The Great North road, the old mail road to Scotland

NO

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

RIVERSIDE

Ex Libris
C. K. OGDEN

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

HISTORIES OF THE ROADS

— BY —

CHARLES G. HARPER.

THE BRIGHTON ROAD : The Classic Highway

to the South.

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD : London to York.
THE GREAT NORTH ROAD : York to Edinburgh
THE DOVER ROAD : Annals of an Ancient

Turnpike.
THE BATH ROAD : History, Fashion and

Frivolity on an old Highway.
THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD :

London to Manchester.
THE MANCHESTER ROAD : Manchester to

Glasgow.

THE HOLYHEAD ROAD : London to Birming-
ham.
THE HOLYHEAD ROAD: Birmingham to

Holyhead.
THE HASTINGS ROAD : And The " Happy

Springs of Tunbridge."
THE OXFORD GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD

HAVEN ROAD : London to Gloucester.
THE OXFORD, GLOUCESTER AND MILFORD

HAVEN ROAD • Gloucester to Milford Haven.
THE NORWICH ROAD An East Anglian

Highway.
THE NEWMARKET, BURY, THETFORD AND

CROMER ROAD.
THE EXETER ROAD . The West of England

Highway.

THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD
THE CAMBRIDGE, KING'S LYNN AND ELY

ROAD.

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. I

D/K '

H38

I f.3.2.

First Published in 1901.
Second and Revised Edition • 1922.

Printed in Great Britain by C. TINLING & Co., LTD.,
53, Victoria Street, Liverpool.
Also at London and Prescot.

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD
YORK TO EDINBURGH

London (General Post Office) to — MILES

York , 196|

Clifton. . . . ... . * 198J

Rawcliff . . . ... . . , 200J

Skelton . . . ... . . . 201 J

Shipton » . 202f

Tollerton Lanes . . . . . . 206£

Easingwold . 210J

White House . .... . 211J

Thormanby 214J

Birdforth . . . . . ..215

Bagby Common (" Griffin " Inn) . ... 217J

Mile House . . , ^ . . 218J

Thirsk . . * fc % . . 220J

South Kilvington ...... 222

Thornton-le-Street . . . . ; . 223J

Thornton-le-Moor . . ., . . • . . 224|

Northallerton . . . . . . . . 229 £

Lovesome Hill . . , ,. . . 229|

Little Smeaton (cross River Wiske) . . . 231 1

Great Smeaton 232J

High Entercommon ...... 233J

Dalton-on-Tees 236J

Croft (cross River Tees) . . . 237f

Oxneyfield Bridge (cross River Skerne) . . 238

Darlington ....... 241 J

Harrowgate ....... 243 1

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

MILES

Coatham Mundeville ..... 245J

Aycliffe 246f

Traveller's Rest 248

Woodham 249 J

Rushyford Bridge 250£

Ferryhill 253

Low Butcher Race and Croxdale . . . 255

Sunderland Bridge ..... 255|

Browney Bridge (cross River Wear) . . 256

Durham (cross River Browney) . . . 260

Durham Moor (Framwellgate) . . . 261

Plawsworth 263£

Chester-le-Street 266

Birtley 269

Gateshead Fell 271

Gateshead (cross River Tyne) .... 273 £

Newcastle-on-Tyne ..... 274J
Gosforth . . . . . . .277

Seaton Burn 280|

Stannington Bridge (cross River Blyth) . . 284

Stannington ...... 284J

Clifton. . 286J

Morpeth (cross River Wansbeck) . . . 289J

Warrener's House . . . . 29 1J

Priest's Bridge 293J

West Thirston (cross River Coquet) . . 299J

Feiton , 299|

Newton-on-the Moor ..... 302 £•

Alnwick (cross River Aln) .... 308 J

Heiferlaw Bank 310

North Charlton 31 4 1

Warenford 318|

Belford 323

Detchant Cottages 325}

Fenwick 328

MILEAGES.

MILKS

Haggerston ....... 331

Tweedmouth (cross River Tweed) . . . 337£

Berwick-on-Tweed . . . . * 338

Lamberton Toll . 341

(ENTER SCOTLAND)

Greystonelees ...... 343 1

Flemington Inn and Burnmouth (cross River Eye) 344

Ayton ..... .... 346

Hound wood ...... 351 f

Grant's House . . . . . 354i

Cockburnspath . . . . . 358

Dunglass Dene . . . . . 359J

Broxburn ....... 3634

Dunbar ....... 365

Belhaven . . . . , . .- 365J

Beltonford . . . .. ... 367 £

Phantassie . . . . . . 370

East Linton ..... . 370 £

Haddington . . . • . ~: .376

Gladsmuir ....... 379|

Macmerry ....... 381 J

Tranent ...... . 383J

Musselburgh (cross North Esk River) . . 387J

Joppa . . . ... ... 389J

Portobello . . . , . . . .390

Jock's Lodge . . . . . . 391 \

Edinburgh . . . . . . 393

Via FERRYBRIDGE, WETHERBY, AND BOROUGHBRIDGE.

Doncaster (cross River Don) ....
York Bar ..... . . 164

Red House . . . . . . 167J

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

MILES

Robin Hood's Well 169J

Went Bridge (cross River Went) . . . 172f

Darrington ....... 174J

Ferrybridge (cross River Aire) . . . 177J

Brotherton . . . . . . 178i

Fairburn 180

Micklefield 184

Aberford 186J

Bramham Moor . . . . . .189

Bramham 190J

Wetherby (cross River Wharfe) . . . 194J

KirkDeighton 195J

Walshford Bridge (cross River Nidd) . . 197^

Allerton Park 200 f

Nineveh 202^

Ornham's Hall 204£

Boroughbridge (cross River Ure) . . . 206£

Kirkby Hill 207£

Dishforth ...."... 210J

Asenby 212J

Topcliffe (cross River Swale) . . . . 21 2 J

Sand Hutton 217

Newsham ....... 219

South Otterington 220|

North Otterington 222J

Northallerton 225J

Edinburgh 389

ILBS?

PAGE

The " Highflyer," 1812 . . Frontispiece

Old York : The Shambles . . ... 6

The Walls of York . . ... . 9

York Castle : Clifford's Tower . . . 14

York Minster, from the Foss .... 33

All Saints' Pavement ..... 41

Jonathan Martin, Incendiary . . ... 45

York Minster 011 Fire ..... 49

Bootham Bar ...... 52

Skelton Church ...... 53

The " Spotted Dog," Thornton-le-Street . . 60

York Bar 63

Robin Hood's Well ..... 64

The Battlefield of Towton and surrounding

country ...... 70

Saxton ....... 71

Towton Dale 72

Lead Chapel . . . . . . 74

Ruined Mill overlooking Aberford . 76

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

PAGE

Barwick-in-Elmete ..... 77

Moor End 80

Nineveh . . . . . . . 81

The Edinburgh Express, 1837 . . . 85

Croft Bridge 93

Sockburn Falchion ..... 94

" Locomotion " . . . . . . 98

" The Experiment "" 99

" I say, fellow, give my buggy a charge of coke,

your charcoal is too d d dear " . . 101

The Iron Road to the North . . . .105

Traveller's Rest .108

Rushyford Bridge . . . . .109

Ferry hill : The Abandoned Road- Works. . Ill

Merrington Church . . . . . 113

Road, Rail, and River : Sunderland Bridge . 115

Entrance to Durham . . . . .117

Durham Cathedral, from Prebend's Bridge . 121

The Sanctuary Knocker. . . . .125

Durham Cathedral and Castle from below

Framwellgate Bridge . . . 12 T

Framwellgate Bridge . . . . .130
Penshaw Monument . . . . .132

The Coal Country 137

A Wayside Halt 138

Travellers arriving at an Inn . . . .145
Modern Newcastle : from Gateshead . . 153

Old Newcastle : showing the Town Bridge, now

demolished . . . . . .157

" The Drunkard's Cloak " . . .162
" Puffing Billy " 165

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PAGE

The Gates of Blagdon Park . . . .167

Morpeth 169

The Market-place, Morpeth . . . .173

Felton Bridge 174

Alnwick ....... 175

Alnwick Castle . . . . . . 185

Malcolm's Cross . . . ... . 188

Bambrough Castle 192

The Scottish Border : Berwick Town and Bridge

from Tweedmouth . . . . .197

Lamberton Toll 203

Off to the Border . . . . .205

Cockburnspath Tower . . . . .213

The Tolbooth, Dunbar . . . . .215

Bothwell Castle ...... 220

Haddington Abbey, from Nungate . . . 221
Edinburgh, from Tranent .... 223

Musselburgh . . . v . . ~ . 228

Calton Hill .232

The " White Horse " Inn . . . . 235
" Squalor and Picturesqueness " . . 238

Canongate 239

Old Inscription, Lady Stair's House . . 241
The " Heave Awa " Sign . . . . 242

A Tirle-pin " 243

Greyfriars ....... 245

The Wooden Horse 247

Stately Princes Street ..... 249

P^dinburgh, New Town, 1847, from Mons Meg

Battery 251

Skyline of the Old Town . . . . 255

THE

GREAT

, NORJH

YORK TO EDINBURGH

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,

B 1

2 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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, 110 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.

ROMAN YORK 3

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 ru^e, 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 Evrauc, 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

4 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 1'Eveque, 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 a1! 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 West-
minster 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,''

ANCIENT STREETS 5

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 pla.ce. 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

6

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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, extreme-
ly proud, be-
comes the best
means of ascer-
taining its im-
portance and the
relative positions
of Castle and
Minster. It is
no short stroll,
for, by the time
the whole circuit
is made, a dis-
tance of nearly
three miles has
been covered.
These medieval
walls form, in-
deed, the most
delightful pro-
menade imagin-
able, being built
on a grassy ram-
part and pro-
vided with a
paved footpath
running on the
inner side of the
battlements, and
thus command-
ing 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

OLD YORK : THE SHAMBLES.

MICKLEGATE BAR 7

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 medieval 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 hun-
dreds of years ago, when kings of England claimed
also to be kings of France and quartered the seme'e
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 mediaeval 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

8 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 Borough-
bridge, 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

'•' - ' v^^' ; •

&M ^

BFSjjSo^'v* ' 'V • ~

^A°M: , ^

"WHIP-DOG DAY' 11

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 mediaeval 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

12 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 aw'ful time should stand.
History alone, without the aid of sword or shattered
wall, is more than sufficient to keep the barbarous

THE JEWS OF YORK 13

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

14

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

YORK CASTLE: CLIFFORD'S TOWER,

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

DICK TURPIN 15

can be seen by those who, after much diligent applica-
tion to the Prisons Department of the Home Office,
procure the entree 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.

Ill

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 Lincoln-
shire. Authorities disagree, both as to the particular

1H THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

EXECUTION OF TURPIN 17

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

18 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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,

NEVISON 19

indeed, he had an occasion to do, because the Totten-
ham 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, high-
souled (and at times maudlin) fellow of those pages
is absolutely fictitious.

IV

AIXSWORTII 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 unconsconable 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 011 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

20 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 cf confederates. He
probably had many such houses of call, for he was
one of a numerous band of highwaymen whose head-
quarters 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.

THE REAL HERO 21

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 Knarcsborough, Ferrybridge, York, or
Newark. Here are two verses of it ; not perhaps
distinguished by wealth of fancy or resourcefulness
of rhyme : —

])id 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.

HP maintained himself like a gentleman,

Besides, he was good to the poor ;
He rode about like a great he-.o,

And he pain'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

22 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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.

THAT once dreaded mid-eighteenth century highway-
man, 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

BOULTER 23

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 unfor-
tunate 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 black-
guards." 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

24. THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 a 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,

JUDICIAL HUMOUR 25

and judges simply treated the accusations with humor-
ous 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

26 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 particu-
larise 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 —

INNS 27

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
Barker's Hotel, though solid, comfortable, and pros-
perous-looking, with its cleanly stucco front, is not
interesting, and the " Black Swan " is a typical red-
brick 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. There-
fore, 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

28 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 coach-
men 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 " High-
flyer," whence he was transferred to the mail. During
these years he had saved money, and was a compara-
tively rich man when coaching ended ; so that although

TOM HOLTBY 29

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

30 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

counties put together, returned only two representa-
tives 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 Hare wood,
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

ELECTIONS 31

the quiet traveller to pursue his humble journey in
peace, or to find a chair at an inn to sit down upon."
As a result, Wilberforce kept his place, Viscount
Milton was elected second, and Lascelles was rejected.
The figures were : —

Wilberforce . . . 11,806
Milton .... 11,177
Lascelles . . . 10,988

Only some thirty-four thousand voters in the great
shire !

It was said that Earl FitzwiUiam'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,

32 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 " monas-

YORK MINSTER 35

terium," 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 twic? 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,

36 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 con-
temporary 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 whitewashes
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 1'Eveque, 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.

YORK MINSTER 37

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

38 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 archi-
tectural 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,

INTERIOR OF THE MINSTER 39

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 them-
selves 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

40 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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, theParliamentary
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

DESTRUCTION OF CHURCHES

41

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

ALL SAIXT3' PAVEMENT.

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,

42 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

JONATHAN MARTIN 43

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 com-
municant 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

44 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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, Avhile
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 writh 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

JONATHAN MARTIN, INCENDIARY.

Drawn in gaol at York Castle by t>ie Rev. ,J. Kilby.

THE INCIENDIARY 47

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

48 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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, arid 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 mediaeval 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 North-
allerton, 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,

FAREWELL, YORK 51

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

52

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 beffun to recover the lost art in Yorkshire of

SKELTON

53

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

SKELTOX CHURCH.

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.

54 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.

EASINGWOLD 55

Now comes Easingvvold ; 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 loco-
motives. " 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

56

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 Easing-
wold 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

MURDER 57

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

58 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 acciden-
tally 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 North-
allerton ; 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,

THIRSK 59

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 encoun-
tered 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,"

60

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

THE "SPOTTED DOG," THORNTON-LK-STREET.

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

NORTHALLERTON 61

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 wilt be laid up at the ' Black Swan,'
Northallerton, or the ' Elephant and Castle,' Borough-
bridge ; 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

62 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

whether or not the reverend humorist is out of date as
regards the tariff ; nor will he forget to try the North-
allerton ale, to determine if Master George Meryon's
verse, written in the days of James the Second, is
still topical : —

Northallerton, in Yorkshire, doth excell
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

ROBIN HOOD'S WELL

63

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

YORK BAR.

principally concerned with the traffic along the Wake-
field 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 travel-
ling 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

64 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 scat,"

ROBIX HOOD'S WELL.

Some fifty years later, the very ugly building that now
covers the spring was erected by Vanbrugh for the
Earl of Carlisle. It cannot be said to add much to the
romantic associations of the place, but the efforts of the
wayfarers, who in two centuries have carved every
available inch of its surface with their names, render
it a curious sight.

Here the road begins a long climb up to the spot
where five ways meet, the broad left-hand road con-
ducting 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

WENT BRIDGE 65

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 corres-
ponding 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 Bl-.ie Bell on Wentbridse 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

66 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 mediaeval
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 associa-
tions 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

THE "SWAN" 67

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

68 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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.

BATTLE OF TOWTON 69

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 pre-
ceded 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 impor-
tant 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 Lancas-
trians 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

70

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

TATKASTER

FERRYBRIDGE

THE BATTLEFIELD OF TOWTON AND
SURROUNDING COUNTRY.

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

MILITARY POSITIONS

71

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

SAXTOX.

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,

72

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

and the towers of York itself may be seen on the
skyline, 011 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

TOWTOX DALE.

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

ROUT OF LANCASTRIANS 73

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 Lori) 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

74 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

LEAD CHAPEL.

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

ACROSS THE MOORS 75

valley, in an almost sheer drop from the road, looking
out upon illimitable perspectives. Then comes Fair-
burn, 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, qua 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.

76

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

RUINED MILL, OVERLOOKING ABERFORD.

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,"

COACHING

77

that classic coaching authority, travelled in 1827, his
eagle eye engaged in criticism of the Yorkshire pro-
vincial coaches.

The rustical driver of the Leeds to York stage,

BARWICK-IN-ELMETE.

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. Every-
thing, says " Nimrod," was inferior. The man who
drove (he scorns, you see, to call him a coachman) was

78 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

BRAMHAM 79

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

80

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

82 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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,

BOROUGHBRIDGE 83

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 bodies 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 mediaeval, 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

84 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 church-
wardens 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.

BATTLE OF THE STANDARD 87

XVI

THE alternative route now described and North-
allerton 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 pros-
perity 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

88 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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
Caesar." " 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 " Lowrsey 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 neigh-
bouring 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 North-
allerton 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 fe\v 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-

TRAVELLERS' TALES 89

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

90 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 counter-
mand the accommodation already secured for the night

EVIL INNS 91

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.

92 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 pro-
fession, 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-

THE SOCKBURN WORM

93

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 pre-
sumption of the old squirearchy sometimes went.

A sturdy old Gothic bridge here carries the road
across the stream into the ancient Palatinate of

CROFT BRIDGE.

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 mediaeval chroniclers, was a " monstrous
and poysonous vermine or wyverne, aske or werme
which overthrew and devoured many people in fight,
for yfc ye sent of ye poyson was so strong y' 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 Sock-

94

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

burn 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
bi.shop 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.

Croft Bridge, a massive and venerable-looking stone
structure of seven arches, built in 1676, is itself the
successor of a much older building, referred to in a
Royal Brief of 1531 as being " the moste directe and
sure waye and passage for the King o'er Soveraigne

SOCKBURN
FALCHION.

"HELL'S KETTLES" 95

Lorde's armie and ordyn'ce to resort and pass over into
the north p'tes and marches of this his reaulme, for
the surtie and defence of the same againste the invasion
of the Scotts and others his enemyes, over which such
armys and ordyn'ces hathe hertofor always bene
accostomyed to goo and passe."

Here we are in Durham, and three miles from
Darlington. Looking backwards on crossing the
bridge, the few scattered houses of the hither shore
are seen beside the way ; one of them, the " Comet "
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'

96 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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
Kenningtoii 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 plough-
boy'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 !"

DARLINGTON 97

he said when told its name ; "I think it's Darneton
i' 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 fore-
gathered 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,

98 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

" 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 Osbaldistonc 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 Avays. But, as already

5- * D- R- N? I • I 825

" LOCOMOTION."

remarked, the " Black Bear " at Darlington docs 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

RAILWAYS

99

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 mean-
while the Rainhill experiments had proved the
possibility of locomotive engines. The Act was there-
fore amended, to authorise the use of them and to

"THE EXPERIMENT."

permit the conveyance of passengers ; a kind of traffic
which, odd though it may seem now, was not con-
templated 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,"

100 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 high-
roads, 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 com-
monly 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

COACHING 103

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
Stock well. 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

104 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 com-
pleted. 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, neat 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 know-
ledge, 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 'my self am little aware of the pace.
But, seated on the old mail-coach, we needed no

COACHES v. RAILWAYS

105

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

THE IRON ROAD TO THE NORTH.

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

106 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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, on?e 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

AYCLIFFE 107

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

108

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

TRAVELLER'S REST.

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

BOON-COMPANIONS

109

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 "

RUSHYFORD BRIDGE.

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 com-
pelled his unwilling host to go with him. In London
he rarely went, remarking when reproached that he,

110 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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-bottb 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

112 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 wrhich 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.

AN OLD HORROR

113

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

MERRINGTOX CHURCH.

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

114 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 Ferry hill
and the neighbourhood when the last splinter of
Andrew Mills' gibbet was used up, and what the
warty, scrofulous, ulcerous, and rheumaticky inhabi-
tants 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 fyerdis in c'epe 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.

CROXDALE

115

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

ROAD, RAIL, AND RIVER : SUNDERLAND BRIDGE.

is the dark hollow which mediaeval 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 " Croix-
dale " ; 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 Sunderlatvd
Bridge, just below Croxdale, where the exceedingly
picturesque old stone bridge of four arches carrie, the

116 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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
Browiiey 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

*w%i' y ,

l ^

•'•

118 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 con-
ducts 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

ST. CUTHBERT 119

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 wan-
dering, 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

120 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 fane
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

A TOWER-TOP CUSTOM 123

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 inter-
vention 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

124

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 over-
balanced 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

THE SANCTUARY KXOCKER.

126 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

" 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 con-
fession 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

DURHAM MARKET-PLACE 129

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
aegis, 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 011 Sunday : she said, ' they play on other

130

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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."

liu,.

FRAMWELLGATE BRIDGE.

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

And so she continued southward : —

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

The Great North Road leaves Durham over

"PITY ME" 131

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 Framwell-
gate 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 undistinguishable 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

132

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

PENSHAW MONUMENT.

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-lc-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 con-
tribution 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

CHESTER-LE-STREET 133

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 explana-
tion 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 cf 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,

134 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

from A.D. 882 to 995 ; having been removed from the
Fame 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 neighbour-
hood 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

THE DURHAM COAL-FIELD 135

with DC 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 tunne's 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 wrhich, by the fall of a roof of
coal, by fire or flood, explosion, or the unseen hut

136 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 ha'f-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 smart-
ness when to the yellow doorstep are added bright
green window-shutters and a window full of scarlet

138

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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 after-
noons, 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

A WAYSIDE HALT.

After Uoirlandson.

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

SMOLLETT 139

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 amuse-
ment. 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

140 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

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

ADVENTURES ON THE ROAD 141

the highwayman heard him through the partition.
Alarmed, he asked the landlady who was there, and
when she told him, travellers, replied, " Spies ! you
jade ! But no matter, I'll send them all to hell in an
instant."

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

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

After having paid their score in the morning, the
two set out again. They had not gone more than
five miles before a man on horseback overtook them,
whom they recognised as Mr. Rifle, the highwayman
of the night before. He asked them if they knew
who he was. Strap fell on his knees in the road.
" For heaven's sake, Mr. Rifle," said he, " have mercy
on us, we know you very well."

