It behoves us now, after tracing this truly Royal route, to return and plod the plebeian path. Let us start from whence the road of old was measured, from busy Shoreditch.

Here the ordinary traffic of London streets is complicated by that of the heavy railway vans and trollies to and from the great neighbouring goods station of Bishopsgate, and the din and confusion are intensified by the stone setts that here have not been replaced by wood paving.

Upon all this maze of traffic the church of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, looks down with an eighteenth-century gravity. It is not old, as churches go, and looks, like all its fellows in the classic Renaissance of a hundred and fifty years ago, something alien and inhospitable. It marks the extension of London at that time, past the old bounds of Bishopsgate, Norton Folgate—whose name is supposed to be a corruption of Norton ’Fore the-gate, outside the City—and the ancient “Sordig,” “Sorditch,” or “Shordych,” an open sewer outside the walls. Popular legend, in this particular instance at fault, still ascribes the name to Jane Shore, the fallen favourite of Edward IV., who, in the words of a doleful old ballad, is said to have ended here:—

By the church the road turns acutely to the right, along the Hackney Road, to Mare Street and Cambridge Heath, where, at the junction of the roads, the first turnpike from London stood.

The ’Ackney Road—for it is thus that the inhabitants know it—is a broad artery athwart those wilds of Bethnal Green and Haggerston, where the Hooligans live—those sprightly hobbledehoys who find life all too dull and tame, and so spice it with the uncivilised frays that keep the police so actively employed. Boot and buckled strap play their part in the street-war between Hooligan and Hooligan, a warfare varied by unprovoked assaults upon unoffending citizens, who find themselves unexpectedly floored and their ears and noses being savaged off by the Hooligan teeth.

It is no new thoroughfare, the Hackney Road, and is merely the modern development of the country lane that once upon a time led into the fields immediately after Shoreditch church was passed. It follows exactly the same route as when Hackney was a pleasant country village, when Cambridge Heath really was a heath, and when the sheep grazed in the meadows of Hoxton. But it was a dangerous as well as a pretty road in those times, the scene during the long series of years between 1718 and 1756 of so many robberies and murders that the village residents of Hackney, weary of being clubbed separately, at last clubbed together and offered handsome rewards for the arrest of any of those footpads and Highway-men who rendered it unsafe to stir abroad. That it was not in 1732 a desirable place for an evening stroll may readily be gathered from the adventures that befell a worthy tradesman who, returning to London from Hackney about six o’clock in the evening, was set upon by two fellows, who robbed him of his money and pocket-book. He pleaded earnestly for the book to be restored to him, and happening to recognise one of the rogues, said, “Honest friend, one good turn deserves another. I was one of the jurymen who took compassion upon you last sessions at the Old Bailey, when you were tried for robbery and acquitted, although we all believed you to be guilty.”

To this the thief ungratefully replied, “Curse your eyes, you son of a bitch, learn to do justice another time and be damned”; and, knocking their unfortunate victim backwards into a slimy ditch, they both decamped.

The papers of the time, reporting this little incident, seem astonished at the violence of the language, but we moderns feel inclined to ask, “Is that all?” It is mildness itself compared with the foul language, the damning and cursing that may be heard to-day, without any provocation, at every street-corner.

But if the foodpads who infested the Hackney Road were the merest tyros in swearing, they seem to have been proficients in assassination, for many bodies, shot and stabbed, were continually found beside the road, and it was not until about 1756 that any degree of safety could be obtained. On January 15th, in that year, the way between Shoreditch and Hackney was lighted with lamps for the first time, and a military guard, with muskets loaded and bayonets fixed, patrolled the distance.

The original “pleasant village” of Hackney, thought to have derived from “Hacon’s Ey,” the island settlement of some Danish landowner on the wide-spreading waters of the river Lea, has disappeared under many millions of tons of brick and stone. Of this Hacon we know nothing, and his very existence is deduced, perhaps wrongly, from the place-name. The same person is perhaps commemorated in the name of that City church, St. Nicholas Acon, in Lombard Street, whose origin is unknown. Stow tells us it was sometimes written Hacon, “for so I have read it in records”; and there was ever much uncertainty in words beginning with A or H.

Hackney is not a name of pleasant savour. The word is associated with everything trite, threadbare, flat, stale, and unprofitable. Hackneyed subjects, hackney authors, hackney horses, and hackney carriages occur at once to the mind; but we must do Hackney the justice to acknowledge that they have no connection with the place, and that those who long ago sought to prove such a connection were utterly wrong. “The village,” says one, “being anciently celebrated for numerous seats of the nobility and gentry, people of all kinds resorted to it from the City, and so great a number of horses were daily hired that they became known as Hackney horses. Hence the term spread to public conveyances.” Unfortunately for so neat and four-square an origin, the word “haquenÉe,” meaning a slow-paced nag, is as old as Chaucer, whose typical young gentleman had a hackeney. This, however, was not at all in the nature of a cab-horse, for we are told in the next line, he “loved wel to have a horse of prise.”

It is singular, in view of this mistaken idea of derivation, that the chief street of Hackney should be Mare Street, but any attempt to connect that name with the supposed origin of Hackney would only result in a mare’s nest for the too-ingenious. That street, originally “Meare” Street, had nothing to do with horses. Its name probably marked the line of some forgotten boundary.