Part 13

In the vanished era, only those who could afford it travelled; in the present, only those who _cannot_ afford it go “first.” Jack is as good as his master—“and a d—d sight better,” as the Radical orator said. Caste, happily, is breaking down, and their privileges are being stripped from the governing cliques who for centuries have battened on the public purse. Perhaps it was because they had a prophetic fore-knowledge of all this that the titled and other landowners so strenuously withstood railways at their beginning. They sometimes opposed railways so successfully that great trunk routes, planned to go as direct as possible between two points, were diverted and made circuitous. When the Great Northern Railway was projected it was proposed to follow the highway to the North as nearly as possible, and to go through Stamford; but the Marquis of Exeter opposed the Bill as far as it concerned his own property, and procured a deviation which sent the main line through Grantham, with the results that Stamford languishes while Grantham is made to flourish, and that the short-sightedness of the then Marquis has wofully affected the value of his successor’s property. If the thing were to do again, how eagerly would the Company be invited to take the route it was once forbidden!

XXVI

WE, none of us, who read the story of the roads, or who make holiday along them, would really like those old times back, when railways were undreamt of, and travelling for the pleasure of it was unknown. It is sufficient to read the old travellers’ tales, to realise what discouragements from leaving one’s own fireside existed then. There was, for instance, toward the close of the seventeenth century, and well on into the eighteenth, an antiquary of repute who lived at Leeds, and journeyed very frequently in the Midlands, Ralph Thoresby was his name. He travelled much, and in all weathers, and knew the Great North Road well. In his day the coaches were often, through the combined badness of the roads and the severity of the weather, obliged to lay up in the winter, like ships in Arctic seas. Like his much more illustrious contemporary, Pepys, he not infrequently lost his way, owing to the roads at that period having no boundary, and once, he tells us, he missed the road between York and Doncaster, fervently thanking God for having found it again. Indeed, all his journeys end with more or less hearty thanksgivings for a safe return. On one occasion we find him missing his pistols at an inn, and darkly suspecting the landlord to be in league with thieves and murderers; but he finds them, after a nerve-shaking search, and proceeds, thanking the Lord for all his mercies. At another time, journeying to London, he passes, and notes the circumstance, “the great common where Sir Ralph Wharton slew the highwayman.” This was doubtless Witham Common, but, although he alludes to the subject as though it were in his time a matter of great notoriety, all details of this encounter are now sadly to seek, and Sir Ralph Wharton himself lives only in Thoresby’s diary.

Thoresby was a very inaccurate person. He mentions “Stonegate Hole, between Stamford and Grantham,” but he is out of his reckoning by forty miles or so, Ogilby’s map of 1697 marking the spot near Sawtry. Accordingly when we find him, going by coach, instead of by his usual method, on horseback, in May 1714, and noting “we dined at Grantham: had the usual solemnity (this being the first time the coach passed in May), the coachman and horses being decked with ribbons and flowers, the town music and young people in couples before us,” we shrewdly suspect he was referring to the festivities of this kind held at Sutton-on-Trent, twenty-three miles further north.

Witham Common passed, we come to the village of Colsterworth, built on a rise, with fine views from it of the upland copses and gentle hills and dales of this hunting country, where the Cottesmore, the Atherstone, and the Quorn overrun one another’s boundaries. Colsterworth is the last of the stone-built villages for many a mile to come, red brick reigning from Grantham onwards, to far beyond York. It is a narrow-streeted village, with an old church, closely elbowed by houses beside the road; the church where Sir Isaac Newton and his ancestors worshipped, and where, on the wall of the Newton Chapel, may yet be seen one of the sundials he carved with a penknife when only nine years of age. In a secluded nook, nearly two miles to the left of the highroad, lies Woolsthorpe Manor House, the Newtons’ ancestral home, now a small farmhouse, with a tablet built into the wall of the room where the philosopher was born. The famous apple-tree whose falling fruit suggested the Law of Gravitation has long since disappeared.

Lincolnshire now begins to thoroughly belie its reputation for flatness, the road descending steeply from Colsterworth and rising sharply from Easton Park to the park of Stoke Rochford, with another long sharp descent beyond, and a further rise of some importance into Great Ponton, another of the very small “Great” villages.

