Part 4

Perhaps the most striking way of picturing the great changes that have taken place in Wolverhampton in the course of a century is by comparing the different aspects presented by High Green at periods ranging from 1797 to modern times. It has had many changes. Only two features in the series of pictures have remained unaltered during that period: the handsome old brick houses at one corner have survived, and the noble tower of St. Peter’s still looks down upon the scene, as it has done for close upon five hundred years. The series opens with Rowlandson’s spirited drawing, showing the market in full swing. There are the butchers’ and other stalls; there you see a milkmaid, milk-pail on head, and the pack-horse of some country trader in the foreground. On the right hand is a picturesquely gabled, half-timbered shop, selling such incongruous things as toys and oysters: the building covered over with plaster and become an inn, long known as “Cholditch’s,” by the time the next view, taken in 1826, was drawn.

In that view, the coach, making so stately an exit in the direction of Birmingham and London, is the “Prince of Wales,” from Maran’s Hotel, Holyhead, to the “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn. It reached London from Birmingham by way of Henley-in-Arden, Stratford-on-Avon, Woodstock, and Oxford. The imposing-looking coachman with the three-caped coat was Miller, said to have been of Dunstall Hall, reduced in circumstances, and driving a coach as to the manner born. As for the monumental structure, like the second cousin to a lighthouse, standing in the middle of the road, that was erected in 1821 by the “Light Committee” of the town, to celebrate the establishment of the first gasworks and to illuminate the Market-place. As a monument it was successful enough, and the patent refracting gas-lamp that crowned it shed a light visible for miles around; but its height was so great that the Market-place itself remained in darkness. It only served to illuminate the bedroom windows of the surrounding houses and light the good folks to bed. The “Big Candlestick,” as the pit-men of the neighbourhood called it, was a failure, and, after several proposals had been made to crown the pillar with a statue of the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, or other heroes of that time, it was removed in 1842, to be succeeded some years later by that warlike trophy the captured Russian gun, seen in the picture of “High Green, 1860.” Railways had then long abolished coaches, and cabs waiting to be hired form a feature of the scene, eloquent alike of altered manners and of Wolverhampton’s growth. Some of the houses are also seen to have been rebuilt.

In the “Queen Square” of to-day the gun is replaced by an equestrian statue of the Prince Consort: a Gothic stone bank stands on the site of the old inn, and on the right hand stands a newer new building, with sundry other reconstructions and changes. High Green became “Queen Square” from November, 1866, when Queen Victoria unveiled the statue. History does not tell us why the Prince Consort should have been especially honoured at Wolverhampton, which owed him nothing, nor he it. Local association he had none, and in the placing of his effigy here we find only another example of the tiresome excess of loyalty that has planted statues of Royal personages thickly all over the kingdom, and has produced a dreary and unmeaning repetition of “Victoria” and “Albert” squares, streets, stations, museums, and what not, to the blotting out of really interesting local names that had endured for centuries before the wallowing snob came upon the scene, like some evil pantomime sprite.

Electric tramways now run through Queen Square to all parts of this modern and progressive borough, and new streets and new buildings of both a business and a public character have changed the squalid and formless character of the town into something very different; while pleasant suburbs extend far into the country districts.

XII

At Tettenhall the borough of Wolverhampton ends, and with it the Black Country. Crossing over the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, the road makes direct for Tettenhall Hill, eased in its course by a long embankment in the hollow, and by a deep cutting through the red rocks of the hill-top, but still a formidable rise. The old road, however, was infinitely worse. Its course may still be traced branching off to the left by the “Newbridge Inn,” where the old toll-house used to stand, and plunging down into the hollow where Wolverhampton’s only watercourse, the Smestow brook, trickles under a narrow bridge, thought to enshrine among its stones some remains of Roman masonry. Thence the old way rose steeply, and went partly through grounds now private, and up “Old Hill,” where a bye-road still zig-zags with an extravagant steepness between sheer rocks. Here is the chief part of old Tettenhall village, much the same as it was a hundred years ago, and, with the exception of an ugly modern hotel built on the summit of the rocks, untouched by the life and changes of all the revolutionary years that have passed since Telford cut the new road and left this in a quiet backwater of life.

