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A TOUR ROUND ENGLAND.
BY
WALTER THORNBURY,
AUTHOR OF ' HAUNTED LONDON,' ETC.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. II.
>
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS,
13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1870.
Tin riijht of Translation is reserved.
London : Printed by Macdonald & Tugwell,
Marlborough Mews. Oxford Street.
CONTENTS
OF
THE SECOND VOLUME.
SECOND FLIGHT— Continued.
CHAPTER TAGE
XVIII. (Suffolk.) Framlingham to Lowestoft . . 3
XIX. Norfolk and Yarmouth 27
XX. Norfolk.— Caistor to Cromer . . • .51
THIRD FLIGHT— DUE SOUTH.
XXL Cheam to Epsom 81
XXII. ASHSTEAD AND LEATHERHEAD TO DORKING AND WOTTON 95
XXIII. Winchester to Southampton . • . .117
FOURTH FLIGHT— DUE NORTH.
XXIV. St. Albans to Bedford and Kimbolton . . 143
XXV. Peterborough to Lincoln 164
XXVI. Lincoln 182
XXVII. Leeds and York to Rokeby .... 205
XXVIII. Scarborough. (One Point of View.) . . 222
XXIX. Scarborough. (From another Point of View.) 251
XXX. Durham 266
XXXI. Alnwick to Berwick 290
SECOND FLIGHT— Continued.
DUE EAST.
VOL. II.
A. TOUR ROUND ENGLAND.
CHAPTER XVIII.
(SUFFOLK.) FRAMLINGHAM TO LOWESTOFT.
A TALENTED modern writer, who has made Suf-
folk the background of some of his best novels,
has taken up arms gallantly in defence of the scenery
of East Anglia. He contends that the county that
fostered the genius of Gainsborough and Constable,
and nurtured that contemplative and mournful poet,
" nature's sternest painter yet the best," is neither
flat, dull, nor monotonous. From the brow of its
hillocks, the crow may, he thinks, obtain gratifying
glimpses of verdant and thickly-wooded landscape,
of umbrageous park, of rivers glancing from dark
recesses of shade, of peaceful church towers, grey
sentinels of leafy hamlets. " For," he says, in " Crew
Rise," " as the traveller gets away from the heaths on
the sea coast on the one side, or the broad open
fields of the light lands on the other side of the coun-
ty, and works his way into what is called by the
B 2
A Tour Round /England.
aborigines ' the garden of Suffolk,' he unceasingly
comes to breaks in the high fences which border the
lanes he passes along and through. These openings
rejoice us with the sight of some snatch of scenery
which refreshes the eye." And truly the crow, cut-
ting his swift path from Aldborough to Framlingham,
does get many pleasant glimpses of abbey ruins, of
farm-houses built out of half demolished mansions, of
snug cottages at the corners of woods, of old halls
almost hidden by broad- armed oaks, and of high
roads cool and umbrageous as park avenues.
A continued series of quiet Gainsborough land-
scapes surround Framlingham, the old town of the
pleasant hilly ground near the sources of the river
Ore, which falls into the sea at Oreford. Britons,
Romans, Saxons, and Danes alternately chased each
other in and out of this fortified place, till at last a
sort of sensible compromise was effected, and shak-
ing down altogether in a clubbable way, the Danes
gave the good-natured place the Saxon name of
Friemdlingham (stranger's home). The town of the
mere and the river soon became a stronghold, and
Redwald, one of the earliest of the East Anglian
kings, is said to have occupied the castle with his
spearmen. More certain it is that King Edmund was
enthroned here, and in this town enjoyed some hap-
py days of a troublous reign. After the battles of
Thetford and Dunwich, the king was besieged at
Framlingham Castle.
Framlingham by the ravenous sea robbers. The
monarch fled, but was pursued, shot to death with
arrows, and then beheaded. His head was found
under a bush at Hoxne, a small village on the
Waveney, and there the martyr's body lay till it was
removed to Beodrics-worthe, which then became a
much frequented shrine of special sanctity, and soon
acquired its present name of Bury St. Edmunds.
The Norman Conqueror in due time laid his strong
hand on Framlingham Castle, but the present build-
ing, with its thirteen square massy towers fifty-eight
feet high, and its long battlemented lines of walls forty-
four feet high and eight feet thick, are only of the early
part of the fifteenth century, and were built by Thomas
de- Brotherton in the unhappy reign of Edward the
Second. A grand gate still fronts the broad cause-
way of the approach. On the west side a mere
guarded the walls ; on the east there was a double
ditch. Altogether it is a royal ruin. Every place of
this kind has had its culminating time of greatness to
which it rose, and after which it fell. The culmination
came to Framlingham in 1553. Young King Edward
died at Greenwich in July of that year. The moment
he appeared to be dying, the crafty and ambitious
Northumberland, who is supposed to have poisoned
him, attempted to get the two princesses into his
power. Mary was already within half a day's journey
of the wolf's den when the Earl of Arundel sent her
6 A Tour Round England.
secret intelligence of the conspiracy. She instantly
hurried to Framlingham, and gathered an army (if
thirteen thousand men under its walls. The Tndor
blood burned within her, and her father's lion spirit
asserted itself. She wrote to the chief nobles and
gentlemen of England, calling on them to defend her
crown and person, and to the council desiring them
to proclaim her accession in London. Worst come to
the worst she could easily, on a defeat, hurry to
Yarmouth, and from there embark to Flanders. But
nobles and yeomen flocked to her daily, and faster
still came the billmen and bowmen when they knew
that she had promised not to alter the laws of good
King Edward. The Earls of Bath and Sussex, the
eldest sons of Lord Wharton and Lord Mordaunt, Sir
William Drury, Sir Henry Bedingfield, and Henry
Jerningham, great Suffolk landowners, rode in to
Framlingham at the head of their retainers. Sir Ed-
ward Hastings brought over a small army. Nor-
thumberland's fleet, driven into Yarmouth by a storm,
declared for Mary. In the meantime poor Lady
Jane Grey reigned unwillingly in the Tower. The
duke (the real monarch) as he left London to join his
army, said forebodingly to Lord Grey, his atten-
dant :
" Many come out to look at us, but I find not one
who cries, ' God speed us.' "
The moment the Duke left London, the council
The Queen of Ten Days.
quitted the Tower, and going to Baynard's Castle,
near St. Paul's, proclaimed Mary Queen. Suffolk
surrounded the Tower, and the poor queen of ten
days then returned to her quiet country life, and those
books which had been the dear companions of her
studious youth. Northumberland, finding his army
of six thousand men rapidly disbanding, laid down
his arms at Bury St. Edmunds. Mary soon after
entered London in triumph, and was welcomed by
her brave sister Elizabeth at the head of a thousand
horse which she had levied. On the 22nd of August,
Northumberland deservedly lost his mischievous head
on Tower Hill, and two of his special abettors were
also executed with him. Sentence was pronounced
against Lady Jane Grey and Lord Guildford ; but
they were so young, neither of them being seventeen,
that it seemed murder to carry severity further than
imprisonment. But in February of the next year
Wyatfa unsuccessful march on London, with four
thousand Kentish men, proved fatal to Lady Jane
and her husband, who were soon after executed pri-
vately on Tower Green.
In the old flint church of St. Michael at Framling-
ham — a fine decorated building, with a perpendicular
clerestory, a very rich timber roof, and a grand tower
ninety feet high — there are some interesting monu-
ments of the Norfolk family. On the south side of
the chancel is the very effigies of that Thomas, third
8 A Tour Bound England.
Duke of Norfolk, who led our knights and archers at
Flodden to the slaughter of ten thousand Scotchmen
and their chivalrous hot-blooded King James. That
heavy blow stopped the inroads of our warlike neigh-
bours for many a day ; yet, after all, the dogs of war
were " scotched, not killed ;" and in Charles's time the
Lowlanders and Highlanders were down on us again,
till Cromwell beat them small as dust at Dunbar, and
scattered them like chaff before the wind. On the
north side of Framlingham chancel (for, as Bob Acres
observed, "there is snug lying in the abbey") rests
the counterfeit of the poet, Earl of Surrey — he and
his Countess, the successful rival of the fair Geraldine,
who was born here, clasp hands unchangeably on a
tomb erected here 1617 (James the First). This ill-
starred young noble, who was cup-bearer to King
Henry the Eighth, and accompanied him to the Field
of the Cloth of Gold, in 1535 married Lady Francis
Vere, daughter of the Earl of Oxford. In 1542 he
fought with his father against the Scotch, and helped
to burn Kelso. He next distinguished himself in
France ; but his army, being overpowered near St.
Etienne in 1545-6, he was recalled and disgraced.
The king, jealous of him, and irritated by Sum
enemies, sent the young general to the Tower, and
finally had him brought to trial for having the arms
of Edward the Confessor, although it was well known
that Richard the Second had granted these heraldic
The Poet Surrey. 9
bearings to the Howard family. He was beheaded in
1547. His poems were not published till ten years
after his death. It has never been discovered who
the Geraldine was to whom he addressed his sonnets.
Horace Walpole tried to prove it to be Lady Elizabeth
Fitzgerald ; but she was only a child (twelve or thir-
teen) when these verses were written. Surrey, though
not a genius, was certainly undoubtedly useful to
succeeding English poets, for he transplanted the
Italian sonnets, and he introduced blank verse. That
great authority, Mr. Hallam, praises his taste, his
correctness of style, and purity of expression. His
" means to attain a happy life," are characteristic of
his classical tendencies :
" Mortal, the things that do attain
The happy life by these I find
The riches left, not got with pain,
The fruitful ground, the quiet mind."
Near the Earl of Surrey rests the friend with whom
he was brought up, and to whom he alludes in his
poem, " The Prisoner at Windsor" — Henry, Duke of
Richmond, that bastard son of Henry the Eighth, who
married Mary, a sister of the Earl. There are also
here effigies of Mary (Fitzalan and Margaret Aud-
ley) first and second wives of Thomas, the fourth Duke
of Norfolk, beheaded in 1572 (Elizabeth), for a long
course of guilty plotting and foolish dangerous in-
trigue with that evil woman, Mary Queen of Scots.
10 A Tour Round England.
On to Southwold, centre of a later history and of
old sea legends of the great wars with the Dutch that
ensanguined the North Sea and the east coast all
through the reckless reign of Charles the Second.
Southwold is the wreck of a larger town destroyed
by fire in April, 1(359 (the month and year Richard
Cromwell resigned). The whole region was once a
forest (South-wood), and is called in Domesday Book
" Bovens." The coast here since then is supposed to
have receded nearly a mile. The hill on which the
one long street of the town is built is steep to the sea,
but slopes inland to the marshes formed by the river
Blythe. Southwold is almost insulated, for on the
north is Buss Creek (Buss is the old Dutch word for
a herring boat), and on the east the German Ocean.
Southwold was once the rival of Dunwich, which was
the abode of East Anglian kings and of prelates too,
till the see became part of the diocese of Norwich.
Dunwich boasted eight churches, besides convents,
hospitals, and a chantry. It was so wealthy a place
indeed, that when Richard Coeur-de-Lion fined the
East Anglian forts for supplying his enemies with
corn, Ipswich and Yarmouth only paid two hundred
marks each, while Dunwich was taxed one thousand
and sixty marks. An inundation of the sea destroy-
ed the town, which is now a mere cluster of sloping
cornfields round grey monastic ruins. The King's
Holm, tradition says, was buried under a flood of
Southwold Fishermen. 11
shingle, while the Cock-and-Hen hills were washed
away with all the chief buildings of the town.
The coast between Dunwich and Southwold is flat,
and terraced with shingle. " The low coast (line)
with level pastures and dykes behind" is broken only
by the tall tower of Walberswick and the rounded
height that terminates Solebay. At the mouth of
the Blythe long timber piles stretch out to form a
port. A broad tongue of shingle spreads across the
entrance, and through the narrowed neck the tide runs
in furiously. The inland scenery is quite Dutch in
character. The meadows are surrounded by high
banks, along which run the paths, and the common
lands are under the charge of " fen reeves." The town
once depended on its trade with Iceland for ling, but
the Southwold fishermen (one hundred boats or so)
now depend on the catching of soles and shrimps, and
on the trapping of visitors, who are attracted by the
breezy crags and the dry healthy gravel on which
the houses stand. The fishermen congregate on the
outer side of the bluff, round their two shelter sheds,
watching the boat-builders, or are found smoking
against the capstans, and on clear nights trying to
make out Orford light. There are two government
batteries (twelve eighteen-pounders)at Eyecliff, where
the Danes once had a fort, and at Gunhill is an old
battery of six old-fashioned guns taken at Preston by
the Pretender, and re-captured at Culloden. The
12 A Tour Round England.
Duke of Cumberland gave theru to the town. South-
wold church (St. Edmund the Martyr), built in 1460
(Henry the Sixth), is one hundred and forty-four feet
long, and, with its eighteen clerestory windows, ap-
pears like a huge casket of glass. The temperature
of Southwold is so mild that it is always honoured
by the earliest arrival and latest departure of our dis-
tinguished visitor — the swallow. Amber and jet
are dredged up here, and cornelians and agates
hide themselves among the vulgar pebbles of the
beach.
Beyond Southwold the crow discerns new features
of the Suifolk coast scenery in the Broads (as at Easton
and Covehithe), where large sheets of water collect
near the shore, and after heavy rains are allowed to
escape by sluices into the sea. Rough paths, through
scrub, rushes, and sea holly, over a rugged beach
strewn with lumps of shelly red crag, shingle, and
sand hills, low cliffs covered with fern and heath,
hollows of loose sand, and bluffs honeycombed by
sand martins, guide the crow to Solebay. On these
calm blue waters, under the silent cliffs, took place on
June 1st, 1672 (Charles the Second), that tremendous
naval battle between sixty-five English sail command-
ed by the Duke of York, and thirty-five French men-
of-war under the Count d'Etrees, and ninety-one Dutch
vessels led by the famous De Ruyter. He and Tromp
had tormented and insulted us long enough, a' 1 we
The Doomed Earl. 13
owed him and Van Ghent one for having in 1667
taken Sheerness, sailed up the Medway, and burned
six men-of-war. The Dutch, too, had had their
wrongs ; for they were savage with us for having just
before tried hard to swoop down on their Smyrna
fleet and its two million of treasure. The Dutch were
stolid dogged old enemies, who had learned to disre-
gard our self-assumed sovereignty of the seas, and
they took a good deal of pounding. De Ruyter was
eager to give us a final crippling blow at sea and
leave him free to pour the musketeers of Utrecht and
Guelderland on the French, who, under Turenne and
Conde, were then taking and subduing Holland town
by town, and preparing for the famous passage of
the Rhine. Pepys's friend, the Earl of Sandwich, had
warned the Duke of the danger of being netted in
Southwold Bay, where the Dutch fire-ships could
have burnt us like so many chips in a grate. Bat the
Duke (never very sweet-tempered) had only replied
to the Earl's cautions by a sneer at his timidity. The
taunts rankled in the Earl's soul, and he resolved to
conquer or perish. The moment the Dutch appeared,
closing their nets in upon us, he bore out of the bay
to give the Duke and the French admiral time to de-
bouch. Then he went at the enemy like a mad lion.
He killed our old foe Van Ghent, and beat off his ship
after a furious fight. He then sank a Dutch man-of-
war and three fire ships that grappled with him. His
14 A Tour Round England.
own vessel was now shattered and pierced, two-
thirds of his nine hundred men were killed or
wounded, yet he still continued to blaze at the
enemy, till a third Dutch fire-ship closed with him,
and refusing to escape, he perished, fighting to the
last. Nor was the Duke all this time idle. He bore
down on De Ruyter and hammered at him for two
hours, till night came. Two and thirty battles the
grey old Dutch veteran had fought, but never, he
declared, so hard a one as this. In the morning the
Duke of York (certainly not a Nelson) thought it
prudent to retire. The Dutch, though disabled,
began to harass his retreat, till he turned on them,
and, bull-dog like, renewed the fight, while Sir
Joseph Jordan, who led our van, got the weather
gauge of De Ruyter, who then fairly fled, pursued by
the Duke to the coast of Holland. We were close at
the Dutchman's rear, and only a timely Dutch fog
saved fifteen of his leaky and lagging vessels. The
French took little part in the fray, for their captains
had been told by Louis the Fourteenth to leave the
English and the Dutch to fight it out between them.
The French, however, lost two ships and their rear-
admiral ; we six ships (one taken, two burned, and
three sunk) and two thousand men. The Dutch
confessed to three large vessels, but the States
General forbade the publication of their casualties.
It was not much of a victory, that must be confessed.
Cannon heard Seventy Miles. 15
and far unlike the tremendous overthrow of the
Dutch by Monk in 1653, when Van Tromp perished,
It is a curious fact about this battle of Solebay that
the sound of the cannonading was heard thirty miles.
The Earl of Ossory, then at Euston, eight miles north
of Bury St. Edmunds, heard the firing and instantly
took horse and galloped thirty miles to join the fleet.
But this story is quite surpassed by a Cambridge
tradition of Newton. In June, 166(3 — those three
days that the English and Dutch fleets were wrang-
ling and fighting between the Naze and the North
Foreland, distant at least seventy miles from Cam-
bridge — Newton, then a Bachelor of Arts at Trinity,
and just commencing his optical discoveries, came
one day into the college hall and told the fellows
that a battle was being fought between the Dutch
and the English, and that the latter were having the
worst of it. He had been studying, he said, in the
observatory over the gateway, and had there heard
the vibration of cannon. It seemed to grow louder
as it came nearer ; he therefore concluded that we
had had the worst of it. Mr. White quotes a fine old
naval ballad :
" I cannot stay to name the names
Of all the ships that fought with James,
Their number or their tonnage ;
But this I say, the noble host
Right gallantly did take its post,
And covered all the hollow coast
From Walderswyck to Dunwich.
16 A Tour Round England.
Well might you hear their guns I guess
From Sizewell Gap to Euston ness.
The show was rare and sightly :
They batter'd without let or stay
Until the evening of that day —
'Twas then the Dutchmen ran away,
The Duke had beat them tightly.
Of all the battles gained at sea,
This was the rarest victory
Since Philip's grand armada.
I will not name the rebel Blake ;
He fought for Roundhead Cromwell's sake,
And yet was forced three days to take
To quell the Dutch bravado.
So now we've seen them take to flight —
This way and that, where'er they might,
To windward or to leeward.
Here's to King Charles, and here's to James,
And here's to all the captains' names,
And here's to all the Suffolk dames,
And here's the house of Stuart."
Up the Waveney now for the crow, " the waving
water" of the Saxons, the stream that winds through
broad green tranquil meadows, spotted red with
cattle, past rushy flats and draining mills, and rows
of poplars, and heathy slopes, and patches of fir. and
golden swaying oceans of corn, with towers and
spires for landmarks. Bungay " le bon Eye " (the
beautiful island) we strike for, a sleepy old Hast
Anglian town, with a round-towered church, and the
old flint walls of Hugh Bigod's Castle, now lurking
embowered in the "King's Head" gardens. Hugh
Bigod was one of those proud barons who rebelled
Bigod the Bold. 17
against Henry the Second, that prince who recovered
his dominions at the death of the usurper Stephen,
and who, after expiating the murder of Beckett,
subduing Ireland, defeating by turns the Scotch
and the French, died at last almost broken-hearted
at the ingratitude of his rebellious children, who, in
their turn, were tormented by their offspring. It was
in 1174 that the King sent for Hugh Bigod, and the
story still lives in the ballad. The very old ballad
(so old indeed it can hardly walk alone) says :
" The king has sent for Bigod bold,
In Essex whereat he lay ;
But Lord Bigod laughed at his poursuivant,
And stoutly thus did say,
1 Were I in my castle of Bungay
Upon the river of Wavenay,
1 would not care for the King of Cokenay
Nor all his bravery.'
The Baily he rode, and the Baily he ran,
To catch the gallant Lord Hugh,
But for every mile the Baily rode,
The Earl he rode more than two.
When the Baily had ridden to Bramfield oak,
Sir Hugh was at Ilksale bower,
When the Baily had ridden to Halesworth cross,
He was singing in Bungay tower."
We regret, however, to state that the bold Bigod,
in spite of his bragging and his five hundred soldiers
from Framlingham, proved dunghill after all, and
instead of replying to the king with arrows and
crossbow bolts, craftily capitulated in the folio w-
V()L. II. C
18 A Tour Round England.
ing unworthy manner. The king arrived, and there-
upon
" Sir Hugh took threescore sacks of gold
And flung them over the wall,
Says, ' Go your way in the devil's name,
Yourself and your merry men all ;
But leave me my castle of Bungay
Upon the river of Wavenay,
And I'll pay my shot to the King of Cokenay."
The Bramfield oak referred to in the above ballad of
1174 did not fall till June 15, 1843. This Bigod of
the loud words became a crusader, and died in 1177,
when his castle was destroyed. A Roger Bigod
restored it in 1281 (Edward the First). It is hard to
efface the results of man's thought and labour, and
great remains still exist here both of Roman and of
Norman toil. The keep and inner bailey of the
castle, which is octangular in ground plan, stands on
a high mound above the moats, and a vast earthen
rampart (probably Roman) stretches down to the
Waveney, and is continued along the edge of the
hill above Bridge Street, then, in a crescent form,
on the north and west again to the river. Two
round gate towers without loop or window stand at
thirty feet distance from the keep, which is fifty-four
feet square ; the curtain walls are one hundred and
eighteen feet high, and ten or twelve feet through.
King Stephen took this castle at Whitsuntide in
1140. Iu the reign of Henry the Eighth the Duke
The Dog Fiend, W
of Norfolk deserted Bungay Castle for Kenning Hall*
a more cheerful place.
St. Mary's church at Bungay once formed part of a
Benedictine nunnery, founded by Roger de Glanville
and his Countess Gundreda, in the reign of Henry
the Second — that very reign, indeed, in which Bigod
was besieged by the King of Cockayne. In Edward
the First's time this nunnery contained a prioress
and fifteen religious sisters, but at the Dissolution
there were only seven nuns remaining, living on a
yearly income of sixty-two pounds two shillings, and
fourpence. Henry the Eighth gave the foundation
to the Duke of Norfolk. It was upon this same St.
Mary's church that a tremendous storm of thunder
and lightning broke, August 4, 1577 (Elizabeth).
Several persons were struck. In this same awful
storm — which broke out between nine and ten A.M.,
during divine service, which was earlier in those days
than now — forty persons were felled by lightning at
the church in the adjoining village of Blythburg.
The superstition of the Bungay people was roused to
the utmost by this falling of the fire from heaven,
and some excited imaginations declared they saw
during the flashes a huge black dog, of Satanic ori-
gin, rush down the aisle and gripe one person in the
back, and wring the necks of two others. The
Waveney, at Bungay, is the Boundary of Norfolk
and Suffolk, and the small barges upon its waters
c 2
20 A Tour Round England.
bring from and cany into Suffolk stores of corn,
malt, flour, coal, and lime. Bungay, quiet and even
sleepy as it is now, has had its deep sorrows and its
stormy troubles. In March, 1688 (James the Se-
cond), an irresistible fire destroyed, in four hours
only, a church, the market cross, and four hundred
houses, leaving only one small street and a few cot-
tages standing. Horace "Walpole once said of a
London earthquake that it was so quiet you might
have stroked it. One of these gentle earthquakes
was felt here and at Yarmouth, January 15, 1757.
On to Lowestoft, which first
" Of all old England's busy towns, uplifts
Its orisons and greets the rising morn."
According to Mr. Walcott, the name of the town in
Domesday was Lothu-YVistoft, that is, the toft or
cluster of houses by the Loth (slow) river, and he
supposes that Lothen and Wing, Danes, after the
conquest of Essex, in 1047 (Edward the Confessor),
established a station here to receive Danish colonists.
The old Danish fishing town, on which a modern
watering place has engrafted itself, stands on an
eminence backed by hills with a broad beach at its
feet. Below the houses on the brow of the ridge,
hanging gardens slope to the alluvial land lying be-
tween Lake Lothing and the sea. Beyond this flat
land " the ground rises at Kirkley into another line
of cliffs, which stretch along the Suffolk coast." cut
Old "crib" Potter. 21
through here and there by rivers. The beach along
this shore is a mere strip of shingle, from which runs
the great shoal called the Pakefield Flats, probably-
submerged land ; but the sands of the Denes, in
front of Lowestoft, are never overflowed. The flood
stream and the ebb tide have each scooped out bays,
and formed shoals of the displaced material.
The legends of Lowestoft are of a naval and pis-
catorial kind. In the Civil War times the Cavaliers
of Lowestoft were always privateering against Yar-
mouth, and the cliffs between the rival towns were
constantly vibrating to the sound of their cannons.
There has, indeed, long been a jealousy between
the two places, and it existed even in the times of
old Potter (1789-1804), the worthy and learned vicar
of Lowestoft, gratefully known to us in our school
days for those flowery translations of iEschylus, So-
phocles, and Euripides, fluent " cribs " much resorted
to by "first form" boys. Old Potter was jealous
for the honour of Lowestoft, and when the primate
of those days once wrote to him, and addressed the
letter " Lowestoft, near Yarmouth," the vicar expos-
tulated in his grand and rhetorical manner : " The
next time your grace will be pleased to write simply
Lowestoft. Lowestoft does not want Yarmouth for
a direction post, for Lowestoft was ere Yarmouth
rose out of the azure main."
The Swan Inn on the east side of High Street is
22 A Tour Round England.
still pointed out as the head-quarters of Cromwell
when here, looking keenly after the east coast in
1644. Short as that visit was, his bronze face, his
plain steel corselet, and his simple, soldierly dress,
will always haunt the memory of Lowestoft. The
fishing people here were always proud of their sea
trophies ; formerly at weddings rows of ship flags
used to be hung across the streets, and some of these
had been captured by Arnold, a Lowestoft man, from
the "Royal Philip," a Spanish man-of-war. Close by,
at Barsham Rectory house, Catherine, Lord Nelson's
mother, was born 1725. Admiral Sir Thomas Allin,
who, in the time of the Commonwealth, snapped up
a rich Smyrna fleet, was a Lowestoft man ; and
from the same part of the coast came also those two
brave seamen, Sir John Ashby and Sir Andrew
Leake ; the latter, " the handsome captain," admired
by Queen Anne, who assisted Rooke in the taking
of Gibraltar from the Spaniards (1704). He was
desperately wounded in an action off Malaga, but he
would not go below, and sat erect and grand in his
cocked hat and gold laced coat, and kept his post in
an arm-chair on his quarter-deck till he saw the shat-
tered sails of the enemy fade back into the smoke.
Then he arose, smiled, and fell dead. There is a
monument to this staunch old warrior in the che-
quered flint-work church of Saint Margaret. The
same church contains monuments of old "crib" Pot-
" Wicked Will Whiston." 23
ter (bless him !), of John Tanner, who edited the
Monasticon of his learned and ponderous brother, the
Bishop of St. Asaph ; of Lord Chief Justice Holt, that
sound constitutional lawyer of the great Revolution
of 1686 ; and of poor heretical Whiston, the hetero-
dox Holborn rector and the suspected professor of
mathematics at Cambridge. Will Whiston was vicar
here from 1698 to 1702. Swift wrote terrible verses
upon him, and held him up to the most scathing ridi-
cule, but he really seems to have been only a clever,
eccentric, wrong-headed enthusiast, always doing odd
and mistaken things.
But the greatest event of which Lowestoft ever
was a witness was the great pounding match between
the English and Dutch fleets in June, 1665. The Duke
of York, Rupert, the Earl of Sandwich, Penn, Ays-
cough, and Lawson led our grand fleet of one hundred
and fourteen ships of war, not including fire-ships and
ketches. The Dutch had only one hundred sail ; but
then they were led by Opdam and Van Tromp, and
their example was worth twenty frigates. We lost
only one vessel. The Dutch, bleeding and beaten,
hauled off eventually to the Texel, with a loss of
eighteen ships taken and fourteen burnt or sunk. It
was a glorious victory. Pepys, proud of his patron,
the Earl of Sandwich, says " the Dutch neglected the
opportunity of the wind, and so lost the benefit of
their fire-ships. It was hot work in the Duke's ship,
24 A Tour Round England.
the 'Royal Charles,' where one shot killed the Eai'l of
Falmouth, Muskerry, and Sir Richard Boyle (the Earl
of Burlington's second son). It was reported that Mr.
Boyle's head struck down the Duke, and he was cover-
ed with his blood and brains. We lost about seven
hundred men, the Dutch eight thousand." At this
very time the Plague had just broken out in London,
and only the day before his entry of the victory, Pepys
says:
u The hottest day that ever I felt in my life. This
day, much against my will, I did in Drury Lane see
two or three houses marked with a red cross upon
the doors, and * Lord have mercy upon us' writ there,
in which was a sad sight to me, being the first of the
kind that, to my remembrance, I ever saw."
The Lowestoft two-masted luggers are famous
in the North Sea. The town boasts some twenty-
five, besides fifty half-and-half boats. In 1802
they caught thirty thousand mackerel ; iu 1853,
30,750,000 in ten weeks. They were valued at
ten thousand pounds. It is calculated that the nets
of the Lowestoft and Yarmouth fishermen, if placed in
a straight line, would reach two hundred miles. The
herring fishery commences on this east coast a fort-
night before Michaelmas and lasts to Martinmas.
The prosperity of Lowestoft commenced in 1827,
when Mr. Cubitt began operations to form Lake Loth-
ing, with its one hundred and sixty acres to the
Progress of Lowestoft. 25
south-west, into an inner harbour and part of a ship
canal to Norwich. Before that a rampart of sand had
formed between Lake Lothing and the sea, and at
times the lowlands used to be flooded, and the bridge
at Mutford, two miles from the coast, to be carried
away by the spring tides. In 1831 the works were
completed, and, at a cost of eighty-seven thousand
pounds, the river Waveney re-wedded to the sea.
Government took possession of the harbour in 1842,
in default of the liquidation of advances made for the
works, and in 1844 it was sold to Mr. Peto.
The inner harbour, two miles long with three thou-
sand feet of wharfage, will accommodate vessels of
four hundred tons, and those which draw fifteen feet
at any time of the tide. The railway was opened in
1847. The south pier is one thousand three hundred
feet long. The north pier, devoted chiefly to the
Danish cattle trade, has often sheltered five hundred
sail. The dry dock cost ten thousand pounds. In
1845 there were only four hundred and ten vessels
frequenting Lowestoft ; in 1851 one thousand six
hundred and thirty-six vessels of one hundred and
thirty-three thousand nine hundred and fourteen tons
entered the harbour. The town now boasts one
thousandsix hundred houses, and a population of more
than six thousand seven hundred and eighty-one per-
sons. The herring curing-houses are ontheDenes,sands
that spread at the foot of the cliffs. In the north and
26 A Tour Round England.
south roads seven hundred sail are sometimes seen at
anchor, sheltered by the Corton and Newcome sand
banks. The lighthouse for the chief channel is movable.
A gong sounds on the Stanford sand floating light
during fogs.
27
CHAPTER XIX.
NORFOLK AND YARMOUTH.
THE crow, as he glances along the Norfolk coast to
Yarmouth, is informed that centuries ago, when
Carausius, the Roman admiral of the Saxon shore,
was building forts to keep out the Jutes and Angles,
and later, when the vexatious Danes were perpetually
landing at Cromer, or Caistor, or Weybourne Hope,
the coast of Norfolk was a mere group of low islets,
Norwich was a seaport, the walls of Bungay castle
faced the sea, and the site of Yarmouth was the basin
of an estuary. The Yare, the Waveney, and the Bure
still flow through marshy flats, studded by insulated
holmes and by small lakes ; but in the early centuries
half Norfolk must have been a mere reedy refuge for
snipes and plovers, herons and curlews.
Yarmouth, with its population of thirty thousand
herring catchers and herring eaters, stands at the
confluence of the Yar (Celtic, dark) water, the Wave-
ney and the Bure, in the centre of a low sandy pen-
28 A Tour Round England.
insula, surrounded by these rivers and the German
ocean. It is mentioned by Ptolemy (70), and close
by, at Caistor, Roman cavalry were quartered, as the
learned Spelman thinks. The scenery on the Bure,
as the crow approaches Yarmouth, struck that rest-
less bird as peculiarly Dutch. Towards the sea, the
pumps driven by wind are superseded by scoop
wheels driven by more resolute and active steam.
There are cattle swimming across the river at Run-
ham Swim and Mautby Swim, and where the banks
are protected with flints the water becomes gay with
flashing wherries; presently there appear houses with
quaint gables and dormer windows, then lines of trees,
and masts of ships rising among roofs; soon sand-hills
glisten against the sun, and the curious crow's nest
look-out at Caistor shows conspicuously against the
sky. More gardens, orchards-, and boats, an old round
tower with a conical roof, on the left bank, and the
crow has Yarmouth all before him where to choose.
The sea has not encroached upon the Yarmouth
sands since the reign of Elizabeth. They are sup-
posed by an eminent topographical authority to have
become firm, consistent, and habitable about the year
1008. Gradually the old estuary was blocked, the
river only keeping open a narrow washed-out chan-
nel, which within five centuries has been deflected
four miles to the south. The flood tide from the
north is the cause of this southward deflection of the
Yarmouth when Young. 29
Yare, and the other rivers of the eastern coast.
That great artificer, Nature, has so directed the
sands here that thousands of acres of land have been
reclaimed from the greedy sea, and about sixty fresh-
water lakes formed, which threaten at times to drain
away the Yare and sister streams. About Cromer way
the earth is yielding to the sea in all directions ; here
at Yarmouth the sea is conquering. The theory is
this, and it gives a curious notion of the vast agen-
cies at work in re-shaping the outer surface of the
earth. Only a portion of the great tidal Waves of the
Atlantic passes up the channel through the Straits
of Dover, the great mass moving more swiftly up the
west sweeps round the Orkneys, and pours down
southward between Norway and Scotland. Where-
ever, therefore, a river stream breaks a passage
through this southward beating pulsation of the
great ocean's heart, there sand banks are deposited at
the angle where the two forces meet.
Yarmouth, first mentioned in 1081, was originally
a mere cluster of tarry fishermen's huts on a sand
bank at the mouth of the Yare. The chief eminence
in the neighbourhood is still called Fuller's Hill,
from the name of one of the first settlers. Gradually
the sand-bank increased its deposits, gave up its
sinking fund, and became a resort of French, Nor-
wegian, and Dutch fishermen. The first charter,
establishing Yarmouth as a sort of herring kingdom,
30 A Tour Round England.
was granted in 1108, and confirmed by successive
sovereigns until 1702, the year before Queen Anne
came to the throne. In 1(596 the north channel of
the Yare became choked by a sort of sand apoplexy.
Gradually the mere obstruction grew into an island,
and the inhabitants here about then moved south-
ward to the Cerdic or Cedric sands, so called, accord-
ing to tradition, from some early Saxon invader.
There was always a creeping fear ou this side of
Norfolk that the sea eventually meant them some
mischief, for even that audacious and confident old
witch, Mother Shipton, prophesied that Yarmouth
would become a nettle bush, the bridges be pulled
up, and small vessels be seen sailing to Irstead and
Barton Broads. 'When Henry the Third gave a
charter to Yarmouth in 1260, he allowed a wall to be
built, enclosing the houses on the land side. This
was commenced thirteenth Edward the First, and
completed eleventh Edward the Second. A castle
with four watch-towers was also erected in the centre
of the town, and the date of its erection marks tin-
period when the home of the Norfolk fishermen was
first thought worth defending. The serviceable old
rampart is still to be tracked through the quaint
narrow streets of Yarmouth. First there is an old
conical roofed north tower by the Bure some twenty-
five feet in diameter, strongly built of flint, with
thin red brick for the upper story. Close by stands
A Ramp Row Goose. 31
a solid buttress, and a portion of the wall running
eastward, flint below, brick above, with an even
outer face. At Ramp Row the wall is supported
within by arched recesses seven feet deep. The poor
people, who live here in tumble-down tenements,
use the recesses as pantries or bedrooms, according
to Mr. White. "A Ramp Row goose" is the Yar-
mouth metonym for a herring. Close by the Priory
national, schools there is more of the wall, while a
ruined tower is to be seen in an adjoining nursery
garden. Southward rises a third tower, now used
as a dwelling-house. The wall appears again in
solid, unimpaired flint-work facing the North Denes.
Cut in two by a street, it re-emerges in the rear of a
yard where anchors are stored; and presently the
versatile rampart forms one side of a rope-walk. It
turns up again often behind hovels, sheds, stables,
and smoke houses. Eight of the round towers can
still be traced, and also the ancient south gate ; and
from the last tower on the banks of the Yare, there
is a fine view of red roofs to the Denes, and across
the Yare crowded with ships of Suffolk, and the steep
banks of Gorleston.
In 1588 (Elizabeth) at the universal fear of the
Spaniards, a fire beacon was erected on Yarmouth
Castle, ^to flame alarm along the Norfolk coast, and a
south mound was also thrown up and mounted
with heavy ordnance. In 1621 the castle which
32 A Tour Round England
stood near St. George's Church was demolished, and
a fort with ramps erected two and a half miles in
circuit, with platforms facing the sea. In old times
the fishermen of Yarmouth and the Cinque Ports
were always in jealous rivalry, trying to cut each
other's nets and anticipate each other's profits. The
Reeves of Kent and Sussex came annually to Yar-
mouth for forty days, from Michaelmas to Martinmas,
to superintend the herring fishery, and maintain
peace. This burning hatred came to a climax on
August 27th, 1297, when the two rival squadrons
accompanied King Edward the First to Sluys. The
quarrel began, and soon assumed the dignity of
homicide. Eventually the Kent men and the Norfolk
men went at it tooth and nail. The Kentish lads
proved staunchest and quickest in the rigging and in
the turrets, on the poops, and along the gunwales.
The Yarmouth men lost twenty-five ships of the
value of fifteen thousand pounds, and only three of
their vessels returned to tell the tale. But there
were good men and true still left on the Denes. In
1294 the Yarmouth fleet bore in and burned Cher-
bourg, spite of French arrows and French mangonels.
By the reign of Edward the Third Yarmouth had
recovered, for it contributed to the Calais expedition
no fewer than forty-three ships and one thousand and
seventy-five men. Later — in Edward the Third's
puissant reign — the Yarmouth fleet numbered one
Kett the Tanner. 33
hundred and twenty sail. In 1340 a burgher of the
city, John Perenbaume, being one of King Edward's
admirals, fell upon the French at Sluys, and with
drifts of Greek fire destroyed two hundred and
thirty ships and killed thirty thousand Frenchmen.
Dartmouth, mentioned by Chaucer, was the only town
then superior to Yarmouth in its naval force.
In the reign of Richard the Second, Wat Tyler
made a demonstration before Yarmouth, hoping to
rouse all East Anglia, but the treacherous blow in
Smithfield before long stopped that daring reformer,
and dispersed his archers. In 1549 (Edward the
Sixth) Kett, the tanner of Wymondham, who had
headed the rising at Aldborough, planted his standard
on the summit of Moushold Hill, near Norwich, and
established courts of justice under the Oak of Re-
formation. Marching with twenty thousand men in-
to Yarmouth, he proclaimed his intention to release
the commons from the oppression of the rich, to re-
store the ancient services, and to remove all greedy
and tyrannical counsellors from the side of the young
king. Being repulsed at Yarmouth he attacked
Norwich, which was held by the Marquis of North-
ampton with one thousand English horse and a body
of Italian mercenaries, set the city on fire, killed Lord
Sheffield and one hundred of his followers, and chased
the rest out of Norfolk. The Earl of Warwick soon
drove the rebel tanner to bay near Norwich, and
VOL. II. D
34 A Tour Round England.
hemmed him in with six thousand men and two
thousand German horse. Rett's men forced their
way into the town and repeatedly drove the gunners
from their batteries. The Earl, in despair, made his
soldiers swear on their swords never to desert the
place. Starved out, Rett was at last driven from his
unassailable hill. At Dussingdale the Earl's cavalry
broke in upon his men and slew two thousand. The
remainder surrounded themselves with a rampart of
waggons and a trench protected by stakes, and de-
clared their determination to die rather by the sword
than the halter. The Earl, promising them pardon,
they surrendered. Rett was however hung at Nor-
wich Castle, his brother on the steeple of Windham,
and nine other leaders on the nine branches of the
Oak of Reformation ; so burnt out the last great Ca-
tholic insurrection in Norfolk.
French and Flemish Protestant refugees, escaping
from the Guises and from Philip, established themselves
at Yarmouth during the reigns of James and Charles,
and gave to the chapels in the lanes of this Norfolk
period a republican and anti-state church tone. Brad-
shaw, the Puritan sergeant, who presided at Ring
Charles's trial, and who declared with his dying
breath that if the deed were to do again he would do
it, resided for some time at the Star Inn, Yarmouth.
Wheu his mouldering corpse was dug up in West-
minster and hung on a gibbet beside the bodies of
" Is it Possible r 35
Cromwell and Ireton, the Yarmouth Puritans declar-
ed that the real Bradshaw was safe in Jamaica.
On July 9, 1642, Yarmouth declared openly for the
Parliament, and was henceforward harassed by the
Lowestoft Cavaliers' cruisers. The consequence was
that when the tide turned Yarmouth had to turn also,
and within a few days of its rival presented enthusias-
tic addresses to Richard Cromwell and Charles the
Second. The swarthy " mutton eating " king came
to the town for some reason or other in 1671, and
having received a present of three golden herrings,
dubbed three of the richest herring sellers knights.
At various periods all sorts of great men embarked
and disembarked at Yarmouth. In 1687 came there
Prince George of Denmark, Queen Anne's foolish
husband, " Est-il Possible," as the father-in-law he
deserted nicknamed him from his favourite exclama-
tion. In 1652, William of Orange, with his reticent
face and dry asthmatic cough, landed here with lin-
gering looks of regret at Holland. In 1810 the
King of Sweden arrived, calling himself Count Got-
torp, and in 1807 Louis the Eighteenth alias Count de
Lille.
But the most honoured name at Yarmouth is that
of Nelson. He landed on this Norfolk coast close to
his own birthplace, November 6, 1800, after the great
victory of the Nile, when he took all the French fleet
except four ships, and blew up the " L'Orient " in spite
1) 2
36 A Tour Round England.
of all the batteries of Aboukir. The memory of the
great admiral is for ever treasured at the Star Hotel,
once the residence of the Howards, then of Brad-
shaw. " The Nelson Room" is still the palladium of
the building. In this oak-panelled chamber, with
its arched fillets and diaper work, its quaint female
figures with animals' heads, and its scroll-bordered
ceiling with pendants, Nelson once dined, and his
portrait painted by Keymer, a quaker admirer, still
hangs on the wall. The lower banqueting room,
which has a handsome ceiling, has been convert-
ted into a bar or kitchen.
Yarmouth has been often compared to Genoa, and
a writer, by no means unknown to the public, has
named the many-alleyed town "the Norfolk Gridiron,"
the five principal streets being crossed at right angles
by one hundred and fifty-six rows or narrow lanes,
which are, on an average, about eight feet wide. The
reason of this minute subdivision of street way is that in
the old time the teeming city was pressed in on the
north, south, and east sides by a wall two hundred and
forty yards long, and on the west by a rampart two
thousand and thirty yards long. Within this boxing the
population lay, to use a simile not inappropriate, like
herrings in a barrel. These little lanes, that must have
made the street fighting in Rett's time very deadly,
are so narrow that you can touch either wall by
stretching out your hands while passing. Till Re-
The Harry- Carries. 37
gent-street was built in 1813, at a cost of three
thousand pounds, in the centre of the quay leading
to the market, and the north end of King-street, the
rows were the only cross cuts between the five chief
streets. These narrow rows created a necessity for
a special low long narrow vehicle, first introduced in
Henry the Seventh's time, and hence popularly known
as " Harry-carries." These Dutch-looking trolly
carts are sledges twelve feet long by three feet six
inches broad ; they are mounted on wheels, two feet
nine inches high, and are drawn by one horse, the
driver standing on the cross staves. A topographi-
cal writer of 1777 shows how simple Norfolk society
was at that era when many of these Harry-carries,
painted red, green, and blue, plied for hire, and
were let out to visitors wishing to drive to the Fort,
the quay, or the Denes. The writer inveighs against
the hard-trotting horses that thundered and rum-
bled down the narrow rows which the uncouth carts
exactly fitted.
Yarmouth quay, with its commingled trees, masts,
and houses, has been compared to the Boomtjes at
Rotterdam. The Dutch Clock is the quaintest spot
on the banks of the Tare. It is an old sixteenth
century building, now used as a public library and an
office for toll receivers and haven commissioners ; it
was formerly a place where the Dutch and Flemish
refugees celebrated in quiet and pastoral gratitude
38 A Tour Round England.
their morning prayers ; and here Brinsley, the non-
conformist, when driven from St. Nicholas church,
preached the tenets of toleration. In olden times the
town waits assembled on the roof on summer Sunday
evenings and " did resound forth upon several con-
sorts of musical instruments most melodious and de-
lightful harmony." The old clock, that has seen out
so many generations, still counts the hours ; and the
original carved stone mariner's compass, three feet in
diameter, stands now in front of the old building.
The houses in the market-place are old, and have a
character of their own ; and the fish-market displays
on its shields the half fishes, half lions, which are the
heraldic glory of Yarmouth. The Fisherman's Hos-
pital, a low, quadrangular building, with curious
gables and dormers with finials, dates back to the
last year of William of Orange, who, no doubt, liked
the semi-Dutch city. A carved ship, tossed cease-
lessly on stormy waves, is placed over an inner door-
way ; while a large statue of Charity (all promises
and no deeds) guards a contribution-box in the mid-
dle of the court. No ancient mariner is admitted
within this tranquil precinct till he has battled the
storms and waves of this troublesome world three
score years — then, and not till then, he can leave the
see-sawing quarter-deck for the quiet court and the
shady porches of this sanctuary.
The four rustling avenues of lime trees — delicious
The. Falstaffs. 39
when in blossom — bring us to «the old priory church
of St. Nicholas, the great saint of the Norfolk fisher-
men. It was founded in 1101-14 by Bishop Lozinga,
and till 1716 Yarmouth had no other church. The
enormous building, which will hold six thousand per-
sons if tightly and professionally packed, is a great
composite of many pious ages. The aisles, high and
broad, and containing chantry chapels, are early Eng-
lish, but the windows are perpendicular. The tran-
sept arches are of immense span, but the windows of
the choir are early decorated. The rich roofs, all
panelled and waggon-headed, are in nave, aisles, and
transept enriched with foliage, bosses, and groups of
figures. The chief restorations and additions were
in 1251 and 1286. The spire, one hundred and eighty-
six feet high, rebuilt in 1806, is copper tinned, and
rises from a battlemented tower as a landmark to the
endangered seaman. One of the memorial windows
records the benevolence of the celebrated Sarah Mar-
tin. In the south aisle there is a recess for a monu-
ment to one of those brave Falstolfes of Caistor, the
greatest of whom, the hero of Henry the Fifth's wars,
Shakespeare has transformed into the most inimita-
ble of butts. In 1338 the bachelors of Yarmouth began
to build an aisle in this church, but were stayed by a
plague. The edifice boasted of seventeen chapels and
the right of sanctuary, a mischievous way of rescu-
ing homicides, swelling priests' fees, and defeating
40 A Tour Round England.
justice. This noble 'conglomerate of the piety of
many generations has known endless desecrations.
For more than three hundred years the ignoble
corporation picked up the brasses and melted them
into weights. Still worse, a little later, all the
grave-stones were drawn, like so many teeth, and
shamefully sent into Newcastle to be shaped into
grindstones. During the Puritan epoch three con-
gregations met at the same time in this enormous
church. The partitions dividing the three enclosures
were only finally removed about twenty years ago.
The organ (by Muller) has one thousand one hun-
dred and thirty-three pipes, and is thought to be not
far inferior to the great Thunderer at Haarlem.
After " The Ballast Keel," with its fourteenth cen-
tury arch and Jacobean ceiling, the ruins of the
Franciscan friary in the road leading to Gaol Street,
and the old building with herring-bone masonry in
George and Dragon Row, the most remarkable bit of
antiquity in Yarmouth is Mr. Palmer's house on the
quay, built 1596 (Elizabeth) ; the date appears on a
chimney-piece carving. The drawing-room is richly
panelled with oak. Mr. Palmer boasts a curious pic-
ture of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins,
by Tintoretto, and a very valuable Teniers " Rural
Festivities," with seventy-eight figures of Dutch
revellers. This house once belonged to John Carter,
a bailiff of Yarmouth in the Parliamentary times.
