THE DOVER ROAD

HISTORIES OF THE ROADS

—BY—

Charles G. Harper.

THE BRIGHTON ROAD: The Classic Highway to the South.

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: London to York.

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: York to Edinburgh.

THE DOVER ROAD: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

THE BATH ROAD: History, Fashion and Frivolity on an old Highway.

THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD: London to Manchester.

THE MANCHESTER ROAD: Manchester to Glasgow.

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: London to Birmingham.

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: Birmingham to Holyhead.

THE HASTINGS ROAD: And The “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.”

THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: London to Gloucester.

THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD: Gloucester to Milford Haven.

THE NORWICH ROAD: An East Anglian Highway.

THE NEWMARKET, BURY, THETFORD AND CROMER ROAD.

THE EXETER ROAD: The West of England Highway.

THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD.

THE CAMBRIDGE, KING’S LYNN AND ELY ROAD.

MERCERY LANE, CANTERBURY.

The
DOVER ROAD

Annals of an Ancient Turnpike

By CHARLES G. HARPER

Illustrated by the Author and from Old Prints
and Portraits

Hartford, Connecticut
EDWIN VALENTINE MITCHELL

First Published 1895.
Second and Revised Edition 1922.

Manufactured in England by C. Tinling & Co., Ltd.
53, Victoria Street, Liverpool,
and 187, Fleet Street, London.

PREFACE

It has been said, by whom I know not, that “prefaces to books are like signs to public-houses; they are intended to give one an idea of the kind of entertainment to be found within.” But this preface is not to be like those; for it would require an essay in itself to give a comprehensive idea of the Dover Road, in all its implications. A road is not merely so many miles of highway, more or less well-maintained. It is not only something in the surveyor’s way; but history as well. It is life, touched at every point.

The Dover Road—the highway between London and that most significant of approaches to the Continent of Europe—would have been something much more in its mere name had it not been for the accident of London: one of the greatest accidents. It would have been considered a part of the great road to Chester and to Holyhead: the route diagonally across England, from sea to sea, which really in the first instance it was.

For the Dover Road is actually the initial limb of the Watling Street: that prehistoric British trackway adopted by the Romans and by them engineered into a road; and it would seem that those Roman engineers, instructed by the Imperial authorities, considered rather the military and strategic needs of those times than those of Londinium; for London was not on the direct road they made; and it was only at a later date, when it was grown commercially, they constructed an alternative route that served it.

It would be rash to declare that more history has been enacted on this road than on any other, although we may suspect it; but certainly history is more spectacular along these miles. Those pageants and glittering processions are of the past: they ended in 1840, when railways were about to supplant the road; when the last distinguished traveller along these miles, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, came up by carriage to wed Queen Victoria.

CHARLES G. HARPER.

February, 1922.

THE ROAD TO DOVER

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

I

Of all the historic highways of England, the story of the old Road to Dover is the most difficult to tell. No other road in all Christendom (or Pagandom either, for that matter) has so long and continuous a history, nor one so crowded in every age with incident and associations. The writer, therefore, who has the telling of that story to accomplish is weighted with a heavy sense of responsibility, and though (like a village boy marching fearfully through a midnight churchyard) he whistles to keep his courage warm, yet, for all his outward show of indifference, he keeps an awed glance upon the shadows that beset his path, and is prepared to take to his heels at any moment.

And see what portentous shadows crowd the long reaches of the Dover Road, and demand attention! Cæsar’s presence haunts the weird plateau of Barham Downs, and the alert imagination hears the tramp of the legionaries along Watling Street on moonlit nights. Shades of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans people the streets of the old towns through which the highway takes its course, or crowd in warlike array upon the hillsides. Kings and queens, nobles, saints of different degrees of sanctity, great blackguards of every degree of blackguardism, and ecclesiastics holy, haughty, proud, or pitiful, rise up before one and terrify with thoughts of the space the record of their doings would occupy; in fine, the wraiths and phantoms of nigh upon two thousand years combine to intimidate the historian.

How rich, then, the road in material, and how embarrassing the accumulated wealth of twenty centuries, and how impossible, too, to do it the barest justice in this one volume! Many volumes and bulky should go toward the telling of this story; and for the proper presentation of its pageantry, for the due setting forth of the lives of high and low, rich or poor, upon these seventy miles of highway, the rugged-wrought periods of Carlyle, the fateful march of Thomas Hardy’s rustic tragedies, the sly humour and the felicitous phrases of a Stevenson, should be added to the whimsical drolleries of Tom Ingoldsby. To these add the lucid arrangement of a Macaulay shorn of rhetorical redundancies, and, with space to command one might hope to give a glowing word-portraiture of the Dover Road; while, with the aid of pictorial genius like that possessed by those masters of their art, Morland and Rowlandson, illustrations might be fashioned that would shadow forth the life and scenery of the wayside to the admiration of all. Without these gifts of the gods, who shall say he has done all this subject demands, nor how sufficiently narrate within the compass of these covers the doings of sixty generations?

The Dover Road, then, to make a beginning with our journey, is measured from the south side of London Bridge, and is seventy and three-quarters of a mile long.

II

THE COACHES

If we had wished, in the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, to proceed to Dover with the utmost expedition and despatch consistent with coach-travelling, we should have booked seats in Mr. Benjamin Worthy Horne’s “Foreign Mail,” which left the General Post-Office in Saint Martin’s-le-Grand every Tuesday and Friday nights, calling a few minutes later at the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street, and finally arriving at Dover in time for the packets at 8.15 the following morning; thus beating by half an hour the time of any other coach then running on this road.

If, on the other hand, we objected to night travel, we should have had to sacrifice that half-hour, and go by either the “Express,” which, starting from the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, at 10 a.m. every morning, did the journey in nine hours; or else by the “Union” coach, which, travelling at an equal speed, left the “White Bear,” Piccadilly, at 9 a.m. Not that these were the only choice. Coaches in plenty left town for Dover; the “Eagle,” the “Phœnix,” Worthington’s Safety Coaches, the “Telegraph,” the “Defiance,” the “Royal Mail,” and the “Union Night Coach,” starting from all parts of London. The famous “Tally-ho Coach,” too, between London and Canterbury, left town every afternoon, and did the fifty-four miles in the twinkling of an eye—that is to say (with greater particularity and less vague figure of speech) in five hours and a half; while Stanbury and Rutley’s fly-vans and wagons conveyed goods and passengers who could not afford the fares of the swifter coaches between the “George,” Aldermanbury, and Dover at the rate of six miles an hour.

Besides these methods of conveyance, numerous coaches, vans, omnibuses and carriers’-carts plied between the Borough and Chatham, Rochester and Strood; or served the villages between London and Gravesend. Indeed, at this period, we find the crack coaches, the long-distance mails, starting from London city, leaving to the historic inns of Southwark only the goods-wagons, the short-stages, and the carriers’-carts. In 1837, also, you could vary the order of your going to Dover by taking boat from London to Gravesend, Whitstable, or Herne Bay, and at any of those places waiting for the coach. The voyage to Herne Bay took six hours, and the coach journey from thence to Dover occupied another four, the whole costing but ten shillings; which, considering that you could get horribly sea-sick in the six hours between London and Herne Bay, and had four hours of jolting in which to recover, was decidedly cheap, and not to be matched nowadays.

The traveller of this time would probably select the “Express” from the “Golden Cross,” because this was a convenient and central starting-point from which that excellent coach started at an hour when the day was well-aired. The coachman of that time was the ultimate product of the coaching age, and we who travel by train do not see anything like him. He owed something to heredity, for in those days son succeeded to father in all kinds of trades and professions much more frequently than now; for the rest of his somewhat alarming appearance he was indebted partly to the rigours of the weather and partly to the rum-and-milk for which he called at every tavern where the coach stopped—and at a good many where it had no business to stop at all. As a result of these several causes, he generally had cheeks like pulpit cushions, puffy, and of an apoplectic hue, and a plum-coloured nose with red spots on it; he was, in fact, what Shakespeare would call a “purple-hued malt-worm.” He shaved scrupulously. A rugged beaver hat with a curly brim and a coat of many capes would have identified him as a coachman, even if the evidence of his face had failed, and his talk, which consisted of “Gee-hups,” biting repartees administered to passing Jehus, and contemptuous references to the railways, which were just beginning to be spoken of, was solely professional.

Some of these latter-day coaches went direct from the West End, over Westminster Bridge, and so to the Old Kent Road, but others had to call at various inns on the way to the City, and so came over London Bridge in the approved fashion.

III

LONDON BRIDGE

And the London Bridge by which they would cross in 1837 was a very different structure from that driven over by their forbears of twenty years previously.

So late as 1831, Old London Bridge remained that, built in 1176, had thus for nearly seven hundred years borne the traffic to and from London, and had stood firmly centuries of storms and floods, and all the attacks of rebels from Norman to late Tudor times. Its career was closed on the 1st of August, 1831, when the new bridge, that had taken seven years in the building, was opened. The old bridge crossed the Thames at a point about a hundred feet to the eastward of the present one; the city approach leading steeply down a narrow street by Monument Yard, and passing close under the projecting clock of Saint Magnus the Martyr. The view was eminently picturesque, with the many and irregular pointed arches of the bridge; the rush of water in foaming cascades through the narrow openings; the weathered stonework, and the curious old oil-lamps; and the soaring Monument with the fantastic spire of St. Magnus, seen from Southwark, in the background. This was the aspect of Old London Bridge at any time between 1750, when the houses that had been for centuries standing on it were removed, and 1831, when the bridge itself was destroyed with pick and shovel. In previous ages there were gates both at the London and the Southwark ends, and on these fortified gateways were stuck the heads of many traitors to the State and martyrs to religious opinions. The heads of Sir William Wallace, Jack Cade, Bishop Fisher of Rochester, Sir Thomas More, and of many another, were once to be seen here; and in Queen Elizabeth’s time, when John Visscher made a drawing of London Bridge, so many were the rotting skulls that the Southwark gate-house wore not so much the appearance of an entry into the capital of a civilised kingdom as that of a doorway to some Giant Blunderbore’s bloodstained castle.

THE “GEORGE.”

BRIDGE FOOT

“Bridge Foot” was the name of the Southwark end of London Bridge. It was a narrow lane leading to Southwark High Street, paved with knobbly stones and walled in with tall houses. Bridge Foot is a thing of the past, and London Bridge Station stands on the site of it. “High Street, Borough,” too, is very different from not only mediæval days, but even from coaching times. The many old inns that used to front toward the street, dating their prosperity back to the twelfth century, and their fabric to some time subsequently to the fire of 1676, are nearly all either utterly demolished, or are put to use as railway receiving offices. The “Queen’s Head” is gone; the “George,” most interesting of all that remain here, is threatened; the “Spur” is left, little changed; the “Half Moon” is still the house for a good chop or steak and a tankard of ale; but the “White Hart,” where is it? Where the “Tabard,” the “King’s Head,” the “Catherine Wheel,” the “Boar’s Head,” the “Old Pick my Toe,” or the “Three Widows”? In vain will the curious who pay pilgrimage to Southwark seek them. There still are many cavernous doorways, stone-flagged passages, and great courtyards; but nothing more romantic than railway vans is to be seen in the most of them, and the yard where Sam Weller was first introduced to an admiring public is quite gone.

The most romantically named of the Southwark inns now left is undoubtedly the “Blue Eyed Maid,” so named, possibly, in connection with Tamplin’s “Blue Eyed Maid” coach that used to run between Southwark and Rochester in the twenties. The building, though, does not share the romanticism of its name. Near it, let into the seventeenth-century brick frontage of No. 71, High Street, is the old sign of the “Hare and Sun,” the trade-mark of Nicholas Hare; and this, together with the stone half-moon sign in the yard of the “Half Moon Inn,” is the sole relic of the many devices that once decorated the street. The hop trade has taken almost undivided possession of the place nowadays. The Hop Exchange is over the way, and hop-factors are as frequently to be met with here as diamond-merchants in Hatton Garden; and with their coming the old-fashioned appearance of Southwark High Street is gone.

Even when Hogarth painted his “Southwark Fair,” in 1733, the street was suburban, and in the distance, seen between the crowds gathered round old St. George’s Church, are the hills and dales of Kent. The church was pulled down in the following year, and the present building put up in its place. The fair was suppressed in 1762.

At that time, Kent Street was the only way to the Dover Road, and, even then, the dirt and over-crowding in that notorious thoroughfare were phenomenal. Englishmen were ashamed of this disgraceful entrance into London, and one whose duty lay in bringing a representative foreigner from Dover to London craftily contrived that he should enter the Metropolis at night, when the dirty tenements of Kent Street, by which their carriage would pass, would be hidden in darkness. When Newington Causeway was made, and direct access gained to the Old Kent Road, the horrors of Kent Street were no longer to be braved by travellers. The street is here still, but somewhat civilised, and now called “Tabard Street”; but to “give a bit of Kent Street” is yet understood to mean language for which Billingsgate has also been long renowned.