Tettenhall church and pretty churchyard are cut off from the rest of the village by the modern Holyhead Road. Half-way up the hillside, and overhung with trees, the old-fashioned rural spot overlooks Wolverhampton, seated in smoky majesty on its ridge.

In the crowded churchyard they show the confiding stranger a stone with the much flattened and battered figure of a woman, and recount the legend of it being the memorial of a seamstress who worked on Sundays, and when reproached for it replied that if it were wrong she hoped her arms would drop off. Her arms dropped off accordingly the next Sunday, when plying her needle! The stone is really a much mutilated effigy from some ancient tomb, cast out of the church so long ago that every feature has been worn away; but it will be noticed that the arms have been hacked off at the shoulders.

On the hill-top is Tettenhall Green, where old road and new meet, and so go past a park and hamlet oddly named “The Wergs” to Wrottesley Park, fenced off for the length of a mile by as ugly a stone wall as it would be possible to find in many a long journey. “The Wergs” is a corruption of the ancient name “Witheges,” itself a mangled form of “withy hedges.” It is probable that the name was derived from the sallows with which some early squatter fenced his land, instead of the rude cut-wood fences of primitive times. Wrottesley Hall, burnt in 1896, still lifts its ruined and blackened walls between the trees.

Five miles beyond Wolverhampton, passing the “Foaming-Jug” Inn, Staffordshire is left behind, and the borders of Shropshire crossed.

XIII

Shropshire is the land of the “proud Salopian.” Of what, you may ask, is the Salopian proud? It may be doubted, however, if the phrase really means more than that the Shropshireman has ever been high-spirited, jealous of his own good name, and quick to wrath. But he has good cause for pride in the fair shire that held out of old against the Welsh in the hazardous centuries when this was part of the Marches, the Debatable Land where the frontiers shifted hither and thither as the Lords Marchers or the Welsh chieftains warred with varying fortunes, and where the Englishman often sowed, and raiding Taffy came and reaped unbidden. Shropshire bore its part well in those centuries of strife, when the Welsh were continually striving to get back their own; for it should not be forgotten that this also was Wales in the dim background of history. More than eleven hundred years ago the Englishman threw the Welshman back upon his rugged hills and out of these fertile plains, and this became part of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia. Not only politically a part of that realm, but socially, for war was not an affair of kid gloves in those days, but an affair of race-hatred and extermination, so that when the conquering King Offa had set his rule over what is now Shropshire, those Welshmen who had not fled were slain, and their land occupied by an alien race. So thorough was that change that the very names of the towns and villages were altered, and are either quite forgot or else only survive in the memories of antiquaries. Take a map of England and its neighbouring Wales, and you will find a mysterious earthwork called “Offa’s Dyke,” traced from near Prestatyn, on the Flintshire coast, to Bridge Sollars, on the Wye in Herefordshire. That was the boundary set up by Offa, “the Terrible.” The Shropshire portion of it runs from Chirk, by Llanymynech, Welshpool, Montgomery, and Clun, and to this day not only the place-names, but the people on either side show a distinct cleavage between Saxon and Welsh. In the heart of Shropshire it is difficult to find a trace of the old race. Who but the antiquary knows that before Offa came and seized that town Shrewsbury was “Pengwern”? Yet that was its name. Under the Saxon it became “Scrobbesbyrig,” that is to say “Scrub-borough,” or the Town in the Bush. Two hundred years after Offa and his kingdom had perished, another fierce personage laid his heavy hand upon the Welsh in this region. This was the Norman, Richard Fitz Scrob, to whom Edward the Confessor granted what was not his to give, namely, all the land he could seize from the Welsh on the Borders. The curious similarity of his name to that of “Scrobbesbyrig” has often led to the supposition that he built the first castle of Shrewsbury, and that the place took its name from him. But he certainly built Richard’s castle, on the border, near Ludlow, one of a chain of more than thirty fortresses designed to keep the as yet unconquerable Welsh in check.

