The beautiful church suffered during the Reformation. Roger Martin, of that date, speaks of many ornaments in the past tense. "There was a goodly mount, made of one great Tree, and set up at the foot of the window there"

(behind the High Altar), "carved very artificially, with _The Story of Christ's Pa.s.sion_.... There was also in my Ile, called Jesus Ile, at the back of the Altar, a table with a crucifix on it, with the two thieves hanging, on every side one, which is in my house decayed, and the same I hope my heires will repaire, and restore again, one day." Other vanished ornaments good Roger enumerates, and then sundry ceremonies in the church and customary celebrations of the village, whereof some examples may be given.

"Upon Palm Sunday, the Blessed Sacrament was carried in procession about the Church-yard, under a fair Canopy, borne by four Yeomen; the Procession coming to the Church Gate, went westward, and they with the Blessed Sacrament, went Eastward; and when the procession came against the door of Mr. Clopton's Ile" (the Cloptons were large benefactors), "they, with the Blessed Sacrament, and with a little bell and singing, approached at the East end of our Ladie's Chappell, at which time a Boy, with a thing in his hand, pointed to it, signifying a Prophet, as I think, sang, standing upon the Tyrret that is on the said Mr. Clopton's Ile doore, _Ecce Rex tuus venit_, &c.; and then all did kneel down, and then, rising up, went and met the Sacrament, and so then, went singing together, into the Church, and coming near the Porch, a Boy, or one of the Clerks, did cast over among the Boys flowers, and singing cakes, &c."

Some there be, doubtless, whose gorge will rise at this account of ancient usage in and about the church, but surely none can object to the next extract, pointing as it does to a feeling of real friendship between rich and poor.

"_Memorand._ On St. James's Even, there was bonefire, and a tub of ale, and bread then given to the poor, and, before my doore, there were made, three other bonefires, viz. on Midsummer Even, on the Even of St. Peter and St.

Paul, when they had the like drinkings, and on St. Thomas's Even, on which, if it fell not on the fish day, they had some long pyes of mutton, and peasecods, set out upon boards, with the aforesaid quant.i.ty of bread, and ale; and, in all these bonefires, some of the friends and more civil poor neighbours were called in, and sat at the board, with my Grandfather, who had, at the lighting of the bonefires, wax tapers, with b.a.l.l.s of wax, red and green, set up, all the breadth of the Hall, lighted then, and burning there, before the image of _St. John the Baptist_; and after they were put out, a watch candle was lighted, and set in the midst of the said Hall, upon the pavement, burning all night."

A list of utensils, furniture, jewels, ornaments and relics follows that would make a collector's mouth water, but it may not all be quoted.

Thirteen chalices there were, "the best Chalice, gilt," weighing 133-1/2 ounces. Amongst other objects were "a relique of the Pillar that our Saviour Christ was bound to," several examples of the Pax (a piece of metal with the picture of Christ on it, to be kissed by all after Ma.s.s, typical of the Kiss of Peace), several silver ships, many rings and jewels, gorgeous coats for "Our Lady," copes and vestments belonging to the Church and like articles in great number, but the list is of immense length.

Celebrated in the church were many Cloptons and Martins, and "Sir William Cordell, Knt. of Melford Hall, Speaker of the House of Commons and Master of the Rolls, in the time of Philip and Mary, and Queen Elizabeth," who married Mary, the daughter of Richard Clopton, Esq., of Fore Hall. His epitaph contained the lines--

_Pauperibus largus, victum, vestemque ministrans Insuper Hospitii condidit ille domum._

Here, to avoid insult to those who have Latin, and to afford them an opportunity of laughing at me, while at the same time the unlearned may follow the meaning, let me attempt the rare venture of a translation into English Elegiacs:

Good to the poor was Sir William, a giver of food and of raiment, And of his own good will founded an Hospital home.

Of the foundation referred to a full account may be found in Sir William Cordell's will (A.D. 1580) recorded in extracts from the _Visitation of Suffolk_, edited by Joseph Jackson Howard, LL.D. (printed by S. Tymms, Lowestoft, 1867). It included a building, a warden, and twelve almsmen, and it was to be continued--for it had been founded in good Sir William's lifetime--after his death. It was, in effect, the kind of foundation which Anthony Trollope took and gave pleasure in describing; nor, as the long will shows plainly enough, was the benefaction made at his expense of leaving the testator's relations at all pinched for money. In fact, his widow, Dame Mary Cordell, in 1584, "being sikelye in body, and nevertheless of good and p'fecte remembrance," made a will in which she disposed of much property, devoting some of it to this very hospital, and some, almost as a matter of course, to Long Melford Church. Dame Mary was prescient. The will made in 1584 was proved in October 1585.

So thoroughly comfortable were the people of Long Melford in the days of old that the temptation to mention the fact that a "Long Melford" was once a name for a purse is irresistible, because the conjunction is so appropriate. The temptation ought, perhaps, to be resisted because, although the fact has been read and remembered, it appears to be unfamiliar to Suffolk natives, and the source of information cannot be traced. It has eluded fairly diligent search; but the fact has certainly been noticed since this book was undertaken. I can remember no more than that it was a purse of some peculiar make; and it would seem fairly safe to imply that it was of capacious dimensions. Still, as the inscriptions already mentioned show, those long purses were always laid under contribution for the adornment of the church which was Long Melford's pride, and among the most prosperous and the most generous benefactors of it were the Martins or Martyns. The first of them came from Dorsetshire to Melford and was buried there in 1438. How the family made its money the "clothmark" proves; and the _Visitation_ shows how they spread over the county and made their mark in the country. Roger, who died in 1543, was a Bencher of Lincoln's Inn; Sir Roger, who died in 1573, had been Lord Mayor of London; Roger, born 1639, was created a baronet; daughters married into good families all over East Anglia. But it was a tradition of the family that all should be brought back to Long Melford for burial; and it was also a tradition to do something for the church. It was a tradition which lasted till 1851 at any rate, and it may very likely still be held in honour; for we read in "Murray" that there was, at that time, very large expenditure on the chantries chancel by Sir William Parker and the Rev. C. J. Martyn, the patron of the living. Sir William Parker, it may be added, was the owner of Melford Hall, which formerly belonged to the Cordells and, being Elizabethan, was no doubt built by the Sir William Cordell already named, who flourished in the reign of Elizabeth.