Neptunus Rex. 41
Cromwell often visited him, and Carter's son married
Mary Ireton, the daughter of the stern and some-
what savage general. Tradition says in this man-
sion was held that final consultation of the Parlia-
mentary leaders, at which they decided upon the
death of the faithless and hopeless king. The prin-
cipal Puritan officers met in the oak-panelled draw-
ing-room upstairs for privacy. It was strictly com-
manded that no person should come near the room ex-
cept a man appointed to attend. The dinner which was
ordered at four o'clock was put off from time to time
till past eleven at night. The caballers then came
down to a very short repast, and immediately all set oif
post, many for London, and some for the quarters of
the army. The die was cast. Among other lesser
traditions Yarmouth men like to remember that
Praed, that refined and graceful poet of the drawing-
room and boudoir, sat for Yarmouth in 1834. It was
at this port that in June, 1797, the year of the mutiny
at the Nore, the North Sea fleet revolted, the sea-
men justly demanding higher wages and better pro-
visions. In 1807, Lord Gambler s fleet, numbering
sixty-nine pendants, gathered at this Norfolk port
before sailing to bombard Copenhagen.
Neptune, the " Rex " of the sea, has indeed earned
his terrrible title off these shallow Norfolk sands.
Whatever is blowing blows here, and the friendly
lights of Caistor and Gorleston are too often powers
42 A Tour Round England.
less to save the tempest-driven vessel. On drifts the
fatal ship to its doom and death, and the gluttonous
sands soon engulf the screaming men. In 1692
(William and Mary), out of a fleet of two hundred
sail of light colliers, who always make Yarmouth their
favourite roadstead on their perilous way from New-
castle, one hundred and forty were battered to pieces
on the Yare shoals. In the furious storms of May,
1860, upwards of two hundred Norfolk fishermen
were lost. How many widows and orphans has the
pitiless sea, England's great ally, England's ceaseless
enemy, made ! Nor in mentioning real Yarmouth
wrecks must we forget the novelist and the poet's
wrecks. It was off this place that Robinson Crusoe
came into trouble ; in his boat he " passed the light-
house at Winterton," where the shore falls off to the
westward towards Cromer, and so the land broke off
a little the violence of the wind, and at Yarmouth
he and his tired comrades were kindly treated and
sheltered ; and here, too, a certain person named
Steerforth, not unknown to some of our readers, was
overtaken by his fate amid a storm such as one might
expect to precede the Day of Doom. Indeed, the
harbour planned by Joas Johnson, a Dutchman, in
1567 (Elizabeth), the south pier (two thousand feet
long, and built on oak trunks), the leafy commercial
quay, or the south quay, improved by Sir John Ren-
nie, and still more than all these, the Britannia jetty
David Copperjield. 43
(which cost five thousand pounds in 1808), recalls to
the crow (who feeds on book-worms among other
diet, and is therefore in some respects literary) sever-
al passages of ingenuous David Copperfield's Yar-
mouth career, as, for example, his finished photogra-
phic Dutch picture of the fisherman's quarter.
" I smelt," says the young gentleman alluded to,
" I smelt the fish, and pitch, and tar, and oakum, and
saw the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling
up and down over the stony lanes, bestrewn with
bits of chip, and little hillocks of sand; past gasworks,
ropewalks, boat-builders' yards, shipwrights' yards,
shipbreakers' yards, caulkers' yards, riggers' lofts,
smiths' forges, and a great litter of such places, until
we came out upon a dull waste and a desolate flat." In
this quarter tarrypalings are hung with blackish brown
nets, and tan-coloured sails are everywhere being
dried or patched, rolled up, or unfolded. Here are the
herring yawls, and the mackerel boats, and those stur-
dy cobles that come from Whitby and Scarborough,
bringing periwinkles and pickled mushrooms, and
those decked boats also that brave the most wolfish
gales of the North Sea, and that in old times used to
thread the crushing ice-floes of Greenland in search of
that heaving mountain of sensitive fat, thewhale, a fish,
whose interests have been so cruelly injured by the
introduction of gas.
Herrings, which derive their Saxon name from their
44 A Tour Round England.
gregarious habit of moving, not alone, but in an
army (Heer), are not only the arms, they are the very
legs of Yarmouth. The town lives on them, and
stands by them. In 1798 Yarmouth had only six-
teen fishing-boats, Lowestoft twenty-four, and the
Yorkshire men only forty. But in 1833 there were
one hundred Norfolk boats (chiefly Yarmouth) to the
mere forty or fifty of Yorkshire, the whole employing
a capital of two hundred audfifty thousand pounds. At
the present day, a recent able wiiter says, there are
two hundred Yarmouth boats, and forty Yorkshire
and Sussex cobles, catching every season six or seven
score million herrings, of the value of at least two
hundred thousand pounds. (The herring is certainly
not a Malthusian, whatever the opinions of the dog-
fish and the guillemot may be). The Yarmouth
mackerel fishing employs one hundred boats and
fourteen hundred men and women. Every mackerel
lugger costs seven hundred or eight hundred pounds,
and carries eighty or a hundred nets each, twenty
yards long, by eight and a half broad, and every
herring boat costs from six hundred to a thousand
pounds. It is calculated that half a million in one
way and another is invested at Yarmouth in reaping
the fish market. The mackerel fishing in 1852 pro-
duced twenty thousand pounds. The herring har-
vest commences at the end of September, " when the
stormy winds do blow," and the glittering millions
The Last of all. 45
of over population with which the North Sea then
teems are dragged out for ten consecutive weeks. A
recent topographical traveller has collected, with
patient care and skill, some curious, close-pressed
facts on the subject of Yarmouth's ceaseless industry.
On those rough October nights, when the sands froth
and boil crimson in the slant light of the beacon, the
green Norfolk seas are literally coagulated with the
not incurable bloater ; the nets drag them up in
tumbling, frightened heaps of loose and spangled
silver ; while by lantern light and moonlight the grim
rugged faces of their rough and unsympathising fel-
low-creatures haul them in with sturdy song and a
laughing welcome. Ever since those great formative
epochs when the " All Father " said on the fifth day,
" Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving
creature that hath life," and when he created great
whales and every living creature that moveth in the
water,and blessed them, saying, "Befruitful and multi-
ply, and fill the waters in the seas," these great hordes
of fish have, at their periodical season of migration,
duly darkened this wild northern sea. Only imagine :
a single Yarmouth boat has been known to bring in
twelve to sixteen lasts, each last being ten barrels, or
ten thousand herrings! When cured, every last is
worth twenty-two pounds. In 1859, however, the
last went up as high as thirty-two pounds. What a
haul to think of, after a day's failure at trout — one
46 A Tour Round England.
hundred and sixty thousand pounds' worth of her-
rings !
Herring nets cost a shilling the twenty yards.
These nets, woven at Bridport out of grey twine
spun at Yarmouth, are dipped in cutch to turn
them a warm brown before using. Each net has
four breadths, and the oldest breadth of the four is
replaced every season. The poor women who mend
the nets, says one who has written pleasantly on this
subject of the bloater, get a shilling a net whether
the holes take two days to mend or only half a day.
There are one hundred thousand barrels used every
year at busy Yarmouth. The smoke-houses have
separate floors for the cooper, the net-mender, the
curer, and the drier, who all work in friendly and
chatty co-operation without jealousy, and inspired
by an unrequited love for the bloater. Oak lop, the
crow is informed, is used to smoke the best herrings,
but the Birmingham bloater, being of a lower caste,
is seasoned with hazel wood and fir loppings. A
smoke house, half malt kiln, half " oast " house, is a
large oblong tower, forty or fifty feet high, without
floors. High up run transverse compartments, di-
vided by partitions of horizontal rails. In these open
racks or " loves " lie the lathes or " speets." The
herring, arriving in carts from the beach to fulfil his
destiny for the good of a higher species, is first
thrown with his fellows into a brick recess, spriukled
Bloaters. 47
with salt, and there left for several days. The dura-
tion of this vaporous purgatory depends on the des-
tination of the fish, whose second migration is com-
pulsory and often by land. If he is a Belgravian
bloater, " a bloated aristocrat," as Radicals would
call him, he merely hangs twenty-four hours, till he
begins to swell with self-importance and to prepare
for packing ; if a Straits man for the Mediterranean
ports, he lingers longer ; if a mere black herring, for
the blackguard, or for the alley, the chandlers, or the
tally shop, he serves his full ten days, and emerges
hard, dark, and salt as ham. On emerging from
their bath the herrings are run through the gills by
gangs of skilful women, called "ryvers," who
" speet " them on long sticks ; eight women com-
pleting eight lasts of herrings (thirteen thousand
two hundred herrings to a last) in the day. For
each last the women get three shillings and nine-
pence. The speets are then placed by climbing men
on the loves, tier by tier, till the smoke house is full.
The oak fire is then lit, the oil begins to distil, and
the herrings slowly turn yellow, dusky orange, dingy
red, then black, according to the duration of the
smokings. " Last scene of all that ends this strange
eventful history," comes the packer, who removes
the speets, and strips the fish off the lathes into the
barrels in the radiating order in which they are to
lie till the barrel has its regulated seven hundred and
48 A Tour Round England.
fifty (thirteen dozen to the hundred). Then the bar-
rel is placed in a press to softly but firmly force down
the mutinous fish, and prepare it for " heading up."
The Scotch fishermen at Yarmouth are known by
their honourable refusal to do any work on Sun-
day.
The scenes on the old jetty are picturesque, espe-
cially when the mackerel boats are coming in, and
the fish auctions are beginning. This moment there
is nothing visible but a few bald flag-staves marking
the auction stands, tangles of straw, piles of madder-
coloured nets, heaps of baskets and empty oily tubs,
some old mermaids in blue aprons, and a few old
fishermen in oilskin dreadnaughts and long boots,
chatting, loafing, and dozing. Presently a brown
sail lops rouud and comes in sight. Instantly the
jetty rouses to life. The ferry boats mounted on
iron stakes are shoved down to the water and warp-
ed out, the tubs are rolled down and got ready. The
boats presently return crowded with mackerel bas-
kets. Nautical women gather round the auctioneer,
who stands gravely — a red book in one hand, a bell
in the other. He rings the bell, and merely an-
nounces, with true Saxon brevity, that " Here he has
so many hundred and so many quarters at so much
a hundred." The baskets are instantly emptied into
tubs half full of water, and the women at once wash
and pack the perishable fish in layers (sixty mackerel
The Rainbow Fish. 49
to a basket), six score to the hundred, the largest
fish on the top ; straw is spread over them, down go
the lids, scaly hands tie the reddened strings, redder
hands lift them into quick railway carts, and off they
fly, borne by enchantment to expectant London and
hungry Birmingham. A few hours more and the
beautiful fish, shining like solid lumps of rainbow,
tabbied with dark veins, barred with a rich enamel
of mother-of-pearl, faintly flushed with rose and eme-
rald, and almost exquisite enough, indeed, to stay
the hand of even the most gluttonous of epicures,
will smoke on the London board. In this way, the
crow would mildly observe, are caught, dried, and
packed, the one hundred and twenty thousand tons
of fish that the brave Yarmouth fishermen, at that
hourly risk of their lives, annually draw from the
shallow, dangerous, and treacherous, but prolific sea
that spreads between the red light ships, Knoll and
Scroby sands, and the Brown Ridge near the opposite
Dutch coast, to send to all-devouring and insatiable
London. *..
But the crow must tear himself away from his last
bloater, and strike off towards Cromer and the north-
ern part of the North Sea. But first he has one
grateful thought, that here on this dangerous shore
man learnt to battle the cruel element, and brave
Captain Manby here first, in 1808, tested his appara-
tus for saving the crews of stranded ships by throw-
vot tt. E
50 A Tour Round England.
ing them a line by a shot from a mortar. By night
fireworks are used that burst at the height of three
hundreds yards, and diffuse a clear light over every
object, so that the aim can be properly directed. In
twenty years the Manby system saved fifty-eight
vessels and four hundred and ten human beings.
Turner, never tiring of the sea, painted a fine grave
picture of the Yarmouth sands at twilight, with the
Manby mortar just discharging its shell.
Swift now on the wing over the Denes, broad
green levels, with dull patches here and there of
loose sand, and sprinkled with self-heal, stone-crop,
and sandwort. Poising over the Xelson Column
(two hundred and seventeen steps), our black friend
catches at once with his intelligent eye the miles of
flat level across Breyden water, along the Yare and
from Gorleston heights to the Suffolk cliffs, stretch-
ing towards Lowestoft. Yarmouth-way lies the
great sapphire pavement of the unstable sea, studded
with flocks of brown fishing-boats, sworn chasers of
the social fish. He sees, too, the red light ships mark-
ing the entrance, and the tossing line of froth where
the shoals begin as you look straight across towards
the Dutch coast.
51
CHAPTER XX.
NORFOLK.— CAISTOR TO CROMER.
FROM Caistor look out, that sentry-box sixty feet
high, the itinerant bird watches the brown-
winged herring-boats beating up against the wind,
yonder are miles of grassy sand hills, and pale belts
of sand, gleaming almost as white as the racing
foam, and on the fore-shore, like stranded turtles,
loll red-bottomed boats among the patches of coarse
gorse. On the inner slopes of the sand hills, clear
of the long loose drifts which here and there en-
croach on the marshes, rise the red roofs and black-
tarred walls of fishermen's villages ; the fishermen's
gardens and hedgerows bordering the waste, gradu-
ally lead on to belts of trees and chequerings of fer-
tile fields ; and at the doors of the Caistor cottages
the crow, having a pictorial eye, discerns rugged-
faced fishwives sitting netting amoug lobster pots
and heaps of fishing furniture. The church tower at
E 2
52 A Tour Round England.
Caister has a legend of its own. Over the centre of
its parapet a long low ridge marks the tomb of a
Norfolk maiden, who, losing her lover by shipwreck
on the adjacent coast, directed, before her heart quite
broke, that her body should be buried there under a
pyramid which should be high enough to serve as a
sea mark. The pyramid is gone, even the sailor's
name is forgotten, but the woman's true love is still
remembered, and will be for ever.
About a mile from Caistor, over the fields, a long
line of old brick wall — within a moat screened by
tall trees — marks the ruins of the Falstolfs old
fortified mansion, Caistor Castle, built in the reign of
Henry the Fifth. It was three hundred feet square,
and had a round tower at each corner. Only one of
these towers now remains. Inside, the ruins are
hidden by fruit trees, elder bushes, and ivy, but there
are still traces of the ruffling days of the brave Sir
John and the letter-writing Pastons who succeeded
him. An old ogee arched gateway still stands, but
instead of rooms hung with cloth of gold, it leads
only to poultry sheds. The bay window of the hall
exists, you can trace the gable mark of the roof,
and there is still the tower near the chapel where
the priest used to live, and to pray for those who
nourished him. This tower is famous for its jack-
daw's nest — a great pile of loose sticks, reaching
from the winding stairs to the window, and express-
Guarding the Herrings. 53
ing a vast and unwearied industry. On the ground
floor is a small chamber with groined ceiling and
two light foliated windows, but there is no roof above
but the clear blue sky, and the old fireplaces, black
against the walls above, will never again be warmed
by friendly fires. The Sir John Falstolf who built
this castle (one of the earliest fortified brick houses
in the kingdom) was a great warrior in the French
Avars of Henry the Fifth and Sixth. It was this com-
mander who, just before Joan of Arc appeared to
scare us English, left Paris on a certain day in Lent
with one thousand five hundred men to convey four
hundred waggons of herrings and other provisions
to the English besiegers of Orleans, just then dis-
heartened by the death of the Earl of Salisbury,
their commander. He was attacked at Roucroi by
four thousand French and Scotch cavalry, but sur-
rounding his men with a rampart of carriages, he and
his archers repulsed two savage onslaughts, killed
six hundred of the enemy, and reached triumphantly
the English camp. When Orleans had been rescued
by the maiden of Domremy, the English forts burned,
and the Earl of Suffolk taken prisoner, Talbot and
Falstolf retreated towards Paris. At Patay, Talbot,
bull-dog as he was, would retreat no further, but
stood at bay till he had lost twelve thousand men,
and was struck from his horse and taken. Falstolf,
refusing to fight with soldiers demoralised by the
54 A Tour Round England.
recent loss of three fortresses, left Talbot alone to
suffer for his obstinacy.
The English, in a rage at his desertion of Talbot,
branded Falstolf as a coward, and condemned him to
forfeit his garter. But the Norfolk worthy was no
young braggart who needed to prove his courage;
he calmly persisted, and proved, to the satisfaction
of the Regent, that nothing but defeat was possible
with soldiers that Jeanne d'Arc had so recently
cowed. This brave old Sir John, who died in 1459,
aged eighty, had a mansion also at Yarmouth, and
traded there in corn and wool. Soon after the
Pastons became lords of Caistor, William of Worces-
ter, writing to one of the new family, says, u I am
right glad that Caistor is, and shall be, at your com-
mandment, and yours in especial. A rich jewel it is at
need for all the country in time of war, and my
master, Falstolf, would rather he had never builded
it than it should be in the governance of any sove-
reign that will oppress the country."
But, indeed, if the crow, being of an ancient
family, may be allowed to be for once biographical,
it may not be amiss to here briefly sketch the career
of a gentleman soldier in the reigns of Henry the
Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth, in order to show the life
men led in those stormy ages. The aforesaid Sir
John, born about 1378 (Edward the Third), was the
son of a gentleman of Yarmouth, renowned for his
A Veteran. 55
piety and charity. His father dying when he was
young, John's person and estate were committed to
the guardianship of that wise and able ruler, the
Duke of Bedford, our Regent in France. It is sup-
posed that when a youth, learning arms under
Thomas of Lancaster, the second son of Henry the
Fourth, the young Norfolk squire accompanied that
noble (afterwards Duke of Clarence) to Ireland,
where Thomas was lord-lieutenant. John flashed
his maiden sword against the rough kernes and
savage gallowglasses of Munster and Connaught,
and married, in Ireland, a daughter of Lord Tibetot,
binding himself, on the Feast of St. Hilary, which
was their marriage day. in the sum of one thousand
pounds, to pay her one hundred pounds a year for
pin-money. Hardened to steel in the wars of Nor-
mandy, Anjou, Maine, and Guienne, countless spears
having broken on his wide chest, countless ar-
rows having splintered on his steel armour, Sir
John, now a knight banneret, and, what is more,
knight companion of the most noble Order of the
Garter, grew famous abroad as a brave and wise
general ; at home as a charitable and hospitable
man, a founder of religious buildings and state-
ly edifices, moreover, an enlightened patron of
worthy and learned men, and a benefactor to the
pious and poor, especially those of Norfolk. In 1413,
the first year of Henry the Fifth, he had the castle
56 ' A Tour Round England.
and domain of Veires, in Gascony, given him to
guard. When his chivalrous young king landed in
France, Sir John quickly joined him at Harfleur with
ten men-at-arms and thirty archers. The Earl of
Derby then appointed Falstolf governor of the Nor-
man port. At the great melee at Agincourt Sir
John bore himself nobly, and soon after took prisoner
the son of that brave Duke of Alencon whom Henry
had struck down with his own hand in the press after
the Duke had swept half the King's beaver off with a
swingeing blow of his battle-axe. Next we meet Sir
John pushing deep into Normandy, then driven slow-
ly back to Harfleur, and there besieged. For taking
Tonque, Caen, Courcy, Sees, and Falaise, he was
granted the Manor of Friteuse, near Harfleur, and in
1423 was made lieutenant for the king in Normandy.
Many towns he then thundered down, at many barred-
up gates he knocked for admittance.
The aging warrior reaped many laurels. He was
an ambassador at the Council of Basil ; he led our
succours to the Duke of Brittany ; he was our envoy
at the final peace with bellicose France. When the
Regent died, Sir John became one of his executors.
In 1440, the old warrior returned to the moated
house at Caistor, and there hung up his battered hel-
met and his cloven target. In 1450, the king ordered
Thomas Danyell, Esq., to pay one hundred pounds
for having seized a ship of Sir Johns, called M The
Caistor Castle. 57
George of Prussia." Falstolf died at last, worn out
with old man's fever, after a lingering one hundred
and forty-eight days of asthma, on the Festival of
St. Leonard, in the last year of the reign of Henry
the Sixth. The old scarred hulk was buried with
great solemnity under an arch in the Chapel of our
Lady, of his own building, at the Abbey of St. Bennet
in the Holme, Norfolk ; and so much was he vener-
ated in his county, that in the fifteenth of Edward
the Fourth, John Beaucham, Lord of Powyke, ap-
pointed a chantry there, more especially for the
soul of Sir John Falstolf. The old knight left Cais-
tor to John Paston, eldest son of Judge Paston,
to found, with the manors and lands, a college of
seven priests and seven poor men. The Duke of
Norfolk, however, claimed Caistor, and in 1469 came
before the old turreted brick mansion with three
thousand men and guns and culverins, and besieged
it doggedly for five weeks and three days. A wicked
justice named Yelverton and other lawyers tried to
get pickings out of the place ; and at one time Lord
Scales took actual possession of it in the name of
King Edward the Fourth, who, however, eventually
restored it to the Pastons, who soon afterwards near-
ly lost it by fire. Besides Caistor, Sir John had a
house at Norwich in Pokethorp, opposite St. James's
Church. This large-minded soldier was a great bene-
factor to Cambridge, helpiug to found philosophical
58 A Tour Round England.
schools ; nor did he forget the sister-seat of learning,
for he gave broad lands to Magdalen College, Ox-
ford, out of friendship to William Wainfleet, the
founder (who, indeed, had the intention of founding
a special college where Sir John's soul might be
prayed for). It is a singular fact (considering that,
following some vague old story, Shakespeare has
traduced this excellent man) that among other pro-
perty left by Falstolf to Magdalen College, was the
Boar's Head in Southwark, where the poet might
have found the old soldier's name still traditional.
There is a legend at Caistor that the house was
erected by the young Duke of Alencon, according to
the model of his chateau in Fi-anee, and as the price
of his ransom. Henry the Sixth gave Sir John leave
to fortify it, and lent him nine ships to bring mate-
rials. The house formed a rectangled parallelogram,
the stables being in front, the hall and best rooms
on the right hand. Over one of the windows of the
north-west tower there used to be visible the found-
er's arms, enclosed in a garter and supported by an-
gels. The dining-room was fifty-nine feet long by
twenty -eight broad. On the east stood the college
in a square flanked by two round towers. The moat
is said to have communicated with a navigable creek,
and in a farm-house near the tower, called " the
barge-house," used to be shown a large arch capable
of receiving sailing boats. There is a wild legend
The Black Coach. 59
about Caistor (more worthy of some old German
tower under the shadow of the Brocken) that on cer-
tain midnights a black coach drawn by headless
horses, and driven by a skeleton, or some such ap-
propriate coachman, rolls silently into the ruined and
echoing courtyard, and carries off a freight of un-
earthly passengers ; whether ghosts of sinful knights
long dead, or a relieved demon guard, is not exactly
known. But indeed Norfolk legends are often wild
enough, for at Over-Strand the country people be-
lieve in a headless coal-black demon dog, with flam-
ing hair, known to mortals as " Old Shock," and
which on stormy nights chases along the desolate
and dangerous shores between Over-Strand and
Beeston, exulting at the frequent shipwrecks.
But the crow must by no means leave the old
brick ruin without a word about those delightful
" Paston Letters," many of which were here indited
by anxious Yorkists. They present a perfect picture
of social life during the bloodthirsty wars of the
Roses. One almost wonders, when England was
still streaming with human blood, how people could
have the heart to propose marriage, or to write for
figs and raisins, and " ij pots off oyle for saladys."
Soon after the battle of Mortimer Cross, when Henry
the Sixth was lying feebly in London in the iron
grip of the King maker, one of the Pastons writes
about the troubled state of Norfolk ; traitors having
60 A Tour Hound England.
risen after the Battle of Wakefield to murder John
Damme (whoever he might be) ; also that the people
at Castle Rising were gathering and hiring armour ;
also that plunderers in Yarmouth had robbed a ship
" under colour of my Lord of Warwick." In Decem-
ber, 1463, third, Edward the Fourth, John Paston,
the youngest, writing home to the old Norfolk house
from Northumberland, whither he had gone to be-
siege three castles taken by Queen Margaret, says
naively :
" I pray you let my father have knowledge of this
letter, and of the other letter that I sent to my mo-
ther by a Felbriggs man, and how that I pray both
him and my mother lowly of their blessings .... I
pray you that this bill may recommend me to my sis-
ter Margery (he had before sent remembrances to his
grandam and cousin Clere), and to my mistress, Joan
Gayne, and to all good masters and fellows within
Caster." Then what a picture of Caxton's times is
given in the letter dated Coventry, Tuesday after
Corpus Christi Day (circa 1445). It is addressed by
one John Northwood, to Viscount Beaumont, a
nobleman slain by Jack Cade's men in 1450.
" On Corpus Christi even last passed between
eight and nine of the clock at afternoon, Sir Hum-
phrey Stafford had brought my master Sir James of
Ormond towards his inn from my Lady of Shrews-
bury, and returned from him towards his inn ; he
A Fray. 61
met with Sir Robert Harcourt, coming from his mo-
ther towards his inn, and passed Sir Humphrey, and
Richard his son came somewhere behind, and when
they met together, they fell in hands together, and
Sir Robert smote him a great stroke on the head
with his sword, and Sir Richard with his dagger has-
tily went towards him, and as he stumbled, one of
Harcourt's men smote him in the back with a knife ;
men wot not who it was readily ; his father heard a
noise, and rode towards them, and his men ran before
him thitherward ; and in the going down off his
horse, one, he wot not who, behind him smote him
on the head with an edged tool, men know not as
yet with what weapon that he fell down, and his son
fell down before him as good as dead, and all this
was done as men say in a paternoster while — and
forthwith Sir Humphrey Stafford's men followed
after and slew two men of Harcourt's, and more be
hurt, some be gone, and some be in prison, in the
jail at Coventry, and Almighty Jesu preserve your
high estate, my special lord, and send you long life
and good health."
Such were the rough-and-ready times when the
streets of English towns were crowded by the quar-
relsome Montagues and Capulets of those gusty
days.
And now swift through the Norfolk air to Filby-
decoy, rousing other scenes and far different associa-
62 A Tour Round England.
tions, going back to those days of bolster breeches
and peasecod doublets, when King James spluttered
out his alarm at Jesuit plots in clumsy Latin or un-
couth Scotch. It was a clever amphibious Dutchman
in those Jacobean days who introduced the decoy
(endekoy — a duck cage — Dutch) ; Norfolk, with its
reedy pools, approximating to the sea, being just
suited for his ingenious lures. Ran worth-decoy,
lucidly explained by a recent traveller in Norfolk,
gives, however, a better notion of the Norfolk decoys
than that at Filby. At Ran worth, where the marshes
vein the flat pastures witlra deep green, where the
pools and dykes are marked in the ground plan by
waving green patches and long sharp lines, where
gnats darken the aguish air, and all day and night
you hear the restless clank of the pump mills that
are draining the levels that look so flat and so Dutch,
you come to a wood on the margin of a lake. The
first glimpse of the decoy is an arch of brown net-
work among the trees, and glimpses of a pale fence
of reeds. In the centre of a hundred acres of reedy
and oozy water, thick with water-lilies and ranuncu-
luses, spread eleven shallow creeks, pointing star
fashion to various points of the compass. The^c
rays are about six yards wide at their mouth, narrow-
ing gradually as they recede, and craftily curved to
the right. They run about seventy-five yards each,
and terminate in a point. At about thirty feet from
Decoy Ducks. 63
the mouth of each there rises an iron rod arch some
ten feet high, smaller arches follow the end one,
sinking to less than two feet high and wide. These
arches are covered with cord nets which, staked to .
the ground, form long cages, broad and open to
the pool. These are what Norfolk men call *' pipes."
On each side of the any traps are screens of greyish
yellow reeds five feet high. The screen runs in
zig-zag about a foot from the water's edge, walling
along the edge of the pipe alternately high and
low ; wild fowl always fly against the wind, so that
a pipe to be successful must have the wind blowing
down it from the narrow end towards the mouth.
In Norfolk the north-east pipe is a special favourite.
There is no mystery in decoying, it needs only a
man, some decoy ducks, and a trained dog. The
ducks are to rise and come to the man for the
bruised barley he sprinkles on the water at the sig-
nal of a very faint yet clear whistle. The " piper "
dog may be a mongrel, only he must be of a grey
colour, and of quiet, obedient, staid habits. The
decoy season is almost exactly contemporaneous
with the oyster season, when the weeds and rank
grass have been cleared away outside the pipes.
The time chosen is often noon on a bright day. The
decoy man carries with him a piece of lighted peat
to neutralise any scent of himself that might scare
the fowl. Stealing along like a murderer, he slips
64 A Tout Round England.
behind the screen, and looks through loopholes pre-
pared in the reed walls. If there are any signs of
emerald necks and brown backs he gives the whistle,
fatal as Varney's to Amy Robsart. The moment the
decoy ducks swim towards the mouth of the pipe the
wild birds gain confidence, and enter more or less
eagerly into the pipe allured by the floating barley ;
at the same moment the piper dog, running along
the screen, leaps back through the first break in
search of biscuit thrown him. This instantly allures
the teal and widgeon, who then flock in with greater
confidence. They are now safe in the toils, and the
decoy-man having fitted a purse-net about as large
as a corn-sack to the narrow end of the opening, an
assistant, on a given signal, shows himself at one of
the breaks in the screen in the rear of the ducks,
and, without shouting, throws up his arms or waves
his hat. The sensitive birds, always suspicious of
man, who loves them only too well, instantly, with
splash, flap, and screaming quack, flash up the pipe
in utter panic, and making for the first opening, find
themselves in the inhospitable purse-net. The de-
coy-man's cruel grinning face soon appears to the
jostling captives, and in five minutes they are ready
for Leadenhall Market. The decoy ducks, if well
trained, have long before this painful denouement
pivoted round and gone back calmly to the pool to
be the sirens of future mallards.
Wild Ducks. 65
But the decoy-man has many vexations. There is
one species of duck known as the Pochard, who is
always fatal to his schemes. A demoniacal craft,
as of metamorphosed attorneys, is possessed by these
birds, who, the moment there is an alarm, turn, dive,
and re-emerge beyond the pipes. Often do they
form a vanguard and swim forward in line, taking
precedence of other species, probably on the strength
of superior subtlety, and so keep back their unsus-
pecting companions. Decoy-men have tried to cap-
ture these sagacious wretches by sunken bait, brist-
ling with ambushed hooks, but a pochard's dying
struggles are scarcely very alluring to the inquiring
widgeon. A heron perching on the crown of the
netted arch, often scares the suspicious birds, the
sullen shark of a pike splashing in the shallows, or
the sight of even the tip of the black nose of an
otter is also fatal to sport. A gunshot in a distant
field, the ring of a hammer, the rumbling of cart
wheels, or the creaking of a passing barrow will
frighten away ducks for weeks. Decoying, says a
very sound authority, was more profitable formerly
before steam-boats brought over such heaps of Dutch
and Flemish mallards. Yet there are still times
when wild ducks fetch eight shillings a couple in
Leadenhall Market. Two thousand birds, all but
thirty-seven, were captured at Ranworth decoy in
1858-59.
VOL. II. F
66 A lour Round England.
Swift now to Norwich steers the voyaging bird,
for how can any crow of sagacity crow at all
if he neglect the old cathedral city of Norfolk,
with its seventy-five thousand people, its thirty-six
churches, its narrow, crooked, steep streets, its busy
factories, its crowd of low and even-thatched cot-
tages, and lastly Bigod's Castle, now a prison, stately,
on a central mound. The town lies in a deep basin,
scooped out of the level table-land. St. Andrew's
Hall, where concerts are given and corporation feasts
held, was once a church of the Benedictine Friars,
but it takes more than past sanctity to make a
musician of Norwich quaver over his crotchets, or a
Norwich alderman forget to refill his glass — and quite
right too. Charles the Second and the ill-favoured
Portuguese queen he neglected so shamelessly, dined
in this hall of St. Andrew's, in 1671. Some good
memorial pictures, expressing various paroxysms of
national gratitude, royalty, and party feeling, adorn
the walls — meretricious, graceful Lawrences ; delight-
ful, sketchy Gainsboroughs ; vigorous, coarse Opies ;
and above all, Sir William Beechey's manly portrait
of that great Norfolk worthy — Nelson.
Apropos of Art, Norwich is the city in which to
see old Crome's fine landscapes, as wonderful in their
way as those of Cuyp. This great artist was the
son of a poor journeyman weaver, and was born
in a humble Norwich public-house, in 1769. At first
Old Crome. 67
an errand boy to a doctor, who found him. clumsy and
slovenly, he was afterwards apprenticed to a house
and sign-painter. Happening to lodge with a painter's
apprentice, who had a certain rude taste for art, the'
two boys drew and painted together. Sir William
Beechey, who was kind to our Norfolk lad, whose
words were insufficient to express his ideas, observed
with surprise his rapid progress. Marrying, however,
early, Crome became so poor that he had to paint
sugar ornaments for the confectioners, to clip his cat's
tail to make brushes, and to use pieces of bedtick or
old apron instead of canvas.
But there is no stopping a man of that kind ; only
a bullet in the head can do it. Crome soon mastered
his art, and learned with naive simplicity to show
the beauty of the simplest natural effects ; he could
conjure with the simplest spells — a few old trees, a
broken cottage, a rough scrap of heath ; and what-
ever he painted was always grand, simple, luminous,
broad, and massive. He always clung to Norfolk and
to simple subjects — never falling over the fatal Grand
Style, like poor Haydon and others. He founded the
Norwich Society of Artists, became their president,
and did good service to art in originating, in 1805,
the first provincial exhibition of pictures in England.
He died in 1821, and the same year one hundred and
eleven of his paintings were exhibited, beginning
with " The Sawyers," a sketch made for a public-
F 2
68 A Tour Hound England.
house in 1790, down to a fine wood scene, painted
within a month of his departure. Moushold Heath
was old Crome's favourite hunting ground.
With Norwich, as with so many other spots the
crow has visited, Shakespeare has associated himself.
The old black flint wall that once girdled the town
wears for a brooch at one spot the Erpingham Gate,
a fine pointed arch of the fourteenth century, with
panelled buttresses, and a statue of the builder sen-
tinelled high up in an airy niche. This sentinel was
a brave old soldier, whom Shakespeare, with an affec-
tion for the character, calls " a good old commander
and a most kind gentleman." He lent his cloak to.
Henry the Fifth on the eve of Agincourt, and bore
himself nobly in that sturdy encounter. Sir John,
however, favoured the Lollards, and for this heresy
was sentenced by Bishop Spencer, a fighting bishop,
to build this gate as a penance. The word " Poena "
is still visible here and there, like a tear drop, upon
the grey stone scrolls. Norwich is full of old houses,
old churches, and old bits of wall, stolen original ly
from the Roman station at Caistor, for the legend
says :
" Caistor was a city when Norwich was none,
And Norwich was built of Caistor stone."
The churches, too, are of great antiquity. St.
Julian's, with the round and very ancient tower ; St.
Norwich. 69
John's, Madder-market, earlier than the Confessor's
coronation; and St. Peter's, Mancroft, the finest parish
church in England, excepting St. Mary's, Redcliffe.
The cathedral, though begun by Bishop Lozinga in
1096, was not finished till 1430.
Norwich has not been without its historical ta-
bleaux at stormy periods; it has often come forward
in generous hope or despair to struggle for the
right, and to aim hard blows at the wrong. It origi-
nally rose out of the decay of Caistor, a Roman sta-
tion, and in early ages standing then nearer to the
sea, it became a fishing town of such importance
that in Edward the Confessor's time it boasted one
thousand three hundred and twenty burgesses, and
twenty-five churches. But before this Uffa, founder
of the East Anglian monarchy, had, about the year
572, entrenched Northwic (the northern station), and
on the site of these entrenchments, on the south-east
shoulder of Norwich Hill, Canute eventually built a
castle. The place was roughlyhandled by the Conqueror,
who hated opposition from Saxon boors, who did not
know what was good for them. When he levied his
contribution, the twenty-five original churches had
already grown to fifty-four. In 1122, Henry the
First kept royal Christmas in the Norfolk capital, and,
pleased with himself and the world, endowed Nor-
wich with a franchise equal to that of London. About
this time Jews began to settle in Norwich ; but the
70 A Tour Round England.
wealth and heresy of the bearded men " of the wan-
dering foot and weary eyes" alarmed the bigoted
monks and the suspicious citizens, and the populace
being roused by the usual slander of a Christian child
having been crucified by the Jews, a horrible massacre
ensued. In the same reign a colony of Flemings
brought a blessing to the hospitable city that opened
its arms to them. They introduced woollen manu-
factures into the city, and getting their loug wool
spun at a village called Worsted, about nine miles
north of Norwich, drew from the place a name for
the goods there prepared. Norwich has ever since
remained a great mart for crapes, bombazine, and
horse-hair cloth. In 1336, more woollen manufactur-
ers arrived from Holland, and laid the foundation of
the wealth and greatness of Norwich. Blomefield,
the Norfolk historian, records that in the reign of
Henry the Eighth the yearly sale of Norwich stuffs
alone amounted to two hundred thousand pounds,
and of stockings to sixty thousand pounds. In 1770
Arthur Young (who, by-the-by, was here burnt in
effigy) represents the analogous amount at one mil-
lion two hundred thousand pounds.
Many of our kings and queens visited this city,
generally when on their way as pilgrims to Walsing-
ham. Edward the Third and Queen Philippa, the
brave and true — Henry the Sixth, the weak and the
unfortunate — lion-hearted Elizabeth and good-na-
The Paston Letters. 71
tured, shameless Charles the Second, were all here in
their turns.
There is a Paston letter extant which records some
particulars of the visit of Henry the Sixth. William
Paston, writing from Sheen, in 1473, says that the
king was just setting out for Norwich. " He will lie
there," he says, " on Palm Sunday even, and so tarry
there all Easter, and then to Walsingham ; wherefore
ye had need warn William Gogney and his fellows
to purvey them of wine enough, for every man bear-
eth me in hand that the town shall be drunk dry as
York was when the king was there"; and all the best
looking gentlewomen were to be assembled, " for my
Lord hath made great boast of the fayre and goode
gentlewomen of the countrey, and so the king said he
would see them sure." An earlier letter of the same
collection incidentally mentions that as much victuals
could be bought at Norwich for one penny as at Ca-
lais for fifteenpence, and " a pye of Wymondham "
to boot.
Moushold Heath, to the east of Norwich, is the
practising ground for riflemen now, as it was for
archers when rough Kett, the tanner, sat in royal
state under the Gospel Oak. It was here that
Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, came out to
preach to the fierce insurgents who had built on the
heath their rude huts made of boughs and sods of
turf. On the same height dwelt Howard, Earl ot
72 A Tour Round England.
Surrey, and Queen Elizabeth, when at Norwich, visit-
ed his mansion.
In the church of St. Peter's. Mancroft, whose lofty
tower overhangs the market-place, lies a great Nor-
wich worthy, Sir Thomas Brown, that learned and
eccentric physician who was the author of those
strange but delightful books, " Religio Medici,"
" Urn Burial," and " The Garden of Cyrus." Charles
Lambe has written some delightful commentaries on
this paradoxical thinker. Sir Thomas, who was
educated at Montpellier and learned Padua, had a
great practice at Norwich, where he died in 1682.
His life, written by Dr. Johnson in 1756, first recall-
ed public attention to the learned physician of Charles
the Second's time, of whom his editor said : " There
is no science in which he does not discover some
skill, and scarce any kind of knowledge, profane or
sacred, abstruse or elegant, which he does not appear
to have cultivated with success."
It was at a coffee-house in Norwich that Clarke, a
great expounder of the Newtonian philosophy, met
wicked Will Whiston, Swift's butt, and Whiston
openly expressed his surprise that so young a man
should know so much of those sublime discoveries
which were then almost a secret to all but a few
special mathematicians. This Dr. Samuel Clarke,
son of an alderman of Norwich, was rector of Dray-
ton. He succeeded Whiston as chaplain to the
A Witty Bishop. 73
Bishop of Norwich, stoutly attacked Toland, Collins,
and other infidels of his day, and translated New-
ton's Optics into Latin. He also, as Newton thought,
nearly broke Leibnitz's heart by a public controversy
with him on the profound questions of liberty and
necessity, Queen Caroline (the Princess of Wales)
being arbiter in the dispute, and the whole corre-
spondence passing through her hands. It was this
argumentative queen that Leibnitz used to say
always wanted to know the " pourquoi of the pour-
quoi."
Pope, who could hate, detested Dr. Clarke, and
called him a courtier, because he did not use his
interest to obtain the recall of Bolingbroke from
France. Dr. Clarke was offered the mastership of
the Mint on Newton's death, but refused it from a
conscientious scruple.
Nor should the crow leave Norwich without re-
membering that Bishop Corbet lies in the Cathedral.
" Where be his jibes now V This jovial, jocular pre-
late, now so quiet at the upper end of the choir, was
chaplain to King James the First, who, in 1627,
made him Dean of Christchurch, where he wrote
those quaint lines on Great Tom, which end with
" And though we are grieved to see thee thumpt and banged,
We'll all be glad, Great Tom, to see thee hanged."
At Walsingham the crow, though bound for Cro-
mer, alights for a survey, the quiet town at the foot
74 A Tour Round England.
of the wooded slope having been the great centre of
mediaeval pilgrimages, and more celebrated even
than Becket's tomb at Canterbury, which Chaucer
has immortalised. Erasmus, that cautious sceptic,
came here sneering safely under the shadow of his
hood, when he was professor at Cambridge. He calls
it, in his Colloquies, " the most celebrated place
throughout all England, and at the extreme coast of
England, on the north-west (north-east), at about three
miles distance from the sea." He goes on to say that
the glitter of gold and jewels at the shrine "made it
resemble the seat of the gods." Nor does he forget a
gibe or two at the monks in his sly way when he
mentions the undoubted milk of the Virgin, which
had been brought from Constantinople, and looked
like chalk, or the dried white of eggs ; and the frag-
ments of the true cross, so common in Europe that
if put together they would load an East India ship.
Great, too, was his quiet enjoyment of the fact that
the Walsingham monks mistook a Greek inscription
for Hebrew. He also listened complacently to his
monkish guide, who took him to the old gate-house,
still standing, and told him the miracle that had
happened there, when, in 1314, Sir Raaf Boutetourt,
a Norfolk knight, being hotly pursued by an enemy,
prayed Our Lady for deliverance, and was instantly
projected, horse, armour, and all, through a wicket
only an ell high and three-quarters broad ; the suro
Our Lady of Walsingham. 75
proof of the miracle being that a bar commemorat-
ing the event was to be seen nailed to the gate.
The famous chapel in Walsingham was built in 1061,
by the widow of Richard de Favarches, in imita-
tion of the Santa Casa at Nazareth. The widow's
son, Geoffrey, who visited Jerusalem in 1150, built
a priory and convent here of Black Canons. Ruins
of the Lady Chapel still remain in Mr. Warner's
grounds. There are two stair turrets of stone and
flint, panelled with rich "perpendicular" niches,
" some buttresses, and a large east window stripped
of its tracery ; and there are four early decorated
windows, with a well staircase to the pulpit of the
old refectory." Two "wishing wells " in the same
grounds mark the site of the old Chapel of the An-
nunciation, a plain wooden structure, said, like that
of Loretto, to have been brought here by choirs of
angels. It contained a miracle-working image of the
Virgin. Erasmus says these wells were fed by a
spring sacred to the Virgin, and that "the water was
wonderfully cold and efficacious in curing the pains
of the head and stomach."
Many of our kings came to Walsingham with
looped hat and sandled shoon, with wallets at their
side, and calabashes hanging from their staves. Henry
the Third was there in 1248 ; Edward the First came
twice— 1280, 1296 ; Edward the Second and Edward
the Third also visited the shrine, and in the reign of
76 A Tour Round England.
the latter monarch David Bruce, King of Scotland,
and twenty of his knights, obtained a safe conduct
from the wardens of the marches to come hither.
Henry the Sixth was the next King to visit the Norfolk
shrine. Henry the Seventh, too, after keeping his
Christmas at Norwich, sought Our Lady's Church at
Walsingham, and made his prayers and vows for
help and deliverance. When the battle of Stoke
ended the wars of the Roses, and Lambert Simnel fell
into his hands, the king, after offering supplications
and thanksgivings at Lincoln, sent his banner to be
offered here to Our Lady, who had answered his
prayers for victory, and gave also, at the same time,
an image of silver gilt.
Henry's burly son inherited the respect of his
subtle father for the Norfolk shrine, for in the second
year of his reign the young king, innocent and pure
then, walked barefoot from Barsham, two miles off, to
the sacred shrine, and there hung a chain of gold or
jewels round the neck of the holy doll, which years
after was derisively burnt at Chelsea, with other
cheating lumber of the same kind. At a time when,
as Roger Ascham says, " that the three kings of Co-
logne be not so rich" as Walsiugham, and just after
Flodden, Catherine of Arragon went on a Norfolk
pilgrimage. At that time the monks used to say
that the milky way pointed the road to Walsingham.
A recent writer says the palmers road hither is still
Unpleasant Qnestions. 77
traceable at certain spots between Newmarket,
Brandon, and Fakenham, although the old ballad
says .
" Unto the town of Walsingham
The way is hard for to be gone,
And very crooked are those paths
For you to find out all alone."
At the time of the suppression, Cromwell and his
searchers set their faces like flints against this shrine,
issuing nineteen articles of inquiry, and pressing
cruelly hard these two special questions :
" Whether Our Lady hath done so many miracles
newe of late, as it was said she did when there was
more offering made unto her?
" Whether Our Lady's milke be liquid or no, and
whether the former sexton could not testify that he
had renewed the milk when it was like to be dried
up!"
Fragments of the old ecclesiastical grandeur are
strewn about this Norfolk town. Close by the
" Common Place " there is an old domed conduit,
with bricked-up niches and the stump of a broken
cross ; and not far from the station, built in among
stables and low sheds, there are remains of the
house of Franciscan or Grey Friars, reared in 1346 by
Elizabeth de Burgo, Countess of Clare, the foundress
of Clare Hall in Cambridge.
And now with one quick glance across the sea,
that flashes in the sunlight, the crow turns tail,
78 A Tour Round England.
and bears straight, steady, and undeviating for his
old perch on the black, gold-tipped mountain dome
of St. Paul's, his next flight being to the sea south-
ward.
THIRD FLIGHT
DUE SOUTH.
81
CHAPTER XXL
CHEAM TO EPSOM.
JUST outside a village a little off the Brighton
road — a village so leafy and embowered that
twenty years ago the gardens were in summer
twilights so noisy with nightingales that dying per-
sons in that retired hamlet have been known to have
had their last trance- like sleeps painfully broken in
upon by the sweet unceasing jangle, the crow, swoop-
ing down from his " coign of vantage " at St. Paul's,
alights on a grave avenue of old ancestral elms. Here
you see the special tree of Surrey to perfection. The
huge free-grown, close-grained limbs bear aloft with
triumphant ease their thick, green clouds of foliage,
aud, meeting overhead, cast a carpet of mottled sha-
dows beneath. This avenue at Cheam (a place skirted
by all persons who drive to the Derby) was one of
the old approaches to Nonesuch, one of Queen Eliza-
beth's palaces. Henry the Eighth, following the deer
from Hampton Court to the very foot of Banstead
VOL. II. G
82 A Tour Round England.
Downs, took a fancy to the quiet spot where he had
rested one day, in 1539, and dined under the trees after
the mort was blown and the deer broken up by the
eager knives. He bought the manor of Sir Richard de
Cuddington, in exchange for a' Norfolk rectory, and,
pulling down the old manor house and parish church,
he began a palace. Leland calls it the " nullique
parem" — the matchless or " nonesuch" — but the king
dying before it was finished, Queen Mary gave it to
the Earl of Arundel, " in free socage, to hold of the
honour of Hampton Court ;" and the earl, for love of
his old master, completed the palace.
