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Hertfordshire (Hertford, Watford, St. Albans, Hemel Hempstead, Stevenage, Hatfield)

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• Historical notes about The English Administrative County of Hertfordshire
  HERTFORDSHIRE in 1950
  A fond and charming annalist once emphasized a quality of Hertfordshire which time is not likely to destroy, though some new rural factories may one day affect it. Thomas Fuller, travelling through the county on the conclusion of the Civil War, after expressing his joy at the singing of the birds and the sweetness of the flowers, added, "It is the garden of England" (a phrase appropriated by Kent), "for delight and men commonly say that such who buy a house in Hertfordshire pay two years' purchase for the aire thereof." And, indeed, the air flows freely, for the valleys, made by rivers trickling down from the Chiltern ridges, are open and gentle; and the uplands, though seldom more than some four hundred feet, are higher than the surrounding levels of Essex, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, if not Buckinghamshire and Middlesex.
• A more widely known tribute was written some one hundred and fifty years later. It might have been expected, so strong and affectionate is county patriotism throughout England, that constant epithets would have been attached, say, to Sussex, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Devon and the rest; yet Hertfordshire remains conspicuous for possessing at least two, bound to it by the strong chain alliteration. It is impossible to write of the shire without reference to Charles Lamb's epithets, evoked by his famous visit, accompanied by his sister, to Mackery End and Wheathampstead. His "hearty," homely, loving Hertfordshire" "staid put," at least as to the first two, as the farmhouse he visited and the lovely Elizabethan country house beside it have "staid put." The first adjective is doubtless one of Lamb's favourite puns, and "homely" is the more appropriate. It is in particular sense a county of homes. No other county of a like acreage (Hertfordshire cover only six hundred and thirty-two square miles) contains anything like so many old and lovely country houses, from such palaces as became a preparatory school; Rye House is a grossly neglected ruin; the Letchworth Garden City has converted a glorious Jacobean manor house (once owned by the most freakish of Hertfordshire worthies, so called, the Reverend but un-revered Alington) into a hotel and its farmland into a golf-links. The future of Tewin Water, just below the famous L.N.E.R viaduct over the Mimram, is in the balance.
• Houses Great and Small
  Such changes multiply; but almost all the smaller houses remain, and indeed increase, especially along the Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire borders, though Water End by Ayot is a good example of restored glory. We may hope, too, that the very greatest and most pleasing will survive. Hatfield House is supreme on any account. It has remained in one family since the days of the first Lord Salisbury, son of Queen Elizabeth's chief minister, who was induced by James I to exchange it for Theobalds, which he preferred. The Jacobean house which he planned has no architectural rival of the period; and the old hall and buildings beside it are relics of the very finest Tudor architecture. Nor can a successful rival be found to its internal decorations and gallery of pictures. Those who attend the yearly agricultural show in the vast part have to walk very few yards to see the oak under which Queen Elizabeth was found, so the story goes, when the news was brought of her succession to the throne. Again Panshanger - of which Lord Desborough was peculiarly fond - has a park in some ways more pictorial than Hatfield Park, and within the house the priceless pictures are a memorial to the great day of the English country house, where, as a much travelled Dutchman said, the highest point in civilization was reached. To give one more example, the descendants of Bulwar Lytton still inhabit Knebworth; and time has added virtue to the intricate flamboyance of the too-imaginative architecture of the house.
• It is to hope that the remnants will survive death duties and modern planning? To-morrow has a question mark printed particularly large in Hertfordshire.
• A curious example is on record. A signpost once stood at the corner of a Hertfordshire lane leading to Hatfield, and one arm bore the legend "The Way to Yesterday" - so Lord Salisbury told me, and he went bail for the historic truth of the fact. It was alleged later that the post bore a second arm pointing north to Welwyn Garden City, and on this arm was written "The Way to Hell." No one has gone bail for the historic truth of this gloss. Anyway, to make the antithesis quite crisp as well as true, that northern arm ought to have given the direction. "The Way to To-morrow," for To-morrow was the first and whole title of Ebenezer Howard's epoch-making book, later called Garden Cities of To-morrow, which created the Garden City movement. Yesterday and to-morrow may be said to have coalesced when Howard founded Letchworth in 1903; the change was confirmed when the owners of Hatfield sold - for a very moderate sum - the site near Welwyn of a second Garden City to a group, again inspired and represented by Sir Ebenezer Howard.
