The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries Part 13

[Ill.u.s.tration: "CONSIDERING CAP."]

XXIII

And now the road brings us to the borders of Hants. It is no mere pose to a.s.sert that every English county has its own especial characteristics, an unmistakable and easily recognizable individuality: the fact has been so often noted and commented upon that it is fast becoming a truism. But of a county of the size of Hamps.h.i.+re, which ranks eighth in point of size among the forty English divisions, it would be rash to generalize too widely.

One is apt to sum up this county as merely a slightly more gracious, and generous variant of the forbidding downs and uplands of Wilts.h.i.+re, but, although quite three-quarters of the area of Hants is poor, waterless, and inhospitable, yet there are fertile corners, nooks, and valleys, covered with ancient alluvial soil, that yield nothing to any other part of England.

Still, Fuller is a little more than just to Hamps.h.i.+re when he calls it "a happy countrey in the foure elements, if culinary _fire_ in courtesie may pa.s.s for one, with plenty of the best wood for the fuel thereof; most pure and piercing the _aire_ of this shyre; and none in England hath more plenty of clear and fresh rivulets of troutful _water_, not to speak of the friendly sea, conveniently distanced from London. As for the _earth_,"

he continues, "it is both fair and fruitful, and may pa.s.s for an expedient betwixt pleasure and profit, where by mutual consent they are moderately accommodated."

[Sidenote: _HANTS_]

If old Fuller could revisit the scenes to which this description belongs, he would indeed find profit but moderately accommodated, if at all; for as the greater proportion of the soil of Hamps.h.i.+re has always been notoriously poor, so now the farming of it has decayed from the moderately profitable stage to a condition in which the tenant farmer sits down in despair, and the landlord has to meet the changed conditions of the times with heavier reductions of rents than his contemporaries of more fertile counties are called upon to make. And even so, and despite the fifteen and twenty-five per cent. deductions that are constantly being made, innumerable farms have gone, or are going, out of cultivation in Hamps.h.i.+re, whose bare chalk downs and unkindly levels of sand are growing lonelier and more desolate year by year.

But a grateful and profitable feature of Hamps.h.i.+re are the water-meadows that border the fishful streams of the Itchen, the Test, and the Avon.

They merit all the commendation that Fuller gives them, and more; but, so far as the Portsmouth Road is concerned, Hamps.h.i.+re exhibits its most barren, ill-watered, and flinty aspects; from the point where it enters the county, near Liphook, past the chalky excrescence of Butser Hill, through the bare and barren downs of Chalton, to Portsmouth itself.

Cobbett has not very much to say in praise of Hamps.h.i.+re soil, but he found a considerable deal of prosperity within its bounds in his day, when agricultural folk still delved, and rural housewives still kept house in modest fas.h.i.+on. Still! Yes, but already modern luxury and progress had appeared to leaven the homely life of the villager, when that indignant political and social censor was riding about the country and addressing the farmers on the State of Politics, the Price of Wheat, and the advantages of American Stoves.

Cobbett, writing in 1825, was particularly severe upon the farmers of his time, who were changing from the race he had known who sat with their carters and labourers at table; who, with their families, dined at the same board off fat bacon and boiled cabbage as a matter of course. "When the old farm-houses are down," he says, "(and down they must come in time), what a miserable thing the country will be! Those that are now erected are mere painted sh.e.l.ls, with a mistress within who is so stuck-up in a place she calls the _parlour_" (note, by the way, the withering irony of Cobbett's italics), "with, if she have children, the 'young ladies and gentlemen' about her; some showy chairs and a sofa (a _sofa_ by all means); half-a-dozen prints in gilt frames hanging up; some swinging bookshelves with novels and tracts upon them; a dinner brought in by a girl that is perhaps better 'educated' than she; two or three nick-nacks to eat instead of a piece of bacon and a pudding; the house too neat for a dirty-shoed carter to be allowed to come into; and everything proclaiming to every sensible beholder that there is here a constant anxiety to make a _show_ not warranted by the reality. The children (which is the worst part of it) are all too clever to _work_; they are all to be _gentlefolks_. Go to plough! Good G.o.d! What! 'young gentlemen' go to plough! They become _clerks_, or some skimmy-dish thing or other. They flee from the dirty _work_ as cunning horses do from the bridle. What misery is all this! What a ma.s.s of materials for proclaiming that general and _dreadful convulsion_ that must, first or last, come and blow this funding and jobbing and enslaving and starving system to atoms!"

One only wonders, after reading all this, what Cobbett would have said at this time, when things have advanced another stage towards the millennium; when nick-nackery is abundant in almost every farm-house; when every other farmer's wife has her drawing-room ("parlour," by the way, being vulgar and American), and every farmer's daughter reads,--not tracts, my friend Cobbett,--but novelettes of the pseudo-Society brand.

