An epitaph in the churchyard to “Mr. Lewis Powel Williams, Surgeon,” who died in 1771, aged forty, declares “He was the first that Introduced into Practice; Inoculation without Preparation.” A similar claim is made at Worth Matravers, in Dorset, for Benjamin Jesty in 1774, but with the careful proviso that he was the first “known” to have practised it.
Glen Magna, three miles onward, more commonly known by the English form, “Great Glen,” is said by the villagers (of neighbouring villages) to contain “more dogs than honest men.” The sting of this saying is supposed to reside in the alleged fact that Great Glen has ever been singularly deficient in dogs. And so it remains to this day; and, so far as the observation of the present writer goes, the deficiency extends to houses and inhabitants as well. Great Glen, in short, is one of those many places that are great in name and ludicrously small in fact. The wayside church is almost all the wayfarer sees. It has a Norman south porch with carvings of weird horses whose tails stand erect over their backs, like Scotch pines: a kind of horse not known outside the region of nightmare.
THE “LONDON WAYE”
At Oadby, in another two miles, the influence of the great and still rapidly growing town of Leicester begins to be felt. The old church stands in the centre of the village, and narrows the road almost into the semblance of a lane. The east window of the north aisle, looking upon the road, is of the Decorated period of Gothic and is enriched with the comparatively rare “ballflower” moulding. An epitaph on three brothers and three sisters Davenport, “who lived together in a state of Celibacy in the same House 54 years, deservedly esteemed for their suitable demeanour and punctual integrity,” and died in the years 1820-7, seems to show that their “race suicide” was more approved then than it would be now apostles of increase are raising their voices.
XXI
The electric tramways run far out from Leicester, and in the town itself form a maze of lines that only the Leicester people themselves can readily understand. The long approach by the London road, composed as it is of the residential quarters of the wealthier classes, is the best of all the entrances, just as Belgrave, on the north, is the worst; but in the olden days this was “Gallowtree Gate,” leading uphill from the hollow in which the town stands, to the place of execution. Here you pass the Victoria Park, and so come at length to the centre of the busy place, at the Clock Tower. But in 1600 the “London Waye,” as Speed on his map of that date describes it, was the Welford Road, on the left hand, which, branching from our road at Northampton, and avoiding Harborough, came into Leicester in a mile and a half less. It led through the town by way of Highcross Street, North Bridge, and Frog Island. But Ogilby, in his Britannia, of seventy years later, gives the London road as now used.
The Clock Tower, the centre of modern Leicester, is what the Forum was to ancient Rome. Everything centres around it. Dr. Johnson said that the tide of London life ran most strongly at Charing Cross, and even more justly it may be said that the tide of Leicester’s busy days eddies with greatest force at the Clock Tower. This is a particularly fine stone structure with spire, standing in the centre of the road where the five great thoroughfares of Gallowtree Gate, Belgrave Gate, Church Gate, Humberstone Gate, and High Street meet. It was built in 1868, as a tribute to the memory of four Leicester worthies: Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester; William of Wyggeston, the founder, in the early part of the sixteenth century, of the Wyggeston Hospital, whose money now also supports the Wyggeston Schools; Sir Thomas White, and Gabriel Newton, benefactors of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Roman Leicester centred around the site of the mediæval castle, some distance away, the Clock Tower standing outside the East Gate.