We often read in romances of the villainous innkeepers of long ago, who were in league with highwaymen, and we generally put those stories down as rather wild and far-fetched illustrations of a bygone age. But there were many such innkeepers in the old road-faring times, and they were the highwaymen’s best sources of information. Such an one was the host of an inn at St. Albans, who in 1718 was associated with Tom Garrett and another “road agent” working the highway between St. Albans and London, in an evil partnership. It is a pity that the sign of this inn is not specified; we should have gazed upon it with interest.

To this inn came one evening a gentleman travelling to London on horseback. The landlord himself helped him up to his bedroom with a weighty portmanteau which promised good plunder, and while his guest was preparing for supper, took the good news of a likely haul to Garrett and his partner, who were staying in the house. A pretty scheme was arranged on the instant, and the landlord, when his guest came downstairs, introduced his two confederates to him in the guise of travellers, also on their way to London the following morning, who would be glad of his company. The unsuspecting stranger, nothing loth to spend an evening in pleasant company, instead of sitting in solitary state, joined the other “travellers” with a good will, and they had a convivial night; setting out the next morning together. When they had reached a lonely part of the road near London Colney, the one covered him with a pistol while the other ransacked his portmanteau, taking all its contents, including a hundred guineas from his person. Then they disappeared down a bye-road.

Our traveller sat mournfully by the roadside for a while, contemplating his empty pack and the reins of his horse, which had been cut by the two partners in crime. It was not long before he arrived at the very just conclusion that the landlord of the inn was a party to this business, and a very pretty little scheme occurred to him by which he saw the possibility of getting his own again. He carefully refilled his portmanteau with stones, and retracing his way to St. Albans, called first at a saddler’s to have his reins mended, and then leaving the horse behind him, went back to the inn. When the rascally landlord saw him return with his baggage as heavy as before, he came to the natural conclusion that his confederates had not robbed the stranger, and cursed them under his breath for a pair of bungling fools. The returned traveller himself confirmed this impression, accounting for his reappearance by telling how an accident had happened to his nag. In the meantime, he said, before starting out again, he must have dinner, and only wished he could have had the pleasure of the company at that meal of the good fellows his host had introduced him to the night before. With much extravagant praise of their good and sociable qualities, he declared that he must really not lose sight of such fine fellows. Did mine host know where they lived in London?

That villainous tapster was quite deceived. He did know the addresses, and gave them. In due course, then, imagine our traveller once more on his way, and finally arriving in town. The next morning he called upon Garrett, in the guise of a “gentleman on important business.” Garrett was still in bed, and could not be seen, having “just returned from a journey in the country.”

To this he replied that it was urgent and important business, and this message brought the highwayman down. The traveller had not come without very potent persuaders to support his demand for his property. The one was a threat to have both highwaymen arrested; the other was a pistol. These inducements were successful, and his hundred guineas found their way back to his pockets, together with a portion of his other property. Then he made a similar call upon the other malefactor, who yielded up the other moiety of the contents of the portmanteau, and (as we are told by the contemporary historian of these things) another hundred guineas. We need not believe in this epic completeness and overflowing measure of justice and retribution. There lurks the eighteenth-century moralist, eager to cross the t’s and dot the i’s of every situation. But there is no reason why, up to that point, the story should not be true.

Before the road was remodelled by Telford, in 1826, the way out of St. Albans was past the “George” and down the steep descent of Romeland and Fishpool Street, through the village of St. Michael’s, and diagonally across a portion of Gorhambury Park, crossing the river Ver at Bow Bridge, at a point one and a half miles from the city, just short of Prae Mill. The present Holyhead Road, starting from the “Red Lion” in the Market Place, was in 1828 an entirely new work. It is described by Telford as a two miles’ length, extending from the “Red Lion” to “Pond Yards,” a spot probably identical with Shefford Mill, half a mile beyond Prae House, the site of the ancient hospital of St. Mary de la PrÉ, or de Pratis (“St. Mary of the Meadows”) originally a retreat for women lepers, founded in 1190, and afterwards a Priory of Benedictine nuns, suppressed by Wolsey in 1528. Priory and mill are alike gone, but Prae House is seen on the left of the road, dwarfed by the embankment with which the roadway is raised securely above danger of flooding from the river Ver.

When the new road was completed, the old route through Gorhambury became private, and the entrance to it is now guarded, in the village of St. Michael’s, by lodge gates. St. Michael’s, now lying on the road to nowhere in particular, remains a sweetly old-world place, and the breakneck descent to it is one of the quaintest corners of St. Albans. Here old houses and quaint signs are the rule, and modern buildings the exception. The “Jackdaw,” the “Cock and Flower Pot,” and many other old names attract attention. Curiosities of the geological sort at St. Michael’s are the huge masses of conglomerate rock, or “pudding-stone,” found here and there in prominent positions, having been dug up at different periods in the neighbourhood. The name of “pudding-stone” is excellently descriptive, the rock consisting entirely of pebbles welded together by some prehistoric force, and resembling, to the imaginative mind, Cyclopean fossilised fragments of some antediluvian plum-pudding, extraordinarily rich in plums.

St. Michael’s Church, standing as it does almost in the centre of the site of old Verulamium, is largely built of Roman tiles. It is of many periods, from Saxon to Scottian and Grimthorpian, and of an extraordinary interest, somewhat blighted by the heavy hand of Sir Gilbert Scott, who “thoroughly restored” it in 1867, and the inconceivably heavier hand of Lord Grimthorpe, who pulled it about shamefully in 1897, utterly demolishing its quaint old rough-cast tower, and building a new one from his own amateur-architect design. The odd architectural details would be ridiculous if they were not pitiful, in view of the really interesting work they replace. One device, in especial, resembles a cycling free-wheel clutch rather than anything known in the whole range of Gothic design.

But greater than any other conceivable interest is the association of the great Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, with Gorhambury and St. Michael’s. Bacon, who in his sixty-five years of life studied law, and rose to be Lord Chancellor, was a sufficiently remarkable man. Not only was he a successful lawyer and a diligent courtier, a philosopher, and the industrious author of essays, historical works, and the Advancement of Learning, but wrote all the plays attributed to Shakespeare, Greene, and Christopher Marlowe, as we are asked by ingenious latter-day discoverers of cryptograms to believe. Nay, not only so, but a rival Columbus on the stormy sea of cryptogamic discovery has even found that Francis was not the son of Nicholas Bacon, but the unacknowledged offspring of Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Leicester! This is startling, and lends an altogether novel interest to the statue of Bacon in the church, and the ruins of old Gorhambury House in the park. “Thus he sat,” runs the inscription beneath the statue, seated in philosophic abstraction in an arm-chair, and truly he looks wise enough for anything; but it was not serious wisdom alone that went towards the construction of Shakespeare’s plays.