At Cavendish, a few miles to the westward, we are at the original home of a family better known than the Cordells or the Martins, and of real note in history. "In the chancel of the Church was buried Chief Justice Sir John Cavendish, beheaded by Wat Tyler's mob. His younger son, John, and Esquire to Richard II is said to have slain this st.u.r.dy rebel." So "Murray," but the last statement, standing alone, is merely irritating. What is the sense of saying this, and no more, to a generation taught by painstaking historians to believe that Walworth, the Lord Mayor, struck Wat Tyler to the ground "where he was instantly dispatched by others of the King's attendants"? Of course young John Cavendish may have been one of these attendants; but in any case Walworth was the protagonist, and should have been mentioned at least. According to the just custom of Indian sport the credit belongs to him who gets in the first spear, and in the Highlands the sportsman who lays the stag low, not the gillie who grallochs him, possesses the honour of the day.

The story of the Cavendish family shall not be told here, for it is long, and not free from controversial points, and, of course, they are still in the land and of far greater consequence now than they ever were when Cavendish was their chief home. The glory of the village has waned and theirs has waxed. Of both the next village, Clare, and of the family who gave it their name or took theirs from it, Ichabod may be written without reserve. The Earls of Clare flourished from the days of the Conquest to those of Bannockburn, where the last of the race lost his life, and during that period of nearly two hundred and fifty years they clearly held high sway in these parts of East Anglia. Their great seat was at Clare, in a castle long desecrated by a railway station, the castle itself being built in connection with one of those great and mysterious mounds, like that of Thetford, concerning which the ancients were far more willing than the moderns are to write with a.s.surance. The names of several adjacent places, Stoke by Clare, for example, serve at once to show how wide was the area of the Clare influence and to raise the suspicion that the place was named after them and not they after the place. Not, perhaps, the greatest of them, but certainly the one whose memory has lasted longest, was "Richard, surnamed Strongbow, Earl of Strigul," who came to the a.s.sistance of Dermot Macmorrogh, King of Leinster, in 1172. Dermot, it may be remembered, had carried off the wife of a brother Prince, named Ororic of Breffny, who, with the a.s.sistance of the King of Connaught, Roderic, had invaded Leinster and had expelled Dermot. Dermot then laid his case before our Henry II, offering to hold his kingdom in va.s.salage for Henry, if help to recover it were forthcoming, and Henry, being busy in Guienne, but having an eye for the main chance, gave him letters patent authorizing subjects of the Crown of England to a.s.sist him in his efforts. At Bristol Dermot met Strongbow, and Hume, citing the not unduly truthful Giraldus Cambrensis as his authority, proceeds: "This n.o.bleman, who was of the ill.u.s.trious house of Clare, had impaired his fortune by expensive pleasures, and being ready for any desperate undertaking, he promised a.s.sistance to Dermot, on condition that he should espouse Eva, daughter of that Prince, and be declared heir to all his dominions." How Strongbow eventually conquered the Irish princes in one great battle, how Henry, jealous of Strongbow's power, crossed to Ireland and made a Royal progress, and how the island was not fully subdued until Elizabeth's time, are more or less matters of history, so far as the history of those days in Ireland can really be ascertained. But the most striking part of the pa.s.sage quoted is, in these days, the simple confidence with which the historian speaks of "the ill.u.s.trious family of Clare." How little that confidence would be justified now is plain to me from inquiries addressed in apparently artless curiosity to more than one highly cultivated man and woman about the time of writing. Macaulay's schoolboy, the omnipresent paragon of marvellous memory, would no doubt have known all about this famous family; but it flourished, and perished, so long ago that the "man on the road" is not likely to be hurt by a reminder of the a.s.sociations properly belonging to that valley of the Stour which was beloved of Gainsborough and of Constable.

On we go through Stoke by Clare, Ridgewell, and Tilbury-juxta-Clare (how these old place-names serve to stimulate historical curiosity!) to another valley, that of the Colne, full of memories of another family, bulking fully as large in the annals of England as the Clares, and lasting far longer. The valley of the Colne, which we follow on our return journey to Colchester, was the De Vere country. They were the Earls of Oxford of course, and in this case there is no affectation of confidence in the standard of average knowledge in the use of the words "of course." Rather are they employed in regret, for a good long stretch of my course might be accomplished at a comfortable canter (or "on my highest gear" over the open road, if this metaphor be preferred), by mentioning only a few of the great occasions between the Conquest and the eighteenth century in which this magnificent House played its part in shaping the destinies of England.

Still, by way of kindly relief to the reader, Macaulay's sonorous pa.s.sage summarizing the grandeur of the De Veres must needs be quoted. It was written by him as the first comment on the list of Lords Lieutenant, who "peremptorily refused to stoop to the odious service which was required of them" by James II, that is to say, the service of revising the Commission of the Peace with the view to retaining upon it only those gentlemen who were prepared to support the King's policy of packing a Parliament in 1687.

