library, stored away in the parvise chamber, over the porch. It is a
treasure not likely to be greatly coveted, nor are its constituent
volumes frequently read, consisting, as they do, of dull black-letter
discourses on just those religious matters in which the learned are of
necessity as ignorant as the veriest clod. Not even the best-equipped of
those disputants could pierce the veil that hides from us the other
world, and now they are gone hence and acquired that knowledge, or just
become extinct, they cannot enlighten ourselves. All they could do was
to raise cloudy disputations, and the dust one bangs out of their
ponderous folios is typical of their useless labours.
A more desirable treasure is the ancient muniment-chest kept jealously
under lock and key in the vestry. It is a weighty affair, covered with
gilt lead, in perforated patterns, and secured with five locks. Inside
the heavy lid are barbarically coloured paintings of the Crucifixion,
the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John, St. Peter, and St. Paul.
An early morning bell-ringing custom of immemorial antiquity is still
maintained at Newport, but happily not with all its old-time severity.
It was not until 1875 that the local revolt broke out, and the four
o’clock-in-the-morning bell-ringing during the winter was modified, and
replaced by an eight in the morning peal in the months between
Michaelmas and Lady Day. Bell-ringing at Newport was wont to be greatly
favoured, for there was a nightly curfew, followed by a number of
strokes corresponding with the day of the month. Then there was the
“gleaners’ bell,” at harvest-time, rung to tell the poor the corn had
been carried and they might go into the fields and glean. But modern
agricultural machinery leaves nothing to be gathered up, and so gleaning
is a lost chance
XIII
AMONG the many points of interest in Newport, the still-surviving
“Newport Toll” is certainly not least. In these latter days, when
traffic fares the road unhindered, all public roads are toll-free—except
the road through Newport. Pedestrians and cyclists in general, and the
whole of the traffic from certain specified neighbouring villages are
exempt; but waggons from elsewhere pay 2_d._ each, forwards and
backwards; higglers’ horses, ½_d._ each; and sheep and all other cattle,
4_d._ per score. The exempted places are: Newport, Wicken, Saffron
Walden, Great and Little Chesterford, the Wendens, Quendon, and
Widdington.
How comes it, then, that this one toll survives when others have been
abolished? That is a long story, but one that may readily be summarised
here. It seems, then, up to some two hundred years ago the little stream
which even now runs across the highway, and is known variously as Wicken
Water and the Granta, was unbridged, and crossed only by a ford. Neither
the county nor the parish would be at the expense of building a bridge,
and at last the lord of the manor obtained an Act of Parliament which
conferred upon him the right of building, and authorised the levying of
those tolls which are collected to this day. The tolls are still vested
in the lord of the manor, but are not very strictly enforced, and as the
gate has not, for many years past, been closed, and is, indeed, half
buried in the ground and nearly rotted away, a good many waggons and
many cattle must, especially at night, escape paying. It was a Smith, of
Shortgrove, who obtained the Act and built the bridge, and, although
Shortgrove Park has been let, these rights are still in the family. The
toll has often been disputed, and was once, indeed, some thirty years
since, the subject of a law-suit, when the uncle of the present Smith
asserted his rights, and won.
Before railways had come, to clear the roads of most of the cattle and
the waggons, the income of this toll-gate was considerable, but in these
days it is not worth the while of the owner of these petty rights to
collect the small gains, and the toll-house has been let as an ordinary
cottage, but, in consideration of the tolls, at a rent slightly above
its value as a dwelling. The occupier is, therefore, in a rather
sporting position, and, by strict attention to business and by keeping
sleepless vigils, might stand to gain quite a respectable trifle of
pocket-money out of sheep that pass in the night, or from waggons that
creak and rumble by in the early hours of morn, before the day is well
aired. But it is an elderly occupant, and many a fourpence and a
twopence go unchallenged into the darkness. Only the slow-going vehicles
and the flocks and herds of daytime find themselves intercepted. One of
the most humorous things in connection with this quaint survival was an
incident that came under the notice of the present writer, when a huge
furniture-removing van—one of the kind that goes at a two-and-a-half
miles an hour pace—was stopped, and, much to the amazement of the driver
(who, in common with the world at large, thought all tolls to be things
of the past), made to pay.
