Part 2

LONDON made no remarkable growth between the Roman and mediæval periods, but this road had in that time slightly altered its course from its starting-point, and, instead of going from Cannon Street to Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Old Ford, left the City by way of Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, continuing down the Mile End and Bow Roads to Stratford.

The traveller of Chaucer's day, coming to Ald Gate, in the City wall, had reached the country. That gate spanned the road at a point marked nowadays by the house, No 2 Aldgate High Street, standing at the boundary of the parishes of St Katharine Cree and St Botolph. In 1374 Chaucer took from the Corporation of London a lease for the remainder of his life of the rooms in this gate, which was pulled down and succeeded by another, built in 1606, which in its turn disappeared in 1761.

From his windows commanding the road Chaucer must often have seen that dainty gentlewoman, the Prioress of St Leonard's, Stratford, riding to or from London, escorted by a numerous train, and from her must have drawn that portrait of the prioress who spoke French with a Cockney accent:--

"After the scole of Stratford-attè-Bowe, For French of Parys was to hire unknowe."

In Chaucer's day they probably taught French, of sorts, at the Priory schools.

At that time it was no little journey to Stratford, although by measurement less than four miles, and the lady went strongly escorted, as, indeed, did all of consequence, or those who had aught to lose. For the more common wayfarers who went alone on this desperate eastern trail there stood the Chapel and the Holy Well of St Michael the Archangel within the City, where the otherwise unprotected might seek the aid of the Saint's strong arm before leaving the walled City behind on their perilous faring. This chapel stood where Leadenhall Street, Fenchurch Street and Aldgate meet, on a site thrown into the roadway in 1876, when the street was widened. Until that year the crypt of this shrine had filled the prosaic functions of a cellar in the corner house, itself demolished, together with the beautiful Early English arches on which it stood. Adjoining was "Aldgate Pump," which had long before unromantically taken the place of the sanctified spring. That celebrated civic monument is seen in the accompanying illustration, taken in 1854. Many City wits have exercised their satirical powers upon it, and the expression long current of "a draft on Aldgate Pump," a once popular mercantile phrase for a bad note, goes back so far as the days of Fielding. Oddly enough, the water of the pump retained some repute until 1876, when, on being analysed, it was found impure, and the supply closed. The pump, however, is still in existence, rebuilt of its original stones, a few feet away from the old site, and yields water again; not, however, from the old saintly source, but from the strictly secular filter-beds of the New River Water Company.

Having implored the protection of St Michael, travellers of old went, heartened, upon their way down what is now Whitechapel High Street, which Strype, writing in the time of James the First, calls a "spacious fair street," with "sweet and wholesome air." Past hedgerows of elm trees and rustic stiles and bridges, those old wayfarers went, and onward down the Whitechapel Road, where the country was a lovely solitude, with "nothing but the bounteous gifts of Nature and saint-like tokens of innocency," which, according to Sir Thomas More, in 1504, characterised the charming fields of Mile End, Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse. This, it will be allowed, is scarcely descriptive of those places to-day, whatever they may become when the People's Palace and the University Settlements have done their work.

Thus far for sake of contrast. Let us return to Aldgate for a while, and, without following its fortunes throughout the centuries, glance at it in the Coaching Age, before the squalor of modern Whitechapel had invaded it from the east, or the extension of City business had come to destroy most of that picturesque assemblage of old inns and mediæval gabled houses, to replace them with the giant warehouses and "imposing" offices of modern London.

IV

ALTHOUGH, as we have seen, the East Anglian roads were, in coaching days, measured from Whitechapel Church, the great actual starting-place was Aldgate, where many of the old inns were situated, as, in like manner, the ancient hostelries of the Borough clustered at the beginning of the road to Canterbury and Dover. Aldgate occupies a position midway between London Stone, the Roman starting-point in Cannon Street, and Whitechapel Church, and to and from this spot came and went the stage-coaches, post-chaises and waggons in the palmy days of the road. The mail-coaches, of course, had a starting-point of their own, and set out from the old General Post-Office in Lombard Street, or, in the last years of coaching, from St Martin's-le-Grand.

It is true that one might have taken coach from many other and more central inns for Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich:--from the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, a fine old galleried inn demolished at the close of 1865; from the "Cross Keys," in the same street; from the "Swan with Two Necks," in Lad Lane, anciently Lady Lane (that is to say, the Lane of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin), now Gresham Street; or from the "Bull," 151 Leadenhall Street, which must by no means be confounded with its namesake in Aldgate High Street. Exactly what that Leadenhall Street hostelry was like let the picture of its old galleried courtyard show.

