“Ha, ha, ha!” cried Miss Jenny; “I believe you will eat all you kill, indeed, captain.”
The usurer was so well pleased at the end of this adventure that he could not refrain from being severe, and took notice that Captain Weazel seemed to be a good Christian, for he had armed himself with patience and resignation, instead of carnal weapons, and worked out his salvation with fear and trembling; whereupon, amidst much laughter, Weazel threatened to cut the Jew’s throat. The usurer, taking hold of this menace, said:—“Gentlemen and ladies, I take you all to witness, that my life is in danger from this bloody-minded officer: have him bound over to the peace.” This second sneer procured another laugh against the captain, who remained crestfallen for the rest of the journey.
Theremaining miles to Gateshead are made up of the shabby village of Low Fell, where the road begins to rise, and the uninteresting way over the ridge of the Fell itself. By the word “Fell,” North of England people describe what Southerners call a hill. The common land of Gateshead Fell, 675 acres, was enclosed under Acts of Parliament, 1809, 1822.
Modern Newcastle: from Gateshead
Many were the gibbets erected in the old days on Gateshead Fell. The last was that on which swung the body of Robert Hazlett, who on this spot, on the evening of August 6th, 1770, robbed a young lady, Miss Margaret Benson, who was returning to Newcastle in a post-chaise from Durham. On the same night a post-boy was relieved of his bags at the same place. Hazlett was hanged at Durham, and his body gibbeted here, twenty-five feet high. For some time afterwards, every day for an hour, an old man was seen to kneel and pray at the foot of the gibbet. It was the wretched man’s father! A beacon was fixed on the Fell in the winter of 1803–4, on an alarm of invasion; hence this height was afterwards known as “Beacon Hill.”
The present-day aspect of the road does not hint at anything so tragical, and is merely commonplace, the last touch of vulgarity added by the trams that ply along it from Gateshead.
The place-name of Gateshead seemed to John Ogilby, in his book,Britannia Depicta, 1676, to require explanation, and he proceeded to say that it was “alias Gate-Side, seated on the Banks of the Tine, by the Saxons call’d Gates-heved, i.e.Caprae Caput, or Goat’s-head, perchance from an Inn with such a sign.”
But perchance not. While the Saxon name certainly was Gatesheved, it meant “road’s head,” either in allusion to the Roman bridge across the river being broken down and passage being possible only by water, or else referring to the abruptly-descending land on either side, where the road would seem to be coming to a sudden end.
Gateshead is to Newcastle what Southwark is to London, and the Tyne which runs between may be likened in the same way to the Thames. Comparison from any other point of view is impossible. Gateshead is nowadays a great deal worse than it was when Doctor Johnson called it “a dirty lane leading to Newcastle.” It may be ranked among the half-dozen dirtiest places on earth, and the lane which the Doctor saw has sent forth miles of streets as bad as itself, sothat the geographical distribution of filth and squalor has in modern times become very wide. There are two ways of entering Newcastle since the High Level Bridge across the Tyne has supplemented what used to be the old Tyne Bridge, once, and until fifty years ago, the only way of crossing the river except by boat. When Stephenson flung his High Level Bridge across that stream, as yellow, if not as historic, as the Tiber, he provided a roadway for general traffic beneath the railway, and the old bridge lost its favour, simply for the reason that to cross it the steeply descending West Street and Bottle Lane had to be taken and the just as steeply ascending bank of the river on the Newcastle side to be climbed; while by the High Level a flat road was provided. It is true that all traffic, pedestrian and wheeled, pays a small toll for the privilege, but it is the lesser of the two evils.
Let those who have no concern with old times take their easeful way through the gloomy portals of the High Level Bridge, eighty-five feet above high-water mark. But let us examine the steep and smelly street, paved with vile granite setts and strewn with refuse, which conducts to the Tyne Bridge, or the Swing Bridge as it is nowadays, since the old structure was removed, the channel of the river deepened, and the wonderful swinging portion of the remodelled bridge, 281 feet in length, and swung open or closed by hydraulic power, constructed in 1876. With that work went the last fragments of the Roman bridge built by Hadrian (Publius Aelius Hadrianus) more than a thousand years before; a bridge which, indeed, gave the Roman camp its name ofPons Ælii. His bridge, long in ruins, was replaced in 1248 by a mediæval structure which was destroyed by a flood in 1771.
This way came the coaches, climbing into Newcastle up Sandhill and the Side, whose steep and curving roadway remains to prove how difficult were the ways of travellers as well as transgressors in the old times. Old and new jostle here. The Swing Bridge turns silently on its pivot to the touch of a lever in its signaltower, and a force our grandfathers never knew performs the evolution; but side by side with this miracle still stand the darkling lanes and steep waterside alleys of Gateshead and Newcastle that were standing before science and commerce, mother and daughter, came down upon the Tyne and transformed it.
