Part 10

The town is left behind by way of a long causeway and a bridge spanning the Ouse, in succession to the “street ford” that once plunged through it. Once across the river and the canal that runs parallel, and so uphill into the not unpicturesque village of Old Stratford and the frontiers of Buckinghamshire—“the historic county of Bucks,” as Disraeli, posing as a Buckinghamshire farmer in one of his after-dinner political speeches called it—are crossed and Northamptonshire entered. Northants is traditionally the “county of squires and spires”; but the squire as a political force and a great social figure is extinct nowadays, and let it be said at once that, in all the twenty-three miles of Northants through which the Holyhead Road takes its way, only one spire—that of Braunston—is visible: the rest of the churches on the way have towers, save indeed the freakish, classical church of Daventry, rejoicing in a steeple.

Potterspury, succeeding to Old Stratford, is a kind of brother village, as it were, to Paulerspury, a mile away. Potterspury, really owing its name to an ancient pottery trade in common ware of the kitchen utensil and flower-pot sort, stands partly facing the old coach-road and partly down a bye-lane, and is wholly old-world and delightful. One comes into it under the thickly interlacing branches of tall hedgerow elms that conspire to cheer the traveller with a perpetual triumphal arch of welcome. Through this leafy bower one perceives the roadside cottages dwindling away in perspective along a gentle rise. Graceless the village looks awhile, for no church meets the gaze. _That_, however, is a long distance down the bye-lane, and in the neighbourhood of a little inn with the odd name of the “Blue Ball,” and the still more odd sign pictured in the accompanying sketch. The blue ball, apparently representing the world, is placed below a brown heart, the whole mystical composition semi-circled by the motto “_Cor supra mundum_.” It is a representation of the triumph of sentiment that would have caused the Rev. Laurence Sterne to shed tears. “Heart above the world.” How idyllic!

It would be as vain to seek the old potteries that gave its name to Potterspury as it would be to enquire for any living representatives of the Paveleys who provided Paulerspury with style and title. The potteries vanished in times beyond the memory of man, and the sole relics of the Paveleys are the thirteenth-century wooden effigies of Sir Laurence de Paveley and his dame in Paulerspury Church.

At some little distance beyond Potterspury, Potterspury Lodge and its lime avenue come in sight, on the right side of the road. A wonderfully picturesque old mansion it is, recently restored by the retired tradesman who has purchased the property. At the rear of the house stands the historic “Queen’s Oak,” whose story has already been told.

The remaining four miles into Towcester, though hilly, had much of their difficulties disposed of when Telford came this way with theodolite, chain, and spirit-level. Plumb Park Hill is not what it was, thanks to this fifteen-foot cutting and the forty-four high embankment in the hollow of Cuttle Mill, where the road goes nowadays on a level with the chimney-pots of old roadside cottages.

At the crest of one of these rises stand Havencote Houses, which it pleased the compilers of old road-books to name “Heathencott,” and beyond come the lodges of Sir Thomas Hesketh’s domain—Easton Neston Park, an originally fine, but now somewhat dreary parade of classical stone columns forming an open screen, with stone stags couchant, and a central display of a coat-of-arms supported by weary-looking lions. The motto, “_Hora e Semper_”—“Now and Always”—bids a futile defiance to irresistible change.

The lodges on either side are deserted, and their windows boarded up. Somewhere within the park stand the “great house” and the manorial church, with monuments of the Fermors, successively Barons Lempster and Earls of Pomfret, to whom the estates came so long ago as 1527. Those titles, duly engrossed on their original patents in that manner of spelling, derive from the towns of Leominster and Pontefract, and prove the local pronunciation to have been the same then as now. They prove, in addition, that there was no person then at the Heralds’ College who could correctly spell the names of those places; but my Lords Lempster and Pomfret had to take and use the illiterate forms, just as the Earl of Arlington, whose title, conferred in 1663, came from Harlington in Middlesex, was made by those ’eralds to write himself with every signature an ’Arry.

