The Dover Road Part 4

[Sidenote: A QUAINT EPITAPH]

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

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

The life of this Clerk was just three-score and ten, Nearly half of which time he chaunted Amen.

In his youth he was married, like other young men; But his wife died one day, so he chaunted Amen.

A second he married--she departed--what then?

He married and buried a third, with Amen.

Thus, his joys and his sorrows were treble; but then His voice was deep ba.s.s as he sung out Amen.

On the horn he could blow, as well as most men So his horn was exalted in sounding Amen.

But he lost all his wind after three-score and ten And here, with three wives, he waits, till again The trumpet shall rouse him to sing out Amen.

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

The duty on coals entering London amounted in 1885 to no less than 449,343, and on wines to 8,488. By far the greater part of these amounts was, of course, collected on the railways and in the port of London.

Originally imposed for the maintenance of London orphans, the wine dues became, like the coal duties, great sources of income, by which many notable London improvements, among them the Victoria Embankment, have been carried out.

XIII

[Sidenote: DARTFORD]

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

It is, or was, a small wild plum, of the damson kind.

And here is the traditional home of paper-making in England, for it was in Dartford, in the reign of Good Queen Bess, that John Spielman (majesty, in the person of Gloriana's successor, James the First, knighted him for it in 1605) introduced the art of paper-making to these sh.o.r.es. What induced that man of gold and jewels and precious stones (he was jeweller to Her Majesty) to take up paper-making, I do not know; but he made a very good thing of it, commercially speaking, and no wonder, when he had sole license during ten years for collecting rags for making his paper withal.

Besides introducing the manufacture of paper, Sir John Spielman added the lime-tree to our parks and gardens, for he brought over with him from his native place, Lindau, in Germany, two slips from some _unter den linden_ or another, and planted them in front of his Dartford home, where they flourished and became the progenitors of all the limes in England.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARMS OF SPIELMAN AND HIS FIRST WIFE.]

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

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

In 1858 an a.s.sociation styling themselves the "Legal Society of Paper Makers," of whom I know nothing, restored Spielman's tomb. The strange heraldic coat-of-arms of Spielman will be noticed. It is, and looks, German, and is of an extravagant nature that would utterly discompose an English herald. Spielman's coat exhibits a blue serpent with a red crest, standing on his tail on a gold background, between six golden lions on a red field, the whole of this singular device based on a green mount. His wife's arms, impaled with his own, are a man clothed in a long black gown, with a long cap, holding in his hand an olive branch, and standing on a red mount inverted. The crest is: a savage, wreathed about the temples and loins with ivy. Motto: _Arte et fortuna_. The epitaph is in German.

Spielman's first wife died in 1607. In 1609 he married again, and deceased in 1626, leaving by the second wife three sons and one daughter.

[Sidenote: THE SPIELMANS]

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

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: DARTFORD CHURCH.]

We may be thankful that Spielman did no more to the church, for, had he rebuilt it, we should have lost one of the finest and most picturesque churches on the Dover Road, whose tall tower, severely unornamental, with clock oddly placed on one side, is such a prominent feature of Dartford.

Gundulf, that famous architect-bishop of Rochester, to whom Rochester Keep, Dover Castle, the White Tower of the Tower of London, portions of Rochester Cathedral, and a number of other buildings, civil, ecclesiastical and military, are ascribed with more or less show of authority, is supposed to have built Dartford tower, not so much for religious as for defensive uses. For hereby runs the Darent across the road, and no bridge spanned the ford when Gundulf's tower was first built.

It therefore guarded the pa.s.sage until the neighbouring hermit, who lived in a fine damp cell by the riverside, succeeded in collecting enough money wherewith to build a bridge whose successor forms an excellent leaning-stock on Sundays to the British workman waiting anxiously for the public-houses to open.

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

[Sidenote: THE "BULL"]

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "BULL" INN, DARTFORD.]

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

Pastor Moritz, in his account of a seven weeks' tour in England, tells us how he pa.s.sed through Dartford. He was by no means a distinguished person, but what he has to say of his travels is interesting, as contributing to show how others see us. He came into England by way of the Thames, May 31, 1782, and landed (he says) just below Dartford--probably at Greenhithe--to which place he walked in company with some others, and there breakfasted.

He was fresh from the dreary, sandy Mark of Brandenburg, and this fair county of Kent delighted him hugely. At Dartford he saw, for the first time, an English soldier. That robust Tommy struck him with admiration, both for the sake of his red coat and his martial bearing. "Here, too, I first saw" (says he) "(what I deemed a true English sight) two boys boxing in the street." The party separated at Dartford, and, taking two post-chaises at the "Bull," drove to London, the Pastor "stunned," as it were, by a constant rapid succession of interesting objects, arriving at Greenwich nearly in a state of stupefaction.

[Sidenote: WAT TYLER]

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

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

W. T. Stead three months' imprisonment some years ago--when the Tyler, who had just returned from work, killed him with a stroke from his hammer.

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

XIV

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: DARTFORD BRIDGE.]

[Sidenote: MARTYRS]

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