of Rochester. It has long since been transferred to Canterbury, and
the manor that had belonged to the Bishops of Rochester ever since the
eighth century, when it was given to them by King Ethelbert, was sold
with the palace into private hands in 1845. Those who will may see the
exterior of it to this day, but it is not the palace that the Norman
Gundulf built, nor even that whence Bishop Warner escaped, for it was
several times rebuilt, lastly in 1775. The site of the once Holy Well
of St. Blaise, the woolcombers’ saint, formerly much resorted to for
its chalybeate waters, is still to be seen in the grounds.
There are pitfalls for the stranger on every road in the way of
pronouncing place-names. Bromley-by-Bow is (or was until recently, but
there is a constant flux in these things) “Brumley,” and accordingly
this should have the like sound; but you will not hear this Kentish
town so named. The natives will not change the “o” into “u.”
But aborigines are somewhat difficult to find here, for the Bromley
that was a little market town with two fairs a year and a weekly market
granted by Henry the Sixth is a thing of the buried past. Bromley is
now suburban. It has grown from the little place of 1801, with 2,700
inhabitants, to a populous town which in 1901 numbered 27,358.
Much of the old town has vanished, but it will never be like an
ordinary suburb that grew potatoes last year, and has within six months
grown streets of houses “fitted with electric light, hot and cold
water-supply, and drained in accordance with the latest improvements,”
thus to quote advertisements. The town, in common with other places,
has all those modern features, but it has also a surviving proportion
of ancient houses, and even when they are gone it will still have its
history. By virtue of that past it keeps to-day a larger air and a
greater disunity than it could command merely as the dormitory of City
men who leave early in the morning and return at night, and pay rent,
rates, and taxes, but can have little of the sense of belonging to the
place.
Bromley, precisely like an assertive person who has “got on” in the
world, signalised its recent expansion by acquiring a coat-of-arms;
but not the most magnificent parvenu would dare sport a display so
elaborate and comprehensive as that which alone would serve Bromley. In
the recondite terminology affected by heralds it is “quarterly, gules
and azure; on a fesse wavy argent three ravens volant proper between,
in the first quarter, two branches slipped of the third: in the second
a sun in splendour; in the third an escallop shell or; and in the
fourth a horse forcené, also argent: and for the crest, on a wreath of
the colours, upon two bars wavy azure and argent, an escallop shell, as
in the arms, between two branches of broom proper.”
It sounds like the description by a maniac of the contents of a
shop-window, set up by a compositor who had misplaced the punctuation;
but it is clear and pellucid reading to a herald. At any rate, there
is no difficulty in discovering what it all means, for the device is
proudly and abundantly displayed in Bromley itself.
These many charges are not without their significance. The escallop
shell is in allusion to the time when the palace of the Bishops of
Rochester was situated here; the broom refers to the _planta genista_,
the broom that gave, in the long ago, its name to Bromley, and still
flourishes in the district; the sun in splendour indicates Sundridge,
whose name itself by no means alludes to the sun; and the white horse
is, of course, the familiar unconquered horse of Kent. The ravens
recall the legendary history of the Ravensbourne. Beneath all this
display is a Latin motto, to the effect that “While I grow I hope.”
Gravely aloof from all these things, the old parish church of Bromley
stands indeed in the centre of the town, but in a quiet lane leading
to a pretty little public garden on the edge of a height overlooking
all South London and its sea of roof-tops. It need scarcely be said
that the long body and the apocalyptic towers of the Crystal Palace
are prominent in the view. They brood like an obsession over all the
southern suburbs.
The exterior of the church looks very venerable and rustic, and has
even been improved by a tasteful new chancel built in recent times. In
the churchyard, built into the south wall, is a small and modest tablet
inscribed:
Here lyeth interred ye body of Martine French of this parish, with
four of his wives and two daughters. He departed this life 12 January
anno 1661, being aged 61, and his last wife died ye 13th of ye same
month, leaving behind him one sonne Martine and two daughters, Sarah
and Mary.