A writer in an old-time Northern magazine appears to have been jolted into a bad humour respecting Newcastle’s precipitous old approach:—“We have no connection whatever with the coal-trade, and were never at Newcastle but once, passing through it on the top of an exceedingly heavy coach, along with about a score of other travellers. But, should we live a thousand years, it would not be possible for us to forget that transit. We wonder what blockhead first built Newcastle; for before you can get into and out of it, you must descend one hill and ascend another, about as steep as the sides of a coal-pit. Had the coach been upset that day, instead of the night before and the day after, there would have been no end and, indeed, no beginning, to this magazine. We all clustered as thickly together on the roof of the vehicle (it was a sort of macvey, or fly) as the good people of Rome did to see Great Pompey passing along:—but we, on the contrary, saw nothing but a lot of gaping inhabitants, who were momentarily expecting to see us brought low. We remarked one man fastening his eye upon our legs that were dangling from the roof under an iron rail, who, we are confident, was a Surgeon. However, we kept swinging along, from side to side, as if the macvey had been as drunk as an owl, and none of the passengers, we have reason to believe, were killed that day—it was a maiden circuit. But, after all, we love Newcastle, and wish its coals may burn clear and bright till consumed in the last general conflagration.”
Old Newcastle: Showing the now Demolished Town Bridge
High over head goes the High Level, and the smoke and rumble of its trains mingle with the clash of Newcastle’s thousand anvils and the reek of her million chimneys; but there still stands against the sky-line—most fittingly seen from the Gatesheadbank at eventide, when petty details are lost and only broad effects remain—the coroneted steeple of St. Nicholas and the great black form of the Norman keep, reminding the contemplative that Monkchester was the name of the city before the Conqueror came and built that fortress whose fame as the “New Castle” has remained to this day to give a title to the place, just as the “new work” at Newark has ever since stood sponsor for that town. Again, no sooner have you crossed the Swing Bridge and come to Quayside than other vestiges of old Newcastle are encountered, in the remains of the Castle wall and the steps that lead upwards to Castle Garth, where shoemakers and cobblers of footgear of the most waterside and unfashionable character still blink and cobble in their half-underground dens, the descendants, probably, of those whom a French traveller remarked here in the time of Charles the Second. If, instead of climbing these stairs, the traveller elects to follow the track of the coaches, he will traverse Sandhill, which in very early days was an open space by the river, but has for centuries past been a street. It was at Sandgate close by, according to the ballad, that the lassie was heard to sing the well-known refrain of “Weel may the keel row, the boat that my love’s in,” and indeed it is a district that breathes romance, commonplace though its modern offices may look. Does not the Moot Hall look down upon Sandhill? “Many a heart has broken inside those walls,” said a passer-by, with unwonted picturesqueness, to the present writer, gazing at that hall of justice.
There is a pretty flavour of romance—compact, it is true, of the most unpromising materials, like the voluptuous scents which modern science extracts from coal-tar—still clinging to Sandhill. Just where a group of curious old houses, very old, very tall, and nearly all windows, remains, the explorer will perceive a memorial tablet let into one of the frontages, setting forth that “From one of the windows of this house, now marked with a blue pane of glass, Bessie Surteeseloped with John Scott, afterwards Lord Chancellor Eldon, November 18th, 1772.” John Scott was twenty-one years of age at the time, and was at home on vacation from Oxford. His father, a successful coal-fitter, had sent him, as he had already done his elder brother, William, afterwards Lord Stowell, to the University. He had already gained a fellowship there, which he forfeited on his elopement with, and marriage to, his Bessie. She descended from her casement by the aid of a ladder hidden by an accomplice in the shop below, and they were over the Border and wedded by the blacksmith at Blackshields before any one could pursue. Bessie’s relatives were bitterly opposed to the match, and so, nearly without resources, the pair had to resort to London and live frugally in Cursitor Street while he studied hard at law, instead of, as originally intended, for the Church. His first year’s earnings scarce amounted to enough to live on. “Many a time,” said he in after years, “have I run down from Cursitor Street to Fleet Market, to buy sixpennyworth of sprats for our supper.” The turning-point in his career occurred in a case in which he insisted on a legal point against the wishes of his clients. The case was decided against him, but was reversed on appeal on the point he had contested. From that time continued success awaited him, and he eventually became Lord Chancellor. The clashing Romeo of an earlier day became, however, a very different person in after years. Much poring over parchments and long-continued professional strife took all the generous enthusiasm out of him, and by ways not the most scrupulous he amassed one of the greatest fortunes ever scraped together by a successful lawyer. Bessie, meanwhile, had become quite as much of a handful as she had been an armful.
