Part 6

The traveller along the highroad has left Broxbourne behind before he has quite discovered he has reached it, and comes into Hoddesdon unawares. Broxbourne, where the "brocks," or badgers, were once plentiful enough to give a name to the little stream running into the Lea, is indeed a much more shy and retiring place than those who on Saturdays, Sundays, and Mondays visit the tea-gardens aforesaid have any idea of. This is by way of a testimonial. Hoddesdon, too, which to be sure is not a tiny village like Broxbourne, but quite a little town, is altogether delightful. It has not been modernised, and its inhabitants still obtain their water in pailsful from the public pump in the middle of the broad street, which remains much as it was when the Cambridge "Telegraph" came through, and when the Newmarket and Bishop Stortford traffic branched off to the right in the midst. To this day most of its old inns remain, clustering round the fork of the roads: the Bull, its gabled porch and projecting sign quickening the traveller's pace as he sees it afar; the Salisbury Arms, the Maiden's Head, the Swan.

The Bull is a famous house, finding, as it does, a mention in Prior's "Down Hall." It was in 1715 that Matthew Prior, one of the most notable poets of his day, and sometime Ambassador at the Court of Versailles, travelled this road to Down Hall, near Hatfield Broadoak. His "chariot" halted at the Bull, as he tells us--

"Into an old inn did this equipage roll, At a town they call Hodsdon, the sign of the Bull, Near a nymph with an urn that divides the highway, And into a puddle throws mother of tea."

Nymph and urn and puddle are gone long since, and where they were placed there stands at this day the ugly modern building that Hoddesdon folk call the "Clock House": really a fire-engine house with a clock-tower; the tower surmounted by a weather-vane oddly conjoining the characteristics of a fiddler, a sagittarius, and a dolphin. Inquiry fails to discover what it symbolises. Before ever the nymph or the present building occupied this site, there stood here the wayside chapel of St. Catherine, whose ancient bell hangs in the clock-tower.

Prior writes as though the Bull had long been familiar to him, but his intimate touches of the life and character of an inn came, doubtless, from his own youthful observation; for his uncle had been landlord of the Rummer at Charing Cross, where as a boy he had been a waiter and general help. Doubtless he had heard many an old frequenter of the Rummer put questions similar to these he asks:--

"'Come here, my sweet landlady! how do you do? Where's Cic'ly so cleanly, and Prudence, and Sue? And where is the widow that lived here below? And the other that sang, about eight years ago? And where is your sister, so mild and so dear, Whose voice to her maids like a trumpet was clear?'

'By my troth,' she replies, 'you grow younger, I think. And pray, sir, what wine does the gentleman drink? But now, let me die, sir, or live upon trust, If I know to which question to answer you first, For things since I saw you most strangely have varied-- The ostler is hanged, and the widow is married;

And Prue left a child for the parish to nurse; And Cic'ly went off with a gentleman's purse; And as to my sister, so mild and so dear, She has lain in the churchyard full many a year.'"

What a sorry catalogue of changes and disasters!

A mile or more distant, along the Bishop Stortford road, is the gatehouse of the famous Rye House, its clustered red-brick chimneys and thick walls still left to remind the historically-minded of that Rye House Plot of 1681 which was to have ended Charles the Second, and his brother, the Duke of York, on their way past from Newmarket to London. Although the Bishop Stortford road does not concern us, the house is alluded to in these pages because it now contains that notorious piece of furniture, the Great Bed of Ware.

Hoddesdon gives place to Amwell, steeply downhill. The village is properly "Great Amwell," but no one who knows his Lamb would think of calling it so, although there is a "Little Amwell" close at hand. To the Lambs it was just "Amwell," and that is sufficient for us. Moreover, like so many places named "Great," it is now really very small. It is, however, exceedingly beautiful, with that peculiarly park-like beauty characteristic of Hertfordshire. The old church, also of the characteristically Hertfordshire type, stands, charmingly embowered amid trees, on a bank overlooking the smoothly-gliding stream of the New River, new-born from its source in the Chadwell Spring, and hurrying along on its beneficent mission toward the smoke and fog of London. Two islands divide the stream; one of them containing a monument to Sir Hugh Myddelton, and a stone with lines from Scott, the "Quaker poet of Amwell," commencing--

"Amwell, perpetual be thy stream, Nor e'er thy spring be less."

