Thatonce dreaded mid-eighteenth century highwayman, Thomas Boulter, junior, of Poulshot in Wiltshire, once made acquaintance with York Castle. The extent of his depredations was as wide as his indifference to danger was great. A West-countryman, his most obvious sphere of operations was the country through which the Exeter Road passed; but being greedy andinsatiable, he soon exhausted those districts, and thought it expedient to strike out for roads where the name of Boulter was unknown, and along which the lieges still dared to carry their watches and their gold. He came up to town at the beginning of 1777 from his haunts near Devizes, and, refitting in apparel and pistols, gaily took the Great North Road. Many adventures and much spoil fell to him in and about Newark, Leeds, and Doncaster; but an encounter between Sheffield and Ripon proved his undoing. He had relieved a gentleman on horseback of purse and jewellery, and was ambling negligently away when the traveller’s man-servant, who had fallen some distance behind his master, came galloping up. Thus reinforced, the plundered one chased Mr. Boulter, and, running him to earth, haled him off to the nearest Justice, who, quite unmoved by his story of being an unfortunate young man in the grocery line, appropriately enough named Poore, committed him to York Castle, where, at the March assizes, he was duly found guilty and sentenced to be hanged within fifteen days. Heavily ironed, escape was out of the question, and he gave himself up for lost, until, on the morning appointed for his execution, the news arrived that he might claim a free pardon if he would enter his Majesty’s service as a soldier, and reform his life. His Majesty badly wanted soldiers inA.D.1777, and was not nice as to the character of his recruits; and indeed the British army until the close of the Peninsular War was composed of as arrant a set of rascals as ever wore out shoe-leather. No wonder the Duke of Wellington spoke of his army in Spain as “my blackguards.” But they could fight.
This by the way. To return to Mr. Thomas Boulter, who, full of moral resolutions and martial ardour, now joined the first marching regiment halting at York. For four days he toiled and strove in the barrack-yard, finding with every hour the burdens of military life growing heavier. On the fifth day he determined to desert, and on the sixth put that determination intopractice; for if he had waited until the morrow, when his uniform would have been ready, escape would have been difficult. Stealing forth at dead of night, without mishap, he made across country to Nottingham, and so disappears altogether from these pages. The further deeds that he did, and the story of his end are duly chronicled in the pages of theExeter Road, to which they properly belong.
The authorities did well to secure their criminal prisoners with irons, because escape seems to have otherwise been easy enough. In 1761, for instance, there were a hundred and twenty-one French prisoners of war confined in York Castle, and such captives were of course not ironed. Some of them filed through the bars of their prison and twenty escaped. Of these, six were recaptured, but the rest were never again heard of, which seems to be proof that the prison was scarcely worthy of the name, and that the city of York contained traitors who secretly conveyed the fugitives away to the coast.
The troubles and escapades of military captives are all in the course of their career, and provoke interested sympathy but not compassion, because we know full well that they would do the same to their foes, did fortune give the opportunity. Altogether different was the position of the unfortunate old women who, ill-favoured or crazy, were charged on the evidence of ill-looks or silly talk with being witches, and thrown into the noisome cells that existed here for such. Theirs were sad cases, for the world took witchcraft seriously and burnt or strangled those alleged practitioners of it who had survived being “swum” in the river close by. The humour of that old method of trying an alleged witch was grimly sardonic. She was simply thrown into the water, and if she sank was innocent. If, on the other hand, she floated, that was proof that Satan was protecting his own, and she was fished out and barbarously put to death. Trials for witchcraft were continued until long after the absurdity of the charges became apparent,and judges simply treated the accusations with humorous contempt: as when a crazy old woman who pretended to supernatural powers was brought before Judge Powell. “Do you say you can fly?” asked the Judge, interposing. “Yes, I can,” said she. “So you may, if you will then,” rejoined that dry humorist. “I have no law against it.” The accused did not respond to the invitation.
So farewell, grim Castle of York, old-time prison of such strangely assorted captives as religious pioneers, poor debtors, highwaymen, prisoners of war, and suspected witches; and modern gaol whose romance is concealed beneath contemporary common-places. Blood stains your stones, and persecution is writ large on the page of your story. Infidel Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and Nonconformists of every shade of nonconformity have suffered within your walls in greater or less degree, and even now the black flag occasionally floats dolorously in the breeze from your roofs, in token that the penalty for the crime of Cain has been exacted.
Beforerailways came and rendered London the chief resort of fashion, county towns, and many lesser towns still, were social centres. Only the wealthier among the country squires and those interested in politics to the extent of having a seat in the House visited London; the rest resorted to their county town, in which they had their town-houses and social circles. Those times are to be found reflected in the pages of Jane Austen and other early novelists, who picture for us the snug coteries that then flourished and the romances that ran their course within the unromantic-looking Georgian mansions now either occupied by local professional men or wealthy trades-folk, or else divided into tenements. It was the era before great suburbs began to spring up aroundevery considerable town, to smother the historic in the commonplace; the time before manufacturing industries arose to smirch the countryside and to rot the stonework of ancient buildings with smoke and acid-laden air; the days when life was less hurried than now. York, two days’ journey removed from London, had its own society and a very varied one, consisting of such elements as the Church, the Army, and the Landed Interest, which last must also be expressed in capital letters, because in those days to be a Landowner was a patent of gentility. Outside these elements, excepting the dubious ones of the Legal and Medical professions, there was no society. Trade rendered the keepers of second-hand clothes-shops and wealthy manufacturers equally pariahs and put them outside the pale of polite intercourse. Society played whist in drawing-rooms; tradesmen played quoits, bowls, or skittles in grounds attached to inns, or passed their evenings in convivial bar-parlours. Yet York must have been a noted place for conviviality, if we are to believe the old poet:—
York, York for my monie,Of all the cities that ever I see,For merry pastime and companie,Except the citie of London.
York, York for my monie,Of all the cities that ever I see,For merry pastime and companie,Except the citie of London.
