The Dover Road Part 8

[Sidenote: THE OLD ROADS]

When the Saxons came, they could not p.r.o.nounce the name by which the half-Roman people called this road, and so "Gwyddelin" became "watling" on their tongues, while "strata" was corrupted to "street." No new roads were made now, and, indeed, not until the Turnpike Acts of George the Third's time and the era of MacAdam was the art of road-making practised again in England. For ages the "roads" of this country were a byword and a reproach to us. By the middle of the twelfth century the Roman roads that had been made and kept in repair for hundreds of years fell into ruin, and the detritus and miscellaneous acc.u.mulations of twenty-five generations now cover the greater portion of them. At a depth varying from five to fourteen, and even eighteen, feet, excavators have come upon the hard surface of the original Roman road, and mosaic pavements of villas found at that extreme depth attest how the surface of a country may be altered only by the gradual deposit of vegetable matter. The thickest deposits are found in low-lying situations, where the flow of streams or rain-water has brought liquid earth to settle upon the deserted sites of an ancient civilisation. This has occurred notably at such places as Dartford, Rochester, and Canterbury, all situated in deep valleys, where springs and storms have united to bring mud, sand, and gravel down from the hillsides, and thus to equalise in some measure the ancient irregularities of the scenery. While the hollows have thus been rendered less profound, the hill-tops and table-lands have remained very much as they were, and it is in these elevated situations that the line of Watling Street can most readily be traced, or _could_ have been had not the stone pavings that composed the road been long ages ago abstracted.

This long neglect of the roads made country journeys exceedingly difficult and dangerous. Travellers' tales in England during six or seven centuries are concerned with two great evils; highway robbery and the shocking state of the roads; and so deep and dangerous were some of the quagmires that, rather than attempt to cross them, coachmen would drive through wayside fields, and thus make a road for themselves. It was in this way that ancient highways became diverted, and the pedestrian who finds the route between two towns to be extraordinarily circuitous must often look to these circ.u.mstances for an explanation. The southern counties bore a bad reputation for impa.s.sable roads until about seventy years ago, and Kentish miles were long linked with Ess.e.x stiles and Norfolk wiles as prime causes of beguilement; while the fertility of Kentish soil is joined with the muddy character of Kentish roads in two old county proverbs. Thus, "Bad for the rider, good for the abider," expressed truths obvious enough to those who came this way a hundred years ago; and "There is good land where there is foul way" would have said much for the excellence of Kent, where all the ways were foul. But if the traveller was not a landed gentleman, except in the sense that he was generally covered with mud from head to foot, the reflection that the county through which he waded deep in slush must be singularly fertile could scarce have afforded him much consolation for lost time and spoiled clothes. Here is a tale of an unfortunate horseman bogged on these miscalled "roads" which is quite eloquent of what old-time wayfaring was like. He comes to a suspicious-looking slough and hesitates. "Is there a good bottom here, my man?" he asks of a country joskin regarding him with a wide smile. "Oo-ah! yes, there's a good bottom to un," replies the countryman, and the traveller urges on his way until, within a yard or so, his horse sinks to the girth in liquid mud. "I thought you said there was a good bottom to this road," shouts the traveller. "Yes," rejoins the rustic, "soo there ees, but you a'n't coom to un yit, master."

XX

Strood is one long street of miscellaneous houses, with fields and meadows running up to the backyards; with engine-shops, mills, wheelwrights, and a variety of other noisy trades clanging and clattering in the rear, and an old church on the hillside to the left, appropriately dedicated to that patron of thieves and sailor-men, Saint Nicholas. But whether or no "Saint Nicholas' clerks" looked in here to pray the saint to send them "rick franklins and great oneyers" across that "high old robbing hill," I should not like to say; having though, the while, a shrewd suspicion that their piety was somewhat to seek, and that the shrine of the saint profited but little, if at all, from their ill-gotten gains upon the road.

