MOTOR TOURS
IN YORKSHIRE

I

THE DALES

In the motorist's life there are hours that can never be forgotten. It may be some hour of sunshine that haunts us, when the warm wind, we remember, was heavy with the scent of gorse or pungent with the stinging breath of the sea; or some hour when the road lay white and straight before us across a moor, and the waves of heather rolled away from us to the horizon in long curves of colour, and as we sped over the miles we seemed no nearer to the shore of the purple sea nor to the end of the white straight road; or it may be, perhaps, the hour of our gradual approach to some ancient city transfigured in the sunset, "soft as old sorrow, bright as old renown." But, whatever the scene may be, whether moor or fen,[4] forest or shore, there are two elements which are always present in the motorist's memory of a happy run—a good surface, and a good engine.

No one could travel in Yorkshire, I think, without adding to his store of unforgotten hours. So great is the variety of scenery and interest that all must somewhere find the landscape that appeals to them. Some will remember those moors of Cleveland that have no visible limit, and some the many-coloured dales of the West Riding, and some the straight roads of the plain where the engine hums so gaily. Some will ever after dream of the day when they followed the course of the wooded Tees; others will dream of the distant towers of York or Beverley, or of the heights and depths of the Buttertubs Pass. And, to be quite frank, there are some to whom this last exciting dream will be rather of the nature of a nightmare.

In more ways than one Yorkshire is a good field for motoring. Throughout the greater part of the county there are few hedges, and the stone walls that take the place of these are low. The roads are wide and their surface[5] good, except in unfrequented places. Now in Yorkshire the places that are unfrequented are very few indeed, and it is in connection with this fact that the motorist has the greatest advantage over every other kind of tourist. He can choose his own time for visiting Bolton or Fountains or the incomparable Rievaulx; he can see them when the dew is on the grass and the glamour of solitude is in the woods. To be alone with our emotions is what we all desire in the presence of wide spaces or stately aisles; and in this county, where there is so much beauty to be seen and so many to see it, those only who possess "speed as a chattel" can ever hope to be alone. It is almost impossible to lay too much stress on our advantages, as motorists, in this matter of securing peace.

Looking back upon a tour among the Yorkshire dales, I see that the keynote was struck at the very outset by the little town of Skipton, with its grey granite houses and slated roofs, its wide street and the castle above it, the ancient church and the tombs of the great. Such are a hundred Yorkshire villages and little towns. Each of them, it seems, is[6] connected with some historic name. In the case of Skipton the name is Clifford. If the first builders of the castle and the church were not Cliffords, but de Romilles, it was the Cliffords who made both castle and church what they now are. It was a Clifford who built the long gallery and the octagon tower that we see beyond the grass of the great outer court; it was a Clifford who repaired all the other towers; a Clifford who devised the curious shell-pictures that line the guardroom; Cliffords who lived for centuries in the castle, and the few Cliffords that died in their beds who enriched the church with their tombs. Their motto, "Désormais," stands up against the sky in letters of stone above the round towers of their gateway, and their arms are carved above the inner door. The court on which this door opens, the "Conduit Court," as it is called, is the very core of Skipton, and one of the most romantic places I have ever seen. It would seize the dullest imagination—this little paved enclosure shut in on every side, the long flight of steps, the doorways with the crumbling carvings, the mullioned windows, the yew-tree[7] that has seen so many centuries, the low stone seat with its shields, the Norman archway through which all the Cliffords have passed. Most of the feet that came this way awoke ringing echoes under the old arch, for the Cliffords were wont to be dressed in coats of mail. They were all mighty in war. The first armour-clad baron of the name, he who began the building of this court and died at Bannockburn, has clattered through this doorway; and after him the hero of Créçy; and later on that other who fought for Henry V. and died at Meaux; and he who fell at St. Albans in the cause of Lancaster; and his son and avenger, called "the Butcher," who slew that "fair gentleman and maiden-like person," the young Earl of Rutland, and was himself slain at Towton; and the great sailor, Cumberland, who made nine voyages and fought the Spaniards for Queen Elizabeth. Here, too, when he came to his own at last, has stood that strange, romantic figure, the Shepherd Lord, who spent his youth in hiding among the northern hills, yet who, despite his love of solitude and learning, could not forget his long ancestry[8] of fighting men, and himself fought on Flodden Field.

Among all these heroes the kings who have come through this doorway cut rather a sorry figure: Edward II., a sorry figure in any company; Richard III., a usurper here as in larger courts, playing the master while the true lord of Skipton was keeping sheep; and Henry VIII., who came here to take part in a wedding—a spectator for once. The bride on this occasion was his niece, Eleanor Brandon, the daughter of that love-match that was so great a failure, between the Duke of Suffolk and Mary, Princess of England and Queen Dowager of France. The wedding ceremony took place in the long gallery, which was built for the occasion by the bridegroom's father. Lady Eleanor's granddaughter, Lady Pembroke, was more closely connected with this spot where we are standing than any Clifford who came before her.

THE CONDUIT COURT, SKIPTON CASTLE.

[9]

Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, who rustled through this archway many a time, no doubt, while the castle of her ancestors was being repaired at her charges, was a very busy woman. "Her house was a home for the young, and a retreat for the aged; an asylum for the persecuted, a college for the learned, and a pattern for all." She restored six castles, we are told, and built seven churches and two hospitals; she erected a monument to Spenser; she wrote some memoirs, too, with a record of all these things, and wherever she made her mark she stamped her initials. You can see them, very large and clear, if you look overhead upon the leaden spouting of this court, and you may see them again in the windows of the church. Anne Clifford's disposition was in no respect a retiring one, as we may gather from her famous answer to the Secretary of State who wished a nominee of his own to stand for her borough of Appleby. "I have been bullied by a usurper," she said, "and neglected by a Court, but I will not be dictated to by a subject. Your man shall not stand."

Her work in restoring her castle of Skipton was no light undertaking, for it had lately endured a three years' siege by the army of the Parliament, and its seven towers must have been sadly battered before the day of[10] its proud surrender. So defiant was that surrender that the garrison marched out through the great entrance gate beneath the motto of the Cliffords, "accordingley to the Honour of a Souldier, with colours flying, Trumpets sounding, Drums beating, Matches lighted at both ends, and Bullets in their Mouthes," while the commissioned officers took with them "their wearing apparell that was properley their owne in their Portmantles."

One other pious work did Anne perform. She made a magnificent tomb for her father the Admiral, third Earl of Cumberland—who fought the Armada with the Queen's glove in his hat—and she set upon it seventeen armorial shields, all gilt and painted, and a mighty black marble slab, and a list of honours. We may see it in the chancel of the church she repaired; this grey church that stands so picturesquely at the end of the long street, with the hollyhocks and daisies brightening its dark walls. Opposite to the grave of Lady Pembroke's father is that of her little brother, "an infant of most rare towardness in all the appearances that might promise wisdome"; and near to this[11] is the splendid tomb, with restored brasses, of the first Earl of Cumberland. Such of the earlier Cliffords as found burial at all, including the Shepherd Lord, were laid in Bolton Abbey, whose monks were connected with this church and gave it the delicately carved screen that adds so much to its beauty.

It is sometimes said or hinted that Jane Clifford, the Rose of the World, was in some way connected with Skipton. This can hardly be the case, however, for the Fair Rosamund was born and spent her childhood on the banks of the Wye, and was laid in her temporary grave at Godstowe long before Edward II. gave this castle to the Cliffords who came after her.

From Skipton, where homely comfort may be found at the sign of the "Black Horse," an expedition should be made to Malham and its famous Cove, about twelve miles away; and if time allows, the run may be lengthened very enjoyably by rejoining the main road at Hellifield and skirting the moors as far as Clapham or Ingleton. In this way we shall see something of the craggy country of[12] Craven, of which Camden wrote long ago: "What with huge stones, steep rocks, and rough ways, this place is very wild and unsightly." The huge stones and steep rocks are still there, but the way by which we go is very far from being rough; it is, on the contrary, such an exceptionally fine road that it seems almost a pity to leave it. Those who wish to see Malham, however, must turn off at Gargrave or Coniston.

Much has been written concerning Malham Cove, and many long adjectives used. Some writers have even declared themselves terrified by it; but these, I think, must have been of a timid temperament. It is the position of the place, no doubt, that has this overwhelming effect upon some minds: the sudden and unexpected presence of a great semi-circular cliff amid quiet undulating fields. If one could be carried blindfold to the foot of it I can imagine that it would be truly imposing; but it is visible from a distance as a grey scar on the face of the green hillside, and thus a good deal of its effect is lost in the course of a gradual approach. The best way to reach it is to walk across the fields from[13] Malham village, following the course of the Aire, the stream that tunnels its way so strangely into the Cove. There is, it is true, a narrow and steep road which commands a fine view of it as a whole, but there is no room here for any but a small car to turn, and there is no doubt that the cliff can best be seen on foot.

This is true also of its more imposing neighbour, Gordale Scar. Says Wordsworth—

"Let thy feet repair

To Gordale chasm, terrific as the lair
Where young lions couch,"

and indeed, as the hill that approaches Gordale Chasm is nearly as terrific as the chasm itself, it is certainly best, if not imperative, to repair to it on thy feet. I believe that the tarn which lies upon the moor above Malham Cove, and long ago belonged to the monks of Fountains, may be reached by road, but I have not been there myself.

From Malham the way is narrow and surprisingly tortuous as far as Hellifield, but here we rejoin the splendid high road we left at Coniston, and speed along it through[14] Ribblesdale to Settle. This small town has progressive ambitions. It "treats" the surface of its main road, it lights its streets by electricity, it has a fine new garage and a hotel that has the air of being nice. It is attractive, too, and pretty as well as praiseworthy, with hills behind it and a tiny weir above the bridge. Beyond it we pass the ebbing and flowing spring of Giggleswick in its stone basin by the wayside; climb the long hill under the grey crags of Giggleswick Scar, with a splendid backward view, and run down by wood and beck to Clapham, where the village cross stands close to the stream in the shadow of the trees. Not very far away is the famous cave, bristling with stalactites. After leaving Clapham we cross a wide heath, with the throttle open.

First and last this is a good run. On the left is the open country; on the right that wild land of huge stones and steep rocks that seemed to Camden so unsightly, in an age when the whole duty of a landscape was to smile. Clambering on the hillside in a cleft of the crags are the narrow, winding streets of Ingleton, and a viaduct spanning the[15] valley. This valley, which is hardly wider than a gorge, is said to be well worth exploring; but neither its waterfall, Thornton Force, nor its caves of Yordas and Weathercote, can be seen by road. They hardly concern us here. It concerns us rather to return to Skipton, and thence to strike up into the heart of the hills.

Climbing the road above the castle we see how Skipton lies in a hollow among the moors. Behind us to the south is the Brontë country; Haworth and its graves far off beyond Airedale, and Stonegappe only three miles away. It was at Stonegappe that Charlotte reluctantly taught the little Sidgwicks, and no doubt made them suffer nearly as much as she suffered herself from her over-sensitive feelings. Embsay Moor appears on our right as we rise, and beyond it the savage outline of Rylstone Fell, with the ruined watch-tower of the Nortons, the foes of the Cliffords, showing desolately against the sky upon the topmost crag. Of the Nortons and their tower, and the daughter of their house, and of the White Doe of Rylstone and her weekly journey across the[16] moors to the grave of the youth with whom the Nortons ended, Wordsworth has told us. We are running down now into "the valley small," where the house of the Nortons once stood, and here is the Church where

"the bells of Rylstone played

Their Sabbath music—God us ayde!"

At Threshfield we turn to the left and are in Wharfedale.

The names of all these Yorkshire Dales are very familiar in our ears. Wharfedale, Wensleydale, Swaledale, Teesdale—they are all words with a charm in them. And here, as we glide out of a wood, is Wharfedale spread before us; and we know at last that it is not only in the name that the charm lies.

The river flows below through the wide valley and winds away in shining curves into the far distance, past the bluff outline of Kilnsey Crag, past the dark belt of firs, till it vanishes among the folds of the jewelled hills. For in their liquid brilliancy the colouring of all these dales is that of gems, of amethyst and emerald, of sapphire and[17] turquoise and opal; and the sunlight that floods them on the days when we are fortunate has the luminous gold of the topaz. As we drive under the overhanging crag of Kilnsey—"the highest and steepest that ever I saw," says Camden—and pass the tiny village where the sheep belonging to the Abbey of Fountains used to be shorn, the hills begin to close in, till, as we draw near Kettlewell, they rise round us so protectively that we seem to have entered a new and calmer world. Kettlewell itself is so calm as to appear asleep. Its grey houses, shadowed by trees and sheltered by the mighty shoulder of Great Whernside, are defended from every wind, and from every sound but the rippling of the Wharfe. Beyond this peaceful spot, where we cross the river, the road is rather rough, and after passing through pretty Buckden it is also extremely narrow. However, it leads to Hubberholme, and no more than that need be asked of any road.

At Hubberholme the river is still wide, and thickly strewn with stones; the slopes of the hills are very near and steep, and are clothed with bracken and fir-trees, and deeply cleft[18] by tiny becks; masses of wild flowers fringe the banks with clouds of mystic blue; and beyond an old stone bridge stands the church, low and grey, with a paved pathway and a porch bright with crimson ramblers. The rough walls have stood in this lonely spot for many centuries. The door is open, and we may see for ourselves the strange state of the masonry within, whose builders, when they left it thus rugged and unplastered, little thought that its unfinished appearance would be tenderly cherished by the antiquarians of a future age. A rare rood-loft of oak divides the tiny chancel from the nave. This loft dates from the year 1558, the last year that the Old Faith reigned in England; and in this remote hiding-place among the hills it escaped the vigilant eye of Elizabeth and the destructive hands of the Puritans.

On returning to Kettlewell we shall find it worth our while to continue the journey down the dale on the road that passes through Conistone, for though it is not so good, as regards surface, as that on the right bank of the river, it commands a different—and[19] a very lovely—series of views. From Grassington we cross to Linton, on the right bank, where there are some little falls whose prettiness is hardly striking enough to allure us from our way; and at Burnsall we should keep to the same side of the stream rather than follow the public conveyances to the left bank. Horse-drawn travellers may well be excused for shirking the hill above Burnsall; but few gradients have any terrors for us, and the backward view of Wharfedale from the high hillside is more beautiful than anything we have yet seen in Yorkshire. The two roads meet near Barden Tower, the beloved retreat of the Shepherd Lord.

Henry, the tenth Lord Clifford, was a very small boy when his father, "the Butcher," lost his estates, his cause, and his life, on the blood-red grass of Towton. It was not without reason that John Clifford was surnamed "the Butcher." It was in vain that young Rutland knelt to him for mercy on Wakefield Bridge, "holding up both his hands and making dolorous countenance, for his speech was gone for fear." "By God's blood," snarled[20] Clifford, "thy father slew mine, and so will I do thee and all thy kin!" And he plunged his dagger into the boy's heart. "In this act," says the historian, "the Lord Clifford was accounted a tyrant and no gentleman. With his hands still dyed with the son's blood he savagely cut off the head of the dead father, the busy, plotting head of Richard, Duke of York, and carried it, crowned with paper, 'in great despite and much derision,'" to the Lancastrian Queen. "Madam, your war is done," he cried, "here is your King's ransom!" Margaret of Anjou, for all her manly ways, became rather hysterical at the hideous sight, laughing violently with pale lips; and Clifford's triumph was short. While he lay with an arrow through his throat upon the field of Towton—which we shall see later on—his little son was hurried away to a shepherd's hut in the north, where in the course of twenty-five years or so on the hillside he learnt more than the tending of sheep. He became the gentlest of his line, a lover of learning, a watcher of the skies; and though at last Skipton came back to him, and Brougham, and Pendragon, and many another castle, he lived here quietly in this simple tower above the wooded Wharfe, befriending the poor, reading his books, and now and then reading the stars as well, with his friends the monks of Bolton.

FROM THE ROAD NEAR BARDEN TOWER.

[21]

"And ages after he was laid in earth,
The good Lord Clifford was the name he bore."

His descendant, the notable Lady Pembroke, whose initials are so conspicuous at Skipton, expended some of her energy here at Barden. This was one of the six castles she restored, and over the door we may read the inscription she placed there according to her habit, with all her names and titles recorded at length, and a reference to a complimentary text about "the repairer of the breach."

Those who wish to see the famous Strid—and none should miss the sight—may leave their cars by the wayside at a point not very far from Barden Tower; but this is not the course I recommend. The Bolton woods are beautiful beyond description, and it is only by walking or driving through them from the Abbey to the Strid, or even to Barden[22] Tower, that one can fully enjoy their ferny slopes and serried stems, and the little shining streams that slip through them to the Wharfe. George Eliot and George Lewes once spent a whole day wandering together along these paths, and we might follow in their footsteps very happily, I think. Those who prefer to drive must hire carriages, for motors are not admitted to the woods; but the existence of a very nice little hotel at Bolton Bridge makes everything easy.

By one means or another the Strid must be seen. Here the Wharfe is contracted into a narrow cleft, an abrupt chasm between low masses of rock; and the angry river, suddenly straitened in its course, has in its convulsions bitten into the stone till it is riddled with a thousand holes and hollows. When the river is low it is possible to leap across from rock to rock. This is the leap that Alice de Meschines' boy attempted but failed to achieve so many years ago, when the hounds he held in leash hesitated to follow him, and so dragged him back into the torrent. "I will make many a poor man's son my heir," said his mother; and the priory that her parents had founded at Embsay was moved by her to Bolton, and greatly enriched in memory of the drowned Boy of Egremond. Here is the stone from which he leapt, they say, and here the stone he never reached, and both are polished by the feet of those who have been more successful. This legend—and I fear the unkinder "myth" would be the more accurate word—has prompted several poets to make verses, but has signally failed to inspire them.

BOLTON PRIORY.

[23]

All that is left of Bolton Priory is before us when we reach the Cavendish Memorial. Close to this spot, though hidden from the road, is the log hut known as Hartington Seat, the point of view whence the ruin looks its loveliest. We are at the edge of a wooded cliff. The Priory lies far below us in its level graveyard, framed in trees; the river sweeps away from our feet, and after curving thrice, disappears into the blue haze of the hills. Between the churchyard and the foot of the red cliffs beyond the Wharfe lies the regular line of the monks' stepping-stones, by which for many centuries, probably, the congregation of the[24] faithful came from the hills to their devotions; and came, too, on other occasions, laden with fruit or game for the hospitable table of the prior. Do not go to Bolton on a bank holiday, nor, if you can help it, in August, lest you should find as many people as were there in the days of its splendour, when the canons and the lay-brethren and the men-at-arms and the thirty servants and the unnumbered serfs and the frequent guests made it a stirring place. Yet it is always possible to find an early hour when there is peace in the ruined choir, where somewhere in the shadow of the arcaded walls the dust of the Shepherd Lord lies under the grass. Bolton was sold to the Shepherd's son, the first Earl of Cumberland, at the time of the Dissolution, when the building of the west tower was brought to a sudden standstill, and the nave, the parish church, was separated by a wall from the choir, the monks' church, which would be needed no more. There stands the tower, still unfinished; and here is the nave, now, as then, a parish church, where for seven hundred years without interruption, it is said, services have been held Sunday by Sunday. The beauty of the interior, unfortunately, is not great. The Early Victorian Age has left its fatal stamp upon it. It was not till forty years ago that the walls were cleansed of whitewash; and in 1851 a large sum of money was mis-spent at the Great Exhibition in acquiring some dreadful glass.

THE CHOIR, BOLTON PRIORY

[25]

The motorist's route from Bolton Bridge to Harrogate is undoubtedly the moorland road by Blubberhouses. The contour-book describes it as rough and steep; but the steepness is nowhere very severe, and the surface is now excellent, while the moors have their usual charms—charms not only for the artist, though these are appealing enough, but special charms for the motorist too, the delight of an unfenced road and a wide country. Not that this road lies altogether on the moors. There are woods here and there, and soft, green beds of bracken, and slopes of massive rock; and presently we pass the great reservoir of the Leeds waterworks. Then the country opens out again, and we have a series of fine[26] wide views till Harrogate appears below us, occupying a considerable proportion of the landscape.

Harrogate is exactly what one would expect it to be: a place of large hotels and fine shops, a place whose ideals are comfort and prosperity. Those who like to motor round a centre—a plan which has many advantages—could hardly find a better base for their operations.

"The great merit of Harrogate," wrote George Eliot, "is that one is everywhere close to lovely open walks." Our field has widened since her day, but Harrogate's great merit is still its merit as a centre. In this respect it is superior even to York, though in itself not worthy to be named with that incomparable city. To the west, within easy distance, are Nidderdale and Wharfedale; to the north are Ripon, Fountains, and Jervaulx, with Middleham and even Wensleydale for the enterprising; to the south is Kirkstall Abbey on the outskirts of Leeds. Byland and Rievaulx may be seen in a single day's drive, and only twenty-one miles away is York itself.

[27]

Harrogate is so entirely, so aggressively modern, so resolute to let bygones be bygones, that one learns with something of a shock how it came by its name. Harrogate, it appears, means the Soldiers' Hill on the Road. The soldiers who lived on the hill were Roman: the road was the Roman road through the forest of Knaresborough. Except for this faint hint of an earlier and more strenuous life, the history of Harrogate is the history of its "Spaw." These crowded acres were a bare, uninhabited common at the end of the sixteenth century, when Captain Slingsby, wandering one day across the Stray, was led by the tewits to a spring that cured him of his ills, which had hitherto yielded only to the waters of Germany. He set a roof over the precious spot, and so this spring became the fons et origo of modern Harrogate. And the Stray, though now in the heart of a large town, is still uninhabited, still common-land; for a century after the discovery of the Tewit Well, when hotels were already thick upon the surrounding ground, an Act of Parliament was passed by which[28] two hundred acres of land were presented for ever to the people of Harrogate, to serve for the daily walks of those who drank the waters.

At Knaresborough, only three miles further on, we are in a very different world, the world of old houses and older tales, of monarchs and saints, of William the Conqueror and the proud de Stutteville, of Richard, king in name but not in deed, and of Oliver, king in deed but not in name—an inspiring world, one would think. The first view of the town, too—the river, and the high, unusual bridge, and the red houses on the hillside, and above them the castle that had once so proud a crown of towers—seems to promise much. Looking at that fragment of a fortress we remember those who have owned it; the de Burgh who built it; the de Stutteville who fought in the Battle of the Standard; Piers Gaveston, who is better forgotten; de Morville, murderer of Beckett, hiding here from justice; Queen Philippa, whom we are glad to remember for any reason; John of Gaunt; Charles I. And we remember[29] Richard II., a prisoner in the one tower that still stands, alone with his humiliating memories.