" Oho ! " cried the thief, " you do ! But you shall
never be evidence against me in this world, you
dog ! " and so saying, he drew a pistol and fired at
the unfortunate shaver, who fell flat on the ground,
without a word. He then turned upon Roderick, but
the sound of horses' hoofs was heard, and a party of
travellers galloped up, leaving the highwayman barely
time to ride off. One of them was the captain who
had been robbed the day before. He was not, as may
already have been gathered, a valiant man. He turned
pale at the sight of Strap. " Gentlemen," said he,
" here's murder committed ; let us alight." The
others were for pursuing the highwayman, and the
captain only escaped accompanying them by making his
horse rear and snort, and pretending the animal was
frightened. Fortunately, Strap " had received no
other wound than what his fear had inflicted " ; and
after having been bled at an inn half a mile away, they
were about to resume their journey, when a shouting

142 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

crowd came down the road, with the highwayman in the
midst, riding horseback with his hands tied behind him.
He was being escorted to the nearest Justice of the
Peace. Halting a while for refreshment, they dis-
mounted Mr. Rifle and mounted guard, a circle of
peasants armed with pitchforks round him. When they
at length reached the magistrate's house, they found
he was away for the night, and so locked their prisoner
in a garret, from which, of course, he escaped.

Roderick and Strap were now free from being
detained as evidence. For two days they walked on,
staying on the second night in a public-house of a very
sorry appearance in a small village. At their entrance,
the landlord, who seemed a venerable old man, with
long grey hair, rose from a table placed by a large fire
in a neat paved kitchen, and, with a cheerful
countenance, accosted them with the words : " Salvete,
pueri ; ingredimini." It was astonishing to hear a
rustic landlord talking Latin, but Roderick, concealing
his amazement, replied, " Dissolve frigus, ligna super
foco large reponens." He had no sooner pronounced
the words than the innkeeper, running towards him,
shook him by the hands, crying, " Fill mi dilectissime !
unde venis ? — a super is, ni fallor." In short, finding
them both read in the classics, he did not know how
to testify his regard sufficiently ; but ordered his
daughter, a jolly, rosy-cheeked damsel, who was his
sole domestic, to bring a bottle of his quadrimum ;
repeating at the same time from Horace, " Deprome
quadrimum Sabind, 0 Thaliarche, merum diota" This
was excellent ale of his own brewing, of which he told
them he had always an amphora, four years old, for the
use of himself and friends.

The innkeeper proved to be a schoolmaster who was
obliged, by his income being so small, to supplement it
by turning licensed victualler. He was very inquisitive
about their affairs, and, while dinner was preparing,
his talk abounded both with Latin tags and with good
advice to the inexperienced against the deceits and
wickedness of the world. They fared sumptuously on

A RASCALLY INNKEEPER 143

roast fowl and several bottles of quadrimum, going to
bed congratulating themselves on the landlord's good-
humour. Strap was of opinion that they would be
charged nothing for their lodging and entertainment.
" Don't you observe," said he, " that he has conceived a
particular affection for us ; nay, even treated us with
extraordinary fare, which, to be sure, we should not of
ourselves have called for ? "

Roderick was not so sanguine. Rising early in the
morning, and having breakfasted with their host and
his daughter on hasty-pudding and ale, they desired
to know what there was to pay.

" Biddy will let you know7, gentlemen," said the old
rascal of a tapster, " for I never mind these matters.
Money-matters are beneath the concern of one who
lives on the Horatian plan : Crescentem sequitur euro,
pecuniam."

Meanwhile, Biddy, having consulted a slate that
hung in a corner, gave the reckoning as eight shillings
and sevenpence.

" Eight shillings and sevenpence ! " cried Strap ;
' 'tis impossible ! You must be mistaken, young
woman."

" Reckon again, child," said the father very
deliberately ; " perhaps you have miscounted."

" No, indeed, father," replied she. " I know my
business better."

Roderick demanded to know the particulars, on
which the old man got up, muttering, " Ay, ay, let
us see the particulars : that's but reasonable " ; and,
taking pen, ink, and paper, wrote :

«. d.

To bread and beer, . .06

To a fowl and sausages,
To four bottles of quadrim,
To fire and tobacco,
To lodging,
To breakfast,

2 6

2 0

0 7
2 0

1 0

8 7

As he had not the appearance of a common publican,
Roderick could not upbraid him as he deserved, simply

144 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

remarking that he was sure he had not learned from
Horace to be an extortioner. To which the landlord
replied that his only aim was to live cont ent us parvo, and
keep off importuna pauperies.

Strap was indignant. He swore their host should
either take one-third or go without ; but Roderick,
seeing the daughter go out and return with two stout
fellows, with whom to frighten them, thought it politic
to pay what was asked.

It was a doleful walk they had that day. In the
evening they overtook the wagon, and it is here,
and in the following scenes, that we get an ex-
cellent description of the cheap road travel of
that era.

Strap mounted first into the wagon, but retired,
dismayed, at a tremendous voice which issued from
its depths, with the words, " Fire and fury ! there
shall no passengers come here." These words came
from Captain Weazel, one of the most singular
characters to be found in Smollett's pages.

Joey, the wagoner, was not afraid of the captain,
and called out, with a sneer : " Waunds, coptain,
whay woan't you soofer the poor wagoneer to meake a
penny ? Coom, coom, young man, get oop, get oop ;
never moind the coptain."

" Blood and thunder ! where's my sword ? "
exclaimed the man of war, when the two eventually
fell, rather than climbed, into the wagon's dark
recesses, and incidentally on to his stomach.

" What's the matter, my dear ? " asked a female
voice.

" The matter ? " replied the captain ; " my guts
are squeezed into a pancake by that Scotchman's
hump." The " hump," by the \vay, was poor Strap's
knapsack.

" It is our own fault," resumed the feminine voice ;
" we may thank ourselves for all the inconveniences
we meet with. I thank God I never travelled so
before. I am sure, if my lady or Sir John were to
know where we are, they would not sleep this night

POOR PASSENGERS

145

for vexation. I wish to God we had written for the
chariot ; I know we shall never be forgiven."

" Come, come, my dear," replied the captain, " it
don't signify fretting now ; we shall laugh it over
as a frolic ; I hope you will not suffer in your health.
I shall make my lord very merry with our adventures
in the diligence."

The unsophisticated lads were greatly impressed by
this talk. Not so the others. " Some people," broke

TRAVELLERS ARRIVING AT AN INN.

After Rowlandson.

in another woman's voice, " give themselves a great
many needless airs ; better folks than any here have
travelled in wagons before now. Some of us have rode
in coaches and chariots, with three footmen behind
them, without making so much fuss about it. What
then ! we are now all on a footing ; therefore let us be
sociable and merry. What do you say, Isaac ? Is not
this a good motion, you doting rogue ? Speak, old
Cent, per cent. ! What desperate debt are you

146 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

thinking of ? What mortgage are you planning ?
Well, Isaac, positively you shall never gain my favour
till you turn over a new leaf, grow honest, and live like a
gentleman. In the meantime, give me a kiss, you
old fool."

The words, accompanied by hearty smack,
enlivened the person to whom they were addressed to
such a degree, that he cried, in a transport, though
with a faltering voice : " Ah, you baggage ! on my
credit you are a waggish girl — he, he, he ! " This
laugh introduced a fit of coughing which almost
suffocated the poor usurer — for such they afterwards
found was the profession of their fellow-traveller.

At their stopping-place for the night they had their
first opportunity of viewing these passengers. First
came a brisk, airy girl, about twenty years of age,
with a silver-laced hat on her head instead of a cap,
a blue stuff riding-suit, trimmed with silver, very much
tarnished, and a whip in her hand. After her came,
limping, an old man, with a worsted night-cap buttoned
under his chin and a broad-brimmed hat slouched over
it, an old rusty blue cloak tied about his neck, under
which appeared a brown surtout that covered a thread-
bare coat and waistcoat, and a dirty flannel jacket.
His eyes were hollow, bleared, and gummy ; his face
shrivelled into a thousand wrinkles, his gums destitute
of teeth, his nose sharp and drooping, his chin peaked
and prominent, so that when he mumped or spoke they
approached one another like a pair of nut-crackers ;
he supported himself on an ivory-headed cane, and
his whole figure was a just emblem of winter, famine,
and avarice.

The captain was disclosed as a little thin creature,
about the age of forty, with a long, withered visage
very much resembling that of a baboon. He wore
his own hair in a queue that reached to his rump,
and on it a hat the size and cock of Antient Pistol's.
He was about five feet and three inches in height,
sixteen inches of which went to his face and long
scraggy neck ; his thighs were about six inches in

CAPTAIN WEAZEL 147

length ; his legs, resembling two spindles or drum-
sticks, two feet and a half ; and his body the remainder ;
so that, on the whole, he appeared like a spider or
grasshopper erect. His dress consisted of a frock of
bear-skin, the skirts about half a foot long, a hussar
waistcoat, scarlet breeches reaching half-way down his
thighs, worsted stockings rolled up almost to his
groin, and shoes with wooden heels at least two inches
high ; he carried a sword very nearly as long as himself
in one hand, and with the other conducted his lady,
who seemed to be a woman of his own age, still retaining
some remains of good looks, but so ridiculously affected
that any one who was not a novice in the world would
easily have perceived in her deplorable vanity the
second-hand airs of a lady's woman.

This ridiculous couple were Captain and Mrs. Weazel.
The travellers all assembled in the kitchen of the inn,
where, according to the custom of the time, such
impecunious wayfarers were entertained ; but the
captain desired a room for himself and his wife, so that
they might sup by themselves, instead of in that
communal fashion. The innkeeper, however, did not
much relish this, but would have given way to the
demand, providing the other passengers made no
objection. Unhappily for the captain's absurd dignity,
the others did object ; Miss Jenny, the lady with the
silver-trimmed hat, in particular, observing that
" if Captain Weazel and his lady had a mind to sup by
themselves, they might wait until the others should
have done." At this hint the captain put on a martial
frown and looked very big, without speaking ; while
his yoke-fellow, with a disdainful toss of her nose,
muttered something about " creature ! " which Miss
Jenny overhearing, stepped up to her, saying, " None
of your names, good Mrs. Abigail. Creature ! quotha
— I'll assure you — no such creature as you, neither — no
quality-coupler." Here the captain interposed, with
a " D n me, madam, what do you mean by that ? "

" Sir, who are you ? " replied Miss Jenny ; " who
made you a captain, you pitiful, trencher- scraping,

148 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

pimping curler ? The army is come to a fine pass
when such fellows as you get commissions. What,
I suppose you think I don't know you ? You and
your helpmate are well met : a cast-off mistress and a
bald valet-de-chambre are well yoked together."

" Blood and wounds ! " cried Weazel ; " d'ye
question the honour of my wife, madam ? No man in
England durst say so much — I would flay him,
carbonado him ! Fury and destruction ! I would have
his liver for my supper ! " So saying, he drew his
sword and flourished it, to the great terror of Strap ;
while Miss Jenny, snapping her fingers, told him she did
not value his resentment that !

We will pass over the Rabelaisian adventures of the
night, which, amusing enough, are too robust for these
pages ; and will proceed to the next day's journey.
Before they started, Weazel had proved himself the
arrant coward and braggart which the reader has
already perceived him to be ; but, notwithstanding this
exposure, he entertained the company in the wagon
with accounts of his valour : how he had once knocked
down a soldier who had made game of him ; had
tweaked a drawer by the nose who had found fault
with his picking his teeth with a fork ; and had,
moreover, challenged a cheesemonger who had had the
presumption to be his rival.

For five days they travelled in this manner. On the
sixth day, when they were about to sit down to dinner,
the innkeeper came and told them that three gentle-
men, just arrived, had ordered the meal to be sent to
their apartment, although told that it had been
bespoken by the passengers in the wagon, — to which
information they had replied : " The passengers in the

wagon might be d d ; their betters must be served

before them ; they supposed it would be no hardship
on such travellers to dine on bread and cheese for
one day."

This was a great disappointment to them all, and
they laid their heads together to remedy it, Miss Jenny
observing that Captain Weazel, being a soldier by

MISS JENNY 149

profession, ought to protect them. The captain
adroitly excused himself by saying that he would
not, for all the world, be known to have travelled in a
wagon ; swearing, at the same time, that, could he
appear with honour, they should eat his sword sooner
than his provision. On this declaration, Miss Jenny,
snatching his weapon, drew it and ran immediately
into the kitchen, where she threatened to put the cook
to death if he did not immediately send the victuals
into their room. The noise she made brought the
three strangers down, one of whom no sooner perceived
her than he cried, " Ha ! Jenny Ramper ! what
brought thee hither ? "

" My dear Jack Rattle," she replied, running into
his arms, "is it you ? Then Weazel may go whistle
for a dinner — I shall dine with you."

They consented with joy to this proposal ; and the
others were on the point of being reduced to a very
uncomfortable meal, when Joey, the wagoner, under-
standing the whole affair, entered the kitchen with a
pitchfork in his hand, and swore he would be the
death of any man who should pretend to seize the
victuals prepared for the wagon. On this, the three
strangers drew their swords, and, being joined by their
servants, bloodshed seemed imminent ; when the
landlord, interposing, offered to part with his own
dinner, for the sake of peace ; which proposal was
accepted and all ended happily.

When the journey was resumed in the afternoon,
Roderick chose to walk some distance beside the
wagoner, a merry, good-natured fellow, who informed
him that Miss Jenny was a common girl of the town,
who, falling in company with a recruiting officer who
had carried her down in the stage-coach from London
to Newcastle, was obliged to return, as her companion
was now in prison for debt. Weazel had been a
valet-de-chambre to my Lord Fizzle while he lived
separate from his lady ; but on their reconciliation
she insisted on Weazel's being turned off, as well as
the woman who had lived with him : when his lordship,

150 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

to get rid of them both with a good grace, proposed
that Weazel should marry his mistress, when he would
procure a commission in the army for him.

Roderick and the wagoner both had a profound
contempt for Weazel, and resolved to put his courage
to the test by alarming the passengers with the cry
of " a highwayman " as soon as a horseman should
appear. It was dusk when a man on horseback
approached them. Joey gave the alarm, and a
general consternation arose ; Strap leaping out of the
wagon and hiding himself behind a hedge ; the usurer
exclaiming dolefully and rustling about in the straw,
as though hiding something ; Mrs. Weazel wringing her
hands and crying ; and the captain pretending to
snore.

This latter artifice did not succeed with Miss Jenny,
who shook him by the shoulder and bawled out :
" 'Sdeath ! captain, is this a time to snore when we are
going to be robbed ? Get up, for shame, and behave
like a soldier and man of honour."

Weazel pretended to be in a great passion for being
disturbed, and swore he would have his nap out if all
the highwaymen in England surrounded him. " W7hat
are you afraid of ? " continued he ; at the same time
trembling with such agitation that the whole vehicle
shook.

" Plague on your pitiful soul ! " exclaimed Miss
Jenny ; " you are as arrant a poltroon as was ever
drummed out of a regiment. Stop the wagon, Joey,
and if I have rhetoric enough, the thief shall not
only take your purse, but your skin also."

By this time the horseman had come up with them,
and proved to be a gentleman's servant, well known
to Joey, who told him the plot, and desired him to
carry it on a little further, by going up to the wagon and
questioning those within. Accordingly he approached,
and in a terrible voice demanded, " Who have we got
here ? " Isaac replied, in a lamentable voice, " Here's
a poor, miserable sinner, who has got a small family to
maintain, and nothing in the world but these fifteen

WEAZEL CONFOUNDED 151

shillings, which, if you rob me of, we must all starve
together."

" Who's that sobbing in the corner ? " continued the
supposed highwayman.

" A poor, unfortunate woman," answered Mrs.
Weazel, " on whom, I beg you, for Christ's sake, to
have compassion."

" Are you maid or wife ? " said he.

" Wife, to my sorrow," said she.

" Who, or what is your husband ? " continued he.

" My husband," continued Mrs. Weazel, " is an
officer in the army, and was left sick at the last inn
where we dined."

" You must be mistaken, madam," said he, " for
I myself saw him get into the wagon this afternoon."
Here he laid hold of one of Weazel's legs, and pulled
him out from under his wife's petticoats, where he had
concealed himself. The trembling captain, detected in
this inglorious situation, rubbed his eyes, and affecting
to wake out of sleep, cried, " What's the matter ? "

" What's the matter ? The matter is not much,"
answered the horseman ; " I only called in to inquire
after your health, and so adieu, most noble captain."
So saying, he clapped spurs to his horse, and was out of
sight in a moment.

t It was some time before Weazel could recollect
himself ; but at length, reassuming his big look, he
said, " 'Sdeath ! why did he ride away before I had
time to ask him how his lord and his lady do ? Don't
you remember Tom, my dear ? " addressing his wife.

" Yes," replied she ; " I think I do remember some-
thing of the fellow ; but you know I seldom converse
with people of his station."

" Hey-day ! " cried Joey ; " do you know the young
man, coptain ? "

" Know him ? " cried Weazel ; " many a time has he
filled a glass of Burgundy for me at my Lord Trippett's
table."

> " And what may his neame be, coptain ? " said
Joey.

152 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

" His name ! — his name," replied Weazel, " is Tom
Rinser."

" Waunds ! " cried Joey, " a has changed his own
neame then ! for I'se lay any wager he was christened
John Trotter."

This raised a laugh against the captain, who seemed
very much disconcerted ; when Isaac broke silence and
said, " It was no matter who or what he was, as he had
not proved the robber they suspected. They ought to
bless God for their narrow escape."

" Bless God ! " said Weazel, " for what ? Had he
been a highwayman I should have eaten his blood
and body before he had robbed me or any one in this
diligence."

" Ha, ha, ha ! " cried Miss Jenny ; "I believe you
Avill eat all you kill, indeed, captain."

The usurer was so well pleased at the end of this
adventure that he could not refrain from being severe,
and took notice that Captain Weazel seemed to be a
good Christian, for he had armed himself with patience
and resignation, instead of carnal weapons, and worked
out his salvation with fear and trembling ; whereupon,
amidst much laughter, Weazel threatened to cut the
Jew's throat. The usurer, taking hold of this menace,
said : — " Gentlemen and ladies, I take you all to
witness, that my life is in danger from this bloody-
minded officer : I'll have him bound over to the peace."
This second sneer procured another laugh against the
captaiij, who remained crestfallen for the rest of the
journey.

XXV

THE remaining miles to Gateshead are made up of
the shabby village of Low Fell, where the road begins
to rise, and the uninteresting way over the ridge of
the Fell itself. By the word " Fell," North of England
people describe what Southerners call a hill. The
common land of Gateshead Fell, 675 acres, was enclosed
under Acts of Parliament, 1809, 1822.

154 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Many were the gibbets erected in the old days on
Gateshead Fell. The last was that on which swung
the body of Robert Hazlett, who on this spot, on the
evening of August 6th, 1770, robbed a young lady,
Miss Margaret Benson, who was returning to Newcastle
in a post-chaise from Durham. On the same night a
post-boy was relieved of his bags at the same place.
Hazlett was hanged at Durham, and his body gibbeted
here, twenty-five feet high. For some time afterwards,
every day for an hour, an old man was seen to kneel and
pray at the foot of the gibbet. It was the wretched
man's father ! A beacon was fixed on the Fell in the
winter of 1803-4, on an alarm of invasion ; hence this
height was afterwards known as " Beaccn Hill."

The present-day aspect of the road does not hint at
anything so tragical, and is merely commonplace, the
last touch of vulgarity added by the trams that ply
along it from Gateshead.

The place-name of Gateshead seemed to John Ogilby,
in his book, Britannia Depicta, 1676, to require
explanation, and he proceeded to say that it was " alias
Gate-Side, seated on the Banks of the Tine, by the
Saxons call'd Gates-heved, i.e. Capra? Caput, or Goafs-
head, perchance from an Inn with such a sign."

But perchance not. While the Saxon name certainly
was Gatesheved, it meant " road's head," either in
allusion to the Roman bridge across the river being
broken down and passage being possible only by water,
or else referring to the abruptly-descending land on
either side, where the road would seem to be coming
to a sudden end.

Gateshead is to Newcastle what Southwark is to
London, and the Tyne which runs between may be
likened in the same way to the Thames. Comparison
from any other point of view is impossible. Gateshead
is nowadays a great deal worse than it was when
Doctor Johnson called it "a dirty lane leading to
Newcastle." It may be ranked among the half-dozen
dirtiest places on earth, and the lane which the Doctor
saw has sent forth miles of streets as bad as itself, so

NEWCASTLE 155

that the geographical distribution of filth and squalor
has in modern times become very wide. There are
two ways of entering Newcastle since the High Level
Bridge across the Tyne has supplemented what used to
be the old Tyne Bridge, once, and until fifty years ago,
the only way of crossing the river except by boat.
When Stephenson flung his High Level Bridge across
that stream, as yellow, if not as historic, as the Tiber,
he provided a roadway for general traffic beneath the
railway, and the old bridge lost its favour, simply for
the reason that to cross it the steeply descending
West Street and Bottle Lane had to be taken and the
just as steeply ascending bank of the river on the
Newcastle side to be climbed ; while by the High Level
a flat road was provided. It is true that all traffic,
pedestrian and wheeled, pays a small toll for the
privilege, but it is the lesser of the two evils.

Let those who have no concern with old times take
their easeful way through the gloomy portals of the
High Level Bridge, eighty-five feet above high-water
mark. But let us examine the steep and smelly street,
paved with vile granite setts and strewn with refuse,
which conducts to the Tyne Bridge, or the Swing Bridge
as it is nowadays, since the old structure was removed,
the channel of the river deepened, and the wonderful
swinging portion of the remodelled bridge, 281 feet in
length, and swung open or closed by hydraulic ppwer,
constructed in 1876. With that work went the last
fragments of the Roman bridge built by Hadrian
(Publius Aelius Hadrianus) more than a thousand years
before ; a bridge which, indeed, gave the Roman camp
its name of Pom ffLlii. His bridge, long in ruins, was
replaced in 1248 by a mediaeval structure which was
destroyed by a flood in 1771.

This way came the coaches, climbing into Newcastle
up Sandhill and the Side, whose steep and curving
roadway remains to prove how difficult were the ways of
travellers as well as transgressors in the old times.
Old and new jostle here. The Swing Bridge turns
silently on its pivot to the touch of a lever in its signal

156 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

tower, and a force our grandfathers never knew per-
forms the evolution ; but side by side with this miracle
still stand the darkling lanes and steep waterside alleys
of Gateshead and Newcastle that were standing before
science and commerce, mother and daughter, came
down upon the Tyne and transformed it.