[Sidenote: "CRISPIN AND CRISPIa.n.u.s"]

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the old houses here and at Rochester, and, indeed, along a great portion of the Dover Road, is the great use of weather-boarding, chiefly on the upper storeys. An instance of this is seen at Strood at an inn, the "Crispin and Crispia.n.u.s,"

standing in the main street. A still more interesting point about this old house is its pictorial swinging sign, overhanging the pathway--a representation of the two shoemaker brothers, Crispin and Crispian, at work, cobbling boots. The brothers were Christian martyrs who suffered death at Soissons, A.D. 287. How they came to serve as the sign of an inn is quite unknown. It has been suggested that, as Agincourt was fought on Saint Crispin's Day, this old sign is of the warlike and patriotic order to which belong the Waterloo, Wellington, Nelson, Alma, and Trafalgar signs that are so plentiful on this road; but it is a great deal more likely that it is a relic of the days when men made pilgrimages to Becket's shrine, when innkeepers found their account to lie in calling their houses after some popular saint or another.

A curious incident in connection with the "Crispin and Crispia.n.u.s" must be noted before we pa.s.s on. It happened in 1830. One night in September of that year, a doctor who had only just then commenced practice in Strood was called in to see a man lying at the point of death in an upper room of the old inn. He hastened to the place, and found a man lying in bed who told him that, although he was known only as an ostler, he was really the Earl of Coleraine, nephew of that notorious Colonel Hanger who is chiefly known as the riotous boon-companion of the Prince Regent in the early days of Brighton and the Pavilion. Colonel Hanger was the fourth earl, and succeeded his brother in the t.i.tle, which he never a.s.sumed. He died, childless, in 1824, and the earldom became extinct. As Colonel Hanger was the youngest son of his father, and as no mention has ever been made of any of his elder brothers leaving sons, the matter is not a little mysterious, especially as the colonel's right to the t.i.tle, had he chosen to use it, was not disputed. However, the strange man who died on September 20, 1830, at the "Crispin and Crispia.n.u.s" apparently satisfied Doctor Humphrey Wickham of the truth of his story, and that his real name was Charles Parrott Hanger, instead of "Charley Roberts," by which he had been known at Strood and the neighbourhood for twenty years. During this time he had acted as ostler at the coaching inns of Rochester and Chatham; had tramped the country, selling laces, thread, tape, and other small wares; and on Sundays shaved labourers. He had deserted his wife years before. She was long dead, and he had a son apprenticed to a firm of ironmongers at Birmingham. To this son he left all he was possessed of, making the doctor his executor. It will not be imagined that this ex-ostler, dying in a room of the "Crispin and Crispia.n.u.s," where he was lodged by the landlady out of charity, had anything to bequeath; but the doctor paid over, as executor, the sum of 1000 to Charles Henry Hanger, the son of this eccentric.

XXI

[Sidenote: ROCHESTER]

And so, as Mr. Samuel Pepys might say, into Rochester.

Rochester was to d.i.c.kens variously "Mudfog," "Great Winglebury,"

"Dullborough," and "Cloisterham." It cannot be said that any of these names form anything like an adequate word-picture of the place. As names, they vary from good to indifferent, and very bad, but none of them shadow forth the real Rochester, which is rather a busy place than otherwise: none, for instance, are so happily descriptive as that under which a waggish fellow introduced a wealthy distiller to an a.s.semblage of Polish notables--as "Count Caskowisky." I might pluck a feather from d.i.c.kens'

wing with which to furnish forth a wounding shaft, and say of Rochester, under any of those pseudonyms, as Trabbs' boy said in another connection (and yet not deserve the t.i.tle of "unlimited miscreant,") "Don't know yah!"

The somnolent place which d.i.c.kens drew--its High Street a narrow lane, its houses abodes of gloom and mystery--has not much existence in fact. It is, of course, heresy to say so (but it is none the less true), that although no other place was probably so well known to d.i.c.kens, and that from his youth upward, yet he never caught the true note of Rochester. That he loved the place seems obvious enough, but his was not the Gothic, mediaeval temperament that could really appreciate it aright. The test of this is found in the fact that although d.i.c.kens has written many glowing pages on Rochester, and apparently yielded to none in his admiration for the old city, yet its appearance is far more beautiful to the stranger learned in d.i.c.kens-lore than anything he is prepared to see.

