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Title: Motor tours in Yorkshire
Author: Stawell, Mrs. Rodolph
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Motor tours in Yorkshire" ***
[Illustration: THE CHAPEL OF THE NINE ALTARS, FOUNTAINS ABBEY.
[_Frontispiece._]
MOTOR TOURS
IN YORKSHIRE
BY
MRS. RODOLPH STAWELL
AUTHOR OF "MOTOR TOURS IN WALES," ETC.
WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY R. DE S. STAWELL
HODDER AND STOUGHTON
NEW YORK AND LONDON
CONTENTS
I
PAGE
THE DALES 1
II
THE COAST 87
III
CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 117
IV
YORK AND THE SOUTH 167
INDEX 223
ILLUSTRATIONS
THE CHAPEL OF THE NINE ALTARS, FOUNTAINS ABBEY
_Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
THE CONDUIT COURT, SKIPTON CASTLE 8
FROM THE ROAD NEAR BARDEN TOWER 20
BOLTON PRIORY 22
THE CHOIR, BOLTON PRIORY 24
THE NAVE, FOUNTAINS ABBEY 38
THE TOWER, FOUNTAINS ABBEY 40
FOUNTAINS HALL 42
CHAPTER HOUSE, JERVAULX ABBEY 48
BOLTON CASTLE 60
ASKRIGG 66
THE BUTTERTUBS PASS 68
THE SWALE 70
RICHMOND 74
GRETA BRIDGE 80
THE DAIRY BRIDGE 82
HIGH FORCE 86
THE CLIFF, STAITHES 88
THE QUAY, STAITHES 94
THE HARBOUR, STAITHES 96
RUNSWICK BAY 98
WHITBY ABBEY 100
WHITBY HARBOUR 102
WHITBY ABBEY, INTERIOR 104
WHITBY CHURCH, FROM THE ABBEY 106
WHITBY HARBOUR 108
ROBIN HOOD'S BAY 110
MOORS BETWEEN WHITBY AND SCARBOROUGH 112
THE VILLAGE OF LASTINGHAM 128
LASTINGHAM CROSS 132
HODGE BECK 136
KIRKDALE 140
DOUBLE ENTRANCE TO HELMSLEY CASTLE 144
RIEVAULX ABBEY FROM THE TERRACE 148
RIEVAULX ABBEY 150
CHANCEL ARCH, RIEVAULX ABBEY 152
SHERIFF HUTTON CASTLE 160
GATEWAY OF KIRKHAM PRIORY 164
WALMGATE BAR, YORK 170
MICKLEGATE BAR, YORK 172
YORK MINSTER 176
ST. MARY'S ABBEY, YORK 182
BOOTHAM BAR, YORK 184
STREET IN YORK 186
NORMAN DOORWAY IN PONTEFRACT CASTLE 192
WEST DOORWAY OF SELBY ABBEY 202
CHAPTER HOUSE, HOWDEN 210
BEVERLEY 214
THE DALES
SUMMARY OF TOUR THROUGH THE DALES
DISTANCES.
Skipton
(Ingleton and back, _viâ_ Malham 62 miles)
Hubberholme 20 "
Bolton Bridge 22 "
Ripon 33 "
(Fountains and back 9 " )
Askrigg 33 "
Richmond, _viâ_ Buttertubs Pass 31 "
High Force 30 "
---
Total 240 miles
ROADS.
No bad hills except on Buttertubs Pass--which is precipitous in
parts--and in Richmond.
Surface: usually good.
I
THE DALES
In the motorist's life there are hours that can never be forgotten.
It may be some hour of sunshine that haunts us, when the warm wind,
we remember, was heavy with the scent of gorse or pungent with the
stinging breath of the sea; or some hour when the road lay white and
straight before us across a moor, and the waves of heather rolled away
from us to the horizon in long curves of colour, and as we sped over
the miles we seemed no nearer to the shore of the purple sea nor to the
end of the white straight road; or it may be, perhaps, the hour of our
gradual approach to some ancient city transfigured in the sunset, "soft
as old sorrow, bright as old renown." But, whatever the scene may be,
whether moor or fen, forest or shore, there are two elements which are
always present in the motorist's memory of a happy run--a good surface,
and a good engine.
No one could travel in Yorkshire, I think, without adding to his store
of unforgotten hours. So great is the variety of scenery and interest
that all must somewhere find the landscape that appeals to them. Some
will remember those moors of Cleveland that have no visible limit, and
some the many-coloured dales of the West Riding, and some the straight
roads of the plain where the engine hums so gaily. Some will ever after
dream of the day when they followed the course of the wooded Tees;
others will dream of the distant towers of York or Beverley, or of the
heights and depths of the Buttertubs Pass. And, to be quite frank,
there are some to whom this last exciting dream will be rather of the
nature of a nightmare.
In more ways than one Yorkshire is a good field for motoring.
Throughout the greater part of the county there are few hedges, and
the stone walls that take the place of these are low. The roads are
wide and their surface good, except in unfrequented places. Now in
Yorkshire the places that are unfrequented are very few indeed, and
it is in connection with this fact that the motorist has the greatest
advantage over every other kind of tourist. He can choose his own time
for visiting Bolton or Fountains or the incomparable Rievaulx; he can
see them when the dew is on the grass and the glamour of solitude is
in the woods. To be alone with our emotions is what we all desire in
the presence of wide spaces or stately aisles; and in this county,
where there is so much beauty to be seen and so many to see it, those
only who possess "speed as a chattel" can ever hope to be alone. It
is almost impossible to lay too much stress on our advantages, as
motorists, in this matter of securing peace.
Looking back upon a tour among the Yorkshire dales, I see that the
keynote was struck at the very outset by the little town of Skipton,
with its grey granite houses and slated roofs, its wide street and the
castle above it, the ancient church and the tombs of the great. Such
are a hundred Yorkshire villages and little towns. Each of them, it
seems, is connected with some historic name. In the case of Skipton
the name is Clifford. If the first builders of the castle and the
church were not Cliffords, but de Romilles, it was the Cliffords who
made both castle and church what they now are. It was a Clifford who
built the long gallery and the octagon tower that we see beyond the
grass of the great outer court; it was a Clifford who repaired all the
other towers; a Clifford who devised the curious shell-pictures that
line the guardroom; Cliffords who lived for centuries in the castle,
and the few Cliffords that died in their beds who enriched the church
with their tombs. Their motto, "_Désormais_," stands up against the
sky in letters of stone above the round towers of their gateway, and
their arms are carved above the inner door. The court on which this
door opens, the "Conduit Court," as it is called, is the very core of
Skipton, and one of the most romantic places I have ever seen. It would
seize the dullest imagination--this little paved enclosure shut in on
every side, the long flight of steps, the doorways with the crumbling
carvings, the mullioned windows, the yew-tree that has seen so many
centuries, the low stone seat with its shields, the Norman archway
through which all the Cliffords have passed. Most of the feet that came
this way awoke ringing echoes under the old arch, for the Cliffords
were wont to be dressed in coats of mail. They were all mighty in war.
The first armour-clad baron of the name, he who began the building of
this court and died at Bannockburn, has clattered through this doorway;
and after him the hero of Créçy; and later on that other who fought
for Henry V. and died at Meaux; and he who fell at St. Albans in the
cause of Lancaster; and his son and avenger, called "the Butcher,"
who slew that "fair gentleman and maiden-like person," the young Earl
of Rutland, and was himself slain at Towton; and the great sailor,
Cumberland, who made nine voyages and fought the Spaniards for Queen
Elizabeth. Here, too, when he came to his own at last, has stood that
strange, romantic figure, the Shepherd Lord, who spent his youth in
hiding among the northern hills, yet who, despite his love of solitude
and learning, could not forget his long ancestry of fighting men, and
himself fought on Flodden Field.
Among all these heroes the kings who have come through this doorway
cut rather a sorry figure: Edward II., a sorry figure in any company;
Richard III., a usurper here as in larger courts, playing the master
while the true lord of Skipton was keeping sheep; and Henry VIII.,
who came here to take part in a wedding--a spectator for once. The
bride on this occasion was his niece, Eleanor Brandon, the daughter
of that love-match that was so great a failure, between the Duke of
Suffolk and Mary, Princess of England and Queen Dowager of France. The
wedding ceremony took place in the long gallery, which was built for
the occasion by the bridegroom's father. Lady Eleanor's granddaughter,
Lady Pembroke, was more closely connected with this spot where we are
standing than any Clifford who came before her.
[Illustration: THE CONDUIT COURT, SKIPTON CASTLE.]
Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, who rustled through this archway
many a time, no doubt, while the castle of her ancestors was being
repaired at her charges, was a very busy woman. "Her house was a
home for the young, and a retreat for the aged; an asylum for the
persecuted, a college for the learned, and a pattern for all." She
restored six castles, we are told, and built seven churches and two
hospitals; she erected a monument to Spenser; she wrote some memoirs,
too, with a record of all these things, and wherever she made her mark
she stamped her initials. You can see them, very large and clear, if
you look overhead upon the leaden spouting of this court, and you
may see them again in the windows of the church. Anne Clifford's
disposition was in no respect a retiring one, as we may gather from
her famous answer to the Secretary of State who wished a nominee of
his own to stand for her borough of Appleby. "I have been bullied by
a usurper," she said, "and neglected by a Court, but I will not be
dictated to by a subject. Your man shall not stand."
Her work in restoring her castle of Skipton was no light undertaking,
for it had lately endured a three years' siege by the army of the
Parliament, and its seven towers must have been sadly battered before
the day of its proud surrender. So defiant was that surrender that
the garrison marched out through the great entrance gate beneath the
motto of the Cliffords, "accordingley to the Honour of a Souldier,
with colours flying, Trumpets sounding, Drums beating, Matches lighted
at both ends, and Bullets in their Mouthes," while the commissioned
officers took with them "their wearing apparell that was properley
their owne in their Portmantles."
One other pious work did Anne perform. She made a magnificent tomb
for her father the Admiral, third Earl of Cumberland--who fought the
Armada with the Queen's glove in his hat--and she set upon it seventeen
armorial shields, all gilt and painted, and a mighty black marble slab,
and a list of honours. We may see it in the chancel of the church she
repaired; this grey church that stands so picturesquely at the end
of the long street, with the hollyhocks and daisies brightening its
dark walls. Opposite to the grave of Lady Pembroke's father is that
of her little brother, "an infant of most rare towardness in all the
appearances that might promise wisdome"; and near to this is the
splendid tomb, with restored brasses, of the first Earl of Cumberland.
Such of the earlier Cliffords as found burial at all, including the
Shepherd Lord, were laid in Bolton Abbey, whose monks were connected
with this church and gave it the delicately carved screen that adds so
much to its beauty.
It is sometimes said or hinted that Jane Clifford, the Rose of the
World, was in some way connected with Skipton. This can hardly be the
case, however, for the Fair Rosamund was born and spent her childhood
on the banks of the Wye, and was laid in her temporary grave at
Godstowe long before Edward II. gave this castle to the Cliffords who
came after her.
From Skipton, where homely comfort may be found at the sign of the
"Black Horse," an expedition should be made to Malham and its famous
Cove, about twelve miles away; and if time allows, the run may be
lengthened very enjoyably by rejoining the main road at Hellifield and
skirting the moors as far as Clapham or Ingleton. In this way we shall
see something of the craggy country of Craven, of which Camden wrote
long ago: "What with huge stones, steep rocks, and rough ways, this
place is very wild and unsightly." The huge stones and steep rocks are
still there, but the way by which we go is very far from being rough;
it is, on the contrary, such an exceptionally fine road that it seems
almost a pity to leave it. Those who wish to see Malham, however, must
turn off at Gargrave or Coniston.
Much has been written concerning Malham Cove, and many long adjectives
used. Some writers have even declared themselves terrified by it;
but these, I think, must have been of a timid temperament. It is the
position of the place, no doubt, that has this overwhelming effect upon
some minds: the sudden and unexpected presence of a great semi-circular
cliff amid quiet undulating fields. If one could be carried blindfold
to the foot of it I can imagine that it would be truly imposing; but
it is visible from a distance as a grey scar on the face of the green
hillside, and thus a good deal of its effect is lost in the course of a
gradual approach. The best way to reach it is to walk across the fields
from Malham village, following the course of the Aire, the stream that
tunnels its way so strangely into the Cove. There is, it is true, a
narrow and steep road which commands a fine view of it as a whole, but
there is no room here for any but a small car to turn, and there is no
doubt that the cliff can best be seen on foot.
This is true also of its more imposing neighbour, Gordale Scar. Says
Wordsworth--
"Let thy feet repair
To Gordale chasm, terrific as the lair
Where young lions couch,"
and indeed, as the hill that approaches Gordale Chasm is nearly as
terrific as the chasm itself, it is certainly best, if not imperative,
to repair to it on thy feet. I believe that the tarn which lies upon
the moor above Malham Cove, and long ago belonged to the monks of
Fountains, may be reached by road, but I have not been there myself.
From Malham the way is narrow and surprisingly tortuous as far as
Hellifield, but here we rejoin the splendid high road we left at
Coniston, and speed along it through Ribblesdale to Settle. This small
town has progressive ambitions. It "treats" the surface of its main
road, it lights its streets by electricity, it has a fine new garage
and a hotel that has the air of being nice. It is attractive, too, and
pretty as well as praiseworthy, with hills behind it and a tiny weir
above the bridge. Beyond it we pass the ebbing and flowing spring of
Giggleswick in its stone basin by the wayside; climb the long hill
under the grey crags of Giggleswick Scar, with a splendid backward
view, and run down by wood and beck to Clapham, where the village cross
stands close to the stream in the shadow of the trees. Not very far
away is the famous cave, bristling with stalactites. After leaving
Clapham we cross a wide heath, with the throttle open.
First and last this is a good run. On the left is the open country; on
the right that wild land of huge stones and steep rocks that seemed
to Camden so unsightly, in an age when the whole duty of a landscape
was to smile. Clambering on the hillside in a cleft of the crags are
the narrow, winding streets of Ingleton, and a viaduct spanning the
valley. This valley, which is hardly wider than a gorge, is said to be
well worth exploring; but neither its waterfall, Thornton Force, nor
its caves of Yordas and Weathercote, can be seen by road. They hardly
concern us here. It concerns us rather to return to Skipton, and thence
to strike up into the heart of the hills.
Climbing the road above the castle we see how Skipton lies in a hollow
among the moors. Behind us to the south is the Brontë country; Haworth
and its graves far off beyond Airedale, and Stonegappe only three miles
away. It was at Stonegappe that Charlotte reluctantly taught the little
Sidgwicks, and no doubt made them suffer nearly as much as she suffered
herself from her over-sensitive feelings. Embsay Moor appears on our
right as we rise, and beyond it the savage outline of Rylstone Fell,
with the ruined watch-tower of the Nortons, the foes of the Cliffords,
showing desolately against the sky upon the topmost crag. Of the
Nortons and their tower, and the daughter of their house, and of the
White Doe of Rylstone and her weekly journey across the moors to the
grave of the youth with whom the Nortons ended, Wordsworth has told us.
We are running down now into "the valley small," where the house of the
Nortons once stood, and here is the Church where
"the bells of Rylstone played
Their Sabbath music--_God us ayde_!"
At Threshfield we turn to the left and are in Wharfedale.
The names of all these Yorkshire Dales are very familiar in our ears.
Wharfedale, Wensleydale, Swaledale, Teesdale--they are all words with
a charm in them. And here, as we glide out of a wood, is Wharfedale
spread before us; and we know at last that it is not only in the name
that the charm lies.
The river flows below through the wide valley and winds away in shining
curves into the far distance, past the bluff outline of Kilnsey Crag,
past the dark belt of firs, till it vanishes among the folds of the
jewelled hills. For in their liquid brilliancy the colouring of all
these dales is that of gems, of amethyst and emerald, of sapphire and
turquoise and opal; and the sunlight that floods them on the days
when we are fortunate has the luminous gold of the topaz. As we drive
under the overhanging crag of Kilnsey--"the highest and steepest that
ever I saw," says Camden--and pass the tiny village where the sheep
belonging to the Abbey of Fountains used to be shorn, the hills begin
to close in, till, as we draw near Kettlewell, they rise round us so
protectively that we seem to have entered a new and calmer world.
Kettlewell itself is so calm as to appear asleep. Its grey houses,
shadowed by trees and sheltered by the mighty shoulder of Great
Whernside, are defended from every wind, and from every sound but the
rippling of the Wharfe. Beyond this peaceful spot, where we cross the
river, the road is rather rough, and after passing through pretty
Buckden it is also extremely narrow. However, it leads to Hubberholme,
and no more than that need be asked of any road.
At Hubberholme the river is still wide, and thickly strewn with stones;
the slopes of the hills are very near and steep, and are clothed with
bracken and fir-trees, and deeply cleft by tiny becks; masses of wild
flowers fringe the banks with clouds of mystic blue; and beyond an old
stone bridge stands the church, low and grey, with a paved pathway and
a porch bright with crimson ramblers. The rough walls have stood in
this lonely spot for many centuries. The door is open, and we may see
for ourselves the strange state of the masonry within, whose builders,
when they left it thus rugged and unplastered, little thought that its
unfinished appearance would be tenderly cherished by the antiquarians
of a future age. A rare rood-loft of oak divides the tiny chancel from
the nave. This loft dates from the year 1558, the last year that the
Old Faith reigned in England; and in this remote hiding-place among
the hills it escaped the vigilant eye of Elizabeth and the destructive
hands of the Puritans.
On returning to Kettlewell we shall find it worth our while to continue
the journey down the dale on the road that passes through Conistone,
for though it is not so good, as regards surface, as that on the right
bank of the river, it commands a different--and a very lovely--series
of views. From Grassington we cross to Linton, on the right bank, where
there are some little falls whose prettiness is hardly striking enough
to allure us from our way; and at Burnsall we should keep to the same
side of the stream rather than follow the public conveyances to the
left bank. Horse-drawn travellers may well be excused for shirking the
hill above Burnsall; but few gradients have any terrors for us, and the
backward view of Wharfedale from the high hillside is more beautiful
than anything we have yet seen in Yorkshire. The two roads meet near
Barden Tower, the beloved retreat of the Shepherd Lord.
Henry, the tenth Lord Clifford, was a very small boy when his father,
"the Butcher," lost his estates, his cause, and his life, on the
blood-red grass of Towton. It was not without reason that John Clifford
was surnamed "the Butcher." It was in vain that young Rutland knelt
to him for mercy on Wakefield Bridge, "holding up both his hands and
making dolorous countenance, for his speech was gone for fear." "By
God's blood," snarled Clifford, "thy father slew mine, and so will
I do thee and all thy kin!" And he plunged his dagger into the boy's
heart. "In this act," says the historian, "the Lord Clifford was
accounted a tyrant and no gentleman. With his hands still dyed with the
son's blood he savagely cut off the head of the dead father, the busy,
plotting head of Richard, Duke of York, and carried it, crowned with
paper, 'in great despite and much derision,'" to the Lancastrian Queen.
"Madam, your war is done," he cried, "here is your King's ransom!"
Margaret of Anjou, for all her manly ways, became rather hysterical at
the hideous sight, laughing violently with pale lips; and Clifford's
triumph was short. While he lay with an arrow through his throat upon
the field of Towton--which we shall see later on--his little son was
hurried away to a shepherd's hut in the north, where in the course of
twenty-five years or so on the hillside he learnt more than the tending
of sheep. He became the gentlest of his line, a lover of learning, a
watcher of the skies; and though at last Skipton came back to him, and
Brougham, and Pendragon, and many another castle, he lived here quietly
in this simple tower above the wooded Wharfe, befriending the poor,
reading his books, and now and then reading the stars as well, with his
friends the monks of Bolton.
[Illustration: FROM THE ROAD NEAR BARDEN TOWER.]
"And ages after he was laid in earth,
The good Lord Clifford was the name he bore."
His descendant, the notable Lady Pembroke, whose initials are so
conspicuous at Skipton, expended some of her energy here at Barden.
This was one of the six castles she restored, and over the door we may
read the inscription she placed there according to her habit, with
all her names and titles recorded at length, and a reference to a
complimentary text about "the repairer of the breach."
Those who wish to see the famous Strid--and none should miss the
sight--may leave their cars by the wayside at a point not very far from
Barden Tower; but this is not the course I recommend. The Bolton woods
are beautiful beyond description, and it is only by walking or driving
through them from the Abbey to the Strid, or even to Barden Tower,
that one can fully enjoy their ferny slopes and serried stems, and the
little shining streams that slip through them to the Wharfe. George
Eliot and George Lewes once spent a whole day wandering together along
these paths, and we might follow in their footsteps very happily, I
think. Those who prefer to drive must hire carriages, for motors are
not admitted to the woods; but the existence of a very nice little
hotel at Bolton Bridge makes everything easy.
By one means or another the Strid must be seen. Here the Wharfe is
contracted into a narrow cleft, an abrupt chasm between low masses
of rock; and the angry river, suddenly straitened in its course, has
in its convulsions bitten into the stone till it is riddled with a
thousand holes and hollows. When the river is low it is possible
to leap across from rock to rock. This is the leap that Alice de
Meschines' boy attempted but failed to achieve so many years ago, when
the hounds he held in leash hesitated to follow him, and so dragged
him back into the torrent. "I will make many a poor man's son my
heir," said his mother; and the priory that her parents had founded at
Embsay was moved by her to Bolton, and greatly enriched in memory of
the drowned Boy of Egremond. Here is the stone from which he leapt,
they say, and here the stone he never reached, and both are polished
by the feet of those who have been more successful. This legend--and I
fear the unkinder "myth" would be the more accurate word--has prompted
several poets to make verses, but has signally failed to inspire them.
[Illustration: BOLTON PRIORY.]
All that is left of Bolton Priory is before us when we reach the
Cavendish Memorial. Close to this spot, though hidden from the road,
is the log hut known as Hartington Seat, the point of view whence the
ruin looks its loveliest. We are at the edge of a wooded cliff. The
Priory lies far below us in its level graveyard, framed in trees; the
river sweeps away from our feet, and after curving thrice, disappears
into the blue haze of the hills. Between the churchyard and the foot
of the red cliffs beyond the Wharfe lies the regular line of the
monks' stepping-stones, by which for many centuries, probably, the
congregation of the faithful came from the hills to their devotions;
and came, too, on other occasions, laden with fruit or game for the
hospitable table of the prior. Do not go to Bolton on a bank holiday,
nor, if you can help it, in August, lest you should find as many
people as were there in the days of its splendour, when the canons and
the lay-brethren and the men-at-arms and the thirty servants and the
unnumbered serfs and the frequent guests made it a stirring place. Yet
it is always possible to find an early hour when there is peace in
the ruined choir, where somewhere in the shadow of the arcaded walls
the dust of the Shepherd Lord lies under the grass. Bolton was sold
to the Shepherd's son, the first Earl of Cumberland, at the time of
the Dissolution, when the building of the west tower was brought to
a sudden standstill, and the nave, the parish church, was separated
by a wall from the choir, the monks' church, which would be needed no
more. There stands the tower, still unfinished; and here is the nave,
now, as then, a parish church, where for seven hundred years without
interruption, it is said, services have been held Sunday by Sunday.
The beauty of the interior, unfortunately, is not great. The Early
Victorian Age has left its fatal stamp upon it. It was not till forty
years ago that the walls were cleansed of whitewash; and in 1851 a
large sum of money was mis-spent at the Great Exhibition in acquiring
some dreadful glass.
[Illustration: THE CHOIR, BOLTON PRIORY]
The motorist's route from Bolton Bridge to Harrogate is undoubtedly the
moorland road by Blubberhouses. The contour-book describes it as rough
and steep; but the steepness is nowhere very severe, and the surface
is now excellent, while the moors have their usual charms--charms not
only for the artist, though these are appealing enough, but special
charms for the motorist too, the delight of an unfenced road and a wide
country. Not that this road lies altogether on the moors. There are
woods here and there, and soft, green beds of bracken, and slopes of
massive rock; and presently we pass the great reservoir of the Leeds
waterworks. Then the country opens out again, and we have a series
of fine wide views till Harrogate appears below us, occupying a
considerable proportion of the landscape.
Harrogate is exactly what one would expect it to be: a place of large
hotels and fine shops, a place whose ideals are comfort and prosperity.
Those who like to motor round a centre--a plan which has many
advantages--could hardly find a better base for their operations.
"The great merit of Harrogate," wrote George Eliot, "is that one is
everywhere close to lovely open walks." Our field has widened since
her day, but Harrogate's great merit is still its merit as a centre.
In this respect it is superior even to York, though in itself not
worthy to be named with that incomparable city. To the west, within
easy distance, are Nidderdale and Wharfedale; to the north are Ripon,
Fountains, and Jervaulx, with Middleham and even Wensleydale for the
enterprising; to the south is Kirkstall Abbey on the outskirts of
Leeds. Byland and Rievaulx may be seen in a single day's drive, and
only twenty-one miles away is York itself.
Harrogate is so entirely, so aggressively modern, so resolute to let
bygones be bygones, that one learns with something of a shock how it
came by its name. Harrogate, it appears, means the Soldiers' Hill on
the Road. The soldiers who lived on the hill were Roman: the road
was the Roman road through the forest of Knaresborough. Except for
this faint hint of an earlier and more strenuous life, the history
of Harrogate is the history of its "Spaw." These crowded acres were
a bare, uninhabited common at the end of the sixteenth century, when
Captain Slingsby, wandering one day across the Stray, was led by the
tewits to a spring that cured him of his ills, which had hitherto
yielded only to the waters of Germany. He set a roof over the precious
spot, and so this spring became the _fons et origo_ of modern
Harrogate. And the Stray, though now in the heart of a large town, is
still uninhabited, still common-land; for a century after the discovery
of the Tewit Well, when hotels were already thick upon the surrounding
ground, an Act of Parliament was passed by which two hundred acres of
land were presented for ever to the people of Harrogate, to serve for
the daily walks of those who drank the waters.
At Knaresborough, only three miles further on, we are in a very
different world, the world of old houses and older tales, of monarchs
and saints, of William the Conqueror and the proud de Stutteville, of
Richard, king in name but not in deed, and of Oliver, king in deed but
not in name--an inspiring world, one would think. The first view of the
town, too--the river, and the high, unusual bridge, and the red houses
on the hillside, and above them the castle that had once so proud a
crown of towers--seems to promise much. Looking at that fragment of a
fortress we remember those who have owned it; the de Burgh who built
it; the de Stutteville who fought in the Battle of the Standard; Piers
Gaveston, who is better forgotten; de Morville, murderer of Beckett,
hiding here from justice; Queen Philippa, whom we are glad to remember
for any reason; John of Gaunt; Charles I. And we remember Richard
II., a prisoner in the one tower that still stands, alone with his
humiliating memories.