• In no shire in England does to-morrow so obviously threaten to-day. At Stevenage, between the two garden cities, and not far from either, a satellite town of sixty thousand inhabitants in designed, and at least two others are in contemplation.
• Peace Undisturbed
  The rural calm of Hertfordshire has persisted for centuries in spite of the neighbourhood of London, in spite of the passage of the Great Northern and Midland railways, in spite of the Great North Road in its centre and Watling Street on the west. One carries a signpost "To the North" and the other "To Holyhead," and the through-faring leaves Hertfordshire's peace almost undisturbed: indeed, less disturbed than when Dick Turpin frequented Ermine Street, especially at its approach to Royston. Only over a narrow strip on the south, by Barnet and Watford, has London conquered and the built-up area superseded the farm. But even Watford has a core of antiquity and a lovely park, and Barnet still celebrates its fair with much of the old gusto. The unhappy prospect is that the green belt, of which an arc crosses the county to the south of these, will be no more than a temptation for new towns to leapfrog over it. Nevertheless let it be put on record that until the Second World War not only its villages, but its dainty little towns - Hertford itself, with Ware, Hitchin and Buntingford (which still seems a village); indeed, in some aspects St Albans - savour of the deep country. Will the new towns or enlarged villages such as Harpenden, where the famous Rothamsted Research Station was founded by Gilbert and Lawes, acquire as pleasing a savour? It may be said that all the towns, except those on the Middlesex border, still retain a sort of rural flavour, like the hundreds of villages and hamlets which remain "wrapt from the world."
• Past and Present
  It is likely to remain a true verdict that there are few shires where past and present jostle one another in so friendly and palpable a manner. The county town itself, though many of the streets are urban in the ordinary sense, gives a good example. The old castle of Hertford, where King Arthur checked the invasion by the Danes by manipulating the navigable waters of the Lea, to-day provides some charming municipal offices, and its surroundings are as pleasant a public playground as can be found anywhere in the Southern Counties. Again, St Albans has suffered a number of new additions that are not of the loveliest, if we except the architecture of the new post office; but you slip out of the main street straight into the precincts of the cathedral - famous for its possession of the longest nave in England - and at its side the yet older gateway, which is now part of St Albans School; and this claims to be older, even by several hundred years, than the oldest of our public schools. It was a happy idea of the restorers of the magnificent screen in the cathedral to include the figure of Nicholas Breakspear, the only English Pope, who took the title of Adrian IV. He was a Hertfordshire man, born at Abbots Langley; his family name is perpetuated in Breakspear Farm. When you leave the cathedral and wander down the green slope towards the River Ver, you presently pass the Fighting Cocks, perhaps the oldest house used as an inn in Enland; and over the river you are in Verulamium proper, with its eloquent relics of
• Old, unhappy, far-off things
  And battles long ago.
  Battles in and about St Albans have been many and fierce ever since the days of Queen Boadicea and Cassivelaunus. In the centuries that followed the Roman victories successive invastions by northern and western tribes seem almost to have wiped out the imported civilization. Verulamium itself was utterly destroyed, probably by the Angles round A.D. 500. A more or less peaceful period succeeded in which King Offa, as the tale goes, found the bones of the Christian marty, St Alban. His cathedral was partly built of the stones and tiles of Roman Verulamium, whose destructed was thus completed. Battles were resumed at the Norman Conquest (when peace was made at Berkhamstead), and then was a pause until the Wars of the Roses, when the opening battle was fought at St Albans, and yet a bloodier battle six years later on the way to Harpenden, after which Queen Margaret's borderers were said to have ravaged the city, including the Abbey. The war finished as it began in Hertfordshire, at the battle of Barnet in 1471. The chief victor of the earlier battle was the Earl of Warwick, and the tomb of unnamed members of his family is to be found in Flamstead Church, where the medieval wall paintings are of particular interest.
