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Title: The Great North Road: York to Edinburgh - The Old Mail Road to Scotland
Author: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Language: English
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EDINBURGH***
[Picture: Book cover]
[Picture: The “Highflyer,” 1812]
_The_
GREAT NORTH ROAD
The Old Mail Road to Scotland
_By_ CHARLES G. HARPER
* * * * *
YORK TO EDINBURGH
* * * * *
_With_ 77 _Illustrations by the Author_, _and from_
_old-time Prints and Pictures_
[Picture: Old-time Coachman]
London:
CECIL PALMER
OAKLEY HOUSE, BLOOMSBURY STREET, W.C. 1
* * * * *
_First Published in_ 1901.
_Second and Revised Edition_—1922.
* * * * *
Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & Co., LTD.,
53, Victoria Street, Liverpool.
Also at London and Prescot.
* * * * *
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
YORK TO EDINBURGH
London (General Post Office) to— MILES
York 196¾
Clifton 198¼
Rawcliff 200¼
Skelton 201¼
Shipton 202¾
Tollerton Lanes 206½
Easingwold 210¼
White House 211¾
Thormanby 214¼
Birdforth 215
Bagby Common (“Griffin” Inn) 217½
Mile House 218½
Thirsk 220½
South Kilvington 222
Thornton-le-Street 223½
Thornton-le-Moor 224¾
Northallerton 229¼
Lovesome Hill 229¾
Little Smeaton (cross River Wiske) 231¾
Great Smeaton 232¾
High Entercommon 233¾
Dalton-on-Tees 236¾
Croft (cross River Tees) 237¾
Oxneyfield Bridge (cross River Skerne) 238
Darlington 241¾
Harrogate 243½
Coatham Mandeville 245¾
Aycliffe 246¾
Traveller’s Rest 248
Woodham 249¼
Rushyford Bridge 250½
Ferryhill 253
Low Butcher Race and Croxdale 255
Sunderland Bridge 255¾
Browney Bridge (cross River Wear) 256
Durham (cross River Browney) 260
Durham Moor (Framwellgate) 261
Plawsworth 263½
Chester-le-Street 266
Birtley 269
Gateshead Fell 271
Gateshead (cross River Tyne) 273½
Newcastle-on-Tyne 274½
Gosforth 277
Seaton Burn 280¾
Stannington Bridge (cross River Blyth) 284
Stannington 284½
Clifton 286½
Morpeth (cross River Wansbeck) 289¼
Warrener’s House 291¼
Priest’s Bridge 293¼
West Thirston (cross River Coquet) 299¼
Felton 299¾
Newton-on-the Moor 302½
Alnwick (cross River Aln) 308½
Heiferlaw Bank 310
North Charlton 314¾
Warenford 318¾
Belford 323
Detchant Cottages 325¼
Fenwick 328
Haggerston 331
Tweedmouth (cross River Tweed) 337½
Berwick-on-Tweed 338
Lamberton Toll 341
(ENTER SCOTLAND)
Greystonelees 343½
Flemington Inn and Burnmouth (cross River Eye) 344
Ayton 346
Houndwood 351¾
Grant’s House 354½
Cockburnspath 358
Dunglass Dene 359¼
Broxburn 363½
Dunbar 365
Belhaven 365¾
Beltonford 367½
Phantassie 370
East Linton 370½
Haddington 376
Gladsmuir 379¾
Macmerry 381½
Tranent 383¾
Musselburgh (cross North Esk River) 387¼
Joppa 389¼
Portobello 390
Jock’s Lodge 391½
Edinburgh 393
_Via_ FERRYBRIDGE, WETHERBY, AND BOROUGHBRIDGE.
Doncaster (cross River Don) 162¼
York Bar 164
Red House 167¼
Robin Hood’s Well 169¼
Went Bridge (cross River Went) 172¾
Darrington 174½
Ferrybridge (cross River Aire) 177½
Brotherton 178½
Fairburn 180
Micklefield 184
Aberford 186½
Bramham Moor 186½
Bramham 190¼
Wetherby (cross River Wharfe) 194¼
Kirk Deighton 195¼
Walshford Bridge (cross River Nidd) 197¼
Allerton Park 200¾
Nineveh 202½
Ornham’s Hall 204¼
Boroughbridge (cross River Ure) 206¼
Kirkby Hill 207¼
Dishforth 210½
Asenby 212¼
Topcliffe (cross River Swale) 212¾
Sand Hutton 217
Newsham 219
South Otterington 220¾
North Otterington 222¼
Northallerton 225¼
Edinburgh 389
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
[Picture: Decorative heading]
PAGE
The “Highflyer,” 1812 Frontispiece
Old York: The Shambles 6
The Walls of York 9
York Castle: Clifford’s Tower 14
York Minster, from the Foss 33
All Saints’ Pavement 41
Jonathan Martin, Incendiary 45
York Minster on Fire 49
Bootham Bar 52
Skelton Church 53
The “Spotted Dog,” Thornton-le-Street 60
York Bar 63
Robin Hood’s Well 64
The Battlefield of Towton and surrounding country 70
Saxton 71
Towton Dale 72
Lead Chapel 74
Ruined Mill overlooking Aberford 76
Barwick-in-Elmete 77
Moor End 80
Nineveh 81
The Edinburgh Express, 1837 85
Croft Bridge 93
Sockburn Falchion 94
“Locomotion” 98
“The Experiment” 99
“I say, fellow, give my buggy a charge of coke, 101
your charcoal is too d—d dear”
The Iron Road to the North 105
Traveller’s Rest 108
Rushyford Bridge 109
Ferryhill: The Abandoned Road-Works 111
Merrington Church 113
Road, Rail, and River: Sunderland Bridge 115
Entrance to Durham 117
Durham Cathedral, from Prebend’s Bridge 121
The Sanctuary Knocker 125
Durham Cathedral and Castle from below Framwellgate 127
Bridge
Framwellgate Bridge 130
Penshaw Monument 132
The Coal Country 137
A Wayside Halt 138
Travellers arriving at an Inn 145
Modern Newcastle: from Gateshead 153
Old Newcastle: showing the Town Bridge, now 157
demolished
“The Drunkard’s Cloak” 162
“Puffing Billy” 165
The Gates of Blagdon Park 167
Morpeth 169
The Market-place, Morpeth 173
Felton Bridge 174
Alnwick 175
Alnwick Castle 185
Malcolm’s Cross 188
Bambrough Castle 192
The Scottish Border: Berwick Town and Bridge from 197
Tweedmouth
Lamberton Toll 203
Off to the Border 205
Cockburnspath Tower 213
The Tolbooth, Dunbar 215
Bothwell Castle 220
Haddington Abbey, from Nungate 221
Edinburgh, from Tranent 223
Musselburgh 228
Calton Hill 232
The “White Horse” Inn 235
“Squalor and Picturesqueness” 238
Canongate 239
Old Inscription, Lady Stair’s House 241
The “Heave Awa” Sign 242
A Tirle-pin 243
Greyfriars 245
The Wooden Horse 247
Stately Princes Street 249
Edinburgh, New Town, 1847, from Mons Meg Battery 251
Skyline of the Old Town 255
[Picture: Chapter Heading: The Great North Road]
I
AT last we are safely arrived at York, perhaps no cause for comment in
these days, but a circumstance which “once upon a time” might almost have
warranted a special service of prayer and praise in the Minster. One
comes to York as the capital of a country, rather than of a county, for
it is a city that seems in more than one sense Metropolitan. Indeed, you
cannot travel close upon two hundred miles, even in England and in these
days of swift communication, without feeling the need of some dominating
city, to act partly as a seat of civil and ecclesiastical government, and
partly as a distributing centre; and if something of this need is even
yet apparent, how much more keenly it must have been felt in those “good
old days” which were really so bad! A half-way house, so to speak,
between those other capitals of London and Edinburgh, York had all the
appearance of a capital in days of old, and has lost but little of it, in
these, even though in point of wealth and population it lags behind those
rich and dirty neighbours, Leeds and Bradford. For one thing, it has a
history to which they cannot lay claim, and keeps a firm hold upon titles
and dignities conferred ages ago. We may ransack the pages of historians
in vain in attempting to find the beginnings of York. Before history
began it existed, and just because it seems a shocking thing to the
well-ordered historical mind that the first founding of a city should go
back beyond history or tradition, Geoffrey of Monmouth and other equally
unveracious chroniclers have obligingly given precise—and quite
untrustworthy—accounts of how it arose, at the bidding of kings who never
had an existence outside their fertile brains.
When the Romans came, under Agricola, in A.D. 70, York was here. We do
not know by what name the Brigantes, the warlike tribe who inhabited the
northern districts of Britain, called it, but they possessed forts at
this strategic point, the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss, where
York still stands, and evidently had the military virtues fully
developed, because it has seemed good to all who have come after them,
from the Romans and the Normans to ourselves, to build and retain castles
on the same sites. The Brigantes were a great people, despite the fact
that they had no literature, no science, and no clothes with which to
cover their nakedness, and were they in existence now, might be useful in
teaching our War Office and commanding officers something of strategy and
fortification. They have left memorials of their existence in the names
of many places beginning with “Brig,” and they are the sponsors of all
the brigands that ever existed, for their name was a Brito-Welsh word
meaning “hill-men” or “highlanders,” and, as in the old days, to be a
highlander was to be a thief and cut-throat, the chain of derivative
facts that connects them with the bandits of two thousand years is
complete.
A hundred and twenty years or so after the Romans had captured the
Brigantes’ settlement here, we find York suddenly emerging, a
fully-fledged Roman city, from the prehistoric void, under the name of
Eboracum. This was in the time of the Emperor Septimus Severus, who died
in A.D. 211 in this _Altera Roma_, the principal city of Roman Britain.
For this much is certain, that, as Winchester was, and London is, the
capital of England, so was York at one time the chief city of the Roman
colony, the foremost place of arms, of rule, and of residence; and so it
remained until Honorius, the hard-pressed, freed Britain from its
allegiance in A.D. 410 and withdrew the legionaries. Two hundred years
is a considerable length of time, even in the history of a nation, and
much happened in Eboracum in that while. Another Roman emperor died
here, in the person of Constantius Chlorus, and his son, Constantine the
Great, whom some will have it was even born here, succeeded him. Both
warred with the Pictish tribes from the North; that inhospitable North
which swallowed up whole detachments; the North which Hadrian had
conquered over two hundred years before, and now was exhausting the
energies of the conquerors. Empire is costly in lives and treasure, and
the tragedy of Roman conquest and occupation is even now made manifest in
the memorials unearthed by antiquaries, recording the deaths of many of
the Roman centurions at early ages. Natives of sunny Italy or of the
south of France, they perished in the bleak hills and by the wintry
rivers of Northumbria, much more frequently than they did at the hands of
the hostile natives, who soon overwhelmed the magnificence of Eboracum
when the garrisons left. The civilisation that had been established
here, certainly since the time of Severus, was instantly destroyed, and
Caer Evraue, as it came to be called, became a heap of ruins. Then came
the Saxons, who remodelled the name into Eoferwic, succeeded in turn by
the Danes, from whose “Jorvic,” pronounced with the soft J, we obtain
Yorvic, the “Euerwic” of Domesday Book, and finally York. But whence the
original “Eboracum” derived or what it meant is purely conjectural.
Christianity, fulfilling Divine promise, had brought “not peace, but a
sword” to the Romans, and the Saxon king, Edwin of Northumbria, had not
long been converted and baptized at York, on the site of the present
Minster, before he was slain in conflict with the heathen. It was
Paulinus, first Archbishop of York, who had baptized Edwin in 625. Sent
to the North of England by Gregory the Great, as Augustine had already
been sent for the conversion of the South, it was the Pope’s intention to
establish two Archbishoprics; and thence arose centuries of quarrelling
between the Archbishops of Canterbury and those of York as to who was
supreme. York, indeed, only claimed equal rights; but Canterbury claimed
precedence. In the Synod of 1072 the Archbishop of York was declared
subordinate to Canterbury, but half a century later, in order to make
peace, Rome adjudged them equal. Even this did not still the strife, and
Roger Pont l’Évêque, the Archbishop of York, who was contemporary with
Becket, and aided the king in his struggle with that prelate, was
especially bitter in the attempt to assert in all places and at all
seasons this equality. He renewed the contention with Becket’s
successor, and provoked an absurd scene at the Council of Westminster in
1176, when, arriving late and finding the Archbishop of Canterbury
present and already seated, he sat down in his lap. The result was, that
the Council of Westminster immediately resolved itself into a faction
fight, in which my lord of York was jumped upon and kicked, for all the
world like a football umpire who has given an unpopular decision. Even
this did not settle either the Archbishop of York or the strife, and so
at last, in 1354, it was decreed that each should be supreme in his own
Province, and that the Archbishop of Canterbury should be “Primate of All
England,” while his brother of York should bear the title of “Primate of
England”; but whenever an Archbishop of York was consecrated he should
send to the Primate of All England a golden jewel, valued at £40, to be
laid on the Shrine of St. Thomas. “Thus,” says Fuller, in his inimitably
humorous manner, “when two children cry for the same apple, the indulgent
father divides it between them, yet so that he gives the better part to
the child which is his darling.” Rome has long since ceased to have part
or lot in the English Church, but this solemn farce of nomenclature is
still retained.
In such things as these does York retain something of its old pride of
place. Even its Mayor is a Lord Mayor, which was something to be proud
of before these latter days, now Lord Mayors are three a penny, and every
bumptious modern overgrown town is in process of obtaining one. The
first Lord Mayor of York, however, was appointed by Richard the Second,
and thus the title has an honourable antiquity.
In its outward aspect, York is varied. It runs the whole gamut, from the
highest antiquity to the most modern of shops and villas; from the
neatest and tidiest streets to the most draggle-tailed and out-at-elbowed
courts and alleys. From Clifton and Knavesmire, which is a great deal
more respectable and clean than its evil-sounding name would lead the
stranger to suppose, to the Shambles, Fossgate, and Mucky Peg’s Lane (now
purged of offence as Finkle Street) is a further social than geographical
cry, and they certainly touch both extremes. “Mucky Peg” and the knaves
of the waste lands outside the city are as historic in their way as Roman
York, which lies nine feet below the present level of the streets, and
for whose scanty relics one must visit the Museum of the Philosophical
Society in the grounds of the ruined St. Mary’s Abbey. In those grounds
also the only fragment of the Roman walls may be seen, in the lower stage
of the Multangular Tower, once commanding the bank of the river Ouse.
York is perhaps of all English towns and cities the most difficult place
to explore. Its streets branch and wind in every direction, without any
apparent plan or purpose, and thus an exploration of the Walls, of which
the city is, with reason, extremely proud, becomes the best means of
ascertaining its importance and the relative positions of Castle and
Minster. It is no short stroll, for, by the time the whole circuit is
made, a distance of nearly three miles has been covered. These medieval
walls form, indeed, the most delightful promenade imaginable, being built
on a grassy rampart and provided with a paved footpath running on the
inner side of the battlements, and thus commanding panoramic views within
and without the city.
[Picture: Old York: The Shambles]
Endeavour, by an effort of the imagination, to see the ground outside the
walls free from the suburbs that now spread far in almost every
direction, and you have the York of ancient days, little changed; for
from this point of view, looking down upon the clustered red roofs of the
city, with its gardens and orchards, the towering bulk of the Minster,
and the broad expanse of adjoining lawns, nearly all the signs of modern
life are hidden. Something of an effort it is to imagine the great
railway station of York away, for it bulks very largely outside the walls
near the Lendal Bridge; but the mediæval gates of the city help the
illusion, and hint at the importance of the place in those times.
Micklegate Bar, the chief of them, still bears the heraldic shields
sculptured hundreds of years ago, when kings of England claimed also to
be kings of France and quartered the _semée_ of lilies with the lions.
There are four arches now to this and three to the other bars, instead of
but the one through which both pedestrian and other traffic went in olden
times; but the side arches have been so skilfully constructed in the
mediæval style that they are not an offence, and are often, indeed, taken
on trust as old by those unlearned in these things. Stone effigies of
men-at-arms still appear on the battlemented turrets, and take on
threatening aspects as seen against the skyline by approaching
travellers. But did they ever achieve their purpose and succeed in
deceiving an enemy into the belief that they were really flesh and blood?
If so, they must in those days have been very credulous folk, to be
imposed upon by such devices.
Crossing the Ouse by Lendal Bridge, where chains stretched across the
river from towers on either bank formerly completed the circle of
defences, Bootham Bar is reached, spanning the exit from York along the
Great North Road. Still a worthy approach to, or exit from, the city, it
wore a yet more imposing appearance until towards the close of the
coaching age, when its barbican, the outworks with which every one of the
York bars was provided, was wantonly destroyed. Those who would recall
the ancient appearance of Bootham Bar and its fellows, as viewed from
without, have only to see Walmgate Bar, whose barbican still remains, the
only one left in the march of intellect and of “improvements.” Then it
presented a forbidding front to the North, and with the walls, which were
here at their highest and strongest, disputed the path of the Scots. The
walls have been broken down and demolished between the river and this
bar, and modern streets driven through, so that something of the grim
problem presented to a northern enemy is lost to the modern beholder; but
the view remains among the finest, and comprises the towers of the
Minster, peering in grandeur from behind this warlike frontal. The Scots
were here soon after Bannockburn. In 1319 an army of 15,000 came down,
and York would probably have fallen had it not been for these strong
defences, the finest examples of military architecture in England. As it
was, they found York too well cared for, and so, destroying everything
outside the walls and leaving it on their left, they endeavoured to pass
south by Ferrybridge. At Myton-upon-Swale, near Boroughbridge, they met
the English, hastily brought up by the Archbishop, and defeated them with
the utmost ease. But prudence was ever a Scottish characteristic, and
so, with much booty, they retreated into Scotland, instead of following
up their advantage.
[Picture: The Walls of York]
The walk along the walls from Bootham Bar to Monk Bar is glorious in
spring, with the pink and white blossoms of apple, pear, and plum-trees,
for here the well-ordered gardens of the ecclesiastical dignitaries are
chiefly situated. Midway, the wall makes a return in a south-easterly
direction. Monk Bar, whose name derives from General Monk, Duke of
Albemarle, was once known as Goodramgate, and the street in which it
stands still bears that name, supposed to be a corruption of “Guthram,”
the name of some forgotten Danish chieftain. At some distance beyond it,
the wall goes off due east, to touch the river Foss at Layerthorpe, where
that stream and the quagmires that once bordered it afforded an excellent
defence in themselves, without any artificial works. Thus it is that the
wall ceases entirely until the Red Tower is reached, on the outer bank of
the Foss, where it recommences and takes a bend to the south-west. From
this point to Walmgate Bar and the Fishergate Postern it is particularly
slight, the necessary strength being provided by the Foss itself, forming
a second line of defence, with the castle behind it. Thence we come to
the broad Ouse again, now crossed by the Skeldergate Bridge, but once
protected, as at Lendal, by chains drawn from bank to bank. On the
opposite bank, on the partly natural elevation of Baile Hill, stood a
subsidiary castle, and here the wall is carried on a very high mound
until it rejoins Micklegate Bar.
There are but few so-called “streets” in York. They are mostly “gates,”
a peculiarity of description which is noticeable throughout the Midlands
and the North. And queerly named some of these “gates” are. There is
Jubbergate, whose name perpetuates the memory of an ancient Jewish
quarter established here; Stonegate, the narrow lane leading to the
Minster, along which went the stone with which to build it; Swinegate, a
neighbourhood where the unclean beasts were kept, and many more. But
most curious of all is “Whipmawhopmagate,” a continuation of Colliergate.
This oddly named place is rarely brought to the notice of the stranger,
because it has but two houses; but, despite its whimsical name, it has a
real, and indeed a very old, existence. Connected with its name is the
institution of “Whip Dog Day,” a celebration once honoured on every St.
Luke’s Day, October 18, by the thrashing of all the dogs met with in the
city. According to the legend still current, it seems that in mediæval
times, while the priest was celebrating the sacrament at the neighbouring
church of St. Crux, he dropped the consecrated pax, which was swallowed
by a stray dog who had found his way into the building. For this crime
the animal was sentenced to be severely whipped, and an annual day was
set apart for the indiscriminate thrashing of his fellows. A more likely
derivation of the name of Whipmawhopmagate is from the spot having been
the whipping-place of religious penitents, or of merely secular
misdemeanants.
II
THE grim blackened walls of York Castle confront the traveller who
approaches the city by Fishergate, and lend a gloomy air to the entrance;
the more gloomy because those heavy piles of sooty masonry nowadays
encircle a prison for malefactors, rather than forming the defences of a
garrison, and keep our social enemies within, instead of a more chivalric
foe without. For over two hundred years York Castle has been an assize
court and a gaol, and the military element no longer lends it pure
romance. Romance of the sordid kind it has, this beetle-browed place of
vain regrets and expiated crimes, of dismal cells and clanking fetters;
but if you would win back to the days of military glory which once
distinguished it, your imaginary journey will be lengthy indeed. These
battlemented walls, enclosing four acres of ground, and with a compass of
over eleven hundred yards, were completed in 1856, and, with the prison
arrangements within, cost £200,000. If, as the poet remarks, “peace hath
her victories, no less renowned than war,” she also needs defences, as
much against the villainous centre-bit as against the foreign foe.
But there is still something left of the York Castle of old, although you
must win to it past frowning portals eloquent of a thousand crimes, great
and small, guarded by prison warders and decorated with notice-boards of
Prison Regulations. Clifford’s Tower, this ancient portion, itself goes
no farther back into history than the time of Edward the First; and of
the buildings that witnessed the appalling massacre of the Jews, in March
1190, nothing fortunately remains. It cannot be to the advantage of
sightseers that the blood-stained stones of that awful time should stand.
History alone, without the aid of sword or shattered wall, is more than
sufficient to keep the barbarous tale alive, of how some five hundred
Jews of all ages and sexes fled for protection to the Castle keep, and
were besieged there for days by Christians, thirsting for their blood.
Their death was sure: only the manner of it remained uncertain. The
wholesale slaughter of Jews at Lynn, Lincoln, and Stamford rendered
surrender impossible, and rather than die slowly in the agonies of
starvation they set the Castle on fire, husbands and brothers slaying the
women and children, and then stabbing themselves. Those few who feared
to die thus opened the gates as morning dawned. “Affliction has taught
us wisdom,” they said, “and we long for baptism and for the faith and
peace of Christ”; but even as they said it the swords and axes of
ruthless assassins struck them down. Christ was avenged, and,
incidentally, many a Christian debtor cried quits with his Jewish
creditor as he dashed out the infidel’s brains. It is not often given to
champions of causes, religious or political, to make one blow serve both
public and private ends, and those Christians were fortunate. At the
same time, sympathy with the murdered Jews may easily be overstrained.
They had but sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. Trading and
following the traditional Jewish occupation of usury, they had eaten like
a canker into the heart of York. They had lived in princely style, and
knew how to grind the faces of their Christian debtors, whose lives they
had made miserable, and so simply fell victims to that revenge which has
been aptly described as “a kind of wild justice.”
Clifford’s Tower, standing where these scenes were enacted, is a roofless
shell, standing isolated on its mound within the Castle walls, and
obtains its name, not from its builder, but from Francis Clifford, Earl
of Cumberland, who made a doorway in it in the time of Charles the First.
It was ruined by explosion and fire in 1684, and so remains, shattered
and overgrown with trees and grass, a picturesque object that the eye
loves to linger upon in contrast with the classic buildings that occupy
the old Castle wards, and speak of crime and its penalties. He who would
bring back the crimes and ferocities of a hundred and fifty years or more
to the mind’s eye can have his taste gratified and the most vivid
pictures conjured up at the sight of such choice and thrilling relics as
the horn-handled knife and fork with which the bodies of rebels captured
in the ’45 were quartered; the leathern strap that Holroyd used for the
purpose of hanging his father from the boughs of a cherry-tree; a
fragment of the skull of Eugene Aram’s victim, Daniel Clark; the
curiously varied implements used by wives and husbands who murdered their
yoke-fellows, ranging from the unwifely sledge-hammer and razor wielded
by wives, to the knives and pokers chiefly affected by the husbands;
Jonathan Martin the incendiary’s impromptu flint and steel, and the bell
rope by whose aid he escaped from the Minster; and those prime
curiosities, Dick Turpin’s fetters. Even Turpin’s cell can be seen by
those who, after much diligent application to the Prisons Department of
the Home Office, procure the _entrée_ to the Castle; and in that “stone
jug,” as the criminals of old called their cells, the imaginative can
reconstruct their Turpin as they will. Many a better man than he has
occupied this gloomy dungeon, but scarce a worse.
[Picture: York Castle: Clifford’s Tower]
III
ONE of the most notorious of the criminals who were haled forth from this
condemned hold to end their days on Knavesmire was Richard Turpin, who
was hanged on the 17th of April, 1739. This cruel and mean ruffian,
around whose sordid career the glamour of countless legends of varying
degrees of impossibility has gathered, was the son of a small innkeeper
and farmer at the appropriately named village of Hempstead, in Essex.
The inn, called the “Crown,” almost wholly rebuilt, however, is in
existence to this day, and his baptismal record may yet be read in the
parish register:—“1705, Sept. 21, _Richardus_, _filius Johannis et Mariae
Turpin_.”
Apprenticed to a butcher in Whitechapel, he soon set up in business for
himself, obtaining his cattle by the simple and ready expedient of
stealing them. He married a girl named Palmer, whose name he afterwards
took, and after a career of house-breaking and cattle-lifting in Essex
and parts of Middlesex, in which he figured as one of a numerous gang who
never attacked or plundered unless they were armed to the teeth and in a
great numerical superiority, found the home counties too hot to hold him;
and so, after shooting his friend, one of the three brothers King, all
highwaymen, in the affray at Whitechapel in 1737, in which he escaped
from the Bow Street officers, he fled first into Essex and then into
Lincolnshire. Authorities disagree, both as to the particular King who
was shot, and on the question of whether Turpin shot him accidentally in
aiming at one of the officers, or with the purpose of preventing him
giving evidence disclosing his haunts. The legends make Tom King the
martyr on this occasion, and represent him as bidding Turpin to fly; but
the facts seem to point to Matthew being the victim, and to his cursing
Turpin for a coward, as he died. It is quite certain that a Tom King, a
highwayman, suffered at Tyburn in 1755, eight years later.
As for Turpin, or Palmer, as he now called himself, he settled at Welton,
near Beverley, and then at Long Sutton, Lincolnshire, as a gentleman
horse-dealer. He had not long been domiciled in those parts before the
farmers and others began to lose their stock in a most unaccountable
manner. The wonder is that no one suspected him, and that he could
manage, for however short a period, to safely sell the many horses he
stole. He even managed to mix freely in company with the yeomen of the
district, and despite his ill-favoured countenance, made himself not
unwelcome. But his brutal nature was the cause of his undoing.
Returning from a shooting excursion, he wantonly shot one of his
neighbour’s fowls, and on being remonstrated with, threatened to serve
one of his new friends the same. He was accordingly summoned at the
Beverley Petty Sessions, when it appeared that he had no friends to find
bail for him, and that he was, in point of fact, a newcomer to the
district, whose habits, now investigated for the first time, proved
suspicious. Eventually he was charged with stealing a black mare, blind
of the near eye, off Heckington Common, and was committed to York Castle.
From his dungeon cell he wrote a letter to his brother at Hempstead, to
cook him up a character. The letter was not prepaid, and the brother,
not recognising the handwriting, refused to pay the sixpence demanded by
the Post Office. On such trivial things do great issues hang! The
village postmaster happened to have been the schoolmaster who had taught
Turpin to write. He recognised the handwriting and read the letter. He
was a man of public spirit, and, travelling to York, identified the
prisoner as the Richard Turpin who had long been “wanted” for many
crimes.
After his trial and condemnation the farmers flocked in hundreds to see
him. His last days in prison were as well attended as a levee, and, to
do him justice, his courage, conspicuously lacking at other times, never
faltered at the last. He became one of the shows of that ancient city
for a time, but nothing daunted him. He spent his last days in joking,
drinking, and telling stories, as jovial, merry, and frolicsome as though
the shadow of the gallows was not impending over him. He scouted the
Ordinary, and suffered no twinges of conscience, but busied himself in
preparing a decent costume for his last public appearance. Nothing would
serve him but new clothes and a smart pair of pumps to die in. On the
morning before the execution, he gave the hangman £3. 10s. to be divided
among five men who were to follow him as mourners, and were to be
furnished with black hatbands and mourning gloves. When the time came
and he went in the tumbril to be turned off, he bowed to the ladies and
flourished his cocked hat as though he would presently see them again.
He certainly, when he had mounted the ladder, kept the people waiting for
the spectacle they had come to see, for he talked with the hangman for
over half-an-hour. But when the conversation was ended, he threw himself
off in the most resolute fashion, and had the reward of his courage, for
he died in a moment.
Thus died the famous Turpin, in the thirty-third year of his age. After
the execution his body lay in state for that day and the succeeding night
at the “Black Boar” inn in Castlegate. The following morning it was
buried in the churchyard of St. George’s, by Fishergate Postern, and the
evening afterwards it was dug up again by some of the city surgeons, for
dissection. By this time the mob had apparently agreed that this brutal
horse-stealer, who according to the contemporary _London Magazine_, was
“so mean and stupid a wretch,” was really a very fine fellow; and they
determined that his remains should not be dishonoured. Accordingly they
rescued the body and reinterred it, in black lime, so as to effectually
balk any further attempts on the part of the surgeons.
Dick Turpin, although his name bulks so largely in the legendary story of
the roads, was by no means the foremost of his profession. He was
brutal, and lacked the finer instincts of the artist. It could never,
for instance, have been in his nature to invite the wife of a traveller
he had just robbed to dance a coranto with him on the Common, as Duval
did on Hounslow Heath when the distant clocks were sounding the hour of
midnight. With Turpin it was an oath and a blow. Curses and violence,
not courtesy, were his methods. Therefore, it is with the less
compunction that we may tear away the romance from Richard Turpin and say
that, so far from being the hero of the Ride to York, he never rode to
York at all, except on that fatal morning when he progressed to York
Castle in chains, presently to be convicted and hanged for the unromantic
crimes of horse, sheep, and cattle stealing. He was little better than a
vulgar burglar and horse-thief. It was Harrison Ainsworth who made
Turpin a hero from such very unpromising material, and he, in fact,
invented not only the ride to York, but Black Bess as well. According to
the novelist, Turpin started from Kilburn, and came into the Great North
Road at Highgate, with three mounted officers after him. Thence he
turned into Hornsey, and so by the Ware route, the mare clearing the
twelve feet high toll-gate on the way without an effort. They always do
that in fiction, but the animal that could do it in fact does not exist.
At Tottenham (always according to the novelist, of course) the people
threw brickbats at the gallant Turpin. They “showered thick as hail, and
quite as harmlessly, around him,” and Turpin laughed, as, indeed, he had
an occasion to do, because the Tottenham people must have been the
poorest of marksmen. And so pursuers and pursued swept through Edmonton
and Ware, and quite a number of places which are not on our route. At
Alconbury Hill he comes into view again, and the inconceivable chase
proceeds until Black Bess expires, at sunrise, within sight of the
glorious panorama of York’s spires and towers.
There are very many who believe Ainsworth’s long rigmarole, and take
their ideas of that unromantic highwayman from his novel, but the
dashing, highsouled (and at times maudlin) fellow of those pages is
absolutely fictitious.
IV
AINSWORTH constructed his fictitious hero from a very slight basis of
fact. What a pity he did not rear his narrative on better lines, and
give the credit of the Ride to York to the man who really did it. For it
was done, and it was a longer ride by some twenty-six miles, at least,
than that recounted in the vulgar romance of _Rookwood_. It was, in
fact, a better ride, by a better man, and at a much earlier period.
John Nevison was the hero of this exploit. It was on a May morning in
1676, at the unconscionable hour of four o’clock, that he robbed a
traveller on Gad’s Hill, near Chatham, and, fired with the ambition of
establishing an alibi, immediately set off to ride to York. Crossing the
Thames from Gravesend to Tilbury, he rode on his “blood bay” to
Chelmsford, where he baited and rested his horse for half-an-hour.
Thence on to Cambridge and through the town without drawing rein, he went
through by-lanes to Fenny Stanton, Godmanchester, and Huntingdon, where
he took another half-hour’s rest; continuing, by unfrequented ways, until
York was reached, the same evening. Of course, he must have had several
fresh horses on the way. Stabling the horse that had brought him into
the cathedral city, he hastily removed the travel-stains from his person,
and strolled casually to the nearest bowling-green, where the Mayor of
York happened to be playing a game with some friends. Nevison took the
opportunity of asking him the time, and received the answer that it was
just a quarter to eight. That was sufficient for his purpose. By this
question and the reply he had fixed the recollection of himself and of
the time in the Mayor’s mind, and had his _alibi_ at need. Sure enough,
he needed it a little later, when he was arrested for another highway
robbery, and the Gad’s Hill traveller happened to be the one witness who
could swear to him. Nevison called his York witnesses, who readily
enough deposed to his being there on the evening of the day on which the
traveller swore he had been robbed by him near Chatham. This was
conclusive. No one conceived it possible for a man to have been in two
places so remote in one day, and he was acquitted. Then, when the danger
was past, his sporting instincts prevailed, and he told the story. He
became the hero of a brief hour, and Charles the Second, who dearly loved
a clever rogue, is said to have christened him “Swift Nicks.” If we
roughly analyse this ride we shall find that Nevison’s performance
amounted to about 230 miles in fifteen hours: a rate of over fifteen
miles an hour. To have done as much was a wonderful exploit, even though
(as seems certain) he had remounts at the houses of confederates. He
probably had many such houses of call, for he was one of a numerous band
of highwaymen whose headquarters were at Newark.
This escape served him for eight years longer, for it was in 1684 that
his career came to a close on Knavesmire, where he was hanged on the 4th
of May.
There was something of the Robin Hood in Nevison’s character, if we are
to believe the almost legendary stories told in Yorkshire of this darling
of the Yorkshire peasantry. He robbed the rich and gave to the poor, and
many are the tales still told of his generosity. Such an one is the tale
that tells of his being at a village inn, when the talk turned upon the
affairs of an unfortunate farmer whose home had been sold up for rent.
Among those in the place was the bailiff, with the proceeds of the sale
on him. Nevison contrived to relieve him of the cash, and restored it to
the farmer. Perhaps he was not so well-liked by the cattle-dealers along
the Great North Road, whom he and his gang robbed so regularly that at
length they commuted their involuntary contributions for a quarterly
allowance, which at the same time cleared the road for them and afforded
them protection against any other bands. Indeed, Nevison, or Bracy, as
his real name appears to have been, was in this respect almost a
counterpart of those old German barons on the Rhine, who levied dues on
the travellers whose business unfortunately led them their way. The
parallel goes no greater distance, for those picturesque miscreants were
anything but the idols of the people. Nevison was sufficiently popular
to have been the hero of a rural ballad, still occasionally heard in the
neighbourhood of his haunts at Knaresborough, Ferrybridge, York, or
Newark. Here are two verses of it; not perhaps distinguished by wealth
of fancy or resourcefulness of rhyme:—
Did you ever hear tell of that hero;
Bold Nevison, that was his name?
He rode about like a bold hero,
And with that he gain’d great fame.
He maintained himself like a gentleman,
Besides, he was good to the poor;
He rode about like a great hero,
And he gain’d himself favour therefore.
Yorkshire will not willingly let the fame of her Nevison die. Is not his
Leap shown, and is not the inn at Sandal, where he was last captured,
still pointed out? Then there is the tale of how he and twenty of his
gang attacked fifteen butchers who were riding to Northallerton Fair, an
encounter recounted in a pamphlet dated 1674, luridly styled _Bloody News
from Yorkshire_. Another memory is of the half dozen men who at another
time attempted to take him prisoner. He escaped and shot one of them,
also a butcher. Nevison and butchers were evidently antipathetic.
Released once on promising to enter the army, he, like Boulter, deserted.
That he could break prison with the best he demonstrated fully at
Wakefield; but his final capture was on a trivial charge. It sufficed to
do his business, though, for the prosecution were now prepared with the
fullest evidence against him and his associates, and their way of life.
They had secured Mary Brandon, who acted as housekeeper for the gang.
According to her story, they were John Nevison, of York; Edmund Bracy, of
Nottingham; Thomas Wilbere, of the same town; Thomas Tankard, vaguely
described as “of Lincolnshire”; and two men named Bromett and Iverson.
This last was “commonly at the ‘Talbott,’ in Newarke,” which was their
headquarters. The landlord of that inn was supposed to be cognisant of
their doings, as also the ostler, one William Anwood, “shee haveinge
often scene the said partyes give him good summs of money, and order him
to keepe their horses close, and never to water them but in the night
time.” They kept rooms at the “Talbot” all the year round, and in them
divided their spoil, which in one year, as the result of ten great
robberies, came to over £1,500. No other highwaymen can hold a candle to
this gang, either for their business-like habits or the success of their
operations.
V
THAT once dreaded mid-eighteenth century highwayman, Thomas Boulter,
junior, of Poulshot in Wiltshire, once made acquaintance with York
Castle. The extent of his depredations was as wide as his indifference
to danger was great. A West-countryman, his most obvious sphere of
operations was the country through which the Exeter Road passed; but
being greedy and insatiable, he soon exhausted those districts, and
thought it expedient to strike out for roads where the name of Boulter
was unknown, and along which the lieges still dared to carry their
watches and their gold. He came up to town at the beginning of 1777 from
his haunts near Devizes, and, refitting in apparel and pistols, gaily
took the Great North Road. Many adventures and much spoil fell to him in
and about Newark, Leeds, and Doncaster; but an encounter between
Sheffield and Ripon proved his undoing. He had relieved a gentleman on
horseback of purse and jewellery, and was ambling negligently away when
the traveller’s man-servant, who had fallen some distance behind his
master, came galloping up. Thus reinforced, the plundered one chased Mr.
Boulter, and, running him to earth, haled him off to the nearest Justice,
who, quite unmoved by his story of being an unfortunate young man in the
grocery line, appropriately enough named Poore, committed him to York
Castle, where, at the March assizes, he was duly found guilty and
sentenced to be hanged within fifteen days. Heavily ironed, escape was
out of the question, and he gave himself up for lost, until, on the
morning appointed for his execution, the news arrived that he might claim
a free pardon if he would enter his Majesty’s service as a soldier, and
reform his life. His Majesty badly wanted soldiers in A.D. 1777, and was
not nice as to the character of his recruits; and indeed the British army
until the close of the Peninsular War was composed of as arrant a set of
rascals as ever wore out shoe-leather. No wonder the Duke of Wellington
spoke of his army in Spain as “my blackguards.” But they could fight.
This by the way. To return to Mr. Thomas Boulter, who, full of moral
resolutions and martial ardour, now joined the first marching regiment
halting at York. For four days he toiled and strove in the barrack-yard,
finding with every hour the burdens of military life growing heavier. On
the fifth day he determined to desert, and on the sixth put that
determination into practice; for if he had waited until the morrow, when
his uniform would have been ready, escape would have been difficult.
Stealing forth at dead of night, without mishap, he made across country
to Nottingham, and so disappears altogether from these pages. The
further deeds that he did, and the story of his end are duly chronicled
in the pages of the _Exeter Road_, to which they properly belong.
The authorities did well to secure their criminal prisoners with irons,
because escape seems to have otherwise been easy enough. In 1761, for
instance, there were a hundred and twenty-one French prisoners of war
confined in York Castle, and such captives were of course not ironed.
Some of them filed through the bars of their prison and twenty escaped.
Of these, six were recaptured, but the rest were never again heard of,
which seems to be proof that the prison was scarcely worthy of the name,
and that the city of York contained traitors who secretly conveyed the
fugitives away to the coast.
The troubles and escapades of military captives are all in the course of
their career, and provoke interested sympathy but not compassion, because
we know full well that they would do the same to their foes, did fortune
give the opportunity. Altogether different was the position of the
unfortunate old women who, ill-favoured or crazy, were charged on the
evidence of ill-looks or silly talk with being witches, and thrown into
the noisome cells that existed here for such. Theirs were sad cases, for
the world took witchcraft seriously and burnt or strangled those alleged
practitioners of it who had survived being “swum” in the river close by.
The humour of that old method of trying an alleged witch was grimly
sardonic. She was simply thrown into the water, and if she sank was
innocent. If, on the other hand, she floated, that was proof that Satan
was protecting his own, and she was fished out and barbarously put to
death. Trials for witchcraft were continued until long after the
absurdity of the charges became apparent, and judges simply treated the
accusations with humorous contempt: as when a crazy old woman who
pretended to supernatural powers was brought before Judge Powell. “Do
you say you can fly?” asked the Judge, interposing. “Yes, I can,” said
she. “So you may, if you will then,” rejoined that dry humorist. “I
have no law against it.” The accused did not respond to the invitation.
So farewell, grim Castle of York, old-time prison of such strangely
assorted captives as religious pioneers, poor debtors, highwaymen,
prisoners of war, and suspected witches; and modern gaol whose romance is
concealed beneath contemporary common-places. Blood stains your stones,
and persecution is writ large on the page of your story. Infidel Jews,
Protestants, Catholics, and Nonconformists of every shade of
nonconformity have suffered within your walls in greater or less degree,
and even now the black flag occasionally floats dolorously in the breeze
from your roofs, in token that the penalty for the crime of Cain has been
exacted.
VI
BEFORE railways came and rendered London the chief resort of fashion,
county towns, and many lesser towns still, were social centres. Only the
wealthier among the country squires and those interested in politics to
the extent of having a seat in the House visited London; the rest
resorted to their county town, in which they had their town-houses and
social circles. Those times are to be found reflected in the pages of
Jane Austen and other early novelists, who picture for us the snug
coteries that then flourished and the romances that ran their course
within the unromantic-looking Georgian mansions now either occupied by
local professional men or wealthy trades-folk, or else divided into
tenements. It was the era before great suburbs began to spring up around
every considerable town, to smother the historic in the commonplace; the
time before manufacturing industries arose to smirch the countryside and
to rot the stonework of ancient buildings with smoke and acid-laden air;
the days when life was less hurried than now. York, two days’ journey
removed from London, had its own society and a very varied one,
consisting of such elements as the Church, the Army, and the Landed
Interest, which last must also be expressed in capital letters, because
in those days to be a Landowner was a patent of gentility. Outside these
elements, excepting the dubious ones of the Legal and Medical
professions, there was no society. Trade rendered the keepers of
second-hand clothes-shops and wealthy manufacturers equally pariahs and
put them outside the pale of polite intercourse. Society played whist in
drawing-rooms; tradesmen played quoits, bowls, or skittles in grounds
attached to inns, or passed their evenings in convivial bar-parlours.