This one glimpse of the castle and its past, however, is all that
Knaresborough can give us of romance. It is almost best to ask no more,
for a nearer view of the crumbling keep will leave us very sad. The
path that leads to it, the path that took de Morville to safety and
Richard to prison, is neatly asphalted, and lighted with gas-lamps on
stone bases, which the local guide-book describes as "ornamental."
Hard by the door through which the sad king passed from his shame at
Westminster, and went forth again to the mystery of Pontefract, stands
a penny-in-the-slot machine. A custodian will show us the guardroom
and its relics, and even the dungeon; but we must be careful to look
at them in the right order, or we shall be rebuked. The wolf-trap must
be seen before the Conqueror's chest, and Philippa's chest before the
armour from Marston Moor. By this time the glamour has faded. Even the
fine view from the castle rock must be inspected--_inspected_ is the
right word--from nicely painted seats, placed at regular intervals in
the shelter of clipped evergreens.
The most satisfactory place in Knaresborough is the Old Manor beside
the river, where the original "roof-tree" round which the house was
built still grows up through the rooms, and would be taller if a
too zealous workman had not aspired to "make it tidy." A great deal
of beautiful furniture has been gathered in the panelled rooms,
including the sturdy and simple oak bedstead in which Oliver Cromwell
slept when he was staying in the house that faces the Crown Hotel,
in the upper part of the town. Perhaps the bed was brought here when
Oliver's lodging was pulled down and rebuilt, as happened some time
ago. The floor of his room was carefully preserved; that floor on
which the landlady's little girl, peeping through the keyhole at "this
extraordinary person," saw him kneeling at his prayers. It was in
this town that he gathered his troops to meet the Scottish invasion,
and from hence that he marched out, by way of Otley, Skipton, and
Clitheroe, to defeat the Duke of Hamilton at Preston. The siege of the
castle was not his work: Fairfax had taken it by assault some years
earlier. Cromwell had sad memories in connection with Knaresborough,
for it was somewhere in its neighbourhood that his second boy, Oliver,
was killed. "I thought he looked sad and wearied," said a contemporary
who met him just before the battle of Marston Moor, "for he had had
a sad loss--young Oliver had got killed to death not long before, I
heard; it was near Knaresborough."
To see the Dropping Well we must cross the river by bridge or ferry,
and walk along a pretty path under the beeches. Here, as everywhere in
Knaresborough, disillusion dogs our steps. This beautiful curiosity
of nature, this great overhanging rock, worn smooth by the perpetual
dripping of the water, framed in moss and ferns, has been made into a
"side-show," with a railing, an entrance fee, and a row of bowler hats,
stuffed parrots, and other ornaments in process of petrifaction. On the
other side of the river is St. Robert's Chapel. Here, too, the world
is too much with us.
Leland, that stout traveller, who "was totally enflammid with a love to
see thoroughly al those partes of this opulente and ample reaulme ...
and notid yn so doing a hole worlde of thinges very memorable," tells
us how Robert Flower, the son of a man "that had beene 2 tymes mair of
York," came to these rocks by the river Nidd "desiring a solitarie life
as an hermite." He made himself this chapel, "hewen owte of the mayne
stone"; and he seems to have had some persuasive power of goodness or
wisdom that turned his enemies into friends. "King John was ons of an
il-wille to this Robert Flour," yet ended by benefiting him and his,
an unusual developement in the case of King John; and de Stutteville,
who lived up at the castle, had actually set out to raid the hermitage,
suspecting it to harbour thieves, when he too, persuaded by a vision or
otherwise, suddenly became the hermit's friend. This tiny sanctuary,
eight or nine feet long, with its altar and groined roof and recesses
for relics, all wrought in the solid rock, would be a place to
stimulate the imagination if it were not that the surroundings and the
guide are such as would cause the strongest imagination to wilt.
Some say that the black slab of marble which is now a memorial to Sir
Henry Slingsby in the parish church once formed the altar-top in St.
Robert's Chapel; others say it came from the Priory, and was raised
there in honour of the saint who "forsook his fair lands" and caused
the Priory's foundation. The slab lies in the Slingsby chapel, and
records that Sir Henry was executed "by order of the tyrant Cromwell."
Carlyle tells us that this Slingsby, "a very constant Royalist all
along," was condemned for plotting the betrayal of Hull to the
Royalists.
The road from Knaresborough to Ripon follows the valley of the Nidd as
far as Ripley. This village has the air of being a feudal survival. Its
cottages with their neatness and their flowers, its _Hôtel de Ville_,
and even the "treated" surface of its excellent road, all bear the
stamp of a close connection with the castle whose park gates are at
the corner. In the sixteenth century the village of Ripley was under
the eye of a very masterful lady. It was to this castle that Oliver
Cromwell, tired from fighting on Marston Moor, came in search of rest.
Rest, however, was denied him. His hostess, whose husband was away, had
no sympathy with fatigue that came from resisting the King's Majesty,
and so poor Oliver--"sad and wearied," as we know, even before the
battle--spent the night on a chair in the hall, while Lady Ingilby,
seated opposite to him with a couple of pistols in her hands, kept her
relentless eye upon him till the morning. When he rode away she told
him it was fortunate for him that he had been so tractable. I think
this fierce lady must have been agreeable to Oliver's grim humour.
The approach to Ripon is pretty, by a road shaded with trees. Above
the town rises the cathedral, massive and stately if not superlatively
beautiful. Though it is not one of our largest cathedrals, its history
is immense.
Even St. Wilfrid's seventh-century church was not the first that
stood here, for before his remote day Eata had founded a monastery
that was hardly built before the Danes burnt it. Indeed, the monastery
was destroyed so often--by Danes, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Scots in
turn--that every style of architecture, from Saxon to Perpendicular,
is represented in the various restorations. There are even, I believe,
in the crypt and chapter-house, fragments of Wilfrid's own church,
among them being the curious slit called Wilfrid's Needle, which has
been "mighty famous," as Camden said, for a great many centuries. The
saint himself was mighty famous in his day, as he well deserved to be.
Even still we know a good deal about him, through Bede and others: how,
when he was a poor and ignorant boy of fourteen, "not enduring the
frowardness of his stepmother, he went to seek his fortune," and was
brought to the notice of Queen Eanfled, "whom for his wit and beauty he
was not unfit to serve"; and how she sent him to Lindisfarne, where,
"being of an acute understanding, he in a very short time learnt the
psalms and some books"; and how he refused a wife in France; and was
presented by King Alfred of Deira with a monastery at Rhypum, here on
this very hill; and was consecrated at Compiègne in a golden chair
carried by singing bishops; and how he converted the people of Bosham
by teaching them to fish with eel-nets, so that "they began more
readily at his preaching to hope for heavenly goods"; and how he won
the day in the great controversy at Whitby, and finally died as an
archbishop and was buried at the south end of the altar here at Ripon.
He was a very human saint, and much beloved. His church was destroyed
by Edred, but his monastery grew in power. The most beautiful part of
the present building is the Early English west front, which dates from
the reign of Henry III.
Ripon is altogether charming, and still does homage very prettily to
its patron, King Alfred, who made it a royal borough. He it was who
ordained that every night a horn should be blown by the wakeman, and
that any one who was robbed between the blowing of the horn and the
hour of sunrise should be repaid by the townsfolk. From his day to ours
each night at nine o'clock the men of Ripon have heard the horn--three
long, penetrating blasts before the town hall and three before the
wakeman's house. Several centuries ago the wakeman became the mayor,
and now he blows the horn by deputy. "Except ye Lord keep ye Cittie,"
are the words on the town hall, "ye wakeman waketh in vain"; and not
far away, at one corner of the market-square, is a pretty old gabled
house bearing this legend: "1604. In thys house lived a long time Hugh
Ripley, ye last Wakeman and first Mayore of Rippon."
Yet it is not these links with the beginnings of our history, with
Wilfrid the Saxon saint and Alfred the Saxon king, that draw so many
people to Ripon. Ripon has a greater attraction than these. Only a few
miles away is Fountains Abbey.
When approaching Fountains the motorist may feel very thankful that a
few additional miles on the road are of little importance to him. By
choosing the longer way, through the village of Studley Royal, he will
certainly save himself a considerable walk and may possibly secure the
unspeakable blessing of solitude. The walk through the park from the
main entrance is, I know, regarded as one of the chief beauties of the
place, with its Temple of Fame, and its Surprise View, and its little
cascades; but except for the view of the Abbey, which is lovely, these
artificial prettinesses are more appreciated by those who come forth
on "an expedition" than by those who really wish to seize and keep
something of the spirit of the place. The distant abbey seen from the
east is part of a beautiful landscape, a satisfaction to the eye, a
picturesque incident in the long glade; but those who approach it from
the west come upon it suddenly in all its vastness, close at hand, and
realise, probably for the first time, something of the splendour of the
old monasteries.
[Illustration: THE NAVE, FOUNTAINS ABBEY.]
Here--in this long line of doorways, in this enormous church which
the choir of birds still fills with sacred music, this cloister-garth
and chapter-house with the rich archways, these stairs and domestic
buildings, wall beyond wall and room beyond room--here truly was a
power to make a monarch jealous! It is no wonder that Yorkshire,
crowded as it was with monasteries, thought a strength like theirs
might pit itself against the strength of the king, and rose in protest
against the Dissolution; it is no wonder that the king's agents could
not find enough chains in the country to hang the prisoners in. If this
vast skeleton is so magnificent, of what sort was the actual life!
Close your eyes for a moment to it all, and think of the beginnings of
it.
Think of those thirteen monks, Prior Richard and his brethren from St.
Mary's at York, hungering for a more perfect fulfilment of their vows,
who came here long ago, when this green sward was "overgrown with wood
and brambles, more proper for a retreat of wild beasts than for the
human species." Like wild beasts they lived, with no shelter but the
trees and no food but herbs and leaves. They worked with their hands by
day, and kept their vigils by night, "but of sadness or of murmuring
there was not one sound," says the monk who wrote their story, "but
every man blessed God with gladness." They lived under the thatched
yews till they had raised a roof for themselves, but even when that
was accomplished they were often on the point of starvation. One day
when all the food they had was two loaves and a half, a beggar asked
for bread. "One loaf for the beggar," was Abbot Richard's decree, "and
one and a half for the builders. For ourselves God will provide." The
cartload of bread which arrived immediately afterwards as a gift from a
pious knight was the cause of much thankfulness among the monks, but of
little surprise.
[Illustration: THE TOWER, FOUNTAINS ABBEY.]
As the years passed, lands and legacies made the monastery rich. And
so at last this splendid fabric rose--a triumph of the spirit over
circumstances, a monument to those long-buried monks whose toils and
sufferings are built into the mighty nave, though surely they never
dreamed of such power and wealth as we are forced to dream of as we
stand amid this mass of broken walls, now green with moss and weeds,
but once the heart of a huge organism. It is a monument, too, to many
who came after the brave thirteen: to Abbot Huby, who built the tower
and is said to be buried near it; to John of Kent, who gave us the
bewildering beauty of the Chapel of the Nine Altars, one of the most
exquisite things ever wrought in stone: so spiritual, so aspiring, that
it seems to be a prayer made visible, or even--with its slender arrowy
columns rising into the air till, like fountains, they break into
curves--to be the embodiment of the abbey motto: _Benedicite Fontes
Domino_.
And while we are remembering those who laboured for Fountains, do not
let us forget the man who died for it at Tyburn--William Thirsk. This
abbot was rash enough to resist the messengers of Privy Seal, and was
accused by them of many things. He had, they wrote, "gretly dilapidate
his howse" by theft and sacrilege, had sold the plate and jewels of
the abbey, and had not even secured a proper price for them. To those
who were themselves bent upon theft and sacrilege on a large scale
this last offence seemed worst of all. He had actually, they declared
contemptuously, been persuaded by a jeweller that a valuable ruby was
a mere garnet; "for the trewith ys he is a varra fole and a miserable
ideote." He joined in that desperate protest the Pilgrimage of Grace,
and so was hanged.
Fortunately for posterity as well as for himself, Thirsk's successor,
Brodelay, who was a creature of Thomas Cromwell and chosen with a view
to future events, was not a "varra fole," and yielded meekly when his
abbey was demanded of him, saving it from the fate of Jervaulx. As it
is, too much of it is gone--much that might have been preserved. The
cloisters have vanished though the garth is there, with the long flight
of steps and the great stone basin in the grass and the yew-tree beside
it; and gone, too, is the magnificent infirmary, deliberately destroyed
in the days of James I. by the vandal who owned it and was in want of
some building material.
[Illustration: FOUNTAINS HALL.]
One thing, however, still stands, which is, perhaps, the last relic of
the monks of Fountains that we should expect to find, and is certainly
the most touching relic possible--actually linking us with those
far-off days when the patient thirteen were left here in the wilderness
by Archbishop Thurstan to keep their vow of poverty with such terrible
literalness. Over there, beside the wall, is one of the yew-trees whose
boughs, covered with thatch, formed the first monastery of Fountains.
Close to the western entrance is Fountains Hall. Surely we must forgive
that wicked man who pulled down the infirmary, since the place he built
with the stones is this lovely Jacobean house, a thing as beautiful
in its own domestic way as time-worn stone and bays and mullions can
make it. A balustrade, a sundial, an old-fashioned garden and ancient
yew-hedge make the picture and our pleasure complete.
There is a comfortable hotel at Ripon, and as we have a great deal
to see before reaching any other desirable shelter, we shall find it
best, I think, to spend a night there either before or after visiting
Fountains. From the windows of the _Unicorn_, on market-day, the paved
square is a gay and pleasant sight, with its crowded stalls and bright
awnings, and stores of fruit and flowers and basket-work; and here on
a summer's night the horn-blower may be dimly seen at nine o'clock in
his three-cornered hat and laced coat, doing the bidding of Alfred the
Great.
From Ripon there are three ways of reaching Richmond, without taking
into account the direct route, which would show us nothing of the dales
we came out to see. In either case we must go by Jervaulx and Middleham
and Wensley.
Only a few miles from Ripon is a village less famous, but not less
attractive, than any of these: a spot well-known to antiquarians, and
doubtless to artists too, but unfamiliar to ordinary folk. The charm
of West Tanfield catches the eye at once from the bridge that spans
the Ure, and comes as a pleasant surprise in the midst of rather tame
scenery. The red-roofed cottages are grouped upon the river-bank, with
gay little gardens sloping to the water's edge; behind them rises the
church tower, and the square grey gatehouse of the Marmions, with
its delicate oriel. This gateway was built by Henry V.'s friend and
executor FitzHugh, who married one of the Marmions and lived here,
and added to the church that held the splendid tombs of his wife's
ancestors. He was not buried here himself, but by his own wish with
curious haste at Jervaulx. It is seldom that a little village church
possesses such monuments as these of the Marmions, so rich in ornament
and so marvellously preserved: the arched and canopied recess that
holds the effigy of Sir John; the cloaked and coronetted figure of
Maud his wife, who built this aisle and founded chantries here; the
emblazoned tomb of the unknown lady with the lion; the knight in
mail; and the magnificent monument of that other knight and his wife
which is probably a cenotaph in memory of John and Elizabeth Marmion
of the fourteenth century. Their effigies lie, perfectly preserved,
under a light and graceful "hearse" of ironwork, with seven sconces
for candles--the only iron hearse, they say, in England. Every detail
of the dress, every line of the features, is distinct. The knight's
aquiline nose and full lips, rather sweet in expression, are encircled
by a gorget of mail, over whose delicate links droop the ends of his
long moustache. A collar of SS clasps his throat.
On the north side of the chancel there is a curious recess, with a
squint into the nave and two little windows into the choir. It is
unique, I believe, and as regards its origin and uses very baffling.
Beyond West Tanfield the scenery grows in beauty, for we are nearing
the hills. Masham lies prettily in a valley, with a setting of moors
and dales, gold and emerald when the sun is shining, soft grey and
green when the day is dull. Skirting the little town we go on our way
to Jervaulx.
The site of Jervaulx is not beautiful, but pleasant and peaceful. It
lies in a private park, so the car must wait beside the gardener's
cottage while we walk, borrowed key in hand, across the field to
the scattered fragments of what was once a great Cistercian abbey.
Of the ruins tragically little was left standing by the energetic
commissioners of Henry VIII., though they apologised for some necessary
delay in their congenial work. "Pleasythe your lordship to be
advertysed," wrote Thomas Cromwell's "most bounden beadman" Richard
Bellyseys, "I have taken down all the lead of Jervaulx ... and the
said lead cannot be conveit nor carried until the next sommre, for the
ways in that countre are so foul and deep that no caryage can pass in
wyntre. And as concerninge the taking down of the house I am minded to
let it stand to the next spring of the year, by reason of the days are
now so short it wolde be double charges to do it now." The work was
finished with great thoroughness at last, however, as all may see. Of
the church the barest outline only is left, with the raised platform
where once the high altar stood, and near it the broken figure that is
said to represent the Henry FitzHugh who did so much for West Tanfield
and left such strange orders about his funeral. He desired to be buried
at Jervaulx with all possible haste after his death. "To be carried
thither by daylight, if it come not too late; but if so, then the same
night." The land on which this community first settled, at Fors, was
the gift of one of FitzHugh's ancestors, which may account for his wish
to be buried here.
The case of the last abbot of Jervaulx, Adam Sedbergh, was a sad one;
for he suffered the pains of martyrdom without its exaltation, and
while certainly failing to please himself, pleased no one else. He was
a timid creature, apparently, and when Yorkshire rose in the Pilgrimage
of Grace, he was so much afraid of king and rebels alike that he simply
ran away and hid. The rebel mob came clamouring about the gates of
Jervaulx, crying: "Choose you a new abbot!" and the frightened brothers
gathered hurriedly in the chapter-house. If we follow this path, and
turn down by these crumbling steps, we may stand where they stood that
day; for there is more of the chapter-house still in existence than
of any other part of the building. The roof that covered the monks'
bewildered heads is gone; but here is the wide stone bench on which
they sat, trembling, through that hasty conclave, and here are the
columns and the walls on which their eyes dwelt, unseeingly, while the
rebels threatened them with fire at their gates and their rightful
leader was hiding in the heather. They could think of no better course
than to seek the reluctant Adam, and make a rebel of him whether
he would or no. They found him on the moors at last, and lest his
beautiful abbey should be burnt to the ground because of him, he came
back to face the curses and daggers of the mob, the futile sufferings
of rebellion, the prison-cell in the Tower where his name still shows
upon the wall, and the gallows of Tyburn. His tardy and unwilling
heroism was piteously useless, for not even the flames of the Pilgrims
of Grace could have laid the walls of Jervaulx lower or left its altars
more desolate than did the hammers and picks of the king's agents.
[Illustration: CHAPTER HOUSE, JERVAULX ABBEY.]
Charles Kingsley came here once, and picked a forget-me-not for
his wife--a pleasant memory among so many fierce ones. He was the
last canon of the collegiate church of Middleham, where he stayed
for several days at the time of his instalment, and endured "so
much bustle, and robing and unrobing" that he had no time to think.
Middleham, as a rule, is anything but a bustling place; but in spite
of its demure looks, I believe there are still days when its streets
are, as Kingsley saw them, "crowded with jockeys and grooms." We are
now on our way thither. After passing through East Witton we cross the
Cover, whose pools are dear to fishermen, and were therefore dear to
Kingsley. "Little Cover," he called it affectionately, "in his deep
wooded glen, with his yellow rock and bright white stones, and brown
water clearer than crystal."
We climb into Middleham past the base of an old cross on which is
fixed a modern head. At the top of the hill is the curious structure
called the Swine Cross, with the mutilated stone beast whose identity
has proved so hard to establish. Some say it is the Bear of Warwick;
others recognise in it the Boar of Gloucester. As far as its personal
appearance is concerned it might with equal plausibility be called
the Lion of England or the Hound of the Baskervilles, seeing that its
outline commits the sculptor to nothing and it has no manner of face
whatever. Turning to the left we find the castle looking down upon us
gloomily.
This castle of Middleham is square and stern; more strong than
beautiful. Its keep is Norman, and is the work of a Fitzranulph of the
twelfth century; but the towered wall that hems it round so closely
was built by the Nevilles, who lived here for many years in princely
state. The great Earl of Warwick, when he was not making kings--and,
indeed, sometimes when he was--chose this to be a centre of his pomp
and power; and one of the kings he made, Edward IV., is said to have
been imprisoned here for a short time. The time would have been longer
if Edward had not cajoled his custodian, the Archbishop of York, into
allowing him to hunt in the park. We know from _Henry VI._ how Richard,
Duke of Gloucester, and Lord Hastings lay in ambush in the forest that
is no longer here, and rescued Edward from those who were hunting with
him.
That same Duke of Gloucester, who was a trespasser on this occasion,
came to Middleham as its master later on. Poor Anne Neville, the
kingmaker's daughter, spent most of her sad married life within this
melancholy fortress, with the husband who asked no man to make him
king, but made himself Richard III. We may see the gloomy walls of her
withdrawing room--bereft now of both roof and floor--where she sat so
often sick at heart and ailing; and the banquet-hall where her father
kept such state; and the kitchen where six oxen were sometimes roasted
for one breakfast. There, in the north wall, is the gateway through
which she watched her husband riding out to entrap his little nephews,
and through which she herself soon followed him to see him crowned;
and here at the south-west corner of the outer wall is the tower where
her only son was born. The boy spent practically all his short life
here, all but that brief and brilliant interlude of the coronation at
Westminster and the pageantry at York; and here, too, he died in his
parents' absence. I do not know if Anne ever returned to Middleham. We
hear of her "in a state bordering on madness," and not long afterwards
her tragic life was over.
For many years the castle was left at the mercy of all who cared to
despoil it. It was very literally treated as a quarry; for when all the
faced stone within reach had been removed the walls were hollowed out
below, in the hope that the upper part might fall and so provide more
plunder. Such is the cohesion of the masonry, however, that this design
was more or less frustrated, and the undermined walls still stand like
overhanging cliffs. Here and there, indeed, great masses have fallen
in huge boulders as solid as rock; but perhaps the gunpowder of the
Commonwealth was responsible for these.
There was once a suggestion made, in a letter from Lord Huntingdon to
his "verrye good lord ye lord Treasurer," that Queen Elizabeth should
join in this work of quarrying. She purposed to pay a visit to her city
of York, a visit which was designed to be "no small comforte to all
hyr good subjects, and no less terrour to ye others." But the great
difficulty was to find "a good housse" for her. Huntingdon excitedly
laid his scheme before Burleigh. "Ye meanes ys thys," he wrote. "Hyr
hyghness hathe heare ye Castell of Midham, which ys in greate ruyne
and daylye wasteth, ... but ye tymber ye stone ye lead and ye iron yt
ys theare wold make a fayre housse heare, and as I gesse with good
husbandrye paye all ye chargys. I am sure if your L. dyd see ye place
... you wolde thinke yt most convenient to be pulled downe, rathyr than
yt shuld stande and waste daylye as yt dothe."[1] Fortunately Burleigh
did not think it most convenient, and now the place no longer wastes
daily, but is daily being repaired.
When we crossed Cover Bridge we entered Wensleydale, and a mile or
two beyond Middleham is the pretty little town from which the dale
takes its name. The scenery is quiet and pastoral here, the Ure flows
smoothly, and it is difficult to realise how near we are to the sort of
country Defoe was thinking of when he wrote in his eighteenth-century
way: "The black moorish lands show dismal and frightful." How near we
are to the moorish lands, however, we shall shortly find out, and it
is at Wensley that we have to decide by which road we shall cross them.
But first, here is Wensley Church on the left, with Saxon stones in
it, and a splendid brass that no one who cares for such things would
wish to pass by, and among its graves one that has been thought to be
of interest to every British man and woman. It is an altar-tomb with
fluted corners standing on the right of the path that leads from gate
to porch. Beneath it lies Peter Goldsmith. It has been stated,[2] on
what grounds I cannot discover, that he was surgeon of the _Victory_
at Trafalgar, and that Nelson died in his arms. This is making a great
claim for him. Yet his name is not mentioned in the standard accounts
of Nelson's death,[3] nor does it appear in the list of the _Victory's_
officers. As we all know, Beatty was the surgeon who attended Nelson in
the cockpit. The assistant-surgeon was Neil Smith; the surgeon's mate
was Westerburgh.[4]
This is the country of the Scropes of Bolton, and their names and arms
are conspicuous in the church--over the porch, on the buttresses, on
the carved chancel stalls, and, above all, on Lord Bolton's screened
pew in the north aisle. The carved sides of this were originally part
of the parclose by which the tombs of the Scropes were surrounded in
Easby Abbey. The front of it is ugly and has an eighteenth-century air.
The horrible grey marbled paint that defaces the woodwork suggests the
nineteenth. The famous brass, which lies within the communion rails,
is so beautiful as to appeal to the most ignorant in such matters, and
dates from the fourteenth century. It marks the grave of two men--Sir
Simon of Wensley, priest, and the seventeenth-century rector who
desired to be buried under the same stone and brass.
Our course, after leaving Wensley, depends on our further intentions.
The course I recommend is this: to drive up Wensleydale on the lower
road, past the cascades and village of Aysgarth--named by the Danes
Asgard, the home of the gods--past Bainbridge and Hawes; to cross the
river at Yorebridge, and return by Askrigg and Redmire, making a short
digression to Bolton Castle; then, turning to the left beyond Redmire,
to strike across the "moorish lands" to Richmond. These Yorkshire
moors, which seemed so "ill-looking" to Defoe, are neither black nor
frightful in our later eyes, but glorious with colour and light. The
old road from Leyburn across Barden and Hipswell Moors has rather a bad
surface, and a hill that is stiff enough to account for the making of
the new road; but on a sunny summer's evening the view from the highest
point is lovely beyond words. Beautiful it must be at all seasons and
in all weathers, but it is only when the air is clear that the head of
Swaledale may be seen on one side of the ridge and the far-away slopes
of Wensleydale on the other, and it is only when the sun is sinking
that those distant hills are washed with gold. The moors sweep round
us far and near; a line of dark firs crosses them mid-way; patches of
vivid green break through the heather; and down in the valley the
Swale shows as a thin thread of twisted silver. Behind us, towards
Middleham, the more level country is a dark blue streak beyond the
crimson of the sunlit heather. The white road, straight and narrow,
lies before us.