Queen Elizabeth liked well the spot selected by her
father, and often came here when the Earl of Arundel
was its owner, and also when it passed to the earl's
son-in-law, a Lumley. ( " Did ye ever ken that
Adam was a Lumley ? " King James once said to a
proud lord of this family who was boasting of his
pedigree.) Eventually she bought the palace, and
spent many of her later summers here. There her
well-guarded maids of honour rambled and laughed
between the close-cut green hedges, and her pretty
pages played at the brim of the fountains, and Raleigh
and his rivals clattered their rapiers up the flight of
eight steps that led through the clock tower to the
inner court, and grave men like Burleigh and Walsing-
ham looked from the turret roofs over the downland
and the woodland, and keepers slew fallow deer under
Gloriana ! 83
the elms, and many wise and foolish actors fretted
their little hour upon the stage and then were seen
no more. Here, especially, took place an interview
that was the turning point in the fortune of the
wrong-headed, rashly-brave Earl of Essex. This, the
last of her favourites (Gloriana was only sixty-seven,
thin as a herring, painted, and addicted to fuzzy red
wigs, stuck with jewels, and ruffs as big as cart
wheels), had distinguished himself by tossing his hat
on shore at Cadiz, and leading the way to the capture
of Spain's strongest fortress, where Raleigh captured
and destroyed thirteen men-of-war and immense
magazines of provisions and naval stores. The India
fleet, with twenty millions of dollars, might have
been also captured, but for the jealous opposition to
the impetuosity of Essex. Proud Spain had never
received such a blow in the teeth before, and threat-
ened a second Armada. Essex — disdainful of all
rivals, and always in a pet with the queen, who, pro-
voked at his factious insolence, once struck him in the
face at the council table — was sent by Burleigh, the
" old fox," who hated him, with great expectations to
Ireland, to quell the rebellion of the O'Neil in Ulster.
To the queen's alarm and infinite vexation, Essex
wasted his time in Munster, and ended by concluding
a treaty with Tyrone, tolerating the Catholic religion.
On Michaelmas eve, about ten o'clock of the morning,
Essex, booted and spurred and splashed with mud,
g2
84 A Tour Round England.
even to his face, threw himself off his horse at the
court gate of Xonesuch, made haste up to the privy
chamber, and thence to the queen's bedchamber.
The queen was newly up, but not dressed, and her
hair was all about her face. The earl knelt unto her,
kissed her hands, and had private speech, which, says
a court letter- writer of that day, " seemed to give him
great contentment, for coming from her Majesty, to
go shift himself in his chamber, he was very pleasan t,
and thanked God, though he had suffered much trouble
and storms abroad, he found a sweet calm at home."
The courtiers were aghast at the temerity of this
coup de main, but all at first seemed halcyon weather
with the returned favourite. About eleven the earl,
resplendent in satin and jewels, went up again to the
queen, and had a gracious interview of an hour and a
half. But then slight symptoms of a squall appeared,
and after dinner Her Majesty seemed much changed
for so small a time, and began to question sharply
about his precipitate return, and to complain of his
leaving suddenly, and all things at hazard. She
appointed that very afternoon a council, where the
lords might hear him. That same night between ten
and eleven a commandment came from the queen to
my Lord of Essex that he should keep his chamber,
and on the following Monday he was committed to
the custody of the keeper at York House. When
Sir John Harrington, her godson, went to the queen,
Essex in Disgrace. 85
she chafed, walked to and fro, and cried, snatching at
his girdle,
" By G , sir, I am no queen ! That man is above
me. Who gave him command to come here so soon?
I did send him on other business. Go home !"
" And home I went," says Harrington. " I did not
stay to be bidden twice. If all the Irish rebels had
been at my heels, I should not have made better
speed. "
Essex was equally tossed by passion. Raleigh
says of him, " He uttered strange words, bordering
on such strange designs, that made me hasten forth
and leave his presence. Thank heaven ! I am so far
home, and if I go in such trouble again I deserve the
gallows for a meddling fool. The queen never
knoweth how to humble the haughty spirit, the
haughty spirit knoweth not how to yield, and the
man's soul seemed tossed to and fro like the waves
of a troubled sea."
His last letter repulsed, the earl grew desperate,
and resolved to seize the queen and win over her
councillors. To his house near Temple Bar he invit-
ed the leading Puritans, Scotch emissaries, and all
disaffected noblemen and captains. In February,
1601, took place his foolish outbreak, and before the
same month was over his foolish head fell from his
shoulders in the courtyard of the Tower. What really
cost him his head, said Raleigh, was not the depart-
86 A Tour Hound England.
ure from Ireland, or the ill-hatched rebellion, but his
saying that Elizabeth " was an old woman, as crook-
ed in mind as in body." Perhaps, however, she had
never forgotten being seen without her wig — who
knows ? Nonesuch was given by the parliament to
Algernon Sidney and General Lambert ; afterwards,
during the Plague, the office of the Exchequer was
transferred there; after that Charles the Second
gave the palace to the Duchess of Cleveland, who, on
the same principle which makes thieves instantly melt
stolen plate, pulled it down, sold the materials, and
divided the park into farms. There are but few
traces of the palace now, only one long deep ditch, al-
ways wet in winter, which is called " Diana's Ditch"
by the poor people, and is supposed to be the site of
a great Diana and Actaeon fountain. A sorry ending.
In the centre of a ploughed field, in a rejoicing old
age, there stands a wonderful elm, twenty-two feet
six inches in girth and eighty feet high. It is still
full of vigour, and one of the earliest trees in the
neighbourhood to bud and bloom. The legend is
that it springs from the site of the palace kitchen,
but it is really one of those " Queen Elizabeth elms "
under which, when hunting, she used to stand with
her small steel crossbow to kill the deer when driven
past her.
Cheam, during the great Plague, was selected as
the site of a school for citizens' children, which still
A Legend of Laud.
flourishes, and an old wooden house called " White
hall " yet exists, where business of the palace used to
be transacted. The tower of the old church, a square
ugly stump, has a large clamp bracing it together, to
restrain a crack which gaped open as long ago as
when Archbishop Laud was in prison. Laud had
been curate here, and being a superstitious man, who
even shuddered at curious spots coming on his nails,
he trembled at this omen, lost heart, and soon after
lost his head.
And now the crow bears away with a slant flight to
Banstead Downs, that rolling prairie all in a golden
blaze with gorse blossom, and spotted purple with
the dry, fragrant network of wild thyme. Here,
where the throbbing windmill tosses its broad giant
arms, the larks are up by dozens above the clover
and the green corn that now, with a grey bloom on
every blade, undulates in rippling waves. Through
miles of blue distance, the crow Bees St. Paul's, no
bigger than a chimney ornament, to the east ; Wind-
sor Castle, visible to a keen eye, appears no bigger
than a toy castle ; and on Penge Hill a little diamond
speck, which is the Crystal Palace, is pointed out by
the golden finger of an admiring sunbeam. By day
the smoke-cloud of the monster city broods on the
eastern horizon like a phantom ship, and at night
the glare of its million lamps illuminates the sky.
There is no certainty as to when racing began at
88 A Tour Round England.
Epsom Downs ; but most antiquaries believe in the
reign of James the First, who loved a good horse
and liked to sweep up a stake. Certain it is that in
] 648 six hundred Cavalier gentlemen assembled at
Epsom Downs under pretence of a horse race, and
marched from there to Reigate. Major Audely, with
five troops of horse and three of foot, overtook them
at Ewell, skirmished with them in Nonesuch Park,
and charged and routed them on a hill half-way to
Kingston. The Duke of Buckingham — a noble, brave
handsome youth — set his back to an elm tree, and
there fought desperately at bay till he was struck
down. At Kingston the Cavaliers rallied, and drove
back the Puritan cavalry. The Epsom races can
only be clearly traced back as far as the year 1730,
when the famous Madcap won the prize, and proved
the best plate horse in England. The races were at
first held in the spring and autumn, and being then
comparatively local, began at eleven, and were con-
ducted in a quiet leisurely way, the company usually
trooping off to the town for a general dinner after
the first and second heat, and returning to another
tranquil race after their wine. In 1825, sixty thou-
sand persons was thought a grand assemblage at the
Derby. The London, Dorking, Worthing, and Chi-
chester coaches brought down the few visitors, but
there were no trains to pour their two hundred thou-
sand at once upon the town. The day had not be-
Epsom. 89
come the carnival it now is : no green boughs, false
noses, or oak apples enlivened the noisy, jostling
procession. It must have been in the early times a
sober trotting along of long-coated men in cocked-
hats for a mere day's fresh air and pic-nic.
Epsom, a place proud of its traditions, has a name
of very doubtful derivation. Some etymologists
trace it back to Ebbs-ham (the village of the Ebb),
from an intermittent spring that here gushes out of
the chalk, and at certain periods is drawn back into
the earth ; others from the Princess Ebba, who was
baptised here A.D. 660, and gave her hand to one of
the earliest of the Saxon kings. The palace of the fair
Christian stood where Epsom Court now is. In
Doomsday Book, Ebesham stands good for thirty-
four villains and six bondmen, two churches, two
mills, and a wood that fed twenty swine. The manor
belonged to the monastery of Chertsey, about whose
Black Abbot there is a legend preserved, not unwor-
thy of the crow's record. A certain gay princess be-
came enamoured of a handsome abbot of the river-
side monastery, and, unable to allure the holy man
from his vows of celibacy, the wanton lady sent a
troop of her maidens to lie in ambuscade for the aus-
tere priest, and bring him by gentle force to her cas-
tle. The maidens fell upon him and overpowered
him. The abbot prayed only for time to repeat his
prayers at the altar of a neighbouring chapel ; and
90 A Tour Round England.
his captors laughingly granted his request. Prostrat-
ing himself before the altar, the abbot prayed to the
Virgin to save him by rendering him at once loath-
some to all women. The Virgin granted his prayer,
and when the abbot returned to the rejoicing escort
he was black as a negro, and an object of horror, and
not of love. The manor of Epsom, seized by Henry
the Eighth, was given by him to one of his companions
at the tournament, Sir Nicholas Carew, of Beddington,
who was soon after executed for treason. Queen
Elizabeth bestowed it on Edward Darcy, a groom of
the Privy Chamber, who soon sold it to pay his gam-
bling debts.
Now, Muse, arise and sing of Epsom Salts ! It was
the discovery of this nauseous but efficacious sedi-
ment that first made Epsom famous. A donkey,
and not a philosopher, first discovered the medical
spring in 1618, by wisely refusing to drink its waters.
Fuller and Aubrey both mention the pool as alumin-
ous, and with a deposit of snowy flakes. About 1619,
certain learned physicians, following in the footsteps
of the learned ass, analysed the water and pronoun-
ced it to be impregnated with " a calcareous nitre,
or rather a soluble, bitter, cathartic salt," the practical
effects of which were beyond all argument.
About 1621 the wells were enclosed and a shed
erected for patients. The doctors soon began to sing
the praises of Epsom. In Charles the Second's time,
Durdans. 91
Shad well lays the scene of one of his plays at Epsom,
and introduces a bubbling projector who proposes to
supply London with fresh air in bladders from Ban-
stead Downs. Nell Gwynne, at that time under the
protection of LordBuckhurst, one of her early lovers,
lived in a house next the King's Head Hotel, now a
shop, some years ago remarkable for its low bay
windows and balcony. There Nell, tossing her
golden curls, used to sit laughing and bantering,
watching the company parading to and fro. She
remained always fond of Epsom, and Charles after-
wards built her stables near Pitt's-place, close to the
parish church. In 1723 a fantastic old writer named
Toland, who concocted An Itinerary through England,
and who had known Epsom in Queen Anne's time,
when dull Prince George of Denmark came there to
drink the waters, bequeathed us a curious picture of
a fashionable country spa in the old time. It seems
to have been then a long, straggling village about a
mile in length, open to the cornfields and the fresh
breezy down, a church at one end, Lord Guildford's
palace (Durdans) at the other, and gardens and trees
before every door. The ruddy-faced country people
rode round daily with fish, venison, Banstead DoAvn
mutton, fruit and flowers, and bargained with the
court and city ladies, who made it their custom of a
morning to sit on benches outside their doors.
Epsom, at this period, boasted two rival bowling
92 A Tour Round England.
greens, to which " the company " devoted themselves
every evening, especially on Mondays, music playing
most of the day, and dancing sometimes crowning
the night. Indeed this intense coxcomb Toland tells
his fair correspondent Eudoxia that " a fairer circle
was not to be seen at Carlsbad or Aix-la-Chapelle,than
at Epsom High Green and Long Room on a public
day." The raffling shops brought together as many
sharpers as Tunbridge ; and the writer takes care to
observe " that it was very diverting for a stander-by
to observe the different humours and passions of both
sexes, which discover themselves with less art and
reserve at play than on any other occasion ; the rude,
the sullen, the noisy, and the affected, the peevish,
the covetous, the litigious, and the sharping, the
proud, the prodigal, the impatient, and the imperti-
nent, become visible foils to the well-bred, prudent,
modest, and good-humoured." At the taverns, inns,
and coffee-houses, all distinctions of Whig and Tory
were forgotten. After an early dinner, the visitors
to the wells rode on the Downs or took coach for the
Ring, where, on a Sunday evening, this detestable
prig had actually counted as many as sixty vehicles.
Saturday, when the husbands of the city ladies came
from town, was the great evening for display ; and,
next to that, Monday, when there was a public ball
in the Assembly Rooms. On Sundays, in the fore-
noon, the ever restless " company " that did not ride
Epsom Fashions. 93
the four-mile course past the old warren (still exist-
ing) to Carshalton, drove to Boxhill, where they
partook of refreshments in arbours cut among the
trees.
Epsom was no doubt a pretty countrified, quaint
place when Toland (who must have been a stupend-
ous bore) was there, for nearly all the houses had
porticos of clipped elms or limes, and an avenue of
trees shaded the long terrace that ran from the
watchhouse (where the clock tower now stands) as
far as the chief tavern, now the Albion Hotel. The
citizens and gentlemen took breakfast and supper al
fresco under these whispering bowers, and pretty
Hogarthian pictures the groups must have formed.
" By the conversation of those walking in these
avenues," says Toland, " you would fancy yourself
to be this minute on the Exchange, and the next at
St. James's ; one while in an East India factory, and
another while with the army in Flanders [how they
swore there, Uncle Toby ! ], or on board the fleet on *
the ocean ; nor is there any profession, trade, or call-
ing that you can miss of here either for your instruc-
tion or your diversion." Indeed, considering the races
and packs of hounds, the angling in the Mole and
the rides on the Downs, one can scarcely wonder
that, as Toland says, the place was well filled with
bankrupts, fortune-hunters, crazed superannuated
beaux, married coquettes, intriguing prudes, richly
94 A Tour Round England.
dressed waiting-maids, and complimenting footmen.
By-and-by knavery and quackery invaded the
wells. A rascally apothecary, named Levingstone,
started sham new wells, gave concerts and balls,
bought and shut up the real spring, and procured
testimonials of cures and medical certificates (you
can't do that sort of thing now). The cures began
to cease, the restless " company" to grow shy. The
poor neglected old spring still exists, and is as full of
sulphate of magnesia as ever, but no one cares to be
cured by it now.
95
CHAPTER XXII.
ASHSTEAD AND LEATHERHEAD TO DORKING AND
WOTTON.
THE crow passing over Surrey on his swift way to
the sea, alights at Ashstead Park, on one of the
limes, an avenue of which light-leafed trees was
planted when William of Orange came here to visit
his loyal adherent, Sir Robert Howard, a poor dra-
matist, the prototype of Bayes, in the Duke of Buck-
ingham's comedy of the Rehearsal, and the Sir Posi-
tive at all of Shadwell's Sullen Lovers. His romantic
rhyming plays, stuffed full of extravagant metaphors
and false tropes, seem to have deserved all the ridicule
showered upon them. Evelyn tells us of a man he
knew who planted an ash-tree, and before his death
cut it down and sold it for forty shillings ; and he
goes on to mention, as a proof of the profits of grow-
ing trees, that he knew three acres of barren land
sown with acorns, that in sixty years became a thriv-
ing wood worth three hundred pounds. The records
of Ashstead help us to some facts about the age of
96 A Tour Round England.
trees, Avhich are difficult to obtain elsewhere. Here
we get at certainty. There are some fine Spanish
chestnuts growing near the lake on this demesne that
have reached the girth of twenty-two feet. These
fine trees, whose jagged spear-shaped leaves and
twisted trunks Salvator Rosa delighted to introduce
into his vigorous landscape, were planted by Thomas
Davis, an old gardener, only six years before the bat-
tle of Culloden. When a boy he brought from Lon-
don three shillings' worth of Spanish chestnuts as a
treat for his fellow-servants, but the thorny fruit be-
ing then little eaten in England, the servants took a
prejudice to them, and would not touch them. Davis,
not wishing to waste them, sowed them in a bed in
the garden at Ashstead, and afterwards planted them
out where they now stand, giants looking down on
feeble and short-lived man. The sheltered, moist,
warm park suited them. These facts convince us
more thau ever that the age of celebrated trees is
often overrated. Trees supposed to be of immense
antiquity are often only the descendants of historic
trees. They have grown up in the same place, and
retained the name of their progenitor. But for the
facts we have noted, the Spanish chestnuts of Ash-
stead would pass muster for veterans of three cen-
turies, and the crow topographer might have sworn
they were planted the year Catherine of Arragon
came to England.
The Royal Stag. 97
A certain curious legend is told of two large antlers
preserved in Ashstead Hall. They once belonged to
the king of the herd, a stag of unprecedented age, to
whom all the other deer paid homage, following his
train, obeying all his behests, and allowing him even
to gore to death offenders against his authority.
When he reached extreme old age he remained al-
most entirely by the banks of the lake where the
grass grew thickest and greenest, and where he could
drink without having to walk far. It is said that his
special followers used to bring him leaves and
chewed grass, and wait upon him with undeviating
loyalty till death came to call the old monarch.
A little further south, at Leatherhead (a sloping-
place — Celtic) where the " nousling " Mole slips be-
tween the trees, and just by the bridge stands an old
inn, now the " Running Horse," an ale-house, that
has for hundreds of years opened its doors to thirsty
and dusty travellers. This is where Eleanor Rum-
mynge, the famous ale wife lived, upon whom Skelton,
that enemy of begging friars, once wrote one of his
rough and ready satires in jolting verse, not unlike
what Rabelais might have written. The enemy of
Wolsey describes the old landlady,
"■ Footed like a plane,
Legged like a crane ;
In her furred flocket,
And grey russet rocket.
VOL. IT. H
98 A Tour Round England.
Her hood of Lincoln green —
It had been hers I ween
More than forty year.
She breweth nappy ale,
And maketh pot sale
To travellers and tinkers,
To sweaters, to swynkers,
To all good ale-drinkers,
That will nothing spare,
But drink till they stare,
And bring themselves bare."
And then, in his reckless steeplechase way, the rough
poet sketches old Eleanor's gossips with almost Chau-
cerian breadth, and more than Rabelais's coarseness,
as they come in with eggs, and wool, and London
trinkets and rabbit -skins, and strings of beads, to bar-
ter for the dame's ale. Yet Skelton could be refined
when he chose, and Erasmus respected him, and
called him " a decus and lumen ;" in his Colin
Clout the poet has not badly described his own
verse :
"Though my ryme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Motley rain beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith. "
There is still extant a curious old woodcut of ugly,
jovial Eleanor, holding an ale-pot in either hand, and
below is the following inscription :
" When Skelton wore the laurel crown,
My ale put all the ale-wives down."
The River Mole. 99
And here at Leatherhead, where Judge Jeffreys once
hid his ugly head when his time came, the crow feels
a duty to give a word to the peculiarities of that
strange and weird river, the Mole, whom topographi-
cal Drayton describes, in rather an extravagant alle-
gory, as beloved by the Thames :
" But as they thus in pomp came sporting on the shoal,
'Gainst Hampton Court he meets the soft and gentle Mole,
Whose eye so pierced his breast."
The parents of Master Thames refused their consent,
the lad was obdurate :
" But Thames would hardly on ; oft turning back to show
From his much-loved Mole, how he was loath to go."
The parents, still obdurate, raise hills to shut in their
wilful daughter ; but all in vain ; Mole is so artful :
" Mole digs herself a path by working day and night,
(According to her name) to show her nature right ;
And underneath the earth for three miles space doth creep.
Till, gotten out of sight, far from her mother's keep,
Her fore-intended course the wanton nymph doth run,
As longing to embrace old Tames and Isis' son."
Spenser also makes the Mole a guest at his pretty
Raphaelesque marriage of the Thames and Medway.
The river is said to derive its name from the Celtic
word melyn (a mill), as in Doomsday Book it is noted
as turning twenty mills ; but it is just as likely that
it was first called the Mole from its singular tendency
to burrow. It springs from a cluster of little rivulets
100 A Tour Round England.
on the borders of Sussex that meet at Gatwick, in
Surrey, and, coursing under the arches of Kinnersley
Bridge, push on for the leafy vale of Mickleham.
There is an erroneous notion prevalent that the river
Mole suddenly dives into the earth, disappears, and
re-emerges at a spot further on. Two of the swallows,
as they are called, can be seen close by the Fridley
meadows, and more near the little picturesque road-
side inn at Burford, where Keats, that wonderful
youth, wrote the latter part of his Endymion. By
the Mole he must have wandered, comparing it,
no doubt, to the Sicilian Arethusa, that shrinking
nymph, who, flying from her fierce lover, Alpheus,
rose in Sicily, transformed by Diana into a fountain,
only to find the river Alpheus rising by her side
ardent as ever. These swallows, into which the Mole
sinks rather than dives, are really occasioned by the
river as it swirls round bends of the hills, washing
away the mud, sand, and softer strata from under the
more resisting and less impressionable chalk. Into
the cavities the deeper strata sink, and the under-
groundchannels continue beneath them. GossipingAu-
brey, acontemporary of the excellent Evelyn, say sthat
in his time a great pit, thirty feet deep, and with run-
ning water at the bottom of it, opened one night near
the Mole — "the sullen Mole that dives his hiding
flood," as Pope calls it. Defoe mentions a party of
gentlemen damming up this river, and the water sud-
Box Hill. 101
denly sinking all away. They caught in the dry fields
a vast quantity of fish.
Just above the Mole, which flows like a moat at
its feet, rises that steep rampart of Box Hill, which is
one of those great chalk waves that spread from
Farnham to Folkestone, and here meet the red
sandstone. The chalk runs out in a long pier head,
four hundred and forty-five feet high, so barren and
desolate in parts of its escarpment where the rain has
washed off in long furrows all the surface earth, that
not even a hair-bell can fix its roots or find nourish-
ment ; but its south side is covered thick with bosky
groves of box-trees, planted, as some think, by the
Romans, but most probably indigenous. One tradi-
tion attributes their planting to some Earl of Arun-
del, two or three centuries ago ; but in old deeds, as
early as King John and Henry the Third, " Henry of
Box Hill," and " Adam of Box Hill," are found men-
tioned as witnesses. The box-tree is fond of chalk,
and grows equally well at Bexley, in Kent, at Box-
well, on the Cotswolds, and on the chalk hills near
Dunstable. Another proof that the box is indigenous
in this part of Surrey is that at Betch worth, close by r
it is found in equally wild luxuriance, and at least
twenty-feet high. The groves at Box Hill — dark
and close, with the long whitish stems bare below,
and no vegetation growing beneath and around them
— have an unusual bewitched and lifeless appearance
102 A Tour Bound England.
so different from the ordinary rich nnderwood of
England, purpled dark with orchis, or lit with pale
primroses.
This close-grained crisp wood has always been
valuable to cabinet-makers and wood-engravers. In
1608, fifty pounds' worth of box-trees were cut down
on one sheep walk. Within a year or two of 1712,
three thousand pounds' worth were sold ; and in 1795,
when war had reduced the supply of the superior
box-wood from the Levant, Sir W. Mildmay put up
the trees (uncut for sixty-five years) at twelve thou-
sand pounds. This cutting, it was agreed, should
last over twelve years, so that the hill was never
shaved too bare. Over the brow of the hill the soil
suddenly ceases to grow box, and turns purple and
gold, with gorse and heather, or shoots up into odor-
ous juniper-trees. Just on the brow that rises be-
yond Dorking like a great petrified blue wave, there
is a small cottage; near it, looking down on the valley,
stands a table for tea-drinkers and resting travellers,
and under this table lies Major Labelliere. An odd
place for a major? Well, it is ; but this was a major
of the marines, who went mad from a disappoint-
ment in love — and what eccentricity might not be
expected of a marine crossed in love? Labelliere was
a handsome, fashionable man, who never quite re-
covered having been rejected in early life, and whose
brain eventually gave way under the strain of that
The Crazy Major. 103
ceaseless regret. His old friend, the Duke of De-
vonshire, pitying his misfortune, allowed him one
hundred pounds a year. After residing in town
some time, he came to live at Dorking. At Chiswick
the major had been in the habit of walking to Lon-
don, his pockets stuffed with newspapers and pamph-
lets, haranguing the tribes of boys who followed and
teased him. At Dorking his humour was to revel in
rags and dirt, till he became a sort of walking dung-
hill. His last eccentricity, on his death-bed, was to
leave an expectant friend a curiously-folded, sealed,
and promising parcel, not by any means to be opened
till after his death. It proved, unfortunately, to con-
tain nothing but a plain memorandum-book. By his
own request, the major was buried on the brow of the
hill (perhaps a favourite resting-place of the crazed
whilom man of fashion), without church rites, and
with his head downwards, it being one of the gallant
major's favourite axioms that the world was turned
upside-down, and so at the last day he should come
up right. From the major's grave there is a view
across the green wooded heights that command
Dorking, like redoubts, of the whole of Sussex,
stretching thirty-six miles towards the South Downs.
That little inn, the " Hare and Hounds," nestling at
the foot of Box Hill, is specially dear to the crow, be-
cause in 1817 it sheltered Keats, that wonderful son
of a Moorfields livery-stable-keeper, who here wrote
104 A Tour Round England.
that wild poem of Diana's love, that begins,
" A thing of beauty is a joy for ever."
Yes, here, in the clefts of Box Hill, Keats found the
scenes he describes :
" Under the brow
Of some steep mossy hill, where ivy dun
Would hide us up, although spring leaves be none,
And where rank yew -trees, as we nestle through,
Will drop their scarlet berry cups of dew."
In the same sunny little inn, beside the river, Lord
Nelson, before starting for Trafalgar, spent several
days of retirement with the syren who begiuled him.
That amiable poetess and excellent schoolmistress,
Mrs. Barbauld, has left some pleasant lines on this
little caravanserai, and they end prettily enough :
" From the smoke and the din, and the hurry of town,
Let the care-wearied cit to this spot hasten down ;
And embosomed in shades hear the lark singing shrill,
In the cottage that stands at the foot of the hill.
******
Here's a health to the cottage, a health to the plains ;
Ever blithe be your damsels and constant your swains :
Here may industry, peace, and contentment reign still,
While the Mole softly creeps at the foot of the hill."
One dart from the road, the crow makes between
NorburyPark and Dorking, to visit at Westhumble,the
house "Camilla Lacy," built by Mr. Locke for his friend
General D'Arblay, an artillery officer, who had served
Louis the Sixteenth faithfully, and at last fled from
the descending blade of the guillotine. To this plea-
Camilla Lacy. 105
sant retreat "Little Fanny D'Arblay" came when she
gave the general her hand, and after she had written
Camilla, one of her most successful novels, drawing
some of her characters from the family of Mr. Locke.
Madame D'Arblay wrote her Camilla, or a picture of
Youth — for which she received many hundred pounds
in 1795, two years after her marriage, and the year
her tragedy of Edwy and Elgiva failed at Drury
Lane. The world may forget Miss Burney the nov-
elist, but they will never forget the keeper of that ad-
mirable Diary in which, amid much silly toadyism and
sentimental vanity, she has left us an extraordinary
series of pictures of internal court life. It is the only
book in which we really see pleasantly the respectable
old couple, and their wild and selfish children.
The crow, glancing over the fields, "the Lord-
ships," as they are called, that spread between Bur-
ford Bridge and Dorking, to the right of the road,
passes a quiet farm-house up a shaded lane, where
one would think, hearing the larks singing over the
fresh green corn, with bloom on every blade, and the
blackbirds carolling from the wooded hills above,
Death had never set his black foot. Yet to this lone
farm, begirt by its silent region of cornfields, a farmer
and his wife once returned from London, with symp-
toms of the plague. They both died of the terrible
disease, deserted by the frightened neighbours, and
were buried behind their house, in a hole dug in one
106 A Tour Round England.
of their cornfields. Not far over these hills is Poles-
den, among whose beech-woods is the house where
Sheridan retired during one of the lulls of his revel-
ling life, just after his marriage with his second wife,
Miss Ogle, the daughter of the Dean of Winchester.
It was in 1795, immediately after his reply on the Be-
gum charge, and his four days deluge of eloquence
and invective, that this extraordinary meteor of a
man expended twenty thousand pounds (Heaven and
the Jews only knew where he got it). At this Poles-
den house, and in these beech-woods, he polished his
bon-mots and rounded his periods. He was living here
during the great debates on the mutiny at the Nore
and the dreadful Irish Rebellion. A toothless old man
is still living at Polesden, who, when young and
curly-headed, was footboy in Sheridan's house. He
has preserved many traditions of those wild and reck-
less days. It was not unfrequent, says the old boy,
for Sheridan to drive out with four horses, and before
the first stage to have the leaders seized by an am-
buscade of hook-nosed sheriff's officers. It was well
known to the Dorking tradesmen that they had only
to toil up Ranmore Hill to Polesden, to be sure if
they did not get their bill paid, to at least secure a
box at Drury Lane for themselves and friends. If
stories were true, relying on his ultimate power of ob-
taining money, Sherry was not very scrupulous in his
expedients to raise ready supplies. On one occasion
Sheridan s Tricks. 107
he sold a butcher a drove of hogs that he had allowed
a friendly farmer to drive on to his stubbles ; and on
another time, when a choleric and refractory butcher
refused to leave a juicy leg of mutton that had been
ordered, without being first paid for, he sent a ser-
vant, while it was in the parlour for approval, to
thrust it into the pot, and begin to sodden it, so as
to checkmate the irascible tradesman when he asked
for its return.
Not far from Polesden is Ranmore Common, the
breezy summit of a hill that commands Dorking, a
wild, undulating sweep of fox-haunted furze and
brake, with a twenty-five miles range of landscape.
" Can you see St. Paul's from here V asked a tra-
veller of an old native breaking stones on this high
plateau of Surrey down.
" Lor' bless your honour, yes," said the old man,
pushing back the shade over his eyes, " and general-
ly just before a shower — it's always going to be wet
when we see St. Paul's, so we call it hereabouts
our weather-glass."
Thus time and distance dwarf objects. A king's
reign forms a line in a chronicler's book of dynasties
and a huge cathedral becomes a countryman's wea-
ther-glass.
The Aladdin's Palace of a mansion that crowns
this embowered hill, and rises like a fortress above
Dorking, so that a military owner would be almost
108 A Tour Bound England.
compelled to have himself chained up, lest he should
buy eighteen-pounders and open fire on the circum-
jacent towers, is Denbies, now Mr. Cubitt's, once Mr.
Denison's, and originally built on the site of an ob-
scure farm-house by Mr. Jonathan Tyers, the ingenious
and eccentric gentleman who in 1730 bought Vaux-
hall, in the Borough, and opened a nightly Ridotto
al fresco. Here a hypochondriac, his son Tom-
my Tyers, an amateur poet, and a friend of Dr.
Johnson's, the proprietor of the centre of fashion and
folly, turned the place into a sort of sentimental
cemetery. One wood of eight acres, which he called
the Penseroso, was supposed to resemble the
pleasantest side of the Valley of the Shadow of
Death. There was a small temple with elegiac in-
scriptions, and a loud but concealed clock to break
the intolerable " sound of nothing." A dismal alcove
with paintings by roystering Hayman, of " The Dying
Christians " and " The Dying Unbelievers," and the
stern statue of Truth trampling on a mask, had as a
wind-up and final corrector, at the termination of a
walk, two u elegantly carved pedestals " with two
skulls. Beneath one, a lady's, was written :
" Blush not, ye fair, to own ine — but be wise,
Nor turn from sad mortality your eyes."
And so on, ending thus :
" When coxcombs flatter, and when fools adore,
Here learn the lesson to be vain no more.''
Old Weller. 109
Beneath the gentleman's was this poetical rap on
the knuckles :
" Why start ? The case is yours — or will be soon,
Some years perhaps — perhaps another moon.
Life, &c, &c.
*******
" Farewell ! remember ! nor my words despise,
The only happy are the only wise."
All this sham asceticism of the proprietor of the
Lambeth tea-gardens was swept away by the next
proprietor in 1767, and instead of dismal graves
there are now broad sweeps of sunny lawn, and in-
stead of ladies' and gentlemen's skulls, a scarlet blaze
of geranium beds and golden billows of calceolarias.
The crow drops from Ranmore Hill upon Dorking,
which stands close to the old Roman road, or " stone
street " from Arundel to the Sussex coast — one long
street with an ugly church of the Georgian Gothic,
lying back shyly behind the house, as if ashamed of
itself.
The literary pilgrim looks in vain for his special
throne — the Marquis of Granby. There is the Red
Lion, once the Cardinal's Cap, and the White Horse,
once the Cross House (held of the manor of St. John
of Jerusalem at Clerkenwell) ; but the famed inn,
where the fatal widow beguiled old Weller, and
where the Shepherd, after imbibing too deeply of his
special vanity, was cooled in the horse-trough, is
gone. Let the pilgrim be informed the real " Mar-
110 A Tour Round England.
kis " was the King's Head (now the Post Office), a
great coaching house on the Brighton road in the
old days, and where many a smoking team drew up
when Sammyvell was young. Long before old
Weller mounted his chariot throne Dorkiug was a
quiet place, much frequented by London merchants
(chiefly the Dutch), who came down to see Box Hill,
and eat fresh-caught perch. Here and there a
gable end marks a house of that period, but the only
history the town claims is that its church has the
honour of containing the body of that fat Duke of
Norfolk, who died in 1815, and who was famous for
eating more beefsteaks than any other Englishman
living. The sworn boon companion of Fox and the
Regent, the daring man who, in 1798, consist-
ently opposed war with revolutionary France, was
dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy of York for
having, at the Whig Club, toasted " the Majesty
of the People." At Deepdene, that bountifully wood-
ed estate, with hilly plantations rising above it in
three dark billows, "Anastasius" Hope resided, and
collected his stores of Etruscan vases, ancient statues,
and Thorwaldsen sculpture ! Anastasius, or the Me-
moirs of a Modern Greek, came out in 1819, and were
at first attributed to Byron. The hero was like By-
ron's heroes, a remorseful scoundrel, sometimes brave,
always amorous, and alternately, in Egypt and Tur-
key, a witness of endless scenes of sorrow and tragic
Captain Morris. Ill
misery. As a romance the book is nought, but the
pictures of the Plague and of the Bagnio, and some
of the Greek adventures, are very powerful and very
true. It was at Deepdene that Mr. Disraeli wrote
that brilliant book, " Coningsby," and he elaborated
all his rhapsodies on the Caucasian race, and all
his broad satire, in this delicious retirement.
Through Deepdene Park, with its huge twisted
Spanish chestnuts, and its defaced castle ruin, ap-
proached by a funereal triple avenue of limes, the
crow skims to that unobtrusive cottage near Brock-
ham Green, that many a midnight has echoed to
the songs of that Bacchanalian veteran of the Re-
gent's times, Captain Morris, to whom the fat Duke
of Norfolk did, after much pressure, give this asylum
for his old age. Under this quiet roof the Regent
has, perhaps joined in the chorus of" Billy's too youog
to drive us," or " Billy Pitt and the Farmer." The cap-
tain not only won the gold cup from the Anacreontic
Society for the song u Ad Poculum," but carried his
poems through twenty-four editions, and was for
years the choicest spirit of the Beefsteak Club,
where he was always the chosen brewer of the
punch.
What a contrast, this quiet haven with noisy
Offley's and the club revelries that never shook his
iron constitution! He has been described as one
night heartlessly reading a funeral service from the
112 A Tour Round England.
back window of Offley's that opened on Covent Gar-
den churchyard, and pouring out as a swilling liba-
tion a crown bowl of punch on the grave of the origi-
nal of Mr. Thackeray's Costigan, a poor, clever,
worn-out sot, who had been recently buried under-
neath. If this was the fun of the Regency times,
Heaven guard us from its revival under whatever
Prince, Besonian ! Hundreds of such weaker vessels
this old steel-bound roysterer must have seen under
the turf.
The crow cannot tear himself away en route for
Southampton without one swoop on Wotton, close
to Dorking, where that true philospher, patriot, and
philanthropist of the seventeeth century — John Eve-
lyn — was born. His life was uneventful ; first, a
traveller and student in Italy, then a secret corre-
spondent of the Royalists, and after the Restoration
one of the first and most active fellows of the Royal
Society. After much public employment, and the
patronage of all good and useful discoveries, Evelyn
inherited Wotton, and was here in the great storm of
1 703, when above a thousand trees were blown down
in sight of the house. Evelyn was a great promoter
of tree planting, and he particularly mentions, in his
quiet, amiable way, so devoid of all self-assertion,
that his grandfather had standing at Wotton timber
worth one hundred thousand pounds. Of that in his own
lifetime thirty thousand pounds' worth had fallen by
Honest Evelyn. 113
the axe or storm. His Diary is full of the records of
inventions, and of facts proving the progress of our
commerce and civilization. One day he is allowed by
Charles the Second to taste the first pine-apple eaten
in England ; another day, Prince Rupert shows him
the new art of mezzotint. He contributed to Bur-
net's History, and he procured the Arundel mar-
bles for Oxford. Never did man better deserve
the epitaph which is engraved upon his tomb at
Wotton :
" Living in an age of extraordinary events and re-
volutions, he had learned from thence this truth: That
all is vanity which is not honest, and that there is no
solid wisdom but in real piety."
Evelyn, in a bad age, seems to have been a sincere
and honest man, of a gentle, placid nature, and inca-
pable of anything base. They still show at Wot-
ton an old beech table, six feet in diameter, which is
probably as old as the days of " Sylvy Evelyn ; "
but the oak table he himself mentions, five feet
broad, nine feet long, and six inches thick, is gone.
This worthy person, whose life was, as Horace Walpole
says, " a course of inquiry, study, curiosity, instruc-
tion, and benevolence," has described his own house
at Wotton, where he wished to found his ideal col-
lege, as " large and ancient, and suitable to those hos-
pitable times, and so sweetly environed with those
delicious streams and venerable woods as, in the
VOL. II. I
114 A Tour Hound England.
judgment of strangers as well as Englishmen, it may
be compared to one of the most pleasant seats in
the nation, most tempting to a great person and a
■wanton purse ; to render it most conspicuous, it has
rising grounds, meadows, woods, and water in
abundance."
Skirting the woods Evelyn loved so well, the crow
passes to Leith Hill. From the tower, under whose
pavement the builder, Mr. Hull, an eccentric old bar-
rister, who had known Pope and Bishop Berkeley,
and who had lived close by here, in learned retirement,
was buried in 1772. This region of moor and sandbank
is the delight of Mr. Linnell, and a host of living land-
scape painters. The eye has a radius of enjoyment
two hundred miles in circumference. Surrey, Sussex,
Hampshire, Berkshire, Bucks, Herts, Middlesex, Kent,
Essex, and Wiltshire are visible in miniature. That
little dark spot of firs is Nettlebed, in Oxfordshire ;
that glimmer through a blue dimple of the horizon is
the sea glittering through Shoreham Gap, a cleft in
the South Downs, thirty miles distant. Those tired
Londoners, hot with scrambling through the fern and
heather, are unconsciously saying about the viewjust
what Pope's enemy, John Dennis, the hornet, said so
many years ago :
" It is a sight that looks like enchantment, and a vision beatific."
The vale is thirty miles broad and about sixty
The Gap. 115
long. St. Paul's is twenty-five miles off. Dennis
had seen the Valdarno from the Apennines, Rome
from Viterbo, the Campagna from Tivoli and Fras-
cati, but he preferred the view from Leith Hill. But
he was wrong on one point. He says the time to
catch the glimpse of the sea, some thirty miles
off, is " noon on a serene day ;" it is really about
eleven A.M. on a clear but not too hot morning,
when no mist rises from the intervening valleys.
Then the sea sparkles for a moment or two as the
sun passes the Gap, and, with a glass, you can even
catch a white glimpse of a passing sail.
One of the greatest finds ever made of Anglo-Saxon
coins was in 1817, at Winterfield Farm, near Dork-
ing. Seven hundred coins in a wooden box were
turned up by the plough in a field near an old Ro-
man road, and not far from Hanstiebury camp, which
is generally thought to have been Danish. The
coins, caked together by coppery alloys, which had de-
composed since the owner had buried the money here
with fear and doubt, were lying twelve inches below
the surface, in a patch of dark earth, always known
to be specially fertile. There was money of many
kings, but chiefly of Ethel wolf (265) and Ethelbert
(249). It is supposed they were not buried there
before 890, the year Athelstan began to reign. Mr.
Barclay, of Bury Hill, a descendant of the Apologist
I 2
116 A Tour Round England.
for the Quakers, and of that Mr. David Barclay, the
London merchant, who feasted three successive Kiug
Georges at his house in Cheapside, bought most of
this great find, and gave it to the British Museum.
117
CHAPTER XXIII.
WINCHESTER TO SOUTHAMPTON.
THE crow looks down on the " white city" optically,
but not intellectually. He sees many houses in a
cluster, the shape of a woolpack, nipped in the centre
by the girdle of the High Street. The old city of
the Roman weavers and huntsmen, the home of the
West Saxon kings, lies healthily and pleasantly in a
snug valley between two sheltering steep chalk hills,
the river Itchen running on its border. This is the
spot where Edward the Third established the wool
staple, where Richard the First was recrowned on
his return from his Austrian prison, the town which
Simon de Montford sacked, the place where Richard
the Second held a parliament — the city twice besieged
and taken during the Civil Wars.
The houses of Winchester are ranged round the
cathedral like so many pawns round a king at chess.
This building is a small history of England in itself.
It dates back to some early British king, and was
118 A Tour Round England.
afterwards turned into a Pagan temple. St. Swithin,
Bishop of Winchester (852-863), was the patron saint
whose relics were here honoured for many centuries.
The worthy man had originally snug lying in the
churchyard, but his successor, Bishop Athelwold, re-
moved the honoured bones from a chapel outside the
north door of the nave, and placed them in a glisten-
ing golden shriu e behind the cathedral altar. The
removal of the relics was first frustrated by forty
days' miraculous rain, and it hence became a popular
belief, first in Hampshire, then all over England, that
if it rained on St. Swithun's Day (July 15), it would
rain for forty days after, according to the old
rhyme :
" St. Swithun's day, if thou doth rain,
For forty days it will remain ;
St. Swithun's day, if thou be fair,
For forty days 'twill rain na mair."
But the crow must for a moment be biographical.
In a recent chapter he gave a sketch of the career of
an old soldier in the reign of Henry the Fifth ; he
will now give an outline of the life of a prelate in
the reign of Edward the Third. The old cathedral
was rebuilt by Bishop Wakelin, 1007, with Isle of
Wight limestone and Hempage oak. Bishop de
Lucy carried the work further, and Bishop Eding-
ton began the nave that William of Wykeham con-
tinued ; the great statesman lies in effigy still in his
beautiful chantry, arrayed in cope and mitre, his
William of Wykeliam. 119
pillow supported by angels, and three stone monks
praying at his feet.
William of Wykeham, born in 1324, the son of poor
parents, was educated by Nicolas Uvedale, governor
of Winchester Castle. While still young, he became
architect to Edward the Third, and rebuilt part of
Windsor Castle. He then took holy orders, and was
made curate of Pulham, in Norfolk. Step by step
Wykeham rose to the highest dignities ; being first,
secretary to the king, and, lastly, Chancellor of Eng-
land and Bishop of Winchester. Compelled to resign
office by a cabal against all priests holding civil em-
ployments, the bishop applied himself to building
and endowing New College, Oxford, and a college at
Winchester, originally the enlargement of a small
grammar school, and to which the founder himself
had been sent as a child by his kind patron, Sir Nico-
las Uvedale. When Edward the Third retired to
Eltham to mourn over the loss of the Black Prince,
the Duke of Lancaster (John of Gaunt) the real
sovereign for the time, persecuted Wykeham, drove
him from parliament, and seized all his temporalities.
Richard the Second rehabilitated him. The minister
resigned when he found the young king recklessly
rushing to ruin, henceforward devoted himself to
good works, and died in 1404. Winchester owes
much to this great prelate, for he procured the char-
ter for the city as a wool staple, and he restored that
120 A Tour Bound England.
admirable charity, the Hospital of St. Cross, just out-
side the town, and originally founded by Bishop de
Blois, in 1136, for thirteen poor men. Shakespeare's
Cardinal Beaufort increased it, and added the district
establishment of " The Almshouse of Noble Poverty,"
for thirty-five brethren and three attendant nuns.
This great cardinal lies in the cathedral in a chantry
of his own, opposite Bishop Waynfletes. It was
mutilated by the Puritan soldiers when they stabled
their horses in Winchester choir. In spite of "the Bard"
and of Reynolds, Beaufort never murdered his rival
Gloucester, nor did he die in a torture of remorse,
but, on the contrary, as an eye-witness tells us, he
made a goodly ending of it. " Unscrupulous in the
choice of his instruments" the cardinal may have
been, but he was a great statesman, firm, far-seeing,
and fertile in resources.
A plain marble slab in Prior Silkstede's Chapel
marks the tomb of that illustrious angler, honest
Fleet Street tradesman, and excellent writer, Isaac
Walton, who died in 1683, at the house of his son-
in-law, Dr. Hawkins, a prebendary of Winchester.
His epitaph, probably written by good Bishop Ken
(the author of the Evening Hymn), his brother-in-law,
is well worthy the excellent man it records :
1 ' Alas ! he's gone before —
Gone to return no more,
Our panting breasts aspire
After their aged sire,
Red Rufus. 121
Whose well-spent life did last
Full ninety years and past ;
But now he hath begun
That which will ne'er be done ;
Crown'd with eternal bliss,
We wish our souls with his."
Every stone of this old cathedral, indeed, has its le-
gend. Here Edward the Confessor was crowned,
and in the nave his mother, Emma, falsely accused
of incontinence, passed safely, blindfold, over her
ordeal of nine red-hot ploughshares. Here lies a
son of King Alfred ; here, at the high altar, Canute,
after his rebuke on the Southampton shore to his
courtiers, hung up his golden crown, and here he
was afterwards interred.
Rufus, that savage successor of the Conqueror,
delighted in Winchester, the city of the Saxon kings,
because it was so near the Hampshire forests. In-
deed, the rapacious rascal had reason to like it, since
on the death of his father he had scooped out of the
Winchester treasury sixty thousand pounds of silver,
besides gold and precious stones. Whetted by this
spoil, no wonder the king grew so reckless, that, ac-
cording to an old chronicler who wrote aghast, " he
refused to put on a pair of hose because they had
only cost three shillings, yet donned a worse pair
when his chamberlain assured him they had cost a
mark." Daily the tyrant (short, fat, red-haired, and
with rolling eyes, so he is painted for us) grew more
122 A Tour Round England.
rapacious, dissolute, and cruel. His reckless brother
Robert, wanting money for a crusade, pawned Nor-
mandy to William for ten thousand marks, and to
raise this loan an intolerable tax was levied in Eng-
land. The monks, driven crazy by having to strip
their shrines, melt their crucifixes, and tear up their
chalices, began to see portents of an immediate Last
Day. An earthquake was felt — the harvest was late
— a sacred image was struck by lightning in a church
at Winchcombe — a November storm destroyed two
London houses, took the roof off Bow Church, and
killed two men with it— there was a comet in
October — and, worst of all, a fountain at Finchhamp-
stead in Berkshire flowed with blood (or, at all
events, turned reddish) for fifteen whole days. It
was time something happened to the king, who fear-
ed neither God nor man. The catastrophe is minutely
related by William of Malmesbury, that very plea-
sant and reliable historian. " Rufus, the night before
he died (August 2, 1106), dreamed that he was let
blood by a surgeon, and that the red vapours rising
from it ascended to heaven and darkened the clouds.
Calling in the morning for succour, he awoke, asked
for a light, and bid his attendant stay and watch
beside him till daybreak. Just as day began to dawn
a wild- looking foreign monk came to Robert Fitz-
Hamon, one of the king's chief nobles, and told him
that he had just had a strange and fearful dream.
RufuHs Dream. 123
He had seen Rufus come into a church, cursing and
threatening, as was his way ; then violently seizing a
crucifix, he had begun gnawing the arms and tearing
off the legs. The image endured this for some time,
till at last it struck out at its tormentor with its foot,
and struck him backwards ; and from his mouth, as
he fell, issued so vast a gust of flame that the vol-
umes of its smoke darkened the very stars. Fitz-
Hamon, seeing mischief in this dream, reported it to
the king, who, roaring with laughter, shouted, " By
the cross of Lucca (his favourite oath), he is a monk,
and dreams for money — some one give the fellow a
hundred shillings." Nevertheless, the king was much
moved, and by the advice of his parasites hesitated
about that day hunting. But after dinner, when he
had plentifully regaled and drunk more Malvoisie
than usual, he cried out for his horse, and rode out
to the forest. The rest is well-known, how, as Rufus
grazed a deer with his arrow, and held his hand over
his eyes to screen them from the sun, watching if the
deer dropped, Sir Walter Tyrrel, a French knight,
wilfully or carelessly let fly an arrow that, glancing
from an oak, struck the king, who, breaking off the
biting shaft, fell forward on the point, and there and
then died. A triangular stone, erected by Lord
Delaware in 1745, in an open glade of the forest,
about a mile from Minstead Church, and about a fur-
long to the right of the road from Romsey to Ring-
124 A Tour Round England.
wood, still marks the spot where the oak tree stood.
