Part 5
The gradual shrinkage of his grain made the owner, a farmer named Witcomb, suspicious, and, with a man named Matthews, he kept a watch. Bolas duly appeared, with an empty sack over his shoulder, which he was proceeding to fill when Witcomb and Matthews made to seize him. Bolas then picked up a bill-hook, and attacking them so furiously that Matthews was killed and Witcomb left, for dead, made off. But it so happened that Witcomb recovered, and the affair, that had in the meanwhile created a great stir in the neighbourhood, was explained. For some reason or another, Bolas was confident of an acquittal, and cheerfully told his friends he would be home in time to harvest his barley.
But they found him guilty, hanged him at Shrewsbury, and gibbeted his body here by the roadside; and so, although, after a fashion, he came home again, other hands reaped his bearded grain. The thing made so strong an impression upon the countryside that the phrase, “Don’t make so sure of your barley,” became proverbial.
All these things happened in 1722. Matthews was buried in Wellington Churchyard, where his tombstone, stating that he was “barbarously murdered,” stood until the railway came and swept it and others away. “Bolas’s Gibbet” long remained a landmark beside the Holyhead Road, a weatherworn stump bristling with the rusty fragments of nails that had been driven into the post so that it should not be climbed and the body removed. That “the evil that men do lives after them” was exemplified shortly after the body of Bolas came home and was hung upon the gibbet. There still stands, not a great way ahead, an old roadside “public,” the “Horseshoes,” where the road forks to Wroxeter. Here, one dismal night, several youths were drinking and joking, when the conversation turned upon Bolas. Each dared the others to go in the dark to the lonely spot and ask the dead man how he felt, and as no one was sufficiently courageous to go alone, they set off a body. On the way, one more mischievous than the rest drew off unperceived, and hid in the hedgerow beneath the gruesome object.
“How are you to-night?” asked the little group, keeping very close together, and sorry they had come.
“Very cold and chilly,” answered a pitiful voice; and immediately they all took to their heels. One suffered such a shock that he became a raving maniac.
XVIII
Wroxeter lies within a short distance, but only approached along a narrow and uneven lane. Its fine church-tower looks down upon little more than a few farms and bartons; for village, as generally understood, there is none. This simple rural place, aromatic with hay and straw and corn, is the representative of, and takes its name from, the great Roman city of _Uriconium_, one-third larger than Pompeii, destroyed by the fury of savage hordes more than fourteen hundred years ago. The City of _Uriconium_,—the “City of the Wrekin”—was established shortly after A.D. 48, when the Roman general, Ostorius Scapula, had driven out the British tribes. He set an important station here, at a crossing of the Watling and the Ikenild Streets, and the place not only served as an armed camp to guard the roads and the ford of the Severn, but grew to be the most important market along the road to Wales. It lasted four hundred years, and only fell some forty years after the Romans had deserted Britain. _Uriconium_ was then taken by the combined onslaughts of the Welsh tribes, and burnt to the ground, and the Romanised British who had remained were all massacred.
[Illustration: THE “OLD WALL.”]
To this great city, its site now under corn and grass land, and inhabited by a handful of peasants, the Roman road led, on its way to Wales and the shores of the Menai, and to its site still leads, but beyond is lost, save to those who study archæology. The only relics left on the spot to tell of that vanished place are the two Roman pillars standing before the church; the font, made out of a carved capital; and that massive fragment of masonry, the Old Wall, standing once in the centre of the city, but now solitary in a field.
[Illustration: WROXETER CHURCH.]
Superstition brooded for ages upon this spot, and weird legends were created by the terrors the lonely place had for the ignorant of other times. Dead and gone Romans, who had, perhaps, been very matter-of-fact and commonplace persons in their lives, and gifted with all the small virtues of the hearth-loving citizen, loomed large, menacing, and supernatural before those whose business took them near the ruin, and so it was not until modern times that much was done to unearth what relics might lie deep down below the earth deposited by the changes of so long a period.
