Part 9

This lover of the road and all its ways lived to see the old order pass away and railways supplant the crack teams that passed his gates. Endeared to all the coachmen and guards on the Holyhead, and the Chester, and Liverpool roads, he was the recipient in 1812 of what was called “a Token of gratitude presented by the Coachmen and Guards of the ‘Lion’ Establishment, Shrewsbury.” This took the form of a silver salver purchased with a subscription of a hundred and twenty guineas. The presentation was made in the course of a dinner at the “Lion” by Isaac Taylor, himself, as the guest of the evening truly said, “one of the most spirited and respected coach-proprietors in the kingdom.” It was an occasion marked by much compliment, and much enthusiasm for the road, but the glory had already waned. Four years before, the London and Birmingham Railway had cleared the greater part of the Holyhead Road of its coaches, and the “Wonder” itself, from the smartest four-horse coach in England had become a two-horse conveyance; but still a wonder, the wonder being that it could, in the face of the railway advance, have kept the road at all.

Nine years later, in 1851, the Honourable Thomas Kenyon died, and was laid to rest in the church of West Felton.

XXIX

Beyond that straggling village, at a point where a branch of the Ellesmere canal runs athwart the road and is lost in a long perspective to the right, is the hamlet called “Queen’s Head,” taking its name from the old coaching-inn of that name still presenting a stolid red face to the highway. The inn, the road, the canal, and a deserted toll-house all tell a tale of the havoc wrought by the railway. It was a busy place once, for many coaches changed at the inn, and on the old grass-grown wharves of the canal many a ton of goods was unloaded from the barges that in times gone by passed in great numbers, laden with coals, bricks, and manure. It is also the point whence a branch road, going through Whittington, and rejoining the main Holyhead Road at Gobowen, saves a mile by avoiding Oswestry altogether.

[Illustration: QUEEN’S HEAD.]

Along that road lies the road to Halston, where, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, lived the Mad Squire, Jack Mytton, of whose exploits we have already heard something at Shrewsbury. He came of the ancient family of Mytton, and traced a distinguished ancestry from 1373, when Reginald de Mutton, as the name was then spelled, was a Member of Parliament for the county town. Between that time and his own there were Myttons who left names honoured in the law and in the service of King and Country, and had always held a tight hand upon Halston; handing from father to son, a fine estate and a handsome rent roll.

John Mytton was born in 1791, and his father died two years later. His admiring friend and biographer, “Nimrod,” gives us the picture of an unlicked cub, spoiled by the indulgence of his mother. Expelled from Westminster and Harrow schools and rusticated from Oxford, he was gazetted to a cornetcy in the 7th Hussars after Waterloo, too late to be taught anything on the battlefield, and just at the time when he came of age, and the estate, carefully managed during a long minority of nineteen years, fell to his own disposal. A rent roll of £10,000 a year and an accumulated sum of £60,000 only existed for him to dissipate as soon as possible; and he was not long about it. In four years he had left the army, and come home to marry and be the Squire and a Member of Parliament, and to enter upon the wildest part of a career that squandered upwards of half a million sterling and brought him to an early grave in 1834.

The “hard-drinking, hard-swearing, hard-fighting and hard-hitting Jack Mytton” has left an immortal memory in North Shropshire. They tell still of his exploits; of how he only engaged a certain gamekeeper for the Halston coverts on condition that he should thrash a sweep supposed to lurk there. The gamekeeper accordingly went forth to battle and fought for his promised place, giving the sweep a thorough hiding. Hard-hitter though he was, the Squire met his match that day, for he was the Sweep! Another encounter, from whose gory twenty rounds he came victorious, was his set-to with a miner who had annoyed him when out with the harriers. The miner boasted himself a “tough ’un,” but was knocked out of time. Mytton gave him half a sovereign and a hare, and told him to take it to Halston “and get another bellyful.”

To his maniacal pranks there was no end. He once went duck-shooting on the ice in the depth of winter, naked, and a favourite amusement was to ride into the drawing-room in full hunting costume on the back of a tame she-bear. To put a guest to bed (dead drunk of course, for hospitality in those days could do no less, and both inclination and etiquette on the guest’s side did their part) in company with the bear and two bull-dogs was a prime joke.

One of his exploits is connected with the toll-gate that once stretched across the road just beyond the “Queen’s Head.” It lay, of course, on his way home from Shrewsbury, whither he had gone one day. Returning at some time between eleven o’clock and midnight, the turnpike man, roused out of his bed, and thinking the hour past twelve o’clock and another day come, insisted upon charging him another toll. It was a bitterly cold night, and the pikeman was glad enough to hurry back to bed.