It is the most insignificant of streams that causes all this pother, and
the smallest of bridges, but it can still be seen, where the road dips,
how awkward the old ford must have been.
Near by stands the starkly ugly old gaol, put to other uses since the
police business was transferred to Saffron Walden, and now, on account
of the imitation fetters that still distinguish its frontage, known as
“the Links.”
Directly the bridge is crossed the road forks; the old road going
downward in a curve to the right, along what must once have been a
particularly wet and marshy course, the newer route continuing straight
ahead, at a higher level. Both unite again in little over a hundred
yards. Between the two, and at a higher level than either, on
road-bridges, arches, and embankments, goes the railway; the rail-level
somewhat above the roofs of the very picturesque line of ancient farms,
inns, and cottages that front the older route.
[Illustration: “NELL GWYNNE’S HOUSE,” FORMERLY THE “HORNS” INN.]
We have not even yet done with Newport, for it is beside this old road
that one of the most interesting houses of the village stands. This is
the so-styled “Crown House,” formerly the “Horns” inn, traditionally
said to have been a posting-house or halting-place on the road, used by
Charles II., Nell Gwynne, the dissolute George Villiers, second Duke of
Buckingham, and the profligate Earl of Rochester. It displays an
elaborately decorated frontage of moulded plaster, and takes its name
from the crown in high relief over the door. Criticism has sought to
destroy the tradition by pointing out that the date of 1692 over the
doorway is five years later than the death of Nell, who died, aged
thirty-seven, in 1687, and three later than the death of Charles; but
traditions very often enshrine truths, and it is permissible to suppose
the date merely records some old-time restorations or additions in
honour of that exalted patronage and those patrons then so recently
passed away. The “Crown House” is not interesting within, and except the
hall, paved with black and white marble, it has no outstanding features.
The house has long been untenanted. Attempts have recently been made to
transfer these traditions to the “Coach and Horses” inn, near by; but
although that is a very old house, its appearance does not quite support
the dignity thus thrust upon it.
[Illustration: “HOSPITAL FARM,” AND “NEWPORT BIG STONE.”]
The very last of Newport’s many notable features is the picturesque old
farmhouse standing by itself, looking upon the road as one leaves for
Audley End. This is “Hospital Farm,” and its isolated position is
thoroughly warranted, for it stands on the site of the ancient Leper
Hospital of Saints Mary and Leonard, founded here in the reign of King
John by Richard de Newport. The garden wall still displays some
fragments of stone said to have come from the chapel. Let us look on
them with what veneration we may, even though they might equally well
have come from the kitchen. It is with much more, and a very genuine,
respect one gazes upon the Big Stone between that wall and the road. It
is very properly spelled with capital letters, for it is as “Newport Big
Stone” the Essex folk know it, and besides, it has a history going back
to many uncounted centuries before Richard de Newport and his lepers
came here—a history no one can narrate, because it opened in those
abysmal voids of time before history began to be. Passing farmhands
volunteer the information that it has been here all _their_ time, which
is fairly obvious, for it is, in fact, a glacial boulder, and was left
here by some expiring glacier in the beginning of things, before the men
of the Stone Age came upon the scene; nay, even before the protoplasmal
common ancestral jelly-fish began to crawl in the lifeless ooze.
_Whence_ it was brought on the shoulders of that sliding ice-pack
perhaps not even the most cocksure geologist could say; but it is, of
course, wholly alien from Essex, which has no stone of any kind. A ruddy
sandstone, it might have come from Devonshire, from Worcestershire, or
from Midland districts, where red sandstone is a native formation; but
it would be a matter of speculation to attempt to fix its origin. It is
very large, must needs be enormously weighty, and must in years past
have been sorely tempting to road surveyors hungering in this stoneless
county for road metal. But having escaped destruction in those bygone
years, we may suppose Newport Big Stone is now pretty safe on that
score. Its presence here may, for all we know, have influenced the
founder of that thirteenth-century hospital to place his buildings at
this particular spot; for in after-years it became known as the “Leper
Stone,” and was the rough-and-ready table on which old-time passers-by
deposited their alms for the afflicted.