"The n.o.blest subject in England, and indeed, as Englishmen loved to say, the n.o.blest subject in Europe, was Aubrey de Vere, twentieth and last of the old Earls of Oxford. He derived his t.i.tle through an uninterrupted male descent, from a time when the families of Howard and Seymour were still obscure, when the Nevilles and the Percies enjoyed only a provincial celebrity, and when even the great name of Plantagenet had not yet been heard in England. One chief of the house of De Vere had held high command at Hastings; another had marched, with G.o.dfrey and Tancred, over heaps of slaughtered Moslem, to the sepulchre of Christ. The first Earl of Oxford had been minister of Henry Beauclerc. The third Earl had been conspicuous among the Lords who extorted the Great Charter from John. The seventh Earl had fought bravely at Cressy and Poictiers. The thirteenth Earl had, through many vicissitudes of fortune, been chief of the party of the Red Rose, and had led the van on the decisive day of Bosworth. The seventeenth Earl had shone at the Court of Elizabeth, and had won for himself an honourable place among the early masters of English poetry. The nineteenth Earl had fallen in arms for the Protestant religion and for the liberties of Europe under the walls of Maestricht. His son Aubrey, in whom closed the longest and most ill.u.s.trious line of n.o.bles that England has seen, a man of loose morals, but of inoffensive temper and of courtly manners, was Lord Lieutenant of Ess.e.x and Colonel of the Blues. His nature was not factious; and his interest inclined him to avoid a rupture with the Court; for his estate was enc.u.mbered, and his military command lucrative. He was summoned to the Royal Closet; and an explicit declaration of his intentions was demanded from him. 'Sir,' answered the Earl of Oxford, 'I will stand by Your Majesty against all enemies to the last drop of my blood. But this is a matter of conscience and I cannot comply.' He was instantly deprived of his Lieutenancy and of his regiment."

A parenthesis forces itself forward here. The line of the true De Veres, of the house that earned the motto, _Vero nil Verius_, from the Virgin Queen in recognition of its steadfast loyalty, of the family concerning whom it was said, "Let the name and dignity of De Vere stand so long as it pleaseth G.o.d," came to an absolute end in 1703. Yet the last century saw an Aubrey de Vere of distinguished family and of no mean distinction as a poet. It will probably occur to others, as it has occurred to me, to wonder whether the nineteenth-century poet De Vere was a descendant or a kinsman of the Elizabethan peer and poet. A rapid reference would seem to show that he may have been--the cautious phrase is used by one who does not aspire to be a genealogist. The first of the Irish De Veres was, it is true, the son of the first Sir Vere Hunt, baronet, and a.s.sumed the name of De Vere by Royal License in 1832. But the Irish De Veres have the same motto--_Vero nil Verius_--as the Ess.e.x De Veres of old; their crest is the boar of the Ess.e.x De Veres; the mullet of the Ess.e.x De Veres appears in their arms. Heaven forbid that I should venture into the thickets of genealogy, that I should attempt to conceal an absolute ignorance of heraldry. But surely, after all this, it may be a.s.sumed to be probably more than a happy coincidence that Aubrey Thomas De Vere, bearing the Christian name of him who came with the Conqueror and the surname of the Elizabethan poet, was a poet of exceptional sincerity and sweetness, albeit little known to "the general reader." No doubt the whole truth is known to genealogists and to students of heraldry; but a stranger to their mysteries is too well aware of the disputatious quality of their temper, and of the existence of doubts concerning the t.i.tle to arms of this or that family, to a.s.sume that because crest and motto and arms are described and ill.u.s.trated in Burke or in Debrett there is therefore any historical connection between the arms and those who bear them.

What the De Veres of Ess.e.x did for England and for Europe we have seen in some measure, and this penultimate part of our afternoon's drive takes us through the country in which they were really at home. Castle Hedingham, pa.s.sed on the left a few miles south of Great Yeldham of the famous oak, was their princ.i.p.al seat. It had been the seat of a Saxon magnate before the Conqueror granted it and wide lands to his follower, Alberic De Vere.

It was built on "an high hill," which, like most of the knolls in East Anglia, had probably felt the tramp of martial feet long before the beginning of authentic history. It was moated, and the moat was crossed by a bridge, still visible; the Norman keep, of extraordinary solidity and strength, still looks out, to use the words of White, the topographer of Eastern England, on "rural beauty of the quiet order, a beauty produced by centuries of planting and tillage." In many a neighbouring church, at Earl's Colne and Cole Eugaine, for example, but only for example, the mullet of the De Veres may be found shaped in enduring stone.

South of Castle Hedingham the wise man will turn some three or four miles out of his direct route, which runs through Halstead, to see the church of Little Maplestead, and will even make a halt when he is there, for good reason. The motorist will, perhaps almost must, be content with a pa.s.sing glance at many a church rich in ancient bra.s.ses or in the carved bench heads for which the churches of East Anglia are celebrated; but he can hardly play the part of the Levite towards one of the very small number of Round Churches, similar in design and origin to the Temple Church, to be found in all the length and breadth of England. After this he will probably be best advised to wend his way to Colchester via Halstead, Earl's Colne, Fordham and Lexden. His road will follow the course of the Colne pretty closely all the way, and between Fordham and Lexden he will pa.s.s quite close to West Bergholt, which he saw as he went forth for his afternoon's drive. If, after travelling by road through so much of these two valleys of the Stour and the Colne he is not satisfied with this restful beauty of smiling and undulating country, if he does not feel some measure of interest when he knows that he has traversed the places which were familiar to Strongbow and Gainsborough, to Constable and to a splendid series of Earls of Oxford, then is he no true motorist, but rather the "road hog"

before whom it is futile to cast pearls of any kind. Such "road hogs" are, in truth, few and far between. It is in the belief, based upon very wide experience, that the average motorist is interested in antiquities no less than in ascents, in scenery more than in sprockets, in castles at least equally with carburettors, that these attempts are made to save him from the labour of research.

