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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Great North Road: London to York, by
+Charles G. Harper
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Great North Road: London to York
+       The Old Mail Road to Scotland
+
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+
+
+Release Date: August 28, 2014  [eBook #46716]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: LONDON TO
+YORK***
+
+
+This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+            [Picture: Starting from G.P.O. in Lombard Street]
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  _The_
+                             GREAT NORTH ROAD
+
+
+                      The Old Mail Road to Scotland
+
+                          _By_ CHARLES G. HARPER
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                              LONDON TO YORK
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+             _Illustrated by the Author_, _and from old-time_
+                          _Prints and Pictures_
+
+                 [Picture: Title Figure (man on bicycle)]
+
+                                 LONDON:
+                               CECIL PALMER
+                 OAKLEY HOUSE, BLOOMSBURY STREET, W.C. 1
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                        _First published in_ 1901
+                    _Second and Revised edition_, 1922
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+           Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & Co., LTD.,
+                      53, Victoria Street, Liverpool
+                      and 187, Fleet Street, London.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                             IN LOVING MEMORY
+                                    OF
+                              HERMAN MORONEY
+
+    “_I expect to pass through this world but once_.  _Any good_,
+    _therefore_, _I can do_, _or any kindness that I can show to any
+    fellow-creature_, _let me do it now_.  _Let me not defer or neglect
+    it_, _for I shall not pass this way again_.”
+
+                                             _Attributed to_ WILLIAM PENN.
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE.
+
+
+                        [Picture: Preface heading]
+
+_WHEN the original edition of the_ “GREAT NORTH ROAD” _was published—in_
+1901—_the motorcar was yet a new thing_.  _It had_, _in November_, 1896,
+_been given by Act of Parliament the freedom of the roads_; _but_, _so
+far_, _the character of the nation’s traffic had been comparatively
+little changed_.  _People would still turn and gaze_, _interested_, _at a
+mechanically-propelled vehicle_; _and few were those folk who had
+journeyed the entire distance between London and Edinburgh in one of
+them_.  _For motor-cars were still_, _really_, _in more or less of an
+experimental stage_; _and on any long journey you were never sure of
+finishing by car what you had begun_.  _Also_, _the speed possible was
+not great enough to render such a long __journey exhilarating to modern
+ideas_.  _It is true that_, _the year before_, _the_ “_Automobile Club of
+Great Britain and Ireland_,” _not yet become the_ “_Royal Automobile
+Club_,” _had in its now forgotten role of a_ “_Society of Encouragement_”
+_planned and carried out a_ “_Thousand Miles Tour_,” _which had Edinburgh
+as its most northern point_; _but it was a very special effort_.  _Those
+who took part in it are not likely to forget the occasion_.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_To-day_, _all that is changed_.  _Every summer_, _every autumn_, _sees
+large numbers of touring automobiles on the way to Scotland and the
+moors_, _filled with those who prefer the road_, _on such terms_, _to the
+railway_.  _From being something in the nature of a lonely highway_, _the
+Great North Road has thus become a very much travelled one_.  _In this
+way_, _some of its circumstances have changed remarkably_, _and old-time
+comfortable wayside inns that seemed to have been ruined for all time
+with the coming of railways and the passing of the coaches have wakened
+to a newer life_.  _Chief among these is the_ “_Bell_” _on Barnby Moor_,
+_just north of Retford_.  _The story of its revival is a romance_.
+_Closed about_ 1845, _and converted into a farm-house_, _no one would
+have cared to predict its revival as an inn_.  _But as such it was
+reopened_, _chiefly for the use of motorists_, _in_ 1906, _and there it
+is to-day_.
+
+_But_, _apart from the tarred and asphalted condition of the actual
+roadway in these times_, _the route_, _all the way between London_, _York
+and Edinburgh_, _looks much the same as it did_.  _Only_, _where perhaps
+one person might then know it thoroughly_, _from end to end_, _a hundred
+are well acquainted with the way and its features_.  _It is for those
+many who now know the Great North Road that this new edition is
+prepared_, _giving the story of the long highway between the two
+capitals_.
+
+                                                        CHARLES G. HARPER.
+
+_April_, 1922.
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
+
+
+                              LONDON TO YORK
+
+                                                   MILES
+Islington (the “Angel”)                               1¼
+Highgate Archway                                      4¼
+East End, Finchley                                    5¾
+Brown’s Wells, Finchley Common (“Green Man”)           7
+Whetstone                                             9¼
+Greenhill Cross                                      10¼
+Barnet                                               11¼
+Hadley Green                                          12
+Ganwick Corner (“Duke of York”)                       13
+Potter’s Bar                                         14¼
+Little Heath Lane                                    15¼
+Bell Bar (“Swan”)                                    17¼
+Hatfield                                             19¾
+Stanborough                                          21½
+Lemsford Mills (cross River Lea)                     22¼
+Digswell Hill (cross River Mimram)                   23¼
+Welwyn                                               25¼
+Woolmer Green                                        27¼
+Broadwater                                           29½
+Stevenage                                            31½
+Graveley                                             33½
+Baldock                                              37½
+Biggleswade (cross River Ivel)                       45¼
+Lower Codicote                                       46¾
+Beeston Cross (cross River Ivel)                     48¼
+Girlford                                             49¼
+Tempsford (cross River Ouse)                          51
+Wyboston                                              54
+Eaton Socon                                          55¼
+Cross Hall                                           56¾
+Diddington                                            60
+Buckden                                              61¼
+Brampton Hut                                         63¾
+Alconbury                                            66¼
+Alconbury Weston                                      67
+Alconbury Hill (“Wheatsheaf”)                         68
+Sawtry St. Andrews                                   71½
+Stilton                                              75½
+Norman Cross                                          76
+Kate’s Cabin                                         79½
+Water Newton                                         81¼
+Sibson                                                82
+Stibbington (cross River Nene)                       83¾
+Wansford                                              84
+Stamford Baron (cross River Welland)                  89
+Stamford                                             89½
+Great Casterton                                      91½
+Stretton                                              96
+Greetham (“New Inn”)                                 97½
+North Witham (“Black Bull”)                         100½
+Colsterworth                                        102½
+Great Ponton                                        106¾
+Spitalgate Hill                                     109¾
+Grantham                                            110¼
+Great Gonerby                                        112
+Foston                                               116
+Long Bennington                                     118¼
+Shire Bridge (cross Shire Dyke)                     120½
+Balderton (cross River Devon)                       122¼
+Newark (cross River Trent)                          124½
+South Muskham                                        127
+North Muskham                                        128
+Cromwell                                             130
+Carlton-on-Trent                                    131½
+Sutton-on-Trent                                      133
+Weston                                              134¾
+Scarthing Moor                                      135½
+Tuxford                                             137¾
+West Markham                                        139½
+Markham Moor                                        140½
+Gamston (cross Chesterfield Canal)                  141½
+Retford (cross River Idle)                           145
+Barnby Moor                                          148
+Torworth                                            149½
+Ranskill                                            150¼
+Scrooby                                              152
+Bawtry                                              153½
+Rossington Bridge (cross River Tome)                157¾
+Tophall                                             158¾
+Doncaster (cross River Don)                         162¼
+Bentley                                              164
+Owston                                              167¾
+Askerne (cross River Went)                          169¼
+Whitley (cross Knottingley and Goole Canal)          174
+Whitley Bridge                                       175
+Chapel Haddlesey (cross River Aire)                 175½
+Burn (cross Selby Canal)                            179¼
+Brayton                                             180¾
+Selby (cross River Ouse)                            182¼
+Barlby                                              183¾
+Riccall                                              186
+Escrick                                             189¼
+Deighton                                            190½
+Gate Fulford                                         195
+York                                                196¾
+
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+         I  Various Notes On Roads In General.            1
+        II  Road Construction And Makers.                10
+       III  Makers Of Coaches: G.P.O. Mails.             13
+        IV  Post Office History.                         26
+         V  Stage Coach Timings.                         33
+        VI  Travel Expenses And Difficulties.            39
+       VII  Journey Stages: Islington: Holloway.         49
+      VIII  Highgate: Dick Whittington.                  53
+        IX  Highgate: Archway.                           57
+         X  Highgate: Footpads.                          61
+        XI  Finchley: Tally-Ho Corner And Common.        65
+       XII  Whetstone: Building Of New Road.             72
+      XIII  Barnet: Prize-Fighting.                      75
+       XIV  Hadley Green: Potter’s Bar: Hatfield.        80
+        XV  Digswell Hill: Welwyn: Knebworth.            87
+       XVI  Stevenage: Posting Charges.                  96
+      XVII  Baldock: Biggleswade: Tempsford.            101
+     XVIII  Some Cycling Records. Eaton Socon.          109
+       XIX  Buckden: Brampton: Matcham’s Bridge.        113
+        XX  Alconbury Hill: Stilton.                    121
+       XXI  Norman Cross: Wansford: Burghley.           129
+      XXII  Stamford: Daniel Lambert.                   145
+     XXIII  Stretton: Bloody Oaks: Ram-Jam Inn.         154
+      XXIV  Travellers.  Some Road History.             164
+       XXV  Coming Of The Railways.                     171
+      XXVI  Witham Common: Great Ponton.                175
+     XXVII  Grantham.                                   180
+    XXVIII  Oliver Cromwell: Gonerby Hill.              188
+      XXIX  Newark: Ringing For Gofer.                  193
+       XXX  North And South Muskham.                    203
+      XXXI  Retford.                                    210
+     XXXII  Barnby Moor: Scrooby.                       213
+    XXXIII  Bawtry: Rossington Bridge.                  222
+     XXXIV  Tophall: Doncaster: St. Leger.              226
+      XXXV  Askerne: Brayton: Selby.                    235
+     XXXVI  Riccall: Invaders: York.                    242
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+To the North in the Days of Old: Mails starting           Frontispiece
+from the General Post Office, Lombard Street
+Old and New Swan Nicks: Vintners’ Company                           16
+Modern Sign of the “Swan with Two Necks”                            17
+The “Spread Eagle,” Gracechurch Street                              19
+The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill                                     23
+The Mails starting from the General Post Office,                    27
+1832
+The “Louth Mail” stopped by the snow                                43
+Entrance to London from Islington, 1809                             47
+Islington Green, 1820                                               50
+Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897                               63
+The Great Common of Finchley: A Parlous Place                       67
+Turpin’s Oak                                                        70
+“The Whetstone”                                                     72
+High Street, Barnet                                                 77
+Hadley Green: Site of the Battle of Barnet                          81
+Old Toll House, Potter’s Bar                                        82
+Ganwick Corner                                                      83
+Bell Bar                                                            84
+Welwyn                                                              89
+The “Six Hills,” Stevenage                                          95
+Trigg’s Coffin                                                     102
+At the 39th Mile                                                   106
+Biggleswade                                                        108
+Buckden                                                            115
+Matcham’s Bridge                                                   119
+Alconbury Hill: Junction of the Great North Road                   123
+and the North Road
+The “Bell,” Stilton                                                127
+Norman Cross                                                       129
+French Prisoners of War Monument, Norman Cross                     132
+Sculptured Figure, Water Newton Church                             133
+Water Newton Church                                                134
+Edmund Boulter’s Milestone                                         135
+The “Haycock,” Wansford                                            137
+Sign of the “Haycock”                                              138
+Wansford Bridge                                                    139
+Burghley House, by Stamford Town                                   143
+Entrance to Stamford                                               147
+Stamford                                                           151
+Daniel Lambert                                                     152
+The “Highflyer,” 1840                                              155
+Bloody Oaks                                                        157
+Interior of a Village Inn                                          159
+House, formerly the “Black Bull,” Witham Common                    163
+Foster Powell                                                      168
+Great Ponton                                                       177
+Great Ponton Church                                                179
+The “Angel,” Grantham                                              182
+The “Wondrous Sign”                                                187
+Newark Castle                                                      195
+Market Place, Newark                                               199
+Newark Castle                                                      201
+Jockey House                                                       210
+An Old Postboy: John Blagg                                         212
+Scrooby Church                                                     216
+Scrooby Manor House                                                217
+The Stables, Scrooby Manor House                                   220
+The “Crown,” Bawtry                                                224
+Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse                                 229
+Brayton Church                                                     237
+Market Place, Selby                                                239
+Micklegate Bar                                                     245
+Micklegate Bar: Present Day                                        246
+
+                        [Picture: Old steam train]
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+THERE was once an American who, with cheap wit, expressed a fear of
+travelling in the little island of Great Britain, lest he should
+accidentally fall over the edge of so small a place.  It is quite evident
+that he never travelled the road from London to York and Edinburgh.
+
+You have to perform that journey to realise that this is, after all, not
+so very small an island.  It is not enough to have been wafted between
+London and Edinburgh by express train—even although the wafting itself
+takes seven hours and a half—for one to gain a good idea of the distance.
+We will not take into consideration the total mileage between Dover and
+Cape Wrath, which tots up to the formidable figure of eight hundred miles
+or so, but will confine ourselves in these pages to the great road
+between London and Edinburgh: to the Great North Road, in fact, which
+measures, by way of York, three hundred and ninety-three miles.
+
+There are a North Road and a Great North Road.  Like different forms of
+religious belief, by which their several adherents all devoutly hope to
+win to that one place where we all would be, these two roads eventually
+lead to one goal, although they approach it by independent ways.  The
+North Road is the oldest, based as it is partly on the old Roman Ermine
+Way which led to Lincoln.  It is measured from Shoreditch Church, and
+goes by Kingsland to Tottenham and Enfield, and so by Waltham Cross to
+Cheshunt, Ware, and Royston, eventually meeting the Great North Road
+after passing through Caxton and climbing Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight
+miles from London.
+
+The Great North Road takes a very different route out of London.  It was
+measured from Hicks’s Hall, Smithfield, and, passing the “Angel” at
+Islington, pursued a straight and continually ascending course for
+Holloway and Highgate, going thence to Barnet, Hatfield, Welwyn,
+Stevenage, Biggleswade, and Buckden to Alconbury; where, as just
+remarked, the North Road merged into it.  From London to Hadley Green,
+just beyond Barnet, the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road are
+identical.
+
+In these volumes we shall consistently keep to the Great North Road;
+starting, however, as the record-making cyclists of late years have done,
+from the General Post-office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, to or from which,
+or the neighbouring old inns, the coaches of the historic past came and
+went.
+
+We travel with a light heart: our forbears with dismal forebodings,
+leaving duly-executed and attested wills behind them.  In the
+comparatively settled times of from a hundred to two hundred years ago,
+they duly returned, after many days: in earlier periods the home-coming
+was not so sure a thing.
+
+These considerations serve to explain to the tourist and the cyclist, who
+travel for the love of change and the desire for beautiful scenery, why
+no one in the Middle Ages travelled from choice.  From the highest to the
+lowest, from the king in his palace to the peasant in his wattled hut,
+every one who could do so stayed at home, and only faced the roads from
+sheer necessity.  No one appreciated scenery in those days; nor are our
+ancestors to be blamed for their shortcomings in this respect, for
+outside every man’s door lurked some danger or another, and when a man’s
+own fireside is the only safe place he knows of, it is apt to appear to
+him the most beautiful and the most desirable of spots.
+
+We cannot say whether the Romans appreciated scenery.  If a love of the
+wildly beautiful in nature is dependent upon the safety of those who
+behold it, and upon the ease with which those scenes are visited, perhaps
+only the later generations of Roman colonists could have possessed this
+sense.  The earlier Romans who made their splendid system of roads were,
+doubtless, only military men, and, well aware of their dangers, found
+nothing beautiful in mountain ranges.  Their successors, however, during
+four hundred years had leisure and plentiful opportunities of cultivating
+taste, and travel was highly organised among them.  A milliare, or
+milestone, was placed at every Roman mile—4854 English feet—and
+“mansiones,” or posting-stations, at distances varying from seven to
+twenty miles.
+
+Roman roads were scientifically constructed.  The following was the
+formula:—
+
+      I.  Pavimentum, or foundation.  Fine earth, hard beaten in.
+     II.  Statumen, or bed of the road.  Composed of large stones,
+          sometimes mixed with mortar.
+    III.  Ruderatio.  Small stones, well mixed with mortar.
+     IV.  Nucleus.  Formed by mixing lime, chalk, pounded brick, or
+          tile; or gravel, sand, and lime mixed with clay.
+      V.  Summum Dorsum.  Surface of the paved road.
+
+So thoroughly well was the work done that remains of these roads are even
+now discovered, in a perfect condition, although buried from six to
+fifteen feet, or even deeper, beneath the present surface of the land,
+owing to the hundreds of years of neglect which followed the abandonment
+of Britain, and the decay of Roman civilisation; a neglect which allowed
+storms and the gradual effects of the weather to accumulate deposits of
+earth upon these paved ways until they were made to disappear as
+effectually as Pompeii and Herculaneum under the hail of ashes and lava
+that hid those cities from view for eighteen hundred years.
+
+When that great people, the Romans, perished off the face of the earth,
+and none succeeded them, their roads began to decay, their bridges and
+paved fords were broken down or carried away by floods, and the rulers of
+the nation were for over five hundred years too busily engaged in
+subduing rebellions at home or in prosecuting wars abroad to attend to
+the keeping of communications in proper repair.  Social disorder, too,
+destroyed roads and bridges that had survived natural decay and the
+stress of the elements.  Even those roads which existed in otherwise good
+condition were only fair-weather highways.  They were innocent of
+culverts, and consequently the storm-water, which nowadays is carried off
+beneath them, swept across the surface, and either carried it away or
+remained in vast lakes on whose shores wayfarers shivered until the
+floods had abated.  Thieves and murderers were the commonplaces of the
+roads, and signposts were not; so that guides—who at the best were
+expensive, and at the worst were the accomplices of cutthroats, and lured
+the traveller to their haunts—were absolutely necessary.
+
+To the relief of travellers in those times came the Church, for the civil
+and secular power had not begun even to dream of road-making.  The Church
+did some very important things for travellers, praying for them, and
+adjuring the devout to include them in their prayers for prisoners and
+captives, the sick, and others in any way distressed.  The very word
+“travel” derives from _travail_, meaning labour or hardship.  This alone
+shows how much to be pitied were those whose business took them from
+their own firesides.
+
+But to pray for them alone would not perhaps have been so very admirable,
+and so the Church took the care of the roads on itself in a very special
+sense.  It granted indulgences to those who by their gifts or their
+bodily labour helped to repair the highways, and licensed hermits to
+receive tolls and alms from travellers over roads and bridges constructed
+by the brethren, those revenues going towards the upkeep of the ways.
+Benefactors to the Church frequently left lands and houses, whose
+proceeds were to be applied for the same purpose; and for many years this
+trust was respected, and all the road and bridge building and repairing
+was done by the religious.  By degrees, however, this trust was, if not
+betrayed, allowed to gradually fall into neglect.  False hermits set up
+in remote places, away from the eyes of the bishops, and living idle and
+dissolute lives on the alms they received, allowed roads and bridges
+alike to fall into decay.  These vicious, unlicensed hermits were great
+stumbling-blocks to the godly in those times.  They were often peasants
+or workmen, who had observed how fat and idle a living was that gained by
+those among the licensed who had betrayed their trust and fared
+sumptuously on alms unearned, and so went and set up in the eremitical
+profession for themselves.  They fared well on bacon, had “fat chekus,”
+toasted themselves before roaring fires in their too comfortable cells,
+and lived “in ydelnesse and ese,” frequenting ale-houses and even worse
+places.  Accordingly many of them were eventually removed, or suffered
+various punishments, and the neighbouring monasteries placed others in
+their stead.
+
+By this time, however, the bishops and abbots, whose broad acres had
+often come to them in trust for the welfare of the traveller, began to
+forget their obligations.  It was, of course, a natural process: the
+possessions of the religious houses had grown enormously, but so also had
+their hospitality to all and sundry.  Travellers had increased, and as it
+was a rule of conduct with the great abbeys to not only relieve the poor,
+but also to entertain the great in those days before the rise of the
+roadside hostelry, their resources must have been well exercised.
+Meanwhile the statutes of the country had gradually been imposing the
+care of the roads upon the laity, and at the time when the greater and
+lesser monasteries were dissolved, in the reign of Henry the Eighth,
+parishes and landowners were chiefly concerned in endeavouring to comply
+with their new and strange obligations in keeping their ways passable.
+Of course they did not succeed, and equally of course, because it was
+impossible that they could, the pains and penalties threatened for foul
+and dangerous roads were not enforced.
+
+A curious pamphlet on the condition of the roads in the seventeenth
+century is that written by Thomas Mace, one of the “clerks” of Trinity
+College, Cambridge, and published in 1675.  Mace, there is no doubt, was
+a man born out of his time.  Had circumstances been propitious, he might
+have become another and an earlier Macadam.  His pamphlet, written both
+in prose and verse, and addressed to the king, is styled _The Profit_,
+_Conveniency_, _and Pleasure for the Whole Nation_, and is “a Discourse
+lately presented to His Majesty concerning the Highways of England; their
+badness, the causes thereof, the reasons of these causes, the
+impossibility of ever having them well mended according to the old way of
+mending; but may most certainly be done, and for ever so maintained
+(according to this New Way) substantially, and with very much ease.”
+
+We find here, as in other publications until the mid-eighteenth century
+was well past, that the country was for the most part unenclosed, so that
+when the traffic had worn the old tracks into deep ruts, or when mud had
+rendered them impassable, the wagons, carts, and laden horses were taken
+round by the nearest firm spots.  “Much ground,” says our author, “is now
+spoiled and trampled down in all wide roads, where coaches and carts take
+liberty to pick and chuse for their best advantages; besides, such
+sprawling and straggling of coaches and carts utterly confound the road
+in all wide places, so that it is not only unpleasurable, but extremely
+perplexing and cumbersome both to themselves and to all horse
+travellers.”
+
+These pickings and choosings were the original cause of the still
+existing twists and turns in many of our roads.  When we see an old road
+winding snake-like through a flat country, with no hills or other obvious
+reasons for its circuitous course, we may, in most cases, safely
+attribute this apparent indecision and infirmity of purpose to these
+ancient difficulties, thus perpetuated.
+
+This ancient state of things occasioned many disputes and even fatal
+affrays between the packhorse men, who carried goods slung across their
+horses’ backs from one part of the country to the other, and between the
+market-folk and those who travelled on horseback and coaches.  Mace would
+himself seem to have experienced some of these contentions as to who
+should take the clean and who the muddy part of the road, for he writes
+with great bitterness about “these disturbances, daily committed by
+uncivil, refractory, and rude, Russianlike rake-shames, in contesting for
+the way.”
+
+“Hundreds of pack-horses,” he continues, “panniers, whifflers, coaches,
+wagons, wains, carts, or whatsoever others,” fought and schemed for
+precedence; and a horseman, his horse already exhausted by a long and
+tedious journey, might, at the entrance to a town, especially on market
+day, be compelled to go out of his way twenty times in one mile, owing to
+the peevishness of these whifflers and market-folk.  “I have often known
+many travellers,” he continues, “and myself very often, to have been
+necessitated to stand stock still behind a standing cart or wagon, on
+most beastly and unsufferable wet wayes, to the great endangering of our
+horses and neglect of public business: nor durst we adventure to stirr
+(for most imminent danger of those deep rutts and unreasonable ridges)
+till it has pleased Mr. Carter to jog on, which we have taken very
+kindly.”
+
+His plan was to once get the roads in good repair, and then, he says,
+with the employment of “day men” to every five miles or so, they could be
+easily kept in order.  The prospect induces him to rise to poetry:
+
+    “First, let the ways be regularly brought
+    To artificial form, and truly wrought;
+    So that we can suppose them firmly mended,
+    And in all needful points, the work well ended,
+    That not a stone’s amiss; but all complete,
+    All lying smooth, round, firm, and wondrous neat.”
+
+So far good.  But then comes the heavy traffic to destroy the good work:
+
+    “Then comes a gang of heavy-laden wains
+    Of carts and wagons, spoiling all our pains.”
+
+But he is ready for this.  His proposed “day men” by at once filling up
+the ruts would make the damage good.  All these things he commends to the
+notice of his Majesty with the concluding lines:
+
+    “There’s only one thing yet worth thinking on,
+    Which is, to put this work in execution.”
+
+That it was _not_ “put into execution” is a matter of history.
+
+We have seen that Mace calls the road to Scotland a “highway,” and the
+terms “highroad” or “highway” are common enough; but what really is a
+highroad? or rather, how did the term originate?  Such a road is usually
+understood to be a main artery of traffic between important towns, but
+that was not precisely the original meaning, which indicated the physical
+character of the road rather than its geographical status.  “High roads”
+were originally in fact, causeways constructed across, and above the
+level of, marshes and low-lying lands, and the term was therefore
+excellently descriptive.  The changed meaning no doubt arose from the
+fact that, as it would scarcely ever have been worth while to build
+embanked roads for the purpose of connecting obscure villages out of the
+way of trade, consequently the “high ways” and the “high roads” only came
+into existence between important centres.  But this highly specialised
+meaning was destroyed when Turnpike Acts and Highway Acts began to be
+passed.  The first Turnpike Act, one relating to the road to the North,
+referred to the Shoreditch, Stamford Hill, Ware, and Royston route, which
+joined the Great North Road at Alconbury Hill.  It was passed in 1663,
+and authorised a toll-gate at Stilton, among other places.  In the
+preamble to this Act we find the road spoken of as “the ancient highway
+and post-road leading from London to York and so into Scotland.”  Later
+Acts providing for the collection of tolls on the main roads and for the
+formation of Turnpike Trusts, whose business it was to collect those
+tolls and with them keep the “turnpike” roads in repair, named them
+“turnpike roads”; while other legislation, culminating in the General
+Highway Act of William the Fourth, perpetrated a delightful paradox by
+especially designating by-roads “highways.”  The cardinal difference, in
+the eyes of the law, was that a turnpike road was a main line of
+communication, to be maintained in proper order throughout its length by
+taxes collected from the users of the road; while highways were only
+local roads for local use and to be maintained by the respective parishes
+in which they were situated.  The ways in which these parish roads were
+kept in repair were sufficiently curious.  “Statute labour” preceded
+highway rates, and was so called from a statute of Philip and Mary
+providing for parish road-surveyors, and for men, horses, carts, and
+materials to be supplied by the farmers at their orders, for repairs.
+“Statute labour” survived in a fashion until the passing of the General
+Highway Act of 1835, when it was wholly superseded by rates.  In later
+days parishes united and formed Highway Boards, just as they formed Poor
+Law Unions; and choosing a surveyor, levied a common highway rate.  These
+surveyors were not always, nor often, competent men.  They were, in fact,
+generally elected by the Boards or the Vestries from some necessitous
+inhabitants little above the status of the broken-down old men who were
+paid a trifle to break or spread stones in order to keep them from being
+burdens to the parish in the workhouse.  These surveyors were appointed
+and work done in fear of the parishes being indicted and heavily fined
+for the dangerous condition of their roads, but it is obvious that they
+must have been very badly repaired in those times.  Nowadays the roads
+are all highways, since the turnpikes have been abolished, and their
+repair, outside the boroughs, is the business of the County Councils.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+BEFORE Macadam and Telford appeared upon the scene, the office of
+road-surveyor was very generally looked down upon.  No self-respecting
+engineer, before the time of these great men, condescended to have
+anything to do with roads.  It is true that a forerunner of Macadam and
+Telford had appeared in Yorkshire in 1765, when “Blind Jack of
+Knaresborough” began the construction of the Boroughbridge and Harrogate
+road, the first of the long series for which he contracted; but he was
+not an official road-surveyor, nor by profession an engineer.  He was, in
+fact, an engineer born and wholly untaught.
+
+John Metcalf, the famous blind roadmaker, was born in 1717, and lost his
+eyesight at six years of age.  A native of Knaresborough, he filled in
+his time many parts; being fiddler, huckster, soldier, carrier,
+proprietor of the first stage-wagon between York and Knaresborough, and
+road and bridge maker and contractor by turns.  The marvellous instinct
+which served him instead of sight is scarce credible, but is well
+authenticated.  He joined Thornton’s company of Yorkshire volunteers
+raised at Boroughbridge to meet the Scots rebels in the ’45, and marched
+with them and played them into action at Falkirk.  His marvellous
+adventures have no place here, but his solitary walk from London to
+Harrogate in 1741 concerns the Great North Road.  Being in London, and
+returning at the same time, Colonel Liddell of Harrogate offered Blind
+Jack a seat behind his carriage, which Metcalf declined, saying that he
+could easily walk as far in a day as the colonel could go in his carriage
+with post-horses.  This incidentally shows us how utterly vile the roads
+were at the time.  Metcalf, although blind and unused to the road, having
+travelled up to London by sea, walked back, and easily reached Harrogate
+before the colonel, who posted all the way.
+
+Liddell, who had an escort of sixteen mounted servants, started an hour
+later than Metcalf.  It had been arranged that they should meet that
+night at Welwyn, but, a little beyond Barnet, on Hadley Green, where the
+roads divide, Metcalf took the left hand, or Holyhead, road by mistake
+and went a long distance before he discovered his mistake.  Still he
+arrived at Welwyn first.  The next day he was balked at Biggleswade by
+the river, which was in flood, and with no bridge to cross by.
+Fortunately, after wandering some distance along the banks, he met a
+stranger who led the way across a plank bridge.  When they had crossed,
+Metcalf offered him some pence for a glass of beer, which his guide
+declined, saying he was welcome.  Metcalf, however, pressed it upon him.
+
+“Pray, can you see very well?” asked the stranger.
+
+“Not very well,” replied Blind Jack.
+
+“God forbid I should tithe you,” said his guide.  “I am the rector of
+this parish; so God bless you, and I wish you a good journey.”
+
+In the end, Metcalf reached Harrogate two days before the colonel.
+
+Metcalf made many roads around Knaresborough and in different parts of
+Yorkshire, but none actually on the Great North Road.  He died, aged
+ninety-three, in 1810, five years before Macadam and Telford began their
+work upon the roads.  Like them, he rather preferred boggy ground for
+road-making, and forestalled both them and Stephenson in adopting fagots
+as foundations over mires.  At that time the ignorant surveyors of roads
+repaired them with dirt scraped from ditches and water-courses, in which
+they embedded the first cartloads of stones which came to hand; stone of
+all kinds and all sizes.  This done, their “repairs” were completed, with
+the result that the roads were frequently as bad as ever and constantly
+in the most rugged condition.  Roads—it may be news to the
+uninstructed—cannot be made with dirt.  In fact, a good road through
+anything but rock is generally excavated, and the native earth being
+removed, its place is taken by coarse-broken granite or rock; this in its
+turn receiving a layer of “macadam,” or smaller broken granite or
+whinstone, which is finally bound together by a sprinkling of red gravel,
+of the kind known by builders as “hoggin,” whose binding qualities are
+caused by a slight natural admixture of clay.  In his insistence upon
+broken stones, Macadam proved a power of observation not possessed by the
+generality of road-makers, whose method was the haphazard one of strewing
+any kind upon the road and trusting in the traffic to pack them.  With
+rounded pebbles or gravel stones thus chafing against one another, they
+never packed into a solid mass, but remained for all time as unstable as
+a shingly beach.  Generations of road-making had not taught wisdom, but
+Macadam perceived the readiness of the angularities in broken stones to
+unite and form a homogeneous mass, and in introducing his system proved
+himself unwittingly a man of science, for science has in these later days
+discovered that ice is compacted by the action of ice-crystals uniting in
+exactly this manner.
+
+A great scheme for laying out the whole of the Great North Road between
+London and Edinburgh on a scientific basis was in progress when the
+successful trial of the competing locomotives at Rainhill, near
+Liverpool, cast a warning shadow over the arrangements, and finally led
+to the project being entirely abandoned.  Had the work been done, it is
+quite possible that the railways to the north would have taken another
+direction; that, in fact, instead of land having to be surveyed and
+purchased for them, the new, straight, and level road would have been
+given up to and largely used by the railways.  Telford was the engineer
+chosen by the Government to execute this work, of which the portion
+between Morpeth and Edinburgh was actually constructed.  The survey of
+the road between London, York, and Morpeth was begun as early as 1825,
+and had been not only completed, but the works on the eve of being
+started, when the Rainhill trials in 1829 stopped them short, and caused
+the utter waste of the public money spent in the surveying.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+IT were vain, nowadays, to seek any of the old starting-points from
+London.  The late Mr. Frederick Locker-Lampson asked in 1896, “Are ‘The
+Bull and Mouth,’ ‘The Spread Eagle,’ The Swan with Two Necks,’ and ‘The
+Green Man and Still,’ yet in existence?”  With some little research he
+would have discovered that—with the sole exception of the last-named—they
+are not.  The “Bull and Mouth” in later years became the “Queen’s Hotel,”
+and was demolished only when the site was required for an extension of
+the General Post Office in 1887.  At the same time as the “Queen’s”
+disappeared, the street at the side of it, called from the old inn “Bull
+and Mouth Street,” was stopped up.  In this street was the entrance to
+the famous old coaching-stables which were in the last years of their
+existence used as a railway receiving-office for goods.  On their being
+pulled down, the grotesque plaster sign, representing a giant face with
+yawning mouth in which stood a bull, was removed to the Guildhall Museum,
+where it may still be seen, together with the yet larger and more
+elaborate sign which decorated the frontage of the “Queen’s.”  This also
+included a mouth and a bull, set amidst a frame of plaster fruits and
+flowers, with the inscription:—
+
+    “Milo the Cretonian,
+    An ox slew with his fist,
+    And ate it up at one meal,
+    Ye gods! what a glorious twist.”
+
+The origin, however, of the curious sign had nothing to do with this
+hungry person.  Precisely what was that origin is never likely to be
+known; for although the legend that it derived from the capture of
+“Boulogne Mouth”—_i.e._ Boulogne Harbour—in the reign of Henry the Eighth
+is in general acceptation, it has been shrewdly suspected that this was a
+tale wickedly invented by George Steevens, a literary practical joker,
+who palmed off many similar stories upon unsuspecting antiquaries at the
+end of last century.  A perhaps more likely story is that the sign was
+originally the “Bowl and Mouth.”
+
+Under Sherman’s rule the “Bull and Mouth” became a mighty resort of
+coaches to and from all parts, but more especially the north, and his
+underground stables formed one of the sights of London.
+
+Edward Sherman was a man of many parts, and had a varied career.
+Originally a stockbroker, he followed Willans at the “Bull and Mouth” in
+1823, and rebuilt it as the “Queen’s” in 1830, continuing the stables
+under the old name, and eventually reconstructing them.  The money for
+these enterprises came from three old and wealthy ladies whom he married
+in succession.  If the stranger, unversed in the build and colour of
+coaches, could not pick out the somewhat old-fashioned, bright-yellow
+vehicles as Sherman’s, he was helped in identifying them by the pictorial
+sign of the inn painted on the panels—rather a startling one, by the way,
+to the rustics.  Sherman, however, had not the prescience of Chaplin or
+of Horne, who clearly foresaw the success of railways, and he kept his
+coaches on the roads for some time after they were opened to their
+destinations.  He was sufficiently ill-advised not to come to terms with
+the railway companies, and actually attempted, with the “Red Rover,” to
+run the Manchester trains off.  Of course this could not last very long,
+and Sherman withdrew after having lost seven thousand pounds in a
+gallant, but futile, competition with steam.
+
+In its prime the “Bull and Mouth” sent forth the Edinburgh and Aberdeen
+Royal Mail by York; the Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen coach by
+Ferry-bridge to Newcastle, where the Glasgow passengers changed; the
+Glasgow and Carlisle Royal Mail; the Newcastle “Wellington”; Shrewsbury
+and Holyhead “Union” and “Oxonian”; Birmingham “Old Post Coach” and
+“Aurora”; Leeds Royal Mail and “Express”; and Leicester “Union Post
+Coach.”
+
+The site of the “Swan with Two Necks” is now occupied by the London and
+North-Western and South-Western Joint Goods Depot, in Gresham Street.
+Modern sculptured keystones may be seen over the entrances, bearing the
+effigy of a double-headed swan.  This sign, like that of the “Bull and
+Mouth,” is a corruption of a widely different term; originally, indeed,
+the “Swan with Two Nicks,” from the particular “nicks” with which the
+bills of the swans belonging to the Vintners’ Company on the Thames were
+marked.  The City Companies each had their swans on the river, and even
+nowadays they are maintained on the upper reaches.  The young cygnets
+were marked at the annual festival of “swan-upping,” at which the City
+magnates used hugely to enjoy themselves.  The old and the new “nicks” of
+the Vintners’ Company are pictured here.
+
+[Picture: Old And New Swan Nicks] So far back as 1556, the “Swane with ij
+Nekes at Mylke Street End” was known, and was then the property of the
+Vintners.  In the coaching era it is best remembered as the headquarters
+of the great William Chaplin’s huge coaching business.  Chaplin succeeded
+William Waterhouse, who had established himself here in 1792, issuing a
+curious token bearing the representation of a mail-coach on one side and
+that of the Double-Necked Swan on the other, with the legend, “Speed,
+Regularity, and Security.  Payable at the Mail Coach Office, Lad Lane,
+London, W.W.”
+
+Lad Lane was until recent years the name by which this part of Gresham
+Street was known, while the inn itself was generally called by the
+coaching fraternity the “Wonderful Bird.”
+
+Chaplin had in early days been a coachman himself.  His career would have
+delighted that sturdy moralist, Hogarth, painter of the successful career
+of the Industrious Apprentice, for from that useful but humble position
+he rose to be the largest coach-proprietor in England, Deputy-Chairman of
+the London and Southampton (now London and South-Western) Railway, and
+Member of Parliament for Salisbury.  He is said to have accumulated half
+a million of money.  Twenty-seven mails left London every night, and of
+these Chaplin horsed fourteen for various distances.  Very many
+stage-coaches were in his hands, and at the height of the coaching era he
+is said to have owned nearly two thousand horses.  He was an entirely
+level-headed man, and, seeing at an early stage that railways must
+succeed, threw in his lot with them.  Railway directors were exceedingly
+anxious to win over the coaching proprietors, and to induce them to
+withdraw from the road, so that with no coaches running the public should
+of necessity, whether they liked it or not, be compelled to travel by
+rail.  Chaplin sold off his stock before the oncoming railways
+depreciated it, and, joining Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the “Golden
+Cross,” Charing Cross, founded the great carrying firm of Chaplin and
+Horne, which enjoyed the exclusive agency for the London and Birmingham
+Railway.  There can be little doubt, although it was denied by the early
+officials of that line, that Chaplin and Horne were really bought off the
+road, and the sum of £10,000 has been mentioned as the price of their
+withdrawal.  Before that time had come, coaches issued from Chaplin’s
+yard for many places on the north-western roads: the Carlisle Royal Mail;
+the Birmingham Royal Mail, “Courier,” and “Balloon Post Coach”; the
+Chester “New Coach”; Coventry “Light Post Coach”; Liverpool Royal Mail;
+Holyhead “New Mail” and a stage-coach without any particular name; and
+the Manchester Royal Mail, “Defiance,” “Regulator,” and “Prince
+Saxe-Cobourg.”  The “Spread Eagle” in Gracechurch Street has also
+disappeared.  It was at one time a house of Chaplin’s, and was afterwards
+owned in succession, together with the “Cross Keys” next door, by Mrs.
+Nelson and Mrs. Mountain.
+
+           [Picture: Modern sign of the “Swan with Two Necks”]
+
+The “Green Man and Still,” the last of the quartet of inns inquired after
+by Mr. Locker-Lampson, is the only one now standing, and may be seen at
+the corner of Oxford and Argyll Streets, close by Oxford Circus.  It was
+not a coaching hostelry in the fullest sense, being only a place of call
+for the Oxford “Age,” and for the Harrow and other north-westerly “short
+stages,” running between London and the suburbs.  It is now a railway
+receiving-office.  This curious sign probably alludes to the old
+profession of the “herb-doctors,” who distilled medicines from wild or
+cultivated herbs.  There were other inns whence Great North Road coaches
+set out, but they have all vanished.  The “George and Blue Boar,”
+Holborn, whence the famous “Stamford Regent” started, has long since been
+pulled down, and the “Inns of Court Hotel” stood on its site.  The hotel
+building remains, but about 1912 it ceased to be a hotel, and has since
+been converted into offices for an Insurance Company.  The “Regent”
+originally left London at six o’clock in the evening, but in 1822 the
+hour was altered to six in the morning, an unearthly time for those who
+had to go some distance to reach Holborn, and necessitating, perhaps,
+getting up at three o’clock.  The announcement by the proprietors that
+this alteration was for the “more perfect convenience” of their patrons
+seems ironical:—
+
+                          SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
+                                 From London.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+                              THE PROPRIETORS OF
+                               THE REGENT COACH
+
+    Respectfully inform the public and their friends in particular, that,
+    for their more perfect convenience, and to keep pace with the daily
+    improvements in travelling, the hour of its leaving London will be
+    altered on Monday, the 13th of May (and continued during the summer
+    months),
+
+                        TO SIX O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING,
+                             _Instead of Night_.
+
+    The arrangements that are forming in furtherance of this long-desired
+    alteration will ensure a steady and punctual conveyance of Passengers
+    to Stamford by a Quarter before Six o’clock, and to Melton by a
+    Quarter before Nine o’clock in the Evening.
+
+    The hours of leaving Melton and Stamford will NOT be altered.
+
+    The proprietors take this opportunity to acknowledge their sense of
+    the decided patronage shown to the REGENT COACH under their several
+    regulations, and to repeat their promise that no exertion shall be
+    wanting to make it one of the most desirable conveyances to and from
+    London.
+
+    Passengers and Parcels booked at Mr. Weldon’s, and the Bull and Swan
+    Inn, Stamford; and at Mr. Sharp’s, Bell Inn, Melton.—_Stamford_,
+    _May_ 1, 1822.
+
+            [Picture: The “Spread Eagle,” Gracechurch Street]
+
+The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, which must not he confounded with the
+other and equally celebrated “Saracen’s Head” in Aldgate High Street, was
+another very notable coaching establishment, and a galleried inn of
+picturesqueness and antiquity.  Alas! that it has long since disappeared.
+Its history went back beyond the fifteenth century, and a reference made
+to it in 1522, when the suite of the Emperor Charles the Fifth lay here,
+speaks of the house as of some importance:—“The signe of the Sersyns hed:
+xxx beddes, a stable for xl horses.”
+
+The sign, of course deriving from the Crusades, itself gives the inn a
+very high antiquity.  It was a sign of a gruesome and savage aspect, and
+had its origin in the pictures the returning Crusaders drew of their
+adversaries.  As Selden says:—“Our countrymen pictured them with huge,
+big, terrible faces, when in truth they were like other men.  But this,”
+he adds slyly, “they did for their own credits.”  The inn owed its later
+celebrity to Dickens, who made it the London inn of Mr. Squeers.  Thus he
+describes it:—“Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield,
+on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastward
+seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney
+cabriolets going westward not unfrequently fall by accident, is the
+coachyard of the Saracen’s Head Inn; its portal guarded by two Saracens’
+heads and shoulders frowning upon you from each side of the gateway.  The
+inn itself, garnished with another Saracen’s head, frowns upon you from
+the top of the yard.  When you walk up this yard you will see the
+booking-office on your left and the tower of St. Sepulchre’s Church
+darting abruptly up into the sky on your right, and a gallery of bedrooms
+upon both sides.”
+
+There is a “Saracen’s Head” on Snow Hill to this day, but it is a modern
+building.  From the old house went the “Lord Nelson,” York, Newcastle,
+and Edinburgh coach; the “Post,” despite its name, a slow-coach, for
+Carlisle and Penrith, by Doncaster, Ferrybridge, and Greta Bridge,
+doubtless the one by which Mr. Wackford Squeers took his “dear pupils” to
+Dotheboys Hall; and coaches to Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham,
+and Shrewsbury, besides others for the western roads.  The “Saracen’s
+Head” was kept by Mrs. Mountain, in succession to her husband and her
+husband’s father.  Her son, Peter, managed the business for her, but it
+must not be supposed that she took no active part in it.  To the
+contrary, Mrs. Sarah Ann Mountain, like her contemporary, Mrs. Nelson, of
+the “Bull,” Aldgate, possessed the most brilliant business capacity.  She
+built coaches, as well as horsing them, and earned a profit by charging
+her partners down the road the mileage which in the usual course of
+business would have been paid over to a coach-builder.  There was no more
+expressive sight in the London of the beginning of the nineteenth century
+than the simultaneous starting of the mails every evening from the
+General Post Office.  Londoners and country-cousins alike were never
+weary of the spectacle of the smart coaches, the business-like coachmen,
+and the resplendent, scarlet-coated guards preparing to travel through
+the night, north, south, east, or west, with his Majesty’s mails.  Even
+the passengers shone with a reflected glory, and felt important as, one
+after the other, the twenty-seven mails began at the stroke of eight
+o’clock to move off from the double file that lined the street.
+
+                [Picture: The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill]
+
+That street was not the broad thoroughfare of St. Martin’s-le-Grand, but
+the narrow one of Lombard Street, in which the General Post Office was
+situated for many years, until 1829, when what is now called the “old”
+General Post Office, but was then the newly completed building of
+Smirke’s, was occupied.  The old headquarters can still be seen, in the
+Lombard Street Post Office of to-day.  It is from here that the picture
+of the mails starting, forming the frontispiece of this volume, was
+taken.  To our eyes, accustomed to the crowded thoroughfare of modern
+times, the street appears supremely dull and desolate, but that is only a
+retrospective way of looking at it.
+
+Here is a testimony to the beauty of the scene.  It is eloquent
+testimony, for it is De Quincey’s:—“On any night the spectacle was
+beautiful.  The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the
+carriages and the harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness,
+their beautiful simplicity—but, more than all, the royal magnificence of
+the horses—were what might first have fixed the attention.  Every
+carriage, on every morning of the year, was taken down to an official
+inspector for examination—wheels, axles, linchpins, poles, glasses,
+lamps, were all critically probed and tested.  Every part of every
+carriage had been cleaned, every horse had been groomed, with as much
+rigour as if they belonged to a private gentleman; and that part of the
+spectacle offered itself always. . . .  Every moment are shouted aloud by
+the post-office servants, and summoned to draw up, the great ancestral
+names of cities known to history through a thousand years—Lincoln,
+Winchester, Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York,
+Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling, Aberdeen—expressing the
+grandeur of the empire by the antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of
+the mail establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate
+missions.  Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked down upon the
+mail-bags.  That sound to each individual mail is the signal for drawing
+off, which process is the finest part of the entire spectacle.  Then came
+the horses into play.  Horses!  Can these be horses that bound off with
+the action and gestures of leopards?  What stir! what sea-like ferment!
+what a thundering of wheels! what a trampling of hoofs! what a sounding
+of trumpets!”
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+NOW for Post Office history.  Much has been made at the “old” General
+Post Office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand; and although the building was not
+in existence until 1829, it has sent forth and received many
+mail-coaches.  Its disappearance in 1912, we say, therefore severs the
+last link by which this busy quarter was connected with the old days.
+
+     [Picture: The Mails starting from the General Post Office, 1832]
+
+The story of the Post Office goes back long before the G.P.O. was
+situated either here or at Lombard Street.  The original Post Office was
+off Eastcheap.  When it was there, the course of post between London and
+Edinburgh took three days.  The first regular service was established in
+1635, when Charles the First, to end the inefficiency of the
+communications between the two capitals, inaugurated “a running post or
+two, to run night and day, between Edinburgh and London, to go thither
+and come back again in six days.”  We may suppose that this did not work
+very well, for in 1649 we find the city of London establishing a post of
+its own with a regular staff of runners and postmasters between London
+and the North.
+
+But with the Restoration came the establishment of the General Post
+Office and an instantaneous decline in the efficiency of the post, six
+days instead of three being taken for the single journey to or from
+Edinburgh.  This roused the towns on the way to indignant protests, and
+the post was accelerated to “three and a half or four days,” the
+acceleration being slower than the original time.
+
+But however keenly the intermediate towns may have felt this, it could
+not have mattered much to Edinburgh, whose mail-bag was very scanty.  One
+day in 1745, we are told, the mail brought only one letter, for the
+British Linen Company; and on another day in the same year only one was
+despatched to London, for Sir William Pulteney, the banker.
+
+In 1750 things were no better, but eight years later an Edinburgh
+merchant, George Chalmers, procured an improvement.  Before 1758 the
+Great North Mail set out three times a week and took eighty-seven hours
+in going north, and not fewer than one hundred and thirty-one from
+Edinburgh to London.  This last itinerary was lengthened so greatly in
+time on account of stoppages made at Berwick and at Newcastle, ranging
+from three hours at one to twenty-four at the other.  These delays
+Chalmers, in corresponding with the officials, proved to be quite
+needless.  He also induced them to avoid the old and longer route through
+Thorne and York and to take the alternative road by Boroughbridge, thus
+shortening the journey by twelve miles.  The times were then fixed at
+eighty-two hours for the northward-bound mail, and eighty-five for the
+south.  For his services the Government made Chalmers a grant of £600.
+Some years afterwards he induced the Post Office to run the mails six
+days a week.
+
+But a greater than Chalmers was at hand in Palmer, the organiser of the
+mail-coach service.  Palmer accomplished, according to De Quincey, “two
+things very hard to do on our little planet, the earth, however cheap
+they may be held by eccentric people in comets: he had invented
+mail-coaches, and he had married the daughter of a duke.  He was
+therefore just twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent
+(or, which is the same thing, discover) the satellites of Jupiter, those
+very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital pretensions of
+speed and keeping time; but, on the other hand, who did not marry the
+daughter of a duke.”  Palmer married, in point of fact, Lady Madeline
+Gordon, daughter of the Duke of Richmond, but De Quincey does not lay the
+stress he should have done on his having fought his postal scheme to
+success against the obstinacy and red-tapeism of the Post Office
+officials, itself an enterprise sufficient to daunt any but the stoutest
+heart.  Government officials have a wonderful power of passive resistance
+and an insensibility to argument and proof which might be envied by a
+lamp-post.  It was thought a brilliant rejoinder when one of these Post
+Office dunderheads replied to Palmer’s scheme for supplanting the slow
+and uncertain post-boys by fast coaches with the observation that there
+was no reason why the post should be the swiftest conveyance in England!
+No doubt this witty gentleman resigned in an access of mortification when
+Palmer actually succeeded in being appointed Controller-General of the
+Post Office, with a salary of £1,500 a year and a two and a-half per
+cent. commission on a rise of the income above the £240,000 at which it
+stood when he was placed at the head of affairs.  The first mail-coach
+was put upon the Bath Road on the 8th of August 1784, and its success was
+so great and immediate that the chief towns of the kingdom presently
+began to petition for similar facilities to be accorded them.  York was
+the first successful applicant, and a mail was put on the road between
+London, York, and Edinburgh in October of the same year, taking three
+nights and two days to perform the journey.  This was not a very
+remarkable rate of speed, to be sure, but the times were not so hurried
+then.  A greater speed was attained when the roads began to be
+reorganised by Telford and Macadam.  Macadam’s method of metalling the
+existing roads and Telford’s reconstruction of steep and winding highways
+produced great results.  To Macadam was due the greater speeds attained
+at last on the mail route between London and Edinburgh; for, although
+Telford’s improved road was begun in 1824, it was never completed owing
+to the introduction of railways.  Government had, in fact, by this time
+recognised the necessity of good roads, and, fresh from the
+reorganisation of the mail route between London and Holyhead, had
+determined on an improved communication between England and Scotland.
+This road, already referred to, was to be straight and as flat as
+engineering science could contrive it, and a portion—that between
+Edinburgh and Morpeth—was constructed about 1824, going by way of Soutra
+Hill, Lauderdale, Coldstream, and Wooler.  The route between London and
+Morpeth was also surveyed and authorised, and portions between London and
+York actually begun, when the opening of the Stockton and Darlington
+Railway in 1825 convinced the authorities that the days of the road were
+numbered.
+
+But although it was long apparent that a change was impending, coaches
+were not entirely run off the Great North Road for another twenty years,
+and Post Office surveyors were still busy expediting the mails over short
+cuts and roads of more favourable gradients.  Thus in 1832 we find the
+Scotch mail going by way of Selby.  Here is the official time-bill for
+that year:—
+
+MILES
+           LONDON                dep.           8.00 P.M.
+      12½  Waltham Cross         arr.            9.25  ,,
+       22  Ware                   ,,            10.26  ,,
+      35½  Buckland               ,,            11.52  ,,
+      45½  Arrington              ,,           12.57 A.M.
+       60  Huntingdon             ,,             2.30  ,,
+      65¼  Alconbury Hill         ,,             3.03  ,,
+      72¼  Stilton                ,,             3.45  ,,
+       87  Stamford               ,,             5.15  ,,
+       95  Stretton               ,,             6.03  ,,
+     108½  GRANTHAM              arr.            7.23  ,,
+                                 dep.            8.03  ,,
+     115½  Long Bennington       arr.            8.53  ,,
+     122¼  Newark                 ,,             9.30  ,,
+     132¾  Scarthing Moor         ,,            10.34  ,,
+     145½  Barnby Moor            ,,            11.49  ,,
+     155¼  Rossington Bridge      ,,           12.47 P.M.
+     159½  Doncaster              ,,             1.12  ,,
+     166¼  Askerne                ,,             1.55  ,,
+     179¾  Selby                  ,,             3.21  ,,
+      194  YORK                  arr.            4.54  ,,
+                                 dep.            5.34  ,,
+     207¼  Easingwold            arr.            6.54  ,,
+      218  Thirsk                 ,,             7.58  ,,
+      227  Northallerton          ,,             8.52  ,,
+      243  Darlington             ,,            10.28  ,,
+     261½  Durham                 ,,            12.23  ,,
+      276  NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE     arr.            1.50  ,,
+                                 dep.            1.53  ,,
+     290½  Morpeth               arr.            3.22  ,,
+     300½  Felton                 ,,             4.23  ,,
+     309¾  Alnwick                ,,             5.17  ,,
+     324½  BELFORD               arr.            6.47  ,,
+                                 dep.            7.17  ,,
+     329¾  Berwick-on-Tweed      arr.            8.47  ,,
+     353½  Houndswood             ,,            10.09  ,,
+     369¼  Dunbar                 ,,            11.41  ,,
+     380¼  Haddington             ,,           12.45 P.M.
+     397¼  EDINBURGH              ,,             2.23  ,,
+               _Time_—42 hours 23 minutes
+
+The “up” mail was timed considerably slower, 45 hours 39 minutes.
+
+The punctuality of the mails was so great that the Glasgow and the
+Edinburgh mails, which went by Shoreditch and Islington respectively, and
+took different routes as far as Alconbury Hill, where their roads met,
+could always be depended upon to keep the official interval of four
+minutes which divided them at that point.  Their route was identical
+between Alconbury Hill and Doncaster, where the Glasgow mail branched off
+to the left to Ferrybridge and Greta Bridge.
+
+This was the _ne plus ultra_ of Post Office enterprise on the Great North
+Road, and closes an era.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+WE have seen with what extraordinary speed letters were carried in the
+time of Charles the First between London and Edinburgh; but how did folk
+travel?  They rode horseback, from kings, to nobles, and down to
+merchants; princesses, madam, or my lady riding pillion.  Private
+carriages—“coaches,” they were called—had been introduced in 1553, when
+Queen Mary rode in one, as a novelty, from London to Westminster, drawn
+by six horses.  In 1556 Sir Thomas Hoby had one of these strange
+machines, and just because the fact is expressly mentioned we see how
+rare they were.  In fact, they went out of use altogether for a time, and
+were reintroduced by William Boonen, Queen Elizabeth’s Dutch coachman, in
+1564.  On this occasion they came into better favour, and their numbers
+must have greatly increased, for a Bill “to restrain their excessive use”
+was introduced to Parliament, and rejected, in 1601.  But both their make
+and the fearful condition of the roads forbade them being used in the
+country.  Moreover, they had only shutters in place of windows, the first
+“glass coach” being that used by the Duke of York in 1661.
+
+It was in 1658 that the first stage-coach between London and Edinburgh
+was put on the road.  It set out once a fortnight, but the length of the
+whole journey and just what kind of vehicle it was are unknown.  Four
+days, however, and two pounds were consumed in travelling between London
+and York.  The cost of the whole journey was four pounds.
+
+In 1734 things do not seem to have been much better, John Dale
+advertising in the May of that year that a coach would take the road from
+Edinburgh for London “towards the end of each week, to be performed in
+nine days, or three days sooner than any coach that travels that road.”
+After this matters went from bad to worse, and speed was slower twenty
+years later than it had been for a long time.
+
+The _Edinburgh Courant_ of 1754 contained the following advertisement:—
+
+                          THE EDINBURGH STAGE COACH,
+
+    for the better accommodation of passengers, will be altered to a new
+    genteel, two-end, glass coach machine, being on steel springs,
+    exceeding light, and easy to go in ten days in summer and twelve in
+    winter; to set out the
+
+                           FIRST TUESDAY IN MARCH,
+
+    and continue it from HOSEA EASTGATE’S, the COACH AND HORSES in DEAN
+    STREET, SOHO, LONDON, and from JOHN SOMERVILLE’S in the CANONGATE,
+    EDINBURGH, every other Tuesday, and meet at BURROW BRIDGE on Saturday
+    night and set out from thence on Monday morning, and get to LONDON
+    and EDINBURGH on Friday.  In winter to set out from LONDON to
+    EDINBURGH every other (alternate) Monday morning, and to go to BURROW
+    BRIDGE on Saturday night.  Passengers to pay as usual.
+
+                        Performed, if God permits, by
+
+                                                     Your dutiful servant,
+                                                           HOSEA EASTGATE.
+
+Even Hosea Eastgate’s conveyance stands forth as a miracle of swiftness
+and frequency when compared with the coach of 1763, which set out once a
+month and took a _fortnight_, _if the weather was favourable_!  Probably
+this degeneracy of coaches was due to the practice of travellers clubbing
+together to hire a post-chaise for the journey.  This was a plan
+eminently characteristic of the Scottish mind.  It both secured quicker
+travelling and saved expense.  The Edinburgh papers of that time often
+contained advertisements inquiring for a fellow-passenger to share these
+costs and charges.
+
+Edinburgh, as a matter of fact, even now a far cry, was beyond the ken of
+most Londoners in those times, and London was to Edinburgh folks a place
+dimly heard of, and never to be visited, save perhaps once in a lifetime.
+York, half-way, was better known, and was well supplied with coaches.
+The “Black Swan” in Coney Street, York, received and sent forth a
+coach—in after years known as the “York Old Coach”—so early as 1698.
+This appears to have always laid up for the winter and come out again in
+April, like the cuckoo, as a harbinger of spring.  One of these spring
+announcements was discovered, some years since, in an old drawer at the
+“Black Swan.”  It runs:—
+
+                                YORK Four Days
+
+                                 Stage-Coach.
+
+                _Begins on Friday the_ 12_th_ _of April_ 1706.
+
+    ALL that are defirous to pafs from _London_ to _York_, or from York
+    to London, or any other Place on that Road; Let them Repair to the
+    _Black Swan_ in _Holbourn_ in _London_, and to the _Black Swan_ in
+    _Coney Street_ in _York_.
+
+    At both which Places they may be received in a Stage Coach every
+    _Monday_, _Wednefday_, and _Friday_, which performs the whole Journey
+    in Four Days (_if God permits_).  And fets forth at Five in the
+    Morning.
+
+    And returns from _York_ to _Stamford_ in two days, and from
+    _Stamford_ by _Huntingdon_ to _London_ in two days more.  And the
+    like Stages on their return.
+
+    Allowing each Paffenger 14lb. weight, and all above 3d. a Pound.
+
+    Performed By
+
+                                                       _Benjamin Kingman_.
+                                                         _Henry Harrifon_.
+                                                         _Walter Bayne’s_.
+
+    Alfo this gives Notice that Newcaftle Stage Coach fets out from York
+    every Monday and Friday, and from Newcaftle every Monday and Friday.
+
+It is singular that this coach should have had a “Black Swan” at either
+end of its journey.  The London house was in later years the well-known
+“Black Swan Distillery” in Holborn.
+
+To display the many coaches, their names and times of arrival and
+departure in these pages would afford but dull reading.  Besides,
+Paterson and Cary, those encyclopædic old road-books, contain lists of
+them in interminable array: the “Highflyers,” “Rockinghams,” “Unions,”
+“Amitys,” “Defiances,” “Wellingtons,” “Bluchers,” “Nelsons,” “Rodneys,”
+and what not.  There was so extraordinary a run upon these popular names
+that they are often triplicated—and sometimes occur six times—on the
+local and byroad coaches; with the result that if the traveller desired
+to travel by the “Highflyer,” let us say, to Edinburgh, he had to
+carefully sort it out from other “Highflyers” which flew not only to
+Leeds but to all kinds of obscure places.
+
+The early stage-coaches must have been terribly trying.  They were, as
+Byron says of the “kibitka,” “a cursed kind of carriage without springs.”
+As time went on they were not only provided with glass windows, but—as
+duly set forth in the advertisements—were furnished with springs and
+cushions.  The resources of civilisation were not exhausted at this
+point, for it was gravely announced that the guards were armed, and the
+coaches were bullet-proof!
+
+The life of a coach-proprietor was all hard work, with no little anxiety
+attached.  Up early and to bed late—for on however large a scale his
+business might be, it was one peculiarly dependent upon the master’s
+eye—he knew the inner meaning of the primeval curse, and earned his
+living by the sweat of his brow.  And, lest that was not sufficient, the
+Government sweated him in a financial sense.  The coaching business was
+the especial prey of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and yielded huge
+returns.  If it be argued that coach-proprietors, unlike railway
+companies, had no parliamentary powers to obtain, and no enormous
+expenses for purchase of land and construction of lines, this can be met
+by setting forth the heavy duties and taxes, the great outlay on turnpike
+tolls, and the relatively high cost of haulage by horses.  The initial
+expenses of a railway are immense, the upkeep of lines and buildings
+large; but the actual cost of steam-power as against horse-traction is
+absurdly little.  Railways, of course, pay passenger duty, and immense
+sums in the aggregate for rates and taxes; but they are not burdened as
+the coaches were.  If it cost from £3 10s. to £6 15s. to travel “outside”
+or “inside” by ordinary stage-coach between London and Edinburgh, those
+high figures were the necessary results of Government exactions and
+turnpike imposts.  Duties and taxes varied from time to time, but a
+stage-coach licensed, about 1830, to carry fifteen passengers paid a duty
+of threepence a mile, whether the coach carried a full load or not.
+Thus, for every single journey, a coach licensed to that extent paid £4
+19s. 3d.  A coach could be licensed to carry a smaller number, when the
+duties would be proportionately lighter, and coaches licensed for fifteen
+or so during the summer would take out a licence for perhaps six or eight
+in winter, when travellers were few and far between.
+
+Suppose, now, that we roughly add up the working expenses of a
+stage-coach to Edinburgh.  We start with the passenger-duty of £4 19s.
+3d.  To this we add, say, £4 for hire of coach at the rate of 2½d. a
+mile; £4 19s. 3d. for horsing, at 3d. a mile; and £6 12s., turnpikes, at
+4d.  This gives a total of £20 10s. 6d.  But we have not yet done with
+expenses, including wages for coachmen, guards, ostlers, and helpers;
+advertising, rent, oil for lamps, greasing, washing, etc.
+
+There would be six, or perhaps seven, coachmen, one driving about sixty
+miles, when he would be relieved by another; and perhaps four guards,
+because guards, not having the physical exertion of driving, could go
+longer journeys.  The proportion of their week’s wages must be added to
+the debit account for the one journey, together with the proportion of
+the £5 yearly tax payable for every coachman and guard employed, and a
+similar annual sum for the coach itself.  Any more items?  Oh yes!
+Office expenses, clerks, etc., and incidentals.  If we lump all these
+items together, they will mean an additional £12 cost on every journey to
+or from Edinburgh, bringing the cost to the proprietors to over £32.
+
+Now for the other side of the account.  Our coach is licensed for
+fifteen, and if we carry our four insides and eleven outsides all the
+way, it holds £65 10s. at the fares named above—about 4d. and 2d. a mile
+respectively.  But how often were those fifteen “through” passengers?
+Not more, perhaps, than half would be bound for Edinburgh.  Others might
+alight at York, or even at Grantham or Stamford.  Others, again, might go
+to Newcastle.  For fares thus lost, the proprietors looked to chance
+passengers; but the shillings and perhaps the two shillings taken on the
+way for short distances went, by common consent, into the coachmen’s and
+guards’ pockets, and were never entered on the way-bill.  In this manner,
+and by their “tips,” the men added to their somewhat meagre wages, which,
+rightly considered, were retaining-fees rather than full payment.  This
+practice was generally known as “shouldering.”  Some proprietors,
+however, were stricter than others, and did not allow it.  Of course it
+went on all the same, and the standing toast which they were compelled to
+give at annual coaching dinners, “Success to shouldering,” with the
+proviso, “but don’t let me find you at it,” was a tacit acknowledgment of
+the custom.  In later days, when proprietors paid slightly higher wages
+and tried to forbid tips, the coachmen were loth to give up these odd
+sums, for the diminution of tips was greater than the increase of wages.
+They then pocketed larger fares, and called the practice “swallowing.”  A
+tale is told of a coach approaching town, and the coachman asking his
+box-seat passenger if he had any luggage.  “No,” said the passenger.
+“Then,” rejoined the coachman, “do you mind getting down here, sir,
+because I mean to swallow you.”  The passenger got down, and was
+“swallowed” accordingly.
+
+The average takings of the coach would certainly never, at the best of
+it, come to more than £50 a journey, leaving a balance of £15 10s.
+profit.  Now, taking a year of three hundred and thirteen days, and
+coaches “up” and “down,” this gives a profit of £9,702—not, be it borne
+in mind, going to one man.  The “end men” had the greatest share, as they
+had also the heaviest expenses, and the “middle-ground men” got little
+beyond the mileage on which they horsed the coaches; but with twenty-five
+stages or so, and twenty-five participants in the profits, it will be
+seen that the individual earnings on one coach could not be classed very
+high.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+IT was a costly as well as a lengthy business to travel from London to
+Edinburgh.  Not so lengthy, of course, by mail as by stage-coach, but
+much more expensive.  If you wished to take it comfortably during the
+forty-two hours and a-half or so of travelling, you went inside,
+especially if it happened to be in winter; but an inside place cost
+eleven guineas and a-half, which was thought a much larger sum in 1830
+than it would be nowadays.  Accordingly, the stalwart and the not
+particularly well-to-do, who at the same time wanted to travel quickly,
+went outside, whereby they saved no less than four guineas.
+
+But let not the reader think that these respective sums of eleven and
+a-half and seven and a-half guineas comprised the whole of the
+traveller’s expenses in the old days.  There were numerous people to tip,
+such as porters, waiters, and last, but certainly not the least of them,
+the coachmen and guards, who at the end of their respective journeys,
+when they left their seats to a new guard or a new Jehu, “kicked” the
+passengers, as the expressive phrase went, for their respective two
+shillings or so.  To be kicked at intervals in this figurative manner,
+all the way between London and Edinburgh, was not physically painful, but
+it came expensive; and what with the necessary meals and refreshments
+during those forty-two hours or so, it could scarce have cost an “inside”
+less than fifteen guineas, or an “outside” less than eleven.
+
+Now let us take the mazy “Bradshaw” or the simpler “A B C” railway
+guides, and see what it will cost us in time and pocket to reach the
+capital of Scotland.  A vast difference, you may be sure.  It is possible
+to go by three different routes, but the distance is much the same, and
+the times vary little, whether you go by Midland, London and
+North-Western, or by the Great Northern Railway.  The last-named has, on
+the whole, the best of it, with a mileage of 395 miles, and a fast train
+performing the journey in seven hours and twenty-five minutes.  It costs
+by any of these routes for first-class travelling, which answers to the
+“inside” of old times, fifty-seven shillings and sixpence, and thirty-two
+shillings and eightpence by third-class, equivalent to the “outside.”
+{40}  You need not tip unless you like, and even then but once or twice,
+and assuredly no one will ask you for one.  Whether you travel “first” or
+“third,” a dining-saloon and an excellent dinner are at your service for
+a moderate sum, and the sun scarce rises or sets with greater certainty
+than that the Scotch express or its London equivalent will set out or
+reach its destination at its appointed minute.
+
+Accidents—when they happen—are beyond comparison more fearful on the
+railway than ever they were on the coaches; but they are rare indeed when
+it is considered how many trains are run.  Coaching accidents were
+frequent, but just because they seldom ended fatally they do not figure
+so largely in coaching annals as might be expected.  A dreadful accident,
+however, happened in 1805 to the Leeds “Union” coach, owing to the reins
+breaking and the horses dashing the vehicle against a tree.  This
+occurred at a point about half a mile from Ferrybridge.  William Hope,
+the coachman, and an outside passenger were killed, and many others
+seriously injured.  The jury imposed a deodand of £5 on the coach and £10
+on the horses.
+
+In later years, an almost equally serious disaster happened to another
+Leeds coach, the “Express.”  It was racing with the opposition “Courier,”
+which had been stopped at the bottom of the hill for the purpose of
+taking off the drag, and in the effort to pass was upset, with the result
+that a woman was killed on the spot, another was laid up for a year with
+a broken leg, and other passengers were more or less injured.  Probably
+because of the evident recklessness displayed by the coachman, a deodand
+of £1,400 was laid on the coach.  The mail-coaches were not so often
+involved in disasters as the stages.  They had not the incentive to race,
+and smashes arising from this form of competition were infrequent.  But
+other forms of accident threatened them and the stage-coaches alike.
+There were, for instance, fogs, and they were exceedingly dangerous.
+Penny, an old driver of the Edinburgh mail, was killed from this cause.
+Starting one foggy night, he grew nervous, and asked the guard, a younger
+and stronger man, to take the reins.  He did so, and drove up a bank.
+The mail was upset, and Penny was killed.
+
+Snow and frost were the especial foes of the mails on the northern
+stretches of the Great North Road, just as widespread floods were in the
+Huntingdonshire and Nottinghamshire levels, by Ouse and Trent; so that no
+mail-coach was completely equipped which did not in the winter months
+carry a snow-shovel.
+
+But it was not always the north-country coaches that felt the fury of the
+snowstorms.  The famous storm of December 1836 blocked all roads
+impartially.  The Louth mail, which left the Great North Road at Norman
+Cross, had to be abandoned and the mails transferred to the lighter
+agency of a post-chaise, while numerous others were buried in the snow as
+far south as St. Albans.
+
+The earlier and later periods of coaching were productive of accidents in
+equal degrees.  Stage-coaches may be said to date, roughly, from 1698,
+and continued as lumbering, uncomfortable conveyances until competition
+with the mails began to smarten them up, soon after 1784, when their
+second period dawned.  Stage-coachmen of the first period were well
+matched with their machines, and not often fit to be trusted with any
+other cattle than a team of tired plough-horses.  Their want of skill
+generally caused the accidents in those days, and the efficiency of
+others was affected by the conditions of their employment.  The “classic”
+age had not arrived, and bad roads, ill-made coaches, and poor horses,
+combined with long hours of driving to render travelling quite dangerous
+enough, without the highwaymen’s aid.  Coachmen drove long distances in
+those days, and sometimes fell asleep from sheer weariness—a failing
+which did not conduce to the safety of the passengers.  But the old
+coach-proprietors did not do the obvious thing—make the stages shorter
+and change the coachman more frequently.  No; they contrived a hard,
+uncomfortable seat for him which rested on the bed of the axletree in
+such a manner as to shake every bone in his body, and to render repose
+quite out of the question.
+
+              [Picture: The Louth Mail stopped by the snow]
+
+To these clumsy or worn-out fellows succeeded the dashing charioteers of
+the palmy age of coaching, which we may say came into full being with the
+year 1800, and lasted for full thirty years.  Many broken heads and
+limbs, and bruises and contusions innumerable, can be laid to the account
+of these gay sportsmen.  Washington Irving has left us a portrait of the
+typical stage-coachman of this time, in this delightful literary jewel:—
+
+    “He cannot be mistaken for one of any other craft.  He has commonly a
+    broad full face, curiously mottled with red, as if the blood had been
+    forced by hard feeding into every vessel of the skin; he is swelled
+    into jolly dimensions by frequent potations of malt liquors, and his
+    bulk is still further increased by a multiplicity of coats in which
+    he is buried like a cauliflower, the upper one reaching to his heels.
+    He wears a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, a huge roll of coloured
+    handkerchief about his neck, knowingly knotted and tucked in at the
+    bosom, and has in summer-time a large bouquet of flowers in his
+    buttonhole—the present, most probably, of some enamoured country
+    lass.  His waistcoat is commonly of some bright colour, striped; and
+    his small-clothes extend far below the knees, to meet a pair of
+    jockey-boots which reach about half-way up his legs.
+
+    “All this costume is maintained with much precision; he has a pride
+    in having his clothes of excellent materials, and, notwithstanding
+    the seeming grossness of his appearance, there is still discernible
+    that neatness and propriety of person which is almost inherent in an
+    Englishman.  He enjoys great confidence and consideration along the
+    road; has frequent conferences with the village housewives, who look
+    upon him as a man of great trust and dependence, and he seems to have
+    a good understanding with every bright-eyed country lass.  The moment
+    he arrives where the horses are to be changed, he throws down the
+    reins with something of an air, and abandons the cattle to the care
+    of the ostler; his duty being merely to drive from one stage to
+    another.  When off the box, his hands are thrust into the pockets of
+    his great-coat, and he rolls about the inn-yard with an air of the
+    most absolute lordliness.  Here he is generally surrounded by an
+    admiring throng of ostlers, stable-boys, shoe-blacks, and those
+    nameless hangers-on that infest inns and taverns, and run errands,
+    and do all kinds of odd jobs for the privilege of battening on the
+    drippings of the kitchen and the leakings of the tap-room.  These all
+    look up to him as an oracle, treasure up his cant phrases, echo his
+    opinions about horses and other topics of jockey-lore, and, above
+    all, endeavour to imitate his air and carriage.  Every ragamuffin
+    that has a coat to his back thrusts his hands in the pockets, rolls
+    in his gait, talks slang, and is an embryo coachey.”
+
+But how different the last years of this gorgeous figure!  When railways
+were projected, the coachman laughed at the idea.  He thought himself
+secure on his box-seat, and witnessed the preparations for laying the
+iron rails with an amused confidence that his horses could run the
+“tin-kettles” off the road with little trouble.  He kept this frame of
+mind even until the opening of the line that competed with him; and even
+when it was proved to demonstration that railways could convey passengers
+at least three times as swiftly as coaches, and at about a quarter of the
+cost, he generally professed to believe that “it couldn’t last long.”
+His was the faith that should have moved mountains—to say nothing of
+blighting locomotives; but it was no use.  His old passengers deserted
+him.  They were not proof against the opportunities of saving time and
+money.  Who is?  Nor did they come back to him, as he fondly thought they
+would, half-choked with cinders and smoke.  He was speedily run off the
+road.  There were those who liked him well, and, unwilling to see him
+brought low, made interest with railway companies to secure him a post;
+but he indignantly refused it when obtained; and, finding a cross-country
+route to which the railway had not yet penetrated, drove the coachman’s
+horror—a pair-horse coach—along the by-ways.  Gone by now was his lordly
+importance.  He had not even a guard, and frequently was reduced to
+putting in the horses himself.  He grew slovenly, and was maudlin in his
+drink.  “Tips” were seldom bestowed upon him, and when he received an
+infrequent sixpenny-piece, he was known to burst into tears.  The
+familiar figure of Belisarius begging an obolus is scarce more painful.
+The last of him was generally in the driving of the omnibus between the
+railway station and the hotel; a misanthropic figure, consistently
+disregarded by his passengers, lingering, resolutely old-fashioned in
+dress, and none too civil, superfluous on the stage.
+
+            [Picture: Entrance to London from Islington, 1809]
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+THESE long preliminaries over, we may duly start for the North from the
+General Post Office, coming to Islington by way of Goswell Road.  Here,
+at the “Peacock” or the “Angel,” travellers of a century and a-half ago
+were one mile from London, or from Hicks’s Hall, which was the same
+thing.  A milestone proclaimed the fact, and its successor, with a
+different legend, stood until quite recently opposite the Grand Theatre,
+on Islington Green.  Here stood the first toll-gate as you went out of
+London.  Here also was the village pound for strayed horses and cattle.
+Here again, according to those who do not know anything at all about it,
+the bailiff’s daughter of Islington might have met her lover; only,
+unhappily for this Islington, the old ballad refers to quite another
+Islington, away in Norfolk.
+
+The usual suburban perils awaited wayfarers to Islington at any time
+during the eighteenth century, and those bound for it from the city were
+accustomed to wait at the Smithfield end of St. John Street until a
+number had collected, when they were convoyed outwards by the armed
+patrol stationed there for that purpose.  But the footpads were quite
+equal to the occasion, and simply waited until those parties dispersed
+for their several homes, and then, like skilful generals, attacked them
+in detail.  The Islington Vestry were obliged to make a standing offer of
+£10 to any one who should arrest a robber; but that this failed seems
+certain, for at a later period we find the inhabitants subscribing a fund
+for rewards to those who arrested evildoers.
+
+Time has wrought sad havoc with Islington’s once rural aspect, and with
+its old coaching inns.  That grand coaching centre, the “Peacock,” has
+utterly vanished, and so has the picturesque “Queen’s Head,”—gabled,
+Elizabethan—wantonly destroyed in 1829; while the “Angel,” pulled down in
+1819 and rebuilt, and again rebuilt in 1900, has since retired from
+business as a public-house, and is now a tea and lunch place, in the
+hands of a popular firm of caterers.  In early days, and well on into the
+nineteenth century, the Green was really a pleasant spot, with tall elms
+shading the footpaths, and a very rustic-looking pound for strayed
+cattle.  Near by stood for many years a little hatter’s shop, bearing the
+legend in large characters, “Old Hats Beavered,” and it is curious to
+note how, in a long succession of old prints, this shop and its now
+curiously sounding notice kept their place while all else was changing.
+
+                     [Picture: Islington Green, 1820]
+
+Islington was once a Cockney paradise, and to it retired, as into the
+country, the good citizens and shopkeepers of London, setting up
+miniature parks and pleasances of their own.  So favourite a practice was
+this that the witlings of that period, a hundred and fifty years ago,
+used to publish absurd notices supposed to have been found displayed at
+the entrances of these haunts.  “The New Paradise,” ran one of them,
+“Gentlemen with Nails in their Boots not Admitted.”  Perhaps also
+“Serpents Warned Off.”  At that time, and long before, Islington was
+resorted to on account of some alleged mineral waters existing here.
+“Islington,” according to M. Henri Misson, who travelled in England, and
+wrote a book about us and our country in 1718, “is a large village, half
+a league from London, where you drink waters that do you neither good nor
+harm, provided you don’t take too much of them.”  This is decidedly a
+“palpable hit,” and may be commended to those who take medicinal waters
+in our own time.
+
+“It is not much flock’d to by People of Quality,” he goes on to observe.
+Here, at least, he is not out of date.  People of Quality do not flock to
+Islington.  The medicinal waters are all gone; and that Islington is,
+even now, not in any great degree a resort of fashion is an
+incontrovertible fact.
+
+Between this and Highgate, the road leading to what the poets call the
+“true and tender North” is by no means happy.  Any other of the classic
+highways of England begins better, and however delightful the Holloway
+Road may have been in the coaching age, it is in these crowded days a
+very commonplace thoroughfare indeed.  The long reaches of mean streets
+and sordid bye-roads combine with the unutterably bad road surface to
+render the exit from London anything but pleasurable.
+
+Sir Walter Scott, on his way down to Abbotsford in 1826, calls the Great
+North Road “the dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,”
+and the description, minus the convenience, might well stand for its
+suburban portion to-day.  In Sir Walter’s time, however, these first few
+miles were only just emerging from a condition in which dulness could
+have had no part.  In fact, it may well be supposed that the travellers,
+who up to that time went by coach to York, well armed, found the journey
+a thought too lively.  Indeed, the Holloway Road, into which they came,
+from the last outposts of civilisation, was, as it were the ante-chamber
+into that direful territory of highwaymen and footpads, the veritable
+Alsatias of Finchley Common and Whetstone.  In fact, a few years earlier
+still, when there were no houses at Holloway at all, and no district
+known by that name, what is now called the Holloway Road was a lonely
+track, full of mud and water, through which the coach route ran, infested
+all the while by the most villainous characters, compared with whom the
+gay highwayman in ruffles and lace, and mounted on a mettlesome horse,
+was a knight indeed—a chevalier without fear or reproach.  This stretch
+of road lay then between high banks, and considerably below the level of
+the surrounding fields.  It was a “hollow” road, as such roads are called
+wherever they exist in the country—the actual, original Hollow Way from
+which, in the course of time, a whole residential district has obtained
+its name.  Such roads, worn down through the earth by constant traffic,
+are always very ancient, and though the story of the Holloway Road at a
+period from a hundred and fifty to eighty years ago was a disgraceful
+one, the inhabitants of that part can console themselves by the soothing
+thought that, although it cannot claim the Roman ancestry of the route by
+Shoreditch, Waltham Cross and Cheshunt, which was the Ermine Way, the
+road in question probably dates back to the respectable antiquity of
+mediæval times.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+THE road has been ascending ever since the General Post Office was left
+behind, and now we come to the beginning of Highgate Hill, where the old
+way over the hill-top, and the more recent one, dating from 1813, divide
+left and right.  Here, at the junction of Salisbury Road with Highgate
+Hill, stands the Whittington Stone, marking the traditional spot where
+Dick rested on his flight, and heard the bells inviting him to
+
+    “Turn again, Whittington,
+    Thrice Lord Mayor of London.”
+
+It is a pretty story, and one which, let us hope, will never be forgotten
+or popularly discredited; how the boy, running away from ill-treatment at
+his master’s house in the city, halted here in his four-miles’ flight,
+and resting on the slope of Highgate Hill, saw the clustered spires of
+London and the silvery Thames—it _was_ silvery then—down below, and heard
+the prophetic message of Bow Bells inviting him to return.  If we can
+believe that he had his favourite cat with him, let us believe with joy,
+because it goes far to complete the tender story which has always held
+captive the hearts of the children; and God forbid we should grow the
+less tender towards the beautiful legends of our forbears as we grow
+older.
+
+Bow Bells fulfilled their prophecy in full measure and running over, for
+Dick Whittington was chosen to complete the year of Mayor—Adam Bamme—who
+died in 1397, and was Mayor on three separate occasions as well; in 1397,
+1406, and 1420.  He was knighted, of course, and, moreover, he became one
+of the richest men of his time.  Perhaps the most dramatic thing recorded
+of his prosperous career as Mayor and a member of the Mercers’ Company,
+is that splendid entertainment which he gave to Henry the Fifth and his
+Queen at Guildhall in his last year of office, when he threw into the
+fire bonds equal to £60,000 of our money, due to him from the king—a
+generous, nay, a princely gift.
+
+But he was not “Lord” Mayor.  The tradition is wrong in that respect.
+There were “Mayors,” but no “Lord Mayor” until 1486.
+
+Who was Richard Whittington?  We know him well in his later career as a
+Mercer, and as a pious and patriotic citizen; but whence came he?  Was he
+the poor and friendless lad of legend?  Well, not quite that.  Poor,
+perhaps, because he was the youngest of three brothers; but not
+friendless, for his family was of no mean descent.  His father, Sir
+William Whittington, had an estate on which he lived, at Pauntley, in
+Gloucestershire, and other possessions of the family were at Sollers
+Hope, Herefordshire.  Misfortunes fell upon Sir William, who seems to
+have died not long after Dick was born; but the family had friends in the
+FitzWarrens, of whom one, Sir John, was a prominent Mercer in London.
+Dick’s brothers had, as elder brothers have nowadays, the best chances,
+as it seemed, and remained in the country, enjoying the family property,
+or following rural employments.  Dick we may readily picture as being
+sent to FitzWarren, to learn a trade.  The great man probably took him
+for old acquaintance’ sake, and, having received the lad of thirteen, and
+turned him over to one of his many underlings, promptly forgot him.  It
+is a way with the great, not yet obsolete.  We may with a good conscience
+reject that part of the legend which tells how Dick was found, an obscure
+waif and stray, on FitzWarren’s doorstep, and taken, in compassion, to
+serve as a scullion.  The pantomimes always insist on this, and on the
+ferocious cook’s ill-treatment of him; but pantomime librettists have
+many sins to answer for.
+
+No; Dick was an apprentice, a poor one, and doubtless taken without a
+premium; but not scullion.  There can be little doubt that the country
+lad, thus thrown into the midst of many other apprentices in FitzWarren’s
+house, must have been an object of sport.  They would taunt him with his
+country ways, and, superior in their clothes of London cut, ridicule,
+with the cruel satire of boys, his homely duds.  Possibly his flight had
+some such origin as this.
+
+But it is chiefly on the legend of the cat that more or less learned
+antiquaries have so savagely fallen, with intent to explain it away.  The
+cat, they assure us, was a fable, and they go on to say that it was from
+coal vessels called “cats,” in which Whittington embarked his money, that
+the story grew.  Another school of commentators, eager to reduce the
+pretty tale to commonplace, tell us that it originated in the old French
+word for a purchase, _achat_.  To what shifts will they not proceed in
+this hunt for an ignoble realism!  Whittington is not known to have
+engaged in the ownership of colliers, or in the carrying of coal.  A
+Mercer has no commerce with such things.  Then, that derivation from the
+French _does_ smell of the lamp, does it not?
+
+Now for the truth of his embarking his favourite cat as a venture, to be
+sold at a profit in some foreign port.  The story, regarded with a
+knowledge of those times, is by no means an improbable one.  Indeed, to
+go further, it is quite likely.  Cats were in that era comparatively
+rare.  They had a high value at home; were even more valuable in Europe,
+and in the darkly-known countries on the confines of the known world—a
+small world, too, before the discovery of America—they were almost
+priceless.
+
+Many childish searchings of heart have arisen over Dick’s parting with
+his cat for love of gain.  Did Dick, like the Arab who sold his steed,
+repent with tears?  Perhaps Dick was the happy possessor of two cats, and
+his favourite was a “tom.”  If the other was a she-cat, and as prolific
+as are our own, no doubt Dick would have been glad to have got rid of
+her; except that the progeny themselves were marketable.  To this, then,
+we are reduced: that Dick Whittington as a boy bred cats for exportation,
+and that his black-and-white Tom, as the progenitor of them all, was the
+founder of his fortunes.  The legend tells us of only one cat, which,
+when the vessel was driven out of her course to the coast of Barbary, was
+sold for immense riches of gold and precious stones to the Sultan, whose
+palace was infested with mice.  That may do for the pantomimes; but,
+unhappily, the ships that were so unfortunate in those times as to be
+driven on those shores were plundered and their crews slain.  It was
+cheaper than buying.
+
+But whatever the details, it is certain that Whittington owed his first
+successes to his cat.  Several things, despite all destructive criticism,
+point to the essential truth of the popular story.  Firstly, original
+portraits, painted from the life, testify to it by showing Whittington’s
+hand laid caressingly on a black and white cat.  Then, Whittington was
+the rebuilder of the old New Gate, and his effigy, with a cat at his
+feet, stood in one of its niches until the building was pulled down
+hundreds of years afterwards.  Finally, a very remarkable confirmation of
+the story came from Gloucester in 1862, when, on a house occupied by the
+Whittington family until 1460 being repaired, the fragment of a carved
+chimney-piece of that century was discovered, bearing the sculpture of a
+boy carrying a cat in his arms.  It may reasonably be claimed that these
+evidences, together with the popular belief in the story, which can be
+traced back almost to Whittington’s own day, confound unbelievers.
+
+The present Whittington Stone is the degenerate and highly unornamental
+descendant of quite a number of vanished memorials to the great Lord
+Mayor which have occupied this spot since his day.  It is not by any
+means a romantic spot to the sight nowadays, but for those who can bring
+romance with them in their own minds, it matters little that the heights
+just here are crowned with suburban villa roads, that a public-house—the
+“Whittington Stone Tavern”—stands by, or that the whole neighbourhood
+reeks vulgarity.  The present stone is dated 1821, and succeeded one
+which had disappeared shortly before, itself the successor in 1795 of a
+cross.  The existing inscription was recut, and railings enclosing the
+stone put up in 1869; a public-house gas-lamp now crowning and
+desecrating the whole.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+IT is a far cry from the London County Council, the present highway
+authority at Highgate, to the first roadmaker here, in 1364.  A hermit,
+William Phelippe by name, at that time lived in a little cell on the
+lower slope of Highgate Hill, looking down upon London.  From that remote
+eyrie, had he been a man of imagination, he might have beheld prophetic
+visions of London’s future sprawling greatness, when the tide of life
+should rise to the crest of his hill and bring with it bricks and mortar,
+wood-pavements, cable-tramways, and other things of equal use and beauty.
+He foresaw none of these things, possibly because he did not sufficiently
+mortify the flesh.  Certainly he was a hermit not without wealth, and
+perhaps therefore not one of your sad-eyed ascetics.  He had a goodly
+balance in some old earthenware crock under the floor, or at the bank—the
+road bank of the Hollow Way, very old-established—and he had ample
+leisure, unencroached upon by toilette requirements, for which hermits
+had no use.  Lazing in his cell commanding the road—it stood near where
+the Whittington Stone stands now—he had often noticed how wet, miry, and
+full of sloughs was the Hollow Way, and with what difficulty travellers
+ascended by it.  Accordingly he devised a scheme by which he conferred
+benefits alike upon the travellers along the road and the farmers of
+Highgate.  He directed and paid for the digging of gravel and the laying
+of it along the road, and in the work presently expended all his money.
+But in so doing he had made an excellent investment; much better than
+leaving it on deposit at the bank mentioned above, where, in the nature
+of things, it accrued no interest; for he procured a decree from Edward
+the Third, authorising “our well-beloved William Phelippe, the hermit,”
+to set up a toll-bar, and licensing him to levy tolls and keep the road
+in repair for “our people passing between Heghgate and Smethfelde.”  Thus
+were the first toll-bar and the first turnpike-keeper established, and we
+may judge that the undertaking was profitable from the records that show
+how very largely the roadside hermits throughout the country went into
+the business of road and bridge making or mending shortly afterwards.
+There were hermits of sorts: some authorised, and some not; some who did
+good work in this wise and some who did nothing at all, and yet continued
+to live substantially on the mistaken gifts of wayfarers.  The profession
+of the eremite was not without its jealousies.  An industrious road-maker
+might have a cell placed in a position outside a town favourable for the
+collection of dues, when another would set up business, say a quarter of
+a mile further out, and so intercept the money; so that travellers having
+paid once, had nothing for the real Simon Pure.  Having satisfied Codlin,
+they disregarded Short; whereupon it not infrequently happened that if
+Short were the more muscular of the two he would go and have it out with
+his rival, while the world went by, scandalised at the apostolic blows
+and knocks these holy men were dealing one another.
+
+William Phelippe’s licence was renewed every year.  His tariff of tolls
+is still extant, and we read that for every cart carrying merchandise,
+its wheels shod with iron, twopence per week was paid; if not shod with
+iron, one penny.  Every horse carrying merchandise was charged one
+farthing per week.  Pedestrians and horsemen without goods went free.
+These charges seem absurdly small until we multiply them by twenty, which
+gives results representing the present value of money, and then it will
+be found that those ancient tolls were on much the same scale as those
+which existed until July 1st, 1864, when all turnpikes on public highways
+within fifty miles of London were abolished by Act of Parliament.
+
+A great gap stretches between the time of our road-making hermit and that
+of Telford—a gap of four hundred and fifty years.  Yet, although Highway
+Acts were from time to time devised for the betterment of the roads,
+their condition remained bad, and there was always, since 1386, the crest
+of Highgate Hill to surmount.
+
+Unless we take this hill-top route to the left we shall not have seen
+Highgate; nor, in truth, is there much to see, now that the old Gatehouse
+Tavern is gone, and with it the last outward and visible connection with
+the days of yore.  The tavern marked the site of the old turnpike-gate
+that stood here, the lineal successor of the hermit’s original pitch
+lower down, when the old route to Barnet by Tallingdon Lane, Crouch End,
+Hornsey Great Park, Muswell Hill, Friern Barnet, and Whetstone was
+superseded by the new one through the Bishop of London’s estate, by
+Finchley and Whetstone, in 1386.  It is in the existence at that time of
+the Bishop’s park that we may perhaps seek with success the origin of the
+name of “Highgate,” which does not necessarily allude to the very
+obviously “high” gate situated here—more than 350 feet above sea-level.
+No; it was the “haigh” gate, the portal which gave access through the
+enclosure (_haia_) with which my Lord Bishop’s domain was presumably
+surrounded.  Through his land all traffic passed until it emerged on the
+other side of Whetstone, where, commanding the entrance to Barnet, stood
+another gate in receipt of tolls, swelling the income of that very
+business-like ecclesiastic and his successors for hundreds of years.
+
+At the Highgate end dues were collected on horned cattle, among other
+things, and here originated the practice of being initiated into the
+freedom of Highgate, a mock ceremonial founded upon Roman Catholic rites
+at the time of the Reformation.  For three hundred years this farcical
+observance was continued at the tavern by the gate, and only fell into
+disuse with the decay of coaching.  Those who had not previously passed
+this way were “sworn in on the horns,” a practice traced to the
+unwillingness of the cattle drovers who frequented the tavern to allow
+strangers to mix with them.  This exclusiveness no doubt originated in
+the fear of trade secrets being divulged, a feeling which may still be
+met with among commercial travellers of the older school, who resent the
+appearance of the mere tourist in their midst.  The stranger who in olden
+times happened upon these drovers at Highgate was discouraged from taking
+bite or sup here, and only permitted to join them after having kissed the
+horns of one of their beasts.  This speedily became elevated (or
+degraded, shall we say?) into a sort of blasphemous ritual parodying the
+admission of a novice into the Church, and this again, with the lapse of
+time and the dying of religious hatreds, developed into the merely
+good-natured farce played during the last hundred years of the existence
+of the custom.
+
+When the coaches pulled up here, it was soon discovered, by judicious
+questioning, who were the strangers who had not been made “free.”  They
+were made to alight, and, having removed their hats and kissed a pair of
+horns mounted on a pole, “the oath” was administered by the landlord in
+this wise:—“Upstanding and uncovered: silence.  Take notice what I now
+say to you, for _that_ is the first word of the oath; mind _that_.  You
+must acknowledge me to be your adopted father.  I must acknowledge you to
+be my adopted son.  If you do not call me father you forfeit a bottle of
+wine; if I do not call you son I forfeit the same.  And now, my good son,
+if you are travelling through this village of Highgate, and you have no
+money in your pocket, go call for a bottle of wine at any house you may
+think proper to enter and book it to your father’s score,” and so forth.
+
+An initiate had to swear never to drink small beer when he could get
+strong (unless he preferred small); never to eat brown bread when he
+could get white (unless he preferred brown); never to kiss the maid when
+he could kiss the mistress (unless he preferred the maid, and in case of
+doubt he might kiss both); after which he had to kiss the horns or the
+woman in the company who appeared the fairest, as seemed good to him, the
+ceremony concluding with the declaration of his privileges as a freeman
+of Highgate.  Among the well-known privileges were—that if he felt tired
+when passing through Highgate and saw a pig lying in a ditch, he might
+kick the pig away and take its place, but if he saw three lying together
+he must only kick away the middle one and lie between the other two!
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+IT was on Highgate Hill that the great Francis, Lord Bacon, whom some
+believe to have written Shakespeare’s dramas, fell a martyr to his
+scientific enthusiasm.  Driving up this chilly eminence one winter’s day
+when the snow lay on the ground, it occurred to him that, from its
+chemical constituents, snow must possess admirable preservative
+properties, and he accordingly resolved immediately to put this theory to
+the proof.  Stopping his carriage at a neighbouring farmhouse, he
+purchased a fowl and stuffed it carefully with snow.  Being in weak
+health at the time, he took a chill, and before he could be driven home,
+became so alarmingly ill that he was obliged to be carried to Lord
+Arundel’s house at Highgate.  There a damp bed aggravated his seizure, so
+that in a few days he died, in 1626.
+
+Farmhouses are far to seek from Highgate Hill nowadays, new roads and
+streets of shops being more general.  With the end of the eighteenth
+century, Highgate became a populous little town, but its outskirts did
+not altogether lose their terrors for travellers.  Suburban villas had
+begun to sparsely dot these northern heights of London with the coming of
+the new era, but the New Police had not yet been brought into being; and
+so belated dwellers in these wilds afforded fine sport for the footpads,
+who, hunting in couples, and armed with horrible pitch-plasters, attacked
+the mild citizen from behind, and, clapping a plaster over his mouth,
+reduced him to an enforced silence, while they emptied his pockets at
+leisure.  It was late one night in 1807 that Grimaldi, the most famous of
+all clowns, was robbed on Highgate Hill by two footpads.  They spared him
+the usual plaster, perhaps because there was no one else about, and so it
+did not matter in the least how loudly he might shout for help.  Among
+minor articles of spoil, they secured a remarkable watch which had been
+given him two years before as a testimonial by his many admirers.  The
+dial represented his face in character when singing his popular comic
+song, “Me and my Neddy.”  The robbers, seeing this, immediately
+recognised him.  Looking at one another, they could not make up their
+minds to rob him of his treasure, and so they gave it back, Grimaldi
+goggling and grinning at them the while, as on the stage.  So, with a
+vivid recollection of Sadler’s Wells, and bursting with laughter, they
+left him.
+
+It is peculiarly unfortunate for those who are uncertain about their
+aspirates that London and its neighbourhood should abound in place-names
+beginning with the letters “A” and “H.”  Cockneys have ever—or ’ave
+hever, shall we say?—been afflicted with this difficulty; but they are
+overcoming the tendency of their forbears to speak of “’Ornsey,
+’Ampstead, ’Igit, ’Arrow, ’Omerton, ’Ackney, ’Endon or ’Atfield.”  The
+classic anecdote in this connection is that of the City Alderman who
+lived at Highgate, praising his locality to a distinguished guest at a
+Mayoral banquet.
+
+             [Picture: Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897]
+
+“Don’t you think ’Iget pretty?” he asked.
+
+“Really,” the guest is supposed to have replied, “I haven’t known you
+long enough to say.”
+
+“I’m not talking of meself,” returned the Alderman, “but of ’Iget on the
+’Ill.”
