The duty on coals entering London amounted in 1885 to no less than £449,343, and on wines to £8,488. By far the greater part of these amounts was, of course, collected on the railways and in the port of London. Originally imposed for the maintenance of London orphans, the wine dues became, like the coal duties, great sources of income, by which many notable London improvements, among them the Victoria Embankment, have been carried out.
XIII
DARTFORD
Dartford, to which we now come, is a queer little town, planted in a profound hollow, through which runs its wealth-giving Darent. Mills and factories meet the eye at every turn. Not smoking, grimy factories of the kinds that blast the Midland counties, but cleanly-looking boarded structures for the most part, own brothers to flour-mills in outward aspect; places where paper is manufactured, and nowadays drugs and chemicals. Dartford is industrial to-day, but there are old-fashioned nooks, and some of the street-names are intriguing: “Bullace Lane” and “Overy Street,” for example. Few people nowadays know what is a “bullace.” It is, or was, a small wild plum, of the damson kind.
And here is the traditional home of paper-making in England, for it was in Dartford, in the reign of Good Queen Bess, that John Spielman (majesty, in the person of Gloriana’s successor, James the First, knighted him for it in 1605) introduced the art of paper-making to these shores. What induced that man of gold and jewels and precious stones (he was jeweller to Her Majesty) to take up paper-making, I do not know; but he made a very good thing of it, commercially speaking, and no wonder, when he had sole license during ten years for collecting rags for making his paper withal. Besides introducing the manufacture of paper, Sir John Spielman added the lime-tree to our parks and gardens, for he brought over with him from his native place, Lindau, in Germany, two slips from some unter den linden or another, and planted them in front of his Dartford home, where they flourished and became the progenitors of all the limes in England.
ARMS OF SPIELMAN AND HIS FIRST WIFE.
If you step into the quaint old church of Dartford, you will see, as soon as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, the tomb of Sir John Spielman and his wife, with their effigies, properly carved, painted and gilt, while in various parts of the church may be found what is said to be his crest, the fool’s cap, which he used as a water-mark on a particular size of paper. “Foolscap” paper derives its name from that water-mark; and thus, though the term now indicates a size, it was originally a trade-mark. The mark may have been derived, not from any crest, but from the long cap worn by the figure on his wife’s shield of arms; although it was greatly changed in the process. At the same time, it is to be noted that the fool’s cap water-mark occurred on paper made in Germany in 1472.