would be to dot the “i’s” and cross the “t’s” of allusion, and we must
not expect such fitness and completeness. It is a small church, placed
just outside a farmyard, but stands otherwise solitary and unheeded by
those who keep the main road. It might be thought the Georgian red-brick
tower was built on to the ancient body by some one concerned to make it
fit the place-name—for it is not beautiful—did we not know that Georgian
towers, and churches too, were commonly hideous, and this, therefore, by
no means exceptional. But the kindly aid of Nature has done much here,
and “that rare old plant, the ivy green,” has mantled the stark design
to such purpose that it now gives the ideal rustic effect presented by
the literary efforts of Gray’s “Elegy,” and the artistic convention of
Birket Foster’s drawings. Its note is one with the Christmas cards of
our youth, when no one was ashamed of such pictures as that of the old
parish church in the snow, or the Robin Redbreast on his spray of holly.
XII
QUENDON, a scattered little village prettily situated where the road
broadens out and curves slightly, with broad margins of grass, bears a
resemblance to Trumpington, on the Cambridge Road. In advance of the
cottages stands a picturesque modern well-house and fountain, with a
beautifully designed horse-trough, “given to Quendon and Pickling in
memory of Caroline Mary Cranmer-Byng,” as an inscription states. Quite
at the end of the village is the “Coach and Horses” inn, a survival of
posting and coaching days, very much in its old condition. Beyond it the
open road leads into Newport.
Newport, whose name has nothing whatever to do with a water port,
derives that title from its situation on a new road—a new gate, or door,
or portal—made at some unrecorded time through the Forest of Essex. It
is now nothing but a village, as picturesque and delightful as any on
the road, but fallen from its ancient importance, and overshadowed by
Saffron Walden, only three miles away. Time was—a very long while
ago—when Newport had a market and Saffron Walden had none. At that time
Newport was one of the many manors belonging to Harold, and it continued
to be a Royal manor for some time after the Conquest; coming afterwards
into the hands of the Magnavilles. There was a castle at Newport in
those days, and a lake, whence the old name for this place of “Newport
Pond.” Tradition tells that the pond or lake was situated where the
railway station is now, but of it and of that castle no traces have
survived. The fortunes of Newport fell, and those of Saffron Walden
began to rise, when the Empress Maud, somewhere about 1142, authorised
Geoffrey de Magnaville to transfer the market to Walden, and although,
some sixty years later, in 1203, King John granted Newport the right to
hold an annual fair, this stricken town never recovered from the blow
inflicted by the loss of its market privileges. A century later the
Manor of Newport belonged to an historical character—that Piers
Gaveston, the favourite of Edward II., who was executed, murdered, or
done to death in 1310 on Blacklow Hill, near Warwick, by insurgent
Barons, jealous of his influence over the King. The fate of Gaveston
seems to prove how dangerous was the stinging gift of satire in the
early part of the fourteenth century. That unfortunate man, raised by
the King to the highest offices of State, of course became hateful to
others not so successful, and his splendour, his arrogance, and, above
all, the wittily offensive nicknames he showered upon that baronial
crew, aggravated the original offence beyond endurance, so that they
finally seized and beheaded him. It will be allowed that this eminently
practical retort was even more stinging than the original satire, and
certainly forbade a rejoinder.
Later lords of the manor of Newport have been more fortunate, or have
been such comparatively obscure persons that their misfortunes are
scarcely historic. Indeed, with the passing of Gaveston, the annals of
the place are purely domestic, but none the less interesting; Newport
is, in fact, singularly full of interest. Prominent in its broad street
stands the beautiful old house of timbered frame and brick nogging known
locally as “Monks’ Barns,” and said to have once been used by the
monastery of St. Martin-in-the-Fields as a country sanatorium, but much
more likely to have been a Priest’s House at the time when Newport
church was under the joint control of Westminster Abbey and St.
Martin’s, and served from them. However that may be, this fine relic of
the fifteenth century is now in secular occupation, and divided into two
cottages. The interior is without interest; and its most beautiful and
interesting feature the one most easily seen by the wayfarer—the fine
old oak-framed oriel window looking upon the road and decorated with an
elaborate and curious carving of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin
Mary.
[Illustration: “MONKS’ BARNS.”]
It was at Newport the route often taken Charles II. to Newmarket, by way
of Rye House, passing Rickling Church End and Wicken Bonant, fell into
the existing highway. It is still known as “London Lane”; the junction
of roads remaining the most old-world corner of the village. The church,
dominating the view at this point, looks almost cathedral-like, and its
tower is strongly reminiscent of Great St. Mary’s, Cambridge; but the
interior proves less imposing, and the bare nave and wide chancel, built
in the later and less refined style of Gothic, disappointing.
[Illustration: ANCIENT CARVING AT “MONKS’ BARNS.”]
A memorial tablet on the chancel wall, plain in design, but grotesquely
ornate in the epitaph of the person it praises, hands down to us the
memory of the many virtues of “Joseph Smith, M.A., of Shortgrove Hall.”
It appears that the worthy Smith, who died in 1822, was private
secretary to William Pitt. It would be easier to recount the few virtues
he was _not_ possessed of than to recite a list of those that, according
to his executors, rendered him such a Phœnix. He—or they for him—wholly
lacked humility.
Tragical memories are revived by the memorial window in the south aisle
to the son of the vicar, one of the 130 who perished in the destruction
by fire of the Theatre Royal, Exeter. An inscription tells how “This
window was erected by loving friends in memory of Robert Morgan Tamplin,
B.A., of Keble College, Oxford, who entered into his rest at Exeter, in
the great fire, Monday, September 5th, 1887, aged 23 years.”
[Illustration: LONDON LANE, NEWPORT: WHERE CHARLES THE SECOND’S ROUTE TO
NEWMARKET JOINED THE HIGHWAY.]