+
+Until 1813 coaches and foot-passengers alike toiled over the Hill,
+through Highgate village, and by a roundabout road into East End,
+Finchley, which, with its adjoining hamlets, was until quite recently so
+greatly cut off from London by these comparatively Alpine heights and the
+lack of suburban railways, that it was, for all practical purposes, as
+distant as many other places fifty or sixty miles away, but situated on
+more level roads or on direct railway routes.  To remedy this the Archway
+Road was cut direct from the Upper Holloway Road to East End, saving half
+a mile in the distance to be travelled and a hundred feet in the height
+to be climbed.
+
+The Archway and the Archway Road were constructed about 1813, following
+upon the failure of the original idea of driving a tunnel through the
+hill-top.  The Hill is a great outstanding knob of London clay, a
+substance both difficult and dangerous to pierce; but it was not until
+the work was nearly completed that it fell in, one day in 1812, happily
+before the labours of the day had been begun.  The present open cutting
+of the Archway Road, rather over a mile in length, took the place of the
+projected tunnel, and the Archway was constructed for the purpose of
+carrying Hornsey Lane across the gap.  If an unlovely, it was in its way
+an impressive, structure, even though the impression was, rather of the
+nightmare sort.  It was scarcely necessary, for Hornsey Lane has been at
+no time a place of great resort, and the traffic along it could have been
+diverted at small cost, and with little inconvenience made to cross the
+Archway Road by a circuitous route.  Highgate Archway has now
+disappeared, giving place to a lighter structure, spanning the road
+without the support of the cumbrous old piers which, until the summer of
+1900, continued to block three-fourths of the way.  It has gone because
+the road-traffic has grown with the suburbs and the way was not wide
+enough; but its disappearance removes a landmark proclaiming where town
+and country met.
+
+The making of the Archway and the road was no public-spirited act, but
+the commercial undertaking of a Company, whose total expenses were very
+large, and, by consequence, the tolls exacted extremely high.
+Pedestrians were not chargeable at ordinary toll-gates, but here they had
+to pay a penny, or go the tedious way over the Hill.  Sixpence was levied
+on every laden or draught horse.
+
+It was not a profitable undertaking, even at these rates, and the tolls
+had a very decided effect in stemming the advance of Suburbia in this
+direction.  In 1861, when the abolition of tolls within fifty miles of
+London was a burning question, the Company owed the Consolidated Fund no
+less than £13,000.  The Government bought it out for £4,000, receiving
+£9,000 by instalments spread over fifteen years, after which period the
+road was to be declared free.  It was accordingly opened free of toll in
+1876.  And thus it remained, as in the illustration, until 1897, when it
+was demolished and the roadway widened.  The present Archway was opened
+in 1900.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+EAST End, Finchley, to which we now come, is one of the many straggling
+settlements built upon Finchley Common.  Stretches of fields alternate
+with rows of new shops and tiny old-world cottages.  Here stands the
+“Bald-Faced Stag,” with the effigy of a stag surmounting the
+appropriately bald elevation of that huge and ugly public-house.  The
+yards of monumental masons jostle it on either hand; a grim and
+unpleasing conjunction, and a prelude to those vast townships of London’s
+dead, the St. Marylebone, Islington, and St. Pancras Cemeteries, which
+with other properties of the Cemetery Companies render the road dismal
+and people these northern heights with a vast population of departed
+citizens.  The merry market-gardener has betaken himself and his cabbages
+to other parts, and the builder builds but sparely.
+
+Just where the Great Northern Railway bridge crosses over the road at
+East End stands the “Old White Lion,” in a pretty wooded dip of the road.
+The house was once known, and marked on the maps as the “Dirt House,”
+from its having been the house of call of the market-wagons on the way to
+London with produce, and on the way back with loads of dirt and manure.
+The wood was also known as “Dirt House Wood.”  It was here also that
+Horne the coachmaster’s stables were situated.
+
+To this succeeds North Finchley, beginning at the junction of a road from
+Child’s Hill with the Great North Road, known as Tally Ho Corner.  North
+Finchley, called by the genteel “Torrington Park,” is yet another
+settlement, filched, like the cemeteries, from Finchley Common by
+successive iniquitous Acts of Parliament at the beginning of the
+nineteenth century.  Could the gay highwaymen who, a hundred years ago,
+were gathered to their fathers at the end of a rope down Tyburn way
+revisit Finchley, the poor fellows would sadly need a guide.  Where,
+alas! is Finchley Common, that wide-spreading expanse of evil omen on
+which these jovial spirits were so thoroughly at home?  Finchley Common,
+once second only to the far-famed Hounslow Heath, has long since been
+divided up between the many who, more than a hundred years ago, conspired
+to cheat the people of their birthright in this once broad expanse of
+open space.  The representatives of the people at Westminster allowed it,
+and my Lord Bishop of London profited by it, together with lesser folk,
+each in their several degrees.  The Common then extended to considerably
+over two thousand acres.  Of this vast tract only a few acres are left,
+beyond North Finchley.  The rest was sold quietly, and by degrees, for
+absurdly small sums.
+
+         [Picture: The Great Common of Finchley: a parlous place]
+
+Between 1700 and 1800 the great Common of Finchley was a parlous place,
+and not one of the better-known highwaymen but had tried his hand at
+“touching the mails” as they went across this waste; or patrolled the
+darkest side of the road, ready to spring upon the solitary traveller.
+Indeed, the childlike simplicity of the lonely travellers of those days
+is absolutely contemptible, considering the well-known dangers of the
+roads.  For instance, on the night of the 28th August, 1720, a horseman
+might have been observed in the act of crossing Finchley Common.  He had
+fifteen guineas in his pocket, and ambled along as though he had been in
+Pall Mall instead of on perhaps the most dangerous road in England.  At a
+respectful distance behind him came his servant, and just in front of
+him, midway of this howling wilderness, stood three figures.  “There is
+an eye that notes our coming,” says the poet, and three pairs of eyes had
+perceived this wayfarer.  They belonged to an enterprising individual
+named Spiggott and to two other ruffians, whose names have not been
+handed down to posterity.  The weirdly named Spiggott was apparently
+above disguising himself; his companions, however, might have stood for
+stage brigands, for one of them had the cape of his coat buttoned over
+his chin, and the other wore a slouched hat over his eyes.  In addition
+to this, he kept the ends of his long wig in his mouth—which seems rather
+a comic opera touch.  It is to be hoped, rather than expected, that the
+traveller with the guineas saw the humour of it.  In the twinkling of an
+eye one brigand had seized his horse and made him dismount, while the
+others covered him with their pistols.  The servant also was secured, the
+guineas transferred with the dexterity of a practised conjurer, the
+horses turned loose, and then the three rode away, leaving the traveller
+and his servant to get on as best they could.  Spiggott eventually paid
+the penalty of his rashness in not disguising himself in accordance with
+the canons of the hightoby craft, for when, a little later in his career,
+he was caught, with some others, in an attempt on the Wendover wagon at
+Tyburn, he was identified by the Finchley traveller.  The end of him was
+the appointed end of all his kind.  The moral of this story seems to be
+“Wear a mask when engaged in crime.”
+
+In 1774, Edmund Burke, travelling to Malton, in Yorkshire, was stopped
+here by two highwaymen, who robbed him of ten guineas, and his servant of
+his watch, in the most easy way.  Some of these highwaymen were, indeed,
+persons who took their calling in an earnest and whole-hearted manner,
+and doubtless regarded Jack Sheppard as a mere scatterbrain, quite
+unfitted to be in business for himself.  Thoroughly business-like men
+were Messrs. Everett and Williams, who entered into a duly drawn and
+properly attested deed of partnership, by which it was agreed that they
+should work together on Finchley Common and elsewhere and divide the
+profits of their labours into equal shares.  Their industry prospered,
+and the common fund soon reached the very respectable total of £2,000.
+But when required to render accounts and to pay over half this amount,
+Mr. Williams refused; whereupon his partner brought an action-at-law
+against him, in 1725.  A verdict for £20 was actually obtained, and
+appealed against by the defendant.  The court then very properly found
+the matter scandalous, and sentenced Everett to pay costs, the solicitors
+engaged on either side being fined £50 each for their part in this
+discreditable affair.  One partner was executed, two years later, at
+Maidstone, and the other at Tyburn, in 1730.
+
+There still exists an ancient oak by the road at a place called Brown’s
+Wells, at the corner of a lane nearly opposite the “Green Man,” and in
+the trunk of this last survival of the “good old days” there have been
+found, from time to time, quite a number of pistol bullets, said to have
+been fired by passing travellers at the trunk to frighten the highwaymen
+who might chance to be hiding behind it, under cover of the night.  The
+tree itself has long borne the name of Turpin’s Oak, no less celebrated a
+person than the re-doubtable Dick himself having once frequented it.
+History fails to inform us who was the Brown after whom the Wells were
+named.  I suggest they should be, and were in the first place “Brent
+Wells”; a source of the river Brent.  Nor are those Wells—whatever they
+may have been—now in existence, while the name itself is only perpetuated
+by two or three old stuccoed villas beside the road.
+
+[Picture: Turpin’s Oak] Turpin, of course, is the greatest of all the
+rascals who made the name of the Great North Road a name of dread.
+Before him, however, the redoubtable Jack Sheppard figured here, but not,
+it is sad to relate, in an heroic manner.  In fact that nimble-fingered
+youth, after escaping from the Stone Jug (by which piece of classic slang
+you are to understand Newgate to be meant) had the humiliation to be
+apprehended on Finchley Common, disguised in drink and a butcher’s blue
+smock.  That was the worst of those roystering blades.  The drink was the
+undoing of them all.  If only they had been Good Templars, and had
+sported the blue ribbon, it is quite certain that they had not been cut
+off untimely; and might, with reasonable luck, even have retired with a
+modest competence in early years.  It was in 1724 that Jack Sheppard was
+arrested by Bow Street runners on the Common, and the fact somewhat
+staggers one’s belief in the wild lawlessness of that place.  To capture
+a highwayman in his own peculiar territory!  One might just as soon
+expect to hear of the Chief Commissioner of Police being kidnapped from
+Scotland Yard.  And yet it is quite certain that Finchley was no safe
+place for a good young man with five pounds in his pocket and a mere
+walking-stick in his hand, whether he proposed to cross it by night or
+day.  Even sixty-six years later this evil reputation existed; for, in
+1790, the Earl of Minto, travelling to London, wrote to his wife that
+instead of pushing on to town at night, he would defer his entry until
+morning, “for I shall not trust my throat on Finchley Common in the
+dark.”  Think of it!  And Dick Turpin had been duly executed fifty years
+before!
+
+Of the many names in the long and distinguished roll of road agents who
+figured here at some time or another in their meteoric careers, it is not
+possible to say much.  There was the courageous and resourceful Captain
+Hind, the whimsically nicknamed “Old Mob,” burly Tom Cox, Neddy Wicks,
+and Claud Duval.  Duval’s proper territory is, however, the Bath Road.
+
+The palmy days of the highwayman were before 1797, the year of Pitt’s Act
+for Restricting Cash Payments.  Before then, travellers carried nothing
+but gold, and as they required plenty of that commodity on their long and
+tedious journeys, the booty seized by these gentry was often
+considerable.  Bank notes then came into favour, and were issued for as
+low a denomination as one pound.  These would have been a perilous kind
+of plunder, and accordingly as they grew popular, so did the certainty of
+a good haul from coaches and post-chaises diminish, until panics came,
+banks failed, and paper money became for a time a discredited form of
+currency.  By that time the roads were better patrolled, and coin was to
+be conjured from the pockets of the lieges with less safety than before.
+From these causes, and from the new law which made it penal to receive
+stolen goods as well as to steal them, we may date the decadence of a
+great industry, now utterly vanished from the roads.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+[Picture: “The Whetstone”] WHETSTONE, coming next after the Finchleys, is
+held in local legends to have acquired its name from the battered old
+stone still to be seen embedded in the ground by the signpost of the
+“Griffin” inn.  On it the men-at-arms are said to have whetted their
+swords and spears before the battle of Barnet.  The sceptical smile at
+this antiquity, and for their benefit there is a rival legend which gives
+the date as that of 1745, when King George’s army marched down to meet
+Prince Charles and his Highlanders.  Antiquaries have often demolished
+this derivation of the place-name; but the hoary (and quite unveracious)
+tale survives, and is doubtless immortal.  You may explain it away, but
+the stone is there, and your local patriot is ever a materialist in such
+a resort.
+
+It is a straggling, broad-streeted village, with a breadth implying the
+originally small value of the land, and encroachments here and there upon
+the old building-line proving both the implication and the fact that,
+many years ago, there were those who, having the foreknowledge of a
+coming betterment, and more daring than their neighbours, grabbed while
+they might.  Many inns, laundries, dairy-farms, great black-timbered
+barns, and a few rotting hoardings and unfinished houses make up the long
+street and tell alike of a vanished rusticity and of an arrested
+development.
+
+Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here, his first
+stage out of London on the northern roads.  They were placed here, rather
+than at Barnet, in order to avoid expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated
+down the road, near Greenhill Cross.  Whetstone Gate gave travellers
+going north the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed
+Finchley Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society
+of Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.
+
+The road across Finchley Common was in passive alliance with these
+gentry.  When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly for sake of its now
+forgotten medicinal waters, he found the highway “torne, plowed, and
+digged up,” in consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long
+struggling teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had
+been a fairly good roadway.  Progress was difficult, even in the best
+circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost impossible, the
+highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely at their leisure.
+
+The road remained more or less in this condition up to the early years of
+the nineteenth century.  This was partly owing to the mistaken local
+patriotism which had prevented the remodelling of it in 1754, when the
+rustics of Whetstone routed the surveyor and his labourers at the point
+of the pitchfork.  Better counsels prevailed in the first decade of the
+new era, and the eight miles of highway under the control of the
+Whetstone and Highgate Turnpike Trust rose in 1810 to be considered as
+good as any in the kingdom.  It then became possible, for the first time
+in its history, for the Barnet stage to leave for London and to reach its
+destination without the necessity of stopping on the way for tea.  The
+Trustees were naturally pleased with their road, and so in 1823 received
+with some surprise, under the new Act for the improvement of the line of
+road from London to Holyhead, a demand for the reconstruction of the
+highway between Prickler’s Hill and the southern end of Barnet town.
+They pointed out how greatly superior their portion of the road was to
+others, but to no purpose.  The Government admitted the excellence of the
+surface, but boggled at the severity of the gradient, and practically
+insisted on its being reduced.
+
+The Trustees were dismayed.  Telford and Macadam supplied rival plans,
+and both foreshadowed heavy expense.  Telford’s idea was to slice off the
+top of Barnet Hill, and to run the road through a more or less deep
+cutting through the street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the
+houses and the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a
+cliff.  Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by Macadam prevailed.
+It was for the partial filling up of the dip in the road between
+Prickler’s Hill and the excessively steep entrance into the town, an
+entrance even now by no means easily graded.  What it must originally
+have been may readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked
+road to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where the
+old roadside houses still stand, among them the “Old Red Lion,” on the
+site of the inn where Pepys stayed.  The end one of a row of ten or
+twelve cottages, at the corner of May’s Lane, was once a toll-house.
+
+The work of making the new road, begun in 1823, was not completed until
+four years later, at a cost of £17,000.  A large portion of this heavy
+sum went in compensation to the Sons of the Clergy Corporation, for land
+taken.  The cost of these improvements came eventually, of course, out of
+the pockets of travellers along the road.  On this Trust they were
+mulcted severely, for the Trustees, finding the existing tolls to be
+utterly inadequate to their expenses, obtained powers in 1830 to increase
+them.  They considered themselves hardly treated in being obliged to
+undertake such costly works on the eve of the London and Birmingham
+Railway being constructed—a railway which would have the effect of
+withdrawing traffic from the road, and reducing receipts at the
+toll-gates to a minimum; but the end, although not far off, was not yet,
+and on the 3rd of July they succeeded in letting the tolls by auction for
+one year at the handsome sum of £7,530.  Accordingly they commenced to
+pay off their debts, and succeeded in liquidating the whole of them by
+the beginning of 1842, notwithstanding two successive reductions of tolls
+in 1835 and 1841.
+
+It was in 1833 that the London and Birmingham Railway obtained its Act,
+and it was opened throughout on September 7, 1838, the first of the
+railways which were to contribute to the ruin of Barnet’s great coaching
+and posting trade.  The annual takings at Whetstone Gate immediately fell
+to £1,300, but it lingered on until the Trust expired, November 1, 1863.
+
+It is interesting, as showing the growth of road traffic, to compare the
+figures still available, giving the annual sums at which the tolls at
+this gate were let in the old days.  Thus, in Queen Elizabeth’s time,
+they were farmed at £40 per annum, and in 1794 they fetched only £150.
+But few vehicles passed then.  Forty years later, no fewer than ninety
+coaches swept through Whetstone Gate every twenty-four hours!
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+BARNET, or Chipping Barnet, or High Barnet, as it is variously called,
+stands on the summit of a steep and high ridge running east and west.  On
+the east the height of Muswell Hill, now suburban and crowned
+conspicuously with that unfortunate place of entertainment, the Alexandra
+Palace, is prominent; and on the west are Totteridge and the range of
+hills stretching away to Elstree.  Other Barnets, old and new, are
+plentiful: East and Friern Barnet, and the modern suburb of New Barnet.
+Chipping Barnet derives the first part of its name from its ancient
+chepe, or weekly market, granted by Henry the Second, and its more common
+prefix of “High,” from its situation on the ridge just mentioned.
+
+Barnet was, to many coaching proprietors, the first stage out of London,
+and the town prospered exceedingly on the coaching and posting traffic of
+those two great thoroughfares—the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road.
+When the Stamford “Regent,” the York “Highflyer,” and the early morning
+coaches for Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Manchester, or Liverpool arrived, the
+passengers, who had not found time for breakfast before starting, were
+generally very sharp-set indeed, and the viands already prepared and
+waiting in the cosy rooms of the old hostelries, disappeared before their
+onslaught “in less than no time.”  The battle of Barnet was fought over
+again every morning, but they were not men-at-arms who contended
+together, nor was the subject of their contention the Crown of England.
+They were just famished travellers who struggled to get something to eat
+and drink before the guard made his appearance at the door, with the
+fateful cry, “Time’s up, gentlemen; take your seats please.”  When the
+horn sounded in the yard, desperate men would rush forth with hands full
+of food, and finish their repasts as best they might on the coach.
+
+                      [Picture: High Street, Barnet]
+
+The two principal inns were the “Red Lion” and the “Green Man.”  It was,
+and is now in some degree, a town of inns, but these were the
+headquarters of the two great political parties.  Neither was a
+“coaching” inn, for they despised trafficking with ordinary travellers,
+and devoted themselves wholly to the posting business.  The “Red Lion”
+was originally the “Antelope.”  Standing in the most favourable position
+for intercepting the stream of post-chaises from London, it generally
+secured the pick of business going that way, unless indeed the political
+bias of gentlemen going down into the country forbade them to hire
+post-horses at a Tory house.  In that case, they went to the “Green Man,”
+further on, which was Whig.  And perhaps, in sacrificing to politics,
+they got inferior horses!  The “Green Man” placed in midst of the town,
+was in receipt of the up traffic, and was the largest establishment,
+keeping twenty-six pairs of horses and eleven postboys, against the
+eighteen pairs and eight postboys of the “Red Lion”; and it is recorded
+that between May 9th and 11th, when, on May 10th, 1808, two celebrated
+prizefighters, Gully and Gregson, fought at Beechwood Park, Sir John
+Sebright’s place down the road, near Flamstead, no fewer than one hundred
+and eighty-seven pairs were changed.  Those three days formed a record
+time for the “Green Man,” according to these figures:—
+
+Posting                  £141      17      10½
+Bills in the house         54      19        0
+Bills in the yard          14      10        0
+                         £211       6      10½
+
+The “boys” of the “Green Man” wore blue jackets; those of the “Red Lion,”
+yellow jackets and black hats.
+
+An inn called the “Green Man” stands on the site of that busy house, but
+it is of more recent date than the old Whig headquarters.  It may be seen
+at the fork of roads where the “new” road to St. Albans, driven through
+the yard of the old “Green Man” in 1826, branches off.
+
+Thus the “Red Lion” remains, long after the eclipse of its rival.  Its
+frontage is impressive by size rather than beauty.  With a range of
+fifteen windows in line, and its fiercely-whiskered red lion balancing
+himself at the end of a prodigiously long wrought-iron sign, it is
+eloquent of the old days.  The lion turns his head north, gazing away
+from the direction in which his chief customers came.
+
+But this white-stuccoed frontage does not hide anything of antiquity, for
+this is not that original “Red Lion” to which Samuel Pepys resorted.  The
+house he refers to in his diary is the “Old Red Lion”; down the hill, at
+the approach to Barnet.  There he “lay” in 1667.  “August 11th, Lord’s
+Day,” he writes: “Up by four o’clock . . . and got to the wells at Barnet
+by seven o’clock, and there found many people a-drinking.”  After
+“drinking three glasses and the women nothing,” the party sojourned “to
+the Red Lion, where we ’light and went up into the great room, and there
+drank, and ate some of the best cheesecakes that ever I ate in my life.”
+
+The keenness of the innkeepers who let post-horses during the last few
+years of the coaching age is scarcely credible.  It was a fierce
+competition.  The landlord of the “Red Lion” at Barnet thought nothing of
+forcibly taking out the post-horses from any private carriage passing his
+house, and putting in a pair of his own, to do the next stage to St.
+Albans.  This, too, free of charge, in order to prevent the business
+going to the hated rival.  Mine host of that hotel also had his little
+ways of drawing custom, and gave a glass of sherry and a sandwich,
+gratis, to the travellers changing there.  But things did not end here.
+The landlord of the “Red Lion,” finding, perhaps, that the sherry and
+sandwich at the “Green Man” was more attractive than his method, engaged
+a gang of bruisers to pounce upon passing chaises, and even to haul them
+out of his rival’s stable-yard.  Evidently a man of wrath, this licensed
+victualler!  After several contests of this kind, the authorities
+interfered.  The combatants were bound over to keep the peace, the
+punching of conks and bread-baskets, and the tapping of claret ceased,
+and people travelling down the road were actually allowed to decide for
+themselves which house they would patronise!
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+FROM Barnet the road runs across Hadley Green, a broad and picturesque
+expanse, cursed nowadays with the ubiquitous golfer.  Here, where the
+road divides—the Great North Road to the right and the old Holyhead Road
+to the left—stands the obelisk known as Hadley Highstone, which serves
+both as a milestone and as a memorial of the great battle of Barnet,
+fought here on that cold and miserable Easter Day, April 14, 1471, when
+Edward the Fourth utterly defeated the Lancastrians under the Earl of
+Warwick, the “King Maker.”  Warwick fell, and the Red Rose was finally
+crushed.  Hadley Green was then a portion of a wide stretch of unenclosed
+country known as Gladsmoor Heath, extending up to Monken Hadley church,
+away on the right.  The obelisk was erected by Sir Jeremy Sambrooke in
+1740 on the spot where Warwick is said to have been slain.  There is,
+however, another spot which aspires to the honour, at Rabley Park, near
+South Mimms.  This also has its monumental pillar, but without
+inscription.  Among the guileless youth of the neighbourhood it is said
+to mark “the place where a soldier was knocked down,” which is a
+commonplace way of stating the fact.  But who knocked him down, or why,
+or when, is beyond them when questioned.
+
+Past the lodge gates of Wrotham Park and by Ganwick Corner, where stands
+the “Duke of York” inn with its bust of that wonderful strategist.  He is
+looking enquiringly south, from his alcove over the front door, as though
+wondering what has become of all the post-chaises and coaches of old.  He
+is that great commander who managed, according to the well-known rhyme,
+to march his ten thousand men to the top of a hill and then down
+again—but he never otherwise distinguished himself—except by the
+magnitude of his debts.
+
+          [Picture: Hadley Green: Site of the Battle of Barnet]
+
+Potter’s Bar marks where the counties of Middlesex and Hertford join.  It
+is not a place of delirious delights, consisting of stuccoed villas
+fondly supposed to be Italian, and unfinished roads, and streets in a
+state of suspended animation.  Until 1897, when it was pulled down, an
+old toll-house, the last in a long succession of toll-houses and
+toll-bars which had stood here from the earliest times and had given
+Potter’s Bar its name, occupied the fork of the roads at the north end of
+the village, commanding the high-road and the road on the right to
+Northaw.  [Picture: Old Toll-House, Potter’s Bar]  It was not a beautiful
+building, but it hinted of old times, and its disappearance is to be
+regretted.  It was taken down because already, in the first twelve months
+of the new automobile era a car had dashed into it and done most of any
+demolition necessary.  A War Memorial now stands on the site.  Between
+this and Hatfield the road goes in undulating fashion, with the Great
+Northern Railway on the left hand nearly all the way, but chiefly
+downhill.  Down Little Heath Hill and then half-way up the succeeding
+incline we come to a cutting which affords a newer and easier road than
+the hilly route to the left.  [Picture: Ganwick Corner]  Where this joins
+the old road again, nearly two miles onward, at Bell Bar, stands the
+pretty “Swan” inn.  The “bar” has, of course, long since disappeared.
+Immediately ahead is Hatfield Park, stretching away for over three miles.
+Through the park, by where the present south lodge stands, the highway
+used to run in former times, and brought wayfarers between the wind and
+the nobility of the Cecils.  Accordingly the road was diverted at the
+instance of the then Lord Salisbury, and the public no longer offend him,
+his heirs, executors, or assigns.  And now, for ever and a day, those who
+use the road between Potter’s Bar and Hatfield village must go an extra
+half mile.  This is indeed a free and happy country.
+
+                           [Picture: Bell Bar]
+
+Hatfield village touches the extremity of wretchedness, just as Hatfield
+House marks the apogee of late feudal splendour.  And yet, amid its
+tumbledown hovels there are quaintly beautiful old-gabled cottages with
+bowed and broken-backed red-tiled roofs, delightful to the artistic eye,
+if from the builder’s and decorator’s point of view sadly out of repair.
+Motor repair-shops and garages, with their squalid advertisements, have
+helped to ruin Hatfield, and the railway does its share, running closely
+to the main road, and, with the station directly opposite the highly
+elaborate modern wrought-iron gates that lead to Hatfield House,
+detracting not a little from that state of dignified seclusion by which,
+as we have just seen, a former Marquis of Salisbury set such store.  Let
+us hope his pale ghost does not revisit his old home.  If it does, it
+must be sorely vexed.
+
+But at any rate, that Marquis who was one of Queen Victoria’s Prime
+Ministers, sits there in bronze portrait-effigy.  He gazes mournfully,
+directly at the railway booking-office, as one who has long been waiting,
+without hope, for a train.  It is a fine statue, by Sir George Frampton,
+R.A., and bears the inscription:—
+
+                            ROBERT ARTHUR TALBOT,
+                    Marquess of Salisbury, K.G., G.C.V.O.,
+                        Three times Prime Minister of
+                          Great Britain and Ireland,
+                                  1830–1903.
+              Erected to his memory by his Hertfordshire friends
+            and neighbours in recognition of a great life devoted
+                        to the welfare of his country.
+
+Hatfield House, that great historical museum and ancient repository of
+State secrets, is little seen from the village, nor have we, as wayfarers
+along the road, much to do with it.  It is by the parish church, its
+characteristic Hertfordshire extinguisher spire so prominent above the
+tumbled roofs of Hatfield, that we may glimpse the older parts of the
+house.  In that church lies its builder, the great Robert Cecil, his
+effigy, with the Lord Treasurer’s wand of office, recumbent on a slab
+uplifted by statues emblematic of Fortitude, Justice, Prudence, and
+Temperance, and a skeleton below, to show that even Lord Treasurers,
+possessed though they be of all the virtues, are mortal, like less
+exalted and less virtuous men.
+
+The house that he built seems sadly out of repair.  The history of it is
+romantic to a degree.  Originally the palace of the Bishops of Ely, whose
+delicate constitutions could not stand the fen-land vapours which
+enwrapped the neighbourhood of their glorious Cathedral (but perhaps were
+not harmful to the less dignified clergy!), it remained in their
+possession until it was coveted by Henry the Eighth, who gave some land
+at Ely in exchange.  So the bishops had, doubtless with an ill grace, to
+go back to that fertile breeding-ground of agues and rheumatism, and one
+can well imagine the resident inferior clergy, between their aches and
+pains, chuckling secretly about this piece of poetic justice.
+
+And so in Royal possession the old palace continued until James the First
+in his turn exchanged it for the estate of Sir Robert Cecil at Theobalds.
+Previously it had been the home—the prison, rather of the Princess
+Elizabeth during her sister Mary’s reign.  The oak is still shown in the
+park under which she was sitting when the news of Mary’s death and the
+end, consequently, of the surveillance to which she was subjected, was
+brought her, November 17, 1588.  (But is tradition truthful here?  Would
+she have been sitting under an oak in November?)  “It is the Lord’s
+doing, it is marvellous in our eyes,” she exclaimed, quoting from the
+Psalms.  Three days later she held her first council in the old palace,
+and then on the 23rd set out for London.
+
+There are relics of the great queen at Hatfield House: a pair of her
+stockings and the garden hat she was wearing when the great news came to
+her.  But the house is nearly all of a later date, for when Sir Robert
+Cecil obtained it in exchange for Theobalds, he pulled down the greater
+part of the old palace and built the present striking Jacobean building,
+magnificent and impressive, and perhaps not the less impressive for being
+also somewhat gloomy.  This is no place to recount the glories of its
+picture-galleries and its noble state-rooms, or of the long line of the
+exalted and the great who have been entertained here.  Moreover, the
+great are not uncommonly the dullest of dull dogs.  It is rather with
+those of less estate, and with travellers, that in these pages we shall
+find our account.  Pepys, for instance, whom we need not object to call
+the natural man (for does not Scripture tell us that the human heart in a
+natural state is “desperately wicked”? and Samuel was no Puritan), who
+was here lusting to steal somebody’s dog, as he acknowledged in that very
+outspoken _Diary_ of his:—“Would fain have stolen a pretty dog that
+followed me, but could not, which troubled me.”
+
+There was a tragical happening at Hatfield, November 27, 1835, when the
+house was greatly injured by fire, and the old and eccentric Dowager
+Marchioness of Salisbury burnt to death, in her eighty-fifth year.  The
+pious declared it to be a “judgment” for her playing cards on Sunday; but
+what a number of conflagrations we should have if that were true and
+Providence consistent in its vengeance!
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+LEAVING Hatfield and its memories behind, we come, past the tree-shaded
+hamlet of Stanborough, to the long gradual rise of Digswell Hill,
+beautifully engineered over the uplands rising from the marshy banks of
+the little river Lea.  Off to the left, at the foot of the hill, goes the
+old road at a wide tangent, and with a decidedly abrupt plunge down into
+the water-meadows, crossing the Lea by Lemsford Mills, and rejoining the
+newer road on an equally abrupt and difficult rise half-way up the hill,
+by the wall of Brockett Hall Park.  It was here that Brickwall turnpike
+gate was situated in the old days.  The brick wall of the park that gave
+the gate its name is still there and a very old, substantial, and
+beautifully lichened red-brick wall it is—but the gate and the toll-board
+and the toll-house have all vanished.  Digswell Hill is beautiful, and so
+is Ayot Green, at the summit, with its giant trees and humble cottages
+stretching away on the left to the Ayot villages.  Not so the “Red Lion”
+close by.  More beautiful still—and steeper—is the descent into Welwyn,
+beneath over-arching trees and rugged banks, down from which secluded
+rustic summer-houses look upon the traffic of the highway.
+
+Welwyn lies in a deep hollow on the little river—or, more correctly
+speaking, the streamlet—of the Mimram.  Street and houses face you
+alarmingly as you descend the steep hillside, wondering (if you cycle) if
+the sharp corner can safely be rounded, or if you must needs dash through
+door or window of the “White Hart,” once one of the two coaching inns of
+the village.
+
+The “White Hart” at Welwyn was kept in the “twenties” by “old Barker,”
+who horsed the Stamford “Regent” a stage on the road, and was, in the
+language of the coachmen, a “three-cornered old beggar.”  That is to say,
+he kept a tight hand over the doings of coachmen and guards, did not
+approve of “shouldering,” and objected to the coachmen giving lessons to
+gentlemen coachmen, or allowing amateurs to “take the ribbons.”  From the
+passengers’ point of view this was entirely admirable of “old Barker,”
+for many an inoffensive traveller’s life had been jeopardised by the
+driving of unqualified persons.  Colonel Birch Reynardson tells a story
+of him and of Tom Hennesy, the best known of the “Regent” coachmen—one
+who could whistle louder, hit a horse harder, and tell a bigger lie than
+any of his contemporaries.  Hennesy had resigned the reins to him one day
+between London and Hatfield, but when they neared Welwyn, the
+accomplished Tom thought he had better resume them.  “It would never do
+for old Barker to see you driving,” said he.  The words were scarcely out
+of his mouth before the “three-cornered old beggar” himself appeared,
+walking up the hill, with the double object of taking a constitutional
+and of seeing if any “shouldering” was going on.
+
+“Don’t look as if you seed him,” said Tom.  “We’ll make the best of it we
+can.”
+
+                            [Picture: Welwyn]
+
+Down they went to the inn door, where the fresh team was standing.  By
+the time the horses had been got out of the coach, old Barker, who had
+turned back, looking anything but pleasant, was upon them.
+
+“Good morning, Mr. Barker, sir,” said Tom, with all the impudence he
+could command.  “Did you ever see a young gentleman take a coach steadier
+down a hill?  ’Pon my word, sir, he could not have done it better.  He’s
+a pupil of mine, sir, and I’m blessed if he did not do it capital; don’t
+you think he did, sir, for you seed him?”  “Hum,” said old Barker; “you
+know it’s all against the laws.  Supposing anything happened, what then?”
+“Well, sir, I did not expect anything _would_ happen, with such horses as
+these of yours; there’s no better four horses, sir, betwixt London and
+Stamford; and as for those wheelers, why, they’ll hold anything.”  This,
+of course, was pouring balm into old Barker’s wounds, which seemed to
+heal pretty quickly, and he put on a pleasanter face, and said, “Well,
+Hennesy, you know I don’t like ‘gentlemen coachmen,’ and, above all
+things, very _young_ ones.  Don’t you do it again.”
+
+Was Hennesy grateful?  Not at all; for, when they had driven away, he
+said, “Well, he was wonderful civil for _him_,” and added that if he
+could only catch him lying drunk in the road, he would run over his neck
+and kill him, “blessed if he wouldn’t!”
+
+This bold and independent fellow, like many another coachman, came down
+in the world when railways drove the coaches off the main roads, and was
+reduced to driving a pair-horse coach between Cambridge and Huntingdon.
+
+More picturesque than the “White Hart” is the “Wellington,” which
+composes so finely with the red-brick tower of the church, at the further
+end of the village street, where the road abruptly forks.  It is a street
+of all kinds and sizes of houses, mostly old and pleasingly grouped.
+
+But Welwyn has other claims upon the tourist.  It was the home for many
+years of Young, author of the once-popular _Night Thoughts_.  Who reads
+that sombre work now?  He was rector here from 1730 until 1765, when he
+died, but lives as a warning to those who inevitably identify an author
+with his books.  His work, _The Complaint_, _or_, _Night Thoughts on
+Life_, _Death_, _and Immortality_, is dour reading, but he was so little
+of a sombre man that we find him not infrequently in the company of, and
+a fellow spirit among, the convivial men of his time.  This was only a
+product of his “sensibility,” that curious quality peculiar to the
+eighteenth century, and did not necessarily prove him a weeping
+philosopher.  He had, indeed, a mental agility which could with ease fly
+from the most depressing disquisitions on the silent tomb, to the proper
+compounding of a stiff jorum of punch.  Young, on his appointment to
+Welwyn, married Lady Elizabeth (“Betty”) Lee, daughter of the Earl of
+Lichfield.  He found the rectory too small (or perhaps not good enough
+for her ladyship), and so purchased a more imposing house called the
+“Guessons”—anciently the “Guest House” of some abbey.  With it he bought
+land, and planted the lime-tree avenue which still remains a memorial of
+him.  There is a votive urn here, erected by Mr. Johnes-Knight, a
+succeeding rector; but probably the most enduring memorial of Young is
+the very first line of the _Night Thoughts_, the fine expression:—
+
+    “Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.”
+
+No one reads Young nowadays, and so every one who sees this, one of the
+most hackneyed of quotations, ascribes it to Shakespeare.  Alas, poor
+Young!
+
+Young erected a sundial in his garden here, with the motto, “_Eheu_,
+_fugaces_!” “Alas, how fleeting!”  It was not long before some midnight
+robbers came, and, carrying it off, justified the inscription.  Nowadays,
+besides the avenue and the votive urn, all that remains to tell of him is
+the tablet to his memory on the south wall of the aisle.
+
+Knebworth Park, with mansion and an ancient parish church full of
+monuments to Strodes, Robinsons and Lyttons, is just off to the left.
+There is no Lytton blood in the Earls “of” Lytton, who are not of Litton,
+near Tideswell, in Derbyshire, whence came the now extinct Lytton family.
+The whole assumption is romantic rather than warranted by facts.
+
+Knebworth is a place of much combined beauty and historic interest,
+together with a great deal of vulgar and uninteresting sham.  It has been
+described as “a sham-old house, with a sham lake, sham heraldic monsters,
+and sham-ancient portraits.”  Bulwer, the first Lord Lytton—“Bulwig,” as
+someone, to his intense annoyance, called him—was intensely fond of
+Gothic architecture and ornamentation; fond of it in an undiscriminating,
+Early Victorian, uninstructed way, and he stuck his house of Knebworth
+all over with gimcrackery that he fondly thought to be mediæval.
+Crockets, tourelles, pinnacles and grotesque gargoyles were added in
+wholesale fashion, and in a very carpenterish way.  One might almost say
+they were _wafered_ on.  They were not carved out of stone, but moulded
+cheaply in plaster, and in his son’s time were always falling.  As they
+fell, they were relegated to the nearest dustheap, and their places
+remained vacant.  A visitor to the second Lord Lytton tells, apropos of
+these things, how he was walking on the terrace with his host, when the
+gardener came up and said, “If you please, my lord, another of them
+bloody monkeys has fallen down in the night.”  It was, of course, one
+more of “Bulwig’s” quasi-Gothic abominations come to its doom.
+
+The Earls Lytton are neither baronial Bulwers nor ancient lordly Lyttons.
+Their real name is the very much more plebian one of Wiggett.  So far
+back as 1756, William Wiggett assumed the name of Bulwer on his marriage
+with a Sarah of that ilk.  His youngest son, the novelist, the child of
+another wife, who had been an Elizabeth Warburton, added the name of
+Lytton to his own on succeeding to his mother’s property of Knebworth.
+
+But that does not at once bring us to the Lytton connection.  For that,
+we must quote the late Augustus J. C. Hare, who was an adept at
+relationships to the remotest degree.  He had hundreds of cousins of his
+own, and knew who was everybody else’s twentieth or thirtieth cousin.  He
+tells us that this Elizabeth Warburton’s very remote connection with the
+real Lyttons lay in the fact that “her grandfather, John Robinson, was
+cousin (maternally) to Lytton Strode, who was great-nephew of a Sir
+William Lytton, who died childless in 1704.”  It will be allowed that the
+connection _is_ remote; practically indeed, non-existent.
+
+Nor is the name of Bulwer as distinguished as the novelist wished it to
+appear.  He sought to range it with Bölver, one of the war-titles of the
+Norse god, Odin; but it really derived from some plebian cattle-driver,
+or Bullward.
+
+The road rises steeply out of Welwyn, in the direction of Stevenage.
+Here some of the coaches had a narrow escape from destruction at the
+hands of unknown miscreants, ancestors of the criminal lunatics who place
+obstacles upon the railways in our times.  Our murderous larrikins had
+their counterparts in the old days, in those who placed gates across the
+roads, so that the coaches should run into them in the darkness.  An
+incident of this kind happened here on the night of June 5, 1805, when
+two gates were found set up in the main road, and another at Welwyn
+Green.  Fortunately, no accident resulted, and the ruffians, who
+doubtless were waiting the result of their work, must have gone home
+disappointed.
+
+From the beautiful expanse of gorsy and wooded hillside common above the
+village may be glimpsed the great red-brick viaduct of Welwyn, carrying
+the main line of the Great Northern Railway across the wide and deep
+valley of the Mimram, an insignificant stream for such a channel.
+Woolmer Green and Broadwater, between this point and Stevenage, are
+modern and uninteresting hamlets, created out of nothingness by the
+speculative builder and the handy situation of Knebworth station, beside
+the road, which now begins to give another example of its flatness.
+
+Leisurely wayfarers will notice the old half-timbered cottage at the
+entrance to the churchyard.  On its side wall are hung two stout long
+poles with formidable hooks attached.  These are old fire-appliances,
+used in the days of thatched roofs, for pulling off the whole of the
+blazing thatch.  Travellers, leisured or otherwise, will scarce be able
+to miss seeing the great and offensive boards hereabouts, advertising a
+new suburban or “Garden Suburb” settlement in course of building away to
+the right, since 1920; blessed and boomed by Lord Northcliffe, and
+apparently to be given the name of “Daily Mail.”  Horrible!
+
+The entrance to Stevenage is signalised by a group of new and commonplace
+cottages elbowing the famous Six Hills, a series of sepulchral barrows of
+prehistoric date, beside the highway.  These six grassy mounds might not
+unreasonably be passed unthinkingly by the uninstructed, or taken for
+grass-grown heaps of refuse.  Centuries of wear and weather have had
+their effect, and they do not look very monumental now; but they were
+once remarkable enough to give the place its name, Stevenage deriving
+from the Saxon “_stigenhaght_,” or “hills by the highway.”
+
+To coachmen, who were adepts in the art of what the slangy call
+“spoofing,” and were always ready—in earlier slang phrase—to “take a rise
+out of” strangers, the Six Hills afforded an excellent opportunity of
+practising a diluted form of wit, and often brought them a glass of
+brandy or rum-and-milk at the next pull-up, in payment of the bets they
+would make with the most innocent-looking passenger, that he could not
+tell which two of the hills were furthest apart.  They are, as nearly as
+possible, equi-distant; but strangers would select one couple or another,
+according to their fancy; whereupon the coachman would triumphantly point
+out that the first and the last were, as a matter of fact, the most
+widely divided.  This perhaps does not exhibit coaching wit in a
+strikingly robust light; but a very weak kind of jocularity served to
+pass the weary hours of travel in our grandfathers’ days.
+
+                  [Picture: The “Six Hills,” Stevenage]
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+STEVENAGE is the first of the many wide-streeted towns and villages whose
+emptiness proclaims the something missing that was provided for by all
+this vast roominess.  Its one street, lining the old road, was originally
+laid out so spaciously for the purpose of affording room for the traffic
+for which, once upon a time, it was not too spacious.  It is all too wide
+now that the intercourse of two nations proceeds by rail, and many of the
+old inns that once did so famous a trade are converted into private
+residences.  Prominent among them was the “Swan,” which may now be sought
+in the large red-brick house on the right-hand side of the forking roads,
+as the town is left for Baldock.  It may readily be identified by its
+archway, which formerly led to the spacious stables.
+
+The “Swan” at Stevenage, kept in pre-railway days by a postmaster named
+Cass, was one of those exclusive houses which, like the “Red Lion” and
+the “Green Man” at Barnet, did not condescend to the ordinary
+coach-traveller.  Cass kept post-horses only, and his customers ranged
+from princes and dukes down to baronets and wealthy knights.
+
+“Posting in all its branches,” as the postmasters used to say in the
+announcements outside their establishments, was at the beginning of the
+nineteenth century essentially aristocratic; but it had many changes,
+from its beginning, about the dawn of the seventeenth century, to its
+end, before the middle of the nineteenth.  Originally “posting” meant the
+hire of horses only, and the traveller rode horseback himself,
+accompanied perhaps by a mounted guide.  Thus Fynes Morison, in his
+_Itinerary_, published in 1617, speaks of the early days of posting:—“In
+England, towards the south, and in the west parts, and from London to
+Barwick upon the confines of Scotland, post-horses are established at
+every ten miles or thereabouts, which they ride a false gallop after some
+ten miles an hour sometimes, and that makes their hire the greater; for
+with a commission from the chief postmaster or chiefe lords of the
+councell (given either upon publike businesse, or at least pretence
+thereof), a passenger shall pay twopence halfpenny each mile for his
+horse, and as much for his guide’s horse; but one guide will serve the
+whole company, though many ride together, who may easily bring back the
+horses, driving them before him, who ‘know the waye as well as a beggar
+knowes his dishe.’  This extraordinary charge of horses’ hire may well be
+recompensed with the speede of the journey, whereby greater expences in
+the innes are avoided; all the difficultie is, to have a body able to
+endure the toyle.  For these horses the passenger is at no charge to give
+them meat onely at the ten miles, and the boy that carries them backe
+will expect some few pence in gift.”
+
+When carriages were introduced, the very great personages of the realm
+“progressed” in them, and had their love of display gratified thereby.
+But what they gained in pomp they lost in speed, for at the best of it
+they rarely travelled at a greater pace than seven miles an hour.
+
+An odd institution with the noble and the wealthy families of that bygone
+age was the “running footman.”  It has sometimes been supposed that these
+deer-footed servitors were for town service, perhaps because “old Q,” the
+profligate Marquis of Queensberry, who was the last to keep one, lived in
+town during his last years and necessarily kept his lackey running London
+streets.  The unique sign of the “running footman,” with the portrait of
+such an one in costume, is also in London, and may be seen any day on a
+little public-house, still chiefly frequented by men-servants, in Charles
+Street, Berkeley Square.  He wears a uniform consisting of blue coat and
+breeches, trimmed with gold lace.  Round his waist is a red sash, on his
+head a cap with a nodding plume, and in his hand the long staff carried
+by all his tribe.  This is an outfit somewhat different from that usually
+worn, for we are told that they wore no breeches, but a short silk
+petticoat kept down by a deep gold fringe.
+
+The function of a running footman was to run ahead of his employer’s
+carriage, to point out the proper turnings to take, or to arrange for his
+reception at the inns; but as time went on and accommodation increased,
+he was not of any practical use, and became simply a kind of unnecessary
+fore-runner, who by his appearance advertised the coming of my lord and
+upheld my lord’s dignity.  It is said that these ministers to senseless
+pomp and vanity usually ran at the rate of seven miles an hour, and
+frequently did sixty miles a day.  The long and highly ornamented staff
+they carried had a hollow silver ball at the end containing white wine.
+Unscrewing it, the footman could refresh himself.  More white wine, mixed
+with eggs, was given him at the end of his journey, and he must have
+needed it!  Over the bad and hilly roads of a hundred and fifty years
+ago, the running footman could readily keep ahead of a carriage; on the
+flat the horses, of course, had the advantage.
+
+Post-chaises were unknown in England until after the middle of the
+eighteenth century had come and gone.  Thus we find Horace Walpole and
+Gray, taking the “grand tour” together in 1739, astonished to laughter at
+the post-chaises which conveyed them from Boulogne towards Paris.  This
+French vehicle, the father of all post-chaises, was two-wheeled, and not
+very unlike our present hansom-cab, the door being in front and the body
+hung in much the same way, only a little more forward from the wheels.
+The French _chaise de-poste_ was invented in 1664, and the first used in
+England were of this type; but they proved unsuitable for use in this
+country, and English carriage-builders at length evolved the well-known
+post-chaise, which went out only with the coaching age.  But it was long
+before it began to supplant the post-horses and the feminine pillion.
+
+Every one is familiar with the appearance of the old post-chaise, which,
+according to the painters and the print-sellers, appears to have been
+used principally for the purpose of spiriting love-lorn couples with the
+speed of the wind away from all restrictions of home and the Court of
+Chancery.  A post-chaise was (so it seems nowadays) a rather cumbrous
+affair, four-wheeled, high, and insecurely hung, with a glass front and a
+seat to hold three, facing the horses.  The original designers evidently
+had no prophetic visions as to this especial popularity of post-chaises
+with errant lovers, nor did they ponder the proverb, “Two’s company,
+three’s none,” else they would have restricted their accommodation to
+two, or have enlarged it to four.
+
+It was an expensive as well as a pleasant method of travelling, costing
+as it did at least a shilling a mile, and, in times when forage was dear,
+one shilling and threepence.  The usual rates were chaise, nine-pence a
+mile, pair of post-horses, sixpence; four horses and chaise, supposing
+you desired to travel speedily—say at twelve miles an
+hour—one-and-ninepence.  But these costs and charges did not frank the
+traveller through.  The post-boy’s tip was as inevitable as night and
+morning.  Likewise there were the “gates” to pay every now and again.
+One shudders to contemplate the total cost of posting from London to
+Edinburgh, even with only the ordinary equipment of two horses.  There
+were thirty post-stages between the two capitals, according to the books
+published for the use of travellers a hundred years ago.  Those books
+were very necessary to any one who did not desire to be charged for
+perhaps a mile more on each stage than it really measured, which was one
+of those artful postmasters’ little ways.  Here is a list of these stages
+with the measurements, to which travellers drew the attention of those
+postmasters who commonly endeavoured to overcharge:—
+
+                    Miles       Furlongs                      Miles       Furlongs
+Barnet                 11              0  York                    9              3
+Hatfield                8              4  Easingwold             13              3
+Stevenage              11              7  Thirsk                 10              3
+Biggleswade            13              5  Northallerton           9              0
+Buckden                15              7  Darlington             16              0
+Stilton                13              7  Durham                 18              2
+Stamford               14              2  Newcastle              14              4
+Witham Common          11              2  Morpeth                14              6
+Grantham                9              5  Alnwick                18              6
+Newark                 14              3  Belford                14              5
+Tuxford                13              2  Berwick                15              3
+Barnby Moor            10              4  Press Inn              11              5
+Doncaster              12              0  Dunbar                 14              3
+Ferrybridge            15              2  Haddington             11              0
+Tadcaster              12              7  Edinburgh              16              0
+
+Nearly four hundred miles by these measurements.  This, at a shilling a
+mile for the posting, gives £20; but, including the postboys’ tips,
+“gates,” and expenses at the inns on the road, the journey could not have
+been done in this way under £30, at the most modest calculation.  This
+list of post-stages was one drawn up for distances chiefly between the
+towns, but nothing is more remarkable along the Great North Road than the
+number of old posting-houses which still exist (although of course their
+business is gone) in wild and lonely spots, far removed from either town
+or village.
+
+Another “branch” of posting was the horsing alone, by which a private
+carriage could be taken to or from town by hiring posters at every stage.
+This was a favourite practice with the gentry of the shires, who thus had
+all the _éclat_ of travelling in private state, without the expense and
+trouble of providing their own horses.  It is probably of this method
+that De Quincey speaks in the following passage:—
+
+    “In my childhood,” says he, “standing with one or two of my brothers
+    and sisters at the front window of my mother’s carriage, I remember
+    one unvarying set of images before us.  The postillion (for so were
+    all carriages then driven) was employed, not by fits and starts, but
+    always and eternally, in quartering, _i.e._ in crossing from side to
+    side, according to the casualties of the ground.  Before you
+    stretched a wintry length of lane, with ruts deep enough to fracture
+    the leg of a horse, filled to the brim with standing pools of
+    rain-water; and the collateral chambers of these ruts kept from
+    becoming confluent by thin ridges, such as the Romans called _lirae_,
+    to maintain the footing upon which _lirae_, so as not to swerve (or
+    as the Romans would say, _delirare_), was a trial of some skill, both
+    for the horses and their postillion.  It was, indeed, next to
+    impossible for any horse, on such a narrow crust of separation, not
+    to grow _delirious_ in the Roman metaphor; and the nervous anxiety
+    which haunted me when a child was much fed by this image so often
+    before my eyes, and the sympathy with which I followed the motion of
+    the docile creatures’ legs.  Go to sleep at the beginning of a stage,
+    and the last thing you saw—wake up, and the first thing you saw—was
+    the line of wintry pools, the poor off-horse planting his steps with
+    care, and the cautious postillion gently applying his spur whilst
+    manoeuvring across the system of grooves with some sort of science
+    that looked like a gipsy’s palmistry—so equally unintelligible to me
+    were his motions in what he sought and in what he avoided.”
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+BEFORE we leave Stevenage, we must pay a visit to the “Old Castle” inn,
+in whose stable the body of the eccentric Henry Trigg is deposited, in a
+coffin amid the rafters, plain for all to see; somewhat dilapidated and
+battered in the lapse of two centuries, and with a patch of tin over the
+hole cut in it by some riotous blades long ago, but doubtless still
+containing his bones.  His Will sufficiently explains the circumstances.
+
+                          IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN.
+
+    I, HENRY TRIGG, of Stevenage, in the County of Hertford, Grocer,
+    being very infirm and weak in body, but of perfect sound mind and
+    memory, God be praised for it, calling into mind the mortality of my
+    body, do now make and ordain this my last Will and Testament, in
+    writing, hereafter following: that is to say:—Principally I recommend
+    my soul into the merciful hands of Almighty God that first gave me
+    it, assuredly believing and only expecting free pardon and
+    forgiveness of all my sins, and eternal life in and through the only
+    merits, death, and passion of Jesus Christ my Saviour; and as to my
+    body I commit it to the West end of my Hovel, to be decently laid
+    there upon a floor erected by my Executor, upon the purlin, for the
+    same purpose; nothing doubting but at the general Resurrection I
+    shall receive the same again by the mighty power of God; and as for
+    and concerning such worldly substance as it hath pleased God to bless
+    me with in this world, I do devise and dispose of the same in manner
+    and form here following.
+
+                          [Picture: Trigg’s Coffin]
+
+    _Imprimis_.  I give and devise unto my loving brother Thomas Trigg,
+    of Letchworth, in the County of Hertford, Clerk, and to his Heirs and
+    Assigns for ever, all those my Freehold Lands lying dispersedly in
+    the several common fields in the parish of Stevenage aforesaid, and
+    also all my Copyhold Lands, upon condition that he shall lay my body
+    upon the place before mentioned; and also all that Messuage, Cottage,
+    or Tenement at Redcoats Green in the Parish of Much Wymondly,
+    together with those Nine Acres of Land (more or less) purchased of
+    William Hale and Thomas Hale, Jun.; and also my Cottage, Orchard, and
+    barn, with four acres of Land (more or less) belonging, lying, and
+    being in the Parish of Little Wymondly, and now in the possession of
+    Samuel Kitchener, labourer; and all my Cottages, Messuages, or
+    Tenements situate and being in Stevenage, aforesaid: or, upon
+    condition that he shall pay my brother, George Trigg, the sum of Ten
+    Pounds per annum for life: but if my brother shall neglect or refuse
+    to lay my body where I desire it should be laid, then, upon that
+    condition, I will and bequeath all that which I have already
+    bequeathed to my brother Thomas Trigg, unto my brother George Trigg,
+    and to his heirs for ever; and if my brother George Trigg should
+    refuse to lay my body under my Hovel, then what I have bequeathed
+    unto him, as all my Lands and Tenements, I lastly bequeath them unto
+    my nephew William Trigg and his heirs for ever, upon his seeing that
+    my body is decently laid up there as aforesaid.
+
+    _Item_.  I give and bequeath unto my nephew William Trigg, the sum of
+    _Five Pounds_, at the age of Thirty years; to his sister Sarah the
+    sum of _Twenty Pounds_; to his sister Rose the sum of _Twenty
+    Pounds_; and lastly to his sister Ann the sum of _Twenty Pounds_; all
+    at the age of Thirty Years: to John Spencer, of London, Butcher, the
+    sum of _One Guinea_; and to Solomon Spencer, of Stevenage, the sum of
+    _One Guinea_, Three Years next after my decease; to my cousin Henry
+    Kimpton, _One Guinea_, One Year next after my decease, and another
+    _Guinea_ Two Years after my decease; to William Waby, _Five
+    Shillings_; and to Joseph Priest, _Two Shillings and Sixpence_, Two
+    Years after my decease; to my tenant Robert Wright the sum of _Five
+    Shillings_, Two years next after my decease; and to Ralph Lowd and
+    John Reeves, _One Shilling_ each, Two Years next after my decease.
+
+    _Item_.  All the rest of my Goods and Chattels, and personal Estate,
+    and Ready Money, I do hereby give and devise unto my brother Thomas
+    Trigg, paying my debts and laying my body where I would have it laid;
+    whom I likewise make and ordain my full and sole Executor of this my
+    last Will and Testament, or else to them before mentioned; ratifying
+    and confirming this and no other to be my last Will and Testament, in
+    witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal this
+    Twenty-eighth day of September, in the year of our Lord One Thousand
+    Seven Hundred and Twenty-four
+
+                                                              HENRY TRIGG.
+
+    Read, signed, sealed, and declared by the said Henry Trigg, the
+    Testator, to be his last Will and Testament, in the presence of us
+    who have subscribed our names as witnesses hereto, in the presence of
+    the said Testator.
+
+                                                        JOHN HAWKINS, Sen.
+                                                        JOHN HAWKINS, Jun.
+                                             × The mark of WILLIAM SEXTON.
+
+    Proved in the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon, the 15th day of October,
+    1724, by the Executor Thomas Trigg.
+
+The inn-signs of Stevenage afford some exercise for the contemplative
+mind.  As the town is approached from London, the sign of “Our Mutual
+Friend” appears, nearly opposite a domestic Gothic building of red and
+white brick, originally a home for decayed authors, founded by Charles
+Dickens and the first Lord Lytton.  The decayed authors did not take
+kindly to the scheme.  Perhaps they did not like being patronised by
+authors of better fortunes than their own.  The institution was a
+failure, and the building is now put to other uses.  No doubt the sign of
+“Our Mutual Friend” derives from those times when Dickens and Lytton
+foregathered here and at Knebworth.  At quite the other end of the town
+appears the obviously new sign of the “Lord Kitchener,” almost opposite
+that of another military hero, the “Marquis of Granby.”
+
+Passing through the little old-world village of Graveley, succeeded by
+the beautifully graded rise and fall of Lannock Hill, we come into the
+town of Baldock, with its great church prominent in front, and its empty
+streets running in puzzling directions.  It was at Baldock that Charles
+the First, being conducted as a prisoner to London, was offered wine in
+one of the sacramental vessels by the vicar, Josias Byrd, and it was on
+the road outside the town, near where the old turnpike gate stood, that
+the Newcastle wagon, on its way to London, was plundered of £500 in coin
+by three mounted highwaymen, on a February morning in 1737.
+
+Our old friend Mr. Samuel Pepys, journeying on August 6th, 1661, from
+Brampton, came into Baldock, and stayed the night, at some inn not
+specified.  He says, “Took horse for London, and with much ado got to
+Baldwick.  There lay, and had a good supper by myself.  The landlady
+being a pretty woman, but I durst not take notice of her, her husband
+being there.”
+
+Always some spoil-sport in the way!
+
+Baldock, from its stunted extinguisher spire to its fine old brick houses
+and nodding plaster cottages, is characteristically Hertfordshire.  Among
+other things of general interest, it has a row of almshouses, duly
+inscribed:—
+
+                           “Theis Almes Howses are
+                         the gieft of Mr. John Wynne
+                         cittezen of London, Latelye
+                          Deceased, who hath left a
+                          Yeareley stipend to everey
+                          poore of either howses to
+                         the Worldes End.  September
+                              Anno Domini 1621.”
+
+The worthy citizen reckoned without the Charity Commissioners, who may
+confidently be expected to propound a “scheme” some day long anterior to
+the final crash, by which his wishes will be entirely disregarded.
+
+Away to the left of Baldock will be noticed a new town, and the factory
+chimneys of it.  This is Letchworth, the “Garden City,” developed out of
+Letchworth, the little village of old.  This “First Garden City,” founded
+in 1902, on a nominal capital of £300,000 actual £125,000, by the Garden
+City Association, itself founded in June, 1899, with a capital of about
+thirty shillings, represents a passionate quest of the ideal life on a 5
+per cent. basis of profit.  The problem of how to create an earthly
+paradise (plus industrial factories) was here to be tackled.  The
+beginnings of such things are always the most charming; and Letchworth
+began ideally.  But the factories and the five per cent. always have a
+way of overcoming ideals; and we shall see.
+
+                       [Picture: At the 39th mile]
+
+The stone outside Baldock, marking the thirty-ninth mile is milestone and
+upping-block as well.
+
+Midway between Baldock and Biggleswade, at Topler’s Hill, the
+Bedfordshire border is crossed.  We may perhaps be excused if we pass
+Topler’s Hill unwittingly, for the rises called “hills” on the Great
+North Road would generally pass unnoticed elsewhere.  Biggleswade town
+and neighbourhood are interested wholly in cabbages and potatoes and
+other highly necessary, but essentially unromantic, vegetables.  The
+surrounding country is in spring and summer one vast market-garden; at
+other times it is generally a lake of equal vastness, for the Ivel and
+the Ouse, that run so sluggishly through the flat lands, arise then in
+their might and submerge fields and roads for miles around.
+
+As for Biggleswade itself, it is a town with an extraordinarily broad and
+empty market-place, a church with a spire of the Hertfordshire type, and
+two old coaching inns—the “White Swan” and the “Crown”—facing one another
+in an aggressive rivalry at a narrow outlet of the market-place.  The
+“White Swan” was the inn at which the up “Regent” coach dined.  It was
+kept at that time by a man named Crouch, “that long, sour old beggar,” in
+the words of Tom Hennesy.  Here “the process of dining on a really cold
+day in winter,” to quote Colonel Birch Reynardson, “was carried on under
+no small amount of difficulty.  Your hands were frozen, your feet were
+frozen, your very mouth felt frozen, and in fact you felt frozen all
+over.  Sometimes, with all this cold, you were also wet through, your hat
+wet through, your coat wet through, the large wrapper that was meant to
+keep your neck warm and dry wet through, and, in fact, you were wet
+through yourself to your very bones.  Only twenty minutes were allowed
+for dinner; and by the time you had got your hands warm enough to be able
+to untie your neck wrapper, and had got out of your great-coat, which,
+being wet, clung tenaciously to you, the time for feeding was half gone.
+By the time you had got one quarter of what you could have consumed, had
+your mouth been in eating trim and your hands warm enough to handle your
+knife and fork, the coachman would put his head in, and say: “Now,
+gentlemen, if you please; the coach is ready.”  After this summons,
+having struggled into your wet greatcoat, bound your miserable wet
+wrapper round your miserable cold throat, having paid your two and
+sixpence for the dinner that you had the will, but not the time, to eat,
+with sixpence for the waiter, you wished the worthy Mr. Crouch good day,
+grudged him the half-crown he had pocketed for having dined so miserably,
+and again mounted your seat, to be rained and snowed upon, and almost
+frozen to death before you reached London.”
+
+                          [Picture: Biggleswade]
+
+Leaving Biggleswade, the Ivel is crossed and Tingey’s Corner passed.
+Tingey’s Corner marks the junction of the old alternative route from
+Welwyn, by Hitchin to Lower Codicote, the route adopted by
+record-breaking cyclists.  The hamlets of Lower Codicote and Beeston
+Green open up a view of Sandy, away to the right, with its range of
+yellow sand-hills running for some three miles parallel with the road,
+and seeming the more impressive by reason of the dead level on which they
+look.  The canal-like, bare banks of the Ivel are passed again at
+Girtford, and the roadside cottages of Tempsford reached; the village and
+church lying off to the left, where the Ouse and the Ivel come to their
+sluggish confluence, and form a waterway which once afforded marauding
+Danes an excellent route from the coast up to Bedford.  Even now the
+remains of a fortification they constructed to command this strategic
+point are visible, and bear the name of the “Dannicke”; that is to say,
+the “Danes’ work,” or perhaps the “Danes’ wick,” “wick” meaning
+“village.”
+
+An infinitely later work—Tempsford turnpike-gate, to wit—has disappeared
+a great deal more effectively than those ancient entrenchments, and the
+way is clear and flat, not to say featureless, over the Ouse, past the
+outlying houses of Wyboston, and so into Little End, the most southerly
+limit of Eaton Socon.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+PAST Tempsford some of the coaches, notably the Stamford “Regent,” turned
+off into the loop road by St. Neots and Huntingdon.  In the winter time,
+or when the spring rains were falling, they did this at some risk, for
+the low-lying land by the river Ouse was often awash.  Two old ladies
+were on one occasion given a terrible fright, the road being deeply
+flooded and the water coming into the coach, so that they had to stand on
+the seats.  They quite thought they were going to be drowned, and perhaps
+they would have been had the “Regent” been driven by one unused to the
+road.  Had the coachman driven into a ditch—as he might easily have done
+with the floods covering all the landmarks—it would have been “all up”
+with the “insides” for certain and perhaps for the “outsides” as well.
+
+The most prudent coachmen in winter time kept to the main road, which
+lies somewhat higher, and passed through Eaton Socon.  Once—to judge by
+its name—a place of importance, this is now only a long village of one
+straggling street.  At some undetermined period the head of a “soke,” or
+separate legal jurisdiction, all memories of the dignity implied are
+gone, save only the empty title, which Dickens makes fun of by calling
+the village in _Nicholas Nickleby_ “Eton Slocomb.”  The “White Horse,” a
+picturesque roadside inn, may be looked upon with interest by those keen
+on identifying Dickens landmarks.  In later days it became a favourite
+resort of the North Road Cycling Club, and witnessed the beginning and
+ending of many a road race in the “eighties” and early “nineties,” when
+such things were.
+
+The story of the London to York cycling record is fitly to be told in
+this page.  It is not so long a tale as that of the famous one from
+London to Brighton and back, but it stands for greater efforts and for a
+vast amount of pluck and endurance.  There have been those
+unsportsmanlike souls who, not finding sport an end in itself, have
+questioned the use of record making and breaking.  But it has had its
+use, and even from this point of view has amply justified itself, for the
+continually increasing speed required out of cycles for these purposes
+has led to the perfecting of them within what is, after all, a
+comparatively short time; so that the sporting clubman has, after all,
+while strictly occupied within the range of his own ambitions,
+contributed to the general good by bringing about the manufacture of a
+vehicle which, used by many hundreds of thousands of people who never
+raced in their lives, and are probably incapable of a speed of more than
+twelve miles an hour, has brought the roads and lanes of the country
+within the knowledge of many to whom rural life was something new and
+strange.
+
+The first recorded cycle ride to York in which speed was an object was
+that of C. Wheaton, September 1872.  That pioneer took two days to
+perform the journey, making Stamford, a distance of eighty-nine miles,
+the end of his first day’s adventure, in 15½ hours, and on the second day
+reaching York in a further 26 hours 40 minutes: total, 42 hours 10
+minutes.  This, with the front-driving low cycle of those days, was an
+achievement.  Wooden wheels and iron tyres did not conduce to either
+speed or ease, and that now historic figure, painfully crawling (as we
+should now think his progress) to York is heroic.
+
+Perhaps this tale of hardship was calculated to deter others from trying
+their mettle, but at any rate it was not until July 9, 1874, that two
+others, Ian Keith-Falconer and J. H. Stanley Thorpe, followed, and they
+failed in the effort.  After another two years had almost passed, on June
+5, 1876, Thorpe made another attempt.  Leaving Highgate Archway at 11.10
+P.M., he arrived the next day at York at 9.40 P.M. = 22 hours 30 minutes;
+chiefly, of course, by favour of that then “improved” form of bicycle,
+the tall “ordinary.”
+
+Thirteen years passed before this record was lowered, and the one that
+replaced it was not a remarkable performance, considering the further
+great improvements in cycles.  This ride, in the summer of 1889,
+performed on a solid-tyred “safety,” took 21 hours 10 minutes, and was
+beaten in the same year by six minutes by H. R. Pope, riding a tricycle;
+himself displaced, shortly after, by F. T. Bidlake, also mounted on a
+tricycle, who did the 197 miles in 18 hours 28 minutes.
+
+In 1890, and for several years following, records came and went with
+increasing rapidity.  In 1890 J. M. James put the safety record at 16
+hours 52 minutes, and T. A. Edge soon followed, reducing it to 14 hours
+33 minutes, James regaining the record again in 1891 by a bare thirteen
+minutes.  In the following year, S. F. Edge, on a front-driving safety,
+made a splendid record of 12 hours 49 minutes, but had the mortification
+to see it beaten the next day, June 27, by F. W. Shorland, in 39 minutes
+less.  In this year there were several rival tricycle records: that of W.
+J. A. Butterfield, of 18 hours 9 minutes being lowered by F. T. Bidlake
+by nearly three hours, and beaten again, on September 29, Bidlake’s
+figures on this occasion being 13 hours 19 minutes.  On the same day M.
+A. Holbein and F. W. Shorland rode to York on a tandem tricycle in
+exactly the same time.
+
+C. C. Fontaine went for the safety record on August 29, 1894, when he put
+the figures down to 11 hours 51 minutes.  Fontaine lowered his own record
+in the following year, on October 18, by 21 minutes 45 seconds, and this
+was disposed of by George Hunt on May 7, 1896, when he got well within
+the eleven hours, at 10 hours 48 minutes.
+
+This was lowered by F. R. Goodwin on July 19, 1899, his time being 10
+hours 16 minutes; the speed on this occasion averaging rather over
+nineteen miles an hour.  Even this could not have been accomplished
+without the aid of the most perfect motor pace-making arrangements.
+Goodwin smashed all these previous records on his way to establish the
+London to Edinburgh record of 25 hours 26 minutes, in which the average
+was somewhat higher; nearly twenty miles an hour.
+
+The next, and latest, safety cycle record to York was made, unpaced, in
+1900; when H. Green performed the journey in 10 hours 19 minutes.
+
+The tandem safety London to York records should be mentioned.  The first
+two were set up on July 24, 1895, and October 2, 1896, respectively: by
+G. P. Mills and T. A. Edge; and T. Hobson and H. E. Wilson, the times
+being 12 hours 33 minutes, and 11 hours 35 minutes.
+
+These were followed by:—
+
+                                                     Hrs.      Mins.
+1901.      A. H. and P. S. Murray (unpaced)              10         59
+1905.      R. L. I. Knipe and S. Irving                  10         52
+           (unpaced)
+1907.      F. H. Wingrave and R. A. Wingrave              9         30
+           (unpaced)
+
+The London to Edinburgh records are:
+
+                             SAFETY BICYCLE.
+
+                                           Hrs.      Mins.
+1889.      F. W. Shorland                      44         49
+1891.      P. A. Ransom                        43         25
+1892.      R. H. Carlisle                      32         55
+1894.      G. P. Mills                         29         28
+   ,,      C. C. Fontaine                      28         27
+1895.      W. J. Neason                        27         38
+1897.      J. Hunt                             26         47
+1899.      F. R. Goodwin (motor-paced)         25         26
+1903.      F. Wright (unpaced)                 31         48
+1904.      E. H. Grimsdell                     28          3
+   ,,      G. A. Olley                         27         10
+1905.      E. H. Grimsdell                     26         10
+   ,,      R. Shirley                          23         43
+
+A tricycle record, unpaced, made by F. W. Wesley in 1905, at 32 hours 42
+minutes yet stands.
+
+Tandem safety records:—
+
+                                                   Hrs.      Mins.
+1894.      E. Oxborrow and H. Sansom                   27         33
+1905.      E. Bright and P. H. Miles (unpaced)         27         54
+
+XIX
+
+
+EATON Socon, its long straggling street and beautiful church-tower, left
+behind, the road descends to the “river Kym,” as the guidebooks call the
+tiny stream which, bordered by marshes, crosses under the road at a point
+known as Cross Hall.  The “river Kym” certainly is, or was, important
+enough to confer its name upon the neighbouring townlet of Kimbolton, but
+the country folk now only know it as Weston Brook.  The descent to it has
+of late years acquired the name of “Chicken Hill,” given by the North
+Roaders, racing cyclists, who must often have run over the fowls kept by
+the people of a cottage at the bottom.  This is succeeded by Diddington
+Bridge, a picturesque, white-painted timber structure spanning the little
+Diddington Brook, which has eaten its way deeply into the earth, and is
+romantically shaded by tall trees and bordered by the undergrowth that
+fills the pretty hollow.
+
+The slight rise from this spot is succeeded by an easy descent into
+narrow-streeted Buckden, one of those old “thoroughfare” coaching
+villages which imagined themselves on the way to becoming towns in the
+fine, free-handed old days.  The huge bulk of the “George” is eloquent of
+this, with its fifteen windows in a row, and the signs still noticeable
+in the brickwork, showing where the house was doubled in size at the
+period of its greatest prosperity.  Nowadays the “George” is all too
+large for its trade, and a portion of it is converted into shops.  As for
+the interminable rooms and passages above, they echo hollow to the
+infrequent footfall, where they were once informed with a cheerful bustle
+and continuous arrival and departure.  There was a period, a few years
+ago, when the North Road Club’s road-racing events brought crowds of
+cyclists and busy times once more to the “George,” but they are
+irretrievably gone.
+
+To and from Buckden and Welwyn in coaching times drove every day the
+notable Cartwright, of the York “Express”; a day’s work of about seventy
+miles.  Cartwright was something more than a coachman, being himself
+landlord of the “George” at Buckden, and horsing one or two of the stages
+over which he drove.  “Peter Pry,” one of the old _Sporting Magazine’s_
+coaching critics, waxes eloquent over him.  It was a vile day when, to
+sample Cartwright’s quality, he set out by the York “Express” from London
+for Grantham; but neither the weather nor the scenery, nor anything in
+Heaven or Earth drew his attention from Cartwright.  He starts at once
+with being struck at Welwyn with Cartwright’s graceful and easy way of
+mounting the box, and then proceeds to make a kind of admiring inventory
+of his person.  Thus, he might have been considered to be under fifty
+years of age, bony, without fat; healthy looking, evidently the effect of
+abstemiousness; not too tall, but just the size to sit gracefully and
+powerfully.  His right hand and whip were beautifully in unison; he kept
+his horses like clock-work, and to see the refinement with which he
+managed the whip was well worth riding many hours on a wet day.  But the
+occasions on which he used the whip were rare, although the tits were
+only fair, and not by any means first-rate.  No dandy, but equipped most
+respectably and modestly, and with good taste, he was the idol of the
+road, both with old and young; while his manners on the box were
+respectful, communicative without impertinence, and untarnished with
+slang.  Acquainted with everybody and every occupation within his sphere,
+he was an entertaining companion even to an ordinary traveller; but he
+enchanted the amateur of coaching with his perfect professional
+knowledge, which embraced all niceties.  His excellent qualities, we are
+glad to notice, in conclusion, had gained their reward; he was
+well-to-do, lived regularly, had a happy family, and envied neither lord
+nor peasant.
+
+                            [Picture: Buckden]
+
+Welwyn, the road to Buckden, and Buckden itself seem quite lonely without
+this figure of all the virtues and the graces.
+
+Spelt “Bugden” in other times, the inhabitants still pronounce its name
+in this way.  There is a well-defined air of aristocracy about this
+village, due partly to the ruined towers of the old palace of the Bishops
+of Lincoln, and to the sturdy old red-brick walls that enclose the
+grounds in which they stand.  They are walls with a thickness and lavish
+use of material calculated to make the builder of “desirable villa
+residences” gasp with dismay at such apparently wanton extravagance.  But
+the Bishops of Lincoln, who built those walls in the fifteenth century,
+had not obtained their land on a building lease; and, moreover, they were
+building for their own use, which makes a deal of difference, it must be
+conceded.
+
+You cannot help noticing these walls, for they run for some distance
+beside the road.  Through a gateway is seen a pleasant view of lawns and
+the front of a modern mansion.  The Bishops have long left Buckden, and
+have gone to reside at their palace at Lincoln, Buckden Palace having
+been wantonly demolished when the Order in Council, authorising these
+Right Reverend Fathers in God to alienate the property, was obtained.
+The church adjoins their roofless old gatehouse, and is a fine old place
+of worship, with a stone spire of the Northants type.
+
+In this church will be found a singular example of modesty.  It is an
+epitaph without the name of the person:—
+
+                           “Sacred to the memory of
+                                 AN OFFICER,
+                         who sincerely regarded this
+                              his native village
+                and caused an asylum to be erected, to protect
+                         Age, and to reward Industry.
+                          Reader, ask not his name.
+                    If thou approve a deed which succours
+                       the helpless, go and emulate it.
+                             Obiit 1834, aet 65.”
+
+The tiny hamlet of Hardwick, dignified with mention on the Ordnance map,
+is passed without its existence being noticed, and the road, flat as
+though constructed with the aid of a spirit-level, proceeds straight
+ahead for the town of Huntingdon, swinging acutely to the left for York.
+Beyond, at the cross-roads, stands Brampton Hut, the modern vivid
+red-brick successor of the old inn of that name.  Brampton village lies
+down the cross-road to the right, and is the place where Samuel Pepys, it
+is thought, was born in 1632. {117}  The registers afford no information,
+for they do not begin until twenty-one years later, and the old gossip
+himself makes no mention of the fact.  His father and mother lived here,
+and both lie in the church.  Their home, his birthplace, stands even now,
+but so altered that it is practically without much interest.  It was in
+its garden, in October, 1666, that Samuel caused his £1,300 to be buried
+when the Dutch descent upon London was feared.  A timorous soul, poor
+Samuel! sending his father and his wife down from London to Brampton with
+the gold, and with £300 in a girdle round where his waist should have
+been, but was not, for Samuel was a man of “full habit,” as the elegant
+phrase, seeking to disguise the accusation of exceeding fatness, has it.
+Great was his anxiety when, the national danger over, he came down to
+disinter his hoard.  “My father and I with a dark lantern, it being now
+night, into the garden with my wife, and there went about our great work
+to dig up my gold.  But Lord! what a tosse I was for some time in, that
+they could not justly tell where it was; but by and by, poking with a
+spit, we found it, and then begun with a spudd to lift up the ground.”
+
+But they had not been cautious in their work.  “Good God!” says he, “to
+see how sillily they hid it, not half a foot under ground, in sight of
+passers-by and from the neighbours’ windows.”  Then he found the gold all
+loose, and the notes decaying with the damp, and all the while, routing
+about among the dirt for the scattered pieces, he was afraid lest the
+neighbours should see him, and fancy the Pepys family had discovered a
+gold mine; so he took up dirt and all, and, carrying it to his brother’s
+bedroom, washed it out with the aid of several pails of water and some
+besoms, with the result that he was still over a hundred pieces short.
+This “made him mad.”  He could not go out in the garden with his father,
+because the old man was deaf, and, in shouting to him, all the neighbours
+would get to know.  So he went out with W. Hewer, and by diligent
+grubbing in the mould, made the sum nearly tally.  The day after, leaving
+his father to search for the remainder, we find him setting out for
+London, with his belongings; the gold in a basket in the coach, and he
+coming to look after it every quarter of an hour.
+
+Something over a mile distant from Brampton cross-roads, and passing over
+two little bridges, we come to a third bridge, spanning one of the lazy
+rivulets that trickle aimlessly through the flats.  It is just an old
+red-brick bridge, braced with iron and edged with timber; an
+innocent-looking, although dull and lonely spot, with the water trickling
+along in its deeply worn bed, and no sound save the occasional splash
+made by a frightened water-rat.  Yet this is “Matcham’s Bridge,” and the
+scene of an infamous murder.
+
+                       [Picture: Matcham’s Bridge]
+
+Matcham’s Bridge, spanning the little river Wey, obtained its name from
+the murder of a drummer-boy here by Gervase (or Jarvis) Matcham, on the
+19th of August 1780.  The murder was a remarkable one, and is made
+additionally memorable by the after-career of the murderer, whose bloody
+deed and subsequent confession, six years later, form the subject of the
+_Dead Drummer_, one of Barham’s _Ingoldsby Legends_.
+
+Gervase Matcham, the son of a farmer living at Frodingham, in Yorkshire,
+had a varied and adventurous career.  When in his twelfth year, he ran
+away from home and became a jockey.  In the course of this employment he
+was sent to Russia in charge of some horses presented by the Duke of
+Northumberland to the Empress, and returning to London well supplied with
+money, dissipated it all in evil courses.  He then shipped as a sailor on
+board the _Medway_ man-of-war, but after a short experience of fighting,
+managed to desert.  He had no sooner landed in England than he was seized
+by one of the prowling pressgangs that then scoured the seaports, and was
+shipped aboard the _Ariadne_, fitting out on an expedition to destroy the
+pirate, Paul Jones.  Succeeding in an attempt to escape when off
+Yarmouth, he enlisted in the 13th Regiment of Foot, and deserting again,
+near Chatham, set out to tramp through London to York, visiting
+Huntingdon on the way.  The 49th Regiment was then recruiting in the
+district, and Matcham promptly enlisted in it.
+
+From Huntingdon, on the 19th of August 1780, he was sent to Major
+Reynolds at Diddington, to draw some subsistence-money, amounting to
+between £6 and £7.  With him was a drummer-boy, Benjamin Jones, aged
+about sixteen years, the son of the recruiting sergeant.  The boy having
+drawn the money, they returned along the high road, Matcham drinking on
+the way.  Instead of turning off to Huntingdon, Matcham induced the boy
+to go on with him in the direction of Alconbury, and picking a quarrel
+with him at the bridge, seized him and cut his throat, making off with
+the money.  He then fled across country to the nearest seaport, and
+shipped again to sea.  For six years he continued in the Navy and saw
+hard fighting under Rodney and Hood, being at last paid off H.M.S.
+_Sampson_ at Plymouth, on June 15, 1786.  From Plymouth he set out with a
+messmate—one John Shepherd—to walk along the Exeter Road to London.  Near
+the “Woodyates Inn” they were overtaken one afternoon by a thunderstorm
+in which Matcham startled his shipmate by his abject terror of some
+unseen apparition.  Eventually he confessed his crime to Shepherd, and
+begged his companion to hand him over to the nearest magistrate, so that
+Justice might be satisfied.  He was accordingly committed at Salisbury,
+and, inquiries as to the truth of his confession having been made, he was
+brought to trial at Huntingdon, found guilty, and executed on the 2nd of
+August 1786, his body being afterwards hanged in chains on Alconbury
+Hill.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+THE summit of this convenient Golgotha is the place where the North Road
+and the Great North Road adjust their differences, and proceed by one
+route to the North.  Not a very terrible hill, after all, despite the way
+in which it figures in the letters and diaries of old travellers; but
+nowadays a very lonely place, although it is the meeting-point of two
+main roads and that of a branch one.  It was once different indeed, and
+the great “Wheatsheaf” inn and posting-house, which stood a hundred yards
+or so away from the junction, used commonly to send out thirty pairs of
+post-horses a day.  This establishment was kept in its prime by John
+Warsop, who lived long enough to see his business ruined by railways.
+Let no one imagine the “Wheatsheaf” public-house, standing where the
+roads meet, to be the representative of that old posting-house.  Face
+north, and you will see a private house of considerable size standing on
+the east side of the road, behind a hedge and lawn.  Not a beautiful
+house; in fact, an ugly house of a dingy whitey-buff brick, the colour of
+pastry taken out of the oven before it is properly baked.  Approaching
+nearer, it will be observed that this building is now divided into two
+private residences.  This was once the “Wheatsheaf.”  In the bygone days
+it possessed a semicircular approach from the road, and afforded all the
+year round, and round the clock of every day and night, a busy scene;
+with the postboys, whose next turn-out it was, sleeping with spur on
+heel, ready to mount and away at a minute’s notice, north, south, east,
+or west.  Those times and manners are as absolutely vanished as though
+they never had existed, and even although there are yet living those who
+remember the old “Wheatsheaf” of their youthful days, perhaps not one
+wayfarer in a hundred has any idea of that once busy era on Alconbury
+Hill.  How many of all those who pass this way have ever noticed that
+pathetic relic of the “Wheatsheaf’s” bygone prosperity, the old post from
+which its sign used to hang?  It is still to be seen, by those who know
+where to look for it, facing the road, a venerable and decrepit relic,
+now thickly covered with ivy, and somewhat screened from the casual
+glance by the shrubs and trees growing close beside it.
+
+Travellers coming south could have a choice of routes to London from
+Alconbury Hill, as the elaborate old milestone still standing at the
+parting of the ways indicates, showing sixty-four miles by way of
+Huntingdon, Royston, and Ware, and four miles longer by the way we have
+come.  This monumental milestone, now somewhat dilapidated, railed round,
+and with some forlorn-looking wall-flowers growing inside the enclosure,
+is a striking object, situated at a peculiarly impressive spot, where the
+left-hand route by Huntingdon is seen going off on the level to a
+vanishing-point lost in the distant haze, rather than by any dip or curve
+of the road to right or left; the right-hand road diving down the hill to
+Alconbury Weston and Alconbury at its foot.
+
+                    [Picture: Alconbury Hill Junction]
+
+The descent, going north, is known as Stangate Hill, and leads past the
+lonely churchyard of Sawtry St. Andrews, whose church has disappeared as
+utterly as Sawtry Abbey, which, less wealthy than the great abbeys of
+Ramsey, Thorney, Crowland, or Peterborough, stood beside the road, and
+was besieged by mediæval tramps:
+
+    “Sawtry-by-the-Way, that old Abbaye,
+    Gave more alms in one day than all they.”
+
+Thus ran the old rhyme.  To-day, the only vestiges of that vanished
+religious house are in the names of Monk’s Wood, to the right of the
+road, descending the hill, and of the Abbey Farm.
+
+The foot of Stangate Hill is no doubt the place called by Thoresby and
+others “Stangate Hole,” where highwaymen were confidently to be expected.
+De Foe, writing about 1720 of this road, says: “Some Parts are still
+paved with stone, which strengthens the conjecture that the Name Stangate
+was given it from thence.  It traverses great woods between the Two
+Saltries.”
+
+In his spelling of “Sawtry,” in that last line, although he does not
+follow the invariable form, he has hit upon the original.  For “Sawtry”
+was in the beginning “Salt Reeth.”  Salt marshes and creeks crept inland
+even as far as this, past Ely and Ramsey.
+
+Stilton lies some three miles ahead, and, two miles before reaching it,
+the old “Crown and Woolpack,” a very large red-brick posting-house, part
+of it still occupied as an inn, the rest used as cottages, while the
+stables are given over to spiders and lumber.
+
+Passing this, the road presently begins to rise gently, and then, level
+again, widens out to almost treble its usual width, where a long street
+of mingled old houses and cottages, a medley of stone, brick, and
+plaster, stands, strangely silent.  This is Stilton, dreaming of bygone
+busy times.  Had the railway touched here, things would have worn a very
+different aspect at Stilton to-day.  Let us, therefore, thank the shades
+of that Marquis of Exeter, and of the others who resisted the railway,
+and by causing it to describe a wide loop instead of hugging the road,
+unwittingly contributed to the preservation in a glass case, as it were,
+of this old coaching centre.
+
+Night and day the coaches kept Stilton awake, and if for a few minutes
+there was no coach, the post-chaises at one end of the social scale, and
+the fly-wagons at the other, kept the inns busy.  Stilton buzzed with
+activity then.  From the far North came the drovers, doing twenty miles a
+day, with their sheep and cattle, their pigs and geese; animal creation
+marching, martyrs in their sort, to Smithfield.  At Stilton they shod the
+cattle, like horses, and one blacksmith’s business here consisted of
+nothing else than this.
+
+The glory of Stilton has departed, and the “Bell” and the “Angel” face
+one another, dolefully wondering in what channels the tide of business
+now flows.  The “Bell” is more racy of the soil than the “Angel,” just as
+it is also much older.  We are here in a stone district, and the “Bell”
+is a building of that warm yellowish stone characteristic of these parts.
+Built at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, it was already of
+a respectable age when the brick “Angel” opposite began to rise from its
+foundations.  The older house is the feature of Stilton, its great sign,
+with the mazy quirks and curls of its wrought-iron supports, projecting
+far out towards the road, and arresting the eye on first entering the
+street.  The sign itself is painted on copper, for the sake of lightness,
+but has long been supported by a crutch, in the shape of a post.  With
+this ornamental iron-work, incomparably the finest sign on the road, it
+was in the old days the subject of many wagers made by coachmen and
+guards with unwary strangers who did not, like those artful ones, know
+its measurements.  It measures in fact 6 ft. 2¾ inches in height.
+
+The old “Talbot” inn still has its coach gallery, or balcony, in front.
+
+The “Angel,” in the best days of posting, became the principal house at
+Stilton, and the little public-house of that name next door to the
+commanding brick building which is now a private residence was only the
+tap of the hotel.  But the “Bell,” that has seen the beginning and the
+end of the “Angel,” still survives, with memories of the days when the
+delicacy which renders the name of Stilton world-famous had its origin.
+Allusion is hereby made—need one explain it?—to “Stilton” cheese.  They
+say those old stagers who knew it when its local reputation first began
+to be dispersed throughout the country—that Stilton cheese is not what it
+was.  What is?  The “English Parmesan,” they called it then, when their
+palates first became acquainted with it, but it deserved better of them
+than that.  It was a species of itself, and not justly comparable with
+aught else.  But Stilton cheese is not, nor ever was, made at Stilton, or
+anywhere near it.  It originated with Mrs. Paulet of Wymondham, near
+Melton Mowbray, who first supplied it to Cooper Thornhill, the once
+celebrated landlord of the “Bell,” for the use of the table provided for
+the coach passengers and other travellers who dined there.  Mrs. Paulet’s
+cheeses immediately struck connoisseurs as a revelation, and they came
+into demand, not only on Thornhill’s table, but were eagerly purchased
+for themselves or friends by those who travelled this way.  Thornhill was
+too business-like a man to give away the secret of the make, and he did
+very well for himself, charging as he did half-a-crown a pound.  Then the
+almost equally famous Miss Worthington, of the “Angel,” began to supply
+“Stilton” cheeses, so that scarce any one came through the place but was
+asked to buy one.  Nor did travellers usually wait to be asked.  If it
+happened that they did not want any for themselves, they were usually
+charged by friends with commissions to purchase as they passed through.
+Smiling waiters and maidservants, Miss Worthington herself, rosy, plump,
+benevolent-looking, asked travellers if they would not like to take away
+with them a real Stilton cheese.  Miss Worthington, the kindly, whose
+lavender-scented beds were famed along the whole length of the Great
+North Road—there she stood, declaring that they were real Stilton
+cheeses!  Nor were travellers for a long while any the wiser.  Stilton
+folks kept the secret well.  But it gradually leaked out.  A native of
+those parts, too, was the traitor.  “Pray, sir, would you like a nice
+Stilton cheese to take away with you?” asked the unsuspecting landlady,
+as the coach on whose outside he was seated drew up.
+
+                       [Picture: The Bell, Stilton]
+
+“Do you say they are made at Stilton?” he asked in reply.
+
+“Oh, yes,” said she.
+
+Then came the crushing rejoinder.  “Why, Miss Worthington, you know
+perfectly well that no Stilton cheese was ever made at Stilton; they’re
+all made in Leicestershire, and as you say your cheeses are made at
+Stilton, they cannot be good, and I won’t have one.”  The secret was
+then, of course, exploded.
+
+Which of these two inns could it have been to which Mrs. Calderwood of
+Coltness refers in her diary when, travelling from Scotland to London in
+the middle of the eighteenth century, she mentions at Stilton a “fine
+large inn,” where the linen was “as perfit rags as ever I saw: plain
+linen with fifty holes in each towell.”  It would be interesting to know,
+but it is hopeless now to attempt to identify it.
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+UP-HILL from Stilton, three-quarters of a mile away, but well within
+sight, stands the Norman Cross inn, where the Peterborough, Louth,
+Lincoln, and Hull coaches turned off to the right.
+
+                         [Picture: Norman Cross]
+
+Norman Cross! how many have been those old-time cyclists who have
+partaken of the hospitality of the inn here!  Not always, though, has it
+been a place of welcome memories.  For years, indeed, during the long
+struggles between England and France, this was the site of one of the
+largest of the prisons in which captured French soldiers were
+incarcerated.  Over three thousand were placed here, officers and
+privates, some remaining captive for more than ten years.  Happy those
+who, through influence or by mere luck, were selected to be exchanged for
+our soldiers, prisoners in France.
+
+It was a weary time for those poor fellows.  Many of them died in the
+great insanitary sheds in which they were confined, and others lost their
+reason.  Desperate men sometimes succeeded in escaping to the coast,
+where friends were awaiting them.  Others, wandering over the lonely
+flats, perished miserably in the dykes and drains into which they fell
+when the mists shrouded the countryside.  There were, again, those who
+stabbed the sentries and made off.  Such an one was Charles François
+Marie Bonchew, an officer, who had wounded, but had not killed, a sentry
+named Alexander Halliday.  Being captured, he was sentenced to death at
+Huntingdon, and was brought back to Norman Cross to be executed,
+September 1808.  All the prisoners were turned out to witness the
+execution, and the garrison was under arms.
+
+But it was not all savagery and horror here among those military
+captives, for they were often allowed out on parole, within certain hours
+and well-defined bounds.  It was understood that no prisoner out on
+parole should leave the highroad, nor was he to be at large after sunset.
+If he disregarded these rules he was liable to be shot at sight by any
+one who had a gun handy.  He was an Ishmael against whom every hand was
+turned, and, indeed, the Post Office offered a reward of £5 to any mail
+guard who, seeing a prisoner breaking parole, should shoot him.  After
+several inoffensive farm-labourers, going home after dusk, had been
+peppered with shot in mistake by guards anxious to secure this reward,
+the village streets and roads adjacent became singularly desolate when a
+coach was heard approaching.
+
+There were exceptions to these strict rules, and officers of high
+rank—and consequently assumed to have a nicer sense of honour than that
+obtaining among subalterns and the rank and file—were permitted to take
+private lodgings at Stilton.  Those were the fortunate ones.  Most of the
+prisoners, unhappily, were penniless, and after a time even their own
+Government refused supplies for their maintenance.  Accordingly, they
+obtained some few little luxuries, and employed the time that hung so
+heavily on their hands, by carving toys and artistic nick-nacks out of
+fragments of wood, or from the bones left from their rations, and selling
+them to the crowds of country folks who came to gaze at them on certain
+days.  Straw-plaiting, too, was a prisoners’ industry, until it was
+stopped by some of the military in charge.
+
+In March, 1812, Sergeant Ives, of the West Essex Militia, was stopped on
+the highway between Stilton and Norman Cross by a number of persons
+unknown, who, after having knocked him down and robbed him of his money
+and watch, wrenched open his jaws, and with savage cruelty, cut off a
+piece of his tongue.  It was supposed that this outrage was in revenge
+for his having been concerned in suppressing the plait trade at Norman
+Cross barracks.
+
+The prisoners were not entirely without spiritual consolation, for the
+good Bishop de Moulines appointed himself their chaplain, and, of his own
+free will leaving France, took up residence at Stilton.  He attended them
+in sickness, and helped them out of his own resources.
+
+The officers in charge of these prisoners were often brutal, but that
+there were some who sympathised with their sorrows is evident from the
+tablet still to be seen in Yaxley Church, a mile distant, which tells of
+the gratitude of the prisoners for the kindness shown them by Captain
+John Draper, R.N., who died after being in charge of the prison for only
+eighteen months.
+
+Norman Cross Prison, or “Yaxley Barracks”—Norman Cross being in the
+parish of Yaxley—built in 1796; was demolished in 1816, and no vestige of
+it is left.
+
+And so all recollection of these things might in time have faded away had
+it not been for the monument erected by the wayside in the fateful year
+1914.  Let us pause to consider that moment.  Events were hurrying
+towards the beginning of the Great War of 1914–18, and the nation in
+general was wholly ignorant of what was coming.  Stupidly ignorant, for
+there were many omens.  It was at this moment, afterwards seen to be so
+full of tragedy, that the memorial pillar on, or near, the site of Yaxley
+Barracks, to the memory of those French prisoners of war, was unveiled,
+July 28th, 1914, by Lord Weardale.  A gilded bronze French Imperial eagle
+stoops on the crest of a handsome pillar, and on the plinth is a tablet
+stating that this is a memorial to 1770 French prisoners who died in
+captivity.
+
+        [Picture: French Prisoners of War Monument, Norman Cross]
+
+These incidents, “picked from the wormholes of long vanished days,” give
+romance to the otherwise featureless road onwards to Kate’s Cabin and
+Water Newton.  The “Kate’s Cabin” inn is mentioned by every road-book of
+coaching-times, but no one ever condescended to explain the origin of
+this curious sign, and the inn itself, once standing in the receipt of
+custom at the cross-roads, three miles and a half from Norman Cross, is
+now a pretty cottage.
+
+[Picture: Sculptured figure, Water Newton Church] Nearly two miles
+onward, Water Newton comes in sight, standing, dry and secure, on its
+knoll above the water-meadows on the river Nene.  On the western face of
+its church tower, which originally, before Wansford bridge was built and
+the road diverted, faced the highway, may yet be seen a tabernacle
+containing an ancient effigy of a man in semi-ecclesiastical attire, his
+hands clasped in prayer.  An inscription in Norman French may with some
+difficulty be deciphered beneath it, inviting the passer-by to pray for
+the soul of Thomas Purden:—
+
+    “VOVS KE PAR
+    ISSI PASSEZ
+    POVR LE ALME
+    TOMAS PVR
+    DEN PRIEZ.”
+
+Read aloud, we perceive this to be intended for rhyme.
+
+No one prays for the soul of Thomas Purden nowadays, for these two very
+excellent and individually sufficient reasons—that prayers for the dead
+are not customary in the Church of England, and that, since the road has
+been diverted, there are no passers-by.
+
+This brings us to the reason why Thomas Purden should have expected
+wayfarers to intercede for his soul.  That he expected them to do this
+out of gratitude seems obvious; but it is not at first evident for what
+they should be so grateful.  We are, however, to bear in mind that a road
+passed down beside this church tower in those days, where no road—only a
+meadow—exists to-day.  The meadow slopes steeply to the river, and
+doubtless a ford, a ferry, or some primitive bridge was established here
+by Thomas Purden long before even a wooden bridge existed at Wansford.
+In providing some safe method by which travellers might pass this river,
+even now subject to dangerous floods, Purden would have been a benefactor
+in the eyes alike of men and of Holy Church, and fully entitled to the
+prayers and intercessions of all.
+
+                      [Picture: Water Newton Church]
+
+For many years the head of the figure had disappeared, but when the
+church was restored, some years since, an ingenious mason fitted him with
+another which had, in the usual careless fashion of restorers, been
+knocked off something else.  And it is a simple truth that since its
+“restoration,” Water Newton church is sadly bare.
+
+By the wayside, on the left, against the wall of a farm-house residence,
+will be noticed an old milestone and horseman’s upping-block combined.
+It marks the 81st mile from London, and bears the initials “E. B.,”
+together with the date, 1708.  This is perhaps the only survivor of a
+series which, according to De Foe, in his “Tour through the Whole Island
+of Great Britain,” a Mr. Boulter was projecting “to London, for the
+general benefit.”