A writer in an old-time Northern magazine appears
to have been jolted into a bad humour respecting
Newcastle's precipitous old approach : — " We have no
connection whatever with the coal-trade, and were
never at Newcastle but once, passing through it on the
top of an exceedingly heavy coach, along with about a
score of other travellers. But, should we live a
thousand years, it would not be possible for us to forget
that transit. We wonder what blockhead first built
Newcastle ; for before you can get into and out of it,
you must descend one hill and ascend another, about
as steep as the sides of a coal-pit. Had the coach been
upset that day, instead of the night before and the day
after, there would have been no end and, indeed, no
beginning, to this magazine. We all clustered as
thickly together on the roof of the vehicle (it was a sort
of macvey, or fly) as the good people of Rome did to see
Great Pompey passing along : — but we, on the con-
trary, saw nothing but a lot of gaping inhabitants, who
were momentarily expecting to see us brought low.
We remarked one man fastening his eye upon our legs
that were dangling from the roof under an iron rail,
who, we are confident, was a Surgeon. However, we
kept swinging along, from side to side, as if the macvey
had been as drunk as an owl, and none of the passengers,
we have reason to believe, were killed that day — it
was a maiden circuit. But, after all, we love New-
castle, and wish its coals may burn clear and bright till
consumed in the last general conflagration."

High over head goes the High Level, and the smoke
and rumble of its trains mingle with the clash of
Newcastle's thousand anvils and the reek of her
million chimneys ; but there still stands against the
sky-line — most fittingly seen from the Gateshead

SANDHILL 159

bank at eventide, when petty details are lost and only
broad effects remain — the coroneted steeple of St.
Nicholas and the great black form of the Norman keep,
reminding the contemplative that Monkchester was
the name of the city before the Conqueror came and
built that fortress whose fame as the " New Castle "
has remained to this day to give a title to the place,
just as the " new work " at Newark has ever since
stood sponsor for that town. Again, no sooner have
you crossed the Swing Bridge and come to Quayside
than other vestiges of old Newcastle are encountered,
in the remains of the Castle wall and the steps that
lead upwards to Castle Garth, where shoemakers and
cobblers of footgear of the most waterside and
unfashionable character still blink and cobble in their
half-underground dens, the descendants, probably, of
those whom a French traveller remarked here in the
time of Charles the Second. If, instead of climbing
these stairs, the traveller elects to follow the track
of the coaches, he will traverse Sandhill, which in
very early days was an open space by the river, but
has for centuries past been a street. It was at Sandgate
close by, according to the ballad, that the lassie was
heard to sing the well-known refrain of " Weel may the
keel row, the boat that my love's in," and indeed it is a
district that breathes romance, commonplace though
its modern offices may look. Does not the Moot Hall
look down upon Sandhill ? " Many a heart has broken
inside those walls," said a passer-by, with unwonted
picturesqueness, to the present writer, gazing at that
hall of justice.

There is a pretty flavour of romance — compact, it is
true, of the most unpromising materials, like the
voluptuous scents which modern science extracts
from coal-tar — still clinging to Sandhill. Just where
a group of curious old houses, very old, very tall, and
nearly all windows, remains, the explorer will perceive
a memorial tablet let into one of the frontages, setting
forth that " From one of the windows of this house,
now marked with a blue pane of glass, Bessie Surtees

160 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

eloped with John Scott, afterwards Lord Chancellor
Eldon, November 18th, 1772." John Scott was
twenty-one years of age at the time, and was at home
on vacation from Oxford. His father, a successful
coal-fitter, had sent him, as he had already done his
elder brother, William, afterwards Lord Stowell, to the
University. He had already gained a fellowship there,
which he forfeited on his elopement with, and marriage
to, his Bessie. She descended from her casement by
the aid of a ladder hidden by an accomplice in the shop
below, and they were over the Border and wedded by
the blacksmith at Blackshields before any one could
pursue. Bessie's relatives were bitterly opposed to
the match, and so, nearly without resources, the pair
had to resort to London and live frugally in Cursitor
Street while he studied hard at law, instead of, as
originally intended, for the Church. His first year's
earnings scarce amounted to enough to live on.
" Many a time," said he in after years, " have I run
down from Cursitor Street to Fleet Market, to buy
sixpenny worth of sprats for our supper." The
turning-point in his career occurred in a case in which
he insisted on a legal point against the wishes of his
clients. The case was decided against him, but was
reversed on appeal on the point he had contested.
From that time continued success awaited him, and he
eventually became Lord Chancellor. The dashing
Romeo of an earlier day became, however, a very
different person in after years. Much poring over
parchments and long-continued professional strife took
all the generous enthusiasm out of him, and by ways not
the most scrupulous he amassed one of the greatest
fortunes ever scraped together by a successful lawyer.
Bessie, meanwhile, had become quite as much of a
handful as she had been an armful.

Romance wanes. As Conservators of the Tyne, the
Corporation of Newcastle have, for the last four
centuries, proclaimed their authority by once in every
five years going in procession on the river, in various
craft. It was on these occasions the acknowledged

WESLEY ON NEWCASTLE 161

custom that, on returning and landing, the Mayor
should choose the prettiest girl in the crowds of
spectators and publicly salute her with a civic kiss.
In acknowledgment of this favour his Worship pre-
sented her with a new sovereign. But the procession of
" Barge Day," as it was called, was discontinued after
May 16th, 1901, and is not likely to be revived.

From Sandhill the coaches journeyed along the
Side, which remains as steep and almost as picturesque
as ever, even if not rendered additionally curious by
the gigantic railway arch that spans it and clears the
roofs of its tallest houses. The last mail-coach left
Newcastle for Berwick and Edinburgh, with the
Union Jack flying at half-mast, on July 5, 1847, and
those days are so thoroughly done with that none of
Newcastle's coaching inns are left. Indeed, the whole
character of the place has changed since little over a
century and a half ago, when John Wesley entered the
opinion in his diary that it was a " lovely place and
lovely company," and, furthermore, said that "if he
wrere not journeying in hope of a better world, here he
would be content to live and die." Coal had even then
been shipped for centuries from Newcastle, but miles
of manufactories had not yet arisen upon the banks of
" coaly Tyne," and so unprogressive was the town that
it was still, with gardens and orchards, easily comprised
within its mediaeval walls ; those walls which had
many a time withstood the Scots, and even when
Wesley was here in 1745 were being prepared to resist
the Pretender.

Newcastle — difficult as it may now be to realise the
fact — was then a very small town, and was governed
accordingly. Primitive punishments as well as
primitive government survived until a hundred and
fifty years ago, when scolds still wore bridles or were
ducked, and when local tipplers yet perambulated the
streets in the drunkard's cloak, an ingenious instrument
of little ease which now reposes in the Museum.

Far beyond the ancient walls now extend the streets
of the modern city ; Grey Street chief among them,

162

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

THE DRUNKARD'S
CLOAK."

classically gloomy and extra-classically grimed to the
blackness of Erebus ; a heavy Ionic pillar at its
northern end bearing aloft the
statue of Earl Grey, the Prime
Minister who secured the passing of
the first Reform Bill in 1832.

Away from the chief business
streets, many of the curious old
thoroughfares may be sought, but
they are nowadays the receptacles
of inconceivable dirt, and anything
but desirable. The narrow streets
called " chares " answer to the
" wynds " of Edinburgh and the
" rows " of Yarmouth. Their name
has been the subject of jokes in-
numerable, and misunderstandings
not a few ; as, when a judge, previ-
ously unacquainted with Newcastle,
holding an assize here, heard a witness
say that he'saw " three men come out of the foot of a
chare," and ordered him out of the witness-box,
thinking him insane, until the jury of Newcastle men
explained matters.

Despite its smoke and untidiness, the folks of this
grimy Tyncside city have a good conceit of it. To
them it is " canny Newcastle," an epithet whose
meaning differs from the Scotch, and here means
" fine," or " neat." The stranger who fails to find
those qualities, who perceives instead the defects of dirt
and a pall of smoke that blackens everything to an inky
hue, and accordingly thanks Providence that his home
is elsewhere, is to the Tynesiders a Goth.

For Newcastle is practical. It has its great news-
papers, and has produced literary men of note ; but
the forging of iron and steel, the shrinking of steel
jackets upon big guns, the making of ships and all
kinds of munitions of war appeal principally to the
Novocastrian who may by chance have no especial love
of that coaling trade which is pre-eminently and

PRACTICAL NEWCASTLE 163

historically his. It is therefore quite characteristic
of Newcastle folks that, in the mid-century, a literary
man, since become famous, was as a boy solemnly
warned by a townsman against such a career as he
was contemplating. " Ah'm sorry," said he, " to hear
that ye want to go to London, and to take to this
writing in the papers. It'll bring ye to no good,
my boy. I mind there was a very decent friend of
mine, auld Mr. Forster, the butcher in the Side. He
had a laddie just like you ; and nothing would sarve
him but he must go away to London to get eddicated, as
he called it ; and when he had got eddicated, he
wouldn't come back to his father's shop, though it
was a first-class business. He would do nothing but
write, and write, and write ; and at last he went back
again to London, and left his poor old father all alone ;
and ah've never heard tell of that laddie since ! "

Of course he had not. What rumours of literary
life in London could then have penetrated to the
shores of the " coaly Tyne." That laddie, however,
was John Forster, the biographer of Dickens.

These practical men of Newcastle have achieved the
most wonderful things. The home of the Stephensons
was at Wylam, only nine miles away, and so the town
can fairly claim the inventor of railways among its
natives. We need not linger to discuss the wonders of
the locomotive ; they are sufficiently evident. New-
castle men have even changed the character of their
river. There are still those who can recollect the
Tyne as a shallow stream in which' the laden " keels,"
heaped up with coal, not infrequently grounded.
Nowadays the largest war-vessels are built up-stream,
at Elswick, and take their stately way to the sea with
their heavy armaments, and no mishap occurs.
Clanging arsenals and factories line the banks for many
more miles than the historian, anxious for his
reputation, dare mention. The Armstrong works
alone are over a mile long, and employ some sixteen
thousand hands. Lord Armstrong himself was the
inventor of hydraulic machinery ; and the Swan

164 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

incandescent electric lamp, which bears the name of its
inventor, was the work of a Newcastle man. Others of
whom England is proud were born here, notably
Admiral Lord Colling wood. To their practicality
these men of Newcastle add sentiment, for they have
carefully placed tablets on the houses where their
celebrated men were born, and they have not only
erected a monument to Stephenson, but have also
placed one of his first engines — •" Puffing Billy " — on a
pedestal beside the High Level Bridge, where the huge
modern expresses roar past the quaint relic, day and
night, in startling contrast. Also, they one and
all have the most astonishingly keen affection for
their old parish church of St. Nicholas, in these latter
days become a cathedral.

If you would touch a Novocastrian on his most
sensitive spot, praise or criticise the cathedral church
of St. Nicholas, and he will plume himself or lose his
temper, as the case may be. That building, and
especially its tower, with the wonderful stone crown
supported on ribbed arches and set about with its
cluster of thirteen pinnacles, is the apple of Newcastle's
eye. It figures as a stock decorative heading in the
Newcastle papers, and does duty in a hundred other
ways. Built toward the close of the sixteenth century,
that fairy-like corona has had its escapes, as when,
during the stubborn defence in 1644, under the
Royalist Sir John Marley, the Scottish general,
Alexander Leslie, Lord Leven, commanding the
besieging forces, threatened to batter it down with his
cannon if the town were not at once surrendered.
To this Sir John Marley made the very practical
reply of causing all his Scottish prisoners to be placed
in the tower, and sent word to the besiegers that they
might, if they would, destroy it, but that their friends
should perish at the same time. The " Thief and
Reiver " bell, a relic of old times when the outlaws of
Northumberland were given short shrift wherever and
whenever found, is still rung before the opening of the
annual fair, and recalls the old custom of giving those

166 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

gentry immunity from arrest during fair-time ; but it
would probably not be safe for any one " wanted " by
the police to rely upon this sentimental survival.

XXVI

FOR fully a mile and a half on leaving Newcastle
the road runs over the Town Moor, a once wild waste of
common, and even now a bleak and forbidding open
space whose horizon on every side commands the gaunt
Northumbrian hills, or is hidden with the reek of
Newcastle town, or the collieries that render the way
sordid and ugly. Newcastle's lovely pleasance,
Jesmond Dene, is hidden away to the right from the
traveller along the road, who progresses through
Bulman's Village (now dignified with the new name of
Gosforth), Salter's Lane, Wide Open and Seaton Burn
with sinking heart, appalled at the increasing
wretchedness and desolation brought by the coal-
mining industry upon the scene. Off to the right lies
Killingworth, among the collieries, where George
Stephenson began his career in humble fashion. His
cottage stands there to this day. At the gates of
Blagdon Park, eight miles from Newcastle, where the
white bulls of the Ridleys guard the entrance in
somewhat spectral fashion, the surroundings improve.
Here the Ridleys have been seated for centuries, and
from their wooded domain watched the belching
smoke of the pits they own, which year by year and
generation by generation have added to their wealth.
Lord Ridley is now the representative of these owners
of mineral wealth, and lord of Blagdon. Midway of the
long park wall that borders the road on the way to
Morpeth stand the modern lodge and gates, erected in
1887 ; with that relic of old Newcastle, the Kale Cross,
just within the grounds and easily seen from the
highway. The building is not so much a cross as a
market-house, and is just a classical pavilion in the

BLAGDON

167

Doric style, open on all sides to the weather. It stood,
until the middle of the eighteenth century, upon the
Side at Newcastle, and marked the centre of the
market then held there. The townfolk presented it to
the Matthew White Ridley of the period, and here in
lovelier surroundings than it knew originally, it stands,
the wreathed urns and couchant lion on its roof
contrasting finely with a dense background of foliage.

THE GATES OF BLAGDON PARK

Beyond the park, the road crosses the Black Dene,
whence Blagdon derives its name ; one of those
ravines that now begin to be a feature of the way.
This expands on the right hand into Hartford Dene,
to which Newcastle picnic-parties come in summer-time
for brief respite from the smoke and clangour of their
unlovely town. Thence, through Stannington, Clifton,
and Catchburn, and to the long and tortuous descent
into Morpeth, lying secluded in the gorge of the
Wansbeck.

Morpeth is little changed since coaching times, but
the one very noticeable alteration shows by what
utter barbarians the town was inhabited towards the
close of that era. Entering it, the turbulent Wansbeck
is crossed by a stone bridge, built in 1830, to provide

168 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

better accommodation for the increased traffic than
the ancient one, a few yards up stream, afforded.
For some five years longer the old building was suffered
to remain, and then, with the exception of its piers,
it was demolished. No one benefited by its destruction,
it stood in no one's way, and its utility was such
that a footbridge, a graceless thing of iron and scantling,
has been erected across those ancient piers, to continue
the access still required at this point from one bank to
the other. It was to our old friends the monks that
travellers were beholden for that ancient Gothic bridge,
and their old toll-house still remains, after having
passed through a varied career as a chapel, a school,
and a fire-engine house. Turner's view shows the road
over the bridge, looking south ; with the castle
gate-house on the hill-top, a great deal nearer than it
actually is. This, the sole relic of that old stronghold,
has in later years been restored until it looks almost as
new as the would-be Gothic of the gaol, which stands
beside the modern bridge on entering the town and
deludes the more ignorant into a belief of its genuine
antiquity. At Morpeth, until the assizes were removed
to Newcastle, justice was dispensed in this sham
mediaeval castle, built in 1821, and now, all too vast for
present needs, used as a police-station. The old town
gaol, at the other end of the town, facing the market-
place, is much more interesting. Built in the likeness
of a church tower, curfew is still rung from its belfry,
beneath the queer little figures on the roof. Market-
day brings crowds of drovers and endless droves of
sheep and cattle to this spot, to say nothing of the pigs,
singularly plentiful in these parts. " He's driving his
swine to Morpeth market," is an expression still used
of a snoring man in the neighbourhood. Always
excepting market-day, Morpeth is now a curiously
quiet and dreamy town. The stress of ancient times
has left its few relics in the mouldering remains of
strong and defensible walls, and in certain proverbs and
sayings reflecting discreditably upon the Scottish
people, but the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

MORPETH 171

are more evident in its streets than previous eras.
To those centuries belong the many old inns with signs
for the most part redolent of the coaching age : the
" Nag's Head," the " Grey Nag's Head," the " Queen's
Head," " Turk's Head," and " Black Bull " ; this last
with an odd semi-circular front and a beautiful coach-
entrance displaying some fine Adam decoration.

That Morpeth folk still cherish old anti-Scottish
sayings is not at all remarkable ; for old manners, old
sayings, and ancient hatreds die slowly in such places as
this, and moreover, the Morpeth of old suffered terribly
from Scottish raiders. Later times saw a more peaceful
irruption, when Scottish youths came afoot down the
great road in quest of fame and fortune in the south.
People looked askance upon them as Scots, while
innkeepers hated them for their poverty and their
canniness. Those licensed victuallers thought, with
Dr. Johnson, who did not greatly like them either, that
" the finest prospect for a Scotchman was the high road
that led him into England." This bitter satire, by the
way, was in reply to a Mr. Ogilvie, who had been
contending on behalf of the " great many noble wild
prospects " which Scotland contained. Smollett, in his
Humphry Clinker, shows how greatly the Scots were
misliked along this route about 1766. He says that,
from Doncaster northwards, all the windows of all
the inns were scrawled with doggerel rhymes in abuse of
the Scottish nation. This fact was pointed out to
that fine Scottish character, Lismahago, and with it a
particularly scurrilous epigram. He read it with some
difficulty, the glass being dirty, and with the most
starched composure.

" Vara terse and vara poignant," said he ; " but with
the help of a wat dishclout it might be rendered more
clear and parspicuous."

The country between Morpeth and Alnwick is dotted
with peel-towers and their ruins, built in the wild old
times when the ancestors of these peaceful Scots came in
quest of spoil, laying waste the Borders far and wide.
One had but to turn aside from the road at Warrener's

172 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

House, two miles beyond Morpeth, and thence proceed
eastward for a further two, for ten castles to be seen at
once from the vantage-point of Cockle Park Tower,
itself a fine relic of a fortress belonging in the fifteenth
century to the Ogles, situated now on a farm called by
the hideous name of Blubberymires.

The peculiar appropriateness of Morpeth's name,
meaning as it does " moor-path," is fully realised when
coming up the road, up the well-named High Highlaws
to where the road to Cockle Park Tower branches off,
and where an old toll-house stands, with " Warrener's
House," a deserted red-brick mansion, opposite.
It is quite worth while to ask any passing countryman
the name of that house, for then the " Northumbrian
burr " will be heard in all its richness. As De Foe
remarked, two hundred years ago, Northumbrians have
" a Shibboleth upon their Tongues, namely, a difficulty
in pronouncing the letter R," and in their mouths,
consequently, the name becomes, grotesquely enough,
" Wawwener."

Causey Park Bridge, over a little rivulet, a ruined
windmill, and the remains of Causey Park Tower are
the next features of the way before reaching a rise
where an old road goes scaling a hillside to the right
hand, surmounted by a farm picturesquely named
" Helm-on-the-Hill." Thence downhill on to Bocken-
field Moor, and then precipitously down again through
West Thirston and across the picturesque bridge that
spans the lovely Coquet, into Felton : villages bordering
either bank of the river, wrhere the angler finds excellent
sport, and where the rash cyclist, regardless of the
danger-boards erected for his guidance on the hill-tops,
tries involuntary conclusions with the aforesaid bridge
at the bottom. A mile onward, up the rising road, is
the park of Swarland Hall, with " Nelson's Monument,"
a time-stained obelisk, seen amid the trees within the
park fence, and showing against the sky-line as the
traveller approaches the moorland height of Rushy Cap.
Alexander Davison, squire of Swarland Hall and friend
of the Admiral, erected it, " not to commemorate the

174

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

public virtue and heroic achievements of Nelson, which
is the duty of England, but to the memory of private
friendship." Occupying so prominent a position by the
roadside, it was probably intended to edify the coach-
passengers of old. So to Newton-on-the-Moor — which
might more fitly be named Newton-on-the-Hill — with
its half a dozen cottages and its coal-pits, and thence by
a featureless but not unpleasing road into Alnwick.

FELTOX BRIDGE.

It is something of a shock to the sentimental pilgrim,
northward-bound, that the entrance to historic
Alnwick should be by the gas-works, the railway
station, the Farmers' Folly (of which more shall
presently be said), and other unmistakable and
unromantic evidences of modernity that spread
beyond the ancient confines of the town to form the
suburb of Bondgate Without ; but man cannot live
by medievalism alone. The town itself is gained at
that point where the heavy blackened mass of Bondgate

ALNWICK 177

itself spans the road, just beyond the elaborately
rebuilt " Old Plough," still exhibiting, however, the
curious tablet from the old house : — •

That which your Father old hath purchased and left
You to possess, do you dearly
Hold to show his worthiness. 1714.

XXVII

ALNWICK is a town with a great past and a somnolent
present. There are yawns at every turn, echoes with
every footfall, and grass growing unbidden in the
streets. But there are forces of elemental power at
Alnwick, little though the stranger suspects them.
There have of late years been periods of storm and
stress in the columns of the Alnwick Gazette, for
instance, respecting the local water-supply, which
have drawn forth inappropriately fiery letters from
correspondents, together with many mixed metaphors.
How is this for impassioned writing ? — " The retribu-
tive forces of well-balanced justice have, after a dead
ebb, returned with a swelling tide, and overtaken the
arrogative policy of the freeholders." But this is
nothing to the following striking figure of " the arm
of scandalous jobbery steeped to the lips in perfidious
dishonour ; " a delightful literary image unsurpassed in
Ireland itself ; or " another hydra of expense arising
phoenix-like from the ashes of misgovernment." Did
the word " hydrant," we wonder, suggest this last
period ? Is the dulness of Alnwick due to the decay
following the corruption hinted at ? Perhaps, for,
as this publicist next inquires, " How could anything
symbolical of greatness, wrapped with ropes of sand,
ever and for aye, flourish like the green bay-tree ? "
Ah ! how ? It is a difficult question to answer, and
so we will leave the question at that.

Alnwick, of course, derives its name from its situation
on the romantic Aln : the " wick," or village on that

178 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

river. The name is kin to that of many other " wicks,"
" weeks," and " wykes " in England, and has its
fellows in such places as High Wycombe ; Wykeham
(now spelt Wickham) in Hampshire, whence came
William of Wykeham ; the village of Weeke, near
Winchester ; and in the town named simply Wick, in
the north of Scotland. Alnwick in these times is a
place of a certain grim and lowering picturesqueness.
Its grey stone houses are at one with the greyness of the
Northumbrian skies, and a general air of barren
stoniness impresses the traveller as its chief feature.
It is an effect of prisons and jailers wrhich reaches its
height in the open space that fronts the barbican of the
castle. You look, instinctively, for His Majesty's
prison regulations on the outer walls, and, approaching
the gate, expect a warder's figure at the wicket.

