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44 chapters
PREFACE
PREFACE
It has been said, by whom I know not, that “prefaces to books are like signs to public-houses; they are intended to give one an idea of the kind of entertainment to be found within.” But this preface is not to be like those; for it would require an essay in itself to give a comprehensive idea of the Dover Road, in all its implications. A road is not merely so many miles of highway, more or less well-maintained. It is not only something in the surveyor’s way; but history as well. It is life, touc
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I
I
Of all the historic highways of England, the story of the old Road to Dover is the most difficult to tell. No other road in all Christendom (or Pagandom either, for that matter) has so long and continuous a history, nor one so crowded in every age with incident and associations. The writer, therefore, who has the telling of that story to accomplish is weighted with a heavy sense of responsibility, and though (like a village boy marching fearfully through a midnight churchyard) he whistles to kee
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II
II
If we had wished, in the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, to proceed to Dover with the utmost expedition and despatch consistent with coach-travelling, we should have booked seats in Mr. Benjamin Worthy Horne’s “Foreign Mail,” which left the General Post-Office in Saint Martin’s-le-Grand every Tuesday and Friday nights, calling a few minutes later at the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street, and finally arriving at Dover in time for the packets at 8.15 the following morning; thus beating by half
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III
III
And the London Bridge by which they would cross in 1837 was a very different structure from that driven over by their forbears of twenty years previously. So late as 1831, Old London Bridge remained that, built in 1176, had thus for nearly seven hundred years borne the traffic to and from London, and had stood firmly centuries of storms and floods, and all the attacks of rebels from Norman to late Tudor times. Its career was closed on the 1st of August, 1831, when the new bridge, that had taken
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IV
IV
The Southwark of Chaucer’s time was a very different place. For one thing, it was a great deal smaller. The year in which his Canterbury Pilgrims were supposed to set out has generally been fixed at 1383, and at that time the whole country had only recently been smitten with three great pestilences, which had carried off nearly half the population of England. London numbered probably no more than thirty thousand inhabitants. Southwark was comparatively a village; a village, too, not with the odi
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V
V
There are milestones on the Dover Road. Of course. Mr. F’s aunt, in Little Dorrit , knew something about them, but not much. Her knowledge was general, not particular. We read in Chapter XXIII:— “A diversion was occasioned here by Mr. F.’s aunt, making the following inexorable and awful statement: ‘There’s milestones on the Dover Road.’ Clennam was disconcerted by this. ‘Let him deny it if he can,’ continued the venomous old lady. He could not deny it. There are milestones on the Dover Road.” We
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VI
VI
When the old coachmen had got through New Cross Gate, which stood where the “Marquis of Granby” occupies the junction of the Deptford and Lewisham roads, they found themselves in the country, with Deptford, a busy but small and compact place, yet some distance ahead. Also, they had entered the county of Kent. Nowadays, it is difficult for the uninstructed to tell where New Cross ends or Deptford begins, for there is never a break in the houses all the way, while the street presents no attraction
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VII
VII
Leaving “dirty Deptford,” that being the contumelious conjunction by which the place has generally been known, any time these last hundred years or so (and far be it from me to deprive any place of its well-merited title, whether good or ill), the road ascends steeply to Blackheath, past some fine old mansions which, having been built in the days of Queen Anne and the earlier Georges, and having long housed the aristocracy who at one time frequented the place, became afterwards the homes of rich
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VIII
VIII
And here (says Stowe) came, in 1415, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London, with four hundred citizens in scarlet, and with white and red hoods, to receive Henry the Fifth on his return from the victories in France, of which that of Agincourt was the greatest. “The gates and streets of the City were garnished and apparelled with precious cloths of arras, containing the history, triumphs, and princely acts of the kings of England, his progenitors, which was done to the end that the king might und
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IX
IX
As one proceeds through Charlton village, past an oddly-named public-house, “The Sun in the Sands,” and the uncharted wilderness of Kidbrook, Shooter’s Hill comes into view, and the long line of “villas” ends. Just beyond the seventh milestone from London is another little public-house, the “Fox under the Hill,” followed shortly by the “Earl of Moira,” overlooked by the great buildings of the new Fever Hospital which the London County Council has set up here, to the disgust of all the dwellers r
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X
X