This one glimpse of the castle and its past, however, is all that Knaresborough can give us of romance. It is almost best to ask no more, for a nearer view of the crumbling keep will leave us very sad. The path that leads to it, the path that took de Morville to safety and Richard to prison, is neatly asphalted, and lighted with gas-lamps on stone bases, which the local guide-book describes as "ornamental." Hard by the door through which the sad king passed from his shame at Westminster, and went forth again to the mystery of Pontefract, stands a penny-in-the-slot machine. A custodian will show us the guardroom and its relics, and even the dungeon; but we must be careful to look at them in the right order, or we shall be rebuked. The wolf-trap must be seen before the Conqueror's chest, and Philippa's chest before the armour from Marston Moor. By this time the glamour has faded. Even the fine view from the castle rock must be inspected—inspected[30] is the right word—from nicely painted seats, placed at regular intervals in the shelter of clipped evergreens.

The most satisfactory place in Knaresborough is the Old Manor beside the river, where the original "roof-tree" round which the house was built still grows up through the rooms, and would be taller if a too zealous workman had not aspired to "make it tidy." A great deal of beautiful furniture has been gathered in the panelled rooms, including the sturdy and simple oak bedstead in which Oliver Cromwell slept when he was staying in the house that faces the Crown Hotel, in the upper part of the town. Perhaps the bed was brought here when Oliver's lodging was pulled down and rebuilt, as happened some time ago. The floor of his room was carefully preserved; that floor on which the landlady's little girl, peeping through the keyhole at "this extraordinary person," saw him kneeling at his prayers. It was in this town that he gathered his troops to meet the Scottish invasion, and from hence that he marched out, by way of Otley, Skipton, and Clitheroe,[31] to defeat the Duke of Hamilton at Preston. The siege of the castle was not his work: Fairfax had taken it by assault some years earlier. Cromwell had sad memories in connection with Knaresborough, for it was somewhere in its neighbourhood that his second boy, Oliver, was killed. "I thought he looked sad and wearied," said a contemporary who met him just before the battle of Marston Moor, "for he had had a sad loss—young Oliver had got killed to death not long before, I heard; it was near Knaresborough."

To see the Dropping Well we must cross the river by bridge or ferry, and walk along a pretty path under the beeches. Here, as everywhere in Knaresborough, disillusion dogs our steps. This beautiful curiosity of nature, this great overhanging rock, worn smooth by the perpetual dripping of the water, framed in moss and ferns, has been made into a "side-show," with a railing, an entrance fee, and a row of bowler hats, stuffed parrots, and other ornaments in process of petrifaction. On the other side of the river is St. Robert's[32] Chapel. Here, too, the world is too much with us.

Leland, that stout traveller, who "was totally enflammid with a love to see thoroughly al those partes of this opulente and ample reaulme ... and notid yn so doing a hole worlde of thinges very memorable," tells us how Robert Flower, the son of a man "that had beene 2 tymes mair of York," came to these rocks by the river Nidd "desiring a solitarie life as an hermite." He made himself this chapel, "hewen owte of the mayne stone"; and he seems to have had some persuasive power of goodness or wisdom that turned his enemies into friends. "King John was ons of an il-wille to this Robert Flour," yet ended by benefiting him and his, an unusual developement in the case of King John; and de Stutteville, who lived up at the castle, had actually set out to raid the hermitage, suspecting it to harbour thieves, when he too, persuaded by a vision or otherwise, suddenly became the hermit's friend. This tiny sanctuary, eight or nine feet long, with its altar and groined roof and recesses for[33] relics, all wrought in the solid rock, would be a place to stimulate the imagination if it were not that the surroundings and the guide are such as would cause the strongest imagination to wilt.

Some say that the black slab of marble which is now a memorial to Sir Henry Slingsby in the parish church once formed the altar-top in St. Robert's Chapel; others say it came from the Priory, and was raised there in honour of the saint who "forsook his fair lands" and caused the Priory's foundation. The slab lies in the Slingsby chapel, and records that Sir Henry was executed "by order of the tyrant Cromwell." Carlyle tells us that this Slingsby, "a very constant Royalist all along," was condemned for plotting the betrayal of Hull to the Royalists.

The road from Knaresborough to Ripon follows the valley of the Nidd as far as Ripley. This village has the air of being a feudal survival. Its cottages with their neatness and their flowers, its Hôtel de Ville, and even the "treated" surface of its excellent road, all bear the stamp of a close connection with the castle whose park gates are[34] at the corner. In the sixteenth century the village of Ripley was under the eye of a very masterful lady. It was to this castle that Oliver Cromwell, tired from fighting on Marston Moor, came in search of rest. Rest, however, was denied him. His hostess, whose husband was away, had no sympathy with fatigue that came from resisting the King's Majesty, and so poor Oliver—"sad and wearied," as we know, even before the battle—spent the night on a chair in the hall, while Lady Ingilby, seated opposite to him with a couple of pistols in her hands, kept her relentless eye upon him till the morning. When he rode away she told him it was fortunate for him that he had been so tractable. I think this fierce lady must have been agreeable to Oliver's grim humour.

The approach to Ripon is pretty, by a road shaded with trees. Above the town rises the cathedral, massive and stately if not superlatively beautiful. Though it is not one of our largest cathedrals, its history is immense.

Even St. Wilfrid's seventh-century church[35] was not the first that stood here, for before his remote day Eata had founded a monastery that was hardly built before the Danes burnt it. Indeed, the monastery was destroyed so often—by Danes, Anglo-Saxons, Normans, and Scots in turn—that every style of architecture, from Saxon to Perpendicular, is represented in the various restorations. There are even, I believe, in the crypt and chapter-house, fragments of Wilfrid's own church, among them being the curious slit called Wilfrid's Needle, which has been "mighty famous," as Camden said, for a great many centuries. The saint himself was mighty famous in his day, as he well deserved to be. Even still we know a good deal about him, through Bede and others: how, when he was a poor and ignorant boy of fourteen, "not enduring the frowardness of his stepmother, he went to seek his fortune," and was brought to the notice of Queen Eanfled, "whom for his wit and beauty he was not unfit to serve"; and how she sent him to Lindisfarne, where, "being of an acute understanding, he in a very short time[36] learnt the psalms and some books"; and how he refused a wife in France; and was presented by King Alfred of Deira with a monastery at Rhypum, here on this very hill; and was consecrated at Compiègne in a golden chair carried by singing bishops; and how he converted the people of Bosham by teaching them to fish with eel-nets, so that "they began more readily at his preaching to hope for heavenly goods"; and how he won the day in the great controversy at Whitby, and finally died as an archbishop and was buried at the south end of the altar here at Ripon. He was a very human saint, and much beloved. His church was destroyed by Edred, but his monastery grew in power. The most beautiful part of the present building is the Early English west front, which dates from the reign of Henry III.

Ripon is altogether charming, and still does homage very prettily to its patron, King Alfred, who made it a royal borough. He it was who ordained that every night a horn should be blown by the wakeman, and that any one who was robbed between[37] the blowing of the horn and the hour of sunrise should be repaid by the townsfolk. From his day to ours each night at nine o'clock the men of Ripon have heard the horn—three long, penetrating blasts before the town hall and three before the wakeman's house. Several centuries ago the wakeman became the mayor, and now he blows the horn by deputy. "Except ye Lord keep ye Cittie," are the words on the town hall, "ye wakeman waketh in vain"; and not far away, at one corner of the market-square, is a pretty old gabled house bearing this legend: "1604. In thys house lived a long time Hugh Ripley, ye last Wakeman and first Mayore of Rippon."

Yet it is not these links with the beginnings of our history, with Wilfrid the Saxon saint and Alfred the Saxon king, that draw so many people to Ripon. Ripon has a greater attraction than these. Only a few miles away is Fountains Abbey.

When approaching Fountains the motorist may feel very thankful that a few additional miles on the road are of little importance to him. By choosing the longer way,[38] through the village of Studley Royal, he will certainly save himself a considerable walk and may possibly secure the unspeakable blessing of solitude. The walk through the park from the main entrance is, I know, regarded as one of the chief beauties of the place, with its Temple of Fame, and its Surprise View, and its little cascades; but except for the view of the Abbey, which is lovely, these artificial prettinesses are more appreciated by those who come forth on "an expedition" than by those who really wish to seize and keep something of the spirit of the place. The distant abbey seen from the east is part of a beautiful landscape, a satisfaction to the eye, a picturesque incident in the long glade; but those who approach it from the west come upon it suddenly in all its vastness, close at hand, and realise, probably for the first time, something of the splendour of the old monasteries.

THE NAVE, FOUNTAINS ABBEY.

[39]

Here—in this long line of doorways, in this enormous church which the choir of birds still fills with sacred music, this cloister-garth and chapter-house with the rich archways, these stairs and domestic buildings, wall beyond wall and room beyond room—here truly was a power to make a monarch jealous! It is no wonder that Yorkshire, crowded as it was with monasteries, thought a strength like theirs might pit itself against the strength of the king, and rose in protest against the Dissolution; it is no wonder that the king's agents could not find enough chains in the country to hang the prisoners in. If this vast skeleton is so magnificent, of what sort was the actual life! Close your eyes for a moment to it all, and think of the beginnings of it.

Think of those thirteen monks, Prior Richard and his brethren from St. Mary's at York, hungering for a more perfect fulfilment of their vows, who came here long ago, when this green sward was "overgrown with wood and brambles, more proper for a retreat of wild beasts than for the human species." Like wild beasts they lived, with no shelter but the trees and no food but herbs and leaves. They worked with their hands by day, and kept their vigils by night, "but of sadness or of[40] murmuring there was not one sound," says the monk who wrote their story, "but every man blessed God with gladness." They lived under the thatched yews till they had raised a roof for themselves, but even when that was accomplished they were often on the point of starvation. One day when all the food they had was two loaves and a half, a beggar asked for bread. "One loaf for the beggar," was Abbot Richard's decree, "and one and a half for the builders. For ourselves God will provide." The cartload of bread which arrived immediately afterwards as a gift from a pious knight was the cause of much thankfulness among the monks, but of little surprise.

THE TOWER, FOUNTAINS ABBEY.

[41]

As the years passed, lands and legacies made the monastery rich. And so at last this splendid fabric rose—a triumph of the spirit over circumstances, a monument to those long-buried monks whose toils and sufferings are built into the mighty nave, though surely they never dreamed of such power and wealth as we are forced to dream of as we stand amid this mass of broken walls, now green with moss and weeds, but once the heart of a huge organism. It is a monument, too, to many who came after the brave thirteen: to Abbot Huby, who built the tower and is said to be buried near it; to John of Kent, who gave us the bewildering beauty of the Chapel of the Nine Altars, one of the most exquisite things ever wrought in stone: so spiritual, so aspiring, that it seems to be a prayer made visible, or even—with its slender arrowy columns rising into the air till, like fountains, they break into curves—to be the embodiment of the abbey motto: Benedicite Fontes Domino.

And while we are remembering those who laboured for Fountains, do not let us forget the man who died for it at Tyburn—William Thirsk. This abbot was rash enough to resist the messengers of Privy Seal, and was accused by them of many things. He had, they wrote, "gretly dilapidate his howse" by theft and sacrilege, had sold the plate and jewels of the abbey, and had not even secured a proper price for them. To those who were themselves bent upon theft and sacrilege on[42] a large scale this last offence seemed worst of all. He had actually, they declared contemptuously, been persuaded by a jeweller that a valuable ruby was a mere garnet; "for the trewith ys he is a varra fole and a miserable ideote." He joined in that desperate protest the Pilgrimage of Grace, and so was hanged.

Fortunately for posterity as well as for himself, Thirsk's successor, Brodelay, who was a creature of Thomas Cromwell and chosen with a view to future events, was not a "varra fole," and yielded meekly when his abbey was demanded of him, saving it from the fate of Jervaulx. As it is, too much of it is gone—much that might have been preserved. The cloisters have vanished though the garth is there, with the long flight of steps and the great stone basin in the grass and the yew-tree beside it; and gone, too, is the magnificent infirmary, deliberately destroyed in the days of James I. by the vandal who owned it and was in want of some building material.

FOUNTAINS HALL.

[43]

One thing, however, still stands, which is, perhaps, the last relic of the monks of Fountains that we should expect to find, and is certainly the most touching relic possible—actually linking us with those far-off days when the patient thirteen were left here in the wilderness by Archbishop Thurstan to keep their vow of poverty with such terrible literalness. Over there, beside the wall, is one of the yew-trees whose boughs, covered with thatch, formed the first monastery of Fountains.

Close to the western entrance is Fountains Hall. Surely we must forgive that wicked man who pulled down the infirmary, since the place he built with the stones is this lovely Jacobean house, a thing as beautiful in its own domestic way as time-worn stone and bays and mullions can make it. A balustrade, a sundial, an old-fashioned garden and ancient yew-hedge make the picture and our pleasure complete.

There is a comfortable hotel at Ripon, and as we have a great deal to see before reaching any other desirable shelter, we shall find it best, I think, to spend a night there either before or after visiting Fountains. From the windows of the Unicorn, on market-day, the[44] paved square is a gay and pleasant sight, with its crowded stalls and bright awnings, and stores of fruit and flowers and basket-work; and here on a summer's night the horn-blower may be dimly seen at nine o'clock in his three-cornered hat and laced coat, doing the bidding of Alfred the Great.

From Ripon there are three ways of reaching Richmond, without taking into account the direct route, which would show us nothing of the dales we came out to see. In either case we must go by Jervaulx and Middleham and Wensley.

Only a few miles from Ripon is a village less famous, but not less attractive, than any of these: a spot well-known to antiquarians, and doubtless to artists too, but unfamiliar to ordinary folk. The charm of West Tanfield catches the eye at once from the bridge that spans the Ure, and comes as a pleasant surprise in the midst of rather tame scenery. The red-roofed cottages are grouped upon the river-bank, with gay little gardens sloping to the water's edge; behind them rises the church tower, and the square grey gatehouse of the Marmions, with its delicate oriel. This[45] gateway was built by Henry V.'s friend and executor FitzHugh, who married one of the Marmions and lived here, and added to the church that held the splendid tombs of his wife's ancestors. He was not buried here himself, but by his own wish with curious haste at Jervaulx. It is seldom that a little village church possesses such monuments as these of the Marmions, so rich in ornament and so marvellously preserved: the arched and canopied recess that holds the effigy of Sir John; the cloaked and coronetted figure of Maud his wife, who built this aisle and founded chantries here; the emblazoned tomb of the unknown lady with the lion; the knight in mail; and the magnificent monument of that other knight and his wife which is probably a cenotaph in memory of John and Elizabeth Marmion of the fourteenth century. Their effigies lie, perfectly preserved, under a light and graceful "hearse" of ironwork, with seven sconces for candles—the only iron hearse, they say, in England. Every detail of the dress, every line of the features, is distinct. The knight's aquiline nose and full lips, rather sweet in expression,[46] are encircled by a gorget of mail, over whose delicate links droop the ends of his long moustache. A collar of SS clasps his throat.

On the north side of the chancel there is a curious recess, with a squint into the nave and two little windows into the choir. It is unique, I believe, and as regards its origin and uses very baffling.

Beyond West Tanfield the scenery grows in beauty, for we are nearing the hills. Masham lies prettily in a valley, with a setting of moors and dales, gold and emerald when the sun is shining, soft grey and green when the day is dull. Skirting the little town we go on our way to Jervaulx.

The site of Jervaulx is not beautiful, but pleasant and peaceful. It lies in a private park, so the car must wait beside the gardener's cottage while we walk, borrowed key in hand, across the field to the scattered fragments of what was once a great Cistercian abbey. Of the ruins tragically little was left standing by the energetic commissioners of Henry VIII., though they apologised for some necessary delay in their congenial work. "Pleasythe your lordship to be advertysed,"[47] wrote Thomas Cromwell's "most bounden beadman" Richard Bellyseys, "I have taken down all the lead of Jervaulx ... and the said lead cannot be conveit nor carried until the next sommre, for the ways in that countre are so foul and deep that no caryage can pass in wyntre. And as concerninge the taking down of the house I am minded to let it stand to the next spring of the year, by reason of the days are now so short it wolde be double charges to do it now." The work was finished with great thoroughness at last, however, as all may see. Of the church the barest outline only is left, with the raised platform where once the high altar stood, and near it the broken figure that is said to represent the Henry FitzHugh who did so much for West Tanfield and left such strange orders about his funeral. He desired to be buried at Jervaulx with all possible haste after his death. "To be carried thither by daylight, if it come not too late; but if so, then the same night." The land on which this community first settled, at Fors, was the gift of one of FitzHugh's ancestors, which may account for his wish to be buried here.

[48]

The case of the last abbot of Jervaulx, Adam Sedbergh, was a sad one; for he suffered the pains of martyrdom without its exaltation, and while certainly failing to please himself, pleased no one else. He was a timid creature, apparently, and when Yorkshire rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace, he was so much afraid of king and rebels alike that he simply ran away and hid. The rebel mob came clamouring about the gates of Jervaulx, crying: "Choose you a new abbot!" and the frightened brothers gathered hurriedly in the chapter-house. If we follow this path, and turn down by these crumbling steps, we may stand where they stood that day; for there is more of the chapter-house still in existence than of any other part of the building. The roof that covered the monks' bewildered heads is gone; but here is the wide stone bench on which they sat, trembling, through that hasty conclave, and here are the columns and the walls on which their eyes dwelt, unseeingly, while the rebels threatened them with fire at their gates and their rightful leader was hiding in the heather. They could think of no better course than to seek the reluctant Adam, and make a rebel of him whether he would or no. They found him on the moors at last, and lest his beautiful abbey should be burnt to the ground because of him, he came back to face the curses and daggers of the mob, the futile sufferings of rebellion, the prison-cell in the Tower where his name still shows upon the wall, and the gallows of Tyburn. His tardy and unwilling heroism was piteously useless, for not even the flames of the Pilgrims of Grace could have laid the walls of Jervaulx lower or left its altars more desolate than did the hammers and picks of the king's agents.

CHAPTER HOUSE, JERVAULX ABBEY.

[49]

Charles Kingsley came here once, and picked a forget-me-not for his wife—a pleasant memory among so many fierce ones. He was the last canon of the collegiate church of Middleham, where he stayed for several days at the time of his instalment, and endured "so much bustle, and robing and unrobing" that he had no time to think. Middleham, as a rule, is anything but a bustling place;[50] but in spite of its demure looks, I believe there are still days when its streets are, as Kingsley saw them, "crowded with jockeys and grooms." We are now on our way thither. After passing through East Witton we cross the Cover, whose pools are dear to fishermen, and were therefore dear to Kingsley. "Little Cover," he called it affectionately, "in his deep wooded glen, with his yellow rock and bright white stones, and brown water clearer than crystal."

We climb into Middleham past the base of an old cross on which is fixed a modern head. At the top of the hill is the curious structure called the Swine Cross, with the mutilated stone beast whose identity has proved so hard to establish. Some say it is the Bear of Warwick; others recognise in it the Boar of Gloucester. As far as its personal appearance is concerned it might with equal plausibility be called the Lion of England or the Hound of the Baskervilles, seeing that its outline commits the sculptor to nothing and it has no manner of face whatever. Turning to the left we find the castle looking down upon us gloomily.

[51]

This castle of Middleham is square and stern; more strong than beautiful. Its keep is Norman, and is the work of a Fitzranulph of the twelfth century; but the towered wall that hems it round so closely was built by the Nevilles, who lived here for many years in princely state. The great Earl of Warwick, when he was not making kings—and, indeed, sometimes when he was—chose this to be a centre of his pomp and power; and one of the kings he made, Edward IV., is said to have been imprisoned here for a short time. The time would have been longer if Edward had not cajoled his custodian, the Archbishop of York, into allowing him to hunt in the park. We know from Henry VI. how Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Lord Hastings lay in ambush in the forest that is no longer here, and rescued Edward from those who were hunting with him.

That same Duke of Gloucester, who was a trespasser on this occasion, came to Middleham as its master later on. Poor Anne Neville, the kingmaker's daughter, spent most of her sad married life within[52] this melancholy fortress, with the husband who asked no man to make him king, but made himself Richard III. We may see the gloomy walls of her withdrawing room—bereft now of both roof and floor—where she sat so often sick at heart and ailing; and the banquet-hall where her father kept such state; and the kitchen where six oxen were sometimes roasted for one breakfast. There, in the north wall, is the gateway through which she watched her husband riding out to entrap his little nephews, and through which she herself soon followed him to see him crowned; and here at the south-west corner of the outer wall is the tower where her only son was born. The boy spent practically all his short life here, all but that brief and brilliant interlude of the coronation at Westminster and the pageantry at York; and here, too, he died in his parents' absence. I do not know if Anne ever returned to Middleham. We hear of her "in a state bordering on madness," and not long afterwards her tragic life was over.

For many years the castle was left at the[53] mercy of all who cared to despoil it. It was very literally treated as a quarry; for when all the faced stone within reach had been removed the walls were hollowed out below, in the hope that the upper part might fall and so provide more plunder. Such is the cohesion of the masonry, however, that this design was more or less frustrated, and the undermined walls still stand like overhanging cliffs. Here and there, indeed, great masses have fallen in huge boulders as solid as rock; but perhaps the gunpowder of the Commonwealth was responsible for these.

There was once a suggestion made, in a letter from Lord Huntingdon to his "verrye good lord ye lord Treasurer," that Queen Elizabeth should join in this work of quarrying. She purposed to pay a visit to her city of York, a visit which was designed to be "no small comforte to all hyr good subjects, and no less terrour to ye others." But the great difficulty was to find "a good housse" for her. Huntingdon excitedly laid his scheme before Burleigh. "Ye meanes ys thys," he wrote. "Hyr[54] hyghness hathe heare ye Castell of Midham, which ys in greate ruyne and daylye wasteth, ... but ye tymber ye stone ye lead and ye iron yt ys theare wold make a fayre housse heare, and as I gesse with good husbandrye paye all ye chargys. I am sure if your L. dyd see ye place ... you wolde thinke yt most convenient to be pulled downe, rathyr than yt shuld stande and waste daylye as yt dothe."[1] Fortunately Burleigh did not think it most convenient, and now the place no longer wastes daily, but is daily being repaired.

When we crossed Cover Bridge we entered Wensleydale, and a mile or two beyond Middleham is the pretty little town from which the dale takes its name. The scenery is quiet and pastoral here, the Ure flows smoothly, and it is difficult to realise how near we are to the sort of country Defoe was thinking of when he wrote in his eighteenth-century way: "The black moorish lands show dismal and frightful." How near we are to the moorish lands, however, we shall shortly find out, and it[55] is at Wensley that we have to decide by which road we shall cross them.

