Part 7

If it were not for its church, which has been re-built and has a very fine and tall spire, one might easily pass Widford and not know it, for the very few houses do not suffice to make a village. Such as it is, it stands on the crest of something not quite so much as a hill and rather more than an incline, and beside its large church has an equally fine and large and brand-new inn, the "White Horse." Time was, and that until three years since, when Widford was celebrated for its one other inn, the "Good Woman," or, as it was sometimes styled, the "Silent Woman"; a bitter jest emphasised by the picture-sign of a headless woman, with the inscription, _Fort Bone_, on one side, and a portrait of Henry the Eighth on the other. "_Fort Bone_" was commonly Englished by slangy cyclists as "good business." The sign, of course, was a pictorial and satiric allusion to Anne Boleyn, but it remains an open question whether or not in their present form this and the several other "Quiet Woman" and "Good Woman" signs throughout the country are perversions of the original legend, "_la bonne fame_" displayed on old inns in the distant past; an inscription laudatory of the hostelry, and matching the self-recommendation of "_la bonne rénommée_," found in modern France, or the more familiar "noted house for--" and "good pull up" inscriptions on inns in modern England. Virgil's description of Fame, walking the earth, her head lost to sight in the clouds, may have originated the pictorial sign of the headless woman in days of ancient learning; and the classic allusion becoming lost and the supposedly incorrect spelling of "_fame_" being altered to "_femme_," we thus obtain a very reasonable derivation. We may take it that many shrew-bitten folks, innkeepers and customers alike, readily agreed to forget the original meaning in order to adopt one so exactly fitting their opinion that the only quiet or good women were headless ones.

Unhappily, in that senseless itch for change that is robbing places of all interest and distinction, the sign of the "Good Woman" no longer swings from its accustomed place, and the bay-windowed inn opposite the "White Horse" has retired into private life. The picture sign is now housed inside the "White Horse."

XVIII

WIDFORD almost immediately introduces the explorer to Moulsham (originally the "mole's home"), itself own brother--but a very out-at-elbows brother--to Chelmsford. If we wished to put the wind between our gentility and the somewhat fusty purlieu of Moulsham, we should turn to the left at the fork of the roads, half a mile short of the town, and so, proceeding along the "new London road," come into Chelmsford, half way down the High Street. Being, however, intent rather upon old roads than new, we will e'en endure the half-mile length of shabby, untidy street, and thus come bumpily into Chelmsford, the county town of Essex, the Metropolitan City of Calves, over the hunchbacked and narrow stone bridge across the Chelmer, the successor, at an interval of seven hundred years or so, of the original bridge built by Maurice, Bishop of London. That is a huge slice of time, but it was too late, even in Norman days, for the town to change its name from Chelmers_ford_ to something more appropriate when the ford was thus superseded.

Straight ahead over this bridge goes the High Street of the town, the view closed by the Shire Hall and the church; the Norwich Road, however, turning abruptly to the right, by the Conduit, and refusing to make acquaintance with the town. It is the Conduit that is seen in this illustration of the High Street, its architecture scarce improved by the placing of an electric lamp, alleged to be ornamental, over its cupola.

Chelmsford church and the Shire Hall, seen at the end of this view, spoil one another, the Hall almost entirely hiding the church when looking down the High Street, and the dignified Perpendicular exterior of the church putting the clumsy architecture of the Hall to shame, as a pagan upstart. The Shire Hall has its terrors for some, but its architecture, alleged to be classic, alone concerns the passing stranger, who feels so concerned by sight of it that he accordingly passes the quicker. A captured Russian gun and the seated bronze effigy of a native, a bygone Lord Chief Justice (who looks whimsically like an old apple-woman crouching over her basket, and drops green coppery stains over his nice stone pedestal) keep one another company in the open space fronting this building.

The L.C.J. in question was Nicholas Tindal, whose career came to a close in 1806. The monument was erected in 1850, "to preserve for all time the image of a judge whose administration of English law, directed by serene wisdom, assisted by purest love of justice, endeared by unwearied kindness, and graced by the most lucid style, will be held by his country in undying remembrance." His birthplace could hardly have said more than that.