THE TELEGRAPH TOWER

A singular structure standing in Tooley Street, and visible for a very great distance up or down the river, was the so-called “Telegraph Tower,” which was burned down in the great fire of August, 1843. It had at one time been a shot-tower, and had always completely dwarfed its next-door neighbour, St. Olave’s Church. It was very ugly, and so its loss was a distinct gain; but with its disappearance went all recollection of the old system of signalling that had no rival before the electric telegraph was introduced in 1838.

OLD TELEGRAPH TOWER, TOOLEY STREET.

This system was introduced in 1795, at the suggestion of the Rev. Lord George Murray, afterwards Bishop of Saint David’s. He proposed to the Admiralty to erect signal-posts or towers on the heights between London and the coast, and upon experiments being made, it was found easily practicable to send messages in this way to our ships in the Downs. That year, then, witnessed the establishment of a line of telegraph-towers between the Admiralty and Deal, with a branch to Sheerness. The original apparatus of revolving shutters was in use until 1816, when it was changed for a semaphore system, resembling very closely that in use upon railways at the present day, the chief peculiarity being that, instead of only two movements of the semaphore arms, each one could be made to assume six different positions. Some old prints of the Admiralty buildings in Whitehall show a telegraph-station of this kind upon the roof, with the little wooden cabin in which were stationed the men (generally four) whose duty it was to read through telescopes the signals from the nearest station, and to work the shutters or semaphores above their own. One of these stations has given the name of “Telegraph Hill” to that knoll at Hatcham, by New Cross, which was opened as a public park so recently as April, 1895. From hence was signalled news of Nelson and Trafalgar, of Wellington and Waterloo; here worked the arms that carried orders from the Admiralty to the admirals in the Downs to sail east or west; to proceed home or fare forth to foreign stations; to summon Courts Martial, and to put the sentences of those stern drum-head tribunals into execution.

IV

SOUTHWARK

The Southwark of Chaucer’s time was a very different place. For one thing, it was a great deal smaller. The year in which his Canterbury Pilgrims were supposed to set out has generally been fixed at 1383, and at that time the whole country had only recently been smitten with three great pestilences, which had carried off nearly half the population of England. London numbered probably no more than thirty thousand inhabitants. Southwark was comparatively a village; a village, too, not with the odious surroundings of later years, but a pleasant spot over the water from the City, where great prelates had their palaces, and whence a short walk of five minutes or so would bring you into the open country, and among the fragrant hedgerows of the Kent Road. No picture exists of Southwark as Chaucer saw it, but when an ingenious Dutchman—one Antony van der Wyngrerde—made a drawing of Southwark and London Bridge, in 1546, this historic part of the “Surrey side” was still distinctly rural. Orchards and pleasant gardens are seen clustering round St. George’s Church, and stretching away to the site of the present Kent Street, and bosky woods flourished where the tall wharves of Bankside are crowded together. Where are those orchards, woods, and gardens now? Where is Winchester House, the grand palace of the Bishops of Winchester, that looked upon the river? Where its neighbour, Rochester House? Where, too, is Suffolk House, the princely residence of the Dukes of Suffolk? Gone, all of them, like the morning dew; and the only recognisable object in Van Wyngrerde’s drawing is the tower of St. Mary Overie’s Church that still, as “St. Saviour’s,” rears its four pinnacles above the Southwark of to-day.

The most famous of all the inns of Southwark was the “Tabard,” famous not only as an ordinary house of good cheer, but as a hostelry immediately under the protection of the Church, whereto resorted many good folk bent on pilgrimage. The Abbot of Hyde Monastery at Winchester was the owner of the ground upon which the original “Tabard” was built, and he built here not only an inn (which it is to be supposed he let out) but also a guest-house for the brethren of Hyde, and all others of the clergy who resorted to London to wait on the Bishop of Winchester, whose grand palace stood close by. In 1307 did the Abbot of Hyde build the “Tabard,” and Chaucer gave it immortality in 1383. At that time the landlord was the Harry Bailly of the “Canterbury Tales”; a real person, probably an intimate friend of Chaucer’s, and Chaucer’s description of him is most likely to be a careful portraiture of the man, his appearance, his speech, and his ways of thought.

CHAUCER’S PILGRIMS

He was a considerable person, this host. He was a Member of Parliament, and his name is an index of his importance, for Bailiff of Southwark his ancestor, Henry Tite, or Martin, had been made in 1231, and himself held the position through so long a line of grandfathers and great-grandfathers that their name had become merged in that of his civic office. So Chaucer’s description we know to be very truth, so far as his worth and position are concerned:—

A seemly man our hostè was withal
For to have been a marshal in a hall.
A largè man was he, with eyen steep,
A fairer burgess is there none in Chepe;
Bold of his speech, and wise, and well ytaught;
And of manhóod lackèd righte nought,
Eke thereto he was right a merry man.

This explains the host’s sitting at supper with his guests, even with such gentlefolk as the knight and his son, the squire, and with the Lady Abbess. Thus is he able to take charge of and assume leadership over his party on the road to Canterbury, and to reprove or praise each and all, according to his mind.

The “Tabard” is, of course, only a memory now, and, indeed, so often had it been patched and repaired, that but little of the original could have been standing when the great fire of Southwark, in 1676, swept away many of the old inns. But the “Talbot,” as it was called in later times, stood until 1870 on the site of the older building, and was itself so venerable that many good folks were used to believe it to have been the veritable house where those old-time pilgrims lay before setting out on their journey.

To that shrine of St. Thomas crowds of pilgrims flocked from every part of the Christian world. Rich and poor, high and low alike, left court and camp, palace or hovel. The knight left his castle, the lady her bower; the merchant his goods, the sailor his ship; and the ploughman forsook his tillage to partake in the blessings that radiated from Becket’s resting-place in Canterbury Cathedral. From such varied ranks of society are Chaucer’s pilgrims drawn. A knight whose manhood had been spent in battle at home or in Palestine is at their head. He had been present at the taking of Alexandria; had fought with the Germans against Russia, and had campaigned in Granada against the Moors. Yet his is a meek and Christian-like deportment, and he is in truth a very perfect, gentle knight. With him is his son, the squire, a boy of twenty, who had already made one campaign against the French, and had borne himself well, both in battle and in the tourney. Love deprives him of his sleep, and for love he writes sonnets and attires himself in smart clothes, broidered over with flowers like a May meadow. In attendance on this love-lorn swain is a yeoman clad in Lincoln green and bristling with arms. Sword and buckler, a dagger in his belt, with bow and arrows complete his equipment. Following upon these comes firstly Madame Eglantine, a lady prioress whose noble birth is seen both in her appearance and in the nicety with which she eats and drinks. With a sweet, if rather nasal, tone she chants portions of the Liturgy, and speaks French by preference; but it is the French, not of Paris, but of “Stratford-atte-Bow.” So high-strung is her sensibility that she would weep if she was shown a mouse in a trap, or if her little dog was beaten with a stick. She wears—somewhat inconsistently, considering her religious profession—a brooch bearing the inscription, Amor vincit omnia.

THE “SPUR” INN.

Next this dainty lady comes a fat monk of the Benedictine Order, whose shaven crown and red cheeks are as smooth as glass, and whose eyes shine like burning coals, both by reason of lust and good living. He is dressed in a fashion no holy monk should affect, for the sleeves of his robe are trimmed with the finest fur, and a golden love-knot pin holds his hood in place. Clearly ring the bells on his horse’s bridle; hare-hunting and a feast off a fat swan are more to him than the rule of St. Benedict and all the holy books in his cell. Beside this disgrace to his religious profession is a mendicant friar who is no whit better than his fellow, for he can sing tender songs to his harp, treats the country-folk in the taverns, and knows well how to please the women with timely gifts of needles and knives. Follow these a merchant and two learned men. Well does the merchant know the rate of exchange, and better still does he know how to secure his own interest. Not so the clerk of Oxenford, hollow-cheeked and lean, dressed in threadbare clothes and riding a bare-ribbed horse. As yet he is unbeneficed; but his books are his only joy. His fellow is a law serjeant in good practice, and at his heels comes the Franklin, a representative of a very large class who held land of their own, but were not of gentle birth.

A lower social stratum is represented by a haberdasher, a carpenter, a weaver, a dyer, and a tapster; all of consideration in their own grade, and likely to become aldermen some day. As wealthy as any is the miller, a big-bodied fellow, with a spade beard, red, like a fox, and as cunning. He well knows how to take a share of the corn his customers bring him to grind. He wears a white coat and a blue hood; plays on the bagpipes, and tells stories fitted to make the young and innocent blush. The wife of Bath is every whit as indelicate. She has been married five times, and of love, says Chaucer, “she knew the oldè dance.” Therefore she is privileged. A shipman from Dartmouth has with him a bottle of Burgundy stolen from his captain’s cabin, from which he thinks it no sin to drink when on pious pilgrimage. A doctor of physic, a cook, a poor parson, a ploughman, a reeve, or estate agent, a manciple, and two disgraceful characters—a summoner and a pardoner—make up the total of the company. The summoner has a fiery face, which nothing but abstinence from drink will assuage; and the pardoner is totally without conscience or morals of any kind. He makes a good living by selling pardons from the Pope, and gets more by the sale of relics in one day than the parson can earn in two months.

When these pilgrims rode forth on that April morning—nine and twenty of them—from the “Tabard,” to seek Becket’s shrine, they started from the ultimate suburb of London. Picture that, Londoners of to-day, who find streets unceasing until Blackheath is gained, and no true roadside country this side of Gravesend! The thymy air then blew in at the casements of the many inns of Southwark, and the views thence extended over fields and meadows where countless chimneys now pollute the sky. Some way down the Kent Road ran a little stream across the highway—“Saint Thomas à Watering” the ford was called, and here the pilgrims made their first halt—

And forth we riden a litel more than pas,
Unto the watering of Saint Thomàs,
And then our host began his hors arrest.

Saint Thomas’s Road marks the site of this stream, and the “Thomas à Becket” inn perpetuates a house of call for wayfarers; but the fame of all these things—of the heretics, the cutpurses, the varied thieves and beggars who were executed here, with their quarters stuck on poles by the ford by way of warning, is lost in the latter-day commonplace of the Old Kent Road.

Yet, at this place, which was something more than a mere water-splash, and the Golgotha of this road out of London, many met their end through being born a little in advance of their time. This was, and is yet, a criminal offence; but it is no longer capital. If, for example, the unfortunate John Penry, Welsh scholar and graduate alike of Oxford and Cambridge, religious reformer and prime mover in the “Martin Marprelate” tracts, directed against the Episcopal bench, had but been born fifty years later, he would have been honoured, instead of meeting here an ignominious end. He was hanged at St. Thomas à Watering, May 29, 1593, and was a victim to the vengeance of my lords spiritual in general, and of Archbishop Whitgift in particular.

V

MILESTONES

There are milestones on the Dover Road. Of course. Mr. F’s aunt, in Little Dorrit, knew something about them, but not much. Her knowledge was general, not particular. We read in Chapter XXIII:—

“A diversion was occasioned here by Mr. F.’s aunt, making the following inexorable and awful statement: ‘There’s milestones on the Dover Road.’ Clennam was disconcerted by this. ‘Let him deny it if he can,’ continued the venomous old lady. He could not deny it. There are milestones on the Dover Road.”

We will not grow excited about this incontrovertible fact. But not many people can say where the first milestone from London on this highway is to be found. Although, in fact, it is at the end of the first mile from the south side of London Bridge, no one in these days would suspect such a relic of surviving in London streets. It stands where the Old Kent Road begins, on the left-hand side as you go south, with an iron plate on it, proclaiming this to be “1 mile from London Bridge.” The stone, greatly battered, stands prominently, on an elevated kerb. Just because we associate milestones with country roads and hedgerows, we look upon this, standing in that crowded urban region, as curious; but when it was first set up, this was on the very verge of the country.

We have heard much of the Old Kent Road in recent years. People who never so much as suspected the existence of it, grew familiar with its name, in the refrain of a comic song dealing with costermongers. The music-halls in 1891 reverberated with the name. But that is all done with. The Old Kent Road is not to be described in a phrase, nor thought of as the coster’s paradise. It is in fact a road of many aspects.

But how to catalogue the kinds of them that dwell here? It cannot well be done. Shopkeepers of every kind and degree; private residents of a more than average decent respectability; publicans, the landlords of public-houses of a prodigious bigness; family doctors—these are the more salient classes of the Old Kent Road. The coster? you ask. Nay, but he does not “inhabit” here. He (shall I phrase it thus?) pervades the road—the “road,” bien entendu, not the houses that line the road—and it is only on Saturday nights, when frugal housewives fare forth, cheapening necessary provisions, that you who seek shall find him, with his booths and shallows, his barrows and crazy trestles; his naphtha-lamps flaring gustily, his voice raucous, his goods striking both eye and nose in no uncertain manner. At such times the kennel becomes a busy mart, where you may purchase most articles of daily food at a price much below the current quotations in shops. Here a shilling possesses the purchasing power of a half-crown expended in the West End, and at this bon marché the artisan’s table is fully furnished forth for a sum which would give the dwellers in mid-London pause.