But Martin French is a very minor person beside the neighbouring
ELIZABETH MONK
who departed this Life on the 27^{th} Day of August 1753
Aged 101
She was the Widow of John Monk late of this Parish,
Blacksmith,
her second Husband,
To whom she had been a Wife near 50 Years:
By whom she had no Children:
And of the Issue of her first Marriage none lived to the second.
But VIRTUE
would not suffer her to be childless:
An infant to whom and to whose Father & Mother she had
been Nurse
(such is the uncertainty of temporal Prosperity)
became dependent upon Strangers for the Necessaries of Life.
To him she afforded the Protection of a Mother.
This parental Charity was returned with filial Affection:
And she was supported in the feebleness of Age
By him whom she had cherished in the Helplessnesss of Infancy.
_Let it be Rememb’red_
That there is no Station in which Industry will not obtain
Power to be Liberal:
Nor any Character on which Liberality will not
Confer Honour.
She had been long prepared by a simple and unaffected Piety
for that awful Moment, which however delayed
is universally sure.
How few are allowed an equal Time of Probation:
How many by their Lives appear to presume upon more:
To preserve the Memory of this Person,
but yet more to perpetuate the Lesson of her Life,
This Stone was erected by voluntary Contribution.
For lavish use of capital letters, adjectives, and copybook sentiments
this would be difficult to beat.
IX
The interior of the church is injured by the galleries built round
it, to accommodate a crowded congregation, and is otherwise of little
interest; the tombs of the Bishops of Rochester consisting merely of
a mangled relic of that supposed to be for Richard de Wendover, who
died in 1350, and the slab and the tablet, respectively, to John Yonge,
1605, and Zachary Pearce, 1774.
But in the pavement near the font, covered with a mat, is the
ledger-stone marking the resting-place of Dr. Samuel Johnson’s wife,
who died in 1753. It bears, of course, a Latin epitaph, for that great
literary giant of the eighteenth century was violently of opinion
that the English language was no fitting medium for the conveyance
of monumental honours. His arguments in support of that opinion are
unfortunately not recorded. They would doubtless be amusing, but it
would require a very robust argument to convince most people that an
inscription in a foreign language, and that a dead one, not to be
understood except by the comparatively few who are well versed in it,
is the best vehicle for the purpose. There seems, however, to have
been in Johnson’s time, and before, and for some while after it, an
odd feeling that the mother-tongue of the Englishman was, applied
to monuments, vulgar. To be classic, even at the risk of not being
understood, was the only resort of those who at all risks desired
to dissociate themselves from the vulgar herd. Johnson shared this
feeling to the full, and thus the epitaph to his “Tetty” is couched in
the language that Cæsar spoke. It extols the charms of her person and
manners, and thus gives point to Macaulay’s description of Johnson’s
singular infatuation for a woman twenty-one years older than himself.
“Every eye makes its own beauty,” truly says the old proverb, and here
is an instance. It was in 1736, when he was twenty-seven years of age,
that Johnson met the widowed Mrs. Elizabeth Porter, fell in love with
her, and married her. She was then forty-eight, and had children as old
as himself. Macaulay, in his broad, expressive, rather cruel way, says:
“To ordinary spectators the lady appeared to be a short, fat, coarse
woman, painted half an inch thick, dressed in gaudy colours, and fond
of exhibiting provincial airs and graces which were not exactly those
of the Queensberrys and Lepels.” She was, continues Macaulay, “a silly,
vain old woman. To Johnson, however, whose passions were strong, and
whose eyesight was too weak to distinguish cerise from natural bloom,
his Tetty was the most beautiful, graceful, and accomplished of her
sex. That his admiration of her was unfeigned cannot be doubted, for
she was as poor as himself.”
There are many tablets on the walls of this much-galleried building:
one to a Mr. Thomas Chase, of the Rookery, who was nearly swallowed up
by the great earthquake at Lisbon in 1755. He seems to have been born
there in 1729, and after his nerve-shaking experience to have removed
to this country. He died in 1788, aged fifty-nine.
One harrowing inscription meets the eye on leaving the building. It
tells how, on Saturday, September 10th, 1904, a peal of grandsire
triples of 5,040 changes was rung upon the bells. They took 3 hours
6 minutes, and then quiet came to the suffering town. Bromley has my
respectful sympathy.
