Chapter 14

RUNEMEDE

Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to Egham, once devoted almost wholly to the coaching interest, then the scene of suburban race-meetings, and now that those blackguardly orgies have been suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb—dusty, uninteresting. The old church has been modernised,{87} and the old coaching inns either mere beer-shops or else improved away altogether. The last one to remain in its old form—the ‘Catherine Wheel’—has recently lost all its old roadside character, and has become very much up-to-date.

Here we are upon the borders of Windsor Great Park, and a road turning off to the right hand leads beside the Thames to Old Windsor, past Cooper’s Hill and within sight of Runemede and Magna Charta island, where the ‘Palladium of our English liberties’ was wrung from the unwilling King John. A public reference to the ‘Palladium’ used unfailingly to ‘bring down the house,’ but it has been left to the present generation to view the very spot where it was granted, not only without a quickening of the pulse, but with the suspicion of a yawn. You cannot expect reverence from people who possibly saw King John as the central and farcical figure of last year’s pantomime, with a low-comedy nose and an expression of ludicrous terror, handing Magna Charta to baronial supers armoured with polished metal dish-covers for breastplates and saucepans for helmets. ‘Nothing is sacred to a sapper,’ is a saying that arose in Napoleon’s campaigns. Let us, in these piping times of peace, change the figure, and say, ‘Nothing is sacred to a librettist.’

Long years before Egham ever became a coaching village, in the dark ages of road travel, when inns were scarce and travellers few, the ‘Bells of Ouseley,’ the old-fashioned riverside inn along this bye-road, was a place of greater note than it is now. Although forgotten by the crowds who keep the high-road, it is{88} an inn happier in its situation than most, for it stands on the banks of the Thames at one of its most picturesque points, just below Old Windsor.
Image unavailable: THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY.’
THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY.’

The sign, showing five bells on a blue ground, derives its name from the once-famed bells of the long-demolished Oseney Abbey at Oxford, celebrated, before the Reformation swept them away, for their silvery tones, which are said to have surpassed even those
Bells of Shandon
Which sound so grand on
The pleasant waters of the River Lea,
THE ‘BELLS OF OUSELEY’

of which ‘Father Prout’ sang some forty-five years ago. The abbey, however, possessed six bells. They were named Douce, Clement, Austin, Hauctetor, Gabriel, and John.{89}

The ‘Bells of Ouseley’ had at one time a reputation for a very much less innocent thing than picturesqueness, for a hundred and fifty years ago, or thereabouts, it was very popular with the worst class of footpads, who were used to waylay travellers by the shore, or on the old Bath and Exeter Roads, and, robbing them, were not content, but, practically applying the axiom that ‘dead men tell no tales,’ gave their victims a knock over the head, and, tying them in sacks, heaved them into the river. These be legends, and legends are not always truthful, but it is a fact that, some years ago, when the Thames Conservancy authorities were dredging the bed of the river just here, they found the remains of a sack and the perfect skeleton of a human being.