Part 5

Hay gate derived its name from “the Haye of Wellington,” and was a gate into the forest of the Wrekin in ancient times. Nothing remains of that forest; the pine-trees that now clothe the Wrekin were planted on what was then a bare hillside in the early years of the last century.

Down this road that once led into the forest glades in one direction, and to Wellington in the other, the town is soon reached. Shropshire has few places so uninteresting, and its modesty in thus secluding itself from the old turnpike is therefore not misplaced. The narrow and devious streets of the town are not excused by their houses, almost without exception ugly and dull. A duller and uglier church, very “classic” and grimy, fitly lords it over those secular buildings, and looks down upon the railway station, placed in a cutting in the very centre of the town. A portion of the churchyard, indeed, was cut away to form the site of that station. A depressing monument, as pagan and as “classic” as the church, stands prominent among the humbler tombs. It is black-painted and gilt, like a jeweller’s show-case, and forms a canopy or shrine over an urn that does _not_ contain the ashes of the Reverend John Eyton, who died in 1823, and is commemorated in a very long epitaph. He lies below, and the urn is merely decorative: just of a piece with the rest of the pagan affectation around. The author of that epitaph was evidently not one who “damned with faint praise.” But listen to the virtues of the departed:—

“As a Christian Pastor he was vigilant, affectionate, and faithful; unweariedly devoted to the concerns of the fold, gathering the lambs with his arm, and daily feeding the flock committed to his charge. And now, while the Chief Shepherd places upon his Head a crown of glory that will never fade away——.”

And so forth. Another side of the monument takes up the tale, and tells us what manner of cleric this was:

“A man of whose character and endowments it is difficult to speak in any other language than that of admiration and reverence. His person and appearance interesting and attractive. His deportment and manners graceful and engaging. His intellectual and sacred attainments so various, so extensive, and so captivating as to render him everywhere the Desire and Delight of his edified associates.”

All these advantages and virtues did not avail him much for preferment, for he never became a Right Reverend. And yet this surely would have been the man for a Bishopric. Nay, Primates could be no more—and are commonly less.

XVII

Regaining the old turnpike at Haygate Inn, the Wrekin broods monstrous on the scene for miles to come, its central bulk reinforced by Ercall to the left, and little attendant Wrekins, crowned with fir-trees, on the right. In midst of this comes Burcot toll-house, situated on a lonely rise, where cross-roads seem to butt up against the great hill on one side and disappear into a valley on the other. This toll-house may well compare for size and solidity with any on the way from London to Holyhead; but why it should, and why a shield carved in stone, and inscribed “W.T., 1835,” should especially distinguish it from its fellows, are things now hid from mortal ken. Nor has “W.T.” achieved the fame he evidently desired, for the initials—to whomsoever they really belonged—are commonly and erroneously ascribed to Telford, whose Christian name was Thomas.

From this point, for a distance of nearly two miles, Telford made what were described in the published projects of that time as “sundry valuable improvements.” He planned and carried out a new line of road through the shoulder of Overley Hill, so that the coaches, instead of toiling over its crest, went through a short piece of rocky cutting below, and left so much of the old Roman road to solitude and decay. Coming from Shrewsbury, even this improved road remains a weary drag; the summit and its little group of villas gained with joy.

Below and beyond comes the Wrekin again, brooding vengefully over the smiling vale, and in wind and storm spreading a greater blackness over the scene: at all times giving a sombre cast to the long straight reaches of the Watling Street. There it has sat, moodily reminiscent, since time began to be. Geologists, who have their reasons for so doing, describe it as “a mass of eruptive greenstone,” and say the Wrekin is “the oldest mountain in England.” Therefore it may well be reminiscent. It has seen mankind emerge from the primeval ooze and floating as invertebrate jelly-fishes in the inland sea that washed its base, and has watched the family history from that interesting era to the present time; through the period of the arboreal ancestor, when the jelly-fishes acquired backbones and prehensile tails and took, as monkeys, to climbing trees; and unless some of the glorified monkeys come meanwhile as engineers and quarry it off the face of the earth, or blast it away, it will probably see the race itself follow the lead given by the governments of this country during the last sixty years, and resume the condition of invertebrata, wallowing in the slime.

