Part 8

“‘Let it be done then,’ said his worship. ‘Andrew, you will be bound in a bond of fifty pounds to prosecute this charge at the next assizes.’

“‘Please your honour’s worship, I’d rather be excused,’ said Andrew, looking alarmed. ‘Who’s to pay expenses?’

“‘I rather think the prisoner won’t pay, at any rate,’ said his worship; ‘those who prosecute will have the first chance of that.’

“‘Then I couldn’t do it,’ said the constable; ‘I’d rather not have any hand in the affair.’

“‘Is the man to be discharged then?’ asked the magistrate.

“‘Yes, if your honour pleases,’ said the constable; ‘I don’t like them ’ere bonds.’

“The magistrate then asked me what I was and where I came from, and I told him I was a weaver and came from Lancashire.

“He asked me where I was going to and for what purpose, and I told him I was on my way to London in expectation of getting a place.

“Had I relatives in London, and what sort of a place did I expect to obtain? I said I had not any relatives in London, but I had some good friends, and I had little doubt of getting a situation under Government.

[Sidenote: _DISCHARGED_]

“‘Under Government,’ said he, with surprise; the clerk also elevated his eyebrows.

“‘Yes, sir,’ said I, half laughing; ‘I’m going up in expectation of a Government place.’

“‘The man is _non compos_,’ said the magistrate in an undertone.

“‘Very likely, sir,’ replied the clerk.

“‘You are discharged, then,’ said the magistrate. ‘We can’t do anything with you unless there be an undertaking to prosecute.’

“I bowed respectfully to his worship, gave the clerk a questionable smile, and quitting the room, I made the best of my way to the public-house, where I had left my bundle and stick.

“Another person had come in whilst we were away, and the landlady had told him about the girl running off and my being taken prisoner. This person was an attorney’s clerk, and he took up my cause earnestly, and advised me to prosecute the constable for a false imprisonment, he was giving me that advice when the constable returned. I pretended to entertain the project, and when the official became aware of the subject on which we were deliberating, he became very uneasy, and seemed almost willing to make any compromise rather than be under the clutches of the other ‘limb of the law.’ At length, after I had sufficiently tormented him, I agreed to a settlement, the terms of which were that he should pay for a quantity of ale, I and the attorney’s clerk, whom I found to be a queer, ironical fellow, agreeing to pay for as much to come in after his was drunk.

“We had sat here rather a considerable time, and had got into high good humour with each other and the liquor, when the sounds of voices and a fiddle were heard approaching the house, and in a minute after in walked the girl we had prisoner in the morning, arm in arm with a young fellow, who, by his speech and dress, we recognised as the one with the patched face; in short, they were the two runaways, followed by some half a dozen young men, two young women, and an elderly person fiddling. They had been at church and had got wed, the banns having been published there some months before. They were now all ready for dancing, singing, and mirth; I scarcely ever saw a set of happier-looking countenances; the lad was in raptures; the bride seemed to have more self-command than any in the place. She thanked me most gratefully for the kindly feelings I had evinced; her husband joined her, and I found it of no use offering to break up from the wedding party. The constable was quite reconciled, as the charge, he said, would be taken off the township, and the ratepayers would deem it no bad day’s work of his. The attorney offered his friendly services in reconciling the squire’s coachman to the match, and the landlady brought in a posset of spiced ale for the wedding feast. The fiddler rosined his bow afresh, and played up a jig that set all the lads a-capering. In short, we ate and drank and danced the afternoon away. Evening followed, night came, and then the noon of night; and the last scenes I committed to memory were the fiddler falling from his chair and smashing his viol, and the attorney painting the constable’s face delicately with a blacking-brush whilst the latter person was fast asleep.