+
+                  [Picture: Edmund Boulter’s Milestone]
+
+Edmund Boulter was one of the family who were then seated at Gawthorp
+Hall, near Leeds, and who, not much later, sold that property to Henry
+Lascelles, father of the first Lord Harewood.
+
+At the hamlet of Sibson, on the left hand in descending toward the
+level-crossing at Wansford station, may still be seen the stocks and
+whipping-post beside the road.  To the right flows the winding Nene,
+through illimitable oozy meadows, its course marked in the far distance
+by the pollard willows that line its banks.  The Nene here divides the
+counties of Huntingdonshire and Northants, Wansford itself lying in the
+last-mentioned county and Stibbington on the hither side of the river.
+The famous Wansford Bridge joins the two, and helps to render Wansford
+and Stibbington one place in the eyes of strangers.  Both places belong
+to the Duke of Bedford, Stibbington bearing the mark of its ownership
+distinctly visible in its severe and uncomfortable-looking “model”
+modern-gothic stone houses, with the coroneted “B” on their gables.  In
+this manner the accursed Russells have bedevilled many of the villages
+and townlets unhappily owned by them, and the feelings of all who live in
+their earmarked houses must be akin to those of paupers who inhabit
+workhouses and infirmaries, with the important exception that the Duke’s
+tenants pay rent and taxes.  Wansford, fortunately, has not been rebuilt,
+and it is possible for the villagers to live without an uncomfortable
+sense of belonging, body and soul, to the Dukes of Bedford.
+
+The famous “Haycock” inn, usually spoken of as at Wansford, is, in fact,
+on the Huntingdonshire side of the bridge, and in Stibbington.  Its sign
+alludes to the supposed origin of the curious nick-name of
+“Wansford-in-England,” first mentioned in that scarce little early
+eighteenth-century book, _Drunken Barnaby’s Four Journeys to the North of
+England_.  In its pages he describes being carried off by a flood:—
+
+    “On a haycock sleeping soundly,
+    Th’ River rose and took me roundly
+    Down the current: People cry’d;
+    Sleeping, down the Stream I hy’d:
+       ‘Where away,’ quoth they, ‘from Greenland?’
+       ‘No, from Wansforth-brigs in England.’”
+
+This “in England” has puzzled many.  It really refers to the situation of
+Wansford in Northamptonshire, near, but not in, “Holland”—the Holland
+division of Lincolnshire.
+
+                    [Picture: The “Haycock,” Wansford]
+
+Wansford’s peculiar fame is thus more than local.  Perhaps the queer
+picture-sign of the grand old inn, representing Drunken Barnaby on his
+haycock, helped to disperse it over England in days when it could not
+fail to be seen by every passing traveller.  The “Haycock” ceased to be
+an inn, and is now occupied as a hunting-box.  It affords a pleasing
+relief from the Duke of Bedford’s almshouse-looking cottages, and is a
+building not only of considerable age, but of dignified architectural
+character.  Stone-built, with handsome windows and steep slated roof, and
+carefully designed, even to its chimneys, it is, architecturally
+speaking, among the very finest of the houses ever used as inns in
+England, and has more the appearance of having been originally designed
+as a private mansion than as a house of public entertainment.  The sign
+is now hung in the hall of the house, the corbels it rested on being
+still visible beside the present door, replacing the old archway by which
+the coaches and post-chaises entered and left the courtyard of the inn of
+old.
+
+The “Haycock,” even in its days as an inn, was a noted hunting centre.
+Situated in the country of the Fitzwilliam Hunt, it afforded, with its
+splendid accommodation for guests and for horses, headquarters for those
+who had not a hunting-box of their own, and in those days stabled as many
+as a hundred and fifty horses.
+
+                    [Picture: Sign of the “Haycock.”]
+
+“Young Percival” kept the “Haycock” from about 1826, and drove the
+“Regent” between Wansford and Stamford, in place of “old John Barker.”
+At that time he had more valour than discretion in driving, and on one
+occasion at least nearly brought disaster upon the coach at the famous
+bridge by “punishing” a spirited team which had given some trouble at
+starting.  At the steep and narrow entrance to the bridge they took it in
+their heads to resent his double-thonging, the leaders turning round, and
+the whole team presently facing towards London instead of Stamford.  They
+had to be driven back to the “Haycock,” and Barker took them on to
+Stamford.
+
+                        [Picture: Wansford Bridge]
+
+That bridge would have been an exceedingly awkward place for a coach
+accident.  It is picturesqueness itself, and by consequence not the most
+convenient for traffic.  Originally built in 1577, with thirteen arches,
+it was repaired in 1674, as a Latin inscription carved midway on it
+informs the inquiring stranger.  In the winter of 1795 an ice-flood
+destroyed some of the southernmost arches, which were replaced the
+following year by two wider spans, so that Wansford Bridge has now only
+ten openings.  The northern approach to it from Stamford leads down in a
+dangerous, steep, sudden, and narrow curve, intersected by a cross-road.
+Now that there is no longer a turnpike gate at this point to bring the
+traffic to a slow pace, this descent is fruitful in accidents, and at
+least one cyclist has been killed here in an attempt to negotiate this
+sharp curve on the descent into the cross-road.  An inoffensive cottage
+standing at the corner opposite the “Mermaid” inn has received many a
+cyclist through its window, and the new masonry of its wall bears witness
+to the wreck caused by a heavy wagon hurtling down the hill, carrying
+away the side of the house.
+
+The five miles between Wansford and Stamford begin with this long rise,
+whose crest was cut through in coaching days, the earth taken being used
+to fill up a deep hollow which succeeded, where a little brook trickled
+across the road, the coaches fording it.  Thence, by what used to be
+called in the old road-books “Whitewater Turnpike,” past the few cottages
+of Thornhaugh, and so to where the long wall of Burghley Park begins on
+the right hand.  Here the telegraph poles, that have hitherto so
+unfailingly followed the highway, suddenly go off to the right, and into
+Stamford by the circuitous Barnack road, in deference to the objections,
+or otherwise, of the Marquis of Exeter, against their going through his
+park.
+
+The famous Burghley House by Stamford town is not visible from the road,
+and is indeed situated a mile within the park, only the gate-house to the
+estate being passed in the long descent into that outlying portion of the
+town known as Stamford Baron.
+
+There is, amid the works of Tennyson, a curiously romantic poem, “The
+Lord of Burleigh,” which on the part of the literary pilgrim will repay
+close examination; and this examination will yield some astonishing
+results.  It is, briefly stated, the story of an Earl masquerading as a
+landscape painter and winning the heart and hand of a farmer’s daughter.
+He takes her, after the wedding, to see—
+
+    “A mansion more majestic
+       Than all those she saw before;
+    Many a gallant gay domestic
+       Bows before him at the door.
+    And they speak in gentle murmur
+       When they answer to his call,
+    While he treads with footstep firmer,
+       Leading on from hall to hall.
+    And, while now she wonders blindly,
+       Nor the meaning can divine,
+    Proudly turns he round and kindly,
+       ‘All of this is mine and thine.’
+    Here he lives in state and bounty,
+       Lord of Burleigh, fair and free,
+    Not a lord in all the county
+       Is so great a lord as he.”
+
+The original person from whose doings this poem was written was, in fact,
+Henry Cecil, tenth Earl, and afterwards first Marquis, of Exeter.  He was
+the lord of Burghley House (not “Burleigh Hall”), by Stamford town, and
+his descendants are there yet.
+
+Not a landscape painter, but a kind of London man about town and Member
+of Parliament for Stamford, 1774–1780, 1784–1790, and then plain Mr.
+Henry Cecil (for he did not succeed his uncle in the title until
+December, 1793), he is found rather mysteriously wandering about
+Shropshire in 1789, calling himself (there is never any accounting for
+taste) “Mr. Jones.”  He was then a man who had been married fourteen
+years, and was thirty-six years of age.
+
+The scene opens (thus to put it in dramatic form) on an evening towards
+the end of June, 1789, when a stranger knocked at the door of Farmer
+Hoggins at Great Bolas in Shropshire, and begged shelter for the night.
+He was obviously a gentleman, but called himself by the very plebian name
+of “John Jones.”  He made himself so agreeable that his stay “for the
+night” lasted some weeks, and he returned again in a month or so, taking
+up his residence in the village.  The attraction which brought him back
+to Great Bolas was evidently Sarah Hoggins, the farmer’s daughter, at
+that time a girl of sixteen, having been born in June, 1773.  He proposed
+for Sarah, and on April 17th, 1790, they were married in Great Bolas
+Church, the register showing that he married in the name of “John Jones.”
+Meanwhile he had purchased land in the village, and built a house which
+he called “Bolas Villa.”  Gossip grew extremely busy with this mysterious
+stranger who had thus descended upon the place, and it was generally
+suspected that he was a highwayman in an extensive way of business,
+especially as some notable highway robberies happened coincidently with
+his appearance.
+
+Early in 1794, “Mr. John Jones,” living thus at Great Bolas, learnt that
+his uncle, the ninth Earl of Exeter, had died in December.  Telling his
+wife they must journey into Northamptonshire, where he had business, they
+set out and arrived at “Burghley House, by Stamford town,” and there he
+disclosed to her for the first time that he was not “John Jones,” but
+Henry Cecil, and now Earl of Exeter.
+
+At what time he broke the news to her that he was already a married man
+there is no evidence to show.  Strictly speaking, he had made a bigamous
+marriage, because, although his wife, one of the Vernons of Hanbury, in
+Worcestershire, had eloped on June 14, 1789, with the Reverend William
+Sneyd, curate of that place, he had at the time taken no steps to obtain
+a divorce.
+
+               [Picture: Burghley House, by Stamford Town]
+
+But he had every excuse.  He had honestly fallen in love with Sarah
+Hoggins after thus meeting her while wandering about the country a few
+days after his wife’s flight; and he obtained a divorce by Act of
+Parliament in March, 1791.  Having done this, he married Sarah Hoggins
+secondly some six months later (October 3) in the City of London Church
+of St. Mildred, Bread Street, in whose register his name appears as
+“Henry Cecil, bachelor.”
+
+Tennyson’s poem is, therefore, rather more romantic than truthful; and
+the lines which tell us how she murmured—
+
+             “Oh! that he
+    Were again that landscape painter
+    Who did win my heart from me,”
+
+have no authority.  Nor is there any evidence to warrant the statement
+that—
+
+    “A trouble weighed upon her
+       And perplexed her, night and morn,
+    With the burthen of an honour
+       Unto which she was not born.”
+
+The poet continues—
+
+    “So she droop’d and droop’d before him,
+       Fading slowly from his side;
+    Three fair children first she bore him,
+       Then before her time she died.”
+
+The Countess of Exeter, in fact, died on January 18, 1797, not quite
+twenty-four years of age; but not from “the burthen of an honour unto
+which she was not born.”  Happily, accession to the ranks of the titled
+nobility is not fatal, as the marriage of many distinguished ornaments of
+the musical comedy stage assure us; and so we must charge the Poet
+Laureate with the flunkey thought that blue blood is a kind apart, and
+not to be admixed with other strains.  This from the poet who wrote—
+
+    “Kind hearts are more than coronets,
+    And simple faith than Norman blood.”
+
+is unexpected.
+
+She left two sons and one daughter.  Her eldest son became second Marquis
+of Exeter, his father, the Earl, having been raised a step in the peerage
+in 1801.
+
+The enterprising Earl married, thirdly, in 1800, the divorced wife of the
+eighth Duke of Hamilton, and died May 1, 1804, aged fifty; but his third
+wife survived until January 17, 1837.  In the billiard-room of Burghley
+House is a portrait-group of “the Lord of Burleigh” and his wife, Sarah
+Hoggins, by Sir Thomas Lawrence.
+
+“Bolas Villa” was given by the Earl to his godson.  It has since been
+enlarged, and is now styled “Burghley Villa.”  The church of Great Bolas
+is a grim-looking brick building of the eighteenth century, when many of
+the Shropshire churches in that district were rebuilt.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+STAMFORD compels enthusiasm, from the first glimpse of it on entering, to
+the last regretful backward glance on leaving.  It is historic,
+picturesque, stately, aristocratic, and cleanly, all at once.  Its
+stone-built mansions and houses are chiefly of the Renaissance period,
+from Elizabeth onwards to the time of George the First, and it is in this
+sort the most beautiful town in England, after Oxford and Cambridge, and
+even in some aspects surpassing them.
+
+Apart from its lovely churches, one seeks not Gothic architecture at
+Stamford but the stateliness of classic methods as understood in the
+sixteenth and seventeenth century revival.  It is this especial
+architectural character which gives the town such an air of academic
+distinction and leads the stranger to compare it with the great
+university towns, even before the fact comes to his knowledge that
+Stamford itself was once the seat of a University.
+
+The entrance is of a peculiar stateliness, the broad quiet street
+descending, lined with dignified private houses, to where the river
+Welland flows beneath the bridge, dividing the counties of Northampton
+and Lincoln, and Stamford Baron from Stamford town.  On the right hand
+rises the fine tower of St. Martin’s, its perforated battlements showing,
+lace-like, against the sky, just as when Turner painted his view.  Lower
+down across the street straddles the sign of the great “George” inn, and
+a few steps forward serve to disclose the exquisite picture of St. Mary’s
+tower and spire soaring from the rising ground on the other side of the
+river.  The “distracting bustle of the ‘George,’ which exceeded anything
+I ever saw or heard,” as the Reverend Thomas Twining wrote, in 1776, has
+long since become a thing of the past, and a certain quiet dignity now
+belongs to it, as to Stamford in general.
+
+The “George” is an inn with a history.  Charles the First slept there,
+August 23, 1645, and a whole train of dignitaries at one time or another.
+“Billy the Butcher,” too, returning from Culloden, stayed in the house,
+and with his officers celebrated that victory.  “Billy the Butcher,” one
+regrets to say, was the vulgar nickname by which the people called
+William, Duke of Cumberland.
+
+Distinguished foreigners without number have rested here and wondered at
+the habits of Englishmen.  The foreigner, it is to be feared, never, with
+every advantage, really understands us; sometimes, too, he is so perverse
+that we find a difficulty in understanding him.  Thus, Master Estienne
+Perlin, who travelled the roads and sampled the inns of England so far
+back as 1558, says we were great drunkards then.  He wrote an account of
+his travels, and of England, as it appeared to him; and the way in which
+he wrestles with the pronunciation of the language is amusing enough.
+Thus, according to this traveller, if an Englishman would treat you, he
+would say in his language: “Vis dring a’ quarta uin oim gasquim oim
+hespaignol oim malvoysi.”  This is merely maddening, and it is a positive
+relief to know that the meaning of it is, “Will you drink a quart of
+Gascony wine, another of Spanish, and another of Malmsey?”  According to
+this, the Englishman of three hundred years ago mixed his drinks
+alarmingly.  “In drinking,” continues this amusing foreigner, “they will
+say to you, a hundred times, ‘Drind iou,’ which is, ‘I drink to you’; and
+you should answer them in their language, ‘Iplaigiou,’ which means ‘I
+pledge you.’  If you would thank them in their language, you say, ‘God
+tanque artelay.’  When they are drunk,” he concludes, “they will swear by
+blood and death that you shall drink all that is in your cup, and will
+say to you thus: ‘Bigod sol drind iou agoud uin.’”
+
+      [Picture: Entrance to Stamford. (After J. M. W. Turner R.A.)]
+
+Such customs as these must have been excellent business for the “George”
+and its contemporaries.
+
+To this inn belongs an incident not paralleled elsewhere.  The daughter
+of one of its landlords, Margaret, daughter of Bryan Hodgson, married a
+bishop!  Or, more exactly, one who became a bishop: the Reverend Beilby
+Porteous, who at the time of his marriage, in 1765, was vicar of Ruckinge
+and Wittersham, in Kent.  In 1776 he became Bishop of Chester, and eleven
+years later Bishop of London.  This was long years before Whincup kept
+the house.  He reigned here in the full tide of the coaching age, and was
+one of the proprietors of the “Stamford Regent.”
+
+Much history has been made at Stamford, from the time when it was the
+“stone ford” of the Romans across the Welland, through the long ages of
+blood and destruction, stretching, with little intermission, from the
+days of Saxon and Danish conflicts to that final clash of arms in 1643,
+when Cromwell held the town and besieged Burghley House; and to that
+Monday in the first week of May, 1646, when Charles the First, having
+slept the night before at the residence of Alderman Wolph (descended from
+Wulph, son of King Harold) slipped through a postern-gate in the town
+wall, and so escaped for a final few hours as a free man.  The gate is
+there yet, in the grounds of Barn Hill House, a mansion which, in 1729,
+was purchased by Stukeley, the antiquary, vicar of All Saints.
+
+Here is no place to tell of the Councils and Parliaments held at
+Stamford; but, as justifying the academic air the town still holds, it
+must be said that it was indeed the home of a University, long centuries
+ago.  It was following the early quarrels of Oxford University and Oxford
+town that a body of students left that seat of learning, in 1260, and set
+up a temporary home at Northampton.  Political troubles drove them, six
+years later, to Stamford, where they founded several Colleges and Halls,
+which were already flourishing when, in 1333, the northern students at
+Oxford, disgusted with the alleged favouritism shown to the southerners,
+left in a body and found a welcome at Stamford.  Liberty in those days
+was construed as permission given the strong to oppress the weak, and so
+when Oxford University and Oxford town jointly petitioned the king to
+forbid the seceders learning where they listed, those unhappy students
+were promptly arrested and sent back to suck wisdom from _alma mater_ on
+the Isis.  Oxford and Cambridge both agreed not to recognise degrees
+conferred by Stamford, and at length, by 1463, this University was
+strangled.
+
+The actual relics of those times are few.  Chief in point of interest is
+the old Brasenose Gate, the only fragment of the College of that name,
+said to have been founded by students from Brasenose College, Oxford.
+Here remained until recent years the ancient bronze knocker, in the form
+of a lion’s head with a massive ring in its mouth, brought, according to
+the legend, from the Oxford college.  This knocker certainly belongs to a
+period not later than the thirteenth century, and may have been conveyed
+away.  Whether it was the original “brazen nose,” said to have originated
+the odd name of the College, or whether that name arose from the
+_brassen-huis_, or brew-house, whose site the original College was built
+upon, is one of those mysteries of derivation never likely to be solved.
+During the last years of its stay at Stamford, the knocker was kept in a
+house adjoining, until it and the house were purchased by Brasenose
+College, Oxford, in whose Common Room the ancient relic now occupies a
+place of honour.
+
+                           [Picture: Stamford]
+
+Stamford was attached to the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the Roses, and
+had occasion to regret the fact; for it offered an especial mark to the
+victorious Lancastrians in 1461, after the battle of St. Albans, when Sir
+Andrew Trollope, with the triple ferocity of the _trois loups_ from which
+the name derives, fell upon the town and pillaged and burnt it.  Eight
+churches, two castles, and the town walls, together with many hundreds of
+houses, were destroyed, and Stamford has never recovered its ancient
+importance since then.  It is enough for us that it is among the
+stateliest of towns, stone-built and dignified; with its beautiful
+churches of St. Mary, All Saints, and St. Martin; its old almshouses and
+mansions, not exactly matched in all England.
+
+The histories tell of a long list of famous men, natives of Stamford; but
+the mere mental capacity or personal bravery shown by these great ones is
+sardonically overshadowed by the physical greatness of quite another kind
+of person, who, although not even a native of Stamford, has, by his dying
+here, shed an especial lustre upon the town.
+
+[Picture: Daniel Lambert] Far transcending the fame of all other
+personages is that of Daniel Lambert, the Fat Man.  In the computation of
+avoirdupois and of the tape-measure, this was the greatest figure that
+ever travelled the Great North Road.  No king or noble can vie with him,
+nor are saintly shrines more zealously visited than his grave in the old
+churchyard of St. Martin’s.  While the tomb of that great Cecil, the Lord
+Treasurer Burghley, within the church, remains often unvisited,
+photographs of Daniel Lambert and of his epitaph meet the traveller at
+every turn.
+
+Although destined to this undying fame, and to pothouse canonisation,
+Daniel’s career was short, as that epitaph tells us:—
+
+                              “In Remembrance of
+                            That Prodigy in Nature
+                                DANIEL LAMBERT
+                             who was possessed of
+                        An exalted and convivial mind
+                          And in personal greatness
+                              Had no Competitor
+               He measured three feet, one inch, round the leg
+                    Nine feet, four inches, round the body
+                                 And Weighed
+                        Fifty-two stone Eleven pounds
+                            He departed this life
+                             On the 21st of June
+                                     1809
+                               Aged 39 years.”
+
+His diet is said to have been plain, and the quantity moderate, and he
+never drank anything stronger than water.  His countenance was manly and
+intelligent, and he had a melodious tenor voice.  For some years before
+his death he had toured the country, exhibiting himself, and visited
+London on two occasions.  The weights and measurements quoted on his
+tombstone were taken at Huntingdon only the day before his death.  In the
+evening he arrived at the “Waggon and Horses,” Stamford, in good health,
+in preparation for “receiving company” during Stamford Races, but before
+nine o’clock the next morning was dead in the room on the ground floor
+which he had taken because of his inability to go upstairs.  For many
+years two of his suits were shown at the inn, seven men often succeeding
+in squeezing themselves within the mighty embrace of his waistcoat,
+without bursting a button.  The “Waggon and Horses” has long since given
+place to a school, and so here is a place of pilgrimage the less; but
+Daniel’s fame is immortal, for he lives as the sign of many an inn and
+refreshment-house, whose proprietors use him as an advertisement of the
+plenteous fare to be obtained within, regardless of the fact that his
+immense bulk was due rather to a dropsical habit than to much eating or
+drinking.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+THE road, mounting steeply out of Stamford, reaches a fine, elevated
+track commanding wide views.  This is the spot chosen by Forrest for his
+painting of the old “Highflyer” London, York, and Edinburgh coach which
+ran from 1788 to 1840.  In less than two miles the road crosses the
+border of Lincolnshire, traversing for six miles an outlying corner of
+little Rutland, the smallest county in England, and entering Lincolnshire
+again on passing Stretton.  Great Casterton, at the foot of the hill two
+and a quarter miles from Stamford, is in Rutland.  It is said to be
+situated on the Guash, but that stream and the bridge over it, from which
+the old road-books often called the village “Bridge Casterton,” are not
+readily glimpsed.
+
+It is a pretty stone-built village, with a well preserved Early English
+church beside the road.  “Greatness,” either as a village or as the site
+of a Roman “castrum” (whence derives the “Caster”-ton) has long ceased to
+be a characteristic of this pleasant spot, and the ancient Roman camp is
+now visible only in some grassy banks where the rathe primrose grows.
+
+Just beyond Casterton, coyly hiding down a lane to the left, is the
+little village of Tickencote, preserving in its name some prehistoric
+goat-farm, “Tyccen-cote” meaning in the Anglo-Saxon nothing more nor less
+than “goat’s-home.”  Of more tangible interest is the splendid Norman
+church, of small size but extraordinary elaboration; a darkling building
+with heavy chancel arch covered with those zigzags, lozenges, birds’
+heads, and tooth-mouldings so beloved by Norman architects, and with a
+“Norman” nave built in 1792 to replace that portion of the building
+destroyed many years before.  The pseudo-Norman work of our own day is,
+almost without exception, vile, and that of the eighteenth century was
+worse, but here is an example of such faithful copying of existing
+portions that now, since a hundred years and more have passed and the
+first freshness of the new masonry gone, it is difficult to distinguish
+the really old work from the copy.
+
+             [Picture: The “Highflyer,” 1840 (After Forrest)]
+
+Returning to the highroad, a further two miles bring us to Horn Lane, the
+site of a vanished turnpike gate, and to the coppices and roadside trees
+of Bloody Oaks, where the battle of Empingham was fought, March 13, 1470,
+between the forces of Edward the Fourth and the hastily assembled
+Lincolnshire levies of Sir Robert Welles and Sir Thomas de la Launde,
+fighting, _not_ for the Lancastrian cause, as so often stated, but in an
+insurrection fomented by the Earl of Warwick, whose object was to raise
+Edward’s brother, the Duke of Clarence, to the throne.  It was a
+massacre, rather than a battle, for Edward’s army was both more numerous
+and better equipped, and the rebels soon broke and fled.  Flinging away
+their weapons, and even portions of their clothing, as they went, the
+fight was readily named “Losecoat Field.”  The captured leaders paid for
+their ineffectual treason with their blood, for they were executed at
+Stamford.
+
+                          [Picture: Bloody Oaks]
+
+The country folks have quite forgotten Losecoat Field, and think the
+woodlands of Bloody Oaks were so named from the execution of John
+Bowland, a highwayman who was gibbeted at Empingham Corner in 1769.
+
+Greetham spire now rises away to the left, and shows where that village
+lies hid.  Here, away from the village and facing the highroad, stood,
+and stands still, the “Greetham Inn.”  It is now a farmhouse, and has
+lost its stables, its projecting bar-parlour, and its entrance archway.
+Once, however, it was one of the foremost inns and posting-houses on the
+road.  Marked on old Ordnance maps as the “Oak,” it seems to have been
+really named the “New Inn,” if we may judge from an inscription cut on
+stone under the eaves: “This is the New Inn, 1786.”  However this may
+have been, it was known to travellers, coachmen, and postboys along the
+road only as “Greetham Inn.”  Towards the last it was kept by one of the
+Percivals of Wansford.  At that time no fewer than forty-four
+coaches—twenty-two up and the same number down—changed here and at the
+“Black Bull,” Witham Common, every twenty-four hours.
+
+Less than a mile down the road is that humble little public-house whose
+strange sign, the “Ram Jam,” has puzzled many people.  Its original name
+was the “Winchilsea Arms,” and it bore no other sign than the armorial
+shield of the Earls of Winchilsea until long after coaching days were
+done; but in all that time it was known only as the “Ram Jam House,” and
+thereby hangs a tale, or several tales, most of them untrue.  All kinds
+of wild legends of the house being so crammed with travellers that it was
+called “Ram Jam,” from that circumstance, have been heard.  But
+travellers, as a matter of fact, never stayed there, for the inn never
+had any accommodation for them.  It was more a beer-house than anything
+else.  It’s fame began about 1740, when the landlord was an officer’s
+servant, returned from India.  He possessed the secret of compounding a
+liqueur or spirit which he sold to travellers down the road, this
+eventually becoming as well-known a delicacy as Cooper Thornhill’s
+“Stilton” cheeses.  He called this spirit “Ram Ján,” which seems to be an
+Indian term for a table servant, and sold it in small bottles, either
+singly, for consumption on the journey, or in cases of half-dozens or
+dozens.  The secret of this liqueur was imparted to his son, but
+afterwards died out, and it is said that “Ram Jam” ceased to be sold
+before the beginning of the nineteenth century.
+
+          [Picture: Interior of a Village Inn.  (After Morland)]
+
+Although the “Ram Jam” was never more than a tavern of a very humble
+description, and probably never sheltered guests above the rank of
+cattle-drovers, it is noted as having been the house where Molyneux, the
+black, slept before his fight with Tom Cribb at Thistleton Gap, three and
+a half miles away, on September 28, 1811.  Cribb, who was easily the
+victor, had his quarters at the “Blue Bull,” another small roadside
+house, which stood, until the beginning of 1900, at the cross roads on
+Witham Common, where roads go right and left to Bourn and Melton Mowbray.
+It has now been demolished.
+
+Here we have passed the little Rutlandshire village of Stretton on the
+right, which obtained its name of “Street-town” from having been on the
+ancient road called the Ermine Way.  Here we come again into
+Lincolnshire.
+
+For some twenty miles the Great North Road runs through this broad
+county, the land of the “yellow-bellies,” as Lincolnshire folk are named,
+from the frogs and eels that inhabit their fens and marshes.  North and
+South Witham, giving a name to Witham Common, lie unseen, off to the
+left, and the once famous old “Black Bull” stands, as it always has
+stood, solitary beside the road, out of sight from any other house.  It
+consists of two separate buildings, at right angles to one another and
+erected at different times.  The original house is a structure of
+rag-stone, placed a little way back from the road, and facing it.  The
+second building, which bears a more imposing architectural character, and
+with its handsome elevation of red brick and stone, bears witness to the
+once extensive business of the “Black Bull,” stands facing south, with
+its gable-end to the road, thus forming two sides of a courtyard.  Long
+ranges of stables extend to the rear.  The place is now in use as a
+farmhouse and hunting-box, and a screen of laurels and other evergreen
+shrubs is planted on the site of the old coach-drive.  Sturtle, who kept
+the house in the old days, is gathered to his fathers, and the railway
+whistle sounds across country, where the guards’ horns once aroused the
+echoes of Morkery Woods or Spittle Gorse.
+
+How different the outlook now from the time when Sir Walter Scott made
+entries in his _Journal_.  “Old England,” he writes, from his hotel at
+Grantham, “is no changeling.  Things seem much the same.  One race of
+red-nosed innkeepers are gone, and their widows, eldest sons, or head
+waiters exercise hospitality in their room, with the same bustle and
+importance.  The land, however, is much better ploughed; straight ridges
+everywhere adopted in place of the old circumflex of twenty years ago.
+Three horses, however, or even four, are often seen in a plough, yoked
+one before the other.  Ill habits do not go out at once.”
+
+A few years later, and these things, which had changed so little, were
+revolutionised.  The railway carried all the traffic and the roads were
+deserted, the “red-nosed innkeepers” so rarely seeing a guest, that when
+a stray one arrived they almost fell on his shoulder and wept.
+Agriculture, too, converted even Witham Common into a succession of
+fertile fields, and thus banished wayfaring romance to the pages of
+history or of sensation novels.
+
+        [Picture: House, formerly the “Black Bull,” Witham Common]
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+LET us rest awhile by this sunlit stretch of road, where the red roofs of
+distant farmsteads alone hint of life; always excepting the humming
+telegraph wires whispering messages to Edinburgh and the Far North, or
+perhaps the summer breeze bringing across country the distant echo of a
+train.  If it does, why then the sound renders our solitude the more
+complete, and gives flight to a lagging imagination.  It reminds us that
+it was here, and not there, three miles away over the meadows in a
+railway cutting, that the traffic of two kingdoms went, sixty years ago.
+
+These green selvedges of grass that border the highway so delightfully
+were not then in existence.  They were a part of the road itself, which
+was, for all that, not too wide for the mail-coaches, the stages, the
+fly-wagons, private chariots, post-chaises, and especially the runaway
+couples _en route_ for Gretna Green, who travelled along it.  “The
+dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,” quoth Sir Walter
+Scott, in his diary, when journeying to Abbotsford in 1826.  Dull
+scenically, but not historically.  Had it been an unlettered cyclist who
+had made this criticism, a thousand critical lashes had been his
+portion—and serve him right; but what shall we say of the author of
+_Waverley_?  Dull! why, the road is thronged with company.  One can—any
+one can who has the will to it—call spirits from the vasty deep with
+which to people the way.  No need to ask, “Will they come?”  They cannot
+choose but do so; they are here.
+
+A strange and motley crowd: the pale ghosts of the ages.  From Ostorius
+Scapula and the Emperors Hadrian, Severus, and Constantine the Great,
+down through the Middle Ages, they come, mostly engaged in cutting one
+another’s throats.  York and Lancaster, as their fortunes ebbed or
+flowed, setting up or taking down the heads of traitors; obscure
+murderers despatching equally obscure victims by the way, and in later
+times—the farcical mingling with the more tragic humours—we see James the
+First journeying to his throne, confirmed in his good opinion of himself
+as a second Solomon by a sycophantic crowd of courtiers; Lord Chancellor
+Littleton, fleeing from Parliament to Charles the First at York, carrying
+with him that precious symbol of Royal authority, the Great Seal (the
+third Great Seal of that reign), made in the year the Long Parliament
+began to sit; Charles the First, a few years later, conducted by the
+victorious Parliament to London, and, at the interval of another century,
+the Rebel Lords.  “The ’45,” indeed, made much traffic on this road: the
+British army going down, with Billy the Butcher at its head, to crush the
+rebellion, and the prisoners coming up—their last journey, as they knew
+full well.  They were pinioned on the way, for their better custody, and
+so that Hanoverian heads might sleep the sounder at St. James’s.  The
+Hanoverians themselves rarely came this way, nor would their coming have
+added greatly to the romance of the road.  George the Third passed once.
+He was a stay-at-home king, and of roads knew little, save of those that
+led from London to Windsor, or to that western _Ultima Thule_ of his,
+Weymouth.  Indeed, it is said, on what authority it is difficult to
+determine, that the third George never voyaged out of the kingdom.  Even
+Hanover, beloved of his forbears, he never knew, although the Jacobites
+ceased not with their brass tokens, to wish him there. {165}  His
+furthest journey is said to have been to York.
+
+His son, afterwards George the Fourth, had occasion to remember this
+road, for he was upset on it in 1789, when returning from a visit to Earl
+Fitzwilliam at Wentworth Woodhouse.  Two miles from Newark, a cart
+overturned his carriage in a narrow part of the highway.  It rolled over
+three times down an incline, and fell to pieces like a box of tricks, but
+the prince was unhurt.
+
+Of bygone sporting figures with which, in imagination, to people the way
+we have a crowd.  There has always been something in the great length of
+the road to York, and of its continuation to Edinburgh, that has appealed
+to sportsmen and all those interested in the speeds of different methods
+of progression.  Pedestrians, horsemen, and coaches—and in recent times
+cyclists—have competed in their several ways, from an early period until
+our own day, and the rival railways even have had their races to
+Edinburgh.
+
+Of these feats, that of Sir Robert Cary, son of Lord Hunsdon, is not the
+least remarkable.  He carried the news of Queen Elizabeth’s death to
+James at Edinburgh, and was the first to hail him King of England.
+Riding in furious haste, and with fresh horses wherever he could obtain
+them, he succeeded in covering the distance in the sixty hours between a
+Thursday morning and a Saturday night.  Again, a very few years later—in
+May 1606—a certain esquire of James the First’s, John Lepton of York,
+undertook for a wager to ride on six consecutive days between that city
+and London.  He started from Aldersgate on the 20th of May, and
+accomplished his task every day before darkness had fallen; “to the
+greater praise of his strength in acting than to his discretion in
+undertaking it,” as Fuller remarks.  He also, of course, had relays of
+horses.  Among the pedestrians is Ben Jonson, who walked to Scotland, on
+his visit to Drummond of Hawthornden, starting in June 1618; but he
+footed it less for sport than from necessity.
+
+When Charles the First was at York, according to Clarendon, it was a
+frequent occurrence for gentlemen couriers to ride with despatches
+between that place and London, completing the double journey—400 miles—in
+thirty-four hours.  Thus, a letter sent by the Council in London on the
+Saturday, midnight, was answered on its arrival at York by the king, and
+the answer delivered in London at ten o’clock on the Monday morning.
+
+Then there was Cooper Thornhill, landlord of the “Bell” at Stilton, who
+for a wager rode to London and back again to Stilton, about 1740.  The
+distance, 154 miles in all, was done in eleven hours thirty-three minutes
+and forty-six seconds.  He had nineteen horses to carry him, and so is no
+rival of Turpin’s mythical exploit in riding to York on his equally
+mythical Black Bess; but he was evidently considered a wonderful person,
+for there was a poem published about him in 1745, entitled “The Stilton
+Hero: O Tempora!  O Mores:” a sixpenny quarto of fourteen pages.
+
+Foster Powell is easily first among the pedestrians.  He was an
+eighteenth century notability, a native of Horsforth, near Leeds, and
+born in 1734.  Articled to an attorney, he remained a solicitor’s clerk,
+undistinguished in the law, but early famed for his walking powers.  In
+1764 he backed himself for any amount to walk fifty miles on the Bath
+Road in seven hours, and having accomplished this, despite his wearing a
+heavy greatcoat and leather breeches at the time, he visited France and
+Switzerland, and fairly walked the natives off their legs.  It was in
+1773 that he performed his first walk from London to York and back, doing
+the 400 miles in five days and eighteen hours.  This was followed by a
+walk of 100 miles, out and home, on the Bath Road, done in twenty-three
+hours and a quarter.  His three great pedestrian records on the Great
+North Road in 1788 and twice in 1792 are his most remarkable
+achievements.  Although by this time he had long passed the age at which
+athletics are commonly indulged in, he performed the London to York and
+back walk of 1788 in five days twenty hours, and its repetitions of 1792
+in five days eighteen hours and five days fifteen hours and a quarter,
+respectively.  The starting and turning-points were Shoreditch Church and
+York Minster.  This last effort probably cost him his life, for he died,
+aged fifty-nine, early the following year.  Powell figures—rightly
+enough—as one of Wilson and Caulfield’s company of “Remarkable
+Characters,” in which he is described as about five feet nine inches in
+height, close-knit body, of a sallow complexion, and of a meagre habit.
+He lived on a light and spare diet, and generally abstained from drink,
+only on one of his expeditions partaking of brandy.  He took but little
+sleep, generally five hours.
+
+                         [Picture: Foster Powell]
+
+Robert Barclay of Ury, born 1731, died 1797, walked from London to Ury,
+510 miles, in ten days.  He is described as having been well over six
+feet in height.  He married, in 1776, Sarah Ann Allardice, and was the
+father of the next notable pedestrian.
+
+Captain Barclay of Ury, an eighteenth century stalwart, born in 1779 and
+living until 1854, walked the whole way from Edinburgh to London and
+back.  He was at the time Member of Parliament for Kincardineshire.
+Another of his feats of endurance was driving the mail for a wager from
+London to Aberdeen.  He then offered to drive it back for another wager,
+but Lord Kennedy, who had already lost, was not inclined to renew.
+Barclay started the “Defiance” coach between Edinburgh and Aberdeen in
+July 1829.  He only once upset it, and thus described the event:—“She
+fell as easy as if she had fallen on a feather bed, and looking out for a
+soft place, I alighted comfortably on my feet.”  A favourite axiom with
+him was that no man could claim to be a thoroughly qualified coachman
+until he had “floored”—that is, upset—his coach; “for till he has done so
+he cannot know how to get it up again.”  Barclay was the claimant of the
+Earldom of Monteith and Ayr, and it was a source of genuine anxiety with
+him whether, in the event of his proving his claim, he would have to give
+up the reins.  He consulted his friend the Duke of Gordon on this point.
+“Why,” replied his Grace, “there is not much difference between an earl
+and a marquis, and as the Marquis of Waterford drives the Brighton
+‘Defiance,’ I see no reason why you may not drive its Aberdeen namesake.
+At all events, if there be any objection to your being the coachman,
+there can be none to your being the guard.”  Barclay was snubbed!
+
+As for the many great people who were furiously driven back and forth, up
+and down the road, the historian is dismayed at the prospect of
+chronicling their whirling flight.  Let us respectfully take the most of
+their performances on trust.  There was no occasion for all this haste,
+save the spirit of the thing, as Byron hints:—
+
+    “Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits,
+    Leavening his blood as cayenne doth a curry,
+    As going at full speed—no matter where its
+    Direction be, so ’tis but in a hurry,
+    And merely for the sake of its own merits;
+    For the less cause there is for all this flurry,
+    The greater is the pleasure in arriving
+    At the great end of travel—which is driving.”
+
+Thus there was Lord Londonderry, who made a speech in the House one
+night, and the next evening was at his own place in Durham, 250 miles or
+so away, having travelled down in his “chariot and four.”
+
+There were those, however, who scorned these effeminate methods.  Like
+Barclay of Ury, they walked or rode horseback, long after the
+introduction of coaches.  Foul-mouthed old Lord Monboddo, for instance, a
+once famous Scots Lord of Session, persisted in the use of the saddle.
+He journeyed between the two capitals once a year, and continued to do so
+until well past fourscore years of age.  On his last journey to London he
+could get no further than Dunbar, and when his nephew asked him why he
+gave up, “Eh, George,” said he, “I find I am noo auchty-four.”  He was,
+in fact, suffering from the incurable disease of “Anno Domini.”  He held
+it unmanly “to sit in a box drawn by brutes.”  Would that we could have
+his shade for a companion on a ’bus ride from Charing Cross to the Bank!
+
+At that period the stage-wagons performed the journey in fourteen days,
+carrying passengers at a shilling a day.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+THE list of equestrians is long and distinguished.  Lord Mansfield rode
+up from Scotland to London when a boy, on a pony, and took two months
+over the enterprise.  Dr. Skene, who left town in 1753 in the same
+fashion, reached Edinburgh in nineteen days.  His expenses, having sold
+his mare on arrival for eight guineas—exactly the sum he had given for
+her—amounted to only four guineas.
+
+This, indeed, was the usual plan to purchase a horse for the journey and
+to sell it on arrival; a method so canny that it must surely be of Scots
+invention.  It had the advantage that, if you found a good market for
+your nag, it was often possible to make a profit on the transaction.
+
+But it behoved the purchaser to make some inquiry as to the previous
+owners, as no doubt the Scotsman, leaving London with one of these newly
+bought mounts, discovered, after some embarrassing experiences.  He went
+gaily forth upon his way, and nothing befell him until Finchley Common
+was reached.  On that lonely waste, however, he met another horseman;
+whereupon his horse began to edge up to the stranger, as though to
+prevent him from proceeding.  The Scotsman was at a loss to understand
+this behaviour, but the other traveller, thinking him to be a highwayman,
+was for handing over his purse forthwith.  This little difficulty
+explained away, our friend resumed his journey, presently meeting a
+coach, when the performance was repeated.  This time, however,
+blunderbusses were aimed at him, and, the nervous passengers being in no
+mood to hear or understand explanations, he had a rather narrow escape of
+his life.  At Barnet he sold this embarrassing horse for what he could
+get, and continued his journey by coach.
+
+It was in 1756 that Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness travelled to London from
+Edinburgh in her own post-chaise, her sturdy serving-man, John Rattray,
+riding beside the vehicle on horseback, armed with pistols and a
+broadsword by his side.  She set out from Edinburgh on the 3rd of June
+and reached London on the evening of the 10th—an astonishing rapid
+journey, it was thought.  Let it not be supposed that the armed
+serving-man, or the case of pistols the good dame carried with her inside
+the vehicle, showed an excess of precaution.  Not at all; as was
+instanced near that suspicious place, Bawtry, in whose neighbourhood a
+doubtful character whom they took to be a highwayman made his appearance.
+However, when John Rattray began talking ostentatiously about powder and
+ball to the post-boy, the supposed malefactor was nonplussed; and on John
+Rattray furthermore “showing his whanger,” the fellow made off.  And so
+Cox—and Box—were satisfied.  Strangest of all travellers, however, was
+Peter Woulfe, chemist, mineralogist, and eccentric, whose specific for
+illness was a journey by mail-coach.  He indulged this whim for years,
+riding from London to Edinburgh and back, until 1803, when the remedy
+proved worse than the disease, for he caught cold on these bleak miles
+and died.
+
+John Scott, afterwards Earl of Eldon and created Lord Chancellor, left a
+record of his early travels along this road—surely it were better named
+the Road to Fortune!  He left school at Newcastle in 1766 to proceed to
+London on the way to Oxford, and travelled in a “fly,” so called because
+it did the journey in the previously unheard-of time of three days and
+four nights.  This “fly” had probably once been a private carriage, for
+it still bore the motto, “_Sat cito_, _si sat bene_”—that is to say,
+“Quick enough, if well enough”—exquisitely appropriate, however, to that
+slow pace.  Young Scott had noticed this, and made an impudent remark to
+a fellow-traveller, a Quaker, who, when they halted at Tuxford, had given
+sixpence to a chamber-maid, telling her that he had forgotten to give it
+her when he had slept at the inn two years before.  “Friend,” said he to
+the Quaker, “have you seen the motto on this coach?”
+
+“No,” said his companion.
+
+“Then look at it,” he rejoined, “for I think giving her sixpence now is
+neither sat cito nor sat bene.”
+
+It is astonishing, indeed, how many future Lord Chancellors came from the
+North.  Lord Chancellor Campbell, who as a boy came up to London from
+Fife in 1798, was among the early arrivals by mail-coach.  At that time
+his father was the admiration of his Fifeshire village, for he was the
+only one in the place who had been to London.  Every one, accordingly,
+looked up to, and consulted, so great a traveller.  He had seen Garrick,
+too, and was used to boast of the fact, although, it is to be supposed,
+with discretion and amid the inner circle of his friends, for play-actors
+were not yet favourites in the dour Scottish mind.  Great was the
+excitement when young Campbell left home.  The speed of the coaches had
+been accelerated, and they now began to reach London from Edinburgh in
+two days and three nights.  Friends advised him to stay in York and
+recuperate for a day or two after a taste of this headlong speed, lest
+he—as it was rumoured had happened to others—should be seized with
+apoplexy from the rush of air at that rate of travelling.  But, greatly
+daring, he disregarded their advice, and came to town direct and in
+safety.
+
+When railways were introduced, they meant much more than cheap and speedy
+travelling; they prefigured a social revolution and an absolute reversal
+of manners and customs.  The “great ones of the earth” were really great
+in the old days; to-day no one is great in the old exclusive sense.
+Every one can go everywhere—and every one does.  Dukes travel in
+omnibuses and go third-class by train because there is no fourth.  If
+there _were_, they would go by it, and save the difference.
+
+The judges kept up the practice of going on circuit in their carriages
+for some little while after railways had rendered it unnecessary; and
+barristers who used to post to the assizes were for a few years unwilling
+to be convinced that it was quite respectable and professional to go by
+train.  The juniors were the readiest converts, for the difference in
+cost touched them nearly.  The clergy soon embraced the opportunity of
+travelling cheaply, for the cloth has ever had, at the least of it, a due
+sense of the value of money.
+
+Dignified and stately prelates therefore speedily began to look
+ridiculous by contrast, and the old picture in _Punch_, once considered
+exquisitely humorous, of a bishop carrying a carpet-bag, has lost its
+point.  Samuel Wilberforce, when elevated to the Bishopric of Oxford in
+1845, was probably the first Bishop to give up his coach and four and his
+gorgeous lackeys.  He rode, unattended, on horseback, and scandalised
+those who saw him.  How much more scandalised would they have been to see
+bishops ride bicycles: a sight not uncommon in our time.
+
+In the vanished era, only those who could afford it travelled; in the
+present, only those who _cannot_ afford it go “first.”  Jack is as good
+as his master—“and a d—d sight better,” as the Radical orator said.
+Caste, happily, is breaking down, and their privileges are being stripped
+from the governing cliques who for centuries have battened on the public
+purse.  Perhaps it was because they had a prophetic fore-knowledge of all
+this that the titled and other landowners so strenuously withstood
+railways at their beginning.  They sometimes opposed railways so
+successfully that great trunk routes, planned to go as direct as possible
+between two points, were diverted and made circuitous.  When the Great
+Northern Railway was projected it was proposed to follow the highway to
+the North as nearly as possible, and to go through Stamford; but the
+Marquis of Exeter opposed the Bill as far as it concerned his own
+property, and procured a deviation which sent the main line through
+Grantham, with the results that Stamford languishes while Grantham is
+made to flourish, and that the short-sightedness of the then Marquis has
+wofully affected the value of his successor’s property.  If the thing
+were to do again, how eagerly would the Company be invited to take the
+route it was once forbidden!
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+WE, none of us, who read the story of the roads, or who make holiday
+along them, would really like those old times back, when railways were
+undreamt of, and travelling for the pleasure of it was unknown.  It is
+sufficient to read the old travellers’ tales, to realise what
+discouragements from leaving one’s own fireside existed then.  There was,
+for instance, toward the close of the seventeenth century, and well on
+into the eighteenth, an antiquary of repute who lived at Leeds, and
+journeyed very frequently in the Midlands, Ralph Thoresby was his name.
+He travelled much, and in all weathers, and knew the Great North Road
+well.  In his day the coaches were often, through the combined badness of
+the roads and the severity of the weather, obliged to lay up in the
+winter, like ships in Arctic seas.  Like his much more illustrious
+contemporary, Pepys, he not infrequently lost his way, owing to the roads
+at that period having no boundary, and once, he tells us, he missed the
+road between York and Doncaster, fervently thanking God for having found
+it again.  Indeed, all his journeys end with more or less hearty
+thanksgivings for a safe return.  On one occasion we find him missing his
+pistols at an inn, and darkly suspecting the landlord to be in league
+with thieves and murderers; but he finds them, after a nerve-shaking
+search, and proceeds, thanking the Lord for all his mercies.  At another
+time, journeying to London, he passes, and notes the circumstance, “the
+great common where Sir Ralph Wharton slew the highwayman.”  This was
+doubtless Witham Common, but, although he alludes to the subject as
+though it were in his time a matter of great notoriety, all details of
+this encounter are now sadly to seek, and Sir Ralph Wharton himself lives
+only in Thoresby’s diary.
+
+Thoresby was a very inaccurate person.  He mentions “Stonegate Hole,
+between Stamford and Grantham,” but he is out of his reckoning by forty
+miles or so, Ogilby’s map of 1697 marking the spot near Sawtry.
+Accordingly when we find him, going by coach, instead of by his usual
+method, on horseback, in May 1714, and noting “we dined at Grantham: had
+the usual solemnity (this being the first time the coach passed in May),
+the coachman and horses being decked with ribbons and flowers, the town
+music and young people in couples before us,” we shrewdly suspect he was
+referring to the festivities of this kind held at Sutton-on-Trent,
+twenty-three miles further north.
+
+Witham Common passed, we come to the village of Colsterworth, built on a
+rise, with fine views from it of the upland copses and gentle hills and
+dales of this hunting country, where the Cottesmore, the Atherstone, and
+the Quorn overrun one another’s boundaries.  Colsterworth is the last of
+the stone-built villages for many a mile to come, red brick reigning from
+Grantham onwards, to far beyond York.  It is a narrow-streeted village,
+with an old church, closely elbowed by houses beside the road; the church
+where Sir Isaac Newton and his ancestors worshipped, and where, on the
+wall of the Newton Chapel, may yet be seen one of the sundials he carved
+with a penknife when only nine years of age.  In a secluded nook, nearly
+two miles to the left of the highroad, lies Woolsthorpe Manor House, the
+Newtons’ ancestral home, now a small farmhouse, with a tablet built into
+the wall of the room where the philosopher was born.  The famous
+apple-tree whose falling fruit suggested the Law of Gravitation has long
+since disappeared.
+
+Lincolnshire now begins to thoroughly belie its reputation for flatness,
+the road descending steeply from Colsterworth and rising sharply from
+Easton Park to the park of Stoke Rochford, with another long sharp
+descent beyond, and a further rise of some importance into Great Ponton,
+another of the very small “Great” villages.
+
+                         [Picture: Great Ponton]
+
+Great Ponton, or Paunton Magna, as it was formerly called, was in early
+days the site of a Roman camp, and of a turnpike gate in latter times.
+Both have gone to a common oblivion.  If the ascent to the tiny village
+by the highroad is steep, the climb upwards to it by the country lanes
+from the lowlands on the east, where the Great Northern Railway takes its
+easeful course, is positively precipitous.  Overlooking the pleasant vale
+from its commanding eyrie stands the beautiful old church, in a by-way
+off the main road; the church itself strikingly handsome, but the
+pinnacled and battlemented tower its peculiar glory.  It is distinctly of
+the ornate Somersetshire type, and a very late example of Perpendicular
+work.  Having been built in 1519, when Gothic had reached its highest
+development, and Renaissance ideals were slowly but surely obtaining a
+hold in this country, we find in its lavish ornamentation and abundant
+panelling an attempt to combine the florid alien Renaissance conventions
+with that peculiarly insular phase of Gothic, the Perpendicular style.
+The result is, as it chances, happy in this instance, the new methods
+halting before that little further development which would have made this
+a debased example.  The building of this tower was the work of Anthony
+Ellys, merchant of the staple, and of his wife, as a thank-offering for a
+prosperous career, and of an escape from religious persecution; and his
+motto, “Thynke and thanke God of all,” is still visible, carved on three
+sides.  His house, a crow-stepped old mansion next the church, is still
+standing, and recalls the legend of his sending home a cask from his
+warehouses in Calais, labelled “Calais sand.”  Arriving home, he asked
+his wife what she had done with the “sand.”  She had put it in the
+cellar.  He then revealed the fact that it contained, not sand, but the
+greater part of his wealth.
+
+                      [Picture: Great Ponton Church]
+
+Prominent on the south-east pinnacle of this tower is a curious vane in
+the shape of a fiddle.  The legend told of it says that, many years ago,
+there wandered amid the fenland villages of Lincolnshire a poor fiddler
+who gained a scanty livelihood by playing at fairs and weddings, and not
+infrequently in the parlours of the village inns on Saturday nights.
+After some years of this itinerant minstrelsy, he amassed a sufficient
+sum of money wherewith to pay his fare as a steerage passenger to the
+United States, to which country his relatives had emigrated some time
+before.  In course of time, this once almost poverty stricken fiddler
+became rich through land speculation in the backwoods; and, revisiting
+the scenes of his tuneful pilgrimages in the new character of a wealthy
+man, offered to repair this then dilapidated church, as some sort of
+recognition of the kindnesses shown him in bygone years.  Only one
+stipulation was made by him, that a vane representing his old fiddle
+should take the place of the weathercock.  This was agreed to, and, as we
+see, that quaint emblem is there to this day.
+
+Candour, however, compels the admission that this pretty legend has no
+truth in it; but the story has frequently found its way into print, and
+so is in a fair way to become a classic.  The original fell in 1899 and
+was broken.  The then rector would have replaced it with another vane of
+different character, but the old folk were attached to their fiddle, and
+so a replica was made by subscription, and fixed; and there it is to-day:
+the first fiddle, said the rector, that ever he heard of in the guise of
+a wind-instrument!
+
+Among the many curious inn-signs along the road, that of the “Blue
+Horse,” at Great Ponton, is surely one of the most singular, and is a
+zoological curiosity not readily explained.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+GRANTHAM, one hundred and ten and a quarter miles from London by road,
+and five miles less by rail, is three miles and a half distant from Great
+Ponton.  Entered down the very long and steep descent of Spitalgate Hill,
+the utterly modernised character of the town becomes at once apparent,
+and all pleasurable anticipations based upon memories of the lettered
+ease of Stamford are instantly dispelled.  The expectant traveller comes
+to Grantham hopeful of a fine old town with streets and buildings
+befitting its historic dignity; but these hopes are soon dispelled by
+grimy engine-shops and roads gritty with coal-dust, giving earnest of an
+aggressive modernity fully unfolded when the level is reached and the
+town entered at Spitalgate and St. Peter’s Hill.  Grantham is a red-brick
+town, and modern red brick at that.  A cruelly vulgar Town Hall, all
+variegated brick, iron crestings, and general spikiness, fondly believed
+to be “Italian,” testifies at once to the expansive prosperity of
+Grantham and to its artlessness.  This monument of Grantham’s pride faces
+the grass-plots that border the broad thoroughfare of St. Peter’s Hill
+(which is flat, and not a hill at all) where stand bronze statues of Sir
+Isaac Newton, Grantham’s great man, and of a certain Frederick James
+Tollemache, M.P. for Grantham, who departed this life in 1888, after
+having probably achieved some kind of local celebrity which, whatever it
+may have been, has not sent the faintest echo to the outer world.  It is
+an odd effigy, representing the departed legislator in an Inverness
+cloak, and holding in his right hand a something which looks curiously
+like a billiard-cue, but is probably intended for some kind of official
+wand.  The untutored might be excused for thinking this a monument to a
+champion billiard-player.
+
+Great are the Tollemaches in Lincolnshire, great territorially, that is
+to say; for the Earls of Dysart, at the head of the family, own many
+manors and broad acres; from Witham and Buckminster, away along the road
+to Foston and Long Bennington, and so to where the Shire Dyke divides the
+counties of Lincolnshire and Nottingham, on the marches of the Duke of
+Newcastle’s estates.
+
+To an Earl of Dysart, Grantham owes the ugly polished granite obelisk in
+the market-place, with a lying inscription which purports to mark the
+spot where the ancient Eleanor Cross formerly stood, before it was
+utterly demolished by Puritan fanatics in 1645.  That spot was really on
+St. Peter’s Hill, at quite the other end of the town!
+
+Grantham owes its name to the river on which it stands, now the Witham,
+but once called the Granta, and its ancient prosperity to its position on
+the road to the North.  To this circumstance is due also its long
+reputation as a town of many and excellent inns, from those early times
+when the Church was the earliest inn-keeper, to those others when the
+coaches were at their best and “entertainment for man and beast” a merely
+secular business.  The “Angel” and the “George” at Grantham have a long
+history.  The “Angel” still survives as a mediæval building, and, like
+the equally famous “George” at Glastonbury, contrives to please alike the
+antiquary and the guest whose desire for modern creature comforts takes
+no account of Gothic architecture.  Anciently a wayside house of the
+Knights Templar, the existing building belongs to the mid-fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries.  On either side of its great archway now appear the
+carved stone heads of Edward the Third and the heroic Queen Philippa, and
+at the crown of the arch, serving the purpose of a supporting corbel to
+the beautiful oriel window above, is an angel, supporting a shield of
+arms; not the old sign, indeed, but an architectural adornment merely.
+This, and all the numerous “Angels” and the several “Salutations” on the
+road, derived from the religious picture-sign of the Annunciation, of
+which the saluting angel in the “Hail Mary” group in course of time alone
+remained.
+
+                     [Picture: The “Angel,” Grantham]
+
+Before coaches or carriages were, kings and courtiers on their way north
+or south made the “Angel” their headquarters, coming to it, of necessity,
+on horseback.  Thus, John held his Court here in the February of 1213, in
+the building which preceded even this old one, and Richard the Third
+signed Buckingham’s death-warrant in 1483 in the great room, now divided
+into three, and that once extended the whole length of the frontage on
+the first floor.  Perhaps it was in the bay of this oriel window that he
+“off’d with his head!” in the familiar phrase mouthed by many generations
+of gory tragedians and aspiring amateurs; and exclaiming “So much for
+Buckingham!” turned on his heel, in the attitude of triumphant villainy
+we know so well.  But, unhappily for the truth of this and similar
+striking situations, it is to be feared that Richard, unappreciative of
+the situation—the “situation,” that is to say, in the theatrical
+sense—signed the warrant in a businesslike way, and neither mouthed nor
+struck attitudes.  He left that scene to be exploited by Shakespeare or
+Colley Cibber as authors, and by Charles Kean and many another as actors.
+Between them, _they_ could have shown him how to play the part.
+
+But let us to less dramatic—and safer—times.  The “Angel” divided the
+honours in coaching days with the “George,” a house with a history as
+long, but not so distinguished, as this old haunt of bloody minded
+monarchs.  The old “George,” burnt down in 1780, was an equally beautiful
+house, and was rebuilt in the prevailing Georgian taste—or want of
+taste—that raised so many comfortable but ugly inns toward the close of
+the eighteenth century.  “One of the best inns in England,” says Dickens,
+in describing the journey from London to Yorkshire in _Nicholas
+Nickleby_, and there is not wanting other testimony to its old-time
+excellence.
+
+“At the sign of the ‘George’ you had a cleaner cloth, brighter plate,
+higher polished glass, and a brisker fire, with more prompt attention and
+civility than at most other places,” says one who had occasion to know;
+and so the local proverb, current among towns and villages adjacent to
+Grantham, “Grantham gruel; nine grots and a gallon of water,” was
+evidently no reflection upon the quality of this inn.  The “George” was
+busy with the coaches, early and late.  First to arrive was the Edinburgh
+mail, at twenty-three minutes past seven in the morning.  Three
+lengthened blasts of the horn announced its arrival, and out stepped
+night-capped passengers, half asleep and surly, but fresh water and good
+spirits dispelled the gloomy faces, and down went, for the allotted
+period of forty minutes, hot rolls, boiled eggs, and best Bohea; good
+fare after weary wayfaring, and calculated to make the surliest
+good-tempered.
+
+Francis, Lord Jeffrey, writing from his hotel (doubtless the “George”) at
+Grantham, when journeying to London in January 1831, is not so
+enthusiastic on old-time travel as he might have been, considering the
+high character of Grantham’s inns.  “Here we are,” says he, “on our way
+to you; toiling up through snow and darkness, with this shattered carcase
+and this reluctant and half-desponding spirit.  You know how I hate early
+rising; and here have I been for three days, up two hours before the sun,
+and, blinking by a dull taper, haggling at my inflamed beard before a
+little pimping inn looking-glass, and abstaining from suicide only from a
+deep sense of religion and love to my country.  To-night it snows and
+blows, and there is good hope of our being blocked up at Wytham Corner or
+Alconbury Hill, or some of these lonely retreats, for a week or so, or
+fairly stuck in the drift and obliged to wade our way to some such hovel
+as received poor Lear and his fool in some such season.  Oh, dear, dear!
+But in the meantime we are sipping weak black tea by the side of a
+tolerable fire, and are in hopes of reaching the liberties of Westminster
+before dark on Wednesday.”  He was writing on Monday evening!
+
+At any rate such as he could afford to take his ease and partake of the
+best.  Those who needed pity were the poor folk who had just enough for
+the journey, and could not afford to stay at expensive inns, waiting
+until better weather came.  But, however much we may read in novels of
+the charm of winter travelling in the old coaching days, if we turn to
+contemporary accounts, by the travellers themselves, we shall always find
+that even those who could afford the best did not like it.
+
+Henry St. George Tucker, afterwards Chairman of the East India Company,
+travelled from Edinburgh to London in 1816, in the depth of winter.  He
+wrote:—
+
+“Throughout the whole journey, as far as Newcastle, we had a violent
+storm of snow, rain and sleet; and the cold was more severe than I had
+felt it before.  The coach was not wind-tight at the bottom; and as I was
+obliged to keep my window open to allow the escape of certain fumes, the
+produce of whisky, rum, and brandy, I felt the cold so pinching that I
+should have been glad of fur cap and worsted stockings.  To aggravate the
+evil, I had not a decent companion to converse with.  We picked up sundry
+vagabonds on the road, but there was only one, between Edinburgh and
+York, who bore the ‘slightest appearance of being a gentleman.’”  He,
+however, we learn was “effeminate and affected.”
+
+In Mozley’s _Reminiscences_ we find a horrid story of the endurance
+practised by a woman travelling by coach from Edinburgh to London.  “I
+once travelled,” he says, “to London _vis-à-vis_ with a thin, pale,
+elderly woman, ill-clad in black, who never once got down, or even moved
+to shake off the snow that settled on her lap and shoulders.  I spoke to
+the guard about her.  He said she had come from Edinburgh and had not
+moved since changing coaches, which she would have to do once; she feared
+that if she once got down she would not he able to get up again.  She had
+taken no food of any kind.”
+
+There the picture ends, and this tragical figure is lost.  Who was she
+who endured so much?  Had she come to London to purchase with her few
+savings the discharge of an only son who had enlisted in the army?  Had
+she made this awful journey to bid good-bye to a husband condemned to
+death or transportation?  Surely some such story was hers, but we can
+never know it, and so the gaunt figure, pathetic in its endurance, haunts
+the memory and the baffled curiosity like an enigma.
+
+Grantham, it is true, has few things more interesting than its inns.
+This is not the confession of a _bon vivant_, suspicious though it
+sounds, but is just another way of stating the baldness of Grantham’s
+street.  One of these few things is the tall steeple of the parish
+church, which has a fame rivalling that of some cathedrals miles away.
+Journeying by road or rail, that lofty spire is seen, even while Grantham
+itself remains undisclosed.  If this were a proper place for it much
+might be said of the church and spire of St. Wulfran’s: how the tower
+rises to a height of one hundred and forty feet, and the slim crocketed
+spire to one hundred and forty feet more; being sixth in point of
+measurement among the famed spires of England.  Salisbury is first, with
+its four hundred and four feet, followed by Norwich, three hundred and
+fifteen feet, Chichester, and St. Michael’s, Coventry, three hundred
+feet, and Louth, two hundred and ninety-two feet.  But generalities must
+serve our turn here.  If the spire is only sixth in point of measurement
+it is first in date, being earlier than Salisbury’s.  Sir Gilbert Scott
+held it to be second only to Salisbury in beauty, but Scott’s reputation
+in matters of taste had slight foundations, and, beautiful though
+Grantham’s spire is, there are others excelling it.  The majesty of
+Newark’s less lofty spire is greater than this of Grantham, and indeed it
+may be questioned whether a Decorated spire, comparatively so attenuated
+and with its purity of outline broken and worried by an endless array of
+crockets is really more admirable as a thing of beauty, or as a daring
+and successful exercise in the piling up of fretted stones in so
+apparently frail a fashion.
+
+                      [Picture: The “Wondrous Sign”]
+
+We cannot get away from the inns, and even the church is connected with
+them, the town being annually edified by the so-called “Drunken Sermon”
+preached at it in the terms of a bequest left in the form of an annual
+rent-charge of forty shillings on the “Angel” by one Michael Solomon.
+
+But among the popular curiosities of Grantham, few things are more
+notable than the unpretending inn at Castlegate known variously as the
+“Beehive” or the “Living Sign.”  Immediately in front of the house is a
+small tree with a beehive fixed in its branches, and a board calling
+attention to the fact in the lines:
+
+    “Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign explore,
+    And say, when thou hast viewed it o’er and o’er,
+    ‘GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine,
+    A lofty Steeple and a living Sign.’”
+
+It may fairly be advanced that the suggestion to “explore” an inhabited
+beehive is an unfortunate choice of a word.
+
+There is (unless it has lately been abolished) another curiosity at
+Grantham.  It is a custom.  When the time-expired Mayor vacates his
+office, what has aptly been called a “striking” ceremony takes place.
+His robe is stripped off, his chain is removed from his shoulders, and
+with a small wooden hammer the Town Clerk takes the ex-Chief Magistrate
+on the head to typify the end of his authority.  There is only one
+possible method more derogatory than this humiliating treatment, but it
+need not be specified.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+IN history, Grantham and its immediate neighbourhood are notable as
+having witnessed the rise of Oliver Cromwell.  At the outbreak of
+hostilities in March 1643, the town was taken and its fortifications
+demolished by the Royalists, but was retaken shortly afterwards by the
+Parliamentary troops under a hitherto undistinguished Cornet of Horse,
+after some fighting at Gonerby.  The rise of this cornet is picturesquely
+described by De Foe.  “About this time,” he says, “it was that we began
+to hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud, rose
+out of the East, and spread first into the North, until it shed down a
+flood that overwhelmed the three kingdoms.”  It was on May 22, 1643,
+that, with twelve troops, Cromwell defeated at Gonerby twenty-four troops
+of the opposing forces, and thus commenced this meteorological career.
+
+The ascent of Gonerby Hill, where these events took place, is a part of
+the journey to the North.  It begins at the distance of a mile and a
+quarter beyond Grantham, shortly before reaching the hundred and twelfth
+milestone from London.  For this part of the world it is a remarkable
+eminence, but although a long continuous climb, it does not come up to
+the impressive old descriptions of it, and cannot compare with such hills
+as Reigate Hill, or with Boughton Hill on the Dover Road.  The village of
+Great Gonerby, a poor, out-at-elbows kind of a place, stands on the crest
+of the hill, with its great spired church as a landmark, a wide, bare
+street, a little inn with the curious sign of the “Recruiting Sergeant,”
+and an old posting inn, the “Rutland Arms,” its principal features.
+Passing through the cutting by which the gradient of the northern side of
+the hill has been eased, a remarkable view is unfolded of that flat
+region, fertile as a land of promise, the Vale of Belvoir.
+
+We shall hear presently what Sir Walter Scott has to say of Gonerby Hill,
+but in the meanwhile let us see how the view from it struck another
+traveller, the Reverend Thomas Twining, an amiable clergyman of
+Colchester, who in the eighteenth century was in the habit of taking
+holidays along the roads, mounted on his horse “Poppet,” and writing
+letters to his friends, describing what he saw.  He was here in 1776.
+
+“You have a view,” says he, “somewhat sublime and striking from its mere
+extent and suddenness but it is flat as a pancake.  The road is through
+level, moorish, unpleasant ground from the bottom of that hill to Newark,
+but, as road, excellent.”  No guide-book ever pictured a view so vividly
+as this description, which may stand unaltered to-day.
+
+Gonerby Hill—“Gunnerby” is the correct pronunciation of the word—is
+something more to us in these pages than merely a hill.  It is a place of
+literary eminence, whose terrors are enshrined in the pages of Scott and
+Ainsworth.  Jeanie Deans, of all the romantic and historic characters
+that people this historic and romantic road the most prominent, is
+especially to be identified with this height.  Historic she is because
+there is a substantial basis of truth in the character of Sir Walter
+Scott’s heroine, and of Effie and many another figure in the _Heart of
+Midlothian_.  They have fictitious names, but some were real persons.
+Helen Walker, who died in 1791 and was buried in the churchyard of
+Irongray, near Dumfries, is the prototype of Jeanie.  She had in 1737
+walked to London and sought a pardon for her sister, Isabella, condemned
+to death by the ferocious Scots law on a _presumption_ of having murdered
+her child.  She actually did (as Scott’s heroine is described as having
+done) seek the Duke of Argyle and through his interest obtain the object
+of her journey; but Scott is responsible for the embroidery of this
+simple and affecting story; for he never saw Helen Walker, and she, with
+Scottish closeness, never described her adventures, being only too
+anxiously concerned that the story of her sister’s shame should be
+forgotten.
+
+It is a curious and (admirable or not, as one may personally think it)
+unusual conscience that would hesitate to stretch a point in evidence
+when to do so would be to save the life of a loved sister; and more
+strange still to find so unbending a moralist enduring the toils and
+dangers of a four-hundred miles’ tramp with the bare possibility of
+preserving the life of the sinner in view at the end; but to understand
+the workings of the Scottish conscience is beyond the mental reach of any
+one who does not chance to be either a Scot or a Presbyterian.
+
+And here let it be said that the Jeanie Deans of the novel is by no means
+so attractive a heroine as Scott wished to make her.  There is heroism in
+her walk from Scotland to London, and we rejoice when she is fortunate
+enough to obtain a “cast in a wagon,” or pity her when she falls in with
+thieves and murderers at Gonerby Hill foot; but when we find her
+“conforming to the national (that is to say, the English) extravagance of
+wearing shoes and stockings for the whole day,” we can scarce subdue a
+snort of contempt at the very superior manner in which she thus yields to
+the popular prejudice in favour of this extravagance in shoe-leather.
+Nor is she a particularly lovable figure when she disputes theology with
+the rector of Willingham, with all the assurance of a Doctor of Divinity
+and all the narrow-minded bigotry of a Covenanter; coming in these things
+perilously near the ideal of the perfect prig.
+
+We must here quote the landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” at Newark on
+Gonerby Hill.  He spoke of it as though it were some beetling eminence,
+resembling at the very least a Snowdon or an Helvellyn.  He called it a
+“high mountain,” and indeed Scott has in putting this phrase into mine
+host’s mouth made him characteristic of his age.
+
+The year of Jeanie Deans’ romantic expedition was 1737, and then, and for
+long afterwards, travellers and all who had business with the roads
+magnified hills in this manner.  They disliked hills, and so for that
+matter did most people, for the appreciation of scenery was not yet born.
+“When I was young,” said Wordsworth, many years later, “there were no
+lakes nor mountains,” and it was Thomas Gray, the author of the _Elegy_,
+who really was the first to discover beauty instead of terror and
+desolation in them.
+
+Jeanie Deans, on the other hand, was pleased to hear of Gonerby Hill.
+Not, mark you, that she was educated up to an appreciation of the
+picturesque.  We know, in fact, that she was not, because when she and
+the Duke of Argyle stood looking down upon the lovely expanse of woods,
+meads, and waters seen from Richmond Hill, all she could find to say was
+that “It’s braw feeding for the cows.”  No, when she learned with
+pleasure of the “mountain” she was to cross, it was only for
+association’s sake: “I’m glad to hear there’s a hill, for baith my sight
+and my very feet are weary o’ sic tracts o’ level ground—it looks a’ the
+way between this and York as if a’ the land had been trenched and
+levelled, whilk is very wearisome to my Scotch een.  When I lost sight of
+a muckle blue hill they ca’ Ingleboro’, I thought I hadna a friend left
+in this strange land.”
+
+“As for the matter of that, young woman,” said mine host, “an you be so
+fond o’ hill, I carena an thou couldst carry Gunnerby away with thee in
+thy lap, for it’s a murder to post-horses.  But here’s to thy journey,
+and mayst thou win well through it, for thou is a bold and a canny lass.”
+
+Gonerby Hill was reputed the steepest bit between London and Edinburgh.
+It was, at the time when Scott wrote, a great deal steeper than nowadays,
+now that the road has been cut deeply through it, instead of climbing
+painfully over the crest.  Then also, as he remarks, the open ground at
+its foot was unenclosed and covered with copses and swampy pools.  Also,
+as Jeanie discovered, there was “bad company” where the “bonny hill
+lifted its brow to the moon.”  But surely never did such odd company as
+Sir Walter has invented lurk in these recesses.  The _Heart of
+Midlothian_, indeed, is a fantastic novel quite unworthy of the Wizard of
+the North, and its wildly improbable characters and marvellous
+rencounters are on a par with Harrison Ainsworth at his worst.  Syston,
+two miles away to the right, is, they say, the original of the Willingham
+village in the novel, and Barkston, close by, is doubtless the “Barkston
+town-end” where Mother Murdockson was put in the stocks; but the
+references to them are of the haziest.
+
+It was not inadvisedly that Ainsworth was just mentioned, for Gonerby
+Hill is named in Turpin’s Ride.  Ainsworth always resorted to the gibbet
+when he wanted to make a point in the gruesome.  Accordingly, when Turpin
+mounts the rise, what does he find but “two scarecrow objects covered
+with rags and rusty links of chain,” depending from “the tree.”  “Will
+this be my lot, I wonder?” asks the hero with a shudder.  We need only to
+be slightly acquainted with Ainsworth’s methods to know that a
+melodramatic answer was immediately forthcoming.  Springing from the
+briars and tussocks of rank grass between the foot of the gallows and the
+road, a gaunt figure exclaimed, “Ay, marry will it!”  These “gaunt
+figures” never failed the novelist; but the plain man wants to know what
+they were doing on these inclement spots, and by what unfailing instinct
+they were always there at the precise moment demanded in the interests of
+fiction.
+
+The descent of Gonerby Hill accomplished, and the level reached, a
+singularly featureless and flat twelve miles leads into Newark, past
+Marston cross-roads, where a turnpike gate used to trouble travellers,
+past Foston, a forlorn village on a knoll, Long Bennington, a larger and
+still more forlorn village on the flat, and thence, with the graceful
+spire of Claypole far on the right, over the Shire Dyke, into
+Nottinghamshire, and through Balderton.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+THE approach to Newark is long and dull, by way of the suburban “London
+Road” and past the decaying Beaumond Cross, but this leads at length to
+the great open square of the Market-place, the most striking of all such
+centres of public resort to be found on the way to the North.
+Newark-“upon-Trent” is a misnomer, for neither the town nor the castle,
+which was once the “new work” that gave the place its name, are on that
+river, but only on a branch of it—the Devon—which falls into the Trent at
+Crankley Point, some miles below the town.  The “new work” was only new
+some eight hundred years ago, when Edward the Confessor’s castle on the
+banks of the Devon was built, or when it was rebuilt or enlarged by
+Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, 1123–47.  Bishops and other mighty
+castle-builders in those times not infrequently built their own prisons
+when piling up their grim fortresses, and so the Bishop of Lincoln found,
+when King Stephen seized him and kept him in durance within his own
+stronghold.  A judiciously low diet of bread and water, and confinement
+in an unhealthy dungeon below the level of the river, soon broke the
+haughty Churchman’s spirit, and he transferred the castle to the Crown.
+
+But Newark Castle has better claims to notice than as the dungeon of one
+of those old bloody-minded prelates.  As the place where King John ended
+his evil life, we may well look upon its ruined walls with interest.  His
+rebellious barons scattered on his approach in that year of 1216, and
+England seemed in danger of a long continuance of its troubles under the
+profligate king.  But a surfeit of peaches brought that wicked life to a
+hasty conclusion, and here, on the banks of the sluggish Devon, one of
+the worst of English monarchs died.  We need not regard peaches with
+apprehension because John is said to have died of them.  We must consider
+whence they came; from the monks of Swineshead Abbey, where the king had
+stayed on his journey to Newark.  Now, Holy Church had the very best of
+reasons for hating that monarch, and from hatred to murder was not a far
+cry in those days.  So of peaches King John doubtless died; but of
+peaches subtly flavoured with poison, there is little doubt.
+
+The castle was again seized by the barons, in the succeeding reign, but
+they surrendered, after a week’s siege, and by the gift of the king, the
+Bishops of Lincoln received their own again.  Under Edward the Sixth it
+again became the property of the crown, and when James the First
+“progressed” through England to his throne, these walls sheltered him
+during a week of festivity.
+
+A lawless and discourteous, as well as a weak-minded king, as we shall
+see.  Crowds assembled during the festivities set apart by the
+corporation, and a fellow was caught in the act of pocket-picking.  By
+order of the king, the unfortunate wretch was strung up, instanter,
+without the veriest semblance of a trial!  There’s your lawlessness, and
+here follows the discourtesy.
+
+                         [Picture: Newark Castle]
+
+There was a certain Dame Eleanor Disney, who, to do honour to this
+strange kind of king, came, splendidly dressed, with her husband, Sir
+Henry, to one of the receptions.  James’s eye lighted upon all this
+finery, and his frugal mind was shocked.  “Wha,” he asked, “be that lady
+wi’ a lairdship to her bock?”
+
+But the most stirring of Newark’s historic days were yet to come.  Newark
+to the last was loyal to Charles the First.  Three times was the town
+besieged by the Parliament, and never taken.  All the inhabitants armed
+and did excellent service, making sorties and capturing troops of
+Parliamentary horse; and had not the royal cause failed elsewhere, Newark
+must have emerged, triumphant, at the end.  But at last all that remained
+were some few outlying garrisons throughout the country.  Newark was
+especially commanded by the king to discontinue a hopeless resistance,
+and accordingly the town laid down its arms in 1646.  It was then that
+the castle was ruined.
+
+It is a highly picturesque ruin to-day, and lacking nothing in itself of
+grandeur, only needs a more effective site.  As it stands, only slightly
+elevated above the river and the surrounding levels, this historic castle
+has not the advantages that belong to fortresses like Ludlow and Harlech,
+perched on their rocky heights.  But it has done its duty and still
+serves to give a note of dignity to Newark town, as one approaches it by
+the long straight levels of the road from the north.  It looks much the
+same to-day as when Rowlandson made his sketch of it, with the coach
+dashing over the bridge, more than a hundred years ago; the projecting
+Tudor oriel windows still looking forth upon the sullen tide from the
+more ancient walls, their crumbling stones scarce more decayed than then.
+The old wooden bridge, however, that formerly spanned the Devon, was
+pulled down and rebuilt in 1775.
+
+The great glory of Newark is its beautiful church, with that soaring
+spire which is visible for miles away, before the town itself is
+glimpsed.  Not so tall as Grantham spire, it is as beautiful in its
+simpler style, and the church is better placed in the town than that of
+Grantham.  Especially striking is the view across the great market-place,
+the grey Early English and Decorated spire, with its numerous
+belfry-lights, and the fine windows and bold arcading of the tower
+forming a splendidly effective contrast with the seventeenth and
+eighteenth century red-brick houses facing the square.  Newark and
+Grantham spires are really the products of an old-time rivalry between
+the two towns.  Either town is satisfied that it possesses the best, and
+so the peace is kept throughout the ages.
+
+A relic of old times is found in the custom at Newark known as “Ringing
+for Gofer.”  On six successive Sunday evenings, beginning twelve Sundays
+before Christmas, the old parish church bells are rung for one hour,
+complying with the terms of a bequest left by a merchant named Gofer,
+over two centuries ago.  He had on one occasion lost his way at night in
+Sherwood Forest, then infested by robbers of no very chivalrous
+instincts, who required, not “your money or your life,” but both.  Just
+as he had given up hope, he heard these bells of Newark, and by their
+sound he made his way to safety.  In memory of his deliverance he left a
+sum of money for this bell-ringing.
+
+The market-square has always been the centre of Newark’s life.  It is
+singularly like the great market-square of Nottingham, on a smaller
+scale, and, like it, is partly surrounded by houses with a colonnaded
+piazza.  An empty void now, save on the weekly market-day, that occasion
+finds its broad, cobble-stoned space thickly covered with stalls, while
+groups of farmers throng the pavements, and with their samples of corn
+displayed in the palms of their hands sell and buy in immense quantities.
+In the old times this vast empty square was peopled every day with
+arriving or departing coaches, and its pavements beset with passengers
+mounting or alighting, for the celebrated inns of Newark were mostly
+situated here, and the chief of them are here, even now, on the opposite
+side from the church, and adjoining one another.  Newark is said to have
+once had no fewer than fifty inns.  The classical Town Hall, built in
+1773, on the west side of the square, stands on the site of two of them,
+and many others have been converted to different uses.  Here on the south
+side are the “Clinton Arms,” so called in honour of the Duke of
+Newcastle’s family, powerful in these parts; the “Saracen’s Head,” with a
+bust of an alleged (but very pallid and mild-looking) Saracen on its
+frontage; and the “White Hart,” most ancient of all these existing
+hostelries.  An inn of this name is spoken of as existing here in 1113.
+A “Saracen’s Head” stood here, certainly as far back as 1341, but
+unhappily the existing house only dates from 1721.  This house is the one
+mentioned by Sir Walter Scott, who says, “The travellers who have visited
+Newark more lately will not fail to remember the remarkably civil and
+gentlemanly manners of the person who now keeps the principal inn there,
+and may find some amusement in contrasting them with those of his more
+rough predecessor.”
+
+Let us put on record the name of this remarkable person: William
+Thompson, landlord from 1784 to 1819.  His “more rough predecessor” was
+perhaps the landlord who dispensed such open-handed and free hospitality
+to Jeanie Deans, when that somewhat priggish young woman stayed there,
+and on leaving asked for her “lawing.”
+
+                     [Picture: Market-Place, Newark]
+
+“Thy lawing!” exclaimed that “more rough” person; “Heaven help thee,
+wench! what ca’st thou that?”
+
+“It is—I was wanting to ken what was to pay.”
+
+“Pay?  Lord help thee!—why, nought, woman—we hae drawn no liquor but a
+gill o’ beer, and the “Saracen’s Head” can spare a mouthful o’ meat to a
+stranger like thee, that cannot speak Christian language.”
+
+Alas! whatever your language, the more smooth innkeepers of Newark, in
+our times, do not do business on this principle.
+
+The “Clinton Arms” has seen many changes of name.  It was originally the
+“Talbot,” and as such is mentioned in 1341.  At a later date it became
+the “Kingston Arms.”  Byron often stayed there, and writes from London in
+1807, “The ‘Kingston Arms’ is my inn.”  It was also the inn, during the
+election contest of 1832, of Mr. Gladstone, soliciting for the first time
+the suffrages of “free and independent” electors, who duly returned him,
+in the Tory interest.  Newark thus gave him an opportunity in Parliament
+of defending his father as a slave-owner, and of whetting his youthful
+eloquence to a keen edge in extolling the principle of slave-owning.  The
+Newarkers were long proud of having returned the “statesman” to the
+House, but history will perhaps deny him that title.  It has been denied,
+and the term of “egotistical politician” found to fit better.  He set a
+fashion in surrender, and his country reaped shame while he lived; but
+the bitterest harvest-home of his methods has come, after his death, in
+the red vintage of English blood.  It was when standing for this
+pocket-borough of the Duke of Newcastle’s that Gladstone gave an early
+and characteristic specimen of his peculiarly Jesuitical ways of thought.
+He took the mail-coach on a Sunday from Newark for London, and beguiled
+the tedium of the journey and the Sabbath by discussing the question of
+Sunday travelling with a Tory companion.  Not merely did he severely
+condemn the practice, but he also gave some tracts to his
+fellow-traveller!  He gives the facts himself: it is no outsider’s
+satire.  Thus, in one moment of confidence, he reveals not only what he
+is, but what he will be.  He implicitly announces that he is a law unto
+himself and that those things are permitted to him which in others must
+be deadly sins.  In the very moment of crime he can present an accomplice
+with a tract, and glow with all the fervour of one helped to save a lost
+soul.
+
+               [Picture: Newark Castle (After Rowlandson)]
+
+The “Ram,” another old inn, is still standing, opposite the castle, on
+Beast Market Hill.  George Eliot stayed here in September 1868, “seeing
+some charming quiet landscapes” along the Trent.  Quiet, undoubtedly.
+
+Ridge, the printer and bookseller, Byron’s first publisher, who issued
+his _Hours of Idleness_, carried on business in a fine old house still
+standing at a corner of the square, and the house-door and the brass
+knocker at which the new-fledged poet knocked exist to-day.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+BY Beast Market Hill, past the castle and over the bridge, one leaves
+Newark for the north.  Level crossings of the railways now and again
+bedevil the way, which is flat so far as the eye can reach—and much
+farther, and the meadows on either side are intersected by runlets and
+marshes, the road carried over them by a succession of red-brick bridges.
+At a distance of one and a half miles, the true Trent is crossed by a
+wooden bridge, and South Muskham reached, where the level-crossing gates
+take the place of the old turnpike.
+
+The act of looking backwards at this point is a more pleasing physical
+exercise than the mental retrospect is ever likely to be, anywhere.  Sir
+Walter Scott perceived the beauty of the view, for he introduces it in
+Jeanie Deans’ journey south, and says, in a fine passage: “The
+hundred-armed Trent and the blackened ruins of Newark castle, demolished
+in the great Civil War, lay before her.”
+
+“Hundred-armed” is a good and eloquent figure, although on a prosaic
+calculation likely to be found an exaggeration.  Milton, indeed, writing
+a hundred and ninety years or so before, gives the Trent but thirty arms,
+on which, it must be allowed, Sir Walter’s computation is a great
+advance.  But here is Milton’s version:—
+
+    “Trent, which like some earth-born giant spreads
+    His thirty arms along the indented meads.”
+
+Even Drayton, in his _Polyolbion_, does not more nearly approach to Sir
+Walter’s computation, in the couplet:—
+
+    “The bounteous Trent, that in herself enseams,
+    Both thirty sorts of fish and thirty sundry streams.”
+
+Shakespeare rather shirks the calculation, and contents himself with
+describing it as the “smug and silver Trent.”  As for mere travellers,
+who did not happen to be poets or to be engaged in the exploitation of
+scenery, they regarded this stream merely with apprehension, and they did
+right so to look upon it, for Trent often overflowed its thirty or
+hundred arms, as the case might be, and converted the flats for miles
+around into the semblage of a vast lake.  Then, indeed—if at no other
+time—Newark was “upon” Trent, if not actually “in” it, and all the many
+other towns and villages, which bear a similarly composite title, were in
+like case.  Doubtless it was on one of these occasions in 1739, before
+the river was bridged here, that the Newcastle wagon was lost at the
+ford, when the driver and the horses all perished.  Nearly thirty years
+later, on the 6th of June 1767, the poet Gray, writing from London,
+before starting on a journey in these parts, says:—“Pray that the Trent
+may not intercept us at Newark, for we have had infinite rain here.”  Nor
+are floods infrequent, even now, and many a boating-party has voyaged
+down the Great North Road between Newark and Carlton-upon-Trent.
+
+North and South Muskham lie off the road to the right, and are not
+remarkable, except perhaps for the fact that a centenarian, in the person
+of Thomas Seals of Grassthorpe, who died in 1802, age 106, lies in North
+Muskham churchyard.  Cromwell, on the other hand, which now comes in
+sight, although now a commonplace roadside village of uninteresting,
+modern, red-brick cottages, with an old, but not remarkable, church, has
+a place in history.  According to Carlyle, “the small parish of Cromwell,
+or Crumwell (the well of Crum, whatever that may be), not far from the
+left bank of the Trent, simple worshippers still doing in it some kind of
+divine service every Sunday,” was the original home of the Cromwell
+family, from which the great Protector sprang.  “From this,” he adds,
+“without any ghost to teach us, we can understand that the Cromwell
+kindred all got their name.”  But the hero-worshipper will look in vain
+for anything at Cromwell to connect the place with that family.  Not even
+a tablet in the church; nothing, in fact, save the name itself survives.
+
+Here is a blacksmith’s forge, with the design of a huge horseshoe
+encompasing the door, and this inscription:—
+
+                                  “F. NAYLOR
+                                  Blacksmith
+
+    Gentlemen, as you pass by,
+    Upon this shoe pray cast an eye.
+    I’ll make it wider,
+    I’ll ease the horse and please the rider.
+    If lame from shoeing, as they often are
+    You may have them eased with the greatest care.”
+
+Hence to Carlton-upon-Trent, Sutton-upon-Trent, Scarthing Moor, and
+Tuxford is an easy transition of nearly eight miles, with little scenery
+or history on the way.  An old posting-house, now retired into private
+life, the level-crossing of Crow Park, and an old roadside inn, the
+“Nag’s Head,” beside it are all the objects of interest at Carlton; while
+Sutton is scarce more than a name, so far as the traveller along the road
+is concerned.
+
+Weston, a village at a bend and dip of the road, stands by what was once
+Scarthing Moor, whose famous inn, the “Black Lion,” is now, like the
+old-time festivities of Sutton-on-Trent, only a memory.  The farmers and
+cottagers of Sutton-on-Trent long preserved the spring-time custom of
+welcoming the coaches, and freely feasting guards, coachmen, and
+passengers.  It was an annual week’s merrymaking, and young and old
+united to keep it up.  Coaches were compelled to stop in the village
+street, and every one was invited to partake of the good things spread
+out upon a tray covered with a beautiful damask napkin on which were
+attractively displayed plum-cakes, tartlets, gingerbread, exquisite
+home-made bread and biscuits, ale, currant and gooseberry wines,
+cherry-brandy, and sometimes spirits.  These in old-fashioned glass jugs,
+embossed with figures, had a most pleasing effect.  As to the contents,
+they were superlative.  Such ale! such currant-wine! such cherry-brandy!
+Half a dozen damsels, all enchanting young people, neatly clad, rather
+shy, but courteously importunate plied the passengers.
+
+“Eat and drink you must,” says one who partook of these _al fresco_
+hospitalities.  “I tasted all.  How could I resist the winning manners of
+the rustics, with rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes?  My poor stomach, not
+used to such luxuries and extraordinaries at eleven o’clock in the
+morning, was, however, in fine agitation the remainder of the ride, fifty
+miles.  Neither time nor entreaties can prevent their solicitations; they
+are issued to reward the men for trifling kindnesses occasionally
+granted.”
+
+“Scarthing Moor” is a name of somewhat terrifying sound; but, as with all
+the “moors” met with on the Great North Road, enclosure and cultivation
+have entirely changed its character, and the “moor” is just a stretch of
+fields undistinguishable from the surrounding country.  It leads
+presently to the little town of Tuxford-in-the-Clay, approached up a
+steep rise passing under the bridge of the Lincolnshire and East Coast
+Railway, and in view of Tuxford’s Great Northern Station, away on the
+right, perched on a windy and uncomfortable-looking ridge.  A red rash of
+recent brick cottages has broken out at the foot of the rise, but Tuxford
+itself, on the crest of the hill, seems unchanged since coaching days,
+except that the traffic which then enlivened it has gone.  It is a gaunt,
+lifeless place, in spite of its three railway stations, and stands where
+the roads cross on the height, and the church, the “Newcastle Arms,”
+another inn which arrogates the title of “The Hotel,” and the private
+houses and shops of the decayed town face a wide open street, and all
+shiver in company.  But Tuxford has seen gorgeous sights in its time.
+Witness the gay and lengthy cavalcade that “lay” here in the July of
+1503, when the Princess Margaret was on her way to her marriage with the
+king of Scotland.  The princess stayed at the “Crown,” demolished in 1587
+by one of the storms which hill-top Tuxford knows so well, and leaving us
+the poorer by one ancient hostelry.  Not that it would have survived to
+this day had there been no storm, for the town itself was destroyed by
+fire at a much later date, in 1702.
+
+The “Newcastle Arms” is one of those old houses built for the reception
+of many and wealthy travellers in the Augustan age of the road, and is by
+consequence many sizes too large for present needs, so that a portion of
+the house is set apart for offices quite unconnected with hotel business.
+Even the roomy old church away on the other side of the broad road seems
+on too large a scale for Tuxford, as it is, and the stone effigies of the
+Longvilliers and the mouldy hatchments of later families hanging on the
+walls of its bare chapels tell a tale of vanished greatness.  There is a
+curious and clumsy carving in this church, representing the martyrdom of
+St. Lawrence.  The Saint is shown on his gridiron (which resembles
+nothing so much as a ladder) and wears a pleased expression, as though he
+rather liked the process of being grilled, while one tormentor is turning
+him and another blowing up the fire with a pair of bellows.
+
+After the church, the old red-brick grammar-school, founded by “Carolo
+Read” in 1669, is the most interesting building in Tuxford.  “What God
+hath built, let no man destroy,” says the inscription over the entrance,
+placed there, no doubt, by the donor with a vivid recollection of the
+destruction wrought in the Civil War of some twenty years before.
+
+The road leaves Tuxford steeply downhill and facing another hill.
+Descending this, the villages of East and West Markham are just visible,
+right and left; West Markham with a hideous church like a Greek temple,
+its green copper dome conspicuous for a long distance.  At the foot of
+Cleveland Hill, as it is called, is, or was, Markham Moor, for it was
+enclosed in 1810, with the great “Markham Moor Inn,” now looking very
+forlorn and lonely, standing at the fall of the roads, where the turnpike
+gate used to be, and where the Worksop road goes off to the left, and a
+battered pillar of grey stone with a now illegible inscription stands.
+This may or may not be the “Rebel Stone,” spoken of in old county
+histories as standing by the wayside, bearing the inscription, “Here
+lieth the Body of a Rebel, 1746.”
+
+Beyond this, again, is Gamston, a still decaying village, its red-brick
+houses ruined or empty, the wayside forge closed and the handsome old
+church on a hillock but sparsely attended; the whole a picture of the
+failure and neglect which descended upon the roadside villages fifty
+years ago.  Many have found other vocations, but Gamston is not of them.
+
+For some one hundred and fifty years the Great North Road has gone
+through Tuxford to East Retford and Barnby Moor; but this is not the
+original road.  That has to be sought, half-deserted, away to the left.
+There is much romance on that old way, which is one of several derelict
+branching roads just here.  The time seems to be approaching when this
+original road will be restored, to effect a relief to the heavy traffic
+through Retford.
+
+We may branch off for the exploration of the old road either at Markham
+Moor or at Gamston.  Either turning will bring us in two and a half miles
+to Jockey House, now a farmhouse, but once an inn at what were
+cross-roads.  Two of these roads are grass tracks, but the old Great
+North Road on to Rushy Inn and Barnby Moor is quite good, although very
+little used.
+
+A substantial stone pillar stands at the corner of the cross-roads
+opposite the Jockey House, inscribed:—
+
+                                     From
+                                  London 142
+                                    Miles
+                                  and a half
+                                  Coach Road
+                                Work/op Mannor
+                                    Hou/e
+                                7 Miles 3 qrs
+                                    176 —
+                                   The Keys
+                                in the Jockey
+                                    House.
+
+The “keys in the Jockey House” means that here was a turnpike-gate with
+no turnpike keeper.  The taking of toll seems to have been conducted from
+the inn.
+
+In the churchyard of Elkisley, a mile or so distant, there is a tombstone
+which refers to a tragedy in the Jockey House two hundred years ago.  It
+reads:—
+
+                         “Here lieth the body of
+                               JOHN BARAGH,
+                      gentleman, who was murdered by
+                  Midford Hendry, officer of the Guards,
+                      on the 24th day of June, 1721.
+                              Age 29 years.”
+
+Hendry, it seems, was in command of a company of Guards travelling south
+on the Great North Road.  They had halted for refreshment at Jockey
+House, and Hendry got into a violent political discussion in the inn with
+Baragh, who was sitting there, a complete stranger to him.  In the course
+of their high words, Hendry drew his sword and stabbed Baragh to the
+heart.
+
+                         [Picture: Jockey House]
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+RETFORD, on the main road, is over three miles distant from Gamston, past
+the more cheerful-looking little hamlet of Eaton, and the outlying
+settlement by the “White House Inn,” at the beginning of the long
+approach to the town.
+
+Retford is a town of varied industries, situated on either bank of the
+river Idle, and by it divided into East and West Retford.  Engineering
+works, brick and tile making, and agricultural pursuits combine to render
+it prosperous, if not progressive, for when Retford built its elaborate
+Town Hall in 1867 it probably exhausted itself with the effort.  In this
+Square, on a plinth, stands the “Bread Stone,” or “Broad Stone,” a
+seventeenth century Plague Stone with a hollow at that time filled with
+vinegar and water for the immersion of coins passing in the market
+against infection.  The town centres in its Market Square, in which the
+old Town Hall stood.  When that building was pulled down a great amount
+of additional room was obtained at the cost of a certain picturesqueness,
+to which quality the town can now scarcely lay claim.  The “White Hart,”
+standing at this corner of the Market Square, is the only relic of old
+coaching days.  Its modernised frontage does not give the house credit
+for the respectable age which it really owns, and it is only when we
+explore the stableyard, a picturesque and narrow passage, extending from
+the Market Square to Bridgegate, that we see the old-time importance of
+the “White Hart.”  It is perhaps unique in one respect.  Nowadays, the
+old innkeepers are, of course, all dead.  In some instances their
+families carried on the business for a while, but soon afterwards all
+these old coaching-houses passed into other hands.  Even the Percival
+family, innkeepers and coach-masters for some generations at Wansford and
+at Greetham, no longer have the “Haycock” or the “Greetham Inn,” but the
+“White Hart” is still in the Dennett family, and has been since 1818,
+when William Dennett took it over.  He reigned here until 1848, and was
+succeeded by his son, Joseph Dennett, who, dying in 1890, was in his turn
+followed by Arthur Dennett, the present landlord.  An old
+coaching-house—the coaching-house of Retford—it occupied a particularly
+favourable position on the main and cross-country coach-routes: those of
+Worksop and Chesterfield on the one hand, and Gainsborough, Market Rasen,
+and Boston on the other.  Besides being in receipt of the local coaching
+business between Stamford and Doncaster, Joseph Dennett horsed a stage of
+the Doncaster and Stamford Amity Coach and the Stamford and Retford
+Auxiliary Mail, among others.