It was in 1859 that two acres of land were excavated. What did they find? Many things. Fragments of the red Samian ware on which the Roman citizens served their banquets, and whence they pledged one another, drinking to the eternity of Rome. A rusty key without a lock, and a stylus among bones, wine-cups, and scattered coins; the wooden tablets it wrote upon perished, like the hand that held it. The figure of a cock, modelled in lead, once a child’s toy, and near it the skeleton of a child, doubtless the one that owned that ancient plaything. Three skeletons of older persons were found, crouched up in one of the underground hypocausts. A hypocaust was a basement chamber, constructed to heat a room or house. Into one of these places those persons had fled when the barbarians stormed the city. They intended to creep out when danger was past, but the place was fired, and they perished in their hiding-place. Two of these fugitives were women; the other an old man. Within his grasp lay a pile of Roman coins, 142 in all, and, beside them, all that was left of his cash-box—some fragments of wood and rusty nails.
Roofing-slates, still with nails in many of their holes, were discovered in the ruins; the slate, by its appearance, judged to have been brought from Bettws-y-Coed. Millstones for grinding corn, and a charred heap of the corn itself, were found; brooches, seals, household gods, and fragments of the innumerable intimate articles of everyday life. Even some careless scribbling, such as that often found on the walls of Pompeii, was seen; but before it could be protected some graceless excursionists among the thousands carried by rail at that time to see the novelty of a buried city, obliterated it with their walking-sticks.
The two acres then explored, with the little that has been done since, give the impression that if the three-miles’ circuit of the walls could be excavated, results surpassing the finds at Silchester might be attained.
From Wroxeter, crossing the Severn, the Watling Street went by the two Strettons Wattlesborough, taking its name from being situated on the great road; _Rutunium_, now Rowton; thence to _Mediolanum_ at the crossing of the river Tanad, under the Breidden, a site now called Clawdd Coch, or “Red Ditch”; _Mons Heriri_, under the shadow of Snowdon (whose Welsh name is Eryri, or Eagles’ Mountain) at the ancient earthwork known as Tomen-y-Mur, in the Vale of Maentwrog; and to the sea-coast at _Segontium_, identified with Caer Seiont, near Carnarvon. A branch, with stations of the way at _Bovium_ (Bangor-ys-Coed); _Deva_, the great fortress of the Twentieth Legion, identical with Chester, on the Dee; _Varae_, the modern Bodfari; and _Conovium_, by the Conway (Caer Hên, or Old Fort), traversed the Dee estuary and the coast-line looking out to Anglesey and the Irish Sea.
XIX
Returning from Wroxeter and passing the tiny hamlet of Norton, the way lies flat to Shrewsbury. Flat, because we are now come beside the Severn (which no Welshman calls anything else than Sivern). Away across the watery plain as we advance are the Stretton Hills on the left, volcanic and mountainous in outline, blue and beautiful in colour; and, more distant, ahead, far beyond Shrewsbury, the Breidden Hills, a great bulk starting from the level without any disguise of foothills or preliminary rises to detract from their dramatic effect.
The Tern, a tributary of the Severn, crosses the road beneath a handsome stone balustraded bridge, with views to the right over Attingham Park and along the road, through a mass of overarching trees, toward the village of Atcham. There, in the Park, stands the classical stone building of Attingham Hall, one of those places built a century or more ago at incredible expense, and only to be maintained at a cost far exceeding the resources available to-day. Corn at 50_s._ and 60_s._ a quarter built many fine mansions, and nowadays corn at 25_s._ keeps them empty. Attingham Hall lacks a tenant. It belongs to Lord Berwick, whose title does not, by the way, come from the only Berwick commonly known—the town of Berwick-on-Tweed—but from Berwick Maviston, close by Atcham, the old home of the extinct Malvoisin or Mayvesin family.
