This eBook was transcribed by Les Bowler.

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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

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

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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.

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.

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.

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:—

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 y^t ye sent of y^e poyson was so strong y^t 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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

XXI

The traveller pursuing his northward way comes into Durham by the back door, as it were, for the suburb of Old Elvet through which the Great North Road conducts to the ancient city is one of the least prepossessing of entrances, and, besides being dirty and shabby, is endowed with a cobble-stoned road which, as if its native unevenness were not sufficient, may generally be found strewed with fragments of hoop-iron, clinkers, and other puncturing substances calculated to give tragical pauses to the exploring cyclist who essays to follow the route whose story is set forth in these pages. Old Elvet is in no sense a prepossessing suburb of Durham, but its steep and stony street is a true exemplar of the city’s other highways and byways, which are nothing if not breakneck and badly paved, as well as being badly kept. But facing Old Elvet’s long street is still to be found the “Three Tuns,” where coach passengers in the closing years of that era delighted to stay, and where, although the well-remembered hostess of the inn has been gathered to Abraham’s bosom, the guest on entering is still served in his bedroom with the welcoming glass of cherry-brandy which it has for the best part of a century been the pleasing custom of the house to present. No other such ambrosial cup as this, rare in itself and hallowed by old memories, greets the wayfarer along the roads nowadays.

From here, or other headquarters, let us set forth to explore the city, planted on a craggy site looking down upon the encompassing Wear that flows deep down between rocky banks clothed thickly with woods. To enter the city proper from “Old Elvet,” one must needs cross Elvet Bridge, still narrow, although the subject of a widening by which its width was doubled in 1805. How the earlier coaches crossed it is therefore something of a problem.

It has often been claimed for Durham that it is “the most picturesque city in England,” and if by that contention we are to understand the site of it to be meant, the claim must be allowed. Cities are not so many that there is much difficulty in estimating their comparative charms; and were it even a question of towns, few might be found to have footholds of such beauty.

The Wear and that rocky bluff which it renders all but an island, seemed to the distracted monks of Lindisfarne, worn out with a century’s wandering over the north of England in search of safety from the marauding heathen Danes who had laid waste the coast and their island cathedral, an ideal spot; and so to the harsh necessities of over nine hundred years ago we owe both this selection of a site and the building upon it of a cathedral which should be an outpost for the Lord in the turbulent North and a castle for the protection of his servants. It was in the year 995 that, after a hundred and twenty years of constant wandering, the successors of those monks who had fled from Lindisfarne with the body of their revered bishop, the famous Saint Cuthbert, came here, still bearing his hallowed remains. Their last journey had been from Ripon. Coming near this spot, the Saint, who though by this time dead for over three hundred years, was as masterful as he had been in life, manifested his approval of the neighbourhood by refusing to be carried any further. When the peripatetic bishop and monks found that his coffin remained immovable they fasted and prayed for three days, after which disciplinary exercise, one of their number had a vision wherein it was revealed to him that the Saint should be carried to Dunholme, where he was to be received into a place of rest. So, setting forth again, distressed in mind by not knowing where Dunholme lay, but hoping for a supernatural guidance, they came presently to “a place surrounded with rocks, where there was a river of rapid waves and fishes of various kinds mingling with the floods. Great forests grew there, and in deep valleys were wild animals of many sorts, and deer innumerable.” It was when they were come to this romantic place that they heard a milkmaid calling to her companion, and asking where her cow was. The answer, that “she was in Dunholme” was “an happy and heavenly sound to the distressed monks, who thereby had intelligence that their journey’s end was at hand, and the Saint’s body near its resting-place.” Pressing onward, they found the cow in Dunholme, and here, on the site of the present Cathedral, they raised their first “little Church of Wands and Branches.” The Cathedral and the Castle that they and their immediate successors raised have long since been replaced; but the great Norman piles of rugged fame and stern battlemented and loopholed fortress crowning the same rocky heights prove that those who kept the Church anchored here had need to watch as well as pray, to fight secular battles as well as wage war against the devil and all his works. It was this double necessity that made the bishops of Durham until our own time bishops-palatine; princes of the State as well as of the Church, and in the old days men of the sword as well as of the pastoral staff; and their cathedral shadows forth these conditions of their being in no uncertain way. There is no finer pile of Norman masonry in this country than this great edifice, whose central tower and east end are practically the only portions not in that style, and of these that grand and massive tower, although of the Perpendicular period, is akin to the earlier parts in feeling; nor is there another quite so impressive a tower in England as this, either for itself or in its situation, with the sole exception of “Boston Stump,” that beacon raised against the sky for many miles across the Lincolnshire levels.

