Part 7

Towards the middle of the tenth century, those ruins in the valley were a source of terror to the good folks of the rising town of St. Albans. In them lurked those outlaws—robbers, murderers, and general offscourings of society—for whom it would have been dangerous to appear in the town, and who rendered it equally dangerous for law-abiding burgesses to wander far from their domestic hearths when the sun had set and darkness gathered. It was partly for this reason, perhaps quite as much as for the use of the materials for building purposes, that so much of the ruins was removed by Ealdred, the eighth Abbot. He warred with the Verulam vagabonds, carting much of their harbourage away, and explored a cave supposed to be inhabited by a dragon—who was not at home on that occasion. The good Abbot, however, is said to have found traces of the monster! His successor, Eadmer, was of the fiery sort. He, too, removed much building material, but the “pagan altars” found during his explorations he ground to powder—and so earns the maledictions of all antiquaries.

And so it went on for centuries. Stukeley, about 1690, noticed a good part of the walls standing, but, as he rode along, saw hundreds of loads of Roman bricks being carted off, to mend the highway.

XVI

The old entrance by Holywell Hill is the most charming part of St. Albans, with fine old red-brick mansions and old inns where the coaches and the post-chaises used to come. Many of the inns are either mere shadows of their former selves, or have been entirely altered to other uses, but their coach-entrances and yards remain to toll of what they once were. There stands a building now a girls’ school, but once the “Old Crown,” and close by the “White Hart,” with “Saracen’s Head Yard” beyond, but the “Saracen’s Head” itself is now divided into shops. In a continuous line uphill were the “Angel,” “Horsehead,” “Dolphin,” “Seven Stars,” “Woolpack,” “Peahen,” and “Key”; which last house stood squarely on the site where the London road now enters the city. It was from the “Keyfield,” at the back of this house, that the Yorkists burst into the streets and fell upon the Lancastrians in the first Battle of St. Albans, 1455. Another long-vanished inn was the “Castle,” made famous by Shakespeare in a scene of _Henry VI._, where Richard Plantagenet kills the Duke of Somerset, in this fight:—

So, lie thou there:— For underneath an alehouse’ paltry sign, The Castle in St. Albans, Somerset Hath made the wizard famous in his death.

Somerset had been warned by a witch to “shun castles”:—

Let him shun castles; Safer shall he be upon the sandy plains, Than where castles mounted stand.

He could scarce have interpreted the prophecy in the crooked way it was verified.

Holywell Hill still echoes to the sound of the coach-horn, as the modern “Wonder,” with an extra pair of horses, dashes up from the hollow to the “Peahen.” The “Wonder,” however, does not journey to and from St. Albans by the Holyhead road. Leaving London from the Hotel Victoria, Northumberland Avenue, at 10.50 a.m., it follows somewhat the line of the Watling Street by Hendon, the “Welsh Harp,” Edgware, Great Stanmore, Bushey, and Watford; reaching its destination at 1.50, and setting out on the return journey at 3.45. The “Wonder” has run daily to and from St. Albans, sometimes through the winter as well as summer, since 1882; owned by that consistent amateur of coaching, Mr. P. J. Rumney, familiarly known down the road and at Brighton as “Dr. Ridge,” from his proprietorship of a certain world-famed “Food for Infants.” But, before the “Wonder” came upon the scene, the modern coaching revival had provided St. Albans with summer coaches from about 1872. The now famous “Old Times” began to run, November 4th, 1878, and continued to St. Albans until the following spring, when it was transferred to Virginia Water.

The “Peahen,” standing at the meeting of Holywell Hill and the London Road, has of late been rebuilt in a somewhat gorgeous and baronial style, but is the lineal descendant of a house of the same name in existence so far back as 1556. The name of the “Peahen” is thought to be unique.