Those who choose this way will have little to regret, and will have one
real advantage: they will approach Richmond by the road which gives the
finest view of that fair town. They must remember, however, that there
is a very steep downward gradient at one point between the moors and
the river, and at the bottom of it a sharp turn over a bridge. The run
up Swaledale may easily be achieved from Richmond, where there is a
comfortable hotel.
The other alternative is to cross from Wensleydale to Swaledale by way
of the Buttertubs Pass. Now, I do not wish to be too encouraging about
this pass! It is a place for the well-equipped only, and for those
who do not suffer too much when their tyres are suffering. Many cars,
of course, have passed this way, and many more will do so; but none
the less it is not a suitable road for motoring. It is precipitous in
places, narrow everywhere, and the surface is almost entirely composed
of loose stones. Moreover, a grassy slope, so steep as to be almost a
precipice, drops away from the edge of it; and though I am assured the
pass is perfectly safe, there are points in it where nothing but faith
in one's driver can make it comfortable! The scenery is magnificent.
Starting from Wensley, we must take the upper of the two roads to
Redmire marked on Bartholomew's map, for the lower one, apparently,
runs through Lord Bolton's park. It occurs to one here, as in several
other places in Yorkshire, that it would be a good plan if map-makers
would adopt some distinctive way of marking private roads. The views
from the high ground are lovely. All Wensleydale lies before us--green
as an emerald in the valley, bare and grey on the hilltops, dimly blue
in the distance. Over it all lies that haze of luminous gold that the
sunshine gives to these dales. Far away, but clearly visible, Bolton
Castle stands up on the hillside, massive and grey and relentless, a
queen's prison. At Redmire Station we turn aside to see it.
"The castelle," says Leland, "as no great howse, is al compactid in
4 or 5 towers." Outwardly, it is probably much the same as in his
day: a square of cold, grey stone with a tower at each corner, gloomy
and forbidding, with no attempt at ornament, no break in the solid
masonry except the tiny windows. To Leland it was simply the castle
of the Scropes, the work of the famous Chancellor who fought at Créçy
in his younger days, the fortress of a family that was perpetually
distinguishing itself. So he looked at it and passed it by. It was
"no great howse." But we see it with other eyes, because it has been
touched by the charm that wins us in spite of our better judgment, just
as it won men long ago in spite of theirs--the glamour of the Queen of
Scots. The banquet hall where so many Scropes have feasted--bishops,
statesmen, judges, Knights of the Garter--leaves us cold; we do not
care to know there was a chantry here; even the cruel dungeon in the
ground, with the hole through which the victim was lowered and the bolt
to which he was fastened and the slab of stone that was fixed over the
top, only calls for a passing shudder. To us the interest of Bolton
Castle is centred in the whitewashed room upstairs.
[Illustration: BOLTON CASTLE.]
It was a summer evening, "one hour after sunsetting," when Mary
rode into that grass-grown court with Sir Francis Knollys and Sir
George Bowes, and two companies of soldiers, and six ladies, and
forty-three horses, and four cartloads of luggage. She was not yet very
unhappy. "She hath been very quiet," wrote Knollys of the journey,
"very tractable, and void of displeasant countenance." She was less
tractable when the time came for her to leave Bolton: she had learnt
much meanwhile. For the months spent at Bolton were the crisis of her
misfortunes. In this upper room she sat "knitting of a work" in the
deep recess of the window, or writing endless letters by the fire,
or turning young Christopher Norton's head, while the Casket Letters
were being read at Hampton Court, and her accusers were discussing her
character at York, and her "dear cousin and sister" was pressing her
to abdicate her throne. It was in this room that she wrote at last to
her advisers: "I pray you do not speak to me again about abdication,
for I am deliberately resolved rather to die than to resign my crown;
and the last words that I shall utter in my life shall be the words of
a Queen of Scotland."
She wrote a vast number of other letters here. Some were to the young
Queen of Spain, her sister-in-law, who, as Elizabeth of France, had
been her playmate at the Court of Henri II.; some were about the care
of her infant son; and some, of a conciliatory kind, were to the Queen
of England. "Toutesfoyes," she wrote, "sur votre parolle il n'est rien
que je n'entreprisse, car je ne doutay jamays de votre honneur et
royalle fidelitay."
It was here, too, that she wrote her first English letter to her
custodian, Sir Francis Knollys--her schoolmaster, as she called him,
who had been giving her lessons, apparently without any marked success.
"It is sed Seterday my unfrinds wil be wth zou; y sey nething, bot
trest weil. An ze send one to zour wiff ze may asur her schu wold a
bin weilcom to a pur strenger.... Thus affter my commendations I pray
God heue you in his kipin.
"Your assured gud frind,
"MARIE R.
"Excus ivel vreitn furst tym."
Mary's rooms have lately been restored; but this plain stone fireplace
is the same by which she sat shivering while the news of the
Westminster Conference was so long in coming through the snow, hoping
against hope that the English Queen would not "make her lose all";
turning over in her mind the scheme for marrying her to Don John of
Austria; reading specious letters from Elizabeth pleading "the natural
love of a mother towards her bairn"; and smiling upon Knollys till
he credited her with "an eloquent tongue, a discreet head, a stout
courage, and a liberal heart adjoined thereunto." This is the window
through which she looked out over Wensleydale, luminous in the August
sunshine or white with snow, and realised gradually that she was indeed
a prisoner, she who "loved greatly to go on horseback." She was allowed
to ride in the park, it is true; but her riding was a mockery with
twelve soldiers at her horse's heels.
Yet she was not always sad. She had her lighter moments and pastimes
other than knitting. "The Queen here is merry, and hunteth," wrote
Knollys, "and passeth her time in pleasant manner." She even coquetted
with the Reformed Faith, and "grew into a good liking of the Liturgy";
and she took pleasure (of a more convincing kind) in having her hair
busked by Mistress Mary Seaton, whom she declared to be the finest
busker in any country. Knollys, apparently, was not insensible to the
charms of a _coiffure_. "This day she did set such a curled hair upon
the Queen that it was like to be a periwig that showed very delicately;
and every other day she hath a new device of hairdressing, without any
cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gaily well."
Here, up these steps upon which Mary's skirts have trailed, is the
room where Mistress Seaton set such a curled hair upon the lovely
head, the room where the Queen slept, or more often lay awake. There
had been some difficulty in making her rooms ready to receive her.
The Scropes were not luxurious, it seems. Her bedding and hangings
came from Sir George Bowes' house, near Barnard Castle; pewter vessels
and a copper kettle were hastily borrowed from the Court of England;
and the neighbours lent some furniture with rather a bad grace. There
is a very strong local tradition that Mary once escaped from Bolton
Castle. The "Queen's Gap" on Leyburn Shawl is pointed out as the scene
of her recapture, and this little bedroom window as the way of her
escape. I cannot find the least evidence that the story is true. But
it was in this room that she lay sick for days, before she was dragged
reluctantly away in the dusk of a January dawn, bitterly cold and
bitterly angry, to her next prison at Tutbury.
This castle held for the king in the Civil War, and that is why it has
lost its north-west tower. The actual fall was in a storm, a hundred
years later than the siege that weakened the masonry.
As we drive away up Wensleydale we look back again and again at the
fortress, which dominates the valley far more conspicuously than its
position on the green hillside seems to warrant. The scenery grows
wilder and the slopes nearer before a steep descent with a bad surface
takes us into Askrigg. Here, in a little open space beside the church,
is a picturesque Jacobean house of grey stone, bearing an inscription
and the date MDCLXXVIII. Its projecting bays are joined by a wooden
gallery, which was designed, it is said, to give a good view of the
bull-baiting that took place before it. There, hidden in the grass, is
the iron ring to which the bull was tied; and close beside it stands
the restored village-cross--a strange conjunction of symbols! In the
fifteenth-century church there are some pillars which are thought
to have been transported from Fors, the original dwelling, about a
mile from here, of the brothers of Jervaulx--the little band of monks
from Savigny, who came to this valley under the leadership of Peter
de Quincy, the Leech, in the reign of Stephen. They found this place
too wild even for their Cistercian ideals, too cold and foggy for the
ripening of crops, too frequently beset by wolves; and so, though
the optimistic Peter was "very certain we shall be able to raise a
competent supply of ale, cheese, bread, and butter," the community
moved nearer to civilisation, leaving behind them nothing for us to see
except a window in a barn and these pillars in Askrigg Church.
[Illustration: ASKRIGG.]
As the road becomes narrower and rougher the scenery every moment grows
more beautiful. Hawes lies on the other side of the valley at the foot
of the blue hills, in a lovely position beside the Ure; and when we
have reached a point exactly opposite to it we turn sharply up a steep
pitch on the right, with a splendid panoramic view of mountains on the
left as we climb.
This is the beginning of the Buttertubs Pass. From this point onwards,
till the road plunges down into Swaledale, the surface is composed
more or less of loose stones. The stiffest upward gradients we shall
have to encounter are within a mile or two of this spot, for the wild
part of the pass--the real moorland--is comparatively level, and by
the time we reach the actual Buttertubs we are already running down.
This is the climax--this point where the downward gradient begins--for
here suddenly the solid earth seems to fall away from us: here suddenly
the rough and narrow road is no longer lying across the far-stretching
moorland, but is hanging high upon the hillside, clinging upon the
extremest edge of a gulf which drops dizzily into a blue sea of
shadows. Thus it clings for miles. Beyond the chasm the bare hillside
rises again above our heads in magnificent curves, glowing with colour,
and cleft here and there into purple gorges. Slightly above the road on
the left are the Buttertubs, strange crater-like hollows of unplumbed
depth, appearing at intervals beside us, with sharp rocks bristling
through the grass at their mouths. As we slowly descend, the hills of
Swaledale rise before us like a wall blocking the defile; and presently
a gate across the road shows that we are near the world again.
[Illustration: THE BUTTERTUBS PASS.]
Truly this is one of the runs that are unforgettable. To be among these
savage heights and depths, these heaving waves of desolate moor, to
have these solitudes above us and these blue shadows so far below us,
is to know something of "the strong foundations of the earth." It is
with a feeling of anti-climax that we close the gate behind us, and, on
a precipitous gradient and no surface worth mentioning, steer slowly
down into Swaledale.
As we cautiously make our way over the stones of this very trying lane,
we are confronted with rather a startling notice board: "No Road." It
seems a little late to tell us that now: they might have mentioned it
before we crossed the pass! Then it dawns upon us that the amateur hand
that traced the letters has sloped the board in the wrong direction.
It is really meant to face down the valley, for the discouragement of
those who might stray up from Swaledale, ignorant of the pass.
Swaledale, I think, is the most beautiful of all the dales. Of course
beauty varies with the weather, and distant Muker in the hollow of the
hills cannot be the same on a colourless, grey day as when it lies in
a pool of sunshine. But on any day Swaledale must seem, to one who
is fresh from the elemental dignity of the pass, to hold a wonderful
variety of lovely things: opal hills and soft woods, patches of heather
and slopes of fern, fir-trees and feathery birches and clumps of
scarlet rowans. There are individual pictures that one remembers as
types of the whole. At Gunnerside, for instance, where the road crosses
the Swale, cliffs rise from the stony river-bed, and are crowned with
overhanging trees, the banks are smothered in masses of burdock leaves,
and the whole scene is encircled by the hills. The road is not very
good, and there are some steep pitches between Gunnerside and Reeth;
but it matters little, for who would care to hurry through such a land
as this?
[Illustration: THE SWALE.]
It was on the road near Low Row that John Wesley began his preaching in
this part of the world, standing on a table by the wayside. A little
further on is Helaugh, once a gayer place than it is at present. The
hills above it have echoed many a time to the winding of the horn, when
John of Gaunt was lord here and went out to chase the boar. Later on
these lands belonged to that strange Duke of Wharton, "the scorn and
wonder" of Pope's day, who was a Whig when it was unfashionable and a
Jacobite when it became dangerous, who fought against his country and
died a monk.
"Ask you why Wharton broke through every rule?
'Twas all for fear the Knaves should call him Fool."
At Reeth, a fascinating place built on a slope at the mouth of
Arkengarth Dale, we cross the river again, and find a much better road
on the other side.
Between Reeth and Richmond the Swale, flowing softly past its richly
wooded banks, is as beautiful as the lower Wye. On the further side
of it we see the Norman tower of Marrick Priory, where once twelve
blackrobed nuns lived only a mile away from their "white-clothid"
sisters of Ellerton. The nuns of Marrick were fortunate, for though
they were so few they won a short respite for some unknown reason, and
were allowed to stay in their beautiful retreat till the dissolution of
the larger monasteries. There are few places in England, I think, that
would be easier to love and harder to leave than Swaledale.
Richmond, on its hill, guards the mouth of the valley. This first view
of it from Swaledale, with the tower of the castle rising slowly into
sight, gives no idea at all of the beauty and strength that have made
it famous. We only know how Richmond has won its name when we see it
from below, with the buttressed bridge in the foreground, and the
bright waters of the Swale reflecting the houses that are clustered at
their brink, and the sun-flecked path under the trees, and the roofs,
tier above tier, climbing the steep hillside, and above them all--foe
of their foes and shelter of their friends--the long curtain-wall and
towering keep of the castle. This view of Richmond has been praised
so much that one fears disappointment. Yet one is not disappointed.
Richmond is not only beautiful: it has that other quality--so much more
important than beauty in woman or town--the quality of charm. Richmond
is lovable.
It was the Normans who first took advantage of this fine position for
a fortress: the Saxon owners of the place were the Earls of Mercia,
and had no castle here, for Gilling, their headquarters in the north,
was only a few miles away. We may dream, if we like, that Ethelfled,
the soldierly daughter of Alfred the Great, and Godiva, the Lady of
Coventry, visited this place when their husbands were minded to chase
the wolf or the boar in this part of their lands. It is possible that
they did so: but there is no authentic history of Richmond before
the time when Alan the Breton received from his kinsman, William the
Conqueror, "at the siege before York," a grant of "all the towns and
lands which lately belonged to Earl Edwin in Yorkshire." It was this
Alan who began to build the castle. We may not enter it without
permission, for it is now used as barracks; but we can walk up to
the gateway at the foot of the great keep and see its buttresses and
turrets towering above us; and we can follow the path that surrounds
the walls and look at the view that George IV. admired so much. This
view of the river from the castle is very pretty, but is by no means
comparable to the view of the castle from the river. Possibly George
IV. fixed his eyes upon the Culloden Tower among the trees to the
right, and was biassed by association.
Three times this castle wall behind us has imprisoned a king. When
five English knights and their men-at-arms made their dashing march to
Alnwick and captured William the Lion of Scotland, it was to Richmond
they brought him; and David Bruce, another Scottish king, was here
nearly two hundred years later; and the third was Charles I. Legend,
indeed, tells us of a fourth king still imprisoned here; for this
castle rock is one of the many places wherein King Arthur lies asleep
with all his knights, awaiting the magic blast upon the horn that shall
some day wake him. The Breton folk say he waits beneath the island of
Agalon; the Welsh look for him to come forth from among the mountains
of Glamorganshire.
[Illustration: RICHMOND.]
Soon after Bruce's imprisonment the castle seems to have fallen into
disrepair; and this, I suppose, was the reason that John of Gaunt, who
was Lord of Richmond, made his hunting expeditions from Helaugh rather
than from here. Harry of Richmond, when he became Henry VII., gave this
castle of his to his mother, and finding that the "mantill wall" was
"in decay of maisone wark," and "all the doyers, wyndoys, and other
necessaries," with much beside, were also in decay, he gave orders that
the whole should "be new refresshede."
Though this attractive town possesses much, it has also lost much. Once
it had a wall--built to keep the Scots out--and several gates; but all
are gone now, except the postern in Friar's Wynd, and the old pointed
arch of Bargate, which we may see from the foot of Carnforth Hill.
Gone, too, is the elaborate cross, which, according to all accounts,
was an object of beauty in the paved market-place. This is more than
can be said for the strange obelisk that has supplanted it. But in this
same market-square still stands Holy Trinity Chapel--not beautiful,
but very ancient, being that "chapel in Richemont toune" which, Leland
says, had "straung figures in the waulles of it. The people there
dreme," he goes on, "that it was ons a temple of idoles." Some even
dream that this chapel was founded by Paulinus, the seventh-century
saint, in memory of an occasion when he baptized an enormous number of
converts in the Swale; but, as Bede says the ceremony took place in the
river because it was impossible to build oratories "in those parts,"
this dream is not very credible. It is no dream, I believe, but a fact,
that the chapel stands on the site of a Danish temple. In its walls
there are now no strange figures of "idoles," but some very strange
_annexes_ for a chapel. A butcher's shop is wedged between the tower
and the nave, and several other shops are built into its side.
One of the most notable things here is the Grey Friars' Tower, which
we passed on entering the town from Swaledale: a peculiarly slender and
graceful piece of Perpendicular work. Like the campanile at Evesham, it
stands alone because the building of the church connected with it was
suddenly brought to an end by the Dissolution. The Franciscans who had
their friary here were mostly put to death or imprisoned for life--yet
not for long--because they thought it their duty to obey St. Francis
rather than Henry VIII.
There are remains of another religious house quite close to Richmond.
Very little is left at Easby of the abbey church of St. Agatha, but the
position of the ruins beside the river is full of quiet charm. Those
who dwelt here were Premonstratensian Canons, whose rather confusing
order was founded by the German visionary St. Norbert, and whose white
garments were chosen for them by the Virgin herself. They passed
to their dormitory through the Norman archway with the ornamented
mouldings, the last remaining fragment of the original twelfth-century
building raised by Roald, the Constable of Richmond. Until lately a
very decorative tree grew up through this archway and figured in every
picture of Easby, but it threatened to break down the masonry, and so
was sacrificed. It is a sad loss to artists. But the last memorial of
Roald would have been a loss still sadder, for, even as it is, Roald is
often forgotten in favour of the Scropes, who practically rebuilt St.
Agatha's. Their shield is still over the porch of the parish church, a
hundred yards away; their dust lies under the rough sods to the west of
the north transept. At Wensley we saw the carved sides of what was once
their parclose.
We finally leave the town by the same road that leads to Easby, turning
off to the left to join the great Roman highway beyond Gilling. It was
just here, where the roads fork, that the Lass of Richmond Hill lived
in the eighteenth century, till she married the writer of the song; and
hither, too, to the same Hill House, came later songs, greater than
MacNally's--songs from Byron to his future wife, Miss Milbank. Our last
view of Richmond, from _Maison Dieu_, is worthy of remembrance. The
town is spread before us with all its towers; the slender Grey Friars'
Tower, the church, the soaring keep; and in the background of hills is
the green gap that means so much to those who have lost their hearts
to Swaledale. That is behind us now; and on the right is stretched the
great green plain of central Yorkshire--the plain that divides the
western moors from the moors of Clevedon and Hambledon. Somewhere in
that plain is the Great North Road.
Soon after passing Lord Zetland's place, Aske Hall, we drive through
the wide street of Gilling, the little village of gardens, where there
is nothing left, except a few Saxon stones, to remind us that the great
Earls of Mercia made it one of their capitals till Alan of Brittany
laid it waste. A little way beyond it we turn a sharp corner and are
on the Roman road. After speeding along this for some minutes it is
interesting to look back and see the amazing straightness of the white
streak that stretches away behind the car and disappears over the crest
of the hill. The scenery is dull at first; but presently a new line
of moors and dales appears on the horizon, and the roadway itself is
shaded with trees and fringed with grass and flowers. Meantime the
surface is enough in itself to make a motorist happy.
The car glides up the slope of a little bridge; we pass a screen
of trees; and the extreme beauty of the Greta is revealed with a
suddenness that is almost startling. This bridge with the stone parapet
is the famous Greta Bridge; this is the stream painted by Turner and
sung by Scott; there by the roadside are the gates of Rokeby.
"Oh, Brignall banks are fresh and fair,
And Greta woods are green!"
Brignall banks are not in sight, but here are Greta woods--intensely
green--flinging their branches across the river till they meet and
interlace in an archway over the clear water and the yellow stones.
[Illustration: GRETA BRIDGE.]
At the northern limit of Rokeby Park we must leave the highway. There
is a road here that is not marked on Bartholomew's map--a road that
turns to the right and leads to Mortham Tower, and the Dairy Bridge,
and the meeting of the Greta and the Tees. The "battled tower" of
Mortham is now inhabited; we may not see the bloodstains on the stairs;
but from a little distance the fifteenth-century peel and the Tudor
buildings that surround it make a pretty group. Below the grassy knoll
on which it stands the Greta dashes down between its overshadowing
banks and veiling foliage to join the quieter, statelier Tees.
The beauty of this place is really haunting. Sir Walter Scott has
described every inch of it in "Rokeby," with complete accuracy if with
no great inspiration. For the wild sweetness of this spot is not such
as can be put into words. It is a place of enchantment, where the
spell-bound poet can only stammer helplessly, and the plain man for a
moment feels himself a poet.
Returning to the main road, we follow the wooded Tees to Barnard
Castle. For miles the river is as we saw it at the meeting of the
waters, darkly shadowed by trees and bound by rocky banks; more
beautiful in itself than Wharfe or Swale, though flowing through a
valley that cannot be compared to the other dales except at its head:
but there, I think, excelling them all. Through the greater part of
Teesdale the beauty of the river is so closely confined to its banks
that we only catch a glimpse of it now and then, when actually crossing
the stream. One of these glimpses we have from the toll-bridge just
below Eggleston Abbey, where we cross for a few minutes into the county
of Durham. The ruins of the abbey are visible through the trees,
standing on a grassy hill upon the Yorkshire bank of the river.
[Illustration: THE DAIRY BRIDGE.]
At Barnard Castle--which is not a very attractive town at first sight,
and is sorely disfigured by its portentous museum--we again cross the
Tees into Yorkshire, near the point where the familiar towers of the
Baliols' ruined fortress stand high above the river on their cliff.
This commanding position was granted to the Norman Guy de Baliol by
Rufus, and Guy's son Bernard raised on it the castle that was forfeited
by his descendant. This Bernard was no friend to the throne on which
the later Baliol sat, for he was the most zealous of the five knights
who captured William of Scotland and took him to Richmond Castle. When
the enterprise seemed about to fail, it was Bernard who cried: "If
you should all turn back, I would go on alone!" A little more than a
hundred years later John Baliol, King of Scotland, was rashly refusing
to be at the beck and call of the English king. "Has the fool done this
folly?" asked Edward. "If he will not come to us we will come to him!"
So John lost his crown, and Barnard Castle saw the Baliols no more. It
was given to the Nevilles, and so with many other things fell into the
capacious hands of Richard III., who actually lived here for a time,
and has left his symbol, the wild boar, upon the oriel window.
There is one gracious memory that makes these towers sacred. The ruined
halls are haunted by the presence of that gentle and sad lady who was
the widow of one John Baliol and the mother of another--Devorgilla,
daughter of kings, foundress of Baliol College, and in her endless
sorrow the builder of Dulce Cor. When her husband died she "had his
dear heart embalmed and enshrined in a coffer of ivory, enamelled and
bound with silver bright, which was placed before her daily in her hall
as her sweet, silent companion." It was here at Bernard Castle that she
chiefly lived with that silent companion, until the noble shrine of
stone was ready to receive the ivory coffer; it was here she lived on
alone, till she too died and was carried out to be buried in Sweetheart
Abbey, with John Baliol's "dear heart" upon her breast.
Of the two roads to Middleton-in-Teesdale the one on the Durham side is
the best as regards both surface and scenery; but the greater number
of those who drive up Teesdale will return to Barnard Castle before
going on their way to the north or crossing Yorkshire to the coast,
and will probably prefer to drive up the valley by one road and come
down it again on the other. On the Yorkshire side there is nothing very
striking. Lartington is pretty, and gay with flowers; Cotherstone still
has a fragment of the FitzHughs' castle in a field above the river;
Romaldkirk has an interesting church. Beyond Mickleton we cross the
Lune, which is a miniature copy of the Tees, with the same rocky bed
and the same close screen of overarching boughs. A few minutes later we
cross the Tees itself and are in Middleton.
The road from Middleton to High Force is surprisingly populous. Here
among the hills, where the fields are yielding to moorland, and
the river flows under bare crags, one expects a certain amount of
loneliness; yet here is a broad and civilised highway, with all the
character of a road near some large town. The scenery, however, is
wild enough; and more beautiful than anything we have seen. Beyond the
river--open now to the sky, no longer veiled by trees--rise the moors,
piled high, fold upon fold, grand in outline and glorious in colour,
green and purple and crimson. A wood by the wayside blots out river and
hills for a moment; then suddenly through a gap we see High Force.
Looking down from the road we see it as a picture framed in trees: the
solid wall of rock, the leap of the foaming waters, the cloud of spray,
the fir-trees with their spires against the sky, the crimson moors
beyond. That white torrent is the boundary of the county, the crown and
climax of the beauty of Yorkshire, and our last and most perfect memory
of the dales.
[Illustration: HIGH FORCE.]
THE COAST
SUMMARY OF TOUR ALONG THE COAST
DISTANCES.
Yarm
Saltburn 21 miles
Whitby 21 "
Scarborough 25 "
Total 67 miles
ROADS
Hills very steep and frequent near coast.
Surface usually good.
[Illustration: THE CLIFF, STAITHES.]
II
THE COAST
When one is approaching the coast of Yorkshire from the north, the
important thing is to avoid the manufacturing towns of Stockton and
Middlesbrough. This can be done by crossing the Tees at Yarm, and
joining the splendid road that runs so straightly from this point
to the sea. Those who have come from the dales will notice at once,
even in Yarm, how greatly the houses here differ from the houses of
the west. In that fair land the buildings, both small and great, have
the character common to moorland buildings: they are stern and sturdy
and grey; made not to please the eye, but to endure the buffetings of
wind and rain. But these houses of the plain, it seems, do their best
to provide the beauty that is lacking in scenery. They are warm and
picturesque, red and tiled and gabled, a feature in the landscape. The
wide street of Yarm, with its trees and grass and pretty buildings,
has almost a foreign air. Beyond it is the straight road with the
magnificent surface.