[Sidenote: _THE HAUGHTY HOSTELRY_]

“The next morning I was at Newport Pagnell at an early hour. The place had a most romantic appearance as I approached it. There must have been heavy rains upwards, for the Ouse had overflowed its banks, and numerous cattle were grazing on small green islets surrounded by the flood. The weather continued all that a foot traveller could wish, and I walked on leisurely, enjoying the cooling breeze, the odour of flowers, and the music of birds some six or eight miles until I arrived at the celebrated village of Woburn, where I stepped into the first public-house I came to on the left-hand side—I think it was the sign of the ‘Bedford Arms.’ The place seemed very fine, and the people I saw moving about looked, I thought, in a strange supercilious way at me; none of them stopped to ask what I wanted. At length I desired a woman to bring me a glass of ale, intending it as a preliminary to breakfast. She did not pause a moment to receive my order, but looking down, swept past me. ‘Bless us,’ I thought, ‘what sort of a public-house have I got into now?’ No one attended to me, and soon after I asked again for a glass of ale; this servant also went away without speaking, but in a short time a female of a superior appearance came and said they did not entertain foot travellers. I expressed my surprise at that, and assured her I was both able and willing to pay for whatever I called for. She said she did not doubt it, but it was an invariable rule of the house not to serve persons travelling on foot, and the rule could not be departed from. Could I not have a draught of ale? I asked. No, foot travellers could not have anything there. I accordingly rose, and replacing my bundle on my shoulder, I begged her to inform her employer that the rule of the house might bring trouble and humiliation sometime, inasmuch as, if other engagements did not press me, I would go before the nearest magistrate or the Duke of Bedford himself, and prefer a complaint against the occupier for refusing to entertain a traveller without sufficient cause. She smiled at my law (as well she might, having scanned my appearance, and thence formed an opinion of my purse), and said there were other places in the village where I might have whatever refreshment I wanted; and then, probably thinking she had wasted time enough on me, she turned and walked off, and I came out of that inhospitable and pride-infected place. At another inn I met with a reception the very reverse of the first; the people, both landlord and servants, were very obliging and attentive. I made a good breakfast, rested, chatted, and received an invitation to call there again if I came that way.

“I wonder whether the people of the Duke’s Arms are yet in business? and if they are, whether, like scores of their arrogant brotherhood, they have not been so far humbled by those great levellers, the railways, that if a wayfaring man now enters their house he can have a cup of ale for money?

[Sidenote: _JOURNEY ENDED_]

“I walked to Redbourn to dinner, which consisted of a plain but delicious repast at a very humble pothouse. Here I remarked a horseshoe nailed inside the weather board of the door, and on my pretending ignorance of its purpose, and asking what it was for, an old wrinkled dame, seemingly the mother of the household, told me with perfect seriousness that it was to keep all witches and bewitched persons and things out of the place, and that so long as it remained there nothing under the influence of witchcraft could enter.

“At St. Albans I walked amid the ruins of the Old Abbey, having previously passed a fragment of a wall in the meadows below, undoubtedly a part of the remains of the British city of Verulam. I lingered rather long with these scenes, and it was getting dark when I passed the Obelisk at Barnet, where the famous battle was fought in the Wars of the Roses. Every step I advanced to-day, the people, their houses, and their manners, became more Londonish; and it will not then appear surprising that at the first public-house I went into I was made welcome to comfortable quarters, and so remained there during the night. The next morning I walked into London, and took my breakfast at a coffee-house.”

XI

Islington is but a mile and a quarter from the General Post Office. Even eighty years ago it was only semi-rural. London, in fact, is really after all a slow-moving monster, and although there are, here and there, instances of swift extension, the Great City enlarges itself as a rule with elephantine deliberation. At Islington, in the heyday of the coaching era, you first experienced the sensation of being on the road to anywhere in particular; for there, on Islington Green, stood the first turnpike gates. On the hither side was London: once through them, and you were definitely in the country. As the illustration shows, characteristically urban streets of houses had then begun to appear, but the cocks and hens and the drove of sheep in the road present a rural appearance, and in the distance the church seems to stand amid rustic bowers.

