BY
J. EWING RITCHIE
(CHRISTOPHER CRAYON.)
Author of “East Anglia” &c.
Chelmsford, one of the youngest of the Essex Boroughs, and almost a suburb of Greater London by means of the Great Eastern Railway, was, when I first knew it, a dignified county town, the leading people of which considered a second post from London as a daily nuisance, and had no taste for what is practically too near the rush and roar of modern life. The old stage-coaches stopped and changed horses at quaint old hotels, which have long disappeared. Now, as you drop down from the railway station, past the Quakers’ chapel on one side, and the big brewery on the other, all is modern, and except the church which stands on your left, there is little left to recall the past. In the square, opposite the Shire Hall, there is a modern statue which recalls to memory Chief Justice Tindal, who, born in 1776, at a house called Coval Hall, was educated at the Chelmsford Grammar School, and died at Folkestone, in 1846. The statue is erected on the site of an ancient conduit, which stood long upon the spot, with a Latin inscription which few Essex people cared to read. Not far off is the Corn Exchange, which, what time corn was a commodity worth dealing in, was on Fridays as busy as Mark Lane itself.
But on the whole the town is modern, and all of the modern time. It is respectable, thoroughly so, quite as much as any London square or street. Its great industry is a modern one—the manufacture of Electric apparatus, by the firm of Crompton and Co., Ltd., a firm which has for some time occupied a leading place in connection with the installation of Electric light, and has been the means of lighting not only Chelmsford, but many of the principal buildings in London. If you want to see antiquity in Chelmsford, you must pay a visit to the Museum, now incorporated with the Essex Field Club, which is a very good one of its kind. One of the best antiquarian magazines of the day is the Essex Review, published in High street, which is really a credit to the town. But Chelmsford is of the present rather than the past. Its men and women move with the times, perhaps in consequence of their nearness to the great metropolis. It has literary and scientific tastes, of which the sette of Odde Volumes is an illustration; and it is further known to fame as the head-quarters of the Essex Bee-keeping Association, established in 1880, which has done much to develop the taste for, and the growth of, honey—an article not unknown to the ancients, and an industry by means of which many a careful cottager may pay his rent. Of that association Mr. Edmund Durrant is the life and soul, and in all parts of the land he has lifted up his voice, on behalf of this new and desirable source of wealth in our country towns and village homes. As to its Beef Steak Club, which was founded in Chelmsford in the time of the Georges—it was second to none.
“The position of the town at the junction of the rivers Chelmer and Cann probably” writes Mr. Christy, “led to its being inhabited in very early days.” As Roman remains have been discovered there, there is reason to suppose that it was known to those enterprising people.
In the good old times, as some people call them, there was a Priory here (of which no trace now remains), where in the reign of Edward II. resided Thomas Langford, an author, of whose works I know little, save that a local historian describes them as curious. A greater man, I apprehend, was Philemon Holland, a physician and translator of Livy, Pliny, and other classic authors. He has better claims on us as having first translated Camden’s Britannia into English. He was born in Chelmsford, in 1551, and educated at the Grammar School, a school which still exists, but in a recent building, the older one having passed into the hands of the County Council Technical Instruction Committee. One of the old houses still remaining, “Springfield Mill,” is that in which Strutt wrote his Sports and Pastimes.
Chelmsford fell into Church hands at an early date: It owes indeed much of its prosperity to Maurice, Bishop of London, who, about the year 1100, built a bridge over the Cann, which brought the main stream of traffic through Chelmsford instead of Writtle.
The Church has been once at any rate in danger, that is in 1800, when a great part of the building fell down. Hence arose a well-known local rhyme.
Chelmsford Church, and Writtle steeple,
Both fell down, but killed no people.
Chelmsford seems early to have struggled after a Reformed Church. Strype tells us of one, William Maldon, who learned to read in order that he might study the Bible for himself, and there discovered how idolatrous it was to kneel to the crucifix, much to the anger of his father, who beat him till he was almost dead. A little later we hear of George Eagles, who, for preaching, was hanged, drawn and quartered at Chelmsford, in Queen Mary’s reign, and whose head was set up in the market-place on a long pole. Archbishop Laud found many victims in Essex. One was Thomas Hooker, Fellow of Emanuel College, Cambridge, and lecturer at Chelmsford, where by his preaching he wrought a great reformation, not only in the town but in all the country round. Happily for himself, Hooker escaped to America, where he died. When the Quakers appeared, they were sorely handled by those who ought to have known better; for instance, in July 1655, there was a day of general fasting, prayer, and public collection of money for the poor persecuted Protestants of Piedmont. John Parnell, the Quaker, embraced that opportunity for disturbing the people, and for this he was tried at Chelmsford, and sent to Colchester Castle where he died. One of the ejected ministers at Chelmsford, Mark Mott, is described as an able preacher. The congregational cause in Chelmsford, dates from the time of John Reeve, who took out a license for a Presbyterian Meeting-house, in 1692. Edward Rogers, an ejected minister, succeeded him. Before the year 1716, a meeting-house had been erected, and at that time a separation took place, which led to the erection of another meeting-house. In 1716, the pastor at the old meeting was Nathaniel Hickford. The congregation then consisted of seven hundred hearers, of whom twenty are described as having votes for the county, and eighteen as gentlemen. The first pastor at the new meeting was Richard, the father of the well-known Nathaniel Lardner. In 1763, the two churches united, but not long after they separated again. The new meeting, which is still in the London road, was for some time under the pastoral care of the Rev. George Wilkinson, but lately resigned, and his place is filled by the Rev. MacDougal Mundle, whose popularity argues well for the cause with which he is connected, and the church over which he presides.