XXVI

Where the park-wall of Easton Neston ends, Towcester—“_vulgo_ Tosseter,” as Ogilby says, on the Towe, and once the _Lactodorum_ of the Romans—begins. It is not the best of beginnings, or one calculated to favourably impress the stranger with the town. On the left hand rises a terrace of dingy brick houses, whose age is certified by the inscription, “Jubilee Row, 1809”; their height masked by the raising of the road in front, in Telford’s improvements of 1820, their social status evident in the notice on their frontages, “Lodgings for Travellers”—tramping travellers being understood. Beyond, Towcester unwinds its one long street of brick, stone, and plaster, with roofs, tiled, slated, and thatched: a very miscellaneous street. Among the houses, ancient, modern, and middle-aged; among the few dignified old stone mansions of golden russet stone, and the older, but more familiar, gabled plastered houses, that nod as though they could tell a thing or two worth the hearing; among these and the less interesting brick dwellings stand the Bickerstaff Almshouses, “rebuilt in the year 1815,” brick themselves and wholly uninteresting, except for the tablet preserved from the older buildings:—

Hee that earneth Wages By labour and care By the Blessing of god may Have Something to Spare. T. B. 1689.

Only when the Town Hall is reached, at a considerable distance along this street, may we fairly claim to have entered Towcester. All this hitherward part is outside the pale, as it were, and looked down upon, contemned, and sniffed at. It can only be looked down upon in a social, ungeographical sense, for Towcester from end to end is flat; but those who would sniff corporeally as well as mentally will not go unrewarded, considering that the gas-works occupy a very prominent position here. The Town Hall, built in 1866, when the flighty and Mansard-roofy French Renaissance was the architectural craze of the moment, turns its back to this quarter and shoulders the broad street into the semblance of a narrow lane, emphasising the difference between these social strata.

Emerging from this narrow way, a broad street of inns and shops expands. On the left is the “Talbot,” an old inn with modern front, and with a long perspective of stables vanishing down its yard into the dim distance. The “Talbot,” it is thought, owes its present name to that Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who fought and died in the Battle of Northampton, eight miles away, in 1460. As the “Tabard,” it was purchased in 1440 by Archdeacon Sponne, a charitable Rector of Towcester, who gave it to the town, its rent to go in relief of taxation, toward paving, “or for other uses.” The good Archdeacon lies, under a gorgeous monument, in the church, and a fragment of stained glass bearing his shield of arms, with his name, “William Sponne” underneath, still remains in one of the windows of the “Talbot.” In what was once, in coaching days, the taproom, but now a store for empty boxes and such lumber, a relic of old times is left, in the wide stone chimney-piece carved with the figure of that old English hound, something between a foxhound and blood-hound—the talbot. Beside it is the date, 1707, together with the initials, “T.O.” and “G.S.” The story that Dean Swift halted often at the old house on his many journeys is likely enough, and a chair, said to have been used by him, is still a cherished relic.

But another, and equally famous, hostelry claims attention. The “Pomfret Arms,” as it is now named, is the old coaching inn once known as the “Saracen’s Head,” the inn where Mr. Pickwick stayed the night after the wet post-chaise journey from Birmingham. “Dry postboys” and fresh horses had been procured on the way, at the usual stages at Dunchurch and Daventry; but as, “at the end of each stage it rained harder than it had done at the beginning,” Mr. Pickwick wisely decided to halt at Towcester, together with those undesirable companions of his, Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen.

“There’s beds here,” said Sam Weller, “everything clean and comfortable. Very good little dinner, sir, they can get ready in half an hour—pair of fowls, sir, and a weal cutlet; French beans, ’taturs, tarts, and tidiness. You’d better stop vere you are, sir, if I might recommend.”

At the moment when this conference was proceeding in the rain, the landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” himself appeared, “to confirm Mr. Weller’s statement relative to the accommodations of the establishment, and to back his entreaties with a variety of dismal conjectures regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of fresh horses being to be had at the next stage, the dead certainty of its raining all night, the equally moral certainty of its clearing up in the morning, and other topics of inducement familiar to innkeepers.”