Continuing the line of hostelries past the “Peahen” and the “Key,” into Chequer Street, there were the “Chequers,” the “Half Moon,” and the “Bell”; and in French Row the “Fleur-de-Lis,” and the “Old Christopher,” still remaining. The “Great Red Lion” in the market-place, has been rebuilt. Near it, in George Street, on the old road out of St. Albans, is the “George,” one of the pleasantest old places still left, with an old red-brick front and a picturesque courtyard. There was an inn on this site certainly as early as 1448, when it was mentioned as the “George upon the Hupe”—whatever that may mean. In those times it was a pilgrim’s inn, and had an oratory chapel. Nothing so interesting as that survives, but the old house has its features. The room to the right of the archway, used in old times, when a coach plied from the “George” to London and back every day, as a booking-office and waiting-room, remains in use as a parlour and rendezvous for the country-folk on market days, and all the summer the courtyard is like a bower with flowers and vines. Under the gable can be seen a spoil snatched from the destruction of old Holywell House in 1837—the decorative carving from the pediment, a work representing Ceres, surrounded with emblems of agriculture its products, and attended by Cupids and shameless creatures of that sort.

To and from the “George” went daily the “Favourite” London coach, until the first of the railways came in May 1858, and ran it off the road. William Seymour, who used to drive it, then descended to the position of driver of an omnibus plying between St. Albans and Hatfield, but even that humble occupation was soon swept away by railway extension. He then became landlord of the “King Harry” inn at St. Stephens, and died at last, May 30th, 1869, in the Marlborough almshouses, St. Albans. Two other coaches in those days plied between St. Albans and London, generally taking three and a half hours. One came and went from the “Woolpack,” and the other, the “Accommodation,” from the “Fleur-de-Lis,” French Row.

A particularly haughty and exclusive establishment was the “Verulam Arms.” No common fellow who travelled by public conveyances was encouraged there. Only the lordly travellers who came in their own family coaches, or posted, ever sheltered beneath that condescending roof. The house remains, on the right-hand of Telford’s new road leaving St. Albans, but had, as an hotel and posting-house, the shortest of careers. Built between 1827 and 1828, another ten years saw the coming of the railway. With that event vanished the trade of the “Verulam Arms.” The house was soon closed, and has for fifty years past been a private residence. It is an extremely plain and uncompromisingly formal building in pallid brick, within railings enclosing a semicircular drive. It is said that the Princess Victoria stayed here once. Some portions of the once extensive stable-yards and coach-houses remain, but the greater part of the grounds was taken, as long ago as 1848, as the site for a Roman Catholic Church, an unfortunate building discontinued and sold before completion, and finally purchased and finished as a Church of England place of worship, as it still remains, with the title of Christ Church. It would be difficult to find a more hideous building.

But a far higher antiquity than can be shown by any other house in St. Albans belongs to a little inn called the “Fighting Cocks,” standing by the river Ver, below the Abbey. Its origin goes back to early monastic days, when the lower part of this curious little octagonal building was a water-gate to the monastery, and known as St. Germain’s Gate. Here the monks kept their nets, using the upper part as a fortification. That embattled upper stage disappeared six hundred years ago, and in its place the upper storey of the inn is reared, in brick and timber, upon the stone substructure. The inn claims to be the oldest inhabited house in the kingdom, and exhibited until recently the inscription:—

The Old Round House, Rebuilt after the Flood.

Obviously, judging from that old sign, the distinction between an eight-sided and a round house was too subtle to be noticed. The “Rebuilt after the Flood” does not (seeing where the house stands, beside the river Ver) necessarily mean the Deluge.

The hanging sign has of late years become pictorial. On one side the Cocks are to be seen, a whirling mass of contention, and on the other the victor stands proudly over the prostrate body of the vanquished, and indulges in a triumphant crow.