XIV
PASSING by Shortgrove Park and Uttlesford Bridge, the dirty and dismal
station of Audley End is noticed, down the left-hand road we take, on
the way to discover what manner of place “Wendens Ambo” may be. To the
present historian nothing is more attractive than a place with an odd
name, and he has gone unconscionable distances out of his way, often to
find the most unusual names enshrining the most commonplace towns and
villages. But not always. Here, for example, Wendens Ambo is a quaint,
old-world place, characteristically Essexian. In the churchyard is a
tombstone to William Nicholson, who died, aged 104, in 1886. He had been
midshipman on Nelson’s _Vanguard_.
There are, or were, it seems, two Wendens—Great and Little. Their name
derives from that Anglo-Saxon deity, Woden, who gives us the name of our
Wednesday, _i.e._, “Woden’s day.” In 1662 the ruined church of Little
Wenden was cleared away and the two parishes united. Great Wenden
swallowed Little Wenden, and altered its name to the present Latinised
form, thus proclaiming that the present church does for the two: Wendens
Ambo meaning, when properly Englished, Both Wendens, and incorrectly
written “Wenden’s” in the possessive case, as though the place were
Ambo, belonging to some manorial Wenden:—Wenden, his Ambo.
[Illustration: WENDENS AMBO.]
Audley End Station takes its name from that great palace a mile distant,
whose site was given to Lord Chancellor Audley by Henry VIII. in 1538.
The Abbey of Walden then stood here; an ancient foundation built, like
most monastic establishments, in a pleasant vale, beside a fishful
stream. It was a noble piece of spoil, and probably the richest of all
the plundered monastic tit-bits that came the artful Chancellor’s way.
He was thus a great receiver of stolen property, but put a portion of
his gains, at least, to good use, for he founded Magdalene College,
Cambridge, as the epitaph on his tomb, in the course of surely one of
the most shockingly bad puns in existence, tells us. The founder of
“M—audley—n” College lies, indeed, in the beautiful church of Saffron
Walden, within sight of Audley End, and there you shall read how—
The stroke of Death’s inevitable dart
Hath now, alas! of lyfe beraft the hart
Of Syr Thomas Audeley, of the Garter Knight,
Late Chancellor of England under owr Prince of might
Henry Theight, wyrthy high renowne,
And made by him Lord Audeley of this towne.
The great pile of Audley End was not, however, reared in his time, and
although when it arose it was given his name, which it still bears, it
speedily, for lack of heirs of his blood, came into altogether alien
hands. His daughter was sole heiress. She married, at the age of
fourteen, Lord Henry Dudley, and when he died, became wife of the
widowed fourth Duke of Norfolk. She died at the age of twenty-three, and
the Duke then married for the third time, became for the third time a
widower, and finally closed his career in the approved way by dabbling
in conspiracy and getting beheaded for it. His son, that Lord Thomas
Howard who so signally helped to destroy the Spanish Armada, was
restored to the estates, made Lord High Treasurer and created
successively Baron Howard de Walden and Earl of Suffolk. It was he who
built the vastly spacious and vastly costly house of Audley End, of
which the existing building, large though it be, is only a portion. In
1721, and again in 1749, great ranges of it were taken down by the then
owners, unable to bear the enormous expense of maintaining so huge a
place. The building and furnishing of Audley End are said to have cost
the Lord High Treasurer not less than £200,000. He began the works in
1603, and not until thirteen years later were they completed. Well might
James I., who visited the incomplete palace, declare, with sarcastic
meaning, that “it was too much for a King, though it might do very well
for a Lord Treasurer.” It was not an ill-founded belief that the
treasury chests of the nation had been laid under contribution for the
benefit of my Lord’s building extravagances. His wife, too, was credited
in public opinion with receiving bribes from the Constable of Castile,
and the saying thus arose that “Audley End was built with Spanish gold.”