When the decision to stay was arrived at, “the landlord smiled his delight,” and issued orders to the waiter. “Lights in the Sun, John; make up the fire; the gentlemen are wet,” he cried anxiously; although doubtless, if the gentlemen had gone forward, they might have been drowned for all he cared.

“This way, gentlemen,” he continued; “don’t trouble yourselves about the postboy”—who, poor devil, must have been wet through several times over—“I’ll send him to you when you ring for him, sir.”

And so the scene changes, from the rain-washed road to a cosy room, with a waiter laying the cloth for dinner, a cheerful fire burning, and the tallies lit with wax candles; “everything looked (as everything always does in all decent English inns) as if the travellers had been expected, and their comforts prepared for, days beforehand.”

Upon this picture of ease at one’s inn descended the atrabilious rival editors of the _Eatanswill Gazette_ and the _Eatanswill Independent_, the organs respectively of “blue” and “buff” shades of political opinion. Both Pott of the _Gazette_, and Slurk of the _Independent_ found the rival sheet lying on the tables of the inn; but what either of the editors, or their newspapers, were doing in Northamptonshire (Eatanswill being an East Anglian town generally identified as Ipswich) is not clearly specified. Even in these days Suffolk newspapers are not found at Towcester.

Slurk retired to the kitchen when the inn was closed for the night, to drink his rum and water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet luxury of sneering at the rival print; but as it happened, Mr. Pickwick’s party, accompanied by Pott, also adjourned to that culinary shrine, to smoke a cigar or so before bed. How the rival editors—the “unmitigated viper” and the “ungrammatical twaddler”—met and presently came from oblique taunts to direct abuse of one another, and thence to blows, let the pages of the _Pickwick Papers_ tell.

The inn itself stands the same as ever, at the end of Towcester’s long street; but the sign, long since changed, owes its present style to the Earls of Pomfret, of whom the fifth and last died in 1867. The somewhat severe frontage, in the golden-brown ferruginous local stone, is the same as when Dickens knew it, and if the kitchen of that time has now become the bar and the room called the “Sun” cannot with certainty be identified, the old coach-archway through the centre of the building into the stable-yard remains, as do the alcoves above, containing white plaster statuettes of two very scantily draped classic deities—Venus and Mars perhaps. They still tell at Towcester the tale of an old landlady—Mrs. Popple—coming new to the house, and asking the old ostler what “those disgraceful things” were.

“They carls ’em Junus and Wenus,” he said, “but I don’t rightly knaw the history on ’em; but there, mum, you’ll find arl about ’em in the Bible.”

XXVII

We shall not be far wrong if we identify Towcester with the town at which the coach with Tom Brown on board stopped for breakfast, and the “well-known sporting house,” famous for its breakfasts, with the “Saracen’s Head.” A half-past seven breakfast, in a low, dark, wainscoted room, hung with sporting prints; a blazing fire, and a card of hunting fixtures stuck in the mantel-glass. Twenty minutes for breakfast, with such a spread as pigeon-pie, ham, cold boiled beef, kidneys and steak, bacon and eggs, buttered toast and muffins, coffee and tea, smoking hot—why, an irresolute man would waste some of those precious minutes in considering where to begin. But the hungry are not at such a loss, and certainly little Tom Brown could not have been, for he ate kidney and pigeon-pie and drank coffee till his skin was as tight as a drum, and then had sufficient time to pay the head waiter in leisurely manner and to stroll calmly to the door, to see the horses put to.

And then, all being ready, they are off again. “Let ’em go, Dick!” says the coachman, and the ostlers fly back, drawing off the horse-cloths like lightning. Along the High Street goes the “Tally-Ho,” with passing glimpses into first-floor windows, where the burgesses are seen shaving; past shops and private houses, where shopboys are cleaning windows and housemaids doing the steps, and out of the town as the clock strikes eight.