From “Scrobbesbyrig,” its capital, Shropshire derived its Saxon name of “Scrobbescire” (pronounced “Shrobshire”), changed in after centuries to its present form; and let it be noted by all who would not earn the contempt of Salopians that the right pronunciation of Shrewsbury follows the derivation, and that to name it as spelled is regarded by all Salopians as a vulgarism. It is “Shrowsbury” to the elect, rhyming with _blows_, not _news_.

The name of “Salop,” applied frequently both to shire and county town—whence “Salopian”—is another matter, and difficult of derivation. It comes, say philologists, from “the ancient Erse words, _sa_, a stream, and _lub_, a loop,” describing the site of Shrewsbury, encircled as it is by the strange windings of the Severn.

Shropshire remains one of the most exclusive and aristocratic counties in England, as well as one of the wealthiest. It might well have claimed, not so long since, to be the thirstiest also, the Squire as an institution lived longer here than in most parts, and flourished most. Two generations ago, Salopians of every class had the reputation of being able to drink all others senseless, but that is one of the obsolete virtues.

One topples over the edge of Staffordshire, as it were, into Salop, for here the steep descent of a range of hills leads, by a dramatic transition, from the waterless plateau around Wolverhampton to the valley of the Severn. Summerhouse Hill is the joy of the cyclist bound for Shrewsbury, and the bane of his return; with a mile run down in one direction, and a steady heartbreaking climb in the other. Near the summit is the “Summer House,” an inn where the flying “Wonder” of seventy years ago changed horses punctually at 8.16 every morning, on its journey from London to Shrewsbury; and at the foot of the hill, the “Horns” of Boningale. Boningale itself may be sought on a slip road that goes off to the left and returns in a semicircle of five hundred yards: the tiniest village, with a very small church and one very large black-and-white farmhouse, almost as ancient as the church itself. The road onwards is quiet, and unmarked by any outstanding features, save a house at Whiston Cross; Albrighton and other large villages lying a little distance to one side.

Whiston Cross, situated 130¼ miles from London, can claim the distinction of being exactly half-way between London and Holyhead. The house was once an inn, but has long been the place where the Albrighton Hounds are kenneled. In the old days of hard drinking, this and the “Harp” inn at Albrighton were the resorts of a cobbler reputed to be the greatest sot in the neighbourhood. He must have been exceptional, for he scandalised even _these_ parts. He was once the victim, when in his cups, of a joke whose echoes still linger mirthfully in the countryside. Senselessly and helplessly drunk, he was driven over to a coalpit at Lilleshall and lowered into its depths. When he came dimly to his senses, he found himself surrounded by a circle of inquisitors, their faces blackened, in an uncanny place, spectrally lighted, and was very soon made to understand that he was dead and come to judgment before a jury of fiends anxious to consign him to a warm corner.

“I don’t know why I was brought here,” he said miserably, addressing the supposedly satanic tribunal, “and I can assure you, gentlemen, I was once a respectable shoemaker, of Albrighton, in Shropshire.”

Beyond Whiston Cross, in Cosford Brook Dingle, the Wolverhampton Waterworks raise their tall chimneys unexpectedly from the surrounding woodlands of Halton Park; the engine houses humming with the machinery that daily pumps more than three million gallons of water for the use of that enterprising community. In another two miles across the Salopian plain, Shiffnal is reached, and with it the first, and entirely lovable, specimen of a Shropshire town.

XIV

Shiffnal is a little place, changed less in the course of three hundred years than any along this road. Three centuries ago, when it was called “Idsall” quite as often as by its other name, all the town, with the exception of the church, was brand new, and its site with it; for the fire that in 1591 had levelled it with the ground led to the new township being erected a hundred yards or so to the east of the old one.

