Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/570

 while the dancers and skittle-players revelled at the door of the thatched country inn, where everybody could partake at the fountainhead of the special dainties of Epping and of Waltham hundred, hissing sausages, pork as white as chicken, rich mellow cream, and fresh country butter that smells of the meadow flowers. No wonder that from Elizabeth's days to those of Johnny Gilpin, "Hey for Epping upland!" has been a London holiday cry.

By-the-by, would any kind Member of Parliament some night inquire what is a royal chase, and why Epping should remain one without forest and without deer? Also, who has a right to alienate from the people the ten thousand acres of Epping and Hainault, and grant permission to build villas and rear plantations? Also, who pays the lord warden, and four verderers, and what they do for their money? The answers might be interesting to real economists who are not merely pretending to retrench.

Every Easter Monday, an unfortunate, tame, highly educated, and knowing stag used to be turned out at Epping, to be pursued by a shambling pack of aldermen, grooms, shopmen, sporting touts, and novices of all kinds. George Cruikshank caricatured the hunt, and indeed a more pitiful and ludicrous shadow of the royal sports of the Norman kings could hardly have been presented. It seemed to be a rule that no one inured to the pigskin was permitted to ride, and Osbaldeston or Assheton Smith would not have marched through Coventry with such a rabble rout of Whitechapel chivalry, for twice ten thousand pounds.

South-east of Epping, across the river Roding, stretch the once scrubby wilds of Hainault, disforested in 1851. Here, among the thorn and hazel bushes, once rose the great Fairlop oak that was blown down by a February storm in 1820. This giant patriarch, with a trunk forty-eight feet in circumference, was five centuries old. Bursting the acorn just before the death of Henry the Fifth, it had known all the storms of the Tudors and Stuarts, had outlived Queen Anne and three of the Georges, and, eventually overcome by the accession of George the Fourth, submitted to Fate the year that glorious monarch ascended the throne. An ancient fair used to be held under the great tree, the first Friday of every July. This social gathering was originated by Mr. Daniel Day, an eccentric pump and block-maker of Wapping, who, having a small estate hard by, used to annually repair to the oak's pleasant shadow and feast a party of friends on rural beans and bacon. Wishing to perpetuate the pleasure he had himself experienced under the kindly oak of Fairlop, Mr. Day bequeathed a fund to keep up the custom. The tree, from which a man-of-war could easily have been built, contributed timber to form a pulpit for St. Pancras Church, and the site of the oak is still kept in remembrance by the merry picnic parties that still make the spot their rendezvous.

It was in a cave in Epping Forest that Dick Turpin, a Whitechapel butcher by profession, hid when hard pressed on the road, circa 1730. This low rascal, who was never of "the high Toby," and not, indeed, a true highwayman at all, was the son of a farmer of Hempstead. He began by stealing cattle at Plaistow, and selling the hides at Waltham Abbey. He first joined smugglers and ran brandy in the hundreds of Essex, and then a gang of deer-stealers in Epping Forest. His first burglary with violence was at Loughton, where he and his companions stole four hundred pounds, and tortured the old woman of the house. He next broke into a house at Barking, and carried off seven hundred pounds. His men then forced the cottage of a Mr. Mason, keeper of Epping Forest, and in smashing a china punch-bowl a hoard of one hundred and twenty guineas showered down upon their heads. A reward of one hundred pounds being offered, and two of the gang seized and hung in chains, Turpin and his men betook themselves to a cave large enough to hold them and their horses, between the King's Oak and the Loughton road, in Epping Forest. The cave was in a thicket, so ambuscaded with thornbushes and brambles, that the rascals could observe travellers without being themselves seen.

No inn would give them shelter now, and even the pedlars carried pistols. It was near this cave that Turpin first dipped his hands in blood. A gentleman's servant and a higgler went out, armed, to try and earn the reward of one hundred pounds by taking Turpin. The thief, seeing them beating the covert, mistook them for poachers, and called out, "You'll find no hares, man, in that thicket!" "No," said the servant, presenting his gun, "but I've found a Turpin," and bade the rogue surrender. Turpin, speaking in a friendly way, gradually backed into his cave, and, seizing a loaded gun he had placed at the entrance, shot his captor dead on the spot; the higgler instantly fled. For some time Turpin skulked about the forest, but, being at last hunted by bloodhounds, he left this retreat for ever. Soon after this, while he was waiting for his wife at a public-house at Hertford, he was recognised by a butcher to whom he owed money, and had to make his escape by leaping out of a window. On his way to London with his associates, King and Potter, Turpin stopped a Mr. Major, near the Green Man, in Epping Forest, and changed horses with him. Watch being set round the Red Lion, in Whitechapel, where Turpin left the stolen horse, King was seized when he came to fetch it, and, in firing at the constable Turpin shot his friend by accident. Dick then rode into Yorkshire, and lived by stealing horses in Lincolnshire and selling them in his own neighbourhood. He was at last seized, tried, found guilty, and hanged at York in April, 1739. He talked to the hangman for half an hour, bowed carelessly to the spectators, and at last flung himself savagely from the ladder.

Waltham Abbey is too near Epping for the crow to pass it unnoticed, since it has a legend of its own that connects it with Hastings and Harold. The river Lea, that runs into the