The chief entrance to Attingham Park is through the great archway in Atcham village. One side of the village street is made up of church, school-house, post office, a deserted coaching inn, and a number of rustic cottages; the other is the long brick wall of the Park, densely overhung with trees, on to which the village blankly looks. The only opening in this wall is the great archway aforesaid; very tall, Doric, and stony. With a spinal shiver the stranger, who stands wondering awhile where he has seen its like, suddenly realises the resemblance it bears to the entrance of certain great London cemeteries. The arch is flanked by a stag on one side and by a pegasus on the other, with the inscription in gigantic lettering in between: “Qui uti scit ei bona.” A very proper aspiration; but it is just as well that tramps are innocent as a rule of Latin, or they might not inaptly call and ask for something on account.
Opposite this gateway stands what was once the “Talbot,” a first-class posting-house. It looks on to the church in one direction, the entrance to the Park in another, and down upon the Severn in a third, so that its situation is by no means commonplace. When the altered conditions of travelling rendered it no longer possible to carry on a remunerative business here, the hotel was converted into a private mansion, and the gravelled drive walled in and turfed, but it has only been occupied for short periods and has long stood empty. Like the Princess in the fairy tale, it waits and still waits, looking up the road and down the road and over the bridge for the expected. It is weary waiting, and even the rats and mice who lived royally in old times, and were reduced at last to the pitiful expedient of subsisting on the faint smell of what _had_ been, gave it up and lived on one another. The ultimate survivor is believed to have committed suicide in the Severn.
It is a noble bridge that spans the river here, and, built before the art—no, _not_ the art, the science—of constructing bridges in iron was understood, is of stone, and very steep. This steepness added to its narrow proportions was a terror to those nervous coach-passengers whose faith in Sam Hayward of the “Wonder” was not what it should have been, considering the consummate art he displayed as a whip. But possibly they thought that all the artistry in the world would be of little use to save them and the coach if, on one of the wintry nights and mornings when the Severn mists had obscured the road, they came into collision with the parapets and so were hurled into the swirling river; and, moreover, the hours—5.30 in the morning and 10 at night—when the “Wonder” passed this dangerous spot, are not those when courage is high and confidence greatest.
[Illustration: ATCHAM BRIDGE.]
It is a gentle rise from here to Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, passing on the way the old toll-house of Emstrey Bank. On the hill-top, and looking down the Foregate from the summit of his Doric column, stands the statue of “old Rowley.” The personage owning that nickname was Sir Rowland, afterwards Lord Hill, Field-Marshal and Commander-in-Chief in succession to Wellington. As a Peninsula and Waterloo hero, and a brother-in-arms of Wellington, Shropshire people held him in great honour, for was he not also a Salopian—one of the Hills of Hawkstone—and a fine representative of the county? It was left to a descendant to bankrupt the estate and disperse the medals, warlike relics, and trophies of Hawkstone Park.
[Illustration: LORD HILL’S MONUMENT.]
It is perhaps not the sculptor’s fault, but a result of distance and acute perspective, that the gallant general on his elevated post bears an extraordinary likeness to Pecksniff, as pictured by Phiz.
Abbey Foregate must have been the place where Benjamin Disraeli, travelling post to Shrewsbury in June 1839, in company with Sir Philip Rose, to fight for one of the two Parliamentary seats the borough then retained, had his attention drawn by his companion to a huge poster, displayed on the walls of a roadside barn. Disraeli was standing in the Conservative interest, and was at the time head over ears in debt.
“Something about you,” said Rose to his companion, as his eye lighted on the poster. The chaise was stopped, and Disraeli, deliberately adjusting an unnecessary eyeglass—for the bill was set in the boldest and blackest of “display” type—slowly read it from beginning to end.
It began, “Judgment Debts of Benjamin Disraeli, Tory Candidate for Shrewsbury,” and unfolded a long, long list of creditors and the amounts due to them. After long and careful consideration of the lengthy roll, Disraeli turned to his friend, and calmly said: “How accurate they are. Now let us go on.”
Shrewsbury was apparently not so scandalised as it should have been by this revelation of Disraeli’s financial straits, for the electors returned both himself and the other Conservative candidate by thumping majorities.