There was also "another way" to Norwich; out of Bishopsgate, by way of Newmarket, Bury and Thetford. Taking this route, which, although 2½ miles shorter, no true sportsman considered to be the real Norwich Road, one started from the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross; from the "White Horse," in Fetter Lane (improved away in 1898); from the "Flower Pot," in Bishopsgate Street; from yet another "Bull," also in Bishopsgate Street; or from the "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand. But when all these places have been duly set forth, it is to Aldgate that we must turn as the real starting-point.

Aldgate in the days before railways was quite unlike the Aldgate of to-day. Certain of the old buildings remain, but the "note" of the place is entirely altered. It is now a noisy, distracting ante-room to the City, in which tinkling tram-cars and costermongers' barrows jostle with elephantine railway goods vans; where the Jewish second-hand clothes shop rubs a greasy shoulder with the "merchant tailor's" vulgar show of electric light, plate glass and wax models; and where the East End, in the person of the aproned, ringleted and ostrich-feathered factory girl, meets the West, in the shape of some City clerk strayed beyond his mercantile or financial frontiers, each regarding the other as a curiosity in these social marches. It is as the meeting of salt water and fresh, this mingling of the tides of City and East End, and to the observant not a little curious. Nothing like it--nothing so marked--is to be seen on any other of the borders of the City. There is, too, a smack of the sea, a certain air of romance, in the street, coming, perhaps, from the windows of the nautical instrument-makers, where the binoculars, the quadrants, the sextants and the sea-faring tackle in general hint of distant climes and the coral reefs of South Pacific isles.

These mariners' emporia were here and in the Minories before railways came, and so also were many fine old inns. For Aldgate, difficult though it may be to realise it to-day, was not only the place whence many of the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches set out, but was also the resting-place of travellers to London; and its inns were quite as well-appointed as those of the more central ones in the City, or those of Charing Cross, or the West End. As travellers by rail to London in modern times resort to the railway hotels, so did our great-grandfathers find rest at the coaching inns at whose thresholds they were set down at their journey's end.

The fragments merely of the last of Aldgate's old hostelries remain, in the bold front of Nos. 6 and 7, forming two-thirds of the old frontage of the "Saracen's Head." No. 5, the other third, has been destroyed, and so also has the old appearance of the galleried courtyard, still named "Saracen's Head Yard," but now surrounded by warehouses. The old coach archway remains, and the gables at the back of the buildings are quaint reminiscences of other times. Coaches plied between the "Saracen's Head" and Norwich so far back as 1681, and Strype, the antiquary, born in the neighbourhood, in a court whose name now flaunts the horrid travesty of "Tripe Court," referring to the inn, speaks of it as "very large and of a considerable trade." The existing fragment, with its handsome architectural elevation of richly-moulded plaster in the Renaissance style of the late seventeenth century, is part of the building mentioned by him. Small shops now occupy the ground floor, and the upper rooms are let as tenements.

But the "Bull" was perhaps the most famous of these old inns. From it Mr Pickwick set out for Ipswich, and from Sam Weller's remark on that occasion, "Take care o' the archway, gen'l'men," as the coach started, it is evident that the "Bull" possessed a courtyard. At that palmy time of inns and coaches, the opening of the nineteenth century, the "Bull" was, and long had been, in the Nelson family, a noted race of inn and coach proprietors. At that particular time Mrs Ann Nelson, widow of the late host, who died about 1812, was the presiding genius. Associated with her was her son John. Another son, Robert, had a business of his own, and was long proprietor of the "Belle Sauvage," on Ludgate Hill, and partner with others in many coaches. A third son, George, drove the Exeter "Defiance," horsed by his mother out of London.

But to return to the "Bull" and Mrs Nelson, who had, as her husband had, and his father before him, some sort of interest in many coaches running into Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, on main or bye-roads. She also at one time leased the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, and extended her energies so far as to horse the Exeter "Telegraph" and the "Quicksilver" Devonport Mail out of London, together with the Exeter "Defiance" night coach, the Manchester "Telegraph," the Oxford "Defiance," Brighton "Red Rover," and the Leeds "Courier." In their coaching speculations the Nelson family were associated with a pastrycook whose little shop adjoined the gateway of the "Bull." Occasionally a new hand on one of the coaches would send his leaders' noses through the shop front, for that gateway was very narrow and Mrs Nelson's coachmen anything but deliberate. On the other side of the gateway was a whip-maker's shop, kept by one James Johnson, who throve mightily on the custom of the coachmen and others who frequented the "Bull."