And for long after those lines were written they held good. Not many other cities had York’s advantages as a great military headquarters, as well as the head of an ecclesiastical Province, and its position as a great coaching centre to and from which came and went away many other coaches besides those which fared the Great North Road was commanding. Cross-country coach-routes radiated from the old cathedral city in every direction; just as, in fact, the railways do nowadays. It is no part of our business to particularise them, but the inns they frequented demand a notice. Some of these inns were solely devoted to posting, which in this broad-acred county of wealthy squires was not considered the extravagance that less fortunate folks thought it. Chief amongthese was—alas! that we must saywas—the “George,” which stood almost exactly opposite the still extant “Black Swan” in Coney Street. A flaunting pile of business premises occupied by a firm of drapers now usurps the site of that extremely picturesque old house which rejoiced in a sixteenth-century frontage, heavily gabled and enriched with quaint designs in plaster, and a yawning archway, supported on either side by curious figures whose lower anatomy ended in scrolls, after the manner of the Renaissance. The “George” for many years enjoyed an unexampled prosperity, and the adjoining houses, of early Georgian date, with projecting colonnade, were annexed to it. When it went, to make way for new buildings, York lost its most picturesque inn, for the York Tavern, now Harker’s Hotel, though solid, comfortable, and prosperous-looking, with its cleanly stucco front, is not interesting, and the “Black Swan” is a typical redbrick building of two hundred years ago, square as a box, and as little decorative as it could possibly be. As for the aristocratic Etteridge’s, which stood in Lendal, it may be sought in vain in that largely rebuilt quarter. Etteridge’s not only disdained the ordinary coaching business, but also jibbed at the average posting people—or, perhaps, to put it more correctly, even the wealthy squires who flung away their money on posting stood aghast at Etteridge’s prices. Therefore, in those days, when riches and gentility went together—before the self-made millionaires had risen, like scum, to the top—Etteridge’s entertained the most select, who travelled in their own “chariots,” and were horsed on their almost royal progresses by Etteridge and his like.
From the purely coaching point of view, the “Black Swan” is the most interesting of York’s hostelries. To the York Tavern came the mails, while the “Black Swan” did the bulk of the stage-coach business, from the beginning of it in 1698 until the end, in 1842. It was here that the old “York in Four Days” coaching bill of 1706 was discovered some years ago. The houseremained one of the very few unaltered inns of coaching days, the stableyard the same as it was a hundred years or more since, even to the weather-beaten old painted oval sign of the “Black Swan,” removed from the front and nailed over one of the stable-doors.
York still preserves memories of the old coachmen; some of them very great in their day. Tom Holtby’s, for instance, is a classic figure, and one that remained until long after coaching came to an end. He died in June 1863, in his seventy-second year, and was therefore, not greatly beyond his prime when he drove the Edinburgh mail into York for the last time, in 1842, on the opening of the railway. That last drive was an occasion not to be passed without due ceremony, and so when the mail, passing through Selby and Riccall, on its way to the city, reached Escrick Park, it was driven through, by Lord Wenlock’s invitation, and accompanied by him on his drag up to the “Black Swan” and to the York Tavern. The mail flew a black flag from its roof, and Holtby gave up the reins to Lord Macdonald.
“Please to remember the coachman,” said my lord to Holtby, in imitation of the professional’s usual formula. “Yes,” replied Holtby, “I will, if you’ll remember the guard.” “Right,” said that innocent nobleman, not thinking for the moment that coachmen and guards shared their tips; “he shall have double what you tip me.” Holtby accordingly handed him a £5 note, so that he reaped a profit of £2. 10s. on the business.
Holtby’s career was as varied as many of the old coachmen’s, but more prosperous. He began as a stable-hand at the “Rose and Crown,” Easingwold, and rose to be a postboy. Thence to the box of a cross-country coach was an easy transition, and his combined dash and certainty as a whip at last found him a place on the London and Edinburgh “Highflyer,” whence he was transferred to the mail. During these years he had saved money, and was a comparatively rich man when coaching ended; so that althoughhe lost some heavy sums in ill-judged investments, still he died worth over £3,000. “Rash Tom,” as they called him, from his showy style of driving, was indeed something of a “Corinthian,” and coming into contact with the high and mighty of that era, reflected their manners and shared their tastes. If the reflection, like that of a wavy mirror, was not quite perfect, and erred rather in the direction of caricature, that was a failing not found in Tom only, and was accordingly overlooked. Moreover, Tom was useful. No man could break in a horse like him, and nowhere was a better tutor in the art of driving. “If,” said Old Jerry, “Tom Holtby didn’t live on potato-skins and worn’t such a one for lickin’ folks’ boots, he’d be perfect.” “Old Jerry,” who probably had some professional grudge against Holtby, referred to potato-skins as well as to boot-licking in a figurative way. He meant to satirise Holtby as a saving man and as an intimate of those who at the best treated Jerry himself with obvious condescension. Jerry himself was one of the most famous of postboys, and remained for long years in the service of the “Black Swan.” The burden of his old age was the increasing meanness of the times. “Them wor graand toimes for oos!” he would say, in his Yorkshire lingo, talking of the early years of the nineteenth century, and so they must have been, for that was the tail-end of the era when all England went mad over Parliamentary elections, and when Yorkshire, the biggest of all the counties, was the maddest. Everybody posted, money was spent like water on bribery and corruption, and on more reputable items of expenditure, and postboys shared in the golden shower.
Themost exciting of these Homeric election contests was the fierce election for Yorkshire in 1807. At that time the huge county, larger than any other twocounties put together, returned only two representatives to Parliament, and the City of York was the sole voting-place. Yorkshire, roughly measuring eighty miles from north to south, and another eighty from east to west, must have contained ardent politicians if its out-voters appeared at the poll in any strength. But if polling-places were to seek and voting the occasion of a weary pilgrimage, at least the authorities could not be accused of allowing too little time for the exercise of that political right. The booths remained open for fifteen days. William Wilberforce had for years been the senior member, and had hitherto held a secure position. On this particular occasion the contest lay between the rival houses of Fitzwilliam and Lascelles, Whigs and Tories respectively, intent upon capturing the junior seat. Lord Milton, the eldest son of Earl Fitzwilliam, and the Honourable Henry Lascelles, heir to the Earl of Harewood, were the candidates. Lord Harewood expressed his intention of expending, if necessary, the whole of his Barbados estates, worth £40,000 a year, to secure his son’s return, and equal determination was shown by the other side. With such opponents, it was little wonder that Yorkshire was turned into a pandemonium for over a fortnight. All kinds of vehicles, from military wagons, family chariots, and mourning-coaches at one extreme, to sedan-chairs and donkey-carts at the other, were pressed into service. Invalids and even thosein articulo mortiswere herded up to the poll.
