XVIII
GAD’S HILL
There is little to see or remark upon in the three miles between Chalk and Gad’s Hill. Two old roadside inns, each claiming to be a “half-way house”; a lane that leads off to the right, towards the village of Shorne; a windmill, without its sails, standing on the brow of a singular hill; these, together with the great numbers of men and women working in the fields, are all the noticeable features of the road until one comes up the long, gradual ascent to the top of Gad’s Hill.
Gad’s Hill is at first distinctly disappointing; perhaps all places of pilgrimage must on acquaintance be necessarily less satisfactory than a lively fancy has painted them. How very often, indeed, does not one exclaim on standing before world-famed sites, “Is this all?”
The stranger comes unawares upon Gad’s Hill. The ascent is so gradual that he is quite unprepared for the shock that awaits him when he comes in sight of a house and two spreading cedars that can scarce be other than Charles Dickens’ home. He has seen them pictured so often that there can surely be no mistake; and yet—— He feels cheated. Is this, then, the famous hill where travellers were wont to be robbed? Is this the place referred to by that seventeenth-century robber turned littérateur, John Clavell, who, in his “Recantation of an Ill-led Life,” speaks so magniloquently of—
Gad’s Hill, and those
Red tops of mountains, where good people lose
Their ill kept purses.
Was it here, then, upon this paltry pimple of a hill that Falstaff and Prince Hal, Poins and the rest of them, robbed the merchants, the franklins, and the flea-bitten carriers, who, Charles’s Wain being over the chimneys of their inn at Rochester, set out early in the morning for London? Was this the spot where Falstaff, brave amid so many confederates, added insult to injury of those travellers by calling them “gorbellied knaves” and “caterpillars,” and where Prince Henry, in his turn, alluded to the knight as “fat guts”? Yes, this is the place, but how changed from then! To see Gad’s Hill as it was in those times it would be necessary to sweep away the rows of mean cottages that form quite a hamlet here, together with Gad’s Hill Place, the hedges and enclosures, and to clothe the hillsides with dense woodlands, coming close up to, and overshadowing the highway, which should be full of ruts and sloughs of mud. Then we should have some sort of an idea how terrible the hill could be o’nights when the rogues[3] who lurked in the shadow of the trees pounced upon rich travellers, and, tricked out in
vizards, hoods, disguise,
Masks, muzzles, mufflers, patches on their eyes;
Those beards, those heads of hair, and that great wen
Which is not natural,
relieved them of their gold.
And not only rogues of low estate, but others of birth and education, pursued this hazardous industry, so that Shakespeare, when he made the Prince of Wales and Sir John Falstaff appear as highwaymen on this scene, was not altogether drawing upon his imagination. Thus, when the Danish Ambassador was set upon and plundered here in 1656, they were not poor illiterates who sent him a letter the next day in which they took occasion to assure him that “the same necessity that enforc’t ye Tartars to breake ye wall of China compelled them to wait on him at Gad’s Hill.” But travellers did not always tamely submit to be robbed and cudgelled, as you shall see in these extracts from Gravesend registers—“1586, September 29th daye, was a thiefe yt was slayne, buryed;” and, again, “1590, Marche, the 17th daie, was a theefe yt was at Gad’shill wounded to deathe, called Robert Writs, buried.”