This is no uncongenial aspect of that old fortress.
It is rather in the Italian drawing-rooms, the picture-
galleries, and the Renaissance luxuries of the interior
of the castle that the jarring note is struck and all
association with feudal times forgotten. Many a Border
moss-trooper has unwillingly passed through this grim
barbican, and so left the world for ever ; and many
more of higher estate have found this old stronghold
of the Percies a place of lifelong durance, or have
in its dungeons met a secret end. For chivalry was
not inconsistent with midnight murder or treachery,
and the Percies, centred in their fortress like spiders
in their webs, had all the virtues and the vices of
chivalric times. Ambitious and powerful, they were
alike a bulwark against the Scots and a menace to
successive kings of England, and none in those olden
times could have approached their castle gate with
the equable pulsation of the modern tourist. In those
times, instead of finding a broad level open space here,
a deep ditch would have been seen and a drawbridge
must have been lowered before access was possible.
Then possibly the stone figures in violent attitudes that
line the battlements, and seem to be casting missiles
down upon the heads of visitors, may have been

" WHISKERS " 179

alarming ; to-day we only wonder if they could ever
have tricked even the most bat-eyed warrior into a
belief that they were really living men-at-arms.

The Percies, whose name attaches more than any
other to Alnwick, were, strictly speaking, never its
owners. The first of that name came over to England
with the Conqueror in the person of William de Percy,
a younger son of the feudal lord of the village of Percie
in Normandy, which still exists to point out to the
curious tourist the spot whence this historic family
sprang. This William de Percy was nicknamed
" Als Gernons," or " WThiskers," whence derives the
name of Algernon, even now a favourite one with the
Smithson-Percies. " Whiskers " was present at the
battle of Hastings, and for his aid was granted manors
in Hampshire, Lincolnshire, and York, but none in
Northumberland. He died in 1086, when with the
Crusaders, near Jerusalem. The Percies never became
connected in any way with Alnwick, for the family of
this William de Percy became extinct in 1166, when
Agnes, an only child of his descendant, married
Josceline de Lovaine ; and it was not until 1309 that
the descendant of this Lovaine, who had assumed the
Percy name, came into wrongful possession of the vast
estates. Alnwick and sixty other baronies in North-
umberland had until then been in possession of the
de Vescis, of whom Yvo de Vesci was the original
Norman owner. His descendant, William de Vesci,
who died in 1297, was the last of his line, and appears to
have been of a peculiarly trusting disposition. He put
a great (and an unfounded) faith in the honesty of
churchmen, leaving all his estates to Anthony Bek,
Prince-Bishop of Durham, in trust for an infant
illegitimate son, until he should come of age. But Bek
picked a quarrel with his ward, and in 1309 sold the
lands to Henry Percy, who thus became the first
Baron Percy of Alnwick.

But let us not do an injustice to the Church. Prince-
Bishops were kittle cattle, an amorphous kind of
creature. Perhaps his lay half impelled Bek to this

180 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

knavery, and, following the Scriptural injunction not
to let the right hand know what is done by the left,
his clerical moiety remained in ignorance of the
crime. Heaven be praised, there arc no longer any
of these Jekyll and Hyde creatures, for the Bishops-
Palatine of Durham Avere abolished two generations or
more since.

There were, in the fulness of time, three Barons Percy
of Alnwick, and then the Barony was erected into the
Earldom of Northumberland. The axe and the sword
took heavy toll of this new line, for the Earls of
Northumberland seldom died in their beds, and father
and son often followed one another in a bloody death,
until at length they became extinct with the death of
the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland. Of
these eleven, only seven died a natural death. There
\vere Percies \vho fell in battle ; others who, rightly or
wrongly, met the death of traitors ; one was torn to
pieces by a mob ; and another was obscurely done to
death in prison. Nor did only the heads of the family
end violently ; their sons and other relations led lives as
turbulent, and finished as suddenly.

The only child of the eleventh Earl of Northumber-
land was a daughter, Elizabeth Percy. She married
firstly the Earl of Ogle ; secondly, Thomas Thynne of
Longleat, -who was murdered in Pall Mall in 1682 by
Count Koningsmarck ; and thirdly, the sixth Duke of
Somerset ; thus bringing the Percy estates into the
Seymour family, and the Percy red hair as well.

It was of red-haired Elizabeth Percy, when Duchess
of Somerset, that Dean Swift wrote the bitter and
diabolically clever lines that are supposed to have lost
him all chance of becoming a bishop. He wrote of her
as " Carrots " :—

Beware of carrots from Northumberland,
Carrots sown Thynne a deep root may get,
Tf so be they are in Somer set ;
Their cunnings mark thou ; for I have been told
They assassin when young and poison when old.
Root out those carrots, O thou whose name
Is backwards and forwards always the same.

The one whose name was backwards and fonvards alike

SIR HUGH SMITHSON 181

was Queen Anne, for Swift's purpose " Anna." It will
he noticed that Swift not very obscurely hints that
Elizabeth Percy connived at murder.

Her eldest son, the seventh Duke of Somerset, had,
curiously enough, only one child, a daughter. She
married " the handsomest man of his time," Sir Hugh
Smithson, in 1740, and thus the property came into the
hands of the present holders.

This most fortunate, as well as most handsome,
fellow was Sir Hugh Smithson, one of a family of
Yorkshire squires whose ancestor gained a baronetcy,
created 1660, for his services to the Stuarts. Sir Hugh,
born 1714, a son of Langdale Smithson, and grandson
of another Sir Hugh, the third baronet, had little early
prospect of much position in life. He was a younger
son, and, like many another such, he went into trade.
He was an apothecary. Having succeeded as fourth
baronet to position and wealth, and with what he had
made in commerce, the " handsomest man " made this
very handsome marriage. He had the aristocratic
instinct, and, discarding his old name, took that of
Percy, to which, of course, he had no sort of
right,

For him in 1749 was revived the old title, Earl of
Northumberland, together with that of Baron Wark-
worth. In 1766 he became further, Duke of
Northumberland and Earl Percy, and died 1786.

The name of Percy is one to conjure with. The
Lovaines, who had assumed it, made it famous in
the annals of chivalry, with a thousand deeds of
derring-do in the debateable lands. Smithson, too, is
a good name. It at least tells of descent from an
honest craftsman, and Sir Hugh's knighted ancestor
had, obviously, done nothing to be ashamed of.
Unfortunately for Sir Hugh and his successors, this
unwarranted assumption of an historic name took
place so well within the historic period that it is never
likely to be forgotten. George the Third, who also
had the instinct of aristocracy, kept the fact well in
mind, and when, sorely against his will, he was obliged

182 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

to confer the Dukedom of Northumberland upon this
ex-apothecary, consoled himself by vowing that he
should never obtain the Order of the Garter. The duke
personally solicited a blue ribbon from the king, and
observed that he was " the first Percy who has been
refused the Garter." " You forget," replied his
Majesty, " that you are the first Smithson who has ever
asked for it."

The huge and historic stronghold of Alnwick had
by this time become ruinous, and the Smithson duke
was for a while uncertain whether to reside here or at
Warkworth. Alnwick, however, found favour with
him, and he set to work to render it a place worthy of
one of his quality. To this end he wTought havoc with
the feudal antiquities of the castle, pulling down the
ancient chapel and several of the towers, filling up the
moats, plastering the walls and ceilings, enlarging
arrow-slits into great windows, and playing the very
devil with the place. The military history of the
castle, as expressed in the picturesque irregularity of
successive alterations and additions during many
centuries, was swept away by his zeal for uniformity,
and the interior rooms were remodelled in the taste of
that age, to serve for a residence, to such an extent that.
only the outer walls retained even the appearance of a
castle. When Pennant wrote of it in 1767, he said : —
" You look in vain for any marks of the grandeur of the
feudal age ; for trophies won by a family eminent in our
annals for military prowess and deeds of chivalry ; for
halls hung with helms and hauberks " (good alliteration,
that ! but rash for Cockney repetition), " or with the
spoils of the chase ; for extensive forests or for
venerable oaks. The apartments are large, and lately
finished with a most incompatible elegance. The
gardens are equally inconsistent, trim in the highest
degree, and more adapted to a villa near London than
to the ancient seat of a great baron." It was to this
criticism of " trimness " that Bishop Percy objected.
Discussing Pennant with Dr. Johnson, he could not sit
quietly and hear him praise a man who had spoken so

ALNWICK CASTLE 183

disrespectfully of Alnwick Castle and the Duke's
pleasure-grounds, and he eagerly opposed the Doctor,
evidently with some heat, for Johnson said, " He has
done what he intended ; he has made you very angry."
To which the Bishop replied, " He has said the garden is
trim, which is representing it like a citizen's parterre,
when the truth is, there is a very large extent of fine
turf and gravel walks."

" According to your own account, sir," rejoined
Johnson, " Pennant is right. It is trim. Here is
grass cut close and gravel rolled smooth. Is not that
trim ? The extent is nothing against that ; a mile
may be as trim as a square yard." The Bishop was
vanquished.

All the sham Gothic alterations made at a huge
outlay by the first Duke (with the exception of one
room, which remains to show how atrocious his style
was) were swept away by Algernon, the fourth Duke,
about 1855, and at a still greater cost replaced internally
with an interminable series of salons in the Italian style.
Externally, the castle is a mediaeval fortress ; internally
it is an Italian palace. These works cost over £300,000,
and serve to show the measure of ducal folly. Make a
man a duke and give him an income commensurate, and
he goes mad and builds and rebuilds, burying himself in
masonry like a maggot in a cheese. But it is good
for trade ; and perhaps that is why Providence allows
a duke to be created now and then.

This magnificence for a long time created its own
Nemesis, and the Dukes of Northumberland, in their
gigantic castle, were worse off in one respect than a
clerk in London suburbs in a six-roomed, nine-inch
walled, jerry-built " villa " at £30 a year. They could
never get a hot dinner ! The kitchen is large enough,
and the fireplace so huge that the fire cannot be made
up without shovelling on a ton of coals ; but the
dining-room is so far away, and the communication was
so bad (involving going across courtyards open to the
sky) that everything was cold before it reached table.
This has been remedied, and my lords dukes now have

184 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

their food sent to them along rails on trolleys — just as
they feed the beasts at the Zoo.

The Dukes of Northumberland are well titled.
They are autocrats in that county, owning as they do
181,616 of its acres, and drawing a rental of £161,874.
Some of them have been insufferably egotistical.
The " Brislee " Tower, built on the neighbouring
height of Brislaw by the first Duke, is evidence sufficient
to prove that. It is a monument by himself to his own
doings, and invites the pilgrim, in a long bombastical
inscription, to " Look around, behold," and marvel at
the plantations with which he caused the bare hillsides
to be covered.

But the most prominent memorial in Alnwick is the
well-named " Farmers' Folly," erected to the second
Duke in 1816. Entering or leaving the town, it is a
most striking object : a pillar 85 feet in height with
the Percy lion on its summit. What did the second
Duke do to deserve this ? Did he serve his country in
war ? Was he a statesman ? Was he benevolent to
the tenants who erected it ? Not at all. Here is the
story.

When the nineteenth century dawned we were at war
with France, and wheat and all kinds of produce were at
enormously enhanced prices. The farmers, therefore,
began to do very well. Their banking-accounts
swelled, and some of them were on the way to realise
small fortunes. The Duke saw this and sorrowed
because they found it possible to do more than exist,
and accordingly he added to their rents, doubling in
almost every instance — and in many others quadrupling
— them. But when the country entered on the long
peace that followed Waterloo, and prices fell
enormously, the unfortunate farmers found it
impossible to pay their way under these added burdens.
Mark the ducal generosity ! As they could not pay, he
reduced the rents by twenty-five per cent. ! Like a
draper at his annual sale, he effected a " great
reduction," an " alarming sacrifice," by taking off a
percentage of what he had already imposed. How

186 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

noble ! Then the tenants, the grateful fellows,
subscribed to build the column, which is inscribed : —
" To Hugh, Duke of Northumberland, by a grateful and
united tenantry." Having done this, they went into
bankruptcy and the workhouse, or emigrated, or just
gave up their farms because they could not carry on
any longer. The money they had subscribed did not
suffice to complete this testimonial to Duke Hugh's
benevolence, and so — a comic opera touch — he
subscribed the rest, and finished it himself. What
humorists these Smithsons are !

XXVIII

THE road, leaving Alnwick, plunges down from the
castle barbican to the black hollow in which the Aln
flows, overhung with interlacing and overarching trees.
The river is crossed here by that bridge showrn in
Turner's picture, the " Lion Bridge " as it is called,
from the Percy lion, " with tail stretched out as straight
as a broom-handle," standing on the parapet and
looking with steadfast gaze to the North. It is an
addition since Turner's picture was painted, and an
effective one, too. Also, since that time, the trees have
encroached and enshrouded the scene most completely ;
so that the only satisfactory view is that looking
backwards when one has emerged from the black dell.
And a most satisfactory view it is, with the i's and t's of
romance dotted and crossed so emphatically that it
looks like some theatrical scene, or the optically
realised home of the wicked hero of one of Grimm's
fairy tales. If this were not the beginning of the
twentieth century, one might well think twice before
venturing down into the inky depths of that over-
shaded road ; but these are matter-of-fact times, and
we know well that only the humdrum burgesses of
Alnwick, in their shops, are beyond ; with, instead
of a mediaeval duke in the castle, who would think

THE BLEAK NORTH 187

nothing of hanging a stray wayfarer or so from his
battlements, only a very modern peer.

The road onwards is a weariness and an infliction to
the cyclist, for it goes on in a heavy three miles'
continuous rise up to the summit of Heiferlaw Bank,
whence there is a wide and windy view of uncomfortable
looking moorlands to the north, with the craggy
Cheviots, perhaps covered with snow, to the north-west.
As a literary lady — Mrs. Montagu — wrote in 1789, when
on a northern journey, " These moors are not totally
uninhabited, but they look unblest." How true !

The proper antidote to this is the looking back to
where, deep down in the vale of Aln, lie town and
castle, perhaps lapt in infrequent sunshine, more
probably seen through rain, but, in any case, presenting
a picture of sheltered content, and seeming to be
protected from the rude buffets of the weather by the
hill on which we are progressing and b)^ the wooded
flanks of Brislaw on the other side. " Seeming,"
because those who know Alnwick well could tell a
different tale of wintry blasts and inclement seasons
that belie the hint of this hillside prospect for three
whole quarters round the calendar and a good pro-
portion of the fourth. In this lies a suggestion of why
the Percies were so warlike. They and their northern
foes fought to keep themselves warm ! Nowadays such
courses would lead to the police-court, and so football
has become a highly-popular game in these latitudes.
But the southward glimpse of Alnwick and its
surroundings from the long rise of Heiferlaw Bank is,
when sunshine prevails, of a quite incommunicable
charm. The background of hills, covered with
Duke Hugh's woods and crowned with his tower, recalls
in its rich masses of verdure the landscapes of De Wint,
and if in the Duke's inscription on that tower he seems
to rank himself in fellowship with the Creator, certainly,
now he has been dead and gone these hundred and
twenty years, his saplings, grown into forest trees and
clothing the formerly barren hillsides, have effected a
wonderful change.

188

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Beside the road are the few remaining stones of
St. Leonard's Chapel, and, a short distance beyond, on
the right, in a grove of trees, Malcolm's Cross, marking
the spot where Malcolm Caenmore, king of Scotland,

MALCOLM'S CROSS.

was slain in 1093. It replaces a more ancient cross,
and was erected by the first Duchess of Northumberland
in 1774. It was on his seventh foray into Northumber-
land, besieging Alnwick Castle, that Malcolm was
killed, in an ambush carefully prepared for him. The
legend, which tells how he was treacherously slain by a

THE NORTHUMBRIAN COAST 189

thrust of a spear in the eye by one of the Percies, who
was pretending to deliver up the castle keys on the
spear's point, is untrue, as of course is the popular
derivation of the family name from " pierce eye."
Moreover, the Percies, as we have seen, did not own
Alnwick until more than two hundred years afterwards.
Heiferlaw, as befits so commanding a hill-top so close
to the Border, has its watch-tower, looking across the
marches, whence the outlying defenders of Alnwick,
ever watchful against Scottish raids, could give timely
warning to the garrison. It stands to-day a picturesque
ruin, in cultivated fields that in those fierce old times,
when men had no leisure for peaceful arts and industries,
formed a portion of the wild moorland. " Blaw-
weary," they call one of these fields, and the title is as
descriptive of this exposed situation as anything in the
whole range of nomenclature. Beyond this point the
road descends to a level stretch of country leading to
North Charlton, where a few farmsteads alone stand for
a village, together with a prominent hillock covered
Avith trees and looking as though it had, or ought to
have, a story to it ; a story which research fails to
unearth. Opposite, meadows called locally " Comby
Fields," presumably from a series of ridges seen in them,
seem to point to some forgotten history. Brownyside,
adjoining, is an expanse of moorland, covered with
bracken, followed by Warenford, a pretty hamlet
in a hollow by a tiny stream, with Twizel Park on the
left. At Belford, a large wide-streeted village with a
nowadays all too roomy coaching inn, the " Blue Bell,"
and an old cross with gas-lamps fitted to it by some
vandal or other, the road draws near the coast ; that
storied Northumbrian sea-shore where Bambrough
Castle on its islanded rock, many miles of yellow
quicksands, and the Fame and Holy Islands are
threaded out in succession before the gaze. Bambrough,
the apex of its pyramidical form, just glimpsed above
an intervening headland, looks in the distance like
another St. Michael's Mount, and Holy Island, ahead,
is a miniature fellow to it. The ruined cathedral of

190 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Holy Island, the ancient Lindisfarne, the spot whence
the missionary Aidan from lona began the conversion of
Northumbria in 634, and where he was succeeded by
that most famous of all northern bishops and saints, the
woman-hating St. Cuthbert, is the mother-church of the
north, and became possessed in later times of great
areas of land through which the road now passes.
Buckton, Goswick, Swinhoe, Fenwick, Cheswick, were
all " possessions " of the monastery ; and the old
ecclesiastical parish of Holy Island, once including all
these places on the mainland, and constituting then
an outlying wedge of Durham in the county of
Northumberland, although now a thing of the past,
still goes by the local name of Islandshire. Buckton,
now a few scattered cottages by the roadside, held
a place in the old rhyme which incidentally shows that
the monks of Lindisfarne adopted that comforting
doctrine :

Who lives a good life is sure to live well.

Their farms and granges yielded them all that the
appreciative stomachs of these religious recluses could
desire, save indeed when the Scots swooped over the
Tweed and took their produce away. It is a rhyme of
good living : —

From Goswick we've geese, from Cheswick we've cheese ;

From Buckton we've venison in store ;
From Swinhoe we've bacon, but the Scots it have taken,

And the Prior is longing for more.

The yellow sands that occupy the levels and reach
out at low tide to Holy Island are treacherous. With
the exquisite colouring of sea and sky on a summer day
blending with them, they look at this distance like the
shores of fairyland ; but the grim little churchyard of
Holy Island has many memorials presenting another
picture — a picture of winter storm and shipwreck, for
which this wild coast has ever been memorable.
Off Bambrough, where the Fame Islands are scattered
in the sea, the scene is still recalled of the wreck of the
Forfarshire and Grace Darling's heroism ; and the

GRIZEL COCHRANE 191

monument of that famous girl stands in Bambrough
churchyard to render the summer pilgrim mindful of
the danger of this coast. Dangerous not only to those
on the waters, but also to travellers who formerly took
the short cut from Berwick across the sands, instead of
going by the hilly road. The way, clearly marked in
daylight by a line of poles, has often been mistaken at
night ; sudden storms, arising when travellers have
reached midway, have swept them out to sea ; or fogs
have entangled the footsteps even of those who knew
the uncharted flats best. Whatever the cause, to be
lost here was death. The classic instance, still narrated,
is that of the postboy carrying the mails from
Edinburgh on the 20th of November, 1725. Neither he
nor the mail-bags was ever heard of again after leaving
Berwick, and it was naturally concluded that he was
lost on the quicksands in a sea-fog.

Away on the west of the road rise the Kyloe hills,
like ramparts, and on their tallest ridge the church
tower of Kyloe, conspicuous for long distances, and
greatly appreciated by sailors as a landmark. The
village is not perhaps famous, but certainly notable
for a former vicar, who apparently aspired to writing a
personal history of his parish as well as keeping
a merely formal set of registers. Scattered through
his official records are some very curious notes, among
them : " 1696. Buried, Dec. 7, Henry, the son of
Henry Watson of Fenwick, who lived to the age
of 36 years, and was so great a fool that he could
never put on his own close, nor never went a J mile
off ye house in all this space."

The road at this point was the scene of Grizel
Cochrane's famous exploit, in 1685, when at night-fall,
disguised as a man, and mounted on horseback,
she waylaid the mail rider, and, holding a pistol to
his head, robbed him of the warrant he was carrying
for the execution of her father, Sir John Cochrane,
taken in rebellion against James the Second. By this
means she obtained a fortnight's respite, a delay
which was used by his friends to secure his pardon.

192

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Grizel Cochrane has, of course, been ever since the
heroine of Border song. A clump of trees on a hillock,
surrounded by a wall, to the right of the road, long bore
the name of " Grizzy's Clump," but it has recently been
felled and so much of the landmark destroyed. The
country folk, possessed of the most invincible ignorance

BAMBROUGH CASTLE.

of the subject, know the place only as " Bambrough
Hill," a title they have given it because from the
summit an excellent view of Bambrough Castle is
gained.

The plantations of Haggertson Castle now begin to
cover the land sloping down toward the sea, and, after
passing a deserted building on the left, once a coaching
inn, the park surrounding the odd-looking modern
castellated residence is reached. Here, by the entrance
to the house, the road goes off at an acute angle to the
left, and, continuing thus for a quarter of a mile,
turns as sharply to the right. An old manorial pigeon-
house, still with a vane bearing the initials C.L.H.,
stands by the way, and bears witness to the ownership

THE SQUIRES 193

of the estate in other times by the old Haggerston
family. It was to Sir Carnaby Haggerston that those
initials belonged, the late eighteenth-century squire
who destroyed the old Border tower of Haggerston
Castle, and built a new mansion in its stead, just as so
many of his contemporaries did.

