YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

3 9002 06756 9930

D

fcr the founding cf a College in this Colony"

Bought with the income
of the
Henry W. Scott, Jr. Fund
I lib

THE EXETER ROAD

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE BRIGHTON ROAD : Old Times and New on a
Classic Highway.
THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD, and its Tributaries,
To-day and in Days of Old.
THE DOVER ROAD: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.
THE BATH ROAD : History, Fashion, and Frivolity
on an Old Highway.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD:
Vol. I. London to York. \In the Press.
II. York to Edinburgh.

THE LIONESS ATTACKINO THE EXETEll MAIL, 'WINTERSLOW HUT ' (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).

THE

EXETER ROAD
THE STORY OF
THE WEST OF ENGLAND HIGHWAY

By CHARLES G. HARPER
Author of 'The Brighton Road,' 'The Portsmouth Road,'
' The Dover Road,' and ' The Bath Road '

Illustrated by the Author, and from Old-Time
Prints and Pictures

London : CHAPMAN & HALL, Limited

1899

All rights reserved

rHIS, the fifth volume in a series of works
purporting to tell the Story of the Great
Roads, requires but few forewords; but occasion
may be taken to say that perhaps greater care has
been exercised- than in preceding volumes to collect
and put on record those anecdotes and floating
traditions ofthe country, which, the gossip of yester
day, will be the history of to-morrow. These are
precisely the things that are neglected by the County
Historians at one end of the scale of writers, and
the compilers of guide-books at the other ; and it is
just because this gossip and these local anecdotes
are generally passed by and often lost that those
which are gathered now ivill become more valuable
as time goes on.
For the inclusion of these hitherto unconsidered
trifles much archceology and much purely guide-

viii THE EXETER ROAD
book description have been suppressed ; nor for this
would it seem necessary to appear apologetic, even
although local 'patriotism is a militant force, and
resents anything less than a detailed and favour
able description of every village, interesting or not.
How militant parochial patriots may be the
writer already knows. You may criticise the British
Empire and prophesy its' downfall if you feel that
way inclined, and welcome ; but it is the Unpardon
able Sin to say that Little Pedlington is anything
less than the cleanest, the neatest, and the busiest
for its size of all the Sweet Auburns in the land !
Has not the writer been promised a bad quarter of
an hour by the local press, should he revisit Cray-
ford, after writing of that uncleanly place in the
Dover Road ? and have the good folks of Chard
still kept the tar and feathers in readiness for him
ivho, daring greatly, presumed to say the place was
so quiet that when the stranger appeared in its
streets every head was out of doors and windows?
Point of view is everything. Tlie stranger finds
a place charming because everything in it is old,
and quiet reigns supreme. Quietude and antiquity,
how eminently desirable and delightful when found,
he thinks. Not so the dweller in such a spot. He
would welcome as a benefactor any one who would
rebuild his house in modem style, and woxdd- behold

PREFACE ix
with satisfaction the traffic of Cheapside thronging
the grass-grown market-place.
No brief is held for such an one in these pages,
nor is it likely that the professional antiquary will
find in them anything not already known to him.
The book, like all its predecessors, and like those
that are to follow it, is intended for those who
journey down the roads either in person or in
imagination, and to their judgment it is left. In
conclusion, let me acknowledge the valuable infor
mation with regard to Wiltshire aflbrded me by
Cecil Simpson, Esq., than whom no one knows the
county better. CHAELES G. HAEPEE.
Petersham, Surrey,
October 1899.

A&tff" <?A QSA%tc*A-&ia/LoTZ>J

SEPARATE PLATES

i. The Lioness attacking the Exeter Mail, 'Winter-
slow Hut.' {After James, Pollard) Frontispiece.
2. The 'Comet' 
3. The 'Regulator' on Hartford Bridge Flats .
4. The ' Quicksilver ' Mail : — ' Stop, Coachman, I
have lost my Hat and Wig'
5. The West Country Mails starting from the
Gloucester Coffee House, Piccadilly. (After
James Pollard) . .....
6. The Duke of Wellington's Statue .
7. The Wellington Arch and Hyde Park Corner,
1851 
8. St. George's Hospital, and the Road to Pimlico,
1780 ... . . .
9. Knightsbridge Toll-Gate, 1854 .
10. Knightsbridge Barracks Toll-Gate .
n. Brentford . ...
1 2. Hounslow : The Parting of the Ways
13. The 'White Hart,' Hook ....

13 l9
23

35 39
41
43 4549 5767
111

THE EXETER ROAD

PAGE

14. The Ruins of Basing House . 117
15. Whitchurch . . . 129
16. 'Winterslow Hut' . .... 159
17. Salisbury Cathedral. (After Constable, B. A.) 171
18. View of Salisbury Spire from the Ramparts
of Old Sarum . . 189
19. Old Sarum. (After Constable, R.A.) . 193
20. The Great Snowstorm of 1836; The Exeter
' Telegraph,' assisted by Post-Horses, driving
through the Snow-drifts at Amesbury. (After
James Pollard) . . . 197
21. Stonehenge. (After Turner, Pi. A.) 201
22. Sunrise at Stonehenge 207
23. Ancient and Modern: Motor Cars at Stone
henge, Easter 1899 . -213
24. COOMBE BlSSETT . . -235
25. The Exeter Road, near 'Woodyates Inn' 239
26. Tarrant Hinton . 243
27. Blandford . 259
28. Town Bridge, Blandford 263
29. The 'White Hart,' Dorchester. 269
30. Dorchester . . 277
31. wlnterbourne abbas . 28 1
32. 'Traveller's Rest' . . 287
33. 'The Long Reaches of the Exeter Road' 301
34. Exeter, from the Dunsford Road . 311

ILLUSTRATIONS IN TEXT

VignettePreface (Stonehenge) .
List of Illustrations (Hartford Bridge Flats)
The Exeter Road 
' An Old Gentleman, a Cobbett-like. Person '
The Pikeman
The ' New Police '
Tommy Atkins, 1838 .
Old Kensington Church
The Beadle .
The ' Bell,' Hounslow
The ' Green Man,' Hatton .
The Highwayman's Retreat, the ' Green Man !
East Bedfont
The Staines Stone
The ' Bells of Ouseley '
BagshotRoadside Scene. (After Rowlandson)
Roadside Scene. (After Rowlandson)
Roadside Scene. (After Rowlandson)
Roadside Scene. (After Rowlandson)
Funeral Garland, Abbot's Ann

(Title-page)

VI 1
xi i
33
47 5i
5354
56
65 7273
79
84
88 97
103104l°5107i54

THE EXETER ROAD

St. Anne's Gate, Salisbury

PAGE
182

Highway Robbery Monument at Imber

• 231

Where the Robber fell Dead .

233

Judge Jeffreys' Chair .

273

Kingston Russell .

284

Chilcombe Church

285

Chideock

293

Sign of the ' Ship,' Moreeomblake .

. 294

Interior of the ' Queen's Arms,' Charmouth

295

' Copper Castle ' . . .

298

The Exeter City Sword-bearer

3°7

' Matty the Miller '

• 3U

The End . . . .

3i4

THE ROAD TO EXETER
London (Hyde Park Corner) to — MI1ES
Kensington —
St. Mary Abbots . . . i|
Addison Road . . 2|
Hammersmith . 3^
Turnham Green . . 5
Brentford —
Star and Garter .... .6
Town Hall (cross River Brent and Grand
Junction Canal) . . . . . 7
Isleworth (Railway Station) .... 8^
Hounslow (Trinity Church) . . . . 9I
(Cross the Old River, a branch of the River Colne).
Baber Bridge (cross the New River, a branch of the
River Colne) . . . nf
East Bedfont .... .13^
Staines Bridge (cross River Thames) . . . 16J
Egham . . . . .18
Virginia Water —
'Wheatsheaf ... 2 of
Sunningdale —
Railway Station . . 2s|
Bagshot —
' King's Arms ' . 2 6\
'Jolly Farmer' 27^

THE EXETER ROAD

Camberley

MILES 29

York Town ...

29!

Blackwater (cross River Blackwater)

3°f

Hartford Bridge

35*

Hartley Row

36*

Hook .

40

Water End (for Nately Scures)

4i|

Mapledurwell Hatch (cross River Loddon) .

43

Basingstoke —

Market Place

45f

W or ting

47f

Clerken Green, and Oakley —

Railway Station

49!

Dean

54

Overton

53*

Laverstoke, and Freefolk

55*

Whitchurch —

Market House

56f

Hurstbourne Priors

58*

Andover —

Market Place (cross River Anton)
63I
Little Ann .
65i
Little (or Middle) Wallop (cross River Wallop)
7oi
Lobcombe Corner
73!
' Winterslow Hut ' (cross River Bourne)
75
Salisbury —
Council House
8ii
West Harnham (cross River Avon)
8-4
Coombe Bissett (cross a branch of the River Avon)
S4i
' Woodyates Inn '
94
' Cashmoor Inn '
9H
Tarrant Hinton (cross River Tarrant) .
99
Pimperne .
10 1 1
THE ROAD TO EXETER xvii
Blandford — MILES
Market Place (cross River Stour) . . 103I
Winterbourne Whitchurch (cross River Winter
bourne) . . . io8|
Milborne St. Andrews (cross River Milborne) . \\\\
Piddletown (cross River Piddle) . 115
Troy Town (cross River Frome) . . . .116^
Dorchester —
Town Hall . . . 120
Winterbourne Abbas (cross River Winterbourne) 124^
' Traveller's Rest ' . .131^
Bridport —
Market House (cross River Brit) . 134A
Chid eock . . 137 J
Moreeomblake . . . . . !38f
Charmouth (cross River Char) 141^
' Hunter's Lodge Inn ' . 145
Axminster —
Market Place (cross River Axe) 147
(Cross River Yart).
Kilmington . . . 148I
Wilmington (cross River Coly) . 153
Honiton . . . I56*
Fenny Bridges (cross River Otter) J59*
Fairmile . i6i-J
Rockbeare . . .166
Honiton Clyst (cross River Clyst) i68|-
Heavitree I 171
Exeter . 172I

THE EXETER
ROAD

From Hyde Park Corner, whence it is measured, to
the west end of Hounslow town, the Exeter Road is
identical with the road to Bath. At that point the
ways divide. The right-hand road leads to Bath,
by way of Maidenhead ; the Exeter Road goes off to
the left, through Staines, to Basingstoke, Whitchurch,
and Andover ; where, at half a mile beyond that
town, there is a choice of routes.
The shortest way to Exeter, the ' Queen City of
the West,' is by taking the right-hand road at this last
point and proceeding thence through Weyhill, Mullen's
Pond, Park House, and Amesbury to Deptforcl Inn,
Hindon, Mere, Wincanton, Ilchester, Ilminster, and
Honiton. This ' short cut,' which is the hilliest and
bleakest of all the bleak and hilly routes to Exeter, is
165 miles, 6 furlongs in length. Another way, not
much more than 2^ miles longer, is by turning to the
left at this fork just outside Andover, and going
thence to Salisbury, Shaftesbury, Sherborne, Yeovil,
Crewkerne, and Chard, to m.eet the other route at
Honiton ; at which point, in fact, all routes met. A
B

2 THE EXETER ROAD
third way, over 4^ miles longer than the last, instead
of leaving Salisbury for Shaftesbury, turns in a more
southerly direction, and passing through Blandford,
Dorchester, Bridport, and Axminster, reaches Exeter
by way of the inevitable Honiton in 172 miles, 6
furlongs. It is thus, by whichever way you elect to travel, a
far cry to Exeter, even in these days ; whether you
go by rail from Waterloo or Paddington — 171 J and
194 miles respectively, in three hours and three-
quarters — or whether you cycle, or drive in a motor
car, along the road, when the journey may be accom
plished by the stalwart cyclist in a day and a half,
and by a swift car in, say, ten hours.
But hush ! we are observed, as they say in the
melodramas. Let us say fourteen hours, and we shall
be safe, and well within the legal limit for motors of
twelve miles an hour.
Compare these figures with the very finest per
formances of that crack coach of the coaching age, the
Exeter ' Telegraph,' going by Amesbury and Ilchester.
which, with the perfection of equipment, and the
finest teams, eventually cut down the time from
seventeen to fourteen hours, and was justly considered
the wonder of that era ; and it will immediately be
perceived that the century has well earned its reputa
tion for progress.
It may be well to give a few particulars of the
' Telegraph ' here before proceeding. It was started
in 1826 by Mrs. Nelson, of the 'Bull,' Aldgate, and
originally took seventeen hours between Piccadilly
and the ' Half Moon,' Exeter. It left Piccadilly at

OLD ROUTES 3
5.30 a.m., and arrived at Exeter at 10.30 p.m.
Twenty minutes allowed for breakfast at Bagshot,
and thirty minutes for dinner at Deptford Inn. The
' Telegraph,' be it said, was put on the road as a
rival to the ' Quicksilver ' Devonport mail, which,
leaving Piccadilly at 8 p.m., arrived at Exeter at
12.34 next day; time, sixteen hours, thirty-four
minutes. Going on to Devonport, it arrived at that
place at 5.14 p.m., or twenty-one hours, fourteen
minutes from London. There were no fewer than
twenty -three changes in the 216 miles.

II
But those travellers who, in the early days of
coaching, a century and a half ago, desired the safest,
speediest, and most comfortable journey to Exeter,
went by a very much longer route than any of those
already named. They went, in fact, by the Bath
Road and thence through Somerset. The Exeter
Road beyond Basingstoke was at that period a miser
able waggon-track, without a single turnpike ; while
the road to Bath had, under the management of
numerous turnpike-trusts, already become a com
paratively fine highway. The Somersetshire squires
were also bestirring themselves to improve their
roads, despite the strenuous opposition encountered
from the peasantry and others on the score of their
rights being invaded, and the anticipated ruin of
local trade.

4 THE EXETER ROAD
A writer of that period, advocating the setting up
of turnpikes on the direct road to Exeter, anticipated
little trouble in converting that ' waggon-track ' into
a first-class highway. Four turnpikes, he considered,
would suffice very well from Salisbury to Exeter ; nor
would the improvement of the way over the Downs
demand much labour, for the bottom was solid, and
one general expense for pickaxe and spade work, for
levelling, and for widening at the approaches to the
villages would last a long while ; experience proving
so much, since those portions of the road remained
pretty much the same as they had been in the days
of Julius Csesar.
' It may be objected,' continues this reformer,
' that the peasantry will demolish these turnpikes so
soon as they are erected, but we will not suppose this
is in a well-governed happy state like ours. Lex non
supponet odiosa. If such terrors were to take place,
the great legislative power would lie at the mercy of
the rabble. If the mob will not hear reason they
must be taught it.
' It may be urged that there are not passengers
enough on the Western Road to defray the expenses
of erecting these turnpikes. To this I answer by
denying the fact ; 'tis a road very much frequented,
and the natural demands from the West to London
and all England on the one part, and from all the
eastern counties to Exeter, Plymouth, and Falmouth,
etc., on the other are very great, especially in war
time. Besides, were the roads more practicable, the
number of travellers would increase, especially of
those who make best for towns and inns — namely,

A PLEA FOR GOOD ROADS 5
such people of fashion and fortune as make various
tours in England for pleasure, health, and curiosity.
In picturesque counties, like Cornwall and Devon,
where the natural curiosities are innumerable, many
gentlemen of taste would be fond of making purchases,
and spending their fortunes, if with common ease
they could readily go to and return from their en
chanted castles. Whereas, a family, as things now
stand, or a party of gentlemen and ladies, would
sooner travel to the South of France and back again
than down to Falmouth or the Land's End. And 'tis
easier and pleasanter — so that all beyond Sarum or
Dorchester is to us terra incognita, and the map-
makers might, if they pleased, fill the vacuities of
Devon and Cornwall with forests, sands, elephants,
savages, or what they please. Travellers of every
denomination — the wealthy, the man of taste, the
idle, the valetudinary — would all, if the roads were
good, visit once at least the western parts of this
island. Whereas, every man and woman that has an
hundred superfluous guineas must now turn bird of
passage, flit away across the ocean, and expose them
selves to the ridicule of the French. Now, what but
the goodness of the roads can tempt people to make
such expensive and foolish excursions, since, out of
fifty knight- and lady-errants, not tw\), perhaps, can
enounce half a dozen French words. Their inns are
infinitely worse than ours, the aspect of the country
less pleasing ; men, manners, customs, laws are no
objects with these itinerants, since they can neither
speak nor read the language. I have known twelve
at a time ready 'to starve at Paris and lie in the

6 THE EXETER ROAD
streets, though their purses were well crammed with
louis d'or. When they wanted to go to bed, they
yawned to the chambermaid, or shut their eyes ;
when hunger attacked, they pointed to their mouths.
Even pretty Miss K., and Miss G., realised not the
distortion of their labial muscles, but cawed like
unfledged birds for food. They paid whatever the
French demanded, and were laughed at (not before
their faces, indeed) most immeasurably. And yet
simpletons of this class spent near £'100,000 last
year in France.
' But to return. A rich citizen in London, a gentle
man of large fortune eastwards, has, perhaps, some
very valuable relations or friends in the West. Half
a dozen times in his lifetime he hears of their welfare
by the post, and once, perhaps, receives a token when
the Western curate posts up to town to be initiated
into a benefice — and that is all. He thinks no more of
visiting them than of traversing the deserts of Nubia,
considering them as a sort of separate beings, which
might as well be in the moon, or in Limbo Pat rum.
' I hear the nobility and gentry of Somersetshire
have exerted a laudable spirit, and are now actually
erecting turnpikes, which will give that fruitful
county a better intercourse with its neighbours, and
bring an accession of wealth into it ; for every wise
traveller who goes from London to Exeter, etc. will
surely take Bath in his way (as the digression is a
mere nothing). At least, all the expensive people
with coaches certainly will — and then the supine
inhabitants of Wilts and Dorset may repine in vain ;
for when a road once comes into repute, and persons

CONSERVATLVES 7
find a pleasant tour and good usage, they will never
return to that which is decried as out of vogue ;
unless, indeed, they should reason as a Marlborough
stage-coachman did when turnpikes were first erected
between London and Bath. A new road was planned
out, but still my honest man would go round by a
miserable waggon -track called "Ramsbury narrow
way." One by one, from little to less, he dawdled
away all his passengers, and when asked why he was
such an obstinate idiot, his answer was (in a grumbling
tone) that he was now an aged man ; that he relished
not new fantasies ; that his grandfather and father
had driven the aforesaid way before him, and that he
would continue in the old track to his death, though
his four horses only drew a passenger -fly. But the
proprietor saw no wit in this : the old Automedon
"resigned" (in the Court phrase), and was replaced
by a youth less conscientious. As a man of honour,
I would not conclude without consulting the most
solemn-looking waggoner on the road. This proved
to be Jack Whipcord, of Blandford. Jack's answer
was, that roads had but one object — namely, waggon-
driving ; that he required but 5 feet width in a
lane (which he resolved never to quit), and all the
rest might go to the devil. That the gentry ought
to stay at home and be damned, and -not run gossip
ing up and down the country. No turnpikes, no
improvements of roads for him. The Scripture for
him was Jeremiah vi. 16.1 Thus, finding Jack an
1 ' Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where
is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your
souls.'

THE EXETER ROAD

ill-natured brute and a profane country wag, I left
him, dissatisfied.'

Ill
In these pages, which purport to show the old
West of England highway as it was in days of old
and as it is now, it is not proposed to follow either of
the two routes taken by the ' Telegraph ' coach or
the ' Quicksilver ' Devonport mail, by Amesbury or
by Shaftesbury, although there will be occasion to
mention those smart coaches from time to time. We
will take the third route instead, for the reasons that
it is practically identical with the course of the Via
Iceniana, the old Roman military way to Exeter
and the West ; and, besides being thus in the fullest
sense the Exeter Road, is the most picturesque and
historic route. This way went in 1826, according to
Cary, those eminently safe and reliable coaches, the
1 Regulator,' in twenty - four hours ; the ' Royal
Mail,' in twenty-two hours ; and the ' Sovereign,'
which, as no time is specified, would seem to have
journeyed down the road in a haphazard fashion. Of
these, the ' Mail ' left that famous hostelry, the ' Swan
with Two Necks ' (known familiarly as the ' Wonderful
Bird'), in Lad Lane, City, at 7.30 every evening, and
Piccadilly half an hour later, arriving at the ' New
London Inn,' Exeter, by six o'clock the following
evening. But even these coaches, which jogged along in so
leisurely a fashion, went at a furious and breakneck —

EARL Y CO A CHANG DA YS 9
not to say daredevil — pace compared with the time
consumed by the stage coach advertised in the
Mercurius Politicus of 1658 to start from the
' George Inn,' Aldersgate Without, ' every Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday. To Salisbury in two days
for xxs. To Blandford and Dorchester in two days
and a half for xxxs. To Exminster, Nunnington,
Axminster, Honiton, and Exeter in four days xls.'
The ' Exeter Fly ' of a hundred years later than
this, which staggered down to Exeter in three days,
under the best conditions, and was. the swiftest public
conveyance down this road at that time, before the
new stages and mails were introduced, had been
known, it is credibly reported, to take six.
Palmer's mail coaches, which were started on the
Exeter Road in the summer of 1785, rendered all this
kind of meandering progress obsolete, except for the
poorest class of travellers, who had still for many a
long year (indeed, until road travel was killed by the
railways) to endure the miseries of a journey in the
great hooded luggage waggons of Russell and Com
pany, which, with a team of eight horses, started
from Falmouth, and travelling at the rate of three
miles an hour, reached London in twelve days. A
man on a pony rode beside the team, and with a long
whip touched them up when this surprising pace was
not maintained. The travellers walked, putting their
belongings inside ; and when night was come either
camped under the ample shelter of the lumbering
waggon, or, if it were winter, were accommodated for a
trifle in the stable lofts of the inns they halted at.
Messrs. Russell and Company were in business for

io THE EXETER ROAD
many years as carriers between London and the West,
and at a later date — from the '20's until the close
of the coaching era — were the proprietors of an
intermediate kind of vehicle between the waggon at
one extreme and the mail coaches at the other. This
was the ' Fly Van,' of which, unlike their more
ancient conveyances which set out only three times
a week, one started every week-day from either end.
This accommodated a class of travellers who did not
disdain to travel among the bales and bundles, or to
fit themselves in between the knobbly corners of heavy
goods, but who would neither walk nor consent to the
journey from the Far West occupying the best part of
a fortnight. So they paid a trifle more and travelled
the distance between Exeter and London in two days,
in times when the ' Telegraph,' according to Sir
William Knighton, conveyed the aristocratic pas
senger that distance in seventeen hours. He writes,
in his diary, under date of 23rd September 1832,
that he started at five o'clock in the morning
of that day from Exeter in the ' Telegraph ' coach
for London. The fare, inside, was £3 :10s., and,
in addition, four coachmen and one guard had to be
paid the usual fees which custom had rendered
obligatory. They breakfasted at Ilminster and dined
at Andover. ' Nothing,' he says, ' can exceed the
rapidity with which everything is done. The journey
of one hundred and seventy-five miles was accom
plished in seventeen hours1 — breakfast and dinner were
so hurried that the cravings of appetite could hardly be
1 Yes, but the time was cut down to fourteen hours a few years
later.

FARES 1 1
satisfied, and the horses were changed like lightning.'
The fare, inside, was therefore practically 5d. a mile,
to which must be added at least fifteen shillings in tips
to those four coachmen and that guard, bringing the
cost of the smartest travelling between London and
Exeter up to £4 : 5s. for the single journey ; while
the fares by waggon and ' Fly Van ' would be at the
rate of a halfpenny and twopence per mile respectively,
something like 7s. 6d. and 29s. 6d. ; without, in those
cases, the necessity for tipping.
There were, however, more degrees than these in
the accommodation and fares for coach travellers.
The proper mail coach fare was 4d. a mile, but the
mails were not the ne plus ultra of speed and
comfort even on this road, where the ' Quicksilver '
mail ran a famous course. Hence the 5d. a mile by
the ' Telegraph. ' But it was left to the ' Waggon
Coach ' to present the greatest disparity of prices and
places. This was a vehicle which, under various
names, was seen for a considerable period on most of
the roads, and can, with a little ingenuity, be looked
upon as the precursor of the three classes on railways.
There were the first-class ' insides,' the second-class
' outsides,' and those very rank outsiders indeed, the
occupants of the shaky wicker work basket hung on
behind, called the ' crate ' or the ' rumble-tumble,'
who were very often noisily drunken sailors and
people who did not mind a little jolting more or
less. Some very fine turns-out were on this road at the
end of the '30's. Firstly, there was the ' Royal Mail,'
between the ' Swan with Two Necks,' in Lad Lane,

12 THE EXETER ROAD
and the ' New London Inn,' Exeter, both in those
days inns of good solid feeding, with drinking to
match. It was of the first-named inn, and of another
equally famous, that the poet (who must have been
of the fleshly and Bacchic order) wrote : —
At the Swan with Two Throttles
I tippled two bottles,
And bothered the beef at the Bull and the Mouth.
One can readily imagine the sharp-set and shivering
traveller, fresh from the perils of the road, ' bothering
the beef with his huge appetite, and tippling the
generous liquor (which, of course, was port) with loud
appreciative smackings of the lips.
Then there were the ' Sovereign,' the ' Regulator,'
and the ' Eclipse,' going by the Blandford and
Dorchester route; the 'Prince George,' 'Herald,' 'Pilot,'
' Traveller,' and ' Quicksilver,' by Crewkerne and
Yeovil; and the 'Defiance,' 'Celerity,' and ' Subscrip
tion,' by Amesbury and Ilminster ; to leave unnamed
the short stages and the bye-road coaches, all helping
to swell the traffic in those old days, now utterly
forgotten.

IV
A very great authority on coaching — the famous
' Nimrod,' the mainstay ofthe Sporting Magazine —
writing in 1836, compares the exquisite perfection to
which coaching had attained at that time with the era

A RIP VAN WINKLE 15
of the old Exeter ' Fly,' and imagines a kind of Rip
Van Winkle old gentleman, who had been a traveller
by that crazy conveyance in 1742, waking up and
journeying by the 'Comet' of 1836. Rousing from
his long sleep, he determines to go by the ' Fly ' to
Exeter. In the lapse of ninety -four years, however,
that vehicle has been relegated to the things that
were, and has been utterly forgotten. He waits in
Piccadilly. ' What coach, your honour ? ' asks a
ruffianly-looking fellow.
' I wish to go home to Exeter,' replies the old
gentleman. ' Just in time, your honour, here she comes — them
there gray horses ; where's your luggage 1 '
But the turn-out is so different from those our
Rip Van Winkle knew, that he says, ' Don't be in a
hurry, that's a gentleman's carriage.'
' It ain't, I tell you,' replies the cad ; ' it's the
" Comet," and you must be as quick as lightning.'
Whereupon, vehemently protesting, the ' cad ' and a
fellow ruffian shove him forcibly into the coach,
despite his anxiety about his luggage.
The old fellow, impressed by the smartness of the
Jehu — a smartness to which coachmen had been
entire strangers in his time — asks, ' What gentleman
is going to drive us ? '
' He is no gentleman,' replies the proprietor of the
coach, who happens to be sitting at his side ; ' but he
has been on the " Comet" ever since she started, and
is a very steady young man.'
' Pardon my ignorance,' says our ancient, ' from
the cleanliness of his person, the neatness of his

1 6 THE EXETER ROAD
apparel, and the language he made use of, I mistook
him for some enthusiastic bachelor of arts, wishing to
become a charioteer after the manner of the illustrious
ancients.' ' You must have been long in foreign parts, sir,'
observes the proprietor.
Presently they come to Hyde Park Corner.
' What ! ' exclaims Rip, ' off the. stones already ? '
' You have never been on the stones,' says a fellow-
passenger ; ' no stones in London now, sir.'
The old gentleman is engaged upon digesting this
information and does not perceive for some time
that the coach is a swift one. When he discovers
that fact, and mentions it, he is met with the re
joinder, ' We never go fast over this stage.'
So they pass through Brentford. ' Old Brentford
still here ? ' he exclaims ; ' a national disgrace ! ' Then
Hounslow, in five minutes under the hour. ' Wonder
ful travelling, but much too fast to be safe. How
ever, thank Heaven, we are arrived at a good-looking
house ; and now, waiter, I hope you have got
breakf  '
Before the last syllable, however, of the word
can be pronounced, the worthy old gentleman's
head strikes the back of the coach with a jerk, and
the waiter, the inn, and indeed Hounslow itself, dis
appear in the twinkling of an eye. ' My dear sir,'
exclaims he, in surprise, ' you told me we were to
change horses at Hounslow. Surely they are not
so inhuman as to drive those poor animals another
stage at this unmerciful rate ! '
' Change horses, sir ! ' says the proprietor ; ' why,

THE GALLOPING GROUND 17
we changed them while you were putting on your
spectacles and looking at your watch. Only one
minute allowed for it at Hounslow, and it is often
done in fifty seconds by those nimble-fingered horse-
keepers.' Then the coach goes fast and faster on the way to
Staines. ' We always spring 'em over these six
miles,' says the proprietor, in reply to the old gentle
man's remark that he really does not like to go so
fast. ' Not a pebble as big as a nutmeg on the road,
and so even that the equilibrium of a spirit-level
could not be disturbed.'
' Bless me ! ' exclaims the old man, ' what improve
ments ; and the roads ! ! ! '
' They are at perfection, sir,' says the proprietor.
' No horse walks a yard in this coach between London
and Exeter — all trotting-ground now.'
' A little galloping ground, I fear,' whispers the
senior to himself. ' But who has effected all this
improvement in your paving 1 '
' An American of the name of M'Adam,' is the
reply ; ' but coachmen call him the Colossus of Roads.'
' And pray, my good sir, what sort of horses may
you have over the next stage ? '
'Oh, sir, no more bo -kickers. It is hilly and
severe ground and requires cattle strong and staid.
You'll see four as fine horses put to the coach at
Staines as ever you saw in a nobleman's carriage in
your life.'
' Then we shall have no more galloping — no more
springing them as you term it ? '
' Not quite so fast over the next stage,' replies the
c

1 8 THE EXETER ROAD
proprietor ; ' but he will make good play over some
part of it ; for example, when he gets three parts down
a hill he lets them loose, and cheats them out of half
the one they have to ascend from the bottom of it. In
short, they are half-way up it before a horse touches
his collar ; and we must take every advantage with
such a fast coach as this, and one that loads so well,
or we should never keep our time. We are now to a
minute ; in fact, the country people no longer look to
the sun when they want to set their clocks — they
look only to the Comet.'
Determined to see the changing of the team at the
next stage, the old gentleman remarks one of the new
horses being led to the coach with a twitch fastened
tightly to his nose. ' Holloa, Mr. Horsekeeper ! ' he
says, ' you are going to put an unruly horse in.' —
' What ! this here 'oss,' growls the man ; ' the quietest
hanimal alive, sir.' But the good faith of this pro
nouncement is somewhat discounted by the coachman's
caution, ' Mind what you are about, Bob ; don't let
him touch the roller-bolt.' Then, ' Let 'em go, and
take care of yourselves,' his next remark, seems a
little alarming. More alarming still the next
happening. The near leader rears right on end,
the thoroughbred near -wheeler draws himself back
to the extent of his pole-chain, and then, darting
forward, gives a sudden start to the coach which
nearly dislocates the passengers' necks.
We will not follow every heart -beat of our old
friend on this exciting pilgrimage. He quits the
coach at Bagshot, congratulating himself on being
still safe and sound, and rings the bell for the waiter.

THE 'REGULATOR' 21
A well-dressed person appears, whom he takes for
the landlord. ' Pray, sir,' says he, ' have you any
slow coach down this road to-day ? ' — ' Why, yes, sir,'
replies the waiter. ' We shall have the " Regulator "
down in an hour.'
He has breakfast, and at the appointed time the
' Regulator ' appears at the door. It is a strong, well-
built drag, painted chocolate colour, bedaubed all
over with gilt letters — a Bull's Head on the doors,
a Saracen's Head on the hind boot, and drawn by
four strapping horses ; but it wants the neatness of
the other. The waiter announces that the c Regulator '
is full inside and in front ; ' but,' he says, ' you'll
have the gammon -board all to yourself, and your
luggage is in the hind boot.'
' Gammon-board ! Pray, what's that ? Do you
not mean the basket ? '
' Oh no, sir,' says John, smiling, ' no such a thing
on the road now. It's the hind-dickey, as some call
it.' Before ascending to his place, our friend has cast
his eye on the team that is about to convey him
to Hartford Bridge, the next stage. It consists of
four moderate -sized horses, full of power, and still
fuller of condition, but with a fair sprinkling of
blood ; in shorb, the eye of a judge would have found
something about them not very unlike galloping.
'All right!' cries the guard, taking his key -bugle
in his hand ; and they proceed up the village at a
steady pace, to the tune of ' Scots wha hae wi'
Wallace bled,' and continue at that pace for the
first five miles. The old gentleman again congratu-

22 THE EXETER ROAD
lates himself, but prematurely, for they are about to
enter upon Hartford Bridge Flats, which have the
reputation at this time of being the best five miles
for a coach in all England. The coachman now
' springs ' his team and they break into a gallop
which does those five miles in twenty-three minutes.
Half-way across the Flats they meet the returning
coachman of the ' Comet,' who has a full view of his
quondam passenger — and this is what he saw. He
was seated with his back to the horses — his arms
extended to each extremity of the guard-irons — his
teeth set grim as death — his eyes cast down towards
the ground, thinking the less he saw of his danger
the better. There was what was called a top-heavy
load, perhaps a ton of luggage on the roof, and the
horses were of unequal stride ; so that the lurches of
the ' Regulator ' were awful.
Strange to say, the coach arrives safely at Hartford
Bridge, but the antiquated passenger has had enough
of it, and exclaims that he will walk into Devonshire.
However, he thinks perhaps he will post down, and
asks the waiter, ' What do you charge per mile,
posting ? '
' One and sixpence, sir.' — 'Bless me! just double!
Let me see — two hundred miles at two shillings per
mile, postboys, turnpikes, etc., £20. This will never
do. Have you no coach that does not carry luggage
on the top ? ' — ' Oh yes, sir,' replies the waiter ; ' we
shall have one to-night that is not allowed to carry a
bandbox on the roof — ' That's the one for me ; pray,
what do you call it ? ' — ' The " Quicksilver " Mail, sir ;
one of the best out of London.' — 'Guarded and

THE ' QUICKSILVER ' MAIL : — ' STOP, COACHMAN, I HAVE LOST MY HAT AKD "WIG.

THE ' QUICKSILVER' MAIL 25
lighted ? ' — ' Both, sir ; blunderbuss and pistols in the
sword-case ; a lamp each side the coach, and one
under the footboard — see to pick up a pin the darkest
night of the year.'—' Very fast?'—' Oh no, sir, just
keeps time, and that's all.' — ' That's the coach for me,
then,' says our hero.
Unfortunately, the ' Devonport ' (commonly called
the ' Quicksilver') mail is half a mile faster in the hour
than most in England, and is, indeed, one of the
miracles of the road. Let us then picture this un
fortunate passenger seated in this mail on a pitch-
dark night in November. It is true she has no
luggage on the roof, nor much to incommode her
elsewhere ; but she is a mile in the hour faster than
the ' Comet,' at least three miles quicker than the
' Regulator.' and she performs more than half her
journey by lamplight. It is needless to say, then,
our senior soon finds out his mistake ; but there is no
remedy at hand, for it is dead of night, and all the
inns are shut up. The climax of his misfortunes then
approaches. He sleeps, and awakes on a stage called
the fastest on the journey — it is four miles of ground,
and twelve minutes is the time. The old gentleman
starts from his seat, dreaming the horses are running
away. Determined to see if it is so, although the
passengers assure him it is ' all right,' and assure
him he will lose his hat if he looks out of window, he
does look out. The next moment he raises his voice
in a stentorian shout : ' Stop, coachman, stop. I have
lost my hat and wig ! ' The coachman hears him
not — and in another second the broad wheels of
a road waggon have for ever demolished the lost

26 THE EXETER ROAD
headgear. And so we leave him, hatless, wigless, to
his fate.

The late Thomas Adolphus Trollope, brother of the
better-known Anthony, was never tired of writing
voluminously about old times, and what he has to
say about the coaches on the Exeter Road is the
more interesting and valuable as coming from one
who lived and travelled in the times of which he
speaks. The coaches for the South and West of England,
he says, started from the ' White Horse Cellars,'
Piccadilly, which was one of the fashionable hotels
of 1820, the time he treats of.
The ' White Bear,' Piccadilly, he adds, was looked
upon with contempt, as being the place whence only
the slow coaches started. The mails and stages
moved off to the accompaniment of news-vendors
pushing the sale of the expensive and heavily taxed
newspapers of the period, and the cries of the Jew-
boys who sold oranges and cedar pencils on the pave
ment at sixpence a dozen. Once clear of town, his
enthusiasm over the travel of other days finds scope,
and he begins : ' What an infinite succession of
teams ! What an endless vista of ever-chano-iner
miles of country ! What a delicious sense of belong
ing to some select and specially important and
adventurous section of humanity as we clattered
through the streets of quiet little country towns at

COACH CONSTRUCTION 27
midnight, or even at three or four o'clock in the
morning ; ourselves the only souls awake in all the
place. What speculations as to the immediate
bestowal and occupation ofthe coachman as he " left
you here, sir," in the small hours ! '
Then he goes on to give a kind of gossipy history
of the smart mails put on the road about 1820.
' A new and accelerated mail-coach service was
started under the title of the " Devonport Mail," at
that time the fastest in England. Its performances
caused a sensation in the coaching world, and it was
known in such circles as the " Quicksilver Mail." Its
early days had chanced, unfortunately, to be marked
by two or three accidents, which naturally gave it an
increased celebrity.
' And if it is considered what those men and horses
were required to perform, the wonder was, not that
the " Quicksilver '' should have come to grief two or
three times, but rather that it ever made its journey
without doing so. What does the railway traveller
of the present day, who sees a travelling Post Office
and its huge tender, crammed with postal matter,
think of the idea of carrying all that mass on one, or
perhaps two, coaches? The guard, occupying his
solitary post behind the coach on the top of the
receptacle called, with reference to the constructions
of still earlier days, the hinder-boot, sat on a little
seat made for one, with his pistol and blunderbuss in
a box in front of him. And the original notion of
those who first planned the modern mail coach was
that the bags containing the letters should be carried
in the hinder - boot. The fore - boot, beneath the

28 THE EXETER ROAD
driver's box, was considered to be appropriated to the
baggage of the three outside and four inside passengers,
which was the Mail's entire complement. One of the
outsiders shared the box with the driver, and two
occupied the seat on the roof behind him, their backs
to the horses, and facing the guard, who had a seat
all to himself. The accommodation provided for these
two was not of a very comfortable description. They
were not, indeed, crowded, as the four who occupied a
similar position on another coach often were ; but
they had a mere board to sit on, whereas the seats on
the roof of an ordinary stage coach were provided
with cushions. The fares by the mail were nearly
always somewhat higher than those by even equally
fast, or, in some cases, faster, coaches ; and it seems
unreasonable, therefore, that the accommodation
should have been inferior. I can only suppose that
the patrons of the mail were understood to be com
pensated for its material imperfections by the superior
dignity of their position. The &oa>seat, however, was
well cushioned.
' But if the despatches, which it was the mail's busi
ness to carry, could once upon a time be contained in
the hinder-boot, such soon ceased to be the case. The
bulk of postal matter which had to be carried was
constantly and rapidly increasing, and often as many
as nine enormous sacks, which were as long as the
coach was broad, were heaped upon the roof. The
huge heap, three or four tiers high, was piled to a
height which prevented the guard, even when stand
ing, from seeing or communicating with the coach
man. If to these considerations the reader will add

THE COACHING AGE 29
the consideration of the Devon and Somerset roads,
over which this top-heavy load had to be carried at
twelve miles an hour, it will not seem strange that
accidents should have occurred. Not that the roads
were bad.- They, thanks to M'Adam, were good,
hard, and smooth, but the hills were numerous and
steep. ' The whole of the service was well done and admir
able, and the drivers of such a coach were masters of
their profession. Work hard, but remuneration good.
There were fewer passengers by the mail to "remem
ber " the coachman, but it was more uniformly full,
and somewhat more was expected from a traveller by
the mail. It was a splendid thing to see the beauti
ful teams going over their short stage at twelve miles
an hour. None but good cattle in first-rate condition
could do the work. A saying of old Mrs. Mountain,
for many years the well-known proprietress of one of
the large coaching inns in London, used to be quoted
as having been addressed by her to one of her
drivers: "You find whip -cord, John, and I'll find
oats." And, as it used to be said, the measure of the
corn supplied to a coach-horse was — his stomach !
' It was a pretty sight to see the changing of the
horses. There stood the fresh team, two on the off
side, two on the near side, and the coach was drawn
up with the utmost exactitude between them. Four
ostlers jump to the splinter-bars and loose the traces ;
the reins have already been thrown down. The
driver retains his seat, and, within the minute (more
than once, within fifty seconds by the watch) the
coach is again on its onward journey.