“No such scene,” said a Yorkshire paper, “had been witnessed in these islands for a hundred years as the greatest county in them presented for fifteen days and nights. Repose and rest have been unknown, unless exemplified by postboys asleep in the saddle. Every day and every night the roads leading to York have been covered by vehicles of all kinds loaded with voters—barouches, curricles, gigs, coaches, landaus, dog-carts, flying wagons, mourning-coaches, and military cars with eight horses, have left no chance forthe quiet traveller to pursue his humble journey in peace, or to find a chair at an inn to sit down upon.”
As a result, Wilberforce kept his place, Viscount Milton was elected second, and Lascelles was rejected. The figures were:—
Wilberforce
11,806
Milton
11,177
Lascelles
10,988
Only some thirty-four thousand voters in the great shire!
It was said that Earl Fitzwilliam’s expenses were £107,000 and his unsuccessful opponent’s £102,000. Wilberforce, who in the fray only narrowly kept at the head of the poll, was at little expense, a public subscription which reached the sum of £64,455 having been made on his behalf. A great portion of it was afterwards returned by him. He afterwards wrote that had he not been defrauded of promised votes, his total would have reached 20,000. “However,” said he, “it is unspeakable cause for thankfulness to come out of the battle ruined neither in health, character, or fortune.” It was in this election that a voter who had plumped for Wilberforce and had come a long distance for the purpose, boasting that he had not spent anything on the journey, was asked how he managed it. “Sure enow,” said he, “I cam all d’way ahint Lord Milton’s carriage.”
A story is told of a bye-election impending in Yorkshire, in which Pitt had particularly interested himself. Just upon the eve of the polling he paid a visit to the famous Mrs. B—, one of the Whig queens of the West Riding, and said, banteringly, “Well, the election is all right for us. Ten thousand guineas for the use of our side go down to Yorkshire to-night by a sure hand.”
“The devil they do!” responded Mrs. B—; and that night the bearer of the precious burden was stopped by a highwayman on the Great North Road,and the ten thousand guineas procured the return of the Whig candidate. The success of that robbery was probably owing to the “sure hand” travelling alone. Had he gone by mail-coach, the party funds would have been safe, if we may rely upon thebona fidesof the York Post Office notice, dated October 30, 1786, which was issued for the reassurance of those intending to travel by mail, and says: “Ladies and gentlemen may depend on every care and attention being paid to their safety. They will be guarded all the way by His Majesty’s servants, and on dark nights a postillion will ride on one of the leaders.” The notice concluded by saying that the guard was well armed. This was no excess of caution, or merely issued to still the nerves of timid old ladies, for at this period we find “safety” coaches advertised, “lined with copper, and secure against bullets”; and recorded encounters with armed highwaymen prove that these precautions were not unnecessary.
York Minster, although so huge and imposing a pile when reached, is not glimpsed by the traveller approaching the city from the Selby route until well within the streets, and only when Knavesmire is passed on the Tadcaster route are its three towers seen rising far behind the time-worn turrets of Micklegate Bar. In bulk, it is in the very front rank among English cathedrals, but the flatness of its site and the narrow streets that lead to the Minster Yard render it quite inconspicuous from any distance, except from a few selected points and from the commanding eyrie of the City Walls, whence, indeed, it is seen at its grandest. “Minster” it has been named from time immemorial, but for no apparent reason, for York’s Chapter was one of secular priests, and as the term “minster” derives from “monasterium,”this is clearly a misnomer. But as the larger churches were those in connection with monastic rule, it must have seemed in the popular view that this gigantic church was rightly a Minster, no matter what its government.
York Minster, from the Foss
It lies quite away from the tortuous streets by which the traveller proceeds through York for the road to the North, and it is only when nearly leaving the city by Bootham Bar that glimpses of its grey bulk are seen, at the end of some narrow lane like Stonegate or Petergate, framed in by old gabled houses that lean upon each other in every attitude suggesting age and decay, or seem to nod owlishly to neighbours just as decrepit across the cobble-stoned path. These be ideal surroundings. In the ancient shops, too, are things of rarity and price, artfully displayed to the gaze of unwary purchasers who do not know the secrets of the trade in antiques and curiosities, and are quite ignorant of the fact that they pay twice or thrice the value at such places as these for the old china, the silver, the chairs, and bookcases of quaint design that take their fancy. Only a narrow space prevents the stranger from butting up against the Minster, at the end of these lanes, for here at York we find no such wide and grassy Cathedral close as that of Winchester, or those of Canterbury, Wells, or Peterborough. Just a paved yard, extremely narrow along the whole south side and to the east, with a broader paved space at the west front, and some mingled lawns and pavements to the north, where dwell the Dean, the prebendaries, and suchlike: these are the surroundings of the Minster, which render it almost impossible to gain a comprehensive view of any part save the west front.
The Minster—the Cathedral Church of St. Peter, to call it by its proper title—is the fifth building on this site. First of all in the series was the wooden chapel erected for the baptism of Edwin, the Saxon king, inA.D.627, followed by a stone church, begun by him in 628 and completed eight years later by King Oswald,who placed the head of Edwin, slain in battle by the heathen at Hatfield near Doncaster, here in the chapel of St. Gregory. Thirty-five years later this second church was found by Wilfrid the Archbishop to be in a state of decay, and he accordingly repaired the roofs and the walls, which he rendered “whiter than snow by means of white lime,” as we are told by contemporary chroniclers. In point of fact, he whitewashed the cathedral, just as the churchwardens of a hundred years ago used to treat our village churches, for which conduct we have been reviling them for many years past, not knowing that as whitewashers they could claim such distinguished kinship. About the year 741 this second building was destroyed by fire and was replaced by another, completed in 780, itself burnt in 1069. The fourth was then begun by Thomas of Bayeux, the first Norman archbishop, and completed about 1080; to be in its turn partly demolished by Roger Pont l’Évêque, who about 1170 rebuilt the choir on a larger scale. Following him came Archbishop Gray, who rebuilt the south transept in its present form between 1230 and 1241; the north transept and the central tower in its original form being the work of John Romanus, sub-dean and treasurer from 1228 to 1256. To the son of the sub-dean, Archbishop Romanus, fell the beginning of a new nave, which was commenced by him in 1291, but was not completed until 1345, and is the existing one. All these rebuildings were on a progressive scale of size and magnificence, and so by the time they had been completed it happened that Archbishop Roger’s Late Norman choir, which had replaced the smaller Early Norman one by Thomas of Bayeux, was itself regarded as too small and mean, and so was pulled down to make room for the existing choir, completed about 1400. Thus the earliest architectural features of the existing Minster above ground are the Early English transepts, and nothing remains of those vanished early buildings save some dubious Saxon masonry and Norman walling in the crypt.
