Along this road comes daily and all day a varied procession of tramps. The traveller looks down upon them from this eyrie with wonderment and dismay; the cottagers, the householders and gardeners hereabouts, see them pass with less surprise and additional misgivings, for their gardens, their hen-roosts, clothes-lines and orchards pay tribute to these Ishmaelites to whom the rights of property are but imperfectly known.
This is why the gates and doors along the Dover Road are so uniformly and resolutely barred, bolted, chained, and padlocked; for these reasons ferocious dogs roam amid the suburban pleasances, and turn red eyes and foaming mouths toward one who leans across garden-gates to admire the flowers with which the fertile soil of Kent has so liberally spangled every cultivated spot; and to them is due the murderous-looking garnishment of jagged and broken glass with which every wall-top is armed.
There is, indeed, no road to equal the Dover Road for thieves, tramps, cadgers, and miscellaneous vagrants, either for number or depravity.
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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, [Pg 42] 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 the winter months are fleeted in progresses from one casual ward to another in the numerous unions along the road.
Phenomenally ragged, bronzed by the sun, unshaven, unshorn, they are met, men, women, and children alike, at every turn, for many miles, especially between Southwark and Canterbury. Whole families on the tramp are to be met with between these places, and long vistas of them are gained along any particularly straight piece of road.
They are everything that is dirty and horrible, but they are perfectly happy and quite irreclaimable, many of them being hereditary tramps. Philanthropic societies inquire into the tramp; classify him, endeavour to cleanse him and restore him to some place in society, but all to no purpose. He is quite satisfied with himself; he likes dirt, and dislikes nothing so much as either moral or physical cleansing.
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That is one reason why he seeks the shelter of the casual ward only as a last resource. He has to undergo a bath there, and feels as chilly when his top-dressing of grime is removed as you and I would be were we turned naked into the streets. To reform your tramp it would be essential to snare him at a very early age indeed, and, even then, I am not sure but that his natural traits would break out suddenly, like those of any other wild beast kept in captivity.
The truth is, tramping is a very old profession, and hereditary in a degree very few good people imagine. The argot and the sign-language of the road are not difficult to acquire by those who have observant eyes and ears to hearken, but, like all languages, they are ever changing, and the accepted signs of yesteryear are constantly superseded by newer symbols. Little do the country-folk understand the significance of the chalk-marks on their gates and walls.
It may safely be said that the tramp is not grateful. He is, indeed, altruistic, but his altruism he saves for his kind, and he exhibits it in the danger-signals he chalks up in places the brotherhood wot of. There are degrees of danger, as of luck. Some good-hearted people become soured by many calls on their generosity, and one can readily understand even the mildest-mannered of elderly ladies becoming restive when the sixth tramp appears at the close of the day. Sure of being quodded. 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 small , the shade of it falls across the green and into the next field. To Bell Grove, then, succeeds Welling, and Welling is a quite uninteresting and shabby hamlet fringing the road, ten-and-a-quarter miles from London Bridge. The new suburban railway from London to Bexley Heath crosses the road, and has a station—a waste of sand, stones, and white palings—here.
Indeed, I seem to see in this the [Pg 45] irresponsible frivolity of the guards and coachmen of the Dover Mail. Why, the thing reeks of coaching wit, and how Hasted, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, could have included in his monumental work which took him forty years to write so obvious a witticism, is beyond my comprehension. Shall I be considered pedantic if I point out that the place-name, with its termination ing , carries with it evidence of being as old as Saxon times, and denotes that here was the settlement of an ancient tribe, or patriarchial family, the Wellings?
I will dare the deed and record the fact, remarking, meanwhile, that if other county historians were as little learned as Hasted, and equally speculative, they would seem more human, and their deadly tomes become much more entertaining. Half a mile onward, and then begins Bexley Heath. The old village of Bexley lies a mile and a half to the right of the road, and is as rural, peaceful, and pleasant as Bexley Heath is mean and wretched. Between here and the village lies Hall Place, a Tudor mansion of great size and stately architecture, largely distinguished for its chequer-board patterning of flint and stone.