Romance wanes. As Conservators of the Tyne, the Corporation of Newcastle have, for the last four centuries, proclaimed their authority by once in every five years going in procession on the river, in various craft. It was on these occasions the acknowledgedcustom that, on returning and landing, the Mayor should choose the prettiest girl in the crowds of spectators and publicly salute her with a civic kiss. In acknowledgment of this favour his Worship presented her with a new sovereign. But the procession of “Barge Day,” as it was called, was discontinued after May 16th, 1901, and is not likely to be revived.
From Sandhill the coaches journeyed along the Side, which remains as steep and almost as picturesque as ever, even if not rendered additionally curious by the gigantic railway arch that spans it and clears the roofs of its tallest houses. The last mail-coach left Newcastle for Berwick and Edinburgh, with the Union Jack flying at half-mast, on July 5, 1847, and those days are so thoroughly done with that none of Newcastle’s coaching inns are left. Indeed, the whole character of the place has changed since little over a century and a half ago, when John Wesley entered the opinion in his diary that it was a “lovely place and lovely company,” and, furthermore, said that “if he were not journeying in hope of a better world, here he would be content to live and die.” Coal had even then been shipped for centuries from Newcastle, but miles of manufactories had not yet arisen upon the banks of “coaly Tyne,” and so unprogressive was the town that it was still, with gardens and orchards, easily comprised within its mediæval walls; those walls which had many a time withstood the Scots, and even when Wesley was here in 1745 were being prepared to resist the Pretender.
Newcastle—difficult as it may now be to realise the fact—was then a very small town, and was governed accordingly. Primitive punishments as well as primitive government survived until a hundred and fifty years ago, when scolds still wore bridles or were ducked, and when local tipplers yet perambulated the streets in the drunkard’s cloak, an ingenious instrument of little ease which now reposes in the Museum.
Far beyond the ancient walls now extend the streets of the modern city; Grey Street chief among them,classically gloomy and extra-classically grimed to the blackness of Erebus; a heavy Ionic pillar at its northern end bearing aloft the statue of Earl Grey, the Prime Minister who secured the passing of the first Reform Bill in 1832.
Away from the chief business streets, many of the curious old thoroughfares may be sought, but they are nowadays the receptacles of inconceivable dirt, and anything but desirable. The narrow streets called “chares” answer to the “wynds” of Edinburgh and the “rows” of Yarmouth. Their name has been the subject of jokes innumerable, and misunderstandings not a few; as, when a judge, previously unacquainted with Newcastle, holding an assize here, heard a witness say that he saw “three men come out of the foot of a chare,” and ordered him out of the witness-box, thinking him insane, until the jury of Newcastle men explained matters.
“The Drunkard’s Cloak”Despite its smoke and untidiness, the folks of this grimy Tyneside city have a good conceit of it. To them it is “canny Newcastle,” an epithet whose meaning differs from the Scotch, and here means “fine,” or “neat.” The stranger who fails to find those qualities, who perceives instead the defects of dirt and a pall of smoke that blackens everything to an inky hue, and accordingly thanks Providence that his home is elsewhere, is to the Tynesiders a Goth.
For Newcastle is practical. It has its great newspapers, and has produced literary men of note; but the forging of iron and steel, the shrinking of steel jackets upon big guns, the making of ships and all kinds of munitions of war appeal principally to the Novocastrian who may by chance have no especial love of that coaling trade which is pre-eminently andhistorically his. It is therefore quite characteristic of Newcastle folks that, in the mid-century, a literary man, since become famous, was as a boy solemnly warned by a townsman against such a career as he was contemplating. “Ah’m sorry,” said he, “to hear that ye want to go to London, and to take to this writing in the papers. It’ll bring ye to no good, my boy. I mind there was a very decent friend of mine, auld Mr. Forster, the butcher in the Side. He had a laddie just like you; and nothing would sarve him but he must go away to London to get eddicated, as he called it; and when he had got eddicated, he wouldn’t come back to his father’s shop, though it was a first-class business. He would do nothing but write, and write, and write; and at last he went back again to London, and left his poor old father all alone; and ah’ve never heard tell of that laddie since!”
Of course he had not. What rumours of literary life in London could then have penetrated to the shores of the “coaly Tyne.” That laddie, however, was John Forster, the biographer of Dickens.