This most energetic of landladies and Napoleonic of coach proprietors developed and managed her extensive coaching interests long before her husband died. He, good, easy-going man, had been a fair whip in earlier days, but had long left the box, and had no head for business, although a very fine taste in wines and spirits: the lack of the first probably a corollary of the second. She spared neither herself nor her servants. Rising considerably before the lark, she saw the owls to bed, and was a martinet to her coachmen. Left a widow while in the prime of life, she still wore in old age the dress of her youth. The sketch of her in the picture of the "Bull" yard in coaching days shows exactly what her costume was like. A short skirt revealed high-heeled shoes with large buckles, the heels painted red. Black velvet was her winter wear, and fancy apron, lace neckerchief and frilled cap invariable items. Up to her seventieth year she was the last up at night, scouring the house to see that all was safe; and the first up in the morning, looking after the stable people and seeing that the horses had their feeds and were properly cared for. Inside and outside the house, and down the eastern roads, her influence was despotic and would brook no defiance. Her "Ipswich Blues" had long been famous when an opposition coach was started. Opposition could not be allowed to live, and so the fares were reduced from eight shillings inside and sixteen shillings out, by regular stages until the point was reached when passengers were not only carried for nothing, but were presented with an excellent dinner at Witham. At that point the rivals discreetly retired, when fares rose again to their old level.

Mrs Nelson insisted on the most rigid punctuality. Did the coachman of one of her crack coaches or one of her still more famous "Oppositions" bring his team down her yard five minutes over time, he was reprimanded; ten minutes, and he was fined half-a-crown; a quarter of an hour, and he stood a good chance of being dismissed. She ran a Southend "Opposition" every afternoon by Romford, Brentwood, Billericay, Wickford, Raleigh and Rochford, along Essex roads of a feather-bed softness of mud; but time must be kept. She provided good horses and would not hear of excuses. One day, when the roads were particularly heavy, the "Opposition" came in half an hour late from Southend. The coachman, after the manner of his kind, on driving into the yard and pulling up at the coffee-room door, threw his whip across the wheelers' backs. Mrs Nelson had long been watching the clock, and, coming out, took the whip and hung it up, with the quiet remark, "That whip is no longer yours, Philpot--half an hour behind."

"But the roads are so bad, ma'am," remonstrated poor Toby. "I'm sure, ma'am, the gentlemen knew I did my best; but I felt bound to spare the cattle."

"_I_ find the cattle and employ you to drive them," replied the inexorable landlady; "_you_ have nothing to do but to keep time. Draw your wages and leave the yard."

Under this iron rule it is no wonder that her coachmen were sometimes "pulled up" for furious driving. On one of these occasions she appeared in court in defence of her man. "I understand, Mrs Nelson," blandly remarked the Chairman of the Bench, "that you give your coachmen instructions to race the rival coach."

"Not exactly," replied the lady; "my orders to them are simply that they are to get the road and keep it."

But if a very dragon of strictness, she treated coachmen and guards very well. They had their especial room, and dined as well there, at reduced prices, as any of her coffee-room customers. This especial consideration reflected itself in those functionaries, who jealously preserved the privacy of their room; the amateur coachman who secured the invitation to join them (and to pay out of his own pocket for their wine and spirits) feeling himself greatly honoured.

In other respects, the "Bull" was a model to other houses. No damp sheets in any one of its hundred and fifty beds, no drunken brawlers; nothing a minute out of time, or an inch out of place. Mrs Nelson's fine house was, indeed, nothing less than an institution. In later years her son John took more of the management upon his shoulders, and the business seemed likely to long outlast his time.

V

BUT a whisper of coming changes disturbed the air as early as 1830. Coachmen and travellers talked in the stableyard and the cosy rooms of the "Bull" of men with strange instruments encountered along the road; "chaps with telescopes on three sticks, and other chaps with chains and things, measuring the fields." It was thus that they described the surveyors, with their theodolites and their staff of men, who were setting out the proposed route of the projected Eastern Counties Railway that was to run all the way from London to Colchester, Norwich and Yarmouth.

John Nelson was too confident in the existing order of things to believe that a few pounds of coal and some boiling water would ever be a match for his horses, or that a time would presently come when those passengers of his who now derided the railways would desert the coaches. The "Bull" had been in his family for more than a hundred and twelve years, as an inn and a coaching house, and he could as soon have imagined the end of the world as a day coming when the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches should no longer enter or leave his yard. It was a good joke for a while, when the coaches came in, to ask "How they were getting on with that railway?" but when the surveys were completed and the prospectus of the "Grand Eastern Counties Railway" was issued in 1834, it was seen that the railway men meant business. The original proposal of the directors was to follow the road closely and to bring the line into Aldgate. When it was seen that the railway was really to be made, Nelson raised an opposition against the Aldgate terminus, and was successful in driving the Company into an out-of-the-way site in Shoreditch, where for many years that terminus remained.