30 THE EXETER ROAD
' Then how welcome was breakfast at an excellent
old-world country inn — twenty minutes allowed.
The hot tea, after your night's drive, the fresh cream,
butter, eggs, hot toast, and cold beef, and then, with
your cigar alight, back to the box and off again.
' I once witnessed on that road- — not quite that
road, for the " Quicksilver" took a somewhat different
line — the stage of four miles between Ilchester and
Ilminster done in twenty minutes, and a trace broken
and mended on the road. The mending was effected
by the guard almost before the coach stopped. It is
a level bit of road, four miles only for the entire stage,
and was performed at a full gallop. That was done
by a coach called the " Telegraph," started some years
after the " Quicksilver," to do the distance between
Exeter and London in one day. We started at
5 a.m. from Exeter and reached London between
9 and 10 that night, with time for breakfast and
dinner on the road. I think the performance of the
Exeter "Telegraph" was the ne plus ultra of coach-
travelling. One man drove fifty miles, and then
meeting the other coach on the road, changed from
one box to another and drove the fifty miles back.
It was tremendously hard work. " Not much work
for the whip arm ? " I asked a coachman. " Not
much, sir ; but just put your hand on my left arm."
The muscle was swollen to its utmost, and as hard as
iron. Many people who have not tried it think it
easier work to drive such a coach and such a team as
this than to have to flog a dull team up to eight miles
an hour.'
Thomas Adolphus Trollope's reminiscences may be

AN OLD MAIL-GUARD 31
fitly supplemented by those of Moses James Nobbs,
who died in June 1897, at the age of eighty years,
and was one of the last of the mail-guards on the
Exeter Road. To say that he was actually the last
would be rash, for coachmen, postboys, and guards
were a long-lived race, and it would not be at all
surprising to learn that some ancient veterans still
survive. Nobbs entered the service of the Post Office
in 1836, and was transferred from the Bristol and
Portsmouth to the London, Yeovil, and Exeter Mail
in 1837. Retiring at the close of 1891, he therefore saw
fifty-five years' service, and vividly recollected the
time when the mails were conveyed in bags secured
on the roof of the coach. At Christmas-time the
load was always heavy ; but although the corre
spondence of that season sometimes severely strained
the capacity of the vehicle, it is not recorded that
the mail had to be duplicated, as had to be done
sometimes in after years when railways had super
seded coaches.
When the Great Western Railway was opened
throuo-h to Exeter in 1844 and the last mail coach
on this route had been withdrawn, Nobbs was given
the superintendence of the receiving and despatching
of the mails from Paddington, and often spoke of
the extraordinary growth of the Post Office business
during the railway era. At one Christmas-tide he
despatched from Paddington in a single day no less
than twenty tons of letters and parcels.
He had not been without his adventures. 'We
had a very sad accident,' he says, 'with that mail

32 THE EXETER ROAD
on one occasion, between Whitchurch and Andover.
The coach used to start from Piccadilly, where all the
passengers and baggage were taken up. On this
occasion the bags were brought up in a cart, as usual,
and we were off in a few seconds. My coachman
had been having a drinking bout with a friend that
day, and when we had got a few miles on the road,
I discovered that he was the worse for drink and
that it was not safe for him to drive. So when
we reached Hounslow I made him get off the box-
seat ; and after securing the mail-bags and putting
him in my seat and strapping him in, I took the
ribbons. At Whitchurch the coachman unstrapped
himself and exchanged places with me, but we had
not proceeded more than three miles when, the coach
giving a jolt over a heap of stones, he fell between
the horses, and the wheels of the coach ran over him,
killing him on the spot. The horses, having no
driver, broke into a full gallop, so, as there was no
front passenger, I climbed over the roof, to gather up
the reins, when I found that they had fallen among
the horses' feet and were trodden to bits. Returning
over the roof, I missed my hold and fell into the
road, but fortunately with no worse accident than
some bruises and a sprained ankle. The horses kept
on till they reached Andover, where they pulled up
at the usual spot. Strange to say, no damage was
done to the coach, though there was a very steep hill
to go down. The " Old Exeter Mail," which came
behind our coach, found the body of my coachman
on the road, and, a mile farther, picked me up.'

THE SHORT STAGES

VI

Suppose, instead of taking one of the fast mails to
Exeter, and journeying straight away, we book a seat
in one of the ' short stages ' which were the only
popular means of being conveyed between London
and the suburbs in the days before railways,
omnibuses, and tramways existed. We will take
the stage to Brentford, because that is on our
way. What year shall we imagine it to be ? Say 1837,
because that date marks the accession of Her Majesty
and the opening of the great Victorian Era, in which
everything except human nature (which is still pretty
much what it used to be) has been turned inside out,
altered, and ' improved.'
If, in the year 1837, we wished to reach Brentford
and could not afford to hire a trap or carriage,
practically the only way, other than walking the
seven miles, would have been to take the stage ; and
as these stages, starting from the City or the Strand,
were comparatively few, it was always advisable to
go down to the starting-places and secure a seat,
rather than to chance finding one vacant at Hyde
Park Corner.
' How we hate the Putney and Brentford stages
that draw up in a line in Piccadilly, after the mails
are gone,' says Hazlitt, writing of the romance of the
Mail Coach. Well, it may be that their five or ten
mile journeys afforded no hold for the imagination,
compared with the dashing ' Quicksilver ' and the
D

34 THE EXETER ROAD
lightning ' Telegraph ' to Exeter ; but what on
earth the Londoner of modest means who desired
to travel to Putney or to Brentford would in
those pre-omnibus times have done without those
stages it is impossible to conceive. We, in these
days, might just as well find romance in the
majesty of the beautiful Great Western Express
locomotives that speed between Paddington and
Penzance, and then turn to the omnibuses that
run to Hammersmith, and say, ' How we hate the
'buses ! '
All these suburban stages started from public-
houses. There were quite a number which went to
Brentford and on to Hounslow, and they set out from
such forgotten houses as the ' New Inn,' Old Bailey ;
the ' Goose and Gridiron,' St. Paul's Churchyard ; the
' Old Bell,' Holborn ; the ' Gloucester Coffee House,'
Piccadilly ; the ' White Hart,' ' Red Lion,' and
' Spotted Dog,' Strand ; and the ' Bolt-in-Tun,' Fleet
Street. It is to be feared that those stages wTere not
' Swiftsures,' ' Hirondelles,' or ' Lightnings.' Nor,
indeed, were ' popular prices ' known in those days.
Concessions had been made in this direction, it is true,
some seven years before, when the man with the
extraordinary name — Mr. Shillibeer — introduced the
first omnibus, which ran between the ' Yorkshire
Stingo,' in the New Road, Marylebone, and the City ;
and the very name ' omnibus ' was originally intended
as a kind of finger-post to point out the intended
popularity of the new conveyance, but as the fare to
the City was one shilling, it may readily be supposed
that Bill Mortarmixer, Tom Tenon, and the whole of

Udtf

!

mm
1 -j j

[_
THE WEST COUNTIIT MAILS STARTING FliOM THE GLOUCESTER COFFEE HOUSE, PICCADILLY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).
THE ' GOOSE AND GRIDIRON' 37
their artisan brethren, who did not in those times
aspire to one-and-twopence per hour, preferred to walk.
For the same reason, they were only the compara
tively affluent who could afford the eighteenpenny
fare, or the two-hours journey, to Brentford by the
' stage.' Let us suppose ourselves to be of that fortunate
company, and, paying our one-and-sixpence, set out
from the ' Goose and Gridiron. '
That old-fashioned hostelry, which stood modestly
back from the roadway on the north side of St.
Paul's Churchyard, was, unhappily, demolished in
1894, after a good deal more than two centuries'
record for good cheer. It was originally the ' Swan
and Harp,' but some irreverent wag, probably as
far back as the building of the house in Wren's
time, found the other name for it, and the effigies
of the goose and the gridiron remained even to our
own time.
This year of our imaginary journey affords a
strange contrast with the appearance the streets will
possess some sixty years later. Ludgate Hill, in 1837
an exceedingly narrow thoroughfare, paved with rough
granite setts, will in the last decade of the century
present a very different aspect. Instead of the dingy
brick warehouses there will be handsome premises of
some architectural pretensions, and the Hill will be
considerably widened. The setts will have dis
appeared, to be replaced by wood pavement, and the
traffic will have increased tenfold ; until, in fact, it
has become a continuous stream. There will be
strange vehicles, too, unknown in 1837, — omnibuses,

THE EXETER ROAD

hansom-cabs, and motor cars, and where Ludgate
Hill joins Fleet Street there will be a Circus and an
obstructive railway-bridge.
We proceed in leisurely fashion down Ludgate
Hill, and halt for passengers and parcels at the 'Bolt-
in-Tun,' Fleet Street, which is now a railway receiving
office. Thence by slow degrees, calling at the ' Red
Lion,' ' Spotted Dog,' and the ' White Hart,' we
eventually reach the ' Gloucester Coffee House,'
Piccadilly, re-built many years ago,
and now the ' Berkeley Hotel'
Beyond this point, progress is
fortunately speedier, and we reach
Hyde Park Corner in, compara
tively speaking, the twinkling of
an eye. Hyde Park Corner in
1837, this year of the Queen's
accession, has begun to feel the
great changes that are presently to
alter London so marvellously. We
have among our fellow-travellers
by the stage an old gentleman,
a Cobbett-like person, who wears a
rustic, semi-farmer kind of appear
ance, and recollects many improvements here ; who can
' mind the time, look you,' when the turnpike-gate
(which was removed in 1825) stood at the corner;
when St. George's Hospital was a private mansion,
the residence of Lord Lanesborough ; and when the road
leading past it to Pimlico was quite wild country,
as in the picture on page 43, where sportsmen shot
snipe in those marshes that were in future years

' AN OLD GENTLEMAN, A
COBBETT-LIKE PERSON.'

THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON S STATUE.

40 THE EXETER ROAD
to become the site of Belgrave Square and other
aristocratic quarters.
At this spot Mr. Decimus Burton had already built
the great Triumphal Arch forming the entrance to
Constitution Hill, together with the Classic Screen at
Hyde Park Corner. The Screen was built in 1828,
and the Arch, which is a copy of the Arch of Titus at
Rome, in 1832. Already, in 1820, Apsley House had
become the residence of the Iron Duke, but it was not
until 1846 that what Thackeray justly names 'the
hideous equestrian monster ' was placed on the summit
of that Arch, opposite the Duke's windows. Here is
an illustration of it, before it was hoisted up to that
height. Beside it you see the Duke himself, in his
characteristic white trousers, in company with several
weirdly dressed persons. Again, over page, may be
seen the Arch, with the statue on it, and the
neighbourhood vastly changed from the appearance it
wears in the picture of the ' North-East Prospect of
St. George's Hospital.' Instead of the great hooded
waggons starting for the West Country, the road is
occupied with very crowded traffic, and among the
vehicles may be noticed two omnibuses, one going to
Chelsea, the other (for this is the year 1851) to the
Exhibition, — the first exhibition that ever was. If,
ladies and gentlemen, you will be pleased to look at
those omnibuses, you will see that they have neither
knifeboards nor seats on the roof, and that passengers
are squatting up there in the most supremely un
comfortable, not to say dangerous, positions. Also, in
those dark ages of London locomotion, the ascent to
that uncomfortable roof was of itself perilous, for no

THE WELLINGTON ARCH AND HYDE PARK CORNER, 1851.

st. george's hospital, and the road to pimlico, 1780.

44 THE EXETER ROAD
one had as yet dreamed ofthe staircase. Other curious
points will be noticed by the observant, and among
them the fact that 'buses then had doors. The
present historian vividly recollects a door being part
of the equipment of every 'bus, and of the full-
flavoured odour of what Mr. W. S. Gilbert calls 'damp
straw and squalid hay ' which assailed the nostrils of
the ' insides ' when that door was shut ; but in what
particular year did the door vanish altogether ? Alas !
the straw, with the door, is gone for evermore, and
passengers no longer lose their small change in it to
the great gain of the conductor, who, by the way,
used to be called 'the cad,' even although he commonly
wore a ' top hat ' and a frock coat, as per the picture.
The word ' cad ' has since then acquired a much more
offensive meaning, and if you addressed a conductor
by that name nowadays,, he would probably express a
desire to punch your head.
The hideous statue of the Duke and his charger
' Copenhagen,' which the French said ' avenged
Waterloo,' was removed to Aldershot in 1884, when
the alterations were made at Hyde Park Corner.

VII
And now we come to the first toll-gate, which,
removed to this spot in 1825, opposite where the
Alexandra Hotel now stands, stood here until 1854.
There were many troublesome survivals in 1837
which have long since been swept away. Toll-gates,

knightsbridge toll-gate, 1S54.

THE PIKEMEN

47

for instance. The toll or turnpike gate of sixty,
fifty, forty years ago was a very real grievance, both
on country roads and in London itself, or in those
districts which we now call London. Many people
objected to pay toll then, and a favourite amusement
of the young bloods was fighting the pikeman for his
halfpenny, his penny, or his sixpence, as the case
might be. Sometimes
the pikeman won, some
times those gay young-
sparks ; and the pike
man always took those
terrific encounters as
part of the day's work,
and never summoned
those sportsmen for
assault and battery.
In fact, they were such
sporting times that,
whether the pikeman
or the Corinthian youth
won, the latter would probably chuck his antagonist a
substantial coin of the realm, whereupon the pikeman
would say that ' his honour was a gemman,' and
exeunt severally to purchase beef-steaks for the
reduction of black eyes.
The present generation has, of course, never seen
a pikeman. He wore a tall black glazed hat and
corduroy breeches, with white stockings. But the
most distinctive part of his costume was his white linen
apron. No one knows why he wore an apron ; neither
did he, and the reason of it must now needs be lost in

THE PIKEMAN.

48 THE EXETER ROAD
the mists of history, because the last pikeman, whom
otherwise we might have asked, is dead, and gone to
Hades, where he probably is still going through a
series of shadowy encounters beside the shores of the
Styx with the ghosts of the Toms and Jerrys of long
ago, and offering to fight Charon for the price of his
ferry across the stream.
But here we are at rural Knightsbridge, in 1837
as quiet a spot as you could find round London, with
scattered cottages of the rustic, rose-embowered kind.
Knightsbridge Green tvas a green in those days, and
not, as it is now, a squalid paved court. Then, and
for many years afterwards, the soldiers from the
neighbouring barracks would walk with the nurse
maids in the country lanes, and take tea in the
tea-gardens which stood away behind the highroad
and were a feature of Brompton. Where are those
tea-gardens now, and where the toll-gate that barred
the road by the barracks ? Gone, my friends ; swept
away like the gossamer threads of the spiders that
spun webs in the arbours of those gardens and
dropped in the nursemaids' tea and the soldiers' beer.
Those soldiers and those nursemaids are gone too, else
it would be a pleasing, a curious, and an instructive
thing to take them, tottering in their old age, by the
hand and say : ' Here, my gallant warrior of eighty
years or so,' and ' Here, my pretty maiden of four
score, is Knightsbridge, the self-same Knightsbridge
you knew, but with some new, and somewhat larger,
buildings.' They would be as strangers in a strange
land, and, dazed by the din of the thronging traffic
amid the sky-scraping buildings, beg to be taken

m-&rZM^

mm,

knightsbridge barracks toll-gate.

THE 'NEW POLICE'

5i

away. But to bring back the policeman of that era,
if that were possible, and set him to control this
traffic, would be more instructive still. When the
last years of the coaching age along this road were
still running their course, ' Robert,'
the ' Peeler,' or the ' New Police,' as
he was variously named, had an easy
time of it here. Not so his successors,
who have to deal with an almost
continual block, all day long and
every clay.
The ' New Police ' were a novel body
of men in the early years of the reign,
having been introduced in 1829 by
Sir Robert Peel. Hence the brilliant
appropriateness of those nicknames.
There still, however, lingered in various
parts of the Metropolis that ancient institution, the
Watchman, who patrolled the streets at night and
announced the hours in a curious sing-song voice
with remarks upon the state of the weather added.
Those who sat up late were familiar with the chant :
' Twelve o'clock, and a stormy night ! ' and found
comfort in the companionship of that voice.
The watchmen, although scarce anyone now living
can have seen one of those many-caped, tottering
old fellows, seem strangely familiar to us. That is
because we have read so much about them in the
exploits of Tom and Jerry, the Corinthian youth of
the glorious days of George the Fourth, when the
most popular forms of sport were knocker-wrenching,
bilking a pikeman, and thrashing a Charley. A

the new police.

52 THE EXETER ROAD
' Charley ' was, of course, a watchman. The thrash
ing of a ' Charley ' was not an heroic pursuit, but
(or, rather, therefore) it was extremely popular.
They were generally old men, and not capable of very
serious reprisals upon the gangs of muscular youths
who thumped, whacked, larrupped, and beat them
unmercifully, and overturned their watch-boxes on to
them, so that those poor old men were imprisoned
until some Samaritan came by and released them.
No one ever attempted that sort of thing with the
' New Police,' who were not old and decrepit men,
but tall, lusty, upstanding fellows. Perhaps that
was why the ' New Police ' were so violently objected
to, although the ostensible grounds of objection were
founded on the supposition that the continental
system of a semi-military gendarmerie was intended.
The authorities were therefore at great pains to keep
the police a strictly citizen force, and although a
uniform was, of course, necessary, one as nearly as
possible like civilian dress was chosen. The present
uniform of the police, and the police themselves, if
they had then worn a helmet, would have been
howled out of existence by the violent Radicals and
Chartists who troubled the early years of the Queen's
reign. They did not, therefore, wear a helmet at all,
but a tall glazed hat of the chimney-pot kind. A
swallow-tailed coat, tightly buttoned up. with a belt
round the waist, a stiff stock under the chin, and
trousers of white duck gave him, altogether, a verv
respectable and citizen-like aspect. It has been left
to later years to alter this uniform.

KENSINGTON

VIII
But we must not forget that we are travelling to
Brentford sixty-two years ago. Let us, therefore,
whip up the horses, and, passing the first milestone
at the corner of the lane which a future generation to
that of 1837 is to know by the name of
the Exhibition Road, hurry on to Ken
sington. Kensington in this year of the acces
sion of Her Majesty Queen Victoria is
having an unusual amount of attention
paid to it. Every one is bursting with
loyalty towards the girl of eighteen
suddenly called upon to rule over the
nation, and crowds throng the old-
fashioned High Street of Kensington at
the end by Palace Green, eager to see Her
Majesty drive forth from Kensington
Palace. They are kept at a respectful
distance by a sentry in a dress which
succeeding generations will think absurd.
White trousers, coatee, stiff stock, rigid cross-belts,
and a shako like the upper part of the funnel of a
penny steamer were whimsical things to go a-soldier-
ing in, but the Tommy Atkins of that time had no
other or easier kind of uniform, and it will be left
for the Crimean War, seventeen years later, to prove
the folly of it.
The palace is well guarded, for the Government,
for their part, have not yet learned to trust the

TOMMY ATKINS,
1838.

54

THE EXETER ROAD

people ; nor, indeed, are the people at this time alto
gether to be trusted. The long era of the Georges
did not breed loyalty, and for William the Fourth,
just dead, the people had an amused contempt. They
called him ' Silly Billy.' At this time, also, aristocracy
drew its skirts daintily from any possible contact with

k-A

Shh

OLD KENSINGTON CHURCH.

the lower herd. Alas ! poor lower herd, and still
more, alas ! for aristocracy.
Our fellow-traveller in the Brentford stage has
a friend with him, and, as we jolt from Kensington
Gore into the High Street, points out the palace,
and tells how William the Third and Queen Mary
lived and died there, amid William's stolid Hol
landers. He tells a story which he heard from his
grandfather, of how Dr. Radcliffe, called in to look
at the King's dropsical ankles, said, when asked
what he thought of them, ' Why, truly, I would not

REMINISCENCES 55
have your Majesty's two legs for your three king
doms.' He tells the friend that the King procured a
more courtly and less blunt medical adviser ; and we
can well believe it. More stories beguile the way :
how Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark
ended here in the fulness of time; how their suc
cessor, George the First, furious with Sir Robert
Walpole, with his queen, with the servants, and
anything and everything, used to tear off his wig
and jump on it, in transports of rage. How he
would gaze up at the vane on the clock -tower
entrance to the palace (which we can just glimpse
as we pass), anxious for favouring winds to waft
his ships to England with despatches from his
beloved Hanover, and how he died suddenly at
breakfast one morning after being disappointed in
those breezes.
These are hearsay stories. Our friend, however,
has reminiscences of his own, and can recollect the
Princess Caroline, the eccentric wife of the Prince
Regent, living at the palace between the years 1810
and 1814 — ' a red-faced huzzy, sir, with yellow towzled
hair, all spangles and scarlet cloak, like a play-actress,
making Haroun-al-Raschid visits among the people,
and bothering the house-agents in the neighbourhood
for houses to let.' The old gentleman who says this
is a Radical, and, like all of that political creed, likes
to see Royalty ' behaving as sich, and not like common
people such as you an' me.' Whereupon another
passenger in the stage, on whom the speaker's eye
has fallen, audibly objects to being called, or thought,
or included among common persons ; so that relations

56

THE EXETER ROAD

among the ' insides ' are strained, and so continue,
past Kensington Church, a very decrepit and non
descript kind of building ; past the Charity School,
the Vestry Hall,
where a gorgeous
beadle in plush
breeches, white
stockings, scarlet
cloak trimmed with
gold bullion, a won
derful hat, and a
wand of office, is
standing, and so into
the country. Pre
sently we come to the
village of Hammer
smith, innocent as yet
of whelk -stalls and
fried-fish shops, and so at last, past Turnham Green,
to Brentford.

THE BEADLE.

IX

Brentford was dismissed somewhat summarily in
the pages of the Bath Road, for which let me here
apologise to the county town of Middlesex. Not that
I will renounce one jot as to the dirtiness of the place ;
for what says Gay ? —
Brentford, tedious town,
For dirty streets and white-legged chickens known.

BRENTFORD.

'BRENTFORD, TEDIOUS TOWN' 59
Now, if Brentford is certainly not tedious nowa
days, it is unquestionably as dirty as ever. If you
would know the true, poignant, inner meaning of
tediousness, you must make acquaintance, say, with
Gower Street on a winter's day ; a typical street of
suburban villas, each ' villa ' as like its neighbour as
one new sixpence is to another ; or the Cromwell
Road at any time or under any conditions. Then
you will have known tedium. At Brentford, however,
all is life, movement, dirt, and balmy odours from a
quarter of a mile of roadside gasworks. The bargees
and lightermen of this riverside town are swearing
picturesquely at one another all day, while the gas
men, the hands at the waterworks, and the railway-
men join in occasionally. Sometimes the profanity
so cheerfully bandied about leads to a fight, but not
often, because when a bargee addresses his dearest
friend by a string of epithets that might make a
typical old-time stage-manager blush, it is all taken
as a token of friendship. These are the shibboleths of
the place.
When, however, Gay alludes to the ' white-legged
chickens,' for which, he says, Brentford was known,
we are at a loss to identify the breed. That kind of
chicken must long since have given up the attempt
to be white-legged, and have changed, by process of
evolution, into some less easily soiled variety. For
the dirt of Brentford is always there. It only varies
in kind. In times of drought it makes itself obvious
in clouds of black dust, composed of powdered coals
and clinkers ; and when a day of rain has laid this
plague, it is forthwith re-incarnated in the shape of

60 THE EXETER ROAD
seas of oily black mud. The poet Thomson might
have written yesterday —
E'en so, through Brentford town, a town of mud ;
while Dr. Johnson adds his weighty testimony, for
when a contemporary, a native of Glasgow, was
praising Glasgow to him, the Doctor cut his eloquence
with the query : ' Pray, sir, have you ever seen
Brentford ? ' Here was sarcasm indeed ! Happily,
however, the Glaswegian had not seen Brentford, and
so was not in a position to appreciate the retort.
But Boswell, who, ubiquitous man, was of course
present, knew, and told the Doctor this was shock
ing. ' Why, then, sir,' rejoined Johnson, ' you have
never seen Brentford ! '
Then, when we have all this delightful testimony
as to Brentford's dirt, comes Shenstone, the melan
choly poet who ' found his warmest welcome at an
inn,' to testify as to the character of its inhabitants.
' No persons,' says he, ' more solicitous about the
preservation of rank than those who have no
rank at all. Observe the humours of a country
christening ; and you will find no court in Christen
dom so ceremonious as "the quality" of Brentford.'
Despite these criticisms, it must be acknowledged
that Brentford is a town of high interest. Its filthy
gasworks, its waterworks, its docks have not sufficed
to sweep away the old-fashioned appearance of the
place. It may, in fact, be safely said that no other
such truly picturesque town as Brentford exists near
London. This will not long remain true of it, for,
even now, new buildings are here and there taking

ODD STREET-NAMES 61
the place of the old. For one thing, Brentford has a
quite remarkable number of old inns, and the great
stableyards and courtyards of other old coaching
hostelries which themselves have disappeared. This
was, in fact, the end of the first stage out of London
in the coaching era, and the beginning of the last
stage in ; and in consequence, as befitted a town on
the great highway to the West, had ample accommo
dation, both for man and beast. One of these old
yards, indeed, — Red Lion Inn Yard — is historic, for it
is traditionally the spot where Edmund Ironside, the
king, was murdered by the Danes in 1016, after he
had defeated them here. The most famous, however,
of all the Brentford inns, the Three Pigeons, was
brutally demolished many years ago, although it had
associations with Shakespeare and ' rare ' Ben Jonson.
The ' Tumbledown Dick,' another vanished hostelry,
whose sign was a satire on the nerveless rule and
swift overthrow of the Protector's son, Richard
Cromwell, was a well-known house ; while the names
of some of the old yards — Green Dragon Yard and
Catherine Wheel Yard — are reminiscent of once-
popular signs.
Then Brentford has the queerest of street names.
What think you of 'Half Acre' for the style and
title of a thoroughfare ? or ' Town Moadow,' which is
less a meadow than a slum ? Then there are ' The
Butts,' with some fine, dignified Queen Anne and
Georgian red-brick houses, situated in a quiet spot
behind the High Street ; and ' The Hollows,' a
thoroughfare hollow no longer, if ever it was.
Fronting on to the High Street is the broad and

62 THE EXETER ROAD
massive old stone tower of St. Lawrence's Church,
the parish church of the so-called ' New ' Brentford,
itself old beyond compute. The tower dates back
four hundred years or so, but the body of the church
was rebuilt in Georgian days and is very like, and
only a little less hideous than, the gasworks up the
street. An extraordinary story is told by Cyrus Redding,
in his Fifty Years' Recollections, of a countryman's
adventures in London just before the introduction of
railways. The adventures began at Brentford : ' I
had a relative,' he says, ' who, on stating his inten
tion to come up to town, was solicited to accept as
his fellow-traveller a man of property, a neighbour,
who had never been thirty miles from home in his
life. They travelled by coach. All went well till
they reached Brentford, where the countryman sup
posed he was nearly come to his journey's end. On
seeing the lamps mile after mile, he expressed more
and more impatience, exclaiming, " Are we not yet in
London, and so many miles of lamps ? " At length,
on reaching Hyde Park Corner, he was told they had
arrived. His impatience increased from thence to
Lad Lane. He became overwhelmed with astonish
ment. They entered the " Swan with Two Necks,"
and my relative bade his companion remain in the
coffee-room until he returned. On returning, he
found the bird flown, and for six lonp; weeks there
were no tidings of him. At length it was discovered
that he was in the custody of the constables at Sher
borne in Dorsetshire, his mind alienated. He was
conveyed home, came partially to his reason for a

SION 63
short time, and died. It was gathered from him that
he had become more and more confused at the lights
and the long distances he was carried among them ;
it seemed as if they could have no end. The idea
that he could never be extricated from such a
labyrinth superseded every other. He could not
bear the thought. He went into the street, inquired
his way westward, and seemed to have got into Hyde
Park, and then out again into the Great Western Road,
walking until he could walk no longer. He could re
late nothing more that occurred until he was secured.
Neither his watch nor money had been taken from him.'
The country-folks who now journey up to town do
not behave in this extraordinary fashion on coming
to the infinitely greater and more distracting London
of to-day. At the western end of Brentford, just removed
from its muddy streets, is Sion, the Duke of North
umberland's suburban residence. The great square
embattled stone house stands in the midst of the
park, screened from observation from the road by
great clusters of forest trees. Through the ornamental
classic stone screen and iron gateway, erected in the
well-known 'Adam style' by John Adam about
1780, the green sward may be glimpsed; the fresher
and more beautiful by contrast with the dusty high
road. Above the arched stone entrance stands the
Percy Lion, statant, as heralds would say, with tail
extended. Sion is well named, for no fairer scene can be
imagined than this in the long days of summer, when
the lovely gardens are at their best and the Thames

64 THE EXETER ROAD
flows by the park with glittering golden ripples.
The Daughters of Sion, whose religious retreat this
was, belonged to the Order of St. Bridget. Their
abbey, with its lands and great revenues, was sup
pressed and confiscated by Henry the Eighth in 1532.
Nine years later his Queen, Katherine Howard, was
imprisoned within the desecrated walls before being
handed over to the headsman, and in another seven
years the body of the King himself lay here a night
on its journey to Windsor. There is a horrid story
that tells how the unwieldy corpse of the bloated
royal monster burst, and how the dogs drank his
blood. In the reign of his daughter, Queen Mary, Sion
enjoyed a few years' restitution of its rights and
property, but when Elizabeth ascended the throne,
the ' Daughters ' were finally dispossessed. They
wandered to Flanders, and thence, by devious ways,
and with many hardships, eventually to Lisbon.
The Abbey of Sion yet exists there, and the sisters
are still solely Englishwomen. It is on record that
they still cherish the hope of returning to their lost
home by the banks of the Thames, and have to this
day the keys of that abbey. Seventy years or so
since, the then Duke of Northumberland, travelling
in Portugal, called upon them, and was told of this
fond belief. They even showed him the kevs. But
he was equal to the occasion, and cynically remarked
that the locks had been altered since those days !

HOUNSLOW

65

X
Hounslow, to which we now come, being situated,
like all the other places between this and Hyde Park
Corner, on the Bath Road, as well as on the road

THE 'BELL, HOUNSLOW.
to Exeter, has been referred to at some length in the
book on that highway. Coming to the place again,
there seems no reason to alter or add much to what
was said in those pages. The long, long uninteresting-
street is just as sordid as ever, and the very few
houses of any note facing it are fewer. There re
mains, it is true, that old coaching inn, the ' George,'
modernised with discretion, and at the parting of the
F

66 THE EXETER ROAD
ways the gallows-like sign of the ' Bell ' still keeps
its place on the footpath, with the old original bell
still depending from it, although, at the moment of
writing, the house itself is being pulled down. But
the angle where the roads divide is under revision,
and the hoardings that now hide from sight the old
shops and the red-brick house, with high-pitched roof
and dormer windows, that has stood here so long, will
give place shortly to some modern building with
plate-glass shop-fronts and a general air of aggressive
modernity which will be another link gone with the
Hounslow of the past. Thus it is that an illustration
is shown here of the ' parting of the ways ' before the
transformation is complete ; for although the fork of
the roads leading to places so distant from this point,
and from one another, as Bath and Exeter must
needs always lend something to the imagination, yet
a commonplace modern street building cannot, for
another hundred years, command respect or be worth
sketching, even for the sake of the significant spot
on which it stands.
The would-be decorative gas -lamp that stands
here in the centre of the road bears two tin tablets
inscribed respectively, ' To Slough ' and ' To Staines,'
in a somewhat parochial fashion. They had no
souls, those people who inscribed these legends. Did
they not know that we stand here upon highways
famed in song and story ; not merely the flat and
uninteresting seven and ten miles respectively to
Staines and Slough, but the hundred and fifty-five
miles to Exeter and the ninety -five miles to Bath ?
Here, then, we see the Bath Road going off to the

HOUNSLOW : THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.

AN OLD COACHMAN 69
right and the Exeter Road to the left in semi-suburban
fashion. Had it not been for the winter fogs this
level stretch would have invariably been the delight
of the old coachmen ; but when the roads were
wrapped in obscurity they were hard put to it to
keep on the highway. Sometimes they did not even
succeed in doing so, but drove instead into the
noisome ditches, filled with evil-smelling black mud,
which at that time divided the road from Hounslow
Heath. Charles Ward, whom the coaching critics of his
age united to honour as an artist with ' the ribbons,'
drove the famous Exeter ' Telegraph ' the thirty miles
to Bagshot, reaching that village usually at 11 p.m.,
and taking the up coach from thence to London at
four o'clock in the morning. He tells how in the
winter the mails had often to be escorted out of
London with flaring torches, seven or eight mails
following one another, the guard of the foremost
lighting the one following, and so on, travelling at
a slow pace, like a funeral procession. ' Many times,'
he says, ' I have been three hours going from London
to Hounslow. I remember one very foggy night,
instead of arriving at Bagshot at eleven o'clock, I
did not get there till one in the morning. On my
way back to town, when the fog was very bad, I was
coming over Hounslow Heath, when I reached the
spot where the old powder-mills used to stand. I
saw several lights in the road and heard voices which
induced me to stop. The old Exeter mail, which
left Bagshot thirty minutes before I did, had met
with a singular accident. It was driven by a man

70 THE EXETER ROAD
named Gambier ; his leaders had come in contact
with a hay-cart on its way to London, which caused
them to suddenly turn round, break the pole, and
blunder down a steep embankment, at the bottom
of which was a narrow deep ditch, filled with water
and mud. The mail coach pitched on the stump of
a willow tree that overhung the ditch ; the coachman
and the outside passengers were thrown over into the
meadow beyond, and the horses went into the ditch.
The unfortunate wheelers were drowned or smothered
in the mud. There were two inside passengers, who
were extricated with some difficulty, but fortunately
no one was injured. I managed to take the pas
sengers with the guard and mail bags on to London,
leaving the coachman to wait for daylight before he
could make an attempt to get the mail up the
embankment. They endeavoured to accomplish this
with cart horses and chains, and they had nearly
reached the top of the bank when something gave
way, and the poor old mail went back into the ditch
again. I shall never forget the scene. There were
about a dozen men from the powder-mills trying to
render assistance, and with their black faces, each
bearing a torch in his hand, they presented a curious
spectacle. This happened about 1840. Posts and
rails were erected at the spot after the accident. I
passed the place in 1870, and they were there still,
as well as the old pollard willow stump.'
The old-time associations of Hounslow Heath are
almost forgotten now, for, where Claude du VaU and
Dick Turpin waited patiently for travellers, there are
nowadays long rows of suburban villas which have

HIGH W A YMEN 7 1
long since changed the dreary scene. Nothing so
romantic as the meeting of the lawyer with the
redoubtable Dick is likely to befall the traveller in
these times : —
As Turpin was riding on Hounslow Heath,
A lawyer there he chanced for to meet,
Who said, ' Kind sir, ain't you afraid
Of Turpin, that mischievous blade 1 '
' Oh ! no, sir,' says Turpin, ' I've been more acute,
I've hidden my money all in my boot.'
' And mine,' says the lawyer, ' the villain can't find,
For I have sewed it into my cape behind.'
They rode till they came to the Powder Mill,
When Turpin bid the lawyer for to stand still.
' Good sir,' quoth he, ' that cape must come off,
For my horse stands in need of a saddle-cloth.'
' Ah, well,' says the lawyer, ' I'm very compliant,
I'll put it all right with my next coming client.'
' Then,' says Turpin, ' we're both of a trade, never doubt it,
Only you rob by law, and I rob without it.'
The last vestige is gone of the bleak and barren
aspect of the road, and even the singular memorial
of a murder, which, according to the writer of a road
book published in 1802, stood near by, has vanished :
' Upon a spot of Hounslow Heath, about a stone's
throw from the road, on leaving that village, a small
wood monument is shockingly marked with a bloody
hand and knife, and the following inscription : " Buried
with a stake through his body here, the wicked mur
derer, John Pretor, who cut the throat of his wife
and child, and poisoned himself, July 6, 1765."

72

THE EXETER ROAD

XI
It is a splendidly surfaced road that runs hence
to Staines, and the fact is sufficiently well known for
it to be crowded on Saturday afternoons and Sundays
with cyclists of the ' scorcher ' variety, members of
cycling clubs out for a holiday, and taking their

THE ' GREEN MAN, HATTON.
pleasure at sixteen miles an hour, Indian file, hang
ing on to one another's back wheel, with shoulders
humped over handle-bars and eyes for nothing but
the road surface.
But there are quiet, deserted bye-lanes where these
highway crowds never come. Just such a lane is
that which leads off here, by the river Crane and
the Bedfont Powder Mills, to the right, and makes

HATTON 73
for Hatton — ¦' Hatton-in-the-Hinterland,' one might
well call it.
Have you ever been to Hatton ? Have you,
indeed, ever even heard of it ? I suppose not, for
Hatton is a remote hamlet, tucked away in that
triangular corner of Middlesex situated between the
branching Bath and Exeter Roads which is practically
unexplored. Yet the place, after the uninteresting,
unrelieved flatness of the market gardens that stretch
for miles around, is almost pretty. It boasts a few
isolated houses, and has (what is more to the point in
this connection) a neat and cheerful-looking old inn,
fronted by a large horse-pond.
The ' Green Man ' at Hatton looks nowadays a
guileless place, with no secrets, and yet it possesses
behind that innocent exterior a veritable highway
man's hiding-place. This retiring -place of modest
worth, eager to escape from the embarrassing atten
tions of the outer world, may be seen by the curious
traveller in the little bar-parlour on the left hand as
you enter the front door.
It is a narrow, low -ceiled room, with an old-
fashioned fire - grate in it, filling what was once a
huge chimney-corner. At the back of this grate is
a hole leading to a passage which gives access to a
cavernous nook in the thickness of the wall. Through
this hole, decentlv covered at most times with an
.innocent -looking fire -back, crawled those exquisite
knights of the road, what time the Bow Street
runners were questing almost at their heels.
And here, it is related, one of these fine fellows
nearly revealed his presence while the officers of the

74

THE EXETER ROAD

law were refreshing themselves with a dram in that
room. What with a cold in the head, and the
accumulated soot and dust of his hiding-place, he
could not help sneezing, although his very life

THE HIGHWAYMAN'S RETREAT, THE ' GREEN MAN.'
depended on the question 'To sneeze or not to
sneeze.' The minions of the law were not so far gone in
liquor but that they heard the muffled sound of that
sneeze, and it took all the landlord's eloquence to
persuade them that it was the cat !
Where footpads and highwaymen lurked on the

MARKET GARDENS 75
scrubby heath, and the troopers of King James the
Second, sent here to overawe London, lay encamped,
there stretch nowadays the broad market gardens,
where in spring-time the yellow daffodils, and in
early summer the wallflowers, are grown by the
acre for Covent Garden and the delight of Londoners.
Orchards and vast fields of vegetables take up almost
all the rest of the reclaimed waste, and if the country
for many miles be indeed as flat as, or flatter than, your
hand, and with never a tree but the scraggy hedgerow
elms that grow here in such fantastic shapes, why
amends are made in the scent of the blossoms, the
bounteous promise of nature, and in the free and
open air that resounds with the gladsome shrilling
of the lark.
These market gardens that surround London have
an interest all their own. Such scenes as that of
Millet's 'Angelus' — the rough toil, that is to say,
without the devotion — are the commonplaces of these
wide fields, stretching away, level, to the horizon.
All day long the men, women, and children are
working, according to the season, in the damp, heavy
clay, or in the sun-baked rows of growing produce,
digging, hoeing, sowing, weeding, or gathering the
cabbages, potatoes, peas, lettuces, and beans that go
to furnish the myriad tables of the ' Wen of wens,' as
Cobbett savagely calls London. He thought very
little of Hounslow Heath, which he describes as ' a
sample of all that is bad in soil and villainous in
look. Yet,' he says, writing in 1825, ' all this is now
enclosed, and what they call " cultivated."
What they call cultivated ! That is indeed

76 THE EXETER ROAD
excellent. It would be well if Cobbett could take
a ' Rural Ride ' over the Heath to-day and see this
cultivation, not merely so called, which raises some
of the finest market -garden produce ever seen, and
supplies London with the most beautiful spring
blossoms. If it would not suffice to see the growing
crops, it would perhaps be better to watch the loading
of the clumsy market waggons with the gathered
wealth of the soil. Tier upon tier of cabbages,
neatly packed to an alarming height ; bundles of
the finest lettuces ; bushels of peas ; in short, a
bounteous quantity of every domestic vegetable you
care to name, being packed for the lumbering,
rumbling, three - miles - an - hour journey overnight
from the market gardens to the early morning babel
of Covent Garden.
The market waggons, going to London, or re
turning about eight o'clock in the morning, form,
in short, one of the most characteristic features of
the first fifteen miles of this road. The waggoners,
more often than not asleep, are jogged up to town
by the philosophic horses who know the way just
as well as the blinking fellows who are supposed to
drive them. Drive them ? One can just imagine
the horse - laughs of those particularly knowing
animals, who move along quite independently of
the reclining figure above, stretched full length,
face downwards, on the mountainous pile of smelly
cabbages, if the idea could be conveyed to them.
There is an exquisite touch of appropriateness in
the fact that on converted Hounslow Heath, where
these terrors of the peaceful traveller formerly

A REFORMATORY 77
practised their unlicensed trade, reformatories should
be nowadays established. One of them, called by
the prettier name of the ' Feltham Industrial School,'
is placed just to the south of the road, near East
Bedfont. It houses and educates for honest careers
the young criminals and the waifs and strays brought
before the Middlesex magistrates. The neighbour
hood of this huge institution is made evident to
the traveller across these widespreading levels by the
strange sight of a full-sized, fully-rigged ship on the
horizon. The stranger who journeys this way and
has always supposed Hounslow Heath to be anything
rather than the neighbour to a seaport, feels in some
doubt as to the evidence of his senses or the accuracy
of his geographical recollections. Strange, he thinks,
that he should have forgotten the sea estuary on
which the Heath borders, or the ship canal that
traverses these wilds. But if he inquires of any
one with local knowledge whom he may meet, he
will learn that this is the model training-ship built
in the grounds of the Industrial School. The
' Endeavour,' as she is called, if not registered Al
at Lloyd's, or not at all a seaworthy craft, is at any
rate well found in the technical details of masts and
spars, and the rigging appropriate to a schooner-
rigged Blackwall liner. Those among the seven
hundred or so of the young vagabonds who are being
educated here in the way they should go — those among
them who think they would like a life on the bounding
main, are here taught to climb the rigging with the
agility of cats ; to furl the sails or shake them free,
or to keep a sharp look-out for the iron reefs that

78 THE EXETER ROAD
lurk on the inhospitable coasts of Hounslow Heath,
lest all on board should be cast away and utterly
undone. It is an odd experience to walk around the
great hull, half submerged — half buried, that is to
say — in the asphalt paths of the parade ground, but
the oddest experiences must be those of the boys who,
when they get aboard a floating ship, come to it
thoroughly trained in everything save ' sea - legs '
and the keeping of an easy stomach when the breezes
blow and the surges rock the vessel.

XII
The village of East Bedfont, three miles from
Hounslow, is a picturesque surprise, after the long
flat road. The highway suddenly broadens out here,
and gives place to a wide village green, with a pond,
and real ducks ! and an even more real village church
whose wooden extinguisher spire peeps out from a
surrounding cluster of trees, and from behind a couple
of fantastically clipped yews guarding the churchyard
gate. The ' Bedfont Peacocks,' as they are called, are not
so perfect as they were when first cut in 1704, for the
trimming of them was long neglected, and these
curiously clipped evergreens require constant atten
tion. The date on one side, and the churchwardens'
initials of the period on the other, once standing out
boldly, are now only to be discerned by the Eye of
Faith. The story of the Peacocks is that they were

THE BEDFONT PEACOCKS

79

cut at the costs and charges of a former inhabitant of
the village, who, proposing in turn to two sisters also
living here, was scornfully refused by them. They
were, says the legend, ' as proud as peacocks,' and the
mortified suitor chose this spiteful method of
typifying the fact. Of course, the story was retailed
to travellers on passing through Bedfont by every

EAST BEDFONT.

coachman and guard ; nor, indeed, would it be at all
surprising to learn that they, in fact, really invented
it, for they were masters in the art of romancing. So
the fame of the Peacocks grew. An old writer at
once celebrates them, and the then landlord of the
' Black Dog,' in the rather neat verse : —
Harvey, whose inn commands a view
Of Bedfont's church and churchyard too,
Where yew-trees into peacocks shorn,
In vegetable torture mourn.