No fires, however destructive, warned our Elizabethan forbears that timber was a dangerous material to build with, and Shiffnal arose, one mass of timbered houses, and by a happy chance they most of them remain to this day; so that, whether one comes into the town by road, or is swept swiftly over it by train on the Great Western Railway that looks down from a lofty embankment upon the queer old Market-place, the effect is charming indeed. But, lest this magpie architecture should, or ever could, look monotonous, there have been introduced, from time to time, buildings in other styles and materials. Down the street, and seen, in fact, before one arrives at the Market-place itself, is, for example, the “Jerningham Arms,” stucco-fronted and thrusting forth the elaborate quarterings of the Jerninghams, Lords Stafford, and lords of the manor, ensigned with the Bloody Hand of Ulster, which leads the ignorant to suppose that Allsopp’s ales are obtainable within. The “Jerningham Arms” was a coaching inn, and the “Star” (prominent in the illustration, with a skylight on its roof) another, and a handsomer. Behind the fine old red-brick front of that house, and through the archway, the stable yard runs down; the beam over the arch rich in the badges of old fire insurance offices, and above them the sculptured armorial shield of some forgotten county family.

Shiffnal church stands a little apart: a fine red sandstone building with a central tower crowned with a low pyramidical red-tiled roof that only by a little overtops the battlements. Does that sound like a depreciation of it? I hope not, for it is a type characteristically English, and very lovable. One may trace many architectural periods in Shiffnal church, from the Norman when they could not build too heavily, to the Perpendicular, when lightness was coming in. Not that lightness has part or lot here, for the church is stately rather in the massive masculine way. Within a recess of the chancel wall lies the monumental effigy of Thomas Forster, “sometime Prior of Wombridge, Warden of Tongue and Vicar of Idsall,” 1526. In that inscription the old name of the parish is preserved, as it is also on a tablet giving an account of a much more interesting person; a certain William Wakley. It recounts how he “was baptised at Idsall, otherwise Shiffnal, May 1st, 1590, and was buried at Adbaston, November 28th, 1714. His age was 124 years and upwards. He lived in the Reign of eight Kings and Queens.” But this ancient’s record is surpassed, for the tablet goes on to tell of “Mary, the wife of Joseph Yates, of Lizard Common,” who died August 7th, 1776, aged 127 years. “She walked to London just after the fire in 1666, was hearty and strong 120 years, and married a third husband at ninety-two.”

Two other curiosities, and we are done with Shiffnal church. The first is the odd Christian name of a woman—“Kerenhapputh”—on a stone in the churchyard: the second a Latin inscription of 1691 on the churchyard wall. It may be Englished thus (the wall supposed to be speaking): “At length I rise again, at the sole expense of William Walford, the kindest of men.”

XV

Breasting a long incline of nearly three miles, the road comes to Prior’s Lee and Snedshill, and, reaching a commanding crest, looks down upon the industry and turmoil of Lilleshall on the one side, and the equally busy and industrious Coalbrookdale on the other. The prettiness of Prior’s Lee is in name alone. It and Snedshill are wastes of slag and cinder-heaps—some a century old, others the still smoking refuse from the blast-furnaces that roar and whizz and vomit smoke on the left.

But the great iron furnaces of Snedshill are seen at their most impressive at night. The strange cyclist who has never before known the road sees the reflection of their flames a long way off, and comes upon the scene bewildered by the rising and falling of the lurid light that glows intensely in one direction and sinks all other quarters in an impenetrable obscurity. It is the weirdest of scenes, the surrounding house-fronts and the tower of Prior’s Lee church standing out in the radiated glare against the blackest of backgrounds: spouting flames an angry red, turning the white light of arc-lamps down at the ironworks a wicked and debauched-looking blue. Sighings of escaping steam, like the groans of some weary Titan exhausted with labour, rise now and again, and are succeeded by thunderous crashings and huge clouds of steam and smoke, mingled with millions of sparks, as the molten metal is now and again discharged.

