“Is’t a straunger?”
“Ay, for sewer.”
“Then pause ’im; ’eave a stone at ’un; fettle ’im.”
No inoffensive stranger in country districts is likely to meet with that reception nowadays. The stranger in those times was regarded, as he generally is in savage countries, as necessarily an enemy; but travel has changed all that, and it has been reserved for the London “hooligan,” who has been taught better, to perpetrate, in the very centre of civilisation, the barbarous methods of the uninstructed peasantry of generations ago.
Stories like these are only incredible when the circumstances of the age are unknown. In times when a stranger might easily enough prove to be a highwayman, or at the very least, some Government emissary intent upon collecting hearth-money, window-tax, or one of the very many duties then levied upon necessaries of life, a strange face might be that of an enemy, and at any rate was unlikely to be that of a friend. Sightseers were unknown. No one stirred from home if he could find an excuse for staying by his own fireside. “What do you want here?” asked the Welsh peasants of the earliest tourists; and declined to believe them when they said they journeyed to view the Welsh mountains. “For Christianity’s sake, help a poor man!” implored an early traveller in Scotland, fainting by the way. The door was slammed in his face. “Surely you are Christians?” exclaimed the unhappy man. “There are no Christians here,” replied the half-savage Scot: “we are all Grants and Frasers.” That last is, perhaps, rather a savagely humorous than a true story, but the mere existence of it is significant. More authentic—nay, well established—is the statement that even so late as 1749, in Glasgow, two people of the same name would commonly be distinguished by some physical peculiarity; or else, if one was travelled and the other not, the one who had been to the capital would be “London John,” or James, according to what his Christian name might be.
A course of reading in the “travels” of the authors and diarists who ambled about England, on horseback or otherwise, in the old days, sufficiently demonstrates the aloofness and isolation, and the essential differences that divided the country districts. When the Dukes of Somerset resided at Petworth, in Sussex, the roads were so bad that it was next to impossible to get there, and when once there it was equally difficult to get away. Petworth is only forty-nine miles from London, but the Duke of Somerset maintained a house at Godalming, sixteen miles along the road, where he could halt on the way and pass the night. His steward generally advised the servants some time before his Grace started, so that they might be on the road “to point out the holes.” When the Emperor Charles VI. visited Petworth, his carriage was attended by a strong escort of Sussex peasants, to save it from falling over. In spite of their efforts, it was several times overturned, and that was a very sore and bruised Emperor who supped that night with the Duke. Similar adventures befel Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne, visiting Petworth from Windsor. He went in some state, with a number of carriages. “The length of way was only forty miles, but fourteen hours were consumed in traversing it; while almost every mile was signalised by the overturn of a carriage, or its temporary swamping in the mire. Even the royal chariot would have fared no better than the rest, had it not been for the relays of peasants who poised and kept it erect by strength of arm, and shouldered it forward the last nine miles, in which tedious operation six good hours were consumed.”
The travellers of that era, knowing how strange the country must be to most people, gravely and at length described places that in these intimate times an author would feel himself constrained to apologise for mentioning, except in a personal and impressionistic way; and they not only so describe them, but there is every reason to believe their writings were read with interest. More interesting than their dry bones of topographical history are the accounts they give of manners, customs, and thoughts common to the time when travellers were few and little understood. When, in 1700, the Reverend Mr. Brome, rector of the pleasant Kentish village of Cheriton, determined to make the explorations of England that took him, in all, three years, he was obliged, as a matter of course, to wait until the spring was well advanced and the roads had again become passable. Setting forth at last, one mild May day, his friends and parishioners accompanied him a few miles, and then, with the fervent “God be with you’s” that were the parting salutations of the time, instead of the lukewarm “Good-bye’s” of to-day, turned back home-along, and expected to hear of him no more. But he did return, as his very dull and jejune book, chiefly of stodgy historical and topographical information, published in 1726, sufficiently informs us.