Whatever may be the truth of those charges, certainly this magnificent
man rather overdid his magnificence, with the result that his
descendants could not live in the place, and the third Earl sold it to
Charles II. in 1666. At that time the King, who had already become a
great patron of the Turf at Newmarket, had no adequate lodging there,
and was easily persuaded to buy Audley End for £50,000. That easy-going
monarch probably purchased Lord Suffolk’s white elephant more for the
sake of relieving him of the burden of it than for any liking himself
had taken to a place twenty miles away from Newmarket Heath, and
therefore not in those times particularly convenient for seeing the
races. Only £30,000 of the purchase money was ever paid: the rest
remained on mortgage. For some few occasions Audley End was used by the
Court, but chiefly by the more reputable section of it. Here, while
Charles was housed at Newmarket with courtiers of an infamous stamp, the
Queen and her household led a country life so remarkable for its dulness
that on one occasion, in October, 1670, to save themselves from dying of
_ennui_, they are found going in disguise to Saffron Walden fair. A
curious contemporary letter tells of this interlude:—
[Illustration: AUDLEY END.]
“Last week there was a Faire neare Audley End, the Queen, the Dutchess
of Richmond and the Dutchess of Buckingham had a frolick to disguise
themselves like country-lasses, in red petticoates, wastcoates, etc.,
and soe goe see the Faire. Sir Bernard Gascoign, on a cart-jade, rode
before the Queen, another stranger before Dutchesse of Buckingham, and
M^{r.} Roper before Richmond. They all soe overdone it in their
disguise, which look’d soe much more like the Antiques than Country
volk, that as soon as they came to the Faire the people began to goe
after them; but the Queen, going to a booth, to buy a pair of yellow
stockings for her sweet hart, and Sir Bernard asking for a pair of
gloves, stitcht with blue, for his sweet hart, they were soon, by their
gebrish, found to be strangers, which drew a bigger flock about them.
One amongst them had seen the Queen at dinner, knew her, and was proud
of her knowledge: this soon brought all the Faire into a crowd, to stare
at the Queen. But thus discovered, they, as soon as they could, got to
their horses; but as many of the Faire as had horses got up with their
wives, children, sweet harts, or neighbours behind them, to get as much
gape as they could till they brought them to the Court gate. Thus, by
ill conduct, was a merry frolick turned into a pennance.”
The Earl of Suffolk and his successors did not do so badly over this
incompleted purchase, for to one of their kin was given the care of the
place, together with the salaried post of Housekeeper and Keeper of the
Wardrobe, and at last, in 1701, when it became evident that no King or
Queen was ever likely to reside here, Audley End was reconveyed to the
fifth Earl of Suffolk, on the easy terms of his undertaking to
relinquish his claims to the outstanding £20,000. The Earls of Suffolk
ended in 1745, when the tenth of that title died and was illegally
succeeded in the property by his kinsman, the Earl of Effingham, from
whom the Countess of Portsmouth, one of the two daughters and
co-heiresses of Lord Griffin, who were the true but dispossessed owners,
bought the house and estate. Her heir was her nephew, John Griffin
Whitwell, who in 1788 became Baron Braybrooke. Again, on his death,
childless, the property changed hands, coming into possession of the
Nevilles, who still own it and the Braybrooke title.
That account tells something of the quick changes and varied fortunes of
Audley End, but only a lengthy disquisition could describe its
appearance and contents. Pepys in 1669 made something of an attempt, but
the most convincing part of his discourse is that where he describes how
the housekeeper “took us into the cellar, where we drank most admirable
drink, a health to the King. Here I played on my flageolet, there being
an excellent echo.” But the still more excellent echo seems to have been
that echo of the first drink with which he refreshed himself after his
flageolet-playing. He was here again, and once more in the cellars where
it is not surprising that he found “much good liquors. And indeed the
cellars are fine; and here my wife and I did sing, to my great content.
And then to the garden, and there did eat many grapes, and took some
with us.”
There is little use describing the contents of Audley End at
second-hand, which is the only way it can be done, for the Braybrookes
have excluded the public. But there are exceptionally fine views of the
exterior from the high road, and from the slip road into Saffron Walden.
