“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.
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.’”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
House, formerly the “Black Bull,” Witham Common
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.