But first, here is Wensley Church on the left, with Saxon stones in it, and a splendid brass that no one who cares for such things would wish to pass by, and among its graves one that has been thought to be of interest to every British man and woman. It is an altar-tomb with fluted corners standing on the right of the path that leads from gate to porch. Beneath it lies Peter Goldsmith. It has been stated,[2] on what grounds I cannot discover, that he was surgeon of the Victory at Trafalgar, and that Nelson died in his arms. This is making a great claim for him. Yet his name is not mentioned in the standard accounts of Nelson's death,[3] nor does it appear in the list of the Victory's officers. As we all know, Beatty was the surgeon who attended Nelson in the cockpit. The assistant-surgeon was Neil Smith; the surgeon's mate was Westerburgh.[4]

[56]

This is the country of the Scropes of Bolton, and their names and arms are conspicuous in the church—over the porch, on the buttresses, on the carved chancel stalls, and, above all, on Lord Bolton's screened pew in the north aisle. The carved sides of this were originally part of the parclose by which the tombs of the Scropes were surrounded in Easby Abbey. The front of it is ugly and has an eighteenth-century air. The horrible grey marbled paint that defaces the woodwork suggests the nineteenth. The famous brass, which lies within the communion rails, is so beautiful as to appeal to the most ignorant in such matters, and dates from the fourteenth century. It marks the grave of two men—Sir Simon of Wensley, priest, and the seventeenth-century rector who desired to be buried under the same stone and brass.

Our course, after leaving Wensley, depends on our further intentions. The course I recommend is this: to drive up Wensleydale on the lower road, past the cascades and village of Aysgarth—named by the Danes Asgard, the home of the gods—past[57] Bainbridge and Hawes; to cross the river at Yorebridge, and return by Askrigg and Redmire, making a short digression to Bolton Castle; then, turning to the left beyond Redmire, to strike across the "moorish lands" to Richmond. These Yorkshire moors, which seemed so "ill-looking" to Defoe, are neither black nor frightful in our later eyes, but glorious with colour and light. The old road from Leyburn across Barden and Hipswell Moors has rather a bad surface, and a hill that is stiff enough to account for the making of the new road; but on a sunny summer's evening the view from the highest point is lovely beyond words. Beautiful it must be at all seasons and in all weathers, but it is only when the air is clear that the head of Swaledale may be seen on one side of the ridge and the far-away slopes of Wensleydale on the other, and it is only when the sun is sinking that those distant hills are washed with gold. The moors sweep round us far and near; a line of dark firs crosses them mid-way; patches of vivid green break through the heather; and down in[58] the valley the Swale shows as a thin thread of twisted silver. Behind us, towards Middleham, the more level country is a dark blue streak beyond the crimson of the sunlit heather. The white road, straight and narrow, lies before us.

Those who choose this way will have little to regret, and will have one real advantage: they will approach Richmond by the road which gives the finest view of that fair town. They must remember, however, that there is a very steep downward gradient at one point between the moors and the river, and at the bottom of it a sharp turn over a bridge. The run up Swaledale may easily be achieved from Richmond, where there is a comfortable hotel.

The other alternative is to cross from Wensleydale to Swaledale by way of the Buttertubs Pass. Now, I do not wish to be too encouraging about this pass! It is a place for the well-equipped only, and for those who do not suffer too much when their tyres are suffering. Many cars, of course, have passed this way, and many[59] more will do so; but none the less it is not a suitable road for motoring. It is precipitous in places, narrow everywhere, and the surface is almost entirely composed of loose stones. Moreover, a grassy slope, so steep as to be almost a precipice, drops away from the edge of it; and though I am assured the pass is perfectly safe, there are points in it where nothing but faith in one's driver can make it comfortable! The scenery is magnificent.

Starting from Wensley, we must take the upper of the two roads to Redmire marked on Bartholomew's map, for the lower one, apparently, runs through Lord Bolton's park. It occurs to one here, as in several other places in Yorkshire, that it would be a good plan if map-makers would adopt some distinctive way of marking private roads. The views from the high ground are lovely. All Wensleydale lies before us—green as an emerald in the valley, bare and grey on the hilltops, dimly blue in the distance. Over it all lies that haze of luminous gold that the sunshine gives to these dales. Far away, but clearly visible, Bolton Castle stands up on the hillside,[60] massive and grey and relentless, a queen's prison. At Redmire Station we turn aside to see it.

"The castelle," says Leland, "as no great howse, is al compactid in 4 or 5 towers." Outwardly, it is probably much the same as in his day: a square of cold, grey stone with a tower at each corner, gloomy and forbidding, with no attempt at ornament, no break in the solid masonry except the tiny windows. To Leland it was simply the castle of the Scropes, the work of the famous Chancellor who fought at Créçy in his younger days, the fortress of a family that was perpetually distinguishing itself. So he looked at it and passed it by. It was "no great howse." But we see it with other eyes, because it has been touched by the charm that wins us in spite of our better judgment, just as it won men long ago in spite of theirs—the glamour of the Queen of Scots. The banquet hall where so many Scropes have feasted—bishops, statesmen, judges, Knights of the Garter—leaves us cold; we do not care to know there was a chantry here; even the cruel dungeon in the ground, with the hole through which the victim was lowered and the bolt to which he was fastened and the slab of stone that was fixed over the top, only calls for a passing shudder. To us the interest of Bolton Castle is centred in the whitewashed room upstairs.

BOLTON CASTLE.

[61]

It was a summer evening, "one hour after sunsetting," when Mary rode into that grass-grown court with Sir Francis Knollys and Sir George Bowes, and two companies of soldiers, and six ladies, and forty-three horses, and four cartloads of luggage. She was not yet very unhappy. "She hath been very quiet," wrote Knollys of the journey, "very tractable, and void of displeasant countenance." She was less tractable when the time came for her to leave Bolton: she had learnt much meanwhile. For the months spent at Bolton were the crisis of her misfortunes. In this upper room she sat "knitting of a work" in the deep recess of the window, or writing endless letters by the fire, or turning young Christopher Norton's head, while the Casket Letters were being read at Hampton Court, and her accusers were discussing her character[62] at York, and her "dear cousin and sister" was pressing her to abdicate her throne. It was in this room that she wrote at last to her advisers: "I pray you do not speak to me again about abdication, for I am deliberately resolved rather to die than to resign my crown; and the last words that I shall utter in my life shall be the words of a Queen of Scotland."

She wrote a vast number of other letters here. Some were to the young Queen of Spain, her sister-in-law, who, as Elizabeth of France, had been her playmate at the Court of Henri II.; some were about the care of her infant son; and some, of a conciliatory kind, were to the Queen of England. "Toutesfoyes," she wrote, "sur votre parolle il n'est rien que je n'entreprisse, car je ne doutay jamays de votre honneur et royalle fidelitay."

It was here, too, that she wrote her first English letter to her custodian, Sir Francis Knollys—her schoolmaster, as she called him, who had been giving her lessons, apparently without any marked success.

[63]

"It is sed Seterday my unfrinds wil be wth zou; y sey nething, bot trest weil. An ze send one to zour wiff ze may asur her schu wold a bin weilcom to a pur strenger.... Thus affter my commendations I pray God heue you in his kipin.

"Your assured gud frind,

"Marie R.

"Excus ivel vreitn furst tym."

Mary's rooms have lately been restored; but this plain stone fireplace is the same by which she sat shivering while the news of the Westminster Conference was so long in coming through the snow, hoping against hope that the English Queen would not "make her lose all"; turning over in her mind the scheme for marrying her to Don John of Austria; reading specious letters from Elizabeth pleading "the natural love of a mother towards her bairn"; and smiling upon Knollys till he credited her with "an eloquent tongue, a discreet head, a stout courage, and a liberal heart adjoined thereunto." This is the window through which she looked out over Wensleydale, luminous[64] in the August sunshine or white with snow, and realised gradually that she was indeed a prisoner, she who "loved greatly to go on horseback." She was allowed to ride in the park, it is true; but her riding was a mockery with twelve soldiers at her horse's heels.

Yet she was not always sad. She had her lighter moments and pastimes other than knitting. "The Queen here is merry, and hunteth," wrote Knollys, "and passeth her time in pleasant manner." She even coquetted with the Reformed Faith, and "grew into a good liking of the Liturgy"; and she took pleasure (of a more convincing kind) in having her hair busked by Mistress Mary Seaton, whom she declared to be the finest busker in any country. Knollys, apparently, was not insensible to the charms of a coiffure. "This day she did set such a curled hair upon the Queen that it was like to be a periwig that showed very delicately; and every other day she hath a new device of hairdressing, without any cost, and yet setteth forth a woman gaily well."

Here, up these steps upon which Mary's[65] skirts have trailed, is the room where Mistress Seaton set such a curled hair upon the lovely head, the room where the Queen slept, or more often lay awake. There had been some difficulty in making her rooms ready to receive her. The Scropes were not luxurious, it seems. Her bedding and hangings came from Sir George Bowes' house, near Barnard Castle; pewter vessels and a copper kettle were hastily borrowed from the Court of England; and the neighbours lent some furniture with rather a bad grace. There is a very strong local tradition that Mary once escaped from Bolton Castle. The "Queen's Gap" on Leyburn Shawl is pointed out as the scene of her recapture, and this little bedroom window as the way of her escape. I cannot find the least evidence that the story is true. But it was in this room that she lay sick for days, before she was dragged reluctantly away in the dusk of a January dawn, bitterly cold and bitterly angry, to her next prison at Tutbury.

This castle held for the king in the Civil War, and that is why it has lost its north-west tower. The actual fall was in a[66] storm, a hundred years later than the siege that weakened the masonry.

As we drive away up Wensleydale we look back again and again at the fortress, which dominates the valley far more conspicuously than its position on the green hillside seems to warrant. The scenery grows wilder and the slopes nearer before a steep descent with a bad surface takes us into Askrigg. Here, in a little open space beside the church, is a picturesque Jacobean house of grey stone, bearing an inscription and the date mdclxxviii. Its projecting bays are joined by a wooden gallery, which was designed, it is said, to give a good view of the bull-baiting that took place before it. There, hidden in the grass, is the iron ring to which the bull was tied; and close beside it stands the restored village-cross—a strange conjunction of symbols! In the fifteenth-century church there are some pillars which are thought to have been transported from Fors, the original dwelling, about a mile from here, of the brothers of Jervaulx—the little band of monks from Savigny, who came to this valley under the leadership of Peter de Quincy, the Leech, in the reign of Stephen. They found this place too wild even for their Cistercian ideals, too cold and foggy for the ripening of crops, too frequently beset by wolves; and so, though the optimistic Peter was "very certain we shall be able to raise a competent supply of ale, cheese, bread, and butter," the community moved nearer to civilisation, leaving behind them nothing for us to see except a window in a barn and these pillars in Askrigg Church.

ASKRIGG.

[67]

As the road becomes narrower and rougher the scenery every moment grows more beautiful. Hawes lies on the other side of the valley at the foot of the blue hills, in a lovely position beside the Ure; and when we have reached a point exactly opposite to it we turn sharply up a steep pitch on the right, with a splendid panoramic view of mountains on the left as we climb.

This is the beginning of the Buttertubs Pass. From this point onwards, till the road plunges down into Swaledale, the[68] surface is composed more or less of loose stones. The stiffest upward gradients we shall have to encounter are within a mile or two of this spot, for the wild part of the pass—the real moorland—is comparatively level, and by the time we reach the actual Buttertubs we are already running down. This is the climax—this point where the downward gradient begins—for here suddenly the solid earth seems to fall away from us: here suddenly the rough and narrow road is no longer lying across the far-stretching moorland, but is hanging high upon the hillside, clinging upon the extremest edge of a gulf which drops dizzily into a blue sea of shadows. Thus it clings for miles. Beyond the chasm the bare hillside rises again above our heads in magnificent curves, glowing with colour, and cleft here and there into purple gorges. Slightly above the road on the left are the Buttertubs, strange crater-like hollows of unplumbed depth, appearing at intervals beside us, with sharp rocks bristling through the grass at their mouths. As we slowly descend, the hills of Swaledale rise before us like a wall blocking the defile; and presently a gate across the road shows that we are near the world again.

THE BUTTERTUBS PASS.

[69]

Truly this is one of the runs that are unforgettable. To be among these savage heights and depths, these heaving waves of desolate moor, to have these solitudes above us and these blue shadows so far below us, is to know something of "the strong foundations of the earth." It is with a feeling of anti-climax that we close the gate behind us, and, on a precipitous gradient and no surface worth mentioning, steer slowly down into Swaledale.

As we cautiously make our way over the stones of this very trying lane, we are confronted with rather a startling notice board: "No Road." It seems a little late to tell us that now: they might have mentioned it before we crossed the pass! Then it dawns upon us that the amateur hand that traced the letters has sloped the board in the wrong direction. It is really meant to face down the valley, for the discouragement of those who might stray up from Swaledale, ignorant of the pass.

[70]

Swaledale, I think, is the most beautiful of all the dales. Of course beauty varies with the weather, and distant Muker in the hollow of the hills cannot be the same on a colourless, grey day as when it lies in a pool of sunshine. But on any day Swaledale must seem, to one who is fresh from the elemental dignity of the pass, to hold a wonderful variety of lovely things: opal hills and soft woods, patches of heather and slopes of fern, fir-trees and feathery birches and clumps of scarlet rowans. There are individual pictures that one remembers as types of the whole. At Gunnerside, for instance, where the road crosses the Swale, cliffs rise from the stony river-bed, and are crowned with overhanging trees, the banks are smothered in masses of burdock leaves, and the whole scene is encircled by the hills. The road is not very good, and there are some steep pitches between Gunnerside and Reeth; but it matters little, for who would care to hurry through such a land as this?

THE SWALE.

[71]

It was on the road near Low Row that John Wesley began his preaching in this part of the world, standing on a table by the wayside. A little further on is Helaugh, once a gayer place than it is at present. The hills above it have echoed many a time to the winding of the horn, when John of Gaunt was lord here and went out to chase the boar. Later on these lands belonged to that strange Duke of Wharton, "the scorn and wonder" of Pope's day, who was a Whig when it was unfashionable and a Jacobite when it became dangerous, who fought against his country and died a monk.

"Ask you why Wharton broke through every rule?
'Twas all for fear the Knaves should call him Fool."

At Reeth, a fascinating place built on a slope at the mouth of Arkengarth Dale, we cross the river again, and find a much better road on the other side.

Between Reeth and Richmond the Swale, flowing softly past its richly wooded banks, is as beautiful as the lower Wye. On the further side of it we see the Norman tower of Marrick Priory, where once twelve blackrobed nuns lived only a mile away from[72] their "white-clothid" sisters of Ellerton. The nuns of Marrick were fortunate, for though they were so few they won a short respite for some unknown reason, and were allowed to stay in their beautiful retreat till the dissolution of the larger monasteries. There are few places in England, I think, that would be easier to love and harder to leave than Swaledale.

Richmond, on its hill, guards the mouth of the valley. This first view of it from Swaledale, with the tower of the castle rising slowly into sight, gives no idea at all of the beauty and strength that have made it famous. We only know how Richmond has won its name when we see it from below, with the buttressed bridge in the foreground, and the bright waters of the Swale reflecting the houses that are clustered at their brink, and the sun-flecked path under the trees, and the roofs, tier above tier, climbing the steep hillside, and above them all—foe of their foes and shelter of their friends—the long curtain-wall and towering keep of the castle. This view of Richmond has been praised so[73] much that one fears disappointment. Yet one is not disappointed. Richmond is not only beautiful: it has that other quality—so much more important than beauty in woman or town—the quality of charm. Richmond is lovable.

It was the Normans who first took advantage of this fine position for a fortress: the Saxon owners of the place were the Earls of Mercia, and had no castle here, for Gilling, their headquarters in the north, was only a few miles away. We may dream, if we like, that Ethelfled, the soldierly daughter of Alfred the Great, and Godiva, the Lady of Coventry, visited this place when their husbands were minded to chase the wolf or the boar in this part of their lands. It is possible that they did so: but there is no authentic history of Richmond before the time when Alan the Breton received from his kinsman, William the Conqueror, "at the siege before York," a grant of "all the towns and lands which lately belonged to Earl Edwin in Yorkshire." It was this Alan who began to build the castle. We may not enter it[74] without permission, for it is now used as barracks; but we can walk up to the gateway at the foot of the great keep and see its buttresses and turrets towering above us; and we can follow the path that surrounds the walls and look at the view that George IV. admired so much. This view of the river from the castle is very pretty, but is by no means comparable to the view of the castle from the river. Possibly George IV. fixed his eyes upon the Culloden Tower among the trees to the right, and was biassed by association.

Three times this castle wall behind us has imprisoned a king. When five English knights and their men-at-arms made their dashing march to Alnwick and captured William the Lion of Scotland, it was to Richmond they brought him; and David Bruce, another Scottish king, was here nearly two hundred years later; and the third was Charles I. Legend, indeed, tells us of a fourth king still imprisoned here; for this castle rock is one of the many places wherein King Arthur lies asleep with all his knights, awaiting the magic blast upon the horn that shall some day wake him. The Breton folk say he waits beneath the island of Agalon; the Welsh look for him to come forth from among the mountains of Glamorganshire.

RICHMOND.

[75]

Soon after Bruce's imprisonment the castle seems to have fallen into disrepair; and this, I suppose, was the reason that John of Gaunt, who was Lord of Richmond, made his hunting expeditions from Helaugh rather than from here. Harry of Richmond, when he became Henry VII., gave this castle of his to his mother, and finding that the "mantill wall" was "in decay of maisone wark," and "all the doyers, wyndoys, and other necessaries," with much beside, were also in decay, he gave orders that the whole should "be new refresshede."

Though this attractive town possesses much, it has also lost much. Once it had a wall—built to keep the Scots out—and several gates; but all are gone now, except the postern in Friar's Wynd, and the old pointed arch of Bargate, which we may see from the foot of Carnforth Hill. Gone, too, is the elaborate cross, which, according to[76] all accounts, was an object of beauty in the paved market-place. This is more than can be said for the strange obelisk that has supplanted it. But in this same market-square still stands Holy Trinity Chapel—not beautiful, but very ancient, being that "chapel in Richemont toune" which, Leland says, had "straung figures in the waulles of it. The people there dreme," he goes on, "that it was ons a temple of idoles." Some even dream that this chapel was founded by Paulinus, the seventh-century saint, in memory of an occasion when he baptized an enormous number of converts in the Swale; but, as Bede says the ceremony took place in the river because it was impossible to build oratories "in those parts," this dream is not very credible. It is no dream, I believe, but a fact, that the chapel stands on the site of a Danish temple. In its walls there are now no strange figures of "idoles," but some very strange annexes for a chapel. A butcher's shop is wedged between the tower and the nave, and several other shops are built into its side.

One of the most notable things here is[77] the Grey Friars' Tower, which we passed on entering the town from Swaledale: a peculiarly slender and graceful piece of Perpendicular work. Like the campanile at Evesham, it stands alone because the building of the church connected with it was suddenly brought to an end by the Dissolution. The Franciscans who had their friary here were mostly put to death or imprisoned for life—yet not for long—because they thought it their duty to obey St. Francis rather than Henry VIII.

There are remains of another religious house quite close to Richmond. Very little is left at Easby of the abbey church of St. Agatha, but the position of the ruins beside the river is full of quiet charm. Those who dwelt here were Premonstratensian Canons, whose rather confusing order was founded by the German visionary St. Norbert, and whose white garments were chosen for them by the Virgin herself. They passed to their dormitory through the Norman archway with the ornamented mouldings, the last remaining fragment of the original twelfth-century[78] building raised by Roald, the Constable of Richmond. Until lately a very decorative tree grew up through this archway and figured in every picture of Easby, but it threatened to break down the masonry, and so was sacrificed. It is a sad loss to artists. But the last memorial of Roald would have been a loss still sadder, for, even as it is, Roald is often forgotten in favour of the Scropes, who practically rebuilt St. Agatha's. Their shield is still over the porch of the parish church, a hundred yards away; their dust lies under the rough sods to the west of the north transept. At Wensley we saw the carved sides of what was once their parclose.

We finally leave the town by the same road that leads to Easby, turning off to the left to join the great Roman highway beyond Gilling. It was just here, where the roads fork, that the Lass of Richmond Hill lived in the eighteenth century, till she married the writer of the song; and hither, too, to the same Hill House, came later songs, greater than MacNally's—songs from Byron to his future wife, Miss Milbank. Our last view of[79] Richmond, from Maison Dieu, is worthy of remembrance. The town is spread before us with all its towers; the slender Grey Friars' Tower, the church, the soaring keep; and in the background of hills is the green gap that means so much to those who have lost their hearts to Swaledale. That is behind us now; and on the right is stretched the great green plain of central Yorkshire—the plain that divides the western moors from the moors of Clevedon and Hambledon. Somewhere in that plain is the Great North Road.

Soon after passing Lord Zetland's place, Aske Hall, we drive through the wide street of Gilling, the little village of gardens, where there is nothing left, except a few Saxon stones, to remind us that the great Earls of Mercia made it one of their capitals till Alan of Brittany laid it waste. A little way beyond it we turn a sharp corner and are on the Roman road. After speeding along this for some minutes it is interesting to look back and see the amazing straightness of the white streak that stretches away behind the car and disappears over the crest of the hill. The scenery is dull at first; but[80] presently a new line of moors and dales appears on the horizon, and the roadway itself is shaded with trees and fringed with grass and flowers. Meantime the surface is enough in itself to make a motorist happy.

The car glides up the slope of a little bridge; we pass a screen of trees; and the extreme beauty of the Greta is revealed with a suddenness that is almost startling. This bridge with the stone parapet is the famous Greta Bridge; this is the stream painted by Turner and sung by Scott; there by the roadside are the gates of Rokeby.

"Oh, Brignall banks are fresh and fair,
And Greta woods are green!"

Brignall banks are not in sight, but here are Greta woods—intensely green—flinging their branches across the river till they meet and interlace in an archway over the clear water and the yellow stones.

GRETA BRIDGE.

[81]

At the northern limit of Rokeby Park we must leave the highway. There is a road here that is not marked on Bartholomew's map—a road that turns to the right and leads to Mortham Tower, and the Dairy Bridge, and the meeting of the Greta and the Tees. The "battled tower" of Mortham is now inhabited; we may not see the bloodstains on the stairs; but from a little distance the fifteenth-century peel and the Tudor buildings that surround it make a pretty group. Below the grassy knoll on which it stands the Greta dashes down between its overshadowing banks and veiling foliage to join the quieter, statelier Tees.