80 THE EXETER ROAD
At length they were immortalised by Hood, the
elder, in a quite serious poem : —
Where erst two haughty maidens used to be,
In pride of plume, where plumy Death hath trod,
Trailing their gorgeous velvet wantonly,
Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod ;
There, gentle stranger, thou may'st only see
Two sombre peacocks. Age, with sapient nod,
Marking the spot, still tarries to declare
How once they lived, and wherefore they are there.
Alas ! that breathing vanity should go
Where pride is buried ; like its very ghost,
Unrisen from the naked bones below,
In novel flesh, clad in the silent boast
Of gaudy silk that flutters to and fro,
Shedding its chilling superstition most
On young and ignorant natures as is wont
To haunt the peaceful churchyard of Bedfont !
If any one can unravel the sense from the tangled
lines of the second verse,- — as obscure as some of
Browning's poetry — let him account himself clever.
The ' Black Dog,' once the halting-place of the long
extinct ' Driving Club,' of which the late Duke of
Beaufort was a member, has recently been demolished.
A large villa stands on the site of it, at the corner of
the Green, as the village is left behind.
The flattest of flat, and among the straightest of
straight, roads is this which runs from East Bedfont
into Staines. That loyal bard, John Taylor, the
' Water Poet,' was along this route on his way to the
Isle of Wight in 1647. He started from the ' Rose,'

STAINES 8 i
in Holborn, on Thursday, 19th October, in the
Southampton coach : —
We took one coach, two coachmen, and four horses,
And merrily from London made our courses,
We wheel'd the top of the heavy hill call'd Holborn
(Up which hath been full many a sinful soul borne),
And so along we jolted to St. Giles's,
Which place from Brentford six, or nearly seven, miles is,
To Staines that night at five o'clock we coasted,
Where, at the Bush, we had bak'd, boil'd, and roasted.

XIII
Staines, where the road leaves Middlesex and crosses
the Thames into Surrey, is almost as commonplace a
little town as it is possible to find within the home
counties. Late Georgian and Early Victorian stuccoed
villas and square, box-like, quite uninteresting houses
struggle for numerical superiority over later buildings
in the long High Street, and the contest is not an
exciting one. Staines, sixteen miles from London, is,
in fact, of that nondescript — ' neither fish, flesh, fowl,
nor good red-herring' — character that belongs to places
situated in the marches of town and country. Almost
everything of interest has vanished, and although the
railway has come to Staines, it has not brought with
it the life and bustle that are generally conferred by
railways on places near London. But, of course,
Staines is on the London and South-Western Railway,
which explains everything. G

82 THE EXETER ROAD
Staines disputes with Colnbrook, on the Bath
Road, the honour of having been the Roman station
of Ad Pontes, and has the best of it, according to the
views of the foremost authorities. ' At the Bridges '
would doubtless have been an excellently descriptive
name for either place, in view of the number of
streams at both, and the bridges necessary to cross
them ; but the very name of Staines should of itself
be almost sufficient to prove the Roman origin of the
place, even if the Roman remains found in and about
it were not considered conclusive evidence. There are
those who derive ' Staines ' from the ancient stone
still standing on the north bank of the Thames, above
the bridge, marking the historic boundary up-stream
of the jurisdiction exercised over the river by the City
of London ; but there can be no doubt of its real
origin in the paved Roman highway, a branch of the
Akeman Street, on which this former military station
of Ad Pontes stood. The stones of the old road yet
remained when the Saxons overran the countrv, and
it was named ' the Stones ' by that people, from the
fact of being on a paved highway. The very many
places in this county with the prefixes, Stain, Stone,
Stan, Street, Streat,and Stret,all,or nearly all, originate
in the paved Roman roads (or 'streets') and fords;
and there is little to support another theorv, that the
name of Staines came from a Roman milliarium, or
milestone, which may or may not have stood some
where here on the road.
The stone column, very like a Roman altar, standing
on three steps and a square panelled plinth, and
placed in a meadow on the north bank of the river, is

STAINES STONE 83
known variously as ' Staines Stone,' and ' London
Stone.' It marks the place where the upper and lower
Thames meet ; is the boundary line of Middlesex and
Buckinghamshire ; and is also the boundary mark
of the Metropolitan Police District. Besides these
manifold and important offices, it also delimits the
western boundary of the area comprised within the
old London Coal and Wine Duties Acts, by which a
tax, similar to the octroi still in force at the outskirts
of many Continental towns, was levied on all coals,
coke, and cinders, and all wines, entering London.
Renewed from time to time, the imposts were finally
abolished in 1889, but the old posts with cast-iron
inscriptions detailing the number and date of the
several Acts of Parliament under which these dues
were levied, are still to be found beside the roads,
rivers, and canals around London.
Much weather-worn and dilapidated, ' London
Stone ' still retains long inscriptions giving the
names of the Lord Mayors who have officially visited
the spot as ex-officio chairmen of the Thames Con
servancy : —
Conservators of Thames from mead to mead,
Great guardians of small sprites that swim the flood,
Warders of London Stone,
as Tom Hood mock-heroically sings.
Above all is the deeply cut aspiration, ' God
Preserve the City of London, a.d. 1280.' The pious
prayer has been answered, and six hundred and
twenty years later the City has been, like David,
delivered out of the hands of the spoiler and from

84

THE EXETER ROAD

the enemies that compassed it round about ; by
which Royal Commissions and the London County
Council may be understood.
If the Roman legionaries could return to Ad

THE STAINES STONE.

Pontes and see Staines Bridge and the hideous iron
girder bridge by which the London and South
western Railway crosses the Thames they would -be
genuinely astonished. The first-named, which is the
stone bridge built by Rennie in IS 32, carries the

AD PONTES 85
Exeter Road over the river, and is of a severe classic
aspect which might find favour with the resurrected
Romans ; but what could they think of the other ?
We may see an additional importance in this situa
tion of Ad Pontes in the fact that between Staines
Bridge and London Bridge there was anciently no
other passage across the river, save by the hazardous
expedient of fording it at certain points. The only
way to the West of England in mediaeval times, it
was then of wood, and zealously kept in repair by
the grant of trees from the Royal Forest of Windsor
and by the pontage, or bridge toll levied from
passengers. Still, it was often broken down by
floods. The poet Gay, in his Journey to Exeter, says,
passing Hounslow : —
Thence, o'er wide shrubby heaths, and furrowed lanes,
We come, where Thames divides the meads of Staines.
We ferried o'er ; for late the Winter's flood
Shook her frail bridge, and tore her piles of wood.
That would probably have been about the year 1720.
In 1791 an Act of Parliament authorised the building
of a new bridge, and accordingly a stone structure
was begun, and eventually opened in 1797. This
had to be demolished, almost immediately, owing to
a failure of one of its piers, and an iron bridge was
built in its stead, presently to meet with much the
same fate. This, then, gave place to the existing
bridge. The1 ' Vine Inn,' which once stood by the bridge and
was a welcome sight to travellers, has disappeared,
together with most of the old hostelries that once

86 THE EXETER ROAD
rendered Staines a town of inns. Gone, too, is the
' Bush,' and others, although not demolished, have
either retired into private life, or are disguised as
commonplace shops. The 'Angel' still remains,
but not the ' Blue Boar,' kept, according to Dean
Swift, by the quarrelsome couple, Phyllis and John.
Phyllis had run away from home on her wedding
morn with John, who was her father's groom, and a
good-for-naught. At the inn they were installed at
last, John as the drunken landlord, Phyllis as the
kind landlady : —
They keep at Staines the Old Blue Boar,
Are cat and dog —
and other things unfitted for ears polite.
The church is without interest, but there lies in
its churchyard, among the other saints and sinners,
Lady Letitia Lade, the foul-mouthed cast-off chere
amie of the Prince Regent, who married her off to
John Lade, his coachman, whom he knighted for his
complaisance.

XIV
Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to
Egham, once devoted almost wholly to the coaching
interest, then the scene of suburban race-meetings,
and now that those blackguardly orgies have been
suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb — dusty, un
interesting. The old church has been modernised,

RUNE MEDE 87
and the old coaching inns either mere beer-shops or
else improved away altogether. The last one to
remain in its old form — the ' Catherine Wheel ' — has
recently lost all its old roadside character, and has
become very much up-to-date.
Here we are upon the borders of Windsor Great
Park, and a road turning off to the right hand leads
beside the Thames to Old Windsor, past Cooper's
Hill and within sight of Runemede and Magna Charta
island, where the ' Palladium of our English liberties '
was wrung from the unwilling King John. A public
reference to the ' Palladium ' used unfailingly to
' bring down the house,' but it has been left to the
present generation to view the very spot where it
was granted, not only without a quickening of the
pulse, but with the suspicion of a yawn. You
cannot expect reverence from people who possibly
saw King John as the central and farcical figure of
last year's pantomime, with a low-comedy nose and
an expression of ludicrous terror, handing Magna
Charta to baronial supers armoured with polished
metal dish-covers for breastplates and saucepans for
helmets. ' Nothing is sacred to a sapper,' is a saying
that arose in Napoleon's campaigns. Let us, in these
piping times of peace, change the figure, and say,
' Nothing is sacred to a librettist.'
Long years before Egham ever became a coaching-
village, in the dark ages of road travel, when inns
were scarce and travellers few, the ' Bells of Ouseley,'
the old-fashioned riverside inn along this bye-road,
was a place of greater note than it is now. Although
forgotten by the crowds who keep the high-road, it is

88 THE EXETER ROAD
an inn happier in its situation than most, for it stands
on the banks of the Thames at one of its most
picturesque points, just below Old Windsor.
The sign, showing five bells on a blue ground,
derives its name from the once-famed bells of the
long-demolished Oseney Abbey at Oxford, celebrated,

THE 'BELLS OF OUSELEY. '
before the Reformation swept them away, for their
silvery tones, which are said to have surpassed even
those Bells of Shandon
Which sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lea,
of which ' Father Prout ' sang some forty -five years
ago. The abbey, however, possessed six bells. They
were named Douce, Clement, Austin, Hauctetor,
Gabriel, and John.

THE 'BELLS OF OUSELEY' 89
The ' Bells of Ouseley ' had at one time a reputa
tion for a very much less innocent thing than
picturesqueness, for a hundred and fifty years ago, or
thereabouts, it was very popular with the worst class
of footpads, who were used to waylay travellers by
the shore, or on the old Bath and Exeter Roads, and,
robbing them, were not content, but, practically
applying the axiom that ' dead men tell no tales,'
gave their victims a knock over the head, and,
tying them in sacks, heaved them into the river.
These be legends, and legends are not always truth
ful, but it is a fact that, some years ago, when the
Thames Conservancy authorities were dredging the
bed of the river just here, they found the remains of a
sack and the perfect skeleton of a human being.

XV
Regarding the country through which the road
passes, between Kensington, Egham, Sunningdale,
Virginia Water, and Bagshot, Cobbett has some
characteristic things to say. Between Hammersmith
and Egham it is ' as flat as a pancake,' and the soil
' a nasty stony dirt upon a bed of gravel' Sunning-
hill and Sunningdale, 'all made into "grounds" and
gardens by tax-eaters,' are at the end of a ' black
guard heath,' and are ' not far distant from the Stock
jobbing crew. The roads are level, and they are
smooth. The wretches can go from the "'Change"
without any danger to their worthless necks.'

90 THE EXETER ROAD
There are now, sad to say, after the lapse of nearly
eighty years, a great many more of the ' crew ' here,
and they journey to and from Capel Court with
even less danger to their necks, bad luck to them !
Egham Hill surmounted, the Holloway College for
Women is a prominent object on the left-hand side of
the road, the fad of Thomas Holloway, whose thump
ing big fortune was derived from the advertising
enterprise which lasted wellnigh two generations,
and during the most of that period rendered the
advertisement columns of London and provincial
papers hideous with beastly illustrations of suppura
ting limbs, and the horrid big type inquiry, ' Have
you a Bad Leg ? ' Pills and ointments, what sovereign
specifics you are — towards the accumulation of wealth !
All-powerful unguents, how beneficent — towards the
higher education of woman !
No less a sum than £600,000 was expended on
the building and equipment of this enormous range
of buildings, opened in 1887, and provided royally
with everything a college requires except students,
whose number yet falls far short of_the three hundred
and fifty the place is calculated to house and teach.
A fine collection of the works of modern English
painters is to be seen here, where study is made
easy for the ' girl graduates ' by the provision of
luxuriously appointed class-rooms and shady nooks
where ' every pretty domina can study the pheno
mena ' of integral calculus and other domestic sciences.
It seems a waste of good money that, although a sum
equal to £500 a year for each student is expended
on the higher education of women here, no prophetess

VIRGINIA WATER 91
has yet issued from Egham with a message for the
world; and that, consequently, Mr. Thomas Hollo
way and his medicated grease have as yet missed that
posthumous fame for which so big a bid was made.
In two miles Virginia Water is reached, passing
on the right hand the plantations of Windsor Great
Park. To this spot runs every day in summer-time
the 'Old Times' coach, which,' first put on this road
in the spring of 1879, kept running every season
until 1886, when it was transferred to the Brighton
Road, there to become famous through Selby's historic
' record ' drive. Another coach, called the ' Express,'
was put on the Virginia Water trip in 1886 and 1887;
but, following upon Selby's death in the November
of the latter year, the ' Old Times ' was reinstated on
this route, and has been running ever since, leaving
the Hotel Victoria, Northumberland Avenue, every
week-day morning for the ' Wheatsheaf,' and return
ing in the evening.
This same ' Wheatsheaf ' is probably one of the
very ugliest houses that ever bedevilled a country
road, and looks like a great public-house wrenched
bodily from London streets and dropped down here
at a venture. But it is for all that a very popular place
with the holiday-makers who come here to explore
the beauties and the curiosities of Virginia Water.
There are artificial lakes here, just within the
Park of Windsor — lakes which give the place its name,
and made so long ago that Nature in her kindly way
has obliterated all traces of their artificiality. It is a
hundred years since this pleasance of Virginia Water
was formed by imprisoning the rivulets that run into

92 THE EXETER ROAD
this hollow, and banking up the end of it ; nearly a
hundred years since the Ruined Temple was built as
a ready-made ruin ; and there is no more, nor indeed
any other such, delightful spot near London. It is
quite a pity to come by the knowledge that the ruins
were imported from Greece and Carthage, because
without that knowledge who knows what romance
could not be weaved around those graceful columns,
amid the waters and the wilderness ? Beyond Virginia
Water we come to Sunningdale.
From Turnham Green to Staines, and thence to
Shrub's Hill we are on the old Roman Road to that
famous town whicli has been known at different
periods of its existence as Aquae Solis, Akemanceaster,
and Bath. The Saxons called the road Akeman Street.
Commencing at a junction with the Roman Watling
Street at the point where the Marble Arch now stands,
it proceeded along the Bayswater Road, and so by
Notting Hill, past Shepherd's Bush, and along the
Goldhawk Road, where, instead of turning sharply to
the left like the existing road that leads to Young's
Corner, it continued its straight course through the
district now occupied by the modern artistic colony
of Bedford Park, falling into the present Chiswick
High Road somewhere between Turnham Green and
Gunnersbury. Through Brentford, Hounslow, and
Staines the last vestiges of the actual Roman Road
were lost in the alterations carried out for the
improvement of the highway under the provisions of
the Hounslow and Basingstoke Road Improvement
Act of 1728, but there can be little doubt that the
road traffic of to-day from Hounslow to Shrub's Hill

ROMAN ROADS 93
follows in the tracks of the pioneers who built the
original road in a.d. 43; while as for old-world Brent
ford, it would surprise no one if the veritable Roman
paving were found deep down below its High Street,
long buried in the silt and mud that have raised the
level of the highway at the ford from which the place-
name derives.
The present West of England road turns off from
the Akeman Street at the bend in the highway at
Shrub's Hill, leaving the Roman way to continue in
an unfaltering straight line across the scrubby wastes
and solitudes of Broadmoor, to Finchampsteacl, Strat-
fieldsaye, and Silchester. It is there known to the
country folk as the ' Nine Mile Ride ' and the ' Devil's
Highway.' The prefix of the place-name ' Stratfield-
saye,' as a matter of fact, derives from its situation
on this ' street.' Silchester is the site of the Roman
city Calleva Atrebatum, and the excavated ruins of
this British Pompeii prove how important a place
this was, standing as it did at the fork of the roads
leading respectively to Aquae. Solis, and to Isca
Damnoniorum, the Exeter of a later age. Branching
off here to Isca, the Roman road was for the rest
of the way to the West known as the Via Iceniana,
the Icen Way, and was perhaps regarded as a continua
tion of what is now called the Icknield Street, the
road which runs diagonally to Norfolk and Suffolk,
the country of the Iceni.
Very little of this old Roman road on its way to
the West is identical with any of the three existing
routes to Exeter. There is that length just named,
from Gunnersbury to Shrub's Hill ; another piece, a

94 THE EXETER ROAD
mile or so from Andover onward, by the Weyhill route ;
the crossing of the modern highway between ' Wood
yates Inn ' and Thorney Down ; and from Dorchester
to Bridport, where, as Gay says of his cavaliers'
journey to Exeter : —
Now on true Roman way our horses sound,
Graevius would kneel and kiss the sacred ground.
Onwards to Exeter the measurements of Antoninus
and his fellows — those literally ' classic ' forerunners of
Ogilby, Cary, Paterson, and Mogg — are hazy in the
extreme, and it is difficult to say how the Roman
road entered into the Queen City of the West.
Oh ! for one hour with the author of the Antonine
Itinerary, to settle the vexed questions of routes and
stations along this road to the country of the Damnonii.
' Here,' one would say to him, ' is your starting-point,
Londinium, which we call London. Very good ; now
kindly tell us whether we are correct in giving Staines
as the place you call Ad Pontes ; and is Egham the
site of Bibractef Calleva we have identified with
Silchester, but where was your next station,
Vindomis ? Was it St. Mary Bourne ? '
In the meanwhile, until spiritualism becomes more
of an exact science, we must be content with our own
deductions, and, with the aid of the Ordnance map,
trace the Roman Via Iceniana hy Quarley Hill and
Grateley to the hill of Old Sarum, which is readily
identified as the station of Sorbiodunum. Thence it
goes by Stratford Toney to ' Woodyates Inn ' and
Gussage Cow Down, where the utterly vanished
Vindogladia is supposed to have stood. Between

THE HEATHS 95
this and Dorchester there was another post whose
name and position are alike unknown, although the
course of the road may yet be faintly traced past the
fortified hill of Badbury Rings, the Mons Badonicus
of King Arthur's defeat, to Tincleton and Stinsford,
and so into Dorchester, the Durnovaria of the
Romans, through what was the Eastgate of that city.
The names and sites of two more stations westward
are lost, and the situation of Moridunum, the next-
named post, is so uncertain that such widely sundered
places as Seaton, on the Dorset coast, and Honiton, in
Devon, eighteen miles farther, are given for it.
Moreeomblake, a mile from Seaton, is, however, the
most likely site. Thence, on to Exeter, this Roman
military way is lost.

XVI
From Virginia Water up to the crest of Shrub's
Hill, Sunningdale, is a distance of a mile and a quarter,
and beyond, all the way into Bagshot, is a region of
sand and fir-trees and attempts at cultivation, varied
by newly-built villas, where considerable colonies of
Cobbett's detested stock-jobbers and, other business
men from the ' Wen of wens ' have set up country
quarters. And away to right and left, for miles
upon miles, stretches that wild country known vari
ously as Bagshot and Ascot Heaths and Chobham
Ridges. The extensive and dreary-looking tract of land,

96 THE EXETER ROAD
still wild and barren for the most part, called Bagshot
Heath, has during the last century been the scene of
many attempts made to bring it under cultivation.
These populous times are ill-disposed to the continued
existence of waste and unproductive lands, which,
when near London, are especially valuable, if they
can be made to grow anything at all. One thing
which, above all others, has led to the beginning of
the end of these old-time wildernesses, formerly the
haunts of highwaymen, is the modern discovery of
the country and of the benefits of fresh air. When
the nineteenth century was yet young the townsman
still retained the old habits of thought which regarded
the heaths and the hills with aversion. He pigged
away his existence over his shop or warehouse in the
City, and thought the country fit only for the semi-
savages who grew the fruit and vegetables that helped
to supply his table, or cultivated the wheat of which
his daily bread was compounded. It has been left to
us, his descendants, to love the wilds, and thus it is
that villa homes are springing up amid the heaths
and the pines of this region, away from Woking on
the south to Ascot in the north.
One comes downhill into the large village or small
(very small) town of Bagshot. which gives a name to
these surrounding wastes of scrubby grass, gorse, and
fir-trees. The now quiet street faces the road in the
hollow, across which runs the Bourne brook that
perhaps originated the place-name, ' Beck-shot ' being
the downhill rush of the stream or beck. The many
'shotts' that terminate the names of places in Hants
and Surrey have this common origin, and are similarly

BAGSHOT 97
situated in the little hollows watered by descending
brooks. Bagshot has nearly forgotten the old coaching
days in the growing importance of its military sur
roundings, and most of its once celebrated inns have
retired into private life, all except the ' King's Arms.'
The ground to the north of the Exeter Road, on

the west of Bagshot village, was once a peat moor.
Hazel-nuts and bog-oak were often dug up there.
Then began the usual illegal encroachments on what
was really common land, and stealthily the moor was
enclosed and subsequently converted into a nursery-
ground for rhododendrons, which flourish amazingly
on this soil when it has once been trenched. Beneath
the black sand which usually covers this ground there
frequently occurs a very hard iron rust, or thin stratum
H

98 THE EXETER ROAD
of oxide of iron, which prevents drainage of the soil,
with a blue sandy clay underlying. This stratum of
iron rust requires to be broken through, and the blue
clay subsoil raised to the surface and mixed with the
black sand, before anything will grow here.
There is to be seen on the summit of the steep hill
that leads out of Bagshot an old inn called the ' Jolly
Farmer.' This is the successor of a still older house
which stood at the side of the road, and was famous
in the annals of highway robbery, having been once
the residence of William Davis, the notorious ' Golden
Farmer,' who lived here in the century before last.
The agriculturist with this auriferous name was a
man greatly respected in the neighbourhood, and
acquired the nickname from his invariable practice of
paying his bills in gold. He was never known to
tender cheques, bank-notes, or bills, and this fact was
considered so extraordinary that it excited much com
ment, while at the same time increasing the respect
due to so substantial a man. But respect at last fell
from Mr. William Davis like a cloak ; for one night
when a coach was robbed (as every coach was robbed
then) on Bagshot Heath by a peculiar highwayman
who had earned a great reputation from his invariable
practice of returning all the jewellery and notes and
keeping only the coin, the masked robber, departing
with his plunder, was shot in the back by a traveller
who had managed to secrete a pistol.
Bound hand and foot, the wounded highwayman
was hauled into the lighted space before the entrance
to the ' King's Arms,' when the gossips of the place
recognised in him the well-known features of the

THE 'GOLDEN FARMER' 99
' Golden Farmer.' A ferocious Government, which
had no sympathy with highway robbery, caused the
' Golden Farmer ' to be hanged and afterwards gib
beted at his own threshold.
The present inn, an ugly building facing down the
road, does not occupy the site of the old house, which
stood on the right hand, going westwards. A table,
much hacked and mutilated, standing in the parlour
of the ' Jolly Farmer,' came from the highwayman's
vanished home. A tall obelisk that stood on the
triangular green at the fork of the roads here — where
the signpost is standing nowadays — has long since dis
appeared. It was a prominent landmark in the old
coaching days, and was inscribed with the distances
of many towns from this spot. A still existing link
with the times of the highwaymen is the so-called
' Claude du Vall's Cottage,' which stands in the
heathy solitudes at some distance along Lightwater
Lane, to the right-hand of the road. The cottage, of
which there is no doubt that it often formed a hiding-
place for that worthy, has lost its ancient thatch, and
is now covered with commonplace slates.
Almost immediately after leaving the ' Jolly
Farmer' behind, the road grows hateful, passing in
succession the modern townships of Cambridge Town
Camberley, and York Town. The exact point where
one of these modern squatting-places of those who
hang on to the skirts of Tommy Atkins joins another
may be left to local experts ; to the traveller they
present the appearance of one long and profoundly
depressing street.
Cobbett knew the road well, and liked this shabby

ioo THE EXETER ROAD
line of military settlements little. Coming up to
'the Wen' in 1821, and passing Blackwater, he
reached York Town, and thus he holds forth : ' After
pleasure comes pain' says Solomon, and after the
sight of Lady Mildmay's truly noble plantations (at
Hartley Row) came that of the clouts of the ' gentle
man cadets ' of the ' Royal Military College of Sand
hurst ! ' Here, close by the roadside, is the drying
ground. Sheets, shirts, and all sorts of things were
here spread upon lines covering perhaps an acre of
ground ! We soon afterwards came to ' York Place '
on ' Osnaburg Hill.' And is there never to be an
end of these things ? Away to the left we see that
immense building which contains children breeding
up to be military commanders ! Has this place cost
so little as two millions of pounds ? 1 never see this
place (and I have seen it forty times during the last
twenty years) without asking myself this question,
' Will this thing be suffered to go on ; will this thing,
created by money raised by loan; will this thing
be upheld by means of taxes while the interest of the
Debt is reduced, on the ground that the nation is
unable to pay the interest in full ? '
It is painful to say that ' this thing ' has gone on,
and that ' the sweet simplicity of the Three per
Cents ' has given place to very much reduced interest.
But one little ray of sunshine breaks on the gloomy
picture. If Cobbett could ride this way once more
he would discover that the acre of drying ' sheets,
shirts, and other things ' is no longer visible to shock
the susceptibilities of old-fashioned wayfarers, or of
that new feature of the road, the lady cyclist.

BLACKWATER 101
There is a great deal more of Cambridge Town,
Camberley, and York Town now than when Cobbett
last journeyed along the road ; there are more ' chil
dren breeding up to be military commanders,' more
Tommies, more drinking-shops, and an almost con
tinuous line of ugly, and for the most part out-at-
elbows, houses for a space of two miles. It is with
relief that the traveller leaves behind the last of these
wretched blots upon the country and descends into
Blackwater, where the river of that name, so called
from the sullen hue it obtains on running through
the peaty wastes of this wild, heathy country, flows
beneath a bridge at the entrance to the pretty village.
Over this bridge we enter Hampshire, that county
of hogs and chalky downs, but no sign of the chalk
is reached yet, until coming upon the little stream
in the level between Hartley Row and Hook, called
the Whitewater from the milky tinge it has gained
on coming down from the chalky heights of Alton
and Odiham. This tinge is, however, more imaginary
than real, and the characteristically chalky scenery
of Hampshire is not seen by the traveller along the
Great Western Road until Basingstoke and its chalk
downs are reached.
Blackwater until recently possessed a picturesque
old coaching inn, the ' White Hart,' which has un
happily been rebuilt. But it remains, as ever, a
village of old inns. Climbing out of its one street
we come to a wild and peculiarly unprepossessing
tableland known as Hartford Bridge Flats.
To the lover of scenery this is a quite detestable
piece of road, but the old coachmen simply revelled

io2 THE EXETER ROAD
in it, for here was the best stretch of galloping
ground in England, and they 'sprang' their horses
over it for all they were worth, through Hartley Row
and Hook, and well on towards Basingstoke.
The famous (or infamous let us rather call them)
Hartford Bridge Flats are fully as dreary as any of
the desolate Californian mining flats of which Bret
Harte has written so eloquently. Salisbury Plain
itself, save that the Plain is more extensive, is no
worse place in which to be overtaken by bad weather.
Excessively bleak and barren, the Flats are well
named, for they stretch absolutely level for four
miles : a black, open, unsheltered heath, with nothing
but stunted gorse bushes for miles on either side, and
the distant horizon closed in by the solemn battalions
of sinister -looking pine -woods. The road runs, a
straight and sandy strip, through the midst of this
wilderness, unfenced, its monotony relieved only by
a group of ragged firs about half-way. The cyclist
who toils along these miles against a head wind is
as unlikely to forget Hartford Bridge Flats as were
the unfortunate ' outsides ' on the coaches when rain
or storm made the passage miserable.
Hartford Bridge, at the foot of the hill below this
nightmare country, is a pretty hamlet of yellow sand
and pine-woods, sand-martins and rabbits uncount
able. The place is interesting and unspoiled, because
its development was suddenly arrested when the
Exeter Road became deserted for the railway in the
early '40's ; and so it remains, in essentials, a veri
table old hamlet of the coaching days. Even more
eloquent of old times is the long, long street of

HARTLE Y RO W

i°3

Hartley Row which adjoins. Hartley Row was
absolutely called into existence by the demand in the
old days of road travel for stabling, inns, and refresh
ments, and is one of the most thoroughly representa
tive of such roadside settlements. Half a mile to the
south of the great highway is the parent village of
Hartley Wintney, unknown to and undreamt of by
travellers in those times, and probably much the

ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON

same as it was in the Middle Ages. The well-named
' Row,' on the other hand, sprang up, grew lengthy,
and flourished exceedingly during the sixty years of
coaching prosperity, and then, at one stroke, was
ruined. What Brayley, the historian of Surrey,
wrote of Bagshot in 1841, applies even more elo
quently to Hartley Row : ' Its trade has been
entirely ruined by the opening of the Southampton
and Great Western Railroads, and its numerous inns

104

THE EXETER ROAD

and public-houses, which had long been profitably
occupied, are now almost destitute of business.
Formerly thirty stage coaches passed through the
village, now every coach has been taken off the road.'
The ' Southampton Railroad,' referred to here, is of
course the London and South- Western Railway, which
has drained this part of the road of its traffic, and
whose Winchfield station lies two miles away.

ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
Before the crash of the '40's Hartley Row pos
sessed a thriving industry in the manufacture of
coaches, carried on by one Fagg, who was also land
lord of the ' Bell Inn,' Holborn, and in addition horsed
several stages out of London.
Some day the coming historian of the nineteenth
century will, in his chapter on travel, cite Hartley
Row as the typical coaching village, which was called
into existence by coaching, lived on coaching, and
with the death of coaching was stranded high and
dry in this dried-up channel of life. All the houses

OLD TRAVELLERS

105

of a village like this, which lived on the needs of
travellers, faced the road in one long street, and
almost every fourth or fifth house was an inn, or
ministered in some way to the requirements of those
who travelled. It is remarkable to find so many of
these old inns still in existence at Hartley Row.
Here they still stand, ruddy-faced, substantial but
plain buildings, with, notwithstanding their plainness,

ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON).
a certain air of distinction. The wayfarer, well read
in the habits of the times when they were bustling
with business, can imagine untold comforts behind
those frontages ; can reconstruct the scenes in the
public waiting-rooms, where travellers, passing the
interval between their being set down here by the
' Defiance ' or the ' Regulator ' Exeter coach and the
arrival of the Odiham and Alton bye- stage, could
warm themselves by the roaring fire ; can sniff in
imagination the coffee of the breakfasts and the roast

106 THE EXETER ROAD
beef of the dinners ; or perceive through the old-
fashioned window -frames the lordly posting parties,
detained here by stress of weather, making the best
of it by drinking of the old port or brown sherry
which the cellars of every self-respecting coaching
inn could then produce. Not that these were the
only travellers familiar to the roadside village in
those days. Not every one who fared from London
to Exeter could afford the luxuries of the mail or
stage coach, or of the good cheer and the lavender-
scented beds just glimpsed. For the poor traveller
there were the lumbering so-called 'Fly -vans' of
Russell and Co., which jogged along at the average
pace of three miles 1 an hour — the pace decreed by
Scotland Yard for the modern policeman. The poor
folk who travelled thus might perhaps have walked
with greater advantage, ' save for the dignity of the
thing,' as the Irishman said when the floor of his cab
fell out and he was obliged to run along with the
bottomless vehicle. Certainly they paid more for the
misery of being conveyed thus than the railway
traveller does nowadays for comfort at thirty to fifty
miles an hour. Numbers did walk, including the
soldiers and the sailors going to rejoin their regiments
or their ships, who appear frequently in the roadside
sketches of that period by Rowlandson and others.
The poor travellers probably rode because of their —
luggage I was about to write, let us more correctly
say bundles.
When they arrived at a village at nightfall, they
1 "Waggons travelling at the rate of not more than four miles an
hour were exempt from excise duty.

PICTURESQUE OLD DAYS

107

camped under the ample shelter of the great waggon ;
or, perhaps, if they had anything to squander on
mere luxuries, spent sixpence or ninepence on a
supper of cold boiled beef and bread, to be followed
by a shake- down on straw or hay in the stable-
lofts, which were quite commonly put to this use
among the second- and third-rate inns of the old
times. Those were the days of the picturesque ; if, indeed,

ROADSIDE SCENE (AFTER ROWLANDSON/.
Rowlandson and Morland and the other delightfully
romantic artists of the period did not invent those
roadside scenes. Here, for instance, is Rowlandson's
charming group of three old topers boozing outside
the ' Half Moon.' I cannot tell you where this ' Half
Moon ' was. Probably the artist imagined it ; but at
anyrate the kind of place, and scenes of this descrip
tion, must have existed in his time. Here, you will
observe, the landlord has come out with a mug of
' humming ale ' or ' nut-brown October ' for the thirsty
driver of the curricle, who is apparently going to

108 THE EXETER ROAD
market, if we may judge by the basket of fowls tied
on to the back of the conveyance.
Scenes so picturesque as this are not to be
observed in our own time, nor are the tramps who
yet infest the road, singly or in families, of the
engaging appearance of this family party. The
human form divine was wondrously gnarled and
twisted, or phenomenally fat, a hundred years ago,
according to Rowlandson and Gillray. Legs like
the trunks of contorted apple-trees, stomachs like
terrestrial globes, mouths resembling the mouths of
horses, and noses like geographical features on a
large scale were the commonplaces of their practice,
and this example forms no exception to the general
rule.

XVII
The ruin that descended upon Hartley Row in
common with other coaching towns and villages,
nearly sixty years ago, has long since been lived
down, and the long street, although quiet, has much
the same cheerful appearance as it must have worn
in the heyday of its prosperity. It is a very
wide street, fit for the evolutions of many coaches.
Pleasant strips of grass now occupy, more or less
continuously, one side, and at the western end forks
the road to Odiham, through a pretty common with
the unusual feature of being planted with oak trees.
These oak glades do not look particularly old ; but,
as it happens, we can ascertain their exact age and

TREE-PLANTING 109
at the same time note how slow-growing is the oak
tree by a reference to Cobbett's Rural Rides, where,
in 1821, he notes their being planted: 'I perceive
that they are planting oaks on the " wastes," as the
Agriculturasses call them, about Hartley Row ;
which is very good, because the herbage, after the
first year, is rather increased than diminished by the
operation ; while, in time, the oaks arrive at a timber
state, and add to the beauty and the real wealth of
the country, and to the real and solid wealth of the
descendants of the planter who, in every such case,
merits unequivocal praise, because he plants for his
children's children. The planter here is Lady
Mildmay, who is, it seems, Lady of the Manors
about here.'
This planting was accomplished in days before
any one so much as dreamt of the time to come, when
the navies of the world should be built like tin
kettles. Oaks were then planted with a view to
being eventually worked up into the ' wooden walls
of Old England,' among other uses, and the squires
who laid out money on the work were animated by
the glow of self-satisfaction that warms the breasts of
those who can combine patriotism with the pro
vision of a safe deferred investment. Unhappily,
the 'wooden walls' have long singe become a dim
memory before these trees have attained their proper
timber stage, and now stand, to those who read these
facts, as monuments to blighted hopes. But they
render this common extremely beautiful, and give it
a character all its own. All this is quite apart from
the legal aspect of the case ; whether, that is to say,

no THE EXETER ROAD
the lord of a manor has any right to make planta
tions of common lands for his own or his descendants'
benefit. Cobbett, it will be perceived, calls these
lands ' wastes,' following the term conferred upon
them by the ' Agriculturasses ' — whoever they may
have been. If technically ' wastes of the manors,'
then the landowner's right to do as he will is
incontestable ; but, with the contentious character
of Cobbett before one, is it not remarkable that he
should praise this planting and not question the
right to call the land ' wastes,' instead of common ?
But perhaps Cobbett the tree-planter was contending
with Cobbett the agitator, and the tree-planter got
the best of it.
Hook, which succeeds Hartley Row, is a hamlet of
the smallest size, but that fact does not prevent its
possessing two old coaching inns, the ' White Hart '
and the ' Old White Hart,' both very large and very
near to one another. The Exeter Road certainly did
not lack entertainment for man and beast in those
days, with fine hostelries every few miles, either in
the towns and villages, or else set down, solitary,
amid the downs, like Winterslow Hut.
Nately Scures, whose second name is supposed to
derive from the Anglo-Saxon scora, a shaw, or
coppice (whence we get such place-names as Shaw-
ford, near Winchester ; Shaugh Prior on Dartmoor ;
Shaw, in Berkshire, and many of the ' scors ' forming
the first syllables of place-names all over the country),
is a place even smaller than Hook, with a tiny church,
one of the many ' smallest ' churches ; standing in a
meadow, to which access is had through rick-yards.

THE 'WHITE HART,' HOOK.

OLD BASING 113
It is worth while halting a moment to gain a sight
of the little church, which is late Norman, and one
of the few dedicated to that Norman bishop, Saint
Swithun. Returning to the highway, and coming to the
place known to the old coachmen as Mapledurwell
Hatch, where that fine old coaching inn, the ' King's
Head,' still stands, a road goes off to Old Basing, on
the right, while the highway continues in a straight
line, rising toward the town of Basingstoke.
The hasty traveller who knows nothing of the
delights that await explorers in the byeways, misses
a great deal here by keeping strictly to the high
road. If, instead of continuing direct to Basingstoke,
this turning to the right hand is taken, it brings one
in half a mile to the pretty village of Old Basing,
celebrated for one of the most stubborn and pro
tracted defences recorded in history. It was here
that the equally crafty and courteous Sir William
Paulet, first Marquis of Winchester, and Lord
Treasurer during the reigns of Henry the Eighth,
Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, built an
immense palace on the site of Basing Castle. There
can be little doubt that this magnificent person,
who possessed no principles, and so kept place and
power through the troublous times that these reigns
comprised, must have had his hands in the Royal
coffers to some purpose, or else have used his position
for the sale of preferments. 'No oak, but an osier,'
as his contemporaries said, he bowed before the
tempests of religious persecution and the whirlwinds
of conspiracies which passed him harmlessly by and

ii4 THE EXETER ROAD
left him still peculating. He had become a hoary-
headed sinner by the time Elizabeth reigned, or there
is no knowing but that he might have become a
Prince Consort ; for when he entertained Her
Majesty here in 1560: 'By my troth,' said she, 'if
my Lord Treasurer were but a young man, I could
find it in my heart to have him for a husband before
any man in England.' But she had said this kind of
thing of many another.
The successors of this gorgeous nobleman — not
being Lords Treasurers — could not afford . to keep up
so immense a palace, and so demolished a part of it,
and found the remainder ample. To this place, fitting
alike by its situation at a strategic point on the
Western Road, and by the splendidly defensible nature
of its site, crowded the King's Hampshire adherents
who were not engaged at Winchester and Southanrp-
ton at the outbreak of the war between Charles and
his Parliament. John, fifth Marquis of Winchester,
then ruled. ' Aimez Loyaulte,' he wrote with his
diamond ring on every window of his great mansion,
and, provisioning his cellars, awaited events. As
' Loyalty ' the house speedily became known to
the flying bands of the King's men who, pursued
through the country by the Roundheads, made for
its shelter as birds do for trees in a storm. The
rebels might hold Basingstoke for a time, and lay
siege to Basing House, but troops from Royalist
Oxford would come and take the town and repro-
vision this stronghold. It was a mixed company in
this palace - fortress. My lord, loyalist, soldier,
amateur of the arts ; reposing after the warlike

BASING HOUSE 115
fatigues of the day in a bed whose gorgeous trap
pings made it worth £1300 ; witty and brave
cavaliers ; a company of Roman Catholic priests ;
men-at-arms, drinking, dicing, and fighting by turns
and with equal zest ; and such representatives of the
arts as Inigo Jones, the architect, and Hollar, the
engraver. Gay and careless though they were, they
fought well, and slew and were slain to the number
of two thousand during this long siege. Sometimes
this varied garrison was hard pressed for food, when
relief would come in whimsical fashion, as when
Colonel Gage and his thousand horsemen appeared
with sword in one hand and holding on to a bag of
provisions with the other ; a fitting contrast with the
typical Puritan, a Psalm-book in his left hand and a
pike in his right. Basing House, indeed, in the
words of Carlyle, ' long infested the Parliament in
these quarters, and was an especial eye-sorrow to
the trade of London with the Western parts. It
stood siege after siege for four years, ruining poor
Colonel This and then poor Colonel That, till the jubi
lant Royalists had given it the name of Basting House.'
But the end was at hand after Fairfax had reduced
the garrisons in the West and the Parliamentary
troops could be spared from other places. Cromwell
himself was charged with the business of taking
' Loyalty.' It was in September that he came to
Basingstoke with horse and foot, and established a
post of observation on the summit of Winklebury,
a hill crowned with prehistoric earthworks that over
looks Worting and the Exeter Road, two miles on
the other side of the town.

n6 THE EXETER ROAD
Little over a fortnight later Cromwell wrote that
' Thank God he was able to give a good account of
Basing.' The house was taken by storm on the 14th
October, ' while the garrison was card-playing,' as the
persistent Hampshire legend would have us believe.
' Clubs are trumps, as when Basing House was taken,'
is still an expression often heard at Hampshire card-
parties, and some colour is lent to this story by the
poor defence with which the furious onrush of Crom
well's troops was met. The attacking force lost few
men, but a hundred of the defenders were killed, and
three hundred more taken prisoners. Then the place
caught fire and was utterly burnt, many perishing
miserably in the great brick vaults of the house,
where they were when the fire reached them.
Fuller, that quaint seventeenth - century historian,
who had been staying here, had, fortunately, left
before the arrival of Cromwell's expedition. The
continual fighting and the booming of the guns had
distracted his attention from his work ! There were
others not so fortunate. Thomas Johnson, a peaceful
botanist, was killed, and one Robinson, an actor and
unarmed, was slaughtered by Harrison, the fanatic.
' Cursed is he that doeth the Lord's work negligently,'
exclaimed the Puritan, as he cut him down. Other
soldiers slew the daughter of Dr. Griffith who was
charging them with being violent to her father.
Fanaticism and cupidity were fully satisfied on
this occasion, save that there were those who grumbled
because the lives of the Marquis of Winchester and
his lieutenant were spared. The sack of Basing
House yielded £200,000 worth of plunder, in objects

THE RUINS OF BASING HOUSE 119
of art, gold and silver plate, coin, and provisions ; and
all partook of it, from Cromwell to the rank and file.
' One soldier had a hundred and twenty pieces of gold
for his share, others plate, others jewels.' No wonder
they had, with this dazzling prospect before them,
rushed to the assault ' like a fire-flood.'
They made a rare business of this pillage, taking
away the valuables, and selling the provisions to the
country folks, who ' loaded many carts.' The bricks
and building materials were given away, probably
because they could not wait for the long business
of selling i them. 'Whoever will come for brick or
stone shall freely have the same for his pains,' ran
the proclamation,, and, considering this, it is quite
remarkable that even the existing scanty ruins of
Basing House are left.
The area comprised within the defences measures
fourteen and a half acres, now a tumbled and tangled
stretch of ground, a mass of grassy mounds and
hollows, overgrown in places with thickets. These
ruins are entered from the road by an old brick
gateway, still bearing the ' three swords in pile ' on
a shield, the arms of the Paulets, with ivy over
hanging and tall trees behind. A tall curtain wall
of brick, with a quaintly peaked-roofed tower at
either end, now looks down upon the Basingstoke
Canal, which many strangers think is the moat, but
though a picturesque addition to the scene, it cannot
claim any such historic associations, for it was only
constructed close upon a hundred years ago.
Near by is Old Basing church, with square tower
built of red brick, similar to that seen in the ruins

120 THE EXETER ROAD
of the House. It is said to be of foreign make.
Bullets have up to recent years been extracted from
the south door of the church, the original oak door
in use two hundred and sixty years ago ; and the
flint and stone south walls and buttresses bear vivid
witness, in their patching of brick, to the ruin that
befell this part of the building in those troubled
times. Strange to say, a beautiful group of the
Virgin and Child still occupies a tabernacle over the
west window, uninjured, although it can scarce have
escaped the notice of the fanatical soldiery. Within
the church are memorials of the loyal Paulets,
Marquises of Winchester, and for a period Dukes of
Bolton. Their glory has departed with their great
House, and although a smaller residence was built in
the meadows, close at hand, that has vanished too.
When Basing House was laid in ruins the Marquis
of Winchester retired to his hunting lodge of Hawk
Wood, to the south of Basingstoke, and, enlarging it.
made the place his residence. His son, created Duke
of Bolton, employed Inigo Jones to build a new
house on the site of the lodge, and this is the present
Hackwood Park. The existing house stands in the
midst of dense and tangled woodlands, and although
imposing, is a somewhat gloomy pile, with a ghost
story. That bitter lawyer, Richard Bethell, of whom
it was said that he ' dismissed Hell, with costs, and
took away from orthodox members of the Church of
England their last hope of everlasting damnation,'
when he became Lord Chancellor and was created
Baron Westbury, purchased Hackwood Park, and it
was to one of his friends that the ' Grey Lady ' of

THE ' GREY LADY' 121
the mansion presented herself. Lord Westbury and
a party of his friends had arrived from town soon
after the purchase, and at a late hour they retired
to rest, saying good-night to one another in the
corridor. One of the guests woke up in the middle
of the night and found his room strangely illuminated,
with the indistinct outlines of a human figure visible
in the midst of the uncanny glow. Thinking this
some practical joke, and feeling very drowsy, he
turned round and fell off to sleep again, to wake at a
later hour and see the figure of a woman in a long,
old-fashioned dress. With more courage than most
people would probably have shown under the circum
stances, he, instead of putting his head under the
bed-clothes, jumped out, whereupon the lady modestly
retired. Instead of going to bed again, he sat down
and wrote an account of the occurrence ; but when
at breakfast Lord Westbury and his other friends
kept continually asking him how he had slept, his
suspicions as to a practical joke having been played
upon him were renewed. He accordingly parried
all these queries and said he had slept excellently,
until Lord Westbury said, ' Now, look here, we saw
that lady dressed in grey follow you into your room
last night, you know ! ' Explanations followed, but
the story of the ' Grey Lady ' remains mysterious to
this clay.