There is, indeed, no road to equal the Dover Road for thieves, tramps, cadgers, and miscellaneous vagrants, either for number or depravity. Throughout the year they infest alike the highways and byways of Kent, but the most constant procession of them is to be seen on the great main road between London and the sea. A great deal of begging, some petty pilfering, and a modicum of work in the fruit season and during the hop-harvest suffice to keep them going for the greater part of the year, while
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XI
XI
Passing many of these undesirable wayfarers, one comes, in a mile—fields and hedgerows and market-gardens on either side—to Shoulder of Mutton Green, a scrubby piece of common-ground shaped like South America—but smaller. Hence the peculiar eloquence of its name. The Kent County Council has set up a large and imposing notice-board at the corner of the green which bears its name and a portentous number of bye-laws, and when the sun is low and shadows slant (the board is so large and the green so
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XII
XII
Leaving Bexley Heath, the road becomes suddenly beautiful, where it loses the last of the mean shops—the cats’-meat vendors, the tinkers, the marine stores—that give so distinct and unwholesome a cachet to its long-drawn-out street. The highway goes down a hill overhung with tall trees, with chestnuts and hawthorns, whose blossoms fill the air in spring with sweet and heavy scents; but, in the hollow, gasworks contend with them, and generally, it is sad to say, come off easy victors. Follows the
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XIII
XIII
Dartford, to which we now come, is a queer little town, planted in a profound hollow, through which runs its wealth-giving Darent. Mills and factories meet the eye at every turn. Not smoking, grimy factories of the kinds that blast the Midland counties, but cleanly-looking boarded structures for the most part, own brothers to flour-mills in outward aspect; places where paper is manufactured, and nowadays drugs and chemicals. Dartford is industrial to-day, but there are old-fashioned nooks, and s
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XIV
XIV
The old coachmen had an exciting time of it when either entering or leaving Dartford. They skidded down West Hill, when coming from London, to the imminent danger of their necks and those of their passengers, and they painfully climbed the East Hill, on their way out of the town toward Dover. When several accidents had occurred to prove how hazardous to life and property were these roads, the turnpike-trustmongers reduced their steepness by cutting through the hill-tops. This was about 1820. Alt
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XV
XV
Northfleet adjoins, and is now continuous with, Gravesend. It is a busy place, engaged in the excavation of chalk and flints, and in ship-building. Here, too, were “Rosherville Gardens,” or shortly, “Rosherville.” A suburb of that name is here now, but the Rosherville of the Early and Middle Victorians is a thing of the past, and the place has been sold to an oil company. Jeremiah Rosher was the inventor and sponsor of those once-famed Gardens. It was so far back as the 1830’s that he conceived
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XVI
XVI
Many of these distinguished travellers on this old highway have left written accounts of their doings, and very interesting readings they make. Foremost among the “distinguished” company was Marshal de Bassompierre. He came to England in 1626, on an Embassy from the King of France, and arrived at Dover on the 2nd of October. There he stayed to recruit, for the sea, as usual, had been unkind, until Sunday, the 4th, departing thence on that day for “Cantorbery,” where he slept the night, going on
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XVII
XVII
Having thus disposed of this company of scribbling foreigners, I will get on to Milton-next-Gravesend, which immediately adjoins the town; especially will I do so because, when the old waterside lanes have been explored, little remains to see besides Gordon’s statue and the little cottage where he used to live. The high-road is not at all interesting, unless indeed a Jubilee clock-tower and a number of private houses of the Regent’s Park order of architecture may be considered to lend a charm to
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XVIII
XVIII
There is little to see or remark upon in the three miles between Chalk and Gad’s Hill. Two old roadside inns, each claiming to be a “half-way house”; a lane that leads off to the right, towards the village of Shorne; a windmill, without its sails, standing on the brow of a singular hill; these, together with the great numbers of men and women working in the fields, are all the noticeable features of the road until one comes up the long, gradual ascent to the top of Gad’s Hill. Gad’s Hill is at f
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XIX
XIX
Strood, too, deserves some notice. The place-name has been thought to derive from strata , “the street,” standing as it does on that ancient way, the Roman Watling Street. But, in the recent advance in the study of place-names, it is held to be from the Anglo-Saxon “strode”: a marshy region. The original meaning of “Watling Street” is never likely to be determined to the satisfaction of all antiquaries, and its age is equally a contested point. But that a street or a trackway of some kind, of an
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XX
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
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XXI
XXI
And so, as Mr. Samuel Pepys might say, into Rochester. Rochester was to Dickens 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 introdu
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XXII
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 ineptitudes 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 appreciatio
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XXIII