The views from this road, to right and left, are rather striking, each
in its own way. On the left the scene is not beautiful, yet not without
romance--the romance that is hidden under so much that is ugly. That
long, long line of tall chimneys and distant masts, that cloud of smoke
that darkens all the sky, are symbols of the spirit of adventure,
of the love of enterprise, of untiring progress, of belief in the
future; for surely the history of our commerce has included all these
things. It was from Stockton that the first railway in the world ran to
Darlington; and in Middlesbrough many of our merchant ships are built.
Eighty years ago about a hundred people lived there: to-day there are a
hundred thousand under that black pall.
To the right of us is an equally long line of another sort--the line
of the Cleveland Moors. The curious excrescence of Roseberry Topping
is conspicuous from the first, and even at this distance the monument
to Captain Cook is visible on the hillside. For it was in the little
village of Marton, through which we pass on our way to Guisborough,
that James Cook was born, and learnt his lessons in the village school
when not employed in scaring crows. Roseberry Topping, at first sight,
looks like a huge tumulus. "It is the landmark that directs sailers,
and a prognostick to the neighbours hereabouts." The view from its
summit has been described by many writers, with degrees of enthusiasm
varying from the "most agreeable prospect" of Camden to the ardour of
another traveller, who declared that "there you may see a vewe the
like whereof I never saw, or thinke that any traveller hath seene any
comparable unto yt." A certain discreet author, quoting these words a
hundred years ago, says gravely: "Accurate observation and comparison
forbid us to ratify this assertion in its full extent."
The base of Roseberry Topping is largely composed of alum. In the reign
of Elizabeth some alum works were set up at Guisborough, but were
solemnly cursed by the Pope. His Holiness, it transpired, was himself
the owner of some alum works.
The actual streets of Guisborough are not attractive, but seen from a
distance the general effect of the little place is rather charming. It
lies in a valley with the hills of Cleveland behind it, and towering
above it is the great east window of its priory, bereft so entirely
of tracery that it has the air of some stately gateway. This lovely
fragment, this graceful window with its pinnacles and crockets, is
all, except a Norman gateway, that is left of the burial-place of the
English Bruces--the once rich and famous Augustinian priory whose
buildings covered acres of ground, and whose prior "kept a most
pompous house." At least two churches that have stood upon this spot
were destroyed by fire, but it was not fire that caused this final
destruction; not, as in one of the other cases, the conduct of "a
vile plumber with a wicked disposition"; not even primarily the zeal
of Henry VIII.'s commissioner; but the vandalism of one Chaloner,
who bought it and hacked it to pieces. It was he who built the alum
works that were so distasteful to the Pope, and it is quite possible
that some of the stones of this Gothic masterpiece were used for the
purpose. If this were the case, one could forgive the Pope for his
methods of carrying on business.
At Skelton, over there on the hill, lived the Bruces of the English
branch, who founded the priory. Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII.
and wife of James IV. of Scotland, raised a splendid cenotaph here to
her husband's ancestors, the Bruces of Annandale and Skelton, only a
short time before her brother made the place desolate for ever. The
cenotaph was moved to the parish church, and was broken up in the
eighteenth century. Until quite lately pieces of it were scattered in
various parts of the church and priory, but it has now been restored
with great care and set up near the west door of the church, with all
its statues of Scottish and English Bruces except that of the greatest
Bruce of all. King Robert's figure, it is believed, was on the west end
that has long been lost. There is some fine old glass in this church,
and a modern window of exceptional beauty.
Guisborough is not a place to stay in; but only six miles away is
Saltburn with all its hotels. The short drive thither is pretty, and
close to the wayside on the right is Upleatham Church, the smallest
used for services in England, with a miniature tower and a nave about
fifteen feet long. Saltburn is a rising watering-place, and has
probably a gay future before it, for it has many charms for those who
like plenty of breezes and bathing-boxes. It must have been a lovely
spot when it was quiet, for its deep green dell ends in a fine cliff,
below which the sea ripples over a many-coloured foreshore. The Zetland
Hotel faces these things.
[Illustration: THE QUAY, STAITHES.]
From Saltburn we may drive across to Brotton, or may take the longer
way by Skelton, passing near the castle. This is now a house dating
obviously from the eighteenth century; but I believe there are among
its offices some slight remains of the castle of the Bruces--the castle
that was, long after their day, the scene of much revelry on the part
of its owner John Hall and his familiars. Among these was Laurence
Sterne. "Its festive board," says a Georgian writer, "was attended by
many of the literati of the age. Where genius and talent were blended
in so close union we cannot but imagine that the feast of reason
and the flow of soul were happily realised." According to authentic
accounts the feast and the flow--not of reason nor of soul--made the
place a perfect pandemonium.
Beyond Brotton the fine outline of Boulby Cliff rises before us, marred
by the huge ironworks that disfigure so many places in Cleveland.
Loftus and Easington are uninteresting; but a couple of miles after
passing through the latter we dip into a lovely little tree-clad
valley--one of the many green gorges that run down, "between the
heather and the northern sea," with tumbling becks hurrying through
them. We climb out of this one on a stiff gradient, and in another
moment are looking down on Staithes.
At the top of the hill that leads down into Staithes there is a
little railway inn. Here it is advisable to leave the car, for the
hill is exceedingly steep, and there is no place in the tiny fishing
town itself where a car may find shelter. Visitors, in fact, are not
encouraged. If, seeking food, you ring at a door that seems to offer
hope, you are recommended to try elsewhere. Yet the day will surely
come when a large hotel will rise upon the hill, and lodging-houses
will grow up round it, and we shall hear of the "upper" and "lower"
towns, the new town and the old, and Staithes will be spoilt. Meantime
a cup of tea may be had at the railway inn, which, though homely, is
extremely clean.
[Illustration: THE HARBOUR, STAITHES.]
Long ago James Cook, a little shop-boy hungry for the sea, ran away
from Staithes. One marvels that any one could steel his heart to leave
it. But to little James, hitherto occupied in the scaring of crows,
Mr. Sanderson's shop under the hill was merely the gate of a wonderful
new world, and he hardly hesitated before passing through it to his
adventurous life and death; to the heights of Montcalm and the depths
of hitherto unsounded waters, and finally to the knives of the South
Seas. Even here, it is plain, he was dreaming of the South Seas. Some
sailor brought a South Sea shilling to Staithes and Cook, seeing it
in his master's till, was seized by the romance of it and changed it
for a more prosaic coin. The transaction was suspicious in the eyes of
Sanderson, and though he was sorry for his mistake when he understood
it, James indignantly left him.
Staithes is dear to every artist who has ever looked upon its streets
and quays, and indeed to every one who has an eye for pictorial effect.
The deep valley that we crossed a few minutes ago ends here at the sea
in two cliffs, and between them the town is wedged. The narrow paved
street winds down to the shore, where little quays are washed by the
waves, and little cottages cling to the cliff for shelter, and boats
are drawn up on the beach. At the river's mouth, under the other
cliff, hosts of seagulls whirl about the rocks or float upon the water;
but most deplorably the picturesque wooden bridge that has figured
in so many works of art is now replaced by an unsightly iron girder.
Staithes is a place apart. In this deep gully, hidden from land and
sea, one seems to be worlds away from ordinary English life. Even the
people are picturesque; the women and little girls in pink or lilac
sunbonnets and gay aprons, and the men and boys in dark blue knitted
jerseys. Every group of children, every ancient mariner, every pretty
girl in a doorway, is as decorative as a peasant in the chorus of an
operetta.
[Illustration: RUNSWICK BAY.]
This coast is indented with bays. Runswick, only a few miles away, may
be seen by making a short digression from Hinderwell--more correctly
Hilda's Well--where there is a holy well named in honour of the
saintly abbess of Whitby. Runswick Bay is sheltered on every side by
hills. A long low headland sweeps round it on the south, with a strip
of sandy beach following the line of the land, and beyond the sand a
curving line of surf. On the nearer side a cliff protects a cluster of
red-tiled houses, and on the summit of this cliff the car must be left
while we walk down the winding path. It is only from below that the
pretty grouping of the village can be seen. In the tourist season this
bay is rather thickly populated, and as the place cannot accommodate
more than a few of its admirers, the fields near the shore are dotted
with the tents of the resolute. But there must be times when this
lovely haven is a haven of peace.
It is from the hill above Lythe that we first see the Whitby cliff in
the distance, with the abbey standing up against the sky. The coast
and its long line of surf are before us, and on the right are the
trees of Mulgrave Park. The present castle of Mulgrave is modern, but
there are still some ruins to be seen of the old fortress of the Saxon
giant, Wada, and of the Norman Fossards and mediæval Mauleys, and of
the seventeenth-century President of the North, Lord Sheffield. It was
one of the seven Peters of the house of de Malo-Lacu, or Mauley, who
beautified the castle so greatly to his own satisfaction that he called
it Moult Grace. "But because it became a grievance to the neighbours
thereabouts, the people (who have always the right of coining words),
by changing one single letter, called it Moult Grave, by which name it
is everywhere known." Both its grace and its seriousness were wiped
away by the time the Civil War was done.
The hill that leads from Lythe to the coast is nearly a mile long,
and has gradients varying from 1 in 7 to 1 in 12. At the foot of it
is Sandsend, as near to the sea as a place can stand. Here are the
mouths of two little green valleys, each with its own little beck and
each with its own little village. The villages, the old and the new,
Sandsend and New Row, are very tiny indeed, but there is a good hotel
between them, within reach of the salt spray, and houses are being
busily built. The place is about to be fashionable, I think, and indeed
it has charms, with the deep, green sides of the gorge at the back
of it, and the sea foaming at its doors. For the greater part of our
way from Sandsend to Whitby we are on a private road, with a toll of
one shilling. There are several sharp curves upon it, with "Special
Caution" notices, and the sides of the gully at Upgang are very steep.
[Illustration: WHITBY ABBEY.]
Whitby, fifty or a hundred years ago, before the raucous cries of
steam merry-go-rounds disturbed the ghost of Cædmon or grinning Aunt
Sallies stood beside the Abbey Cross, must have been the loveliest town
in England. Even now it is bewitching. The old town and the new are
separated by the long harbour, with its crowd of gaily painted cobles,
its quays, its rows of nets hung out to dry; and so, from the windows
of the Royal Hotel on the one cliff, one can look across the water at
the other cliff, and the old houses closely packed upon the slope,
the red-tiled roofs, the high-pitched gables, the queer passages; and
raised high above these the grassy hilltop, the long, low church, the
sloping graveyard where Mary Linskill lies, the tall grey cross of
Cædmon. Crowning all stands the ruined abbey on its height. A long
flight of steps winds up the steep hillside from the harbour to the
abbey, skirting the churchyard; and from this distance, in the dusk of
evening, the stream of dark figures climbing endlessly might well be
blackrobed pilgrims.
[Illustration: WHITBY HARBOUR.]
The tall gables of Whitby Abbey on its bare and desolate cliff are
known to us in countless pictures. We are prepared for the general
effect of wild stateliness, the turrets against the sky, the wind-swept
height, the whirling seabirds; but the beauty of the architecture is
a surprise to some of us--the slender lancets, the rich triforium and
trefoiled arches, the rose window, and all the wealth of ornament. The
ruins of the tower lie where they fell, a mass of _débris_ overgrown
with grass and weeds. Here under the grey-brown walls, which are
crumbled and bitten by the salt wind like a cliff against which the
spray has dashed for centuries, we may sit and remember the saints and
kings who came to this place when our history was young. It is not of
the actual builders of these arches that we chiefly think. Hundreds of
years before their day a monastery stood here, whose fame has always
overshadowed this later one. This is the story of it:--
In the seventh century King Oswy of Northumbria and King Penda of the
Mercians were at war. In vain Oswy offered conciliatory gifts: Penda
would have none of them. "If that pagan," cried the exasperated Oswy,
"refuses to receive our gifts we will offer them to the Lord, who knows
how to accept them!" So he vowed, if he defeated the "wicked king," to
dedicate his baby daughter to the cloister and give sites for twelve
monasteries. This bleak cliff, then called Streaneshalch, the Bay
of the Lighthouse, was one of the sites he gave when he had killed
Penda, "that destroyer of his neighbours and fomenter of hostility,"
as William of Malmesbury calls him; and on it a monastery was built
by the royal and saintly Abbess Hilda, "whom all that knew her called
Mother, for her singular piety and grace." Here she ruled for many
years, teaching peace and charity, training holy men--St. Wilfrid of
Ripon, St. John of Beverley--and even conquering snakes and birds, it
was said. Important things took place here during her rule. It was here
that the great synod was held concerning the keeping of Easter, when
St. Wilfrid quoted St. Peter and Colman quoted Columba till King Oswy
closed the discussion by saying, "Peter is an officer whom I am not
disposed to contradict ... lest when I come to the doors of the kingdom
of heaven there may be no one to open them to me." And it was here,
somewhere within a stone's throw of this actual spot, that Cædmon, the
lay-brother, the herdsman "who did not learn the art of poetry from man
but from God," stood before St. Hilda in the presence of learned men,
and told his vision and recited the verses that were the first English
poem. "And his song and his verse were so winsome to hear, that his
teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth." It was somewhere
close at hand, too, that this earliest of our poets lay down to die in
the infirmary, "conversing pleasantly in a joyful manner." "I am in
charity, my children," he said, "with all the servants of God." Then
he crossed himself, "laid his head on the pillow, and falling into
a slumber, ended his life so in silence." St. Hilda herself, "whose
life was a bright example to all who desired to live well," died and
was buried here, but her bones were afterwards taken to Glastonbury.
The dust of her successor, however--that Princess Elfleda whom Oswy
dedicated to the religious life when he defeated Penda--lies somewhere
very near this spot, within the abbey church itself, with that of the
king her father, and her mother, Queen Eanfled. And down there on the
slope, where the old cross stands, was the graveyard of the monks and
in it the grave of Cædmon.
[Illustration: WHITBY ABBEY. INTERIOR.]
In the ninth century came the sons of Lothbroc the Dane, Hinguar and
Hubba, "men of terrible obstinacy and unheard-of valour." Flying the
invincible standard which their sisters had made with their own hands,
they landed on this coast and utterly destroyed the monastery of
Streaneshalch.
For two hundred years this spot lay desolate. Then Reinfrid the soldier
saw it, and was "pricked to the heart." He became a monk of Evesham,
and after long years came back to Streaneshalch--by that time also
called "Hwiteby"--to carry on the traditions of the past. He began the
work of raising the new abbey on the site of the old; but it was those
who came after him who built that early English chancel, and carved the
lilies of the north transept, and made the decorated window through
which we see the church, and the bluff headlands, and the white teeth
of the North Sea for ever biting at the cliff.
There is no need to return to the town, for we can join the high-road
to Scarborough at a point not far from here. By going a few miles out
of the direct route we may see another of the sheltered bays that make
this coast so beautiful; the bay where long ago, it is said, a fleet
of fishing-boats was always ready to carry Robin Hood and his merry
men to safety. Robin Hood's Butts, on the further side of the bay, are
supposed to have been used as targets for his bowmen by that "most kind
and obliging robber," as a sixteenth-century writer calls him. A long,
steep hill leads down into the little town, which lies on the northern
side of the crescent bay; the old town with its red houses clustered in
the shelter of the cliff, its walls washed by the spray; the new town
higher up the slope. There, below us, is the quay where John Wesley so
often preached. It was there that he received--not without seeing the
humour of it--the sailor's remonstrance against the theory that the
fear of death could only be overcome by the fear of God. The sailor
evidently felt that his reputation was at stake.
[Illustration: WHITBY CHURCH, FROM THE ABBEY.]
This lower and most romantic part of Bay Town is far the most
attractive, but even the upper town is not unpleasing, though it has
several little hotels, and threatens to develop into a watering-place.
There is a road that leads out of the valley on the further side, but
it is extremely bad in every way, and it is practically imperative to
return as we came.
Soon after regaining the high-road we climb slowly up to the moors.
Looking back we can still see the cleft in the hills where Whitby's
red houses are hidden, and the headlands beyond it, and the stately
abbey on the cliff. Before us there is a run so entrancing, a feast
of colour so deeply satisfying, that these moors of Cleveland must
henceforward, I think, be the standard by which we appraise all
moorland runs. The road lies visible in front of us for miles: at times
so straight that the telegraph wires are foreshortened till the posts
are hardly distinguishable one from another; at other times winding
in serpentine curves into the far distance. On each side of us, from
the wheels of the hurrying car to the horizon, stretches the heather.
Here and there is a patch of bracken, now and then a strip of yellow
grass; but it is heather that makes the landscape, that flings its
imperial robes over the hills and nestles under the wayside stones,
that satisfies the eye and rests the heart with its astonishing beauty.
Miles of road fly under us; we glide up and we dart down; now we dip
into a ferny dell and climb out of it again, now we cross a stony beck,
now we pass a plantation of firs; but still the setting is heather,
deep bell-heather and pale ling, purple and crimson and mauve, sweeping
away till the colours are merged in blue. Bluest of all is the sea,
which appears now and then in a triangle of sapphire at the end of a
glen. On the shores of that blue sea, a couple of miles to our left,
is Ravenscar, which takes its name from the raven standard of the sons
of Danish Lothbroc, who landed here when they came to devastate St.
Hilda's abbey. Such at least is the tradition.
[Illustration: WHITBY HARBOUR.]
Gradually, and most reluctantly, we leave these shining heights for the
lower world. The heather gives way to fields; the road is again bounded
by respectable stone walls. We pass Claughton, then run down a steep
hill between trees. Beyond these fir-trees, which rise up like walls on
each side of the road, Scarborough appears--a dim mass of red blurred
with smoke--and its castle lifted high above it on the headland.
"The toune stondith hole on a slaty clife," says Leland, "and shoith
very fair to the se side." How very fair this place must have been one
can easily imagine, when there was nothing here but the picturesque
town of a Tudor day, and the "exceding goodly larg and strong castelle
on a stepe rok," and the "paroche chirch of our Lady joyning almost to
the castelle," and the "3 howsis of freres, grey, blake, and white,"
and the sea-wall made by Richard III., "now yn ruine by the se rage,"
and the "peere whereby socour is made for shippes," which, when Leland
saw it, was "sore decayid." The town was partly walled then, too,
and had two gates, one "meatley good," and one "very base." Only one
or two of all these things are left, and even they are now as sore
decayed as was the pier of Henry VIII.'s time. Yet Scarborough is still
exceeding fair; so fair that it overcomes all one's prejudices against
popular watering-places; fair even in spite of huge hotels and a beach
black with people, and rows of ice-cream stalls, and braying bands,
and hoarse hurdy-gurdies, and all kinds of music. It is built at the
junction of two bays, between which the castle juts out on "a rock of
wonderful height and bigness, inaccessible by reason of steep craggs
almost on every side." Into both of these bays the North Sea sweeps,
even upon the calmest day, in mighty curves of frothing surf. Below the
castle is a little sheltered harbour, where a crowd of fishing-boats
and smacks is protected from the "se rage" by breakwaters. Quite lately
a wide road with an embankment has been built from bay to bay round
the base of the castle promontory. Those who have loved the rough
rocks that once were here feel naturally that this new drive spoils
the beauty of the place. But, after all, Scarborough is not designed
for lovers of wild nature. The mischief was done here long ago. The
new drive is a boon to thousands who have to take their pleasure in
bath-chairs, and in this place of esplanades and lawn-tennis court and
smart clothes a little more artificiality is no great grievance.
[Illustration: ROBIN HOOD'S BAY.]
From very early days this rock has been fortified. In the Heimskringla,
I believe, those who can may read how Harald the Norseman landed near
the strong fortress of Skardaburg, and how he and his men climbed the
hill behind the town and made a mighty bonfire; then, with pitchforks,
flung the burning faggots down among the wooden houses. "There the
Northmen killed many people." The present castle was originally built
by William le Gros, one of the heroes of the Battle of the Standard,
who "increased the natural strength of the place by a very costly
work." Henry III. in his fear of his barons ordered it to be destroyed,
and when its owner demurred came to destroy it himself. When he saw the
costly work, however, he bethought him of another destiny for it. He
made it a little stronger and kept it himself.
[Illustration: MOORS BETWEEN WHITBY AND SCARBOROUGH.]
Scarborough Castle has never yielded except to guile or famine. When
Piers Gaveston, the silly favourite of a silly king, took refuge here
from the barons who were tired of his wit and his insulting nicknames,
it was famine that made him surrender himself and his ill-gotten
goods--crown jewels and all--to Warwick, "the Black Dog," and Pembroke,
"the Jew." The great Douglas, by the English named the "Black" and by
the Scots the "Good," the guardian of the Bruce's heart and the hero
of seventy fights, attacked Scarborough Castle in vain; and more than
two hundred years later Robert Aske and his Pilgrims of Grace, though
they took the town, failed to make any impression whatever upon the
fortress. There was a certain market-day in Mary's reign, however, when
a party of peasants strolled up this castle hill, and without any ado
were allowed to pass with their wares between those round towers which
we still may see, and over the two draw-bridges, and past the keep into
the castle bailey. Perhaps the sentinels were a little surprised at the
number of peasants who came to sell butter and eggs that day, but they
were certainly more surprised when they saw their castle in the hands
of Thomas Stafford and the rest of the smocked rebels. The masquerade
cost Stafford his life, and did his cause no good at all.
Twice again was Scarborough Castle attacked, both times in the Civil
War, both times by the army of the Parliament. It was during the first
of these sieges that the church--the "paroche chirch joyning almost
to the castelle"--lost its chancel. There are still gaunt fragments of
it standing like pillars in the churchyard, as we may see. The choir
was turned into a battery, but received more hurt than it gave before
the castle yielded at last to starvation so terrible that some of the
garrison were carried out in sheets. Then a Parliament-man was put in
as governor, but as he shortly afterwards declared for the king the
siege began again. The Parliament took no more risks. When they had
retaken it, and dealt with it as their manner was, Scarborough Castle
was no longer very redoubtable.
Its state of disrepair was a cause of much discomfort to poor George
Fox a few years later; for this dilapidated building was one of his
many prisons, and he found it far from weather-proof. The home-made
suit of leather that impressed Carlyle so much--"the one continuous
including case"--must have been worn out by this time, I think, for the
wetness of his clothes was one of the great Quaker's most constant
afflictions. When the smoky chimney prompted him to tax the Roman
Catholic governor with sending him to Purgatory he was put into a room
that had no fireplace at all. "Being to the sea-side," he says of it,
"and lying much open, the wind drove in the rain forcibly, so that the
water came over my bed and ran about the room, that I was fain to skim
it up with a platter." Here he received distinguished visitors, and
argued about the Pope's infallibility with as much spirit as ever.
The maimed church that stands below the castle on the slope is not now
so imposing as once it was, but it is still a fine building and has
four chantries. In its shadow lies Anne Brontë. From the road leading
to the castle gate, at a point near the fountain, one may see by
looking over the wall of the churchyard the upright stone that bears
her name. When she was dying, her sister Charlotte, with the desperate
hope of those who despair, brought her to Scarborough, whose bay and
headlands gave her the last pleasure she had. "It made her happy,"
wrote Charlotte, "to see Scarborough and its bay once more.... Our
lodgings are pleasant, as Anne sits at the window she can look down on
the sea."
CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES
SUMMARY OF TOUR IN MID-YORKSHIRE
DISTANCES.
Scarborough
Helmsley, _viâ_ Hackness and Lastingham 41 miles
(Rievaulx and back 6 " )
York, _viâ_ Sheriff Hutton and Kirkham 36 "
--
Total 83 miles
ROADS.
No very serious hills except at Rievaulx.
Surface: main roads excellent; by-roads poor.
III
CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES
It is hard to turn away from the sea so soon. If we find it too hard
to bear we may stay at Scarborough for a couple of nights, and, taking
a short run down the coast, may see Filey, and the white cliffs of
Flamborough, and the beautiful priory church of Bridlington, in a few
hours. Then we can turn westwards with less discontent, especially if
we make a short _détour_ by Scalby, Hackness, and the Forge Valley.
Hackness lies in a nest of trees. Every road that leads to it is
lovely. As we run down through glades and woods to this sheltered,
still retreat, this green bower of sweeping boughs, it is easy to
understand how deeply restful it must have seemed to St. Hilda
of Whitby and to the monks of a later day. Hilda founded the tiny
community here, and made it a cell of her own great abbey, hoping,
perhaps, to come here herself sometimes when she was tired of living
in the teeth of the wind. The little grey church, wrapped and hidden
in the trees, is partly Norman, partly Early English, but has various
relics in it belonging to the Saxon life of Hilda's nunnery: a broken
cross or pillar inscribed with runes, and a Saxon stone built into a
Norman arch. A tablet on the wall tells how "the Lady Hilda of royal
descent did for the sake of security and retirement establish a nunnery
or cell for 8 nuns at Hackness." The fortunes of the place rose and
fell with those of its parent abbey, for when Whitby was destroyed
by the Danes in the ninth century, Hackness, too, was utterly wiped
out. Then came the Norman revival. But "thieves and robbers coming
out of the forests and dens where they lurked, carried away all the
monks' substance, and laid that holy place--Whitby Abbey--desolate. In
like manner pirates, void of all compassion, landing there, came and
plundered the monastery." So the monks' benefactor, William de Percy,
gave them this retreat, already sacred to the memory of their great
predecessor, where, like her, they might find security and retirement.
Even to-day those priceless boons are to be found at Hackness. Even
on an August afternoon, when the Forge Valley may almost be described
as crowded, there are security and retirement in the green nest at
Hackness.
Two miles of moderately pretty country lie between these two places.
We see the thick woods before us like a wall across the landscape, and
the archway of trees that spans the road is the gate into the Forge
Valley. This little glen is too famous for its own good; but not a
word of its fame is undeserved. In the early morning it must be quite
perfect in its own gentle way, with its little river winding under
the trees beside the road, and the grassy banks, and the cool woods
rising on each side, and the paths that leave the wayside and disappear
alluringly into the shadows. But in the afternoon of a summer's day,
when the grass is strewn with bowler hats, and every birch-tree is the
background of a family group, flight is best. The flight is quite a
short one, for the valley is on a miniature scale.
At its mouth, in a field beside the Derwent, is the ruin that was once
Ayton Castle, a shattered tower that seems to have had many owners in
turn, Attons and St. Johns and Euers and Cliffords, and was no doubt
very useful in defending the narrow defile through which we have just
driven. It came to the Cliffords with Margaret Bromflete, who was
descended from one of the Attons, and was the wife of Clifford the
Butcher. This was the Lady Clifford who saved her son's life by sending
him away into hiding when the cause of the Red Rose seemed altogether
lost: so this fragment of masonry is probably one of the many castles
that were restored to the Shepherd Lord when Henry VII. became king.
