Dukes, who lived up to their strawberry-leaves, and had a ducal way
with them; were dukes first and men a very long way after. There are
none such now. The mould is broken, the recipe forgotten, the pattern
mislaid. How sad! That must be a degenerate age whose dukes are so
uncharacteristic of their order; whose aldermen, who macerate on
charcoal biscuits, are lean dyspeptics, talk art criticism, and shudder
at the idea of a banquet; who are no longer those rotund, well-larded
figures of convention that drank incredible quantities of fruity port
and turtle-soup. That must be an effete generation whose new-rich no
longer strew their way with dropped aitches; whose paupers, instead of
skilly, dine royally off the best joints, and eat the finest bread,
and when they ask for more—get it. In short, your typical pauper,
millionaire, alderman, or duke no longer exists in real life. Even the
novelists have learned their lesson and know better. Only on the stage
shall you find those outmoded figures still strutting, and even _there_
they are on their last legs. The stage is the last ditch of convention;
but the time is at hand when some dramatist will give us a stout and
haughty workhouse inmate, a humble and cringing duke, and an alderman
virtuoso; and he will be quite as loudly hailed for an emancipator as
ever was Robertson.
The Dukes of Dorset lived up to the fine alliteration of their title,
and when that became impossible, they died out, like the oxyrhincus
and the mastodon, who could not survive their environment. There
is scarce a modern duke who, in the spectacular way, is worthy his
title. Some are bored men and commonplace; most of them “splendidly
null,” as Tennyson might say. I know an undersized duke with a limp
and a falsetto voice, who takes photographs with a hand-camera and an
apologetic manner; and another with the appearance and carriage of an
unsuccessful commercial traveller. They would be ashamed to be ducal in
their behaviour; and it is quite certain that their forbears would be
ashamed of them.
To view Knole intimately is not given to the many. What are seventeen
rooms out of three hundred and sixty-five, even though they be rooms of
State! In fact it is rather in the more ordinary rooms, if any of those
at Knole can so be styled, that you read its everyday story of old.
After all, the Lords of Knole were not always entertaining kings and
great nobles. Sometimes they had a “day off,” no less than the British
workman of this era of ours, and then they were a thought more easy and
less splendid, and occupied the second-best rooms, just as the ordinary
Briton of to-day does, when he is not wanting to “show off.”
I am afraid we all want to impress the visitor with a magnificence
that is not kept up when he is gone. The lower-class parlour, the
drawing-room of the upper strata, are the superstitions not only
of to-day, or of one or two classes. They probably go back to the
beginning of things, when even Prehistoric Man had his ordinary cave to
live in and his extraordinary, in which his wife “received.”
[Illustration: THE SOUTH FRONT, KNOLE.
_Photo by C. Essenhigh Corke & Co._]
There are thus whole suites of ancient rooms at Knole, now silent
and deserted; and overhead, above the long galleries of stately
magnificence, are interminable attics, called “wardrobes,” not
because of being storerooms of clothes, old or new; but presumably
the playrooms of the boys and lads of good family who, after the old
English custom, were sent to Knole under wardship of the noble owners,
to learn the usages of good society and the duties of chivalrous
knights. In short, Knole, and every other castle or stately
mansion, was, as it were, a training-college, a seminary of deportment
and knightly devoirs; and in them one learned that good form whose
inculcation is supposed to be the only value of Oxford and Cambridge at
this day.
[Illustration: THE “DUMB BELL.”]
An odd surviving relic of Knole as a College of Good Manners is the
curious contrivance known as the “Dumb Bell,” in that one of these
wardrobes styled the “Dumb Bell Gallery.” It very closely resembles
the windlass seen over old country wells, with a roller on which is
wound a rope that descends through a hole cut in the floor, into
the billiard-room. The arms projecting from the roller are iron,
tipped with lead. This machine, which appears to date back to about
the beginning of the seventeenth century, is thought to have been
in the nature of a “home exerciser,” and to have been suggested by
the bell-ropes and the exercise of bell-ringing in church towers.
Here, however, the athlete could bring up his muscles without being a
nuisance to every one within earshot. From this originated the name
of those very different objects, used however for the same purpose of
exercising—the modern “dumb-bells.”
XXI
And so, farewell Knole, mausoleum of a departed condition of things,
treasure-house of art and tradition, puppet-show for the summer throng.
