Ike over THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Digitized by tlie Internet Arcliive in 2007 witli funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation littp://www.arcliive.org/details/doverroadannalsoOOIiarpiala THE DOVER ROAD HISTORIES OF THE ROADS — BY — Charles G. Harper. THE BRIGHTON ROAD : The Classic Highway to the South. THE GREAT NORTH ROAD : London to York. THE GREAT NORTH ROAD : York to Edinburgh. THE DOVER ROAD : Annals of an Ancient Turnpike. THE BATH ROAD : History, Fashion and Frivolity on an old Highway. THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD : London to Manchester. THE MANCHESTER ROAD : Manchester to Glasgow. THE HOLYHEAD ROAD : London to Birming- ham. THE HOLYHEAD ROAD : Birmingham to Holyhead. THE HASTINGS ROAD : And The " Happy Springs of Tvmhridge." THE OXFORD. GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD : London to Gloucester. THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD HAVEN ROAD • Gloucester to Milford Haven. THE NORWICH ROAD An East AnprUan Highway. THE NEWMARKET, BURY, THETFORD AND CROMER ROAD. THE EXETER ROAD : The West of England Highway. THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD. THE CAMBRIDGE, KING'S LYNN AND ELY ROAD. MERCERY LANE, CANTERBURY. The DOVER ROAD Annals of an Ancient Turnpike By CHARLES G. HARPER Illustrated by the Author and from Old Prints and Portraits London : CECIL PALMER Oakley House, Bloomsburv Street, W.C. i t)/)400 1 ^xx First Published 1895. Second and Revised. Edition 1922. Printed in Great Britain by C. Tinling & Co. Ltd. 53, Victoria Street, Liverpool, and at London and Prescot. /T has been said, hy whom I know not, that " prefaces to hooks are like signs to public-houses ; they are intended to give one an idea of the kind of enter- tainment to be found within." But this preface is not to he like those ; foi' it xvould 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, touched at every point. The Dover Road—the highway between London and that most significant of approaches to the Continent of PREFACE Europe—would have been something much more in its mere name had it not been for the accident of London : one of the greatest accidents. It would have been considered a part of the great road to Chester and to Holyhead : the route diagonally across England, from sea to sea, which really in the first instance it was. For the Dover Road is actually the initial limb of the Wailing Street : that prehistoric British trackway adopted by the Romans and by them, engineered into a road ; and it would seem that those Roman engineers, instructed by the Imperial authorities, considered rather the military and strategic needs of those times than those of LoNDiNiUM ; for London was not on the direct road they made ; and it was only at a later date, when it was grown commercially, they constructed an alternative route that served it. It would be rash to declare that more history has been enacted on this road than on any other, although we may .suspect it ; hut certainly history is more spectacular along these fniles. Those pageants and glittering processions are of the past : they ended in 1840, when railways were about to supplant the road ; when the last distinguished traveller along these miles. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, came up by carriage to wed Queen Victoria. CHARLES G. HARPER. February, 1922. — THE ROAD TO D0VP:R London Bridge (Surrey side) to MILES Borough (St. George's Churcli) Kent Street Newington (" Bricklayers' Arms New Cross . Deptford . Blackheatli Shooter's Hill Shoulder of Mutton Green Belle Grove Welling Crook Log . Bexley Heath Crayford (Cross River Cray) Dartford (Cross River Darent) John's Hole Horn's Cross Greenhithe Northfleet . Gravesend (Jubilee Tower) Milton Chalk Street Gad's Hill (" Falstaff " Inn) Strood (Cross River Medway) Rochester (Guildhall) . Chatham (Town Pier) . Rainham .... — THE DOVER ROAD London Bridge (Surrey Side) to MILES Moor Street 34^ Newington .... 36i Key Street 88 Chalk Well 39 Sittingbourne (Parish Church) 40 Bapchild .... 41i Radfield .... 41i Green Street 42i Ospringe .... 45i Preston 46i Boughtqn-under-BIean 49 Boughton Hill 50 Dunkirk .... 51J Harbledown 54 Canterbury (Cross River Stour) 55i Gutteridge Gate . 67 Bridge (Cross River Stour) . 58i Halfway House . 62f Lydden .... 65f Temple Ewell 67i Buckland .... 69 Dover ..... 