Busy, beautiful Rochester, and none the less beautiful because busy. The traveller who first sees the old place, its castle and cathedral and the turbid Medway, from Strood, is fortunate in his approach, and will never forget the grand picture it makes. To his right stretches away for miles the broad valley of the Medway, with bold hills crowned with windmills, above, and the stream, diminis.h.i.+ng in long perspective, below; with jutting promontories where the factory-chimneys of Borstal and Wouldham stand up, cl.u.s.tered like the stalks of monstrous vegetables, and the red-sailed barges that drop down with wind and tide. Before him rise the great keep, the cathedral, and the cl.u.s.tered red roofs of the city, with a glimpse of the High Street, the Town Hall and its great vane--a full-rigged s.h.i.+p--at the other end of the bridge. And all the while to his left is the shrieking and the screaming of the trains, rolling in thunder over the two railway bridges that absolutely shut out and ruin the view down the stream. The bustle, roar, and rattle of the trains, the busy, yet silent, traffic of the river, the smoke rising in wreaths from those distant chimneys of Wouldham and Borstal, all bespeak labour and commerce, and all these rumours of a busy community blend finely with the shattered majesty of that ancient Castle, the solemnity of the Cathedral, and the noisy, yet restful, cawing of the raucous rooks who circle round about those lofty battlements, their outcry mingled with the sobbing, moaning voices of the pigeons, and the shrill piping of querulous sea-birds.

The bridge over which Mr. Pickwick leaned and meditated while waiting for breakfast has gone the way of many another old building referred to in that book which will presently have a quite unique archaeological value, so changed are the varied haunts of the Pickwickians. Necessity, they say, the call of progress, demanded the removal of the fine stone bridge of eleven arches that had spanned the Medway so efficiently for five centuries, and it _was_ removed in 1856; but how cruel the necessity, and how heavy a toll we pay for our progression perhaps only those who had stood upon the ancient ways can tell. The masonry was so strong that it was found necessary to blow it up.

Meanwhile, we must clear our minds from a very reasonable prejudice, and acknowledge that, as an example of modern engineering, the new Rochester Bridge is very fine. It is of iron, broad and graceful as its iron construction will allow, and it spans the river in three great arches. It cost 160,000, exclusive of approaches, to build, and was opened in 1856.

The old bridge had a protecting bal.u.s.trade which more or less effectually saved the lieges from being blown by furious winds into the water. Before the bal.u.s.trade there were high iron railings, which were fixed according to the French Amba.s.sador, the Duc de Nivernais, "so that drunkards, not uncommon here, may not mix water with their wine."

That the bal.u.s.trade was not very greatly to be relied upon, and that Mr.

Pickwick, bulky man as he was, ran a considerable risk when he leaned over the parapet, may be gathered when we read that on a night in 1836 a storm demolished a great stretch of it, and that the Princess Victoria, who was coming up the road from Dover, was content to be advised to stay overnight at the "Bull," rather than attempt to cross over to Strood. The riverside wore a somewhat different aspect then. Low and broken cliffs picturesquely shelved down to the water's edge where a neat embankment now runs, and the bal.u.s.trades of the old bridge serve their old purpose on this new river-wall. The embankment is an improvement from an utilitarian point of view, but its long straight line hurts the artistic sense.

The stranger should come into Rochester preferably on the evening of a summer's day, and, as first impressions must ever remain the most distinct, he should walk in over the bridge. At such times a golden haze spreads over the city and the river, and renders both a dream of beauty.

The gilt s.h.i.+p on the Town Hall blazes like molten metal; the "moon-faced clock" of the Corn Exchange is correspondingly calm, and the wide entrance-halls of the older inns begin to glow with light. You should have walked a good fifteen miles or more on the day of your first coming into Rochester, and then you will appreciate aright the mellow comforts of its old inns. But not at once will the connoisseur of antiquity and first impressions who thus enters the old city repair him to his inn. He will turn into the Cathedral precincts underneath the archway of Chertsey's Gate, and I hope he will not already have read _Edwin Drood_, because an acquaintance with that tale quite spoils one's Rochester, and leaves an ineffaceable mark of a modern sordid tragedy upon the h.o.a.ry stones of Cathedral, Castle, and Close. It is as though one had come to the place after reading the unrelieved brutality of a newspaper report. Rochester demands a romance of the Ivanhoe type; chivalry or necessities of State should have enn.o.bled slaughter here, but a tale of secret murder for private ends vulgarises and tarnishes the place, especially when it is told with all d.i.c.kens' wealth of local allusion. He had no comprehension of tragedy and romance other than those of the street and the police-court; which is to say that he had better have left Rochester alone, so far as the _Mystery of Edwin Drood_ is concerned.

