Here we have passed the little Rutlandshire village of Stretton on the right, which obtained its name of “Street-town” from having been on the ancient road called the Ermine Way. Here we come again into Lincolnshire.
For some twenty miles the Great North Road runs through this broad county, the land of the “yellow-bellies,” as Lincolnshire folk are named, from the frogs and eels that inhabit their fens and marshes. North and South Witham, giving a name to Witham Common, lie unseen, off to the left, and the once famous old “Black Bull” stands, as it always has stood, solitary beside the road, out of sight from any other house. It consists of two separate buildings, at right angles to one another and erected at different times. The original house is a structure of rag-stone, placed a little way back from the road, and facing it. The second building, which bears a more imposing architectural character, and with its handsome elevation of red brick and stone, bears witness to the once extensive business of the “Black Bull,” stands facing south, with its gable-end to the road, thus forming two sides of a courtyard. Long ranges of stables extend to the rear. The place is now in use as a farmhouse and hunting-box, and a screen of laurels and other evergreen shrubs is planted on the site of the old coach-drive. Sturtle, who kept the house in the old days, is gathered to his fathers, and the railway whistle sounds across country, where the guards’ horns once aroused the echoes of Morkery Woods or Spittle Gorse.
How different the outlook now from the time when Sir Walter Scott made entries in his Journal. “Old England,” he writes, from his hotel at Grantham, “is no changeling. Things seem much the same. One race of red-nosed innkeepers are gone, and their widows, eldest sons, or head waiters exercise hospitality in their room, with the same bustle and importance. The land, however, is much better ploughed; straight ridges everywhere adopted in place of the old circumflex of twenty years ago. Three horses, however, or even four, are often seen in a plough, yoked one before the other. Ill habits do not go out at once.”
A few years later, and these things, which had changed so little, were revolutionised. The railway carried all the traffic and the roads were deserted, the “red-nosed innkeepers” so rarely seeing a guest, that when a stray one arrived they almost fell on his shoulder and wept. Agriculture, too, converted even Witham Common into a succession of fertile fields, and thus banished wayfaring romance to the pages of history or of sensation novels.
XXIV
Let us rest awhile by this sunlit stretch of road, where the red roofs of distant farmsteads alone hint of life; always excepting the humming telegraph wires whispering messages to Edinburgh and the Far North, or perhaps the summer breeze bringing across country the distant echo of a train. If it does, why then the sound renders our solitude the more complete, and gives flight to a lagging imagination. It reminds us that it was here, and not there, three miles away over the meadows in a railway cutting, that the traffic of two kingdoms went, sixty years ago.
These green selvedges of grass that border the highway so delightfully were not then in existence. They were a part of the road itself, which was, for all that, not too wide for the mail-coaches, the stages, the fly-wagons, private chariots, post-chaises, and especially the runaway couples en route for Gretna Green, who travelled along it. “The dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,” quoth Sir Walter Scott, in his diary, when journeying to Abbotsford in 1826. Dull scenically, but not historically. Had it been an unlettered cyclist who had made this criticism, a thousand critical lashes had been his portion—and serve him right; but what shall we say of the author of Waverley? Dull! why, the road is thronged with company. One can—any one can who has the will to it—call spirits from the vasty deep with which to people the way. No need to ask, “Will they come?” They cannot choose but do so; they are here.
A strange and motley crowd: the pale ghosts of the ages. From Ostorius Scapula and the Emperors Hadrian, Severus, and Constantine the Great, down through the Middle Ages, they come, mostly engaged in cutting one another’s throats. York and Lancaster, as their fortunes ebbed or flowed, setting up or taking down the heads of traitors; obscure murderers despatching equally obscure victims by the way, and in later times—the farcical mingling with the more tragic humours—we see James the First journeying to his throne, confirmed in his good opinion of himself as a second Solomon by a sycophantic crowd of courtiers; Lord Chancellor Littleton, fleeing from Parliament to Charles the First at York, carrying with him that precious symbol of Royal authority, the Great Seal (the third Great Seal of that reign), made in the year the Long Parliament began to sit; Charles the First, a few years later, conducted by the victorious Parliament to London, and, at the interval of another century, the Rebel Lords. “The ’45,” indeed, made much traffic on this road: the British army going down, with Billy the Butcher at its head, to crush the rebellion, and the prisoners coming up—their last journey, as they knew full well. They were pinioned on the way, for their better custody, and so that Hanoverian heads might sleep the sounder at St. James’s. The Hanoverians themselves rarely came this way, nor would their coming have added greatly to the romance of the road. George the Third passed once. He was a stay-at-home king, and of roads knew little, save of those that led from London to Windsor, or to that western Ultima Thule of his, Weymouth. Indeed, it is said, on what authority it is difficult to determine, that the third George never voyaged out of the kingdom. Even Hanover, beloved of his forbears, he never knew, although the Jacobites ceased not with their brass tokens, to wish him there. [165] His furthest journey is said to have been to York.