IN THE OLD KENT ROAD

I have said that the Old Kent Road is eminently respectable; and so it is. But it is also (the natural sequence of respectability) not less eminently dull. It is only when Saturday evening comes, with its street-market commencing as the light dies out of the sky, that this long road becomes really interesting. Then it takes on an aspect of mystery, and is filled with flickering lights and shadows from the yellow gas-lamps and the gusty naphtha-flares that illuminate the dealings of Mr. ’Enery ’Awkins with his clients; and I am quite sure that, if Rembrandt was living now, he would choose such a time and place as the best subject for a picture in all London. One spot in especial he would select. Taking a tramcar from the “Elephant and Castle,” he would ask the conductor to set him down by the bridge that crosses the Grand Surrey Canal, where the great gasometers of the South London Gas Company rear themselves high in air above mean houses and third-rate shops. Arrived here, he would select, as the best point of view, the broad entrance of a large public-house, outside of which the omnibuses stop in their career between the Borough and New Cross; and it is very likely that the thing which happened to me while sketching here would also befall him; that is to say, some short-sighted or dull-witted old lady would probably dig him in the ribs with the ferrule of her umbrella, and say, “Young man, how long before your ’bus starts?” And, after all, I suppose one must not be satirical at the expense of that very worthy person the British matron; for, to a superficial glance, a sketch-block may be not unlike an omnibus way-bill; and who but a mad impressionist would see sketchable material in an ugly gasometer? And who other than a reckless Bohemian would be so far indifferent to public opinion as to sketch outside a gin-palace?

SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE OLD KENT ROAD.

The Old Kent Road of from seventy to eighty years ago presented a very different aspect from that with which those are familiar who travel nowadays up and down its great length in tramcars. It was distinctly rural. The few houses that were to be seen here in coaching days were chiefly inns, with swinging signs creaking, and horse-troughs lining the roadside, and the “Kentish Drovers,” that now wears much the same appearance as any other London public-house, was a veritable rustic house of call for countrymen driving their sheep and cattle to London markets. “The Bricklayers’ Arms” (a ’scutcheon, needless to say, unknown to heraldry), “The World Turned Upside Down,” the “Thomas à Becket,” and the “Golden Cross,” at New Cross, were scarcely less rural. It was at the “Golden Cross” that Pitt and Dundas, overtaken on the road from Dover to London by bad weather, put up for the night, and drank seven bottles of port before they went to bed.

Imagine, though, the condition of the roads, and locomotion upon them, when two Cabinet Ministers could think it not only convenient, but merely prudent, to halt for the night when so near London as New Cross! The Londoner who can take ’bus, tram, or train, and reach the City in less than half-an-hour, can scarce picture the necessity which faced those distinguished travellers.

VI

DEPTFORD

When the old coachmen had got through New Cross Gate, which stood where the “Marquis of Granby” occupies the junction of the Deptford and Lewisham roads, they found themselves in the country, with Deptford, a busy but small and compact place, yet some distance ahead. Also, they had entered the county of Kent. Nowadays, it is difficult for the uninstructed to tell where New Cross ends or Deptford begins, for there is never a break in the houses all the way, while the street presents no attractions whatever; and even though the “good view of part of the Greenwich Railway, the carriages of which may be seen in motion to and fro” (a view which the local guide-book, published in 1837, considered worthy a visit from London), remains to this day, together with several other railways to keep it company, one does not find crowds of visitors hanging on the delirious delights of the several New Cross stations.

The Deptford of to-day is no place for the pilgrim. Instead of reminiscences of Kenilworth and Queen Elizabeth, of Drake and Peter the Great, it is rich in “stores” and “emporiums.” A workhouse stands where Sayes Court afforded shelter under its roof, and amusement in its gardens, for the Czar; the Trinity House of Deptford Strond has been removed to Tower Hill; and perhaps the most remarkable thing in modern Deptford is the Foreign Cattle Market. And yet here Elizabeth knighted Francis Drake, in 1581, on that good ship the Golden Hind, in which he had “compassed the world”; and here, on a site now occupied by cattle and by business premises, was the greatest dockyard in England at the most interesting period of English naval history.

It was at Deptford, they say, in 1593, that Christopher Marlowe, that bright particular star of poesy, was slain, while yet in his thirtieth year. We know too little of him, and no portraiture has come down to show us what manner of man this was who wrote divinely and lived (if we may believe the scribes) sottishly, after the manner, indeed, of the fraternity of his fellow-dramatists. It should seem, by some contemporary accounts, that he was killed by a rival in the affections of some saucy baggage; but there were not wanting those who asserted that the poet was assassinated by some myrmidon of the Church, whose priests he lost no opportunity of reviling. To lend some colour to this, there remains a pamphlet, printed in 1618, entitled—what a title!—“The Thunderbolt of God’s Wrath Against Hard-hearted and Stiff-necked Sinners.” It says, “We read of one Marlowe, a Cambridge Scholler, who was a poet and a filthy play-maker; this wretch accounted that meeke servant of God, Moses, to be but a conjuror, and our Sweet Saviour to be but a seducer and deceiver of the people. But harken, ye brain-sicke and prophane poets and players, that bewitch idle eares with foolish vanities, what fell upon this prophane wretch; having a quarrell against one whom he met in the street in London, and would have stab’d him; but the partie perceiving his villany prevented him with catching his hands, and turning his own dagger into his braines; and so blaspheming and cursing he yeelded up his stinking breath. Marke this, ye players that live by making fools laugh at sinne and wickedness.”

VII

Leaving “dirty Deptford,” that being the contumelious conjunction by which the place has generally been known, any time these last hundred years or so (and far be it from me to deprive any place of its well-merited title, whether good or ill), the road ascends steeply to Blackheath, past some fine old mansions which, having been built in the days of Queen Anne and the earlier Georges, and having long housed the aristocracy who at one time frequented the place, became afterwards the homes of rich City merchants. Finally, when the “schools for young ladies” are gone which now occupy them, and give so distinct a scholastic air to this suburb, they will doubtless disappear amid a cloud of dust and the clinking of trowels, while on their sites will rise the unchanging pattern of suburban shops!

BLACKHEATH

Blackheath is one of the finest suburbs of London; a town girt round with many particularly beautiful outskirts. Strange to say, it has not been spoiled, and though thickly surrounded with houses, remains as breezy and healthful as ever; perhaps, indeed, since highwayman and footpad have disappeared, and now that duels are unknown, Blackheath may be regarded as even more healthy a spot than it was a hundred years ago.

The air which gave Bleak Heath its original name, and nipped the ears and made red the noses of the “outsides” who journeyed across it on their way to Dover in the winter months, is healthful and bracing, and is not so bleak as balmy in the days of June, when the sun shines brilliantly, and makes a generous heat to radiate from the old mellow brick wall of Greenwich Park that skirts the heath on its northern side. Outside the gate of that steepest of all parks stood Montagu House, whence the Earl of Chesterfield wrote those famous letters to his son—letters whose precepts, if carefully and consistently followed, would have infallibly sent their recipient to the Devil. Montagu House is gone now, pulled down long ago, and the site where the worldly Dormer wrote, pointing out to his son the way to perdition, is now a part of the Heath. Gone, too, is the garden where the phenomenally vulgar and undignified Princess Caroline of Wales, who lived here from 1797 to 1814, might have been seen, and was seen one morning, sitting in the grounds in a gorgeous dress, looped up to the knees, to show the stars with which her petticoats were spangled: with silver wings on her shoulders, and drinking from a pewter pot of porter, after the use and wont, between the acts, of the pantomime fairies of Drury Lane.

GREENWICH OBSERVATORY.

With this Princesse au café chantant disappears the last vestige of royalty hereabouts, and Greenwich, lying down beyond the Park, has only dim memories of Henry the Eighth, and Queen Elizabeth, who was born in the palace of Placentia beside the Thames. If you venture into the Park, and stand upon Observatory Hill, you can at once glimpse London and gain an idea of how plebeian Greenwich has become. But its history is not yet done, and on this very spot, in 1893, a chapter of it was made by a foreign Anarchist who blew himself up in the making; and when the park keepers came and gleaned little pieces of him from the November boughs, the incident shaped more picturesquely than any other happening on this spot that I can think of.

ON THE HEATH

As for Blackheath, it seems that when, in older days, people had assignations on the Dover Road, they generally selected this place for the purpose; whether they were kings and emperors that met; or ambassadors, archbishops, rebels, or rival pretenders to the crown, they each and all came here to shake hands and interchange courtesies, or to speak with their enemies in the gate. It is very impressive to find Blackheath thus and so frequently honoured by the great ones of the earth; but it is also not a little embarrassing to the historian who wants to be getting along down the road, and yet desires to tell of all the pageants that here befell, and how the high contending parties variously saluted or sliced one another, as the case might be. Indeed, to write the history of Blackheath would be to despair of ever seeing Dover, and so, instead of beginning with Aulus Plautius, or any of the masterful Roman generals who doubtless had something to say to those cerulean Britons on this spot, I will skip the centuries, and only note the more outstanding and interesting occasions on which the heath has figured largely. Hie we then from the first to the fourteenth century, when, in 1381, Wat, the Tiler of Dartford, encamped here as leader of a hundred thousand insurgents. The fount and origin of this famous rebellion has ever been popularly sought in the historic incident of Dartford, in which the tax-gatherer lost his life; but a discontent had long been smouldering among the people, which needed only an eloquent happening of this nature to be fanned into a flame. The Poll Tax was one of the greatest grievances of the time, and the high rent of land was even more burdensome. The price of land might, perhaps, have been borne with, for it was of gradual growth, and regulated more or less by the law of supply and demand, but the Poll Tax was a new burden, and one exacted harshly from the people by the nobles among whom the Government had farmed it. Then, too, the state of serfdom in which the villeins existed was odious to them at this lapse of time, when men began to aspire to something better than to be the mere pawns of kings and nobles, sent to fight for feudalism on foreign battlefields, or in fratricidal conflicts at home. The days were drawing to a close when it was possible for kings to issue prescriptions for the seizing of artisans to be set to work on the building of royal palaces and castles; documents couched in this wise: “To our trusty and well-beloved Richard, Earl of Essex: Know ye that it is our pleasure that you do take and seize as many masons, carpenters, braziers, and all kinds of artificers necessary to the reparation of our Castle of Windsor, and that this shall be your warrant for detaining them so long as may be necessary to the completion of the work.”

With grievances old and new, it wanted but little to set the home counties in revolt, and so we find the cause of the Dartford tiler to have been warmly taken up, not only throughout his native Kent, but also, across the river, in Essex. The tiler’s neighbours swore they would protect him from punishment, and, marching to Maidstone, appointed him leader of the commons in Kent. The Canterbury citizens, less enthusiastic, were overawed by the number of the rebels, and several of them slain; five hundred joining in the march to London, while a dissolute itinerant priest, that famous demagogue John Ball, was enlarged from prison and appointed preacher to the throng, rousing them to fury by the rough eloquence and apt illustration with which he enlarged upon his text—

When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

REBELS

From Blackheath to London marched this great rabble. The king, with his cousin Henry, Earl of Derby; the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a hundred knights and sergeants were retired for safety to the Tower, whence they issued by boat to receive the petitions of the insurgents. Ten thousand of them waited at Rotherhithe, and by their fierce yells and threatening appearance so terrified the king’s attendants that, instead of permitting him to land, they took advantage of the tide, and returned. This behaviour disappointed Tyler, who saw no hope of concessions from the king’s advisers. He and his men burst into London, and, joined by the discontented host from Essex and Hertfordshire, under the leadership of one John Rakestraw (who has come down to us through the ages as Jack Straw, and whose camping-ground on Hampstead Heath bears to this day the old inn known as “Jack Straw’s Castle”), plundered the town, burning the Palace of the Savoy and all the buildings and records of the Temple. Fear eventually led the Court party to grant the four chief demands of the people: the abolition of slavery; the reduction of the rent of land to fourpence an acre; free liberty of buying and selling in all fairs and markets; and a general pardon for past offences. Had Tyler and Rakestraw been content with these concessions, it is probable that all would have been well; but their ambition had grown with success, and they trusted to further violence for greater advantage. Rushing into the Tower at the head of four hundred men, they murdered there the Archbishop of Canterbury and five others, and, retaining no less than twenty thousand followers in the City, intercepted the king as he rode out the following morning attended only by sixty horsemen. With boorish insolence, Tyler lay hold of the king’s bridle, when Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, stabbed him in the throat. Falling from his horse, the rebel leader was despatched by an esquire. The courage and tact of the young king are historical, and the way in which he quelled the hostility of the insurgents, and drew their sympathies to himself, is well known; but the revocation of the charters of emancipation was a piece of faithlessness which makes the inquirer doubtful of the sincerity in which they were first granted, and the less inclined to blame Wat the Tiler for his excesses.