One looks for it, topping the sky-line, expectantly, and leaves it with
regret; unlike those two tramps seen and heard on this very road by the
present writer. One of them listlessly noticed its towers and gables.
“Wot’s thet?” he asked his mate: not that he was interested, but for
the sake of something to say. How can you be interested in anything
when you are footsore but your feet?
“Corsel,” replied the other, shortly; “_carm_ on.” But he need not
have bidden his fellow “come on,” for he had not given the “castle”
another glance, and had never halted a moment.
[Illustration: THE SEVEN OAKS.]
The road descending steeply from Sevenoaks and having Knole Park on its
left is the coaching highway, improved upon the ancient road. It is
steep now, but how much steeper, how rugged and how narrow may be seen
towards the bottom of the dip, where a little gate admits through the
oaken palings of the park, and leads down a hollow lane whose banks are
thickly set with ancient thorns and other trees. It is, or was before
the embanked road was made, known locally by the names of “Shangden,”
“Shand End,” or “Chene Dene,” in delightful incertitude.
_This_ is the original road, preserved for the last seventy years or
so in the bottom, where the modern highway was slightly deviated and
constructed at a higher level. It is a surviving portion of that road
Archbishop Islip, travelling horseback to Tonbridge in 1362, found so
extremely bad. He struggled persistently, but at last fell from his
horse and became “wet through all over.” In that pitiable condition he
mounted again and rode on, without any change of clothes, and so was
seized with paralysis.
An archway under the modern road, seen even more distinctly from
a bye-road branching off to the right, was made for the especial
purpose of maintaining unbroken the old line of an even more ancient
cross-road—a pack-horse way—which crossed the old road from Sevenoaks
to Tonbridge in the hollow, at right angles. The arch, however, has
long been blocked up with timbering, and the pack-horse route is
scarcely discernible in the park and the meadows.
Coming to the next rise, crowned by the “White Hart” inn, a line of
seven trees is seen in the hedgerow on the right hand. These are the
comparatively modern seven oaks planted at some uncertain time to
commemorate those that are supposed to have originated the name of the
neighbouring town. There is considerable difference in the size of
the trees, and it is thus to be presumed that some of the seven were,
from some cause or other, destroyed, and replaced later. The oldest
may date back two centuries, the others sixty years or so later. No
information exists as to who planted them, or when; even the site of
the old original seven oaks that gave the town of Sevenoaks its name,
away back in the dark ages, is unknown.
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HART” INN.]
This is the summit of River Hill: a place which figures in an early
sixteenth-century trust-fund that offers some entertaining history.
XXII
The road to Hastings, or to Rye, was the beneficiary of a bequest left
in 1526 by James Wilford, a successor of those “pious benefactors” who
from the earliest times, for the good of their souls less than for love
of their kind, had been wont to repair highways, build bridges and
causeways, and perform the like services, either by direct gifts or
through the intermediary of the Church.
Of the practical piety of James Wilford I think there can be little
doubt. In the times when he lived, Reformation was in the air.
The religious houses were moribund, and had Henry the Eighth not
disestablished and suppressed them, another would have done so. People
rather scoffed at the idea of purchasing salvation by bequests, just as
you in modern times insure against fire. Wilford, therefore, in that
he does not appear to have left his money with any ulterior object of
saving his soul, was really more pious than he knew, and perhaps saved
it the more certainly. Let us trust he is enjoying the full credit of
his good deed.
This public benefactor, a “rippier” of Rye, and said to have been an
alderman of London, in his will of 1526 stated that he had actually
_made_ the road from River Hill to Northiam church, a length of some
twenty-six miles; and for the perpetual repair of the ruinous parts
he left an annuity of £7, charged upon the “Saracen’s Head,” Friday
Street, Cheapside, belonging to the Merchant Taylors’ Company.
There had been sufficient reasons in his lifetime for him to make or
amend this road; for by the term “rippier” a fish-carrier was meant,
and James Wilford would appear to constantly have travelled it in
his business of supplying London with fish, carried on horseback
in panniers. That it should have been possible to convey fish this
distance in the early part of the sixteenth century so expeditiously
that it arrived in good condition is a somewhat striking testimony to
the enterprise of an age commonly thought to have been ignorant of
speedy communications.
The Merchant Taylors were by the terms of this will to pay the
£7 annually to the executors and relatives bearing the name of
Wilford, and after their death were to make payment to the vicar and
churchwardens of Rye. In the event of those authorities neglecting
their duty of applying the money for the benefit of the road, the
annuity was to be paid to the vicar and churchwardens of Northiam; and,
should they default, was then to devolve upon Newenden.