For another thing the Chelmsford of the past was distinguished, and that was by a mock election, a very proper thing, when election was a farce, and not as now, the opportunity of the free and independent democracy to utter their political opinions, and to send the wisest of the wise and the purest of patriots to Westminster as Members of Parliament. An election is no farce now when the eyes of all England are on the electors, and orators from every corner of the land come to call on the electors to do their duty. In old times men were merry, and made fun even of an election; at any rate they did this in Chelmsford, where at every county election, a mock contest was held on a small island between the two rivers known as Mesopotamia, (that blessed word, as the old woman said when she heard it in the course of her favourite parson’s sermon). At this mock election, we are told, after the successful candidate was chaired with every mark of honour, he was ducked in the stream. Sometimes one wishes that old customs were revived, I know at any rate more than one candidate, who if he were ducked in the stream, and left there, would be little missed by an enlightened public such as we have in this present age.
About fifty miles away from London—you can run down in an hour by the Great Eastern—stands an ancient, if not the most ancient, city in England, where the mother of Constantine is said to have lived, where, at any rate, she founded a chapel, which still remains, and where Constantine the Great is said to have been born, and where old King Cole, that merry old soul, is reported to have reigned in all his glory. It was built by the Roman Claudius, A.D., 44. It boasts an old castle, which was terribly damaged by Cromwell’s soldiers when they took it after a severe siege, in which the inhabitants suffered terrible privations. It has an ancient priory in ruins, but which is deeply interesting to antiquarians; and it contains old houses and winding streets, which are ever a delight and wonder to the intelligent of the rising generation. Colchester, of which I write, is a busy place, and moves with the times. As you look at it from the Great Eastern Railway, which sweeps around its base, it seems a city set upon a hill; and in the old coaching days, when we drove along its High street, now handsomer than ever, it was a great relief in the summer time, when we stopped there to change horses, after a long and dusty ride, to buy some of the fruits and flowers offered for sale, and for the production of which the country round is famous. The Colchester people have a fine appreciation of their ancient and prosperous town, the streets of which are alive with military. There is a large camp here, the gallant men of which seem to have a due appreciation of the fine complexion and healthy figures of the Essex servant girls. It has its park and its promenades, a river which is rich in commerce and famed for its oysters, and if not quite up to the standard of Dr. W. B. Richardson, I must give its municipal authorities credit for doing the best they can, to bring it up to our modern ideas of sanitary excellence. It has lately taken to making shoes in the swiftest manner possible, and threatens to be a formidable rival to Northampton, and assuredly, when I hear of the money made by many of its citizens, who, starting with the proverbial half-crown, have now accumulated handsome fortunes, I feel justified in asserting that grass does not grow in its streets.
The religious history of Colchester is deeply interesting. That unfortunate Puritan, Bastwicke lived at the Red House, Red Lane. Matthew Newcomen, one of the Puritan divines who took part in the Smectymnian Controversy, was the son of a rector of Trinity. His brother Thomas, a Royalist, lived to be a Prebendary at Lincoln at the Restoration. Colchester has done much for Nonconformity. It was one of the earliest cities to do battle for religious freedom and the rights of conscience. As far back as 1428 we find the keeper of Colchester Castle empowered to search out and imprison persons suspected of “heresie or Lollardie.” In Queen Mary’s days fourteen men and eight women were brought from Colchester to London like a flock of sheep, but bound or chained together, to appear before Bonner, on account of religion; but several were burnt there at different times. The first certain account of the Baptists of Colchester is that of Thomas Lamb, about the year 1630, who was one of the victims of Archbishop Laud. For some time Baptists and Pædo-Baptists seem to have worshipped together here; they in time separated, and the present flourishing cause, under Rev. E. Spurrier, celebrated its bi-centenary last year. From a MS. account in Dr. Williams’s library, we learn that in 1715 there were three Non-conformist congregations in Colchester—one Independant, one Presbyterian (with a total of 1,500 hearers), and one Baptist (with 200). In the schoolroom of the Baptist church at Eld-street is a fine portrait of the Captain Murrell whose noble rescue of a shipwrecked crew in a stormy sea was the admiration of the whole civilised world a year or two since. And it rightly hangs there, for as a boy he was brought up in its Sunday-school. Close to the Baptist church in Eld-lane is the well-known Congregational church, a new and handsome structure, of which Rev. T. Robinson is the pastor.