Sir Carnaby Haggerston does not appear — apart
from this vandal act of his — to have been an especially
Wicked Squire, although his devastating name launched
him upon the world ear-marked for commission of all
the crimes practised by the libertine landowners who
made so brave a show in a certain class of literature and
melodrama once popular. His name strikes the ear
even more dramatically than that of Sir Rupert
Murgatroyd, the accursed Baronet of Ruddigore in
Mr. W. S. Gilbert's comic opera, but he never lived up
to its possibilities. The only things he seems to have
had in common with the typical squire of old seem to
have been a love of port and whist, and a passion for
building houses too large for his needs or means.

The Wicked Squire who unwillingly sat to the
novelists who used to write in the pages of Reynolds'1
Miscellany and journals of that stamp fifty years ago,
as the high-born villain of their gory romances, may be
regretted, because without him the pages of the penny
novelist are become extremely tame ; but his dis-
appearance need not be mourned for any other reasons.

It is to him we owe the many supposedly " classical "
mansions that, huge and shapeless, like so many
factories, reformatories, or workhouses, affront the
green sward, the beautiful gardens, and the noble trees
of many English parks. To build vast mansions of
this " palatial " character, the squires often pulled
down middle-Tudor or Elizabethan, or even earlier
manor-houses of exquisite beauty, vying with one
another in the size and extravagance of the new
buildings, whose original cost and subsequent main-
tenance have during the past hundred and fifty years
kept many county families in straitened circumstances,
and do so still. There was a squire who pulled down a

194 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

whole series of mediaeval wayside crosses in his district,
and used the materials as building-stones toward the
great mansion he was erecting for the purpose of
outshining a neighbour. Those transcendent squires,
the noblemen of old, had larger opportunities and made
the worst use of them. The Duke of Buckingham,
for example, bought a property, demolished the
Elizabethan hall that stood on it, and built Stowe there
in its place ; a building of vast range and classic
elevation with colonnades and porticoes, and " windows
that exclude the light and lead to nothing," as some one
has very happily remarked. Sir Francis Dashwood,
that hero of the Hell Fire Club, pulled down West
Wycombe church and built the existing building, that
looks like a Lancashire cotton-mill, and every one built
houses a great deal larger than were wanted or they
could afford ; which, like the Earl of Leicester's seat at
Holkham were so little like homes that they could
neither live in their stately apartments nor sleep in
their vast bedrooms. Like the Earl and Countess of
Leicester, who were compelled for comfort's sake to
sleep in one of the servants' bedrooms in the attics,
they lived as settlers in corners of their cavernous
and uncomfortable palaces.

Pity the poor descendant of the Squires ! He
cannot afford in these days to keep up his huge house ;
to pull it down would in itself cost a fortune ; and its
very size frightens the clients of the house-agent in
whose hands he has had it for letting, these years past.
All over England this is seen, and the old Yorkshire
tale would stand true of any other county and of many
other county magnates of that time. The Marquis of
Rockingham, according to that story, built a mansion
at Wentworth big enough for the Prince of Wales ;
Sir Rowland Winn built one at Nostel Priory fit for the
Marquis of Rockingham ; and Mr. Wrightson of
Cusworth built a house fit for Sir Rowland Winn.
No doubt the farmers carried on the tale of extrava-
gance down to their stratum of society, and so ad
infinitum.

HAGGERSTON 195

But to return to Haggerston Castle, which now
belongs to the Leylands. Conspicuous for some
distance is the tower built of recent years to at one
and the same time resemble a mediaeval keep and to
serve a practical purpose as a water-tower, engine-
room, and look-out. The place, however, is remarkable
for quite other things than its mock castle, for in the
beautiful park are kept in pens, or roaming about
freely, herds of foreign animals which make of it a
miniature Zoological Gardens. It is, in a sense,
superior indeed to that well-known place, for if the
collections do not cover so wide a range, the animals
are in a state of nature. Emus, Indian cattle,
kangaroos, and many varieties of wild buck roam
this " paradise," together with a thriving herd of
American bison. The bison is almost extinct, even
in his native country, but here he flourishes exceedingly
and perpetuates his kind. A bison bull is a startling
object, come upon unawares, and looks like the
production of a lunatic artist chosen to illustrate, say,
the Jabberwock in Alice in Wonderland. He is all out
of drawing, with huge shaggy forelegs, and head and
shoulders a size too large for the rest of his body ;
an eye like a live coal, tufted coat, like a worn-out
door-mat, and uncomfortable-looking horns : the
kind of creature that inhabits Nightmare Country,
popularly supposed to be bred of indigestion and
lobster mayonnaise.

XXIX

BEYOND Haggerston, and up along the rising road
that leads for six of the seven miles to Berwick, the
journey is unexpectedly commonplace. The road has
by this time turned away from the sea, and when it
has led us through an entirely charming tunnel-like
avenue of dwarf oaks, ceases to be interesting.
Always upwards, it passes collieries, the " Cat " inn,
and the hamlet of Richardson's Stead or Scremerston,

196 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

whence, arrived at the summit of Scremerston Hill,
the way down into Tweedmouth and across the Tweed
into Berwick is clear.

Tweedmouth sits upon the hither shore of Tweed,
clad in grime and clinkers. Like a mudlark dabbling
in the water but not cleansing himself in it, Tweed-
mouth seems to acquire no inconsiderable portion of
its dirt from its foreshore. Engineering works and
coal-shoots are responsible for the rest. Little or
nothing of antiquity enlivens its mean street that leads
down to the old bridge and so across the Tweed into
Scotland. The roofs of Berwick, clustered close
together and scaling one over the other as the town
ascends the opposite shore of the river, are seen, with
the spired Town Hall dominating all at the further
end of the long, narrow, hump-backed old structure,
and away to the left that fine viaduct of the North
Eastern Railway, the Royal Border Bridge. But the
finest view, and the most educational in local topo-
graphy, is that gained by exploring the southern
shore of the Tweed for half a mile in an easterly
direction. An unlovely waterside road, it is true, a
maze of railway arches spanning it, and shabby
houses hiding all but the merest glimpses of Tweed-
mouth church and its gilded salmon vane, referring
to the salmon-fishery of the Tweed, but leading to a
point of view whence the outlook to the north-west
is really grand. There, across the broad estuary of
the Tweed, lies Berwick, behind its quays and its
enclosing defences. Across the river, in the middle
distance, goes Berwick Bridge, its massive piers and
arches looking as though carved out of the rock,
rather than built up of single stones. Beyond it, in
majestic array, go the tall arches of the Royal Border
Bridge, and, in the background, are the Scottish hills.
Tweedmouth, its timber jetty, its docks, and church
spire, and its waterside lumber are in the forefront.
This, then, is the situation of Berwick, for centuries
the best-picked bone of contention between the rival
countries of England and Scotland ; the Border

198 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

cockpit, geographically in the northern kingdom, but
wrested from it by the masterful English seven hundred
and fifty years ago, and taken and re-taken by or from
stubborn Scots on a round dozen of occasions after-
wards. Sieges, assaults, stormings, massacres under
every condition of atrocity ; these are the merest
commonplaces of Berwick's story, until the mid-
sixteenth century ; and the historian who would write
of its more unusual aspects must needs turn attention
to the rare and short-lived interludes of peace.

It was in 1550, during the short reign of Edward
the Sixth, that the existing fortifications enclosing the
town were begun, whose river-fronting walls are so
conspicuous from Tweedmouth. The old bridge, built
by James the First, was the first peaceful enterprise
between the two kingdoms, for, although Berwick had
for over a century been recognised as a neutral or
" buffer " state, peace went armed for fear of accidents,
and easy communication across the Tweed was not
encouraged. There is food for reflection in comparison
between that bridge and the infinitely greater work of
the railway viaduct. The first, 1,164 feet in length,
with only 17 feet breadth between the parapets,
bridging the river with fifteen arches, cost £17,000,
and took twenty-four years to build ; the railway
bridge of twenty-eight giant arches, each of 61 i feet
span, and straddling the Tweed at a height of 129 feet,
was built in three years, at a cost of £120,000. The
" Royal Border Bridge," as it was christened at its
opening by the Queen, has precisely the appearance
of a Roman aqueduct and belongs to the Stone and
Brick Age of railways. Were it to do over again,
there can be no doubt that, instead of a long array of
graceful arches, half a dozen lengths of steel lattice
girders would span the tide. It was at a huge cost
that England and Scotland were thus joined by rail ;
bridge and approaches swallowing up the sum of
£253,000. The first passenger train crossed over,
October 15, 1848, but the works were not finally
completed until 1850. In the August of that year the

BERWICK 199

Queen formally opened it, nearly two years after it was
actually opened ; a fine object-lesson for satirists.
How we laugh at ceremonials less absurd than this
when they take place in China and Japan.

Berwick town is seen, on entering its streets, to
be unexpectedly modern and matter-of-fact. The
classically steepled building that bulks commandingly
in the main thoroughfare and looks like a church is the
Town Hall, and displays the arms of Berwick pro-
minently, the municipal escutcheon supported on either
side by a sculptured bear sitting on his rump and
surrounded by trees. It is thus that one of the
disputed derivations of Berwick's name is alluded to.
At few towns has the origin of a place-name been so
contested as at Berwick ; and, for all the pother about
it, the question is still, and must remain, unanswered.
It might as reasonably have come from aberwic, the
mouth of a river, as from bergwic, the hillside village,
and much more reasonably than from the fanciful
"bar" prefix alluding to the bareness of the country ;
while of course the legend that gives the lie to that last
variant, and seeks an origin in imaginary bears
populating mythical woods, is merely infantile.

The church-like Town Hall, which is also a market-
house and the town gaol, does indeed perform one of
the functions of a church, for the ugly Puritan parish
church of the town has no tower, and so the steeple of
the Town Hall rings for it.

In the broad High Street running northward from
this commanding building are all the prominent inns
of the town, to and from which the coaches came
and went until the opening of the Edinburgh and
Berwick Railway in 1846. Some of the short stages
appear to have been misery-boxes, according to Dean
Ramsay, who used to tell an amusing anecdote of
one of them. On one occasion a fellow-traveller at
Berwick complained of the rivulets of rain-water
falling down his neck from the cracked roof. He
drew the coachman's attention to it on the first
opportunity, but all the answer he got was the matter-

200 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

of-fact remark, " Ay, mony a ane has complained
o' that hole."

The mail-coaches leaving Berwick on their journey
north were allowed to take an extra — a fourth — outside
passenger. Mail-coaches running in England were,
until 1834, strictly limited to four inside and three
outside. Of these last, one sat on the box, beside the
coachman, while the other two were seated immediately
behind, on the fore part of the roof, with their backs
to the guard. This was a rule originally very strictly
enforced, and had its origin in the fear that, if more
were allowed, it would be an easy matter for
desperadoes to occupy the seats as passengers and to
suddenly overpower both coachman and guard. The
guard in his solitary perch at the back, with his sword-
case and blunderbuss ready to hand, could have shot
or slashed at those in front, on his observing any
suspicious movement, and it is somewhat surprising
that no nervous guard ever did wound some innocent
passenger who may have turned round to ask him a
question. The concession of an extra seat on the
outside of coaches entering Scotland was granted to
the mail-contractors in view of the more widely
scattered population of Scotland, and of the com-
parative scarcity of chance passengers on the way.

But there is very great uncertainty as to the number
of passengers allowed on the mails in later years.
Moses Nobbs, one of the last of the old mail-guards,
states that no fewer than eight passengers were
allowed outside at the end of the coaching age.
Doubtless this was owing both to the complaints of
the contractors that with the smaller complement they
could not make the business pay, and to the growing
security of the roads.

Royal proclamations used, until recent times, to
specifically mention " our town of Berwick-upon-
Tweed " when promulgating decrees, for as by treaty
an independent State, neither in England nor Scotland,
laws and ordinances affecting Great Britain and
Ireland could not legally be said to have been extended

THE RAMPARTS 201

to Berwick without the especial mention of " our
town." A state whose boundaries north and south
were Lamberton Toll and the Tweed, a distance of
not more than four miles, with a corresponding extent
from east to west, it was thus on a par with many a
petty German principality. Nearly three-quarters of
the land comprised within " Berwick Bounds " is the
property of the Corporation, having been granted by
James the First when, overjoyed at his good fortune
in succeeding to the English crown and thus uniting
those of the two countries, he entered upon his heritage.
Lucky Berwick ! Its freehold property brings in a
revenue of £18,000 a year, in relief of rates.

If the streets of Berwick are disappointing in so
historic a place, then let the pilgrim make the circuit
of the town on the ramparts. These, at least, tell of
martial times, as also do the fragmentary towers of the
old castle, the few poor relics left of that stronghold
by the modern railway station overhanging a deep cleft.
Then, away in advance of the ramparts, still thrusting
its tubby, telescopic, three-storied form forward, is the
old Bell Tower, where, in this advanced post, the
vigilant garrison kept eyes upon the north, whence
sudden Scottish raids might be developed at any time.

Grass covers the ramparts and sprouts in tufts upon
the gun-platforms contrived in early Victorian days
upon them, and almost every variety of obsolete cannon,
short of the demi-culverins with which Drake searched
the Spanish Main, go to make up what — Heaven
help them and us ! — War Office officials call batteries.
Guns bristle thickly upon the waterside batteries
overlooking the harbour, but not one of them is
modern. All are muzzle-loading pieces, fit for an
artillerist's museum, and their carriages — where they
are mounted at all — are in bewildering variety,
principally, however, of rotting wood. The most
recent piece, an Armstrong gun not less than fifty
years old, lies derelict in the long grass, and children
amuse themselves by filling its hungry-looking maw
with clods. Pot-bellied like all the_old Armstrongs,

202 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

it has a look as though it had grown fat and lazy with
that diet and lain down in the long grass to sleep.
Perhaps to guard its slumbers, a War Office notice
beside the prostrate gun vainly forbids trespassing !

Down in a ditch of the fortifications a soldier in his
shirt sleeves, his braces dangling about his legs, is
tending early peas with all the tenderness of a mother
for an invalid child ; for, look you, early peas in these
latitudes have a hard fight for it ; and the fight of those
vegetables for existence against the nipping blasts that
sweep from off the North Sea is the only sign of warfare
the place has to show. Taken as a whole, and looked at
whichever way you will, the " defences " of Berwick-
upon-Tweed show a trustfulness in Providence and in
the astounding luck of the British Empire which argues
much for the piety or the folly of our rulers. And so,
with the varied reflections these things call forth, let us
away up the High Street, and, passing under the
archway of the Scotch Gate, spanning its northern
extremity, leave Berwick on the way to Scotland.

XXX

" SEEING Scotland, Madam," said Dr. Johnson, in
answer to Mrs. Thrale's expressed wish to visit that
country, " is only seeing a worse England. It is
seeing the flower gradually fade away to the naked
stalk." This bitter saying of the Doctor's comes
vividly to mind when leaving Berwick on the way to
Edinburgh. Passing the outskirts of the town at a
point marked on the Ordnance map with the
unexplained name of " Conundrum," the country
grows bare and treeless on approaching the sea, and
at Lamberton Toll, three miles north, where " Berwick
Bounds " are reached and Scotland entered, the scene
is desolate in the extreme. The cottage to the left of
the road at this point, formerly the toll-house of the
turnpike-gate that stood here, is a famous place,

SCOTS LAW

203

rivalling Gretna Green for the runaway matches,
legalised at the gate until 1856, when changes in the
law rendered a part of the once-familiar notice in the
window out-of-date. It ran, " Ginger-beer sold here,
and marriages performed on the most reasonable
terms " ; an announcement which for combination of
the trivial and the tremendous it would be difficult
to beat.

Geographically in Scotland when across the Tweed,
we are not politically in that country until past this

LAMBERTOX TOLL.

cottage. Then indeed we are, in many ways, in a
foreign country.

Scots law is a fearful and wonderful variant from
English. Even its terminology is strange to the English
ear, which finds — hey, presto ! — on passing Berwick
Bounds, a barrister changed into an " advocate,"
a solicitor converted into a " Writer to the Signet,"
and a prosecutor masquerading under the thrilling and
descriptive alias of " pursuer." It was the laxity of
Scots law that made, not only Gretna Green, but any
other place over the Border from England, a resort
of those about to marry and impatient of constraints,
legal or family, at any period between 1753 and 1856.
Gretna Green and its neighbour, Springfield, in especial,
and in no small degree Lamberton Toll, were the scenes
of much hasty marrying during that space of time.
Marrying, bien entendu, and not giving in marriage, for

204

these were runaway matches, and those whose position
it was to give, and who withheld their consent,
generally came posting up to the toll-gate in pursuit
just in time to hear the last words of the simple but
effective ritual of the toll-keeper who had witnessed the
declaration of the truants that, " This is my wife," and
" This is my husband," a simple form of words which,
uttered in the presence of a witness, was all that the
beneficent legal system of Scotland required as marriage
ceremony. This form completed, and for satisfaction's
sake a rough register subscribed, the indignant parent,
who possibly had been battering on the outside of the
door, was admitted and introduced to his son-in-law.

It was a century of licence (not marriage licence), that
prevailed on the Border from the passing of Lord
Hardwicke's Clandestine Marriage Act in 1753 until
that of Lord Brougham in 1856, which put a stop to
this " over the Border " marrying by rendering
unions illegal on the part of those not domiciled in
Scotland, which had not been preceded by a residence
in that kingdom of not less than twenty-one days by
one or other of the contracting parties.

There was no special virtue in the first place across
the Border-line at any point, nor did it matter who
" officiated," the person who " performed the cere-
mony " being only a witness and in no sense a
clergyman ; but it was obviously, with these legal
facilities, the prime object of runaway couples pressed
for time, and with hurrying parents and guardians
after them, to seize their opportunity at the first place,
and at the hands of the first person in that liberal
minded land. Not that the Kirk looked benevolently
upon this. It fined them, for discipline's sake, and the
happy couples cheerfully paid, for by doing so they
acquired the last touch of validity, which, on the face
of it, could not be called into dispute.

One of this long line of Hymen's secular priesthood
at Lamberton Toll had, early in the nineteenth century,
an unhappy time of it, owing to an error of judgment
and an ignorance of the law scarcely credible. Joseph

HALIDON HILL 207

Atkinson, the toll-keeper, was away one day at
Berwick when a runaway pair arrived at the gate.
His wife, or another, sent them after him, and in
Berwick the ceremony, such as it was, was performed.
Now Berwick is a county of itself, and the inhabitants
boast, or used to, that their town belongs to neither
England nor Scotland. It is hinted (by those who do
not belong to Berwick) that it belongs instead to the
devil, which possibly is a reminiscence of the townsfolk's
smuggling days, on the part of those who duly render
unto Caesar. This by the • way. Unhappily for
Mr. Joseph Atkinson, Berwick owes allegiance to
English law, as he found when his ceremony was
declared null and void, and he was duly sentenced to
seven years transportation for having contravened the
Marriage Act of 1753.

Halidon Hill, where the English avenged Bannock-
burn upon the Scots in 1333, is on the crest of the
upland to the west of Lamberton Toll. Now the road
runs upon the edge of the black cliffs that plunge down
into the North Sea, commanding bold views of a stern
and iron-bound coast. Horses, coachmen, guards, and
passengers alike quailed before the storms that swept
these exposed miles, and even the highwaymen sought
other and more sheltered spots. Macready, on tour
in the north, was snowed up here, in the severe winter
of 1813-14. Coming south through the deep and still
falling snow, he travelled in a cutting made in the drifts
for miles between Ross Inn and Berwick-on-Tweed.
" We did not reach Newcastle," he says, " until nearly
two hours after midnight : and fortunate was it for the
theatre and ourselves that we had not delayed our
journey, for the next day the mails were stopped ; nor
for more than six weeks was there any conveyance by
carriage between Edinburgh and Newcastle. After
some weeks, a passage was cut through the snow for
the guards to carry the mails on horseback, but for a
length of time the communications every way were very
irregular."

Where the little Flemington Inn stands solitary at

208 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

a fork of the road, close by a tremendous gap in the
cliffs, is placed Burnmouth station, on the main
line, wedged in a scanty foothold, hundreds of feet
above the sea. Day or night it is a picturesque place,
but more especially in the afterglow of sunset, when the
inky blackness of the rift in the cliffs can still be set off
against the gleam of the sea, caught in a notch of the
rocks, and when the lighted signal-lamps of the little
junction glow redly against the sky on their tall masts,
like demon eyes. A fishlike, if not an ancient, smell
lingers here, for Burnmouth station is constantly in
receipt of the catches made down below by the hardy
fishers of the three hamlets of Burnmouth, Partinghal,
and Ross, queer fishing villages of white- washed stone
cottages that line the rocky shore unsuspected by
ninety-nine among every hundred travellers along the
road above. Herrings caught in the North Sea are
cured here, packed in barrels, and sent by rail to
distant markets.

Ayton, two miles onward, away from the sea, is
entered in perplexing fashion, downhill and by a sharp
turn to the right over a bridge spanning the Eye Water,
instead of continuing straight ahead along a road that
makes spacious pretence of being the proper way.
Ayton itself, beyond being a large village, with a modern
castellated residence in the Scottish baronial style and
vivid red sandstone at its entrance, is not remarkable.

Leaving Ayton, the road enters a secluded valley
whose solitudes of woodland, water, and meadows
are not imperilled, but only intensified, by the railway,
which goes unobtrusively within hail of this old
coaching highway. On the right rise the gently
swelling sides of a range of hills sloping upwards
from the very margin of the road and covered with
woods of dwarf oak, through whose branches the
sunlight filters and lies on the ferns below in twinkling
patches of gold. Here stood the old Houndwood Inn,
and the building yet remains, converted — good wrord in
such a connection — into a manse for the Free Church
near by, itself a building calculated to make angels

GRANT'S HOUSE 209

weep ; if angels have appreciations in architecture.
Another, and a humbler, building carries on the
licensed victualling trade, and calls itself, prettily
enough, the " Greenwood Inn." It is, in fact, a stretch
of country that makes for inspiration in the rustic sort.
If there were a sign of the " Robin Hood " here we
should acclaim it romantic and appropriate, even
though tradition tells not of that mythical outlaw in
these marches. If not Robin, then some other
chivalric outlaw surely should have pervaded the glades
of Hound wood, open as they are, with never a fence,
a hedge, or a ditch to the road, just as though these
were still the fine free days of old, before barbed-wire
fences were dreamed of, or notices to trespassers set up,
threatening vague penalties to be enforced " with all
the rigour of the law," as the phrase generally runs.