The beauty of this place is really haunting. Sir Walter Scott has described every inch of it in "Rokeby," with complete accuracy if with no great inspiration. For the wild sweetness of this spot is not such as can be put into words. It is a place of enchantment, where the spell-bound poet can only stammer helplessly, and the plain man for a moment feels himself a poet.

Returning to the main road, we follow the wooded Tees to Barnard Castle. For miles the river is as we saw it at the meeting of the waters, darkly shadowed by trees and bound by rocky banks; more beautiful in itself than Wharfe or Swale, though flowing through a valley that cannot be compared[82] to the other dales except at its head: but there, I think, excelling them all. Through the greater part of Teesdale the beauty of the river is so closely confined to its banks that we only catch a glimpse of it now and then, when actually crossing the stream. One of these glimpses we have from the toll-bridge just below Eggleston Abbey, where we cross for a few minutes into the county of Durham. The ruins of the abbey are visible through the trees, standing on a grassy hill upon the Yorkshire bank of the river.

THE DAIRY BRIDGE.

[83]

At Barnard Castle—which is not a very attractive town at first sight, and is sorely disfigured by its portentous museum—we again cross the Tees into Yorkshire, near the point where the familiar towers of the Baliols' ruined fortress stand high above the river on their cliff. This commanding position was granted to the Norman Guy de Baliol by Rufus, and Guy's son Bernard raised on it the castle that was forfeited by his descendant. This Bernard was no friend to the throne on which the later Baliol sat, for he was the most zealous of the five knights who captured William of Scotland and took him to Richmond Castle. When the enterprise seemed about to fail, it was Bernard who cried: "If you should all turn back, I would go on alone!" A little more than a hundred years later John Baliol, King of Scotland, was rashly refusing to be at the beck and call of the English king. "Has the fool done this folly?" asked Edward. "If he will not come to us we will come to him!" So John lost his crown, and Barnard Castle saw the Baliols no more. It was given to the Nevilles, and so with many other things fell into the capacious hands of Richard III., who actually lived here for a time, and has left his symbol, the wild boar, upon the oriel window.

There is one gracious memory that makes these towers sacred. The ruined halls are haunted by the presence of that gentle and sad lady who was the widow of one John Baliol and the mother of another—Devorgilla, daughter of kings, foundress of Baliol College, and in her endless sorrow the builder of Dulce Cor. When her husband died she "had his dear heart embalmed and enshrined[84] in a coffer of ivory, enamelled and bound with silver bright, which was placed before her daily in her hall as her sweet, silent companion." It was here at Bernard Castle that she chiefly lived with that silent companion, until the noble shrine of stone was ready to receive the ivory coffer; it was here she lived on alone, till she too died and was carried out to be buried in Sweetheart Abbey, with John Baliol's "dear heart" upon her breast.

Of the two roads to Middleton-in-Teesdale the one on the Durham side is the best as regards both surface and scenery; but the greater number of those who drive up Teesdale will return to Barnard Castle before going on their way to the north or crossing Yorkshire to the coast, and will probably prefer to drive up the valley by one road and come down it again on the other. On the Yorkshire side there is nothing very striking. Lartington is pretty, and gay with flowers; Cotherstone still has a fragment of the FitzHughs' castle in a field above the river; Romaldkirk has an interesting[85] church. Beyond Mickleton we cross the Lune, which is a miniature copy of the Tees, with the same rocky bed and the same close screen of overarching boughs. A few minutes later we cross the Tees itself and are in Middleton.

The road from Middleton to High Force is surprisingly populous. Here among the hills, where the fields are yielding to moorland, and the river flows under bare crags, one expects a certain amount of loneliness; yet here is a broad and civilised highway, with all the character of a road near some large town. The scenery, however, is wild enough; and more beautiful than anything we have seen. Beyond the river—open now to the sky, no longer veiled by trees—rise the moors, piled high, fold upon fold, grand in outline and glorious in colour, green and purple and crimson. A wood by the wayside blots out river and hills for a moment; then suddenly through a gap we see High Force.

Looking down from the road we see it as a picture framed in trees: the solid wall of rock, the leap of the foaming waters, the cloud of spray, the fir-trees with their spires[86] against the sky, the crimson moors beyond. That white torrent is the boundary of the county, the crown and climax of the beauty of Yorkshire, and our last and most perfect memory of the dales.

HIGH FORCE.

THE COAST

SUMMARY OF TOUR ALONG THE COAST

Distances.

Roads

Hills very steep and frequent near coast.
Surface usually good.

THE CLIFF, STAITHES.

[89]

II

THE COAST

When one is approaching the coast of Yorkshire from the north, the important thing is to avoid the manufacturing towns of Stockton and Middlesbrough. This can be done by crossing the Tees at Yarm, and joining the splendid road that runs so straightly from this point to the sea. Those who have come from the dales will notice at once, even in Yarm, how greatly the houses here differ from the houses of the west. In that fair land the buildings, both small and great, have the character common to moorland buildings: they are stern and sturdy and grey; made not to please the eye, but to endure the buffetings of wind and rain. But these houses of the plain, it seems, do their best to provide the[90] beauty that is lacking in scenery. They are warm and picturesque, red and tiled and gabled, a feature in the landscape. The wide street of Yarm, with its trees and grass and pretty buildings, has almost a foreign air. Beyond it is the straight road with the magnificent surface.

The views from this road, to right and left, are rather striking, each in its own way. On the left the scene is not beautiful, yet not without romance—the romance that is hidden under so much that is ugly. That long, long line of tall chimneys and distant masts, that cloud of smoke that darkens all the sky, are symbols of the spirit of adventure, of the love of enterprise, of untiring progress, of belief in the future; for surely the history of our commerce has included all these things. It was from Stockton that the first railway in the world ran to Darlington; and in Middlesbrough many of our merchant ships are built. Eighty years ago about a hundred people lived there: to-day there are a hundred thousand under that black pall.

To the right of us is an equally long line[91] of another sort—the line of the Cleveland Moors. The curious excrescence of Roseberry Topping is conspicuous from the first, and even at this distance the monument to Captain Cook is visible on the hillside. For it was in the little village of Marton, through which we pass on our way to Guisborough, that James Cook was born, and learnt his lessons in the village school when not employed in scaring crows. Roseberry Topping, at first sight, looks like a huge tumulus. "It is the landmark that directs sailers, and a prognostick to the neighbours hereabouts." The view from its summit has been described by many writers, with degrees of enthusiasm varying from the "most agreeable prospect" of Camden to the ardour of another traveller, who declared that "there you may see a vewe the like whereof I never saw, or thinke that any traveller hath seene any comparable unto yt." A certain discreet author, quoting these words a hundred years ago, says gravely: "Accurate observation and comparison forbid us to ratify this assertion in its full extent."

[92]

The base of Roseberry Topping is largely composed of alum. In the reign of Elizabeth some alum works were set up at Guisborough, but were solemnly cursed by the Pope. His Holiness, it transpired, was himself the owner of some alum works.

The actual streets of Guisborough are not attractive, but seen from a distance the general effect of the little place is rather charming. It lies in a valley with the hills of Cleveland behind it, and towering above it is the great east window of its priory, bereft so entirely of tracery that it has the air of some stately gateway. This lovely fragment, this graceful window with its pinnacles and crockets, is all, except a Norman gateway, that is left of the burial-place of the English Bruces—the once rich and famous Augustinian priory whose buildings covered acres of ground, and whose prior "kept a most pompous house." At least two churches that have stood upon this spot were destroyed by fire, but it was not fire that caused this final destruction; not, as in one of the other cases, the conduct of "a vile plumber with a wicked[93] disposition"; not even primarily the zeal of Henry VIII.'s commissioner; but the vandalism of one Chaloner, who bought it and hacked it to pieces. It was he who built the alum works that were so distasteful to the Pope, and it is quite possible that some of the stones of this Gothic masterpiece were used for the purpose. If this were the case, one could forgive the Pope for his methods of carrying on business.

At Skelton, over there on the hill, lived the Bruces of the English branch, who founded the priory. Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII. and wife of James IV. of Scotland, raised a splendid cenotaph here to her husband's ancestors, the Bruces of Annandale and Skelton, only a short time before her brother made the place desolate for ever. The cenotaph was moved to the parish church, and was broken up in the eighteenth century. Until quite lately pieces of it were scattered in various parts of the church and priory, but it has now been restored with great care and set up near the west door of the church, with all its statues of Scottish and English[94] Bruces except that of the greatest Bruce of all. King Robert's figure, it is believed, was on the west end that has long been lost. There is some fine old glass in this church, and a modern window of exceptional beauty.

Guisborough is not a place to stay in; but only six miles away is Saltburn with all its hotels. The short drive thither is pretty, and close to the wayside on the right is Upleatham Church, the smallest used for services in England, with a miniature tower and a nave about fifteen feet long. Saltburn is a rising watering-place, and has probably a gay future before it, for it has many charms for those who like plenty of breezes and bathing-boxes. It must have been a lovely spot when it was quiet, for its deep green dell ends in a fine cliff, below which the sea ripples over a many-coloured foreshore. The Zetland Hotel faces these things.

THE QUAY, STAITHES.

[95]

From Saltburn we may drive across to Brotton, or may take the longer way by Skelton, passing near the castle. This is now a house dating obviously from the eighteenth century; but I believe there are among its offices some slight remains of the castle of the Bruces—the castle that was, long after their day, the scene of much revelry on the part of its owner John Hall and his familiars. Among these was Laurence Sterne. "Its festive board," says a Georgian writer, "was attended by many of the literati of the age. Where genius and talent were blended in so close union we cannot but imagine that the feast of reason and the flow of soul were happily realised." According to authentic accounts the feast and the flow—not of reason nor of soul—made the place a perfect pandemonium.

Beyond Brotton the fine outline of Boulby Cliff rises before us, marred by the huge ironworks that disfigure so many places in Cleveland. Loftus and Easington are uninteresting; but a couple of miles after passing through the latter we dip into a lovely little tree-clad valley—one of the many green gorges that run down, "between the heather and the northern sea," with tumbling becks hurrying through them.[96] We climb out of this one on a stiff gradient, and in another moment are looking down on Staithes.

At the top of the hill that leads down into Staithes there is a little railway inn. Here it is advisable to leave the car, for the hill is exceedingly steep, and there is no place in the tiny fishing town itself where a car may find shelter. Visitors, in fact, are not encouraged. If, seeking food, you ring at a door that seems to offer hope, you are recommended to try elsewhere. Yet the day will surely come when a large hotel will rise upon the hill, and lodging-houses will grow up round it, and we shall hear of the "upper" and "lower" towns, the new town and the old, and Staithes will be spoilt. Meantime a cup of tea may be had at the railway inn, which, though homely, is extremely clean.

THE HARBOUR, STAITHES.

[97]

Long ago James Cook, a little shop-boy hungry for the sea, ran away from Staithes. One marvels that any one could steel his heart to leave it. But to little James, hitherto occupied in the scaring of crows, Mr. Sanderson's shop under the hill was merely the gate of a wonderful new world, and he hardly hesitated before passing through it to his adventurous life and death; to the heights of Montcalm and the depths of hitherto unsounded waters, and finally to the knives of the South Seas. Even here, it is plain, he was dreaming of the South Seas. Some sailor brought a South Sea shilling to Staithes and Cook, seeing it in his master's till, was seized by the romance of it and changed it for a more prosaic coin. The transaction was suspicious in the eyes of Sanderson, and though he was sorry for his mistake when he understood it, James indignantly left him.

Staithes is dear to every artist who has ever looked upon its streets and quays, and indeed to every one who has an eye for pictorial effect. The deep valley that we crossed a few minutes ago ends here at the sea in two cliffs, and between them the town is wedged. The narrow paved street winds down to the shore, where little quays are washed by the waves, and little cottages cling to the cliff for shelter, and boats are[98] drawn up on the beach. At the river's mouth, under the other cliff, hosts of seagulls whirl about the rocks or float upon the water; but most deplorably the picturesque wooden bridge that has figured in so many works of art is now replaced by an unsightly iron girder. Staithes is a place apart. In this deep gully, hidden from land and sea, one seems to be worlds away from ordinary English life. Even the people are picturesque; the women and little girls in pink or lilac sunbonnets and gay aprons, and the men and boys in dark blue knitted jerseys. Every group of children, every ancient mariner, every pretty girl in a doorway, is as decorative as a peasant in the chorus of an operetta.

RUNSWICK BAY.

[99]

This coast is indented with bays. Runswick, only a few miles away, may be seen by making a short digression from Hinderwell—more correctly Hilda's Well—where there is a holy well named in honour of the saintly abbess of Whitby. Runswick Bay is sheltered on every side by hills. A long low headland sweeps round it on the south, with a strip of sandy beach following the line of the land, and beyond the sand a curving line of surf. On the nearer side a cliff protects a cluster of red-tiled houses, and on the summit of this cliff the car must be left while we walk down the winding path. It is only from below that the pretty grouping of the village can be seen. In the tourist season this bay is rather thickly populated, and as the place cannot accommodate more than a few of its admirers, the fields near the shore are dotted with the tents of the resolute. But there must be times when this lovely haven is a haven of peace.

It is from the hill above Lythe that we first see the Whitby cliff in the distance, with the abbey standing up against the sky. The coast and its long line of surf are before us, and on the right are the trees of Mulgrave Park. The present castle of Mulgrave is modern, but there are still some ruins to be seen of the old fortress of the Saxon giant, Wada, and of the Norman Fossards and mediæval Mauleys, and of the seventeenth-century President of the North, Lord Sheffield. It was one of the seven Peters of the house of de Malo-Lacu, or[100] Mauley, who beautified the castle so greatly to his own satisfaction that he called it Moult Grace. "But because it became a grievance to the neighbours thereabouts, the people (who have always the right of coining words), by changing one single letter, called it Moult Grave, by which name it is everywhere known." Both its grace and its seriousness were wiped away by the time the Civil War was done.

The hill that leads from Lythe to the coast is nearly a mile long, and has gradients varying from 1 in 7 to 1 in 12. At the foot of it is Sandsend, as near to the sea as a place can stand. Here are the mouths of two little green valleys, each with its own little beck and each with its own little village. The villages, the old and the new, Sandsend and New Row, are very tiny indeed, but there is a good hotel between them, within reach of the salt spray, and houses are being busily built. The place is about to be fashionable, I think, and indeed it has charms, with the deep, green sides of the gorge at the back of it, and the sea foaming at its doors. For the greater part of our way from Sandsend to Whitby we are on a private road, with a toll of one shilling. There are several sharp curves upon it, with "Special Caution" notices, and the sides of the gully at Upgang are very steep.

WHITBY ABBEY.

[101]

Whitby, fifty or a hundred years ago, before the raucous cries of steam merry-go-rounds disturbed the ghost of Cædmon or grinning Aunt Sallies stood beside the Abbey Cross, must have been the loveliest town in England. Even now it is bewitching. The old town and the new are separated by the long harbour, with its crowd of gaily painted cobles, its quays, its rows of nets hung out to dry; and so, from the windows of the Royal Hotel on the one cliff, one can look across the water at the other cliff, and the old houses closely packed upon the slope, the red-tiled roofs, the high-pitched gables, the queer passages; and raised high above these the grassy hilltop, the long, low church, the sloping graveyard where Mary Linskill lies, the tall grey cross of Cædmon. Crowning all stands the ruined abbey on its height. A long flight[102] of steps winds up the steep hillside from the harbour to the abbey, skirting the churchyard; and from this distance, in the dusk of evening, the stream of dark figures climbing endlessly might well be blackrobed pilgrims.

WHITBY HARBOUR.

[103]

The tall gables of Whitby Abbey on its bare and desolate cliff are known to us in countless pictures. We are prepared for the general effect of wild stateliness, the turrets against the sky, the wind-swept height, the whirling seabirds; but the beauty of the architecture is a surprise to some of us—the slender lancets, the rich triforium and trefoiled arches, the rose window, and all the wealth of ornament. The ruins of the tower lie where they fell, a mass of débris overgrown with grass and weeds. Here under the grey-brown walls, which are crumbled and bitten by the salt wind like a cliff against which the spray has dashed for centuries, we may sit and remember the saints and kings who came to this place when our history was young. It is not of the actual builders of these arches that we chiefly think. Hundreds of years before their day a monastery stood here, whose fame has always overshadowed this later one. This is the story of it:—

In the seventh century King Oswy of Northumbria and King Penda of the Mercians were at war. In vain Oswy offered conciliatory gifts: Penda would have none of them. "If that pagan," cried the exasperated Oswy, "refuses to receive our gifts we will offer them to the Lord, who knows how to accept them!" So he vowed, if he defeated the "wicked king," to dedicate his baby daughter to the cloister and give sites for twelve monasteries. This bleak cliff, then called Streaneshalch, the Bay of the Lighthouse, was one of the sites he gave when he had killed Penda, "that destroyer of his neighbours and fomenter of hostility," as William of Malmesbury calls him; and on it a monastery was built by the royal and saintly Abbess Hilda, "whom all that knew her called Mother, for her singular piety and grace." Here she ruled for many years, teaching peace and charity, training holy men—St. Wilfrid of Ripon, St. John of Beverley—and even conquering[104] snakes and birds, it was said. Important things took place here during her rule. It was here that the great synod was held concerning the keeping of Easter, when St. Wilfrid quoted St. Peter and Colman quoted Columba till King Oswy closed the discussion by saying, "Peter is an officer whom I am not disposed to contradict ... lest when I come to the doors of the kingdom of heaven there may be no one to open them to me." And it was here, somewhere within a stone's throw of this actual spot, that Cædmon, the lay-brother, the herdsman "who did not learn the art of poetry from man but from God," stood before St. Hilda in the presence of learned men, and told his vision and recited the verses that were the first English poem. "And his song and his verse were so winsome to hear, that his teachers themselves wrote and learned from his mouth." It was somewhere close at hand, too, that this earliest of our poets lay down to die in the infirmary, "conversing pleasantly in a joyful manner." "I am in charity, my children," he said, "with all the servants of God." Then he crossed himself, "laid his head on the pillow, and falling into a slumber, ended his life so in silence." St. Hilda herself, "whose life was a bright example to all who desired to live well," died and was buried here, but her bones were afterwards taken to Glastonbury. The dust of her successor, however—that Princess Elfleda whom Oswy dedicated to the religious life when he defeated Penda—lies somewhere very near this spot, within the abbey church itself, with that of the king her father, and her mother, Queen Eanfled. And down there on the slope, where the old cross stands, was the graveyard of the monks and in it the grave of Cædmon.

WHITBY ABBEY. INTERIOR.

[105]

In the ninth century came the sons of Lothbroc the Dane, Hinguar and Hubba, "men of terrible obstinacy and unheard-of valour." Flying the invincible standard which their sisters had made with their own hands, they landed on this coast and utterly destroyed the monastery of Streaneshalch.

For two hundred years this spot lay desolate. Then Reinfrid the soldier saw it,[106] and was "pricked to the heart." He became a monk of Evesham, and after long years came back to Streaneshalch—by that time also called "Hwiteby"—to carry on the traditions of the past. He began the work of raising the new abbey on the site of the old; but it was those who came after him who built that early English chancel, and carved the lilies of the north transept, and made the decorated window through which we see the church, and the bluff headlands, and the white teeth of the North Sea for ever biting at the cliff.

There is no need to return to the town, for we can join the high-road to Scarborough at a point not far from here. By going a few miles out of the direct route we may see another of the sheltered bays that make this coast so beautiful; the bay where long ago, it is said, a fleet of fishing-boats was always ready to carry Robin Hood and his merry men to safety. Robin Hood's Butts, on the further side of the bay, are supposed to have been used as targets for his bowmen by that "most kind and obliging robber," as a sixteenth-century writer calls him. A long, steep hill leads down into the little town, which lies on the northern side of the crescent bay; the old town with its red houses clustered in the shelter of the cliff, its walls washed by the spray; the new town higher up the slope. There, below us, is the quay where John Wesley so often preached. It was there that he received—not without seeing the humour of it—the sailor's remonstrance against the theory that the fear of death could only be overcome by the fear of God. The sailor evidently felt that his reputation was at stake.

WHITBY CHURCH, FROM THE ABBEY.

[107]

This lower and most romantic part of Bay Town is far the most attractive, but even the upper town is not unpleasing, though it has several little hotels, and threatens to develop into a watering-place. There is a road that leads out of the valley on the further side, but it is extremely bad in every way, and it is practically imperative to return as we came.

Soon after regaining the high-road we climb slowly up to the moors. Looking back we can still see the cleft in the hills[108] where Whitby's red houses are hidden, and the headlands beyond it, and the stately abbey on the cliff. Before us there is a run so entrancing, a feast of colour so deeply satisfying, that these moors of Cleveland must henceforward, I think, be the standard by which we appraise all moorland runs. The road lies visible in front of us for miles: at times so straight that the telegraph wires are foreshortened till the posts are hardly distinguishable one from another; at other times winding in serpentine curves into the far distance. On each side of us, from the wheels of the hurrying car to the horizon, stretches the heather. Here and there is a patch of bracken, now and then a strip of yellow grass; but it is heather that makes the landscape, that flings its imperial robes over the hills and nestles under the wayside stones, that satisfies the eye and rests the heart with its astonishing beauty. Miles of road fly under us; we glide up and we dart down; now we dip into a ferny dell and climb out of it again, now we cross a stony beck, now we pass a plantation of firs; but still the setting is heather, deep bell-heather and pale ling, purple and crimson and mauve, sweeping away till the colours are merged in blue. Bluest of all is the sea, which appears now and then in a triangle of sapphire at the end of a glen. On the shores of that blue sea, a couple of miles to our left, is Ravenscar, which takes its name from the raven standard of the sons of Danish Lothbroc, who landed here when they came to devastate St. Hilda's abbey. Such at least is the tradition.

WHITBY HARBOUR.

[109]

Gradually, and most reluctantly, we leave these shining heights for the lower world. The heather gives way to fields; the road is again bounded by respectable stone walls. We pass Claughton, then run down a steep hill between trees. Beyond these fir-trees, which rise up like walls on each side of the road, Scarborough appears—a dim mass of red blurred with smoke—and its castle lifted high above it on the headland.