Yet York must have been a noted place for conviviality, if we are to
believe the old poet:—
York, York for my monie,
Of all the cities that ever I see,
For merry pastime and companie,
Except the citie of London.
And for long after those lines were written they held good. Not many
other cities had York’s advantages as a great military headquarters, as
well as the head of an ecclesiastical Province, and its position as a
great coaching centre to and from which came and went away many other
coaches besides those which fared the Great North Road was commanding.
Cross-country coach-routes radiated from the old cathedral city in every
direction; just as, in fact, the railways do nowadays. It is no part of
our business to particularise them, but the inns they frequented demand a
notice. Some of these inns were solely devoted to posting, which in this
broad-acred county of wealthy squires was not considered the extravagance
that less fortunate folks thought it. Chief among these was—alas! that
we must say _was_—the “George,” which stood almost exactly opposite the
still extant “Black Swan” in Coney Street. A flaunting pile of business
premises occupied by a firm of drapers now usurps the site of that
extremely picturesque old house which rejoiced in a sixteenth-century
frontage, heavily gabled and enriched with quaint designs in plaster, and
a yawning archway, supported on either side by curious figures whose
lower anatomy ended in scrolls, after the manner of the Renaissance. The
“George” for many years enjoyed an unexampled prosperity, and the
adjoining houses, of early Georgian date, with projecting colonnade, were
annexed to it. When it went, to make way for new buildings, York lost
its most picturesque inn, for the York Tavern, now Harker’s Hotel, though
solid, comfortable, and prosperous-looking, with its cleanly stucco
front, is not interesting, and the “Black Swan” is a typical redbrick
building of two hundred years ago, square as a box, and as little
decorative as it could possibly be. As for the aristocratic Etteridge’s,
which stood in Lendal, it may be sought in vain in that largely rebuilt
quarter. Etteridge’s not only disdained the ordinary coaching business,
but also jibbed at the average posting people—or, perhaps, to put it more
correctly, even the wealthy squires who flung away their money on posting
stood aghast at Etteridge’s prices. Therefore, in those days, when
riches and gentility went together—before the self-made millionaires had
risen, like scum, to the top—Etteridge’s entertained the most select, who
travelled in their own “chariots,” and were horsed on their almost royal
progresses by Etteridge and his like.
From the purely coaching point of view, the “Black Swan” is the most
interesting of York’s hostelries. To the York Tavern came the mails,
while the “Black Swan” did the bulk of the stage-coach business, from the
beginning of it in 1698 until the end, in 1842. It was here that the old
“York in Four Days” coaching bill of 1706 was discovered some years ago.
The house remained one of the very few unaltered inns of coaching days,
the stableyard the same as it was a hundred years or more since, even to
the weather-beaten old painted oval sign of the “Black Swan,” removed
from the front and nailed over one of the stable-doors.
York still preserves memories of the old coachmen; some of them very
great in their day. Tom Holtby’s, for instance, is a classic figure, and
one that remained until long after coaching came to an end. He died in
June 1863, in his seventy-second year, and was therefore, not greatly
beyond his prime when he drove the Edinburgh mail into York for the last
time, in 1842, on the opening of the railway. That last drive was an
occasion not to be passed without due ceremony, and so when the mail,
passing through Selby and Riccall, on its way to the city, reached
Escrick Park, it was driven through, by Lord Wenlock’s invitation, and
accompanied by him on his drag up to the “Black Swan” and to the York
Tavern. The mail flew a black flag from its roof, and Holtby gave up the
reins to Lord Macdonald.
“Please to remember the coachman,” said my lord to Holtby, in imitation
of the professional’s usual formula. “Yes,” replied Holtby, “I will, if
you’ll remember the guard.” “Right,” said that innocent nobleman, not
thinking for the moment that coachmen and guards shared their tips; “he
shall have double what you tip me.” Holtby accordingly handed him a £5
note, so that he reaped a profit of £2. 10s. on the business.
Holtby’s career was as varied as many of the old coachmen’s, but more
prosperous. He began as a stable-hand at the “Rose and Crown,”
Easingwold, and rose to be a postboy. Thence to the box of a
cross-country coach was an easy transition, and his combined dash and
certainty as a whip at last found him a place on the London and Edinburgh
“Highflyer,” whence he was transferred to the mail. During these years
he had saved money, and was a comparatively rich man when coaching ended;
so that although he lost some heavy sums in ill-judged investments, still
he died worth over £3,000. “Rash Tom,” as they called him, from his
showy style of driving, was indeed something of a “Corinthian,” and
coming into contact with the high and mighty of that era, reflected their
manners and shared their tastes. If the reflection, like that of a wavy
mirror, was not quite perfect, and erred rather in the direction of
caricature, that was a failing not found in Tom only, and was accordingly
overlooked. Moreover, Tom was useful. No man could break in a horse
like him, and nowhere was a better tutor in the art of driving. “If,”
said Old Jerry, “Tom Holtby didn’t live on potato-skins and worn’t such a
one for lickin’ folks’ boots, he’d be perfect.” “Old Jerry,” who
probably had some professional grudge against Holtby, referred to
potato-skins as well as to boot-licking in a figurative way. He meant to
satirise Holtby as a saving man and as an intimate of those who at the
best treated Jerry himself with obvious condescension. Jerry himself was
one of the most famous of postboys, and remained for long years in the
service of the “Black Swan.” The burden of his old age was the
increasing meanness of the times. “Them wor graand toimes for oos!” he
would say, in his Yorkshire lingo, talking of the early years of the
nineteenth century, and so they must have been, for that was the tail-end
of the era when all England went mad over Parliamentary elections, and
when Yorkshire, the biggest of all the counties, was the maddest.
Everybody posted, money was spent like water on bribery and corruption,
and on more reputable items of expenditure, and postboys shared in the
golden shower.
VII
THE most exciting of these Homeric election contests was the fierce
election for Yorkshire in 1807. At that time the huge county, larger
than any other two counties put together, returned only two
representatives to Parliament, and the City of York was the sole
voting-place. Yorkshire, roughly measuring eighty miles from north to
south, and another eighty from east to west, must have contained ardent
politicians if its out-voters appeared at the poll in any strength. But
if polling-places were to seek and voting the occasion of a weary
pilgrimage, at least the authorities could not be accused of allowing too
little time for the exercise of that political right. The booths
remained open for fifteen days. William Wilberforce had for years been
the senior member, and had hitherto held a secure position. On this
particular occasion the contest lay between the rival houses of
Fitzwilliam and Lascelles, Whigs and Tories respectively, intent upon
capturing the junior seat. Lord Milton, the eldest son of Earl
Fitzwilliam, and the Honourable Henry Lascelles, heir to the Earl of
Harewood, were the candidates. Lord Harewood expressed his intention of
expending, if necessary, the whole of his Barbados estates, worth £40,000
a year, to secure his son’s return, and equal determination was shown by
the other side. With such opponents, it was little wonder that Yorkshire
was turned into a pandemonium for over a fortnight. All kinds of
vehicles, from military wagons, family chariots, and mourning-coaches at
one extreme, to sedan-chairs and donkey-carts at the other, were pressed
into service. Invalids and even those _in articulo mortis_ were herded
up to the poll.
“No such scene,” said a Yorkshire paper, “had been witnessed in these
islands for a hundred years as the greatest county in them presented for
fifteen days and nights. Repose and rest have been unknown, unless
exemplified by postboys asleep in the saddle. Every day and every night
the roads leading to York have been covered by vehicles of all kinds
loaded with voters—barouches, curricles, gigs, coaches, landaus,
dog-carts, flying wagons, mourning-coaches, and military cars with eight
horses, have left no chance for the quiet traveller to pursue his humble
journey in peace, or to find a chair at an inn to sit down upon.”
As a result, Wilberforce kept his place, Viscount Milton was elected
second, and Lascelles was rejected. The figures were:—
Wilberforce 11,806
Milton 11,177
Lascelles 10,988
Only some thirty-four thousand voters in the great shire!
It was said that Earl Fitzwilliam’s expenses were £107,000 and his
unsuccessful opponent’s £102,000. Wilberforce, who in the fray only
narrowly kept at the head of the poll, was at little expense, a public
subscription which reached the sum of £64,455 having been made on his
behalf. A great portion of it was afterwards returned by him. He
afterwards wrote that had he not been defrauded of promised votes, his
total would have reached 20,000. “However,” said he, “it is unspeakable
cause for thankfulness to come out of the battle ruined neither in
health, character, or fortune.” It was in this election that a voter who
had plumped for Wilberforce and had come a long distance for the purpose,
boasting that he had not spent anything on the journey, was asked how he
managed it. “Sure enow,” said he, “I cam all d’way ahint Lord Milton’s
carriage.”
A story is told of a bye-election impending in Yorkshire, in which Pitt
had particularly interested himself. Just upon the eve of the polling he
paid a visit to the famous Mrs. B—, one of the Whig queens of the West
Riding, and said, banteringly, “Well, the election is all right for us.
Ten thousand guineas for the use of our side go down to Yorkshire
to-night by a sure hand.”
“The devil they do!” responded Mrs. B—; and that night the bearer of the
precious burden was stopped by a highwayman on the Great North Road, and
the ten thousand guineas procured the return of the Whig candidate. The
success of that robbery was probably owing to the “sure hand” travelling
alone. Had he gone by mail-coach, the party funds would have been safe,
if we may rely upon the _bona fides_ of the York Post Office notice,
dated October 30, 1786, which was issued for the reassurance of those
intending to travel by mail, and says: “Ladies and gentlemen may depend
on every care and attention being paid to their safety. They will be
guarded all the way by His Majesty’s servants, and on dark nights a
postillion will ride on one of the leaders.” The notice concluded by
saying that the guard was well armed. This was no excess of caution, or
merely issued to still the nerves of timid old ladies, for at this period
we find “safety” coaches advertised, “lined with copper, and secure
against bullets”; and recorded encounters with armed highwaymen prove
that these precautions were not unnecessary.
VIII
YORK MINSTER, although so huge and imposing a pile when reached, is not
glimpsed by the traveller approaching the city from the Selby route until
well within the streets, and only when Knavesmire is passed on the
Tadcaster route are its three towers seen rising far behind the time-worn
turrets of Micklegate Bar. In bulk, it is in the very front rank among
English cathedrals, but the flatness of its site and the narrow streets
that lead to the Minster Yard render it quite inconspicuous from any
distance, except from a few selected points and from the commanding eyrie
of the City Walls, whence, indeed, it is seen at its grandest. “Minster”
it has been named from time immemorial, but for no apparent reason, for
York’s Chapter was one of secular priests, and as the term “minster”
derives from “monasterium,” this is clearly a misnomer. But as the
larger churches were those in connection with monastic rule, it must have
seemed in the popular view that this gigantic church was rightly a
Minster, no matter what its government.
[Picture: York Minster, from the Foss]
It lies quite away from the tortuous streets by which the traveller
proceeds through York for the road to the North, and it is only when
nearly leaving the city by Bootham Bar that glimpses of its grey bulk are
seen, at the end of some narrow lane like Stonegate or Petergate, framed
in by old gabled houses that lean upon each other in every attitude
suggesting age and decay, or seem to nod owlishly to neighbours just as
decrepit across the cobble-stoned path. These be ideal surroundings. In
the ancient shops, too, are things of rarity and price, artfully
displayed to the gaze of unwary purchasers who do not know the secrets of
the trade in antiques and curiosities, and are quite ignorant of the fact
that they pay twice or thrice the value at such places as these for the
old china, the silver, the chairs, and bookcases of quaint design that
take their fancy. Only a narrow space prevents the stranger from butting
up against the Minster, at the end of these lanes, for here at York we
find no such wide and grassy Cathedral close as that of Winchester, or
those of Canterbury, Wells, or Peterborough. Just a paved yard,
extremely narrow along the whole south side and to the east, with a
broader paved space at the west front, and some mingled lawns and
pavements to the north, where dwell the Dean, the prebendaries, and
suchlike: these are the surroundings of the Minster, which render it
almost impossible to gain a comprehensive view of any part save the west
front.
The Minster—the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, to call it by its proper
title—is the fifth building on this site. First of all in the series was
the wooden chapel erected for the baptism of Edwin, the Saxon king, in
A.D. 627, followed by a stone church, begun by him in 628 and completed
eight years later by King Oswald, who placed the head of Edwin, slain in
battle by the heathen at Hatfield near Doncaster, here in the chapel of
St. Gregory. Thirty-five years later this second church was found by
Wilfrid the Archbishop to be in a state of decay, and he accordingly
repaired the roofs and the walls, which he rendered “whiter than snow by
means of white lime,” as we are told by contemporary chroniclers. In
point of fact, he whitewashed the cathedral, just as the churchwardens of
a hundred years ago used to treat our village churches, for which conduct
we have been reviling them for many years past, not knowing that as
whitewashers they could claim such distinguished kinship. About the year
741 this second building was destroyed by fire and was replaced by
another, completed in 780, itself burnt in 1069. The fourth was then
begun by Thomas of Bayeux, the first Norman archbishop, and completed
about 1080; to be in its turn partly demolished by Roger Pont l’Évêque,
who about 1170 rebuilt the choir on a larger scale. Following him came
Archbishop Gray, who rebuilt the south transept in its present form
between 1230 and 1241; the north transept and the central tower in its
original form being the work of John Romanus, sub-dean and treasurer from
1228 to 1256. To the son of the sub-dean, Archbishop Romanus, fell the
beginning of a new nave, which was commenced by him in 1291, but was not
completed until 1345, and is the existing one. All these rebuildings
were on a progressive scale of size and magnificence, and so by the time
they had been completed it happened that Archbishop Roger’s Late Norman
choir, which had replaced the smaller Early Norman one by Thomas of
Bayeux, was itself regarded as too small and mean, and so was pulled down
to make room for the existing choir, completed about 1400. Thus the
earliest architectural features of the existing Minster above ground are
the Early English transepts, and nothing remains of those vanished early
buildings save some dubious Saxon masonry and Norman walling in the
crypt.
The first impression gained of the exterior of York Minster—an impression
which becomes only slightly modified on further acquaintance—is that of a
vast, rambling, illogical mass of overdone ornament very much out of
repair and very disappointing to the high expectations formed. Nor is
the great central tower greatly calculated to arouse enthusiasm among
those who know that of Lincoln. An immense mass, whose comparative scale
is best seen from a distance, its severity of outline borders closely
upon clumsiness, a defect which is heightened by its obviously unfinished
condition and the clearly makeshift battlements that outrage the skyline
with an effect as of an armoured champion wearing feminine headgear. It
seems clear that the intention, either of the original architect of the
tower, in the Early English period, or of those who re-cased it, some two
hundred years later, was to carry it up another storey. The two western
towers belong to much the same period, the years from 1433 to 1474, and
have more than the usual commonplace appearance of the Perpendicular
style. They form part of the most completely logical west front in
England and almost the least inspired, excepting always that early
Perpendicular fiasco, the west front of Winchester Cathedral. But the
redeeming feature of York’s west front is the beautiful window which,
whether regarded from without or within, is one of the finest details of
the building, its tracery of the flowing Decorated period narrowly
approaching to the French Flamboyant style and resembling in its delicacy
and complicated parts the weblike design seen on the skeleton of a leaf.
A great portion of the Minster is in the Decorated style; not, however,
conceived in the inspired vein of the west window. The nave and
chapter-house cover the period of the sixty years during which Decorated
Gothic flourished, and making the round of the exterior we find its
characteristic mouldings and traceries repeated in a long range of seven
bays, interrupted by the beautiful compositions of north and south
transepts, entirely dissimilar from one another, but individually
perfect, and the most entirely satisfactory features of the exterior.
The architects of that period were more fully endowed with the artistic
sense than those who went before, or those who succeeded them, and their
works, and the more daring and ambitious, but something braggart, designs
of their successors, remain to prove the contention. Eastward, beyond
the transepts, extends the long, nine-bayed choir, the view of it
obscured from the north by the protruding octagonal chapter-house, but
well seen on the south, where the soaring ambition of its designers may
advantageously be compared with the more modest but better ordered art of
the unknown architect who built the south transept. The architects of
the choir would seem to have dared their utmost to produce the largest
windows with the smallest proportion of wall-space, and to have at the
same time been emulative of height. With these obvious ambitions, they
have succeeded to wonderment in rearing a building that is nearly all
windows, with an apparently dangerously small proportion of walling to
hold them together, but a building which has already survived the storms
of five hundred years structurally and essentially sturdy and unimpaired.
A great engineering feat for that time, rather than a masterpiece of
artistry, as those who stand by and compare south transept and choir,
visible in one glance, can see. That the perceptions of those who built
the choir were blunted is proved by the almost flat roof their ambition
for lofty walling has necessitated. With their side walls carried up to
such a height, abutting against the central tower, they could not obtain
the steep pitch of roof which is seen on the transepts, for a higher
pitch would have committed the architectural solecism of cutting above
the sills of the great tower windows, into the windows themselves. Thus
their lofty choir is robbed of half its effect and looks
square-shouldered and ungraceful by comparison.
An odd and entirely inexplicable device is found outside the four eastern
windows of the choir clerestory, north and south, in the placing of the
triforium passage outside the building, and the screening of it and the
windows with a great skeleton framework of stone. The reason of
this—whether it was a mistaken idea of decoration, or for some structural
strengthening purpose—is still to be sought. But the east end is an
equally crude and artless piece of work, almost wholly given up to the
east window; the small flanking windows looking mean and pinched by
comparison, and the abundant decoration characterised by stupid
repetition and want of invention. Here we see the Perpendicular style at
a very low ebb, and thus it is not altogether a disadvantage that the
road is so narrow at this point that a full view of the east end is
difficult to obtain.
Criticism is at once disarmed on entering. One enters, not by the great
portals in the west front, but by the south porch, the most impressive
entrance, as it happens. For this is at once the noblest and the
earliest portion of the great church, and here, in one magnificent view
from south to north we obtain one of the finest architectural vistas in
England. Majesty personified, these Early English transepts are in
themselves broad and long and lofty enough to furnish a nave for many
another cathedral. Spaciousness and nobility of proportion are the notes
of them, and even the beautiful nave, with its aisles, light and
graceful, loftier and broader than almost any other in the land, dwindles
by comparison. They produce in the surprised traveller who first beholds
them the rare sensation of satisfaction, of expectations more than
realised, and give an uplifting of spirit as thrilling as that caused by
some inspiring passage of minstrelsy. To stand at the crossing and gaze
upwards into that vast tower which looks so clumsy to the outward view,
is to receive an impression of beauty, of combined strength and
lightness, which is not to be acquired elsewhere, for it is the finest of
lantern towers, and, open to the vaulting of its roof, a hundred and
eighty feet above the pavement, its great windows on all sides entrap the
sunbeams and shed a diffused glory on arcade and pier. Perhaps one of
the most daring attempts at effect is that which confronts the visitor as
he enters by the south porch. Daring, not from the constructional, but
from the decorative point of view, the five equal-sized lancet windows,
the “Five Sisters” that occupy three parts of the space in the wall of
the north transept, might so easily have been as glaring a failure as
they are a conspicuous success. Their very prominence has doubtless
given them their name, and caused the legend to be invented of their
having been the gift of five maiden sisters. The beauty of the original
Early English glass which still remains in these lancets has a
considerable share in producing this successful effect. That the
unearthly beauty of that pale green glass is preserved to us, together
with much more in the Minster, is due to Sir Thomas Fairfax, the
Parliamentary general, himself a Yorkshireman, who kept the pious but
narrow-minded and mischievous soldiery in order, who otherwise would have
delighted in flinging prayer-books and missals through every window in
this House of God, and have accounted it an act of religious fervour.
We cannot explore the Minster in greater detail, for the road yet lies in
many a league before us; nor recount how York, city and shire, broke into
rebellion when the old religion was suppressed by Henry the Eighth, and
the Minster’s treasures, particularly the head of St. William, stolen.
The Pilgrimage of Grace was the result, in which the Yorkshire gentlemen
and others assembled, with Robert Aske at their head, and taking as their
badge the Five Wounds of Christ, prepared to do battle for their Faith.
Aske ended on a gallows from the height of Micklegate Bar. The same
troubles recurred in the time of Elizabeth, and Yorkshire, the last
resort of Roman Catholicism, was again in arms, with the Earls of
Northumberland and Westmoreland conspiring with the Duke of Norfolk to
release the captive Queen of Scots and restore the old religion. The
movement failed, and Northumberland was executed on the Pavement, others
being put to death or deprived of their estates. That was the last
popular movement in favour of the old faith, and although the city had
been prelatical and Royalist during the first years of Charles the
First’s reign, public opinion at last veered completely round, so that
shortly after the Parliamentary victory of Marston Moor in 1644, and the
consequent surrender of the Royalist garrison of York, the city became as
Puritan and republican as it had been the opposite. Gifts made by
Charles to the Minster were torn down and dispersed, the very font was
thrown out, and dean and chapter were replaced by four divines elected by
an assembly. Many of the York parish churches were wrecked by fanatics
carrying out an order to destroy “superstitious pictures and images,” and
nearly all were without incumbents. When the restoration of the monarchy
and the church was effected together in 1661, York became “one of the
most factious and malignant towns in the kingdom,” and two years later
broke into a revolt for which twenty-one rebels were executed. The final
outburst occurred in 1688, when James the Second was suspected of an
intention to appoint the Roman Catholic Bishop of Callipolis to the
vacant see of York. The bishop was taking part in a religious procession
through the streets when an infuriated mob set upon him and seized his
silver-gilt crozier, which was taken as a trophy to the vestry, where it
may yet be seen. The bishop fled. A few days later James the Second
ceased to reign, and with that event ended these religious contentions.
[Picture: All Saints’ Pavement]
IX
BUT the stirring history of the Minster itself was not yet completed, for
the final chapter in a long record of events was not enacted until the
early years of the nineteenth century.
The roads in the neighbourhood of York on February 2, 1829, were thronged
with excited crowds hurrying to the city. Dashing through them came the
fire-engines of Leeds, and others from Escrick Park. Far ahead, a great
column of smoke hovered in the cold February sky. York Minster was on
fire.
It was no accident that had caused this conflagration, but the wild
imaginings of one Jonathan Martin, which had prompted him to become the
incendiary of that stately pile. A singular character, compacted of the
unlovely characteristics of Mawworm and the demented prophet, Solomon
Eagle, this was the crowning act of a life distinguished by religious
mania. Jonathan Martin was born at Hexham in 1782, and apprenticed to a
tanner. His parents were poor, and he had only the slightest kind of
education. At the expiration of his apprenticeship he found himself in
London, and was speedily entrapped by the press-gang and sent to serve
his Majesty as an able seaman. It seems to have been at this period that
the unbalanced state of his mind first became noticeable. He was with
the fleet at many places, and often in action, from Copenhagen to the
Nile. At times he would exhibit cowardice, and at others either
indifference to danger or actual bravery. He would be religious,
dissolute, industrious, idle, sulky, or cheerful by turns: a pretended
dreamer of dreams and communicant with angels. “Parson Saxe,” his
shipmates named him; “but,” said one, years afterwards, “I always thought
him more rogue than fool.”
Martin was paid off in 1810. He settled to work for a farmer at Norton,
near Durham, and shortly afterwards married. He became a member of the
Wesleyan Methodist body at Norton, and began those religious exercises
which he claims to have converted him and to have emancipated him from
the law, being “justified by faith” only. How dangerous such views of
personal irresponsibility can be when held by the weak-minded his
after-career was only too plainly to show. He immediately conceived an
abhorrence of the Church of England, as a church teaching obedience to
pastors and masters, and of the clergy for their worldliness. In this
last respect, indeed, Martin—as we think now—had no little justification,
for the Church had not then begun to arise from the almost Pagan slough
of laziness, indifference, and greed of wealth and good living which
throughout the previous century had marked the members of the
Establishment, from the country parson up to the archbishops. When
clergymen could find it in them to perform the solemn rite of the burial
service while in a state of drunkenness; when, under Martin’s own
observation at Durham, the Prince-Bishop of that city enjoyed emoluments
and perquisites amounting to £30,000 per annum, there is little cause for
surprise that hatred and contempt of the cloth should arise.
This basis of justification, acting upon a mind already diseased, and not
rendered more healthy by fasting and brooding over the Scriptures,
resulted in his attempting to preach from church pulpits, in writing
threatening letters to the clergy, and eventually to a silly threat to
shoot the Bishop of Oxford when at Stockport. For this he was rightly
confined in a lunatic asylum at Gateshead. Some months later he managed
to escape, and after wandering about the country took service with his
former employer at Norton, the magistrates consenting to his remaining at
liberty. In 1822 he left for Darlington, where he lived until 1827. His
wife had died while he was in the asylum, and in 1828, while engaged in
hawking a pamphlet biography of himself at Boston, he made the
acquaintance of a young woman of that town and married her. By this time
his religious mania had grown worse, and when, on December 26, 1828, he
and his wife journeyed to York, it would appear that he went there with
the design of burning the Cathedral already half-formed. He haunted the
building day by day, leaving denunciatory letters from time to time.
One, discovered on the iron grille of the choir screen, exhorted the
clergy to “repent and cry For marcey for know is the day of vangens and
your Cumplet Destruction is at Hand for the Lord will not sufer you and
the Deveal and your blind Hellish Docktren to dseve the works of His
Hands no longer. . . . Depart you Carsit blind Gides in to the Hotest
plase of Hell to be tormentid with the Deveal and all his Eanguls for
Ever and Ever.”
Violent language! but one may hear harangues very like it any day within
Hyde Park, by the Marble Arch. There are many incendiaries in the making
around us to-day, and as little attention is paid to them as to Martin’s
ravings.
Undoubtedly mad, he possessed something of the madman’s cunning, and with
the plan of firing the Cathedral fully formed, set out with his wife for
Leeds, as he gave out, on the 27th of January. At Leeds he remained a
few days, and was remarkable for his unusually quiet and orderly
behaviour. He left on Saturday morning, ostensibly for Tadcaster, saying
he should return on the Monday; but went instead to York. Here the
madman’s cunning broke down, for he stayed at a place where he was well
known; at the lodgings, in fact, that he had left a few days before. He
prowled about the Cathedral the whole of the next day, Sunday, and
attended service there, hiding behind a tomb in the north transept;
overheard the notes of the organ—the finest in England—thundering and
booming and rolling in echoes amid the fretted roofs. The sound troubled
the brain of the maniac. “Buzz, buzz,” he whispered; “I’ll teach thee to
stop thy buzzing,” and hid, shivering with religious and lunatic ecstasy,
in the recess until the building was empty.
[Picture: Jonathan Martin, Incendiary]
The short February day closed, and left the Cathedral in darkness; but he
still waited. The ringers paid their evening-visit to the belfry, and he
watched them from his hiding-place. He watched them go and then began
his work. The ringers had left the belfry unlocked. Ascending to it, he
cut a length of about a hundred feet off the prayer-bell rope, and, with
his sailor’s handiness, made a rough ladder of it, by which to escape.
Those were the days before lucifer matches. He had come provided with a
razor, which he used as a steel; a flint, tinder, and a penny candle cut
in two. Climbing, then, into the choir, he made two piles on the floor
of prayer-books, curtains, hassocks, and cushions, and taking a candle
from the altar, cut it up and distributed it between the two. Then,
setting light to them, he set to work to escape. He had taken a pair of
pincers from the shoemaker with whom he lodged, and breaking with them a
window in the north transept, he hauled his rope through, and descended
into the Minster Yard, soon after three o’clock in the morning.
The fire was not discovered until four hours later. By that time the
stalls were half-consumed, and the vestry, where the communion plate was
kept, was on fire. The plate was melted into an unrecognisable mass. By
eight o’clock, despite the exertions of many willing helpers, the
organ-screen was burnt, and the organ-pipes fell in thunder to the
pavement, to the accompaniment of a furious shower of molten lead from
the roof, which was now burning. The city fire-engines, those of the
Cathedral, and others from Leeds and Escrick were all playing upon the
conflagration that day, and the 7th Dragoon Guards and the Militia helped
with a will, or kept back the vast crowds which had poured into the city
from far and near. It was not until evening that the fire was quenched,
and by that time the roof of the choir, over 130 feet in length, had been
destroyed, and with it the stalls, the Bishop’s throne, and all the
mediæval enrichments of that part of the building. Curiously enough, the
great east window was but little damaged. The cost of this madman’s act
was put at £100,000. A singular coincidence, greatly remarked upon at
the time, was that on the Sunday following this disaster, one of the
lessons for the day was the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, the Church’s
prayer to God, of which one verse at least was particularly applicable:
“Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is
burned with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste.”
Martin was, in the first instance, connected with the outrage by the
evidence of the shoemaker’s pincers he had left behind him. They were
identified by his landlord. Meanwhile, the incendiary had fled along the
Great North Road; first to Easingwold, thirteen miles away, where he
drank a pint of ale; and then tramping on to Thirsk. Thence he hurried
to Northallerton, arriving at three o’clock in the afternoon, worn out
with thirty-three miles of walking. That night he journeyed in a
coal-cart to West Auckland, and so eventually to a friend near Hexham, in
whose house he was arrested on the 6th of February. Taken to York, he
was tried at the sessions at York Castle on March 30th. The verdict,
given on the following day, was “not guilty, on the ground of insanity,”
and he was ordered to be kept in close custody during his Majesty’s
pleasure. Martin was shortly afterwards removed from York Castle to St.
Luke’s Hospital, London, in which he died in 1838. Two years later, the
Minster was again on fire, this time as the result of an accident, and
the western tower was burnt out.
[Picture: York Minster on Fire, May 20th, 1840]
Insanity in some degree ran through the Martin family. His brother John,
who died in 1854, was a prominent artist, whose unbalanced mind did not
give way, but led him to paint extraordinary pictures, chiefly of
Scriptural interest and apocalyptic horrors. He was in his day
considered a genius, and many of his terrific imaginations were engraved
and must yet be familiar: such pictures as “Belshazzar’s Feast,” “The Eve
of the Deluge,” “The Last Man,” and “The Plains of Heaven”: pictures well
calculated to give children nightmares.
X
WE must now leave York for the North. To do so, we proceed through
Bootham Bar, where the taxis linger that ply between the city and the
railway station.
Let us glance back upon the picturesque sky-line of City and Minster and
read, maybe, the modern explanatory historical inscription placed on the
ancient Bar. Thus:—
“Entry from North through Forest of Galtres. In old times armed men
were stationed here to watch, and to conduct travellers through the
forest and protect them against the wolves.
“The Royal Arms were taken down in 1650, when Cromwell passed
through, against Scotland. Heads of three rebels exposed here, for
attempting to restore Commonwealth, 1663.
“Erected on Roman foundation, probably early in 13th centy.
“Interior rebuilt with freestone, 1719.
“The portcullis remains.”
So, in those ancient times when the Forest of Galtres lay immediately
before you on passing out of Bootham Bar and going North—the forest with
wolves and bandits—you stepped not into a suburb, but came directly off
the threshold into the wild.
[Picture: Bootham Bar]
To-day, outside the walls we come at once into the district of Clifton,
after Knavesmire the finest suburb of York; the wide road lined with old
mansions that almost reek of prebendal appointments, J.P.’s, incomes of
over two thousand a year, and butlers. It is true that there are those
which cannot be included in this category, but they are here on
sufferance and as a foil to the majesty of their superiors, just as the
Lunatic Asylum a little farther down the road gives, or should give, by
contrast a finer flavour to the lives of those who have not to live in
it. There is another pleasing thing at Clifton, in the altogether
charming new building of the “White Horse” inn, which seems to hint that
they have at last begun to recover the lost art in Yorkshire of building
houses that are not vulgar or hideous. It is full time.
Would you see a charming village church, a jewel in its sort? Then, when
reaching Skelton, three miles onward, explore the bye-road at the back of
the village, over whose clustered few roofs its Early English bell-cote
peeps. But a moment, please, before we reach it. This “bye-road” is the
original highway, and the “back” of the village street its old front.
There is a moral application somewhere in these altered circumstances for
those who have the wit, the inclination, and the opportunity to seek it.
[Picture: Skelton Church]
The improved road, a hundred years old, is carried straight and level
past the rear of the cottages, and the rugged old one goes serpentining
past the front doors, where the entrance to the “Bay Horse” looks out
across a little green to where the church stands, the faded old Bay Horse
himself wondering where the traffic that use to pass this way has all
gone to. The signs of the “Bay Horse” and the “Yorkshire Grey” are, by
the way, astonishingly frequent on the Great North Road.
But the church. It is an unpretending building, without a tower, and
only a bell-cote rising from its broad roof; but perfect within its
limits. Early English throughout, with delicately-cut mouldings,
beautiful triple lancets at the east end, and fine porch, the green and
grey harmonies of its slate roof and well-preserved stonework, complete a
rarely satisfying picture. A legend, still current, says it was built
from stone remaining over after the building of the south transept of
York Cathedral, in 1227. The Church in the Wood it was then, for from
the gates of York to Easingwold, a distance of thirteen miles, stretched
that great Forest of Galtres, through which, to guide wandering
travellers, as we have already seen, the lantern-tower and burning
cresset of All Saints in the Pavement, at York, were raised aloft.
Red deer roamed the Forest of Galtres, and bandits not so chivalrous as
Robin Hood; so few dared to explore its recesses unarmed and
unaccompanied. But where in olden times these romantic attendants of, or
dissuading circumstances from travel existed, we have now only occasional
trees and an infinity of flat roads, past Shipton village to Tollerton
Cross Lanes and Easingwold. This country is dulness personified. The
main road is flat and featureless, and the branch roads instinct with a
melancholy emptiness that hives in every ditch and commonplace hedgerow.
A deadly sameness, a paralysing negation, closes the horizon of this
sparsely settled district, depopulated in that visitation of fire and
sword when William the Conqueror came, in 1069, and massacred a hundred
thousand of those who had dared to withstand him. They had surrendered
on promise of their lives and property being respected, but the fierce
Norman utterly destroyed the city of York and laid waste the whole of the
country between York and Durham. Those who were not slain perished
miserably of cold and famine. Their pale ghosts still haunt the route of
the Great North Road and afflict it, though more than eight hundred years
have flown.
Now comes Easingwold; grimly bare and gritty wide street, with narrow
pavements and broad selvedges of cobbles sloping from them down into a
roadway filled, not with traffic, but with children at noisy play.
Shabby houses lining this street, houses little better than cottages, and
ugly at that; grey, hard-featured, forbidding. Imagine half a mile of
this, with a large church on a knoll away at the northern end, and you
have Easingwold. One house is interesting. It is easily identified,
because it is the only one of any architectural character in the place.
Now a school, it was once the chief coaching and posting establishment,
under the sign of the “Rose and Crown,” and in those times kept five post
boys, and, by consequence, twenty horses, others being kept for the
“Wellington” and “Express” coaches which Lacy, the landlord, used to
horse on the Easingwold to Thirsk stage. The “New Inn,” although an
inferior house, was the place at which the Royal mail and the “Highflyer”
changed.
An old post boy of the “Rose and Crown” survived until recent years, in
the person of Tommy Hutchinson. Originally a tailor, he early forsook
the board and the needle for the pigskin and the whip. If a tailor be
the ninth part of a man, certainly the weazened postboys (who ever saw a
fat one?) of old were themselves only fractions, so far as appearance
went; and accordingly Tommy was not badly suited. But a power of
endurance was contained within that spare frame, and he eclipsed John
Blagg of Retford’s hundred and ten miles’ day on one occasion, riding
post five times from Easingwold to York and back, a distance of a hundred
and thirty miles. Tommy used to express an utter contempt for “bilers on
wheels,” as he called locomotives. “Ah divvent see nowt in ’em,” he
would say; “ye can’t beat a po’shay and good horses.” Peace be with him!
That rare thing on the Great North Road, a rise, leads out of Easingwold,
past unkempt cottages, to “White House Inn,” a mile and a half distant,
where the inn buildings, now farmhouses, but still brilliantly
whitewashed, stand on either side of the road, in a lonely spot near
where the Kyle stream, like a flowing ditch, oozes beneath Dawnay Bridge.
The “White House” was the scene of a murder in 1623. At that time the
innkeeper was a certain Ralph Raynard, who “kept company” with a girl in
service at Red House, Thornton Bridge. The lovers quarrelled, and in a
pique the girl married a farmer named Fletcher, of Moor House, Raskelfe.
Unhappily, she did not love the man she had married, while she certainly
did retain an affection for her old sweetheart, and he for her. Going
between Raskelfe and Easingwold on market-days on her horse, she would
often stop at the “White House,” and chat with Ralph Raynard; the ostler,
Mark Dunn, minding the horse when she dismounted. Raynard’s sister kept
house with him at the inn, and she saw that no good could come of these
visits, but he would not listen to her warnings, and the visits
continued. It was not long before Fletcher’s neighbours began to hint to
him something of these little flirtations of his wife with her old lover;
and one evening he caught the ostler of the “White House” in his orchard,
where he was waiting for an opportunity to deliver a message from Raynard
to her. The man returned to the inn without having fulfilled his
mission, and smarting from a thrashing he had received at the hands of
the indignant farmer. Shortly after this, Fletcher had occasion to go a
journey. Things had not been going well with him latterly, and his home
was rendered unhappy by the evidence of his wife’s dislike of him.
Little wonder, then, that he had dismal forebodings as he set out.
Before leaving, he wrote on a sheet of paper:—
If I should be missing, or suddenly wanted be,
Mark Ralph Raynard, Mark Dunn, and mark my wife for me,
addressing it to his sister.
No sooner was he gone than Mrs. Fletcher mounted her horse and rode to
Raskelfe, where, with Raynard and Mark Dunn, a murderous plot was
contrived for putting Fletcher out of the way. They were waiting for him
when he returned at evening, and as he stood a moment on Dawnay Bridge,
where the little river runs beneath the highway, two of them rushed upon
him and threw him into the water. It would be difficult for a man to
drown here, but the innkeeper and the ostler leapt in after him, and as
he lay there held his head under water, while his wife seized his feet.
When the unfortunate man was quite dead they thrust his body into a sack,
and, carrying their burden with them to the inn, buried it in the garden,
Raynard sowing some mustard-seed over the spot. This took place on the
1st of May. On the 7th of July, Raynard went to Topcliffe Fair, and put
up at the “Angel.” Going into the stable, he was confronted by the
apparition of the unhappy Fletcher, glowing with a strange light and
predicting retribution. He rushed out among the booths, and tried to
think he had been mistaken. Coming to a booth where they sold small
trinkets, he thought he would buy a present for his sweetheart, and,
taking up a chain of coral beads, asked the stallkeeper how it looked on
the neck. To his dismay the apparition stood opposite, with a red chain
round its neck, with its head hanging to one side, like that of an
executed criminal, while a voice informed him that presently he and his
accomplices should be wearing hempen necklaces.
When night had fallen he mounted his horse and rode for home. On the
way, at a spot called the Carr, he saw something in the road. It was a
figure emerging from a sack and shaking the water off it, like a
Newfoundland dog. With a yell of terror the haunted man dug his heels
into his horse and galloped madly away; but the figure, irradiated by a
phosphorescent glimmer and dragging an equally luminous sack after it,
was gliding in front of him all the while, at an equal pace, and so
continued until the “White House” was reached, where it slid through the
garden hedge and into the ground where Fletcher’s body had been laid.
Raynard’s sister was waiting for him, with supper ready, and with a dish
of freshly-cut mustard. _She_ did not see the spectre sitting opposite,
pointing a minatory finger at that dreadful salad, but _he_ did, and
terrified, confessed to the crime. Sisterly affection was not proof
against this, and she laid information against the three accomplices
before a neighbouring Justice of the Peace, Sir William Sheffield of
Raskelfe Park. They were committed to York Castle, tried, and hanged on
July 28, 1623. The bodies were afterwards cut down and taken to the inn,
being gibbeted near the scene of the crime, on a spot still called
Gallows Hill, where the bones of the three malefactors were accidentally
ploughed up over a hundred and twenty years ago.
If its surroundings may be said to fit in with a crime, then this seems
an ideal spot for the commission of dark deeds, this eerie place where an
oozy plantation, or little wood, is placed beside the road, its trees
standing in pools or on moss-grown tussocks; the road in either direction
a solitude.
Raskelfe, or “Rascall,” as it is generally called, lies away from the
road. It has a church which still possesses a wooden tower, and the
local rhyme,
Wooden church, wooden steeple,
Rascally church, and rascally people.
is yet heard in the mouths of depreciatory neighbours.
XI
THE Hambleton Hills now come in sight, and close in the view on the right
hand, at a distance of five miles; running parallel with the road as far
as Northallerton; sullen hills, with the outlines of mountains, and
wanting only altitude to earn the appellation. The road, in sympathy
with its nearness to them, goes up and down in jerky rises and falls,
passing the outlying houses of Thormanby and the farmsteads of Birdforth,
which pretends, with its mean little church, like a sanctified cow-shed,
to be a village—and signally fails.
The gates of Thirkleby Park and the “Griffin” inn, standing where a
toll-gate formerly stood on what was once Bagby Common, bring one past a
bye-road which leads to Coxwold, five miles away, and to the Hambleton
White Horse, a quite unhistorical imitation, cut in the hillside in 1857,
of its prehistoric forerunners in Berkshire and Wilts. Coxwold is a
rarely pretty village, famous as having been the living of the Reverend
Laurence Sterne from 1760 to 1768. The house he lived in, now divided
into three cottages, is the place where _Tristram Shandy_ was finished
and the _Sentimental Journey_ written. “Shandy Hall” it is called,
“shandy” being the local dialect-word for “crazy.”