An aspiration which, let us hope, will be fulfilled.

XIV

ALTHOUGH to hurry past spots so interesting and so beautiful looks much like the act of a Vandal, our business is with the road, and linger we must not; and so, downhill again, by the woods of Charley--or "Charl-eye" as the country folk insist on calling them--we come to a vantage-point overlooking Ware; an old town of many maltings, of the famous Bed aforesaid, and of Johnny Gilpin's ride. Fortunate are those who come thus in view of Ware upon some still golden afternoon of summer, when the chimes from the old church-tower are spelling out the notes of that sentimental old song, "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms." Time and tune conspire to render Ware romantic.

The town takes its name from the weir or dam built across the Lea by invading Danes in the year 896. Coming up the Lea in a great flotilla of what historians call ships, more correctly perhaps to be named sailing-barges, they halted here, and, designing a fort beside the dam they built, imagined themselves secure. Around them in the Lea valley between Ware and Hertford stretched the great lake their dam had created, and all King Alfred's men could not by force dislodge them.

Can you not find it possible to imagine that great King--that King truly great in counsels both of war and peace, that contriver and man of his hands--on these Amwell heights and looking down upon that Danish fortress and its ceinture of still water, with twice a hundred prows lying there, proudly secure? Truly, despite the dark incertitude of history on these doings, we may clearly see that monarch. He knits his brows and looks upon the country spread out beneath him: just as you may look down to-day upon the valley where the Lea and the railway run, side by side. He--we have said it with meaning--is a contriver; has brains of some quality beneath that brow; will not waste his men in making glorious but wasteful attacks upon the foe: they shall work--so he wills it--not merely fight; or, working, fight the better for King and Country. Accordingly, his army is set to digging a great channel down this selfsame valley; a channel whose purport those Danes, lying there, do by no means comprehend; nor, I think, many even in this host of the great Alfred himself; for the spy has ever watched upon the doings of armies, and he who keeps his own counsel is always justified of his reticence.

This great ditch, then, excavated over against the camp and harbour of the sea-rovers, is therefore inexplicable, and doubtless the subject of much jest among the enemy: jesting that dies away presently, when, the excavation completed, it is found to touch the river above and below the weir, and indeed to be designed to drain away the Lea from its old channel and so steal away those cherished water-defences.

With what rejoicings Alfred turned the stream into this artificial course we know not, nor anything of the Saxon advance when the old channel ran dry and the Danish war-fleet presently lay stranded; the black hulls canted in all manner of ridiculous and ineffective angles; the sails with the cognisance of the raven on them flapping a farewell to the element they were to know no more. Only this we know, that the Danish host were forced to fly across the country to Cambridge and the fens; those unfailing resorts of fugitives in the long ago.

Alfred probably burnt the deserted fleet; but there may yet lie, somewhere in this pleasant valley between Hertford and Ware, deep down in immemorial ooze and silt, the remains of those hapless craft.

Ware, seen from a distance, is a place of singular picturesqueness; its Dutch-like mass of mellow red roofs endowed with a skyline whose fantastic appearance is due to the clustered cowls of the fourscore malthouses that give the old town a highly individual character. Here, as elsewhere, the sunset hour touches the scene to an unearthly beauty: only here those slanting cowls assume the last note of melodramatic significance, to which, ordinarily, in the broad eye of day, they are by no means entitled; being just so many ventilators to buildings in whose dark recesses is carried on the merely commercial work of drying the malt of which it is fondly assumed our beer is made.