The first impression gained of the exterior of York Minster—an impression which becomes only slightly modified on further acquaintance—is that of a vast, rambling, illogical mass of overdone ornament very much out of repair and very disappointing to the high expectations formed. Nor is the great central tower greatly calculated to arouse enthusiasm among those who know that of Lincoln. An immense mass, whose comparative scale is best seen from a distance, its severity of outline borders closely upon clumsiness, a defect which is heightened by its obviously unfinished condition and the clearly makeshift battlements that outrage the skyline with an effect as of an armoured champion wearing feminine headgear. It seems clear that the intention, either of the original architect of the tower, in the Early English period, or of those who re-cased it, some two hundred years later, was to carry it up another storey. The two western towers belong to much the same period, the years from 1433 to 1474, and have more than the usual commonplace appearance of the Perpendicular style. They form part of the most completely logical west front in England and almost the least inspired, excepting always that early Perpendicular fiasco, the west front of Winchester Cathedral. But the redeeming feature of York’s west front is the beautiful window which, whether regarded from without or within, is one of the finest details of the building, its tracery of the flowing Decorated period narrowly approaching to the French Flamboyant style and resembling in its delicacy and complicated parts the weblike design seen on the skeleton of a leaf.
A great portion of the Minster is in the Decorated style; not, however, conceived in the inspired vein of the west window. The nave and chapter-house cover the period of the sixty years during which Decorated Gothic flourished, and making the round of the exterior we find its characteristic mouldings and traceries repeated in a long range of seven bays, interrupted by the beautiful compositions of north and south transepts, entirely dissimilar from oneanother, but individually perfect, and the most entirely satisfactory features of the exterior. The architects of that period were more fully endowed with the artistic sense than those who went before, or those who succeeded them, and their works, and the more daring and ambitious, but something braggart, designs of their successors, remain to prove the contention. Eastward, beyond the transepts, extends the long, nine-bayed choir, the view of it obscured from the north by the protruding octagonal chapter-house, but well seen on the south, where the soaring ambition of its designers may advantageously be compared with the more modest but better ordered art of the unknown architect who built the south transept. The architects of the choir would seem to have dared their utmost to produce the largest windows with the smallest proportion of wall-space, and to have at the same time been emulative of height. With these obvious ambitions, they have succeeded to wonderment in rearing a building that is nearly all windows, with an apparently dangerously small proportion of walling to hold them together, but a building which has already survived the storms of five hundred years structurally and essentially sturdy and unimpaired. A great engineering feat for that time, rather than a masterpiece of artistry, as those who stand by and compare south transept and choir, visible in one glance, can see. That the perceptions of those who built the choir were blunted is proved by the almost flat roof their ambition for lofty walling has necessitated. With their side walls carried up to such a height, abutting against the central tower, they could not obtain the steep pitch of roof which is seen on the transepts, for a higher pitch would have committed the architectural solecism of cutting above the sills of the great tower windows, into the windows themselves. Thus their lofty choir is robbed of half its effect and looks square-shouldered and ungraceful by comparison.
An odd and entirely inexplicable device is found outside the four eastern windows of the choir clerestory,north and south, in the placing of the triforium passage outside the building, and the screening of it and the windows with a great skeleton framework of stone. The reason of this—whether it was a mistaken idea of decoration, or for some structural strengthening purpose—is still to be sought. But the east end is an equally crude and artless piece of work, almost wholly given up to the east window; the small flanking windows looking mean and pinched by comparison, and the abundant decoration characterised by stupid repetition and want of invention. Here we see the Perpendicular style at a very low ebb, and thus it is not altogether a disadvantage that the road is so narrow at this point that a full view of the east end is difficult to obtain.
Criticism is at once disarmed on entering. One enters, not by the great portals in the west front, but by the south porch, the most impressive entrance, as it happens. For this is at once the noblest and the earliest portion of the great church, and here, in one magnificent view from south to north we obtain one of the finest architectural vistas in England. Majesty personified, these Early English transepts are in themselves broad and long and lofty enough to furnish a nave for many another cathedral. Spaciousness and nobility of proportion are the notes of them, and even the beautiful nave, with its aisles, light and graceful, loftier and broader than almost any other in the land, dwindles by comparison. They produce in the surprised traveller who first beholds them the rare sensation of satisfaction, of expectations more than realised, and give an uplifting of spirit as thrilling as that caused by some inspiring passage of minstrelsy. To stand at the crossing and gaze upwards into that vast tower which looks so clumsy to the outward view, is to receive an impression of beauty, of combined strength and lightness, which is not to be acquired elsewhere, for it is the finest of lantern towers, and, open to the vaulting of its roof, a hundred and eighty feet above the pavement, its great windows on all sides entrap thesunbeams and shed a diffused glory on arcade and pier. Perhaps one of the most daring attempts at effect is that which confronts the visitor as he enters by the south porch. Daring, not from the constructional, but from the decorative point of view, the five equal-sized lancet windows, the “Five Sisters” that occupy three parts of the space in the wall of the north transept, might so easily have been as glaring a failure as they are a conspicuous success. Their very prominence has doubtless given them their name, and caused the legend to be invented of their having been the gift of five maiden sisters. The beauty of the original Early English glass which still remains in these lancets has a considerable share in producing this successful effect. That the unearthly beauty of that pale green glass is preserved to us, together with much more in the Minster, is due to Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Parliamentary general, himself a Yorkshireman, who kept the pious but narrow-minded and mischievous soldiery in order, who otherwise would have delighted in flinging prayer-books and missals through every window in this House of God, and have accounted it an act of religious fervour.
