"The noblest subject in England, and indeed, as Englishmen loved to say, the noblest subject in Europe, was Aubrey de Vere, twentieth and last of the old Earls of Oxford. He derived his title 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 Godfrey 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 illustrious line of nobles that England has seen, a man of loose morals, but of inoffensive temper and of courtly manners, was Lord Lieutenant of Essex 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 encumbered, 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 God," 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 assumed the name of De Vere by Royal License in 1832. But the Irish De Veres have the same motto—Vero nil Verius—as the Essex De Veres of old; their crest is the boar of the Essex De Veres; the mullet of the Essex 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 assumed 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 title to arms of this or that family, to assume that because crest and motto and arms are described and illustrated in Burke or in Debrett there is therefore any historical connection between the arms and those who bear them.
What the De Veres of Essex 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, passed on the left a few miles south of Great Yeldham of the famous oak, was their principal 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 passing glance at many a church rich in ancient brasses 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 viâ 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 pass 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—Quære 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 Essex Archæological 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 Essex. 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 classical example of Fabius, the gentleman who cunctando restituit 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 manœuvres somewhat dull and sterile of incident, he might perhaps be heard to plead that manœuvres 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 advertisement, 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 substitutes is the statement possible that, if one had not known beforehand, the absence of pneumatic tires would not have been noticed. It passed 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 viâ Sawbridgeworth, Harlow, Epping, Loughton, and Woodford Green, and 4-1/2 miles less from Shoreditch, 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 viâ Bentley and Chigwell, or even to turn off at Chelmsford and go on viâ 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 Essex manœuvres. 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 passed 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 circumstances 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 Essex, 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 compass. 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 passage 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 identity 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 pass 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 Essex 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 title, 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 passed 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, (Essex), 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.