The town, when you come to it, resolves itself into zigzag streets, coal-dust, and bargees. It is a very back-door kind of entrance you find, coming downhill, past a railway goods-yard and a smelly waterside with wharves and litter, where solemn horses stolidly drag barges and railway-trucks, and modern Izaak Waltons, sublime in faith, diligently "fysshe with an angle," with ill results. What they seek, these hapless sportsmen, is known only to themselves. Is it the festive tiddler, dear to infantile fisherfolk, or do they whip the water for the lordly trout, the ferocious pike, the grey mullet, or the carp? I know not; but what they find is the Old Boot, the discarded hat, the derelict gamp; in short, the miscellaneous floatable refuse of Hertford. To see one of these brothers of the angle carefully playing what ultimately discloses itself as a ragged umbrella affords one of the choicest five minutes that life has to offer.

Crossing an iron bridge over this fishful stream, you are in Ware. To the left stands the old Saracen's Head, now a little out of date and dreamy, for it is the veritable house where the principal coaches changed horses, and it has remained outwardly the same ever since. Here it was that the Great Bed of Ware stood for many years, conferring fame upon the town until 1869, when it was spirited away to the Rye House, there to be made a show of.

He who would correctly rede the riddle of the Great Bed would be a clever man, for its history is so confounded with legend that to say where the one begins and the other ends is now impossible. The Bed is a huge four-poster of black oak, elaborately carved with Renaissance designs, and is now twelve feet square, having been shorn of three feet of its length by a former landlord of the Saracen's Head. The date, 1463, painted on the head is an ancient and impudent forgery intended to give verisimilitude to the legend of this monumental structure's origin. This story tells how it was the work of one Jonas Fosbrooke, a journeyman carpenter, who presented it to Edward the Fourth "for the use of the royal family or the accommodation of princes, or nobles, or for any great occasion." The King, we are told, was highly pleased with this co-operative bedstead, and pensioned the ingenious Fosbrooke for life; but history, curiously, fails to tell us of royal or any other families herding together in this way. The legend then goes on to tell how, not having been used for many years by any noble persons, it was put to use when the town was very full of strangers. These unfortunate plebeian persons found it anything but a bed of roses, for they were tormented throughout the night by the snobbish and indignant ghost of Jonas, who objected to anyone beneath the rank of a knight-bachelor sleeping in his bed, and savagely pinched all who could not claim gentility. This weird ghost-story was probably invented by the landlords of the several inns in which the Bed has been housed to account for a vigorous and hungry race of fleas that inhabited the old four-poster, and must have been originated at a very early date, for on it hangs the story of Harrison Saxby, Master of Horse to Henry the Eighth. Saxby fell violently in love with the daughter of a miller near Ware, and swore he would do anything to win her from her many other suitors. The King, passing through the town, heard of this and promised to give her (those were autocratic times!) to him who should sleep in the Great Bed, and, daring all that the ferocious apparition of Fosbrooke could do, should be found there in the morning. All save the valorous Saxby held back, but he determined that no disembodied spirit should come between him and his love, and, duly tucked in, was left to sleep--no, not to sleep, for the powers of darkness were exalted to considerable purpose in the night, and when day dawned the rash Saxby was discovered on the floor, covered with bruises. If we seek rather the practical joker than the supernatural visitant to poor Saxby, we shall probably be on the right quest.

The Great Bed was not always housed at the Saracen's Head. Coming originally from Ware Priory, it was next at the Crown, where it remained until that old house was pulled down, in 1765, being in turn transferred to the Bull.

Ware was always a place of great traffic in the long ago. Railways have altered all that, and it is now a gracious old town, extraordinarily rich in the antique entries of ancient hostelries disappeared so long since that their very signs are forgot. As you go along its High Street there are between twenty and thirty of these arched entries countable, most of them relics of that crowded era of road-faring when Ware was a thoroughfare town at the end of a day's journey from London on the main road to the North. It was, in the words of an Elizabethan poet, "the guested town of Ware," and so remained for centuries, even when day's journeys grew longer and longer, and until the road became an obsolete institution. Some of these entries, on the other hand, always were, and others early became, features in the warehouse premises of the old maltsters, for Ware has ever been a place dedicated to the service of John Barleycorn.