+
+                  [Picture: An Old Postboy: John Blagg]
+
+Although overshadowed by the neighbouring “Bell” on Barnby Moor, kept by
+the mighty George Clark, this house did a good posting business.  For one
+thing, the story of the “White Hart” as a posting-house does not go back
+so far as that of the “Bell,” for when Clark came to Barnby Moor he found
+a fine business already developed, but the rise of the “White Hart” into
+prominence dates only from the coming of the Dennetts.  Twelve
+post-horses and three boys formed its ordinary posting establishment, and
+among them the name of John Blagg is prominent.  He left the “Bell” at an
+early period and entered the service of the “White Hart” in 1834,
+remaining for forty-five years, and dying, at the age of seventy-five, in
+October 1880.  The old posting-books of the house still show one of his
+feats of endurance, the riding post from Retford to York and back in one
+day, a distance of a hundred and ten miles.  When posting became a thing
+of the past, John Blagg was still in request, and his well-remembered
+figure, clad in the traditional postboy costume of white breeches, blue
+jacket, and white beaver hat, was seen almost to the last at weddings and
+other celebrations when riding postillion was considered indispensable.
+Here he is, portrayed from the life, a characteristic figure of a
+vanished era.
+
+There are still some relics of that time at the “White Hart”: the old
+locker belonging to the Boston coach, in which the guard used to secure
+the valuables intrusted to him; and in the sunny old booking-office
+looking out upon the Market Square there are even now some old
+posting-saddles and postboys’ whips.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+LEAVING Retford by Bridgegate, the road rises at once to the long
+five-miles’ stretch of Barnby Moor, home of howling winds and whirling
+snow-wreaths in winter, and equally unprotected from the fierce glare of
+the midsummer sun.  At the further end of this trying place, just past a
+huddled group of cottages at the bend of the road, stands the famous old
+“Blue Bell” inn.  But no one was ever heard to talk of this old coaching
+hostelry as the “Blue Bell.”  The “Bell,” Barnby Moor, was the title by
+which it was always known.
+
+For the beginning of the well-earned fame of the “Bell” we must go back a
+long way.  Not, indeed, to ancient times, for there was never a mediæval
+hostel here, but to very old coaching days.  Already, in 1776, when the
+Rev. Thomas Twining was ambling about the country on “Poppet,” making
+picturesque notes, it was a “gentlemanlike, comfortable house,” and
+Sterne knew it well.  “I am worn out,” says he in one of his letters,
+“but press on to Barnby Moor to-night.”  Even the “worn-out” would make
+an effort, you see, to reach this hospitable roof-tree.
+
+But a greater fame was earned by the “Bell” in its later days, when it
+was kept by George Clark, at once innkeeper, sportsman, and breeder of
+racehorses.  He was famed for his anecdotal and conversational powers,
+and when free from gout was reputed “a tough customer over the mahogany,”
+in which testimony we may read, in the manner of that time, a crowning
+virtue.  Something—nay, a great deal—more than the “red-nosed innkeepers”
+of whom Sir Walter Scott speaks, he was also a landed proprietor, and
+supplied his extensive establishment from his own farm.  Peculiarly the
+man for this road, and especially for this portion of the road, his
+personality made the “Bell” inn—the word “hotel” was in those days an
+abomination and an offence—the especial resort of the sporting
+fraternity, and racing men generally contrived to make his house their
+halting-place.
+
+Clark reigned at the “Bell” for forty years, from 1800, dying of gout in
+1842, shortly after he had sold the house to a Mr. Inett.  His was that
+famous mare, Lollypop, who gave birth to the yet more famous Sweetmeat.
+But Clark did not live to learn the quality of that foal, and Sweetmeat
+was sold at the dispersal of his stable for ten guineas.  Three years
+later, when he had won the Somersetshire Stakes at Bath, Lord George
+Bentinck in vain offered four thousand guineas for him, and later in that
+year, 1845, he won the Doncaster Cup.
+
+Clark was chiefly instrumental in bringing to justice two incendiaries,
+disciples of “Captain Swing,” who had fired a hayrick not far from the
+“Bell.”  At that period—the early “thirties”—when the Reform agitation
+was embittering the relations between the squires and the peasantry,
+rick-burnings were prevalent all over the country.  They went by the name
+of the “Swing Riots,” from the circumstance of the threatening letters
+and notices received being signed in the name of that entirely
+pseudonymous or mythical person.  One night Clark was roused from his bed
+with the information that the rioters were at work close at hand.
+Hastily rising and dressing by the glare of his neighbour’s burning
+ricks, he told off fifty from his numerous staff of postboys and stable
+helpers to mount and to thoroughly explore the country within a circuit
+of ten miles, offering a reward of £5 to the one who would discover the
+miscreants, together with five shillings a head to all who took part in
+the chase.  It was a successful foray; for, before morning dawned, two
+shivering “rioters” were brought to him.  They had been found hiding in a
+ditch.  Matches and other incriminating things were found on them, and,
+being committed to York Castle, they eventually were awarded fourteen
+years’ transportation.
+
+The old “Bell” is still standing.  A hundred and twenty horses for the
+road were kept here in those old times, but to-day, instead of horses, we
+have motor-cars.
+
+Soon after railways had driven the coaches off the road, the “Bell”
+ceased to be an inn.  Its circumstances were peculiar.  Standing as it
+did, and still does, away from any town or village, its only trade was
+with coaching or posting travellers, and when they disappeared altogether
+there was nothing for it but to close down.  And so for sixty years and
+more the “Bell” became a private residence, and it would have remained so
+had not a road-enthusiast taken it and re-opened the old house in 1906 as
+a hotel for touring motorists.  The enthusiast took other hotels on this
+road.  Took so many indeed that his resources as a private person were
+overstrained, and he went bankrupt.  But the “Bell,” in this, its second
+time, flourishes exceedingly.
+
+                        [Picture: Scrooby Church]
+
+From hence the bleak hamlets of Torworth and Ranskill lead to Scrooby,
+set amidst the heathy vale of the winding Idle, which sends its silver
+threads in aimless fashion amidst the meadows.  Here the road leaves
+Nottinghamshire and enters Yorkshire.  Beside the road at the little rise
+called Scrooby Top, stands a farmhouse, once the old Scrooby Inn, kept by
+Thomas Fisher as a kind of half-way house between Bawtry and Barnby Moor,
+and calculated to intercept the posting business of the “Bell” and of the
+Bawtry inns.  Competition was keen-edged on the roads in those times.
+
+                      [Picture: Scrooby Manor House]
+
+There seems to have once been a turnpike gate at Scrooby, for a murder
+was committed there in 1779, when John Spencer, a shepherd, calling up
+William Geadon, the turnpike man, one July night under the pretence of
+having some cattle to go through, knocked him down and killed him with a
+hedge-stake and then went upstairs and murdered the turnpike man’s
+mother.  Spencer was hanged at Nottingham, and gibbeted on the scene of
+his crime.  The stump of the gibbet was still visible in 1833.
+
+This is the place whence came the chief among the “Pilgrim Fathers” who
+at last, in 1620, succeeded in leaving England in the _Mayflower_, for
+America.  Scrooby is the place of origin of that Separatist Church which
+refused allegiance to the Church of England.  Here lived William
+Brewster, son of the bailiff of Scrooby Manor, once a Palace of the
+Archbishops of York.  In those times the Great North Road wandered, as a
+lane, down through Scrooby village, and all traffic went this way.
+William Brewster the elder, bailiff and postmaster, was a government
+servant who kept relays of horses primarily for the use of State
+messengers.  His salary was “twenty pence a day”; the equivalent of about
+£300 per annum of our money.  Although very definite regulations were
+laid down by the Board of Posts for the conduct of this service, they
+were not strictly observed, and a postmaster often traded for himself as
+well, keeping horses for hire and being an innkeeper as well.
+
+At any rate, the Brewsters were considerable people; and William the
+elder could afford to send his son to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and later
+had sufficient influence to secure him service with one of Queen
+Elizabeth’s Secretaries of State in Holland.  But the Secretary fell into
+disgrace, and young William’s diplomatic career ended at an early age.
+
+He returned home to Scrooby, where he found employment with his father,
+and eventually succeeded him, in 1594, holding the position of postmaster
+for seventeen years.
+
+Let us see, from one surviving record, what kind of business was his, and
+how prosperous he must have been apart from his official emoluments.  One
+of his guests, as virtually an innkeeper, was Sir Timothy Hutton, in
+1605.  Sir Timothy paid him, for guide and conveyance to Tuxford, 10s.,
+and for candle, supper and breakfast 7s. 6d.  On his return journey he
+paid 8s. for horses to Doncaster, and a threepenny tip to the ostler.
+
+Meanwhile, Brewster, nourished in that old nest of Archbishops, had
+imbibed distinctly anti-episcopal ideas, probably in Holland.  His
+activities in founding the Separatist Church led to his resignation of
+the postmaster’s office in 1607.  In that old Manor House where he lived
+assembled others of his ways of thought: the Revd. Mr. Clifton, rector of
+Babworth, near Retford, William Bradford of Austerfield, John Smyth, and
+other shining lights and painful and austere persons.  William Bradford
+records how the congregation “met ordinarily at William Brewster’s house
+on the Lord’s Day; and with great love he entertained them when they
+came, making provision for them, to his great charge.”
+
+They would not attend services at the parish church; an offence then
+punishable by fine and imprisonment, and thus, persecuted, there was no
+ultimate course but to leave the country: itself not for some time
+permitted.  “They were,” wrote William Bradford, “hunted and persecuted
+on every side.  Some were taken and clapt up in prison, others had their
+houses beset and watched, night and day, and hardly escaped their hands;
+and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations and
+the means of their livelihood.”
+
+The Manor Farm, where these early developments of the Puritan movement
+took place, and where the Brewsters lived, remains in part, and bears an
+explanatory bronze tablet placed there by the Pilgrim Society of
+Plymouth, Massachusetts.  And there, too, near the road, stands Scrooby
+church, rather dilapidated, with its stone spire, much the same as ever.
+
+               [Picture: The Stables, Scrooby Manor House]
+
+Yorkshire, upon which we have now entered, is the largest shire or county
+in England.  In one way it seems almost incredibly large, for it has more
+acres than there are letters (not words) in the Bible.  There are
+3,882,851 acres in Yorkshire, and 3,566,482 letters in the Bible.
+Yorkshire does not reveal its full beauty to the traveller along this
+road.  Its abbeys and waterfalls, its river-gorges and romantic valleys,
+belong rather to the by-ways.  Picturesqueness and romance spelt
+discomfort, and the uneventful road was the one the travellers of old
+preferred.  Thus it is that those who pursue this route to the North, and
+know nothing else of Yorkshire, might deny this huge county, more than
+twice the size of Lincolnshire, the next largest, that variety and beauty
+which, in fact, we know it to possess.  For eighty miles the Great North
+Road goes through Yorkshire with scarce a hill worthy the name, although
+towards the north the Hambleton Hills, away to the east, give the views
+from the road a sullen grandeur.
+
+But if the highway and the scenery bordering it are characterless, this
+is a region of strongly marked character, so far as its inhabitants are
+concerned.  Many wits have been to work on the Yorkshireman’s
+peculiarities.  While they all agree to disregard his hospitality and his
+frank heartiness, they unite to satirise his shrewdness, and his clannish
+ways.  The old Yorkshire toast is famous:—
+
+    “Here’s tiv us, all on us, me an’ all.
+    May we niver want nowt, noan on us,
+    Nor me nawther.”
+
+And this other:—
+
+    “Our Native County: t’biggest,
+    t’bonniest, and t’best.”
+
+The character of John Browdie is a very accurate exemplar of the
+Yorkshire yeoman, and you could not wish to meet a better fellow, but you
+would rather not have any dealings with the Yorkshireman of popular
+imagination, whose native wit goes beyond shrewdness and does not halt on
+the hither side of sharp practice.  The Yorkshireman’s armorial bearings
+are wickedly said to be a flea, a fly, and a flitch of bacon; because a
+flea will suck any one’s blood, like a Yorkshireman; a fly will drink out
+of any one’s cup, and so will a Yorkshireman; and a flitch of bacon is no
+good until it is hung, and no more is a Yorkshireman!  No native of the
+county can be expected to subscribe to this, but no one ever heard of a
+Yorkshireman objecting to be called a “tyke.”
+
+A “Yorkshire tyke” is a familiar phrase.  By it we understand a native of
+this immense shire to be named.  No one knows whence this nickname arose,
+or whether it is complimentary or the reverse.  To be sure, we call a dog
+a “tyke,” and to describe any one as a dog is not complimentary, unless
+qualifications are made.  Thus, the man who is insulted by being called a
+dog rather takes it as a compliment to be dubbed a “sad dog” or a “sly
+dog,” and, like Bob Acres, lets you know, with a twinkle of the eye, that
+on occasion he can be a “devil of a fellow.”
+
+By common consent, whatever its origin may have been, “tyke,” applied to
+a Yorkshireman, is taken in the complimentary sense.  Indeed, the
+Yorkshireman’s good conceit of himself does not allow him to think that
+any other sense could possibly be intended.  He generally prides himself,
+like Major Bagstock, on being “sly, devilish sly.”  That he is so, too,
+those who have tried to overreach him, either in his native wilds or
+elsewhere, have generally discovered.  “He’s a deep ’un,” says a
+character in one of Charles Reade’s novels, “but we are Yorkshire too, as
+the saying is.”  When tyke meets tyke, then, if ever, comes the tug of
+war.  “That’s Yorkshire,” is a saying which implies much, as in the story
+of the ostler from the county who had long been in service at a London
+inn.  “How is it,” asked a guest, “that such a clever fellow as you, and
+a Yorkshireman, remains so long without becoming master of the house?”
+“Measter’s Yorkshire too,” answered the servant.
+
+It is a sporting—more especially a horsey—county.  “Shake a bridle over a
+Yorkshireman’s grave, and he will rise and steal a horse,” is a proverb
+which bears a sort of testimony to the fact.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+YORKSHIRE and Yorkshiremen, their virtues and vices, bring us to Bawtry,
+where the High Sheriff and those in authority used to welcome kingly and
+queenly visitors to Yorkshire, or escort them over the border, on
+leaving; performing the latter office with the better heart, there can be
+little doubt, for royal progresses often left a trail of blood and ruin
+behind them in those “good” old times.  Happy Bawtry! for little or no
+history attaches to the little town, and it lives in the memory only as
+the home of that saddler who, although famous as a proverb, has come down
+to us a nameless martyr to the Temperance Cause.
+
+“The saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving his ale,” runs the
+Yorkshire saying; one eminently characteristic of this county of stingo
+and plurality of acres.  The history of this particular saddler, or the
+crime for which he was condemned, are unknown either here or at York, but
+his end is a terrible warning to all Blue Ribbonites.  It was in this
+wise that the artificer in pigskin lost his life.  Led forth to the fatal
+tree, the procession halted on the way to present the condemned with the
+customary parting bowl of ale, an institution on the way to the gallows
+both in York and London.  But the saddler would take none of their
+farewell courtesies, and refused the drink; whereupon the enraged mob
+strung him up, double quick.  A few minutes later a reprieve arrived, and
+they cut him down; but he was already dead, a melancholy warning to all
+future generations of non-convivial souls.
+
+Coaching days made Bawtry a busy townlet, for although the coaches and
+the postmasters generally made a long stage of fourteen miles between
+Doncaster and Barnby Moor, or else a nine and a half mile stage between
+Doncaster and Scrooby Top, the by-roads gave a good proportion of
+business to the “Angel” and the “Crown.”  The “Crown” is still a
+prominent feature of Bawtry’s now empty street, a street whose width is a
+revelation of the space once considered necessary and now altogether
+superfluous; just as the long pillared range of stableyards beyond the
+old coach archway of the inn itself has now become.
+
+Bawtry to-day is a great emptiness.  Four-square red-brick houses of a
+certain modishness, being indeed built on the model of town houses, look
+across the void roadway, with a kind of patronising air, upon the peaked,
+timbered, or lath-and-plaster gabled cottages that border the opposite
+side of the street.  Much older they are, those old cottages, and more
+akin to the country.  They were built long centuries before the coaching
+age came, bringing a greater prosperity and consequent expansion to
+Bawtry, and for a time they were quite put out of countenance by the
+new-fangled brick houses, with their classic porticoes and brass knockers
+and impudent red faces.  But a period of eighty or ninety years, at the
+most, saw the beginning and the end of this expansion, and this once
+fashionable air has altered to an aspect of old-world dignity.  Both the
+gabled cottages and these Georgian houses would feel greatly degraded if
+confronted with examples of the way in which the small country builder
+runs up his tasteless structures nowadays, but happily Bawtry has nothing
+of this type to show, and the white stuccoed elevation of the “Crown”
+alone hints at a later phase in building fashion, typifying the dawn of
+the nineteenth century and the course of taste in its earlier years.
+This white-painted frontage marks the close of Bawtry’s busy days.  Soon
+afterwards the place ceased to live a pulsing everyday life of business
+and activity, and began to merely exist.  There are shops here—old
+bow-windowed, many-paned shops—which have long seen their best days go
+by.  They came into existence under the influence of the beatific Law of
+Demand and Supply, when all the inns were full of travellers who wanted
+the thousand and one necessities of civilisation.  They did a brave trade
+in those times, and continued it until the railway snuffed it out in
+1842.  Since then no one has come to buy, and their stock must contain
+many curiosities.  Probably the stationer has still some of that goffered
+and perfumed pink notepaper on which the young ladies of sensibility
+wrote their love-letters in the long-ago, together with a goodly supply
+of the wafers with which they were sealed; and, doubtless, those who seek
+could find flint and steel and tinder-boxes elsewhere.  Bawtry, in fine,
+is a monument to the Has Been.
+
+                      [Picture: The “Crown,” Bawtry]
+
+Austerfield, where William Bradford was born in 1580, is a grim and
+unlovely village to the left of Bawtry.  Here yet stands his birthplace,
+in its time a manor-house, but now occupied as two cottage-dwellings, it
+is not a romantic-looking relic to be the place of origin of one who
+became the first Governor of the Pilgrim colony in New England.
+
+There was once a pond beside the road near Bawtry (where is it now,
+alas!) to which a history belonged, for into it used to drive the
+villainous postboys of lang syne, who were in the pay of the highwaymen.
+They would, as though by accident, whip suddenly into it, and when the
+occupants of the chaise let down the windows and looked out, to see what
+was the matter, they were confronted with the grinning muzzle of a
+pistol, and the dread alternative demand for their money or their lives.
+
+Past this dread spot, and over the rise and dip in the road on leaving
+the town, the galloping stage is reached, a dead level by the palings of
+Rossington Park and on to Rossington Bridge, where the tollgate was, and
+now is not.  The inn too, has, like many another, taken down its sign,
+and retired into private occupation.  Off to the left is Rossington
+village, and in the churchyard, the grave, for those who like to turn
+aside to see it, of Charles Bosvile, “King of the Gipsies.”  Here we are
+four miles and a half from Doncaster, or, as a Yorkshireman would say,
+four miles “and a way-bit.”
+
+Ask a Yorkshireman how far it is to any place along the road, and he will
+most likely answer you, so many miles “and a way-bit.”  This is probably
+his pronunciation of “wee bit.”  It is often said that the “way-bit” is
+generally as long as the rest put together.  This expression compares
+with the Scottish so many miles “and a bittock.”
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+FROM Rossington Bridge, a long pale rise, bordered by coppices of hazels
+and silver birches, leads past Cantley to Tophall, where one of the old
+road wagons was struck by lightning on the 22nd of May 1800.  One of the
+seven horses drawing the wagon was killed, and four others were stunned;
+while the great lumbering conveyance and its load of woollen cloths,
+muslins, cottons, rabbit-down and a piano were almost entirely burnt.
+The disaster was a long-remembered event for miles round, and one of the
+Doncaster inns was renamed from it, the “Burning Waggon.”  This house has
+long since been renamed the “Ship.”
+
+Passing Tophall, and by a bridge over the railway cutting, Doncaster is
+seen, with its great church-tower, smoking chimney-stalks, and puffing
+locomotives, map-like, down below, three miles away.  Two miles further,
+past Hawbush, or Lousybush, Green, on which unaristocratically named spot
+old-time tramps used to congregate, Doncaster racecourse is reached, on
+the old Town Moor.
+
+Doncaster, all England over, stands for racing and the St. Leger, just as
+much as Epsom for the Derby, and racing has been in progress here
+certainly ever since 1600, and perhaps even before.  The renowned St.
+Leger, which still draws its hundreds of thousands every September, was
+established in 1778 and named by the Marquis of Rockingham after
+Lieut.-Colonel Ashby St. Leger.  All Yorkshire, and a large proportion of
+other shires, flocks to witness this classic race, greatly to the benefit
+of the town, which owns the racecourse and derives the handsome income of
+some £30,000 per annum from it.  Doncaster, indeed, does exceedingly well
+out of racing, and the Town Council can well afford the £380 annually
+expended in stakes.  But the St. Leger week is a terrible time for quiet
+folks, for all the brazen-throated blackguards of the Three Kingdoms are
+then let loose upon the town, and not even this sum of £30,000 in relief
+of the rates quite repays them for the infliction.
+
+Robert Ridsdale, originally “Boots” at a Doncaster inn, rose to be owner
+of Merton Hall, about 1830.  He was a bookmaker.  Betting is a pursuit in
+which only the bookmakers secure the fortunes.
+
+Dickens, who was here during the St. Leger week in 1857, in company with
+Wilkie Collins, and stayed at the still extant “Angel,” saw this side of
+horse-racing fully displayed.  Looking down into the High Street from
+their window, the friends saw “a gathering of blackguards from all parts
+of the racing earth.  Every bad face that had ever caught wickedness from
+an innocent horse had its representation in the streets,” and the next
+day after the great race every chemist’s shop in the town was full of
+penitent bacchanalians of the night before, roaring to the busy
+dispensers to “Give us soom sal-volatile or soom damned thing o’ that
+soort, in wather—my head’s bad!”  Night was made hideous for all who
+sojourned at the “Angel” by the “groaning phantom” that lay in the
+doorway of one of the bedrooms and howled until the morning, like a lost
+soul; explanation by the landlord in the morning eliciting the fact that
+the fearsome sounds were caused by a gentleman who had lost £1,500 or
+£2,000 by backing a “wrong ’un,” and had accordingly drank himself into a
+_delirium tremens_.
+
+Sir William Maxwell of Menreith, who won the St. Leger with Filho da
+Puta, in 1815, celebrated his success by thrusting his walking-stick
+through all the pier-glasses at the “Reindeer”; expressing his regret
+that there were no more to smash, as an adequate relief to his feelings.
+
+Dean Pigou, once vicar of Doncaster, bears later testimony to the
+character of a large proportion of the race-crowds, and tells amusingly
+how the contingents of pickpockets who flock here on these occasions
+disguise themselves as clergymen, a fact well known to the police, and
+resulting in the arrest of a genuine cleric on one occasion.  “You old
+rascal!” said the constable; “we’ve been looking for you for a long
+time.”
+
+Doncaster, out of the season, is a singularly quiet and inoffensive town,
+and looks as innocent as its native butterscotch.  Quiet, because the
+locomotive and carriage-works of the Great Northern Railway are a little
+way outside; inoffensive, because it is unpretending.  At the same time
+it is just as singularly devoid of interest.  Almost its oldest houses
+are those on Hall Cross Hill, as the traveller passes the elm-avenue by
+the racecourse and enters the town from the direction of London; and they
+are scarce older than the days of the Prince Regent.  Very like the older
+part of Brighton, this southern end of Doncaster is the best the town has
+to show.
+
+Hall Cross—originally called “Hob Cross”—was destroyed in the
+seventeenth-century troubles.  It was a late Norman structure, and is
+copied in the existing Cross, set up by the Corporation, as an
+inscription informs the passer-by, in 1793.  A weird structure it is,
+too, consisting of a stone pillar of five engaged shafts, reflecting
+credit on neither the original designer nor the restorers.  But there it
+stands, elevated above the modern road, as evidence of a momentary
+aberration in favour of restoring antiquity of which the Corporation were
+guilty, a century or so ago.  Doncastrians have purged themselves so
+thoroughly of that weakness in later years that they have left no other
+vestige of old times in their streets.  The finest example of an old inn
+belonging to the town was destroyed in the pulling down of the “Old
+Angel” in 1846, in order to clear a site for the Guildhall.  Others are
+left, but, if old-fashioned, they are scarcely picturesque: the “Angel,”
+“Ram,” “Elephant,” “Salutation,” and “Old George.”
+
+              [Picture: Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse]
+
+In old newspaper files we find Richard Wood, of the “Reindeer” and “Ram”
+inns, High Street, advertising that his coaches were the best—“the horses
+keep good time—_no_ racing”; from which we conclude that there _had_ been
+some.  It was Richard Wood, then the foremost coach-proprietor in
+Doncaster, who first gave employment to that celebrated painter of horses
+and coaches, John Frederick Herring, who, although a Londoner born, lived
+long and worked much at Doncaster.  It was in 1814, when in his
+nineteenth year, that he first came to the town, the love of horses
+bringing him all the way.  Seeing the “Royal Union” starting at eight
+o’clock in the morning with “Doncaster” displayed in large letters on its
+panels, on the inspiration of the moment he took a seat, and arrived in
+time to witness the horse “William” win the St. Leger.
+
+There is a tale of his observing a man clumsily trying to paint a picture
+of the Duke of Wellington, seated on his charger, for the panel of a
+coach to be called after that hero of a hundred fights.  He had, somehow,
+managed to worry through the figure of the Duke, and to secure a
+recognisable likeness of him—because, for this purpose, all that was
+necessary was the representation of an ascetic face and a large,
+beak-like nose—but he boggled at the horse.  Herring offered to paint in
+the horse for him, and did it so well that he earned the thanks of the
+proprietor, who happened to appear on the scene and commissioned him to
+paint the insignia of the “Royal Forester,” Doncaster and Nottingham
+coach; a white lion on one door and a reindeer on the other.  These he
+performed with equal credit, and taking a seat beside the proprietor in
+question, who, with others, mounted for a ride to “prove” the springs and
+christen the new coach, he at once offered himself as coachman.  Mr.
+Wood, for it was he, was naturally surprised at the idea of a painter
+driving a coach, but consented to give him a trial the next day on the
+“Highflyer,” and to abide by the decision of the regular driver of that
+famous drag.  The result was favourable, and Herring obtained the
+box-seat, not of the “Royal Forester,” but of the “Nelson,” Wakefield and
+Lincoln coach.  He was, after two years, transferred to the Doncaster and
+Halifax road, and thence promoted to the “Highflyer,” painting in his
+leisure hours many of the signs of Doncaster’s old inns.  It was when on
+this road that he attracted the attention of a local gentleman, who
+obtained him a commission for a picture which laid the foundation of his
+success.
+
+Nearly all the local signs that Herring painted have disappeared.  Some
+were taken down when he became famous, and added to private collections
+of pictures; while others were renewed from the effects of time and
+weather by being painted over by journeyman painters.  Some landlords,
+however, knew the value of these signs well enough.  There was, for
+instance, mine host of the “Doncaster Arms,” who, having come from
+cow-keeping to the inn-keeping business, determined to change the name of
+the house to the “Brown Cow.”  He induced Herring to paint the new sign,
+which immediately attracted attention.  According to one story, a
+gentleman posting north chanced to see it and stopped the postboy while
+he endeavoured to drive a bargain for the purchase.  He offered twice as
+much as mine host had originally paid; ten times as much, but without
+avail.  “Not for twenty times,” said that licensed victualler; and the
+connoisseur went without it.
+
+The other version makes the traveller a very important man, travelling
+with four post-horses, and represents the landlord as being away, and the
+landlady as the obstinate holder.  “I’s rare and glad, measter, my
+husband’s not at home,” she said, “for p’r’aps he’d ha’ let thee hae it;
+but I wain’t; for what it’s worth to thee it’s worth to me, so gang on.”
+
+A list has been preserved of the signs painted by Herring at Doncaster,
+but they will be sought in vain to-day.  They were—
+
+The Labour in Vain        Marsh Gate.
+The Sloop                 Marsh Gate.
+The Brown Cow             French Gate.
+The Stag                  The Holmes.
+The Coach and Horses      Scot Lane.
+The White Lion            St. George Gate.
+
+The “Labour in Vain” represented the fruitless labour of attempting to
+wash a black man white.
+
+The old sign of the “Salutation,” painted by a Dutchman in 1766, was
+touched up by Herring.  Many years ago it was removed, but has now been
+replaced, and may be seen on the front of the house in Hall Cross.  It is
+much weather-worn, and represents, in dim and uncertain fashion, two
+clumsy looking old gentlemen in the costume of a hundred and forty years
+ago, rheumatically saluting one another.  The sign of the “Stag,” painted
+on plaster still remains, in a decaying condition.
+
+Herring continued as a coachman for several years, and only left the box
+in 1830, when he went to reside in London.  From that date until his
+death in 1865 he devoted himself entirely to painting.
+
+Richard Wood, Herring’s first employer, was part-proprietor of the “Lord
+Nelson” coach, among others.  Especial mention must be made of this
+particular conveyance, because if not the first, it must have been one of
+the earliest, of the coaches by which passengers were allowed to book
+through to or from London, and to break their journey where they pleased.
+To those who could not endure the long agonies of a winter’s journey
+except in small doses, this arrangement must have been a great boon.  To
+this coach belongs the story of a Frenchman, still preserved by Doncaster
+gossips.
+
+It was in the early part of the century that he wanted to travel from
+“Doncastare” to London.  Inquiring at the booking-office for the best
+coach, the clerk mentioned the “Lord Nelson.”
+
+“Damn your Lord Nelson!” says the Frenchman in a rage.  “What others are
+there?”
+
+The names of the others heaped greater offence upon him, for they were
+the “Waterloo” and the “Duke of Wellington.”  So perhaps he posted
+instead, and saved his national susceptibilities at the expense of his
+pocket.
+
+Another, and a later, coach-proprietor and innkeeper at Doncaster was
+Thomas Pye, of the “Angel.”  He lived to see railways ruin the coaching
+business, but he kept the “Angel” for years afterwards, and his family
+after him.  The Queen, on her way to Scotland in 1861, slept there one
+night, and the loyal family promptly added the title of “Royal” to the
+old house.
+
+Coaching days were doomed at Doncaster in 1859, when the Midland Railway
+was opened and diverted the traffic; and nine years later, when the Great
+Northern Railway came, the last coach was withdrawn.
+
+Few think of Doncaster as a centre of spiritual activity.  Racing seems
+to comprehend everything, and to make it, like a famous winner of the St.
+Leger a case of “Eclipse first; the rest nowhere!”  Even Doncaster
+butterscotch is more familiar than Doncaster piety, but the Church is
+particularly active here, nevertheless.  That activity only dates from
+the appointment of Dr. Vaughan as vicar, in 1859.  Before his time
+religion was very dead, so that, when the great parish church of St.
+George was burnt down in 1853, the then vicar, Dr. Sharpe, on seeing the
+flames burst out, could at first only think of his false teeth, which he
+had left in the building, and exclaimed in horror-stricken tones, “Good
+gracious! and I have left my set of teeth in the vestry.”
+
+The church was rebuilt by Sir Gilbert Scott.  It is a magnificent
+building, but too palpably Scott, and the details of the carving
+painfully mechanical.  Also, the stone was so badly selected that the
+crockets and enrichments were long ago found to be decaying, and
+“restoration” of a building not then fifty years old was found necessary.
+
+Dr. Vaughan was a bitter opponent of horse-racing, and so was not popular
+with the sporting element; and as Doncaster is, above everything, given
+over to sport, this meant that his nine years’ vicariate was a sojourn in
+a hostile camp.  His predecessors had been more complaisant.  Always
+within living memory the church bells had been rung on the St. Leger day,
+and generally at the moment the winning horse had passed the post.  Dr.
+Vaughan put an end to this and quietly inaugurated a new era, not by
+raising a dispute, but by obtaining the keys of the belfry on the first
+St. Leger day of his incumbency, and, locking the door, going for a walk
+which kept him out of the town until the evening!
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+LEAVING Doncaster and its racing and coaching memories behind, we come
+out upon the open road again by Frenchgate, past the unprepossessing
+“Volunteer” inn, in whose yard Mendoza and Humphries brought off their
+prize-fight in 1790; past Marshgate and over the dirty Don to a parting
+of the ways.  To the left goes the Ferrybridge, Wetherby, and
+Boroughbridge route to the North; to the right, that by way of Selby and
+York.  Both fall into one again at Northallerton; both claim to be the
+true Great North Road; and both were largely travelled, so that we shall
+have to pay attention to either.  In the first instance, we will go via
+York, the mail-route in later coaching days, and as flat and
+uninteresting a road, so far as the cathedral city, as it is possible to
+imagine.  Beginning with the suburban village of Bentley, with its ugly
+new cottages and handsome new church, it continues, with ruts and loose
+stones as its chief features, to Askerne, passing through lonely woods
+and past pools and lakes, with a stray grouse or so, and astonished hares
+and rabbits, as the sole witnesses of the explorer’s progress in these
+deserted ways.  Off to the right-hand, two miles or so away, goes the
+Great Northern Railway, one of the causes of this solitude, to meet the
+North Eastern at Shaftholme Junction, where, as the chairman said, many
+years ago, the Great Northern ends, ingloriously, “in a ploughed field.”
+
+Askerne, in a situation of great natural beauty, amidst limestone rocks
+and lakes, and with the advantage of possessing medicinal springs, has
+been, like most Yorkshire villages, made hideous by its houses and
+cottages, inconceivably ugly to those who have not seen what abominable
+places Yorkshire folk are capable of building and living in.  Askerne’s
+fame as what its inhabitants call a “spawing place” has not spread of
+late, but its old pump-room and its lake are the resorts of York and
+Doncaster’s trippers in summer-time, and those holiday-makers derive just
+as much health from rowing in pleasure-boats on the lake as did their
+forefathers, who, a hundred years ago, quaffed its evil-tasting
+sulphurous waters.
+
+Thus Askerne.  Between it and Selby, a distance of thirteen miles, the
+road and the country around are but parts of a flat, watery, treeless,
+featureless plain, its negative qualities tempered by the frankly mean
+and ugly villages on the way, and criss-crossed by railways, sluggish
+rivers, and unlovely canals.  So utterly without interest is the road,
+that a crude girder-bridge or a gaunt and forbidding flour-mill remain
+vividly impressed upon the mental retina for lack of any other
+outstanding objects.
+
+                        [Picture: Brayton Church]
+
+Nearing Selby, the octagonal Perpendicular lantern and spire of Brayton
+church, curiously imposed upon a Norman tower, attracts attention as much
+by the relief they give from the deadly dulness just encountered as for
+their own sake; although they are beautiful and interesting, the lantern
+having been designed to hold a cresset beacon by which the travellers of
+the Middle Ages were guided at night across the perilous waste; the spire
+serving the same office by day.  Here, too, the isolated hills of Brayton
+Burf and Hambleton Hough, three miles away, show prominently, less by
+reason of their height, which is inconsiderable, than on account of the
+surrounding levels, which give importance to the slightest rise.
+
+Brayton, which, apart from its beautiful church, is about as miserable a
+hole as it is possible to find in all Yorkshire (and that is saying a
+good deal), is a kind of outpost between Selby and these wilds, standing
+a mile and a half in advance of the town.  In that mile and a half the
+builders are busy erecting a flagrant suburb, so that the traveller
+presses on, curious to witness the prosperity of Selby itself, arguable
+from these signs.  Even without them, Selby is approached with
+expectancy, for its abbey is famous, and abbeys imply picturesque towns.
+
+From this point of view Selby is distinctly disappointing.  The glorious
+Abbey, now the parish church, is all, and more than, one expects, and the
+superlatively cobble-stoned Market-place, painful to walk in, is
+picturesque to look at; but the rest is an effect of meanness.  Mean old
+houses of no great age; mean new ones; mean and threadbare waterside
+industries; second-hand clothes-shops, coal-grit, muddy waters and
+foreshores of the slimy Ouse, shabby rope-walks, and dirty alleys: these
+are Selby.
+
+You forget all this before that beautiful Abbey, whose imposing west
+front faces the Market-place, and whose great length is revealed only by
+degrees.  Alike in size and beauty, it shows itself in a long crescendo
+to the admiring amateur of architecture, who proceeds from the combined
+loveliness of the Norman, Early English, and Perpendicular west front, to
+the entrance by the grand Transitional Norman-Early English north porch,
+thence to the solemn majesty of the purely Norman nave, ending with the
+light and graceful Decorated choir and Lady Chapel.  The upper stage of
+the tower fell in 1690, and destroyed the south transept.
+
+A very destructive fire occurred in October 1906, and opportunity was
+afterwards taken of doing a good deal of general restoration.
+
+Before leaving the town of Selby, let us look at the commonplace little
+square called Church Hill.  A spirit-level might reveal it to be an
+eminence of twelve inches or so above the common level of Selby, but to
+the evidence of eyes or feet it is in no way distinguished from its
+neighbouring streets.  Yet it must have presented the appearance of a
+hillock when the original founder of the Abbey came here in 1068,
+voyaging up the Ouse and landing at this first likely place on its then
+lovely banks.  This founder was a certain Benedict, a monk of Auxerre,
+who, having one of those convenient dreams which came to the pious ones
+of that time when they wanted to steal something, made off with the Holy
+Finger of St. Germanus; rather appropriate spoil, by the way, for the
+light-fingered Benedict.  Arriving in England, he met an Englishman who
+gave him a golden reliquary.  With this, he took ship from Lyme Regis and
+sailed to the Humber and the Ouse; landing, as we have seen, here, and
+planting a cross on the river bank, where he erected a hut for himself
+under an oak-tree.  A few days later, Hugh, the Norman sheriff of
+Yorkshire, came up the Ouse, by chance, and not, as might be supposed, to
+arrest Benedict on a charge of petty larceny.  He was impressed by the
+devoutness of the holy man, and sent workmen to build the original wooden
+place of worship at Selby, on the spot now known as Church Hill, not a
+stone’s throw from the existing Abbey.
+
+                      [Picture: Market Place, Selby]
+
+Centuries passed.  The first building was swept away, and even the
+cemetery which afterwards occupied the site was forgotten and built over,
+becoming a square of houses, among which was the “Crown” inn.  From 1798
+until 1876, when it was rebuilt, the old “Crown” kept an odd secret.  To
+understand this, we must go back to 1798, when the neighbourhood of Selby
+acquired an ill name for highway robberies.  Among other outrages, a
+mailbag was stolen from the York postboy, on the evening of February 22
+in that year.  The Postmaster of York reported the affair to the
+Postmaster-General in the following terms:—
+
+    “SIR,
+
+    “I am sorry to acquaint you that the postboy coming from Selby to
+    this city was robbed of his mail, between six and seven o’clock this
+    evening.  About three miles this side Selby he was accosted by a man
+    on foot with a gun in his hand, who asked him if he was the postboy,
+    and at the same time seizing hold of the bridle.  Without waiting for
+    any answer, he told the boy he must immediately unstrap the mail and
+    give it to him, pointing the muzzle of the gun at him whilst he did
+    it.  When he had given up the mail, the boy begged he would not hurt
+    him, to which the man replied, “He need not be afraid,” and at the
+    same time pulled the bridle from the horse’s head.  The horse
+    immediately galloped off with the boy, who had never dismounted.  He
+    was a stout man, dressed in a dark jacket, and had the appearance of
+    a heckler.  The boy was too much frightened to make any other remark
+    upon his person, and says he was totally unknown to him.
+
+    “The mail contained bags for Howden and London, Howden and York, and
+    Selby and York.  I have informed the surveyors of the robbery, and
+    have forwarded handbills this night, to be distributed in the
+    country, and will take care to insert it in the first paper published
+    here.  Waiting your further instructions,—I remain, with respect,
+    Sir,
+
+                                “Your Obliged and Obedient Humble Servant,
+                                                         “THOS. OLDFIELD.”
+
+A reward of two hundred pounds was offered for the discovery of the
+highwayman, but without effect, and the matter was forgotten in the dusty
+archives of the G.P.O., until it was brought to notice again by the
+singular discovery of one of the stolen bags in the roof of the “Crown”
+when being demolished in 1876.  Stuffed in between the rafters and the
+tiles, the workmen came upon a worn and rotten coat, a “sou’wester” hat,
+and a mail-bag marked “Selby.”  Thus, nearly eighty years after the
+affair, and when every one concerned in it must long since have been no
+more, this incriminating evidence came to light.  The Postmaster-General
+of that time claimed the bag, and it was, after some dispute about the
+ownership, handed over to him, and is now in the Post Office Museum.
+
+A number of skeletons were discovered in digging foundations for the new
+inn, and it was darkly conjectured that the old house had had its
+gruesome secrets, dating from the times when inns were not infrequently
+the nests of murderers; until local antiquaries pointing out that the
+name of the place was Church Hill, and that this was an ancient
+grave-yard, the excitement ceased.  This view was borne out by the fact
+that in many cases the bodies had been enclosed in rude coffins, made of
+hollowed tree-trunks; and it was rightly said that murderers would not
+have buried their victims with so much consideration.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+TO leave Selby for York, one must needs cross the Ouse bridge, one of
+thee few places where tolls still survive.  Foot-passengers and cyclists
+are on an equality, paying one penny each.
+
+Level-crossings again have their wicked will of the road, and are indeed
+its principal features, through Barlby and Riccall.  We need some modern
+Rebeccaites for the abolition of these unpaid-for easements granted to
+the Railway Companies by an indulgent legislature, composed largely of
+Railway Directors, for the mingled danger and waste of public time caused
+by level-crossings over public roads constitute a scandal urgently in
+need of being removed.  Yorkshire people might be recommended to see to
+it, as their forefathers saw to the abolition of turnpikes, collecting in
+armed and disguised bands and wrecking and burning the obnoxious gates
+for great distances.  In May 1753 they assembled at Selby at the summons
+of the public crier’s bell, and proceeded at midnight to demolish all the
+gates in that neighbourhood.  The military were called out to quell these
+Hampdens.  They did not succeed in saving the gates, but shot and
+captured a number of the “rioters,” who were sent for trial to York
+Castle.
+
+Riccall, near the confluence of the Ouse and the Derwent, looks an
+unlikely seaport in these times, now that those rivers and the confluent
+Foss, a mile or so nearer York, flow soberly in their channels and cease
+from spreading over the land.  Eight hundred years ago, however, things
+were very different—as indeed they well might be in that tremendous space
+of time.  So different, in fact, that when the invasion of the North,
+under Tostig and Harald Hardrada, took place in 1066, before that greater
+invasion in the South by William “the Conqueror,” whose success has
+overshadowed these operations, the invaders’ fleet sailed up the Humber
+and the Ouse and blockaded the waterways by anchoring at Riccall.  From
+this base they advanced, defeating Earl Morcar at the battle of Fulford,
+and seized York; retiring on the approach of English Harold to what the
+Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls “Staenfordesbryege,” on Derwent, east of the
+city.  In this we find the original spelling of Stamford Bridge, where
+the great battle which ended in the utter defeat of the invaders was
+fought and their leaders, Tostig and the gigantic Norwegian king, both
+slain.  A fortnight later, and the Duke of Normandy had landed at
+Pevensey, the battle of Hastings had been lost and won, and the victor of
+Stamford Bridge himself lay dead.
+
+Riccall, and the country between it and York, should therefore be
+interesting, as the scene of the earlier of these invasions.  Aside from
+the village flows the Ouse, deep in its channel and navigable for barges,
+than which the Norwegian ships were not much larger; but it could not in
+these days harbour a fleet, even of these primitive transports.  The
+village itself bears nothing on its face telling of great events, and is
+of a placid dulness, a character shared by Escrick and Deighton, on the
+way to York; the road itself gradually becoming an abomination of
+desolate fields until the village of Gate Fulford is reached.  The Great
+North Road is a businesslike highway.  It goes as direct as may be to its
+destination, and gets there quite regardless of scenery or interest to
+right or left.  Thus, although Escrick Park is reputed to be a demesne of
+great beauty, and the village of Naburn, lying hidden off the road, is a
+typical old English village actually boasting a maypole, all the
+traveller along the road perceives is an unromantic vista of
+cabbage-fields and other necessary but uninspiring domestic vegetables,
+through a haze of a particularly beastly kind of black dust peculiar to
+the last few miles of the way into York.  Fulford itself is no fit herald
+of a cathedral city.  A wide street, the terminus of a tramway, a
+mile-long row of cottages, a would-be Gothic church; here you have it.
+Before you, by degrees, York unfolds itself, past the military barracks
+and nondescript, but always disappointing, streets, until, emerging from
+Fishergate, the ancient city, free from suburban excrescences, opens out,
+with the grim castle in front, and the Ouse and Skeldergate Bridge to the
+left.  The so-called “London Road” lies away beyond the Ouse, its name
+referring to the Doncaster, Ferrybridge, Sherburn, and Tadcaster route
+taken by some of the old-time coaches.  By that route York is most
+romantically entered, across Knavesmire, where York’s martyrs, felons,
+and traitors were done to death in the old days, and where the racecourse
+now runs; coming to the walled city through Micklegate, the finest of all
+the mediæval defensible gateways which are York’s especial glory.  By the
+Selby route, through Gate Fulford and along Fishergate, we seem to slink
+in by the back door; through Micklegate we follow in the steps of those
+who have marched with armed hosts at their heels, and have entered with
+the unquestioned right of conquerors.  Thus came the young Duke of York
+at the head of his victorious army, after the crowning victory of Towton;
+the first thing to meet his gaze his father’s head, fixed on the topmost
+turret, and crowned in mockery with a paper crown by the fierce
+Lancastrians under whose swords he had fallen at the battle of Wakefield,
+three months before.  Filial piety could not in those times rest content
+with removing the head from its shameful eminence, and so the Duke caused
+the Earl of Devon and three others among his prisoners to be immediately
+beheaded and their heads to be placed there instead.  Of such, and still
+more sanguinary, incidents is the ancient city of York composed.
+
+             [Picture: Micklegate Bar.  (From an old Print)]
+
+Micklegate, like the other “bars” of York, had its barbican, and equally
+with them, lost that martial outwork at the dawning of the nineteenth
+century.  Its appearance then and now may with advantage be compared in
+the old print and the modern drawing, reproduced here, which also serve
+to show the difference between the road-surface of these times and of a
+century ago.
+
+                  [Picture: Micklegate Bar: present day]
+
+
+
+
+INDEX
+
+
+Alconbury, 2
+
+Alconbury Hill, 2, 121
+
+Askerne, 236
+
+Ayot Green, 87
+
+Austerfield, 225
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Balderton, 193
+
+Baldock, 105
+
+Barlby, 242
+
+Barnby Moor, 209, 212–216
+
+Barnet, 11, 75–79, 171
+
+Barnet, Battle of, 80
+
+Bawtry, 223–225
+
+Bedford, Dukes of, 136
+
+Beeston Green, 108
+
+Bell Bar, 84
+
+Bentley, 236
+
+Biggleswade, 2, 107
+
+Bloody Oaks, 157
+
+Boulter, Edmund, 135
+
+Bradford, William, 219, 225
+
+Brampton, 105, 117
+
+Brayton, 237
+
+Brewster, William, 218–220
+
+Brickwall, 87
+
+Broadwater, 93
+
+Brown’s Wells, 69
+
+Buckden, 2, 114–117
+
+Burghley House, 141–145, 149
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Cantley, 226
+
+Carlton-upon-Trent, 205
+
+Chicken Hill, 113
+
+Coaches—
+
+  “Amity,” Doncaster and Stamford, 212
+
+  “Courier,” Leeds, 41
+
+  “Edinburgh Mails” 15, 29–33, 184
+
+  “Edinburgh Express” 15, 114
+
+  “Edinburgh Stage” 34
+
+  “Express,” Leeds, 41
+
+  “Express,” York, 114
+
+  “Highflyer,” London and York, 76
+
+  “Highflyer,” London, York, and Edinburgh, 154
+
+  “Lord Nelson,” London and Edinburgh, 22, 233, 234
+
+  Mail Coaches, 30–33
+
+  “Nelson,” Wakefield and Lincoln, 232
+
+  “Post,” London and Carlisle, 22
+
+  “Royal Forester,” Doncaster and Nottingham, 232
+
+  “Royal Union,” London and Newcastle, 231
+
+  Stage Coaches, 33–49
+
+  “Stamford Regent” 18–21, 76, 107, 109, 138
+
+  “Stamford and Retford Auxiliary Mail” 212
+
+  “Union,” Leeds, 15, 41
+
+  “Wellington,” London and Newcastle, 15, 234
+
+  “York Four-Days Stage” 35
+
+Coaching Accidents, 41
+
+Coaching Notabilities—
+
+  Barclay of Ury, 169
+
+  Barker, of Welwyn, 88–90
+
+  Barker, John, 138
+
+  Cartwright, of Buckden, 114
+
+  Chaplin, William, 16–18, 73
+
+  Clark, George, 212, 214,
+
+  Dennetts, The, of Retford, 211
+
+  Hennesy, Tom, 88–90
+
+  Herring, J. F., 231–234
+
+  Horne, B. W., 17, 66
+
+  Mountain, Mrs., 18, 22–25
+
+  Nelson, Mrs., 18, 25
+
+  Percivals, The, of Wansford and Greetham, 138, 158, 211
+
+  Sherman, Edward, 14
+
+  Waterhouse, William, 16
+
+  Whincup, of Stamford, 149
+
+  Wood, Richard, 231, 232, 233
+
+Colsterworth, 176
+
+Cromwell, 205
+
+Cromwell, Oliver, 188
+
+Cross Hall, 113
+
+Crow Park, 206
+
+Cycling Notabilities—
+
+  Badlake, F. T., 112
+
+  Butterfield, W. J. H., 112
+
+  Edge, T. A., 111
+
+  Edge, S. F., 111
+
+  Fontaine, C. C., 112
+
+  Goodwin, F. R., 112
+
+  Hobson, T., 112
+
+  Holbein, M. A., 112
+
+  Hunt, G., 112
+
+  James, J. M., 111
+
+  Keith-Falconer, Hon. Ian, 111
+
+  Mills, G. P., 112, 113
+
+  Oxborrow, E., 113
+
+  Pope, H. R., 111
+
+  Sansom, H. H., 113
+
+  Shirley, R., 113
+
+  Shorland, F. W., 112
+
+  Thorpe, J. H. Stanley, 111
+
+  Wheaton, C, 111
+
+  Wilson, H. E., 112
+
+Cycling Records, 110–113
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+_Dead Drummer_, _The_, 120
+
+De Foe, Daniel, 135, 188
+
+Deighton, 243
+
+De Quincey, Thos., 25, 30, 101
+
+Diddington, 113, 120
+
+Digswell Hill, 87
+
+Doncaster, 226–235
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+East End, Finchley, 65
+
+East Markham, 208
+
+Eaton, 210
+
+Eaton Socon, 110, 113
+
+Elkisley, 209
+
+Empingham, 157
+
+Escrick, 243
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Finchley, 65
+
+Finchley Common, 66–72, 171
+
+Foston, 193
+
+Fulford, 243
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Gamston, 208
+
+Ganwick Corner, 80
+
+Gate Fulford, 243
+
+General Post Office, 2, 25–33, 241
+
+Girtford, 109
+
+Gonerby Hill, 189–193
+
+Grantham, 176, 180–188, 197
+
+Graveley, 105
+
+Great Casterton, 154
+
+Great Gonerby, 189
+
+Great Ponton, 178–180
+
+Greenhill Cross, 73
+
+Greetham, 158
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Hadley Green, 2, 80
+
+Hadley Highstone, 80
+
+Hardwick, 117
+
+Hatfield, 2, 84–87
+
+_Heart of Midlothian_, 189–193
+
+Herring, J. F., 231–234
+
+Hicks’s Hall, 2, 49
+
+Highgate, 2, 51–65
+
+Highgate Archway, 63–65, 111
+
+Highgate Hill, 57–62
+
+Highway Acts, 9
+
+Highwaymen, 62, 69–72, 124, 175
+
+  Bowland, John, 158
+
+  Everett and Williams, 69
+
+  Sheppard, Jack, 70
+
+  Spiggott, — 68
+
+  Turpin, Dick, 70, 193
+
+Holloway, 2, 52
+
+Horn Lane, 157
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Inns (mentioned at length)
+
+  “Angel,” Grantham, 182
+
+  “Angel,” Islington, 49, 50
+
+  “Angel,” Stilton, 125
+
+  “Bald-faced Stag,” Finchley, 65
+
+  “Beehive,” Grantham, 188
+
+  “Bell,” Barnby Moor, 212–216
+
+  “Bell,” Stilton, 125–128
+
+  “Black Bull,” Witham Common, 158, 161
+
+  “Black Lion,” Scarthing Moor, 206
+
+  “Black Swan,” Holborn, 35
+
+  “Black Swan,” York, 35
+
+  “Blue Bell,” Barnby Moor, 212–216
+
+  “Blue Bull,” Witham Common, 161
+
+  “Blue Horse,” Great Ponton, 180
+
+  “Brampton Hut” 117
+
+  “Brown Cow,” Doncaster, 232–233
+
+  “Bull and Mouth,” St. Martin’-le-Grand, 13–15
+
+  “Clinton Arms,” Newark, 198, 200
+
+  “Crown,” Bawtry, 223
+
+  “Crown,” Selby, 241
+
+  “Crown and Woolpack,” nr Stilton, 124
+
+  “Dirt House,” Finchley, 66
+
+  “Duke of York,” Ganwick Corner, 80
+
+  “Gatehouse Tavern,” Highgate, 59
+
+  “George,” Buckden, 114
+
+  “George,” Grantham, 182–184
+
+  “George,” Stamford, 146
+
+  “George and Blue Boar,” Holborn, 18
+
+  “Green Man,” Barnet, 76–79
+
+  “Green Man,” Brown’s Wells, 69
+
+  “Green Man and Still,” Oxford Street, 13, 18
+
+  “Greetham Inn” 158, 211
+
+  “Griffin” Whetstone, 72
+
+  “Haycock,” Wansford, 136–140, 211
+
+  “Jockey House” 209
+
+  “Kate’s Cabin, 132
+
+  “Lord Kitchener,” Stevenage, 105
+
+  “Markham Moor” 208
+
+  “Newcastle Arms,” Tuxford, 207
+
+  “Norman Cross” 129
+
+  “Old Castle,” Stevenage, 101
+
+  “Old Red Lion,” Barnet, 79
+
+  “Old White Lion,” Finchley, 66
+
+  “Our Mutual Friend,” 104
+
+  “Peacock,” Islington, 49
+
+  “Ram,” Doncaster, 231
+
+  “Ram,” Newark, 203
+
+  “Ram Jam,” Stretton, 158–161
+
+  “Red Lion,” Barnet, 76–79
+
+  “Salutation,” Doncaster, 231
+
+  “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, 21–25
+
+  “Saracen’s Head,” Newark, 191, 198
+
+  “Scrooby” 216
+
+  “Spread Eagle,” Gracechurch Street, 13, 18
+
+  “Swan,” Stevenage, 96
+
+  “Swan-with-two-Necks,” Gresham Street, 13–17
+
+  “Volunteer,” Doncaster, 235
+
+  “Waggon and Horses,” Stamford, 152
+
+  “Wellington,” Welwyn, 90
+
+  “Wheatsheaf,” Alconbury Hill, 121
+
+  “White Hart,” Retford, 211–213
+
+  “White Hart,” Welwyn, 88
+
+  “White Horse,” Eaton Socon, 110
+
+  “White Swan,” Biggleswade, 107
+
+  “Whittington Stone Tavern,” 56
+
+Islington, 2, 49–51
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Jeanie Deans, 190–192, 198, 204
+
+Jockey House, 209
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Kate’s Cabin, 132
+
+Knavesmire, 244
+
+Knebworth, 92
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Lambert, Daniel, 152
+
+Lannock Hill, 105
+
+Lemsford Mills, 87
+
+Letchworth, 103, 106
+
+Little Heath, 82
+
+Long Bennington, 193
+
+Lord of Burleigh, Tennyson’s, 141–145
+
+Lower Codicote, 108
+
+Lytton family, Earls Lytton, 92
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Macadam, J. L., 6, 10, 12, 31
+
+Mace, Thos, 6–8
+
+Markham Moor, 208
+
+Marston, 193
+
+Matcham’s Bridge, 120
+
+Metcalf, John, 10
+
+Morison, Fynes, 97
+
+Morpeth, 32
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Newark-upon-Trent, 193–204
+
+Newton, Sir Isaac, 176
+
+_Nicholas Nickleby_, 22, 110, 184
+
+Norman Cross, 129–133
+
+North Finchley, 66
+
+North Muskham, 205
+
+North Road Cycling Club, 110, 113, 114
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Old-time Travellers—
+
+  Bacon, Francis Viscount Verulam, 61
+
+  Barclay of Ury, 169
+
+  Burke, Edmund, 69
+
+  Calderwood of Coltness, Mrs., 128, 171
+
+  Campbell, Lord Chancellor, 173
+
+  Cary, Sir Robert, 166
+
+  Charles I., 105, 149
+
+  Eldon, Earl of, 172
+
+  George III., 165
+
+  George IV., 165
+
+  Gladstone, W. E., 200
+
+  James I., 165, 194
+
+  Jeffrey, Lord, 184
+
+  Jonson, Ben, 166
+
+  Lepton, John, 166
+
+  Londonderry, Marquis of, 170
+
+  Mansfield, Earl of, 171
+
+  Minto, Earl of, 71
+
+  Misson, Henri, 51
+
+  Monboddo, Lord, 170
+
+  Pepys, Samuel, 73, 79, 105, 117
+
+  Perlin, Estienne, 146
+
+  Powell, Foster, 167
+
+  Skene, Dr., 171
+
+  Sterne, Rev. Laurence, 214
+
+  Thoresby, Ralph, 124, 175
+
+  Thornhill, Cooper, 126, 167
+
+  Tucker, Henry St. George, 185
+
+  Twining, Rev. Thomas, 146, 189, 214
+
+  Wharton, Sir Ralph, 175
+
+  Woulfe, Peter, 172
+
+Old-time Travelling, 3–8, 11, 36–47, 96–101, 164–175, 184–186, 204–206,
+214
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Palmer, John, 30
+
+Pedestrian Records, 166–169
+
+Pilgrim Fathers, The, 218–220, 225
+
+Posting, 98–101
+
+Potter’s Bar, 80–82
+
+Powell, Foster, 167
+
+Prickler’s Hill, 74
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Railways—37, 46, 75, 82, 93, 125, 174, 228, 234, 236
+
+  Great Northern, 174, 228, 236
+
+  London and Birmingham  (now London and North-Western) 75
+
+  Midland, 234
+
+  North Eastern, 236
+
+Ranskill, 216
+
+Retford, 208, 210–213
+
+Riccall, 242
+
+Roman Roads, 2–4
+
+Rossington Bridge, 226
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+St. Martin’-le-Grand, 2, 14, 25–27
+
+Sandy, 108
+
+Sawtry St. Andrews, 124, 176
+
+Sawtry Abbey, 124
+
+Scarthing Moor, 205–207
+
+Scott, Sir Walter, 51, 162, 164, 190, 192, 198, 204
+
+Scrooby, 216–220
+
+Selby, 238–242
+
+Shaftholme Junction, 236
+
+Sibson, 136
+
+“Six Hills,” The, Stevenage, 94–96
+
+South Muskham, 203, 205
+
+Stamford, 140, 145–153
+
+Stanborough, 87
+
+Stangate Hill, 124
+
+Statute Labour, 9
+
+Stevenage, 2 93–96, 101–105
+
+Stibbington, 136
+
+Stilton, 9, 124–128
+
+Stoke Rochford, 178
+
+Stonegate Hole, 176
+
+Stretton, 154, 161
+
+Sutton-upon-Trent, 205
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+“Tally-ho Corner” 66
+
+Telford, James, 10, 13, 31
+
+Tempsford, 109
+
+Thornhaugh, 140
+
+Tickencote, 154
+
+“Tingey’s Corner,” 108
+
+Tophall, 226
+
+Toplar’s Hill, 107
+
+Torworth, 216
+
+Trent, River, 203–205
+
+Turnpike Acts, 9
+
+Turnpike Gates, 10, 58, 59, 73–75, 82, 87, 105, 209, 218, 242
+
+Turpin’s Oak, 70
+
+Tuxford, 205–208
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+Wansford, 134
+
+Water Newton, 133–140
+
+Welwyn, 2, 88–91, 116
+
+West Markham, 208
+
+Weston, 206
+
+Whetstone, 72
+
+Whittington, Sir Richard, 53–56
+
+Witham Common, 158, 161, 175
+
+Woolmer Green, 93
+
+Woolsthorpe Manor-House, 176
+
+Wyboston, 109
+
+Yaxley Barracks, 129–132
+
+York, 244–246
+
+Yorkshire, 220–223
+
+Young, Revd. Edward, 90
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES.
+
+
+{40}  These are pre-war (1914–18) prices.
+
+{117}  He was baptised in the church of St. Bride, Fleet Street,
+according to a discovery more recently made; and he would thus appear
+really to have been a Londoner.
+
+{165}  Tokens in imitation of the old guineas, which bore on their
+reverse the George and Dragon device now used on our modern sovereigns.
+The token represented the king on horseback (the Hanoverian White Horse),
+with the legend “To Hanover.”
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: LONDON TO
+YORK***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 46716-0.txt or 46716-0.zip *******
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+<head>
+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>The Great North Road: London to York, by Charles G. Harper</title>
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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Great North Road: London to York, by
+Charles G. Harper
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Great North Road: London to York
+       The Old Mail Road to Scotland
+
+
+Author: Charles G. Harper
+
+
+
+Release Date: August 28, 2014  [eBook #46716]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: LONDON TO
+YORK***
+</pre>
+<p>This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/cover.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Book cover"
+title=
+"Book cover"
+ src="images/cover.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/fp.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Starting from G.P.O. in Lombard Street"
+title=
+"Starting from G.P.O. in Lombard Street"
+ src="images/fp.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h1><i>The</i><br />
+GREAT NORTH ROAD</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center">The Old Mail Road to Scotland</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>By</i> CHARLES G. HARPER</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONDON TO YORK</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>Illustrated by the Author</i>,
+<i>and from old-time</i><br />
+<i>Prints and Pictures</i></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/tp.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Title Figure (man on bicycle)"
+title=
+"Title Figure (man on bicycle)"
+ src="images/tp.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">London</span>:<br />
+CECIL PALMER<br />
+<span class="smcap">Oakley House</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Bloomsbury Street</span>, W.C. <span
+class="GutSmall">1</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="pageii"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. ii</span><i>First published in</i> 1901<br />
+<i>Second and Revised edition</i>, 1922</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">Printed in
+Great Britain by C. TINLING &amp; Co., </span><span
+class="GutSmall"><span class="smcap">Ltd</span></span><span
+class="GutSmall">.,</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">53, Victoria Street, Liverpool</span><br
+/>
+<span class="GutSmall">and 187, Fleet Street, London.</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="pageiii"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. iii</span><span class="smcap">In Loving
+Memory</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">OF</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Herman Moroney</span></p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<i>I expect to pass through this world but
+once</i>.&nbsp; <i>Any good</i>, <i>therefore</i>, <i>I can
+do</i>, <i>or any kindness that I can show to any
+fellow-creature</i>, <i>let me do it now</i>.&nbsp; <i>Let me not
+defer or neglect it</i>, <i>for I shall not pass this way
+again</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><i>Attributed to</i> <span
+class="smcap">William Penn</span>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2><a name="pagev"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+v</span>PREFACE.</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/prefhead.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Preface heading"
+title=
+"Preface heading"
+ src="images/prefhead.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><span class="smcap"><i>When</i></span><i> the original edition
+of the</i> &ldquo;<span class="smcap">Great North
+Road</span>&rdquo; <i>was published&mdash;in</i>
+1901&mdash;<i>the motorcar was yet a new thing</i>.&nbsp; <i>It
+had</i>, <i>in November</i>, 1896, <i>been given by Act of
+Parliament the freedom of the roads</i>; <i>but</i>, <i>so
+far</i>, <i>the character of the nation&rsquo;s traffic had been
+comparatively little changed</i>.&nbsp; <i>People would still
+turn and gaze</i>, <i>interested</i>, <i>at a
+mechanically-propelled vehicle</i>; <i>and few were those folk
+who had journeyed the entire distance between London and
+Edinburgh in one of them</i>.&nbsp; <i>For motor-cars were
+still</i>, <i>really</i>, <i>in more or less of an experimental
+stage</i>; <i>and on any long journey you were never sure of
+finishing by car what you had begun</i>.&nbsp; <i>Also</i>,
+<i>the speed possible was not great enough to render such a long
+</i><a name="pagevi"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+vi</span><i>journey exhilarating to modern ideas</i>.&nbsp; <i>It
+is true that</i>, <i>the year before</i>, <i>the</i>
+&ldquo;<i>Automobile Club of Great Britain and
+Ireland</i>,&rdquo; <i>not yet become the</i> &ldquo;<i>Royal
+Automobile Club</i>,&rdquo; <i>had in its now forgotten role of
+a</i> &ldquo;<i>Society of Encouragement</i>&rdquo; <i>planned
+and carried out a</i> &ldquo;<i>Thousand Miles Tour</i>,&rdquo;
+<i>which had Edinburgh as its most northern point</i>; <i>but it
+was a very special effort</i>.&nbsp; <i>Those who took part in it
+are not likely to forget the occasion</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><i>To-day</i>, <i>all that is changed</i>.&nbsp; <i>Every
+summer</i>, <i>every autumn</i>, <i>sees large numbers of touring
+automobiles on the way to Scotland and the moors</i>, <i>filled
+with those who prefer the road</i>, <i>on such terms</i>, <i>to
+the railway</i>.&nbsp; <i>From being something in the nature of a
+lonely highway</i>, <i>the Great North Road has thus become a
+very much travelled one</i>.&nbsp; <i>In this way</i>, <i>some of
+its circumstances have changed remarkably</i>, <i>and old-time
+comfortable wayside inns that seemed to have been ruined for all
+time with the coming of railways and the passing of the coaches
+have wakened to a newer life</i>.&nbsp; <i>Chief among these is
+the</i> &ldquo;<i>Bell</i>&rdquo; <i>on Barnby Moor</i>, <i>just
+north of Retford</i>.&nbsp; <i>The story of its revival is a
+romance</i>.&nbsp; <i>Closed about</i> 1845, <i>and converted
+into a farm-house</i>, <i>no one would have cared to predict its
+revival as an inn</i>.&nbsp; <i>But as such it was reopened</i>,
+<i>chiefly for the use of motorists</i>, <i>in</i> 1906, <i>and
+there it is to-day</i>.</p>
+<p><a name="pagevii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+vii</span><i>But</i>, <i>apart from the tarred and asphalted
+condition of the actual roadway in these times</i>, <i>the
+route</i>, <i>all the way between London</i>, <i>York and
+Edinburgh</i>, <i>looks much the same as it did</i>.&nbsp;
+<i>Only</i>, <i>where perhaps one person might then know it
+thoroughly</i>, <i>from end to end</i>, <i>a hundred are well
+acquainted with the way and its features</i>.&nbsp; <i>It is for
+those many who now know the Great North Road that this new
+edition is prepared</i>, <i>giving the story of the long highway
+between the two capitals</i>.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">CHARLES G. HARPER.</p>
+<p><i>April</i>, 1922.</p>
+<h2><a name="pageix"></a><span class="pagenum">p. ix</span>THE
+GREAT NORTH ROAD</h2>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">LONDON TO
+YORK</span></p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="GutSmall">MILES</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Islington (the &ldquo;Angel&rdquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">1&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Highgate Archway</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">4&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>East End, Finchley</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">5&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Brown&rsquo;s Wells, Finchley Common (&ldquo;Green
+Man&rdquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">7</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Whetstone</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">9&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Greenhill Cross</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Barnet</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Hadley Green</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">12</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Ganwick Corner (&ldquo;Duke of York&rdquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">13</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Potter&rsquo;s Bar</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">14&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Little Heath Lane</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">15&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bell Bar (&ldquo;Swan&rdquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">17&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Hatfield</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">19&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stanborough</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">21&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Lemsford Mills (cross River Lea)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">22&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Digswell Hill (cross River Mimram)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">23&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Welwyn</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">25&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Woolmer Green</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">27&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Broadwater</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">29&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stevenage</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">31&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Graveley</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">33&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Baldock</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">37&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Biggleswade (cross River Ivel)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">45&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagex"></a><span class="pagenum">p. x</span>Lower
+Codicote</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">46&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Beeston Cross (cross River Ivel)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">48&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Girlford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">49&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Tempsford (cross River Ouse)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">51</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wyboston</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">54</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Eaton Socon</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">55&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Cross Hall</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">56&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Diddington</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">60</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Buckden</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">61&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Brampton Hut</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">63&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Alconbury</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">66&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Alconbury Weston</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">67</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Alconbury Hill (&ldquo;Wheatsheaf&rdquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">68</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sawtry St. Andrews</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">71&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stilton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">75&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Norman Cross</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">76</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Kate&rsquo;s Cabin</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">79&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Water Newton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">81&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sibson</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">82</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stibbington (cross River Nene)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">83&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wansford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">84</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stamford Baron (cross River Welland)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">89</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stamford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">89&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Great Casterton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">91&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stretton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">96</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Greetham (&ldquo;New Inn&rdquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">97&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>North Witham (&ldquo;Black Bull&rdquo;)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">100&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Colsterworth</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">102&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Great Ponton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">106&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Spitalgate Hill</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">109&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Grantham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">110&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Great Gonerby</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">112</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagexi"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xi</span>Foston</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">116</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Long Bennington</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">118&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Shire Bridge (cross Shire Dyke)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">120&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Balderton (cross River Devon)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">122&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Newark (cross River Trent)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">124&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>South Muskham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">127</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>North Muskham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">128</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Cromwell</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">130</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Carlton-on-Trent</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">131&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sutton-on-Trent</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">133</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Weston</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">134&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Scarthing Moor</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">135&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Tuxford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">137&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>West Markham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">139&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Markham Moor</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">140&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Gamston (cross Chesterfield Canal)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">141&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Retford (cross River Idle)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">145</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Barnby Moor</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">148</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Torworth</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">149&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Ranskill</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">150&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Scrooby</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">152</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bawtry</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">153&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Rossington Bridge (cross River Tome)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">157&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Tophall</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">158&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Doncaster (cross River Don)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">162&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bentley</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">164</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Owston</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">167&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Askerne (cross River Went)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">169&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Whitley (cross Knottingley and Goole Canal)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">174</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Whitley Bridge</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">175</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Chapel Haddlesey (cross River Aire)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">175&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Burn (cross Selby Canal)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">179&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p><a name="pagexii"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+xii</span>Brayton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">180&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Selby (cross River Ouse)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">182&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Barlby</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">183&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Riccall</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">186</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Escrick</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">189&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Deighton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">190&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Gate Fulford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">195</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>York</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">196&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2>CONTENTS.</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">I</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Various Notes On Roads In General.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page1">1</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">II</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Road Construction And Makers.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">III</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Makers Of Coaches: G.P.O. Mails.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IV</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Post Office History.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page26">26</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">V</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Stage Coach Timings.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page33">33</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VI</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Travel Expenses And Difficulties.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page39">39</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Journey Stages: Islington: Holloway.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page49">49</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VIII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Highgate: Dick Whittington.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page53">53</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IX</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Highgate: Archway.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">X</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Highgate: Footpads.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page61">61</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XI</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Finchley: Tally-Ho Corner And Common.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Whetstone: Building Of New Road.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page72">72</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XIII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Barnet: Prize-Fighting.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page75">75</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XIV</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Hadley Green: Potter&rsquo;s Bar: Hatfield.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XV</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Digswell Hill: Welwyn: Knebworth.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XVI</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Stevenage: Posting Charges.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page96">96</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XVII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Baldock: Biggleswade: Tempsford.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page101">101</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XVIII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Some Cycling Records. Eaton Socon.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XIX</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Buckden: Brampton: Matcham&rsquo;s Bridge.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XX</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Alconbury Hill: Stilton.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXI</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Norman Cross: Wansford: Burghley.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page129">129</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Stamford: Daniel Lambert.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page145">145</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXIII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Stretton: Bloody Oaks: Ram-Jam Inn.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXIV</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Travellers.&nbsp; Some Road History.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page164">164</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXV</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Coming Of The Railways.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXVI</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Witham Common: Great Ponton.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page175">175</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXVII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Grantham.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page180">180</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXVIII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Oliver Cromwell: Gonerby Hill.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page188">188</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXIX</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Newark: Ringing For Gofer.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXX</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>North And South Muskham.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page203">203</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXXI</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Retford.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXXII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Barnby Moor: Scrooby.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page213">213</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXXIII</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Bawtry: Rossington Bridge.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page222">222</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXXIV</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Tophall: Doncaster: St. Leger.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page226">226</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXXV</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Askerne: Brayton: Selby.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page235">235</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">XXXVI</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Riccall: Invaders: York.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page242">242</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span
+class="GutSmall">PAGE</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>To the North in the Days of Old: Mails starting from the
+General Post Office, Lombard Street</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">Frontispiece</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Old and New Swan Nicks: Vintners&rsquo; Company</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image16">16</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Modern Sign of the &ldquo;Swan with Two Necks&rdquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image17">17</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Spread Eagle,&rdquo; Gracechurch Street</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image19">19</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo; Snow Hill</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image23">23</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Mails starting from the General Post Office, 1832</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image27">27</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Louth Mail&rdquo; stopped by the snow</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image43">43</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Entrance to London from Islington, 1809</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image47">47</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Islington Green, 1820</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image50">50</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image63">63</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Great Common of Finchley: A Parlous Place</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image67">67</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Turpin&rsquo;s Oak</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image70">70</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&ldquo;The Whetstone&rdquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image72">72</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>High Street, Barnet</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image77">77</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Hadley Green: Site of the Battle of Barnet</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image81">81</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Old Toll House, Potter&rsquo;s Bar</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image82">82</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Ganwick Corner</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image83">83</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bell Bar</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image84">84</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Welwyn</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image89">89</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Six Hills,&rdquo; Stevenage</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image95">95</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Trigg&rsquo;s Coffin</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image102">102</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>At the 39th Mile</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image106">106</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Biggleswade</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image108">108</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Buckden</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image115">115</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Matcham&rsquo;s Bridge</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image119">119</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Alconbury Hill: Junction of the Great North Road and the
+North Road</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image123">123</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Bell,&rdquo; Stilton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image127">127</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Norman Cross</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image129">129</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>French Prisoners of War Monument, Norman Cross</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image132">132</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sculptured Figure, Water Newton Church</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image133">133</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Water Newton Church</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image134">134</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Edmund Boulter&rsquo;s Milestone</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image135">135</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Haycock,&rdquo; Wansford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image137">137</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Sign of the &ldquo;Haycock&rdquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image138">138</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Wansford Bridge</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image139">139</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Burghley House, by Stamford Town</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image143">143</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Entrance to Stamford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image147">147</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stamford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image151">151</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Daniel Lambert</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image152">152</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; 1840</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image155">155</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bloody Oaks</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image157">157</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Interior of a Village Inn</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image159">159</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>House, formerly the &ldquo;Black Bull,&rdquo; Witham
+Common</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image163">163</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Foster Powell</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image168">168</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Great Ponton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image177">177</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Great Ponton Church</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image179">179</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; Grantham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image182">182</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Wondrous Sign&rdquo;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image187">187</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Newark Castle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image195">195</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Market Place, Newark</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image199">199</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Newark Castle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image201">201</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Jockey House</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image210">210</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>An Old Postboy: John Blagg</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image212">212</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Scrooby Church</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image216">216</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Scrooby Manor House</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image217">217</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Stables, Scrooby Manor House</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image220">220</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The &ldquo;Crown,&rdquo; Bawtry</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image224">224</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image229">229</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Brayton Church</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image237">237</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Market Place, Selby</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image239">239</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Micklegate Bar</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image245">245</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Micklegate Bar: Present Day</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="imageref"><a
+href="#image246">246</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page1"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 1</span>
+<a href="images/p1.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Old steam train"
+title=
+"Old steam train"
+ src="images/p1.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2>I.</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> was once an American who,
+with cheap wit, expressed a fear of travelling in the little
+island of Great Britain, lest he should accidentally fall over
+the edge of so small a place.&nbsp; It is quite evident that he
+never travelled the road from London to York and Edinburgh.</p>
+<p>You have to perform that journey to realise that this is,
+after all, not so very small an island.&nbsp; It is not enough to
+have been wafted between London and Edinburgh by express
+train&mdash;even although the wafting itself takes seven hours
+and a half&mdash;for one to gain a good idea of the
+distance.&nbsp; We will not take into consideration the total
+mileage between Dover and Cape Wrath, which tots up to the
+formidable figure of eight hundred miles or so, but will confine
+ourselves in these pages to the great road between London and
+Edinburgh: to the Great North Road, in fact, which measures, by
+way of York, three hundred and ninety-three miles.</p>
+<p><a name="page2"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 2</span>There are
+a North Road and a Great North Road.&nbsp; Like different forms
+of religious belief, by which their several adherents all
+devoutly hope to win to that one place where we all would be,
+these two roads eventually lead to one goal, although they
+approach it by independent ways.&nbsp; The North Road is the
+oldest, based as it is partly on the old Roman Ermine Way which
+led to Lincoln.&nbsp; It is measured from Shoreditch Church, and
+goes by Kingsland to Tottenham and Enfield, and so by Waltham
+Cross to Cheshunt, Ware, and Royston, eventually meeting the
+Great North Road after passing through Caxton and climbing
+Alconbury Hill, sixty-eight miles from London.</p>
+<p>The Great North Road takes a very different route out of
+London.&nbsp; It was measured from Hicks&rsquo;s Hall,
+Smithfield, and, passing the &ldquo;Angel&rdquo; at Islington,
+pursued a straight and continually ascending course for Holloway
+and Highgate, going thence to Barnet, Hatfield, Welwyn,
+Stevenage, Biggleswade, and Buckden to Alconbury; where, as just
+remarked, the North Road merged into it.&nbsp; From London to
+Hadley Green, just beyond Barnet, the Great North Road and the
+Holyhead Road are identical.</p>
+<p>In these volumes we shall consistently keep to the Great North
+Road; starting, however, as the record-making cyclists of late
+years have done, from the General Post-office in St.
+Martin&rsquo;s-le-Grand, to or from which, or the neighbouring
+old inns, the coaches of the historic past came and went.</p>
+<p>We travel with a light heart: our forbears with dismal
+forebodings, leaving duly-executed and attested wills behind
+them.&nbsp; In the comparatively settled times of from a hundred
+to two hundred years ago, they duly returned, after many days: in
+earlier periods the home-coming was not so sure a thing.</p>
+<p>These considerations serve to explain to the tourist and the
+cyclist, who travel for the love of change and the desire for
+beautiful scenery, why no one in the Middle Ages travelled from
+choice.&nbsp; From the highest to the lowest, from the king in
+his palace to <a name="page3"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+3</span>the peasant in his wattled hut, every one who could do so
+stayed at home, and only faced the roads from sheer
+necessity.&nbsp; No one appreciated scenery in those days; nor
+are our ancestors to be blamed for their shortcomings in this
+respect, for outside every man&rsquo;s door lurked some danger or
+another, and when a man&rsquo;s own fireside is the only safe
+place he knows of, it is apt to appear to him the most beautiful
+and the most desirable of spots.</p>
+<p>We cannot say whether the Romans appreciated scenery.&nbsp; If
+a love of the wildly beautiful in nature is dependent upon the
+safety of those who behold it, and upon the ease with which those
+scenes are visited, perhaps only the later generations of Roman
+colonists could have possessed this sense.&nbsp; The earlier
+Romans who made their splendid system of roads were, doubtless,
+only military men, and, well aware of their dangers, found
+nothing beautiful in mountain ranges.&nbsp; Their successors,
+however, during four hundred years had leisure and plentiful
+opportunities of cultivating taste, and travel was highly
+organised among them.&nbsp; A milliare, or milestone, was placed
+at every Roman mile&mdash;4854 English feet&mdash;and
+&ldquo;mansiones,&rdquo; or posting-stations, at distances
+varying from seven to twenty miles.</p>
+<p>Roman roads were scientifically constructed.&nbsp; The
+following was the formula:&mdash;</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Pavimentum, or foundation.&nbsp; Fine earth, hard beaten
+in.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Statumen, or bed of the road.&nbsp; Composed of large
+stones, sometimes mixed with mortar.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Ruderatio.&nbsp; Small stones, well mixed with mortar.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Nucleus.&nbsp; Formed by mixing lime, chalk, pounded
+brick, or tile; or gravel, sand, and lime mixed with clay.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Summum Dorsum.&nbsp; Surface of the paved road.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>So thoroughly well was the work done that remains of these
+roads are even now discovered, in a perfect <a
+name="page4"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 4</span>condition,
+although buried from six to fifteen feet, or even deeper, beneath
+the present surface of the land, owing to the hundreds of years
+of neglect which followed the abandonment of Britain, and the
+decay of Roman civilisation; a neglect which allowed storms and
+the gradual effects of the weather to accumulate deposits of
+earth upon these paved ways until they were made to disappear as
+effectually as Pompeii and Herculaneum under the hail of ashes
+and lava that hid those cities from view for eighteen hundred
+years.</p>
+<p>When that great people, the Romans, perished off the face of
+the earth, and none succeeded them, their roads began to decay,
+their bridges and paved fords were broken down or carried away by
+floods, and the rulers of the nation were for over five hundred
+years too busily engaged in subduing rebellions at home or in
+prosecuting wars abroad to attend to the keeping of
+communications in proper repair.&nbsp; Social disorder, too,
+destroyed roads and bridges that had survived natural decay and
+the stress of the elements.&nbsp; Even those roads which existed
+in otherwise good condition were only fair-weather
+highways.&nbsp; They were innocent of culverts, and consequently
+the storm-water, which nowadays is carried off beneath them,
+swept across the surface, and either carried it away or remained
+in vast lakes on whose shores wayfarers shivered until the floods
+had abated.&nbsp; Thieves and murderers were the commonplaces of
+the roads, and signposts were not; so that guides&mdash;who at
+the best were expensive, and at the worst were the accomplices of
+cutthroats, and lured the traveller to their haunts&mdash;were
+absolutely necessary.</p>
+<p>To the relief of travellers in those times came the Church,
+for the civil and secular power had not begun even to dream of
+road-making.&nbsp; The Church did some very important things for
+travellers, praying for them, and adjuring the devout to include
+them in their prayers for prisoners and captives, the sick, and
+others in any way distressed.&nbsp; The very word
+&ldquo;travel&rdquo; <a name="page5"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+5</span>derives from <i>travail</i>, meaning labour or
+hardship.&nbsp; This alone shows how much to be pitied were those
+whose business took them from their own firesides.</p>
+<p>But to pray for them alone would not perhaps have been so very
+admirable, and so the Church took the care of the roads on itself
+in a very special sense.&nbsp; It granted indulgences to those
+who by their gifts or their bodily labour helped to repair the
+highways, and licensed hermits to receive tolls and alms from
+travellers over roads and bridges constructed by the brethren,
+those revenues going towards the upkeep of the ways.&nbsp;
+Benefactors to the Church frequently left lands and houses, whose
+proceeds were to be applied for the same purpose; and for many
+years this trust was respected, and all the road and bridge
+building and repairing was done by the religious.&nbsp; By
+degrees, however, this trust was, if not betrayed, allowed to
+gradually fall into neglect.&nbsp; False hermits set up in remote
+places, away from the eyes of the bishops, and living idle and
+dissolute lives on the alms they received, allowed roads and
+bridges alike to fall into decay.&nbsp; These vicious, unlicensed
+hermits were great stumbling-blocks to the godly in those
+times.&nbsp; They were often peasants or workmen, who had
+observed how fat and idle a living was that gained by those among
+the licensed who had betrayed their trust and fared sumptuously
+on alms unearned, and so went and set up in the eremitical
+profession for themselves.&nbsp; They fared well on bacon, had
+&ldquo;fat chekus,&rdquo; toasted themselves before roaring fires
+in their too comfortable cells, and lived &ldquo;in ydelnesse and
+ese,&rdquo; frequenting ale-houses and even worse places.&nbsp;
+Accordingly many of them were eventually removed, or suffered
+various punishments, and the neighbouring monasteries placed
+others in their stead.</p>
+<p>By this time, however, the bishops and abbots, whose broad
+acres had often come to them in trust for the welfare of the
+traveller, began to forget their obligations.&nbsp; It was, of
+course, a natural process: the possessions of the religious
+houses had grown <a name="page6"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+6</span>enormously, but so also had their hospitality to all and
+sundry.&nbsp; Travellers had increased, and as it was a rule of
+conduct with the great abbeys to not only relieve the poor, but
+also to entertain the great in those days before the rise of the
+roadside hostelry, their resources must have been well
+exercised.&nbsp; Meanwhile the statutes of the country had
+gradually been imposing the care of the roads upon the laity, and
+at the time when the greater and lesser monasteries were
+dissolved, in the reign of Henry the Eighth, parishes and
+landowners were chiefly concerned in endeavouring to comply with
+their new and strange obligations in keeping their ways
+passable.&nbsp; Of course they did not succeed, and equally of
+course, because it was impossible that they could, the pains and
+penalties threatened for foul and dangerous roads were not
+enforced.</p>
+<p>A curious pamphlet on the condition of the roads in the
+seventeenth century is that written by Thomas Mace, one of the
+&ldquo;clerks&rdquo; of Trinity College, Cambridge, and published
+in 1675.&nbsp; Mace, there is no doubt, was a man born out of his
+time.&nbsp; Had circumstances been propitious, he might have
+become another and an earlier Macadam.&nbsp; His pamphlet,
+written both in prose and verse, and addressed to the king, is
+styled <i>The Profit</i>, <i>Conveniency</i>, <i>and Pleasure for
+the Whole Nation</i>, and is &ldquo;a Discourse lately presented
+to His Majesty concerning the Highways of England; their badness,
+the causes thereof, the reasons of these causes, the
+impossibility of ever having them well mended according to the
+old way of mending; but may most certainly be done, and for ever
+so maintained (according to this New Way) substantially, and with
+very much ease.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>We find here, as in other publications until the
+mid-eighteenth century was well past, that the country was for
+the most part unenclosed, so that when the traffic had worn the
+old tracks into deep ruts, or when mud had rendered them
+impassable, the wagons, carts, and laden horses were taken round
+by the nearest firm spots.&nbsp; &ldquo;Much ground,&rdquo; says
+our <a name="page7"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 7</span>author,
+&ldquo;is now spoiled and trampled down in all wide roads, where
+coaches and carts take liberty to pick and chuse for their best
+advantages; besides, such sprawling and straggling of coaches and
+carts utterly confound the road in all wide places, so that it is
+not only unpleasurable, but extremely perplexing and cumbersome
+both to themselves and to all horse travellers.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These pickings and choosings were the original cause of the
+still existing twists and turns in many of our roads.&nbsp; When
+we see an old road winding snake-like through a flat country,
+with no hills or other obvious reasons for its circuitous course,
+we may, in most cases, safely attribute this apparent indecision
+and infirmity of purpose to these ancient difficulties, thus
+perpetuated.</p>
+<p>This ancient state of things occasioned many disputes and even
+fatal affrays between the packhorse men, who carried goods slung
+across their horses&rsquo; backs from one part of the country to
+the other, and between the market-folk and those who travelled on
+horseback and coaches.&nbsp; Mace would himself seem to have
+experienced some of these contentions as to who should take the
+clean and who the muddy part of the road, for he writes with
+great bitterness about &ldquo;these disturbances, daily committed
+by uncivil, refractory, and rude, Russianlike rake-shames, in
+contesting for the way.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hundreds of pack-horses,&rdquo; he continues,
+&ldquo;panniers, whifflers, coaches, wagons, wains, carts, or
+whatsoever others,&rdquo; fought and schemed for precedence; and
+a horseman, his horse already exhausted by a long and tedious
+journey, might, at the entrance to a town, especially on market
+day, be compelled to go out of his way twenty times in one mile,
+owing to the peevishness of these whifflers and
+market-folk.&nbsp; &ldquo;I have often known many
+travellers,&rdquo; he continues, &ldquo;and myself very often, to
+have been necessitated to stand stock still behind a standing
+cart or wagon, on most beastly and unsufferable wet wayes, to the
+great <a name="page8"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+8</span>endangering of our horses and neglect of public business:
+nor durst we adventure to stirr (for most imminent danger of
+those deep rutts and unreasonable ridges) till it has pleased Mr.
+Carter to jog on, which we have taken very kindly.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>His plan was to once get the roads in good repair, and then,
+he says, with the employment of &ldquo;day men&rdquo; to every
+five miles or so, they could be easily kept in order.&nbsp; The
+prospect induces him to rise to poetry:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;First, let the ways be regularly brought<br
+/>
+To artificial form, and truly wrought;<br />
+So that we can suppose them firmly mended,<br />
+And in all needful points, the work well ended,<br />
+That not a stone&rsquo;s amiss; but all complete,<br />
+All lying smooth, round, firm, and wondrous neat.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>So far good.&nbsp; But then comes the heavy traffic to destroy
+the good work:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Then comes a gang of heavy-laden wains<br
+/>
+Of carts and wagons, spoiling all our pains.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But he is ready for this.&nbsp; His proposed &ldquo;day
+men&rdquo; by at once filling up the ruts would make the damage
+good.&nbsp; All these things he commends to the notice of his
+Majesty with the concluding lines:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s only one thing yet worth
+thinking on,<br />
+Which is, to put this work in execution.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>That it was <i>not</i> &ldquo;put into execution&rdquo; is a
+matter of history.</p>
+<p>We have seen that Mace calls the road to Scotland a
+&ldquo;highway,&rdquo; and the terms &ldquo;highroad&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;highway&rdquo; are common enough; but what really is a
+highroad? or rather, how did the term originate?&nbsp; Such a
+road is usually understood to be a main artery of traffic between
+important towns, but that was not precisely the original meaning,
+which indicated the physical character of the road rather than
+its geographical status.&nbsp; &ldquo;High roads&rdquo; were
+originally in fact, causeways constructed across, and above the
+level of, marshes and low-lying lands, and the term <a
+name="page9"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 9</span>was therefore
+excellently descriptive.&nbsp; The changed meaning no doubt arose
+from the fact that, as it would scarcely ever have been worth
+while to build embanked roads for the purpose of connecting
+obscure villages out of the way of trade, consequently the
+&ldquo;high ways&rdquo; and the &ldquo;high roads&rdquo; only
+came into existence between important centres.&nbsp; But this
+highly specialised meaning was destroyed when Turnpike Acts and
+Highway Acts began to be passed.&nbsp; The first Turnpike Act,
+one relating to the road to the North, referred to the
+Shoreditch, Stamford Hill, Ware, and Royston route, which joined
+the Great North Road at Alconbury Hill.&nbsp; It was passed in
+1663, and authorised a toll-gate at Stilton, among other
+places.&nbsp; In the preamble to this Act we find the road spoken
+of as &ldquo;the ancient highway and post-road leading from
+London to York and so into Scotland.&rdquo;&nbsp; Later Acts
+providing for the collection of tolls on the main roads and for
+the formation of Turnpike Trusts, whose business it was to
+collect those tolls and with them keep the &ldquo;turnpike&rdquo;
+roads in repair, named them &ldquo;turnpike roads&rdquo;; while
+other legislation, culminating in the General Highway Act of
+William the Fourth, perpetrated a delightful paradox by
+especially designating by-roads &ldquo;highways.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+cardinal difference, in the eyes of the law, was that a turnpike
+road was a main line of communication, to be maintained in proper
+order throughout its length by taxes collected from the users of
+the road; while highways were only local roads for local use and
+to be maintained by the respective parishes in which they were
+situated.&nbsp; The ways in which these parish roads were kept in
+repair were sufficiently curious.&nbsp; &ldquo;Statute
+labour&rdquo; preceded highway rates, and was so called from a
+statute of Philip and Mary providing for parish road-surveyors,
+and for men, horses, carts, and materials to be supplied by the
+farmers at their orders, for repairs.&nbsp; &ldquo;Statute
+labour&rdquo; survived in a fashion until the passing of the
+General Highway Act of 1835, when it was wholly superseded by
+rates.&nbsp; In later days parishes united <a
+name="page10"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 10</span>and formed
+Highway Boards, just as they formed Poor Law Unions; and choosing
+a surveyor, levied a common highway rate.&nbsp; These surveyors
+were not always, nor often, competent men.&nbsp; They were, in
+fact, generally elected by the Boards or the Vestries from some
+necessitous inhabitants little above the status of the
+broken-down old men who were paid a trifle to break or spread
+stones in order to keep them from being burdens to the parish in
+the workhouse.&nbsp; These surveyors were appointed and work done
+in fear of the parishes being indicted and heavily fined for the
+dangerous condition of their roads, but it is obvious that they
+must have been very badly repaired in those times.&nbsp; Nowadays
+the roads are all highways, since the turnpikes have been
+abolished, and their repair, outside the boroughs, is the
+business of the County Councils.</p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Before</span> Macadam and Telford appeared
+upon the scene, the office of road-surveyor was very generally
+looked down upon.&nbsp; No self-respecting engineer, before the
+time of these great men, condescended to have anything to do with
+roads.&nbsp; It is true that a forerunner of Macadam and Telford
+had appeared in Yorkshire in 1765, when &ldquo;Blind Jack of
+Knaresborough&rdquo; began the construction of the Boroughbridge
+and Harrogate road, the first of the long series for which he
+contracted; but he was not an official road-surveyor, nor by
+profession an engineer.&nbsp; He was, in fact, an engineer born
+and wholly untaught.</p>
+<p>John Metcalf, the famous blind roadmaker, was born in 1717,
+and lost his eyesight at six years of age.&nbsp; <a
+name="page11"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 11</span>A native of
+Knaresborough, he filled in his time many parts; being fiddler,
+huckster, soldier, carrier, proprietor of the first stage-wagon
+between York and Knaresborough, and road and bridge maker and
+contractor by turns.&nbsp; The marvellous instinct which served
+him instead of sight is scarce credible, but is well
+authenticated.&nbsp; He joined Thornton&rsquo;s company of
+Yorkshire volunteers raised at Boroughbridge to meet the Scots
+rebels in the &rsquo;45, and marched with them and played them
+into action at Falkirk.&nbsp; His marvellous adventures have no
+place here, but his solitary walk from London to Harrogate in
+1741 concerns the Great North Road.&nbsp; Being in London, and
+returning at the same time, Colonel Liddell of Harrogate offered
+Blind Jack a seat behind his carriage, which Metcalf declined,
+saying that he could easily walk as far in a day as the colonel
+could go in his carriage with post-horses.&nbsp; This
+incidentally shows us how utterly vile the roads were at the
+time.&nbsp; Metcalf, although blind and unused to the road,
+having travelled up to London by sea, walked back, and easily
+reached Harrogate before the colonel, who posted all the way.</p>
+<p>Liddell, who had an escort of sixteen mounted servants,
+started an hour later than Metcalf.&nbsp; It had been arranged
+that they should meet that night at Welwyn, but, a little beyond
+Barnet, on Hadley Green, where the roads divide, Metcalf took the
+left hand, or Holyhead, road by mistake and went a long distance
+before he discovered his mistake.&nbsp; Still he arrived at
+Welwyn first.&nbsp; The next day he was balked at Biggleswade by
+the river, which was in flood, and with no bridge to cross
+by.&nbsp; Fortunately, after wandering some distance along the
+banks, he met a stranger who led the way across a plank
+bridge.&nbsp; When they had crossed, Metcalf offered him some
+pence for a glass of beer, which his guide declined, saying he
+was welcome.&nbsp; Metcalf, however, pressed it upon him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pray, can you see very well?&rdquo; asked the
+stranger.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Not very well,&rdquo; replied Blind Jack.</p>
+<p><a name="page12"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+12</span>&ldquo;God forbid I should tithe you,&rdquo; said his
+guide.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am the rector of this parish; so God bless
+you, and I wish you a good journey.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In the end, Metcalf reached Harrogate two days before the
+colonel.</p>
+<p>Metcalf made many roads around Knaresborough and in different
+parts of Yorkshire, but none actually on the Great North
+Road.&nbsp; He died, aged ninety-three, in 1810, five years
+before Macadam and Telford began their work upon the roads.&nbsp;
+Like them, he rather preferred boggy ground for road-making, and
+forestalled both them and Stephenson in adopting fagots as
+foundations over mires.&nbsp; At that time the ignorant surveyors
+of roads repaired them with dirt scraped from ditches and
+water-courses, in which they embedded the first cartloads of
+stones which came to hand; stone of all kinds and all
+sizes.&nbsp; This done, their &ldquo;repairs&rdquo; were
+completed, with the result that the roads were frequently as bad
+as ever and constantly in the most rugged condition.&nbsp;
+Roads&mdash;it may be news to the uninstructed&mdash;cannot be
+made with dirt.&nbsp; In fact, a good road through anything but
+rock is generally excavated, and the native earth being removed,
+its place is taken by coarse-broken granite or rock; this in its
+turn receiving a layer of &ldquo;macadam,&rdquo; or smaller
+broken granite or whinstone, which is finally bound together by a
+sprinkling of red gravel, of the kind known by builders as
+&ldquo;hoggin,&rdquo; whose binding qualities are caused by a
+slight natural admixture of clay.&nbsp; In his insistence upon
+broken stones, Macadam proved a power of observation not
+possessed by the generality of road-makers, whose method was the
+haphazard one of strewing any kind upon the road and trusting in
+the traffic to pack them.&nbsp; With rounded pebbles or gravel
+stones thus chafing against one another, they never packed into a
+solid mass, but remained for all time as unstable as a shingly
+beach.&nbsp; Generations of road-making had not taught wisdom,
+but Macadam perceived the readiness of the angularities in broken
+stones to unite and form a homogeneous <a name="page13"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 13</span>mass, and in introducing his system
+proved himself unwittingly a man of science, for science has in
+these later days discovered that ice is compacted by the action
+of ice-crystals uniting in exactly this manner.</p>
+<p>A great scheme for laying out the whole of the Great North
+Road between London and Edinburgh on a scientific basis was in
+progress when the successful trial of the competing locomotives
+at Rainhill, near Liverpool, cast a warning shadow over the
+arrangements, and finally led to the project being entirely
+abandoned.&nbsp; Had the work been done, it is quite possible
+that the railways to the north would have taken another
+direction; that, in fact, instead of land having to be surveyed
+and purchased for them, the new, straight, and level road would
+have been given up to and largely used by the railways.&nbsp;
+Telford was the engineer chosen by the Government to execute this
+work, of which the portion between Morpeth and Edinburgh was
+actually constructed.&nbsp; The survey of the road between
+London, York, and Morpeth was begun as early as 1825, and had
+been not only completed, but the works on the eve of being
+started, when the Rainhill trials in 1829 stopped them short, and
+caused the utter waste of the public money spent in the
+surveying.</p>
+<h2>III</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> were vain, nowadays, to seek any
+of the old starting-points from London.&nbsp; The late Mr.