CHAPTER IX

FROM COLCHESTER WESTWARDS--COGGESHALL, BRAINTREE, WITHAM, INGATESTONE, MARGARETTING, DANBURY HILL, MALDON, TIPTREE, MESSING, AND COLCHESTER

Coggeshall--Pleasant site occupied by Romans first and Cistercians later--Braintree--General Wynne as Cunctator--Braintree for motorists having daily work in London--The plan discussed--Middleton Hub makes journeys certain--Routes considered--Witham--Ingatestone--Scene of desolation in 1897--Ingatestone Hall the grange of a Nunnery--How it came to the Petre family--"Murray" shows malice--Courageous farmers--Margaretting--A church tower of wood--Danbury Hill and Camp--Theories concerning--The wolf hypothesis--Edward the Elder "puts a bridle on East Anglia"--Maldon fortified--Battle at Maldon--Tiptree and its jams--Strange crops--Mr. Mechi of _Profitable Farming_--Messing--_Quaere_ whether site of Boadicea's defeat--Mr. Jenkins describes position--Compare Jenkins, Merivale and Tacitus--Merivale fanciful--Tacitus merely a literary gentleman at Rome--Battle may have been anywhere, but amusing to localize here--The fight described--Heckford Bridge--Lovely country and bad roads--Good run to Colchester.

It has, be it hoped, been made sufficiently clear that Colchester and its immediate environs, Lexden and the Roman river for example, will amply repay many mornings or afternoons spent away from the car, or with the car used as an auxiliary only; and so the next drive suggested is one of some sixty miles only, leaving a morning free. It is a circuitous drive like the last, beginning and ending at the inn yard at Colchester. Our first objective is Coggeshall, by way of Marks Tey, which we reach by taking the left fork at Lexden. It is a straight road and good, but Marks Tey, said to mean Mark's enclosure, does not tempt a halt by its appearance. It is, in fact, a commonplace village, noteworthy only for fine timber in the vicinity. Coggeshall would be a prettier village if it were less prosperous, but it possesses ancient interest as well as some modern prosperity, and it has not lacked its _vates sacer_ in the shape of the Rev. E. L. Cutts, who once discoursed upon it to the Ess.e.x Archaeological Society. Here, where a farmhouse now stands, was a Cistercian Abbey reached, as the farmhouse is now, by a thirteenth-century brick bridge across the Blackwater. At the top of a hill is a little and very ancient chapel, once desecrated as a barn, but restored during the last century to sacred uses. Nor were the monks the first men possessing discernment enough to see the amenities of Coggeshall as a place of settlement. Situate as it was on the high road between Camulodunum and Verulamium, otherwise Colchester and St. Albans, it was the settlement of Romans, _post_ Claudian Romans no doubt, of whom the customary traces have been found in sufficient abundance to leave no doubt of permanent occupation. In truth, with its river, its grove and its hill, Coggeshall is still so pleasant a place that its early occupation occasions no surprise.

On we go to Braintree, accomplishing a rise of all but a hundred feet in a couple of miles, a considerable ascent for Ess.e.x. I climbed this hill, or rather my car did, at least a dozen times during my stay at Colchester, for it happened that General Wynne, upon whom, it may be remembered, the duty of resisting the invader fell, made the vicinity of Braintree his head-quarters. Indeed, following the cla.s.sical example of Fabius, the gentleman who _cunctando rest.i.tuit rem_, he abode so long in the neighbourhood of Braintree that he was laughingly described as the Marquis of Braintree. His tactics were no doubt correct, for his army held a strong line in the face of a superior force, and, if his inaction made the manoeuvres somewhat dull and sterile of incident, he might perhaps be heard to plead that manoeuvres are not carried on solely for purposes of entertainment. Be that as it may, I went to Braintree very often, and found it always wearing an appearance of respectable and middle-aged prosperity.

No building in it made any very definite impression on the memory, but the air of place and people seemed to me to be one of vigorous contentment, a result due very likely to the considerable elevation at which the town stands, relatively to the surrounding country. It is a very old town, indeed it is the Raines of Domesday, and it is not too densely populated.

It has a fair provision of apparently comfortable houses, well provided with gardens and the like appurtenances; it is fairly accessible from London by rail, and there are several good routes from it to London by road. On the whole it is somewhat strange that, in days of travelling facilities increased beyond the wildest dreams of our forefathers, more persons have not followed the example of those bygone Bishops of London who had in Braintree a palace which has long vanished.

