The Dover Road Part 7

[Sidenote: THE "LORD NELSON"]

There is one other item of interest at Chalk, and that is an old wayside tavern, the "Lord Nelson," one of those old houses that occupied, during last century, and the first quarter of the nineteenth, a position between the coaching inn and the mere beer-house. This type of tavern is still very largely represented along the Dover Road, although the sailors who chiefly supported them are no longer seen tramping the highways between the seaports. They have, most of them, little arbours and trim gardens with skittle- and bowling-alleys, and here the sailor would sit and drink, spin yarns, or play at bowls; swearing strange oaths, and telling of many a hard-fought fight. If he had kindred company, there would be, I promise you, a riotous time; for no schoolboy so frolicsome as Jack ash.o.r.e, and hard-won wages and prize-money, got at the cost of blood and wounds, he spent like water. Nothing was too expensive for him, nor, indeed, expensive enough, and if he was sufficiently fortunate to leave his landing-place with any money at all, he would very likely post up to town with the best on the road, holding, very rightly, that life without experiences was not worth the having. And of experiences he had plenty. He lived like a lord so long as his money lasted, and when he went afloat again he was shipped in a lordly state of drunkenness; but once the anchor was weighed his was a slave's existence. Not that any word of his hardships escaped him; he took them as inseparable from a seaman's life; and, indeed, once the first rapture of his home-coming was over, the sea unfailingly claimed him again. And when ash.o.r.e all his talk was of battles and storms; he d.a.m.ned Bonaparte, believed that one Englishman could thrash three "darned parleyvoos," despised land-lubbers, and sang "Hearts of Oak" with an unction that was truly admirable. His failings were only those of a free and n.o.ble nature, and it is very largely owing to his qualities of courage and tenacity that England stands where she is to-day.

Let us not, however, decry, either directly or by implication, the sailors who now man our ships. They live in more peaceful times, and have neither the discomforts nor the hard knocks that were distributed so largely years ago; but they have approved themselves no whit less stalwart than their ancestors who wore pigtails, fought like devils; talked of Rodney, Nelson, Trafalgar, and the Nile, and finally disappeared somewhere about the time of the Battle of Navarino.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LIGHT FANTASTIC. BANK HOLIDAY AT CHALK.]

It was for the delight and to secure the custom of these very full-blooded heroes that these old taverns with signs so nautical and bowling-greens so enticing were planted so frequently on this very sea-salty road, and now that the humblest traveller finds it cheaper to pay a railway-fare than to walk, they look, many of them, not a little forlorn. As for the "Lord Nelson," at Chalk, I fear it lies too near London suburbs to last much longer. Already, on Bank Holidays, when the c.o.c.kney comes to Gravesend, literally in his thousands, riotous parties adventure thus far, and dance in the dusty highway to sounds of concertina and penny whistle. Their custom will doubtless enrich the place, and presently a gin-palace will be made of what is now a very romantic and unusual inn, grey and time-stained; its red roof-tiles thickly overgrown with moss and house-leek, and its gables bent and bowed with years.

XVIII

[Sidenote: GAD'S HILL]

There is little to see or remark upon in the three miles between Chalk and Gad's Hill. Two old roadside inns, each claiming to be a "half-way house"; a lane that leads off to the right, towards the village of Shorne; a windmill, without its sails, standing on the brow of a singular hill; these, together with the great numbers of men and women working in the fields, are all the noticeable features of the road until one comes up the long, gradual ascent to the top of Gad's Hill.

Gad's Hill is at first distinctly disappointing; perhaps all places of pilgrimage must on acquaintance be necessarily less satisfactory than a lively fancy has painted them. How very often, indeed, does not one exclaim on standing before world-famed sites, "Is this all?"

The stranger comes unawares upon Gad's Hill. The ascent is so gradual that he is quite unprepared for the shock that awaits him when he comes in sight of a house and two spreading cedars that can scarce be other than Charles d.i.c.kens' home. He has seen them pictured so often that there can surely be no mistake; and yet---- He feels cheated. Is this, then, the famous hill where travellers were wont to be robbed? Is this the place referred to by that seventeenth-century robber turned _litterateur_, John Clavell, who, in his "Recantation of an Ill-led Life," speaks so magniloquently of--

Gad's Hill, and those Red tops of mountains, where good people lose Their ill kept purses.