+Frederick Locker-Lampson asked in 1896, &ldquo;Are &lsquo;The
+Bull and Mouth,&rsquo; &lsquo;The Spread Eagle,&rsquo; The Swan
+with Two Necks,&rsquo; and &lsquo;The Green Man and Still,&rsquo;
+yet in existence?&rdquo;&nbsp; With <a name="page14"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 14</span>some little research he would have
+discovered that&mdash;with the sole exception of the
+last-named&mdash;they are not.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Bull and
+Mouth&rdquo; in later years became the &ldquo;Queen&rsquo;s
+Hotel,&rdquo; and was demolished only when the site was required
+for an extension of the General Post Office in 1887.&nbsp; At the
+same time as the &ldquo;Queen&rsquo;s&rdquo; disappeared, the
+street at the side of it, called from the old inn &ldquo;Bull and
+Mouth Street,&rdquo; was stopped up.&nbsp; In this street was the
+entrance to the famous old coaching-stables which were in the
+last years of their existence used as a railway receiving-office
+for goods.&nbsp; On their being pulled down, the grotesque
+plaster sign, representing a giant face with yawning mouth in
+which stood a bull, was removed to the Guildhall Museum, where it
+may still be seen, together with the yet larger and more
+elaborate sign which decorated the frontage of the
+&ldquo;Queen&rsquo;s.&rdquo;&nbsp; This also included a mouth and
+a bull, set amidst a frame of plaster fruits and flowers, with
+the inscription:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Milo the Cretonian,<br />
+An ox slew with his fist,<br />
+And ate it up at one meal,<br />
+Ye gods! what a glorious twist.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The origin, however, of the curious sign had nothing to do
+with this hungry person.&nbsp; Precisely what was that origin is
+never likely to be known; for although the legend that it derived
+from the capture of &ldquo;Boulogne
+Mouth&rdquo;&mdash;<i>i.e.</i> Boulogne Harbour&mdash;in the
+reign of Henry the Eighth is in general acceptation, it has been
+shrewdly suspected that this was a tale wickedly invented by
+George Steevens, a literary practical joker, who palmed off many
+similar stories upon unsuspecting antiquaries at the end of last
+century.&nbsp; A perhaps more likely story is that the sign was
+originally the &ldquo;Bowl and Mouth.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Under Sherman&rsquo;s rule the &ldquo;Bull and Mouth&rdquo;
+became a mighty resort of coaches to and from all parts, but more
+especially the north, and his <a name="page15"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 15</span>underground stables formed one of the
+sights of London.</p>
+<p>Edward Sherman was a man of many parts, and had a varied
+career.&nbsp; Originally a stockbroker, he followed Willans at
+the &ldquo;Bull and Mouth&rdquo; in 1823, and rebuilt it as the
+&ldquo;Queen&rsquo;s&rdquo; in 1830, continuing the stables under
+the old name, and eventually reconstructing them.&nbsp; The money
+for these enterprises came from three old and wealthy ladies whom
+he married in succession.&nbsp; If the stranger, unversed in the
+build and colour of coaches, could not pick out the somewhat
+old-fashioned, bright-yellow vehicles as Sherman&rsquo;s, he was
+helped in identifying them by the pictorial sign of the inn
+painted on the panels&mdash;rather a startling one, by the way,
+to the rustics.&nbsp; Sherman, however, had not the prescience of
+Chaplin or of Horne, who clearly foresaw the success of railways,
+and he kept his coaches on the roads for some time after they
+were opened to their destinations.&nbsp; He was sufficiently
+ill-advised not to come to terms with the railway companies, and
+actually attempted, with the &ldquo;Red Rover,&rdquo; to run the
+Manchester trains off.&nbsp; Of course this could not last very
+long, and Sherman withdrew after having lost seven thousand
+pounds in a gallant, but futile, competition with steam.</p>
+<p>In its prime the &ldquo;Bull and Mouth&rdquo; sent forth the
+Edinburgh and Aberdeen Royal Mail by York; the Edinburgh,
+Glasgow, and Aberdeen coach by Ferry-bridge to Newcastle, where
+the Glasgow passengers changed; the Glasgow and Carlisle Royal
+Mail; the Newcastle &ldquo;Wellington&rdquo;; Shrewsbury and
+Holyhead &ldquo;Union&rdquo; and &ldquo;Oxonian&rdquo;;
+Birmingham &ldquo;Old Post Coach&rdquo; and &ldquo;Aurora&rdquo;;
+Leeds Royal Mail and &ldquo;Express&rdquo;; and Leicester
+&ldquo;Union Post Coach.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The site of the &ldquo;Swan with Two Necks&rdquo; is now
+occupied by the London and North-Western and South-Western Joint
+Goods Depot, in Gresham Street.&nbsp; Modern sculptured keystones
+may be seen over the <a name="page16"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 16</span>entrances, bearing the effigy of a
+double-headed swan.&nbsp; This sign, like that of the &ldquo;Bull
+and Mouth,&rdquo; is a corruption of a widely different term;
+originally, indeed, the &ldquo;Swan with Two Nicks,&rdquo; from
+the particular &ldquo;nicks&rdquo; with which the bills of the
+swans belonging to the Vintners&rsquo; Company on the Thames were
+marked.&nbsp; The City Companies each had their swans on the
+river, and even nowadays they are maintained on the upper
+reaches.&nbsp; The young cygnets were marked at the annual
+festival of &ldquo;swan-upping,&rdquo; at which the City magnates
+used hugely to enjoy themselves.&nbsp; The old and the new
+&ldquo;nicks&rdquo; of the Vintners&rsquo; Company are pictured
+here.</p>
+<p>
+<a name="image16" href="images/p16.jpg">
+<img class='floatright' alt=
+"Old And New Swan Nicks"
+title=
+"Old And New Swan Nicks"
+ src="images/p16.jpg" />
+</a>So far back as 1556, the &ldquo;Swane with ij Nekes at Mylke
+Street End&rdquo; was known, and was then the property of the
+Vintners.&nbsp; In the coaching era it is best remembered as the
+headquarters of the great William Chaplin&rsquo;s huge coaching
+business.&nbsp; Chaplin succeeded William Waterhouse, who had
+established himself here in 1792, issuing a curious token bearing
+the representation of a mail-coach on one side and that of the
+Double-Necked Swan on the other, with the legend, &ldquo;Speed,
+Regularity, and Security.&nbsp; Payable at the Mail Coach Office,
+Lad Lane, London, W.W.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Lad Lane was until recent years the name by which this part of
+Gresham Street was known, while the inn itself was generally
+called by the coaching fraternity the &ldquo;Wonderful
+Bird.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Chaplin had in early days been a coachman himself.&nbsp; His
+career would have delighted that sturdy moralist, Hogarth,
+painter of the successful career of the Industrious Apprentice,
+for from that useful but humble position he rose to be the
+largest coach-proprietor in England, Deputy-Chairman of the
+London <a name="page17"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 17</span>and
+Southampton (now London and South-Western) Railway, and Member of
+Parliament for Salisbury.&nbsp; He is said to have accumulated
+half a million of money.&nbsp; Twenty-seven mails left London
+every night, and of these Chaplin horsed fourteen for various
+distances.&nbsp; Very many stage-coaches were in his hands, and
+at the height of the coaching era he is said to have owned nearly
+two thousand horses.&nbsp; He was an entirely level-headed man,
+and, seeing at an early stage that railways must succeed, threw
+in his lot with them.&nbsp; Railway directors were exceedingly
+anxious to win over the coaching proprietors, and to induce them
+to withdraw from the road, so that with no coaches running the
+public should of necessity, whether they liked it or not, be
+compelled to travel by rail.&nbsp; Chaplin sold off his stock
+before the oncoming railways depreciated it, and, joining
+Benjamin Worthy Horne, of the &ldquo;Golden Cross,&rdquo; Charing
+Cross, founded the great carrying firm of Chaplin and Horne,
+which enjoyed the exclusive agency for the London and Birmingham
+Railway.&nbsp; There can be little doubt, although it was <a
+name="page18"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 18</span>denied by the
+early officials of that line, that Chaplin and Horne were really
+bought off the road, and the sum of &pound;10,000 has been
+mentioned as the price of their withdrawal.&nbsp; Before that
+time had come, coaches issued from Chaplin&rsquo;s yard for many
+places on the north-western roads: the Carlisle Royal Mail; the
+Birmingham Royal Mail, &ldquo;Courier,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Balloon
+Post Coach&rdquo;; the Chester &ldquo;New Coach&rdquo;; Coventry
+&ldquo;Light Post Coach&rdquo;; Liverpool Royal Mail; Holyhead
+&ldquo;New Mail&rdquo; and a stage-coach without any particular
+name; and the Manchester Royal Mail, &ldquo;Defiance,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Regulator,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Prince
+Saxe-Cobourg.&rdquo;&nbsp; The &ldquo;Spread Eagle&rdquo; in
+Gracechurch Street has also disappeared.&nbsp; It was at one time
+a house of Chaplin&rsquo;s, and was afterwards owned in
+succession, together with the &ldquo;Cross Keys&rdquo; next door,
+by Mrs. Nelson and Mrs. Mountain.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image17" href="images/p17.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Modern sign of the &ldquo;Swan with Two Necks&rdquo;"
+title=
+"Modern sign of the &ldquo;Swan with Two Necks&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p17.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Green Man and Still,&rdquo; the last of the quartet
+of inns inquired after by Mr. Locker-Lampson, is the only one now
+standing, and may be seen at the corner of Oxford and Argyll
+Streets, close by Oxford Circus.&nbsp; It was not a coaching
+hostelry in the fullest sense, being only a place of call for the
+Oxford &ldquo;Age,&rdquo; and for the Harrow and other
+north-westerly &ldquo;short stages,&rdquo; running between London
+and the suburbs.&nbsp; It is now a railway
+receiving-office.&nbsp; This curious sign probably alludes to the
+old profession of the &ldquo;herb-doctors,&rdquo; who distilled
+medicines from wild or cultivated herbs.&nbsp; There were other
+inns whence Great North Road coaches set out, but they have all
+vanished.&nbsp; The &ldquo;George and Blue Boar,&rdquo; Holborn,
+whence the famous &ldquo;Stamford Regent&rdquo; started, has long
+since been pulled down, and the &ldquo;Inns of Court Hotel&rdquo;
+stood on its site.&nbsp; The hotel building remains, but about
+1912 it ceased to be a hotel, and has since been converted into
+offices for an Insurance Company.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Regent&rdquo;
+originally left London at six o&rsquo;clock in the evening, but
+in 1822 the hour was altered to six in the morning, an unearthly
+time for those who had to go some distance <a
+name="page21"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 21</span>to reach
+Holborn, and necessitating, perhaps, getting up at three
+o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; The announcement by the proprietors that
+this alteration was for the &ldquo;more perfect
+convenience&rdquo; of their patrons seems ironical:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">SIX O&rsquo;CLOCK IN THE MORNING</span><br />
+From London.</p>
+
+<div class="gapshortline">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">THE
+PROPRIETORS OF</span><br />
+THE REGENT COACH</p>
+<p>Respectfully inform the public and their friends in
+particular, that, for their more perfect convenience, and to keep
+pace with the daily improvements in travelling, the hour of its
+leaving London will be altered on Monday, the 13th of May (and
+continued during the summer months),</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">TO SIX
+O&rsquo;CLOCK IN THE MORNING,</span><br />
+<i>Instead of Night</i>.</p>
+<p>The arrangements that are forming in furtherance of this
+long-desired alteration will ensure a steady and punctual
+conveyance of Passengers to Stamford by a Quarter before Six
+o&rsquo;clock, and to Melton by a Quarter before Nine
+o&rsquo;clock in the Evening.</p>
+<p>The hours of leaving Melton and Stamford will NOT be
+altered.</p>
+<p>The proprietors take this opportunity to acknowledge their
+sense of the decided patronage shown to the <span
+class="smcap">Regent Coach</span> under their several
+regulations, and to repeat their promise that no exertion shall
+be wanting to make it one of the most desirable conveyances to
+and from London.</p>
+<p>Passengers and Parcels booked at Mr. Weldon&rsquo;s, and the
+Bull and Swan Inn, Stamford; and at Mr. Sharp&rsquo;s, Bell Inn,
+Melton.&mdash;<i>Stamford</i>, <i>May</i> 1, 1822.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image19" href="images/p19.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Spread Eagle,&rdquo; Gracechurch Street"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Spread Eagle,&rdquo; Gracechurch Street"
+ src="images/p19.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo; Snow Hill, which must
+not he confounded with the other and equally celebrated
+&ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head&rdquo; in Aldgate High Street, was
+another very notable coaching establishment, and a galleried inn
+of picturesqueness and antiquity.&nbsp; Alas! that it has long
+since disappeared.&nbsp; Its history went back beyond the
+fifteenth century, and a reference made to it in 1522, when the
+suite of the Emperor Charles the Fifth lay here, speaks of the
+house as of <a name="page22"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+22</span>some importance:&mdash;&ldquo;The signe of the Sersyns
+hed: xxx beddes, a stable for xl horses.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The sign, of course deriving from the Crusades, itself gives
+the inn a very high antiquity.&nbsp; It was a sign of a gruesome
+and savage aspect, and had its origin in the pictures the
+returning Crusaders drew of their adversaries.&nbsp; As Selden
+says:&mdash;&ldquo;Our countrymen pictured them with huge, big,
+terrible faces, when in truth they were like other men.&nbsp; But
+this,&rdquo; he adds slyly, &ldquo;they did for their own
+credits.&rdquo;&nbsp; The inn owed its later celebrity to
+Dickens, who made it the London inn of Mr. Squeers.&nbsp; Thus he
+describes it:&mdash;&ldquo;Near to the jail, and by consequence
+near to Smithfield, on that particular part of Snow Hill where
+omnibus horses going eastward seriously think of falling down on
+purpose, and where horses in hackney cabriolets going westward
+not unfrequently fall by accident, is the coachyard of the
+Saracen&rsquo;s Head Inn; its portal guarded by two
+Saracens&rsquo; heads and shoulders frowning upon you from each
+side of the gateway.&nbsp; The inn itself, garnished with another
+Saracen&rsquo;s head, frowns upon you from the top of the
+yard.&nbsp; When you walk up this yard you will see the
+booking-office on your left and the tower of St.
+Sepulchre&rsquo;s Church darting abruptly up into the sky on your
+right, and a gallery of bedrooms upon both sides.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There is a &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head&rdquo; on Snow Hill to
+this day, but it is a modern building.&nbsp; From the old house
+went the &ldquo;Lord Nelson,&rdquo; York, Newcastle, and
+Edinburgh coach; the &ldquo;Post,&rdquo; despite its name, a
+slow-coach, for Carlisle and Penrith, by Doncaster, Ferrybridge,
+and Greta Bridge, doubtless the one by which Mr. Wackford Squeers
+took his &ldquo;dear pupils&rdquo; to Dotheboys Hall; and coaches
+to Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, and Shrewsbury,
+besides others for the western roads.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head&rdquo; was kept by Mrs. Mountain, in
+succession to her husband and her husband&rsquo;s father.&nbsp;
+Her son, Peter, managed the business for her, but it must not be
+supposed that she took no active part in it.&nbsp; To the <a
+name="page25"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 25</span>contrary,
+Mrs. Sarah Ann Mountain, like her contemporary, Mrs. Nelson, of
+the &ldquo;Bull,&rdquo; Aldgate, possessed the most brilliant
+business capacity.&nbsp; She built coaches, as well as horsing
+them, and earned a profit by charging her partners down the road
+the mileage which in the usual course of business would have been
+paid over to a coach-builder.&nbsp; There was no more expressive
+sight in the London of the beginning of the nineteenth century
+than the simultaneous starting of the mails every evening from
+the General Post Office.&nbsp; Londoners and country-cousins
+alike were never weary of the spectacle of the smart coaches, the
+business-like coachmen, and the resplendent, scarlet-coated
+guards preparing to travel through the night, north, south, east,
+or west, with his Majesty&rsquo;s mails.&nbsp; Even the
+passengers shone with a reflected glory, and felt important as,
+one after the other, the twenty-seven mails began at the stroke
+of eight o&rsquo;clock to move off from the double file that
+lined the street.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image23" href="images/p23.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo; Snow Hill"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo; Snow Hill"
+ src="images/p23.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>That street was not the broad thoroughfare of St.
+Martin&rsquo;s-le-Grand, but the narrow one of Lombard Street, in
+which the General Post Office was situated for many years, until
+1829, when what is now called the &ldquo;old&rdquo; General Post
+Office, but was then the newly completed building of
+Smirke&rsquo;s, was occupied.&nbsp; The old headquarters can
+still be seen, in the Lombard Street Post Office of to-day.&nbsp;
+It is from here that the picture of the mails starting, forming
+the frontispiece of this volume, was taken.&nbsp; To our eyes,
+accustomed to the crowded thoroughfare of modern times, the
+street appears supremely dull and desolate, but that is only a
+retrospective way of looking at it.</p>
+<p>Here is a testimony to the beauty of the scene.&nbsp; It is
+eloquent testimony, for it is De Quincey&rsquo;s:&mdash;&ldquo;On
+any night the spectacle was beautiful.&nbsp; The absolute
+perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the
+harness, their strength, their brilliant cleanliness, their
+beautiful simplicity&mdash;but, more than all, the royal
+magnificence of the horses&mdash;were what <a
+name="page26"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 26</span>might first
+have fixed the attention.&nbsp; Every carriage, on every morning
+of the year, was taken down to an official inspector for
+examination&mdash;wheels, axles, linchpins, poles, glasses,
+lamps, were all critically probed and tested.&nbsp; Every part of
+every carriage had been cleaned, every horse had been groomed,
+with as much rigour as if they belonged to a private gentleman;
+and that part of the spectacle offered itself always. . . .&nbsp;
+Every moment are shouted aloud by the post-office servants, and
+summoned to draw up, the great ancestral names of cities known to
+history through a thousand years&mdash;Lincoln, Winchester,
+Portsmouth, Gloucester, Oxford, Bristol, Manchester, York,
+Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Stirling,
+Aberdeen&mdash;expressing the grandeur of the empire by the
+antiquity of its towns, and the grandeur of the mail
+establishment by the diffusive radiation of its separate
+missions.&nbsp; Every moment you hear the thunder of lids locked
+down upon the mail-bags.&nbsp; That sound to each individual mail
+is the signal for drawing off, which process is the finest part
+of the entire spectacle.&nbsp; Then came the horses into
+play.&nbsp; Horses!&nbsp; Can these be horses that bound off with
+the action and gestures of leopards?&nbsp; What stir! what
+sea-like ferment! what a thundering of wheels! what a trampling
+of hoofs! what a sounding of trumpets!&rdquo;</p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Now</span> for Post Office history.&nbsp;
+Much has been made at the &ldquo;old&rdquo; General Post Office
+in St. Martin&rsquo;s-le-Grand; and although the building was not
+in existence until 1829, it has sent forth and received many
+mail-coaches.&nbsp; Its disappearance in 1912, we say, therefore
+severs the last link by which this busy quarter was connected
+with the old days.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image27" href="images/p27.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Mails starting from the General Post Office, 1832"
+title=
+"The Mails starting from the General Post Office, 1832"
+ src="images/p27.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The story of the Post Office goes back long before the G.P.O.
+was situated either here or at Lombard Street.&nbsp; The original
+Post Office was off Eastcheap.&nbsp; <a name="page29"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 29</span>When it was there, the course of post
+between London and Edinburgh took three days.&nbsp; The first
+regular service was established in 1635, when Charles the First,
+to end the inefficiency of the communications between the two
+capitals, inaugurated &ldquo;a running post or two, to run night
+and day, between Edinburgh and London, to go thither and come
+back again in six days.&rdquo;&nbsp; We may suppose that this did
+not work very well, for in 1649 we find the city of London
+establishing a post of its own with a regular staff of runners
+and postmasters between London and the North.</p>
+<p>But with the Restoration came the establishment of the General
+Post Office and an instantaneous decline in the efficiency of the
+post, six days instead of three being taken for the single
+journey to or from Edinburgh.&nbsp; This roused the towns on the
+way to indignant protests, and the post was accelerated to
+&ldquo;three and a half or four days,&rdquo; the acceleration
+being slower than the original time.</p>
+<p>But however keenly the intermediate towns may have felt this,
+it could not have mattered much to Edinburgh, whose mail-bag was
+very scanty.&nbsp; One day in 1745, we are told, the mail brought
+only one letter, for the British Linen Company; and on another
+day in the same year only one was despatched to London, for Sir
+William Pulteney, the banker.</p>
+<p>In 1750 things were no better, but eight years later an
+Edinburgh merchant, George Chalmers, procured an
+improvement.&nbsp; Before 1758 the Great North Mail set out three
+times a week and took eighty-seven hours in going north, and not
+fewer than one hundred and thirty-one from Edinburgh to
+London.&nbsp; This last itinerary was lengthened so greatly in
+time on account of stoppages made at Berwick and at Newcastle,
+ranging from three hours at one to twenty-four at the
+other.&nbsp; These delays Chalmers, in corresponding with the
+officials, proved to be quite needless.&nbsp; He also induced
+them to avoid the old and longer route through Thorne and York
+and to take the alternative road by Boroughbridge, <a
+name="page30"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 30</span>thus
+shortening the journey by twelve miles.&nbsp; The times were then
+fixed at eighty-two hours for the northward-bound mail, and
+eighty-five for the south.&nbsp; For his services the Government
+made Chalmers a grant of &pound;600.&nbsp; Some years afterwards
+he induced the Post Office to run the mails six days a week.</p>
+<p>But a greater than Chalmers was at hand in Palmer, the
+organiser of the mail-coach service.&nbsp; Palmer accomplished,
+according to De Quincey, &ldquo;two things very hard to do on our
+little planet, the earth, however cheap they may be held by
+eccentric people in comets: he had invented mail-coaches, and he
+had married the daughter of a duke.&nbsp; He was therefore just
+twice as great a man as Galileo, who did certainly invent (or,
+which is the same thing, discover) the satellites of Jupiter,
+those very next things extant to mail-coaches in the two capital
+pretensions of speed and keeping time; but, on the other hand,
+who did not marry the daughter of a duke.&rdquo;&nbsp; Palmer
+married, in point of fact, Lady Madeline Gordon, daughter of the
+Duke of Richmond, but De Quincey does not lay the stress he
+should have done on his having fought his postal scheme to
+success against the obstinacy and red-tapeism of the Post Office
+officials, itself an enterprise sufficient to daunt any but the
+stoutest heart.&nbsp; Government officials have a wonderful power
+of passive resistance and an insensibility to argument and proof
+which might be envied by a lamp-post.&nbsp; It was thought a
+brilliant rejoinder when one of these Post Office dunderheads
+replied to Palmer&rsquo;s scheme for supplanting the slow and
+uncertain post-boys by fast coaches with the observation that
+there was no reason why the post should be the swiftest
+conveyance in England!&nbsp; No doubt this witty gentleman
+resigned in an access of mortification when Palmer actually
+succeeded in being appointed Controller-General of the Post
+Office, with a salary of &pound;1,500 a year and a two and a-half
+per cent. commission on a rise of the income above the
+&pound;240,000 at which it stood when he was placed at the head
+of affairs.&nbsp; The first mail-coach was put upon <a
+name="page31"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 31</span>the Bath Road
+on the 8th of August 1784, and its success was so great and
+immediate that the chief towns of the kingdom presently began to
+petition for similar facilities to be accorded them.&nbsp; York
+was the first successful applicant, and a mail was put on the
+road between London, York, and Edinburgh in October of the same
+year, taking three nights and two days to perform the
+journey.&nbsp; This was not a very remarkable rate of speed, to
+be sure, but the times were not so hurried then.&nbsp; A greater
+speed was attained when the roads began to be reorganised by
+Telford and Macadam.&nbsp; Macadam&rsquo;s method of metalling
+the existing roads and Telford&rsquo;s reconstruction of steep
+and winding highways produced great results.&nbsp; To Macadam was
+due the greater speeds attained at last on the mail route between
+London and Edinburgh; for, although Telford&rsquo;s improved road
+was begun in 1824, it was never completed owing to the
+introduction of railways.&nbsp; Government had, in fact, by this
+time recognised the necessity of good roads, and, fresh from the
+reorganisation of the mail route between London and Holyhead, had
+determined on an improved communication between England and
+Scotland.&nbsp; This road, already referred to, was to be
+straight and as flat as engineering science could contrive it,
+and a portion&mdash;that between Edinburgh and Morpeth&mdash;was
+constructed about 1824, going by way of Soutra Hill, Lauderdale,
+Coldstream, and Wooler.&nbsp; The route between London and
+Morpeth was also surveyed and authorised, and portions between
+London and York actually begun, when the opening of the Stockton
+and Darlington Railway in 1825 convinced the authorities that the
+days of the road were numbered.</p>
+<p>But although it was long apparent that a change was impending,
+coaches were not entirely run off the Great North Road for
+another twenty years, and Post Office surveyors were still busy
+expediting the mails over short cuts and roads of more favourable
+gradients.&nbsp; Thus in 1832 we find the Scotch mail <a
+name="page32"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 32</span>going by way
+of Selby.&nbsp; Here is the official time-bill for that
+year:&mdash;</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p><span class="GutSmall">MILES</span></p>
+</td>
+<td colspan="3"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">London</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">dep.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">8.00 <span
+class="GutSmall">P.M.</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">12&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Waltham Cross</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">9.25&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">22</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Ware</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10.26&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">35&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Buckland</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11.52&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">45&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Arrington</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">12.57 <span
+class="GutSmall">A.M.</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">60</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Huntingdon</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">2.30&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">65&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Alconbury Hill</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3.03&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">72&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Stilton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3.45&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">87</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Stamford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">5.15&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">95</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Stretton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">6.03&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">108&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Grantham</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">7.23&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">dep.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">8.03&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">115&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Long Bennington</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">8.53&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">122&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Newark</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">9.30&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">132&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Scarthing Moor</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10.34&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">145&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Barnby Moor</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11.49&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">155&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Rossington Bridge</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">12.47 <span
+class="GutSmall">P.M.</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">159&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Doncaster</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">1.12&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">166&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Askerne</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">1.55&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">179&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Selby</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3.21&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">194</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">York</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">4.54&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">dep.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">5.34&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">207&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Easingwold</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">6.54&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">218</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Thirsk</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">7.58&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">227</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Northallerton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">8.52&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">243</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Darlington</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10.28&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">261&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Durham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">12.23&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">276</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Newcastle-on-Tyne</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">1.50&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">dep.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">1.53&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">290&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Morpeth</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3.22&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">300&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Felton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">4.23&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">309&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Alnwick</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">5.17&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">324&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Belford</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">6.47&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">dep.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">7.17&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">329&frac34;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Berwick-on-Tweed</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">arr.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">8.47&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">353&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Houndswood</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10.09&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">369&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Dunbar</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11.41&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">380&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Haddington</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">12.45 <span
+class="GutSmall">P.M.</span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">397&frac14;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p><span class="smcap">Edinburgh</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">2.23&nbsp; ,,</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="4"><p style="text-align:
+center"><i>Time</i>&mdash;42 hours 23 minutes</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p><a name="page33"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 33</span>The
+&ldquo;up&rdquo; mail was timed considerably slower, 45 hours 39
+minutes.</p>
+<p>The punctuality of the mails was so great that the Glasgow and
+the Edinburgh mails, which went by Shoreditch and Islington
+respectively, and took different routes as far as Alconbury Hill,
+where their roads met, could always be depended upon to keep the
+official interval of four minutes which divided them at that
+point.&nbsp; Their route was identical between Alconbury Hill and
+Doncaster, where the Glasgow mail branched off to the left to
+Ferrybridge and Greta Bridge.</p>
+<p>This was the <i>ne plus ultra</i> of Post Office enterprise on
+the Great North Road, and closes an era.</p>
+<h2>V</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> have seen with what
+extraordinary speed letters were carried in the time of Charles
+the First between London and Edinburgh; but how did folk
+travel?&nbsp; They rode horseback, from kings, to nobles, and
+down to merchants; princesses, madam, or my lady riding
+pillion.&nbsp; Private carriages&mdash;&ldquo;coaches,&rdquo;
+they were called&mdash;had been introduced in 1553, when Queen
+Mary rode in one, as a novelty, from London to Westminster, drawn
+by six horses.&nbsp; In 1556 Sir Thomas Hoby had one of these
+strange machines, and just because the fact is expressly
+mentioned we see how rare they were.&nbsp; In fact, they went out
+of use altogether for a time, and were reintroduced by William
+Boonen, Queen Elizabeth&rsquo;s Dutch coachman, in 1564.&nbsp; On
+this occasion they came into better favour, and their numbers
+must have greatly increased, for a Bill &ldquo;to restrain their
+excessive use&rdquo; was introduced to Parliament, and rejected,
+in 1601.&nbsp; But both their make and the fearful condition of
+the roads forbade them being used in the country.&nbsp; Moreover,
+they had only shutters in place of windows, the first
+&ldquo;glass coach&rdquo; being that used by the Duke of York in
+1661.</p>
+<p>It was in 1658 that the first stage-coach between <a
+name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 34</span>London and
+Edinburgh was put on the road.&nbsp; It set out once a fortnight,
+but the length of the whole journey and just what kind of vehicle
+it was are unknown.&nbsp; Four days, however, and two pounds were
+consumed in travelling between London and York.&nbsp; The cost of
+the whole journey was four pounds.</p>
+<p>In 1734 things do not seem to have been much better, John Dale
+advertising in the May of that year that a coach would take the
+road from Edinburgh for London &ldquo;towards the end of each
+week, to be performed in nine days, or three days sooner than any
+coach that travels that road.&rdquo;&nbsp; After this matters
+went from bad to worse, and speed was slower twenty years later
+than it had been for a long time.</p>
+<p>The <i>Edinburgh Courant</i> of 1754 contained the following
+advertisement:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">THE EDINBURGH STAGE
+COACH,</p>
+<p>for the better accommodation of passengers, will be altered to
+a new genteel, two-end, glass coach machine, being on steel
+springs, exceeding light, and easy to go in ten days in summer
+and twelve in winter; to set out the</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="smcap">First Tuesday
+in March</span>,</p>
+<p>and continue it from <span class="smcap">Hosea
+Eastgate&rsquo;s</span>, the <span class="smcap">Coach and
+Horses</span> in <span class="smcap">Dean Street</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Soho</span>, <span class="smcap">London</span>, and
+from <span class="smcap">John Somerville&rsquo;s</span> in the
+<span class="smcap">Canongate</span>, <span
+class="smcap">Edinburgh</span>, every other Tuesday, and meet at
+<span class="smcap">Burrow Bridge</span> on Saturday night and
+set out from thence on Monday morning, and get to <span
+class="smcap">London</span> and <span
+class="smcap">Edinburgh</span> on Friday.&nbsp; In winter to set
+out from <span class="smcap">London</span> to <span
+class="smcap">Edinburgh</span> every other (alternate) Monday
+morning, and to go to <span class="smcap">Burrow Bridge</span> on
+Saturday night.&nbsp; Passengers to pay as usual.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">Performed, if God permits, by</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">Your dutiful servant,<br />
+<span class="smcap">Hosea Eastgate</span>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Even Hosea Eastgate&rsquo;s conveyance stands forth as a
+miracle of swiftness and frequency when compared with the coach
+of 1763, which set out once a month and took a <i>fortnight</i>,
+<i>if the weather was favourable</i>!&nbsp; Probably this
+degeneracy of coaches was due to the practice of travellers
+clubbing together to hire a post-chaise for the journey.&nbsp;
+This was a plan eminently <a name="page35"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 35</span>characteristic of the Scottish
+mind.&nbsp; It both secured quicker travelling and saved
+expense.&nbsp; The Edinburgh papers of that time often contained
+advertisements inquiring for a fellow-passenger to share these
+costs and charges.</p>
+<p>Edinburgh, as a matter of fact, even now a far cry, was beyond
+the ken of most Londoners in those times, and London was to
+Edinburgh folks a place dimly heard of, and never to be visited,
+save perhaps once in a lifetime.&nbsp; York, half-way, was better
+known, and was well supplied with coaches.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Black
+Swan&rdquo; in Coney Street, York, received and sent forth a
+coach&mdash;in after years known as the &ldquo;York Old
+Coach&rdquo;&mdash;so early as 1698.&nbsp; This appears to have
+always laid up for the winter and come out again in April, like
+the cuckoo, as a harbinger of spring.&nbsp; One of these spring
+announcements was discovered, some years since, in an old drawer
+at the &ldquo;Black Swan.&rdquo;&nbsp; It runs:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="smcap">York</span> Four Days</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">Stage-Coach.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><i>Begins on Friday the</i>
+12<i>th</i> <i>of April</i> 1706.</p>
+<p><span class="smcap">All</span> that are defirous to pafs from
+<i>London</i> to <i>York</i>, or from York to London, or any
+other Place on that Road; Let them Repair to the <i>Black
+Swan</i> in <i>Holbourn</i> in <i>London</i>, and to the <i>Black
+Swan</i> in <i>Coney Street</i> in <i>York</i>.</p>
+<p>At both which Places they may be received in a Stage Coach
+every <i>Monday</i>, <i>Wednefday</i>, and <i>Friday</i>, which
+performs the whole Journey in Four Days (<i>if God
+permits</i>).&nbsp; And fets forth at Five in the Morning.</p>
+<p>And returns from <i>York</i> to <i>Stamford</i> in two days,
+and from <i>Stamford</i> by <i>Huntingdon</i> to <i>London</i> in
+two days more.&nbsp; And the like Stages on their return.</p>
+<p>Allowing each Paffenger 14lb. weight, and all above 3d. a
+Pound.</p>
+<p>Performed By</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><i>Benjamin Kingman</i>.<br />
+<i>Henry Harrifon</i>.<br />
+<i>Walter Bayne&rsquo;s</i>.</p>
+<p>Alfo this gives Notice that Newcaftle Stage Coach fets out
+from York every Monday and Friday, and from Newcaftle every
+Monday and Friday.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page36"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 36</span>It is
+singular that this coach should have had a &ldquo;Black
+Swan&rdquo; at either end of its journey.&nbsp; The London house
+was in later years the well-known &ldquo;Black Swan
+Distillery&rdquo; in Holborn.</p>
+<p>To display the many coaches, their names and times of arrival
+and departure in these pages would afford but dull reading.&nbsp;
+Besides, Paterson and Cary, those encyclop&aelig;dic old
+road-books, contain lists of them in interminable array: the
+&ldquo;Highflyers,&rdquo; &ldquo;Rockinghams,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Unions,&rdquo; &ldquo;Amitys,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Defiances,&rdquo; &ldquo;Wellingtons,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Bluchers,&rdquo; &ldquo;Nelsons,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Rodneys,&rdquo; and what not.&nbsp; There was so
+extraordinary a run upon these popular names that they are often
+triplicated&mdash;and sometimes occur six times&mdash;on the
+local and byroad coaches; with the result that if the traveller
+desired to travel by the &ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; let us say, to
+Edinburgh, he had to carefully sort it out from other
+&ldquo;Highflyers&rdquo; which flew not only to Leeds but to all
+kinds of obscure places.</p>
+<p>The early stage-coaches must have been terribly trying.&nbsp;
+They were, as Byron says of the &ldquo;kibitka,&rdquo; &ldquo;a
+cursed kind of carriage without springs.&rdquo;&nbsp; As time
+went on they were not only provided with glass windows,
+but&mdash;as duly set forth in the advertisements&mdash;were
+furnished with springs and cushions.&nbsp; The resources of
+civilisation were not exhausted at this point, for it was gravely
+announced that the guards were armed, and the coaches were
+bullet-proof!</p>
+<p>The life of a coach-proprietor was all hard work, with no
+little anxiety attached.&nbsp; Up early and to bed late&mdash;for
+on however large a scale his business might be, it was one
+peculiarly dependent upon the master&rsquo;s eye&mdash;he knew
+the inner meaning of the primeval curse, and earned his living by
+the sweat of his brow.&nbsp; And, lest that was not sufficient,
+the Government sweated him in a financial sense.&nbsp; The
+coaching business was the especial prey of Chancellors of the
+Exchequer, and yielded huge returns.&nbsp; If it be argued that
+coach-proprietors, unlike railway companies, had no parliamentary
+powers to obtain, <a name="page37"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+37</span>and no enormous expenses for purchase of land and
+construction of lines, this can be met by setting forth the heavy
+duties and taxes, the great outlay on turnpike tolls, and the
+relatively high cost of haulage by horses.&nbsp; The initial
+expenses of a railway are immense, the upkeep of lines and
+buildings large; but the actual cost of steam-power as against
+horse-traction is absurdly little.&nbsp; Railways, of course, pay
+passenger duty, and immense sums in the aggregate for rates and
+taxes; but they are not burdened as the coaches were.&nbsp; If it
+cost from &pound;3 10s. to &pound;6 15s. to travel
+&ldquo;outside&rdquo; or &ldquo;inside&rdquo; by ordinary
+stage-coach between London and Edinburgh, those high figures were
+the necessary results of Government exactions and turnpike
+imposts.&nbsp; Duties and taxes varied from time to time, but a
+stage-coach licensed, about 1830, to carry fifteen passengers
+paid a duty of threepence a mile, whether the coach carried a
+full load or not.&nbsp; Thus, for every single journey, a coach
+licensed to that extent paid &pound;4 19s. 3d.&nbsp; A coach
+could be licensed to carry a smaller number, when the duties
+would be proportionately lighter, and coaches licensed for
+fifteen or so during the summer would take out a licence for
+perhaps six or eight in winter, when travellers were few and far
+between.</p>
+<p>Suppose, now, that we roughly add up the working expenses of a
+stage-coach to Edinburgh.&nbsp; We start with the passenger-duty
+of &pound;4 19s. 3d.&nbsp; To this we add, say, &pound;4 for hire
+of coach at the rate of 2&frac12;d. a mile; &pound;4 19s. 3d. for
+horsing, at 3d. a mile; and &pound;6 12s., turnpikes, at
+4d.&nbsp; This gives a total of &pound;20 10s. 6d.&nbsp; But we
+have not yet done with expenses, including wages for coachmen,
+guards, ostlers, and helpers; advertising, rent, oil for lamps,
+greasing, washing, etc.</p>
+<p>There would be six, or perhaps seven, coachmen, one driving
+about sixty miles, when he would be relieved by another; and
+perhaps four guards, because guards, not having the physical
+exertion of driving, could go longer journeys.&nbsp; The
+proportion of their <a name="page38"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+38</span>week&rsquo;s wages must be added to the debit account
+for the one journey, together with the proportion of the &pound;5
+yearly tax payable for every coachman and guard employed, and a
+similar annual sum for the coach itself.&nbsp; Any more
+items?&nbsp; Oh yes!&nbsp; Office expenses, clerks, etc., and
+incidentals.&nbsp; If we lump all these items together, they will
+mean an additional &pound;12 cost on every journey to or from
+Edinburgh, bringing the cost to the proprietors to over
+&pound;32.</p>
+<p>Now for the other side of the account.&nbsp; Our coach is
+licensed for fifteen, and if we carry our four insides and eleven
+outsides all the way, it holds &pound;65 10s. at the fares named
+above&mdash;about 4d. and 2d. a mile respectively.&nbsp; But how
+often were those fifteen &ldquo;through&rdquo; passengers?&nbsp;
+Not more, perhaps, than half would be bound for Edinburgh.&nbsp;
+Others might alight at York, or even at Grantham or
+Stamford.&nbsp; Others, again, might go to Newcastle.&nbsp; For
+fares thus lost, the proprietors looked to chance passengers; but
+the shillings and perhaps the two shillings taken on the way for
+short distances went, by common consent, into the
+coachmen&rsquo;s and guards&rsquo; pockets, and were never
+entered on the way-bill.&nbsp; In this manner, and by their
+&ldquo;tips,&rdquo; the men added to their somewhat meagre wages,
+which, rightly considered, were retaining-fees rather than full
+payment.&nbsp; This practice was generally known as
+&ldquo;shouldering.&rdquo;&nbsp; Some proprietors, however, were
+stricter than others, and did not allow it.&nbsp; Of course it
+went on all the same, and the standing toast which they were
+compelled to give at annual coaching dinners, &ldquo;Success to
+shouldering,&rdquo; with the proviso, &ldquo;but don&rsquo;t let
+me find you at it,&rdquo; was a tacit acknowledgment of the
+custom.&nbsp; In later days, when proprietors paid slightly
+higher wages and tried to forbid tips, the coachmen were loth to
+give up these odd sums, for the diminution of tips was greater
+than the increase of wages.&nbsp; They then pocketed larger
+fares, and called the practice &ldquo;swallowing.&rdquo;&nbsp; A
+tale is told of a coach approaching town, and the coachman asking
+his box-seat passenger <a name="page39"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 39</span>if he had any luggage.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the passenger.&nbsp; &ldquo;Then,&rdquo;
+rejoined the coachman, &ldquo;do you mind getting down here, sir,
+because I mean to swallow you.&rdquo;&nbsp; The passenger got
+down, and was &ldquo;swallowed&rdquo; accordingly.</p>
+<p>The average takings of the coach would certainly never, at the
+best of it, come to more than &pound;50 a journey, leaving a
+balance of &pound;15 10s. profit.&nbsp; Now, taking a year of
+three hundred and thirteen days, and coaches &ldquo;up&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;down,&rdquo; this gives a profit of
+&pound;9,702&mdash;not, be it borne in mind, going to one
+man.&nbsp; The &ldquo;end men&rdquo; had the greatest share, as
+they had also the heaviest expenses, and the &ldquo;middle-ground
+men&rdquo; got little beyond the mileage on which they horsed the
+coaches; but with twenty-five stages or so, and twenty-five
+participants in the profits, it will be seen that the individual
+earnings on one coach could not be classed very high.</p>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was a costly as well as a
+lengthy business to travel from London to Edinburgh.&nbsp; Not so
+lengthy, of course, by mail as by stage-coach, but much more
+expensive.&nbsp; If you wished to take it comfortably during the
+forty-two hours and a-half or so of travelling, you went inside,
+especially if it happened to be in winter; but an inside place
+cost eleven guineas and a-half, which was thought a much larger
+sum in 1830 than it would be nowadays.&nbsp; Accordingly, the
+stalwart and the not particularly well-to-do, who at the same
+time wanted to travel quickly, went outside, whereby they saved
+no less than four guineas.</p>
+<p>But let not the reader think that these respective sums of
+eleven and a-half and seven and a-half guineas comprised the
+whole of the traveller&rsquo;s expenses in the old days.&nbsp;
+There were numerous people to tip, such as porters, waiters, and
+last, but certainly not the least of them, the coachmen and
+guards, who at the <a name="page40"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+40</span>end of their respective journeys, when they left their
+seats to a new guard or a new Jehu, &ldquo;kicked&rdquo; the
+passengers, as the expressive phrase went, for their respective
+two shillings or so.&nbsp; To be kicked at intervals in this
+figurative manner, all the way between London and Edinburgh, was
+not physically painful, but it came expensive; and what with the
+necessary meals and refreshments during those forty-two hours or
+so, it could scarce have cost an &ldquo;inside&rdquo; less than
+fifteen guineas, or an &ldquo;outside&rdquo; less than
+eleven.</p>
+<p>Now let us take the mazy &ldquo;Bradshaw&rdquo; or the simpler
+&ldquo;A B C&rdquo; railway guides, and see what it will cost us
+in time and pocket to reach the capital of Scotland.&nbsp; A vast
+difference, you may be sure.&nbsp; It is possible to go by three
+different routes, but the distance is much the same, and the
+times vary little, whether you go by Midland, London and
+North-Western, or by the Great Northern Railway.&nbsp; The
+last-named has, on the whole, the best of it, with a mileage of
+395 miles, and a fast train performing the journey in seven hours
+and twenty-five minutes.&nbsp; It costs by any of these routes
+for first-class travelling, which answers to the
+&ldquo;inside&rdquo; of old times, fifty-seven shillings and
+sixpence, and thirty-two shillings and eightpence by third-class,
+equivalent to the &ldquo;outside.&rdquo; <a
+name="citation40"></a><a href="#footnote40"
+class="citation">[40]</a>&nbsp; You need not tip unless you like,
+and even then but once or twice, and assuredly no one will ask
+you for one.&nbsp; Whether you travel &ldquo;first&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;third,&rdquo; a dining-saloon and an excellent dinner are
+at your service for a moderate sum, and the sun scarce rises or
+sets with greater certainty than that the Scotch express or its
+London equivalent will set out or reach its destination at its
+appointed minute.</p>
+<p>Accidents&mdash;when they happen&mdash;are beyond comparison
+more fearful on the railway than ever they were on the coaches;
+but they are rare indeed when it is considered how many trains
+are run.&nbsp; Coaching accidents were frequent, but just because
+they seldom ended fatally they do not figure so largely in
+coaching <a name="page41"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+41</span>annals as might be expected.&nbsp; A dreadful accident,
+however, happened in 1805 to the Leeds &ldquo;Union&rdquo; coach,
+owing to the reins breaking and the horses dashing the vehicle
+against a tree.&nbsp; This occurred at a point about half a mile
+from Ferrybridge.&nbsp; William Hope, the coachman, and an
+outside passenger were killed, and many others seriously
+injured.&nbsp; The jury imposed a deodand of &pound;5 on the
+coach and &pound;10 on the horses.</p>
+<p>In later years, an almost equally serious disaster happened to
+another Leeds coach, the &ldquo;Express.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was
+racing with the opposition &ldquo;Courier,&rdquo; which had been
+stopped at the bottom of the hill for the purpose of taking off
+the drag, and in the effort to pass was upset, with the result
+that a woman was killed on the spot, another was laid up for a
+year with a broken leg, and other passengers were more or less
+injured.&nbsp; Probably because of the evident recklessness
+displayed by the coachman, a deodand of &pound;1,400 was laid on
+the coach.&nbsp; The mail-coaches were not so often involved in
+disasters as the stages.&nbsp; They had not the incentive to
+race, and smashes arising from this form of competition were
+infrequent.&nbsp; But other forms of accident threatened them and
+the stage-coaches alike.&nbsp; There were, for instance, fogs,
+and they were exceedingly dangerous.&nbsp; Penny, an old driver
+of the Edinburgh mail, was killed from this cause.&nbsp; Starting
+one foggy night, he grew nervous, and asked the guard, a younger
+and stronger man, to take the reins.&nbsp; He did so, and drove
+up a bank.&nbsp; The mail was upset, and Penny was killed.</p>
+<p>Snow and frost were the especial foes of the mails on the
+northern stretches of the Great North Road, just as widespread
+floods were in the Huntingdonshire and Nottinghamshire levels, by
+Ouse and Trent; so that no mail-coach was completely equipped
+which did not in the winter months carry a snow-shovel.</p>
+<p>But it was not always the north-country coaches that felt the
+fury of the snowstorms.&nbsp; The famous storm of December 1836
+blocked all roads impartially.&nbsp; <a name="page42"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 42</span>The Louth mail, which left the Great
+North Road at Norman Cross, had to be abandoned and the mails
+transferred to the lighter agency of a post-chaise, while
+numerous others were buried in the snow as far south as St.
+Albans.</p>
+<p>The earlier and later periods of coaching were productive of
+accidents in equal degrees.&nbsp; Stage-coaches may be said to
+date, roughly, from 1698, and continued as lumbering,
+uncomfortable conveyances until competition with the mails began
+to smarten them up, soon after 1784, when their second period
+dawned.&nbsp; Stage-coachmen of the first period were well
+matched with their machines, and not often fit to be trusted with
+any other cattle than a team of tired plough-horses.&nbsp; Their
+want of skill generally caused the accidents in those days, and
+the efficiency of others was affected by the conditions of their
+employment.&nbsp; The &ldquo;classic&rdquo; age had not arrived,
+and bad roads, ill-made coaches, and poor horses, combined with
+long hours of driving to render travelling quite dangerous
+enough, without the highwaymen&rsquo;s aid.&nbsp; Coachmen drove
+long distances in those days, and sometimes fell asleep from
+sheer weariness&mdash;a failing which did not conduce to the
+safety of the passengers.&nbsp; But the old coach-proprietors did
+not do the obvious thing&mdash;make the stages shorter and change
+the coachman more frequently.&nbsp; No; they contrived a hard,
+uncomfortable seat for him which rested on the bed of the
+axletree in such a manner as to shake every bone in his body, and
+to render repose quite out of the question.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image43" href="images/p43.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Louth Mail stopped by the snow"
+title=
+"The Louth Mail stopped by the snow"
+ src="images/p43.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>To these clumsy or worn-out fellows succeeded the dashing
+charioteers of the palmy age of coaching, which we may say came
+into full being with the year 1800, and lasted for full thirty
+years.&nbsp; Many broken heads and limbs, and bruises and
+contusions innumerable, can be laid to the account of these gay
+sportsmen.&nbsp; Washington Irving has left us a portrait of the
+typical stage-coachman of this time, in this delightful literary
+jewel:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;He cannot be mistaken for one of any other
+craft.&nbsp; <a name="page45"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+45</span>He has commonly a broad full face, curiously mottled
+with red, as if the blood had been forced by hard feeding into
+every vessel of the skin; he is swelled into jolly dimensions by
+frequent potations of malt liquors, and his bulk is still further
+increased by a multiplicity of coats in which he is buried like a
+cauliflower, the upper one reaching to his heels.&nbsp; He wears
+a broad-brimmed, low-crowned hat, a huge roll of coloured
+handkerchief about his neck, knowingly knotted and tucked in at
+the bosom, and has in summer-time a large bouquet of flowers in
+his buttonhole&mdash;the present, most probably, of some
+enamoured country lass.&nbsp; His waistcoat is commonly of some
+bright colour, striped; and his small-clothes extend far below
+the knees, to meet a pair of jockey-boots which reach about
+half-way up his legs.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;All this costume is maintained with much precision; he
+has a pride in having his clothes of excellent materials, and,
+notwithstanding the seeming grossness of his appearance, there is
+still discernible that neatness and propriety of person which is
+almost inherent in an Englishman.&nbsp; He enjoys great
+confidence and consideration along the road; has frequent
+conferences with the village housewives, who look upon him as a
+man of great trust and dependence, and he seems to have a good
+understanding with every bright-eyed country lass.&nbsp; The
+moment he arrives where the horses are to be changed, he throws
+down the reins with something of an air, and abandons the cattle
+to the care of the ostler; his duty being merely to drive from
+one stage to another.&nbsp; When off the box, his hands are
+thrust into the pockets of his great-coat, and he rolls about the
+inn-yard with an air of the most absolute lordliness.&nbsp; Here
+he is generally surrounded by an admiring throng of ostlers,
+stable-boys, shoe-blacks, and those nameless hangers-on that
+infest inns and taverns, and run errands, and do all kinds of odd
+jobs for the privilege of battening on the drippings of the
+kitchen and the leakings of the tap-room.&nbsp; These all look up
+to him as an oracle, treasure up his cant <a
+name="page46"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 46</span>phrases, echo
+his opinions about horses and other topics of jockey-lore, and,
+above all, endeavour to imitate his air and carriage.&nbsp; Every
+ragamuffin that has a coat to his back thrusts his hands in the
+pockets, rolls in his gait, talks slang, and is an embryo
+coachey.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But how different the last years of this gorgeous
+figure!&nbsp; When railways were projected, the coachman laughed
+at the idea.&nbsp; He thought himself secure on his box-seat, and
+witnessed the preparations for laying the iron rails with an
+amused confidence that his horses could run the
+&ldquo;tin-kettles&rdquo; off the road with little trouble.&nbsp;
+He kept this frame of mind even until the opening of the line
+that competed with him; and even when it was proved to
+demonstration that railways could convey passengers at least
+three times as swiftly as coaches, and at about a quarter of the
+cost, he generally professed to believe that &ldquo;it
+couldn&rsquo;t last long.&rdquo;&nbsp; His was the faith that
+should have moved mountains&mdash;to say nothing of blighting
+locomotives; but it was no use.&nbsp; His old passengers deserted
+him.&nbsp; They were not proof against the opportunities of
+saving time and money.&nbsp; Who is?&nbsp; Nor did they come back
+to him, as he fondly thought they would, half-choked with cinders
+and smoke.&nbsp; He was speedily run off the road.&nbsp; There
+were those who liked him well, and, unwilling to see him brought
+low, made interest with railway companies to secure him a post;
+but he indignantly refused it when obtained; and, finding a
+cross-country route to which the railway had not yet penetrated,
+drove the coachman&rsquo;s horror&mdash;a pair-horse
+coach&mdash;along the by-ways.&nbsp; Gone by now was his lordly
+importance.&nbsp; He had not even a guard, and frequently was
+reduced to putting in the horses himself.&nbsp; He grew slovenly,
+and was maudlin in his drink.&nbsp; &ldquo;Tips&rdquo; were
+seldom bestowed upon him, and when he received an infrequent
+sixpenny-piece, he was known to burst into tears.&nbsp; The
+familiar figure of Belisarius begging an obolus is scarce more
+painful.&nbsp; The last of him was generally in the driving of
+the omnibus between the railway station and the hotel; a <a
+name="page49"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 49</span>misanthropic
+figure, consistently disregarded by his passengers, lingering,
+resolutely old-fashioned in dress, and none too civil,
+superfluous on the stage.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image47" href="images/p47.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Entrance to London from Islington, 1809"
+title=
+"Entrance to London from Islington, 1809"
+ src="images/p47.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">These</span> long preliminaries over, we
+may duly start for the North from the General Post Office, coming
+to Islington by way of Goswell Road.&nbsp; Here, at the
+&ldquo;Peacock&rdquo; or the &ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; travellers of a
+century and a-half ago were one mile from London, or from
+Hicks&rsquo;s Hall, which was the same thing.&nbsp; A milestone
+proclaimed the fact, and its successor, with a different legend,
+stood until quite recently opposite the Grand Theatre, on
+Islington Green.&nbsp; Here stood the first toll-gate as you went
+out of London.&nbsp; Here also was the village pound for strayed
+horses and cattle.&nbsp; Here again, according to those who do
+not know anything at all about it, the bailiff&rsquo;s daughter
+of Islington might have met her lover; only, unhappily for this
+Islington, the old ballad refers to quite another Islington, away
+in Norfolk.</p>
+<p>The usual suburban perils awaited wayfarers to Islington at
+any time during the eighteenth century, and those bound for it
+from the city were accustomed to wait at the Smithfield end of
+St. John Street until a number had collected, when they were
+convoyed outwards by the armed patrol stationed there for that
+purpose.&nbsp; But the footpads were quite equal to the occasion,
+and simply waited until those parties dispersed for their several
+homes, and then, like skilful generals, attacked them in
+detail.&nbsp; The Islington Vestry were obliged to make a
+standing offer of &pound;10 to any one who should arrest a
+robber; but that this failed seems certain, for at a later period
+we find the inhabitants subscribing a fund for rewards to those
+who arrested evildoers.</p>
+<p><a name="page50"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 50</span>Time
+has wrought sad havoc with Islington&rsquo;s once rural aspect,
+and with its old coaching inns.&nbsp; That grand coaching centre,
+the &ldquo;Peacock,&rdquo; has utterly vanished, and so has the
+picturesque &ldquo;Queen&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo;&mdash;gabled,
+Elizabethan&mdash;wantonly destroyed in 1829; while the
+&ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; pulled down in 1819 and rebuilt, and again
+rebuilt in 1900, has since retired from business as a
+public-house, and is now a tea and lunch place, in the hands of a
+popular firm of caterers.&nbsp; In early days, and well on into
+the nineteenth century, the Green was really a pleasant spot,
+with tall elms shading the footpaths, and a very rustic-looking
+pound for strayed cattle.&nbsp; Near by stood for many years a
+little hatter&rsquo;s shop, bearing the legend in large
+characters, &ldquo;Old Hats Beavered,&rdquo; and it is curious to
+note how, in a long succession of old prints, this shop and its
+now curiously sounding notice kept their place while all else was
+changing.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image50" href="images/p50.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Islington Green, 1820"
+title=
+"Islington Green, 1820"
+ src="images/p50.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Islington was once a Cockney paradise, and to it <a
+name="page51"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 51</span>retired, as
+into the country, the good citizens and shopkeepers of London,
+setting up miniature parks and pleasances of their own.&nbsp; So
+favourite a practice was this that the witlings of that period, a
+hundred and fifty years ago, used to publish absurd notices
+supposed to have been found displayed at the entrances of these
+haunts.&nbsp; &ldquo;The New Paradise,&rdquo; ran one of them,
+&ldquo;Gentlemen with Nails in their Boots not
+Admitted.&rdquo;&nbsp; Perhaps also &ldquo;Serpents Warned
+Off.&rdquo;&nbsp; At that time, and long before, Islington was
+resorted to on account of some alleged mineral waters existing
+here.&nbsp; &ldquo;Islington,&rdquo; according to M. Henri
+Misson, who travelled in England, and wrote a book about us and
+our country in 1718, &ldquo;is a large village, half a league
+from London, where you drink waters that do you neither good nor
+harm, provided you don&rsquo;t take too much of
+them.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is decidedly a &ldquo;palpable
+hit,&rdquo; and may be commended to those who take medicinal
+waters in our own time.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is not much flock&rsquo;d to by People of
+Quality,&rdquo; he goes on to observe.&nbsp; Here, at least, he
+is not out of date.&nbsp; People of Quality do not flock to
+Islington.&nbsp; The medicinal waters are all gone; and that
+Islington is, even now, not in any great degree a resort of
+fashion is an incontrovertible fact.</p>
+<p>Between this and Highgate, the road leading to what the poets
+call the &ldquo;true and tender North&rdquo; is by no means
+happy.&nbsp; Any other of the classic highways of England begins
+better, and however delightful the Holloway Road may have been in
+the coaching age, it is in these crowded days a very commonplace
+thoroughfare indeed.&nbsp; The long reaches of mean streets and
+sordid bye-roads combine with the unutterably bad road surface to
+render the exit from London anything but pleasurable.</p>
+<p>Sir Walter Scott, on his way down to Abbotsford in 1826, calls
+the Great North Road &ldquo;the dullest road in the world, though
+the most convenient,&rdquo; and the description, minus the
+convenience, might well stand for its suburban portion
+to-day.&nbsp; In Sir Walter&rsquo;s time, <a
+name="page52"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 52</span>however,
+these first few miles were only just emerging from a condition in
+which dulness could have had no part.&nbsp; In fact, it may well
+be supposed that the travellers, who up to that time went by
+coach to York, well armed, found the journey a thought too
+lively.&nbsp; Indeed, the Holloway Road, into which they came,
+from the last outposts of civilisation, was, as it were the
+ante-chamber into that direful territory of highwaymen and
+footpads, the veritable Alsatias of Finchley Common and
+Whetstone.&nbsp; In fact, a few years earlier still, when there
+were no houses at Holloway at all, and no district known by that
+name, what is now called the Holloway Road was a lonely track,
+full of mud and water, through which the coach route ran,
+infested all the while by the most villainous characters,
+compared with whom the gay highwayman in ruffles and lace, and
+mounted on a mettlesome horse, was a knight indeed&mdash;a
+chevalier without fear or reproach.&nbsp; This stretch of road
+lay then between high banks, and considerably below the level of
+the surrounding fields.&nbsp; It was a &ldquo;hollow&rdquo; road,
+as such roads are called wherever they exist in the
+country&mdash;the actual, original Hollow Way from which, in the
+course of time, a whole residential district has obtained its
+name.&nbsp; Such roads, worn down through the earth by constant
+traffic, are always very ancient, and though the story of the
+Holloway Road at a period from a hundred and fifty to eighty
+years ago was a disgraceful one, the inhabitants of that part can
+console themselves by the soothing thought that, although it
+cannot claim the Roman ancestry of the route by Shoreditch,
+Waltham Cross and Cheshunt, which was the Ermine Way, the road in
+question probably dates back to the respectable antiquity of
+medi&aelig;val times.</p>
+<h2><a name="page53"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+53</span>VIII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> road has been ascending ever
+since the General Post Office was left behind, and now we come to
+the beginning of Highgate Hill, where the old way over the
+hill-top, and the more recent one, dating from 1813, divide left
+and right.&nbsp; Here, at the junction of Salisbury Road with
+Highgate Hill, stands the Whittington Stone, marking the
+traditional spot where Dick rested on his flight, and heard the
+bells inviting him to</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Turn again, Whittington,<br />
+Thrice Lord Mayor of London.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It is a pretty story, and one which, let us hope, will never
+be forgotten or popularly discredited; how the boy, running away
+from ill-treatment at his master&rsquo;s house in the city,
+halted here in his four-miles&rsquo; flight, and resting on the
+slope of Highgate Hill, saw the clustered spires of London and
+the silvery Thames&mdash;it <i>was</i> silvery then&mdash;down
+below, and heard the prophetic message of Bow Bells inviting him
+to return.&nbsp; If we can believe that he had his favourite cat
+with him, let us believe with joy, because it goes far to
+complete the tender story which has always held captive the
+hearts of the children; and God forbid we should grow the less
+tender towards the beautiful legends of our forbears as we grow
+older.</p>
+<p>Bow Bells fulfilled their prophecy in full measure and running
+over, for Dick Whittington was chosen to complete the year of
+Mayor&mdash;Adam Bamme&mdash;who died in 1397, and was Mayor on
+three separate occasions as well; in 1397, 1406, and 1420.&nbsp;
+He was knighted, of course, and, moreover, he became one of the
+richest men of his time.&nbsp; Perhaps the most dramatic thing
+recorded of his prosperous career as Mayor and a member of the
+Mercers&rsquo; Company, is that splendid entertainment which he
+gave to Henry the Fifth and <a name="page54"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 54</span>his Queen at Guildhall in his last
+year of office, when he threw into the fire bonds equal to
+&pound;60,000 of our money, due to him from the king&mdash;a
+generous, nay, a princely gift.</p>
+<p>But he was not &ldquo;Lord&rdquo; Mayor.&nbsp; The tradition
+is wrong in that respect.&nbsp; There were &ldquo;Mayors,&rdquo;
+but no &ldquo;Lord Mayor&rdquo; until 1486.</p>
+<p>Who was Richard Whittington?&nbsp; We know him well in his
+later career as a Mercer, and as a pious and patriotic citizen;
+but whence came he?&nbsp; Was he the poor and friendless lad of
+legend?&nbsp; Well, not quite that.&nbsp; Poor, perhaps, because
+he was the youngest of three brothers; but not friendless, for
+his family was of no mean descent.&nbsp; His father, Sir William
+Whittington, had an estate on which he lived, at Pauntley, in
+Gloucestershire, and other possessions of the family were at
+Sollers Hope, Herefordshire.&nbsp; Misfortunes fell upon Sir
+William, who seems to have died not long after Dick was born; but
+the family had friends in the FitzWarrens, of whom one, Sir John,
+was a prominent Mercer in London.&nbsp; Dick&rsquo;s brothers
+had, as elder brothers have nowadays, the best chances, as it
+seemed, and remained in the country, enjoying the family
+property, or following rural employments.&nbsp; Dick we may
+readily picture as being sent to FitzWarren, to learn a
+trade.&nbsp; The great man probably took him for old
+acquaintance&rsquo; sake, and, having received the lad of
+thirteen, and turned him over to one of his many underlings,
+promptly forgot him.&nbsp; It is a way with the great, not yet
+obsolete.&nbsp; We may with a good conscience reject that part of
+the legend which tells how Dick was found, an obscure waif and
+stray, on FitzWarren&rsquo;s doorstep, and taken, in compassion,
+to serve as a scullion.&nbsp; The pantomimes always insist on
+this, and on the ferocious cook&rsquo;s ill-treatment of him; but
+pantomime librettists have many sins to answer for.</p>
+<p>No; Dick was an apprentice, a poor one, and doubtless taken
+without a premium; but not scullion.&nbsp; There can be little
+doubt that the country <a name="page55"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 55</span>lad, thus thrown into the midst of
+many other apprentices in FitzWarren&rsquo;s house, must have
+been an object of sport.&nbsp; They would taunt him with his
+country ways, and, superior in their clothes of London cut,
+ridicule, with the cruel satire of boys, his homely duds.&nbsp;
+Possibly his flight had some such origin as this.</p>
+<p>But it is chiefly on the legend of the cat that more or less
+learned antiquaries have so savagely fallen, with intent to
+explain it away.&nbsp; The cat, they assure us, was a fable, and
+they go on to say that it was from coal vessels called
+&ldquo;cats,&rdquo; in which Whittington embarked his money, that
+the story grew.&nbsp; Another school of commentators, eager to
+reduce the pretty tale to commonplace, tell us that it originated
+in the old French word for a purchase, <i>achat</i>.&nbsp; To
+what shifts will they not proceed in this hunt for an ignoble
+realism!&nbsp; Whittington is not known to have engaged in the
+ownership of colliers, or in the carrying of coal.&nbsp; A Mercer
+has no commerce with such things.&nbsp; Then, that derivation
+from the French <i>does</i> smell of the lamp, does it not?</p>
+<p>Now for the truth of his embarking his favourite cat as a
+venture, to be sold at a profit in some foreign port.&nbsp; The
+story, regarded with a knowledge of those times, is by no means
+an improbable one.&nbsp; Indeed, to go further, it is quite
+likely.&nbsp; Cats were in that era comparatively rare.&nbsp;
+They had a high value at home; were even more valuable in Europe,
+and in the darkly-known countries on the confines of the known
+world&mdash;a small world, too, before the discovery of
+America&mdash;they were almost priceless.</p>
+<p>Many childish searchings of heart have arisen over
+Dick&rsquo;s parting with his cat for love of gain.&nbsp; Did
+Dick, like the Arab who sold his steed, repent with tears?&nbsp;
+Perhaps Dick was the happy possessor of two cats, and his
+favourite was a &ldquo;tom.&rdquo;&nbsp; If the other was a
+she-cat, and as prolific as are our own, no doubt Dick would have
+been glad to have got rid of her; except that the progeny
+themselves were marketable.&nbsp; To <a name="page56"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 56</span>this, then, we are reduced: that Dick
+Whittington as a boy bred cats for exportation, and that his
+black-and-white Tom, as the progenitor of them all, was the
+founder of his fortunes.&nbsp; The legend tells us of only one
+cat, which, when the vessel was driven out of her course to the
+coast of Barbary, was sold for immense riches of gold and
+precious stones to the Sultan, whose palace was infested with
+mice.&nbsp; That may do for the pantomimes; but, unhappily, the
+ships that were so unfortunate in those times as to be driven on
+those shores were plundered and their crews slain.&nbsp; It was
+cheaper than buying.</p>
+<p>But whatever the details, it is certain that Whittington owed
+his first successes to his cat.&nbsp; Several things, despite all
+destructive criticism, point to the essential truth of the
+popular story.&nbsp; Firstly, original portraits, painted from
+the life, testify to it by showing Whittington&rsquo;s hand laid
+caressingly on a black and white cat.&nbsp; Then, Whittington was
+the rebuilder of the old New Gate, and his effigy, with a cat at
+his feet, stood in one of its niches until the building was
+pulled down hundreds of years afterwards.&nbsp; Finally, a very
+remarkable confirmation of the story came from Gloucester in
+1862, when, on a house occupied by the Whittington family until
+1460 being repaired, the fragment of a carved chimney-piece of
+that century was discovered, bearing the sculpture of a boy
+carrying a cat in his arms.&nbsp; It may reasonably be claimed
+that these evidences, together with the popular belief in the
+story, which can be traced back almost to Whittington&rsquo;s own
+day, confound unbelievers.</p>
+<p>The present Whittington Stone is the degenerate and highly
+unornamental descendant of quite a number of vanished memorials
+to the great Lord Mayor which have occupied this spot since his
+day.&nbsp; It is not by any means a romantic spot to the sight
+nowadays, but for those who can bring romance with them in their
+own minds, it matters little that the heights just here are
+crowned with suburban villa roads, that a public-house&mdash;the
+&ldquo;Whittington Stone <a name="page57"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 57</span>Tavern&rdquo;&mdash;stands by, or
+that the whole neighbourhood reeks vulgarity.&nbsp; The present
+stone is dated 1821, and succeeded one which had disappeared
+shortly before, itself the successor in 1795 of a cross.&nbsp;
+The existing inscription was recut, and railings enclosing the
+stone put up in 1869; a public-house gas-lamp now crowning and
+desecrating the whole.</p>
+<h2>IX</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is a far cry from the London
+County Council, the present highway authority at Highgate, to the
+first roadmaker here, in 1364.&nbsp; A hermit, William Phelippe
+by name, at that time lived in a little cell on the lower slope
+of Highgate Hill, looking down upon London.&nbsp; From that
+remote eyrie, had he been a man of imagination, he might have
+beheld prophetic visions of London&rsquo;s future sprawling
+greatness, when the tide of life should rise to the crest of his
+hill and bring with it bricks and mortar, wood-pavements,
+cable-tramways, and other things of equal use and beauty.&nbsp;
+He foresaw none of these things, possibly because he did not
+sufficiently mortify the flesh.&nbsp; Certainly he was a hermit
+not without wealth, and perhaps therefore not one of your
+sad-eyed ascetics.&nbsp; He had a goodly balance in some old
+earthenware crock under the floor, or at the bank&mdash;the road
+bank of the Hollow Way, very old-established&mdash;and he had
+ample leisure, unencroached upon by toilette requirements, for
+which hermits had no use.&nbsp; Lazing in his cell commanding the
+road&mdash;it stood near where the Whittington Stone stands
+now&mdash;he had often noticed how wet, miry, and full of sloughs
+was the Hollow Way, and with what difficulty travellers ascended
+by it.&nbsp; Accordingly he devised a scheme by which he
+conferred benefits alike upon the travellers along the road and
+the farmers of Highgate.&nbsp; He directed and paid for the
+digging of gravel and the laying of it along the road, and in <a
+name="page58"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 58</span>the work
+presently expended all his money.&nbsp; But in so doing he had
+made an excellent investment; much better than leaving it on
+deposit at the bank mentioned above, where, in the nature of
+things, it accrued no interest; for he procured a decree from
+Edward the Third, authorising &ldquo;our well-beloved William
+Phelippe, the hermit,&rdquo; to set up a toll-bar, and licensing
+him to levy tolls and keep the road in repair for &ldquo;our
+people passing between Heghgate and Smethfelde.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus
+were the first toll-bar and the first turnpike-keeper
+established, and we may judge that the undertaking was profitable
+from the records that show how very largely the roadside hermits
+throughout the country went into the business of road and bridge
+making or mending shortly afterwards.&nbsp; There were hermits of
+sorts: some authorised, and some not; some who did good work in
+this wise and some who did nothing at all, and yet continued to
+live substantially on the mistaken gifts of wayfarers.&nbsp; The
+profession of the eremite was not without its jealousies.&nbsp;
+An industrious road-maker might have a cell placed in a position
+outside a town favourable for the collection of dues, when
+another would set up business, say a quarter of a mile further
+out, and so intercept the money; so that travellers having paid
+once, had nothing for the real Simon Pure.&nbsp; Having satisfied
+Codlin, they disregarded Short; whereupon it not infrequently
+happened that if Short were the more muscular of the two he would
+go and have it out with his rival, while the world went by,
+scandalised at the apostolic blows and knocks these holy men were
+dealing one another.</p>
+<p>William Phelippe&rsquo;s licence was renewed every year.&nbsp;
+His tariff of tolls is still extant, and we read that for every
+cart carrying merchandise, its wheels shod with iron, twopence
+per week was paid; if not shod with iron, one penny.&nbsp; Every
+horse carrying merchandise was charged one farthing per
+week.&nbsp; Pedestrians and horsemen without goods went
+free.&nbsp; These charges seem absurdly small until we multiply
+them by twenty, which gives results representing the present
+value of <a name="page59"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+59</span>money, and then it will be found that those ancient
+tolls were on much the same scale as those which existed until
+July 1st, 1864, when all turnpikes on public highways within
+fifty miles of London were abolished by Act of Parliament.</p>
+<p>A great gap stretches between the time of our road-making
+hermit and that of Telford&mdash;a gap of four hundred and fifty
+years.&nbsp; Yet, although Highway Acts were from time to time
+devised for the betterment of the roads, their condition remained
+bad, and there was always, since 1386, the crest of Highgate Hill
+to surmount.</p>
+<p>Unless we take this hill-top route to the left we shall not
+have seen Highgate; nor, in truth, is there much to see, now that
+the old Gatehouse Tavern is gone, and with it the last outward
+and visible connection with the days of yore.&nbsp; The tavern
+marked the site of the old turnpike-gate that stood here, the
+lineal successor of the hermit&rsquo;s original pitch lower down,
+when the old route to Barnet by Tallingdon Lane, Crouch End,
+Hornsey Great Park, Muswell Hill, Friern Barnet, and Whetstone
+was superseded by the new one through the Bishop of
+London&rsquo;s estate, by Finchley and Whetstone, in 1386.&nbsp;
+It is in the existence at that time of the Bishop&rsquo;s park
+that we may perhaps seek with success the origin of the name of
+&ldquo;Highgate,&rdquo; which does not necessarily allude to the
+very obviously &ldquo;high&rdquo; gate situated here&mdash;more
+than 350 feet above sea-level.&nbsp; No; it was the
+&ldquo;haigh&rdquo; gate, the portal which gave access through
+the enclosure (<i>haia</i>) with which my Lord Bishop&rsquo;s
+domain was presumably surrounded.&nbsp; Through his land all
+traffic passed until it emerged on the other side of Whetstone,
+where, commanding the entrance to Barnet, stood another gate in
+receipt of tolls, swelling the income of that very business-like
+ecclesiastic and his successors for hundreds of years.</p>
+<p>At the Highgate end dues were collected on horned cattle,
+among other things, and here originated the practice of being
+initiated into the freedom of Highgate, <a
+name="page60"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 60</span>a mock
+ceremonial founded upon Roman Catholic rites at the time of the
+Reformation.&nbsp; For three hundred years this farcical
+observance was continued at the tavern by the gate, and only fell
+into disuse with the decay of coaching.&nbsp; Those who had not
+previously passed this way were &ldquo;sworn in on the
+horns,&rdquo; a practice traced to the unwillingness of the
+cattle drovers who frequented the tavern to allow strangers to
+mix with them.&nbsp; This exclusiveness no doubt originated in
+the fear of trade secrets being divulged, a feeling which may
+still be met with among commercial travellers of the older
+school, who resent the appearance of the mere tourist in their
+midst.&nbsp; The stranger who in olden times happened upon these
+drovers at Highgate was discouraged from taking bite or sup here,
+and only permitted to join them after having kissed the horns of
+one of their beasts.&nbsp; This speedily became elevated (or
+degraded, shall we say?) into a sort of blasphemous ritual
+parodying the admission of a novice into the Church, and this
+again, with the lapse of time and the dying of religious hatreds,
+developed into the merely good-natured farce played during the
+last hundred years of the existence of the custom.</p>
+<p>When the coaches pulled up here, it was soon discovered, by
+judicious questioning, who were the strangers who had not been
+made &ldquo;free.&rdquo;&nbsp; They were made to alight, and,
+having removed their hats and kissed a pair of horns mounted on a
+pole, &ldquo;the oath&rdquo; was administered by the landlord in
+this wise:&mdash;&ldquo;Upstanding and uncovered: silence.&nbsp;
+Take notice what I now say to you, for <i>that</i> is the first
+word of the oath; mind <i>that</i>.&nbsp; You must acknowledge me
+to be your adopted father.&nbsp; I must acknowledge you to be my
+adopted son.&nbsp; If you do not call me father you forfeit a
+bottle of wine; if I do not call you son I forfeit the
+same.&nbsp; And now, my good son, if you are travelling through
+this village of Highgate, and you have no money in your pocket,
+go call for a bottle of wine at any house you may think proper <a
+name="page61"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 61</span>to enter and
+book it to your father&rsquo;s score,&rdquo; and so forth.</p>
+<p>An initiate had to swear never to drink small beer when he
+could get strong (unless he preferred small); never to eat brown
+bread when he could get white (unless he preferred brown); never
+to kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress (unless he
+preferred the maid, and in case of doubt he might kiss both);
+after which he had to kiss the horns or the woman in the company
+who appeared the fairest, as seemed good to him, the ceremony
+concluding with the declaration of his privileges as a freeman of
+Highgate.&nbsp; Among the well-known privileges were&mdash;that
+if he felt tired when passing through Highgate and saw a pig
+lying in a ditch, he might kick the pig away and take its place,
+but if he saw three lying together he must only kick away the
+middle one and lie between the other two!</p>
+<h2>X</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> was on Highgate Hill that the
+great Francis, Lord Bacon, whom some believe to have written
+Shakespeare&rsquo;s dramas, fell a martyr to his scientific
+enthusiasm.&nbsp; Driving up this chilly eminence one
+winter&rsquo;s day when the snow lay on the ground, it occurred
+to him that, from its chemical constituents, snow must possess
+admirable preservative properties, and he accordingly resolved
+immediately to put this theory to the proof.&nbsp; Stopping his
+carriage at a neighbouring farmhouse, he purchased a fowl and
+stuffed it carefully with snow.&nbsp; Being in weak health at the
+time, he took a chill, and before he could be driven home, became
+so alarmingly ill that he was obliged to be carried to Lord
+Arundel&rsquo;s house at Highgate.&nbsp; There a damp bed
+aggravated his seizure, so that in a few days he died, in
+1626.</p>
+<p>Farmhouses are far to seek from Highgate Hill nowadays, new
+roads and streets of shops being more <a name="page62"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 62</span>general.&nbsp; With the end of the
+eighteenth century, Highgate became a populous little town, but
+its outskirts did not altogether lose their terrors for
+travellers.&nbsp; Suburban villas had begun to sparsely dot these
+northern heights of London with the coming of the new era, but
+the New Police had not yet been brought into being; and so
+belated dwellers in these wilds afforded fine sport for the
+footpads, who, hunting in couples, and armed with horrible
+pitch-plasters, attacked the mild citizen from behind, and,
+clapping a plaster over his mouth, reduced him to an enforced
+silence, while they emptied his pockets at leisure.&nbsp; It was
+late one night in 1807 that Grimaldi, the most famous of all
+clowns, was robbed on Highgate Hill by two footpads.&nbsp; They
+spared him the usual plaster, perhaps because there was no one
+else about, and so it did not matter in the least how loudly he
+might shout for help.&nbsp; Among minor articles of spoil, they
+secured a remarkable watch which had been given him two years
+before as a testimonial by his many admirers.&nbsp; The dial
+represented his face in character when singing his popular comic
+song, &ldquo;Me and my Neddy.&rdquo;&nbsp; The robbers, seeing
+this, immediately recognised him.&nbsp; Looking at one another,
+they could not make up their minds to rob him of his treasure,
+and so they gave it back, Grimaldi goggling and grinning at them
+the while, as on the stage.&nbsp; So, with a vivid recollection
+of Sadler&rsquo;s Wells, and bursting with laughter, they left
+him.</p>
+<p>It is peculiarly unfortunate for those who are uncertain about
+their aspirates that London and its neighbourhood should abound
+in place-names beginning with the letters &ldquo;A&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;H.&rdquo;&nbsp; Cockneys have ever&mdash;or &rsquo;ave
+hever, shall we say?&mdash;been afflicted with this difficulty;
+but they are overcoming the tendency of their forbears to speak
+of &ldquo;&rsquo;Ornsey, &rsquo;Ampstead, &rsquo;Igit,
+&rsquo;Arrow, &rsquo;Omerton, &rsquo;Ackney, &rsquo;Endon or
+&rsquo;Atfield.&rdquo;&nbsp; The classic anecdote in this
+connection is that of the City Alderman who lived at Highgate,
+praising his locality to a distinguished guest at a Mayoral
+banquet.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page63"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 63</span>
+<a name="image63" href="images/p63.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897"
+title=
+"Old Highgate Archway, demolished 1897"
+ src="images/p63.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page64"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+64</span>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think &rsquo;Iget pretty?&rdquo;
+he asked.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Really,&rdquo; the guest is supposed to have replied,
+&ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t known you long enough to say.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not talking of meself,&rdquo; returned the
+Alderman, &ldquo;but of &rsquo;Iget on the &rsquo;Ill.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Until 1813 coaches and foot-passengers alike toiled over the
+Hill, through Highgate village, and by a roundabout road into
+East End, Finchley, which, with its adjoining hamlets, was until
+quite recently so greatly cut off from London by these
+comparatively Alpine heights and the lack of suburban railways,
+that it was, for all practical purposes, as distant as many other
+places fifty or sixty miles away, but situated on more level
+roads or on direct railway routes.&nbsp; To remedy this the
+Archway Road was cut direct from the Upper Holloway Road to East
+End, saving half a mile in the distance to be travelled and a
+hundred feet in the height to be climbed.</p>
+<p>The Archway and the Archway Road were constructed about 1813,
+following upon the failure of the original idea of driving a
+tunnel through the hill-top.&nbsp; The Hill is a great
+outstanding knob of London clay, a substance both difficult and
+dangerous to pierce; but it was not until the work was nearly
+completed that it fell in, one day in 1812, happily before the
+labours of the day had been begun.&nbsp; The present open cutting
+of the Archway Road, rather over a mile in length, took the place
+of the projected tunnel, and the Archway was constructed for the
+purpose of carrying Hornsey Lane across the gap.&nbsp; If an
+unlovely, it was in its way an impressive, structure, even though
+the impression was, rather of the nightmare sort.&nbsp; It was
+scarcely necessary, for Hornsey Lane has been at no time a place
+of great resort, and the traffic along it could have been
+diverted at small cost, and with little inconvenience made to
+cross the Archway Road by a circuitous route.&nbsp; Highgate
+Archway has now disappeared, giving place to a lighter structure,
+spanning the road without the support of the cumbrous old piers
+which, until the summer of 1900, continued to block three-fourths
+of <a name="page65"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 65</span>the
+way.&nbsp; It has gone because the road-traffic has grown with
+the suburbs and the way was not wide enough; but its
+disappearance removes a landmark proclaiming where town and
+country met.</p>
+<p>The making of the Archway and the road was no public-spirited
+act, but the commercial undertaking of a Company, whose total
+expenses were very large, and, by consequence, the tolls exacted
+extremely high.&nbsp; Pedestrians were not chargeable at ordinary
+toll-gates, but here they had to pay a penny, or go the tedious
+way over the Hill.&nbsp; Sixpence was levied on every laden or
+draught horse.</p>
+<p>It was not a profitable undertaking, even at these rates, and
+the tolls had a very decided effect in stemming the advance of
+Suburbia in this direction.&nbsp; In 1861, when the abolition of
+tolls within fifty miles of London was a burning question, the
+Company owed the Consolidated Fund no less than
+&pound;13,000.&nbsp; The Government bought it out for
+&pound;4,000, receiving &pound;9,000 by instalments spread over
+fifteen years, after which period the road was to be declared
+free.&nbsp; It was accordingly opened free of toll in 1876.&nbsp;
+And thus it remained, as in the illustration, until 1897, when it
+was demolished and the roadway widened.&nbsp; The present Archway
+was opened in 1900.</p>
+<h2>XI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">East</span> End, Finchley, to which we now
+come, is one of the many straggling settlements built upon
+Finchley Common.&nbsp; Stretches of fields alternate with rows of
+new shops and tiny old-world cottages.&nbsp; Here stands the
+&ldquo;Bald-Faced Stag,&rdquo; with the effigy of a stag
+surmounting the appropriately bald elevation of that huge and
+ugly public-house.&nbsp; The yards of monumental masons jostle it
+on either hand; a grim and unpleasing conjunction, and a prelude
+to those vast townships of <a name="page66"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 66</span>London&rsquo;s dead, the St.
+Marylebone, Islington, and St. Pancras Cemeteries, which with
+other properties of the Cemetery Companies render the road dismal
+and people these northern heights with a vast population of
+departed citizens.&nbsp; The merry market-gardener has betaken
+himself and his cabbages to other parts, and the builder builds
+but sparely.</p>
+<p>Just where the Great Northern Railway bridge crosses over the
+road at East End stands the &ldquo;Old White Lion,&rdquo; in a
+pretty wooded dip of the road.&nbsp; The house was once known,
+and marked on the maps as the &ldquo;Dirt House,&rdquo; from its
+having been the house of call of the market-wagons on the way to
+London with produce, and on the way back with loads of dirt and
+manure.&nbsp; The wood was also known as &ldquo;Dirt House
+Wood.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was here also that Horne the
+coachmaster&rsquo;s stables were situated.</p>
+<p>To this succeeds North Finchley, beginning at the junction of
+a road from Child&rsquo;s Hill with the Great North Road, known
+as Tally Ho Corner.&nbsp; North Finchley, called by the genteel
+&ldquo;Torrington Park,&rdquo; is yet another settlement,
+filched, like the cemeteries, from Finchley Common by successive
+iniquitous Acts of Parliament at the beginning of the nineteenth
+century.&nbsp; Could the gay highwaymen who, a hundred years ago,
+were gathered to their fathers at the end of a rope down Tyburn
+way revisit Finchley, the poor fellows would sadly need a
+guide.&nbsp; Where, alas! is Finchley Common, that wide-spreading
+expanse of evil omen on which these jovial spirits were so
+thoroughly at home?&nbsp; Finchley Common, once second only to
+the far-famed Hounslow Heath, has long since been divided up
+between the many who, more than a hundred years ago, conspired to
+cheat the people of their birthright in this once broad expanse
+of open space.&nbsp; The representatives of the people at
+Westminster allowed it, and my Lord Bishop of London profited by
+it, together with lesser folk, each in their several
+degrees.&nbsp; The Common then extended to considerably over two
+thousand acres.&nbsp; Of this vast <a name="page68"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 68</span>tract only a few acres are left,
+beyond North Finchley.&nbsp; The rest was sold quietly, and by
+degrees, for absurdly small sums.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image67" href="images/p67.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Great Common of Finchley: a parlous place"
+title=
+"The Great Common of Finchley: a parlous place"
+ src="images/p67.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Between 1700 and 1800 the great Common of Finchley was a
+parlous place, and not one of the better-known highwaymen but had
+tried his hand at &ldquo;touching the mails&rdquo; as they went
+across this waste; or patrolled the darkest side of the road,
+ready to spring upon the solitary traveller.&nbsp; Indeed, the
+childlike simplicity of the lonely travellers of those days is
+absolutely contemptible, considering the well-known dangers of
+the roads.&nbsp; For instance, on the night of the 28th August,
+1720, a horseman might have been observed in the act of crossing
+Finchley Common.&nbsp; He had fifteen guineas in his pocket, and
+ambled along as though he had been in Pall Mall instead of on
+perhaps the most dangerous road in England.&nbsp; At a respectful
+distance behind him came his servant, and just in front of him,
+midway of this howling wilderness, stood three figures.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;There is an eye that notes our coming,&rdquo; says the
+poet, and three pairs of eyes had perceived this wayfarer.&nbsp;
+They belonged to an enterprising individual named Spiggott and to
+two other ruffians, whose names have not been handed down to
+posterity.&nbsp; The weirdly named Spiggott was apparently above
+disguising himself; his companions, however, might have stood for
+stage brigands, for one of them had the cape of his coat buttoned
+over his chin, and the other wore a slouched hat over his
+eyes.&nbsp; In addition to this, he kept the ends of his long wig
+in his mouth&mdash;which seems rather a comic opera touch.&nbsp;
+It is to be hoped, rather than expected, that the traveller with
+the guineas saw the humour of it.&nbsp; In the twinkling of an
+eye one brigand had seized his horse and made him dismount, while
+the others covered him with their pistols.&nbsp; The servant also
+was secured, the guineas transferred with the dexterity of a
+practised conjurer, the horses turned loose, and then the three
+rode away, leaving the traveller and his servant to get on as
+best they <a name="page69"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+69</span>could.&nbsp; Spiggott eventually paid the penalty of his
+rashness in not disguising himself in accordance with the canons
+of the hightoby craft, for when, a little later in his career, he
+was caught, with some others, in an attempt on the Wendover wagon
+at Tyburn, he was identified by the Finchley traveller.&nbsp; The
+end of him was the appointed end of all his kind.&nbsp; The moral
+of this story seems to be &ldquo;Wear a mask when engaged in
+crime.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In 1774, Edmund Burke, travelling to Malton, in Yorkshire, was
+stopped here by two highwaymen, who robbed him of ten guineas,
+and his servant of his watch, in the most easy way.&nbsp; Some of
+these highwaymen were, indeed, persons who took their calling in
+an earnest and whole-hearted manner, and doubtless regarded Jack
+Sheppard as a mere scatterbrain, quite unfitted to be in business
+for himself.&nbsp; Thoroughly business-like men were Messrs.
+Everett and Williams, who entered into a duly drawn and properly
+attested deed of partnership, by which it was agreed that they
+should work together on Finchley Common and elsewhere and divide
+the profits of their labours into equal shares.&nbsp; Their
+industry prospered, and the common fund soon reached the very
+respectable total of &pound;2,000.&nbsp; But when required to
+render accounts and to pay over half this amount, Mr. Williams
+refused; whereupon his partner brought an action-at-law against
+him, in 1725.&nbsp; A verdict for &pound;20 was actually
+obtained, and appealed against by the defendant.&nbsp; The court
+then very properly found the matter scandalous, and sentenced
+Everett to pay costs, the solicitors engaged on either side being
+fined &pound;50 each for their part in this discreditable
+affair.&nbsp; One partner was executed, two years later, at
+Maidstone, and the other at Tyburn, in 1730.</p>
+<p>There still exists an ancient oak by the road at a place
+called Brown&rsquo;s Wells, at the corner of a lane nearly
+opposite the &ldquo;Green Man,&rdquo; and in the trunk of this
+last survival of the &ldquo;good old days&rdquo; there have been
+found, from time to time, quite a number of <a
+name="page70"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 70</span>pistol
+bullets, said to have been fired by passing travellers at the
+trunk to frighten the highwaymen who might chance to be hiding
+behind it, under cover of the night.&nbsp; The tree itself has
+long borne the name of Turpin&rsquo;s Oak, no less celebrated a
+person than the re-doubtable Dick himself having once frequented
+it.&nbsp; History fails to inform us who was the Brown after whom
+the Wells were named.&nbsp; I suggest they should be, and were in
+the first place &ldquo;Brent Wells&rdquo;; a source of the river
+Brent.&nbsp; Nor are those Wells&mdash;whatever they may have
+been&mdash;now in existence, while the name itself is only
+perpetuated by two or three old stuccoed villas beside the
+road.</p>
+<p>
+<a name="image70" href="images/p70.jpg">
+<img class='floatright' alt=
+"Turpin&rsquo;s Oak"
+title=
+"Turpin&rsquo;s Oak"
+ src="images/p70.jpg" />
+</a>Turpin, of course, is the greatest of all the rascals who
+made the name of the Great North Road a name of dread.&nbsp;
+Before him, however, the redoubtable Jack Sheppard figured here,
+but not, it is sad to relate, in an heroic manner.&nbsp; In fact
+that nimble-fingered youth, after escaping from the Stone Jug (by
+which piece of classic slang you are to understand Newgate to be
+meant) had the humiliation to be apprehended on Finchley Common,
+disguised in drink and a butcher&rsquo;s blue smock.&nbsp; That
+was the worst of those roystering blades.&nbsp; The drink was the
+undoing of them all.&nbsp; If only they had been Good Templars,
+and had sported the blue ribbon, it is quite certain that they
+had not been cut off untimely; and might, with reasonable luck,
+even have retired with a modest competence in early years.&nbsp;
+It was in 1724 that Jack Sheppard was arrested by Bow Street
+runners on the Common, and <a name="page71"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 71</span>the fact somewhat staggers
+one&rsquo;s belief in the wild lawlessness of that place.&nbsp;
+To capture a highwayman in his own peculiar territory!&nbsp; One
+might just as soon expect to hear of the Chief Commissioner of
+Police being kidnapped from Scotland Yard.&nbsp; And yet it is
+quite certain that Finchley was no safe place for a good young
+man with five pounds in his pocket and a mere walking-stick in
+his hand, whether he proposed to cross it by night or day.&nbsp;
+Even sixty-six years later this evil reputation existed; for, in
+1790, the Earl of Minto, travelling to London, wrote to his wife
+that instead of pushing on to town at night, he would defer his
+entry until morning, &ldquo;for I shall not trust my throat on
+Finchley Common in the dark.&rdquo;&nbsp; Think of it!&nbsp; And
+Dick Turpin had been duly executed fifty years before!</p>
+<p>Of the many names in the long and distinguished roll of road
+agents who figured here at some time or another in their meteoric
+careers, it is not possible to say much.&nbsp; There was the
+courageous and resourceful Captain Hind, the whimsically
+nicknamed &ldquo;Old Mob,&rdquo; burly Tom Cox, Neddy Wicks, and
+Claud Duval.&nbsp; Duval&rsquo;s proper territory is, however,
+the Bath Road.</p>
+<p>The palmy days of the highwayman were before 1797, the year of
+Pitt&rsquo;s Act for Restricting Cash Payments.&nbsp; Before
+then, travellers carried nothing but gold, and as they required
+plenty of that commodity on their long and tedious journeys, the
+booty seized by these gentry was often considerable.&nbsp; Bank
+notes then came into favour, and were issued for as low a
+denomination as one pound.&nbsp; These would have been a perilous
+kind of plunder, and accordingly as they grew popular, so did the
+certainty of a good haul from coaches and post-chaises diminish,
+until panics came, banks failed, and paper money became for a
+time a discredited form of currency.&nbsp; By that time the roads
+were better patrolled, and coin was to be conjured from the
+pockets of the lieges with less safety than before.&nbsp; From
+these causes, and from the new law <a name="page72"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 72</span>which made it penal to receive stolen
+goods as well as to steal them, we may date the decadence of a
+great industry, now utterly vanished from the roads.</p>
+<h2>XII</h2>
+<p>
+<a name="image72" href="images/p72.jpg">
+<img class='floatleft' alt=
+"&ldquo;The Whetstone&rdquo;"
+title=
+"&ldquo;The Whetstone&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p72.jpg" />
+</a><span class="smcap">Whetstone</span>, coming next after the
+Finchleys, is held in local legends to have acquired its name
+from the battered old stone still to be seen embedded in the
+ground by the signpost of the &ldquo;Griffin&rdquo; inn.&nbsp; On
+it the men-at-arms are said to have whetted their swords and
+spears before the battle of Barnet.&nbsp; The sceptical smile at
+this antiquity, and for their benefit there is a rival legend
+which gives the date as that of 1745, when King George&rsquo;s
+army marched down to meet Prince Charles and his
+Highlanders.&nbsp; Antiquaries have often demolished this
+derivation of the place-name; but the hoary (and quite
+unveracious) tale survives, and is doubtless immortal.&nbsp; You
+may explain it away, but the stone is there, and your local
+patriot is ever a materialist in such a resort.</p>
+<p>It is a straggling, broad-streeted village, with a breadth
+implying the originally small value of the land, and
+encroachments here and there upon the old building-line proving
+both the implication and the fact that, many years ago, there
+were those who, having the foreknowledge of a coming betterment,
+<a name="page73"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 73</span>and more
+daring than their neighbours, grabbed while they might.&nbsp;
+Many inns, laundries, dairy-farms, great black-timbered barns,
+and a few rotting hoardings and unfinished houses make up the
+long street and tell alike of a vanished rusticity and of an
+arrested development.</p>
+<p>Chaplin, the great coach-proprietor, had large stables here,
+his first stage out of London on the northern roads.&nbsp; They
+were placed here, rather than at Barnet, in order to avoid
+expenses at Whetstone Gate, situated down the road, near
+Greenhill Cross.&nbsp; Whetstone Gate gave travellers going north
+the welcome intelligence that they had finally passed Finchley
+Common and come to the better roads and more reputable society of
+Barnet, where they were safe from highwaymen.</p>
+<p>The road across Finchley Common was in passive alliance with
+these gentry.&nbsp; When Pepys visited Barnet, in 1660, partly
+for sake of its now forgotten medicinal waters, he found the
+highway &ldquo;torne, plowed, and digged up,&rdquo; in
+consequence of the heavily laden wagons and their long struggling
+teams of horses and oxen, which had made havoc with what had been
+a fairly good roadway.&nbsp; Progress was difficult, even in the
+best circumstances, and when stress of weather made it almost
+impossible, the highwaymen robbed with impunity, and absolutely
+at their leisure.</p>
+<p>The road remained more or less in this condition up to the
+early years of the nineteenth century.&nbsp; This was partly
+owing to the mistaken local patriotism which had prevented the
+remodelling of it in 1754, when the rustics of Whetstone routed
+the surveyor and his labourers at the point of the
+pitchfork.&nbsp; Better counsels prevailed in the first decade of
+the new era, and the eight miles of highway under the control of
+the Whetstone and Highgate Turnpike Trust rose in 1810 to be
+considered as good as any in the kingdom.&nbsp; It then became
+possible, for the first time in its history, for the Barnet stage
+to leave for London and to reach <a name="page74"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 74</span>its destination without the necessity
+of stopping on the way for tea.&nbsp; The Trustees were naturally
+pleased with their road, and so in 1823 received with some
+surprise, under the new Act for the improvement of the line of
+road from London to Holyhead, a demand for the reconstruction of
+the highway between Prickler&rsquo;s Hill and the southern end of
+Barnet town.&nbsp; They pointed out how greatly superior their
+portion of the road was to others, but to no purpose.&nbsp; The
+Government admitted the excellence of the surface, but boggled at
+the severity of the gradient, and practically insisted on its
+being reduced.</p>
+<p>The Trustees were dismayed.&nbsp; Telford and Macadam supplied
+rival plans, and both foreshadowed heavy expense.&nbsp;
+Telford&rsquo;s idea was to slice off the top of Barnet Hill, and
+to run the road through a more or less deep cutting through the
+street; a plan which, if adopted, would have left the houses and
+the footpaths in the position of buildings overhanging a
+cliff.&nbsp; Fortunately for Barnet the scheme drawn up by
+Macadam prevailed.&nbsp; It was for the partial filling up of the
+dip in the road between Prickler&rsquo;s Hill and the excessively
+steep entrance into the town, an entrance even now by no means
+easily graded.&nbsp; What it must originally have been may
+readily be judged by looking down from the present embanked road
+to the old one, seen going off to the left, in the hollow where
+the old roadside houses still stand, among them the &ldquo;Old
+Red Lion,&rdquo; on the site of the inn where Pepys stayed.&nbsp;
+The end one of a row of ten or twelve cottages, at the corner of
+May&rsquo;s Lane, was once a toll-house.</p>
+<p>The work of making the new road, begun in 1823, was not
+completed until four years later, at a cost of
+&pound;17,000.&nbsp; A large portion of this heavy sum went in
+compensation to the Sons of the Clergy Corporation, for land
+taken.&nbsp; The cost of these improvements came eventually, of
+course, out of the pockets of travellers along the road.&nbsp; On
+this Trust they were mulcted severely, for the Trustees, finding
+the existing tolls to be utterly inadequate to their expenses,
+obtained <a name="page75"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+75</span>powers in 1830 to increase them.&nbsp; They considered
+themselves hardly treated in being obliged to undertake such
+costly works on the eve of the London and Birmingham Railway
+being constructed&mdash;a railway which would have the effect of
+withdrawing traffic from the road, and reducing receipts at the
+toll-gates to a minimum; but the end, although not far off, was
+not yet, and on the 3rd of July they succeeded in letting the
+tolls by auction for one year at the handsome sum of
+&pound;7,530.&nbsp; Accordingly they commenced to pay off their
+debts, and succeeded in liquidating the whole of them by the
+beginning of 1842, notwithstanding two successive reductions of
+tolls in 1835 and 1841.</p>
+<p>It was in 1833 that the London and Birmingham Railway obtained
+its Act, and it was opened throughout on September 7, 1838, the
+first of the railways which were to contribute to the ruin of
+Barnet&rsquo;s great coaching and posting trade.&nbsp; The annual
+takings at Whetstone Gate immediately fell to &pound;1,300, but
+it lingered on until the Trust expired, November 1, 1863.</p>
+<p>It is interesting, as showing the growth of road traffic, to
+compare the figures still available, giving the annual sums at
+which the tolls at this gate were let in the old days.&nbsp;
+Thus, in Queen Elizabeth&rsquo;s time, they were farmed at
+&pound;40 per annum, and in 1794 they fetched only
+&pound;150.&nbsp; But few vehicles passed then.&nbsp; Forty years
+later, no fewer than ninety coaches swept through Whetstone Gate
+every twenty-four hours!</p>
+<h2>XIII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Barnet</span>, or Chipping Barnet, or High
+Barnet, as it is variously called, stands on the summit of a
+steep and high ridge running east and west.&nbsp; On the east the
+height of Muswell Hill, now suburban and crowned conspicuously
+with that unfortunate place of entertainment, the Alexandra
+Palace, is prominent; and on the west are Totteridge and the
+range of hills stretching <a name="page76"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 76</span>away to Elstree.&nbsp; Other Barnets,
+old and new, are plentiful: East and Friern Barnet, and the
+modern suburb of New Barnet.&nbsp; Chipping Barnet derives the
+first part of its name from its ancient chepe, or weekly market,
+granted by Henry the Second, and its more common prefix of
+&ldquo;High,&rdquo; from its situation on the ridge just
+mentioned.</p>
+<p>Barnet was, to many coaching proprietors, the first stage out
+of London, and the town prospered exceedingly on the coaching and
+posting traffic of those two great thoroughfares&mdash;the Great
+North Road and the Holyhead Road.&nbsp; When the Stamford
+&ldquo;Regent,&rdquo; the York &ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; and the
+early morning coaches for Shrewsbury, Birmingham, Manchester, or
+Liverpool arrived, the passengers, who had not found time for
+breakfast before starting, were generally very sharp-set indeed,
+and the viands already prepared and waiting in the cosy rooms of
+the old hostelries, disappeared before their onslaught &ldquo;in
+less than no time.&rdquo;&nbsp; The battle of Barnet was fought
+over again every morning, but they were not men-at-arms who
+contended together, nor was the subject of their contention the
+Crown of England.&nbsp; They were just famished travellers who
+struggled to get something to eat and drink before the guard made
+his appearance at the door, with the fateful cry,
+&ldquo;Time&rsquo;s up, gentlemen; take your seats
+please.&rdquo;&nbsp; When the horn sounded in the yard, desperate
+men would rush forth with hands full of food, and finish their
+repasts as best they might on the coach.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image77" href="images/p77.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"High Street, Barnet"
+title=
+"High Street, Barnet"
+ src="images/p77.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The two principal inns were the &ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo; and the
+&ldquo;Green Man.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was, and is now in some degree,
+a town of inns, but these were the headquarters of the two great
+political parties.&nbsp; Neither was a &ldquo;coaching&rdquo;
+inn, for they despised trafficking with ordinary travellers, and
+devoted themselves wholly to the posting business.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo; was originally the
+&ldquo;Antelope.&rdquo;&nbsp; Standing in the most favourable
+position for intercepting the stream of post-chaises from London,
+it generally secured the pick <a name="page78"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 78</span>of business going that way, unless
+indeed the political bias of gentlemen going down into the
+country forbade them to hire post-horses at a Tory house.&nbsp;
+In that case, they went to the &ldquo;Green Man,&rdquo; further
+on, which was Whig.&nbsp; And perhaps, in sacrificing to
+politics, they got inferior horses!&nbsp; The &ldquo;Green
+Man&rdquo; placed in midst of the town, was in receipt of the up
+traffic, and was the largest establishment, keeping twenty-six
+pairs of horses and eleven postboys, against the eighteen pairs
+and eight postboys of the &ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo;; and it is
+recorded that between May 9th and 11th, when, on May 10th, 1808,
+two celebrated prizefighters, Gully and Gregson, fought at
+Beechwood Park, Sir John Sebright&rsquo;s place down the road,
+near Flamstead, no fewer than one hundred and eighty-seven pairs
+were changed.&nbsp; Those three days formed a record time for the
+&ldquo;Green Man,&rdquo; according to these figures:&mdash;</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Posting</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">&pound;141</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">17</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bills in the house</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">54</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">19</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">0</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Bills in the yard</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">14</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">0</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">&pound;211</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">6</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10&frac12;</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>The &ldquo;boys&rdquo; of the &ldquo;Green Man&rdquo; wore
+blue jackets; those of the &ldquo;Red Lion,&rdquo; yellow jackets
+and black hats.</p>
+<p>An inn called the &ldquo;Green Man&rdquo; stands on the site
+of that busy house, but it is of more recent date than the old
+Whig headquarters.&nbsp; It may be seen at the fork of roads
+where the &ldquo;new&rdquo; road to St. Albans, driven through
+the yard of the old &ldquo;Green Man&rdquo; in 1826, branches
+off.</p>
+<p>Thus the &ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo; remains, long after the
+eclipse of its rival.&nbsp; Its frontage is impressive by size
+rather than beauty.&nbsp; With a range of fifteen windows in
+line, and its fiercely-whiskered red lion balancing himself at
+the end of a prodigiously long wrought-iron sign, it is eloquent
+of the old days.&nbsp; The lion turns his <a
+name="page79"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 79</span>head north,
+gazing away from the direction in which his chief customers
+came.</p>
+<p>But this white-stuccoed frontage does not hide anything of
+antiquity, for this is not that original &ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo;
+to which Samuel Pepys resorted.&nbsp; The house he refers to in
+his diary is the &ldquo;Old Red Lion&rdquo;; down the hill, at
+the approach to Barnet.&nbsp; There he &ldquo;lay&rdquo; in
+1667.&nbsp; &ldquo;August 11th, Lord&rsquo;s Day,&rdquo; he
+writes: &ldquo;Up by four o&rsquo;clock . . . and got to the
+wells at Barnet by seven o&rsquo;clock, and there found many
+people a-drinking.&rdquo;&nbsp; After &ldquo;drinking three
+glasses and the women nothing,&rdquo; the party sojourned
+&ldquo;to the Red Lion, where we &rsquo;light and went up into
+the great room, and there drank, and ate some of the best
+cheesecakes that ever I ate in my life.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The keenness of the innkeepers who let post-horses during the
+last few years of the coaching age is scarcely credible.&nbsp; It
+was a fierce competition.&nbsp; The landlord of the &ldquo;Red
+Lion&rdquo; at Barnet thought nothing of forcibly taking out the
+post-horses from any private carriage passing his house, and
+putting in a pair of his own, to do the next stage to St.