Waiting until he had got between the bedclothes, Mytton rode back and had him out again to open for him, and returned a little later to rouse the worried wretch once more from his slumbers with the cry of “Gate!” The man then returned the money and Mytton went home.

Among his eccentricities was an inordinate love of filberts. He and a friend ate eighteen pounds on one occasion, on the way down from London in his carriage, and when they reached Halston they were “up to their knees in nutshells,” as he declared. A sporting hairdresser of Shrewsbury, who generally supplied him with filberts, once said that he had sent two cartloads to Halston in one season. Perhaps he ate them to provoke a thirst, and certainly his exploits with the port equalled his consumption of nuts, four to six bottles a day being his usual performance.

But he would drink anything. On one occasion, going into the establishment of the sporting hairdresser, he called imperiously for something, and taking down a bottle of lavender-water, knocked the head off and drank the contents. He said it would be “a good preservative against the night air.”

In a comparison made by an admiring friend between him and the dissolute Lord Rochester of Charles II.’s time—a comparison showing Mytton to be Rochester’s superior in every kind of extravagance and depravity—it was said that Rochester was drunk continually for five years, and Mytton beat him by seven. He had a breath like a wine-vault and a complexion like a beet-root, as a result of these excesses. They, naturally, did not lessen his extravagances, but never left him helpless. “Damn this hiccup!” he exclaimed one night, when standing in his nightshirt, about to get into bed, “but I’ll _frighten_ it away,” that being the usually accepted theory of ridding one’s self of that distressing spasm. So saying, he took a lighted candle and, applying it to the tail of his shirt, was instantly enveloped in flames. By the exertions of two friends, who rushed to his aid and tore the blazing garments piecemeal from him, he was saved from being burnt to death; but his only remark was, as he staggered, naked, to bed, “The hiccup is gone, by God!”

He ran his course to its appointed and inevitable end. The fine timber of his estate went to pay for his racing, hunting, gambling, and drinking extravagances, and for others still less reputable, and the estate followed. A relative remonstrated with him, and deplored the approaching necessity of alienating those ancestral acres. “How long,” asked Mytton, “has the property been in the family?”

“Five hundred years,” was the reply.

“Then,” rejoined the reckless Squire, with an oath, “it is high time it went out of it.” Imprisonment for debt, and exile to the Continent came later. Brandy did what port could not, and sent the graceless scion of an ancient stock to his death-bed. His body was brought from London and laid among the ashes of worthier men, who had passed on to their descendants the patrimony they had received, Halston passed away with the Mad Squire to other hands, and his son lived and died landless, filling the position of bailiff to a Shropshire nobleman.

XXX

Up along the rise from Queen’s Head, past Aston Park, where sepulchral burrows of prehistoric man are seen beneath the trees, the way lies on to Oswestry. The town of “Odgerstree,” as the country people call it, is entered soon after passing the old toll-house of Gallows Tree Gate. Once called Maserfield, it lost that name at an early date, and acquired its present title when history was very young indeed. It owes the name of Oswald’s-tre, or Oswald’s Town, to the Christian King Oswald of Northumbria, slain here in the year 642 in battle with the heathen Penda, King of Mercia. Oswald had taken the offensive, and as a raider only met his deserts; but the Church accounted him a martyr, made him a saint, and dedicated to him a religious house that in the course of time rose here. The parish church bears the name of St. Oswald to this day, and his Well, not so holy as it once was, may be found near by.

From the earliest times Oswestry was a fortified place. It stands two miles on the English side of Offa’s Dyke, that boundary between the Welsh and the Saxons, and, occupying an advanced position, close upon the more rugged Welsh mountains, was greatly exposed to sudden inroads of the Welsh. Five miles away stood the great castle of Chirk, placed there to command the easy road from Wales into England by the Vale of Llangollen; but Oswestry was a fortified post and a market town in one. Sometimes it would be attacked; at others, the Welsh resorted to it as the only place where their needs could be supplied. In course of time the requirements of trade broke down the barrier between the two nations, and Oswestry, from being a Saxon outpost where the roving Welshman, when caught, was surely put to death, became itself half Welsh. The results are plain to see, even now. Offa’s Dyke, along almost the whole of its length, still sharply divides the two races, and only in the immediate neighbourhood of Oswestry is the division blurred and indistinct. Here English names and Welsh mingle, and each understands something of the other: even Welsh place-names exist on the English side of the Dyke.