[Picture: Great Ponton]

Great Ponton, or Paunton Magna, as it was formerly called, was in early days the site of a Roman camp, and of a turnpike gate in latter times. Both have gone to a common oblivion. If the ascent to the tiny village by the highroad is steep, the climb upwards to it by the country lanes from the lowlands on the east, where the Great Northern Railway takes its easeful course, is positively precipitous. Overlooking the pleasant vale from its commanding eyrie stands the beautiful old church, in a by-way off the main road; the church itself strikingly handsome, but the pinnacled and battlemented tower its peculiar glory. It is distinctly of the ornate Somersetshire type, and a very late example of Perpendicular work. Having been built in 1519, when Gothic had reached its highest development, and Renaissance ideals were slowly but surely obtaining a hold in this country, we find in its lavish ornamentation and abundant panelling an attempt to combine the florid alien Renaissance conventions with that peculiarly insular phase of Gothic, the Perpendicular style. The result is, as it chances, happy in this instance, the new methods halting before that little further development which would have made this a debased example. The building of this tower was the work of Anthony Ellys, merchant of the staple, and of his wife, as a thank-offering for a prosperous career, and of an escape from religious persecution; and his motto, “Thynke and thanke God of all,” is still visible, carved on three sides. His house, a crow-stepped old mansion next the church, is still standing, and recalls the legend of his sending home a cask from his warehouses in Calais, labelled “Calais sand.” Arriving home, he asked his wife what she had done with the “sand.” She had put it in the cellar. He then revealed the fact that it contained, not sand, but the greater part of his wealth.

[Picture: Great Ponton Church]

Prominent on the south-east pinnacle of this tower is a curious vane in the shape of a fiddle. The legend told of it says that, many years ago, there wandered amid the fenland villages of Lincolnshire a poor fiddler who gained a scanty livelihood by playing at fairs and weddings, and not infrequently in the parlours of the village inns on Saturday nights. After some years of this itinerant minstrelsy, he amassed a sufficient sum of money wherewith to pay his fare as a steerage passenger to the United States, to which country his relatives had emigrated some time before. In course of time, this once almost poverty stricken fiddler became rich through land speculation in the backwoods; and, revisiting the scenes of his tuneful pilgrimages in the new character of a wealthy man, offered to repair this then dilapidated church, as some sort of recognition of the kindnesses shown him in bygone years. Only one stipulation was made by him, that a vane representing his old fiddle should take the place of the weathercock. This was agreed to, and, as we see, that quaint emblem is there to this day.

Candour, however, compels the admission that this pretty legend has no truth in it; but the story has frequently found its way into print, and so is in a fair way to become a classic. The original fell in 1899 and was broken. The then rector would have replaced it with another vane of different character, but the old folk were attached to their fiddle, and so a replica was made by subscription, and fixed; and there it is to-day: the first fiddle, said the rector, that ever he heard of in the guise of a wind-instrument!

Among the many curious inn-signs along the road, that of the “Blue Horse,” at Great Ponton, is surely one of the most singular, and is a zoological curiosity not readily explained.

XXVII

GRANTHAM, one hundred and ten and a quarter miles from London by road, and five miles less by rail, is three miles and a half distant from Great Ponton. Entered down the very long and steep descent of Spitalgate Hill, the utterly modernised character of the town becomes at once apparent, and all pleasurable anticipations based upon memories of the lettered ease of Stamford are instantly dispelled. The expectant traveller comes to Grantham hopeful of a fine old town with streets and buildings befitting its historic dignity; but these hopes are soon dispelled by grimy engine-shops and roads gritty with coal-dust, giving earnest of an aggressive modernity fully unfolded when the level is reached and the town entered at Spitalgate and St. Peter’s Hill. Grantham is a red-brick town, and modern red brick at that. A cruelly vulgar Town Hall, all variegated brick, iron crestings, and general spikiness, fondly believed to be “Italian,” testifies at once to the expansive prosperity of Grantham and to its artlessness. This monument of Grantham’s pride faces the grass-plots that border the broad thoroughfare of St. Peter’s Hill (which is flat, and not a hill at all) where stand bronze statues of Sir Isaac Newton, Grantham’s great man, and of a certain Frederick James Tollemache, M.P. for Grantham, who departed this life in 1888, after having probably achieved some kind of local celebrity which, whatever it may have been, has not sent the faintest echo to the outer world. It is an odd effigy, representing the departed legislator in an Inverness cloak, and holding in his right hand a something which looks curiously like a billiard-cue, but is probably intended for some kind of official wand. The untutored might be excused for thinking this a monument to a champion billiard-player.

Great are the Tollemaches in Lincolnshire, great territorially, that is to say; for the Earls of Dysart, at the head of the family, own many manors and broad acres; from Witham and Buckminster, away along the road to Foston and Long Bennington, and so to where the Shire Dyke divides the counties of Lincolnshire and Nottingham, on the marches of the Duke of Newcastle’s estates.

To an Earl of Dysart, Grantham owes the ugly polished granite obelisk in the market-place, with a lying inscription which purports to mark the spot where the ancient Eleanor Cross formerly stood, before it was utterly demolished by Puritan fanatics in 1645. That spot was really on St. Peter’s Hill, at quite the other end of the town!