The Wrekin has seen the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the coming of the Romans and the going of them; saw the first clearings in the primeval forest, the subjected Britons slaving under Roman taskmasters at the making of the Watling Street, and the brief period, centuries later, of coaching. It has looked down over the vale these last sixty years upon the railway, and the time is ripe for another change. Perhaps we are on the threshold of it.

It is very still and peaceful on the Roman road, and the traveller has it and its memories wholly to himself. Among those memories is the sad story of Robert Bolas, of Uppington, yonder where the church tower and the hedgerow elms occupy the middle distance, with the Wrekin for background.

Robert Bolas came of an old and respected family in Uppington, but that fact did not serve to keep him honest, and it seems that he had long made a practice of stealing wheat from a farm between his village and Wroxeter. It all happened very long ago, but the tale is not likely to be forgotten.

The gradual shrinkage of his grain made the owner, a farmer named Witcomb, suspicious, and, with a man named Matthews, he kept a watch. Bolas duly appeared, with an empty sack over his shoulder, which he was proceeding to fill when Witcomb and Matthews made to seize him. Bolas then picked up a bill-hook, and attacking them so furiously that Matthews was killed and Witcomb left, for dead, made off. But it so happened that Witcomb recovered, and the affair, that had in the meanwhile created a great stir in the neighbourhood, was explained. For some reason or another, Bolas was confident of an acquittal, and cheerfully told his friends he would be home in time to harvest his barley.

But they found him guilty, hanged him at Shrewsbury, and gibbeted his body here by the roadside; and so, although, after a fashion, he came home again, other hands reaped his bearded grain. The thing made so strong an impression upon the countryside that the phrase, “Don’t make so sure of your barley,” became proverbial.

All these things happened in 1722. Matthews was buried in Wellington Churchyard, where his tombstone, stating that he was “barbarously murdered,” stood until the railway came and swept it and others away. “Bolas’s Gibbet” long remained a landmark beside the Holyhead Road, a weatherworn stump bristling with the rusty fragments of nails that had been driven into the post so that it should not be climbed and the body removed. That “the evil that men do lives after them” was exemplified shortly after the body of Bolas came home and was hung upon the gibbet. There still stands, not a great way ahead, an old roadside “public,” the “Horseshoes,” where the road forks to Wroxeter. Here, one dismal night, several youths were drinking and joking, when the conversation turned upon Bolas. Each dared the others to go in the dark to the lonely spot and ask the dead man how he felt, and as no one was sufficiently courageous to go alone, they set off a body. On the way, one more mischievous than the rest drew off unperceived, and hid in the hedgerow beneath the gruesome object.

“How are you to-night?” asked the little group, keeping very close together, and sorry they had come.

“Very cold and chilly,” answered a pitiful voice; and immediately they all took to their heels. One suffered such a shock that he became a raving maniac.

XVIII

Wroxeter lies within a short distance, but only approached along a narrow and uneven lane. Its fine church-tower looks down upon little more than a few farms and bartons; for village, as generally understood, there is none. This simple rural place, aromatic with hay and straw and corn, is the representative of, and takes its name from, the great Roman city of _Uriconium_, one-third larger than Pompeii, destroyed by the fury of savage hordes more than fourteen hundred years ago. The City of _Uriconium_,—the “City of the Wrekin”—was established shortly after A.D. 48, when the Roman general, Ostorius Scapula, had driven out the British tribes. He set an important station here, at a crossing of the Watling and the Ikenild Streets, and the place not only served as an armed camp to guard the roads and the ford of the Severn, but grew to be the most important market along the road to Wales. It lasted four hundred years, and only fell some forty years after the Romans had deserted Britain. _Uriconium_ was then taken by the combined onslaughts of the Welsh tribes, and burnt to the ground, and the Romanised British who had remained were all massacred.