From this last the fine bridge over the Cam comes effectively into the
picture, but seen from the high road, the great house not only stands
nakedly disclosed, across bare pastures, with never an intervening hedge
or tree, but looks coldly inhospitable and desolate, even although the
extensive stone front is designed in the rich Jacobean style. The
prominent, copper-covered cupolas are a bright green.
But if Audley End does by no means look homely, the scenery is
delightful. The road passes through an open common on the left, planted
with park-like clumps of trees, and with the pretty feature of green
alleys cut through dense coppices. Ahead, down the road, the red-brick
gabled stables of the mansion, older than the mansion itself, lend a
ruddy and cheerful tone. Beyond them the lodge-gates are passed: modern
additions, with the great stone bull’s heads of the Nevilles’ crest
surmounting the piers, and on the roof-ridge of the lodge an heraldic
griffin ramped up on his hinder part and holding two daggers in his
paws. He is a would-be impressive griffin, but his singularly apologetic
attitude, like that of a French poodle on his hind legs, begging for
biscuits and conscious all the while that he is making a fool of
himself, is only laughable.
XV
[Illustration: SAFFRON WALDEN.]
SAFFRON WALDEN lies a mile distant, on a ridge overlooking a wide
stretch of country, and is one of the prettiest and neatest of rural
corporate towns. To the whole countryside it is merely “Walden.” No
local person would ever think of saying “Saffron” Walden; and really,
now there is no longer any saffron grown here, why should he? Prominent,
far and near, is the great Perpendicular church, bracketed with that of
Thaxted as the finest in Essex. Not a little of its proud dominance over
neighbouring hill and dale is due to the tall, tapering crocketed spire,
added so late as 1831, and one of the earliest and most successful
efforts of the Gothic revival. The very late Perpendicular clerestoried
nave, with noble timbered roof, is singularly like the great Gothic
Guildhall Library in London, which would almost seem to have been
designed by its modern architect after this ancient model.
Walden is, and has always been, a great stronghold of the Friends, and
the Friends’ Schools are among the most prominent of the public
buildings in the town. It is a town of old and new in just proportions,
and with a staid prosperity not pushful enough to be vulgar, nor so
allied to modernity that it must needs sweep away its old relics. In
Church Street, indeed, is to be found one of the most curious old
plaster houses that any town or village can boast. This is the old “Sun”
inn, an inn no longer, decorated with two gigantic armed figures in
plastiferous relief. For whom they may be intended, only the designer of
them could say, and he cannot tell us, for if we may believe the date of
1670 on the wall, he must have been gathered to his fathers quite two
centuries ago. Another very old inn, the “Eight Bells,” still looks
prosperous, at the corner of Castle Street, in which long thoroughfare
the stranger, by dint of earnest enquiry, may find the shy retiring
entrance to that delightful pleasaunce known as “Fry’s Garden.” I do not
know who Fry was, but doubtless he was one of that famous Quaker family,
and certainly not only loved gardens, but created one here that in all
the quaint circumstances of the formal walks, lawns, and terraces
fashionable in the gardener’s art of much more than a century ago, has
now become a treasure to the people of Walden, to whom he gave it.
[Illustration: HOUSE FORMERLY THE “SUN” INN.]
There is little left of the great castle of Walden, the chief fortress
of those Magnavilles, Earls of Essex, of whom Geoffrey, lord of a
hundred and seventeen manors in the troublous reigns of the Empress Maud
and Stephen, was the third.
There is no more striking figure in the history of these East Anglian
districts than that of this third Geoffrey. Not even Hereward, that
earlier hero of the Fens, made a deeper impression; but while Hereward
was a patriot, fighting the hopeless cause of his people, Geoffrey de
Magnaville became a murderous bandit, whose hand was against every man.
Succeeding to the family honours in 1130, he took up arms for the
Empress Maud when England was plunged into Civil War between the rival
claims of herself and Stephen, at the death of Henry I., in 1135; but he
was arrested at St. Albans, his castles at Walden and Pleshey seized,
and his high office of Constable of the Tower of London stripped from
him.