If my imaginary traveller comes to Rochester without having read that tale he will be singularly fortunate. Otherwise he will have an uneasy feeling as he stands and gazes a moment upon the west front of the Cathedral, or peeps into the nave, that it ought to be re-consecrated. This, of course, is a tribute to d.i.c.kens' descriptive and narrative powers that clothe the doings of his characters with so great an air of reality; but how unfortunate for those who like their murders to be decently old and historical that he should have brought the atmosphere of the police-court into the grave and reverend air of this ancient city.

My traveller, happily unversed in all this, will gaze upon the Cathedral and the Castle Keep, where the rooks are circling to rest, and, coming again into the High Street, will turn to his inn, where appet.i.te, sharpened by pedestrianism and fresh air, may be appeased as well now as in those days of heavy drinking and no less heavy eating, when seventy-two coaches pa.s.sed through Rochester daily and the trains that thunder across the Medway were undreamt of.

The inns of Rochester receive, as may well be supposed, many pilgrims who for love of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and d.i.c.kens, come hither, not alone from all parts of England, but from America, and even from foreign-speaking countries, and the visitors' books testify not only to their opinions of the place but also of each other. Thus at one inn I read the signatures of a party of Germans, to which some prejudiced Briton, after sundry offensive remarks about foreigners in general and Germans in particular, adds, "They are everywhere, d----n them!" But I must confess that the following surprised me, even after a long acquaintance with the inanities of visitors' books. Some one had remarked "How like Rochester Cathedral was to a Catholic Church," whereupon some other idiot adds, "Of course it is Catholic, but not Roman Catholic." Really one scarcely knows whom to pity most.

[Sidenote: THE "BULL"]

The "Bull" inn (how remarkably like its frontage is to that other "Bull"

at Dartford) is much the same now as when d.i.c.kens wrote of it; only there are portraits of d.i.c.kens hanging on the staircase now, and the ball-room, with its "elevated den," is a place of solitude. They still show you the rooms where Winkle and Mr. Pickwick slept, as though they were real people, and so great an affection do the members of the Pickwick Club command, that, while pointing out where Tracy Tupman and Mr. Snodgra.s.s danced, the rooms occupied by the Princess Victoria are clean forgotten.

So literature scores a success for once; but I wish a too earnest loyalty had not altered the sign from the "Bull Inn" to the "Victoria and Bull Hotel"! The hall is still "a very grove of dead game and dangling joints of mutton," and the "ill.u.s.trious larder, with gla.s.s doors, developing cold fowls and n.o.ble joints and tarts, wherein the raspberry jam coyly withdraws itself, as such a precious creature should, behind a lattice-work of pastry," still whets the appet.i.tes of incoming guests, just as though England stood where she did, and as if our trades were not ruined by foreign compet.i.tion, our industries decayed, the army gone to the dogs, the navy to Davy Jones, the farmer to the workhouse, and the shopkeeper to the Bankruptcy Court, as we are told they have. No doubt all these things have happened, or are in course of fulfilment, and I suppose the hotel-keepers keep up their licences merely for the love of licensed victualling, while the "commercials" still travel the roads for old acquaintance's sake rather than for any business that may be doing. How disinterested of them!

XXII

I notice that there is a great tendency among those who have to describe Rochester Cathedral to dismiss it with the remarks that it is quite small, and that it was "restored" in 1825 and 1875. These, of course, are the merest inept.i.tudes of criticism, and if we allowed praise or censure to be awarded according to the bulk, then that hideous elephantine conventicle, Jezreel's Temple, on the summit of Chatham Hill, would easily bear away the bell.

But size has little to do with a right appreciation of architecture.

Chasteness of proportion, the degree of artistry shown alike in details and in the execution of the whole, are the sole considerations that shall weigh with those who take any sort of an intelligent interest in the architecture of cathedrals; and the admiration of a thing that "licks creation" in the matter of measurement is senseless if it is not wedded to a proper perception of the justness of the parts that go to make its bulk.