Thus tamely ended this, at one time, most formidable rebellion. The south gateway of London Bridge received its leader’s head, and the lieges who fared by that frowning archway, together with those others who felt no loyalty, were invited to look upon the head of a traitor. But some day Wat the Tiler of Dartford will have his monument, and, truly, there are few figures in our history that so well deserve one, for he was one of the first to stir a hand for the English people against the exactions of a largely alien nobility.

Blackheath witnessed no other warlike gathering for the matter of seventy years; but it was in the meanwhile the scene of many peaceful displays.

VIII

And here (says Stowe) came, in 1415, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, with four hundred citizens in scarlet, and with white and red hoods, to receive Henry the Fifth on his return from the victories in France, of which that of Agincourt was the greatest. “The gates and streets of the City were garnished and apparelled with precious cloths of arras, containing the history, triumphs, and princely acts of the kings of England, his progenitors, which was done to the end that the king might understand what remembrance the people would hand to their posterity of these his great victories and triumphs. The conduits in the City ran none other but good sweet wines, and that abundantly. There were also made in the streets many towers and stages, richly adorned, and on the height of them sat small children, apparelled in semblance of angels, with sweet-tuned voices, singing praises and lauds unto God: for the victorious king would not suffer ditties to be made and sung of his history, for that he would wholly have the praise given unto God; neither would he suffer to be carried before him, nor showed unto the people, his helmet, whereupon his crown of gold was broke and deposed in the field by the violence of the enemy, and great strokes he had received, nor his other armour that in that cruel battle was so sore broke.”

CARDINAL WOLSEY

But perhaps the most remarkable meeting on Blackheath was that which assembled to escort the cardinal’s hat, designed for Wolsey. When that particularly haughty prelate learnt that the insignia of his promotion was on its way from Rome in charge only of an ordinary messenger, he deemed it essential to his importance that a more imposing method of conveyance should be provided. Previously, therefore, to the arrival of the Pope’s messenger on our shores, Wolsey caused him to be met and decked out with robes and trappings suitable to so important an occasion. That glorified pursuivant of Papal authority was, therefore, brought along the road from Dover to Blackheath with the greatest show of deference and consideration, and here, on this waste, the hat was met by great numbers of the clergy and nobility, who conducted it to London and to Westminster Abbey in great triumph.

Wolsey’s hat, however, comes out of chronological sequence. Let us then put back the clock of history again to the year 1450, when Jack Cade’s rebellion peopled Blackheath with a menacing host. These were the early days of the quarrels of the rival Roses. England was losing—whether by bad generalship or by trend of unavoidable circumstances it matters not—the provinces of France won by Henry the Fifth whose feeble son now reigned; the kinghead around whose ill-balanced kingship raged the quarrels and family jealousies of the Dukes of York, Suffolk, Somerset, and Buckingham. The king was unpopular with half his subjects, and all of them raged with wounded pride and grief at the loss of France. The name of Mortimer was a power in the land, and the head of that ancient family was the Duke of York, who had probably the greatest following of feudatory tenants in England. To take advantage both of the prevailing discontent and of the Mortimer prestige came Jack Cade, an Irish adventurer, at the head of twenty thousand followers, and encamped on Blackheath. Cade was undoubtedly the Duke of York’s catspaw, but his sudden success in gaining adherents is something of a mystery; for, although he proclaimed himself a cousin of the duke, he was an obviously ignorant clown, a fact seized upon by Shakespeare with grand effect in Henry VI, part i, act 4, where he makes Cade’s companions to be Dick the Butcher, Smith the Weaver, and others of a like humble estate, whose asides upon Cade’s proclaiming himself a Mortimer and his wife a descendant of the Lacies are very amusing. “My father was a Mortimer,” says Cade, to which Dick the Butcher rejoins, whispering behind his hand, that “he was an honest man, and a good bricklayer;” while as to his wife’s descent from the Lacies, he remarks that “she was, indeed, a pedlar’s daughter, and sold many laces”—a punning speech that, were it the work of a modern dramatist, would be received with a howl of execration.

Cade retired from Blackheath to Sevenoaks on an equal force being sent to oppose him, but there turned at bay upon his pursuers, and the Royal army dispersed, leaving London at the mercy of this rabblement. There the fickle mob wavered and Cade fled, presently to suffer the fate that befell so many in those bloody days.

THE RESTORATION

The last occasion on which Blackheath has figured largely was really romantic. The date 1660, the occasion the Restoration of His Gracious Majesty King Charles the Second to the throne of his ancestors. Romantic it was because of the home-coming of the interesting exile who had fled, years before, for his life; and was now come, greatly daring, to meet, not only his loyal citizen-subjects here, but to stand again face to face with the veteran regiments of the army which had finally crushed the Royalist hopes at Worcester Fight. No one knew how they would behave. Commanded by Loyalist officers, they were drawn up here to meet the king, but, amid all the rejoicings of the people, that Puritan soldiery looked on, scowling, and not all the personal charm of the king, nor the enthusiasm of the people, could chase away the sadness with which they looked upon the undoing of that work in which they had gained their scars. Charles and his brothers of York and Gloucester moved about, unarmed, graciously acknowledging the shouts of “Long live King Charles!” and receiving old supporters who saw this glorious Restoration with tears of joy running down their cheeks; and their gay demeanour showed their courage, for little was wanting to make the Ironsides declare for the Commonwealth, and, spurring their horses, change this scene of rejoicing to one of blood and dismay. But the moments of suspense were safely passed; the king pressed on to London, and the Restoration was accomplished. It is in the pleasant pages of Woodstock that one reads how the old cavalier, Sir Henry Lee, of Ditchley, “having a complacent smile on his face and a tear swelling to his eye, as he saw the banners wave on in interminable succession,” came here to witness the return of his sovereign. Here, too, came Colonel Everard, and Alice, his wife; Joceline Joliffe, who wielded quarterstaff so well, and with him Mistress Joceline; Wildrake, from Squattlesea-mere, and Beavis, old and feeble, a shadow of the great wolf-hound he had been. To this little company came Charles, and, dismounting, asked for the old knight’s blessing, who, having witnessed this day, was content to die.

And England was “merry England” again. The maypole reappeared upon the village green, ginger was hot i’ the mouth once more, cakes and ale disappeared down hungry and thirsty throats, and none declared eating and drinking to be carnal sins; folks sang songs and danced where had been only the singing of psalms in nasal tones and walking circumspectly; close-cropped polls grew love-locks again, and sad raiment gave place to the revived glories of ancient doublet and hose whose colours mocked the sun for splendour. For ten years had the people gone in a penitential gait that allowed neither gaiety nor enjoyment of any kind to pass unreproved, and now that all England was rejoicing that a pharisaical Puritanism had been overthrown, what wonder that young men and maidens who were too young to recollect the old England that existed before the Commonwealth plunged now into the wildest excesses, aided and abetted by old and middle-aged alike. The pendulum had swung back, and from whining religiosity the people turned to the extreme of licentiousness.

And so at last to leave the historic aspect of Blackheath, which I had begun to fear would detain me until a volume had been made of it. Leaving the heath by the Dover Road, which still follows the old Watling Street, the way is bordered by apparently endless rows of villas, and the outskirts of Kidbrook and Charlton village are passed before one comes to where the fields, bordered by hedgerows, first come in sight, and even these are disfigured by great boards, offering land to be let for building-plots. This is, indeed, a neighbourhood where the incautious stranger takes a villa overlooking meadows, for the sake of the view, and finds, on waking up one fine morning, the builders putting in the foundations of a new house which will eventually hide his prospect; or where, having taken a month’s holiday, he returns, to find a new street round the corner, with a brand new public-house, and a piano-organ playing the latest comic song, where (eheu, fugaces!) meads and orchards gladdened his eyes a few short weeks before.

IX

SHOOTER’S HILL

As one proceeds through Charlton village, past an oddly-named public-house, “The Sun in the Sands,” and the uncharted wilderness of Kidbrook, Shooter’s Hill comes into view, and the long line of “villas” ends. Just beyond the seventh milestone from London is another little public-house, the “Fox under the Hill,” followed shortly by the “Earl of Moira,” overlooked by the great buildings of the new Fever Hospital which the London County Council has set up here, to the disgust of all the dwellers round about. Next to this come the great dismal buildings of the Military Hospital, where soldier-invalids crawl about the courtyards, or, happily convalescent, lean over the balconies, smoking and chatting the hours away. Funerals go frequently hence, for here are always many poor fellows struggling with death, invalided home from the cruel heats of India, and many are the sad little processions that go with slow step and rumbling of gun-carriages to the God’s Acres of East Wickham and Plumstead.

But up among the young oak coppices, the lush grass, and the perennial springs of Shooter’s Hill, all is peaceful and pleasant. You can hear the Woolwich bugles sing softly through the summer air; birds twitter overhead, the robustious crowings of arrogant cocks, the sharp ring of jerry-builders’ trowels comes up from below, the winds whisper among the oaks and rustle like the frou-frou of silk through the foliage of the silver-beeches—while London toils and moils beyond. Distant smoke drives before the wind in earnest of those metropolitan labours, and kindly obscures many vulgar details; but if you cannot see Jerusalem or Madagascar from here, nor even Saint Paul’s, you can at least view that most commanding object in the landscape near by, Beckton Gasworks, and on another quarter of the horizon shines the Crystal Palace, glittering afar off like a City of the Blest, which indeed it is not, nor anything like it. Directly in front, the sky-line is formed by the elevated table-land of Blackheath, while in mid-distance the few remaining fields of Charlton are seen to be making a gallant stand before the advances of villadom.

Shooter’s Hill was not always a place whereon one could rest in safety. Indeed, it bore for long years a particularly bad name as being the lurking-place of ferocious footpads, cutpurses, highwaymen, cut-throats, and gentry of allied professions who rushed out from these leafy coverts and took liberal toll from wayfarers. Six men were hanged hereabouts, in times not so very remote, for robbery with murder upon the highway; the remains of four of them decorated the summit of the hill, while two others swung gracefully from gibbets beside the Eltham Road. The “Bull” inn, standing at the top of the hill, was in coaching days the first post-house at which travellers stopped and changed horses on their way from London to Dover. The “Bull” has been rebuilt in recent years, but tradition says (and tradition is not always such a liar as some folks would have us believe) that Dick Turpin frequented the road, and that it was at this old house he held the landlady over the fire in order to make her confess where she had hoarded her money. The incident borrows a certain picturesqueness from lapse of time, but, on the whole, it is not to be regretted that the days of barbecued landladies are past.

Our old friend Pepys has something to say of what he did or what was done to him on Shooter’s Hill, under date of April 11, 1661; but it was, at any rate, not a happening of any great note, and moreover, Mr. Pepys’ prattle sometimes becomes tiresome, and so we will pass him by for once in a way. His fellow diarist, Evelyn, was here in 1699, for he writes, under August, “I drank the Shooter’s Hill waters.” A very much more important person, Queen Anne, to wit (who, alas! is dead), is also said to have partaken of the mineral spring which made Shooter’s Hill a minor spa long years ago. The spring is still here, and it is this which makes the summit of Shooter’s Hill so graciously green and refreshing. People no longer come to drink the waters, but he who thirsts by the wayside and sports the blue ribbon, may, an he please, instead of calling at the “Bull,” or the “Red Lion,” across the road, quench his thirst at a drinking-fountain, which is something between a lich-gate and a Swiss châlet, erected here in recent years.

HIGHWAYMEN

So long ago as 1767 a project was set afoot for building a town on the summit of Shooter’s Hill, but it came to nothing, which is not at all strange when one considers how constantly the dwellers there would have been obliged to run the gauntlet of the gentlemen whom Americans happily call “road-agents.” And here is a sample of what would happen now and again, taken, not from the romantic pages of “Don Juan,” nor from Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities,” but from the sober and truthful columns of a London paper, under date of 1773. “On Sunday night,” we read, “about ten o’clock, Colonel Craige and his servant were attacked near Shooter’s Hill by two highwaymen, well mounted, who, on the colonel’s declaring he would not be robbed, immediately fired and shot the servant’s horse in the shoulder. On this the footman discharged a pistol, and the assailants rode off with great precipitation.” That they rode off with nothing else shows how effectually the colonel and his servant, by firmly grasping the nettle danger, plucked the flower safety.