Long centuries ago, ere railways were dreamt of, this was the great warehousing place of the malt from five neighbouring counties. It came in vast quantities by road and by river from up country, and was stored here, over against the demands of the London brewers; being sent to town chiefly by the river Lea. The Lea and its ready passage to London built up this distinctive trade of Ware: the railway destroyed it, and the maltsters' trade exists here nowadays only because it always has been here and because to utterly kill its local habitation would be perhaps impossible. But it is carried on with a difference, and malt is not so much brought and warehoused here as made on the spot. Many of the old houses in which the old-established maltsters reside, adjoining their own warehouses, in the good old style absolutely obsolete in other places, are of early eighteenth century date, and rich in exquisite moulded plaster ceilings and carved oak panelling. One at least dates back to 1625, and is nothing less in appearance than the home of an old prince of commerce.

To have an opportunity of inspecting this is a privilege not lightly to be valued. On one side of the entry, and over the archway, is the residence, and on the other the old-world counting-house, with a narrow roadway between for the waggons to and from the maltings at the farther end. The maltings themselves are rebuilt and fitted with modern appliances, but they strike the only note out of key with the general harmony of the place, and, even so, they are not altogether unpleasing, for they are earnest of trade still brisk and healthy, in direct descent from days of old. Beyond the maltings are old walled gardens where peaches ripen, and velvet lawns and queer pavilions overhanging the river Lea: the whole, from the entry in the High Street, down the long perspective to the river, embowered in flowers.

For the rest, Ware commands much interest, not greatly to be enlarged upon here. The church-tower, rising nobly above the roof-tops of the town, amid a thickly clustered group of oast-house cowls, the interior of the building, noble beyond the common run; the so-called "John Gilpin's House"; the river scenery up the delightful valley to Hertford: all these things are to be seen and not adequately written about in this place.

XV

UPHILL goes the road out of Ware, passing the Royston Crow Inn and some old cottages on the outskirts. The two miles between this and Wade's Mill form the dividing-line between the valleys of the Lea and the Rib, and consequently the way, after climbing upwards, has to go steeply down again. The Sow and Pigs is the unusual name of an inn standing on the crest of the hill before descending into Wade's Mill. Who was Wade of the mill that stands to this day in the hollow where the little stream called the Rib runs beneath the highway? History, imperial, national, or parochial, has nothing to tell us on this head. Perhaps--nay, probably--there never was a Wade, a person so-named; the original mill, and now the hamlet that clusters in the bottom, taking its name from the ford--the ford, or water-splash, or "wade"--that was here before ever a bridge was built. The parish of St. Nicholas-at-Wade, beside the channel that formerly divided the Isle of Thanet from Kent, obtained its name from the ford at that point, and in like manner derives the name of Iwade, overlooking the King's Ferry entrance to Sheppey.

The hamlet of Wade's Mill is a product of the coaching age. Before folks travelled in any large numbers there stood only the mill in the hollow; but, as road-faring progressed, there at length rose the Feathers Inn beside the way, and by degrees a dozen or so cottages to keep it company. Here they are still; standing, all of them, in the parish of Thundridge, whose old church, a mile distant, is now in ruins. The new church is built on the height overlooking Wade's Mill, and may be noticed in the illustration on the following page.

