Leaving the city of St. Alban, the river Ver is crossed at Prae House, and continues companionable as far as Redbourne, where it disappears in another direction, in deference to the rise on which Redbourne is built. That old coaching village is a veritable jewel of quaintness in the Queen Anne and Georgian sort. Red-brick houses of those reigns, and wayside hostelries with elaborate signs of wrought iron that seem to await the coming of the coaches again, are the chief of Redbourne’s architectural features. Very conspicuous, although but the sign of a humble beer-house, is the pictorial sign of the “Mad Tom.” Painted on a large circular plate of copper, it hangs out from the frontage, displaying a different picture on each of its two sides:—the first showing “Mad Tom in Bedlam,” the second, “Mad Tom at Liberty.” A very old sign, it represents one of those pauper lunatics who, in other ages, were confined in Bethlem Hospital, and who, when sufficiently recovered to be released, were provided with “briefs,” or licences to beg a livelihood. These “Mad Toms,” as they were called, were once familiar figures upon the roads.

In the first picture, Tom is seen in a barred cell, madly clutching his hair: fetters load his arms and legs, and a loaf (a stale one, no doubt) stands on a bracket, and looks anything but appetising. The second scene shows him, gaily attired in white stockings and blue knee-breeches, with a gorgeous red coat and a still more gorgeous turban, walking the road and blowing a trumpet.

The more rural part of Redbourne is quite away from the road, across a wide common traversed by a noble elm avenue. Beyond this, and in a hollow where a quite unsuspected street of ancient cottages is found, the exquisitely picturesque church stands. One may look in vain in the guide-books for any mention of its beauties of colour and quaintness of detail that instantly capture the affections of the artist. Long may the restorer be kept at a proper distance, and the delicate silver-grey hues of the old plastered tower, the crumbling “clunch” stone, the patches of black flint and Roman tile and the unconventional beauty of the sixteenth-century brickwork be suffered to remain untouched.

Redbourne seems to have found favour in the eyes of sturdy Cobbett; but rather on negative than positive grounds, and on account of what it did not possess. “No villainous things of the fir tribe here,” he observes, looking upon the landscape with approval. He missed a point though, at Friar’s Wash, where the recurrent Ver or Verlam is seen to cross the road again, by the “Chequers” inn, where a hilly bye-lane goes off in a north-easterly direction to Flamstead. But doubtless Cobbett missed the name, else we might well have heard him characteristically lashing out, something in this sort: “Friars’ Wash! indeed. Good God, when did friars wash? Everybody knows, or ought to know that they did nothing of the sort, and counted personal uncleanliness as not merely next to godliness, but a constituent part of it. They were as dirty physically as Mr. Pitt and his stock-jobbing and funding, fawning and slavering creatures are morally. Aye! and I tell you, poor down-trodden victims of an arbitrary government,” etc., etc. Something of that kind Cobbett would have written in his Rural Rides. Indeed, the “friars austere, unwashed and unpleasantly yellow,” as they were, by all accounts, might well have resented that naming of the ford as an unwarrantable aspersion upon their well-earned reputation for an ancient and invincible dirtiness.

Flamstead, let it be noted, having originally been Verlamstead, owes its name directly to the river whose valley it overlooks from its hill-top. Its church-tower and characteristic Hertfordshire dwarf extinguisher spire may be glimpsed from the road, crowning a wooded ridge. The succeeding mile on to Markyate Street—the “River Hill improvement,” as it was called—was one of the last pieces of work undertaken in the long series of Holyhead Road alterations, and was cut after 1830. The old road, still visible on the right, goes for the length of a mile as a steep and narrow lane, almost parallel with the improved highway, and falls into it at the beginning of the village of Markyate, as it is shortly named nowadays. The “street” has only of late years been officially dropped by the General Post Office, in response to the request of the inhabitants, to whom, and to strangers having business here, the old address caused considerable trouble and misunderstanding; those not familiar with the place not unnaturally thinking “Markyate Street, Dunstable,” to be a thoroughfare in that town, instead of, as a matter of fact, 4½ miles distant. Markyate is indeed merely a street of houses fringing either side of the road, and what the old coachmen called a “thoroughfare village”; a long street certainly, but nothing else, and realising the Euclidian definition of a line, “length without breadth.” It is an old-world place, drowsily conducting from Hertfordshire into Beds, with too many inns for its present needs, and one—the original “Sun” of coaching days—converted into a laundry and looking with severity upon the house directly opposite, that has assumed its old style and title.