+Albans.&nbsp; This, too, free of charge, in order to prevent the
+business going to the hated rival.&nbsp; Mine host of that hotel
+also had his little ways of drawing custom, and gave a glass of
+sherry and a sandwich, gratis, to the travellers changing
+there.&nbsp; But things did not end here.&nbsp; The landlord of
+the &ldquo;Red Lion,&rdquo; finding, perhaps, that the sherry and
+sandwich at the &ldquo;Green Man&rdquo; was more attractive than
+his method, engaged a gang of bruisers to pounce upon passing
+chaises, and even to haul them out of his rival&rsquo;s
+stable-yard.&nbsp; Evidently a man of wrath, this licensed
+victualler!&nbsp; After several contests of this kind, the
+authorities interfered.&nbsp; The combatants were bound over to
+keep the peace, the punching of conks and bread-baskets, and the
+tapping of claret ceased, and people travelling down the road
+were actually allowed to decide for themselves which house they
+would patronise!</p>
+<h2><a name="page80"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+80</span>XIV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">From</span> Barnet the road runs across
+Hadley Green, a broad and picturesque expanse, cursed nowadays
+with the ubiquitous golfer.&nbsp; Here, where the road
+divides&mdash;the Great North Road to the right and the old
+Holyhead Road to the left&mdash;stands the obelisk known as
+Hadley Highstone, which serves both as a milestone and as a
+memorial of the great battle of Barnet, fought here on that cold
+and miserable Easter Day, April 14, 1471, when Edward the Fourth
+utterly defeated the Lancastrians under the Earl of Warwick, the
+&ldquo;King Maker.&rdquo;&nbsp; Warwick fell, and the Red Rose
+was finally crushed.&nbsp; Hadley Green was then a portion of a
+wide stretch of unenclosed country known as Gladsmoor Heath,
+extending up to Monken Hadley church, away on the right.&nbsp;
+The obelisk was erected by Sir Jeremy Sambrooke in 1740 on the
+spot where Warwick is said to have been slain.&nbsp; There is,
+however, another spot which aspires to the honour, at Rabley
+Park, near South Mimms.&nbsp; This also has its monumental
+pillar, but without inscription.&nbsp; Among the guileless youth
+of the neighbourhood it is said to mark &ldquo;the place where a
+soldier was knocked down,&rdquo; which is a commonplace way of
+stating the fact.&nbsp; But who knocked him down, or why, or
+when, is beyond them when questioned.</p>
+<p>Past the lodge gates of Wrotham Park and by Ganwick Corner,
+where stands the &ldquo;Duke of York&rdquo; inn with its bust of
+that wonderful strategist.&nbsp; He is looking enquiringly south,
+from his alcove over the front door, as though wondering what has
+become of all the post-chaises and coaches of old.&nbsp; He is
+that great commander who managed, according to the well-known
+rhyme, to march his ten thousand men to the top of a hill and
+then down again&mdash;but he never otherwise distinguished
+himself&mdash;except by the magnitude of his debts.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image81" href="images/p81.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Hadley Green: Site of the Battle of Barnet"
+title=
+"Hadley Green: Site of the Battle of Barnet"
+ src="images/p81.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Potter&rsquo;s Bar marks where the counties of Middlesex and
+Hertford join.&nbsp; It is not a place of delirious <a
+name="page82"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 82</span>delights,
+consisting of stuccoed villas fondly supposed to be Italian, and
+unfinished roads, and streets in a state of suspended
+animation.&nbsp; Until 1897, when it was pulled down, an old
+toll-house, the last in a long succession of toll-houses and
+toll-bars which had stood here from the earliest times and had
+given Potter&rsquo;s Bar its name, occupied the fork of the roads
+at the north end of the village, commanding the high-road and the
+road on the right to Northaw.&nbsp; 
+<a name="image82" href="images/p82.jpg">
+<img class='clearcenter' alt=
+"Old Toll-House, Potter&rsquo;s Bar"
+title=
+"Old Toll-House, Potter&rsquo;s Bar"
+ src="images/p82.jpg" />
+</a>&nbsp; It was not a beautiful building, but it hinted of old
+times, and its disappearance is to be regretted.&nbsp; It was
+taken down because already, in the first twelve months of the new
+automobile era a car had dashed into it and done most of any
+demolition necessary.&nbsp; A War Memorial now stands on the
+site.&nbsp; Between this and Hatfield the road goes in undulating
+fashion, with the Great Northern Railway on the left hand nearly
+all the way, but chiefly downhill.&nbsp; Down Little Heath Hill
+and then half-way up the succeeding incline we come to a cutting
+which affords a newer and easier road than the hilly route to the
+left.&nbsp; 
+<a name="image83" href="images/p83.jpg">
+<img class='clearcenter' alt=
+"Ganwick Corner"
+title=
+"Ganwick Corner"
+ src="images/p83.jpg" />
+</a>&nbsp; Where this joins the <a name="page84"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 84</span>old road again, nearly two miles
+onward, at Bell Bar, stands the pretty &ldquo;Swan&rdquo;
+inn.&nbsp; The &ldquo;bar&rdquo; has, of course, long since
+disappeared.&nbsp; Immediately ahead is Hatfield Park, stretching
+away for over three miles.&nbsp; Through the park, by where the
+present south lodge stands, the highway used to run in former
+times, and brought wayfarers between the wind and the nobility of
+the Cecils.&nbsp; Accordingly the road was diverted at the
+instance of the then Lord Salisbury, and the public no longer
+offend him, his heirs, executors, or assigns.&nbsp; And now, for
+ever and a day, those who use the road between Potter&rsquo;s Bar
+and Hatfield village must go an extra half mile.&nbsp; This is
+indeed a free and happy country.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image84" href="images/p84.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bell Bar"
+title=
+"Bell Bar"
+ src="images/p84.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Hatfield village touches the extremity of wretchedness, just
+as Hatfield House marks the apogee of late feudal
+splendour.&nbsp; And yet, amid its tumbledown hovels there are
+quaintly beautiful old-gabled cottages with bowed and
+broken-backed red-tiled roofs, delightful to the artistic eye, if
+from the builder&rsquo;s and decorator&rsquo;s point of view
+sadly out of repair.&nbsp; Motor repair-shops and garages, with
+their squalid <a name="page85"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+85</span>advertisements, have helped to ruin Hatfield, and the
+railway does its share, running closely to the main road, and,
+with the station directly opposite the highly elaborate modern
+wrought-iron gates that lead to Hatfield House, detracting not a
+little from that state of dignified seclusion by which, as we
+have just seen, a former Marquis of Salisbury set such
+store.&nbsp; Let us hope his pale ghost does not revisit his old
+home.&nbsp; If it does, it must be sorely vexed.</p>
+<p>But at any rate, that Marquis who was one of Queen
+Victoria&rsquo;s Prime Ministers, sits there in bronze
+portrait-effigy.&nbsp; He gazes mournfully, directly at the
+railway booking-office, as one who has long been waiting, without
+hope, for a train.&nbsp; It is a fine statue, by Sir George
+Frampton, R.A., and bears the inscription:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">ROBERT ARTHUR
+TALBOT,<br />
+Marquess of Salisbury, K.G., G.C.V.O.,<br />
+Three times Prime Minister of<br />
+Great Britain and Ireland,<br />
+1830&ndash;1903.<br />
+Erected to his memory by his Hertfordshire friends<br />
+and neighbours in recognition of a great life devoted<br />
+to the welfare of his country.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Hatfield House, that great historical museum and ancient
+repository of State secrets, is little seen from the village, nor
+have we, as wayfarers along the road, much to do with it.&nbsp;
+It is by the parish church, its characteristic Hertfordshire
+extinguisher spire so prominent above the tumbled roofs of
+Hatfield, that we may glimpse the older parts of the house.&nbsp;
+In that church lies its builder, the great Robert Cecil, his
+effigy, with the Lord Treasurer&rsquo;s wand of office, recumbent
+on a slab uplifted by statues emblematic of Fortitude, Justice,
+Prudence, and Temperance, and a skeleton below, to show that even
+Lord Treasurers, possessed though they be of all the virtues, are
+mortal, like less exalted and less virtuous men.</p>
+<p>The house that he built seems sadly out of repair.&nbsp; The
+history of it is romantic to a degree.&nbsp; Originally the
+palace of the Bishops of Ely, whose delicate <a
+name="page86"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 86</span>constitutions
+could not stand the fen-land vapours which enwrapped the
+neighbourhood of their glorious Cathedral (but perhaps were not
+harmful to the less dignified clergy!), it remained in their
+possession until it was coveted by Henry the Eighth, who gave
+some land at Ely in exchange.&nbsp; So the bishops had, doubtless
+with an ill grace, to go back to that fertile breeding-ground of
+agues and rheumatism, and one can well imagine the resident
+inferior clergy, between their aches and pains, chuckling
+secretly about this piece of poetic justice.</p>
+<p>And so in Royal possession the old palace continued until
+James the First in his turn exchanged it for the estate of Sir
+Robert Cecil at Theobalds.&nbsp; Previously it had been the
+home&mdash;the prison, rather of the Princess Elizabeth during
+her sister Mary&rsquo;s reign.&nbsp; The oak is still shown in
+the park under which she was sitting when the news of
+Mary&rsquo;s death and the end, consequently, of the surveillance
+to which she was subjected, was brought her, November 17,
+1588.&nbsp; (But is tradition truthful here?&nbsp; Would she have
+been sitting under an oak in November?)&nbsp; &ldquo;It is the
+Lord&rsquo;s doing, it is marvellous in our eyes,&rdquo; she
+exclaimed, quoting from the Psalms.&nbsp; Three days later she
+held her first council in the old palace, and then on the 23rd
+set out for London.</p>
+<p>There are relics of the great queen at Hatfield House: a pair
+of her stockings and the garden hat she was wearing when the
+great news came to her.&nbsp; But the house is nearly all of a
+later date, for when Sir Robert Cecil obtained it in exchange for
+Theobalds, he pulled down the greater part of the old palace and
+built the present striking Jacobean building, magnificent and
+impressive, and perhaps not the less impressive for being also
+somewhat gloomy.&nbsp; This is no place to recount the glories of
+its picture-galleries and its noble state-rooms, or of the long
+line of the exalted and the great who have been entertained
+here.&nbsp; Moreover, the great are not uncommonly the dullest of
+dull dogs.&nbsp; It is rather with those of less estate, <a
+name="page87"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 87</span>and with
+travellers, that in these pages we shall find our account.&nbsp;
+Pepys, for instance, whom we need not object to call the natural
+man (for does not Scripture tell us that the human heart in a
+natural state is &ldquo;desperately wicked&rdquo;? and Samuel was
+no Puritan), who was here lusting to steal somebody&rsquo;s dog,
+as he acknowledged in that very outspoken <i>Diary</i> of
+his:&mdash;&ldquo;Would fain have stolen a pretty dog that
+followed me, but could not, which troubled me.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There was a tragical happening at Hatfield, November 27, 1835,
+when the house was greatly injured by fire, and the old and
+eccentric Dowager Marchioness of Salisbury burnt to death, in her
+eighty-fifth year.&nbsp; The pious declared it to be a
+&ldquo;judgment&rdquo; for her playing cards on Sunday; but what
+a number of conflagrations we should have if that were true and
+Providence consistent in its vengeance!</p>
+<h2>XV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Leaving</span> Hatfield and its memories
+behind, we come, past the tree-shaded hamlet of Stanborough, to
+the long gradual rise of Digswell Hill, beautifully engineered
+over the uplands rising from the marshy banks of the little river
+Lea.&nbsp; Off to the left, at the foot of the hill, goes the old
+road at a wide tangent, and with a decidedly abrupt plunge down
+into the water-meadows, crossing the Lea by Lemsford Mills, and
+rejoining the newer road on an equally abrupt and difficult rise
+half-way up the hill, by the wall of Brockett Hall Park.&nbsp; It
+was here that Brickwall turnpike gate was situated in the old
+days.&nbsp; The brick wall of the park that gave the gate its
+name is still there and a very old, substantial, and beautifully
+lichened red-brick wall it is&mdash;but the gate and the
+toll-board and the toll-house have all vanished.&nbsp; Digswell
+Hill is beautiful, and so is Ayot Green, at the summit, with its
+giant trees and humble cottages stretching away on the left to
+the Ayot <a name="page88"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+88</span>villages.&nbsp; Not so the &ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo; close
+by.&nbsp; More beautiful still&mdash;and steeper&mdash;is the
+descent into Welwyn, beneath over-arching trees and rugged banks,
+down from which secluded rustic summer-houses look upon the
+traffic of the highway.</p>
+<p>Welwyn lies in a deep hollow on the little river&mdash;or,
+more correctly speaking, the streamlet&mdash;of the Mimram.&nbsp;
+Street and houses face you alarmingly as you descend the steep
+hillside, wondering (if you cycle) if the sharp corner can safely
+be rounded, or if you must needs dash through door or window of
+the &ldquo;White Hart,&rdquo; once one of the two coaching inns
+of the village.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;White Hart&rdquo; at Welwyn was kept in the
+&ldquo;twenties&rdquo; by &ldquo;old Barker,&rdquo; who horsed
+the Stamford &ldquo;Regent&rdquo; a stage on the road, and was,
+in the language of the coachmen, a &ldquo;three-cornered old
+beggar.&rdquo;&nbsp; That is to say, he kept a tight hand over
+the doings of coachmen and guards, did not approve of
+&ldquo;shouldering,&rdquo; and objected to the coachmen giving
+lessons to gentlemen coachmen, or allowing amateurs to
+&ldquo;take the ribbons.&rdquo;&nbsp; From the passengers&rsquo;
+point of view this was entirely admirable of &ldquo;old
+Barker,&rdquo; for many an inoffensive traveller&rsquo;s life had
+been jeopardised by the driving of unqualified persons.&nbsp;
+Colonel Birch Reynardson tells a story of him and of Tom Hennesy,
+the best known of the &ldquo;Regent&rdquo; coachmen&mdash;one who
+could whistle louder, hit a horse harder, and tell a bigger lie
+than any of his contemporaries.&nbsp; Hennesy had resigned the
+reins to him one day between London and Hatfield, but when they
+neared Welwyn, the accomplished Tom thought he had better resume
+them.&nbsp; &ldquo;It would never do for old Barker to see you
+driving,&rdquo; said he.&nbsp; The words were scarcely out of his
+mouth before the &ldquo;three-cornered old beggar&rdquo; himself
+appeared, walking up the hill, with the double object of taking a
+constitutional and of seeing if any &ldquo;shouldering&rdquo; was
+going on.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Don&rsquo;t look as if you seed him,&rdquo; said
+Tom.&nbsp; &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll make the best of it we
+can.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page89"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 89</span>
+<a name="image89" href="images/p89.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Welwyn"
+title=
+"Welwyn"
+ src="images/p89.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page90"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 90</span>Down
+they went to the inn door, where the fresh team was
+standing.&nbsp; By the time the horses had been got out of the
+coach, old Barker, who had turned back, looking anything but
+pleasant, was upon them.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good morning, Mr. Barker, sir,&rdquo; said Tom, with
+all the impudence he could command.&nbsp; &ldquo;Did you ever see
+a young gentleman take a coach steadier down a hill?&nbsp;
+&rsquo;Pon my word, sir, he could not have done it better.&nbsp;
+He&rsquo;s a pupil of mine, sir, and I&rsquo;m blessed if he did
+not do it capital; don&rsquo;t you think he did, sir, for you
+seed him?&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Hum,&rdquo; said old Barker;
+&ldquo;you know it&rsquo;s all against the laws.&nbsp; Supposing
+anything happened, what then?&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, sir, I
+did not expect anything <i>would</i> happen, with such horses as
+these of yours; there&rsquo;s no better four horses, sir, betwixt
+London and Stamford; and as for those wheelers, why,
+they&rsquo;ll hold anything.&rdquo;&nbsp; This, of course, was
+pouring balm into old Barker&rsquo;s wounds, which seemed to heal
+pretty quickly, and he put on a pleasanter face, and said,
+&ldquo;Well, Hennesy, you know I don&rsquo;t like
+&lsquo;gentlemen coachmen,&rsquo; and, above all things, very
+<i>young</i> ones.&nbsp; Don&rsquo;t you do it again.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Was Hennesy grateful?&nbsp; Not at all; for, when they had
+driven away, he said, &ldquo;Well, he was wonderful civil for
+<i>him</i>,&rdquo; and added that if he could only catch him
+lying drunk in the road, he would run over his neck and kill him,
+&ldquo;blessed if he wouldn&rsquo;t!&rdquo;</p>
+<p>This bold and independent fellow, like many another coachman,
+came down in the world when railways drove the coaches off the
+main roads, and was reduced to driving a pair-horse coach between
+Cambridge and Huntingdon.</p>
+<p>More picturesque than the &ldquo;White Hart&rdquo; is the
+&ldquo;Wellington,&rdquo; which composes so finely with the
+red-brick tower of the church, at the further end of the village
+street, where the road abruptly forks.&nbsp; It is a street of
+all kinds and sizes of houses, mostly old and pleasingly
+grouped.</p>
+<p>But Welwyn has other claims upon the tourist.&nbsp; It was the
+home for many years of Young, author <a name="page91"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 91</span>of the once-popular <i>Night
+Thoughts</i>.&nbsp; Who reads that sombre work now?&nbsp; He was
+rector here from 1730 until 1765, when he died, but lives as a
+warning to those who inevitably identify an author with his
+books.&nbsp; His work, <i>The Complaint</i>, <i>or</i>, <i>Night
+Thoughts on Life</i>, <i>Death</i>, <i>and Immortality</i>, is
+dour reading, but he was so little of a sombre man that we find
+him not infrequently in the company of, and a fellow spirit
+among, the convivial men of his time.&nbsp; This was only a
+product of his &ldquo;sensibility,&rdquo; that curious quality
+peculiar to the eighteenth century, and did not necessarily prove
+him a weeping philosopher.&nbsp; He had, indeed, a mental agility
+which could with ease fly from the most depressing disquisitions
+on the silent tomb, to the proper compounding of a stiff jorum of
+punch.&nbsp; Young, on his appointment to Welwyn, married Lady
+Elizabeth (&ldquo;Betty&rdquo;) Lee, daughter of the Earl of
+Lichfield.&nbsp; He found the rectory too small (or perhaps not
+good enough for her ladyship), and so purchased a more imposing
+house called the &ldquo;Guessons&rdquo;&mdash;anciently the
+&ldquo;Guest House&rdquo; of some abbey.&nbsp; With it he bought
+land, and planted the lime-tree avenue which still remains a
+memorial of him.&nbsp; There is a votive urn here, erected by Mr.
+Johnes-Knight, a succeeding rector; but probably the most
+enduring memorial of Young is the very first line of the <i>Night
+Thoughts</i>, the fine expression:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Tired Nature&rsquo;s sweet restorer, balmy
+sleep.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>No one reads Young nowadays, and so every one who sees this,
+one of the most hackneyed of quotations, ascribes it to
+Shakespeare.&nbsp; Alas, poor Young!</p>
+<p>Young erected a sundial in his garden here, with the motto,
+&ldquo;<i>Eheu</i>, <i>fugaces</i>!&rdquo; &ldquo;Alas, how
+fleeting!&rdquo;&nbsp; It was not long before some midnight
+robbers came, and, carrying it off, justified the
+inscription.&nbsp; Nowadays, besides the avenue and the votive
+urn, all that remains to tell of him is the tablet to his memory
+on the south wall of the aisle.</p>
+<p><a name="page92"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+92</span>Knebworth Park, with mansion and an ancient parish
+church full of monuments to Strodes, Robinsons and Lyttons, is
+just off to the left.&nbsp; There is no Lytton blood in the Earls
+&ldquo;of&rdquo; Lytton, who are not of Litton, near Tideswell,
+in Derbyshire, whence came the now extinct Lytton family.&nbsp;
+The whole assumption is romantic rather than warranted by
+facts.</p>
+<p>Knebworth is a place of much combined beauty and historic
+interest, together with a great deal of vulgar and uninteresting
+sham.&nbsp; It has been described as &ldquo;a sham-old house,
+with a sham lake, sham heraldic monsters, and sham-ancient
+portraits.&rdquo;&nbsp; Bulwer, the first Lord
+Lytton&mdash;&ldquo;Bulwig,&rdquo; as someone, to his intense
+annoyance, called him&mdash;was intensely fond of Gothic
+architecture and ornamentation; fond of it in an
+undiscriminating, Early Victorian, uninstructed way, and he stuck
+his house of Knebworth all over with gimcrackery that he fondly
+thought to be medi&aelig;val.&nbsp; Crockets, tourelles,
+pinnacles and grotesque gargoyles were added in wholesale
+fashion, and in a very carpenterish way.&nbsp; One might almost
+say they were <i>wafered</i> on.&nbsp; They were not carved out
+of stone, but moulded cheaply in plaster, and in his son&rsquo;s
+time were always falling.&nbsp; As they fell, they were relegated
+to the nearest dustheap, and their places remained vacant.&nbsp;
+A visitor to the second Lord Lytton tells, apropos of these
+things, how he was walking on the terrace with his host, when the
+gardener came up and said, &ldquo;If you please, my lord, another
+of them bloody monkeys has fallen down in the night.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+It was, of course, one more of &ldquo;Bulwig&rsquo;s&rdquo;
+quasi-Gothic abominations come to its doom.</p>
+<p>The Earls Lytton are neither baronial Bulwers nor ancient
+lordly Lyttons.&nbsp; Their real name is the very much more
+plebian one of Wiggett.&nbsp; So far back as 1756, William
+Wiggett assumed the name of Bulwer on his marriage with a Sarah
+of that ilk.&nbsp; His youngest son, the novelist, the child of
+another wife, who had been an Elizabeth Warburton, added the name
+of Lytton to his own on succeeding to his mother&rsquo;s property
+of Knebworth.</p>
+<p><a name="page93"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 93</span>But
+that does not at once bring us to the Lytton connection.&nbsp;
+For that, we must quote the late Augustus J. C. Hare, who was an
+adept at relationships to the remotest degree.&nbsp; He had
+hundreds of cousins of his own, and knew who was everybody
+else&rsquo;s twentieth or thirtieth cousin.&nbsp; He tells us
+that this Elizabeth Warburton&rsquo;s very remote connection with
+the real Lyttons lay in the fact that &ldquo;her grandfather,
+John Robinson, was cousin (maternally) to Lytton Strode, who was
+great-nephew of a Sir William Lytton, who died childless in
+1704.&rdquo;&nbsp; It will be allowed that the connection
+<i>is</i> remote; practically indeed, non-existent.</p>
+<p>Nor is the name of Bulwer as distinguished as the novelist
+wished it to appear.&nbsp; He sought to range it with
+B&ouml;lver, one of the war-titles of the Norse god, Odin; but it
+really derived from some plebian cattle-driver, or Bullward.</p>
+<p>The road rises steeply out of Welwyn, in the direction of
+Stevenage.&nbsp; Here some of the coaches had a narrow escape
+from destruction at the hands of unknown miscreants, ancestors of
+the criminal lunatics who place obstacles upon the railways in
+our times.&nbsp; Our murderous larrikins had their counterparts
+in the old days, in those who placed gates across the roads, so
+that the coaches should run into them in the darkness.&nbsp; An
+incident of this kind happened here on the night of June 5, 1805,
+when two gates were found set up in the main road, and another at
+Welwyn Green.&nbsp; Fortunately, no accident resulted, and the
+ruffians, who doubtless were waiting the result of their work,
+must have gone home disappointed.</p>
+<p>From the beautiful expanse of gorsy and wooded hillside common
+above the village may be glimpsed the great red-brick viaduct of
+Welwyn, carrying the main line of the Great Northern Railway
+across the wide and deep valley of the Mimram, an insignificant
+stream for such a channel.&nbsp; Woolmer Green and Broadwater,
+between this point and Stevenage, are modern and uninteresting
+hamlets, created out of nothingness by the speculative builder
+and the handy <a name="page94"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+94</span>situation of Knebworth station, beside the road, which
+now begins to give another example of its flatness.</p>
+<p>Leisurely wayfarers will notice the old half-timbered cottage
+at the entrance to the churchyard.&nbsp; On its side wall are
+hung two stout long poles with formidable hooks attached.&nbsp;
+These are old fire-appliances, used in the days of thatched
+roofs, for pulling off the whole of the blazing thatch.&nbsp;
+Travellers, leisured or otherwise, will scarce be able to miss
+seeing the great and offensive boards hereabouts, advertising a
+new suburban or &ldquo;Garden Suburb&rdquo; settlement in course
+of building away to the right, since 1920; blessed and boomed by
+Lord Northcliffe, and apparently to be given the name of
+&ldquo;Daily Mail.&rdquo;&nbsp; Horrible!</p>
+<p>The entrance to Stevenage is signalised by a group of new and
+commonplace cottages elbowing the famous Six Hills, a series of
+sepulchral barrows of prehistoric date, beside the highway.&nbsp;
+These six grassy mounds might not unreasonably be passed
+unthinkingly by the uninstructed, or taken for grass-grown heaps
+of refuse.&nbsp; Centuries of wear and weather have had their
+effect, and they do not look very monumental now; but they were
+once remarkable enough to give the place its name, Stevenage
+deriving from the Saxon &ldquo;<i>stigenhaght</i>,&rdquo; or
+&ldquo;hills by the highway.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>To coachmen, who were adepts in the art of what the slangy
+call &ldquo;spoofing,&rdquo; and were always ready&mdash;in
+earlier slang phrase&mdash;to &ldquo;take a rise out of&rdquo;
+strangers, the Six Hills afforded an excellent opportunity of
+practising a diluted form of wit, and often brought them a glass
+of brandy or rum-and-milk at the next pull-up, in payment of the
+bets they would make with the most innocent-looking passenger,
+that he could not tell which two of the hills were furthest
+apart.&nbsp; They are, as nearly as possible, equi-distant; but
+strangers would select one couple or another, according to their
+fancy; whereupon the coachman would triumphantly point out that
+the first and the last were, as a matter of fact, the most widely
+divided.&nbsp; This <a name="page96"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+96</span>perhaps does not exhibit coaching wit in a strikingly
+robust light; but a very weak kind of jocularity served to pass
+the weary hours of travel in our grandfathers&rsquo; days.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image95" href="images/p95.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Six Hills,&rdquo; Stevenage"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Six Hills,&rdquo; Stevenage"
+ src="images/p95.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2>XVI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Stevenage</span> is the first of the many
+wide-streeted towns and villages whose emptiness proclaims the
+something missing that was provided for by all this vast
+roominess.&nbsp; Its one street, lining the old road, was
+originally laid out so spaciously for the purpose of affording
+room for the traffic for which, once upon a time, it was not too
+spacious.&nbsp; It is all too wide now that the intercourse of
+two nations proceeds by rail, and many of the old inns that once
+did so famous a trade are converted into private
+residences.&nbsp; Prominent among them was the
+&ldquo;Swan,&rdquo; which may now be sought in the large
+red-brick house on the right-hand side of the forking roads, as
+the town is left for Baldock.&nbsp; It may readily be identified
+by its archway, which formerly led to the spacious stables.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Swan&rdquo; at Stevenage, kept in pre-railway days
+by a postmaster named Cass, was one of those exclusive houses
+which, like the &ldquo;Red Lion&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Green
+Man&rdquo; at Barnet, did not condescend to the ordinary
+coach-traveller.&nbsp; Cass kept post-horses only, and his
+customers ranged from princes and dukes down to baronets and
+wealthy knights.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Posting in all its branches,&rdquo; as the postmasters
+used to say in the announcements outside their establishments,
+was at the beginning of the nineteenth century essentially
+aristocratic; but it had many changes, from its beginning, about
+the dawn of the seventeenth century, to its end, before the
+middle of the nineteenth.&nbsp; Originally &ldquo;posting&rdquo;
+meant the hire of horses only, and the traveller rode horseback
+himself, accompanied perhaps by a mounted guide.&nbsp; <a
+name="page97"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 97</span>Thus Fynes
+Morison, in his <i>Itinerary</i>, published in 1617, speaks of
+the early days of posting:&mdash;&ldquo;In England, towards the
+south, and in the west parts, and from London to Barwick upon the
+confines of Scotland, post-horses are established at every ten
+miles or thereabouts, which they ride a false gallop after some
+ten miles an hour sometimes, and that makes their hire the
+greater; for with a commission from the chief postmaster or
+chiefe lords of the councell (given either upon publike
+businesse, or at least pretence thereof), a passenger shall pay
+twopence halfpenny each mile for his horse, and as much for his
+guide&rsquo;s horse; but one guide will serve the whole company,
+though many ride together, who may easily bring back the horses,
+driving them before him, who &lsquo;know the waye as well as a
+beggar knowes his dishe.&rsquo;&nbsp; This extraordinary charge
+of horses&rsquo; hire may well be recompensed with the speede of
+the journey, whereby greater expences in the innes are avoided;
+all the difficultie is, to have a body able to endure the
+toyle.&nbsp; For these horses the passenger is at no charge to
+give them meat onely at the ten miles, and the boy that carries
+them backe will expect some few pence in gift.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>When carriages were introduced, the very great personages of
+the realm &ldquo;progressed&rdquo; in them, and had their love of
+display gratified thereby.&nbsp; But what they gained in pomp
+they lost in speed, for at the best of it they rarely travelled
+at a greater pace than seven miles an hour.</p>
+<p>An odd institution with the noble and the wealthy families of
+that bygone age was the &ldquo;running footman.&rdquo;&nbsp; It
+has sometimes been supposed that these deer-footed servitors were
+for town service, perhaps because &ldquo;old Q,&rdquo; the
+profligate Marquis of Queensberry, who was the last to keep one,
+lived in town during his last years and necessarily kept his
+lackey running London streets.&nbsp; The unique sign of the
+&ldquo;running footman,&rdquo; with the portrait of such an one
+in costume, is also in London, and may be seen any <a
+name="page98"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 98</span>day on a
+little public-house, still chiefly frequented by men-servants, in
+Charles Street, Berkeley Square.&nbsp; He wears a uniform
+consisting of blue coat and breeches, trimmed with gold
+lace.&nbsp; Round his waist is a red sash, on his head a cap with
+a nodding plume, and in his hand the long staff carried by all
+his tribe.&nbsp; This is an outfit somewhat different from that
+usually worn, for we are told that they wore no breeches, but a
+short silk petticoat kept down by a deep gold fringe.</p>
+<p>The function of a running footman was to run ahead of his
+employer&rsquo;s carriage, to point out the proper turnings to
+take, or to arrange for his reception at the inns; but as time
+went on and accommodation increased, he was not of any practical
+use, and became simply a kind of unnecessary fore-runner, who by
+his appearance advertised the coming of my lord and upheld my
+lord&rsquo;s dignity.&nbsp; It is said that these ministers to
+senseless pomp and vanity usually ran at the rate of seven miles
+an hour, and frequently did sixty miles a day.&nbsp; The long and
+highly ornamented staff they carried had a hollow silver ball at
+the end containing white wine.&nbsp; Unscrewing it, the footman
+could refresh himself.&nbsp; More white wine, mixed with eggs,
+was given him at the end of his journey, and he must have needed
+it!&nbsp; Over the bad and hilly roads of a hundred and fifty
+years ago, the running footman could readily keep ahead of a
+carriage; on the flat the horses, of course, had the
+advantage.</p>
+<p>Post-chaises were unknown in England until after the middle of
+the eighteenth century had come and gone.&nbsp; Thus we find
+Horace Walpole and Gray, taking the &ldquo;grand tour&rdquo;
+together in 1739, astonished to laughter at the post-chaises
+which conveyed them from Boulogne towards Paris.&nbsp; This
+French vehicle, the father of all post-chaises, was two-wheeled,
+and not very unlike our present hansom-cab, the door being in
+front and the body hung in much the same way, only a little more
+forward from the wheels.&nbsp; The French <i>chaise de-poste</i>
+was invented in 1664, and the first used in England were of this
+type; but they <a name="page99"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+99</span>proved unsuitable for use in this country, and English
+carriage-builders at length evolved the well-known post-chaise,
+which went out only with the coaching age.&nbsp; But it was long
+before it began to supplant the post-horses and the feminine
+pillion.</p>
+<p>Every one is familiar with the appearance of the old
+post-chaise, which, according to the painters and the
+print-sellers, appears to have been used principally for the
+purpose of spiriting love-lorn couples with the speed of the wind
+away from all restrictions of home and the Court of
+Chancery.&nbsp; A post-chaise was (so it seems nowadays) a rather
+cumbrous affair, four-wheeled, high, and insecurely hung, with a
+glass front and a seat to hold three, facing the horses.&nbsp;
+The original designers evidently had no prophetic visions as to
+this especial popularity of post-chaises with errant lovers, nor
+did they ponder the proverb, &ldquo;Two&rsquo;s company,
+three&rsquo;s none,&rdquo; else they would have restricted their
+accommodation to two, or have enlarged it to four.</p>
+<p>It was an expensive as well as a pleasant method of
+travelling, costing as it did at least a shilling a mile, and, in
+times when forage was dear, one shilling and threepence.&nbsp;
+The usual rates were chaise, nine-pence a mile, pair of
+post-horses, sixpence; four horses and chaise, supposing you
+desired to travel speedily&mdash;say at twelve miles an
+hour&mdash;one-and-ninepence.&nbsp; But these costs and charges
+did not frank the traveller through.&nbsp; The post-boy&rsquo;s
+tip was as inevitable as night and morning.&nbsp; Likewise there
+were the &ldquo;gates&rdquo; to pay every now and again.&nbsp;
+One shudders to contemplate the total cost of posting from London
+to Edinburgh, even with only the ordinary equipment of two
+horses.&nbsp; There were thirty post-stages between the two
+capitals, according to the books published for the use of
+travellers a hundred years ago.&nbsp; Those books were very
+necessary to any one who did not desire to be charged for perhaps
+a mile more on each stage than it really measured, which was one
+of those artful postmasters&rsquo; little ways.&nbsp; Here is a
+list of these stages with the measurements, to <a
+name="page100"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 100</span>which
+travellers drew the attention of those postmasters who commonly
+endeavoured to overcharge:&mdash;</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">Miles</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">Furlongs</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">Miles</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">Furlongs</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Barnet</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">0</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>York</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">9</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Hatfield</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">8</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">4</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Easingwold</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">13</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stevenage</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">7</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Thirsk</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Biggleswade</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">13</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">5</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Northallerton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">9</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">0</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Buckden</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">15</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">7</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Darlington</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">16</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">0</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stilton</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">13</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">7</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Durham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">18</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">2</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Stamford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">14</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">2</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Newcastle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">14</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">4</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Witham Common</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">2</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Morpeth</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">14</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">6</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Grantham</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">9</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">5</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Alnwick</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">18</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">6</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Newark</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">14</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Belford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">14</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">5</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Tuxford</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">13</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">2</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Berwick</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">15</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Barnby Moor</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">4</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Press Inn</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">5</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Doncaster</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">12</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">0</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Dunbar</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">14</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Ferrybridge</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">15</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">2</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Haddington</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">11</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">0</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Tadcaster</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">12</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">7</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Edinburgh</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">16</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">0</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>Nearly four hundred miles by these measurements.&nbsp; This,
+at a shilling a mile for the posting, gives &pound;20; but,
+including the postboys&rsquo; tips, &ldquo;gates,&rdquo; and
+expenses at the inns on the road, the journey could not have been
+done in this way under &pound;30, at the most modest
+calculation.&nbsp; This list of post-stages was one drawn up for
+distances chiefly between the towns, but nothing is more
+remarkable along the Great North Road than the number of old
+posting-houses which still exist (although of course their
+business is gone) in wild and lonely spots, far removed from
+either town or village.</p>
+<p>Another &ldquo;branch&rdquo; of posting was the horsing alone,
+by which a private carriage could be taken to or from town by
+hiring posters at every stage.&nbsp; This was a favourite
+practice with the gentry of the shires, who thus had all the
+<i>&eacute;clat</i> of travelling in private state, without the
+expense and trouble of providing their own horses.&nbsp; It is
+probably of this method that De Quincey speaks in the following
+passage:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;In my childhood,&rdquo; says he,
+&ldquo;standing with one or two of my brothers and sisters at the
+front window <a name="page101"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+101</span>of my mother&rsquo;s carriage, I remember one unvarying
+set of images before us.&nbsp; The postillion (for so were all
+carriages then driven) was employed, not by fits and starts, but
+always and eternally, in quartering, <i>i.e.</i> in crossing from
+side to side, according to the casualties of the ground.&nbsp;
+Before you stretched a wintry length of lane, with ruts deep
+enough to fracture the leg of a horse, filled to the brim with
+standing pools of rain-water; and the collateral chambers of
+these ruts kept from becoming confluent by thin ridges, such as
+the Romans called <i>lirae</i>, to maintain the footing upon
+which <i>lirae</i>, so as not to swerve (or as the Romans would
+say, <i>delirare</i>), was a trial of some skill, both for the
+horses and their postillion.&nbsp; It was, indeed, next to
+impossible for any horse, on such a narrow crust of separation,
+not to grow <i>delirious</i> in the Roman metaphor; and the
+nervous anxiety which haunted me when a child was much fed by
+this image so often before my eyes, and the sympathy with which I
+followed the motion of the docile creatures&rsquo; legs.&nbsp; Go
+to sleep at the beginning of a stage, and the last thing you
+saw&mdash;wake up, and the first thing you saw&mdash;was the line
+of wintry pools, the poor off-horse planting his steps with care,
+and the cautious postillion gently applying his spur whilst
+manoeuvring across the system of grooves with some sort of
+science that looked like a gipsy&rsquo;s palmistry&mdash;so
+equally unintelligible to me were his motions in what he sought
+and in what he avoided.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2>XVII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Before</span> we leave Stevenage, we must
+pay a visit to the &ldquo;Old Castle&rdquo; inn, in whose stable
+the body of the eccentric Henry Trigg is deposited, in a coffin
+amid the rafters, plain for all to see; somewhat dilapidated and
+battered in the lapse of two centuries, and with a patch of tin
+over the hole cut in it by some riotous <a
+name="page102"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 102</span>blades long
+ago, but doubtless still containing his bones.&nbsp; His Will
+sufficiently explains the circumstances.</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">IN THE NAME OF GOD,
+AMEN.</p>
+<p>I, <span class="smcap">Henry Trigg</span>, of Stevenage, in
+the County of Hertford, Grocer, being very infirm and weak in
+body, but of perfect sound mind and memory, God be praised for
+it, calling into mind the mortality of my body, do now make and
+ordain this my last Will and Testament, in writing, hereafter
+following: that is to say:&mdash;Principally I recommend my soul
+into the merciful hands of Almighty God that first gave me it,
+assuredly believing and only expecting free pardon and
+forgiveness of all my sins, and eternal life in and through the
+only merits, death, and passion of Jesus Christ my Saviour; and
+as to my body I commit it to the <a name="page103"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 103</span>West end of my Hovel, to be decently
+laid there upon a floor erected by my Executor, upon the purlin,
+for the same purpose; nothing doubting but at the general
+Resurrection I shall receive the same again by the mighty power
+of God; and as for and concerning such worldly substance as it
+hath pleased God to bless me with in this world, I do devise and
+dispose of the same in manner and form here following.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image102" href="images/p102.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Trigg&rsquo;s Coffin"
+title=
+"Trigg&rsquo;s Coffin"
+ src="images/p102.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><i>Imprimis</i>.&nbsp; I give and devise unto my loving
+brother Thomas Trigg, of Letchworth, in the County of Hertford,
+Clerk, and to his Heirs and Assigns for ever, all those my
+Freehold Lands lying dispersedly in the several common fields in
+the parish of Stevenage aforesaid, and also all my Copyhold
+Lands, upon condition that he shall lay my body upon the place
+before mentioned; and also all that Messuage, Cottage, or
+Tenement at Redcoats Green in the Parish of Much Wymondly,
+together with those Nine Acres of Land (more or less) purchased
+of William Hale and Thomas Hale, Jun.; and also my Cottage,
+Orchard, and barn, with four acres of Land (more or less)
+belonging, lying, and being in the Parish of Little Wymondly, and
+now in the possession of Samuel Kitchener, labourer; and all my
+Cottages, Messuages, or Tenements situate and being in Stevenage,
+aforesaid: or, upon condition that he shall pay my brother,
+George Trigg, the sum of Ten Pounds per annum for life: but if my
+brother shall neglect or refuse to lay my body where I desire it
+should be laid, then, upon that condition, I will and bequeath
+all that which I have already bequeathed to my brother Thomas
+Trigg, unto my brother George Trigg, and to his heirs for ever;
+and if my brother George Trigg should refuse to lay my body under
+my Hovel, then what I have bequeathed unto him, as all my Lands
+and Tenements, I lastly bequeath them unto my nephew William
+Trigg and his heirs for ever, upon his seeing that my body is
+decently laid up there as aforesaid.</p>
+<p><i>Item</i>.&nbsp; I give and bequeath unto my nephew William
+Trigg, the sum of <i>Five Pounds</i>, at the age of Thirty years;
+to his sister Sarah the sum of <i>Twenty Pounds</i>; to his
+sister Rose the sum of <i>Twenty Pounds</i>; and lastly to his
+sister Ann the sum of <i>Twenty Pounds</i>; all at the age of
+Thirty Years: to John Spencer, of London, Butcher, the sum of
+<i>One Guinea</i>; and to Solomon Spencer, of Stevenage, the sum
+of <i>One Guinea</i>, Three Years next after my decease; to <a
+name="page104"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 104</span>my cousin
+Henry Kimpton, <i>One Guinea</i>, One Year next after my decease,
+and another <i>Guinea</i> Two Years after my decease; to William
+Waby, <i>Five Shillings</i>; and to Joseph Priest, <i>Two
+Shillings and Sixpence</i>, Two Years after my decease; to my
+tenant Robert Wright the sum of <i>Five Shillings</i>, Two years
+next after my decease; and to Ralph Lowd and John Reeves, <i>One
+Shilling</i> each, Two Years next after my decease.</p>
+<p><i>Item</i>.&nbsp; All the rest of my Goods and Chattels, and
+personal Estate, and Ready Money, I do hereby give and devise
+unto my brother Thomas Trigg, paying my debts and laying my body
+where I would have it laid; whom I likewise make and ordain my
+full and sole Executor of this my last Will and Testament, or
+else to them before mentioned; ratifying and confirming this and
+no other to be my last Will and Testament, in witness whereof I
+have hereunto set my hand and seal this Twenty-eighth day of
+September, in the year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and
+Twenty-four</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">Henry
+Trigg</span>.</p>
+<p>Read, signed, sealed, and declared by the said Henry Trigg,
+the Testator, to be his last Will and Testament, in the presence
+of us who have subscribed our names as witnesses hereto, in the
+presence of the said Testator.</p>
+<p style="text-align: right"><span class="smcap">John
+Hawkins</span>, Sen.<br />
+<span class="smcap">John Hawkins</span>, Jun.<br />
+&times; The mark of <span class="smcap">William
+Sexton</span>.</p>
+<p>Proved in the Archdeaconry of Huntingdon, the 15th day of
+October, 1724, by the Executor Thomas Trigg.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The inn-signs of Stevenage afford some exercise for the
+contemplative mind.&nbsp; As the town is approached from London,
+the sign of &ldquo;Our Mutual Friend&rdquo; appears, nearly
+opposite a domestic Gothic building of red and white brick,
+originally a home for decayed authors, founded by Charles Dickens
+and the first Lord Lytton.&nbsp; The decayed authors did not take
+kindly to the scheme.&nbsp; Perhaps they did not like being <a
+name="page105"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 105</span>patronised
+by authors of better fortunes than their own.&nbsp; The
+institution was a failure, and the building is now put to other
+uses.&nbsp; No doubt the sign of &ldquo;Our Mutual Friend&rdquo;
+derives from those times when Dickens and Lytton foregathered
+here and at Knebworth.&nbsp; At quite the other end of the town
+appears the obviously new sign of the &ldquo;Lord
+Kitchener,&rdquo; almost opposite that of another military hero,
+the &ldquo;Marquis of Granby.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Passing through the little old-world village of Graveley,
+succeeded by the beautifully graded rise and fall of Lannock
+Hill, we come into the town of Baldock, with its great church
+prominent in front, and its empty streets running in puzzling
+directions.&nbsp; It was at Baldock that Charles the First, being
+conducted as a prisoner to London, was offered wine in one of the
+sacramental vessels by the vicar, Josias Byrd, and it was on the
+road outside the town, near where the old turnpike gate stood,
+that the Newcastle wagon, on its way to London, was plundered of
+&pound;500 in coin by three mounted highwaymen, on a February
+morning in 1737.</p>
+<p>Our old friend Mr. Samuel Pepys, journeying on August 6th,
+1661, from Brampton, came into Baldock, and stayed the night, at
+some inn not specified.&nbsp; He says, &ldquo;Took horse for
+London, and with much ado got to Baldwick.&nbsp; There lay, and
+had a good supper by myself.&nbsp; The landlady being a pretty
+woman, but I durst not take notice of her, her husband being
+there.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Always some spoil-sport in the way!</p>
+<p>Baldock, from its stunted extinguisher spire to its fine old
+brick houses and nodding plaster cottages, is characteristically
+Hertfordshire.&nbsp; Among other things of general interest, it
+has a row of almshouses, duly inscribed:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;Theis Almes
+Howses are<br />
+the gieft of Mr. John Wynne<br />
+cittezen of London, Latelye<br />
+Deceased, who hath left a<br />
+Yeareley stipend to everey<br />
+poore of either howses to<br />
+the Worldes End.&nbsp; September<br />
+Anno Domini 1621.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page106"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 106</span>The
+worthy citizen reckoned without the Charity Commissioners, who
+may confidently be expected to propound a &ldquo;scheme&rdquo;
+some day long anterior to the final crash, by which his wishes
+will be entirely disregarded.</p>
+<p>Away to the left of Baldock will be noticed a new town, and
+the factory chimneys of it.&nbsp; This is Letchworth, the
+&ldquo;Garden City,&rdquo; developed out of Letchworth, the
+little village of old.&nbsp; This &ldquo;First Garden
+City,&rdquo; founded in 1902, on a nominal capital of
+&pound;300,000 actual &pound;125,000, by the Garden City
+Association, itself founded in June, 1899, with a capital of
+about thirty shillings, represents a passionate quest of the
+ideal life on a 5 per cent. basis of profit.&nbsp; The problem of
+how to create an earthly paradise (plus industrial factories) was
+here to be tackled.&nbsp; The beginnings of such things are
+always the most charming; and Letchworth began ideally.&nbsp; But
+the factories and the five per cent. always have a way of
+overcoming ideals; and we shall see.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image106" href="images/p106.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"At the 39th mile"
+title=
+"At the 39th mile"
+ src="images/p106.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The stone outside Baldock, marking the thirty-ninth mile is
+milestone and upping-block as well.</p>
+<p><a name="page107"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+107</span>Midway between Baldock and Biggleswade, at
+Topler&rsquo;s Hill, the Bedfordshire border is crossed.&nbsp; We
+may perhaps be excused if we pass Topler&rsquo;s Hill
+unwittingly, for the rises called &ldquo;hills&rdquo; on the
+Great North Road would generally pass unnoticed elsewhere.&nbsp;
+Biggleswade town and neighbourhood are interested wholly in
+cabbages and potatoes and other highly necessary, but essentially
+unromantic, vegetables.&nbsp; The surrounding country is in
+spring and summer one vast market-garden; at other times it is
+generally a lake of equal vastness, for the Ivel and the Ouse,
+that run so sluggishly through the flat lands, arise then in
+their might and submerge fields and roads for miles around.</p>
+<p>As for Biggleswade itself, it is a town with an
+extraordinarily broad and empty market-place, a church with a
+spire of the Hertfordshire type, and two old coaching
+inns&mdash;the &ldquo;White Swan&rdquo; and the
+&ldquo;Crown&rdquo;&mdash;facing one another in an aggressive
+rivalry at a narrow outlet of the market-place.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;White Swan&rdquo; was the inn at which the up
+&ldquo;Regent&rdquo; coach dined.&nbsp; It was kept at that time
+by a man named Crouch, &ldquo;that long, sour old beggar,&rdquo;
+in the words of Tom Hennesy.&nbsp; Here &ldquo;the process of
+dining on a really cold day in winter,&rdquo; to quote Colonel
+Birch Reynardson, &ldquo;was carried on under no small amount of
+difficulty.&nbsp; Your hands were frozen, your feet were frozen,
+your very mouth felt frozen, and in fact you felt frozen all
+over.&nbsp; Sometimes, with all this cold, you were also wet
+through, your hat wet through, your coat wet through, the large
+wrapper that was meant to keep your neck warm and dry wet
+through, and, in fact, you were wet through yourself to your very
+bones.&nbsp; Only twenty minutes were allowed for dinner; and by
+the time you had got your hands warm enough to be able to untie
+your neck wrapper, and had got out of your great-coat, which,
+being wet, clung tenaciously to you, the time for feeding was
+half gone.&nbsp; By the time you had got one quarter of what you
+could have consumed, had your mouth been in eating trim and <a
+name="page108"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 108</span>your hands
+warm enough to handle your knife and fork, the coachman would put
+his head in, and say: &ldquo;Now, gentlemen, if you please; the
+coach is ready.&rdquo;&nbsp; After this summons, having struggled
+into your wet greatcoat, bound your miserable wet wrapper round
+your miserable cold throat, having paid your two and sixpence for
+the dinner that you had the will, but not the time, to eat, with
+sixpence for the waiter, you wished the worthy Mr. Crouch good
+day, grudged him the half-crown he had pocketed for having dined
+so miserably, and again mounted your seat, to be rained and
+snowed upon, and almost frozen to death before you reached
+London.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image108" href="images/p108.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Biggleswade"
+title=
+"Biggleswade"
+ src="images/p108.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Leaving Biggleswade, the Ivel is crossed and Tingey&rsquo;s
+Corner passed.&nbsp; Tingey&rsquo;s Corner marks the junction of
+the old alternative route from Welwyn, by Hitchin to Lower
+Codicote, the route adopted by record-breaking cyclists.&nbsp;
+The hamlets of Lower Codicote and Beeston Green open up a view of
+Sandy, <a name="page109"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+109</span>away to the right, with its range of yellow sand-hills
+running for some three miles parallel with the road, and seeming
+the more impressive by reason of the dead level on which they
+look.&nbsp; The canal-like, bare banks of the Ivel are passed
+again at Girtford, and the roadside cottages of Tempsford
+reached; the village and church lying off to the left, where the
+Ouse and the Ivel come to their sluggish confluence, and form a
+waterway which once afforded marauding Danes an excellent route
+from the coast up to Bedford.&nbsp; Even now the remains of a
+fortification they constructed to command this strategic point
+are visible, and bear the name of the &ldquo;Dannicke&rdquo;;
+that is to say, the &ldquo;Danes&rsquo; work,&rdquo; or perhaps
+the &ldquo;Danes&rsquo; wick,&rdquo; &ldquo;wick&rdquo; meaning
+&ldquo;village.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>An infinitely later work&mdash;Tempsford turnpike-gate, to
+wit&mdash;has disappeared a great deal more effectively than
+those ancient entrenchments, and the way is clear and flat, not
+to say featureless, over the Ouse, past the outlying houses of
+Wyboston, and so into Little End, the most southerly limit of
+Eaton Socon.</p>
+<h2>XVIII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Past</span> Tempsford some of the coaches,
+notably the Stamford &ldquo;Regent,&rdquo; turned off into the
+loop road by St. Neots and Huntingdon.&nbsp; In the winter time,
+or when the spring rains were falling, they did this at some
+risk, for the low-lying land by the river Ouse was often
+awash.&nbsp; Two old ladies were on one occasion given a terrible
+fright, the road being deeply flooded and the water coming into
+the coach, so that they had to stand on the seats.&nbsp; They
+quite thought they were going to be drowned, and perhaps they
+would have been had the &ldquo;Regent&rdquo; been driven by one
+unused to the road.&nbsp; Had the coachman driven into a
+ditch&mdash;as he might easily have done with the floods covering
+all the landmarks&mdash;it would have been &ldquo;all up&rdquo;
+with <a name="page110"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 110</span>the
+&ldquo;insides&rdquo; for certain and perhaps for the
+&ldquo;outsides&rdquo; as well.</p>
+<p>The most prudent coachmen in winter time kept to the main
+road, which lies somewhat higher, and passed through Eaton
+Socon.&nbsp; Once&mdash;to judge by its name&mdash;a place of
+importance, this is now only a long village of one straggling
+street.&nbsp; At some undetermined period the head of a
+&ldquo;soke,&rdquo; or separate legal jurisdiction, all memories
+of the dignity implied are gone, save only the empty title, which
+Dickens makes fun of by calling the village in <i>Nicholas
+Nickleby</i> &ldquo;Eton Slocomb.&rdquo;&nbsp; The &ldquo;White
+Horse,&rdquo; a picturesque roadside inn, may be looked upon with
+interest by those keen on identifying Dickens landmarks.&nbsp; In
+later days it became a favourite resort of the North Road Cycling
+Club, and witnessed the beginning and ending of many a road race
+in the &ldquo;eighties&rdquo; and early &ldquo;nineties,&rdquo;
+when such things were.</p>
+<p>The story of the London to York cycling record is fitly to be
+told in this page.&nbsp; It is not so long a tale as that of the
+famous one from London to Brighton and back, but it stands for
+greater efforts and for a vast amount of pluck and
+endurance.&nbsp; There have been those unsportsmanlike souls who,
+not finding sport an end in itself, have questioned the use of
+record making and breaking.&nbsp; But it has had its use, and
+even from this point of view has amply justified itself, for the
+continually increasing speed required out of cycles for these
+purposes has led to the perfecting of them within what is, after
+all, a comparatively short time; so that the sporting clubman
+has, after all, while strictly occupied within the range of his
+own ambitions, contributed to the general good by bringing about
+the manufacture of a vehicle which, used by many hundreds of
+thousands of people who never raced in their lives, and are
+probably incapable of a speed of more than twelve miles an hour,
+has brought the roads and lanes of the country within the
+knowledge of many to whom rural life was something new and
+strange.</p>
+<p>The first recorded cycle ride to York in which <a
+name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 111</span>speed was
+an object was that of C. Wheaton, September 1872.&nbsp; That
+pioneer took two days to perform the journey, making Stamford, a
+distance of eighty-nine miles, the end of his first day&rsquo;s
+adventure, in 15&frac12; hours, and on the second day reaching
+York in a further 26 hours 40 minutes: total, 42 hours 10
+minutes.&nbsp; This, with the front-driving low cycle of those
+days, was an achievement.&nbsp; Wooden wheels and iron tyres did
+not conduce to either speed or ease, and that now historic
+figure, painfully crawling (as we should now think his progress)
+to York is heroic.</p>
+<p>Perhaps this tale of hardship was calculated to deter others
+from trying their mettle, but at any rate it was not until July
+9, 1874, that two others, Ian Keith-Falconer and J. H. Stanley
+Thorpe, followed, and they failed in the effort.&nbsp; After
+another two years had almost passed, on June 5, 1876, Thorpe made
+another attempt.&nbsp; Leaving Highgate Archway at 11.10 <span
+class="GutSmall">P.M.</span>, he arrived the next day at York at
+9.40 <span class="GutSmall">P.M.</span> = 22 hours 30 minutes;
+chiefly, of course, by favour of that then &ldquo;improved&rdquo;
+form of bicycle, the tall &ldquo;ordinary.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Thirteen years passed before this record was lowered, and the
+one that replaced it was not a remarkable performance,
+considering the further great improvements in cycles.&nbsp; This
+ride, in the summer of 1889, performed on a solid-tyred
+&ldquo;safety,&rdquo; took 21 hours 10 minutes, and was beaten in
+the same year by six minutes by H. R. Pope, riding a tricycle;
+himself displaced, shortly after, by F. T. Bidlake, also mounted
+on a tricycle, who did the 197 miles in 18 hours 28 minutes.</p>
+<p>In 1890, and for several years following, records came and
+went with increasing rapidity.&nbsp; In 1890 J. M. James put the
+safety record at 16 hours 52 minutes, and T. A. Edge soon
+followed, reducing it to 14 hours 33 minutes, James regaining the
+record again in 1891 by a bare thirteen minutes.&nbsp; In the
+following year, S. F. Edge, on a front-driving safety, made a
+splendid record of 12 hours 49 minutes, but <a
+name="page112"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 112</span>had the
+mortification to see it beaten the next day, June 27, by F. W.
+Shorland, in 39 minutes less.&nbsp; In this year there were
+several rival tricycle records: that of W. J. A. Butterfield, of
+18 hours 9 minutes being lowered by F. T. Bidlake by nearly three
+hours, and beaten again, on September 29, Bidlake&rsquo;s figures
+on this occasion being 13 hours 19 minutes.&nbsp; On the same day
+M. A. Holbein and F. W. Shorland rode to York on a tandem
+tricycle in exactly the same time.</p>
+<p>C. C. Fontaine went for the safety record on August 29, 1894,
+when he put the figures down to 11 hours 51 minutes.&nbsp;
+Fontaine lowered his own record in the following year, on October
+18, by 21 minutes 45 seconds, and this was disposed of by George
+Hunt on May 7, 1896, when he got well within the eleven hours, at
+10 hours 48 minutes.</p>
+<p>This was lowered by F. R. Goodwin on July 19, 1899, his time
+being 10 hours 16 minutes; the speed on this occasion averaging
+rather over nineteen miles an hour.&nbsp; Even this could not
+have been accomplished without the aid of the most perfect motor
+pace-making arrangements.&nbsp; Goodwin smashed all these
+previous records on his way to establish the London to Edinburgh
+record of 25 hours 26 minutes, in which the average was somewhat
+higher; nearly twenty miles an hour.</p>
+<p>The next, and latest, safety cycle record to York was made,
+unpaced, in 1900; when H. Green performed the journey in 10 hours
+19 minutes.</p>
+<p>The tandem safety London to York records should be
+mentioned.&nbsp; The first two were set up on July 24, 1895, and
+October 2, 1896, respectively: by G. P. Mills and T. A. Edge; and
+T. Hobson and H. E. Wilson, the times being 12 hours 33 minutes,
+and 11 hours 35 minutes.</p>
+<p>These were followed by:&mdash;</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">Hrs.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">Mins.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1901.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>A. H. and P. S. Murray (unpaced)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">59</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1905.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>R. L. I. Knipe and S. Irving (unpaced)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">52</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1907.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>F. H. Wingrave and R. A. Wingrave (unpaced)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">9</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">30</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p><a name="page113"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 113</span>The
+London to Edinburgh records are:</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">SAFETY BICYCLE.</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">Hrs.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">Mins.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1889.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>F. W. Shorland</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">44</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">49</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1891.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>P. A. Ransom</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">43</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">25</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1892.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>R. H. Carlisle</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">32</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">55</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1894.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>G. P. Mills</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">29</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">28</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>C. C. Fontaine</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">28</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">27</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1895.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>W. J. Neason</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">27</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">38</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1897.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>J. Hunt</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">26</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">47</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1899.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>F. R. Goodwin (motor-paced)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">25</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">26</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1903.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>F. Wright (unpaced)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">31</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">48</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1904.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>E. H. Grimsdell</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">28</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">3</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>G. A. Olley</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">27</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1905.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>E. H. Grimsdell</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">26</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">10</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>R. Shirley</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">23</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">43</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>A tricycle record, unpaced, made by F. W. Wesley in 1905, at
+32 hours 42 minutes yet stands.</p>
+<p>Tandem safety records:&mdash;</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">Hrs.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">Mins.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1894.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>E. Oxborrow and H. Sansom</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">27</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">33</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>1905.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>E. Bright and P. H. Miles (unpaced)</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">27</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">54</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2>XIX</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Eaton</span> Socon, its long straggling
+street and beautiful church-tower, left behind, the road descends
+to the &ldquo;river Kym,&rdquo; as the guidebooks call the tiny
+stream which, bordered by marshes, crosses under the road at a
+point known as Cross Hall.&nbsp; The &ldquo;river Kym&rdquo;
+certainly is, or was, important enough to confer its name upon
+the neighbouring townlet of Kimbolton, but the country folk now
+only know it as Weston Brook.&nbsp; The descent to it has of late
+years acquired the name of &ldquo;Chicken Hill,&rdquo; given by
+the North Roaders, racing cyclists, who must often have run over
+the fowls kept by the people of a cottage at the bottom.&nbsp;
+This is succeeded by Diddington Bridge, a picturesque,
+white-painted timber structure spanning the little Diddington
+Brook, which has eaten its way deeply into the earth, and is
+romantically shaded by tall trees and bordered by the undergrowth
+that fills the pretty hollow.</p>
+<p><a name="page114"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 114</span>The
+slight rise from this spot is succeeded by an easy descent into
+narrow-streeted Buckden, one of those old
+&ldquo;thoroughfare&rdquo; coaching villages which imagined
+themselves on the way to becoming towns in the fine, free-handed
+old days.&nbsp; The huge bulk of the &ldquo;George&rdquo; is
+eloquent of this, with its fifteen windows in a row, and the
+signs still noticeable in the brickwork, showing where the house
+was doubled in size at the period of its greatest
+prosperity.&nbsp; Nowadays the &ldquo;George&rdquo; is all too
+large for its trade, and a portion of it is converted into
+shops.&nbsp; As for the interminable rooms and passages above,
+they echo hollow to the infrequent footfall, where they were once
+informed with a cheerful bustle and continuous arrival and
+departure.&nbsp; There was a period, a few years ago, when the
+North Road Club&rsquo;s road-racing events brought crowds of
+cyclists and busy times once more to the &ldquo;George,&rdquo;
+but they are irretrievably gone.</p>
+<p>To and from Buckden and Welwyn in coaching times drove every
+day the notable Cartwright, of the York &ldquo;Express&rdquo;; a
+day&rsquo;s work of about seventy miles.&nbsp; Cartwright was
+something more than a coachman, being himself landlord of the
+&ldquo;George&rdquo; at Buckden, and horsing one or two of the
+stages over which he drove.&nbsp; &ldquo;Peter Pry,&rdquo; one of
+the old <i>Sporting Magazine&rsquo;s</i> coaching critics, waxes
+eloquent over him.&nbsp; It was a vile day when, to sample
+Cartwright&rsquo;s quality, he set out by the York
+&ldquo;Express&rdquo; from London for Grantham; but neither the
+weather nor the scenery, nor anything in Heaven or Earth drew his
+attention from Cartwright.&nbsp; He starts at once with being
+struck at Welwyn with Cartwright&rsquo;s graceful and easy way of
+mounting the box, and then proceeds to make a kind of admiring
+inventory of his person.&nbsp; Thus, he might have been
+considered to be under fifty years of age, bony, without fat;
+healthy looking, evidently the effect of abstemiousness; not too
+tall, but just the size to sit gracefully and powerfully.&nbsp;
+His right hand and whip were beautifully in unison; he kept his
+horses like clock-work, and to see the refinement <a
+name="page116"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 116</span>with which
+he managed the whip was well worth riding many hours on a wet
+day.&nbsp; But the occasions on which he used the whip were rare,
+although the tits were only fair, and not by any means
+first-rate.&nbsp; No dandy, but equipped most respectably and
+modestly, and with good taste, he was the idol of the road, both
+with old and young; while his manners on the box were respectful,
+communicative without impertinence, and untarnished with
+slang.&nbsp; Acquainted with everybody and every occupation
+within his sphere, he was an entertaining companion even to an
+ordinary traveller; but he enchanted the amateur of coaching with
+his perfect professional knowledge, which embraced all
+niceties.&nbsp; His excellent qualities, we are glad to notice,
+in conclusion, had gained their reward; he was well-to-do, lived
+regularly, had a happy family, and envied neither lord nor
+peasant.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image115" href="images/p115.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Buckden"
+title=
+"Buckden"
+ src="images/p115.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Welwyn, the road to Buckden, and Buckden itself seem quite
+lonely without this figure of all the virtues and the graces.</p>
+<p>Spelt &ldquo;Bugden&rdquo; in other times, the inhabitants
+still pronounce its name in this way.&nbsp; There is a
+well-defined air of aristocracy about this village, due partly to
+the ruined towers of the old palace of the Bishops of Lincoln,
+and to the sturdy old red-brick walls that enclose the grounds in
+which they stand.&nbsp; They are walls with a thickness and
+lavish use of material calculated to make the builder of
+&ldquo;desirable villa residences&rdquo; gasp with dismay at such
+apparently wanton extravagance.&nbsp; But the Bishops of Lincoln,
+who built those walls in the fifteenth century, had not obtained
+their land on a building lease; and, moreover, they were building
+for their own use, which makes a deal of difference, it must be
+conceded.</p>
+<p>You cannot help noticing these walls, for they run for some
+distance beside the road.&nbsp; Through a gateway is seen a
+pleasant view of lawns and the front of a modern mansion.&nbsp;
+The Bishops have long left Buckden, and have gone to reside at
+their palace at Lincoln, Buckden Palace having been wantonly
+demolished <a name="page117"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+117</span>when the Order in Council, authorising these Right
+Reverend Fathers in God to alienate the property, was
+obtained.&nbsp; The church adjoins their roofless old gatehouse,
+and is a fine old place of worship, with a stone spire of the
+Northants type.</p>
+<p>In this church will be found a singular example of
+modesty.&nbsp; It is an epitaph without the name of the
+person:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;Sacred to the
+memory of<br />
+AN OFFICER,<br />
+who sincerely regarded this<br />
+his native village<br />
+and caused an asylum to be erected, to protect<br />
+Age, and to reward Industry.<br />
+Reader, ask not his name.<br />
+If thou approve a deed which succours<br />
+the helpless, go and emulate it.<br />
+Obiit 1834, aet 65.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The tiny hamlet of Hardwick, dignified with mention on the
+Ordnance map, is passed without its existence being noticed, and
+the road, flat as though constructed with the aid of a
+spirit-level, proceeds straight ahead for the town of Huntingdon,
+swinging acutely to the left for York.&nbsp; Beyond, at the
+cross-roads, stands Brampton Hut, the modern vivid red-brick
+successor of the old inn of that name.&nbsp; Brampton village
+lies down the cross-road to the right, and is the place where
+Samuel Pepys, it is thought, was born in 1632. <a
+name="citation117"></a><a href="#footnote117"
+class="citation">[117]</a>&nbsp; The registers afford no
+information, for they do not begin until twenty-one years later,
+and the old gossip himself makes no mention of the fact.&nbsp;
+His father and mother lived here, and both lie in the
+church.&nbsp; Their home, his birthplace, stands even now, but so
+altered that it is practically without much interest.&nbsp; It
+was in its garden, in October, 1666, that Samuel caused his
+&pound;1,300 to be buried when the Dutch descent upon London was
+feared.&nbsp; A timorous soul, poor Samuel! sending his father
+and his wife down from London to Brampton with the gold, and with
+&pound;300 in a girdle round where his waist should have been,
+but was not, for Samuel <a name="page118"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 118</span>was a man of &ldquo;full
+habit,&rdquo; as the elegant phrase, seeking to disguise the
+accusation of exceeding fatness, has it.&nbsp; Great was his
+anxiety when, the national danger over, he came down to disinter
+his hoard.&nbsp; &ldquo;My father and I with a dark lantern, it
+being now night, into the garden with my wife, and there went
+about our great work to dig up my gold.&nbsp; But Lord! what a
+tosse I was for some time in, that they could not justly tell
+where it was; but by and by, poking with a spit, we found it, and
+then begun with a spudd to lift up the ground.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But they had not been cautious in their work.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; says he, &ldquo;to see how sillily they
+hid it, not half a foot under ground, in sight of passers-by and
+from the neighbours&rsquo; windows.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then he found
+the gold all loose, and the notes decaying with the damp, and all
+the while, routing about among the dirt for the scattered pieces,
+he was afraid lest the neighbours should see him, and fancy the
+Pepys family had discovered a gold mine; so he took up dirt and
+all, and, carrying it to his brother&rsquo;s bedroom, washed it
+out with the aid of several pails of water and some besoms, with
+the result that he was still over a hundred pieces short.&nbsp;
+This &ldquo;made him mad.&rdquo;&nbsp; He could not go out in the
+garden with his father, because the old man was deaf, and, in
+shouting to him, all the neighbours would get to know.&nbsp; So
+he went out with W. Hewer, and by diligent grubbing in the mould,
+made the sum nearly tally.&nbsp; The day after, leaving his
+father to search for the remainder, we find him setting out for
+London, with his belongings; the gold in a basket in the coach,
+and he coming to look after it every quarter of an hour.</p>
+<p>Something over a mile distant from Brampton cross-roads, and
+passing over two little bridges, we come to a third bridge,
+spanning one of the lazy rivulets that trickle aimlessly through
+the flats.&nbsp; It is just an old red-brick bridge, braced with
+iron and edged with timber; an innocent-looking, although dull
+and lonely spot, with the water trickling along in <a
+name="page120"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 120</span>its deeply
+worn bed, and no sound save the occasional splash made by a
+frightened water-rat.&nbsp; Yet this is &ldquo;Matcham&rsquo;s
+Bridge,&rdquo; and the scene of an infamous murder.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image119" href="images/p119.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Matcham&rsquo;s Bridge"
+title=
+"Matcham&rsquo;s Bridge"
+ src="images/p119.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Matcham&rsquo;s Bridge, spanning the little river Wey,
+obtained its name from the murder of a drummer-boy here by
+Gervase (or Jarvis) Matcham, on the 19th of August 1780.&nbsp;
+The murder was a remarkable one, and is made additionally
+memorable by the after-career of the murderer, whose bloody deed
+and subsequent confession, six years later, form the subject of
+the <i>Dead Drummer</i>, one of Barham&rsquo;s <i>Ingoldsby
+Legends</i>.</p>
+<p>Gervase Matcham, the son of a farmer living at Frodingham, in
+Yorkshire, had a varied and adventurous career.&nbsp; When in his
+twelfth year, he ran away from home and became a jockey.&nbsp; In
+the course of this employment he was sent to Russia in charge of
+some horses presented by the Duke of Northumberland to the
+Empress, and returning to London well supplied with money,
+dissipated it all in evil courses.&nbsp; He then shipped as a
+sailor on board the <i>Medway</i> man-of-war, but after a short
+experience of fighting, managed to desert.&nbsp; He had no sooner
+landed in England than he was seized by one of the prowling
+pressgangs that then scoured the seaports, and was shipped aboard
+the <i>Ariadne</i>, fitting out on an expedition to destroy the
+pirate, Paul Jones.&nbsp; Succeeding in an attempt to escape when
+off Yarmouth, he enlisted in the 13th Regiment of Foot, and
+deserting again, near Chatham, set out to tramp through London to
+York, visiting Huntingdon on the way.&nbsp; The 49th Regiment was
+then recruiting in the district, and Matcham promptly enlisted in
+it.</p>
+<p>From Huntingdon, on the 19th of August 1780, he was sent to
+Major Reynolds at Diddington, to draw some subsistence-money,
+amounting to between &pound;6 and &pound;7.&nbsp; With him was a
+drummer-boy, Benjamin Jones, aged about sixteen years, the son of
+the recruiting sergeant.&nbsp; The boy having drawn the money,
+they <a name="page121"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+121</span>returned along the high road, Matcham drinking on the
+way.&nbsp; Instead of turning off to Huntingdon, Matcham induced
+the boy to go on with him in the direction of Alconbury, and
+picking a quarrel with him at the bridge, seized him and cut his
+throat, making off with the money.&nbsp; He then fled across
+country to the nearest seaport, and shipped again to sea.&nbsp;
+For six years he continued in the Navy and saw hard fighting
+under Rodney and Hood, being at last paid off H.M.S.
+<i>Sampson</i> at Plymouth, on June 15, 1786.&nbsp; From Plymouth
+he set out with a messmate&mdash;one John Shepherd&mdash;to walk
+along the Exeter Road to London.&nbsp; Near the &ldquo;Woodyates
+Inn&rdquo; they were overtaken one afternoon by a thunderstorm in
+which Matcham startled his shipmate by his abject terror of some
+unseen apparition.&nbsp; Eventually he confessed his crime to
+Shepherd, and begged his companion to hand him over to the
+nearest magistrate, so that Justice might be satisfied.&nbsp; He
+was accordingly committed at Salisbury, and, inquiries as to the
+truth of his confession having been made, he was brought to trial
+at Huntingdon, found guilty, and executed on the 2nd of August
+1786, his body being afterwards hanged in chains on Alconbury
+Hill.</p>
+<h2>XX</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> summit of this convenient
+Golgotha is the place where the North Road and the Great North
+Road adjust their differences, and proceed by one route to the
+North.&nbsp; Not a very terrible hill, after all, despite the way
+in which it figures in the letters and diaries of old travellers;
+but nowadays a very lonely place, although it is the
+meeting-point of two main roads and that of a branch one.&nbsp;
+It was once different indeed, and the great
+&ldquo;Wheatsheaf&rdquo; inn and posting-house, which stood a
+hundred yards or so away from the junction, used commonly to send
+out thirty pairs of post-horses <a name="page122"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 122</span>a day.&nbsp; This establishment was
+kept in its prime by John Warsop, who lived long enough to see
+his business ruined by railways.&nbsp; Let no one imagine the
+&ldquo;Wheatsheaf&rdquo; public-house, standing where the roads
+meet, to be the representative of that old posting-house.&nbsp;
+Face north, and you will see a private house of considerable size
+standing on the east side of the road, behind a hedge and
+lawn.&nbsp; Not a beautiful house; in fact, an ugly house of a
+dingy whitey-buff brick, the colour of pastry taken out of the
+oven before it is properly baked.&nbsp; Approaching nearer, it
+will be observed that this building is now divided into two
+private residences.&nbsp; This was once the
+&ldquo;Wheatsheaf.&rdquo;&nbsp; In the bygone days it possessed a
+semicircular approach from the road, and afforded all the year
+round, and round the clock of every day and night, a busy scene;
+with the postboys, whose next turn-out it was, sleeping with spur
+on heel, ready to mount and away at a minute&rsquo;s notice,
+north, south, east, or west.&nbsp; Those times and manners are as
+absolutely vanished as though they never had existed, and even
+although there are yet living those who remember the old
+&ldquo;Wheatsheaf&rdquo; of their youthful days, perhaps not one
+wayfarer in a hundred has any idea of that once busy era on
+Alconbury Hill.&nbsp; How many of all those who pass this way
+have ever noticed that pathetic relic of the
+&ldquo;Wheatsheaf&rsquo;s&rdquo; bygone prosperity, the old post
+from which its sign used to hang?&nbsp; It is still to be seen,
+by those who know where to look for it, facing the road, a
+venerable and decrepit relic, now thickly covered with ivy, and
+somewhat screened from the casual glance by the shrubs and trees
+growing close beside it.</p>
+<p>Travellers coming south could have a choice of routes to
+London from Alconbury Hill, as the elaborate old milestone still
+standing at the parting of the ways indicates, showing sixty-four
+miles by way of Huntingdon, Royston, and Ware, and four miles
+longer by the way we have come.&nbsp; This monumental milestone,
+now somewhat dilapidated, railed round, <a
+name="page124"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 124</span>and with
+some forlorn-looking wall-flowers growing inside the enclosure,
+is a striking object, situated at a peculiarly impressive spot,
+where the left-hand route by Huntingdon is seen going off on the
+level to a vanishing-point lost in the distant haze, rather than
+by any dip or curve of the road to right or left; the right-hand
+road diving down the hill to Alconbury Weston and Alconbury at
+its foot.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image123" href="images/p123.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Alconbury Hill Junction"
+title=
+"Alconbury Hill Junction"
+ src="images/p123.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The descent, going north, is known as Stangate Hill, and leads
+past the lonely churchyard of Sawtry St. Andrews, whose church
+has disappeared as utterly as Sawtry Abbey, which, less wealthy
+than the great abbeys of Ramsey, Thorney, Crowland, or
+Peterborough, stood beside the road, and was besieged by
+medi&aelig;val tramps:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Sawtry-by-the-Way, that old Abbaye,<br />
+Gave more alms in one day than all they.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Thus ran the old rhyme.&nbsp; To-day, the only vestiges of
+that vanished religious house are in the names of Monk&rsquo;s
+Wood, to the right of the road, descending the hill, and of the
+Abbey Farm.</p>
+<p>The foot of Stangate Hill is no doubt the place called by
+Thoresby and others &ldquo;Stangate Hole,&rdquo; where highwaymen
+were confidently to be expected.&nbsp; De Foe, writing about 1720
+of this road, says: &ldquo;Some Parts are still paved with stone,
+which strengthens the conjecture that the Name Stangate was given
+it from thence.&nbsp; It traverses great woods between the Two
+Saltries.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In his spelling of &ldquo;Sawtry,&rdquo; in that last line,
+although he does not follow the invariable form, he has hit upon
+the original.&nbsp; For &ldquo;Sawtry&rdquo; was in the beginning
+&ldquo;Salt Reeth.&rdquo;&nbsp; Salt marshes and creeks crept
+inland even as far as this, past Ely and Ramsey.</p>
+<p>Stilton lies some three miles ahead, and, two miles before
+reaching it, the old &ldquo;Crown and Woolpack,&rdquo; a very
+large red-brick posting-house, part of it still occupied as an
+inn, the rest used as cottages, while the stables are given over
+to spiders and lumber.</p>
+<p><a name="page125"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+125</span>Passing this, the road presently begins to rise gently,
+and then, level again, widens out to almost treble its usual
+width, where a long street of mingled old houses and cottages, a
+medley of stone, brick, and plaster, stands, strangely
+silent.&nbsp; This is Stilton, dreaming of bygone busy
+times.&nbsp; Had the railway touched here, things would have worn
+a very different aspect at Stilton to-day.&nbsp; Let us,
+therefore, thank the shades of that Marquis of Exeter, and of the
+others who resisted the railway, and by causing it to describe a
+wide loop instead of hugging the road, unwittingly contributed to
+the preservation in a glass case, as it were, of this old
+coaching centre.</p>
+<p>Night and day the coaches kept Stilton awake, and if for a few
+minutes there was no coach, the post-chaises at one end of the
+social scale, and the fly-wagons at the other, kept the inns
+busy.&nbsp; Stilton buzzed with activity then.&nbsp; From the far
+North came the drovers, doing twenty miles a day, with their
+sheep and cattle, their pigs and geese; animal creation marching,
+martyrs in their sort, to Smithfield.&nbsp; At Stilton they shod
+the cattle, like horses, and one blacksmith&rsquo;s business here
+consisted of nothing else than this.</p>
+<p>The glory of Stilton has departed, and the &ldquo;Bell&rdquo;
+and the &ldquo;Angel&rdquo; face one another, dolefully wondering
+in what channels the tide of business now flows.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;Bell&rdquo; is more racy of the soil than the
+&ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; just as it is also much older.&nbsp; We are
+here in a stone district, and the &ldquo;Bell&rdquo; is a
+building of that warm yellowish stone characteristic of these
+parts.&nbsp; Built at the very beginning of the seventeenth
+century, it was already of a respectable age when the brick
+&ldquo;Angel&rdquo; opposite began to rise from its
+foundations.&nbsp; The older house is the feature of Stilton, its
+great sign, with the mazy quirks and curls of its wrought-iron
+supports, projecting far out towards the road, and arresting the
+eye on first entering the street.&nbsp; The sign itself is
+painted on copper, for the sake of lightness, but has long been
+supported by a crutch, in the shape <a name="page126"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 126</span>of a post.&nbsp; With this
+ornamental iron-work, incomparably the finest sign on the road,
+it was in the old days the subject of many wagers made by
+coachmen and guards with unwary strangers who did not, like those
+artful ones, know its measurements.&nbsp; It measures in fact 6
+ft. 2&frac34; inches in height.</p>
+<p>The old &ldquo;Talbot&rdquo; inn still has its coach gallery,
+or balcony, in front.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; in the best days of posting, became
+the principal house at Stilton, and the little public-house of
+that name next door to the commanding brick building which is now
+a private residence was only the tap of the hotel.&nbsp; But the
+&ldquo;Bell,&rdquo; that has seen the beginning and the end of
+the &ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; still survives, with memories of the
+days when the delicacy which renders the name of Stilton
+world-famous had its origin.&nbsp; Allusion is hereby
+made&mdash;need one explain it?&mdash;to &ldquo;Stilton&rdquo;
+cheese.&nbsp; They say those old stagers who knew it when its
+local reputation first began to be dispersed throughout the
+country&mdash;that Stilton cheese is not what it was.&nbsp; What
+is?&nbsp; The &ldquo;English Parmesan,&rdquo; they called it
+then, when their palates first became acquainted with it, but it
+deserved better of them than that.&nbsp; It was a species of
+itself, and not justly comparable with aught else.&nbsp; But
+Stilton cheese is not, nor ever was, made at Stilton, or anywhere
+near it.&nbsp; It originated with Mrs. Paulet of Wymondham, near
+Melton Mowbray, who first supplied it to Cooper Thornhill, the
+once celebrated landlord of the &ldquo;Bell,&rdquo; for the use
+of the table provided for the coach passengers and other
+travellers who dined there.&nbsp; Mrs. Paulet&rsquo;s cheeses
+immediately struck connoisseurs as a revelation, and they came
+into demand, not only on Thornhill&rsquo;s table, but were
+eagerly purchased for themselves or friends by those who
+travelled this way.&nbsp; Thornhill was too business-like a man
+to give away the secret of the make, and he did very well for
+himself, charging as he did half-a-crown a pound.&nbsp; Then the
+almost equally famous Miss Worthington, of the
+&ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; began to supply <a name="page128"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 128</span>&ldquo;Stilton&rdquo; cheeses, so
+that scarce any one came through the place but was asked to buy
+one.&nbsp; Nor did travellers usually wait to be asked.&nbsp; If
+it happened that they did not want any for themselves, they were
+usually charged by friends with commissions to purchase as they
+passed through.&nbsp; Smiling waiters and maidservants, Miss
+Worthington herself, rosy, plump, benevolent-looking, asked
+travellers if they would not like to take away with them a real
+Stilton cheese.&nbsp; Miss Worthington, the kindly, whose
+lavender-scented beds were famed along the whole length of the
+Great North Road&mdash;there she stood, declaring that they were
+real Stilton cheeses!&nbsp; Nor were travellers for a long while
+any the wiser.&nbsp; Stilton folks kept the secret well.&nbsp;
+But it gradually leaked out.&nbsp; A native of those parts, too,
+was the traitor.&nbsp; &ldquo;Pray, sir, would you like a nice
+Stilton cheese to take away with you?&rdquo; asked the
+unsuspecting landlady, as the coach on whose outside he was
+seated drew up.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image127" href="images/p127.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Bell, Stilton"
+title=
+"The Bell, Stilton"
+ src="images/p127.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Do you say they are made at Stilton?&rdquo; he asked in
+reply.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Oh, yes,&rdquo; said she.</p>
+<p>Then came the crushing rejoinder.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why, Miss
+Worthington, you know perfectly well that no Stilton cheese was
+ever made at Stilton; they&rsquo;re all made in Leicestershire,
+and as you say your cheeses are made at Stilton, they cannot be
+good, and I won&rsquo;t have one.&rdquo;&nbsp; The secret was
+then, of course, exploded.</p>
+<p>Which of these two inns could it have been to which Mrs.