Thirsk lies less than three miles ahead. There have been those who have
called it “picturesque.” Let us pity them, for those to whom Thirsk
shows a picturesque side must needs have acquaintance with only the
sorriest and most commonplace of towns. The place is, in fact, a larger
Easingwold, with the addition of a market-place like that of Selby—after
the abbey has been subtracted from it! There are Old Thirsk and New
Thirsk, the new town called into existence by the railway, a mile to the
west. The “Three Tuns,” “Crown,” and “Fleece” were the three coaching
inns of Thirsk, and still show their hard-featured faces to the grey,
gaunt streets. The one pretty “bit” is encountered after having left the
town behind. Passing the church, the road is bordered by the beautiful
broad sheet of water formed by damming the Caldbeck. Looking backwards,
the view is charming, with the church-tower coming into the composition,
a glance to the left including the Hambleton Hills.
The hamlet of Thornton-le-Street, which derives its name from standing on
an old Roman road, is a tiny place with a small church full of large
monuments, and the remains of a huge old posting establishment, once
familiar to travellers as the “Spotted Dog,” standing on either side of
the road. One side appears to be empty, and the other is now the post
office. A graceful clump of poplars now shades the sharp bend where the
road descends, past the lodge-gates of the Hall, the seat of the Earl of
Cathcart. Presently the road climbs again to the crest whence
Thornton-le-Moor may be glimpsed on the left, and thence goes, leaving
the singularly named Thornton-le-Beans on the right, in commonplace
fashion to Northallerton.
[Picture: The “Spotted Dog,” Thornton-le-Street]
As are Easingwold and Thirsk, so is Northallerton. Let that suffice for
its aspect, and let us to something of its story, which practically
begins in 1138, at the battle of Northallerton, dimly read of in
schooldays, and still capable of conferring an interest upon the
locality, even though the site of that old-time struggle on Standard Hill
is three miles away to the north on Cowton Moor. The position of the
townlet, directly in the line of march of Scots descending to harry the
English, and of the English marching to punish those hairy-legged
Caledonians, led to many plunderings and burnings, and to various scenes
of retribution, enacted in the streets or along the road; and although
Northallerton must nowadays confess to a mile-long dulness, time cannot
have hung heavily with its inhabitants when the Scots burnt their houses
in 1319 and again in 1322; when the rebel Earls of 1569 were executed
near the church; when the Scottish army held Charles the First prisoner
here in 1647, or when—last scene in its story—the Duke of Cumberland
encamped on the hillsides in 1745.
The name of Allerton is said to derive from the Anglo-Saxon _aelr_, an
alder tree, and many are the Allertons of sorts in Yorkshire. Its
central feature—which, however, is not geographically central, but at the
northern end of the one long street—is the church, large and with a
certain air of nobility which befits the parish church of such a place as
Northallerton, anciently the capital of a “soke,” and still giving a name
to the “Northallertonshire” district of Yorkshire. The old coaching inns
of the town, like those of so many other northern towns and villages on
this road, are not impressive to the Southerner, who, the further north
he progresses, is, with Dr. Johnson, still more firmly convinced that he
is leaving the finest fruits of civilisation behind him. First now, as
then, is the “Golden Lion,” large but not lovely; the inn referred to as
the “Black Swan” by Sydney Smith when writing to Lady Grey, advising her
how to journey from London, in the passage, “Do not set off too soon, or
you will be laid up at the ‘Black Swan,’ Northallerton, or the ‘Elephant
and Castle,’ Boroughbridge; and your bill will come to a thousand pounds,
besides the waiter.” The true sportsman who reads these lines will put
up at the “Golden Lion” to test whether or not the reverend humorist is
out of date as regards the tariff; nor will he forget to try the
Northallerton ale, to determine if Master George Meryon’s verse, written
in the days of James the Second, is still topical:—
Northallerton, in Yorkshire, doth excel!
All England, nay, all Europe, for strong yell.
The “Golden Lion” was, at the close of the coaching era, the foremost inn
at Northallerton, and at its doors the “Wellington” London and Newcastle
coach changed teams until the railway ran it off the road. The Edinburgh
mail changed at the “Black Bull,” which survives as an inn, but only half
its original size, the other half now being a draper’s shop. The “King’s
Head,” another coaching-house, has quite retired into private life, while
the “Old Golden Lion,” not a very noted coaching establishment, except,
perhaps, for the bye-roads, remains much the same as ever.
XII
AT Northallerton we reach the junction of the alternative route, which,
branching from the Selby and York itinerary, goes over difficult, but
much more beautiful, country by way of Wetherby and Boroughbridge. The
ways diverge at the northern extremity of Doncaster, and as both can
equally claim to be an integral part of the Great North Road, it is
necessary to go back these sixty-three miles to that town and explore the
route. Beginning at a left-hand fork by the flat meadows that border the
river Don, it comes in a mile to York Bar, a name recalling the existence
of a turnpike-gate, whose disappearance so recently as 1879 seems to
bring us strangely near old coaching days. The toll-house still stands,
and with the little inn beyond, backed and surrounded by tall trees,
forms a pleasant peep down the long flat road. “Red House,” nearly three
miles onward, is plainly indicated by its flaring red-painted walls. Now
a farmhouse, it was once a small coaching-inn principally concerned with
the traffic along the Wakefield road, which branches off here to the
left.
[Picture: York Bar]
Passing this, we come in two miles to Robin Hood’s Well, a group of
houses by Skelbrooke Park, where at the “New Inn” and the “Robin Hood”
many coaches changed horses daily, the passengers taking the opportunity
of drinking from Robin Hood’s Well, a spring connected with that probably
mythical outlaw, who is said to have met the Bishop of Hereford
travelling along the road at this spot, and to have not only held him to
heavy ransom, but to have compelled him to dance an undignified jig round
an oak in Skelbrooke Park, on a spot still called (now the tree itself
has disappeared) “Bishop’s Tree Root.” Among famous travellers who have
sipped of the crystal spring of Robin Hood’s Well is Evelyn, who
journeyed this way in 1654. “Near it,” he says, “is a stone chaire; and
an iron ladle to drink out of, chained to the seat.”
[Picture: Robin Hood’s Well]
Some fifty years later, the very ugly building that now covers the spring
was erected by Vanbrugh for the Earl of Carlisle. It cannot be said to
add much to the romantic associations of the place, but the efforts of
the wayfarers, who in two centuries have carved every available inch of
its surface with their names, render it a curious sight.
Here the road begins a long climb up to the spot where five ways meet,
the broad left-hand road conducting into Leeds. This is, or was,
Barnsdale Bar, where some of the local Leeds coaches branched from the
Great North Road, the chief ones between London and Leeds continuing
along this route as far as Peckfield Turnpike, five miles to the other
side of Ferrybridge. Barnsdale Bar is, like all the other toll-bars, a
thing of the past, but the old toll-house still hides among the trees by
the roadside. Beyond it the way lies along an exposed road high up on
the hill-tops; a lonely stretch of country where it is a peculiarly ill
mischance to be caught in a storm. Thence it plunges suddenly into the
deep gorge of Went Bridge, where the little river Went goes with
infantile fury among rocks and mossy boulders along a winding course
thickly overhung with trees. The wooded sides of this narrow valley are
picturesque in the highest degree, but were probably not highly
appreciated by timid coach-passengers who, having been driven down the
precipitous road at one side at the peril of their lives, were turned out
by the guard to ease the toiling horses by walking up the corresponding
ascent at the other. This is the prettiest spot in all “merry
Barnsdale,” and anciently one of those most affected by Robin Hood. His
very degenerate successors, the poachers and cut-throats of James the
First’s time, found it a welcome harbourage and foregathered at the
predecessor of the Old Blue Bell Inn, which was accordingly deprived of
its license for some time. The old sign, bearing the date of 1633, when
business was probably resumed, is still kept within the house, as the
rhymed inscription on the modern one outside informs the passer-by:—
The Blae Bell on Wentbridge Hill,
The old sign is existing still
Inside the house.
An old posting-inn, the “Bay Horse,” has long since reverted to the
condition of a private house.
The road rising out of Went Bridge runs between the jagged rocks of a
cutting made in the last years of the coaching age to lighten the pull
up, but still it is a formidable climb. This is followed by a hollow
where a few outlying houses of Darrington village are seen, and then the
bleak high tableland is reached that has to be traversed before the road
drops down into the valley of the Aire at Ferrybridge, that now dull and
grimy town which bears no appearance of having had an historic past. Yet
Ferrybridge was the scene of the skirmish that heralded the battle of
Towton, and stands in the midst of that mediæval cockpit of England,
wherein for centuries so many rival factions contended together. Near by
is Pontefract, in whose castle Richard the Second met a mysterious death,
and not far off lies Wakefield. Towton Field itself lies along the
Tadcaster route to York. In every direction blood has been shed, for
White Rose or Red, for King or Parliament; but Ferrybridge is anything
but romantic to the eye, however greatly its associations may appeal to
the well-stored mind. Coal-mining and quarrying industries overlie these
things. The place-name explains the situation of the townlet
sufficiently well, and refers to the first building of a bridge over the
old-time ferry by which wayfarers crossed the Aire to Brotherton, on the
opposite bank. It is quite unknown when the first bridge was built, but
one existed here in 1461, the year when Towton fight was fought. This
was succeeded by a wooden structure, itself replaced by the present
substantial stone bridge, built at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. This was always a troublesome part of the road to keep in
repair, as we may judge from old records. A forty days’ indulgence was
granted by the Bishop of Durham early in the fourteenth century to the
faithful who would contribute to the repair of the road between
Ferrybridge and Brotherton, in these words:—“Persuaded that the minds of
the faithful are more ready to attach themselves to pious works when they
have received the salutary encouragement of fuller indulgences, trusting
in the mercy of God Almighty and the merits and prayers of the glorious
Virgin his Mother, of St. Peter, St. Paul, and of the most holy confessor
Cuthbert, our patron, and of all saints, we remit forty days of the
penances imposed on all our parishioners and others, sincerely contrite
and confessed of their sins, who shall help by their charitable gifts, or
by their bodily labour, in the building or in the maintenance of the
causeway between Brotherton and Ferrybridge, where a great many people
pass by.”
Let us hope that the pious, thus incited to the commission of good works,
responded. It was a more serious matter, however, in later ages, when a
great many more people passed by, and when road-surveyors, unable to
dispense these ghostly favours, repaired the roads only at the pecuniary
expense of the ratepayers. These Yorkshire streams, the Aire, the
Wharfe, and many others, descending from the high moorlands, develop an
extraordinary force in times of flood, and have often destroyed half the
communications of these districts. Such was the havoc wrought in 1795
that many of the bridges were washed away and great holes made in the
roads. Three bridges on this road between Doncaster and Ferrybridge
disappeared. With such perils threatened, travellers deserved to be
comfortably housed when they lay by for the night. And comfort was the
especial feature of these inns.
The most luxurious inn and posting-house in the north of England was held
to be the “Swan” at Ferrybridge; “in 1737 and since the best inn upon the
great northern road,” according to Scott. However that may have been,
certainly the “Angel” at Ferry-bridge was the largest. Both, however,
have long since been given up. The many scattered buildings of the
“Angel” have become private houses, and the “Swan,” empty for many years
past, is falling into a roofless ruin by the riverside. Innkeeping was
no mean trade in those times, especially when allied with the
proprietorship of horses and coaches. Thus, in the flower of the
coaching age, the “Angel” was in the hands of a medical man, a certain
Dr. Alderson, the son of a local clergyman, who actually found time to
attend properly to his practice and to conduct the business of a licensed
victualler and coach-proprietor. He thought it not derogatory to his
social position to be “mine host,” and he certainly made many friends by
his enterprise. Ferrybridge, as the branching-off place of yet another
Great North Road route—the Tadcaster route to York—was a very busy
coaching centre, and besides the two inns mentioned there were the
“Greyhound” and the “Golden Lion.” The last-named was especially the
drovers’ house. Drovers were a great feature of the road in these old
days, and their flocks and herds an unmitigated nuisance to all other
travellers. Uncouth creatures from Scotland, they footed it all the way
to London with their beasts, making their twenty miles a day; their sheep
and cattle often numerous enough to occupy a whole mile of road, and
raising dust-clouds dense enough to choke a whole district. It was, at
the pace they went, a three weeks’ journey from the far north to London
and the fat cattle that started on the four hundred miles walk must, with
these efforts, have become the leanest of kine on arrival at Smithfield.
The “Old Fox” inn, which still stands on the other side of the river at
Brotherton, was also a drovers’ place of call. It stands at the actual
fork of the roads, eleven miles from Tadcaster, and twenty from York.
The Edinburgh mail originally ran this way, finally changing to the Selby
route, while the “Highflyer” and “Wellington,” London and Edinburgh and
London and Newcastle, coaches kept on it until the end in 1840; but it
was chiefly crowded with the cross-country coach traffic, which was a
very heavy one.
The places are few and uninteresting on these twenty miles into York;
Sherburn and Tadcaster—that town of ales—the chief of them; while the
tiny godless village of Towton, without a church, on the way, is
disappointing to the pilgrim, eager to see it for the sake of its
association with the great battle. The road skirts the eastern side of
that tragic field, after passing the hamlet of Barkston Ash.
XIII
THE battle of Towton, March 29, 1461, was the bloodiest ever fought on
English ground, the slain on both sides in that desperate fight and in
the skirmishes at Ferrybridge and Dintingdale amounting to more than
30,000 men. The events that had preceded it were alternately cheering
and depressing to the hopes of the Yorkists, who had been defeated with
great slaughter at Wakefield on the last day but one of the previous
December, had gained the important victory of Mortimer’s Cross on the 2nd
of February, and had been defeated again at the second battle of St.
Albans on the 17th of the same month; and although on March 4th the young
Duke of York had entered London and assumed the crown as Edward the
Fourth, the Lancastrians still held the Midlands and, lying at York,
interposed a bold front against an advance. It was a singular position.
The Lancastrians had their headquarters at the city from which their
opponents took their title, and two kings of England, equally matched in
power, animated their respective adherents with the utmost loyalty.
After their victory at St. Albans the Lancastrians, exhausted, had
retired to York, the south being as dangerous to a Lancastrian army as
the north, loyal to the Red Rose, was to the Yorkists. The Yorkists, on
their part, eager to enter London, did not pursue their rivals. Both
sides required breathing time, for events had marched too rapidly in the
past two months for the pace to be maintained. Still, the Yorkists were
in force, three weeks later, at Pontefract, and threatening to cross the
Aire at Ferrybridge, a strategic point on their contemplated line of
advance to the city of York. It was here, early in the morning of the
28th, that the bloody prelude to the battle opened, in a sudden
Lancastrian attack on the Yorkist outpost. Lord Fitzwalter, the Yorkist
commander, lay asleep in bed at the time. Seizing a pole-axe at his
sudden awakening, he was slain almost instantly, but his force,
succeeding in driving the enemy across the river, took up a position at
Brotherton, the Lancastrians falling back in disorder to Dintingdale,
near Barkston Ash, where, later in the day, the Lancastrian, Lord
Clifford, was slain by an arrow.
[Picture: Map of Battlefield of Towton and Surrounding Country]
The advance-guard of the Lancastrian army now fell back upon the main
body, which took up a well-chosen position between the villages of Saxton
and Towton, lying across a rising road which led out of the former place,
and having on its right the steeply falling meadows leading down into the
deep depression of Towton Dale, where the Cock Beck still wanders in
far-flung loops in the flat lands below. On their left the ground
stretched away for some distance and then fell gently towards the flats
of Church Fenton.
[Picture: Saxton]
At their rear the road descended steeply again into Towton, while
Tadcaster lay three miles and York eleven miles beyond. It was a
position of great strength and one that could only possibly be turned
from the left. The fatal defect of it lay in the chance, in the case of
defeat, of the beaten army being disorganised by a retreat down so steep
a road, leading as it did to the crossing of a stream swollen with winter
rains.
In visiting this spot, we must bear in mind that the broad road from
Ferrybridge to Tadcaster and York was not then in existence. The way lay
across the elevated land which, rising from Barkston Ash towards Saxton,
reaches to a considerable height between that village and Towton. From
this commanding spot the valleys of the Wharfe and Ouse lie plainly
unfolded, and the towers of York itself may be seen on the skyline, on
the verge of this wide expanse of meadows and woodlands.
The hedgerows on the way to the battle-field are remarkable for the
profusion of briar roses that grow here in place of the more usual
blackberry brambles and thorns, and Bloody Meadow, the spot where the
thickest of the fight took place, was until quite recently thickly
overgrown with the red and white roses with which Nature had from time
immemorial planted this scene of strife. Latterly they have all been
grubbed up by farmers, keener on the purity of their grasslands than on
historic associations.
[Picture: Towton Dale]
The main body of the Yorkists, advancing to Saxton, opened the attack on
the Lancastrians early in the morning of Palm Sunday, the 29th. The
centre of the fight was in the meadow on the left hand of the road
leading towards Towton, a short distance beyond Towton Dale quarry. The
Lancastrians numbered 60,000 men, the Yorkists 48,600. For ten hours the
furious encounter raged, “sore fought, for hope of life was set aside on
every part.” Six years’ warfare, from 1455, when the first battle of St.
Albans had been fought, had rendered the enemies implacable. Almost
every combatant had already lost kinsfolk, and intense hatred caused the
order on both sides that no quarter was to be given and no prisoners
taken. The day was bitterly cold, and snowstorms swept the upland,
driving in the faces of the Lancastrians with such blinding fury that
their arrows, shot in reply to the Yorkist volleys, could not be properly
aimed, and so missed their mark. A hand-to-hand encounter with swords
and battle-axes then followed, obstinately fought, but resulting
practically in the butchery of the Lancastrians, for nearly the half of
their whole force were slain or met their death either in Towton Dale or
at the crossing of the stream down the road past Towton Hall. The rest
fled to Tadcaster and on to York, where Henry the Sixth, the Queen, and
the young Prince of Wales were waiting the result of the fight. They
left immediately, and the victorious Duke of York entered the ancient
city.
Many proud nobles fell that day with the men-at-arms; among others, Lord
Dacre, fighting for the Red Rose, shot by a boy concealed in what the
country people call a “bur-tree,” that is to say, an elder. He lies
buried in the churchyard of Saxton, on the north side of the church,
under a much-mutilated altar-tomb, whose inscription refers to him as
“verus miles”—a true knight. Tradition yet tells of his death, in the
local rhyme:—
The Lord of Dacres
Was slain in the North Acres,
fields still known by that name. Many grave mounds remain in Bloody
Meadow, where a rude cross leans, half hidden under a tangled hedge; and
in 1848, during some excavations in Saxton churchyard, a stratum of
bones, four feet in thickness, was exposed, the poor relics of those who
fell in the great fight. Others still are said to have been buried in
the little chapel of Lead, a mile away, by the banks of the Cock, whose
stream ran red that day. A few stones at the back of Towton Hall mark
the place where a votive chapel was erected, where prayers might be said
for the souls of the dead, whose numbers on both sides are said by one
authority to have reached 36,776.
[Picture: Lead Chapel]
Relics have been found on the battle-field. Many years ago a wandering
antiquary found a farmer’s wife breaking sugar with a battle-axe
discovered in the river. She did not know what it was, but he did, and
secured it. It is now at Alnwick Castle. In 1785 was found a gold ring
which had belonged to the Earl of Northumberland, who was carried
mortally wounded from the field. It weighs an ounce, and bears the Percy
Lion, with inscription, “Now ys thus.” Another interesting and pathetic
find was a spur, engraved with “En loial amour, tout mon coer,” the relic
of some unknown knight.
XIV
IT is a wild, weird kind of country upon which we enter, on the way from
Brotherton to Aberford and the North. Away to the left suddenly opens a
wide valley, in an almost sheer drop from the road, looking out upon
illimitable perspectives. Then comes Fairburn, followed by what used to
be Peckfield Turnpike, where the “Boot and Shoe” inn stands at the fork
of the roads, and where the Leeds and London “Royal Mail,” “Rockingham,”
and “Union Post” coaches turned off. Micklefield, two miles beyond,
approached by a fine avenue of elms, is an abject coal-mining village,
and hauling-gear, smoke, and the inky blackness of the roads emphasise
the fact, even if the marshalled coal-wagons on the railway did not give
it insistence. Coming up the craggy rise out of Micklefield and its
coal, on to Hook Moor, one of the finest stretches of the road, _quâ_
road, brings the traveller past the lodge-gates of Parlington Park and
the oddly ecclesiastical-looking almshouses beyond, down into the stony
old village of Aberford, which lies in a depression on the Cock Beck.
Beyond the village, on journeying towards it, one sees the long straight
white road ascending the bastioned heights of windy Bramham Moor; and the
sight clinches any half-formed inclination to rest awhile at Aberford
before climbing to that airy eminence.
Aberford still seems to be missing its old posting and coaching traffic,
and to be awaiting the return of the days when the Carlisle and Glasgow
mail changed at the “Swan,” a fine old inn, now much shrunken from its
original state. Stone-quarrying and the neighbouring coal-mines keep the
village from absolutely decaying; but it still lives in the past. The
picturesque old settles and yawning fireplaces of the “Swan,” and of that
oddly-named inn, the “Arabian Horse,” eloquent of the habits of
generations ago, survive to show us what was the accommodation those old
inns provided. If more primitive, it was heartier, and a great deal more
comfortable than that of modern hotels.
By the churchyard wall stands part of the old Market Cross, discovered by
the roadside and set up here in 1911; with the “Plague Stone” in whose
water-filled hollow purchasers placed their money, so that the sellers
might not risk infection.
A ruined windmill of strange design, perched on the hillside road behind
the village, is the best point whence to gain an idea of the country in
midst of which Aberford is set. It is boldly undulating country, hiding
in the folds of its hills many old-world villages. Chief among them, two
miles off the road, is Barwick-in-Elmete—_i.e._ in the elm country—with
its prehistoric mounds and the modern successor of an ancient maypole,
set up in the village street by the cross, presented in May 1898 by
Major-General Gascoigne, of Parlington Park.
[Picture: Ruined Mill, Overlooking Aberford]
The road two miles out of Aberford reaches that home of howling winds,
that most uncomfortable and undesirable place, Bramham Moor. Here, where
the Bramham Moor inn stands at the crossing of the Leeds and York road, a
considerable traffic enlivened the way until eighty years ago. Since
that time the broad roadways in either direction have been empty, except
when the hounds meet here in the hunting season, when, for a brief hour,
old times seem come again. It was along this cross-road that “Nimrod,”
that classic coaching authority, travelled in 1827, his eagle eye engaged
in criticism of the Yorkshire provincial coaches.
[Picture: Barwick-in-Elmete]
The rustical driver of the Leeds to York stage, happily, did not know who
his passenger was. Let us hope he never saw the criticism of himself,
his coach and horses, and everything that was his, which appeared shortly
afterwards in the _Sporting Magazine_. Everything, says “Nimrod,” was
inferior. The man who drove (he scorns, you see, to call him a coachman)
was more like a Welsh drover than anything else. The day was cold, but
he had neither gloves, boots, nor gaiters. However, he conducted the
coach only a ten miles’ stage, and made up with copious libations of gin
for the lack of warm clothing. On the way he fell to bragging with his
box-seat passenger of the hair’s-breadth escapes he had experienced when
driving one of the Leeds to London opposition coaches; and “Nimrod,”
complimenting him on the skill he must have shown on those occasions, he
proceeded to give a taste of his quality, which resulted in his getting
the reins clubbed and a narrow escape from being overturned. “Nimrod”
soon had enough of it, and at the first opportunity pretended to be ill
and went inside, as being the least dangerous place. Arriving at
Tadcaster, ten miles from York, the door was opened, and “Please to
remember the coachman” tingled in the ears of the passengers. “What
now,” asked “Nimrod,” “are you going no farther?” “No, sir, but ah’s
goes back at night,” was the Yorkshireman’s answer. “Then you follow
some trade here, of course?” continued the great coaching expert. “No,
sir,” said a bystander, “_he has got his horses to clean_.” Fancy a
coachman, even if only of that inferior kind, who could not be called
anything better than “the man who drove,”—fancy a coachman seeing to his
own horses. “Nimrod” was properly shocked at this, and with memories of
coaching nearer London, with stables and yards full of ostlers and
helpers, and the coachmen, their drinking done, flirting with the Hebes
of the bar, could only say, with a gasp, “Oh! that’s the way your
Yorkshire coaching is done, is it?”
He then saw his fellow-passengers pull out sixpence each and give it to
the driver, who was not only satisfied, but thankful. This also was a
novelty. Coachmen were, in his experience, tipped with florins and
half-crowns, nor even then did they exhibit symptoms of thankfulness, but
took the coin as of right. “What am I to do?” “Nimrod” asked himself; “I
never gave a coachman sixpence yet, and I shall not begin that game
to-day.” So he “chucked” him a “bob,” which brought the fellow’s hat
down to the box of the fore-wheel in gratitude.
With a fresh team and another driver the journey was continued to York.
About half-way, the coach stopped at a public-house, in the old style;
the driver got down, the gin bottle was produced, and, looking out of the
window, “Nimrod” was surprised to see the man whom he had thought was
left behind at Tadcaster. “What, are you here?” he asked. “Why, yes,”
answered the man; “’tis market-day at York, and ah’s wants to buy a goose
or two.” “Ah,” observed “Nimrod,” “I thought you were a little in the
huckstering line.”
XV
BRAMHAM MOOR leads down into Bramham village, past the Park, where a
ruined manor-house, destroyed by fire, stands amid formal gardens and
looks tragical. The place wears the aspect of romance, and seems an
ideal home for the ideal Wicked Squire of Early Victorian novels. Lord
Bingley, who built it and laid out the grounds in the time of Queen Anne,
was not more wicked than the generality of his contemporaries, but here
are all the “properties” with which those novelists surrounded the
cynical deceivers of innocence, who stalked in inky cloaks, curly hats,
and tasselled riding-boots through their gory pages. Here is Lord
Bingley’s Walk, an avenue of gigantic beeches where he did not meet the
trustful village maiden, as he ought to have done, by all the rules; here
also is the obelisk at the suggestively named Blackfen, whence twelve
avenues diverge—where no tattered witch ever cursed him, so far as can be
ascertained. Lord Bingley evidently did not live up to the possibilities
of the place, or of his station, nor did those who came after him, for no
horrid legend is narrated with bated breath in Bramham village, which
lies huddled together in the hollow below the park, the world forgetting,
and by the world forgot, ever since that leap year, 1408, when on the
29th of February the Earl of Northumberland, rebelling against Henry the
Fourth, was defeated and slain by Sir Thomas Rokeby at the battle of
Bramham Moor.
[Picture: Moor End]
Rising steeply out of Bramham and coming to the crest at Moor End, where
the road descends long and continuously to Wetherby and the river Wharfe,
we come to what used to be regarded as the half-way town between London
and Edinburgh. The exact spot, where a milestone told the same tale on
either face, is, in fact, one mile north, where the “Old Fox” inn stands.
This was, of course, the most noted landmark on the long road, and the
drovers who journeyed past it never failed to look in at the “Old Fox”
and “wet their whistles,” to celebrate the completion of half their task.
At Wetherby itself the “Angel” arrogated the title of “half-way house,”
and was the principal coaching inn. It still stands, like its rival, the
“Swan and Talbot,” smaller than of yore, the larger portion of its
stables now converted into cottages. At the “Angel” the down London and
Glasgow mail dined, with an hour to spare; the up coach hurrying through
to its change at Aberford. Wetherby was a change for the stage-coaches,
which ran the whole seventeen miles to Ferrybridge with the same teams; a
cruelly long and arduous stretch for the horses.
[Picture: Nineveh]
This is a hard-featured, stony town; still, as of old, chiefly concerned
with cattle-raising and cattle-dealing, and crowded on market-days with
farmers and drovers driving bargains or swearing at the terrified efforts
of beasts and sheep to find their way into the shops and inns. Down on
the southern side of the town runs the romantic Wharfe, between rocky
banks, hurrying in swirling eddies towards its confluence with the Ouse,
below Tadcaster; and on to the north goes the road, through the main
street, on past the conspicuous spire of Kirk Deighton church, coming in
three miles to Walshford, where a bridge crosses the rocky,
tree-embowered Nidd, and that old posting-house, the comfortable-looking
“Walshford Bridge Inn,” stands slightly back from the road, looking like
a private mansion gone diffidently into business.
Beyond Walshford Bridge the road turns suddenly to the left, and,
crossing the railway at lonely Allerton station, passes a substantial
red-brick farmhouse which looks as if it has seen very different days.
And indeed it has, for this was once the “New Inn,” a changing-place for
the mails. Now on the right comes the long wall of Allerton Park, and
presently there rises ahead that strange mound known by the equally
strange name of Nineveh, a tree-crowned hill, partly artificial, girdled
with prehistoric earthworks, and honeycombed with the graves of the
forgotten tribes, to whom it was probably at once a castle, a temple, and
a cemetery. The road onward to Boroughbridge is, indeed, carried over a
Roman way, which itself probably superseded the tracks of those vanished
people, and led to what is now the village of Aldborough near
Boroughbridge, once that great Roman city of Isurium which rivalled York
itself, and now yields inexhaustible building-stones for modern cottages,
and relics that bring the life of those ancients in very close touch with
that of our own time: oyster-shells and oyster knives, pomatum-pots,
pins, and the hundred little articles in daily use now and fifteen
hundred years ago.
Boroughbridge was originally the settlement founded by the Saxons near
the ruined and deserted city of Isurium. Afraid of the bogies and evil
spirits with which their dark superstitions peopled the ruins, they dared
not live there, but built their abiding-place by the river Ure, where the
mediæval, but now modernised, village of Boroughbridge stood, and where
the bridge built by Metcalf, the blind road- and bridge-maker, over a
century ago spans the weedy stream in useful but highly unornamental
manner. The battle of Boroughbridge, fought in 1322, is almost
forgotten, and coaching times have left their impress upon the town
instead. The two chief coaching inns, the “Crown” and the “Greyhounds,”
still face one another in the dull street; the “Greyhounds” a mere ghost
of its former self, the “Crown” larger, but its stables, where a hundred
horses found a shelter, now echoing in their emptiness to the occasional
footfall. Oddly enough a medical practitioner, a Dr. Hugh Stott, was
landlord of the “Crown” for more than fifty years. Probably he and the
landlord of the “Angel” at Ferrybridge were the only two inn-keeping
doctors in the kingdom. The “Crown” was anciently the home of the
Tancreds, a county family owning property in the neighbourhood: the
“Greyhounds” obtains its curious plural from the heraldic shield of the
Mauleverers, which displays three greyhounds, “courant.” Hotel
accommodation was greatly in request at Boroughbridge in the old days;
for from this point branched many roads. Here the Glasgow coaches turned
off, and a number of coaches for Knaresborough, Ripon, Harrogate, and the
many towns of south-west Yorkshire. The “Edinburgh Express,” which went
by way of Glasgow, also passed through. Boroughbridge was a busy
coaching town, so that ruin, stark, staring, and complete fell upon it
when railways came.
The remaining nineteen miles to Northallerton scarce call for detailed
description. Kirkby Hill, a mile out of Boroughbridge, lies to the left,
its church-tower just within sight. This is followed by the unutterably
dull, lifeless, and ugly village of Dishforth, leading to the hamlet of
Asenby, where the road descends to the picturesque crossing of the Swale
and the Cod Beck, with the village of Topcliffe crowning the ridge on the
other side: a village better looking, but as lifeless as the others.
Thence flat or gently undulating roads conduct in twelve miles to
Northallerton, past Busby Stoop Inn, the villages of Sand Hutton,
Newsham, and North and South Otterington.
South Otterington lives with a black mark in the memory of antiquaries as
that benighted place where the parishioners thought so little of their
church registers some years ago that they allowed the parish clerk to
treat all the old ones, dating from before the eighteenth century, as so
much waste-paper; some of them making an excellent bonfire to singe a
goose with. They were not singular in this respect, for churchwardens of
different places have been known to do the most extraordinary things with
these valuable documents. Thoresby, the antiquary, writing of a
particular register, remarks that “it has not been a plaything for young
pointers. It has not occupied a bacon-cratch or a bread-and-cheese
cupboard. It has not been scribbled on, within and without,” from which
we infer that that was the common fate, and that others had been so
treated.
The junction of the two main routes of the Great North Road at
Northallerton takes place ignominiously outside the goods station at a
level-crossing.
[Picture: The Edinburgh Express, 1837. After Jason Pollard]
XVI
THE alternative route now described and Northallerton regained by it, we
may resume the long journey to Edinburgh. It is the completest kind of
change from the wild ups and downs of the Boroughbridge and Wetherby
route to the long featureless stretches that now lie before us. We will
not linger in the town, but press onward to where the battle of the
Standard, as the battle of Northallerton is often known, was fought, on
the right-hand side of the road, near the still unenclosed fragments of
Cowton Moor. It was not a great struggle, for the Scots fled after a
short resistance, and the great numbers of their slain met their fate
rather at the hands of the peasantry, while fleeing through a hostile
country, than in combat with the English army.
Standing amid the heathy tussocks of Standard Hill, looking over the
Moor, the wide-spreading hill and dale of the Yorkshire landscape fades
into a blue or misty distance, and must in its solitude look much the
same as it did in those far distant days. Nothing save the name of the
hillock and that of the farm called Scot Pits, traditionally said to have
been the place where the Scottish dead were buried, remains to tell of
the struggle. “Baggamoor,” as old chroniclers call the battle-field,
from the baggage thrown away by the Scots in their flight, is traversed
by the road, which proceeds by way of Oak Tree and Lovesome Hills to
Great Smeaton, where the mails changed horses on the short seven miles’
stage between it and Northallerton, or the nine miles to Darlington. The
“Blacksmith’s Arms” was in those times the coaching inn here, but it has
long since been converted into cottages. William Tweedie, the last of a
succession of three Tweedies who kept the “Blacksmith’s Arms” and owed
their prosperity to the mails changing at their house, was also the
village postmaster. A God-fearing man and an absent-minded, it is
recorded of him that during a sermon at the parish church he was
surprised in the midst of one of his mental absences by hearing the
preacher enlarge upon the text of “Render unto Cæsar.” “Ay,” he said, in
a loud voice, when the duty of paying the king’s taxes and just demands
was brought home to the congregation, “that puts me in mind o’t: there’s
old Granny Metcalf’s bin owin’ the matter o’ eightpence on a letter these
two months past.”
Now Widow Metcalf _had_ paid that eightpence. She was in church, too.
The suddenness of the unjust accusation made her forget time and place,
and she retorted with, “William Tweedie, y’re a liar!”
One has a distinct suspicion that by “Lowsey Hill, a small Village
contiguous on the Left” (but a place so-named would more properly have
been “contagious”) mentioned here by Ogilby, he must have meant what is
now Lovesome Hill.
The old coach passengers, driving through, or changing at, Great Smeaton
must have often wondered, seeing the smallness of the place, what size
the neighbouring Little Smeaton, away off to the left, could have been.
Their inquiries on that head were usually answered by the coachmen, who
were wags of sorts, that Little Smeaton consisted of one dog-kennel and
two hen-coops. It is a lonely road between Northallerton and Darlington,
and quips of this kind probably tasted better when administered on the
spot than they do to the armchair traveller. Particularly lonely is High
Entercommon, where a turnpike-gate stood in the days that are done,
together with an inn, the “Golden Lion,” where a few coaches which made a
longer stage from Northallerton changed. Were it not that William
Thompson, landlord at the best period in the history of coaching, was a
highly reputable person, and had been coachman to Sir Bellingham Graham
before he set up as innkeeper, we might point to the house and say how
suitable a locality for the secret roadside crimes of old, of which
novelists delight to tell! Roads, and travelling before railways, used
to set the romancists busily engaged in spinning the most blood-curdling
stories of villainous innkeepers who, like Bob Acres, kept “churchyards
of their own,” and murderous trap-doors in their guest-rooms giving upon
Golgothas filled with the bones of their many victims. If one might
credit these astounding stories, the inns that were not murder-shops were
few and far between; but happily those writers, anxious only to make your
blood creep, were as a rule only exercising their particularly gory
imaginations.
A story of this order is that of a lady who set out in her carriage to
visit some friends in Yorkshire. She had come to within thirty miles of
her destination, when a thunderstorm which had been threatening broke
violently overhead. Struggling against the elements, the coachman was
glad to espy an old-fashioned roadside inn presently visible ahead, and,
his mistress expressing a wish to alight and rest until the storm should
abate, he drove up to the door. It was a wild and solitary spot (they
always are in these stories, and it is astonishing how solitary and wild
they are, and how many such places appeared to exist). The rusty sign
creaked dismally overhead, and the window-shutters flapped violently in
the wind on their broken hinges; altogether it was not an inviting spot.
But any port in a storm, and so the lady alighted. She was shown into a
large old-fashioned apartment, and the horses and carriage were stabled
until such time as it might be possible to resume the journey. But,
instead of passing off, the storm grew momentarily worse. Calling her
servant she asked him if it were possible to continue that night, and on
his replying in the negative, reluctantly resigned herself to staying
under a strange roof. She had her dinner in solitary state, and then
found all the evening before her, with nothing to occupy the time. She
went to the window and looked out upon the howling storm, and, tired of
that uninviting prospect, gazed listlessly about the room. It was a
large room, ill-furnished, and somewhat out of repair, for the inn had
seen its best days. Evidences of a more prosperous time were left in the
shape of some scattered articles of furniture of a superior kind and in
the presence of a curious piece of ancient tapestry facing her on the
opposite wall, bearing a design of a life-sized Roman warrior wielding a
truncheon.
But one cannot spend all the evening in contemplating the old chairs and
moth-eaten tapestry of a half-furnished room, and the storm-bound
traveller soon wearied of those objects. With nothing else to do, she
took out her purse and began to count her money and to calculate her
travelling expenses. Having counted the guineas over several times and
vainly tried to make the total balance properly with her expenditure and
the amount she had set out with, she chanced involuntarily to glance
across the room. Her gaze fell upon the stern visage of the helmeted
Roman, and to her horror the lack-lustre tapestry eyes were now replaced
by living ones, intently regarding her and her money. Ninety-nine of
every hundred women would have screamed or fainted, or have done both;
but our traveller was evidently the hundredth. She calmly allowed her
gaze to wander absent-mindedly away to the ceiling, as if still
speculating as to the disposition of the missing odd guineas; and then,
exclaiming, “Ah! I have it,” made for the door, to call her servant,
leaving her purse, apparently disregarded, on the table. In the passage
outside she met the landlord, who desired to know what it might be she
wanted. “To see my man, with orders for the morning,” said she. The
landlord shuffled away, and her servant presently appeared. She told him
what she had observed, and mounting upon the furniture, he examined the
tapestry, with the result that he found the wall behind it sound enough
in all places, with the exception of the eyes. On pressing the fabric at
those points it gave way, disclosing a hole bored through the wall and
communicating with some other room. This discovery of course aroused the
worst suspicions; but the storm still raged, it was now late, and to
countermand the accommodation already secured for the night would be to
apprise the landlord of something having been discovered. There was
nothing for it but to stay the night. To sleep was impossible, and so
the lady, retiring to her bedroom, securely bolting the door, and
assuring herself that no secret panel or trap-door existed, sat wakefully
in a chair all night. Doubtless the servant did the same, although the
story does not condescend to details where he is concerned. At length
morning came, without anything happening, and, equally without incident,
they set out after breakfast from this place of dread, the lady having
previously ascertained that the room on the other side of the wall behind
the tapestry was the landlord’s private apartment.
These adventures being afterwards recounted, it was called to mind that
an undue proportion of highway robberies had for some time past been
occurring in the immediate neighbourhood of the inn, and a queer story
was remembered of a traveller who had stayed there overnight being robbed
soon after leaving by a highwayman, who, without any preliminary parley,
desired him to instantly take off his right boot—the boot in which, as a
matter of fact, he had stowed away his money. The highwayman, who
evidently had been informed of this secret hiding-place, extracted the
coin, and, returning the boot, went on his way. It afterwards appeared
that the traveller had stowed his money in his boot while under the
impression that he was alone in the tapestry-room. He had reckoned
without the Centurion.
The inn of course fell into evil repute, and the landlord was soon
afterwards compelled to give up business. But the provoking part of it
all, from the point of view of the historian, is that the story does not
descend to topographical particulars, and that the description of the
place as being in Yorkshire is necessarily of the vaguest, considering
the vastness of the shire.
XVII
DALTON-UPON-TEES, three miles onward from High and Low Entercommon, shows
little to the passer-by on the Great North Road, who, a mile beyond its
scattered cottages, looking as though they had lost themselves, comes to
Croft, to the river Tees, and to the end of Yorkshire. It behoves one to
speak respectfully of Croft and its Spa, for its waters are as nasty as
those of Harrogate, with that flavour of rotten eggs so highly approved
by the medical profession, and only the vagaries of fashion can be held
accountable for the comparative neglect of the one and the favouring of
the other. Sulphur renders both equally nauseous and healthful, but
Croft finds few votaries compared with its great and successful rival,
and a gentle melancholy marks the spot, where, on the Yorkshire bank, the
mouldy-looking Croft Spa Hotel fronts the road, its closed assembly
rooms, where once the merry crowds foregathered, given over to damp and
mildew.
Croft is in the Hurworth Hunt, and it is claimed by local folk that the
Hurworth Country was indicated by “Handley Cross,” where Jorrocks and his
cronies chased the fox and enjoyed themselves so vigorously. The Spa
Hotel was then a place of extremely high jinks. Every night there would
be a dinner-party, with much competition as to who could drink the most
port or champagne. The test of the sturdiest fellow was to see who could
manage to place on his head a champagne or port bottle and lie down and
stand up with it still in place. Few reputations, or bottles, survived
that ordeal.
But Croft is a pretty place, straggling on both the Yorkshire and Durham
banks of the Tees; with a fine old church commanding the approach from
the south. It is worth seeing, alike for its architecture; for a huge
and preposterous monument of one of the Milbankes of Halnaby; and
especially for the extravagantly-arrogant manorial pew of that family,
erected in the chancel, and elevated in the likeness of two canopied
thrones approached by an elaborate staircase and over a crimson carpet.
This pompous structure dates from about 1760. The thing would not be
credible, did not we know to what extent the pride and presumption of the
old squirearchy sometimes went.