The Civil War of Charles I.’s time was the last occasion of Oswestry being besieged. It was held for the King by a band of Shropshire loyalists who, to render themselves more secure against attack, partly demolished the tower of the church, standing outside the town walls and likely to afford the besiegers a great advantage. But the siege did not last long. A breach was made in the defences, and a youth named Cranage, “enlivened by the Parliamentary generals with wine,” volunteered to go under fire and explode a petard at the Castle gate. The gate was blown in and the garrison surrendered.

After that period the Castle remained in ruins, and the town walls and gates were left to decay. So long ago as 1782 the work of removing the gates was begun, and now not a fragment remains. Of the Castle, once planted on a hilly site in the town, only some shapeless walls in a public garden are left. When the craze for modernising Oswestry began, a hundred and twenty years ago, the market rights still belonged to the Earls of Powis, Lords of the Manor, who were paid “Toll-Thorough” on all goods entering the town, and on the gates being removed to widen the streets, the places where tolls were still payable were marked by carved stones. One of these may be seen in Church Street, on the site of the New Gate that stood until 1782. It occupies an eminently greasy position in the party-wall dividing two butchers’ shops, and bears the words “Toll-Thorough” and the date. The arms of the Earls of Powis are still to be seen, boldly carved on it, but the Corporation purchased the market rights and abolished tolls in 1833.

History of the larger sort had then been done with, but some interesting happenings may be recounted. For example, the Princess Victoria passed through Oswestry with her mother, the Duchess of Kent, on her Welsh tour, _en route_ for Wynnstay, August 4th, 1832—the tour that made King William IV. so indignant. It was “almost a Royal Progress,” he said. Oswestry was a happy town that day. The Princess’s carriage changed horses at the “Wynnstay Arms,” the Honourable Thomas Kenyon presented a copy of the _History of Oswestry_, and everybody cheered. There was at that time a diary-keeping tradesman in the town, a Pepys in his little way, and a most engaging wrestler with the art of spelling. He tells how “Tom Kinaston” (postboy at Knight’s “Wynnstay Arms”) “got drunk and whas turnd from Mr. Knites as Post Boy; alsow a woman kild at Winstay, thear being such a crowd to See the Royal Pursaneags. Oswestry was the seam as a wood from Pentrey Poeth to Betrey St. With rchs across the streets and frunt of the houses all covered with Laurel and ock.”

The “Wynnstay Arms,” mentioned in this amusing account, was the chief inn of coaching days, and remains much the same in appearance. It was once known as the “Cross Foxes,” the two names meaning the same thing, for two foxes, “counter-salient,” as the heralds say, placed back to back, form a prominent feature in the arms of the Wynnes of Wynnstay, the great landowning family of this district.

The Wynne arms are satirically referred to by Gwillim, who says: “They are not unlike Samson’s foxes that were tied together by the tails, and yet these two agree; they came into the field like two enemies, but they meant nothing like fighting, and therefore pass by each other, like two crafty lawyers which come to the Bar as if they meant to fall out deadly about their clients’ cause; but when they have done, and their clients’ purses are well spunged, they are better friends than ever they were, and laugh at those geese that will not believe them to be foxes till they, too late, find themselves fox-bitten.”

Another charge in the old coat of the Wynnes is a spread eagle, referred to in the proud motto of the family: “Eryr Eryrod Eryri” = “The Eagle of the eagles of North Wales.”

Much might be said of the Wynnes, if one had a mind to it, for each succeeding Sir Watkin has been a species of Providence to the district, from Oswestry to Llangollen, and many of them great sporting figures in North Wales. One of that long line has put upon record his method of conveying his rents to London in days of old. His precautions might well fit the escorting of a convoy through an enemy’s country, and although dealing only with a period covering the close of the eighteenth and the opening of the nineteenth century, read like a mediæval romance.

First of all, the “fourgon,” as he styles his carriage, was thoroughly overhauled, so that no defects might remain to cause a breakdown on the long and arduous four or five days’ journey. Then the iron bullet-proof lining of the carriage was examined, and four of his most muscular gamekeepers selected to accompany him. All at last being ready, two keepers were seated on the box, each provided with a double-barrelled gun, and two others, similarly armed, in the dickey. Sir Watkin would personally superintend the loading of the carriage with the products of his rent-roll, and would then take his seat, accompanied by his land-bailiff. After a day’s journey of between forty and fifty miles, the coach would be drawn up at some hostelry well known to Sir Watkin, and the treasure guarded throughout the night by two of the keepers and by the two carriage-dogs which had trotted beneath the equipage all day. With such precautions, it is not altogether remarkable that the worthy Baronet’s fortress on wheels was never attacked.