It is a place after the Shepherd's own heart, for in his day no doubt
the valley of the Forge was as peaceful as Hackness. Indeed, only a
hundred years ago, a writer described the neighbourhood of Ayton as
"grotesquely rural."
The beauty of the scenery ends rather suddenly as we drive through the
two Aytons, East and West, and go on our way to Pickering. However, the
road is level and has an excellent surface, and if the landscape is a
little dull the villages are pretty. We pass through a series of them,
all more or less alike and all built mainly of grey stone, for we are
near the moors. On the outskirts of Brompton is Gallows Hill, whence,
from her brother's farm, "the phantom of delight," Mary Hutchinson,
came out one autumn morning to marry Wordsworth in the church whose
spire rises on our left. With the bridegroom was Dorothy, a little
sad-hearted we may guess; and with the "perfect woman" was her sister
Joanna, that "wild-hearted" girl who found her brother-in-law's "dear
friendships with the streams and groves" so comical that her laughter
on the subject once raised echoes from all the hills of Grasmere. The
church in which this wedding took place is interesting for its own
sake, and contains, I have read, a memorial to a sixteenth-century
soldier, "who in wars to his greit charges sarved oin kyng and tow
quenes with du obediens and died without recumpens." I did not
see this, but quote it for the sake of those who collect curious
epitaphs.[5]
Beyond Brompton the road skirts Ebberston and Allerston, and passes
through Thornton-le-Dale, where a stream of some size runs by the
wayside from end to end of the village, and an old cross stands among
flowers. This village has a name for beauty, and like some other
beauties takes a little too much pains to keep that reputation. It is
certainly a pretty village, but it has rather a self-conscious air.
Pickering is about two miles away.
Pickering is not particularly beautiful, but its ruined castle, and
above all its wonderful church, should certainly be seen, for one
rarely finds a church whose relics represent so many dates. The font
is Saxon, the pulpit Chippendale, and between these two extremes of
craftsmanship--the roughly hewn stone and the delicately chiselled
wood--are the fourteenth-century tombs and the fifteenth-century
frescoes, and the Elizabethan chest. When Leland was here he saw and
noted this figure of Sir William Bruce, and the "cantuarie bering his
name," and that other effigy, of alabaster, with the "garland about
his helmet," which represents Sir David Roucliffe and no Bruce, though
Leland calls him one. Of these strange frescoes above our heads, which
make the special fame of Pickering Church, there is no word in Leland's
record. Possibly these pictured saints and virtues--St. Christopher
and St. George and the Corporal Acts of Mercy--were so often to be
seen in churches of his day that they did not call for comment, or it
may be that they were already hidden under the thick coat of plaster
that covered them for hundreds of years. They were discovered in the
middle of the nineteenth century, and promptly whitewashed without fear
or favour. The most elaborate of the pictures is the Feast of Herod,
which shows that king dressed in mediæval garments suggestive of Mrs.
Markham's History, while John the Baptist is being horribly beheaded
in the corner.
The remains of the castle are above the town; but the names of
Rosamund's tower and the Devil's are more romantic than their
appearance, and the inevitable lawn-tennis court can be more easily
forgiven here than in the baileys of more beautiful ruins. This castle
belonged to the house of Lancaster, and therefore in his day to that
Lancaster, "the Actor," whom Piers Gavestone in his last moments
besought for mercy, the Lancaster who so shortly afterwards was crying
"Have mercy on me, King of Heaven!" when his turn came to be beheaded.
It belonged, too, to the "time-honoured Lancaster" whose son imprisoned
Richard II. for a little while within these very walls. All the
prisons, it seems, to which Henry IV. committed Richard--Knaresborough,
Pickering, Pontefract--were his own Lancastrian castles, and at Henry's
accession, of course, became crown property. This one, which held for
the King in the Civil War, still belongs to the Duchy of Lancaster.
Not many miles from Pickering, at the very brink of the moors, is a
village whose name is familiar to lovers of old buildings and students
of church history, and whose charms of seclusion and quietness are
so endearing that even the unlearned are likely to think of it again
and again with affection. I do not think "excursions" ever go to
Lastingham. There is nothing there to attract those who visit a sacred
ruin to play games in its aisles, or to sit on the high altar till it
becomes necessary to enclose it with a railing, or to photograph their
_fiancées_ under its arches. These are only drawn by a famous name. The
fame of Lastingham is hidden in a few ancient books, and in the works
of archæologists, and in the memories of those who have sought peace
and found it there. To reach it we must turn to the right a couple of
miles beyond Pickering, and drive by winding ways and on rather an
indifferent surface to the foot of the moors.
It is at Cropton that the moors first come into sight. The scenery has
been uninteresting since we left the Forge Valley, and it is with all
the more delight that we suddenly, at a turn of the road, find the
landscape filled with colour and warmth and beauty, with hills green in
the foreground and gloriously crimson against the sky. The road curves
and twists and curves again, as though hunting for Lastingham among the
little valleys. It seems to be altogether lost, and then suddenly we
find it.
About twelve hundred and fifty years ago, when its history began, it
was not so easily found. Ethelwald, king of the Deiri, wished to have
a monastery in his own Northumbrian country--some peaceful spot to
which, when he had a mind, he might retire for prayer and quietness
during his life, and in which he might be buried when he died. So he
summoned to him that "holy, wise, and good man," Cedd, Bishop of the
East Angles and brother of St. Chad, and offered him a piece of land.
Cedd "chose himself a place among craggy and distant mountains which
looked like lurking-places for robbers ... to the end that the fruits
of good works should spring up where before beasts were wont to dwell,
or men to live after the manner of beasts." Such is Bede's rather
overdrawn description of this green hollow among the rounded hills; yet
some say that Bede visited the place himself. Having chosen the spot
it was necessary "to cleanse the place for the monastery from former
crimes," so Cedd and his brother Cynebil kept between them a forty
days' fast upon that little knoll where the church stands, uplifted
above the village. There the monastery rose, and thither the bishop
often came to see that all was well. Once he came at a time "when there
was a mortality there," and, catching the epidemic, he died. And so it
happens that the dust of this Saxon saint lies beneath the crypt of
Lastingham Church.
[Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF LASTINGHAM.]
Cedd's brother, the famous Chad, to whom so many churches are
dedicated, succeeded him as abbot, and was often here. In connection
with him Bede tells a poetical story of a monk of Lastingham. Oswini
was a practical man, and felt himself unfitted for the contemplative
life, yet greatly longed to renounce the world. So "quitting all he
had"--he had been a Queen's Prime Minister--he came to St. Chad here
on this little hill, and, pointing to the hatchet and axe that he had
brought in his hand, put himself and them at the service of the monks.
So while the others prayed Brother Oswini worked. And it was he, the
humble worker with his hands, and not the monks upon their knees in
the church, who heard the voices of the heavenly choir. He was "doing
such things as were necessary" in the house when, "on a sudden," as he
afterwards said, "he heard the voice of persons singing most sweetly
and rejoicing, and appearing to descend from heaven." This sound
of singing surged round the oratory where Chad was at prayer, then
returned to heaven, "the way it came, with inexpressible sweetness."
None heard it but the saint and the man of labour. Chad knew the
meaning of it. "They were angelic spirits," he said, "who came to call
me to my heavenly reward, which I have always longed after." Seven days
later, says the historian, the bishop died.
This gate and path will lead us to the knoll where all these things
happened, except the actual death of Chad. Here Brother Oswini worked
and heard the angels sing: here Cedd fasted and died. Here in this
little crypt, which we reach through the strange walled opening in the
nave, his dust lies on the right of the altar. Some say that these
Saxon stones with the fishes and dragons carved upon them have been
here ever since the days of Cedd; but the sturdy piers and vaulted
ceiling of the miniature chapel are, of course, Norman. They, and the
apse above them, were probably the work of those monks of Whitby who
founded the Abbey of St. Mary at York, and seem to have paused here for
ten years on their way thither.
The street by which we entered Lastingham winds down the slope to the
foot of the hollow; on the right of it is the restored Well of St.
Cedd in its stone basin. The heather of the huge Cleveland moors is
hardly more than a stone's-throw distant; and high upon the hill that
overlooks the site of the Saxon monastery is a cross, not ancient, but
very striking in this place. The tiny inn is close under the church.
It is extremely small, and of the homeliest kind; but I think that
any one who is not daunted by the simple life--the _very_ simple life,
be it plainly understood--will carry away pleasant memories of the
quietness and cleanliness and kindliness within its doors. It has,
unfortunately, not even a shed wherein to shelter a car, but only a
grass plot where a car may spend a fine night.
We climb out of Lastingham by a road that passes close to the cross.
This cross was set up in commemoration of Queen Victoria's accession,
but there must surely have been another thought in the minds of those
who placed it so symbolically in this particular spot. Let us pause for
a moment and look down. The village lies below us in its little hollow,
with the church of the early saints raised in its midst; and just above
us, conspicuous on its height and clearly outlined against the sky,
stands the cross. It seems to guard the boundary between the poetry of
Lastingham and the prose of the ordinary world, for the beauty that
makes such a perfect setting for the place ends suddenly on the brow of
the hill, and we speed away among commonplace fields and hedges to join
the high-road by way of Appleton-le-Moor.
[Illustration: LASTINGHAM CROSS.]
At Keldholme, though the priory is marked on the map as though still in
existence, only some stones built into a wall are left to show where de
Stutteville's nunnery stood. As for the de Stutteville's own castle,
which once rose proudly on the hill to our right, the stones of it form
the walls of the neighbouring prison, and the site of it is a pasturage
for the neighbouring cows.
The prison in question--a dark, repellent spot in a pretty street--is
in the market-place of Kirbymoorside. Nearly facing it is the "Black
Swan," whose pretty red-tiled porch bears the date 1632; but it was
the "King's Head," further up the street, to which Pope alluded when
he said, neither truthfully nor politely, that the second Duke of
Buckingham died at Kirbymoorside "in the worst inn's worst room."
This trim, modern-looking house with the sober front of grey, so
unsuggestive of the rakish duke, has never formed a part of the inn,
and it was in its best room that Buckingham, on his deathbed, declared
he had always had the greatest veneration for religion and reason. We
may not cross the threshold of the room into which the dying man was
carried--and, indeed, even penitent upon his deathbed, George Villiers
the second was hardly an object for pilgrimages!--but here is its
little window overlooking the street, the middle window of the three
that are next the inn. Many writers, following Macaulay and Pope,
assume that Buckingham died in this house because he had squandered
his fortune so thoroughly that he could not secure a more comfortable
place to die in. But some tell a more likely, if less edifying, tale.
The duke was injured or taken ill, they say, while hunting near this
town, and as his own castle of Helmsley was several miles away he was
carried hither, to the house of one of his tenants. It seems certain
that the estate of Helmsley was still his at his death, since his
executors received nearly ninety thousand pounds for it from Charles
Duncombe, banker and goldsmith. A man who had once possessed all
that the Buckinghams had taken from their kings might be said to
have squandered his fortune without being actually in want of a roof
to die under. He had at one time a very fine roof of his own here
at Kirbymoorside, but this may have been one of the many things he
had lost, or possibly the Civil War had left it in a state even less
luxurious than this little grey house. By following a stony lane we may
see, in a farmyard above the town, the few fragments of masonry that
are the last remains of the castle of the Nevilles and the Buckinghams.
Queen Elizabeth took it from the Nevilles, and her successor gave it
to the man of whom he said: "You may be sure that I love the Earl of
Buckingham more than any one else."
The second duke, who died so humbly, was buried with his betters--among
whom, I think, we may include his father--in Westminster Abbey. His
body was embalmed, and the oft-quoted line in the register of burials
at Kirbymoorside refers only to the viscera: "1687 April 17th. Gorges
vilaus Lord dooke of bookingam."
About a mile beyond Kirbymoorside there is a little valley, not far
from the high-road, of which perhaps the greater number of us have
never heard. The appeal of Kirkdale, like that of Lastingham, is not to
the many, and for that very reason it is irresistible to some; not only
to the man of science and the historian, but to all those who can best
hear the voices of the dead in places where there are no voices of the
living. There is silence in Kirkdale.
A steep hill with a preposterous surface leads down to Hodge Beck; to
the wooden footbridge among the trees, and the quarry where the hyænas
used to live, and the splash that we must cross. Those limestone rocks
to the right are famous in the world of science, for that dark cave
whose entrance we may see was discovered, about a hundred years ago,
to be strewn with the bones of strange beasts. It was a veritable
treasury for geologists, for the hyænas who lived and died here in
such quantities not only bequeathed their own bones to us, but also
many bones of the uncouth creatures they were in the habit of eating,
creatures most happily no longer with us. There were once tigers and
elephants, it appears, in quiet Kirkdale.
[Illustration: HODGE BECK.]
We climb out of the beck and turn to the right. The narrow glen is
thickly wooded, after the manner of Yorkshire dales both large and
small, and in a clump of firs stands the Minster of St. Gregory. This
is a fine name for so small a building; but it was called a minster
nearly nine hundred years ago, and we need not deny it the distinction
in its venerable age. It is not for its beauty that we come to see it,
though it is picturesque enough in its setting of trees; but chiefly it
is for the sake of one stone in its wall, and of the names inscribed
upon it--names familiar yet remote, the names of Edward the King and
Tosti the Earl. Here they are, carved in the lifetime of those who
bore them. It is plain that this great stone was not always, as it is
now, under a porch; for it was once a sundial, and here it is always
in the shadow. The words upon it are deeply and clearly graven, easily
distinguished, and, except for a few words, easily understood. This is
the whole inscription, carved in two columns, with one line below the
dial:--
"Orm Gamal Suna Bohte STS Gregorius Minster Wonne Hit Wes AEl Tobrocan
& Tofalan & He Hit Let Macan Newan From Grunde XPE & STS Gregorius In
Eadward Dagum CNG & In Tosti Dagum Eorl, & Hawarth Me Wrohte & Brand,
PRS."
(_Orm Gamal's son, bought St. Gregory's Minster when it was all
tobroken and tofallen, and he it let be made new from ground to Christ
and St. Gregory, in Edward's days, the King, and in Tosti's days, the
Earl, & Howarth me wrought, and Brand, Priests._)
The sundial has its own legend:--
"This is Daeges Solmerca Aet Ilcum Tide.'
(_This is Day's sunmarker at every time._")
This church, then, was made new from the ground in the middle of the
eleventh century; for it was in 1056 that Tosti, the son of the famous
Godwin, obtained the earldom of Northumbria; and it was in 1065 that he
"impelled the Northumbrians to rebel, by the asperity of his manners,"
and so lost his earldom. In using these words William of Malmesbury
is really most moderate, for Tosti seems to have been a terrible
swashbuckler. He murdered, among many others, the son of the very man
who rebuilt this church and set up this inscription: "All the sons
of the traitor Godwin," says an old chronicler, "were men of such
wickedness that if they saw any beautiful town belonging to any one
they caused the lord of it to be slain by night, and his offspring to
be destroyed, that they might obtain his property." On one occasion
Tosti seized his brother Harold by the hair in the king's presence,
while he was actually drinking his Majesty's health; whereupon Harold
lifted Tosti "up on high, and dashed him down on the floor." Such was
the asperity of their manners.
Edward the King is, of course, the Confessor, the "harmless king."
Within the church there are two carved stones round which much
discussion circles. Until lately they were in the outer wall, where
they naturally suffered much from the climate. One of them--the
one that has a cross engraved upon it--once bore the words "Cyning
Æthilwald," or "King Ethelwald," in runic letters. Upon the slender
foundation of this somewhat vague inscription it has been argued
that this is the coffin lid of King Ethelwald: therefore Ethelwald
was buried at Kirkdale: therefore Cedd's monastery, where Ethelwald
wished to be buried, was at Kirkdale and not at Lastingham. This last
conclusion is then turned into a premise, with a view to suggesting
that the beautiful stone with the Celtic design upon it may be the
coffin lid of Cedd himself. Yet Bede says that Cedd was buried at
"Lestingau."
The door of St. Gregory's Minster is locked. We may see the "sunmarker"
and its clear lettering without entering the building, and also a slab
of stone with an interlaced Celtic pattern which is let into the outer
wall; but to see the reputed coffin lids of Ethelwald and Cedd--which
are beautiful specimens of Celtic work, whatever their story--we
must drive to Nawton village, a mile away, and fetch the key from
the Vicarage. This seems hard; and if hard for motorists, a hundred
times harder for bicyclists and others. The Yorkshire churches are in
the main very kind to the public. Many of them are left open, with a
suggestive money-box close to the door, and often with a guide-book
that may be borrowed. By this method the church probably gains rather
than loses, since it is pleasanter to give half a crown to an old
building that deserves it than to give sixpence to an old man who has
learnt a few facts by rote, and learnt them wrongly. If it is possible,
however, to forgive a church for being closed we must forgive this
church of Kirkdale. It has again and again been defaced and desecrated
by those curious folk who love their own insignificant initials more
than any fairer sight. It is certain that those who care so little for
a building as to treat it thus will not journey very far to fetch the
key.
[Illustration: KIRKDALE.]
The fine high-road that skirts the eastern moors, the road on which we
have been travelling since we left Scarborough, comes to an end, in a
sense, at Helmsley; for here it splits up into two roads, each of which
we must follow for a time. Helmsley itself has its attractions. Among
them are an open market square and an ancient cross, pretty houses and
an inn covered with flowers, a tiny stream running through the town
from end to end, and a castle-keep upon the hill. This is that castle
which was "once proud Buckingham's delight," and now stands within
the park whose name is borrowed from Duncombe the banker. Helmsley
has passed through many hands, of which some helped in the making of
history, and some were not over clean. The first name we hear of in
connection with the place is no less a one than William the Conqueror,
for he, having given Helmsley to one of his followers, chose it on
one occasion for his own resting-place, after a heavy march and much
hard work of the destructive kind he affected. His host, Earl Morton,
lost these lands in the losing cause of Robert Curthose, and they fell
to the famous Walter of Espec, one of the leaders in that strange
semi-religious victory, the Battle of the Standard, whose heroes were
summoned by an archbishop, absolved upon the field by a bishop, and
actually overshadowed through the fight by the consecrated Host and the
banners of three saints. Just such a mixture as this, of religion and
bloodshed, was Walter himself, with his splendid presence, his gigantic
height, his bright eyes and noble forehead, his voice "like the sound
of a trumpet," his life as a warrior, and his death as a monk. Walter's
sister Adeline married Peter de Ros, and it was their great-grandson,
Robert de Ros, who built this much dilapidated tower of Helmsley
Castle. After long centuries of ownership by unimportant Williams and
Roberts and Georges the place came into the fair hands of Katherine,
the daughter of the Earl of Rutland, and the wholly undeserved wife of
the first Duke of Buckingham. Lady Katherine Manners was not, as is
sometimes said, the granddaughter of Sir Philip Sidney, for it was her
Uncle Roger, not her father, who married Sidney's daughter. The Duchess
of Buckingham inherited all the wealth of her father's house, for her
two little half-brothers died "by wicked practice and sorcery": so
Helmsley came to Steenie, whose angel-face brought him so much beside
his nickname. All his honours and his riches were won, says Clarendon,
"upon no other advantage or recommendation than of the beauty and
gracefulness and becomingness of his person." Yet something more truly
lovable than this, we may be sure, was needed to win his Kate and her
broad lands; and indeed the romance that gives this castle of Helmsley
its chief interest remained romantic to the end, even though the
duchess lived to write: "I pray God never woman may love a man as I
have done you."
James I.'s slave-dog, as he called himself, was too busy in court and
camp to visit Helmsley much, if ever, but it must have been a fine
sight when it was his. The keep, not then a crumbling fragment, rose
high above walls and many towers. Here are still the two moats that
surrounded them, and the two gateways that once made a double defence.
How strong the defences were we may gather from the trouble they gave
to Sir Thomas Fairfax when he besieged the castle in the time of
the second Duke of Buckingham, and won it at last, not only for the
Parliament, but for himself. His grateful country gave him the lands
of Helmsley, but at the same time took the precaution of reducing the
castle to ruins, so that this shattered keep and gatehouse should never
again defend royalist or rebel. The Buckinghams were ever humorists,
and the second duke, pondering how he might regain some of his lost
possessions, bethought him of marrying Mary Fairfax. After he had been
embroiled in many plots and suffered many imprisonments he settled down
here within sight of the tower that his father-in-law had reduced to so
sad a state.
[Illustration: DOUBLE ENTRANCE TO HELMSLEY CASTLE.]
There, beyond the lawn-tennis court, is the house he lived in. Some
of it seems to be older than his day, but he probably was obliged to
repair it rather thoroughly after the siege. We may climb those steps,
if we will, and enter.
These are haunted rooms. They are not haunted by a very worthy ghost, I
fear--not even by Steenie of the dainty leg and the lovely complexion,
the gallant adventurer whom many loved much and whom we all love a
little--but only by his handsome, vicious son, the son who was born to
the sound of all the joy-bells of Westminster, and died in the humble
little bed at Kirbymoorside. These rooms were once proud Buckingham's
delight; now they tear at one's heart. It is a thing to be glad of,
no doubt, that Lord Mayor Duncombe found Buckingham's home too small
to hold his vaulting ambitions and so built the palace in the park,
leaving us this pitiful relic of departed glory. Yet one marvels that
any man should have allowed so much beauty to go to wrack. These great
oak panels with their rare design, this splendid moulded ceiling
wrought so elaborately with Tudor roses, that frieze of shields and
fleurs-de-lys, of mermaids and winged dragons, once made an appropriate
setting for the man whom a contemporary called the "finest gentleman
of person and wit" he ever saw. Now, in their decayed grandeur, they
are appropriate still; a dramatic--almost a melodramatic--symbol of his
fate. Half the panelling is gone; shred by shred the plaster of the
ceiling is falling on the uneven floor; bare laths and gaping holes
disfigure the Tudor roses over our heads; of the mermaids and winged
dragons only a few are left. Lumber is piled upon the floor where
"all mankind's epitome" was wont to walk; cobwebs and dust deface the
windows. Such is the symbol of proud Buckingham, than whom "no man was
ever handsomer," yet who was, in the last year of his life, "worn to a
thread"; and up there in the park is the symbol of the city knight who
bought his property with money not always well-gained, and flourished
like a green bay-tree. We see the unromantic, prosperous house of the
thrifty Duncombe as we drive away to Rievaulx.
Motorists will find it their best plan to visit the terrace of Rievaulx
before seeing the abbey itself. The way lies through a gate on the
left at the top of an extremely steep hill; a winding lane leads among
trees to a second gate, and here the car may safely be left. A few
steps bring us to the famous terrace cut on the hillside by a Duncombe
of the eighteenth century. For half a mile the wide and level turf is
stretched between the woods that overshadow it on the left, and the
woods that fall steeply away from it on the right to the foot of the
hill. Beyond the valley another wooded hill rises; to the south are
moors. If we stand at the brink of the terrace and look down through a
gap in the trees we see, far below us, the pointed arches of Rievaulx
Abbey.
At each end of the terrace is a classical temple. At the north end,
where we are standing, is the one described in the local guide-book as
"a beautiful temple with an Ionic portico." At first sight it gives one
a shock. Eighteenth-century buildings so often do give one a shock.
If, however, we forget for a few minutes that Rievaulx Abbey lies down
there in the valley, if we forget Walter of Espec and his monks, and
remember only the days when this temple was built, the Ionic portico
has its uses. It gives us a vision of the age of powder and hoops, of
the fair ladies who rustled here on the soft turf when George was king.
The closely cropped sward was suited to the dainty feet, the scenery
not so "savage" as to wound the dainty susceptibilities. Indeed, in any
century, this scene could only heal.
There is a path that winds down the hill to the abbey, and if our
car is independent of us this is the best way to go. But if she is
unattended and cannot meet us in the valley we must drive down the
steep hill to the village. The surface of this hill is composed of
ruts and loose stones, but the beauty of the woods is compensation for
nearly anything.
[Illustration: RIEVAULX ABBEY FROM THE TERRACE.]
If Fountains Abbey speaks of power, Rievaulx breathes peace. Taking
everything into consideration, I think its beauty has only one rival
in England. The valley of the Rye is far lovelier than Studley Park;
the building itself is far lovelier than Bolton. Only Tintern can
rival it; not even Tintern can eclipse it. For at Tintern the feeling
of Cistercian seclusion can only be acquired through the imagination:
a high-road is close at hand; a brisk trade in picture postcards and
Goss china is carried on at the abbey door; to be alone is almost
impossible. But here at Rievaulx we may chance to stand in perfect
solitude, perfect stillness, under the mighty archway that soars in
dignified simplicity so far above our heads, and separates us as
though by invisible gates from the world. No imagination is needed
here to conjure up the aloofness of the white monks--the actual fact
is here. Through the empty windows--once filled, in defiance of the
early Cistercian ideals, with some of the first efforts of English
glass-stainers--we see the wild hillside rising from the very walls,
and above it the rampart of trees; the grass under our feet grows like
the grass of the field; the world makes no sign, and on each side of
us the slender arches point to heaven. There is something here that is
more than beauty; the very air seems charged with the prayers of holy
men long dead. The weather-worn slab of the high altar is unfortunately
enclosed by a railing, which is doubtless needed, in this Christian
country, to save it from desecration. Not near this stone, as one might
expect, but in the ruined chapter-house, lies the dust of the monk who
came here in his old age to hide his "broad but well-featured face"
under the shadow of a cowl, and to subdue his trumpet-like voice to the
singing of psalms--the monk who had founded this abbey in the days when
he was a famous soldier--Walter of Espec.
[Illustration: RIEVAULX ABBEY.]
Walter founded three monasteries: one at Kirkham, which we shall
presently see; one here; one at Wardon in Bedfordshire. Incorporated
with Leland's Itinerary is a document which tells us how Walter's only
son fell from his horse and broke his neck upon a stone cross, and how
in consequence Walter founded the monasteries of Kirkham and Rievaulx
with some of the wealth for which he had now no heir. Dugdale, the
seventeenth-century antiquarian, believed the tale, and told it for
truth in his "Monasticon." Yet now we are bidden to reject the story of
the younger Walter's sad end; nay, even to doubt that he ever lived!
He is not mentioned, say those who know, in the foundation-charter of
the abbey; there is nowhere in any document a statement that Walter of
Espec ever had a son. However, till we find a definite statement that
he had none, we shall probably continue to accept or reject the story
according to temperament.