[Picture: Croft Bridge]
A sturdy old Gothic bridge here carries the road across the stream into
the ancient Palatinate of Durham. It were here that each successive
Prince-Bishop of that see was met and presented with the falchion that
slew the Sockburn Worm, one of the three mythical monsters that are said
to have infested Durham and Northumberland. Like the Lambton Worm, and
the Laidly—that is to say, the Loathly—Worm of Spindleston Heugh, the
Sockburn terror, according to mediæval chroniclers, was a “monstrous and
poysonous vermine or wyverne, aske or werme which overthrew and devoured
many people in fight, for yt ye sent of ye poyson was so strong yt noe
p’son might abyde it.” The gallant knight who at some undetermined
period slew this legendary pest was Sir John Conyers, descended from
Roger de Conyers, Constable of Durham Castle in the time of William the
Conqueror. The family held the manor of Sockburn by the curious tenure
of presenting the newly appointed Bishop Palatine of Durham on his first
entry into his diocese with the falchion that slew the Worm. The
presentation was made on Croft Bridge, with the words:—“My Lord Bishop, I
here present you with the falchion wherewith the champion Conyers slew
the worm, dragon, or fiery flying serpent which destroyed man, woman and
child; in memory of which the king then reigning gave him the manor of
Sockburn, to hold by this tenure, that upon the first entrance of every
bishop into the county the falchion should be presented.” Taking the
falchion into his hand, the bishop immediately returned it, wishing the
owner of Sockburn health, long life, and prosperity, and the ceremony was
concluded. Sockburn, seven miles below Croft, on the Durham shore of the
Tees, is no longer owned by that old heroic family, for the proud stock
which in its time had mated with the noblest in England decayed, and the
last Conyers, Sir Thomas, died a pauper in Chester-le-Street workhouse in
1810. The manor-house of Sockburn has long since been swept away, and the
old church is a roofless ruin, the estate itself having long since passed
to the Blackett family, in whose possession the wondrous falchion now
remains. The bishops of Durham, no longer temporal princes, do not now
receive it, the last presentation having been made to Bishop Van Mildert
by the steward of Sir Edward Blackett in 1826.
[Picture: Sockburn Falchion] Croft Bridge, a massive and
venerable-looking stone structure of seven arches, built in 1676, is
itself the successor of a much older building, referred to in a Royal
Brief of 1531 as being “the moste directe and sure waye and passage for
the King o’er Soveraigne Lorde’s armie and ordyn’ce to resort and pass
over into the north p’tes and marches of this his reaulme, for the surtie
and defence of the same againste the invasion of the Scotts and others
his enemyes, over which such armys and ordyn’ces hathe hertofor always
bene accostomyed to goo and passe.”
Here we are in Durham, and three miles from Darlington. Looking
backwards on crossing the bridge, the few scattered houses of the hither
shore are seen beside the way; one of them, the “Cornet” hotel, with a
weather-beaten picture-sign of the famous pedigree bull of that name, and
the inscription, “‘Comet,’ sold in 1810 for one thousand guineas.” The
Tees goes on its rippling way through the pointed arches of the historic
bridge, with broad shingly beaches over against the rich meadows, the
road pursuing its course to cross that rival stream, the Skerne, at
Oxneyfield Bridge, a quarter of a mile ahead. Close by, in a grass
meadow to the right of the road, are the four pools called by the
terrific name of “Hell’s Kettles,” which testify by the sulphureous taste
of their water to the quality of Croft Spa. Of course, they have their
wonderful legends; Ogilby in 1676 noted that. “At Oxenhall,” he says,
“are three Pits call’d Hell-kettles, whereof the vulgar tell you many
fabulous stories.” They have long been current, then; the first telling
how on Christmas Day 1179 the ground rose to the height of the highest
hills, “higher than the spires and towers of the churches, and so
remained at that height from nine of the morning until sunset. At the
setting of the sun the earth fell in with so horrid a crash that all who
saw that strange mound and heard its fall were so amazed that for very
fear many died, for the earth swallowed up that mound, and where it stood
was a deep pool.” This circumstantial story was told by an abbot of
Jervaulx, but is not sufficiently marvellous for the peasantry, who
account for the pool by a tale of supernatural intervention. According
to this precious legend, the farmer owning the field being about to carry
his hay on June 11, St. Barnabas’ Day, it was pointed out that he had
much better attend to his religious duties than work on the anniversary
of the blessed saint, whereupon he replied:—
Barnaby yea, Barnaby nay,
I’ll hae my hay, whether God will or nay:
and, the ground opening, he and his carts and horses were instantly
swallowed up. The tale goes on to say that, given a fine day and clear
water, the impious farmer and his carts and horses may yet be seen
floating deep down in these supposedly fathomless pools! De Foe,
however, travelling this way in 1724, is properly impatient of these
tales. “’Tis evident,” says he, “they are nothing but old coal-pits,
filled with water by the river Tees.”
XVIII
DARLINGTON, to which we now come, is a very busy, very prosperous, very
much rebuilt town, nursing a sub-Metropolitan swagger of architectural
pretension in its chief streets infinitely unlike anything expected by
the untravelled in these latitudes. There is a distinctly Holloway
Road—plus Whitechapel Road—and Kennington Lane air about Darlington which
does but add to the piquancy of those streets. Tumbledown houses of no
great age and no conceivable interest are shouldered by flaunting shops;
or rather, to speak by the card, by “stores” and “emporia”; these
alternating with glittering public-houses and restaurants. The effect
can be paralleled only by imagining a typical general servant dressed in
a skirt and train for a Queen’s Drawing Room, with ploughboy’s boots, a
cloth jacket, and ostrich-feathered hat to complete the costume. It is a
town only now beginning to realise that prosperity must make some outward
show of the fact, and it is accordingly going in for show in
whole-hearted fashion, and emerging from the grime in which James the
First found it in 1617. “Darneton!” he said when told its name; “I think
it’s Darneton th’ Dirt.” Dirty indeed it must have been for James, fresh
from his own capital, where they flung their sewage from the windows into
the streets, to have found it remarkable. De Foe, fifty years later,
said, “Darlington, a post-town, has nothing remarkable in it but dirt,
and a high bridge over little or no water.” An odd contemporary
commentary upon this seems to lurk in the fact that cloth was then
brought to Darlington from all parts—even from Scotland—to be bleached!
More akin to those times than these are the names of the streets, which,
like those of York, are chiefly “gates”:—High Northgate, Skinnergate,
Bondgate, Blackwellgate, and Priestgate.
In vain will the pilgrim seek the “Black Bear,” the inn at Darlington to
which Frank Osbaldistone, in the pages of _Rob Roy_, came. Scott
describes the wayfarers whom the young squire met on his way from London
to York and the North as “characters of a uniform and uninteresting
description,” but they are interesting to us, belonging as they do to a
time long past. “Country parsons, jogging homewards after a visitation;
farmers, or graziers, returning from a distant market; clerks of traders,
travelling to collect what was due to their masters in provincial towns;
with now and then an officer going down into the country upon recruiting
service.” These persons kept the tapsters and the turnpikes busy, and at
night time, when they foregathered at the roadside inns, sandwiched their
talk of cattle and the solvency of traders with terrifying tales of
robbers. “At such tales, like children, closing their circle round the
fire when the ghost-story draws to its climax, they drew near to each
other, looked before and behind them, examined the priming of their
pistols, and vowed to stand by each other in case of danger; an
engagement which, like other offensive and defensive alliances, sometimes
glided out of remembrance when there was an appearance of actual peril.”
This was about 1715. In those days, as Scott says, “journeys of any
length being made on horseback, and, of course, by brief stages, it was
usual always to make a halt on the Sunday in some town where the
traveller might attend divine service, and his horse have the benefit of
the day of rest. A counterpart to this decent practice, and a remnant of
old English hospitality, was, that the landlord of a principal inn laid
aside his character of publican on the seventh day and invited the guests
who chanced to be within his walls to take a part of the family beef and
pudding.”
[Picture: “Locomotion”]
The “Black Bear” at Darlington, as pictured by Scott, was such a place
and the landlord as typical a host, and here Frank Osbaldistone met the
first Scot he had ever seen, “a decentish hallion—as canny a North Briton
as e’er crossed Berwick Bridge”—which was high praise from mine host, for
innkeepers loved not Scottish folk and their thrifty ways. But, as
already remarked, the “Black Bear” at Darlington does not exist, and
coaching relics are rare in this town, whose modern prosperity derives
from railways. It is, therefore, with singular appropriateness that
Stephenson’s “Locomotion,” the first engine for that first of railways,
the Stockton and Darlington, long since withdrawn from service, has been
mounted on a pedestal at Darlington Station. In heathen lands this
ancestor of the modern express locomotive would be worshipped as a
fetich, and truly it is an ugly and uncanny-looking object.
[Picture: “The Experiment”]
The Stockton and Darlington Railway Act dates from 1821; the line to be
worked by “men and horses, or otherwise,” steam not being contemplated.
The construction was begun in May, 1822, and meanwhile the Rainhill
experiments had proved the possibility of locomotive engines. The Act
was therefore amended, to authorise the use of them and to permit the
conveyance of passengers; a kind of traffic which, odd though it may seem
now, was not contemplated by the projectors, whose original idea was a
railway for the conveyance of coal. It was on September 27th, 1825, that
the line was opened, a train of thirty-eight wagons travelling, as a
contemporary newspaper breathlessly announced, “with such velocity that
in some parts the speed was frequently twelve miles an hour.” Curiously
enough, however, the first passengers, after the opening ceremony, were
conveyed, not by steam, but by a rough coach, like a gipsy caravan,
running on the rails and drawn by a horse. This odd contrivance was
called the “Experiment,” and did the twelve miles in two hours. It was
followed by other vehicles, consisting of old stage-coach bodies mounted
on railway wheels, and it was not until some months had passed that
passengers were intrusted to the locomotive. The first passenger train
ran a spirited race with the coach over the twelve miles’ course, steam
winning by a hundred and twenty yards, amid the cheers of excited crowds.
After thirty-eight years of independent existence, the Stockton and
Darlington line was, with its branches, finally absorbed into the
North-Eastern system, in 1863.
Darlington is thus a place entirely inimical to coaching interests and
memories. Here, on its pedestal, stands the first of the iron monsters
that killed the coaches, and the town itself largely lives by
manufacturing railway wagons and iron and steel bridges. But coaching
had had its day, and did not die untimely. A few years longer and the
great highroads, already inconveniently crowded, must have been widened
to accommodate the increased traffic. Railways have been beneficent in
many directions, and they have enabled many hundreds of thousands to live
in the country who would otherwise have been pent in stuffy streets.
Imagination fails in the task of endeavouring to picture what the roads
would have been like to-day if road-travel had remained the only means of
communication. Locomotion would have been immensely restricted, of
course; but the mere increase of population must have brought huge crowds
of additional passengers. Figures are commonly said to be dry, but they
can occasionally be eloquent enough. For instance, when we compare the
population of the United Kingdom in 1837, when the Queen came to the
throne, and now, and consider the bearing of those figures on this
question, they are more than eloquent, and are even startling. There
were twenty-five and a half millions of persons in these islands in the
first year of Victoria’s reign. There are now forty-nine millions. Over
twenty-three millions of persons most of whom would have used the roads,
added in eighty years! Of course, the opportunities for cheap and quick
travel have made frequent travellers of those who otherwise would never
or rarely have stirred from their homes; but railways have wrought
greater changes than that. What, let us think, would have been the
present-day position of the city of London without railways? It must
needs have remained largely what it was when the “short stages” conveyed
such citizens as did not live in the city to and from their residences in
the suburbs, which then extended no further than Highgate, Chiswick,
Norwood, and Stockwell. A stage-coach commonly held sixteen persons,
twelve outside and four in; and allowing for those who might manage to
walk into the city, how many of such coaches should we require nowadays,
supposing railways suddenly abolished, to convey the city’s myriad day
population? So many thousands that the task would be impossible. The
impossibility of it gives us at once the measure of the railways’ might,
and raises them from the mere carriers we generally think them to the
height of all-powerful social forces whose effects may be sought in every
detail of our lives. To them the wide-spreading suburbs directly owe
their existence, equally as the deserted main roads of yester-year owed
their loneliness to the same cause; and social scientists have it that
they have performed what may at first sight seem a miracle: that, in
fact, they have increased the population. If railways had not come to
ease the growing pressure that began to be felt upon the roads in the
early “twenties,” something else must have appeared to do the work of
speedy conveyance, and that something would have been the Motor Car.
Railway competition and the restrictive legislation that forbade
locomotive carriages on highways served to keep motor cars under until
recently; but away back to 1787, when the first steam-carriage was made,
the problem of mechanical traction on roads was being grappled with, and
many very good steam-cars made their appearance between 1820 and 1830.
The caricaturists of the period were kept busily engaged making more or
less pertinent fun of them; in itself a testimony to the interest they
were exciting even then. Here is a typical skit of the period which
takes a renewed interest now that we are on the threshold of an era of
horseless traction.
[Picture: “Fellow, Give my Buggy A Charge of Coke, Your Charcoal is Too
D—d Dear.” From an old print]
Few things are more remarkable than the speed with which railways were
constructed through the length and breadth of the country, but it was
long before through communication between London and Edinburgh was
established. It was a coach-guard on this road who, just before the last
coach was run off it by the locomotive, sadly remarked that “railways
were making a gridiron of England.” They were; but it was not until 1846
and 1848, twenty-one and twenty-three years after the initial success of
the Stockton and Darlington line, that by the opening of the Edinburgh
and Berwick Railway, and the building of the railway bridge across the
Tweed, the last links of the railway journey between the two capitals
were completed. Even now, it requires the united efforts of three
entirely distinct and independent railway companies to convey the through
traffic of under four hundred miles between the two capitals. The Great
Northern territory ends at Shaftholme, near Doncaster, whence the
North-Eastern’s system conducts to the Border at Berwick-upon-Tweed, the
remaining fifty miles belonging to the North British Railway.
De Quincey, in his rhapsody on the “English Mail Coach,” says: “The
modern modes of travelling cannot compare with the old mail-coach system
in grandeur and power. They boast of more velocity, not, however, as a
consciousness, but as a fact of our lifeless knowledge, resting upon
alien evidence; as, for instance, because somebody says that we have gone
fifty miles in the hour, though we are far from feeling it as a personal
experience, or upon the evidence of a result, as that actually we find
ourselves in York, four hours after leaving London. Apart from such an
assertion, or such a result, I myself am little aware of the pace. But,
seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no evidence out of ourselves to
indicate the velocity. We heard our speed, we saw it, we felt it as a
thrilling; and this speed was not the product of blind, insensate
agencies, that had no sympathy to give, but was incarnated in the fiery
eyeballs of the noblest amongst brutes, in his dilated nostrils,
spasmodic muscles, and thunder-beating hoofs.”
[Picture: The Iron Road to the North]
But, in truth, railways and coaches have each their especial variety of
the romance of speed. De Quincey missed the quickening rush and contact
of the air quite as much as any other of the sights, sounds, and
sensations he speaks of when travelling by railway; a method of
progression which does not admit of outside passengers. Nothing in its
special way can be more exhilarating than travelling by coach as an
“outside”; few things so unsatisfactory as the position of an “inside”;
and if a well-groomed coach is a thing of beauty, there is also a
beautiful majesty in a locomotive engine that has been equally well
looked after. One of the deep-chested Great Northern expresses puffing
its irresistible way past the green eyes of the dropped semaphores of
some busy junction at night-time, or coming as with the rush and
certainty of Fate along the level stretches of line that characterise the
route of the iron road to the North, is a sight calculated to rouse
enthusiasm quite as much as a coach. Nor are railways always hideous
objects. It is true that in and around the great centres of population
where railway lines converge and run in filthy tunnels and along
smoke-begrimed viaducts they sound the last note of squalor, but in the
country it is a different matter. The embankments are in spring often
covered with a myriad wild flowers; the viaducts give a human interest to
coombe and gully. Lovers of the country can certainly point to places
which, once remote and solitary, have been populated and spoiled by the
readiness of railway access; but the locomotive has rendered more
holidays possible, and has kept the roads in a decent solitude for the
cyclist. Imagine, if you please, the Great North Road nowadays without
the railway. A hundred coaches, more or less, raced along it in the last
years of the coaching age, at all hours of the day and night. How many
would suffice for the needs of the travelling public to-day? and what
chance would be left to the tourist, afoot or awheel?
XIX
BEYOND its grand old church, Darlington has nothing of great antiquity to
show the stranger, save one object of very high antiquity indeed, before
whose hoary age even Norman and Early English architecture is
comparatively a thing of yesterday. This is the Bulmer Stone, a huge
boulder of granite, brought by glacial action in some far-away ice-age
from the heights of Shap Fell in distant Westmoreland to the spot on
which it has ever since rested. Darlington has meanwhile risen out of
the void and lonely countryside; history has passed by, from the remote
times of the blue-stained Britons, down to the present era of the
blue-habited police; and that old stone remains beside the road to the
North. Modern pavements encircle it, and gas-lamps shame with their
modernity its inconceivable age, but not with too illuminating a ray, and
the stranger roaming Darlington after nightfall has barked his shins
against the unexpected bulk of the Bulmer Stone, just as effectually as
countless generations before him have done.
The long rise of Harrowgate Hill conducts out of Darlington and leads on
to Coatham Mundeville, a tiny hamlet on the crest of a hill, with an
eighteenth-century house, a row of cottages, and an inn, making together
an imposing figure against the sky-line, although when reached they are
commonplace enough. The village of Aycliffe lies beyond, on its height,
overlooking a scene of quarrying and coal-mining; an outlook which until
Cromwell’s time was one of dense oak-woods. He it was who caused those
woods to be felled to mend the road on to Durham and make it firm enough
for his ordnance to pass. Whether the name of Aycliffe derives (as some
would have it) from “oak hill,” or whether it was originally “High
Cliffe,” or obtains its name from some forgotten _haia_, or enclosure on
this eminence, let us leave for others to fight over: it is an equally
unprofitable and insoluble discussion. As well might one hope to obtain
a verbatim report of one or other of the two Synods held here in 782 and
789, of which two battered Saxon crosses in the churchyard are thought to
be relics, as to determine this question.
For the rest, Aycliffe is quite unremarkable. Leaving it, and coming
downhill over an arched crossing over a marsh, dignified by the name of
Howden Bridge, we reach Traveller’s Rest and its two inns, the “Bay
Horse” and “Gretna Green Wedding Inn.” An indescribable air of romance
dignifies these two solitary inns that confront one another across the
highway, and form all there is of Traveller’s Rest. The “Wedding Inn,”
the more modern of the two, has for its sign the picture of a marriage
ceremony in that famous Border smithy. The “Bay Horse” is the original
Traveller’s Rest. Dating back far into the old coaching and posting
times, its stables of that era still remain; but what renders the old
house particularly notable is its sign, the odd figure of a horse within
an oval, seen on its wall, with the word “Liberty” in company with the
name of “Traveller’s Rest” and the less romantic than commercial
announcement of “Spirituous Liquors.” Once, perhaps, painted the correct
tint of a “bay” horse, the elements have reduced it to an unobtrusive
brown that bids fair to modestly fade into the obscurity of a neutral
tint, unless the landlord presently fulfils his intention, expressed to
the present historian, of having it repainted, to render it “more
viewly”; which appears to be the North-country phrase for making a thing
“more presentable.” To this old sign belongs the legend of a prisoner
being escorted to Durham Gaol and escaping through the horse ridden by
his mounted guard throwing its rider near here. Hence the word
“Liberty.”
[Picture: Traveller’s Rest]
Woodham, a mile distant down the road, bears a name recalling the times
when it was in fact a hamlet in those oak woods of which we spoke at
Aycliffe. It is now just a group of two or three cottages and a humble
inn, the “Stag,” in a dip of the way. Beyond it comes Rushyford Bridge,
a pretty scene, where a little tributary of the Skerne prattles over its
stony bed and disappears under the road beside that old-time
posting-house and inn, the “Wheatsheaf.” The old house still stands and
faces down the road; but it has long since ceased to be an inn, and,
remodelled in recent taste, is now a private residence. The old drive up
to the house is now converted into lawns and flower-beds. Groups of that
graceful tree, the black poplar, overhang the scene and shade the little
hamlet that straggles down a lane to the left hand. The old “Wheatsheaf”
has its memories. It was a favourite resort of Lord Eldon’s. Holt, the
landlord, was a boon companion of his. The great lawyer’s vacations were
for many years spent here, and he established a cellar of his own in the
house, stocked chiefly with “Carbonell’s Fine Old Military Blackstrap
Newcastle Port,” of which, although they were decidedly not military, he
and his host used to drink seven bottles a day between them, valiant
topers that they were. On Saturdays—we have it on the authority of
Sydney Smith—they drank eight bottles; the extra one being to fortify
themselves against the Sunday morning’s service. Lord Eldon invariably
attended church at Rushyford, and compelled his unwilling host to go with
him. In London he rarely went, remarking when reproached that he, a
buttress of the church, should fail in his devotions, that he was “only
an outside buttress.”
[Picture: Rushyford Bridge]
Lord Eldon was a mean man. It is a defect to be noticed in many others
who, like him, have acquired wealth by great personal efforts; with him,
however, it reached a height and quality not frequently met. He was not
merely “stingy,” but mean in the American sense of the word.
Contemporary with Fox, Pitt, Sheridan, and other valiant “four-bottle
men” of a century ago, and with an almost unlimited capacity for other
persons’ port, his brother, Lord Stowell, aptly said of him that “he
would take any _given_ quantity.”
With these memories to beguile the way we come to Ferryhill, a mining
village crowning a ridge looking over Spennymoor and the valley of the
Wear. To Ferryhill came in 1634 three soldiers—a captain, a lieutenant,
and an ensign—from Norwich on a tour and in search of adventure. These
were early days for tours; days, too, when adventures were not far to
seek. However, risky though their trip may have been, they returned in
safety, as may be judged from the lieutenant having afterwards published
an account of their wanderings through twenty-six English counties. Clad
in Lincoln green, like young foresters, they sped the miles with jest and
observations on the country they passed through. Of Ferryhill they
remark that “such as know it knows it overtops and commands a great part
of the country.” On this Pisgah, then, they unpacked their travelling
plate and “borrowed a cup of refreshing health from a sweet and most
pleasant spring”; by which it seems that there were teetotallers in those
days also. Those were the days before coal-mines and blast-furnaces cut
up the country, and before Spennymoor, away on the left, was converted
from a moorland into a township; a sufficiently startling change.
[Picture: Ferryhill: The Abandoned Road-Works]
Seen from down the road looking southwards, Ferryhill forms an impressive
coronet to the long ridge of hill on which it stands; its rough,
stone-built cottages—merely commonplace to a nearer view—taking an
unwarranted importance from the bold serrated outlines they present
against the sky, and looking like the bastioned outworks of some Giant
Blunderbore’s ogreish stronghold. The traveller from the south, passing
through Ferryhill and looking backwards from the depths of the valley
road, is cheated of a part of this romantic impression; he has explored
the arid and commonplace village and has lost all possibility of
illusion. Let us, therefore, envy the pilgrims from the north. It is,
indeed, a highly interesting view, looking back upon Ferryhill, and one
touched with romance of both the gentle and the terrifying sort. In the
first place, to that tall embankment seen in the accompanying drawing of
the scene belongs a story. You perceive that earthwork to be unfinished.
It sets out from the cutting seen in the distant hillside, and, crossing
the road which comes in a breakneck curve downhill, pursues a straight
and level course for the corresponding rise on the hither side, stopping,
incomplete, somewhat short of it. “An abandoned railway,” thinks the
stranger, and so it looks to be; but it is, in fact, a derelict
enterprise embarked upon at the close of the coaching era by a local
Highway Board for the purpose of giving a flat and straight road across
the valley. It begins with a long cutting on the southern side of the
hill on which the village stands, and, going behind the back of the
houses, emerges as seen in the picture. The tolls authorised would have
made the undertaking a paying one, only road travel ceased before the
work was finished. Railways came to put an end to the project and to
inflict upon the projectors a ruinous loss.
A more darkling romance, however, broods upon the scene. Away on the
western sky-line stands the conspicuous tower of Merrington church, and
near it the farmhouse where, on January 28, 1685, Andrew Mills, a servant
of the Brass family, who then farmed the adjacent land, murdered the
three children in the absence of their parents. It is a story of whose
shuddering horror nothing is lost in contemporary accounts, but we will
leave it to the imagination. It is sufficient to say that the assassin,
a lad of eighteen years of age, seems to have been half-witted, speaking
of having been instigated to the deed by a demon who enjoined him to
“Kill—kill.” To be more or less mad was no surety against punishment in
those times, and so Andrew Mills was found guilty and hanged. Justice
seems to have been devilish then, for he was cut down and hanged in
chains, after the fashion of the time, beside the road. The peculiar
devilry of the deed appears in the fact that he was not quite dead, and
survived in his iron cage on the gibbet for days. His sweetheart brought
him food, but he could not eat, for every movement of his jaw caused it
to be pierced with an iron spike. So she brought milk instead, and so
sustained the wretched creature for some time. Legends still recount how
he lingered here in agony, his cries by day and night scaring the
neighbouring cottagers from their homes, until the shrieks and groans at
length ceased, and death came to put an end to his sufferings. The site
of the gibbet was by the Thinford inn, near the head of the embankment.
The gibbet-post lasted long. Known as “Andrew Mills’ Stob,” its wood was
reputed of marvellous efficacy for toothache, rheumatism, heartburn, and
indeed as wide a range of ailments as are cured by any one of the modern
quack medicines that fill the advertisement columns of our newspapers in
this enlightened age. It was a sad day for Ferryhill and the
neighbourhood when the last splinter of Andrew Mills’ gibbet was used up,
and what the warty, scrofulous, ulcerous, and rheumaticky inhabitants did
then the imagination refuses to consider.
[Picture: Merrington Church]
XX
THE surrounding districts anciently possessed a prime horror (which has
lost nothing in the accumulated legends of centuries) in the “Brawn of
Brancepeth.” This terror of the countryside, resolved into plain matter
of fact, seems to have been a wild boar. Boars were “brawns” in those
days, and the adjacent “Brancepeth” is just “brawn’s path,” as Brandon is
supposed to have been “brawn den.” This, to modern ideas, not very
terrible wild animal, seems to have thoroughly alarmed half a county:—
He feared not ye loute with hys staffe,
Nor yet for ye knyghte in hys mayle,
He cared no more for ye monke with hys boke,
Than the fyendis in depe Croix Dale.
It will be seen by the last line in this verse that the author was
evidently prepared to back the devil and all his works against anything
the Church could do. But that is a detail. The wild boar was eventually
slain by Hodge of the Ferry, who ended him by the not very heroic process
of digging a deep pit in the course of his usual path, and when the
animal fell in, cutting his head off, doubtless from a safe point of
vantage above. Divested of legendary trappings, we can readily picture
the facts: the redoubtable Hodge hiding in the nearest and tallest tree
until the wild boar came along and fell into the hole, when the champion
descended and despatched him in safety. The traditional scene of this
exploit is half a mile to the east of Ferryhill, at a farmstead called
Cleve’s Cross.
Croixdale, or, as modern times have vulgarised its name, Croxdale, lies
on our way to Durham, past the hills of High and Low Butcher Race. Now a
shabby roadside village, with a railway station of that name on the main
line of the North Eastern Railway, this neighbourhood has also had its
romance. The road descends steeply to the river Wear, and in the
vicinity is the dark hollow which mediæval superstition peopled with evil
spirits, the “fyendis” who, as the ballad says, cared nothing for the
monk with his book. To evict these hardy sprites a cross was erected,
hence “Croixdale”; but with what result is not stated.
[Picture: Road, Rail, and River: Sunderland Bridge]
The cross roads here, too, have their story, for Andrew Tate, a
highwayman, convicted of murdering and robbing seven persons near
Sunderland Bridge, was hanged where they branch off, in 1602, and
afterwards buried beneath the gallows. Now that no devils or highwaymen
haunt the lovely woodland borders of the Wear at this spot, it is safe to
linger by Sunderland Bridge, just below Croxdale, where the exceedingly
picturesque old stone bridge of four arches carries the road over the
river. Perhaps the distant railway viaduct may spoil the sylvan solitude
of the place, but, on the other hand, it may help to emphasise it.
Across that viaduct rush and roar the expresses to and from London and
the North; while the fisherman plys his contemplative craft from the
sandy beaches below the bridge. Many a wearied coach passenger, passing
this spot in the old days on summer evenings, must have longingly drunk
in the beauty of the scene. Other passengers by coach had a terrible
experience here in 1822, when the mail was overturned on the bridge and
two passengers killed.
Thoresby, in his _Diary_, under date of May 1703, describes one of his
journeys with his usual inaccuracy as to the incidence of places, and
mentions Sunderland Bridge, together with another, close by. This would
be Browney Bridge, to which we come in a quarter of a mile nearer Durham;
only Thoresby places it the other way, where, on the hillside, such a
bridge would be impossible. He mentions seeing the legend, “Sockeld’s
Leap, 1692,” inscribed on one of the coping-stones, and tells how two
horsemen, racing on this road, jumped on the bridge together with such
force that one of them, breaking down the battlements of the bridge, fell
into the stream below, neither he nor his horse having any injury.
Ascending the steep rise beyond Browney Bridge, Farewell Hall on the left
is passed, the place taking its name, according to the commonly received
story, from the Earl of Derwentwater bidding farewell to his friends here
when on his way, a captured rebel, to London and the scaffold, in 1715.
Climbing one more ridge, the first view of Durham Cathedral is gained on
coming down the corresponding descent, a long straight run into the
outskirts of the city. Durham Cathedral appears, majestic against the
sky, long before any sign of the city itself is noted; a huge bulk
dominating the scene and dwarfing the church of St. Oswald at the foot of
the hill, itself no inconsiderable building. To the right hand rises
Nine Tree Hill, with the nine trees that stand sponsors to it still
weirdly conspicuous on its crest, and down beneath it spread the grimy
and unkempt works of the Old Elvet Colliery.
[Picture: Entrance to Durham]
XXI
THE traveller pursuing his northward way comes into Durham by the back
door, as it were, for the suburb of Old Elvet through which the Great
North Road conducts to the ancient city is one of the least prepossessing
of entrances, and, besides being dirty and shabby, is endowed with a
cobble-stoned road which, as if its native unevenness were not
sufficient, may generally be found strewed with fragments of hoop-iron,
clinkers, and other puncturing substances calculated to give tragical
pauses to the exploring cyclist who essays to follow the route whose
story is set forth in these pages. Old Elvet is in no sense a
prepossessing suburb of Durham, but its steep and stony street is a true
exemplar of the city’s other highways and byways, which are nothing if
not breakneck and badly paved, as well as being badly kept. But facing
Old Elvet’s long street is still to be found the “Three Tuns,” where
coach passengers in the closing years of that era delighted to stay, and
where, although the well-remembered hostess of the inn has been gathered
to Abraham’s bosom, the guest on entering is still served in his bedroom
with the welcoming glass of cherry-brandy which it has for the best part
of a century been the pleasing custom of the house to present. No other
such ambrosial cup as this, rare in itself and hallowed by old memories,
greets the wayfarer along the roads nowadays.
From here, or other headquarters, let us set forth to explore the city,
planted on a craggy site looking down upon the encompassing Wear that
flows deep down between rocky banks clothed thickly with woods. To enter
the city proper from “Old Elvet,” one must needs cross Elvet Bridge,
still narrow, although the subject of a widening by which its width was
doubled in 1805. How the earlier coaches crossed it is therefore
something of a problem.
It has often been claimed for Durham that it is “the most picturesque
city in England,” and if by that contention we are to understand the site
of it to be meant, the claim must be allowed. Cities are not so many
that there is much difficulty in estimating their comparative charms; and
were it even a question of towns, few might be found to have footholds of
such beauty.
The Wear and that rocky bluff which it renders all but an island, seemed
to the distracted monks of Lindisfarne, worn out with a century’s
wandering over the north of England in search of safety from the
marauding heathen Danes who had laid waste the coast and their island
cathedral, an ideal spot; and so to the harsh necessities of over nine
hundred years ago we owe both this selection of a site and the building
upon it of a cathedral which should be an outpost for the Lord in the
turbulent North and a castle for the protection of his servants. It was
in the year 995 that, after a hundred and twenty years of constant
wandering, the successors of those monks who had fled from Lindisfarne
with the body of their revered bishop, the famous Saint Cuthbert, came
here, still bearing his hallowed remains. Their last journey had been
from Ripon. Coming near this spot, the Saint, who though by this time
dead for over three hundred years, was as masterful as he had been in
life, manifested his approval of the neighbourhood by refusing to be
carried any further. When the peripatetic bishop and monks found that
his coffin remained immovable they fasted and prayed for three days,
after which disciplinary exercise, one of their number had a vision
wherein it was revealed to him that the Saint should be carried to
Dunholme, where he was to be received into a place of rest. So, setting
forth again, distressed in mind by not knowing where Dunholme lay, but
hoping for a supernatural guidance, they came presently to “a place
surrounded with rocks, where there was a river of rapid waves and fishes
of various kinds mingling with the floods. Great forests grew there, and
in deep valleys were wild animals of many sorts, and deer innumerable.”
It was when they were come to this romantic place that they heard a
milkmaid calling to her companion, and asking where her cow was. The
answer, that “she was in Dunholme” was “an happy and heavenly sound to
the distressed monks, who thereby had intelligence that their journey’s
end was at hand, and the Saint’s body near its resting-place.” Pressing
onward, they found the cow in Dunholme, and here, on the site of the
present Cathedral, they raised their first “little Church of Wands and
Branches.” The Cathedral and the Castle that they and their immediate
successors raised have long since been replaced; but the great Norman
piles of rugged fame and stern battlemented and loopholed fortress
crowning the same rocky heights prove that those who kept the Church
anchored here had need to watch as well as pray, to fight secular battles
as well as wage war against the devil and all his works. It was this
double necessity that made the bishops of Durham until our own time
bishops-palatine; princes of the State as well as of the Church, and in
the old days men of the sword as well as of the pastoral staff; and their
cathedral shadows forth these conditions of their being in no uncertain
way. There is no finer pile of Norman masonry in this country than this
great edifice, whose central tower and east end are practically the only
portions not in that style, and of these that grand and massive tower,
although of the Perpendicular period, is akin to the earlier parts in
feeling; nor is there another quite so impressive a tower in England as
this, either for itself or in its situation, with the sole exception of
“Boston Stump,” that beacon raised against the sky for many miles across
the Lincolnshire levels.
[Picture: Durham Cathedral, from Prebend’s Bridge]
Woods and river still surround the Cathedral, as Turner shows in his
exquisite view from the Prebend’s Bridge, one among many other glorious
and unexpected glimpses which the rugged nature of Durham’s site provides
from all points, but incomparably the best of all. It is here that, most
appropriately, there has been placed a decorative tablet, carved in oak,
and bearing the quotation from Sir Walter Scott, beginning—
Half House of God, half Castle; ’gainst the Scot;
a quotation that gains additional point from the circumstance of the
battle of Neville’s Cross having been fought against the invading Scots,
October 17th, 1346, within sight from the Cathedral roofs. This view is
one of Turner’s infrequent topographically accurate works. Perhaps even
he felt the impossibility of improving upon the beauty of the scene.
Still, annually, after evensong on May 29th, the lay clerks and
choristers of the Cathedral ascend to the roof of the great central
tower, in their cassocks and surplices, and sing anthems. The first,
Farrant’s “Lord, for Thy tender mercies’ sake,” is a reference to the
national crime of the execution of Charles the First, and is sung facing
south. The second, “Therefore with angels and archangels,” by V.
Novello, expressing the pious sentiment that the martyred king shall rest
in Paradise, in company with those bright beings, is sung facing east;
and the third, “Give Peace in our time, O Lord,” by W. H. Callcott,
facing north.
The origin of this observance was the thanksgiving for the victory of
Neville’s Cross, a famous and a complete success, when fifteen thousand
Scots were slain and David the Second, the Scottish king and many of his
nobles, captured. It was to the special intervention of St. Cuthbert,
whose sacred banner was carried by Prior John Fossor to Maiden Bower, a
spot overlooking the battlefield, that this signal destruction of the
enemy was ascribed. The Prior prayed beside it, but his monks are said
to have offered up their petitions from the more distant, and safer,
vantage-point of the Cathedral towers. Perhaps they had a turn of
agnosticism in their minds; but, at any rate, they took no risks.
The original tower-top _Te Deum_ afterwards sung on the anniversary seems
to have been discontinued at the Reformation. The revival came after the
King’s Restoration in 1660, when the day was altered to May 29th, to give
the celebration the character of a rejoicing at the return of Charles the
Second. This revival itself fell into disuse in the eighteenth century,
being again restored in 1828, and continued ever since.
The battlefield of Neville’s Cross lies to the west of the Cathedral, so
no singing takes place on the western side of the tower. The popular,
but mistaken, idea in Durham is that this is because a choir-boy once
overbalanced on that side and fell from the tower.
If you would see how Castle and Cathedral are situated with regard to the
busy modern city, there is no such place as the railway station, whence
they are seen dominating the mass of houses, among the smoke-wreaths of
commerce, like the martyrs of old steadfast amidst their burning faggots.
If again, reversing the order of precedence as seen in the view from
Prebend’s Bridge, you would have the Castle in the forefront and the
Cathedral behind, it is from the Framwellgate Bridge, carrying the Great
North Road over the Wear, that another lovely glimpse is seen, ranging to
Prebend’s Bridge itself.
XXII
BUT time grows short, and we have not long to linger at Durham. Much
else might be said of the Cathedral; of Saint Cuthbert’s Shrine, and of
the vandal Wyatt, who “restored” the Cathedral in 1775, cutting away, in
the process, a depth of four inches from the stonework of much of the
exterior. The work cost £30,000, and resulted in eleven hundred tons
weight of stone chippings being removed from the building. If that
“restorer” had had his way, he would have destroyed the beautiful Galilee
Chapel that projects from the west front, and forms so uniquely
interesting a feature of Late Norman work. His idea was to drive a
carriage road round this way. The work of destruction had, indeed,
already been begun when it was stopped by more reverent men.
[Picture: The Sanctuary Knocker]
A curious relic still remains upon the door of the Cathedral’s north
porch, in the form of a huge knocker, dating back to Norman times. Cast
in the shape of a grinning monster’s head, a ring hanging from its jaws,
it is the identical sanctuary knocker of Saint Cuthbert’s Sanctuary,
which was in use from the foundation of the Cathedral until 1524. All
fugitives, whatever their crimes, who succeeded in escaping to Durham,
and reaching the bounds of “Saint Cuthbert’s Peace,” were safe from
molestation during thirty-seven days. A criminal, grasping the ring of
this knocker, could not be torn from it by his pursuers, under pain of
their being subjected to excommunication; and lest there should be bold
spirits whom even this could not affright, there were always two monks
stationed, day and night, in a room above the porch, to watch for
fugitives. When admitted, the criminal confessed his crime, with every
circumstance attending it, his confession being taken down in writing, in
the presence of witnesses; a bell ringing in the Galilee tower all the
while, giving notice that some one had fled to the protection of Saint
Cuthbert. After these formalities, the fugitive was clothed with a black
gown, bearing a yellow cross on the left shoulder: the badge of the Saint
whose protection he had secured. After the days of grace had expired,
and in the event of no pardon being obtained, ceremonies were gone
through before the Shrine, in which the malefactor solemnly forswore his
native land for ever. Then, safeguarded to the coast, he was shipped out
of the kingdom by the first vessel sailing after his arrival.
[Picture: Durham Castle and Cathedral from below Framwellgate Bridge]
There must have been many an exciting chase along the roads in those
times, and many a criminal who richly deserved punishment must have
escaped it by the very skin of his teeth. Many another, no doubt, was
seized and handed over to justice, or slain, on the threshold of safety.
Other fugitives still—and here Saint Cuthbert appears in better
guise—victims of hatred and oppression, private or political, claimed the
saintly ægis, and so escaped the vengeance of their enemies. So, looking
upon the ferociously grinning mask of the knocker, glaring with eyeless
sockets upon Palace Green, we can reconstruct the olden times when, at
his last gasp, the flying wretch seized the ring and so came into safety.
By night, the scene was more impressive still, for there were crystals in
those sockets then, and a lamp burning behind, so that the fugitive could
see his haven from afar, and make for it.
To-day, Saint Cuthbert avails no man, as the county gaol and the assize
courts sufficiently prove, and Durham city is essentially modern, from
the coal-grit that powders its dirty streets to the awfully grotesque
effigy of a Marquis of Londonderry that lends so diabolical an air to the
Market-place, where the Statute Fair is held, and where he sits, a
coal-black effigy across his coal-black horse, towering over the steam
merry-go-rounds, like Satan amid the revelries of a Walpurgis Night.
This bronze effigy is probably the most grotesque statue in the British
Isles, and loses nothing of that quality in the noble Marquis being
represented in a hussar uniform with flying dolman over his shoulders,
and a busby, many sizes too large for him, on his head, in an attitude as
though ferociously inviting the houses on the other side of the street to
“come on.”
That diarising Scotswoman, Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness, travelling south
in 1756, wrote:—
“We dined at Durhame, and I went to see the cathedrall; it is a
prodigious bulky building. It was on Sunday betwixt services, and in the
piazzas there were several boys playing at ball. I asked the girl that
attended me, if it was the custome for the boys to play at ball on
Sunday: she said, ‘they play on other days, as well as on Sundays.’ She
called her mother to show me the Church; and I suppose, by my questions,
the woman took me for a heathen, as I found she did not know of any other
mode of worship but her own; so, that she might not think the Bishop’s
chair defiled by my sitting down in it, I told her I was a Christian,
though the way of worship in my country differed from hers. In
particular, she stared when I asked what the things were that they
kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.”
[Picture: Framwellgate Bridge]
They were hassocks: articles apparently then not known to Presbyterians.
And so she continued southward:—
“Next day, the 7th, we dined none, but baited at different places, and
betwixt Doncaster and Bautry a man rode about in an odd way, whom we
suspected for a highwayman. Upon his coming near, John Rattray pretended
to make a quarle with the post boy, and let him know that he keept good
powder and ball to keep such folks as him in order; upon which the felow
scampered off cross the common.”
