The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway

by Charles G. Harper

Returning to what, in Essex parlance, is called the "mine" road, Hatfield Peverel is reached, past the great red-brick Georgian mansion of Crix, standing in its meadows where the little River Ter comes down from Terling, flows under the road, turns the wheels of Hatfield Mill, and then hurries off, as though belated, for a rendezvous with the Chelmer, two miles away. It is an old mill, fronting the road with whitewashed brick walls, a chimney bearing warranty of its age in the inscription, "A.A. 1715"; but if that evidence were lacking it could be found in the position of the mill-house doorway, sunk into an area with the raising of the road for the building of the bridge that long ago replaced the watersplash at this crossing of the stream.

Hatfield Peverel nowadays shows few signs of the heaths that once gave the place its original forename of "Heathfield," and the Peverels, identical with the Derbyshire Peverels of the Peak, are so utterly vanished that they have left not the slightest vestige of themselves in the church—that last resort of the antiquary in search of old manorial lords. It is true that on modern tablets built into the west front of the church the founding of a Benedictine Priory here in 1100 by Ingelrica, mother of William Peverel, is alluded to, together with the rather scandalous story of the Peverel origin, but these things are decently wrapped in the combined obscurity of Latin and lichen-stains, so that both their monastic beneficence and their maternal origin are only dimly to be scanned by the vulgar or the hurried.

It is the distance of half a mile from the high road to where Hatfield church lies secluded, adjoining the grounds of a mansion partly occupying the site of the Priory, and so named from that fact. It is here, if anywhere, that the "heaths" of Hatfield's original baptism must be sought, and accordingly some stretches of common-land may be discovered close by. But wayside Hatfield chiefly concerns us, though there be little enough to say of it, beyond the note that its closeness to the railway station has caused a certain growth and a certain amount of rebuilding, in alien and uncharacteristic style, of the old plaster cottages that were once the invariable feature of its street, and admirably figured forth the Essex manner of decoratively treating plaster-work. There remain here but two such cottages, bearing the date 1703, and the initials M.R., with fleur-de-lis.

XX

A road of almost unvarying flatness conducts in something under three miles to Witham, entered nowadays over an imposing bridge erected by the Essex County Council over a stream that luxuriates in no fewer than three separate and distinct names. As the River Witham, it confers a name upon the townlet; as the Brain, it performs the same sponsorial office for Braintree; but as the Podsbrook it is endowed with a title that smacks rather of the farcical sort. The traveller looking in summer-time over the railings of the bridge, down upon the mere thread of water oozing and stewing in the mud among the kitchen refuse of the neighbourhood, comes to the conclusion that it is not ill-named as the Podsbrook; but the Essex Council in bridging it so substantially think of it rather as the River Witham, which they have every right and cause to do, for the stream can avenge itself of those disfiguring potsherds and that contemptuous title in the most sardonic way when winter comes and the floods are out.

The long street of Witham is remarkable for the number of large and handsome mansions dating from the time of Queen Anne, through the period of the four Georges. The greater number of the professional men of Essex would, from the number of those houses, appear to have settled in the little town and to have medically attended it and legally represented it to such an effect that it is only now beginning to recover from them and from the coming of the railway, which dealt a death-blow to the thriving coaching interest of the early part of the nineteenth century.

For Witham was the half-way house, the dining-place of Mrs Nelson's famous "Ipswich Blues," the crack coaches on the seventy miles of road, which started at eight in the morning and by extraordinary exertions made Ipswich in something under six hours. Such remarkable performances as these were possible only by establishing six-mile stages in place of the average ten miles on other roads, and by placing leaders in readiness at the foot of hills like Brook Street Hill at Brentwood. The "Blue Posts" is gone, but the "White Hart," where some of the principal coaches drew up, is still in existence; its sign, a pierced effigy of that animal projecting from the front of the house and looming weirdly against the sky-line. There are many "White Harts" on the road to Norwich, the sign being just as peculiarly a favourite one here as that of the "Bay Horse" is on the Great North Road; but of all the many examples to be met along these hundred and twelve miles this is the one that is most quaintly out of proportion, with a head and neck less than half the size demanded by body and legs, and a golden collar and chain of prodigious strength. This heraldic device was the favourite badge of Richard the Second, whose connection with East Anglia was too slight for assuming this herd of White Harts to be especially allusive to him, or indeed more than a curious preference on the part of innkeepers along the Norwich Road.

CHIPPING HILL.

Those who would seek the site of the original Witham must turn aside from the high road the matter of half a mile, past the railway station, to Chipping Hill, where, within the earthworks of a camp successively occupied and wrought upon by the Britons, the Romans and the Saxons, it will be found. Chipping Hill overlooks the pleasant valley of that triply-named river already mentioned, in 1749 described by Walpole as "the prettiest little winding stream you ever saw." The "sweet meadows falling down a hill" of which he speaks are there to this day, and as sweet, and the by-road that comes up from the gravelly hollow and cuts through the earthy circumvallation of the ancient stronghold climbs up romantically under the blossoming limes into as pretty a picture in the rural sort as you shall easily find. It is a little piece of Old England before railways came, or science and the ten thousand plagues of modern life, and the cheap builder of hideous new cottages were let loose upon the old order of things. Not a jarring note is in the picture of yellow-plastered and red-roofed old dwellings, flint-built church tower and red-brick rectory, set in, upon and around the swelling grassy banks where Romans kept guard and Saxons had both their fortress and their market, as evidenced by the still surviving name of Chipping, or Market Hill.