Part 6

Even the humble turnpike men were liable to be informed against for not giving a ticket, for taking too much toll, or for not having their names displayed over their doorways.

There were at one time no fewer than five turnpike-gates between London and St. Albans, a distance of only just over twenty miles. The series originally began with the gate on Islington Green, removed afterwards to the Holloway Road, and was continued by the one at Highgate Archway, and others at Whetstone, and South Mimms; the fifth being at the entrance to St. Albans itself. These numerous gates within so comparatively short a distance, gave excellent opportunities to the informing gentry, who were wont to take little excursions into the country along this route, returning with memoranda that brought them a goodly return on their enterprise. They cast their nets wide and captured an astonishing diversity of fish. But their memoranda had to be made with discretion. It was a risky thing to be seen noting down the name of a “collector of tolls,” as a turnpike-man was officially styled. The present writer has held converse with an old man who once kept the toll-gate at South Mimms. Age had withered him, but custom had not staled his reminiscences. He had an especially favourite and Homeric story of an encounter with one of these pests.

It was springtime, and our toll-keeping friend had a mind to whitewash the exterior of his house. To this end he not only took down the climbing roses, that rendered his official residence a fugitive glimpse of beauty to those who fared the road by coach, but he also removed his name-board. To him entered, while engaged in wielding the whitewash brush, one of the informing species, who, thinking himself unobserved, made to examine the board, lying face downwards, on the ground. Our friend, however, was not so intent upon his whitewashing but that he saw with the tail of his eye what was toward behind him. He must have been a man of elemental passions, for he reached over, his brush fully charged, and delivered a staggering sideways blow with it upon the face of the unsuspecting note taker. “I gin him a good ’un,” he always used to say; “but he come up for more, an’ I punched his head and kicked his ——” No matter what he kicked. Suffice it to say that his language was forcible, adjectival, and Saxon.

XIII

The old road regains Telford’s Holyhead Road of the Twenties a little distance short of South Mimms, close by where the cast-iron plate of the old milestone proclaims “Barnett” to be three miles distant. It crosses the broad highway at an acute angle and goes in an ascent, and with many curves behind the village; descending again and almost returning upon itself through the village street, as though a circuitous course and the mounting of every hill were things greatly to be desired by travellers bound on a long and toilsome journey. South Mimms, village and church, is completely islanded by these old and new roads.

In the accompanying illustration, the church with the houses behind it may be seen standing on a knoll. It is a hillocky and picturesque place, with a church unspoiled by the restoration of 1868, and rustic cottages that might well be fifty, instead of less than fifteen, miles from London. The view is towards London, and the road in the foreground is Telford’s; the old road coming steeply down and crossing again. There was an excellent reason for that ancient way taking such high ground at this point. It was for the accommodation of the village, and continued to be the main road until the days of a mere local intercourse between one parish and its next neighbour gave place to the more frequent and extended travel of later times, when direct communication between distant places became of much more importance than the convenience of wayside hamlets. The black despair that overtook the innkeepers and other frontagers relegated by Telford from a position in the midst of the traffic to a stagnant backwater of life may readily be imagined, but they received no compensation for this “worserment,” which must have practically ruined many of them; nor did those more fortunate ones pay for betterment who, in the making of new roads, found themselves, from being in a bye-lane, suddenly placed in the best of situations, on the main road.

Mimms was not only infamous for its floods. In days of yore it harboured highwaymen and footpads in plenty, and for quite a long time. It seems odd, nowadays, that a particular spot should have been of so evil a repute, and yet that no efforts were made to secure the rascals. A quaint document still preserved in the archives of the House of Lords recounts what befell William Symonds here in 1647. It is a petition in which he, as a prisoner in the King’s Bench prison, prays for a new trial. It seems that he was entrusted by Henry Fitzhugh and Richard Wells with a sealed packet of money, for him to carry from Bedford to London, and that when he reached Mimms at break of day he was set upon and robbed by three or four thieves and lost not only the money, but almost all the rest of what he had to bring to London. He further says that he was no common carrier, and that he had not negligently lost the money. Yet Fitzhugh and Wells prosecuted him, and, obtaining judgment, laid him prisoner in the King’s Bench. He concludes by praying for a new trial; but whether or not he ever obtained it does not appear. In any case, coming from Bedford to London, he had no business on this road.