Purkess, a charcoal-burner, whose descendants still
live on the same property, coming by whistling after
his sooty cart, found the dead hunter, and drove
the body (the blood dripping through the black
dusty planks) to Winchester, where it was buried
contemptuously, and without funeral rites, within the
cathedral, the tower of which a few years after fell.
Rufus died detested by his subjects aud the monks
he plundered, but he left two things by which he will
be remembered — the White Tower that he completed,
and the Great Hall at Westminster, that he put to-
gether. The plain tomb of the tyrant, whom no
one lamented, is still existing — a stumbling-block
nearly in the centre of the choir at Winchester
Cathedral.
Winchester has twice been glorified by the splen-
dour of royal marriages — a happy and an unhappy
marriage. The first was in February, 1403, when
Henry the Fourth married Joanna of Xavarre. This
sensible and amiable woman was the daughter of
Charles the Bad, and the fair widow of John,
the valiant Duke of Bretagne ; and Henry was a
widower, his first wife being Mary de Bohun, whom
early in life he had eloped with from the old
castle — the crow has already visited at Fleshy.
Joanna started from Camaret, a small port near
Brest, and arrived at Falmouth storm-driven, attend-
Royal Marriages. 125
ed by her two infant daughters, Blanche and Mar-
guerite, their nurses, and a gay crowd of Breton and
Navarese attendants, after four days' tedious tossing.
The fair widow of France was a beautiful woman,
with small regular features and a broad forehead.
Her handsome husband elect received her at Win-
chester, attended by many lords and knights. The
marriage took place with great pomp in the ancient
royal city at the church of St. Swithin. The bridal
feast was thought very costly, and was remarkable
for two courses offish, and the introduction of crown-
ed eagles and crowned panthers in confectionery dur-
ing intervals of the meal.
After her husband's death Joanna got on but
badly with her stepson, Henry the Fifth; he plundering
her of half her dowry, and accusing her of witchcraft.
She had also to mourn when the nation that had
adopted her was rejoicing, for her son Arthur, attack-
ing our outposts at Agincourt with a whirlwind of
French cavalry, was desperately wounded, struck
down, and taken prisoner. Her son-in-law, the Duke
d'Alencon, who had cloven Henry's jewelled helmet,
was also slain. Her brother, too, the Constable of
France, died of his wounds the following day.
Joanna ended her troublous life at Havering-atte-
Bower, in 1437, and her ghost is still supposed to
haunt the ruins of the palace. Joanna's arms,
an ermine collared and chained, were formerly to
126 A Tour Round England.
be seen in the windows of Christehurch, near New-
gate.
The next royal wedding at Winchester was that
ill-omened and fruitless one of Mary and Philip. The
gloomy Spanish king, with the projecting jaw and
the hard cruel eyes, landed at Southampton, with the
Duke of Alva and other memorable Spanish nobles.
He was dressed in plain black velvet, with a black
cap hung Avith gold chains, and a red felt cloak.
Gardiner, the notorious Bishop of Winchester, es-
corted him to the venerable city, with a train of one
hundred and fifty gentlemen, dressed in black velvet
and black cloth, and with rich gold chains round their
necks. The cavalcade rode slowly over the heavy
roads to Winchester, in a cruel and heavy rain. On
the next day, the 25th of July, St. James's day, took
place the nuptials. The gloomy bridegroom wore
white satin trunk hose, and a robe of rich brocade,
bordered with pearls and diamonds. The ill-favoured
bride a white satin gown and coif, scarlet shoes, and
a black velvet scarf. The chair on which she sat, a
present from the Pope, who had insufficiently blessed
it, is still shown at the cathedral. Gardiner and
Bonner were both present, rejoicing at the match,
and four other bishops, stately with their crosiers.
Sixty Spanish grandees attended Philip. The hall
of the episcopal palace where the bridal banquet took
place was hung with silk and gold striped arras, the
A Defiance. 127
plate was solid gold. The Winchester boys recited
Latin epithalamiums, and were rewardedby the queen.
A year from that time Philip left Mary and England
for ever.
One and not the least interesting of the historical
events that have dignified Winchester, was the defi-
ance hurled at Henry the Fifth, just about to embark
at Southampton for his invasion of Normandy, by
the gallant French ambassador, the Archbishop of
Bruges. On Henry saying, through the Archbishop
of Canterbury, that he would not rest satisfied with
anything short of all the territories formerly possessed
by England, he replied that Henry would be driven
back to the sea, and lose either his liberty or his life ;
and then exclaimed, " I have done with England, and
I demand my passport." Our chivalrous young king
had never forgiven the French King's insolent present
of a case of tennis balls, in scorn of the wild excesses
which had disgraced his youth.
" When I use them," he exclaimed, " I will strike
them back with such a racket as shall force open
Paris gates !"
After his house at Newmarket was burnt down,
Charles the Second squandered nearly twenty thou-
sand pounds, according to that reliable authority,
honest Evelyn, in building a palace on the site of Win-
chester castle. It was to have cost thirty-five thousand
pounds, and to have been a hunting-seat. The first
128 A Tour Round England.
stone was laid by the swarthy king in person, March
23rd, 1683. James stopped the building, but Queen
Anne came to see it, and wished to have completed it
for her dully respectable husband, Prince George of
Denmark. In the French war of 1756, five thousand
French prisoners cooked their soup and cursed the
English within its walls ; in 1792 some poor famished
French cures occupied it; and in 1796 it became
what it has since been — a common barrack. Wren's
design included a large cupola, sixty feet above the
roof, that was to have been a sea mark, and a hand-
some street leading in a direct line from the cathe-
dral to the palace.
It was at Winchester, in August, 1685, that the de-
testable Judge Jeffreys began the butchery that King
James so much desired, by the trial of Lady Alice
Lisle, a venerable and respected woman of more
than seventy, the widow of one of Cromwell's lords
(one of King Charles's judges, some say) who had
been assassinated at Lausanne by the Royalists.
She was accused of harbouring John Hicks, a Non-
conformist divine, and Richard Nelthorp, a fugitive
lawyer, who had dabbled in the Rye House Plot.
The chief witness, a man named Dunne, living at
Warminster, deposed that some days after the battle
of Sedgemoor (which was in July), a short, swarthy,
dark-haired man sent him to Lady Lisle at Moyles
Court, near Fordingbridge, to know if she could give
Lady Lisle. 129
Hicks shelter. Lady Lisle desired them to come
on the following Tuesday, and on the evening of
that day he escorted two horsemen, a full, fat, black
man, and a thin black man. A Wiltshire man, whom
they paid to show them the way over the plain,
betrayed them to Colonel Penruddock, who early the
next morning, surrounding the house, discovered
Hicks hidden in the malthouse, and Nelthorp in a
hole in a chimney. Lady Lisle's defence was that
she knew Hicks to be a Nonconformist minister,
against whom a warrant was issued, but she did not
know he had been with the Duke of Monmouth. As
for Nelthorp, she did not even know his name ; she
had denied him to the soldiers only from fear, as they
were rude and insolent, and with difficulty restrained
from plundering the house. Lady Lisle then avowed
that she abhorred the Monmouth plot, and that the
day on which King Charles was beheaded she had
not gone out of her chamber, and had shed more
tears for him than any woman then living, as the late
Countess of Monmouth, my Lady Marlborough, my
Lord Chancellor Hyde, and twenty persons of the
most eminent quality could bear witness. Moreover,
she said, her son was sent by her to bear arms on
the king's side, and it was she who had bred him up
to fight for the king. Jeffreys, eager to spill blood
at the first case of treason on the circuit, and see-
ing the jury waver, roared and bellowed blasphemy
VOL. II. K
130 A Tour Mound England.
at Dunne, who became too frightened to speak.
" I hope," cried this model judge — " I hope, gen-
tlemen of the jury, you take notice of the strange
and horrible carriage of this fellow, and withal you
cannot but observe the spirit of that sort of people,
what a villanous and devilish one it is ! A Turk is a
saint to such a fellow as this ; many a Pagan would
be ashamed to have no more truth in him. Blessed
Jesus, what a generation of vipers ! Dost thou be-
lieve that there is a God ? Dost thou believe thou
hast a precious and immortal soul ? And "
" I cannot tell what to say, my lord," stammered
poor tormented Dunne.
Jeffreys : " Good God, was there ever such an im-
pudent rascal ! Hold the candle up that we may see
his brazen face." (Amiable judge !)
Dunne : " My lord, I am so balked I do not know
what I say. Tell me what you would have me say,
for I am shattered out of my senses."
Placid Judge : " Why, prithee, man, there is no-
body balks thee but thy own self. Thou art asked
questions as plain as anything in the world can be ;
it is only thy own naughty depraved heart that balks
both thy honesty and understanding, if thou hast
any ; it is thy studying how to prevaricate that puz-
zles and confounds thy intellect ; but I see all the
pains in the world, and all compassion and charity,
King James s Mercy. 131
is lost upon thee, and therefore will say no more unto
thee."
The jury were long in discussion. They three times
brought in Alice Lisle not guilty ; but they succumbed
at last to Jeffreys' threats and denunciations. The
poor charitable woman was condemned to be burnt to
death on the next day. Jeffreys told the jury that the
evidence was full and plain as could be, and if the
prisoner had been his own mother he would have
found her guilty. He had previously taken care to
remind them that the prisoner's husband had been one
of the parliamentary judges who had sent the father
of Colonel Penruddock to the scaffold. The clergy
of Winchester Cathedral remonstrated at the cruel
haste. Jeffreys, not wishing to spoil the sociability
of his visit, postponed the execution for five days. In
the meantime ladies of rank interceded. Faversham,
the miserable hero of Sedgemoor, bribed with a thou-
sand pounds (it is said), pleaded for the poor old lady,
who suffered so terribly for an act of Christian com-
passion. Even Clarendon, the king's brother-in-law,
pleaded in vain. The only mercy James had the
heart to show was to commute the sentence from
burning to beheading. On the afternoon of Septem-
ber the 2nd Lady Lisle suffered death on a scaffold in
the market-place, and underwent her fate with serene
courage and Christian resolution. Her last words
were forgiveness to all who had done her wrong.
k2
132 A Tour Bound England.
In the first year of William and Mary the attainder
was reversed, and Lady Lisle's two daughters, Tri-
phena and Bridget, were restored to all their former
rights.
Winchester Castle, destroyed by Cromwell, is re-
ported by tradition to have been built by King Ar-
thur, who, like King Alfred, is said to have much af-
fected Winchester. The hall (formerly called the
chapel) is now all that remains. The famous Round
Table, made by Merlin, still hangs at the east end.
Henry the Eighth and Charles the Fifth came to see
this relic, whose date is uncertain. There are bul-
let-marks in it said to be the work of Cromwell's
relic-despising musketeers. This castle was built by
the Conqueror. Henry the Third was born within
its walls. The Earl of Kent, Edward the Second's
brother, was beheaded here, and in its hall Raleigh
was tried and condemned to death.
Passing over the college, in spite of its Dulce Do-
mum legend and all its quaint customs, the crow
stops only at the Sokebridge, to remember that good
St. Swithin built a bridge here, having first miracul-
ously restored to perfection an old woman's basket
of eggs broken by his masons ; and here in some early
century a citizen returning from his farm was stopped
by three dark unclothed women, one of whom struck
him to the ground, a cripple. These were supposed
to be the Fates or Wcelcyrien, of the Saxon myth-
Sir Bevis. 133
ology, whom Christianity had not yet finally chased
away.
The crow skims to Southampton, and alights on
the Bar-gate, just above the sullen figures of Sir Bevis
and Ascapart. This Ascapart was a lothley giant,
whom Sir Bevis subdued with sword and spear, and
forced into more or less patient bondage. Only half
tamed, however, this Caliban mutinied on one occa-
sion in the absence of his master, and carried off
Josyan the Bright, wife of Sir Bevis, whose knights
tracked and slew the foul felon. Sir Bevis lived on
the mount three quarters of a mile above the Bar,
where, according to the old romance once so popular,
" Of Hampton all the baronage
Came and did Sir Bevis homage.
" He is now of great mighte
Beloved both of kyng and knighte,
Each man both earl and baron,
Loved and dred Bevis of Hampton."
This noble paladin, after much fighting, died on
the same day with his loving wife, Josyan, and his
horse Arundel. The Venice galleys that in the Mid-
dle Ages brought to the Hampshire coast Indian spices,
Damascus carpets, Murano glass, and Levant wine,,
took back with them English cloth and English le-
gends, for Mr. Rawdon Brown tells us that to this
day the " History of Sir Bevis of Hampton " is a
stock piece at the Venetian puppet-show theatres.
134 A Tour Round England.
The crow must not forget that it was on the shore
near Southampton (not at Bosham, as Sussex anti-
quaries insist on having it) that Canute, to rebuke
his Danish courtiers, who beheld in him a monarch
feared by the English, Scotch, Welsh, Danish, Swedes,
and Norwegians, commanded the tide to recede, and
respect its sovereign. Indeed a daring Southampton
man has settled the site of the story by erecting a
public-house near the Docks, called " The Canute
Castle."
Our bird rejoices in Southampton, not because it
was once a depot for Cornish tin, or because Charles
the Fifth embarked from here, or because Richard the
First here assembled his fleet for the crusades, and
took on board eight hundred protesting Hampshire
hogs, and ten thousand horse shoes, or even because
the army for Crecy embarked here, but because it is
eminently a Shakespearean place, like so many others
he has visited. Here, at the depot for Cordovan leather,
Alexandrian sugar, and for Bordeaux and Rochelle
wine, at the favourite place of embarkation for Nor-
mandy and Guienne, the chivalrous king gathered
together in 1415 his one thousand five hundred
sail, his six thousand men-at-arms, his twenty-four
thousand archers, and Nym, Bardolph, and Pistol.
Shakespeare has given a splendid panorama of the
magnificent scene :
No Scenery. 135
" Suppose that you have seen
The well-appointed king at Hampton pier
Embark his royalty ; and his brave fleet
With silken streamers the young Phcebus fanning.
O, do but think,
You stand upon the rivage, and behold
A city on the inconstant billows dancing ;
For so appears this fleet majestical,
Holding due course to Harfleur."
It was just at starting that the discovery took place
of the conspiracy which Shakespeare has also drama-
tised. The king's cousin Richard, Earl of Cambridge,
had conspired with Henry's favourite councillors and
companions, Sir Thomas Grey and Lord Scroop of
Masham, to ride to the frontiers of Wales, and there
proclaim the Earl of March the rightful heir to the
crown, if Richard the Second, were really dead,
which some still doubted. The three conspirators
were all executed, and their bones lie in the chapel
of the Domus Dei, an ancient hospital in Winkle
Street.
Bevis Mount, just outside Southampton, is where
that restless and extraordinary man, Lord Peterbo-
rough, lived, the general who drove the French out
of Spain in the War of the Succession, the steady
friend, first of Dryden, then of Pope and Swift, and
all their set. He spent the latter part of his stirring
life at his " wild romantic cottage " with his second
wife, Anastasia Robinson, a celebrated singer, whom
130 A Tour Round England.
pride refused him for a long time to publicly ac-
knowledge. Pope visited him here, particularly in
the autumn of 1735, just before the Earl started to
Lisbon, in which voyage he died. Pope pays the
veteran several compliments, talks of his gardening,
and his taming
" The genius of the stubborn plain
Almost as quickly as he conquer'd Spain."
The poet also describes the Spanish flags and trophy
guns which the eccentric old general had arranged
over his garden-gate. The poet and the general
went to Winchester to see the prizes distributed at
the college ; Pope, as a compliment to the hero of
Barcelona, having given "The Campaign in Valencia"
as a subject for the boys' prize poem.
Peterborough travelled so furiously fast, that the
wits said of him that he had talked to more kings
and more postillions than any man in Europe ; and
Queen Anne's ministers used to declare that they al-
ways wrote at him, not to him. Swift has sketched
him with kindly sarcasm :
" Mordaunt gallops on alone ;
The roads are with his followers strewn ;
This breaks a girth, and that a bone.
" His body, active as his mind,
Returning sound in limb and wind,
Except some leather lost behind.
Doctor Watts. 137
" A skeleton in outward figure,
His meagre corpse, though full of vigour,
Would halt behind him, were it bigger.
" So wonderful his expedition,
When you have not the least suspicion,
He's with you like an apparition."
That excellent little man, Dr. Watts, is also one of
the prides of Southampton, having been born at a
small red-brick house (21, French Street), in 1674.
His father, a humble schoolmaster, had suffered much
for his nonconformity ; and once, when her husband
was in prison, the wife was seen sitting on a stone out-
side the door, suckling little Isaac, the embryo poet,
whose simple Hymns have sold by thousands annual-
ly ever since they first appeared. Dr. Watts's happy
and unclouded residence of thirty-six years in the
family of his friend, Sir Thomas Abney, of Newing-
ton, is a proof of the amiability of both men.
From Southampton to the New Forest (sixty-four
thousand acres) is a mere flap of the wing to the
crow at his best speed. The beech glades, alive
with countless squirrels, the ridings echoing with the
swift hoofs of half-wild ponies, the great arcades of
trees lie before him. It was long supposed that this
wild district was turned into hunting ground by Wil-
liam the Conqueror. According to one old chronicler,
the savage Norman, " who loved the tall deer as if
he were their father," and made it a hanging matter
138 A Tour Round England.
to kill a stag, destroyed fifty-two mother churches
and effaced countless villages in a space thirty miles
long; but this is untrue. It is true that thirty
manors around Lyndhurst, in the green heart of the
forest, ceased to be cultivated ; but the Gurths and
Wambas, the serfs, thralls, and villains were not
driven away. The only two churches mentioned in
Domesday Book — Milford and Brockenhurst — still
exist ; and, indeed, immediately after the afforesta-
tion, a church was built at Boldre, and another at
Hordle. The real grievance, therefore, with the
Hampshire Saxons, thirteen years after the Con-
quest, was the placing a large new district under the
cruel Norman forest law. The deaths in the forest
by chance arrow wounds of Rufus, of the Conqueror's
youngest son Richard, and also of an illegitimate son
of Duke Robert, were looked upon by the Saxon pea-
sants as the result of divine vengeance. There are
no red deer now in the forest, as when Mr. Howitt
wrote his delightful sketches of the scenery, and saw,
" awaking as from a dream, one deep shadow, one
thick and continuous roof of boughs, and thousands
of hoary boles, standing clothed, as it were, with
the very spirit of silence." But the stirrup of Rufus
still hangs at the Queen's House at Lyndhurst. The
moat of Malwood Keep, where Rufus slept the night
before his death, can still be traced near Stony Cross,
on the Minstead road. The cottage of Purkess, the
The Groaning Elm. 139
charcoal-burner, is still shown to those who care to
believe in it. Through Boldrewood Rufus and the
chase rode the day Tyrrell's arrow flew. Away above
Sopley, on the main road from Christchurch to Ring-
wood, is Tyrrell's Ford, where the frightened French
knight forded the Avon on his way to Poole, to em-
bark for Normandy ; and close by the ford is the forge
of the blacksmith who shoed Tyrrell's horse. The fu-
gitive is said to have slain him to prevent his prating
of his having passed that way.
At Lymington, close to which is Baddesley, where,
in the last century, a groaning elm, for a year and a
half, caused much superstitious excitement, the
crow, refreshed by a blue glimpse of the Isle of
Wight, turns smart for London and his old perch
on St. Paul's, to rest a moment before he strikes due
north.
FOURTH FLIGHT.
DUE NORTH.
143
CHAPTER XXIV.
ST. ALBANS TO BEDFORD AND KIMBOLTON.
STRIKING up the great north road straight from
the great black dome, the crow alights first at
St. Albans, certainly the most interesting spot in all
Hertfordshire. The old city of the British kings that
Caesar is supposed to have stormed, standing on the
slope of a hill above the river Ver, and close to the
old Watling-street Road, although sacked by the
fiery Boadicea, and again burnt in revenge by a
Roman general fresh from the conquest of the
Isle of Man, boasts for its special glory that it was
the birth-place of St. Albanus, the first Christian
martyr in Britain. This is its great and special
legend.
Albanus, during the great Diocletian persecution,
sheltered in his house a fugitive Welsh preacher,
named Amphibalus, who converted him to the new
faith. The Roman prefect, hearing of this, summoned
Albanus and Amphibalus to assist in a public sacrifice
144 A Tour Round England.
to the gods of Olympus. Albanus, instantly chang-
ing clothes with his guest, assisted in his escape.
Soon after, the house of Albanus being surrounded
by the legionaries, he was taken before the prefect,
and urged to join in the sacrifices. Firmly refusing,
Albanus was soon after ordered to execution on
Holmehurst Hill. On his way to death, loaded with
chains, and pelted and derided by the pagan populace,
Albanus performed several miracles. A river ob-
structing the passage of the procession, it dried up
instantly on a prayer of the holy man ; and the mul-
titude complaining of thirst, a fountain sprung out
of the earth at his wish. No wonder that Heaven,
to avenge the death of such a man, caused the eyes
of the executioner to drop out bodily the moment he
struck off the saint's head. * The body of the martyr
lay undiscovered for three hundred and forty-four
years, when Oifa, King of Mercia, wishing to found
a monastery in remorse for a son-in-law he had mur-
dered, a light from Heaven revealed the holy grave.
The king placed a crown of gold round the skeleton's
sacred skull, and enriched the chapel over the bones
with tapestry and plates of gold and silver. In the
time of Cadmer, the ninth abbot, a book, written in
gold letters, and containing a record of the Life and
Passion of Saint Alban, was found among the ruins
of the old Roman city.
A record of the virtues and vices of the fortv
Forging Relics. 145
abbot of St. Albans still exists. It is said that Queen
Mary planned the restoration of this among many
other famous English monasteries. At the recent
meeting of the British Archaeological Association,
over which Lord Lytton so ably presided, a curious
history of the relics in St. Albans Abbey. In the reign
of Athelstan (930) the Danes, who had an appetite
for all plunder, sacred or profane, that was not too
hot or too heavy, carried off the sacred bones, which
were, however, recovered by a daring monk of St.
Albans, who, after long service as sacristan at the
Scandinavian monastery to which they had been con-
veyed, bored a hole in the shrine, recovered the trea-
sures, and sent them back to Hertfordshire.
In the reign of Edward the Confessor, when the
Danes reappeared in England, the monks, afraid
of such rough visitors, hid away the holy bones in a
wall beneath the altar of St. Nicholas. To cover
their pious fraud, the crafty ecclesiastics sent some
spurious relics to Ely, and with them "a rough shab-
by old coat," supposed to be the disguise that St.
Alban lent Amphibalus for his escape. The invasion
over, the monks of Ely, with charming good faith,
refused however to restore the spurious relics, and,
what was far worse, refused to acknowledge that
they had been deceived.
The dispute between the rival houses went on with
true monastic bitterness till 1256, when the saint's-
VOL. II. L
146 A Tour Hound England.
coffin was discovered under the abbey pavement,
and the Pope pronounced it authentic. The contro-
versy, however, always left the St. Alban's relics
doubtful. It was said that King Canute had given
away a shoulder-blade. A convent in Germany swore
by a leg-bone, and even now a church at Cologne
claims possession of a good share of a skeleton sup-
posed to have been brought from St. Albans by Ger-
manus and Lupus, two French bishops, who came
over to England in 401, to refute the errors of the
Pelagians. The miracles, therefore, wrought by the
saint's bones become even more miraculous when we
learn that after Bede's time the site of the saint's
grave was entirely forgotten, and never found again,
till the monks found it convenient to find, or invent,
a saint's body for King Offa. The lights, the copes,
the golden crosses, the gold and silver figures, the
votive jewels, are all gone, but still in the Saint's
Chapel, behind the high altar, six small holes in the
centre of the area mark where the columns stood
that supported the canopy over the shrine. There
is scarcely in all England a quaint nook so character-
istic of mediasval life as the loft in the eastern arch
erected for the monk who, by sunlight, moonlight,
and lamplight, watched the golden shrine. There,
hour after hour, the lone ascetic pondered over the
saint's sufferings. At one end of this loft there
is a small staircase leading to a narrow vestibule and
Cardina I Beanfort. 147
a room which commanded a view of the whole side
of the church. At the east side of the abbey there
used to be two gratings, now walled up, through
which the peasants were allowed to view the shrine.
In digging a vault for one Alderman Gape, in
1703 (Queen Anne), close to the site of the saint's
shrine, the lucky sexton discovered the mummy of
Humphrey Plantagenet, Duke of Gloucester, the
fourth son of Henry the Fourth. The duke's shrine,
built by his friend Abbot Wheathemstead, still ex-
ists, adorned with seventeen shields, and seventeen
canopied niches, filled with little squat figures of the
kings of Mercia. This is the duke whose wife, Dame
Eleanor, Shakespeare has shown us as walking in
penance through London streets for having conspired,
by witchcraft, against the life of Henry the Sixth.
Proud Margaret of Anjou treated the duke as a con-
spirator, and had him arrested while attending a
parliament at Bury St. Edmunds. Such birds seldom
live long in the cage, and seventeen days later the
duke was found dead in his bed — apoplexy, said
some ; others whispered murder ; but the wise said
a broken heart. Six weeks after, Cardinal Beaufort
died also — not in agony and despair, as Shakespeare
has it — but after a lingering illness and a solemn
rehearsal of his own funeral. The workmen, in dig-
ging the alderman's vault, came upon some stone
steps leading to an inner vault, wherein was a leaden
L 2
148 A Tour Round England.
coffin with the duke's body, embalmed in a brown
liquor. " Duke Humphrey's vault " became a mine
of shillings to the parish clerk for many years, till,
the embalming liquor drying up, the body fell to
dust.
An antiquary has recently noticed some curious
facts about old Verulam, the city Tacitus mentions,
and which Caesar besieged. It is nearly the exact size
and shape of Pompeii — three quarters of a mile loug
by half a mile wide. St. Michael's Church is sup-
posed to have been the site of the Roman temple to
Apollo. The theatre at Verulam had twenty rows
of seats, and was nearly exactly the size of that of
Pompeii. Burnt wood, tesserae of pavement, marble
slabs, Italian roofing tiles, and cream-coloured plaster
striped brown, red, and blue, as at Pompeii, are still
constantly found.
Nor can the crow leave the abbey's old brick
tower without gratefully remembering that that ex-
cellent early historian, Matthew of Paris (so called
from his French education), was a monk of St. Albans.
This honest and candid opposer of Papal usurpa-
tions, high in the favour of Henry, was a mathema-
tician, poet, oi-ator, theologian, painter, and architect.
He died in the reign of Henry the First, having com-
pleted the history of twenty-three abbots of St.
Albans, and what, perhaps, he thought of less impor-
tance, the history of eight English kings. The early
The Wars of the Roses. 149
part of Matthew's history was avowedly founded on
the chronicle of Mister Roger of Wendover, formerly
Prior of Belvoir.
The savage Wars of the Roses twice deluged
St. Albans with blood ; the battles are singularly
characteristic of the times, and here again we are on
Shakespearean ground. Hollinshead tells the story
of both conflicts with rough picturesqueness. In the
first, in 1455, the Duke of York, with the King-
maker, Warwick, the Earl of Salisbury, and Lord
Cobham, discontented with the Duke of Somerset,
the royal favourite, assembled an army of Welsh
horsemen, and marching towards London, met the
weak and half-crazed king, with his two thousand
men. One May morning at St. Albans the royal
standard was raised in St. Peter's Street, and Lord
Clifford defended the town barrier. The Duke of
York's men were drawn up in Key Field, south-east
of the town. To the king's envoy the Yorkists
replied, " We are the king's true liegemen ; we intend
him no harm ; deliver us that bad man, that traitor
who lost Normandy, who neglected the defence of
Gascony, and brought the kingdom to this state, and
we will instantly return to our allegiance."
The king sounding trumpets and offering no quar-
ter, the Earl of Warwick shouting, " A Warwick ! a
Warwick !" drove back the Lancastrians and entered
the town through a garden wall between the Key
150 A Tour Round England.
and the Chequer, at the lower part of Holywell-street.
The fight was " right sharp and cruel," and the Duke
of Somerset fell at the Castle Inn (a prophecy had bid
him beware of castles), and near him the Earl of
Northumberland and Lord Clifford. The Lancastri-
ans, escaping through the gardens, left their king al-
most alone under his standard. The arrows flying
round him "as thick as snow," he was wounded,
and had to take refuge in a baker's shop, where the
Duke of York came on his knees to beg forgive-
ness, assuring him that now Somerset was dead all
would be well. "For God's sake stop the slaughter
of my subjects !" said the humbled king. York, with
feigned deference, then led Henry by the hand, first
to the shrine of St. Albans, then to his apartments in
the abbey. Many a tall man was that day slain, says
Grafton the chronicler. Historians differ (they often
do differ) about the numbers. Hall says eight thou-
sand ; Stowe five thousand; Crane, in a letter to one
of the Pastons, six score ; William Stonor, steward of
the abbey, the best authority, only deposes to the
burial of forty-eight. Shakespeare, who has in so
many places falsified the history of this reign, has
made Richard the Crookback kill Somerset, and cut
off his head to show to York, and introduces young
Clifford, after much declamation, carrying off the
body of his slain father ; and instead of Henry vol-
untarily accompanying his conqueror to London, the
Another Battle at St. Albans. 151
poet makes the king hurried into flight by the scold-
ing remonstrances of the virago of Anjou.
King Henry, who had early in his reign visited St.
Albans, and granted a charter of privilege to the
abbey, visited Bedfordshire again in the Easter of 1459.
At his departure the careless king ordered his best
robe to be given to the prior. The royal treasurer,
knowing the king's poverty,redeemed the robe for fifty
marks. The king unwillingly yielded to this prudent
arrangement, and charged the prior to follow him to
London for the money, which he insisted on person-
ally seeing paid.
In 1461, the storm of war again broke on St. Al-
bans. This time, the death of York had roused both
sides to the utmost ferocity. Leaving over York-
gate the head of York, crowned with paper, the
savage queen had marched to London to release her
husband from the grip of Warwick, who was acting
as regent in the absence of the young Duke of York
(afterwards Edward the Fourth), in Wales. The
queen encamped on Bernard-heath, north of the
town. The King-maker posted his sturdy archers
thick round the great cross in the market-place. The
Lancastrians came swarming on through a lane into
St. Peter's-street ; and Warwick's men, being unsup-
ported, were forced back to Barnet-heath, where the
vanguard was encamped. Warkwick's Londoners re-
treated before the strong northern men from the Cum-
152 A Tour Hound England.
berland mountains and the Yorkshire fells. Lovelace
and the city bands remained neutral. At the ap-
proach of night the Yorkists fled, leaving the almost
imbecile king cowering in his tent with only two or
three attendants. A faithful servant ran to tell Lord
Clifford, and presently the queen flew into her hus-
band's arms. Proudly showing her son, the young
prince, who had been by her side through all the bat-
tle, Margaret requested Henry to at once knight him,
and fifty more of the bravest of his adherents. This
done, the king, queen, and all the northern nobles
went in procession to the abbey, tattered and blood-
stained as they were, to return thanks to God for the
king's deliverance. The abbot and monks received
them at the church door with hymns of triumph, and
wafts of incense. Two or three thousand men fell in
this battle, and the queen, brutalized and driven
cruel by her persecutors, ordered Lord Bonville and
Sir Thomas Kyriell, two Yorkists, in defiance of the
king's promises, to be beheaded, in the presence of
herself and child. Ten years later, that young prince
was dragged before his arch enemy at Tewkesbury,
and York striking him in the face with his gauntlet,
Clarence and Gloucester despatched him with their
daggers.
Crime breeds crime. After this second battle of
St. Albans, Queen Margaret's troops plundered the
town. "When Edward the Fourth ascended the
Gorhambury. 153
throne, the royal displeasure fell on St. Albans as a
Lancastrian foundation ; but the wise abbot, Wheat-
hamstead, averted the Avrath of the new king, and
obtained the confirmation of his charter.
But in Gorhambury Park there is an old ruined
Jacobean porch, and some mullioned windows em-
bowered by trees, that are dearer to the crow than
even the narrow streets haunted by Shakespearean
ghosts ; for by this porch, in June, 1621, entered the
owner of the stately house, now a ruin, that dis-
graced Lord Chancellor Bacon. This was the house
built by his father, the lord keeper, to which Queen
Elizabeth came on a visit during one of her progresses
in 1577 : a house with piazzas for sun and shade,
painted with the adventures of Ulysses, and towers
from whence to see the abbey and the town. " Your
house, my lord keeper, is too small for you," said the
queen. " Nay, madam," said the wise old Chancellor,
" it is your majesty has made me too great for my
house." At Gorhambury Bacon's learned mother, who
had been governess to that prodigy of unfulfilled
promise, Edward the Sixth, taught him the path to
wisdom and virtue. Here, the summer of his fall,
the stricken philosopher commenced his history of
Henry the Seventh, and his book on the Advance-
ment of Learning. Thanks to the patient thirty
years' labours of Mr. Basil Montagu, and the elo-
quent and lucid epitome of his arguments by Mr.
154 A Tour Bound England.
Hep worth Dixon, the memory of this great man has
been freed from every stain but that of somewhat
servile adulation of James the First : an adulation
which was the fault of the age, and not of the man.
The defence is so clear and so palpable, that the
crow cannot, while at Gorhambury, forbear to recapi-
tulate it. King James, driven by want of money to
summon a parliament, found it, to his mortification,
determined to reform abuses, and, first and foremost,
the patents and monopolies granted by the king and
Buckingham to certain rapacious adventurers, the
prototypes of Massinger's Sir Giles Overreach. No
one could sell gold or silver thread, horsemeat,
starch, candles, tobacco-pipes, salt, or train-oil with-
out licences from these men, who bribed justice to
fine and imprison all questioning their rights. The
House, more violent as the inquiries of its eighty
committees expanded, grew more and more clamor-
ous for reform. To save himself, Buckingham made
Bacon the Jonah that was to be cast to the open-
mouthed whale. The chancellor pleaded guilty to
twenty-three charges. In one case he had received
from a suitor gold buttons worth fifty pounds ; in
another case, a rich cabinet, valued at eight hundred
pounds ; in another, a diamond ring, costing five
hundred or six hundred pounds ; in another, a suit of
hangings, worth one hundred and sixty pounds.
From some London apothecaries he accepted some
Bacons Fall. 155
ambergris and a gold taster, and he took from cer-
tain French merchants one thousand pounds. The
simple defence for these acts is this : it was the cus-
tom at that time all over Europe to make such pre-
sents to judges. In nearly all the cases the presents
were made after the suit was decided, and in many
cases the presents were received by Bacon's servants
without his knowledge. Bacon was all his life em-
barrassed by early debts, and by the difficulties into
which his own generous and careless nature led him.
Bacon himself always adhered to this line of defence.
He wrote, on his fall, to his royal master : " This is
my last suit that I shall make to your majesty in this
business, prostrating myself at your mercy-seat after
fifteen years' service, wherein I have served your ma-
jesty in my poor endeavours with an entire heart,
and, as I presume to say unto your majesty, am still
a virgin in matters that concern your person and
crown, and now craving that, after eight steps of
honour, I be not precipitated altogether .... And
so, concluding with my prayers, I rest — Clay in your
majesty's hands."
And he says again in another letter to the false,
cowardly, and unworthy king :
" For the briberies and gifts, wherewith I am
charged, when the book of hearts shall be opened, I
hope I shall not be found to have the troubled foun-
tain of a corrupt heart, in a depraved habit of taking
156 A Tour Round England.
rewards to pervert justice ; howsoever I may be frail
and partake of the abuses of the times."
" I wish," he used to say, " I may be the first and
last sacrifice of these times. When a creature is to
be sacrificed, it is easy to pick stakes for the fire
from any thicket."
" Those who strike at the chancellor, will strike at
the king," said the fallen man, prophetically. And
he wrote to Buckingham, with all the boldness of
innocence willing to bear the cross : " However, I
acknowledge the sentence just, and for reformation
sake fit, I have been a trusty, and honest, and Christ-
loving friend to your lordship, and the justest chan-
cellor that hath been in the five changes since my
father's time."
Fined forty thousand pounds, sent to the Tower,
though but for a short time, and deprived of the
Great Seal, Bacon, exiled to Gorhambury, has left a
record of his own feelings in that solitude. He calls
himself, touchingly, old, weak, ruined, in want, and
a very subject of pity. He longs for York House in
the Strand or Gray's Inn, where he might have com-
pany, physicians, conference with his creditors and
friends about his debts and the necessities of his
estate, and helps for his studies and writings. At
St. Albans he says he lived " upon the sword-point
of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled if I
stay within, solitary and comfortless without com-
In the Shade. 157
pany, banished from all opportunities to treat with
any to do myself good, and to help out any wrecks ;
and that which is one of my greatest griefs, my
wife, that hath been no partaker of my offending,
must be partaker of the misery of my restraint." But
time gradually made Gorhambury less of a prison,
and Bacon expressed his resolve to the Queen of
Bohemia to study, "and not to become an abbey
lubber, as the old proverb was, but to yield some
fruit of my private life." In those green shades he
studied and meditated with his chaplain, Dr. Romilly,
his faithful secretary Meautys, his amanuensis Hobbp,
and his friend George Herbert. In October, 1625,
the autumn before he died, he wrote to a friend :
" Good Mr. Palmer, I thank God by means of the
sweet air of the country I have obtained some degree
of health, and I would be glad in this solitary time
and place to hear a little from you how the world
goeth."
In his will he desired to be buried in St. Michael's
Church, near St. Albans, for, says the great philoso-
pher, " There was my mother buried, and it is the
parish church of my mansion house of Gorhambury,
and it is the only Christian church within the walls
of old Verulam." In a niche formed by a bricked-up
window on the north side of that church which is
built of Roman tiles, is a marble statue of Lord
Bacon, which was erected by his faithful secretary,
158 A Tour Round England.
Sir Thomas Meautys, who lies himself beneath an
almost plain stone at the feet of this great Gamaliel.
The statue, which represents Bacon seated in " deep
yet tranquil thought," was by an Italian artist, and
below is an inscription from the pen of Sir Henry
Wotton, the diplomatist, wit, and poet. " Sic SEDE-
BAT, so he sat," says the epitaph. Bacon is leaning
back in a square-backed elbow-chair, his head resting
on his hand. He wears a long stately furred robe and
voluminous trunk hose, a laced ruff, sash garters, and
shoes adorned with large ribbon roses. His capa-
cious brow is partly hidden by a low-crowned broad-
brimmed hat — so meditated the mighty Verulam.
At Bedford on the Ouse, the crow alights to look
for relics of honest John Bunyan, who was born at
Elstow, close by, who lived here in St. Cuthbert's
parish, who preached in a barn on the very site of the
chapel now existing, and who pined in the darkness
of the old gate-house prison on the bridge for
twelve years, during which he wrote that wonderful
and imperishable allegory, " The Pilgrim's Progress."
His rude chair is preserved in the chapel vestry, and
the county subscription library possesses his favourite
book, Fox's Book of Martyrs, two volumes folio,
black letter, which contain his autograph and some
uncouth quatrains written by him under the rude
woodcuts of the martyrdoms. While reading this
book the wonderful imagination of the imprisoned
Bunyan in Prison. 159
preacher must have had those beautiful visions
of Christian's flight, the wrestle with Apollyon,
Doubting Castle, the Dark River, and the Bright
City. Bunyan has left a full narrative of his suffer-
ings in prison. At first he thought continually, he
says, of death, till he almost believed himself on the
ladder with a rope round his neck. " If I should
make a scrambling shift," he writes, " to clamber up
the ladder, yet I would, either with quaking or other
symptoms of fainting, give occasion to the enemy to
reproach the way of God and His people for their
timorousness. This, therefore, lay with great trouble
upon me ; for methought I was ashamed to die with
a pale face and tottering knees in such a case as this.
Wherefore I prayed to God that he would comfort
me." Then, as doubts and temptations thronged
around him, and Mr. Face-both-ways, and Lord Car-
nal Delight, and his toady, Mr. Pickthank, gibed at
him through the street window-grating, he cried im-
petuously, " If God doth not come in, I will leap off
the ladder, even blindfold, into eternity — sink or
swim — come heaven, come hell ! Lord Jesus, if thou
wilt catch me, do ; if not, I will venture for thy
name." The parting with his wife and children was
to him, he says, " like the pulling the flesh from his
bones." Particularly he mourned for the hardships,
miseries, and wants that would fall on a certain
" Tiny Tim " of his, a poor blind child that lay nearer
160 A Tour Round England.
his heart than all besides. The thought broke his
heart to pieces, as he strongly phrases it. "Poor
child! thought I," he writes, pathetically, "what
sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this
world ! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer
hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand other cala-
mities, though I cannot now endure the wind should
blow upon thee ! But yet I must venture you all
with God, though it goes to the quick to leave
you . . ." After many examinations, however, the
judges left him alone. Bunyan learnt to make
tagged thread laces, and by sale of these trifles
helped to support his family. His jailer committed
the management of the prison to his care, and the
last four years he was allowed to attend the Baptist
meeting. On his release he became an itinerant
preacher of eminence. That great Nonconformist
divine, Owen, who admired Runyans preaching, being
asked by Charles the Second " How such a learned
man could sit and listen to an ignorant tinker, "
replied, " An it please your majest}-, could I preach
like that tinker, I would gladly relinquish all my
learning." Bunyan died in 1688, at the house of a
friend of his, a grocer on Suow Hill.
Another good man, Howard, the philanthropist, is
associated with Bedford, having lived at Cardington,
close by, where he bought an estate, near his relative,
Mr. Whitbread, the father of the demagogue brewer.
Kimbolton. 161
He was the son of a rich Smithfield carpet-seller, and
on his way to Lisbon to observe the effect of the
great earthquake that had swallowed half that city,
Howard was taken prisoner by a French privateer.
His sufferings in France led his mind to the question
of the condition of prisons, and the rest of his life
was devoted to that generous object. In 1774 he
offered himself as a candidate for Bedford, but was
not returned, in spite of his popularity among the
Dissenters of that town.
Fast northwards from Bedfordshire into Hunting-
donshire, where the crow selects, amid the pleasant
hills, and valleys brimmed with golden corn and
dark green woodlands, the Duke of Manchester's
square and massive castle of Kimbolton. The Mon-
tagues, from Montacutus in Normandy, flourished
here from the time of the Conquest. Sir Edward
Montague, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas,
was a member of the Privy Council of Henry the
Eighth, and one of that bluff tyrant's sixteen exe-
cutors. The castle was the scene of that last touch-
ing scene of the history of Katherine of Arragon,
which Shakespeare has so exquisitely dramatised in
his play of Henry the Eighth. The ill-used, insulted,
deserted woman had objected to Fotheringay as un-
wholesome, and Kimbolton, which she equally dis-
liked, was then chosen for her.
A bull had just been published against the king in
VOL. II. M
162 A Tour Round England.
Flanders, and he was raging mad at the Pope and
all his adherents who would not legalise the divorce.
The queen's confessors he had thrown into Newgate.
Her nominal income of five thousand a year, as
Prince Arthur's widow, was paid her only in drib-
lets. The brutal king even refused to let her see her
child Mary. The queen's castellan regarded with
suspicion even her last interview with her nephew
Charles the Fifth's ambassador. Henry shed tears
over his wife's last reproachful letter, but instantly
sent a lawyer to seize the property of the dead wo-
man. The queen, in her will, desired five hundred
masses to be said for her soul, and a pilgrimage to
Walsingham to be made on her behalf, and begged
that all her gowns might be made into church orna-
ments. She had wished to be buried in a convent of
Observant Friars, but the king had her interred near
the great altar at Peterborough, an abbey which
Henry spared for her sake. Old Scarlett, the sexton,
who buried her, lived to also bury Mary, Queen of
Scots, in the same cathedral.
At the obsequies performed at Greenwich the king
and court appeared in black, but Anne Boleyn made
her ladies dress themselves in yellow, and lamented
the good end which her rival had made. A chamber
hung with tapestry is still shown at Kimbolton as that
in which Queen Katherine expired. The hangings con-
ceal the door to a small ante-room. The duke also
Cromwell versus the Earl. 163
preserves a travelling trunk, which is covered with
scarlet velvet, and has upon its lid the queen's ini-
tials and a regal crown. As the latest historian of
this unhappy woman has well observed, among
many eulogists, " one mighty genius who was nearly
her contemporary has done her the noblest justice.
In fact, Shakespeare alone has properly appreci-
ated and vividly portrayed the great talents as well
as the moral worth of the right royal Katherine of
Arragon."
Edward, the second Earl of Manchester, became a
great parliamentary general, and helped to defeat
Rupert at Marston Moor. Cromwell, who hated all
half-and-half measures, accused the Earl of refusing
to complete the rout and final destruction of the
king's army ; and the Earl, in return, accused Crom-
well of urging him to conspire against the parlia-
ment. Cromwell was too much for the Earl, so the
parliament deprived him of all his employments,
which he returned by helping to Bring back Charles
the Second.
M 2
164
CHAPTER XXV.
PETERBOROUGH TO LINCOLN.
THE crow, leaving the sluggish express train behind
him (a mere tortoise in the race) with one con-
temptuous flap of his jet black wings, alights on one
of the massy grey western towers of Peterborough
Cathedral, above those three great cavernous porches
that give shadow to the old west front. He looks
over a sea of green pasture, cane-coloured stubble,
and rich chocolate-brown arable over which William
and his master conquerors, chanting of Roland and
Roncesvalles, and proud Paynim and Christian cham-
pions " militant here on earth," as, fresh from scorch-
ing and bleeding Yorkshire and Durham, they bore
down on Cambridgeshire, whose fens and morasses and
oozy tangled places where the herons boomed when
all was still and safe, and Avhere the wild ducks scat-
tered and screamed when even the most velvet-
footed scout set his foot upon a crackling twig, the
Saxons still held out against the savage Norman.
Hereward. 165
Hereward, the son of the Saxon lord of Baurn, in
Lincolnshire (a chieftain whose fame Mr. Kingsley
has lately revived), had built a stockade in the Island
of Ely, where he erected his standard and defied the
Norman bowmen. An exile in Flanders, banished in
youth for treasonable turbulence by Edward the Con-
fessor, Hereward, on hearing that Ins father was
dead, and that a Norman robber had expelled his
mother from the fair lands of Baurn, returned, rallied
his warlike tenantry, drove out the intruder, and
collected a small guerilla army — like the stout-hearted
Saxon Garibaldi that he was. His uncle Brand,
abbot of Peterborough, that Benedictine abbey among
the wet meadows by the river Nene, originally reared
by King Penda as early as the seventh century, en-
couraged the partisan leader in whom the Cedrics and
Gurths of that day trusted, and knighted his brave ne-
phew. At Brand's death in 1069, William gave the ab-
bey (as dangerous a gift as a cask of gunpowder) to
Turold, a foreign monk, who, chanting Kyrie Eleisons
for his own safety, rode into Northamptonshire in the
centre of one hundred and sixty spearmen. It was
an ill-omened ride, and a red light rose in the north-
ern sky at the new abbot's approach. That fire
arose from the flaming town of Peterborough. The
Danes had come down from the Humber to the West,
and Sbern their chief had joined Hereward, who was
sweeping now like a resistless deluge over the marsh
166 A Tour Round England.
country. The abbey was burnt, the golden chalices
and patens melted and gone before. Turold, pale
and scared, rode over the still hot ashes of his new
domain, while proud Hereward retired to his fort at
Ely, and the Dane's black sails faded away towards
the Baltic.
Poor Turold ! he had a wolf to trap, and he went
out as if he was looking for a rabbit. What did
he do, poor man, but hire soldiers of Tailbois, a neigh-
bour of his, the new Norman lord of Hoyland, who
sent him cavalry to surround Hereward and his Saxon
outlaws. One day, while Tailbois and his vanguard
were ridiug gallantly along a dangerous part of the
fenland, close to the side of a forest dark and im-
penetrable by cavalry, Hereward and his woodmen
sprang out on the rear, where Turold rode, singing
his Ave Marias, and bore him off to a damp corner of
the wooden fort, from which he emerged after many
days, rheumatic, soured, and poorer by two thousand
pounds. William at last, aroused himself like a lion
from sleep, for many Scotch exiles had now joined
Hereward, who grew daily more confident and more
dangerous. He sternly closed in on Hereward,
Norman ships barricaded the outlets from the west,
spearmen gathered closer and closer (as a strong
wrestler's grip contracts) upon the fortress of the fens ;
with cruel care and pent rage William built a solid
road across the marshes, and bridged the rushing
The Norman Sorceress. 167
channel, though harassed and tormented by Here-
ward's swooping forays. Heavy fell the Saxon axes,
time after time, on the Norman hewers and delvers.