The Cathedral of Saint Andrew at Rochester is at least equally interesting with that of Canterbury; and that this should be so is only natural, for one is the complement of the other. Canterbury was the earliest Cathedral in England; the See of Rochester was established immediately afterwards, and was for many years not only intimately a.s.sociated with that great metropolitan church, but was actually dependent upon it. Then, the early Norman Archbishops and Priors of Canterbury and the Bishops and Priors of Rochester were often intimate personal friends who had come over together from Normandy to England; and the close relations thus established lasted for many years. The See of Rochester was founded by Saint Augustine about A.D. 600, and by him the first Bishop was consecrated, four years later.

[Sidenote: ROCHESTER CATHEDRAL]

But when the Norman Conquest brought a new era of church building into England, Rochester Cathedral was rebuilt. Gundulf, the second Norman Bishop, the friend of Anselm and Lanfranc, the greatest military and ecclesiastical architect of his time, prepared to erect a new and grander edifice on the ruins of the Saxon church. The number and extent of this great architect's works are simply prodigious. How he could have packed into even _his_ lengthy life the duties of a Churchman, which we are told by those who knew him he never missed for a single day; the cares of statecraft which also fell to his lot; and the building, not only of his Cathedral, but also of the Tower of London, Rochester Keep, Dartford Church, Malling Abbey, and minor works, we are at a loss to conceive. He was consecrated in 1077 and died in 1108, before he had completed his work here. Ernulf, Prior of Canterbury, succeeded him, and finished the building, which was consecrated in 1130, in the same year that witnessed the completion and consecration of Ernulf's and Conrad's new Cathedral at Canterbury. Here, then, we see at once the close connection between the architectural history of these two neighbouring churches. Ernulf had a hand in both; a very large share of the crypt, the west front, and a part of the nave of Rochester was his; while at Canterbury the crypt and the choir were built in collaboration with Prior Conrad. These facts partly explain the unusual and beautiful feature of a choir raised many feet above the level of the nave, which is characteristic both of Canterbury and Rochester Cathedrals, and seen nowhere else in England. And not only in these most prominent features of their architectural construction are the two buildings alike; their stories run curiously parallel, both in their building and in their destruction. Less than fifty years after their simultaneous consecration, both churches were partly destroyed by fire, and their ruined portions rebuilt in the Transitional Norman and Early English styles, by those two architects who are supposed to be one and the same person--William de Hoo, Bishop of Rochester, and that "William the Englishman" who succeeded French William of Sens in rebuilding the choir of Canterbury. At that time, allowing for the great difference in their relative sizes, the two Cathedrals must have borne a strong likeness to one another; and when we look upon Ernulf's nave here, we look upon the likeness of the nave at Canterbury until that period, between 1390 and 1421, when Prior Chillendon replaced Lanfranc's work with the light and lofty, but exceedingly uninteresting, Perpendicular nave that now forms the western end of the Primate's Metropolitan Church.

Fortunately for ourselves, who think Norman work not the flower of ecclesiastical architecture, but the most interesting and aesthetically satisfying next to the incomparable grace of the Early English period, Rochester was too poor a See to be able to embark on extensive schemes of rebuilding, and we are spared the rather vulgar ostentation of skill and wealth to which the Perpendicular style lends itself. Little could be added to the dignity and solemn majesty, the right proportions and impressive simplicity, of this ma.s.sive Norman nave. Here came Cromwell, whose soldiers quartered their horses in the aisles, leaving the building so desecrated that a saw-pit sunk afterwards in the pavements seemed a scarcely worse use of the House of G.o.d. Here also eighteenth-century monumental masons have contrived monuments bad enough, even for the surroundings of cla.s.sic architecture, but no less than an affront in this place; while the half-learnt Gothic restorations of Cottingham, whose puerilities of seventy years ago were seen in the choir, are a sorrow to behold.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GOOD SAMARITAN.]

A long line of tombs and effigies, from Bishops down to a Good Samaritan in seventeenth-century costume, carved grotesquely and all out of drawing, on the pavement of the Lady Chapel, claim attention, and easily first among them is the beautiful coloured effigy of Bishop John de Sheppey, discovered, built up in his recess, in 1825. The plain tomb of Gundulf is shown, and the resting-place of Bishop Walter de Merton, drowned while crossing the Medway in a boat, 1277. The authorities of Merton College have restored and beautified the tomb of their founder, and it lies, painted and decorated, near the grave of St. William.