The strange story of unfortunate William Symonds is followed by equally strange happenings some forty years later; when, for example, on November 9th. 1690, seven highwaymen not only robbed the Manchester carrier near this spot of £15,000, tax-money being conveyed from the Midlands to London, but also killed or hamstrung eighteen horses of the escort, in order to prevent pursuit. It was a leisurely business and thoroughly well carried out; all travellers who were unlucky enough to be passing at the time being robbed first and then tied to wayside trees, where they were left to be released by later wayfarers. Two Roman Catholics were subsequently arrested on a charge of being concerned in this affair, and committed for trial, but it does not appear what happened to them. At any rate, whatever their fate may have been, it did not stop these outrages on the Holyhead Road; for, two years later, the most audacious bands were still at work in this district, reaping almost incredible plunder. On the night of August 23rd, 1692, for instance, the great Churchill, the terrible “Malbrouck,” scourge of the foreigner on many a stricken field, tamely submitted to be robbed by the highwaymen who lay wait for him near “Coney,” as Narcissus Luttrell calls London Colney, and plundered him of 500 guineas; a loss “which,” says Macaulay, alluding to that great captain’s miserly disposition, “he doubtless never ceased to regret to the last moment of his long career of prosperity and glory.”

The plunder reaped by these daring highwaymen must have been immense, and inferior only to that bagged by modern company promoters. Three months later than their little parley with Marlborough, a party of eight or nine made a haul of between £1,500 and £2,000 out of a waggon “near Barnet,” and might have long continued their career had it not been for the King, who suspecting Roman Catholics and Jacobites in all these marauding bands, took measures that for a time effectually cleared the roads near London. Detachments of a regiment of Dragoons were posted some ten miles out, along all the great roads, and formed patrols. Captures were numerous, and executions almost as many. Among their notable seizures was that of Captain James Whitney, at some unspecified spot “at Barnet.” In this later Battle of Barnet, between the soldiers and Whitney’s band, December 6th, 1692, in which one dragoon was killed and several wounded, he was captured, and afterwards promptly hauled off to Newgate, amid great rejoicings, for he had been a terror in many widely separated districts of England. They hanged the “Captain,” not at Tyburn but in Smithfield, in the beginning of 1693, and the roads knew an interval of peace.

The parish registers and churchwardens’ accounts of South Mimms throw a further and a sombre light upon the history of the road, with their entries of “strangers” buried and “poor people” relieved. No fewer than seven “strangers” were found dead on the road, within the limits of the parish, in 1727, one of them having been drowned in Mimms Wash. Among other items in the accounts is one of 1737, “To a man that had the small-pox, to go forwards, 00 . 1 . 00_d._” Set down in this manner a shilling looks a great deal, but what astonishes the reader of these things more than anything else is the heartless way in which the poor and the sick were given a trifle and hurried off to the next parish, to die on the way, if they would, in order that some other community should have the expense of them, or the infection, as the case might be.

XIV

The Holyhead Road goes broad and straight, and with a long perspective of dust-clouds and telegraph-poles, up Ridge Hill, where the borders of Middlesex are crossed and Hertfordshire entered; but the old way, after passing the “White Hart,” crosses to the right hand and climbs up by itself as a deserted track. Near the hill-top it crosses again, and so descends on the left hand towards St. Albans. It is quite a narrow way, measuring at the most twelve feet across, against the average twenty feet of the modern road; and, sunk between deep banks as it is, giving rise to astonishment that a road such as this was, until the first, quarter of the nineteenth century had nearly passed away, the chief means of communication between the capitals of England and Ireland. Nature, left to herself, has long since resumed sway over the old road, here and there scored with waggon-ruts through eighty years’ deposit of leaf-mould, or, in other places, become a green ride through the unchecked trees that grow along it and interlace overhead. It is a relic of Old England of the days before railways: no museum specimen, but an open-air survival, unnoted and untravelled; discovered by the few who, haply realising what it is, thread its winding course and leave the modern well worn road to the crowd.

Descending Ridge Hill, into the valley of the Colne, London Colney is reached, skirting the road by that insignificant stream, spanned by a picturesque old red-brick bridge, whose generous proportions seem to be much too large for so unassuming a runlet. Such criticism, however, is severely deprecated by those who know the Colne throughout the year. They tell wondrous stories of the things it is capable of. London Colney’s name is perhaps not a very attractive one, but the place itself is exceedingly picturesque. Quaint village inns, timber-and-plaster gabled cottages, and old brick houses with a certain air of refinement that comes of chaste design and sound workmanship, are its constituent features.