• Ancient Remains
  Since those Civil Wars Hertfordshire has not only cultivated the arts of peace, but restored evidence of the Roman civilization. Almost where Boadicea and Cassivelaunus and the British tribes fought bloody battles with the Romans is now shown the beautifully preserved outline of a Roman theatre, which is unique in England, and the museum near by is an archaeologist's feast. A little to the east, ivied ruins recall that famous lady, Julia Berners of the Sopwell nunnery, who wrote the earliest of our books of sport and anticipated Izaak Walton as an authority on fishing by several hundred years. However, before turning east to the nunnery, those who take such a walk should have visited the old and beautiful church of St Michael, built at the very centre of the Roman Verulamium. Apart from the many architectural charms of the church, an unusually artistic monument stands over the tomb of Francis Bacon, whose views on gardening, given in a charming essay, were acquired at his home of Grohambury, close by.
• It is difficult to imagine a change more pleasantly abrupt than the passage from the busy street under the shadow of the spreading cedar by the east end of the cathedral. A pleasant throw-back to a later antiquity is to be found in the yet busier and broader part of the street to the north. Here an old barn from Watered House (favourite home of the Duke of Marlborough) has been re-erected as a modern restaurant. "Great is juxtaposition," and there are few of the little towns that do not acknowledge some such obvious and agreeable touch with a distant past. Berkhampstead, a market and residential town, will seem to motorists one interminably long stretch of no very particular charm except perhaps for an odd house or two.
• Castle and Common
  The castle where the Black Prince lived and played the beneficent lord of the manor is a much less conspicuous object than the railway station beside it, but on the north side you find yourself almost instantly on a glorious common, famous for the fight for its preservation between Mr Smith and Lord Bridgwater; and alongside it is Ashridge, the one place in the shire that belongs to the National Trust. The vista of the fine avenue excels even the chestnut avenue at Hertford. Behind are such gems as the two Gaddesdens and Nettleden, and a little to the west spread out a view only less spacious than those from Telegraph Hill, near Lilley Hoo, or the northerly view from the bare downs above Royston, where James I loved to hunt, when he was not hunting at Theobalds (or "Tibbles"). On the whole the shires of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire give rather wider and richer views than Cambridgeshire and Essex.
• Just one town in the shire is associated with a comic past. Cowper, who was at school for a while at Berkhampstead, made Ware the bourne of the most facetious of holiday rides; and long before John Gilpin's expedition, the Great Bed of Ware, some eleven feet square and seven feet high, built of carved oak, became a popular jest, used by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night. It is a deprivation that after several migrations from inn to inn it has been removed to South Kensington. Ware should be appreciated for other than comic reasons.
• Ware's Malt Houses
  The waterways, increased by Sir Hugh Myddelton's canals, cut for the sake of London's water supply, make the lower part of the town a sort of Venice. Navigation is busy, and one line of dwelling-houses on the waterside makes a delightful unexpected picture. Behind the most attractive of its hotels rise malt houses which here, as at Bishops Stortford, indicate an important county industry, still in being after a long and flourishing past; and their presence truly suggests that the farms round about produce as good barley as Norfolk itself. Malting has played, and still plays, a very large part of the industry of a wide area, especially along a line from the Bedfordshire boundary near Hitchin to the Essex border near Bishops Stortford.
• No modern additions, though some are very unlovely, have actually destroyed the spirit of these little, merry Hertfordshire towns, in spite of such a "cautionary guide" as a preserver of modern England wrote of St Albans. Many of the villages are unhurt. Charles Lamb could still fulfil his final ambition. "I had thought," he wrote in 1822, "in a green old age (O green thought) to have retired to Ponders End, emblematic name, how beautiful! in the Ware Road, toddling about it and Cheshunt, anon stretching on some fine Izaak Walton morning, to Hoddesdon or Amwell, careless beggar; but walking, walking ever, till I fairly walked myself off my legs, dying walking." Of all these places Amwell at any rate still remains a walker's paradise, and there the source of the New River still makes a neat and unspoilt picture under the little old church and the famous memorial stones. While such villages as Westmill, Aldbury, Ayot and Gaddesden are still in being, homeliness refuses to be ejected.