Hamps.h.i.+re cottages remain practically the same, only the dear, delightful old thatches are gone that afforded pasturage for all sorts of parasitic plants and mosses; harboured earwigs and other insects too numerous to mention, and divided the artist's admiration equally with the rich red tiling of the more pretentious houses.

[Sidenote: _HAMPs.h.i.+RE ARCHITECTURE_]

Hamps.h.i.+re cottage architecture is peculiarly characteristic of the county.

The wayside villages and the scattered hamlets that nestle between the folds of its chalky hills are made up of cottages built with chalk rubble, or with black flints and red brick mixed. The flints being readily obtained, they form by far the greater portion of Hamps.h.i.+re walls; the red brick being used for dressings and for binding the long, flinty expanses together, or occupying the place taken by stone quoins, in counties where building-stone is freely found. Thus, the homely architecture of the greater part of Hants is mean and uninteresting, for black flint is not beautiful and has never been used with good effect in modern times, although in ancient days the mediaeval builders and architects of East Anglia--notably in Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds--contrived some remarkably effective work in this unpromising material. Some old work in the larger Hamps.h.i.+re towns, notably at Hyde Abbey, Winchester, shows an effective use of black flint in squares alternating with squared stone,--a method known as diaper work,--but the elaborate flint panelling of Norfolk and Suffolk is unknown in Hamps.h.i.+re.

And this brings me to Liphook, a roadside village perhaps originally sprung from the near neighbourhood of the old deer-forest of Woolmer, when half-forgotten Saxon and Norman kings and queens, earls and thanes, hunted here and made the echoes resound with the winding of their horns--"made the welkin ring," in fact, as the fine romantic writers of some generations ago said, in that free and fearless way which is, alas! so discredited now-a-days. And this is so much more a pity, because along this old road, upon whose every side the hallooing and the rumour of the hunting-field were wont to be heard so often and so loudly, one could have worked in that phrase about "the welkin" with such fine effect, had it not been altogether so battered and worn-out a literary _cliche_. This it is to be born a hundred years later than Sir Walter Scott!

[Sidenote: _FOREST FIRES_]

The Royal Forest of Woolmer lies partly in this parish. It is a tract of land about seven miles in length by two and a half in breadth, running nearly north and south. In the days of William and Mary the punishments of whipping and confinement in a house of correction were awarded to all them that should "burn on any waste land, between Candlemas and Midsummer, any grig, ling, heath, and furze, goss or fern"; yet in this forest, about March or April, according to the dryness of the season, such vast heath-fires were lighted up that they frequently became quite unmanageable, and burnt the hedges, woods, and coppices for miles around.

These burnings were defended on the plea that when the old and coa.r.s.e coating of heath was consumed, young and tender growths would spring up and afford excellent browsing for cattle; but where the furze is very large and old, the fire, penetrating to the very roots, burns the ground itself; so that when an old common or ancient underwoods are burnt, nothing is to be seen for hundreds of acres but smother and desolation, the whole extent of the clearance looking like the cinders of an active volcano.

One of these great fires broke out on May 22, 1881, and consumed over 670 acres. It was originated by the keepers of the Aldershot Game Preserving a.s.sociation, for the purpose of obtaining a belt of burnt land around the Forest, to prevent the straying of the pheasants; but the fire, fanned by a wind, grew entirely out of hand and quite uncontrollable. Great damage was occasioned by this outbreak, and the Earl of Selborne's plantations were destroyed, together with those of the vicar, whose very house and stabling had a narrow escape. The Forest was the picture of desolation for a long time afterwards. The oaks were either dead or dying, and the whole district had an inexpressibly blasted and weird appearance.

"I remember," says Gilbert White, of a fire that occurred in his time, "that a gentleman who lives beyond Andover, coming to my house, when he got on the downs between that and Winchester, at twenty-five miles distance, was surprised with much smoke, and a hot smell of fire, and concluded that Alresford was in flames, but when he came to that town, he then had apprehensions for the next village, and so on to the end of his journey."

When the forest was enclosed, in 1858, about one thousand acres were allotted to the Crown.

XXIV

[Sidenote: _LOCAL CELEBRITIES_]

Liphook is the centre of a tract of country thickly settled with "men of light and leading." From Hindhead and Haslemere on one side, to Rake and Petersfield on the other, are the country homes of men well known to fame.