These cautious provisions seem to have been prophetic, for Rye _did_
actually at some uncertain time lose the money, which was then received
by Northiam until Midsummer, 1799, when, from some dereliction of
duty, it passed, as directed, to Newenden. Disputes then appear to
have arisen, for in 1804 the Merchant Taylors, not quite sure of their
position, refused any longer to pay the amount until a legal decision
was arrived at. The whole matter then remained in abeyance, as probably
being too small a sum to worry about, until 1819. By that time the
twenty years’ accumulation was worth having, and the inhabitants of
Rye, Northiam, and Newenden accordingly joined forces and petitioned
the Merchant Taylors, praying them to disburse the money to Rye, which
was done, the vicar and churchwardens of that town in turn handing it
over to the commissioners of the turnpike road from Flimwell to Rye.
The sum of £140 was then paid over, from which the Land Tax authorities
sweated £28, twenty years’ land-tax, at 28_s._ a year.
Flimwell is the point where the road to Rye branches from the Hastings
Road. Nineteen and a half miles of road, therefore, appear by this
decision to have been cut off from these small mercies.
The trifling sum now trickles into the revenue of the Kent County
Council.
River Hill was once—in the days of inefficient brake-power—a terror
to cyclists. A terror with reason, for it is three-quarters of a mile
long, and not straight; and it has notoriously been the scene of many
accidents at the two sharp turns in its course—one left and one right.
A joint C.T.C. and N.C.U. danger-board at the beginning is supplemented
by the notice that it is unrideable without a brake; but that is as
may be. When the first chapter of cycling was being enacted, an early
wheelman rode it, quite inadvertently, and lived to tell the tale, in
picturesque fashion.
In the ancient days of cycling, when it had not long ceased to he
“velocipeding” and was still in the intermediate stage of “bicycling,”
this greatly daring person decided to ride from Greenwich to
Burwash—some fifty miles—on what was then, with the most exquisite
appropriateness, called a “bone-shaker.” It was so unusual and
adventurous a thing to do that he wrote an account of it, and it duly
appears in the records of that time. He thought how splendid a thing
it would be to run hundreds of miles about the country at “a speed of
from ten to fourteen miles an hour,” as in the advertisements, and so
purchased what he thought to be a very camelopard of a machine, with
45-in. wheels.
In two days he had so mastered this fearsome contrivance that he
decided to start, and did so, in the evening. He had not gone more than
a mile or two when he met a butcher standing in the middle of the road,
who continued to stand there until he was run into, when both were
upset. The bicyclist was pitched over the handles and cut his knee, and
the butcher abused him until the cyclist—I mean the bicyclist—showed
fight, when he made off.
By the time this early wheelman had reached Bromley he was
almost exhausted, and realised that he, at any rate, was not a
fourteen-mile-an-hour rider. There was also, he discovered, an
undue proportion of hills to be climbed—a discovery still being
re-discovered daily by thousands of his descendants in straddling two
wheels.
[Illustration: RIVER HILL AND THE KENTISH WEALD]
At Bromley he rested and refreshed; and again, at 9 p.m. at Sevenoaks,
where his exertions had given him such an appetite that, when he
had finished discussing the cold beef, he dared not look at the
waiter. At River Hill—even in these days to be descended with extra
caution—the rough road broke his primitive brake, and then at last—oh,
happiness!—he found himself going fourteen miles an hour—and a bit
over. There was no stopping, and the only thing to be done was to
keep in the middle of the road, continually shouting, and in the hope
nothing was in the way. Not even nowadays would a cyclist care to
descend River Hill in this manner, in the dark, brakeless; but this
adventurous one found the level, and, passing through Tunbridge Wells,
at last reached his destination with only an incidental attack upon him
by a foxhound on the way.
The view from River Hill is delightful, ranging across the wooded
valley of the Medway to the heights where Tunbridge Wells is situated.
So wooded is it that even Tonbridge itself, near at hand, is invisible,
and the little village of Hildenborough—with scarcely more houses to it
than there are letters in its name—might be non-existent.
A green, smiling woodland vale: just that. Not a profound, romantic
depth, but a widespread, all-embracing view of meadows, corn-fields,
parks, and hop-gardens: suave, well-ordered, appealing even more to the
farmer than to the landscape-painter. Such is the Weald of Kent. Remote
from the vulgar herd, who—
“Gawblimee!”