These practical men of Newcastle have achieved the most wonderful things. The home of the Stephensons was at Wylam, only nine miles away, and so the town can fairly claim the inventor of railways among its natives. We need not linger to discuss the wonders of the locomotive; they are sufficiently evident. Newcastle men have even changed the character of their river. There are still those who can recollect the Tyne as a shallow stream in which the laden “keels,” heaped up with coal, not infrequently grounded. Nowadays the largest war-vessels are built up-stream, at Elswick, and take their stately way to the sea with their heavy armaments, and no mishap occurs. Clanging arsenals and factories line the banks for many more miles than the historian, anxious for his reputation, dare mention. The Armstrong works alone are over a mile long, and employ some sixteen thousand hands. Lord Armstrong himself was the inventor of hydraulic machinery; and the Swanincandescent electric lamp, which bears the name of its inventor, was the work of a Newcastle man. Others of whom England is proud were born here, notably Admiral Lord Collingwood. To their practicality these men of Newcastle add sentiment, for they have carefully placed tablets on the houses where their celebrated men were born, and they have not only erected a monument to Stephenson, but have also placed one of his first engines—“Puffing Billy”—on a pedestal beside the High Level Bridge, where the huge modern expresses roar past the quaint relic, day and night, in startling contrast. Also, they one and all have the most astonishingly keen affection for their old parish church of St. Nicholas, in these latter days become a cathedral.
If you would touch a Novocastrian on his most sensitive spot, praise or criticise the cathedral church of St. Nicholas, and he will plume himself or lose his temper, as the case may be. That building, and especially its tower, with the wonderful stone crown supported on ribbed arches and set about with its cluster of thirteen pinnacles, is the apple of Newcastle’s eye. It figures as a stock decorative heading in the Newcastle papers, and does duty in a hundred other ways. Built toward the close of the sixteenth century, that fairy-like corona has had its escapes, as when, during the stubborn defence in 1644, under the Royalist Sir John Marley, the Scottish general, Alexander Leslie, Lord Leven, commanding the besieging forces, threatened to batter it down with his cannon if the town were not at once surrendered. To this Sir John Marley made the very practical reply of causing all his Scottish prisoners to be placed in the tower, and sent word to the besiegers that they might, if they would, destroy it, but that their friends should perish at the same time. The “Thief and Reiver” bell, a relic of old times when the outlaws of Northumberland were given short shrift wherever and whenever found, is still rung before the opening of the annual fair, and recalls the old custom of giving thosegentry immunity from arrest during fair-time; but it would probably not be safe for any one “wanted” by the police to rely upon this sentimental survival.
“Puffing Billy”
Forfully a mile and a half on leaving Newcastle the road runs over the Town Moor, a once wild waste of common, and even now a bleak and forbidding open space whose horizon on every side commands the gaunt Northumbrian hills, or is hidden with the reek of Newcastle town, or the collieries that render the way sordid and ugly. Newcastle’s lovely pleasance, Jesmond Dene, is hidden away to the right from the traveller along the road, who progresses through Bulman’s Village (now dignified with the new name of Gosforth), Salter’s Lane, Wide Open and Seaton Burn with sinking heart, appalled at the increasing wretchedness and desolation brought by the coal-mining industry upon the scene. Off to the right lies Killingworth, among the collieries, where George Stephenson began his career in humble fashion. His cottage stands there to this day. At the gates of Blagdon Park, eight miles from Newcastle, where the white bulls of the Ridleys guard the entrance in somewhat spectral fashion, the surroundings improve. Here the Ridleys have been seated for centuries, and from their wooded domain watched the belching smoke of the pits they own, which year by year and generation by generation have added to their wealth. Lord Ridley is now the representative of these owners of mineral wealth, and lord of Blagdon. Midway of the long park wall that borders the road on the way to Morpeth stand the modern lodge and gates, erected in 1887; with that relic of old Newcastle, the Kale Cross, just within the grounds and easily seen from the highway. The building is not so much a cross as a market-house, and is just a classical pavilion in theDoric style, open on all sides to the weather. It stood, until the middle of the eighteenth century, upon the Side at Newcastle, and marked the centre of the market then held there. The townsfolk presented it to the Matthew White Ridley of the period, and here in lovelier surroundings than it knew originally, it stands, the wreathed urns and couchant lion on its roof contrasting finely with a dense background of foliage.
Beyond the park, the road crosses the Black Dene, whence Blagdon derives its name; one of those ravines that now begin to be a feature of the way. This expands on the right hand into Hartford Dene, to which Newcastle picnic-parties come in summer-time for brief respite from the smoke and clangour of their unlovely town. Thence, through Stannington, Clifton, and Catchburn, and to the long and tortuous descent into Morpeth, lying secluded in the gorge of the Wansbeck.