Woods and river still surround the Cathedral, as Turner shows in his exquisite view from the Prebend’s Bridge, one among many other glorious and unexpected glimpses which the rugged nature of Durham’s site provides from all points, but incomparably the best of all. It is here that, most appropriately, there has been placed a decorative tablet, carved in oak, and bearing the quotation from Sir Walter Scott, beginning—

Half House of God, half Castle; ’gainst the Scot;

a quotation that gains additional point from the circumstance of the battle of Neville’s Cross having been fought against the invading Scots, October 17th, 1346, within sight from the Cathedral roofs. This view is one of Turner’s infrequent topographically accurate works. Perhaps even he felt the impossibility of improving upon the beauty of the scene.

Still, annually, after evensong on May 29th, the lay clerks and choristers of the Cathedral ascend to the roof of the great central tower, in their cassocks and surplices, and sing anthems. The first, Farrant’s “Lord, for Thy tender mercies’ sake,” is a reference to the national crime of the execution of Charles the First, and is sung facing south. The second, “Therefore with angels and archangels,” by V. Novello, expressing the pious sentiment that the martyred king shall rest in Paradise, in company with those bright beings, is sung facing east; and the third, “Give Peace in our time, O Lord,” by W. H. Callcott, facing north.

The origin of this observance was the thanksgiving for the victory of Neville’s Cross, a famous and a complete success, when fifteen thousand Scots were slain and David the Second, the Scottish king and many of his nobles, captured. It was to the special intervention of St. Cuthbert, whose sacred banner was carried by Prior John Fossor to Maiden Bower, a spot overlooking the battlefield, that this signal destruction of the enemy was ascribed. The Prior prayed beside it, but his monks are said to have offered up their petitions from the more distant, and safer, vantage-point of the Cathedral towers. Perhaps they had a turn of agnosticism in their minds; but, at any rate, they took no risks.

The original tower-top Te Deum afterwards sung on the anniversary seems to have been discontinued at the Reformation. The revival came after the King’s Restoration in 1660, when the day was altered to May 29th, to give the celebration the character of a rejoicing at the return of Charles the Second. This revival itself fell into disuse in the eighteenth century, being again restored in 1828, and continued ever since.

The battlefield of Neville’s Cross lies to the west of the Cathedral, so no singing takes place on the western side of the tower. The popular, but mistaken, idea in Durham is that this is because a choir-boy once overbalanced on that side and fell from the tower.

If you would see how Castle and Cathedral are situated with regard to the busy modern city, there is no such place as the railway station, whence they are seen dominating the mass of houses, among the smoke-wreaths of commerce, like the martyrs of old steadfast amidst their burning faggots. If again, reversing the order of precedence as seen in the view from Prebend’s Bridge, you would have the Castle in the forefront and the Cathedral behind, it is from the Framwellgate Bridge, carrying the Great North Road over the Wear, that another lovely glimpse is seen, ranging to Prebend’s Bridge itself.

XXII

But time grows short, and we have not long to linger at Durham. Much else might be said of the Cathedral; of Saint Cuthbert’s Shrine, and of the vandal Wyatt, who “restored” the Cathedral in 1775, cutting away, in the process, a depth of four inches from the stonework of much of the exterior. The work cost £30,000, and resulted in eleven hundred tons weight of stone chippings being removed from the building. If that “restorer” had had his way, he would have destroyed the beautiful Galilee Chapel that projects from the west front, and forms so uniquely interesting a feature of Late Norman work. His idea was to drive a carriage road round this way. The work of destruction had, indeed, already been begun when it was stopped by more reverent men.

