Part 12

Beyond Weeford, the next landmark, the Watling Street goes straight for three and a half miles, and then brings up against another dead end, where it is crossed by the Lichfield and Birmingham road. A hedge and a ploughed field forbid further progress, and it is only when armed with large-scale maps, and by comparing antiquarian authorities, that the course of the Watling Street can be traced, straight on to Wall. That village is found by following the road to Lichfield until the first left-hand turning is reached, leading, as a steep lane, uphill for a mile. On the hill-top, Wall is found and the Watling Street regained. The tiny village is built over the site of _Etocetum_, of whose ruins some fragments were yet to be seen in Pennant’s time, including portions of the ancient Roman wall giving a name to the place. These have long since disappeared, but in 1887 some excavations here laid bare many foundations heaped with the ruins of Roman civilisation, among whose oddments were found roofing-slates from Bangor and lime from Walsall. If thorough search were made, much more might be brought to light, for this was an important station in those times, situated at the intersection of the Icknield Street with Watling Street. Below the hill, and on the line of the Icknield Street, is the hamlet or farm called Chesterfield—a significant name, telling of Roman relics.

Muckley Corner, beyond Wall, is the meeting-place of roads from Walsall to Lichfield and Wolverhampton. The Watling Street still goes unflinchingly ahead, and reaches the outskirts of Hammerwich, uphill. At that nail-making and coal-mining place, it becomes somewhat confused, but is well-known locally to every man, woman, and child as the “Watling Street Road.” Here it has reached a very high-lying tract, that abomination of desolation called Brownhills. Words are ineffectually employed to describe the hateful, blighted scene; but imagine a wide, dreary stretch of common land, surrounded by the scattered, dirty, and decrepit cottages of a semi-savage population of nail-makers and pitmen, with here and there a school, a woe-begone brick chapel, a tin tabernacle, and a plentiful sprinkling of public-houses. Further, imagine the grass of this wide-spreading common to be as brown, wiry, and innutritious as it is possible for grass to be, and with an extraordinary wealth of scrap-iron, tin-clippings, broken glass, and brickbats deposited over every square yard, and all around it the ghastly refuse-heaps of long-abandoned mines. Finally, clap a railway embankment and station midway across the common, and there you have a dim adumbration of what Brownhills is like.

The Roman road makes a sudden change of direction here, at a point opposite the “Rising Sun,” where the old Chester road falls in. It is a change that would be inexplicable, were it not for a strange relic that by chance has survived for sixteen hundred years to explain it. This is a mile’s length of deserted road that continues the straight line of Watling Street, and then abruptly ends, as though the Romans had abandoned some contemplated work. It is, as a matter of fact, a monument to the incompetence of the surveyor who had the construction of this division of the Watling Street in his charge. The several changes of direction taken here and there along the whole length of this great military way—as, for example, at High Cross and Gailey—are explained by the work having been in progress from both ends at once, and the surveys being somewhat inaccurate; but the official entrusted with the road from _Etocetum_ seems to have lost his bearings very badly indeed, and to have been road-making at a wide angle from the correct line, when his chief appeared and plotted out the direction afresh from Brownhills.

The road now goes downhill again, past a fine old inn, the “Fleur-de-Lis,” and comes to Wyrley Bank, a busy colliery district on the verge of Cannock Chase. Bridgetown, Great Wyrley, and Churchbridge are lumped together in this coal-getting neighbourhood, and the crash of waggons, the shrieking of engines, and coal-dust everywhere bedevil the scene. But, with all these unlovely details, it is far preferable to the stark and hopeless barrennesss of Brownhills.

In little more than two miles this coalfield is quite out of sight and sound, and the road approaches the beautiful old “Four Crosses” inn at Hatherton. Dean Swift is commonly said to have visited this old house on his journeys, and it is quite likely he did, but it could not—for reasons shown elsewhere in those pages[1]—have been the house where he wrote his famous epigram on the landlady. But most accounts continue to give this as the scene, and locally it is firmly believed in.