X
The way through Bromley is not straight and it is not broad. This is so
much of a truism at Bromley that the statement is calculated to make
its inhabitants smile indulgently, as do those good-natured people
who are told what they already know. The early nineteenth-century
roadmakers strove to remedy these defects, and did what they could
to widen and straighten the way, and incidentally to abolish the
picturesqueness of the place; but those “vested interests” that are
a part of every civilisation forbade much alteration, and the road
still trickles and meanders through the town and divides into two
channels and unites again, like some sluggish, undecided river. It
is an infirmity of purpose that can be carried back to a very remote
origin: to the time, in fact, when Bromley was only beginning to be a
settlement amid the then widespreading wastes; when the prehistoric
tribesmen drove their herds across the broomy heaths to water at the
Ravensbourne, and tracked deviously to avoid boulders, trees, or boggy
places. These were the circumstances that fixed throughout the ages
the windings of Bromley’s streets. One somewhat important change was,
however, made under the Improvement Act of 1830. A new road was cut
to one side of the Market Place, starting just beyond the “Bell” and
ending just short of the “White Hart.”
The historian seeking something of the old coaching days at Bromley
pities himself. He finds the “Swan” very gay and attractive in summer
with displays of geraniums, calceolarias, and lobelia, but he does not
find the old house, and when he has found the “Bell,” in the centre of
the town, he has come to a very beautiful building; but it is modern.
The alleged fact that its doorway is on a level with the cross of
St. Paul’s Cathedral does not seem to have the significance it would
possess were the old house standing.
The old inn is the subject of a slight reference in Jane Austen’s
“Pride and Prejudice,” where she makes Lady Catherine say: “Where shall
you change horses? Oh, Bromley, of course. If you mention my name at
the ‘Bell’ you will be attended to.” The passage does not make my
pulses leap.
Only the “White Hart” remains; appropriately enough white-faced, cool
and clean-looking, with the white hart himself “couchant regardant,
collared or,” as a herald might say, over the portico. Unhappily,
gigantic modern red-brick buildings encompass the inn, rising to four
times the height of it, and presently the old house itself will
inevitably go.
Beyond this point is South Bromley, where the railway runs and modern
expansion is most evident. You descend to it, and having descended
immediately ascend again, up the not very Andean slope of Mason’s Hill.
At the time these lines are being written Mason’s Hill still remains
old-fashioned. A few of its dignified Queen Anne mansions, standing
with an old-world detachment behind their palisade of formal iron
railings, are left; but they are to be sold for clearance and
rebuilding, and so also are a group of ancient dormer-windowed
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century houses of a humbler type. They
have all the added importance that comes from being situated above a
footpath which itself is in places raised more than head and shoulders
above the road for wheeled traffic. Old wooden railings protect
children, boozy wayfarers, and sheer wool-gathering, star-gazing folk
from falling off the pavement into the hollow road.
[Illustration: THE ROAD ACROSS BROMLEY COMMON.]
Having wriggled its way through Bromley and climbed Mason’s Hill, the
Hastings Road sets out across Bromley Common, broad and straight and
forceful, in a splendid forthright manner, about its ultimate business
of getting to the coast. Most other roads show plentiful evidences
of having, like Topsy, grown; but this, you can see at a glance, was
obviously made. It occupies a ridge. Villas front upon it on leaving
the town behind: villas of every type since such things began to be,
and a leisurely walk past them is therefore something in the nature of
a generous education in the varying ideals in domestic architecture
since the days of the Regency.
But presently these are all left behind, and the fields on either side
of this modern road with an ancient Roman inflexibility are broken
only by the house and grounds of that most beautiful and noble early
eighteenth-century mansion, the Rookery, built of the most exquisite
red brick.
The Rookery belongs to a time before this fine road came into being:
to that time when travellers came painfully up the hill to that open
common much dwelt upon by old county historians. Opposite the mansion
in those days stood the two polled elms known from time immemorial as
Great and Little Beggars’ Bush, and known most unfavourably, for in the
shade cast by them at night not merely beggars, but those highwaymen of
the meaner sort called footpads, lurked.