We cannot explore the Minster in greater detail, for the road yet lies in many a league before us; nor recount how York, city and shire, broke into rebellion when the old religion was suppressed by Henry the Eighth, and the Minster’s treasures, particularly the head of St. William, stolen. The Pilgrimage of Grace was the result, in which the Yorkshire gentlemen and others assembled, with Robert Aske at their head, and taking as their badge the Five Wounds of Christ, prepared to do battle for their Faith. Aske ended on a gallows from the height of Micklegate Bar. The same troubles recurred in the time of Elizabeth, and Yorkshire, the last resort of Roman Catholicism, was again in arms, with the Earls of Northumberland and Westmoreland conspiring with the Duke of Norfolk to release the captive Queen of Scots and restore the old religion. The movement failed, and Northumberlandwas executed on the Pavement, others being put to death or deprived of their estates. That was the last popular movement in favour of the old faith, and although the city had been prelatical and Royalist during the first years of Charles the First’s reign, public opinion at last veered completely round, so that shortly after the Parliamentary victory of Marston Moor in 1644, and the consequent surrender of the Royalist garrison of York, the city became as Puritan and republican as it had been the opposite. Gifts made by Charles to the Minster were torn down and dispersed, the very font was thrown out, and dean and chapter were replaced by four divines elected by an assembly. Many of the York parish churches were wrecked by fanatics carrying out an order to destroy “superstitious pictures and images,” and nearly all were without incumbents. When the restoration of the monarchy and the church was effected together in 1661,York became “one of the most factious and malignant towns in the kingdom,” and two years later broke into a revolt for which twenty-one rebels were executed. The final outburst occurred in 1688, when James the Second was suspected of an intention to appoint the Roman Catholic Bishop of Callipolis to the vacant see of York. The bishop was taking part in a religious procession through the streets when an infuriated mob set upon him and seized his silver-gilt crozier, which was taken as a trophy to the vestry, where it may yet be seen. The bishop fled. A few days later James the Second ceased to reign, and with that event ended these religious contentions.
All Saints’ Pavement
Butthe stirring history of the Minster itself was not yet completed, for the final chapter in a long record of events was not enacted until the early years of the nineteenth century.
The roads in the neighbourhood of York on February 2, 1829, were thronged with excited crowds hurrying to the city. Dashing through them came the fire-engines of Leeds, and others from Escrick Park. Far ahead, a great column of smoke hovered in the cold February sky. York Minster was on fire.
It was no accident that had caused this conflagration, but the wild imaginings of one Jonathan Martin, which had prompted him to become the incendiary of that stately pile. A singular character, compacted of the unlovely characteristics of Mawworm and the demented prophet, Solomon Eagle, this was the crowning act of a life distinguished by religious mania. Jonathan Martin was born at Hexham in 1782, and apprenticed to a tanner. His parents were poor, and he had only the slightest kind of education. At the expiration of his apprenticeship he found himself in London, and was speedily entrapped by the press-gang and sent to serve his Majesty as an ableseaman. It seems to have been at this period that the unbalanced state of his mind first became noticeable. He was with the fleet at many places, and often in action, from Copenhagen to the Nile. At times he would exhibit cowardice, and at others either indifference to danger or actual bravery. He would be religious, dissolute, industrious, idle, sulky, or cheerful by turns: a pretended dreamer of dreams and communicant with angels. “Parson Saxe,” his shipmates named him; “but,” said one, years afterwards, “I always thought him more rogue than fool.”
Martin was paid off in 1810. He settled to work for a farmer at Norton, near Durham, and shortly afterwards married. He became a member of the Wesleyan Methodist body at Norton, and began those religious exercises which he claims to have converted him and to have emancipated him from the law, being “justified by faith” only. How dangerous such views of personal irresponsibility can be when held by the weak-minded his after-career was only too plainly to show. He immediately conceived an abhorrence of the Church of England, as a church teaching obedience to pastors and masters, and of the clergy for their worldliness. In this last respect, indeed, Martin—as we think now—had no little justification, for the Church had not then begun to arise from the almost Pagan slough of laziness, indifference, and greed of wealth and good living which throughout the previous century had marked the members of the Establishment, from the country parson up to the archbishops. When clergymen could find it in them to perform the solemn rite of the burial service while in a state of drunkenness; when, under Martin’s own observation at Durham, the Prince-Bishop of that city enjoyed emoluments and perquisites amounting to £30,000 per annum, there is little cause for surprise that hatred and contempt of the cloth should arise.
This basis of justification, acting upon a mind already diseased, and not rendered more healthy by fasting and brooding over the Scriptures, resulted in his attemptingto preach from church pulpits, in writing threatening letters to the clergy, and eventually to a silly threat to shoot the Bishop of Oxford when at Stockport. For this he was rightly confined in a lunatic asylum at Gateshead. Some months later he managed to escape, and after wandering about the country took service with his former employer at Norton, the magistrates consenting to his remaining at liberty. In 1822 he left for Darlington, where he lived until 1827. His wife had died while he was in the asylum, and in 1828, while engaged in hawking a pamphlet biography of himself at Boston, he made the acquaintance of a young woman of that town and married her. By this time his religious mania had grown worse, and when, on December 26, 1828, he and his wife journeyed to York, it would appear that he went there with the design of burning the Cathedral already half-formed. He haunted the building day by day, leaving denunciatory letters from time to time. One, discovered on the iron grille of the choir screen, exhorted the clergy to “repent and cry For marcey for know is the day of vangens and your Cumplet Destruction is at Hand for the Lord will not sufer you and the Deveal and your blind Hellish Docktren to dseve the works of His Hands no longer. . . . Depart you Carsit blind Gides in to the Hotest plase of Hell to be tormentid with the Deveal and all his Eanguls for Ever and Ever.”
Violent language! but one may hear harangues very like it any day within Hyde Park, by the Marble Arch. There are many incendiaries in the making around us to-day, and as little attention is paid to them as to Martin’s ravings.
Undoubtedly mad, he possessed something of the madman’s cunning, and with the plan of firing the Cathedral fully formed, set out with his wife for Leeds, as he gave out, on the 27th of January. At Leeds he remained a few days, and was remarkable for his unusually quiet and orderly behaviour. He left on Saturday morning, ostensibly for Tadcaster, saying he should return on the Monday; but went instead toYork. Here the madman’s cunning broke down, for he stayed at a place where he was well known; at the lodgings, in fact, that he had left a few days before. He prowled about the Cathedral the whole of the next day, Sunday, and attended service there, hiding behind a tomb in the north transept; overheard the notes of the organ—the finest in England—thundering and booming and rolling in echoes amid the fretted roofs. The sound troubled the brain of the maniac. “Buzz, buzz,” he whispered; “I’ll teach thee to stop thy buzzing,” and hid, shivering with religious and lunatic ecstasy, in the recess until the building was empty.
Jonathan Martin, Incendiary
The short February day closed, and left the Cathedral in darkness; but he still waited. The ringers paid their evening-visit to the belfry, and he watched them from his hiding-place. He watched them go and then began his work. The ringers had left the belfry unlocked. Ascending to it, he cut a length of about a hundred feet off the prayer-bell rope, and, with his sailor’s handiness, made a rough ladder of it, by which to escape. Those were the days before lucifer matches. He had come provided with a razor, which he used as a steel; a flint, tinder, and a penny candle cut in two. Climbing, then, into the choir, he made two piles on the floor of prayer-books, curtains, hassocks, and cushions, and taking a candle from the altar, cut it up and distributed it between the two. Then, setting light to them, he set to work to escape. He had taken a pair of pincers from the shoemaker with whom he lodged, and breaking with them a window in the north transept, he hauled his rope through, and descended into the Minster Yard, soon after three o’clock in the morning.