"The toune stondith hole on a slaty clife," says Leland, "and shoith very fair to the se side." How very fair this place must have been one can easily imagine, when[110] there was nothing here but the picturesque town of a Tudor day, and the "exceding goodly larg and strong castelle on a stepe rok," and the "paroche chirch of our Lady joyning almost to the castelle," and the "3 howsis of freres, grey, blake, and white," and the sea-wall made by Richard III., "now yn ruine by the se rage," and the "peere whereby socour is made for shippes," which, when Leland saw it, was "sore decayid." The town was partly walled then, too, and had two gates, one "meatley good," and one "very base." Only one or two of all these things are left, and even they are now as sore decayed as was the pier of Henry VIII.'s time. Yet Scarborough is still exceeding fair; so fair that it overcomes all one's prejudices against popular watering-places; fair even in spite of huge hotels and a beach black with people, and rows of ice-cream stalls, and braying bands, and hoarse hurdy-gurdies, and all kinds of music. It is built at the junction of two bays, between which the castle juts out on "a rock of wonderful height and bigness, inaccessible by reason of steep craggs almost on every side." Into both of these bays the North Sea sweeps, even upon the calmest day, in mighty curves of frothing surf. Below the castle is a little sheltered harbour, where a crowd of fishing-boats and smacks is protected from the "se rage" by breakwaters. Quite lately a wide road with an embankment has been built from bay to bay round the base of the castle promontory. Those who have loved the rough rocks that once were here feel naturally that this new drive spoils the beauty of the place. But, after all, Scarborough is not designed for lovers of wild nature. The mischief was done here long ago. The new drive is a boon to thousands who have to take their pleasure in bath-chairs, and in this place of esplanades and lawn-tennis court and smart clothes a little more artificiality is no great grievance.

ROBIN HOOD'S BAY.

[111]

From very early days this rock has been fortified. In the Heimskringla, I believe, those who can may read how Harald the Norseman landed near the strong fortress of Skardaburg, and how he and his men climbed the hill behind the town and made[112] a mighty bonfire; then, with pitchforks, flung the burning faggots down among the wooden houses. "There the Northmen killed many people." The present castle was originally built by William le Gros, one of the heroes of the Battle of the Standard, who "increased the natural strength of the place by a very costly work." Henry III. in his fear of his barons ordered it to be destroyed, and when its owner demurred came to destroy it himself. When he saw the costly work, however, he bethought him of another destiny for it. He made it a little stronger and kept it himself.

MOORS BETWEEN WHITBY AND SCARBOROUGH.

[113]

Scarborough Castle has never yielded except to guile or famine. When Piers Gaveston, the silly favourite of a silly king, took refuge here from the barons who were tired of his wit and his insulting nicknames, it was famine that made him surrender himself and his ill-gotten goods—crown jewels and all—to Warwick, "the Black Dog," and Pembroke, "the Jew." The great Douglas, by the English named the "Black" and by the Scots the "Good," the guardian of the Bruce's heart and the hero of seventy fights, attacked Scarborough Castle in vain; and more than two hundred years later Robert Aske and his Pilgrims of Grace, though they took the town, failed to make any impression whatever upon the fortress. There was a certain market-day in Mary's reign, however, when a party of peasants strolled up this castle hill, and without any ado were allowed to pass with their wares between those round towers which we still may see, and over the two draw-bridges, and past the keep into the castle bailey. Perhaps the sentinels were a little surprised at the number of peasants who came to sell butter and eggs that day, but they were certainly more surprised when they saw their castle in the hands of Thomas Stafford and the rest of the smocked rebels. The masquerade cost Stafford his life, and did his cause no good at all.

Twice again was Scarborough Castle attacked, both times in the Civil War, both times by the army of the Parliament. It was during the first of these sieges that[114] the church—the "paroche chirch joyning almost to the castelle"—lost its chancel. There are still gaunt fragments of it standing like pillars in the churchyard, as we may see. The choir was turned into a battery, but received more hurt than it gave before the castle yielded at last to starvation so terrible that some of the garrison were carried out in sheets. Then a Parliament-man was put in as governor, but as he shortly afterwards declared for the king the siege began again. The Parliament took no more risks. When they had retaken it, and dealt with it as their manner was, Scarborough Castle was no longer very redoubtable.

Its state of disrepair was a cause of much discomfort to poor George Fox a few years later; for this dilapidated building was one of his many prisons, and he found it far from weather-proof. The home-made suit of leather that impressed Carlyle so much—"the one continuous including case"—must have been worn out by this time, I think, for the wetness of his clothes was one of the great Quaker's most constant[115] afflictions. When the smoky chimney prompted him to tax the Roman Catholic governor with sending him to Purgatory he was put into a room that had no fireplace at all. "Being to the sea-side," he says of it, "and lying much open, the wind drove in the rain forcibly, so that the water came over my bed and ran about the room, that I was fain to skim it up with a platter." Here he received distinguished visitors, and argued about the Pope's infallibility with as much spirit as ever.

The maimed church that stands below the castle on the slope is not now so imposing as once it was, but it is still a fine building and has four chantries. In its shadow lies Anne Brontë. From the road leading to the castle gate, at a point near the fountain, one may see by looking over the wall of the churchyard the upright stone that bears her name. When she was dying, her sister Charlotte, with the desperate hope of those who despair, brought her to Scarborough, whose bay and headlands gave her the last pleasure[116] she had. "It made her happy," wrote Charlotte, "to see Scarborough and its bay once more.... Our lodgings are pleasant, as Anne sits at the window she can look down on the sea."

CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES

SUMMARY OF TOUR IN MID-YORKSHIRE

Distances.

Roads.

No very serious hills except at Rievaulx.
Surface: main roads excellent; by-roads poor.

[119]

III

CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES

It is hard to turn away from the sea so soon. If we find it too hard to bear we may stay at Scarborough for a couple of nights, and, taking a short run down the coast, may see Filey, and the white cliffs of Flamborough, and the beautiful priory church of Bridlington, in a few hours. Then we can turn westwards with less discontent, especially if we make a short détour by Scalby, Hackness, and the Forge Valley.

Hackness lies in a nest of trees. Every road that leads to it is lovely. As we run down through glades and woods to this sheltered, still retreat, this green bower of sweeping boughs, it is easy to understand how deeply restful it must have seemed to[120] St. Hilda of Whitby and to the monks of a later day. Hilda founded the tiny community here, and made it a cell of her own great abbey, hoping, perhaps, to come here herself sometimes when she was tired of living in the teeth of the wind. The little grey church, wrapped and hidden in the trees, is partly Norman, partly Early English, but has various relics in it belonging to the Saxon life of Hilda's nunnery: a broken cross or pillar inscribed with runes, and a Saxon stone built into a Norman arch. A tablet on the wall tells how "the Lady Hilda of royal descent did for the sake of security and retirement establish a nunnery or cell for 8 nuns at Hackness." The fortunes of the place rose and fell with those of its parent abbey, for when Whitby was destroyed by the Danes in the ninth century, Hackness, too, was utterly wiped out. Then came the Norman revival. But "thieves and robbers coming out of the forests and dens where they lurked, carried away all the monks' substance, and laid that holy place—Whitby Abbey—desolate. In like manner pirates, void of all compassion,[121] landing there, came and plundered the monastery." So the monks' benefactor, William de Percy, gave them this retreat, already sacred to the memory of their great predecessor, where, like her, they might find security and retirement. Even to-day those priceless boons are to be found at Hackness. Even on an August afternoon, when the Forge Valley may almost be described as crowded, there are security and retirement in the green nest at Hackness.

Two miles of moderately pretty country lie between these two places. We see the thick woods before us like a wall across the landscape, and the archway of trees that spans the road is the gate into the Forge Valley. This little glen is too famous for its own good; but not a word of its fame is undeserved. In the early morning it must be quite perfect in its own gentle way, with its little river winding under the trees beside the road, and the grassy banks, and the cool woods rising on each side, and the paths that leave the wayside and disappear alluringly into the shadows. But in the afternoon of a summer's day,[122] when the grass is strewn with bowler hats, and every birch-tree is the background of a family group, flight is best. The flight is quite a short one, for the valley is on a miniature scale.

At its mouth, in a field beside the Derwent, is the ruin that was once Ayton Castle, a shattered tower that seems to have had many owners in turn, Attons and St. Johns and Euers and Cliffords, and was no doubt very useful in defending the narrow defile through which we have just driven. It came to the Cliffords with Margaret Bromflete, who was descended from one of the Attons, and was the wife of Clifford the Butcher. This was the Lady Clifford who saved her son's life by sending him away into hiding when the cause of the Red Rose seemed altogether lost: so this fragment of masonry is probably one of the many castles that were restored to the Shepherd Lord when Henry VII. became king. It is a place after the Shepherd's own heart, for in his day no doubt the valley of the Forge was as peaceful as Hackness. Indeed, only a hundred years[123] ago, a writer described the neighbourhood of Ayton as "grotesquely rural."

The beauty of the scenery ends rather suddenly as we drive through the two Aytons, East and West, and go on our way to Pickering. However, the road is level and has an excellent surface, and if the landscape is a little dull the villages are pretty. We pass through a series of them, all more or less alike and all built mainly of grey stone, for we are near the moors. On the outskirts of Brompton is Gallows Hill, whence, from her brother's farm, "the phantom of delight," Mary Hutchinson, came out one autumn morning to marry Wordsworth in the church whose spire rises on our left. With the bridegroom was Dorothy, a little sad-hearted we may guess; and with the "perfect woman" was her sister Joanna, that "wild-hearted" girl who found her brother-in-law's "dear friendships with the streams and groves" so comical that her laughter on the subject once raised echoes from all the hills of Grasmere. The church in which this wedding took place is interesting for its own sake, and contains, I[124] have read, a memorial to a sixteenth-century soldier, "who in wars to his greit charges sarved oin kyng and tow quenes with du obediens and died without recumpens." I did not see this, but quote it for the sake of those who collect curious epitaphs.[5]

Beyond Brompton the road skirts Ebberston and Allerston, and passes through Thornton-le-Dale, where a stream of some size runs by the wayside from end to end of the village, and an old cross stands among flowers. This village has a name for beauty, and like some other beauties takes a little too much pains to keep that reputation. It is certainly a pretty village, but it has rather a self-conscious air. Pickering is about two miles away.

Pickering is not particularly beautiful, but its ruined castle, and above all its wonderful church, should certainly be seen, for one rarely finds a church whose relics represent so many dates. The font is Saxon, the pulpit Chippendale, and between these two extremes of craftsmanship—the roughly hewn stone and the delicately[125] chiselled wood—are the fourteenth-century tombs and the fifteenth-century frescoes, and the Elizabethan chest. When Leland was here he saw and noted this figure of Sir William Bruce, and the "cantuarie bering his name," and that other effigy, of alabaster, with the "garland about his helmet," which represents Sir David Roucliffe and no Bruce, though Leland calls him one. Of these strange frescoes above our heads, which make the special fame of Pickering Church, there is no word in Leland's record. Possibly these pictured saints and virtues—St. Christopher and St. George and the Corporal Acts of Mercy—were so often to be seen in churches of his day that they did not call for comment, or it may be that they were already hidden under the thick coat of plaster that covered them for hundreds of years. They were discovered in the middle of the nineteenth century, and promptly whitewashed without fear or favour. The most elaborate of the pictures is the Feast of Herod, which shows that king dressed in mediæval garments suggestive of Mrs. Markham's History, while[126] John the Baptist is being horribly beheaded in the corner.

The remains of the castle are above the town; but the names of Rosamund's tower and the Devil's are more romantic than their appearance, and the inevitable lawn-tennis court can be more easily forgiven here than in the baileys of more beautiful ruins. This castle belonged to the house of Lancaster, and therefore in his day to that Lancaster, "the Actor," whom Piers Gavestone in his last moments besought for mercy, the Lancaster who so shortly afterwards was crying "Have mercy on me, King of Heaven!" when his turn came to be beheaded. It belonged, too, to the "time-honoured Lancaster" whose son imprisoned Richard II. for a little while within these very walls. All the prisons, it seems, to which Henry IV. committed Richard—Knaresborough, Pickering, Pontefract—were his own Lancastrian castles, and at Henry's accession, of course, became crown property. This one, which held for the King in the Civil War, still belongs to the Duchy of Lancaster.

[127]

Not many miles from Pickering, at the very brink of the moors, is a village whose name is familiar to lovers of old buildings and students of church history, and whose charms of seclusion and quietness are so endearing that even the unlearned are likely to think of it again and again with affection. I do not think "excursions" ever go to Lastingham. There is nothing there to attract those who visit a sacred ruin to play games in its aisles, or to sit on the high altar till it becomes necessary to enclose it with a railing, or to photograph their fiancées under its arches. These are only drawn by a famous name. The fame of Lastingham is hidden in a few ancient books, and in the works of archæologists, and in the memories of those who have sought peace and found it there. To reach it we must turn to the right a couple of miles beyond Pickering, and drive by winding ways and on rather an indifferent surface to the foot of the moors.

It is at Cropton that the moors first come into sight. The scenery has been uninteresting since we left the Forge Valley,[128] and it is with all the more delight that we suddenly, at a turn of the road, find the landscape filled with colour and warmth and beauty, with hills green in the foreground and gloriously crimson against the sky. The road curves and twists and curves again, as though hunting for Lastingham among the little valleys. It seems to be altogether lost, and then suddenly we find it.

About twelve hundred and fifty years ago, when its history began, it was not so easily found. Ethelwald, king of the Deiri, wished to have a monastery in his own Northumbrian country—some peaceful spot to which, when he had a mind, he might retire for prayer and quietness during his life, and in which he might be buried when he died. So he summoned to him that "holy, wise, and good man," Cedd, Bishop of the East Angles and brother of St. Chad, and offered him a piece of land. Cedd "chose himself a place among craggy and distant mountains which looked like lurking-places for robbers ... to the end that the fruits of good works should spring up where before beasts were wont to dwell, or men to live after the manner of beasts." Such is Bede's rather overdrawn description of this green hollow among the rounded hills; yet some say that Bede visited the place himself. Having chosen the spot it was necessary "to cleanse the place for the monastery from former crimes," so Cedd and his brother Cynebil kept between them a forty days' fast upon that little knoll where the church stands, uplifted above the village. There the monastery rose, and thither the bishop often came to see that all was well. Once he came at a time "when there was a mortality there," and, catching the epidemic, he died. And so it happens that the dust of this Saxon saint lies beneath the crypt of Lastingham Church.

THE VILLAGE OF LASTINGHAM.

[129]

Cedd's brother, the famous Chad, to whom so many churches are dedicated, succeeded him as abbot, and was often here. In connection with him Bede tells a poetical story of a monk of Lastingham. Oswini was a practical man, and felt himself unfitted for the contemplative life, yet greatly longed to renounce the world. So "quitting all he had"—he had been a Queen's Prime Minister—he[130] came to St. Chad here on this little hill, and, pointing to the hatchet and axe that he had brought in his hand, put himself and them at the service of the monks. So while the others prayed Brother Oswini worked. And it was he, the humble worker with his hands, and not the monks upon their knees in the church, who heard the voices of the heavenly choir. He was "doing such things as were necessary" in the house when, "on a sudden," as he afterwards said, "he heard the voice of persons singing most sweetly and rejoicing, and appearing to descend from heaven." This sound of singing surged round the oratory where Chad was at prayer, then returned to heaven, "the way it came, with inexpressible sweetness." None heard it but the saint and the man of labour. Chad knew the meaning of it. "They were angelic spirits," he said, "who came to call me to my heavenly reward, which I have always longed after." Seven days later, says the historian, the bishop died.

This gate and path will lead us to the knoll where all these things happened, except[131] the actual death of Chad. Here Brother Oswini worked and heard the angels sing: here Cedd fasted and died. Here in this little crypt, which we reach through the strange walled opening in the nave, his dust lies on the right of the altar. Some say that these Saxon stones with the fishes and dragons carved upon them have been here ever since the days of Cedd; but the sturdy piers and vaulted ceiling of the miniature chapel are, of course, Norman. They, and the apse above them, were probably the work of those monks of Whitby who founded the Abbey of St. Mary at York, and seem to have paused here for ten years on their way thither.

The street by which we entered Lastingham winds down the slope to the foot of the hollow; on the right of it is the restored Well of St. Cedd in its stone basin. The heather of the huge Cleveland moors is hardly more than a stone's-throw distant; and high upon the hill that overlooks the site of the Saxon monastery is a cross, not ancient, but very striking in this place. The tiny inn is close under the church. It is[132] extremely small, and of the homeliest kind; but I think that any one who is not daunted by the simple life—the very simple life, be it plainly understood—will carry away pleasant memories of the quietness and cleanliness and kindliness within its doors. It has, unfortunately, not even a shed wherein to shelter a car, but only a grass plot where a car may spend a fine night.

We climb out of Lastingham by a road that passes close to the cross. This cross was set up in commemoration of Queen Victoria's accession, but there must surely have been another thought in the minds of those who placed it so symbolically in this particular spot. Let us pause for a moment and look down. The village lies below us in its little hollow, with the church of the early saints raised in its midst; and just above us, conspicuous on its height and clearly outlined against the sky, stands the cross. It seems to guard the boundary between the poetry of Lastingham and the prose of the ordinary world, for the beauty that makes such a perfect setting for the place ends suddenly on the brow of the hill, and we speed away among commonplace fields and hedges to join the high-road by way of Appleton-le-Moor.

LASTINGHAM CROSS.

[133]

At Keldholme, though the priory is marked on the map as though still in existence, only some stones built into a wall are left to show where de Stutteville's nunnery stood. As for the de Stutteville's own castle, which once rose proudly on the hill to our right, the stones of it form the walls of the neighbouring prison, and the site of it is a pasturage for the neighbouring cows.

The prison in question—a dark, repellent spot in a pretty street—is in the market-place of Kirbymoorside. Nearly facing it is the "Black Swan," whose pretty red-tiled porch bears the date 1632; but it was the "King's Head," further up the street, to which Pope alluded when he said, neither truthfully nor politely, that the second Duke of Buckingham died at Kirbymoorside "in the worst inn's worst room." This trim, modern-looking house with the sober front of grey, so unsuggestive of the rakish duke, has never formed a part of the inn, and it was in its best room that Buckingham,[134] on his deathbed, declared he had always had the greatest veneration for religion and reason. We may not cross the threshold of the room into which the dying man was carried—and, indeed, even penitent upon his deathbed, George Villiers the second was hardly an object for pilgrimages!—but here is its little window overlooking the street, the middle window of the three that are next the inn. Many writers, following Macaulay and Pope, assume that Buckingham died in this house because he had squandered his fortune so thoroughly that he could not secure a more comfortable place to die in. But some tell a more likely, if less edifying, tale. The duke was injured or taken ill, they say, while hunting near this town, and as his own castle of Helmsley was several miles away he was carried hither, to the house of one of his tenants. It seems certain that the estate of Helmsley was still his at his death, since his executors received nearly ninety thousand pounds for it from Charles Duncombe, banker and goldsmith. A man who had once possessed all that the Buckinghams had taken from their kings[135] might be said to have squandered his fortune without being actually in want of a roof to die under. He had at one time a very fine roof of his own here at Kirbymoorside, but this may have been one of the many things he had lost, or possibly the Civil War had left it in a state even less luxurious than this little grey house. By following a stony lane we may see, in a farmyard above the town, the few fragments of masonry that are the last remains of the castle of the Nevilles and the Buckinghams. Queen Elizabeth took it from the Nevilles, and her successor gave it to the man of whom he said: "You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than any one else."

The second duke, who died so humbly, was buried with his betters—among whom, I think, we may include his father—in Westminster Abbey. His body was embalmed, and the oft-quoted line in the register of burials at Kirbymoorside refers only to the viscera: "1687 April 17th. Gorges vilaus Lord dooke of bookingam."

About a mile beyond Kirbymoorside there[136] is a little valley, not far from the high-road, of which perhaps the greater number of us have never heard. The appeal of Kirkdale, like that of Lastingham, is not to the many, and for that very reason it is irresistible to some; not only to the man of science and the historian, but to all those who can best hear the voices of the dead in places where there are no voices of the living. There is silence in Kirkdale.

A steep hill with a preposterous surface leads down to Hodge Beck; to the wooden footbridge among the trees, and the quarry where the hyænas used to live, and the splash that we must cross. Those limestone rocks to the right are famous in the world of science, for that dark cave whose entrance we may see was discovered, about a hundred years ago, to be strewn with the bones of strange beasts. It was a veritable treasury for geologists, for the hyænas who lived and died here in such quantities not only bequeathed their own bones to us, but also many bones of the uncouth creatures they were in the habit of eating, creatures most happily no longer with us. There were once tigers and elephants, it appears, in quiet Kirkdale.

HODGE BECK.

[137]

We climb out of the beck and turn to the right. The narrow glen is thickly wooded, after the manner of Yorkshire dales both large and small, and in a clump of firs stands the Minster of St. Gregory. This is a fine name for so small a building; but it was called a minster nearly nine hundred years ago, and we need not deny it the distinction in its venerable age. It is not for its beauty that we come to see it, though it is picturesque enough in its setting of trees; but chiefly it is for the sake of one stone in its wall, and of the names inscribed upon it—names familiar yet remote, the names of Edward the King and Tosti the Earl. Here they are, carved in the lifetime of those who bore them. It is plain that this great stone was not always, as it is now, under a porch; for it was once a sundial, and here it is always in the shadow. The words upon it are deeply and clearly graven, easily distinguished, and, except for a few words, easily understood. This is the whole inscription, carved in two columns, with one line below the dial:—

[138]

"Orm Gamal Suna Bohte STS Gregorius Minster Wonne Hit Wes AEl Tobrocan & Tofalan & He Hit Let Macan Newan From Grunde XPE & STS Gregorius In Eadward Dagum CNG & In Tosti Dagum Eorl, & Hawarth Me Wrohte & Brand, PRS."

(Orm Gamal's son, bought St. Gregory's Minster when it was all tobroken and tofallen, and he it let be made new from ground to Christ and St. Gregory, in Edward's days, the King, and in Tosti's days, the Earl, & Howarth me wrought, and Brand, Priests.)

The sundial has its own legend:—

"This is Daeges Solmerca Aet Ilcum Tide.'
(This is Day's sunmarker at every time.")

This church, then, was made new from the ground in the middle of the eleventh century; for it was in 1056 that Tosti, the son of the famous Godwin, obtained the earldom of Northumbria; and it was in 1065 that he "impelled the Northumbrians to rebel, by the asperity of his manners," and so lost his earldom. In using these words William of Malmesbury is really most moderate, for Tosti seems to have been a terrible swashbuckler. He murdered, among many others, the son of the very man who rebuilt this church and set up this inscription: "All the sons of the traitor Godwin," says an old[139] chronicler, "were men of such wickedness that if they saw any beautiful town belonging to any one they caused the lord of it to be slain by night, and his offspring to be destroyed, that they might obtain his property." On one occasion Tosti seized his brother Harold by the hair in the king's presence, while he was actually drinking his Majesty's health; whereupon Harold lifted Tosti "up on high, and dashed him down on the floor." Such was the asperity of their manners.

