Part 14

It was here, in 1686, that Jonathan Simpson robbed Lord Delamere of 350 guineas, and “innumerable drovers, pedlars, and market-people,” all the way to Barnet. Jonathan was executed the followed September, aged thirty-two.

Two famous posting-houses once stood beside this lonely road: the “Blue Boar” and the “Black Dog.” Both have retired into private life. The old “Blue Boar,” still giving the name of “Blue Boar Corner” to the cross-roads, two miles out from Dunchurch, is a square building of white-painted brick, and stands on the left hand, with a garden where the coach-drive used to be. It must have been especially welcome to travellers in the dreadful snowstorm of December, 1836, when no fewer than seventeen coaches were snowed up on the Heath, near a spot named, appropriately enough, “Cold Comfort.”

This also was the “lonely spot, with trees on either side for six miles,” where the “Eclipse” coach, on its way from Birmingham to London, was overpowered by convicts on a day in November, 1820. It seems that, on the day before this occurrence, the deputy-governor of Chester Gaol and two warders, in charge of twelve convicts, chained and locked together in twos by padlocks, had set out from Birkenhead for London by the “Albion” coach, and that during the confusion of an accident at Walsall, when the deputy-governor was killed and the coachman and one of the warders seriously injured, one of the prisoners, more enterprising than his fellows, managed to steal the master-key from the dead official’s body, and, with his fellows, plotted an escape from the long journey to Botany Bay. Brought from Walsall to Birmingham by another coach, they were lodged for the night in Moor Street prison, and the following morning, still chained together, placed on the “Eclipse” coach for London, in charge of the remaining warder and another from Birmingham. This consignment of gaolbirds, together with their guardians, formed the sole passengers by the “Eclipse.” In the “lonely spot” aforesaid four of the convicts, having unlocked their fetters, rose suddenly up, seized the coachman and guard, and stopped the coach, while others overpowered their custodians. They explained that they had no wish to harm any one, but were determined at all costs to make a dash for liberty; and, securing coachman, guard, and the bewildered warders with ropes and straps, unharnessed the horses, and, mounting them, galloped across country. Coming upon a roadside blacksmith’s forge, they compelled the smith to unloose the remaining portion of their fetters, and then disappeared. All are said to have afterwards been recaptured, with the exception of two “gentlemen” forgers, who were never again heard of.

A grossly incorrect account of this happening is to be found in the pages of Colonel Birch-Reynardson’s _Down the Road_. The coachman and guard of the “Eclipse” were Robert Hassall and Peck. Hassall ended his days as a hopeless lunatic. His affliction was caused by witnessing the sudden death of his colleague and friend at Coventry. While the horses were being changed at that city, Peck busied himself on the roof of the coach, in unstrapping some luggage. The strap broke, and the unfortunate man fell backwards on to the pavement, dashing his skull to pieces. Hassall, who was seated on the box, fainted, and, on regaining consciousness, became a raving lunatic.

A curious feature of the milestones across Dunsmore, a feature not met with elsewhere, is their being cut into the shape of two or more steps, resembling “louping-on” stones, or “upping-blocks,” for the convenience of horsemen.

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It is here, five miles and a half from Dunchurch, that the famous “Knightlow Cross” stands. Just past a group of cottages, and an inn called Frog Hall, that mark the neighbourhood of Stretton-upon-Dunsmore, and where Knightlow Hill begins to tip downwards, this mysterious relic is found, in a meadow. The so-called “Knightlow Cross” is a square block of red sandstone, standing on the summit of a prehistoric grassy tumulus. It measures thirty inches square, and has a deep square cavity sunk in it. From its appearance, the stone may once have been the socket of a wayside or boundary cross, possibly marking the limits of the parish of Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, extending thus far. Here, from time immemorial, on the morning of St. Martin’s Day, November 11th, has been collected the “wroth-money” annually due to the Lord of the Manor of Knightlow Hundred: a district comprising some twenty-eight villages. These tributary communities pay sums ranging from one penny to two shillings and threepence-halfpenny each, with the exception of Ryton, which pays nothing. The whole amounts to nine shillings and threepence-halfpenny, the forfeit for non-payment in each case being either one pound for every penny not forthcoming, or “a white bull with pink nose and ears.” This tribute is said to be paid for the privilege of using certain roads, but it probably was originally “rother money,” or fees payable in very ancient days to the Lord of Manor for the privilege of grazing cattle and swine in the great forests that then overspread the district, and for having all such animals officially branded by the Lord’s verderer; strange and unmarked beasts being liable to confiscation.