The fire was not discovered until four hours later. By that time the stalls were half-consumed, and the vestry, where the communion plate was kept, was on fire. The plate was melted into an unrecognisable mass. By eight o’clock, despite the exertions of many willing helpers, the organ-screen was burnt, and the organ-pipes fell in thunder to the pavement, to theaccompaniment of a furious shower of molten lead from the roof, which was now burning. The city fire-engines, those of the Cathedral, and others from Leeds and Escrick were all playing upon the conflagration that day, and the 7th Dragoon Guards and the Militia helped with a will, or kept back the vast crowds which had poured into the city from far and near. It was not until evening that the fire was quenched, and by that time the roof of the choir, over 130 feet in length, had been destroyed, and with it the stalls, the Bishop’s throne, and all the mediæval enrichments of that part of the building. Curiously enough, the great east window was but little damaged. The cost of this madman’s act was put at £100,000. A singular coincidence, greatly remarked upon at the time, was that on the Sunday following this disaster, one of the lessons for the day was the sixty-fourth chapter of Isaiah, the Church’s prayer to God, of which one verse at least was particularly applicable: “Our holy and our beautiful house, where our fathers praised Thee, is burned with fire; and all our pleasant things are laid waste.”
Martin was, in the first instance, connected with the outrage by the evidence of the shoemaker’s pincers he had left behind him. They were identified by his landlord. Meanwhile, the incendiary had fled along the Great North Road; first to Easingwold, thirteen miles away, where he drank a pint of ale; and then tramping on to Thirsk. Thence he hurried to Northallerton, arriving at three o’clock in the afternoon, worn out with thirty-three miles of walking. That night he journeyed in a coal-cart to West Auckland, and so eventually to a friend near Hexham, in whose house he was arrested on the 6th of February. Taken to York, he was tried at the sessions at York Castle on March 30th. The verdict, given on the following day, was “not guilty, on the ground of insanity,” and he was ordered to be kept in close custody during his Majesty’s pleasure. Martin was shortly afterwards removed from York Castle to St. Luke’s Hospital,London, in which he died in 1838. Two years later, the Minster was again on fire, this time as the result of an accident, and the western tower was burnt out.
York Minster on Fire, May 20th, 1840
Insanity in some degree ran through the Martin family. His brother John, who died in 1854, was a prominent artist, whose unbalanced mind did not give way, but led him to paint extraordinary pictures, chiefly of Scriptural interest and apocalyptic horrors. He was in his day considered a genius, and many of his terrific imaginations were engraved and must yet be familiar: such pictures as “Belshazzar’s Feast,” “The Eve of the Deluge,” “The Last Man,” and “The Plains of Heaven”: pictures well calculated to give children nightmares.
Wemust now leave York for the North. To do so, we proceed through Bootham Bar, where the taxis linger that ply between the city and the railway station.
Let us glance back upon the picturesque sky-line of City and Minster and read, maybe, the modern explanatory historical inscription placed on the ancient Bar. Thus:—
“Entry from North through Forest of Galtres. In old times armed men were stationed here to watch, and to conduct travellers through the forest and protect them against the wolves.“The Royal Arms were taken down in 1650, when Cromwell passed through, against Scotland. Heads of three rebels exposed here, for attempting to restore Commonwealth, 1663.“Erected on Roman foundation, probably early in 13th centy.“Interior rebuilt with freestone, 1719.“The portcullis remains.”
“Entry from North through Forest of Galtres. In old times armed men were stationed here to watch, and to conduct travellers through the forest and protect them against the wolves.
“The Royal Arms were taken down in 1650, when Cromwell passed through, against Scotland. Heads of three rebels exposed here, for attempting to restore Commonwealth, 1663.
“Erected on Roman foundation, probably early in 13th centy.
“Interior rebuilt with freestone, 1719.
“The portcullis remains.”
So, in those ancient times when the Forest of Galtres lay immediately before you on passing out of BoothamBar and going North—the forest with wolves and bandits—you stepped not into a suburb, but came directly off the threshold into the wild.
Bootham Bar
To-day, outside the walls we come at once into the district of Clifton, after Knavesmire the finest suburb of York; the wide road lined with old mansions that almost reek of prebendal appointments, J.P.’s, incomes of over two thousand a year, and butlers. It is true that there are those which cannot be included in this category, but they are here on sufferance and as a foil to the majesty of their superiors, just as the Lunatic Asylum a little farther down the road gives, or should give, by contrast a finer flavour to the lives of those who have not to live in it. There is another pleasing thing at Clifton, in the altogether charming new building of the “White Horse” inn, which seems to hint that they have at last begun to recover the lost art in Yorkshire ofbuilding houses that are not vulgar or hideous. It is full time.
Would you see a charming village church, a jewel in its sort? Then, when reaching Skelton, three miles onward, explore the bye-road at the back of the village, over whose clustered few roofs its Early English bell-cote peeps. But a moment, please, before we reach it. This “bye-road” is the original highway, and the “back” of the village street its old front. There is a moral application somewhere in these altered circumstances for those who have the wit, the inclination, and the opportunity to seek it.
Skelton Church
The improved road, a hundred years old, is carried straight and level past the rear of the cottages, and the rugged old one goes serpentining past the front doors, where the entrance to the “Bay Horse” looks out across a little green to where the church stands, the faded old Bay Horse himself wondering where the traffic that use to pass this way has all gone to. The signs of the “Bay Horse” and the “Yorkshire Grey” are, by the way, astonishingly frequent on the Great North Road.
But the church. It is an unpretending building, without a tower, and only a bell-cote rising from its broad roof; but perfect within its limits. Early English throughout, with delicately-cut mouldings, beautiful triple lancets at the east end, and fine porch, the green and grey harmonies of its slate roof and well-preserved stonework, complete a rarely satisfying picture. A legend, still current, says it was built from stone remaining over after the building of the south transept of York Cathedral, in 1227. The Church in the Wood it was then, for from the gates of York to Easingwold, a distance of thirteen miles, stretched that great Forest of Galtres, through which, to guide wandering travellers, as we have already seen, the lantern-tower and burning cresset of All Saints in the Pavement, at York, were raised aloft.