XXIII
Rochester has had many Royal and distinguished visitors, and many of them have left traces of their sojourn in more or less quaint, instructive, and amusing accounts. When Edward the First came here in 1300, he gave seven shillings to the Priory for the shrine of Saint William, and twelve shillings compensation to one Richard Lamberd whose horse, hired for the King’s service, was blown over Rochester Bridge into the Medway and drowned. On his return from Canterbury, nine days later, the King flu
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XXIV
XXIV
This was the last romantic event that befell at Rochester, and it fitly closed a stirring history. But Chatham and Rochester, although outward romance had departed, did not cease to be interested in naval and military affairs. Indeed, they have grown continually greater on them. It was in 1756 that the plates of England and France were published by Hogarth. We were suffering then from one of those panic fears of invasion by the French to which this country has been periodically subject, and thes
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XXV
XXV
To plunge into mediæval legends at Chatham will seem the strangest of transitions, and Chatham Parish Church will appear to most people the last place likely to have a story. Yet in demolishing the old building to make way for a new, the workmen found some fragments of sculpture which had a history. Amongst these was a headless group of the Virgin and Child. THE INVASION OF ENGLAND: FRANCE. After Hogarth. This was, in all probability, the effigy of Our Lady of Chatham, who, in pre-Reformatio
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XXVI
XXVI
Little else is to be seen or noted in leaving Chatham for Rainham. The shop in which that singular old gentleman lived, with whom little David Copperfield made acquaintance, is not pointed out to the curious, and the identity of that apostrophizer of his lungs and liver, who exclaimed “Goroo, goroo,” and tearfully asked David if he would go for fourpence, has been much disputed. “The House on the Brook,” to which the Dickens family removed when Mr. John Dickens’ fortunes were low, is still to be
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XXVII
XXVII
The village of Newington stands on either side of the old Dover Road, which is here identical with the famous Roman military viâ of Watling Street. It is situated in the centre of a district covered thickly with Roman remains, and the village itself dates from Saxon times, when it really was a “new town” as distinguished from the adjacent ruins of the ancient Roman station of Durolevum. All the ingenuity of archæologists has been insufficient to determine at what particular spot this military po
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XXVIII
XXVIII
As mediæval travellers approached Sittingbourne from the direction of London, the first objects they perceived were the chapel and hermitage of Schamel, dedicated to Saint Thomas à Becket, and standing on the south side of the road. They are gone now, and a wayside public-house—“The Volunteers”—stands on, or near their site; but the hermitage was, from the time of King John to the impious days of Henry the Eighth, a resting-place for those devout pilgrims who sought the shrine of the “holy bliss
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XXIX
XXIX
Five miles and a half down the road from Sittingbourne, the pilgrims who had prayed so devoutly at the shrine of Our Lady of the Buttress (and it is to be hoped had not forgotten the claims of Swanstree Hermitage) came to Ospringe, where they usually found a profuse hospitality waiting for them at the Maison Dieu. Not that there was any lack of religious houses on the way. Far from it, indeed. They had not proceeded much farther than a mile when they came in those times to the Hermitage of Bapch
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XXX
XXX
Faversham town, lying a mile distant, between Faversham Creek and the turnpike road, will doubtless in the course of a few years adjoin Ospringe, and convert the village into a mere suburb. Preston, the old suburb of Faversham, is distant something over a mile, but in between there have lately been built very many new streets of cottages and villas, evidences of Faversham’s prosperity, doubtless, but not pleasing to the tourist. That prosperity is due to its situation upon a navigable creek, alo
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XXXI
XXXI
The history of Faversham town is extremely long and interesting, but as it does not lie on the direct road to Dover, it will not be necessary to go into a very detailed account of it. It is a curious, half-maritime borough whose Mayor wears a chain of office decorated with badges of oars and rudders; a town whose records include such events as the burial of King Stephen, his Queen, and his son Eustace; and at a very much later date, the attempted escape of James the Second. Faversham fishermen r
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XXXII
XXXII
Boughton-under-Blean is perhaps the neatest, quietest, longest, and most cheerfully picturesque village on the Dover Road. It lies near the foot of the hill. Half-way up is the church. In the churchyard of Boughton there is a great yew-tree whose girth at three feet from the ground was taken by the vicar in 1894. It was then 9 ft. 9 in. The age of this tree is exactly known, for a seventeenth century vicar, the Reverend John Johnson, recorded, “the little yew-tree by the south doer was sett in 1
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XXXIII
XXXIII
Dunkirk was anciently a common in the Forest of Blean, and was a veritable Alsatia, the resort of lawless men who squatted here because it was not within any known jurisdiction. Hasted, in his History of Kent , says houses were built here and “inhabited by low persons of suspicious character, this being a place exempt from the jurisdiction of either hundred or parish, as in a free port, which receives all who enter it, without distinction. The whole district from hence gained the name of ‘Dunkir