Morpeth is little changed since coaching times, but the one very noticeable alteration shows by what utter barbarians the town was inhabited towards the close of that era. Entering it, the turbulent Wansbeck is crossed by a stone bridge, built in 1830, to providebetter accommodation for the increased traffic than the ancient one, a few yards up stream, afforded. For some five years longer the old building was suffered to remain, and then, with the exception of its piers, it was demolished. No one benefited by its destruction, it stood in no one’s way, and its utility was such that a footbridge, a graceless thing of iron and scantling, has been erected across those ancient piers, to continue the access still required at this point from one bank to the other. It was to our old friends the monks that travellers were beholden for that ancient Gothic bridge, and their old toll-house still remains, after having passed through a varied career as a chapel, a school, and a fire-engine house. Turner’s view shows the road over the bridge, looking south; with the castle gate-house on the hill-top, a great deal nearer than it actually is. This, the sole relic of that old stronghold, has in later years been restored until it looks almost as new as the would-be Gothic of the gaol, which stands beside the modern bridge on entering the town and deludes the more ignorant into a belief of its genuine antiquity. At Morpeth, until the assizes were removed to Newcastle, justice was dispensed in this sham mediæval castle, built in 1821, and now, all too vast for present needs, used as a police-station. The old town gaol, at the other end of the town, facing the market-place, is much more interesting. Built in the likeness of a church tower, curfew is still rung from its belfry, beneath the queer little figures on the roof. Market-day brings crowds of drovers and endless droves of sheep and cattle to this spot, to say nothing of the pigs, singularly plentiful in these parts. “He’s driving his swine to Morpeth market,” is an expression still used of a snoring man in the neighbourhood. Always excepting market-day, Morpeth is now a curiously quiet and dreamy town. The stress of ancient times has left its few relics in the mouldering remains of strong and defensible walls, and in certain proverbs and sayings reflecting discreditably upon the Scottish people, but the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesare more evident in its streets than previous eras. To those centuries belong the many old inns with signs for the most part redolent of the coaching age: the “Nag’s Head,” the “Grey Nag’s Head,” the “Queen’s Head,” “Turk’s Head,” and “Black Bull”; this last with an odd semi-circular front and a beautiful coach-entrance displaying some fine Adam decoration.
Morpeth
That Morpeth folk still cherish old anti-Scottish sayings is not at all remarkable; for old manners, old sayings, and ancient hatreds die slowly in such places as this, and moreover, the Morpeth of old suffered terribly from Scottish raiders. Later times saw a more peaceful irruption, when Scottish youths came afoot down the great road in quest of fame and fortune in the south. People looked askance upon them as Scots, while innkeepers hated them for their poverty and their canniness. Those licensed victuallers thought, with Dr. Johnson, who did not greatly like them either, that “the finest prospect for a Scotchman was the high road that led him into England.” This bitter satire, by the way, was in reply to a Mr. Ogilvie, who had been contending on behalf of the “great many noble wild prospects” which Scotland contained. Smollett, in hisHumphry Clinker, shows how greatly the Scots were misliked along this route about 1766. He says that, from Doncaster northwards, all the windows of all the inns were scrawled with doggerel rhymes in abuse of the Scottish nation. This fact was pointed out to that fine Scottish character, Lismahago, and with it a particularly scurrilous epigram. He read it with some difficulty, the glass being dirty, and with the most starched composure.
“Vara terse and vara poignant,” said he; “but with the help of a wat dishclout it might be rendered more clear and parspicuous.”
The country between Morpeth and Alnwick is dotted with peel-towers and their ruins, built in the wild old times when the ancestors of these peaceful Scots came in quest of spoil, laying waste the Borders far and wide. One had but to turn aside from the road at Warrener’sHouse, two miles beyond Morpeth, and thence proceed eastward for a further two, for ten castles to be seen at once from the vantage-point of Cockle Park Tower, itself a fine relic of a fortress belonging in the fifteenth century to the Ogles, situated now on a farm called by the hideous name of Blubberymires.
The peculiar appropriateness of Morpeth’s name, meaning as it does “moor-path,” is fully realised when coming up the road, up the well-named High Highlaws to where the road to Cockle Park Tower branches off, and where an old toll-house stands, with “Warrener’s House,” a deserted red-brick mansion, opposite. It is quite worth while to ask any passing countryman the name of that house, for then the “Northumbrian burr” will be heard in all its richness. As De Foe remarked, two hundred years ago, Northumbrians have “a Shibboleth upon their Tongues, namely, a difficulty in pronouncing the letter R,” and in their mouths, consequently, the name becomes, grotesquely enough, “Wawwener.”
