The decayed coaching town of Colnbrook, in Middlesex, seventeen miles from Hyde Park Corner, on the great road to Bath, is little changed from the time when the coaches ceased running through it, seventy years ago. Still do the old red-brick houses on either side of the narrow, causeway-like street wear their seventeenth, their eighteenth, or their early nineteenth-century look unchanged, and the solid, stolid red-faced “George” inn yet seems to be awaiting the arrival of the mail, or of some smart post-chaise nearing London or setting out on the second stage of the 105¾ miles to Bath.
Colnbrook is perhaps the best illustration of a coaching town ruined by railways that it is possible to discover, and certainly the nearest to London. How great its fall since those prosperous days of 1549, when it was incorporated as a market-town! Its charter was renewed in 1632, and, judging from the many houses in its narrow street built about 1700-1750, the prosperity of the place survived unimpaired for certainly considerably over another century. It is now merely a village, but, as a result of its former highway importance, still a place of inns. There are at least ten even now surviving; and it is quite safe to assume that any important-looking old house, now in private occupation, facing the long thoroughfare, was once a hostelry.
The “George,” already mentioned, although re-fronted at some period of the eighteenth century, is older within, and an old gable overlooking the stable yard even has a sixteenth-century barge-board surviving. Of rather more human interest is the decorative and spiky iron-work fixed on the ground-floor window-sills of the frontage, which clearly shows that the architect of the building, when he drew out his design, had forgotten the loungers of Colnbrook, and, in placing his sills at the height above the ground of the average chair, had unwittingly provided the lazy with seats in the most advantageous position. Hence the afterthought of the decorative but penetrative ironwork.
But the oldest and most interesting building in Colnbrook is the “Ostrich” inn, whose long, gabled timber-and-plaster front, now partly divided up into shops and tenements, is clearly of Elizabethan date. It is picturesque, rambling, shabby outside, and shabby and darkling within, and the most satisfactory part of it is without doubt the little courtyard through the archway, where, turning round on the cobble-stones, you get a picturesque and a sunny view of steep roofs, dormer windows, dove-cot, and white-washed walls covered with grape-vines.
The present “Ostrich” is the successor of a much more ancient inn. There have been, in fact, several inns on this site. The first appears to have been a guest-house, or hospice—“quoddam hospitium in viâ Londoniæ apud Colebroc”—founded by one Milo Crispin, and given, in 1106, in trust to the Abbey of Abingdon, for the good of travellers in this world and the salvation of his soul in the next.
It would seem to be from this circumstance that the inn obtained its name, for it was early known as the “Ospridge,” a kind of orthographic half-way house between the former “hospice” and the present “Ostrich.”
If we may believe the old chroniclers’ statements—and there is no reason why we should not—the house became in after years a place of resort for guests going to and from Windsor Castle; and here the ambassadors robed themselves before being conducted the last few miles, and so into the Royal presence. Froissart chronicles four ambassadors to Edward the Third dining with the King: “So they dyned in the Kynge’s chamber, and after they departed, lay the same night at Colbrook.”
THE “OSTRICH,” COLNBROOK.