Grantham owes its name to the river on which it stands, now the Witham, but once called the Granta, and its ancient prosperity to its position on the road to the North. To this circumstance is due also its long reputation as a town of many and excellent inns, from those early times when the Church was the earliest inn-keeper, to those others when the coaches were at their best and “entertainment for man and beast” a merely secular business. The “Angel” and the “George” at Grantham have a long history. The “Angel” still survives as a mediæval building, and, like the equally famous “George” at Glastonbury, contrives to please alike the antiquary and the guest whose desire for modern creature comforts takes no account of Gothic architecture. Anciently a wayside house of the Knights Templar, the existing building belongs to the mid-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. On either side of its great archway now appear the carved stone heads of Edward the Third and the heroic Queen Philippa, and at the crown of the arch, serving the purpose of a supporting corbel to the beautiful oriel window above, is an angel, supporting a shield of arms; not the old sign, indeed, but an architectural adornment merely. This, and all the numerous “Angels” and the several “Salutations” on the road, derived from the religious picture-sign of the Annunciation, of which the saluting angel in the “Hail Mary” group in course of time alone remained.

[Picture: The “Angel,” Grantham]

Before coaches or carriages were, kings and courtiers on their way north or south made the “Angel” their headquarters, coming to it, of necessity, on horseback. Thus, John held his Court here in the February of 1213, in the building which preceded even this old one, and Richard the Third signed Buckingham’s death-warrant in 1483 in the great room, now divided into three, and that once extended the whole length of the frontage on the first floor. Perhaps it was in the bay of this oriel window that he “off’d with his head!” in the familiar phrase mouthed by many generations of gory tragedians and aspiring amateurs; and exclaiming “So much for Buckingham!” turned on his heel, in the attitude of triumphant villainy we know so well. But, unhappily for the truth of this and similar striking situations, it is to be feared that Richard, unappreciative of the situation—the “situation,” that is to say, in the theatrical sense—signed the warrant in a businesslike way, and neither mouthed nor struck attitudes. He left that scene to be exploited by Shakespeare or Colley Cibber as authors, and by Charles Kean and many another as actors. Between them, _they_ could have shown him how to play the part.

But let us to less dramatic—and safer—times. The “Angel” divided the honours in coaching days with the “George,” a house with a history as long, but not so distinguished, as this old haunt of bloody minded monarchs. The old “George,” burnt down in 1780, was an equally beautiful house, and was rebuilt in the prevailing Georgian taste—or want of taste—that raised so many comfortable but ugly inns toward the close of the eighteenth century. “One of the best inns in England,” says Dickens, in describing the journey from London to Yorkshire in _Nicholas Nickleby_, and there is not wanting other testimony to its old-time excellence.

“At the sign of the ‘George’ you had a cleaner cloth, brighter plate, higher polished glass, and a brisker fire, with more prompt attention and civility than at most other places,” says one who had occasion to know; and so the local proverb, current among towns and villages adjacent to Grantham, “Grantham gruel; nine grots and a gallon of water,” was evidently no reflection upon the quality of this inn. The “George” was busy with the coaches, early and late. First to arrive was the Edinburgh mail, at twenty-three minutes past seven in the morning. Three lengthened blasts of the horn announced its arrival, and out stepped night-capped passengers, half asleep and surly, but fresh water and good spirits dispelled the gloomy faces, and down went, for the allotted period of forty minutes, hot rolls, boiled eggs, and best Bohea; good fare after weary wayfaring, and calculated to make the surliest good-tempered.

Francis, Lord Jeffrey, writing from his hotel (doubtless the “George”) at Grantham, when journeying to London in January 1831, is not so enthusiastic on old-time travel as he might have been, considering the high character of Grantham’s inns. “Here we are,” says he, “on our way to you; toiling up through snow and darkness, with this shattered carcase and this reluctant and half-desponding spirit. You know how I hate early rising; and here have I been for three days, up two hours before the sun, and, blinking by a dull taper, haggling at my inflamed beard before a little pimping inn looking-glass, and abstaining from suicide only from a deep sense of religion and love to my country. To-night it snows and blows, and there is good hope of our being blocked up at Wytham Corner or Alconbury Hill, or some of these lonely retreats, for a week or so, or fairly stuck in the drift and obliged to wade our way to some such hovel as received poor Lear and his fool in some such season. Oh, dear, dear! But in the meantime we are sipping weak black tea by the side of a tolerable fire, and are in hopes of reaching the liberties of Westminster before dark on Wednesday.” He was writing on Monday evening!

At any rate such as he could afford to take his ease and partake of the best. Those who needed pity were the poor folk who had just enough for the journey, and could not afford to stay at expensive inns, waiting until better weather came. But, however much we may read in novels of the charm of winter travelling in the old coaching days, if we turn to contemporary accounts, by the travellers themselves, we shall always find that even those who could afford the best did not like it.