" Satan helps the Saxon boors ! " cried the wounded
diggers ; and William, to please them, had a wooden
tower built, in which a Norman sorceress stood to
exorcise Hereward and his guerillas ; but one day,
when the wind blew fair, the Saxon set fire to half
a mile of reeds, and tower, witch, and workmen
passed away in a gust of flame. But steel and fire
could not turn the conqueror. Faster grew the solid
roads, faster sprang the arches of fresh bridges, till
nearly all Ely was his. Then Hereward, refusing
to surrender, escaped over the marshes into the forest,
and renewed his forays ; but the rest lost heart, and
laid down their arms before the Normans. Morcar
and the Bishop of Durham were thrown into prison
for life, and other leaders lost eyes, hands, or feet,
according to William's cruel caprice over his wine ;
but the brave Hereward fared after all better than the
colder-hearted, for William respected his courage,
and restored him the lauds of Baurn, on his taking
an oath of allegiance. Hereward was the last Saxon
to sheath the sword.
The crow would particularly like, as he listens from
above, to hear Mr. Rnskin below talking aloud to him-
self about the west front of Peterborough. It is a
grand title-page to a chapter of Gothic architecture, a
168 A Tour Round England.
noble aspiration to express the infinity of God, round
Avhom the worlds revolve, and their wonder and de-
light at the beauty of the universe. There is some-
thing, perhaps, of inspiration in the free air that
blows round a great cathedral, for one of the latest
visitors to Peterborough, who has written upon it,
rises to real eloquence when he speaks of those beau-
tiful triple arches. " The solid masses of deep shadow,"
he says, "thrown in colossal curves by the triple arches,
strong as adamant, tall and profound as Horeb's cave,
yet graceful as a light bow momentarily bended, con-
trast with the play of the sunshine, slowly changing
from porch to porch, and impart a gloom to those
recesses that seem in sympathy with the sorrows of
human life, that are carried within to a church bright
and sunny by the contrast to the worshipper there
to be laid down and find consolation." This is very
finely expressed, and not to be easily matched even
in Mr. Ruskin's prose poems on Gothic architecture.
No one who knows the west front of Peterborough,
even by a flying glance from the Great Northern, but
will feel its beauty and truth. From that dark mountain
of shadow, from that entrance of the Valley of Death,
the traveller passes into the freedom and sunshine of the
church, where the anthem sounds and the prayer for
mercy and forgiveness rises to Heaven, and the air
brightens with the wings of angels, and Paradise
The Fen Churches. 169
seems to open before the astonished eyes of those who
enter from the outer darkness.
Great monasteries arose of old time among the
fens and marshes of this amphibious part of England.
The old rhyming proverb sums them up graphi-
cally :
" Romsey, the rich of gold and fee,
Thorney, the flower of many fair tree,
Crowland, the courteous of meat and drink,
Spalding, the gluttons as all men do think,
Peterborough the proud.
Sawtrey, by the way, that old abbey
Gave more alms in one day than all they."
Peterborough, though a mitred abbey, had to bear
its rubs before it folded its arms, and settled down
to its present grave dozing tranquillity among
flowers and strawberries, quiet as a fat abbot in a
garden of a summer afternoon, the capon done, the
bottle emptied. It was burnt by the howling Danes
in 870, when all the monks were butchered in the
flames ; again in 1069, according to a prophecy of
Egelvic, a Bishop of Durham, who had turned her-
mit; again in 1116, for the sins of Abbot deLees and
his brother, who had invoked the devil, who came in
fire; lastly in 1264, when the Abbot of Peterborough,
having joined the rebellious barons, down the abbey
would have gone, broken like a china jar, had not the
abbot turned away the wrath of King Henry the
Third by a heavy ransom.
170 A Tour Bound England.
— 9
Many, many builders put together that city of
stone, that world of petrified pious thoughts, yet no
one thinks now of John of Calais, or the Abbot An-
drew, or Henry, or Morcot, or good Richard the
Sacristan ; yet only some years ago one shred of the
Saxon time remained when so much else had perish-
ed, and a strip of the cope of John of Calais (1249)
hung over the tomb in the Lady Chapel, of Hed-
da, the Saxon Abbot; but even conservatism has
its limits, and Time swallowed the relic at last.
Cromwell's Ironsides laid their iron hands very
heavily on Peterborough, whose old ill-luck broke
out again with great severity during the Civil wars.
The Calvinists, with musket and sword, and pick and
axe, destroyed the reredos, the chapter house, clois-
ters, and palace, shattering with cruel carefulness,
"red with the blood of martyrs and of saints," the em-
blazoned glass. They stripped off all the lead and sent
it for sale to Holland, but a storm waited for the
sacrilegious bark and sunk it. They then pulled
down the Lady Chapel to save the expense of repairs,
and turned the old house of God into a workshop, out
of zeal for religion.
Some great people lie under Peterborough pave-
ment. As Bob Acres was told, " there is snug lying
in the abbey." Poor Queen Katherine, whose honest
chronicler, Griffith, after all, never wrote her apology,
though no doubt handsomely paid for the copyright.
Fotheringay. 171
came here from Kimbolton, as our readers know ;
and in the nave lies old Scarlet (ninety-eight years
old), the sexton who buried her and Mary Queen of
Scots, too, and, for the matter of that, all the
population of Peterborough twice over, as he several
times no doubt grimly boasted over his tankard of ale
as he stirred it round with a sprig of rosemary. " A
king of spades," indeed, as his last chronicler pithily
observes. Queen Katherine, the Spanish queen, lies
on the north side of the choir, and Tinder the door-
way out of the choir on the south side once lay a
worse and even more unhappy woman, Mary, who
married her husband's murderer ; and yet one pities
her when it came to that cold February morning in
the hall of Fotheringay. It brings a moisture into
most eyes to think <3f that moment when, calm and
bravely, she read her will to her faithful household,
and distributed her clothes. We seem to see her
now, as with majesty she rises from the altar in her
oratory, and, taking down the ivory crucifix, passes
into the ante-chamber where the four hard-faced
earls await her with their retinue. She wears a gown
of black satin, with a veil of white linen fastened to
her hair, and her chaplet of beads is by her side.
Then came a very touching little episode in the
last scene. Suddenly an old servant of hers, Sir
Robert Melville, her house-steward, who had been
debarred her presence for three weeks, falls on his
172 A Tour Round England.
knees weeping passionately, being heart-broken at
having to bear such sorrowful news to Scotland.
<4 Good Melville," said the queen, with placid dig-
nity and gentleness, " cease to lament, but rather
rejoice, for thou shalt now see a final period to Mary
Stuart's troubles. The world, my servant, is all but
vanity, and subject to more sorrow than an ocean of
tears can wash away. But I pray thee take tins
message, when thou goest, that I die true to my
religion, to Scotland, and to France. God forgive
them that have thirsted for my blood as the hart
longeth for the water brooks ! Commend me to
my son" (pedantic, selfish rascal, he never troubled
himself about his mother's death), " and tell him I
have done nothing to prejudice the kingdom of Scot-
land."
Melville sobbed, and could not utter a word.
There must have been something good and lovable
about a woman who so won the attachment of her
servants. She stooped, turned to the faithful old
servitor, and weeping too, herself, said :
" Once more farewell, good Melville : pray for thy
mistress and queen."
She then requested the four earls to treat her ser-
vants with kindness, and to allow them to stand by
her at her death. The Earl of Kent, hard and icily
fanatical, objected, saying it would be troublesome
to her majesty and unpleasant to the company ; be-
Last scene of all. 173
sides, as Papists, they would be sure to put in prac-
tice, he said, some superstitious trumpery, such as
dipping handkerchiefs in her grace's blood.
" My lords," said Mary, " I will give you my word
they shall deserve no blame, nor do such thing you
mention ; but, poor souls, it would do them good to
see the last of their mistress ; and I hope your mis-
tress, as a maiden queen, would not deny me, in
regard of womanhood, to have some of my women
about me at my death. Surely you might grant a
greater favour than this, though I were a woman of
less rank than the Queen of Scots."
Kent uttered no reply. Then the royal blood of
Lorraine rose and flushed the Stuart's cheek.
" Am I not," she said, vehemently, " cousin to
your queen, descended from the royal blood of
Henry the Seventh, a married Queen of France, and
anointed Queen of Scotland ?"
The lords then agreed, and poor old Sir Robert
Melville, the steward, apothecary, and surgeon, and
Kennedy and Curie, two of her maids, followed her
to the scaffold, the sheriff and his officers leading,
Sir Amyas Paulet and Sir Drew Drury following, and
after them coming the Earls of Shrewsbury and
Kent. The scaffold, which stood in the hall, was a
railed-in platform, three feet high, and covered with
black cloth. On it stood a low stool, a cushion, and
the block, all covered with black. By the horrible
174 A Tour Bound England.
block, axe iu hand, stood the headsman from the
Tower, dressed in black velvet, and his assistant.
Mary, with no change of face, and no tremor, sat
down cheerfully, while Beale, the clerk of the coun-
cil, read the death-warrant aloud, and as he conclud-
ed, the spectators cried out, " God save Queen Eliza-
beth !" Mary said but little, only asserting that she
was a princess not subject to the laws of England,
and declaring that she had never sought the life of
Elizabeth, and that from her heart she pardoned all
her enemies.
The Dean of Peterborough then stood up and
preached to her the necessity of conversion, his gra-
cious mistress being most anxious for the welfare
of her soul. Mary replied firmly and scornfully :
"Mr. Dean, trouble not yourself; I am fixed in
the ancient religion, and by God's grace I will shed
my blood for it." Then again, " Good Mr. Dean,
trouble not yourself about these matters : I was born
in this religion, I have lived in this religion, and I
will die in this religion." So saying, she turned
away, but the dean w r ent on again, till the Earl of
Shrewsbury set him to begin a prayer, and all this
time Mary repeated with fervour the Penitential
psalms in Latin ; and then, when the dean became
silent, prayed aloud in English for the Church, her
unworthy son, and Queen Elizabeth. She then kiss-
ed the crucifix she held, and exclaimed :
Queen Mary. 175
" As thy arms, Jesus, were stretched upon the
cross, so receive me, God, into the arms of mercy."
" Madam," said the fanatical Earl of Kent, reproach-
fully, " you had better put such Popish trumpery out
of your hand and carry Christ in your heart."
Mary replied : " I can hardly bear this emblem in
my hand without at the same time bearing Him in
my heart."
The two executioners then came forward, and
kneeling before the queen, prayed her forgiveness.
Her women began to disrobe her, but the execution-
ers, nervously hurrying, helped to pull off her veil
and ruff, and Mary said to the Earls, as if apologeti-
cally at the delay :
" I am not used to be undressed by such attend-
ants, or to put oif my clothes before such a com-
pany."
At this little playfulness the servants burst into
loud sobs and into tears ; but Mary calmly put her
finger to her lips to hush them, kissed them again,
and bade them pray for her. The maid Kennedy
took a handkerchief edged with gold, in which the
Holy Eucharist had once been enclosed, and bound
her eyes. The two grim men in black then led her
to the block, and Mary knelt on the black cushion,
resting her head calmly on the block, exclaiming :
" Into thy hands, Lord, I commend my spirit."
Then the servants burst forth again with groans
176 A Tour Hound England.
and sobs, and the axe fell. Faintly and tremblingly
the ruffian, however, struck, for he had to give three
blows before he cut through the thin white neck.
At last, when the head fell on the sounding planks, he
raised it, and holding it at arm's length, exclaimed :
" God save Queen Elizabeth !"'
The Dean cried, " Thus perish all her enemies !"
The Earl of Kent, stepping to the headless body,
said, in a loud voice, " So perish all the enemies of
the queen's gospel !"
But no one said Amen to that cruel wish. When
the executioner raised the body, the queen's little
pet dog w T as found nestling under the gown, and
after being once forced away, more faithful than
many a courtier, it went and lay down sorrowfully
between the head and the body. Thus perished
Mary, after forty-five years' sorrow in this trouble-
some world. If she had married Edward the Sixth,
as was first planned, or the Earl of Leicester, as
Elizabeth wished* how different might have been her
life and death ! Immediately after the body was re-
moved, Mr. Talbot, the earl's son, rode straight to
London with the news, and by the next night the
City, from Whitechapel to Whitehall, was flaming
with bonfires and echoing with bells. Folly or crime,
the execution might have been in Elizabeth harsh,
but it was not at least disapproved by the English
nation — thus much is certain.
Better late than never. 177
King James, driven by mere filial decency, re-
moved the body of his mother from Peterborough
choir, but not till nine years after his accession.
The prophetical Northamptonshire saying at the time
was :
" Stuarts shall not prosper, since the dead have been
removed in their grave."
Mary now rests under a stately canopied tomb (a
grand artificial piece of furniture) in Westminster
Abbey, where her fair cousin, ** a little more than kin,
and less than kind," also lies. If an impartial person
from this side of the Tweed looks at the two faces he
will, the crow surmises, pronounce Elizabeth's the
most handsome, in spite of all the false romance that
has accumulated over the grave of the fair but false
Queen Mary.
Peterborough is proud of that staunch old divine
Paley, who was born here in 1743, his father being a
minor canon that summer in residence. It is a stand-
ing wonder and a lasting disgrace to the Church
that such a man should have died a mere north coun-
try rector, when he had brains enough for a judge,
and wisdom enough to fill half a dozen mitres. Paley
always abused Pitt, and it was supposed Pitt was small
enough to never forgive him ; but the truth has since
oozed out that George the Third, a dogmatist in re-
ligion as well as in politics, personally disliked Paley,
who in one of his philosophical books (once thought
VOL. II. N
178 A Tour Round England.
so profound), has some metaphor about pigeons,
in which he rather ridicules royalty. In person the
prebend of Carlisle was a short, podgy man, with
clever bushy brows, a snub nose, and projecting
teeth. He always wore a white wig and a common
coat, detesting cassocks, which he used to say were
just like the black aprons the master-tailors wore at
Durham. His gait was awkward, his action un-
graceful, and his dialect coarsely provincial ; but his
rich smile was delightful, and redeemed all. He
seems to have been a warm-hearted, plain, sensible
man, with a horror of professional humbug, and of
all hypocrisy and false pretence. Some of his hearty
north common-sense sayings were very happy. Once,
at the Hyson Club, a Liberal association at Cam-
bridge, he had to give his reasons for advocating
" braibery and corrooption." " Why,"' said be, laugh-
ing, " who is so mad as to wish to be governed by
force, and no one is such a fool as to expect to be
governed by virtue ; so what remains, tell me, but
' braibery and corrooption' ?" He was on principle
slow to pay debts. " Never paay mooney," he used
to say, "till you can't help it ; soomething maay happen."
On the other hand, being really frugal and thrifty,
and worthy of a Giggleswick father, he always made
his wife and daughters pay ready money at Carlisle.
" It's of no use," he used to say, with a patient shrug,
" to desire them to buy only what they want ; they
A Check to the Imagination. 179
will always imagine they want what they wish to
buy ; but that paying ready mooney is such a check
upon their imagination." This worthy north coun-
try divine used to give admirable sketches of his
early life, when he was a poor, hopeless, second usher
at a Greenwich school. " I flattered my imagina-
tion when I first went to town," he used to say,
" with the pleasure of ' teaching the young idea how
to shoot.' I entered a very offensive room, and a
little boy came up as soon as I was seated, and be-
gan : ' B-a-b bab, b-l-e ble, babble.' And wanting a
waistcoat, I went into a second-hand clothes-shop, and
it so chanced that 1 bought the very identical garment
Lord Clive wore when he made his triumphant entry
into Calcutta. I went to a play, and on coming out
found six simultaneous hands all trying to pick my
pockets. Whether they were rival or conspiring
hands I cannot say. They took from me a handker-
chief not worth twopence. I felt quite sorry for the
disappointment of the poor scoundrels." Paley was
passionately fond of angling, and made Romney
paint him with a rod in his hand. Although always
riding about his parishes in a good, Vicar-of-G old-
smith sort of way, Paley was still a slovenly and
clumsy rider. " When I followed my father on a
pony, on my first journey to Cambridge," he used to
say humorously, " I fell off seven times. Every
time my father heard a thump, he would turn round,
N 2
180 A Tour Round England.
and calmly say, with his head half aside, ' Take
care of thy money, lad.' I am so bad a horse-
man," he continued, "that if any person at all were
to come near me when I am riding I should certainly
have a fall. Company would take off my attention,
and I have need of all I can command to manage my
horse, though it is the quietest creature that ever
lived; one that at Carlisle used to be often covered
with children from the ears to the tail." The north
country clergy were in Paley's time, like Parson
Adams, very poor, often being farmers, sometimes
being publicans, and very often being sinners. "I
know a great many parishes," Paley once said, "to
which I could take you, if the whole population were
to pass in review before you, you would not be able
to tell which was the parson. I know him by cer-
tain signs that I have learned by long practice : he
has usually a black silk handkerchief round his neck,
and he is always the greasiest man in the parish ex-
cept the butcher." Paley was fond of good eating,
and once, when asked what he would eat, replied,
" Eat, madam ? — eat everything, from the top of the
table to the bottom." Another time he declared he
should eat of every course, but stuck at some irrele-
vant pork-steaks. " I had intended," he said regret-
fully, " to have proceeded regularly and systemati-
cally, through the ham and fowl to the beef, but
those pork-staakes staggered my system."
Paley. 181
Paley was a fine honest fellow, and did in his time
good work against the sceptics. He boldly opposed
Home Tooke's right to a degree, because Tooke was
an infidel; and he would not let a Spanish protege of
Lord Sandwich (Jeremy Twicher), give a concert in
Christ's College Hall, if Miss Ray, Lord S.'s mistress,
attended.
182
CHAPTER XXVI.
LINCOLN.
IF old King Harry really is in the habit of looking
over Lincoln, as the proverb says, then the crow-
looks over old King Harry, for he is now perched
with a fine view of wolds, heaths, and fens, high
above the valley of the Witham, on the topmost grey
air-bathed pinnacle of one of the grand central
towers of Lincoln cathedral, that glorious result of
man's aspiration to express his craving wonder and
adoration at the divine centre of all being. Upon
six subject counties looks down the favoured bird ; at
his feet lies the damp amphibious Holland of Eng-
land, land of the grebe and hern, paradise of the
wild duck, city of refuge to the lapwing and water
hen; at his feet indeed lies more than this, for there lies
a region won from the sea by the hands and brains of
centuries of men, a great conquest of man's mind
over the brute forces that war against the progress
of our race.
Changes. 183
Let us watch these changes from Lincoln Tower,
just as if they were passing across our bird's-eye
view. Ages before the blue painted savages antici-
pated with unconscious prophecy the naval blue that
has since been seen in several parts of the world, all
those dismal flat swamps between the Humber and the
Wash must have been receding surfaces of brackish
morass, traversed by restless seagulls and meditative
herons; but by-and-by, as Homer sang, and Mara-
thon was fought, as Socrates died and Alexander
marched, constant alluvial deposits washing down
from the Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire high-
lands westward, soft beds of brown and yellow sand
(mere ground-down stone) gritty drifts of silt and
oozy sops of black mud and earth, and the daily
warp rolled in by those careless carriers, the
tides, would slowly have raised the surface of the fen
country above the level of the deluge of waters that
had so long appeared staunchless. Then would begin
to spring coarse grass, and moss, and bent, and seeds
of trees would grow from saplings to many branched
veterans, and they would in time crumble and form
fresh soil.
Soon would come noisy wild geese and rejoicing
shovellers, and terns, and coots, and red shanks, and
great-billed curlews, eager for perch, dace, and roach,
and after these winged pursuers would follow the
low-browed savages, first with flint arrow, then with
3 84 A Tour Round England.
bronze axe, and fishermen and fowlers would begin,
defiant of ague fevers and such pale cohorts of death,
to build on piles amid the low swamps. Then, with a
blast of trumpets, broke in the strong-willed Romans,
as potent with the spade as the sword, and shut
out the tyrannical tides more and more with sea-
banks, and cut canals, and drained one-third the
level. Above all, they dug the Car dyke, and saved
the Coritani (as the Lincolnshire people were
called by the Britons) from future deluges. Certain it
is, before or after the Romans, half Lincolnshire was
oak, birch, fir, and alder forest. Dugdale particular-
ly mentions that the island of Axholm was full of
oak trees close under the surface of the moors, some
even five yards in circumference. Hazel nuts were
also found by the peck together. Near Thurden, says
the noble old antiquary of Charles the Second's time,
the inhabitants dug up at least two thousand cart-
loads of bog timber in one year. Year by year,
under the Heptarchy, the fen country grew and
throve ; various irruptions were made by its old
enemy the sea, but those attacks grew less and less
dangerous. The rough fen men seem from early
times to have been in the habit of burning down
their tracts of rank grass in November, during which
time the fens were in a flicker day and night. In Wil-
liam of Malmesbury's time, 1200 (King John), the fen
country was " passing rich and plenteous," the plain
A Theory. 185
country a level green ocean of grass, the orchards
and vineyards very numerous.
That original but rather crotchety Lincolnshire
antiquary, Dr. Stukeley, whom his friend Warburton
called " a mixture of simplicity, drollery, absurdi-
ty, ingenuity, superstition, and antiquarianism,"
often laughed at by fools who had neither his sense,
knowledge, nor honesty, has some remarkable and
ingenious theories about the origin of Lincolnshire, in
which he enters, as it were, into the very workshop
of creation. He first notices that in England the
eastern shore is generally flat and low, while the
western is steep and rocky. In the same way,
mountains, not only in Britain, but all over the world,
are steep and abrupt to the west, and descend to
gentle declivities on the east. Plains, as a rule,
always slope eastward. The reason for this, says
Stukeley, is that when the Almighty Artist gave
the half solid earth its first diurnal motion the
mountain part, still soft, flew westward, as the dirt
on a wheel, by its vis inertice, flies from a wheel
in a tangent in a contrary way to its motion.
" Thus," says the amiable philosopher, with entire
self-complacency, "it is that we have so large a
quantity of this marsh land in the middle of the
eastern shore of England, seeming as if made by
the washing and sluices of the many rivers that fall
that way, such as the Welland, the Witham, the Nene,
186 A Tour Round England.
the Ouse, great and little, together with many other
streams of inferior note. These all empty themselves
into the great bay formed between the Lincolnshire
Wolds and the cliffs of Norfolk, called by Ptolemy
(reign of Hadrian) Metaris iEstuarium.
The crow, rubbing up his old memory, suddenly
remembers the great tempest and inundation that in
October, 1571 (Elizabeth), swept the great flat green
country of the stilt walkers, over which he now casts
his eye. Three score vessels were lost on the coast
of Boston and Grimsby. Three arches of Wansford-
bridge were carried away by the sudden and devast-
ating torrent. Poor " Master Pellam," of Mum-
by Chappell lost one thousand one hundred sheep ;
but then how could he stop to lament when all
Mumby Chappell itself, but three houses and the
church steeple, were destroyed? A strange thing,
too, happened there, for a ship driving upon a
house, the frightened sailors took it for a rock, and
leaping out of the foundering bark and clambering on
the root, were saved. They also rescued the poor
pregnant woman in the house who climbed up to
them, when her husband and child were both drown-
ed. Between Hummerston and Grimsby, one Mr.
Specers lost one thousand one hundred sheep. The
shepherd about noon came to his mistress and asked
for his dinner. She replied, crossly, he should have
none of her. Just at that moment the sharp-tongued
A brave Shepherd. 187
shrew happened to look towards the marshes where
her husband's sheep were, and saw the water break
in with a fierce and irresistible rush. Then she
said, " He is not a good shepherd that would not
venture his life for his sheep." Upon which the man
ran straight to drive home the sheep ; but he and they
were all drowned, and when the inundation subsided
the faithful fellow was found dead standing upright
in a ditch, into which he must have fallen unawares.
Four gentlemen of Kelsey and Maplethorpe lost to-
gether about twenty thousand head of cattle.
Bourne was overflowed till the water reached half up
the church. Heeling was wholly carried away, and
a loaded waggon at that place was torn in two by
the raging water.
The history of the drainage of the country now
surveyed by the winged commissioner is a romance in
itself. In the isle of Axholm, once a fen caused by
the silt thrown up the Trent by the tides of the
Humber, which silt obstructed the free passage of the
Dun and Sole, and forced back their waters over the
circumjacent lands. The Mardyke sluices were im-
proved by an abbot of Selby (Henry the Fifth). In
James the First's time, a local jury decided against
the further draining ; but in 1626 (Charles the First)
the king granted leave to Cornelius Vermuyden, a
Zealander, who offered for a third part of all he could
reclaim to retrieve seventy thousand acres in Axholm.
188 A lour Hound England.
The Van Peenens, Valkenburgks, and Vernattis, rich
merchants of Dort and Amsterdam, helped the adven-
tures of their countryman, and his skilled Dutch and
Flemish workmen soon got near the end of their
work. The fen men were furious at the improve-
ments, though now released from the irksome forest
laws. They complained of unjust distribution of the
new lands, and of wilful injury done to the old.
Openly countenanced by Portington, a turbulent jus-
tice of the peace, the fen men frequently fell on the
Dutchmen, broke down their new embankments, and
burnt their obnoxious implements. Slander is com-
pared by Solomon to " the letting out of waters,"
but in poor Vermuyden's case, it was the shutting in
of waters produced discord. Still straight as a
plough, unswerving as a bullet, pressed forward the
sturdy Dutchman, through what Mr. Smiles, in his
crisp pleasant way, describes as part of a fresh water
bay formed by the confluence of the rivers Don,
Went, Ouse, and Trent, and was fed by the sea,
which brought down into the Humber almost the
entire rainfall of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottingham,
and North Lincoln. The drained land was once tra-
versed by the fen men in boats, when, in the reign
of Henry the Second, they attacked the Mowbray
stronghold in the isle of Axholm, as that hilly dis-
trict was called that rose midway between the York-
shire and Lincolnshire uplands. The resolute Dutch-
Draining the Fens. 189
man, who had checked the Thames at Dagenham,
and had drained Windsor and Sedgemoor, was not
to be baffled by the stilt walkers of the fens. Ver-
muyden collected round him French Protestants
from Picardy, and Walloons from Flanders, refugees
whose fathers had fled from the Duke of Alva, and
settled in eastern England, along the edge of the
fens, especially at Wisbeach, "Whittlesea, Thorn ey,
and Spalding. Slowly he carried the waters of the
Sole into new deep channels for ever to be tributary
to the Trent. The waters of the capricious Don
were also forced henceforward to flow directly into
the Ouse, near Goole. Farmers had no longer need
to ferry from Axholm to Sandtoffc, nor would a boat
with coffin and mourners again be lost when rowing
from Thorney to Hatfield. Nor, on the other hand,
would future time ever see the glorious sight that
Prince Henry saw, when five hundred deer (a forest
of antlers) were driven before his one hundred boats,
from Hatfield to Thorny Mere. Unfortunately for
the industrious Dutchman, one single error in his
first plan rendered his whole life miserable. Fortune
gives some men many opportunities, others only one,
and this one neglected or misused,
" All the current of their lives "
runs wrong. Vermuyden forced the Don at first
through its northern channel alone into the river
Aire. This cutting proved insufficient, and fresh
190 A Tour Round England.
lands were flooded. These people of the northern
Don became the chief enemies of the improvement,
and one of Vermuyden's men killing one of the
rioters led to fifty successive attacks on the works,
till at last a royal proclamation read in Axholm by
the sheriff, escorted by fifty horsemen, mingled with
threats of fire and vengeance, led to some transient
quietude. Vermuyden, though proud and resolute,
and sometimes driven to retaliation by the stupid
boors who did not know their own good, succeeded
at last. In 1629 he was knighted by Charles the
First, and took a grant from the crown of Hatfield
Chase for the sum of sixteen thousand and eighty
pounds, and an annual rent of one hundred and
ninety-five pounds three shillings and fivepence-
halfpenny, and one red rose.
The Dutch and German settlers were also allowed
to build chapels in their villages. Still the conserva-
tive fen men remained turbulent and complaining.
Their houses and farms were flooded, they said, their
corn washed away, their cattle drowned, and the
old right of common cancelled. Unfortunately
for Vermuyden, he had now either lost his temper
or grown arrogant and despotic. He threaten-
ed petitioners against him with the gallows, which
indeed many of them richly deserved. He threw
many offenders against his Dutchmen into York gaol.
He ruthlessly stopped the old freeholders' privileges
Breaking the Dykes. 191
of cutting moor turf, till he had at last to restore
many old rights, owing to the interference of Lord
Wentworth, president of the North. Eventually Ver-
muyden washed his hands of ungratefnl Lincolnshire,
and sold all his property there. In 1642, when the
Royalists were threatening the fens, Cromwell's party
broke the dykes, pulled up the flood-gates, and
again laid Oxholm under water. The tide had
turned, and henceforward all (except during short
gleams of success) went ill with Sir Cornelius. He
became involved in a spider's web of lawsuits, and
found his way into prison. The Dutch speculators
who had lost by the " Dutch Canal," also took legal
proceedings against him. But indomitable as ever,
in 1628 he commenced the great Bedford Level. The
clamour against the brave, resolute, industrious
Dutchman grew louder than ever. The street ballads
sung against the drainers contained such verses as
the following :
" Behold the great design, which they do now determine,
Will make our bodies pine, a prey to crows and vermine ;
For they do meane all fens to drain and waters over-master,
All will be dry, and we must die, 'cause Essex calves want
pasture.
" Wherefore let us entreat our antient water-nurses
To show their power, so great as t' help to drain their
purses ;
And send us good old Captain Flood to lead us out to battle,
The two-penny Jack, with scales on's back, will drive out all the
cattle.
192 A Tour Round England.
" This noble captain yet was never known to fail us,
But did the conquest get of all that did assail us ;
His furious rage none could assuage, but to the world's great
wonder,
He tears down banks, and breaks their cranks and whirligigs
asunder."
Still the Dutchmen plied their spades. Charles
the First urged forward the work, which was how-
ever stopped by the agitation aroused by Oliver
Cromwell, " Lord of the Fens," as he was called, and
who pleaded the gross exactions of the royal commis-
sion and the inevitable plunder that would fall on the
helpless smaller proprietors ; at that great man's voice
the work stopped, and the Earl of Bedford died
poor.
In 1649, the new earl and Vermuyden again set
to work, presently aided by Cromwell's Scotch and
Blake's Dutch prisoners, and by 1653 forty thousand
acres of land were reclaimed. There are now in
Lincolnshire and the Great Bedford Level 680,000
acres of reclaimed land, or an area equal, says Mr.
Smiles, to that of North and South Holland, and
worth on an average four pounds an acre. Ely is
now healthier than Pau, sheep feed where fish once
floated, and fen men are no longer savages, more
irreclaimable than their fever-haunted marshes. The
fate of Vermuyden was sad indeed. During the
Civil Wars he had sold all his lands in Dagenham,
Hatfield, Sedgemoor, and Malvern, and in the Bed-
Lighten in the Morning. 193
ford Level, to pay his Dutch workmen. The un-
grateful company then preferred heavy pecuniary
claims against him. He could not meet them, and in
1656 appeared before parliament, four years after
the completion of his great work, as a suppliant for
redress. It is supposed that he soon after went
abroad and died, a poor heart-broken old man. Yet
Vermuyden did a brave work, and he left large-
brained descendants. Through the Babingtons (the
mother's side) the late Mr. Macaulay was descended
from the patient far-seeing Dutchman.
And now the crow is on his " coign of vantage."
From High Burnham, in the isle of Axholm, the fur-
thest object is the bright heaven-pointing spire of
Laughton-le-Morthen, that Yorkshire hill village
which the Sheffield people, who can see the spire
shine in the daybreak, call prettily " Lighten in the
Morning ;" but from the Rood Tower of Lincoln the
crow sees not only Hatfield Chase, which Vermuyden
won from the water, but the blue Yorkshire wolds on
the other side of the Humber, and the azure hills
about Aldborough and Buxton ; indeed, much of
Yorkshire and all that amphibious country which old
Fuller, in his quaint graphic way, compares in shape
" to a bended bow, of which the sea makes the back,
the rivers Welland and Humber the two horns, and
the river Trent the string." This noble altar to God,
set on a rock above the Witham, is seen from six
VOL. IT. O
194 A Tour Round England.
counties, and its silent finger pointing to the sky is
discernible even from the Derbyshire hills.
In Lincoln, even more than Peterborough, an ad-
mirer observes a fervour of Gothic aspiration. " Size
in Egypt, beauty in Greece, strength in Rome" —
these ideals attained perfection, because they were
finite ; but the Christian builder struck out a greater
and more inspired thought, an ideal always striving
heavenward, and never to be fully realised outside the
golden gates of Paradise. The windows, like the
transparent walls of Heaven, the boundless roofs, the
shadowy porches, the vaulted cloisters, the great stone
trees of pillars, the petrified leaves and flowers in
the capitals, the vastness, the mystery, are unap-
proachable in any other style. Its failure, its cease-
less growth, are proofs of its divinity. Lincoln, once
the throne of a vast see that embraced Ely, Oxford,
and Peterborough, is in itself a history of Gothic art,
from early Saxon to late pointed. Begun by Bishop
Remigius, to resemble Rouen, in 1075 (Rufus), it was
partly rebuilt by Alexander, after a fire in 1123-47.
St. Hugh built the east transept, chapels, choir,
chapter -house, and east front of western transept ;
Hugh of Wells, in 1206-35, completed the nave, the
late geometrical decorated cloisters, and the rood
screen having been begun in the reign of Edward the
First. It was just after Hugh of Wells had put by
his hods and trowels (in 1237), that as one of the
Bold Preachers. 195
canons was preaching on the unseemly feuds then
raging between the chapter of Lincoln and the
bishop, having taken the very appropriate text,
" Were we silent the very stones would cry out," the
central tower, perhaps too hastily built by Remigius,
fell with the crash of an earthquake, shaking the
very foundation of the building. Many thought the
end of the world had come, but the strong-nerved
canon, quite unmoved, continued to thunder forth
his sermon against the enemies of the peacemakers.
This tower Bishop Grosteste (1237-54) rebuilt, and
also the east tower. D'Alderby added the wooden
spire, Lexington and Oliver Sutton the beautiful
angel choir, Alnwick the great west window, Wren
the pagan Doric cloister, the James the First clergy
the big bell of the central tower.
Grosteste, the prelate who partly rebuilt the cen-
tral tower, was almost as great a man as Roger
Bacon, of whom he was a contemporary (Henry the
Third). He seems to have been at once a reformer, a
logician, a theologian, a linguist, a poet, and a philo-
sopher. He was one of the first English scholars to
study Aristotle in the original Greek, and one of the
pioneers in Hebrew learning. He did not reach such
a height of learning as Roger Bacon, who seems to
have had more than foreshadowings both of steam
and gunpowder, but he believed in the possibility of
transmuting metals, as Bacon did, and he, no doubt,
o 2
196 A Tour Round England.
laboured hard, as Bacon did, at the discovery of
machinery. The mediaeval legend, indeed, was that
like the " Doctor Mirabilis," the great Franciscan
monk of Oxford, Grosteste constructed a metal head
that would answer questions,though whether it fell and
smashed out of vexation at not being questioned at
the proper nick of time is not, we believe, recorded.
Richard de Bardney, indeed, boldly asserts that the
fragments of Grosteste's talking bronzed head, of
which Gower sings, are still hidden somewhere in the
vaults of Lincoln ; would that we could find and put
together the bits, and our first question to the bronze
head should be :
"When are women going to dress sensibly?"
There is also a legend of St. Hugh, bishop in part
of Henry the Third's reign.
At the death of this holy man the unseen world
trembled with such sympathy that
" A' the bells o' merrie Lincoln
Without men's hands were rung ;
And a' the books o' merrie Lincoln
Were read without men's tongue ;
And ne'er was such a burial
Sin' Adam's days begun."
There is a legend at Canterbury not unlike this,
for the bells there rang of their own accord when
Becket fell before the altar; and Mr. Walcott observe-
that at Coeur de Lion's coronation the bells at West-
minister were, the monks report, rung by angel hands
A Lincoln Legend. 197
in first peal at Compline ; so lie hatches lie in the
Papal oven. This same St. Hugh has a chantry
chapel all to himself in the south-west corner of the
east aisle of the choir transept. In 1280 (Edward
the First), he was translated to the presbytery where
John the Baptist's altar was, and where the angel
choir strike for ever their golden harps. The king,
the queen, the archbishop, seven prelates, and
six abbots led the procession at this translation.
But the crow's readers must not confound this
honoured man with the other hero of Lincoln cathe-
dral legends, namely, Sir Hugh, that little boy whom,
it was firmly believed, some wicked Jews trepanned
as he was playing, and crucified him in secret, in ridi-
cule of the great mystery of our Christian faith.
There is some basis for the legend ; but in the times
of persecution that are so well sketched in "Ivanhoe,"
Jews were suspected of endless iniquities, and any-
thing was believed against the poor sufferers of the
" wandering foot and weary eye." True or not true,
however, still long live Sir Hugh, for he gave rise to
one of Chaucer's beautiful tales, and to the old Percy
ballad :
"The bonny boys of merry England
Were playing at the ba,'
And wi' them stood the sweet Sir Hugh,
The sweetest of them a'."
The same story is related of a Sir William at Nor-
198 A Tour Bound England.
wich. It is not improbable that the Asiatic blood of
the Jew was sometimes roused to a white heat by
the ceaseless injustice and cruelties he had to endure,
and then, with the revenge, some Israelitish fanatics
might not impossibly blend bitter mockery of the
great stumbling-block to Jewish belief. At all events
the slander was a good weapon for the Front-de-
Bceufs and Brian de Bois-Gilberts of that day, who
were longing for the bezants and golden pieces locked
up in the Jewish chests. It is certain that the Jews
at Lincoln were nearly as wealthy as those of York.
The Steep Hill Lincoln people still show the house
(late Norman) of Beleset de Wallingford, a rich
Jewess, who was hanged in the reign of Edward the
First for clipping and sweating money.
There are, too, at Lincoln, as there are at Rouen,
legendary windows. The Lincoln story windows
are the two roses (each twenty-four feet in diameter)
in the central lantern that shoots up one hundred and
twenty-seven feet from the pavement. At Roslin the
story is told of pillars, here of windows, somewhere in
Germany of bells. Everywhere the same central idea
for the kernel of the myth. The despised Cinderella
of an apprentice thinks and toils till he produces a
window richer and brighter than that of his master.
The master, returning and seeing it, slays the ap-
prentice in a paroxysm of jealous rage and hatred.
The best judges say the Lincoln rose is the most
The Brazen Head. 199
perfect and valuable window in England, but we do
not remember if it surpasses the Rouen " Marygolds."
But perhaps the most wonderful relic at Lincoln of
past time is that conundrum in stone, the Centenarian
Beam, an instance of the almost supernatural ingenu-
ity and daring originality of the old Gothic architects,
only equalled by the triangular bridge at Crossland.
It is formed of twenty -three blocks of stone adjoining
the two towers. The stones (of unequal size), are
eleven inches in depth. The beam is twenty-nine
and a quarter feet long, twenty-one inches broad,
twenty-one inches in diameter at each end, and only
twelve inches in the centre. This strange vibrating
bow of elastic stone, cemented solely by lateral pressure,
was designed to exactly and for ever gauge the set-
tlement of the towers. It seems the work of a
magician, so extraordinary is its ingenuity. Surely
good Bishop Grosteste's bronze head must have dis-
closed it to the wise and pious builder. By-the-by,
the bronze and brazen heads of Grosteste and Roger
Bacon were no doubt merely heads of Roman or
Greek statues, which had become favourite orna-
ments of the philosopher's studies.
The Lives of the Bishops of Lincoln form a History of
England in themselves. A few of them are interesting,
and the crow takes them in rude sequence. Remigius,
the first Norman prelate, was the priest who urged
William the Conqueror to record his gratitude for the
200 A Tour Round England.
crowning victory of Hastings by creating Battle
Abbey. He built a hospital for lepers at Lincoln, and
is said to have fed one thousand poor persons daily
for three months in every year. Robert Blovet, the
second Norman bishop, fell dead at Woodstock as he
was riding with Henry the First. The successor of
Blovet was chief justice of England, and is celebrated
for rousing Stephen's jealousy by building three
castles, and pleasing the monks by rearing four
monasteries. St. Hugh, who came two prelacies
afterwards, was borne to his grave by King John of
England and William of Scotland, who happened to
be at Lincoln when the sainted body arrived. Ascetic
Hugh might have been, but he certainly was a fana-
tic, for he dug up the body of poor Fair Rosamond,
and cast it out of Godstow nunnery, to which she had
been a benefactress. Presently arrived Grosteste, who
is said to have written two hundred works (many
still in manuscripts, and no enterprising publisher as
yet even looming in the distance), and whose hatred
of interloping Italian priests led to his excommunica-
tion by the Pope. Grosteste's apparition, according
to the learned Bale, appeared to Pope Innocent at
Naples, but why or with what result has not reached
us. There is a ghost story, too, about Henry Burg-
hersh, a bishop (Edward the Second) ; after plunder-
ing oxen and stealing poor men's land, his repentant
ghost used subsequently to haunt Tinghurst Common,
Tom of Lincoln. 201
not mitred, but in outward semblance of a green ver-
derer, till the Lincoln canons made restitution, and
laid the perturbed and restless spirit. But we have for-
gotten Robert de Chisney, the prodigal young Nor-
man (died 1167), who, in compensation for having
impaired the revenues of the diocese, built nearly all
the palace at Lincoln and the episcopal house at Lin-
coln's-Inn. Then there was Fleming, founder of
Lincoln College, Oxford, who threw WyclhTe's ashes
into the Swift to be carried round the world;
Chaderton, who preached a sermon against mar-
riage at Cambridge, in which he compared a good
wife to an eel hid in a barrel of snakes ; Barlow,
whom the Puritans called "the barley loaf;" Sander-
son (Charles the First), the last bishop who wore a
moustache ; Barlow the second, nicknamed Bishop of
Buckden, because he never once visited the cathe-
dral ; and, last of all to deserve record, facetious
Bishop Thomas, who married five times.
And now a word about poor cracked Great Tom, the
third largest bell in England. The verger may well
call it, in punning slang, " a stunner;" for it weighs
four tons fourteen hundredweight, holds four hun-
dred and twenty-four gallons ale measure, and has a
mouth seven yards and a half and two inches wide.
A tall man, Southey says graphically, might stand
upright in it.
The u mighty Tom " of Oxford, however, over-
202 A Tour Round England.
weighs Lincoln by three tons, the Exeter Goliath by-
two tons, and " Tom Growler," the giant of St.
Paul's, by one ton. Canterbury,. Gloucester, and
Beverley rank after these four mammoths. Lincoln
Tom was always too big for the tower ; but it used
to swing out over the fens when the judges entered
the city. It only dates back to the eighth year of
James the First, and it was cast in the minster yard,
so it has never travelled far.
And now, though faithfully believing that the ca-
thedral was made expressly for his perch, the crow
strikes eastward towards Horncastle and Tennyson's
country. Here are " the glooming flats " — " the
lonely poplars trembling in the dusk " — and here
in the dark fen the oxen low as round Mariano's
moated grange. A lane at Winceby, up in the
rounded wolds, five miles east of Horncastle, is still
called " Slash Lane," a record of a " short, sharp
fight," as Mr. Walter White tersely calls it, during
the Civil Wars. Sir Ingram Hopton's cavalry met
Cromwell's here. It went hard with Oliver, whose
charger was shot under him as he led the van of the
Ironsides full plunge. He had scarcely struggled
from the dying horse, when a Cavalier (probably Sir
Ingram) felled him again ; but Cromwell shook him-
self straight, mounted another horse, and routed the
Kakehells.
It was all over in half an hour. Charles's men
Tennyson s Home. 203
were chivied down the lane, and shot and cut down
at every hedge and gate. Many were drowned in
the ditches and quagmires, and Sir Ingram was slain
with the rest. He now lies in Horn castle Church,
and is described in his epitaph as having fallen »' in
the attempt of seizing the arch-rebel in the bloody
skirmish near Winceby." This storm cleared the
air, for immediately after the melee in Slash Lane,
Bolingbroke Castle surrendered to the Parliamenta-
rians, and Lincolnshire was freed from the king's
freebooters.
Rounded breadths of wold, a blue wavering hori-
zon, thin starvling hedgerows, and on a dim purple
hill, the dark pile of Lincoln, past Spilsby, where
the father of Sir John Franklin was a small draper,
brings the crow to Somersby, where our great modern
poet was born. It is described as a warm wooded
vale ; a streamlet meandering by a mill, a curving
road overshadowed by trees, a deep lane with grand
trees, and a clear spring reflecting the ferns that
edge its brink, border the hill on which the vicarage
of the poet's father stands. It is a comfortable,
plain, not picturesque house, screened from the road
by large chestnut-trees. There are the poplars behind
the house, and the brook of which the laureate sings
with such tender affection, in his Ode to Memory :
" Come from the woods that belt the grey hill side,
The seven elms, the poplars four,
That stand beside my father's door,
204 A Tour Hound England.
And chiefly from the brook that loves
To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand,
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves,
Drawing into his narrow earthen urn,
In every elbow and turn,
The filter'd tribute of the rough woodland.
O ! hither lead thy feet —
Pour round mine ears the livelong bleat
Of the thick-fleeced sheep from wattled folds,
Upon the ridged wolds,
When the first matin-song hath waken'd loud,
Over the dark dewy earth forlorn,
What time the amber morn
Forth gushes from beneath a low-hung cloud."
205
CHAPTER XXVII.
LEEDS AND YORK TO ROKEBY.
FROM the baldest and highest point of Mickle Fell,
the crown of Yorkshire, the crow with twink-
ling eye surveys the great county, half as large as
Holland, which he is about to traverse on his swift
way to his final roosting place on the tower of Ber-
wick-upon-Tweed. The bird, who writes with fea-
thers from his own wing, sees beneath him, small as
dolls' houses, those great ruins of Rievaulx, Fountain's
Kirkstall, Bolton, and Jorevaulx. The castles of
Knaresborough, Pontefract, Skipton, York, Rich-
mond, and Scarborough, wake up the old bird's me-
mory of the days of the Cliffords and Mowbrays, the
Lacys and the Scropes, names that still make the
heart of a true Yorkshireman beat with a warmer
and a fuller pulse. Yorkshire Dr. George Hickes in
a sermon once called " the epitome of England," the
birthplace and nursery of many great men." The
eastern cliffs, ramparts washed by the German Ocean,
206 A Tour Round England.
the bracing moors and fells, the green and laughing
vales, the great seething manufacturing cities, smoking
like witches' caldrons, and larded with spikes of
factory chimneys, lie before the crow and threaten to
alternately tempt him from the even tenor of his
flight. Those fair rivers, the Humber, the Wharfe,
the Nid, and the Derwent, stretch far beneath his
airy perch, their silver chains clues to the labyrinth
he has to traverse.
First he descends through clouds of smoke and
steam, and alights on the black shore of the sable
and Acherontic river Aire. He is in Leeds, that
paradise of clothiers, that murky Eden of woollen
manufacturers. The street and market talk is of swan-
downs, twill nets, and kerseymeres, and of shoddy
also. Half the wool of the West Riding comes to
the thousand busy and sinewy Yorkshire hands that
force wool into new and higher forms in the good
town of Leeds. No wonder, then, that the poor Saxon
hamlet belonging to six humble thanes, who employed
upon ten carucates of land and six oxgangs, twenty-
seven hardfisted villanes, and four sokemen with
fourteen ploughs, has increased. These twenty-seven
poor families (two hundred and seventy souls circa)
have grown to one hundred and fifty-two thousand
three hundred and thirteen, having, indeed, almost
trebled since 1801 : in fact, ever since the Yorkshire
manufacturers began to conquer the west country
A Slight Dispute. 207
clothiers and surpass their produce, the trade throve,
and grew fast, as this single fact will show. The
woollen cloth manufactured in the West Riding from
1812 to 1821, was four million five hundred and
twenty-one thousand seven hundred and forty-two
pieces.