To this great city, its site now under corn and grass land, and inhabited by a handful of peasants, the Roman road led, on its way to Wales and the shores of the Menai, and to its site still leads, but beyond is lost, save to those who study archæology. The only relics left on the spot to tell of that vanished place are the two Roman pillars standing before the church; the font, made out of a carved capital; and that massive fragment of masonry, the Old Wall, standing once in the centre of the city, but now solitary in a field.

Superstition brooded for ages upon this spot, and weird legends were created by the terrors the lonely place had for the ignorant of other times. Dead and gone Romans, who had, perhaps, been very matter-of-fact and commonplace persons in their lives, and gifted with all the small virtues of the hearth-loving citizen, loomed large, menacing, and supernatural before those whose business took them near the ruin, and so it was not until modern times that much was done to unearth what relics might lie deep down below the earth deposited by the changes of so long a period.

It was in 1859 that two acres of land were excavated. What did they find? Many things. Fragments of the red Samian ware on which the Roman citizens served their banquets, and whence they pledged one another, drinking to the eternity of Rome. A rusty key without a lock, and a stylus among bones, wine-cups, and scattered coins; the wooden tablets it wrote upon perished, like the hand that held it. The figure of a cock, modelled in lead, once a child’s toy, and near it the skeleton of a child, doubtless the one that owned that ancient plaything. Three skeletons of older persons were found, crouched up in one of the underground hypocausts. A hypocaust was a basement chamber, constructed to heat a room or house. Into one of these places those persons had fled when the barbarians stormed the city. They intended to creep out when danger was past, but the place was fired, and they perished in their hiding-place. Two of these fugitives were women; the other an old man. Within his grasp lay a pile of Roman coins, 142 in all, and, beside them, all that was left of his cash-box—some fragments of wood and rusty nails.

Roofing-slates, still with nails in many of their holes, were discovered in the ruins; the slate, by its appearance, judged to have been brought from Bettws-y-Coed. Millstones for grinding corn, and a charred heap of the corn itself, were found; brooches, seals, household gods, and fragments of the innumerable intimate articles of everyday life. Even some careless scribbling, such as that often found on the walls of Pompeii, was seen; but before it could be protected some graceless excursionists among the thousands carried by rail at that time to see the novelty of a buried city, obliterated it with their walking-sticks.

The two acres then explored, with the little that has been done since, give the impression that if the three-miles’ circuit of the walls could be excavated, results surpassing the finds at Silchester might be attained.

From Wroxeter, crossing the Severn, the Watling Street went by the two Strettons Wattlesborough, taking its name from being situated on the great road; _Rutunium_, now Rowton; thence to _Mediolanum_ at the crossing of the river Tanad, under the Breidden, a site now called Clawdd Coch, or “Red Ditch”; _Mons Heriri_, under the shadow of Snowdon (whose Welsh name is Eryri, or Eagles’ Mountain) at the ancient earthwork known as Tomen-y-Mur, in the Vale of Maentwrog; and to the sea-coast at _Segontium_, identified with Caer Seiont, near Carnarvon. A branch, with stations of the way at _Bovium_ (Bangor-ys-Coed); _Deva_, the great fortress of the Twentieth Legion, identical with Chester, on the Dee; _Varae_, the modern Bodfari; and _Conovium_, by the Conway (Caer Hên, or Old Fort), traversed the Dee estuary and the coast-line looking out to Anglesey and the Irish Sea.

XIX

Returning from Wroxeter and passing the tiny hamlet of Norton, the way lies flat to Shrewsbury. Flat, because we are now come beside the Severn (which no Welshman calls anything else than Sivern). Away across the watery plain as we advance are the Stretton Hills on the left, volcanic and mountainous in outline, blue and beautiful in colour; and, more distant, ahead, far beyond Shrewsbury, the Breidden Hills, a great bulk starting from the level without any disguise of foothills or preliminary rises to detract from their dramatic effect.