A curious relic still remains upon the door of the Cathedral’s north porch, in the form of a huge knocker, dating back to Norman times. Cast in the shape of a grinning monster’s head, a ring hanging from its jaws, it is the identical sanctuary knocker of Saint Cuthbert’s Sanctuary, which was in use from the foundation of the Cathedral until 1524. All fugitives, whatever their crimes, who succeeded in escaping to Durham, and reaching the bounds of “Saint Cuthbert’s Peace,” were safe from molestation during thirty-seven days. A criminal, grasping the ring of this knocker, could not be torn from it by his pursuers, under pain of their being subjected to excommunication; and lest there should be bold spirits whom even this could not affright, there were always two monks stationed, day and night, in a room above the porch, to watch for fugitives. When admitted, the criminal confessed his crime, with every circumstance attending it, his confession being taken down in writing, in the presence of witnesses; a bell ringing in the Galilee tower all the while, giving notice that some one had fled to the protection of Saint Cuthbert. After these formalities, the fugitive was clothed with a black gown, bearing a yellow cross on the left shoulder: the badge of the Saint whose protection he had secured. After the days of grace had expired, and in the event of no pardon being obtained, ceremonies were gone through before the Shrine, in which the malefactor solemnly forswore his native land for ever. Then, safeguarded to the coast, he was shipped out of the kingdom by the first vessel sailing after his arrival.

There must have been many an exciting chase along the roads in those times, and many a criminal who richly deserved punishment must have escaped it by the very skin of his teeth. Many another, no doubt, was seized and handed over to justice, or slain, on the threshold of safety. Other fugitives still—and here Saint Cuthbert appears in better guise—victims of hatred and oppression, private or political, claimed the saintly ægis, and so escaped the vengeance of their enemies. So, looking upon the ferociously grinning mask of the knocker, glaring with eyeless sockets upon Palace Green, we can reconstruct the olden times when, at his last gasp, the flying wretch seized the ring and so came into safety. By night, the scene was more impressive still, for there were crystals in those sockets then, and a lamp burning behind, so that the fugitive could see his haven from afar, and make for it.

To-day, Saint Cuthbert avails no man, as the county gaol and the assize courts sufficiently prove, and Durham city is essentially modern, from the coal-grit that powders its dirty streets to the awfully grotesque effigy of a Marquis of Londonderry that lends so diabolical an air to the Market-place, where the Statute Fair is held, and where he sits, a coal-black effigy across his coal-black horse, towering over the steam merry-go-rounds, like Satan amid the revelries of a Walpurgis Night. This bronze effigy is probably the most grotesque statue in the British Isles, and loses nothing of that quality in the noble Marquis being represented in a hussar uniform with flying dolman over his shoulders, and a busby, many sizes too large for him, on his head, in an attitude as though ferociously inviting the houses on the other side of the street to “come on.”

That diarising Scotswoman, Mrs. Calderwood of Coltness, travelling south in 1756, wrote:—

“We dined at Durhame, and I went to see the cathedrall; it is a prodigious bulky building. It was on Sunday betwixt services, and in the piazzas there were several boys playing at ball. I asked the girl that attended me, if it was the custome for the boys to play at ball on Sunday: she said, ‘they play on other days, as well as on Sundays.’ She called her mother to show me the Church; and I suppose, by my questions, the woman took me for a heathen, as I found she did not know of any other mode of worship but her own; so, that she might not think the Bishop’s chair defiled by my sitting down in it, I told her I was a Christian, though the way of worship in my country differed from hers. In particular, she stared when I asked what the things were that they kneeled upon, as they appeared to me to be so many Cheshire cheeses.”

They were hassocks: articles apparently then not known to Presbyterians.

And so she continued southward:—

“Next day, the 7th, we dined none, but baited at different places, and betwixt Doncaster and Bautry a man rode about in an odd way, whom we suspected for a highwayman. Upon his coming near, John Rattray pretended to make a quarle with the post boy, and let him know that he keept good powder and ball to keep such folks as him in order; upon which the felow scampered off cross the common.”

The Great North Road leaves Durham over Framwellgate Bridge, built by Bishop Flambard in Norman times. Although altered and repaired in the fifteenth century and later, it is still substantially the same bridge. There was once a fortified gateway on it, but that was taken down in 1760. Bridge, River, Castle, and Cathedral here form a majestic picture.

XXIII

And now to take the open road again. The chief features of the road between Durham and Newcastle are coal-pits, dismal pit villages, and coal-dust. Not at once, however, is the traveller introduced to these, and the ascent out of Durham, through the wooded banks of Dryburn, is very pretty. It is at Framwellgate Moor, a mile and a half from the city, that the presence of coal begins to make itself felt, in the rows of unlovely cottages, and in the odd figures of the pitmen, who may be seen returning from their work, with grimy faces and characteristic miner’s dress. Adjoining this village, and indistinguishable from it by the stranger, is the roadside collection of cottages known as “Pity Me,” taking its name from the hunted fox in the sign of the “Lambton Hounds” inn.