Let us pause for a minute or two to follow the roads by which one living in Braintree might travel by car to London, every day if need be, remembering that this mode of living and travelling up and down to business is working a gradual revolution in the social habits of Englishmen. That revolution will cease to be gradual and will become rapid when the danger of a burst or punctured tire becomes, as it surely will become soon, a thing of the past. It has become more rapid of quite recent years owing to the marked increase of the trustworthiness of cars. And here, even at the risk of giving a free advertis.e.m.e.nt, nothing shall deter me from specific recommendation of a device which unquestionably has solved the tire problem, if the users of motor-cars for ordinary purposes, that is to say the persons who are content with thirty miles an hour or so, had but the sense to adopt it generally. That device is the Middleton Pneumatic Hub, in which I have no interest direct or indirect, the owners of which are merely acquaintances, no more. I have tried it, and sundry other mechanical devices over very rough roads. Of it alone among subst.i.tutes is the statement possible that, if one had not known beforehand, the absence of pneumatic tires would not have been noticed. It pa.s.sed through a four-thousand-mile club trial at an expense of ten shillings and sixpence in repairs. The judges made also sundry observations, more or less critical, of no interest to me because I had made my own trial on the question of comfort, and my impressions were clear. Finally I write thus boldly because I know the difficulties which the Middleton Hub has to fight to be entirely distinct from its structure or from any defects which it may possess. So long as persons who sell motor-cars are interested in pneumatic tires, or persons who sell the latter are possessed of substantial influence over those who sell or make the former, it is simply idle to hope that the seller of a car will always give disinterested advice to the buyer who, in these still infant days of motoring, is more often than not a mere novice, if even that. Again let me say, _Honi soit qui mal y pense_; the advice to adopt the Middleton Hub and to acquire a mind free from apprehension of puncture or burst, without any loss of personal comfort, is given because it is needed. An alternative is the Stepney wheel, which is capable of being adjusted in a very short time in case of tire trouble. Of this I cannot speak from personal trial, but amateur friends testify that it adds immensely to the traveller's peace of mind. One thing, at least, is certain. He who trusts to pneumatic tires when he is on an important journey must always allow a margin of time unless he is to be liable to sudden disappointment and, perhaps, to grave inconvenience and loss of time.

Let us look then for the routes open to our hypothetical slave of London in the day who hates trains and would fain breathe country air at night. Ten miles and a quarter will take him to Bishop's Stortford and to the easternmost of the great trunk roads out of London, cutting through part of Herts, of which the Chief Constable of Hertfordshire spoke with so much feeling in his evidence before the Royal Commission. There he will be 32-3/4 miles from Marble Arch via Sawbridgeworth, Harlow, Epping, Loughton, and Woodford Green, and 4-1/2 miles less from Sh.o.r.editch, and he will have but a few miles to travel in Herts. That, in the present state of the law, is a consideration, for the account given by Colonel Daniell of his picketed zone is rather alarming. It goes a long way indeed to explain that apparent instinct of motorists which leads them to avoid Hertfordshire and its magnificent roads as much as possible, even when they are northward bound. Another, and the more obvious route is along the great high-road through Chelmsford, which is about the same distance; but it has the disadvantage of entering London through Romford, Ilford, Stratford, and Whitechapel, and the last ten miles from Ilford to Marble Arch, or 3-1/2 miles less if the City be the destination, are unpleasant and difficult. It would be a better plan to turn off at Shenfield, ten miles nearer to London than Chelmsford, to the right and to proceed via Bentley and Chigwell, or even to turn off at Chelmsford and go on via Chipping Ongar and Epping.

Both routes are a little longer, but both are through exquisite scenery, and both involve an easier access to the heart of London.

From Braintree on our present expedition we proceed to Witham, a long and straggling place, half village and half town, which was fortified, and perhaps saw fighting, in the days of Edward the Elder, that is to say early in the tenth century, and heard the crackling of musketry during the last Ess.e.x manoeuvres. Witham, however, strikes me as a place of no special interest, but the drive should most certainly be extended to Ingatestone.

Nearly ten years have pa.s.sed since my first visit to Ingatestone, which needless to say was not made in a motor-car, and I have traversed its high-road many a time since. It charmed me the first time I saw it, its charm still survives for me, and, never having seen it in pre-railway days, I am totally at a loss to understand what the author of "Murray" can mean by the sentence "The town is small, and has been much injured by the railway." Improved, in the sense of beautified, by a railway no town could ever be expected to be. Still Ingatestone and its surrounding district made a very favourable impression on me, and that in circ.u.mstances which produced a very high opinion of the English courage of the inhabitants of the district.

The occasion was, I venture to think, really interesting, even pathetic, and for that reason, as well as because it gave me an opportunity of seeing more than the traveller can see in the ordinary way, the experience gained in a day shall be narrated. After all, to arouse healthy interest should be the first aim of every sensible writer, since only thus can he hope to secure attention, and people are, or may be, quite as interesting as places. It may be remembered generally, it is certainly not likely to be forgotten at Ingatestone for many a long year, that a day or two after the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of 1897 a veritable tornado swept across Ess.e.x, working havoc to which this happy country is usually a complete stranger. In my capacity of correspondent to a great newspaper I was sent to describe the path of the storm, in the centre of which Ingatestone lay, with such fidelity as I might be able to compa.s.s. Sheer good fortune caused me to travel in the same carriage with Lord Petre on the Great Eastern Railway, and the kindly nature of this landowner, who was himself travelling to Ingatestone, with the object of surveying the details of a disaster affecting him personally in a serious manner, enabled me to see Ingatestone and its surroundings in a very intimate way without any preliminary trouble. First we went to the agent's house. It was a dream of ancient architecture and of splendid trees. One could almost have guessed from the high walls, the fish-ponds, and a cool green walk shaded by dense green trees, limes unless memory plays a trick, that this had been once the home of an ecclesiastical community. To learn that the walk under the close limes, if limes they indeed were, was known as the Nun's Walk, was no surprise. The sequestered character of the whole quite prepared the mind for the intelligence that Ingatestone Hall occupied the site of a subsidiary establishment attached to the greater nunnery of Barking, and it was clear that much of its original environment remained. This manor, with many others, was acquired at the Dissolution by Sir William Petre, the father of the first Lord Petre, and the old grange of the nuns, with very slight changes to all appearance, remained the seat of the great Roman Catholic family until they migrated to Thorndon Hall, near Brentwood, which, apart from its view and its contents, does not sound nearly so attractive as Ingatestone. "Murray," by the way, has a pa.s.sage in this connection which, by dint of its tone, raises more than a suspicion of the Roman hand of the late Mr. Augustus Hare. In reference to the church we read: "Between the chancel and the south chapel is the monument of the well-known Sir William Petre (the father of the first Lord Petre) who, 'made of the willow and not of the oak,' managed to accommodate his loyalty and his religion to the various changes under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth." This, it is suggested, was a needlessly spiteful reference to the direct ancestor of the Roman Catholic peer who at that time (1875) was Domestic Prelate at the Vatican; and it may well be that uncalled-for malice of this kind has had the effect of making owners of historic houses less willing than they might have been to receive and to aid those upon whom the duty of writing about places is cast in these later days.