There are still some fragments of the actual church that was built by
the eager hands of the monks from Clairvaux, the monks sent by St.
Bernard himself to live their austere lives in this valley; but, of
course, this rich triforium, these corbels of elaborate carving, these
lancets and moulded arches and clustered columns were never seen by
Norman Walter. Nor, indeed, would they have met with approval from the
saintly abbot of Clairvaux, whose aspirations, like those of all the
early Cistercians, tended to severe simplicity in architecture as in
life. The vanished nave, it is thought, was part of the Norman work of
Bernard's missionary monks, but this glorious chancel and the refectory
with the strange doorway belong entirely to the thirteenth century.
Beautiful as are the details it is by the great chancel-arch that we
shall always remember Rievaulx. It is the reposefulness of its simple
grandeur that strikes the keynote of peace. Its quiet, stately lines
rest the eye, and the memory of it rests the heart whenever we think of
this fair daughter of Citeaux and mother of Melrose.
[Illustration: CHANCEL ARCH, RIEVAULX ABBEY.]
Long ago there was a second Cistercian abbey on the banks of Rye. The
bells of Old Byland and the bells of Rievaulx clashed with one another,
which for some reason shocked the Byland monks. Those who live in
towns to-day, and Sunday by Sunday hear the bells of seven or eight
churches ringing simultaneously in varying keys, will sympathise with
them; but there seems to have been some idea in their minds beyond
the obvious one, an idea strong enough to make them migrate first to
Stocking and then to the spot where we may see the ruins of their
abbey. Those who can spare the time will find that the beautiful west
front of the second Byland repays them well for driving the few miles
between the two ruins. The community that finally settled on this spot
had been through a great deal. When they came here it was more than
fifty years since the thirteen monks necessary to found a new house had
left Furness to wander in their ox-waggon from place to place--from
Furness to Cumberland, from Cumberland to Thirsk, from Thirsk to
Byland-on-the-Moor, from Byland-on-the-Moor to Stocking, and from
Stocking to their final home at last. None of the original thirteen
can have seen the trefoiled door and gigantic wheel-window of the west
front; for this, the most striking part of the existing ruin, was
probably the finishing touch to a very splendid church.
Those who reach Byland may perhaps like to drive about a mile and a
half beyond it, to see the interesting church at Coxwold, and the house
where Laurence Sterne lived for some time and wrote the greater part of
"Tristram Shandy," alternated with many sermons. From Coxwold a series
of byways will take them to the high-road at Brandsby.
Those, however, who are unable to go beyond Rievaulx, must return to
Helmsley. They may follow the Rye for a little while, and then, turning
to the left with a last and lovely view of the abbey, may mount the
hill through the woods, the fairy-haunted woods of Rievaulx, where
the stems are not wrapped about with a confusion of undergrowth, but
rise unhampered from a carpet of ferns and creepers. This climb among
the dusky trees is very short, but adds to one's sense of Rievaulx's
remoteness. The shadowy stillness of these woods is like a veil dropped
between the valley and the world.
After driving through Helmsley we cross the Rye, and presently pass the
upper entrance of Duncombe Park, the "Nelson Gate," erected as we see
"to the memory of Lord Viscount Nelson, and the unparallelled gallant
achievements of the British Navy." Between Helmsley and Sheriff Hutton,
whither we are bound, lies some very pretty country of a pastoral kind,
and a series of picturesque villages, several of which deserve more
attention than we are likely to give them.
Here, for instance, is Oswaldkirk, which might well tempt us to pause.
It is scattered along the side of a hill, with its little houses
half smothered in trees. The tiny church is open, and in it are some
fragments of Saxon and Norman work, and a Jacobean pulpit which once
held the famous John Tillotson, who began life in a tailor's shop and
ended it as Archbishop of Canterbury. His success was chiefly due, I
believe, to his eloquence, so we may regard this spot as the cradle
of his fortunes, since the sermon he preached here was his first. And
here in Oswaldkirk was born another man of mark, the antiquarian to
whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the ruined monasteries, Roger
Dodsworth. He collaborated with Dugdale in the "Monasticon," which was
not published till after his death. The younger man inherited the fruit
of his researches, and has more or less eclipsed his name.
A little more than a mile beyond Oswaldkirk is Gilling, one of the
prettiest villages in the county. Its wide street is bordered by
bright gardens; a tiny stream runs through it under a row of miniature
bridges; on the left is a church with some interesting tombs; and
on the right, entirely hidden by the trees, is the castle of the
Fairfaxes. Only those who have secured special permission are admitted
to see this castle and its splendid Elizabethan Hall, of which the
fame has reached many who were never in it. It is, according to all
accounts, a marvel of rich ornament, of oaken panels and delicate
inlay, of carved mouldings and stained glass and armorial shields.
A road with a perfect surface carries us out of the village to the
top of a hill--where one patch of heather by the wayside reminds us
that we are on Grimston Moor--and on through Brandsby to Stillington.
The church we leave behind us as we turn sharply to the left has no
special interest beyond the fact that Laurence Sterne preached many of
his sermons in it, while he was living at Sutton-in-the-Forest and at
Coxwold. Here in Stillington we leave the fine high-road for a very
poor one--one that is a mere lane in fact--which leads us past the
strange little church of Marton-on-the-Forest, with its crow-stepped
gables and tower, to the village of Sheriff Hutton.
"What is this forest call'd?" we may be inclined to ask with Archbishop
Scrope in "Henry IV." "'Tis Gaultree Forest, an't shall please your
grace." Even in Leland's time there was very little wood in the
neighbourhood of Sheriff Hutton, and now the Forest of Galtres, so
"impenetrable and swampy" when the Romans set to work to drain it, has
practically vanished. A good proportion of it, I think, must always
have been forest only in the technical sense, for we hear of it in
the reign of Elizabeth as the scene of a yearly horse-race, wherein
the prize for the winning horse was a little golden bell. Moreover,
there is a tradition that wanderers in the Forest of Galtres, which
reached to the outskirts of York, were guided by a light hung in the
lantern tower of All Saints Church. Unless a great part of the country
were open--"low medows and morisch ground"--this light would not have
greatly aided the belated traveller. Be that as it may, the country
is now so open that as we draw near Sheriff Hutton we may see with a
thrill, if we look very intently along the far horizon, the faint,
elusive gleaming of York Minster.
The castle of Sheriff Hutton is more impressive at a distance than
close at hand. It is visible miles away across the flat country, and
the jagged outlines of its cluster of towers stand up so imposingly
against the sky that one is led to expect something rather vast and
effective. But these gaunt remnants are all there is to see. They
stand in a farmyard and are surrounded with haystacks. Once upon a
time this castle was fine enough. It had eight or nine great towers,
"and the stately staire up to the haul" was very magnificent, and so
was "the haul it self, and al the residew of the house." It owed its
splendour to the splendid Nevilles, to the great Warwick among others,
who seems always to have lived in a state of kingly magnificence, as
befitted one who made kings. When he died it passed, with his other
castles, to his son-in-law Richard III., who used it as a prison for
such claimants of the throne as he did not trouble to murder. There
was humour in this plan of sending the two young cousins to keep each
other company--Edward IV.'s daughter, Elizabeth of York, and the
youthful Warwick, son of that Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a
butt of Malmsey. They were not here very long, for hardly had their
Uncle Richard's ill-gotten crown fallen under the hawthorn on Bosworth
Field, before the new king's emissary was riding in all haste to
Sheriff Hutton. There was a crowd that day about this gate that still
bears the arms of the Nevilles and of England, for from all the country
round the people gathered to do honour to their future queen; and as
she was led out from her prison to share Henry's throne, the gentry of
the neighbourhood, an eager bodyguard, pressed forward to escort her
to London. Poor cousin Warwick went to London too, with a bodyguard of
a sterner sort; for since his claims could not, like Elizabeth's, be
merged in those of the new king, he was destined for the Tower and the
block.
There is no record, apparently, of how this stately castle was
transformed in the course of one century from a "Princely Logginges" to
a mere shell. The usual death sentence of castles, "dismantled by order
of the Parliament," was never pronounced in this case, for the mischief
was done before Charles I. was king. In Henry VIII.'s reign this was
for a time the home of that Duke of Norfolk who was the uncle of two
queens, and lived to see them both upon the scaffold. He was a witness
at Anne Boleyn's wedding and a judge at her trial, and was himself
only saved from the block by Henry's death. His son Surrey, the sweet
singer, has walked here too, where now the hay is stacked.
[Illustration: SHERIFF HUTTON CASTLE.]
Richard III. was here at least once, in the year before his death. He
and his sad wife--sad all her life, but now heart-broken--came here
to bury their little son. At the end of the sloping village street
is the old church where they laid him; and there we may still see,
not the place of his burial, for that is unknown, but the little
alabaster figure that once lay upon his tomb. It has the air of being
a good portrait. The features are still faintly visible; the pathetic
down-drawn mouth suggests that Anne Neville's son was not much happier
than herself. Circling the boyish head is a heavy crown, the only crown
it ever wore. The reason that the Prince of Wales was buried here
does not appear. Some suggest that his mother, who was with Richard
at Nottingham, could not bear to return to Middleham, and so met
the funeral procession here; but there is at least one historian[6]
who describes her despair when she saw her dead son in his own home.
Elizabeth of York was probably at Sheriff Hutton when her little cousin
Edward was brought here to his grave. She must have remembered another
Edward, nearer and dearer to her, whose grave, not yet discovered, had
been so lately made at the foot of the dark staircase in the Tower of
London.
This ancient church has some fine brasses in it. One of them is hidden
beneath a trap-door in the floor; another bears the figures of two
babies in swaddling clothes. The church's patron saint is St. Helena,
the mother of Constantine, and the discoverer, through a vision, of
the Holy Cross. The historians give us a good deal of choice in the
matter of this lady's origin. Some declare that she was the daughter of
a British king, a woman of surprising beauty and intelligence; but it
seems to be more likely that her father was an innkeeper.
Sheriff Hutton is only about ten miles away from York, but if possible
we should add a few miles to the distance by making a _détour_ to
Kirkham Priory. All that there is to be seen there is comprised in one
picture, so to speak, a picture of an old gateway and the base of a
cross; but it is a picture that one remembers.
To reach it we pass through country that is sometimes moderately
pretty, sometimes dull. There is a little church at Foston that
is pleasant to the eye, with a red-tiled roof, and a miniature
bell-tower, and a pathway where the yew-trees nearly meet. But we
are now on the borderland between the beautiful part of Yorkshire
and the uninteresting south-eastern plain. After we leave Kirkham we
shall see little more of the beauties of nature. We shall see some
beautiful architecture, and various things that are more appealing to
the imagination than to the eye. And here, too, as is so often the case
where the scenery is tame, the roads are sufficient in themselves for
the pleasure of the day's journey.
About a mile beyond Foston we turn on to the high-road from
Scarborough to York; but after a few moments leave it again for a
road on the right, by which we slowly descend into the valley of the
Derwent. The hillside is thickly wooded, and as we pass beyond the
overarching trees we see Kirkham lying below us: the little village,
and the wooded hill beyond it, and the beautiful gateway that is so
entirely unlike all others, and, fringed with rushes, the wide, smooth
river--the Derwent, which we last saw at Ayton, shadowed by the birches
of the Forge Valley and overlooked by the ruins of Margaret Bromflete's
castle.
This was the first of the monasteries founded by Walter of Espec. In
front of the gateway is the base of an old cross, of which the top step
is carved with an almost illegible design. Local tradition, in its
courageous way, declares that there is incorporated with these steps a
fragment of the "little stone cross" that caused the death of Walter
of Espec's son. The truth of this tale seems to depend a good deal on
whether Walter ever had a son.
[Illustration: GATEWAY OF KIRKHAM PRIORY.]
It is this gateway that we have come to see. The fragment of wall in
which it is framed was probably built in the twelfth century, but all
this wealth of ornament and heraldry belongs to a much later date.
The quiet valley and the stream would suggest to one that this, like
Walter's Rievaulx, was a Cistercian house; but there was never a
Cistercian community that would have countenanced all this display
of tracery and crockets and statuary, and all these worldly coats of
arms. They were Augustinian Canons who made their gate so fine, and
carved upon it these ten shields of men with sounding names--Clare and
Vaux, Scrope, Ros, Plantagenet--and set these saints in their niches,
and above them the seal of the priory; and who passed to their meals
in the refectory under all the varied mouldings of this magnificent
Norman door south of the cloister-garth; and who chanted their Credo
with their eyes fixed on that lovely lancet window, once part of the
east-end of their church.
And now we are at last bound for York. We cross the Derwent and climb
the hill again to the high-road, and there before us, very far away,
lies our goal. Faintly shining, York Minster shows like a pale opal
hanging above the horizon.
The very thought of York and all that it stands for makes the heart
beat faster. Let us open the throttle then, and speed to it as quickly
as we may; for the road lies broad and level between the fields, and
nearly as straight as an arrow's path, and never, if we love our engine
and our England as we should, shall we forget this flight of ours to
the city of all our kings.
YORK AND THE SOUTH
SUMMARY OF TOUR IN THE SOUTH
DISTANCES.
York
Pontefract 24 miles
Beverley, _viâ_ Selby 45 "
Hull 9 "
--
Total 78 miles
ROADS.
Usually good and level.
IV
YORK AND THE SOUTH
No man knows the spell of York till he has approached it by road in the
evening. Of all the fresh experiences that the motor-car has brought to
us there are few from which the imagination gains so much as from this
way of entering old and beautiful towns. We have too long accepted the
roof of a railway station as our first view of such places. It is not
an inspiring view. But to see York Minster from afar, shining under
the evening sky and lifted high above the city; to watch it growing
larger and larger, rising higher and higher, increasing in beauty every
moment, until at last one drives slowly into its huge shadow; to pass
under one of the great gates that have survived so many centuries,
so many wars, so many pageants, that have welcomed so many kings, and
dripped with the blood of so many warriors; to see the ancient streets
for the first time idealised by the dusk of twilight, will help us, if
anything will, to recall and realise something of what York has been
during the eighteen hundred years of her history.
The past is very insistent here. Here are the walls, encircling the
whole city, that were built by Edward I. and repaired after the Civil
War. We may drive round them, and pass in and out of the four gates
that were once so hard to enter: Monk Bar, by which we come in from
Kirkham under the arms of England and France quartered together; and
Bootham Bar on the Newcastle Road; and Micklegate Bar on the Tadcaster
Road; and Walmgate Bar, where the restored barbican reminds us that it
was undermined during the long siege of the Civil War. All these bars
are turreted and ornamented with painted shields and statues or helmets
of stone; three of them still have their portcullises; three still bear
the arms of France.
[Illustration: WALMGATE BAR, YORK.]
Walmgate, or Watling Gate, Bar is the most picturesque of them on the
inner side, for it carries on its stone pillars an Elizabethan house of
timber and plaster. But by far the richest in memories is Micklegate
Bar. Some of these memories are of a very ghastly kind, for it was
here that the heads of "traitors" were set up. It was here that Harry
Hotspur's head looked down upon his doubly treacherous old father,
the Duke of Northumberland, as that time-server rode out through the
gate in perfect friendliness with Henry IV., and found it advisable,
no doubt, to ignore the thing that stared above the parapet. Here, in
Henry V.'s reign, the head of Lord Scrope of Masham was set up because
he favoured the House of York; and here, half a century later, was the
head of the Duke of York himself, crowned with paper--to be replaced,
almost before Margaret of Anjou had finished laughing at it, by the
head of the man who put it here--Clifford the Butcher. The hideous
series closed with the followers of Prince Charlie in the Forty-five.
[Illustration: MICKLEGATE BAR, YORK.]
Meantime there were other sights to be seen at Micklegate Bar. Richard
III., fresh from one coronation and eager for another, was received
here "with great pomp and triumph" by the citizens and the clergy "in
their richest copes," and passed through this archway with his stolen
crown upon his head, followed by his luckless queen and the little
boy who was so soon to die. His successor's daughter, Margaret Tudor,
entered York very gaily by this gate with five hundred lords and
ladies, on her way to her unhappy marriage with James IV. of Scotland.
James I. was on his way to Scotland, too, when he rode to Micklegate
Bar from Tadcaster, with the sheriffs of York bearing their white rods
before him. He waited here while the Mayor, kneeling in the road,
presented him with a sword and the city keys, and a cup and a purse,
"and made a worthy speech at the delivery of each particular." Still
braver was the scene when Charles I. came in, with that strange army
that was no army; the army that was commanded by an "amateur general"
and was intended to overawe the Scots by pomp. "The progress was more
illustrious than the march, and the soldiers were the least part of
the army," says Clarendon. This sombre bar was gay enough that day. So
splendid a procession has seldom been seen as that which filed through
its dark shadow then, all glittering and glowing, while the trainbands
of the city, magnificent in scarlet and silver and feathered caps,
greeted Charles with a volley, and the civic authorities on their knees
greeted him with flattery. It was not many years before another sort of
scene was enacted on this spot: when the army of Fairfax--commanded by
no amateur--was drawn up in a double line that stretched away from this
gate for a mile, and the two Royalist generals who had defended the
city so finely, Glenham and Slingsby, marched out between the two lines
with the remnant of the garrison, with all the honours of war. That was
the most stirring sight, I expect, that Micklegate Bar has seen.
Fairfax and the other victorious generals marched to the Minster and
"sang a psalm." What that psalm must have meant to Fairfax we can
hardly realise. The siege had lasted for thirteen weeks; more than
four thousand of his men had died in the course of it; twenty-two
times they had assaulted the walls. He was himself a Yorkshireman, and
like all Yorkshiremen, loved and honoured the city that has held so
proud a place in English history, and the Minster that is the city's
crown. No wonder he marched straight from the gate to the Minster and
sang a psalm! What York Minster meant to Fairfax it must in a lesser
degree mean to every Englishman. It combines superlative interest with
superlative beauty. We may come to it primed with its history--the
history that begins with the Roman temple whose foundations are hidden
beneath it, the history that includes so many great names; we may know
that Paulinus of the seventh century--the tall, majestic man with
the hawk-face whom Bede has described for us--built the first church
here of wood, and was the first Archbishop of York; that three other
churches stood here and were destroyed before the present building was
begun in the thirteenth century and slowly rose to its perfection; but
when we see it we can remember nothing but its beauty. It completely
dominates York. It is impossible to forget its presence for a moment,
whether it be dim and blurred in the dawn or flushed with the light of
sunset.
Nearly every one, I suppose, has seen it. Nearly every one has felt,
on passing through the entrance in the south transept, that breathless
sensation of awe that is almost fear, of reverence that is almost
worship. The first sight of those immense arches, so absolutely simple,
so indescribably majestic, with the lancets of the Five Sisters behind
them, is overwhelming. It is only gradually that memory returns, and
the great nave slowly fills with the processions of the past, with
the weddings and funerals and coronation pageants that have swept by,
century after century, to choir or chapter-house. Young Edward III.
and Philippa of Hainault were a comely pair when they were married
here in the presence of the Parliament and Council, surrounded by
the nobles of England and Scotland. Not very many years later their
little son was carried to his grave in the north aisle of the choir.
Much was spent in alms and masses, many pounds of wax were burnt, many
widows watched round the little coffin before William of Hatfield was
laid in this tomb where we see his effigy, a slender, boyish figure
lying very straightly under the high canopy. In the next century a
sinister scene took place here: Richard Crookback mourning for his
brother, coming here to hear a requiem sung, with his head full of
plots against the dead man's little sons. Very soon he was here again,
entering those splendid doors with the iron scrollwork, which lead
into the chapter-house where he was crowned for the second time--the
chapter-house that Pius II. described as "a fine lightsome chapel, with
shining walls and small, thin-waisted pillars quite round." "As the
rose is the flower of flowers," said the monks, "so is this the house
of houses."
[Illustration: YORK MINSTER.]
There are not very many notable tombs here, though there is much
illustrious dust. Here was buried the head of King Edwin of
Northumbria, who so "often sat alone by himself for a long time,
silent as to his tongue, but deliberating in his heart" whether he
should become a Christian. This Minster is in a sense the fruit of his
deliberations. There is no monument to him, nor to Earl Tostig of the
violent temper, whose body was carried here from Stamford Bridge; but
the founder of the present building lies in his robes under a canopy
in the south transept. We may see, too, in the Lady Chapel, the marble
tomb of Archbishop Scrope, the builder of Bolton Castle, who preached
a sermon in this Minster inciting the people to take up arms, and lost
his head in consequence. And near the altar of the same chapel is a
little black kneeling figure that deserves attention. It is a monument
to Frances Matthew, the wife of Tobie Matthew, Archbishop of York, and
the daughter of William Barlow, Bishop of Chichester. "She had four
sisters married to four bishops.... So that a bishop was her father,
an archbishop her father-in-law, she had four bishops her brethren,
and an archbishop her husband." Unless I am much mistaken she had also
an abbess for her mother, which was the strangest thing of all. There
was a William Barlow, at one time Bishop of St. David's, who is said to
have married an abbess as soon as the Reformation made it possible, and
had five daughters married to five bishops. Frances Matthew must surely
have been one of these. Tradition says that Bishop Barlow, who had many
unpleasant traits, stripped the lead from the Palace of St. David's
and dowered his daughters with it; but Frances must have been a baby,
if indeed she was born, when her father was guilty of this thievish
vandalism. She herself is described as being above her sex, and even
above the times--but indeed all the women who were buried in ages gone
by seem to have been superior to all the rest. She gave her husband's
library to the Minster.
Close to her mural monument is the largest window in England. There is
no building, I believe, that has so much ancient and beautiful glass as
this, and it is a miracle to be thankful for that it was not destroyed
in the last century, when the poor maniac set fire to the Minster
because he disliked the buzzing of the organ. The soft-toned window of
the Five Sisters is the loveliest of all.
But all these are modern things. Down in the crypt we shall find
ourselves in touch with the century of Paulinus and St. Chad and St.
Wilfrid, the three earliest Archbishops of York; for here is the
herringbone work of the first stone church, and here, they say, are
the pillars of the building that succeeded it and was destroyed by the
Danes. This is the spot on which the Roman temple stood, and the wooden
church where King Edwin was baptized, and the altar on which Ulphus
the Saxon laid his horn. This Ulphus was a prince in Deira, whose sons
were of a quarrelsome temper, and were likely, he thought, to fall out
over the division of his property after his death. So "he presently
took this course to make them equal." He carried his favourite
drinking-horn, his horn of ivory and gold, to York, and filling it
there he knelt before the altar of the Minster and drank the wine in
token that he endowed the church with all his lands for ever. That this
brought peace to his family I rather doubt; but the lands of Ulphus are
to this day in the possession of York Minster, and the horn of Ulphus
is to this day within its walls. If we go through this door in the
south aisle of the choir we may see it--an elephant's tusk, rich tawny
in colour, finely carved. It disappeared mysteriously at the time of
the Civil War, but somehow fell into the hands of Fairfax, whose son
returned it to the Minster. How it came to Fairfax is not recorded;
but is it not possible that he may have quietly taken possession of
it, knowing how unsafe it was in the hands of the Puritans, and have
told his son to give it back in less troubled times? Or was it perhaps
one of those relics which would have "irrecoverably perished in the
late wars" if Fairfax had not paid "that industrious antiquary, Mr.
Dodsworth," to collect them? We know that Fairfax had "a peculiar
respect" for antiquities, and that it was owing to his unceasing care
that the Minster suffered so little in the war.
It is not in a few days that York can be seen. Only those really know
the place who live within the enchanted walls; we should linger here
as long as possible, and return again and again. Yet those whose time
is limited will find that even a couple of nights spent at the justly
famous Station Hotel will enable them to see more than the Minster
without suffering from that sense of hurry that spoils pleasure.
York has not hurried. In the Museum Gardens, themselves a wonderful
museum, we may realise how many centuries she has taken to become what
she is. Here is a tower that was raised by the Romans. The date of it
is uncertain, but Mr. Wellbeloved tells us it was probably built when
the Conquering Legion came to Eboracum. This, says Gibbon, was at the
beginning of the second century; so this tower of many angles takes us
back to the time of Hadrian, to days before the Emperor Severus died
here in the palace that has altogether vanished, bidding his sons let
all their conduct tend to each other's good; days long before the death
of Constantius and the accession of Constantine the Great. It is not
true that Constantine was born in York, but it was here that he went
through his little performance of reluctant modesty when the soldiers
made him Emperor--weeping and spurring his horse while they pursued him
with the imperial robes.
In the same garden are the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey. The Benedictine
monks who founded this community came from Whitby, and were perhaps
the builders of the Norman apse we saw at Lastingham, where they
paused for a time on their way to York. It is easy to see that this
remnant of a most beautiful church was not of their raising: there is
nothing Norman here, nothing but the purest Gothic work. It was while
the earlier eleventh-century church was still standing that a strange
scene took place here; when the Archbishop of York with his retinue
clamoured long upon the abbey gates in vain, while the abbot refused to
open to him; then forced his way at last into the abbey and pronounced
an interdict--here where the grass grows under our feet--against the
abbot and his monks. The cause of all this commotion was that little
band of brethren who built the Abbey of Fountains with so much toil and
endurance. They were at that time monks of St. Mary's, and had appealed
to Archbishop Thurstan to reform their house. Abbot Geoffrey, however,
preferred to remain unreformed; and so the fiery prelate swept off with
the zealous thirteen and set them down in the wilderness beside the
Skell to live as austerely as they would. The Abbey of St. Mary, in
spite of the interdict, grew very great as well as beautiful.
[Illustration: ST. MARY'S ABBEY, YORK.]
Not only at the Dissolution, but far later, this monastery was horribly
ill-treated. Its stones have built a palace and a prison; they have
been used for mending, and have been made into quicklime. The palace
they built has to a great extent vanished, but the Tudor house that
stands near Bootham Bar--the red house with the arms of James I. over
the door--is either actually a part of it or was rebuilt from its
ruins. It was in that house that Strafford lived when he was President
of the Council of the North; both James I. and Charles I. stayed in it
when they came to York; and it was probably there that Henrietta Maria
lived for three months when she brought materials of war to the city.
There are other stones of St. Mary's still to be seen, by which we may
partly guess the glory that has departed. There are countless numbers
of them in this garden; every flower-bed is bordered with them, and the
lower part of the guesthouse, down there across the grass, is literally
stacked with statues and mouldings and bosses of wonderful richness.