Footnote 1:

Page 245.

The old house is of two distinct periods: one dating back to the sixteenth century and exquisite in black oak and white plastered and gabled front; the other probably built about 1710, in a handsome “Queen Anne” style. A curious feature is the Latin couplet carved in 1636, on an oak beam outside the older portion of the house:—

Fleres si scires unum tua tempora me’sem, Rides cum non sit forsitan una dies,

which has been translated:

Brief is your time: a month, perchance, Nor even but a day, Yet ignorant, poor foolish wight, You laughing go your way.

Adjoining is a disused toll-house, and opposite stands another old inn, the “Green Dragon,” the group forming a little oasis of settlement in the surrounding desert of lonely road. It was between this and the “Welsh Harp” inn at Stonnal, on the Castle Bromwich road, that the “Shrewsbury Caravan” was halted and robbed on April 30th, 1751, by “a single Highwayman, who behaved very civilly to the Passengers, told them he was a Tradesman in Distress, and hoped they would contribute to his assistance.” Whereupon, he handed round his hat and each passenger gave him something, making an involuntary contribution of about £4, “with which he was mighty well satisfied,” as indeed he had every reason to be. But he was not so distressed a tradesman that he could condescend to accept coppers, and so “returned some Halfpence to one of them, saying he never took Copper.” After this, informing his victims that there were two other “collectors” on the road (were they also Distressed Tradesmen?) he rode with the Caravan for some distance, until it was out of danger and he almost in it, when he left with much courtesy, begging the passengers that they would not at their next inn mention the affair, nor appear against him should he afterwards be arrested.

XXXIII

The gently undulating stretch of country from “Four Crosses” to “Spread Eagle,” once dreaded by the name of Calf Heath, is now under cultivation, and the Watling Street, crossing it, broad and well-kept, wears more the look of a high-road. The spreading lakes seen here and there, known as “Gailey Pools,” are reservoirs of the old Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal that presently crosses the road under a hunchbacked bridge and by an old round-house, whose tower stands out prominently for a long distance down the straight perspective. The “Spread Eagle,” an old coaching-inn, once gave a name to the adjoining railway station of Gailey, but where the village hides that now serves sponsor to it is not readily discovered. A mile beyond comes the river Penk, crossed at a pretty spot by a substantial stone bridge, and across the meadows by a red-brick one, where a mill-cut froths and foams, and a cheerful old mill and farmhouse stand. On the other side of the river is the hamlet of Horsebrook, with Stretton down a side lane, supposed to have been the _Pennocrucium_—the crossing of the Penk—of Roman times.

The ubiquitous Thomas Telford is recalled to mind at a little distance onward by his name in cast-iron on the aqueduct of the Birmingham and Liverpool Canal. Near by is another reservoir, rejoicing in the name of “Stinking Lake.” At that fine old inn, the “Bradford Arms,” Ivetsey Bank, the left-hand road leads in less than two miles to Boscobel, one of the most famous places in our history, for to that hunting-lodge in the forests then thickly overspreading this part of the country came Charles II. in 1651, as a hunted fugitive, after the disastrous defeat at Worcester. Boscobel had been built seventy years before, by the Giffards of Chillington, ostensibly as a hunting-lodge where their guests might rest in the intervals of the chase, and in a sense it was so used, with officers of the law for hunters, and fleeting Papists as quarry; but in the other sense it was a very transparent pretence, when we consider that the family residence at Chillington Hall stands not more than a mile away. For many years it had been used as a refuge for recusant Roman Catholic priests, at a time when that religion was proscribed; for the Giffards were then, as they are still, of that faith, and so were the yeomen Penderels who occupied the house. It was built, too, under the direction of a Jesuit lay-brother, one Nicholas Owen, or “Little John” as his intimates called him, a skilful deviser of priest’s-holes and such like hiding-places under stairways or in the recesses of panellings. No Roman Catholic gentleman’s house was at that time considered to be complete without some of “Little John’s” darkling hutches and inconveniently cramped nooks secreted somewhere between foundation and roof. Truth to tell, however, these supposedly “secret” places are fairly obvious, and, given a search-party convinced that the fugitive was somewhere near, they must have been dull-witted fellows who did not light upon them.

