A mile or more distant, along the Bishop Stortford road, is the gatehouse of the famous Rye House, its clustered red-brick chimneys and thick walls still left to remind the historically-minded of that Rye House Plot of 1681 which was to have ended Charles the Second, and his brother, the Duke of York, on their way past from Newmarket to London. Although the Bishop Stortford road does not concern us, the house is alluded to in these pages because it now contains that notorious piece of furniture, the Great Bed of Ware.
Hoddesdon gives place to Amwell, steeply downhill. The village is properly "Great Amwell," but no one who knows his Lamb would think of calling it so, although there is a "Little Amwell" close at hand. To the Lambs it was just "Amwell," and that is sufficient for us. Moreover, like so many places named "Great," it is now really very small. It is, however, exceedingly beautiful, with that peculiarly park-like beauty characteristic of Hertfordshire. The old church, also of the characteristically Hertfordshire type, stands, charmingly embowered amid trees, on a bank overlooking the smoothly-gliding stream of the New River, new-born from its source in the Chadwell Spring, and hurrying along on its beneficent mission toward the smoke and fog of London. Two islands divide the stream; one of them containing a monument to Sir Hugh Myddelton, and a stone with lines from Scott, the "Quaker poet of Amwell," commencing—
"Amwell, perpetual be thy stream,
Nor e'er thy spring be less."
An aspiration which, let us hope, will be fulfilled.
XIV
Although to hurry past spots so interesting and so beautiful looks much like the act of a Vandal, our business is with the road, and linger we must not; and so, downhill again, by the woods of Charley—or "Charl-eye" as the country folk insist on calling them—we come to a vantage-point overlooking Ware; an old town of many maltings, of the famous Bed aforesaid, and of Johnny Gilpin's ride. Fortunate are those who come thus in view of Ware upon some still golden afternoon of summer, when the chimes from the old church-tower are spelling out the notes of that sentimental old song, "Believe me, if all those endearing young charms." Time and tune conspire to render Ware romantic.
The town takes its name from the weir or dam built across the Lea by invading Danes in the year 896. Coming up the Lea in a great flotilla of what historians call ships, more correctly perhaps to be named sailing-barges, they halted here, and, designing a fort beside the dam they built, imagined themselves secure. Around them in the Lea valley between Ware and Hertford stretched the great lake their dam had created, and all King Alfred's men could not by force dislodge them.
Can you not find it possible to imagine that great King—that King truly great in counsels both of war and peace, that contriver and man of his hands—on these Amwell heights and looking down upon that Danish fortress and its ceinture of still water, with twice a hundred prows lying there, proudly secure? Truly, despite the dark incertitude of history on these doings, we may clearly see that monarch. He knits his brows and looks upon the country spread out beneath him: just as you may look down to-day upon the valley where the Lea and the railway run, side by side. He—we have said it with meaning—is a contriver; has brains of some quality beneath that brow; will not waste his men in making glorious but wasteful attacks upon the foe: they shall work—so he wills it—not merely fight; or, working, fight the better for King and Country. Accordingly, his army is set to digging a great channel down this selfsame valley; a channel whose purport those Danes, lying there, do by no means comprehend; nor, I think, many even in this host of the great Alfred himself; for the spy has ever watched upon the doings of armies, and he who keeps his own counsel is always justified of his reticence.
WARE.