Retracing our steps to the Holyhead Road again, the “dumpling hills of Northamptonshire,” as Horace Walpole calls them, give place to the long Warwickshire levels. Four miles and a half from Daventry, and just before reaching Willoughby village, lying off the road, the Great Central Railway comes from Rugby, and crosses over on an embankment and a blue-brick-and-iron-girder bridge; a station labelled “Willoughby, for Daventry,” looking up and down the road. Does any one, it may be asked, ever alight for Daventry in this solitary road, four miles and a half distant from that town, on the inducement of that notice? And when the innocent traveller has thus alighted, what does he say when he gets his bearings, and finds himself thus marooned, far away from where he would be?

Possibly he resorts, after being thus scurvily tricked by the railway company, to the “Four Crosses” Inn, a house with a history, standing close by. The old inn of that name, demolished in 1898, faced the bye-road to Willoughby village; the new building fronts the highway. The junction of roads at this point has only three arms, hence the original sign of the “Three Crosses,” changed to four, according to the received story, at the suggestion of Dean Swift, who was a frequent traveller along this road between Dublin and London, riding horseback, with one attendant. The old inn, hardly more than a wayside pot-house, was scarce a fit stopping place for that dignitary; but it is well known that Swift delighted in such places and the odd society to be met in them, and it may have been in some ways more convenient than the usual posting-houses at Daventry and Dunchurch.

The story runs that on one of his journeys, anxious for breakfast and to be off, he could not hurry the landlady, who tartly told him “he must wait, like other people.” He waited, of necessity, but employed the time in writing with his diamond ring upon one of the panes:—

The landlord probably did not hang up his wife, but he certainly seems to have altered his sign.

The window-pane disappeared from the old inn very soon afterwards, and it is not at all unlikely that the landlady herself saw to it being removed. Certainly it had disappeared in 1819, when some verses in the Gentlemen’s Magazine gave the misquotation of those lines that has been the basis of every incorrect rendering since then. Many years ago the late Mr. Cropper, of Rugby, who was a native of Willoughby, and whose father had kept the “Four Crosses,” purchased the pane of a cottager in the village. It is of the old diamond shape, of green glass, and bears the words quoted above, scratched in a line, bold style.

The distinction is wrongly claimed for the “Four Crosses” Inn at Hatherton, near Cannock, on the Watling Street; a very fine old coaching inn, under whose roof Swift must certainly often have stayed; but as the roads at that point form a complete cross of four arms, the sign must always have been what it is now, and certainly all the evidence points to the Willoughby claim being justified.

Willoughby may on some old maps be found marked as a “spa,” and a little handbook, published in 1828, dealing with the merits of the “New Sulphureous and Saline Baths” that stood opposite the “Four Crosses,” assured all likely and unlikely scrofulous visitors that the waters were just as unpleasing to taste and smell, and inferentially as efficacious, as those of Harrogate itself. Cropper was both proprietor of the new baths and keeper of the inn, somewhat grandiloquently described as the “principal house for the reception of company.” The little shop seen built out from the old “Four Crosses” was a chemist’s, added at that hopeful time. But the Willoughby Spa, although so conveniently situated on the great road, never attracted much custom, and is now quite forgot. The chemist gave up in despair, and his shop was in use as a bar-parlour at the last: the old drug drawers, with their abbreviated Latin labels, remaining until the house was pulled down.

Willoughby legends still linger. They tell even yet, of the cross that stood here in the seventeenth century, and of Cromwell’s soldiery, retreating from Edge Hill, tying a rope round the shaft to pull it down, only being dissuaded by the vicar, who diverted their attention with a foaming beer-jug. It is gone now, however, but the date of its disappearance is uncertain. Gone too are the seventeen hundred acres of common land that once belonged to the parish; but their fate is a matter of precise information. They were enclosed in 1758 and the plunder divided, as by law enacted.

There was once a “New Inn” between Willoughby and Dunchurch, but it no longer tempts the wayfarer; just as there was a toll-gate at Woolscot, not far beyond, that no longer takes tolls. The toll-house remains, as do certain legends of the ways of Rugby boys with the pikeman; boys and man alike long since ferried across the inky Styx by the grim boatmen.

Pikemen acquired a preternaturally acute memory for faces. It is an acquirement that, with the smile of recognition which costs nothing, makes princes more popular and beloved than the exercise of the most austere virtues. Not that pikemen commonly smiled. Suspicion and malevolence sat squarely on their countenances, and when a something that might by an effort be construed as a smile contorted their countenances, it was like that of an alligator who perceives a fine fat nigger within reach of his jaws. A pikeman who took toll of even a thousand persons in the course of a day, might safely be counted upon to recognise each on his return and to pass him without the formality of halting to show the ticket issued in the morning; but let one who had not already paid toll that day attempt to pass with the customary nod of the returning traveller, franked through by his morning’s payment, and he was certain to be stopped and asked for his ticket. Those were the occasions when the pikeman smiled in his most hateful manner. The only places where this cold-blooded grin of triumph may nowadays be seen off the melodramatic stage, are the Old Bailey and other criminal courts; when prosecuting counsel have forged the last link in a chain of conviction.

It was at Woolscot toll-gate that the pikeman on one occasion was paid twice in one day for a gig. Tom Pinner, a well-known coachman who afterwards kept the “Five Ways” tavern at Birmingham, was once visited at Dunchurch by some friends who set out early from Daventry. They had a pleasant day and wound up with dinner. The feast was good, the wines potent, and the guests slept heavily. As they lay thus, the jocular Pinner blacked their faces, and when they had revived a little started them home. When the gig drew up in the flickering light of the toll-gate, they of course could not find their tickets, and the pikeman insisted on toll being paid: he was quite sure no black men had passed that day!

Passing over the streamlet spanned by Rains Bridge, which is probably the “stone bridge” referred to by Ogilby in 1675, as situated at the end of the twelve furlongs’ length of “Dunchurch Lane, bad way,” the exquisite half-mile avenue of majestic elms leading along a gently curving road into Dunchurch is entered. Branches and thick foliage meet overhead and realise the oft-met similitude drawn between cathedral aisles and avenues such as this.