It is a valley of whose delights one must needs
chatter, although with but dim hopes of communicating
much of its charm. Through it that little stream
called by the medicinally sounding name, the Eye
Water, wanders with a feminine hesitancy and
inconstancy of purpose. It flows all ways by turns
and never long in any direction, and with so many
amazing loops and doublings, that it might well
defy the precision of the Ordnance chartographers
themselves. We bid farewell to this fickle stream at
Grant's House, and scrape acquaintance with another,
the Pease Burn, flowing in another direction. For
Grant's House stands on the watershed which orders the
going of several watercourses. It is also the summit
level of this railway route to the North. Here, quite
close to the road, is Grant's House station, and here,
bordering the road itself, are the houses that form
Grant's House itself. This sounds like speaking in
paradox, but the place is a village, or rather a scattered
collection of pretty cottages that have gathered around
the one inn which was the home of the original Grant.
The place-name seems to hint of other and less-
travelled times, when these Borders were sparsely
settled and wayfarers few ; when but one house served

210 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

to take the edge off the solitude, and that an inn kept by
one Grant. The imagination, thus uninstructed,
weaves cocoons of speculation around these premises
and conceives him to have been a host of abounding
personality, thus to hand his name down to posterity,
preserved in a place-name, like a fly in amber. But all
speculations that start upon this innkeeping basis
would be incorrect, for this sponsorial Grant was the
contractor who made the road from Berwick to
Edinburgh, building a cottage for himself in this then
lonely spot, which only in later years became the
Grant's House inn.

More streams and woods beyond this point, and then
comes the long and toilsome rise up to Cockburns-
path, past Pease Burn, where the road takes a double
S curve on the hillside, and other tall hills, to right
and left and ahead, largely covered with firs and
larches, seem to look on with a gloomy anticipation
of some one, less cautious than his fellows, breaking
his neck. Where there are no hillside woods there
are grass meadows in which, if it be June or July,
the haymakers can be seen from the road, haymaking,
with attendant horses and carts, at a perilous angle.
The Pease Burn, flowing deep down in its Dene, is
spanned at a height of 127 feet, half a mile down
stream, by a four-arched bridge, built in 1786.

XXXI

SET in midst of these steep and twisting roads and
above these watery ravines is Cockburnspath Tower,
a ruined Border castle of rust-red stone that frowns
down upon the road on the edge of a tremendous
gully. It was never more than a peel-tower, but
strongly placed and solidly built, a fitting refuge for
those who took part in the ups and downs of Border
forays. In the days when Co 'path Tower (local
pronunciation) was built, every one's house was more or

THE REIVERS 211

less a defensible building. " An Englishman's house
is his castle " is a figurative expression commonly used
to prefigure the inviolate character of the law-abiding
citizen's domicile, but it might have been said literally
of dwellers in these debateable lands. The more
property he possessed, the stronger was the Border
farmer's tower. When the moss-troopers and mediaeval
scoundrels of every description were on the warpath,
or merely out on a cattle-lifting expedition, these
embattled agriculturists shut themselves up in their
safe retreats. The lower floor, on a level with the
ground, received the live stock ; the floor above, the
servants ; and to the topmost story, as the safest
situation, the family retired. The gate below was of
iron, for your Border reiver was no squeamish sort, and
would burn these domestic garrisons alive without
hesitation. Therefore in the most approved type of
fortress there was nothing inflammable. Sympathy,
however, would be wasted on those old-time cultivators,
for they all took a turn at armed cattle-lifting as
occasion offered, and found the readiest way of stocking
their farms with every requisite to be that of stealing
what they required.

For why ? Because the good old rule

Sufflceth them : the simple plan
That they should take who have the power,

And they should keep who can.

Short and sudden forays were characteristic of this kind
of life. The Border cattle-lifter came and went in the
twinkling of an eye, and drove the captured flocks and
herds away with him at a rate no merely honest drover
ever marshalled his sheep and heifers to market.
There must have been many highly desirable, but
inanimate and not easily portable, things which the
raiders were obliged to leave behind, as one of this
kidney regretted in casting a last glance at a hayrick he
had no means of lifting. " Had ye but four feet, ye
suld no stand lang there," said he, as he turned to go.
The mouldering old tower here at Cockburnspath
belonged to the Earls of Home. Beautifully situated

212 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

for preying upon occasional travellers, the glen and
the foaming torrent below have no doubt received the
bodies of many a one who in the old days was rash
enough to pass within sight of the old tower. The
comparatively modern bridge that takes a flying leap
across the ravine is the successor of an ancient one of
narrower span that still, covered with moss and ferns,
arches over the water, deep down in the hollow, and is
popularly supposed to be the oldest bridge in Scotland.
A dense tangle of red-berried rowan-trees, firs, and oaks
overhangs the gorge. Altogether a place that calls
insistently to be sketched and painted, but a place,
from the military point of view, to be wary of ; being
a position, as Cromwell in one of his despatches says,
" where one man to hinder is better than twelve to
make way." It was at the " strait pass at Coppers-
path," as he calls it, that the great general, writing
after the battle of Dunbar, found plenty to hinder.

If ever general profited more by the mistakes of the
enemy than by his own tactical ability, it was Cromwell
at this juncture. The Scots under Leslie had cooped
him up at Dunbar, and, surrounded by the enemy,
who occupied the heights and closed every defile that
led to a possible line of retreat, he must, diseased and
famishing as were his forces, have capitulated, for the
sea was at his back, and no help possible from that
direction. It was then that Leslie made his disastrous
move from the hills, and came down upon the English
in the levels of Broxburn, to the south of Dunbar town,
where Cromwell had his headquarters ; and it was then
that Cromwell, seizing the moment when the enemy,
coming down in a dense mass upon a circumscribed
space by Broxburn Glen, retrieved the situation, and,
directing a cavalry movement upon Leslie's forces,
had the supreme relief of seeing them broken up and
stamped into the earth by the furious charge of his
horsemen. The fragments of the Scottish army, routed
with a slaughter of three thousand, and ten thousand
prisoners, fled, and Cromwell's contemplated retreat
to Berwick was no longer a necessity. Indeed, the

214 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

whole of the Lowlands of Scotland now lay open before
him, and he entered Edinburgh with little opposition.

It is a distance of nine miles between the village of
Cockburnspath and Dunbar, the road going parallel
with the sea all the way. First it goes dizzily over the
profound rift of Dunglass Dene, spanned at a height
of a hundred and twenty-five feet above the rocky bed
of a mountain stream by the bold arch of the railway
viaduct and by the road bridge itself. It is a scene of
rare beauty, and the walk by the zigzagging path
among the thickets and the trees, down to where the
sea comes pounding furiously into a little cove, a
quarter of a mile below, wholly charming. Away out
to sea is the lowering bulk of the Bass Rock, a constant
companion in the view approaching Dunbar.

The direct road for Edinburgh avoids Dunbar
altogether, forking to the left at Broxburn where
the battlefield lay, where the burn still flows across
the road as it did on the day of " Dunbar Drove," as
Carlyle calls that dreadful rout. Here "the great
road then as now crosses the Burn of Brock. . . .
Yes, my travelling friends, vehiculating in gigs or
otherwise over that piece of London road, you may
say to yourselves, Here, without monument, is the
grave of a valiant thing which was done under the
Sun ; the footprint of a Hero, not yet quite undis-
tinguishable, is here ! "

Ahead, with its great red church on a hillock, still
somewhat apart of the south end of the town, is Dunbar,
the first characteristically Scottish place to which we
come. It is not possible to compete with Carlyle's
masterly word-picture of it, which presents the place
before you with so marvellous a fidelity to its spirit and
appearance : — " The small town of Dunbar stands high
and windy, looking down over its herring-boats, over
its grim old castle, now much honeycombed, on one of
those projecting rock-promontories with which that
shore of the Firth of Forth is niched and vandyked as
far as the eye can reach. A beautiful sea ; good land
too, now that the plougher understands his trade ;

DUNBAR

215

a grim niched barrier of whinstone sheltering it from the
chafings and tumblings of the big blue German Ocean."
There you have Dunbar.

Let us add some few details to the master's fine
broad handling ; such as the fact that its streets are

THE TOLBOOTH, DUNBAR.

wondrously cobble-stoned, that those whinsfeoneTrocks
are red and give a dull, blood-like coloration to the
scene, and that the curious old whitewashed Tolbooth
in the High Street is the fullest exemplar of the
Scottish architectural style. Windy it is, as Carlyle

216 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

says, and with a rawness in its air that calls forth
shivers from the Southron even in midsummer.
Here the stranger new to Scotland is apt to see for the
first time the sturdy fishwives and lasses who, still often
with bare feet, go along the streets carrying prodigiously
weighty baskets of fish on their backs, sometimes
secured by a leather strap that goes from the basket
around the head and forehead !

One leaves Dunbar by wriggly and exiguous streets,
coming through the fisher villages of Belhaven and
West Barns to where the main avoiding route rejoins at
Beltonford. The Scottish Tyne winds through the
flat meadows on the right — at such fortunate times,
that is to say, as when it does not pretend to be an
inland sea and take the meadows, the road, and the
railway for its province. The road, too, is flat, and the
railway, which hugs it closely, the same. A good road,
too, and beautiful. Midway of it, towards East Linton,
are the farmsteads and ricks of Phantassie, at which
spot Rennie, the engineer who built London Bridge, and
heaven and Dr. Smiles alone know how many harbours,
was born in 1761. " Phantassie " is a name that sorely
piques one's curiosity, so odd is it ; but the group of
farm-buildings is commonplace enough, if more than
commonly substantial. No fantasy in their design,
at any rate.

At East Linton we cross the Tyne which, crawling
through the meadows, plunges here in cascades under
the road bridge, amid confused rocks. The railway
crosses it too, close by, and spans the road beyond ;
and the village huddles together at an angle of the way.
A long ascent out of it commands wide views of
agricultural Haddingtonshire, and of that surprising
mountainous hill, Traprain Law, rising out of the plain
to a height of over seven hundred feet.

Not merely a surprising hill, but one with an
astonishing story. It had always been thought that
treasure was buried there, among the traces of ancient
buildings ; and accordingly, with the the permission of
Right Honourable A. J. Balfour, on whose land the

TRAPRAIN LAW 217

hill is situated, excavations were begun in 1919.
It was found that the hill-to,) had been inhabited
intermittently over remote periods, and diggings were
made into successive strata of hearths and floorings.
At first the " finds " were of minor articles : bronze
ornaments, glass and pottery, fragments of iron, mostly
of Celtic origin, but some Roman. The great discovery
was made on May 12th, 1919, when a workman, driving
a pick through a floor, brought up a silver bowl on the
point of it. A deep recess was then discovered, filled
with treasure : bowls, spoons, cups, saucers, and a
miscellaneous collection of plate, mostly cut to pieces
in strips folded over and hammered down into packets
of silver. Although it was grievous to look upon that
destruction, a good many of the fragments retained their
original decoration. They appear to be partly of
Romano-Christian origin, for the sacred symbol occurs
among them, and on one piece is the inscription
" Jesus Christus." Other pieces are almost as certainly
pagan, bearing as they do figures of Pan and Hercules.
Among them were four coins : the earliest of the
Emperor Valerius, whose reign began A.D. 364, and the
latest of Honorius, who died A.D. 463. A metal belt of
Saxon character was among this treasure-trove.

It appeared, therefore, that this hoard was a relic of
one of the sea-rovers' raids on this coast in the fifth or
sixth century, and that the spoils had in some cases
come from plundered religious houses. The raiders
were perhaps disturbed in their activities, and buried
their loot in the expectation of returning for it at some
more suitable time.

But they never returned. What happened to them is
a vain conjecture. They may have been found here and
slain by some stronger force, and perhaps they were
lost at sea. In any case, their hoard lay here for close
upon one thousand five hundred years. What they
had hoped to carry away is now an exhibit in the
Scottish National Museum at Edinburgh.

To the north-going cyclist the road presently makes
ample amends for the mile-long rise, for, once topping it,

218 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

a gentle but continuous descent of four miles leads into
Haddington, down a road that for the most part could
scarce be bettered, so excellent its surface, so straight
its course, and so beautifully sylvan its surroundings.
Hailes Castle is finely seen on the left during this
descent, its ruined walls and ivy-covered towers
wrapped three parts round with the thick woodlands
that clothe the lower slopes of Traprain Law. Mary,
Queen of Scots, and her evil spirit, the sinister Both well,
had Hailes Castle for their bower of love, and Wishart
the martyr had a cell in it for a prison, so that its
present beauty of decay lacks nothing of historic
interest.

Nor does the fine mansion of Amisfield, through
whose park-like lands the road now descends. Amisfield
has lurid associations. Under the name of New Mills,
it was in 1687 the scene of a dreadful parricide, and
was at a later period purchased by the infamous
Colonel Francis Charteris, who might aptly be termed
(in Mr. Stead's phrase), the Minotaur of his day. It was
he who renamed it after the home of his family in
Nithsdale. As his exploits belong chiefly to London,
we, fortunately, need not enlarge upon them here.
The parricide already referred to was the murder of his
father by Philip Standsfield. Sir James Standsfield
had set up a cloth factory here, on the banks of the
Tyne, and had done remarkably well. He had two
sons, Philip and John. The eldest had been a scape-
grace ever since that day when, as a student at St.
Andrews, he had gone to a meeting-house and flung a
loaf at the preacher. It took the astonished divine on
the side of the head and aroused within him the spirit of
prophecy. Addressing the crowded chapel at large
(for the loaf had been thrown unseen from some dark
corner), he saw in a vision the death of the culprit, at
whose end there would be more present than were
hearing him that day ; " and the multitude then
present," adds the chronicler, " was not small."

Philip had a short and ignominious military career
on the Continent, and returned home to prey upon his

HADDINGTON 219

father ; who, for sufficient reasons, disinherited him in
favour of his younger brother. In the end, aided by
some servants, he strangled the old man and threw the
body in the river. For this he was hanged at
Edinburgh, and as the hanging was not effectual, the
executioner had to finish by strangling him, in which
public opinion of that time saw the neat handiwork of
Providence.

XXXII

HERE begins Haddington, and here end good roads
for the space of a mile ; and not until the burgh is left
behind do they recommence. The traveller who might
set out in quest of bad roads and vile paving would
without difficulty discover the objects of his search at
Haddington. He might conceivably find as bad
elsewhere, but worse examples would be miraculous
indeed. We have encountered many stretches of road,
thus far, of a mediaeval quality, but the long road to the
North boasts, or blushes for, nothing nearly so craggy
as are the cobble-stoned thoroughfares of this " royal
burgh." The entrance to the town from the south
resembles, in its picturesque squalor, that to one of the
decayed towns of Brittany. Unswept, tatterdemalion
as it is, it still remains a fitting subject for the artist's
pencil, for here beside the narrow street stands the
rugged mass of Bothwell Castle, patched and clouted
from time to time, but happily as yet unrestored.
Over the lintels of old houses adjoining, still remain the
pious invocations and quaint devices originally sculp-
tured there for the purpose of averting the baleful
glance of the Evil Eye.

The initial letter in the name of Haddington is a
superfluity and a misuse of the letter H, the name
deriving from that of Ada, Countess of Northumberland
and ancestress of Scottish monarchs ; foundress also
of a nunnery here which has long gone the way of such
mediaeval things. The Tyne borders this town, and

220

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

sometimes floods it, as may be readily seen by an
inscription on the wall of a house in High Street,
which tells how the water on October 4, 1775, suddenly
rose eight feet and three quarters. A curious legend,
too, still survives, recording a flood in 1358, when a nun
of the pious Ada's old foundation, seizing a statue of the
Virgin out of its niche, waded into the torrent and

BOTHWELL CASTLF.

threatened to throw it in unless the Blessed Mary
instantly caused the waters to subside. That they
immediately did so appears to have been taken as
evidence of the effective moral suasion thus applied.

Haddington Abbey, the successor of earlier buildings,
and now itself partly ruined, stands by the inconstant
river, the nave, now the parish church, and the choir
roofless, open to the sky. It is here within these grass-
grown walls that " Jane Welsh Carlyle, spouse of
Thomas Carlyle, Chelsea, London," lies, as the remorse-
ful epitaph says, " suddenly snatched away from him,
and the light of his life as if gone out." The spot where
the Abbey stands, by the dishevelled and tumbledown
quarter of Nungate, is the more abject now in that it

THE "LAMP OF LOTHIAN

221

still possesses old mansions that tell of a more pros-
perous past. Here, on the river-bank, neglected and
forlorn like everything around, is the fine old screen of
the Bowling Green, where no one has, for a century
past, played bowls, unless indeed the wraiths of bygone
Scottish notables haunt the spot o' nights and play
ghostly games, like the Kaatskill gnomes in Rip Van
\\ inkle. It is from the other side of the river that the

HADDIXGTOX ABBEY, FROM NUXGATE.

Abbey is best seen, its roofless central tower, the
Lucernia Laudoniae, or " Lamp of Lothian," still
showing those triple lancets in every face which,
according to the legend, obtained for it that title.
To obtain this view, the Abbey bridge is crossed,
which even now vividly illustrates on its wall the ready
way the old burgh had with malefactors. From it
projects a great hook, rusty for long want of usage,
from which were hanged the reivers, the horse-thieves,
and casual evildoers, with jurisdiction of the most
summary kind. No Calcraft science with it either,
with neck broken in decent fashion, but just a hauling
up of the rope and a tying of it to some handy stanchion,
and the unhappy malefactor left to throttle by slow
degrees. No other such picturesque hanging-place as

222 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

this, but what is scenery to a criminal about to be
hanged like a tom-cat caught killing chickens.

The crest, arms, trade-mark or badge of Haddington
is a goat. There is no doubt about that, for Billy
(or is it a Nanny ?) has his (or her) effigy on many
of the old buildings. Only by comparison and by
slow degrees is it that the stranger arrives at the
conclusion that it is a goat, for the drawing of many
of these representations leaves much to be desired.
Some resemble an elephant, others a horse, others yet
what " the mind's eye, Horatio " might conceive a
Boojum to be like ; but in the open space where
High Street and Market Street join, the modern Market
Cross, surmounted by a more carefully executed
carving, determines the species.

This is the centre of the town and neater than its
entrance from the south. The steepled classic building
close by is not a church but the Town House, mas-
querading in ecclesiastical disguise, very much as
Berwick's Town Hall does. From this point it is only
seventeen miles into Edinburgh ; but in 1750 and for
long after the coach journey employed the best efforts
of the local stage during the whole day. Musselburgh,
little more than eleven miles away, was reached in time
for dinner, and only when evening was come did the
lumbering vehicle lurch into its destination in Auld
Reekie, when every one went to bed, bruised and weary
with the toils of the expedition. The road at that time
must have resembled the specimen of roadway still
adorning the south entrance to Haddington.

To-day, happily, it is in good condition as far as
Levenhall, seven miles short of our journey's end,
whence it is bad beyond the credibility of those who
have not seen it. Gladsmuir, Macmerry, and Tranent
are interposed between ; places that sink their memories
of the battle of Prestonpans in ironfounding and coal-
digging and suchlike, disregarding the futilities of the
Stuarts. As for Macmerry, whose name prefigures
orgies at the most of it, or sober revelry at the very
least, it is odds against your finding as depressing a place

224 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

within a hundred miles. If place-names were made
to fit, why, then, Macdolour might suit it to a marvel.
Why ? Just because it stands at the crest of a barren
knowe ; an ugly row of cottages on either side, with
cinders and dust, clinkers and mud in front of them, and
some gaunt works within eyeshot. God knows who
christened the place, or if the name signified
merriment, but, if it did, either the scene has changed
wholly since then, or else he was a humorist of the
sardonic sort who so dubbed it. Tranent, too, a
townlet subsisting upon collieries : how grimly
commonplace ! But it at least has this advantage, that
from its elevated foothold it looks down upon the
Firth of Forth, that noble frith which Victor Hugo
blundered over so whimsically in rendering it as
" la Premiere de la Quatrieme." Seen under the
summer sun, how glorious that seaward view, with the
villages of Preston and Cockenzie, half hidden by their
woodlands, by the level shores. Half-way down from
Tranent's hillside you see a fine panorama : Arthur's
Seat in front, Calton Hill and its Nelson's column,
peering from behind, and the distant shores of Fife,
with blowing smoke-clouds, many miles away. Between
Arthur's Seat and the Calton, Edinburgh is hid, nine
miles from this point. Down in the levels in the
mid-distance there are hints of Musselburgh in smoke-
wreaths and peeping towers ; and mayhap, while you
gaze, the southward-bound train, with its white puff
of steam, is seen setting forth on its long journey.
London wards. In these levels was fought the battle
of Prestonpans, Sunday, September 21, 1745, around
that village of Preston and those briny meads where the
salt-pans used to be and are no longer.

Preston — formerly Priest's Town — got its name at
the time when it was part of the celebrated Abbey of
Newbattle. The monks of that religious house were
the first discoverers of coal in Scotland, and also, in the
twelfth century, made this district the seat of a manu-
facture of salt. Prestonpans, indeed, at one time
supplied the whole of the East Coast with salt, and it

PRESTONPANS 225

was only on the repeal of the Salt Duty that this old
town fell into decay. Women, known as salt-wives,
a class almost as picturesque as the fish- wives
of Newhaven, used to carry the salt in creels
on their backs, to sell in Edinburgh and other
towns.

In an orchard stands what was once the ancient
village cross, erected in 1617, in place of an earlier.
Well-known as the " Chapmen's Cross," it was the
meeting-place of the chapmen, packmen, or pedlars of
the Lothians. They gathered early in July, transacted
the business of their guild and elected their " King "
and his " Lord Deputy " for the ensuing year. The
" ink-bottle," cut in stone, into which they dipped their
pens, is still visible on the base of the cross. The
Bannatyne Club saved it from utter destruction, and
instituted a convivial guild, the " Society of Chapmen
of the Lothians," visiting the cross every year, with
Sir Walter Scott as one of their members.

The world has vastly changed since " the Forty-
five." It has, as a small detail, ceased to produce its
salt by evaporation of sea water ; and, a larger and
more significant matter, no longer wages war for sake
of dynasties. The Highlanders who fought and gained
this fleeting victory for Prince Charlie were the last who
drew the sword for Romance and Right Divine. Prince
Charlie had moved out of his loyal Edinburgh at the
approach of the English under Sir John Cope, who, of
course, in that fine foolish manner of British officers,
which will survive as long as the officers themselves,
wholly underrated his enemy. He was defeated easily,
with every circumstance of indignity, his soldiers
fleeing in abject terror before the impetuous charge of
the ferocious hairy-legged Highlanders, emerging,
figures of grotesque horror, out of the mists slowly
dispersing off the swampy fields in the laggard Septem-
ber sunrise.