Beyond the village of Islington lay the open road again, and travellers still, as they came to Ring Cross, spoke fearfully of the gibbet that had stood there, and hoped the memory of such things had not died out, nor ceased to be a warning to malefactors.

Ring Cross has long since disappeared from the map. It stood, according to such careful cartographers as John Rocque and his coadjutors in 1746, at a point three and a half miles from London, now to be identified with the junction of the Holloway Road and the Benwell and Hornsey Roads, which then, under the fearful name of “Devil’s Lane,” led to the remote hamlet of Crouch End.

[Sidenote: _SCENES OF DREAD_]

The neighbourhood was of ill omen. There many a tattered body, slowly disintegrating, had hung in chains; most notable among them that of John Price, the hangman, who on May 31st, 1718, was himself hanged for robbing and murdering one Elizabeth White in Bunhill Fields, his body being afterwards suspended here. The horror of it was revived in 1827, when a skeleton with the gibbet-irons was found at “Catherine Street, near the main road, Holloway”; the gibbet and the remains being afterwards exhibited at the “Coach and Horses” public-house near by, perhaps to be identified with the house of that name now at 214, Holloway Road.

Highgate formed in those times another settled spot, where London citizens lived a rural life and cultivated the virtues and ruddy cheeks, amid villainously ill-reputed wastes to north and south. Finchley Common and its fringing Alsatias stretched north, as far as that other civilised interval, Barnet; and through the great common of Finchley ran the road which all who travelled north must pass, as messieurs the highwaymen knew full well.

In days before any kind of coach travelled the road, it was the usual thing for a traveller to get astride his own horse and so, bumping in the saddle, to come to his destination. Others, who, although owning no horses, had a good eye for horseflesh and were good at a bargain, would often purchase a mount and at the end of a long journey sell him to advantage. It was one of these travellers who, having bought a fine horse in London at a very moderate price, found when he had come to Finchley Common that he had acquired a very singular bargain indeed. Riding across the lonely waste, he saw another horseman advancing; whereupon his own horse, in the most curious manner, edged up to the stranger and pushed in so threatening a way against him that he, with every sign of fear, handed over his purse. The horse had obviously been the property of a highwayman.

The Manchester Mail changed horses at the “Old White Lion,” Finchley, as the print after James Pollard shows; and whether or not Pollard intended to convey any such idea, it looks distinctly a hostelry and a neighbourhood in which it would not be prudent for a stranger with much money about him to linger long after the mail had duly changed and driven off. What an astonishing change is that which has now come upon the scene!

Change, in fact, looms large upon the home stretches of the road, and even Barnet Fair is threatened with extinction. Threatened men and threatened institutions live long, but at last some one or something puts a period to their existence; and they are in the end, when people have almost come to consider them immortal, cut off with suddenness. Barnet Fair will doubtless in the near future follow most other fairs into the past tense; but meanwhile, although considered moribund by many, it is without doubt extremely lively. And it is just this lusty liveliness that will, paradoxically, cause its abolition; for the crowds of horse-dealers, and East-End and low-life Londoners in general, who are attracted to it for its annual three days, commencing on the first Monday in September, are not favourably regarded by the “residential” classes of Barnet and the district; although the tradespeople seem to look upon them with tolerably friendly eyes. Opinions are divided, as they must needs be when such opposite ideals of life prevail. The “residents” want peace and quietness: the tradespeople want trade, and they apparently have the ear of the vestry, which so long since as 1888 passed a resolution that as the fair at that time brought over 20,000 people into the district and was the means of some £10,000 to £12,000 being spent there, it would be a great hardship to the commercial classes in Barnet if it were abolished. A memorial was presented to the then Home Secretary praying that the fair should be continued, and the petition proved successful.

