Unfortunately, the beautiful and characteristic Market Hall was pulled down some little time ago, to be replaced by a modern and not very satisfactory Gothic cross, and the church, that dates from the thirteenth century, has lost much of its venerable appearance through injudicious restoration. It still retains, however, several well-preserved and most interesting monuments, including that to Lady Tiploft, who died in 1446, one to Sir Nicolas Raynton and his wife, who passed away two centuries later, and one to Mrs. Martha Palmer, the last the work of Nicolas Stone, the famous seventeenth-century sculptor.
Waltham Holy Cross
Although, strictly speaking, neither Waltham Cross, Waltham Abbey, nor Epping Forest can be called suburbs of London, they are in such intimate touch with the capital, that a point may well be strained to include them in a publication intended to serve to some extent as a guide to beautiful places within easy reach of the city. Waltham Cross, a hamlet of Cheshunt, is specially noteworthy, as owning one of the crosses (well restored in 1883) that were set up by Edward I. to mark the resting-places of the body of his beloved queen Eleanor on the way to her tomb at Westminster, and it also greatly prides itself on the possession of the actual inn at which the bearers of the coffin rested for a night, the signboard bearing the legend, 'Ye Old Four Swannes Hostelrie, 1260.' The town of Waltham Abbey, or Waltham Holy Cross, that may possibly ere long be the seat of a new bishopric, a low-lying, straggling settlement, intersected by the Lea, which here divides into several branches, is a far more important place than its namesake of Cheshunt parish, with which it is often confounded, for it is the seat of a great Government gunpowder manufactory, the works of which occupy an area of some two hundred acres. It owes its chief fame, however, to what was once one of the grandest abbey churches of England—of which the nave, that is amongst the oldest places of worship in Great Britain, alone remains—that was built by Harold, the last of the Saxon kings, on the site of an earlier one founded by Tovi or Tovig, standard-bearer to Canute the Great, to enshrine a remarkable crucifix that was found on his estate in Somersetshire. The story goes that the place where the precious relic had been buried for many centuries was revealed in a dream to a smith, and that after it had been dug up, an attempt was made to send it to Glastonbury. The twelve red oxen and twelve cows harnessed to the cart in which the crucifix was placed, refused, however, to move in that direction, and Tovi therefore bade the drovers make for Waltham or Wealdham, as the village was then called, the name meaning the homestead in the forest. Directly their heads were turned northwards the animals set off at so rapid a pace that the escort could hardly keep up with them, and they needed no guidance till they reached the site of the abbey, when they halted of their own accord. This was at once accepted as a proof that it was the divine will that the church should be erected there, and the work was begun at once, the crucifix meanwhile working many miracles in the temporary shelter in which it was housed. After the death of Tovi the estate of Waltham was forfeited by his son Athelstan to King Edward the Confessor, who gave it to his brother-in-law Harold. The Saxon earl, who was a very devout Catholic, considered the church unworthy of the priceless treasure it enshrined, and he lost no time in having it pulled down, to replace it with a stately building that was consecrated in 1060. To it he often went to pray, the last time on the eve of the battle of Senlac, when it was popularly believed that the sad issue of the struggle was foreshadowed by a significant omen, for as the king prostrated himself before the miraculous crucifix the figure of the Lord bent its head, and gazed into the suppliant's face with an expression of infinite sorrow. But a few days afterwards the dead body of the last of the Saxon kings was brought to the abbey he had loved so well, and buried in front of the high altar, whence it is said to have been later removed to a tomb some little distance from the present church. During the reign of Elizabeth this tomb was opened, when it was found to contain the skeleton of a man of great stature, but there is no absolute evidence that it was that of the unfortunate Harold.
After being despoiled of its treasures by William the Conqueror, and suffering many things at the hands of his successors, the beautiful church of Waltham was given in 1187 to a branch of the Augustinian order by Henry II., who added greatly to the monastic buildings and was from the first a liberal patron of the abbey. It was for many centuries a favourite resort of the English kings, probably on account of the fine hunting-grounds in its immediate neighbourhood, and it was there that Henry VIII. received from Cranmer the joyful news that a device had been hit upon for justifying the divorce from Katharine of Aragon on which his heart was set. It was at Waltham, too, that the Reformation may in a certain sense be said to have begun, for it was there that the king first decided on the drastic measures which inaugurated it. Harold's foundation shared the fate of the rest of the religious houses, and was given to Sir Anthony Denny, to whom there is a beautiful though much defaced monument in the church, that was well restored in the early nineteenth century. Of the monastic buildings, however, that were associated with so many historic memories, the only relics now remaining are a single gateway, a small vaulted chamber in a market garden once part of the abbey grounds, a few fragments of the walls, and some subterranean arches. A quaint little bridge spanning the Corn-Mill stream, a tributary of the Lea, is still called Harold's Bridge, and a picturesque modern mill occupies the site of the one that belonged to the monks of the abbey.
Waltham Abbey
The immediate neighbourhood of Waltham Abbey is still thoroughly rural in character, well-watered undulating districts dotted here and there with beautiful seats—amongst which Copped Hall and Warlies Hall are the chief—replacing the forests which once extended over nearly the whole of Essex, including with what is now known as Epping Forest, the so-called Harold's Park—the name of which is still retained by a farm—that was given by Richard I. to a branch of the Augustinian order.
At the ancient Copped Hall—so named from the Saxon cop, signifying the top of a hill—that occupied the site of the present nineteenth-century mansion, the Princess Mary lived during the brief reign of her brother, and from it she addressed in 1551 a remarkable letter protesting against the prohibition to have mass celebrated in her private chapel. There, too, she received the messengers who brought back the king's unfavourable reply, and gave to the chief of them, no less a personage than the Lord Chancellor himself, a ring to be delivered to His Majesty, who was to be informed 'that she would obeye his commandements in all things excepte in theis matters of religion towchinge the mass.' It is noteworthy that three years later, when the tables were turned on the Protestants by the accession of Mary, the same Lord Chancellor should have received orders from her 'to be presente at the burning of such obstinat persons as presently are sent downe to be burned in diverse partes of the county of Essex.'
Epping Forest