Causey Park Bridge, over a little rivulet, a ruined windmill, and the remains of Causey Park Tower are the next features of the way before reaching a rise where an old road goes scaling a hillside to the right hand, surmounted by a farm picturesquely named “Helm-on-the-Hill.” Thence downhill on to Bockenfield Moor, and then precipitously down again through West Thirston and across the picturesque bridge that spans the lovely Coquet, into Felton: villages bordering either bank of the river, where the angler finds excellent sport, and where the rash cyclist, regardless of the danger-boards erected for his guidance on the hill-tops, tries involuntary conclusions with the aforesaid bridge at the bottom. A mile onward, up the rising road, is the park of Swarland Hall, with “Nelson’s Monument,” a time-stained obelisk, seen amid the trees within the park fence, and showing against the sky-line as the traveller approaches the moorland height of Rushy Cap. Alexander Davison, squire of Swarland Hall and friend of the Admiral, erected it, “not to commemorate thepublic virtue and heroic achievements of Nelson, which is the duty of England, but to the memory of private friendship.” Occupying so prominent a position by the roadside, it was probably intended to edify the coach-passengers of old. So to Newton-on-the-Moor—which might more fitly be named Newton-on-the-Hill—with its half a dozen cottages and its coal-pits, and thence by a featureless but not unpleasing road into Alnwick.
The Market-Place, Morpeth
Felton Bridge
It is something of a shock to the sentimental pilgrim, northward-bound, that the entrance to historic Alnwick should be by the gas-works, the railway station, the Farmers’ Folly (of which more shall presently be said), and other unmistakable and unromantic evidences of modernity that spread beyond the ancient confines of the town to form the suburb of Bondgate Without; but man cannot live by medievalism alone. The townitself is gained at that point where the heavy blackened mass of Bondgate itself spans the road, just beyond the elaborately rebuilt “Old Plough,” still exhibiting, however, the curious tablet from the old house:—
That which your Father old hath purchased and leftYou to possess, do you dearlyHold to show his worthiness. 1714.
That which your Father old hath purchased and leftYou to possess, do you dearlyHold to show his worthiness. 1714.
Alnwick
Alnwickis a town with a great past and a somnolent present. There are yawns at every turn, echoes with every footfall, and grass growing unbidden in the streets. But there are forces of elemental power at Alnwick, little though the stranger suspects them. There have of late years been periods of storm and stress in the columns of theAlnwick Gazette, for instance, respecting the local water-supply, which have drawn forth inappropriately fiery letters from correspondents, together with many mixed metaphors. How is this for impassioned writing?—“The retributive forces of well-balanced justice have, after a dead ebb, returned with a swelling tide, and overtaken the arrogative policy of the freeholders.” But this is nothing to the following striking figure of “the arm of scandalous jobbery steeped to the lips in perfidious dishonour;” a delightful literary image unsurpassed in Ireland itself; or “another hydra of expense arising phoenix-like from the ashes of misgovernment.” Did the word “hydrant,” we wonder, suggest this last period? Is the dulness of Alnwick due to the decay following the corruption hinted at? Perhaps, for, as this publicist next inquires, “How could anything symbolical of greatness, wrapped with ropes of sand, ever and for aye, flourish like the green bay-tree?” Ah! how? It is a difficult question to answer, and so we will leave the question at that.
Alnwick, of course, derives its name from its situation on the romantic Aln: the “wick,” or village on thatriver. The name is kin to that of many other “wicks,” “weeks,” and “wykes” in England, and has its fellows in such places as High Wycombe; Wykeham (now spelt Wickham) in Hampshire, whence came William of Wykeham; the village of Week, near Winchester; and in the town named simply Wick, in the north of Scotland. Alnwick in these times is a place of a certain grim and lowering picturesqueness. Its grey stone houses are at one with the greyness of the Northumbrian skies, and a general air of barren stoniness impresses the traveller as its chief feature. It is an effect of prisons and jailers which reaches its height in the open space that fronts the barbican of the castle. You look, instinctively, for His Majesty’s prison regulations on the outer walls, and, approaching the gate, expect a warder’s figure at the wicket.
This is no uncongenial aspect of that old fortress. It is rather in the Italian drawing-rooms, the picture-galleries, and the Renaissance luxuries of the interior of the castle that the jarring note is struck and all association with feudal times forgotten. Many a Border moss-trooper has unwillingly passed through this grim barbican, and so left the world for ever; and many more of higher estate have found this old stronghold of the Percies a place of lifelong durance, or have in its dungeons met a secret end. For chivalry was not inconsistent with midnight murder or treachery, and the Percies, centred in their fortress like spiders in their webs, had all the virtues and the vices of chivalric times. Ambitious and powerful, they were alike a bulwark against the Scots and a menace to successive kings of England, and none in those olden times could have approached their castle gate with the equable pulsation of the modern tourist. In those times, instead of finding a broad level open space here, a deep ditch would have been seen and a drawbridge must have been lowered before access was possible. Then possibly the stone figures in violent attitudes that line the battlements, and seem to be casting missiles down upon the heads of visitors, may have beenalarming; to-day we only wonder if they could ever have tricked even the most bat-eyed warrior into a belief that they were really living men-at-arms.