Framwellgate is scarce left behind before there rises up in the far distance, on the summit of one of the many hills to the north-east, a hill-top temple resembling the Athenian Acropolis, and as you go northward it is the constant companion of your journey for some seven or eight miles. This is “Penshaw Monument,” erected on that windy height in 1844, four years after his death, to the memory of John George Lambton, first Earl of Durham. It cost £6,000, and commemorates the championship of the Reform movement in its earlier and precarious days by that statesman. Like many another monument, impressive at a distance, a near approach to it leads to disillusion, for its classic outlines are allied to coarse workmanship, and its eighteen great columns are hollow. Penshaw, deriving its name from Celtic words, signifying a wooded height, still has its woodlands to justify the name given nearly a thousand years ago.

The little town of Chester-le-Street lies three miles ahead, past the few cottages of Plawsworth, once the site of a turnpike-gate, and by Chester Moor and the pretty wooded hollow of Chester Dene, where the Con Burn goes rippling through the undergrowth to join the river Wear, and a bridge carries the highway across the gap. Approaching Chester-le-Street, the bright yellow sandstone mass of Lumley Castle, the ancient seat of the Earl of Scarborough, is prominent in the valley to the right, while beyond it rise the woods of Lambton Castle, the Earl of Durham’s domain. The neighbourhood of Chester-le-Street yet preserves the weird legend of the “Lambton Worm,” and Worm Hill is still pointed out as the home of that fabulous monster who laid the country under contribution for the satisfying of his voracious appetite, and was kept in good humour by being provided with the milk of nine cows daily. Many had essayed to slay the serpent and had fallen victims instead, until the heir of Lambton, returned from the red fields and hair’s-breadth escapes of foreign wars, set forth to free the countryside from the terror. But before he started, he was warned (so the legend runs), that unless he vowed, being successful in his enterprise, to slay the first living thing he met on his return, the lords of Lambton would never, for nine generations to come, die in their beds. He took that vow, and, armed with his trusty sword and a suit of armour made of razor-blades, met and slew the Worm, who coiled himself round the knight in order to crush him as he had the others, and so was cut in pieces against the keen edges. But the victor on returning was met by his father, instead of by the favourite dog who had been destined for the sacrifice. The sword dropped from his nerveless hand, and he broke the vow. What mattered it where the future generations died; in their beds, or, as warriors might wish, in their boots?

As a matter of fact, the next nine heirs of Lambton did die more or less violent deaths; a circumstance which is pointed to in proof of the legend’s truth. If other proof be wanting, one has only to visit Lambton Castle, where the identical trough from which the Worm drank his daily allowance of milk is still shown the curious tourist!

Chester-le-Street bears little in its appearance to hint at its great age and interesting history. A very up-to-date little town, whose prosperity derives from its position as a marketing centre for the surrounding pitmen, it supports excellent shops and rejoices in the possession of Co-operative Societies, whose objects are to provide their subscribers with whatever they want at cost price, and to starve the trader, who trades for profit, out of existence. That shops and societies exist side by side, and that both look prosperous, seems remarkable, not to say miraculous. Let the explanation of these things be left to other hands.

The name of Chester-le-Street doubly reveals the Roman origin of the place from the castle on the road which existed here in those distant times, and has easily survived the name of Cunecaster, which the Saxons gave it. At Cunecaster the ancient bishopric of Bernicia, forerunner of the present See of Durham, had its cathedral for a hundred and thirteen years, from A.D. 882 to 995; having been removed from the Farne Islands on the approach of the heathen Danes, the monks carrying the coffin of their sainted bishop, St. Cuthbert, with them on their wanderings. The dedication of the present church to Saints Mary and Cuthbert is a relic of that time, but the building itself is not older than the thirteenth century. It preserves an ancient anchorites’ cell.

The finest surviving anchorage in England is this of Chester-le-Street. It is built against the north wall of the tower, and is of two storeys with two rooms on each. Two “low-side” windows communicating with the churchyard remain, and a smaller opening into the church is close by. Through this, food and offerings were passed to the anchorite, together with the keys of the church treasure-chest, left in his custody by the clergy. From this orifice the holy hermit could obtain a view all over the building, and an odd hagioscope or “squint,” pierced through one of the pillars, allowed of his seeing the celebration of Mass at a side-chapel, in addition to that at the High Altar. This was no damp and inconvenient hermitage, for when the anchorite was kicked out at the Reformation, and bidden go and earn an honest living, his old home was let to three widows. Eventually, in 1619, the curate found the place so desirable—or, as a house-agent would say, so “eligible”—that he took up his abode there.