The Great North Road leaves Durham over Framwellgate Bridge, built by
Bishop Flambard in Norman times. Although altered and repaired in the
fifteenth century and later, it is still substantially the same bridge.
There was once a fortified gateway on it, but that was taken down in
1760. Bridge, River, Castle, and Cathedral here form a majestic picture.
XXIII
AND now to take the open road again. The chief features of the road
between Durham and Newcastle are coal-pits, dismal pit villages, and
coal-dust. Not at once, however, is the traveller introduced to these,
and the ascent out of Durham, through the wooded banks of Dryburn, is
very pretty. It is at Framwellgate Moor, a mile and a half from the
city, that the presence of coal begins to make itself felt, in the rows
of unlovely cottages, and in the odd figures of the pitmen, who may be
seen returning from their work, with grimy faces and characteristic
miner’s dress. Adjoining this village, and indistinguishable from it by
the stranger, is the roadside collection of cottages known as “Pity Me,”
taking its name from the hunted fox in the sign of the “Lambton Hounds”
inn.
Framwellgate is scarce left behind before there rises up in the far
distance, on the summit of one of the many hills to the north-east, a
hill-top temple resembling the Athenian Acropolis, and as you go
northward it is the constant companion of your journey for some seven or
eight miles. This is “Penshaw Monument,” erected on that windy height in
1844, four years after his death, to the memory of John George Lambton,
first Earl of Durham. It cost £6,000, and commemorates the championship
of the Reform movement in its earlier and precarious days by that
statesman. Like many another monument, impressive at a distance, a near
approach to it leads to disillusion, for its classic outlines are allied
to coarse workmanship, and its eighteen great columns are hollow.
Penshaw, deriving its name from Celtic words, signifying a wooded height,
still has its woodlands to justify the name given nearly a thousand years
ago.
[Picture: Penshaw Monument]
The little town of Chester-le-Street lies three miles ahead, past the few
cottages of Plawsworth, once the site of a turnpike-gate, and by Chester
Moor and the pretty wooded hollow of Chester Dene, where the Con Burn
goes rippling through the undergrowth to join the river Wear, and a
bridge carries the highway across the gap. Approaching
Chester-le-Street, the bright yellow sandstone mass of Lumley Castle, the
ancient seat of the Earl of Scarborough, is prominent in the valley to
the right, while beyond it rise the woods of Lambton Castle, the Earl of
Durham’s domain. The neighbourhood of Chester-le-Street yet preserves
the weird legend of the “Lambton Worm,” and Worm Hill is still pointed
out as the home of that fabulous monster who laid the country under
contribution for the satisfying of his voracious appetite, and was kept
in good humour by being provided with the milk of nine cows daily. Many
had essayed to slay the serpent and had fallen victims instead, until the
heir of Lambton, returned from the red fields and hair’s-breadth escapes
of foreign wars, set forth to free the countryside from the terror. But
before he started, he was warned (so the legend runs), that unless he
vowed, being successful in his enterprise, to slay the first living thing
he met on his return, the lords of Lambton would never, for nine
generations to come, die in their beds. He took that vow, and, armed
with his trusty sword and a suit of armour made of razor-blades, met and
slew the Worm, who coiled himself round the knight in order to crush him
as he had the others, and so was cut in pieces against the keen edges.
But the victor on returning was met by his father, instead of by the
favourite dog who had been destined for the sacrifice. The sword dropped
from his nerveless hand, and he broke the vow. What mattered it where
the future generations died; in their beds, or, as warriors might wish,
in their boots?
As a matter of fact, the next nine heirs of Lambton did die more or less
violent deaths; a circumstance which is pointed to in proof of the
legend’s truth. If other proof be wanting, one has only to visit Lambton
Castle, where the identical trough from which the Worm drank his daily
allowance of milk is still shown the curious tourist!
Chester-le-Street bears little in its appearance to hint at its great age
and interesting history. A very up-to-date little town, whose prosperity
derives from its position as a marketing centre for the surrounding
pitmen, it supports excellent shops and rejoices in the possession of
Co-operative Societies, whose objects are to provide their subscribers
with whatever they want at cost price, and to starve the trader, who
trades for profit, out of existence. That shops and societies exist side
by side, and that both look prosperous, seems remarkable, not to say
miraculous. Let the explanation of these things be left to other hands.
The name of Chester-le-Street doubly reveals the Roman origin of the
place from the castle on the road which existed here in those distant
times, and has easily survived the name of Cunecaster, which the Saxons
gave it. At Cunecaster the ancient bishopric of Bernicia, forerunner of
the present See of Durham, had its cathedral for a hundred and thirteen
years, from A.D. 882 to 995; having been removed from the Farne Islands
on the approach of the heathen Danes, the monks carrying the coffin of
their sainted bishop, St. Cuthbert, with them on their wanderings. The
dedication of the present church to Saints Mary and Cuthbert is a relic
of that time, but the building itself is not older than the thirteenth
century. It preserves an ancient anchorites’ cell.
The finest surviving anchorage in England is this of Chester-le-Street.
It is built against the north wall of the tower, and is of two storeys
with two rooms on each. Two “low-side” windows communicating with the
churchyard remain, and a smaller opening into the church is close by.
Through this, food and offerings were passed to the anchorite, together
with the keys of the church treasure-chest, left in his custody by the
clergy. From this orifice the holy hermit could obtain a view all over
the building, and an odd hagioscope or “squint,” pierced through one of
the pillars, allowed of his seeing the celebration of Mass at a
side-chapel, in addition to that at the High Altar. This was no damp and
inconvenient hermitage, for when the anchorite was kicked out at the
Reformation, and bidden go and earn an honest living, his old home was
let to three widows. Eventually, in 1619, the curate found the place so
desirable—or, as a house-agent would say, so “eligible”—that he took up
his abode there.
The church also contains fourteen monumental effigies ascribed, without
much truth in the ascription, to the Lumleys. John, Lord Lumley,
collected them from ruined abbeys and monasteries in the neighbourhood
some three hundred years ago, and called them ancestors. He was
technically right; for we all descend from Adam, but not quite so right
when, finding he could not steal a sufficient number of these
“ancestors,” he commissioned the local masons to rough-hew him out a few
more. They are here to this day, and an ill-favoured gang they look,
too.
The town of Chester-le-Street found little favour with De Foe, who,
passing through it, found the place “an old dirty thoroughfare town.”
The modern traveller cannot say the same, but it is possible that if he
happened to pass through on Shrove Tuesday, he would describe the
inhabitants as savages; for on that day the place is given up to a game
of football played in the streets, the town taking sides, and when the
ball is not within reach, kicking one another. With a proper respect for
their shop fronts, the trades-folk all close on this day.
The three miles between Chester-le-Street and Birtley afford a
wide-spreading panorama of the Durham coal-field. Pretty country before
its mineral wealth began to be developed, its hills and dales reveal
chimney-shafts and hoisting-gear in every direction, and smoke-wreaths,
blown across country by the raging winds of the north, blacken
everything. Birtley is a typical pit village and its approaches
characteristic of the coal country. The paths are black, the hedges and
trees ragged and sooty, and tramways from the collieries cross the road
itself, unfenced, the trucks dropping coal in the highway. One coal
village is as like another as are two peas. They are all frankly
unornamental; all face the road on either side, each cottage the exact
replica of its unlovely neighbour, and the footpaths are almost
invariably unpaved. These are the homes of the “Geordies,” as the pitmen
once were invariably called. They were rough in their ways, but very
different from the more recent sort: the trade-unionist miner: the better
educated but more discontented and unlovable man. But “Geordie,” the
old-type typical pitman, was not a bad fellow, by any means. If any man
worked, literally, by the sweat of his brow, it was he, in his eight
hours’ shift down in the stifling tunnels of the coal-mine. He earned a
high wage and deserved a higher, for he carried his life in his hand, and
any day that witnessed his descent half a mile or so into the black
depths of the pit might also have seen an accident which, by the fall of
a roof of coal, by fire or flood, explosion, or the unseen but deadly
choke-damp, should end his existence, and that of hundreds like him.
The midday aspect of a coal village is singularly quiet and empty.
Scarce a man or boy is to be seen. Half of them are at work down below,
in the first day shift to which they went at an early hour of the
morning: and those of the night, who came up when the others descended,
are enjoying a well-earned repose. A coal-miner just come to bank from
his coal-hewing, looks anything but the respectable fellow he generally
is, nowadays. With his peaked leathern cap, thick short coat, woollen
muffler, limp knickerbockers, blue worsted stockings, heavy lace-up boots
and dirty face, he looks like a half-bleached nigger football-player.
When washed, his is a pallid countenance which the stranger, unused to
the colourless faces of those who work underground, might be excused for
thinking that of one recovering from an illness. And washing is a
serious business with “Geordie.” Every pitman’s cottage has its tub
wherein he “cleans” himself, as he expresses it, while the women-folk
crowd the street. What the cottages lack in accommodation they make up
for in cleanliness and display. The pitman’s wife wages an heroic and
never-ending war against dirt and grime, and both have an astonishing
love of finery and bright colours which reveals itself even down to the
door-step, coloured a brilliant red, yellow, or blue, according to
individual taste. Nowadays football claims “Geordie’s” affections before
anything else. That rowdy game, more than any other, serves to work off
any superfluous energy, and there are stories, more or less true, which
tell of pitmen, tired of waiting for “t’ ball,” starting “t’ gaame” by
kicking one another instead! Coursing, dog-fancying, and the breeding of
canaries are other favourite pitmen’s pastimes, and they dearly love a
garden. Where an outdoor garden is impossible, a window garden is a
favourite resource, and even the ugliest cottages take on a certain
smartness when to the yellow doorstep are added bright green
window-shutters and a window full of scarlet geraniums. Very many pitmen
are musical. We do not in this connection refer to the inevitable
American organ whose doleful wails wring your very heart-strings as you
pass the open cottage doors on Sunday afternoons, but to the really
expert violinists often found in the pit villages.
[Picture: The Coal Country]
XXIV
AT Harlowgreen Lane, where a little wayside inn, the “Coach and Horses,”
stands beside a wooded dingle, we have the only pleasant spot before
reaching Gateshead. Prettily rural, with an old-world air which no doubt
gains an additional beauty after the ugliness of Birtley, it looks like
one of those roadside scenes pencilled so deftly by Rowlandson, and might
well have been one of the roadside stopping-places mentioned in that book
so eloquent of the Great North Road, Smollett’s _Roderick Random_. No
other work gives us so fine a description of old road travel, partly
founded, no doubt, upon the author’s’ own observation of the wayfaring
life of his time. Smollett himself travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh
and London in 1739, and in the character of Roderick he narrates some of
his own adventures. For a good part of the way Roderick found neither
coach, cart, nor wagon on the road, and so journeyed with a train of
pack-carriers so far as Newcastle, sitting on one of the horses’
pack-saddles. At Newcastle he met Strap, the barber’s assistant, and
they journeyed to London together, sometimes afoot; at other times by
stage-wagon, a method of travelling which, practised by those of small
means, was a commonplace of the period at which Smollett wrote. It was a
method which had not changed in the least since the days of James the
First, and was to continue even into the first years of the nineteenth
century. Fynes Morrison, who wrote an _Itinerary_—and an appallingly
dull work it is—in the reign of the British Solomon, talks of them as
“long covered wagons, carrying passengers from place to place; but this
kind of journeying is so tedious, by reason they must take wagon very
early and come very late to their innes, that none but women and people
of inferior condition travel in this sort.” Hogarth pictured these
lumbering conveyances, which at their best performed fifteen miles a day,
and Rowlandson and many other artists have employed their pencils upon
them.
[Picture: A Wayside Halt. After Rowlandson]
Smollett is an eighteenth-century robust humorist, whose works are
somewhat strong meat for our times; but he is a classic, and his works
(unlike the usual run of “classics,” which are aptly said to be books
which no one ever reads) have, each one, enough humour to furnish half a
dozen modern authors, and are proof against age and change of taste. To
the student of bygone times and manners, _Roderick Random_ affords (oh!
rare conjunction) both instruction and amusement. It is, of course, a
work of fiction, but fiction based on personal experience, and
palpitating with the life of the times in which it was written. It thus
affords a splendid view of this great road about 1739, and of the way in
which the thrifty Scots youths then commonly came up to town.
Their first night’s halt was at a hedgerow alehouse, half a mile from the
road, to which came also a pedlar. The pedlar, for safety’s sake,
screwed up the door of the bedroom in which they all slept. “I slept
very sound,” says Roderick, “until midnight, when I was disturbed by a
violent motion of the bed, which shook under me with a continual tremor.
Alarmed at this phenomenon, I jogged my companion, whom, to my amazement,
I found drenched in sweat, and quaking through every limb; he told me,
with a low, faltering voice, that we were undone, for there was a bloody
highwayman with loaded pistols in the next room; then, bidding me make as
little noise as possible, he directed me to a small chink in the board
partition, through which I could see a thick-set, brawny fellow, with a
fierce countenance, sitting at a table with our young landlady, having a
bottle of ale and a brace of pistols before him.” The highwayman was
cursing his luck because a confederate, a coachman, had given
intelligence of a rich coach-load to some other plunderer, who had gone
off with £400 in cash, together with jewels and money.
“But did you find nothing worth taking which escaped the other gentleman
of the road?” asked the landlady.
“Not much,” he replied. “I gleaned a few things, such as a pair of pops,
silver-mounted (here they are); I took them, loaded, from the charge of
the captain who had charge of the money the other fellow had taken,
together with a gold watch which he had concealed in his breeches. I
likewise found ten Portugal pieces in the shoes of a Quaker, whom the
spirit moved to revile me, with great bitterness and devotion; but what I
value myself mostly for is this here purchase, a gold snuff-box, my girl,
with a picture on the inside of the lid, which I untied out of the tail
of a pretty lady’s smock.”
Here the pedlar began to snore so loudly that the highwayman heard him
through the partition. Alarmed, he asked the landlady who was there, and
when she told him, travellers, replied, “Spies! you jade! But no matter,
I’ll send them all to hell in an instant.”
The landlady pacified him by saying that they were only three poor
Scotchmen; but Strap by this time was under the bed.
The night was one of alarms. Roderick and Strap awakened the pedlar,
who, thinking the best course was not to wait for the doubtful chance of
being alive to see the morning dawn, vanished with his pack through the
window.
After having paid their score in the morning, the two set out again.
They had not gone more than five miles before a man on horseback overtook
them, whom they recognised as Mr. Rifle, the highwayman of the night
before. He asked them if they knew who he was. Strap fell on his knees
in the road. “For heaven’s sake, Mr. Rifle,” said he, “have mercy on us,
we know you very well.”
“Oho!” cried the thief, “you do! But you shall never be evidence against
me in this world, you dog!” and so saying, he drew a pistol and fired at
the unfortunate shaver, who fell flat on the ground, without a word. He
then turned upon Roderick, but the sound of horses’ hoofs was heard, and
a party of travellers galloped up, leaving the highwayman barely time to
ride off. One of them was the captain who had been robbed the day
before. He was not, as may already have been gathered, a valiant man.
He turned pale at the sight of Strap. “Gentlemen,” said he, “here’s
murder committed; let us alight.” The others were for pursuing the
highwayman, and the captain only escaped accompanying them by making his
horse rear and snort, and pretending the animal was frightened.
Fortunately, Strap “had received no other wound than what his fear had
inflicted”; and after having been bled at an inn half a mile away, they
were about to resume their journey, when a shouting crowd came down the
road, with the highwayman in the midst, riding horseback with his hands
tied behind him. He was being escorted to the nearest Justice of the
Peace. Halting a while for refreshment, they dismounted Mr. Rifle and
mounted guard, a circle of peasants armed with pitchforks round him.
When they at length reached the magistrate’s house, they found he was
away for the night, and so locked their prisoner in a garret, from which,
of course, he escaped.
Roderick and Strap were now free from being detained as evidence. For
two days they walked on, staying on the second night in a public-house of
a very sorry appearance in a small village. At their entrance, the
landlord, who seemed a venerable old man, with long grey hair, rose from
a table placed by a large fire in a neat paved kitchen, and, with a
cheerful countenance, accosted them with the words: “_Salvete_, _pueri_;
_ingredimini_.” It was astonishing to hear a rustic landlord talking
Latin, but Roderick, concealing his amazement, replied, “_Dissolve
frigus_, _ligna super foco large reponens_.” He had no sooner pronounced
the words than the innkeeper, running towards him, shook him by the
hands, crying, “_Fili mi dilectissime_! _unde venis_?—_a superis_, _ni
fallor_.” In short, finding them both read in the classics, he did not
know how to testify his regard sufficiently; but ordered his daughter, a
jolly, rosy-checked damsel, who was his sole domestic, to bring a bottle
of his _quadrimum_; repeating at the same time from Horace, “_Deprome
quadrimum Sabinâ_, _O Thaliarche_, _merum diota_.” This was excellent
ale of his own brewing, of which he told them he had always an _amphora_,
four years old, for the use of himself and friends.
The innkeeper proved to be a schoolmaster who was obliged, by his income
being so small, to supplement it by turning licensed victualler. He was
very inquisitive about their affairs, and, while dinner was preparing,
his talk abounded both with Latin tags and with good advice to the
inexperienced against the deceits and wickedness of the world. They
fared sumptuously on roast fowl and several bottles of quadrimum, going
to bed congratulating themselves on the landlord’s good-humour. Strap
was of opinion that they would be charged nothing for their lodging and
entertainment. “Don’t you observe,” said he, “that he has conceived a
particular affection for us; nay, even treated us with extraordinary
fare, which, to be sure, we should not of ourselves have called for?”
Roderick was not so sanguine. Rising early in the morning, and having
breakfasted with their host and his daughter on hasty-pudding and ale,
they desired to know what there was to pay.
“Biddy will let you know, gentlemen,” said the old rascal of a tapster,
“for I never mind these matters. Money-matters are beneath the concern
of one who lives on the Horatian plan: _Crescentem sequitur cura
pecuniam_.”
Meanwhile, Biddy, having consulted a slate that hung in a corner, gave
the reckoning as eight shillings and sevenpence.
“Eight shillings and sevenpence!” cried Strap; “’tis impossible! You
must be mistaken, young woman.”
“Reckon again, child,” said the father very deliberately; “perhaps you
have miscounted.”
“No, indeed, father,” replied she. “I know my business better.”
Roderick demanded to know the particulars, on which the old man got up,
muttering, “Ay, ay, let us see the particulars: that’s but reasonable”;
and, taking pen, ink, and paper, wrote:
_s._ _d._
To bread and beer, 0 6
To a fowl and sausages, 2 6
To four bottles of quadrim, 2 0
To fire and tobacco, 0 7
To lodging, 2 0
To breakfast, 1 0
8 7
As he had not the appearance of a common publican, Roderick could not
upbraid him as he deserved, simply remarking that he was sure he had not
learned from Horace to be an extortioner. To which the landlord replied
that his only aim was to live _contentus parvo_, and keep off _importuna
pauperies_.
Strap was indignant. He swore their host should either take one-third or
go without; but Roderick, seeing the daughter go out and return with two
stout fellows, with whom to frighten them, thought it politic to pay what
was asked.
It was a doleful walk they had that day. In the evening they overtook
the wagon, and it is here, and in the following scenes, that we get an
excellent description of the cheap road travel of that era.
Strap mounted first into the wagon, but retired, dismayed, at a
tremendous voice which issued from its depths, with the words, “Fire and
fury! there shall no passengers come here.” These words came from
Captain Weazel, one of the most singular characters to be found in
Smollett’s pages.
Joey, the wagoner, was not afraid of the captain, and called out, with a
sneer: “Waunds, coptain, whay woan’t you soofer the poor wagoneer to make
a penny? Coom, coom, young man, get oop, get oop; never moind the
coptain.”
“Blood and thunder! where’s my sword?” exclaimed the man of war, when the
two eventually fell, rather than climbed, into the wagon’s dark recesses,
and incidentally on to his stomach.
“What’s the matter, my dear?” asked a female voice.
“The matter?” replied the captain; “my guts are squeezed into a pancake
by that Scotchman’s hump.” The “hump,” by the way, was poor Strap’s
knapsack.
“It is our own fault,” resumed the feminine voice; “we may thank
ourselves for all the inconveniences we meet with. I thank God I never
travelled so before. I am sure, if my lady or Sir John were to know
where we are, they would not sleep this night for vexation. I wish to
God we had written for the chariot; I know we shall never be forgiven.”
“Come, come, my dear,” replied the captain, “it don’t signify fretting
now; we shall laugh it over as a frolic; I hope you will not suffer in
your health. I shall make my lord very merry with our adventures in the
diligence.”
[Picture: Travellers arriving at an Inn. After Rowlandson]
The unsophisticated lads were greatly impressed by this talk. Not so the
others. “Some people,” broke in another woman’s voice, “give themselves
a great many needless airs; better folks than any here have travelled in
wagons before now. Some of us have rode in coaches and chariots, with
three footmen behind them, without making so much fuss about it. What
then! we are now all on a footing; therefore let us be sociable and
merry. What do you say, Isaac? Is not this a good motion, you doting
rogue? Speak, old Cent. per cent.! What desperate debt are you thinking
of? What mortgage are you planning? Well, Isaac, positively you shall
never gain my favour till you turn over a new leaf, grow honest, and live
like a gentleman. In the meantime, give me a kiss, you old fool.”
The words, accompanied by hearty smack, enlivened the person to whom they
were addressed to such a degree, that he cried, in a transport, though
with a faltering voice: “Ah, you baggage! on my credit you are a waggish
girl—he, he, he!” This laugh introduced a fit of coughing which almost
suffocated the poor usurer—for such they afterwards found was the
profession of their fellow-traveller.
At their stopping-place for the night they had their first opportunity of
viewing these passengers. First came a brisk, airy girl, about twenty
years of age, with a silver-laced hat on her head instead of a cap, a
blue stuff riding-suit, trimmed with silver, very much tarnished, and a
whip in her hand. After her came, limping, an old man, with a worsted
night-cap buttoned under his chin and a broad-brimmed hat slouched over
it, an old rusty blue cloak tied about his neck, under which appeared a
brown surtout that covered a threadbare coat and waistcoat, and a dirty
flannel jacket. His eyes were hollow, bleared, and gummy; his face
shrivelled into a thousand wrinkles, his gums destitute of teeth, his
nose sharp and drooping, his chin peaked and prominent, so that when he
mumped or spoke they approached one another like a pair of nut-crackers;
he supported himself on an ivory-headed cane, and his whole figure was a
just emblem of winter, famine, and avarice.
The captain was disclosed as a little thin creature, about the age of
forty, with a long, withered visage very much resembling that of a
baboon. He wore his own hair in a queue that reached to his rump, and on
it a hat the size and cock of Antient Pistol’s. He was about five feet
and three inches in height, sixteen inches of which went to his face and
long scraggy neck; his thighs were about six inches in length; his legs,
resembling two spindles or drumsticks, two feet and a half; and his body
the remainder; so that, on the whole, he appeared like a spider or
grasshopper erect. His dress consisted of a frock of bear-skin, the
skirts about half a foot long, a hussar waistcoat, scarlet breeches
reaching half-way down his thighs, worsted stockings rolled up almost to
his groin, and shoes with wooden heels at least two inches high; he
carried a sword very nearly as long as himself in one hand, and with the
other conducted his lady, who seemed to be a woman of his own age, still
retaining some remains of good looks, but so ridiculously affected that
any one who was not a novice in the world would easily have perceived in
her deplorable vanity the second-hand airs of a lady’s woman.
This ridiculous couple were Captain and Mrs. Weazel. The travellers all
assembled in the kitchen of the inn, where, according to the custom of
the time, such impecunious wayfarers were entertained; but the captain
desired a room for himself and his wife, so that they might sup by
themselves, instead of in that communal fashion. The innkeeper, however,
did not much relish this, but would have given way to the demand,
providing the other passengers made no objection. Unhappily for the
captain’s absurd dignity, the others _did_ object; Miss Jenny, the lady
with the silver-trimmed hat, in particular, observing that “if Captain
Weazel and his lady had a mind to sup by themselves, they might wait
until the others should have done.” At this hint the captain put on a
martial frown and looked very big, without speaking; while his
yoke-fellow, with a disdainful toss of her nose, muttered something about
“creature!” which Miss Jenny overhearing, stepped up to her, saying,
“None of your names, good Mrs. Abigail. Creature! quotha—I’ll assure
you—no such creature as you, neither—no quality-coupler.” Here the
captain interposed, with a “D—n me, madam, what do you mean by that?”
“Sir, who are you?” replied Miss Jenny; “who made you a captain, you
pitiful, trencher-scraping, pimping curler? The army is come to a fine
pass when such fellows as you get commissions. What, I suppose you think
I don’t know you? You and your helpmate are well met: a cast-off
mistress and a bald valet-de-chambre are well yoked together.”
“Blood and wounds!” cried Weazel; “d’ye question the honour of my wife,
madam? No man in England durst say so much—I would flay him, carbonado
him! Fury and destruction! I would have his liver for my supper!” So
saying, he drew his sword and flourished it, to the great terror of
Strap; while Miss Jenny, snapping her fingers, told him she did not value
his resentment that!
We will pass over the Rabelaisian adventures of the night, which, amusing
enough, are too robust for these pages; and will proceed to the next
day’s journey. Before they started, Weazel had proved himself the arrant
coward and braggart which the reader has already perceived him to be;
but, notwithstanding this exposure, he entertained the company in the
wagon with accounts of his valour: how he had once knocked down a soldier
who had made game of him; had tweaked a drawer by the nose who had found
fault with his picking his teeth with a fork; and had, moreover,
challenged a cheesemonger who had had the presumption to be his rival.
For five days they travelled in this manner. On the sixth day, when they
were about to sit down to dinner, the innkeeper came and told them that
three gentlemen, just arrived, had ordered the meal to be sent to their
apartment, although told that it had been bespoken by the passengers in
the wagon,—to which information they had replied: “The passengers in the
wagon might be d—d; their betters must be served before them; they
supposed it would be no hardship on such travellers to dine on bread and
cheese for one day.”
This was a great disappointment to them all, and they laid their heads
together to remedy it, Miss Jenny observing that Captain Weazel, being a
soldier by profession, ought to protect them. The captain adroitly
excused himself by saying that he would not, for all the world, be known
to have travelled in a wagon; swearing, at the same time, that, could he
appear with honour, they should eat his sword sooner than his provision.
On this declaration, Miss Jenny, snatching his weapon, drew it and ran
immediately into the kitchen, where she threatened to put the cook to
death if he did not immediately send the victuals into their room. The
noise she made brought the three strangers down, one of whom no sooner
perceived her than he cried, “Ha! Jenny Ramper! what brought thee
hither?”
“My dear Jack Rattle,” she replied, running into his arms, “is it you?
Then Weazel may go whistle for a dinner—I shall dine with you.”
They consented with joy to this proposal; and the others were on the
point of being reduced to a very uncomfortable meal, when Joey, the
wagoner, understanding the whole affair, entered the kitchen with a
pitchfork in his hand, and swore he would be the death of any man who
should pretend to seize the victuals prepared for the wagon. On this,
the three strangers drew their swords, and, being joined by their
servants, bloodshed seemed imminent; when the landlord, interposing,
offered to part with his own dinner, for the sake of peace; which
proposal was accepted and all ended happily.
When the journey was resumed in the afternoon, Roderick chose to walk
some distance beside the wagoner, a merry, good-natured fellow, who
informed him that Miss Jenny was a common girl of the town, who, falling
in company with a recruiting officer who had carried her down in the
stage-coach from London to Newcastle, was obliged to return, as her
companion was now in prison for debt. Weazel had been a valet-de-chambre
to my Lord Fizzle while he lived separate from his lady; but on their
reconciliation she insisted on Weazel’s being turned off, as well as the
woman who had lived with him: when his lordship, to get rid of them both
with a good grace, proposed that Weazel should marry his mistress, when
he would procure a commission in the army for him.
Roderick and the wagoner both had a profound contempt for Weazel, and
resolved to put his courage to the test by alarming the passengers with
the cry of “a highwayman” as soon as a horseman should appear. It was
dusk when a man on horseback approached them. Joey gave the alarm, and a
general consternation arose; Strap leaping out of the wagon and hiding
himself behind a hedge; the usurer exclaiming dolefully and rustling
about in the straw, as though hiding something; Mrs. Weazel wringing her
hands and crying; and the captain pretending to snore.
This latter artifice did not succeed with Miss Jenny, who shook him by
the shoulder and bawled out: “’Sdeath! captain, is this a time to snore
when we are going to be robbed? Get up, for shame, and behave like a
soldier and man of honour.”
Weazel pretended to be in a great passion for being disturbed, and swore
he would have his nap out if all the highwaymen in England surrounded
him. “What are you afraid of?” continued he; at the same time trembling
with such agitation that the whole vehicle shook.
“Plague on your pitiful soul!” exclaimed Miss Jenny; “you are as arrant a
poltroon as was ever drummed out of a regiment. Stop the wagon, Joey,
and if I have rhetoric enough, the thief shall not only take your purse,
but your skin also.”
By this time the horseman had come up with them, and proved to be a
gentleman’s servant, well known to Joey, who told him the plot, and
desired him to carry it on a little further, by going up to the wagon and
questioning those within. Accordingly he approached, and in a terrible
voice demanded, “Who have we got here?” Isaac replied, in a lamentable
voice, “Here’s a poor, miserable sinner, who has got a small family to
maintain, and nothing in the world but these fifteen shillings, which, if
you rob me of, we must all starve together.”
“Who’s that sobbing in the corner?” continued the supposed highwayman.
“A poor, unfortunate woman,” answered Mrs. Weazel, “on whom, I beg you,
for Christ’s sake, to have compassion.”
“Are you maid or wife?” said he.
“Wife, to my sorrow,” said she.
“Who, or what is your husband?” continued he.
“My husband,” continued Mrs. Weazel, “is an officer in the army, and was
left sick at the last inn where we dined.”
“You must be mistaken, madam,” said he, “for I myself saw him get into
the wagon this afternoon.” Here he laid hold of one of Weazel’s legs,
and pulled him out from under his wife’s petticoats, where he had
concealed himself. The trembling captain, detected in this inglorious
situation, rubbed his eyes, and affecting to wake out of sleep, cried,
“What’s the matter?”
“What’s the matter? The matter is not much,” answered the horseman; “I
only called in to inquire after your health, and so adieu, most noble
captain.” So saying, he clapped spurs to his horse, and was out of sight
in a moment.
It was some time before Weazel could recollect himself; but at length,
reassuming his big look, he said, “’Sdeath! why did he ride away before I
had time to ask him how his lord and his lady do? Don’t you remember
Tom, my dear?” addressing his wife.
“Yes,” replied she; “I think I do remember something of the fellow; but
you know I seldom converse with people of his station.”
“Hey-day!” cried Joey; “do you know the young man, coptain?”
“Know him?” cried Weazel; “many a time has he filled a glass of Burgundy
for me at my Lord Trippett’s table.”
“And what may his neame be, coptain?” said Joey.
“His name!—his name,” replied Weazel, “is Tom Rinser.”
“Wounds!” cried Joey, “a has changed his own neame then! for I’se lay any
wager he was christened John Trotter.”
This raised a laugh against the captain, who seemed very much
disconcerted; when Isaac broke silence and said, “It was no matter who or
what he was, as he had not proved the robber they suspected. They ought
to bless God for their narrow escape.”
“Bless God!” said Weazel, “for what? Had he been a highwayman I should
have eaten his blood and body before he had robbed me or any one in this
diligence.”
“Ha, ha, ha!” cried Miss Jenny; “I believe you will eat all you kill,
indeed, captain.”
The usurer was so well pleased at the end of this adventure that he could
not refrain from being severe, and took notice that Captain Weazel seemed
to be a good Christian, for he had armed himself with patience and
resignation, instead of carnal weapons, and worked out his salvation with
fear and trembling; whereupon, amidst much laughter, Weazel threatened to
cut the Jew’s throat. The usurer, taking hold of this menace,
said:—“Gentlemen and ladies, I take you all to witness, that my life is
in danger from this bloody-minded officer: have him bound over to the
peace.” This second sneer procured another laugh against the captain,
who remained crestfallen for the rest of the journey.
XXV
THE remaining miles to Gateshead are made up of the shabby village of Low
Fell, where the road begins to rise, and the uninteresting way over the
ridge of the Fell itself. By the word “Fell,” North of England people
describe what Southerners call a hill. The common land of Gateshead
Fell, 675 acres, was enclosed under Acts of Parliament, 1809, 1822.
[Picture: Modern Newcastle: from Gateshead]
Many were the gibbets erected in the old days on Gateshead Fell. The
last was that on which swung the body of Robert Hazlett, who on this
spot, on the evening of August 6th, 1770, robbed a young lady, Miss
Margaret Benson, who was returning to Newcastle in a post-chaise from
Durham. On the same night a post-boy was relieved of his bags at the
same place. Hazlett was hanged at Durham, and his body gibbeted here,
twenty-five feet high. For some time afterwards, every day for an hour,
an old man was seen to kneel and pray at the foot of the gibbet. It was
the wretched man’s father! A beacon was fixed on the Fell in the winter
of 1803–4, on an alarm of invasion; hence this height was afterwards
known as “Beacon Hill.”
The present-day aspect of the road does not hint at anything so tragical,
and is merely commonplace, the last touch of vulgarity added by the trams
that ply along it from Gateshead.
The place-name of Gateshead seemed to John Ogilby, in his book,
_Britannia Depicta_, 1676, to require explanation, and he proceeded to
say that it was “alias Gate-Side, seated on the Banks of the Tine, by the
Saxons call’d Gates-heved, i.e. _Caprae Caput_, or Goat’s-head, perchance
from an Inn with such a sign.”
But perchance not. While the Saxon name certainly was Gatesheved, it
meant “road’s head,” either in allusion to the Roman bridge across the
river being broken down and passage being possible only by water, or else
referring to the abruptly-descending land on either side, where the road
would seem to be coming to a sudden end.
Gateshead is to Newcastle what Southwark is to London, and the Tyne which
runs between may be likened in the same way to the Thames. Comparison
from any other point of view is impossible. Gateshead is nowadays a
great deal worse than it was when Doctor Johnson called it “a dirty lane
leading to Newcastle.” It may be ranked among the half-dozen dirtiest
places on earth, and the lane which the Doctor saw has sent forth miles
of streets as bad as itself, so that the geographical distribution of
filth and squalor has in modern times become very wide. There are two
ways of entering Newcastle since the High Level Bridge across the Tyne
has supplemented what used to be the old Tyne Bridge, once, and until
fifty years ago, the only way of crossing the river except by boat. When
Stephenson flung his High Level Bridge across that stream, as yellow, if
not as historic, as the Tiber, he provided a roadway for general traffic
beneath the railway, and the old bridge lost its favour, simply for the
reason that to cross it the steeply descending West Street and Bottle
Lane had to be taken and the just as steeply ascending bank of the river
on the Newcastle side to be climbed; while by the High Level a flat road
was provided. It is true that all traffic, pedestrian and wheeled, pays
a small toll for the privilege, but it is the lesser of the two evils.
Let those who have no concern with old times take their easeful way
through the gloomy portals of the High Level Bridge, eighty-five feet
above high-water mark. But let us examine the steep and smelly street,
paved with vile granite setts and strewn with refuse, which conducts to
the Tyne Bridge, or the Swing Bridge as it is nowadays, since the old
structure was removed, the channel of the river deepened, and the
wonderful swinging portion of the remodelled bridge, 281 feet in length,
and swung open or closed by hydraulic power, constructed in 1876. With
that work went the last fragments of the Roman bridge built by Hadrian
(_Publius Aelius Hadrianus_) more than a thousand years before; a bridge
which, indeed, gave the Roman camp its name of _Pons Ælii_. His bridge,
long in ruins, was replaced in 1248 by a mediæval structure which was
destroyed by a flood in 1771.
This way came the coaches, climbing into Newcastle up Sandhill and the
Side, whose steep and curving roadway remains to prove how difficult were
the ways of travellers as well as transgressors in the old times. Old
and new jostle here. The Swing Bridge turns silently on its pivot to the
touch of a lever in its signal tower, and a force our grandfathers never
knew performs the evolution; but side by side with this miracle still
stand the darkling lanes and steep waterside alleys of Gateshead and
Newcastle that were standing before science and commerce, mother and
daughter, came down upon the Tyne and transformed it.
A writer in an old-time Northern magazine appears to have been jolted
into a bad humour respecting Newcastle’s precipitous old approach:—“We
have no connection whatever with the coal-trade, and were never at
Newcastle but once, passing through it on the top of an exceedingly heavy
coach, along with about a score of other travellers. But, should we live
a thousand years, it would not be possible for us to forget that transit.
We wonder what blockhead first built Newcastle; for before you can get
into and out of it, you must descend one hill and ascend another, about
as steep as the sides of a coal-pit. Had the coach been upset that day,
instead of the night before and the day after, there would have been no
end and, indeed, no beginning, to this magazine. We all clustered as
thickly together on the roof of the vehicle (it was a sort of macvey, or
fly) as the good people of Rome did to see Great Pompey passing
along:—but we, on the contrary, saw nothing but a lot of gaping
inhabitants, who were momentarily expecting to see us brought low. We
remarked one man fastening his eye upon our legs that were dangling from
the roof under an iron rail, who, we are confident, was a Surgeon.
However, we kept swinging along, from side to side, as if the macvey had
been as drunk as an owl, and none of the passengers, we have reason to
believe, were killed that day—it was a maiden circuit. But, after all,
we love Newcastle, and wish its coals may burn clear and bright till
consumed in the last general conflagration.”
[Picture: Old Newcastle: Showing the now Demolished Town Bridge]
High over head goes the High Level, and the smoke and rumble of its
trains mingle with the clash of Newcastle’s thousand anvils and the reek
of her million chimneys; but there still stands against the sky-line—most
fittingly seen from the Gateshead bank at eventide, when petty details
are lost and only broad effects remain—the coroneted steeple of St.
Nicholas and the great black form of the Norman keep, reminding the
contemplative that Monkchester was the name of the city before the
Conqueror came and built that fortress whose fame as the “New Castle” has
remained to this day to give a title to the place, just as the “new work”
at Newark has ever since stood sponsor for that town. Again, no sooner
have you crossed the Swing Bridge and come to Quayside than other
vestiges of old Newcastle are encountered, in the remains of the Castle
wall and the steps that lead upwards to Castle Garth, where shoemakers
and cobblers of footgear of the most waterside and unfashionable
character still blink and cobble in their half-underground dens, the
descendants, probably, of those whom a French traveller remarked here in
the time of Charles the Second. If, instead of climbing these stairs,
the traveller elects to follow the track of the coaches, he will traverse
Sandhill, which in very early days was an open space by the river, but
has for centuries past been a street. It was at Sandgate close by,
according to the ballad, that the lassie was heard to sing the well-known
refrain of “Weel may the keel row, the boat that my love’s in,” and
indeed it is a district that breathes romance, commonplace though its
modern offices may look. Does not the Moot Hall look down upon Sandhill?
“Many a heart has broken inside those walls,” said a passer-by, with
unwonted picturesqueness, to the present writer, gazing at that hall of
justice.
There is a pretty flavour of romance—compact, it is true, of the most
unpromising materials, like the voluptuous scents which modern science
extracts from coal-tar—still clinging to Sandhill. Just where a group of
curious old houses, very old, very tall, and nearly all windows, remains,
the explorer will perceive a memorial tablet let into one of the
frontages, setting forth that “From one of the windows of this house, now
marked with a blue pane of glass, Bessie Surtees eloped with John Scott,
afterwards Lord Chancellor Eldon, November 18th, 1772.” John Scott was
twenty-one years of age at the time, and was at home on vacation from
Oxford. His father, a successful coal-fitter, had sent him, as he had
already done his elder brother, William, afterwards Lord Stowell, to the
University. He had already gained a fellowship there, which he forfeited
on his elopement with, and marriage to, his Bessie. She descended from
her casement by the aid of a ladder hidden by an accomplice in the shop
below, and they were over the Border and wedded by the blacksmith at
Blackshields before any one could pursue. Bessie’s relatives were
bitterly opposed to the match, and so, nearly without resources, the pair
had to resort to London and live frugally in Cursitor Street while he
studied hard at law, instead of, as originally intended, for the Church.
His first year’s earnings scarce amounted to enough to live on. “Many a
time,” said he in after years, “have I run down from Cursitor Street to
Fleet Market, to buy sixpennyworth of sprats for our supper.” The
turning-point in his career occurred in a case in which he insisted on a
legal point against the wishes of his clients. The case was decided
against him, but was reversed on appeal on the point he had contested.
From that time continued success awaited him, and he eventually became
Lord Chancellor. The clashing Romeo of an earlier day became, however, a
very different person in after years. Much poring over parchments and
long-continued professional strife took all the generous enthusiasm out
of him, and by ways not the most scrupulous he amassed one of the
greatest fortunes ever scraped together by a successful lawyer. Bessie,
meanwhile, had become quite as much of a handful as she had been an
armful.
Romance wanes. As Conservators of the Tyne, the Corporation of Newcastle
have, for the last four centuries, proclaimed their authority by once in
every five years going in procession on the river, in various craft. It
was on these occasions the acknowledged custom that, on returning and
landing, the Mayor should choose the prettiest girl in the crowds of
spectators and publicly salute her with a civic kiss. In acknowledgment
of this favour his Worship presented her with a new sovereign. But the
procession of “Barge Day,” as it was called, was discontinued after May
16th, 1901, and is not likely to be revived.
From Sandhill the coaches journeyed along the Side, which remains as
steep and almost as picturesque as ever, even if not rendered
additionally curious by the gigantic railway arch that spans it and
clears the roofs of its tallest houses. The last mail-coach left
Newcastle for Berwick and Edinburgh, with the Union Jack flying at
half-mast, on July 5, 1847, and those days are so thoroughly done with
that none of Newcastle’s coaching inns are left. Indeed, the whole
character of the place has changed since little over a century and a half
ago, when John Wesley entered the opinion in his diary that it was a
“lovely place and lovely company,” and, furthermore, said that “if he
were not journeying in hope of a better world, here he would be content
to live and die.” Coal had even then been shipped for centuries from
Newcastle, but miles of manufactories had not yet arisen upon the banks
of “coaly Tyne,” and so unprogressive was the town that it was still,
with gardens and orchards, easily comprised within its mediæval walls;
those walls which had many a time withstood the Scots, and even when
Wesley was here in 1745 were being prepared to resist the Pretender.
