Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/568

 his future proceedings. He was accordingly invited to attend the next meeting of the committee, which he did, and received a three hours' drilling with great composure. He promised to adopt all the suggestions which were made, and to carry out all the plans which were proposed. Walter Joyce, who happened to be present, was much amused at Mr. Bokenham's great amiability and power of acquiescence, and was about saying so to Mr. Byrne, who was seated next him, when he was startled by hearing the candidate say, in answer to a question from one of the committee as to whether any one was in the field on the Tory side,

"Oh yes; an old gentleman named Creswell, a retired manufacturer of great wealth and position in those parts."

"Is he likely to make a strong fight?"

"Well, ya-as!" drawled young Bokenham. "Old boy's not supposed to care particularly about it himself, don't you know, but he's lately married a young wife—doosid pretty woman, and all that kind of thing—and they say she's set her heart on becoming the memberess."

"Do you hear that?" whispered Byrne to Joyce.

"I do!" replied Walter. "This man is a fool, but he must be got in, and Mr. Creswell must be kept out, at all hazards."

And Jack Byrne grinned.

restless inquisitive bird, his wings still wet with the soft spray of the Atlantic, rising from his favourite perch, the massive gold cross upon the airy summit of St. Paul's great dome, bears away for the flat green pastures, soaking vapours, and river-side marshes of fertile Essex, the calf-breeding, oyster-rearing, teazle-growing county, of a million acres and four hundred thousand inhabitants. The patient toilers in the saffron, hop, and carraway fields; the men scooping out Colchester oysters for Billingsgate; the Maldon fishermen, red-faced and scale-bespangled as Tritons; the drovers of Pleshy bringing the wayward calves to Essex railway stations; the heavy-built Dutch sailors at Harwich, will not observe the silent bird as he drifts by, a mere black flake against the rainy sky, reconnoitring, like a military spy from a balloon, the marshy, well-wooded, well-watered county that forms the dull muddy shore of the Thames from Blackwall, at the confluence of the Lea, to Shoeburyness.

At Barking the bird first alights on the banks of the Roding. Barking was the Barging of the Saxons—"the fort in the meadow"—and the blunt lines (so long is Time in effacing man's work) may still be traced of the old walls that, perhaps, Saxon thanes raised to protect their churls or neatherds from those Danes who sacked and burnt London in 835. Whether the Danish robbers—as good sailors as horsemen—had discovered the juicy richness of Essex beeves as early as the time of Alfred, who twice rebuilt London, is uncertain, Dr. Dryasdust kindly informs us; but this at least is sure, that in 870 the hardy Norsemen ran up Barking Creek, and massacred or carried off a whole convent of Benedictine nuns, planted at Barking in 670 by Erkenwald, a Saxon Bishop of London. King Edgar raised again the shattered and desecrated convent of Barking, where so much martyrs' blood had been shed by the rude Pagan hands. After the death of this amorous, wolf-slaying, monk-beloved king, his widow, Elfrida (to win whom Edgar had murdered her first husband), was made abbess of Barking, and the convent became a royal one, inferior only to Wilton, Winchester, and Shaftesbury. The Barking abbess was lady paramount of all the manors in the half hundred, and a very great lady, therefore, at Chadwell, Ilford, and Ripple, and much to be honoured wherever her plain black and white robes were seen, whether she angled with her nuns upon the Thames, or ambled on her palfrey towards the cool green glades of Epping. Through the pointed arch of that square embattled Barking gateway many generations of half-willing sisters of the convent have passed to their living death within, and to their burial without, the icy prison walls. The abbey remained wealthy for eight or nine centuries, for even at the Dissolution it was valued at one thousand and eighty-four pounds six shillings and twopence (a large sum for those times), and Edward the Sixth, feeding his noble bloodhounds with rich sops, as Henry the Eighth had done his ravening pack, granted Barking Convent to Lord Clinton.

When the Conqueror had slain Harold on the cliff, borne down through brave Kent upon sturdy and pugnacious London, and burnt Southwark, just as a slight sample of what he could do, he retired to the little quiet Essex village of Barking, where the London portreeves, aldermen, and burgesses swore fealty to him, while his fighting Bishop of Rochester, Gundulphus, was building a White Tower on the site of Cæsar's river-side castrum. There, amid the green meadows, with an outlook on Barking Creek, the fierce Norman received homage from those proud chieftains so slow to surrender, Morcar, Earl of Northumberland, and Edwyn, Earl of Mercia. When William returned to town to raise his banners upon his new White Tower, Bainard, one of his barons, built a castle in Upper Thames-street (Carron Iron Company), and Gilbert de Montfichet another in Blackfriars (Times Office, Printing-house-square); so there was a triple curb in the mouth of poor prostrate London. One great man at least has therefore trodden the streets of the Essex market town. And what else does Barking boast? Well, an Elizabethan market-house, and the right