“What was that? Hark! there it is again.”
“’Strewth! ’Fyaint leff me blooming pipe beyine.”
“Leavyer bloomined beyine nex’ time, fatted.”
“Garn, fatted yer bloomin’ self.”
Hop-pickers, tramping and quarrelling their way down to the Kentish
hop-gardens. And not always quarrelling, for their moods are even
as those of an April day, wherein sunshine and clouds are for ever
alternating. Listen to them as they go “piping down the valley wild,
singing songs of pleasant glee”:
Skoylork, skoylork, upin ther skoy so oi,
If ermong ther aingils muvver you should see,
Awsk ‘er if she’ll come dahn agine
To pussy, daddy, an’ me.
Here are your true sentimentalists.
At the foot of the hill lies Hildenborough, a tiny hamlet with a modern
church, until comparatively recent years figuring merely as Hilden, or
Hilden Green. The meaning of “Hilden” is obvious here. It is simply
descriptive of the situation of the place: in the dene, or valley,
beneath River Hill.
Borough, as commonly understood, is a ridiculous misnomer in this
place, but it appears to have been brought into use as some way of
indicating the existence here of a manor separate from, and independent
of, Tonbridge, whose suburban houses now begin to mingle with it.
XXIII
The town of Tonbridge lies in the valley of the Medway, and the river
itself runs through what is now the centre of the borough. Originally,
however, the town was situated on the north bank only; and all that
portion—now an intimate part of the place—over the bridge was in the
open country.
There are but two bridges across the Medway nowadays, one large and
one other very small; but in the early days of Tonbridge there were
no fewer than five, for if you look at the maps you will perceive the
Medway spreading out from Yalding into five tributaries, like the
fingers of your hand, over the two miles’ breadth of flat country
between River Hill and the foothills of Hildenborough and the heights
of Somerhill and Quarry Hill, on the way to Tunbridge Wells.
According to some authorities, it was to these bridges that Tonbridge
owed its name, but it seems probable that those channels were not
bridged, but were merely fords, at the time when the town was baptized;
and we must seek for the origin of the name rather in “Ton-burig”—the
great Saxon “burh” or artificial mound on which the keep of Tonbridge
Castle stood from the earliest times, guarding the passage of the
river. Thus the place-name should properly have become “Tonbury,” but
the bridges in the meanwhile got themselves built and, becoming the
most striking feature of the place, crept illegitimately, at a very
early period, into the name of it. In this way we find “Tonebridge”
mentioned in 1088, and afterwards meet such variants as “Tunebricgia,”
“Tunebregge,” “Tunebrugge,” and “Tonebryge.”
Mediæval Tonbridge was a walled town and moated, both as to town in
general and castle in particular. It was, accordingly, in its own
special way, as strongly defensible as though situated on some craggy
height. You could not come into it save by water, and not then except
by favour and permission of those who guarded the gates.
[Illustration: TONBRIDGE CASTLE.]
This stronghold was successively the lordship of the Fitz Gilberts,
the great Earls of Clare, the Earls of Gloucester, and the Staffords
and Dukes of Buckingham: all of whom were, in respect of it, chief
butlers and stewards of his Grace the Right Reverend Father in God, the
Archbishop of Canterbury for the time being. Of those prelates they
held the place by the grand sergeantry of serving in those capacities
at the enthronisation of their Graces.
Those great earls left nothing to chance. They not only walled and
embattled their town, and moated it, but on the prehistoric mound by
the river they reared a keep and around it built a high wall with
towers, and moated that as well. This was their castle; and although
the ditches they dug are dried up and filled in, and the walls are for
the most part gone, there yet remains the great Gateway of their hold
to tell us something of its strength. It is a most worshipful Gateway:
strong and tall and massive, so that one cannot, in naming it, do else
than give it a capital G. There is scarce a more impressive Gateway in
England. It was built somewhere about 1290, in the reign of Edward the
First, as the architecture of its great drum-towers shows, and was the
last word in massive fortification of that time: the walls ten feet
thick and fifty-three feet high, the gloomy entrance arch ribbed with
immense ribs of stone, the outer face of the towers relieved only by
narrow slits for arrows. The workmanship was superb, and although more
than six hundred years have passed since these stones were wrought so
well and jointed so neatly, they remain perfect to this day.
