Read Ebook: The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway by Harper Charles G Charles George

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Ebook has 617 lines and 77829 words, and 13 pages

The Bridge: Entrance to Chelmsford 115

The Conduit, Chelmsford 116

Tindal's Statue 117

The "Three Cups" Sign 122

Springfield Church 123

Boreham 128

The "Angel," Kelvedon 141

Birthplace of Spurgeon 151

Near Mark's Tey 176

Lexden 180

The Grand Staircase, Colchester Castle 199

Old Man Trap, Colchester Castle 205

Colchester Castle 207

Gun Hill 221

Old Toll-house, Stratford Bridge 222

Wolsey's Gateway 242

The "Lion and Lamb," Angel Lane 244

Sparrowe's House 246

The "Great White Horse" 248

Mockbeggar Hall 253

"Stonham Pie" 256

Near Brockford 257

"Thwaite Low House" 259

The "Cock," Thwaite 260

Long Stratton 295

Tasburgh 297

The Old Brick Pound 301

Caistor Camp 303

Norwich Snap 318

Norfolk Turkey, on his way to Leadenhall Market 320

THE ROAD TO NORWICH

MILES

London to Mile End 1 Stratford-le-Bow 2 1/2 . Stratford 4 Forest Gate 5 Manor Park 6 Ilford 6 1/2 . Seven Kings 7 1/2 . Chadwell Heath 9 Romford 12 Hare Street 13 Puttels Bridge 15 1/2 . Brook Street 16 1/2 Brentwood 18 Shenfield 19 Mountnessing Street 21 Ingatestone 23 Margaretting Street 25 Widford 27 1/2 . Moulsham 28 1/4 .

Chelmsford 29 Springfield 29 1/2 Boreham 32 3/4 . Hatfield Peverel 34 3/4 . Witham 37 1/2 Rivenhall End 39 1/2 Kelvedon 41 . Gore Pit 42 Mark's Tey 45 3/4 Copford 46 1/4 Stanway 47 Lexden Heath 48 Lexden 49 Colchester 51 . Dilbridge 52 1/2 Stratford Bridge 57 3/4 . Stratford St Mary 58 1/2 Capel Railway Crossing. Capel Station. Capel St Mary. 63 1/2 Copdock 65 1/2 Washbrook 66 . Ipswich 69 1/4 Whitton Street 71 3/4 Claydon 72 3/4 Creeting All Saints 76 3/4 Stonham Earls 79 Little Stonham 79 3/4 Brockford 83 3/4 Thwaite 84 1/2 Stoke Ash 86 1/4 Yaxley 88 1/4 Brome 90 1/4 . Scole 92 Dickleburgh 94 1/2 Tivetshall Level Crossing 97 1/4 Wacton 100 Long Stratton 101 1/2 Tasburgh 102 3/4 . Newton Flotman 104 1/2 . Hartford Bridge 109 1/4 . Norwich 111 1/2

IN the days before railways came, robbing the exits from London of all dignity and purpose, the runaway 'prentice lads of the familiar legends, who were always half starved and continually beaten, revolting at length from their uncomfortable beds under the shop counters and their daily stripes and scorpions, were wont, according to the story-books, to steal at night out of their houses of bondage and make for the roads. Such an one, making in those days for Norwich, and standing at Aldgate in the grey of the morning, looking across the threshold of London, would have seen, in the long broad road stretching before him, the only means of escape. The shilling or so of which he would be the owner would scarce serve him for two or three days' keep; and so, although he might have longed for a place on the coach he could see starting from the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, at 4 a.m., there would have been for such as he no choice but to start afoot, with as light a heart as possible, and chance the offer of a lift on some waggon returning into Essex. Had he, in leaving Aldgate behind, asked some passer-by the way to Norwich, he might have been seized for what he was, a runaway; but, if he escaped suspicion, would have been answered readily enough, for everyone in those times knew the way to lie along the Whitechapel Road and by Mile End Turnpike. Has anyone in these enlightened and highly-educated times courage sufficient to ask his way to Norwich from Aldgate? and, assuming that dauntless courage, is it conceivable that anyone in that crowded street could tell him?

There are no apprentices and no tyrannical masters of the old kind left now, and the only runaways of these days are the bad boys of precocious wits who would not think of tramping the highway while they could raise a railway fare or "lift" a bicycle. But the way still lies open to the explorer from Aldgate, and the old Norwich Road yet follows the line of the Roman way into the country of the Iceni.

Between the era of our imaginary truant and that of the Romans, who originally constructed this road, there yawns a vast gulf of time; certainly not less than eighteen hundred years. The history of the road during that space has largely been forgotten; but, worst of all, we know perhaps less of it and its life in the times of Charles the First, onward to those of William and Mary, than we can recover from Roman historians; and certainly its coaching history is in tatters and fragments, for those who made it did not live in the bright glow of publicity that surrounded the coachmen of roads north, south or west, and died unexploited by the sporting writers of the Coaching Age.

A hundred and twenty-eight miles, that is to say, between Venta and London. The Romans, of course, calculated all their mileages in Britain from that hoary relic, the still existing "London Stone," which, from behind its modern iron grating in the wall of St Swithin's Church, still turns a battered face towards the heedless, hurrying crowds in Cannon Street, in the City of London.

In coaching days the Norwich Road, in common with most East Anglian routes, was measured from Whitechapel Church, and the distance from that landmark to Norwich given as 111 1/2 miles. The apparent wide difference between those measurements of classic and modern times is very nearly reconciled when we add a mile for the distance between London Stone and Whitechapel Church to the 111 1/2 miles, and when we reduce the Roman miles to English. An English mile measures 5280 feet, while a Roman mile runs only to 4842 feet, this fact accounting, along the road to Norwich, for some 13 miles of the discrepancy, and bringing the difference to the insignificant one of 3 1/2 miles; or, assuming the Roman ruins at Caistor, 3 miles short of Norwich, to mark the site of Venta Icenorum, 6 1/2 miles; no very wide margin of error.