At the beginning of last century the “Wroth Money” custom was discontinued, but revived after some years. The Duke of Buccleuch, the present Lord of the Manor, upholds what the villagers call “the old charter”; and still with every recurring Martinmas, at the shivery hour of sunrise, the Steward of the Manor attends and duly checks the coins thrown into the hollow by the representatives of the subject parishes. The tribute, and perhaps a good deal more, is expended in drinks of rum and milk for the party, and breakfast at the “Oak,” at Stretton. The “initiation of the colts” is a humorous contribution levied upon those who have never before been present.

Of the four fir-trees that once guarded the tumulus, locally supposed to mark the spot where four knights were buried, only one now remains; sycamore saplings have taken the places of the others.

Through Ryton-upon-Dunsmore, and past pretty Willenhall, with the Warwickshire Avon crossing under the road and seven tall poplars fringing it, Coventry is reached, over Whitley Common, once a lonely spot, horrific by reason of being Coventry’s place of execution. Old maps give the picture of a structure like a football goal at this point, ominously permanent, and labelled “Gallows.” It was not until shortly after 1831, when Mary Anne Higgins was hanged here for poisoning her uncle, that “Whitley Common” lost its old notoriety. Even so, the present directions to the stranger enquiring the way into Coventry are scarcely cheerful, the cemetery being the guiding landmark. Beyond that evidence of the populous nature of Coventry, commence the outskirts of that city; the road still with a kind of a furtive back door approach, with many twists and turns and narrow passes through picturesque slums as far as the very centre of the place. The entrance from London, in fact, remains the most difficult and crooked of any town all the way to Holyhead, and this although it stands as an improvement upon what had been before 1827, when Telford cut a new length of road here. The only good entrance to Coventry is from the railway station and along Hertford Street, an improvement made in 1812 in place of Greyfriars Lane; a steep, narrow, and cobble-stoned way that was once the only road in that direction.

Coventry’s lanes possessing every possible disability and inconvenience from the coachman’s point of view, it was, when the question of reforming the Holyhead Road was being debated, seriously proposed that a new route should be adopted, avoiding the city altogether. The proposition failed, and resulted in a compromise that did little real good, even though it cost £11,000. As an indignant writer of that period remarks: “Individual interest was allowed to have its weight, and the traveller is still jolted through the long and narrow streets, uttering imprecations at every yard of his progress.” It is a thrilling picture thus presented to the imagination, the traveller cursing as he goes, and recalls Swift’s proposition for a Swearers’ Bank, enriched by funded damns. If he could have estimated a good income from the number of good, hearty oaths uttered in one day at a little Connaught fair, riches surely beyond the dreams of avarice would have accrued to a branch of the Bank at Coventry.

These “private interests” were, of course. those of the innkeepers and the tradesmen, and they secured the continuance of the old route into the city, while permitting the not so urgent alteration of the exit toward Birmingham, where no trade would be disturbed by making what is now the so-called “Holyhead Road,” and deserting the “Old Allesley Road.”

The maze of Much Park Street, Earl Street, and High Street, brings one to the centre of Coventry at the intersection of that last-named thoroughfare with Hertford Street, Broadgate, and Smithford Street, and directly opposite the “King’s Head,” once a famous old coaching inn, but rebuilt these later years. The great Duke of Wellington breakfasted in the old house, November 28th, 1823, on returning from a shooting party at Beaudesert, the Staffordshire seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, with whom he had been at shooting parties of a very different character, in the Peninsula and at Waterloo.