There was work to be done on the day of my visit more melancholy than that of inspecting beautiful houses, more serious than that of speculating upon the ident.i.ty and lamenting the ill-nature of a bygone writer of guide-books. Forth we fared--drawn by a cob whose nose had been scarred to a depth of half an inch by a hailstone during the tornado--to inspect the desolation. Here I am going for the first time in my life to quote some of my own words, words which I am proud to believe were not without influence in bringing some substantial measure of aid to a stricken country-side.

"All down the street at Ingatestone the windows on one side were smashed to atoms, and the only cheerful men were the glaziers. The backs of the houses on the other side were in like condition. An odour, familiar enough later in the year, when the hedges are clipped, pervaded the air. It was the scent of green leaves of elm and hawthorn shrivelling in the sun. Soon we reached a great elm uprooted, and another broken off sharp in the middle.

The elms, with their surface roots, had suffered most. But they were not alone, for oaks and ash trees had fallen also. From the trees that were not overthrown hung here, there, and everywhere, great boughs with their tough fibres twisted like straw ropes at the point of fracture, and repeatedly one came across cases in which immemorial elms had been hurled across the road and had blocked it until it was cleared. Others that had survived were often stripped of leaves by the hail as if it had been mid-winter and the scorching sun of June had not been beating on our heads. It was a sickening sight to those who love woodland beauties. But soon the wreck of trees became of no account, for we were nearing the centre of the storm area.

Hitherto broken windows and chipped tiles had saluted the eye, though it was noticeable that slates had, for the most part, escaped damage. Now we reached the house of Mr. Milbank, or what was once his house ... the tiled roof looked as if it were that of a house which had been subjected to a heavy fire of musketry for several hours; and this was the story all along our long drive." So, I remember, we went on noting shattered roofs, and chimneys collapsed, seeing bare earth where the oats had waved in green promise, fields which had contained crops of mangels, turnips, and potatoes, converted into an expanse of sun-baked mud. We fared from farm to farm, meeting farmer after farmer who had lost his all, after years of patient struggling against depression, and was settling down with true English pluck to make the best of the situation and to begin life again.

All that country smiles again now, although that terrible storm has left an indelible scar on its fair face, or rather a scar which will not be quite healed over for a hundred years to come. But, without claiming to be more full of sympathy than any other man, I protest that the memory of that sad day makes me eager now to pa.s.s through Ingatestone as often as may be, that because of it the beautifully timbered country seems to me perhaps more attractive than it really is, and that I never see it without an eager hope that the farmers encountered in June, 1897, saddened by disaster but dauntless in the resolve to go on fighting against fate, have had, so many of them as survive, the reward of renewed prosperity.

We ought to have stopped at Margaretting on our way to Ingatestone, with the special object of inspecting the church, with its tower and spire composed entirely of timber, the kind of structure which can be seen in East Anglia only; but after all our next objective after Ingatestone is Maldon, and the best way of reaching it is to go back on our own wheelmarks so far as Margaretting, halt there for a few minutes, and then turn to the right for Galleywood Common and Maldon. On this piece of road the motorist will find a variation of levels and a frequent stiffness of gradients which will disabuse his mind for ever of the notion that Ess.e.x is a flat county.

Entering Galleywood Common he is just over the 200 feet contour; towering above him to the right will be West Manningfield, which actually over-tops the 300 feet contour. Between Sandon and Danbury he will be down as low as 75 feet, and at Danbury he will be up again almost as high as 350 feet. The hill itself is 380 feet, and has a camp at the top, commonly called Danish.

Danish in one sense it probably was. That is to say the Danes, who had a sagacious eye for military positions and a particular predilection for heights from which the sea was visible, in all probability made use of it.

They came by sea, they might have to flee by their boats, and in some other parts of our islands, in Carnarvonshire for example, one can identify cases where they had and used one inland camp on an eminence commanding a wide prospect and much coastline, and another close to the coast. Danbury commands such a prospect eastward, westward and northward, and it is no less pleasing to the peaceful pilgrim than it may have been valuable to the fierce freebooter.