The Tern, a tributary of the Severn, crosses the road beneath a handsome stone balustraded bridge, with views to the right over Attingham Park and along the road, through a mass of overarching trees, toward the village of Atcham. There, in the Park, stands the classical stone building of Attingham Hall, one of those places built a century or more ago at incredible expense, and only to be maintained at a cost far exceeding the resources available to-day. Corn at 50_s._ and 60_s._ a quarter built many fine mansions, and nowadays corn at 25_s._ keeps them empty. Attingham Hall lacks a tenant. It belongs to Lord Berwick, whose title does not, by the way, come from the only Berwick commonly known—the town of Berwick-on-Tweed—but from Berwick Maviston, close by Atcham, the old home of the extinct Malvoisin or Mayvesin family.

The chief entrance to Attingham Park is through the great archway in Atcham village. One side of the village street is made up of church, school-house, post office, a deserted coaching inn, and a number of rustic cottages; the other is the long brick wall of the Park, densely overhung with trees, on to which the village blankly looks. The only opening in this wall is the great archway aforesaid; very tall, Doric, and stony. With a spinal shiver the stranger, who stands wondering awhile where he has seen its like, suddenly realises the resemblance it bears to the entrance of certain great London cemeteries. The arch is flanked by a stag on one side and by a pegasus on the other, with the inscription in gigantic lettering in between: “Qui uti scit ei bona.” A very proper aspiration; but it is just as well that tramps are innocent as a rule of Latin, or they might not inaptly call and ask for something on account.

Opposite this gateway stands what was once the “Talbot,” a first-class posting-house. It looks on to the church in one direction, the entrance to the Park in another, and down upon the Severn in a third, so that its situation is by no means commonplace. When the altered conditions of travelling rendered it no longer possible to carry on a remunerative business here, the hotel was converted into a private mansion, and the gravelled drive walled in and turfed, but it has only been occupied for short periods and has long stood empty. Like the Princess in the fairy tale, it waits and still waits, looking up the road and down the road and over the bridge for the expected. It is weary waiting, and even the rats and mice who lived royally in old times, and were reduced at last to the pitiful expedient of subsisting on the faint smell of what _had_ been, gave it up and lived on one another. The ultimate survivor is believed to have committed suicide in the Severn.

It is a noble bridge that spans the river here, and, built before the art—no, _not_ the art, the science—of constructing bridges in iron was understood, is of stone, and very steep. This steepness added to its narrow proportions was a terror to those nervous coach-passengers whose faith in Sam Hayward of the “Wonder” was not what it should have been, considering the consummate art he displayed as a whip. But possibly they thought that all the artistry in the world would be of little use to save them and the coach if, on one of the wintry nights and mornings when the Severn mists had obscured the road, they came into collision with the parapets and so were hurled into the swirling river; and, moreover, the hours—5.30 in the morning and 10 at night—when the “Wonder” passed this dangerous spot, are not those when courage is high and confidence greatest.

It is a gentle rise from here to Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, passing on the way the old toll-house of Emstrey Bank. On the hill-top, and looking down the Foregate from the summit of his Doric column, stands the statue of “old Rowley.” The personage owning that nickname was Sir Rowland, afterwards Lord Hill, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief in succession to Wellington. As a Peninsula and Waterloo hero, and a brother-in-arms of Wellington, Shropshire people held him in great honour, for was he not also a Salopian—one of the Hills of Hawkstone—and a fine representative of the county? It was left to a descendant to bankrupt the estate and disperse the medals, warlike relics, and trophies of Hawkstone Park.

It is perhaps not the sculptor’s fault, but a result of distance and acute perspective, that the gallant general on his elevated post bears an extraordinary likeness to Pecksniff, as pictured by Phiz.

Abbey Foregate must have been the place where Benjamin Disraeli, travelling post to Shrewsbury in June 1839, in company with Sir Philip Rose, to fight for one of the two Parliamentary seats the borough then retained, had his attention drawn by his companion to a huge poster, displayed on the walls of a roadside barn. Disraeli was standing in the Conservative interest, and was at the time head over ears in debt.