A very pretty glimpse, this, of the “good old times,” but the coaches did not always hark away so triumphantly; as, for example, when, on a day in March, 1829, an axle of the celebrated “Wonder” coach broke in Towcester street, and the unfortunate coachman was killed in the inevitable upset. The hilly eight miles or so between Towcester and Weedon Beck witnessed many thrilling escapades in the coaching sort. One eminence, rejoicing in the name of Dirt House Hill, was the scene of a violent collision, in which the Holyhead Mail and the Manchester Mail came into disastrous contact, June 29th, 1838. It was one of the closing smashes of the Coaching Age. Here is the official account:—

“Both coaches were in fault. The Holyhead coach had no lamps, and the explanation of their absence was that the 28th June was the Coronation Day of our beloved Queen, and the crowd was so great in Birmingham that, in paying attention to getting the horses through the streets, and having lost considerable time in so doing, in the hurry to get the coach off again the guard did not ascertain if the lamps were with the coach, or not. The Manchester coach, at the time of the accident, was attempting, when climbing the hill, to pass the Carlisle Mail, and was ascending on the wrong side of the road. The horses dashed into each other, with the result that one of the wheelers of the Holyhead Mail, belonging to Mr. Wilson, of Daventry, was killed, and the others injured, one seriously. The harness was old and snapped like chips, or more serious would have been the consequences; and had not the horse killed been old and worn out, the sudden concussion would have been more violent, and might have deprived the passengers of life. As it was difficult to decide which of the two coachmen was most in the wrong, it was left to the two coachmasters to arrange affairs between themselves.”

In Telford’s reports mention is made of no fewer than seven hills cut down and hollows filled on this stretch of road, with an aggregate length of cutting and embanking of two and a half miles. Yet, even so, this remains the most trying part of the route; so much so, that the two hillsides past Foster’s Booth are laid with granite kerbs for the purpose of easing the pull-up for horses drawing heavy-laden waggons. The place oddly named Foster’s or Forster’s Booth is said, on the authority of Pennant, to have derived that title from a wayside booth established by “one Forster, a poor countryman.” It grew at length into a scattered street of houses and carrier’s inns, and so remains.

Stowe Hill, the last of this hunchbacked company leading to Weedon, acquires its name from the village of Stowe-Nine-Churches, whose scattered houses and _one_ church lie on the hill-top, hid from the road by lanes and windy coppices. The title of “Nine Churches” is rather lamely said to arise from nine benefices having been included in the lordship of the manor in ancient times, but a much more picturesque origin is found in the legend of the triumphant diabolism that foiled eight previous attempts to erect the church on other sites. Every night, the stones of the eight ill-fated buildings set up in the daytime were removed by a mysterious shape “summat bigger nor a hog,” but the existing church, the ninth, was suffered to grow to completion. As it is of Saxon origin, this fearful legend itself perhaps goes back to that superstitious time.

Stowe Church is remarkable for the fine monuments it contains: those of Sir Gerald de l’Isle, about 1250; Lady Carey, 1630; and Dr. Turner, 1714. The first is the Purbeck marble effigy of a cross-legged knight, shield on arm, and clad in chain-mail. That of Lady Carey, “the most elegant,” says Pennant, “that this or any other kingdom can boast of,” is a white marble sleeping figure raised on a black and white marble altar-tomb. This beautiful work of Renaissance art was by the “Master Mason” of James I. and Charles I.—Nicholas Stone, who executed it and set it up here “for my Lady,” as he says in his still-existing correspondence, ten years before her death; “for the which,” he adds, “I had £220.” Although of the most delicate workmanship, it remains, strange to say, in perfect preservation; even the sharp beak of the very savage-looking griffin at the foot of the effigy quite uninjured.

The monument to Dr. Turner, who does not lie here, but at Oxford, where he was President of Corpus Christi College, is a huge mass, occupying a great wall space. He was a non-juring pluralist, who, unlike his brother non-jurors, held successfully to what he had gotten. An effigy of him, very wiggy and gowny, stands in midst of alcoves, scrolls, and volutes, representing him, like some reverend acrobat, standing on a globe and holding a book in his hand. Religion, beside him, offers a cross and a temple, which he seems disinclined to take, and an all-seeing eye—like that blood-freezing eye in Martin’s “Belshazzar’s Feast”—radiates down upon the group.