XVII

We often read in romances of the villainous innkeepers of long ago, who were in league with highwaymen, and we generally put those stories down as rather wild and far-fetched illustrations of a bygone age. But there were many such innkeepers in the old road-faring times, and they were the highwaymen’s best sources of information. Such an one was the host of an inn at St. Albans, who in 1718 was associated with Tom Garrett and another “road agent” working the highway between St. Albans and London, in an evil partnership. It is a pity that the sign of this inn is not specified; we should have gazed upon it with interest.

To this inn came one evening a gentleman travelling to London on horseback. The landlord himself helped him up to his bedroom with a weighty portmanteau which promised good plunder, and while his guest was preparing for supper, took the good news of a likely haul to Garrett and his partner, who were staying in the house. A pretty scheme was arranged on the instant, and the landlord, when his guest came downstairs, introduced his two confederates to him in the guise of travellers, also on their way to London the following morning, who would be glad of his company. The unsuspecting stranger, nothing loth to spend an evening in pleasant company, instead of sitting in solitary state, joined the other “travellers” with a good will, and they had a convivial night; setting out the next morning together. When they had reached a lonely part of the road near London Colney, the one covered him with a pistol while the other ransacked his portmanteau, taking all its contents, including a hundred guineas from his person. Then they disappeared down a bye-road.

Our traveller sat mournfully by the roadside for a while, contemplating his empty pack and the reins of his horse, which had been cut by the two partners in crime. It was not long before he arrived at the very just conclusion that the landlord of the inn was a party to this business, and a very pretty little scheme occurred to him by which he saw the possibility of getting his own again. He carefully refilled his portmanteau with stones, and retracing his way to St. Albans, called first at a saddler’s to have his reins mended, and then leaving the horse behind him, went back to the inn. When the rascally landlord saw him return with his baggage as heavy as before, he came to the natural conclusion that his confederates had not robbed the stranger, and cursed them under his breath for a pair of bungling fools. The returned traveller himself confirmed this impression, accounting for his reappearance by telling how an accident had happened to his nag. In the meantime, he said, before starting out again, he must have dinner, and only wished he could have had the pleasure of the company at that meal of the good fellows his host had introduced him to the night before. With much extravagant praise of their good and sociable qualities, he declared that he must really not lose sight of such fine fellows. Did mine host know where they lived in London?

That villainous tapster was quite deceived. He _did_ know the addresses, and gave them. In due course, then, imagine our traveller once more on his way, and finally arriving in town. The next morning he called upon Garrett, in the guise of a “gentleman on important business.” Garrett was still in bed, and could not be seen, having “just returned from a journey in the country.”

To this he replied that it was urgent and important business, and this message brought the highwayman down. The traveller had not come without very potent persuaders to support his demand for his property. The one was a threat to have both highwaymen arrested; the other was a pistol. These inducements were successful, and his hundred guineas found their way back to his pockets, together with a portion of his other property. Then he made a similar call upon the other malefactor, who yielded up the other moiety of the contents of the portmanteau, and (as we are told by the contemporary historian of these things) another hundred guineas. We need not believe in this epic completeness and overflowing measure of justice and retribution. _There_ lurks the eighteenth-century moralist, eager to cross the t’s and dot the i’s of every situation. But there is no reason why, up to that point, the story should not be true.

Before the road was remodelled by Telford, in 1826, the way out of St. Albans was past the “George” and down the steep descent of Romeland and Fishpool Street, through the village of St. Michael’s, and diagonally across a portion of Gorhambury Park, crossing the river Ver at Bow Bridge, at a point one and a half miles from the city, just short of Prae Mill. The present Holyhead Road, starting from the “Red Lion” in the Market Place, was in 1828 an entirely new work. It is described by Telford as a two miles’ length, extending from the “Red Lion” to “Pond Yards,” a spot probably identical with Shefford Mill, half a mile beyond Prae House, the site of the ancient hospital of St. Mary de la Pré, or de Pratis (“St. Mary of the Meadows”) originally a retreat for women lepers, founded in 1190, and afterwards a Priory of Benedictine nuns, suppressed by Wolsey in 1528. Priory and mill are alike gone, but Prae House is seen on the left of the road, dwarfed by the embankment with which the roadway is raised securely above danger of flooding from the river Ver.