It has been aptly pointed out by East Anglian antiquaries that the circuitous route eastward or westward of the straight road between Stratford St Mary and Norwich, on which Sitomagus and Combretonium may have been situated, may probably have been an early Roman way, constructed shortly after the conquest of the Iceni, along an old native trackway, and superseded in later and more settled times by the direct road, overlooked by the Antonine compilers who, working at Rome, the very centre of the Empire, may not have been fully informed of changes in countries like Britain, on the edge of the Unknown. This view, when we consider the long period stretching between the conquest of this part of the country and the final break up of the Romano-British civilisation, about A.D. 450, has much to recommend it. A period of some three hundred and eighty years of colonisation and development, equalling, for example, the great gulf of time between our own day and that of Henry the Eighth, the changes in its course must have rivalled, if not have surpassed, those in our roads between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. During those eras, between the first and the fifth centuries, many of the original winding tracks must have been straightened, or left to the secondary position of byways, while new and straight roads were engineered across country formerly, for one reason or another, avoided. Meanwhile, the Antonine Itinerary-makers must have relied for their surveys upon old and out-of-date information, just as, in our own time, we find many recent maps, printed from the Ordnance Survey of a hundred years ago, still indicating winding roads that have been non-existent for generations, and ignoring the direct highways made by Telford and others just before the opening of the Railway Era.

LONDON made no remarkable growth between the Roman and mediaeval periods, but this road had in that time slightly altered its course from its starting-point, and, instead of going from Cannon Street to Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Old Ford, left the City by way of Leadenhall Street and Aldgate, continuing down the Mile End and Bow Roads to Stratford.

The traveller of Chaucer's day, coming to Ald Gate, in the City wall, had reached the country. That gate spanned the road at a point marked nowadays by the house, No 2 Aldgate High Street, standing at the boundary of the parishes of St Katharine Cree and St Botolph. In 1374 Chaucer took from the Corporation of London a lease for the remainder of his life of the rooms in this gate, which was pulled down and succeeded by another, built in 1606, which in its turn disappeared in 1761.

From his windows commanding the road Chaucer must often have seen that dainty gentlewoman, the Prioress of St Leonard's, Stratford, riding to or from London, escorted by a numerous train, and from her must have drawn that portrait of the prioress who spoke French with a Cockney accent:--

"After the scole of Stratford-att?-Bowe, For French of Parys was to hire unknowe."

In Chaucer's day they probably taught French, of sorts, at the Priory schools.

At that time it was no little journey to Stratford, although by measurement less than four miles, and the lady went strongly escorted, as, indeed, did all of consequence, or those who had aught to lose. For the more common wayfarers who went alone on this desperate eastern trail there stood the Chapel and the Holy Well of St Michael the Archangel within the City, where the otherwise unprotected might seek the aid of the Saint's strong arm before leaving the walled City behind on their perilous faring. This chapel stood where Leadenhall Street, Fenchurch Street and Aldgate meet, on a site thrown into the roadway in 1876, when the street was widened. Until that year the crypt of this shrine had filled the prosaic functions of a cellar in the corner house, itself demolished, together with the beautiful Early English arches on which it stood. Adjoining was "Aldgate Pump," which had long before unromantically taken the place of the sanctified spring. That celebrated civic monument is seen in the accompanying illustration, taken in 1854. Many City wits have exercised their satirical powers upon it, and the expression long current of "a draft on Aldgate Pump," a once popular mercantile phrase for a bad note, goes back so far as the days of Fielding. Oddly enough, the water of the pump retained some repute until 1876, when, on being analysed, it was found impure, and the supply closed. The pump, however, is still in existence, rebuilt of its original stones, a few feet away from the old site, and yields water again; not, however, from the old saintly source, but from the strictly secular filter-beds of the New River Water Company.

Having implored the protection of St Michael, travellers of old went, heartened, upon their way down what is now Whitechapel High Street, which Strype, writing in the time of James the First, calls a "spacious fair street," with "sweet and wholesome air." Past hedgerows of elm trees and rustic stiles and bridges, those old wayfarers went, and onward down the Whitechapel Road, where the country was a lovely solitude, with "nothing but the bounteous gifts of Nature and saint-like tokens of innocency," which, according to Sir Thomas More, in 1504, characterised the charming fields of Mile End, Shadwell, Stepney and Limehouse. This, it will be allowed, is scarcely descriptive of those places to-day, whatever they may become when the People's Palace and the University Settlements have done their work.

Thus far for sake of contrast. Let us return to Aldgate for a while, and, without following its fortunes throughout the centuries, glance at it in the Coaching Age, before the squalor of modern Whitechapel had invaded it from the east, or the extension of City business had come to destroy most of that picturesque assemblage of old inns and mediaeval gabled houses, to replace them with the giant warehouses and "imposing" offices of modern London.

ALTHOUGH, as we have seen, the East Anglian roads were, in coaching days, measured from Whitechapel Church, the great actual starting-place was Aldgate, where many of the old inns were situated, as, in like manner, the ancient hostelries of the Borough clustered at the beginning of the road to Canterbury and Dover. Aldgate occupies a position midway between London Stone, the Roman starting-point in Cannon Street, and Whitechapel Church, and to and from this spot came and went the stage-coaches, post-chaises and waggons in the palmy days of the road. The mail-coaches, of course, had a starting-point of their own, and set out from the old General Post-Office in Lombard Street, or, in the last years of coaching, from St Martin's-le-Grand.

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