The English numbered 2100 against the 1400 under
Prince Charlie ; but only four minutes passed between
the attack and the flight. In that short space of time

223 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

the field was deserted and the clansmen, pursuing the
terror-stricken rabble which just before had been a
disciplined force, slew nearly four hundred of them.
The total loss of the Highlanders in slain was thirty,
nearly the whole of them falling in the first discharge of
musketry. Almost incredible, but well-authenticated,
stories are told of the cowardice of Cope's regiments.
Cope himself was swept away in the wild rush, vainly
endeavouring to stem it, and it was not until they were
two miles from the field, at St. Clement's Wells, that he
could bring them to a halt. Even then, the accidental
discharge of a pistol scared them off again, and although
no one pursued, they rode off with redoubled energy.
This precipitate retreat of mounted troops over miles
of country, from an unmounted enemy who were not
pursuing them, is perhaps the most disgraceful incident
in the military history of the country.

The flying infantry were in far worse case. In
endeavouring to escape by climbing the park walls of
Preston, they were cut down in great numbers by the
terrible broadswords of the Highlanders. Colonel
Gardiner and a brave few were cut down defending
themselves on the field of battle. One story, of a piece
with many others, relates how a Highlander, pursuing
alone a party of ten soldiers, struck down the hinder-
most with his sword, and shouting, " Down with your
arms ! " called upon the others to surrender. They
threw their weapons away without looking behind them,
and the Highlander, his sword in one hand and a
pistol in the other, drove them — nine of them ! —
prisoners into camp. Everywhere Cope, so helter-
skelter was his flight, himself brought the first news of
his defeat. He reached Coldstream that night, and
did not rest until the next day he was within the
sheltering fortifications of Berwick.

We will^not further pursue the fortunes of the
Young Pretender, but hurry on into Levenhall.

Where that battle was fought, there is to-day the
most extensive cabbage-plant cultivation in Scotland.
It is a usual thing in the early part of the year for

MUSSELBURGH 227

almost daily special cabbage trains to be despatched to
all parts of Britain.

And so downhill, and then over the awful cobbles into
the accursed town of Musselburgh. " Accursed," not
by reason of those self-same cobbles, but for the
sacrilegious doings of its magistrates who rebuilt their
Tolbooth, burnt after the battle of Pinkie, with stones
from the Chapel of Loretto. Now that chapel, which
stood at the entrance to the town, was the place of
business of one of those roadside hermits of whom we
have in these pages heard so much (would that he had a
successor in these times, for then the road would
perhaps be in better condition), and the Pope, indignant
at the injury done to the wayside shrine, solemnly
anathematised town and inhabitants in sleeping or
waking, eating and drinking, at every conceivable time
and every imaginable function. No Pope since that
period seems to have removed the curse, and no one is
particularly anxious that it should be removed,
Musselburgh being rather proud of it than otherwise.
When it begins to take effect will be quite time enough.
There were those who at the close of the coaching days
perceived the beginning of it, although then three
hundred years overdue, but as the town has rather
increased in prosperity since that period, the time
evidently is not yet. Nor do the burghers anticipate
it, for they still repeat the brave old rhyme : —

Mussetburgh was a burgh

When Edinburgh was nane ;
And Musselburgh shall be a burgh

When Edinburgh is gane.

This, however, is a quibble, for Musselburgh derived
its name from the " broch," or bed, of mussels at the
mouth of the river Esk. Looked at in this light, the
statement is true enough and the prophecy a not
particularly rash one. The sponsorial shell-fish have
an honoured place in the town arms, in which three
mussels are seen in company with three anchors : the
motto " Honesty " writ large below. This was

228

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

probably adopted at some period later than the
purloining of the stones of the Loretto Chapel.

The Town Hall, with that tower whose building
brought about the curse, forms the centre of Mussel-
burgh, a fishy, stony, picturesque place with four
bridges over the Esk, leading to the western bank,

MUSSELBURGH.

where the fisher quarter of Fisherrow straggles towards
Joppa, two miles distant. Joppa Pans are gone now,
just as those other pans at Preston, but factories of
sorts, with clustered chimney-stacks, are still grouped
about the melancholy sea-shore, where gales set the
very high-road awash on occasion. Not vulgar,
modern factories, but of a certain age ; old enough and
grim enough to look like the scene of some thrilling
story that yet awaits the telling. Somewhat thrilling
is the report as to the condition of the road here in 1680,
a complaint laid before the Privy Council stating that,
four miles on the London side of Edinburgh, travelling
was dangerous, and travellers to be pitied, " either by
their coaches overturning, their horses falling, their
carts breaking, their loads casting, or horses stumbling,
and the poor people with burdens on their backs sorely
discouraged ; moreover, strangers do often exclaim
thereat." All this reads with a very modern touch to

PORTOBELLO 229

those who know the road to-day, for it is as bad now as it
could have been then, and so continues, in different
kinds of badness, through adjoining Portobello into
Edinburgh itself. Here seas of slimy mud, there
precipitous setts, here again profound holes in the
macadam, or tramway rails projecting above the road
level, make these last miles wretched. Portobello,
that suburban seaside resort of Edinburgh, fares in
this respect no better than the rest of the way, and the
original road across Figgate Whins, the lonely moor
that was here before the first house of Portobello was
built, could have been no worse. That house was the
creation of a retired sailor who had been at the capture
of Portobello in Central America by Admiral Vernon in
1739. He named it after that town, and when the
present seaside resort began to spring up, it took the
title. Now it has a promenade, a pier, hotels, and
crowds of visitors in summer upon the sands, and calls
itself " the Brighton of Scotland." Observe that
Brighton does not return the compliment, and has not
yet begun to style itself " the Portobello of England."

XXXIII

LEAVING the " Brighton of Scotland " behind, we
come to the flat lands of Craigentinny, stretching
away from the now suburban highway down to the
wind-swept and desolate seashore, where the whaups
and the sandpipers make mournful concerts in a minor
key, to the accompaniment of the noise of the sullen
breakers and the soughing of the wind amid the
rustling bents. Overlooking the road, within sight and
sound of the tinkling tramcars passing between Joppa,
Portobello, and Edinburgh, is that singular monument,
" Miller's Tomb."

William Henry Miller, whose remains lie beneath this
pile of classic architecture, was an antiquary and
bibliophile, and obtained his nickname of " Measure

230 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Miller " from his habit of measuring the margins of
the " tall copies " of the scarce books he bought. His
beardless face and shrill voice led to the lifelong belief
the he was really a woman. The tomb is elaborately
decorated with a carved marble frieze representing the
Song of Miriam and the destruction of the Egyptians in
.the Red Sea. Miller and his father were both Quakers,
and the wealth of which .they were possessed derived
from a prosperous seedsman's business in Canongate,
Edinburgh. To the father came an adventure which
does not fall to many men. He was married in 1789 for
the third time, when nearly seventy years of age, to an
Englishwoman, who conveyed him against his will in a
post-chaise from Edinburgh to London.

Passing Craigentinny and Jock's Lodge we are, in the
words of the old song, " Within a mile of Edinburgh
town." The more modern and acceptable name of
Jock's Lodge is Piershill, but it has been known by the
other for over two hundred and seventy years. Who
the original Jock was seems open to doubt, but he is
supposed to have been a beggar who built himself a hut
on this then lonely road leading to Figgate Whins.
Even in 1650, when Cromwell besieged Edinburgh, the
spot had obtained its name, and is referred to as
" that place called Jockis Lodge.'1 Towards the close
of the eighteenth century a Colonel Piers had a villa
here, pulled down in 1793, when barracks — known as
Piershill Barracks — were built on the site. It is a
district slowly emerging from the reproach of a dis-
reputable past, when footpads and murderers haunted
the muddy roads, or took refuge amid the towering
rocks of Arthur's Seat, Crow Hill, or Salisbury Craigs, or
hid in the congenial sloughs of the Hunter's Bog.
Close by the road, at the entrance to the Queen's
Park of Holyrood, is Muschat's Cairn, the place where
Scott makes Jeanie Deans meet the outlaw Robertson.
This heap of stones marks the spot where Nicol Muschat
of Boghall, a surgeon, a man of infamous character,
murdered his wife by cutting her throat in 1720, a
crime which, with Scottish old-time mysticism, he said

TO EDINBURGH 231

was committed by direct personal instigation of the
devil. All the same, they hanged him for it in the
Grassmarket, where martyrs " testified " of old and the
criminals of " Auld Reekie " expiated their crimes.

Of course the approach to Edinburgh has, from the
picturesque standpoint, been spoiled. Ranges of grim
stone houses and sprawling suburbs now hem in the road
and hide the view of Arthur's Seat and its neighbouring
eminences ; but a few steps to the left serve to disclose
them, the little loch of St. Margaret, and the ruined
walls of St. Anthony's Chapel on the hillside, once
guarding the holy well. St. Anthony's Chapel, within
the rule of the Abbey of Holyrood, served another turn,
for from its tower glimmered a beacon which in the old
days guided mariners safely up the Forth, a service
paid for out of the harbour dues.

The so-called " London " and " Regent " Roads that
now lead directly into the New Town of Edinburgh are
modem improvements upon the old approach through
Canongate into the Old Town. If steep, rugged, and
winding, the old wray was at least more impressive, for it
lay within sight of Holyrood Palace and brought the
wayfarer into the very heart of Scott's " own romantic
town," to where the smells and the dirt, the crazy
tenement-houses and the ragged clouts hanging from
dizzy tiers of windows, showed " Scotia's darling seat "
in its most characteristic aspects.

As Alexander Smith puts it, Scott discovered the city
was beautiful, sang its praises to the world, " and he has
put more coin into the pockets of its inhabitants than
if he had established a branch of manufacture of which
they had the monopoly."

The distant view of Edinburgh is magnificent. The
peaked and jagged masses of Arthur's Seat and
Salisbury Craigs, the monument-cumbered Calton Hill,
the Castle Rock — all these combine to make the
traveller eager to reach so picturesque a spot.
Approaching it and seeing the smoke-cloud drifting
with the breeze away from the hollow from which
Edinburgh's million chimneys are seen peering, one

232

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

instantly notes the peculiar appropriateness of the
Scots endearing epithet, " Auld Reekie." But it was
not only — if indeed at all — an admiration of the
picturesque that made the sight of Edinburgh so
welcome to old-time travellers. It was rather the
prospect of coming to the end of their journey, and
almost in sight of a comfortable hotel, that rendered

CALTON HILL.

the view so welcome to those who in the last thirty
years or so of the coaching era made this trip of
almost four hundred miles ; but those who had come
this way at an earlier period had no such comfortable
prospect before them. Instead of putting up at some
fine hospitable inn, such as they were used to even
in the smaller English towns, they were set down at
a " stabler's," the premises of one whose first business
was to horse the coaches and to let saddle-horses, and
who, as in some sort of an after-thought, lodged those
who were obliged to journey about the country.

THE "BEST INN" 233

A traveller arriving at Edinburgh in 1774, for
instance, had indeed little comfort awaiting him.
" One can scarcely form in imagination the distress
of a miserable stranger on his first entrance into this
city," says one writing at this period. No inn better
than an alehouse, no decent or cleanly accommodation,
nor in fact anything fit for a gentleman. " On my
first arrival," says this traveller, " my companion
and self, after the fatigue of a long day's journey, were
landed at one of these stable-keepers' (for they have
modesty to give themselves no higher denomination) in
a part of the town which is called the Pleasance ; and
on entering the house we were conducted by a poor girl
without shoes or stockings, and with only a single
linsey-woolsey petticoat which just reached half-way to
her ankles, into a room where about twenty Scotch
drovers had been regaling themselves with whisky and
potatoes. You may guess our amazement when we
were informed that this was the best inn in the metro-
polis, and that we could have no beds unless we had an
inclination to sleep together, and in the same room with
the company which a stage-coach had that moment
discharged. ' Well,' said I to my friend, ' there is
nothing like seeing men and manners ; perhaps we
may be able to repose ourselves at some coffee-house.'
Accordingly, on inquiry, we discovered that there was
a good dame by the Cross who acted in the double
capacity of pouring out coffee and letting lodgings to
strangers, as we were. She was easily to be found out,
and, with all the conciliating complaisance of a
Maitresse d'Hotel, conducted us to our destined apart-
ments, which were indeed six stories high, but so
infernal in appearance that you would have thought
youserlf in the regions of Erebus. The truth is, I will
venture to say, you will make no scruple to believe
when I tell you that in the whole we had only two
windows, which looked into an alley five feet wide,
where the houses were at least ten stories high and the
alley itself was so sombre in the brightest sunshine that
it was impossible to see any object distinctly."

234 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Private lodgings, just as those described above,
were the resort of those who had neither friends nor
acquaintance in Edinburgh at that time ; but travellers
in Scotland were nearly always exercising their
ingenuity to come, at the end of their day's journey, to
the house of some friend or some friend's friend, to
whom before starting they had been careful to obtain
letters of introduction. So old and so widespread a
custom was this that, so far back as 1425, we find an
Act of James the First of Scotland actually forbidding
all travellers resorting to burgh towns to lodge with
friends or acquaintances, or in any place but the
" hostillaries," unless indeed he was a personage of
consequence, with a great retinue, in which case he
might accept a friend's hospitality, provided that his
" horse and meinze " were sent to the inns.

Of course such an Act was doomed to fall into
neglect, but the innkeepers, equally of course during a
long series of years, almost ceased to exist. A few
" stablers' " establishments became known as " inns "
at about the period of Doctor Johnson's visit to
Edinburgh. They were chiefly situated in the Pleas-
ance, or in that continuation of it, St. Mary's Wynd
(now St. Mary Street). These inns, such as they were,
burst upon the by no means delighted gaze of the
wayfarer from England as he entered the historic town
of Edinburgh, and when he saw them he generally lifted
up his voice and cursed the fate that had sent him so
far from home and into so barbarous a country.

The Pleasance was largely in receipt of the traffic to
and from the south until the construction of the
North and South Bridges, opened in 1769 and 1788,
diverted it to a higher level. We may look in vain
nowadays in the Pleasance for the inns of that day.
They are demolished and altered so greatly as to be
unrecognisable ; but the " White Horse," which stands
in a court away down Canongate, will give us an
idea of the kind of place. Situated in " White Horse,"
or Davison's Close in Canongate, and reached from
that street by a low-browed archway, it remains a

THE "WHITE HORSE"

235

perfect example of the Edinburgh inn of nearly three
hundred years ago. An inn no longer, but occupied
in tenements, the internal arrangements are somewhat
altered, but the time when the house extended a

THE " WHITE HORSE " IXX.

primitive hospitality to travellers is not difficult to
reconstruct in the imagination. To it, at the end
of their journeys, came those wearied ones, to find
accommodation of the most intimate and domestic
kind. Kitchen and dining-room were one, and it
was scarce possible for a guest to obtain a bedroom
to himself. Dirt was accepted as inevitable. In
fact, the modern " dosser " is better and more decently
housed. To the " White Horse " came others — those
about to set out upon their travels. Booted and
spurred, wills made and saddle-bags packed, they
resorted hither to hire horses for their journeys, and
it is not unlikely that the old house saw in early
times many a quaking laird, badly wanted by the

236 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Government, slinking through the archway from the
Canongate, to secure trusty mounts for instant flight.
Scott, indeed, has made it the scene of strange doings
in his Waverley.

This is the oldest house in Edinburgh ever used as
an inn, but must not be confused with that other
" White Horse," long since demolished, made famous
by Doctor Johnson.

It was in 1773 that Johnson reached Edinburgh.
He put up at the " White Horse " in Boyd's Close,
called, even in those uncleanly times, " that dirty and
dismal " inn, kept by James Boyd. The great man
immediately notified his arrival to Bos well in this
short note : —

" Saturday night. — Mr. Johnson sends his compli-
ments to Mr. Boswell, being just arrived at Boyd's."

When Boswell arrived, falling over himself in his
eagerness, he found the Doctor furiously angry.
Doubtless he had been conducted to his room, as
was not unusually the case, by some dirty sunburnt
wench, without shoes or stockings, a fit object for
dislike ; but the chief cause of his anger was the
waiter, who had sweetened his lemonade without the
ceremony of using the sugar-tongs. He threw the
lemonade out of window, and seemed inclined to throw
the waiter after it.

" Peter Ramsay's " was a famous inn, situated at
the foot of St. Mary's Wynd, next the Cowgate Port.
To it came travellers along both the east and the
south roads. Ramsay advertised it in 1776 as being
" a good house for entertainment, good stables for
above one hundred horses, and sheds for about twenty
carriages." In 1790, he retired with a fortune of
£10,000. But in the best of these old Edinburgh
inns the beds well merited a description given of them
as " dish-clouts stretched on grid-irons."

First among the innkeepers of this unsanctified
quarter to remove from it into the New Town was
James Dun. He was a man notable among his kind,
having not only been the first to call himself an

THE FIRST "HOTEL" 237

" innkeeper " instead of a " stabler," but the greatly
daring person who first used the outlandish word
" Hotel " in Edinburgh. He began " hotel "-keeping
in the flats above the haberdashery shop of John Neale,
who, two years before, in 1774, had built the first
house in the New Town. Neale himself was a pioneer of
considerable nerve, for although the New Town had
been projected and building-sites laid out on what is
now the chief ornament of it, Princes Street, prospective
tenants were shy of so bleak and exposed a situation as
this then was. They preferred to live in the dirty
cosiness of the old wynds and closes, and so the New
Town seemed likely to be a paper project for years to
come. At this juncture the Town Council made a
sporting offer of exemption from all local taxes for the
first who would build a house there. Neale was this
pioneer, and he built the house that still stands next the
Register House, the most easterly house in Princes
Street.

Dun, to whom he had let the upper part, immediately
displayed a great gilded sign, " Dun's Hotel," where-
upon the Lord Provost, representing public feeling,
wrote objecting to the foreign word " Hotel," saying
that, whatever might be the real character of his
establishment, he might at least avoid the scandalous
indecency of publicly proclaiming it !

XXXIV

THESE concluding pages of a book on the road to
Edinburgh form no fitting place to attempt the
description or history of so ancient and historic a town.
Our business is to reach the northern capital, leaving
the story of Edwin's Burgh to be told by others.
Yet we cannot leave it thus without some brief survey.
The modern traveller by road, coming in by the
London Road, Greensicle, Leith Street, and Princes
Street, comes in by the New Town, and sees on his

238

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

SQUALOR AND MCTCKESQCEXESS."

left, across a deep
ravine, partly occupied
by a huge railway
station and partly by
beautiful public
gardens, the dark mass
of the Castle and the
Old Town crowning the
opposite heights, grey
and stern, in effect ive
contrast with the gay
f 1 o w e r - b e d s down
below, the old houses
huddling together on
the scanty foothold of
the ridge and rising to
sheer heights. That is
the original historic
town : this, to which
the modern traveller
comes by road, the
new. Little more than
a hundred years ago
this New Town was
not thought of : its site
the meadows and
wastes that sloped
down to the Firth of
Forth and the sea, and
the site of the railway
station and the Princes
Street Gardens covered
with the dark waters
of the Nor' Loch.

Old-time arrivals in
Edinburgh, coming in
by Canongate, found
themselves in midst of
squalor and pictur-
esqueness; and

SQUALOR

239

although much of the picturesque is gone, it is still
a quaint street and the squalor survives. The
poor who live here " hang forth their banners from
the outward walls," in the shape of their domestic

CANOXGATE.

washing, fluttering in the breeze from every window,
at the end of long poles, and how poor they are
may be judged from the condition of the clothes
they consider worth keeping. That sometime prison,
the Canongate Tolbooth, facing the long street, remains
one of the most curious relics of Edinburgh's past.

240 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Not a very ancient past, for it was only " biggit " in
1591, but old enough to be regarded with reverence, and
quaint to admiration, with its spired tower and
tourelles, so eminently Scotch of that period when the
French influence in architecture was yet strong. You
can match those curious spires time and time again
among the old chateaux of the Loire, and in Brittany ;
just as in the old Norman town of Coutances one can
find the counterpart of the old theatre in Playhouse
Close, near by.

From here, those travellers saw the Old Town ahead
and, progressing up High Street, came successively to
the Tron Church, the Market Cross, St. Giles's
Cathedral, and, before 1817 — when it was pulled
down — to the Old Tolbooth. Beyond this, the
Lawnmarket conducted to the Castle, which then
marked the end of the town. In this progress the
tall and crowded houses and darkening wynds and
closes stood to right and left. Later years have seen
the disappearance of many of these places, where in
old times the ferocious Scots nobles lived, poor and
proud, bloodthirsty and superstitious, but those that
are left are very grim, dark, and dirty, and the ten-
and eleven-storied houses of such a height that only
by great exertions is it possible to crane the neck and
lift the eyes to the skyline, against which the belching
chimneys of the piled-up " lands " are projecting
the smoke of domestic hearths and eternally justifying
the old Scots term of endearment for Edinburgh.
The nobles are gone, lang syne, their old dens occupied
now by the very poorest of Edinburgh's poor ; but
sanitary conditions, even with the present occupants,
are not so degraded as they were when the flower of
Scotland's nobility dwelt here ; when pigs and fowls
were herded in the basements, or ran unheeded in the
alleys, and wayfarers skulked under the walls at the
sound of voices above, calling " gardy-loo " — a call
which accompanied a discharge of overflowing house-
hold utensils from inconceivable heights into the
gutters below. " Gardy-loo " was a term which, with

SUPERSTITION

241

this dreadfully unclean custom, derived from France,
having been originally gardez-Veau ; just as the cakes
sold at Craigmillar, called " petticoat tails " were
originally petits gateaux.

Still, the Old Town is sufficiently grimy and huddled
yet to fitly illustrate the Scottish saying " The clartier
(i.e. the dirtier) the cosier."

Nothing is more characteristic of the Old Town than
the religious texts carved upon the stone door lintels of
these ancient houses. Few are without them. To a
stranger they would seem to tell of a fervent piety, but
they meant more than that. They were always

OLD INSCRIPTION, LADY STAIR'S HOUSE.

accompanied with a date and with the initials — some-
times also the arms — of their owners ; as in the
beautiful example still remaining in Lady Stair's Close,
and represented both pride and a fearful superstition.
Superstition, because the improving texts and pious
ejaculations meant little beyond talismanic protection
against " Auld Hornie," wizards, and warlocks, wehr-
wolves, and all those frightful inhabitants of Satan's
invisible world in which the Scotch most fervently
believed, from king to peasant. Thus when we read
over one of these old doorways the queerly spelled

Blissit be God in all His giftis,

we know that this was little less than an incantation,
and marked a lively sense of favours to come ; and
when our eye lights upon the inscription next door,

iPax intrantibus : Sains exevntibvs,

242

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

we know that the good feeling thus prominently
displayed would by no means have prevented the
fierce lord of the house from stabbing his guest in
a dark corner, if he had a mind to it.

