But one must not be tempted to stray into another county, else much might be said of the road that turns right at the Potter’s Bar Police Station for Northaw, Cheshunt, and Enfield. From Potter’s Bar, on this side, another finely-bordered highway turns back to London, through what was once Enfield Chase, by Cock Fosters and Southgate. At the leafy hollow, where a large board beacons to Hadley Wood Station, one can turn by it for a walk of two miles to Barnet, pleasantly reached over the upper part of Hadley Common.
The cross-road in the other direction leads in three miles to Enfield and the scenes of our next chapter, passing the north side of Trent Park, which got its exotic name from George III., when he gave a lease of it to Sir Richard Jebb, in reward for his services to one of the royal princes on a sick-bed at the Tyrolese Trent. Where the road touches the park, over the fence may be seen the remains of Camelot Moat, an overgrown enclosure of immemorial antiquity that makes one of the scenes in the Fortunes of Nigel. A later novelist may have picked up a hint here in the legend of such a “Lost Sir Massingberd” as is said to have hid himself in a hollow tree and perished miserably by falling into a well underneath. By the country-folk Camelot Moat seems best remembered as one of Dick Turpin’s lairs; but all over the county linger memories of this worthy, whose spirit on rough nights haunts its lonely roads from Enfield Chase to Stanmore Heath, or did so till quite recently, when it is understood to have taken offence at the passage of motor-cars as not easily brought to “stand and deliver.”
IV
EDMONTON AND ENFIELD
AN older road north is the line of the ancient Ermyn Street, running out roughly parallel with the Great Eastern Railway to Cambridge, by the Middlesex side of the Lea. Defoe styles this the North Road, and states that more carriages came that way in his time than on any other road into London. But there are Londoners of our day to whom it is unknown beyond Shoreditch; and few foreigners find it out, though Americans might see here perhaps our best effort at one of their long city avenues. It is not, indeed, as long as Yonge Street, Toronto, which has laid itself out for thirty miles as a shadow cast before future greatness, and it may be surpassed by the “magnificent distances” of Washington or Philadelphia; still, this modest London thoroughfare holds an almost straight course for half a dozen miles from Shoreditch, past Dalston and Stoke Newington, over Stamford Hill, and through Tottenham to Edmonton. Here it makes a slight bend from the line of the ancient road; that a little to the left may still be traced in grassy and sloughy stretches beside fragments of woodland, where one might believe oneself many miles from a busy highway. But for a few green gaps, which seem in the way of being filled up, the actual road as far as the edge of Hertfordshire and beyond has been shut in with houses, often spreading out so far on either side that the Edmonton census district is the most populous part of Middlesex outside London. Edmonton’s name included one of the county’s half-dozen Hundreds, which, in the more practical grouping for parliamentary representation, is divided under the titles of Enfield and Tottenham; while Enfield, for its part, holds the distinction of being the largest Middlesex parish.
This is the road on which fared Hobson, the Cambridge carrier of Milton’s day, whose rule that each horse must be hired in turn as it stood in the stable is said to have originated the phrase “Hobson’s choice.” It has also memories of Dick Turpin, who, according to the legend recorded by Harrison Ainsworth, leapt Black Bess clean over a donkey-cart at Edmonton as he spurred on to Ware, with the myrmidons of the law in hot pursuit. Another criminal hero of the neighbourhood was the pickpocket George Barrington, transported to Botany Bay in 1790, where he reformed himself to become a police superintendent, an author, even a poet, known by one trite couplet—
True patriots all! for, be it understood,
We left our country for our country’s good.
“Stop, thief! Stop, thief! A highwayman!” was the cry naturally raised by those who saw John Gilpin racing along the road, its most famed hero to the general reader. There appears, indeed, some obscurity as to the first stage taken by the worthy linen-draper on his untamed steed. The text distinctly states that he passed through ‘merry Islington‘; but commentators differ as to whether by Aldersgate Street he gained the Essex Road, and thence struck across the line of the Green Lanes, or more directly attained the Kingsland Road, which seems his shortest line from Cheapside, but would soon bring him into the parish of Stoke Newington, a name perhaps omitted by poetic license as more intractable to the metre.
We can confidently follow his race beyond where the Seven Sisters Road comes in from Finsbury Park. Were the seven sisters of Tottenham those seven daughters who, with such comically lugubrious looks, kneel in a diminishing row along the Barkham monument in its Parish Church? The received legend makes them seven elms, whose successors stand railed in on the green at Seven Sisters Corner. From this landmark we hold up the road to another corner, where has been restored Tottenham High Cross, the name of which calls to mind shades as abiding as John Gilpin’s. It was from Tottenham that Piscator and his friend set out to take their “morning draught” at the “Thatched House” of Hoddesdon, after a walk of over a dozen miles. It may have been in the garden of the “Swan” here that Izaak Walton in the flesh could stroll under a “honeysuckle hedge” and rest “in a sweet shady arbour,” rural amenities now much to seek about the Tottenham highroad, though in entering this parish it crossed the invisible boundary of London. By Tottenham Hale one might now turn down to the Lea, that ripples so sweetly through Walton’s seventeenth-century Arcadia; but one had better not.
We have a vision of our own,
Ah! why should we undo it?
On the other side of Tottenham’s spacious Broadway, towards Hornsey, we might still find a remnant of green fields shrinking like the peau de chagrin in Balzac’s romance. A height between this road and the Green Lanes has of late been laid out as a pretty park, overlooking the meadows of the Muswell Brook—mocked with the alias of Moselle—where the London County Council proposes to plant a new town of working men’s dwellings. Socially, Tottenham has not much to boast of, Stamford Hill perhaps being its only purlieu on visiting terms with the West End. A century ago it had come down to snug and sober respectability, when it was much affected by Quakers and other Dissenters, and such names as Bernard Barton and John Williams, the missionary, marked its eminent natives. Still, its main thoroughfare wears a certain aspect of broad-brimmed sobriety and unpretentious comfort. But time was when this village rang with the stir of feudal chivalry, even before that burlesque “Tournament of Tottenham,” sung by an English Cervantes of so early date that a quotation would need a glossary. To lists set up beside Tottenham highway came “all the men of Islington, of Highgate, and of Hackney,” their weapons flails, their shields baskets, their armour sheep-skins; then Perkin the potter, “with doughtiness of dent,” carried away the prize, the hand of the Reeve’s daughter Tib, along with which went such trophies as a grey mare, a spotted sow, and a brood-hen. The fair lady was forthwith led to church, the beaten champions in her train, and rancour was drowned in a wedding-feast that lasted “all the long day” for those eupeptic heroes.