The Percies, whose name attaches more than any other to Alnwick, were, strictly speaking, never its owners. The first of that name came over to England with the Conqueror in the person of William de Percy, a younger son of the feudal lord of the village of Percie in Normandy, which still exists to point out to the curious tourist the spot whence this historic family sprang. This William de Percy was nicknamed “Als Gernons,” or “Whiskers,” whence derives the name of Algernon, even now a favourite one with the Smithson-Percies. “Whiskers” was present at the battle of Hastings, and for his aid was granted manors in Hampshire, Lincolnshire, and York, but none in Northumberland. He died in 1086, when with the Crusaders, near Jerusalem. The Percies never became connected in any way with Alnwick, for the family of this William de Percy became extinct in 1166, when Agnes, an only child of his descendant, married Josceline de Lovaine; and it was not until 1309 that the descendant of this Lovaine, who had assumed the Percy name, came into wrongful possession of the vast estates. Alnwick and sixty other baronies in Northumberland had until then been in possession of the de Vescis, of whom Yvo de Vesci was the original Norman owner. His descendant, William de Vesci, who died in 1297, was the last of his line, and appears to have been of a peculiarly trusting disposition. He put a great (and an unfounded) faith in the honesty of churchmen, leaving all his estates to Anthony Bek, Prince-Bishop of Durham, in trust for an infant illegitimate son, until he should come of age. But Bek picked a quarrel with his ward, and in 1309 sold the lands to Henry Percy, who thus became the first Baron Percy of Alnwick.
But let us not do an injustice to the Church. Prince-Bishops were kittle cattle, an amorphous kind of creature. Perhaps his lay half impelled Bek to thisknavery, and, following the Scriptural injunction not to let the right hand know what is done by the left, his clerical moiety remained in ignorance of the crime. Heaven be praised, there are no longer any of these Jekyll and Hyde creatures, for the Bishops-Palatine of Durham were abolished two generations or more since.
There were, in the fulness of time, three Barons Percy of Alnwick, and then the Barony was erected into the Earldom of Northumberland. The axe and the sword took heavy toll of this new line, for the Earls of Northumberland seldom died in their beds, and father and son often followed one another in a bloody death, until at length they became extinct with the death of the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland. Of these eleven, only seven died a natural death. There were Percies who fell in battle; others who, rightly or wrongly, met the death of traitors; one was torn to pieces by a mob; and another was obscurely done to death in prison. Nor did only the heads of the family end violently; their sons and other relations led lives as turbulent, and finished as suddenly.
The only child of the eleventh Earl of Northumberland was a daughter, Elizabeth Percy. She married firstly the Earl of Ogle; secondly, Thomas Thynne of Longleat, who was murdered in Pall Mall in 1682 by Count Koningsmarck; and thirdly, the sixth Duke of Somerset; thus bringing the Percy estates into the Seymour family, and the Percy red hair as well.
It was of red-haired Elizabeth Percy, when Duchess of Somerset, that Dean Swift wrote the bitter and diabolically clever lines that are supposed to have lost him all chance of becoming a bishop. He wrote of her as “Carrots”:—
Beware of carrots from Northumberland,Carrots sownThynnea deep root may get,If so be they are in Sumer set;Theircunnings markthou; for I have been toldThey assassin when young and poison when old.Root out those carrots, O thou whose nameIs backwards and forwards always the same.
Beware of carrots from Northumberland,Carrots sownThynnea deep root may get,If so be they are in Sumer set;Theircunnings markthou; for I have been toldThey assassin when young and poison when old.Root out those carrots, O thou whose nameIs backwards and forwards always the same.
The one whose name was backwards and forwards alikewas Queen Anne, for Swift’s purpose “Anna.” It will be noticed that Swift not very obscurely hints that Elizabeth Percy connived at murder.
Her eldest son, the seventh Duke of Somerset, had, curiously enough, only one child, a daughter. She married “the handsomest man of his time,” Sir Hugh Smithson, in 1740, and thus the property came into the hands of the present holders.
This most fortunate, as well as most handsome, fellow was Sir Hugh Smithson, one of a family of Yorkshire squires whose ancestor gained a baronetcy, created 1660, for his services to the Stuarts. Sir Hugh, horn 1714, a son of Langdale Smithson, and grandson of another Sir Hugh, the third baronet, had little early prospect of much position in life. He was a younger son, and, like many another such, he went into trade. He was an apothecary. Having succeeded as fourth baronet to position and wealth, and with what he had made in commerce, the “handsomest man” made this very handsome marriage. He had the aristocratic instinct, and, discarding his old name, took that of Percy, to which, of course, he had no sort of right.
For him in 1749 was revived the old title, Earl of Northumberland, together with that of Baron Warkworth. In 1766 he became further, Duke of Northumberland and Earl Percy, and died 1786.