When the new road was completed, the old route through Gorhambury became private, and the entrance to it is now guarded, in the village of St. Michael’s, by lodge gates. St. Michael’s, now lying on the road to nowhere in particular, remains a sweetly old-world place, and the breakneck descent to it is one of the quaintest corners of St. Albans. Here old houses and quaint signs are the rule, and modern buildings the exception. The “Jackdaw,” the “Cock and Flower Pot,” and many other old names attract attention. Curiosities of the geological sort at St. Michael’s are the huge masses of conglomerate rock, or “pudding-stone,” found here and there in prominent positions, having been dug up at different periods in the neighbourhood. The name of “pudding-stone” is excellently descriptive, the rock consisting entirely of pebbles welded together by some prehistoric force, and resembling, to the imaginative mind, Cyclopean fossilised fragments of some antediluvian plum-pudding, extraordinarily rich in plums.

St. Michael’s Church, standing as it does almost in the centre of the site of old Verulamium, is largely built of Roman tiles. It is of many periods, from Saxon to Scottian and Grimthorpian, and of an extraordinary interest, somewhat blighted by the heavy hand of Sir Gilbert Scott, who “thoroughly restored” it in 1867, and the inconceivably heavier hand of Lord Grimthorpe, who pulled it about shamefully in 1897, utterly demolishing its quaint old rough-cast tower, and building a new one from his own amateur-architect design. The odd architectural details would be ridiculous if they were not pitiful, in view of the really interesting work they replace. One device, in especial, resembles a cycling free-wheel clutch rather than anything known in the whole range of Gothic design.

But greater than any other conceivable interest is the association of the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, with Gorhambury and St. Michael’s. Bacon, who in his sixty-five years of life studied law, and rose to be Lord Chancellor, was a sufficiently remarkable man. Not only was he a successful lawyer and a diligent courtier, a philosopher, and the industrious author of essays, historical works, and the _Advancement of Learning_, but wrote all the plays attributed to Shakespeare, Greene, and Christopher Marlowe, as we are asked by ingenious latter-day discoverers of cryptograms to believe. Nay, not only so, but a rival Columbus on the stormy sea of cryptogamic discovery has even found that Francis was not the son of Nicholas Bacon, but the unacknowledged offspring of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester! This is startling, and lends an altogether novel interest to the statue of Bacon in the church, and the ruins of old Gorhambury House in the park. “Thus he sat,” runs the inscription beneath the statue, seated in philosophic abstraction in an arm-chair, and truly he looks wise enough for anything; but it was not serious wisdom alone that went towards the construction of Shakespeare’s plays.

XVIII

Leaving the city of St. Alban, the river Ver is crossed at Prae House, and continues companionable as far as Redbourne, where it disappears in another direction, in deference to the rise on which Redbourne is built. That old coaching village is a veritable jewel of quaintness in the Queen Anne and Georgian sort. Red-brick houses of those reigns, and wayside hostelries with elaborate signs of wrought iron that seem to await the coming of the coaches again, are the chief of Redbourne’s architectural features. Very conspicuous, although but the sign of a humble beer-house, is the pictorial sign of the “Mad Tom.” Painted on a large circular plate of copper, it hangs out from the frontage, displaying a different picture on each of its two sides:—the first showing “Mad Tom in Bedlam,” the second, “Mad Tom at Liberty.” A very old sign, it represents one of those pauper lunatics who, in other ages, were confined in Bethlem Hospital, and who, when sufficiently recovered to be released, were provided with “briefs,” or licences to beg a livelihood. These “Mad Toms,” as they were called, were once familiar figures upon the roads.

