May God, whose piercing eye pursues his flight,
Pardon the crime, but bring the deed to light.
That the deed was “brought to light” is obvious enough, but that is not what the author of those lines meant. The perpetrator of the deed was never discovered. Blackgrove Wood, a dark mass in a little hollow, is easily seen from the road. In another two miles Hockliffe is reached.
XXI
“A dirty way leads you to Hockley, alias Hockley-in-the-Hole,” said Ogilby, in 1675; and it seems to have gradually become worse during the next few years, for Celia Fiennes, confiding her adventures to her diary, about 1695, tells of “seven mile over a sad road. Called Hockley in ye Hole, as full of deep slows in ye winter it must be Empasable.” It received, in fact, all the surface-water draining from Dunstable Downs to the south and Brickhills to the north. It is not, however, until he has left Hockliffe behind and started to climb out of it that, the amateur of roads discovers how deeply in a hole Hockliffe is, for it is approached from the Dunstable side by a level stretch that dims the memory of the downs, and makes all those old tales of sloughs appear like fantastic inventions. It is at this time perhaps the most perfectly preserved example of Telford’s road-making. Surface, cross-drains, ditches, and hedges are maintained in as good condition as when first made. And why so more than in other places? For this very reason; that it is in a hole, and if not properly drained, would again become as “empasable” as it was over two hundred years ago.
Hockliffe, originally a very small village, grew to great importance in coaching times, for here is the junction of the Holyhead and Manchester and Liverpool roads, both in those times of the greatest vogue and highest importance. An after-glow of those radiant glories of the road is seen in the long street. Hockliffe was in Pennant’s time, when coaching had grown enormously in importance, “a long range of houses, mostly inns.” It is so now, with the difference that the houses mostly have been inns, and are so no longer. In his day he observed “the English rage for novelty” to be “strongly tempted by one sagacious publican, who informs us, on his sign, of newspapers being to be seen at his house every day in the week.”
THE “WHITE HORSE,” HOCKLIFFE.
At which of the two principal inns, the “White Hart” or the “White Horse,” this enterprising publican carried on business he does not tell us. Perhaps it was the “White Horse”; now certainly one of the most interesting of inns, and then the chiefest in Hockliffe. Before its hospitable door the “Holyhead Mail,” the Shrewsbury “Greyhound,” the Manchester “Telegraph,” the Liverpool “Royal Umpire,” and many another drew up, together with some of the many “Tally-Hoes” that spread a fierce rivalry down the road. It was probably at Hockliffe and at the hospitable door of the “White Horse,” that the “Birmingham Tally-Ho” conveying Tom Brown to Rugby drew up at dawn “at the end of the fourth stage.” We need not look for exact coaching data in that story; else, among other things, we might cavil at the description of it as a “little” roadside inn.
A bright fire gleaming through the red curtains of the bar window gave promise of good refreshment, and so while the horses were changed, the guard took Tom in to give him “a drop of something to keep the cold out,” or rather to drive it out, for poor Tom’s feet were already so cold that they might have been in the next world, for all he could feel of them, and the guard had to pick him off the coach-top and set him in the road. “Early purl” set that right, and warmed the cockles of his heart.