XXVIII

One mile from Weedon and half-way down Stowe Hill, a broad vale opens to the view, the London and North-Western Railway shooting out below from Stowe Hill Tunnel, with the Grand Junction Canal and the river Nen in close company. Weedon Beck is seen while yet a great way off, its neighbourhood fixed by an immense ugly block of yellow brick buildings on a distant hillside. Nearing the place, these are found to be the officers’ quarters of Weedon Barracks; but before that fact is ascertained the stranger occupies the time between first glimpsing them and arriving at the spot in speculating whether the hideous pile forms a lunatic asylum, a workhouse, an infirmary, or a prison. Weedon, in fact, is a large military depôt, originally established for the Ordnance Department in 1803. Its situation here is due to one of the periodical scares with which the fear of foreign invasion afflicts nervous Governments once in every half-century or so. The scare that produced Weedon Barracks, among other odd things, was a particularly severe and craven one, for it assumed our being unable to hold our own upon the sea-coast and in the capital, and selected this site as being as nearly as possible in the centre of England, and the safest place for retiring to in the event of a sudden descent upon our shores. So great was the national terror of “Boney” a hundred years ago! Even the needs of the Court were not forgotten, and a pavilion was provided for the use of George III. over against the time when it should be necessary to flee from Windsor Castle!

The name of Weedon “Beck” might not unreasonably be supposed to derive its second half from the river Nen, that ripples not unpicturesquely through the village, were it not that it has clearly been proved an ancient manor of the Abbey of Bee, in Normandy. When Leland was pursuing his antiquarian studies through England, in the time of Henry VIII., he found it “a praty thoroughfare, sette on a playne grounde, and much celebrated by cariars, bycause it stondeth hard by the famose way there comunely caullid of the people Watheling Street.” It became a very busy place in coaching times, and was then chiefly a street of inns. What would have become of Weedon had the military depôt not been placed here to keep it alive before the railway came, with the thoroughness of a new besom, to sweep the long road clear of traffic from end to end, goodness only knows. There is a Providence that shapes the ends of even old thoroughfare villages; and undoubtedly Weedon believes in the beneficence of that Providence, because, taking away with one hand, it has given double with the other: that is to say, it has a railway junction and a canal, so that when the officers become bored to death in their ugly quarters they can either drown themselves in the canal, or take leave of absence and train to some more lively spot. A third course is to enjoy the billiards and society that the hotels of Weedon afford, or the pleasures of the Grafton Hunt. Those hotels, chiefly of the old coaching type, have all been restored and added to of recent years, and a very large modern one, the “Globe,” taking the name of the old and extinct “Globe” half a mile onward, has been built at that spot where the Holyhead Road and the Watling Street part company for some seventy-three miles: a spot quaintly called by Ogilby, in 1675, “Cross o’ th’ Hand.” The “White Hart” stands next door, and opposite glares the “Red Lion”; while the “New” inn—new in 1740, as a tablet over its doorway tells—is trebled in size by two modern wings. “Cash Stores” spell modernity, and the imposing branch of a Northamptonshire bank speaks of business. In contrast with all this, the old “Bull” inn, situated on the left hand, at the entrance to the village, is now a farmhouse, and the road by which the carriages and post-chaises came to it off the turnpike, though still traceable, has long been stopped at either end.

There is a great deal more of Weedon than the hurried traveller along the Holyhead Road would suspect. It lies down the turning by this same old house and on the other side of the parallel embankments of railway and canal; embankments so tall that they succeed in completely hiding all but the upper stage of Weedon Church tower. “Here,” says that tower, “is Weedon”; and there it is; barracks like model lodging-houses, with children playing and clothes drying upon tier over tier of balconies; women fresh from the washtub, with arms akimbo and rolled-up sleeves, voluble in the entries; and soldiers “married on the strength,” slatternly and listless, at the windows: all very domestic and inglorious. The everyday aspect of the barracks is not inspiring. Only occasionally, when on the neighbouring hillsides a sabre-scabbard flashes by chance in the sun, and the eye thus startled discovers some leisurely horseman scouting, visible to all the world, is the military view of Weedon productive of a thrill.