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XXXIV
XXXIV
The entrance to Canterbury from London is one of the most impressive approaches to a city to be found in all England. The traveller passes through the suburb of Saint Dunstan, by the old parish church that holds the severed head of Sir Thomas More, coming into the city through a street of ancient houses and under the postern arch of West Gate. The great drum towers of West Gate mark the ancient limits of the mediæval city, and guard an opening in the city wall which stood on the further side of
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XXXV
XXXV
Not all visitors to Canterbury were so evilly entreated as the Duc de Nivernais. Indeed, the city has been remarkable rather for its lavish and abounding hospitality than for any attempted over-reaching of the stranger. But since those strangers were chiefly Kings and Emperors, and great personages of that kind, perhaps it is little to be wondered at that the citizens, to say nothing of those greedy time-servers, the Priors and monks of Christ Church Priory and the Priory of Saint Augustine, ren
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XXXVI
XXXVI
The chief point of interest in Canterbury is, of course, the Cathedral, the bourne to which countless pilgrims came from all parts of the civilized world to gain the goodwill and intercedence of that thrice sacred and potent Saint Thomas whose peculiar sanctity over-topped by far that of any other English martyr, and whose shrine possessed scarce less efficacy than that of the most renowned Continental resorts of the pious. But long before Becket’s day the Metropolitan Cathedral of Canterbury ha
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XXXVII
XXXVII
When in the last days of 1170 Becket was murdered in his own Cathedral, no one could have foreseen how fertilizing would be the blood of the martyr to religious faith; and not only to faith but also to English thought, trades, and professions. No sinner could be considered safe for Paradise unless he had made pilgrimage to Canterbury, and this pilgrimage became one of the chief features of English life during four hundred years. We owe directly to it the inspiration which has given Chaucer, our
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XXXVIII
XXXVIII
Soon after this came the downfall. With the struggles of the Reformation went the relics, the gold and jewels, and—worse than all—the decorations and painted windows of the Cathedral. With many abuses and with the disgusting humbug of the old order of things went also, it is sad to think, much of the living reality of religion; and Canterbury Cathedral is to-day an historical museum to the crowd of tourists, and an architectural model for students of that first of all the arts. Curiosity, and li
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XXXIX
XXXIX
The Dover Road, after leaving Canterbury, loses very much of that religious character, picturesquely varied with robbery and murder, which is its chiefest feature between Southwark and the Shrine of Saint Thomas; for, although many foreign pilgrims landed at Dover to proceed to the place where the martyr lay, encased in gold and jewels, their number was nothing to be compared with that of the crowds who came into Canterbury from London, or along the Pilgrims’ Road from the West Country; and cons
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XL
XL
By daylight the traveller can see that the barren chalk of Barham Downs, although left so long in repose, has been lately cut up into golf links. A racecourse, little frequented now, also stands on the ridge. Bourne Park skirts the road for some distance on the right, and the spire of Barham Church, rising from behind a thick clump of trees in a little valley, shows where the village of Barham lies secluded, some three hundred yards down a country lane. How few the wayfarers who either notice wh
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XLI
XLI
In the London Road approach to Dover, one mile from the centre of the town, there used to stand an old inn called “The Milestone.” A hatter’s shop now occupies the site; but two old milestones are yet there. One says “70 miles to London: 14 miles to Canterbury,” and the other proclaims it to be “1 mile to Dovor.” This old spelling of “Dover” was common until the opening of the railway era; and the coach-bills of the great Dover Road coach-proprietors, Horne, Chaplin, and Gray, spelt the place-na
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XLII
XLII
Since we are in the way of it, it comes naturally to include Shakespeare Cliff in this little survey. You reach it from here either by a hideous contrivance called the Shaft, fashioned in the cliffs that frown down upon Snargate Street, or by Limekiln Street beyond. Here, on the way, is Archcliffe Fort, between the Citadel and the sea. They say, who should know, that it is heavily armed, but it is not at all impressive: old boots, tin cans, brick-bats, cabbage-stalks, and rusty umbrella-frames r
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XLIII
XLIII
Dover Castle possesses the longest and most continuous, if not quite the most stirring, military history of any fortress within these narrow seas. Described picturesquely by ancient chroniclers as “the very front door of England,” or, as “clavis Angliæ et repagulum,” it is, and in very truth has ever been, since its foundation, the main bulwark of Britain against foreign foes. At what precise period a Castle was first raised here is a question that has never yet and probably never will be settle
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