Time has a sardonic trick of turning the matter-of-fact descriptions of
the old topographers into absurdly misleading statements. Thus, reading
Lysons’ description of Bromley, written in 1796, we smile at his
remarks that “the Anglo-Saxon _Brom-leag_ signifies a field, or heath,
where broom grows,” and that “the great quantity of that plant on all
the waste places near the town fully justifies this etymology.”
Bromley Common was in great part enclosed soon after the middle of
the eighteenth century, and most of the remaining two hundred and
fifty acres were cut up and partitioned in 1822, amid much local
satisfaction. With it went the broom near the town; although, to be
sure, it is still plentifully to be found on the further commons
towards Keston.
A piece of beautiful common-land through which the road runs at the
extremity of the parish is still called “Bromley Common.” Down below
it, in a hollow, is Lock’s Bottom, a hamlet whose pretty scenery
is rather vainly endeavouring to bear up, under the infliction of
some commonplace houses and a prominent police-station. There are
picturesque alders in front of the “White Lion,” but the blue lamp
of the police-station spoils the sentiment of it all. Why, you ask
yourself, _that_ in a place by way of being so pretty and so rural?
A few steps onward give the answer, in the great workhouse and the
casual-ward, and the expectant tramps reclining, more pictorially than
they know, by the pond under the tall fir-trees opposite.
XI
The road in the neighbourhood of Lock’s Bottom seems, in the old days,
to have been particularly dangerous. It ran, in the middle of the
seventeenth century and for long afterwards, through a wide district of
unenclosed common-land, and was just one of those lonely highways where
the footpads and highwaymen had matters very much their own way.
An unpleasant adventure of this sort happened just here, beside a
vanished landmark once known to wayfarers as the “Procession Oak,” to
John Evelyn, the diarist, on May 23rd, 1652.
Leaving his wife to take the waters at Tunbridge Wells, he set out on
horseback for London. In his “Diary” we learn what befell him on the
way:
“The weather being hot, and having sent my man on before me, I rode
negligently under favour of the shade till within three miles of
Bromley. At a place call’d the Procession Oake, two cut-throates
started out, and striking with long staves at the horse and taking
hold of the reines, threw me downe, took my sword, and haled me into
a deepe thickett some quarter of a mile from the highway, where they
might securely rob me, as they soone did. What they got of money was
not considerable, but they took two rings, the one an emerald with
diamonds, the other an onyx, and a pair of bouckles set with rubies and
diamonds, which were of value, and, after all, bound my hands behind
me, and my feete, having before pull’d off my bootes; they then set
me up against an oake, with most bloudy threats to cutt my throat if
I offer’d to crie out or make any noise, for they should be within
hearing, I not being the person they looked for. I told them, if they
had not basely surpriz’d me, they should not have had so easy a prize,
and that it would teach me never to ride neere an hedge, since had I
been in the mid-way they durst not have adventur’d on me; at which
they cock’d their pistols, and told me they had long guns too, and
were fourteen companions. I begg’d for my onyx, and told them it being
engraven with my armes would betray them, but nothing prevail’d. My
horse’s bridle they slipt, and search’d the saddle, which they pull’d
off, but let the horse graze, and then, turning againe, bridled him and
tied him to a tree, yet so as he might graze, and thus left me bound.
My horse was perhaps not taken because he was mark’d and cropt on both
eares, and well known on that roade.
“Left in this manner, grievously was I tormented with flies, ants, and
the sunn, nor was my anxiety little how I should get loose in that
solitary place, where I could neither heare nor see any creature but my
poore horse and a few sheepe stragling in the copse. After neere two
houres attempting, I got my hands to turn palm to palm, having been
tied back to back, and then it was long before I could slip the cord
over my wrists to my thumb, which at last I did, and then soone unbound
my feete, and saddling my horse and roaming awhile about, I at last
perceiv’d dust to rise, and soone after heard the rattling of a cart,
towards which I made, and by the help of two country men I got back
into the high way.