XLI

One sees the city perhaps to best advantage from the Warwick road, or from the rising ground at Stivichall, close by. There below lies Coventry, the famous trinity whence comes the familiar name of the City of the Three Spires, silhouetted against the calm evening sky. The view recalls that eloquent passage where Ruskin, speaking with enthusiasm of the old coaching age that he had known, paints the joy of the traveller who from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw for the first time the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset, and came to his appointed inn after “hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent.”

Those three spires still advise the stranger, to whose ears by some strange chance the fame of ancient Coventry has not come, that he is indeed about to enter, not merely the great home of the cycle-making industry, but a city that has for centuries been famous for its religious houses, and was indeed a place notable in this wise before ever the Battle of Hastings was fought, to bring England under a Norman domination. Its very name, whence the present form has been evolved, is held by some to have been originally “Conventre,” or Convent Town, and it came in after years to own, not three, but seven spires. The other four went down in the days of spoliation that came in with Harry VIII.

Earl Leofric, the pious founder of the original Greyfriars monastery around whose religious buildings secular Coventry first arose, must have been a hard man, if legends tell truth, for his grinding taxation aroused the pity of his Countess, the immortal Godiva. Those must have been no slight hardships that could have earned the compassion of a Saxon gentlewoman, whose times and training alike could only have made her look upon the miseries of the lower orders as incidental to their lot. They were chiefly churls; men and women of bondage, and mere chattels, who had, it is true the accidental advantages of speech and a modicum of understanding; but, for the rest, were of no account.

Tennyson has “shaped the city’s ancient legend” into verse, and reveals the circumstances that led to his doing so, in the opening lines:—

I waited for the train at Coventry; I hung with grooms and porters on the bridge.

Waiting for a railway train is so unpromising a prelude to a mediæval legend that at the first blush a processional “train” is understood, and certainly a practical man would wait on the platform, rather than the bridge, for the train to London or Birmingham. But Tennyson actually _did_ allude to the railway, and if he shaped the legend while he waited, the train must have been very late, for the poem is a long one. These unpromising circumstances perhaps account for its unequal merit, and for the figure of fun that Leofric, “the grim Earl,” is unintentionally made to represent, with “his beard a foot before him and his hair a yard behind.” It is a tripping music-hall line, and the words those of a comic song. Not even a Duke—nay, nor a King—in these days of vulgar boys and popular songs, could dare defy the current prejudice in favour of a close crop, and so the Tennysonian Leofric suffers accordingly.

Leofric, so says the ancient legend, consented to remove the tax if his Countess would ride unclothed through the streets of Coventry. This, as he thought it a thing impossible for her to do, was his grimly humorous way of refusing to satisfy her compassionate pleadings. But she took him at his word, and thus, “clothed on with chastity,” rode the length of the town, her hair, we are told, in competition with Leofric’s own yard-length, falling about her in golden masses, shielding her person from the shameless sun.

Coventry that day was a city of the dead. None stirred, or might stir, out of doors while the pious Godiva rode her enfranchising pilgrimage, and all faces were turned from curtained and shuttered windows. All, that is to say, save one. A graceless tailor, whose name has been handed down to us as “Peeping Tom,” looked out from a hole he had bored in a shutter, and we are asked to believe that he was blinded by the wrath of Heaven for his presumption. “The story of Peeping Tom is well known,” says Wigstead, writing in 1797; adding, “This effigy is now to be seen next door to the ‘King’s Head’ inn, said to be the very house from whence he attempted to gratify his curiosity.” Peeping Tom, in fact, is a personage whom Coventry will not willingly resign to oblivion. Representations of that “low churl, compact of thankless earth,” have been numerous in the city. Not so long since there were three, all spying from their several positions down upon the streets, and certainly the one Wigstead mentions is still in evidence, not now “next door” to the “King’s Head,” but built into a blank window of that rebuilt hostelry. If tailors dressed thus in Saxon days, they must have been gorgeous persons. But the effigy, looking like that of an Admiral from some comic opera, is not older than a century and a half, and is perhaps a portion of a figure carried in the Godiva processions that at intervals have paraded Coventry’s streets for many years past. They do so now, but whether the obvious wig and the pink silk tights of the music-hall woman, representing Godiva, commend themselves as realising the old legend, is a matter of individual taste.