Who made these camps on eminences all over the country, or made the eminences themselves when nature had not provided them, is a question men grow more and more shy in answering. Time was when, drawing inferences from outline only, they said confidently this or that camp was British, Roman, Saxon, or Danish. Now the tendency is to go farther back still into prehistoric times, and even to doubt whether the origin of these camps is military at all. Learned men, who somehow or other contrive to excite respect and admiration without compelling conviction, argue that many, perhaps most, of the huge earthworks with which the face of England and Wales is studded, were piled up by primeval man as a defence against the wild beasts, and most of all against the ravening wolves which overran the land and threatened his flocks and herds. To the unlearned it appears that a mound without a crowning palisade would have been quite ineffectual against the nimble wolves, and that a palisade without the mound would have been quite as effectual as mound and palisade. These are amusing speculations, but they cannot reach a certain conclusion. What is beyond doubt is that, if an invading foe, Roman, Saxon, or Dane, found these works ready to his hand, he would use them for military purposes. If the compilers of _Domesday Book_ called Danbury Hill Danengeberia it was because the natives, as they doubtless called them, used this t.i.tle, having in mind the last warriors who had availed themselves of the commanding position. Native memory, indeed, had not to tax itself severely in this case, nor to go back very far. The average man, not the historian steeped in the study of a period, is apt to allow his memories of histories read to settle down on broad and accurate lines. For him, as for me, until this book suggested refreshment of memory, Alfred was the man who conquered the Danes and secured the freedom of Saxon England. The fact that they made head again in the time of his son Edward the Elder, that they were indeed never expelled from East Anglia by Alfred, had pa.s.sed out of memory. Edward succeeded to the throne, such as it was, in 901 only--dates are repellent to eye and mind, but it is worth while to remember how shortly before the Conquest this was--and Edward spent a good deal of his time in "bridling"

the Danes of East Anglia, who had made common cause with his rival Ethelwald. Edward, indeed, "conducted his forces into East Anglia and retaliated the injuries which the inhabitants had committed by spreading the like devastation among them. Satiated with revenge and loaded with booty, he gave the order to retire." In fact his orders were disobeyed by his Kentish followers, who settled themselves at Bury and were attacked and defeated by the Danes. But in this battle Ethelwald, Edward's Saxon cousin and rival, was killed, so the Danish victory was Pyrrhic, for Ethelwald's cause was theirs. For all the rest of his reign of twenty-four years Edward continued to fight the Danes. It was not a long period, then, over which the "natives" had to look back, when in 1080 or thereabouts, they gave evidence before the Royal Commissioners, so to speak, who compiled _Domesday Book_, and probably most of those "natives" were Danes themselves.

Our next point is Maldon, situate at the inmost end of the estuary of the Blackwater, and itself standing on a hill. It is a sleepy little place now, but it has played no small part in the story of England. It has been stated that Edward the Elder merely made it his head-quarters while he superintended the fortification of Witham, but it is much more likely, as stated by Hume, that it was one of the towns which he fortified with a view to making the country secure. Seven of the others--Hume takes the list from the Saxon Chronicle--were outside our purview; Maldon and Colchester were selected for putting a bridle on East Anglia. And Maldon was well chosen.

It was the place where Edward himself fought and won a signal battle. It was also the place where the Northmen landed again, in the days of Ethelred the Unready, "and having defeated and slain at Maldon Brithnot, Duke of that county, (Ess.e.x), who ventured with a small force to attack them, they spread their devastations over all the neighbouring province." In fact it was precisely the place open to raiders from over sea, and therefore the right place to fortify against them also.

Here, crossing at Heybridge, we may say good-bye to history for a while and devote ourselves to things more mundane. At Heybridge we are about as near the sea-level as we can be. In two miles and a half we climb two hundred feet or more, and then we follow the top of a ridge for four miles to Tiptree. For me, before the Ess.e.x manoeuvres, Tiptree simply spelled "jam" in seven letters, none of them appearing in that familiar word. To be plain, Tiptree jam is far better than any "home-made" comestible of the kind it has been my fortune to encounter, because it has all the purity of the domestic product, while it is made with all care and knowledge that science and experience can furnish. A cook or a careful housewife has many distractions of puddings, entrees, sauces, savouries, and what you will.

Tiptree devotes all its energy and intelligence to jam, and the result is a divine confection, pure ambrosia. Tiptree will not thank me for this advertis.e.m.e.nt because the name of Tiptree is established. To many it will appear as superfluous to praise the jams of Tiptree as it would be to state that two and two make four, or that '47 port is excellently good. Still, experience has shown the existence of a benighted but considerable minority who will infallibly be grateful for the knowledge, if they use it. If they do not, so much the worse for them. Without doubt the fame of the Tiptree jams must involve prosperity also, and the district, with its trim orchards, a sea of bloom in late spring and loaded with rosy fruit in the autumn, is full of encouragement to one who believes that where land is not made to pay something is rotten in the state. It is a pretty sight too, and one recalling sundry speeches of the late Mr. Gladstone which were not taken very seriously when they were uttered. Other crops you will find hereabouts--it was at Tiptree, as told elsewhere, that the military balloon came down in the middle of a crop of bird-seed--and the whole district gives one the impression of being in the hands of persons, courageous and competent, who refuse to meet the difficulties of farming with mere lamentation but, like the farmers of Ingatestone at the time of the 1897 disaster, are resolved to make the best of things.

That spirit is traditional at Tiptree. Was it not there that the great Mr.

Mechi, who flourished in the middle of the last century, produced wondrous results by plentiful use of liquid manure, and proved the profitable quality of beans in such fashion as to astonish his contemporaries? To men of his quality, who made two blades of gra.s.s grow where but one grew before, I for one insist upon giving all praise and honour, and, when one thinks upon their good work, there is a disposition to feel that, in its proper place, a trim hedge is not without its attraction, what though it be not nearly so beautiful as one that is a straggling thicket of hawthorn, honeysuckle and wild rose. But a doubting afterthought rises. Mr. Mechi farmed from 1840 to 1870, perhaps longer. His _Profitable Farming_, with its striking figures, was published during that period, and those were piping times for agriculture. Could he have shown accounts even half or a quarter as good for the thirty years from 1875 to 1905?