Chelmsford stands not upon the ancient ways, being indeed very severely bitten with a taste for modernity. Is it not famous as the first town in the kingdom to adopt electric lighting, and have not its streets been resolutely swept clear of antiquity? The town, in short, is scarce picturesque. It is busy in the agricultural way on Fridays, but on other occasions every house provokes a yawn, with perhaps the exception of the "Saracen's Head," an inn that, despite its modernised and stuccoed frontage, keeps some memories of old times. There was a "Saracen's Head" here certainly as far back as the fifteenth century, and probably much earlier. Like all the signs of that name, it derived from Crusading times, when the knights and men-at-arms, returning from Palestine with wounds and spoils from the pagan; with monkeys, leprosy, tall stories, and other relics out of the Holy Land, found their fame come home before them, and the old inns they had known--the "Salutation," the "Peter's Finger," the "Catherine Wheel," and the like--often re-named in their honour. With little effort we can imagine the scenes at the "Saracen's Head" of that period, when exploits at Acre, Joppa and Jerusalem were told and re-told, and gained wonderfully in the repetition over sack and malvoysie. What bloody fellows they were, and with what zest they slew the Soldan's soldiers over and over again as they sat over their cups. It is, at the least of it, six hundred years ago, and the "Saracen's Head" has been rebuilt many times since then; but human nature remains the same though timber rot and brick perish, and again and again the same old talk has been heard in the bar-parlour of the inn. Those who fought at Agincourt and Creçy; men of a later age who warred under Marlborough at Blenheim, Ramillies or Malplaquet; the lads of the Peninsula and Waterloo; survivors from the horrors of the Crimean winter, and heroes from a hundred fights on the burning South African veldt--all have had their circle of greedy listeners here.

The "Saracen's Head" of to-day turns a sleek and stuccoed face to the street, and the house shows signs of extensive rebuilding and remodelling, undertaken in the full flush of the great days of coaching prosperity, when so many old inns were rebuilt, in the belief that coaching, and the road as an institution, would last for ever. Fond belief! Has anyone ever stopped to consider the fact that the great coaching era of the 'twenties and the 'thirties had a great deal more to do with the pulling down of the old-fashioned galleried and timbered inns of country towns than ever railways have had? The average small country town felt in fullest measure the great increase in business incidental to the last years of the coaching age, and every innkeeper hastened to rebuild his inn and to call it an "hotel." Those who had, from one cause and another, deferred rebuilding until the dawn of the Railway Age, on seeing that the road would decay and travellers be carried to their journeys' ends without halting for rest and refreshment, promptly gave up any such ideas and were thankful that they had not begun the work of reconstruction and enlargement. Those who had were ruined, and to this day the huge hotels they reared may yet be often met with, a world too large, in country towns where once the mails and the stage-coaches passed, like a procession, day by day. It is quite by a happy chance that an old galleried house like the "White Hart" at Brentwood remains, and it is not too much to say that, had the Coaching Age lasted another ten years, it also would have been rebuilt.

An amusing story, with Anthony Trollope for its central figure, belongs to the "Saracen's Head" at Chelmsford. For some years after he had won fame as a novelist he still retained his position in the General Post Office, of which he was a travelling inspector. On one of these official journeys he happened to be staying here, at the time when his _Barchester Towers_ was being issued, after the then prevailing fashion, in parts. He was seated in the coffee-room when two clergymen entered, one of them with the newly-issued part of the story. The cleric, cutting the pages, was soon immersed in the trials of the Bishop and the domineering ways of Mrs Proudie, who was rather a trial to Trollope's readers, as well as to the Bishop. Suddenly the clergyman put the book down. "Confound that Mrs Proudie!" he exclaimed, "I wish she were dead!"

Trollope looked up. Introducing himself, he thanked the reader for thus accidentally telling him that the Bishop's wife had become wearisome, and undertook to have done with her. "Gentlemen," said he, "she shall die in the next number;" and die she accordingly did. But in defence of Trollope's truthful character-drawing, let it be said that, in the opinion of those likely to be best informed, Mrs Proudies may yet be found in a goodly proportion of the episcopal palaces of England.

XIX

RETURNING now to the Conduit, and making for the open road once more, Chelmsford is left by way of Springfield, past the successor of Chelmsford's finest old inn, the "Black Boy," demolished in 1857. The old inn of that name had stood on the spot for five centuries, and had been the halting-place of many famous travellers, among them a long line of Earls of Oxford, journeying between their castle at Hedingham and London; but none of these associations sufficed to save the house. Fragments of its carved beams are preserved in the local museum, but recall it as little as does the skeleton of the mastodon bring back in his majesty that denizen of the earth in the dim æons of the past. Chelmsford would dearly like many of its old buildings--wantonly demolished years ago--back again; but what is done cannot be undone, and there's an end on't. The "Cross Keys" remains, in a restored condition.