  
• If you do not believe, go visit Ayot St Lawrence where George Bernard Shaw sought serenity, or Aspenden or Nettleden. The old type of labourer is found in these hamlets as well as the craftsmen; but the craftsmen have changed, not their nature, but their methods. For example, in a village near the little gem of Ayot lives a blacksmith whose forbears have worked at the same trade for some two hundred years. He and other blacksmiths, at Hatfield and elsewhere, have of late years become experts of such artwork as fire irons and iron gates, and have had the eagerly accepted chance of studying traditional patterns at South Kensington. While engaged in such work the financial return hardly enters this smith's head. He will work for continuous hours well into the night; and is so conscientious an artist that nothing in the world would persuade him to use a file instead of a hammer. I once saw him fall into a passion when he detected marks of a file on a piece of iron-work sent for exhibition at the County Agricultural Show. To correct bad hammer work with a file was in his eyes high treason against true art.
• Valley of Glass
  The shire has, in part, protected itself against urbanization behind the defences of the River Lea, especially towards the east along the reaches which Izaak Walton made famous. Few counties have enjoyed a more persuasive tribute than opening the pages of The Complete Angler, when Piscator joined the otter hunt and foretasted the cheer at The Thatched House - now, alas, no more - in Hoddesdon. That defensive barrier changed its name abruptly from the beginning of the century. Glass-houses began to spring up, and presently many miles of waterway between Cheshunt and Hoddesdon helped to create a veritable valley of glass. Within a few years the transformation of the scene became scarcely credible. Quick fortunes were made, employment multiplied, the kings of Covent Garden set up headquarters on the riverbanks - almost at the spot where the Rye House Plot against James I was hatched. It has been plausibly alleged that the value of the produce under glass now at least equals the value of the open-field output within the county, though the farms still retain their old reputation for barley and wheat. The example became infectious as well as contagious, and many isolated glasshouses sprang up.
• Village Industry
  A more pictorial industry flourishes by several villages higher up the valley. Agreeable springs bubble up in many places near the river, and these were found to give ideal conditions for the growth of watercress. Its culture is singularly attractive. The first January harvesting may be a chilly performance, but an expert craftsman of my acquaintance could excel at his work of cutting the cress, as well as rolling and planting it. It is a village industry to be encouraged. Much more than a village industry is the manufacture of high grades of paper, carried out of Hemel Hempstead, at Apsley, and at Croxley Green, near Watford. Poultry keeping on a large scale is practised at King's Langley.
• Within the memory of living people Hertfordshire has lost a village industry, straw plaiting, that brought some wealth and much occupation to great numbers of poor people. For example, soon after the world-famous Rothamsted Research Station was started at the edge of the hamlet of Harpenden in 1843, a small boy of ten years old -the usual age at which boys went out to work in those days - was employed on the farm. In the course of years he rose to be farm manager and, on his retirement, under the wise encouragement of Sir John Russell, the director, he put together a book of reminiscences, which gives a most engaging picture of village life just before the railway came. He preserves a number of racy words and phrases now half or wholly forgotten, the old beliefs or superstitions, and, what are most important, the old ways of thought and habits of life. The village folk were poor and worked very hard. The boys often began work at 4 a.m., and were boarded out on the farms for a good part of the week, taking a three or four days' supply of food with them. Wages were miserably low, but poverty was relieved to some extent by payment in kind, by the keeping of pigs and general cheapness.
• Throughout the account of such things as remembered most faithfully by Mr Gray, the author of the reminiscences, straw plait runs like a thread. The women plaited straw almost continuously, the tiny babes learnt and practised the simpler patterns, and continual journeys to St Albans, largely by Shanks, his mare, were concerned with the selling of the plait as well as the purchase of goods. This cottage industry, destroyed in part by the beginning of the twentieth century by cheap imports from Japan, was a godsend: and nothing has been found to take its place.