To tell Coventry’s long story is not the purport of these pages. Much of it is inseparable from the history of England. History in that more spacious sort was making when, in the reign of Richard II., the Dukes of Hereford and Norfolk fought their duel on Gosford Green, in 1398. Richard banished both: Norfolk for life and Hereford for ten years; but Hereford was back within a year and proclaimed King, and Richard deposed and murdered in the dungeons of Pontefract.

A hundred years later, Coventry’s beautiful hospitals and the noble St. Mary’s Hall, the home of the great trading guilds, began to rise. They remain, in greater or less preservation, until the present time; and perhaps there is nothing in the kingdom to surpass the exquisite beauty of Ford’s Hospital—an almshouse built in 1529, whose tiny courtyard of traceried woodwork should for its delicacy be under the protection of a glass case. Six years after Ford’s beautiful almshouse was built, the dissolution of the monasteries took place throughout the land; and Coventry, fostered by the great religious houses of the Whitefriars and the Greyfriars in its midst, shared in the ruin that befel them. Its population fell from 15,000 to 3,000 in a few years. Yet it was in this melancholy period that the great “Coventry Cross” arose. It was, however, not a building erected by the city, but the gift of one of its sons, who could find no other way of employing his superfluous wealth. It rose in all the majesty of carved pinnacles, tabernacled statuary, and gilded bannerets, in the market-place of Cross Cheaping: a sight to dazzle the eyes of all who beheld it. The Cross was repaired and re-gilded in 1669; but from that time, although the city was prosperous again, it fell into decay and was removed in 1771.

Coventry is a city by ancient right of the time when there were Bishops of Coventry and Lichfield. The style of the See was afterwards reversed, and the scanty ruins of Coventry’s Abbey Church or Cathedral alone tell of that ancient dignity. The encircling walls, too, of Coventry are gone. They kept out many unwelcome visitors in their existence of three hundred years, and behind them the citizens withstood the Royalists of 1642 with such effect that the memory of it rankled twenty years later, when the Restoration brought the Stuarts back again, and Charles II. ordered the fortifications to be destroyed. It was to the Civil War that the expression of “sending to Coventry” any objectionable person owes its origin. Every one knows that this means the social ostracism—the “cutting”—of those thus punished; but its original meaning is not so commonly understood. It derives from Birmingham, where the townspeople took up a hostile attitude towards the Royalists, overwhelming scattered parties and sending them prisoners to Coventry. A very excellent reason for not keeping them at Birmingham was that, the town had no defences and no prisons, while Coventry was a fortress-city and had both.

“True as Coventry blue” would, in view of this old attitude, seem a saying ill-applied to a place of Puritan politics; but it referred to a dye then used here. When Ogilby came to Coventry in the compilation of his great road-book, he noted its position “on the little river Sherborne, whose water is peculiar for the Blue Dye.” Even then, it will be seen, the city was beginning to recover from the decay of a hundred years before.

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Romance did not leave Coventry with the passing of mediæval days. It merely changed its aspect; doffed the “armour bright” the romancists love to tell of, and went clad instead in russet; put away helm and pike and broadsword, and sat the livelong day at the loom; changed indeed the Romance of Warfare for that of Industry, so that it was possible for old travellers to remark “the noise of the looms assails the passengers’ ears in every direction.” Coming in later years upon its discarded old warlike panoply of steel, Coventry has fashioned it anew, in the form of bicycles, for the needs of a peaceful age.