The Tudor flint-and-stone building we now see was built by Sir Justinian Champneis, a Lord Mayor of London, towards the middle of the sixteenth century. In less than a hundred years the Champneis [Pg 46] were succeeded by the Austens, who made alterations, until , when it passed to Sir Francis Dashwood, in whose family it yet remains. In the neighbourhood of Bexley Heath, and also at Crayford and places beside the Thames near Dartford are some singular shafts of unknown age or purpose, sunk into the soil, frequently to a depth of a hundred feet, through the chalk of which this district chiefly consists.
Antiquaries have a theory that these singular pits were sunk by our neolithic forbears in search of flints. The antiquaries, however, are most probably wrong, because flints were to be found readily enough by the men of the Stone Age, without going to the trouble of mining for them; and no one has yet arisen to show that neolithic man was more likely than we, his descendants, to give himself unnecessary labour.
These remarkable pits commence with a trumpet-shaped orifice which immediately contracts into a narrow shaft, broadening at the bottom into a bulb-like chamber, not unremotely resembling in shape the tube and bulb of a thermometer. 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 then a nondescript bend of the road which brings one presently into Crayford, fifteen miles from London. Antiquaries are divided in opinion over the ancient history of Crayford. While some incline to the belief that it is the site of the Roman Noviomagus, others are prone to select Keston Common as the locality of that shadowy camp and city. The question will probably never be settled beyond a doubt, but the weight of evidence is strong in favour of Keston Common, eight miles away to the south-west.
Here still exist the traces of great earthworks, covering a space of a hundred acres, while numerous finds of Roman coins and pottery have been made from time to time. At Crayford, on the other hand, the only presumptive evidence is to be found in this having been that old Roman military way, Watling Street, and, in the very slender thread of allusion to the name of Noviomagus, supposed, on the authority of Hasted, to be extant in the title of the half-forgotten manor of Newbury.
But, however vague may be the connection between Noviomagus and Crayford, certain it is that here, in , was fought that tremendous battle between the Saxons under Hengist, and the Britons commanded by Vortigern, a conflict in which four thousand of the Romanised Britons were slain. It was in that [Pg 48] Hengist and Horsa, brother-chiefs [1] of the Jutish-Saxons, landed at Ebbsfleet, in Thanet, at the invitation of Vortigern, who sought their aid against the Picts and the Sea-rovers.
They came in three ships, and their original force could scarcely have numbered more than five hundred men. But, having warred for the Britons, and fought side by side with them against the Scots, they soon perceived how defenceless was the land. Pretexts for a quarrel were readily found, and, through the mists that hang about the scanty records of that time, we hear first of the Battle of Aylesford, fought in , in which the Britons experienced their first great defeat. Here, though, Horsa was slain, and to Hengist, with his son Esc, was left the foundation of the Saxon kingdom of Kent.
The Battle of Crayford for a time left all this fertile corner of England to the Saxons. Eight years later, the work of Aurelius began to be undone, and in another eight years the veteran Hengist and his son had completed the foundation of their kingdom. He lived respected as a pious and mirthful man, and died on his way to church, to assist at a wedding, on the 31st of March, , aged The inhabitants of Crayford have raised this stone to his cheerful memory, and as a token of his long and faithful services.
The life of this Clerk was just three-score and ten, Nearly half of which time he chaunted Amen. In his youth he was married, like other young men; But his wife died one day, so he chaunted Amen. A second he married—she departed—what then? He married and buried a third, with Amen. Thus, his joys and his sorrows were treble; but then His voice was deep bass as he sung out Amen. On the horn he could blow, as well as most men So his horn was exalted in sounding Amen.
But he lost all his wind after three-score and ten And here, with three wives, he waits, till again The trumpet shall rouse him to sing out Amen. The distance between Crayford and Dartford is but two miles, past White Hill; and all the way are fruit [Pg 50] gardens, tramps, and odious little terraces of brick cottages with tiny gardens in front, whose brilliant, old-fashioned flowers—sweet-williams, marigolds, and polyanthuses—put to shame these wretched efforts of the builder. This wayside pillar marks at once the limits of the London Police District, and the boundary of the area affected by the London Coal and Wine Duties Continuance Act of The City of London has been entitled from time immemorial to levy dues on all coal entering the metropolis, and this privilege, regulated from time to time, was abolished only in Two separate duties of twelve pence and one penny per ton were confirmed by this act and authorised to be levied upon coals, culm, and cinders; while the acts dating from , imposing a tax of four shillings per tun on all kinds of wine were at the same time confirmed and renewed, and the radius made identical with the London police jurisdiction, instead of the former limit of twenty miles.