[Sidenote: _BARNET FAIR_]

“Improvements” have not been lacking of late in Barnet. That they are improvements admits of no doubt, for they have caused the widening of the roadway at a narrow point, and have disclosed the noble parish church to view, It was built in at its eastern end, at some bygone period, with a quaint old house and shop; a picturesque jumble, and one which has, to some, left an aching void in its disappearance. This odd excrescence was an old-world baker’s shop, with carpenter-Gothic stuccoed little house above: not (as may be gathered) admirable for the purity of its style. Like the fly in amber, it was neither rich nor rare, but one speculated on what brought it in such a strange conjunction, built on to the end of the church in such a manner that the uninstructed stranger was at a loss to tell where the ecclesiastical building ended and the merely secular one began.

Barnet has been already fully treated of in the pages of the GREAT NORTH ROAD and the HOLYHEAD ROAD, and there remains little else to say of it; but it, among other places, cherishes the diverting story of the postmaster’s wife handing out her husband’s leathern breeches from the bedroom window to the up night mail, instead of the postal bags. The guard did not discover the mistake until Highgate was reached, when he returned on horseback to exchange the wearing apparel for His Majesty’s mails.

The mail-bags themselves were once stolen here. The incident happened in February, 1810, whiles the horses were being changed. Thieves made off with the bags for places from Hatfield to Grantham, and thence to Spilsby and Boston, and although the notice issued on March 1st by the Postmaster-General offered a reward of one hundred pounds for the apprehension of the robber, no one was ever captured, nor did the bags ever reappear.

XII

[Sidenote: _COCKFOSTERS_]

A weird place-name, prominent upon the signposts along the road, irresistibly invites to a further exploration. “To Cockfosters,” says the signposts. Certainly, by all means. You cannot choose but go to see what manner of place this may be; but after all—as in countless other instances—nothing so very remarkable meets the explorer’s gaze. It is, in fact, a little woodland hamlet on the borders of the three parishes of Hadley, East Barnet, and Enfield; and the name, in the lack of any actual evidence, is presumed to derive from the ancient French phrase, _Bicoque forestière_, a little settlement amid unenclosed forest land.

[Sidenote: _MONKEN HADLEY_]

More meets the eye at Monken Hadley, a village not yet overwhelmed by the suburban tide. The centre of local interest is, of course, as usual, in the church, and the interest of the church itself is centred on the tower.

The date of the tall tower is readily fixed by the quaint arabic figures over the doorway, which, deciphered, give the year 1494. But the great curiosity of Monken Hadley church is, of course, the fire-pot, or beacon, which arouses such speculation on the part of strangers at a distance.

How far back such a beacon existed on this, or any earlier, tower-turret here must remain uncertain; but its purpose is plain enough. The light of it was intended to guide travellers benighted in the once dense and far-spreading Enfield Chase. The elevated site of the church itself was known as “Beacon Hill” in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and even then had long borne that name. There is evidence that the beacon was lighted in the troubled times of 1745, when the Scottish rebels were hourly expected to descend upon London and replace King George with a Stuart sovereign. Blown down in the great gale of January 1st, 1779, the existing one is, of course, merely a restoration. It was lighted on the night of the rejoicings over the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and again at the Coronation of Edward the Seventh.

The Battle of Barnet, in which Monken Hadley and all the surrounding district were involved, is an oft-told tale, and romantic novelists have long had their way with it. Lord Lytton was probably the last, as he was certainly the greatest, to make that great contest of 1471 the vehicle for a story; and he wrote of it so convincingly that an ancient and weatherbeaten fragment of a huge oak tree marking the border of Enfield Chase is pointed out as a legitimate historic landmark of that great contest. It is the “gaunt and leafless tree” whereon Friar Bungay hangs his hated rival, Adam Warner, whilst at its foot lay the lifeless form of his daughter Sibyll and “the shattered fragments of the mechanical ‘eureka’ on which he had spent the labours of his life.”

The old trunk, long ago divested of its bark, was upset some years ago by some drunken volunteers, but it has been replaced in its original position and enclosed within a railing.