Newcastle—difficult as it may now be to realise the fact—was then a very
small town, and was governed accordingly. Primitive punishments as well
as primitive government survived until a hundred and fifty years ago,
when scolds still wore bridles or were ducked, and when local tipplers
yet perambulated the streets in the drunkard’s cloak, an ingenious
instrument of little ease which now reposes in the Museum.
Far beyond the ancient walls now extend the streets of the modern city;
Grey Street chief among them, classically gloomy and extra-classically
grimed to the blackness of Erebus; a heavy Ionic pillar at its northern
end bearing aloft the statue of Earl Grey, the Prime Minister who secured
the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1832.
Away from the chief business streets, many of the curious old
thoroughfares may be sought, but they are nowadays the receptacles of
inconceivable dirt, and anything but desirable. The narrow streets
called “chares” answer to the “wynds” of Edinburgh and the “rows” of
Yarmouth. Their name has been the subject of jokes innumerable, and
misunderstandings not a few; as, when a judge, previously unacquainted
with Newcastle, holding an assize here, heard a witness say that he saw
“three men come out of the foot of a chare,” and ordered him out of the
witness-box, thinking him insane, until the jury of Newcastle men
explained matters.
[Picture: “The Drunkard’s Cloak”] Despite its smoke and untidiness, the
folks of this grimy Tyneside city have a good conceit of it. To them it
is “canny Newcastle,” an epithet whose meaning differs from the Scotch,
and here means “fine,” or “neat.” The stranger who fails to find those
qualities, who perceives instead the defects of dirt and a pall of smoke
that blackens everything to an inky hue, and accordingly thanks
Providence that his home is elsewhere, is to the Tynesiders a Goth.
For Newcastle is practical. It has its great newspapers, and has
produced literary men of note; but the forging of iron and steel, the
shrinking of steel jackets upon big guns, the making of ships and all
kinds of munitions of war appeal principally to the Novocastrian who may
by chance have no especial love of that coaling trade which is
pre-eminently and historically his. It is therefore quite characteristic
of Newcastle folks that, in the mid-century, a literary man, since become
famous, was as a boy solemnly warned by a townsman against such a career
as he was contemplating. “Ah’m sorry,” said he, “to hear that ye want to
go to London, and to take to this writing in the papers. It’ll bring ye
to no good, my boy. I mind there was a very decent friend of mine, auld
Mr. Forster, the butcher in the Side. He had a laddie just like you; and
nothing would sarve him but he must go away to London to get eddicated,
as he called it; and when he had got eddicated, he wouldn’t come back to
his father’s shop, though it was a first-class business. He would do
nothing but write, and write, and write; and at last he went back again
to London, and left his poor old father all alone; and ah’ve never heard
tell of that laddie since!”
Of course he had not. What rumours of literary life in London could then
have penetrated to the shores of the “coaly Tyne.” That laddie, however,
was John Forster, the biographer of Dickens.
These practical men of Newcastle have achieved the most wonderful things.
The home of the Stephensons was at Wylam, only nine miles away, and so
the town can fairly claim the inventor of railways among its natives. We
need not linger to discuss the wonders of the locomotive; they are
sufficiently evident. Newcastle men have even changed the character of
their river. There are still those who can recollect the Tyne as a
shallow stream in which the laden “keels,” heaped up with coal, not
infrequently grounded. Nowadays the largest war-vessels are built
up-stream, at Elswick, and take their stately way to the sea with their
heavy armaments, and no mishap occurs. Clanging arsenals and factories
line the banks for many more miles than the historian, anxious for his
reputation, dare mention. The Armstrong works alone are over a mile
long, and employ some sixteen thousand hands. Lord Armstrong himself was
the inventor of hydraulic machinery; and the Swan incandescent electric
lamp, which bears the name of its inventor, was the work of a Newcastle
man. Others of whom England is proud were born here, notably Admiral
Lord Collingwood. To their practicality these men of Newcastle add
sentiment, for they have carefully placed tablets on the houses where
their celebrated men were born, and they have not only erected a monument
to Stephenson, but have also placed one of his first engines—“Puffing
Billy”—on a pedestal beside the High Level Bridge, where the huge modern
expresses roar past the quaint relic, day and night, in startling
contrast. Also, they one and all have the most astonishingly keen
affection for their old parish church of St. Nicholas, in these latter
days become a cathedral.
If you would touch a Novocastrian on his most sensitive spot, praise or
criticise the cathedral church of St. Nicholas, and he will plume himself
or lose his temper, as the case may be. That building, and especially
its tower, with the wonderful stone crown supported on ribbed arches and
set about with its cluster of thirteen pinnacles, is the apple of
Newcastle’s eye. It figures as a stock decorative heading in the
Newcastle papers, and does duty in a hundred other ways. Built toward
the close of the sixteenth century, that fairy-like corona has had its
escapes, as when, during the stubborn defence in 1644, under the Royalist
Sir John Marley, the Scottish general, Alexander Leslie, Lord Leven,
commanding the besieging forces, threatened to batter it down with his
cannon if the town were not at once surrendered. To this Sir John Marley
made the very practical reply of causing all his Scottish prisoners to be
placed in the tower, and sent word to the besiegers that they might, if
they would, destroy it, but that their friends should perish at the same
time. The “Thief and Reiver” bell, a relic of old times when the outlaws
of Northumberland were given short shrift wherever and whenever found, is
still rung before the opening of the annual fair, and recalls the old
custom of giving those gentry immunity from arrest during fair-time; but
it would probably not be safe for any one “wanted” by the police to rely
upon this sentimental survival.
[Picture: “Puffing Billy”]
XXVI
FOR fully a mile and a half on leaving Newcastle the road runs over the
Town Moor, a once wild waste of common, and even now a bleak and
forbidding open space whose horizon on every side commands the gaunt
Northumbrian hills, or is hidden with the reek of Newcastle town, or the
collieries that render the way sordid and ugly. Newcastle’s lovely
pleasance, Jesmond Dene, is hidden away to the right from the traveller
along the road, who progresses through Bulman’s Village (now dignified
with the new name of Gosforth), Salter’s Lane, Wide Open and Seaton Burn
with sinking heart, appalled at the increasing wretchedness and
desolation brought by the coal-mining industry upon the scene. Off to
the right lies Killingworth, among the collieries, where George
Stephenson began his career in humble fashion. His cottage stands there
to this day. At the gates of Blagdon Park, eight miles from Newcastle,
where the white bulls of the Ridleys guard the entrance in somewhat
spectral fashion, the surroundings improve. Here the Ridleys have been
seated for centuries, and from their wooded domain watched the belching
smoke of the pits they own, which year by year and generation by
generation have added to their wealth. Lord Ridley is now the
representative of these owners of mineral wealth, and lord of Blagdon.
Midway of the long park wall that borders the road on the way to Morpeth
stand the modern lodge and gates, erected in 1887; with that relic of old
Newcastle, the Kale Cross, just within the grounds and easily seen from
the highway. The building is not so much a cross as a market-house, and
is just a classical pavilion in the Doric style, open on all sides to the
weather. It stood, until the middle of the eighteenth century, upon the
Side at Newcastle, and marked the centre of the market then held there.
The townsfolk presented it to the Matthew White Ridley of the period, and
here in lovelier surroundings than it knew originally, it stands, the
wreathed urns and couchant lion on its roof contrasting finely with a
dense background of foliage.
Beyond the park, the road crosses the Black Dene, whence Blagdon derives
its name; one of those ravines that now begin to be a feature of the way.
This expands on the right hand into Hartford Dene, to which Newcastle
picnic-parties come in summer-time for brief respite from the smoke and
clangour of their unlovely town. Thence, through Stannington, Clifton,
and Catchburn, and to the long and tortuous descent into Morpeth, lying
secluded in the gorge of the Wansbeck.
Morpeth is little changed since coaching times, but the one very
noticeable alteration shows by what utter barbarians the town was
inhabited towards the close of that era. Entering it, the turbulent
Wansbeck is crossed by a stone bridge, built in 1830, to provide better
accommodation for the increased traffic than the ancient one, a few yards
up stream, afforded. For some five years longer the old building was
suffered to remain, and then, with the exception of its piers, it was
demolished. No one benefited by its destruction, it stood in no one’s
way, and its utility was such that a footbridge, a graceless thing of
iron and scantling, has been erected across those ancient piers, to
continue the access still required at this point from one bank to the
other. It was to our old friends the monks that travellers were beholden
for that ancient Gothic bridge, and their old toll-house still remains,
after having passed through a varied career as a chapel, a school, and a
fire-engine house. Turner’s view shows the road over the bridge, looking
south; with the castle gate-house on the hill-top, a great deal nearer
than it actually is. This, the sole relic of that old stronghold, has in
later years been restored until it looks almost as new as the would-be
Gothic of the gaol, which stands beside the modern bridge on entering the
town and deludes the more ignorant into a belief of its genuine
antiquity. At Morpeth, until the assizes were removed to Newcastle,
justice was dispensed in this sham mediæval castle, built in 1821, and
now, all too vast for present needs, used as a police-station. The old
town gaol, at the other end of the town, facing the market-place, is much
more interesting. Built in the likeness of a church tower, curfew is
still rung from its belfry, beneath the queer little figures on the roof.
Market-day brings crowds of drovers and endless droves of sheep and
cattle to this spot, to say nothing of the pigs, singularly plentiful in
these parts. “He’s driving his swine to Morpeth market,” is an
expression still used of a snoring man in the neighbourhood. Always
excepting market-day, Morpeth is now a curiously quiet and dreamy town.
The stress of ancient times has left its few relics in the mouldering
remains of strong and defensible walls, and in certain proverbs and
sayings reflecting discreditably upon the Scottish people, but the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are more evident in its streets than
previous eras. To those centuries belong the many old inns with signs
for the most part redolent of the coaching age: the “Nag’s Head,” the
“Grey Nag’s Head,” the “Queen’s Head,” “Turk’s Head,” and “Black Bull”;
this last with an odd semi-circular front and a beautiful coach-entrance
displaying some fine Adam decoration.
[Picture: Morpeth]
That Morpeth folk still cherish old anti-Scottish sayings is not at all
remarkable; for old manners, old sayings, and ancient hatreds die slowly
in such places as this, and moreover, the Morpeth of old suffered
terribly from Scottish raiders. Later times saw a more peaceful
irruption, when Scottish youths came afoot down the great road in quest
of fame and fortune in the south. People looked askance upon them as
Scots, while innkeepers hated them for their poverty and their canniness.
Those licensed victuallers thought, with Dr. Johnson, who did not greatly
like them either, that “the finest prospect for a Scotchman was the high
road that led him into England.” This bitter satire, by the way, was in
reply to a Mr. Ogilvie, who had been contending on behalf of the “great
many noble wild prospects” which Scotland contained. Smollett, in his
_Humphry Clinker_, shows how greatly the Scots were misliked along this
route about 1766. He says that, from Doncaster northwards, all the
windows of all the inns were scrawled with doggerel rhymes in abuse of
the Scottish nation. This fact was pointed out to that fine Scottish
character, Lismahago, and with it a particularly scurrilous epigram. He
read it with some difficulty, the glass being dirty, and with the most
starched composure.
“Vara terse and vara poignant,” said he; “but with the help of a wat
dishclout it might be rendered more clear and parspicuous.”
The country between Morpeth and Alnwick is dotted with peel-towers and
their ruins, built in the wild old times when the ancestors of these
peaceful Scots came in quest of spoil, laying waste the Borders far and
wide. One had but to turn aside from the road at Warrener’s House, two
miles beyond Morpeth, and thence proceed eastward for a further two, for
ten castles to be seen at once from the vantage-point of Cockle Park
Tower, itself a fine relic of a fortress belonging in the fifteenth
century to the Ogles, situated now on a farm called by the hideous name
of Blubberymires.
The peculiar appropriateness of Morpeth’s name, meaning as it does
“moor-path,” is fully realised when coming up the road, up the well-named
High Highlaws to where the road to Cockle Park Tower branches off, and
where an old toll-house stands, with “Warrener’s House,” a deserted
red-brick mansion, opposite. It is quite worth while to ask any passing
countryman the name of that house, for then the “Northumbrian burr” will
be heard in all its richness. As De Foe remarked, two hundred years ago,
Northumbrians have “a Shibboleth upon their Tongues, namely, a difficulty
in pronouncing the letter R,” and in their mouths, consequently, the name
becomes, grotesquely enough, “Wawwener.”
Causey Park Bridge, over a little rivulet, a ruined windmill, and the
remains of Causey Park Tower are the next features of the way before
reaching a rise where an old road goes scaling a hillside to the right
hand, surmounted by a farm picturesquely named “Helm-on-the-Hill.”
Thence downhill on to Bockenfield Moor, and then precipitously down again
through West Thirston and across the picturesque bridge that spans the
lovely Coquet, into Felton: villages bordering either bank of the river,
where the angler finds excellent sport, and where the rash cyclist,
regardless of the danger-boards erected for his guidance on the
hill-tops, tries involuntary conclusions with the aforesaid bridge at the
bottom. A mile onward, up the rising road, is the park of Swarland Hall,
with “Nelson’s Monument,” a time-stained obelisk, seen amid the trees
within the park fence, and showing against the sky-line as the traveller
approaches the moorland height of Rushy Cap. Alexander Davison, squire
of Swarland Hall and friend of the Admiral, erected it, “not to
commemorate the public virtue and heroic achievements of Nelson, which is
the duty of England, but to the memory of private friendship.” Occupying
so prominent a position by the roadside, it was probably intended to
edify the coach-passengers of old. So to Newton-on-the-Moor—which might
more fitly be named Newton-on-the-Hill—with its half a dozen cottages and
its coal-pits, and thence by a featureless but not unpleasing road into
Alnwick.
[Picture: The Market-Place, Morpeth]
[Picture: Felton Bridge]
It is something of a shock to the sentimental pilgrim, northward-bound,
that the entrance to historic Alnwick should be by the gas-works, the
railway station, the Farmers’ Folly (of which more shall presently be
said), and other unmistakable and unromantic evidences of modernity that
spread beyond the ancient confines of the town to form the suburb of
Bondgate Without; but man cannot live by medievalism alone. The town
itself is gained at that point where the heavy blackened mass of Bondgate
itself spans the road, just beyond the elaborately rebuilt “Old Plough,”
still exhibiting, however, the curious tablet from the old house:—
That which your Father old hath purchased and left
You to possess, do you dearly
Hold to show his worthiness. 1714.
[Picture: Alnwick]
XXVII
ALNWICK is a town with a great past and a somnolent present. There are
yawns at every turn, echoes with every footfall, and grass growing
unbidden in the streets. But there are forces of elemental power at
Alnwick, little though the stranger suspects them. There have of late
years been periods of storm and stress in the columns of the _Alnwick
Gazette_, for instance, respecting the local water-supply, which have
drawn forth inappropriately fiery letters from correspondents, together
with many mixed metaphors. How is this for impassioned writing?—“The
retributive forces of well-balanced justice have, after a dead ebb,
returned with a swelling tide, and overtaken the arrogative policy of the
freeholders.” But this is nothing to the following striking figure of
“the arm of scandalous jobbery steeped to the lips in perfidious
dishonour;” a delightful literary image unsurpassed in Ireland itself; or
“another hydra of expense arising phoenix-like from the ashes of
misgovernment.” Did the word “hydrant,” we wonder, suggest this last
period? Is the dulness of Alnwick due to the decay following the
corruption hinted at? Perhaps, for, as this publicist next inquires,
“How could anything symbolical of greatness, wrapped with ropes of sand,
ever and for aye, flourish like the green bay-tree?” Ah! how? It is a
difficult question to answer, and so we will leave the question at that.
Alnwick, of course, derives its name from its situation on the romantic
Aln: the “wick,” or village on that river. The name is kin to that of
many other “wicks,” “weeks,” and “wykes” in England, and has its fellows
in such places as High Wycombe; Wykeham (now spelt Wickham) in Hampshire,
whence came William of Wykeham; the village of Week, near Winchester; and
in the town named simply Wick, in the north of Scotland. Alnwick in
these times is a place of a certain grim and lowering picturesqueness.
Its grey stone houses are at one with the greyness of the Northumbrian
skies, and a general air of barren stoniness impresses the traveller as
its chief feature. It is an effect of prisons and jailers which reaches
its height in the open space that fronts the barbican of the castle. You
look, instinctively, for His Majesty’s prison regulations on the outer
walls, and, approaching the gate, expect a warder’s figure at the wicket.
This is no uncongenial aspect of that old fortress. It is rather in the
Italian drawing-rooms, the picture-galleries, and the Renaissance
luxuries of the interior of the castle that the jarring note is struck
and all association with feudal times forgotten. Many a Border
moss-trooper has unwillingly passed through this grim barbican, and so
left the world for ever; and many more of higher estate have found this
old stronghold of the Percies a place of lifelong durance, or have in its
dungeons met a secret end. For chivalry was not inconsistent with
midnight murder or treachery, and the Percies, centred in their fortress
like spiders in their webs, had all the virtues and the vices of
chivalric times. Ambitious and powerful, they were alike a bulwark
against the Scots and a menace to successive kings of England, and none
in those olden times could have approached their castle gate with the
equable pulsation of the modern tourist. In those times, instead of
finding a broad level open space here, a deep ditch would have been seen
and a drawbridge must have been lowered before access was possible. Then
possibly the stone figures in violent attitudes that line the
battlements, and seem to be casting missiles down upon the heads of
visitors, may have been alarming; to-day we only wonder if they could
ever have tricked even the most bat-eyed warrior into a belief that they
were really living men-at-arms.
The Percies, whose name attaches more than any other to Alnwick, were,
strictly speaking, never its owners. The first of that name came over to
England with the Conqueror in the person of William de Percy, a younger
son of the feudal lord of the village of Percie in Normandy, which still
exists to point out to the curious tourist the spot whence this historic
family sprang. This William de Percy was nicknamed “Als Gernons,” or
“Whiskers,” whence derives the name of Algernon, even now a favourite one
with the Smithson-Percies. “Whiskers” was present at the battle of
Hastings, and for his aid was granted manors in Hampshire, Lincolnshire,
and York, but none in Northumberland. He died in 1086, when with the
Crusaders, near Jerusalem. The Percies never became connected in any way
with Alnwick, for the family of this William de Percy became extinct in
1166, when Agnes, an only child of his descendant, married Josceline de
Lovaine; and it was not until 1309 that the descendant of this Lovaine,
who had assumed the Percy name, came into wrongful possession of the vast
estates. Alnwick and sixty other baronies in Northumberland had until
then been in possession of the de Vescis, of whom Yvo de Vesci was the
original Norman owner. His descendant, William de Vesci, who died in
1297, was the last of his line, and appears to have been of a peculiarly
trusting disposition. He put a great (and an unfounded) faith in the
honesty of churchmen, leaving all his estates to Anthony Bek,
Prince-Bishop of Durham, in trust for an infant illegitimate son, until
he should come of age. But Bek picked a quarrel with his ward, and in
1309 sold the lands to Henry Percy, who thus became the first Baron Percy
of Alnwick.
But let us not do an injustice to the Church. Prince-Bishops were kittle
cattle, an amorphous kind of creature. Perhaps his lay half impelled Bek
to this knavery, and, following the Scriptural injunction not to let the
right hand know what is done by the left, his clerical moiety remained in
ignorance of the crime. Heaven be praised, there are no longer any of
these Jekyll and Hyde creatures, for the Bishops-Palatine of Durham were
abolished two generations or more since.
There were, in the fulness of time, three Barons Percy of Alnwick, and
then the Barony was erected into the Earldom of Northumberland. The axe
and the sword took heavy toll of this new line, for the Earls of
Northumberland seldom died in their beds, and father and son often
followed one another in a bloody death, until at length they became
extinct with the death of the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland.
Of these eleven, only seven died a natural death. There were Percies who
fell in battle; others who, rightly or wrongly, met the death of
traitors; one was torn to pieces by a mob; and another was obscurely done
to death in prison. Nor did only the heads of the family end violently;
their sons and other relations led lives as turbulent, and finished as
suddenly.
The only child of the eleventh Earl of Northumberland was a daughter,
Elizabeth Percy. She married firstly the Earl of Ogle; secondly, Thomas
Thynne of Longleat, who was murdered in Pall Mall in 1682 by Count
Koningsmarck; and thirdly, the sixth Duke of Somerset; thus bringing the
Percy estates into the Seymour family, and the Percy red hair as well.
It was of red-haired Elizabeth Percy, when Duchess of Somerset, that Dean
Swift wrote the bitter and diabolically clever lines that are supposed to
have lost him all chance of becoming a bishop. He wrote of her as
“Carrots”:—
Beware of carrots from Northumberland,
Carrots sown _Thynne_ a deep root may get,
If so be they are in Sumer set;
Their _cunnings mark_ thou; for I have been told
They assassin when young and poison when old.
Root out those carrots, O thou whose name
Is backwards and forwards always the same.
The one whose name was backwards and forwards alike was Queen Anne, for
Swift’s purpose “Anna.” It will be noticed that Swift not very obscurely
hints that Elizabeth Percy connived at murder.
Her eldest son, the seventh Duke of Somerset, had, curiously enough, only
one child, a daughter. She married “the handsomest man of his time,” Sir
Hugh Smithson, in 1740, and thus the property came into the hands of the
present holders.
This most fortunate, as well as most handsome, fellow was Sir Hugh
Smithson, one of a family of Yorkshire squires whose ancestor gained a
baronetcy, created 1660, for his services to the Stuarts. Sir Hugh, horn
1714, a son of Langdale Smithson, and grandson of another Sir Hugh, the
third baronet, had little early prospect of much position in life. He
was a younger son, and, like many another such, he went into trade. He
was an apothecary. Having succeeded as fourth baronet to position and
wealth, and with what he had made in commerce, the “handsomest man” made
this very handsome marriage. He had the aristocratic instinct, and,
discarding his old name, took that of Percy, to which, of course, he had
no sort of right.
For him in 1749 was revived the old title, Earl of Northumberland,
together with that of Baron Warkworth. In 1766 he became further, Duke
of Northumberland and Earl Percy, and died 1786.
The name of Percy is one to conjure with. The Lovaines, who had assumed
it, made it famous in the annals of chivalry, with a thousand deeds of
derring-do in the debateable lands. Smithson, too, is a good name. It
at least tells of descent from an honest craftsman, and Sir Hugh’s
knighted ancestor had, obviously, done nothing to be ashamed of.
Unfortunately for Sir Hugh and his successors, this unwarranted
assumption of an historic name took place so well within the historic
period that it is never likely to be forgotten. George the Third, who
also had the instinct of aristocracy, kept the fact well in mind, and
when, sorely against his will, he was obliged to confer the Dukedom of
Northumberland upon this ex-apothecary, consoled himself by vowing that
he should never obtain the Order of the Garter. The duke personally
solicited a blue ribbon from the king, and observed that he was “the
first Percy who has been refused the Garter.” “You forget,” replied his
Majesty, “that you are the first Smithson who has ever asked for it.”
The huge and historic stronghold of Alnwick had by this time become
ruinous, and the Smithson duke was for a while uncertain whether to
reside here or at Warkworth. Alnwick, however, found favour with him,
and he set to work to render it a place worthy of one of his quality. To
this end he wrought havoc with the feudal antiquities of the castle,
pulling down the ancient chapel and several of the towers, filling up the
moats, plastering the walls and ceilings, enlarging arrow-slits into
great windows, and playing the very devil with the place. The military
history of the castle, as expressed in the picturesque irregularity of
successive alterations and additions during many centuries, was swept
away by his zeal for uniformity, and the interior rooms were remodelled
in the taste of that age, to serve for a residence, to such an extent
that only the outer walls retained even the appearance of a castle. When
Pennant wrote of it in 1767, he said:—“You look in vain for any marks of
the grandeur of the feudal age; for trophies won by a family eminent in
our annals for military prowess and deeds of chivalry; for halls hung
with helms and hauberks” (good alliteration, that! but rash for Cockney
repetition), “or with the spoils of the chase; for extensive forests or
for venerable oaks. The apartments are large, and lately finished with a
most incompatible elegance. The gardens are equally inconsistent, trim
in the highest degree, and more adapted to a villa near London than to
the ancient seat of a great baron.” It was to this criticism of
“trimness” that Bishop Percy objected. Discussing Pennant with Dr.
Johnson, he could not sit quietly and hear him praise a man who had
spoken so disrespectfully of Alnwick Castle and the Duke’s
pleasure-grounds, and he eagerly opposed the Doctor, evidently with some
heat, for Johnson said, “He has done what he intended; he has made you
very angry.” To which the Bishop replied, “He has said the garden is
trim, which is representing it like a citizen’s parterre, when the truth
is, there is a very large extent of fine turf and gravel walks.”
“According to your own account, sir,” rejoined Johnson, “Pennant is
right. It is trim. Here is grass cut close and gravel rolled smooth.
Is not that trim? The extent is nothing against that; a mile may be as
trim as a square yard.” The Bishop was vanquished.
All the sham Gothic alterations made at a huge outlay by the first Duke
(with the exception of one room, which remains to show how atrocious his
style was) were swept away by Algernon, the fourth Duke, about 1855, and
at a still greater cost replaced internally with an interminable series
of salons in the Italian style. Externally, the castle is a mediæval
fortress; internally it is an Italian palace. These works cost over
£300,000, and serve to show the measure of ducal folly. Make a man a
duke and give him an income commensurate, and he goes mad and builds and
rebuilds, burying himself in masonry like a maggot in a cheese. But it
is good for trade; and perhaps that is why Providence allows a duke to be
created now and then.
This magnificence for a long time created its own Nemesis, and the Dukes
of Northumberland, in their gigantic castle, were worse off in one
respect than a clerk in London suburbs in a six-roomed, nine-inch walled,
jerry-built “villa” at £30 a year. They could never get a hot dinner!
The kitchen is large enough, and the fireplace so huge that the fire
cannot be made up without shovelling on a ton of coals; but the
dining-room is so far away, and the communication was so bad (involving
going across courtyards open to the sky) that everything was cold before
it reached table. This has been remedied, and my lords dukes now have
their food sent to them along rails on trolleys—just as they feed the
beasts at the Zoo.
The Dukes of Northumberland are well titled. They are autocrats in that
county, owning as they do 181,616 of its acres, and drawing a rental of
£161,874. Some of them have been insufferably egotistical. The
“Brislec” Tower, built on the neighbouring height of Brislaw by the first
Duke, is evidence sufficient to prove that. It is a monument by himself
to his own doings, and invites the pilgrim, in a long bombastical
inscription, to “Look around, behold,” and marvel at the plantations with
which he caused the bare hillsides to be covered.
But the most prominent memorial in Alnwick is the well-named “Farmers’
Folly,” erected to the second Duke in 1816. Entering or leaving the
town, it is a most striking object: a pillar 85 feet in height with the
Percy lion on its summit. What did the second Duke do to deserve this?
Did he serve his country in war? Was he a statesman? Was he benevolent
to the tenants who erected it? Not at all. Here is the story.
When the nineteenth century dawned we were at war with France, and wheat
and all kinds of produce were at enormously enhanced prices. The
farmers, therefore, began to do very well. Their banking-accounts
swelled, and some of them were on the way to realise small fortunes. The
Duke saw this and sorrowed because they found it possible to do more than
exist, and accordingly he added to their rents, doubling in almost every
instance—and in many others quadrupling—them. But when the country
entered on the long peace that followed Waterloo, and prices fell
enormously, the unfortunate farmers found it impossible to pay their way
under these added burdens. Mark the ducal generosity! As they could not
pay, he reduced the rents by twenty-five per cent.! Like a draper at his
annual sale, he effected a “great reduction,” an “alarming sacrifice,” by
taking off a percentage of what he had already imposed. How noble! Then
the tenants, the grateful fellows, subscribed to build the column, which
is inscribed: “To Hugh, Duke of Northumberland, by a grateful and united
tenantry.” Having done this, they went into bankruptcy and the
workhouse, or emigrated, or just gave up their farms because they could
not carry on any longer. The money they had subscribed did not suffice
to complete this testimonial to Duke Hugh’s benevolence, and so—a comic
opera touch—he subscribed the rest, and finished it himself. What
humorists these Smithsons are!
[Picture: Alnwick Castle, from the Road to Belford]
XXVIII
THE road, leaving Alnwick, plunges down from the castle barbican to the
black hollow in which the Aln flows, overhung with interlacing and
over-arching trees. The river is crossed here by that bridge shown in
Turner’s picture, the “Lion Bridge” as it is called, from the Percy lion,
“with tail stretched out as straight as a broom-handle,” standing on the
parapet and looking with steadfast gaze to the North. It is an addition
since Turner’s picture was painted, and an effective one, too. Also,
since that time, the trees have encroached and enshrouded the scene most
completely; so that the only satisfactory view is that looking backwards
when one has emerged from the black dell. And a most satisfactory view
it is, with the i’s and t’s of romance dotted and crossed so emphatically
that it looks like some theatrical scene, or the optically realised home
of the wicked hero of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. If this were not the
beginning of the twentieth century, one might well think twice before
venturing down into the inky depths of that over-shaded road; but these
are matter-of-fact times, and we know well that only the humdrum
burgesses of Alnwick, in their shops, are beyond; with, instead of a
mediæval duke in the castle, who would think nothing of hanging a stray
wayfarer or so from his battlements, only a very modern peer.
The road onwards is a weariness and an infliction to the cyclist, for it
goes on in a heavy three miles’ continuous rise up to the summit of
Heiferlaw Bank, whence there is a wide and windy view of uncomfortable
looking moorlands to the north, with the craggy Cheviots, perhaps covered
with snow, to the north-west. As a literary lady—Mrs. Montagu—wrote in
1789, when on a northern journey, “These moors are not totally
uninhabited, but they look unblest.” How true!
The proper antidote to this is the looking back to where, deep down in
the vale of Aln, lie town and castle, perhaps lapt in infrequent
sunshine, more probably seen through rain, but, in any case, presenting a
picture of sheltered content, and seeming to be protected from the rude
buffets of the weather by the hill on which we are progressing and by the
wooded flanks of Brislaw on the other side. “Seeming,” because those who
know Alnwick well could tell a different tale of wintry blasts and
inclement seasons that belie the hint of this hillside prospect for three
whole quarters round the calendar and a good proportion of the fourth.
In this lies a suggestion of why the Percies were so warlike. They and
their northern foes fought to keep themselves warm! Nowadays such
courses would lead to the police-court, and so football has become a
highly-popular game in these latitudes. But the southward glimpse of
Alnwick and its surroundings from the long rise of Heiferlaw Bank is,
when sunshine prevails, of a quite incommunicable charm. The background
of hills, covered with Duke Hugh’s woods and crowned with his tower,
recalls in its rich masses of verdure the landscapes of De Wint, and if
in the Duke’s inscription on that tower he seems to rank himself in
fellowship with the Creator, certainly, now he has been dead and gone
these hundred and twenty years, his saplings, grown into forest trees and
clothing the formerly barren hillsides, have effected a wonderful change.
[Picture: Malcolm’s Cross]
Beside the road are the few remaining stones of St. Leonard’s Chapel,
and, a short distance beyond, on the right, in a grove of trees,
Malcolm’s Cross, marking the spot where Malcolm Caenmore, king of
Scotland, was slain in 1093. It replaces a more ancient cross, and was
erected by the first Duchess of Northumberland in 1774. It was on his
seventh foray into Northumberland, besieging Alnwick Castle, that Malcolm
was killed, in an ambush carefully prepared for him. The legend, which
tells how he was treacherously slain by a thrust of a spear in the eye by
one of the Percies, who was pretending to deliver up the castle keys on
the spear’s point, is untrue, as of course is the popular derivation of
the family name from “pierce eye.” Moreover, the Percies, as we have
seen, did not own Alnwick until more than two hundred years afterwards.
Heiferlaw, as befits so commanding a hill-top so close to the Border, has
its watch-tower, looking across the marches, whence the outlying
defenders of Alnwick, ever watchful against Scottish raids, could give
timely warning to the garrison. It stands to-day a picturesque ruin, in
cultivated fields that in those fierce old times, when men had no leisure
for peaceful arts and industries, formed a portion of the wild moorland.
“Blawweary,” they call one of these fields, and the title is as
descriptive of this exposed situation as anything in the whole range of
nomenclature. Beyond this point the road descends to a level stretch of
country leading to North Charlton, where a few farmsteads alone stand for
a village, together with a prominent hillock covered with trees and
looking as though it had, or ought to have, a story to it; a story which
research fails to unearth. Opposite, meadows called locally “Comby
Fields,” presumably from a series of ridges seen in them, seem to point
to some forgotten history. Brownyside, adjoining, is an expanse of
moorland, covered with bracken, followed by Warenford, a pretty hamlet in
a hollow by a tiny stream, with Twizel Park on the left. At Belford, a
large wide-streeted village with a nowadays all too roomy coaching inn,
the “Blue Bell,” and an old cross with gas-lamps fitted to it by some
vandal or other, the road draws near the coast; that storied Northumbrian
sea-shore where Bambrough Castle on its islanded rock, many miles of
yellow quicksands, and the Farne and Holy Islands are threaded out in
succession before the gaze. Bambrough, the apex of its pyramidical form,
just glimpsed above an intervening headland, looks in the distance like
another St. Michael’s Mount, and Holy Island, ahead, is a miniature
fellow to it. The ruined cathedral of Holy Island, the ancient
Lindisfarne, the spot whence the missionary Aidan from Iona began the
conversion of Northumbria in 634, and where he was succeeded by that most
famous of all northern bishops and saints, the woman-hating St. Cuthbert,
is the mother-church of the north, and became possessed in later times of
great areas of land through which the road now passes. Buckton, Goswick,
Swinhoe, Fenwick, Cheswick, were all “possessions” of the monastery; and
the old ecclesiastical parish of Holy Island, once including all these
places on the mainland, and constituting then an outlying wedge of Durham
in the county of Northumberland, although now a thing of the past, still
goes by the local name of Islandshire. Buckton, now a few scattered
cottages by the roadside, held a place in the old rhyme which
incidentally shows that the monks of Lindisfarne adopted that comforting
doctrine:
Who lives a good life is sure to live well.
Their farms and granges yielded them all that the appreciative stomachs
of these religious recluses could desire, save indeed when the Scots
swooped over the Tweed and took their produce away. It is a rhyme of
good living:—
From Goswick we’ve geese, from Cheswick we’ve cheese;
From Buckton we’ve venison in store;
From Swinhoe we’ve bacon, but the Scots it have taken,
And the Prior is longing for more.
The yellow sands that occupy the levels and reach out at low tide to Holy
Island are treacherous. With the exquisite colouring of sea and sky on a
summer day blending with them, they look at this distance like the shores
of fairyland; but the grim little churchyard of Holy Island has many
memorials presenting another picture—a picture of winter storm and
shipwreck, for which this wild coast has ever been memorable. Off
Bambrough, where the Farne Islands are scattered in the sea, the scene is
still recalled of the wreck of the _Forfarshire_ and Grace Darling’s
heroism; and the monument of that famous girl stands in Bambrough
churchyard to render the summer pilgrim mindful of the danger of this
coast. Dangerous not only to those on the waters, but also to travellers
who formerly took the short cut from Berwick across the sands, instead of
going by the hilly road. The way, clearly marked in daylight by a line
of poles, has often been mistaken at night; sudden storms, arising when
travellers have reached midway, have swept them out to sea; or fogs have
entangled the footsteps even of those who knew the uncharted flats best.
Whatever the cause, to be lost here was death. The classic instance,
still narrated, is that of the postboy carrying the mails from Edinburgh
on the 20th of November, 1725. Neither he nor the mail-bags was ever
heard of again after leaving Berwick, and it was naturally concluded that
he was lost on the quicksands in a sea-fog.
Away on the west of the road rise the Kyloe hills, like ramparts, and on
their tallest ridge the church tower of Kyloe, conspicuous for long
distances, and greatly appreciated by sailors as a landmark. The village
is not perhaps famous, but certainly notable for a former vicar, who
apparently aspired to writing a personal history of his parish as well as
keeping a merely formal set of registers. Scattered through his official
records are some very curious notes, among them: “1696. Buried, Dec. 7,
Henry, the son of Henry Watson of Fenwick, who lived to the age of 36
years, and was so great a fool that he could never put on his own close,
nor never went a ¼ mile off ye house in all this space.”
The road at this point was the scene of Grizel Cochrane’s famous exploit,
in 1685, when at night-fall, disguised as a man, and mounted on
horseback, she waylaid the mail rider, and, holding a pistol to his head,
robbed him of the warrant he was carrying for the execution of her
father, Sir John Cochrane, taken in rebellion against James the Second.
By this means she obtained a fortnight’s respite, a delay which was used
by his friends to secure his pardon. Grizel Cochrane has, of course,
been ever since the heroine of Border song. A clump of trees on a
hillock, surrounded by a wall, to the right of the road, long bore the
name of “Grizzy’s Clump,” but it has recently been felled and so much of
the landmark destroyed. The country folk, possessed of the most
invincible ignorance of the subject, know the place only as “Bambrough
Hill,” a title they have given it because from the summit an excellent
view of Bambrough Castle is gained.
[Picture: Bambrough Castle]
The plantations of Haggerston Castle now begin to cover the land sloping
down toward the sea, and, after passing a deserted building on the left,
once a coaching inn, the park surrounding the odd-looking modern
castellated residence is reached. Here, by the entrance to the house,
the road goes off at an acute angle to the left, and, continuing thus for
a quarter of a mile, turns as sharply to the right. An old manorial
pigeon-house, still with a vane bearing the initials C.L.H., stands by
the way, and bears witness to the ownership of the estate in other times
by the old Haggerston family. It was to Sir Carnaby Haggerston that
those initials belonged, the late eighteenth-century squire, who
destroyed the old Border tower of Haggerston Castle, and built a new
mansion in its stead, just as so many of his contemporaries did.
Sir Carnaby Haggerston does not appear—apart from this vandal act of
his—to have been an especially Wicked Squire, although his devastating
name launched him upon the world ear-marked for commission of all the
crimes practised by the libertine landowners who made so brave a show in
a certain class of literature and melodrama once popular. His name
strikes the ear even more dramatically than that of Sir Rupert
Murgatroyd, the accursed Baronet of Ruddigore in Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s
comic opera, but he never lived up to its possibilities. The only things
he seems to have had in common with the typical squire of old seem to
have been a love of port and whist, and a passion for building houses too
large for his needs or means.
The Wicked Squire who unwillingly sat to the novelists who used to write
in the pages of _Reynolds’ Miscellany_ and journals of that stamp fifty
years ago, as the high-born villain of their gory romances, may be
regretted, because without him the pages of the penny novelist are become
extremely tame; but his disappearance need not be mourned for any other
reasons.
It is to him we owe the many supposedly “classical” mansions that, huge
and shapeless, like so many factories, reformatories, or workhouses,
affront the green sward, the beautiful gardens, and the noble trees of
many English parks. To build vast mansions of this “palatial” character,
the squires often pulled down middle-Tudor or Elizabethan, or even
earlier manor-houses of exquisite beauty, vying with one another in the
size and extravagance of the new buildings, whose original cost and
subsequent maintenance have during the past hundred and fifty years kept
many county families in straitened circumstances, and do so still. There
was a squire who pulled down a whole series of mediæval wayside crosses
in his district, and used the materials as building-stones toward the
great mansion he was erecting for the purpose of outshining a neighbour.
Those transcendent squires, the noblemen of old, had larger opportunities
and made the worst use of them. The Duke of Buckingham, for example,
bought a property, demolished the Elizabethan hall that stood on it, and
built Stowe there in its place; a building of vast range and classic
elevation with colonnades and porticoes, and “windows that exclude the
light and lead to nothing,” as some one has very happily remarked. Sir
Francis Dashwood, that hero of the Hell Fire Club, pulled down West
Wycombe church and built the existing building, that looks like a
Lancashire cotton-mill, and every one built houses a great deal larger
than were wanted or they could afford; which, like the Earl of
Leicester’s seat at Holkham were so little like homes that they could
neither live in their stately apartments nor sleep in their vast
bedrooms. Like the Earl and Countess of Leicester, who were compelled
for comfort’s sake to sleep in one of the servants’ bedrooms in the
attics, they lived as settlers in corners of their cavernous and
uncomfortable palaces.
Pity the poor descendant of the Squires! He cannot afford in these days
to keep up his huge house; to pull it down would in itself cost a
fortune; and its very size frightens the clients of the house-agent in
whose hands he has had it for letting, these years past. All over
England this is seen, and the old Yorkshire tale would stand true of any
other county and of many other county magnates of that time. The Marquis
of Rockingham, according to that story, built a mansion at Wentworth big
enough for the Prince of Wales; Sir Rowland Winn built one at Nostel
Priory fit for the Marquis of Rockingham; and Mr. Wrightson of Cusworth
built a house fit for Sir Rowland Winn. No doubt the farmers carried on
the tale of extravagance down to their stratum of society, and so _ad
infinitum_.
But to return to Haggerston Castle, which now belongs to the Leylands.
Conspicuous for some distance is the tower built of recent years to at
one and the same time resemble a mediæval keep and to serve a practical
purpose as a water-tower, engine-room, and look-out. The place, however,
is remarkable for quite other things than its mock castle, for in the
beautiful park are kept in pens, or roaming about freely, herds of
foreign animals which make of it a miniature Zoological Gardens. It is,
in a sense, superior indeed to that well-known place, for if the
collections do not cover so wide a range, the animals are in a state of
nature. Emus, Indian cattle, kangaroos, and many varieties of wild buck
roam this “paradise,” together with a thriving herd of American bison.