“Something about you,” said Rose to his companion, as his eye lighted on the poster. The chaise was stopped, and Disraeli, deliberately adjusting an unnecessary eyeglass—for the bill was set in the boldest and blackest of “display” type—slowly read it from beginning to end.

It began, “Judgment Debts of Benjamin Disraeli, Tory Candidate for Shrewsbury,” and unfolded a long, long list of creditors and the amounts due to them. After long and careful consideration of the lengthy roll, Disraeli turned to his friend, and calmly said: “How accurate they are. Now let us go on.”

Shrewsbury was apparently not so scandalised as it should have been by this revelation of Disraeli’s financial straits, for the electors returned both himself and the other Conservative candidate by thumping majorities.

The Foregate, a broad thoroughfare outside the town walls, was an early suburb on the hither shore of the Severn, which comes winding again athwart the road, presenting, when such things were matters of the first importance, a defence that not the boldest might pass. Whoever held Shrewsbury, girdled by river and ramparted walls for fully seven-eighths of a circle, and with the remaining eighth, the only easy approach, blocked by the frowning dark red turrets of its great castle, was master of the situation. Hence that race between Henry IV. and Hotspur for possession of the town in 1403; a race won by the King, who flung his army into it a day before Hotspur’s Northumbrians and Scots came in sight; hence, too, the repeated attempts of the Welsh to gain possession.

Foregate still keeps something of its old suburban character, the old-fashioned houses partaking both of town and country; curious old inns neighbouring stately mansions, and village shops shouldering the doctor’s or the lawyer’s staid Queen Anne and Georgian residences. But the great feature is the Abbey Church, great even though only a fragment of its former self. Ruddy sandstone of a particularly deep, almost blood-red, hue gives its massive and time-worn tower a suggestion of Shrewsbury’s sanguinary history; just as the great bulk of the Abbey may have been the measure of the sins of that Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, who founded it and died, a world-renouncing monk, within these walls in 1094. Close upon two hundred years later, in 1283, the first English Parliament was held in the Chapter House; and that would be a place of much historic interest to-day, but, like most of the monastery buildings, it has been destroyed.

XX

“Shrowsbury,” as already noted, is the correct pronunciation of the name of Shropshire’s capital; a mode that still follows the structure of the Saxon place-name, “Scrobbesbyrig.” But it is not reasonable to suppose that the outlander who has never been to Shrewsbury should know all the rights and wrongs of the case, and though it may grate upon the Salopian to hear strangers talk of “Shroosbury,” he can have no possible remedy until he procures a reform in the spelling of the word. Meanwhile, the outlander aforesaid is often severely entreated for his solecism. Sometimes, too, he deserves all he gets, as for example when, somewhere about 1894, the author of “Pictures in Parliament” taunted a Shropshire member with using a “Salopian pronunciation which for some time hid from the ordinary member a knowledge that he was alluding to Shrewsbury.” It did _not_ hide the identity, and moreover, no Salopian ever did or could use any other pronunciation. Now, if that member had said “Salop” there would have been more room for criticism, although by that name Shrewsbury is just as often known in Shropshire. It may be presumed that every one knows the county to be often so-called, but it is a novelty for strangers in these gates to hear the word applied to the town. To this day the railway booking-clerks for at least twenty miles round Shrewsbury are commonly asked for tickets to “Salop,” and the very milestones adopt the same name. The Earls of Shrewsbury, on the other hand, are (it may not be generally known) miscalled by that title, and are really Earls of Salop. Not, let it be noted, of the town of Salop, but of the _county_; as seen in the original patent of nobility granted to the ancestral Talbot in 1442. But, although there is not the shadow of a warrant for their adoption of the “Shrewsbury” title, they appear never to have used any other, and in literature, from Shakespeare downwards, the same custom has always been observed. But why? Is it possible that the ill meaning of the French word “Salop” has forbidden the use?