We have reached Tiptree in imagination from Maldon, and there is no difficulty in doing so by road from the same place. As a matter of fact, my first visit to Tiptree was made from Braintree, whither a morning expedition had been taken to see if General Wynne was at his accustomed post, and the _ignis fatuus_ which lured me and a companion in that direction was the balloon, seen in the air from a long distance, which we found afterwards in the bird-seed field. (In pa.s.sing, as the officer in the car of the balloon had seen nothing at all of the troops shrouded from his view, the inference that balloons are of precious little use in a wooded country would seem to be fairly obvious.) Leaving the balloon to its fate--although the officer would have liked to commandeer our car for the transport of his ma.s.s of collapsed silk--we proceeded by way of Messing to Heckford Bridge. Of these the first-named has been suggested by a learned antiquary, the Reverend H. Jenkins, as a possible site for the stark battle in which Suetonius wiped the army of Boadicea out of existence and avenged the ma.s.sacre of Camulodunum: "Whoever visits the camp at Haynes Green, near the village of Messing, will be struck with the resemblance it bears to the position taken up by Suetonius. Two large woods, Pod's Wood and Layer Marney Wood, seem to form the narrow gorge in front of the camp which Tacitus mentions." Merivale, who says that the speculations of Mr. Jenkins were useful to him, although he could not go all the way with them, describes the position of Suetonius thus: "In a valley between undulating hills, with woods in the rear, and the ramparts of the British oppidum"

(Lexden) "not far perhaps on his right, he had every advantage for marshalling his slender forces.... Ten thousand resolute men drew their swords for the Roman Empire in Britain. The natives, many times their number, spread far and wide over the plain; but they could a.s.sault the narrow front of the Romans with only few battalions at once, and their wagons, which conveyed their acc.u.mulated booty and bore their wives and children, thronged the rear, and cut off almost the possibility of retreat."

Now there is no doubt that places become manifold more interesting if one can fill the scene, so to speak, with action and actors of long ago.

Westminster Hall would be majestic if it had no a.s.sociations, but few men enter it for the first time without recalling the trial of Charles the First. A well-known tract near Brussels would attract no pilgrims if the freedom of Europe had not been won on its fields. The case is the same with Messing. If there be cause for saluting it as the place where Briton and Roman met in a conflict to the death every fold in the ground stirs the imagination. But when an antiquary talks of two large woods as seeming to form a narrow gorge, and a clerical historian writes of a "valley between undulating hills," of a wood in the rear, of a plain in front over which the natives "spread far and wide," and locates the wagons in the rear, only one course is open to me. It is to forget the six and twenty years which have pa.s.sed since last I faced the "small but well-armed tribe" of the examiners, during which there has been neither occasion nor desire to read Latin prose works, to ignore the terrors of the historic present and of what I believe used to be called _oratio obliqua_, and to refer to Tacitus, upon whom both these clerical gentlemen relied for information. One sentence disposes of the question of position. Tacitus tells us that Suetonius had ten thousand armed men when he made up his mind to give battle, "and he picks a place with narrow jaws and closed in by a wood at the rear, well a.s.sured that there was no part of the enemy save in the front, and that the plain was open, without fear of ambushes." There is nothing to suggest that the sides of the defile were wooded, as Mr. Jenkins thought they might have been, or that there was any wood at all except in the rear. Indeed, the probability is the other way. Still less is there any word to explain why Dean Merivale invented "a valley between undulating hills." Indeed, the description of the defile by the word _fauces_ (which has been translated literally) conveys a sharper and more rugged idea than our word "valley," which, of course, comes directly from _vallis_ and carries the same meaning. In fact, the "gorge" of Mr. Jenkins is the better translation, and undulating hills would have given Boadicea a chance of taking Suetonius in flank. The wagons apparently were drawn up in a crescent behind the British so that their occupants might see the fight.

That is all concerning the position, and it is really mere guess-work on the part of Dean Merivale to suggest that the great battle was fought anywhere near Colchester. All we know is that Suetonius determined to leave London to its fate, and St. Albans also, and that Merivale thought "the situation of Camulodunum, enclosed in its old British lines, and backed by the sea, would offer him a secure retreat where he might defy attack and await reinforcements; and the insurgents, after their recent triumphs, had abandoned their first conquests to wreak their fury on other seats of Roman civilization. While, therefore, the Iceni sacked and burnt first Verulamium (St. Albans) and then London Suetonius made, as I conceive, a flank march toward Camulodunum, and kept ahead of their pursuit, till he could choose his own position to await their attack." All this is pure fancy. All we know for certain is that Suetonius left London, then not a _colonia_ but already a great centre of commerce and business, and St. Albans to their fate. There is not a particle of evidence whither he went; and there was less reason to go to Camulodunum than to any place; for it had recently been sacked by the Iceni under Boadicea, and resistance had been hopeless because the colonists had taken no steps in the way of preparing defences.

The "old British lines" of Camulodunum had seemed to the veteran colonists of so little use when they were attacked that they made their only stand, and that to no avail, in the Temple of Claudius. In fact there is no evidence to show which way Suetonius marched, or where the defile was, with the wood in rear, in which he induced Boadicea to attack him. Tacitus most likely did not know himself. He was not present. He was merely a Roman gentleman and an ex-official, of literary proclivities, writing a picturesque military history, partly from hearsay, partly from official records. He probably knew very little of the geography of Britain--not a very important province, be it remembered--and his desire, presumably, was to interest Roman readers and to give gratification to great men whom he liked, or from whom he might look for favour. He described the military position and showed Suetonius in the character of a capable general. To have done more, to have gone into geographical detail, would have puzzled his readers as English readers might be puzzled to-day by detailed allusions to unheard-of places in an unfamiliar part of the globe.