Was it here, then, upon this paltry pimple of a hill that Falstaff and Prince Hal, Poins and the rest of them, robbed the merchants, the franklins, and the flea-bitten carriers, who, Charles's Wain being over the chimneys of their inn at Rochester, set out early in the morning for London? Was this the spot where Falstaff, brave amid so many confederates, added insult to injury of those travellers by calling them "gorbellied knaves" and "caterpillars," and where Prince Henry, in his turn, alluded to the knight as "fat guts"? Yes, this is the place, but how changed from then! To see Gad's Hill as it was in those times it would be necessary to sweep away the rows of mean cottages that form quite a hamlet here, together with Gad's Hill Place, the hedges and enclosures, and to clothe the hillsides with dense woodlands, coming close up to, and overshadowing the highway, which should be full of ruts and sloughs of mud. Then we should have some sort of an idea how terrible the hill could be o'nights when the rogues[3] who lurked in the shadow of the trees pounced upon rich travellers, and, tricked out in

vizards, hoods, disguise, Masks, muzzles, m.u.f.flers, patches on their eyes; Those beards, those heads of hair, and that great wen Which is not natural,

relieved them of their gold.

And not only rogues of low estate, but others of birth and education, pursued this hazardous industry, so that Shakespeare, when he made the Prince of Wales and Sir John Falstaff appear as highwaymen on this scene, was not altogether drawing upon his imagination. Thus, when the Danish Amba.s.sador was set upon and plundered here in 1656, they were not poor illiterates who sent him a letter the next day in which they took occasion to a.s.sure him that "the same necessity that enforc't ye Tartars to breake ye wall of China compelled them to wait on him at Gad's Hill." But travellers did not always tamely submit to be robbed and cudgelled, as you shall see in these extracts from Gravesend registers--"1586, September 29th daye, was a thiefe yt was slayne, buryed;" and, again, "1590, Marche, the 17th daie, was a theefe yt was at Gad'shill wounded to deathe, called Robert Writs, buried."

[Sidenote: MURDER]

Gad's Hill is not only memorable for the robberies committed on its miry ways. Its story rises to tragic heights with the murder, on the night of October 15, 1661, of no less a person than a foreign Prince, Cossuma Albertus, Prince of Transylvania. This unfortunate Prince, who was on a visit to England to seek aid from Charles the Second against the Germans, was approaching Rochester, apparently on his return to the Continent, when his coach stuck fast in the October mud of Gad's Hill. He had already experienced the villainous nature of our highways, and so, knowing that it would be impossible to proceed further that evening, he resigned himself to sleeping a night on the road. Having wrapped himself up as warmly as possible, he fell off to sleep, whereupon his coachman, one Isaac Jacob, a Jew, took his sword and stabbed him to the heart, and, calling upon the footman, this precious pair completed the tragedy by dragging the body out of the coach, and, cutting off the head, flinging the mutilated remains in a neighbouring ditch.

The first tidings of this inhuman murder were brought to a Rochester physician, who, riding past the spot some days afterwards, was horrified by his dog bringing him a human arm in his mouth. Meanwhile the murderers had possessed themselves of the Prince's clothes, together with a large sum of money he had with him, and, dragging the coach out of the ruts, had driven back to Greenhithe, where they left coach and horses to be called for. Not long afterwards, they were arrested in London, and, being brought before the Lord Mayor, the footman made a full confession. The trial took place at Maidstone, where Isaac Jacob, coachman, and Casimirus Karsagi, footman, were sentenced to death, the first being hanged in chains at the scene of the crime. The body of the ill-fated Prince of Transylvania was buried in the nave of Rochester Cathedral.

Sixteen years later, we come to the exploits of that ingenious highwayman, Master Nicks, who, one morning in 1676, so early as four o'clock, committed a robbery on this essentially "bad eminence," upon the person of a gentleman, who, from some unexplained reason, was crossing the hill at that unearthly hour. This, by the way, seems to disprove the wisdom of the early worm, who, to be caught, must of necessity be up still earlier than that ornithological Solon, the early bird. 'Tis a nice point.