DON JUAN

It was by similarly bold conduct that Don Juan put to flight no fewer than four assailants on this very spot. Arrived thus far from Dover, he had alighted, and was meditatively pacing along the road behind his carriage when—— But there! It had best be read in Byron’s verse, and let no one cry out upon me for quoting “Don Juan,” and say the thing is nothing new, lest I, in turn, call fie upon him for an undue acquaintance with that “wicked” poem—

... Juan now was borne,
Just as the day began to wane and darken,
O’er the high hill which looks, with pride or scorn,
Toward the great city. Ye who have a spark in
Your veins of Cockney spirit, smile or mourn,
According as you take things well or ill;
Bold Britons, we are now on Shooter’s Hill!
······
A mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping
Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye
Could reach, with here and there a sail just skipping
In sight, then lost amidst the forestry
Of masts; a wilderness of steeples peeping
On tiptoe through their sea-coal canopy;
A huge, dun cupola, like a foolscap crown
On a fool’s head—and there is London Town!
······
Don Juan had got out on Shooter’s Hill:
Sunset the time, the place the same declivity
Which looks along that vale of good and ill
Where London streets ferment in full activity;
While everything around was calm and still,
Except the creak of wheels, which on their pivot he
Heard; and that bee-like, bubbling, busy hum
Of cities, that boil over with their scum.
I say Don Juan, wrapt in contemplation,
Walk’d on behind his carriage, o’er the summit,
And lost in wonder of so great a nation,
Gave way to it, since he could not o’ercome it.
“And here,” he cried, “is Freedom’s chosen station;
Here peals the people’s voice, nor can entomb it
Racks, prisons, inquisitions; resurrection
Awaits it, each new meeting or election.
“Here are chaste wives, pure lives; here people pay
But what they please; and, if that things be dear,
’Tis only that they love to throw away
Their cash, to show how much they have a year.
Here laws are all inviolate; none lay
Traps for the traveller; every highway’s clear:
Here”—here he was interrupted by a knife,
With,—“Damn your eyes! Your money or your life!”
These freeborn sounds proceeded from four pads,
In ambush laid, who had perceived him loiter
Behind his carriage; and, like handy lads,
Had seized the lucky hour to reconnoitre,
In which the heedless gentleman who gads
Upon the road, unless he prove a fighter,
May find himself, within that isle of riches,
Exposed to lose his life as well as breeches.

Juan did not understand a word
Of English, save their shibboleth, “God damn!”
And even that he had so rarely heard,
He sometimes thought ’twas only their “Salaam,”
Or “God be with you!” and ’tis not absurd
To think so; for, half English as I am
(To my misfortune), never can I say
I heard them wish “God with you,” save that way.

But if he failed to understand their speech, he interpreted their actions accurately enough, and, drawing a pocket-pistol, shot the foremost in the stomach, who, writhing in agony on the ground, and unable to discriminate between Continental nationalities, called out that “the bloody Frenchman” had killed him. His three companions did not wait to discover that it was not a Frenchman, but a Spaniard. No, they promptly ran away, and left their fellow to die, which he presently did, and Don Juan, after an interview with the coroner, proceeded on his road in wonderment. “Perhaps,” he thought, “it is the country’s wont to welcome foreigners in this way.”

Shooter’s Hill is pictured excellently well in A Tale of Two Cities; the time, “a Friday night, late in November, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five,” the occasion the passing of the Dover Mail. The coachman was “laying on” to the horses like another Macduff, and the near leader of the tired team was shaking its head and everything upon it, as though denying that the coach could be got up the hill at all; while the passengers, having been turned out to walk up the road and ease the horses, splashed miserably in the slush. The time was “ten minutes, good, past eleven,” and the coachman had but just finished addressing the horses in such strange exclamations as “Tst! Yah! Get on with you! My blood!” and other picturesque, not to say lurid, phrases, when sounds were heard along the highway. Sounds of any sort on the road could not at this hour be aught than ominous, and so the passengers, who were just upon the point of re-entering the coach, shivered and wondered if their purses and watches were quite safe which were lying snugly perdu in their boots.

“Tst! Joe!” calls the coachman, from his box, warningly to the guard.

“What do you say, Tom?”

“I say a horse at a canter coming up,” replies Tom.

“I say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” rejoins the guard, entrenching himself behind his seat, and cocking his blunderbuss, calling out to the passengers at the same time, “Gentlemen, in the King’s name, all of you!”

The mail stopped. The hearts of the passengers within thumped audibly, and if one could not see how they blenched, it was only owing to the obscurity of the mildewy inside of the old Mail. There they sat, in anxious expectancy, amid the disagreeable smell arising from the damp and dirty straw, and the relief they experienced when it was not a highwayman who rode up to them, but only a messenger for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, who sat shivering among the rest, may (in the words of a certain class of novelists) “be better imagined than described.”

There is but one criticism I have to make of this; but it is a serious point. There was no Dover Mail coach in 1775, for the earliest of all mail coaches, that between Bristol and London, was not established before 1784. The mails until then were carried by post-boys on horse-back.

Of Severndroog Castle, built on the crest of Shooter’s Hill during the last century, I shall say nothing, because, for one thing, it is of little interest, and, for another, whatever has to be said about it belongs to the province of the Guide Books, upon whose territory I do not propose to infringe. I want to give a modicum of information with the maximum of amusement, with which declaration of policy I will proceed along the road to Dover.

Directly one comes to the crest of the hill there opens a wide view over the Kentish Weald. Reaches of the Thames are seen, peeping through foliage; distant houses and whitewashed cottages shine clearly miles away, and the spire of Bexley Church closes the view in front, where the road ends dustily. Along this road comes daily and all day a varied procession of tramps. The traveller looks down upon them from this eyrie with wonderment and dismay; the cottagers, the householders and gardeners hereabouts, see them pass with less surprise and additional misgivings, for their gardens, their hen-roosts, clothes-lines and orchards pay tribute to these Ishmaelites to whom the rights of property are but imperfectly known. This is why the gates and doors along the Dover Road are so uniformly and resolutely barred, bolted, chained, and padlocked; for these reasons ferocious dogs roam amid the suburban pleasances, and turn red eyes and foaming mouths toward one who leans across garden-gates to admire the flowers with which the fertile soil of Kent has so liberally spangled every cultivated spot; and to them is due the murderous-looking garnishment of jagged and broken glass with which every wall-top is armed. “Peace must lie down armed” on the Dover Road; the citizen must lock, bolt, and bar his house o’ nights, and does well to exhibit warning placards, “Beware of the Dog!” He does better to tip the policeman occasionally to keep an especially vigilant look-out, and it is not an excess of precaution that so frequently covers the flower-beds with wire-netting.

X

TRAMPS

There is, indeed, no road to equal the Dover Road for thieves, tramps, cadgers, and miscellaneous vagrants, either for number or depravity. Throughout the year they infest alike the highways and byways of Kent, but the most constant procession of them is to be seen on the great main road between London and the sea. A great deal of begging, some petty pilfering, and a modicum of work in the fruit season and during the hop-harvest suffice to keep them going for the greater part of the year, while the winter months are fleeted in progresses from one casual ward to another in the numerous unions along the road. Phenomenally ragged, bronzed by the sun, unshaven, unshorn, they are met, men, women, and children alike, at every turn, for many miles, especially between Southwark and Canterbury. The sixteen miles’ stretch of road between Canterbury and Dover is comparatively unfrequented by them; but Gravesend, Dartford, Crayford, and Bexley Heath are centres of the most disgraceful mendicancy. “Lodgings for travellers” at fourpence a night, or two shillings a week, are a feature of these places, and how prominent a feature cannot be guessed by any one who has not been there. Whole families on the tramp are to be met with between these places, and long vistas of them are gained along any particularly straight piece of road. They are everything that is dirty and horrible, but they are perfectly happy and quite irreclaimable, many of them being hereditary tramps.

Philanthropic societies inquire into the tramp; classify him, endeavour to cleanse him and restore him to some place in society, but all to no purpose. He is quite satisfied with himself; he likes dirt, and dislikes nothing so much as either moral or physical cleansing. That is one reason why he seeks the shelter of the casual ward only as a last resource. He has to undergo a bath there, and feels as chilly when his top-dressing of grime is removed as you and I would be were we turned naked into the streets. To reform your tramp it would be essential to snare him at a very early age indeed, and, even then, I am not sure but that his natural traits would break out suddenly, like those of any other wild beast kept in captivity.

TRAMPS’ SIGNS

The truth is, tramping is a very old profession, and hereditary in a degree very few good people imagine. Unlettered, but highly organised, trampdom has a lingua franca of its own, and its signs are to be read, chalked on the fences and gateposts of the Dover Road, as surely as one could read a French novel.

The argot and the sign-language of the road are not difficult to acquire by those who have observant eyes and ears to hearken, but, like all languages, they are ever changing, and the accepted signs of yesteryear are constantly superseded by newer symbols. Little do the country-folk understand the significance of the chalk-marks on their gates and walls. Does the portly yeoman suspect that the λ on his gatepost means “no good”? And how mixed would be the feelings of many a worthy lady were the inner meaning of ⊕ revealed to her—“Religious, but good on the whole.” Were the eloquence of that mark discovered to her, she would know at once how it was that the poor men, with their ragged beards and their toes peeping through their boots, were so unfailingly pious and thankful for the cold scran and the threepenny-piece with which she relieved their needs, asking a blessing on her and hers until they were out of sight, when they “stowed” the piety and threw the provisions into the nearest ditch, calling in at the next roadside pub to take the edge off their thirst with that threepenny-piece. It may safely be said that the tramp is not grateful. He is, indeed, altruistic, but his altruism he saves for his kind, and he exhibits it in the danger-signals he chalks up in places the brotherhood wot of. There are degrees of danger, as of luck. Some good-hearted people become soured by many calls on their generosity, and one can readily understand even the mildest-mannered of elderly ladies becoming restive when the sixth tramp appears at the close of the day. Other people, too, lose their generosity with the bedding-out plants which one of the fraternity has “sneaked” from the front garden under cover of night. In the first instance, the sign △ (which means “Spoilt by too many callers”) is likely to be found somewhere handy, and in the second that innocent-looking triangle is apt to become ☐, the English of which is “Likely to have you taken up,” even if it does not become ☉ == “Dangerous. Sure of being quodded.”

XI

Passing many of these undesirable wayfarers, one comes, in a mile—fields and hedgerows and market-gardens on either side—to Shoulder of Mutton Green, a scrubby piece of common-ground shaped like South America—but smaller. Hence the peculiar eloquence of its name. The Kent County Council has set up a large and imposing notice-board at the corner of the green which bears its name and a portentous number of bye-laws, and when the sun is low and shadows slant (the board is so large and the green so small), the shade of it falls across the green and into the next field.

And now comes Belle Grove, spelled, as one may see on the stuccoed cottages by the wayside, with a pleasing diversity, Belle Grove, Bell Grove, and Belgrove; and one would pin one’s faith on the correct form being the second variety, because the place is not beautiful, nor ever could have been.

To Bell Grove, then, succeeds Welling, and Welling is a quite uninteresting and shabby hamlet fringing the road, ten-and-a-quarter miles from London Bridge. The new suburban railway from London to Bexley Heath crosses the road, and has a station—a waste of sand, stones, and white palings—here. The place, says Hasted, in his “History of Kent,” was called Well End, from the safe arrival of the traveller at it, after having escaped the danger of robbers through the hazardous road from Shooter’s Hill, which derivation, though regarded as a happy effort of the imagination, is considerably below the dignified level of a county historian. Indeed, I seem to see in this the irresponsible frivolity of the guards and coachmen of the Dover Mail. Why, the thing reeks of coaching wit, and how Hasted, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, could have included in his monumental work (which took him forty years to write) so obvious a witticism, is beyond my comprehension. Shall I be considered pedantic if I point out that the place-name, with its termination ing, carries with it evidence of being as old as Saxon times, and denotes that here was the settlement of an ancient tribe, or patriarchial family, the Wellings? I will dare the deed and record the fact, remarking, meanwhile, that if other county historians were as little learned as Hasted, and equally speculative, they would seem more human, and their deadly tomes become much more entertaining.

But, after this, it would not beseem me to do else than record the fact that the new suburban district springing up beside the road, half a mile past Welling, is called “Crook Log.” Why “Crook Log,” and whence came that singular name, are things “rop in mistry,” and I will run no risks of becoming fogged in rash endeavours to elucidate the origin of this place-name.

TO BEXLEY

Half a mile onward, and then begins Bexley Heath. “Once upon a time,” that is to say, before an Act of Parliament was obtained in 1817 for enclosing what was then a wide, wild tract of desolate heath-land, Bexley Heath was entirely innocent of buildings.

The old village of Bexley lies a mile and a half to the right of the road, and is as rural, peaceful, and pleasant as Bexley Heath is mean and wretched. Between here and the village lies Hall Place, a Tudor mansion of great size and stately architecture, largely distinguished for its chequer-board patterning of flint and stone. The property was once that of the family called “At-hall,” from their residence here, in an earlier mansion. The Tudor flint-and-stone building we now see was built by Sir Justinian Champneis, a Lord Mayor of London, towards the middle of the sixteenth century. In less than a hundred years the Champneis were succeeded by the Austens, who made alterations, until 1772, when it passed to Sir Francis Dashwood, in whose family it yet remains.

In the neighbourhood of Bexley Heath, and also at Crayford and places beside the Thames near Dartford are some singular shafts of unknown age or purpose, sunk into the soil, frequently to a depth of a hundred feet, through the chalk of which this district chiefly consists. “Danes’ Holes,” the country-folk call them, and they are traditionally supposed to have been constructed as hiding-places to which the old inhabitants of these parts could retire when the Northmen’s piratical fleets appeared in the estuary of the Thames. Antiquaries have a theory that these singular pits were sunk by our neolithic forbears in search of flints. The antiquaries, however, are most probably wrong, because flints were to be found readily enough by the men of the Stone Age, without going to the trouble of mining for them; and no one has yet arisen to show that neolithic man was more likely than we, his descendants, to give himself unnecessary labour.