The name of Springfield, the eastern suburb of Chelmsford, carries varying significances. To the mere newcomer it sounds idyllic; to the American from the New England States it recalls the Pilgrim Fathers and their settlement of Springfield, Massachusetts; and to the gaol-bird it means a "stretch" of longer or shorter duration. At Springfield, in fact, is situated the County Gaol, a gloomy building enlarged in recent years for the accommodation of the guests consigned to it at Assize time from the Shire Hall down yonder in the High Street. But, once past this depressing place, Springfield is pleasing and cheerful. Its long miscellaneous street, where the quaint sign of the "Three Cups" stands out, gives place to suburban villas situated in attractive grounds and designed to sound the ultimate note of picturesqueness. That this has been the aim of their architects is abundantly manifest in examples where, under a single roof, one may experience the mingled romantic feelings of inhabiting an Edwardian castle, a Tudor manor-house, a Jacobean grange, and a "Queen Anne" mansion; all done in red brick, gabled here and battlemented there, and, moreover, fitted with electric light and hot and cold water supply. To this end has castellated and domestic architecture unwound its long story during some five hundred years. It will be seen thereby that William of Wykeham, John Thorpe, and many another old-time architect did not live in vain.

But if Springfield be modern as a suburb, it is ancient as a village. To see old Springfield, it is necessary to turn off the road to the left, and to journey a quarter of a mile, towards the old church, a noble building with mingled red brick and stone tower bearing the inscription, "Prayse God for al the good benefactors 1586." Oliver Goldsmith, it is quite erroneously said, took Springfield as the model for his _Deserted Village_. He certainly visited at an old cottage opposite the church, but the real Sweet Auburn is Lissoy, in Ireland.

Beyond the village and facing the high road are the strangely impressive lodges of the historic estate of New Hall; new at the end of the fifteenth century, but declined into a respectable age by now and cobwebbed with much history and many legends. The place, now and for a considerable number of years past an alien convent, has been owned during a period of four hundred years by an astonishing number of historic personages, who have succeeded one another like flitting phantoms. Here the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps out spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the handling of the historic kaleidoscope. Built by Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose daughter and heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus eventually came into possession of Henry the Eighth, who occasionally resided here and re-named it "Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex. By this time it had resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners were George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, and Oliver Cromwell, who had it as a gift from Parliament and exchanged it so soon as he decently could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him succeeded another Duke of Buckingham, and to him that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and was visited here, when he was suffering from gout and dropsy, by that scribbling traveller, Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of historic owners may be said to end, but constant change has ever been the lot of New Hall, and a succession of lesser lights followed him until the nuns set up their secluded life here and bade farewell to a vain world. That world passes by; the road on one side, the railway midway in the grounds, and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the vineyard.

No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road. All is emptiness, and the lichened brick and the crumbling stone vases of neighbouring boundary walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled aims characteristic of the place.

There is an air of romance about Boreham House, as seen from the tree-embowered road at a little distance from New Hall; an altogether deceptive air, let it be said, for the house is modern; a classic building of white brick. It is its situation at the head of a formal lake, fringed with stately elms, that confers the illusory distinction, but the explorer of old roads, who halts here and listens to the cawing rooks on the swaying tree-tops, or watches the water-fowl squattering on the lake, can weave his own romance to fit the scene. And if the house, though stately, be modern, yet it holds something of interest in the shape of the identical carriage used by the Duke of Wellington at the Battle of Waterloo. Greatly daring, they dragged it out in recent years to grace a Chelmsford holiday, when it was broken to pieces in an accident. Restored now to its original condition, it will need to be a great occasion indeed that brings it forth again.

