Who shall say certainly how or when the phrase “Downright Dunstahle” first arose, or what it originally meant. Not the present historian, who merely sucks his wisdom from local legends as he goes. And when it happens, as not infrequently is the case, they have no agreement, but lead the questing toiler after truth into culs-de-sac of falsehoods and blind-alleys and mazes of contradictions, the labour were surely as profitless as the mediÆval search for the Philosopher’s Stone. Briefly, then, “Downright Dunstable” is a figurative expression for either or both of two things: a state of helpless intoxication, or for that kind of candid speech often called “brutal frankness.” At any rate, it is ill questing at Dunstable for light on the subject, and it is quite within the usual run of things to find the old saying unknown nowadays in the place that gave it birth.

There is no evidence in the long broad street of Dunstable town of the age and ancient importance of the place. It looks entirely modern, and the Priory church is hidden away on the right. When—in the course of a century or so—the young limes, sycamores, and chestnuts, planted on either side of that main thoroughfare, have grown to maturity, the view coming into Dunstable from London will be a noble one. At present it is merely neat and cheerful.

No mention is made of Dunstable in Doomsday Book. When that work was compiled, the old Roman station of DurocobrivÆ, occupied in turn by the Saxons and burnt to the ground by marauding Danes, lay in a heap of blackened ruins, the only living creatures in the neighbourhood the fierce robbers who lay wait for travellers at this ancient crossing of the Watling and the Icknield Streets. If any of the surveyors who took notes for the making of Doomsday Book were so rash as to come here for that purpose, certainly they must have perished in the doing. At that period and until the beginning of Henry I.’s reign the road was bordered by dense woodlands, affording a safe hiding-place for malefactors, chief among whom, according to an absurd monkish legend, purporting to account for the place-name, was a robber named Dun. The ruined town and the impenetrable thickets were known, they said, as “Dun’s Stable.”

The first step towards reclaiming the road and the ruins from anarchy and violence was the clearing of these woods. This was followed by the building of a house—probably a hunting-lodge—for the King, and the founding of the once powerful and stately Priory of Dunstable, portions of whose noble church remain to day as the parish church of the town. To the Augustine priors the town and its market rights were given, and the place, new-risen from its ashes, throve under the combined patronage of Church and State. Whatever the religious merits of those old monks may have been, certainly they were business men, stock-raisers, and wool-growers of the first order. Their flocks and herds covered those downs that remain much the same now as eight hundred years ago, and their Dunstable wool was prized as the best in the kingdom. But these business-like monks were not altogether loved by the townsfolk, who resented the taxes laid upon them by the Church, all-powerful here in those days. It seemed to men unjust that fat priors and their crew should command the best of both worlds: should wield the keys of heaven and take heavy toll of goods in the market. The townsfolk, indeed, in 1229 made a bold stand, and protesting that they “would sooner go to hell than be taxed,” vainly attempted to form a new settlement outside the town. The sole results were that they were taxed rather more heavily than before, and ecclesiastically cursed. To detail here the grandeur and the pride of that great Priory would be to halt too long on the way. All who had, in those ancient times, any business along this great road were entertained by the Prior. The common herd in those early days were entertained at the guest house, a building facing the main road, on a site now occupied by a house called “The Priory.” King John in 1202 had given his hunting-lodge to the Priory, and from that time onward Kings and Queens were lodged in the Priory itself. Here rested—the next halting-place from Stony Stratford the body of Queen Eleanor on the way to Westminster, in 1290; and one of the long series of Eleanor crosses remained in the market-place until 1643, when it was destroyed by the Parliamentary troops. In the Lady Chapel (long since swept away) of the Priory Church, Cranmer promulgated the divorce of Henry VIII. and Katherine of Arragon. Two years later, the Priory itself was dissolved. At first it seemed likely that Dunstable would be made the seat of a Bishop and the great church erected to the dignity of a Cathedral, but the project came to nothing, and the sole remaining portions of the old buildings are the nave and the west front. Presbytery, choir, transepts, lady chapel, and aisles were torn down. The aisles and east end of the church are modern, the nave a majestic example of Norman architecture, and the west front a curiously picturesque mass of Transitional Norman, Early English, and Perpendicular, worthy the dexterous pencil of a Prout.

The spoliation of the Priory Church was a long but thorough process. Many of its carved stones are worked into houses and walls in and around the town, but it was left for modern times to complete the vandalism; when, for example, great numbers of decorative pillars and capitals were discovered, some put to use to form an “ornamental rockery” in a neighbouring garden, the remaining cartloads taken to a secluded spot in the downs and buried; when the stone coffin of a prior was sold for use as a horse-trough and afterwards broken up for road-metal; when a rector could find it possible to destroy a holy-water stoup, the old font could be thrown away, and the pulpit sold to a publican for the decoration of a tea-garden. Among other objects that have disappeared in modern times is the life-size effigy of St. Fredemund, the sole remaining portion of his shrine. Fredemund was a son of King Offa. His body had been brought hither in ancient times, on the way to Canterbury, but was, by some miraculous interposition, prevented from leaving Dunstable. No miracle saved his statue. The ancient sanctus bell of the church, inscribed “Ave Maria, gracia plena,” hangs on the wall of the modern town-hall.

“Dunstable,” says Ogilby, writing in 1675, “is full of Inns for Accommodation, and noted for good Larks.” This would seem to hint at an unwonted sprightliness in the hostelries and town of Dunstable, were it not that larks bore but one signification in Ogilby’s day. Slang had not then stepped in to give the word a double meaning. Of the notable old inns of Dunstable the “Sugarloaf” remains, roomy and staid, reprobating unseemliness. Larks, like Dunstable wool in still older days, and straw-plaiting in more recent times, no longer render the town notable. Straw-plaiting and hat-making are, it is true, yet carried on, but the industry is a depressed one. A greater feature, perhaps, is seen in the extensive printing works established here in recent years by the great London firm of Waterlow & Sons.