We will, therefore, assume that the legendary name of “Danes’ Holes” shadows forth the purpose of these shafts a great deal more correctly than the ingenious theories of antiquaries, made to fit personal predilections; the more especially as legendary history is generally found to square with facts much more frequently than scientific pundits would have us believe.

These remarkable pits commence with a trumpet-shaped orifice which immediately contracts into a narrow shaft, broadening at the bottom into a bulb-like chamber, not unremotely resembling in shape the tube and bulb of a thermometer. “By a curious coincidence,” says one who has long been familiar with these strange survivals, “the shape of the Bexley shafts is exactly that of a local beer-measure which is held in great estimation.” In several houses may be seen an advertisement that “beer is sold by the yard.”

XII

CRAYFORD

Leaving Bexley Heath, the road becomes suddenly beautiful, where it loses the last of the mean shops—the cats’-meat vendors, the tinkers, the marine stores—that give so distinct and unwholesome a cachet to its long-drawn-out street. The highway goes down a hill overhung with tall trees, with chestnuts and hawthorns, whose blossoms fill the air in spring with sweet and heavy scents; but, in the hollow, gasworks contend with them, and generally, it is sad to say, come off easy victors. Follows then a nondescript bend of the road which brings one presently into Crayford, fifteen miles from London.

Antiquaries are divided in opinion over the ancient history of Crayford. While some incline to the belief that it is the site of the Roman Noviomagus, others are prone to select Keston Common as the locality of that shadowy camp and city. The question will probably never be settled beyond a doubt, but the weight of evidence is strong in favour of Keston Common, eight miles away to the south-west. Here still exist the traces of great earthworks, covering a space of a hundred acres, while numerous finds of Roman coins and pottery have been made from time to time. At Crayford, on the other hand, the only presumptive evidence is to be found in this having been that old Roman military way, Watling Street, and, in the very slender thread of allusion to the name of Noviomagus, supposed, on the authority of Hasted, to be extant in the title of the half-forgotten manor of Newbury.

But, however vague may be the connection between Noviomagus and Crayford, certain it is that here, in 457, was fought that tremendous battle between the Saxons under Hengist, and the Britons commanded by Vortigern, a conflict in which four thousand of the Romanised Britons were slain. It was in 449 that Hengist and Horsa, brother-chiefs[1] of the Jutish-Saxons, landed at Ebbsfleet, in Thanet, at the invitation of Vortigern, who sought their aid against the Picts and the Sea-rovers. They came in three ships, and their original force could scarcely have numbered more than five hundred men. But, having warred for the Britons, and fought side by side with them against the Scots, they soon perceived how defenceless was the land. “They sent,” says the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, “to the Angles, and bade them be told of the worthlessness of the Britons, and the richness of the land.” In response to this invitation, there came from over sea the men of the Old Saxons, the Jutes, and the Angles; and, six years after the landing of the two brothers, these treacherous allies, strengthened in number, felt strong enough to attempt the seizure of Kent. Pretexts for a quarrel were readily found, and, through the mists that hang about the scanty records of that time, we hear first of the Battle of Aylesford, fought in 455, in which the Britons experienced their first great defeat. Here, though, Horsa was slain, and to Hengist, with his son Esc, was left the foundation of the Saxon kingdom of Kent. The Battle of Crayford for a time left all this fertile corner of England to the Saxons. “The Britons,” says the chronicler, “forsook the land of Kent, and in great consternation fled to London.” But, though enervated by long years of luxury, and so greatly demoralised by defeats, the Britons had yet some force left. Vortigern, “the betrayer of Britain,” as he has come down to us in the pages of history, was overthrown by another enemy, a rival British prince, that doughty Romanised chieftain, Aurelius Ambrosianus, who, after defeating that weak king, gathered up the scattered patriots, and fell upon the Saxons with such fury that they were driven back to that Isle of Thanet which had originally been given them for their services against the Scots of Strathclyde. “Falchions drank blood that day; the buzzard buried his horny beak in the carcases of the slain; the eagles feasted royally on the flesh of them that fell; and the whitening bones of the Northmen long afterwards strewed the fair land of Kent.”

Eight years later, the work of Aurelius began to be undone, and in another eight years the veteran Hengist and his son had completed the foundation of their kingdom.

Crayford, it will thus be seen, is a town of considerable historic interest; but, apart from this claim upon one’s attention, it has, I fear, no attraction whatever.

A QUAINT EPITAPH

But here is Crayford church, in whose yard is one of the quaintest epitaphs imaginable:—

“Here lies the body of Peter Isnell, thirty years clerk of this parish. He lived respected as a pious and mirthful man, and died on his way to church, to assist at a wedding, on the 31st of March, 1811, aged 70. The inhabitants of Crayford have raised this stone to his cheerful memory, and as a token of his long and faithful services.

The life of this Clerk was just three-score and ten,
Nearly half of which time he chaunted Amen.
In his youth he was married, like other young men;
But his wife died one day, so he chaunted Amen.
A second he married—she departed—what then?
He married and buried a third, with Amen.
Thus, his joys and his sorrows were treble; but then
His voice was deep bass as he sung out Amen.
On the horn he could blow, as well as most men
So his horn was exalted in sounding Amen.
But he lost all his wind after three-score and ten
And here, with three wives, he waits, till again
The trumpet shall rouse him to sing out Amen.

The distance between Crayford and Dartford is but two miles, past White Hill; and all the way are fruit gardens, tramps, and odious little terraces of brick cottages with tiny gardens in front, whose brilliant, old-fashioned flowers—sweet-williams, marigolds, and polyanthuses—put to shame these wretched efforts of the builder. There is, half a mile from Crayford, beside the road, an iron post with the City of London arms and the legend, “Act 24 & 25 Vict. cap. 42,” in relief. This wayside pillar marks at once the limits of the London Police District, and the boundary of the area affected by the London Coal and Wine Duties Continuance Act of 1861. The City of London has been entitled from time immemorial to levy dues on all coal entering the metropolis, and this privilege, regulated from time to time, was abolished only in 1889. Two separate duties of twelve pence and one penny per ton were confirmed by this act and authorised to be levied upon coals, culm, and cinders; while the acts dating from 1694, imposing a tax of four shillings per tun on all kinds of wine were at the same time confirmed and renewed, and the radius made identical with the London police jurisdiction, instead of the former limit of twenty miles. These boundary marks were ordered to be set up on turnpike and public roads, beside canals, inland navigations, and railways, and are frequently encountered by the cyclist and pedestrian, to whom their purpose is not a little mysterious.

The duty on coals entering London amounted in 1885 to no less than £449,343, and on wines to £8,488. By far the greater part of these amounts was, of course, collected on the railways and in the port of London. Originally imposed for the maintenance of London orphans, the wine dues became, like the coal duties, great sources of income, by which many notable London improvements, among them the Victoria Embankment, have been carried out.

XIII

DARTFORD

Dartford, to which we now come, is a queer little town, planted in a profound hollow, through which runs its wealth-giving Darent. Mills and factories meet the eye at every turn. Not smoking, grimy factories of the kinds that blast the Midland counties, but cleanly-looking boarded structures for the most part, own brothers to flour-mills in outward aspect; places where paper is manufactured, and nowadays drugs and chemicals. Dartford is industrial to-day, but there are old-fashioned nooks, and some of the street-names are intriguing: “Bullace Lane” and “Overy Street,” for example. Few people nowadays know what is a “bullace.” It is, or was, a small wild plum, of the damson kind.

And here is the traditional home of paper-making in England, for it was in Dartford, in the reign of Good Queen Bess, that John Spielman (majesty, in the person of Gloriana’s successor, James the First, knighted him for it in 1605) introduced the art of paper-making to these shores. What induced that man of gold and jewels and precious stones (he was jeweller to Her Majesty) to take up paper-making, I do not know; but he made a very good thing of it, commercially speaking, and no wonder, when he had sole license during ten years for collecting rags for making his paper withal. Besides introducing the manufacture of paper, Sir John Spielman added the lime-tree to our parks and gardens, for he brought over with him from his native place, Lindau, in Germany, two slips from some unter den linden or another, and planted them in front of his Dartford home, where they flourished and became the progenitors of all the limes in England.

ARMS OF SPIELMAN AND HIS FIRST WIFE.

If you step into the quaint old church of Dartford, you will see, as soon as your eyes become accustomed to the gloom, the tomb of Sir John Spielman and his wife, with their effigies, properly carved, painted and gilt, while in various parts of the church may be found what is said to be his crest, the fool’s cap, which he used as a water-mark on a particular size of paper. “Foolscap” paper derives its name from that water-mark; and thus, though the term now indicates a size, it was originally a trade-mark. The mark may have been derived, not from any crest, but from the long cap worn by the figure on his wife’s shield of arms; although it was greatly changed in the process. At the same time, it is to be noted that the fool’s cap water-mark occurred on paper made in Germany in 1472.

The presence of the badge in the church shows that the paper-maker had a good deal to do with the reparation of the building.

In 1858 an association styling themselves the “Legal Society of Paper Makers,” of whom I know nothing, restored Spielman’s tomb. The strange heraldic coat-of-arms of Spielman will be noticed. It is, and looks, German, and is of an extravagant nature that would utterly discompose an English herald. Spielman’s coat exhibits a blue serpent with a red crest, standing on his tail on a gold background, between six golden lions on a red field, the whole of this singular device based on a green mount. His wife’s arms, impaled with his own, are a man clothed in a long black gown, with a long cap, holding in his hand an olive branch, and standing on a red mount inverted. The crest is: a savage, wreathed about the temples and loins with ivy. Motto: Arte et fortuna. The epitaph is in German. Spielman’s first wife died in 1607. In 1609 he married again, and deceased in 1626, leaving by the second wife three sons and one daughter.

THE SPIELMANS

The fortunes of the Spielmans were short-lived. His second wife was living in 1646, but seems to have had little interest in the business, which about 1686 was in possession of a Mr. Blackwell. Meanwhile the Spielman family had declined to poverty, and in 1690 “goody Spielman,” widow of his grandson George, was in receipt of 1s. 6d. weekly relief; and in 1696 the wife of a John Spielman was receiving 2s. The Spielman paper mill stood where the gas-mantle factory of Curtis and Harvey is now found.

There is a curious sundial actually in the church; oddly placed on a stone foundation on the splayed sill of the south-east window. It is dated 1820, and records the hours only from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m.

A brass to John Donkin (1782-1846) shows him with head and shoulders. The inscription states it was placed here because it was not considered proper that one who had placed ancient men and times on record should himself be forgotten.

DARTFORD CHURCH.

We may be thankful that Spielman did no more to the church, for, had he rebuilt it, we should have lost one of the finest and most picturesque churches on the Dover Road, whose tall tower, severely unornamental, with clock oddly placed on one side, is such a prominent feature of Dartford. Gundulf, that famous architect-bishop of Rochester, to whom Rochester Keep, Dover Castle, the White Tower of the Tower of London, portions of Rochester Cathedral, and a number of other buildings, civil, ecclesiastical and military, are ascribed with more or less show of authority, is supposed to have built Dartford tower, not so much for religious as for defensive uses. For hereby runs the Darent across the road, and no bridge spanned the ford when Gundulf’s tower was first built. It therefore guarded the passage until the neighbouring hermit, who lived in a fine damp cell by the riverside, succeeded in collecting enough money wherewith to build a bridge whose successor forms an excellent leaning-stock on Sundays to the British workman waiting anxiously for the public-houses to open.

There is in the church a small thirteenth century lancet window in the west end wall of the north aisle, which is pointed out as the window of the cell occupied by the hermit who tended the ford. It commanded the road; and no doubt the hermit was often knocked up at night by travellers desiring to be guided over the river. In 1903 a charming picture in stained glass was added, “The Hermit of the Ford,” showing a bearded and hooded man holding up a lantern. The ford was not superseded until 1461, when the first bridge was built. This remained until the present bridge replaced it, in 1754. On that occasion, the churchyard on the south side of the church was curtailed, for widening the road, and an angle of the church itself was in 1792 shaved off for the footpath, as can be seen to this day.

THE “BULL”

The old inns of Dartford are very numerous. Most of them, unfortunately, have been cut up into small beer-houses and tenements since the coaches were run off the road by steam, but one fine old galleried inn, the “Bull,” remains to show what the coaching inns of long ago were like. The courtyard is now roofed-in with glass, and the little bedrooms behind the carved balusters of the gallery are largely given up to spiders and lumber. But, fortunately for those who care to see what an old galleried inn was like, the changes here have consisted only of additions instead, as is only too usual, of destruction. There is a curious detail, too, about the “Bull,” and that is the whimsical position of its sign in a place where ninety out of a hundred people never see it. The “bull in a china-shop” is proverbial, but a bull among the chimney-pots is something quite out of the common. It is here, though, that the effigy of a great black bull may be seen, reared up aloft in a place between the constellations and the beasts of the field.

THE “BULL” INN, DARTFORD.