Carriage dogs—Dalmatian hounds or “plum-pudding” dogs—are not so fashionable as they were. Until recent years they were often to be seen trotting at an even pace under the carriages of the aristocracy and the wealthy during the London season, and were almost wholly kept for the sake of style and display. They were then, apart from being somewhat companionable and soothing to the nerves of restive horses, wholly useless; but—just as the waist-belt of a groom is the now meaningless survival of the necessary belt by which ladies riding pillion on horseback in the old days clung to the horseman—they had originally a very good reason for existence. Carriage dogs, in fact, date from more than two centuries ago, when families, travelling in their “chariots” between their country and their town houses, and often carrying great store of valuables with them, were always accompanied by these dogs, whose especial business was by no means comprised solely in keeping pace with the equipage. Indeed, the serious part of their profession only began when the wayside inn was reached, and the carriage put up in the coach-house. Throughout the night they kept watch and ward over their master’s goods; and ill fared the thief, or even the incautious stable-hand, who went near.

XXXI

Modern Oswestry is a place of engineering shops, foundries, and mining interests, and, as the seat of the Cambrian Railway locomotive and carriage works, is busy and prosperous. Not a vestige of its old trade in Welsh flannel remains, for the mills of Lancashire long ago began to produce a cheaper article than the Welsh could make. Very little of old Oswestry is left, and although the streets are still for the most part narrow and crooked, the greater number of the houses are modern. Inns abound in the grimy and slovenly place; a very different state of things from a hundred years ago, when Rowlandson and Wigstead came here and found it “remarkable for having (though rather a large town) the fewest public-houses we ever witnessed.” No one is at all likely to raise that complaint in these times.

The road out of Oswestry passes close by two grassy hills crowned with trees, the original site, according to legend, of the town, and still known as “Old Oswestry.” The Welsh name them, and the ancient entrenchments that ring their summits, “Hen Dinas,” or “Old Fort.” Hidden away behind is Porkington, a historic estate whose real name is Brogyntyn, but thus vulgarised by the invading Saxon certainly as early as the reign of Henry III. Quite recently Lord Harlech, who now owns the estate, has re-adopted the original name, but “Porkington,” after an existence of six hundred years, is not so readily forgotten.

The Great Western Railway crosses the road on the level, three miles out of the town, at Gobowen, on its way to Chester. Gobowen village itself is utterly commonplace, but marks the beginning of one of Telford’s important alterations in setting out a new line of road, in place of the three miles of steep, circuitous, and narrow old road leading from here to the “Bridge Inn” at the crossing of the river Ceiriog. The old road is still in existence, and can be easily explored. It goes off to the left soon after the “Cross Foxes” is passed, beginning where a narrow lane, entered by a turnstile, runs between the “Railway Tavern” and a hideous Wesleyan Chapel: an atrocity in red and yellow brick and blue slates.

Having found the old road, you “dinna turn none,” as the Shropshire country folks say, but go straight ahead, up hill and down dale, along a track that in every rut proclaims “old road,” and “disused” in the grass and rubbish plentiful everywhere along its course. At its further end, where the Ellesmere Canal is crossed, the rotting quays by the waterside are faced by a row of cottages and a little general shop, pushed suddenly into the background, as it were, when those two successive blows of fate—the making of the new road and the coming of the railway—took away both the wayfaring and the canal traffic. It is a picture of bygone prosperity and present ruin as complete as ever drawn of any deserted mining town in California.

The new road is the model of what a road should be; broad, level, and straight. It passes the estate of Belmont, and was indeed cut through a portion of the Park, sold to the Commissioners for the Parliamentary Road in 1820. To the ground sold for this purpose the Lovetts, who owned Belmont, agreed to add, as a gift, the site for a toll-house, afterwards erected and known as Belmont Bar. One condition was attached to this gift: that if within seventy years the toll-house should no longer be required, the ground should revert to the estate. The Shropshire gates were abolished towards the close of 1883, and the toll-house has, therefore, again become private property.

There is not a single dwelling near, or within sight of, that old toll-house, lonely by the wayside at the edge of a dark plantation: and the life of the old man who lives there rent-free on a small weekly allowance must be dull indeed. It would be lonelier and duller still were it not for the tramps, whose footsteps can be heard stealthily crawling round the house and trying the doors and the shuttered windows at all hours of the night. They add a little spice of excitement to life in such a place; but an occupant who had anything to lose would be nervous. One night the old man discovered two navvies and a woman in his garden, preparing to camp out there. As they seemed to be genuine travellers on the way to a job of work, he brought them in, warmed them at his fire, and let them sleep by the hearth. Early in the morning they prepared to go, and made their breakfast before he rose. “God bless you, Daddy!” said the woman as they went, “we’ve left you something”; and he found a pound of sugar, a loaf, and some tea.