The bison is almost extinct, even in his native country, but here he
flourishes exceedingly and perpetuates his kind. A bison bull is a
startling object, come upon unawares, and looks like the production of a
lunatic artist chosen to illustrate, say, the Jabberwock in _Alice in
Wonderland_. He is all out of drawing, with huge shaggy forelegs, and
head and shoulders a size too large for the rest of his body; an eye like
a live coal, tufted coat, like a worn-out door-mat, and
uncomfortable-looking horns: the kind of creature that inhabits Nightmare
Country, popularly supposed to be bred of indigestion and lobster
mayonnaise.
XXIX
BEYOND Haggerston, and up along the rising road that leads for six of the
seven miles to Berwick, the journey is unexpectedly commonplace. The
road has by this time turned away from the sea, and when it has led us
through an entirely charming tunnel-like avenue of dwarf oaks, ceases to
be interesting. Always upwards, it passes collieries, the “Cat” inn, and
the hamlet of Richardson’s Stead or Scremerston, whence, arrived at the
summit of Scremerston Hill, the way down into Tweedmouth and across the
Tweed into Berwick is clear.
Tweedmouth sits upon the hither shore of Tweed, clad in grime and
clinkers. Like a mudlark dabbling in the water but not cleansing himself
in it, Tweedmouth seems to acquire no inconsiderable portion of its dirt
from its foreshore. Engineering works and coal-shoots are responsible
for the rest. Little or nothing of antiquity enlivens its mean street
that leads down to the old bridge and so across the Tweed into Scotland.
The roofs of Berwick, clustered close together and sealing one over the
other as the town ascends the opposite shore of the river, are seen, with
the spired Town Hall dominating all at the further end of the long,
narrow, hump-backed old structure, and away to the left that fine viaduct
of the North Eastern Railway, the Royal Border Bridge. But the finest
view, and the most educational in local topography, is that gained by
exploring the southern shore of the Tweed for half a mile in an easterly
direction. An unlovely waterside road, it is true, a maze of railway
arches spanning it, and shabby houses hiding all but the merest glimpses
of Tweedmouth church and its gilded salmon vane, referring to the
salmon-fishery of the Tweed, but leading to a point of view whence the
outlook to the north-west is really grand. There, across the broad
estuary of the Tweed, lies Berwick, behind its quays and its enclosing
defences. Across the river, in the middle distance, goes Berwick Bridge,
its massive piers and arches looking as though carved out of the rock,
rather than built up of single stones. Beyond it, in majestic array, go
the tall arches of the Royal Border Bridge, and, in the background, are
the Scottish hills. Tweedmouth, its timber jetty, its docks, and church
spire, and its waterside lumber are in the forefront. This, then, is the
situation of Berwick, for centuries the best-picked bone of contention
between the rival countries of England and Scotland; the Border cockpit,
geographically in the northern kingdom, but wrested from it by the
masterful English seven hundred and fifty years ago, and taken and
re-taken by or from stubborn Scots on a round dozen of occasions
afterwards. Sieges, assaults, stormings, massacres under every condition
of atrocity; these are the merest commonplaces of Berwick’s story, until
the mid-sixteenth century; and the historian who would write of its more
unusual aspects must needs turn attention to the rare and short-lived
interludes of peace.
[Picture: The Scottish Border: Berwick Town and Bridge from Tweedmouth]
It was in 1550, during the short reign of Edward the Sixth, that the
existing fortifications enclosing the town were begun, whose
river-fronting walls are so conspicuous from Tweedmouth. The old bridge,
built by James the First, was the first peaceful enterprise between the
two kingdoms, for, although Berwick had for over a century been
recognised as a neutral or “buffer” state, peace went armed for fear of
accidents, and easy communication across the Tweed was not encouraged.
There is food for reflection in comparison between that bridge and the
infinitely greater work of the railway viaduct. The first, 1,164 feet in
length, with only 17 feet breadth between the parapets, bridging the
river with fifteen arches, cost £17,000, and took twenty-four years to
build; the railway bridge of twenty-eight giant arches, each of 61½ feet
span, and straddling the Tweed at a height of 129 feet, was built in
three years, at a cost of £120,000. The “Royal Border Bridge,” as it was
christened at its opening by the Queen, has precisely the appearance of a
Roman aqueduct and belongs to the Stone and Brick Age of railways. Were
it to do over again, there can be no doubt that, instead of a long array
of graceful arches, half a dozen lengths of steel lattice girders would
span the tide. It was at a huge cost that England and Scotland were thus
joined by rail; bridge and approaches swallowing up the sum of £253,000.
The first passenger train crossed over, October 15, 1848, but the works
were not finally completed until 1850. In the August of that year the
Queen formally opened it, nearly two years after it was _actually_
opened; a fine object-lesson for satirists. How we laugh at ceremonials
less absurd than this when they take place in China and Japan.
Berwick town is seen, on entering its streets, to be unexpectedly modern
and matter-of-fact. The classically steepled building that bulks
commandingly in the main thoroughfare and looks like a church is the Town
Hall, and displays the arms of Berwick prominently, the municipal
escutcheon supported on either side by a sculptured bear sitting on his
rump and surrounded by trees. It is thus that one of the disputed
derivations of Berwick’s name is alluded to. At few towns has the origin
of a place-name been so contested as at Berwick; and, for all the pother
about it, the question is still, and must remain, unanswered. It might
as reasonably have come from _aberwic_, the mouth of a river, as from
_bergwic_, the hillside village, and much more reasonably than from the
fanciful “bar” prefix alluding to the bareness of the country; while of
course the legend that gives the lie to that last variant, and seeks an
origin in imaginary bears populating mythical woods, is merely infantile.
The church-like Town Hall, which is also a market-house and the town
gaol, does indeed perform one of the functions of a church, for the ugly
Puritan parish church of the town has no tower, and so the steeple of the
Town Hall rings for it.
In the broad High Street running northward from this commanding building
are all the prominent inns of the town, to and from which the coaches
came and went until the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick Railway in
1846. Some of the short stages appear to have been misery-boxes,
according to Dean Ramsay, who used to tell an amusing anecdote of one of
them. On one occasion a fellow-traveller at Berwick complained of the
rivulets of rain-water falling down his neck from the cracked roof. He
drew the coachman’s attention to it on the first opportunity, but all the
answer he got was the matter-of-fact remark, “Ay, mony a ane has
complained o’ that hole.”
The mail-coaches leaving Berwick on their journey north were allowed to
take an extra—a fourth—outside passenger. Mail-coaches running in
England were, until 1834, strictly limited to four inside and three
outside. Of these last, one sat on the box, beside the coachman, while
the other two were seated immediately behind, on the fore part of the
roof, with their backs to the guard. This was a rule originally very
strictly enforced, and had its origin in the fear that, if more were
allowed, it would be an easy matter for desperadoes to occupy the seats
as passengers and to suddenly overpower both coachman and guard. The
guard in his solitary perch at the back, with his sword-case and
blunderbuss ready to hand, could have shot or slashed at those in front,
on his observing any suspicious movement, and it is somewhat surprising
that no nervous guard ever did wound some innocent passenger who may have
turned round to ask him a question. The concession of an extra seat on
the outside of coaches entering Scotland was granted to the
mail-contractors in view of the more widely scattered population of
Scotland, and of the comparative scarcity of chance passengers on the
way.
But there is very great uncertainty as to the number of passengers
allowed on the mails in later years. Moses Nobbs, one of the last of the
old mail-guards, states that no fewer than eight passengers were allowed
outside at the end of the coaching age. Doubtless this was owing both to
the complaints of the contractors that with the smaller complement they
could not make the business pay, and to the growing security of the
roads.
Royal proclamations used, until recent times, to specifically mention
“our town of Berwick-upon-Tweed” when promulgating decrees, for as by
treaty an independent State, neither in England nor Scotland, laws and
ordinances affecting Great Britain and Ireland could not legally be said
to have been extended to Berwick without the especial mention of “our
town.” A state whose boundaries north and south were Lamberton Toll and
the Tweed, a distance of not more than four miles, with a corresponding
extent from east to west, it was thus on a par with many a petty German
principality. Nearly three-quarters of the land comprised within
“Berwick Bounds” is the property of the Corporation, having been granted
by James the First when, overjoyed at his good fortune in succeeding to
the English crown and thus uniting those of the two countries, he entered
upon his heritage. Lucky Berwick! Its freehold property brings in a
revenue of £18,000 a year, in relief of rates.
If the streets of Berwick are disappointing in so historic a place, then
let the pilgrim make the circuit of the town on the ramparts. These, at
least, tell of martial times, as also do the fragmentary towers of the
old castle, the few poor relics left of that stronghold by the modern
railway station overhanging a deep cleft. Then, away in advance of the
ramparts, still thrusting its tubby, telescopic, three-storied form
forward, is the old Bell Tower, where, in this advanced post, the
vigilant garrison kept eyes upon the north, whence sudden Scottish raids
might be developed at any time.
Grass covers the ramparts and sprouts in tufts upon the gun-platforms
contrived in early Victorian days upon them, and almost every variety of
obsolete cannon, short of the demi-culverins with which Drake searched
the Spanish Main, go to make up what—Heaven help them and us!—War Office
officials call batteries. Guns bristle thickly upon the waterside
batteries overlooking the harbour, but not one of them is modern. All
are muzzle-loading pieces, fit for an artillerist’s museum, and their
carriages—where they are mounted at all—are in bewildering variety,
principally, however, of rotting wood. The most recent piece, an
Armstrong gun not less than fifty years old, lies derelict in the long
grass, and children amuse themselves by filling its hungry-looking maw
with clods. Pot-bellied like all the old Armstrongs, it has a look as
though it had grown fat and lazy with that diet and lain down in the long
grass to sleep. Perhaps to guard its slumbers, a War Office notice
beside the prostrate gun vainly forbids trespassing!
Down in a ditch of the fortifications a soldier in his shirt sleeves, his
braces dangling about his legs, is tending early peas with all the
tenderness of a mother for an invalid child; for, look you, early peas in
these latitudes have a hard fight for it; and the fight of those
vegetables for existence against the nipping blasts that sweep from off
the North Sea is the only sign of warfare the place has to show. Taken
as a whole, and looked at whichever way you will, the “defences” of
Berwick-upon-Tweed show a trustfulness in Providence and in the
astounding luck of the British Empire which argues much for the piety or
the folly of our rulers. And so, with the varied reflections these
things call forth, let us away up the High Street, and, passing under the
archway of the Scotch Gate, spanning its northern extremity, leave
Berwick on the way to Scotland.
XXX
“SEEING Scotland, Madam,” said Dr. Johnson, in answer to Mrs. Thrale’s
expressed wish to visit that country, “is only seeing a worse England.
It is seeing the flower gradually fade away to the naked stalk.” This
bitter saying of the Doctor’s comes vividly to mind when leaving Berwick
on the way to Edinburgh. Passing the outskirts of the town at a point
marked on the Ordnance map with the unexplained name of “Conundrum,” the
country grows bare and treeless on approaching the sea, and at Lamberton
Toll, three miles north, where “Berwick Bounds” are reached and Scotland
entered, the scene is desolate in the extreme. The cottage to the left
of the road at this point, formerly the toll-house of the turnpike-gate
that stood here, is a famous place, rivalling Gretna Green for the
runaway matches, legalised at the gate until 1856, when changes in the
law rendered a part of the once-familiar notice in the window
out-of-date. It ran, “Ginger-beer sold here, and marriages performed on
the most reasonable terms”; an announcement which for combination of the
trivial and the tremendous it would be difficult to beat.
Geographically in Scotland when across the Tweed, we are not politically
in that country until past this cottage. Then indeed we are, in many
ways, in a foreign country.
[Picture: Lamberton Toll]
Scots law is a fearful and wonderful variant from English. Even its
terminology is strange to the English ear, which finds—hey, presto!—on
passing Berwick Bounds, a barrister changed into an “advocate,” a
solicitor converted into a “Writer to the Signet,” and a prosecutor
masquerading under the thrilling and descriptive alias of “pursuer.” It
was the laxity of Scots law that made, not only Gretna Green, but any
other place over the Border from England, a resort of those about to
marry and impatient of constraints, legal or family, at any period
between 1753 and 1856. Gretna Green and its neighbour, Springfield, in
especial, and in no small degree Lamberton Toll, were the scenes of much
hasty marrying during that space of time. Marrying, _bien entendu_, and
not giving in marriage, for these were runaway matches, and those whose
position it was to give, and who withheld their consent, generally came
posting up to the toll-gate in pursuit just in time to hear the last
words of the simple but effective ritual of the toll-keeper who had
witnessed the declaration of the truants that, “This is my wife,” and
“This is my husband,” a simple form of words which, uttered in the
presence of a witness, was all that the beneficent legal system of
Scotland required as marriage ceremony. This form completed, and for
satisfaction’s sake a rough register subscribed, the indignant parent,
who possibly had been battering on the outside of the door, was admitted
and introduced to his son-in-law.
It was a century of licence (not marriage licence), that prevailed on the
Border from the passing of Lord Hardwicke’s Clandestine Marriage Act in
1753 until that of Lord Brougham in 1856, which put a stop to this “over
the Border” marrying by rendering unions illegal on the part of those not
domiciled in Scotland, which had not been preceded by a residence in that
kingdom of not less than twenty-one days by one or other of the
contracting parties.
There was no special virtue in the first place across the Border-line at
any point, nor did it matter who “officiated,” the person who “performed
the ceremony” being only a witness and in no sense a clergyman; but it
was obviously, with these legal facilities, the prime object of runaway
couples pressed for time, and with hurrying parents and guardians after
them, to seize their opportunity at the first place, and at the hands of
the first person in that liberal minded land. Not that the Kirk looked
benevolently upon this. It fined them, for discipline’s sake, and the
happy couples cheerfully paid, for by doing so they acquired the last
touch of validity, which, on the face of it, could not be called into
dispute.
One of this long line of Hymen’s secular priesthood at Lamberton Toll
had, early in the nineteenth century, an unhappy time of it, owing to an
error of judgment and an ignorance of the law scarcely credible. Joseph
Atkinson, the toll-keeper, was away one day at Berwick when a runaway
pair arrived at the gate. His wife, or another, sent them after him, and
in Berwick the ceremony, such as it was, was performed. Now Berwick is a
county of itself, and the inhabitants boast, or used to, that their town
belongs to neither England nor Scotland. It is hinted (by those who do
not belong to Berwick) that it belongs instead to the devil, which
possibly is a reminiscence of the townsfolk’s smuggling days, on the part
of those who duly render unto Cæsar. This by the way. Unhappily for Mr.
Joseph Atkinson, Berwick owes allegiance to English law, as he found when
his ceremony was declared null and void, and he was duly sentenced to
seven years transportation for having contravened the Marriage Act of
1753.
[Picture: Off to the Border]
Halidon Hill, where the English avenged Bannockburn upon the Scots in
1333, is on the crest of the upland to the west of Lamberton Toll. Now
the road runs upon the edge of the black cliffs that plunge down into the
North Sea, commanding bold views of a stern and iron-bound coast.
Horses, coachmen, guards, and passengers alike quailed before the storms
that swept these exposed miles, and even the highwaymen sought other and
more sheltered spots. Macready, on tour in the north, was snowed up
here, in the severe winter of 1813–14. Coming south through the deep and
still falling snow, he travelled in a cutting made in the drifts for
miles between Ross Inn and Berwick-on-Tweed. “We did not reach
Newcastle,” he says, “until nearly two hours after midnight: and
fortunate was it for the theatre and ourselves that we had not delayed
our journey, for the next day the mails were stopped; nor for more than
six weeks was there any conveyance by carriage between Edinburgh and
Newcastle. After some weeks, a passage was cut through the snow for the
guards to carry the mails on horseback, but for a length of time the
communications every way were very irregular.”
Where the little Flemington Inn stands solitary at a fork of the road,
close by a tremendous gap in the cliffs, is placed Burnmouth station, on
the main line, wedged in a scanty foothold, hundreds of feet above the
sea. Day or night it is a picturesque place, but more especially in the
afterglow of sunset, when the inky blackness of the rift in the cliffs
can still be set off against the gleam of the sea, caught in a notch of
the rocks, and when the lighted signal-lamps of the little junction glow
redly against the sky on their tall masts, like demon eyes. A fishlike,
if not an ancient, smell lingers here, for Burnmouth station is
constantly in receipt of the catches made down below by the hardy fishers
of the three hamlets of Burnmouth, Partinghal, and Ross, queer fishing
villages of white-washed stone cottages that line the rocky shore
unsuspected by ninety-nine among every hundred travellers along the road
above. Herrings caught in the North Sea are cured here, packed in
barrels, and sent by rail to distant markets.
Ayton, two miles onward, away from the sea, is entered in perplexing
fashion, downhill and by a sharp turn to the right over a bridge spanning
the Eye Water, instead of continuing straight ahead along a road that
makes spacious pretence of being the proper way. Ayton itself, beyond
being a large village, with a modern castellated residence in the
Scottish baronial style and vivid red sandstone at its entrance, is not
remarkable.
Leaving Ayton, the road enters a secluded valley whose solitudes of
woodland, water, and meadows are not imperilled, but only intensified, by
the railway, which goes unobtrusively within hail of this old coaching
highway. On the right rise the gently swelling sides of a range of hills
sloping upwards from the very margin of the road and covered with woods
of dwarf oak, through whose branches the sunlight filters and lies on the
ferns below in twinkling patches of gold. Here stood the old Houndwood
Inn, and the building yet remains, converted—good word in such a
connection—into a manse for the Free Church near by, itself a building
calculated to make angels weep; if angels have appreciations in
architecture. Another, and a humbler, building carries on the licensed
victualling trade, and calls itself, prettily enough, the “Greenwood
Inn.” It is, in fact, a stretch of country that makes for inspiration in
the rustic sort. If there were a sign of the “Robin Hood” here we should
acclaim it romantic and appropriate, even though tradition tells not of
that mythical outlaw in these marches. If not Robin, then some other
chivalric outlaw surely should have pervaded the glades of Houndwood,
open as they are, with never a fence, a hedge, or a ditch to the road,
just as though these were still the fine free days of old, before
barbed-wire fences were dreamed of, or notices to trespassers set up,
threatening vague penalties to be enforced “with all the rigour of the
law,” as the phrase generally runs.
It is a valley of whose delights one must needs chatter, although with
but dim hopes of communicating much of its charm. Through it that little
stream called by the medicinally sounding name, the Eye Water, wanders
with a feminine hesitancy and inconstancy of purpose. It flows all ways
by turns and never long in any direction, and with so many amazing loops
and doublings, that it might well defy the precision of the Ordnance
chartographers themselves. We bid farewell to this fickle stream at
Grant’s House, and scrape acquaintance with another, the Pease Burn,
flowing in another direction. For Grant’s House stands on the watershed
which orders the going of several watercourses. It is also the summit
level of this railway route to the North. Here, quite close to the road,
is Grant’s House station, and here, bordering the road itself, are the
houses that form Grant’s House itself. This sounds like speaking in
paradox, but the place is a village, or rather a scattered collection of
pretty cottages that have gathered around the one inn which was the home
of the original Grant. The place-name seems to hint of other and
less-travelled times, when these Borders were sparsely settled and
wayfarers few; when but one house served to take the edge off the
solitude, and that an inn kept by one Grant. The imagination, thus
uninstructed, weaves cocoons of speculation around these premises and
conceives him to have been a host of abounding personality, thus to hand
his name down to posterity, preserved in a place-name, like a fly in
amber. But all speculations that start upon this innkeeping basis would
be incorrect, for this sponsorial Grant was the contractor who made the
road from Berwick to Edinburgh, building a cottage for himself in this
then lonely spot, which only in later years became the Grant’s House inn.
More streams and woods beyond this point, and then comes the long and
toilsome rise up to Cockburnspath, past Pease Burn, where the road takes
a double S curve on the hillside, and other tall hills, to right and left
and ahead, largely covered with firs and larches, seem to look on with a
gloomy anticipation of some one, less cautious than his fellows, breaking
his neck. Where there are no hillside woods there are grass meadows in
which, if it be June or July, the haymakers can be seen from the road,
haymaking, with attendant horses and carts, at a perilous angle. The
Pease Burn, flowing deep down in its Dene, is spanned at a height of 127
feet, half a mile down stream, by a four-arched bridge, built in 1786.
XXXI
SET in midst of these steep and twisting roads and above these watery
ravines is Cockburnspath Tower, a ruined Border castle of rust-red stone
that frowns down upon the road on the edge of a tremendous gully. It was
never more than a peel-tower, but strongly placed and solidly built, a
fitting refuge for those who took part in the ups and downs of Border
forays. In the days when Co’path Tower (local pronunciation) was built,
every one’s house was more or less a defensible building. “An
Englishman’s house is his castle” is a figurative expression commonly
used to prefigure the inviolate character of the law-abiding citizen’s
domicile, but it might have been said literally of dwellers in these
debateable lands. The more property he possessed, the stronger was the
Border farmer’s tower. When the moss-troopers and mediæval scoundrels of
every description were on the warpath, or merely out on a cattle-lifting
expedition, these embattled agriculturists shut themselves up in their
safe retreats. The lower floor, on a level with the ground, received the
live stock; the floor above, the servants; and to the topmost story, as
the safest situation, the family retired. The gate below was of iron,
for your Border reiver was no squeamish sort, and would burn these
domestic garrisons alive without hesitation. Therefore in the most
approved type of fortress there was nothing inflammable. Sympathy,
however, would be wasted on those old-time cultivators, for they all took
a turn at armed cattle-lifting as occasion offered, and found the
readiest way of stocking their farms with every requisite to be that of
stealing what they required.
For why? Because the good old rule
Sufficeth them: the simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.
Short and sudden forays were characteristic of this kind of life. The
Border cattle-lifter came and went in the twinkling of an eye, and drove
the captured flocks and herds away with him at a rate no merely honest
drover ever marshalled his sheep and heifers to market. There must have
been many highly desirable, but inanimate and not easily portable, things
which the raiders were obliged to leave behind, as one of this kidney
regretted in casting a last glance at a hayrick he had no means of
lifting. “Had ye but four feet, ye suld no stand lang there,” said he,
as he turned to go.
The mouldering old tower here at Cockburnspath belonged to the Earls of
Home. Beautifully situated for preying upon occasional travellers, the
glen and the foaming torrent below have no doubt received the bodies of
many a one who in the old days was rash enough to pass within sight of
the old tower. The comparatively modern bridge that takes a flying leap
across the ravine is the successor of an ancient one of narrower span
that still, covered with moss and ferns, arches over the water, deep down
in the hollow, and is popularly supposed to be the oldest bridge in
Scotland. A dense tangle of red-berried rowan-trees, firs, and oaks
overhangs the gorge. Altogether a place that calls insistently to be
sketched and painted, but a place, from the military point of view, to be
wary of; being a position, as Cromwell in one of his despatches says,
“where one man to hinder is better than twelve to make way.” It was at
the “strait pass at Copperspath,” as he calls it, that the great general,
writing after the battle of Dunbar, found plenty to hinder.
If ever general profited more by the mistakes of the enemy than by his
own tactical ability, it was Cromwell at this juncture. The Scots under
Leslie had cooped him up at Dunbar, and, surrounded by the enemy, who
occupied the heights and closed every defile that led to a possible line
of retreat, he must, diseased and famishing as were his forces, have
capitulated, for the sea was at his back, and no help possible from that
direction. It was then that Leslie made his disastrous move from the
hills, and came down upon the English in the levels of Broxburn, to the
south of Dunbar town, where Cromwell had his headquarters; and it was
then that Cromwell, seizing the moment when the enemy, coming down in a
dense mass upon a circumscribed space by Broxburn Glen, retrieved the
situation, and, directing a cavalry movement upon Leslie’s forces, had
the supreme relief of seeing them broken up and stamped into the earth by
the furious charge of his horsemen. The fragments of the Scottish army,
routed with a slaughter of three thousand, and ten thousand prisoners,
fled, and Cromwell’s contemplated retreat to Berwick was no longer a
necessity. Indeed, the whole of the Lowlands of Scotland now lay open
before him, and he entered Edinburgh with little opposition.
[Picture: Cockburnspath Tower]
It is a distance of nine miles between the village of Cockburnspath and
Dunbar, the road going parallel with the sea all the way. First it goes
dizzily over the profound rift of Dunglass Dene, spanned at a height of a
hundred and twenty-five feet above the rocky bed of a mountain stream by
the bold arch of the railway viaduct and by the road bridge itself. It
is a scene of rare beauty, and the walk by the zigzagging path among the
thickets and the trees, down to where the sea comes pounding furiously
into a little cove, a quarter of a mile below, wholly charming. Away out
to sea is the lowering bulk of the Bass Rock, a constant companion in the
view approaching Dunbar.
The direct road for Edinburgh avoids Dunbar altogether, forking to the
left at Broxburn where the battlefield lay, where the burn still flows
across the road as it did on the day of “Dunbar Drove,” as Carlyle calls
that dreadful rout. Here “the great road then as now crosses the Burn of
Brock. . . . Yes, my travelling friends, vehiculating in gigs or
otherwise over that piece of London road, you may say to yourselves,
Here, without monument, is the grave of a valiant thing which was done
under the Sun; the footprint of a Hero, not yet quite indistinguishable,
is here!”
Ahead, with its great red church on a hillock, still somewhat apart of
the south end of the town, is Dunbar, the first characteristically
Scottish place to which we come. It is not possible to compete with
Carlyle’s masterly word-picture of it, which presents the place before
you with so marvellous a fidelity to its spirit and appearance:—“The
small town of Dunbar stands high and windy, looking down over its
herring-boats, over its grim old castle, now much honeycombed, on one of
those projecting rock-promontories with which that shore of the Firth of
Forth is niched and vandyked as far as the eye can reach. A beautiful
sea; good land too, now that the plougher understands his trade; a grim
niched barrier of whinstone sheltering it from the chafings and tumblings
of the big blue German Ocean.” There you have Dunbar.
[Picture: The Tolbooth, Dunbar]
Let us add some few details to the master’s fine broad handling; such as
the fact that its streets are wondrously cobble-stoned, that those
whinstone rocks are red and give a dull, blood-like coloration to the
scene, and that the curious old whitewashed Tolbooth in the High Street
is the fullest exemplar of the Scottish architectural style. Windy it
is, as Carlyle says, and with a rawness in its air that calls forth
shivers from the Southron even in midsummer. Here the stranger new to
Scotland is apt to see for the first time the sturdy fishwives and lasses
who, still often with bare feet, go along the streets carrying
prodigiously weighty baskets of fish on their backs, sometimes secured by
a leather strap that goes from the basket around the head and forehead!
One leaves Dunbar by wriggly and exiguous streets, coming through the
fisher villages of Belhaven and West Barns to where the main avoiding
route rejoins at Beltonford. The Scottish Tyne winds through the flat
meadows on the right—at such fortunate times, that is to say, as when it
does not pretend to be an inland sea and take the meadows, the road, and
the railway for its province. The road, too, is flat, and the railway,
which hugs it closely, the same. A good road, too, and beautiful.
Midway of it, towards East Linton, are the farmsteads and ricks of
Phantassie, at which spot Rennie, the engineer who built London Bridge,
and heaven and Dr. Smiles alone know how many harbours, was born in 1761.
“Phantassie” is a name that sorely piques one’s curiosity, so odd is it;
but the group of farm-buildings is commonplace enough, if more than
commonly substantial. No fantasy in their design, at any rate.
At East Linton we cross the Tyne which, crawling through the meadows,
plunges here in cascades under the road bridge, amid confused rocks. The
railway crosses it too, close by, and spans the road beyond; and the
village huddles together at an angle of the way. A long ascent out of it
commands wide views of agricultural Haddingtonshire, and of that
surprising mountainous hill, Traprain Law, rising out of the plain to a
height of over seven hundred feet.
Not merely a surprising hill, but one with an astonishing story. It had
always been thought that treasure was buried there, among the traces of
ancient buildings; and accordingly, with the permission of Right
Honourable A. J. Balfour, on whose land the hill is situated, excavations
were begun in 1919. It was found that the hill-top had been inhabited
intermittently over remote periods, and diggings were made into
successive strata of hearths and floorings. At first the “finds” were of
minor articles: bronze ornaments, glass and pottery, fragments of iron,
mostly of Celtic origin, but some Roman. The great discovery was made on
May 12th, 1919, when a workman, driving a pick through a floor, brought
up a silver bowl on the point of it. A deep recess was then discovered,
filled with treasure: bowls, spoons, cups, saucers, and a miscellaneous
collection of plate, mostly cut to pieces in strips folded over and
hammered down into packets of silver. Although it was grievous to look
upon that destruction, a good many of the fragments retained their
original decoration. They appear to be partly of Romano-Christian
origin, for the sacred symbol occurs among them, and on one piece is the
inscription “Jesus Christus.” Other pieces are almost as certainly
pagan, hearing as they do figures of Pan and Hercules. Among them were
four coins: the earliest of the Emperor Valerius, whose reign began A.D.
364, and the latest of Honorius, who died A.D. 463. A metal belt of
Saxon character was among this treasure-trove.
It appeared, therefore, that this hoard was a relic of one of the
sea-rovers’ raids on this coast in the fifth or sixth century, and that
the spoils had in some cases come from plundered religious houses. The
raiders were perhaps disturbed in their activities, and buried their loot
in the expectation of returning for it at some more suitable time.
But they never returned. What happened to them is a vain conjecture.
They may have been found here and slain by some stronger force, and
perhaps they were lost at sea. In any case, their hoard lay here for
close upon one thousand five hundred years. What they had hoped to carry
away is now an exhibit in the Scottish National Museum at Edinburgh.
To the north-going cyclist the road presently makes ample amends for the
mile-long rise, for, once topping it, a gentle but continuous descent of
four miles leads into Haddington, down a road that for the most part
could scarce be bettered, so excellent its surface, so straight its
course, and so beautifully sylvan its surroundings. Hailes Castle is
finely seen on the left during this descent, its ruined walls and
ivy-covered towers wrapped three parts round with the thick woodlands
that clothe the lower slopes of Traprain Law. Mary, Queen of Scots, and
her evil spirit, the sinister Bothwell, had Hailes Castle for their bower
of love, and Wishart the martyr had a cell in it for a prison, so that
its present beauty of decay lacks nothing of historic interest.
Nor does the fine mansion of Amisfield, through whose park-like lands the
road now descends. Amisfield has lurid associations. Under the name of
New Mills, it was in 1687 the scene of a dreadful parricide, and was at a
later period purchased by the infamous Colonel Francis Charteris, who
might aptly be termed (in Mr. Stead’s phrase), the Minotaur of his day.
It was he who renamed it after the home of his family in Nithsdale. As
his exploits belong chiefly to London, we, fortunately, need not enlarge
upon them here. The parricide already referred to was the murder of his
father by Philip Standsfield. Sir James Standsfield had set up a cloth
factory here, on the banks of the Tyne, and had done remarkably well. He
had two sons, Philip and John. The eldest had been a scapegrace ever
since that day when, as a student at St. Andrews, he had gone to a
meeting-house and flung a loaf at the preacher. It took the astonished
divine on the side of the head and aroused within him the spirit of
prophecy. Addressing the crowded chapel at large (for the loaf had been
thrown unseen from some dark corner), he saw in a vision the death of the
culprit, at whose end there would be more present than were hearing him
that day; “and the multitude then present,” adds the chronicler, “was not
small.”
Philip had a short and ignominious military career on the Continent, and
returned home to prey upon his father; who, for sufficient reasons,
disinherited him in favour of his younger brother. In the end, aided by
some servants, he strangled the old man and threw the body in the river.
For this he was hanged at Edinburgh, and as the hanging was not
effectual, the executioner had to finish by strangling him, in which
public opinion of that time saw the neat handiwork of Providence.
XXXII
HERE begins Haddington, and here end good roads for the space of a mile;
and not until the burgh is left behind do they recommence. The traveller
who might set out in quest of bad roads and vile paving would without
difficulty discover the objects of his search at Haddington. He might
conceivably find as bad elsewhere, but worse examples would be miraculous
indeed. We have encountered many stretches of road, thus far, of a
mediæval quality, but the long road to the North boasts, or blushes for,
nothing nearly so craggy as are the cobble-stoned thoroughfares of this
“royal burgh.” The entrance to the town from the south resembles, in its
picturesque squalor, that to one of the decayed towns of Brittany.
Unswept, tatterdemalion as it is, it still remains a fitting subject for
the artist’s pencil, for here beside the narrow street stands the rugged
mass of Bothwell Castle, patched and clouted from time to time, but
happily as yet unrestored. Over the lintels of old houses adjoining,
still remain the pious invocations and quaint devices originally
sculptured there for the purpose of averting the baleful glance of the
Evil Eye.
The initial letter in the name of Haddington is a superfluity and a
misuse of the letter H, the name deriving from that of Ada, Countess of
Northumberland and ancestress of Scottish monarchs; foundress also of a
nunnery here which has long gone the way of such mediæval things. The
Tyne borders this town, and sometimes floods it, as may be readily seen
by an inscription on the wall of a house in High Street, which tells how
the water on October 4, 1775, suddenly rose eight feet and three
quarters. A curious legend, too, still survives, recording a flood in
1358, when a nun of the pious Ada’s old foundation, seizing a statue of
the Virgin out of its niche, waded into the torrent and threatened to
throw it in unless the Blessed Mary instantly caused the waters to
subside. That they immediately did so appears to have been taken as
evidence of the effective moral suasion thus applied.
[Picture: Bothwell Castle]
Haddington Abbey, the successor of earlier buildings, and now itself
partly ruined, stands by the inconstant river, the nave, now the parish
church, and the choir roofless, open to the sky. It is here within these
grass-grown walls that “Jane Welsh Carlyle, spouse of Thomas Carlyle,
Chelsea, London,” lies, as the remorseful epitaph says, “suddenly
snatched away from him, and the light of his life as if gone out.” The
spot where the Abbey stands, by the dishevelled and tumbledown quarter of
Nungate, is the more abject now in that it still possesses old mansions
that tell of a more prosperous past. Here, on the river-bank, neglected
and forlorn like everything around, is the fine old screen of the Bowling
Green, where no one has, for a century past, played bowls, unless indeed
the wraiths of bygone Scottish notables haunt the spot o’ nights and play
ghostly games, like the Kaatskill gnomes in _Rip Van Winkle_. It is from
the other side of the river that the Abbey is best seen, its roofless
central tower, the _Lucernia Laudoniae_, or “Lamp of Lothian,” still
showing those triple lancets in every face which, according to the
legend, obtained for it that title. To obtain this view, the Abbey
bridge is crossed, which even now vividly illustrates on its wall the
ready way the old burgh had with malefactors. From it projects a great
hook, rusty for long want of usage, from which were hanged the reivers,
the horse-thieves, and casual evildoers, with jurisdiction of the most
summary kind. No Calcraft science with it either, with neck broken in
decent fashion, but just a hauling up of the rope and a tying of it to
some handy stanchion, and the unhappy malefactor left to throttle by slow
degrees. No other such picturesque hanging-place as this, but what is
scenery to a criminal about to be hanged like a tom-cat caught killing
chickens.
[Picture: Haddington Abbey, from Nungate]
The crest, arms, trade-mark or badge of Haddington is a goat. There is
no doubt about that, for Billy (or is it a Nanny?) has his (or her)
effigy on many of the old buildings. Only by comparison and by slow
degrees is it that the stranger arrives at the conclusion that it is a
goat, for the drawing of many of these representations leaves much to be
desired. Some resemble an elephant, others a horse, others yet what “the
mind’s eye, Horatio” might conceive a Boojum to be like; but in the open
space where High Street and Market Street join, the modern Market Cross,
surmounted by a more carefully executed carving, determines the species.
This is the centre of the town and neater than its entrance from the
south. The steepled classic building close by is not a church but the
Town House, masquerading in ecclesiastical disguise, very much as
Berwick’s Town Hall does. From this point it is only seventeen miles
into Edinburgh; but in 1750 and for long after the coach journey employed
the best efforts of the local stage during the whole day. Musselburgh,
little more than eleven miles away, was reached in time for dinner, and
only when evening was come did the lumbering vehicle lurch into its
destination in Auld Reekie, when every one went to bed, bruised and weary
with the toils of the expedition. The road at that time must have
resembled the specimen of roadway still adorning the south entrance to
Haddington.
[Picture: Edinburgh, from Tranent]
To-day, happily, it is in good condition as far as Levenhall, seven miles
short of our journey’s end, whence it is bad beyond the credibility of
those who have not seen it. Gladsmuir, Macmerry, and Tranent are
interposed between; places that sink their memories of the battle of
Prestonpans in iron-founding and coal-digging and suchlike, disregarding
the futilities of the Stuarts. As for Macmerry, whose name prefigures
orgies at the most of it, or sober revelry at the very least, it is odds
against your finding as depressing a place within a hundred miles. If
place-names were made to fit, why, then, Macdolour might suit it to a
marvel. Why? Just because it stands at the crest of a barren knowe; an
ugly row of cottages on either side, with cinders and dust, clinkers and
mud in front of them, and some gaunt works within eyeshot. God knows who
christened the place, or if the name signified merriment, but, if it did,
either the scene has changed wholly since then, or else he was a humorist
of the sardonic sort who so dubbed it. Tranent, too, a townlet
subsisting upon collieries: how grimly commonplace! But it at least has
this advantage, that from its elevated foothold it looks down upon the
Firth of Forth, that noble firth which Victor Hugo blundered over so
whimsically in rendering it as “_la Premiére de la Quatrième_.” Seen
under the summer sun, how glorious that seaward view, with the villages
of Preston and Cockenzie, half hidden by their woodlands, by the level
shores. Half-way down from Tranent’s hillside you see a fine panorama:
Arthur’s Seat in front, Calton Hill and its Nelson’s column, peering from
behind, and the distant shores of Fife, with blowing smoke-clouds, many
miles away. Between Arthur’s Seat and the Calton, Edinburgh is hid, nine
miles from this point. Down in the levels in the mid-distance there are
hints of Musselburgh in smoke-wreaths and peeping towers; and mayhap,
while you gaze, the southward-bound train, with its white puff of steam,
is seen setting forth on its long journey Londonwards. In these levels
was fought the battle of Prestonpans, Sunday, September 21, 1745, around
that village of Preston and those briny meads where the salt-pans used to
be and are no longer.
Preston—formerly Priest’s Town—got its name at the time when it was part
of the celebrated Abbey of Newbattle. The monks of that religious house
were the first discoverers of coal in Scotland, and also, in the twelfth
century, made this district the seat of a manufacture of salt.
Prestonpans, indeed, at one time supplied the whole of the East Coast
with salt, and it was only on the repeal of the Salt Duty that this old
town fell into decay. Women, known as salt-wives, a class almost as
picturesque as the fish-wives of Newhaven, used to carry the salt in
creels on their backs, to sell in Edinburgh and other towns.
In an orchard stands what was once the ancient village cross, erected in
1617, in place of an earlier. Well-known as the “Chapmen’s Cross,” it
was the meeting-place of the chapmen, packmen, or pedlars of the
Lothians. They gathered early in July, transacted the business of their
guild and elected their “King” and his “Lord Deputy” for the ensuing
year. The “ink-bottle,” cut in stone, into which they dipped their pens,
is still visible on the base of the cross. The Bannatyne Club saved it
from utter destruction, and instituted a convivial guild, the “Society of
Chapmen of the Lothians,” visiting the cross every year, with Sir Walter
Scott as one of their members.
The world has vastly changed since “the Forty-five.” It has, as a small
detail, ceased to produce its salt by evaporation of sea water; and, a
larger and more significant matter, no longer wages war for sake of
dynasties. The Highlanders who fought and gained this fleeting victory
for Prince Charlie were the last who drew the sword for Romance and Right
Divine. Prince Charlie had moved out of his loyal Edinburgh at the
approach of the English under Sir John Cope, who, of course, in that fine
foolish manner of British officers, which will survive as long as the
officers themselves, wholly underrated his enemy. He was defeated
easily, with every circumstance of indignity, his soldiers fleeing in
abject terror before the impetuous charge of the ferocious hairy-legged
Highlanders, emerging, figures of grotesque horror, out of the mists
slowly dispersing off the swampy fields in the laggard September sunrise.
The English numbered 2100 against the 1400 under Prince Charlie; but only
four minutes passed between the attack and the flight. In that short
space of time the field was deserted and the clansmen, pursuing the
terror-stricken rabble which just before had been a disciplined force,
slew nearly four hundred of them. The total loss of the Highlanders in
slain was thirty, nearly the whole of them falling in the first discharge
of musketry. Almost incredible, but well-authenticated, stories are told
of the cowardice of Cope’s regiments. Cope himself was swept away in the
wild rush, vainly endeavouring to stem it, and it was not until they were
two miles from the field, at St. Clement’s Wells, that he could bring
them to a halt. Even then, the accidental discharge of a pistol scared
them off again, and although no one pursued, they rode off with redoubled
energy. This precipitate retreat of mounted troops over miles of
country, from an unmounted enemy who were not pursuing them, is perhaps
the most disgraceful incident in the military history of the country.
The flying infantry were in far worse case. In endeavouring to escape by
climbing the park walls of Preston, they were cut down in great numbers
by the terrible broadswords of the Highlanders. Colonel Gardiner and a
brave few were cut down defending themselves on the field of battle. One
story, of a piece with many others, relates how a Highlander, pursuing
alone a party of ten soldiers, struck down the hindermost with his sword,
and shouting, “Down with your arms!” called upon the others to surrender.
They threw their weapons away without looking behind them, and the
Highlander, his sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, drove
them—nine of them!—prisoners into camp. Everywhere Cope, so
helter-skelter was his flight, himself brought the first news of his
defeat. He reached Coldstream that night, and did not rest until the
next day he was within the sheltering fortifications of Berwick.
We will not further pursue the fortunes of the Young Pretender, but hurry
on into Levenhall.
Where that battle was fought, there is to-day the most extensive
cabbage-plant cultivation in Scotland. It is a usual thing in the early
part of the year for almost daily special cabbage trains to be despatched
to all parts of Britain.