There is one modern incident in connection with the “Bull” at Dartford which shows how inflamed were the passions of the working class in favour of George the Fourth’s silly and indiscreet wife, and this incident happened while the monarch was changing horses here. It was a journeyman currier who showed his sympathy with Queen Caroline, and he did so by thrusting his head in at the carriage window, and roaring in the face of startled majesty, “You are a murderer!” which can be taken neither as a compliment nor a statement of fact—unless, indeed, we agree with that mathematically inclined cynic who held that a “fact” was a lie and a half.

Pastor Moritz, in his account of a seven weeks’ tour in England, tells us how he passed through Dartford. He was by no means a distinguished person, but what he has to say of his travels is interesting, as contributing to show how others see us. He came into England by way of the Thames, May 31, 1782, and landed (he says) just below Dartford—probably at Greenhithe—to which place he walked in company with some others, and there breakfasted. He was fresh from the dreary, sandy Mark of Brandenburg, and this fair county of Kent delighted him hugely. At Dartford he saw, for the first time, an English soldier. That robust Tommy struck him with admiration, both for the sake of his red coat and his martial bearing. “Here, too, I first saw” (says he) “(what I deemed a true English sight) two boys boxing in the street.” The party separated at Dartford, and, taking two post-chaises at the “Bull,” drove to London, the Pastor “stunned,” as it were, by a constant rapid succession of interesting objects, arriving at Greenwich nearly in a state of stupefaction.

WAT TYLER

Dartford will ever live in history as being the starting-point of Wat the Tyler’s rebellion of 1381. Tradition places the scene of Wat’s murderous attack on the tax-gatherer opposite the “Bull,” where once was Dartford Green. The Green has long since gone, but the story never stales of how the Tyler dashed out the tax-gatherer’s brains with his hammer. It is, for one thing, a tale that appeals strongly to an over-taxed community, sinking under burdens imposed chiefly for the support of imperial and local bureaucracy; and I fear that if some modern tax-collector met a similar fate, many worthy people, not ordinarily bloodthirsty, would say, “Serve him right!”

The particular impost which caused the trouble five hundred years ago was the odious Poll-tax, a hateful burden that had already caused wide discontent throughout England, and needed only a more than usually unpleasant incident to cause ill feelings to break out in ill deeds. That incident was not lacking. At Dartford, one of the collectors had demanded the tax for a young girl, daughter of he who is known to history as Wat Tyler. Her mother maintained that she was under the age required by the statute. The tax-collector grew insolent and overbearing, and, it seems, was proceeding to a delicate investigation—like that which procured Mr. W. T. Stead three months’ imprisonment some years ago—when the Tyler, who had just returned from work, killed him with a stroke from his hammer.

How Wat the Tyler was appointed by popular acclamation leader of the Commons in Kent; how, at the head of a hundred thousand insurgents, he marched to Blackheath, are matters rather for the history of England than for this causerie along the Dover Road.

XIV

The old coachmen had an exciting time of it when either entering or leaving Dartford. They skidded down West Hill, when coming from London, to the imminent danger of their necks and those of their passengers, and they painfully climbed the East Hill, on their way out of the town toward Dover. When several accidents had occurred to prove how hazardous to life and property were these roads, the turnpike-trustmongers reduced their steepness by cutting through the hill-tops. This was about 1820. Although the roads were thus lowered, they still have a remarkably abrupt rise and fall, and the traveller in leaving the town for Dover can gain from halfway up the slope of the East Hill quite an extended view over Dartford roof-tops. He, however, remains to sketch at peril of some inconvenience, for the tramps who frequent Dartford take a quite embarrassing interest in art.

DARTFORD BRIDGE.

MARTYRS

Somewhere at this end of the town stood the Chantry of St. Edmund the Martyr, a halting-place at which pilgrims on their way to Canterbury stopped to pray and to kiss the usual relics. The site was probably where the Dartford Cemetery now stands beside the road, on the border of what is now called Dartford Brent, a wide expanse of common land known in other times as Brent, or Burnt Heath. This place came very near to being the site of a battle between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, for here it was that the rival armies first confronted one another; but, instead of coming to blows, their leaders held a parley; and so, fair words on their lips, but with deceit in their hearts, they went up to London. Many years later, on July 19, 1555, to be precise, Dartford Brent reappears in history as the place on which three Protestant martyrs, Christopher Wade, Margaret Pollen, and Nicholas Hall, were burnt at the stake, and since then the annals of the place have been quite uninteresting. The gilt-crested spire of the memorial to them peers up on the skyline of the road-cutting, on the way up to the Brent. It stands in the old cemetery, on the left.

Donkin, the historian of Dartford, wrote in 1844:—“On the Brent are the outlines of the ‘Deserter’s Grave,’ cut in the turf, formerly frequented by the scholars of Hall Place School: the sod of which is still continued to be cut away by the country people in memory of the unknown, traditionally said to have been shot in the adjoining pit.”

Some light on this tradition is shed by an item in the churchwardens’ accounts:—

Here the road branches—the Dover Road to the left, the Roman Watling Street to the right; although, the Roman road being older and itself based on an immeasurably more ancient British trackway, it would be more fitting to say that it is the existing Dover Road which branches off from the parent trunk road. From this point of departure on the Heath, until at the north end of Strood High Street the ways again come to a meeting, over eleven miles of the original route have been abandoned for what in mediæval times proved to be the more convenient route round by the waterside at Greenhithe and Gravesend.

But although not for many centuries have these eleven miles or so of abandoned Roman way been in use as a through route, they are not all lost. The first three miles across the Heath form a good local road, which then turns off to the right, leaving the Watling Street to climb the hill of Swanscombe, steeply up, as a tangled lane amid the dense woods. It is a very considerable elevation. Here and there the footpath deviates from the original Roman line, and the ridges, banks and hollows of it can occasionally be glimpsed amid the undergrowth; but in any case it seems evident that the Watling Street in these eleven miles was not straight, but re-aligned in some four limbs or individually straight stretches, partly to avoid going over the extreme crest of Swanscombe Hill. On the shoulder of that hill there was at the time of the road being made or remodelled by the Romans a British village, established inland here away from the Thames estuary probably as being a safer place than any settlement by the riverside.

WATLING STREET

Here, on the slope of the hill, the Watling Street is cut through by the vastly deep and broad excavation in the chalk made by the activities of the Associated Portland Cement Manufacturers. The construction of it may even thus be studied in section.

Below, in the levels of Springhead, where a lane takes up the line of the ancient road, there may have been that Roman station called Vagniacæ; although it may possibly have been by the waterside at Northfleet or Southfleet, for it is by no means certain that the Romans themselves had no lesser riverside route along the line of the present Dover Road. However, to lay down a dogma upon so uncertain a matter as the Roman road-system in Britain proves to be would not commend itself to those best qualified by study to judge.

From Springhead the Watling Street continued through Cobham Park, and so at length to a junction with the Dover Road, as already noted, at Strood.

Meanwhile, the more or less modern highway goes on through a dusty district where the builder is contending with the country, and, judging from appearances, he seems likely to get the best of it. All around are glimpses of the Heath, and problematical-looking settlements of houses and institutions are grouped together on the sky-line, with weird, bottle-like towers, extravagantly grotesque, like the architecture of a nightmare, or “Alice in Wonderland.” The City of London Lunatic Asylum is here beside the road; penitentiaries and their like are grouped about; a huge black windmill stands awfully on the Brent; while everywhere are puddles, bricks, old boots, old hats, and fragments of umbrellas. Dartford Brent is a singular place.

At the old hamlet of John’s Hole, just past here, called often in coaching days, “Jack-in-the-Hole,” was one of the Dover Road turnpikes. The old toll-house still remains beside the way. To this succeeds, at a distance of three quarters of a mile, the melancholy roadside settlement of Horns Cross, where a post-office, two inns, and a blasted oak look from one side of the road, across great fields of barley, to the broad Thames, crowded with shipping, below.

Stone Church, one of the most beautiful and interesting in Kent, stands on a hill-top, a short distance from the left-hand side of the road, and commands a wide view of the Thames. To architects and lovers of architecture it is remarkable on account of the striking similarity its rich details bear to those of Westminster Abbey, and it is generally considered that the architect of the one designed the other. This is the more remarkable since the Abbey, with this exception of Stone Church, stands alone in England as a beautiful and peculiarly personal example of Gothic thirteenth-century architecture as practised in France. The architect of Westminster Abbey must have been of French nationality; and so curiously similar, in little, are not only the details of both church and Abbey, but also the varieties of stone of which they are built, that they are most unlikely to have been the work of different men.

THE QUARRIES

Greenhithe lies off the road to the left hand, and fronts on to the Thames. The road, all the way hence to Northfleet, is enclosed by high walls with tall factory-chimneys on either side; or passes between long rows of recent cottages alternating with cabbage-fields in the last stage of agricultural exhaustion. Docks; huge and ancient chalk-pits; great tanks of lime and whitening, and brickfields are everywhere about, for Greenhithe and Northfleet are, and have been for many years, the chief places of a great export trade in flints, chalk, and lime. The flints are sent into Derbyshire, and even to China, where they are used in the making of porcelain; and many thousands of tons are shipped annually. The excavation of chalk and flints during so long a period has left its mark—a very deep and ineffaceable mark, too—upon this part of the road, and, to a stranger, the appearance presented by the scarred and deeply quarried countryside is wild and wonderful. Spaces of many acres have been quarried to a depth, in some places, of over a hundred and fifty feet, and many of these great pits have been abandoned for centuries, accumulating in that time a large and luxuriant growth of trees and bushes. Others are still being extended, and present a busy scene with men in white duck, corduroy, or canvas working clothes cutting away the chalk or loading it into the long lines of trucks that run on tramways down to the water’s edge. Not the least remarkable things in these busy places are the great bluffs of chalk left islanded amid the deepest quarries, and reaching to the original level of the land. They rise abruptly from the quarry floors, are generally quite inaccessible, and have been left thus by the quarrymen, as containing an inferior quality of chalk, mixed with sand and gravel, which is not worth their while to remove.

In midst of scenery of this description, and surrounded by shops and modern houses, stands Northfleet Church, beside the highway. It is a large Gothic building of the Decorated period, and has been much patched and repaired at different times without having been actually “restored.” There are some mildly interesting brasses in the chancel; but the massive western embattled tower is of greatest interest to the student of other times, for it was built, like many of the church towers in the Welsh marches and along the Scots borders, chiefly as a means of defence. The enemies who were thus to be guarded against at Northfleet were firstly Saxon pirates, then the fierce and faithless Danes, and (much later) the French. This defensible tower at Northfleet was largely rebuilt in 1628, but a part of it belongs to the end of the fourteenth century, and it even retains fragments of an earlier building, contemporary with the terrible Sea-rovers who sailed up the estuary of the Thames, burning and destroying everything as they passed.

A significant sign of the quasi-military uses of this extremely interesting tower is the tall stone external staircase that runs up its northern face from the churchyard to the first-floor level. The small doorway that opens at the head of this staircase into the first floor was originally the only entrance to the tower, and before the church could be finally taken the enemy would have had to storm these stairs, exposed to a fire of cloth-yard shafts from arrow-slits, and of heavy stones cast down upon them from the roof.

XV

Northfleet adjoins, and is now continuous with, Gravesend. It is a busy place, engaged in the excavation of chalk and flints, and in ship-building. Here, too, were “Rosherville Gardens,” or shortly, “Rosherville.” A suburb of that name is here now, but the Rosherville of the Early and Middle Victorians is a thing of the past, and the place has been sold to an oil company.

Jeremiah Rosher was the inventor and sponsor of those once-famed Gardens. It was so far back as the 1830’s that he conceived the grand idea of building a new town between Northfleet and Gravesend, on an estate he owned here, beside the Thames. The idea remained an idea only, for although a pier was built and the Gardens formed, Rosher never lived to see his “ville,” in the sense of being a town. But his Gardens were a hugely-compensating success. It is not given to many to make a success of a hole (unless the hole is a mine), and the site of that celebrated Cockney resort was, and is, nothing else; being in fact one of the oldest and largest of the chalk-quarries, excavated to a depth of one hundred and fifty feet in some parts.

WATERCRESS

There a curious kind of rusticity was tempered with an equally curious urban flavour; there the succulent shrimp and the modest watercress (“Tea ninepence; srimps and watercreases, one shilling”), were supplemented romantically by the strains of husky bands. There art was represented by broken-nosed plaster statues of Ceres and a variety of other heathen goddesses, some supporting gas-lamps in sawdusty bars and restaurants; others gracing lawns and flower-beds. To those who delighted in plaster statues grown decrepit and minus a leg or an arm, like so many neo-classic Chelsea pensioners, Rosherville was ideal.

“Where to spend a happy day,” as the advertisements used to invite—“Rosherville.” The watercress consumed there, and at the other popular places near by, came from Springhead, which will be found in the country at the back of Gravesend. In 1907 died the last surviving daughter of the man who “invented” watercress as an article of food. It was about 1815 that William Bradbery, of Springhead, began to cultivate from a green weed that grew in the ditches this favourite addition to tea-tables.

