But if the foodpads who infested the Hackney Road were the merest tyros in swearing, they seem to have been proficients in assassination, for many bodies, shot and stabbed, were continually found beside the road, and it was not until about 1756 that any degree of safety could be obtained. On January 15th, in that year, the way between Shoreditch and Hackney was lighted with lamps for the first time, and a military guard, with muskets loaded and bayonets fixed, patrolled the distance.
The original “pleasant village” of Hackney, thought to have derived from “Hacon’s Ey,” the island settlement of some Danish landowner on the wide-spreading waters of the river Lea, has disappeared under many millions of tons of brick and stone. Of this Hacon we know nothing, and his very existence is deduced, perhaps wrongly, from the place-name. The same person is perhaps commemorated in the name of that City church, St. Nicholas Acon, in Lombard Street, whose origin is unknown. Stow tells us it was sometimes written Hacon, “for so I have read it in records”; and there was ever much uncertainty in words beginning with A or H.
Hackney is not a name of pleasant savour. The word is associated with everything trite, threadbare, flat, stale, and unprofitable. Hackneyed subjects, hackney authors, hackney horses, and hackney carriages occur at once to the mind; but we must do Hackney the justice to acknowledge that they have no connection with the place, and that those who long ago sought to prove such a connection were utterly wrong. “The village,” says one, “being anciently celebrated for numerous seats of the nobility and gentry, people of all kinds resorted to it from the City, and so great a number of horses were daily hired that they became known as Hackney horses. Hence the term spread to public conveyances.” Unfortunately for so neat and four-square an origin, the word “haquenée,” meaning a slow-paced nag, is as old as Chaucer, whose typical young gentleman had a hackeney. This, however, was not at all in the nature of a cab-horse, for we are told in the next line, he “loved wel to have a horse of prise.”
It is singular, in view of this mistaken idea of derivation, that the chief street of Hackney should be Mare Street, but any attempt to connect that name with the supposed origin of Hackney would only result in a mare’s nest for the too-ingenious. That street, originally “Meare” Street, had nothing to do with horses. Its name probably marked the line of some forgotten boundary.
V
The place is now a busy suburb, like every other in most respects, and remarkable only for the extraordinary number and variety of its places of worship. Every brand of religion is represented here, but all that remains of the old parish church is the venerable mediæval tower, hard by where the North London Railway crosses over the road. The body of the old building was demolished, on the plea that it was dangerous, in 1798: really, the times were out of sympathy with Gothic architecture, and any excuse was made to serve for the building of the hideous, nondescript pagan church that now stands close at hand. The old tower keeps watch and ward, beside the thronged modern street, over that great graveyard where the dead of 900 years lie, and pious hands, with the first year of the present century, have erected a tall Celtic cross of Kilkenny marble, in memory of “all who died in faith.”
It is a hard-working population that lives at Hackney, whose by-streets and alleys are very grey and mean; but somewhere in this very neighbourhood the hero of Mr. Gus Elen’s song had his “pretty little garden.” That was supposed to be a comic song, but it was one with a certain amount of pathos in it. It is not a pathos discernible by the builder, who finds his greatest satisfaction in pushing London still further out into the country, but it is there all the same. That Hackney hero was as fond of his backyard garden and of his somewhat problematical neighbourhood to the country as many an owner of vast estates, and took a greater personal delight in them. Thus went the refrain to one of the verses:—
It was a very pretty little garden,
And Epping from the ’ousetops might be seen,
With the aid of op’ra-glasses you could see to ’Ackney Marshes,