Those delightful puzzle-headed old gentlemen, the
antiquaries, always seeing too much in simple things,
sometimes too little in difficult things, have tied up
the etymology of Leeds in a pretty knot. That
sound old scholar Thoresby of Leeds, said Leeds
meant " the town in the wood," but then nearly all
British towns that were not in bogs were in woods.
Some say Leeds was a British chief, and others,
equally noisy and not a whit less obstinate, that
Leeds was the name of some German town used by
the Saxon conquerors as an appellation for the York-
shire village. Doctor Gibson, scornfully ignoring his
predecessors, says Leod (Leeds) means gens or natio,
and indicates the populousness of Leeds during the
Heptarchy ; while Doctor Whitaker, turning his back
on almost everybody but posterity, declares, with a
simplicity subversive of all Pickwickian investigators,
that Leeds is merely the genitive case of Lord, the
first Saxon possessor of the fourteen ploughs, the
church and the mill, besides the useful but now sooty
Aire.
During the Civil Wars, when the Scropes and the
208 A Tour Round England.
Fairfaxes were shouting their rival battle cries, Leeds
was nearly always Parliamentarian. There had not
been much fighing on the banks of the Aire from 655
till 1643, a pretty good interval for refreshment.
True, Pendar, the hoary Pagan tyrant, in his
time slew three East Anglian and two Northum-
brian kings (such as they were), and at last fell in a
great rout of his Mercians on the shores of the over-
flowing Aire, twenty of his vassal chieftains perish-
ing with him on the field or in the flood. *\.t last the
war fever had seethed up again once more in the veins
of the staunch men of the West Riding. The storm
soon broke. In January, 1643 (Charles raised his
standard in 1642), Sir Thomas Fairfax, of Denton,
marched on the clothiers' town with six troops of
horse, three companies of dragoons, one thousand
musketeers, and two thousand club men from Brad-
ford. Sir William Saville, the Royalist commandant,
returning a haughty answer to the summons to sur-
render, Sir Thomas marched straight at the town
with colours flying, beating the garrison from their
outworks and killing their cannoneers. The storm
lasted two hours, at the end of which Fairfax, follow-
ed by Sir Henry Fowlis and Captain Forbes, hewed
his way into the town, taking five hundred prison-
ers and two brass cannons with good store of ammu-
nition. Sir William Saville fled, and got safely across
the Aire, but his sergeant-major, Beaumont, was
A Friend in Need. 209
drowned in trying to follow his leader. The Puri-
tains only lost twenty or thirty men in the short but
hot assault.
Briggate and Kirkgate then remained tolerably
quiet till 1647, when the Scotch army having gene-
rously surrendered King Charles to the Parliament
he loved so much, the rueful king passed through
Leeds a prisoner. It was on that occasion, when
Charles was lodged at the Red Hall, that that good
man, John Harrison, the great Leeds merchant,
nobly came
" True as the dial to the sun,
Although it be not shone upon,"
and coaxing and forcing his way through the sullen
and morose musketeers, knelt, and with bowed head,
presented his majesty with what he smilingly called
" a tankard of right home-brewed excellent ale."
The guards, sympathising with the gift, and seeing
its harmlessness, withdrew ; but when the surprised
king lifted the lid of the great silver flagon, lo ! and
behold, the vessel was brimming with yellow gold
pieces, which the royal gentleman in trouble, with his
usual craft, took care to instantly stow away in his big
pockets, dismissing the kindly giver with a gracious
smile. The window is (we believe) still shown — it
is on the north side, on the extreme right of the
second storey. The husband of a female servant, who
offered to help the king that night to escape, was,
VOL. II. P
210 A Tour Round England.
after the Restoration, appointed, by a not too grate-
ful monarch, the king's chief bailiff in Yorkshire ; and
growing rich, he built for his disport Crosby House,
in Upperhead Row. Poor old Alderman Harrison's
lot fell in other places, for the sequestrators vexed
and robbed him, and confiscated his estates. He
died in 1652, at a ripe age, and was interred in his
own orchard, on the site of the present Kirkgate
market, but his honoured body was afterwards lifted
•
and removed to gloomy St. John's Church, and a
portrait of the worthy philanthropist, who rebuilt the
Leeds Grammar School, and founded St. John's Hos-
pital in the same town, now hangs, a palladium of the
city, in the Council Room of the Grand Town Hall :
but Thorseby has another version of the story. The
Red Hall (a house so consecrated to those strange
folk who idolize the memory of a hopelessly faith-
less king) stands near the West Bar, in Upperhead
Row. It was built by Mr. Thomas Metcalf, a Leeds
Alderman, in 1628 (early Charles the First), and it
derived its name from being the first large house in
the town built of brick. Richard Thornton, the learn-
ed Recorder of Leeds, lived there in worthy Thores-
by's time.
That great Leeds antiquary gives a more graphic
version of the old Carolan legend. He says, Charles
at the time was in the hand of the Scots, and on his
way from Newark to Newcastle; so far the worthy
Old Tkoretby. 211
old gentleman errs exceedingly. While the king was
at Red Hall, a zealous maid-servant of Alderman
Metcalf's entreated the king to change clothes with
her and so escape ; she promised, if he did, to lead
him in the dark out of the garden door into a back
alley, called Land's Lane, and thence to a friend's
house, who would forward him safely to France.
The obstinate king, however, declined the offer
of the generous woman with thanks, and gave her a
token (the legend says the Garter, which is unlikely,
saymg that if it were never in his own power, on
sight of that token his son would hereafter reward
her. After the Restoration the woman's husband
built Crosby House, in Upper Head Row.
Before the crow dismisses good Mr. Thoresby, that
admirable and laborious antiquary and his tomb in
St. Peter's, let him cull one or two choice notes of
that worthy's upon Leeds memorabilia ; and first a
note on Leeds strength (1648 — 1725). He mentions
Ralph Dinsdale, a cloth-worker, who, vexed at the
carrier complaining that a certain pack of cloth would
break his horses' back, lifted it up and carried it
easily as a Hercules, from Alderman Ibbotson's house
to the churchyard. He also records the strength of
Mr. Thomas Smalwood, a chaplain in the Parliamen-
tary army, who, to outbrave the soldiers, would
sometimes lift at arm's length three pikes (fourteen
p 2
212 A Tour Hound England.
feet long, tied together). A note of memory, too —
one Miss Dorothy Dixon, of Hunslet Lane, when a
child was able to remember nearly a whole sermon,
" letter perfect," as actors say. Of swiftness —
Edmund Preston, the Leeds butcher, could run
twice round Chapelton Moor (a four mile course) in
fourteen minutes. It was roughly calculated that
three thousand pounds had been won by this man's
heels. This hare-foot died (in 1700) at last of a
wound received from a stake as he was skipping over
a hedge after some stray sheep. Of strange sym-
pathies — a note of one Mr. Thomas Sharp, who died
at Leeds in 1693. At the very hour of his dissolu-
tion, a distant friend and townsman of his fell into a
bitter agony of tears and vehement passion of appre-
hension, so that he could not continue to dress him-
self, but stood naked till he could send a messenger
to inquire for the sick man. Impatient of the mes-
senger's return, he hastened after him, and found Mr.
Sharp just dead, and the shroud not yet wrapped round
him. Two notes of longevity. One Mr. Thomas Ber-
nard, of Leeds, fifty years old when he married, had
eighteen children, rode briskly to hunting when he
was above a hundred, and could then read without
spectacles.
But we may have too much even of old Thores-
by, so the crow, launching from the top of the
domed tower of the Town Hall, which only wants
Ancient York. 213
"just a something" to rival the great H6tel de Ville
of Flanders, pushes on over moor and valley for the
city of York, rising crowned by its triple tiara of
minster towers, above the Ouse and Foss, nearly mid-
way between London and Edinburgh ; from that
tower the crow looks down greetingly on Severus's
Hills and many a fertile field of pasture. The warlike
Scots, with even then a strong tendency southward,
besieged this city in the reign of Severus, aided by
the Britons (208) under a Scythian leader. (Heaven
only knows how a Russian or a Tartar general ever
got promoted to such a post in those days). The
Emperor Severus, however, though old and gouty,
drove the wasps off with his cohorts, who then
marched into Scotland, cutting down forests, making
roads, and draining marshes as they moved. The
march, however, is said to have cost him fifty thou-
sand men, for the Scotch even then never gave any
one more than two shillings for half-a-crown, and
were stubborn, shoulder to shoulder, canny, hard
to beat kind of bodies. Severus then turned the
eighty miles of earth rampart that the Emperor Ha-
drian had made (he also had lived at York) into stone
from the Solway Firth to VVallsend, where coals
were then scarcely sufficiently appreciated. On a
second revolt of the Scots, the old emperor vowed,
like Edward the First, their entire extermination,
but death stopped him at the very threshold of the
214 A lour Round England.
Palace of Eboracum (York). Feeling his blood
chilling at the source, worn by long Syrian and Cale-
donian campaigns, he called to his bedside his two evil
sons, Geta the dog, and Caracalla the wolf. " I leave
you, my sons," he said, " a firm government, though
I found the republic torn and disturbed ; cherish the
legions." Then to his attendants the Caesar said :
" I have been all, and yet am no better for it." It
was Solomon's bitter sigh of " vanity of vanities "
over again. He next called for the golden urn in
which his ashes were to be conveyed to Rome, and ear-
nestly looking at it said, " Thou shalt soon hold what
the whole world could scarcely contain." Soon after
he calmly departed, meeting King Death as a king
should meet a king. The body of the Roman em-
peror was burnt on a great pile of wood on one of
those three hills near Holdgate, that the crow has
already fixed his keen eye on. After the old man's
death there was hideous work at the city on the
Ouse, for discord sowed envy and hatred in the
hearts of the brothers, and Caracalla (the stronger
and more evil spirit of the two, fearing Geta and
the army) massacred twenty thousand of his ad-
herents in the ranks, and, led by the devil from bad
to worse, ended by stabbing Geta in his mother's
arms.
Now the crow,, taking a bold flight over centuries,
alights on a later scene of tragic horror, which
The Wars of the Roses. 215
Shakespeare has painted in Rembrandt's manner.
Those blood-thirsty Wars of the Roses culminated in
that terrible day of retaliation at York in 1460. The
pretender to the crown unwisely allowed himself, in
all the reckless arrogance of his nature, to be shut up
in his castle of Sandal with only six thousand men
at arms, while the Duke of Somerset, a king's man,
beleagued him with eighteen thousand. York's
faithful old counsellor, Sir David Hale, entreated his
master not to venture forth in the open till joined by
his son (afterwards Edward the Fourth) with rein-
forcements ; but Queen Margaret's insults and sneers,
that it was disgraceful to a man who aspired to a
crown to be shut up in a castle, and by a woman,
were not to be borne by a proud self-willed man.
" Hast thou loved me so long," he said, "and
wouldst thou have me now dishonoured ? Thou never
sawest me keep fortress when I was regent in Norman-
dy. No ; like a man I always issued forth and fought
mine enemies, and ever to their loss and my own
honour. Yes, I will fight them, Davy, though I fight
them alone."
The Duke then marched out, and drew up his
small army on Wakefield Green. The Duke of
Somerset came to meet him in three divisions, him-
self in the centre, Lord Clifford on the left, and the
Earl of Worcester on the right. The Duke of York
began by a bull-like rush straight at the heart of his
216 A Tour Bound England.
enemies, but they outflanked him, and lapped him in
with a flood of swords, lances, and axes. The fight
was hand to hand — the hatred embittered by past
mutual cruelties. A priest, the tutor to the Earl of
Rutland, York's second son, escaped from the melee,
and hurried to Wakefield ; but cruel Clifford, observ-
ing the lad's rich dress, spurred after him, and on
the bridge overtook him and the priest.
" Save him !" cried the good monk ; " he is the son
of a prince, and may do you good hereafter."
" Son of York !" shouted the savage Lancastrian,
whose own son had been slain at the battle of St.
Albans ; seizing the boy by the hair, " thy father
slew mine, child, and so will I thee and all thy
kin," and he stabbed him to the heart. The Duke
of York, also, was dragged to a mound and placed on
it in mockery as on a throne. The soldiers twisted
a crown of grass, and paying him derisive homage,
shouted,
" Hail king without a kingdom ! Hail prince
without a people !"
Then they forced him on his knees and struck off
his head. This gory and hideous trophy Clifford
stuck on a lance, and with his own hands presented
to the she-wolf Margaret, saying with a bitter
laugh,
" Madame, your war is done ; here is the ransom
of your king."
The paper Crown. 217
The pale bead was then decked with a paper
crown, and, by order of Margaret of Anjou, and amid
the ruthless laughter of her courtiers, placed over
the inside of Micklegate Bar, with the heedless face
turned towards the city. The Earl of Salisbury and
other noblemen were sent to Pomfret and beheaded,
and their heads also placed over the gates of York.
About three thousand Yorkists fell in this bloody
battle.
But nearly all that York has seen or done histori-
cally happened in the Minster, and the crow, on the
highest tower, sits, as it were, in inquest over the
coronation place of many happy and unhappy kings.
That chivalrous king married the faithful Philippa
his Amazonian queen at this altar at which Edward
the Fourth and Richard the Third both successively
knelt almost directly they had donned their blood-
stained crowns. Henry the Seventh came here, and
so did James the First ; while, as for Charles, he
made York his northern capital till Cromwell's cannon,
at Marston Moor, shattered his last hopes. A church
has stood, where the fair Minster now rises, ever
since the Easter of 627, when Paulinus baptised the
newly-converted Edwin, King of Northumberland, in
a little wooden oratory hastily built for the occasion ;
the woodwork was soon replaced by stone. The
Minster was partly destroyed by fire, once in 1069,
then in 1829, and, lastly, in 1840, by the carelessness
218 A Tour Hound England.
of plumbers. The fire of 1829 was the work of a
mad sailor, brother of Martin the painter. The reli-
gious madness of this man has been frequently-
described ; but not the details of the crime, which
it took sixty-five thousand pounds to partially
remedy. Martin, who believed Heaven had sent
visions to tell him to burn the Minster, where the
prayers and sermons vexed him as mere forms, and
not prayers of the heart, lodged with a shoemaker,
whose house he left some days before the fire, saying
he was going to reside at Leeds. The fire was on
Monday morning ; on the Saturday Martin suddenly-
returned to his old lodgings, to his landlord's sur-
prise. Martin, however, told him that, having some
of his books to sell in Tadcaster, he had settled
to come on to York. He left on Sunday early, and
did not return. He took with him from the old shoe-
maker a pair of pincers, which were afterwards found
on a stool near the last window of the north tran-
sept, from which a knotted rope was hanging.
About a week afterwards Martin was taken at
Hexham, in Northumberland. He confessed every-
thing with amusing exultation and triumph. At
evening service he had " laid down beside the
Bishop " — that is, hidden himself behind the tomb of
Archbishop Grenfield. He had heard the man come
down from the belfry after ringing the bell for
evening service ; he went up there, and struck a light
Burning the Minster. 219
with a flint and razor; he then cut off about a hundred
feet of rope, and, being a sailor, soon constructed a
scaling ladder, and went up, hand over hand, over
the gates into the choir, where there was most wood-
work for his purpose. He had taken care to bring
a wax candle, tinder, and brimstone matches. When
he got down into the choir, the madman fell on his
knees and thanked God, but felt a voice say he would
be caught, do what he would. The fringe and tas-
sels from the pulpit and bishop's throne he carried off
to prove the fire was his work, and also to adorn a
hairy jacket he had at Lincoln. When he had torn
up the prayer books and music books in heaps ready
to light, he cried " Glory to God ;" he told the magis-
trates, " I never felt so happy, but I had a hard
night's work of it, particularly with a hungered
belly." He regretted he could not save the big
Bible, but he could not get it over the gates. What
the Lord had given him for his hire he tied up in his
handkerchief; and while he was doing so he kept
shouting, " Glory to God !" so often and so loud,
that he only wondered it was not heard outside.
This mad sailor, who was confined as a lunatic, died
in 1858. It is a curious fact that up to the time ot
his death, although expressly forbidden to draw the
Minster or to write about it, he was always (with a
madman's craft) sketching portions of it under pre-
tence of making drawings of Kenilworth and other
220 A Tour Round England.
ruins. To the last he believed that in a dream he
had seen a cloud pass from the Minster to the shoe-
maker's shop where he lodged, and that he had seen
an angel shoot an arrow through the Minster door.
The great organ burst with a tremendous noise dur-
ing this lamentable fire. All the choir carving was
destroyed, and the tombs of Archbishop Sterne and
Sharp were injured. The rood loft was burnt, with
all the oak tabernacle woi'k, and the celebrated
screen between the choir and Lady Chapel had to be
rebuilt. A curious old altar chair and the great
brass eagle were saved, in spite of torrents of molten
lead and falling rafters.
One of the greatest curiosities in the Minster is
the horn of Ulphus, which is of ivory mounted in
brass. It is preserved in a chapel on the south side
of the choir, which is used as a vestry, museum, and
registrar room. This Ulphus, the son of Toraldus,
was a Danish chieftain, who ruled the west parts of
Deira. A difference arising between his eldest and
youngest son about the succession after his death, he
adopted a plan to make their shares equal. He rode
to York with his largest drinking horn, and, filling it
with wine, went on his knees before the altar, and
bestowed upon God and the blessed Saint Peter all
his lands, tenements, and wealth. There is pro-
perty to the east of York which in old deeds still
bears his name. This horn was stolen in the reign
Bearding an Archbishop. 221
of Elizabeth, but restored to the church by one of the
Fairfaxes, shorn however of its precious settings.
It was remounted by the Dean and Chapter in 1675
(Charles the Second). There is in this chapel also a
curious pastoral staff of silver given by Queen Cathe-
rine to her confessor when nominated Catholic Arch-
bishop of York by James the Second. It is said that
when marching insolently in procession to the Min-
ster, the Earl of Danby confronted him, and wrest-
ing the new sceptre from the Pretender's hand, gave
it to tbe Dean and Chapter.
222
CHAPTER XXVIII.
SCARBOROUGH. (ONE POINT OF VIEW.)
I.
A STROLLING band (a cheery hopeful horn, a
restless and merry violin, a deep-voiced mellow
bass viol, and a flute that whistles like a jolly black-
bird) welcomes us to Scarborough, the night of our
arrival at Crowther's. We are also reminded of where
we are by the hoarse marine cry of " Native oyster —
fresh native oyster — OYSTER ALIVE." The cry befits
the windy and fitful moonlight of a rough September
night, and we are comforted by hearing that the
oyster of the neighbourhood is as well as can be ex-
pected. His friend and cousin, the retiring crab, is
evidently not nearly so thriving and vivacious, for a
second nautical Yorkshire voice, with no upper notes
to mention, announces to us presently that there are
passing our doors " Crabs, fresh-boiled crabb-a !'"
We look out from our lofty window at Scarborough
Bay, which shines like fluid silver in the moonlight.
Mouther's Gong. 223
while half a dozen herring-boats, each with a speed
of light hung like a talisman somewhere about it,
ride at anchor sleepily on the bright, placid tide.
The bright ring of lamps on the esplanade circles the
southern cliff like an outspread necklace of gold, to
which the double row of light on the Spa Terrace
forms a sort of centre pendant ; above rises the dark
flat-topped whale's back of Oliver's Hill, the old mount
from whence grim Cromwell once bombarded Scar-
borough, and sent his angry shot bounding and crash-
ing into those narrow steep streets that climb up from
the sea towards the castle.
Hark ! 'twas the Indian drum ! What means that
cang-bang, as of showmen perpetually going to
begin — are we in Benares ? Is this Jubbelpore or
Sulipatam, and are the festivals commencing in the
Hindoo temples, by order of Kehama the Accursed?
dear no ! That is Mouther's private hotel gong
calling the Mouther world to tea, that brazen bray
that replies to it defiantly is Crowther's, lower
down, resolved to also advertise its meals and the
crowded state of its apartments, which, full or not,
are equally kept lit up at night, on the principle that
fires are kept burning in a camp the night it is de-
serted. Mowther's people despise Crowther's because
" private hotel and boarding-house " is painted in vul-
gar, staring,large letters over their first-floor windows;
and Mouther's people do not think much of Crow-
224 A Tour Round England.
ther's, because they have no seats of their own in the
terrace garden, and, what is more despicable, no cro-
quet-ground. Moreover, Madre Mouther is musical,
and so are the Miss Mouthers, especially Louisa, the
blonde, the second, who wears a blue snood and blue
" suivez-moi jeune homme," that flutter in the even-
ing breeze as, at the piano, by the open window, she
nightly sings, surrounded by admirers, till we, the
Crowther set, who only venture on Tommy Dodd
and low comic tunes, almost burst with envy.
We go out on the north cliff, and look at the grey
pile of castle ruin rising on the hill, like a blinded
Samson, old and shattered, but still invincible and
defiant. The moon is hidden now by a cloud, and
one star only shines above us. Look below there, at
the very edge of the wet sand, just where the edge
of foam is receding, there stands a white lady, a
pale phantom figure, like a ghost on the shore, wait-
ing fixedly for some phantom ship. No, after all, it
is only the reflection of that lone star on the wet
sand. Well, we have seen worse ghosts than that.
Latest birth of Folly, here comes a bicycle ; a tall-
legged stork upon it is standing over it on tiptoe
— misguided man. The moment he puts his feet on
the wheel supports away he is borne — a self-tor-
mented Mazeppa. On he rolls, and over he topples
time after time, to the open scorn of our vendor of the
lively oyster. At last, in sheer compassion, two friends
Queen Ocean. 225
of the misguided Phaeton hold him ignominiously on,
one on each side, a volunteer watches him contemp-
tuously behind, and he is conveyed home, for this time,
without the broken leg he seems to so ardently covet.
Those two lovers on the seat looking seaward, with
their faces so near together, do not turn to mark the
ignominious retreat of the bicyclist, and probably
would not look round if half Scarborough was to sud-
denly blaze up like a vesuvian.
II.
I awake early and thrust my head out of the open
window at Crowther's, to see if everything is where
it was. Queen Ocean has three deep lace flounces of
foam to her gown. The ruined castle is hid in a
sunny mist. One sail a bright tan turns reddish yel-
low in the sunshine ; beyond scatter other sails, black
in the foreground and growing to mere specks, greyer
and dimmer as they recede more and more towards
Flamborough Head. What are those dark spots like
black corks, washing about down there in the spray?
Are they flies or men's heads ? — those are the hardy
bathers of Scarborough. All theamusementsare already
mustered on the parade ; the Hindoo with tracts ; the
blind beggar, whose unsympathising dog holds in his
mouth a tin for pence; the blue-coated, tow-haired frowsy
German band; the boy with fuzees and the Scarborough
Gazette done up in pink wrappers ; the garrulous old
VOL. II. Q
226 A Tour Round England:
Italian with a big nose that quivers when he walks,
and the monkey in a plaid tunic that plays the tam-
bourine. I get up and find Mouther's set are watch-
ing with dignity the little caricature of man gnawing
at an apple, while Crowther's people, in their hearty,
vulgar way, are preparing a handful of nuts to throw
him when he comes to their steps. The proprietor
of the performing birds is making slowly towards us
with his cage of canaries and little green averdavats,
and I hear the pop of the little gun that announces
the execution of that old offender, the deserter.
Down below in the foam is one of Crowther's lot, that
vulgar man with the accent from Bradford (tallow-
chandler, the wicked wit at Mouther's suggests, he's
so very partial to dips) out wading breast high
in the green water, like a Polyphemus pursuing Acis ;
while the bathing-machine proprietor dashes along
the shore on his pony as if rushing off for a lifeboat.
A large concourse on the pier head watch with in-
terest the straggler with the elements, while a reso-
lute angler fishes stolidly for haddock, as if he was
never to have a meal unless he drew it from the sea.
Fresh humbug of Mouther's reported this morning :
four servants and a tiger in plum colour (who makes
open fun of the whole thing) are just sent out to the
meadow at the end of the cliff to pretend to shake
carpets and attract attention. Better have a van at
once and distribute bills, Crowther's faction says, the
Rival Factions. 227
object evidently being to show that they keep a boy
in buttons, and are getting ready rooms for fresh
arrivals, when, in very truth, half their rooms are, to
Mrs. Crowther's positive knowledge, at this moment
stark empty. Mrs. C. can't abide such nasty mean
ways, but it was always so with the Mouthers,
stuck-up, false things ! Now as we have friends
at both houses, we hear all that is said. That
stony man with the black whiskers (large way of
business at Huddersfield) who walks about with the
eldest Mouther, says that the people at Crowther's
look like illustrations to a book of the last fifteen
years' fashions, while the funny man at Crowther's
calls Mouther's a place where they give lessons in
gentility. The two houses walk about like Mon-
tagues and Capulets, biting their thumbs at each
other, and if swords were still in fashion, I have no
doubt blood would be shed.
There is one quiet and changeless amusement
always in vogue at Scarborough. In fact, it is not so
much the custom as the religion of this and of other
sea-side places. They do the same at Scalyton :
you sit down facing the sea, and look steadily sea-
ward till you get giddy and sleepy ; you then walk
long enough to clear yourself from this feeling, and
then sit down and stare vacantly again. Red-faced
farmers, bilious business men, merry school girls, old
country women in poke bonnets, young dandies —
q2
228 A Tour Hound England.
every one does it. Most of these contemplators
would exhaust the sea (mentally I mean) in three
minutes. They observe it is blue, and level, with sunny
gleams on it here and there, that some white-winged
gulls flicker over it like large white butterflies; they
know that it has illimitable power of getting angry,
and in its wrath of devouring man, and there they
end, but still magnetised by its irresistible fascina-
tion tbey sit there day after day, as if they were
trying to write something to rival Byron's Address
to the Ocean. The custom may tend slightly to
idiotcy, but in other respects it is a rational and
healthy custom enough.
As I walk round to the castle cliff, where the big
gun from Sebastopol is, I find an old lame fisherman
leaning on it and gazing wistfully seaward. I ask
him if that is a collier out yonder. He says "Yes,"
with an air of surprise at any landsman knowing a
collier so far off. I explain to him I mean the vessel
out there by the pier (five miles nearer than where he
means). He shifts his ground grimly, and rather scorn-
fully, at this. Lord ! he meant that speck out ever so
far. (I try, but I can't see it at all, and go down to
zero at once in my own estimation.) I ask my
mariner (to carry the thing off), if it is a good day
for fishing. Never was a better, he says : would I
like his boat? He's got plenty of bait ready. The
day was fine, with a little white feather on the sea,
A good day for a Boat. 229
the breakers crashing along the shore in rolling dia-
pasons. It might be a good day for a strong con-
stitution, but not for Joseph. Since that I have had
reason to suspect it was not so good a day. The
day after I asked the same question. The wind was
then furious, raging demoniacally, spiteful in the
matter of chimney-pot hats. I was then also in-
formed it was a first-rate day, and safe for mackerel.
A third day it rained violently — even that day, too,
was pronounced perfect ; now, as the days could not
all be perfect, I am inclined to think that not one of
them was, and that if Youth had been at the prow,
Nausea would certainly have been at the helm. —
These are Mouther's set going out now, all in yacht-
ing dress — it's a show off, Crowther's people say,
they always come back ill. Do you hear that crash,
as if Heaven's door had been slammed against us for
ever? That is thunder. The Mouthers will just
have got comfortably out to sea. Serve them right,
growls Crowther, who is what his friends call a
plain sort of man ; but though I certainly esteem him,
I must confess that, for my own part, I set him down
long ago as decidedly ugly.
III.
Bathing ! There again, the Mouther set, who
break every law human and divine, troop off smirk-
ing and philandering almost directly after breakfast,
230 A Tour Round England.
when everybody knows it as much as one's life is
worth to bathe within two hours of any meal. Every
one at Crowther's expects that some day the whole
lot will go off in simultaneous apoplexy, and have to
be skimmed off the water just as you skim flies out of
a beer-glass. They dabble and shiver about, but I'll
just give you an idea of how they suffer. The other
day I went to bathe and had to wait until an invisible
gentleman in No. 32 had done dressing. I stood
kicking the sand about for an endless time ; at last
the bathing man said,
" I think I'd knock, sir," so I did ; a feeble wavering
voice answered,
" In a moment."
Presently the door slowly opened, and a blue
shivering jelly of a woe-begone man, looking a pale
image of alarm and nervousness, stammeringly ar-
ticulates,
" Would you be kind enough to button my braces,
sir, my hands are so benumbed : I've been half au hour
trying to do them. Ain't it cold."
" Button your braces," I said ; " why, my dear sir,
if it would have made you quicker, I would have
dressed you altogether."
1 saw that man afterwards on the Terrace shrink-
ing home to Mouther's. He was never his own man
again, and after all he went off (just like Mouther's
people) without paying for his last six bathing tickets.
A pleasant Meeting. 231
Now improper bathing may benumb a man, but
it doesn't make him forget to pay for his bath-
ing tickets. The Crowther set are jolly, hearty,
honest, rather vulgar people, who talk loud, dress any
how, brag a good deal about cloth and iron, and
Hoodersfield and Braaaadford, and hate fuss, sham,
and pretension. Their wives are generally rather
full faced, hard sturdy women, who speak their minds,
and their daughters are hearty, pretty, strong, good-
natured girls, who laugh loud, sing loud, and walk
fast and far, delight in boating, and do not at all con-
ceal their likes and dislikes. They are not afraid to
show they enjoy themselves, they are fresh and na-
tural, and have no affectation ; but their dialect is
detestable. The Crowther men are very hearty and
sociable, and they are always meeting friends from
" flool," wherever you go with them. The other day
I was bathing next a jolly sturdy Yorkshireman, the
very image of Nicholas Nickleby's friend. He was
buffeting with the waves about twenty yards from
me, when all at once he made a dash at a little thin
man two or three machines off, shouting,
" Why, Bowdler, what brought you from Hooders-
field, and how's fold woman and t' little lad ?"
" What, Hooddlestone !" piped the little whiskery
man, puffing and blowing, and shaking hands with
Bowdler. " yes, we're all here, and there's Simpson
232 A Tour Round England.
out there. Here, 1 say, Simpson man, here's Bowdler
— come and shake hands with Bowdler."
So Bowdler swam up and shook hands too, and
a very pleasant little chat the three North Riding
men had, with the waves ten feet high breaking over
their heads, or washing them every now and then
apart as if they had been three corks. That's the
Crowther's style. One of Mouther's lot, if Bowdler had
tackled him, would have yaw-yawed, and paddled
back to his machine to get his eye-glass, or his opera-
glass, or telescope, to make sure Bowdler was Bowd-
ler, and not his tailor or his man milliner, or some other
such interesting well-wisher. What a stupendous
fool I am ! Here I have been afraid to bathe for a
whole week because of the cold, and I declare if the
water isn't delightfully fresh, and without a sting.
How like this is to many other of our foolish apprehen-
sions. How often a big threatening vessel looms in our
offing, a fire-ship, portentous, alarming. At last, when
we muster courage, and pull out and board it, it proves
a mere phantom ship, that melts into air before our
advancing oars.
" Always is warm, sir, after the night's been rough,"
says the machine proprietor.
I long to know the scientific reason for this pheno-
menon, but like a fool again I am ashamed to ask,
so I say, " I suppose so," which veils my ignorance.
I presume the sea beats itself warm just as a cabman
A Sparkling Sea. 233
warms his hands by striking himself on the chest; and
yet that hardly seems to bring one much nearer to an
adequate explanation.
Bathing at Scarborough is bathing indeed. A cold
plunge — but here another of the Mouther's nasty
ways strike me. The young men there always go
out in a boat to take what they call " a header," and
as they can't swim, not one man Jack of them, they
are fished up by the man in the boat one by one,
just as you'd draw a conger-eel or a drowning puppy
on board. " It's just like their bragging way ; a
bathing machine isn't good enough for them, oh, of
course not," says Mr. Crowther, (but this is an episode)
— a plunge, I say, into a yielding mass of cold still
sea-water is all very well as a bracer, but give me a
breaking wave, heaving angrily, till it gathers its
strength, then shrugging its shoulders, curls over
and breaks into a foaming cataract over one's head.
We set our shoulder to it, and the great flood of
foam surges round us in harmless ferocity, and buf-
fets us warm in a moment. Yes, that one blow on
the chest sent fresh life to my heart. It was a great
sparring match, and the sea drew first blood.
Why, good gracious, that bath was as much supe-
rior to bathing in a dead sea as sparkling Moselle is
to still Hock. Wave after wave charges on me, but
I stand firm as a Theban phalanx, and laugh at their
impotent rage, I glow with all the dignity of man-
234 A Tour Bound England.
hood, and deride the element long ago conquered
by the invincible biped. On coming out I try and
educe from the bathing-machine man principles to
guide me in bathing. His rule is simple and com-
prehensive.
" What I always say, sir, is, in and out again."
This principle, thought I, has at least one good
point about it, it makes a bathing-machine useful to
as many people as possible in a morning. As I jump
down the steps of the bathing-machine and dance on
the sands for sheer joy and redundancy of animal
life, the lively sand is blowing over the beach like a
flowing river, and the sand-hills below the cliffs are
all a smoke with eddies of restless atoms. Great
broad dark brown ribbons of glue-coloured sea-weed
are washing into land ; a pallid little crab is vainly
trying to work home to his parish to secure a settle-
ment, while a flabby star-fish, stranded half an hour
ago, moves one of his rays in a feeble appeal to me
(Levite that I am), as I pass recklessly by, denounc-
ing aloud the blatant humbug of Mouther's gong that
is thundering out from the cliff-top the summons to
an indifferent and pretentious dinner.
IV.
An evening stereoscope. A Scarborough evening is
full of pleasant contrasts. Hoarse, almost fierce cries
of" Oyster, live oyster !" struck down by the sullen
Scarborough by Twilight. 235
tolling for a ritualistic service at which no one will
be present. Lights in the old church by the castle,
give effect to the crimson-robed saints and martyrs
in the old blazoned windows. Invisible hands are
decorating the kirk for a festival, when thanks
will be returned to God for the abundant harvest.
The bay glows a silver sea (only Mr. Poole could
paint it), and the headlands are steeped in a moonlit
mist that bathes also the whole bluff shoulder of the
Castle Hill. The moon a moment ago had a great
black-winged cloud stretching athwart it like a dusky
eagle preparing to swoop on Ganymede. Then the
eagle faded and the cloud thinned till it turned a
mother-of-pearl colour, ambery in parts. Presently
all these hues dissolve, and the great full bright moon
swims out into an ocean of cloudless blue. The
lamps on the North Pier are lighting, two by two,
and cast golden hues and dark shadows on the
sands below. Wafts of music arise from the southern
bay, for there is to be a fete to-night at the Spa Gar-
den, and the Spa terraces gleam already in golden
lines, like a miniature Naples. " Rule Britannia ? and
so she do," as one of Crowther's people remarks to
me. There are crowds of tremendously-dressed per-
sons at the door of the Domdaniel Hotel, on the
south side ; they are all going to the fete. Ha ! there
they begin : whish ! streams up a rocket high over the
dark green woods that slope back from the sea. It
236 A Tour Round England.
bursts over the sea in clusters of crimson and emerald
fire, as if in mockery of the moon, that looks down
with such clear and steadfast eye. The cold pride
of Diana is in her gaze at our transient follies, our
little fizzing fantastical pleasures. The gay crowd
chatters and paces ; presently a fitful explosion
breaks out everywhere, it is a set piece. " Good
night" appears in a thousand colours, the band
blusters out " God save the Queen," and the gala is
over.
The Mouther faction were all at the gala, but they
shrank to nothing there ; their second-hand airs and
finery looked very insignificant beside the full-blown
splendour of the Upper Ten. For once they were
quite humble, and huddled together in a corner, the
men sucking the ends of their walking-sticks, the
women discussing the dresses, and for once they
talked low. As I stroll back along the North Ter-
race, I look in and see the supper laid out at Mou-
ther's, epergnes full of dingy muslin flowers, one
epergne to every two people. The gong thunders.
In they stream from the drawing-room, actually arm-
in-arm (to supper, mind), that young wretch from
Hull they make so much of leading in Miss Carry
Mouther, the funny man following with Louisa. No
nonsense of that kind at Crowther's ; there the two
old waiters just run out, touch your shoulder and
tell you that " sooper's gone oop," and if after
Morning at Scarborough. 237
supper Crowther sings "T" Coronation," or any special
favourite of that kind, the two old waiters stand in
the doorway and laugh with the best. A game of
whist at Crowther's, a song from one or two of the
younger ladies, then to bed. I look out and see
the lights on the pier blown out one by one, the
waves race underneath, and foam against the iron
stilt-like legs of the pier, as much as to say, " Some
day or other, when we are really hungry, we'll just
make a mouthful of you, young gentlemen." The
windows in the crescent fade out one by one. The
street gaslights look lonely now. The sea plunges
and roars as we go to sleep, further and further off,
to a whisper — to nothing — for we have descended
into Dreamland.
v.
A morning stereoscope at Scarborough. The cliff
is all alive — children everywhere — rosy, plump, merry
children, equipped with wooden spades, and toy-
pails, and landing-nets ; the sporting instinct strong
with the elder boys — the boys in the knickerbockers.
They are descending in great numbers the rude
stairs that lead down to the sands. The green-
roofed bathing-machines are wading in the sea, and
several young ladies dressed as Banshees, with
cascades of golden hair, are splashing each other
and laughing ; those pink spots out there are men
238 A Tour Round England.
swimming. There is a pretty sight ! a stalwart
father, with the chest of Hercules, has got his little
curly-headed boy on his shoulders, and they both
are laughing and shouting in enjoyment of the fun.
Now he is resting him on that great wallowing
green buoy, and the urchin is screaming, half in fun,
half in real alarm. That little blue-striped hut on
the cliff is doing a lively business in pails, but no one
buys the old tattered copies of the " Whole Duty of
Man," and " Fox's Book of Martyrs," or those corne-
lians that are kept in pudding basins like so many
plums. More humbug at Mouther's. There are three
basket-carriages waiting at the door, each with its
special Scarborough attraction ; the little postillion in
scarlet jacket and boots. Mouther does not want
them, but he pays the boys to come there as if he
did. " They'll be off directly, empty," Crowther
says, as he growlingly arranges the coloured pebbles
that firmly pave his garden walk. Crowther's are
great people for pic-nics ; they go in a waggonette
jam full ; a laughing, noisy, jolly party of all
ages, and rattle off to Hackness and Forge Valley, as
if the elder Harry was behind them. They also
(much to Mouther's open scorn and contempt) are
addicted to donkey-races on the sands. The great
blue eye of the sea watches them with placid surprise.
A donkey-race is perhaps a vulgar sort of amuse-
ment, but it certainly produces more laughter and
Mouther s v. Crowthers. 239
fun than any other race on any other animal as yet
discovered. Bonnets are lost (they ain't much to lose,
you know, now), shawls float away, ribbons scatter,
girths break, saddles turn round, whips drop — it is a
whirlwind of delight and clamour, for a donkey always
goes too fast or else refuses to go at all. But, what
the miserable Mouthers do, is to hire two or three
stiff-legged, tall, spavined, hairy-hoofed, wooden hack
horses, without mouths, and which they can't manage,
and solemnly canter (or what they call canter)
along the edge of the sands till their hour is up. It
is well known to make Mrs. Crowther quite ill to see
them. Their great object seems to be to ride as
nearly over people as they can, without actually
committing manslaughter.
Mouther's people, again, think it low to go down
to the harbour to see the herring-boats come in,
which is a pleasant and lively sight, for the sky to
seaward, beheld from that great breakwater of Cyclo-
pean stones, is always full of breezy Vandervelde
and Bachhuysen effects, and is delicious in its fine
sunny atmosphere and its great bosoming grey
clouds, shifting to all colours, from white to rose and
from purple to amber. It's been a rough night, and
the decks of the herring-boats are sodden-salt with
spray and speckled with silvery scales. The rugged,
bearded men have their shiny-yellow sou'-westers
pulled down over their brows, and their yellow
240 A Tour Round England.
waterproofs come down as far as their great greasy
boots, so that the Deluge itself would be a mere
trifle to them. Rough lads thrust their heads up the
hatchways, and lift out brimming baskets of fish.
Yes, they did pull them in last night pretty tidy.
The quay is covered with herrings, and women are
measuring them off in baskets, and mixing them with
coarse salt as they measure them. The great dark
sails are lowering every moment a boat comes round
the lighthouse corner with a shouting crew. In an
hour cart-loads of red-brown nets will be stretching
to dry over the green fields outside Scarborough, and
nothing about the busy scene do I more like than to
see the little fisherman's boy — sou'-wester, jersey-
boots, the very miniature of his father — pulling at a
tow rope, or, with great self-importance, carrying
nets ashore. In him the baby and the hero are
combined ; the urchin, only just released from his
mother's arms, has learnt to look death every night
smilingly in the face, to despise storms, to laugh at
reefs, and to rule the waves as if they were mere
flocks of patient sheep. Look at that youngster
now, kneeling on the stern of a boat that is rocking in
the surf, while his brother, a year younger, is up to
his knees in the mud in the back harbour pulling at a
small anchor. They're chips of the good old block,
and you should see how smart and handy they are in
a gale of wind.
Ladybirds. 241
What have we done? A curse of ladybirds is upon
us. Everything is studded with that little flying
tortoise with the orange-shell and the black spots.
They crawl about the scorched white wild barley on
the edge of the cliff, and they nestle in the thistle-
down. They survey the fences and emboss the
walls. Where do they hail from % What is their lit-
tle game at Scarborough % Where were they before
they came here % I just now met four, a mother and
three daughters, coming up to our front door at
Crowther's as if they were going to leave their cards,
and that little brute of a page-boy in plum colour at
Mouther's, I observe, scrunches hundreds a day as he
runs his errands.
What a morning ! the only sound the sleepy sim-
mering of the surf on the shore as the ebbing wave
leaves its thread of foam upon the sand. The waves
are driving white against the black boulders at the
Castle foot, and miles away yonder I see the waves
leaping up like a pack of mad white deer-hounds round
the Brig at Filey. A distant lamp glass on the Ter-
race sparkles like a diamond, and the board with the
touching appeal, " Don't leave Scarborough without
seeing the camera !" flaps protestingly against the rails
to which it is tied. The long line of seaside houses
are all in shadow, except one that catches the eastern
sun from a side street.
ifo-ROOM ! — and a shock of thunder makes all Scar-
VOL. II. II
242 A Tour Round England.
borough stagger again, as the long deep echoes roll
away seaward. That is a cannon, and the artillery-
men on the castle are practising at a floating mark.
Ah ! those are the men I've seen about, loafing, lurch-
ing, rather podgy gunners, almost grown into civilians
from long idleness and alienation from the severities
of headquarters. Number One, sponge ; Number
Two, load — and so on. Ba-room ! they bellow again,
with very tolerable activity. One would think the
old line of walls — so often invested in old times —
was once more beleaguered ; but those shattered
towers are helpless now, and laughing at his work
Time, in likeness of a Yorkshire urchin, sits on the
broken battlements and watches the gun-practice. I
go in at the gate leading to the castle ; it is hung
with toy boats, and is guarded by a lame sailor : a
red flag waves-^tbove from the edge of the northward
cliff. Young fellows in scarlet tunics, by twos and
threes, come striding up to the castle-hill with rifles on
their shoulders ; they are Scarborough riflemen, going
to shoot for prizes. I find two batches of alert scar-
let men drawn up outside a tent in the high meadow
above the castle. There are two targets backed by
high turf walls. Two of the men are out on the
edge of the cliff behind the tents firing down at a bit
of floating wreck. The men are fine stalwart, grave,
resolute fellows, all intent on the prize. A jolly per-
son, with big sandy beard, aud in plain dress, is
Ting-tang. 243
seated in a chair with a telescope before him to
watch the targets. A bugle sounds. Good ! Hythe
position at three hundred yards, every bullet on,
and blue and red-white flags up every moment. The
bull's-eyes sound full and clear ; the outside shots
give a slighter tang. The prize is all with a quiet
brown-looking fellow, who fires carefully and with-
out hurry, waiting for lulls of the wind. Some young
sisters of volunteers, sent to bring their dinners, look
on with wonder and delight, as David did when he
was sent to the Israelitish camp and culled pebbles
by the way. A red and white flag — a bull's-eye ;
bravo ! the steady brown man has won the cup with
a good score of fifty-nine.
The tradesmen at Scarborough are not smooth-
tongued ; they are too rich for that. No, they are
blunt, sturdy Yorkshire people, who quietly let you
know they don't care whether you deal with them or
not. Yet for all that they do not despise the small
arts of trade, and your second pounds of tea, and
your second joints, and your second couple of fowls.
are not, as a rule, by any means so good as the first.
They remind one of the people of a wild hamlet out-
side Monmouth, who in summer, when you question
where they come from, would say boldly and rather
defiantly, "Why, from Penal t," and with a devil-may-
care air sure enough; but in winter and snow-time,
if you asked them, they used to give a deprecating
r2
244 A Tour Round England.
shudder, " Oh, from Permit, God bless us !" A month
or two hence, and yon might fire a seventy-four-
pounder up and down Scarborough without hitting a
visitor. The Scarborough shopocracy will be humble
enough then, I warrant, and they'd send a pound
of sugar twenty miles for you, I very strongly conjec-
ture.
Sunday is a characteristic day at Scarborough. Go,
just as the churches " come out," and see how in the
High Street the cross-currents of Ritualists, Congre-
gationalists, Wesleyans, Primitive Christians, Roman
Catholics, &c, ebb and flow through the little sham
fortified gate they call the Bar. And through the
midst of the gaily-dressed people, and the rich manu-
facturers, and the simple country people in for the
day, and the chattering servants moving to and fro
(as if for ever condemned to pace a real or imaginary
quarter-deck), stride the fishermen, broad-chested, rug-
ged fellows, in eternal blue guernsey — the Norseman's
shirt of mail softened and civilized at last into harm-
less woollen. Like pirates on shore they seem to
walk, defiantly eyeing the degenerate tourists around
them, and ready at a shrill boatswain's whistle to
sack the whole town, and sail away with the Sabine
women to the " golden South Amerikies."
It is difficult, when the calm waves are breaking
in music on the shore, to reflect on the place having
any dangers : but it has. How many a Scarborough
Mouther again. 245
boat Death in his black coffin-barkhas hailed! One out
of every three poor women you meet would tell you
she had lost a brother or a son or a husband by
drowning. Some years ago a gay party was caught
by the tide on the sands near Filey, and all, or near-
ly all, drowned. Those cliffs, too, that look so calm
in the sun, have had their countless victims. Only
last week, two boys, out for a scramble over the
Holmes under the castle before breakfast, scaled the
cliff to get home the sooner. One boy got up safely,
and hearing a cry looked back. His friend was half-
way up, unable to move, clinging at some grass, and
benumbed with fear. The first lad ran to the artil-
lerymen's barracks for a rope. When he came back
the younger boy was gone. They searched and
found his crushed body between some rocks on the
shore.
This Sunday night at supper at Crowther's there
are more stories about Mouther. That foppish
young fellow from Hull, who used to hang over the
second Miss Mouther at the piano, is gone, and she
is setting her cap now at a fat vulgar shoddy manu-
facturer from Dewsbury. She has given up sentiment
and sings jovial songs, "Let the World jog along "
and " Paddle your own Canoe," with the new man.
The younger people at Crowther's are so wild with
her, her airs and graces, and the way she carries
on, that they talk of hiring all the nigger minstrels
246 A Tour Round England.
in the place and collecting them under the window
to overpower her with " Why don't the men propose,"
and " She is fooling thee," as quiet warnings to the
member for Dewsbury. We are also informed that
my old friend, Bowdler of Hoodersfield, last night
at Crowther's, after a visit to a concert at the Spa
Gardens, solemnly and publicly warned his daughters
against the modern follies in dress.
" Polly," shouted he, drowning every other voice,
" and you, Susan," says he, " you're good lasses ; but
don't ye take to those mountebank skimpy dresses
that always look as if they had been sold as too
short and too small, and bought as a bargain ; and
don't tuck up your gowns into saddle-bags like act-
resses at a fair ; and don't ye stuff your hair with
wool till the back of your head is as big as the end
of a bolster ; and don't ye wear high heels and get
lame ; and don't walk as if you'd broken your backs,
there's good lasses."
The swallows are collecting on the roofs. It is
time to migrate. The wind gets fresher and colder.
Everyone is leaving Scarborough. At the hotel doors
the railway busses are loading with tin boxes and
perambulators. A fly just now passed with two
sponge -baths sprawling on the roof. Children are
departing by whole vans full. The fantastic set at
Mouther's are being bottled off in flies. The fat man
from Dewsbury is actually kissing his hand to the
A long Shot. 247
second Miss Mouther. A few weeks more and Scar-
borough will be a howling wilderness. The lodging-
house-keepers will have to let lodgings to each
other; the shopkeepers to sell to each other. I
hope they will like it. They have fed on us long
enough. The Crowthers follow their lodgere to the
station, and, like good homely people as they are,
shake them by the hands, and " tuck them up," to
use a nursery phrase, in their respective carriages.