Edward the King is, of course, the Confessor, the "harmless king."

Within the church there are two carved stones round which much discussion circles. Until lately they were in the outer wall, where they naturally suffered much from the climate. One of them—the one that has a cross engraved upon it—once bore the words "Cyning Æthilwald," or "King Ethelwald," in runic letters. Upon the slender foundation of this somewhat vague inscription it has been argued that this is the coffin lid of King Ethelwald: therefore Ethelwald was buried at Kirkdale: therefore Cedd's monastery,[140] where Ethelwald wished to be buried, was at Kirkdale and not at Lastingham. This last conclusion is then turned into a premise, with a view to suggesting that the beautiful stone with the Celtic design upon it may be the coffin lid of Cedd himself. Yet Bede says that Cedd was buried at "Lestingau."

The door of St. Gregory's Minster is locked. We may see the "sunmarker" and its clear lettering without entering the building, and also a slab of stone with an interlaced Celtic pattern which is let into the outer wall; but to see the reputed coffin lids of Ethelwald and Cedd—which are beautiful specimens of Celtic work, whatever their story—we must drive to Nawton village, a mile away, and fetch the key from the Vicarage. This seems hard; and if hard for motorists, a hundred times harder for bicyclists and others. The Yorkshire churches are in the main very kind to the public. Many of them are left open, with a suggestive money-box close to the door, and often with a guide-book that may be borrowed. By this method the church probably gains rather than loses, since it is pleasanter to give half a crown to an old building that deserves it than to give sixpence to an old man who has learnt a few facts by rote, and learnt them wrongly. If it is possible, however, to forgive a church for being closed we must forgive this church of Kirkdale. It has again and again been defaced and desecrated by those curious folk who love their own insignificant initials more than any fairer sight. It is certain that those who care so little for a building as to treat it thus will not journey very far to fetch the key.

KIRKDALE.

[141]

The fine high-road that skirts the eastern moors, the road on which we have been travelling since we left Scarborough, comes to an end, in a sense, at Helmsley; for here it splits up into two roads, each of which we must follow for a time. Helmsley itself has its attractions. Among them are an open market square and an ancient cross, pretty houses and an inn covered with flowers, a tiny stream running through the town from end to end, and a castle-keep upon the hill. This is that castle which was "once proud Buckingham's delight," and now stands within the park whose name is borrowed from[142] Duncombe the banker. Helmsley has passed through many hands, of which some helped in the making of history, and some were not over clean. The first name we hear of in connection with the place is no less a one than William the Conqueror, for he, having given Helmsley to one of his followers, chose it on one occasion for his own resting-place, after a heavy march and much hard work of the destructive kind he affected. His host, Earl Morton, lost these lands in the losing cause of Robert Curthose, and they fell to the famous Walter of Espec, one of the leaders in that strange semi-religious victory, the Battle of the Standard, whose heroes were summoned by an archbishop, absolved upon the field by a bishop, and actually overshadowed through the fight by the consecrated Host and the banners of three saints. Just such a mixture as this, of religion and bloodshed, was Walter himself, with his splendid presence, his gigantic height, his bright eyes and noble forehead, his voice "like the sound of a trumpet," his life as a warrior, and his death as a monk. Walter's sister Adeline married Peter de Ros, and it was their great-grandson,[143] Robert de Ros, who built this much dilapidated tower of Helmsley Castle. After long centuries of ownership by unimportant Williams and Roberts and Georges the place came into the fair hands of Katherine, the daughter of the Earl of Rutland, and the wholly undeserved wife of the first Duke of Buckingham. Lady Katherine Manners was not, as is sometimes said, the granddaughter of Sir Philip Sidney, for it was her Uncle Roger, not her father, who married Sidney's daughter. The Duchess of Buckingham inherited all the wealth of her father's house, for her two little half-brothers died "by wicked practice and sorcery": so Helmsley came to Steenie, whose angel-face brought him so much beside his nickname. All his honours and his riches were won, says Clarendon, "upon no other advantage or recommendation than of the beauty and gracefulness and becomingness of his person." Yet something more truly lovable than this, we may be sure, was needed to win his Kate and her broad lands; and indeed the romance that gives this castle of Helmsley its chief interest remained romantic to the end, even[144] though the duchess lived to write: "I pray God never woman may love a man as I have done you."

James I.'s slave-dog, as he called himself, was too busy in court and camp to visit Helmsley much, if ever, but it must have been a fine sight when it was his. The keep, not then a crumbling fragment, rose high above walls and many towers. Here are still the two moats that surrounded them, and the two gateways that once made a double defence. How strong the defences were we may gather from the trouble they gave to Sir Thomas Fairfax when he besieged the castle in the time of the second Duke of Buckingham, and won it at last, not only for the Parliament, but for himself. His grateful country gave him the lands of Helmsley, but at the same time took the precaution of reducing the castle to ruins, so that this shattered keep and gatehouse should never again defend royalist or rebel. The Buckinghams were ever humorists, and the second duke, pondering how he might regain some of his lost possessions, bethought him of marrying Mary Fairfax. After he had been embroiled in many plots and suffered many imprisonments he settled down here within sight of the tower that his father-in-law had reduced to so sad a state.

DOUBLE ENTRANCE TO HELMSLEY CASTLE.

[145]

There, beyond the lawn-tennis court, is the house he lived in. Some of it seems to be older than his day, but he probably was obliged to repair it rather thoroughly after the siege. We may climb those steps, if we will, and enter.

These are haunted rooms. They are not haunted by a very worthy ghost, I fear—not even by Steenie of the dainty leg and the lovely complexion, the gallant adventurer whom many loved much and whom we all love a little—but only by his handsome, vicious son, the son who was born to the sound of all the joy-bells of Westminster, and died in the humble little bed at Kirbymoorside. These rooms were once proud Buckingham's delight; now they tear at one's heart. It is a thing to be glad of, no doubt, that Lord Mayor Duncombe found Buckingham's home too small to hold his vaulting ambitions and so built the palace[146] in the park, leaving us this pitiful relic of departed glory. Yet one marvels that any man should have allowed so much beauty to go to wrack. These great oak panels with their rare design, this splendid moulded ceiling wrought so elaborately with Tudor roses, that frieze of shields and fleurs-de-lys, of mermaids and winged dragons, once made an appropriate setting for the man whom a contemporary called the "finest gentleman of person and wit" he ever saw. Now, in their decayed grandeur, they are appropriate still; a dramatic—almost a melodramatic—symbol of his fate. Half the panelling is gone; shred by shred the plaster of the ceiling is falling on the uneven floor; bare laths and gaping holes disfigure the Tudor roses over our heads; of the mermaids and winged dragons only a few are left. Lumber is piled upon the floor where "all mankind's epitome" was wont to walk; cobwebs and dust deface the windows. Such is the symbol of proud Buckingham, than whom "no man was ever handsomer," yet who was, in the last year of his life, "worn to a thread"; and up[147] there in the park is the symbol of the city knight who bought his property with money not always well-gained, and flourished like a green bay-tree. We see the unromantic, prosperous house of the thrifty Duncombe as we drive away to Rievaulx.

Motorists will find it their best plan to visit the terrace of Rievaulx before seeing the abbey itself. The way lies through a gate on the left at the top of an extremely steep hill; a winding lane leads among trees to a second gate, and here the car may safely be left. A few steps bring us to the famous terrace cut on the hillside by a Duncombe of the eighteenth century. For half a mile the wide and level turf is stretched between the woods that overshadow it on the left, and the woods that fall steeply away from it on the right to the foot of the hill. Beyond the valley another wooded hill rises; to the south are moors. If we stand at the brink of the terrace and look down through a gap in the trees we see, far below us, the pointed arches of Rievaulx Abbey.

At each end of the terrace is a classical[148] temple. At the north end, where we are standing, is the one described in the local guide-book as "a beautiful temple with an Ionic portico." At first sight it gives one a shock. Eighteenth-century buildings so often do give one a shock.

If, however, we forget for a few minutes that Rievaulx Abbey lies down there in the valley, if we forget Walter of Espec and his monks, and remember only the days when this temple was built, the Ionic portico has its uses. It gives us a vision of the age of powder and hoops, of the fair ladies who rustled here on the soft turf when George was king. The closely cropped sward was suited to the dainty feet, the scenery not so "savage" as to wound the dainty susceptibilities. Indeed, in any century, this scene could only heal.

There is a path that winds down the hill to the abbey, and if our car is independent of us this is the best way to go. But if she is unattended and cannot meet us in the valley we must drive down the steep hill to the village. The surface of this hill is composed of ruts and loose stones, but the beauty of the woods is compensation for nearly anything.

RIEVAULX ABBEY FROM THE TERRACE.

[149]

If Fountains Abbey speaks of power, Rievaulx breathes peace. Taking everything into consideration, I think its beauty has only one rival in England. The valley of the Rye is far lovelier than Studley Park; the building itself is far lovelier than Bolton. Only Tintern can rival it; not even Tintern can eclipse it. For at Tintern the feeling of Cistercian seclusion can only be acquired through the imagination: a high-road is close at hand; a brisk trade in picture postcards and Goss china is carried on at the abbey door; to be alone is almost impossible. But here at Rievaulx we may chance to stand in perfect solitude, perfect stillness, under the mighty archway that soars in dignified simplicity so far above our heads, and separates us as though by invisible gates from the world. No imagination is needed here to conjure up the aloofness of the white monks—the actual fact is here. Through the empty windows—once filled, in defiance of the early Cistercian ideals, with some of the first efforts of[150] English glass-stainers—we see the wild hillside rising from the very walls, and above it the rampart of trees; the grass under our feet grows like the grass of the field; the world makes no sign, and on each side of us the slender arches point to heaven. There is something here that is more than beauty; the very air seems charged with the prayers of holy men long dead. The weather-worn slab of the high altar is unfortunately enclosed by a railing, which is doubtless needed, in this Christian country, to save it from desecration. Not near this stone, as one might expect, but in the ruined chapter-house, lies the dust of the monk who came here in his old age to hide his "broad but well-featured face" under the shadow of a cowl, and to subdue his trumpet-like voice to the singing of psalms—the monk who had founded this abbey in the days when he was a famous soldier—Walter of Espec.

RIEVAULX ABBEY.

[151]

Walter founded three monasteries: one at Kirkham, which we shall presently see; one here; one at Wardon in Bedfordshire. Incorporated with Leland's Itinerary is a document which tells us how Walter's only son fell from his horse and broke his neck upon a stone cross, and how in consequence Walter founded the monasteries of Kirkham and Rievaulx with some of the wealth for which he had now no heir. Dugdale, the seventeenth-century antiquarian, believed the tale, and told it for truth in his "Monasticon." Yet now we are bidden to reject the story of the younger Walter's sad end; nay, even to doubt that he ever lived! He is not mentioned, say those who know, in the foundation-charter of the abbey; there is nowhere in any document a statement that Walter of Espec ever had a son. However, till we find a definite statement that he had none, we shall probably continue to accept or reject the story according to temperament.

There are still some fragments of the actual church that was built by the eager hands of the monks from Clairvaux, the monks sent by St. Bernard himself to live their austere lives in this valley; but, of course, this rich triforium, these corbels of elaborate carving, these lancets and moulded[152] arches and clustered columns were never seen by Norman Walter. Nor, indeed, would they have met with approval from the saintly abbot of Clairvaux, whose aspirations, like those of all the early Cistercians, tended to severe simplicity in architecture as in life. The vanished nave, it is thought, was part of the Norman work of Bernard's missionary monks, but this glorious chancel and the refectory with the strange doorway belong entirely to the thirteenth century.

Beautiful as are the details it is by the great chancel-arch that we shall always remember Rievaulx. It is the reposefulness of its simple grandeur that strikes the keynote of peace. Its quiet, stately lines rest the eye, and the memory of it rests the heart whenever we think of this fair daughter of Citeaux and mother of Melrose.

CHANCEL ARCH, RIEVAULX ABBEY.

[153]

Long ago there was a second Cistercian abbey on the banks of Rye. The bells of Old Byland and the bells of Rievaulx clashed with one another, which for some reason shocked the Byland monks. Those who live in towns to-day, and Sunday by Sunday hear the bells of seven or eight churches ringing simultaneously in varying keys, will sympathise with them; but there seems to have been some idea in their minds beyond the obvious one, an idea strong enough to make them migrate first to Stocking and then to the spot where we may see the ruins of their abbey. Those who can spare the time will find that the beautiful west front of the second Byland repays them well for driving the few miles between the two ruins. The community that finally settled on this spot had been through a great deal. When they came here it was more than fifty years since the thirteen monks necessary to found a new house had left Furness to wander in their ox-waggon from place to place—from Furness to Cumberland, from Cumberland to Thirsk, from Thirsk to Byland-on-the-Moor, from Byland-on-the-Moor to Stocking, and from Stocking to their final home at last. None of the original thirteen can have seen the trefoiled door and gigantic wheel-window of the west front; for this, the most striking part of the existing ruin, was probably[154] the finishing touch to a very splendid church.

Those who reach Byland may perhaps like to drive about a mile and a half beyond it, to see the interesting church at Coxwold, and the house where Laurence Sterne lived for some time and wrote the greater part of "Tristram Shandy," alternated with many sermons. From Coxwold a series of byways will take them to the high-road at Brandsby.

Those, however, who are unable to go beyond Rievaulx, must return to Helmsley. They may follow the Rye for a little while, and then, turning to the left with a last and lovely view of the abbey, may mount the hill through the woods, the fairy-haunted woods of Rievaulx, where the stems are not wrapped about with a confusion of undergrowth, but rise unhampered from a carpet of ferns and creepers. This climb among the dusky trees is very short, but adds to one's sense of Rievaulx's remoteness. The shadowy stillness of these woods is like a veil dropped between the valley and the world.

[155]

After driving through Helmsley we cross the Rye, and presently pass the upper entrance of Duncombe Park, the "Nelson Gate," erected as we see "to the memory of Lord Viscount Nelson, and the unparallelled gallant achievements of the British Navy." Between Helmsley and Sheriff Hutton, whither we are bound, lies some very pretty country of a pastoral kind, and a series of picturesque villages, several of which deserve more attention than we are likely to give them.

Here, for instance, is Oswaldkirk, which might well tempt us to pause. It is scattered along the side of a hill, with its little houses half smothered in trees. The tiny church is open, and in it are some fragments of Saxon and Norman work, and a Jacobean pulpit which once held the famous John Tillotson, who began life in a tailor's shop and ended it as Archbishop of Canterbury. His success was chiefly due, I believe, to his eloquence, so we may regard this spot as the cradle of his fortunes, since the sermon he preached here was his first. And here in Oswaldkirk[156] was born another man of mark, the antiquarian to whom we owe so much of our knowledge of the ruined monasteries, Roger Dodsworth. He collaborated with Dugdale in the "Monasticon," which was not published till after his death. The younger man inherited the fruit of his researches, and has more or less eclipsed his name.

A little more than a mile beyond Oswaldkirk is Gilling, one of the prettiest villages in the county. Its wide street is bordered by bright gardens; a tiny stream runs through it under a row of miniature bridges; on the left is a church with some interesting tombs; and on the right, entirely hidden by the trees, is the castle of the Fairfaxes. Only those who have secured special permission are admitted to see this castle and its splendid Elizabethan Hall, of which the fame has reached many who were never in it. It is, according to all accounts, a marvel of rich ornament, of oaken panels and delicate inlay, of carved mouldings and stained glass and armorial shields.

A road with a perfect surface carries us[157] out of the village to the top of a hill—where one patch of heather by the wayside reminds us that we are on Grimston Moor—and on through Brandsby to Stillington. The church we leave behind us as we turn sharply to the left has no special interest beyond the fact that Laurence Sterne preached many of his sermons in it, while he was living at Sutton-in-the-Forest and at Coxwold. Here in Stillington we leave the fine high-road for a very poor one—one that is a mere lane in fact—which leads us past the strange little church of Marton-on-the-Forest, with its crow-stepped gables and tower, to the village of Sheriff Hutton.

"What is this forest call'd?" we may be inclined to ask with Archbishop Scrope in "Henry IV." "'Tis Gaultree Forest, an't shall please your grace." Even in Leland's time there was very little wood in the neighbourhood of Sheriff Hutton, and now the Forest of Galtres, so "impenetrable and swampy" when the Romans set to work to drain it, has practically vanished. A good proportion of it, I think, must always[158] have been forest only in the technical sense, for we hear of it in the reign of Elizabeth as the scene of a yearly horse-race, wherein the prize for the winning horse was a little golden bell. Moreover, there is a tradition that wanderers in the Forest of Galtres, which reached to the outskirts of York, were guided by a light hung in the lantern tower of All Saints Church. Unless a great part of the country were open—"low medows and morisch ground"—this light would not have greatly aided the belated traveller. Be that as it may, the country is now so open that as we draw near Sheriff Hutton we may see with a thrill, if we look very intently along the far horizon, the faint, elusive gleaming of York Minster.

The castle of Sheriff Hutton is more impressive at a distance than close at hand. It is visible miles away across the flat country, and the jagged outlines of its cluster of towers stand up so imposingly against the sky that one is led to expect something rather vast and effective. But these gaunt remnants are all[159] there is to see. They stand in a farmyard and are surrounded with haystacks. Once upon a time this castle was fine enough. It had eight or nine great towers, "and the stately staire up to the haul" was very magnificent, and so was "the haul it self, and al the residew of the house." It owed its splendour to the splendid Nevilles, to the great Warwick among others, who seems always to have lived in a state of kingly magnificence, as befitted one who made kings. When he died it passed, with his other castles, to his son-in-law Richard III., who used it as a prison for such claimants of the throne as he did not trouble to murder. There was humour in this plan of sending the two young cousins to keep each other company—Edward IV.'s daughter, Elizabeth of York, and the youthful Warwick, son of that Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a butt of Malmsey. They were not here very long, for hardly had their Uncle Richard's ill-gotten crown fallen under the hawthorn on Bosworth Field, before the new king's emissary was riding in all haste to Sheriff[160] Hutton. There was a crowd that day about this gate that still bears the arms of the Nevilles and of England, for from all the country round the people gathered to do honour to their future queen; and as she was led out from her prison to share Henry's throne, the gentry of the neighbourhood, an eager bodyguard, pressed forward to escort her to London. Poor cousin Warwick went to London too, with a bodyguard of a sterner sort; for since his claims could not, like Elizabeth's, be merged in those of the new king, he was destined for the Tower and the block.

There is no record, apparently, of how this stately castle was transformed in the course of one century from a "Princely Logginges" to a mere shell. The usual death sentence of castles, "dismantled by order of the Parliament," was never pronounced in this case, for the mischief was done before Charles I. was king. In Henry VIII.'s reign this was for a time the home of that Duke of Norfolk who was the uncle of two queens, and lived to see them both upon the scaffold. He was a witness at Anne Boleyn's wedding and a judge at her trial, and was himself only saved from the block by Henry's death. His son Surrey, the sweet singer, has walked here too, where now the hay is stacked.

SHERIFF HUTTON CASTLE.

[161]

Richard III. was here at least once, in the year before his death. He and his sad wife—sad all her life, but now heart-broken—came here to bury their little son. At the end of the sloping village street is the old church where they laid him; and there we may still see, not the place of his burial, for that is unknown, but the little alabaster figure that once lay upon his tomb. It has the air of being a good portrait. The features are still faintly visible; the pathetic down-drawn mouth suggests that Anne Neville's son was not much happier than herself. Circling the boyish head is a heavy crown, the only crown it ever wore. The reason that the Prince of Wales was buried here does not appear. Some suggest that his mother, who was with Richard at Nottingham, could not bear to return to[162] Middleham, and so met the funeral procession here; but there is at least one historian[6] who describes her despair when she saw her dead son in his own home. Elizabeth of York was probably at Sheriff Hutton when her little cousin Edward was brought here to his grave. She must have remembered another Edward, nearer and dearer to her, whose grave, not yet discovered, had been so lately made at the foot of the dark staircase in the Tower of London.

This ancient church has some fine brasses in it. One of them is hidden beneath a trap-door in the floor; another bears the figures of two babies in swaddling clothes. The church's patron saint is St. Helena, the mother of Constantine, and the discoverer, through a vision, of the Holy Cross. The historians give us a good deal of choice in the matter of this lady's origin. Some declare that she was the daughter of a British king, a woman of surprising beauty and intelligence; but it seems to be more likely that her father was an innkeeper.

[163]

Sheriff Hutton is only about ten miles away from York, but if possible we should add a few miles to the distance by making a détour to Kirkham Priory. All that there is to be seen there is comprised in one picture, so to speak, a picture of an old gateway and the base of a cross; but it is a picture that one remembers.

To reach it we pass through country that is sometimes moderately pretty, sometimes dull. There is a little church at Foston that is pleasant to the eye, with a red-tiled roof, and a miniature bell-tower, and a pathway where the yew-trees nearly meet. But we are now on the borderland between the beautiful part of Yorkshire and the uninteresting south-eastern plain. After we leave Kirkham we shall see little more of the beauties of nature. We shall see some beautiful architecture, and various things that are more appealing to the imagination than to the eye. And here, too, as is so often the case where the scenery is tame, the roads are sufficient in themselves for the pleasure of the day's journey.

About a mile beyond Foston we turn[164] on to the high-road from Scarborough to York; but after a few moments leave it again for a road on the right, by which we slowly descend into the valley of the Derwent. The hillside is thickly wooded, and as we pass beyond the overarching trees we see Kirkham lying below us: the little village, and the wooded hill beyond it, and the beautiful gateway that is so entirely unlike all others, and, fringed with rushes, the wide, smooth river—the Derwent, which we last saw at Ayton, shadowed by the birches of the Forge Valley and overlooked by the ruins of Margaret Bromflete's castle.

This was the first of the monasteries founded by Walter of Espec. In front of the gateway is the base of an old cross, of which the top step is carved with an almost illegible design. Local tradition, in its courageous way, declares that there is incorporated with these steps a fragment of the "little stone cross" that caused the death of Walter of Espec's son. The truth of this tale seems to depend a good deal on whether Walter ever had a son.

GATEWAY OF KIRKHAM PRIORY.

[165]

It is this gateway that we have come to see. The fragment of wall in which it is framed was probably built in the twelfth century, but all this wealth of ornament and heraldry belongs to a much later date. The quiet valley and the stream would suggest to one that this, like Walter's Rievaulx, was a Cistercian house; but there was never a Cistercian community that would have countenanced all this display of tracery and crockets and statuary, and all these worldly coats of arms. They were Augustinian Canons who made their gate so fine, and carved upon it these ten shields of men with sounding names—Clare and Vaux, Scrope, Ros, Plantagenet—and set these saints in their niches, and above them the seal of the priory; and who passed to their meals in the refectory under all the varied mouldings of this magnificent Norman door south of the cloister-garth; and who chanted their Credo with their eyes fixed on that lovely lancet window, once part of the east-end of their church.