When Worcester Fight ended so badly for “the man Charles Stuart, that Son of Belial,” as the Republicans were pleased to call Charles II., he made at once for Boscobel, the place where, only a few days before, the Earl of Derby had secreted himself. Accompanied by Colonel Carless, he threw himself upon the assured loyalty of the five Penderel brothers and their widowed mother, Dame Joan, who then lived here and at ruined Whiteladies Priory, half a mile away. “Will Jones,” for that was the name he adopted, could have found no more loyal hearts had he searched the realm, and the Penderels had already found the transition from secreting priests to Royalist fugitives an easy one. But Boscobel had become suspect, and the quarry was now so important that rigorous search was made, and Charles and Carless, although hid respectively in the secret recess behind the panelling in the Squire’s room, and in the pit beneath the cheese-loft during the night, were in daytime for greater security secreted in the bushy head of a pollard oak growing in a meadow near the house: the tree afterwards famous as the “Royal Oak.” In that leafy refuge Charles slept, with his head in the faithful Colonel’s lap, and beneath them quested the search-party of Cromwell’s dragoons. The story is well known, how that tree effectually concealed them, and how, after many wanderings, the King fled the country from the sea shore at Brighthelmstone.

The original Royal Oak is gone; hacked to pieces for mementoes in a very short while after the Restoration, and the youthful oak that stands solitary in a field does but mark the spot. But the house stands still, with its old hiding-places, and many are those who come to see; so that the pile of visitors’ books, all closely filled, is a mighty and a growing one. Of the “bosco bello,” the Fair Wood that gave the old house its name, not a trace remains.

Downhill from Ivetsey Bank, the Watling Street presently crosses into Shropshire, and comes to the village of Weston-under-Lizard—or “Weston-subter-Liziard” as it was formerly named—a cheerful little place, clinging like some feudal dependant to the park and Hall, the seat of the Earl of Bradford. The church and mansion stand adjoining, at the end of a short drive: in the church the cross-legged effigies of Sir Hugh and Sir Hamo de Weston, who flourished six or seven hundred years ago; and in the exquisitely fitted Bradford Chapel memorials of that family.

Burlington Pool, a reedy lake on the right hand, is now passed, and Crackley Bank, leading downhill towards another scene of industry and coal-mining, seen from afar by reason of its smoky skies. Close by, at the place called Red Hill, the Roman station of _Uxaconium_ was placed.

Before the pits and furnaces of the Lilleshall, Oakengates, and Ketley coal and iron mines are reached, the long street of St. George’s has to be passed through. There was a time, not so long since, when this was merely the hamlet of “Pain’s Lane,” and its local makeshift place of worship simply “Pain’s Lane Chapel.” All this is changed, and though its old prosperity has abated, the place now possesses a fine Gothic church dedicated to St. George, and has changed its name to match. Oakengates also has seen its best days, for many of the mines are exhausted. In these latter circumstances, the neat little houses of “Perseverance Place, 1848,” and others with similarly virtuous titles, look not a little pathetic. Perseverance, indulged in continually, has stripped the district of its mineral wealth, and the miners, living like maggots in a cheese, have eaten their home away. The township, at the very bottom of a steep descent, is busy, but dirty and slatternly, with a railway station and level crossing, and huge cinder heaps, likening it to some domestic dustbin in Brobdingnag. Ascending out of it, Ketley is reached, and with it the junction of Watling Street with the Holyhead Road.