And so downhill, and then over the awful cobbles into the accursed town
of Musselburgh. “Accursed,” not by reason of those self-same cobbles,
but for the sacrilegious doings of its magistrates who rebuilt their
Tolbooth, burnt after the battle of Pinkie, with stones from the Chapel
of Loretto. Now that chapel, which stood at the entrance to the town,
was the place of business of one of those roadside hermits of whom we
have in these pages heard so much (would that he had a successor in these
times, for then the road would perhaps be in better condition), and the
Pope, indignant at the injury done to the wayside shrine, solemnly
anathematised town and inhabitants in sleeping or waking, eating and
drinking, at every conceivable time and every imaginable function. No
Pope since that period seems to have removed the curse, and no one is
particularly anxious that it should be removed, Musselburgh being rather
proud of it than otherwise. When it begins to take effect will be quite
time enough. There were those who at the close of the coaching days
perceived the beginning of it, although then three hundred years overdue,
but as the town has rather increased in prosperity since that period, the
time evidently is not yet. Nor do the burghers anticipate it, for they
still repeat the brave old rhyme:—
Musselburgh was a burgh
When Edinburgh was nane;
And Musselburgh shall be a burgh
When Edinburgh is gane.
This, however, is a quibble, for Musselburgh derived its name from the
“broch,” or bed, of mussels at the mouth of the river Esk. Looked at in
this light, the statement is true enough and the prophecy a not
particularly rash one. The sponsorial shell-fish have an honoured place
in the town arms, in which three mussels are seen in company with three
anchors: the motto “Honesty” writ large below. This was probably adopted
at some period later than the purloining of the stones of the Loretto
Chapel.
[Picture: Musselburgh]
The Town Hall, with that tower whose building brought about the curse,
forms the centre of Musselburgh, a fishy, stony, picturesque place with
four bridges over the Esk, leading to the western bank, where the fisher
quarter of Fisherrow straggles towards Joppa, two miles distant. Joppa
Pans are gone now, just as those other pans at Preston, but factories of
sorts, with clustered chimney-stacks, are still grouped about the
melancholy sea-shore, where gales set the very high-road awash on
occasion. Not vulgar, modern factories, but of a certain age; old enough
and grim enough to look like the scene of some thrilling story that yet
awaits the telling. Somewhat thrilling is the report as to the condition
of the road here in 1680, a complaint laid before the Privy Council
stating that, four miles on the London side of Edinburgh, travelling was
dangerous, and travellers to be pitied, “either by their coaches
overturning, their horses falling, their carts breaking, their loads
casting, or horses stumbling, and the poor people with burdens on their
backs sorely discouraged; moreover, strangers do often exclaim thereat.”
All this reads with a very modern touch to those who know the road
to-day, for it is as bad now as it could have been then, and so
continues, in different kinds of badness, through adjoining Portobello
into Edinburgh itself. Here seas of slimy mud, there precipitous setts,
here again profound holes in the macadam, or tramway rails projecting
above the road level, make these last miles wretched. Portobello, that
suburban seaside resort of Edinburgh, fares in this respect no better
than the rest of the way, and the original road across Figgate Whins, the
lonely moor that was here before the first house of Portobello was built,
could have been no worse. That house was the creation of a retired
sailor who had been at the capture of Portobello in Central America by
Admiral Vernon in 1739. He named it after that town, and when the
present seaside resort began to spring up, it took the title. Now it has
a promenade, a pier, hotels, and crowds of visitors in summer upon the
sands, and calls itself “the Brighton of Scotland.” Observe that
Brighton does not return the compliment, and has not yet begun to style
itself “the Portobello of England.”
XXXIII
LEAVING the “Brighton of Scotland” behind, we come to the flat lands of
Craigentinny, stretching away from the now suburban highway down to the
wind-swept and desolate seashore, where the whaups and the sandpipers
make mournful concerts in a minor key, to the accompaniment of the noise
of the sullen breakers and the soughing of the wind amid the rustling
bents. Overlooking the road, within sight and sound of the tinkling
tramcars passing between Joppa, Portobello, and Edinburgh, is that
singular monument, “Miller’s Tomb.”
William Henry Miller, whose remains lie beneath this pile of classic
architecture, was an antiquary and bibliophile, and obtained his nickname
of “Measure Miller” from his habit of measuring the margins of the “tall
copies” of the scarce books he bought. His beardless face and shrill
voice led to the lifelong belief that he was really a woman. The tomb is
elaborately decorated with a carved marble frieze representing the Song
of Miriam and the destruction of the Egyptians in the Red Sea. Miller
and his father were both Quakers, and the wealth of which they were
possessed derived from a prosperous seedsman’s business in Canongate,
Edinburgh. To the father came an adventure which does not fall to many
men. He was married in 1789 for the third time, when nearly seventy
years of age, to an Englishwoman, who conveyed him against his will in a
post-chaise from Edinburgh to London.
Passing Craigentinny and Jock’s Lodge we are, in the words of the old
song, “Within a mile of Edinburgh town.” The more modern and acceptable
name of Jock’s Lodge is Piershill, but it has been known by the other for
over two hundred and seventy years. Who the original Jock was seems open
to doubt, but he is supposed to have been a beggar who built himself a
hut on this then lonely road leading to Figgate Whins. Even in 1650,
when Cromwell besieged Edinburgh, the spot had obtained its name, and is
referred to as “that place called Jockis Lodge.” Towards the close of
the eighteenth century a Colonel Piers had a villa here, pulled down in
1793, when barracks—known as Piershill Barracks—were built on the site.
It is a district slowly emerging from the reproach of a disreputable
past, when footpads and murderers haunted the muddy roads, or took refuge
amid the towering rocks of Arthur’s Seat, Crow Hill, or Salisbury Craigs,
or hid in the congenial sloughs of the Hunter’s Bog. Close by the road,
at the entrance to the Queen’s Park of Holyrood, is Muschat’s Cairn, the
place where Scott makes Jeanie Deans meet the outlaw Robertson. This
heap of stones marks the spot where Nicol Muschat of Boghall, a surgeon,
a man of infamous character, murdered his wife by cutting her throat in
1720, a crime which, with Scottish old-time mysticism, he said was
committed by direct personal instigation of the devil. All the same,
they hanged him for it in the Grassmarket, where martyrs “testified” of
old and the criminals of “Auld Reekie” expiated their crimes.
Of course the approach to Edinburgh has, from the picturesque standpoint,
been spoiled. Ranges of grim stone houses and sprawling suburbs now hem
in the road and hide the view of Arthur’s Seat and its neighbouring
eminences; but a few steps to the left serve to disclose them, the little
loch of St. Margaret, and the ruined walls of St. Anthony’s Chapel on the
hillside, once guarding the holy well. St. Anthony’s Chapel, within the
rule of the Abbey of Holyrood, served another turn, for from its tower
glimmered a beacon which in the old days guided mariners safely up the
Forth, a service paid for out of the harbour dues.
The so-called “London” and “Regent” Roads that now lead directly into the
New Town of Edinburgh are modern improvements upon the old approach
through Canongate into the Old Town. If steep, rugged, and winding, the
old way was at least more impressive, for it lay within sight of Holyrood
Palace and brought the wayfarer into the very heart of Scott’s “own
romantic town,” to where the smells and the dirt, the crazy
tenement-houses and the ragged clouts hanging from dizzy tiers of
windows, showed “Scotia’s darling seat” in its most characteristic
aspects.
As Alexander Smith puts it, Scott discovered the city was beautiful, sang
its praises to the world, “and he has put more coin into the pockets of
its inhabitants than if he had established a branch of manufacture of
which they had the monopoly.”
The distant view of Edinburgh is magnificent. The peaked and jagged
masses of Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Craigs, the monument-cumbered
Calton Hill, the Castle Rock—all these combine to make the traveller
eager to reach so picturesque a spot. Approaching it and seeing the
smoke-cloud drifting with the breeze away from the hollow from which
Edinburgh’s million chimneys are seen peering, one instantly notes the
peculiar appropriateness of the Scots endearing epithet, “Auld Reekie.”
But it was not only—if indeed at all—an admiration of the picturesque
that made the sight of Edinburgh so welcome to old-time travellers. It
was rather the prospect of coming to the end of their journey, and almost
in sight of a comfortable hotel, that rendered the view so welcome to
those who in the last thirty years or so of the coaching era made this
trip of almost four hundred miles; but those who had come this way at an
earlier period had no such comfortable prospect before them. Instead of
putting up at some fine hospitable inn, such as they were used to even in
the smaller English towns, they were set down at a “stabler’s,” the
premises of one whose first business was to horse the coaches and to let
saddle-horses, and who, as in some sort of an after-thought, lodged those
who were obliged to journey about the country.
[Picture: Calton Hill]
A traveller arriving at Edinburgh in 1774, for instance, had indeed
little comfort awaiting him. “One can scarcely form in imagination the
distress of a miserable stranger on his first entrance into this city,”
says one writing at this period. No inn better than an alehouse, no
decent or cleanly accommodation, nor in fact anything fit for a
gentleman. “On my first arrival,” says this traveller, “my companion and
self, after the fatigue of a long day’s journey, were landed at one of
these stable-keepers’ (for they have modesty to give themselves no higher
denomination) in a part of the town which is called the Pleasance; and on
entering the house we were conducted by a poor girl without shoes or
stockings, and with only a single linsey-woolsey petticoat which just
reached half-way to her ankles, into a room where about twenty Scotch
drovers had been regaling themselves with whisky and potatoes. You may
guess our amazement when we were informed that this was the best inn in
the metropolis, and that we could have no beds unless we had an
inclination to sleep together, and in the same room with the company
which a stage-coach had that moment discharged. ‘Well,’ said I to my
friend, ‘there is nothing like seeing men and manners; perhaps we may be
able to repose ourselves at some coffee-house.’ Accordingly, on inquiry,
we discovered that there was a good dame by the Cross who acted in the
double capacity of pouring out coffee and letting lodgings to strangers,
as we were. She was easily to be found out, and, with all the
conciliating complaisance of a _Maitresse d’Hôtel_, conducted us to our
destined apartments, which were indeed six stories high, but so infernal
in appearance that you would have thought yourself in the regions of
Erebus. The truth is, I will venture to say, you will make no scruple to
believe when I tell you that in the whole we had only two windows, which
looked into an alley five feet wide, where the houses were at least ten
stories high and the alley itself was so sombre in the brightest sunshine
that it was impossible to see any object distinctly.”
Private lodgings, just as those described above, were the resort of those
who had neither friends nor acquaintance in Edinburgh at that time; but
travellers in Scotland were nearly always exercising their ingenuity to
come, at the end of their day’s journey, to the house of some friend or
some friend’s friend, to whom before starting they had been careful to
obtain letters of introduction. So old and so widespread a custom was
this that, so far back as 1425, we find an Act of James the First of
Scotland actually forbidding all travellers resorting to burgh towns to
lodge with friends or acquaintances, or in any place but the
“hostillaries,” unless indeed he was a personage of consequence, with a
great retinue, in which case he might accept a friend’s hospitality,
provided that his “horse and meinze” were sent to the inns.
Of course such an Act was doomed to fall into neglect, but the
innkeepers, equally of course during a long series of years, almost
ceased to exist. A few “stablers’” establishments became known as “inns”
at about the period of Doctor Johnson’s visit to Edinburgh. They were
chiefly situated in the Pleasance, or in that continuation of it, St.
Mary’s Wynd (now St. Mary Street). These inns, such as they were, burst
upon the by no means delighted gaze of the wayfarer from England as he
entered the historic town of Edinburgh, and when he saw them he generally
lifted up his voice and cursed the fate that had sent him so far from
home and into so barbarous a country.
The Pleasance was largely in receipt of the traffic to and from the south
until the construction of the North and South Bridges, opened in 1769 and
1788, diverted it to a higher level. We may look in vain nowadays in the
Pleasance for the inns of that day. They are demolished and altered so
greatly as to be unrecognisable; but the “White Horse,” which stands in a
court away down Canongate, will give us an idea of the kind of place.
Situated in “White Horse,” or Davison’s Close in Canongate, and reached
from that street by a low-browed archway, it remains a perfect example of
the Edinburgh inn of nearly three hundred years ago. An inn no longer,
but occupied in tenements, the internal arrangements are somewhat
altered, but the time when the house extended a primitive hospitality to
travellers is not difficult to reconstruct in the imagination. To it, at
the end of their journeys, came those wearied ones, to find accommodation
of the most intimate and domestic kind. Kitchen and dining-room were
one, and it was scarce possible for a guest to obtain a bedroom to
himself. Dirt was accepted as inevitable. In fact, the modern “dosser”
is better and more decently housed. To the “White Horse” came
others—those about to set out upon their travels. Booted and spurred,
wills made and saddle-bags packed, they resorted hither to hire horses
for their journeys, and it is not unlikely that the old house saw in
early times many a quaking laird, badly wanted by the Government,
slinking through the archway from the Canongate, to secure trusty mounts
for instant flight. Scott, indeed, has made it the scene of strange
doings in his _Waverley_.
[Picture: The “White Horse” Inn]
This is the oldest house in Edinburgh ever used as an inn, but must not
be confused with that other “White Horse,” long since demolished, made
famous by Doctor Johnson.
It was in 1773 that Johnson reached Edinburgh. He put up at the “White
Horse” in Boyd’s Close, called, even in those uncleanly times, “that
dirty and dismal” inn, kept by James Boyd. The great man immediately
notified his arrival to Boswell in this short note:—
“_Saturday night_.—Mr. Johnson sends his compliments to Mr. Boswell,
being just arrived at Boyd’s.”
When Boswell arrived, falling over himself in his eagerness, he found the
Doctor furiously angry. Doubtless he had been conducted to his room, as
was not unusually the case, by some dirty sunburnt wench, without shoes
or stockings, a fit object for dislike; but the chief cause of his anger
was the waiter, who had sweetened his lemonade without the ceremony of
using the sugar-tongs. He threw the lemonade out of window, and seemed
inclined to throw the waiter after it.
“Peter Ramsay’s” was a famous inn, situated at the foot of St. Mary’s
Wynd, next the Cowgate Port. To it came travellers along both the east
and the south roads. Ramsay advertised it in 1776 as being “a good house
for entertainment, good stables for above one hundred horses, and sheds
for about twenty carriages.” In 1790, he retired with a fortune of
£10,000. But in the best of these old Edinburgh inns the beds well
merited a description given of them as “dish-clouts stretched on
grid-irons.”
First among the innkeepers of this unsanctified quarter to remove from it
into the New Town was James Dun. He was a man notable among his kind,
having not only been the first to call himself an “innkeeper” instead of
a “stabler,” but the greatly daring person who first used the outlandish
word “Hotel” in Edinburgh. He began “hotel”-keeping in the flats above
the haberdashery shop of John Neale, who, two years before, in 1774, had
built the first house in the New Town. Neale himself was a pioneer of
considerable nerve, for although the New Town had been projected and
building-sites laid out on what is now the chief ornament of it, Princes
Street, prospective tenants were shy of so bleak and exposed a situation
as this then was. They preferred to live in the dirty cosiness of the
old wynds and closes, and so the New Town seemed likely to be a paper
project for years to come. At this juncture the Town Council made a
sporting offer of exemption from all local taxes for the first who would
build a house there. Neale was this pioneer, and he built the house that
still stands next the Register House, the most easterly house in Princes
Street.
Dun, to whom he had let the upper part, immediately displayed a great
gilded sign, “Dun’s Hotel,” whereupon the Lord Provost, representing
public feeling, wrote objecting to the foreign word “Hotel,” saying that,
whatever might be the real character of his establishment, he might at
least avoid the scandalous indecency of publicly proclaiming it!
XXXIV
THESE concluding pages of a book on the road to Edinburgh form no fitting
place to attempt the description or history of so ancient and historic a
town. Our business is to reach the northern capital, leaving the story
of Edwin’s Burgh to be told by others. Yet we cannot leave it thus
without some brief survey.
[Picture: “Squalor and Picturesqueness”] The modern traveller by road,
coming in by the London Road, Greenside, Leith Street, and Princes
Street, comes in by the New Town, and sees on his left, across a deep
ravine, partly occupied by a huge railway station and partly by beautiful
public gardens, the dark mass of the Castle and the Old Town crowning the
opposite heights, grey and stern, in effective contrast with the gay
flower-beds down below, the old houses huddling together on the scanty
foothold of the ridge and rising to sheer heights. _That_ is the
original historic town: _this_, to which the modern traveller comes by
road, the new. Little more than a hundred years ago this New Town was
not thought of: its site the meadows and wastes that sloped down to the
Firth of Forth and the sea, and the site of the railway station and the
Princes Street Gardens covered with the dark waters of the Nor’ Loch.
Old-time arrivals in Edinburgh, coming in by Canongate, found themselves
in midst of squalor and picturesqueness; and although much of the
picturesque is gone, it is still a quaint street and the squalor
survives. The poor who live here “hang forth their banners from the
outward walls,” in the shape of their domestic washing, fluttering in the
breeze from every window, at the end of long poles, and how poor they are
may be judged from the condition of the clothes they consider worth
keeping. That sometime prison, the Canongate Tolbooth, facing the long
street, remains one of the most curious relics of Edinburgh’s past. Not
a very ancient past, for it was only “biggit” in 1591, but old enough to
be regarded with reverence, and quaint to admiration, with its spired
tower and tourelles, so eminently Scotch of that period when the French
influence in architecture was yet strong. You can match those curious
spires time and time again among the old châteaux of the Loire, and in
Brittany; just as in the old Norman town of Coutances one can find the
counterpart of the old theatre in Playhouse Close, near by.
[Picture: Canongate]
From here, those travellers saw the Old Town ahead and, progressing up
High Street, came successively to the Tron Church, the Market Cross, St.
Giles’s Cathedral, and, before 1817—when it was pulled down—to the Old
Tolbooth. Beyond this, the Lawnmarket conducted to the Castle, which
then marked the end of the town. In this progress the tall and crowded
houses and darkening wynds and closes stood to right and left. Later
years have seen the disappearance of many of these places, where in old
times the ferocious Scots nobles lived, poor and proud, bloodthirsty and
superstitious, but those that are left are very grim, dark, and dirty,
and the ten-and eleven-storied houses of such a height that only by great
exertions is it possible to crane the neck and lift the eyes to the
skyline, against which the belching chimneys of the piled-up “lands” are
projecting the smoke of domestic hearths and eternally justifying the old
Scots term of endearment for Edinburgh. The nobles are gone, lang syne,
their old dens occupied now by the very poorest of Edinburgh’s poor; but
sanitary conditions, even with the present occupants, are not so degraded
as they were when the flower of Scotland’s nobility dwelt here; when pigs
and fowls were herded in the basements, or ran unheeded in the alleys,
and wayfarers skulked under the walls at the sound of voices above,
calling “gardy-loo”—a call which accompanied a discharge of overflowing
household utensils from inconceivable heights into the gutters below.
“Gardy-loo” was a term which, with this dreadfully unclean custom,
derived from France, having been originally _gardez-l’eau_; just as the
cakes sold at Craigmillar, called “petticoat tails” were originally
_petits gateaux_.
Still, the Old Town is sufficiently grimy and huddled yet to fitly
illustrate the Scottish saying “The clartier (_i.e._ the dirtier) the
cosier.”
[Picture: Old Inscription, Lady Stair’s House]
Nothing is more characteristic of the Old Town than the religious texts
carved upon the stone door lintels of these ancient houses. Few are
without them. To a stranger they would seem to tell of a fervent piety,
but they meant more than that. They were always accompanied with a date
and with the initials—sometimes also the arms—of their owners; as in the
beautiful example still remaining in Lady Stair’s Close, and represented
both pride and a fearful superstition. Superstition, because the
improving texts and pious ejaculations meant little beyond talismanic
protection against “Auld Hornie,” wizards, and warlocks, wehr-wolves, and
all those frightful inhabitants of Satan’s invisible world in which the
Scotch most fervently believed, from king to peasant. Thus when we read
over one of these old doorways the queerly spelled
Blissit be God in all His giftis,
we know that this was little less than an incantation, and marked a
lively sense of favours to come; and when our eye lights upon the
inscription next door,
Pax intrantibus: Salus exevntibvs,
we know that the good feeling thus prominently displayed would by no
means have prevented the fierce lord of the house from stabbing his guest
in a dark corner, if he had a mind to it.
[Picture: The “Heave Awa” Sign] A highly interesting book might be
written on these old sculptured stones alone. Nor are they in every
instance old. Some modern ones exist, and the entirely laudable passion
for commemoration has caused interesting tablets to be set up, marking
many of Edinburgh’s famous spots. A curious modern piece of sculpture
decorates more or less artistically the archway leading from the High
Street into Paisley Close, supporting a tall building erected in 1862.
It represents the bust of a boy, and includes an inscribed label. It
seems that the old building standing on this site suddenly collapsed on a
Sunday morning in 1861, and buried a number of people in the ruins,
thirty-five actually dying from their injuries. Some were fortunate
enough to be screened from the heavy masses of stone and brick by timbers
which in falling had imprisoned them. Among these was the lad whose face
is represented in the carving. The rescuers who came with pick and
shovel to dig out the survivors had succoured many, and were turning back
when they heard the muffled cry, “Heave awa, lads, I’m no’ deid yet,” and
redoubling their efforts, extricated the author of it.
No relic now remains upon the door-posts of these old houses of the
curious contrivance which preceded the door-knocker, and for the sight of
a “tirle-pin” the stranger must needs go to the museum of the Royal
Scottish Society of Antiquaries, to which the last example was long since
removed, from an old house in the Canongate.
[Picture: A Tirle-Pin] The tirle-pin had a variety of names. Sometimes
it would be called a “risp” or a “ringle,” and there were those who knew
it as a “craw”; that is to say, a crow, from the harsh crow-like sound
produced by its use. A tirle-pin was just a rasping contrivance made of
a twisted bar of iron fixed against the door post with an iron ring
hanging loosely from it, as in the accompanying sketch. Instead of
knocking, one who desired admittance would seize the ring and rasp it up
and down the twisted iron, producing a noise which could be distinctly
heard within.
The origin of the tirle-pin, like that of many another Scottish custom,
was French. It originated in France in the times of the Valois, in days
when it was not etiquette to knock at the doors of royal personages. In
face of this, courtiers were reduced to scratching with the
finger-nails—a disagreeable sensation when practised upon wood, as any
one who tries it may readily discover for himself. Perhaps from this
cause, or because the scratching was not loud enough (or, perhaps, even
because the polish began to disappear from the royal portals) this
mechanical scratcher was invented. The fashion spread from France to
Scotland in times when the two countries were linked in close ties of
friendship. From the palace it spread down to the mansions of the nobles
and the houses of the merchants, finally coming into general use. It was
never acclimatised in England, although another kind of scratching was,
if we may believe the satirists, who say that James the First and his
Scottish followers imported the itch.
However, the tirle-pin is obsolete, but it did not disappear without
leaving a trace of its existence in old Scots ballads; as, for instance,
that of _Sweet William’s Ghaist_:—
There cam a ghaist to Margaret’s door,
Wi’ mony a grievous groan;
And aye he tirled upon the pinne,
But answer made she nane.
Is that my father Philip?
Or is’t my brother John,
Or is’t my true love Willie
To Scotland now come home?
XXXV
A GRIM old town, Edinburgh, dominated by the ancient castle from its
rock, bodeful with the story of a thousand years. Newer new towns have
sprung up around it to south and west, and hem the old fortress in with a
bordure of unhistoric suburbs, so that from the topmost battlements you
see how small the original Edinburgh is, compared with its surroundings.
Places of pilgrimage are not lacking in the old streets. There are John
Knox’s house, one of the queerest, three-storied, and gabled, the very
ideal of rugged strength; and the Parliament Square, once St. Giles’s
churchyard, where “I K 1572,” on a stone in the pavement, marks the site
of Knox’s grave. Passers-by walk over it, curiously fulfilling Johnson’s
aspiration, made years before the churchyard was destroyed, by which he
hoped that the dour Presbyterian was buried on a highway. While we are
on the subject of tombs, let us mention that other place of pilgrimage,
Greyfriars churchyard, that grisly place where Robert Louis Stevenson was
accustomed in his youth to make assignations with parlour-maids. Few
places so grim as a Scottish burial-ground, and Greyfriars is of these
the grimmest. Dishevelled backs of houses look down upon the mouldering
tombs, and kitchens and living-rooms open into the houses of the dead.
Rusty iron railings, bolts and bars, guard the blackened and broken
mausoleums and give the pilgrim the weird idea that the living have taken
extraordinary precautions to imprison those who are never likely to break
out. The only living things here are the foul grass that grows within
the sepulchral enclosures, and the demon cats of an heraldic slimness
that haunt the churchyard in incredible numbers, and stealing victuals
from the neighbouring houses, gnaw them within the tombs. Many martyrs
for religion have their resting-place here, together with those who
martyred them. Persecutors and persecuted alike rest here now.
[Picture: Greyfriars]
Sympathies will ever be divided between the Covenanters and their
oppressors. As you read how they upheld their faith and signed their
names to the Covenant in this gruesome yard of Greyfriars, so ominously
on that flat tombstone which even now remains, you are fired with an
enthusiasm for those rejecters of a liturgy alien from their convictions,
and can curse “Claverse” with the best of those who do not forget the
heavy ways of “bonnie Dundee” with them. But the Covenanters were as
intolerant with those when they came to rule. The men of both sides were
men of blood. The strain of intolerance remains, and the tomb of that
other persecutor of the Covenanters, Sir George Mackenzie, has always
been, and still is, with the people “bloody Mackenzie’s.”
Old Edinburgh life centred at the Market Cross, happily restored in 1885
by Mr. Gladstone. The Cross has had a troubled history. Reconstructed
from a much older one in 1617, it remained here until 1756, when the
“improving” fanatics of that time swept the historic structure away,
without a thought of the associations belonging to it. They were
associations of every kind. Kings had been proclaimed at it by heralds
with fanfare of trumpet; patriots and traitors with equal contumely had
been done to death beside it; and the continual round of punishments
which gave the common hangman a busy time were inflicted here. In fact,
were a rogue to be pilloried or a king’s birthday to be kept with
becoming ceremony, the Cross was the place. Let us see what those
punishments were like, from one example illustrative of the general run
of them. Here is what they did in 1655 to “Mr. Patrik Maxwell, ane
arrant decevar.” They brought him here “quhair a pillorie was erectit,
gairdit and convoyed with a company of sodgeris; and their, eftir ane
full houris standing on that pillorie, with his heid and handis lyand out
and hoilis cuttit out for that end, his rycht lug was cuttit of; and
thaireftir careyit over to the town of St. Johnnestoun, quhair ane uther
pillorie wes erectit, on the quhilk the uther left lug wes cuttit af him.
The caus heirof wes this; that he haid gevin out fals calumneis and leyis
aganes Collonell Daniell, governour of Peirth. Bot the treuth is, he was
ane notorious decevar and ane intelligencer, sumtyme for the Englesches,
uther tymes for the Scottis, and decevand both of thame: besyde mony
prankis quhilk wer tedious to writt.” Quite so; but if all deceivers had
their ears cut off, how few would retain them! A ferocious folk, those
old Scots, and petty delinquents supped sorrow at their hands with a big
spoon. Sorry the lot of scandal-mongers and the like, seated on a wooden
horse with hands and legs tied, and permission freely accorded to all for
the throwing of missiles. Ferocity, however, should go hand in hand with
courage—a quality apparently not possessed by the citizens of Edinburgh
when Prince Charlie and his Highlanders came, in 1745. Incredulous of
the wild clansmen ever daring to attack the town, they laughed at the
very idea; but when they heard of his small force having eluded the force
of Johnny Cope, sent to intercept them, and advancing in earnest, things
took a very different colour. Those who were loyal to the House of
Hanover were quaking in their shoes, and the Jacobites rejoicing. The
city armed, even to the clergymen, who, on the Sunday before the
surrender, preached in the churches with swords and daggers buckled on
under their gowns. Bands of volunteers were raised, and on the report
that the Pretender was near, were marched outside the walls to dispute
his entry, despite their murmurs that they had volunteered to defend the
city from the inside, and were not prepared to go out to be cut to pieces
with the invaders’ claymores. Captain ex-Provost Drummond marched with
his company down the West Bow towards the West Port. Looking round when
he had reached it, he to his astonishment found himself alone. The
volunteers had vanished down the back lanes or closes! But the dragoons
were as bad. Coming near the enemy at Corstorphine, two miles out, they
bolted without firing a shot, and so back into Edinburgh and through it
and out at the other end. It was the ferocious appearance of the
Highlanders that caused this terror. They were comparatively few;
ill-armed, ragged, and ill-fed. But their strange dress, their wild
looks, shaggy locks, and generally outlandish appearance, frightened the
good Lowlanders, who knew almost as little of these Gaelic tribes as
Londoners themselves. The old-time warfare of the Japanese and the
Chinese, with their hideous masks; the dismal tom-toming of the African
savage; the war-paint of the Red Indian, are justified of their
existence, for the strange and hideous in warfare is very effective in
striking a paralysing terror into an enemy. Accordingly, the tartans,
the naked legs and arms, and the uncombed locks of the lairds’
uncivilised levies captured Edinburgh for Prince Charlie, who, a few days
later, September 17, caused his father, the Old Pretender, to be
proclaimed king, by the title of James the Third, at the Cross.
[Picture: The Wooden Horse]
[Picture: The Last of the Town Guard] With the suppression of “the
Forty-five,” the stirring warlike story of Edinburgh came to an end; but
not until 1807, when the Edinburgh police came into existence, was the
semi-military Town Guard, raised in 1682, abolished. The Town Guard and
the townspeople were always at odds, and hated one another cordially.
Recruited from the army, and armed with the formidable weapons called
“Jeddart axes,” it was originally a fine body, designed rather to keep
the town in order than to protect it, and its members never lost sight of
that fact. In its last years, however, the Town Guard declined in
importance and in numbers, and, coming to be regarded as a refuge for old
pensioners who could scarcely manage to crawl about, became an object of
derision. Then the sins of their forerunners were visited upon the heads
of those unhappy old men, and it became a common sight to see them baited
by mischievous small boys. The last of the Town Guard tottered about
Parliament Square in his queer uniform and three-cornered hat, hardly
able to shoulder his axe, and regarded by the inhabitants as one of their
most genuine antiquities, until he too followed his comrades to the tomb.
[Picture: Stately Princes Street]
XXXVI
ONE must needs admire Edinburgh. You may have seen the noblest cities of
the world; have stood upon the Acropolis at Athens, on the Heights of
Abraham at Quebec; have viewed Rome and her seven hills, or
Constantinople from the Golden Horn; but Edinburgh still retains her
pride of place, even in the eyes of the much travelled. You need not be
Scottish to feel the charm of her, and can readily understand why she
means so much to the Scot; but your gorge rises at the immemorial dirt of
the Old Town, simultaneously with your admiration of its wondrous
picturesqueness, and stately Princes Street seems to you a revelation of
magnificence even while the bulk of the New Town appears grey, formal,
and forbidding. The great gulf fixed between Old Town and New, that
ravine in which the railway burrows, and on whose banks the Princes
Street Gardens run, renders that thoroughfare, with its one side of grass
and trees and the other of fine shops and towering houses, reminiscent to
the Londoner of Piccadilly. But Piccadilly has not a towering Castle on
one side of it, nor a Calton Hill at the end; nor, on the other hand,
does Piccadilly know such easterly blasts as those that sweep down the
long length of Princes Street and freeze the very marrow of the
Southerner.
[Picture: Edinburgh, New Town, 1817, from Mons Meg Battery]
“The same isothermal line,” wrote Robert Chambers, “passes through
Edinburgh and London.” “Still,” James Payn used to say, “I never knew of
a four-wheeled cab being blown over by an east wind in London, as has
just happened in Edinburgh,” and R.L.S. tells us frankly that his native
city has “the vilest climate under heaven.”
Princes Street is perhaps even more like the Brighton Front in its
well-dressed crowds and fine shops. With the sea in place of the Gardens
and the Castle, the resemblance would be singularly close.
As for Calton Hill, that neo-classic eminence gives form and substance to
Edinburgh’s claim to be the “Modern Athens.” Learning had not been
unknown in the Old Town, where Hume and Boswell wrote; but, given air and
elbow-room, it expanded vastly when the New Town was planned, and with
the dawn of the nineteenth century, literature flourished exceedingly.
This seems to have inspired the idea of emulating the capital of Greece,
to the eye as well as to the mind. Accordingly a copy of the Parthenon
was begun on the crest of Calton Hill, as a monument to the Scots
soldiers who fell in the campaigns against Napoleon. It cost a huge sum
and has never been completed, and so it has familiarly been called
“Scotland’s Folly” and “Scotland’s Shame”; but doubtless looks a great
deal more impressive in its unfinished state, in the semblance of a ruin,
than it would were it ever finished. A variety of other freak buildings
keep it company: the Nelson Monument, memorials to Burns, to Dugald
Stewart, and to Professor Playfair, together with what the many “guides,”
who by some phenomenal instinct scent the stranger from afar, call an
“obsairvatory.”
Coaching days at Edinburgh ceased in 1846, when that sole surviving relic
of the coaches between London and the North—the Edinburgh and Berwick
coach—was discontinued on the opening of the Edinburgh and Berwick
Company, completing the series of lines that connect the two capitals.
It is true that passengers could not yet travel through without changing,
for the great bridges that cross the Tyne at Newcastle and the Tweed at
Berwick were not opened until four years later; but it was possible, with
these exceptions, to journey the whole distance by train. The opening of
the railway meant as great a change for Edinburgh as did the beginning of
the New Town seventy years before. Just what it was like then we may
judge from the drawing made from the Castle by David Roberts in 1847.
The point of view he has chosen is that from the Mons Meg Battery, and
the direction of his glance, omitting the Old Town on the right, is to
the northeast. Changes in detail have come about since then, but, as a
whole, it is the Edinburgh we all know: the Calton Hill, with its cluster
of weird monuments, prominent; the New Town, stretching away vaguely to
the water-side; while in the distance, on the right, is seen the shore
curving to Portobello; the twin masses of the Bass Rock and North Berwick
Law on the horizon. Down in the New Town itself the changes are evident.
Where the toy train with its old-fashioned locomotive is crawling out of
the tunnel under the Mound, and where the old Waverley Station is seen,
alterations have been plenty. The old North Bridge pictured here has
given place to a new, spanning the ravine in three spans of steel.
Beyond it are still seen the smoked-grimed modern Gothic battlements of
the Calton Gaol, but the huge new hotel of the North British Railway has
replaced the buildings that rose on that side of the old bridge, while
the towering offices of the _Scotsman_ occupy the other, all in that
florid French Renaissance that is the keynote of modern Edinburgh’s
architectural style. The Scott Monument stands where it did, not, as
David Roberts’s drawing shows us, among grounds but little cared for, but
amid gay parterres and velvet lawns. The Bank of Scotland has been
rebuilt and all the vacant sites long built upon; evidences these of half
a century’s progress, the direct outcome of those railways that two
generations ago wrote “Finis” to the last chapter in the romantic story
of the Great North Road.
[Picture: Skyline of the Old Town]
INDEX.
Aberford 74–76, 82
Alnwick 174, 186
“Andrew Mills’ Stob” 113
Asenby 84
Aycliffe 107
Ayton 208
* * * * *
Bagby Common 59
Bambrough Castle 190, 192
Barkston Ash 68, 71
Barwick-in-Elmete 76
Belford 189
Belhaven 216
Beltonford 216
Berwick-upon-Tweed 191, 196–202
Birdforth 58
Birtley 135
Blagdon 166
Boroughbridge 82
Bramham 79
Bramham Moor 76, 79
Brotherton 66–68, 74
Browney Bridge 116
Brownyside 189
Broxburn 212
Burnmouth 208
* * * * *
Causey Park Bridge 172
Chester-le-Street 133–135
Clifton, Yorks 52
Clifton, Northumberland 167
Coaches—
Edinburgh Mails 55, 68
Edinburgh Express 55, 83
Glasgow and Carlisle Mail 82
“High-flyer,” London, York and Edinburgh 28, 55, 68
Leeds Mail 75
Leeds and York Stage Coach 77
“Rockingham,” Leeds 75
“Union,” Leeds 75
“Wellington,” London and Newcastle 55, 62, 68
Coaching Accident 116
Coaching Notabilities:—
Alderson, Dr. 67
Holtby, Tom 98
“Nimrod” 76–79
Coatham Mundeville 107
Cockburnspath 210–212
“Conundrum” 202
Coxwold 59
Craigentinny 230
Croft 92–95
Cromwell, Oliver 107, 212
Croxdale 115
Cunecaster 133
Cuthbert, Saint 66, 119, 124, 126, 190
* * * * *
Dalton-upon-Tees 92
Darling, Grace 190
Darlington 96–107
Darrington 65
De Quincey, Thomas 104
Dintingdale 69, 70
Dishforth 84
Doncaster 62
Dunbar 212–216
Dunglass Dene 214
Durham 118–131
* * * * *
Easingwold 54–56
East Linton 216
Edinburgh 231–255
Elections 29–32
* * * * *
Fairborn 75
“Farmers’ Folly,” The, Alnwick, 174, 184, 186
Felton 172
Ferrybridge 65–67
Ferryhill 110–112
Fisherrow 228
Flemington 207
Framwellgate, Durham 130
Framwellgate Moor 131
* * * * *
Galtres, Forest of 51, 54
Gateshead 152, 154–156
Gladsmuir 222
Gosforth 166
Grant’s House 209
Great Smeaton 88
Grizzy’s Clump 191
* * * * *
Haddington 219–222
Haggerston Castle 192–195
Halidon Hill 207
Hambleton Hills 58, 59
Harlowgreen Lane 138
Heiferlaw Bank 187
Hell’s Kettles 85
High Butcher Race 115
High Entercommon 88
Highwaymen:—
Boulter, Thomas 22–24
Hazlett, Robert 154
King, Tom 16
Nevison, John 19–22
Tate, Andrew 115
Turpin, Dick 14–19
Holy Island 189–191
Hook Moor 75
Houndwood 208
* * * * *
Inns (mentioned at length):—
“Angel,” Ferrybridge 67
“Angel,” Wetherby 80
“Arabian House,” Aberford 75
“Bay Horse,” Skelton 53
“Bay Horse,” Traveller’s Rest 108
“Black Swan,” York 27, 28, 29
“Blue Bell,” Went Bridge 65
“Comet,” Croft 95
“Crown,” Boroughbridge 83
“Etteridge’s,” York 27
“George,” York 27
“Golden Lion,” Ferrybridge 68
“Golden Lion,” Northallerton 61
“Grant’s House” 210
“Gretna Green Wedding,” “Traveller’s Rest” 107
“Greyhounds,” Boroughbridge 83
“New Inn,” Allerton 82
“New Inn,” Easingwold 55
“Old Fox,” Brotherton 68
“Old Fox,” Wetherby 80
“Plough,” Alnwick 177
“Red House,” near Doncaster 63
“Rose and Crown,” Easingwold 55
“Spa Hotel,” Croft 92
“Spotted Dog,” Thornton-le-Street 59
“Swan,” Aberford 75
“Swan,” Ferrybridge 67
“Walshford Bridge Inn” 82
“Wheatsheaf,” Rushyford Bridge 109
“White Horse,” Edinburgh 234–236
“White House,” nr. Easingwold 55–58
“York Tavern,” York 27
Jock’s Lodge 230
Joppa 228
* * * * *
Kirk Deighton 82
Knavesmire, York 15, 32, 52
Kyloe 191
* * * * *
Lamberton Toll 202–207
“Lambton Worm,” The 132
Levenhall 222
Little Smeaton 89
Lovesome Hill 88
Low Butcher Race 115
* * * * *
Macmerry 222
Malcolm’s Cross 188
Martin, Jonathan 14, 42–51
Merrington 112–114
Metcalf, John 83
Micklefield 75
Morpeth 167–173
Musselburgh 227
* * * * *
Neville’s Cross, Battle of 123
Newcastle-upon-Tyne 154–166
Newsham 84
Newton-on-the-Moor 174
“Nineveh,” or Claro Hill 82
Northallerton 59–62, 84
North Charlton 189
North Otterington 84
* * * * *
Old-Time Travellers:—
Calderwood of Coltness, Mrs. 129
Defoe, Daniel 172
Derwentwater, Earl of 116
Eldon, Earl of 109, 160
Evelyn, John 63
James the First 96
Jeanie Deans 230
Johnson, Dr. 61, 202
Macready, W. J. 207
Montagu, Mrs. 187
Sterne, Rev. Laurence 59
Thoresby, Ralph 84, 116
Old-Time Travelling 77–79, 88–91, 97–103, 155, 199, 232–237
* * * * *
Partinghal 208
Penshaw Monument 131
Percys, the Dukes of Northumberland, 178–186, 138–152
Phantassie 216
Piershill 230
“Pity Me” 132
Plawsworth 132
Portobello 229
Prestonpans, Battle of 222, 224–226
* * * * *
Railways:—
Edinburgh and Berwick 104, 199, 254
Great Northern 104
North British 104, 255
North-Eastern 104, 115, 196
Stockton and Darlington 98–100
Rashelfe 58
Richardson’s Stead 195
Robin Hood’s Well 63
_Rob Roy_ 97
_Roderick Random_ 138–152
Ross 208
Runaway Marriages 203–207
Rushy Cap 172
Rushyford Bridge 109
* * * * *
Sand Hutton 84
Saxton 70, 72
Scott, Sir Walter 97, 123
Scremerston 195
Seaton Burn 166
Shaftholme Junction 104
Shipton 54
Skelton 53
“Sockburn Worm,” The 93
“Sockeld’s Leap” 116
South Otterington 84
Sunderland Bridge 115
Standard, Battle of the 87
* * * * *
Tadcaster 68, 71
Thirkleby Park 59
Thirsk 59
Thormanby 59
Thornton-le-Street 59
Tollerton Cross-Lanes 54
Topcliffe 84
Towton, Battle of 69–74
Tranent 222
Traprain Law 216
“Traveller’s Rest” 107
Turpin, Dick 15–19
Tweedmouth 196
* * * * *
Walshford Bridge 82
Warenford 189
Warrener’s House 172
Went Bridge 65
West Barns 216
West Thirston 172
Wetherby 80, 82
Wide Open 166
Woodham 108
* * * * *
York 1–52
York Bar 62
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Great North Road: York to Edinburgh - The Old Mail Road to Scotland" ***
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