The church also contains fourteen monumental effigies ascribed, without much truth in the ascription, to the Lumleys. John, Lord Lumley, collected them from ruined abbeys and monasteries in the neighbourhood some three hundred years ago, and called them ancestors. He was technically right; for we all descend from Adam, but not quite so right when, finding he could not steal a sufficient number of these “ancestors,” he commissioned the local masons to rough-hew him out a few more. They are here to this day, and an ill-favoured gang they look, too.

The town of Chester-le-Street found little favour with De Foe, who, passing through it, found the place “an old dirty thoroughfare town.” The modern traveller cannot say the same, but it is possible that if he happened to pass through on Shrove Tuesday, he would describe the inhabitants as savages; for on that day the place is given up to a game of football played in the streets, the town taking sides, and when the ball is not within reach, kicking one another. With a proper respect for their shop fronts, the trades-folk all close on this day.

The three miles between Chester-le-Street and Birtley afford a wide-spreading panorama of the Durham coal-field. Pretty country before its mineral wealth began to be developed, its hills and dales reveal chimney-shafts and hoisting-gear in every direction, and smoke-wreaths, blown across country by the raging winds of the north, blacken everything. Birtley is a typical pit village and its approaches characteristic of the coal country. The paths are black, the hedges and trees ragged and sooty, and tramways from the collieries cross the road itself, unfenced, the trucks dropping coal in the highway. One coal village is as like another as are two peas. They are all frankly unornamental; all face the road on either side, each cottage the exact replica of its unlovely neighbour, and the footpaths are almost invariably unpaved. These are the homes of the “Geordies,” as the pitmen once were invariably called. They were rough in their ways, but very different from the more recent sort: the trade-unionist miner: the better educated but more discontented and unlovable man. But “Geordie,” the old-type typical pitman, was not a bad fellow, by any means. If any man worked, literally, by the sweat of his brow, it was he, in his eight hours’ shift down in the stifling tunnels of the coal-mine. He earned a high wage and deserved a higher, for he carried his life in his hand, and any day that witnessed his descent half a mile or so into the black depths of the pit might also have seen an accident which, by the fall of a roof of coal, by fire or flood, explosion, or the unseen but deadly choke-damp, should end his existence, and that of hundreds like him.

The midday aspect of a coal village is singularly quiet and empty. Scarce a man or boy is to be seen. Half of them are at work down below, in the first day shift to which they went at an early hour of the morning: and those of the night, who came up when the others descended, are enjoying a well-earned repose. A coal-miner just come to bank from his coal-hewing, looks anything but the respectable fellow he generally is, nowadays. With his peaked leathern cap, thick short coat, woollen muffler, limp knickerbockers, blue worsted stockings, heavy lace-up boots and dirty face, he looks like a half-bleached nigger football-player. When washed, his is a pallid countenance which the stranger, unused to the colourless faces of those who work underground, might be excused for thinking that of one recovering from an illness. And washing is a serious business with “Geordie.” Every pitman’s cottage has its tub wherein he “cleans” himself, as he expresses it, while the women-folk crowd the street. What the cottages lack in accommodation they make up for in cleanliness and display. The pitman’s wife wages an heroic and never-ending war against dirt and grime, and both have an astonishing love of finery and bright colours which reveals itself even down to the door-step, coloured a brilliant red, yellow, or blue, according to individual taste. Nowadays football claims “Geordie’s” affections before anything else. That rowdy game, more than any other, serves to work off any superfluous energy, and there are stories, more or less true, which tell of pitmen, tired of waiting for “t’ ball,” starting “t’ gaame” by kicking one another instead! Coursing, dog-fancying, and the breeding of canaries are other favourite pitmen’s pastimes, and they dearly love a garden. Where an outdoor garden is impossible, a window garden is a favourite resource, and even the ugliest cottages take on a certain smartness when to the yellow doorstep are added bright green window-shutters and a window full of scarlet geraniums. Very many pitmen are musical. We do not in this connection refer to the inevitable American organ whose doleful wails wring your very heart-strings as you pass the open cottage doors on Sunday afternoons, but to the really expert violinists often found in the pit villages.