THE EXETER ROAD

XVIII

The whereabouts of Basingstoke may be noted from
afar by the huge and odd-looking clock-tower of the
Town Hall, added to that building in 1887. Its
windy height, visible from many miles around, is
also favourable to the hearing at a distance of its
sweet-toned carillons, modelled on the pattern of
the famous peal of Bruges. When the shrieking of
the locomotives at the railway station is hushed, and
the wind is favourable, you may hear those tuneful
bells far away over the melancholy wolds that hem
in Basingstoke to the north and west, or listen to
them by the waters of the Loddon eastward, or the
undulating farm-lands of the south.
We have seen how Old Basing became of prime
military importance from its situation at the point
where many roads from the south and west of Eng
land converged and fell into one great highway to
London ; and from the same cause is due the com
mercial prosperity of Basingstoke. Basingstoke, with
a record as a town going back to the time when the
Domesday Book was compiled, is yet a mere modern
settlement compared with the mother-parish of Old
Basing ; but it was an important place in the
sixteenth century, when silks and woollens were
manufactured here. At later periods this junction
of the roads brought a great coaching trade, and
has finally made Basingstoke a railwav junction.
Silks and woollens have given place to engineering
works and machine-shops, and the town, with its
modern reputation for the manufacture of agricul-

HOLY GHOST CHAPEL 123
tural machinery, bids fair at no distant date to
become to Hampshire what Colchester and Ipswich
are to Essex and Suffolk.
When the Parliamentary Generals were engaged
in the long .business of besieging Basing House, it
may well be supposed that the town suffered greatly
at the hands of their soldiery. They, who were
experts at wrecking churches and cathedrals in ¦• a
few hours, had ample opportunities for destruction in
the four years that business was about. Their handi
work may be seen to this day — together with that
of modern Toms, Dicks, and Harrys, who have not
the excuse of being fanatics — in the ruined walls of
Holy Ghost Chapel on the northern outskirts of the
town. Within the roofless walls of the chapel,
unroofed by those Roundheads for the sake of their
leaden covering, are two recumbent effigies, sadly
mutilated. Perhaps Sergeant Humility-before-the-
Lord Mawworm slashed them with his pike in his
hatred of worldly pomp ; but his zeal did not do
the damage wrought on the marble by the recording
penknives of the past fifty years. A stained -glass
window, pieced together from the fragments of those
destroyed here, is still to be seen' in Basingstoke
Parish Church.
The Exeter Road leaves. Basingstoke at its. south
western end, . where a fork of the highway, gives a
choice to the traveller of continuing to Andover on
the right, or making on the left to Winchester. The
first village on the way-tc Exeter is Worting,Aelow
the shoulder of Battle Down, a village — nay, a
hamlet, let us call it — of a Sundayfied stillness.

124 THE EXETER ROAD
Yet Worting has had its bustling times, for here
was one of the most famous coaching inns on the
road, the 'White Hart.' Another 'White Hart,' at
Whitchurch, is scarcely less celebrated in the annals of
the road. In fact, the 'White Harts ' are so many and
so notable on this road that the historian of the high
ways becomes almost as ashamed of mentioning them
as of recounting the places which Cromwell stormed,
or where Charles the Second hid ; the houses in which
Queen Elizabeth slept, or the inns where Pepys made
merry. Worting is followed in quick succession by the
outskirts of Oakley, Clerken Green, Deane, Ashe, and
Overton. Except Overton, which is a picturesque
village lining the road, of the old coaching, or
' thoroughfare ' type, these places are all shy and
retiring, tucked away up bye-lanes, with great parks
on their borders, in whose midst are very vast, very
hideous country mansions where dwell the local
J.P.'s, like so many Rogers de Coverley in miniature,
with churches rebuilt or restored to their glory and
the glory of God, and a general air of patronage
bestowed upon the villagers and wayfarers from the
outside world by those august partners. These
parks, with their mile after mile of palings bordering
the road, and their dense foliage overhanging it, are
given over to solitude. An occasional gamekeeper,
or a much more than occasional rabbit or hare, are
the only signs of life, with perhaps the hoarse
' crock ' of a pheasant's call from the neighbouring-
coverts. The air beneath the overarching trees along
the road is stale and stagnant, and typical of the life

OVERTON 125
here, like the green damp on the entrance lodges of
Hall Place, where heraldic lions, sitting on their
rumps and holding what at a distance look like quart-
pots from the country inn opposite, scowl at one
another across the gravelled drive.
It is a relief to emerge from this stifling atmo
sphere upon the open road where Overton stands.
We are fully entered here into the valley of the Test,
or Anton, a sparkling little stream whose course we
follow henceforward as far as Hurstbourne Priors.
Fishermen love Overton and this valley well, for
there is royal sport here among the trout and gray
ling, and in the village a choice of those old inns
which the angler appreciates as much as any one.
Picturesque Overton is a doubly ruined village, for it
has lost its silk industry, together with the coaching
interest ; but like the splendid bankrupts of modern
high finance who fail for millions and continue to live
like princes, it continues cheerful. Perhaps every
one in the place made a competency before the crash,
and put it away where no one could touch it !
The valley broadens out delightfully beyond
Overton, and the road, reaching Laverstoke, com
mands beautiful views over the water-meadows, and
the open park in whose midst stands Laverstoke House,
clearly seen in passing. In this village, in the neat
and clean paper-mill by the road, is made the paper
for Bank of England notes. It was so far back as
1719 that this industry was established here by the
Portal family, French Protestants emigrating from
their country for conscience' sake. Cobbett, who
hated paper-money as much as he did the ' Wen ' in

126 THE EXETER ROAD
which it is chiefly current, passed this spot in a fury.
He says, with a sad lack of the prophetic faculty,
' We passed the mill where the Mother-Bank paper is
made ! Thank God ! this mill is likely soon to want
employment. Hard by is a pretty park and house,
belonging to '"Squi're" Portal, the paper -maker.
The country people, who seldom want for sarcastic
shrewdness, call it " Rag Hall ! " And again, ' I hope
the time will come when a monument will be erected
where that mill stands, and when on that monument
will be inscribed " the Curse of England." This spot
ought to be held accursed in all time henceforth and
for evermore. It has been the spot from which have
sprung more and greater mischief than ever plagued
mankind before.'
Unhappily for Cobbett's wishes and predictions,
the mill is still in existence and is busier than it was
when he wrote in 1821. There are as many as two
hundred and fifty people now employed here in the
making of the ' accursed ' paper.
Now comes Freefolk village, with a wayside
drinking-fountain and a tall cross, with stone seat.
furnished with some pious inscription ; the whole
erected by a Portal in 1870, and intended to further
the honour and glory of that family. There is plenty
water everywhere around, in the river and its many '
runlets amid the water-meadows, but the fountain is
dry. Passing tramps are properly sarcastic, and the
dry fountain and its texts, so far from leading in the
paths of temperance and godliness, are the occasion
of much blasphemy. But the pious Portals have
their advertisement.

NE WMAN A T WHITCHURCH 127
Whitchurch, two miles down the road, is ap
proached past the much-quarried hills that rise on
the right hand and shelter that decayed little town
from the buffetings of the north-easterly winds. If
there be those who are curious to learn what a decayed
old coaching town is like, let them journey to Whit
church. After much tiresome railway travelling, and
changing at junctions, they will arrive in the fulness
of time at Whitchurch station, whence the omnibus
of the ' White Hart ' will drive them, rumbling over
the stone-pitched streets of the town, to the door of
that quaint inn, in one of whose rooms the future
Cardinal Newman wrote the beginning of the Lyra
Apostolica : —
Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend ?
2nd December 1832, while waiting for the mail to
Falmouth. He had come from Oxford that morning
by the Oxford-Southampton coach.
' Here I am,' he says, writing to his mother, ' from
one till eleven,' waiting for the down Exeter mail.
Think, modern railway traveller, what would you say
were it your lot to wait ten hours, say at Temple-
combe Junction, for a connection ! Moreover, a bore
claiming to be the brother of an acquaintance claimed
to share his room and his society at the ' White
Hart,' and eventually journeyed to Exeter with him.
The future Cardinal did not like this. He writes : ' I
am practising for the first time the duty of a traveller,
which is sorely against the grain, and have been
talkative and agreeable without end,' adding (one can
almost imagine the sigh ofthe retiring scholar !), ' Now

128 THE EXETER ROAD
that I have set up for a man of the world, it is my
vocation.' The latter part of his journey was accomplished
at night. Travelling thus through Devonshire and
Cornwall is, he remarks, ' very striking for its mys-
teriousness.' It was a beautiful night, ' clear, frosty,
and bright, with a full moon. Mere richness of
vegetation is lost by night, but bold features remain.
As I came along, I had the whole train of pictures so
vividly upon my mind that I could have written
a most interesting account of it in the most approved
picturesque style of modern composition, but it has
all gone from me now, like a dream.
' The night was enlivened by what Herodotus calls
a " night engagement " with a man, called by courtesy
a gentleman, on the box. The first act ended by his
calling me a d — d fool. The second by his insisting
on two most hearty shakes of the hand, with the pro
test that he certainly did think me very injudicious
and ill-timed. I had opened by telling him he was
talking great nonsense to a silly goose of a maid
servant stuck atop of the coach ; so I had no reason
to complain of his giving me the retort uncourteous.'
There are corridors in the ' White Hart ' with up
and down twilight passages, in which the guests of
another day lost themselves with promptitude and
despatch. There is also a barbarically coloured coffee-
room, snug and comfortable, which looks as though
Washington Irving could have written an eloquent
essay around it ; and, more essential than anything
else in clays of old, a capacious yard with huge
yawning stables. For Whitchurch is at the cross

w

WHITCHURCH.

BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION 131
roads, along which in one direction went the Exeter
mails, while at right angles goes the road between
Southampton, Winchester, Newbury, Didcot, and
Oxford, little used now, but once an important route.
Whitchurch, in the gay old times when few men had
votes but every voter had his price, used to send two
members to Parliament. Horrid Reform and Bribery
Acts which, together with the extension of the
franchise and the adoption of secret voting, have
brought about the disfranchising of rotten boroughs
and the decay of such home industries as electoral
corruption, personation, and the like, have taken
away much of the prosperity of the town, which, like
Andover, used to live royally from one election to
another on the venality of the ' free and independent.'
But the last visit of the ' Man in the Moon ' was paid
to Whitchurch very many years ago, and not even
the oldest inhabitant can recollect the days when
cash was given for votes and the electors, gloriously
and incapably drunk, were herded together to plump
for the candidate with the longest purse.
When it is said that Whitchurch is a tiny town of
very steep, narrow, and crooked streets, that it still
boasts some vestiges of its old silk industry, and that
it is a ' Borough by prescription,' all its salient points
have been exhausted. Reform has .not only reformed
away the Parliamentary representation of the town,
but has also swept away the municipal authority.
Mayor and bailiff are both elected every year, but
the offices carry no power nowadays.
Leaving Whitchurch, the road presently comes to
the village of Hurstbourne Priors, which stands in a

132 THE EXETER ROAD
hollow on the Bourne, an affluent of the Anton, and
on the verge of the Ancient and Royal Forest of
Harewood. Not only does the village stand on the
banks of the stream and the edge of the woods, but it
also derives the first of its two names from these
circumstances, 'Hurstbourne' being obviously descrip
tive of woodlands and brooklet, while the ' Priors '
is a relic of its old lords of the manor, the abbots of
Saint Swithun's at Winchester. These historic and
geographical facts, however, are apt to be lost in the
local corruption of the place-name, and that of
Hurstbourne Tarrant, a few miles higher up the
stream ; for they are, according to Hampshire speech,
respectively ' Up Husband ' and ' Down Husband.'

XIX
The road between this point and Andover, ascend
ing the high ground between the Ann and the Test,
is utterly without interest, and brings the traveller
down into the town at the south side of the market
square without any inducement to linger on the way.
Except on the Saturday market-day, Andover is given
over to a dreamy quiet. The butchers' dogs lie
blinking sleepily on the thresholds, or on the kerbs,
and regard with a pained surprise, rather than with
any active resentment, the intrusive passage of a stray
customer. Tradesmen's assistants leisurely open
casual crates of goods on the pavements, with long
intervals for gossip between the drawing of each nail,

ANDOVER 133
and no one objects to the blocking ofthe footpath. A
chance cyclist manoeuvres in the empty void of the
road in the midst of the square, and collides with no
one, for the simple reason that there is nobody to
collide with, and one acquaintance talks to another
across the wide space and is distinctly heard. Formal
but not unpleasing houses front on to this square,
together with the usual Town Hall, and a great
modern, highly uninteresting Gothic church, erected
after the model of Salisbury Cathedral, on the site of
the old building.
For fifty-one weeks of the fifty-two that comprise
the year, this is the weekly six-days aspect of the
place, varied occasionally by the advent of a travelling
circus, or the arrival of a route-marching detachment
of the Royal Artillery, who park their guns in the
square, and may be seen in the stable-yards of the
inns on which they are billeted, in various stages of
dishevelment, in shirt-sleeves rolled up to elbows, and
braces dangling at waists, littering down their horses,
or smoking very short and very foul pipes.
All this idyllic quiet is blown to the winds during
the week of Weyhill Fair, the October pandemonium
held three and a half miles away. Then hordes of
cattle- and horse-jobbers, hop growers and buyers,
cheese-factors, and the travellers of firms dealing in
machinery, seeds, oil-cake, tarpaulins, and half a
hundred other everyday agricultural requisites, de
scend upon the town. Then are dragged out from
mysterious receptacles the most antiquated of ' flys,'
and waggonettes, and nondescript vehicles, to be
pressed into the service of conveying visitors to the

134 THE EXETER ROAD
Fair, some three and a half miles from the town.
Whence they come, and where they are hidden away
afterwards, is more than the stranger can tell, but it is
quite certain that their retreat is in some corner where
spiders dwell, and earwigs and other weird insects have
a home. Add to these facts the all-important one
that it is generally possible to walk the distance in a
shorter time, and you have a full portraiture of the
average Weyhill conveyance.
This sleepy old place, older by many more centuries
than the oldest house remaining here can give any
hint of, was not always so quiet. There were alarums
and excursions (ending, however, with not so much as
a cut finger) when James the Second, falling back
from Salisbury before the advance of his son-in-law,
William of Orange, halted here. There might have
been a battle in Andover's streets, or under the
shadow of Bury Hill, had James put a bolder front on
the business ; but instead of cutting up William's
Dutchmen, he just dined overnight, and hearing in the
morning that his other son-in-law, Prince George of
Denmark, had slunk off with Lords Ormond and
Drumlanrig, went off himself, strategically to the rear.
He was an obstinate and ridiculous bigot, and a quite
unlovable monarch, but he had a power of sarcasm.
' What,' said he, hearing of the Prince's desertion, and
bitterly mimicking the absurd intonation of that
recreant's French catch-phrase, 'is "Est-il possible?"
gone too ? Truly, a good trooper would have been a
greater loss.'
After these events, that era of bribery and corrup
tion set in, which is mistakenly supposed to have

OLD ELECTLONS 135
been brought to an end through the agency of the
several Reform Acts, passed by well-meaning Legisla
tures to secure the purity of Parliamentary elections.
As if treating, and the crossing of horny hands with
gold were the only ways of corrupting a constituency
that the wit of man, or the address of a candidate,
could discover ! The palm no longer receives the coin ;
but who has not heard of the modern art of ' nursing
a constituency,' by which the candidate, eager for
Parliamentary honours, sits down before a town, or a
county division, subscribes liberally to hospitals and
horticultural societies, cricket and football clubs, opens
bazaars, and presides at Young Men's Christian
Associations, thereby winning the votes which would
in other days have been acquired by palming the men
and kissing all the babies ? This tea-fight business
gives us no picturesque situations like that in which
Charles James Fox figured. Fox was canvassing
personally, and called upon one of the bluff and blunt
order of voters, who listened to his eloquence, and
remarked, ' Sir, I admire your abilities, but damn
your principles ! ' To which Fox supplied the obvious
retort, ' Sir, I admire your sincerity, but damn your
manners ! '
Andover no longer sends a representative to
Parliament, but in the brave old d,ays it elected two.
With a knowledge of the wholesale purchasing of
votes that then went on, it will readily be perceived
that Andover, with two members to elect, must have
been a place flowing with milk and honey ; or, less
metaphorically, a happy hunting-ground for guineas
and free drinks. It was somewhere about a hundred.

136 THE EXETER ROAD
and fifty years ago that Sir Francis Blake Delaval, a
prominent rake and practical humorist of the period,
was canvassing Andover. One voter amid the venal
herd was, to all appearance, proof against all tempta
tions. Money, wine, place, flattery had no seductions
for this stoic. The baffled candidate was beside
himself in his endeavours to discover the man's weak
point ; for of course it was an age in which votes
were so openly bought and sold that the saying 'Every
man has his price' was implicitly believed. Only
what tvas this particular voter's figure ? Strange to
say, he had no weakness for money, but was possessed
with an inordinate desire to see a fire-eater, and
doubted if there existed people endowed with that
remarkable power. ' Off went Delaval to London,
and returned with Angelo in a post-chaise. Angelo
exerted all his genius. Fire poured from his mouth and
nostrils — fire which melted that iron nature, and sent
it off cheerfully to poll for Delaval ! '
This was that same Delaval whose attorney sent
him the following bill of costs after one of his
contests : —
To being thrown out of the window of the George Inn,
Andover ; to my leg being thereby broken ; to surgeon's bill,
and loss of time and business ; all in the service of Sir Francis
Delaval, £500.
And cheap too.
They kept this sort of thing up for many years ;
not always, however, throwing solicitors out of hotel
windows ; although rival political factions often
expressed their determination to throw one another's
candidate in the Anton, after the fashion of the bills

/

PR A CTICAL fOKING 1 3 7
posted in the town during a contest in the '40's,
which announced in displayed type —
LORD HUNTINGTOWER FOR EVER !
SIR JOHN POLLEN IN THE RIVER ! !
CATCHING FISH FOR HIS LORDSHIP'S DINNER ! ! !
History does not satisfy us on the point whether
or not those furious partisans carried out their threat ;
or whether, if they did, their victim afforded good
bait. This Lord Huntingtower was the eldest son of the
late Earl of Dysart, and a well-matched companion
of the late Marquis of Waterford. Roaming the
country-side on dark nights, mounted on stilts, with
sheets over their clothes and hollowed turnips on their
heads with scooped-out holes for eyes and mouth,
and lit with candles, they frightened many a timid
rustic out of his dull wits. In daytime they played
practical jokes on the tradesfolk of Andover. For
example, entering a little general shop in the town,
Lord Huntingtower asked for a pound of treacle.
' Where shall I put it ? ' asked the old woman who
kept the shop, seeing that the usual basin was not
forthcoming. ' P-pup-pup-put it in my hat,' said my Lord, who
stuttered in yard-lengths, holding, out his 'topper.'
The pound of treacle was accordingly poured into the
Lincoln and Bennett, and the next instant it was on
the shopkeeper's head.
This was the manner in which Lord Huntingtower
endeared himself to the people — those, that is to say,
who were not the victims of his pleasantries.

138 THE EXETER ROAD
That kind of person is quite extinct now. They
should have (but unfortunately they have not) a
stuffed specimen in the Natural History Museum at
South Kensington ; because he is numbered with the
Dodo, the Plesiosaurus, and the Mastodon. The
Marquis of Winchester who flourished at the same
period as my Lords Huntingtower and Waterford was
of the same stamp. He had the fiery Port Countenance
which was the sign of the three-bottle man, and his
life and the deeds that he did are still fondly re
membered at Andover, for his country-house was at
Amport, in the immediate neighbourhood. He was
the Premier Marquis of England, and although up to
his neck in mortgages and writs, an extremely Great
Personage. Let us, therefore, take our hats off as
humbly as we know how to do.
When he was at his country-place he worshipped
at the little village church of Amport. Sometimes he
did not worship, but slept, lulled off to the Land of
Nod by the roaring fire he kept in his room-like pew.
On one occasion it chanced that he was wide awake,
and, like the illustrious Sir Roger de Coverley, leant
upon the door of that pew, and gazed around to satisfy
himself that all his tenantry were present. Then an
awful thing happened, the hinges of the door broke,
and it fell with a great clatter to the ground, and the
Marquis with it. He said ' Damn ! ' with great fervour
and unction, and everybody laughed. No one thought
it — as they should have done — shocking, which shows
the depravity of the age.
There is no doubt whatever about that depravity,
which, like the worm in the bud, has wrought ruin

THE MARQUIS AND THE SQUIRE 139
among our manners since then. How sad it is that
we are not now content to call upon Providence to
Bless the squire and his relations
And keep us in our proper stations ;
but are all too intent upon ' getting on,' to defer to
rank, or take a spell at the delightful occupations of
tuft-hunting and boot-licking ! Even in those days
this horrid decadence had begun to manifest itself, as
you will see by the story of this same Marquis and
Mr. Assheton Smith of Tedworth Park. Mr. Smith
could (as the saying goes) have ' bought up ' the
impoverished Marquis of Winchester several times
over, and not have felt any strain upon his resources.
Moreover, he was a Squire of great consideration in
these parts, and as Master of the Tedworth Hunt,
something of a rival in importance. For which
things, and more, the Marquis hated him, and on one
occasion took an opportunity of reproving him publicly
before the whole field, in the fine florid language of
which he had so ready a command. Possibly Mr.
Smith had committed the unpardonable indignity of
showing my lord the way over a particularly stiff
fence he was hesitating at. At any rate the language
of the Premier Marquis was violent, and contained
some reference to the disparity between their
respective ranks. But the Squire was ready with his
retort. He said, ' Anyhow, I'd sooner be a rich
Squire than a poor Marquis ! ' The field smiled,
because the reduced circumstances of the Marquis of
Winchester had been notorious ever since his father
had been secretly buried at midnight in the family

140 THE EXETER ROAD
vault at Amport, for fear the bailiffs should seize the
body for debt.
There are, for good or ill, no such sportsmen
nowadays as there were in the times before railways
came and brought more competition into existence,
making life a business and a struggle, instead of the
light-hearted and irresponsible game that the sporting
squires at least found it. Noble sportsmen do not
nowadays, when detained by stress of weather in a
country inn, while away the tedium of the afternoon
by backing the raindrops racing down the window-
panes and betting fortunes on the result. No, that
very real bogey, ' agricultural depression,' has stopped
that kind of full-blooded prank, and the titled in
these progressive times find their account on the
' front page ' of company -promoters' swindles instead.
They barter good names for gold, and lick the boots
of wealthy rogues, instead of kicking their bodies.
Where their fathers scorned to go the sons delight
to be. Would the fathers have done the like had
' agricultural depression ' come earlier ?
The noblemen and the sporting squires of old lived
in one mad whirl of excitement. They gambled on
every incident in their lives, and sometimes even on
their death-beds ; like the old gamester who, when
the doctor told him he would be dead the next
morning, offered to bet him that he would not ! We
are not told whether or not the medical man backed
his professional opinion.
One of the most illuminating side-lights on these
truly Corinthian folk is the story which tells how
Lord Albert Conyngham and that classic sportsman,

OLD SPORTSMEN 141
Mr. George Payne, were travelling from London to
Poole by post-chaise in the last decade of the coaching
days — that is to say, between 1830 and 1840. They
found the journey tedious, and so played ecarte, iii
which they grew so interested that they continued
playing all day and into the night, the chaise being-
lit with the aid of a patent lamp which Mr. Payne
always took with him on a long journey. The play
was high; £100 a game, with bets on knaves and
sequences, and had been continued with varying
success, until when they were passing in the darkness
of night through the New Forest, Mr. Payne, who
had been a heavv loser for some time, had a run of
luck. In midst of this exciting play the post-boy,
who, in the secluded glades of the Forest, had managed
to lose the road, stopped the chaise and, dismounting,
tapped at the window. But so engrossed were the
two travellers in the cards that they had not noticed
that the conveyance was standing still, and the
post-boy stood tapping there for a long while before
he was heard.
' What on earth do you want ? ' angrily asked the
winning gambler, indignant at this interruption.
' Please, sir,' replied the post-boy, ' I've lost my
way.' ' Then,' rejoined Mr. Payne, pulling up the window
with a bang, ' come and tell us when you've found it,
and be damned to you ! '

M2 THE EXETER ROAD

XX

Cobbett, that sturdy Radical and consistent
grumbler, had an adventure at Andover, at the
' George Inn.' It was in October 1826, on returning
from Weyhill Fair, that he took occasion to dine
here. Of course he had no business or pleasure at
the ' George,' for he had secured a lodging elsewhere ;
but with that obsession of his for agitation he must
needs repair to the inn and dine at the ordinary ; less
we may be sure for the sake of the meal than to
embrace the opportunity of addressing the farmers,
the cattle-dealers, cheese and hop factors, and bankers
whom he knew would be dining there at Fair-time.
It was an opportunity not to be missed.
He must have been sadly disappointed at first, for
there were only about ten people dining ; but when
it was seen that this was the well-known Cobbett, the
diners increased, and, after the meal was over, the
room became inconveniently crowded ; guests coming
from other inns until at length the room door was
left open so that the crowd in the passage and on the
stairs, which were crammed from top to bottom,
might listen to the inevitable harangue on the sins of
kings, and governments, and of landowners, and the
criminal stupidity of every one else.
At this stage of the proceedings, just as the dinner
was done, one of the two friends by whom he was
accompanied gave Cobbett's health. This, naively
adds the arch-agitator, ' was of course followed by a
speech; and, as the reader will readily suppose, to

COBBETT 143
have an opportunity of making a speech was the main
motive for my going to dine at an inn, at any hour,
and especially at seven o'clock at night.' That, at
any rate, is frank enough.
After he had been thus holding forth on ruin,
past, present, and to come, for half an hour or so, it
seems to have occurred to the landlord that the com
pany upstairs were drinking very little for so large a
concourse, and he accordingly forced his way through
the crowd, up the staircase, and along the passage into
the dining-room. Cobbett had already cast an un
favourable eye upon that licensed victualler, and
describes him as ' one Sutton, a rich old fellow, who
wore a round-skirted sleeved fustian waistcoat, with a
dirty white apron tied round his middle, and with no
coat on ; having a look the eagerest and the sharpest
that I ever saw in any set of features in my whole
lifetime ; having an air of authority and of master
ship, which, to a stranger, as I was, seemed quite
incompatible with the meanness of his dress and the
vulgarity of his manners : and there being, visible to
every beholder, constantly going on in him a pretty
even contest between the servility of avarice and the
insolence of wealth.'
The person who called forth this severe description
having forced his way into the room? some one called
out that he was causing an interruption, to which he
replied that that was, in fact, what he had come to
do, because all this speechifying injured the sale of his
liquor ! Can it be doubted that this roused all the
lion in Cobbett's breast ? He first of all tells us that
' the disgust and abhorrence which such conduct could

144 THE EXETER ROAD
not fail to excite produced, at first, a desire to quit
the room and the house, and even a proposition to
that effect. But, after a minute or so, to reflect, the
company resolved not to quit the room, but to turn
him out of it who had caused the interruption ; and
the old fellow, finding himself tackled, saved the
labour of shoving, or kicking, him out of the room, by
retreating out of the doorway, with all the activity of
which he was master.'
The speech at last finished, the company began to
settle down to what Cobbett calls the ' real business
of the evening, namely, drinking, smoking, and
singing.' It was a Saturday night, and as there was
all the Sunday morning to sleep in, and as the wives
of the company were at a convenient distance, the
circumstances were favourable to an extensive con
sumption of ' neat ' and ' genuine ' liquors. At this
juncture the landlord announced, through the waiter,
that he declined to serve anything so long as Mr.
Cobbett remained in the room ! This uncorked all
the vials of wrath of which Cobbett had so large and
bitter a supply. ' Gentlemen,' he said, ' born and
bred, as you know I was, on the borders of this
county, and fond as I am of bacon, Hampshire hogs
have with me always been objects of admiration
rather than of contempt ; but that which has just
happened here induces me to observe that this feeling
of mine has been confined to hogs of four legs. For
my part, I like your company too well to quit it. I
have paid this fellow six shillings for the wing of a
fowl, a bit of bread, and a pint of small beer. I have
a right to sit here ; I want no drink, and those who

WEYHILL FAIR 145
do, being refused it here, have a right to send to
other houses for it, and to drink it here.'
Mine host, alarmed at this declaration of inde
pendence, withdrew the prohibition, and indeed
brought up pipes, tobacco, and the desired drinks
himself; and soon after this entered the room with
two gentlemen who had inquired for Mr. Cobbett,
and laying his hand on Cobbett's knee, smiled and
said the gentlemen wished to be introduced. ' Take
away your paw,' thundered the agitator, shaking the
strangers by the hand ; ' I am happy to see you, even
though introduced by this fellow.' After which they
all indulged in the English equivalent of the Scotch
' willie waucht ' until half-past two in the morning.
' But,' remarks Cobbett, as a parting shot, ' the
next time this old sharp-looking fellowgets six shillings
from me for a dinner, he shall, if he choose, cook me,
in any manner that he likes, and season me with
hand so unsparing as to produce in the feeders thirst
unquenchable.'

XXI
Weyhill Fair, which brought Cobbett and the
people he harangued into Andover, is a thoroughly old
English institution, and although the old custom of
fairs is gradually dying out, and this, the Largest Fair
in England, is not so important as it was a hundred
years ago, it is still a place where much money
changes hands once a year. Weyhill is supposed to
L

146 THE EXETER ROAD
be one of the places mentioned in Piers Plowman s
Vision, in the line : —
At \Yy and at Wynchestre I went to ye fair,
and it is the ' Weydon Priors ' of the Mayor of
Castcrbridge, where Henchard sells his wife.
Weyhill Fair was once — in the fine fat days of
agricultural prosperity, when England was always at
war with France, and corn was dear — a six-days fair.
As the ' oldest inhabitant ' to be discovered nowadays
at Weyhill will complain, shaking his head sadly the
while, ' There warn't none o' them 'ere 'sheenery
fal-lals about in them clays to do the wark o' men
and harses so's no -one can't get no decent living
like, d'ye see ? ' If by ' 'sheenery,' you understand
mechanical appliances — 'machinery,' in fact — to be
meant, you will see how distrustfully the agricultural
mind still marches to the modern quick-step of pro
gress. There is always plenty of machinerv on view
at Weyhill Fair : ploughs and harrows, and such like
inanimate things, and machinery in motion ; steam
threshers, winnowers, binders, and the like, threshing,
and winnowing, and binding the erupt y air.
There are special days set apart — and more or less
rigorously observed — for Hiring, for Pleasure, for the
Hop Fair, and for the sale of sheep. This great annual
fixture begins on Old Michaelmas Eve, 10th October,
and lasts four clays, as against the six davs, that
were all too short in which to do the business, up to
fifty years ago. Railways have dealt the old Enolish
institution of fairs a deadly blow all over the country,
and before many more years have gone the majority

'JOHNNY'S SO LONG AT THE FAIR' 147
of them will be things of the past. Their reason for
existing will then be quite gone, even as it is now
going. Before railways came into being the farmer-
travelled little, and his men not at all. From one
year's end to the other they probably never saw a
town beyond their nearest marketing centre, and
they certainly never made the acquaintance of London.
So, since the farmer and his men, the mistress and
her maids, could not get about to buy, it follows that
those who had goods to sell had need to take all the
advantage possible of that great and glorious institu
tion, the Fair.
Bitterly disappointed in the old days were those
who, from some reason or another, were prevented
from coming to this Promised Land of gay and
glittering stalls and booths. Jolly .and convivial, on
the other hand, were those who had the luck to be
able to come. ' Oh, clear ! what can the matter be ?
Johnny's so long at the Fair,' commences an old
country song. AVe can guess pretty well what the
matter was, just as certainly as if we had been there
ourselves. Johnny, of course, had got too much
cider, or strong, home-brewed October ' humming ale '
into him, and, as the rustics would put it, ' couldn't
stir a peg, were't ever so.' And so the girl he left
behind him at the farmhouse had 'need of all the
patience at her command while she waited for his
return. She probably didn't much care — for Johnny's
sake ; rather for another re'ason. As thus : —
He promised he'd buy me a fairing to please me ;
A bunch of blue ribbons to tie up my bonny brown hair.

148 THE EXETER ROAD
It was the blue ribbons she wanted, you see. Let us,
dear friends, hope she got them.
Many dangers threatened the Johnnies — the Colin
Clouts of that time. The fair was the happy hunting-
ground of Sergeant Kite, who used to treat the dull-
witted fellows until they were stupid as owls, when,
hey presto ! the Queen's Shilling was clapped into
their nerveless palms, and they woke the next morn
ing to find themselves duly enlisted, with a bunch of
parti-coloured ribbons fixed in their hats as a token
and badge of their military servitude. Then ' what
price' those blue ribbons lying forgotten in the
pocket for the disconsolate fair one ? Nothing under
a fine of twenty pounds sterling sufficed to release a
recruit in those days, and as few families could then
afford that ransom, the fair was a turning-point in
the career of many a lusty fellow.
The recruiting sergeant still does a little business
at Weyhill, but his claws are nowadays cut very
close. Weyhill, as you approach it, is situated, much to
your surprise, not on a hill at all, but rather on the
flat. It is a mere nothing of a village, and beyond
the parish church, the inevitable inn, and the equally
inevitable farmhouse, houses are very much to seek.
The stranger who happens upon the place at any
other than fair time is astonished by the large
numbers of open sheds and the numerous clusters
of long, low, thatched, and white - washed cottages,
situated on a wide, open, grassy common beside the
road, all empty, and every one bearing boldly-painted
announcements, in black paint, of ' Hot Dinners,'

THE HORSE FAIR H9
' Refreshments,' and the like. The stranger might be
excused if he thought this some bankrupt settlement
whose vanished inhabitants, like the people of that
mythical place who ' eked out a precarious existence
by taking in one another's washing,' had lived on
selling refreshments to each other until they had
finally all died of indigestion. He would be very
much mistaken, however, in his surmise, for this is
Weyhill Fair-ground in undress. If you wish to see
it in full swing, you must visit the spot between
10th and 13th October, when it is lively enough.
The first day is the Sheep Fair. As many as
150,000 sheep have been sold here on this day.
The Horse Fair is held every day ; and an astonishing
number and variety of horses there are too. Irish
horses, brought all the way from Cork, Scotch horses,
AVelsh horses ; every kind of horse, from the Suffolk
Punch to the New Forest Pony. Great lumbering
young cart-horses stand behind their pens with manes
and tails plaited to wonderment with straw, for all
the world like beauties dressed for the County Ball,
and just as proud and self-conscious. Do you want
to buy a horse of any kind at the Fair ? Then
don't ! — unless, indeed, you know all that is to be
known about horses, and a bit over ; otherwise the
dealer will ' have ' you, for a dead certainty. To see
them showing off a horse's good qualities and hiding
his bad ones is a liberal education, but see that you
acquire your knowledge at some one else's expense.
AVith this determination you can afford to be well
amused with the waving of coloured flags on long
sticks, by which the horses are made to pirouette

iso THE EXETER ROAD
before the eyes of likely purchasers, and can safely
smile at the wily dealer's exclamations of ' There's
blood ! ' ' Get up, my beauty ! ' and ' Here's the
quality ! '
The very pick of the horseflesh, however, does not
reach AVeyhill. The dealers bring their stock with
them by road from Milford, Holyhead, Scotland, at the
rate often miles a day, and as they thus have to come a
hundred or a hundred and fifty miles, the journey takes
from ten days to a fortnight. This would be a serious
expense and loss of time were it not for the fact that
dealers always look to make sales along the road.
The second day of the Fair is known as Mop Fair,
or Molls' and Johns' Day. Its official title is the
Hiring, or Statute Fair. At twelve o'clock, mid-dav,
farm-servants, men or women, ' Molls ' or ' Johns,'
leave their employ, and, drawing their wages, offer
themselves to be hired for the coming twelvemonth.
They stand in long lines, the carters with a length of
plaited whipcord in their hats, the shepherds with a
lock of wool, and wait while the farmers come and
bargain with them. When they have struck up an
agreement, the men proceed to fix coloured ribbons in
their hats, and do their best to have a merrv time
with the wages they have just received.
There is certainly every opportunity of spending
money on the spot. Steam merry-go-rounds keep up
a continual screeching and bellowing ; stalls with all
manner of toys and nicknacks of the most grotesque
shapes and hideous colouring ; cake and sweetmeat
stalls, loaded, as Weyhill stalls have been from time
immemorial, with Salisbury gingerbread ; Aunt

MINOR TRADES 151
Sallies ; try -your -strength machines, and a hundred
others compete for the rustic's coin. Then, if he
wants a new suit of clothes, here is the clothier's
stall, where Hodge can bespeak a suit, wear it during
the next twelve months, and pay for it next Fair.
just as his father and grandfather used to do before
him. All the booths visited, the horse medicines
stall inspected, the latest improvements in agri
cultural machinery gaped at, Hodge repairs to the
refreshment hovels, wherein certain crafty men who
have come down for the occasion from London are
awaiting him, to treat the unsuspecting yokel to
drinks, to lure him on to play cards, and finally to
cheat him and pick his pockets in the most finished
and approved fashion. For these gentry, and for the
disorderly in general, there is a police-station on the
ground, with cells all complete, and with local
magistrates every morning to hear cases, and to
consign prisoners,- if necessary, to Winchester Gaol,
sixteen miles away.
The third and fourth clays are now given up to
the Pleasure and Hop Fairs. One of the smaller
trades connected with the malting and general agri-
cultural industries is that of malt-shovel and barn-
shovel making. These are wooden shovels of a
peculiar shape, and are sold only at one stall.
Another of the minor businesses is that of umbrella
selling. The umbrellas are very fine and large, and
of a kind that would make a marked man of any
Londoner who should use one in town.
The Cheese Fair is now a small one, dealings
generally being confined to local folks, who delight in

152 THE EXETER ROAD
the Blackmore and ' Blue Vinney ' cheeses of this and
the adjoining counties. London dealers still attend
the Hop Fair, in which many thousands of pounds'
worth of hops change hands to the drinking of much
champagne, brought on to the ground by the cart
load, as in the brave days of yore. There are two
distinct hop markets, the Farnham Row and the
Country Side. Hops from Farnham, Bentley, Peters-
field, Liphook, and other neighbouring places find a
ready market. They are sold more exclusively by
sample than formerly, and so only a few ' pockets,'
as the tightly packed sacks are named, are visible.
Round them dealers may be seen, rubbing the hops
in their hands and smelling them with a knowing
O O
look, while the vendor cuts another sample out of the
pocket for the next likely customer. He does this
with a singular steel instrument called a ' sample
drawer.' First a sharp and long -bladed knife is
thrust into the hard mass, and two sides cut, and
then the broad-bladed ' drawer ' driven in and screwed
tight, bringing out a compact square of hops to be
tested. By nine o'clock every night all the booths and
stalls have to be closed, and stillness reigns over the
scene, save for the cough of the sheep, the occasional
lowing of the cattle, or the fretful whinnying of a
wakeful horse. And when the last day of the Fair is
done, the booths are all shut up and deserted, and
desolation reigns again for a year.