Away towards Haslemere, on the breezy heights of Blackdown, stands the picturesque modern house of Aldworth, the home, in his later years, of Tennyson; and on the very ridge of Hindhead is the obtrusive and still more modern house built by the late Professor Tyndall, with his hideous screens of turf and woodwork, set up by the Professor with the object of s.h.i.+elding his privacy from the curious gaze of the vulgar herd. Near by is a house lately built by Mr. Grant Allen, while Professor Williamson, the well-known professor of chemistry, resides close at hand, and conducts experiments with chemical fertilizers over some forty acres of wilderness and common land, which his care and long-enduring patience have at last made to "blossom like the rose." At Blackmoor, towards Selborne, Sir Roundell Palmer, Q.C., afterwards Lord Chancellor and Earl of Selborne ("the mildest-mannered man that ever helped to pa.s.s a Reform Bill or disestablish a Church"), has created a fine estate out of a waste of furze-bushes and heather; while he had for many years a neighbour at Bramshott in that eminent lawyer, Sir William Erle, who died at the Grange in 1880. Professor Bell, a natural historian after Gilbert White's own heart, and the editor of a scholarly edition of the "Natural History of Selborne," lived for many years at that village, in White's old home, the Wakes; and at Hollycombe, down the road, Sir John Hawkshaw, the well-known engineer and designer of the Victoria Embankment, had a beautiful demesne.

Artists in plenty, including Vicat Cole, R.A., Mr. Birket Foster, and Mr.

J. S. Hodgson, have delighted to make their home where these three counties of Suss.e.x, Surrey, and Hamps.h.i.+re meet; and among literary men, the names of G. P. R. James and of Anthony Trollope occur. Some years ago, one who was familiar with the country-side said, while standing on the tower of Milland new church:--"Within a circle of twelve miles from here there are more brains than within any other country district in England,"

and if we read _quality_ for quant.i.ty, I think he was right.

[Sidenote: _THE 'ROYAL ANCHOR'_]

But if the neighbourhood of Liphook is the favoured home of so many distinguished men of our own time, the annals of that famous old hostelry, the "Royal Anchor," in Liphook village, can boast quite a concourse of royal visitors, from the first dawn of its history until the childhood of Queen Victoria; while as for historic people of less degree (although very great folk indeed in their own way), why, they are to be counted in battalions. In fact, had I time to write it, and you sufficient patience to read, I might readily produce a big book of bigwigs who, posting, or travelling by stage or mail to Portsmouth, have slept over-night under this hospitable roof. As for the royalties, one scarce knows where to begin: indeed, almost every English sovereign within the era of history has had occasion to travel to Portsmouth, and most of them appear to have been lodged at the "Anchor," as it was called before Mr. Peake very rightly, considering the distinguished history of his house, affixed the "Royal" to his old sign.

Records are left of a sovereign as early as the unfortunate Edward II.

having visited Liphook, although we are not told by the meagre chronicles of his remote age whether the King, who came here for sport in his Royal Forest of Woolmer, stayed at an inn, nor, indeed, if there was any early forerunner of the "Anchor" here in those times. Edward VI. pa.s.sed down the road to Cowdray, and Elizabeth, who was always "progressing" about the country, and, like the Irishman, never seemed so much at home as when she was abroad, halted here on her way to that princely seat, and put in a day or so hunting in the Forest.

Beyond the fact that the "Merry Monarch" journeyed to Portsmouth and stayed once at the "Castle" Inn, at Petersfield, we have no details of his hostelries. He was in a hurry when he came thus far, and troubled the Woolmer glades but little at any time. Queen Anne, who, after all, seems rather less of a sportswoman than any other of our Queens, came to Liphook and Woolmer for the express purpose of seeing the red deer whom her remote ancestor, the Conqueror, "loved like a father"; and after her time royal personages came thick and fast, like swallows in summer, and we find them conferring a deathless fame upon the old inn by the feasts they ordered, the pretty things they said, and the number of equipages they hired for the conveyance of themselves and their trains towards the sea-coast. But never was there in the history of the "Anchor" a more august company than that a.s.sembled here in 1815, after Waterloo, when the Prince Regent, journeying to Portsmouth to take part in the rejoicings and the reception of the Allied Sovereigns, entertained at luncheon these crowned heads, together with the d.u.c.h.ess of Oldenburg and Marshal Blucher. Afterwards came William IV., who, when Duke of Clarence and Lord High Admiral, had frequently stayed in the old house and taken his meals in the kitchen, sitting sometimes, with commendable and endearing _bonhomie_, on the edge of the kitchen table, gossiping with the landlord, and eating bread-and-cheese with all the gusto and lack of ceremony of a hungry plough-boy. The last royal personages to stay at the old inn were the d.u.c.h.ess of Kent and the Princess Victoria, who walked in the garden or showed themselves at the windows before the crowds who never failed to obstruct the roads, eager for a glance at their future Queen.