This Hospitium is used as a museum. It is a little bewildering, with
its mingled associations of mediæval monks and Roman matrons. Here
are all the things that we are accustomed to see in collections of
Roman relics--pottery, tiles, jewellery, everything from a tesselated
pavement to a circus ticket. One thing there is, however, to which we
are not accustomed; a thing whose interest is rather painful, if not
morbid; a coil of a woman's hair, as bright and brown as if it had been
laid in its stone coffin only yesterday. The hair of poor Flavia or
Placida would be better buried, I think.
[Illustration: BOOTHAM BAR, YORK.]
The prison that was built from the stones of St. Mary's Abbey is on the
site of William the Conqueror's castle. It is still called the Castle,
but there is nothing left of the fortress except one round grey tower,
standing alone on a little hill. Its walls have been concerned with
many great deeds; much valour has defended it and much besieged it;
much English History has been made in the shadow of it. Yet Clifford's
Tower is generally remembered chiefly in connection with the wild scene
of horror that took place here at the time of Richard I.'s coronation,
when the Jews of York rushed to the castle for shelter, with their
ducats and their daughters, and were besieged by the mob. Here, where
the steps wind up between the tidy laurels, the mad crowd yelled and
battered on the walls, while the White Friar who led them shrieked:
"Down with the enemies of Christ!" Here within the tower, where the
grass is strewn with exquisite fragments of Gothic ornament--probably
from St. Mary's--the starving Jews were huddled with their families
till they grew desperate. They killed their wives and children, and
then they killed themselves. A few surrendered, begging for baptism,
converted by these strange methods; but they were allowed no baptism
but that of blood.
As we drive slowly through the streets of York, peering now at some
carved archway, now at some time-worn coat-of-arms, passing here under
the overhanging eaves of St. William's College, or there under the
lantern tower of St. Helen's, we feel that the life of the past is
still existing in this city, in some strange astral way, hidden within
the life of the present. The past is not merely a picturesque memory
here. Even if we had never heard the magic name of York, I think we
should feel that her streets were crowded with figures we could not
see.
[Illustration: STREET IN YORK.]
A modern note is struck as we drive out of the town past the
racecourse, and find to our pleasure that the splendid road is
"treated" with some preparation that makes it absolutely dustless. This
is the road by which the Stewart Kings approached York with so much
show and colour, and by which their supporters marched away, defeated,
but with honours of war. Like them, we are going to Tadcaster. The
middle of the bridge that spans the Wharfe at Tadcaster is the boundary
between the West Riding and the Ainsty, or County of York City; and
this is why it was the spot where the sheriffs welcomed the Kings of
England when they came to York. It was not on this actual bridge,
however, that Charles was met by the citizens; for this one was made
from the ruins of the castle early in the eighteenth century. Both
castle and bridge, it would seem, were useless by the time they had
passed from hand to hand in the Civil War. Tadcaster was an important
place then, an outpost of York; even as its predecessor, Calcaria, had
been an outpost to Eboracum.
A couple of miles beyond Tadcaster we pass through the village of
Towton. It was near here, in the fields that lie between the main
road and the river Cock, that the White Rose overcame the Red after
ten hours of "deadly battle and bloody conflict." It was on the night
before the actual battle that Lord Clifford and his company "were
attrapped or they were ware," and Clifford, having taken off his gorget
for some reason, was killed by an arrow "stricken into the throat."
"This end had he," says the chronicler, "which slew the young Earl of
Rutland kneeling upon his knees." If we leave the high-road for a few
minutes, turning to the right beyond Towton, we shall be crossing the
actual battlefield, the ground that was such a horrible medley of snow
and blood on that Palm Sunday when "both the hosts approached in a
plain field," the ground in which the Yorkists stuck the spent arrows
of the Lancastrians, "which sore annoyed the legs of the owners when
the battle joined." The falling snow, too, "somewhat blemished and
minished" their sight, and the end of it was that King Henry's men
turned and fled towards Tadcaster. We cannot see "the little broke
called Cocke" from this spot, but there on the right is the depression
in the fields through which it runs. So many men were "drent and
drowned" that day in the Cock that their comrades, it is said, crossed
the stream on their dead bodies, and even the river Wharfe was red with
blood. From this scene of slaughter, which "did sore debilitate and
much weaken the puysance of this realme," Edward IV. rode into York as
its master.
At Saxton we turn to the left and rejoin the high-road to Pontefract,
and after some miles of good going but cheerless scenery we cross the
Aire at Ferrybridge. It was this crossing of the Aire at Ferrybridge
that caused the death of Clifford the Butcher on the eve of Towton; for
he, "being in lusty youth and of frank courage," attempted to prevent
Edward of York from passing the river, and so was himself cut off
from the Lancastrian army. He did actually secure the bridge. Lord
Fitzwalter was keeping the passage for Edward "with a great number of
tall personages," but Clifford and his light-horse stole up to this
spot early in the morning "or his enemies were ware, gat the bridge,
and slew the keepers of the same." This was the beginning of the
carnage of Towton. Lord Fitzwalter, hearing the racket, rose from his
bed and hurried, poleaxe in hand, to join in the fray, but "before he
knew what the matter meant" he was killed. A few hours later Clifford,
too, was dead.
For the last few minutes we have been travelling on the road that
holds, perhaps, for road-lovers, more glamour in its name than any
other--the Great North Road. We have no time to think of the romance
of it, of the millions who have trodden its dust, of the gay-hearted
vagabonds or anxious kings who have passed this way, for we turn from
it too soon and take the road to Pontefract.
I do not know if it was on this identical road between Ferrybridge and
Pontefract that Edward IV. and Warwick rode out to the field of Towton;
it was in any case on a very different surface. The town of Pontefract
itself is strangely unimposing for a place of such great renown; the
houses are unpicturesque, the surrounding country dull. Yet Camden says
it is sweetly situated, and is remarkable for producing liquorice.
There are other things for which Pontefract has been remarkable in its
day; but as we mount the slope into the long, straggling town there is
little to show that it has ever been concerned with affairs of more
vital importance than liquorice. There is, it is true, a fine church
greatly ruined on our right, which has the air of having lived through
a good deal. It was battered to pieces in the course of three sieges,
and the transept only has been rebuilt. The strange Perpendicular
tower, of which the lower part is square and the upper octagonal, seems
oddly enough to have suffered less than the body of the building,
for it has been very little restored. This church of All Saints was
connected with a religious house whose brethren served the castle
chapel; but it was not the abbey that Camden "industriously omits" from
his description of Pontefract, because even in his day there was hardly
a sign of it left. In his day the walls of this forlorn nave were still
unbroken, and rising high above it on the hill were all the towers of
the castle, a splendid cluster, with the great Norman wall encircling
them, and the Round Tower of Ilbert de Lacy tallest of all. Of this
"high and stately, famous and princely impregnable castle and citadel,"
as it was called only a few years before the Civil War, there is
deplorably little for us to see. Hardly one stone was left upon another
by General Lambert. The _débris_ were heaped over the foundations, soil
was spread over all, and the sinister fortress whose walls had echoed
the sighs of royal prisoners and the last groan of a king, the "guilty
closure" that was drenched with blood and tears, was devoted to the
rearing of silkworms and other such innocent uses. During the last
century, however, a good deal was excavated, and we may without great
difficulty find out the scene of much that has happened here.
[Illustration: NORMAN DOORWAY IN PONTEFRACT CASTLE.]
"Oh, Pomfret! Pomfret! O thou bloody prison,
Fatal and ominous to noble peers!"
The names of those to whom it has been fatal make a long list. The most
illustrious name on that list is Richard Plantagenet.
That Richard was by some means done to death in this castle is, I
believe, certain; but how he died and where is unknown. The old tale
that tells how Sir Piers Exton and his eight men rushed into the room
where the imprisoned king was dining, and how Richard "right valiantly
defended himself," but was finally struck on the head with a poleaxe
by Sir Piers, who "withal ridded him of his life in an instant," was
discredited when Richard's grave at Westminster was opened, and the
skull, which was perfectly preserved, showed no mark of a blow. Another
theory is the one believed by Northumberland and Harry Hotspur, who
accused Henry IV. of having traitorously caused their sovereign lord
and his "with hunger, cold, and thirst to perish, to be murdered." If
we skirt the lawn-tennis court and turn down a little path to the left
we shall find, behind the raised bowling-alley, a fragment of vaulted
ceiling and a wall with three little recesses in it. This is reputed
to be Richard's prison. I do not know if there be any real evidence
that it was so. There is certainly not the evidence of a continuous
tradition; for until the siege destroyed it a room in the round tower
was shown to visitors as the scene of Piers Exton's fabulous exploit
with the poleaxe--a room in which there was a post all hacked and cut
by the blows aimed at the King! When the post disappeared the scene of
Richard's death moved to this Gascoign Tower where we see the vaulted
ceiling. It is curious how often the only fragment left of a building
happens to be the scene of the event in the building's history that is
most likely to appeal to popular sentiment. One grows suspicious of
local traditions!
Richard II. was not the only prince to be imprisoned in Pontefract
Castle. James I. of Scotland was here, and with him were the Dukes
of Orléans and Bourbon and other prisoners taken on the field of
Agincourt. Henry V. was a little anxious at one time lest he should
lose "the remnant of his prisoners of France," for a plot was on foot
to rescue them. "I will," wrote the King, "that the Duke of Orléans
be kept still within the Castle of Pomfret, without going to Robert's
Place or to any other disport; for it is better he lack his disport
than we were deceived of all the remnant."
Of all those who actually met their death here Thomas Earl of
Lancaster--he whom Gaveston called the Actor--had the hardest fate. The
place belonged to him, and he had done much for it. Among other things
he built or repaired the tower called Swillington, the tower that was
destined to be his own prison, whose fragments we may see down there
guarding the moat on the north side. His hatred of Gaveston and the
Despencers, Edward II.'s favourites, brought him to this plight; to
this dark tower whose walls he had made so thick, whose entrance was a
trap-door in the roof; to his mock trial by his enemies in the great
hall that stood here on the north side of the lawn; to his condemnation
and ignominious death. It was here within this court, somewhere near
the northern boundary wall, that he stood facing the Despencers as
they venomously sent him to the block; it was here that he uttered his
last despairing words: "Shall I die without answer?" Then they muffled
his head in an old hood and set him, the King's uncle, on "a lean mare
without a bridle," and so led him out among the mocking soldiers to
his death. We can see, from the castle ramparts, the hill where he was
beheaded. It is called St. Thomas's Hill to this day, for later on he
was canonised and his grave in St. John's Priory became a shrine. The
site of the priory--the monastery that Camden industriously omitted--is
between the hill and the castle.
Pontefract was fatal to many of Edward IV.'s followers and kin. Before
his final triumph at Tewkesbury some of his supporters were imprisoned
here. "John Pylkyngton, Mr. W. att Cliff, and Fowler ar taken," we read
in the Paston Letters, "and in the Castyll of Pomfrett, and ar lyck to
dye hastyly, withowte they be dead." Very hastily, too, and without
trial, Edward's brother-in-law Lord Rivers, and stepson Sir Richard
Grey died here by order of Richard III.
It really seems as though there had been something sinister in the
atmosphere of this place. Even its one gay memory--the visit of Henry
VIII. and his fifth bride--is overshadowed by the scaffold; for it was
here that Katherine Howard put a weapon into her husband's hand by
making Francis Derham her private secretary.
Indeed Pontefract has no cheerful annals: they are all of battle,
murder, and sudden death. There was very little bloodshed, I believe,
when the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace took the castle; but who can
guess how many died during the three sieges of the Civil War? The place
was Crown property, but after two sieges it surrendered to the army of
the Parliament. It is rather difficult to ascertain by what particular
form of treachery it was recovered by the Royalists. The deed was
done, in any case, by one Colonel Marris, whom Clarendon describes
as "a stout and bold undertaker in attempts of the greatest danger."
Stout and bold he certainly was, but not very attractive; for he began
by deserting the royal cause, and then, when he wished to turn his
coat again, was enabled to carry out his plot by his close friendship
with the governor. Being always welcome he made friends with some of
the guard. The garrison, as it happened, needed new beds, so when
Marris and some others appeared at the gates laden with beds they were
admitted at once. They carried the beds into that solid-looking house
that was on our right as we entered the castle, the house that bears
the arms of Lancaster over the door. It was the Main Guardhouse. There
they flung the beds upon the floor and overpowered the friendly guard.
So Pontefract came back to the Crown, the Parliamentary garrison were
imprisoned in the magazine, and the third siege began. The magazine in
which Colonel Cotterell and his men lived for eleven weeks is under the
lawn-tennis court. If you borrow a taper from the custodian you can go
down into it, and read, on the wall of the staircase, the names that
some of these soldiers cut in the stone.
When the time came for discussing terms of surrender General Lambert
said that Marris and five others must be given up to him. The governor
asked and was granted six days in which the six men might do their
best to escape. On the fifth day they had all disappeared and the
garrison surrendered. Two of the six, however, were still within the
castle, in a secret place beneath the Pipe Tower, which stood over
there beyond the Norman Keep. They were walled up "with great store of
waste stones," and had food for a month beside them. The situation was
a critical one. They heard their garrison march away, some to Newark,
some to the enemy's camp, some to their homes, the officers with their
horses and arms, even the men with Portmantles and Snapsacks; heard the
rumbling of the three waggons that carried the wounded; heard, during
ten awful days, the incessant clamour and crash of the first hurried
dismantling of the castle, the clamour that might be their death at any
moment; heard at last the withdrawal of the Parliamentary troops. Then
they took down their wall of waste stones, and stole away.
These men who imprisoned themselves were the last prisoners of
Pontefract Castle, for after this the historic ground was sown with
liquorice; but the Main Guardhouse was spared, as we see, and for
another century or two kept up the gloomy traditions of the place as a
prison.
The country that lies between Pontefract and Beverley is by no means
beautiful. It is so aggressively dull that it may almost be called
ugly. It is not for the sake of the scenery, truly, that we cover so
many miles of Southern Yorkshire, but chiefly for the sake of Beverley
Minster; and there are many, no doubt, who will prefer to make York or
Pontefract the last stopping-place of their tour. Those who do not care
for historical memories unless there be something beautiful connected
with them I advise to drive across from York to Beverley by the most
direct road.
Half-way between Pontefract and Knottingley we have once more a
flashing glimpse of the Great North Road and the immense signposts
that mark its dignity, and are in themselves a lesson in geography; at
Chapel Haddlesey we cross a toll-bridge. These are the only incidents
on this singularly uneventful route until we reach Selby; but as all
good motorists very well know, the road without incidents is often as
happy as the country without history, and the particular road that lies
through these melancholy fields and unattractive villages is very fine.
Those who depend on horses or trains cannot vary their speed according
to the beauty of the country, but to us is given the special joy of
sauntering through lovely landscapes and hurrying on when there is
nothing to be seen.
In 1906 the name of Selby was brought into tragic prominence by the
fire that made its abbey roofless and "only not a wreck." But as there
are disastrous victories so there are beneficent calamities; and Selby
Abbey, it seems, whose restoration has already been a triumph of
energy, will soon be more complete than it has been since 1690, when
the tower fell and ruined the south transept.
This grand church is the work of many hands. It is a mixture of
every style of architecture, both within and without: Early Norman,
Transition, Early English, Decorated, Perpendicular. The west front,
for instance, has a splendid Norman doorway with five mouldings, and
above it an Early English window filled with Perpendicular tracery. No
part of this building was raised by the founder; and indeed it was not
to this exact spot, but nearer to the Ouse, that Benedict of Auxerre,
bringing with him "the glorious finger" of St. Germanus and the memory
of a heavenly vision, came to set up his hut. The first benefactor of
the foundation was the man who presented a tent to shelter the relic,
round which a cluster of wooden buildings grew, and formed the first
monastery of Selby. William the Conqueror gave land, and a charter, and
many privileges; and Abbot Benedict won from the Pope the much-coveted
honour of the mitre. William's charter was dated the year after the
birth of Prince Henry, and its great generosity, it is said, was
prompted by the fact that Selby was the birthplace of this favourite
son of the king, Henry the fine scholar, Henry the lion of justice. To
him, says an old chronicler, "Almighty God gave three gifts--wisdom,
victory, and riches." Yet his wisdom failed him, alas, in the matter of
lampreys!
[Illustration: WEST DOORWAY OF SELBY ABBEY.]
It was Abbot Hugh, a member of that great house of de Lacy which gave
so many fine buildings to England, who raised the abbey on the spot
where it still stands. That massive pillar at the east end of the nave,
the pillar with the spiral mouldings, was part of his work. It is even
possible that some of its stones were actually laid in their places by
his strenuous hands, for he worked with the builders. It is a fine
picture--the beautiful pillar rising course by course towards the open
sky, as Hugh de Lacy, abbot and noble, with infinite care and reverence
fixed each stone in its place with a hymn of praise.
The later abbots, the three who in the fourteenth century raised the
choir that has been called peerless, were men of another fashion--not
especially humble--members of Parliament, entertainers of kings, men
of the world. Yet to them, too, we owe much gratitude for all this
splendour of ornament, these capitals and bosses, this great east
window, this flowing parapet that is so often repeated. And, as a
nation, we owe gratitude to all those whose work or money has helped in
the recent restoration.[7]
There is nothing but the abbey itself to keep us in Selby. There is
no sign by which we may know the spot where Sir Thomas Fairfax, by
defeating the Royalists and capturing their colonel, first made his
name honoured. We do know, however, that he and his troops marched
to Selby on that occasion by this wondrously level road upon which
we drive away. For the first mile or so, until we turn away from the
Ouse, we are on the road that used to be, in the old coaching days,
called the lower road to York. It diverges from the Great North Road
at Barnet, and though not the main highway, was the more direct route,
and therefore the one chosen by those who were in a hurry. It is for
a very short time that we are on it; but surely, for a moment, above
the humming of the engine, above the rushing of the wind, we hear the
ringing of Black Bess's hoofs.
Five level miles bring us to the door of Hemingborough Church, which
is large and renowned, but of a dreariness so gaunt and bare that it
altogether fails to charm. Its walls, unsoftened by creepers, rise
from the treeless landscape in uncompromising severity; and inside the
building the colourless effect is equally depressing, in spite of some
fine woodwork. The tall and slender spire is really beautiful, however,
and may be seen for miles across the plain.
To visit Wressle Castle we must leave the direct road to Howden,
turning to the left immediately after crossing the Derwent. Here again
the sad landscape seems to have infected the building. Theoretically it
has all the elements of romance, and to read of it without seeing it
is to conjure up a picture of decaying splendour, of venerable walls
eloquent of revelry and war, a picture worthy of the great names of
Percy and Lacy and Seymour. A castle founded by that Earl of Worcester
whose headless body lies in Shrewsbury Abbey because he fought for
Richard II.'s lost cause, a castle that has seen all the might of
the Northumberlands and all the tragedy of civil war, must surely
have "the grand air." So one thinks till one has seen Wressle. In the
background is a building, shabby but not ruined; in the foreground is a
cabbage-patch.
Yet once this place was all magnificence, made "al of very fair and
greate squarid stone both withyn and withoute." Leland tells us of
its halls and great chambers, and its five towers, and its brewhouse
without the wall, and its "botery, pantery, pastery, lardery, and
kechyn." All these things were exceedingly fair, he says, and so were
the gardens within the moat and the orchards without. It was here where
the cabbages are that those fair gardens grew. And in the orchards were
mounds, "writhen about with degrees like turninges of cokilshilles,
to cum to the top without payn." Most fondly of all he describes the
"study caullid Paradise," with the ingenious device of ledged desks
for holding books. There, looking down upon us from the upper part of
the tower nearest to the road, are the empty windows of that Paradise
whose inhabitants were driven out of it for ever by the flaming sword
of Civil War.
This is only a fragment of the original castle. The Northumberlands
needed a considerable amount of house-room, for they had, it appears,
two hundred and twenty-nine servants. There were gentlemen to wait
before noon and gentlemen to wait after noon, and gentlemen to wait
after supper; there were yeoman officers, and groom officers, and
grooms of the chambers; there was a groom for brushing clothes, a
groom of the stirrup, a groom to dress the hobbies and nags, a groom
to keep the hounds, a groom to keep the gates, and an endless list of
others. The day came when the servants in this house were called upon
by the Parliament to demolish it themselves, and were given a month
to do it in. This one side of the quadrangle was all they left. It is
possible, I believe, to climb one of the towers to see the view--but I
cannot think it desirable. The view from the bottom of the tower is not
so attractive as to make one wish for more.
A very great relief to the eye is Howden, about three miles further on.
The town itself is not without a certain degree of picturesqueness,
though it was scarcely a happy thought to surmount the ancient steps
of the cross in the market-place by a modern street lamp. However,
from that same market-place we see, behind the red houses, the ruined
gable-end of the church that is Howden's pride, whose lovely tower is
one of the landmarks of the plain. The peculiarly slender and graceful
effect of this tower is partly owing, I think, to the unusual height
of the lower stage compared with the upper. Those tall lancets were the
work of Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, whose palace stood over there
to the east of the church, where the pretty gardens are. If we venture
a little way on foot along that lane at the corner of the square, we
may see, without trespassing, the beautiful old ivy-covered wall and
the blocked gatehouse with the shield upon it, within which the bishops
of Durham were wont to seek rest and change. Camden's tale, to the
effect that Bishop Skirlaw built "the huge tall steeple" as a refuge
for the inhabitants in times of flood, need not be believed; it was
probably the invention, as a certain quaint old book suggests, of "some
doating scribe, desirous of assimilating the steeple of Howden Church
to the tower of Babel."
In the thirteenth century the Archbishop of York, seeing that this
church was "very wide and large," and rich enough to support "many
spiritual men," made it collegiate. Hence arose the need for the
chapter-house that Walter Skirlaw built on the south side of the
choir, and made so wonderfully beautiful that even now, robbed as it is
of its groined roof and much of its rich ornament, it dwells in one's
mind as a thing apart. The Decorated choir, which was first the work
and afterwards the shrine of the thirteenth-century poet, John Hoveden,
is itself a ruin; for when the church lost its prebends and its riches
in the reign of Edward VI. there was neither need nor means left for
keeping this part of the building in repair. The nave is still the
parish church.
[Illustration: CHAPTER HOUSE, HOWDEN.]
After leaving Howden we have to pass, with what speed we may, over
ten more miles of absolutely level, absolutely uninspiring country.
Then we go through North Cave, where George Washington's ancestors
used to live; and at last the road begins to rise over Kettlethorpe
Hill. The flat land is laid out like a map below us; far away upon the
horizon--which is level as the sea--rises "the huge tall steeple" of
Howden; and between the plain of Yorkshire and the rising-ground of
Lincolnshire are the sullen waters of that great river that has brought
England so much of her prosperity. Not always, however, has the Humber
brought prosperity. More than a thousand years ago the fleet of the
avenging Danes, Hinguar and Hubba, swept up between these low banks,
to lay this rich country waste. Right into the heart of the land they
sailed, and ceased not to destroy till all the country of the fens was
desolate. Now this calamity and much more besides--the destruction of
Lindisfarne and Whitby, of Croyland and Ely and Peterborough, and the
death of St. Edmund the King--was brought about by the jealousy of one
obscure individual. For Lothbroc the Dane, being a guest at Edmund's
Court, had showed so much skill in the trapping of birds and beasts
that the King's head-keeper, as one may call him, was "inflamed with
mortal envy." So he slew Lothbroc treacherously. Then the King sent
the murderer to sea in a little boat, without sail or oars, and the
boat drifted to the shores of Denmark. And the wicked keeper sought the
sons of Lothbroc, whose names were Hinguar and Hubba, and told them
that their father had been slain by order of King Edmund. So Hinguar
and Hubba swore by "their almighty gods that they would not leave that
murder unpunished"; and verily they fulfilled their oath.
Two hundred years later another Dane, Sweyn of the Forked Beard, "a
cruel man, and ready for the shedding of blood," sailed up to conquer
the north. Just beyond that island that lies close to the left bank,
where we see the Ouse suddenly widen into the Humber, Sweyn turned into
the river Trent. And "all England groaned like a bed of reeds shaken by
the west wind."
At the top of the hill we pass through a wonderful avenue of beeches
and sycamores; then run down a long and pleasant slope into Walkington;
and soon the blue towers of Beverley appear.
The brief run across the common above Beverley will probably be the
last of our memorable moments in Yorkshire: the last of those memories
which we motorists--while the days are long and the winds are soft and
the engine purrs contentedly hour after hour--hoard up to enjoy again
and again, not only through the winter but through the years. This
particular moment is a very short one; but it will be long, I think,
before we forget the beauty of the town of Beverley as it lies in the
blue dusk of a summer evening, with its matchless towers dominating it.
Yes, surely, they are matchless! See how the straight, clean lines of
their tall buttresses--those parallel lines that are repeated again
and again in the Perpendicular panels, and even in the deep shadows
cast by the masonry--give the impression of slenderness and height. Not
anywhere, not at Lincoln, not at York, are there towers of a design so
complete and finished, of a simplicity so exquisite. Nowhere else does
the accumulation of straight lines produce so rich a whole; nowhere
else are the very shadows used to enhance the effect. There is much
that is beautiful in Beverley Minster, but in the main it is these
twin towers that are going to be our compensation for all those miles
we have driven between flat fields, "enclosid," as Leland says, "with
hegges."
The monastery of Beverley was founded, or at all events much frequented
in the eighth century, by a certain Archbishop of York, who retired
hither "out of a pious aversion to this world," and has been known
ever since as St. John of Beverley. Bede's account of this saint is
well worth reading. He was a man of many miracles, of much kindliness,
of some sharpness of tongue. Never was there a saint of so much
commonsense, mingled with the compelling power that works miracles in
every age. There was a "dumb boy," for instance, who had also a sore
head. The archbishop divined the nervous nature of the dumbness, and
cured it so thoroughly that the youth talked incessantly for a day and
a night, as long as he could keep awake. Then the archbishop "ordered
the physician to take in hand the cure of his head." The shrewd saint
recognised his own limitations. On another occasion he was brought to
heal a dying nun. "What can I do to the girl," he asked tartly, "if she
is like to die?"
[Illustration: BEVERLEY.]
Such was St. John of Beverley, of whom we may see a picture, though
not, I fear, a portrait, in the south transept of this minster.
It represents him receiving from King Athelstane a charter with a
portentous seal and the following legend:--
"Als fre make I the
as hert may thynke
or egh may see."
King Athelstane, it is true, was by no means a contemporary of St.