The stretch of road between the northern face of Ridge Hill, London Colney, and St. Albans was always dreaded by coachmen in winter, for when snow fell in conjunction with a driving north or north-east wind, huge drifts resulted in this district. Ridge Hill formed a barrier against which the snow-charged wind battled, with the result that a flurry of snow-wreaths gathered in the levels. The great storm that began with startling suddenness on the Christmas Day of 1836 was a great deal more widespread than any other experienced during the coaching age. Curiously enough, it had its exact counterpart precisely half a century later, when the terrible snowstorm of Christmas night, 1886, fell, equally without warning, from what had been a blue and sunshiny sky. The storm of 1836 buried many coaches all over the country, particularly in the neighbourhood of St. Albans and Dunstable. The Manchester down mail of the 26th reached St. Albans, and, getting off the road into a hollow, was upset, and left where it fell, the guard returning to London with the bags and the passengers in a post-chaise. A mile distant from this accident, on the London side, a “chariot”—that is to say, a family carriage—was seen the next day without horses, and nearly covered with snow; two ladies making frantic appeals from its windows for help, saying their postboy, having left them two hours before to go to St. Albans for fresh horses, had not returned. They could not be helped; and so, still wildly gesticulating, we leave them for ever, without the means of knowing whether that postboy ever _did_ return.

The up Birmingham mail, _viâ_ Aylesbury, also on the 26th, just managed to get beyond that town when it ran into a drift and thus suddenly ceased its journey. All attempts to force a way through were fruitless. Accordingly, Price, the guard, mounted one of the horses and, tying the mailbags on another, set out in this fashion for London. Joined a little later by two postboys on other horses, with the bye-bags, all three pushed on together, discovering now and again that they had wandered far from the road when the hoof of a horse chanced to strike on the top bar of a field-gate or stick in the summit of a hedge buried in the drifts. By great good fortune they reached London at last, exhausted, but safe. The passengers, who were quite a secondary consideration, were left behind to be dug out by the country folk, and taken back, somehow, to Aylesbury. The Chester and the Holyhead mails were embedded at the same time at Hockliffe.

On leaving the old-world village of London Colney behind, a distant view of St. Albans opens out, the Abbey first disclosing itself, and then the clock-tower in the market-place, followed by an indiscriminate grouping of roofs and chimneys. The Abbey—in recent years ennobled as a Cathedral and by consequence of that and the creation of the See conferring the dignified style of “city” upon the town—very rightly dominates all else.

XV

We must penetrate very deeply into the past to reach the event that gave the City and Cathedral of St. Alban their name. So dim have records and traditions become, by reason of lapse of time, that it is not quite certain whether the year A.D. 285 or A.D. 305 witnessed the martyrdom of that saint. By all accounts it would seem that the proto-martyr of Britain was a citizen of Verulamium, and a pagan, when the Diocletian persecution of Christians broke out; but a strange thing happened to turn him towards the Faith that already had made converts steadfast throughout many dangers and trials. To him came one Amphibalus, a Christian, seeking shelter from the fury of the persecutors; and, whether from innate nobility of character or from long friendship with the fugitive, Alban offered him the protection of his house. Sheltered thus, Amphibalus expounded to him the tenets of this new creed that had made enemies so bitter and so powerful, with the result that Alban himself became a Christian. It was not long before the fugitive’s hiding-place was discovered, but Alban, filled with the newborn zeal that distinguishes the convert, secretly allowed his guest to depart, and then, acknowledging as much, cursed the gods and announced himself a Christian and prepared to suffer in his stead. Imprisonment and torture availed nothing to shake his resolution, and it was not long before the day dawned when he was led out from the gates of Verulam and beheaded upon that hill beyond the Roman city, now and for eleven hundred years past, the site of a succession of great churches set up in memory of him. Vague stories of a very early church erected upon the scene of the martyrdom may be met with, but the relics of Saint Alban (as in the meanwhile he had become) had long been lost when, four hundred and eighty-seven years later, Offa, King of Mercia, penitent for having compassed the murder of Ethelbert, King of the East Angles, proposed to absolve his soul by founding a church over the scene of the martyr’s agony. Divine light and a ray of fire are said by the legend to have conducted him to a certain spot called Holmhurst (that is to say “Holly wood”) where the relics lay, and they were removed to the church he then built, or, as some accounts will have it, enlarged. Of that edifice only some doubtful fragments remain, for not only did Ealdred and Eadmer alter it about A.D. 950, but Paul de Caen, the first Norman Abbot after the Conquest, set himself to entirely rebuild it on a grander scale, little more than a hundred years later. Again, in A.D. 1195, rebuildings and enlargements were undertaken, and throughout the centuries very few decades have passed without something, good or ill, being done to the huge fabric. Huge it is, for it measures from end to end 550 feet, and is only surpassed in this particular by Winchester Cathedral, the longest in England; but only by seven feet. How great is the rise of the Holyhead road from London may be gathered from the fact that the ground on which the Cathedral of St. Alban stands is on a level with the cross on the dome of St. Paul’s. The long story of the Abbey; how those slain in the two battles of St. Albans are buried here and at St. Peter’s; how it was sold to the people for a parish church for £400 after the dissolution of the monastery in 1539; how it in modern times became a Cathedral; and how Sir Gilbert Scott and Lord Grimthorpe successively have wrought havoc with their “restorations,” at a total cost of over £166,000, are matters for ecclesiologists, and not for telling in a book on the road.