These boundary marks were ordered to be set up on turnpike and public roads, beside canals, inland navigations, and railways, and are frequently encountered by the cyclist and pedestrian, to whom their purpose is not a little mysterious. By far the greater part of these amounts was, of course, collected on the railways and in the port of London.
Originally imposed for the maintenance of London orphans, the wine dues became, like the coal duties, great sources of income, by which many notable London improvements, among them the Victoria Embankment, have been carried out. 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.
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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. What induced that man of gold and jewels and precious stones he was jeweller to Her Majesty to take up paper-making, I do not know; but he made a very good thing of it, commercially speaking, and no wonder, when he had sole license during ten years for collecting rags for making his paper withal.
Besides introducing the manufacture of paper, Sir John Spielman added the lime-tree to our parks and gardens, for he brought over with him from his native place, Lindau, in Germany, two slips from some unter den linden or another, and planted them in front of his Dartford home, where they flourished and became the progenitors of all the limes in England.
The strange heraldic coat-of-arms of Spielman will be noticed. It is, and looks, German, and is of an extravagant nature that would utterly discompose an English herald. The crest is: a savage, wreathed about the temples and loins with ivy. Motto: Arte et fortuna. The epitaph is in German. In he married again, and deceased in , leaving by the second wife three sons and one daughter. The fortunes of the Spielmans were short-lived. His second wife was living in , but seems to have had little interest in the business, which about was in possession of a Mr.
The Spielman paper mill stood where the gas-mantle factory of Curtis and Harvey is now found. There is a curious sundial actually in the church; oddly placed on a stone foundation on the splayed sill of the south-east window. It is dated , and records the hours only from 2 p.
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A brass to John Donkin shows him with head and shoulders. The inscription states it was placed here because it was not considered proper that one [Pg 54] who had placed ancient men and times on record should himself be forgotten. We may be thankful that Spielman did no more to the church, for, had he rebuilt it, we should have lost one of the finest and most picturesque churches on the Dover Road, whose tall tower, severely unornamental, with clock oddly placed on one side, is such a prominent feature of Dartford.
Gundulf, that famous architect-bishop of Rochester, to whom Rochester Keep, Dover Castle, the White Tower of the Tower of London, portions of Rochester Cathedral, and a number of other buildings, civil, ecclesiastical and military, are ascribed with more or less show of authority, is supposed to have built Dartford tower, not so much for religious as for defensive uses. It therefore guarded [Pg 55] the passage until the neighbouring hermit, who lived in a fine damp cell by the riverside, succeeded in collecting enough money wherewith to build a bridge whose successor forms an excellent leaning-stock on Sundays to the British workman waiting anxiously for the public-houses to open.
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There is in the church a small thirteenth century lancet window in the west end wall of the north aisle, which is pointed out as the window of the cell occupied by the hermit who tended the ford. It commanded the road; and no doubt the hermit was often knocked up at night by travellers desiring to be guided over the river. The ford was not superseded until , when the first bridge was built. This remained until the present bridge replaced it, in On that occasion, the churchyard on the south side of the church was curtailed, for widening the road, and an angle of the church itself was in shaved off for the footpath, as can be seen to this day.
The old inns of Dartford are very numerous. The courtyard is now roofed-in with glass, and the little bedrooms behind the carved balusters of the gallery are largely given up to spiders and lumber. But, fortunately for those who care to see what an old galleried inn was like, the changes here have consisted only of additions instead, as is only too usual, of destruction. It is here, though, that the effigy of a great black bull may be seen, reared up [Pg 56] aloft in a place between the constellations and the beasts of the field.
He was by no means a distinguished person, but what he has to say of his travels is interesting, as contributing to show how others see us. He came into England by way of the Thames, May 31, , and landed he says just below Dartford—probably at Greenhithe—to which place he walked in company with some others, and there breakfasted. He was fresh from the dreary, sandy Mark of Brandenburg, and this fair county of Kent delighted him hugely.
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At Dartford he saw, for the first time, an English soldier.