The Scarborongh fishermen are fine fellows, but I
fear they are given to fiction. I heard one the other
day talking to one of Mouther's young gentlemen
about gunnery. They were both leaning against
the big Russian gun on the north cliff. The mariner
was discoursing on a certain revolving cannon lately
invented, and he ended by assuring his young friend
that the longest distance he had ever known a shell
thrown was ftve-and-thirty miles, but that that was a
peculiar case. The other day I fell into conversation
with a long-limbed old pilot who was on the watch
for a certain schooner loaded with slates, that he and
his mate had heard of the day before when they
werelaying their lobster-pots out there yonder beyond
that second point where the sea was running. There
was no waiting forturns with the pilots at Scarborough,
if he could only just set eyes on the schooner he'd
be off with his boat in a jiffy. He'd been out till two
o'clock with the lobster-pots and only got two lobs-
248 A Jour Round England.
ters. It was owing, he thought, to the Northern
Lights and heavy they was all night, dancing and ca-
pering, and the sky all in a flame wi' 'em, wonderful
for them as had never seen it. Those lights didn't bode
no good weather just about the equinox. Yester-
day the sun crossed the line, about meridian, and the
Northern Lights 'bout that time boded bad weather.
Did I see that Whitby steamer down there trying to
get to the pier for passengers ? She'd better take
care what she was after or she'd be aground. Look
how that sea struck her there ! Two or three more
like they would jam her stern in. It was a burning
shame she wasn't obliged to take a pilot. Yes, she's
lost her way in the fog near "Whitby several times,
and she'd do it once too often. You better get off,
my gentleman. That pier was not well built, and
would go some winter. It was caulked, there was
no ventilation in it, wind and water must have
vent, and when a heavy sea came under it, it would
lift off all the planking and play old Harry with it.
No, he had never been in the Baltic, but he had been
off Cape Horn three weeks trying to get round it,
first by Patagonia and Terra-fuegar. That was
Captain Bell of Whitby, who then proposed to try
the Straits of Magellan, as ain't barely navigable.
Three hundred miles long they was, and a nasty
shop to be in, sure enough. Shore at the Horn ?
Rocks tremendous high. What vessel was that? — Only
The Grumpus. 249
a light collier. What cargo was the most dangerous?
Well, copper ore ; linseed was bad too, it shifted so ;
coals was good, a vessel was always lively with
coals, and timber wasn't amiss ; but it was all screw
colliers now, went home with water for ballast, and
got it pumped out with a donkey engine directly
they arrived at Shields. I hadn't got the price of
half an ounce of 'baccy about me, had I ?
I am afraid the fellow was a humbug, and that the
schooner for which he was looking was the " Flying
Dutchman," or some such shadowy craft ; for the next
day I met him he had forgotten me, and began talk-
ing about a tract that a parson had just given him.
Very pretty reading it was, and uncommon thirsty
weather we had to be sure. He was not communi-
cative about the schooner, thought she must have
"blown away" in the night, worse luck, for he hadn't
the price of a screw of anything in his pocket.
The outdoor sights at Scarborough are sometimes
especially characteristic. The other day, in a side
street, I came upon a truck drawn by three sailors.
An artful-looking man in a dreadnought was the
spokesman, and his assistant was a little, fair, podgy
fellow, in a blue jersey, who held in his hand a cigar-
box with a slit in the lid ready for contributions. On
the truck lay a huge blubbery fish, about ten feet
long, with a mean head and a small vacant eye.
A crowd of nursemaids, children in buff frocks, and
250 A Tour Round England.
wondering foolish excursionists, surrounded the dead
monster.
" But what is it ?" said some one, after pinching the
ambiguous fish all over.
" Well, if we was to say it was a Avhale," said the
podgy exhibitor, " we should be saying the thing
that wasn't right, though it's the same specie. It's a
grumpus."
"Yes, that's what it is," said the artful man,
pointing to a sort of nostril in the creature's head ;
" here we struck him, and this is the place where he
throws up the water."
" Ah !" puffing like a grampus ; " that accounts for
it," said I.
" 'Xactly so," said the podgy man. " This is a
grumpus ; we don't charge anything reg'lar, but any
coppers as gemmen likes to give, goes in this 'ere
box. Thank you, sir."
251
CHAPTER XXIX.
SCARBOROUGH. (FROM ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW.)
THE crow, with a clear look out over the German
Ocean, and the Dogger Bank and the coast of
Jutland out there yonder, though invisible even to his
keen, black, restless eyes, turns from the sea to look
down with placid approbation on pleasant, breezy,
briny, wave-washed Scarborough. It was a small
and humble cluster of huts of Yorkshire fishermen
in the old times before one of Stephen's barons,
William le Gros, Earl of Albemarle built the keep.
Yet it was not so humble but that it had its stormy
days in the Danish wars, and more especially when
that fierce rebel Tosti, the son of the great Earl
Goodwin, and brother of Harold, urged on by Wil-
liam of Normandy, who had already a shrewd eye on
the white cliffs, and by Baldwin, Earl of Flanders,
landed in Yorkshire a second time (after being once
driven back to his ships by the watchful Earls ot
Northumberland and Chester), and, burning, robbing,
252 A Tour Round England.
and slaying, came reeking with blood to little Scar-
borough.
The legend is that the Norwegians, greedy for
slaughter, piled great masses of timber on the hill
where the ruins of the castle now stand, and, having
set them on fire in one great crimson drift of raging
flame, stuck pitchforks into the burning wood, and
hurled it down upon the roof and into the narrow
streets of the town, which was soon wrapped in fire.
But a little later Scarborough had its revenge, for
Harold and sixty thousand Saxons met Tosti and
the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge, and, after ten
hours' fighting, slew his rebellious brother and the
rash Norwegian king, and so twenty shattered ships
carried back the army that five hundred ships had
brought.
In Edward the Second's reign, Scarborough, still
in its bloom of youth, had again its hour of ro-
mance. The foolish, wild young king had been re-
velling at York with his French favourite, Gaveston,
who daily grew more insolent and rapacious. The
indignant barons, who hated the insolent foreigner,
headed by that great noble, Henry the Third's
grandson, the Earl of Lancaster, Lincoln, Leicester,
Salisbury, and Derby, besieged Gaveston in Scar-
borough, where the king had placed him for safety,
making him governor of that eagle's nest of a castle
on the sea cliffs. Gaveston repulsed bravely several
A Ruse de Guerre. 253
attacks, but the provisions in the town falling short,
and communication with the king at York being
intercepted, he surrendered to the " Black Dog," as
the earl was called by his enemies, on condition, if
negotiations failed, that he should be restored safe
to Scarborough. But at Dedington Castle, near
Bunbury, he was hurried to Warwick, from there
taken to Blacklow Hill (now Gaversike Heath) and
there beheaded. The king, inconsolable at the death
of his favourite, had the body interred at a new
church at Langley, and with his own hands placed
two cloth-of-gold palls upon his tomb. The execution
of the young Gascon vaurien took place just two
years before the battle of Bannockburn.
Scarborough also had adventures during the
Wyatt rebellion, when the approaching Spanish mar-
riage of Queen Mary was fevering the brains of all
aggressive Protestants. Mr. Thomas Stafford, se-
cond son of Lord Stafford, a hot-headed adherent of
Wyatt, collected some English fugitives in France
and returned with them to Scarborough. On a
market-day he, and thirty of his men dressed as cart-
ers or countrymen, and secretly armed, strolled up
the hill into Scarborough Castle, and began staring
about, as excursionists do, at the different towers and
gates. At a given signal they rushed on the sen-
tinels, secured them and admitted then expectant
companions. Poor gallant lad ! The success was
254 A Tour Round England.
useless. Sir Thomas Wyatt had been defeated at
Hyde Park Corner, and at Temple Bar had thrown
away his sword. After holding Scarborough Castle
for three days of triumph only, he surrendered it to
the Earl of Westmoreland. The young nobleman,
Captain Saunders, and three of their associates^
Shelly, Bradford, and Proctor, were sent to the Tower.
Stafford was beheaded, and the rest hanged and
quartered, and this was the origin of the old saying,
" A Scarborough warning — a word andablow, and the
blow first."
It was in April, 1642, that from the battlements of
the Beverley Gate at Hull Sir John Hotham re-
fused the king admittance, and by that refusal com-
menced the Civil "Wars. It was not till February,
1644, that the storm once more fell upon Scarborough.
The watchful Parliament sent Sir John Meldrum to
succeed the general whom Fairfax had appointed,
and the steel head-pieces mustering to the chanting
of a sullen psalm, the men in grey and buff stormed
the town and carried St. Mary's Church on the hill
by assault, driving Sir Hugh Cholmeley, the Cavalier
governor, into the castle. It was a great victory for
the men of the sword and the Bible, for they took in
the town and the fortress-church thirty-two pieces
of cannon, with a great quantity of arms and ammu-
nition, and in the harbour one hundred and twenty
ships laden with wheat and timber surrendered to
The Surrender. 255
their blue flag. Sir John Meldrum then regularly-
invested the castle, which tormented the sea, sands,
town, and harbour with its plunging fire ; and fixing
nine guns in the east window of St. Mary's, he opened
a battery on the stubborn Castle. The garrison re-
plied quite as hotly and as fast, and the Cavaliers' in-
cessant and close fire soon demolished the choir of St.
Mary's, the grey ruins of which still mark the
site. It was a tedious siege, and on the 17th of May,
1645, the Puritans, weary at the delay, made a
general assault of the chief gate. They were repuls-
ed, many of their best officers killed, and their
commander, Sir John Meldrum himself, mortally
wounded. Sir Mathew Boynton, the new general,
brought reinforcements and pressed the siege with
vigour ; still it was not till July, 1 645, that brave Sir
HughCholmeleysurrendered. Twelve months' fire had
made the inner towers, the barbican, even the square
Norman keep, begin to shatter and crumble; the stores
were all but gone ; fatigue, sickness, and, above all,
scurvy, had worn out the garrison. Many of the
pale and miserable survivors had to be carried out in
sheets, nearly all required support. Durin g this staunch
siege the Cavaliers struck square crowns and half-
crowns, some of which still exist. In old times there
were only four churches in Scarborough ; St. Nicho-
las on the cliff; St. Sepulchre's ; St. Thomas in New-
borough, which was destroyed by the fire of the
256 A Tour Round England.
castle-guns ; and St. Mary's, the central tower of
which (shaken during the siege) fell in 1659.
The Spa at Scarborough has a legend or two of
its own. It was discovered in the reign of James
the First by Mrs. Farrer, a sensible and quick-sight-
ed observer. She had observed that the waters of
a spring at the foot of the south cliff turned the
stones over which they trickled a rusty red. Tast-
ing the waters and finding them peculiar, and dis-
covering that they became tinged with purple when
mixed with galls, she began to make experiments to
ascertain if they possessed medical properties. Then-
value soon became acknowledged by the citizens of
York and the gentry of the three Ridings. In the reign
of William and Mary, a cistern was first made to
collect the Spa waters. In December, 1737, a slight
earthquake (as it was supposed "by the curious")
caused a very extraordinary change in the Spa
spring. The " straith," a stone breakwater bound
with timber, to protect the Spa House from the
waves, suddenly gave way. A mass of the cliff, con-
taining nearly an acre of pasture land, and with cat-
tle grazing upon it at the very time, sank perpen-
dicularly several yards. At the same sime, the sand
under the cliff for a hundred yards long rose six or
seven feet.
Many old historical legends of piratical forays and
daring revenges still hang about Scarborough. The
Robin Hood. 257
crow has his little eye on one in the early part of the
luckless reign of Richard the Second. A Scottish
sea chief, named Andrew Mercer, being taken by
northern ships, was clapped in prison in windy
Scarborough Castle. The son of Mercer, furious
at this, sailed into the Yorkshire harbour with a
little band of Scottish, French, and Spanish ships,
and carried off several vessels. Eager for revenge,
and naturally solicitous for the safety of our seas,
Alderman Philpot, a rich London merchant, at once
patriotically equipped an armed fleet at his own ex-
pense, sailed out after Mercer, overtook him, recap-
tured the Scarborough ships, and, in addition, fifteen
richly-laden Spanish barks; so virtue was not merely
its own reward in Philpot's case. Yorkshire ballads,
which seem to centre round that brave and generous
chief, Robin Hood, have apparently mixed up some
story of him with this exploit of the sturdy alder-
man. The old ballad has it that on a certain occa-
sion (a long run of rheumatic wet weather, perhaps?)
the outlaw of merry Sherwood, growing tired of the
green-wood, resolves to go to Scarborough and
turn fisherman. But Robin, quite out of his element
at sea, and half his time as squeamish and uncertain
about the legs as a Margate yachting man, catches
no fish. Suddenly, however, a French ship of war
bears down on the little " Betsy Jane ;" the master
VOL. II. S
258 A Tour Round England.
is in sore fear ; but Robin's eye kindles, and his
chest expands.
" ' Master, tie me to the mast,' said he,
' That at my mark I may stand fair ;
And give me my bent bow in my hand,
And never a Frenchman will I spare.' "
And right he was; for fast flew his grey-winged
shafts, till the Frenchman's deck was strewn with
dead men, and the scuppers ran blood. Then
Robin and his merry men boarded the helpless
vessel, and found in her, to their infinite delight,
" Twelve thousand pound of money bright."
Many legends of Robin prevail in this part of
Yorkshire, for, not far off, near Whitby, is the bay
still named after him, where tradition says, when
hard pressed, he fled to the fishing vessels he kept
there, and, putting to sea, escaped the fangs of the
angry law. On the wild moors beyond Stoupe Brow,
are British or Saxon-Danish tumuli, where Robin
and Little John are said to have practised then- feats
of archery. From the tower of Whitby Abbey it was
that Robin and his tall lieutenant, after they had
been entertained by St. Hilda's monks, gave, at the
request of their hosts, a proof of their skill with the
bent yew. Their arrows (no doubt about it) fell
nearly three miles off in the village of Hawsker,
where (and this entirely clenches it) two upright
stones indicate where the shafts fell. When you
Robin Hoods Death. 259
have passed the din of the great, smoky Low-
moor ironworks, and past Whitfield, yon reach a few
miles further up the green valley of the Calder
Kirklees, where all true Yorkshiremen declare the
great outlaw, when " distempered with cold and
age," was treacherously bled to death by his ruth-
less aunt, the old prioress, who hated her brave
nephew for the scorn he had always shown to
priests. A small closet in the priory gate-house is
shown as the place where, when bleeding to death in
the bolted room, the dying man bethought him of
his bugle horn ; staggering to it, he opened the
window and
" blew out weak blasts three.
Then little John said, hearing him,
As he sat under the tree,
' I fear my master is near dead,
He blows so wearily.' "
So faithful Little John tightened his belt, flew to
Kirklees, and breaking locks, bolts, &c, he reached
his master, and saw that he was dying. But Robin,
gentle even under foul wrong, would not hear of
Little John burning Kirklees Hall and the treacher-
ous nunnery. " No," said he,
" ' I never burnt fair maid in all my time,
Nor at my end shall it be ;
But give me my bent bow in my hand,
And a broad arrow I'll let flee,
And where this arrow is taken up,
There shall my grave digg'd be.' "
s2
260 A Tour Round England.
And so it was done, and on a spot of high table-land,
commanding a fine view of the sunny glades of Kirk-
lees, lies the bold outlaw. An iron railing among
thick trees encloses a block of stone, on which is
engraved a sham antique inscription, dated 1247
(Henry the Third). It records the death of Ro-
bert, Earl of Huntingdon, and concludes with these
lines :
M Such outlaws as he and his men
Will England never see again."
In the genuine old classic ballad, " Robin Hood's
Garland," the verse runs :
" Lay me a green sod under my head,
And another at my feet,
And lay my bent bow by my side,
Which was my music sweet.
And make my grave of gravel and green,
Which is most right and meet.
Let me have length and breadth enough.
With a green sod under my head,
That they may say when I am dead,
Here lies bold Robin Hood."
Yorkshire and the neighbouring counties are, indeed,
full of relics and records of Robin. At Fountains
Abbey they still show the well beside which he
fought the Curtal friar. His chair, his pike, and cap
used to be shown at St. Ann's Well, near Notting-
ham; there is a Robin Hood's Well at Skelbroke,
near Doncaster ; there is a Robin Hood's Hill above
the vale of Castleton ; and Robin Hood's Stride is
Little Johns Grave. 261
shown among the solitary rocks on Stanton Moor, in
Derbyshire.
The antiquaries have fought hard over Little
John's grave. One says he died in Scotland, an-
other that he was hanged near Dublin, while Mr.
Hicklin, the last speaker, loudly asserts that he was
buried at the picturesque village of Hathersage, in
Derbyshire, where he was born. This cottage is still
shown. His green cap used to be hung up in
Hathersage Church, but is now removed to Canon
Hall. There has been equal fighting as to where Robin
Hood's took place. The oldest records say Loxley's
Chase, near Sheffield (hence the name Sir Walter
has given brave Robin in " Ivanhoe "). Others say
the real Loxley was in Staffordshire or Warwickshire.
Leland (Henry the Eighth) calls Robin a noble, and
others boldly make him Robert Fitz Odo, Earl of
Huntingdon, outlawed in the twelfth century. Mr.
Planche inclines to the opinion that Robin was a claim-
ant at least of the earldom. After much controversy,
it is almost certain that if Robin ever lived, he lived
between 1 160 and 1247, that is through the reigns of
Henry the Second, Richard the First, John, and part
of Henry the Third. Thierry, the French historian,
has shown with much discrimination that in Richard
Coeur de Lion's time Sherwood Forest stretched
from Nottingham to the very centre of York-
shire, and in these wild bands of Saxon outlaws
262 A Tour Round England.
lived, who still defied and tormented the Norman.
The crow bears on from Whitby to Harrowgate,
in the last century the northern rival of Bath,
as a depot of gay invalids and the testy fathers of
old comedy. This bare common was once part of
Knaresborough Forest, but in Elizabeth's time was
"stripped of most of its timber by the iron smelters.
The first chalybeate spring (the earliest, indeed, dis-
covered in England), was first analysed by Sir Wil-
liam Slingsby in 1596 (Elizabeth). It was a lonely
spring in a cozy spot, frequented by lapwings, from
whom it derived its local name " Tewit." Sir Wil-
liam had travelled in Germany, and tasted the waters
at Spa, near Liege, and understood their medical
qualities, so that he knew a chalybeate again when
he saw it. Even before the Restoration the Harrow-
gate waters had become famous for curing sick peo-
ple. The company began to gather, and lodging-
houses sprang up, but it was not till 1687 that the
first public-house, on the site of the present Queen,
was built. Smollett came to Harrowgate ; he was
fond of Yorkshire, and, as the crow would remind his
readers, has fixed on Scarborough as the place where
the faithful but blundering Humphrey Clinker drags
out by the ear his choleric master, whom he has fan-
cied to be drowning. Smellfungus, as Sterne calls
him, who travelled " from Dan to Beersheba," and
declared all to be barren, described the fashionable
Smollett on Harrowgate. 263
resort of Yorkshire as " a wild common, bare and
bleak, without tree or shrub, or the slightest signs of
cultivation." Worthy but testy Matthew Bramble
(a type of Smollett himself), sketches the frugal and
simple-hearted life then prevailing at the paradise of
invalids. The company mostly lodged at four sepa-
rate inns scattered over the bleak common, and went
every morning to the well in their own carriages.
From eight o'clock to eleven there was a table-cChote
breakfast at each of the inns. They drank tea in
the afternoon, and played cards or danced in the
evening, one custom Smollett much condemned ; the
ladies were obliged to treat with tea alternately, and
even girls of sixteen were not exempted from this
shameful imposition. There was a public subscrip-
tion ball every night at one or other of the inns, and
the company from the other houses were admitted by
tickets.
And now the crow darts forward to the northern
frontier of Yorkshire, and singles out Rokeby —
Scott's Rokeby— for his prey. Scott visited his
friend Morritt there in 1809. Writing to Ellis, the
poet expatiates on the beautiful scenery, especially
at the junction of those swift and beautiful rivers,
the Greta and the Tees, in a glen not unlike Roslin.
" It is," he writes, " one of the most enviable places I
have ever seen, as it unites the richness and luxuri-
ance of English vegetation with the romantic variety
264 A Tour Round England.
of glen, torrent, and copse, which dignify our north-
ern scenery. The poem was written in 1812, during
all the confusion of the " flitting " from Ashestiel to
Abbotsford. The descriptions are singularly faithful,
and form an eternal guide-book to the place. The
poet has sketched the Tees near Egglestone Abbey,
where it flows over broad smooth beds of grey mar-
ble, and also Mortham Tower, which is haunted by
the ghost of a headless lady. The junction of the
Tees and Greta has been drawn by Turner and de-
scribed by Scott. The banks of the Greta below
Mortham Scott has painted with Salvator's pencil :
" It seemed some mountain, rent and riven,
A channel for the stream had given.
So high the cliffs, of limestone grey,
Hung beetling o'er the torrent's way,
Yielding along their rugged base
A flinty footpath's narrow space."
And then again :
»« The cliffs
Were now all naked, wild, and grey,
Now waving all with greenwood spray.
Here trees to every crevice clung,
And in the dell their branches hung ;
And there all splintered and uneven,
The shiver'd rocks ascend to heaven."
The scene of Bertram's interview with Guy Denzil
is the glen called " Brignall Banks," below Scargill ;
the robbers' cave, hard by, is still shown, quarried in
the flagstone, and Mr. Morritt tells us that he ob-
The Felon Sowe. 265
served Scott noting with extreme care the plants
(the throatwort and thyme) that grew round the
spot. The woods and scaurs of Rokeby are the scene
of the old mock-romance (fifteenth century) of the
Hunting of the Felon Sowe of Rokeby, by the blun-
dering and not too brave friars of Richmond :
" She was more than other three
The grisliest beast that ere might be —
Her head was great and gray.
She was bred in Rokeby Wood ;
There were few that thither goed
That came alive away."
266
CHAPTER XXX.
DURHAM.
THE crow skims now to that rocky eminence almost
islanded by the Weare, which the Saxons called
Dunholme (a hilly river island), and the Normans
Duresme.
The town did -not begin with either a fortress
or a market-place, but with a shrine and with a
tomb. In the reign of Ethelred the Unready North-
umberland was plundered by the Danes, who stormed
castles, burnt barns, and swept off cattle. When
the town and castle of Bamborough was destroyed
by these rude invaders, the pale and trembling
monks of Chester-le-Street lifted the holy body of
St. Cuthbert from his endangered tomb, and sought
refuge at the monastery of Ripon, as they had once
before sought an asylum at Chester-le-Street, when
driven from Lindisfarne. When Ethelred bought
peace, the monks again looked wistfully towards
their old home, and prepared to re-occupy it. On
Saint Cuthbert. 267
their way back, the procession rested on the emi-
nence of Wardon Law, five miles from the east
shore, and with a view of the whole valley of the
Weare. Here for three days the ark that contained
the saint's body remained miraculously immovable,
till the monks could rest, and an inspired dun cow
come, after solemn prayers, fast and supplications,
to lead the procession to Dunholme, where St. Cuth-
bert wished finally to sleep. Durham was then
a mere wooded hill, with a small plateau of
level plough-land. A tabernacle of boughs, or
wicker work, received the relics, which were after-
wards removed to a small edifice called the White
Church, where they rested three years, till Alduin
could complete the cathedral, which Saxon nobles
soon endowed with lands in Darlington, Cornscliffe,
Cockerton, Haughton, Bradbury, &c.
But a word about St. Cuthbert of Durham. Cuth-
bert, either a Scotch king or a Scotch shepherd (his
monkish biographers are doubtful which), accom-
panied Eata, a monk of Melrose, who became bishop
of Lindisfarne. Cuthbert, as Prior of Lindisfarne,
displayed peculiar zeal and holiness, both in convent-
ual discipline and in converting the ferocious and
warlike Northumbrians. After fourteen years of such
pious labours, Cuthbert retired to a lonely hermitage
in one of the desolate Fame Islands, where he culti-
vated the earth, and devoted himself to religious
268 A Tour Round England.
contemplation. He is said to have by his prayers
created a spring of water, herbage and grass, and to
have expelled a race of demons. The eider ducks
which frequent the Fame Islands are still called by
his name, and so are the fossils, resembling beads,
which are common on Holy Island. He forbade the
visits of women to this basaltic rock ; and once,
while preaching a sermon, turned an apparently
beautiful woman, who was ogling him, into a pal-
pable devil, who flew off in a fizz of fire, as if she
had been scalded. After nine years of this unsociable
meditation, Cuthbert, yielding to the importunities
of King Egfrid, and the nobles and clergy who
visited his cell, consented to become bishop first of
Hexham, then of Lindisfarne ; and he is then sup-
posed to have been granted by King Egfrid, Carlisle
and Crake, with eighteen miles of territory. But
Cuthbert had taken up the crozier too late. In two
years, feeling old age creeping on, he laid down his
episcopal sceptre, and retired again to his lonely
hermitage in the German Ocean. He expired two
months afterwards, in the thirty-ninth year of his
monastic life, exhorting his brethren with his last
breath to unity, discipline, and obedience. The
saint had wished to be humbly buried on the lonely
rock in the German Ocean, but yielding to the earnest
request of the monks of Lindisfarne, he was eventu-
ally interred in a stone coffin, the gift of Cedda, in
The Miraculous Crows. 269
the cemetery of his old church. His body is said to
have floated down the Tweed, in this coffin, from
Melrose to Tillmouth. This very coffin still exists
near the ruined chapel of Tillmouth: it is finely shaped,
and is ten feet long, three and a half in diameter,
and four inches thick. Mr. Surtees, in his history of
Durham, says, " It has been proved by statistical ex-
periments to be capable of floating with a weight
equal to that of a human body." Scott, in Marmion
(canto ii.), says :
" In his stone coffin forth he rides
(A ponderous bark for river tides),
Yet light as gossamer it glides
Downward to Tillmouth cell."
The venerable Bede devotes forty-six almost idola-
trous chapters to this saint, to whom no less than
forty churches or chapels in the northern, counties
are dedicated. He is said to have raised the dead,
and to have converted water into wine by the mere
touch of his abstinent mouth. On one special occa-
sion two ill-bred crows, seriously rebuked by the
grave saint for stealing his grain, slank away in
confusion, and returned a few days after with some
swine's fat, as a penitentiary oblation, to anoint and
soften the sandals of the holy man. But the stand-
ing miracle connected with St. Cuthbert was the
incorruptibility of his body, a not unusual result
of burial in an antiseptic soil. Hagge thus quaintly
270 A Tour Round England.
describes the discovery : " Behold a wonder ! They
look for a skeleton, but found an entire body, with
joints flexible, and flesh so succulent that they only
wanted heat to make his body live without a soul ;
nay, his very funeral weeds were so fresh as if
putrefaction had not dared to plucke him by the
coate." A Durham historian, in recording this
pseudo-miracle, takes care to remind his readers that
in 1807 the body of the unfortunate Jacobite,
Lord Derwentwater, who was executed in 1715, was
discovered equally perfect. The venerable Bede,
our first ecclesiastical historian, who died in 735, was
buried beside the saint he venerated.
When the saint's tomb was opened by Prior Tur-
got, they found in it a little silver altar, an ivory
comb, and that book of the evangelists which, lost at
sea in a storm by the monks of Lindisfarne, had been
miraculously washed ashore, uninjured, on the coast
of Galloway. The bones of Bede, three bishops, and
the head of St. Oswald, were in the same coffin.
They laid St. Cuthbert on his back, under the high
altar, with St. Oswald's head in his hands.
St. Cuthbert's shrine, of green marble profuse-
ly gilt, stood behind the high altar, and had
four seats beneath it for pilgrims or cripples while
making their offerings. On St. Cuthbert's Day it
was usual to lift off the wooden covering of the
shrine, by means of a rope, " hung with .six very fine-
The Saint of Durham. 271
sounding silver bells," and the relics and jewels were
then displayed, also the banners taken from the
Scotch, and the holy standard of white and
crimson velvet, which had been in many of the
Border battles. In 1255, Henry the Third, visiting
Durham, after invoking the saint, rifled his tomb of
treasures hidden there by several bishops. In Henry
the Eighth's time, the visitors broke open the iron
chest containing the saint, and found him there in-
corrupt, all his vestments about him, and a gold
metewand by his side. They buried him under a
large blue stone, that still marks the spot. The
marble monument is gone. Mr. Pennant describes in
his time the pavement round the shrine as worn by
pilgrims' feet. Hutchinson gives a drawing of the
saint's iron-bound coffin, which then lay neglected at
the bishop's palace. When King Canute visited this
shrine at Durham, he alighted humbly from his horse
at Trimdon (five miles from the city,) and proceeded
along Garmondsway, discrowned and disrobed — a
mere conscience-stricken, bare-footed pilgrim.
In the great religious processions at Durham, St.
Cuthbert's banner headed the train ; the monks
were clad in the splendid copes belonging to the
church, the prior's being cloth of gold, so massy
that he could not walk straight with it unless his
train-bearers supported it on both sides. They also
carried gold and gilt crosses, and various relics ;
272 A Tour Round England.
while four sturdy monks carried on their shoulders St.
Bede's shrine. The stately processions came out of
the north door, and passed through the churchyard,
down Lidgate, by Bow Church, up the South Bai-
ley, in at the abbey gates and through the abbey
garth, where no woman might enter, and back to the
cloisters of the church. St. Cuthbert is said to have
been specially venerated by King Alfred — the saint
having appeared to him in those dark hours in the
Isle of Athelney, and predicted the Saxon mo-
narch's victory over the Danes.
Durham, in the year 1040, was besieged by Dun-
can of Scotland, but the town was steep and strong,
except at Clayportgate, at the neck of land between
the streams of the Weare. So the sturdy towns-
people plying sword and bow, catapulta and man-
gonel, drove back the Redshanks, routed them, and
stuck the heads of their leaders on poles in the
market-place. But the Durham people did not fare
so well at the Conquest, when William sent Robert
Comyn, one of his Normans, to keep down the
North; and Bishop Egluin met the governor of
Northumberland outside the city, and warned him of
the turbulence and irritation of the people. Comyn, at
the head of his seven hundred Normans, despising
the warning, hanged some peasants who had inter-
rupted his march outside the city, and quartered his
insolent and cruel troops on the wrathful inhabi-
Killing the Bishop. 273
tants. The Durham people, driven to despair by a
heavy fall of snow, which prevented their escape, fell
at night on the drunken and revelling soldiers, and
aided by the country people, who forced the gates,
slew every Norman except one wounded man.
Comyn and his staff perished, desperately defending
their burning house, the flames of which spread to the
cathedral, and would have destroyed it had not the
wind changed. This outrage, so dangerous as a
precedent, William the implacable was not slow to
revenge — he instantly marched north to trample out
the wild fire. From York to Durham, a distance of
sixty miles, he slew and burnt wherever he came, not
sparing even the convents. The monks of Durham
fled at his approach, and by way of dismal Jarrow
sought refuge at Lindisfarne. At Durham, William
ordered a castle to be built, to curb the town ; and
he appointed Walcher (Walker), a learned French-
man, bishop of the troublesome diocese. He was
the first of the Palatine bishops. His archdeacons,
greedy and tyrannous, provoked the people — espe-
cially by the assassination of Liulph, a patriotic-
Saxon nobleman, who had remonstrated with the
new prelate on their oppressions. The people now
looked upon the bishop as the abettor of murderers.
At an assembly at Gateshead, a furious mob sur-
rounded the house, crying, " Good rede (confession),
short rede, slay ye the bishop !" The few guards
VOL. II. T
274 A Tour Round England.
were slain, the church beset and set on fire, and
Walcher and all who were with him brutally slain.
The good monks of Jarrow took up the stripped and
mangled body, and buried it secretly in Durham
Cathedral. The insurgents then attempted to sur-
prise the castle, but after four days' stormy occupa-
tion of the city, failed, and dispersed. Again the
Conqueror sent an army, this time headed by Odo,
the fighting Bishop of Bayeux, to ravage the refrac-
tory province; but he, nevertheless, enriched the
shrine of St. Cuthbert, and restored the great golden
and jewelled crucifix, which had been given by Tosti,
the rebellious brother of Harold.
The death of poor Walcher had been predicted by
a man named Eardulf, who rose from the dead at
Ravensworth, expressly for that purpose. He started
bolt upright at his own funeral, and as soon as the
company were brought to by means of a copious
sprinkle of holy water, proceeded to calmly relate
his experiences during his ambiguous trance of twelve
hours. He had seen many of his monastic acquaint-
ances lying among the flowers of Paradise, and a
red-hot chair preparing for Waltheof, one of the
Bishop's murderers.
The Scotch were always laying hot and heavy
hands on Durham, " the English Zion," as the monks
called it. Bishop Flambard, one of the creatures oi"
brutal Rufus, enlarged the castle, connected its forti-
The first Stuart. 275
fications with the cathedral, and built Norham Castle
to repress the sturdy Scots. In 1138, in the reign of
Stephen, David, King of Scotland, burnt down
Norham, and threatened Durham ; but soon after
was overthrown at Northallerton by the English
army, headed by Thurston, Archbishop of York, on
whose banner was fastened a consecrated host, in a
silver casket, surrounded by the banners of the
patron saints of Ripon, Beverley, and York. Among
the Scotch nobles who fought that August day under
Malcolm, was Alan Percy, a natural son of the first
Alan Percy of Semar. That sour but acute critic,
Ritson, insists upon it that this warlike bastard was
the father of the first Stuart. In April, 1139, Dur-
ham entertained Queen Maud, and the English barons,
who here concluded peace with Scotland; and by
the intercession of the Papal Legate, the Queen
ceded Northumberland to Prince Henry, with an
express reservation of the rights of the Bishop of
Durham.
In 1140, on the death of Bishop Galfrid, Cumin, a
Scotchman, and an adherent of the Empress Maud,
usurped the see, encouraged by Baliol and the
Bruces. Some Durham monks, escaping to York,
chose William de St. Barbara their bishop ; but he
was nearly murdered, and had to fly to Lindisfarne.
Cumin's soldiers burnt Elvet and Framwellgate, and
everywhere spread dismay ai\d devastation. The
T 2
276 A Tour Round England.
very name of Durham became a terror. He sus-
pended his prisoners across ropes, with heavy weights
attached to their neck and feet ; he plunged others
in the frozen bed of the river. But all at once yield-
ing to some sudden fit of superstitious fear, he wel-
comed his rival to the city, and in the humble garb
of a penitent, prostrated himself at St. Barbara's feet,
and surrendered his power and conquests without
reserve.
The next prelate was Hugh Pudsey. A galley witli
silver throne and fittings, which he prepared for the
Crusade, was appropriated by Richard for his own
use. The prelate died at last of over-eating — a not
uncommon cause of the death of wealthy prelates.
Robert de Insula, a subsequent Bishop of Durham
(1274 — 1283), is said to have originally been a con-
vent cook. His mother he enriched. Once he went
to see her.
" How fares my sweet mother ?" said he.
" Never worse," quoth she.
" And what ails or troubles thee ? Hast thou not
men and women attendants sufficient ?"
" Yea," quoth she ; " and more than enough. I
say to one, ' Go,' and he runs ; to another, ' Come
hither, fellow,' and the varlet falls down on his
knees ; and, in short, all things go on so abominably
smooth, that my heart is bursting for something to
spite me, and pick a quarrel withal."'
A princely Bishop. 277
But the lordliest Prince Palatine was that am-
bitious prelate Bishop Beck, who received the mitre
in 1283. During the interregnum, the Archbishop of
York had come in person to claim the spiritual
superiority ; but refused admittance into the cathe-
dral, and attempting in consequence to pronounce
sentence of excommunication against the refractory
ecclesiastics in the church of St. Nicholas, he was
attacked by the townspeople, and openly insulted.
He escaped with difficulty by the private road lead-
ing to Keyper. Bishop Beck proved a man of almost
regal ambition. When Scotland submitted to Edward
as its guardian, he was appointed one of the five
regents ; and when Edward invaded Scotland, to
support Baliol's claim, Beck joined him, with the
banner of St. Cuthbert, twenty- six standard-bearers,
one hundred and forty knights, one thousand foot
and five hundred horse ; and in the Roll of Caerlave-
rock, he is described as lately wounded. This bishop,
who reigned for twenty-eight years, was to all intents
and purposes a monarch — nobles addressed him
kneeling, and knights, bare-headed and standing,
waited on him at table. During one of Edward's
progresses, a palfrey belonging to the royal train
threw and killed its rider. Anthony instantly seized
the palfrey as a deodand forfeited to the Palatine.
Though himself chaste and temperate, his pride and
prodigality knew no bounds. Anticipating the late
278 A Tour Round England.
Duke of Wellington, he used to say " that he was
no true man who turned in bed and did not at once
get up." He once gave forty shillings (£80) for
forty herrings, that had been refused as too expensive
by all the magnates in Parliament. On another
occasion, hearing a man in a shop say, " This cloth
is so dear, that even Bishop Anthony would not buy
it," he immediately purchased the whole, and cut it up
into horse-cloths. He lived chiefly at Bishop Mid-
dleham, a fortress protected against the Scotch by
morasses and broken ground. There is a northern
legend that the skeleton ghost of this bishop's chief
huntsman, Black Hugh, of Thickley Pontchardon,
appeared to him, mounted on a white horse, as he
hunted the wild hart in the forest of Galtres. The
legend adds, u This Anthony was the maist proud
and masterful bishop in all England; and it was
commonly said that he was the proudest lord in
Christendom."
Edward the First, after the battle of Falkirk, march-
ed northward from Durham. In the year 1300, the
king was again in Durham, mediating between the
bishop and his monks. After Bannockburn, in the
next untoward reign, Bruce and the Douglas
thrice ravaged Durham ; and the second and
third times, in 1316, 1317, the Scotch destroyed
Beaurepaire and fired Hartlepool. Such a terrible
famine followed, that prisoners are said to have de-
Carrying off a Bishop. 279
voured each other, and mothers to have hidden then-
children for fear of cannibals ; yet, in 1323, we find
Edward the Second chiding Bishop Beaumont for
allowing the wall of Durham to become ruinous.
Edward the Third was frequently at Durham, on his
war-trail after the Scotch ; and in 1333 rested here
before the fight at Halidon Hill, for a time subdued
Scotland.
In 1503, Durham was gay indeed, when Bishop
Fox entertained the Princess Margaret, daughter of
Henry the Seventh, on her way to espouse James of
Scotland. Beyond Norham, Sir William Boummer,
the sheriff, met the royal train, with six score horse ;
and at Darnton came Sir Richard Stanley, with fifty
retainers. The Earl of Northumberland wore a
goodly gown of tinsel, trimmed with ermine ; and into
his horse harness of fine goldsmith's work were sewn
small bells. Trumpeters and minstrels then led the
princess to the cathedral, where the bishop, the prior
and all the monks, clad in rich copes, welcomed her.
In Edward the Third's reign, Bishop Beaumont, on
his way to be installed at the shrine of St. Cuthbert,
was stopped by moss-troopers at Cycliffe, near Rushy-
ford, his servants were robbed, and he himself was
borne away, by a cloud of light horsemen, sixty miles
off, to Mitford Castle, whose owner, Gilbert Middleton,
had been used harshly by the king, in some matter
of the marches. A heavy ranson was obtained, but
280 ^4 Tour Round England.
Middleton was soon after surprised, sent to London,
and executed.
In 1346, the Scotch, before the battle of Neville's
Cross, lay at Beaurepaire, near Durham. The night
before, there appeared to John Fossour, prior of the
abbey, a vision, commanding him to take the holy
corporax cloth wherewith St. Cuthbert used to cover
the chalice, when he said mass, and to carry the
same on a spear's point to a place on the Red Hills,
west of Durham, and there await the battle ; he did
so, and the banner was reared by the kneeling monks
on a hillock called " The Maiden's Bower," still dis-
cernible on the north side of Neville's Cross, " in the
depth of the valley," says Mr. Hutchinson, "by the
hedges of Shaw Wood." Brave Queen Philippa
watched the fight. The Scotch, sore galled by the
English archers, rushed at once on them, and broke
them with broad-swords and battle-axes ; but Baliol's
horse charging them in flank, defeated them, and
surrounded the division of the Scotch king; after
three hours' fighting. David, disarmed, with two
spears hanging in his body, and wounded in the leg,
struck out the teeth of the governor of Roxburgh
Castle, who called on him to surrender, and then gave
up his sword. The Scotch lost fifteen thousand men
m this battle.
The annals of the Durham bishops furnish many a
curious biographical and historical anecdote. The
A wavering Bishop. 281
crow, prying into the old tombs in search of them,
feels, however, almost as guilty as a thievish sexton
looking for episcopal rings, and such unconsidered
trifles.
After Wolsey had held the see of Durham for six
years, without ever seeing his diocese, the mitre was
worn by Cuthbert Tunstall, brother of that Sir Brian
Tunstall, who fell at Flodden. This prelate was a
friend of Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More, and a
waverer between the Protestant and Papist parties ;
still, the good old man refused to persecute the
Keformers during the Marian reign of blood. Fixing
at last to the old faith, he refused to take the oath
of supremacy, on the accession of Elizabeth. On
arriving in London, on horseback, followed by three
score retainers, he was deprived of his see, and placed
under restraint at Lambeth, where he died.
Pilkington, the next bishop, had been an exile at
Geneva during the last reign, and brought home
with him certain Calvinistic scruples, such as an
objection to the surplice as the invention of the
Novatian heretics ; and he agreed with Bucer in dis-
liking the square university cap — " Quia caput hu-
manum non est quadratum."
In 1569, the northern rebellion broke out. The
Earl of Northumberland, zealous for the marriage of
Mary Queen of Scots with the Duke of Norfolk, who
then lay in the Tower, was persuaded by his servants
282 A Tour Round England.
that be was in danger. Alarmed at night at Top-
cliffe, he fled to Brancepeth Castle, and joined the
Earl of Westmorland in arming his retainers. The
bells ringing backward, the beacons firing, the in-
surgents rushed on to Durham, followed by half the
moss-troopers and mounted thieves in Tynedale,
Riddesdale, and Teviotdale. Their chief captains
were Swinburne, a daring and zealous man, and
Thomas Markenfield, an exile who had stolen back
5
from Flanders to fight for the old faith. The rebels
banner, aping the traditions of the old Pilgrimage of
Grace, bore the motto, " God speed the plough,"
and a cross with the words, " In hoc signo vinces,"
Foremost among the insurgeuts was an old grey-
headed warrior, Norton, whose brother and seven
sons all fought beside him, as the readers of
Wordsworth's delightful poem, " The White Doe of
Rylstone," will well remember. Bearing a standard,
on which was a cross and the five wounds, he led the
rebel troops into Durham Cathedral, where they
tore the bibles and books of common prayer, and
trod them under foot ; and overthrowing the com-
munion-tables, they celebrated mass at the high altar.
When they mustered on Clifford Moor, near Wether-
by, the Catholic rebels mustered four thousand foot
and six hundred horse. But the triumph was short-
lived. Catholics and Protestants were, either from
love or prudence, fast rallying round the crown.
The Nor tons. 283
The Earl of Cumberland and Lord Scroop barred
Carlisle against them ; Sir Henry Percy and Sir
John Forster secured Berwick and the east marches.
Sir George Bowes, the stern Provost Marshal, was
busy twisting his ropes at Bernard Castle ; while the
Earl of Sussex, with three thousand men, was ad-
vancing on their flank, followed by the Earl of War-
wick, with a larger force. The rebels had three
plans open — to defeat Sussex before Warwick could
join him, to hold Hartlepool till foreign aid could
arrive, or to retreat to the friendly mountains of the
west. But the faint-hearted leaders acted as the
Pretender afterwards did at Derby. They turned
tail at Raby, failed at Barnard Castle, fled first to
Auckland, then to Hexham, lastly to Ilworth. The
earls there disbanded their men, and rode across the
border to hide among the bogs and woods of Liddes-
dale. Northumberland, betrayed by Hector Graham,
of Harlaw, perished on the scaffold ; Westmor-
land, changing his rich armour with Jock of the
Side, a borderer at whose peel tower the un-
happy Countess of Northumberland was left, was
sheltered by Kerr, of Farnyhurst, who swore that
the Regent had better " eat his own lugs " than
come and seek his guest. The earl eventually es-
caped to Flanders, became a colonel in the service of
Spain, and " protracted a life of unavailing regret to
extreme old age." Old Norton, Swinburne, and others
284 A Tour Hound England.
also escaped over seas ; but one of the young Nor-
ton® was executed, and about sixty rebels (chiefly
petty constables) were hanged at Durham alone. Vast
confiscations took place, and it is said that in a track
of sixty miles, from Wetherby to Newcastle, there
was scarcely a village which did not witness an exe-
cution.
The thrifty queen appropriated all the forfeitures,
which rightly fell to the Palatinate, to defray the ex-
pense of the campaign. A quaint old ballad of the
time, called "News from Northumberland," thus
describes the chief actors heraldically : —
" I will tell you for truth what news I hear —
The Bull of the north is afraid of the Bear ;
The Moon and the Stars are fallen at stryfe ;
I never knew warre so strange in my life.
What made the Murrian head so stout,
To seek the Sheaf of arrows out ?"
The bear in these verses means Warwick, the star
Sussex, the crescent Percy, the arrows Bowes. The
poor old bishop seems to have got thoroughly tired
of his troublous diocese, for in 1573 he petitioned Lord
Burleigh to let him winter in the south, saying
pathetically that if he did not, " there is a highway out
of all countries, of which free passage I pray God I
doubt not." For his two daughters, conveyed south
in beggars' clothes at the breaking out of the rebel-
lion, the bishop saved up such large fortunes (£4000
each) that Elizabeth, jealous that a bishop's daughter
A Dangerous Sermon. 285
should equal a princess, took £1000 a year from
the bishopric, and gave it to the garrison of Ber-
wick.
Bishop Barnes, Pilkington's successor, soon after
his enthronement, wrote to Burleigh, lauding himself
for having driven the " priests and massers " into
Lancashire and Yorkshire, and called the people of
Durham county stubborn and churlish, and the
church of Durham an Augean stable. Barnes's suc-
cessor, Hutton, was that worthy prelate who durst
preach to Elizabeth at Whitehall Chapel, and urge
her to establish the succession by naming James.
Harrington, the translator of Ariosto, and the queen's
godson, says, " I no sooner remember that famous
and worthie prelate, but I think I see him in the
the chapel atte Whitehall, Queen Elizabeth at the
window in the closet, all the lords of Parliament,
spirituall and temporall, about them, and then hear
him out of the pulpit thundering this text — ' The
kingdoms of the earth are mine, and I shall give
them to whom I will, and I have given tjjjem to
Nebuchadnezzar and his'sonne, and his Sonne's sonne."
This bishop deserves especial respect for his noble
and pathetic letter in favour of Lady Margaret Nevil.
He writes : —
" A most distressed maiden, descended of divers
noble houses in the memory of man ; of the house of
Buckingham, Norfolk, Westmorland, and Eutland,
286 A lour Round England.
and now behold the instability of all human things —
two of them are utterly overthrown, only one stand-
eth unspotted, and she herself a poor maid con-
demned to die."
This must have been a large-hearted man — Le Neve
gives the crow a fine picture of the divided belief of
the northern counties in 1605, when he says that at
the last sermon Hutton ever preached at York (he
became archbishop in 1594), the Popish recusants,
who were obliged to be present by Elizabeth's
order, were so obstreperous that they were forced
to be gagged.
In 1589, the plague broke out at Durham, and con-
tinued till 1597, when it raged with special violence.
Both here and at York it was so dreaded that the
poorer people were removed into huts and sheds
on commons and waste places ; particularly at Elvet
Moor, where, as late as 1780, the plague cells could
be seen on the south side of the hill below the wood ;
and also at Hob Moor, near York.
Toby Mathew, the next bishop, a great con-
troversialist of his day, was allowed even by the
Jesuits with whom he warred to be an eloquent,
learned, amiable, and witty man. Fuller says the
worthy bishop would often condemn himself for his
own levity ; but he would add he could as well not
be as not be merry. When he quitted Durham, he
confessed it was for lack of grace, for, according to a
A Shrewd Answer. 287
homely northern proverb, " York had the higher rack,
but Durham the deeper manger."
Richard Neile, a subsequent bishop, was an Arme-
nian, of Laud's mischievous way of thinking. He
seems to have been a great parasite of King James.
