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On
the front line
Towcester
had once again become a frontier town, this time between Royalist
Oxford and Roundhead Northampton.
No
great battle was fought here but plenty of skirmishing took place
round about.
The
strategic significance of the town did not go unnoticed and after
the Royalists were forced to withdraw, the Parliamentarian Army
was billeted here on its march from Newport Pagnell to Naseby to
the battle that sealed the King's fate.
The Pickwick Papers
The
18th and early 19th centuries saw developments of a different kind
as social stability brought greater wealth and the needs for increased
travel.
This
became the great age of the stage coach. Watling Street was the
road to Holyhead and hence Dublin, the second city of Georgian Britain.
Towcester
once again found itself on perhaps the most important road of the
kingdom with countless travellers passing up and down it, Swift
and Dickens among them.
They
stayed at such famous coaching inns as The Saracens Head (of Pickwick
papers fame), the Talbot (now Sponne House and one of Towcester's
earliest inns) and the White Horse Inn (where the new Towcester
Museum is under construction).
The
latter was one of the most famous coaching inns on the Watling Street
renowned for its hospitality and the standard of its cuisine.
Although now a shadow of its former self, it remains substantially
unchanged.
In
its Pickwickian heyday, Towcester must have presented the picture
of a bustling thriving country town with coaches passing through
by day and night travelling between London and Liverpool, Manchester
or Holyhead as well as between Oxford and Northampton.
These
were the days when nearly every other establishment on the Watling
Street was an inn and those that weren't inns were ale houses.
Time
for change
The
railway saw an end to all that.
The
coaching trade died almost overnight.
Towcester must have looked as though it had gone into the doldrums,
even though it carried on the business of a small market town.
However, it was not totally by-passed by the Victorian age - witness
its Town Hall, its many fine non-conformist churches, its brewery
and its railway, now both come and gone.
The Watling Street might have been eclipsed by the new London to
Birmingham Railway but it had not entirely had its day.
With
the 20th Century came the motor car, charabanc and lorry.
Initially
novelties, these were to become indispensable parts of living and
they breathed new life into the Watling Street and through it the
town.
It
did not seem that long before this new life came to resemble a lingering
choking death only relieved by the opening of the Ml motorway in
1958 and complemented by the A43 by-pass.
Towcester
now awaits an A5 relief road in the hope that a slight separation
of the town from the road which has given so much meaning to its
history might enable it to resume the more dignified and civilised
air reminiscent of its heydey some two centuries ago.
Dr.
J. Sunderland 1998 Towcester Local History Society.
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