A highly interesting book might' be written on
these old sculptured stones alone. Nor are they in
every instance old. Some modern ones exist, and
the entirely laudable passion for commemoration has
caused interesting tablets to be set up, marking many
of Edinburgh's famous spots. A curious modern
piece of sculpture decorates more or less artistically
the archway leading from the High Street into

Paisley Close, sup-
porting a tall building
erected in 1862. It
represents the bust of
a kboy, and includes
an inscribed label. It
seems that the old
building standing on
this site suddenly col-
lapsed on a Sunday
morning in 1861, and
buried a number of

people in the ruins, thirty-five actually dying from their
injuries. Some were fortunate enough to be screened
from the heavy masses of stone and brick by timbers
which in falling had imprisoned them. Among these was
the lad whose face is represented in the carving. The
rescuers who came with pick and shovel to dig out the
survivors had succoured many, and were turning back
when they heard the muffled cry, '' Heave awa, lads,
I'm no' deid yet," and redoubling their efforts, extri-
cated the author of it.

No relic now remains upon the door-posts of these
old houses of the curious contrivance which preceded
the door-knocker, and for the sight of a "tirle-pin" the
stranger must needs go to the museum of the Royal
Scottish Society of Antiquaries, to which the last

THE "HEAVE AWA " SIGX.

THE "TIRLE-PIN" 243

example was long since removed, from an old house
in the Canongate.

The tirle-pin had a variety of names. Sometimes it
would be called a " risp " or a " ringle," and there
were those who knew it as a " craw " ; that is to say,
a crow, from the harsh crow-like sound produced by
its use. A tirle-pin was just a rasping contrivance
made of a twisted bar of iron fixed against the
door post with an iron ring hanging loosely
from it, as in the accompanying sketch.
Instead of knocking, one who desired
admittance would seize the ring and rasp
it up and down the twisted iron, producing
a noise which could be distinctly heard
within.

The origin of the tirle-pin, like that of many
another Scottish custom, was French. It
originated in France in the times of the
Valois, in days when it was not etiquette to
knock at the doors of royal personages. In
face of this, courtiers were reduced to scratching
with the finger-nails — a disagreeable sensation
when practised upon wood, as any one who
tries it may readily discover for himself.
Perhaps from this cause, or because the
scratching was not loud enough (or, perhaps,
even because the polish began to disappear
from the royal portals) this mechanical
scratcher was invented. The fashion spread A
from France to Scotland in times when the TIRLB-

"PT"\"

two countries were linked in close ties of
friendship. From the palace it spread down to
the mansions of the nobles and the houses of the
merchants, finally coming into general use. It was
never acclimatised in England, although another kind
of scratching was, if we may believe the satirists, who
say that James the First and his Scottish followers
imported the itch.

However, the tirle-pin is obsolete, but it did not
disappear without leaving a trace of its existence in

244 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

old Scots ballads ; as, for instance, that of Sweet
William's Ghaist : —

There cam a ghaist to Margaret's door,

Wi' mony a grievous groan ;
And aye he tirled upon the pinne,

But answer made she nane.

Is that my father Philip ?

Or is't my brother John,
Or is't my true love Willie

To Scotland now come hame ?

XXXV

A GRIM old town, Edinburgh, dominated by the
ancient castle from its rock, bodeful with the story of
a thousand years. Newer new towns have sprung up
around it to south and west, and hem the old fortress
in with a bordure of unhistoric suburbs, so that from
the topmost battlements you see how small the original
Edinburgh is, compared with its surroundings. Places
of pilgrimage are not lacking in the old streets. There
are John Knox's house, one of the queerest, three-
storied, and gabled, the very ideal of rugged strength ;
and the Parliament Square, once St. Giles's churchyard,
where "IK 1572," on a stone in the pavement, marks
the site of Knox's grave. Passers-by walk over it,
curiously fulfilling Johnson's aspiration, made years
before the churchyard was destroyed, by which he
hoped that the dour Presbyterian was buried on a
highway. While we are on the subject of tombs, let
us mention that other place of pilgrimage, Greyfriars
churchyard, that grisly place where Robert Louis
Stevenson was accustomed in his youth to make
assignations with parlour-maids. Few places so grim
as a Scottish burial-ground, and Greyfriars is of these
the grimmest. Dishevelled backs of houses look down
upon the mouldering tombs, and kitchens and living-
rooms open into the houses of the dead. Rusty iron
railings, bolts and bars, guard the blackened and
broken mausoleums and give the pilgrim the weird

GREYFRIARS

245

idea that the living have taken extraordinary pre-
cautions to imprison those who are never likely to break

GREYFRIARS.

out. The only living things here are the foul grass
that grows within the sepulchral enclosures, and the

246 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

demon cats of an heraldic slimness that haunt the
churchyard in incredible numbers, and stealing victuals
from the neighbouring houses, gnaw them within the
tombs. Many martyrs for religion have their resting-
place here, together with those who martyred them.
Persecutors and persecuted alike rest here now.

Sympathies will ever be divided between the
Covenanters and their oppressors. As you read how
they upheld their faith and signed their names to the
Covenant in this gruesome yard of Greyfriars, so
ominously on that flat tombstone which even now
remains, you are fired with an enthusiasm for those
rejecters of a liturgy alien from their convictions, and
can curse " Claverse " with the best of those who do
not forget the heavy ways of " bonnie Dundee " with
them. But the Covenanters were as intolerant with
those when they came to rule. The men of both sides
were men of blood. The strain of intolerance remains,
and the tomb of that other persecutor of the Covenan-
ters, Sir George Mackenzie, has always been, and still
is, with the people " bloody Mackenzie's."

Old Edinburgh life centred at the Market Cross,
happily restored in 1885 by Mr. Gladstone. The Cross
has had a troubled history. Reconstructed from a
much older one in 1617, it remained here until 1756,
when the " improving " fanatics of that time swept
the historic structure away, without a thought of the
associations belonging to it. They were associations
of every kind. Kings had been proclaimed at it by
heralds with fanfare of trumpet ; patriots and traitors
with equal contumely had been done to death beside
it ; and the continual round of punishments which
gave the common hangman a busy time were inflicted
here. In fact, were a rogue to be pilloried or a king's
birthday to be kept with becoming ceremony, the Cross
was the place. Let us see what those punishments were
like, from one example illustrative of the general run
of them. Here is what they did in 1655 to " Mr. Patrik
Maxwell, ane arrant decevar." They brought him here
" quhair a pillorie wes erectit, gairdit and convoyed

PUNISHMENTS

247

with a company of sodgeris ; and their, eftir ane full
houris standing on that pillorie, with his heid and
handis lyand out and hoilis cuttit out for that end,
his rycht lug was cuttit af ; and thaireftir careyit over
to the town of St. Johnnestoun, quhair ane uther
pillorie wes erectit, on the quhilk the uther left lug
wes cuttit af him. The caus heirof wes this ; that he
haid gevin out fals calumneis and leyis aganes Collonell
Daniell, governour of Peirth. Bot the treuth is, he was
ane notorious decevar and ane intelligencer, sumtyme
for the Englesches,
uther tymes for
the Scottis, and
decevand both of
thame : besyde
mony prankis
quhilk wer tedious
to writt." Quite
so ; but if all de-
ceivers had their
ears cut off, how
few would retain
them! A ferocious
folk, those old
Scots, and petty
delinquents supped sorrow at their hands with a big
spoon. Sorry the lot of scandal-mongers and the like,
seated on a wooden horse with hands and legs tied, and
permission freely accorded to all for the throwing of
missiles. Ferocity, however, should go hand in hand
with courage — a quality apparently not possessed by
the citizens of Edinburgh when Prince Charlie and his
Highlanders came, in 1745. Incredulous of the wild
clansmen ever daring to attack the town, they laughed
at the very idea ; but when they heard of his small
force having eluded the force of Johnny Cope, sent to
intercept them, and advancing in earnest, things took
a very different colour. Those who were loyal to the
House of Hanover were quaking in their shoes, and the
Jacobites rejoicing. The city armed, even to the

THE WOODEX HORSE.

248 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

clergymen, who, on the Sunday before the surrender,
preached in the churches with swords and daggers
buckled on under their gowns. Bands of volunteers
were raised, and on the report that the Pretender was
near, were marched outside the walls to dispute his
entry, despite their murmurs that they had volunteered
to defend the city from the inside, and were not prepared
to go out to be cut to pieces with the invaders'
claymores. Captain ex-Provost Drummond marched
with his company down the West Bow towards the
West Port. Looking round when he had reached it,
he to his astonishment found himself alone. The
volunteers had vanished down the back lanes or closes !
But the dragoons were as bad. Coming near the
enemy at Corstorphine, two miles out, they bolted
without firing a shot, and so back into Edinburgh and
through it and out at the other end. It was the
ferocious appearance of the Highlanders that caused
this terror. They were comparatively few ; ill -armed,
ragged, and ill-fed. But their strange dress, their
wild looks, shaggy locks, and generally outlandish
appearance, frightened the good Lowlanders, who knew
almost as little of these Gaelic tribes as Londoners
themselves. The old-time warfare of the Japanese
and the Chinese, with their hideous masks ; the
dismal tom-toming of the African savage ; the war-
paint of the Red Indian, are justified of their existence,
for the strange and hideous in warfare is very effective
in striking a paralysing terror into an enemy. Accord-
ingly, the tartans, the naked legs and arms, and the
uncombed locks of the lairds' uncivilised levies captured
Edinburgh for Prince Charlie, who, a few days later,
September 17, caused his father, the Old Pretender, to
be proclaimed king, by the title of James the Third,
at the Cross.

With the suppression of " the Forty-five," the stir-
ring warlike story of Edinburgh came to an end ; but
not until 1807, when the Edinburgh police came into
existence, was the semi-military Town Guard, raised
in 1682, abolished. The Town Guard and the towns-

250 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

people were always at odds, and hated one another
cordially. Recruited from the army, and armed with
the formidable weapons called " Jeddart axes," it was
originally a fine body, designed
rather to keep the town in order
than to protect it, and its members
never lost sight of that fact. In its
last years, however, the Town Guard
declined in importance and in
numbers, and, coming to be regarded
as a refuge for old pensioners who
could scarcely manage to crawl
about, became an object of derision.
Then the sins of their forerunners
were visited upon the heads of those
unhappy old men, and it became a
common sight to see them baited by
mischievous small boys. The last of
the Town Guard tottered about
Parliament Square in his queer
uniform and three-cornered hat,
hardly able to shoulder his axe,
and regarded by the inhabitants as
one of their most genuine antiquities,
THE LAST or THE until he too followed his comrades
TOWN GUARD. to the tomb.

XXXVI

ONE must needs admire Edinburgh. You may have
seen the noblest cities of the world ; have stood upon
the Acropolis at Athens, on the Heights of Abraham
at Quebec ; have viewed Rome and her seven hills, or
Constantinople from the Goldern Horn ; but Edinburgh
still retains her pride of place, even in the eyes of the
much travelled. You need not be Scottish to feel the
charm of her, and can readily understand why she
means so much to the Scot ; but your gorge rises at
the immemorial dirt of the Old Town, simultaneously

PRINCE'S STREET 253

with your admiration of its wondrous picturesqueness,
and stately Princes Street seems to you a revelation
of magnificence even while the bulk of the New Town
appears grey, formal, and forbidding. The great gulf
fixed between Old Town and New, that ravine in which
the railway burrows, and on whose banks the Princes
Street Gardens run, renders that thoroughfare, with
its one side of grass and trees and the other of fine
shops and towering houses, reminiscent to the Londoner
of Piccadilly. But Piccadilly has not a towering Castle
on one side of it, nor a Calton Hill at the end ; nor, on
the other hand, does Piccadilly know such easterly
blasts as those that sweep down the long length of
Princes Street and freeze the very marrow of the
Southerner.

" The same isothermal line," wrote Robert Chambers,
" passes through Edinburgh and London." " Still,"
James Payn used to say, " I never knew of a four-
wheeled cab being blown over by an east wind in
London, as has just happened in Edinburgh," and
R.L.S. tells us frankly that his native city has " the
vilest climate under heaven."

Princes Street is perhaps even more like the Brighton
Front in its well-dressed crowds and fine shops. With
the sea in place of the Gardens and the Castle, the
resemblance would be singularly close.

As for Calton Hill, that neo-classic eminence, gives
form and substance to Edinburgh's claim to be the
" Modern Athens." Learning had not been unknown
in the Old Town, where Hume and Boswell wrote ;
but, given air and elbow-room, it expanded vastly
when the New Town was planned, and with the
dawn of the nineteenth century, literature flourished
exceedingly. This seems to have inspired the idea
of emulating the capital of Greece, to the eye as well
as to the mind. Accordingly a copy of the Parthenon
was begun on the crest of Calton Hill, as a monument
to the Scots soldiers who fell in the campaigns against
Napoleon. It cost a huge sum and has never been
completed, and so it has familiarly been called

254 THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

" Scotland's Folly " and " Scotland's Shame " ; but
doubtless looks a great deal more impressive in its
unfinished state, in the semblance of a ruin, than it
would were it ever finished. A variety of other freak
buildings keep it company : the Nelson Monument,
memorials to Burns, to Dugald Stewart, and to
Professor Playfair, together with what the many
" guides," who by some phenomenal instinct scent the
stranger from afar, call an " obsairvatory."

Coaching days at Edinburgh ceased in 1846, when
that sole surviving relic of the coaches between London
and the North — the Edinburgh and Berwick coach —
was discontinued on the opening of the Edinburgh and
Berwick Company, completing the series of lines that
connect the two capitals. It is true that passengers
could not yet travel through without changing, for the
great bridges that cross the Tyne at Newcastle and
the Tweed at Berwick were not opened until four years
later ; but it was possible, with these exceptions, to
journey the whole distance by train. The opening of
the railway meant as great a change for Edinburgh
as did the beginning of the New Town seventy years
before. Just what it was like then we may judge from
the drawing made from the Castle by David Roberts
in 1847. The point of view he has chosen is that from
the Mons Meg Battery, and the direction of his glance,
omitting the Old Town on the right, is to the north-
east. Changes in detail have come about since then,
but, as a whole, it is the Edinburgh we all know : the
Calton Hill, with its cluster of weird monuments,
prominent ; the New Town, stretching away vaguely
to the water-side ; while in the distance, on the right,
is seen the shore curving to Portobello ; the twin
masses of the Bass Rock and North Berwick Law on
the horizon. Down in the New Town itself the changes
are evident. Where the toy train with its old-fashioned
locomotive is crawling out of the tunnel under the
Mound, and where the old Waverley Station is seen,
alterations have been plenty. The old North Bridge
pictured here has given place to a new, spanning the

THE END

ravine in three spans of steel. Beyond it are still seen
the smoked-grimed modern Gothic battlements of the
Calton Gaol, but the huge new hotel of the North
British Railway has replaced the buildings that rose
on that side of the old bridge, while the towering
offices of the Scotsman occupy the other, all in that
florid French Renaissance that is the keynote of
modern Edinburgh's architectural style. The Scott
Monument stands where it did, not, as David Roberts's
drawing shows us, among grounds but little cared for,
but amid gay parterres and velvet lawns. The Bank
of Scotland has been rebuilt and all the vacant sites
long built upon ; evidences these of half a century's
progress, the direct outcome of those railways that two
generations ago wrote " Finis " to the last chapter in
the romantic story of the Great North Road.

SKYLINE OF THE OLD TOWN.

INDEX

Aberford 74-76, 82

Alnwick: 174,186

" Andrew Mills' Stab " 113

Asenby > 84

Aycliffe 107

Ayton 208

Bagby Common 59

Bambrough Castle 190, 192

Barkston Ash 68, 71

Barwick-in-Elmete 76

Belford 189

Belhaven .216

Beltonford 216

Berwick-upon-Tweed 1 91 , 196-202

Birdforth 58

Birtley 135

Blagdon 166

Boroughbridge 82

Bramham 79

Bramham Moor 76, 79

Brotherton 66-68, 74

Browney Bridge 116

Brownyside 189

Broxburn 212

Burnmouth 208

Causey Park Bridge 172

Chester -le-Street 133-135

Clifton, Yorks 52 j

Clifton , Northumberland 00

Coaches —

Edinburgh Mails 55, 68

Edinburgh Express 55, 83

Glasgow and Carlisle Mail 82

S

Coaches — eon. PAGE

" High-flyer," London, York

and Edinburgh 28, 55, 68

Leeds Mail 75

Leeds and York Stage Coach 77

" Rockingham," Leeds 75

" Union," Leeds 75

" Wellington," London and

Newcastle 55, 62, 68

Coaching Accident 116

Coaching Notabilities : —

Alderson, Dr. S7

Holtby. Tom 28

" Nimrod " 76-79

Coatham Mundeville 107

Cockburnspath 210-212

" Conundrum " 202

Coxwold 59

Craigentinny 230

Croft 92-95

Cromwell, Oliver 107, 212

Croxdale 115

Cunecaster 133

Cuthbert, Saint ...66, 119, 124, 126, 190

Dalton-upon-Tees. . . ^ 92

Darling, Grace 190

Darlington 96-107

Darrington 65

De Quincey, Thomas 104

Dintingdale 69, 70

Dishforth 84

Doncaster 62

Dunbar 212-216

Dunglass Dene 214

Durham 118-131

THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

Easingwold 54-56

East Linton 216

Edinburgh 231-255

Elections 29-32

Fairburn 75

" Farmers' Folly," The, Alnwick,

174, 184, 186

Felton 172

Ferrybridge ....65-67

Ferryhill 110-112

Fisherrow 228

Flemington 207

Framwellgate, Durham 130

Framwellgate Moor 131

Galtres, Forest of 51, 51

Gateshead 152, 151-156

Gladsnuir 222

Gosforth 166

Grant's House 209

Great Smeaton 88

Grizzy's Clump 191

Haddington 219-222

Haggerston Castle 192-195

HalidonHill 207

Hambleton Hills 58, 59

Harlowgreen Lane 138

Heiferlaw Bank 187

Hell's Kettles 85

High Butcher Race 115

High Entercommon 88

Highwaymen : —

Boulter, Thomas 22-24

Hazlett, Robert ; 154

King, Tom 16

Nevison, John 19-22

Tate, Andrew 115

Turpin, Dick 14-19

Holy Island 189-191

Hook Moor 75

Houndwood , ....208

Inns (mentioned at length) : —

" Angel," Ferrybridge 67

" Angel," Wetherby 80

" Arabian House," Aberford 75

" Bay Horse," Skelton 53

" Bay Horse," Traveller's Rest ....108

" Black Swan," York 27, 28, 29

" Blue Bell," Went Bridge 65

" Comet," Croft 95

"Crown," Boroughbridge 83

" Etteridge's," York 27

" George," York 27

" Golden Lion," Ferrybridge 68

" Golden Lion," Northallerton 61

" Grant's House " 210

" Gretna Green Wedding,"

" Traveller's Rest " 107

" Greyhounds," Boroughbridge 83

" New Inn," Allerton 82

" New Inn," Easingwold 55

" Old Fox," Brotherton 68

" Old Fox," Wetherby 80

" Plough," Alnwick 177

" Red House," near Doncaster 63

" Rose and Crown," Easingwold 55

"Spa Hotel," Croft 92

" Spotted Dog," Thornton-le-Street 59

" Swan," Aberford 75

" Swan," Ferrybridge 67

" Walshford Bridge Inn " 82

" Wheatsheaf," Rushyford Bridge 109
" White Horse," Edinburgh ...234-236
" White House," ur. Easingwold.. 55-58
" York Tavern," York 27

Jock's Lodge 230

Joppa 228

Kirk Deighton 82

Knavesmire, York 15, 32, 52

Kyloe ...191

Lamberton Toll

" Lambtou Worm," The

202-207

,...132

INDEX

PAGE

Leven hall 22:

Little Smeaton 89

Lovesome Hill 88

Low Butcher Race 115

Macmerry •. 222

Malcolm's Cross 188

Martin, Jonathan 14, 42-51

Merrington 112-114

Metcalf, John v 83

Micklefield 75

Morpeth 167-173

Musselburgh 227

Neville's Cross, Battle of 123

Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1 54-166

Newsham 84

Newton-on-the-Moor 1 74

" Nineveh," or Claro Hill 82

Northallerton 59-62, 84

North Charlton 189

North Otterington 84

Old-Time Travellers : —

Calderwood of Coltness, Mrs 129

Defoe, Daniel 172

Derwentwater, Earl of 116

Eldon, Earl of 109, 160

Evelyn, John 63

James the First 96

J eanie Deans 230

Johnson, Dr 61, 202

Macready, W. J 207

Montagu, Mrs 187

Sterne, Rev. Laurence 59

Thoresby, Ralph 84, 116

Old-Time Travelling 77-79, 88-91, 97-103
155, 199, 232-237

Partinghal 208

Penshaw Monument 131

Percys, the Dukes of Northumberland,

178-186, 138-152

PAGE

Phantassie 216

Piershill 230

" Pity Me " 132

Plawsworth 132

Portobello 229

Prestonpans, Battle of 222, 224-226

Railways :—

Edinburgh and Berwick 104, 199, 254

Great, Northern 104

North British 104, 255

North-Eastern 104, 115, 196

Stockton and Darlington 98-100

Rashelfe 58

Richardson's Stead 195

Robin Hood's Well 63

Rob Roy 97

Roderick Random 138-152

Ross 208

Runaway Marriages 203 207

Rushy Cap 172

Rushy-ford Bridge 109

Sand Hntton 84

Saxton 70, 72

Scott, Sir Walter 97, 123

Scremerston 195

Seaton Burn 166

Shaftholme Junction 104

Shipton 54

Skelton 53

" Sockburn Worm," The 93

" Sockeld's Leap " 116

South Otterington 84

Sunderland Bridge 115

Standard, Battle of the 87

Tadcaster 68,71

Thirkleby Park 59

Thirsk 59

Thormanby 59

Thornton-le-Street 59

Tollerton Cross-Lanes 54