XXXIV

And now to resume, at Weedon, the modern road. It is a tiring pull up out of Weedon, on the way to Daventry, and anything that may excuse a rest is welcome. That excuse is found in the contemplation of a substantial stone-built farmhouse, with nine windows in a row, half a mile out of the village, on the right of the road, and fronted at this day with a pleasant garden. This, now called the “Grange,” was formerly the “Globe” coaching and posting inn. Beyond it, opposite a group of Georgian red-brick wayside houses, the old road goes over what used to be a water-splash in the deep hollow; but Telford’s road proceeds inflexibly onward. The church in the meads to the right is that of Dodford, the name of the water-splash aforesaid. As for the derivation of that name, Fuller, with some hesitancy, gives “‘Dods,’ water-weeds, commonly called by children ‘cat’s-tails,’ growing thereabouts.”

The rough cart-track by which alone Dodford Church is reached, and the unusual jealousy that keeps the building locked, combine to hide much of interest from all wayfarers, save those of the most determined type. The enterprising and energetic who prevail have their reward, for the interior—good Early English and Decorated—has an unusually interesting collection of monuments. Here, cross-legged and mail-clad, lies the effigy of Sir William Keynes, one of the last of his family, settled here—no, _not_ settled, because they were continually away, warring for kings or against kings; rather let us say, who owned this manor—from the Conqueror’s time until that of Edward III., when the name was extinguished in the marriage of an heiress, the last representative. The true significance of the crossed legs of these old knights is still in dispute, but the commonly received idea is that the attitude proclaims a Crusader. But it is scarce possible that Sir William de Keynes (who died in 1344) ever fought for the Cross in Palestine. Had he done so, he must have been, in two senses, an infant in arms, for the Crusades were over and done with, and the Soldan had got his own again (or what was as good as his own) before William could have relinquished his coral and bells and taken to mace and broadsword. The fact seems to be that the early Crusaders, who adopted this mortuary symbolism, were followed in it by many who had never warred against the Infidel at all, and debased the original significance into a mere fashion.

Two others of the family are represented here in effigies of women, thought to be Hawisa de Keynes (1330) and her great-granddaughter, Wentiliana (1376). The earliest of the two is wooden, and is represented in the nun-like headdress of her time.

But the finest monument is that of Sir John Cressy, who died in 1444, across the seas in Lorraine, in the service of Henry VI. He is represented in plate-armour, and wears the Lancastrian badge, the Collar of SS. On the breastplate of the effigy is carved, very bold and deep, “Iohn Newell 1601.” Who John Newell was, except that he thus proves himself of the great ’Arry family, it is hopeless to inquire. “I.A. 1776” has also proved on the alabaster the barbarism of his nature and the mettle of his penknife.

Besides these memorials, the church has numerous brasses and tablets, while in the churchyard a stone tells of a Major Campbell, commanding the Royal Artillery at Weedon, who died in 1809, after having lived “strictly fulfilling the duties of the Soldier, Gentleman, and Christian: not less lamented in death than valued in life.” In conclusion, an odd custom prevailing here and in surrounding villages may be noticed: epitaphs on stones erected by widows over their husbands giving the relationship, “the husband of.” So complete a reversal of the usual practice, placing the man in the subsidiary place, is a novelty.

The remainder of the way to Daventry, or “Daintry,” as old travellers always called it, is hilly, but beautifully shaded by hedgerow trees. Hills and vales in constant alternation are seen on either hand; the frowning bulk of Borough Hill on the right, crowned with British earthworks, converted by the Romans into a military camp, probably identical with the lost station of _Beneventa_. Roman remains have been discovered up there in great numbers in days before the hill became enclosed, cultivated, and hedged about with difficulties in the way of exploring antiquaries. Down below, and near the road, is the ruin-strewn field called “Burnt Walls,” known by that name at least six hundred and fifty years ago, when it is mentioned as “ad brende walles” in a deed relating to property. On the eastern side of Borough Hill, near the village of Norton, and adjoining the Watling Street, another field, oddly named “Great Shawney,” has yielded many traces of old Rome. The name, indeed, is thought to be a faint and far echo of _Isannavaria_, another vanished Roman camp.