Steeply rising goes the road out of this sleepy hollow; passing, when half-way up the hill, a mean little stone obelisk perched on a grassy bank. This is a memorial to Thomas Clarkson, a native of Wisbeach, and marks the spot where in his youth he knelt down and vowed to dedicate his life to the abolition of the slave trade. It was placed here in 1879 by Arthur Giles Puller, of Youngsbury, in the neighbourhood. Clarkson was born in 1760, the son of the Rev. John Clarkson, Headmaster of Wisbeach Free Grammar School. He graduated at Cambridge in 1783, and two years later gained the first prize in the Latin Essay competition on the subject of "Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African." This success finally fixed his choice of a career, and he forthwith set afoot an agitation against the slave trade. In an introduction to the wealthy William Wilberforce, he succeeded in enlisting the support of that philanthropist, to whom the credit of abolishing the nefarious traffic is generally given. A Committee was formed to obtain the passing of an Abolition Bill through Parliament; an object secured after twenty years' continued agitation and strenuous work on the platform. Clarkson's health and substance were alike expended in the effort, but he was not eventually without reward for his labours, a recompense in subscriptions to which he seems to have looked forward in quite a business-like way; more soothing than Wordsworth's pedestrian sonnet beginning--

"Clarkson, it was an obstinate hill to climb; How toilsome, nay, how dire it was."

Doubtless he argued the labourer was worthy of his hire.

Abolition in the West Indian Islands followed, and then the Emancipation Act of 1833, liberating 800,000 slaves and placing the sum of twenty millions sterling, as compensation, into the pockets of Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow slave-owners. That sturdy beast of burden, the British taxpayer, of course paid for this expensive burst of sentiment. Clarkson, already an old man, and weary with his long labours, received the Freedom of the City of London in 1839, and died in his eighty-seventh year, in 1846.

Midway between the hamlets of High Cross and Collier's End, at the second of the two left-hand turnings sign-posted for "Rowney Abbey and the Mundens," is the other hamlet of Standon Green End--if the two cottages and one farmhouse in a by-lane may so be dignified. Some three hundred yards along this lane, in the centre of a meadow, stands the singular monument known in all the country round about as the "Balloon Stone," a rough block of sandstone, surrounded by an iron railing, placed here to record the alighting on this spot of the first balloon that ever ascended in England. Tradition still tells of the terror that seized the rustics when they saw "a summat" dropping out of the sky, and how they fled for their lives.

On lifting a hinged plate, the astonishing facts of this antique æronautical adventure may be found duly set out in an amusingly grandiloquent inscription, engraved on a bronze tablet let into the upper part of the stone--

"Let Posterity Know And Knowing be Astonished That On the 15 Day of September 1784 Vincent Lunardi of Lucca in Tuscany The first Aerial Traveller in Britain Mounting from the Artillery Ground in London And Traversing the Regions of the Air For Two Hours and Fifteen Minutes, In this Spot Revisited the Earth. On this Rude Monument For Ages be Recorded That Wondrous Enterprise Successfully atchieved By the Powers of Chemistry And the Fortitude of Man That Improvement in Science Which The Great Author of all Knowledge Patronising by His Providence The Invention of Mankind Hath graciously permitted To their Benefit And His own Eternal glory."

* * * * *

"This Plate A facsimile of the Original One was placed here in the month of November 1875 by Arthur Giles Puller of Youngsbury."

Collier's End is a wayside hamlet of a few timber-framed and plaster cottages, leading to Puckeridge, where the ways to Cambridge divide: one going by Buntingford, Royston, and Melbourn; the other by Braughing, Barkway, Barley, and Fowlmere, meeting again at Harston in another nineteen miles. Away to the left, between Collier's End and Puckeridge, is St Edmund's College, a Roman Catholic seminary.

Puckeridge itself, standing where the roads branch, grew in the old road-faring days from a tiny hamlet to be considerably larger than its mother-parish of Standon, a village nearly two miles distant, to the right-hand. That it developed early is quite evident in its two old inns, the fifteenth century Falcon, and the Old George, scarcely a hundred years younger.

XVI

WE will first take the right-hand road to Cambridge, by Barkway, for that would appear in early days to have been the favourite route. Braughing, the first village on this route, is soon reached, lying down below the highway beside the river Rib, with the usual roadside fringe of houses. The local pronunciation of the place-name is "Braffing."