Beyond Markyate, where the land shelves steeply down from the road on the right hand, is the lovely park of Markyate Cell, with a fine old Elizabethan manor-house, turreted, terraced, and with noble clusters of carved brick chimneys, once the site of a nunnery; and in a hollow—the roof of its absurd little Georgian red-brick tower below the road level—the toy-like church of this beautiful domain. The rest of the way to Dunstable is lonely, Kensworth village hidden somewhere in the folds of the hills, and its Post Office only visible. At one mile from Dunstable remains an old toll-house, the first now met with on the journey from London.

It was on this stretch of road, between St. Albans and Hockliffe, that the gay and mercurial highwayman, “Gentleman Harry,” did his last stroke of business, in the spring of 1747. Harry Simms had been highwayman, rover, soldier, sailor on board a man o’ war, and, deserting and setting foot ashore at Bristol, became highwayman again. Having, as himself might have said, thus boxed the compass, his career was fully rounded off, and the only things necessary to complete it were a rope and a hangman. They were nearer than he thought, poor butterfly!

He had been a successful ruffler along the road in all his brief but varied career, and although a man of peace, and never known to enforce his demands for the turning out of pockets with anything worse than an oath and a well-assumed air of truculence, had always enjoyed exceptional fortune. It is scarce necessary to add that his gains were spent as freely as they were made: few highwaymen ever put anything by for a rainy day. On his return home, he amassed so great a store of gold watches, diamonds, and guineas, in so short a time that, had they grown wild in the hedges, he could scarce have gleaned more, or more speedily. “Jam satis,” he exclaimed (for he had been a Cambridge undergrad in his time, and loved a Latin tag) when coming out of Essex into Aldgate with his pockets bursting with gold rings and chains; and, putting up at the “Saracen’s Head,” determined to forswear the road and live cleanly on his accumulated wealth. An incident he had witnessed in the dusk, coming from Snaresbrook to Aldgate, had probably been the inducement to “the quiet life” thus contemplated. At the turnpike gate he had observed a gentleman arrested in mistake for himself!

So, leaving the “Saracen’s Head” early the next morning, he set out on horseback on the long journey to Holyhead, proposing to voyage over to Dublin and there dispose of his plunder. Good resolutions filled his heart: he carolled as he went, in rivalry with the hedge-side warblers, and in this manner left St. Albans behind, and so came into this broad reach of the road near Redbourne. Unhappily for him, he had taken a little too much port at St. Albans, and the port disguised his prudence to that extent that, seeing three horsemen slowly ambling along the highway, he must needs resume his old trade and bid them “stand and deliver!”

“Gentleman Harry” had never been distinguished for his personal courage, and those who dared to disregard him generally found themselves safe enough. The first of the travellers said he would not be robbed, and rode on; the second gave our friend a slash over the head with his riding-whip; and all three went their way. “Blood and wounds!” thought Simms, the wine fermenting in his brain; “shall I be scorned thus? Never!” And, in a drunken fury, he titupped after them, and really did secure a delivery. From one he received nine shillings, from another an old watch and seven shillings, and from the third two guineas and seventeen shillings.

Other spoil fell to him on the way, and when the Warrington stage hove in sight, he held it up with dramatic completeness and much financial success, spurring on to Dunstable in a tumult of port and professional pride. At the “Bull” he called for brandy, and had but raised the glass to his lips when the robbed coach came lumbering in, and the passengers entered the room where he was. How he rushed out, and, mounting his horse, dashed away, he never knew; but presently found himself at Hockliffe, where, in the kitchen of the “Star,” with more brandy at his elbow, he fell into a drunken stupor by the fire.

The whole district was, however, aroused, and the road being searched while he lay in that condition. Three soldiers traced him to the “Star,” and he awoke to find himself covered by their pistols. To them he yielded all his varied wealth, with the exception of a few trifles hidden in his neckcloth, and then staggered up to bed with the troopers at his heels. There they watched him all night.

He was, as he says in his last account and confession of a wild career, “a good deal chagrined” at this. How to escape? He thought of a plan. Throwing the few remaining trinkets suddenly in the fire, the soldiers, as he had expected, made a dash to save them, while he pounced upon the pistols. He seized a couple, and, standing at the door, desperately pulled the triggers. The soldiers would probably have been sent to Kingdom Come but for the trifling circumstance that the weapons missed fire. It was a mishap that cost Simms his life, for he was quickly seized and more vigilantly guarded, and, when morning dawned, taken up to London on the road he had so blithely travelled the day before. One more journey followed—to Tyburn, where they hanged him in the following June.

The pilgrim of the roads who looks for the “Bull” at Dunstable, or the “Star” at Hockliffe, will not find those signs: the shrines of the saints and the haunts of the highwaymen are alike the food of ravenous Time.