“I rode to Coll. Blount’s, a greate justiciarie of the times, who
sent out hue and cry immediately. The next morning, sore as my wrists
and armes were, I went to London and got 500 tickets printed and
dispers’d by an officer of Goldsmiths Hall, and within two daies had
tidings of all I had lost, except my sword, which had a silver hilt,
and some trifles. The rogues had pawn’d one of my rings for a trifle
to a goldsmith’s servant, before the tickets had come to the shop, by
which meanes they scap’d; the other ring was bought by a victualler,
who brought it to a goldsmith, but be, having seen the ticket, seiz’d
the man. I afterwards discharg’d him, on his protestation of innocence.
Thus,” he concludes, “did God deliver me from these villains, and
not onely so, but restor’d what they tooke, as twice before He had
graciously don, both at sea and land ... for which, and many, many
signal preservations, I am extreamely oblig’d to give thanks to God my
Saviour.”
This incident of impudent highway robbery in midday sufficiently
illustrates the general insecurity of the times and the risks that
travellers ran.
But let it not be thought that all highwaymen were brutal and lacking
in bowels of compassion. We know, from the stirring annals of Hounslow
Heath, that a Duval could act a courtly part when a lady was in the
case; and here records tell of a very perfect, gentle knight of the
road, who could be polite and considerate even to one of his own sex.
But hear what the London newspapers of 1773 said: “Last night Mr.
Delves, whalebone merchant, being taken ill at Hayes in Kent, and
coming to town in a postchaise, was stopped by a highwayman, who robbed
him of his money; but finding him greatly indisposed and not able to
help himself, civilly wrapped him up warm, wished him better health and
a good evening, gave the postboy a shilling, and ordered him to drive
gently on.” We do not find that he returned the money. He doubtless
thought it enough to rob with civility and to wish the invalid well
again.
XII
Beyond this, one comes in a mile to the casual, disjointed, and
scattered collection of houses called Farnborough, once a spruce and
busy “thoroughfare” hamlet in the days of coaching: now a rather seedy
place of resident market-gardeners and tramping hop-pickers. The old
“George and Dragon” inn, that in the Queen Annean sort faces you on
approach and, as it were, plants its considerable bulk half-way into
the road, as though to dare your passing, has been furbished up in the
public-house kind, and without difficulty stops the passage of most. It
has a portico with pillars painted and grained to resemble real marble;
but the veins are too preposterous, and the much more real compo
underneath peeps out, like the obvious advertisement in a badly written
puff.
If I were an amateur of ugly houses—which the Lord forbid—I would turn
to the right-hand here and make for Downe, which is two miles distant.
For there, by the pond of that pretty village, stands the hideous
mansion in which Darwin lived, and where, in 1882, he died of a chill
caught in prowling at night on the lawn with a dark lantern, studying
earthworms. A carpenter near by preserves the coffin, with inscription
all complete, in which the great naturalist was to have been laid (but
for some reason was not), and strangely morbid people, with gruesome
ideas of sight-seeing, go numerously to see it.
Keeping, however, to the main road and on to Green Street Green, we
cannot altogether avoid the ugly, which appears, very large and brutal,
in the Oak Brewery. I am told it is a famous brewing firm, but one
willingly forgets their name, and only knows that their buildings are
ugly and sooty, and look dry and make one feel thirsty. Perhaps there
is more in that than meets the eye.
Green Street Green really _has_ a green: a thing which in a world where
New College, Oxford, and the numerous Newports throughout the country
are among the oldest of institutions and places, and where villages
with the prefix “Great” are almost inevitably among the smallest, was
by no means to be counted upon as a certainty. And not only has Green
Street Green a green, but it is rather a large and a not unbeautiful
specimen. But perhaps its most striking feature is the extraordinary
number of old City of London cast-iron posts, indicating the boundaries
of the old Coal and Wine Dues area. It seems as though the City, having
delimited those bounds in a fifteen-miles radius from London, and come
at last, full circle, to Green Street Green, found itself with a
surplus stock of posts, and so set them up here, rather than be at the
trouble of taking them home again.
It was somewhere near here that, about 1783, a malefactor who had
robbed the mail was hanged in chains, upon the scene of his crime. A
house was formerly pointed out, with a window bricked up at that time
in order to shut out the view of the blackened body of the robber
swinging and circling on his gibbet.
Pratt’s Bottom, the next of the hamlets strung so numerously, like
beads, upon this portion of the Hastings Road, is a mile and a half
ahead.