ABBOT'S ANN 153

XXII

The trail of the Romans is over all the surroundings
of Andover, and they must have loved this fishful
and fertile valley well, for ample relics of extensive
settlements and gorgeous villas have been unearthed
by the plough. Some of the fine mosaic pavements
discovered here are now in the British Museum, and
every now and again the shepherd or the ploughman
picks up a worn and battered coin of the Csesars in
the neighbouring fields. One of the finest Roman
pavements came from the village of Abbot's Ann, a
short distance away, under the shadow of the great
bulk of Bury Hill, which, crowned with prehistoric
earthworks of cyclopean size, frowns down upon the
valley. The whimsical name of this village and that
of Little Ann derive from the stream, the Ann, or
Anton, on whose banks they are situated.
In this village of Abbot's Ann there still prevails
a remarkable custom. On the death of a young un
married person of the parish, his or her friends and
relatives make a funeral garland, or chaplet, similar
to the one sketched overleaf, in paper, and hang it
from the ceiling of the church. The interior of the
building now holds quite a number of these singular
mementoes, the oldest dating back to the last century.
They are fashioned of cardboard and white paper,
something in the shape of a crown, with elaborately
cut rosettes and with five paper gloves suspended, on
two of which are recorded the name, the age, and
the date of death of the deceased whose memory is

154 THE EXETER ROAD
thus kept alive, while the other three are iuscribed
with texts or verses from favourite hymns. The par
ticulars of age and death are repeated on a little
wooden shield above.
During the last eight years three of these memo
rials have been added. They are
placed here after having been carried
in front of the coffin on the day of
the funeral. On such occasions the
garland is carried by two girls, dressed
in white, with curiously folded hand
kerchiefs on their heads. There is
funeral garland, now only one other place in England.
abbot's ann. ^ Matlock, in Derbyshire, where this
curious custom survives.
These villages, together with Amport, Thruxton,
Monxton, and East Cholderton, lie in the triangular
district between the branching of the two great
routes of the road to Exeter. Just out of Andover,
on the rising road, stands the old toll -house that
commanded either route, with the mileage to various
towns still displayed prominently on its walls. The
right-hand road leads to the AVeyhill and Amesbury
branch of the Exeter Road, while the left-hand fork
is the main road to Salisbury. Passing this toll-house,
the old road runs through an inhospitable succession of
uplands which are for the most part a weariness alike
to mind and body, whether you walk, or cycle, or
drive a horse, or urge forth your wild career on a
motor-car. Going westwards, the gradient is chiefly
a rising one for a long distance after leaving Andover
behind, and it is not until ' the AVallops ' are reached,

THE WALLOPS 155
at Little (or Middle) Wallop, lying in a hollow where
a little stream trickles across the road, that any relief
is experienced. It must be Little AVallop to which Mr. Thomas
Hardy refers in the Mayor of Casterbridge, where
the ruined and broken-hearted Henchard, after tak
ing up his early occupation of hay-trusser, becomes
employed at a ' pastoral farm near the old western
highway. . . . He had chosen the neighbourhood of
this artery from a sense that, situated here, though
at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer
to her whose welfare was so clear than he would be
at a roadless spot only half as remote.'
The Wallops are interesting places, despite their
silly name. There are Over, and Nether, and Middle,
or, as they are otherwise styled, Upper, Lower, and
Little AVallop. According to one school of antiquaries
(who must by no means be suspected of joking), the
Wallop district is to be identified with the ' Gual-
oppum ' described by an old chronicler, a district,
appropriately enough, the scene of a great battle in
which Vortigern was defeated by the Saxons. There
are, of course, local derivations of the meaning of
this place-name, together with a belief that to Sir
John AVallop, an ancestor of the Earl of Portsmouth,
who ' walloped the French ' in one. or other of our
many mediasval battles with that nation, we owe that
very active, not to say slangy verb, 'to wallop.'
But, unhappily for unscientific theories, there is a
little stream, called the AVallop, flowing through these
villages, to which they owe their generic name ; the
name of the stream itself deriving from the Anglo-

156 THE EXETER ROAD
Saxon ' Weallan,' to boil or bubble ; the root of our
English word ' well'
Of these villages, Little AVallop alone is on the
road, and is merely an offshoot of the others, called
into existence by the traffic which followed this course
in the old coaching days. Since railways have left
the roads lonely it has simply slumbered, ' far from
the madding crowd's ignoble strife,' and its inhabit
ants are presumably happy in their retirement ;
although, when days are short and nights are long,
and the stormy winds do blow, it is quite conceivable
that there are more cheerful and warmer situations.
Three miles from here the road leaves Hampshire
and enters Wilts, and two miles onwards from that
point, after passing 'Lobcombe Corner,' the junction of
the Stockbridge road, is seen that famous old coach
ing inn, the ' Pheasant,' known much better under
its other name, ' Winterslow Hut.'

XXIII
There are few more desolate and cheerless places
in England than the spot where this old coaching
inn stands beside the open road, with the unenclosed
downs stretching away to the far horizon, fold
after fold. Somewhere amid these hills and hollows,
but quite hidden, is the village of AVest AAAiter-
slow, from which the ' Hut ' obtains its name. The
place, save for the periodical passing of the
coaches, was as solitary in old times as it is now,

HAZLITT 157
and its quiet as profound. The very name is chilling,
and as excellently descriptive as it is possible for a
name to be.
When, coming within sight of its isolated roof-
tree from the summit of the hills on either side, the
coach-guards used to blow fanfares on their bugles as
a reminder for the ostler to have his fresh teams
ready, the inn and its surrounding stables woke into
life, and when they were gone their several ways,
it dozed again. Save that it doubtless looked more
prosperous then, the present appearance of ' Winter-
slow Hut ' is identical with its aspect of sixty years
ago. The same horse-pond by the roadside, the same
trees, only older and more decrepit, the same pre
historic dykes and tumuli on the unchanging downs ;
it must have been capable of absorbing the fun and
jollity of a fair, and still presenting its characteristic
ally dour and dreary aspect ; but now that, sitting
in the bay window of the parlour that commands
the road in either direction, you may watch the
highway by the half-hour and see no traveller, the
emptiness is appalling.
To this solitary outpost of civilisation came
William Hazlitt, critic and essayist, during several
years, for quietude. For four years, from 1808 to
1812, he and his wife lived in a cottage at West
Winterslow, on the small income derived from her
other cottage property there, supplemented by the
sums the wayward Hazlitt earned fitfully by the
practice of literature. Then they removed to London,
where they disagreed, Hazlitt retiring- to the 'Hut'
in 1819, and leaving his wife in town. Nervous and

158 THE EXETER ROAD
irritable, he wanted quiet, nor can it be doubted that
in this spot he found what he sought. He was cursed,
according to the widely different beliefs of his friends,
with ' an ingrained selfishness,' or ' a morbid self-
consciousness,' and on the downs he wTould walk,
for the pleasure of having the neighbourhood all to
himself, from forty to fifty miles a day. He wrote
his Winterslow essays here, and his Xapoleon, for
whom he had an almost insane reverence. The ' dia
bolical scowl ' of Hazlitt when Napoleon or any other
of his pet susceptibilities were abused must have been
worth seeing.
' Now,' says a literary hero-hunter, who has visited
' AVinterslow Hut,' as a place of pilgrimage, — ' now it
is a desolate place, fallen into decay, and tenanted by
a labouring man and his family, cultivating a small
farm of some thirty acres, and barely able to make a
living out of it. In winter two or three weeks will
sometimes elapse without even a beggar or tramp
or cart passing the door. On the ground floor, look
ing out upon a horse-pond, flanked bv two old lime-
trees, is a little parlour, which was the one probably
used by Hazlitt as his sitting-room. At the other
end of the house is a large empty room, formerly
devoted to cock-fighting matches and singlestick
combats. It was with a strange and eerie feeling that
o o
I contemplated this little parlour, and pictured to my
self the many solitary evenings during Avhich Hazlitt
sat in it enjoying copious libations of his favourite
tea (for during the last fifteen years of his life he
never tasted alcoholic drinks of any kind) perhaps
reading Tom Jones for the tenth time, or enjoying

rc-HrmpfR.

WINTERSLOW HUT.'

A LITER AR Y RECL USE 1 6 1
one of Congreve's comedies, or Rousseau's Confessions,
or writing, in his large flowing hand, a dozen pages
of the essay on Persons one ivould Wish to have Seen,
or On Living to One's Self. One cannot imagine
any retreat more consonant with the feelings of this
lonely thinker, during one of his periods of seclusion,
than the out-of-the-world place in which I stood. In
winter time it must have been desolate beyond
description — on wild nights especially — "heaven's
chancel- vault " blind with sleet — the fierce wind
sweeping down from the bare wolds around, and
beating furiously against the doors and windows of
the unsheltered hostelry.'
It is not to be supposed that Hazlitt was insensible
to the dreariness of the spot. ' Here, even here,' he
says, as though the dolour of the place had come
home to him, ' with a few old authors I can manage
to get through the summer or winter months without
ever knowing what it is to feel ennui. They sit
with me at breakfast ; they walk out with me before
dinner. After a long walk through unfrequented
tracts, after starting the hare from the fern, or
hearing the wing of the raven rustling above my
head, or being greeted by the woodman's " stern
good-night," as he strikes into his narrow homeward
path, I can " take mine ease at mine inn," beside the
blazing hearth, and shake hands with Signor Orlando
Friscobaldo, as the oldest acquaintance I have.'
His Farewell to Essay Writing was written here
20th February 1828. He had long given up the
intemperance of former years, and cultivated litera
ture on copious tea - drinking. ' As I quaff my
M

1 62 THE EXETER ROAD
libations of tea in a morning,' he says, ' I love to
watch the clouds sailing from the west, and fancy
that " the spring comes slowly up this way." In
this hope, while " fields are dank, and ways are
mire," I follow the same direction to a neighbouring
wood, where, having gained the dry, level green
sward, I can see my way for a mile before me,
closed in on each side by copse -wood, and ending
in a point of light more or less brilliant, as the day
is bright or cloudy.' And so this harbinger of our
own literary neurotics continues, dropping into a
morbid introspective strain, pulling up his soul, like
a plant, by the roots, to see how it is growing,
and babbling to the world, between the jewel-work of
his literature, of his follies and his unrest. Strange,
that this wiry pedestrian, this apostle of fresh air,
should be of the same dough of which the degenerates
o o
of our time are compounded.

XXIV
It was here, however, that one of the most
thrilling episodes of the road was enacted in the
old days. The Mail from Exeter to London had
left Salisbury on the night of 20th October 1816,
and proceeded in the usual way for several miles,
when what was thought to be a large calf was seen
trotting beside the horses in the darkness. The
team soon became extremely nervous and fidgety,
and as the inn was approached they could scarcely
be kept under control.

AN ESCAPED LIONESS 163
At the moment when the coachman pulled up
to deliver his bags, one of the leading horses was
O ' O
suddenly seized by the supposed calf. The horses
kicked and plunged violently, and it was with
difficulty the driver could prevent the coach from
being overturned. The guard drew his blunderbuss
and was about to shoot the mysterious assailant
when several men, accompanied by a large mastiff,
appeared in sight. The foremost, seeing that the
guard was about to fire, pointed a pistol at his head,
swearing that he would be shot if the beast was killed.
Every one then perceived that this ferocious
' calf ' was nothing less than a lioness. The dog was
set on to attack her, and she thereupon left the
horse and turned on him. He turned and ran, but
the lioness caught him and tore him to pieces,
carrying the remains in her mouth under a granary.
The spot was then barricaded to prevent her escape,
and a noose being thrown over her neck, she was
secured and marched off to captivity again.
It is said that the horse when attacked fought
with great spirit, and would probably have beaten
off his assailant with his fore -feet had he been
at liberty ; but in his frantic plunges he became
entangled in the harness. The lioness, it seems,
attacked him in front, springing at- his throat and
fastening the claws of her fore -feet on either side
of the neck, while her hind- feet tore at his chest.
The horse, although fearfully mangled, survived.
The showmen of the time were evidently quite
as enterprising as those of these latter days, for
the menagerie proprietor purchased the horse and

1 64 THE EXETER ROAD
exhibited him the next day at Salisbury Fair, with
excellent results in the shape of increased gate-
money. The passengers on this extraordinary occasion
were absolutely terror-stricken. Bounding off the
coach, they made a wild rush for the inn, and,
reaching the door, slammed it to and bolted it, to
the exclusion of one poor fellow who, not active
enough, found himself shut out in the road. The
lioness, pursuing the dog, actually brushed against
him. When she was secured, the poltroons inside
the house opened the door and let the half- fainting
traveller in. They gave him refreshments, and he
recovered sufficiently to be able to write an account
of the event for the local papers ; but in a few days
he became a raving maniac, and was sent to an
asylum at Laverstock. For over twenty-seven years
he lived there, incurable, and died in 1843.
The leader attacked by the lioness was a famous
horse, even before that affair. There were many
such in the coaching age. Animals unmanageable
on the racecourse were frequently sold to coach-
proprietors, and soon learnt discipline on the roads.
' Pomegranate ' was his name. A ' thief ' on the
course, and a bad-tempered brute in the stable, he
had worked on the Exeter Mail for some time
before this dramatic episode in his career found
him, for a time, a home in a menagerie.
The fame of the affair was great and lasting.
O O
That coaching specialist, James Pollard, drew, and
R. Havell engraved, a plate showing the dramatic
scene, which was dedicated to Thomas Hasker,

SALISBURY 165
Superintendent of His Majesty's Mails. In it you
see Joseph Pike, the guard, rising to shoot the
very heraldic - looking lioness, and the passengers
encouraging him in the background, from the safe
retreat of the first-floor windows. It will be observed
that this is apparently the lioness's first spring, and
yet those passengers are already upstairs : at once a
striking testimony to their agility and a warranty of
the exquisite truth of the saying- that fear lends wings
to the feet.

XXV
Salisbury spire and the distant city come with
the welcome surprise of a Promised Land after these
bleak downs. Even three miles away the unenclosed
wilds are done, and we drop continuously from Three
Mile Hill, clown, down, down to the lowlands on a
smooth and uninterrupted road, to where the trees
and the houses can be distinguished, nestling around
and below the graceful cathedral, a long way yet
ahead. It is coming thus with that needle-pointed
spire, so long and so prominently in view, that the
story of its having been built to its extraordinary
height of 404 feet for the purpose of guiding the
strayed footsteps of travellers across the solitudes of
Salisbury Plain may readily be believed.
Salisbury wears a bland and cheerful appearance,
and has an air of modernity that quite belies its age.
Few places in England have so well-ascertained an

1 66 THE EXETER ROAD
origin. We can fix the very year, six hundred and
eighty years ago, when it began to be, and yet,
although there is the cathedral to prove its age, with
the Poultry Cross, and very many ancient houses
happily still standing, it has a general air of anything
but medigevalism. This curious feeling that strikes
every visitor is really owing to the generous and well-
ordered plan on which the city was originally laid
out ; broad streets being planned in geometrical pre
cision, and the blocks of houses built in regular
squares. That phenomenally simple-minded person, Tom
Pinch, thought Salisbury" ' a very desperate sort of
place ; an exceedingly wild and dissipated city ' — a
view of it which is not shared by any one else. I wish
I could tell you to which inn it was that he resorted
to have dinner, and to await the arrival of Martin. A
coaching inn, of course, for Martin came by coach
from London. But whether it was the ' AVhite Hart,'
or the ' Three Swans ' (which, alas ! is no longer an
inn), or the ' King's Arms,' or the ' George,' is more
than I or any one else can determine.
Salisbury is by no means desperate or dissipated,
even though it be market-day, and although itinerant
cutlery vendors may still sell seven -bladed knives,
with never a cut among them, to the unwary. It is
O ' j
true that Mr. Thomas Hardy has given us, in On the
Western Circuit, a picture of blazing orgies at
Melchester Fair, with steam -trumpeting merry-go-
rounds, glamour and glitter, glancing young women
no better than they ought to be, and an amorous
young barrister much worse than he should have

NEW SARUM 167
been ; and it is true that by ' Melchester ' this fair
city of Salisbury is meant ; but you can conjure up
no very accurate picture of this ancient place from
those pages. The real Salisbury is extremely urbane
and polished, decorous and well - ordered. It is
graceful and sunny, and has, in fact, all the sweetness
of medigevalism without its sternness, and affords a
thorough contrast with Winchester, which frowns
upon you where Salisbury smiles. One need not
waver from one's allegiance to Winchester to admit so
much. Salisbury is still known in official documents as
' New Sarum.' It is, nevertheless, of a quite respect
able antiquity, its newness dating from that day,
28th April 1220, when Bishop Poore laid the
foundation-stone of the still existing cathedral.
There are romantic incidents in the exodus from Old
Sarum on its windy height upon the downs, a mile
and a half away, to these ' rich champaign fields and
fertile valleys, abounding with the fruits of the earth,
and watered by living streams,' in this ' sink of
Salisbury Plain,' where the Bourne, the AVylye, the
Avon, and the Nadcler flow in innumerable runlets
through the meads.
Old Sarum was old indeed. Its history strikes
rootlets deep down into the Unknown. A natural
hillock upon the wild downs, its defensible position
rendered it a camp for the earliest aboriginal tribes,
who, always at war with one another, lived for
safety's sake in such bleak and inhospitable places
when they would much rather be hunting and
enjoying life generally in the sheltered wooded vales

1 68 THE EXETER ROAD
and fertile plains. These tribes heaped up the first
artificial earthworks that ever strengthened this
historic hill, and they were succeeded during the long
march of those dim centuries by Romans, Saxons,
and Danes. The Romans, with their unerring
military instinct, saw the importance of the hill, and
added to the simple defences they found there. They
called the place Sorbiodunum, and made it a great
strategic station. The Saxons strengthened the
fortifications in their turn, and at the time of the
Norman Conquest a city had grown up under the
shelter of the citadel.
In its deserted state to-day, the site of Old Sarum
vividly recalls the appearance presented by an extinct
volcano, the conical hill rising from the downs with
the suddenness of an upheaval, and the area enclosed
within the concentric rings of banks and ditches
forming a hollow space similar to a crater. The total
area enclosed within these fortifications is about 28
acres. Within this space was comprised that ancient
city, and in its very centre, overlooking everything
else, and encompassed by a circular fosse and bank,
100 feet in height, stood the citadel. The site of this
castle is now overgrown with dense thickets of
shrubs and brambles ; the fragments of its flint and
rubble walls, 12 feet thick, and some remaining
portions of its gateways affording evidence of its old-
time strength.
Within this city, enclosed for centuries by the
ring-fence of these fortifications, stood the cathedral,
in a position just below the Castle ward. Its exact
site and size (although not a fragment of it is

OLD SARUM 169
standing) were discovered in the summer of 1834.
That portion of the vanished city had been laid down
as pasture, and the drought of that year revealed the
plan of the cathedral, in a distinct brown outline
upon the grass. This building, completed in 1092
by Bishop Osmund, furnished the stone in later years
for the spire of Salisbury Cathedral and for the walls
of the Close, in which, by St. Anne's Gate, many
sculptured fragments of these relics from Old Sarum
may yet be seen.
A variety of circumstances brought about the
removal of the cathedral from Old Sarum. Water
was lacking on that height, and winds raged so
furiously around it that the monks could not hear the
priests say Mass ; and, worse than all, during the
Papal Interdict, the King, in revenge for many
ecclesiastical annoyances, transferred the custody of
the Castle of Old Sarum from the bishops to his own
creatures, who locked the monks out of their
monastery and church on one occasion when they
had gone on some religious procession. When the
monks returned, they found entrance denied them,
and were forced to remain in the open air during- the
whole of a frosty winter night. There was no end to
the hardships which those Men of Wrath brought
upon the Church. No wonder that Peter of Blois
cried out, ' What has the House of the Lord to do
with castles ? It is the Ark of the Covenant in the
Temple of Baalim. Let us in God's name descend
into the plain.'
The removal decided upon, it remained to choose a
site. Tradition tells us that the Virgin Mary appeared

170 THE EXETER ROAD
to Bishop Poore in a vision, and told him to build the
church on a spot called Merryfield ; and has it that
the site was chosen by the fall of an arrow shot from
the ramparts of Old Sarum. If that was the case,
there must have been something miraculous in that
shot, for the place where Salisbury Cathedral is built
is a mile and a half away from those ramparts. But
perhaps the bishop or the legends used the long bow
in a very special sense.
The cathedral was completed in sixty years,
receiving its final consecration in 1260; but the
great spire was not finished until a hundred years
later. The city was an affair of rapid growth,
receiving a charter of incorporation seven years after
being founded. Seventeen years later, Bishop Bing
ham dealt a final blow at the now utterly ruined city
of Old Sarum by diverting the old Roman road to
the West from its course through Old Sarum, Bemer-
ton, and Wilton, and making a highway running
directly to New Sarum, and crossing the Avon by
the new bridge which he had built at Harnham. Old
Sarum could by this time make little or no resistance,
for it was deserted, save for a few who could not
bring themselves to leave the home of their fore
fathers. Wilton, however, which was a thriving
town, bitterly resented this diversion of the roads,
and petitioned against it, but without avail. From
that date Wilton's decline set in, and the rise of New
Sarum progressed at an even greater speed. A
clothing trade sprang up and prospered, and many
Royal visits gave the citizens an air of importance.
They waxed rich and arrogant, and were eternally

THE MARTYRS 173
quarrelling with the bishops, one of whom they mur
dered in the turbulent times that prevailed during
Jack Cade's rebellion. Bishop Ayscough was that
unfortunate prelate. He had cautiously retired to
Edington, but a furious body of Salisbury malcontents
marched out across the Plain, and dragging him from
the altar of the church, where he was saying Mass,
took him to an adjacent hill-top, and slew him with
the utmost barbarity. It was for the benefit of these
unruly citizens that one of Jack Cade's quarters was
consigned from London to Salisbury and elevated
there on a pole, as a preliminary warning. Full
punishment followed a little later.

XXVI
It is really too great a task to follow the history
of Salisbury through the centuries to the present
time ; nor, indeed, since the city and the cathedral
are from our present point of view but incidents
along the Exeter Road, would it be desirable to
dwell very long on their story, which, as may have
been judged from what has already been said, is an
exceedingly turbulent one. The fearful martyrdoms
carried out in Fisherton Fields by the bloody hell
hounds of the Marian Persecution still stain the
records of the Church ; nor, although the very read
ing of them turn brain and body sick, and make
even the architectural enthusiast almost turn away
in disgust from that lovely cathedral, may God grant

174 THE EXETER ROAD
that they ever be forgotten, as in the England of
to-day they would almost seem to be. Hellish ferocity,
damnable frauds, how they smirch those sculptured
stones and cry insistently for remembrance !
Nicholas Shaxton, Bishop in the time of Henry
the Eighth, was alive to it all, and cleared away
the false relics ; the ' stinking boots, mucky combs,
ragged rochetts, rotten girdles, pyled purses, great
bullocks' horns, locks of hair, filthy rags, and gobbets
of wood,' which he found here ; but, with less courage
than others, he recanted in Mary's reign. Sherfield,
Recorder of Salisbury, was another reformer, but he
lived in less dangerous times for such men. It was
in 1629 that he smashed the stained -glass window,
representing the Creation, in St. Edmund's Church.
In other times he would assuredly have been burnt
for this act ; as it was, he was summoned before the
Star Chamber. He pleaded that the window did not
contain a true history of the Creation, and objected
that God was represented as ' a little old man in
a long blue coat,' which he held was ' an indignity
offered to Almighty God.' He was committed to
the Fleet Prison for this, fined £500, and required
to apologise to the Bishop of Salisbury. Fortunate
Mr. Sherfield !
This fair city has been almost as much of a Gol
gotha as the settlements of savage African kinglets
are wont to be. Shakespeare has made mention of
the execution of the Duke of Buckingham here in
1484 by Richard the Third, but many an one has
suffered and left no such trace. That such execu
tions were generally unjust and almost always too

MURDER OF THE HARTGILLS 175
severe is their sufficient condemnation; but the
hanging of Charles, Lord Stourton, in 1556, is an
exception. The affair for which he was put to death
was the murder of the two Hartgills, father and son,
at Kilmington, Somerset, and it affords an unusually
instructive glimpse into the manners of the period.
It seems that William Hartgill had long been steward
to the previous Lord Stourton, the father of Charles.
Like most stewards, he had profited by his steward
ship, over and above his salary, to a considerable
extent. There was no friendship wasted between
him and the new lord, but the quarrels which had
taken place between William Hartgill and his son
on the one side, and Charles, Lord Stourton, and his
servants on the other, finally came to a head when
my lord demanded a written undertaking from his
mother that she would never marry again, and that
Hartgill should be bond for the undertaking being-
kept. The widowed Lady Stourton was residing- at
the Hartgills' house when this demand was made.
She refused to have anything to do with such a
paper, and Hartgill bluntly declined as well. Lord
Stourton would then appear to have determined on
revenge for this defeat, and eventually, after the
Hartgills had been on several occasions waylaid,
threatened, and attacked by his servants, he conceived
the devilish plan of a pretended reconciliation over
this and other disputes in the village churchyard of
Kilmington, the occasion to be used as a means of
O ¦>
taking them off their guard, and finally disposing of
them. The two victims were suspicious of this
apparent friendliness ; but, unhappily for them,

176 THE EXETER ROAD
eventually agreed to meet in that God's Acre, on
12th January 1556, there to settle all accounts and
differences. They met, and, at a previously arranged
signal, Lord Stourton's servants rushed upon the
Hartgills and stabbed and battered them to death
in a revoltingly cruel manner, while their master
looked on with approval. The details of this cold
blooded atrocity are fully set forth in the trials of
that period, for the satisfaction of any one greedy
of horrors. This was in the reign of Queen Mary, when Pro
testants were burned at the stake with the approval of
Roman Catholics ; but not even in those brutal times
could this affair be hushed up. Lord Stourton was
arrested, brought to trial in London, and, together
with four of his servants, found guilty of murder,
and sentenced to death. Justice was commendably
swift. The two Hartgills had been done to death
on the 12th of January, and on the second day of
March in the same year my lord set out under
escort from the Tower of London for Salisbury, the
place of execution. The melancholy cavalcade came
down the Exeter Road, the chief figure in it set
astride a horse, with legs and arms pinioned. The
first night they lay at Hounslow, the second at
Staines, the third at Basingstoke, and thence to
Salisbury, where, in the Market Place, on the morn
ing of the 6th of March, they hanged him with a
silken cord. His servants were turned off at the
end of quite common hempen ropes, which doubtless
did their business quite as neatly. The body of this
prime malefactor, the organiser of the crime, was

THE DEVIL'S HEALTH 17 7
buried with much ceremony in the cathedral, but
those of the lesser criminals were treated (we may
suppose) with less reverence, because you may search
the building in vain for tomb or epitaph to their
memory. But — quaintest touch of all — the silken
rope by which Lord Stourton swung was suspended
here, over his tomb, where it remained for many a
long year afterwards.
The next outstanding landmark in the way of
executions is the hanging of a prisoner who had just
been awarded a sentence when he threw a brickbat
at the Chief Justice. His lordship was considerably
damaged and for this assault pronounced sentence
of death upon him. The execution took place at
once, outside the Council House, the unfortunate
man's right hand being first struck off.
The Civil AVar did not result in anything very
tragical for Salisbury, the operations in and around
the city being quite unimportant. The ' Catherine
Wheel Inn,' however, was the scene of much alarm
among the superstitious, when, according to a grue
some story, the Cavaliers assembled there, having
toasted the King and the Royal family, proceeded
to drink the health of the Devil, — and the Devil
appeared, the room becoming filled with ' noisome
fumes of sulphur, and a hideous monster, which was
the Devil, no doubt,' entering, and grabbing the
giver of the toast, flying away with him out of the
window. Salisbury was the scene of Penruddocke's rising for
the King in 1655. He was a county gentleman, of
Compton Chamberlayne, and with some others and a
N

178 THE EXETER ROAD
band of a hundred and fifty horsemen, rode into the
city at four o'clock in the morning of 14th March.
They seized the Judges of Assize in their beds, opened
the doors of the prison, and imprisoned the judges in
the place of the released convicts. Then, finding the
citizens too timid to join them in their revolt against
Cromwell, they sped across country, into Devon,
where they were captured.
Charles the Second was welcomed by Salisbury's
citizens, just as they welcomed every one else ;
practising with much success St. Paul's admirable
precept, to be ' all things to all men.' When James
the Second came here, on his way to meet, and fight,
the Prince of Orange, he was escorted, with every
show of deference and respect, to his lodgings at the
Bishop's Palace by the Mayor, and when he had
slunk away, and the Prince came, less than four weeks
later, and was lodged in the same house, the same
Mayor did precisely the same thing.
From the beginning of the seventeenth centurv
onward the citizens began to dearly love kings and
great personages, or, if they did not love them,
effectually pretended to do so. AArhen plague ravaged
the city of London, no one coming from that direc
tion was allowed to enter Salisbury, and even
Salisbury's own citizens returning home from that
infected centre were obliged to remain outside for
three months, while goods were not permitted to be
brought nearer than Three Mile Hill. But Charles
the Second and his Court, flying from London from
the disease, were welcomed all the same !

BRUTAL SCENES 17 9

XXVII
Coach, passengers entering Salisbury even so late
as 1835 were sometimes witnesses of shocking scenes
that, however picturesque they might have rendered
mediaeval times, were brutalising and degrading in a
civilised era. Almost every year of the nineteenth
century up to that date was fruitful in executions.
In 1801 there were ten : seven for the crime of sheep-
stealing, one for horse-stealing, one for stealing a calf,
and one for highway robbery. The practice of hang
ing criminals on the scenes of their crimes afforded
spectacles of the most extraordinary character, as
instanced in the procession that accompanied two
murderers, George Carpenter and George Ruddock,
from Fisherton Gaol, on the north-west of the city,
to the place of their execution on AAArminster Down,
15th March 1813. Such parades were senseless,
since no one ever dreamed of a rescue being at
tempted ; but, all the same, the condemned men,
placed in a cart and accompanied by a clergyman
preaching of Kingdom Come, preceded by the hang
man and followed by eight men carrying two coffins,
were escorted all the way by a troop of Wiltshire
Yeomanry, followed by some two hundred constables
and local gentlemen, all walking and carrying white
staves; with bailiffs, sheriffs, under-sheriffs, magis
trates, a hundred mounted squires, a posse of 'javelin
men,' more clergymen, the gaoler and his assistants,
more javelin men and sheriff's officers, more yeomanry,
and, at last, bringing up the rear, a howling mob,

180 THE EXETER ROAD
numbering many thousands. As for the central
objects in this show, ' they died penitent,' we are
told ; and indeed they could do nothing less, seeing
to what trouble they had thus put a goodly pro
portion of the county.
Executions for all manner of crimes were so many
that it would be idle to detail them ; but some stand
out prominently by reason of their circumstances.
For example, the hanging of Robert Turner AAAtkins
in 1819, for a murder near Purton, presents a lurid
scene. His wife had died of a broken heart shortly
after his arrest, and his mother was among the
spectators of his end. The same kind of procession
accompanied him across Salisbury Plain to the place
of execution, and a similar mob made the occasion
a holiday. Mother and son were able to bid one
another farewell, owing to an unexpected halt on the
road ; and when they made a halt for the refresh
ments which the long journey demanded, the con
demned man's children were brought to him.
' Mammy is dead,' said one. ' Ah ! ' replied the
man, ' and so will your daddy be, shortly.' At the
fatal spot he prayed with the chaplain, and was
allowed to read to the people a psalm which he had
chosen. It was Psalm 108, which, on reference,
will not prove to be particularly appropriate to the
occasion. Then he blessed the fifteen thousand or so
present, felt the rope, and remarked that it could
only kill the body, and was turned off, amid the
sudden and unexpected breaking of one of the most
terrific thunderstorms ever experienced on the Plain.
They hanged a gipsy, one Joshua Shemp, in 1801,

HUMANE JURLES 1 8 1
for stealing a horse, and afterwards discovered that
he was innocent, according to a monument still to be
seen in Odstock churchyard. In 1802 John Everett
suffered death for uttering forged bank-notes, followed
in 1820 by AVilliam Lee, who died for the same
offence. So late as 1835, two men were hanged for
arson ; but public opinion had already been aroused
against such severity, judges and juries taking every
advantage offered by faults in the drawing up of
indictments to acquit all those criminals not guilty
of murder whose crimes were then met by capital
punishment. The statutes left no choice but death
for the convicted incendiary, the horse- or sheep-
stealer, and many another ; and so many a guilty
person was acquitted by judges and juries horrified
by the thought of incurring blood - guiltiness by
sending such men to the scaffold. The law allowed
loopholes for escape, and so when the straw-Y\ck, to
which a prisoner was charged with setting fire, was ,
proved to have been hay, he was found 'Not guilty.'
Blackstone called this action taken by juries 'pious
perjury,' and so it certainly was when, to avoid
shedding blood, they used to find £5 and £10 notes
which prisoners sometimes were charged with stealing,
to be articles to the value of twelvepence or a few
shillings, according as the case required.
The last lawless scenes around Salisbury were
enacted at the close of 1830, when the so-called
' Machinery Riots,' which had spread all over the
country, culminated here in fights between the Wilt
shire Yeomanry and the discontented agricultural
labourers, who, fearing that steam machinery, then

1 82 THE EXETER ROAD
beginning to be adopted, was about to take away
their livelihood, scoured the country in bands, wreck
ing and burning farmsteads and barns. The ' Battle
of Bishop Down,' on the Exeter Road between

Winterslow Hut ' and Salisbury, was

fought

on

ST. ANNE S GATE, SALISBURY.

23rd November, and was caused by the collision of
a large body of rioters who were marching to the
city with the avowed object of pillaging it, and a
mixed force of yeomanry and special constables. All
the coaches, together with every other kind of traffic,
were brought to a standstill. Stone-throwing on the
part of the rioters, and bludgeoning by the special

ALDERBURY 183
constables were succeeded by charges of the yeomanry,
and the contest resulted in the capture of twenty -two
rioters, who were locked up in Fisherton Gaol. The
next day a number of rioters were surprised in the
' Green Dragon Inn,' Alderbury, and marched off to
prison ; and the clay after, twenty -five were taken in
a fight near Tisbury, after one of their number had
been killed. There were no fewer than three hundred
and thirty prisoners awaiting trial when the Special
Commissioners arrived for that purpose on 27th Decem
ber. Many of the prisoners were transported, and
others had short terms of imprisonment ; but a
leader, called ' Commander ' Coote, who was captured
by two constables at the Compasses, Rockbourn, was
hanged at Winchester.

XXVIII
And now for some little-known literary land
marks. Salisbury, of course, is the scene of some
passages in Martin Chuzzlewit ; but it is outside the
city that we must go, on the road to Southampton,
to find the residence of that eminent architect, Mr.
Pecksniff ; or the ' Blue Dragon,' where Tom Pinch's
friend, Mrs. Lupin, was landlady. St. Mary's
Grange, four miles from Salisbury, is the real name
of Mr. Pecksniff's home, but the house is only
vaguely indicated in the novel. It is different with
the ' Blue Dragon,' which is an undoubted portrait
of the ' Green Dragon Inn,' at Alderbury, despite the

1 84 THE EXETER ROAD
fact that the sign-board has since disappeared. ' A
faded, and an ancient dragon he was ; and many a
wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail had
changed his colour from a gaudy blue to a faint,
lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he hung ; rearing
in a state of monstrous imbecility on his hind legs ;
waxing, with every month that passed, so much
more dim and shapeless, that as you gazed on him
at one side of the sign-board, it seemed as if he must
be gradually melting through it, and coming out
upon the other.'
The ' Green Dragon ' is a quaint gabled village
inn, standing back from the road. It is even more
ancient than any one, judging only from its exterior,
would suppose, for a fine fifteenth-century mantel
piece, adorned with carved crockets and heraldic
roses, yet remains in the parlour, a relic of bygone
importance. As for Mrs. Lupin, the landlady, it is supposed
that Dickens drew the character from a real person.
If so, how one would like to have known that cheery
woman. Do you remember how Tom Pinch left
Salisbury to seek his fortune in London ? and how
Mrs. Lupin met the coach on the London road with
his box in the trap, and a great basket of provisions,
with a bottle of sherry sticking out of it ? and how
the open-handed fellow shared the cold roast fowl,
the packet of ham in slices, the crusty loaf, and the
other half-dozen items — not forgetting the contents
of the bottle — with the coachman and guard as they
drove along the old road to London through the
night ?

A WORD-PICTURE 185
' Yoho, past hedges, gates, and trees ; past
cottages and barns, and people going home from
work. Yoho, past donkey -chaises, drawn aside into
the ditch, and empty carts with rampant horses,
whipped up at a bound upon the little watercourse,
and held by struggling carters close to the five-
barred gate, until the coach had passed the narrow
turning in the road. Yoho, by churches dropped
down by themselves in quiet nooks, with rustic
burial-grounds about them, where graves are green,
and daisies sleep — for it is evening — on the bosoms
of the dead. Yoho, past streams in which the cattle
cool their feet, and where the rushes grow ; past
paddock-fences, farms and rick-yards ; past last year's
stacks, cut slice by slice away, and showing in the
waning light like ruined gables, old and brown.
Yoho, down the pebbly dip, and through the merry
water-splash, and up at a canter to the level road
again. Yoho ! Yoho ! '
Quite so. And an excellent picture of the
coaching age, although ' Yoho ! ' smacks too much
of the sea for a coach. In his haste he wrote that
word when he surely meant ' Tallyho ! ' Nor is this
a correct portrait of the Exeter Road by any manner
of means. Dickens, usually so precise in topo
graphical details, has generalised here. A true and
stirring picture of country roads in general, there
are farms, and villages, and churches all too many
for this highway. It should have been ' Yoho !
across the bleak and barren down. Yoho ! by the
blasted oak on the lonely common,' and so forth,
so far as Andover, at any rate. And what was that

1 86 THE EXETER ROAD
water-splash doing on a main road in the flower of
the coaching age, when all the runnels and streams
across the mail routes were duly bridged ? But it
is not very odd that Dickens should have been so
inexact here, for he began Martin Chuzzlewit in
1843, and it was not until long after the book was
published, in 1848, that he really explored the Exeter
Road. Forster tells us that Dickens, in company
with himself, Leech, and Lemon, stayed at Salisbury
in the March of that year, and ' passed a March day
in riding over every part of the Plain ; visiting
Stonehenge, and exploring Hazlitt's "Hut" at
Winterslow.' It must be obvious how exquisitely fitted, both
by reason of its situation and circumstances, ' AVinter-
slow Hut ' is for the novelist's use, and that, had he
explored it before, that wild spot would have found
a place in the pages of Martin Chuzzlewit, together
with detailed references to some of Salisbury's old
coaching inns, of which there were many, this being
a meeting-place of several roads, besides being on the
great highway to the West.
So far back as 1786 there were three coaches
passing through Salisbury on their way from London
to Exeter, daily. Firstly, the ' Post Coach ' every
morning at eight o'clock, with the up coach to
London every afternoon at four o'clock, Saturdays
excepted. Secondly, a mail coach, specially adver
tised as carrying a guard all the way, every morning at
ten o'clock, Sundays excepted, and the up mail every
night at ten o'clock, Saturdays excepted. Thirdly,
a ' Diligence,' which passed through every night

VANISHED INNS 187
about eight o'clock, the up coach at twelve, mid
night. All these coaches stopped, and were horsed,
at the ' AVhite Hart' In 1797 there were five
coaches to and from London, daily, and three on
alternate days ; and three waggons, two every day,
the other on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.
In those times, when highwaymen were numerous
and daring and travellers appropriately anxious,
stage-coach proprietors in Salisbury advertised the
fact of their conveyances being provided with an
armed guard, and that any one making an attempt at
robbery would be handed over to justice. But, not
withstanding such bold announcements, all the friends
and relatives of citizens daring the journey to
London used to assemble on the London road and
tearfully watch the coaches as they toiled up Bishop
Down and over the crest of Three Mile Hill, into
the Unknown. The spot is still called ' AVeeping
Cross.' Of the old Salisbury coaching inns, a goodly
number have been either pulled down or converted to
other purposes. The ' King's Head,' the ' Maiden
head,' the ' Sun,' the ' Vine,' the ' Three Tuns,' and
others have entirely disappeared ; and the ' Spread
Eagle,' the ' Lamb,' ' Three Cups,' ' Antelope,' and
the ' George ' — where Pepys stayed and was over
charged — have become shops or private residences ;
while the beautiful old ' Three Swans ' was converted
into a Temperance Hotel five years ago.
There is a passage in Sir AVilliam Knighton's Diary
under date of 1832, which, although written without
any special emphasis, is highly picturesque and informa-

1 88 THE EXETER ROAD
tive on the subject of travelling at that time. It gives
in one phrase a glimpse of the waiting-room which
was a feature of all-coaching inns, and in another
shows that it was possible to bargain for fares. Only
in this instance the bargain was not struck.
He had come at half-past one in the morning into
Salisbury by a cross-country coach, and waiting for
the arrival of the mail to Exeter, ' sat quietly by the
fire in the common dirty room appropriated to coach
passengers. '
For twenty minutes, he says, he had for companion
a man who had just disengaged himself from an irri
table rencontre with the coachman of the mail. He
had waited from two o'clock in the afternoon to go
on to Bristol, but when the time arrived he quarrelled
with the coachman about whether he should pay
nine shillings or twelve, the passenger insisting upon
nine, the whip three shillings more ; upon which the
traveller decided not to go, returned to the coach-
room, and ordered his bed. Sir William asked him if
it really was worth while to lose the time and to pay
for a bed. at the inn over this unsuccessful negotiation,
and to this the man replied that it was not. ' In
fact,' said he, ' we have both been taken in. The
coachman thought I would pay, and I thought he
would take my offer.'

XXIX
It is a nine-miles journey, due north from Salis
bury to Stonehenge, but although it would, under

VIEW OF SALISBURY sl'IRE FROM THE RAMPARTS OF OLD SARUM.