In the first picture, Tom is seen in a barred cell, madly clutching his hair: fetters load his arms and legs, and a loaf (a stale one, no doubt) stands on a bracket, and looks anything but appetising. The second scene shows him, gaily attired in white stockings and blue knee-breeches, with a gorgeous red coat and a still more gorgeous turban, walking the road and blowing a trumpet.

The more rural part of Redbourne is quite away from the road, across a wide common traversed by a noble elm avenue. Beyond this, and in a hollow where a quite unsuspected street of ancient cottages is found, the exquisitely picturesque church stands. One may look in vain in the guide-books for any mention of its beauties of colour and quaintness of detail that instantly capture the affections of the artist. Long may the restorer be kept at a proper distance, and the delicate silver-grey hues of the old plastered tower, the crumbling “clunch” stone, the patches of black flint and Roman tile and the unconventional beauty of the sixteenth-century brickwork be suffered to remain untouched.

Redbourne seems to have found favour in the eyes of sturdy Cobbett; but rather on negative than positive grounds, and on account of what it did not possess. “No villainous things of the fir tribe here,” he observes, looking upon the landscape with approval. He missed a point though, at Friar’s Wash, where the recurrent Ver or Verlam is seen to cross the road again, by the “Chequers” inn, where a hilly bye-lane goes off in a north-easterly direction to Flamstead. But doubtless Cobbett missed the name, else we might well have heard him characteristically lashing out, something in this sort: “Friars’ Wash! indeed. Good God, when _did_ friars _wash_? Everybody knows, or _ought_ to know that they did nothing of the sort, and counted personal uncleanliness as not merely next to godliness, but a constituent part of it. They were as dirty physically as Mr. Pitt and his stock-jobbing and funding, fawning and slavering creatures are morally. Aye! and I tell you, poor down-trodden victims of an arbitrary government,” etc., etc. Something of that kind Cobbett would have written in his _Rural Rides_. Indeed, the “friars austere, unwashed and unpleasantly yellow,” as they were, by all accounts, might well have resented that naming of the ford as an unwarrantable aspersion upon their well-earned reputation for an ancient and invincible dirtiness.

Flamstead, let it be noted, having originally been Verlamstead, owes its name directly to the river whose valley it overlooks from its hill-top. Its church-tower and characteristic Hertfordshire dwarf extinguisher spire may be glimpsed from the road, crowning a wooded ridge. The succeeding mile on to Markyate Street—the “River Hill improvement,” as it was called—was one of the last pieces of work undertaken in the long series of Holyhead Road alterations, and was cut after 1830. The old road, still visible on the right, goes for the length of a mile as a steep and narrow lane, almost parallel with the improved highway, and falls into it at the beginning of the village of Markyate, as it is shortly named nowadays. The “street” has only of late years been officially dropped by the General Post Office, in response to the request of the inhabitants, to whom, and to strangers having business here, the old address caused considerable trouble and misunderstanding; those not familiar with the place not unnaturally thinking “Markyate Street, Dunstable,” to be a thoroughfare in that town, instead of, as a matter of fact, 4½ miles distant. Markyate is indeed merely a street of houses fringing either side of the road, and what the old coachmen called a “thoroughfare village”; a long street certainly, but nothing else, and realising the Euclidian definition of a line, “length without breadth.” It is an old-world place, drowsily conducting from Hertfordshire into Beds, with too many inns for its present needs, and one—the original “Sun” of coaching days—converted into a laundry and looking with severity upon the house directly opposite, that has assumed its old style and title.

Beyond Markyate, where the land shelves steeply down from the road on the right hand, is the lovely park of Markyate Cell, with a fine old Elizabethan manor-house, turreted, terraced, and with noble clusters of carved brick chimneys, once the site of a nunnery; and in a hollow—the roof of its absurd little Georgian red-brick tower below the road level—the toy-like church of this beautiful domain. The rest of the way to Dunstable is lonely, Kensworth village hidden somewhere in the folds of the hills, and its Post Office only visible. At one mile from Dunstable remains an old toll-house, the first now met with on the journey from London.