[Sidenote: ST. WILLIAM]

Saint William of Perth was for long the chief glory and princ.i.p.al source of income to the Priory and monks of Rochester. He was a wealthy Scottish baker who, having ama.s.sed a fortune, probably both by overcharging for his bread and in the giving of short weight, determined to go on pilgrimage.

He must have been a superlative rogue and cheat, for nothing less than a pilgrimage to Jerusalem would serve his purpose. However, he never reached the Holy City; for, having arrived at Rochester in 1201, and having contributed magnificently to the shrines there, he was murdered by his guide while journeying hence to Canterbury. At least, so runs the story, but I believe the monks themselves did the deed. They were exceedingly poor, having by some unexplained excesses squandered the wealth which the once highly venerated bones of Saint Paulinus had brought them, and they had already melted down the silver shrine of that Saint to pay their way withal. The compet.i.tion of Canterbury, too, was killing, and the fame of Paulinus paled before that of Becket; and so they probably conceived the idea of murdering the rich pilgrim in order to obtain at once a remunerative martyr of their own, and to put themselves in funds with the wealth he carried about with him. If the Dean and Chapter of Rochester could in after years wilfully appropriate to their own uses an annual income of several thousands of pounds intended for educational purposes, and become thus common thieves and peculators, what scruples could be supposed to hinder the monks of the dark ages from becoming murderers?

The south-east transept has a curious mural monument to Richard Watts; with a coloured and very life-like portrait-bust "starting out of it like a s.h.i.+p's figure-head," and underneath is a bra.s.s to the memory of Charles d.i.c.kens. On the eastern wall is a medallion profile of Joseph Maas, the singer, vulgar and amateurish beyond the power of words to tell.

[Sidenote: ROCHESTER CASTLE]

Rochester Cathedral is not rich in decorative carvings, but its two enriched doorways are famous. One is the beautiful Norman west door, of five receding arches, carved over with a profusion of characteristic Norman scrolls; interlacing patterns; semi-human and half-supernatural figures of appalling build and ferocious expression; and flanked by two statues supposed to represent Henry the First and Queen Matilda. The other is the unsurpa.s.sed Decorated doorway of the Chapter House, whose sculptured emblematic figures of the Church, and of angels, priests and bishops are at the other, and more beautiful, end of decorative art.

Having seen all these things, the verger who has. .h.i.therto shepherded his flock of visitors through these upper regions, takes them down a flight of stone stairs and unlocks the door of the crypt. An ancient and mouldy smell rushes up from the dark labyrinth of pillars and indistinct arches, and the ladies of the party pretend to be terrified. But they might just as well be afraid of a coal-cellar, which is generally darker and dirtier, for neither bones nor coffins, nor anything more awful than a few shattered fragments of architectural carvings are to be seen. The usual legends current in most old places would have us believe that a subterraneous pa.s.sage runs between Castle and Cathedral, and certainly they are sufficiently near one another for such a communication to have been made; but these legends have never been resolved into fact. Near neighbours they are, and the Cathedral has suffered not a little at different times from this close proximity. For when Rufus besieged the Castle, and when, in 1215 and 1264, it was closely invested for respectively three months and a week, the Cathedral had its share of the violent doings that resulted in the Keep being undermined and the wooden bridge of Rochester burned. Gundulf's Tower had not been completed when that mighty master-builder died, and although it is generally ascribed to him, it seems really to have been finished under the supervision of an inexperienced architect employed by that Archbishop William de Corbeil to whom and his successors of Canterbury Henry the Second granted "the perpetual charge and constables.h.i.+p of the Castle of Rochester." This prelate died in 1139, and the irony of circ.u.mstances decreed that only one other of the Archbishops to whom the "perpetual constables.h.i.+p" was granted should ever exercise the rights and privileges of the gift. This was Stephen Langton. The Castle was found to be too important in those times for it to be held by any other than the King, and so to the Crown it reverted. Now that it is ruined and open to the sky the Mayors of Rochester are _ex officio_ constables, and they wear a sword on grand occasions as an outward and visible sign of their dignity.