XXIV

At Harlowgreen Lane, where a little wayside inn, the “Coach and Horses,” stands beside a wooded dingle, we have the only pleasant spot before reaching Gateshead. Prettily rural, with an old-world air which no doubt gains an additional beauty after the ugliness of Birtley, it looks like one of those roadside scenes pencilled so deftly by Rowlandson, and might well have been one of the roadside stopping-places mentioned in that book so eloquent of the Great North Road, Smollett’s Roderick Random. No other work gives us so fine a description of old road travel, partly founded, no doubt, upon the author’s’ own observation of the wayfaring life of his time. Smollett himself travelled from Glasgow to Edinburgh and London in 1739, and in the character of Roderick he narrates some of his own adventures. For a good part of the way Roderick found neither coach, cart, nor wagon on the road, and so journeyed with a train of pack-carriers so far as Newcastle, sitting on one of the horses’ pack-saddles. At Newcastle he met Strap, the barber’s assistant, and they journeyed to London together, sometimes afoot; at other times by stage-wagon, a method of travelling which, practised by those of small means, was a commonplace of the period at which Smollett wrote. It was a method which had not changed in the least since the days of James the First, and was to continue even into the first years of the nineteenth century. Fynes Morrison, who wrote an Itinerary—and an appallingly dull work it is—in the reign of the British Solomon, talks of them as “long covered wagons, carrying passengers from place to place; but this kind of journeying is so tedious, by reason they must take wagon very early and come very late to their innes, that none but women and people of inferior condition travel in this sort.” Hogarth pictured these lumbering conveyances, which at their best performed fifteen miles a day, and Rowlandson and many other artists have employed their pencils upon them.

Smollett is an eighteenth-century robust humorist, whose works are somewhat strong meat for our times; but he is a classic, and his works (unlike the usual run of “classics,” which are aptly said to be books which no one ever reads) have, each one, enough humour to furnish half a dozen modern authors, and are proof against age and change of taste. To the student of bygone times and manners, Roderick Random affords (oh! rare conjunction) both instruction and amusement. It is, of course, a work of fiction, but fiction based on personal experience, and palpitating with the life of the times in which it was written. It thus affords a splendid view of this great road about 1739, and of the way in which the thrifty Scots youths then commonly came up to town.

Their first night’s halt was at a hedgerow alehouse, half a mile from the road, to which came also a pedlar. The pedlar, for safety’s sake, screwed up the door of the bedroom in which they all slept. “I slept very sound,” says Roderick, “until midnight, when I was disturbed by a violent motion of the bed, which shook under me with a continual tremor. Alarmed at this phenomenon, I jogged my companion, whom, to my amazement, I found drenched in sweat, and quaking through every limb; he told me, with a low, faltering voice, that we were undone, for there was a bloody highwayman with loaded pistols in the next room; then, bidding me make as little noise as possible, he directed me to a small chink in the board partition, through which I could see a thick-set, brawny fellow, with a fierce countenance, sitting at a table with our young landlady, having a bottle of ale and a brace of pistols before him.” The highwayman was cursing his luck because a confederate, a coachman, had given intelligence of a rich coach-load to some other plunderer, who had gone off with £400 in cash, together with jewels and money.

“But did you find nothing worth taking which escaped the other gentleman of the road?” asked the landlady.

“Not much,” he replied. “I gleaned a few things, such as a pair of pops, silver-mounted (here they are); I took them, loaded, from the charge of the captain who had charge of the money the other fellow had taken, together with a gold watch which he had concealed in his breeches. I likewise found ten Portugal pieces in the shoes of a Quaker, whom the spirit moved to revile me, with great bitterness and devotion; but what I value myself mostly for is this here purchase, a gold snuff-box, my girl, with a picture on the inside of the lid, which I untied out of the tail of a pretty lady’s smock.”

Here the pedlar began to snore so loudly that the highwayman heard him through the partition. Alarmed, he asked the landlady who was there, and when she told him, travellers, replied, “Spies! you jade! But no matter, I’ll send them all to hell in an instant.”

The landlady pacified him by saying that they were only three poor Scotchmen; but Strap by this time was under the bed.

The night was one of alarms. Roderick and Strap awakened the pedlar, who, thinking the best course was not to wait for the doubtful chance of being alive to see the morning dawn, vanished with his pack through the window.