PEPYS AT OLD SARUM 191
other circumstances, be unduly extending the scope
of this work to travel so far from the highway, we
need have no compunction in making this trip, for
it brings us to one of the most interesting places on
the Amesbury and Ilminster route to Exeter — to
Stonehenge, in fact, and passes by the wonderful
terraced hill of Old Sarum. You can see Old Sarum
looming ahead immediately after passing the outlying
houses of Salisbury, and if you come upon it when
a storm is impending, as in Constable's picture, the
impression of size and strength created is one not
soon to be forgotten. As to coming upon it in the
dark, as Pepys did, the sight is awe-inspiring.
Time and place conspired to frighten him. 'So
over the Plain,' he says, ' by the sight of the steeple,
to Salisbury by night; but before I came to the town,
I saw a great fortification, and there alighted, and
to it, and in it ; and find it prodigious, so as to fright
me to be in it all alone at that time of night, it being
dark. I understand since it to be that that is called
Old Sarum.'
To climb the steep grassy ramparts, one after the
other, and to descend into and climb out of the suc
cessive yawning ditches is a tiring exercise, but per
haps in no other way is it possible to gain anything
like a proper idea of the strength of the place. Nor
is there any more sure way of arriving at the relative
scale of it than by observing the stray cyclist stand
ing on the topmost ramparts and gazing toward the
distant spire of Salisbury,
There are other things than ancient history that
make Old Sarum memorable. It was the head and

192 THE EXETER ROAD
front of the electoral scandals that brought about the
great Reform Act of 1832. Although it contained
neither a single house nor an inhabitant, Old Sarum
survived as a Parliamentary borough until that date,
and regularly returned two members. Lord John
Russell, introducing the Reform Bill to the House of
Commons, remarked that Old Sarum was a green
mound without a single habitation upon it, and like
Gatton, also an uninhabited borough, returned two
members, while great towns like Birmingham and
Manchester were entirely without Parliamentary re
presentation. The two members sent to Parliament
were merely the nominees of the Lord of the Manor,
elected by two dummy electors who, shortly after
each dissolution of Parliament, were granted leases
in the borough of Old Sarum — leases known as
'burgage tenures.' Their voting done, they quietly
surrendered their leases, which were not granted again
until a like occasion arose. The elections took place at
the ' Parliament Tree,' which, until 1896 (when it was
blown down in a snowstorm), stood in a meadow be
tween the mound and the village of ' Stratford-under-
the-Castle.' It was supposed to have marked the site
of the Town Hall of the vanished town. Cobbett,
riding horseback past the spot, anathematised this
' rotten borough ' and the system that allowed such
things. He calls it ' The Accursed Hill.' The only
house standing near is the ' Old Castle Inn.'
Beyond it the road dips steeply to the downs,
and so continues, with regular undulations, unsheltered
from storms or frosts, or the fierce heat of the summer
sun, to Amesbury.

OLD SARUM (AFTER CONSTABLE, R.A.).

AMESBURY 195
Amesbury is a sheltered village, lying in a valley
between these downs. It was on the alternative
coach route taken by the ' Telegraph,' ' Celerity,'
' Defiance,' and ' Subscription ' coaches, which, leaving
Andover, came by AVeyhill, Mullen's Pond, and ' Park
House Inn.' This way came the 'Telegraph' coach
on its journey to London, 27th December 1836,
through the thick of that terrible snowstorm of
which we find copious mention on every one of the
classic roads. It began when they reached Wincanton,
and from that place they struggled on up to the
Plain, where it was a white world of scurrying snow-
flakes, howling winds, and deep drifts. Down into
Amesbury, and to the hospitable ' George ' there, was
but a momentary respite, for the determined coach
man, although immediately snowed up in the open
country beyond the village, sent for help and, assisted
by a team of six fresh post-horses with a post-boy to
every pair, charged up the hills in the direction of
Andover, with that fortune which is said to favour
the brave. That is to say, he and His Majesty's
mails got through to London, where the story was
duly chronicled in the papers of the period.
Here, or hereabouts, it was that the up Exeter
'Celerity' coach came into collision with the ' Defiance'
at one o'clock in the morning of 25th July 1827,
resulting in the death of a gentleman who was thrown
off the roof of the ' Celerity ' and instantly killed, and
in serious injuries to others. Both coaches were
overturned. The ' Celerity ' coachman, according to
the evidence at the subsequent trial, was to blame
for reckless driving, and for endeavouring to take

196 THE EXETER ROAD
too much of the road ; but the lawyers found a flaw
in the indictment, which stated that he was driving
three geldings and a mare, and as it could not be
proved that this description was correct, the matter
dropped.

XXX
And now to Stonehenge and Salisbury Plain, up
the steep road from Amesbury taken by the coaches.
Unless you can see Stonehenge in such an awful
thunderstorm as Turner shows in his picture of it,
or can come upon the place at dead of night either
by moonlight, or in the blackness of a moonless
midnight, you will fail to be impressed ; unless you
are a literary pilgrim and can be moved to sentiment,
not by thoughts of the mythical human sacrifices
offered up here by imaginary Druids, but by the
last scenes in the tragedy of poor Tess. Then the
place has an immediate human interest which other
wise it lacks in the immeasurably vast space of time
dividing us from the period of its building and of
the heaping up of the sepulchral barrows that make
a wide circle round it on the Plain. Solitary, with
nothing to give it scale, even the brakes that convev
irreverent excursionists help to confer a dignity on
the spot, when seen afar upon the ridge where this
Mystery, sphinx-like, offers an insoluble riddle to
archaeologists of all the ages.
No one, despite the affected archaisms and the

M^

A

**•*-

THE GREAT SNOWSTORM OF 1836 ; THE EXETER 'TELEGRAPH,' ASSISTED BY POST-HORSES, DRIVING THROUGH
THE SNOW-DRIFTS AT AMESBURY (AFTER JAMES POLLARD).

STONEHENGE 199
sham archaeology, has described Stonehenge so im
pressively as that ' wondrous boy ' Chatterton : —
A wondrous pyle of rugged mountaynes standes,
Placed on eche other in a dreare arraie,
It ne could be the worke of human handes,
It ne was reared up by menne of claie.
Here did the Britons adoration paye
To the false god whom they did Tauran name,
Lightynge hys altarre with greate fyres in Maie,
Roasteyng theire victims round aboute the flame ;
'Twas here that Hengyst dyd the Brytons slee,
As they were met in council for to bee.
Stonehenge was probably standing when the
Romans came to Britain, and doubtless astonished
them when they first saw it as much as any one else.
Its surroundings were not very different then from now.
A farmstead, with ugly blue-slated roof, which has
appeared on the ridge of the down of late years, and
possibly a road which did not exist in days of old :
these alone have changed the aspect of the vast
solitude in which the hoary monument stands. No
hedges, no gates, never a sheep upon the meagre
grass. As Ingoldsby says of Salisbury Plain, in
general : —
Not a shrub, nor a tree, nor a bush can you see ;
No hedges, no ditches, no gates, no stiles,
Much less a house or a cottage for miles.
This, saving that intrusive farmstead, still holds
good here ; and although every one is inevitably
disappointed with Stonehenge, as first seen at a
distance, looking so small and insignificant in the
vastness of the bare downs in which it is set, the

2oo THE EXETER ROAD
place, and not the great stones merely, impresses by
its sadness and utter detachment from the living
world, its loves and hates and interests. The birds
forget to sing in this loneliness, which is awful in
winter and not less awful in the emptiness visible
under the blue sky and blazing sun of summer. Just
the situation in which Stonehenge is placed, you
understand, not Stonehenge itself, gives these feelings.
' Do not we gaze with awe upon these massive
stones?' asks the high-falutin guide-book compiler.
No, indeed we don't. It is a pity, but it can't be
done, and the average description of Stonehenge
which sets forth the grandeur and stupendous size
of these stones, is pumped-up fudge and flapdoodle
of the damnablest kind, which takes in no one. It
is not merely the Philistine who thinks thus, but
even the would-be marvel! ers, and those of light and
leading are disquieted by secret thoughts that, had
we a mind to it, and if there was money in it, we could
build a better and a bigger Stonehenge by a long way.
The earliest account of this mystic monument is
found in the writings of Nennius, who lived in the
ninth century. The first-comer is entitled to respect,
and when Nennius tells us that Stonehenge was
erected by the surviving Britons, in memory of four
hundred and sixty British nobles, murdered here at a
conference to which the Saxon chieftain, Hengist, had
invited King Vortigern and his Court, we are bound
to pay some attention to the statement, although to
place implicit reliance upon it would be rash, con
sidering the fact that Nennius wrote four hundred
years after the event.

WHO BUILT STONEHENGE? 203
But there are, and have been, many theories
which profess to give the only true origin of these
stone circles. An antiquary formerly living at
Amesbury went to the beginnings of creation and
held that they were erected by Adam. If so, it is to
be hoped for Adam's sake that he finished the job in
the summer, or that if it occupied him in winter
time, he had clothed himself with something warmer
than the traditional fig-leaf, in view of the rigours
of these Wiltshire Downs. It would be interest
ing also to have Adam's opinion as to the compara
tive merits of Salisbury Plain and the Garden of
Eden. Then a tradition existed that Merlin, the sorcerer,
arranged the circles. Those who do not think much
of this view may take more kindly to the legend of
our old friends the Druids, who, according to Dr.
Stukeley and others, made this their chief temple ;
while, according to other views, the Britons before
and after the Roman occupation, and the Romans
themselves, were the builders. Then there are others
who conceive this to have been the crowning-place of
the Danish kings. The Saxons, indeed, appear to be
the only people who have not been credited with the
work ; although, curiously enough, its very name is
of Saxon derivation, and the eaisliest writers refer to
it as ' Stanenges,' from Anglo-Saxon words meaning
'the hanging-stones.' That the Saxons discovered
Stonehenge, and were puzzled by it as greatly as it
must have excited the wonder of the Romans,
hundreds of years before, seems obvious from this
name they gave the lonely place. Ignorant as to its

2o4 THE EXETER ROAD
use, they either saw in the upright stones and the
imposts they carried a resemblance to a gallows, or
else, not being themselves expert builders, marvelled
that the great imposts should remain suspended in
the air.
Much of the legitimate wonderment in respect of
Stonehenge lies in the mystery of how the forgotten
builders could have quarried and shaped these stones,
and could have cut the tenons and mortice-holes that
held the tall columns, and the flat stones above them,
together. Camden, the old chronicler, has a ready
way out of this puzzling question. Beginning with
a description of this ' huge and monstrous piece of
work,' he goes on to say that ' some there are that
think them to be no natural stones, hewn out of the
rock, but artificially made out of pure sand, and, by
some glue or unctuous matter, knit and incorporate
together.' Stonehenge is considered to have consisted, when
perfect, of an outer circle of thirty tall stones, three
and a half feet apart, and connected together by a
line of imposts, in whose extremities mortice-holes
were cut, fitting into corresponding tenons projecting
from the upright stones. The height of this circular
screen was sixteen feet. A second and inner circle
consisted of smaller and rougher stones, some forty
in number, and six feet in height. AVithin this circle,
again, rose five tall groups of stone placed in an
ellipse, each group consisting of two uprights, with an
impost above. These stones were the largest of all,
the tallest reaching- to a height of twenty-five feet.
They were named by Dr. Stukeley, impressively

THE ' FRLAR 'S HEEL ' 205
enough, the Great Trilithons. Each of these five
groups would appear to have been accompanied on
the inner side by a cluster of three small standing
stones, while a black flat monolith, called the ' Altar
Stone,' occupied the innermost position. A smaller
trilithon seems to have once stood near its big
brethren, but it and three of the great five are in
ruins. Only six imposts of the outer circle are left
in their place overhead, and but sixteen of its thirty
upright stones are now standing. The smaller circles
and groups are equally imperfect. Some of this ruin
has befallen within the historical period ; one of the
Great Trilithons having been wrecked in 1620, in the
absurd treasure-seeking expedition of the Duke of
Buckingham, while another fell on the 3rd of January
1797, during a thaw.
These circles seem to have been surrounded by an
earthen bank, with an avenue leading off towards
the east. Very few traces of these enclosures now
remain. In midst of the avenue lies the flat so-
called ' Stone of Sacrifice,' with the rough obelisk
of the ' Friar's Heel,' as the most easterly outpost of
all, beyond. To the Friar's Heel belongs a legend
which gives, by the way, an even more distinguished
person than Adam as the builder of Stonehenge.
The Devil, according to this story, was the architect,
and when he had nearly finished his work, he
chuckled to himself that no one would be able to tell
how it was done. A wandering friar, however, who
had been a witness of it all, remarked, ' That's more
than thee can tell,' and thereupon ran away, the
Devil flinging one of the stones left over after him.

206 THE EXETER ROAD
It only just struck the friar on the heel, and stuck
there in the turf, where it stands to this day.
The various stones of which Stonehenge is con
structed derive from widely -sundered districts. The
outer circle and the five Great Trilithons are said to
have been fashioned from stones that came from
Marlborough Downs, and the second circle and inner
most ellipse belong to a rock formation not known to
exist nearer than South Wales. The ' Altar Stone '
is different from any of the others, and the circum
stance lends some colour to the theory that it,
coming from some unknown region, was the original
stone fetish brought from a distance by the pre
historic tribe that settled here, around which grew
by degrees the subsequent great temple. There are
those who "will have it that this was a temple of
serpent-worshippers ; and an argument not altogether
unsupported by facts would have us believe that
Stonehenge is really a Temple of the Sun. It is a
singular accident (if it is an accident) that the
' Friar's Heel,' as seen from the centre of the circle,
is in exact orientation with the rising sun on the
morning ofthe Longest Day of the year, 21st June.
Every year, on this occasion, great crowds of people
set out from Salisbury to see sunrise at Stonehenge.
There have frequently been as many as three thousand
persons present on this occasion. As the spot is nine
miles from that cathedral city, and as the sun rises
on this date at the early hour of 3.44 a.m., it requires
some enthusiasm to rise one's self for the occasion, if
indeed the more excellent way is not to sit up all
night. Great, therefore, is the disappointment when

SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE.

SUNRISE AT STONEHENGE 209
the morning is misty. If this sunrise phenomenon is
not an accident, then Stonehenge, as the Temple of
the Sun, is the earliest cathedral in Britain. But, as
we have already seen, in these multitudes of guesses, at
the truth, no one can arrive at the facts, and all we
can do is to say frankly, with old Pepys, who was
here in 1668, ' God knows what its use was.'
The present historian has waited for the sun to
rise here. Arriving at Amesbury village at half-past
two in the morning, the street looked and sounded
lively with the clustered lights of bicycles and con
veyances gathered there ; with the ringing of bicycle
bells, the sounding of coach-horns, and the talk of
those who had come to pay their devoirs to the
rising luminary. The village inn was open all night
for the needs of travellers journeying to this shrine,
and ten minutes was allowed for each person, a
policeman standing outside to see that they were
duly turned out at the end of that time.
To one who arrived early on the scene, while the
Plain remained shrouded in the grayness of the mid
summer night, and the rugged stones of Stonehenge
yet loomed vague and formless, the scene looking
down towards Amesbury was an impressive one.
Dimly the ascending- white road up to the stones
could be discerned by much straining of tired eyes,
and along it twinkled brightly the lights of approach
ing vehicles, now dipping down into a hollow of
this miscalled ' Plain,' now toiling slowly and pain
fully up a corresponding ascent. It is not to be
supposed that it was a reverent crowd assembled
here. Reverence is not a characteristic of the age,
p

210 THE EXETER ROAD
nor are cyclists as a rule, or agricultural folks, or
provincials generally, inclined greatly to worship the
immeasurably old. And of such this crowd was chiefly
composed. It may very pertinently be asked, ' Why,
if they don't reverence the place, do they come here
at all ? ' It is a question rather difficult to answer ;
but probably most people visit it on this occasion as
an excuse for being up all night. There would seem
to be an idea that there is something dashing and
eccentric about such a proceeding which must have
its charm for those to whom archaeology, or those
eternal and unsolvable questions, ' AVhy was Stone
henge built, and by whom ? ' have no interest. There
were, for instance, two boys on the spot who had
come over on their bicycles from Marlborough School,
over twenty miles away. AA^ithout leave, of course !
They hoped to get back as quietly as they had
slipped away out of their bedroom windows. Had
they any archaeological enthusiasm ? Not a bit of
it, the more especially since it was evident they
would have to hurry back before the sun was due to
rise. There were no fewer than fifteen police at Stone
henge, sent on account of the disorderly scenes said
to have taken place in previous years. But this
crowd was sufficiently quiet. Patiently the throng
waited the rising of the sun upon the horizon, and
the coming of the shadow of the gnomon-stone across
the Stone of Sacrifice. The skv lightened, showing
up the tired faces, and transferring the Great
Trilithons from the realms of romance to those of
commonplace reality. The larks began to trill ;

TRIPPERS A T STONEHENGE 2 1 1
puce- and purple -coloured clouds floated overhead ;
the brutal staccato notes of a banjo strummed to
the air of a music-hall song stale by some three or
four seasons ; a cyclist struck a match on a sarsen
stone ; watches were consulted — and the sun re
fused to rise to the occasion. That is to say, for
the twelfth time or so consecutively, according- to
local accounts, the morning was too cloudy for the
sunrise to be seen. So, tired and disappointed, all
trooped back to Amesbury, the snapshotters disgusted
beyond measure, and breakfasted, or refreshed in
various ways, according to individual tastes, at the
unholy hour of half-past four o'clock in the morning.
Those who say that Stonehenge will remain a
monument to all time speak without a knowledge of
the facts. In reality the larger stones are disin
tegrating ; slowly, perhaps, but none the less surely.
They are weatherworn, and some of them very
decrepit. Frosts have chipped and cracked them, and
other extremes of climate have found out the soft
places in the sandstone. Also, modern facilities for
reaching such out-of-the-way spots as this used to be
have brought so many visitors of all kinds here that,
in one way and another Stonehenge is bound to
suffer. It is now the proper thing for every one who
visits Stonehenge to be photographed by the photo
grapher who sits there for that purpose all day long
and every day ; and although there is no occasion
for such insane fury, the picnic parties generally
contrive to smash beer and lemonade bottles against
the stones until the turf is thickly strewn with
broken glass. Modernity also likes to range itself

THE EXETER ROAD

beside the unfathomably ancient, and so when the
Automobile Club visited Stonehenge, on Easter
Saturday 1899, all the cars and their occupants
were photographed beside the stones, to mark so
historic an occasion.

XXXI
Away beyond Stonehenge stretches Salisbury
Plain, in future to be vulgarised by military camps
and manoeuvres, and to become an Aldershot on a
larger scale, but hitherto a solitude as sublime in its
own way as Dartmoor and Exmoor. Dickens gives us
his meed of appreciation of this wild country, and
finds the boundless prairies of America tame by
comparison. ' Now,' he says, writing when on his visit to
America, ' a prairie is undoubtedly worth seeing, but
more that one may say one has seen it, than for any
sublimity it possesses in itself. . . . You stand upon
the prairie and see the unbroken horizon all round
you. You are on a great plain, which is like a sea
without water. I am exceedingly fond of wild and
lonely scenery, and believe that I have the faculty of
being as much impressed by it as any man living.
But the prairie fell, by far, short of my preconceived
idea. I felt no such emotions as I do in crossing
Salisbury Plain. The excessive flatness of the scene
makes it dreary, but tame. Grandeur is certainly
not its characteristic ... to say that the sio-ht is a

ANCIENT AND MODERN : MOTOR CARS AT STONEHENGE, EASTER 1899.

SALISB UR Y PLAIN 2 1 5
landmark in one's existence, and awakens a new set of
sensations, is sheer gammon. I would say to every
man who can't see a prairie — go to Salisbury Plain,
Marlborough Downs, or any of the broad, high, open
lands near the sea. Many of them are fully as
impressive; and Salisbury Plain is decidedly more so.'
Salisbury Plain is the very core and concentrated
essence of the wild bleak scenery so characteristic of
Wiltshire. An elevated tract of country measuring
roughly twenty-four miles from east to west, and
sixteen from north to south, and comprising the dis
trict between Ludgershall and Westbury, and Devizes
and Old Sarum, it is by no means the Plain pictured
by strangers, who, misled by that geographical ex
pression, have a mind's -eye picture of it as being
quite flat. As a matter of fact, Salisbury Plain is
not a bit like that. It is a long series of undulating
chalky downs, ' as flat as your hand ' if you like,
because the hand is anything but flat, and the simile
is excellently descriptive of a rolling country that
resembles the swelling contours of an outstretched
palm. Unproductive, exposed, and lonely, Salisbury
Plain opposes even to this clay a very effectual
barrier against intercourse between north and south
or east and west Wiltshire, and was the lurking-
place, until even so late as 1839, of highwaymen and
footpads, who shared the solitudes with the bustards,
and attacked and robbed those travellers whose
business called them across the dreary wastes. Many
a malefactor has tried his 'prentice hand and learned
his business in these wilds, and has, after robbing
elsewhere, retired here from pursuit. Salisbury Plain,

216 THE EXETER ROAD
in short, bred a race of highwaymen who preyed upon
the neighbourhood and levied contributions from all
the rich farmers and graziers who travelled between
the Cathedral City and other parts, and sometimes
graduated with such honours that they became
Knights of the Road at whose name travellers along
the whole length of the Exeter Road would tremble.
Among them was William Davis, the ' Golden
Farmer,' whom we have already met at Bagshot.
His career was a long one, and was continued, here
and in other parts of the country, for forty years.
They hanged him, at the age of sixty-nine, in 1689.
His most famous exploit was on the borders of the
Plain, near Clarendon Park, when he attacked the
Duchess of Albemarle, single-handed, and, in the
presence of her numerous attendants, tore her diamond
rings off her fingers, and would probably have had
her watch and money as well, despite her cursing
and torrents of full-flavoured abuse, had not the
sound of approaching travellers warned him to fly.
' Captain ' James Whitney, too, was another desper
ado who at times made the Plain his headquarters, and
harried the Western roads, in the time of AVilliani the
Third. He was probably a son of the Reverend James
Whitney, Rector of Donhead St. Andrews. He raised
a troop of highwaymen, and was captured at the
close of 1692 after his band had been defeated in
battle with the Dragoon Guards. He ' met a most
penitent end ' at Smithfield.
Then there was Biss, perhaps a descendant of the
Reverend AV alter Biss, minister of Bishopstrow, near
Salisbury, in the reign of Charles the First. Biss

THOMAS BOULTER 217
the highwayman was hanged at Salisbury in 1695,
and was not succeeded by any very distinguished
practitioner until Boulter appeared on the scene.
The distinguished Mr. Thomas Boulter was born
of poor but dishonest parents at Poulshot, near
Devizes, and ran a brief but brilliant and busy course
which ended on the gallows outside Winchester. Mr.
Boulter's parentage and the deeds that he did form
splendid evidence to help bolster up the doctrine of
heredity. He came of a very numerous clan of
Boulters and Bisses, whose names are even to this
day common at Chiverell and Market Lavington, on
the Plain. His father rented a grist mill at Poulshot,
stole grain for years, and was publicly whipped in
Devizes market-place for stealing honey from an old
woman's garden. Shortly after that unfortunate
incident, in 1775, on returning from Trowbridge, he
stole a horse, the property of a Mr. Hall, and riding
it over to Andover sold it for £6, although worth at
least £15. This injudicious deal aroused the suspicions
of the onlookers, so that he was arrested, and being
convicted was sentenced to death. But the Boulters
and the Bisses made interest for him, so that his
sentence was commuted to transportation for fourteen
years. Mrs. Boulter, the wife of this transported felon
and the mother of the greater hero, is said to have
also suffered a public whipping at the cart's tail, and
Isaac Blagden, his uncle, also did a little in the
footpad line on Salisbury Plain between the intervals
of agricultural labouring. He never attained emi
nence, having met in an early stage of his career

218 THE EXETER ROAD
with a sad check while attempting to rob a gentle
man near Market Lavington. The traveller drew a
pistol and lodged a couple of slugs in his thigh,
leaving him bleeding on the highway. Some humane
person passing by procured assistance, and had him
conveyed to the village. The wound was cured, but
he remained a cripple ever afterwards, and being
unable to work was admitted into Lavington AVork-
house. He was never prosecuted for the attempted
crime. Thomas Boulter, junior, the daring outlaw who
shared with Hawkes the title of the ' Flying High
wayman,' and whose name for very many years
afterwards was used as a bogey to frighten refractory
children, was born in 1748. He worked with his
father, the miller, in the grist-mill at Poulshot until
1774, when, his sister having opened a millinery
business in the Isle of Wight, he joined her there,
and embarked his small capital in a grocery business.
But the business did not flourish. Perhaps it
could not be expected to do so in the hands of so
roving a blade, for he only gave it a year's per
functory trial, and then, being pressed for money,
set out to find it on the road. He went to Ports
mouth, procured two brace of pistols, casting-irons
for slugs, and a powder-horn, and, lying by a little
while, started in the summer of 1775, on the pretence
of paying his mother a visit at Poulshot. Setting-
out from Southampton, mounted on horseback, he
made for the Exeter Road, near ' AATinterslow Hut.'
In less than a quarter of an hour the Salisbury dili
gence rewarded his patience and enterprise by coming

THE BEGINNING OF A CAREER 219
in sight across the downs. The perspiration oozed
out of his every pore, and he was so timid that he
rode past the diligence two or three times before he
could muster sufficient resolution to pronounce the
single word ' Stand ! ' But at length he found
courage in the thought that he must begin, or go
home as poor as he came out, and so, turning short
round, he ordered the driver to stop, and in less than
two minutes had robbed the two passengers of their
watches and money, saying that he was much obliged
to them, for he was in great want ; and so, wishing
them a pleasant journey, departed in the direction of
Salisbury and Devizes. By the time he reached
Poulshot he had robbed three single travellers on
horseback and two on foot, and had secured a booty
of nearly £40 and seven watches.
This filial visit coming to an end, he returned
home to Newport, Isle of Wight, by way of Andover,
AVinchester, and Southampton. On his way across
Salisbury Plain he stopped a post-chaise, several
farmers on horseback, one on foot, and two country
women returning from market, going in sight of the
last person into Andover, and putting up his horse
at the ' Swan,' where he stayed for an hour.
This successful beginning fired our hero for more
adventures, and the autumn of the same year found
him, equipped with new pistols, a fine suit of clothes,
and a horse stolen at Ringwood, making his way to
Salisbury, with the intention of riding into the neigh
bourhood of Exeter before commencing business. But
between Salisbury and Blandford he could not resist
the temptation of robbing a diligence and a gentleman

220 THE EXETER ROAD
on horseback, resulting in the rather meagre booty
of a gold watch, two guineas, and some silver. He
then pushed on through Blandford towards Dor
chester, robbing on the way ; all in broad daylight.
When night was come he thought it prudent to break
off from the Exeter Road and lie by at Cerne Abbas
until the next afternoon, when he regained the
highway near Bridport, very soon finding himself
in company with a wealthy grazier who was jogging
home in the same direction. The grazier found his
companion so sociable that he not only expressed
himself as glad of his society, but gossiped at length
upon the successful day he had experienced at
Salisbury market, where he had sold a number of
cattle at an advanced price. He was well known,
he said, for carrying the finest beasts to market, and
could always command a better price than his
neighbours. Boulter broke in upon this self-satisfied talk with
the wish that he had been so lucky in his way of
business. Unhappily, repeated misfortunes had at
last reduced him to distress, and he had taken to the
road for relieving his distresses, and was glad he had
had the fortune to fall in with a gentleman who
appeared so well able to assist him. Suiting the
action to his words, he pulled out a pistol, and
begged he might have the pleasure of easing his
companion of some of the wealth he had acquired at
Salisbury market.
The grazier thought this was a joke and supposed
that it was done to frighten him ; whereupon Boulter
clapped the pistol close to his breast and told him he

ROBBERY BY WHOLESALE 221
should not advance a single step until he had
delivered his money. In a few minutes his trembling
victim had handed over, in bank-notes and cash,
nearly £90. His watch, which he seemed to set a
value upon for its antiquity, together with some bills
of exchange, Boulter returned, and, wishing him
good-day, and observing that he should return to
London, continued, instead, his journey to Exeter.
Altogether, in this trip, he secured a booty of £500,
in money and valuables, and spent the winter and
these ill-gotten gains among his relatives on Salisbury
Plain. He opened his next campaign in May 1776, having
first provided himself with a splendid mare named
' Black Bess,' which he stole from Mr. Peter DelnieA
stables at Erie Stoke. This horse, scarce inferior to
Turpin's mare of the same name, is indeed supposed
to have been a descendant of hers. Starting from
Poulshot, he rode to Staines, reaching- that place on
the second night out. Rising at four o'clock the
next morning, he was on the road, in wait for the
AVestern coaches ; but he was a prudent man, and at
the sight of blunderbusses on their roofs, he concluded
that to attack them would be a tempting of Provi
dence. Accordingly, he confined his attentions to the
diligences and the post-chaises, and was so active that
day that he visited Maidenhead, Hurley, Wokingham,
Hartley Row, Whitchurch, and Eversley, reaching
Poulshot again the same night with nearly £200,
and with the ' Hue and Cry ' of five counties at his
heels. His exploits on this occasion would not shame
the first masters of the art of highway robbery, and

222 THE EXETER ROAD
the performances of his mare were worthy of her
distinguished ancestry. At Hartley Row he called
for a bottle of wine, drank a glass himself, and
pouring the remainder over a large toast, gave it to
his steed, repeating it at Whitchurch and Eversley.
Two months' retirement at Poulshot seemed
advisable after this, but during the latter part of the
summer and through the autumn he was very busy,
his operations extending as far as Bath and Bristol.
To give an account of his many robberies would
require a long and detailed biography. He did not
always meet with travellers willing to resign their
purses without a struggle, and on those occasions he
generally came off second best ; as in the case of
the butcher whom he met upon the Plain. Although
Boulter held a pistol at the heads of travellers, he
never really meant to use it, and it was his boast, at
his last hour, that he had never taken life. Perhaps
the butcher knew this, for when our friend presented
his firearm at his head, and asked him to turn his
pockets out, he said, ' I don't get my money so easily
as to part with it in that foolish manner. If you rob
me, I must go upon the highway myself before I
durst go home, and that I'd rather not do.'
What was a good young highwayman, with
conscientious scruples about shedding blood, to do
under those circumstances? It was an undignified
situation, but he retreated from it as best he could,
and with the words : ' Good-night, and remember
that Boulter is your friend,' disappeared.
In 1777 he took a journey up to York, and was
laid by the heels there, escaping the hangman by

BOULTER AND PARTNER 223
enlisting, a course then left open to criminals by
the Government, which did not tend to bring the
Army into better repute. After three days in
barracks he deserted, and made the best of his way
southwards. Reaching Bristol, he found a fellow-
spirit in one James Caldwell, landlord of the ' Ship
Inn,' Milk Street, and with him entered upon a new
series of robberies. But, first of all, he paid a visit
to his relatives at Poulshot, doing some business on
the way, and scouring the country round about that
convenient retreat. He stopped the diligence again
at ' Winterslow Hut,' emptying the pockets of all the
passengers, and robbed a Salisbury gentleman near
Andover, who, after surrendering his purse, lamented
that he had nothing left to carry him home.
' How far have you to go home ? ' asked Boulter.
' To Salisbury,' said the traveller.
' Then,' rejoined the highwayman, ' here's two
pence, which is quite enough for so short a journey.'
Boulter, according to his biographers, had the
light hair and complexion of the Saxon. ' His
bonhomie, not untinctured with a quiet humour,
fascinated and disarmed his victims, who felt that,
had he been so disposed, he could have descended upon
them like the hammer of Thor.' His companion
henceforward, Caldwell, was of a .dark complexion
and ferocious disposition. Together they visited the
Midlands in 1777, and with varying success brought
that season to a close, Boulter returning alone to
Poulshot for a short holiday from professional cares.
Riding on the Plain early one morning, he was
surprised to meet a gentlemanly-looking horseman,

224 THE EXETER ROAD
who looked very hard at him, and who, after passing
him about a hundred yards, turned round and
pursued him at a gallop. ' Well,' thought Boulter,
' this seems likely to prove a kind of adventure on
which I never calculated. I am about to be stopped
myself by a gentleman of the road. In what manner
will it be necessary to receive the attack.'
The stranger came up rapidly, and whatever his
intentions were, merely observed, ' You ride a very
fine horse ; would you like to sell her ? '
' Oh yes,' replied Boulter ; ' but for nothing less
than fifty guineas.'
' Can she trot and gallop well ? '
' She can trot sixteen miles an hour, and gallop
twenty, or she would not do for my business,' said
Boulter, with a significant look.
By this time the stranger, becoming uneasy,
desired to see her paces, probably thinking thus to
rid himself of so mysterious a character.
1 With all my heart,' rejoined the highwayman,
' you shall see how she goes, but I must first be
rewarded for it,' presenting his pistol with the
customary demand. That request having been com
plied with, Boulter wished him good-morning, saying,
' Now, sir, you have seen my performance, you shall
see the performance of my horse, which I doubt not
will perfectly satisfy you ' ; and putting spur to her,
was soon but a distant speck upon the Plain, leaving
the stranger to bewail his foolish curiosity.
The winter of 1777 and the spring of 1778 were
employed by Boulter and Caldwell in scouring
Salisbury Plain and the neighbouring country. A

A HUE AND CRY 225
reward had long been offered for the apprehension of
the robber who infested the district, and the appear
ance of a confederate now ' alarmed Salisbury so
greatly that private persons began to advertise in the
local papers their readiness to supplement this sum.
A public subscription, amounting to twenty guineas,
was also raised at Devizes, so that there was every
inducement to the peasantry to make a capture.
Yet, strange to say, no one, either private or official
persons, laid a hand on them, even though Boulter
appears to have been identified with the daring
horseman who robbed every one crossing the Plain.
The following advertisement appeared 10th January
1778 :—
Whereas divers robberies have been lately committed
on the road from Devizes to Salisbury, and also near the
town of Devizes: and as it -is strongly suspected that one
Boulter, with an accomplice, are the persons concerned in
these robberies, a reward of thirty guineas is offered for
apprehending and bringing to justice the said Boulter, and
ten guineas for his accomplice, over and above the reward
allowed by Act of Parliament : — to be paid, on conviction,
at the Bank in Devizes. If either of these persons are
taken in any distant part of the country, reasonable charges
will also be allowed. Boulter is about five feet eleven
inches high, stout made, light hair, crooked nose, brownish
complexion, and about thirty years of age. His accomplice,
about five feet nine inches high, thin made, long favoured,
black hair, and is said to be about twenty -five years of

This publicity did not hinder their enterprises, and
speaking of Boulter, a little later, the Salisbury
Journal says : ' The .robberies he has committed

226 THE EXETER ROAD
about Salisbury, the Plain, Romsey, and Southamp
ton, and the several roads to London, are innumer
able.' But what local law and order could not accom
plish was effected at Birmingham, to which town the
confederates had made a journey in the spring of
1778, for the purpose of selling some of the jewellery
and watches they had accumulated. Boulter had
approached a Jew dealer on the subject, and was
arrested, together with Caldwell, and thrown into
Birmingham Prison. They were sent thence to
Clerkenwell, from which, having already secured by
bribery a jeweller's saw and cut through his irons, he
escaped, with two other prisoners, carrying the irons
away with him, and hanging them in triumph on a
whitethorn bush at St. Pancras. With consummate
impudence he took lodgings two doors away from
Clerkenwell Prison, and, procuring a new outfit, set
off down to Dover, to take ship across the Channel.
But, unfortunately for him, the country was on the
eve of a war with France, and an embargo had been
laid upon all shipping. He could not even secure a
small sailing-boat. Hurrying off to Portsmouth, he
found the same difficulty, and could not even get
across to the Isle of AVight. Thence to Bristol,
haunted with a constant fear of being arrested ; but
not a single vessel was leaving that port. Then it
occurred to him that the desolate Isle of Portland
was the most likely hiding-place. Setting out from
Bristol, he reached Bridport, and went to an inn to
refresh himself and his horse. AAAen he asked what
he could have for dinner, he was told there was a

CAPTURE OF BOULTER 227
family ordinary just ready. He accordingly sat
down at table, beside the landlord and three gentle
men, one of whom eyed him with a searching scrutiny,
until, becoming fully satisfied that this was none
other than Boulter, the escaped prisoner, he beckoned
the landlord out of the room, and reminded him of
the duty and necessity which lay upon them of
securing so notorious an offender. The landlord
then returned to the dining-room and desired Boulter
to accompany him to an adjoining parlour, where he
revealed to him the perilous state of affairs ; but
added, ' As you have never done me an injury, I wish
you no harm, so just pay your reckoning, and be off
as quick as you can.'
Boulter bade him tell the strangers that they were
totally mistaken, that he was a London rider (that is
to say, a commercial traveller), and that his name
was AVhite ; but having no wish to be the cause of a
disturbance in his house, he would take his advice
and go on his way.
The landlord went back to his guests, and Boulter
got on his horse with all possible expedition. Once
fairly seated in the saddle, a single application of the
spur would have launched him beyond the reach of
these hungry pursuers, nor in such an emergency as
this would his pistol be harmlessly pointed against
those who thus sought to earn the rewards offered for
his capture. Alas ! he had but placed his foot in the
stirrup when out rushed the false landlord and his
guests. They secured him, and being handed over to
the authorities, he was lodged in Dorchester Gaol.
He was arraigned at Winchester with Caldwell (who

228 THE EXETER ROAD
had been removed from London) on 31st July, and
both being found guilty, they were hanged at
Winchester, 19th August 1778.

XXXII
Soon after those two comrades had met their end,
there arose a highway-woman to trouble the district.
This was Mary Sandall, of Baverstock, a young
woman of twenty - four years of age, who had
borrowed a pair of pistols and a suit of his clothes
from the blacksmith of Quidhampton, and, bestriding
a horse, set out one day in the spring of 1779, and
meeting Mrs. Thring, of North Burcombe, robbed her
of two shillings and a black silk cloak. Mrs. Thring
went home and raised an alarm, with the result that
Mary Sandall was captured, and committed for trial
at the next assizes. Although there seems to have
been some idea that this was a practical joke, the
authorities were thick-headed persons who had heard
too much of the real thing to be patient with an
amateur highway - woman, and so they sentenced
Mary Sandall to death in due form, although she was
afterwards respited as a matter of course.
William Peare was the next notability of the
roads, but it is not certain that he was the one who
stopped Mr. Jeffery, of Yateminster, on his way
home from Weyhill, 9th October 1780, and knock
ing him off his horse, robbed him of £500 in bank
notes and £37 in coin. It was the same unknown,

WILLIAM PEARE 229
doubtless, who during the same week robbed a Mrs.
Turner, of Upton Scudamore, of £45, in broad day
light. He was a 'genteelly-dressed' stranger. Making
a low bow, he requested her money, and that within
sight of many people working in the fields, who
concluded, from his polite manners, that he was a
friend of the lady.
William Peare was only twenty-three years of age
when he was executed, 19th August 1783. His
first important act was the robbing of the Chippen
ham coach on the 2nd of February 1782. Captured,
and lodged in Gloucester Gaol, he escaped on the
19th of April, and began a series of the most daring
highway robberies. On the 8th of February 1783 he
stopped the Salisbury diligence just beyond St.
Thomas's Bridge, smashed the window, and fired a
shot into the coach, terrifying the lady and gentleman
who were the only two passengers, so that they at
once gave up their purses. He then went on to
Stockbridge, where he stopped a diligence full of
military officers ; but finding the occupants prepared
to fight for the military chest they were escorting,
hurried off. After many other crimes in the West,
he was captured in the act of undermining a bank
at Stroud, in Gloucestershire. He was tried and
sentenced at Salisbury, and executed at Fisherton,
going to the gallows with the customary nosegay,
which remained tightly held in his hand when his
body was cut down. A set of verses, purporting to
be by his sweetheart, was published that year,
lamenting his untimely end : —

230 THE EXETER ROAD
For me he dared the dangerous road,
My days with goodlier fare to bless ;
He took but from the miser's hoard,
From them whose station needed less.
Highwaymen continued numerous at the dawn of
the nineteenth century, as may be judged from the
executions at Fisherton Gaol, or on the scenes of
their misdeeds, that continued to afford a spectacle
for the mob. For highway robbery alone one man
was hanged in 1806, one in 1816, two in 1817, and
two in 1824; while three were sentenced to fifteen
years' transportation in 1839 for a similar offence
near Imber, in the very centre of the Plain.
The spot was Gore Cross, a solitary waste ; time
and date, seven o'clock on the evening of 21st
October 1839. Upon this wilderness entered Mr.
Matthew Dean, of Imber, returning on horseback
from Devizes Fair, when he was suddenly set upon
by four men, dragged off his horse, and robbed of
£20 in notes of the North AA7ilts Bank, and £3 : 10s.
in coin. The gang then made off, but Mr. Dean
followed them on foot. On the way he met Mr.
Morgan, of Chitterne ; but being afraid that the men
carried pistols they decided to get more help before
pursuing them farther. So they called on a Mr.
Hooper, who joined the chase on horseback, armed
with a double-barrelled gun. Meeting a Mr. Sains-
bury, he accompanied the party, and, pressing on,
they presently came in sight of the men. One ran
away for some miles at a great pace, and they could
not overtake him until about midway between Tils-
head and Imber, where he fell down and lay still on

A TRAGEDY OF THE PLAIN 231
the grass. His pursuers thought this to be a feint,
and were afraid to seize him, so they continued the
chase of the other three, who were eventually
captured. The next day the body of the unfortunate

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man was found where he had fallen, quite dead.
He had died from heart disease. An inquest was
held on him, and the curious verdict of _ felo-de-se
returned, according to the law which holds a person
a suicide who commits an unlawful act, the conse-

232 THE EXETER ROAD
quence of which is his death. Two memorial stones
mark the spot where the robbery took place and the
spot, two miles distant, where the man fell.
The times were still dangerous for wayfarers here,
for a few weeks later, on the night of 16th November,
between nine and ten o'clock p.m., a Mr. Richard
Brown, of Little Pannel, driving a horse and cart,
was attacked by two footpads near Gore Cross Farm.
One seized the horse, while the other gave him two
tremendous blows on the head with a bludgeon,
which almost deprived him of his senses. Recover
ing, he knocked the fellow down with his fist. Then
the two jumped into the cart and robbed him of ten
shillings, running away when he called for help, and
leaving him with his purse containing £14 in notes
and gold.
AVith this incident the story of highway robbery
on Salisbury Plain comes to an end, and a very good
thing too.

XXXIII
If you want to know exactly what kind of a road
the Exeter Road is between Salisbury and Bridport,
a distance of twenty-two miles, I think the sketch
facing page 238 will convey the information much
better than words alone. It is just a repetition of
those bleak seventeen miles between Andover and
Salisbury — only ' more so.' More barren and hillier than
the Andover to Salisbury section, and less romantically
wild than the rugged stretches between Blandford,

A DREARY ROAD 233
Dorchester, and Bridport, it is a weariness to man
and beast. Buffeted by the winds which shriek
across the rolling downs, or nipped by the keen airs
of these altitudes, old-time travellers up to London or

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il lAA". .-¦ l^yj^i ¦Kan KSV
i*-
w« , «r 1 1

WHERE THE BOBBER FELL DEAD.

down to Exeter dreaded the passage, and prepared
themselves, accordingly, at Bridport or at Salisbury,
while exhausted nature was recruited at the several
inns which found their existence abundantly justified
in those old times.

234 THE EXETER ROAD
Passing through West Harnham, a suburb of
Salisbury, the road immediately begins to climb the
downs, descending, however, in three miles to the
charming little village of Coombe Bissett, in the
water-meadows of the AViltshire Avon, which runs
prettily beside the road. An ancient church, old
thatched barns standing on stone staddles whose feet
are in the stream, bridges across the water, and the
inevitable downs closing in the view, make one of the
rare picturesque compositions to be found along this
dreary stretch of country.
Make much, wayfarer, of Coombe Bissett. Linger
there, soothe your soul with its rural graces before
proceeding ; for the road immediately leaves this
valley of the Avon, and the next bend discloses the
unfenced rolling downs, going in a mile -long rise,
and so continuing, with a balance in the matter of
gradients against the traveller going westwards, all
the way to Blandford.
At eight miles from Salisbury is situated the old
' AVoodyates Inn,' placed in this lonely situation, far
removed from any village, in the days when the
coaching traffic made the custom of travellers worth
obtaining. It was in those days thought that after
travelling eight miles the passengers by coach or
post-chaise would want refreshments. It was a
happy and well-founded thought ; and if all tales be
true, the prowess of our great - grandfathers as
trenchermen left nothing to be desired — nor any
thing remaining in the larder when they had done.
The curious, on the lookout for this old coaching
inn, will scarcely recognise it when seen, for it has

WOODYATES 237
been garnished and painted, and rechristened of late
years by the title of the ' Shaftesbury Arms.' But
there it is, and portions of it may be found to date
back to the old times.
It was given the name of ' AVoodyates ' from its
position standing at the entrance to the wooded
district of Cranborne Chase ; the name meaning
'Wood-gates.' It also stands on the border-line
dividing the counties of Wilts and Dorset.
Bokerley Dyke, a prehistoric boundary consisting
of a bank and ditch, intersects the road as you
approach the inn, and goes meandering over the
downs among the gorse and bracken. Built, no
doubt, more than fifteen hundred years ago by
savages, solely with the aid of their hands and
pointed sticks, it has outlasted many monuments
of costly stones and marbles, and when civilisation
comes to an end some day, like the blown-out flame
of a candle, it will still be there, with the existing,
but more recent, Roman road still beside it. That
road goes across the open country like a causeway,
or a slightly raised railway embankment.
The Dyke may have sheltered the fugitive Duke
of Monmouth on his flight in 1685. The reading of
that melancholy story of how the handsome and gay
Duke of Monmouth, a haggard fugitive from Sedge-
moor Fight, accompanied by his friend, Lord Grey,
and another, left their wearied horses near this spot,
and, disguising themselves as peasants, set out for
the safe hiding-places of the New Forest, only to fall
prisoners to James's scouts, paints the road and the
downs with an impasto of tragedy. All the country-

238 THE EXETER ROAD
side was being searched for him, and watchers were
stationed' on the hills, looking down upon this open
country where the movement of a rabbit almost
might be noted from afar. So he doubtless skulked
along in the shadow of the Dyke from the shelter of
Cranborne Chase down to Woodlands, where he
was caught, under the shadow of a tree still stand
ing, called Monmouth Ash.
Scattered all around are the inevitable barrows.
The industry of a byegone generation of anti
quaries has explored them all. Pick and shovel
have scattered the ashes and the cinerary urns of
the Britons or Saxons who were buried here, and
the only relics likely to be found by any other
ghouls are the discs of lead deposited by Sir Richard
Colt Hoare, or W. Cunnington, with the initials
' R. C. H. 1815,' or some such date; or, ' Opened by
W. Cunnington 1804 ' on them.
George the Third always used to change horses at
' Woodyates Inn ' when journeying to or from Wey
mouth, and the room built for his use on those
occasions is still to be seen, with its outside flight
of steps. When the coaches were taken off the
road, the inn became for a time the training estab
lishment of William Day.
The road near this old inn is the real scene of the
Ingoldsby legend of the Dead Drummer, and not
Salisbury Plain, on ' one of the rises ' where
An old way-post shewed
Where the Lavington road
Branched off to the left from the one to Devizes.

"1'Hmj*'*w^

THE EXETER ROAD, NEAR 'WOODYATES INN.'

A HIGHWAY MURDER 241
It was on Thursday, 15th June 1786, that two
sailors, paid off from H.M.S. Sampson, at Plymouth,
and walking up to London, came to this spot. Their
names were Gervase (or Jarvis) Matcham, and John
Shepherd. Near the ' Woodyates Inn' they were over
taken by a thunderstorm, in which Matcham startled
his companion by showing extraordinary marks of
horror and distraction, running about, falling on his
knees, and imploring mercy of some invisible enemy.
To his companion's questions he answered that he
saw several strange and dismal spectres, particularly
one in the shape of a female, towards which he
advanced, when it instantly sank into the earth, and
a large stone rose up in its place. Other large stones
also rolled upon the ground before him, and came
dashing against his feet. He confessed to Shepherd
that, about seven years previously, he had enlisted as
a soldier at Huntingdon, and shortly afterwards was
sent out from that town in company with a drummer-
boy, seventeen years of age, named Jones, son of a
sergeant in the regiment, who was in charge of some
money to be paid away. They quarrelled because the
lad refused to return and drink at a public -house on
the Great North Road which they had just passed,
four miles from Huntingdon. Matcham knocked him
down, cut his throat, and taking the money (six
guineas) made off to London, leaving the body by
the roadside. He now declared that, with this ex
ception, he had never in his life broken the law, and
that, before the moment of committing this crime, he
bad not the least design of injuring the deceased,
who had given him no other provocation than ill-
R

242 THE EXETER ROAD
language. But from that hour he had been a
stranger to peace of mind ; his crime was always
present to his imagination, and existence seemed at
times an insupportable burden. He begged his com
panion to deliver him into the hands of Justice in
the next town they should reach. That was Salis
bury. He was imprisoned there, brought to trial,
found guilty, and hanged.
Barham in his legend of the Dead Drummer has
taken many liberties with the facts of the case, both
as regards place and names, and makes the scene of
the murderer's terror identical with the site of the
crime, which he (for purely literary purjDoses) places
on Salisbury Plain, instead of the Great North Road,
between Buckden and Alconbury.

XXXIV
Three more inns were situated beside the road
between this point and Blandford in the old days.
Of them, two, the 'Thorney Down Inn,' and the
' Thickthorn Inn ' (romantic and shudder}' names !),
have disappeared, while the remaining- one, — the
' Cashmoor Inn ' — formerly situated between the other
two, ekes out a much less important existence than of
old, as a wayside ' public'
Then comes a village — the first one since Coombe
Bissett was passed, fifteen miles behind, and so more
than usually welcome. A pretty village, too, Tarrant
Hinton by name, lying in a hollow, with its little

CRANBORNE CHASE 245
street of cottages, along a road running at right
angles to the Exeter highway, with its church tower
peeping above the orchards and thick coppices, and
a sparkling stream flowing down from the hillside.
In this and other respects, it bears a striking similarity
to Middle and Over Wallop.
The quiet, not to say sleepy, Dorsetshire villager
who, lounging at the bend of the road, replies to your
query by saying that this is ' Tarnt Hinton,' is the
peaceable descendant of very desperate and bloody-
minded men, and the like circumstances that, a mere
hundred years ago, rendered them savages, would do
the same by him, were they revived. The peasantry
are what the law and social conditions make them.
Oppress the sturdy rustic and you render him a
brutal and resentful rebel, who, having an unbroken
spirit, will give trouble. Treat him fairly, and he
will live a life of quiet industry, tempered by
gossipy evenings in the village 'pub.' ; and although
he will never rise to be the mincing Strephon imagined
by the eighteenth -century poets of rurality, he will
raise gigantic potatoes, and cultivate flowers for the
local Horticultural Society, and do nothing more
tragical in all his life than the sticking of the
domestic porker, or the twisting of a fowl's neck. .
The civilising of the rustic in these parts dates
from the disfranchising of Cranborne Chase in 1830.
The Chase, which took its name from the town of
Cranborne, eight miles distant from this spot, was
originally a vast deer-forest, extending far into Hants,
Wilts, and Dorset. The great western highway entered
it at Salisbury and did not pass out of its bounds

246 THE EXETER ROAD
until Blandford was reached ; while Shaftesbury to
the north, and Wimborne to the south, marked its
extent in another direction. Belonging anciently to
great feudal lords or to the Sovereign, it was Crown
property from the time of Edward the Fourth to the
reign of James the First. James delighted in killing
the buck here, but that Royal prig granted the Chase
to the Earl of Pembroke, from whom, shorn of its
oppressive laws, it has descended to Lord Rivers ;
while the Earl of Shaftesbury also owns great tracts
of woodlands here. But, singularly enough, that part
of the Chase which still retains the wildest and densest
aspect lies quite away from Cranborne, and in the
county of Wilts, around Tollard Royal. The nature
of the country and the character of the soil must needs
always keep this vast tract wild, and, in an agricul
tural sense, unproductive. Game will always abound
here in the thickets, and indeed the weird-looking
hill-top plantations, called by the rustics ' hats of
trees,' are especially planted as cover, wherever the
country is open and unsheltered.
The severity of the laws which governed a Chase
and punished deer-stealers was simply barbarous.
Cranborne had its courts and Chase Prison where
offenders and deer-stealers were punished by mutila
tion, imprisonment, or fine, according to the crime,
the status of the offender, or the comparative state of
civilisation of the period in whicli the offence was
committed. But whether the punishment for stealing
deer was the striking off of a hand, or imprisonment
in a noisome dungeon, or merely being mulcted in a
larger or smaller sum, there were always those who

DEER-STEALERS 247
unlawfully killed the buck in these romantic glades.
Sometimes, for the devilment of it, the dashing young-
blades of the countryside — sons of the squires and
others — would hunt the deer.
' From four to twenty assembled in the evening,
dressed in cap and jack and quarter-staff, with dogs
and nets. Having set the watchword for the night
and agreed whether they should stand or run if they
should meet the keepers, they proceeded to the Chase,
set their nets, and let slip their dogs to drive the deer
into the nets ; a man standing at each net, to strangle
the deer as soon as they were entangled. Frequent
desperate and bloody battles took place ; the keepers,
and sometimes the hunters, were killed.'
Other law-breakers were of a humbler stamp, and
ferocious enough to murder keepers at sight. Thus,
in 1738, a keeper named Tollerfield was murdered on
his way home from Fontmell Church ; and another
at Fernditch, near ' Woodyates Inn.' For the latter
crime a man named Wheeler was convicted, and
suffered the extreme penalty of the law ; his body
being hanged in chains at the scene of the murder.
His friends, however, in the course of a few nights cut
the body down, and threw it into a very deep well,
some distance away. The weight of the irons caused
it to sink, and it was not discovered until long
afterwards. One of the most exciting of these encounters
between the deer-stealers and the keepers took place on
the night of 16th December 1781. Chettle Common,
away at the back of the ' Cashmoor Inn,' was the scene
of this battle. The stealers, assembling in disguise at

248 THE EXETER ROAD
Pimperne, marched up the road through the night,
and headed by a Sergeant of Dragoons, then quartered
at Blandford, poured through the Thickthorn Toll-gate,
armed with weapons called ' swindgels,' which appear
to have been hinged cudgels, like flails. It would
seem that the object of this expedition was the
bludgeoning of a few keepers, rather than the stealing
of deer. At any rate, the keepers expected them,
and armed with sticks and hangers, awaited the attack.
The fight was by no means a contemptible one, for in
the result one keeper was killed and several disabled,
while the stealers were so badly knocked about that
the whole expedition surrendered, together with the
Sergeant of Dragoons, who had a hand sliced off at
the wrist by a hanger. The hand was subsequently
buried, with military honours, in Pimperne church
yard. Leader and followers alike were committed to
Dorchester Gaol, and were eventually sentenced to
seven years' penal servitude, reduced to a nominal
term, in consideration of the severe wounds from
which they were suffering. One wonders how far
mercy, and to what extent the wish not to be at
the expense of medically attending the prisoners,
influenced this decision. As for the Dr. Jameson of
this raid, he retired from the Dragoons on half-pay,
and, coming to London, set up shop as a dealer in
game and poultry !
Ten years later, a keeper killed a stealer, and
another murderous encounter took place on 7th
December 1816 near Tarrant Gunville, at a gate in
the woods which the melodramatic instincts of the

WILTSHIRE MOONRAKERS 249
peasantry have named ' Bloody Shard,' while the
wood itself is known as ' Blood- way Coppice.'
Cranborne Chase was also at this time a haunt of
smugglers, who found its tangled recesses highly
convenient for storing their 'Free Trade' merchan
dise on its way up from the sea- coast. AVhether or
not the original ' Wiltshire moonrakers ' belonged to
the Wilts portion of the Chase or to some other part
of the county, tradition does not say.
That Wiltshire folk are called ' moonrakers ' is
generally known, and it is usually supposed that
they obtained this name for stupidity, according- to
the story which tells how a party of travellers
crossing a bridge in this county observed a number
of rustics raking in the stream in which the great
yellow harvest-moon was shining. Asked what they
were doing, the reply was that they were trying to
rake ' that cheese ' out of the water. The travellers
went on their way, laughing at the idiotcy of the
yokels. One tale, however, only holds good until
the other is told. The facts seem to be that the
rustics were smugglers who were raking in the river
for the brandy-kegs they had deposited there in the
gray of the morning, and that the ' travellers ' were
really revenue-officers ; those ' gaugers,' or ' preven
tive men ' who were employed to check the smug
gling which was rife a hundred years ago. It may
be thought that the seaside was the only place where
smuggling could be carried on, but a moment's reflec
tion will show that the goods had to be conveyed
inshore for inland customers. Smuggling, in fact,
was so extensive, and brought to such a perfection of

2 5 o THE EXE TER ROAD
system that forwarding agents were established every
where. Kegs of spirits, being bulky, were hidden for
the day in ponds and watercourses, wherever pos
sible, and removed at night for another stage towards
their destination, being deposited in a similar hiding-
place at the break of day, and so forth until they
reached their consignees. Thus the 'moonrakers'
by this explanation are acquitted of being monu
mental simpletons, at the expense of losing their
reputation in another way. But everyone smuggled,
or received or purchased smuggled goods, in those
times, and no one was thought the worse for it.

XXXV
At the distance of a mile up the bye-road from
Tarrant Hinton, in Eastbury Park, still stands in a
lonely position the sole remaining wing of the once-
famed Eastbury House, one of those immense palaces
which the flamboyant noblemen and squires of a past
era loved to build. Comparable for size and style
with Blenheim and Stowe, and built like them by the
ponderous Vanbrugh, the rise and fall of Eastbury
were as dramatic as the building and destruction
of Canons, the seat of the ' princely Chandos ' at
Edgware. Of Canons, however, no stone remains,
while at Eastbury a wing and colonnade are left,
standing sinister, sundered and riven, the melancholy
relics of a once proud but hospitable mansion.
Eastbury was begun on a scale of princely mag-

DODINGTON 251
nificence by George Dodington, a former Lord of the
Admiralty, who, having presumably made some fine
pickings in that capacity, determined to spend them
on becoming a patron of the Arts and an entertainer
of literary men, after the fashion of an age in which
painters were made to fawn upon the powerful, and
poets to sing their praises in the blankest of blank
verse. Every rich person had his henchmen among
the followers of the Muses, and they were petted or
scolded, indulged or kept on the chain, just as the
humour of the patron at the moment decreed. Un
fortunately, however, for this eminently eighteenth-
century ambition of George Dodington, he died
before he could finish his building. All his worldly
goods went to his grand-nephew, George Bubb, son of
his brother's daughter, who had married a Weymouth
apothecary named Jeremias Bubb. Already, under
the patronage of his uncle, a member of Parliament,
and an influential person, George on coming into this
property assumed the name of Dodington ; perhaps
also because the obvious nickname of ' Silly Bubb '
by which he was known might thereby become
obsolete. George Bubb Dodington, as he was now known,
immediately stopped the works on his uncle's palace,
and thus the unfinished building remained gaunt and
untenanted from 1720 to 1738. Then, as suddenly
as the building was stopped, work was resumed again.
The vast sum of £140,000 was spent on the comple
tion. Tapestries, gilding, marbles, everything of the
most costly and ornate character was employed, and
the grounds which had been newly laid out eighteen

252 THE EXETER ROAD
years before, and in the interval allowed to subside
into a wilderness, were set in order again. The
reason of this sudden activity was that Dodington
had become infected with that same ' Patron ' mania
which had caused his uncle to lay the foundation
stones of these marble halls. He was at this period
forty-seven years of age, and in those years had filled
many posts in the Government, and about the rival
Whig and Tory Courts of the King and the Prince of
Wales. Scheming and intriguing from one party to
the other, he had always been ambitious of influence,
and now that even greater accumulations of wealth
had come to him, he set up as the host of birth,
beauty, and intellect in these Dorsetshire wilds.
The gossips of the time have left us a picture of
the man. Fat, ostentatious, extravagant, with the
love of glitter and colour of a barbarian, he was yet
a wit of repute, and had undoubtedly some learning.
He possessed, besides, a considerable share of shrewd
ness. If he lent £5000 to Frederick, Prince of
AVales, and never got it back, we are not to suppose
that he ever expected to be repaid. That was, no
doubt, regarded as practically an entrance-fee to the
exalted companionship of a prince of whom it was
written, when he came to an untimely end : —
But since it's Fred who is dead, there's no more to be said.
That same Fred thought himself the clever man
when he remarked ' Dodington is reckoned clever,
but I have borrowed £5000 of him which he will
never see again ' ; but Dodington doubtless imagined
the sum to have been well laid out ; which, indeed,

A WHIMSICAL FIGURE 253
would have been the case had not the prince died
early. Msecenas was, in fact, working for a title, and
this was then regarded as the ready way to such a
goal. They say the same idea prevails in our own
happy times; but that £5000 would not go far
towards the realisation of the object. But, be that
as it may, Dodington did not win to the Peerage as
Lord Melcombe until 1761, and as he died in the
succeeding year, his enjoyment of the ermine was
short. As, however, the working towards an object
and its anticipation are always more enjoyable than
the attainment of the end, he is perhaps not to be
regarded with pity, or thought a failure.
One who partook of his hospitality at Eastbury,
and did not think the kindness experienced there a
sufficient reason for silence as to his host's eccen
tricities and failings, has given us some entertaining
stories. The State bed of the gross but witty
Dodington at Eastbury was covered with gold and
silver embroidery ; a gorgeous sight, but closer in
spection revealed the fact that this splendour had
been contrived at the expense of his old coats and
breeches, whose finery had been so clumsily converted
that the remains of the pocket-holes were clearly
visible. ' His vast figure,' continues this reminis
cencing friend, ' was always arrayed in gorgeous
brocades, and when he paid his court at St. James's,
he approached to kiss the Queen's hand, decked in
an embroidered suit of silk, with lilac waistcoat and
breeches ; the latter in the act of kneeling down,
forgot their duty and broke loose from their moorings
in a very indecorous and uncourtly manner.' That

254 THE EXETER ROAD
must have been a sore blow to the dignity of one
who possessed, as we are told, ' the courtly and
profound devotion of a Spaniard towards women,
with the ease and gaiety of a Frenchman to men.'
Rolling down the Exeter Road, from his London
mansion, or from his suburban retreat of ' La
Trappe,' at Hammersmith, in his gilded, old-fashioned
chariot, he gathered a variety of literary men at what
Young calls ' Pierian Eastbury.' Johnson, sick of
the Chesterfields and the whole gang of literary
patrons, scornfully refused Dodington's proffered
friendship ; but Fielding, Thomson, Bentley, Cumber
land, Young, Voltaire, and others were not slow to
revel in these more or less Arcadian delights. Chris
topher Pitt wrote to Young, congratulating him on
his stay here : —
Where with your Dodington retired you sit,
Charmed with his flowing Burgundy and wit ;
Where a new Eden in the wild is found,
And all the seasons in a spot of ground.
While Thomson, moved to it by the Burgundy or the
more potent punch, has celebrated palace and park in
his Autumn.
Dodington had either no stomach for fighting, or
else was a good fellow beyond the common run, as
the following affair proves. Eastbury marches with
Cranborne Chase, and one day the Ranger found one
of Dodington's keepers with his dogs in a part of the
Chase called Burseystool AAralk. The keeper was
warned that if he was found there again, his dogs
would be shot and himself prosecuted ; but despite
this warning he was found near the same spot a few

RUINED EASTBURY 255
days later, when the Ranger, having a gun in his
hand, put his threat into execution and shot the
three dogs as they were drinking in a pool, with
their heads close together, in one of the Ridings.
Dodington, in a first outburst of fury, sent a
challenge to the Ranger over this affair, and tbe
Ranger bought a sword and sent a friend to call on
the challenger to fix time and place for the encounter ;
but by that time Dodington had thought better of
it, and instead of making arrangements to shed the
enemy's gore, invited both him and his friend to
dinner. They met and had a jovial time together,
and the sword remained unspotted.
On Dodington's death his estates passed to Earl
Temple, who could not afford to keep up the vast
place. He accordingly offered an income of £200 a
year to anyone who would live at Eastbury and keep
it in repair. No one came forward to accept these
terms ; and so, after the pictures, objects of art, and
the furniture had been sold, the great house was
pulled clown, piecemeal, in 1795, with the exception
of this solitary fragment.
There is room for much reflection in Eastbury
Park to-day, by the crumbling archway with the two
large fir-trees growing between the joints of its
masonry ; by the remaining wing, or the foundations
of the rest of the vanished house, which can still be
distinctly traced in the grass during dry summers.
The stories of ' Haunted Eastbury ' and of the head
less coachman and his four-in-hand are dying out, but
the panelled room in which Doggett, Earl Temple's
fraudulent steward, shot himself is still to be seen.

2 56 THE EXETER ROAD
Doggett had embezzled money, and when discovered
found this the only way out of his trouble.
When the church of Tarrant Gunville, just outside
the Park gates, was rebuilt in 1845 the workmen
found his body, the legs tied together with a yellow
silk ribbon which was as bright and fresh as the
day it was tied.

XXXVI
Returning to the road at Tarrant Hinton, a steep
hill leads up to the wild downs again, with a corre
sponding descent in three miles into the village of
Pimperne whose chief part is situated in the same
manner, along a byeway at a right angle to the coach-
road. There is a battered cross on an open space
near the church, and the church itself has been severely
restored. Christopher Pitt was Rector of Pimperne,
and it requires no great stretch of imagination to con
jure up a vision of him pacing the road to Eastbury,
and composing laudatory verses on Dodington and
his ' flowing wit ' ; rendered, perhaps, the more
eloquent by anticipations of the flow of Burgundy
already quoted. He died in 1748, fourteen long
years, alas ! before the wine had ceased to flow at
that Pierian spot.
From this haunt of the Muses it is two miles to
the town of Blandford Forum, whose name it is sad
to be obliged to record is nowadays shamefully
docked to ' Blandford,' although the market, wdience

BLANDFORD 257
the distinctive appellation of ' Forum ' derived, is still
in existence. One comes downhill into Blandford, all the way
from Pimperne, and it remains a standing wTonder
how the old coachmen managed to drive their top-
heavy conveyances through the steep and narrow
streets by which the town is entered from London,
without upsetting and throwing the ' outsides ' through
the first-floor windows.
If the outskirts of Blandford town are of so
mediasval a straitness, the chief streets of it are
spacious indeed and lined with houses of a classic
breadth and dignity, as classicism was understood in
the days of George the Second, when the greater part
of the town was burnt down and rebuilt. One needs
not to be in love with classic, or debased classic,
architecture to love Blandford. The town is stately,
and with a thoroughly urban air, although its streets
are so quiet, clean, and well-ordered. Civilisation
without its usual accompaniments of rush and crowded
pavements would seem to be the rule of Blandford.
You can actually stand in the street and admire the
architectural details of its houses without being run
over or hustled off the pavement. In short, Blandford
can be seen, and not, like crowded towns, glimpsed
with intermittent and alternate glances at the place
and at the traffic, for fear of jostling or being
jostled. Who, for instance, really sees London. You can
stand in Hyde Park and see that, or in St. Paul's
and observe all the details of it ; but does anyone ever
really see Cheapside, Fleet Street, or the Strand, when
s

25 8 THE EXETER ROAD
walking ? The only way to make acquaintance with
these thoroughfares is to ride on the outside of an
omnibus, where it is possible to give an undivided
attention to anything else than the crowds that
throng the pavements.
The progress of Blandford seems to have been
quietly arrested soon after its rebuilding in 1731,
and so it remains typical of that age, without being
actually decayed. So far, indeed, is it from decay
that it is a cheerful and prosperous, though not an
increasing, town. Red moulded and carved brick
frontages to the houses prevail here, and dignity is
secured- by the tall classic tower of the church,
which, although not in itself entirely admirable, and
although the stone of it is of an unhealthy green
tinge, is not unpleasing, placed to advantage closing
the view at one end of the broad market-place, instead
of being aligned with the street.
Most things in Blandford date back to ' the fire/
which forms a red-letter day in the story of the
town. This may well be understood when it is said
that only forty houses were left when the flames had
done their worst, and that fourteen persons were
burnt, while others died from grief, or shock, or
injuries received. Blandford has been several times
destroyed by fire. In Camden's time it was burned
down by accident, but was rebuilt soon after in a
handsome and substantial form. Again in 1677 and in
1713 the place was devastated in the same manner.
The memorable fire of 1731 began at a soap-boiler's
shop in the centre of the town.
A pump, placed in a kind of shrine under the

GIBBON 261
churchyard wall, bears an inscription recounting this
terrible happening : — In remembrance
Of God's dreadful visitation by Fire,
Which broke out the 4th of June, 1731,
and in a few Hours not only reduced the
Church, but almost the whole Town, to Ashes,
Wherein 14 Inhabitants perished,
But also two adjacent Villages ;
And
In grateful Acknowledgement of the
Divine Mercy,
That has since raised this Town,
Like the Phoenix from its Ashes,
To its present flourishing and beautiful State ;
and to prevent,
By a timely Supply of Water,
(With God's Blessing) the fatal
Consequences of Fire hereafter ¦
This Monument
Of that dire Disaster, and Provision
Against the like, is humbly erected
By
John Bastard
A considerable Sharer
In the great Calamity,
1760.
Between 1760 and 1762 Gibbon, the historian of
the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was
constantly in the neighbourhood of Blandford, camp
ing on the downs which surround the town, and
enjoying all the pomp and circumstance which may
have belonged to his position as a Captain of Hants
Militia. Of these 'amateur soldierings he speaks as a

262 THE EXETER ROAD
' wandering life of military service,' a very amusing
view of what everybody else but that pompous his
torian regarded as mere picnics.
But Gibbon, although his person was not precisely
that of an ideal military commander, and although
the awkward squads he accompanied were not easily
comparable with the legions of old Rome, affected to
believe that the military knowledge he thus acquired
among the hills and woodlands of Hants and Dorset
was of the greatest use in helping him to understand
the strategic feats of Caesar and Hannibal in Britain
or across the Alps. Let us smile !
In after years, when living at Lausanne, amid the
eternal hills and mountains of Switzerland, he looked
back upon those days with regret, alike for the good
company of his brother officers, the jovial nights at
the ' Crown ' in ' pleasant, hospitable Blandford,' and
for the interference those happy times caused to his
studies ; when, instead of burning the midnight oil,
he drank deeply of the two-o'clock-in-the-morning
punch-bowl. Many of Blandford's natives have risen to more
than local eminence. Latest among her distinguished
sons is Alfred Stevens, that fine artist who designed
the Wellington Monument in St. Paul's Cathedral, as
yet, unhappily, incomplete. He came into contact
with governments and red-tape, and broken in spirit
and in health by disappointments, died in 1875. A
tablet on the wall of his birthplace in Salisbury Street
records the fact that he was born in 1817.

.. W^A>fc
'-AAA^Aa

WINTERBORNE WHITCHURCH 265

XXXVII
Sixteen and a quarter miles of very varied road
brought the old coachmen with steaming horses
clattering from Blandford into Dorchester, past the
villages of Winterborne Whitchurch, Milborne St,
Andrew, and the village of Piddletown, which is by
no means a town, and never was.
It is a long, long rise out of Blandford, past tree-
shaded Bryanstone and over the Town Bridge, to the
crest of Charlton Downs, a mile out ; where, looking
back, the town is seen lying in a wooded hollow
almost surrounded by park-like trees in dense clumps
— the woods of Bryanstone. From this point of van
tage it is clearly seen how Blandford is entered down
hill from east or west.
Very hilly, very open, very white and hot and
dusty in summer, and covered with loose stones and
flints after any spell of dry weather, the road goes
hence steeply down into AVinterborne Whitchurch,
where the ' bourne,' from which the place takes the
first half of its name, goes across the road in a hollow,
and the church stands, with its neighbouring parsonage
and cottages, in a lane running at right angles to the
high-road, for all the world like Tarrant Hinton and
Little Wallop. John Wesley, the grandfather of the
founder of the ' Wesleyans ' — or the ' Methodys,' as
the country people call Methodists — was Vicar of
Winterborne Whitchurch for a time during the
Commonwealth ; but as he seems never to have been
regularly ordained, he was thrown out at the Restora-

266 THE EXETER ROAD
tion by ' malignants ' and began a kind of John the
Baptist life amid the hills and valleys of Dorsetshire,
an exemplar for the imitation of his grandsons in later
days. Itineracy and a sturdy independence thus be
came a tradition and a duty with the Wesleys. Thus
are sects increased and multiplied, and no more
sure way exists of producing prophets than by the
persecution and oppression of those who, left judi
ciously alone, would live and die unknown to and
unhonoured by the world.
Milborne St. Andrew, close upon three miles
onward, is placed in another of these many deep
hollows which, with streams running through them,
are so recurrent a feature of the Exeter Road ; only
the hollow here is a broader one and better dignified
with the title of valley. The stream of the ' mill-
bourne,' from which the original mill has long since
vanished (if, indeed, the name of the place is not,
more correctly, ' Melbourne,' ' mell ' in Dorsetshire
meaning, like the prefix of ' lew ' in Devon, a warm
and sheltered spot), is a tributary of the river Piddle,
which, a few miles down the road gives name to
Piddletown, and along its course to Aff-Piddle, Piddle-
trenthide, Piddlehinton, Tolpiddle, and Turner's
Piddle. Milborne St. Andrew is a pretty place, and those
who know Normandy may well think it, with its
surrounding meads and feathery poplars, like a village ¦
in that old-world French province. Almost midway
along the sixteen and a quarter miles between Bland
ford and Dorchester, it still keeps the look of an old
coaching and posting village, although the last coach

MILBORNE ST. ANDREW 267
and the days of road-travel are beyond the recollection
of the oldest inhabitant. Here, in the midst of the
village, the street widens out, where the old ' White
Hart,' now the Post Office, with a great effigy of a
White Hart, and a number of miniature cannons on
the porch roof, waits for the coaches that come no
more, and for the dashing carriages and post-chaises
that were driven away with their drivers and their
gouty red-faced occupants to Hades, long, long ago.
Is the ' White Hart,' standing like so many of these
old hostelries beside the highway, waiting successfully
for the revival of the roads, and will it live over the
brave old days again with the coming ofthe Motor Car?
Meanwhile, given fine weather, there are few
pleasanter places to spend a reminiscent afternoon in
than Milborne St. Andrew.
The old church is up along the hillside, reached with
the aid of a bye-road. Its tower, like that of Winter
borne Whitchurch, shows the curious and rather pleas
ing local fashion of building followed four hundred years
or so back, consisting of four to six courses of nobbled
flints alternating with a course of ashlar. A stone in
the east wall ofthe chancel to the memory of AVilliam
Rice, servant to two of the local squires here for more
than sixty years, ending in 1826, has the curious par
ticulars : —
He superintended the Harriers, and was the first Man who
hunted a Pack of Boebuck Hounds.
At a point a mile and a half farther used to stand
Dewlish turnpike gate, where the tolls were taken
before coming down into Piddletown.

268 THE EXETER ROAD
This large village is the ' Weatherbury ' of some
of Mr. Thomas Hardy's Wessex stories, and the
Jacobean musicians' gallery of the fine unrestored
church is vividly reminiscent of many humorous
passages between the village choir in Under the
Greenwood Tree. An organ stands there now, but
the ' serpent,' the ' clar'net/ and the fiddles of Mr.
Hardy's rustic choir would still seem more at home in
that place.
Between this and Dorchester, past that end of
Piddletown called ' Troy Town,' is Yellowham — one
had almost written ' Yalbury ' — Hill, crowned with
the lovely woodlands described so beautifully under
the name of ' Yalbury AVoods ' in that story, and
drawn again in the opening scene of Far from the
Madding Crowd, where Gabriel Oak, invisible in his
leafy eyrie above the road, perceives Bathsheba's
feminine vanities with the looking-glass.
Descending the western side of the hill and pass
ing the broad park-lands of Kingston, we enter the
town of Dorchester along the straight and level road
running through the water - meadows of the river
Frome. Until a few years ago this approach was
shaded and rendered beautiful by an avenue of stately
old elms that enclosed the distant picture of the town
as in a frame ; but they were cut down by the Duchy
of Cornwall officials, in whose hands much of the sur
rounding property is placed, and only the pitiful
stumps of them, shorn off close to the ground, remain
to tell of their existence. As Dorchester is approached
the road is seen in the distance becoming a street, and
going, as straight as ever, and with a continuous rise,

' CASTERBRIDGE ' 271
through the town, with the square tower of St.
Peter's and the spiky clock-tower of the Town Hall
cresting the view in High West Street, and in High
East Street the modern Early English spire of All
Saints nearer at hand. The particular one among the
many bridges and culverts that carry the rivulets
under the road here, mentioned by the novelist in his
Mayor of Casterbridge as the spot where Henchard,
the ruined mayor, lounged in his aimless idleness,
amid the wastrels and ne'er-do-weels of Casterbridge,
is the bridge that finally brings the road into the
town, by the old ' White Hart Inn.' It is the inevi
table lounging-stock for Dorchester's failures, who
mostly live near by at Fordington, the east end of the
town, where the ' Mix en Lane ' of the story, ' the
mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourishing Caster
bridge plant ' was situated.
It is a transfigured Dorchester that is painted by
the novelist in that story ; or, perhaps more exactly,
the Dorchester of fifty years ago. ' It is huddled all
together ; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees,
like a plot of garden-ground by a box -edging,' is
the not very apt comparison with the tall chestnuts
and sycamores of the surviving avenues. ' It stood,
with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-
cut and distinct, like a chess-board on a green table
cloth. The farmer's boy could sit under his barley-
mow and pitch a stone into the window of the town-
clerk ; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to
acquaintances standing on the pavement corner ; the
red-robed judge, when he condemned a sheep-stealer,
pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated

272 THE EXETER ROAD
in at the window from the remainder of the flock
browsing hard by.'
This peculiarity of Dorchester, a four-square clearly-
defined applique of town upon a pastoral country, has
been gradually disappearing during many years past,
owing to an increase of population that has burst the
ancient bounds imposed by the town being almost
completely surrounded by the Duchy of Cornwall
lands. This property, known by the name of Ford-
ington Field (and not the existence at any time of a
ford on the Frome), gives the eastern end of Dor
chester its title. The land, let by the Duchy in olden
times, in quarters or ' fourthings ' of a carucate, gave
the original name of ' Fourthington.' A great deal
of this property has now been sold or leased for build
ing purposes, and so the avenues that once clearly
defined with their ramparts of greenery the bounds of
Dorchester are now of a more urban character.
Dorchester shares with Blandford and with Marl
borough a solid architectural character of a sober and
responsible kind. As in those towns, imaginative
Gothic gables and quaint mediaeval fancies are some
what to seek amid the overwhelming proportion of
Renaissance, or neo-classic, or merely Queen Anne
and Georgian red-brick or stone houses. The cause of
this may be sought in the recurrent disastrous fires
that on four occasions practically swept the towrn out
of existence, as in the case of Marlborough and Bland
ford. The earliest of these happened in 1613. Over
three hundred houses were burnt on that occasion, and
property amounting to nearly a quarter of a million
sterling lost. This insistent scourge of the AVest of

THE BLOODY ASSIZE

273

England thatched houses visited the town again, nine
years later, and also in 1725 and 1775. Little wonder,
then, that mediaeval Dorchester has to be sought for
in nooks and corners. But if like those other unfor
tunate towns in these circumstances, it is very differ
ent in appearance, the streets being comparatively
narrow and the houses of a more stolid and heavy
character ; so that only in sunny weather does
Dorchester strike the stranger as being at all a cheerful
place.

XXXVIII
All the incidents in Dorchester's history seem
insignificant beside the
tremendous melodrama
of the ' Bloody Assize.'
The stranger has eyes
and ears for little else
than the story of that
terrible time, and longs
to see the Court where
Jeffreys sat, mad with
drink and disease, and
sentenced the unhappy
prisoners to floggings,
slavery, or death. Un
happily, that historic
room has disappeared, but ' Judge Jeffreys' chair '
is still to be seen in the modern Town Hall, and one
can approach in imagination nearer to that awful year
T

JUDGE JEFFREYS CHAIR.

274 THE EXETER ROAD
of 1685 by gazing at 'Judge Jeffreys' Lodgings,'
still standing in High AVest Street, over Dawes' china
shop. It must have been with a ferocious satisfaction that
Jeffreys arrived here to open that Assize, for Dor
chester had been a ' malignant ' town and a thorn in
the side of the Royalists forty years before. A kind
of wild retribution was to fall upon it now, not only
for the share that this district of the AVest had in
Monmouth's Rebellion in this unhappy year, but for
the Puritanism of a bygone generation.
Jeffreys reached here on 2nd September and the
Assize was opened on the following day, lasting until
the 8th. Macaulay has given a most convincing-
picture of it : —
' The Court was hung, by order of the Chief Justice,
with scarlet ; and this innovation seemed to the
multitude to indicate a bloody purpose. It was also
rumoured that when the clergyman, who preached the
assize sermon, enforced the duty of mercy, the fero
cious mouth of the Judge was distorted by an ominous
grin. These things made men augur ill of what was
to follow-.
' More than three hundred prisoners were to be tried
The work seemed heavy ; but Jeffreys had a contrivance
for making it light. He let it be understood that the
only chance of obtaining- pardon or respite was to
plead guilty. Twenty-nine persons who put them
selves on their country, and were convicted, were
ordered to be tied up without delay. The remaining
prisoners pleaded guilty by scores. Two hundred and
ninety-two received sentence of death. The whole

GEORGE THE THIRD 275
number hanged in Dorsetshire amounted to seventy-
four.' It is a relief to turn from such things to the less
tragical coaching era. The ' King's Arms,' which was
formerly the great coaching hostelry of Dorchester.
still keeps pride of place here, and its capacious bay-
windows of old-fashioned design yet look down upon
the chief street. Instead, however, of the kings and
princes and the great ones of the earth who used to
be driven up in fine style in their ' chariots ' a
hundred years ago, and in place of the weary coach-
travellers who used to alight at the hospitable doors
of the ' King's Arms/ the commercial travellers of
to-day are deposited here by the hotel omnibus from
the railway station with little or no remains of that
pomp and circumstance which accompanied arrivals in
the olden time. King George the Third was well
acquainted with this capacious house, for his horses
were changed here on his numerous journeys through
Dorchester between London, Windsor, and Weymouth.
He kept a commonplace Court in the summer at
Weymouth for many years, and thus made the fortune
of that town, while his son, the Prince of Wales, was
similarly making Brighthelmstone popular. If we
are to believe the story of the Duchesse cl'Abrantes,
Napoleon had conceived the very theatrical idea of
kidnapping the King on one of these journeys. The
exploit was planned for execution in the wild and
lonely country between Dorchester and Weymouth ;
possibly beneath the grim shadow of sullen Maums-
bury, or of prehistoric Maiden Castle. The King and
his escort were to have been surprised by a party

276 THE EXETER ROAD
of secretly - landed French sailors, and his Majesty
forthwith hustled on board an open boat which was
then to be rowed across the Channel to Cherbourg.
According to this remarkable statement, the English
coastguards had been heavily bribed to assist in this
affair. It was magnificent, but it was not war — nor
even business. As an elaborate joke, the project has
its distinctly humorous aspects, as one vividly conjures
up a picture of ' Farmer George,' helplessly sea-sick,
leaning on the gunwale of the row-boat, with the
equally unhappy sailors toiling away at rowing those
seventy miles of salt water. Then, too, the thought
of that essentially unromantic King compelled to cut
a ridiculous figure as a kind of modern travesty of
the imprisoned Richard Lionheart, raises a smile. But,
although Napoleon, who was not a gentleman, may
very possibly have entertained this rather character
istic notion, he certainly never attempted to put it
into execution, and the road to AA^eymouth is by so
much the poorer in incident.
But to return to the ' King's Arms,' which figures
in Mr. Thomas Hardy's story. Here it wras, looking
in with the crowd on the street, that Susan saw her
long-lost husband presiding as Mayor at the banquet,
the beginning of all his troubles.
Although the stranger who has no ties wdth Dor
chester to help paint it in such glowing colours as
those used by that writer, who finds it ' one of the
cleanest and prettiest towns in the AA^est of England,'
cannot subscribe to that description, the town is of a
supreme interest to the literary pilgrim, who can
identify many spots hallowed by Mr. Hardy's genius.

THE ROMAN ROAD 279
There are those in Dorsetshire who bitterly resent the
Tony Kytes, the Car Darches, the Bathshebas, and
in especial poor Tess, who flit through his unconven
tional pages, and hold that he deprives the Dorset
peasant of his moral character ; but if you hold no
brief for the natives in their relation to the Ten
Commandments, why, it need matter little or
nothing to you whether his characters are intended
as portraitures, or are evolved wholly from a peculiar
imagination. It remains only to say that they are
very real characters to the reader, who can follow
their loves and hatreds, their comedy and tragedy,
and can trace their footsteps with a great deal more
personal interest than can be stirred up over the
doings of many historical personages.

XXXIX
The Exeter Road begins to rise immediately on
leaving Dorchester. Leaving the town by a fine
avenue of ancient elms stretching for half a mile, the
highway runs, with all the directness characteristic of
a Roman road, on a gradual incline up the bare and
open expanse of Bradford Down, unsheltered as yet
by the stripling trees newly planted as a continuation
of the dense avenue just left behind. The first four
miles of road from the town are identical with the
Roman Via Iceniana, the Icen Way or Icknield
Street ; and on the left rises, at the distance of a
mile away, the sombre Roman earthwork of Maiden

280 THE EXETER ROAD
Castle crowning a hill forming with the earthen
amphitheatre of Poundbury on the right hand, evi
dence, if all else in Dorchester were wanting, of the
importance of the place at that remote period.
At the fourth milestone the Exeter Road leaves
that ancient military way, and, turning sharply to the
left, goes down steeply, amid loose gravel and rain-
runnels, to Winterborne Abbas, with an exceedingly
awkward fork to the road to Weymouth on the left
hand half-way clown. Bold and striking views of
the sullen ridge of Blackdown, with Admiral Hardy's
pillar on the ridge, are unfolded as one descends.

XL
Winterborne Abbas, one of the twenty -five
AVinterbornes that plentifully dot the map of AVilts
and Dorset, lies on the level at the bottom of this
treacherous descent : a small village of thatched
cottages with a church too large for it, overhung by
fir trees, and a remodelled old coaching inn, appar
ently also too large, with its sign swinging pic
turesquely from a tree -trunk on the opposite side of
the road which, like the majority of Dorsetshire
roads, is rich in loose flints.
Half a mile beyond the village, a railed enclosure
on the strip of grass on the left-hand side of the road
attracts the wayfarer's notice. This serves to protect
from the attentions of the stone-breaker a group of
eight prehistoric stones called the ' Broad Stone.'

c<; ha (<(>*.

WINTERBORNE ABBAS.

THE RUSSELLS 283
The largest is 10 feet long by 5 feet, and 2 feet thick,
lying clown. A notice informs all who care to know
that this group is constituted by the owner, accord
ing to the Act of Parliament, an ' Ancient Monu
ment.' The cynically -minded might well say that
the hundreds of similar ' ancient monuments ' with
which the neighbouring downs are peppered might
also be railed off, to give a welcome fillip to the trade
in iron fencing, and certainly this caretaking of every
misshapen stone without a story is the New Idolatry.
Just beyond this point is the castellated lodge of
the park of Bridehead, embowered amid trees. The
place obtains its name from the little river Bride or
Bredy which rises in the grounds and flows away to
enter the sea at Burton ( = ' Bride-town ') Bradstock,
eight miles away ; passing iu its course the two other
places named from it, Little Bredy and Long Bredy.
Now the road rises again, and ascends wild un
enclosed downs which gradually assume a stern, and
even mountainous, character. Amid this panorama,
in the deep hollows below these stone-strewn heights,
are gracious wooded dells, doubly beautiful by con
trast. In the still and sheltered nooks of these
sequestered spots the primrose blooms early, and frosts
come seldom, while the uplands are covered with
snow or swept with bleak winds .that freeze the
traveller's very marrow. One of these gardens in tbe
wilderness is Kingston Russell, the spot whence the
Russells, now Dukes of Bedford, sprang from obscurity
into wealth and power. Deep down in their retire
ment, the world (or such small proportion of it as
travelled in those days) passed unobserved, though

284

THE EXETER ROAD

not far removed. For generations the Russells had
inhabited their old manor-house here, and might
have done so, in undistinguished fashion, for many
years more, had it not been for the chance which
brought John Russell into prominence and preferment
in 1502. He was the Founder of the House and
died an Earl, with vast estates, the spoil of the
Church, showered upon him. He was the first of all

KINGSTON RUSSELL.

the Russells to exhibit that gift of ' getting on ' which
his descendants have almost uniformly inherited.
Unlike him, however, they have rarely commanded
affection, and the Dukes of Bedford, with much
reason, figure in the public eye as paragons of mean
ness and parsimony.
At the cross roads, where on the left the bye-path
leads steeply down the sides of these immemorial hills
to Long Bredy, and on the right in the direction of
Maiden Newton, used to stand Long Bredy Gate and
the 'Hut Inn.' Here the high-road is continued

CHILCOMBE

285

along the very backbone of the ridge, exposed to all
the rigours of the elements. To add to the weird
aspect of the scene, barrows and tumuli are scattered
about in profusion. We now come to a turning on
the left hand called ' Cuckold's Corner,' why, no
legend survives to tell us. Steeply this lane leads to
the dowms that roll away boldly to the sea, coming in

CHILCOMBE CHURCH.

little over a mile to ' chilly Chilcombe,' a tiny hamlet
with a correspondingly tiny church tucked away
among the great rounded shoulders of the hills, but
not so securely sheltered but that the eager winds
find their way to it and render both name and epithet
eminently descriptive. The population of Chilcombe,
according to the latest census, is twenty-four, and
the houses six ; and it is, accordingly, quite in order
that the church should be regarded as the smallest

286 THE EXETER ROAD
in England. There are many of these ' smallest
churches,' and the question as to which really .deserves
the title is not likely to be determined until an ex
pedition is fitted out to visit all these rival claimants,
and to accurately measure them. Of course the re
maining portions of a church are not eligible for
inclusion in this categorv. Chilcombe, however,
is a complete example. The hamlet was never, in
all probability, more populous than it is now, and
the church certainly was never larger. Originally
Norman, it underwent some alterations in the late
Perpendicular period. The measurements are : nave
22 feet in length, chancel 13 feet. It is a picturesque
though unassuming little building, without a tower.
but provided instead with a quaint old stone bell-cote
on the west gable. This gives the old church the
appearance of some ancient ecclesiastical pigeon-house.
The bell within is dated 1656. The very fine and
unusual altar-piece of dark walnut wood, with scenes
from the life of Christ, is credibly reported to have
been brought here from one of the ships of the
' Invincible Armada,' known to have been wrecked
on the beach at Burton Bradstock, some three miles
away. Returning to the highway at ' Cuckold's Corner,'
we come to ' Traveller's Rest,' now a wayside inn on
the left hand, situated on the tremendous descent
which commences a mile beyond Long Bredy turn
pike, and goes practically down into Bridport's long
street ; a distance of five miles, with a fall from 702
feet above the sea, to 253 feet at 'Traveller's Rest,'
two miles farther on, and eventually to sea-level at

' traveller's rest. '

HLLLS ROUND BRLDPORT 289
Bridport, with several curves in the road and an
intermediate ascent or two between this point and the
town. The cyclist who cares to take his courage in
both hands, and has no desire to linger over perhaps
one of the most magnificent scenic panoramas in
England, can coast down this long stretch with the
speed of the wind, and chance the result. But it is
better to loiter here, for none of the great high-roads
has anything like this scenery to show. From away
up the road the eye ranges over a vast stretch of
country westwards. South-west lies the Channel,
dazzling like a burnished mirror if you come here at
the psychological moment for this view — that is to
say, the late afternoon of a summer's day ; with the
strangely contorted shapes of the hills round about
suggesting volcanic origin, and casting cool shadows
far down into the sheltered coombes that have been
baking in the sun all day long. Near at hand is
Shipton Beacon, rising almost immediately beyond
' Traveller's Rest,' and looking oddly from some
points of view like some gigantic ship's hull lying
keel uppermost. Beyond are Puncknoll and
Hammerdon, and away in the distance, with the
Channel sparkling behind it, and the sun making a
halo for its head, overlooking the sea at a height of
615 feet, the grand crest of Golden Cap, which some
hold to be so named from this circumstance, while
others have it that the picturesque title derives from
the yellow gorse that grows on its summit. To the
right hand rises the natural rampart of Eggardon,
additionally fortified by art, a thousand years ago,
whether by Briton, Dane, or Saxon, let those determine
u

290 THE EXETER ROAD
who will, with the village of Askerswell lying deep
down, immediately under this ridge on which the
road goes, the roof of its village church tower
apparently so near that you could drop a stone neatly
on to its leads. But ' one trial will suffice,' as the
advertisements of much-puffed articles say, for the
stone goes no nearer than about a quarter of a mile.
Very charming, this panorama, on a summer's day ;
but how about the winters' nights, in the times when
the 'Traveller's Rest' was better named than now;
when the coaches halted here, and coachmen, guards,
and passengers alike, half-frozen and breathless from
the blusterous heights of Long Bredy, tumbled out
for something warming ? For this hillside was reputed
to be the coldest part of the journey between London
and Exeter, and it may be readily enough supposed
by all who have seen the spot, that this was indeed
the fact.

XLI
The last mile into Bridport has none of these terrify -
descents, although, to be sure, there are sudden curves
in the road which it behoves the cyclist to take
slowly, for they may develop anything in the way of
traffic, from a traction engine to the elephantine
advance-guard of a travelling circus.
At Bridport, nine miles from the Devon border,
the country already begins to lose something of the
Dorset character, and to look like the county of
junket and clotted cream. As for the town, it is

BRIDPORT 291
difficult to say what character it possesses, for its
featureless High Street is redeemed only from tedious
ness by the belfry of the Town Hall which, with the
fine westward view, including the conical height of
Colmer's Hill and the high table-land of Eype to the
left, serves to compose the whole into something
remotely resembling an effect.
Bridport is a town which would very much like to
be on the sea, but is, as a matter of fact, situated
rather over a mile from it. Just where the little river
Bredy runs out and the sea comes banging furiously
in, is a forlorn concourse of houses sheltering abjectly
one behind the other, called variously Bridport
Harbour and West Bay. This is the real port, but
it matters little, or nothing at all, by what name you
call the place ; it remains more like a Port Desolation.
Bridport almost distinguished itself in 1651 by
the fugitive Charles the Second having been nearly
captured at the ' George Inn ' by the Harbour, an ostler
recognising his face, which, it must be conceded, was
one that once seen could scarce have been mistaken
when again met with. Charles was then trying to
reach the coast after the disastrous battle of Worcester,
and it is quite certain that if Cromwell's troopers had
laid their hands on him, there would never have been
any Charles the Second in English, history.
The tragical comedy of the Stuarts throws a
glamour over the Exeter Road to its very end. The
fugitive Charles, fleeing before the inquisitive stare
of the ostler, is a striking picture ; and so, thirty-four
years later, is the coming of his partly acknowledged
son, the Duke of Monmouth, to upset James the

292 THE EXETER ROAD
Second. Bridport was seized, and one of the
' Monmouth men ' slew Edward Coker, gentleman,
of Mappowder, on the 14th of June 1685, as the
memorial tablet to that slaughtered worthy in Brid
port parish church duly recounts. For their share in
the rebellion, a round dozen of Bridport men were
hanged before the eyes of their neighbours, ' stabbed,'
as the ancient slang phrase has it, ' with a Bridport
dagger.' The ghastly imagery of this saying derives
from the old-time local manufacture of rope, twine,
and string, and the cultivation of hemp in the
surrounding country. Rope- and twine-walks still
remain in the town.
Leaving Bridport behind, the coach passengers by
this route presently came to its most wildly romantic
part ; only it is sad to reflect that the travellers of a
hundred years ago had not the slightest appreciation
of this kind of thing.
Through Bridport's stony lanes our way we take,
And the proud steep descend to Morcombe's lake.
Thus the poet Gay, but he writes from the horse
man's point of view, and if he had bruised his bones
along this road in the lurching Exeter Fly, his tone
would probably have been less breezy. Travellers,
indeed, looked upon hills with loathing, and upon
solitude (notwithstanding the poets of the time) with
disgust ; therefore it may well be supposed that when
they came to the rugged scenery around Moreeomb
lake, and the next village Chideock (called locally
' Chiddick '), they did not enjoy themselves.
Here Stonebarrow Hill and Golden Cap, with many

A ROYAL FUGITIVE 293
lesser eminences, frown down upon the steep highway
on every side, and render the scenery nothing less
than mountainous, so that strangers in these parts,
overcome with ' terrour ' and apprehensions of worse to
come, wished themselves safe housed in the roadside
inn of Moreeomblake, whose hospitable sign gave, and
still gives, promise of good entertainment.
The run down into Charmouth from this point is

a breakneck one. At this remote seaside place, in
that same year, 1651, Charles the Second had another
narrow escape. Travelling in bye-ways from the
disastrous field of AVorcester on horseback, with his
staunch friends, Lord Wilmot and Colonel AVyndham,
arrangements had been made with the master of ' a
trading vessel hailing from Lyme, to put in at
Charmouth with a boat in the stillness of the night.
But they had reckoned without taking into account
either the simplicity of the sailor, or the inquisitive-

294

THE EXETER ROAD

ness of his wife, who wormed the secret out of him,
of his being engaged in this mysterious affair with a
party of strangers. All the country was ringing with
the escape of Charles from Worcester and the hue and
cry after him, and the woman rightly guessed whom
these people might be. She effectually prevented her
husband from putting in an appearance by the threat

SIGN OF THE 'SHIP,' MORECOMBLAKE.

that if he made any such attempt she would inform
the magistrate.
Wearied with watching for the promised boat, the
King's companions reluctantly had to make Charmouth
the resting-place of the party for the night. In the
morning it was found that the King's horse had cast
a shoe. When it was taken to the blacksmith, that
worthy remarked the quaint circumstance that the
three others had been replaced in three different
counties, and one of these three in AVorcestershire.

ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS

295

When Charles heard that awkward discovery he
was off in haste, for if a rural blacksmith was clever
enough to discover so much, it was quite possible that
he might apply his knowledge in a very embarrassing
manner. The little band had not hurried away a moment
too soon, for the ostler of the inn (what Sherlock
Holmes's all these Dorsetshire folks were, to be sure !)
who had already arrived independently at the con
clusion that this was King Charles, had in the mean
while gone to the Rev. Bartholomew Wesley, a local
Roundhead divine, and told him his thoughts. Thence
to the inn, where legends tell us the landlady gave
Mr. Wesley a fine full-flavoured piece of her mind,
and so eventually to the ears of a captain of horse,
this wondrous news spread. Horsemen scoured the
country ; clergyman re
turned home to think
over the loyal landlady's
abuse; ostler, prob
ably dismissed, had
leisure to curse his
officiousness ; while
King and companions
were off, whip and spur,
to Bridport, whence,
after that alarming
recognition at the Har-

INTERIOR OF THE ' QUEEN'S ARMS, '
CHARMOUTH.

bour, to Broadwinsor.
This historic Charmouth inn is still existing.
The ' Anchor,' as it is now known, was for many years
the ' Queen's Arms,' but although the sign has thus

296 THE EXETER ROAD
been altered and half of the building partitioned off as
a separate house, the interior remains very much the
same as it was then, and the original rough, stone-
flagged passages, dark panelling, and deep-embrasured
windows add a convincing touch to the story of the
King's flight through England with a price on his head.
For the rest, Charmouth, which stands where the
tiny river Char empties itself into the sea, consists of
one long street of mutually antagonistic houses, of all
shapes, sizes, and materials, and is the very exemplar
of a fishing village turned into an inchoate seaside
resort. But a sunny, sheltered, and pleasing spot.
On leaving Charmouth, the road begins to ascend
again, and leaves Dorsetshire for Devon through a
tunnel cut in the hillside, called the ' New Passage,'
coming in four miles to ' Hunter's Lodge Inn,' pictur
esquely set amid a forest of pine trees. From this
point it is two and a half miles on to Axminster, a
town which still gives a name to a particular make of
carpets, although since 1835 the local factories have
been closed and the industry transferred to AVilton,
in Wiltshire. It was in 1755 that the industry was
started here.
There is one fine old coaching inn, the ' George,'
at Axminster, with huge rambling stables and inter
minable corridors, in which one ought to meet the
ghosts of departed travellers on the Exeter Road.
But they are shy. There should, in fact, be many
ghosts in this old town of many memories ; and so
there are, to that clairvoyant optic, the ' mind's eye.'
But they refuse to materialise to the physical organ,
and it is only to a vivid imagination that the streets

SHUTE HILL 297
are repeopled with the excited peasantry who, in that
fatal summer of 1685, flocked to the standard of the
Duke of Monmouth, whom ' the Lord raised vp ' as
the still existing manuscript narrative of an Ax
minster dissenting minister says, to champion the
Protestant religion — with what results we already
know. Pleasant meadow-lands lead by flat and shaded
roads from Axminster by the river Axe to Axmouth,
Seaton, and the sea, but our way continues inland.

XLII
There are steep ups and downs on the nine miles
and a half between Axminster, the byegone home of
carpets, and Honiton, once the seat of the lace in
dustry, where all routes from London to Exeter
meet. ' Honiton lace ' is made now in the surround
ing villages, but not in the town itself.
The first hill is soon met with, on passing over
the river Yart. This is Shute Hill, where the coaches
generally were upset, if either the coachman or the
horses were at all 'fresh.' Then it is a long run
down to Kilmington, where the travellers, having
recovered their hearts from their boots or their
throats, according to their temperaments, and found
their breath, promptly cursed those coachmen and
threatened them with all manner of pains and penal
ties for reckless driving. Thence, by way of Wil
mington, to Honiton.

298 THE EXETER ROAD
A quarter of a mile before reaching that town the
traveller comes upon a singular debased Gothic toll
house. If he walks or cycles he may pass freely, but
all carts and cattle have still to pay toll. This queer
survival is known as King's Road Gate, or by the
more popular name of ' Copper Castle,' from its once
having a peaked copper roof above its carpenter-
gothic battlements.

' COPPER CASTLE.

Honiton, whose name is locally ' Honeyton,' is a
singularly uninteresting town, with its mother-parish
church half a mile away from the one broad street that
forms practically the whole of the place. Clean, quiet,
and neither very old nor very new, so far as outward
appearance goes, Honiton must be of a positively
deadly dulness to the tourist on a rainy day ; when
to go out of doors is to get wet, and to remain
in, thrown oh the slender resources for amusement
afforded by the local papers and the ten-years-old

THE LAST COACH 299
county directory in the hotel coffee-room, is a weari
ness. Once a year, during Honiton Great Fair, this long,
empty street is not too wide ; but all the year round,
and every year, the broad highway hence on to
Exeter is a world too spacious for its shrunken traffic.
Broad selvedges of grass encroach as slyly as a land-
grabbing, enclosing country gentleman upon this
generous width of macadamised surface, and are
allowed their will of all but a narrow strip sufficient
for the present needs of the traffic. It is fifty-five
years since the Great Western Railway was opened
through to Exeter, and during that more than half a
century these long reaches of the road have been
deserted. Do belated cyclists, wheeling on moonlit
nights along this tree-shaded road, ever conjure up
a picture of the last mail down ; the farewells at the
inns, the cottagers standing at their doors, or leaning
out of their windows, to see the visible passing away
of an epoch ; the flashing of the lamps past the
hedgerows, and the last faint echoes of the horn
sounding in melancholy fashion a mile away ? If
they do not, why then they must be sadly lacking in
imagination, or ill-read in the Story of the Roads.
Where the roads branch in puzzling fashion, four
and a half miles from Honiton, and all ways seem to
lead to Exeter, there stands on the* grassy plot at the
fork a roadside monument to a missionary bishop,
Dr. Patteson, who, born 1st April 1827, met martyr
dom, together with two other workers in the mission-
field, in New Zealand, in 1871. He was the eldest
son of Sir John Patteson, of Feniton Court, near by,

300 THE EXETER ROAD
hence the placing of this brick and stone column
here, surmounted by a cross, and plentifully inscribed
with texts. The story of his and his friends' death is
set forth as having been ' in vengeance for wrongs
suffered at the hands of Europeans by savage men
whom he loved and for whose sake he gave up home
and country and friends dearer than his life.'
This memorial also serves the turn of finger-post,
for directions are carved on its four sides ; and very
necessary too, for where two roads go to Exeter, the
one by Ottery St. Mary some two miles longer than
the other, the passing rustic is not wholly to be
depended upon for clear and concise information.
Cobbett in his day found that exasperating direction
of the rustics to the inquiring wayfarer, to ' keep
straight on,' just as great a delusion as the tourist
now discovers it to be. The formula, according to
him, was a little different in his time, being 'keep
right on.'
' Aye,' says he, ' but in ten minutes, perhaps, you
come to a Y or a T, or to a X. A fellow once
told me, in my way from Chertsey to Guildford,
" keep right on, you can't miss your way." I was in
the perpendicular part of the T, and the top part
was only a few yards from me. " Right on," said I,
"what, over that bank into the wheat?" — "No, no,"
said he, " I mean that road, to be sure," pointing to
the road that went off to the left.'
Here a branch of the river Otter crosses the road
in the wooded dell of Fenny Bridges, and in the
course of another mile, on the banks of another
stream, stands the ' Fair Mile Inn,' the last stage into

THE LONG REACHES OF THE EXETER ROAD.

EXETER 3°3
Exeter in coaching times. Lonely the road remains,
passing the scattered cottages of Rockbeare, and the
depressing outlying houses of Honiton Clyst, situated
on the little river Clyst, with the first of the charac
teristic old red sandstone church-towers of the South
Devon looking down upon the road from the midst of
embowering foliage. Then the squalid east end of
Exeter and the long street of Heavitree, where
Exeter burnt her martyrs, come into view, and there,
away in front, with its skyline of towers and spires,
is Exeter, displayed in profile for the admiration of
all who have journeyed these many miles to where
she sits in regal grandeur upon her hill that descends
until its feet are bathed in the waters of her god
mother, the Exe. Her streets are steep and her site
dignified, although it is partly the level range of the
surrounding country, rather than an intrinsic height,
which confers that look of majesty which all travellers
have noticed. The ancient city rises impressive in
contrast with the water-meadows, rather than by
reason of actual measurement. Wayfarers approach
ing from any direction brace themselves and draw
deep breaths preparatory to scaling the streets, which,
at a distance, assume abrupt vistas. Villas, with
spacious gardens, and snug, prebendal-looking houses,
eloquent of a thousand a year and cellars full of old
port, clothe the lower slopes of this rising ground,
to give place, by degrees, to streets which, as the
traveller advances, grow narrower and more crooked,
their lines of houses becoming ever older, more pic
turesque, and loftier as they near the heart of the
city. Modernity inhabits the environs, antiquity is

304 THE EXETER ROAD
seated, impressive, in the centre, where, on a plateau,
closely hemmed in from the bustling, secular life of
the streets, rises the sombre mass of the cathedral,
the pride of this western land.

XLIII
Exeter is called by those who know her best and
love her most the ' Queen City of the West.' To
historians she is perhaps better epithetically remem-
branced as the ' Ever Faithful,' loyal and staunch
through the good fortune or adversity of the causes
for which she has, with closed and guarded gates,
held fast the Key of the West. She has suffered
much at different periods of her history for this
loyalty ; from the time when, declaring against the
usurpation of Stephen, her citizens fought and starved
within the walls ; through the centuries to the time
of Perkin Warbeck, the impostor, and so on to the
Civil War between King and Parliament, when the
citizens were more loyal than their rulers and were
disarmed and kept under surveillance until the
Royalists came and took the place, themselves to be
dispossessed a few years later.
Loyalty, tried for so many centuries at so great a
cost, broke down finally in 1688, and the city gates
were opened to the Prince of Orange. Had James
been less of a bigot, and had his hell-hounds, Jeffreys
and Kirke, been animated with less zeal, who knows
what these Devonshire men would have done ? Pos-

THE KEY OF THE WEST 305
sibly it may be said that AVilliam's fleet would, under
such circumstances, never have found its way into
Tor Bay, nor that historic landing have been consum
mated at Brixham. True enough ; but granting the
landing, the proclamation at Newton Abbot, and the
advance to the gates of Exeter, how then if James had
been less of the stubborn oak and more of the com
plaisant willow ? Can it be supposed that they would
have welcomed this frigid, hawk-nosed foreigner of the
cold eye and silent tongue ? And if the Dutchman
and his mynheers had been ill-received at Exeter,
what then ? Take the map and study it for answer.
You will see that the ' Ever Faithful ' stands at the
Gates of the West. The traveller always has had to
enter these portals if he would go in either direction,
and the more imperative was this necessity to those
coming from West to East. Even now the traveller
by railway passes through Exeter to reach further
Devon and Cornwall, equally with him who fares the
high-road. What chance, then, of success would a foreign
expedition command were its progress barred at this
point ? Less mobile than a single traveller, or party
of mere travellers, it could not well evade the struggle
for a passage by taking another route. William and
his following might, in such an event, have at great
risk forced the passage of the treacherous Exe estuary,
but even supposing that feat achieved, there is diffi
cult country beyond, before the road to London is
reached. To the northwards of his march from
Brixham lies Dartmoor and its outlying hills, and
let those who have explored those inhospitable wastes
x

306 THE EXETER ROAD
weigh the chances of a force marching through the
hostile countryside in the depth of winter to outflank
Exeter. But all hope for James's cause was gone, and
although the spirits of the ambitious AA^illiam sank
when, on entering the streets of Exeter, he was only
received with a chilly curiosity, he was not to know
— for how could that most stony of champions read
into the hearts of these people ? — that their generous
enthusiasm for faith and freedom was quite crushed
out of existence by the bloody work of three years
before, when the peasantry saw with horror the
progress of the fiendish Jeffreys marked by a line
of gibbets ; when they could not fare forth upon the
highways and byeways without presently arriving at
some Golgotha rubricated with the dishonoured
remains of one or other of their fellows ; and when
many a cottage had its empty chair, the occupants
dead or sold into a slavery worse than death.
The people received William with a well-simulated
lack of interest, because they knew what would be
their portion were he defeated and James again
triumphant. They could not have cherished any
personal affection for the Prince of Orange, but can
only, at the best of it, have had an impersonal regard
for him as a champion of their liberties ; and of
helping such champions they had already acquired
a bitter surfeit. Thus it was that the back of loyalty
was broken, and Exeter, for once in her story, belied
her motto, Semper Fidelis, the gift of Queen Elizabeth.
The gifts that loyalty has brought Exeter may soon
be enumerated, for they comprise just a number of

THE CITY SWORD-BEARER

307

charters conferred by a long line of sovereigns ; an
Elizabethan motto ; a portrait of his sister, presented
by Charles the Second ; a Sword of Honour, and an
old hat, the gifts of Henry the Seventh in recognition
of Exeter's stand against Perkin AVarbeck in 1497.
Against these parchments, this picture, and the
miscellaneous items of motto, sword,
and old hat, there are centuries of
fighting and of spoliation on
account of loyalty to be named.
It seems a very one-sided affair,
even though the old hat be a Cap
of Maintenance and heraldically
notable. Among the maces and
the loving-cups, and all the civic
regalia of Exeter, these objects are
yet to be seen. Old headgear will
wear out, and so the Cap, in its
present form, dates back only to the
time of James the First. It is by
no means a gossamer, weighing, as
it does, seven pounds. As may be
seen by the accompanying illustra
tion, it is a broad-brimmer of the
most pronounced type.
The crown fixed upon the point of the sword-sheath
belongs to the same period, while a guinea of the
same reign may be seen let into the metal of the
pommel. On occasions of State, at Exeter, this
sword is carried before the Mayor and Corporation
by their official Sword-Bearer.
The dignified effect of the affair, however, is

THE EXETER CITY
SWORD-BEARER.

308 THE EXETER ROAD
generally spoiled by the commonplace black kid
gloves worn by him, and by his everyday clothes
visible under the official robes, which can be seen
in the illustration.
Of late the Cap has been replaced by one built on
the lines of those worn by the Yeomen of the Guard
in the Tower of London, the old Cap being thought
too historical to be any longer exposed to the danger
of being worn, while possibly some feelings of humanity
towards the Sword-Bearer may have dictated the
replacing of the seven - pound hat by something
lighter. It is now preserved in the Guildhall, where
it may be seen by curious visitors.

XLIV
It is a relief to turn from the thronging streets
to the absolute quiet of the cathedral precincts,
shaded by tall elms and green with trim lawns.
Externally, the cathedral is of the grimiest and
sootiest aspect — black as your hat, but comely. Not
even the blackest corners of St. Paul's Cathedral, in
London, show a deeper hue than the west front of St.
Peter's, at Exeter. The battered, time-wrorn array
of effigies of saints, kings, crusaders, and bishops
that range along the screen in mutilated array under
Bishop Grandison's great west window are black,
too, and so are the gargoyles that leer with stony
grimaces down upon you from the ridges and string
courses of the transepts, where they lurk in an
enduring crepuscule.

A COACHING STRONGHOLD 309
The sonorous note of Great Peter, the great bell
of the cathedral, sounding from the south transept
tower is in admirable keeping with the black-browed
gravity of the close, and keeps the gaiety of the
surrounding hotels within the limits of a canonical
sobriety. Elsewhere are ancient hostelries innumerable, with
yawning archways under which the coaches entered
in the byegone days. The ' Elephant,' the ' Mermaid,'
and the ' Half Moon ' are the chief among these, and
have the true Pickwickian air, which is the out
standing note of all inns of the Augustan age of
coaching. It must have been worth the journey to
be so worthily housed at the end of the alarums and
excursions which more or less cheerfully enlivened
the way.
Exeter and the far West of England were the last
strongholds of the coaching interest. The Great
Western Railway was opened to Exeter on 1st May
1844, and up to that time over seventy coaches left
that city daily for London and the cross-country
routes. Nor did coaching languish towards the close.
On the contrary, it died game, and, until finally ex
tinguished by the opening of the railway, coaching
on the old road between London and Exeter was a
matter of the utmost science and the best speed ever
attained by the aid of four horses on a turnpike road.
Charles Ward, the best -known driver of the old
' Telegraph ' Exeter coach, driven from his old route,
retreated westwards and took the road between
Exeter and Devonport, retiring into Cornwall when
the railway was opened to Plymouth on 1st May

310 THE EXETER ROAD
1848 ; but not before he had brought the time of
the ' Telegraph ' between London and Exeter down
to fifteen hours.
The 'Half Moon' is the inn from which the
'Telegraph' started at 6.30 in the morning, break
fasting at Ilminster, dining at Andover, and stopping
for no other meal, reaching Hyde Park Corner at
9.30 p.m. It was kept in 1777 by a landlord named
Hemming, who had a very good understanding with
the highwaymen Boulter and Caldwell, and doubtless
with many another. There is a record of those two
knights of the road being here, one of them with
a stolen horse, when a Mr. Harding, of Bristol, being
in the yard, recognised it. ' Why, Mr. Hemming,'
said he, ' that is the very mare my father-in-law, Mr.
James, lost a few months ago ; how came she here ? '
To which the landlord replied, ' She has been my owrn
mare these twelve months, and how should she be
your father-in-law's ? '
' Well,' replied Harding, ' if I had seen her in any
other hands, or met her on the road, I could have
sworn to her.' Boulter and Caldwell were at that
moment in the house at dinner, so the landlord took
the first opportunity of warning them.
For the rest, Exeter is still picturesque. It
possesses many quaint and interesting churches,
placed in the strangest positions ; while that of St.
Mary Steps has a queer old clock with grotesque
figures that strike the hours and chime the quarters:
The seated figure is intended to represent Henry the
Eighth, and those on either side of him men-at-arms,
but the local people have a rhyming legend wThich

EXETER CASTLE

3i3

would have it that the King is a certain ' Matty the
Miller':— The people around would not believe
That Matty the Miller was dead ;
For every hour on Westgate tower,
Matty still nods his head.
And, in fact, the King kicks his heels against the
bell and nods with every stroke.
The Jacobean Guildhall of Exeter,
too, is among the most striking
relics of this old-world city;
while away from the High Street,
but near the continual clashing
of a great railway station, there
stand the remains of Exeter
Castle, the appropriately named
Rougemont, that cruel Blunder-
bore, drunken in the long ago
with the blood of many a gallant
gentleman. At the end of a
long line of those who suffered were Colonel
John' Penruddocke and Hugh Grove, captured at
South Molton after that ineffectual Salisbury rising.
Executed in the Castle Yard, in the very heart of
this loyal city of Exeter, many a heart must have
ached on that fatal morning for these unhappy men.
' This, I hope,' said Penruddocke, ascending the
scaffold, ' will prove like Jacob's Ladder ; though the
feet of it rest upon the earth, yet I doubt not but
the top of it reaches to Heaven. The crime for
which I am now to die is Loyalty, in this age
called High Treason.'

' MATTY THE MILLER.

314 THE EXETER ROAD
They knew both how to fight and how to die,
those dauntless Cavaliers. The Earl of Derby, who
suffered at Bolton, Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George
Lisle, barbarously shot at the taking of Colchester ;
gray-haired Sir Nicholas Kemys at Chepstow, and
many another died as valiantly as their master —
Who nothing little did, nor mean,
But bowed his shapely head
Down, as upon a bed.
It is away through the city and across the Exe, to
where the road rises in the direction of Dartmoor,
that one of the finest views back upon the streets and
the cathedral is obtained. Exeter from the Dunsford
road, glimpsed by the ancient and decrepit elm
pictured here, is worth seeing and the view itself is
worth preserving, for elm and old-world foreground,
with the inevitable changes which the growth of
Exeter is bringing about, will not long remain. Like
many another relic of a past era along this old
highway, they are vanishing even while the busy
chronicler of byegone days is hastening to record
them.

INDEX

Abbot's Ann, 153
Alderbury, 183
Amesbury, 1, 2, 8, 12, 154, 195,
209
Andover, 1, 94, 123, 132-145, 217,
219
Ashe, 124
Automobile Club, 212
Axminster, 2, 9, 296
Bagshot, 3, 18, 69, 89, 96-98, 103
Bagshot Heath, 95-98
Basing House, siege of, 114-120, 123
Basing, Old, 113, 122
Basingstoke, 101, 113, 122
Bedfont, East, 78-80
Bedford Park, 92
Blackwater, 100, 101
Blandford, 2, 7, 9, 12, 242-246,
256-265
' Bloody Assize,' 273-275
Bokerley Dyke, 237
Bredy, Little, 283
Bredy, Long, 283, 284, 286, 289
Brentford, 16, 33, 34, 53, 56-63,
92, 93
Bridehead, 283
Bridport, 2, 94, 226, 286, 290-292,
295
'Broad Stone,' the, 280
Bryanstone, 265
Camberley, 99, 101
Cambridge Town, 99, 101
Charlton Downs, 265
Charmouth, 293-296
Chettle Common, 247
Chideock, 292

Chilcombe, 285
Chiswick High Road, 92
Clerken Green, 124
Coaches —
'Celerity,' 12, 195
'Comet,' 15, 18, 25
'Defiance,' 12, 105, 195
Devonport Mail (see ' Quicksilver ')
' Diligence,' 186
'Exeter Fly,' 2, 9, 15, 292
'Express,' 91
'Fly Vans,' 10, 106
'Herald,' 12
'Old Times,' 91
'Pilot,' 12
'Post Coach,' 186
' Prince George, ' 1 2
'Quicksilver,' 3, 8, 11, 12, 22,
25, 27, 30, 33
'Regulator,' 8, 12, 21, 25, 105
'Royal Mail,' 8, 9, 11, 32, 69,
162-165, 186
Short Stages, 33
'Sovereign,' 8, 12
Stage Waggons, 11, 106
'Subscription,' 12, 195
'Telegraph,' 2, 3, 8, 10, 11, 30,
33, 69, 195, 309, 310
'Traveller,' 12
Coaching, 2, 7-34, 62, 69, 81, 91,
102-108, 127, 141, 157, 162-
165, 184-188, 195, 309
Coaching Notabilities —
Mountain, Mrs., 29
Nelson, Mrs., 2
'Nimrod,' 12
Nobbs, Moses James, 31
Ward, Charles, 69, 309

3i6

THE EXETER ROAD

Coombe Bissett, 234, 242
Cranborne Chase, 237, 238, 245-
250, 254
Cuckold's Corner, 285, 286
Lead Druminer, the, 238-242
Deane, 124
Deer-stealers, 246-248
Dickens, Charles, 184-186, 212-215
Dodington, George Bubb, 250-255
Dorchester, 2, 12, 94, 95, 227,
268-279
Eastbury Park, 250-256
Egham, 86, 89-91, 94
Exeter, 2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 11, 30, 31,
33, 93, 94, 95, 303-314
Fares, 11, 22, 28, 106
Feltham Industrial School, 77
Fenny Bridges, 300
Fordington, 271, 272
Freefolk, 126
Gay, John, 59, 85, 292
Gibbon, Edward, 26 lj
Great Western Railway, 31, 299, 309
Gunnersbury, 92, 93
Hammersmith, 56, 89, 254
Hardy, Thomas, 155, 166, 268, 276
Hartford Bridge, 21, 22, 102-110
Hartford Bridge Flats, 22, 101 C
Hartley Row, 100, 101, 221, 222
Hatton, 73
Hazlitt, William, 73, 157-162, 186
Highwaymen, 70, 74, 98, 187, 215-
232
Biss, 216, 310
Blagden, Isaac, 217
Boulter, Thomas, 217
Boulter, Thomas, junr., 218-228,
310
Caldwell, James, 223-228, 310
Davis, William, 98, 216
Du Vail, Claude, 70, 99
'Golden Farmer,' the (see Davis,
William)
Peare, William, 228
Turpin, Richard, 70
Whitney, Capt. James, 216
Highwaywoman (Mary Sandall), 228
Holloway College, 90

Honiton, 1, 2, 95, 297-299
Hook, 101, 110
Hounslow, 16, 17, 32, 65, 69, 92
Hounslow Heath, 69-71, 75-78
Hurstbourne Priors, 125, 131
Hurstbourne Tarrant, 132
Hyde Park Corner, 1, 16, 33, 38,
40, 62
Inns (mentioned at length) —
' Anchor,' Charmouth, 295
' Bell,' Hounslow, 65
'Bells of Ouseley,' Old Windsor,
87-89
'Black Dog,' East Bedfont, 79
'Bull,' Aldgate, 2
'Bull and Mouth,' St. Martin-le-
Grand, 12
' Cashmoor,' 242, 247
'Deptford,' Wilton, 13
' Elephant,' Exeter, 309
' Fair Mile,' 300
' George, ' Andover, 136, 142-145
'George,' Axminster, 296
' Gloucester Coifee House, ' Picca
dilly, 34, 38
'Goose and Gridiron,' St. Paul's
Churchyard, 37
'Green Dragon,' Alderbury, 183
'Green Man,' Hatton, 74
'Half Moon,' Exeter, 2, 310
' Hotel Victoria, ' Northumberland
Avenue, 91
'Jolly Farmer,' Bagshot, 99
' King's Arms,' Bagshot, 97, 98
'King's Arms,' Dorchester, 275,
276
'Mermaid,' Exeter, 310
'New London,' Exeter, 8, 12
'Old White Hart,' Hook, 110
'Park House,' Amesbury, 1, 195
'Queen's Arms,' Charmouth, 295
' Ship,' Moreeomblake, 294
' Swan - with - Two - Necks, ' Lad
Lane, 8, 11, 12, 62
'Thickthorn,' 242
'Thorney Down,' 242
' Traveller's Rest, 2S6-289, 290
'Wheatsheaf,' Virginia Water, 91
'White Bear,' Piccadilly, 26
'White Hart,' Hook, 110
'White Hart,' Milborne St. An
drew, 267

INDEX

3'7

Inns —
'White Hart,' Whitchurch, 127,
128
' White Horse Cellars,' Piccadilly,
26
'Winterslow Hut,' 110, 156-165,
186, 218, 223
' Woodyates,' 94, 234-241, 247
Jeffreys, Judge, 273
Kensington, 53-56, 89
Kilmington, 297
Kingston Russell, 283
Knightsbridge, 48
Laverstoke, 125
Lioness attacks Mail, 162-165
Little Ann, 153
Little Bredy, 283, 289
Little Wallop, 155, 265
Lobcombe Corner, 156
Long Bredy, 283, 284
M'Adam, John Loudon, 17, 29
Mail coaches established, 9
Mapledurwell Hatch, 113
Market- gardens, 73-76
Martin Chuzzlewit, 183-186
Matcham, Jarvis, 241
Mayor of Casterbridge, 146, 155, 271,
276
Middle Wallop, 155
Milborne St. Andrew, 266
Monmouth's Rebellion, 237, 273,
291, 297
Moreeomblake, 95, 292-294
Mullen's Pond, 1, 195
Nately Scures, 110
Nether Wallop, 154-156
New Sarum, 167, 170
Oakley, 124
Old Basing, 113, 122
Old Sarum, 94, 167-170, 191
Old Windsor, 87
Old-time travellers —
Charles II. , 291, 293-296
Cobbett, Richard, 75, 89, 99-101,
109, 110, 125, 142-145, 192,
300
Conyngham, Lord Albert, 140

Old-time travellers —
George III., 238, 275
Knighton, Sir William, 10, 187
Monmouth, Duke of, 237, 291,
297
Newman, Cardinal, 127
Payne, George, 141
Pepys, Samuel, 187, 191
Taylor, John (the ' Water Poet '),
80
Trollope, Thomas Adolphus, 26-30
Omnibuses, 34, 40
Overton, 124, 125
Over Wallop, 154-156
Patteson, Dr., 299
Piccadilly, 2
Piddletown, 265, 267
Pimperne, 248, 256
Police, the, 51
Roman Roads, 8, 82-85, 92-95, 279
Russells, the, 283
St. George's Hospital, 38, 40
St. Mary Bourne, 94
Salisbury, 1, 4, 9, 165-183, 313
Salisbury Plain, 102, 191, 195-199,
203, 209, 212-217, 230-232, 238,
242
Sarum, New,. 167, 170
Sarum, Old, 94, 167-170, 191
Shrub's Hill, 92, 93, 95
Shute Hill, 297
Staines, 1, 17, 72, 81-86, 92
Staines Stone, 82-84
Stevens, Alfred, 262
Stonehenge, 188, 196-212
Sunningdale, 89, 95
Sunninghiil, 89
Tarrant Gunville, 248, 256
Tarrant Hinton, 242, 256, 265
Thorney Down, 94, 242
Troy Town, 268
Turnham Green, 56, 92
Turnpike Gates, 44-48, 154, 267,
298
Upper Wallop, 154-156
Virginia Water, 89, 91, 95

3i8

THE EXETER ROAD

Wallops, the, 154-156, 265
Watchmen, the old, 51
Wesley, Rev. Bartholomew, 295
Wesley, John, 265
West Harnham, 234
Weyhill, 1, 94, 154
Weyhill Fair, 133, 142, 145-152
Whitchurch, 1, 32, 124, 127-131,
221
AVilmington, 297

Windsor, Old, 87
Winterborne Abbas, 280
Winterborne Whitchurch, 265, 267
Worting, 115, 123

Yellowham Hill, 268
Yeovil, 1, 12
York Town, 99, 100, 101
Young's Corner, 92 ¦

Printed by R. & R. Clark, Limited, Edinburgh.

»'-