However, Master Nicks, who was mounted on a bay mare, effectually despoiled the traveller and rode away, reaching York on the afternoon of the same day. Dismounting there at an inn, he changed his riding-clothes and repaired to the bowling-green, where he found the Lord Mayor of York playing bowls with several other tradesmen. The artful rogue, in order to fix himself, the date, and the hour in that magistrate's memory, made a bet with him upon the game, took an opportunity to ask him the time, and by some means contrived to give him occasion to bear in mind the day of the month, in case he should chance to be arrested on suspicion of the affair. Sure enough, he was apprehended some time later, and when put upon his trial the jury acquitted him, as they held it impossible for a man to be at two places so remote in one day. After his acquittal, all danger being past, he confessed the truth of the matter to the judge, already doubtful of the jury's wisdom, and the affair coming to the knowledge of Charles the Second, his Majesty eke-named this speedy road-agent "Swiftnicks." This name conceals the ident.i.ty of John, or William, Nevison, who was executed on Knavesmire, York, in 1685. His exploit in thus riding from near Rochester to York is the original of the later, inferior and wholly fict.i.tious story of d.i.c.k Turpin's ride from London to York, on Black Bess; an exploit never performed by him.

[Sidenote: MRS. LYNN LINTON]

One presently becomes more tolerant of Gad's Hill, for, coming to Charles d.i.c.kens' house and the old "Falstaff" inn, almost opposite, there opens a view over the surrounding country that is really fine, and the road goes down, too, towards Strood, in a manner eminently picturesque. The story is well known of how, even when but a "queer small boy," d.i.c.kens always had a great desire to, some day, be the owner of the place, and how his father, who would take him past here on country walks from Chatham, told him that if he "were to be very persevering, and were to work hard," he might some day come to live in it; but it is not equally a matter of common knowledge that the house had been also the object of an equal affection, years before, to the Reverend Mr. Lynn, father of Mrs. Lynn Linton, who tells us how her early years were spent here, and how, when her father died, it was she who sold the estate to the novelist. She gives also a most picturesque account of Gad's Hill in those times. The coaches were still running when Mrs. Lynn Linton, as a girl, lived here.

"Gad's Hill House stands a little way back from the road. The grand highway between London and Dover, not to speak of between Gravesend and Rochester, it was as gay as an approach to a metropolis. Ninety-two public coaches and pleasure-vans used to pa.s.s in the day, not counting the private carriages of the grandees posting luxuriously to Dover for Paris and the grand tour. Soldiers marching or riding to or from Chatham and Gravesend, to embark for India, or on their return journey home; ships'

companies paid off that morning, and cruising past the gates, shouting and singing and comporting themselves in a generally terrifying manner, being, for the most part, half-seas over, and a trifle beyond; gipsies and travelling tinkers; st.u.r.dy beggars with stumps and crutches; savoyards with white mice, and organ-men with a wonderful wax doll, two-headed and superbly dressed, in front of their machines; chimney-sweepers, with a couple of shivering, little, half-naked climbing boys carrying their bags and brushes; and costermongers, whose small, flat carts were drawn by big dogs, were also among the accidents and circ.u.mstances of the time.... Old Mr. Weller[4] was a real person, and we knew him. He was 'Old Chumley' in the flesh, and drove the stage daily from Rochester to London, and back again."

[Ill.u.s.tration: GAD'S HILL PLACE. RESIDENCE OF CHARLES d.i.c.kENS.]

[Sidenote: d.i.c.kENS]

It was here, then, that d.i.c.kens lived from 1856 to his death, on June 9, 1870, and thus Gad's Hill is, for many, doubly a place of pilgrimage. And, truly, the whole course of the Dover Road is rich in memories of him and of the characters he drew with such a flow of sentimentality; and sentiment is more to the Englishman than is generally supposed. Hence that amazing popularity which is only just now being critically inquired into, weighed and appraised. d.i.c.kens was a man of commanding genius. His observation was acute, and he reproduced with so photographic a fidelity the life and times of his early years that the "manners and customs of the English," during the first third of the nineteenth century, find no such luminous exponent as he. When, if indeed ever, the _Pickwick Papers_ cease to amuse, they will still afford by far the most valuable evidence that could possibly exist as to the ways and thoughts, the social life and the conditions of travel, that immediately preceded the railway era.