Far or near, the Abbey dominates the city, whose clustered roofs rise gradually toward where it stands on its elevated plateau, overlooking the quiet Hertfordshire meadows. Indeed, it stands on higher ground than any abbey or cathedral in England, the floor level at the crossing being 340 feet above mean sea-level. Lichfield is next highest, standing at 286 feet, and Durham, placed though it be on a craggy cliff beside the river Wear, comes only third, at 212 feet. St. Albans’ very bulk is impressive, and, to the distant view, softened as it is by the smoke of the town chimneys, not unlovely, despite that long outline which rivals Winchester’s great span; and though the crudities of the wealthy architectural amateur are insistent at close quarters they are fortunately lost in great measure from a distance. For where bygone abbots strove so greatly to build in ages past, it is happily difficult for one man to largely alter the outline of their work.

A cheerful old place is St. Albans, crowning its hill proudly with a mural crown, and rich in all the traditional attributes of a cathedral city—darkling nooks, quaint alleys, and ancient churches—satellites attendant upon the central fane. Before the present main road from London came into existence in 1794, the entrance was by Sopwell Lane, still in use, branching off to the left at something more than half a mile from the city. It is a steep and rugged way, leading down into the meadows where Sopwell ruins stand, and so to Holywell Hill, where an acute right-angle turn and a formidable climb used to bring the early coaches staggering into the market-place by the aid of an extra pair of horses. The Roman way, the famous “Watling Street,” avoided the site of St. Albans altogether, and went considerably to the left of the Holyhead Road, to the valley of the Ver, where the ruins of Verulamium may yet be found below the hilly site of the monastery of St. Alban, founded by King Offa of Mercia in 793. It was the monks who in mediæval times diverted the Watling Street from its straight course to Verulam, and made the road from St. Stephens into St. Albans, by the tremendous descent and ascent of Holywell Hill. The travellers of those times came from London chiefly by the Watling Street, _viâ_ Stanmore, Brockley Hill, and Elstree, and it was not until later that the present route came greatly into vogue.

This monkish interference with the road was by no means on behalf of travellers, but rather from a highly developed sense of self-preservation. Before they laid hands upon it, traffic went by in the valley, and the town and monastery suffered from neglect. St. Albans Monastery, like other religious houses, did not exist by grants of land alone, but owned tolls and market-rights, and it was to increase the value of these that this drastic plan was adopted. Drastic, indeed, it was, for the paved Roman way was grubbed up and utterly destroyed from St. Stephens to Verulam, so that it became impossible to travel by it, and every one was then compelled to come into St. Albans by the mountainous Holywell Hill.

Verulamium had from the earliest times of the Roman settlement of Britain been the wealthiest of all the towns in this island. It possessed a theatre and all the graces of civilisation, but no walls or defences of any kind. Thus it was that when Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, revolted under oppression in A.D. 61, it became the easiest, as well as the earliest prey of her avenging hosts. Verulamium and Londinium fell before their onslaughts, and in the massacres following, 70,000 persons are said to have perished, in addition to those who fell at Camulodunum.

Verulamium, in common with those other towns, was afterwards rebuilt, and grew more prosperous than before; but it met a similar fate some 400 years later, when the Roman troops left Britain, and barbaric hordes overwhelmed it in some obscure foray. The very obscurity that clings about its end adds to the horror of those times. Those were wars of extermination, and none were left to tell the tale of how the great town and its people perished by fire and sword. Only when, in course of time, civilisation touched the Saxons, and historians were produced, do we hear anything of these long-ruined places, by that time become tinged with mystery and regarded with shrinking aversion. Bede, writing about A.D. 720, calls this “Waetlinga-ceaster,” the city of the Watlings. In his time vast ruined walls and houses remained. Offa, when founding St. Albans Abbey, some seventy years later, was probably dissuaded by fears of the supernatural from drawing upon the ruins for building material. It was not so with those who rebuilt and enlarged his Abbey from time to time. They found and worked the ready mine of bricks and tiles, doubly valuable in that district innocent of stone, and thus it is that so little of ruined Verulam is left; but, gazing upon the Abbey, we see, in the immense quantities of Roman brick and tile that have gone towards its construction, that ancient Roman town in a manner re-incarnated.