John of Beverley, but he regarded the saint as his special benefactor,
and gave many privileges to Beverley on that account--so the symbolism
is pretty even if the picture is not. If we walk along the nave till
we are beneath the second boss of the vaulted roof, counting from the
east, we shall be above the spot where John of Beverley's dust has lain
for many centuries. He was originally buried in the porch; probably
his bones were moved when the Saxon Church was replaced by a Norman
one. I do not know on what authority the local guide informs us that
Athelstane's dagger is in this grave. Gibson, who in his additions to
Camden describes the opening of the tomb in the seventeenth century,
makes mention of no dagger, but only of the sweet-smelling dust,
and the six cornelian beads, and the brass pins and iron nails.
Athelstane, it is true, left his dagger as a hostage on St. John's
grave while he was fighting the Scots; but the story says that he
redeemed it on his return by re-founding the monastery as a college,
and granting it the right of sanctuary. Hence the legend on the charter.
In the north aisle of the choir, near the entrance to the Percy Chapel,
is the visible symbol of that right of sanctuary, the Fridstool, the
plain rounded seat in which he that sat was safe even though he were
a murderer, the sacred centre of the six circles that conferred each
its own amount of security. To this Stool of Peace, in the days when
it stood beside the altar, many a man--indeed many a ruffian--has owed
his life and the freedom he so little deserved. It was to this very
seat that Richard II.'s half-brother, Sir John Holland, came hurrying
through the night. Froissart tells the story, how Holland and Lord
Ralph Stafford met in a lane but could not see each other for the
darkness. "I am Stafford," said one. "And I am Holland," said the
other, and added: "Thy servants have murdered my squire whom I loved so
much." Then he killed Lord Ralph with a blow. Stafford's servant cried
out that his master was dead. "Be it so," said Sir John; "I had rather
have put him to death than one of less rank, for I have the better
revenged the loss of my squire." In spite of this haughty attitude,
however, he lost no time in taking refuge here. The beautiful towers
were not in existence then, but the nave through which he hastened was
this Decorated nave that we see now, and these Early English arches
were above him as he sat in the sanctuary, and close to him was that
wonderful canopied tomb near the altar, supposed to be the grave of
Eleanor, Lady Percy.
If it were not eclipsed by the minster the church of St. Mary at
Beverley would be more famous than it is, for it, too, is full of
beauty and interest. But only those who are very enthusiastic lovers of
architecture, or who are able to spend some days in the town, will risk
confusing their memories of the first with the details of the second.
Beverley, though never fortified, had once three gates. Of these only
one still stands, the North Bar. Beneath its crow-stepped parapet
Charles I. must have passed with an angry heart when he rode out to
York after his futile expedition to Hull. And it is very likely that
we, if we are going south, shall drive out of Beverley upon the same
road by which he came from Hull the night before, with the first open
defiance of one of his own towns ringing ominously in his ears.
Who thinks of history when he goes to Hull? It is, no doubt, like all
great commercial centres, of paramount interest to its inhabitants;
but to the traveller what is it? A starting-place, a place where there
are docks, railway stations, hotels. Even that increasing band of
travellers who are learning, with the help of bicycles and motor-cars,
to know their country with the intimate knowledge that nearly always
means love, to linger in its historic towns, to seek its little
villages, and to eat the familiar bacon-and-eggs of its wayside inns,
even these are fain to pass through Hull with no thought beyond their
anxiety to reach some other place. Beyond the two old churches of Holy
Trinity and St. Mary there is nothing here to see except a good deal of
prosperity and the squalor that prosperity brings.
Yet even these wide streets of central Hull, with all their prosaic
traffic, should take our thoughts back to Edward I. These things are
the justification of that astute and high-handed king; they are the
fulfilment of his prophecy. This sheltered corner of the Humber, he
thought, would make a fine position for a commercial town. To think of
a thing was to do it at once, with our first Edward; so he bought the
land from the Abbey of Meaux, made himself a manor, called the place
King's Town, built some houses, and paid people to live in them. Well,
there may be some even now who would have to be paid to live in Hull;
but none the less Edward was wise here as in most other places.
And, moreover, as we reach the outskirts of this town we may recall
that one of the most dramatic scenes in English history was enacted
here--that defiance of Charles I. at the walls of his own town, which
was the gauntlet flung by the Parliament.
War was yet not declared, but there was great store of ammunition
in Hull which might, thought Charles, be useful by and by. So he,
with two or three hundred others, set out from York to see about the
matter, and as he drew near this town--fortified then with a great
wall and many towers--he sent a message to bid the governor dine with
him. I do not know if there is any vestige left of the wall to which
Charles presently came, or any record of the spot where he paused,
dumbfounded, before the gate. This, he surely thought, as he scanned
the walls and the closely shut gates and the hostile draw-bridges,
this was a strange welcome to his city of Hull, the King's Town!
Here were no sheriffs marching out to meet him as at York, nor gay
trainbands, nor kneeling mayors; but walls manned with soldiers who
were anything but gay, and inhospitable gate-keepers whom he could by
no means persuade to let him pass, and on the ramparts the unhappy
governor, Sir John Hotham. "And when the King commanded him to cause
the port to be opened," says Clarendon, "he answered like a distracted
man that no man could understand; he fell upon his knees, used all
the execrations imaginable, that the earth would open and swallow him
up if he were not his Majesty's most faithful subject." Yet in spite
of all his protestations this man "of a fearful nature and perplexed
understanding" was quite clear in his mind as to what his intentions
were, and not too fearful to carry them out. The King should not come
in.
Then solemnly, from below the wall they might not enter, the King's
officers made proclamation that Sir John Hotham, Governor of Hull, was
a traitor; and Charles, with his head high but his spirits very low,
rode on to Beverley in the shadow of the Great Rebellion.
Our plight at this moment is not the same as his. If his difficulty
was to enter Hull, ours lies in the leaving of it--supposing, that
is to say, that we wish to cross the Humber by the ferry. There are
no arrangements of any kind for shipping cars. A narrow, precipitous
gangway, with a right-angled turn in the middle, is the only means
of passing from the quay to the ferry-boat. The transit is a matter
of difficulty for any car--for a large one it is impossible. Hull,
however, is a progressive place, as befits the town of that most
progressive king who saw its possibilities so long ago. Very soon, we
cannot doubt, the shipping of a car on the shores of the Humber will be
less like a feat in a circus than it is at present.
INDEX
AGINCOURT, Battle of, 195
Ainsty of York, 187
Airedale, 15
Aire, River, 13, 189
Alan, Count of Brittany, 73, 79
Alfred the Great, 36, 37, 44
Alfrid, King of Deira, 36
Allerston, 124
Anne Boleyn, 160, 161
Appleton-le-Moor, 133
Arkengarth Dale, 71
Arthur, King, 74, 75
Aske Hall, 79
Aske, Robert, 113
Askrigg, 57, 66, 67
Athelstane, King, 215, 216
Atton, Family of, 122
Aysgarth, 56
Ayton Castle, 122, 164
BAINBRIDGE, 57
Baliol, Bernard, 82, 83
Baliol College, 83
Baliol, Guy, 82
Baliol, John, the elder, 83, 84
Baliol, John, King of Scotland, 82, 83
Barden Moor, 57
Barden Tower, 19, 21
Barlow, Bishop, 177, 178
Barnard Castle, 65, 81, 82-84
Barnet, 205
Bay Town, 107
Bear of Warwick, 50
Beatty, Sir William, 55
Beckett, Thomas à, 28
Bede, The Venerable, 35, 76, 129, 140, 174, 214
Bellyseys, Richard, 47
Benedict, Abbot of Selby, 202, 203
Beverley, 4, 200, 201, 212-218, 221
Black Bess, 205
Blubberhouses, 25
Boar of Gloucester, 50, 83
Bolton Bridge, 22, 25
Bolton Castle, 57, 59-66, 177
Bolton, Lord, 56, 59
Bolton Priory, 5, 11, 21, 23-25, 149
Bolton Woods, 21, 22
Bootham Bar, York, 170, 183
Bosham, St. Wilfrid at, 36
Bosworth, Battle of, 159
Boulby Cliff, 95
Bourbon, Duke of, 195
Bowes, Sir George, 61, 65
Boy of Egremond, 22, 23
Brandon, Lady Eleanor, 8
Brandsby, 154, 157
Bridlington, 119
Brodelay, Abbot of Fountains, 42
Bromflete, Margaret, 122, 164
Brompton, 123, 124
Brontë, Anne, 115, 116
Brontë, Charlotte, 15, 115, 116
Brontë Country, The, 15
Brotton, 94, 95
Brougham Castle, 20
Bruce, David, 74, 75
Bruce, Family of, 92-95, 125
Bruce, Robert, 94
Buckden, 17
Buckingham, First Duke of, 135, 143, 144, 145
Buckingham, Second Duke of, 133-135, 141, 144-146
Buckingham, Katherine Duchess of, 143, 144
Buckingham, Mary Duchess of, 144
Burgh, de, 28
Burleigh, Lord, 53, 54
Burnsall, 19
Buttertubs Pass, 4, 58, 59, 67-69
Byland Abbey, 26, 153, 154
Byland, Old, 152, 153
Byron, Lord, 78
CÆDMON, 101, 104, 105
Camden, Quotations from, 12, 14, 17, 35, 91, 191, 192, 196, 209
Carlyle, Thomas, 33, 114
Cavendish Memorial at Bolton, 23
Chapel Haddlesey, 201
Charles I., 28, 74, 172, 173, 184, 187, 218, 220, 221
Citeaux, 152
Civil War, 9, 31, 33, 34, 53, 65, 100, 113, 114, 126, 135, 144, 170,
180, 187, 192, 197-200, 204, 207, 208, 218, 220, 221
Clairvaux, 151
Clapham, 11, 14
Clarence, Duke of, 159
Clarendon, Quotations from, 143, 173, 198, 221
Clares, Arms of the, 165
Claughton, 109
Cleveland Moors, 4, 79, 91, 92, 95, 108, 131
Clifford "the Butcher," 7, 19, 20, 122, 171, 188-190
Clifford, Family of, 6-11, 15, 122
Clifford "the Shepherd Lord," 7, 8, 11, 19-21, 24, 122
Clifford's Tower, York, 185, 186
Clitheroe, 30
Cock, River, 188, 189
Colman, 104
Compiègne, 36
Coniston, 12, 13
Conistone, 18
Conquering Legion, 181
Constantine the Great, 162, 181
Constantius, Emperor, 181
Cook, Captain, 91, 96, 97
Cotherstone, 84
Cotterell, Colonel, 199
Cover, River, 50, 54
Coxwold, 154, 157
Craven, 5-15
Cromwell, Oliver, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34
Cromwell, Thomas, 41, 42, 47
Cropton, 127
Croyland Abbey, 211
Culloden Tower, Richmond, 74
Cumberland, First Earl of, 11, 24
Cumberland, Third Earl of, 7, 10
Cynebil, 129
DAIRY BRIDGE, 80
Dales, The, 1-86, 89
Danes, The, 35, 105, 109, 120, 179, 211, 212
Darlington, 90
Defoe, Quotations from, 54, 57
Derham, Francis, 197
Derwent, River, 122, 164, 166, 206
Despensers, The, 195, 196
Devorgilla, Princess, 83
Dissolution of Monasteries, 24, 41, 42, 46, 47, 72, 77, 93, 183
Dodsworth, Roger, 156, 180
Douglas, Black, 112, 113
Dropping Well at Knaresborough, 31
Dugdale, 151, 156
Duncombe, Charles, 134, 142, 145, 147
Duncombe Park, 141, 147, 155
EANFLED, Queen, 35, 105
Easby Abbey, 56, 77, 78
Easington, 95
East Ayton, 123
East Witton, 50
Eata, 35
Ebberston, 124
Edmund, King, 211, 212
Edred, King, 36
Edward the Confessor, 137-139
Edward I., 83, 170, 219, 222
Edward II., 8, 11, 196
Edward III., 175, 176
Edward IV., 51, 159, 189, 191, 197
Edward V., 162
Edward, son of Richard III., 52, 161, 162, 172
Edwin, King of Northumbria, 177, 179
Eggleston Abbey, 82
Elfleda, Princess, 105
Elizabeth, Queen, 7, 10, 53, 62, 63, 135
Elizabeth, Queen of Spain, 62
Elizabeth of York, 159, 160, 162
Ellerton Priory, 72
Eliot, George, 22, 26
Ely, 211
Embsay, 23
Embsay Moor, 15
Espec, Walter of, 142, 148, 150-152, 164, 165
Ethelfled, daughter of Alfred the Great, 73
Ethelwald, King of Deira, 128, 139, 140
Euer, Family of, 122
Evesham, 77, 106
Exton, Sir Piers, 193, 194
FAIRFAXES, Castle of the, 156
Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 144, 145, 173, 174, 180, 204, 205
Ferrybridge, 189-191
Filey, 119
FitzHugh, Sir Henry, 45, 47
FitzHughs, Castle of the, 84
Fitzranulph, 51
Fitzwater, Lord, 190
Flamborough Head, 119
Flodden, Battle of, 8
Forge Valley, 119, 121-123, 127, 164
Fors, 47, 66, 67
Fossard, Family of, 99
Foston, 163
Fountains Abbey, 5, 13, 17, 26, 37-43, 149, 183
Fountains Hall, 43
Fox, George, 114, 115
Froissart, Quotations from, 216, 217
Furness, 153
GALLOWS HILL, 123
Galtres, Forest of, 157, 158
Gargrave, 12
Gaveston, Piers, 28, 112, 126, 195
Geoffrey, Abbot of St. Mary's, 183
George IV., 74
George Washington, 210
Gibson, Editor of Camden, 215
Giggleswick, 14
Gilling, 73, 78, 79
Gilling, East, 156
Glastonbury, 105
Glenham, General, 173
Godiva, Lady, 73
Godwin, Earl, 138
Goldsmith, Peter, 55
Gordale Scar, 13
Grasmere, 123
Grassington, 19
Great North Road, 79, 190, 201, 205
Great Whernside, 17
Greta Bridge, 80
Greta, River, 80, 81
Grey Friars' Tower, Richmond, 77, 79
Grey, Sir Richard, 197
Grimston Moor, 157
Gros, William le, 112
Guisborough, 91-94
Gunnerside, 70
HACKNESS, 119-121, 122
Hall, John, 95
Hambledon Moors, 79
Hamilton, Duke of, 31
Hampton Court, 62
Harald the Norseman, 111
Harold II., 139
Harrogate, 25-28
Harry Hotspur, 171, 193
Hartington Seat, 23
Hastings, Lord, 51
Hawes, 57, 67
Haworth, 15
Helaugh, 71, 75
Hellifield, 11, 13
Helmsley, 134, 141-147, 154, 156
Hemingborough, 205
Henrietta Maria, Queen, 184
Henry I., 203
Henry III., 112
Henry IV., 126, 171, 194
Henry V., 7, 45, 195
Henry VI., 189
Henry VII., 75, 93, 122, 160
Henry VIII., 8, 46, 77, 93, 161, 197
High Force, 85, 86
Hill House, Richmond, 78
Hinderwell, 98
Hinguar and Hubba, 105, 109, 211, 212
Hipswell Moor, 57
Hodge Beck, 136
Holland, Sir John, 216, 217
Hospitium of St. Mary's, York, 184, 185
Hotham, Sir John, 221
Hoveden, John, 210
Howden, 206, 208-210
Hubberholme, 17, 18
Huby, Abbot of Fountains, 41
Hull, 33, 218-222
Humber, 211, 212, 219, 222
Huntingdon, Lord, 53
Hutchinson, Joanna, 123
Hutchinson, Mary, 123
INGILBY, Lady, 34
Ingleton, 11, 14
JAMES I., 135, 144, 172, 184
James I. of Scotland, 195
James IV. of Scotland, 93, 172
Jervaulx Abbey, 26, 42, 44, 45, 46-49, 66
John of Austria, 63
John of Gaunt, 28, 71, 75, 126
John of Kent, 41
John, King, 32
KATHERINE HOWARD, 160, 197
Keldholme, 133
Kettlethorpe Hill, 210
Kettlewell, 17, 18
Kilnsey Crag, 16, 17
Kingsley, Charles, 49, 50
Kirbymoorside, 133-135, 145
Kirkdale, 136-141
Kirkham Priory, 150, 151, 163-165, 170
Kirkstall Abbey, 26
Knaresborough, 28-33, 126
Knaresborough, Forest of, 27
Knollys, Sir Francis, 61-64
Knottingley, 201
LACY, Family of, 203, 206
Lacy, Hugh de, 203, 204
Lacy, Ilbert de, 192
Lambert, General, 192, 199
Lancaster, Duchy of, 126
Lancaster, Thomas, Earl of, 126, 195, 196
Lass of Richmond Hill, 78
Lartington, 84
Lastingham, 127-132, 136, 140, 182
Leeds, 26
Leeds Waterworks, 25
Leland, Quotations from, 32, 60, 76, 100, 110, 125, 150, 206, 207, 213
Lewes, George, 22
Leyburn, 57
Leyburn Shawl, 65
Lindisfarne, 35, 211
Linskill, Mary, 101
Linton, 19
Loftus, 95
Lothbroc, 105, 109, 211
Low Row, 70
Lune, River, 85
Lythe, 99, 100
MACAULAY, Lord, 134
MacNally, 78
Malham, 11, 12, 13
Margaret of Anjou, 20, 171
Margaret, Princess, daughter of Henry VII., 93, 172
Marmion, Family of, 44-46
Marrick Priory, 71, 72
Marris, Colonel, 198, 199
Marston Moor, Battle of, 29, 31, 34
Marton-in-Cleveland, 91
Marton-on-the-Forest, 157
Mary, Princess, daughter of Henry VII., 8
Mary Queen of Scots, 60-65
Masham, 46
Matthew, Archbishop of York, 177
Matthew, Frances, 177, 178
Mauley or de Malo-Lacu, Family of, 99, 100
Meaux, Abbey of, 219
Melrose Abbey, 152
Mercia, Earls of, 73, 79
Meschines, Alice de, 22, 23
Micklegate Bar, York, 170, 171-173
Mickleton, 85
Middleham, 26, 44, 49-54, 58, 162
Middlesbrough, 89, 90
Middleton-in-Teesdale, 84, 85
Milbank, Miss, 78
Monk Bar, York, 170
Mortham Tower, 80, 81
Morton, Earl, 142
Morville, de, 28, 29
Muker, 70
Mulgrave Park, 99, 100
Multangular Tower, York, 181, 182
NAWTON, 140
Nelson, 55, 155
Neville, Anne, 51, 52, 161, 172
Neville, Family of, 51, 83, 135, 159, 160
Newark, 199
New Row, 100
Nidd, River, 32
Nine Altars, Chapel of the, Fountains, 41
Norfolk, Duke of, 160
North Cave, 210
North Sea, 106, 111
Northumberland, Duke of, 171, 193
Norton, Christopher, 61
Norton, Family of, 15, 16
ORLÉANS, Duke of, 195
Oswaldkirk, 155, 156
Oswini, monk of Lastingham, 129-131
Oswy, King, 103-105
Otley, 30
Ouse, River, 202, 205, 212
PASTON Letters, Quotation from, 197
Pembroke, Countess of, 8-10, 21
Penda, King of Mercia, 103, 105
Pendragon Castle, 20
Percy, Family of, 205-208
Percy, Lady, 217
Percy, William de, 121
Peterborough, 211
Philippa, Queen, 28, 29, 175, 176
Pickering, 123, 124-127
Pilgrimage of Grace, 39, 42, 48, 49, 113, 197
Pius II., 176
Plantagenets, Arms of the, 164
Pontefract, 29, 126, 189-201
Pope, Alexander, 71, 133, 134
Premonstratensian Order, 77
Preston, Battle of, 31
QUINCY, Peter de, 67
REDMIRE, 57, 59, 60
Reeth, 70, 71
Reinfrid, 105
Ribblesdale, 14
Richard I., 185
Richard II., 28, 29, 126, 192-195, 206, 216
Richard III., 8, 51, 62, 83, 110, 159, 161, 172, 176, 197
Richard, first abbot of Fountains, 39
Richard, second abbot of Fountains, 40
Richmond, 44, 57, 58, 71, 72-79, 83
Rievaulx Abbey, 5, 26, 147-152, 154, 165
Rievaulx Woods, 154
Ripley, 33, 34
Ripon, 26, 33, 34-37, 43, 44
Rivers, Lord, 197
Roald, Constable of Richmond, 78
Robert Curthose, 142
Robin Hood, 108
Robin Hood's Bay, 106, 107
Robin Hood's Butts, 106
_Rokeby_, 81
Rokeby Park, 80
Romaldkirk, 84
Romilles, Family of, 6
Ros, Family of, 142, 143, 165
Rosamund, the Fair, 11
Roseberry Topping, 91, 92
Roucliffe, Sir David, 125
Runswick Bay, 98, 99
Rutland, Earl of, 7, 19, 188
Rye, River, 149, 152, 154, 155
Rylstone, 16
Rylstone Fell, 15
Rylstone, White Doe of, 15, 16
ST. BERNARD, 151, 152
St. Cedd, 128-131, 139, 140
St. Chad, 128-131, 179
St. Columba, 104
St. David's, 178
St. Germanus, 202
St. Helena, 162
St. Hilda, 98, 103-105, 109, 120, 121
St. John of Beverley, 103, 214-216
St. John, Family of, 122
St. John's Priory, Pontefract, 196
St. Mary's Abbey, York, 39, 131, 182-185
St. Mary's Church, Beverley, 217
St. Norbert, 77
St. Paulinus, 76, 174, 179
St. Robert of Knaresborough, 31-33
St. Thomas's Hill, Pontefract, 196
St. Wilfrid, 34-36, 37, 103, 104, 179
St. William's College, York, 186
Saltburn, 94
Sandsend, 100, 101
Saxon Remains, 35, 55, 79, 120, 124, 131, 137-140, 155, 179
Saxton, 189
Scalby, 119
Scarborough, 106, 109-116, 119, 141, 164
Scott, Sir Walter, 80, 81
Scrope, Archbishop, 60, 177
Scrope, Lord, of Masham, 171
Scropes of Bolton, 56, 60, 65, 78, 164
Seaton, Mary, 64, 65
Sedburgh, Abbot of Jervaulx, 48, 49
Selby, 201-205
Settle, 14
Severus, Emperor, 181
Seymour, Family of, 206
Sheffield, Lord, 99
Sheriff Hutton, 155, 157-163
Shrewsbury Abbey, 206
Sidney, Sir Philip, 143
Skell, River, 183
Skelton, 93-95
Skipton, 5-11, 15, 20, 30
Skirlaw, Walter, 209
Slingsby, Captain, 27
Slingsby, Sir Henry, 33, 173
Stafford, Lord Ralph, 216, 217
Stafford, Lord Thomas, 113
Staithes, 96-98
Stamford Bridge, 177
Standard, Battle of the, 28, 112, 142
Station Hotel, York, 181
Sterne, Laurence, 95, 154, 157
Stewart, Charles, the Young Pretender, 172
Stillington, 157
Stocking, 153
Stockton-on-Tees, 89, 90
Stonegappe, 15
Strafford, Earl of, 184
Stray, The, 27, 28
Strid, The, 21-23
Studley Park, 38, 149
Studley Royal, 38
Stuttevilles, de, 28, 32, 133
Suffolk, Duke of, 8
Surrey, Earl of, 161
Sutton-in-the-Forest, 157
Swale, River, 58, 70, 71, 72, 76, 81
Swaledale, 16, 57, 58, 67, 69-79
Sweetheart Abbey, 83, 84
Sweyn, 212
TADCASTER, 170, 172, 187, 188
Tees, River, 4, 81, 82, 85, 89
Teesdale, 16, 81-86
Tewkesbury, Battle of, 197
Thirsk, 153
Thirsk, Abbot of Fountains, 41
Thornton Force, 15
Thornton-le-dale, 124
Threshfield, 16
Thurstan, Archbishop, 43, 182, 183
Tillotson, Archbishop, 155
Tintern, 149
Tosti, Earl, 137-139, 177
Towton, Battle of, 7, 19, 20, 188-191
Trent, River, 212
Trinity Chapel, Richmond, 76
Turner, 80
Tutbury, 65
ULPHUS, 179, 180
Ulphus, Horn of, 180
Upgang, 101
Upleatham, 94
Ure, River, 44, 54, 67
VAUX, Arms of, 165
Victoria, Queen, Accession of, 132
Victory, H.M.S., Surgeons of, 55
WADA THE GIANT, 99
Wakefield, Battle of, 19
Wakeman, The, of Ripon, 36, 37, 44
Walkington, 212
Walmgate Bar, York, 170, 171
Warwick, Earl of, the Kingmaker, 51, 159, 191
Warwick, Earl of, son of Duke of Clarence, 159, 160
Weathercote Cave, 15
Wensley, 44, 55, 56, 59, 78
Wensleydale, 16, 26, 54-67
Wesley, John, 107
West Ayton, 123
Westminster, 29, 52, 63, 135, 145, 193
West Tanfield, 44-46, 47
Wharfe, River, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 81, 187, 189
Wharfedale, 16-25, 26
Wharton, Duke of, 71
Whitby, 36, 99, 101-106, 108, 120, 131, 182, 211
Wilfrid's Needle, 35
William I., 28, 29, 73, 142, 185, 203
William II., 82
William of Hatfield, 176
William the Lion, 74, 83
William of Malmesbury, Quotations from, 103, 138
Worcester, Earl of, 206
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 123
Wordsworth, William, 13, 16, 123
Wressle Castle, 206-208
YARM, 89, 90
Yordas Cave, 15
Yorebridge, 57
York, 4, 26, 52, 53, 62, 73, 158, 168, 164, 165-187, 189, 201, 205, 220
York Minster, 158, 166, 169, 174-181
York, Richard Duke of, 20, 171
ZETLAND, Marquess of, 79
Zetland Hotel, Saltburn, 94
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, WOKING AND LONDON.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Quoted by Speight.
[2] Speight's "Romantic Richmondshire."
[3] See "Nelson's Despatches," vol. vii.
[4] "The Trafalgar Roll," by Col. R. M. Holden, in the _United Service
Magazine_, for October, 1908.
[5] "North Riding of Yorkshire." J. E. Morris.
[6] Croydon.
[7] Many of the facts connected with Selby are derived from Mr. Moody's
handbook.
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE
-Plain print and punctuation errors fixed.
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