Superficial critics may hold that the most humorous book of the century is but a succession of scenes, with little real sequence and no plot; they may also say that Mr. Pickwick, Messrs. Tupman, Snodgra.s.s, Winkle, and the rest of that glorious company, were "idiots," but for genuine fun and frolic that book is still pre-eminent, and none of the "new humorists,"

with their theories and criticisms of the "old humour," have approached within a continent or so of it. Not that d.i.c.kens' methods were irreproachable. It was his pleasure in all his books to give his characters allusive names by which you were supposed to recognise their attributes at once. It is thus upon the stage, in pantomime or farce, that the clown's painted grin and the low-comedian's ill-fitting clothes, red hair, and redder nose, proclaim their qualities before a word is spoken, and when d.i.c.kens calls a pompous fraud "Pecksniff," a vulgar c.o.c.kney clerk "Guppy," or a shifty, irresponsible, resourceful person "Swiveller," we know at once, before we read any further, pretty much what their characters will be like. This, of course, is not art; it is an entirely indefeasible attempt to claim your sympathies or excite your aversions at the outset, independently of the greater or less success with which the author portrays their habits afterwards. We must, however, do d.i.c.kens the justice both to allow that he needed no such advent.i.tious aids to the understanding of his characters, and to recognise that this kind of nomenclature was not peculiarly his own, but very largely the literary fashion of his time.

The pranks of Falstaff and Prince Hal, whose doings were to be "argument for a week, laughter for a month, and a good jest for ever," are commemorated, in a fashion, by a large roadside inn, the "Falstaff,"

standing nearly opposite Gad's Hill Place, the successor, built in the time of Queen Anne, of a lonely beerhouse, the resort of characters more than questionable; more than kin to highwaymen, and much less than kind to unprotected wayfarers.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE "FALSTAFF," GAD'S HILL.]

From here the road goes steeply all the way to Strood, over Coach and Horses' Hill, and through a deep cutting made by the Highway Board about 1830, in order to ease the heavy pull up from Rochester; a cutting known at that time as "Davies' Straits," from the name of the chairman of the Board, the Rev. George Davies. The view here, over house-tops toward the Medway, framed in on either side by this hollow road, is particularly fine, and I think I cannot come through Strood into Rochester without quoting a certain lieutenant who, with a captain and an "ancient" (by which last we understand "ensign" to be meant), travelled in these parts in 1635. "I am to pa.s.se," says he, "to Rochester, and in the midway I fear'd no robbing, although I pa.s.sed that woody, and high old robbing Hill (Gadds Hill), on which I alighted, and tooke a sweet and delightfull prospect of that faire streame, with her pleasant meads she glides through." The lieutenant's description is delightful, and if he drew the sword to such good purpose as he wielded the pen, why, I think he must have been a warrior of no little distinction. He says nothing of Strood; and, indeed, I think Strood has through the centuries been entreated in quite a shabby and inadequate manner. The reason of this, of course, is that Strood is over the water and suburban to Rochester; a kind of poor relation so to speak, and treated accordingly.

But the place is old and historic, and celebrated not only for the great fight which the barons made in the thirteenth century against the king, when they fought their way across the bridge, and, taking possession of Rochester, sacked town, castle, and cathedral, but also for that exploit of the townsfolk who cut off the tail of one of Becket's sumpter-mules, whereupon that wrathful prelate cursed them, and caused them and their descendants to go with tails for ever. Thus the story which accounts for the county nickname of "Kentish long-tails," but I do not perceive that the Strood folks are so unusually decorated. Perhaps they are at pains to hide their shame.

XIX

[Sidenote: STROOD]

Strood, too, deserves some notice. The place-name has been thought to derive from _strata_, "the street," standing as it does on that ancient way, the Roman Watling Street. But, in the recent advance in the study of place-names, it is held to be from the Anglo-Saxon "strode": a marshy region.