+Calderwood of Coltness refers in her diary when, travelling from
+Scotland to London in the middle of the eighteenth century, she
+mentions at Stilton a &ldquo;fine large inn,&rdquo; where the
+linen was &ldquo;as perfit rags as ever I saw: plain linen with
+fifty holes in each towell.&rdquo;&nbsp; It would be interesting
+to know, but it is hopeless now to attempt to identify it.</p>
+<h2><a name="page129"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+129</span>XXI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Up-hill</span> from Stilton,
+three-quarters of a mile away, but well within sight, stands the
+Norman Cross inn, where the Peterborough, Louth, Lincoln, and
+Hull coaches turned off to the right.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image129" href="images/p129.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Norman Cross"
+title=
+"Norman Cross"
+ src="images/p129.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Norman Cross! how many have been those old-time cyclists who
+have partaken of the hospitality of the inn here!&nbsp; Not
+always, though, has it been a place of welcome memories.&nbsp;
+For years, indeed, during the long struggles between England and
+France, this was the site of one of the largest of the prisons in
+which captured French soldiers were incarcerated.&nbsp; Over
+three thousand were placed here, officers and privates, some
+remaining captive for more than ten years.&nbsp; Happy those who,
+through influence or by mere luck, were selected to be exchanged
+for our soldiers, prisoners in France.</p>
+<p>It was a weary time for those poor fellows.&nbsp; Many of them
+died in the great insanitary sheds in which <a
+name="page130"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 130</span>they were
+confined, and others lost their reason.&nbsp; Desperate men
+sometimes succeeded in escaping to the coast, where friends were
+awaiting them.&nbsp; Others, wandering over the lonely flats,
+perished miserably in the dykes and drains into which they fell
+when the mists shrouded the countryside.&nbsp; There were, again,
+those who stabbed the sentries and made off.&nbsp; Such an one
+was Charles Fran&ccedil;ois Marie Bonchew, an officer, who had
+wounded, but had not killed, a sentry named Alexander
+Halliday.&nbsp; Being captured, he was sentenced to death at
+Huntingdon, and was brought back to Norman Cross to be executed,
+September 1808.&nbsp; All the prisoners were turned out to
+witness the execution, and the garrison was under arms.</p>
+<p>But it was not all savagery and horror here among those
+military captives, for they were often allowed out on parole,
+within certain hours and well-defined bounds.&nbsp; It was
+understood that no prisoner out on parole should leave the
+highroad, nor was he to be at large after sunset.&nbsp; If he
+disregarded these rules he was liable to be shot at sight by any
+one who had a gun handy.&nbsp; He was an Ishmael against whom
+every hand was turned, and, indeed, the Post Office offered a
+reward of &pound;5 to any mail guard who, seeing a prisoner
+breaking parole, should shoot him.&nbsp; After several
+inoffensive farm-labourers, going home after dusk, had been
+peppered with shot in mistake by guards anxious to secure this
+reward, the village streets and roads adjacent became singularly
+desolate when a coach was heard approaching.</p>
+<p>There were exceptions to these strict rules, and officers of
+high rank&mdash;and consequently assumed to have a nicer sense of
+honour than that obtaining among subalterns and the rank and
+file&mdash;were permitted to take private lodgings at
+Stilton.&nbsp; Those were the fortunate ones.&nbsp; Most of the
+prisoners, unhappily, were penniless, and after a time even their
+own Government refused supplies for their maintenance.&nbsp;
+Accordingly, they obtained some few little luxuries, and employed
+the time that hung so heavily on their <a
+name="page131"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 131</span>hands, by
+carving toys and artistic nick-nacks out of fragments of wood, or
+from the bones left from their rations, and selling them to the
+crowds of country folks who came to gaze at them on certain
+days.&nbsp; Straw-plaiting, too, was a prisoners&rsquo; industry,
+until it was stopped by some of the military in charge.</p>
+<p>In March, 1812, Sergeant Ives, of the West Essex Militia, was
+stopped on the highway between Stilton and Norman Cross by a
+number of persons unknown, who, after having knocked him down and
+robbed him of his money and watch, wrenched open his jaws, and
+with savage cruelty, cut off a piece of his tongue.&nbsp; It was
+supposed that this outrage was in revenge for his having been
+concerned in suppressing the plait trade at Norman Cross
+barracks.</p>
+<p>The prisoners were not entirely without spiritual consolation,
+for the good Bishop de Moulines appointed himself their chaplain,
+and, of his own free will leaving France, took up residence at
+Stilton.&nbsp; He attended them in sickness, and helped them out
+of his own resources.</p>
+<p>The officers in charge of these prisoners were often brutal,
+but that there were some who sympathised with their sorrows is
+evident from the tablet still to be seen in Yaxley Church, a mile
+distant, which tells of the gratitude of the prisoners for the
+kindness shown them by Captain John Draper, R.N., who died after
+being in charge of the prison for only eighteen months.</p>
+<p>Norman Cross Prison, or &ldquo;Yaxley
+Barracks&rdquo;&mdash;Norman Cross being in the parish of
+Yaxley&mdash;built in 1796; was demolished in 1816, and no
+vestige of it is left.</p>
+<p>And so all recollection of these things might in time have
+faded away had it not been for the monument erected by the
+wayside in the fateful year 1914.&nbsp; Let us pause to consider
+that moment.&nbsp; Events were hurrying towards the beginning of
+the Great War of 1914&ndash;18, and the nation in general was
+wholly ignorant of what was coming.&nbsp; Stupidly ignorant, for
+there were <a name="page132"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+132</span>many omens.&nbsp; It was at this moment, afterwards
+seen to be so full of tragedy, that the memorial pillar on, or
+near, the site of Yaxley Barracks, to the memory of those French
+prisoners of war, was unveiled, July 28th, 1914, by Lord
+Weardale.&nbsp; A gilded bronze French Imperial eagle stoops on
+the crest of a handsome pillar, and on the plinth is a tablet
+stating that this is a memorial to 1770 French prisoners who died
+in captivity.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image132" href="images/p132.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"French Prisoners of War Monument, Norman Cross"
+title=
+"French Prisoners of War Monument, Norman Cross"
+ src="images/p132.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>These incidents, &ldquo;picked from the wormholes of long
+vanished days,&rdquo; give romance to the otherwise featureless
+road onwards to Kate&rsquo;s Cabin and Water Newton.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;Kate&rsquo;s Cabin&rdquo; inn is mentioned by every
+road-book of coaching-times, but no one ever <a
+name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+133</span>condescended to explain the origin of this curious
+sign, and the inn itself, once standing in the receipt of custom
+at the cross-roads, three miles and a half from Norman Cross, is
+now a pretty cottage.</p>
+<p>
+<a name="image133" href="images/p133.jpg">
+<img class='floatleft' alt=
+"Sculptured figure, Water Newton Church"
+title=
+"Sculptured figure, Water Newton Church"
+ src="images/p133.jpg" />
+</a>Nearly two miles onward, Water Newton comes in sight,
+standing, dry and secure, on its knoll above the water-meadows on
+the river Nene.&nbsp; On the western face of its church tower,
+which originally, before Wansford bridge was built and the road
+diverted, faced the highway, may yet be seen a tabernacle
+containing an ancient effigy of a man in semi-ecclesiastical
+attire, his hands clasped in prayer.&nbsp; An inscription in
+Norman French may with some difficulty be deciphered beneath it,
+inviting the passer-by to pray for the soul of Thomas
+Purden:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;VOVS KE PAR<br />
+ISSI PASSEZ<br />
+POVR LE ALME<br />
+TOMAS PVR<br />
+DEN PRIEZ.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Read aloud, we perceive this to be intended for rhyme.</p>
+<p>No one prays for the soul of Thomas Purden nowadays, for these
+two very excellent and individually sufficient reasons&mdash;that
+prayers for the dead are not customary in the Church of England,
+and that, since the road has been diverted, there are no
+passers-by.</p>
+<p>This brings us to the reason why Thomas Purden should have
+expected wayfarers to intercede for his soul.&nbsp; That he
+expected them to do this out of gratitude seems obvious; but it
+is not at first evident for what <a name="page134"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 134</span>they should be so grateful.&nbsp; We
+are, however, to bear in mind that a road passed down beside this
+church tower in those days, where no road&mdash;only a
+meadow&mdash;exists to-day.&nbsp; The meadow slopes steeply to
+the river, and doubtless a ford, a ferry, or some primitive
+bridge was established here by Thomas Purden long before even a
+wooden bridge existed at Wansford.&nbsp; In providing some safe
+method by which travellers might pass this river, even now
+subject to dangerous floods, Purden would have been a benefactor
+in the eyes alike of men and of Holy Church, and fully entitled
+to the prayers and intercessions of all.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image134" href="images/p134.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Water Newton Church"
+title=
+"Water Newton Church"
+ src="images/p134.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>For many years the head of the figure had disappeared, but
+when the church was restored, some years since, an ingenious
+mason fitted him with another which had, in the usual careless
+fashion of <a name="page135"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+135</span>restorers, been knocked off something else.&nbsp; And
+it is a simple truth that since its &ldquo;restoration,&rdquo;
+Water Newton church is sadly bare.</p>
+<p>By the wayside, on the left, against the wall of a farm-house
+residence, will be noticed an old milestone and horseman&rsquo;s
+upping-block combined.&nbsp; It marks the 81st mile from London,
+and bears the initials &ldquo;E. B.,&rdquo; together with the
+date, 1708.&nbsp; This is perhaps the only survivor of a series
+which, according to De Foe, in his &ldquo;Tour through the Whole
+Island of Great Britain,&rdquo; a Mr. Boulter was projecting
+&ldquo;to London, for the general benefit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image135" href="images/p135.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Edmund Boulter&rsquo;s Milestone"
+title=
+"Edmund Boulter&rsquo;s Milestone"
+ src="images/p135.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Edmund Boulter was one of the family who were then seated at
+Gawthorp Hall, near Leeds, and who, not much later, sold that
+property to Henry Lascelles, father of the first Lord
+Harewood.</p>
+<p><a name="page136"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 136</span>At
+the hamlet of Sibson, on the left hand in descending toward the
+level-crossing at Wansford station, may still be seen the stocks
+and whipping-post beside the road.&nbsp; To the right flows the
+winding Nene, through illimitable oozy meadows, its course marked
+in the far distance by the pollard willows that line its
+banks.&nbsp; The Nene here divides the counties of
+Huntingdonshire and Northants, Wansford itself lying in the
+last-mentioned county and Stibbington on the hither side of the
+river.&nbsp; The famous Wansford Bridge joins the two, and helps
+to render Wansford and Stibbington one place in the eyes of
+strangers.&nbsp; Both places belong to the Duke of Bedford,
+Stibbington bearing the mark of its ownership distinctly visible
+in its severe and uncomfortable-looking &ldquo;model&rdquo;
+modern-gothic stone houses, with the coroneted &ldquo;B&rdquo; on
+their gables.&nbsp; In this manner the accursed Russells have
+bedevilled many of the villages and townlets unhappily owned by
+them, and the feelings of all who live in their earmarked houses
+must be akin to those of paupers who inhabit workhouses and
+infirmaries, with the important exception that the Duke&rsquo;s
+tenants pay rent and taxes.&nbsp; Wansford, fortunately, has not
+been rebuilt, and it is possible for the villagers to live
+without an uncomfortable sense of belonging, body and soul, to
+the Dukes of Bedford.</p>
+<p>The famous &ldquo;Haycock&rdquo; inn, usually spoken of as at
+Wansford, is, in fact, on the Huntingdonshire side of the bridge,
+and in Stibbington.&nbsp; Its sign alludes to the supposed origin
+of the curious nick-name of &ldquo;Wansford-in-England,&rdquo;
+first mentioned in that scarce little early eighteenth-century
+book, <i>Drunken Barnaby&rsquo;s Four Journeys to the North of
+England</i>.&nbsp; In its pages he describes being carried off by
+a flood:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;On a haycock sleeping soundly,<br />
+Th&rsquo; River rose and took me roundly<br />
+Down the current: People cry&rsquo;d;<br />
+Sleeping, down the Stream I hy&rsquo;d:<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;Where away,&rsquo; quoth they, &lsquo;from
+Greenland?&rsquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;No, from Wansforth-brigs in
+England.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p><a name="page137"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 137</span>This
+&ldquo;in England&rdquo; has puzzled many.&nbsp; It really refers
+to the situation of Wansford in Northamptonshire, near, but not
+in, &ldquo;Holland&rdquo;&mdash;the Holland division of
+Lincolnshire.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image137" href="images/p137.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Haycock,&rdquo; Wansford"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Haycock,&rdquo; Wansford"
+ src="images/p137.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Wansford&rsquo;s peculiar fame is thus more than local.&nbsp;
+Perhaps the queer picture-sign of the grand old inn, representing
+Drunken Barnaby on his haycock, helped to disperse it over
+England in days when it could not fail to be seen by every
+passing traveller.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Haycock&rdquo; ceased to be
+an inn, and is now occupied as a hunting-box.&nbsp; It affords a
+pleasing relief from the Duke of Bedford&rsquo;s
+almshouse-looking cottages, and is a building not only of
+considerable age, but of dignified architectural character.&nbsp;
+Stone-built, with handsome windows and steep slated roof, and
+carefully designed, even to its chimneys, it is, architecturally
+speaking, among the very finest of the houses ever used as inns
+in England, and has more the appearance of having been originally
+designed as a private mansion than as a house of public
+entertainment.&nbsp; The sign is now hung in the hall of the
+house, the corbels it rested on being still visible beside the
+present door, replacing the old archway by which the coaches and
+post-chaises entered and left the courtyard of the inn of
+old.</p>
+<p><a name="page138"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 138</span>The
+&ldquo;Haycock,&rdquo; even in its days as an inn, was a noted
+hunting centre.&nbsp; Situated in the country of the Fitzwilliam
+Hunt, it afforded, with its splendid accommodation for guests and
+for horses, headquarters for those who had not a hunting-box of
+their own, and in those days stabled as many as a hundred and
+fifty horses.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image138" href="images/p138.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Sign of the &ldquo;Haycock.&rdquo;"
+title=
+"Sign of the &ldquo;Haycock.&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p138.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Young Percival&rdquo; kept the &ldquo;Haycock&rdquo;
+from about 1826, and drove the &ldquo;Regent&rdquo; between
+Wansford and Stamford, in place of &ldquo;old John
+Barker.&rdquo;&nbsp; At that time he had more valour than
+discretion in driving, and on one occasion at least nearly
+brought disaster upon the coach at the famous bridge by
+&ldquo;punishing&rdquo; a spirited team which had given some
+trouble at starting.&nbsp; At the steep and narrow entrance to
+the bridge they took it in their heads to resent his
+double-thonging, the leaders turning round, and the whole team
+presently facing towards London instead of <a
+name="page140"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+140</span>Stamford.&nbsp; They had to be driven back to the
+&ldquo;Haycock,&rdquo; and Barker took them on to Stamford.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image139" href="images/p139.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Wansford Bridge"
+title=
+"Wansford Bridge"
+ src="images/p139.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>That bridge would have been an exceedingly awkward place for a
+coach accident.&nbsp; It is picturesqueness itself, and by
+consequence not the most convenient for traffic.&nbsp; Originally
+built in 1577, with thirteen arches, it was repaired in 1674, as
+a Latin inscription carved midway on it informs the inquiring
+stranger.&nbsp; In the winter of 1795 an ice-flood destroyed some
+of the southernmost arches, which were replaced the following
+year by two wider spans, so that Wansford Bridge has now only ten
+openings.&nbsp; The northern approach to it from Stamford leads
+down in a dangerous, steep, sudden, and narrow curve, intersected
+by a cross-road.&nbsp; Now that there is no longer a turnpike
+gate at this point to bring the traffic to a slow pace, this
+descent is fruitful in accidents, and at least one cyclist has
+been killed here in an attempt to negotiate this sharp curve on
+the descent into the cross-road.&nbsp; An inoffensive cottage
+standing at the corner opposite the &ldquo;Mermaid&rdquo; inn has
+received many a cyclist through its window, and the new masonry
+of its wall bears witness to the wreck caused by a heavy wagon
+hurtling down the hill, carrying away the side of the house.</p>
+<p>The five miles between Wansford and Stamford begin with this
+long rise, whose crest was cut through in coaching days, the
+earth taken being used to fill up a deep hollow which succeeded,
+where a little brook trickled across the road, the coaches
+fording it.&nbsp; Thence, by what used to be called in the old
+road-books &ldquo;Whitewater Turnpike,&rdquo; past the few
+cottages of Thornhaugh, and so to where the long wall of Burghley
+Park begins on the right hand.&nbsp; Here the telegraph poles,
+that have hitherto so unfailingly followed the highway, suddenly
+go off to the right, and into Stamford by the circuitous Barnack
+road, in deference to the objections, or otherwise, of the
+Marquis of Exeter, against their going through his park.</p>
+<p><a name="page141"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 141</span>The
+famous Burghley House by Stamford town is not visible from the
+road, and is indeed situated a mile within the park, only the
+gate-house to the estate being passed in the long descent into
+that outlying portion of the town known as Stamford Baron.</p>
+<p>There is, amid the works of Tennyson, a curiously romantic
+poem, &ldquo;The Lord of Burleigh,&rdquo; which on the part of
+the literary pilgrim will repay close examination; and this
+examination will yield some astonishing results.&nbsp; It is,
+briefly stated, the story of an Earl masquerading as a landscape
+painter and winning the heart and hand of a farmer&rsquo;s
+daughter.&nbsp; He takes her, after the wedding, to
+see&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;A mansion more majestic<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Than all those she saw before;<br />
+Many a gallant gay domestic<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Bows before him at the door.<br />
+And they speak in gentle murmur<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When they answer to his call,<br />
+While he treads with footstep firmer,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Leading on from hall to hall.<br />
+And, while now she wonders blindly,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Nor the meaning can divine,<br />
+Proudly turns he round and kindly,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; &lsquo;All of this is mine and thine.&rsquo;<br />
+Here he lives in state and bounty,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Lord of Burleigh, fair and free,<br />
+Not a lord in all the county<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Is so great a lord as he.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The original person from whose doings this poem was written
+was, in fact, Henry Cecil, tenth Earl, and afterwards first
+Marquis, of Exeter.&nbsp; He was the lord of Burghley House (not
+&ldquo;Burleigh Hall&rdquo;), by Stamford town, and his
+descendants are there yet.</p>
+<p>Not a landscape painter, but a kind of London man about town
+and Member of Parliament for Stamford, 1774&ndash;1780,
+1784&ndash;1790, and then plain Mr. Henry Cecil (for he did not
+succeed his uncle in the title until December, 1793), he is found
+rather mysteriously wandering about Shropshire in 1789, calling
+himself (there is never any accounting for taste) &ldquo;Mr.
+Jones.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was then a man who had been married
+fourteen years, and was thirty-six years of age.</p>
+<p>The scene opens (thus to put it in dramatic form) <a
+name="page142"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 142</span>on an
+evening towards the end of June, 1789, when a stranger knocked at
+the door of Farmer Hoggins at Great Bolas in Shropshire, and
+begged shelter for the night.&nbsp; He was obviously a gentleman,
+but called himself by the very plebian name of &ldquo;John
+Jones.&rdquo;&nbsp; He made himself so agreeable that his stay
+&ldquo;for the night&rdquo; lasted some weeks, and he returned
+again in a month or so, taking up his residence in the
+village.&nbsp; The attraction which brought him back to Great
+Bolas was evidently Sarah Hoggins, the farmer&rsquo;s daughter,
+at that time a girl of sixteen, having been born in June,
+1773.&nbsp; He proposed for Sarah, and on April 17th, 1790, they
+were married in Great Bolas Church, the register showing that he
+married in the name of &ldquo;John Jones.&rdquo;&nbsp; Meanwhile
+he had purchased land in the village, and built a house which he
+called &ldquo;Bolas Villa.&rdquo;&nbsp; Gossip grew extremely
+busy with this mysterious stranger who had thus descended upon
+the place, and it was generally suspected that he was a
+highwayman in an extensive way of business, especially as some
+notable highway robberies happened coincidently with his
+appearance.</p>
+<p>Early in 1794, &ldquo;Mr. John Jones,&rdquo; living thus at
+Great Bolas, learnt that his uncle, the ninth Earl of Exeter, had
+died in December.&nbsp; Telling his wife they must journey into
+Northamptonshire, where he had business, they set out and arrived
+at &ldquo;Burghley House, by Stamford town,&rdquo; and there he
+disclosed to her for the first time that he was not &ldquo;John
+Jones,&rdquo; but Henry Cecil, and now Earl of Exeter.</p>
+<p>At what time he broke the news to her that he was already a
+married man there is no evidence to show.&nbsp; Strictly
+speaking, he had made a bigamous marriage, because, although his
+wife, one of the Vernons of Hanbury, in Worcestershire, had
+eloped on June 14, 1789, with the Reverend William Sneyd, curate
+of that place, he had at the time taken no steps to obtain a
+divorce.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image143" href="images/p143.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Burghley House, by Stamford Town"
+title=
+"Burghley House, by Stamford Town"
+ src="images/p143.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>But he had every excuse.&nbsp; He had honestly fallen in love
+with Sarah Hoggins after thus meeting her while wandering about
+the country a few days after <a name="page144"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 144</span>his wife&rsquo;s flight; and he
+obtained a divorce by Act of Parliament in March, 1791.&nbsp;
+Having done this, he married Sarah Hoggins secondly some six
+months later (October 3) in the City of London Church of St.
+Mildred, Bread Street, in whose register his name appears as
+&ldquo;Henry Cecil, bachelor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Tennyson&rsquo;s poem is, therefore, rather more romantic than
+truthful; and the lines which tell us how she murmured&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;Oh!
+that he<br />
+Were again that landscape painter<br />
+Who did win my heart from me,&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>have no authority.&nbsp; Nor is there any evidence to warrant
+the statement that&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;A trouble weighed upon her<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And perplexed her, night and morn,<br />
+With the burthen of an honour<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Unto which she was not born.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The poet continues&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;So she droop&rsquo;d and droop&rsquo;d
+before him,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Fading slowly from his side;<br />
+Three fair children first she bore him,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Then before her time she died.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The Countess of Exeter, in fact, died on January 18, 1797, not
+quite twenty-four years of age; but not from &ldquo;the burthen
+of an honour unto which she was not born.&rdquo;&nbsp; Happily,
+accession to the ranks of the titled nobility is not fatal, as
+the marriage of many distinguished ornaments of the musical
+comedy stage assure us; and so we must charge the Poet Laureate
+with the flunkey thought that blue blood is a kind apart, and not
+to be admixed with other strains.&nbsp; This from the poet who
+wrote&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Kind hearts are more than coronets,<br />
+And simple faith than Norman blood.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>is unexpected.</p>
+<p>She left two sons and one daughter.&nbsp; Her eldest <a
+name="page145"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 145</span>son became
+second Marquis of Exeter, his father, the Earl, having been
+raised a step in the peerage in 1801.</p>
+<p>The enterprising Earl married, thirdly, in 1800, the divorced
+wife of the eighth Duke of Hamilton, and died May 1, 1804, aged
+fifty; but his third wife survived until January 17, 1837.&nbsp;
+In the billiard-room of Burghley House is a portrait-group of
+&ldquo;the Lord of Burleigh&rdquo; and his wife, Sarah Hoggins,
+by Sir Thomas Lawrence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Bolas Villa&rdquo; was given by the Earl to his
+godson.&nbsp; It has since been enlarged, and is now styled
+&ldquo;Burghley Villa.&rdquo;&nbsp; The church of Great Bolas is
+a grim-looking brick building of the eighteenth century, when
+many of the Shropshire churches in that district were
+rebuilt.</p>
+<h2>XXII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Stamford</span> compels enthusiasm, from
+the first glimpse of it on entering, to the last regretful
+backward glance on leaving.&nbsp; It is historic, picturesque,
+stately, aristocratic, and cleanly, all at once.&nbsp; Its
+stone-built mansions and houses are chiefly of the Renaissance
+period, from Elizabeth onwards to the time of George the First,
+and it is in this sort the most beautiful town in England, after
+Oxford and Cambridge, and even in some aspects surpassing
+them.</p>
+<p>Apart from its lovely churches, one seeks not Gothic
+architecture at Stamford but the stateliness of classic methods
+as understood in the sixteenth and seventeenth century
+revival.&nbsp; It is this especial architectural character which
+gives the town such an air of academic distinction and leads the
+stranger to compare it with the great university towns, even
+before the fact comes to his knowledge that Stamford itself was
+once the seat of a University.</p>
+<p>The entrance is of a peculiar stateliness, the broad quiet
+street descending, lined with dignified private houses, to where
+the river Welland flows beneath the <a name="page146"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 146</span>bridge, dividing the counties of
+Northampton and Lincoln, and Stamford Baron from Stamford
+town.&nbsp; On the right hand rises the fine tower of St.
+Martin&rsquo;s, its perforated battlements showing, lace-like,
+against the sky, just as when Turner painted his view.&nbsp;
+Lower down across the street straddles the sign of the great
+&ldquo;George&rdquo; inn, and a few steps forward serve to
+disclose the exquisite picture of St. Mary&rsquo;s tower and
+spire soaring from the rising ground on the other side of the
+river.&nbsp; The &ldquo;distracting bustle of the
+&lsquo;George,&rsquo; which exceeded anything I ever saw or
+heard,&rdquo; as the Reverend Thomas Twining wrote, in 1776, has
+long since become a thing of the past, and a certain quiet
+dignity now belongs to it, as to Stamford in general.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;George&rdquo; is an inn with a history.&nbsp;
+Charles the First slept there, August 23, 1645, and a whole train
+of dignitaries at one time or another.&nbsp; &ldquo;Billy the
+Butcher,&rdquo; too, returning from Culloden, stayed in the
+house, and with his officers celebrated that victory.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Billy the Butcher,&rdquo; one regrets to say, was the
+vulgar nickname by which the people called William, Duke of
+Cumberland.</p>
+<p>Distinguished foreigners without number have rested here and
+wondered at the habits of Englishmen.&nbsp; The foreigner, it is
+to be feared, never, with every advantage, really understands us;
+sometimes, too, he is so perverse that we find a difficulty in
+understanding him.&nbsp; Thus, Master Estienne Perlin, who
+travelled the roads and sampled the inns of England so far back
+as 1558, says we were great drunkards then.&nbsp; He wrote an
+account of his travels, and of England, as it appeared to him;
+and the way in which he wrestles with the pronunciation of the
+language is amusing enough.&nbsp; Thus, according to this
+traveller, if an Englishman would treat you, he would say in his
+language: &ldquo;Vis dring a&rsquo; quarta uin oim gasquim oim
+hespaignol oim malvoysi.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is merely maddening,
+and it is a positive relief to know that the meaning of it is,
+&ldquo;Will you drink a quart of Gascony wine, another of
+Spanish, and another of <a name="page149"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 149</span>Malmsey?&rdquo;&nbsp; According to
+this, the Englishman of three hundred years ago mixed his drinks
+alarmingly.&nbsp; &ldquo;In drinking,&rdquo; continues this
+amusing foreigner, &ldquo;they will say to you, a hundred times,
+&lsquo;Drind iou,&rsquo; which is, &lsquo;I drink to you&rsquo;;
+and you should answer them in their language,
+&lsquo;Iplaigiou,&rsquo; which means &lsquo;I pledge
+you.&rsquo;&nbsp; If you would thank them in their language, you
+say, &lsquo;God tanque artelay.&rsquo;&nbsp; When they are
+drunk,&rdquo; he concludes, &ldquo;they will swear by blood and
+death that you shall drink all that is in your cup, and will say
+to you thus: &lsquo;Bigod sol drind iou agoud
+uin.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image147" href="images/p147.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Entrance to Stamford. (After J. M. W. Turner R.A.)"
+title=
+"Entrance to Stamford. (After J. M. W. Turner R.A.)"
+ src="images/p147.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Such customs as these must have been excellent business for
+the &ldquo;George&rdquo; and its contemporaries.</p>
+<p>To this inn belongs an incident not paralleled
+elsewhere.&nbsp; The daughter of one of its landlords, Margaret,
+daughter of Bryan Hodgson, married a bishop!&nbsp; Or, more
+exactly, one who became a bishop: the Reverend Beilby Porteous,
+who at the time of his marriage, in 1765, was vicar of Ruckinge
+and Wittersham, in Kent.&nbsp; In 1776 he became Bishop of
+Chester, and eleven years later Bishop of London.&nbsp; This was
+long years before Whincup kept the house.&nbsp; He reigned here
+in the full tide of the coaching age, and was one of the
+proprietors of the &ldquo;Stamford Regent.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Much history has been made at Stamford, from the time when it
+was the &ldquo;stone ford&rdquo; of the Romans across the
+Welland, through the long ages of blood and destruction,
+stretching, with little intermission, from the days of Saxon and
+Danish conflicts to that final clash of arms in 1643, when
+Cromwell held the town and besieged Burghley House; and to that
+Monday in the first week of May, 1646, when Charles the First,
+having slept the night before at the residence of Alderman Wolph
+(descended from Wulph, son of King Harold) slipped through a
+postern-gate in the town wall, and so escaped for a final few
+hours as a free man.&nbsp; The gate is there yet, in the grounds
+of Barn Hill House, a mansion which, in 1729, was purchased by
+Stukeley, the antiquary, vicar of All Saints.</p>
+<p><a name="page150"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 150</span>Here
+is no place to tell of the Councils and Parliaments held at
+Stamford; but, as justifying the academic air the town still
+holds, it must be said that it was indeed the home of a
+University, long centuries ago.&nbsp; It was following the early
+quarrels of Oxford University and Oxford town that a body of
+students left that seat of learning, in 1260, and set up a
+temporary home at Northampton.&nbsp; Political troubles drove
+them, six years later, to Stamford, where they founded several
+Colleges and Halls, which were already flourishing when, in 1333,
+the northern students at Oxford, disgusted with the alleged
+favouritism shown to the southerners, left in a body and found a
+welcome at Stamford.&nbsp; Liberty in those days was construed as
+permission given the strong to oppress the weak, and so when
+Oxford University and Oxford town jointly petitioned the king to
+forbid the seceders learning where they listed, those unhappy
+students were promptly arrested and sent back to suck wisdom from
+<i>alma mater</i> on the Isis.&nbsp; Oxford and Cambridge both
+agreed not to recognise degrees conferred by Stamford, and at
+length, by 1463, this University was strangled.</p>
+<p>The actual relics of those times are few.&nbsp; Chief in point
+of interest is the old Brasenose Gate, the only fragment of the
+College of that name, said to have been founded by students from
+Brasenose College, Oxford.&nbsp; Here remained until recent years
+the ancient bronze knocker, in the form of a lion&rsquo;s head
+with a massive ring in its mouth, brought, according to the
+legend, from the Oxford college.&nbsp; This knocker certainly
+belongs to a period not later than the thirteenth century, and
+may have been conveyed away.&nbsp; Whether it was the original
+&ldquo;brazen nose,&rdquo; said to have originated the odd name
+of the College, or whether that name arose from the
+<i>brassen-huis</i>, or brew-house, whose site the original
+College was built upon, is one of those mysteries of derivation
+never likely to be solved.&nbsp; During the last years of its
+stay at Stamford, the knocker was kept in a house adjoining,
+until it and the house were purchased by <a
+name="page151"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 151</span>Brasenose
+College, Oxford, in whose Common Room the ancient relic now
+occupies a place of honour.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image151" href="images/p151.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Stamford"
+title=
+"Stamford"
+ src="images/p151.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Stamford was attached to the Yorkist cause in the Wars of the
+Roses, and had occasion to regret the fact; for it offered an
+especial mark to the victorious Lancastrians in 1461, after the
+battle of St. Albans, when Sir Andrew Trollope, with the triple
+ferocity of the <i>trois loups</i> from which the name derives,
+fell upon the town and pillaged and burnt it.&nbsp; Eight
+churches, two castles, and the town walls, together with many <a
+name="page152"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 152</span>hundreds of
+houses, were destroyed, and Stamford has never recovered its
+ancient importance since then.&nbsp; It is enough for us that it
+is among the stateliest of towns, stone-built and dignified; with
+its beautiful churches of St. Mary, All Saints, and St. Martin;
+its old almshouses and mansions, not exactly matched in all
+England.</p>
+<p>The histories tell of a long list of famous men, natives of
+Stamford; but the mere mental capacity or personal bravery shown
+by these great ones is sardonically overshadowed by the physical
+greatness of quite another kind of person, who, although not even
+a native of Stamford, has, by his dying here, shed an especial
+lustre upon the town.</p>
+<p>
+<a name="image152" href="images/p152.jpg">
+<img class='floatright' alt=
+"Daniel Lambert"
+title=
+"Daniel Lambert"
+ src="images/p152.jpg" />
+</a>Far transcending the fame of all other personages is that of
+Daniel Lambert, the Fat Man.&nbsp; In the computation of
+avoirdupois and of the tape-measure, this was the greatest figure
+that ever travelled the Great North Road.&nbsp; No king or noble
+can vie with him, nor are saintly shrines more zealously visited
+than his grave in the old churchyard of St. Martin&rsquo;s.&nbsp;
+While the tomb of that great Cecil, the Lord Treasurer Burghley,
+within the church, remains often unvisited, photographs of Daniel
+Lambert and of his epitaph meet the traveller at every turn.</p>
+<p><a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+153</span>Although destined to this undying fame, and to pothouse
+canonisation, Daniel&rsquo;s career was short, as that epitaph
+tells us:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;In Remembrance
+of<br />
+That Prodigy in Nature<br />
+DANIEL LAMBERT<br />
+who was possessed of<br />
+An exalted and convivial mind<br />
+And in personal greatness<br />
+Had no Competitor<br />
+He measured three feet, one inch, round the leg<br />
+Nine feet, four inches, round the body<br />
+And Weighed<br />
+Fifty-two stone Eleven pounds<br />
+He departed this life<br />
+On the 21st of June<br />
+1809<br />
+Aged 39 years.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>His diet is said to have been plain, and the quantity
+moderate, and he never drank anything stronger than water.&nbsp;
+His countenance was manly and intelligent, and he had a melodious
+tenor voice.&nbsp; For some years before his death he had toured
+the country, exhibiting himself, and visited London on two
+occasions.&nbsp; The weights and measurements quoted on his
+tombstone were taken at Huntingdon only the day before his
+death.&nbsp; In the evening he arrived at the &ldquo;Waggon and
+Horses,&rdquo; Stamford, in good health, in preparation for
+&ldquo;receiving company&rdquo; during Stamford Races, but before
+nine o&rsquo;clock the next morning was dead in the room on the
+ground floor which he had taken because of his inability to go
+upstairs.&nbsp; For many years two of his suits were shown at the
+inn, seven men often succeeding in squeezing themselves within
+the mighty embrace of his waistcoat, without bursting a
+button.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Waggon and Horses&rdquo; has long since
+given place to a school, and so here is a place of pilgrimage the
+less; but Daniel&rsquo;s fame is immortal, for he lives as the
+sign of many an inn and refreshment-house, whose proprietors use
+him as an advertisement of the plenteous fare to be obtained
+within, regardless of the fact that his immense bulk was due
+rather to a dropsical habit than to much eating or drinking.</p>
+<h2><a name="page154"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+154</span>XXIII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> road, mounting steeply out of
+Stamford, reaches a fine, elevated track commanding wide
+views.&nbsp; This is the spot chosen by Forrest for his painting
+of the old &ldquo;Highflyer&rdquo; London, York, and Edinburgh
+coach which ran from 1788 to 1840.&nbsp; In less than two miles
+the road crosses the border of Lincolnshire, traversing for six
+miles an outlying corner of little Rutland, the smallest county
+in England, and entering Lincolnshire again on passing
+Stretton.&nbsp; Great Casterton, at the foot of the hill two and
+a quarter miles from Stamford, is in Rutland.&nbsp; It is said to
+be situated on the Guash, but that stream and the bridge over it,
+from which the old road-books often called the village
+&ldquo;Bridge Casterton,&rdquo; are not readily glimpsed.</p>
+<p>It is a pretty stone-built village, with a well preserved
+Early English church beside the road.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Greatness,&rdquo; either as a village or as the site of a
+Roman &ldquo;castrum&rdquo; (whence derives the
+&ldquo;Caster&rdquo;-ton) has long ceased to be a characteristic
+of this pleasant spot, and the ancient Roman camp is now visible
+only in some grassy banks where the rathe primrose grows.</p>
+<p>Just beyond Casterton, coyly hiding down a lane to the left,
+is the little village of Tickencote, preserving in its name some
+prehistoric goat-farm, &ldquo;Tyccen-cote&rdquo; meaning in the
+Anglo-Saxon nothing more nor less than
+&ldquo;goat&rsquo;s-home.&rdquo;&nbsp; Of more tangible interest
+is the splendid Norman church, of small size but extraordinary
+elaboration; a darkling building with heavy chancel arch covered
+with those zigzags, lozenges, birds&rsquo; heads, and
+tooth-mouldings so beloved by Norman architects, and with a
+&ldquo;Norman&rdquo; nave built in 1792 to replace that portion
+of the building destroyed many years before.&nbsp; The
+pseudo-Norman work of our own day is, almost without exception,
+vile, and that of the eighteenth century was worse, but here is
+an <a name="page157"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+157</span>example of such faithful copying of existing portions
+that now, since a hundred years and more have passed and the
+first freshness of the new masonry gone, it is difficult to
+distinguish the really old work from the copy.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image155" href="images/p155.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; 1840 (After Forrest)"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; 1840 (After Forrest)"
+ src="images/p155.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Returning to the highroad, a further two miles bring us to
+Horn Lane, the site of a vanished turnpike gate, and to the
+coppices and roadside trees of Bloody Oaks, where the battle of
+Empingham was fought, March 13, 1470, between the forces of
+Edward the Fourth and the hastily assembled Lincolnshire levies
+of Sir Robert Welles and Sir Thomas de la Launde, fighting,
+<i>not</i> for the Lancastrian cause, as so often stated, but in
+an insurrection fomented by the Earl of Warwick, whose object was
+to raise Edward&rsquo;s brother, the Duke of Clarence, to the
+throne.&nbsp; It was a massacre, rather than a battle, for
+Edward&rsquo;s army was both more numerous and better equipped,
+and the rebels soon broke and fled.&nbsp; Flinging away their
+weapons, and even portions of their clothing, as they went, the
+fight <a name="page158"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+158</span>was readily named &ldquo;Losecoat Field.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+The captured leaders paid for their ineffectual treason with
+their blood, for they were executed at Stamford.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image157" href="images/p157.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Bloody Oaks"
+title=
+"Bloody Oaks"
+ src="images/p157.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The country folks have quite forgotten Losecoat Field, and
+think the woodlands of Bloody Oaks were so named from the
+execution of John Bowland, a highwayman who was gibbeted at
+Empingham Corner in 1769.</p>
+<p>Greetham spire now rises away to the left, and shows where
+that village lies hid.&nbsp; Here, away from the village and
+facing the highroad, stood, and stands still, the &ldquo;Greetham
+Inn.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is now a farmhouse, and has lost its
+stables, its projecting bar-parlour, and its entrance
+archway.&nbsp; Once, however, it was one of the foremost inns and
+posting-houses on the road.&nbsp; Marked on old Ordnance maps as
+the &ldquo;Oak,&rdquo; it seems to have been really named the
+&ldquo;New Inn,&rdquo; if we may judge from an inscription cut on
+stone under the eaves: &ldquo;This is the New Inn,
+1786.&rdquo;&nbsp; However this may have been, it was known to
+travellers, coachmen, and postboys along the road only as
+&ldquo;Greetham Inn.&rdquo;&nbsp; Towards the last it was kept by
+one of the Percivals of Wansford.&nbsp; At that time no fewer
+than forty-four coaches&mdash;twenty-two up and the same number
+down&mdash;changed here and at the &ldquo;Black Bull,&rdquo;
+Witham Common, every twenty-four hours.</p>
+<p>Less than a mile down the road is that humble little
+public-house whose strange sign, the &ldquo;Ram Jam,&rdquo; has
+puzzled many people.&nbsp; Its original name was the
+&ldquo;Winchilsea Arms,&rdquo; and it bore no other sign than the
+armorial shield of the Earls of Winchilsea until long after
+coaching days were done; but in all that time it was known only
+as the &ldquo;Ram Jam House,&rdquo; and thereby hangs a tale, or
+several tales, most of them untrue.&nbsp; All kinds of wild
+legends of the house being so crammed with travellers that it was
+called &ldquo;Ram Jam,&rdquo; from that circumstance, have been
+heard.&nbsp; But travellers, as a matter of fact, never stayed
+there, for the inn never had any accommodation for them.&nbsp; It
+was more a beer-house than anything else.&nbsp; It&rsquo;s <a
+name="page161"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 161</span>fame began
+about 1740, when the landlord was an officer&rsquo;s servant,
+returned from India.&nbsp; He possessed the secret of compounding
+a liqueur or spirit which he sold to travellers down the road,
+this eventually becoming as well-known a delicacy as Cooper
+Thornhill&rsquo;s &ldquo;Stilton&rdquo; cheeses.&nbsp; He called
+this spirit &ldquo;Ram J&aacute;n,&rdquo; which seems to be an
+Indian term for a table servant, and sold it in small bottles,
+either singly, for consumption on the journey, or in cases of
+half-dozens or dozens.&nbsp; The secret of this liqueur was
+imparted to his son, but afterwards died out, and it is said that
+&ldquo;Ram Jam&rdquo; ceased to be sold before the beginning of
+the nineteenth century.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image159" href="images/p159.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Interior of a Village Inn.  (After Morland)"
+title=
+"Interior of a Village Inn.  (After Morland)"
+ src="images/p159.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Although the &ldquo;Ram Jam&rdquo; was never more than a
+tavern of a very humble description, and probably never sheltered
+guests above the rank of cattle-drovers, it is noted as having
+been the house where Molyneux, the black, slept before his fight
+with Tom Cribb at Thistleton Gap, three and a half miles away, on
+September 28, 1811.&nbsp; Cribb, who was easily the victor, had
+his quarters at the &ldquo;Blue Bull,&rdquo; another small
+roadside house, which stood, until the beginning of 1900, at the
+cross roads on Witham Common, where roads go right and left to
+Bourn and Melton Mowbray.&nbsp; It has now been demolished.</p>
+<p>Here we have passed the little Rutlandshire village of
+Stretton on the right, which obtained its name of
+&ldquo;Street-town&rdquo; from having been on the ancient road
+called the Ermine Way.&nbsp; Here we come again into
+Lincolnshire.</p>
+<p>For some twenty miles the Great North Road runs through this
+broad county, the land of the &ldquo;yellow-bellies,&rdquo; as
+Lincolnshire folk are named, from the frogs and eels that inhabit
+their fens and marshes.&nbsp; North and South Witham, giving a
+name to Witham Common, lie unseen, off to the left, and the once
+famous old &ldquo;Black Bull&rdquo; stands, as it always has
+stood, solitary beside the road, out of sight from any other
+house.&nbsp; It consists of two separate buildings, at right
+angles to one another and erected at different times.&nbsp; <a
+name="page162"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 162</span>The
+original house is a structure of rag-stone, placed a little way
+back from the road, and facing it.&nbsp; The second building,
+which bears a more imposing architectural character, and with its
+handsome elevation of red brick and stone, bears witness to the
+once extensive business of the &ldquo;Black Bull,&rdquo; stands
+facing south, with its gable-end to the road, thus forming two
+sides of a courtyard.&nbsp; Long ranges of stables extend to the
+rear.&nbsp; The place is now in use as a farmhouse and
+hunting-box, and a screen of laurels and other evergreen shrubs
+is planted on the site of the old coach-drive.&nbsp; Sturtle, who
+kept the house in the old days, is gathered to his fathers, and
+the railway whistle sounds across country, where the
+guards&rsquo; horns once aroused the echoes of Morkery Woods or
+Spittle Gorse.</p>
+<p>How different the outlook now from the time when Sir Walter
+Scott made entries in his <i>Journal</i>.&nbsp; &ldquo;Old
+England,&rdquo; he writes, from his hotel at Grantham, &ldquo;is
+no changeling.&nbsp; Things seem much the same.&nbsp; One race of
+red-nosed innkeepers are gone, and their widows, eldest sons, or
+head waiters exercise hospitality in their room, with the same
+bustle and importance.&nbsp; The land, however, is much better
+ploughed; straight ridges everywhere adopted in place of the old
+circumflex of twenty years ago.&nbsp; Three horses, however, or
+even four, are often seen in a plough, yoked one before the
+other.&nbsp; Ill habits do not go out at once.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A few years later, and these things, which had changed so
+little, were revolutionised.&nbsp; The railway carried all the
+traffic and the roads were deserted, the &ldquo;red-nosed
+innkeepers&rdquo; so rarely seeing a guest, that when a stray one
+arrived they almost fell on his shoulder and wept.&nbsp;
+Agriculture, too, converted even Witham Common into a succession
+of fertile fields, and thus banished wayfaring romance to the
+pages of history or of sensation novels.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page163"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 163</span>
+<a name="image163" href="images/p163.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"House, formerly the &ldquo;Black Bull,&rdquo; Witham Common"
+title=
+"House, formerly the &ldquo;Black Bull,&rdquo; Witham Common"
+ src="images/p163.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2><a name="page164"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+164</span>XXIV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Let</span> us rest awhile by this sunlit
+stretch of road, where the red roofs of distant farmsteads alone
+hint of life; always excepting the humming telegraph wires
+whispering messages to Edinburgh and the Far North, or perhaps
+the summer breeze bringing across country the distant echo of a
+train.&nbsp; If it does, why then the sound renders our solitude
+the more complete, and gives flight to a lagging
+imagination.&nbsp; It reminds us that it was here, and not there,
+three miles away over the meadows in a railway cutting, that the
+traffic of two kingdoms went, sixty years ago.</p>
+<p>These green selvedges of grass that border the highway so
+delightfully were not then in existence.&nbsp; They were a part
+of the road itself, which was, for all that, not too wide for the
+mail-coaches, the stages, the fly-wagons, private chariots,
+post-chaises, and especially the runaway couples <i>en route</i>
+for Gretna Green, who travelled along it.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+dullest road in the world, though the most convenient,&rdquo;
+quoth Sir Walter Scott, in his diary, when journeying to
+Abbotsford in 1826.&nbsp; Dull scenically, but not
+historically.&nbsp; Had it been an unlettered cyclist who had
+made this criticism, a thousand critical lashes had been his
+portion&mdash;and serve him right; but what shall we say of the
+author of <i>Waverley</i>?&nbsp; Dull! why, the road is thronged
+with company.&nbsp; One can&mdash;any one can who has the will to
+it&mdash;call spirits from the vasty deep with which to people
+the way.&nbsp; No need to ask, &ldquo;Will they
+come?&rdquo;&nbsp; They cannot choose but do so; they are
+here.</p>
+<p>A strange and motley crowd: the pale ghosts of the ages.&nbsp;
+From Ostorius Scapula and the Emperors Hadrian, Severus, and
+Constantine the Great, down through the Middle Ages, they come,
+mostly engaged in cutting one another&rsquo;s throats.&nbsp; York
+and Lancaster, as their fortunes ebbed or flowed, setting up or
+taking <a name="page165"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+165</span>down the heads of traitors; obscure murderers
+despatching equally obscure victims by the way, and in later
+times&mdash;the farcical mingling with the more tragic
+humours&mdash;we see James the First journeying to his throne,
+confirmed in his good opinion of himself as a second Solomon by a
+sycophantic crowd of courtiers; Lord Chancellor Littleton,
+fleeing from Parliament to Charles the First at York, carrying
+with him that precious symbol of Royal authority, the Great Seal
+(the third Great Seal of that reign), made in the year the Long
+Parliament began to sit; Charles the First, a few years later,
+conducted by the victorious Parliament to London, and, at the
+interval of another century, the Rebel Lords.&nbsp; &ldquo;The
+&rsquo;45,&rdquo; indeed, made much traffic on this road: the
+British army going down, with Billy the Butcher at its head, to
+crush the rebellion, and the prisoners coming up&mdash;their last
+journey, as they knew full well.&nbsp; They were pinioned on the
+way, for their better custody, and so that Hanoverian heads might
+sleep the sounder at St. James&rsquo;s.&nbsp; The Hanoverians
+themselves rarely came this way, nor would their coming have
+added greatly to the romance of the road.&nbsp; George the Third
+passed once.&nbsp; He was a stay-at-home king, and of roads knew
+little, save of those that led from London to Windsor, or to that
+western <i>Ultima Thule</i> of his, Weymouth.&nbsp; Indeed, it is
+said, on what authority it is difficult to determine, that the
+third George never voyaged out of the kingdom.&nbsp; Even
+Hanover, beloved of his forbears, he never knew, although the
+Jacobites ceased not with their brass tokens, to wish him there.
+<a name="citation165"></a><a href="#footnote165"
+class="citation">[165]</a>&nbsp; His furthest journey is said to
+have been to York.</p>
+<p>His son, afterwards George the Fourth, had occasion to
+remember this road, for he was upset on it in 1789, when
+returning from a visit to Earl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth
+Woodhouse.&nbsp; Two miles from Newark, a cart overturned his
+carriage in a narrow part of the <a name="page166"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 166</span>highway.&nbsp; It rolled over three
+times down an incline, and fell to pieces like a box of tricks,
+but the prince was unhurt.</p>
+<p>Of bygone sporting figures with which, in imagination, to
+people the way we have a crowd.&nbsp; There has always been
+something in the great length of the road to York, and of its
+continuation to Edinburgh, that has appealed to sportsmen and all
+those interested in the speeds of different methods of
+progression.&nbsp; Pedestrians, horsemen, and coaches&mdash;and
+in recent times cyclists&mdash;have competed in their several
+ways, from an early period until our own day, and the rival
+railways even have had their races to Edinburgh.</p>
+<p>Of these feats, that of Sir Robert Cary, son of Lord Hunsdon,
+is not the least remarkable.&nbsp; He carried the news of Queen
+Elizabeth&rsquo;s death to James at Edinburgh, and was the first
+to hail him King of England.&nbsp; Riding in furious haste, and
+with fresh horses wherever he could obtain them, he succeeded in
+covering the distance in the sixty hours between a Thursday
+morning and a Saturday night.&nbsp; Again, a very few years
+later&mdash;in May 1606&mdash;a certain esquire of James the
+First&rsquo;s, John Lepton of York, undertook for a wager to ride
+on six consecutive days between that city and London.&nbsp; He
+started from Aldersgate on the 20th of May, and accomplished his
+task every day before darkness had fallen; &ldquo;to the greater
+praise of his strength in acting than to his discretion in
+undertaking it,&rdquo; as Fuller remarks.&nbsp; He also, of
+course, had relays of horses.&nbsp; Among the pedestrians is Ben
+Jonson, who walked to Scotland, on his visit to Drummond of
+Hawthornden, starting in June 1618; but he footed it less for
+sport than from necessity.</p>
+<p>When Charles the First was at York, according to Clarendon, it
+was a frequent occurrence for gentlemen couriers to ride with
+despatches between that place and London, completing the double
+journey&mdash;400 miles&mdash;in thirty-four hours.&nbsp; Thus, a
+letter sent by the Council in London on the Saturday, midnight,
+was answered on its arrival at York by the king, and the <a
+name="page167"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 167</span>answer
+delivered in London at ten o&rsquo;clock on the Monday
+morning.</p>
+<p>Then there was Cooper Thornhill, landlord of the
+&ldquo;Bell&rdquo; at Stilton, who for a wager rode to London and
+back again to Stilton, about 1740.&nbsp; The distance, 154 miles
+in all, was done in eleven hours thirty-three minutes and
+forty-six seconds.&nbsp; He had nineteen horses to carry him, and
+so is no rival of Turpin&rsquo;s mythical exploit in riding to
+York on his equally mythical Black Bess; but he was evidently
+considered a wonderful person, for there was a poem published
+about him in 1745, entitled &ldquo;The Stilton Hero: O
+Tempora!&nbsp; O Mores:&rdquo; a sixpenny quarto of fourteen
+pages.</p>
+<p>Foster Powell is easily first among the pedestrians.&nbsp; He
+was an eighteenth century notability, a native of Horsforth, near
+Leeds, and born in 1734.&nbsp; Articled to an attorney, he
+remained a solicitor&rsquo;s clerk, undistinguished in the law,
+but early famed for his walking powers.&nbsp; In 1764 he backed
+himself for any amount to walk fifty miles on the Bath Road in
+seven hours, and having accomplished this, despite his wearing a
+heavy greatcoat and leather breeches at the time, he visited
+France and Switzerland, and fairly walked the natives off their
+legs.&nbsp; It was in 1773 that he performed his first walk from
+London to York and back, doing the 400 miles in five days and
+eighteen hours.&nbsp; This was followed by a walk of 100 miles,
+out and home, on the Bath Road, done in twenty-three hours and a
+quarter.&nbsp; His three great pedestrian records on the Great
+North Road in 1788 and twice in 1792 are his most remarkable
+achievements.&nbsp; Although by this time he had long passed the
+age at which athletics are commonly indulged in, he performed the
+London to York and back walk of 1788 in five days twenty hours,
+and its repetitions of 1792 in five days eighteen hours and five
+days fifteen hours and a quarter, respectively.&nbsp; The
+starting and turning-points were Shoreditch Church and York
+Minster.&nbsp; This last effort probably cost him his life, for
+he died, <a name="page168"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+168</span>aged fifty-nine, early the following year.&nbsp; Powell
+figures&mdash;rightly enough&mdash;as one of Wilson and
+Caulfield&rsquo;s company of &ldquo;Remarkable Characters,&rdquo;
+in which he is described as about five feet nine inches in
+height, close-knit body, of a sallow complexion, and of a meagre
+habit.&nbsp; He lived on a light and spare <a
+name="page169"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 169</span>diet, and
+generally abstained from drink, only on one of his expeditions
+partaking of brandy.&nbsp; He took but little sleep, generally
+five hours.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image168" href="images/p168.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Foster Powell"
+title=
+"Foster Powell"
+ src="images/p168.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Robert Barclay of Ury, born 1731, died 1797, walked from
+London to Ury, 510 miles, in ten days.&nbsp; He is described as
+having been well over six feet in height.&nbsp; He married, in
+1776, Sarah Ann Allardice, and was the father of the next notable
+pedestrian.</p>
+<p>Captain Barclay of Ury, an eighteenth century stalwart, born
+in 1779 and living until 1854, walked the whole way from
+Edinburgh to London and back.&nbsp; He was at the time Member of
+Parliament for Kincardineshire.&nbsp; Another of his feats of
+endurance was driving the mail for a wager from London to
+Aberdeen.&nbsp; He then offered to drive it back for another
+wager, but Lord Kennedy, who had already lost, was not inclined
+to renew.&nbsp; Barclay started the &ldquo;Defiance&rdquo; coach
+between Edinburgh and Aberdeen in July 1829.&nbsp; He only once
+upset it, and thus described the event:&mdash;&ldquo;She fell as
+easy as if she had fallen on a feather bed, and looking out for a
+soft place, I alighted comfortably on my feet.&rdquo;&nbsp; A
+favourite axiom with him was that no man could claim to be a
+thoroughly qualified coachman until he had
+&ldquo;floored&rdquo;&mdash;that is, upset&mdash;his coach;
+&ldquo;for till he has done so he cannot know how to get it up
+again.&rdquo;&nbsp; Barclay was the claimant of the Earldom of
+Monteith and Ayr, and it was a source of genuine anxiety with him
+whether, in the event of his proving his claim, he would have to
+give up the reins.&nbsp; He consulted his friend the Duke of
+Gordon on this point.&nbsp; &ldquo;Why,&rdquo; replied his Grace,
+&ldquo;there is not much difference between an earl and a
+marquis, and as the Marquis of Waterford drives the Brighton
+&lsquo;Defiance,&rsquo; I see no reason why you may not drive its
+Aberdeen namesake.&nbsp; At all events, if there be any objection
+to your being the coachman, there can be none to your being the
+guard.&rdquo;&nbsp; Barclay was snubbed!</p>
+<p>As for the many great people who were furiously driven back
+and forth, up and down the road, the <a name="page170"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 170</span>historian is dismayed at the
+prospect of chronicling their whirling flight.&nbsp; Let us
+respectfully take the most of their performances on trust.&nbsp;
+There was no occasion for all this haste, save the spirit of the
+thing, as Byron hints:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Now there is nothing gives a man such
+spirits,<br />
+Leavening his blood as cayenne doth a curry,<br />
+As going at full speed&mdash;no matter where its<br />
+Direction be, so &rsquo;tis but in a hurry,<br />
+And merely for the sake of its own merits;<br />
+For the less cause there is for all this flurry,<br />
+The greater is the pleasure in arriving<br />
+At the great end of travel&mdash;which is driving.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Thus there was Lord Londonderry, who made a speech in the
+House one night, and the next evening was at his own place in
+Durham, 250 miles or so away, having travelled down in his
+&ldquo;chariot and four.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There were those, however, who scorned these effeminate
+methods.&nbsp; Like Barclay of Ury, they walked or rode
+horseback, long after the introduction of coaches.&nbsp;
+Foul-mouthed old Lord Monboddo, for instance, a once famous Scots
+Lord of Session, persisted in the use of the saddle.&nbsp; He
+journeyed between the two capitals once a year, and continued to
+do so until well past fourscore years of age.&nbsp; On his last
+journey to London he could get no further than Dunbar, and when
+his nephew asked him why he gave up, &ldquo;Eh, George,&rdquo;
+said he, &ldquo;I find I am noo auchty-four.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was,
+in fact, suffering from the incurable disease of &ldquo;Anno
+Domini.&rdquo;&nbsp; He held it unmanly &ldquo;to sit in a box
+drawn by brutes.&rdquo;&nbsp; Would that we could have his shade
+for a companion on a &rsquo;bus ride from Charing Cross to the
+Bank!</p>
+<p>At that period the stage-wagons performed the journey in
+fourteen days, carrying passengers at a shilling a day.</p>
+<h2><a name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+171</span>XXV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> list of equestrians is long and
+distinguished.&nbsp; Lord Mansfield rode up from Scotland to
+London when a boy, on a pony, and took two months over the
+enterprise.&nbsp; Dr. Skene, who left town in 1753 in the same
+fashion, reached Edinburgh in nineteen days.&nbsp; His expenses,
+having sold his mare on arrival for eight guineas&mdash;exactly
+the sum he had given for her&mdash;amounted to only four
+guineas.</p>
+<p>This, indeed, was the usual plan to purchase a horse for the
+journey and to sell it on arrival; a method so canny that it must
+surely be of Scots invention.&nbsp; It had the advantage that, if
+you found a good market for your nag, it was often possible to
+make a profit on the transaction.</p>
+<p>But it behoved the purchaser to make some inquiry as to the
+previous owners, as no doubt the Scotsman, leaving London with
+one of these newly bought mounts, discovered, after some
+embarrassing experiences.&nbsp; He went gaily forth upon his way,
+and nothing befell him until Finchley Common was reached.&nbsp;
+On that lonely waste, however, he met another horseman; whereupon
+his horse began to edge up to the stranger, as though to prevent
+him from proceeding.&nbsp; The Scotsman was at a loss to
+understand this behaviour, but the other traveller, thinking him
+to be a highwayman, was for handing over his purse
+forthwith.&nbsp; This little difficulty explained away, our
+friend resumed his journey, presently meeting a coach, when the
+performance was repeated.&nbsp; This time, however, blunderbusses
+were aimed at him, and, the nervous passengers being in no mood
+to hear or understand explanations, he had a rather narrow escape
+of his life.&nbsp; At Barnet he sold this embarrassing horse for
+what he could get, and continued his journey by coach.</p>
+<p>It was in 1756 that Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness travelled to
+London from Edinburgh in her own <a name="page172"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 172</span>post-chaise, her sturdy serving-man,
+John Rattray, riding beside the vehicle on horseback, armed with
+pistols and a broadsword by his side.&nbsp; She set out from
+Edinburgh on the 3rd of June and reached London on the evening of
+the 10th&mdash;an astonishing rapid journey, it was
+thought.&nbsp; Let it not be supposed that the armed serving-man,
+or the case of pistols the good dame carried with her inside the
+vehicle, showed an excess of precaution.&nbsp; Not at all; as was
+instanced near that suspicious place, Bawtry, in whose
+neighbourhood a doubtful character whom they took to be a
+highwayman made his appearance.&nbsp; However, when John Rattray
+began talking ostentatiously about powder and ball to the
+post-boy, the supposed malefactor was nonplussed; and on John
+Rattray furthermore &ldquo;showing his whanger,&rdquo; the fellow
+made off.&nbsp; And so Cox&mdash;and Box&mdash;were
+satisfied.&nbsp; Strangest of all travellers, however, was Peter
+Woulfe, chemist, mineralogist, and eccentric, whose specific for
+illness was a journey by mail-coach.&nbsp; He indulged this whim
+for years, riding from London to Edinburgh and back, until 1803,
+when the remedy proved worse than the disease, for he caught cold
+on these bleak miles and died.</p>
+<p>John Scott, afterwards Earl of Eldon and created Lord
+Chancellor, left a record of his early travels along this
+road&mdash;surely it were better named the Road to Fortune!&nbsp;
+He left school at Newcastle in 1766 to proceed to London on the
+way to Oxford, and travelled in a &ldquo;fly,&rdquo; so called
+because it did the journey in the previously unheard-of time of
+three days and four nights.&nbsp; This &ldquo;fly&rdquo; had
+probably once been a private carriage, for it still bore the
+motto, &ldquo;<i>Sat cito</i>, <i>si sat
+bene</i>&rdquo;&mdash;that is to say, &ldquo;Quick enough, if
+well enough&rdquo;&mdash;exquisitely appropriate, however, to
+that slow pace.&nbsp; Young Scott had noticed this, and made an
+impudent remark to a fellow-traveller, a Quaker, who, when they
+halted at Tuxford, had given sixpence to a chamber-maid, telling
+her that he had forgotten to give it her when he had slept at <a
+name="page173"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 173</span>the inn two
+years before.&nbsp; &ldquo;Friend,&rdquo; said he to the Quaker,
+&ldquo;have you seen the motto on this coach?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;No,&rdquo; said his companion.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Then look at it,&rdquo; he rejoined, &ldquo;for I think
+giving her sixpence now is neither sat cito nor sat
+bene.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>It is astonishing, indeed, how many future Lord Chancellors
+came from the North.&nbsp; Lord Chancellor Campbell, who as a boy
+came up to London from Fife in 1798, was among the early arrivals
+by mail-coach.&nbsp; At that time his father was the admiration
+of his Fifeshire village, for he was the only one in the place
+who had been to London.&nbsp; Every one, accordingly, looked up
+to, and consulted, so great a traveller.&nbsp; He had seen
+Garrick, too, and was used to boast of the fact, although, it is
+to be supposed, with discretion and amid the inner circle of his
+friends, for play-actors were not yet favourites in the dour
+Scottish mind.&nbsp; Great was the excitement when young Campbell
+left home.&nbsp; The speed of the coaches had been accelerated,
+and they now began to reach London from Edinburgh in two days and
+three nights.&nbsp; Friends advised him to stay in York and
+recuperate for a day or two after a taste of this headlong speed,
+lest he&mdash;as it was rumoured had happened to
+others&mdash;should be seized with apoplexy from the rush of air
+at that rate of travelling.&nbsp; But, greatly daring, he
+disregarded their advice, and came to town direct and in
+safety.</p>
+<p>When railways were introduced, they meant much more than cheap
+and speedy travelling; they prefigured a social revolution and an
+absolute reversal of manners and customs.&nbsp; The &ldquo;great
+ones of the earth&rdquo; were really great in the old days;
+to-day no one is great in the old exclusive sense.&nbsp; Every
+one can go everywhere&mdash;and every one does.&nbsp; Dukes
+travel in omnibuses and go third-class by train because there is
+no fourth.&nbsp; If there <i>were</i>, they would go by it, and
+save the difference.</p>
+<p>The judges kept up the practice of going on circuit in their
+carriages for some little while after railways had rendered it
+unnecessary; and barristers who used <a name="page174"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 174</span>to post to the assizes were for a
+few years unwilling to be convinced that it was quite respectable
+and professional to go by train.&nbsp; The juniors were the
+readiest converts, for the difference in cost touched them
+nearly.&nbsp; The clergy soon embraced the opportunity of
+travelling cheaply, for the cloth has ever had, at the least of
+it, a due sense of the value of money.</p>
+<p>Dignified and stately prelates therefore speedily began to
+look ridiculous by contrast, and the old picture in <i>Punch</i>,
+once considered exquisitely humorous, of a bishop carrying a
+carpet-bag, has lost its point.&nbsp; Samuel Wilberforce, when
+elevated to the Bishopric of Oxford in 1845, was probably the
+first Bishop to give up his coach and four and his gorgeous
+lackeys.&nbsp; He rode, unattended, on horseback, and scandalised
+those who saw him.&nbsp; How much more scandalised would they
+have been to see bishops ride bicycles: a sight not uncommon in
+our time.</p>
+<p>In the vanished era, only those who could afford it travelled;
+in the present, only those who <i>cannot</i> afford it go
+&ldquo;first.&rdquo;&nbsp; Jack is as good as his
+master&mdash;&ldquo;and a d&mdash;d sight better,&rdquo; as the
+Radical orator said.&nbsp; Caste, happily, is breaking down, and
+their privileges are being stripped from the governing cliques
+who for centuries have battened on the public purse.&nbsp;
+Perhaps it was because they had a prophetic fore-knowledge of all
+this that the titled and other landowners so strenuously
+withstood railways at their beginning.&nbsp; They sometimes
+opposed railways so successfully that great trunk routes, planned
+to go as direct as possible between two points, were diverted and
+made circuitous.&nbsp; When the Great Northern Railway was
+projected it was proposed to follow the highway to the North as
+nearly as possible, and to go through Stamford; but the Marquis
+of Exeter opposed the Bill as far as it concerned his own
+property, and procured a deviation which sent the main line
+through Grantham, with the results that Stamford languishes while
+Grantham is made to flourish, and that the <a
+name="page175"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+175</span>short-sightedness of the then Marquis has wofully
+affected the value of his successor&rsquo;s property.&nbsp; If
+the thing were to do again, how eagerly would the Company be
+invited to take the route it was once forbidden!</p>
+<h2>XXVI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span>, none of us, who read the story
+of the roads, or who make holiday along them, would really like
+those old times back, when railways were undreamt of, and
+travelling for the pleasure of it was unknown.&nbsp; It is
+sufficient to read the old travellers&rsquo; tales, to realise
+what discouragements from leaving one&rsquo;s own fireside
+existed then.&nbsp; There was, for instance, toward the close of
+the seventeenth century, and well on into the eighteenth, an
+antiquary of repute who lived at Leeds, and journeyed very
+frequently in the Midlands, Ralph Thoresby was his name.&nbsp; He
+travelled much, and in all weathers, and knew the Great North
+Road well.&nbsp; In his day the coaches were often, through the
+combined badness of the roads and the severity of the weather,
+obliged to lay up in the winter, like ships in Arctic seas.&nbsp;
+Like his much more illustrious contemporary, Pepys, he not
+infrequently lost his way, owing to the roads at that period
+having no boundary, and once, he tells us, he missed the road
+between York and Doncaster, fervently thanking God for having
+found it again.&nbsp; Indeed, all his journeys end with more or
+less hearty thanksgivings for a safe return.&nbsp; On one
+occasion we find him missing his pistols at an inn, and darkly
+suspecting the landlord to be in league with thieves and
+murderers; but he finds them, after a nerve-shaking search, and
+proceeds, thanking the Lord for all his mercies.&nbsp; At another
+time, journeying to London, he passes, and notes the
+circumstance, &ldquo;the great common where Sir Ralph Wharton
+slew the highwayman.&rdquo;&nbsp; This was doubtless Witham
+Common, but, although he alludes to the <a
+name="page176"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 176</span>subject as
+though it were in his time a matter of great notoriety, all
+details of this encounter are now sadly to seek, and Sir Ralph
+Wharton himself lives only in Thoresby&rsquo;s diary.</p>
+<p>Thoresby was a very inaccurate person.&nbsp; He mentions
+&ldquo;Stonegate Hole, between Stamford and Grantham,&rdquo; but
+he is out of his reckoning by forty miles or so, Ogilby&rsquo;s
+map of 1697 marking the spot near Sawtry.&nbsp; Accordingly when
+we find him, going by coach, instead of by his usual method, on
+horseback, in May 1714, and noting &ldquo;we dined at Grantham:
+had the usual solemnity (this being the first time the coach
+passed in May), the coachman and horses being decked with ribbons
+and flowers, the town music and young people in couples before
+us,&rdquo; we shrewdly suspect he was referring to the
+festivities of this kind held at Sutton-on-Trent, twenty-three
+miles further north.</p>
+<p>Witham Common passed, we come to the village of Colsterworth,
+built on a rise, with fine views from it of the upland copses and
+gentle hills and dales of this hunting country, where the
+Cottesmore, the Atherstone, and the Quorn overrun one
+another&rsquo;s boundaries.&nbsp; Colsterworth is the last of the
+stone-built villages for many a mile to come, red brick reigning
+from Grantham onwards, to far beyond York.&nbsp; It is a
+narrow-streeted village, with an old church, closely elbowed by
+houses beside the road; the church where Sir Isaac Newton and his
+ancestors worshipped, and where, on the wall of the Newton
+Chapel, may yet be seen one of the sundials he carved with a
+penknife when only nine years of age.&nbsp; In a secluded nook,
+nearly two miles to the left of the highroad, lies Woolsthorpe
+Manor House, the Newtons&rsquo; ancestral home, now a small
+farmhouse, with a tablet built into the wall of the room where
+the philosopher was born.&nbsp; The famous apple-tree whose
+falling fruit suggested the Law of Gravitation has long since
+disappeared.</p>
+<p>Lincolnshire now begins to thoroughly belie its <a
+name="page178"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 178</span>reputation
+for flatness, the road descending steeply from Colsterworth and
+rising sharply from Easton Park to the park of Stoke Rochford,
+with another long sharp descent beyond, and a further rise of
+some importance into Great Ponton, another of the very small
+&ldquo;Great&rdquo; villages.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image177" href="images/p177.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Great Ponton"
+title=
+"Great Ponton"
+ src="images/p177.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Great Ponton, or Paunton Magna, as it was formerly called, was
+in early days the site of a Roman camp, and of a turnpike gate in
+latter times.&nbsp; Both have gone to a common oblivion.&nbsp; If
+the ascent to the tiny village by the highroad is steep, the
+climb upwards to it by the country lanes from the lowlands on the
+east, where the Great Northern Railway takes its easeful course,
+is positively precipitous.&nbsp; Overlooking the pleasant vale
+from its commanding eyrie stands the beautiful old church, in a
+by-way off the main road; the church itself strikingly handsome,
+but the pinnacled and battlemented tower its peculiar
+glory.&nbsp; It is distinctly of the ornate Somersetshire type,
+and a very late example of Perpendicular work.&nbsp; Having been
+built in 1519, when Gothic had reached its highest development,
+and Renaissance ideals were slowly but surely obtaining a hold in
+this country, we find in its lavish ornamentation and abundant
+panelling an attempt to combine the florid alien Renaissance
+conventions with that peculiarly insular phase of Gothic, the
+Perpendicular style.&nbsp; The result is, as it chances, happy in
+this instance, the new methods halting before that little further
+development which would have made this a debased example.&nbsp;
+The building of this tower was the work of Anthony Ellys,
+merchant of the staple, and of his wife, as a thank-offering for
+a prosperous career, and of an escape from religious persecution;
+and his motto, &ldquo;Thynke and thanke God of all,&rdquo; is
+still visible, carved on three sides.&nbsp; His house, a
+crow-stepped old mansion next the church, is still standing, and
+recalls the legend of his sending home a cask from his warehouses
+in Calais, labelled &ldquo;Calais sand.&rdquo;&nbsp; Arriving
+home, he asked his wife what she had done with the
+&ldquo;sand.&rdquo;&nbsp; <a name="page179"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 179</span>She had put it in the cellar.&nbsp;
+He then revealed the fact that it contained, not sand, but the
+greater part of his wealth.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image179" href="images/p179.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Great Ponton Church"
+title=
+"Great Ponton Church"
+ src="images/p179.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Prominent on the south-east pinnacle of this tower is a
+curious vane in the shape of a fiddle.&nbsp; The legend told of
+it says that, many years ago, there wandered amid the fenland
+villages of Lincolnshire a poor fiddler who gained a scanty
+livelihood by playing at fairs and weddings, and not infrequently
+in the parlours of the village inns on Saturday nights.&nbsp;
+After some years of this itinerant minstrelsy, he amassed a
+sufficient sum of money wherewith to pay his fare <a
+name="page180"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 180</span>as a
+steerage passenger to the United States, to which country his
+relatives had emigrated some time before.&nbsp; In course of
+time, this once almost poverty stricken fiddler became rich
+through land speculation in the backwoods; and, revisiting the
+scenes of his tuneful pilgrimages in the new character of a
+wealthy man, offered to repair this then dilapidated church, as
+some sort of recognition of the kindnesses shown him in bygone
+years.&nbsp; Only one stipulation was made by him, that a vane
+representing his old fiddle should take the place of the
+weathercock.&nbsp; This was agreed to, and, as we see, that
+quaint emblem is there to this day.</p>
+<p>Candour, however, compels the admission that this pretty
+legend has no truth in it; but the story has frequently found its
+way into print, and so is in a fair way to become a
+classic.&nbsp; The original fell in 1899 and was broken.&nbsp;
+The then rector would have replaced it with another vane of
+different character, but the old folk were attached to their
+fiddle, and so a replica was made by subscription, and fixed; and
+there it is to-day: the first fiddle, said the rector, that ever
+he heard of in the guise of a wind-instrument!</p>
+<p>Among the many curious inn-signs along the road, that of the
+&ldquo;Blue Horse,&rdquo; at Great Ponton, is surely one of the
+most singular, and is a zoological curiosity not readily
+explained.</p>
+<h2>XXVII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Grantham</span>, one hundred and ten and a
+quarter miles from London by road, and five miles less by rail,
+is three miles and a half distant from Great Ponton.&nbsp;
+Entered down the very long and steep descent of Spitalgate Hill,
+the utterly modernised character of the town becomes at once
+apparent, and all pleasurable anticipations based upon memories
+of the lettered ease of Stamford are instantly dispelled.&nbsp;
+The expectant traveller comes to Grantham hopeful of a fine old
+town with streets and buildings befitting its <a
+name="page181"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 181</span>historic
+dignity; but these hopes are soon dispelled by grimy engine-shops
+and roads gritty with coal-dust, giving earnest of an aggressive
+modernity fully unfolded when the level is reached and the town
+entered at Spitalgate and St. Peter&rsquo;s Hill.&nbsp; Grantham
+is a red-brick town, and modern red brick at that.&nbsp; A
+cruelly vulgar Town Hall, all variegated brick, iron crestings,
+and general spikiness, fondly believed to be
+&ldquo;Italian,&rdquo; testifies at once to the expansive
+prosperity of Grantham and to its artlessness.&nbsp; This
+monument of Grantham&rsquo;s pride faces the grass-plots that
+border the broad thoroughfare of St. Peter&rsquo;s Hill (which is
+flat, and not a hill at all) where stand bronze statues of Sir
+Isaac Newton, Grantham&rsquo;s great man, and of a certain
+Frederick James Tollemache, M.P. for Grantham, who departed this
+life in 1888, after having probably achieved some kind of local
+celebrity which, whatever it may have been, has not sent the
+faintest echo to the outer world.&nbsp; It is an odd effigy,
+representing the departed legislator in an Inverness cloak, and
+holding in his right hand a something which looks curiously like
+a billiard-cue, but is probably intended for some kind of
+official wand.&nbsp; The untutored might be excused for thinking
+this a monument to a champion billiard-player.</p>
+<p>Great are the Tollemaches in Lincolnshire, great
+territorially, that is to say; for the Earls of Dysart, at the
+head of the family, own many manors and broad acres; from Witham
+and Buckminster, away along the road to Foston and Long
+Bennington, and so to where the Shire Dyke divides the counties
+of Lincolnshire and Nottingham, on the marches of the Duke of
+Newcastle&rsquo;s estates.</p>
+<p>To an Earl of Dysart, Grantham owes the ugly polished granite
+obelisk in the market-place, with a lying inscription which
+purports to mark the spot where the ancient Eleanor Cross
+formerly stood, before it was utterly demolished by Puritan
+fanatics in 1645.&nbsp; That spot was really on St. Peter&rsquo;s
+Hill, at quite the other end of the town!</p>
+<p><a name="page182"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+182</span>Grantham owes its name to the river on which it stands,
+now the Witham, but once called the Granta, and its ancient
+prosperity to its position on the road to the North.&nbsp; To
+this circumstance is due also its long reputation as a town of
+many and excellent inns, from those early times when the Church
+was the earliest inn-keeper, to those others when the coaches
+were at their best and &ldquo;entertainment for man and
+beast&rdquo; a merely secular business.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;Angel&rdquo; and the &ldquo;George&rdquo; at Grantham have
+a long history.&nbsp; The &ldquo;Angel&rdquo; still survives as a
+medi&aelig;val building, and, like the equally famous
+&ldquo;George&rdquo; at Glastonbury, contrives to please alike
+the antiquary and the guest whose desire for modern creature
+comforts takes no account of Gothic architecture.&nbsp; Anciently
+a wayside house of the Knights Templar, the existing building
+belongs to the mid-fourteenth <a name="page183"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 183</span>and fifteenth centuries.&nbsp; On
+either side of its great archway now appear the carved stone
+heads of Edward the Third and the heroic Queen Philippa, and at
+the crown of the arch, serving the purpose of a supporting corbel
+to the beautiful oriel window above, is an angel, supporting a
+shield of arms; not the old sign, indeed, but an architectural
+adornment merely.&nbsp; This, and all the numerous
+&ldquo;Angels&rdquo; and the several &ldquo;Salutations&rdquo; on
+the road, derived from the religious picture-sign of the
+Annunciation, of which the saluting angel in the &ldquo;Hail
+Mary&rdquo; group in course of time alone remained.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image182" href="images/p182.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; Grantham"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; Grantham"
+ src="images/p182.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Before coaches or carriages were, kings and courtiers on their
+way north or south made the &ldquo;Angel&rdquo; their
+headquarters, coming to it, of necessity, on horseback.&nbsp;
+Thus, John held his Court here in the February of 1213, in the
+building which preceded even this old one, and Richard the Third
+signed Buckingham&rsquo;s death-warrant in 1483 in the great
+room, now divided into three, and that once extended the whole
+length of the frontage on the first floor.&nbsp; Perhaps it was
+in the bay of this oriel window that he &ldquo;off&rsquo;d with
+his head!&rdquo; in the familiar phrase mouthed by many
+generations of gory tragedians and aspiring amateurs; and
+exclaiming &ldquo;So much for Buckingham!&rdquo; turned on his
+heel, in the attitude of triumphant villainy we know so
+well.&nbsp; But, unhappily for the truth of this and similar
+striking situations, it is to be feared that Richard,
+unappreciative of the situation&mdash;the
+&ldquo;situation,&rdquo; that is to say, in the theatrical
+sense&mdash;signed the warrant in a businesslike way, and neither
+mouthed nor struck attitudes.&nbsp; He left that scene to be
+exploited by Shakespeare or Colley Cibber as authors, and by
+Charles Kean and many another as actors.&nbsp; Between them,
+<i>they</i> could have shown him how to play the part.</p>
+<p>But let us to less dramatic&mdash;and safer&mdash;times.&nbsp;
+The &ldquo;Angel&rdquo; divided the honours in coaching days with
+the &ldquo;George,&rdquo; a house with a history as long, but not
+so distinguished, as this old haunt of bloody minded
+monarchs.&nbsp; The old &ldquo;George,&rdquo; burnt down in 1780,
+was an equally beautiful house, and was <a
+name="page184"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 184</span>rebuilt in
+the prevailing Georgian taste&mdash;or want of taste&mdash;that
+raised so many comfortable but ugly inns toward the close of the
+eighteenth century.&nbsp; &ldquo;One of the best inns in
+England,&rdquo; says Dickens, in describing the journey from
+London to Yorkshire in <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, and there is not
+wanting other testimony to its old-time excellence.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;At the sign of the &lsquo;George&rsquo; you had a
+cleaner cloth, brighter plate, higher polished glass, and a
+brisker fire, with more prompt attention and civility than at
+most other places,&rdquo; says one who had occasion to know; and
+so the local proverb, current among towns and villages adjacent
+to Grantham, &ldquo;Grantham gruel; nine grots and a gallon of
+water,&rdquo; was evidently no reflection upon the quality of
+this inn.&nbsp; The &ldquo;George&rdquo; was busy with the
+coaches, early and late.&nbsp; First to arrive was the Edinburgh
+mail, at twenty-three minutes past seven in the morning.&nbsp;
+Three lengthened blasts of the horn announced its arrival, and
+out stepped night-capped passengers, half asleep and surly, but
+fresh water and good spirits dispelled the gloomy faces, and down
+went, for the allotted period of forty minutes, hot rolls, boiled
+eggs, and best Bohea; good fare after weary wayfaring, and
+calculated to make the surliest good-tempered.</p>
+<p>Francis, Lord Jeffrey, writing from his hotel (doubtless the
+&ldquo;George&rdquo;) at Grantham, when journeying to London in
+January 1831, is not so enthusiastic on old-time travel as he
+might have been, considering the high character of
+Grantham&rsquo;s inns.&nbsp; &ldquo;Here we are,&rdquo; says he,
+&ldquo;on our way to you; toiling up through snow and darkness,
+with this shattered carcase and this reluctant and
+half-desponding spirit.&nbsp; You know how I hate early rising;
+and here have I been for three days, up two hours before the sun,
+and, blinking by a dull taper, haggling at my inflamed beard
+before a little pimping inn looking-glass, and abstaining from
+suicide only from a deep sense of religion and love to my
+country.&nbsp; To-night it snows and blows, and there is good
+hope of our being blocked <a name="page185"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 185</span>up at Wytham Corner or Alconbury
+Hill, or some of these lonely retreats, for a week or so, or
+fairly stuck in the drift and obliged to wade our way to some
+such hovel as received poor Lear and his fool in some such
+season.&nbsp; Oh, dear, dear!&nbsp; But in the meantime we are
+sipping weak black tea by the side of a tolerable fire, and are
+in hopes of reaching the liberties of Westminster before dark on
+Wednesday.&rdquo;&nbsp; He was writing on Monday evening!</p>
+<p>At any rate such as he could afford to take his ease and
+partake of the best.&nbsp; Those who needed pity were the poor
+folk who had just enough for the journey, and could not afford to
+stay at expensive inns, waiting until better weather came.&nbsp;
+But, however much we may read in novels of the charm of winter
+travelling in the old coaching days, if we turn to contemporary
+accounts, by the travellers themselves, we shall always find that
+even those who could afford the best did not like it.</p>
+<p>Henry St. George Tucker, afterwards Chairman of the East India
+Company, travelled from Edinburgh to London in 1816, in the depth
+of winter.&nbsp; He wrote:&mdash;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Throughout the whole journey, as far as Newcastle, we
+had a violent storm of snow, rain and sleet; and the cold was
+more severe than I had felt it before.&nbsp; The coach was not
+wind-tight at the bottom; and as I was obliged to keep my window
+open to allow the escape of certain fumes, the produce of whisky,
+rum, and brandy, I felt the cold so pinching that I should have
+been glad of fur cap and worsted stockings.&nbsp; To aggravate
+the evil, I had not a decent companion to converse with.&nbsp; We
+picked up sundry vagabonds on the road, but there was only one,
+between Edinburgh and York, who bore the &lsquo;slightest
+appearance of being a gentleman.&rsquo;&rdquo;&nbsp; He, however,
+we learn was &ldquo;effeminate and affected.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>In Mozley&rsquo;s <i>Reminiscences</i> we find a horrid story
+of the endurance practised by a woman travelling by coach from
+Edinburgh to London.&nbsp; &ldquo;I once travelled,&rdquo; he
+says, &ldquo;to London <i>vis-&agrave;-vis</i> with a thin, pale,
+elderly <a name="page186"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+186</span>woman, ill-clad in black, who never once got down, or
+even moved to shake off the snow that settled on her lap and
+shoulders.&nbsp; I spoke to the guard about her.&nbsp; He said
+she had come from Edinburgh and had not moved since changing
+coaches, which she would have to do once; she feared that if she
+once got down she would not he able to get up again.&nbsp; She
+had taken no food of any kind.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There the picture ends, and this tragical figure is
+lost.&nbsp; Who was she who endured so much?&nbsp; Had she come
+to London to purchase with her few savings the discharge of an
+only son who had enlisted in the army?&nbsp; Had she made this
+awful journey to bid good-bye to a husband condemned to death or
+transportation?&nbsp; Surely some such story was hers, but we can
+never know it, and so the gaunt figure, pathetic in its
+endurance, haunts the memory and the baffled curiosity like an
+enigma.</p>
+<p>Grantham, it is true, has few things more interesting than its
+inns.&nbsp; This is not the confession of a <i>bon vivant</i>,
+suspicious though it sounds, but is just another way of stating
+the baldness of Grantham&rsquo;s street.&nbsp; One of these few
+things is the tall steeple of the parish church, which has a fame
+rivalling that of some cathedrals miles away.&nbsp; Journeying by
+road or rail, that lofty spire is seen, even while Grantham
+itself remains undisclosed.&nbsp; If this were a proper place for
+it much might be said of the church and spire of St.
+Wulfran&rsquo;s: how the tower rises to a height of one hundred
+and forty feet, and the slim crocketed spire to one hundred and
+forty feet more; being sixth in point of measurement among the
+famed spires of England.&nbsp; Salisbury is first, with its four
+hundred and four feet, followed by Norwich, three hundred and
+fifteen feet, Chichester, and St. Michael&rsquo;s, Coventry,
+three hundred feet, and Louth, two hundred and ninety-two
+feet.&nbsp; But generalities must serve our turn here.&nbsp; If
+the spire is only sixth in point of measurement it is first in
+date, being earlier than Salisbury&rsquo;s.&nbsp; Sir Gilbert
+Scott held it to be second only to Salisbury in beauty, but <a
+name="page187"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+187</span>Scott&rsquo;s reputation in matters of taste had slight
+foundations, and, beautiful though Grantham&rsquo;s spire is,
+there are others excelling it.&nbsp; The majesty of
+Newark&rsquo;s less lofty spire is greater than this of Grantham,
+and indeed it may be questioned whether a Decorated spire,
+comparatively so attenuated and with its purity of outline broken
+and worried by an endless array of crockets is really more
+admirable as a thing of beauty, or as a daring and successful
+exercise in the piling up of fretted stones in so apparently
+frail a fashion.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image187" href="images/p187.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Wondrous Sign&rdquo;"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Wondrous Sign&rdquo;"
+ src="images/p187.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>We cannot get away from the inns, and even the church is
+connected with them, the town being annually edified by the
+so-called &ldquo;Drunken Sermon&rdquo; preached at it in the
+terms of a bequest left in the form of an <a
+name="page188"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 188</span>annual
+rent-charge of forty shillings on the &ldquo;Angel&rdquo; by one
+Michael Solomon.</p>
+<p>But among the popular curiosities of Grantham, few things are
+more notable than the unpretending inn at Castlegate known
+variously as the &ldquo;Beehive&rdquo; or the &ldquo;Living
+Sign.&rdquo;&nbsp; Immediately in front of the house is a small
+tree with a beehive fixed in its branches, and a board calling
+attention to the fact in the lines:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Stop, traveller, this wondrous Sign
+explore,<br />
+And say, when thou hast viewed it o&rsquo;er and o&rsquo;er,<br
+/>
+&lsquo;GRANTHAM, now two rareties are thine,<br />
+A lofty Steeple and a living Sign.&rsquo;&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It may fairly be advanced that the suggestion to
+&ldquo;explore&rdquo; an inhabited beehive is an unfortunate
+choice of a word.</p>
+<p>There is (unless it has lately been abolished) another
+curiosity at Grantham.&nbsp; It is a custom.&nbsp; When the
+time-expired Mayor vacates his office, what has aptly been called
+a &ldquo;striking&rdquo; ceremony takes place.&nbsp; His robe is
+stripped off, his chain is removed from his shoulders, and with a
+small wooden hammer the Town Clerk takes the ex-Chief Magistrate
+on the head to typify the end of his authority.&nbsp; There is
+only one possible method more derogatory than this humiliating
+treatment, but it need not be specified.</p>
+<h2>XXVIII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> history, Grantham and its
+immediate neighbourhood are notable as having witnessed the rise
+of Oliver Cromwell.&nbsp; At the outbreak of hostilities in March
+1643, the town was taken and its fortifications demolished by the
+Royalists, but was retaken shortly afterwards by the
+Parliamentary troops under a hitherto undistinguished Cornet of
+Horse, after some fighting at Gonerby.&nbsp; The rise of this
+cornet is picturesquely described by De Foe.&nbsp; &ldquo;About
+this <a name="page189"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+189</span>time,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;it was that we began to
+hear of the name of Oliver Cromwell, who, like a little cloud,
+rose out of the East, and spread first into the North, until it
+shed down a flood that overwhelmed the three
+kingdoms.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was on May 22, 1643, that, with twelve
+troops, Cromwell defeated at Gonerby twenty-four troops of the
+opposing forces, and thus commenced this meteorological
+career.</p>
+<p>The ascent of Gonerby Hill, where these events took place, is
+a part of the journey to the North.&nbsp; It begins at the
+distance of a mile and a quarter beyond Grantham, shortly before
+reaching the hundred and twelfth milestone from London.&nbsp; For
+this part of the world it is a remarkable eminence, but although
+a long continuous climb, it does not come up to the impressive
+old descriptions of it, and cannot compare with such hills as
+Reigate Hill, or with Boughton Hill on the Dover Road.&nbsp; The
+village of Great Gonerby, a poor, out-at-elbows kind of a place,
+stands on the crest of the hill, with its great spired church as
+a landmark, a wide, bare street, a little inn with the curious
+sign of the &ldquo;Recruiting Sergeant,&rdquo; and an old posting
+inn, the &ldquo;Rutland Arms,&rdquo; its principal
+features.&nbsp; Passing through the cutting by which the gradient
+of the northern side of the hill has been eased, a remarkable
+view is unfolded of that flat region, fertile as a land of
+promise, the Vale of Belvoir.</p>
+<p>We shall hear presently what Sir Walter Scott has to say of
+Gonerby Hill, but in the meanwhile let us see how the view from
+it struck another traveller, the Reverend Thomas Twining, an
+amiable clergyman of Colchester, who in the eighteenth century
+was in the habit of taking holidays along the roads, mounted on
+his horse &ldquo;Poppet,&rdquo; and writing letters to his
+friends, describing what he saw.&nbsp; He was here in 1776.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You have a view,&rdquo; says he, &ldquo;somewhat
+sublime and striking from its mere extent and suddenness but it
+is flat as a pancake.&nbsp; The road is through level, moorish,
+unpleasant ground from the bottom of that hill to Newark, but, as
+road, excellent.&rdquo;&nbsp; No <a name="page190"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 190</span>guide-book ever pictured a view so
+vividly as this description, which may stand unaltered
+to-day.</p>
+<p>Gonerby Hill&mdash;&ldquo;Gunnerby&rdquo; is the correct
+pronunciation of the word&mdash;is something more to us in these
+pages than merely a hill.&nbsp; It is a place of literary
+eminence, whose terrors are enshrined in the pages of Scott and
+Ainsworth.&nbsp; Jeanie Deans, of all the romantic and historic
+characters that people this historic and romantic road the most
+prominent, is especially to be identified with this height.&nbsp;
+Historic she is because there is a substantial basis of truth in
+the character of Sir Walter Scott&rsquo;s heroine, and of Effie
+and many another figure in the <i>Heart of Midlothian</i>.&nbsp;
+They have fictitious names, but some were real persons.&nbsp;
+Helen Walker, who died in 1791 and was buried in the churchyard
+of Irongray, near Dumfries, is the prototype of Jeanie.&nbsp; She
+had in 1737 walked to London and sought a pardon for her sister,
+Isabella, condemned to death by the ferocious Scots law on a
+<i>presumption</i> of having murdered her child.&nbsp; She
+actually did (as Scott&rsquo;s heroine is described as having
+done) seek the Duke of Argyle and through his interest obtain the
+object of her journey; but Scott is responsible for the
+embroidery of this simple and affecting story; for he never saw
+Helen Walker, and she, with Scottish closeness, never described
+her adventures, being only too anxiously concerned that the story
+of her sister&rsquo;s shame should be forgotten.</p>
+<p>It is a curious and (admirable or not, as one may personally
+think it) unusual conscience that would hesitate to stretch a
+point in evidence when to do so would be to save the life of a
+loved sister; and more strange still to find so unbending a
+moralist enduring the toils and dangers of a four-hundred
+miles&rsquo; tramp with the bare possibility of preserving the
+life of the sinner in view at the end; but to understand the
+workings of the Scottish conscience is beyond the mental reach of
+any one who does not chance to be either a Scot or a
+Presbyterian.</p>
+<p>And here let it be said that the Jeanie Deans of the <a
+name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 191</span>novel is by
+no means so attractive a heroine as Scott wished to make
+her.&nbsp; There is heroism in her walk from Scotland to London,
+and we rejoice when she is fortunate enough to obtain a
+&ldquo;cast in a wagon,&rdquo; or pity her when she falls in with
+thieves and murderers at Gonerby Hill foot; but when we find her
+&ldquo;conforming to the national (that is to say, the English)
+extravagance of wearing shoes and stockings for the whole
+day,&rdquo; we can scarce subdue a snort of contempt at the very
+superior manner in which she thus yields to the popular prejudice
+in favour of this extravagance in shoe-leather.&nbsp; Nor is she
+a particularly lovable figure when she disputes theology with the
+rector of Willingham, with all the assurance of a Doctor of
+Divinity and all the narrow-minded bigotry of a Covenanter;
+coming in these things perilously near the ideal of the perfect
+prig.</p>
+<p>We must here quote the landlord of the &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s
+Head&rdquo; at Newark on Gonerby Hill.&nbsp; He spoke of it as
+though it were some beetling eminence, resembling at the very
+least a Snowdon or an Helvellyn.&nbsp; He called it a &ldquo;high
+mountain,&rdquo; and indeed Scott has in putting this phrase into
+mine host&rsquo;s mouth made him characteristic of his age.</p>
+<p>The year of Jeanie Deans&rsquo; romantic expedition was 1737,
+and then, and for long afterwards, travellers and all who had
+business with the roads magnified hills in this manner.&nbsp;
+They disliked hills, and so for that matter did most people, for
+the appreciation of scenery was not yet born.&nbsp; &ldquo;When I
+was young,&rdquo; said Wordsworth, many years later, &ldquo;there
+were no lakes nor mountains,&rdquo; and it was Thomas Gray, the
+author of the <i>Elegy</i>, who really was the first to discover
+beauty instead of terror and desolation in them.</p>
+<p>Jeanie Deans, on the other hand, was pleased to hear of
+Gonerby Hill.&nbsp; Not, mark you, that she was educated up to an
+appreciation of the picturesque.&nbsp; We know, in fact, that she
+was not, because when she and the Duke of Argyle stood looking
+down upon the lovely expanse of woods, meads, and waters seen <a
+name="page192"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 192</span>from
+Richmond Hill, all she could find to say was that
+&ldquo;It&rsquo;s braw feeding for the cows.&rdquo;&nbsp; No,
+when she learned with pleasure of the &ldquo;mountain&rdquo; she
+was to cross, it was only for association&rsquo;s sake:
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;m glad to hear there&rsquo;s a hill, for baith my
+sight and my very feet are weary o&rsquo; sic tracts o&rsquo;
+level ground&mdash;it looks a&rsquo; the way between this and
+York as if a&rsquo; the land had been trenched and levelled,
+whilk is very wearisome to my Scotch een.&nbsp; When I lost sight
+of a muckle blue hill they ca&rsquo; Ingleboro&rsquo;, I thought
+I hadna a friend left in this strange land.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;As for the matter of that, young woman,&rdquo; said
+mine host, &ldquo;an you be so fond o&rsquo; hill, I carena an
+thou couldst carry Gunnerby away with thee in thy lap, for
+it&rsquo;s a murder to post-horses.&nbsp; But here&rsquo;s to thy
+journey, and mayst thou win well through it, for thou is a bold
+and a canny lass.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Gonerby Hill was reputed the steepest bit between London and
+Edinburgh.&nbsp; It was, at the time when Scott wrote, a great
+deal steeper than nowadays, now that the road has been cut deeply
+through it, instead of climbing painfully over the crest.&nbsp;
+Then also, as he remarks, the open ground at its foot was
+unenclosed and covered with copses and swampy pools.&nbsp; Also,
+as Jeanie discovered, there was &ldquo;bad company&rdquo; where
+the &ldquo;bonny hill lifted its brow to the moon.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+But surely never did such odd company as Sir Walter has invented
+lurk in these recesses.&nbsp; The <i>Heart of Midlothian</i>,
+indeed, is a fantastic novel quite unworthy of the Wizard of the
+North, and its wildly improbable characters and marvellous
+rencounters are on a par with Harrison Ainsworth at his
+worst.&nbsp; Syston, two miles away to the right, is, they say,
+the original of the Willingham village in the novel, and
+Barkston, close by, is doubtless the &ldquo;Barkston
+town-end&rdquo; where Mother Murdockson was put in the stocks;
+but the references to them are of the haziest.</p>
+<p>It was not inadvisedly that Ainsworth was just mentioned, for
+Gonerby Hill is named in Turpin&rsquo;s Ride.&nbsp; Ainsworth
+always resorted to the gibbet when <a name="page193"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 193</span>he wanted to make a point in the
+gruesome.&nbsp; Accordingly, when Turpin mounts the rise, what
+does he find but &ldquo;two scarecrow objects covered with rags
+and rusty links of chain,&rdquo; depending from &ldquo;the
+tree.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Will this be my lot, I wonder?&rdquo;
+asks the hero with a shudder.&nbsp; We need only to be slightly
+acquainted with Ainsworth&rsquo;s methods to know that a
+melodramatic answer was immediately forthcoming.&nbsp; Springing
+from the briars and tussocks of rank grass between the foot of
+the gallows and the road, a gaunt figure exclaimed, &ldquo;Ay,
+marry will it!&rdquo;&nbsp; These &ldquo;gaunt figures&rdquo;
+never failed the novelist; but the plain man wants to know what
+they were doing on these inclement spots, and by what unfailing
+instinct they were always there at the precise moment demanded in
+the interests of fiction.</p>
+<p>The descent of Gonerby Hill accomplished, and the level
+reached, a singularly featureless and flat twelve miles leads
+into Newark, past Marston cross-roads, where a turnpike gate used
+to trouble travellers, past Foston, a forlorn village on a knoll,
+Long Bennington, a larger and still more forlorn village on the
+flat, and thence, with the graceful spire of Claypole far on the
+right, over the Shire Dyke, into Nottinghamshire, and through
+Balderton.</p>
+<h2>XXIX</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> approach to Newark is long and
+dull, by way of the suburban &ldquo;London Road&rdquo; and past
+the decaying Beaumond Cross, but this leads at length to the
+great open square of the Market-place, the most striking of all
+such centres of public resort to be found on the way to the
+North.&nbsp; Newark-&ldquo;upon-Trent&rdquo; is a misnomer, for
+neither the town nor the castle, which was once the &ldquo;new
+work&rdquo; that gave the place its name, are on that river, but
+only on a branch of it&mdash;the Devon&mdash;which falls into the
+Trent at Crankley <a name="page194"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+194</span>Point, some miles below the town.&nbsp; The &ldquo;new
+work&rdquo; was only new some eight hundred years ago, when
+Edward the Confessor&rsquo;s castle on the banks of the Devon was
+built, or when it was rebuilt or enlarged by Bishop Alexander of
+Lincoln, 1123&ndash;47.&nbsp; Bishops and other mighty
+castle-builders in those times not infrequently built their own
+prisons when piling up their grim fortresses, and so the Bishop
+of Lincoln found, when King Stephen seized him and kept him in
+durance within his own stronghold.&nbsp; A judiciously low diet
+of bread and water, and confinement in an unhealthy dungeon below
+the level of the river, soon broke the haughty Churchman&rsquo;s
+spirit, and he transferred the castle to the Crown.</p>
+<p>But Newark Castle has better claims to notice than as the
+dungeon of one of those old bloody-minded prelates.&nbsp; As the
+place where King John ended his evil life, we may well look upon
+its ruined walls with interest.&nbsp; His rebellious barons
+scattered on his approach in that year of 1216, and England
+seemed in danger of a long continuance of its troubles under the
+profligate king.&nbsp; But a surfeit of peaches brought that
+wicked life to a hasty conclusion, and here, on the banks of the
+sluggish Devon, one of the worst of English monarchs died.&nbsp;
+We need not regard peaches with apprehension because John is said
+to have died of them.&nbsp; We must consider whence they came;
+from the monks of Swineshead Abbey, where the king had stayed on
+his journey to Newark.&nbsp; Now, Holy Church had the very best
+of reasons for hating that monarch, and from hatred to murder was
+not a far cry in those days.&nbsp; So of peaches King John
+doubtless died; but of peaches subtly flavoured with poison,
+there is little doubt.</p>
+<p>The castle was again seized by the barons, in the succeeding
+reign, but they surrendered, after a week&rsquo;s siege, and by
+the gift of the king, the Bishops of Lincoln received their own
+again.&nbsp; Under Edward the Sixth it again became the property
+of the crown, and when James the First &ldquo;progressed&rdquo;
+through <a name="page196"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+196</span>England to his throne, these walls sheltered him during
+a week of festivity.</p>
+<p>A lawless and discourteous, as well as a weak-minded king, as
+we shall see.&nbsp; Crowds assembled during the festivities set
+apart by the corporation, and a fellow was caught in the act of
+pocket-picking.&nbsp; By order of the king, the unfortunate
+wretch was strung up, instanter, without the veriest semblance of
+a trial!&nbsp; There&rsquo;s your lawlessness, and here follows
+the discourtesy.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image195" href="images/p195.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Newark Castle"
+title=
+"Newark Castle"
+ src="images/p195.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>There was a certain Dame Eleanor Disney, who, to do honour to
+this strange kind of king, came, splendidly dressed, with her
+husband, Sir Henry, to one of the receptions.&nbsp; James&rsquo;s
+eye lighted upon all this finery, and his frugal mind was
+shocked.&nbsp; &ldquo;Wha,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;be that lady
+wi&rsquo; a lairdship to her bock?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>But the most stirring of Newark&rsquo;s historic days were yet
+to come.&nbsp; Newark to the last was loyal to Charles the
+First.&nbsp; Three times was the town besieged by the Parliament,
+and never taken.&nbsp; All the inhabitants armed and did
+excellent service, making sorties and capturing troops of
+Parliamentary horse; and had not the royal cause failed
+elsewhere, Newark must have emerged, triumphant, at the
+end.&nbsp; But at last all that remained were some few outlying
+garrisons throughout the country.&nbsp; Newark was especially
+commanded by the king to discontinue a hopeless resistance, and
+accordingly the town laid down its arms in 1646.&nbsp; It was
+then that the castle was ruined.</p>
+<p>It is a highly picturesque ruin to-day, and lacking nothing in
+itself of grandeur, only needs a more effective site.&nbsp; As it
+stands, only slightly elevated above the river and the
+surrounding levels, this historic castle has not the advantages
+that belong to fortresses like Ludlow and Harlech, perched on
+their rocky heights.&nbsp; But it has done its duty and still
+serves to give a note of dignity to Newark town, as one
+approaches it by the long straight levels of the road from the
+north.&nbsp; It looks much the same to-day as when Rowlandson
+made his sketch of it, with the <a name="page197"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 197</span>coach dashing over the bridge, more
+than a hundred years ago; the projecting Tudor oriel windows
+still looking forth upon the sullen tide from the more ancient
+walls, their crumbling stones scarce more decayed than
+then.&nbsp; The old wooden bridge, however, that formerly spanned
+the Devon, was pulled down and rebuilt in 1775.</p>
+<p>The great glory of Newark is its beautiful church, with that
+soaring spire which is visible for miles away, before the town
+itself is glimpsed.&nbsp; Not so tall as Grantham spire, it is as
+beautiful in its simpler style, and the church is better placed
+in the town than that of Grantham.&nbsp; Especially striking is
+the view across the great market-place, the grey Early English
+and Decorated spire, with its numerous belfry-lights, and the
+fine windows and bold arcading of the tower forming a splendidly
+effective contrast with the seventeenth and eighteenth century
+red-brick houses facing the square.&nbsp; Newark and Grantham
+spires are really the products of an old-time rivalry between the
+two towns.&nbsp; Either town is satisfied that it possesses the
+best, and so the peace is kept throughout the ages.</p>
+<p>A relic of old times is found in the custom at Newark known as
+&ldquo;Ringing for Gofer.&rdquo;&nbsp; On six successive Sunday
+evenings, beginning twelve Sundays before Christmas, the old
+parish church bells are rung for one hour, complying with the
+terms of a bequest left by a merchant named Gofer, over two
+centuries ago.&nbsp; He had on one occasion lost his way at night
+in Sherwood Forest, then infested by robbers of no very
+chivalrous instincts, who required, not &ldquo;your money or your
+life,&rdquo; but both.&nbsp; Just as he had given up hope, he
+heard these bells of Newark, and by their sound he made his way
+to safety.&nbsp; In memory of his deliverance he left a sum of
+money for this bell-ringing.</p>
+<p>The market-square has always been the centre of Newark&rsquo;s
+life.&nbsp; It is singularly like the great market-square of
+Nottingham, on a smaller scale, and, like it, is partly
+surrounded by houses with a colonnaded <a
+name="page198"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+198</span>piazza.&nbsp; An empty void now, save on the weekly
+market-day, that occasion finds its broad, cobble-stoned space
+thickly covered with stalls, while groups of farmers throng the
+pavements, and with their samples of corn displayed in the palms
+of their hands sell and buy in immense quantities.&nbsp; In the
+old times this vast empty square was peopled every day with
+arriving or departing coaches, and its pavements beset with
+passengers mounting or alighting, for the celebrated inns of
+Newark were mostly situated here, and the chief of them are here,
+even now, on the opposite side from the church, and adjoining one
+another.&nbsp; Newark is said to have once had no fewer than
+fifty inns.&nbsp; The classical Town Hall, built in 1773, on the
+west side of the square, stands on the site of two of them, and
+many others have been converted to different uses.&nbsp; Here on
+the south side are the &ldquo;Clinton Arms,&rdquo; so called in
+honour of the Duke of Newcastle&rsquo;s family, powerful in these
+parts; the &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo; with a bust of an
+alleged (but very pallid and mild-looking) Saracen on its
+frontage; and the &ldquo;White Hart,&rdquo; most ancient of all
+these existing hostelries.&nbsp; An inn of this name is spoken of
+as existing here in 1113.&nbsp; A &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s
+Head&rdquo; stood here, certainly as far back as 1341, but
+unhappily the existing house only dates from 1721.&nbsp; This
+house is the one mentioned by Sir Walter Scott, who says,
+&ldquo;The travellers who have visited Newark more lately will
+not fail to remember the remarkably civil and gentlemanly manners
+of the person who now keeps the principal inn there, and may find
+some amusement in contrasting them with those of his more rough
+predecessor.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Let us put on record the name of this remarkable person:
+William Thompson, landlord from 1784 to 1819.&nbsp; His
+&ldquo;more rough predecessor&rdquo; was perhaps the landlord who
+dispensed such open-handed and free hospitality to Jeanie Deans,
+when that somewhat priggish young woman stayed there, and on
+leaving asked for her &ldquo;lawing.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page199"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 199</span>
+<a name="image199" href="images/p199.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Market-Place, Newark"
+title=
+"Market-Place, Newark"
+ src="images/p199.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page200"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+200</span>&ldquo;Thy lawing!&rdquo; exclaimed that &ldquo;more
+rough&rdquo; person; &ldquo;Heaven help thee, wench! what
+ca&rsquo;st thou that?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;It is&mdash;I was wanting to ken what was to
+pay.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Pay?&nbsp; Lord help thee!&mdash;why, nought,
+woman&mdash;we hae drawn no liquor but a gill o&rsquo; beer, and
+the &ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head&rdquo; can spare a mouthful
+o&rsquo; meat to a stranger like thee, that cannot speak
+Christian language.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Alas! whatever your language, the more smooth innkeepers of
+Newark, in our times, do not do business on this principle.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Clinton Arms&rdquo; has seen many changes of
+name.&nbsp; It was originally the &ldquo;Talbot,&rdquo; and as
+such is mentioned in 1341.&nbsp; At a later date it became the
+&ldquo;Kingston Arms.&rdquo;&nbsp; Byron often stayed there, and
+writes from London in 1807, &ldquo;The &lsquo;Kingston
+Arms&rsquo; is my inn.&rdquo;&nbsp; It was also the inn, during
+the election contest of 1832, of Mr. Gladstone, soliciting for
+the first time the suffrages of &ldquo;free and
+independent&rdquo; electors, who duly returned him, in the Tory
+interest.&nbsp; Newark thus gave him an opportunity in Parliament
+of defending his father as a slave-owner, and of whetting his
+youthful eloquence to a keen edge in extolling the principle of
+slave-owning.&nbsp; The Newarkers were long proud of having
+returned the &ldquo;statesman&rdquo; to the House, but history
+will perhaps deny him that title.&nbsp; It has been denied, and
+the term of &ldquo;egotistical politician&rdquo; found to fit
+better.&nbsp; He set a fashion in surrender, and his country
+reaped shame while he lived; but the bitterest harvest-home of
+his methods has come, after his death, in the red vintage of
+English blood.&nbsp; It was when standing for this pocket-borough
+of the Duke of Newcastle&rsquo;s that Gladstone gave an early and
+characteristic specimen of his peculiarly Jesuitical ways of
+thought.&nbsp; He took the mail-coach on a Sunday from Newark for
+London, and beguiled the tedium of the journey and the Sabbath by
+discussing the question of Sunday travelling with a Tory
+companion.&nbsp; Not <a name="page203"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 203</span>merely did he severely condemn the
+practice, but he also gave some tracts to his
+fellow-traveller!&nbsp; He gives the facts himself: it is no
+outsider&rsquo;s satire.&nbsp; Thus, in one moment of confidence,
+he reveals not only what he is, but what he will be.&nbsp; He
+implicitly announces that he is a law unto himself and that those
+things are permitted to him which in others must be deadly
+sins.&nbsp; In the very moment of crime he can present an
+accomplice with a tract, and glow with all the fervour of one
+helped to save a lost soul.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image201" href="images/p201.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Newark Castle (After Rowlandson)"
+title=
+"Newark Castle (After Rowlandson)"
+ src="images/p201.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Ram,&rdquo; another old inn, is still standing,
+opposite the castle, on Beast Market Hill.&nbsp; George Eliot
+stayed here in September 1868, &ldquo;seeing some charming quiet
+landscapes&rdquo; along the Trent.&nbsp; Quiet, undoubtedly.</p>
+<p>Ridge, the printer and bookseller, Byron&rsquo;s first
+publisher, who issued his <i>Hours of Idleness</i>, carried on
+business in a fine old house still standing at a corner of the
+square, and the house-door and the brass knocker at which the
+new-fledged poet knocked exist to-day.</p>
+<h2>XXX</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">By</span> Beast Market Hill, past the
+castle and over the bridge, one leaves Newark for the
+north.&nbsp; Level crossings of the railways now and again
+bedevil the way, which is flat so far as the eye can
+reach&mdash;and much farther, and the meadows on either side are
+intersected by runlets and marshes, the road carried over them by
+a succession of red-brick bridges.&nbsp; At a distance of one and
+a half miles, the true Trent is crossed by a wooden bridge, and
+South Muskham reached, where the level-crossing gates take the
+place of the old turnpike.</p>
+<p>The act of looking backwards at this point is a more pleasing
+physical exercise than the mental retrospect is ever likely to
+be, anywhere.&nbsp; Sir Walter <a name="page204"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 204</span>Scott perceived the beauty of the
+view, for he introduces it in Jeanie Deans&rsquo; journey south,
+and says, in a fine passage: &ldquo;The hundred-armed Trent and
+the blackened ruins of Newark castle, demolished in the great
+Civil War, lay before her.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hundred-armed&rdquo; is a good and eloquent figure,
+although on a prosaic calculation likely to be found an
+exaggeration.&nbsp; Milton, indeed, writing a hundred and ninety
+years or so before, gives the Trent but thirty arms, on which, it
+must be allowed, Sir Walter&rsquo;s computation is a great
+advance.&nbsp; But here is Milton&rsquo;s version:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Trent, which like some earth-born giant
+spreads<br />
+His thirty arms along the indented meads.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Even Drayton, in his <i>Polyolbion</i>, does not more nearly
+approach to Sir Walter&rsquo;s computation, in the
+couplet:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;The bounteous Trent, that in herself
+enseams,<br />
+Both thirty sorts of fish and thirty sundry streams.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Shakespeare rather shirks the calculation, and contents
+himself with describing it as the &ldquo;smug and silver
+Trent.&rdquo;&nbsp; As for mere travellers, who did not happen to
+be poets or to be engaged in the exploitation of scenery, they
+regarded this stream merely with apprehension, and they did right
+so to look upon it, for Trent often overflowed its thirty or
+hundred arms, as the case might be, and converted the flats for
+miles around into the semblage of a vast lake.&nbsp; Then,
+indeed&mdash;if at no other time&mdash;Newark was
+&ldquo;upon&rdquo; Trent, if not actually &ldquo;in&rdquo; it,
+and all the many other towns and villages, which bear a similarly
+composite title, were in like case.&nbsp; Doubtless it was on one
+of these occasions in 1739, before the river was bridged here,
+that the Newcastle wagon was lost at the ford, when the driver
+and the horses all perished.&nbsp; Nearly thirty years later, on
+the 6th of June 1767, the poet Gray, writing from London, before
+starting on a <a name="page205"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+205</span>journey in these parts, says:&mdash;&ldquo;Pray that
+the Trent may not intercept us at Newark, for we have had
+infinite rain here.&rdquo;&nbsp; Nor are floods infrequent, even
+now, and many a boating-party has voyaged down the Great North
+Road between Newark and Carlton-upon-Trent.</p>
+<p>North and South Muskham lie off the road to the right, and are
+not remarkable, except perhaps for the fact that a centenarian,
+in the person of Thomas Seals of Grassthorpe, who died in 1802,
+age 106, lies in North Muskham churchyard.&nbsp; Cromwell, on the
+other hand, which now comes in sight, although now a commonplace
+roadside village of uninteresting, modern, red-brick cottages,
+with an old, but not remarkable, church, has a place in
+history.&nbsp; According to Carlyle, &ldquo;the small parish of
+Cromwell, or Crumwell (the well of Crum, whatever that may be),
+not far from the left bank of the Trent, simple worshippers still
+doing in it some kind of divine service every Sunday,&rdquo; was
+the original home of the Cromwell family, from which the great
+Protector sprang.&nbsp; &ldquo;From this,&rdquo; he adds,
+&ldquo;without any ghost to teach us, we can understand that the
+Cromwell kindred all got their name.&rdquo;&nbsp; But the
+hero-worshipper will look in vain for anything at Cromwell to
+connect the place with that family.&nbsp; Not even a tablet in
+the church; nothing, in fact, save the name itself survives.</p>
+<p>Here is a blacksmith&rsquo;s forge, with the design of a huge
+horseshoe encompasing the door, and this inscription:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;F. NAYLOR<br />
+Blacksmith</p>
+<p>Gentlemen, as you pass by,<br />
+Upon this shoe pray cast an eye.<br />
+I&rsquo;ll make it wider,<br />
+I&rsquo;ll ease the horse and please the rider.<br />
+If lame from shoeing, as they often are<br />
+You may have them eased with the greatest care.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Hence to Carlton-upon-Trent, Sutton-upon-Trent, Scarthing
+Moor, and Tuxford is an easy transition of nearly eight miles,
+with little scenery or history on <a name="page206"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 206</span>the way.&nbsp; An old posting-house,
+now retired into private life, the level-crossing of Crow Park,
+and an old roadside inn, the &ldquo;Nag&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo;
+beside it are all the objects of interest at Carlton; while
+Sutton is scarce more than a name, so far as the traveller along
+the road is concerned.</p>
+<p>Weston, a village at a bend and dip of the road, stands by
+what was once Scarthing Moor, whose famous inn, the &ldquo;Black
+Lion,&rdquo; is now, like the old-time festivities of
+Sutton-on-Trent, only a memory.&nbsp; The farmers and cottagers
+of Sutton-on-Trent long preserved the spring-time custom of
+welcoming the coaches, and freely feasting guards, coachmen, and
+passengers.&nbsp; It was an annual week&rsquo;s merrymaking, and
+young and old united to keep it up.&nbsp; Coaches were compelled
+to stop in the village street, and every one was invited to
+partake of the good things spread out upon a tray covered with a
+beautiful damask napkin on which were attractively displayed
+plum-cakes, tartlets, gingerbread, exquisite home-made bread and
+biscuits, ale, currant and gooseberry wines, cherry-brandy, and
+sometimes spirits.&nbsp; These in old-fashioned glass jugs,
+embossed with figures, had a most pleasing effect.&nbsp; As to
+the contents, they were superlative.&nbsp; Such ale! such
+currant-wine! such cherry-brandy!&nbsp; Half a dozen damsels, all
+enchanting young people, neatly clad, rather shy, but courteously
+importunate plied the passengers.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Eat and drink you must,&rdquo; says one who partook of
+these <i>al fresco</i> hospitalities.&nbsp; &ldquo;I tasted
+all.&nbsp; How could I resist the winning manners of the rustics,
+with rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes?&nbsp; My poor stomach, not
+used to such luxuries and extraordinaries at eleven o&rsquo;clock
+in the morning, was, however, in fine agitation the remainder of
+the ride, fifty miles.&nbsp; Neither time nor entreaties can
+prevent their solicitations; they are issued to reward the men
+for trifling kindnesses occasionally granted.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Scarthing Moor&rdquo; is a name of somewhat terrifying
+sound; but, as with all the &ldquo;moors&rdquo; met with on <a
+name="page207"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 207</span>the Great
+North Road, enclosure and cultivation have entirely changed its
+character, and the &ldquo;moor&rdquo; is just a stretch of fields
+undistinguishable from the surrounding country.&nbsp; It leads
+presently to the little town of Tuxford-in-the-Clay, approached
+up a steep rise passing under the bridge of the Lincolnshire and
+East Coast Railway, and in view of Tuxford&rsquo;s Great Northern
+Station, away on the right, perched on a windy and
+uncomfortable-looking ridge.&nbsp; A red rash of recent brick
+cottages has broken out at the foot of the rise, but Tuxford
+itself, on the crest of the hill, seems unchanged since coaching
+days, except that the traffic which then enlivened it has
+gone.&nbsp; It is a gaunt, lifeless place, in spite of its three
+railway stations, and stands where the roads cross on the height,
+and the church, the &ldquo;Newcastle Arms,&rdquo; another inn
+which arrogates the title of &ldquo;The Hotel,&rdquo; and the
+private houses and shops of the decayed town face a wide open
+street, and all shiver in company.&nbsp; But Tuxford has seen
+gorgeous sights in its time.&nbsp; Witness the gay and lengthy
+cavalcade that &ldquo;lay&rdquo; here in the July of 1503, when
+the Princess Margaret was on her way to her marriage with the
+king of Scotland.&nbsp; The princess stayed at the
+&ldquo;Crown,&rdquo; demolished in 1587 by one of the storms
+which hill-top Tuxford knows so well, and leaving us the poorer
+by one ancient hostelry.&nbsp; Not that it would have survived to
+this day had there been no storm, for the town itself was
+destroyed by fire at a much later date, in 1702.</p>
+<p>The &ldquo;Newcastle Arms&rdquo; is one of those old houses
+built for the reception of many and wealthy travellers in the
+Augustan age of the road, and is by consequence many sizes too
+large for present needs, so that a portion of the house is set
+apart for offices quite unconnected with hotel business.&nbsp;
+Even the roomy old church away on the other side of the broad
+road seems on too large a scale for Tuxford, as it is, and the
+stone effigies of the Longvilliers and the mouldy hatchments of
+later families hanging on the walls of its bare chapels tell a
+tale of vanished greatness.&nbsp; <a name="page208"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 208</span>There is a curious and clumsy
+carving in this church, representing the martyrdom of St.