Tennyson, in _Godiva_, writing—

We, the latest seed of Time, New men, that in the flying of a wheel Cry down the past,

seems to foreshadow the bicycle, but the early period at which that poem was produced forbids any such allusion. We must needs, therefore, look upon those lines as prophetic, especially since, regarded in any other way, the phrase “the flying of a wheel” appears meaningless. But, even in the light of a prophetic inspiration, is not the cut at the “new men” who “cry down the past” an ill description of the typical cyclist, who uses his flying wheel as a means of communing with Nature and antiquity?

Coventry became earnestly industrial when jousts ceased; and its industries, in their rise and fall, have had their own romance. There were, of course, Coventry makers of woollens; pinners and needlers; girdlers, loriners, and many other tradespeople in the days of chivalry; but it was only in modern times that the industries of silk-weaving and dyeing, ribbon-making and watch-making arose, to give a fugitive prosperity to the place before the cycle industry came to confer upon it a greater boon. Those trades have gone elsewhere; but ask even the most ignorant for what Coventry is famous nowadays, and you get for answer “cycle manufacturing.” Yet before 1869 that industry was unborn, and the trade of Coventry at the lowest ebb. Silk-weaving and ribbon-making had then been dealt a deadly blow by the removal of the duty from foreign goods of that nature, and French ribbons and silks of new designs, and at low prices, poured in. Coventry weavers and dyers were ruined. At the same time, cheap Swiss watches had cut out the local watch-making trade, so that work grew scarce and starvation presently began to stalk the streets. That was a dark hour in Coventry’s modern chapter of romance, an hour brightened by the efforts of one man in particular—James Marriott—to establish a new industry. Those were the first days of a new invention—the sewing machine—and Marriott thought he saw means of setting afoot a great manufacture of that labour-saving device. He contributed £500 to the formation of a business, and was joined by others, and together they established the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, an enterprise that failed to realise the hopes centred in it. But in that failure, unknown to those gallant pioneers, lay the seed of success. Their plant was lying idle, and might have been dispersed but for a happy providence: the appearance in France of the velocipede.

The velocipede was by no means the first attempt of the kind to aid locomotion on highways. Indeed, in Boswell’s _Life of Johnson_ there may be found a reference, under date of 1769, to a “new-invented machine” that went without horses. A man sat in it and turned a handle, which worked a spring, which drove the machine forward. The criticism Johnson levelled against this device was one that will probably appeal powerfully to all cyclists who have stored up in their memories horrid experiences of hill-climbing and head-winds. “What is gained,” said the learned Doctor, “is the man has the choice whether he will move himself alone, or himself and the machine too.” Nothing came of that invention, and it was not until 1810 that the “Hobby Horse,” as it afterwards became known, was devised in Paris by a M. Niepce. He named it a “Celeripede.” This machine, improved by a Baron von Drais, of Mannheim, does not appear to have found its way to England until the autumn of 1818, when a coach-maker of Long Acre, one Dennis Johnson by name, introduced it as a “Pedestrian Curricle.” From 1819 to 1830 this machine—the popularly-named “Hobby Horse”—enjoyed a certain favour, although on country roads it could but seldom have been seen, for no one could ride it twenty miles and remain in an able-bodied condition. Its mere weight was appalling, constructed as it was of two heavy wooden wheels shod with iron, and held together by a stout bar of timber. For saddle, the rider had a cushion, and leant his chest against another cushion, supported by ironwork. Bestriding this fearsome contrivance, the adventurous rider’s feet easily reached the ground. As the Hobby Horse had no cranks or pedals, the method of propulsion was that of running in this straddling position until a sufficient impetus had been gained, when the lumbering machine would carry its owner a short distance on the flat. It was, of course, impossible to ride up even the slightest rise; but, considering the momentum likely to be accumulated by a mass of iron and wood, scaling considerably over a hundredweight, the pace down hill must have been furious enough.