[Sidenote: WATLING STREET]

The original meaning of "Watling Street" is never likely to be determined to the satisfaction of all antiquaries, and its age is equally a contested point. But that a street or a trackway of some kind, of an identical route with the present highway, ran between London and Dover long before Caesar landed can scarce be matter for doubt. That the Britons were barbaric and unused to commerce or intercourse with the Continent can scarcely be supposed, for Britain was the Sacred Island of the Druidical religion, and to it came the youth of Gaul for instruction at the hands of those high priests whose Holy of Holies lay, across the land, in remote Anglesey.

Those priests were the instructors, both in religion and secular knowledge, of the Gaulish youth; and, outside the civilisations of Greece and Rome, Britain was even then the best place to acquire a "liberal education." Up the rugged trackway of the Sarn Gwyddelin == the Foreigners' Road, from Dover to London, and diagonally across the island, came these youths; and down it, to voyage across the Channel, and to take part with their Gaulish friends in any fighting that might be going, went those tall British warriors whose strength and fierceness surprised Caesar in his Gallic War.

Imports and exports, too, pa.s.sed along this rough way; skins and gold, British hunting-dogs and slaves were shipped to Gaul and Rome by merchants who, to keep the trade unspoiled, magnified the dangers of the sea-crossing and the fierceness of the people. Pottery, gla.s.s-beads, and cutlery they imported in return; and this primitive "road" must have presented a busy scene long before it could have deserved the actual name.

When Caesar, eager for spoil and conquest, marched across country from Deal, and first saw the Sarn Gwyddelin from the summit of Barham Downs, it could have been but a track, never _built_, but gradually brought into existence by the tramping of students and fighting-men, and widened by the commerce of those exclusive merchants. Thus it remained for _at least_ ninety-eight years longer; rough, full of holes, mires, and swamps, and crossed by many streams. Caesar came and went; and not until Aulus Plautius and Claudius had overrun Britain, and probably not before many successive Roman governors had served here, and reduced this province of Britannia Prima to the condition of a settled and prosperous colony, was the Foreigners' Road made a _via strata_, a paved Roman Military Way.

Its date might be anything from the landing of Aulus Plautius, in A.D. 45, to the time of Hadrian, the greatest of all road-builders, A.D. 120. Then it became a true "street," made in the thorough manner described by Vitruvius, and paved throughout with stone blocks; the "_strata_" from which the word "street" is derived.

Engineered with all that road-making science which, not less than their victories, has rendered the Romans famous for all time, the Watling Street, as the Romans left it, stretched from sea to sea. Starting from their three great harbour fortresses on the Kentish coast--from _Rutupiae_, _Portus dubris_, and _Lemanis_, Englished now as Richborough, Dover, and Lympne--it converged in three branches upon their first inland camp and city of _Durovernum_, where Canterbury now stands. Proceeding thenceforward on the lines of the present Dover Road, the Roman road came to their next station of _Durolevum_, whose site no antiquary has fixed convincingly, but which might have been at either Sittingbourne, Ospringe, Davington, or Key Street. Thence it reached _Durobrivae_, which was certainly on the site of Rochester. Crossing the Medway by a _trajectus_, or perhaps even by a bridge of either stone or wood, the road pa.s.sed through Strood, and branched off through Cobham, coming again to the modern highway at Dartford Brent. Perhaps it even had two branches here, one touching the river at _Vagniacae_, probably both Northfleet and Southfleet; and the other keeping, as we have seen, inland until a junction was effected near Dartford. But with its proximity to London, the story and the geography of Watling Street grow not a little confused.

Where, for instance, the succeeding station of _Noviomagus_ was situated no one can say with certainty. It might have been at Keston; it probably was at Crayford; or there _might_ have been two branches again, as some antiquaries suggest. Through London, the Watling Street went across England, past St. Albans and Wroxeter, and finally to _Segontium_, or the hither side of the Menai Straits, throwing off a branch to _Deva_, Chester.

This and other great roads grew gradually to perfection throughout the country for four hundred years. Towns and military stations dotted them at intervals, and in between the abodes of men the way was lined, after the custom of the Roman people, with tombs and cemeteries. This explains the many "finds" of sepulchral urns and various relics beside the road.