Hackney, to begin with, is a very ancient place; the manor belonged to the Knights Templars for about two hundred years; a house, now taken down, used to be shown as the Templars’ Palace. It was an ancient house, but not of the thirteenth century: it probably belonged to the reign of Henry VIII. On the suppression of the Templars the manor was given to the Hospitallers, whose traditional house was also shown till about sixty years ago, when it was destroyed. This house was also the traditional residence of Jane Shore, one of those women who, like Agnes Sorel and Nell Gwynne strike the imagination of the people and win their affections. Even the grave and serious Sir Thomas More is carried away by the beauty and the charm of Jane Shore, while the memory of so much beauty and so many misfortunes demands a tear from good old Stow. The name of a street—Palace Road—preserves the memory of the house.
Standing alone in its vast churchyard crammed with monuments, mostly illegible, of dead citizens all forgotten long ago, stands a monument for which we ought to be deeply thankful. They pulled down the old church, but they preserved the tower. It is a tower of singular beauty, the one ancient thing that is left in Hackney. Beneath the feet of the visitor on the east side lie the bones of the buried Templars, proud knights and magnificent once, beyond the power of the bishop, rich and luxurious; with them the dust of their successors, the Knights Hospitallers, and now all forgotten together. In another part of the churchyard they erected a singularly ugly new church—a capacious barn. Outside the churchyard the tower looks down upon a crowded and busy thoroughfare, the full stream of life of this now great town of Hackney. Omnibuses and tram-cars run up and down the street all day long; there is an open market all the year round, with stalls and wheelbarrows ranged along the pavement; a railway arch spans the street, the frequent train thunders as it passes the Templars’ tower; the people throng the place from six in the morning till midnight. In many towns I have watched this stream of life flowing beside the gray survivals of the past; nobody heeds the ancient gate, the tower, the crumbling wall; nobody knows what they mean; the historical associations enter not at all into the mind of the average man; even amid the ruins of Babylon the Great his thoughts would be wholly with the present; he has no knowledge or understanding of the past; his own life is all in all to him; being the heir of all the ages, he takes his inheritance without even knowing what it means, as if it grew spontaneously, as if his security of life, his power of working undisturbed, the peace of the City, his freedom of speech and thought and action were given to mankind like the sunshine to warm him and the rain to refresh him. Yet the presence of this venerable tower should have some influence upon him, if only to remind him that there has been a past.
One who walks about an English town of any antiquity—most of them are of very considerable antiquity—can hardly fail of coming from time to time upon a street, a place, a square, a court, which takes him back two hundred years at least, or even more, to the time of the first George, or even to that of Charles II. Sometimes it is a single house; sometimes it is a whole street. In this respect, one or two of the East London suburbs are richer than those of the west or the south because they are older. Hackney and Stoke Newington, Stepney and Tottenham, were villages inhabited by wealthy people or noble people when the suburbs of the south were mere rural villages, with farms and meadows among their hanging woods.
An East London Suburb, Overlooking Hackney Marshes.
There are two such places which I have found in Hackney. The first is a wide and open place, not a thoroughfare for vehicles; it may be approached by a foot-path through Hackney churchyard. It consists of a row of early eighteenth century houses on the south side, and another row of houses, probably of late eighteenth century, on the north. There is nothing remarkable about the place except its peacefulness and its suggestion of authority and dignity. You may frequently find such places adjoining old churches. It is as if the calm of the church and the tranquillity of the churchyard overflowed into one at least of the streets beside it. The clergy who used to live in this claustral repose have left this memory of their residence; in such a place we look up and down expecting to see a portly divine in black silk cassock, full silk gown, white Geneva bands, and wig theological, step out into the street and magisterially bend his steps toward the church where he will catechize the children.
The second place is also on the east of Hackney church; it is a long and narrow winding street, called magnificently the High Street, Homerton. It contains three great houses and many small ones, mostly old; in spite of its name, which conveys the suggestion of a town, it is a secluded street, remote from the ways of man; it might be a street of some decayed old town, such as King’s Lynn or Sandwich; there are no children playing in the road or on the door-steps. Half way down the street stands a church, the aspect of which proclaims it frankly and openly as belonging to the reign of the great George, first of the name. It was a place of worship simply, without special dedication or presentation to any religious body; it has been sometimes a chapel of ease to the parish church; sometimes it has been an independent chapel, having a service of its own. There it has stood since the year 1723, testifying to possibilities in the way of ugliness which would seem like some dream of architecture, fantastic and visionary, impossible of achievement. Yet it somehow fits in with the rest of the street; the ugliness of the chapel is not out of harmony with the street, for the early eighteenth century claims the houses as well as the church. All should be preserved together among the national monuments as a historical survival. This, it should be said, was how they built in the twenties of the eighteenth century.
If we leave Hackney and walk north we find ourselves in the village of Clapton, more suburban than Hackney, but not yet rural. Clapton lies along the western valley of the river Lea, which here winds its way at the bottom of a broad, shallow depression. There is one spot—before the place was built over there were many spots—where one may stand and, in the summer, when the sunshine lights up the stream, gaze upon the green meadows, the mills, the rustic bridges, the high causeways over the marshes, and the low Essex hills beyond. The Essex hills are always far away; there is always one before the traveler; if he stands on an eminence he sees them, like gentle waves of the heaving ocean, across other valleys, and I would not affirm that this is more lovely than any other; indeed, one knows many valleys which are deeper and more picturesque, planted with nobler woods, shadowed by loftier hills. Yet look again. You remember the lines—
Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green: