The Bath Road Part 6

To the Squire, however, they took that distinguished member of Society, who, of course, identified him at once, and bade them beg his pardon. This they did--according to "Peter Pindar"--with a resolution in future not to judge of people by their looks!

XVI

Just before reaching the roadside hamlet of Longford, fifteen miles from Hyde Park Corner, a lane leads on the right hand to Harmondsworth, a short mile distant across the wide flat cabbage and potato fields.

"Harm'sworth," as the rustics call it, is mentioned in Domesday Book, under the name of "Hermondesworde;" that is to say, Hermonde's sworth or sward, the pasture-land of some forgotten Hermonde.

[Sidenote: _THE "GOTHIC BARN"_]

Few ever turn aside from the dusty high-road to visit this old-fashioned village, rich in old timber-framed houses, and possessing an ancient t.i.the-barn which, standing next the church, was once part of an obscure Priory established here. The "Gothic Barn" is built precisely on ecclesiastical lines, with nave and aisles, and is the largest of the t.i.the-barns now remaining in England, being 191 feet in length and 38 feet, in breadth. The walls are built of a rough kind of conglomerate found in the locality, and called "pudding-stone," the flints and pebbles distributed through the rock resembling to a lively imagination the currants and raisins in plum-puddings. The interior of the barn is a vast ma.s.s of oak columns and open roofing.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "GOTHIC BARN," HARMONDSWORTH.]

A relic of old country life may be seen hanging in this barn, in the shape of a flail, now occasionally used for threshing out beans.

Very few people will understand the meaning of the old English word "flail," because it is almost fifty years since that old-world agricultural implement was in general use. Until steam was introduced as a labour-saving appliance in agricultural work, corn was invariably threshed out of the ear by wooden instruments like that pictured here, consisting of two unequal lengths of rounded wood of the size of an ordinary broomstick, connected by leathern loops.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD FLAIL, HARMONDSWORTH]

The farm hands who used this primitive contrivance grasped hold of the longer stick, and, brandishing it about over their heads, brought the hinged end down repeatedly on the wheat spread out on the threshing floor; thus, with the expenditure of considerable time and muscular strength, separating the grains from the ears. As the "business end" of the flail is constructed so as to swing in every direction, it is obvious that the mastery of it was only acquired with practice, and at the cost of sundry whacks on the head brought on himself by the clumsy novice. Indeed, it is an instrument requiring particular dexterity in manipulation.

Longford obtains its name from the marshy ford over one of the sluggish branches of the Colne, which anciently spread over the road at this spot.

The ford was eventually replaced by the bridge, called "Queen's Bridge,"

which now carries the highway over the stream close by the old inn now called the "Peggy Bedford," from a well-remembered landlady who kept the house in coaching days, and died in 1859. The real name of it, however, now almost forgotten, is the "King's Head." The spot is picturesque in the grouping of gnarled old wayside trees with the quaint house and its luxuriant garden; and more so, perhaps, because it comes as a surprise from the hitherto unrelieved monotony of the flat road all the way from Cranford Bridge.

[Sidenote: _COLNBROOK_]

In another mile and three-quarters the road reaches Colnbrook, in midst of whose long street one of the numerous channels of the Colne divides the counties of Middles.e.x and Bucks. The boundaries of English counties are rarely marked for the information of wayfarers along the highways and byeways of the country, but here the brick bridge over the Colne, built in 1777, has inscriptions which mark where the frontiers march together; and when the Bath Road is crowded with cyclists on Sat.u.r.day afternoons in summer-time one or more can generally be found standing on the bridge with one leg in each county.

There are no fewer than four channels of the Colne here, and the land all round about is flat and waterlogged. The entrance to Colnbrook from London is in fact quite a little Holland in appearance, where streams flow sluggishly beside the road and are spanned by many footbridges that give access to the gardens of the pleasant country cottages on either side. A fine avenue of elms shades the road, and ahead is the cramped street of Colnbrook with its mellowed red-brick houses and bright red-tiled roofs.

Colnbrook street is narrow to a degree, and it is surprising how the many coaches that used to come tearing through at all hours of day and night managed to escape accidents. There is reason for this narrowness, for Colnbrook was originally built upon a stone causeway across the marshes of the Colne, and nowhere else were there to be found solid foundations. The original causeway may possibly have been Roman, for this is said to have been the station of _Ad Pontes_, described by Antoninus in his _Itineraries_. Staines, however, is more likely the site of it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE COUNTY BOUNDARY.]

[Sidenote: _THE "OSTRICH"_]

Colnbrook is probably the best example of a decayed coaching-town now to be found in the Home Counties. Too remote from London for suburban expansion to have affected it, the quaint street remains much as it was a hundred, nay two hundred years ago. The last coach might have left yester-year, so undisturbed appears to be the place. There are coaching-inns here of vast size, ranging from the solid-looking "George"

with "eighteenth century" proclaimed plainly enough on its stolid face, back to the "Ostrich," rambling, gabled, timber-framed, Elizabethan. They would have you believe that this house stands on the site of one of the old guesthouses established in the eleventh, twelfth, and succeeding centuries along the roads by the good Churchmen of those times. The original guesthouse here, however, appears to have been a secular foundation, for it is recorded that in 1106, a certain Milo Crispin gave it--"_quoddam hospitium in via Londoniae apud Colebroc_"--to the Abbot of Abingdon. The sign of the "Ostrich" is therefore a lineal descendant of "_Hospitium_," _via_ "Hospice" and "Ospridge;" for, as we have already seen, the letter H has ever been a negligeable quant.i.ty.

The original house is said by persistent traditions to have been the scene of a dreadful series of abominable murders something of the "Sweeny Todd"

order. The West of England, even so far back as five hundred years ago, was famous for its cloth, and along this road, with their bales and pack-horses, journeyed the rich clothiers to and from the London market, halting in their tedious travels at the inns on the way. The "Ostrich" was one of these, and prospered exceedingly by the patronage of those jolly merchants. The gold they carried, however, aroused the cupidity of the innkeeper and his wife, who devised a murder-trap in one of the upstairs bedrooms, by which the bed, which was placed above a trap-door, was tilted up in the middle of the night, so that its slumbering occupant was shot into a huge copper of boiling water, and so scalded to death. According to this tradition, which itself is some hundreds of years old, thirteen victims were thus disposed of, and the innkeeper waxed rich. There must have been other accomplices, for, according to the story, the bodies were kept until they formed a cartload, when they were heaped up, driven away to the Thames at Wraysbury and thrown in. One, however, had fallen out by the way, and whilst the criminals were disputing by the river-bank as to what had become of it, they were observed by a fisherman who had been hidden in the rushes while engaged in setting eel-bucks. He suggested that the best thing for them to do was to throw in one of themselves, to make up the number; to which sprightly wit they replied with a shower of arrows. The fisherman then rowed away, with one of the arrows sticking in his boat, and went with it into Colnbrook the following day. Outside the "Ostrich" he was espied by the innkeeper's little son, who exclaimed, "You have got one of my father's arrows!" The man and his wife were missing, but were afterwards captured and hanged.

[Ill.u.s.tration: COLNBROOK, A DECAYED COACHING TOWN.]

This gory legend does not render Colnbrook the more attractive to the stranger, but the Colnbrook folks are proud of it. Like the Fat Boy in "Pickwick," they "wants to make yer flesh creep," and would have one believe that the present "Ostrich" is the identical building--which it isn't.

Another cherished tradition of Colnbrook is that King John stayed here on his journey to Runneymede to sign the famous Magna Charta, the "Palladium of English Liberties," as phrase-makers are pleased to call it. They still show the stranger "King John's Palace," a quaint house which looks on to the road, and is not so old as John's time by some three hundred years.

That, however, by no means discredits the story to the good folks of Colnbrook.

A better ascertained historical event is the rising in favour of the deposed Richard the Second in 1400, when forty thousand men from the West Country lay encamped by the Colne, prepared to descend upon Windsor and London, to seize the usurper, Henry the Fourth. But Henry, fleeing from Windsor, raised an army in London; and between the rumours of his coming and treachery in their own ranks, the partisans of Richard faded away.

XVII

[Sidenote: _TO SLOUGH_]

The long stretches of the Bath Road between this and Slough are nowadays enlivened by few incidents or interesting places, although during the last century, and well on into this, the highway was lively enough with Royalties and their escorts, journeying between Windsor and St. James's.

The route taken on these occasions was generally through Datchet, and so on to the Bath Road just here. An old print of this period shows us how George the Third used to travel on this road to London, or to the unkingly domestic life at Kew Palace, where the farmer-like reputation of that not very brilliant monarch was sustained on boiled mutton and turnips, and improving books.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALMSHOUSES, LANGLEY.]

The hamlet of Langley Broom, one and a half miles on the way, is the uninteresting offshoot, of the pretty village of Langley Marish (or "Marshy Langley"), that lies just within sight of the road, and has some delightful old red-brick almshouses, which, together with the ancient library and painted room of Renaissance period in the church, render the place worthy a visit. This is all there is to interest the stranger, with the exception of a pretty peep towards Windsor Castle on the left hand, within two miles of Slough, and near where Cary of the _Itinerary_ places a spot he calls "Tetsworth Water," which does not appear to exist nowadays.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE STOLEN FOUNTAIN.]

[Sidenote: _A STOLEN FOUNTAIN_]

Slough is quite modern and unremarkable, but it is rapidly building up legends of its own. There have, for instance, been many strange thefts on the roads, from time to time, but none perhaps stranger than the purloining, two years ago, of the drinking-fountain which used to stand at the entrance to Slough, where the road branches off to Uxbridge. Until some unusually acquisitive folk came along and carried it away with them, there was at that corner a fountain of bronze and marble, fourteen feet in height, the bronze upper part weighing nearly half a ton. It acted also as a finger-post, directing strayed cyclists in the way they should go. The good folks of Slough went to bed one night and saw their fountain standing where it had been used to stand for years past; but in the morning, when they arose and went forth about their business, the fountain was gone!

Nothing but the plinth was left. Some mad wag suggested that one of the many cyclists who frequent the Bath Road had taken it home with him as a memento of Slough; but it seems that a gang of original-minded thieves made away with it for the sake of the bronze, which, when broken up, must have brought them a good sum. At any rate, it seems quite beyond the bounds of possibility that Slough will ever see its fountain again.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WINDSOR CASTLE, FROM THE ROAD NEAR SLOUGH.]

XVIII

It requires the specialized knowledge of a district surveyor to determine where Slough ends and Salt Hill begins, although probably it would be a shrewd guess to say that the roads which cross the Bath Road in the midst of Slough, and go respectively left and right to Windsor and Stoke Poges, form the dividing line. For all practical purposes, however, the places are one. Salt Hill has decayed, rather than grown, while the town of Slough (unlovely name!) is almost wholly a creation of the railway. Not only strangers have noted the unpleasing name of the place, but some of the inhabitants even endeavoured to change it a few years ago. The proposition was to rechristen it "Upton Royal," Upton being a hamlet near by, the "Royal" a bright idea of the local boot-lickers, who wanted to emphasize the fact of their proximity to Windsor. The project fell through.

[Sidenote: _A TRAGICAL DINNER_]

Many of the crack coaches halted at Salt Hill, where, at the "Castle" or the "Windmill," they found accommodation of the very best. Salt Hill, in fact, was a place which thrived solely on coaching, and the glories of it are now departed. A tragical event clouded over the fair fame of the "Castle" in 1773. It seems that on the 29th of March in that year, a number of gentlemen forming the Colnbrook Turnpike Commission met there, when the Hon. Mr. O'Brien, Capt. Needham, Edward Mason, Major Mayne, Major Cheshire, Walpole Eyre, Capt. Salter, Mr. Isherwood, Mr. Benwell, Mr.

Pote, senr., and Mr. Burcombe attended and dined together. The dinner consisted of soup, jack, perch, and "eel pitch c.o.c.kt" (whatever that may have been), fowls, bacon, and greens, veal cutlets, ragout of pigs' ears, chine of mutton and salad, course of lamb and cuc.u.mbers, crawfish, pastry, and jellies. The wines were Madeira and Port of the very best quality; but, notwithstanding this elaborate spread, the company, we are told, ate and drank moderately, nor was there excess in any respect. Before dinner, several paupers were examined, and among them one most remarkably miserable object. In about ten or eleven days afterwards, every one of the company, except Mr. Pote, who had walked in the garden during the examination of the paupers, was taken ill, and five of them soon died. It was, at the time, supposed that some infection from the paupers had occasioned this fatality, more especially as Mr. Pote, who was absent from the examination, was the only person who escaped unaffected, although he had dined in exactly the same manner as the others.

Some persons have compared this affair with the mortality arising from the Black a.s.sizes, but it should seem, by another account, that these unfortunate gentlemen had partaken of soup that had been allowed to stand in a copper vessel, and that, therefore, they died of mineral poisoning.

They lie buried in the little churchyard of Wexham, two miles distant, where an inscription records the facts. That sad business quite ruined the "Castle" Hotel.

But all the Salt Hill hotels were ruined when the Great Western Railway was constructed. The first section was opened, from Paddington to Taplow, on June 4, 1838, and those old hostelries at one blow found most of their patrons taken from them. It is true that this disaster had been impending since 1833, when the route for the new railway was first surveyed; but after the victory of the opponents of the first Bill, when a public meeting was held at Salt Hill to rejoice in the defeat of the railway project, the innkeepers seemed to think that they could not come to much harm. They were, however, bitterly disillusioned.

[Sidenote: _OPENING OF THE G.W.R._]