Taking by preference the old road, across Hadley Green, by the obelisk, called “Hadley Highstone,” marking the site of the battle, instead of following the “new” road out of Barnet constructed by Telford in 1823, we pass Dyrham Park. The imposing stone-built entrance to this beautiful domain is sufficient to attract attention by itself, without the aid of historic association; but it has, according to oft-repeated story, the added interest of having originally been a triumphal arch erected in London to welcome Charles the Second, at his Restoration in 1660.

The old road comes to a junction again with the new at South Mimms, and old and new proceed together from this point to St. Albans, up Ridge Hill, and so by London Colney. Here and there stretches of the old way may be found, to right or left; hollow, overshaded by trees, and solitary, save for those expertest of expert wayfarers, the gipsies and the tramps, who may often be found there, under the greenwood tree, secure from the dust and the hustling of this new century which has discovered the roads again, but has not the time nor the inclination to know them intimately, or as anything else than a race-track.

[Sidenote: _ST. ALBANS_]

In 1826, seventy-two coaches passed through St. Albans every twenty-four hours, and it was calculated that the travellers passing through in the same time numbered no fewer than 1,000, of whom the coaches conveyed 600. The rest were those at the extremes of poverty and wealth, who rode in the waggons or walked; or sped by swiftly and luxuriously, in post-chaises or in their own private chariots. How many, one wonders, are the motor-cars that now daily speed, in clouds of dust, up Ridge Hill and so through London Colney and St. Albans to North Wales, or to Manchester and then, across the Border, into Scotland?

The streets of St. Albans are by no means adapted for the hurrying methods of to-day; and although the town or the city, as we must now style it—is but twenty-one miles from the centre of London, it is even yet a place of narrow and winding ways. There is, indeed, to this day a certain savour of monasticism about St. Albans, largely though the place has grown of late years. The Abbey, on its crowning ridge, of course dominates everything; but, apart from that chief feature, you have old churches, old houses of every degree of antiquity down to the time of George the Third (after which period houses cease to be antique), and old inns. And with all these evidences of a venerable age there is yet a lively air, a bustling cheeriness, about St. Albans that render it really lovable. Much might be said of St. Albans: of the ruins of Sopwell nunnery, down in the quelchy water-meadows as you come in from London; of St. Stephen’s, the tiny village on its height, looking down upon the city; of the ancient Abbey Gatehouse, proudly known as “the oldest school in England.” Indeed, something must needs be said of this last. It stands immediately by the West Front of the Abbey, and is the last relic of the vanished monastery.

[Sidenote: _ARISTOCRATIC CHURCHMEN_]

The Gatehouse is only by chance the Grammar School, for the school, itself founded about the year 1095 by the monks, was only removed hither in 1869. After the suppression of the Abbey and the demolition of most of its domestic buildings, the Gatehouse became the Sessions House and prison for St. Albans until 1651. Thenceforward, until 1869, it served the not dissimilar purpose of a House of Correction. Indeed, throughout its history, from the building of it in 1380, the great Gatehouse has served like purposes: the stewards of my lords abbots having held assize in the upper rooms and consigned offenders to the dungeons below. Offenders were many, for those ancient Churchmen, who lorded it autocratically over St. Albans, in temporalities as well as in spiritual matters, obtruded into all things. They were, as already shown, for education, and at an extraordinarily early period established the Grammar School: but they took care to excommunicate every other school in the neighbourhood, and none might buy nor sell, nor hold any privileges of market without the Church took toll of them. That there were those who, even in early days, kicked against the pricks of this combined jurisdiction over body and soul duly appears in the records of St. Albans; and they suffered in the Gatehouse the penalties awarded to all fire-brands, malcontents, and agitators, and all such pestiferous fellows. Wherefore the grey old building is a very interesting old relic indeed of those times which certain parties in the State (who ought properly to be flogged at the cart-tail) are eager to bring back.