I must confess, however, staunch Tory of the most crusted and mediaeval type though I be, that all this array of sovereigns _in esse_ or _in posse_ seems very dull, and bores me to yawning-point. With the exception of those two royal brothers, George IV. and the Fourth William, they seem not so much beings of flesh and blood as clothes-props and the deadly dull and impersonal frameworks on which were hung so many tinselled dignities and sounding t.i.tles. I turn with a sigh of relief to a much larger and a great deal more interesting cla.s.s of travellers who have found beneath the hospitable roof of the "Royal Anchor" both a hearty welcome and the best of good cheer; travellers who, however much we may like or dislike them, were men of character who did not owe everything to the dignities to which they were born; who, for good or ill, carved their own careers and have left a throbbing and enduring personality behind them, while a king or a queen is usually remembered merely by a Christian name and a Roman numeral.

[Sidenote: _PEPYS_]

The guest-rooms of the "Royal Anchor" are called by regal names, and their t.i.tles of "King," "Queen," "Crown," or "George" are blazoned upon the doors with great pomp and circ.u.mstance; but as I have retired between the sweet-smelling, lavender-scented sheets in one or other of the s.p.a.cious up-stair rooms and have dowsed the glim of my bedroom candle, I have considered with satisfaction not so much that "Farmer George" and his snuffy old _hausfrau_ may have slept here, as that the dearest of old sinners and inconsequent gossips--I name Samuel Pepys--came to Liphook and "lay here" o' nights, in receipt of many conjugal reproaches, I doubt not, for certain gay vagaries, darkly hinted at with many "G.o.d forgive me's,"

in the pages of those confessions which men know by name as "Pepys'

Diary."

Mr. Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty first, and amiable gossip afterwards--although I fancy we generally reverse those t.i.tles to recognition--was among those travellers who have left some sign of their travels along these miles of heaths and open commons--this wildest high-road in all England. Apart from his suburban trip to Putney, we find the diarist chronicling journeys to and from Portsmouth.

On May 4, 1661, he left Petersfield. "Up in the morning," says he, "and took coach, and so to Gilford, where we lay at the 'Red Lyon,' the best inne, and lay in the room where the King lately lay in, where we had time to see the Hospital, built by Archbishop Abbott, and the free schoole, and were civilly treated by the Mayster.

"So to supper and to bed, being very merry about our discourse with the Drawers" (as who should say the Barmen) "concerning the minister of the towne, with a red face and a girdle.

"_5th, Lord's Day._ Mr. Creed and I went to the red-faced Parson's church, and heard a good sermon of him, better than I looked for. Anon we walked into the garden, and there played the fool a great while, trying who of Mr. Creed or I could go best over the edge of an old fountaine well, and I won a quart of sack of him. Then to supper in the banquet-house, and there my wife and I did talk high, she against and I for Mrs. Pierce (that she was a beauty), till we were both angry."

Seven years later, on August 6, 1688, to wit, Mr. Samuel Pepys was called on business to Portsmouth, and Mrs. Pepys determined to go with him, at an hour's notice. You may notice that Pepys says her readiness pleased him, but that would seem to be a shameless want of frankness altogether unusual in that Diary, wherein are set forth the secret thoughts and doings, not altogether creditable to him who set them down so fully and freely.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SAMUEL PEPYS.]

[Sidenote: _WAYFARING_]

He did not travel as an ordinary commoner, being properly mindful of his dignity as Secretary of a Government Department, a dignity, be it observed, which it had been well if he had maintained more constantly before him. Thus he was not a pa.s.senger in the Portsmouth "Machine," which preceded the mail-coaches, but travelled in his own "coach" or "chariot,"

as he variously describes his private carriage. He would probably have fared better, swifter, and more certainly if he had used the public conveyance, but in that case we should have been the poorer by his description of a journey in which his coachman lost his way for some hours in the district between Cobham and Guildford, and the party came late for dinner to the "Red Lion":--

"_August 6th, 1688._ Waked betimes, and my wife at an hour's warning is resolved to go with me; which pleases me, her readiness.... To St. James's to Mr. Wren, to bid him 'G.o.d be with you!' and so over the water to Fox Hall; and then my wife and Deb. took me up, and we away to Gilford, losing our way for three or four miles about Cobham. At Gilford we dined; and I showed them the hospitall there of Bishop Abbot's, and his tomb in the church; which, and all the rest of the tombs there, are kept mighty clean and neat, with curtains before them. So to coach again, and got to Lippook, late over Hindhead, having an old man a guide in the coach with us; but got thither with great fear of being out of our way, it being ten at night. Here good, honest people; and after supper to bed.

"_7th._ To coach, and with a guide to Petersfield. And so," he says, "took coach again back" after dinner, and "came at night to Gilford; where the 'Red Lyon' so full of people, and a wedding, that the master of the house did get us a lodging over the way, at a private house, his landlord's, mighty neat and fine: and there supped; and so" (the usual formula) "to bed."