Red deer roamed the Forest of Galtres, and bandits not so chivalrous as Robin Hood; so few dared to explore its recesses unarmed and unaccompanied. But where in olden times these romantic attendants of, or dissuading circumstances from travel existed, we have now only occasional trees and an infinity of flat roads, past Shipton village to Tollerton Cross Lanes and Easingwold. This country is dulness personified. The main road is flat and featureless, and the branch roads instinct with a melancholy emptiness that hives in every ditch and commonplace hedgerow. A deadly sameness, a paralysing negation, closes the horizon of this sparsely settled district, depopulated in that visitation of fire and sword when William the Conqueror came, in 1069, and massacred a hundred thousand of those who had dared to withstand him. They had surrendered on promise of their lives and property being respected, but the fierce Norman utterly destroyed the city of York and laid waste the whole of the country between York and Durham. Those who were not slain perished miserably of cold and famine. Their pale ghosts still haunt the route of the Great North Road and afflict it, though more than eight hundred years have flown.
Now comes Easingwold; grimly bare and gritty wide street, with narrow pavements and broad selvedges of cobbles sloping from them down into a roadway filled, not with traffic, but with children at noisy play. Shabby houses lining this street, houses little better than cottages, and ugly at that; grey, hard-featured, forbidding. Imagine half a mile of this, with a large church on a knoll away at the northern end, and you have Easingwold. One house is interesting. It is easily identified, because it is the only one of any architectural character in the place. Now a school, it was once the chief coaching and posting establishment, under the sign of the “Rose and Crown,” and in those times kept five post boys, and, by consequence, twenty horses, others being kept for the “Wellington” and “Express” coaches which Lacy, the landlord, used to horse on the Easingwold to Thirsk stage. The “New Inn,” although an inferior house, was the place at which the Royal mail and the “Highflyer” changed.
An old post boy of the “Rose and Crown” survived until recent years, in the person of Tommy Hutchinson. Originally a tailor, he early forsook the board and the needle for the pigskin and the whip. If a tailor be the ninth part of a man, certainly the weazened postboys (who ever saw a fat one?) of old were themselves only fractions, so far as appearance went; and accordingly Tommy was not badly suited. But a power of endurance was contained within that spare frame, and he eclipsed John Blagg of Retford’s hundred and ten miles’ day on one occasion, riding post five times from Easingwold to York and back, a distance of a hundred and thirty miles. Tommy used to express an utter contempt for “bilers on wheels,” as he called locomotives. “Ah divvent see nowt in ’em,” he would say; “ye can’t beat a po’shay and good horses.” Peace be with him!
That rare thing on the Great North Road, a rise, leads out of Easingwold, past unkempt cottages, to “White House Inn,” a mile and a half distant, where the inn buildings, now farmhouses, but still brilliantlywhitewashed, stand on either side of the road, in a lonely spot near where the Kyle stream, like a flowing ditch, oozes beneath Dawnay Bridge.
The “White House” was the scene of a murder in 1623. At that time the innkeeper was a certain Ralph Raynard, who “kept company” with a girl in service at Red House, Thornton Bridge. The lovers quarrelled, and in a pique the girl married a farmer named Fletcher, of Moor House, Raskelfe. Unhappily, she did not love the man she had married, while she certainly did retain an affection for her old sweetheart, and he for her. Going between Raskelfe and Easingwold on market-days on her horse, she would often stop at the “White House,” and chat with Ralph Raynard; the ostler, Mark Dunn, minding the horse when she dismounted. Raynard’s sister kept house with him at the inn, and she saw that no good could come of these visits, but he would not listen to her warnings, and the visits continued. It was not long before Fletcher’s neighbours began to hint to him something of these little flirtations of his wife with her old lover; and one evening he caught the ostler of the “White House” in his orchard, where he was waiting for an opportunity to deliver a message from Raynard to her. The man returned to the inn without having fulfilled his mission, and smarting from a thrashing he had received at the hands of the indignant farmer. Shortly after this, Fletcher had occasion to go a journey. Things had not been going well with him latterly, and his home was rendered unhappy by the evidence of his wife’s dislike of him. Little wonder, then, that he had dismal forebodings as he set out. Before leaving, he wrote on a sheet of paper:—
If I should be missing, or suddenly wanted be,Mark Ralph Raynard, Mark Dunn, and mark my wife for me,
If I should be missing, or suddenly wanted be,Mark Ralph Raynard, Mark Dunn, and mark my wife for me,
addressing it to his sister.
No sooner was he gone than Mrs. Fletcher mounted her horse and rode to Raskelfe, where, with Raynard and Mark Dunn, a murderous plot was contrived forputting Fletcher out of the way. They were waiting for him when he returned at evening, and as he stood a moment on Dawnay Bridge, where the little river runs beneath the highway, two of them rushed upon him and threw him into the water. It would be difficult for a man to drown here, but the innkeeper and the ostler leapt in after him, and as he lay there held his head under water, while his wife seized his feet. When the unfortunate man was quite dead they thrust his body into a sack, and, carrying their burden with them to the inn, buried it in the garden, Raynard sowing some mustard-seed over the spot. This took place on the 1st of May. On the 7th of July, Raynard went to Topcliffe Fair, and put up at the “Angel.” Going into the stable, he was confronted by the apparition of the unhappy Fletcher, glowing with a strange light and predicting retribution. He rushed out among the booths, and tried to think he had been mistaken. Coming to a booth where they sold small trinkets, he thought he would buy a present for his sweetheart, and, taking up a chain of coral beads, asked the stallkeeper how it looked on the neck. To his dismay the apparition stood opposite, with a red chain round its neck, with its head hanging to one side, like that of an executed criminal, while a voice informed him that presently he and his accomplices should be wearing hempen necklaces.
When night had fallen he mounted his horse and rode for home. On the way, at a spot called the Carr, he saw something in the road. It was a figure emerging from a sack and shaking the water off it, like a Newfoundland dog. With a yell of terror the haunted man dug his heels into his horse and galloped madly away; but the figure, irradiated by a phosphorescent glimmer and dragging an equally luminous sack after it, was gliding in front of him all the while, at an equal pace, and so continued until the “White House” was reached, where it slid through the garden hedge and into the ground where Fletcher’s body had been laid.