Boreham village lies hidden from the road, its old gabled cottages clustering round the still older church, itself embowered in lime trees whose delightful scent weights the July air with an Arcadian languor. The explorer who adventures into Boreham has every likelihood of having his nerves startled by the sudden glimpse at a bend of the road of a great mausoleum in the churchyard, with the door open, and, if it be midday, the sight, apparently, of one of the inmates of the silent tomb making a hearty lunch of bread-and-cheese. High noon being an hour when the supernatural is not so terrifying as to daunt investigation, it becomes evident on drawing nearer that the old tomb-house has been converted into a tool-house and general lumber-room, and that the figure seated within is the sexton enjoying his lunch, screened from the noonday heats. An inscription over the door of the ornate building--a copy of the Temple of the Winds at Athens--proclaims it the "Mausoleum Gentis Walthamianæ, Anno 1764"; but the Walthams have disappeared, both from their mausoleum and the district. The body of the last appears to have been arrested for debt when on the road hither from Chelmsford. The sexton explains that the parish took over the Walthams' last home in consideration of repairing the ruinated roof. "We ha'n't the conwenience hee-ar, years ago," says this typical Essex rustic, and goes on to tell how the oil and coals and candles for church use were formerly stored in the Radcliffe Chapel, where the Sunday School was also held. Three Radcliffes, Earls of Sussex, 1542-1583, grandfather, father, and son, lie in effigy side by side on an altar-tomb in that chapel, "as like as my fingers are to my fingers." "Old wawriors," the sexton calls them, and explains that their broken noses are due to the "ruff" having fallen in, years since.

Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called the "mine" road, Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the great red-brick Georgian mansion of Crix, standing in its meadows where the little River Ter comes down from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels of Hatfield Mill, and then hurries off, as though belated, for a rendezvous with the Chelmer, two miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road with whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing warranty of its age in the inscription, "A.A. 1715"; but if that evidence were lacking it could be found in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into an area with the raising of the road for the building of the bridge that long ago replaced the watersplash at this crossing of the stream.

Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the heaths that once gave the place its original forename of "Heathfield," and the Peverels, identical with the Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige of themselves in the church--that last resort of the antiquary in search of old manorial lords. It is true that on modern tablets built into the west front of the church the founding of a Benedictine Priory here in 1100 by Ingelrica, mother of William Peverel, is alluded to, together with the rather scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things are decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of Latin and lichen-stains, so that both their monastic beneficence and their maternal origin are only dimly to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.

It is the distance of half a mile from the high road to where Hatfield church lies secluded, adjoining the grounds of a mansion partly occupying the site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It is here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's original baptism must be sought, and accordingly some stretches of common-land may be discovered close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us, though there be little enough to say of it, beyond the note that its closeness to the railway station has caused a certain growth and a certain amount of rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the old plaster cottages that were once the invariable feature of its street, and admirably figured forth the Essex manner of decoratively treating plaster-work. There remain here but two such cottages, bearing the date 1703, and the initials M.R., with _fleur-de-lis_.

XX

A ROAD of almost unvarying flatness conducts in something under three miles to Witham, entered nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by the Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates in no fewer than three separate and distinct names. As the River Witham, it confers a name upon the townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same sponsorial office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook it is endowed with a title that smacks rather of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down upon the mere thread of water oozing and stewing in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is not ill-named as the Podsbrook; but the Essex Council in bridging it so substantially think of it rather as the River Witham, which they have every right and cause to do, for the stream can avenge itself of those disfiguring potsherds and that contemptuous title in the most sardonic way when winter comes and the floods are out.

The long street of Witham is remarkable for the number of large and handsome mansions dating from the time of Queen Anne, through the period of the four Georges. The greater number of the professional men of Essex would, from the number of those houses, appear to have settled in the little town and to have medically attended it and legally represented it to such an effect that it is only now beginning to recover from them and from the coming of the railway, which dealt a death-blow to the thriving coaching interest of the early part of the nineteenth century.

For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place of Mrs Nelson's famous "Ipswich Blues," the crack coaches on the seventy miles of road, which started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary exertions made Ipswich in something under six hours. Such remarkable performances as these were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in place of the average ten miles on other roads, and by placing leaders in readiness at the foot of hills like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The "Blue Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some of the principal coaches drew up, is still in existence; its sign, a pierced effigy of that animal projecting from the front of the house and looming weirdly against the sky-line. There are many "White Harts" on the road to Norwich, the sign being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as that of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North Road; but of all the many examples to be met along these hundred and twelve miles this is the one that is most quaintly out of proportion, with a head and neck less than half the size demanded by body and legs, and a golden collar and chain of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was the favourite badge of Richard the Second, whose connection with East Anglia was too slight for assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference on the part of innkeepers along the Norwich Road.