There are dungeons in those towers; there is a hidden watergate to the
river; there is, in fact, every circumstance of romance. Little wonder
that in their Castle the lords of Tonbridge felt sometimes defiant.
There was, indeed, one lord, Roger de Clare, who, even before this grim
Gateway was built, and before his position could be so secure, felt
strong enough to defy his liege, to defy even the great Archbishop,
Thomas à Becket himself, and to treat his messenger with contempt.
His Grace’s pursuivant came with archiepiscopal parchments, formidably
engrossed and alarmingly sealed, but what did that haughty castellan
do? He made the unhappy man _eat_ the documents, “especially,” we are
told, “the seals.” Well for that miserable man that he came merely from
the Archbishop, and not with deeds from the King, given under the Great
Seal! He survived the light repast, but he could scarce have stomached
such a banquet as that would have made.
It would be an unprofitable exercise to trace the ownership of the
Castle through the centuries; “suffice it to say,” as the Early
Victorian novelists were wont to remark—that it came in course of
time to one John Hooker. In 1797, that worthy demolished most of it,
and with the materials thus obtained built the curious house that now
adjoins the Gateway, which he probably would have destroyed as well,
but that the work would have been very costly.
Later, the house was a school, to which period, doubtless, the bust of
the anonymous tutelary genius over the porch belongs. Quite recently,
the Castle has been acquired by the town, and in the beautiful
gardens there are flower-shows, and, I believe, even a band-stand and
penny-in-the-slot machines.
From the Castle the pilgrim naturally seeks the church, expecting to
see many and stately memorials of those ancient lords. But he will find
no trace of them. At some remote period, even before the church was
“thoroughly restored” in 1870, improving besoms came and swept them out
of existence. We may well pause here and consider with what astonishing
completeness things venerable have vanished from Tonbridge. There was
once, for example, south of the town, the Augustinian Priory founded by
the de Clares. Wolsey seized its revenues and squelched it, on behalf
of his proposed “Cardinal College” at Oxford, and the last few remains
were abolished in 1839, when the South Eastern Railway came. The
goods-station stands on the site.
Tonbridge church is disappointing, and it is not improved by the large
churchyard, filled with dense files of tombstones, around it. They are
so many that it is impossible to verify the existence of the scandalous
epitaph alleged to be there, on a drunkard:
Hail!
This stone marks the spot
Where a notorious sot
Doth lie;
Whether at rest or not
It matters not
To you or I.
Oft to the “Lion” he went, to fill his horn,
Now to the grave he’s gone, to get it warm.
_Beered by public subscription by his hail and stout companions, who
deeply lament his absence._
The presumption is that it is a sheer invention, like a very large
proportion of such things printed in collections of epitaphs.
XXIV
[Illustration: THE “CHEQUERS,” TONBRIDGE.]
The general impression of Tonbridge (which elects to spell its “ton”
with an “o,” in contradistinction from the “u” of Tunbridge Wells)
is one of meanness and squalor. There is the fine Grammar School at
the entrance to it, and handsome estates surround the town, but that
impression lasts, and seems rather to be intensified by the gradual
widening of the High Street and the replacing of the picturesque old
houses by flashy modern buildings. That highly sketchable old inn, the
“Chequers,” remains, and so does the so-styled “Old Ivy House,” or “Old
Toll House,” in East Street, a fine gabled timber-and-plaster building
of the fifteenth century, where the Portreeve’s duties, or tolls on
cattle and goods entering the town, were paid.
Very observant persons, too, may notice the queer weathervane over
the old shop of a firm of furnishing ironmongers, representing an
old-fashioned sportsman out with his dog, partridge-shooting. I will
not swear it is partridge; it may be grouse, or perhaps even pigeon;
but any one will declare it is not a pheasant.
[Illustration: A SPORTING WEATHER-VANE.]
The way out of Tonbridge lies over the railway bridge, past the
station, where the banging of trucks and the screaming of whistles
are continuous, and South-Eastern trains are, like practical jokers,
for ever pretending to go off, just to flurry and excite nervous
passengers, and then coming back and casually shunting up and down the
sidings when they ought to be miles distant on their journeys; so while
away the hours.
Contemplative persons will notice with delight as they pass that the
lamp over the station door says “Railway-station.” It is a lesson in
the obvious, information for the already fully informed, as little
needed as a label on the parish church.