The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: York to Edinburgh
by Charles G. Harper · English · Gutenberg #47239 · 428,503 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Great North Road, the Old Mail Road to Scotland: York to Edinburgh
Author: Charles G. Harper
Release date: October 30, 2014 [eBook #47239]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47239
Credits: This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREAT NORTH ROAD, THE OLD MAIL ROAD TO SCOTLAND: YORK TO EDINBURGH ***
This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler.
[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 supernat
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