The Eastern Counties Railway was opened as far as Chelmsford in 1839, to Colchester in 1842, and communication to Norwich was opened up in 1845. From the day of the first opening, the "Bull" declined. Old customers still found their way from the slums of Shoreditch to its hospitable door, but were not reinforced by the newer generation of travellers, to whom the road and its end in Aldgate were alike unknown. They went to the City inns, and later to the more central hotels, leaving the "Bull" to slowly sink into neglect. John Nelson made a big bid for success in another line, and ran the "Wellington" omnibuses with success from 1855 until his death, at the age of seventy-four, in June 1868. He had long resided in the West End, and was a man of ample fortune, so that the end of the "Bull's" coaching career hurt him only in sentiment. His mother, that most autocratic and business-like of women, had died ten years before, active almost to the last, although she had reached the age of eighty-five years. Towards the close of 1868 the old inn ended its long career. Its substantial, old-fashioned silver-plate and massive furniture were sold by auction, with the stock of rare old wines, laid in many years before, for that old generation of travellers who delighted in port and sherry, and plenty of both.

The very site of the "Bull" is now sought with pains and labour, and only to be discovered with difficulty by the present generation. It was numbered 25 Aldgate High Street, and stood where Aldgate Avenue, a modern alley rich in offices of "commission agents," and curious things of that kind, now cuts its way through where the old yard used to be.

Close by the "Bull" was another old coaching inn, the "Blue Boar," now quite vanished, kept for a time by John Thorogood. The Thorogoods were in those days, and in these times of amateur coaching are still, a family of coachmen. "Old John," who owned the "Norwich Times," and actually drove it for two years without missing a journey the whole of that time, clearly deserved his patronymic, in thus handling the reins along a hundred and twelve miles of road for seven hundred and thirty consecutive days.

It was to the "Blue Boar" that little David Copperfield came, on his miserable journey from Yarmouth:--"We approached London by degrees, and got, in due time, to the inn, in the Whitechapel district, I forget whether it was the 'Blue Bull' or the 'Blue Boar,' but I know it was the Blue Something, and that its likeness was painted upon the back of the coach." The sculptured effigy of a boar, with gilded tusks and hoofs, built into the wall of a tobacco factory, marks the site of the inn.

Among other noted inns, the "Three Nuns" must be named. From it set out the short stages to Ilford, Epping, Romford and Woodford, together with coaches for several of the Essex by-roads. The house owes its name to the Minoresses, or nuns, of St Clare, from whose religious establishment the Minories obtains its title. The inn was rebuilt in 1877, and is now nothing more than a huge public-house.

Many other inns of consequence in their day have left nothing but their yards behind them to show where they stood:--George Yard, Spread Eagle Yard, Black Horse Yard, Boar's Head Yard, White Swan Yard, Half Moon Passage, and Kent and Essex Yard are such relics, bordering High Street, Whitechapel, where one curious sign survives, that of an inn called the "Horse and Leaping Bar."

VI

ONE decided advantage the Chelmsford, Colchester and Ipswich route to Norwich possessed in old times over that by way of Newmarket and Thetford. Neither could have been considered safe in the bad old days, but while the traveller across the wild heaths of Newmarket and Thetford was almost certain to be "held up" on his lonely course, the other way, through Essex, passed by few such wildernesses, and had more towns and villages along its course, to give a sense of security. Briefly, robbery on one route was a probability, and on the other was regarded as certain. Margaret Paston, writing from Norfolk to her husband in London, so long ago as the fifteenth century, certainly gives even the way through Essex a bad name, for she asks him to pay a debt for one of their friends, because it was not safe, "on account of the robbers," to send money up from the country; but at the very same time the Thetford route had a much more sinister reputation, and travellers versed in the gossip of the road avoided it if possible, or went in company and well armed, for in that era a certain William Cratfield, Rector of Wrotham, "a common and notorious thief and lurker on the roads, and murderer and slayer," lurked and robbed and slew on Newmarket Heath, in company with a certain "Thomas Tapyrtone, hosyer." He was at last laid by the heels, in 1416, and charged with robbing a Londoner of £12. This distinguished ornament of the Church died in Newgate, but of the villainous hosier we hear no more. Perhaps he had realised a fortune in the business and retired to enjoy the fruits of his industry. With the disappearance of this worthy couple, travellers breathed more freely, but for surety's sake continued to patronise the Essex route, and so by way of Ipswich to come to the City of Orchards, as Norwich was called of old.