70i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Mercery Lane, Canterbury . Frontispiece South Gateway, Old London Bridge . 6 " The George " . 7 Old Telegraph Tower, Tooley Street . 10 The " Spur " Inn .... 15 Saturday Night in the Old Kent Road 21 Greenwich Observatory . 26 Arms of Spielman and his first wife . 52 Dartford Church .... 54 The " Bull " Inn, Dartford 56 Dartford Bridge 59 Riverside, Gravesend 69 Denton Chapel 80 Joe Gargery's Forge 81 Ancient Carving—Chalk 82 Sailors' Folly . 83 Jack come home again 84 The Light Fantastic. Bank Holiday at Chalk 85 Gad's Hill Place. Residence of Charles Dickens 92 The " Falstaff," Gad's Hill 94 A Good Samaritan ..... 111 Rochester Castle and the Medway 116 High Street, Rochester : Eastgate House . 122 Jack in his Glory ..... 123 THE DOVER ROAD PAGE The Invasion of England : England . 127 The Invasion of England : France . 131 Paid off at Chatham .... 135 Key Street ....... 148 Yard of the " Lion " Hotel, Sittingbourne 160 Ospringe : a June hop-garden . 167 " Sir William Courtenay "... 177 "Courtenay" 180 Westgate, Canterbury . 190 The Due de Nivernais .... 193 The Black Prince's Arziis and Badge 205 " " A Gorgeous Creature . 215 William Clements ..... 216 Bridge ....... 218 " " Old England's Hole . 223 Barham Downs ..... 227 Watling Street : Moonrise 231 Floods at Alkham : The Drellingore Stream 239 St. Radigund's Abbey .... 241 Dover Castle, from the Folkestone Road : SunriseI 251 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 keep his courage warm, yet, for all his outward show of indifference, he keeps an awed glance upon the shadows that beset his path, and is prepared to take to his heels at any moment. And see what portentous shadows crowd the long reaches of the Dover Road, and demand attention ! Caesar's presence haunts the weird plateau of Barham Downs, and the alert imagination hears the tramp of the legionaries along Watling Street on moonlit - 2 THE DOVER ROAD nights. Shades of Britons, Saxons, Danes, and Normans people the streets of the old towns through which the highway takes its course, or crowd in warlike array upon the hillsides. Kings and queens, nobles, saints of different degrees of sanctity, great blackguards of every degree of blackguardism, and ecclesiastics holy, haughty, proud, or pitiful, rise up before one and terrify with thoughts of the space the record of their doings would occupy ; in fine, the wraiths and phantoms of nigh upon two thousand years combine to intimidate the historian. How rich, then, the road in material, and how embarrassing the accumulated wealth of twenty centuries, and how impossible, too, to do it the barest justice in this one volume ! Many volumes and bulky should go toward the telling of this story ; and for the pro23er presentation of its pageantry, for the due setting forth of the lives of high and low, rich or poor, upon these seventy miles of highway, the rugged wrought periods of Carlyle, the fateful march of Thomas Hardy's rustic tragedies, the sly humour and the felicitous phrases of a Stevenson, should be added to the whimsical drolleries of Tom Ingoldsby. To these add the lucid arrangement of a Macaulay shorn of rhetorical redundancies, and, with space to command one might hope to give a glowing word-portraiture of the Dover Road ; while, with the aid of pictorial genius like that possessed by those masters of their art, Morland and Rowlandson, illustrations might be fashioned that would shadow forth the life and scenery of the wayside to the admiration of all. Without these gifts of the gods, who shall say he has done all this subject demands, nor how sufficiently narrate within the compass of these covers the doings of sixty generations ? The Dover Road, then, to make a beginning with our journey, is measured from the south side of London Bridge, and is seventy and three-quarters of a mile long. THE COACHES 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- travelUng, we should have booked seats in Mr. Benjamin Worthy Home'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 an hour the time of any other coach then running on this road. If, on the other hand, we objected to night travel, we should have had to sacrifice that half-hour, and go by either the " Express," which, starting from the " Golden Cross," Charing Cross, at 10 a.m. every morning, did the journey in nine hours ; or else by the " Union " coach, which, travelling at an equal speed, left the " W'hite Bear," Piccadilly, at 9 a.m.