“Weeping Cross” is the name of a spot just outside Salisbury, supposed to have taken its name from being the spot where friends and relatives took leave of travellers, with little prospect in their minds of seeing them again. There is another “Weeping Cross” on the London side of Shrewsbury, near Emstrey Bank, about a mile from the town and overlooking the descending road, whence the progress of the travellers could be followed until distance at last hid them from view. There are, doubtless, other places so named throughout the country. The oft-repeated legendary statement that travellers usually made their wills before setting out is thus seen to be reasonable enough, but it is specifically supported by the author of Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, who, writing about 1730, says: “The Highlands are but little known, even to the inhabitants of the low country of Scotland, for they have ever dreaded the difficulties and dangers of travelling among the mountains; and when some extraordinary occasion has obliged any one of them to such a progress, he has, generally speaking, made his testament before he set out, as though he were entering upon a long and dangerous sea-voyage, wherein it was very doubtful if he should ever return.”
When Mrs. Calderwood, of Polton and Coltness, made a journey from Scotland into England in 1756, she wrote a diary, a very much more entertaining and instructive affair than the Reverend Mr. Brome’s book—which, indeed, could have been compiled from other works without the necessity of travelling, and, but for a few fleeting glimpses of original observation, actually gives that impression. Mrs. Calderwood tells us that at Durham she went to see the Cathedral, where the woman who conducted her round the building did not understand her Scottish ways (nor indeed did Mrs. Calderwood comprehend everything English). “I suppose, by my questions, the woman took me for a heathen, as I found she did not know of any other mode of worship but her own; so, that she might not think the Bishop’s chair defiled by my sitting down in it, I told her I was a Christian, though the way of worship in my country differed from hers.” Mrs. Calderwood, quite obviously, had never heard of St. Cuthbert and his antipathy to women, so respected at Durham that womankind were not admitted within certain boundaries in his Cathedral church; nor was she familiar with hassocks, for she narrates how the woman “stared when I asked what the things were that they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.”
The modern tourist along our roads finds a deadly sameness overspreading all parts of the country. The same cheap little suburban houses of stereotyped fashion, built to let at from £25 to £30 a year, that sprawl in mile upon mile on the outer ring of London, are to be found—nay, are insistently to the foreground—wherever he goes. They form the approach to, the outpost of, every town, large or small, he enters, and are built in the same way, and of the same materials, whether he travels farther north, south, east, or west. It was not so, need it be said, in the old times. Then the coach passenger with an eye for the beautiful and the unusual had that sense abundantly gratified along almost every mile of his course, for when men did not build on contract, and when the contractor, had he existed, would not have been able to work outside his own district, there was individuality in building design. We all know the truth of the adage that “variety is charming,” and of variety the travellers had their fill. And not only was there variety in design, but an endless change of materials gratified the eyes of those who cared for these things. London, with its dingy brick, was succeeded, as one penetrated westwards, by the weather-boarded cottages of Brentford and Hounslow, by the timber framing and brick nogging of the next districts, by the chalk and flint of Hampshire and Wilts; and at last, when one had come to the stone country, by the yellow ferruginous sandstone of Ham Hill, that characterises the houses and cottages between Shaftesbury, Crewkerne and Chard. Coming into Devon, the yellow stone was replaced by the rich red sandstone, or the equally red “cob” of that western land; and a final change was found when, the Tamar passed and Plymouth left behind, the massive granite churches, houses and cottages astonished the new-comer to those parts. No one could build with other than local materials in those days. The material might be, like the granite, stubborn and difficult, and expensive to work, but it would have been still more expensive to bring other materials to the spot, and so the local men worked on their local stone, and in course of time acquired that peculiar mastery of it and that way of expressing themselves which originated that “local style” whose secret is so ardently sought by modern architectural students. You cannot transplant the old style of a locality. Like the wilding plucked from its native hedgerow, it dies, or is cultivated into something other than its original old sweet self and becomes artificial. Cynic circumstance has so decreed it that, while these ancient local growths have in modern times been copied in London and the great towns, the rural neighbourhoods have been cursed with an ambition to copy London, while everywhere cheap red brick is ousting the native stone, flint, or wood.