Henry St. George Tucker, afterwards Chairman of the East India Company, travelled from Edinburgh to London in 1816, in the depth of winter. He wrote:—

“Throughout the whole journey, as far as Newcastle, we had a violent storm of snow, rain and sleet; and the cold was more severe than I had felt it before. The coach was not wind-tight at the bottom; and as I was obliged to keep my window open to allow the escape of certain fumes, the produce of whisky, rum, and brandy, I felt the cold so pinching that I should have been glad of fur cap and worsted stockings. To aggravate the evil, I had not a decent companion to converse with. We picked up sundry vagabonds on the road, but there was only one, between Edinburgh and York, who bore the ‘slightest appearance of being a gentleman.’” He, however, we learn was “effeminate and affected.”

In Mozley’s _Reminiscences_ we find a horrid story of the endurance practised by a woman travelling by coach from Edinburgh to London. “I once travelled,” he says, “to London _vis-à-vis_ with a thin, pale, elderly woman, ill-clad in black, who never once got down, or even moved to shake off the snow that settled on her lap and shoulders. I spoke to the guard about her. He said she had come from Edinburgh and had not moved since changing coaches, which she would have to do once; she feared that if she once got down she would not he able to get up again. She had taken no food of any kind.”

There the picture ends, and this tragical figure is lost. Who was she who endured so much? Had she come to London to purchase with her few savings the discharge of an only son who had enlisted in the army? Had she made this awful journey to bid good-bye to a husband condemned to death or transportation? Surely some such story was hers, but we can never know it, and so the gaunt figure, pathetic in its endurance, haunts the memory and the baffled curiosity like an enigma.

Grantham, it is true, has few things more interesting than its inns. This is not the confession of a _bon vivant_, suspicious though it sounds, but is just another way of stating the baldness of Grantham’s street. One of these few things is the tall steeple of the parish church, which has a fame rivalling that of some cathedrals miles away. Journeying by road or rail, that lofty spire is seen, even while Grantham itself remains undisclosed. If this were a proper place for it much might be said of the church and spire of St. Wulfran’s: how the tower rises to a height of one hundred and forty feet, and the slim crocketed spire to one hundred and forty feet more; being sixth in point of measurement among the famed spires of England. Salisbury is first, with its four hundred and four feet, followed by Norwich, three hundred and fifteen feet, Chichester, and St. Michael’s, Coventry, three hundred feet, and Louth, two hundred and ninety-two feet. But generalities must serve our turn here. If the spire is only sixth in point of measurement it is first in date, being earlier than Salisbury’s. Sir Gilbert Scott held it to be second only to Salisbury in beauty, but Scott’s reputation in matters of taste had slight foundations, and, beautiful though Grantham’s spire is, there are others excelling it. The majesty of Newark’s less lofty spire is greater than this of Grantham, and indeed it may be questioned whether a Decorated spire, comparatively so attenuated and with its purity of outline broken and worried by an endless array of crockets is really more admirable as a thing of beauty, or as a daring and successful exercise in the piling up of fretted stones in so apparently frail a fashion.

[Picture: The “Wondrous Sign”]

We cannot get away from the inns, and even the church is connected with them, the town being annually edified by the so-called “Drunken Sermon” preached at it in the terms of a bequest left in the form of an annual rent-charge of forty shillings on the “Angel” by one Michael Solomon.

But among the popular curiosities of Grantham, few things are more notable than the unpretending inn at Castlegate known variously as the “Beehive” or the “Living Sign.” Immediately in front of the house is a small tree with a beehive fixed in its branches, and a board calling attention to the fact in the lines:

“Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore, And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er, ‘GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine, A lofty Steeple and a living Sign.’”

It may fairly be advanced that the suggestion to “explore” an inhabited beehive is an unfortunate choice of a word.

There is (unless it has lately been abolished) another curiosity at Grantham. It is a custom. When the time-expired Mayor vacates his office, what has aptly been called a “striking” ceremony takes place. His robe is stripped off, his chain is removed from his shoulders, and with a small wooden hammer the Town Clerk takes the ex-Chief Magistrate on the head to typify the end of his authority. There is only one possible method more derogatory than this humiliating treatment, but it need not be specified.

XXVIII

IN history, Grantham and its immediate neighbourhood are notable as having witnessed the rise of Oliver Cromwell. At the outbreak of hostilities in March 1643, the town was taken and its fortifications demolished by the Royalists, but was retaken shortly afterwards by the Parliamentary troops under a hitherto undistinguished Cornet of Horse, after some fighting at Gonerby. The rise of this cornet is picturesquely described by De Foe. “About this time,” he says, “it was that we began to hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud, rose out of the East, and spread first into the North, until it shed down a flood that overwhelmed the three kingdoms.” It was on May 22, 1643, that, with twelve troops, Cromwell defeated at Gonerby twenty-four troops of the opposing forces, and thus commenced this meteorological career.