And now we are at last bound for York.[166] We cross the Derwent and climb the hill again to the high-road, and there before us, very far away, lies our goal. Faintly shining, York Minster shows like a pale opal hanging above the horizon.

The very thought of York and all that it stands for makes the heart beat faster. Let us open the throttle then, and speed to it as quickly as we may; for the road lies broad and level between the fields, and nearly as straight as an arrow's path, and never, if we love our engine and our England as we should, shall we forget this flight of ours to the city of all our kings.

YORK AND THE SOUTH

SUMMARY OF TOUR IN THE SOUTH

Distances.

Roads.

Usually good and level.

[169]

IV

YORK AND THE SOUTH

No man knows the spell of York till he has approached it by road in the evening. Of all the fresh experiences that the motor-car has brought to us there are few from which the imagination gains so much as from this way of entering old and beautiful towns. We have too long accepted the roof of a railway station as our first view of such places. It is not an inspiring view. But to see York Minster from afar, shining under the evening sky and lifted high above the city; to watch it growing larger and larger, rising higher and higher, increasing in beauty every moment, until at last one drives slowly into its huge shadow; to pass under one of the great gates that have[170] survived so many centuries, so many wars, so many pageants, that have welcomed so many kings, and dripped with the blood of so many warriors; to see the ancient streets for the first time idealised by the dusk of twilight, will help us, if anything will, to recall and realise something of what York has been during the eighteen hundred years of her history.

The past is very insistent here. Here are the walls, encircling the whole city, that were built by Edward I. and repaired after the Civil War. We may drive round them, and pass in and out of the four gates that were once so hard to enter: Monk Bar, by which we come in from Kirkham under the arms of England and France quartered together; and Bootham Bar on the Newcastle Road; and Micklegate Bar on the Tadcaster Road; and Walmgate Bar, where the restored barbican reminds us that it was undermined during the long siege of the Civil War. All these bars are turreted and ornamented with painted shields and statues or helmets of stone; three of them still have their portcullises; three still bear the arms of France.

WALMGATE BAR, YORK.

[171]

Walmgate, or Watling Gate, Bar is the most picturesque of them on the inner side, for it carries on its stone pillars an Elizabethan house of timber and plaster. But by far the richest in memories is Micklegate Bar. Some of these memories are of a very ghastly kind, for it was here that the heads of "traitors" were set up. It was here that Harry Hotspur's head looked down upon his doubly treacherous old father, the Duke of Northumberland, as that time-server rode out through the gate in perfect friendliness with Henry IV., and found it advisable, no doubt, to ignore the thing that stared above the parapet. Here, in Henry V.'s reign, the head of Lord Scrope of Masham was set up because he favoured the House of York; and here, half a century later, was the head of the Duke of York himself, crowned with paper—to be replaced, almost before Margaret of Anjou had finished laughing at it, by the head of the man who put it here—Clifford the Butcher. The[172] hideous series closed with the followers of Prince Charlie in the Forty-five.

MICKLEGATE BAR, YORK.

[173]

Meantime there were other sights to be seen at Micklegate Bar. Richard III., fresh from one coronation and eager for another, was received here "with great pomp and triumph" by the citizens and the clergy "in their richest copes," and passed through this archway with his stolen crown upon his head, followed by his luckless queen and the little boy who was so soon to die. His successor's daughter, Margaret Tudor, entered York very gaily by this gate with five hundred lords and ladies, on her way to her unhappy marriage with James IV. of Scotland. James I. was on his way to Scotland, too, when he rode to Micklegate Bar from Tadcaster, with the sheriffs of York bearing their white rods before him. He waited here while the Mayor, kneeling in the road, presented him with a sword and the city keys, and a cup and a purse, "and made a worthy speech at the delivery of each particular." Still braver was the scene when Charles I. came in, with that strange army that was no army; the army that was commanded by an "amateur general" and was intended to overawe the Scots by pomp. "The progress was more illustrious than the march, and the soldiers were the least part of the army," says Clarendon. This sombre bar was gay enough that day. So splendid a procession has seldom been seen as that which filed through its dark shadow then, all glittering and glowing, while the trainbands of the city, magnificent in scarlet and silver and feathered caps, greeted Charles with a volley, and the civic authorities on their knees greeted him with flattery. It was not many years before another sort of scene was enacted on this spot: when the army of Fairfax—commanded by no amateur—was drawn up in a double line that stretched away from this gate for a mile, and the two Royalist generals who had defended the city so finely, Glenham and Slingsby, marched out between the two lines with the remnant of the garrison, with all the honours of war. That was the most stirring sight, I expect, that Micklegate Bar has seen.

[174]

Fairfax and the other victorious generals marched to the Minster and "sang a psalm." What that psalm must have meant to Fairfax we can hardly realise. The siege had lasted for thirteen weeks; more than four thousand of his men had died in the course of it; twenty-two times they had assaulted the walls. He was himself a Yorkshireman, and like all Yorkshiremen, loved and honoured the city that has held so proud a place in English history, and the Minster that is the city's crown. No wonder he marched straight from the gate to the Minster and sang a psalm! What York Minster meant to Fairfax it must in a lesser degree mean to every Englishman. It combines superlative interest with superlative beauty. We may come to it primed with its history—the history that begins with the Roman temple whose foundations are hidden beneath it, the history that includes so many great names; we may know that Paulinus of the seventh century—the tall, majestic man with the hawk-face whom Bede has described for us—built the first church here of wood, and was the first Archbishop of[175] York; that three other churches stood here and were destroyed before the present building was begun in the thirteenth century and slowly rose to its perfection; but when we see it we can remember nothing but its beauty. It completely dominates York. It is impossible to forget its presence for a moment, whether it be dim and blurred in the dawn or flushed with the light of sunset.

Nearly every one, I suppose, has seen it. Nearly every one has felt, on passing through the entrance in the south transept, that breathless sensation of awe that is almost fear, of reverence that is almost worship. The first sight of those immense arches, so absolutely simple, so indescribably majestic, with the lancets of the Five Sisters behind them, is overwhelming. It is only gradually that memory returns, and the great nave slowly fills with the processions of the past, with the weddings and funerals and coronation pageants that have swept by, century after century, to choir or chapter-house. Young Edward III. and Philippa of Hainault were a comely pair when they[176] were married here in the presence of the Parliament and Council, surrounded by the nobles of England and Scotland. Not very many years later their little son was carried to his grave in the north aisle of the choir. Much was spent in alms and masses, many pounds of wax were burnt, many widows watched round the little coffin before William of Hatfield was laid in this tomb where we see his effigy, a slender, boyish figure lying very straightly under the high canopy. In the next century a sinister scene took place here: Richard Crookback mourning for his brother, coming here to hear a requiem sung, with his head full of plots against the dead man's little sons. Very soon he was here again, entering those splendid doors with the iron scrollwork, which lead into the chapter-house where he was crowned for the second time—the chapter-house that Pius II. described as "a fine lightsome chapel, with shining walls and small, thin-waisted pillars quite round." "As the rose is the flower of flowers," said the monks, "so is this the house of houses."

YORK MINSTER.

[177]

There are not very many notable tombs here, though there is much illustrious dust. Here was buried the head of King Edwin of Northumbria, who so "often sat alone by himself for a long time, silent as to his tongue, but deliberating in his heart" whether he should become a Christian. This Minster is in a sense the fruit of his deliberations. There is no monument to him, nor to Earl Tostig of the violent temper, whose body was carried here from Stamford Bridge; but the founder of the present building lies in his robes under a canopy in the south transept. We may see, too, in the Lady Chapel, the marble tomb of Archbishop Scrope, the builder of Bolton Castle, who preached a sermon in this Minster inciting the people to take up arms, and lost his head in consequence. And near the altar of the same chapel is a little black kneeling figure that deserves attention. It is a monument to Frances Matthew, the wife of Tobie Matthew, Archbishop of York, and the daughter of William Barlow, Bishop of Chichester. "She had four sisters married to four bishops.... So that a bishop was her father, an archbishop her father-in-law,[178] she had four bishops her brethren, and an archbishop her husband." Unless I am much mistaken she had also an abbess for her mother, which was the strangest thing of all. There was a William Barlow, at one time Bishop of St. David's, who is said to have married an abbess as soon as the Reformation made it possible, and had five daughters married to five bishops. Frances Matthew must surely have been one of these. Tradition says that Bishop Barlow, who had many unpleasant traits, stripped the lead from the Palace of St. David's and dowered his daughters with it; but Frances must have been a baby, if indeed she was born, when her father was guilty of this thievish vandalism. She herself is described as being above her sex, and even above the times—but indeed all the women who were buried in ages gone by seem to have been superior to all the rest. She gave her husband's library to the Minster.

Close to her mural monument is the largest window in England. There is no building, I believe, that has so much ancient and beautiful glass as this, and it is a[179] miracle to be thankful for that it was not destroyed in the last century, when the poor maniac set fire to the Minster because he disliked the buzzing of the organ. The soft-toned window of the Five Sisters is the loveliest of all.

But all these are modern things. Down in the crypt we shall find ourselves in touch with the century of Paulinus and St. Chad and St. Wilfrid, the three earliest Archbishops of York; for here is the herringbone work of the first stone church, and here, they say, are the pillars of the building that succeeded it and was destroyed by the Danes. This is the spot on which the Roman temple stood, and the wooden church where King Edwin was baptized, and the altar on which Ulphus the Saxon laid his horn. This Ulphus was a prince in Deira, whose sons were of a quarrelsome temper, and were likely, he thought, to fall out over the division of his property after his death. So "he presently took this course to make them equal." He carried his favourite drinking-horn, his horn of ivory and gold, to York, and filling it there he[180] knelt before the altar of the Minster and drank the wine in token that he endowed the church with all his lands for ever. That this brought peace to his family I rather doubt; but the lands of Ulphus are to this day in the possession of York Minster, and the horn of Ulphus is to this day within its walls. If we go through this door in the south aisle of the choir we may see it—an elephant's tusk, rich tawny in colour, finely carved. It disappeared mysteriously at the time of the Civil War, but somehow fell into the hands of Fairfax, whose son returned it to the Minster. How it came to Fairfax is not recorded; but is it not possible that he may have quietly taken possession of it, knowing how unsafe it was in the hands of the Puritans, and have told his son to give it back in less troubled times? Or was it perhaps one of those relics which would have "irrecoverably perished in the late wars" if Fairfax had not paid "that industrious antiquary, Mr. Dodsworth," to collect them? We know that Fairfax had "a peculiar respect" for antiquities, and that it was owing to his[181] unceasing care that the Minster suffered so little in the war.

It is not in a few days that York can be seen. Only those really know the place who live within the enchanted walls; we should linger here as long as possible, and return again and again. Yet those whose time is limited will find that even a couple of nights spent at the justly famous Station Hotel will enable them to see more than the Minster without suffering from that sense of hurry that spoils pleasure.

York has not hurried. In the Museum Gardens, themselves a wonderful museum, we may realise how many centuries she has taken to become what she is. Here is a tower that was raised by the Romans. The date of it is uncertain, but Mr. Wellbeloved tells us it was probably built when the Conquering Legion came to Eboracum. This, says Gibbon, was at the beginning of the second century; so this tower of many angles takes us back to the time of Hadrian, to days before the Emperor Severus died here in the palace that has altogether vanished, bidding his sons let[182] all their conduct tend to each other's good; days long before the death of Constantius and the accession of Constantine the Great. It is not true that Constantine was born in York, but it was here that he went through his little performance of reluctant modesty when the soldiers made him Emperor—weeping and spurring his horse while they pursued him with the imperial robes.

In the same garden are the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey. The Benedictine monks who founded this community came from Whitby, and were perhaps the builders of the Norman apse we saw at Lastingham, where they paused for a time on their way to York. It is easy to see that this remnant of a most beautiful church was not of their raising: there is nothing Norman here, nothing but the purest Gothic work. It was while the earlier eleventh-century church was still standing that a strange scene took place here; when the Archbishop of York with his retinue clamoured long upon the abbey gates in vain, while the abbot refused to open to him; then forced his way at last into the abbey and pronounced an interdict—here where the grass grows under our feet—against the abbot and his monks. The cause of all this commotion was that little band of brethren who built the Abbey of Fountains with so much toil and endurance. They were at that time monks of St. Mary's, and had appealed to Archbishop Thurstan to reform their house. Abbot Geoffrey, however, preferred to remain unreformed; and so the fiery prelate swept off with the zealous thirteen and set them down in the wilderness beside the Skell to live as austerely as they would. The Abbey of St. Mary, in spite of the interdict, grew very great as well as beautiful.

ST. MARY'S ABBEY, YORK.

[183]

Not only at the Dissolution, but far later, this monastery was horribly ill-treated. Its stones have built a palace and a prison; they have been used for mending, and have been made into quicklime. The palace they built has to a great extent vanished, but the Tudor house that stands near Bootham Bar—the red house[184] with the arms of James I. over the door—is either actually a part of it or was rebuilt from its ruins. It was in that house that Strafford lived when he was President of the Council of the North; both James I. and Charles I. stayed in it when they came to York; and it was probably there that Henrietta Maria lived for three months when she brought materials of war to the city.

There are other stones of St. Mary's still to be seen, by which we may partly guess the glory that has departed. There are countless numbers of them in this garden; every flower-bed is bordered with them, and the lower part of the guesthouse, down there across the grass, is literally stacked with statues and mouldings and bosses of wonderful richness. This Hospitium is used as a museum. It is a little bewildering, with its mingled associations of mediæval monks and Roman matrons. Here are all the things that we are accustomed to see in collections of Roman relics—pottery, tiles, jewellery, everything from a tesselated pavement to a circus ticket. One thing there is, however, to which we are not accustomed; a thing whose interest is rather painful, if not morbid; a coil of a woman's hair, as bright and brown as if it had been laid in its stone coffin only yesterday. The hair of poor Flavia or Placida would be better buried, I think.

BOOTHAM BAR, YORK.

[185]

The prison that was built from the stones of St. Mary's Abbey is on the site of William the Conqueror's castle. It is still called the Castle, but there is nothing left of the fortress except one round grey tower, standing alone on a little hill. Its walls have been concerned with many great deeds; much valour has defended it and much besieged it; much English History has been made in the shadow of it. Yet Clifford's Tower is generally remembered chiefly in connection with the wild scene of horror that took place here at the time of Richard I.'s coronation, when the Jews of York rushed to the castle for shelter, with their ducats and their daughters, and were besieged by the mob. Here, where the steps wind up between[186] the tidy laurels, the mad crowd yelled and battered on the walls, while the White Friar who led them shrieked: "Down with the enemies of Christ!" Here within the tower, where the grass is strewn with exquisite fragments of Gothic ornament—probably from St. Mary's—the starving Jews were huddled with their families till they grew desperate. They killed their wives and children, and then they killed themselves. A few surrendered, begging for baptism, converted by these strange methods; but they were allowed no baptism but that of blood.

As we drive slowly through the streets of York, peering now at some carved archway, now at some time-worn coat-of-arms, passing here under the overhanging eaves of St. William's College, or there under the lantern tower of St. Helen's, we feel that the life of the past is still existing in this city, in some strange astral way, hidden within the life of the present. The past is not merely a picturesque memory here. Even if we had never heard the magic name of York, I think we should feel that her streets were crowded with figures we could not see.

STREET IN YORK.

[187]

A modern note is struck as we drive out of the town past the racecourse, and find to our pleasure that the splendid road is "treated" with some preparation that makes it absolutely dustless. This is the road by which the Stewart Kings approached York with so much show and colour, and by which their supporters marched away, defeated, but with honours of war. Like them, we are going to Tadcaster. The middle of the bridge that spans the Wharfe at Tadcaster is the boundary between the West Riding and the Ainsty, or County of York City; and this is why it was the spot where the sheriffs welcomed the Kings of England when they came to York. It was not on this actual bridge, however, that Charles was met by the citizens; for this one was made from the ruins of the castle early in the eighteenth century. Both castle and bridge, it would seem, were useless by the time they had passed from hand to hand in the Civil War. Tadcaster was an important[188] place then, an outpost of York; even as its predecessor, Calcaria, had been an outpost to Eboracum.

A couple of miles beyond Tadcaster we pass through the village of Towton. It was near here, in the fields that lie between the main road and the river Cock, that the White Rose overcame the Red after ten hours of "deadly battle and bloody conflict." It was on the night before the actual battle that Lord Clifford and his company "were attrapped or they were ware," and Clifford, having taken off his gorget for some reason, was killed by an arrow "stricken into the throat." "This end had he," says the chronicler, "which slew the young Earl of Rutland kneeling upon his knees." If we leave the high-road for a few minutes, turning to the right beyond Towton, we shall be crossing the actual battlefield, the ground that was such a horrible medley of snow and blood on that Palm Sunday when "both the hosts approached in a plain field," the ground in which the Yorkists stuck the spent arrows of the Lancastrians,[189] "which sore annoyed the legs of the owners when the battle joined." The falling snow, too, "somewhat blemished and minished" their sight, and the end of it was that King Henry's men turned and fled towards Tadcaster. We cannot see "the little broke called Cocke" from this spot, but there on the right is the depression in the fields through which it runs. So many men were "drent and drowned" that day in the Cock that their comrades, it is said, crossed the stream on their dead bodies, and even the river Wharfe was red with blood. From this scene of slaughter, which "did sore debilitate and much weaken the puysance of this realme," Edward IV. rode into York as its master.

At Saxton we turn to the left and rejoin the high-road to Pontefract, and after some miles of good going but cheerless scenery we cross the Aire at Ferrybridge. It was this crossing of the Aire at Ferrybridge that caused the death of Clifford the Butcher on the eve of Towton; for he, "being in lusty youth and of frank courage," attempted to prevent Edward of[190] York from passing the river, and so was himself cut off from the Lancastrian army. He did actually secure the bridge. Lord Fitzwalter was keeping the passage for Edward "with a great number of tall personages," but Clifford and his light-horse stole up to this spot early in the morning "or his enemies were ware, gat the bridge, and slew the keepers of the same." This was the beginning of the carnage of Towton. Lord Fitzwalter, hearing the racket, rose from his bed and hurried, poleaxe in hand, to join in the fray, but "before he knew what the matter meant" he was killed. A few hours later Clifford, too, was dead.

For the last few minutes we have been travelling on the road that holds, perhaps, for road-lovers, more glamour in its name than any other—the Great North Road. We have no time to think of the romance of it, of the millions who have trodden its dust, of the gay-hearted vagabonds or anxious kings who have passed this way, for we turn from it too soon and take the road to Pontefract.

[191]

I do not know if it was on this identical road between Ferrybridge and Pontefract that Edward IV. and Warwick rode out to the field of Towton; it was in any case on a very different surface. The town of Pontefract itself is strangely unimposing for a place of such great renown; the houses are unpicturesque, the surrounding country dull. Yet Camden says it is sweetly situated, and is remarkable for producing liquorice. There are other things for which Pontefract has been remarkable in its day; but as we mount the slope into the long, straggling town there is little to show that it has ever been concerned with affairs of more vital importance than liquorice. There is, it is true, a fine church greatly ruined on our right, which has the air of having lived through a good deal. It was battered to pieces in the course of three sieges, and the transept only has been rebuilt. The strange Perpendicular tower, of which the lower part is square and the upper octagonal, seems oddly enough to have suffered less than the body of the building, for it has been very[192] little restored. This church of All Saints was connected with a religious house whose brethren served the castle chapel; but it was not the abbey that Camden "industriously omits" from his description of Pontefract, because even in his day there was hardly a sign of it left. In his day the walls of this forlorn nave were still unbroken, and rising high above it on the hill were all the towers of the castle, a splendid cluster, with the great Norman wall encircling them, and the Round Tower of Ilbert de Lacy tallest of all. Of this "high and stately, famous and princely impregnable castle and citadel," as it was called only a few years before the Civil War, there is deplorably little for us to see. Hardly one stone was left upon another by General Lambert. The débris were heaped over the foundations, soil was spread over all, and the sinister fortress whose walls had echoed the sighs of royal prisoners and the last groan of a king, the "guilty closure" that was drenched with blood and tears, was devoted to the rearing of silkworms and other such innocent uses. During the last century, however, a good deal was excavated, and we may without great difficulty find out the scene of much that has happened here.

NORMAN DOORWAY IN PONTEFRACT CASTLE.

[193]

"Oh, Pomfret! Pomfret! O thou bloody prison,
Fatal and ominous to noble peers!"

The names of those to whom it has been fatal make a long list. The most illustrious name on that list is Richard Plantagenet.

That Richard was by some means done to death in this castle is, I believe, certain; but how he died and where is unknown. The old tale that tells how Sir Piers Exton and his eight men rushed into the room where the imprisoned king was dining, and how Richard "right valiantly defended himself," but was finally struck on the head with a poleaxe by Sir Piers, who "withal ridded him of his life in an instant," was discredited when Richard's grave at Westminster was opened, and the skull, which was perfectly preserved, showed no mark of a blow. Another theory is the one believed by Northumberland and Harry Hotspur, who accused[194] Henry IV. of having traitorously caused their sovereign lord and his "with hunger, cold, and thirst to perish, to be murdered." If we skirt the lawn-tennis court and turn down a little path to the left we shall find, behind the raised bowling-alley, a fragment of vaulted ceiling and a wall with three little recesses in it. This is reputed to be Richard's prison. I do not know if there be any real evidence that it was so. There is certainly not the evidence of a continuous tradition; for until the siege destroyed it a room in the round tower was shown to visitors as the scene of Piers Exton's fabulous exploit with the poleaxe—a room in which there was a post all hacked and cut by the blows aimed at the King! When the post disappeared the scene of Richard's death moved to this Gascoign Tower where we see the vaulted ceiling. It is curious how often the only fragment left of a building happens to be the scene of the event in the building's history that is most likely to appeal to popular sentiment. One grows suspicious of local traditions!

[195]

Richard II. was not the only prince to be imprisoned in Pontefract Castle. James I. of Scotland was here, and with him were the Dukes of Orléans and Bourbon and other prisoners taken on the field of Agincourt. Henry V. was a little anxious at one time lest he should lose "the remnant of his prisoners of France," for a plot was on foot to rescue them. "I will," wrote the King, "that the Duke of Orléans be kept still within the Castle of Pomfret, without going to Robert's Place or to any other disport; for it is better he lack his disport than we were deceived of all the remnant."