• It is difficult in more expensive days to realize how cheaply life could be lived. Perhaps the most pleasing of all the smaller golf courses within the county was made towards the end of the nineteenth century and the bill for its construction is in being. Its burden is this: "To make a golf course £8 16s. 0d.," and it was credibly reported to me by the first secretary that the maker apologized for the size of the bill on the ground that he had been forced to hire a horse and cart! One of the earliest golfers was the son of a commoner, who fashioned a club for himself out of holly that he cut on the common. He rose to the distinction of a plus handicap and made a notable appearance as an amateur in the Open Championship. He used to say that everyone who played on this course ought to become a plus golfer, for it is so enclosed in ling and gorse, not to mention thorn and juniper and raspberry, that only the straightest hitter can survive. He might have added that at certain seasons your concentration is liable to be disturbed by the song larks and nightingales!
• In the earliest account of Hertfordshire, Michael Drayton, in his Polyolbion, concerns himself chiefly with the rivers and woods; and then Epping or Waltham Forest extended into Hertfordshire. To-day the villages and little town are of more concern than woods and rivers, but the rivers, especially the Lea ("Which oft doth lose its way"), remain important. Most of them have their source in the Chilterns, those lovely chalk ridges that begin to lose altitude, but to gain in richness of clothing, as they enter the western side of the shire. One of the few that has nothing to do with the Chilterns has its most attractive source in the old and famous village of Ashwell. Here, as elsewhere, the villages were first built along the valleys, sometimes for the sake of the mills. For example, the mill in Wheathampstead is in Domesday, and the old beams within are old enough to show the holes made for the reception to show the holes made for the reception of the iron spikes of the candlesticks, necessary for lighting its dark interior. It is a hopeful sign for the return of some measure of self-sufficiency that after lying idle for some years, the old mill wheel revolves again for the grinding of chicken food from local grain. Most of the mills, which were once numerous, have ceased to be, but what is of more vital importance is that the rivers themselves are in danger of extinction. There was a large and famous mill on the Mimram by Codicote, which was turned into a singularly attractive country house. One owner, Lord Hampden, the Lord Lieutenant of the county, made a pleasant swimming-pool beside the house. Then with small warning, the weight of water diminished, and in a few weeks you could walk dryshod across an ex-fishpond and the swimming-pool.
• The failure of the water was due in part to London's greed. Ever since Sir Hugh Myddleton in the seventeenth century doubled the water-courses of the Lea from Amwell southwards to fill an Islington reservoir, the demand for more and more water has grown, till it begins to exceed the supply. Loss of the water is not only threat to rivers. Hertfordshire, as I have already said, is dotted from east to west with great country houses. A fine flourish has been set on a number of then, such as Luton Hoo, Tewin, Wormleybury and Brocket, by the formation of a wide lake made by holding up the streams; and these lakes have greatly added to the bird population of the county. When the war came it was felt that they were a guide-post to the German airmen, so the barriers were removed and the rubbish accumulated over the centuries in these lakes was decanted into the bed of the stream. Contamination ensued, and for various reasons effluents of a poisonous sort were caught up. On the upper reached of the Lea the trout, with which the river was well stocked, died first; but not even the coarse fish could resist for long. Even the fresh-water cray-fish (for which London hotels used to compete) as last perished. A robust fight for the purity of our streams should be joined by all dwellers in Hertfordshire.
• Hertfordshire is as many "fathoms deep" in history as Pevensey itself. When, for example Mr Kindersley, then Member for Hitchin, decided to have a tennis-court by his Welwyn house, a workman struck into a nest of Roman relics. The Samian ware looks as good as new, and bore the maker's mark, giving the precise date. Many of the buried urns were quite unharmed, so was one beautiful green glass decanter, and so would have been its pair, but for the too eager pickaxe of a reverend excavator. Most of the relics are to be seen at Letchworth - the first fruit of "Tomorrow"; and tomorrow has become of overwhelming present interest within the county.