The Foregate, a broad thoroughfare outside the town walls, was an early suburb on the hither shore of the Severn, which comes winding again athwart the road, presenting, when such things were matters of the first importance, a defence that not the boldest might pass. Whoever held Shrewsbury, girdled by river and ramparted walls for fully seven-eighths of a circle, and with the remaining eighth, the only easy approach, blocked by the frowning dark red turrets of its great castle, was master of the situation. Hence that race between Henry IV. and Hotspur for possession of the town in 1403; a race won by the King, who flung his army into it a day before Hotspur’s Northumbrians and Scots came in sight; hence, too, the repeated attempts of the Welsh to gain possession.
Foregate still keeps something of its old suburban character, the old-fashioned houses partaking both of town and country; curious old inns neighbouring stately mansions, and village shops shouldering the doctor’s or the lawyer’s staid Queen Anne and Georgian residences. But the great feature is the Abbey Church, great even though only a fragment of its former self. Ruddy sandstone of a particularly deep, almost blood-red, hue gives its massive and time-worn tower a suggestion of Shrewsbury’s sanguinary history; just as the great bulk of the Abbey may have been the measure of the sins of that Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury, who founded it and died, a world-renouncing monk, within these walls in 1094. Close upon two hundred years later, in 1283, the first English Parliament was held in the Chapter House; and that would be a place of much historic interest to-day, but, like most of the monastery buildings, it has been destroyed.
XX
“Shrowsbury,” as already noted, is the correct pronunciation of the name of Shropshire’s capital; a mode that still follows the structure of the Saxon place-name, “Scrobbesbyrig.” But it is not reasonable to suppose that the outlander who has never been to Shrewsbury should know all the rights and wrongs of the case, and though it may grate upon the Salopian to hear strangers talk of “Shroosbury,” he can have no possible remedy until he procures a reform in the spelling of the word. Meanwhile, the outlander aforesaid is often severely entreated for his solecism. Sometimes, too, he deserves all he gets, as for example when, somewhere about 1894, the author of “Pictures in Parliament” taunted a Shropshire member with using a “Salopian pronunciation which for some time hid from the ordinary member a knowledge that he was alluding to Shrewsbury.” It did _not_ hide the identity, and moreover, no Salopian ever did or could use any other pronunciation. Now, if that member had said “Salop” there would have been more room for criticism, although by that name Shrewsbury is just as often known in Shropshire. It may be presumed that every one knows the county to be often so-called, but it is a novelty for strangers in these gates to hear the word applied to the town. To this day the railway booking-clerks for at least twenty miles round Shrewsbury are commonly asked for tickets to “Salop,” and the very milestones adopt the same name. The Earls of Shrewsbury, on the other hand, are (it may not be generally known) miscalled by that title, and are really Earls of Salop. Not, let it be noted, of the town of Salop, but of the _county_; as seen in the original patent of nobility granted to the ancestral Talbot in 1442. But, although there is not the shadow of a warrant for their adoption of the “Shrewsbury” title, they appear never to have used any other, and in literature, from Shakespeare downwards, the same custom has always been observed. But why? Is it possible that the ill meaning of the French word “Salop” has forbidden the use?
The town presents a hold front from this side of the river, crossed in these peaceful times without let or hindrance by the English Bridge, a beautiful seven-arched stone structure built in 1774. It looks not a little foreign when viewed from the river-banks, with the osier-grown islands in mid-stream; houses and church spires clustered beyond, and the Castle turrets closing the view on the right; while the approach over the bridge discloses a street so steep that it fills the untravelled Londoner with as much astonishment as it did the lawyer come to Shrewsbury for the first time by the “Wonder” coach. “I think I’ll get off,” he said nervously, touching Hayward on the arm.
[Illustration: THE ENGLISH BRIDGE.]
“You be d——d!” shortly replied that past master of the whip and ribbons, as, springing his team up the hill, he brought the coach round in a circular course, and, shooting his wheelers and pointing his leaders, made with the certainty of an arrow through the archway, and into the stony courtyard of the “Lion.”