Once, when Neile of Durham and good Bishop
Andrews of Winchester stood behind the King's
chair, James said to them,
"My lords, may I not take my subjects' money
without all the formality of Parliament V*
" God forbid, sir, but you should," replied obsequi-
ous Neile ; 5* you are the breath of our nostrils."
Winchester, pressed, artfully replied,
" Sir, I have no skill to judge Parliamentary cases."
" No put offs," spluttered the King ; " answer me
presently."
"Then, sir," said Bishop Andrews, "1 think it
lawful for you to take my brother Neile's money, for
he offers it."
In 1633, Charles the First was entertained at Dur-
ham by the excellent Bishop Morton, he and his
locust retinue costing the generous prelate £1,500 a
day. This same good bishop was the chief agent in
inducing the poet Donne to take orders. He often
relieved Donne's necessities. On one occasion, offer-
ing him gold, the bishop said, " Gold is restorative."
" Sir," replied Donne, " I doubt 1 never shall restore
it back again ;" and, says the narrator, quaintly, " I
288 A Tour Round England.
am well assured he never did." When an old man,
and during the troubles, the bishop put his last sixty
pounds in his pocket, and rode to London, to find
there an asylum. On his way he met Sir Christopher
Yelverton, who asked him who he was. The bishop
replied, " I am that old man, the Bishop of Durham,
going to London to live a little while, and then to
die." Sir Christopher at once took him home to his
house at Easton Mauduit, and the old man became
tutor to the baronet's son, who loved him " with the
affection of a most tender child."
Bishop Crewe (1674 — 1722) was a zealous Jacobite,
who alternately toadied James and William, but the
latter with little success. There was a rumour in
Charles's time that Durham was to be annexed to
Scotland, of which the Duke of Monmouth was to be
king ; but the current of court intrigue changed its
direction. It is said that Crewe gave Nell Gwynne
£6,000 for the bishopric. On Crewe's return to
Durham from voting for Sacheverell, he was met by
a procession of five thousand Tory horsemen. He
remained till his death an ardent Jacobite, in spite of
his servility to the court. As he lay dying on the
marble slab before the fire, he used to cry out to his
chaplain, Richard Grey, " Dick, Dick, don't go over
to them !" He is buried at Stene. His monument
is decorated with a bunch of grapes, an ornament
which always strikes visitors as mysterious and in-
The Curate and the Bishop. 289
congruous. It was originally a ghastly skull, but
the bishop, in his lifetime, had the device altered.
But the crow must tear himself from Durham
bishops and their deeds, good or evil, and close with
one word about that excellent man, Van Mildert ; a
friend of the crow's, who dined with this bishop in
almost princely splendour at Durham, used to remem-
ber with pleasure the little humble meals in poor
lodgings in Ely Place, which he had once shared
with Van Mildert when an unknown curate.
VOL. II. U
290
CHAPTER XXXI.
ALNWICK TO BERWICK.
AND now far into Northumberland the crow strikes
where from Brislee Tower (built by a Duke
of Northumberland to commemorate the completion
of his plantations) the crow sees beyond the vale of
Whittingham the blue cones of the Cheviots (twenty
miles distant), and through their ravines glimpses of
the Teviots. On these rest a blue speck, which is fatal
Flodden, and to the south and east is the sea from the
Fame Islands stretching northward, Bamborough on
its steep rock, and the towers of Wark worth, and
the craig where William the Lion was captured, and
the cross marking the grave of the slain Scotch king,
Malcolm the Third. Then the crow swoops down on
Alnwick, standing square and defiant, like a thing of
yesterday, on a gentle slope shelving to the Alne.
Pure and smooth looks the moor-stone in its battle-
ments, and yet the castle has stood the buffets of
centuries, and has been battered by Scotch cannon
Hotspur. 291
and crimsoned with Scotch blood ; rebel powder has
blackened it, and military engines have stormed at
it. It was built by Eustace Fitzjohn, a friend of
Henry the First, and an adherent of the Empress
Maud. He surrendered the new brick fortress to the
Scotch king to hold it against Stephen. This same
staunch partisan, Eustace, was eventually shot
through by an arrow at the siege of Barnard Castle.
Alnwick was through all the centuries a resting-place
for kings. John came here, and angered the northern
barons by his licentious insolence, and Edward the
Third, and Henry the Fourth, and Queen Margaret,
and Edward the Fourth. Several of these monarchs,
indeed, earned their lodging by first capturing the
castle, which has a Shakespearean interest from its
connexion with the chivalrous Hotspur. A part of
the castle between the tower, named " Hotspur's
Chair," and that called the Record Tower, goes by
the name of the Bloody Gap, from a breach through
which the savage Scots once hotly entered, and were
as hotly driven back. A mere record of the Earls of
Northumberland is an epitome of English history.
The first lord of Alnwick was a knight of great
prowess in Gascony and Scotland ; his son Henry
fought bravely at Halidon Hill and Sluys, and cap-
tured King David of Scotland. Henry the fourth Lord
Marshal of England was a favourer of WieklifF, and,
banished by Richard the Second, returned to die on
292 A Tour Round England.
Brornham Moor. Hotspur fell in Hately Field, his
father died in the battle of Taunton, and his son was
slain at St. Albans. The fourth earl was murdered
by a mob. The seventh earl aided the rising in the
North, and was beheaded. The eighth earl, the lover
of Mary, Queen of Scots, was executed in the
Tower.
Some curious feudal customs still prevail in the
shadow of the duke's castle. At the July fair, four
men from different townships form a watch, and
patrol from dusk till midnight. This service, exempt-
ing the townships from toll, preserves the remem-
brance of the annual Scottish inroad made at fair
time in old days. On the evening of St. Mark's day
freemen are admitted. The candidates, armed with
swords, ride on horseback (it was necessary to go
armed at Alnwick in the mosstrooper days), and at
the market-place the cavalcade is joined by the
chamberlains and duke's bailiffs. A band then heads
the procession to the Freemen's Hill (four miles
distant), where the candidates, dismounting, and
putting on white dresses and white caps trimmed
with ribbons, struggle ignominiously through the
well, a dirty, stagnant pool, twenty yards long. The
tradition is that King John, while returning from
hunting, was bemired in this same bog. Holly-trees
are then planted at the doors of the new freemen, as
King Johns Cruelty. 293
a signal for their friends to assemble and offer them
congratulations at a bean feast.
From Alnwick the crow darts to Berwick: his last
roosting-place, before he turns to his final roost on
the old black dome that the golden gallery coronets
so proudly. He alights on the old wall of Berwick
(the town of the Bernicians), which has stood as
much shot from both English and Scotch cannon as
any town on the blood-stained Border ever since
William the Lion surrendered it to the Southron, to
whom it henceforward became a Gibraltar, detested
and yet longed for by the beacon guarders on the
distant Cheviots. The town beside the debatable
river was always being burnt or pillaged. When the
Yorkshire barons went to Melrose and did fealty to
King Alexander of Scotland (a boy of fifteen), as the
Northumberland barons had done before at Felton,
King John, in rage and fury at this, stormed and burnt
Berwick, setting fire with his own black hand to the
very house where he had lodged. He and his foreign
mercenaries, Frenchmen and Brabancons, tortured
many of the inhabitants, hanging them up by their
hands and feet till they groaningly disclosed where
they had hidden their money. Then the Scots had
it again till Edward the First, after coming here to
discuss the claims of Bruce and Baliol, took it by
storm some years after. The king on this occasion
encamped on the declivity at the foot of the east end
294 A Tour Round England.
of Halidon Hill, in full view of the castle and town.
His own quarters were fixed at a nunnery. His fleet
venturing a rash attack, three ships ran aground and
were burnt by the enemy. Edward, enraged at this,
at once attacked the town, and, forcing the rude bar-
ricades of boards, took the place by the first coup de
main.
Thirty Flemish merchants held the Red Hall Tower
till the evening, but were then destroyed by fire.
Edward's soldiers, it is said, slew seven thousand
Scotchmen in this attack, and, as Boethius says, the
mills were that day turned with blood instead of water.
The women and the garrison of two hundred men
were sent into Scotland. Douglas remained a pri-
soner till the end of the war. King Edward stopped
at Berwick fifteen days, and, to protect it against the
warlike Scotch, ordered a vast ditch, eighty feet
broad and forty deep, to be dug through the neck of
land between the sea and the Tweed. But the Scotch
swarmed back again to Berwick ; and when Wallace
had slain the hated Cressingham, and flayed him and
cut his skin into stirrup-leathers, he took Berwick,
the stone wall not being yet finished. The English
found it deserted on their advance. Robert Bruce
then took it by escalade, being aided by a burgess of
the town, Randolph and Douglas being the first to
climb over the ramparts at a part near Cowgate.
A few years later brave Wallace was executed at
A Countess in a Cage. 295
Smithfield, and half his body sent to Berwick to be
hung upon the bridge ; while the wretched Countess
of Buchan, who had crowned Robert Bruce at Scone,
was shut up in a wooden cage, and hung like a black-
bird outside one of the castle towers ; and after Ed-
ward had assembled here his Bannockburn army,
Bruce took the place again, which Edward the Se-
cond soon attacked in force. The English fastened
boats full of men to the masts of their vessels, hoped
to throw a bridge on the ramparts, but they were
driven off. They then tried a sow (a covered batter-
ing ram), but the Scotch split the roof with stones
from their military engines, and with cranes let down
burning timbers upon it, and destroyed it. When the
English archers flew from the shattered sow, the
Scotch cried, sooffingly, " The sow has littered." The
siege was raised at the end of about fourteen days.
Edward Baliol eventually ceded Berwick to England
in 1334; but in 1377, one of the most daring forays
ever made in England, led to the capture of the town
by eight brave Scotch borderers, who killed the con-
stable, Sir Robert Boynton, and allowed his wife and
family to depart, after exacting a ransom of two
thousand marks sterling, to be paid within three
Aveeks.
Eventually, besieged by the Earl of Northumber-
land, forty-eight Scotchmen held the place for eight
days against seven thousand English archers, three
296 A Tour Round England.
thousand horse, two earls, and three lords. On the
ninth day the place was taken, and all but their leader,
the brave Sir John Gordon, were slain in the assault,
in which Shakespeare's Hotspur displayed great cour-
age. After Edward the Fourth took the place, it
ever afterwards remained English, and on the ac-
cession of James the First the garrison was finally
reduced.
From the highest stone of the Bell Tower, where
beacons have been so often lit to warn Northumber-
land that the blue bonnets were over the border, the
crow now, with swiftest flaps of his sable wings,
darts straight as an arrow back to the great black
dome that, rising above the wreathing smoke of Lon-
don, resembles a huge witch's caldron seething with
wizards' spells of good and evil influence.
THE END.
LONDON: PRINTEDBY MACDONALI) AND TUG WELL. BLENHKIM HOUSE
INDEX.
VOL. II.
INDEX.
ALBANS, ST., special legend of,
ii. 143 ; the monastery and its
relics, ii. 145 ; quaint nook in the
Saint's Chapel at, ii. 146; dis-
covery of Duke Humphrey's vault
at, ii. 147 ; antiquarian disco-
veries at, ii. 148 ; a distinguished
monk of, ib. ; hattles, during the
wars of the Roses, at, ii. 149 ;
visit of Henry VI. to, ii. 151;
another hattle at, ii. ib. ; resi-
dence of Lord Bacon at, ii. 153
Alhanus, St., legend of, ii. 143 ;
dispute about the bones of, ii.
145
Aldborough, Suffolk, bay and town
of, i. 321
Alfred, King, traditions of, i. 123
Alnwick, the castle of, ii. 291 ;
feudal customs still prevalent at,
ii. 292
Architects, mediaeval, myths re-
lating to, ii. 198
Arthur, King, legends of, i. 160;
the country of, i. 220; traditions
of his old palace by the sea, i.
222
Ashford Park, the trees of, ii. 95 ;
legend of two antlers preserved
in the hall of, ii. 97
Athelney, Isle of, traditions of King
Alfred at, i. 123
Audley End, the site and remains
of, i. 291
BACON, Lord, records of, ii.
153
Baddesley, groaning elm at, ii. 139
Banstead Downs, the scenery
around, ii. 87
Barbury Camp, tradition of, i. 102
Barking, " the fort in the meadow,"
i. 246 ; convent of Benedictine
nuns earned off by the Danes
from, ib. ; restoration of its abbey
by King Edgar, i. 247; fealty of
the London civil authorities re-
ceived by William the Conqueror
at, i. 248 ; right enjoyed by, i.
249 ; the Gunpowder Plot planned
at, ib.
Barnes and Chiswick, the gardens
of, i. 3
Bayes, comedian, part played in
" The Rehearsal " by, i. 14
Beaufort, Cardinal, Shakspearian
misrepresentation of, ii. 120
Bevis, Sir, and Ascapar, the legend
of, ii. 133
Beck, Bishop of Durham, legends
of, ii. 277
Bedfont, scene of a quaint poem by
Tom Hood, i. 58 ; procession of
the Four-in-hand Club at, i. 54
Bedford, relics of John Runyan at,
ii. 158 ; association of Howard
the philanthropist with, ii.-160
Bells, Cathedral, legends of, ii.
196
300
Index.
Berwick, various sieges of, ii. 293 ;
finally captured by Edward IV.
ii. 296
Bickleigh Court, legends of, i. 142
Blagrove, John, the mathematician,
legacy left to the maid-servants
of Reading by, i. 89
Blake, Admiral, the exploits of,
i. 121 ; his defence of Taunton,
i. 126
Bodmin, the monks' town, i. 211;
historical memoranda of, i. 212 ;
legend of one of its mayors, i.
213 ; carnival on the Goats' Moor
near, i. 214
Boniface, St., remarkable career of,
i. 145.
Box Hill, the chalk rampart of, ii.
101 ; tradition of its planting,
and value of the wood grown on,
ii. 102 ; celebrated frequenters of
the inn at the foot of, ii. 103
Braintree, Essex, formerly a sta-
tion for pilgrims, i. 206
Bray, the Vicar of, anecdotes of,
i. 78
Brent, river, the course of, i. 4;
damage caused by inundation of,
i. 20
Brentford, historical associations of,
i. 4; depth of the Thames at,
i. 5 ; rejoicings on the murder of
Henry VI. at, i. 6 ; Bloody Mary's
last act of cruelty committed at,
i. 7 ; light of Cavaliers and
Roundheads in, i. 10 ; dramatic
reminiscences connected with, i.
13 ; distinguished actors interred
in the cemetery of, i. 17 ; a
distinguished curate of, i. 18 ;
serious inundation at, i. 20 ;
statistics of old and new town
of, i. 21
Bridgewater, scene of remarkable
events near, i. 116 ; birth-place
of Admiral Blake at, i. 121 ;
production of Bath- bricks at,
i. 123
Brown, Sir Thomas, memoranda
of, ii. 72
Browne, William, a contemporary
of Shakspeare,the poetical works
of, 177
Buckingham, Duke of, production
of " The Rehearsal " by, i. 13
Bulstrodes, the, grotesque old
storv of, i. 32 ; descendants of,
i. 34
Bungay, Suffolk, old East Anglian
town, ii. 16; story of a Baron
resident in, ib. ; Roman and Xor-
man remains found at, ii. 18 ;
the Church of St. Mary's in, ii.
19; disaster in 1688 at,'ii. 20.
Bunyan.John, his associations with
Reading, i. 89 ; record of his life
and works, ii. 158.
CADBURY Castle, legendof.i. 144;
camps visible from, ib., disco-
very in one of the fosses of, i. 145
Caddan Point, legend of, i. 238
Caistor, scenery round the look-out
at, ii. 51 ; legend of the church at,
ib. ; ruins of Falstolph's old man-
sion at, ii. 52 ; William of Win-
chester's letter to the Pastons on
becoming lords of, ii. 54 ; legends
prevalent at, ii. 58 ; the Paston
Letters indited at, ii. 59
Cambridgeshire, rhyming proverb
on the monasteries of, ii. 169
Carew, Bamfylde Moore, King of
the Beggars, i. 142
Caroline, Queen, her unfortunate
marriage, death, and funeral,
i. 299
Cavendish, Thomas, Admiral, his
services and death, i. 308
Caversham, Charles I.'s interview
with his children at, i. 82 ; duel
near, i. 90
Charles I., discovery of his body
in St. George's Chapel, Windsor,
i. 59 ; touching episode in the
history of, i. 81
Charles II., angling memoranda of,
i. 77
Charles, William Frederick, Prince
Index.
301
of Brunswick, his reception and
marriage in England, i. 298
Charlinch, near Bridgewater, Mr.
Prince's Agapemone at, i. 125
Charlotte, Princess, of Mecklen-
burg- Strelitz, her arrival and
reception in England, i. 297
Chatham, the Earl of, anecdote of,
i. 105
Cheam, places of interest at, ii. 86
Cheesewring, curious granite column
and hermit's cave near, i. 210
Clarke, Dr. Samuel, memoranda of,
ii. 72
Cleer, St., church and well of, i.
211
Coaches, slow and fast, i. 32
Colchester, memorable incidents
and persons of, i. 281 ; .the great
legend of, i. 284 ; ruins of the
castle at, i. 288 ; siege of, i. 289
Cole, Old King, true story of, i. 282
" Comet," the, and Tom Brown the
Coachman, i. 30 ; remarkable
places passed on the journey by,
i. 31
Corbet, Bishop, quaint lines on
" Great Tom " by, ii. 73
Cornwall, churches choked by sand
on the coast of, i. 227 ; last per-
son who spoke Cornish, i. 239
Cowley, Hannah, memoranda of the
actors in " The Belle's Strata-
gem," by, i. 138
Crabbe, George, the poet and his
family, i. 322 ; anecdotes of, i.
323
Cranbrook Castle, see Prestonbury
Castle
Cranmere Pool, Dartmoor, belief
of the country people respecting,
i. 163
Crediton, birth of St. Boniface at,
i. 145 ; fortification of the barns
of, i. 147 ; miracle in the church
of, ib. ; altar tomb of Sir John
Sully at, i. 148
Crockern Tor, old parliament of
the tinners held at, i. 164
Crome, a Norwich artist, ii. 66
Cuthbert, St., legends of, ii. 266
DANES, the, invasions of Eng-
land by, i. 4
Dart, river, legend of, i. 161
Dartmoor Forest, i. 164 ; city of
refuge at, i. 167 ; use made by
the people of Tavistock of the
hut circles of, i. 170
Dashwood, Francis, founder of the
Franciscan Club, i. 83
Datchet, angling traditions of, i. 77
Deepdene, works produced by-Ana-
stasius " Hope at, ii. 110
Devizes, curious inscription on the
market cross of , i. 1 1 ; anecdotes
of the youth of Sir Thomas Law-
rence at, ib. ; defeat of Sir
William Waller by Lord Wilmot
at, i. Ill
Devonshire, the pastures of, i. 145
Devonshire, Earl of, curious epi-
taph on the tomb of an, i. 140
Dolberry Hill, rhyme and legend
of, i. 144
Donne, the poet, anecdote of, ii. 287
Donnington Castle, Colonel Boyes'
defence of, i. 93
Dorking, anecdotes of an eccentric
major of marines residing at, ii.
102; the inns of, ii. 110; dis-
covery of Anglo-Saxon coins at a
farm near, ii. 115
Drake, Sir Francis, birthplace, re-
sidence, relics, and memoranda
of, i. 1 75 ; Plymouth traditions
of, i. 183
Druids, and their temples, Mr.
Duke's theory of, i. 107
Dryden, parodied in " The Re-
hearsal," i. 14
Dunmow, the inventor of life-boats
a native of, i. 273 ; history of the
curious ceremony instituted at,
i. 274; Mr. Ains worth's revival
of the ceremony at, i. 280 ; the
last flitch given away at, i. 28 L
Durham, historical records of, ii.
266; shrine of St. Cuthbert in
the cathedral of, ii. 270 ; reli-
302
Index.
gious processions at, ii. 271;
sieges of, ii. 272 ; ravaged by
William the Conqueror, ii. 273 ;
death of Bishop Walcher of, ib. ;
Scotch sieges of, ii. 274 ; legends
of different prelates of, ii. 27 5 ;
entertainment of Princess Mar-
garet at, ii. 279 ; biographical
anecdote of a bishop of, ii. 280 ;
attack by the northern rebels on
the cathedral of, ii. 281 ; a bishop
tired of the diocese of, ii. 284 ;
records of the plague at, ii. 286 ;
anecdotes of various bishops of,
ii. 287
Duval, Claude, doubtful anecdote
of, i. 37
I71DDYSTONE Lighthouse, Smea-
J ton's anxiety during the erec-
tion of, i. 199
Edmund Ironsides, his exploits
against the Danes, i. 4 ; the mur-
der of, i. 5
Edgehill, battle of, i. 9
Edward the Confessor, sight re-
stored by the touch of, i. 67 ;
fight of Harold and Tosti in
presence of, i. 68
Edward III., Queen Philippa's last
interview with, i. 69
Elizabeth, Queen, her relations to
Leicester, i. 84 ; a shnrp critic of
pulpit doctrine, i. 89 ; imprudent
intrusion of the Earl of Essex on
the privacy of, ii. 84; compari-
son of her face with that of
Mary Queen of Scots, ii. 177
Epping, impromptu carnivals of
East-end Londoners at, i. 252 ;
amusements of Londoners in the
time of Elizabeth at, i. 253 ;
questions for members of par-
liament relating to, i. 254 ; ludi-
crous shadow of royal sports at, ib.
Epsom, remarks on the races at,
ii. 87 ; skirmish between Cava-
liers and Eoundheads at, ii. 88 ;
traditions of, ii. 89 ; important
mediaeval discovery mai'.e at, ii.
90 ; Nell Gwynne at, ii. 91 ; pic-
ture by a fantastic old writer of
life at, ib. ; quackery and its con-
sequences to, ii. 94
Essex, historical incidents relating
to, i. 260; places of legendary
interest on the coast of, i. 261 ;
a painter's description of, i. 265
Essex, Earl of, his expeditions to
Spain and Ireland, ii. 83 ; his
imprudent intrusion on Queen
Elizabeth, ib. ; his rash proceed-
ings and death, ii. 85
Eton, tradition of a fight with the
poet Shelley at, i. 75
Evelyn, John, his uneventful life
and placid character, ii. 112
Exeter, historical memoranda of,
i. 150; journey, in former days,
from London to, i. 151; cathe-
dral of, i. 152 ; terrible death of
a bishop of, i. 153 ; ancient
building and monuments of, i.
154 ; distinguished sons of, i.
155
FAIRLOP OAK, the ancient fair
held under, i. 255
Falkland, place of his death, i. 92
Falmouth, rise and progress of, i.
233
Falstolf, Sir John, sketch of his
military career, i. 53 ; Shak-
speare's misrepresentation of the
character of, ii. 58
Fellaston, Suffolk, a rising water-
ing-place, i. 305
Fitz Well, Dartmoor, a record of
Devonshire superstition, i. 168
Forrabury, a legend of, i. 224
Four-in-hand Club, the, the turn-
outs of, i. 54
Fox Tor, legend of the Frozen
Knight at, i. 169
Framlingham, historical memo-
randa of, ii. 4 ; interesting relics
in St. Michael's Church at, ii. 7
Franciscans, the, infamous club of,
i. 83 ; trick by which it was
broken up, i. 84
Index.
303
GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS,
sketch of his career, i. 118
Gay, origin of " The Beggars'
Opera " by, i. 46
George III., memoranda of his
daily life at Windsor, i. 61 ;
anecdotes of, i. 62 ; death and
funeral of, i. 64 ; his simple
intercourse with his people, i.
66; vault prepared for himself
and family by, i. 72
George IV., his residence at Wind-
sor, i. 65 ; his disgraceful mar-
riage to Queen Caroline, i. 299
Glanville, Sir John, memoranda of,
i. 178
Glastonbury, Henry VIII. defied
by the Abbot of, i. 114; remark-
able legends of, ib.
Gloucester, Duke of, uncle of
Bichard II., his warlike exploits,
ii. 268
Goodwin, Earl, submits to the
ordeal of bread, i. 67
Greenvil, Sir Richard, a distin-
guished Cavalier leader, i. 186
Grosteste, mediaeval legend of, ii.
195 ; anecdotes of, ii. 200
Gumb, Daniel, the " mountain
philosopher," i. 210
Gunpowder Plot, the, narrative of,
i. 249
HAINAUT, great Fairlop Oak at,
i. 255
Hampden, John, exploit and death
of, i. 33
Harrowgate, first English chaly-
beate spring discovered at, ii.
262 ; life in former times at, ib.
Harwich, memorable" incidents
which have occurred at, i. 295 ;
landing of the Princess Char-
lotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz at,
i. 297 ; conveyance of the remains
of Queen Caroline from, i. 298 ;
harbour and commerce of, i.
302 ; fortifications of, i. 303 ;
annexations of the sea near, i.
304 ; dangers at Felixstow Point
to, i. 305 ; commencement of a
breakwater at, i. 307
Hawkins, John, great mail-coach
robber, i. 42
Heist on, a victory over Satan com-
memorated at, i. 235 ; another
festival at, i. 236
Henry V., defiance hurled by the
Archbishop of Bruges at, ii. 127
Henry VI., Shakspearean misre-
presentation of events in the
reign of, ii. 150
Henry VIII., Windsor traditions of,
i. 74 ; use of the bow encouraged
by, i. 74
Heme the Hunter, legend of, i. 66
Hereward, last Saxon to sheath the
sword, ii. 165
Highwaymen, short-lived romance
of, i. 38 ; artifices by which tra-
vellers defended themselves
against, i. 43
Hind, Captain, a highwayman, story
of, i. 38
Hopkins, Matthew, the witchfincler,
i. 295
Hopton, Sir Balph, the " Soldiers'
Darling," his victory over the
Puritans at Liskeard, i. 202
Hounslow, journey in a phantom
mail-coach to, i. 27 ; the town in
old times, i. 29 ; early legends of ,
i. 32 ; infested by highwaymen,
i. 37 ; a legend prevalent at, i.
44 ; Fielding's illustrations of
the state of the population in
1775, i. 47
Hounslow Heath at the beginning
of the present century and now,
i. 28 ; old traditions of, i. 29 ;
moonlight rides of gamblers and
bankrupts to, i. 43 ; mysterious
crime committed on, i. 47 ; two
legends of, i. 51
Howard, Sir Robert, a poor drama-
tist, ii. 95
Howard the philanthropist, ii. 160
Hugh of Wells, anecdote of, ii. 191
Hugh, St. legend of, ii. 196 ; trans-
lation of his remains, ii. 197
304
Index.
IPSWICH, George Crabbe's sea-
side baunts near, i. 309; the
greatest native of, i. 311 ; repre-
sentatives of the Wolseys in, i.
311 ; old bouses in, i. 317.
Islay, Lord, old joke against, i. 28
Isleworth, quaint characteristic ap-
pearance of, i. 21 ; distinguished
persons connected with, i. 22
JAMES I., anecdote of, ii. 82.
James II., anecdote illustrative of
the bigoted character of, ii. 208
Jeffreys, Judge, his judicial but-
cheries at Taunton, i. 181 ; trial
of Lady Alice Lisle at Winchester
by, ii. 128
Jews, the, mediaeval slanders
against, ii. 198
Joanna of Navarre, incidents in the
life of, ii. 124
Just, St., a damaging legend of, i.
237
KETT, the tanner of Wymond-
ham, leader of a Catholic in-
surrection in Norfolk, ii. 88.
Keyne's, St., Well, stories relating
to the origin of, i. 205.
Killigrews, the, a Cornish family,
anecdotes of, i. 231=
Kimbolton Castle, historical me-
moranda of, ii. 102 ; relics of
Katherine of Arragon at, ii. 162
Kirke, Colonel Percy, his cruelties to
rebel prisoners at Taunton, i.
129 ; Macaulay's account of a de-
graded minister of bis vengeance,
i. 131
LAND'S END, legends of the
coves and headlands of, i. 240
Languard Fort, Suffolk, i. 307
Laud, Archbishop, superstition of,
ii. 87
Lawless Court, curious manorial
custom still existing at, i. 262
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, anecdotes
of his early years, i. 110
Lea, river, tradition respecting the
streams of, i. 258
Leatberhead, Skelton's satire on
the ale-wife of, ii. 97
Leeds, the paradise of clothiers,
ii. 206 ; etymology of the name
of, ii. 207; part taken in the
Civil War by, ib. ; incidents in
the life of Charles II. at, ii.
209 ; memorabilia of, ii. 211
Leith Hall, view from the tower of,
ii. 114
Life-boats, inventor and improvers
of, i. 273
Lincolnshire, region won from the
sea in, ii. 183; Dr. Stukeley's
theory as to the origin of, ii. 185 ;
great tempest and inundation in,
ii. 186; drainage of the fen-
country of, ii. 187 ; reclaimed
land in, ii. 192 ; record of a
sharp fight during the Civil War
in, ii. 202
Lincoln Cathedral, view from the
central tower of, ii. 182 ; view
from the Rood Tower of, ii. 193 ;
the building of, ii. 194 ; legends
of, ii. 196 ; legendary windows of,
ii. 198; bishops of, ii. 199; the
Centenarian Beam at, ib. ; Great
Tom of, ii. 201
Liskeard, a centre of hard fighting
during the Civil War, i. 202 ; dis-
tinguished members of parlia-
liament for, and learned men
educated at, i. 204 ; St. Keyne's
Well near, i. 205
Lisle, Lady Alice, her trial before
Judge Jeffreys, ii. 128
Littlecot House, old legend of, i. 100
London, arming of the citizens on
the defeat at Edgehill, i. 12 :
local character of the towns in
the neighbourhood of, i. 23 :
beats, in 1805, of the horse-
patrols on the roads near, i. 47 ;
Swan-Upping festival of the Cor-
poration of, i. 55; extent and
limits of the port of, i. 260
Lowestoft, original name of, i. 20 :
Index.
305
jealousy between Yarmouth and,
ii. 21 ; naval and other celebri-
ties of, ii. 22 ; battle between
English and Dutch fleets oppo-
site, ii. 23 ; progress of, ib. ; the
two-masted lugger of, ii. 24
Lukin, Lionel, inventor of the life-
boat, i. 273
Lyonesse, the submersion of, i. 238
MAIDENHEAD, why so named,
i. 81 ; touching tradition of, ib.
Manchester, Edward, second earl
of, his disputes with Cromwell,
ii. 163
Manningtree, Essex, witch-burn-
ing at, i. 294
Marlborough, town and castle, their
historical associations, i. 102 ;
college of, i. 103; the Earl of
Chatham at, i. 105
Martin the Incendiary, insane at-
tempt to destroy York Minster by
fire, ii. 211
Mary, Queen of Scots, the last hours
of, ii. 172; a Northampton pro-
phecy on the removal of her
body, ii. 172 ; her face compared
with that of Queen Elizabeth, ib.
Matsys, Quentin, relics at Windsor
Castle of, i. 73
Matthew of Paris, a monk of St.
Albans, ii. 148
Medmenham, annual dinner of the
Lord Mayor and Aldermen at,
i. 55 ; traditions of the abbey of,
i. 82 ; unfounded tradition re-
lating to Queen Elizabeth at,
i. 84
Michael's, St., Bay, the sands of,
i. 238
Minster Church, Cornwall, legend
of, i. 226
Mole, the, strange and weird river,
why so named, ii. 99 ; Drayton's
and Spenser's allegory of, ib. ;
erroneous notion respecting,
ii. 100
Monmouth, Duke of, his defeat at
Sedgmoor, i. 116 ; his reception
at Taunton, i. 128 ; his prime
minister, i. 129
Morris, Captain, a bacchanalian
roysterer of the Kegency, his
cottage at Brookham Green,
ii. Ill ; heartless fun indulged
in by, ib.
NELSON, Admiral, Haydon's re-
miniscence of, i. 197
Neots, St., curious legends of, i. 207
Neville's Cross, battle of, ii. 280
Newbury, Jack of, i. 90 ; best work
accomplished by the brave clo-
thier of, i. 91 ; persecution of
early Reformers at, ib. ; two hot
battles during the Civil War at,
i. 92
New Forest, chronicles of, ii. 137 ;
record of the death of Bufus in,
ii. 138
Newton, Sir Isaac, anecdote of, ii. 15
Nonesuch, approach to the palace
of Queen Elizabeth at, ii. 81 ; in-
terview between Elizabeth and
Essex at, ii. 83 ; its subsequent
occupation, and the last relics of,
ii. 86
Norfolk, its coast, towns, and rivers,
centuries ago, ii. 27 ; last Cath-
olic insurrection in, ii. 33
North Curry, respect for King John's
memory at, i. 135
Northumberland, Earl of, his un-
successful attempt to place Lady
Jane Grey on the throne, ii. 15 ;
failure of the Catholic rebellion
excited by, ii. 281 ; heraldic de-
scription of the chief actors in the
Catholic rebellion of, ii. 284 ; re-
cords of the family an epitome
of English history, ii. 291
Norton Fitzwarren, legend of, i. 134
Norwich, art-treasures of, ii. €6 ;
old houses and churches of, ii. 68;
the history of, ii. 69 ; record of a
royal visit to, ii. 71; historical
associations of Moushold Heath,
east of, ib. ; distinguished men of,
ii. 72 ; a legend of, ii. 197
306
Index.
Noy, William, Cromwell's Attorney-
General, incidents in the career
of, i. 7 ; old legal story of, i. 8
OPIE the painter, i. 230
Orwell, the, channel of, i. 310
" Other Half Stone," the, a runic
cross, i. 211
PADSTOW, old fishing town, de-
cline of, i. 226 ; invaluable
sands of, i. 227 ; Church of St.
Endoc choked up by the sands
near, ib. ; legend respecting the
cause of the sand-bar at, i. 229
Paley, Archdeacon, anecdotes of, ii.
177
Palmer, Fellow of Magdalen Col-
lege, Oxford, scene at the martyr-
dom of, i. 91
Parson, William, wild son of a
baronet, anecdote of, i. 43
Paston Letters, where indited, ii.
59 ; extracts from, ii. fit), 71
Penryn, pathetic tragedy near, i.
231
Penzance, curious custom at, i. 238
Peterborough, view from the Ca-
thedral of, ii. 104 ; Benedictine
abbey at, ii. 165 ; troubles of the
first Norman abbot of, ii. 166 ;
west front of the Cathedral of, ii.
167 ; queens buried in the abbey
of, ii. 171 ; a celebrated divine of,
ii. 177
Philip and Mary, their marriage at
Winchester, ii. 126
Plantagenet, Humphrey, Duke of
Gloucester, his shrine in the
monastery of St. Albans, ii. 1-47
Planting, Evelyn's illustrations of
the profits of, ii. 95
Pleshy, historical memoranda of, i.
267 ; Duke of Gloucester (uncle
of Kicbard II.) buried at, i. 271
Plymouth, general view of, i. 181 ;
historical memoranda of, i. 182 ;
traditions of Sir Francis Drake
at, i. 183; Clarendon's account
of, i. 184 ; romantic episode of
the Civil War at, ib. ; besieged
by Sir John Digby, i. 186 ; pic-
ture, in 1809, of, i. 188; fre-
quenters of old Haydon's shop
at, ib. ; characters of, i. 191 ;
traditions of the Barjieur and
Ajricaine at, i. 192 ; port-admirals
of, i. 194 ; the wrecks of Corunna
and the Walcheren Expedition
at the Military Hospital of, ib. ;
stories of French prisoners in
the depots of, i. 195 ; the press-
gangs of, i. 196 ; Nelson in the
streets of, i. 197 ; follies of
sailors at, i. 198 ; distinguished
natives of, ib. ; erection of the
Breakwater at, i. 199
Pochard, the, a species of duck,
craft of, ii. 65
Polesden, Sheridan's retreat in the
woods of, ii. 106
Prestonbury and Cranbrook Castles,
old camps near, and narrative of
events recorded of, i. 157
Prideaux, Dean, incidents in the
life of, i. 205
Prideaux, the, paintings by Opie
in the old house of, i. 230.
Purchas, Samuel, his life and
works, i. 292
RANMOEE COMMON, anecdote
of a native of, i. 107 ; anec-
dotes of the owners of a splendid
mansion on, ii. 108
Kann, John, Sixteen-string Jack,
i. 44 ; matchless impudence of,
i. 45; exploits of, ib.; trial and
execution of, i. 46
Ranworth Decoy, a recent travel-
ler's description of, ii. 62 •
Beading, siege of, i. 88 ; remark-
able men connected with, i. S--9 ;
Queen Elizabeth worshipping in
the Church of St. Lawrence at,
ib. ; strange legacy to the maid-
servants of, ib.
Reading Abbey, story of a relic
possessed by, i. 85 ; Heraclius,
Bishop of Jerusalem, received by
Index.
307
Henry I. at, i. 86 ; royal person-
ages buried in, ib. ; consequences
of the stubbornness of Hugh
Faringdon, the abbot, to, i. 87 ;
trick played by Henry VII. on
one of the last abbots of, ib. ;
royal marriage at, i. 88
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, anecdote of,
i. 141
Richard II., murder of his uncle,
the Duke of Gloucester, by, i.
2(3!) ; death of, i. 872
Eobin Hood and Little John, York-
shire legend of, ii. 257 ; differ-
ence of opinion respecting the
place of their burial, ii. 261 ; aris-
tocratic claims of the former,
ib.
Rock, the Nut-cracking, a remark-
able logan, i. 160
Rokeby, memoranda of Scott's visit
to, ii. 263
Rowdon Wood, remarkable whirl-
wind at, i. 179
Rowe, the poet, anecdotes of, i. 180
Rufus, William, his oppressions
and his death, ii. 121
Runnymede, signature of Magna
Charta at, and reflections sug-
gested by that event, i. 56
SAFFRON WALDEN, origin of
the singular name of, i. 290
Sandwich, Earl of, his death at
Solebay, ii. 13
Scarborough, our welcome to, ii.
122 ; rival hotels at, ii. 223 ; curi-
ous effect of reflexion at, ii. 224 .
animated scene at, ii. 225 ; a
changeless amusement at, ii. 227
conversation with a fisherman at
ii. 228 ; bathing at, ii. 230
evening stereoscope at, ii. 384
morning stereoscope at, ii. 237
herring-boats coming in at,ii.239
plague of ladybirds at, ii. 241 ,
artillery and riflemen at, ib. ; the
tradesmen of, ii. 243; Sunday
at, ii. 244 ; dangers of, ib. ;
Sunday night supper at, ii. 245 ;
migrating from, ii. 246 ; fisher-
men and pilots of, ii. 247 ; out-
door sights at, ii. 249 ; legend of
the Norwegians at, ii. 251 ;
Gaveston, Edward II.'s favourite,
besieged in, ii. 252 ; adventure of
an adherent of Sir Thomas
Wyatt's rebellion at, ii. 253 ;
besieged by the Parliamentary
troops, ii. 254; churches in old
times at, ii. 255 ; legends of, ii.
256 ; legends of Robin Hood in
connexion with, ii. 257
Seymour, Sir Michael, capture of
the "Thetis," a French ship, by,
i. 190
Shakespeare, falsification of his-
tory by, ii. 150 ; Katharine of
Arragon portrayed by, ii. 1 63
Shelley, tradition at Eton of, i. 75
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, anec-
dotes of, ii. 106
Shoeburyness, antiquities at, and
legends of, i. 265
Silbury Hill and Druidic circles,
rival theories concerning, i. 107
Silverton Park, portrait of Sir
Joshua Reynolds at, i. 141
Sion House, successive occupants
of, i. 23 ; Robert Adams's trans-
formation of, i. 25
Skelton, satirical verses on an old
ale-wife by, ii. 97
Sokebridge, traditions of, ii. 132
Solebay, tremendous battle against
the French and Dutch at, ii. 12
Somerset House, how and by whom
built, i. 6
Somersby, birth-place of our great
modern poet, ii. 203
Southampton, traditions of, ii. 133;
scene of a well-known story of
King Canute near, ii. 134; his-
torical memoranda of, ib. ; scene
described by Shakespeare at, ii.
135 ; residence of Lord Peter-
borough near, ib. ; Dr. Watts
one of the prides of, ii. 137
Southwold, an old town of Suffolk,
ii. 10
308
Index.
Spinsters' Eock, the, traditions of,
i. 158 ; a fallen logan stone near,
i. 159
Staines, origin of the name of, i. 55
Steele, Mr.Javendermerchant, mys-
terious murder of, i. 47
Stonehenge, old legend of, L 109
Sudbury, Gainsborough's sketches
of the scenery around, i. 318
Suffolk, Crabbe's sketches of the
coast scenery of, i. 320 ; a novel-
ist's praise of the scenery of, ii.
1 ; new feature in the coast
scenery of, ii. 12
Surrey, Earl of, cupbearer of Henry
VIII., his career and death, ii. 8
Swan-upping festival, i. 55
Swithin, St. removal of his relics,
and origin of a popular super-
stition respecting, ii. 118 ; a mir-
acle performed by, ii. 132
TAUNTON, sceneryin the vicinity
of, i. 125 ; sieges, during the
Civil War, of, ib. ; holiday kept
at, i. 120 ; Duke of Monmouth's
welcome at, ib. ; James II.'s ven-
geance, after the battle of Sedge-
moor, on, i. 129 ; Jeffreys' Bloody
Assizes at, i. 131
Tavistock, traditions of the abbey
of, i. 171 ; legend of an old Cava-
lier mansion near, i. 173 ; visit of
Prince Charles to, i. 174 ; legends
of St. Eustace Church at, ib. :
Drake and other distinguished
natives of, i. 175
Temple Bar, builder of the hair-
dresser's shop at, i. 311
Thames, the, the swans, their
keepers, and walks on the banks
of, i. 55 ; limits of the jurisdiction
of the Conservators of, i. 200
Thatched House Tavern, curious
portraits belonging to the Dilet-
tante Society at, i. 83
Thomson the poet, anecdotes of,
i. 104
Tilbury Fort, Queen Elizabeth's
address to her army at, i. 203
Tilbury, East, circumstance worthy
of notice respecting, i. 264
Tilbury, West, the church of. i. 205
Tintagel, King Arthur's old palace
by the sea, traditions of, i. 222
Tiverton, one celebrated native
of, i. 137; fanatical peasantry
defeated by German mercenaries
at, i. 139 ; memories of the civil
war connected with, ib. ; the
Greenway almshouses at, i. 140 ;
lace and lace-makers of, i. 141
Tooke, Home, curate of Brentford,
i. 18
Touch, the royal, absurd ceremony
of, i. 68
Townsend, the celebrated Bow-
street runner, anecdote of, i. 44
Townsend, Sir John, duel fought on
horseback by, i. 51
Tregeagle, the wicked, a Cornish
wizard, story of, i. 215
Trelawny, Bishop, committed to
the Tower by James II., i. 208
Tremaynes, the old seat of, i. 79 ;
twin brothers in the family of, ib.
Trevelyan, George, Cavalier gentle-
man, his wife's devotion to, i. 36
Trotter, Dr., ravages of scurvy
stopped in the navy by, i. 1!)7
Turpin, Dick, the highwayman, a
mean and cruel thief, i. 41 ; quot-
ations from a ballad on the ad-
ventures of, ib. ; the execution of,
i. 42 ; sketch of his career, i. 25(i
Tyntes, the, crusading tradition of,
i. 124
YEENOX, ADMIRAL, his ser-
vices, and factious opponents
of, i, 309
Vermuyden, Cornelius, his diffi-
culties and perseverance in drain-
ing the fen country of Lincoln-
shire, ii. l x 7
w
ALSINGHAM, the centre of
mediaeval pilgrimages, ii. 74:
remarks of Erasmus on. ib. : in-
teresting ruins at, ii. 75 ; royal
Index.
309
pilgrimages to, ib. ; Cromwell's
inquiries relating to the shrine of,
ii. 77; fragments of ecclesiastical
grandeur at, ib.
Waltham Abbey, legend of, i. 258
Walton, Izaak, angling reminiscence
of, i. 77 ; his epitaph in Win-
chester Cathedral, ii. 120
Watts, Dr., memoranda of, ii. 137
Wellington, town from which
Arth ur Wellesley chose his title,
ii. 13G
Wells, trial of the abbot of Glaston-
bury at, i. 114
Westhumble, pleasant retreat of
General and Fanny DArblay at,
ii. 104
Whichenoure, Staffordshire, curious
ceremony at, i. 278
White Stone, the, Arthurian legend
of, i. 160
Whitney, the highwayman, good
story of, i. 40
Widdicomb- in -the -Moors, King
Death's ghastly visit to, i. 161
Wilkes, the Franciscan Club broken
up by, i. 84
William of Wykeham, anecdote of,
i. 70; outline of his life, ii. 119
Wiltshire, description and traditions
of the Downs of, i. 94
Winchester, historical memoranda
of, ii. 117 ; patron saint of, ii.
118 ; the cathedral and its build-
ers, ib. ; admirable charity re-
established by William of Wyke-
ham at, ii. 120; tombs of emi-
nent men in the cathedral of, ii.
ib. ; delight of Rufus in, ii. 121 ;
royal marriage at, ii. 124 ; palace
built by Charles II. at, ii. 127 ;
trial of Lady Alice Lisle by Judge
Jeffreys at, ii. 128 ; traditions of
the castle of, ii. 132
Windsor, pretty legend connected
with, i. 57 ; Froissart's descrip-
tion of the parting of King Rich-
ard and Queen Isabella at the
old Deanery of, i. 58 ; rejoicings
on the foundation of the order of
the Blue Garter at, i. 59; dis-
covery of the body of Charles I.
in St. George's Chapel at, ib. ;
gigantic tomb ordered by Henry
VIII. for St. George 7 s Chapel at,
i. 60; memories of old King
George III. at, i. 6 1 ; grand old
oak, and legend connected with
it, at, i. 66 ; Shakspearean asso-
ciations of, i. 67 ; Henry VI. the
saint of, i. 71 ; house of the Duke
of Buckingham at, i. 74.
Windsor Castle, George IV. 's resi-
dence at, i. 65; Miss Burney's
description of a pretty scene on
the terrace of, i. 66 ; conjectures
as to where the first building of
the name stood, i. 67 ; royal re-
miniscences of, i. 67 ; memoranda
of Edward III. at, i. 69 ; relics
once regarded as sacred at, i. 71 ;
the royal tomb-house a centre of
tradition at, i. 72 ; relic of Quen-
tin Matsys at, i. 73; tradition
respecting the buildings of the
upper ward of, ib. ; traditions of
Henry VIII. and Elizabeth at,
i. 74
Wistman's Wood, Dartmoor, tradi-
tions of the old mythology con-
nected with, i. 164
Witchcraft, last sufferers for, i. 295
Wolcot, Dr., short notice of, i. 204
Wolsey, Cardinal, royal tomb pre-
sented by Henry VIII. to, i. 72 ;
sketch of his career, i. 311 ; his
magnificent foundations, i. 313;
Skelton's satire on, and Sir
Thomas More's sketch of him in
all his dignity, i. 314 ; his sump-
tuous establishment, i. 315 ; his
procession in state to West-
minster Hall, i. 316
Wotton, the birth-place of John
Evelyn, ii. 1 12
YARMOUTH, position of, ii. 27;
effects produced by the agency
of the sea at, ii. 29 ; origin and
progress of, ib. ; jealousy and
310
Index.
quarrel between its fishermen
and those of the Cinque Ports,
ii. 32 ; demonstration of Wat
Tyler at, ii. 88 ; incidents in the
history of, ib. ; celebrated men
connected with, ii. 34 ; the me-
mory of Nelson at, ii. 35 ; the
lanes and vehicles of, ii. 36 ; a
quaint old building at, ii. 37 ;
Fishermen's Hospital at, ii. 38;
old priory church of St. Nicholas
at, ii. 39 ; most remarkable bit
of antiquity in, ii. 40; naval me-
mories of, ii. 41; shipwrecks, real
and imaginary, at, ii. 42 ; Da-
vid Copperfield's description of,
ii. 43 ; herring and mackerel
fishing at, ii. 44 ; process of
smoking herring at, ii. 46 ; fish-
auctions on the old jetty at, ii. 48 ;
Captain Manby's apparatus first
tested at, ii. 49
York, memorabilia of the Emperor
Severus at, ii. 213; Geta stabbed
by Caracalla at, ii. 214 ; terrible
day of retaliation at, ii. 21 5
York Minster, three conflagrations
of, ii. 117 ; historical associations
of, ii. 217 ; greatest curiosities of,
ii. 220
Yorkshire, view from the highest
point of Mickle Fell of, ii. 205
York, Duke of, tremendous naval
battle against the Dutch led by,
ii. 12 ; verses on his triumph over
the Dutch fleet, ii. 15
York House, residence of the Duke
of Buckingham, ii. 17
THE END.
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