XI

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Islington is but a mile and a quarter from the General Post Office. Even eighty years ago it was only semi-rural. London, in fact, is really after all a slow-moving monster, and although there are, here and there, instances of swift extension, the Great City enlarges itself as a rule with elephantine deliberation. At Islington, in the heyday of the coaching era, you first experienced the sensation of being on the road to anywhere in particular; for there, on Islington Green, stood the first turnpike gates. On the hither side was London: once through them, and you were definitely in the country. As the illustration shows, characteristically urban streets of houses had then begun to appear, but the cocks and hens and the drove of sheep in the road present a rural appearance, and in the distance the church seems to stand amid rustic bowers.

Beyond the village of Islington lay the open road again, and travellers still, as they came to Ring Cross, spoke fearfully of the gibbet that had stood there, and hoped the memory of such things had not died out, nor ceased to be a warning to malefactors.

ISLINGTON GREEN, 1825.

Ring Cross has long since disappeared from the map. It stood, according to such careful cartographers as John Rocque and his coadjutors in 1746, at a point three and a half miles from London, now to be identified with the junction of the Holloway Road and the Benwell and Hornsey Roads, which then, under the fearful name of “Devil’s Lane,” led to the remote hamlet of Crouch End.

SCENES OF DREAD

The neighbourhood was of ill omen. There many a tattered body, slowly disintegrating, had hung in chains; most notable among them that of John Price, the hangman, who on May 31st, 1718, was himself hanged for robbing and murdering one Elizabeth White in Bunhill Fields, his body being afterwards suspended here. The horror of it was revived in 1827, when a skeleton with the gibbet-irons was found at “Catherine Street, near the main road, Holloway”; the gibbet and the remains being afterwards exhibited at the “Coach and Horses” public-house near by, perhaps to be identified with the house of that name now at 214, Holloway Road.

Highgate formed in those times another settled spot, where London citizens lived a rural life and cultivated the virtues and ruddy cheeks, amid villainously ill-reputed wastes to north and south. Finchley Common and its fringing Alsatias stretched north, as far as that other civilised interval, Barnet; and through the great common of Finchley ran the road which all who travelled north must pass, as messieurs the highwaymen knew full well.

In days before any kind of coach travelled the road, it was the usual thing for a traveller to get astride his own horse and so, bumping in the saddle, to come to his destination. Others, who, although owning no horses, had a good eye for horseflesh and were good at a bargain, would often purchase a mount and at the end of a long journey sell him to advantage. It was one of these travellers who, having bought a fine horse in London at a very moderate price, found when he had come to Finchley Common that he had acquired a very singular bargain indeed. Riding across the lonely waste, he saw another horseman advancing; whereupon his own horse, in the most curious manner, edged up to the stranger and pushed in so threatening a way against him that he, with every sign of fear, handed over his purse. The horse had obviously been the property of a highwayman.

The Manchester Mail changed horses at the “Old White Lion,” Finchley, as the print after James Pollard shows; and whether or not Pollard intended to convey any such idea, it looks distinctly a hostelry and a neighbourhood in which it would not be prudent for a stranger with much money about him to linger long after the mail had duly changed and driven off. What an astonishing change is that which has now come upon the scene!

THE MANCHESTER MAIL CHANGING HORSES AT THE “OLD WHITE LION,” FINCHLEY, 1835.

[After James Pollard.

Change, in fact, looms large upon the home stretches of the road, and even Barnet Fair is threatened with extinction. Threatened men and threatened institutions live long, but at last some one or something puts a period to their existence; and they are in the end, when people have almost come to consider them immortal, cut off with suddenness. Barnet Fair will doubtless in the near future follow most other fairs into the past tense; but meanwhile, although considered moribund by many, it is without doubt extremely lively. And it is just this lusty liveliness that will, paradoxically, cause its abolition; for the crowds of horse-dealers, and East-End and low-life Londoners in general, who are attracted to it for its annual three days, commencing on the first Monday in September, are not favourably regarded by the “residential” classes of Barnet and the district; although the tradespeople seem to look upon them with tolerably friendly eyes. Opinions are divided, as they must needs be when such opposite ideals of life prevail. The “residents” want peace and quietness: the tradespeople want trade, and they apparently have the ear of the vestry, which so long since as 1888 passed a resolution that as the fair at that time brought over 20,000 people into the district and was the means of some £10,000 to £12,000 being spent there, it would be a great hardship to the commercial classes in Barnet if it were abolished. A memorial was presented to the then Home Secretary praying that the fair should be continued, and the petition proved successful.

BARNET FAIR

“Improvements” have not been lacking of late in Barnet. That they are improvements admits of no doubt, for they have caused the widening of the roadway at a narrow point, and have disclosed the noble parish church to view, It was built in at its eastern end, at some bygone period, with a quaint old house and shop; a picturesque jumble, and one which has, to some, left an aching void in its disappearance. This odd excrescence was an old-world baker’s shop, with carpenter-Gothic stuccoed little house above: not (as may be gathered) admirable for the purity of its style. Like the fly in amber, it was neither rich nor rare, but one speculated on what brought it in such a strange conjunction, built on to the end of the church in such a manner that the uninstructed stranger was at a loss to tell where the ecclesiastical building ended and the merely secular one began.

MONKEN HADLEY CHURCH.

Barnet has been already fully treated of in the pages of the Great North Road and the Holyhead Road, and there remains little else to say of it; but it, among other places, cherishes the diverting story of the postmaster’s wife handing out her husband’s leathern breeches from the bedroom window to the up night mail, instead of the postal bags. The guard did not discover the mistake until Highgate was reached, when he returned on horseback to exchange the wearing apparel for His Majesty’s mails.

The mail-bags themselves were once stolen here. The incident happened in February, 1810, whiles the horses were being changed. Thieves made off with the bags for places from Hatfield to Grantham, and thence to Spilsby and Boston, and although the notice issued on March 1st by the Postmaster-General offered a reward of one hundred pounds for the apprehension of the robber, no one was ever captured, nor did the bags ever reappear.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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