To this is added the clattering of coal-waggons where Oakengates and the collieries lie, deep down in the valley, brilliant at night with constellations of lights. In strange contrast with all this, the benighted wayfarer sees roadside cottages whose open doors disclose housewives going about the business of their homes with all the world, as it were, for a background. The sight enforces the thought—how great the little home, how small the vast outside world!

Passing Ketley Station and rising Potter Bank, great banks loom mystically on the left, and bars of light from wayside inns streak the road. If it be summer night, sounds of glee-singing rise by the way, for the colliers, although this is not Wales, have got musical culture.

But daylight strips Ketley of all possible mysticism, for the soaring banks are then found to be just cinder-heaps, and the depth of the deep valley on the right is not so appalling after all. Most of Ketley’s mines are deserted now, but the cinder-heaps are gaunt as ever. Telford drove a new road through the heaps and used vast quantities of the cinders in ballasting and paving it, leaving a portion of the Watling Street, diving down a hollow, on the right. It is still there, with the disreputable roadside cottages beside it, as of old, and the same semisavage class as ever inhabiting them.

Away in the distance, rising majestically over the miners’ rubbish-heaps, comes the whalelike outline of the Wrekin, shaggy and blue-black with pines. Not a great hill, compared with the Stretton Hills and the Welsh mountains presently to come in sight; but its isolated position in the surrounding Shropshire plain gives it a commanding appearance, and has made the Wrekin a centre to which all Salopian hearts fondly turn in response to that old toast, honoured with three times three, “To all friends round the Wrekin.” The toast has not so limited an application as those who are not Salopians, or know not Shropshire, might imagine, for the Wrekin is visible from incredible distances, and the view _from_ it comprises not only the whole of Shropshire, but a radius of distant hills sweeping the horizon round from Malvern, the Warwickshire Edge Hill, the Peak in Derbyshire, the mountains about Llangollen, the Berwyns, Cader Idris, and Plinlimmon, to the Brecon Beacons.

The famous hill rises only 1,260 feet above the surrounding plain, but just because it _is_ a plain, its Protean bulk looms larger and loftier than many a taller eminence. Protean the Wrekin is because the outline of it, viewed from different quarters, varies singularly. Whale-like from Wellington, from the south-west it looks like a truncated sugar-loaf, and seen from the road near Wroxeter resembles a huge and shapely dome.

Wellington lies a mile distant from the road, but straggling outposts of houses extend all the way, and at Cock Corner one may look down the cross-road and clearly perceive the existence of the town and what manner of town it is. To coaching travellers Wellington was but a name and a distant mass of roofs; for, with but two minutes to change horses at the “Cock”—or, if they travelled by the famous Shrewsbury “Wonder,” a minute at Haygate inn, a mile onward—they were gone, and roofs and chimneys sank, as though by magic, beyond the rounded fields and tall hedgerows.

The “Cock” has remained game to the present day, and has witnessed the disappearance of its once prosperous neighbour, the “Hollybush.” That picturesquely named inn was a coaching house of a humbler sort, and carriers and coal-waggoners made it a house of call. Now a private house, brilliantly whitewashed, it seems by that dazzling raiment to have put away, as far as possible, all coaly memories.

XVI

Haygate inn stands, just as does the “Cock,” at the fork of a bye-road leading to Wellington. The “Cock” caught the travellers from London, the “Falcon” (which was really the sign of Haygate inn, although few knew it by any other name than that already mentioned) those from Wales and Shrewsbury. It was intimately connected with the Shrewsbury “Wonder,” being kept by H. J. Taylor, a brother of Isaac Taylor of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, who put that famous coach upon the road in 1825. Another brother kept the chief inn at Shiffnal, and so between them they kept the hotel and coaching business in the family along the first eighteen miles from Shrewsbury.

When the “Falcon” was rebuilt, in the flush of the coaching age, it was built to outlast the requirements of rich and jovial posting and coaching travellers for at least a century to come. So much is evident at sight of the house, substantially constructed and designed with all the dignity of a private mansion. Alas! for all such anticipations; the first railway train rolled into Shrewsbury Station in 1839, and shortly afterwards the house became what it is now—a farmstead.