• The first of the satellite towns organized by the planners of the New England, with Hemel Hempstead as the second, is to be constructed about the body of the famous village of Stevenage, and on the productive farms on its periphery. The old Lancashire tag may be parodied: "What Hertfordshire does today, England will do tomorrow."
• This trial town at Stevenage will be a pioneer, the local reaction to such plans has therefore some historic importance. Such a plan, by which a group some five thousand dwellers was to be expanded into some sixty thousand, entailed at the outset the destruction both of existing houses and of active farms. This again entailed compensation. One actual example, on which public sympathy concentrated, became of more than temporary concern. An airman bought himself and his wife a pleasant home at high price. He had hardly become installed before he received notice to quit and the information that would be compensated at a figure that did not represent half his outlay. Farmers who had brought up their land to a high pitch of fertility felt themselves to be victims of injustice. The moral seems to be that where existing centres of population are taken over, as much of the old should be left as possible, though the paper scheme may thus be interfered with slightly. One of the most significant facts about the two Garden Cities (which are pleasant places and well designed) is that the population has not grown as was expected. Neither is within a third of the planned density, and factory owners proved at first very reluctant to take the sites reserved for them. It is possible it would seem to plan too far ahead.
• It was rather surprising fact that in the more westerly part of the shire two existing centres of population, St Albans, a considerable town, and Harpenden, still desirable as a village, suggested through their representative that they should each be increased by another ten thousand or so, in preference to the proposal that a brand new satellite town should be built near Redbourn. Apart from such considerations, it has been the general feeling Hertfordshire that its nearness to London has been wrongly exploited. The new towns, instead of freeing London from factories, have partially served to house London workers. Why should the bulk of satellite towns and the first experiments be tried out so near London, against which the county has fought so valiant and successful a fight for centuries?
• Yet in spite of the threats of the new planners and the necessities of so-called development, the native scenery of the county holds out. From the charming manor house at Lilley Hoo over one little reach of the Icknield Way (which is pre-Roman) to Telegraph Hill, you may still lose yourself, and find no one who can put you on your way.
• Village cricket flourishes both at No-man's Land and in fields by country houses. Were those Lamb epithets of hearty and homely ever more pleasantly illustrated than at St Paul's Walden in the days when our Queen Elizabeth as a girl helped her sister to score, while her father upset the wickets of the team of the neighbouring village with his slow, leg-breaking deliveries? The cricket, at which most of the family of Bowes Lyon excelled, keeps its zest and simplicity in the same villages; and country house and cottage, to the satisfaction of both, enjoy a mutual and most English reaction. At the yearly ploughing matches one-furrow horse-drawn ploughs compete in the company of five-furrow ploughs drawn by tractors; and on such occasions I have heard street-arabs on holiday from London express their desire to be ploughers - a rare omen.
• A large number of local words survive, though many are dead. When the time comes for hedging and ditching, the labourers still make their own "mollies" (mallets) out of hedge timber, preferably hornbeam. The villagers express their dislike, in true Shakespearean idiom, for the "hugger-mugger" work. When we see great changes - factories in villages, schools in country houses, satellite towns, green but urban belts, ribbon developments and over-mechanized farms - we may still have good grounds for nursing the hope that the more it changes, the more it remains the same thing. Since only one little bit of the county belongs to the National Trust, and is so saved "in perpetuity," the rest must be preserved by native watch-dogs, who will not allow the rivers to be polluted, or the commons invaded, or the half-year land forgotten, or the hedges destroyed, or the spirit of the village to be contaminated and its cottages made ugly or left unsanitary.
• Tomorrow, however different, may keep the essential quality of yesterday throughout the length and breadth, while it grows in comfort and vitality. The glory of the old village was its local self-sufficiency, and to this ideal we see some signs of return in the Village Produce Guild (which has its headquarters in Hertfordshire), the activity of Women's Institutes, where flourish greatly the revival of spinning, as of the Country and Agricultural Societies and, above all, the pride of Hertfordshire, its craftsmen.
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