He cultivated with care, and laid out extensive beds, then, when he had a marketable crop, sold it locally. It soon became a famous table dainty, and nothing would satisfy him but the patronage of London. He filled an old tea-chest with cress, and, with this on his back, trudged off to the metropolis, a score or more miles away. The sample was satisfactory, and he quickly developed a London trade.

Bradbery (it is said) when he was building up his London connection, paid a vocalist to go at night from one place of entertainment to another, singing a song in praise of the famous brown cress from the waters of Springhead.

Be that as it may, Bradbery made a fortune by cultivating his cress on the extended area. He seized an opportunity where another man would not have seen one.

Watercress is now cultivated largely, and in numerous districts. It is known, botanically, as nasturtium officinale.

Electric tramcars now rush and rattle through Northfleet and Rosherville, and no one contemplates journeying to these scenes with the object of spending a “happy day.” The great group of semi-ecclesiastical looking buildings on the left is “Huggens’ College.” Almshouses continue to be built, for the fountain of benevolence is not yet dried up. It was in 1847 that this foundation came into existence, pursuant to the will of John Huggens (born 1776), who was a barge-owner and corn-merchant of Sittingbourne. Looking upon a world rather astonishingly full of almshouses for people of humble birth, he conceived the somewhat original idea of founding what, with extreme delicacy, he termed a “College” for gentlemen reduced to poor circumstances. The establishment, strictly secluded behind enclosing walls, in well-wooded grounds, houses fifty collegians. Huggens himself, in stony effigy, is seen over the gateway, seated in a frockcoat and an uncomfortable attitude, and displaying a scroll or the charter of his “College.” The bountiful gentleman is sadly weatherworn, for the factory fumes of this industrial district have wrought havoc with the Portland stone from which he is sculptured. Huggens was wise among the generation of benefactors: he founded his charity in his own lifetime, and personally supervised it. He died in 1865, and his body lies in Northfleet churchyard.

We will now proceed to Gravesend, noting that in 1787 the slip road between the “Leather Bottle” at Northfleet and the beginnings of Chalk, two miles in length, was made. It would, in the language of to-day, applied to incandescent gas-mantle burners and to avoiding roads alike, be called a “by-pass.”

GRAVESEND

Gravesend was at one time a place remarkable alike for its tilt-boats and its waterside taverns. The one involved the other, for the boats brought travellers here from London, and here, in the days of bad roads and worse conveyances, they judged it prudent to stay overnight, commencing their journey to Rochester the following morning. To the town of Gravesend belonged the monopoly of conveying passengers to and from London by water, and it was not until steamboats began to ply up and down the reaches of the Thames that this privilege became obsolete. Thus it will be seen that, besides being a place of call for ships, either outward bound or proceeding home, Gravesend was in receipt of much local traffic. The railway has, naturally, taken away a large proportion of this, but has brought it back, tenfold, in the shape of holiday trippers, and the continued growth of the town is sufficient evidence of its prosperity. One first hears of Gravesend in the pages of Domesday Book, where it is called “Gravesham”; but the difficulty of distinctly pronouncing the name led, centuries ago, to the corrupted termination of “end” being adopted, first in speech, and, by insensible degrees, in writing. It has an interesting history, commencing from the time when the compilers of Domesday Book found only a “hyhte,” or landing-place, here, and progressing through the centuries with records of growth, and burnings by the French; with tales of Cabot’s sailing hence in 1553, followed by Frobisher in 1576, to the incorporation of the town in 1568, and the flight of James the Second, a hundred and twenty years later.

Gravesend was not, in the sixteenth century, a model town. Its inhabitants paved, lighted, and cleansed their streets, accordingly as individual preferences, industry, or laziness dictated. Spouts, pipes, and projecting eaves poured dirty water on pedestrians who were rash enough to walk those streets in rainy weather, and people threw away out of window anything they wished to get rid of, quite regardless of who might be passing underneath; and so, whether fine or wet, those who picked their way carefully along the unpaved thoroughfares, stood an excellent chance of being drenched with something unpleasant. An open gutter ran down the middle of the street, full of rotting refuse; every tradesman hung out signs which sometimes fell down and killed people, and in the night, when the wind blew strong, a concert of squeaking music filled, with sounds not the most pleasant, the ears of people who wanted to go to sleep.

Things were but little less mediæval in the middle of the seventeenth century, although the trade and importance of Gravesend had greatly increased. Troubles arose then on account of the disorderly hackmen, “foreigners and strangers”—any one not a freeman or a burgess was a “foreigner”—who plied between Gravesend and Rochester, and took away the custom that belonged of right to members of Gravesend guilds. Two years later the Corporation of Gravesend was distinctly Roundhead in its sympathies, for in 1649 we find the town mace being altered, the Royal arms removed, and those of the Commonwealth substituted, at a cost of £23 10s. 0d. In 1660, things wore a very different complexion, for in that year the Gravesend people welcomed Charles the Second with every demonstration of joy. They had the mace restored to its former condition at a cost, this time, of £17 10s. 0d., and allowed the mayor and another £2 5s. 7d. for going up to London to see that the work was done properly. They paid £3 10s. 0d. for painting the king’s arms; 14s. to one John Phettiplace for “trumpeters and wigs”; and 5s. to Will Charley “for sounding about the country.” Having done this, they all got gloriously drunk at a total cost of £12 15s. 8d., of which sum £10 7s. 8d. was for wine, and £2 8s. 0d. for beer.

RIVERSIDE, GRAVESEND.

It was, indeed, during this latter half of the seventeenth century that Gravesend experienced one of its great periods of prosperity; and so the loyalty was well rewarded. Of this date are many of the fine old red-brick mansions in the older part of the town, together with the Admiralty House, official residence of the Duke of York when Lord High Admiral. To Gravesend he came as James the Second, a prisoner.

Embarking from Whitehall, on December 18, 1688, he reached here as late as nine o’clock at night. The next morning he was conducted hence to Rochester in the charge of a hundred of the Prince of Orange’s Dutch Guards, and a melancholy journey it must have been for him, if his memory took him back to the time when, twenty-eight years before, he came up the road with his brothers, Charles the Second and the Duke of Gloucester, happily returning from exile.

To Gravesend came Royal and distinguished travellers on their way from Dover to London, and hence they embarked for the City and Westminster, escorted, if they were sufficiently Royal or distinguished by the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and the City Guilds, and fitly conducted in a long procession of stately barges by this most impressive entrance to the capital of England. And even ordinary travellers preferred this route. For two reasons: the river-road was much more expeditious than the highway in those pre-MacAdamite days, and by taking it they escaped the too-pressing attentions that awaited them on Shooter’s Hill and Blackheath at the hands of Captains Gibbet and Pick-Purse.

XVI

OLD TIME TRAVELLERS

Many of these distinguished travellers on this old highway have left written accounts of their doings, and very interesting readings they make. Foremost among the “distinguished” company was Marshal de Bassompierre. He came to England in 1626, on an Embassy from the King of France, and arrived at Dover on the 2nd of October. There he stayed to recruit, for the sea, as usual, had been unkind, until Sunday, the 4th, departing thence on that day for “Cantorbery,” where he slept the night, going on the Monday as far as “Sitimborne,” and on Tuesday to “Rocheter” and Gravesend, where he was met by the Queen’s barge. Three months later, and he was returning home. On December 1st he began his farewells at the Court of Saint James’s, and bade adieu to, amongst others, such fearful wild fowl as the Earl of Suffolc and the Duke of Boukinkam; this last the dissolute “Steenie”—none other! On the 5th, imagine him at Dover with an equipage of five hundred persons shivering on the brink of the Channel, and stormbound there for fourteen days at a cost of 14,000 crowns.

This imposing company embarked at last, and, after braving winds and sea for a whole day, were compelled to put back again. When they did finally set off, they were five days crossing to Calais, and it was found necessary to jettison the Ambassador’s two carriages en route, in which was, alas! 40,000 francs’ worth of clothes. Also this unfortunate diplomat lost twenty-nine horses, which died of thirst on the voyage.

Another French traveller, Monsieur Jouvin de Rochefort, greatly daring, visited our shores in 1670. He took the ordinary coach for “Gravesine,” in order, as he says, to embark thence for London, passing on his way from Canterbury, Arburtoon, Baten, and Asbery; Grinsrit, Sitingborn, Nieuvetoon, and Renem[2] and coming to Rochester through a strange place called Schatenne, which I don’t find anywhere on the map, but suppose he means Chatham. All along the road he remarked a number of high poles, on the top of which were small kettles, in which fires were lighted to warn the countryside of the robbers who would come in bands and plunder the villages, were it not for the courage of the villagers, who formed themselves into guards. These poles were about a mile distant from each other, and to every one there was a small hut for the person whose business it was to keep the beacons burning. “God be praised,” though, he reached “Gravesine” safely!

Samuel de Sorbière, Historiographer Royal to the King of France, visited our shores in 1663. The normal passage from Calais was three hours, but on this occasion seven hours were consumed in crossing, and although the weather was very fair, the “usual Disorder which those who are not accustomed to the sea are subject to”—but no matter! To make matters worse, contempt and affronts were put upon him in Dover streets by some sons of Belial in the shape of boys who ran after him shouting, “a Monsieur, a Monsieur,” and who, when they had retired to a safe distance, proceeded to the extremely impolite depth of calling him a “French dog,” “which,” says M. de Sorbière, sweepingly, “is the epithet they give us in England.”

Our traveller journeyed to London by wagon, rather than take a post-chaise or even the stage-coach; an extremely undignified thing for an Historiographer Royal to do, one would think. But then, ’twas the way to note the strange customs of these English! The wagon was drawn by six horses, one before another, and beside them walked the wagoner clothed in black and appointed in all things like another Saint George. He had a brave mounteero on his head, and was a merry fellow who fancied he made a figure, and seemed mightily pleased with himself. Arrived at Gravesend, our traveller, for greater expedition, took boat to London, and so an end of him, so far, at least, as these pages are concerned.

M. GROSLEY

But this little crowd of scribbling foreigners who visited England and wrote accounts of their travels in these islands before the locomotive was dreamed of, had much better opportunities of catching impressions than the railway train affords. They came up this way to London, as slowly as the poet’s spring; and, as a rule, they used their opportunities very well. For instance, here is the admirable M. Grosley, a kindly Frenchman who came over from Boulogne in 1765. He gives a most interesting account of his journey along the Dover Road on the 11th April. He embarked upon Captain Meriton’s packet, which arrived, in company with a prodigious number of other ships, three hours before time, off Dover. Here they had to anchor for the tide to serve their landing, and the boisterous winds drove several vessels ashore, while Captain Meriton’s passengers resigned themselves to death. When at length they landed, half dead, an Englishwoman with her very amiable daughter and a tall old Irishman, who pretended to be an officer (and who doubtless “had a way with him”), landed with our traveller, and contrived that he should pay part of their fare, the only trick played upon M. Grosley (I am pleased to say) during his stay in England. The customs officers looked like beggars, but treated this foreigner like a gentleman, as indeed we may suppose he was, for he belonged to the Academy.

However, a crown was levied on passing his luggage by an innkeeper who held the droit de viscomté. All the inns were crowded with the miserable travellers just landed, and he with whom we are particularly concerned found it necessary to go into the kitchen of his inn and take off, with his own hands, one of the tranches de bœuf grilling on the coals. After this exploit, he cautiously went to bed at six o’clock in the afternoon, for there were not enough beds to go round, and possession was ever nine points of the law! At three in the morning he was called upon to turn out in favour of a new arrival; but, notwithstanding all the rout they made, he held to his four-poster until five, when he was turned out and the game of Box and Cox commenced.

The sole inhabitants of Dover (says our traveller) were sailors, ships’ captains, and innkeepers. The height of the triumphal arches, on which the vast signboards of the inns spanned the narrow streets, and the ridiculous magnificence of the ornaments that headed them, were wonderful as compared with the little post-boys, children of twelve and thirteen years of age, who were starting every minute in sole charge of post-chaises. The great multitude of travellers with which Dover was crowded afforded a reason for dispensing with a police regulation which forbade public conveyances to travel on Sundays, and on that day he set out with seven other passengers in two carriages called (“called,” you notice, like that street in Jerusalem that was “called” straight) “flying machines.” There were six horses to a machine, and they covered the distance to London in one day for one guinea each person; passengers’ servants carried outside at half-price. The coachmen, who were most kindly disposed towards their horses, carried whips, certainly, but they were no more in their hands than the fan is in winter in the hand of a lady; they only served to make a show with, for their horses scarcely ever felt them, so great was the tenderness of the English coachman with his cattle.

But see the peculiar advantages of travelling on Sunday. There were no excisemen anywhere on duty, and even the highwaymen had ceased their labours during the night. The only knights of the road our travellers encountered were dangling from gibbets by the wayside in all the glories of periwigs and full-skirted coats. Unfortunately, the pace was marred by the frequent stoppages made to unload the brandy-kegs at the roadside inns from the boots of the coaches, where they had been stowed away in the absence of the gaugers.