+Lawrence.&nbsp; The Saint is shown on his gridiron (which
+resembles nothing so much as a ladder) and wears a pleased
+expression, as though he rather liked the process of being
+grilled, while one tormentor is turning him and another blowing
+up the fire with a pair of bellows.</p>
+<p>After the church, the old red-brick grammar-school, founded by
+&ldquo;Carolo Read&rdquo; in 1669, is the most interesting
+building in Tuxford.&nbsp; &ldquo;What God hath built, let no man
+destroy,&rdquo; says the inscription over the entrance, placed
+there, no doubt, by the donor with a vivid recollection of the
+destruction wrought in the Civil War of some twenty years
+before.</p>
+<p>The road leaves Tuxford steeply downhill and facing another
+hill.&nbsp; Descending this, the villages of East and West
+Markham are just visible, right and left; West Markham with a
+hideous church like a Greek temple, its green copper dome
+conspicuous for a long distance.&nbsp; At the foot of Cleveland
+Hill, as it is called, is, or was, Markham Moor, for it was
+enclosed in 1810, with the great &ldquo;Markham Moor Inn,&rdquo;
+now looking very forlorn and lonely, standing at the fall of the
+roads, where the turnpike gate used to be, and where the Worksop
+road goes off to the left, and a battered pillar of grey stone
+with a now illegible inscription stands.&nbsp; This may or may
+not be the &ldquo;Rebel Stone,&rdquo; spoken of in old county
+histories as standing by the wayside, bearing the inscription,
+&ldquo;Here lieth the Body of a Rebel, 1746.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Beyond this, again, is Gamston, a still decaying village, its
+red-brick houses ruined or empty, the wayside forge closed and
+the handsome old church on a hillock but sparsely attended; the
+whole a picture of the failure and neglect which descended upon
+the roadside villages fifty years ago.&nbsp; Many have found
+other vocations, but Gamston is not of them.</p>
+<p>For some one hundred and fifty years the Great North Road has
+gone through Tuxford to East Retford <a name="page209"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 209</span>and Barnby Moor; but this is not the
+original road.&nbsp; That has to be sought, half-deserted, away
+to the left.&nbsp; There is much romance on that old way, which
+is one of several derelict branching roads just here.&nbsp; The
+time seems to be approaching when this original road will be
+restored, to effect a relief to the heavy traffic through
+Retford.</p>
+<p>We may branch off for the exploration of the old road either
+at Markham Moor or at Gamston.&nbsp; Either turning will bring us
+in two and a half miles to Jockey House, now a farmhouse, but
+once an inn at what were cross-roads.&nbsp; Two of these roads
+are grass tracks, but the old Great North Road on to Rushy Inn
+and Barnby Moor is quite good, although very little used.</p>
+<p>A substantial stone pillar stands at the corner of the
+cross-roads opposite the Jockey House, inscribed:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align: center">From<br />
+London 142<br />
+Miles<br />
+and a half<br />
+Coach Road<br />
+Work/op Mannor<br />
+Hou/e<br />
+7 Miles 3 qrs<br />
+176 &mdash;<br />
+The Keys<br />
+in the Jockey<br />
+House.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The &ldquo;keys in the Jockey House&rdquo; means that here was
+a turnpike-gate with no turnpike keeper.&nbsp; The taking of toll
+seems to have been conducted from the inn.</p>
+<p>In the churchyard of Elkisley, a mile or so distant, there is
+a tombstone which refers to a tragedy in the Jockey House two
+hundred years ago.&nbsp; It reads:&mdash;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">&ldquo;Here lieth the body of<br />
+JOHN BARAGH,<br />
+gentleman, who was murdered by<br />
+Midford Hendry, officer of the Guards,<br />
+on the 24th day of June, 1721.<br />
+Age 29 years.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Hendry, it seems, was in command of a company of <a
+name="page210"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 210</span>Guards
+travelling south on the Great North Road.&nbsp; They had halted
+for refreshment at Jockey House, and Hendry got into a violent
+political discussion in the inn with Baragh, who was sitting
+there, a complete stranger to him.&nbsp; In the course of their
+high words, Hendry drew his sword and stabbed Baragh to the
+heart.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image210" href="images/p210.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Jockey House"
+title=
+"Jockey House"
+ src="images/p210.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2>XXXI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Retford</span>, on the main road, is over
+three miles distant from Gamston, past the more cheerful-looking
+little hamlet of Eaton, and the outlying settlement by the
+&ldquo;White House Inn,&rdquo; at the beginning of the long
+approach to the town.</p>
+<p>Retford is a town of varied industries, situated on either
+bank of the river Idle, and by it divided into East and West
+Retford.&nbsp; Engineering works, brick <a
+name="page211"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 211</span>and tile
+making, and agricultural pursuits combine to render it
+prosperous, if not progressive, for when Retford built its
+elaborate Town Hall in 1867 it probably exhausted itself with the
+effort.&nbsp; In this Square, on a plinth, stands the
+&ldquo;Bread Stone,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Broad Stone,&rdquo; a
+seventeenth century Plague Stone with a hollow at that time
+filled with vinegar and water for the immersion of coins passing
+in the market against infection.&nbsp; The town centres in its
+Market Square, in which the old Town Hall stood.&nbsp; When that
+building was pulled down a great amount of additional room was
+obtained at the cost of a certain picturesqueness, to which
+quality the town can now scarcely lay claim.&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;White Hart,&rdquo; standing at this corner of the Market
+Square, is the only relic of old coaching days.&nbsp; Its
+modernised frontage does not give the house credit for the
+respectable age which it really owns, and it is only when we
+explore the stableyard, a picturesque and narrow passage,
+extending from the Market Square to Bridgegate, that we see the
+old-time importance of the &ldquo;White Hart.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is
+perhaps unique in one respect.&nbsp; Nowadays, the old innkeepers
+are, of course, all dead.&nbsp; In some instances their families
+carried on the business for a while, but soon afterwards all
+these old coaching-houses passed into other hands.&nbsp; Even the
+Percival family, innkeepers and coach-masters for some
+generations at Wansford and at Greetham, no longer have the
+&ldquo;Haycock&rdquo; or the &ldquo;Greetham Inn,&rdquo; but the
+&ldquo;White Hart&rdquo; is still in the Dennett family, and has
+been since 1818, when William Dennett took it over.&nbsp; He
+reigned here until 1848, and was succeeded by his son, Joseph
+Dennett, who, dying in 1890, was in his turn followed by Arthur
+Dennett, the present landlord.&nbsp; An old
+coaching-house&mdash;the coaching-house of Retford&mdash;it
+occupied a particularly favourable position on the main and
+cross-country coach-routes: those of Worksop and Chesterfield on
+the one hand, and Gainsborough, Market Rasen, and Boston on the
+other.&nbsp; Besides being in receipt of the local coaching
+business <a name="page212"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+212</span>between Stamford and Doncaster, Joseph Dennett horsed a
+stage of the Doncaster and Stamford Amity Coach and the Stamford
+and Retford Auxiliary Mail, among others.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image212" href="images/p212.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"An Old Postboy: John Blagg"
+title=
+"An Old Postboy: John Blagg"
+ src="images/p212.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Although overshadowed by the neighbouring &ldquo;Bell&rdquo;
+on Barnby Moor, kept by the mighty George Clark, this house did a
+good posting business.&nbsp; For one <a name="page213"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 213</span>thing, the story of the &ldquo;White
+Hart&rdquo; as a posting-house does not go back so far as that of
+the &ldquo;Bell,&rdquo; for when Clark came to Barnby Moor he
+found a fine business already developed, but the rise of the
+&ldquo;White Hart&rdquo; into prominence dates only from the
+coming of the Dennetts.&nbsp; Twelve post-horses and three boys
+formed its ordinary posting establishment, and among them the
+name of John Blagg is prominent.&nbsp; He left the
+&ldquo;Bell&rdquo; at an early period and entered the service of
+the &ldquo;White Hart&rdquo; in 1834, remaining for forty-five
+years, and dying, at the age of seventy-five, in October
+1880.&nbsp; The old posting-books of the house still show one of
+his feats of endurance, the riding post from Retford to York and
+back in one day, a distance of a hundred and ten miles.&nbsp;
+When posting became a thing of the past, John Blagg was still in
+request, and his well-remembered figure, clad in the traditional
+postboy costume of white breeches, blue jacket, and white beaver
+hat, was seen almost to the last at weddings and other
+celebrations when riding postillion was considered
+indispensable.&nbsp; Here he is, portrayed from the life, a
+characteristic figure of a vanished era.</p>
+<p>There are still some relics of that time at the &ldquo;White
+Hart&rdquo;: the old locker belonging to the Boston coach, in
+which the guard used to secure the valuables intrusted to him;
+and in the sunny old booking-office looking out upon the Market
+Square there are even now some old posting-saddles and
+postboys&rsquo; whips.</p>
+<h2>XXXII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Leaving</span> Retford by Bridgegate, the
+road rises at once to the long five-miles&rsquo; stretch of
+Barnby Moor, home of howling winds and whirling snow-wreaths in
+winter, and equally unprotected from the fierce glare of the
+midsummer sun.&nbsp; At the further end of this trying place,
+just past a huddled group of cottages at the bend of the road,
+stands the famous old <a name="page214"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 214</span>&ldquo;Blue Bell&rdquo; inn.&nbsp;
+But no one was ever heard to talk of this old coaching hostelry
+as the &ldquo;Blue Bell.&rdquo;&nbsp; The &ldquo;Bell,&rdquo;
+Barnby Moor, was the title by which it was always known.</p>
+<p>For the beginning of the well-earned fame of the
+&ldquo;Bell&rdquo; we must go back a long way.&nbsp; Not, indeed,
+to ancient times, for there was never a medi&aelig;val hostel
+here, but to very old coaching days.&nbsp; Already, in 1776, when
+the Rev. Thomas Twining was ambling about the country on
+&ldquo;Poppet,&rdquo; making picturesque notes, it was a
+&ldquo;gentlemanlike, comfortable house,&rdquo; and Sterne knew
+it well.&nbsp; &ldquo;I am worn out,&rdquo; says he in one of his
+letters, &ldquo;but press on to Barnby Moor
+to-night.&rdquo;&nbsp; Even the &ldquo;worn-out&rdquo; would make
+an effort, you see, to reach this hospitable roof-tree.</p>
+<p>But a greater fame was earned by the &ldquo;Bell&rdquo; in its
+later days, when it was kept by George Clark, at once innkeeper,
+sportsman, and breeder of racehorses.&nbsp; He was famed for his
+anecdotal and conversational powers, and when free from gout was
+reputed &ldquo;a tough customer over the mahogany,&rdquo; in
+which testimony we may read, in the manner of that time, a
+crowning virtue.&nbsp; Something&mdash;nay, a great
+deal&mdash;more than the &ldquo;red-nosed innkeepers&rdquo; of
+whom Sir Walter Scott speaks, he was also a landed proprietor,
+and supplied his extensive establishment from his own farm.&nbsp;
+Peculiarly the man for this road, and especially for this portion
+of the road, his personality made the &ldquo;Bell&rdquo;
+inn&mdash;the word &ldquo;hotel&rdquo; was in those days an
+abomination and an offence&mdash;the especial resort of the
+sporting fraternity, and racing men generally contrived to make
+his house their halting-place.</p>
+<p>Clark reigned at the &ldquo;Bell&rdquo; for forty years, from
+1800, dying of gout in 1842, shortly after he had sold the house
+to a Mr. Inett.&nbsp; His was that famous mare, Lollypop, who
+gave birth to the yet more famous Sweetmeat.&nbsp; But Clark did
+not live to learn the quality of that foal, and Sweetmeat was
+sold at the dispersal of his stable for ten guineas.&nbsp; Three
+years later, when <a name="page215"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+215</span>he had won the Somersetshire Stakes at Bath, Lord
+George Bentinck in vain offered four thousand guineas for him,
+and later in that year, 1845, he won the Doncaster Cup.</p>
+<p>Clark was chiefly instrumental in bringing to justice two
+incendiaries, disciples of &ldquo;Captain Swing,&rdquo; who had
+fired a hayrick not far from the &ldquo;Bell.&rdquo;&nbsp; At
+that period&mdash;the early &ldquo;thirties&rdquo;&mdash;when the
+Reform agitation was embittering the relations between the
+squires and the peasantry, rick-burnings were prevalent all over
+the country.&nbsp; They went by the name of the &ldquo;Swing
+Riots,&rdquo; from the circumstance of the threatening letters
+and notices received being signed in the name of that entirely
+pseudonymous or mythical person.&nbsp; One night Clark was roused
+from his bed with the information that the rioters were at work
+close at hand.&nbsp; Hastily rising and dressing by the glare of
+his neighbour&rsquo;s burning ricks, he told off fifty from his
+numerous staff of postboys and stable helpers to mount and to
+thoroughly explore the country within a circuit of ten miles,
+offering a reward of &pound;5 to the one who would discover the
+miscreants, together with five shillings a head to all who took
+part in the chase.&nbsp; It was a successful foray; for, before
+morning dawned, two shivering &ldquo;rioters&rdquo; were brought
+to him.&nbsp; They had been found hiding in a ditch.&nbsp;
+Matches and other incriminating things were found on them, and,
+being committed to York Castle, they eventually were awarded
+fourteen years&rsquo; transportation.</p>
+<p>The old &ldquo;Bell&rdquo; is still standing.&nbsp; A hundred
+and twenty horses for the road were kept here in those old times,
+but to-day, instead of horses, we have motor-cars.</p>
+<p>Soon after railways had driven the coaches off the road, the
+&ldquo;Bell&rdquo; ceased to be an inn.&nbsp; Its circumstances
+were peculiar.&nbsp; Standing as it did, and still does, away
+from any town or village, its only trade was with coaching or
+posting travellers, and when they disappeared altogether there
+was nothing for it but to close down.&nbsp; And so for sixty
+years and <a name="page216"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+216</span>more the &ldquo;Bell&rdquo; became a private residence,
+and it would have remained so had not a road-enthusiast taken it
+and re-opened the old house in 1906 as a hotel for touring
+motorists.&nbsp; The enthusiast took other hotels on this
+road.&nbsp; Took so many indeed that his resources as a private
+person were overstrained, and he went bankrupt.&nbsp; But the
+&ldquo;Bell,&rdquo; in this, its second time, flourishes
+exceedingly.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image216" href="images/p216.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Scrooby Church"
+title=
+"Scrooby Church"
+ src="images/p216.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>From hence the bleak hamlets of Torworth and Ranskill lead to
+Scrooby, set amidst the heathy vale of the winding Idle, which
+sends its silver threads in aimless fashion amidst the
+meadows.&nbsp; Here the road leaves Nottinghamshire and enters
+Yorkshire.&nbsp; Beside the road at the little rise called
+Scrooby Top, stands a farmhouse, once the old Scrooby Inn, kept
+by Thomas Fisher as a kind of half-way house between Bawtry and
+Barnby Moor, and calculated to intercept the posting business of
+the &ldquo;Bell&rdquo; and of the Bawtry <a
+name="page218"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 218</span>inns.&nbsp;
+Competition was keen-edged on the roads in those times.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image217" href="images/p217.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Scrooby Manor House"
+title=
+"Scrooby Manor House"
+ src="images/p217.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>There seems to have once been a turnpike gate at Scrooby, for
+a murder was committed there in 1779, when John Spencer, a
+shepherd, calling up William Geadon, the turnpike man, one July
+night under the pretence of having some cattle to go through,
+knocked him down and killed him with a hedge-stake and then went
+upstairs and murdered the turnpike man&rsquo;s mother.&nbsp;
+Spencer was hanged at Nottingham, and gibbeted on the scene of
+his crime.&nbsp; The stump of the gibbet was still visible in
+1833.</p>
+<p>This is the place whence came the chief among the
+&ldquo;Pilgrim Fathers&rdquo; who at last, in 1620, succeeded in
+leaving England in the <i>Mayflower</i>, for America.&nbsp;
+Scrooby is the place of origin of that Separatist Church which
+refused allegiance to the Church of England.&nbsp; Here lived
+William Brewster, son of the bailiff of Scrooby Manor, once a
+Palace of the Archbishops of York.&nbsp; In those times the Great
+North Road wandered, as a lane, down through Scrooby village, and
+all traffic went this way.&nbsp; William Brewster the elder,
+bailiff and postmaster, was a government servant who kept relays
+of horses primarily for the use of State messengers.&nbsp; His
+salary was &ldquo;twenty pence a day&rdquo;; the equivalent of
+about &pound;300 per annum of our money.&nbsp; Although very
+definite regulations were laid down by the Board of Posts for the
+conduct of this service, they were not strictly observed, and a
+postmaster often traded for himself as well, keeping horses for
+hire and being an innkeeper as well.</p>
+<p>At any rate, the Brewsters were considerable people; and
+William the elder could afford to send his son to Peterhouse,
+Cambridge, and later had sufficient influence to secure him
+service with one of Queen Elizabeth&rsquo;s Secretaries of State
+in Holland.&nbsp; But the Secretary fell into disgrace, and young
+William&rsquo;s diplomatic career ended at an early age.</p>
+<p>He returned home to Scrooby, where he found employment with
+his father, and eventually succeeded <a name="page219"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 219</span>him, in 1594, holding the position
+of postmaster for seventeen years.</p>
+<p>Let us see, from one surviving record, what kind of business
+was his, and how prosperous he must have been apart from his
+official emoluments.&nbsp; One of his guests, as virtually an
+innkeeper, was Sir Timothy Hutton, in 1605.&nbsp; Sir Timothy
+paid him, for guide and conveyance to Tuxford, 10s., and for
+candle, supper and breakfast 7s. 6d.&nbsp; On his return journey
+he paid 8s. for horses to Doncaster, and a threepenny tip to the
+ostler.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, Brewster, nourished in that old nest of
+Archbishops, had imbibed distinctly anti-episcopal ideas,
+probably in Holland.&nbsp; His activities in founding the
+Separatist Church led to his resignation of the
+postmaster&rsquo;s office in 1607.&nbsp; In that old Manor House
+where he lived assembled others of his ways of thought: the Revd.
+Mr. Clifton, rector of Babworth, near Retford, William Bradford
+of Austerfield, John Smyth, and other shining lights and painful
+and austere persons.&nbsp; William Bradford records how the
+congregation &ldquo;met ordinarily at William Brewster&rsquo;s
+house on the Lord&rsquo;s Day; and with great love he entertained
+them when they came, making provision for them, to his great
+charge.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They would not attend services at the parish church; an
+offence then punishable by fine and imprisonment, and thus,
+persecuted, there was no ultimate course but to leave the
+country: itself not for some time permitted.&nbsp; &ldquo;They
+were,&rdquo; wrote William Bradford, &ldquo;hunted and persecuted
+on every side.&nbsp; Some were taken and clapt up in prison,
+others had their houses beset and watched, night and day, and
+hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to fly and
+leave their houses and habitations and the means of their
+livelihood.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The Manor Farm, where these early developments of the Puritan
+movement took place, and where the Brewsters lived, remains in
+part, and bears an <a name="page220"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+220</span>explanatory bronze tablet placed there by the Pilgrim
+Society of Plymouth, Massachusetts.&nbsp; And there, too, near
+the road, stands Scrooby church, rather dilapidated, with its
+stone spire, much the same as ever.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image220" href="images/p220.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Stables, Scrooby Manor House"
+title=
+"The Stables, Scrooby Manor House"
+ src="images/p220.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Yorkshire, upon which we have now entered, is the largest
+shire or county in England.&nbsp; In one way it seems almost
+incredibly large, for it has more acres than there are letters
+(not words) in the Bible.&nbsp; There are 3,882,851 acres in
+Yorkshire, and 3,566,482 letters in the Bible.&nbsp; Yorkshire
+does not reveal its full beauty to the traveller along this
+road.&nbsp; Its abbeys and waterfalls, its river-gorges and
+romantic valleys, belong rather to the by-ways.&nbsp;
+Picturesqueness and romance spelt discomfort, and the uneventful
+road was the one the travellers of old preferred.&nbsp; Thus it
+is that those <a name="page221"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+221</span>who pursue this route to the North, and know nothing
+else of Yorkshire, might deny this huge county, more than twice
+the size of Lincolnshire, the next largest, that variety and
+beauty which, in fact, we know it to possess.&nbsp; For eighty
+miles the Great North Road goes through Yorkshire with scarce a
+hill worthy the name, although towards the north the Hambleton
+Hills, away to the east, give the views from the road a sullen
+grandeur.</p>
+<p>But if the highway and the scenery bordering it are
+characterless, this is a region of strongly marked character, so
+far as its inhabitants are concerned.&nbsp; Many wits have been
+to work on the Yorkshireman&rsquo;s peculiarities.&nbsp; While
+they all agree to disregard his hospitality and his frank
+heartiness, they unite to satirise his shrewdness, and his
+clannish ways.&nbsp; The old Yorkshire toast is
+famous:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Here&rsquo;s tiv us, all on us, me
+an&rsquo; all.<br />
+May we niver want nowt, noan on us,<br />
+Nor me nawther.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And this other:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Our Native County: t&rsquo;biggest,<br />
+t&rsquo;bonniest, and t&rsquo;best.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The character of John Browdie is a very accurate exemplar of
+the Yorkshire yeoman, and you could not wish to meet a better
+fellow, but you would rather not have any dealings with the
+Yorkshireman of popular imagination, whose native wit goes beyond
+shrewdness and does not halt on the hither side of sharp
+practice.&nbsp; The Yorkshireman&rsquo;s armorial bearings are
+wickedly said to be a flea, a fly, and a flitch of bacon; because
+a flea will suck any one&rsquo;s blood, like a Yorkshireman; a
+fly will drink out of any one&rsquo;s cup, and so will a
+Yorkshireman; and a flitch of bacon is no good until it is hung,
+and no more is a Yorkshireman!&nbsp; No native of the county can
+be expected to subscribe to this, but no one ever heard of a
+Yorkshireman objecting to be called a &ldquo;tyke.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A &ldquo;Yorkshire tyke&rdquo; is a familiar phrase.&nbsp; By
+it we understand a native of this immense shire to be
+named.&nbsp; No one knows whence this nickname arose, <a
+name="page222"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 222</span>or whether
+it is complimentary or the reverse.&nbsp; To be sure, we call a
+dog a &ldquo;tyke,&rdquo; and to describe any one as a dog is not
+complimentary, unless qualifications are made.&nbsp; Thus, the
+man who is insulted by being called a dog rather takes it as a
+compliment to be dubbed a &ldquo;sad dog&rdquo; or a &ldquo;sly
+dog,&rdquo; and, like Bob Acres, lets you know, with a twinkle of
+the eye, that on occasion he can be a &ldquo;devil of a
+fellow.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>By common consent, whatever its origin may have been,
+&ldquo;tyke,&rdquo; applied to a Yorkshireman, is taken in the
+complimentary sense.&nbsp; Indeed, the Yorkshireman&rsquo;s good
+conceit of himself does not allow him to think that any other
+sense could possibly be intended.&nbsp; He generally prides
+himself, like Major Bagstock, on being &ldquo;sly, devilish
+sly.&rdquo;&nbsp; That he is so, too, those who have tried to
+overreach him, either in his native wilds or elsewhere, have
+generally discovered.&nbsp; &ldquo;He&rsquo;s a deep
+&rsquo;un,&rdquo; says a character in one of Charles
+Reade&rsquo;s novels, &ldquo;but we are Yorkshire too, as the
+saying is.&rdquo;&nbsp; When tyke meets tyke, then, if ever,
+comes the tug of war.&nbsp; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s Yorkshire,&rdquo;
+is a saying which implies much, as in the story of the ostler
+from the county who had long been in service at a London
+inn.&nbsp; &ldquo;How is it,&rdquo; asked a guest, &ldquo;that
+such a clever fellow as you, and a Yorkshireman, remains so long
+without becoming master of the house?&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Measter&rsquo;s Yorkshire too,&rdquo; answered the
+servant.</p>
+<p>It is a sporting&mdash;more especially a
+horsey&mdash;county.&nbsp; &ldquo;Shake a bridle over a
+Yorkshireman&rsquo;s grave, and he will rise and steal a
+horse,&rdquo; is a proverb which bears a sort of testimony to the
+fact.</p>
+<h2>XXXIII</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Yorkshire</span> and Yorkshiremen, their
+virtues and vices, bring us to Bawtry, where the High Sheriff and
+those in authority used to welcome kingly and queenly visitors to
+Yorkshire, or escort them over the border, <a
+name="page223"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 223</span>on leaving;
+performing the latter office with the better heart, there can be
+little doubt, for royal progresses often left a trail of blood
+and ruin behind them in those &ldquo;good&rdquo; old times.&nbsp;
+Happy Bawtry! for little or no history attaches to the little
+town, and it lives in the memory only as the home of that saddler
+who, although famous as a proverb, has come down to us a nameless
+martyr to the Temperance Cause.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving his
+ale,&rdquo; runs the Yorkshire saying; one eminently
+characteristic of this county of stingo and plurality of
+acres.&nbsp; The history of this particular saddler, or the crime
+for which he was condemned, are unknown either here or at York,
+but his end is a terrible warning to all Blue Ribbonites.&nbsp;
+It was in this wise that the artificer in pigskin lost his
+life.&nbsp; Led forth to the fatal tree, the procession halted on
+the way to present the condemned with the customary parting bowl
+of ale, an institution on the way to the gallows both in York and
+London.&nbsp; But the saddler would take none of their farewell
+courtesies, and refused the drink; whereupon the enraged mob
+strung him up, double quick.&nbsp; A few minutes later a reprieve
+arrived, and they cut him down; but he was already dead, a
+melancholy warning to all future generations of non-convivial
+souls.</p>
+<p>Coaching days made Bawtry a busy townlet, for although the
+coaches and the postmasters generally made a long stage of
+fourteen miles between Doncaster and Barnby Moor, or else a nine
+and a half mile stage between Doncaster and Scrooby Top, the
+by-roads gave a good proportion of business to the
+&ldquo;Angel&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Crown.&rdquo;&nbsp; The
+&ldquo;Crown&rdquo; is still a prominent feature of
+Bawtry&rsquo;s now empty street, a street whose width is a
+revelation of the space once considered necessary and now
+altogether superfluous; just as the long pillared range of
+stableyards beyond the old coach archway of the inn itself has
+now become.</p>
+<p>Bawtry to-day is a great emptiness.&nbsp; Four-square
+red-brick houses of a certain modishness, being indeed <a
+name="page224"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 224</span>built on
+the model of town houses, look across the void roadway, with a
+kind of patronising air, upon the peaked, timbered, or
+lath-and-plaster gabled cottages that border the opposite side of
+the street.&nbsp; Much older they are, those old cottages, and
+more akin to the country.&nbsp; They were built long centuries
+before the coaching age came, bringing a greater prosperity and
+consequent expansion to Bawtry, and for a time they were quite
+put out of countenance by the new-fangled brick houses, with
+their classic porticoes and brass knockers and impudent red
+faces.&nbsp; But a period of eighty or ninety years, at the most,
+saw the beginning and the end of this expansion, and this once
+fashionable air has altered to an aspect of old-world
+dignity.&nbsp; Both the gabled cottages and these Georgian houses
+would feel greatly degraded if confronted with examples of the
+way in which the small country builder runs up his tasteless
+structures nowadays, but happily Bawtry has nothing of this type
+to show, and the white stuccoed elevation of the
+&ldquo;Crown&rdquo; alone hints at a later phase in building
+fashion, typifying the dawn of the nineteenth century <a
+name="page225"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 225</span>and the
+course of taste in its earlier years.&nbsp; This white-painted
+frontage marks the close of Bawtry&rsquo;s busy days.&nbsp; Soon
+afterwards the place ceased to live a pulsing everyday life of
+business and activity, and began to merely exist.&nbsp; There are
+shops here&mdash;old bow-windowed, many-paned shops&mdash;which
+have long seen their best days go by.&nbsp; They came into
+existence under the influence of the beatific Law of Demand and
+Supply, when all the inns were full of travellers who wanted the
+thousand and one necessities of civilisation.&nbsp; They did a
+brave trade in those times, and continued it until the railway
+snuffed it out in 1842.&nbsp; Since then no one has come to buy,
+and their stock must contain many curiosities.&nbsp; Probably the
+stationer has still some of that goffered and perfumed pink
+notepaper on which the young ladies of sensibility wrote their
+love-letters in the long-ago, together with a goodly supply of
+the wafers with which they were sealed; and, doubtless, those who
+seek could find flint and steel and tinder-boxes elsewhere.&nbsp;
+Bawtry, in fine, is a monument to the Has Been.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image224" href="images/p224.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The &ldquo;Crown,&rdquo; Bawtry"
+title=
+"The &ldquo;Crown,&rdquo; Bawtry"
+ src="images/p224.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Austerfield, where William Bradford was born in 1580, is a
+grim and unlovely village to the left of Bawtry.&nbsp; Here yet
+stands his birthplace, in its time a manor-house, but now
+occupied as two cottage-dwellings, it is not a romantic-looking
+relic to be the place of origin of one who became the first
+Governor of the Pilgrim colony in New England.</p>
+<p>There was once a pond beside the road near Bawtry (where is it
+now, alas!) to which a history belonged, for into it used to
+drive the villainous postboys of lang syne, who were in the pay
+of the highwaymen.&nbsp; They would, as though by accident, whip
+suddenly into it, and when the occupants of the chaise let down
+the windows and looked out, to see what was the matter, they were
+confronted with the grinning muzzle of a pistol, and the dread
+alternative demand for their money or their lives.</p>
+<p>Past this dread spot, and over the rise and dip in the road on
+leaving the town, the galloping stage <a name="page226"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 226</span>is reached, a dead level by the
+palings of Rossington Park and on to Rossington Bridge, where the
+tollgate was, and now is not.&nbsp; The inn too, has, like many
+another, taken down its sign, and retired into private
+occupation.&nbsp; Off to the left is Rossington village, and in
+the churchyard, the grave, for those who like to turn aside to
+see it, of Charles Bosvile, &ldquo;King of the
+Gipsies.&rdquo;&nbsp; Here we are four miles and a half from
+Doncaster, or, as a Yorkshireman would say, four miles &ldquo;and
+a way-bit.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Ask a Yorkshireman how far it is to any place along the road,
+and he will most likely answer you, so many miles &ldquo;and a
+way-bit.&rdquo;&nbsp; This is probably his pronunciation of
+&ldquo;wee bit.&rdquo;&nbsp; It is often said that the
+&ldquo;way-bit&rdquo; is generally as long as the rest put
+together.&nbsp; This expression compares with the Scottish so
+many miles &ldquo;and a bittock.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2>XXXIV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">From</span> Rossington Bridge, a long pale
+rise, bordered by coppices of hazels and silver birches, leads
+past Cantley to Tophall, where one of the old road wagons was
+struck by lightning on the 22nd of May 1800.&nbsp; One of the
+seven horses drawing the wagon was killed, and four others were
+stunned; while the great lumbering conveyance and its load of
+woollen cloths, muslins, cottons, rabbit-down and a piano were
+almost entirely burnt.&nbsp; The disaster was a long-remembered
+event for miles round, and one of the Doncaster inns was renamed
+from it, the &ldquo;Burning Waggon.&rdquo;&nbsp; This house has
+long since been renamed the &ldquo;Ship.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Passing Tophall, and by a bridge over the railway cutting,
+Doncaster is seen, with its great church-tower, smoking
+chimney-stalks, and puffing locomotives, map-like, down below,
+three miles away.&nbsp; Two miles further, past Hawbush, or
+Lousybush, Green, on which unaristocratically named spot <a
+name="page227"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 227</span>old-time
+tramps used to congregate, Doncaster racecourse is reached, on
+the old Town Moor.</p>
+<p>Doncaster, all England over, stands for racing and the St.
+Leger, just as much as Epsom for the Derby, and racing has been
+in progress here certainly ever since 1600, and perhaps even
+before.&nbsp; The renowned St. Leger, which still draws its
+hundreds of thousands every September, was established in 1778
+and named by the Marquis of Rockingham after Lieut.-Colonel Ashby
+St. Leger.&nbsp; All Yorkshire, and a large proportion of other
+shires, flocks to witness this classic race, greatly to the
+benefit of the town, which owns the racecourse and derives the
+handsome income of some &pound;30,000 per annum from it.&nbsp;
+Doncaster, indeed, does exceedingly well out of racing, and the
+Town Council can well afford the &pound;380 annually expended in
+stakes.&nbsp; But the St. Leger week is a terrible time for quiet
+folks, for all the brazen-throated blackguards of the Three
+Kingdoms are then let loose upon the town, and not even this sum
+of &pound;30,000 in relief of the rates quite repays them for the
+infliction.</p>
+<p>Robert Ridsdale, originally &ldquo;Boots&rdquo; at a Doncaster
+inn, rose to be owner of Merton Hall, about 1830.&nbsp; He was a
+bookmaker.&nbsp; Betting is a pursuit in which only the
+bookmakers secure the fortunes.</p>
+<p>Dickens, who was here during the St. Leger week in 1857, in
+company with Wilkie Collins, and stayed at the still extant
+&ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; saw this side of horse-racing fully
+displayed.&nbsp; Looking down into the High Street from their
+window, the friends saw &ldquo;a gathering of blackguards from
+all parts of the racing earth.&nbsp; Every bad face that had ever
+caught wickedness from an innocent horse had its representation
+in the streets,&rdquo; and the next day after the great race
+every chemist&rsquo;s shop in the town was full of penitent
+bacchanalians of the night before, roaring to the busy dispensers
+to &ldquo;Give us soom sal-volatile or soom damned thing o&rsquo;
+that soort, in wather&mdash;my head&rsquo;s bad!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Night was made hideous for all who sojourned at the
+&ldquo;Angel&rdquo; by the &ldquo;groaning phantom&rdquo; that
+lay in the doorway <a name="page228"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+228</span>of one of the bedrooms and howled until the morning,
+like a lost soul; explanation by the landlord in the morning
+eliciting the fact that the fearsome sounds were caused by a
+gentleman who had lost &pound;1,500 or &pound;2,000 by backing a
+&ldquo;wrong &rsquo;un,&rdquo; and had accordingly drank himself
+into a <i>delirium tremens</i>.</p>
+<p>Sir William Maxwell of Menreith, who won the St. Leger with
+Filho da Puta, in 1815, celebrated his success by thrusting his
+walking-stick through all the pier-glasses at the
+&ldquo;Reindeer&rdquo;; expressing his regret that there were no
+more to smash, as an adequate relief to his feelings.</p>
+<p>Dean Pigou, once vicar of Doncaster, bears later testimony to
+the character of a large proportion of the race-crowds, and tells
+amusingly how the contingents of pickpockets who flock here on
+these occasions disguise themselves as clergymen, a fact well
+known to the police, and resulting in the arrest of a genuine
+cleric on one occasion.&nbsp; &ldquo;You old rascal!&rdquo; said
+the constable; &ldquo;we&rsquo;ve been looking for you for a long
+time.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Doncaster, out of the season, is a singularly quiet and
+inoffensive town, and looks as innocent as its native
+butterscotch.&nbsp; Quiet, because the locomotive and
+carriage-works of the Great Northern Railway are a little way
+outside; inoffensive, because it is unpretending.&nbsp; At the
+same time it is just as singularly devoid of interest.&nbsp;
+Almost its oldest houses are those on Hall Cross Hill, as the
+traveller passes the elm-avenue by the racecourse and enters the
+town from the direction of London; and they are scarce older than
+the days of the Prince Regent.&nbsp; Very like the older part of
+Brighton, this southern end of Doncaster is the best the town has
+to show.</p>
+<p>Hall Cross&mdash;originally called &ldquo;Hob
+Cross&rdquo;&mdash;was destroyed in the seventeenth-century
+troubles.&nbsp; It was a late Norman structure, and is copied in
+the existing Cross, set up by the Corporation, as an inscription
+informs the passer-by, in 1793.&nbsp; A weird structure it is,
+too, consisting of a stone pillar of five <a
+name="page231"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 231</span>engaged
+shafts, reflecting credit on neither the original designer nor
+the restorers.&nbsp; But there it stands, elevated above the
+modern road, as evidence of a momentary aberration in favour of
+restoring antiquity of which the Corporation were guilty, a
+century or so ago.&nbsp; Doncastrians have purged themselves so
+thoroughly of that weakness in later years that they have left no
+other vestige of old times in their streets.&nbsp; The finest
+example of an old inn belonging to the town was destroyed in the
+pulling down of the &ldquo;Old Angel&rdquo; in 1846, in order to
+clear a site for the Guildhall.&nbsp; Others are left, but, if
+old-fashioned, they are scarcely picturesque: the
+&ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; &ldquo;Ram,&rdquo; &ldquo;Elephant,&rdquo;
+&ldquo;Salutation,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Old George.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image229" href="images/p229.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse"
+title=
+"Coach passing Doncaster Racecourse"
+ src="images/p229.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>In old newspaper files we find Richard Wood, of the
+&ldquo;Reindeer&rdquo; and &ldquo;Ram&rdquo; inns, High Street,
+advertising that his coaches were the best&mdash;&ldquo;the
+horses keep good time&mdash;<i>no</i> racing&rdquo;; from which
+we conclude that there <i>had</i> been some.&nbsp; It was Richard
+Wood, then the foremost coach-proprietor in Doncaster, who first
+gave employment to that celebrated painter of horses and coaches,
+John Frederick Herring, who, although a Londoner born, lived long
+and worked much at Doncaster.&nbsp; It was in 1814, when in his
+nineteenth year, that he first came to the town, the love of
+horses bringing him all the way.&nbsp; Seeing the &ldquo;Royal
+Union&rdquo; starting at eight o&rsquo;clock in the morning with
+&ldquo;Doncaster&rdquo; displayed in large letters on its panels,
+on the inspiration of the moment he took a seat, and arrived in
+time to witness the horse &ldquo;William&rdquo; win the St.
+Leger.</p>
+<p>There is a tale of his observing a man clumsily trying to
+paint a picture of the Duke of Wellington, seated on his charger,
+for the panel of a coach to be called after that hero of a
+hundred fights.&nbsp; He had, somehow, managed to worry through
+the figure of the Duke, and to secure a recognisable likeness of
+him&mdash;because, for this purpose, all that was necessary was
+the representation of an ascetic face and a large, beak-like
+nose&mdash;but he boggled at the horse.&nbsp; Herring <a
+name="page232"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 232</span>offered to
+paint in the horse for him, and did it so well that he earned the
+thanks of the proprietor, who happened to appear on the scene and
+commissioned him to paint the insignia of the &ldquo;Royal
+Forester,&rdquo; Doncaster and Nottingham coach; a white lion on
+one door and a reindeer on the other.&nbsp; These he performed
+with equal credit, and taking a seat beside the proprietor in
+question, who, with others, mounted for a ride to
+&ldquo;prove&rdquo; the springs and christen the new coach, he at
+once offered himself as coachman.&nbsp; Mr. Wood, for it was he,
+was naturally surprised at the idea of a painter driving a coach,
+but consented to give him a trial the next day on the
+&ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; and to abide by the decision of the
+regular driver of that famous drag.&nbsp; The result was
+favourable, and Herring obtained the box-seat, not of the
+&ldquo;Royal Forester,&rdquo; but of the &ldquo;Nelson,&rdquo;
+Wakefield and Lincoln coach.&nbsp; He was, after two years,
+transferred to the Doncaster and Halifax road, and thence
+promoted to the &ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; painting in his leisure
+hours many of the signs of Doncaster&rsquo;s old inns.&nbsp; It
+was when on this road that he attracted the attention of a local
+gentleman, who obtained him a commission for a picture which laid
+the foundation of his success.</p>
+<p>Nearly all the local signs that Herring painted have
+disappeared.&nbsp; Some were taken down when he became famous,
+and added to private collections of pictures; while others were
+renewed from the effects of time and weather by being painted
+over by journeyman painters.&nbsp; Some landlords, however, knew
+the value of these signs well enough.&nbsp; There was, for
+instance, mine host of the &ldquo;Doncaster Arms,&rdquo; who,
+having come from cow-keeping to the inn-keeping business,
+determined to change the name of the house to the &ldquo;Brown
+Cow.&rdquo;&nbsp; He induced Herring to paint the new sign, which
+immediately attracted attention.&nbsp; According to one story, a
+gentleman posting north chanced to see it and stopped the postboy
+while he endeavoured to drive a bargain for the purchase.&nbsp;
+He offered twice as much as mine host had originally paid; ten
+times as much, <a name="page233"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+233</span>but without avail.&nbsp; &ldquo;Not for twenty
+times,&rdquo; said that licensed victualler; and the connoisseur
+went without it.</p>
+<p>The other version makes the traveller a very important man,
+travelling with four post-horses, and represents the landlord as
+being away, and the landlady as the obstinate holder.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I&rsquo;s rare and glad, measter, my husband&rsquo;s not
+at home,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;for p&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps
+he&rsquo;d ha&rsquo; let thee hae it; but I wain&rsquo;t; for
+what it&rsquo;s worth to thee it&rsquo;s worth to me, so gang
+on.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>A list has been preserved of the signs painted by Herring at
+Doncaster, but they will be sought in vain to-day.&nbsp; They
+were&mdash;</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Labour in Vain</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Marsh Gate.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Sloop</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Marsh Gate.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Brown Cow</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>French Gate.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Stag</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>The Holmes.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The Coach and Horses</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Scot Lane.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>The White Lion</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>St. George Gate.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>The &ldquo;Labour in Vain&rdquo; represented the fruitless
+labour of attempting to wash a black man white.</p>
+<p>The old sign of the &ldquo;Salutation,&rdquo; painted by a
+Dutchman in 1766, was touched up by Herring.&nbsp; Many years ago
+it was removed, but has now been replaced, and may be seen on the
+front of the house in Hall Cross.&nbsp; It is much weather-worn,
+and represents, in dim and uncertain fashion, two clumsy looking
+old gentlemen in the costume of a hundred and forty years ago,
+rheumatically saluting one another.&nbsp; The sign of the
+&ldquo;Stag,&rdquo; painted on plaster still remains, in a
+decaying condition.</p>
+<p>Herring continued as a coachman for several years, and only
+left the box in 1830, when he went to reside in London.&nbsp;
+From that date until his death in 1865 he devoted himself
+entirely to painting.</p>
+<p>Richard Wood, Herring&rsquo;s first employer, was
+part-proprietor of the &ldquo;Lord Nelson&rdquo; coach, among
+others.&nbsp; Especial mention must be made of this particular <a
+name="page234"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 234</span>conveyance,
+because if not the first, it must have been one of the earliest,
+of the coaches by which passengers were allowed to book through
+to or from London, and to break their journey where they
+pleased.&nbsp; To those who could not endure the long agonies of
+a winter&rsquo;s journey except in small doses, this arrangement
+must have been a great boon.&nbsp; To this coach belongs the
+story of a Frenchman, still preserved by Doncaster gossips.</p>
+<p>It was in the early part of the century that he wanted to
+travel from &ldquo;Doncastare&rdquo; to London.&nbsp; Inquiring
+at the booking-office for the best coach, the clerk mentioned the
+&ldquo;Lord Nelson.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Damn your Lord Nelson!&rdquo; says the Frenchman in a
+rage.&nbsp; &ldquo;What others are there?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The names of the others heaped greater offence upon him, for
+they were the &ldquo;Waterloo&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Duke of
+Wellington.&rdquo;&nbsp; So perhaps he posted instead, and saved
+his national susceptibilities at the expense of his pocket.</p>
+<p>Another, and a later, coach-proprietor and innkeeper at
+Doncaster was Thomas Pye, of the &ldquo;Angel.&rdquo;&nbsp; He
+lived to see railways ruin the coaching business, but he kept the
+&ldquo;Angel&rdquo; for years afterwards, and his family after
+him.&nbsp; The Queen, on her way to Scotland in 1861, slept there
+one night, and the loyal family promptly added the title of
+&ldquo;Royal&rdquo; to the old house.</p>
+<p>Coaching days were doomed at Doncaster in 1859, when the
+Midland Railway was opened and diverted the traffic; and nine
+years later, when the Great Northern Railway came, the last coach
+was withdrawn.</p>
+<p>Few think of Doncaster as a centre of spiritual
+activity.&nbsp; Racing seems to comprehend everything, and to
+make it, like a famous winner of the St. Leger a case of
+&ldquo;Eclipse first; the rest nowhere!&rdquo;&nbsp; Even
+Doncaster butterscotch is more familiar than Doncaster piety, but
+the Church is particularly active here, nevertheless.&nbsp; That
+activity only dates from the appointment of Dr. Vaughan as vicar,
+in 1859.&nbsp; Before his time religion was very dead, so that,
+when the <a name="page235"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+235</span>great parish church of St. George was burnt down in
+1853, the then vicar, Dr. Sharpe, on seeing the flames burst out,
+could at first only think of his false teeth, which he had left
+in the building, and exclaimed in horror-stricken tones,
+&ldquo;Good gracious! and I have left my set of teeth in the
+vestry.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The church was rebuilt by Sir Gilbert Scott.&nbsp; It is a
+magnificent building, but too palpably Scott, and the details of
+the carving painfully mechanical.&nbsp; Also, the stone was so
+badly selected that the crockets and enrichments were long ago
+found to be decaying, and &ldquo;restoration&rdquo; of a building
+not then fifty years old was found necessary.</p>
+<p>Dr. Vaughan was a bitter opponent of horse-racing, and so was
+not popular with the sporting element; and as Doncaster is, above
+everything, given over to sport, this meant that his nine
+years&rsquo; vicariate was a sojourn in a hostile camp.&nbsp; His
+predecessors had been more complaisant.&nbsp; Always within
+living memory the church bells had been rung on the St. Leger
+day, and generally at the moment the winning horse had passed the
+post.&nbsp; Dr. Vaughan put an end to this and quietly
+inaugurated a new era, not by raising a dispute, but by obtaining
+the keys of the belfry on the first St. Leger day of his
+incumbency, and, locking the door, going for a walk which kept
+him out of the town until the evening!</p>
+<h2>XXXV</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Leaving</span> Doncaster and its racing
+and coaching memories behind, we come out upon the open road
+again by Frenchgate, past the unprepossessing
+&ldquo;Volunteer&rdquo; inn, in whose yard Mendoza and Humphries
+brought off their prize-fight in 1790; past Marshgate and over
+the dirty Don to a parting of the ways.&nbsp; To the left goes
+the Ferrybridge, Wetherby, and Boroughbridge route to the North;
+to the right, that by way of Selby and York.&nbsp; Both fall into
+one <a name="page236"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+236</span>again at Northallerton; both claim to be the true Great
+North Road; and both were largely travelled, so that we shall
+have to pay attention to either.&nbsp; In the first instance, we
+will go via York, the mail-route in later coaching days, and as
+flat and uninteresting a road, so far as the cathedral city, as
+it is possible to imagine.&nbsp; Beginning with the suburban
+village of Bentley, with its ugly new cottages and handsome new
+church, it continues, with ruts and loose stones as its chief
+features, to Askerne, passing through lonely woods and past pools
+and lakes, with a stray grouse or so, and astonished hares and
+rabbits, as the sole witnesses of the explorer&rsquo;s progress
+in these deserted ways.&nbsp; Off to the right-hand, two miles or
+so away, goes the Great Northern Railway, one of the causes of
+this solitude, to meet the North Eastern at Shaftholme Junction,
+where, as the chairman said, many years ago, the Great Northern
+ends, ingloriously, &ldquo;in a ploughed field.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Askerne, in a situation of great natural beauty, amidst
+limestone rocks and lakes, and with the advantage of possessing
+medicinal springs, has been, like most Yorkshire villages, made
+hideous by its houses and cottages, inconceivably ugly to those
+who have not seen what abominable places Yorkshire folk are
+capable of building and living in.&nbsp; Askerne&rsquo;s fame as
+what its inhabitants call a &ldquo;spawing place&rdquo; has not
+spread of late, but its old pump-room and its lake are the
+resorts of York and Doncaster&rsquo;s trippers in summer-time,
+and those holiday-makers derive just as much health from rowing
+in pleasure-boats on the lake as did their forefathers, who, a
+hundred years ago, quaffed its evil-tasting sulphurous
+waters.</p>
+<p>Thus Askerne.&nbsp; Between it and Selby, a distance of
+thirteen miles, the road and the country around are but parts of
+a flat, watery, treeless, featureless plain, its negative
+qualities tempered by the frankly mean and ugly villages on the
+way, and criss-crossed by railways, sluggish rivers, and unlovely
+canals.&nbsp; So utterly without interest is the road, that a
+crude <a name="page237"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+237</span>girder-bridge or a gaunt and forbidding flour-mill
+remain vividly impressed upon the mental retina for lack of any
+other outstanding objects.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image237" href="images/p237.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Brayton Church"
+title=
+"Brayton Church"
+ src="images/p237.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Nearing Selby, the octagonal Perpendicular lantern and spire
+of Brayton church, curiously imposed upon a Norman tower,
+attracts attention as much by the relief they give from the
+deadly dulness just encountered as for their own sake; although
+they are beautiful and interesting, the lantern having been
+designed to hold a cresset beacon by which the travellers of the
+Middle Ages were guided at night across the perilous waste; the
+spire serving the same office by day.&nbsp; Here, too, the
+isolated hills of Brayton Burf and Hambleton Hough, three miles
+away, show prominently, less by reason of their height, which is
+inconsiderable, than on account of the surrounding levels, which
+give importance to the slightest rise.</p>
+<p>Brayton, which, apart from its beautiful church, is about as
+miserable a hole as it is possible to find in all Yorkshire (and
+that is saying a good deal), is a kind of outpost between Selby
+and these wilds, standing a mile and a half in advance of the
+town.&nbsp; <a name="page238"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+238</span>In that mile and a half the builders are busy erecting
+a flagrant suburb, so that the traveller presses on, curious to
+witness the prosperity of Selby itself, arguable from these
+signs.&nbsp; Even without them, Selby is approached with
+expectancy, for its abbey is famous, and abbeys imply picturesque
+towns.</p>
+<p>From this point of view Selby is distinctly
+disappointing.&nbsp; The glorious Abbey, now the parish church,
+is all, and more than, one expects, and the superlatively
+cobble-stoned Market-place, painful to walk in, is picturesque to
+look at; but the rest is an effect of meanness.&nbsp; Mean old
+houses of no great age; mean new ones; mean and threadbare
+waterside industries; second-hand clothes-shops, coal-grit, muddy
+waters and foreshores of the slimy Ouse, shabby rope-walks, and
+dirty alleys: these are Selby.</p>
+<p>You forget all this before that beautiful Abbey, whose
+imposing west front faces the Market-place, and whose great
+length is revealed only by degrees.&nbsp; Alike in size and
+beauty, it shows itself in a long crescendo to the admiring
+amateur of architecture, who proceeds from the combined
+loveliness of the Norman, Early English, and Perpendicular west
+front, to the entrance by the grand Transitional Norman-Early
+English north porch, thence to the solemn majesty of the purely
+Norman nave, ending with the light and graceful Decorated choir
+and Lady Chapel.&nbsp; The upper stage of the tower fell in 1690,
+and destroyed the south transept.</p>
+<p>A very destructive fire occurred in October 1906, and
+opportunity was afterwards taken of doing a good deal of general
+restoration.</p>
+<p>Before leaving the town of Selby, let us look at the
+commonplace little square called Church Hill.&nbsp; A
+spirit-level might reveal it to be an eminence of twelve inches
+or so above the common level of Selby, but to the evidence of
+eyes or feet it is in no way distinguished from its neighbouring
+streets.&nbsp; Yet it must have presented the appearance of a
+hillock when the original founder of the Abbey came here in 1068,
+voyaging up <a name="page240"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+240</span>the Ouse and landing at this first likely place on its
+then lovely banks.&nbsp; This founder was a certain Benedict, a
+monk of Auxerre, who, having one of those convenient dreams which
+came to the pious ones of that time when they wanted to steal
+something, made off with the Holy Finger of St. Germanus; rather
+appropriate spoil, by the way, for the light-fingered
+Benedict.&nbsp; Arriving in England, he met an Englishman who
+gave him a golden reliquary.&nbsp; With this, he took ship from
+Lyme Regis and sailed to the Humber and the Ouse; landing, as we
+have seen, here, and planting a cross on the river bank, where he
+erected a hut for himself under an oak-tree.&nbsp; A few days
+later, Hugh, the Norman sheriff of Yorkshire, came up the Ouse,
+by chance, and not, as might be supposed, to arrest Benedict on a
+charge of petty larceny.&nbsp; He was impressed by the devoutness
+of the holy man, and sent workmen to build the original wooden
+place of worship at Selby, on the spot now known as Church Hill,
+not a stone&rsquo;s throw from the existing Abbey.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image239" href="images/p239.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Market Place, Selby"
+title=
+"Market Place, Selby"
+ src="images/p239.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Centuries passed.&nbsp; The first building was swept away, and
+even the cemetery which afterwards occupied the site was
+forgotten and built over, becoming a square of houses, among
+which was the &ldquo;Crown&rdquo; inn.&nbsp; From 1798 until
+1876, when it was rebuilt, the old &ldquo;Crown&rdquo; kept an
+odd secret.&nbsp; To understand this, we must go back to 1798,
+when the neighbourhood of Selby acquired an ill name for highway
+robberies.&nbsp; Among other outrages, a mailbag was stolen from
+the York postboy, on the evening of February 22 in that
+year.&nbsp; The Postmaster of York reported the affair to the
+Postmaster-General in the following terms:&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Sir</span>,</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I am sorry to acquaint you that the postboy coming from
+Selby to this city was robbed of his mail, between six and seven
+o&rsquo;clock this evening.&nbsp; About three miles this side
+Selby he was accosted by a man on foot with a gun in his hand,
+who asked him if he was the postboy, and at the same time seizing
+hold of the bridle.&nbsp; Without waiting for any answer, he told
+the boy he must immediately <a name="page241"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 241</span>unstrap the mail and give it to him,
+pointing the muzzle of the gun at him whilst he did it.&nbsp;
+When he had given up the mail, the boy begged he would not hurt
+him, to which the man replied, &ldquo;He need not be
+afraid,&rdquo; and at the same time pulled the bridle from the
+horse&rsquo;s head.&nbsp; The horse immediately galloped off with
+the boy, who had never dismounted.&nbsp; He was a stout man,
+dressed in a dark jacket, and had the appearance of a
+heckler.&nbsp; The boy was too much frightened to make any other
+remark upon his person, and says he was totally unknown to
+him.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The mail contained bags for Howden and London, Howden
+and York, and Selby and York.&nbsp; I have informed the surveyors
+of the robbery, and have forwarded handbills this night, to be
+distributed in the country, and will take care to insert it in
+the first paper published here.&nbsp; Waiting your further
+instructions,&mdash;I remain, with respect, Sir,</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&ldquo;Your Obliged and Obedient
+Humble Servant,<br />
+&ldquo;<span class="smcap">Thos</span>. <span
+class="smcap">Oldfield</span>.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>A reward of two hundred pounds was offered for the discovery
+of the highwayman, but without effect, and the matter was
+forgotten in the dusty archives of the G.P.O., until it was
+brought to notice again by the singular discovery of one of the
+stolen bags in the roof of the &ldquo;Crown&rdquo; when being
+demolished in 1876.&nbsp; Stuffed in between the rafters and the
+tiles, the workmen came upon a worn and rotten coat, a
+&ldquo;sou&rsquo;wester&rdquo; hat, and a mail-bag marked
+&ldquo;Selby.&rdquo;&nbsp; Thus, nearly eighty years after the
+affair, and when every one concerned in it must long since have
+been no more, this incriminating evidence came to light.&nbsp;
+The Postmaster-General of that time claimed the bag, and it was,
+after some dispute about the ownership, handed over to him, and
+is now in the Post Office Museum.</p>
+<p>A number of skeletons were discovered in digging foundations
+for the new inn, and it was darkly conjectured that the old house
+had had its gruesome secrets, dating from the times when inns
+were not infrequently the nests of murderers; until local
+antiquaries pointing out that the name of the place was Church
+Hill, and that this was an ancient <a name="page242"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 242</span>grave-yard, the excitement
+ceased.&nbsp; This view was borne out by the fact that in many
+cases the bodies had been enclosed in rude coffins, made of
+hollowed tree-trunks; and it was rightly said that murderers
+would not have buried their victims with so much
+consideration.</p>
+<h2>XXXVI</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">To</span> leave Selby for York, one must
+needs cross the Ouse bridge, one of thee few places where tolls
+still survive.&nbsp; Foot-passengers and cyclists are on an
+equality, paying one penny each.</p>
+<p>Level-crossings again have their wicked will of the road, and
+are indeed its principal features, through Barlby and
+Riccall.&nbsp; We need some modern Rebeccaites for the abolition
+of these unpaid-for easements granted to the Railway Companies by
+an indulgent legislature, composed largely of Railway Directors,
+for the mingled danger and waste of public time caused by
+level-crossings over public roads constitute a scandal urgently
+in need of being removed.&nbsp; Yorkshire people might be
+recommended to see to it, as their forefathers saw to the
+abolition of turnpikes, collecting in armed and disguised bands
+and wrecking and burning the obnoxious gates for great
+distances.&nbsp; In May 1753 they assembled at Selby at the
+summons of the public crier&rsquo;s bell, and proceeded at
+midnight to demolish all the gates in that neighbourhood.&nbsp;
+The military were called out to quell these Hampdens.&nbsp; They
+did not succeed in saving the gates, but shot and captured a
+number of the &ldquo;rioters,&rdquo; who were sent for trial to
+York Castle.</p>
+<p>Riccall, near the confluence of the Ouse and the Derwent,
+looks an unlikely seaport in these times, now that those rivers
+and the confluent Foss, a mile or so nearer York, flow soberly in
+their channels and cease from spreading over the land.&nbsp;
+Eight hundred years ago, however, things were very
+different&mdash;as <a name="page243"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+243</span>indeed they well might be in that tremendous space of
+time.&nbsp; So different, in fact, that when the invasion of the
+North, under Tostig and Harald Hardrada, took place in 1066,
+before that greater invasion in the South by William &ldquo;the
+Conqueror,&rdquo; whose success has overshadowed these
+operations, the invaders&rsquo; fleet sailed up the Humber and
+the Ouse and blockaded the waterways by anchoring at
+Riccall.&nbsp; From this base they advanced, defeating Earl
+Morcar at the battle of Fulford, and seized York; retiring on the
+approach of English Harold to what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
+calls &ldquo;Staenfordesbryege,&rdquo; on Derwent, east of the
+city.&nbsp; In this we find the original spelling of Stamford
+Bridge, where the great battle which ended in the utter defeat of
+the invaders was fought and their leaders, Tostig and the
+gigantic Norwegian king, both slain.&nbsp; A fortnight later, and
+the Duke of Normandy had landed at Pevensey, the battle of
+Hastings had been lost and won, and the victor of Stamford Bridge
+himself lay dead.</p>
+<p>Riccall, and the country between it and York, should therefore
+be interesting, as the scene of the earlier of these
+invasions.&nbsp; Aside from the village flows the Ouse, deep in
+its channel and navigable for barges, than which the Norwegian
+ships were not much larger; but it could not in these days
+harbour a fleet, even of these primitive transports.&nbsp; The
+village itself bears nothing on its face telling of great events,
+and is of a placid dulness, a character shared by Escrick and
+Deighton, on the way to York; the road itself gradually becoming
+an abomination of desolate fields until the village of Gate
+Fulford is reached.&nbsp; The Great North Road is a businesslike
+highway.&nbsp; It goes as direct as may be to its destination,
+and gets there quite regardless of scenery or interest to right
+or left.&nbsp; Thus, although Escrick Park is reputed to be a
+demesne of great beauty, and the village of Naburn, lying hidden
+off the road, is a typical old English village actually boasting
+a maypole, all the traveller along the road perceives is an
+unromantic vista of cabbage-fields and other <a
+name="page244"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 244</span>necessary
+but uninspiring domestic vegetables, through a haze of a
+particularly beastly kind of black dust peculiar to the last few
+miles of the way into York.&nbsp; Fulford itself is no fit herald
+of a cathedral city.&nbsp; A wide street, the terminus of a
+tramway, a mile-long row of cottages, a would-be Gothic church;
+here you have it.&nbsp; Before you, by degrees, York unfolds
+itself, past the military barracks and nondescript, but always
+disappointing, streets, until, emerging from Fishergate, the
+ancient city, free from suburban excrescences, opens out, with
+the grim castle in front, and the Ouse and Skeldergate Bridge to
+the left.&nbsp; The so-called &ldquo;London Road&rdquo; lies away
+beyond the Ouse, its name referring to the Doncaster,
+Ferrybridge, Sherburn, and Tadcaster route taken by some of the
+old-time coaches.&nbsp; By that route York is most romantically
+entered, across Knavesmire, where York&rsquo;s martyrs, felons,
+and traitors were done to death in the old days, and where the
+racecourse now runs; coming to the walled city through
+Micklegate, the finest of all the medi&aelig;val defensible
+gateways which are York&rsquo;s especial glory.&nbsp; By the
+Selby route, through Gate Fulford and along Fishergate, we seem
+to slink in by the back door; through Micklegate we follow in the
+steps of those who have marched with armed hosts at their heels,
+and have entered with the unquestioned right of conquerors.&nbsp;
+Thus came the young Duke of York at the head of his victorious
+army, after the crowning victory of Towton; the first thing to
+meet his gaze his father&rsquo;s head, fixed on the topmost
+turret, and crowned in mockery with a paper crown by the fierce
+Lancastrians under whose swords he had fallen at the battle of
+Wakefield, three months before.&nbsp; Filial piety could not in
+those times rest content with removing the head from its shameful
+eminence, and so the Duke caused the Earl of Devon and three
+others among his prisoners to be immediately beheaded and their
+heads to be placed there instead.&nbsp; Of such, and still more
+sanguinary, incidents is the ancient city of York composed.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><a name="page245"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 245</span>
+<a name="image245" href="images/p245.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Micklegate Bar.  (From an old Print)"
+title=
+"Micklegate Bar.  (From an old Print)"
+ src="images/p245.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p><a name="page246"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+246</span>Micklegate, like the other &ldquo;bars&rdquo; of York,
+had its barbican, and equally with them, lost that martial
+outwork at the dawning of the nineteenth century.&nbsp; Its
+appearance then and now may with advantage be compared in the old
+print and the modern drawing, reproduced here, which also serve
+to show the difference between the road-surface of these times
+and of a century ago.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a name="image246" href="images/p246.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Micklegate Bar: present day"
+title=
+"Micklegate Bar: present day"
+ src="images/p246.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h2><a name="page247"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+247</span>INDEX</h2>
+<p>Alconbury, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span></p>
+<p>Alconbury Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page121">121</a></span></p>
+<p>Askerne, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page236">236</a></span></p>
+<p>Ayot Green, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span></p>
+<p>Austerfield, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page225">225</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Balderton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span></p>
+<p>Baldock, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span></p>
+<p>Barlby, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page242">242</a></span></p>
+<p>Barnby Moor, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page209">209</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span>&ndash;216</p>
+<p>Barnet, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page11">11</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page75">75</a></span>&ndash;79, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+<p>Barnet, Battle of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span></p>
+<p>Bawtry, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page223">223</a></span>&ndash;225</p>
+<p>Bedford, Dukes of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span></p>
+<p>Beeston Green, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span></p>
+<p>Bell Bar, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page84">84</a></span></p>
+<p>Bentley, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page236">236</a></span></p>
+<p>Biggleswade, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page107">107</a></span></p>
+<p>Bloody Oaks, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Boulter, Edmund, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page135">135</a></span></p>
+<p>Bradford, William, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page219">219</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page225">225</a></span></p>
+<p>Brampton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span></p>
+<p>Brayton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page237">237</a></span></p>
+<p>Brewster, William, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page218">218</a></span>&ndash;220</p>
+<p>Brickwall, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span></p>
+<p>Broadwater, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page93">93</a></span></p>
+<p>Brown&rsquo;s Wells, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page69">69</a></span></p>
+<p>Buckden, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page114">114</a></span>&ndash;117</p>
+<p>Burghley House, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page141">141</a></span>&ndash;145, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page149">149</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Cantley, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page226">226</a></span></p>
+<p>Carlton-upon-Trent, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Chicken Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+<p>Coaches&mdash;</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Amity,&rdquo; Doncaster and Stamford,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page212">212</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Courier,&rdquo; Leeds, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page41">41</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Edinburgh Mails&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page29">29</a></span>&ndash;33,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Edinburgh Express&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page114">114</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Edinburgh Stage&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page34">34</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Express,&rdquo; Leeds, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page41">41</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Express,&rdquo; York, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page114">114</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; London and York,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page76">76</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Highflyer,&rdquo; London, York, and
+Edinburgh, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Lord Nelson,&rdquo; London and
+Edinburgh, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page22">22</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page233">233</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page234">234</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Mail Coaches, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span>&ndash;33</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Nelson,&rdquo; Wakefield and Lincoln,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page232">232</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Post,&rdquo; London and Carlisle,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page22">22</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Royal Forester,&rdquo; Doncaster and
+Nottingham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Royal Union,&rdquo; London and
+Newcastle, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Stage Coaches, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page33">33</a></span>&ndash;49</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Stamford Regent&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page18">18</a></span>&ndash;21,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page76">76</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page107">107</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page109">109</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Stamford and Retford Auxiliary
+Mail&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Union,&rdquo; Leeds, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page41">41</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Wellington,&rdquo; London and
+Newcastle, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page15">15</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page234">234</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;York Four-Days Stage&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span></p>
+<p>Coaching Accidents, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page41">41</a></span></p>
+<p>Coaching Notabilities&mdash;</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Barclay of Ury, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page169">169</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Barker, of Welwyn, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page88">88</a></span>&ndash;90</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Barker, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page138">138</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Cartwright, of Buckden, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page114">114</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Chaplin, William, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span>&ndash;18,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page73">73</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Clark, George, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page214">214</a></span>,</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Dennetts, The, of Retford, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page211">211</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Hennesy, Tom, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page88">88</a></span>&ndash;90</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Herring, J. F., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span>&ndash;234</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Horne, B. W., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page17">17</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page66">66</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Mountain, Mrs., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page18">18</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page22">22</a></span>&ndash;25</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Nelson, Mrs., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page18">18</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Percivals, The, of Wansford and Greetham,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page138">138</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page158">158</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page211">211</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Sherman, Edward, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page14">14</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Waterhouse, William, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page16">16</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Whincup, of Stamford, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page149">149</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Wood, Richard, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page233">233</a></span></p>
+<p>Colsterworth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>Cromwell, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Cromwell, Oliver, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page188">188</a></span></p>
+<p>Cross Hall, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+<p>Crow Park, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page206">206</a></span></p>
+<p>Cycling Notabilities&mdash;</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Badlake, F. T., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Butterfield, W. J. H., <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Edge, T. A., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Edge, S. F., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Fontaine, C. C., <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Goodwin, F. R., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Hobson, T., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Holbein, M. A., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Hunt, G., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">James, J. M., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Keith-Falconer, Hon. Ian, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent"><a name="page248"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 248</span>Mills, G. P., <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page112">112</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Oxborrow, E., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Pope, H. R., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Sansom, H. H., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Shirley, R., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Shorland, F. W., <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Thorpe, J. H. Stanley, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Wheaton, C, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Wilson, H. E., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page112">112</a></span></p>
+<p>Cycling Records, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page110">110</a></span>&ndash;113</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p><i>Dead Drummer</i>, <i>The</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page120">120</a></span></p>
+<p>De Foe, Daniel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page135">135</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page188">188</a></span></p>
+<p>Deighton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span></p>
+<p>De Quincey, Thos., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page101">101</a></span></p>
+<p>Diddington, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page120">120</a></span></p>
+<p>Digswell Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span></p>
+<p>Doncaster, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page226">226</a></span>&ndash;235</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>East End, Finchley, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p>East Markham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p>Eaton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span></p>
+<p>Eaton Socon, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page110">110</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span></p>
+<p>Elkisley, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page209">209</a></span></p>
+<p>Empingham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+<p>Escrick, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Finchley, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p>Finchley Common, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page66">66</a></span>&ndash;72, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+<p>Foston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span></p>
+<p>Fulford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Gamston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p>Ganwick Corner, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span></p>
+<p>Gate Fulford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page243">243</a></span></p>
+<p>General Post Office, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span>&ndash;33, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page241">241</a></span></p>
+<p>Girtford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span></p>
+<p>Gonerby Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page189">189</a></span>&ndash;193</p>
+<p>Grantham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page180">180</a></span>&ndash;188, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page197">197</a></span></p>
+<p>Graveley, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span></p>
+<p>Great Casterton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span></p>
+<p>Great Gonerby, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page189">189</a></span></p>
+<p>Great Ponton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span>&ndash;180</p>
+<p>Greenhill Cross, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page73">73</a></span></p>
+<p>Greetham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page158">158</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Hadley Green, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span></p>
+<p>Hadley Highstone, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span></p>
+<p>Hardwick, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span></p>
+<p>Hatfield, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page84">84</a></span>&ndash;87</p>
+<p><i>Heart of Midlothian</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page189">189</a></span>&ndash;193</p>
+<p>Herring, J. F., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page231">231</a></span>&ndash;234</p>
+<p>Hicks&rsquo;s Hall, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page49">49</a></span></p>
+<p>Highgate, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page51">51</a></span>&ndash;65</p>
+<p>Highgate Archway, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page63">63</a></span>&ndash;65, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+<p>Highgate Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page57">57</a></span>&ndash;62</p>
+<p>Highway Acts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page9">9</a></span></p>
+<p>Highwaymen, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page62">62</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page69">69</a></span>&ndash;72, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page124">124</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page175">175</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Bowland, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page158">158</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Everett and Williams, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page69">69</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Sheppard, Jack, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page70">70</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Spiggott, &mdash; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page68">68</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Turpin, Dick, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page70">70</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span></p>
+<p>Holloway, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page52">52</a></span></p>
+<p>Horn Lane, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page157">157</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Inns (mentioned at length)</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; Grantham, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page182">182</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; Islington, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page49">49</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page50">50</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Angel,&rdquo; Stilton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page125">125</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Bald-faced Stag,&rdquo; Finchley,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page65">65</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Beehive,&rdquo; Grantham, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page188">188</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Bell,&rdquo; Barnby Moor, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span>&ndash;216</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Bell,&rdquo; Stilton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page125">125</a></span>&ndash;128</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Black Bull,&rdquo; Witham Common,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page158">158</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Black Lion,&rdquo; Scarthing Moor,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page206">206</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Black Swan,&rdquo; Holborn, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Black Swan,&rdquo; York, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page35">35</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Blue Bell,&rdquo; Barnby Moor, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page212">212</a></span>&ndash;216</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Blue Bull,&rdquo; Witham Common,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Blue Horse,&rdquo; Great Ponton,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page180">180</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Brampton Hut&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page117">117</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Brown Cow,&rdquo; Doncaster, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page232">232</a></span>&ndash;233</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Bull and Mouth,&rdquo; St.
+Martin&rsquo;-le-Grand, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span>&ndash;15</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Clinton Arms,&rdquo; Newark, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page198">198</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page200">200</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Crown,&rdquo; Bawtry, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page223">223</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Crown,&rdquo; Selby, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page241">241</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Crown and Woolpack,&rdquo; nr
+Stilton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Dirt House,&rdquo; Finchley, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page66">66</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Duke of York,&rdquo; Ganwick Corner,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page80">80</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Gatehouse Tavern,&rdquo; Highgate,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page59">59</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;George,&rdquo; Buckden, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page114">114</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;George,&rdquo; Grantham, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page182">182</a></span>&ndash;184</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;George,&rdquo; Stamford, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page146">146</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;George and Blue Boar,&rdquo; Holborn,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page18">18</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Green Man,&rdquo; Barnet, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page76">76</a></span>&ndash;79</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Green Man,&rdquo; Brown&rsquo;s
+Wells, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page69">69</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Green Man and Still,&rdquo; Oxford
+Street, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page18">18</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Greetham Inn&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page158">158</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page211">211</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Griffin&rdquo; Whetstone, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page72">72</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Haycock,&rdquo; Wansford, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page136">136</a></span>&ndash;140,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page211">211</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Jockey House&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page209">209</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Kate&rsquo;s Cabin, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Lord Kitchener,&rdquo; Stevenage,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page105">105</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Markham Moor&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Newcastle Arms,&rdquo; Tuxford, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page207">207</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Norman Cross&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page129">129</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent"><a name="page249"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 249</span>&ldquo;Old Castle,&rdquo; Stevenage,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page101">101</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Old Red Lion,&rdquo; Barnet, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page79">79</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Old White Lion,&rdquo; Finchley,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page66">66</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Our Mutual Friend,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page104">104</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Peacock,&rdquo; Islington, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page49">49</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Ram,&rdquo; Doncaster, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Ram,&rdquo; Newark, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page203">203</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Ram Jam,&rdquo; Stretton, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page158">158</a></span>&ndash;161</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Red Lion,&rdquo; Barnet, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page76">76</a></span>&ndash;79</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Salutation,&rdquo; Doncaster, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page231">231</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo; Snow
+Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page21">21</a></span>&ndash;25</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Saracen&rsquo;s Head,&rdquo; Newark,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page191">191</a></span>,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page198">198</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Scrooby&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page216">216</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Spread Eagle,&rdquo; Gracechurch
+Street, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page18">18</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Swan,&rdquo; Stevenage, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page96">96</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Swan-with-two-Necks,&rdquo; Gresham
+Street, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span>&ndash;17</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Volunteer,&rdquo; Doncaster, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page235">235</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Waggon and Horses,&rdquo; Stamford,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page152">152</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Wellington,&rdquo; Welwyn, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page90">90</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Wheatsheaf,&rdquo; Alconbury Hill,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page121">121</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;White Hart,&rdquo; Retford, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page211">211</a></span>&ndash;213</p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;White Hart,&rdquo; Welwyn, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page88">88</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;White Horse,&rdquo; Eaton Socon,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page110">110</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;White Swan,&rdquo; Biggleswade, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page107">107</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">&ldquo;Whittington Stone Tavern,&rdquo;
+<span class="indexpageno"><a href="#page56">56</a></span></p>
+<p>Islington, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page49">49</a></span>&ndash;51</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Jeanie Deans, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page190">190</a></span>&ndash;192, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page198">198</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page204">204</a></span></p>
+<p>Jockey House, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page209">209</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Kate&rsquo;s Cabin, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page132">132</a></span></p>
+<p>Knavesmire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page244">244</a></span></p>
+<p>Knebworth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Lambert, Daniel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page152">152</a></span></p>
+<p>Lannock Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span></p>
+<p>Lemsford Mills, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span></p>
+<p>Letchworth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page103">103</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page106">106</a></span></p>
+<p>Little Heath, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page82">82</a></span></p>
+<p>Long Bennington, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span></p>
+<p>Lord of Burleigh, Tennyson&rsquo;s, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page141">141</a></span>&ndash;145</p>
+<p>Lower Codicote, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span></p>
+<p>Lytton family, Earls Lytton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Macadam, J. L., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page12">12</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span></p>
+<p>Mace, Thos, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page6">6</a></span>&ndash;8</p>
+<p>Markham Moor, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p>Marston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span></p>
+<p>Matcham&rsquo;s Bridge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page120">120</a></span></p>
+<p>Metcalf, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span></p>
+<p>Morison, Fynes, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page97">97</a></span></p>
+<p>Morpeth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page32">32</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Newark-upon-Trent, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page193">193</a></span>&ndash;204</p>
+<p>Newton, Sir Isaac, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p><i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page22">22</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page110">110</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p>Norman Cross, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page129">129</a></span>&ndash;133</p>
+<p>North Finchley, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page66">66</a></span></p>
+<p>North Muskham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>North Road Cycling Club, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page110">110</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page113">113</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page114">114</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Old-time Travellers&mdash;</p>
+<p class="gutindent">Bacon, Francis Viscount Verulam, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page61">61</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Barclay of Ury, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page169">169</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Burke, Edmund, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page69">69</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Calderwood of Coltness, Mrs., <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page128">128</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Campbell, Lord Chancellor, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page173">173</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Cary, Sir Robert, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page166">166</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Charles I., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page149">149</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Eldon, Earl of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">George III., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page165">165</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">George IV., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page165">165</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Gladstone, W. E., <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page200">200</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">James I., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page165">165</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page194">194</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Jeffrey, Lord, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page184">184</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Jonson, Ben, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page166">166</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Lepton, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page166">166</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Londonderry, Marquis of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Mansfield, Earl of, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Minto, Earl of, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page71">71</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Misson, Henri, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page51">51</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Monboddo, Lord, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page170">170</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Pepys, Samuel, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page73">73</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page79">79</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page105">105</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page117">117</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Perlin, Estienne, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page146">146</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Powell, Foster, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page167">167</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Skene, Dr., <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Sterne, Rev. Laurence, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page214">214</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Thoresby, Ralph, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page124">124</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page175">175</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Thornhill, Cooper, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page126">126</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page167">167</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Tucker, Henry St. George, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Twining, Rev. Thomas, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page146">146</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page189">189</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page214">214</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Wharton, Sir Ralph, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page175">175</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Woulfe, Peter, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page172">172</a></span></p>
+<p>Old-time Travelling, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page3">3</a></span>&ndash;8, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page11">11</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page36">36</a></span>&ndash;47, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page96">96</a></span>&ndash;101,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page164">164</a></span>&ndash;175, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page184">184</a></span>&ndash;186,
+<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page204">204</a></span>&ndash;206, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page214">214</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Palmer, John, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page30">30</a></span></p>
+<p>Pedestrian Records, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page166">166</a></span>&ndash;169</p>
+<p>Pilgrim Fathers, The, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page218">218</a></span>&ndash;220, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page225">225</a></span></p>
+<p>Posting, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page98">98</a></span>&ndash;101</p>
+<p>Potter&rsquo;s Bar, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page80">80</a></span>&ndash;82</p>
+<p>Powell, Foster, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page167">167</a></span></p>
+<p>Prickler&rsquo;s Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page74">74</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Railways&mdash;<span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page37">37</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page46">46</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page75">75</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page82">82</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page93">93</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page125">125</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page174">174</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page228">228</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page234">234</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page236">236</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent"><a name="page250"></a><span
+class="pagenum">p. 250</span>Great Northern, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page174">174</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page228">228</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page236">236</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">London and Birmingham&nbsp; (now London and
+North-Western) <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page75">75</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">Midland, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page234">234</a></span></p>
+<p class="gutindent">North Eastern, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page236">236</a></span></p>
+<p>Ranskill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page216">216</a></span></p>
+<p>Retford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page210">210</a></span>&ndash;213</p>
+<p>Riccall, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page242">242</a></span></p>
+<p>Roman Roads, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>&ndash;4</p>
+<p>Rossington Bridge, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page226">226</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>St. Martin&rsquo;-le-Grand, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page14">14</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page25">25</a></span>&ndash;27</p>
+<p>Sandy, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page108">108</a></span></p>
+<p>Sawtry St. Andrews, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>Sawtry Abbey, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span></p>
+<p>Scarthing Moor, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span>&ndash;207</p>
+<p>Scott, Sir Walter, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page51">51</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page162">162</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page164">164</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page190">190</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page192">192</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page198">198</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page204">204</a></span></p>
+<p>Scrooby, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page216">216</a></span>&ndash;220</p>
+<p>Selby, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page238">238</a></span>&ndash;242</p>
+<p>Shaftholme Junction, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page236">236</a></span></p>
+<p>Sibson, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Six Hills,&rdquo; The, Stevenage, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page94">94</a></span>&ndash;96</p>
+<p>South Muskham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page203">203</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+<p>Stamford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page145">145</a></span>&ndash;153</p>
+<p>Stanborough, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page87">87</a></span></p>
+<p>Stangate Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span></p>
+<p>Statute Labour, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page9">9</a></span></p>
+<p>Stevenage, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span> <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page93">93</a></span>&ndash;96, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page101">101</a></span>&ndash;105</p>
+<p>Stibbington, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page136">136</a></span></p>
+<p>Stilton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page9">9</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page124">124</a></span>&ndash;128</p>
+<p>Stoke Rochford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page178">178</a></span></p>
+<p>Stonegate Hole, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>Stretton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span></p>
+<p>Sutton-upon-Trent, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>&ldquo;Tally-ho Corner&rdquo; <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page66">66</a></span></p>
+<p>Telford, James, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page31">31</a></span></p>
+<p>Tempsford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span></p>
+<p>Thornhaugh, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page140">140</a></span></p>
+<p>Tickencote, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page154">154</a></span></p>
+<p>&ldquo;Tingey&rsquo;s Corner,&rdquo; <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page108">108</a></span></p>
+<p>Tophall, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page226">226</a></span></p>
+<p>Toplar&rsquo;s Hill, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page107">107</a></span></p>
+<p>Torworth, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page216">216</a></span></p>
+<p>Trent, River, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page203">203</a></span>&ndash;205</p>
+<p>Turnpike Acts, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page9">9</a></span></p>
+<p>Turnpike Gates, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page10">10</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page58">58</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page59">59</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page73">73</a></span>&ndash;75, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page82">82</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page87">87</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page105">105</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page209">209</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page218">218</a></span>, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page242">242</a></span></p>
+<p>Turpin&rsquo;s Oak, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page70">70</a></span></p>
+<p>Tuxford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page205">205</a></span>&ndash;208</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p>Wansford, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page134">134</a></span></p>
+<p>Water Newton, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page133">133</a></span>&ndash;140</p>
+<p>Welwyn, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page2">2</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page88">88</a></span>&ndash;91, <span
+class="indexpageno"><a href="#page116">116</a></span></p>
+<p>West Markham, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page208">208</a></span></p>
+<p>Weston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page206">206</a></span></p>
+<p>Whetstone, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page72">72</a></span></p>
+<p>Whittington, Sir Richard, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page53">53</a></span>&ndash;56</p>
+<p>Witham Common, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page158">158</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page161">161</a></span>, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page175">175</a></span></p>
+<p>Woolmer Green, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page93">93</a></span></p>
+<p>Woolsthorpe Manor-House, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page176">176</a></span></p>
+<p>Wyboston, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page109">109</a></span></p>
+<p>Yaxley Barracks, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page129">129</a></span>&ndash;132</p>
+<p>York, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page244">244</a></span>&ndash;246</p>
+<p>Yorkshire, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page220">220</a></span>&ndash;223</p>
+<p>Young, Revd. Edward, <span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page90">90</a></span></p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES.</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote40"></a><a href="#citation40"
+class="footnote">[40]</a>&nbsp; These are pre-war (1914&ndash;18)
+prices.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote117"></a><a href="#citation117"
+class="footnote">[117]</a>&nbsp; He was baptised in the church of
+St. Bride, Fleet Street, according to a discovery more recently
+made; and he would thus appear really to have been a
+Londoner.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote165"></a><a href="#citation165"
+class="footnote">[165]</a>&nbsp; Tokens in imitation of the old
+guineas, which bore on their reverse the George and Dragon device
+now used on our modern sovereigns.&nbsp; The token represented
+the king on horseback (the Hanoverian White Horse), with the
+legend &ldquo;To Hanover.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT NORTH ROAD: LONDON TO
+YORK***</p>
+<pre>
+
+
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diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
+Procedures for determining public domain status are described in
+the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org.
+
+No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in
+jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize
+this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright
+status under the laws that apply to them.
diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #46716 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46716)