Of all those who actually met their death here Thomas Earl of Lancaster—he whom Gaveston called the Actor—had the hardest fate. The place belonged to him, and he had done much for it. Among other things he built or repaired the tower called Swillington, the tower that was destined to be his own prison, whose fragments we may see down there guarding the moat on the north side. His hatred of Gaveston and the Despencers,[196] Edward II.'s favourites, brought him to this plight; to this dark tower whose walls he had made so thick, whose entrance was a trap-door in the roof; to his mock trial by his enemies in the great hall that stood here on the north side of the lawn; to his condemnation and ignominious death. It was here within this court, somewhere near the northern boundary wall, that he stood facing the Despencers as they venomously sent him to the block; it was here that he uttered his last despairing words: "Shall I die without answer?" Then they muffled his head in an old hood and set him, the King's uncle, on "a lean mare without a bridle," and so led him out among the mocking soldiers to his death. We can see, from the castle ramparts, the hill where he was beheaded. It is called St. Thomas's Hill to this day, for later on he was canonised and his grave in St. John's Priory became a shrine. The site of the priory—the monastery that Camden industriously omitted—is between the hill and the castle.

Pontefract was fatal to many of Edward[197] IV.'s followers and kin. Before his final triumph at Tewkesbury some of his supporters were imprisoned here. "John Pylkyngton, Mr. W. att Cliff, and Fowler ar taken," we read in the Paston Letters, "and in the Castyll of Pomfrett, and ar lyck to dye hastyly, withowte they be dead." Very hastily, too, and without trial, Edward's brother-in-law Lord Rivers, and stepson Sir Richard Grey died here by order of Richard III.

It really seems as though there had been something sinister in the atmosphere of this place. Even its one gay memory—the visit of Henry VIII. and his fifth bride—is overshadowed by the scaffold; for it was here that Katherine Howard put a weapon into her husband's hand by making Francis Derham her private secretary.

Indeed Pontefract has no cheerful annals: they are all of battle, murder, and sudden death. There was very little bloodshed, I believe, when the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace took the castle; but who can guess how many died during the three sieges of the Civil War? The place was[198] Crown property, but after two sieges it surrendered to the army of the Parliament. It is rather difficult to ascertain by what particular form of treachery it was recovered by the Royalists. The deed was done, in any case, by one Colonel Marris, whom Clarendon describes as "a stout and bold undertaker in attempts of the greatest danger." Stout and bold he certainly was, but not very attractive; for he began by deserting the royal cause, and then, when he wished to turn his coat again, was enabled to carry out his plot by his close friendship with the governor. Being always welcome he made friends with some of the guard. The garrison, as it happened, needed new beds, so when Marris and some others appeared at the gates laden with beds they were admitted at once. They carried the beds into that solid-looking house that was on our right as we entered the castle, the house that bears the arms of Lancaster over the door. It was the Main Guardhouse. There they flung the beds upon the floor and overpowered the friendly guard.

So Pontefract came back to the Crown,[199] the Parliamentary garrison were imprisoned in the magazine, and the third siege began. The magazine in which Colonel Cotterell and his men lived for eleven weeks is under the lawn-tennis court. If you borrow a taper from the custodian you can go down into it, and read, on the wall of the staircase, the names that some of these soldiers cut in the stone.

When the time came for discussing terms of surrender General Lambert said that Marris and five others must be given up to him. The governor asked and was granted six days in which the six men might do their best to escape. On the fifth day they had all disappeared and the garrison surrendered. Two of the six, however, were still within the castle, in a secret place beneath the Pipe Tower, which stood over there beyond the Norman Keep. They were walled up "with great store of waste stones," and had food for a month beside them. The situation was a critical one. They heard their garrison march away, some to Newark, some to the enemy's camp, some to their homes, the officers with their[200] horses and arms, even the men with Portmantles and Snapsacks; heard the rumbling of the three waggons that carried the wounded; heard, during ten awful days, the incessant clamour and crash of the first hurried dismantling of the castle, the clamour that might be their death at any moment; heard at last the withdrawal of the Parliamentary troops. Then they took down their wall of waste stones, and stole away.

These men who imprisoned themselves were the last prisoners of Pontefract Castle, for after this the historic ground was sown with liquorice; but the Main Guardhouse was spared, as we see, and for another century or two kept up the gloomy traditions of the place as a prison.

The country that lies between Pontefract and Beverley is by no means beautiful. It is so aggressively dull that it may almost be called ugly. It is not for the sake of the scenery, truly, that we cover so many miles of Southern Yorkshire, but chiefly for the sake of Beverley Minster; and there are many, no doubt, who will prefer to make[201] York or Pontefract the last stopping-place of their tour. Those who do not care for historical memories unless there be something beautiful connected with them I advise to drive across from York to Beverley by the most direct road.

Half-way between Pontefract and Knottingley we have once more a flashing glimpse of the Great North Road and the immense signposts that mark its dignity, and are in themselves a lesson in geography; at Chapel Haddlesey we cross a toll-bridge. These are the only incidents on this singularly uneventful route until we reach Selby; but as all good motorists very well know, the road without incidents is often as happy as the country without history, and the particular road that lies through these melancholy fields and unattractive villages is very fine. Those who depend on horses or trains cannot vary their speed according to the beauty of the country, but to us is given the special joy of sauntering through lovely landscapes and hurrying on when there is nothing to be seen.

[202]

In 1906 the name of Selby was brought into tragic prominence by the fire that made its abbey roofless and "only not a wreck." But as there are disastrous victories so there are beneficent calamities; and Selby Abbey, it seems, whose restoration has already been a triumph of energy, will soon be more complete than it has been since 1690, when the tower fell and ruined the south transept.

This grand church is the work of many hands. It is a mixture of every style of architecture, both within and without: Early Norman, Transition, Early English, Decorated, Perpendicular. The west front, for instance, has a splendid Norman doorway with five mouldings, and above it an Early English window filled with Perpendicular tracery. No part of this building was raised by the founder; and indeed it was not to this exact spot, but nearer to the Ouse, that Benedict of Auxerre, bringing with him "the glorious finger" of St. Germanus and the memory of a heavenly vision, came to set up his hut. The first benefactor of the foundation was the man who presented a tent to shelter the relic, round which a cluster of wooden buildings grew, and formed the first monastery of Selby. William the Conqueror gave land, and a charter, and many privileges; and Abbot Benedict won from the Pope the much-coveted honour of the mitre. William's charter was dated the year after the birth of Prince Henry, and its great generosity, it is said, was prompted by the fact that Selby was the birthplace of this favourite son of the king, Henry the fine scholar, Henry the lion of justice. To him, says an old chronicler, "Almighty God gave three gifts—wisdom, victory, and riches." Yet his wisdom failed him, alas, in the matter of lampreys!

WEST DOORWAY OF SELBY ABBEY.

[203]

It was Abbot Hugh, a member of that great house of de Lacy which gave so many fine buildings to England, who raised the abbey on the spot where it still stands. That massive pillar at the east end of the nave, the pillar with the spiral mouldings, was part of his work. It is even possible that some of its stones were actually laid in their places by his strenuous hands, for[204] he worked with the builders. It is a fine picture—the beautiful pillar rising course by course towards the open sky, as Hugh de Lacy, abbot and noble, with infinite care and reverence fixed each stone in its place with a hymn of praise.

The later abbots, the three who in the fourteenth century raised the choir that has been called peerless, were men of another fashion—not especially humble—members of Parliament, entertainers of kings, men of the world. Yet to them, too, we owe much gratitude for all this splendour of ornament, these capitals and bosses, this great east window, this flowing parapet that is so often repeated. And, as a nation, we owe gratitude to all those whose work or money has helped in the recent restoration.[7]

There is nothing but the abbey itself to keep us in Selby. There is no sign by which we may know the spot where Sir Thomas Fairfax, by defeating the Royalists and capturing their colonel, first made his name honoured. We do know, however,[205] that he and his troops marched to Selby on that occasion by this wondrously level road upon which we drive away. For the first mile or so, until we turn away from the Ouse, we are on the road that used to be, in the old coaching days, called the lower road to York. It diverges from the Great North Road at Barnet, and though not the main highway, was the more direct route, and therefore the one chosen by those who were in a hurry. It is for a very short time that we are on it; but surely, for a moment, above the humming of the engine, above the rushing of the wind, we hear the ringing of Black Bess's hoofs.

Five level miles bring us to the door of Hemingborough Church, which is large and renowned, but of a dreariness so gaunt and bare that it altogether fails to charm. Its walls, unsoftened by creepers, rise from the treeless landscape in uncompromising severity; and inside the building the colourless effect is equally depressing, in spite of some fine woodwork. The tall and slender spire is really beautiful, however, and may be seen for miles across the plain.

[206]

To visit Wressle Castle we must leave the direct road to Howden, turning to the left immediately after crossing the Derwent. Here again the sad landscape seems to have infected the building. Theoretically it has all the elements of romance, and to read of it without seeing it is to conjure up a picture of decaying splendour, of venerable walls eloquent of revelry and war, a picture worthy of the great names of Percy and Lacy and Seymour. A castle founded by that Earl of Worcester whose headless body lies in Shrewsbury Abbey because he fought for Richard II.'s lost cause, a castle that has seen all the might of the Northumberlands and all the tragedy of civil war, must surely have "the grand air." So one thinks till one has seen Wressle. In the background is a building, shabby but not ruined; in the foreground is a cabbage-patch.

Yet once this place was all magnificence, made "al of very fair and greate squarid stone both withyn and withoute." Leland tells us of its halls and great chambers, and its five towers, and its brewhouse without[207] the wall, and its "botery, pantery, pastery, lardery, and kechyn." All these things were exceedingly fair, he says, and so were the gardens within the moat and the orchards without. It was here where the cabbages are that those fair gardens grew. And in the orchards were mounds, "writhen about with degrees like turninges of cokilshilles, to cum to the top without payn." Most fondly of all he describes the "study caullid Paradise," with the ingenious device of ledged desks for holding books. There, looking down upon us from the upper part of the tower nearest to the road, are the empty windows of that Paradise whose inhabitants were driven out of it for ever by the flaming sword of Civil War.

This is only a fragment of the original castle. The Northumberlands needed a considerable amount of house-room, for they had, it appears, two hundred and twenty-nine servants. There were gentlemen to wait before noon and gentlemen to wait after noon, and gentlemen to wait after supper; there were yeoman officers, and groom officers, and grooms of the chambers;[208] there was a groom for brushing clothes, a groom of the stirrup, a groom to dress the hobbies and nags, a groom to keep the hounds, a groom to keep the gates, and an endless list of others. The day came when the servants in this house were called upon by the Parliament to demolish it themselves, and were given a month to do it in. This one side of the quadrangle was all they left. It is possible, I believe, to climb one of the towers to see the view—but I cannot think it desirable. The view from the bottom of the tower is not so attractive as to make one wish for more.

A very great relief to the eye is Howden, about three miles further on. The town itself is not without a certain degree of picturesqueness, though it was scarcely a happy thought to surmount the ancient steps of the cross in the market-place by a modern street lamp. However, from that same market-place we see, behind the red houses, the ruined gable-end of the church that is Howden's pride, whose lovely tower is one of the landmarks of the plain. The peculiarly slender and graceful effect of[209] this tower is partly owing, I think, to the unusual height of the lower stage compared with the upper. Those tall lancets were the work of Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, whose palace stood over there to the east of the church, where the pretty gardens are. If we venture a little way on foot along that lane at the corner of the square, we may see, without trespassing, the beautiful old ivy-covered wall and the blocked gatehouse with the shield upon it, within which the bishops of Durham were wont to seek rest and change. Camden's tale, to the effect that Bishop Skirlaw built "the huge tall steeple" as a refuge for the inhabitants in times of flood, need not be believed; it was probably the invention, as a certain quaint old book suggests, of "some doating scribe, desirous of assimilating the steeple of Howden Church to the tower of Babel."

In the thirteenth century the Archbishop of York, seeing that this church was "very wide and large," and rich enough to support "many spiritual men," made it collegiate. Hence arose the need for the chapter-house that Walter Skirlaw built on the south side[210] of the choir, and made so wonderfully beautiful that even now, robbed as it is of its groined roof and much of its rich ornament, it dwells in one's mind as a thing apart. The Decorated choir, which was first the work and afterwards the shrine of the thirteenth-century poet, John Hoveden, is itself a ruin; for when the church lost its prebends and its riches in the reign of Edward VI. there was neither need nor means left for keeping this part of the building in repair. The nave is still the parish church.

CHAPTER HOUSE, HOWDEN.

[211]

After leaving Howden we have to pass, with what speed we may, over ten more miles of absolutely level, absolutely uninspiring country. Then we go through North Cave, where George Washington's ancestors used to live; and at last the road begins to rise over Kettlethorpe Hill. The flat land is laid out like a map below us; far away upon the horizon—which is level as the sea—rises "the huge tall steeple" of Howden; and between the plain of Yorkshire and the rising-ground of Lincolnshire are the sullen waters of that great river that has brought England so much of her prosperity. Not always, however, has the Humber brought prosperity. More than a thousand years ago the fleet of the avenging Danes, Hinguar and Hubba, swept up between these low banks, to lay this rich country waste. Right into the heart of the land they sailed, and ceased not to destroy till all the country of the fens was desolate. Now this calamity and much more besides—the destruction of Lindisfarne and Whitby, of Croyland and Ely and Peterborough, and the death of St. Edmund the King—was brought about by the jealousy of one obscure individual. For Lothbroc the Dane, being a guest at Edmund's Court, had showed so much skill in the trapping of birds and beasts that the King's head-keeper, as one may call him, was "inflamed with mortal envy." So he slew Lothbroc treacherously. Then the King sent the murderer to sea in a little boat, without sail or oars, and the boat drifted to the shores of Denmark. And the wicked keeper sought the sons of Lothbroc, whose names were Hinguar and Hubba, and told them that their father had been slain[212] by order of King Edmund. So Hinguar and Hubba swore by "their almighty gods that they would not leave that murder unpunished"; and verily they fulfilled their oath.

Two hundred years later another Dane, Sweyn of the Forked Beard, "a cruel man, and ready for the shedding of blood," sailed up to conquer the north. Just beyond that island that lies close to the left bank, where we see the Ouse suddenly widen into the Humber, Sweyn turned into the river Trent. And "all England groaned like a bed of reeds shaken by the west wind."

At the top of the hill we pass through a wonderful avenue of beeches and sycamores; then run down a long and pleasant slope into Walkington; and soon the blue towers of Beverley appear.

The brief run across the common above Beverley will probably be the last of our memorable moments in Yorkshire: the last of those memories which we motorists—while the days are long and the winds are soft and the engine purrs contentedly hour after hour—hoard up to enjoy again and again, not[213] only through the winter but through the years. This particular moment is a very short one; but it will be long, I think, before we forget the beauty of the town of Beverley as it lies in the blue dusk of a summer evening, with its matchless towers dominating it.

Yes, surely, they are matchless! See how the straight, clean lines of their tall buttresses—those parallel lines that are repeated again and again in the Perpendicular panels, and even in the deep shadows cast by the masonry—give the impression of slenderness and height. Not anywhere, not at Lincoln, not at York, are there towers of a design so complete and finished, of a simplicity so exquisite. Nowhere else does the accumulation of straight lines produce so rich a whole; nowhere else are the very shadows used to enhance the effect. There is much that is beautiful in Beverley Minster, but in the main it is these twin towers that are going to be our compensation for all those miles we have driven between flat fields, "enclosid," as Leland says, "with hegges."

The monastery of Beverley was founded, or at all events much frequented in the[214] eighth century, by a certain Archbishop of York, who retired hither "out of a pious aversion to this world," and has been known ever since as St. John of Beverley. Bede's account of this saint is well worth reading. He was a man of many miracles, of much kindliness, of some sharpness of tongue. Never was there a saint of so much commonsense, mingled with the compelling power that works miracles in every age. There was a "dumb boy," for instance, who had also a sore head. The archbishop divined the nervous nature of the dumbness, and cured it so thoroughly that the youth talked incessantly for a day and a night, as long as he could keep awake. Then the archbishop "ordered the physician to take in hand the cure of his head." The shrewd saint recognised his own limitations. On another occasion he was brought to heal a dying nun. "What can I do to the girl," he asked tartly, "if she is like to die?"

BEVERLEY.

[215]

Such was St. John of Beverley, of whom we may see a picture, though not, I fear, a portrait, in the south transept of this minster. It represents him receiving from King Athelstane a charter with a portentous seal and the following legend:—

"Als fre make I the
as hert may thynke
or egh may see."

King Athelstane, it is true, was by no means a contemporary of St. John of Beverley, but he regarded the saint as his special benefactor, and gave many privileges to Beverley on that account—so the symbolism is pretty even if the picture is not. If we walk along the nave till we are beneath the second boss of the vaulted roof, counting from the east, we shall be above the spot where John of Beverley's dust has lain for many centuries. He was originally buried in the porch; probably his bones were moved when the Saxon Church was replaced by a Norman one. I do not know on what authority the local guide informs us that Athelstane's dagger is in this grave. Gibson, who in his additions to Camden describes the opening of the tomb in the seventeenth century, makes mention of no dagger, but only of the sweet-smelling dust, and the six[216] cornelian beads, and the brass pins and iron nails. Athelstane, it is true, left his dagger as a hostage on St. John's grave while he was fighting the Scots; but the story says that he redeemed it on his return by re-founding the monastery as a college, and granting it the right of sanctuary. Hence the legend on the charter.

In the north aisle of the choir, near the entrance to the Percy Chapel, is the visible symbol of that right of sanctuary, the Fridstool, the plain rounded seat in which he that sat was safe even though he were a murderer, the sacred centre of the six circles that conferred each its own amount of security. To this Stool of Peace, in the days when it stood beside the altar, many a man—indeed many a ruffian—has owed his life and the freedom he so little deserved. It was to this very seat that Richard II.'s half-brother, Sir John Holland, came hurrying through the night. Froissart tells the story, how Holland and Lord Ralph Stafford met in a lane but could not see each other for the darkness. "I am Stafford," said one. "And I am[217] Holland," said the other, and added: "Thy servants have murdered my squire whom I loved so much." Then he killed Lord Ralph with a blow. Stafford's servant cried out that his master was dead. "Be it so," said Sir John; "I had rather have put him to death than one of less rank, for I have the better revenged the loss of my squire." In spite of this haughty attitude, however, he lost no time in taking refuge here. The beautiful towers were not in existence then, but the nave through which he hastened was this Decorated nave that we see now, and these Early English arches were above him as he sat in the sanctuary, and close to him was that wonderful canopied tomb near the altar, supposed to be the grave of Eleanor, Lady Percy.

If it were not eclipsed by the minster the church of St. Mary at Beverley would be more famous than it is, for it, too, is full of beauty and interest. But only those who are very enthusiastic lovers of architecture, or who are able to spend some days in the town, will risk confusing their[218] memories of the first with the details of the second.

Beverley, though never fortified, had once three gates. Of these only one still stands, the North Bar. Beneath its crow-stepped parapet Charles I. must have passed with an angry heart when he rode out to York after his futile expedition to Hull. And it is very likely that we, if we are going south, shall drive out of Beverley upon the same road by which he came from Hull the night before, with the first open defiance of one of his own towns ringing ominously in his ears.

Who thinks of history when he goes to Hull? It is, no doubt, like all great commercial centres, of paramount interest to its inhabitants; but to the traveller what is it? A starting-place, a place where there are docks, railway stations, hotels. Even that increasing band of travellers who are learning, with the help of bicycles and motor-cars, to know their country with the intimate knowledge that nearly always means love, to linger in its historic towns, to seek its little villages, and to eat the[219] familiar bacon-and-eggs of its wayside inns, even these are fain to pass through Hull with no thought beyond their anxiety to reach some other place. Beyond the two old churches of Holy Trinity and St. Mary there is nothing here to see except a good deal of prosperity and the squalor that prosperity brings.

Yet even these wide streets of central Hull, with all their prosaic traffic, should take our thoughts back to Edward I. These things are the justification of that astute and high-handed king; they are the fulfilment of his prophecy. This sheltered corner of the Humber, he thought, would make a fine position for a commercial town. To think of a thing was to do it at once, with our first Edward; so he bought the land from the Abbey of Meaux, made himself a manor, called the place King's Town, built some houses, and paid people to live in them. Well, there may be some even now who would have to be paid to live in Hull; but none the less Edward was wise here as in most other places.

And, moreover, as we reach the outskirts[220] of this town we may recall that one of the most dramatic scenes in English history was enacted here—that defiance of Charles I. at the walls of his own town, which was the gauntlet flung by the Parliament.

War was yet not declared, but there was great store of ammunition in Hull which might, thought Charles, be useful by and by. So he, with two or three hundred others, set out from York to see about the matter, and as he drew near this town—fortified then with a great wall and many towers—he sent a message to bid the governor dine with him. I do not know if there is any vestige left of the wall to which Charles presently came, or any record of the spot where he paused, dumbfounded, before the gate. This, he surely thought, as he scanned the walls and the closely shut gates and the hostile draw-bridges, this was a strange welcome to his city of Hull, the King's Town! Here were no sheriffs marching out to meet him as at York, nor gay trainbands, nor kneeling mayors; but walls manned with soldiers[221] who were anything but gay, and inhospitable gate-keepers whom he could by no means persuade to let him pass, and on the ramparts the unhappy governor, Sir John Hotham. "And when the King commanded him to cause the port to be opened," says Clarendon, "he answered like a distracted man that no man could understand; he fell upon his knees, used all the execrations imaginable, that the earth would open and swallow him up if he were not his Majesty's most faithful subject." Yet in spite of all his protestations this man "of a fearful nature and perplexed understanding" was quite clear in his mind as to what his intentions were, and not too fearful to carry them out. The King should not come in.

Then solemnly, from below the wall they might not enter, the King's officers made proclamation that Sir John Hotham, Governor of Hull, was a traitor; and Charles, with his head high but his spirits very low, rode on to Beverley in the shadow of the Great Rebellion.

Our plight at this moment is not the[222] same as his. If his difficulty was to enter Hull, ours lies in the leaving of it—supposing, that is to say, that we wish to cross the Humber by the ferry. There are no arrangements of any kind for shipping cars. A narrow, precipitous gangway, with a right-angled turn in the middle, is the only means of passing from the quay to the ferry-boat. The transit is a matter of difficulty for any car—for a large one it is impossible. Hull, however, is a progressive place, as befits the town of that most progressive king who saw its possibilities so long ago. Very soon, we cannot doubt, the shipping of a car on the shores of the Humber will be less like a feat in a circus than it is at present.