COCKFOSTERS

A weird place-name, prominent upon the signposts along the road, irresistibly invites to a further exploration. “To Cockfosters,” says the signposts. Certainly, by all means. You cannot choose but go to see what manner of place this may be; but after all—as in countless other instances—nothing so very remarkable meets the explorer’s gaze. It is, in fact, a little woodland hamlet on the borders of the three parishes of Hadley, East Barnet, and Enfield; and the name, in the lack of any actual evidence, is presumed to derive from the ancient French phrase, Bicoque forestiÈre, a little settlement amid unenclosed forest land.

More meets the eye at Monken Hadley, a village not yet overwhelmed by the suburban tide. The centre of local interest is, of course, as usual, in the church, and the interest of the church itself is centred on the tower.

The date of the tall tower is readily fixed by the quaint arabic figures over the doorway, which, deciphered, give the year 1494. But the great curiosity of Monken Hadley church is, of course, the fire-pot, or beacon, which arouses such speculation on the part of strangers at a distance.

How far back such a beacon existed on this, or any earlier, tower-turret here must remain uncertain; but its purpose is plain enough. The light of it was intended to guide travellers benighted in the once dense and far-spreading Enfield Chase. The elevated site of the church itself was known as “Beacon Hill” in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and even then had long borne that name. There is evidence that the beacon was lighted in the troubled times of 1745, when the Scottish rebels were hourly expected to descend upon London and replace King George with a Stuart sovereign. Blown down in the great gale of January 1st, 1779, the existing one is, of course, merely a restoration. It was lighted on the night of the rejoicings over the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, and again at the Coronation of Edward the Seventh.

The Battle of Barnet, in which Monken Hadley and all the surrounding district were involved, is an oft-told tale, and romantic novelists have long had their way with it. Lord Lytton was probably the last, as he was certainly the greatest, to make that great contest of 1471 the vehicle for a story; and he wrote of it so convincingly that an ancient and weatherbeaten fragment of a huge oak tree marking the border of Enfield Chase is pointed out as a legitimate historic landmark of that great contest. It is the “gaunt and leafless tree” whereon Friar Bungay hangs his hated rival, Adam Warner, whilst at its foot lay the lifeless form of his daughter Sibyll and “the shattered fragments of the mechanical ‘eureka’ on which he had spent the labours of his life.”

The old trunk, long ago divested of its bark, was upset some years ago by some drunken volunteers, but it has been replaced in its original position and enclosed within a railing.

Taking by preference the old road, across Hadley Green, by the obelisk, called “Hadley Highstone,” marking the site of the battle, instead of following the “new” road out of Barnet constructed by Telford in 1823, we pass Dyrham Park. The imposing stone-built entrance to this beautiful domain is sufficient to attract attention by itself, without the aid of historic association; but it has, according to oft-repeated story, the added interest of having originally been a triumphal arch erected in London to welcome Charles the Second, at his Restoration in 1660.

The old road comes to a junction again with the new at South Mimms, and old and new proceed together from this point to St. Albans, up Ridge Hill, and so by London Colney. Here and there stretches of the old way may be found, to right or left; hollow, overshaded by trees, and solitary, save for those expertest of expert wayfarers, the gipsies and the tramps, who may often be found there, under the greenwood tree, secure from the dust and the hustling of this new century which has discovered the roads again, but has not the time nor the inclination to know them intimately, or as anything else than a race-track.

In 1826, seventy-two coaches passed through St. Albans every twenty-four hours, and it was calculated that the travellers passing through in the same time numbered no fewer than 1,000, of whom the coaches conveyed 600. The rest were those at the extremes of poverty and wealth, who rode in the waggons or walked; or sped by swiftly and luxuriously, in post-chaises or in their own private chariots. How many, one wonders, are the motor-cars that now daily speed, in clouds of dust, up Ridge Hill and so through London Colney and St. Albans to North Wales, or to Manchester and then, across the Border, into Scotland?

The streets of St. Albans are by no means adapted for the hurrying methods of to-day; and although the town or the city, as we must now style it—is but twenty-one miles from the centre of London, it is even yet a place of narrow and winding ways. There is, indeed, to this day a certain savour of monasticism about St. Albans, largely though the place has grown of late years. The Abbey, on its crowning ridge, of course dominates everything; but, apart from that chief feature, you have old churches, old houses of every degree of antiquity down to the time of George the Third (after which period houses cease to be antique), and old inns. And with all these evidences of a venerable age there is yet a lively air, a bustling cheeriness, about St. Albans that render it really lovable. Much might be said of St. Albans: of the ruins of Sopwell nunnery, down in the quelchy water-meadows as you come in from London; of St. Stephen’s, the tiny village on its height, looking down upon the city; of the ancient Abbey Gatehouse, proudly known as “the oldest school in England.” Indeed, something must needs be said of this last. It stands immediately by the West Front of the Abbey, and is the last relic of the vanished monastery.

The Gatehouse is only by chance the Grammar School, for the school, itself founded about the year 1095 by the monks, was only removed hither in 1869. After the suppression of the Abbey and the demolition of most of its domestic buildings, the Gatehouse became the Sessions House and prison for St. Albans until 1651. Thenceforward, until 1869, it served the not dissimilar purpose of a House of Correction. Indeed, throughout its history, from the building of it in 1380, the great Gatehouse has served like purposes: the stewards of my lords abbots having held assize in the upper rooms and consigned offenders to the dungeons below. Offenders were many, for those ancient Churchmen, who lorded it autocratically over St. Albans, in temporalities as well as in spiritual matters, obtruded into all things. They were, as already shown, for education, and at an extraordinarily early period established the Grammar School: but they took care to excommunicate every other school in the neighbourhood, and none might buy nor sell, nor hold any privileges of market without the Church took toll of them. That there were those who, even in early days, kicked against the pricks of this combined jurisdiction over body and soul duly appears in the records of St. Albans; and they suffered in the Gatehouse the penalties awarded to all fire-brands, malcontents, and agitators, and all such pestiferous fellows. Wherefore the grey old building is a very interesting old relic indeed of those times which certain parties in the State (who ought properly to be flogged at the cart-tail) are eager to bring back.

Of the inns of St. Albans I shall say little in this place, for much has been said of them in the pages of the Holyhead Road and the Great North Road. But a word or two, and a sketch, must be reserved for the “Fleur de Lis” inn, close by the Market Place. Like Canning’s “Needy Knife-Grinder” it has no story to tell, but its courtyard, with the odd little external staircase shown here, sufficiently justifies notice, even though in history, national or local, the house has no place. An effective item in the view—the object resembling a church-tower—is entirely extrinsic. It has nothing to do with the inn, except serving the purpose of composing a picture; nor is it even strictly ecclesiastical, being a fourteenth-century curfew-tower, once of remarkable interest, but shorn of much of that quality after Sir Gilbert Scott laid his heavy restoring hand on it, some forty years ago.