The hill leading in this astonishing fashion into Shrewsbury is Wyle Cop, the main thoroughfare in old days. Its name, meaning “Hilltop,” is sufficiently descriptive. The “Lion” still stands on the summit, on the left hand, its coach-entrance yawning as of old; the streets, as narrow as ever, giving point to Sam Hayward’s clever feat of coachmanship.
“Pleasant and chatty,” says one who frequented the Holyhead Road in those days, “was Ash, the guard of the ‘Wonder’ coach, but the coachman, one of two brothers, Hayward[1] by name, could by no means be so called. The other brother drove the Holyhead Mail. The coachman of the ‘Wonder’ was grimly silent. ‘I will wager,’ said one of this taciturn Jehu’s passengers to another, ‘that you don’t get a word out of him from the “Hen and Chickens” at Birmingham to the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, barring a pure answer to a question.’” The bet was won, for Hayward kept silence all the way.
Footnote 1:
The authority here quoted says “Hodgson,” but that is an error. Nor even was there a Hodgson driving the Holyhead Mail, but a guard of that name who accompanied it on to Holyhead. Many of the statements made by writers on old coaching days are, indeed, surprisingly inaccurate, even when they have been contemporary with those times. Thus, Colonel Corbet sanctions the frontispiece to his _Old Coachman’s Chatter_, showing the “Wonder” from London ascending Wyle Cop at one minute to twelve, noon. The “Wonder” reached Shrewsbury at 10.30 every night; the midday coach was the Holyhead Mail.
But he was no misanthrope. A naturally cheerful nature was overlaid by an undue sense of responsibility to the proprietors of the “Wonder,” whose law was “ten miles an hour, including stoppages; or put the paint-brush over the name of the ‘Wonder’ on the dickey.” Had his road not been one of the best in the world—true almost to the spirit-level, and constructed of hard dhu-stone—he could not have kept that excellent time, day by day, and from year to year. As it was, the doing of it absorbed the man’s very existence. He might hum an air to himself, but talk he would not.
“What the deuce ails you, Hayward?” asked one of his box passengers, “are you dumb, man?”
Then the Sphinx broke silence: “Can’t drive and talk, too,” he said; and, closing his mouth like a steel trap, spoke no more.
That he was not only a master of the ribbons, but also of a peculiar feat in driving, has already been hinted. This exploit, only once known to be attempted by any other,[2] was repeated every time he brought the “Wonder” into Shrewsbury, and never failed to draw an appreciative knot of spectators, or to transfix with horror any strangers who might chance to be among the outside passengers. There was always some difficulty in driving up the steep and narrow Cop and into the “Lion” yard, standing on the near side. Other coachmen quartered slowly up, and then, having first drawn to their off side, turned carefully across and slowly piloted their teams through the narrow entrance of the “Lion.” Hayward’s method was radically different. Galloping up the hill and almost scraping the near-side kerb, he would pass the inn, and then, suddenly thonging his leaders, smartly turn them round in their own length opposite the street called “Dogpole.” Then, calling to the “outsides” to “mind their heads,” he would drive the coach at a trot into the yard, with an inch to spare.
Footnote 2:
Stephen Howse, of the Ludlow night mail, was the hero of that occasion. He was born in 1809, and died in 1888.
When the “Wonder” was driven off the London road, and became only a two-horse coach, running between Shrewsbury and Birmingham, Hayward drove the “Greyhound” between Shrewsbury and Aberystwith. Then, following the example of Tony Weller, he “took a widow and a pub.” This house, the “Raven and Bell,” next door to the “Lion,” was long since pulled down. He died November 1st, 1851, but his widow was still in business in 1856. Hayward lies near the scene of his daily exploit, in the churchyard of St. Julian’s, under the shadow of the square tower seen in the accompanying view of Wyle Cop. The flowers bloom fresh at the head of his grave.
XXI