Markyate Street, as it is how, is a wayside village, with a number of more or less decayed coaching and drovers’ and waggoners’ inns in its narrow street. The lovely old mansion of Markyate Cell, beyond, standing removed from the dusty road, in its beautiful park, owes its name to the spot having once been the hermit’s cell of one Roger, a monk of St. Albans, who, returning from pious pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was confronted by three angels, who there and then laid the vocation of hermit upon him, and conducted him to this spot, where he lived ever after: not altogether happy, for he suffered constant persecution from the Devil, who, according to Roger’s own account, tried once to drown him, and once set light to his hood. Had he ceased praying, there can be no doubt the worst would have befallen him; but he continued, unmoved, under these most alarming circumstances, and the Enemy was foiled.
After a while in this solitude, a “holy virgin,” Christina by name, came from Huntingdon and settled near by the equally holy Roger, who afforded her religious instruction, until he was called away from this vale of tears, when his body was laid in St. Albans Abbey. Christina established the Benedictine Convent of Markyate Cell, and became first Prioress of it in 1145. The mansion that now stands on the site in the wooded park is a veritable dream of peace and beauty; but there are hiding-holes in it, which sufficiently prove, if proof were wanted, that not always was peace and security the dominant note.
At one mile before Dunstable we leave Hertfordshire and enter Bedfordshire. It was a standing joke with all the coach-guards to ask their passengers “What comes after Herts?” and to answer, before their victims had time to reply, “Beds, if the Herts are serious enough.” Fortunately, even the weakest jokes that would be anæmic enough by the fireside seem quite robust in the fresh air; and the tedium of a long journey was such that even this wretched specimen was not usually resented.
Dunstable’s long and very broad chief street was until quite recently a pleasant gravelled stretch of road, but since fast motor-cars have come in crowds upon the highway, the townsfolk, in an attempt to save themselves from the dust they raise, have been obliged to resort to the expedient of treating the thoroughfare with a tarry preparation; with the result that the dust nuisance has not been thoroughly abolished, and instead of the old, cleanly-looking surface there is an ugly, coaly-looking way, smelling abominably.