Raynard’s sister was waiting for him, with supperready, and with a dish of freshly-cut mustard.Shedid not see the spectre sitting opposite, pointing a minatory finger at that dreadful salad, buthedid, and terrified, confessed to the crime. Sisterly affection was not proof against this, and she laid information against the three accomplices before a neighbouring Justice of the Peace, Sir William Sheffield of Raskelfe Park. They were committed to York Castle, tried, and hanged on July 28, 1623. The bodies were afterwards cut down and taken to the inn, being gibbeted near the scene of the crime, on a spot still called Gallows Hill, where the bones of the three malefactors were accidentally ploughed up over a hundred and twenty years ago.
If its surroundings may be said to fit in with a crime, then this seems an ideal spot for the commission of dark deeds, this eerie place where an oozy plantation, or little wood, is placed beside the road, its trees standing in pools or on moss-grown tussocks; the road in either direction a solitude.
Raskelfe, or “Rascall,” as it is generally called, lies away from the road. It has a church which still possesses a wooden tower, and the local rhyme,
Wooden church, wooden steeple,Rascally church, and rascally people.
Wooden church, wooden steeple,Rascally church, and rascally people.
is yet heard in the mouths of depreciatory neighbours.
TheHambleton Hills now come in sight, and close in the view on the right hand, at a distance of five miles; running parallel with the road as far as Northallerton; sullen hills, with the outlines of mountains, and wanting only altitude to earn the appellation. The road, in sympathy with its nearness to them, goes up and down in jerky rises and falls, passing the outlying houses of Thormanby and the farmsteads of Birdforth, which pretends, with its mean little church,like a sanctified cow-shed, to be a village—and signally fails.
The gates of Thirkleby Park and the “Griffin” inn, standing where a toll-gate formerly stood on what was once Bagby Common, bring one past a bye-road which leads to Coxwold, five miles away, and to the Hambleton White Horse, a quite unhistorical imitation, cut in the hillside in 1857, of its prehistoric forerunners in Berkshire and Wilts. Coxwold is a rarely pretty village, famous as having been the living of the Reverend Laurence Sterne from 1760 to 1768. The house he lived in, now divided into three cottages, is the place whereTristram Shandywas finished and theSentimental Journeywritten. “Shandy Hall” it is called, “shandy” being the local dialect-word for “crazy.”
Thirsk lies less than three miles ahead. There have been those who have called it “picturesque.” Let us pity them, for those to whom Thirsk shows a picturesque side must needs have acquaintance with only the sorriest and most commonplace of towns. The place is, in fact, a larger Easingwold, with the addition of a market-place like that of Selby—after the abbey has been subtracted from it! There are Old Thirsk and New Thirsk, the new town called into existence by the railway, a mile to the west. The “Three Tuns,” “Crown,” and “Fleece” were the three coaching inns of Thirsk, and still show their hard-featured faces to the grey, gaunt streets. The one pretty “bit” is encountered after having left the town behind. Passing the church, the road is bordered by the beautiful broad sheet of water formed by damming the Caldbeck. Looking backwards, the view is charming, with the church-tower coming into the composition, a glance to the left including the Hambleton Hills.
The hamlet of Thornton-le-Street, which derives its name from standing on an old Roman road, is a tiny place with a small church full of large monuments, and the remains of a huge old posting establishment, once familiar to travellers as the “Spotted Dog,”standing on either side of the road. One side appears to be empty, and the other is now the post office. A graceful clump of poplars now shades the sharp bend where the road descends, past the lodge-gates of the Hall, the seat of the Earl of Cathcart. Presently the road climbs again to the crest whence Thornton-le-Moor may be glimpsed on the left, and thence goes, leaving the singularly named Thornton-le-Beans on the right, in commonplace fashion to Northallerton.
The “Spotted Dog,” Thornton-le-Street
As are Easingwold and Thirsk, so is Northallerton. Let that suffice for its aspect, and let us to something of its story, which practically begins in 1138, at the battle of Northallerton, dimly read of in schooldays, and still capable of conferring an interest upon thelocality, even though the site of that old-time struggle on Standard Hill is three miles away to the north on Cowton Moor. The position of the townlet, directly in the line of march of Scots descending to harry the English, and of the English marching to punish those hairy-legged Caledonians, led to many plunderings and burnings, and to various scenes of retribution, enacted in the streets or along the road; and although Northallerton must nowadays confess to a mile-long dulness, time cannot have hung heavily with its inhabitants when the Scots burnt their houses in 1319 and again in 1322; when the rebel Earls of 1569 were executed near the church; when the Scottish army held Charles the First prisoner here in 1647, or when—last scene in its story—the Duke of Cumberland encamped on the hillsides in 1745.
The name of Allerton is said to derive from the Anglo-Saxonaelr, an alder tree, and many are the Allertons of sorts in Yorkshire. Its central feature—which, however, is not geographically central, but at the northern end of the one long street—is the church, large and with a certain air of nobility which befits the parish church of such a place as Northallerton, anciently the capital of a “soke,” and still giving a name to the “Northallertonshire” district of Yorkshire. The old coaching inns of the town, like those of so many other northern towns and villages on this road, are not impressive to the Southerner, who, the further north he progresses, is, with Dr. Johnson, still more firmly convinced that he is leaving the finest fruits of civilisation behind him. First now, as then, is the “Golden Lion,” large but not lovely; the inn referred to as the “Black Swan” by Sydney Smith when writing to Lady Grey, advising her how to journey from London, in the passage, “Do not set off too soon, or you will be laid up at the ‘Black Swan,’ Northallerton, or the ‘Elephant and Castle,’ Boroughbridge; and your bill will come to a thousand pounds, besides the waiter.” The true sportsman who reads these lines will put up at the “Golden Lion” to testwhether or not the reverend humorist is out of date as regards the tariff; nor will he forget to try the Northallerton ale, to determine if Master George Meryon’s verse, written in the days of James the Second, is still topical:—
Northallerton, in Yorkshire, doth excel!All England, nay, all Europe, for strong yell.
Northallerton, in Yorkshire, doth excel!All England, nay, all Europe, for strong yell.
The “Golden Lion” was, at the close of the coaching era, the foremost inn at Northallerton, and at its doors the “Wellington” London and Newcastle coach changed teams until the railway ran it off the road. The Edinburgh mail changed at the “Black Bull,” which survives as an inn, but only half its original size, the other half now being a draper’s shop. The “King’s Head,” another coaching-house, has quite retired into private life, while the “Old Golden Lion,” not a very noted coaching establishment, except, perhaps, for the bye-roads, remains much the same as ever.