It was on Borough Hill that Charles I.’s army of ten thousand men, on a night in June, 1645, set a seventeenth-century example to the eighteenth-century ten thousand under the “brave old Duke of York,” who were marched to the top of a hill and then marched down again, as a well-known rhyme tells us. Nothing happened on either occasion. Charles’s troops, occupying Daventry and the surrounding villages for some days before, were frightened to that night’s hill-top vigil by some skirmishing exploits on the part of Fairfax. Before morning came, they descended and went off in retreat to Naseby, the King with them, reluctant to leave the comfortable lodgings he had enjoyed for six nights past at the “Wheatsheaf.”

XXXV

The first prominent object on approaching the town is the “Wheatsheaf” itself, boasting of being established in 1610, but rebuilt in the coaching age, and just a white-painted, stucco-fronted building with a courtyard and a general Pickwickian and respectable Early Victorian air. Opposite stands an “Independent Chapel, erected 1722,” which, with its secular air and big gates, looks like a converted inn. Continuing along the narrow and unpicturesque Sheaf Street thus entered, the unwary pilgrim, unobservant on wheels, is downhill at the other end and out of the town in the proverbial “jiffy,” or the not less proverbial “two-twos.” But Sheaf Street, lining the Holyhead Road, is a snare and a delusion. _That_ does not form the sum and substance of Daventry, sprawling largely down a street to the right and developing itself astonishingly at the end in a mutton-chop-shaped market-place, continued to the left hand again as a High Street. It is as though Daventry had long ago resolved to keep itself retired and select from the throng that once went up and down the Holyhead Road; and very quiet and empty the market-place looks to this day, with a church rebuilt in 1752 and supposed to be Doric: the exterior in a yellow sandstone rapidly crumbling away, and the interior like a concert-hall. The eye lights upon only one memorable thing, and that an epitaph to a certain Susanna Pritchett Godson, who died in 1809, aged twenty-five:—

She was—— But room won’t let me tell you what. Name what a Wife should be, And She was that.

Daventry Priory once stood hereby, but many years have passed since its last fragments were cleared away to provide a site for the town gaol in front of this ugly church. The Priory itself was, with others, suppressed by Wolsey, that ambitious Cardinal, for the purpose of seizing its funds, towards the endowment of his colleges at Oxford and Ipswich. He is charged with having sent five of his creatures to pick a quarrel with the house, and, causing the dispute to be referred to himself, of having dissolved it by fraud. The story of what happened to his five emissaries and himself, and the moral drawn from their fate, are quite in keeping with the superstitious spirit of those times. Thus, one learns that two of the five quarrelled, and one slew the other, the survivor being hanged; that a third drowned himself in a well; that a fourth, formerly well-to-do, became penniless and begged till his dying day; and that the remaining one “was cruelly maimed in Ireland.” This series of “judgments” is then carried on to the Cardinal, whose miserable end is historic; to his colleges, of which one was immediately pulled down, and the other finished under other patronage; and to the Pope who permitted Wolsey’s high-handed doings, and who was besieged and long imprisoned. Unhappily, for the sake of a poetic completeness of vengeance, Henry VIII.—who dissolved more religious houses than any one, and, moreover, appropriated their revenues and lands to his own uses—flourished amazingly for years afterwards. Like the wicked whoso good fortunes are bitterly lamented by the Psalmist, his eyes swelled out with fatness, and he was well filled.

The old pronunciation of “Daintry” goes back certainly to the sixteenth century, when it was probably responsible for the device of the old town seal, adopted at that time, representing a figure intended to picture a Dane at odds with an indeterminate kind of a tree. Pennant, on the other hand, derives the name from “Dwy—avon—tre,” “the dwelling of the two Avons”: and indeed the town is placed, as it were, at the fork of the Nen, sometimes called the Avon, and another insignificant stream; but this is looked upon with an almost equal contempt, and mystery still enshrouds the real origin and the significance of the name.