The name of Percy is one to conjure with. The Lovaines, who had assumed it, made it famous in the annals of chivalry, with a thousand deeds of derring-do in the debateable lands. Smithson, too, is a good name. It at least tells of descent from an honest craftsman, and Sir Hugh’s knighted ancestor had, obviously, done nothing to be ashamed of. Unfortunately for Sir Hugh and his successors, this unwarranted assumption of an historic name took place so well within the historic period that it is never likely to be forgotten. George the Third, who also had the instinct of aristocracy, kept the fact well in mind, and when, sorely against his will, he was obligedto confer the Dukedom of Northumberland upon this ex-apothecary, consoled himself by vowing that he should never obtain the Order of the Garter. The duke personally solicited a blue ribbon from the king, and observed that he was “the first Percy who has been refused the Garter.” “You forget,” replied his Majesty, “that you are the first Smithson who has ever asked for it.”
The huge and historic stronghold of Alnwick had by this time become ruinous, and the Smithson duke was for a while uncertain whether to reside here or at Warkworth. Alnwick, however, found favour with him, and he set to work to render it a place worthy of one of his quality. To this end he wrought havoc with the feudal antiquities of the castle, pulling down the ancient chapel and several of the towers, filling up the moats, plastering the walls and ceilings, enlarging arrow-slits into great windows, and playing the very devil with the place. The military history of the castle, as expressed in the picturesque irregularity of successive alterations and additions during many centuries, was swept away by his zeal for uniformity, and the interior rooms were remodelled in the taste of that age, to serve for a residence, to such an extent that only the outer walls retained even the appearance of a castle. When Pennant wrote of it in 1767, he said:—“You look in vain for any marks of the grandeur of the feudal age; for trophies won by a family eminent in our annals for military prowess and deeds of chivalry; for halls hung with helms and hauberks” (good alliteration, that! but rash for Cockney repetition), “or with the spoils of the chase; for extensive forests or for venerable oaks. The apartments are large, and lately finished with a most incompatible elegance. The gardens are equally inconsistent, trim in the highest degree, and more adapted to a villa near London than to the ancient seat of a great baron.” It was to this criticism of “trimness” that Bishop Percy objected. Discussing Pennant with Dr. Johnson, he could not sit quietly and hear him praise a man who had spoken sodisrespectfully of Alnwick Castle and the Duke’s pleasure-grounds, and he eagerly opposed the Doctor, evidently with some heat, for Johnson said, “He has done what he intended; he has made you very angry.” To which the Bishop replied, “He has said the garden is trim, which is representing it like a citizen’s parterre, when the truth is, there is a very large extent of fine turf and gravel walks.”
“According to your own account, sir,” rejoined Johnson, “Pennant is right. It is trim. Here is grass cut close and gravel rolled smooth. Is not that trim? The extent is nothing against that; a mile may be as trim as a square yard.” The Bishop was vanquished.
All the sham Gothic alterations made at a huge outlay by the first Duke (with the exception of one room, which remains to show how atrocious his style was) were swept away by Algernon, the fourth Duke, about 1855, and at a still greater cost replaced internally with an interminable series of salons in the Italian style. Externally, the castle is a mediæval fortress; internally it is an Italian palace. These works cost over £300,000, and serve to show the measure of ducal folly. Make a man a duke and give him an income commensurate, and he goes mad and builds and rebuilds, burying himself in masonry like a maggot in a cheese. But it is good for trade; and perhaps that is why Providence allows a duke to be created now and then.
This magnificence for a long time created its own Nemesis, and the Dukes of Northumberland, in their gigantic castle, were worse off in one respect than a clerk in London suburbs in a six-roomed, nine-inch walled, jerry-built “villa” at £30 a year. They could never get a hot dinner! The kitchen is large enough, and the fireplace so huge that the fire cannot be made up without shovelling on a ton of coals; but the dining-room is so far away, and the communication was so bad (involving going across courtyards open to the sky) that everything was cold before it reached table. This has been remedied, and my lords dukes now havetheir food sent to them along rails on trolleys—just as they feed the beasts at the Zoo.
The Dukes of Northumberland are well titled. They are autocrats in that county, owning as they do 181,616 of its acres, and drawing a rental of £161,874. Some of them have been insufferably egotistical. The “Brislec” Tower, built on the neighbouring height of Brislaw by the first Duke, is evidence sufficient to prove that. It is a monument by himself to his own doings, and invites the pilgrim, in a long bombastical inscription, to “Look around, behold,” and marvel at the plantations with which he caused the bare hillsides to be covered.
But the most prominent memorial in Alnwick is the well-named “Farmers’ Folly,” erected to the second Duke in 1816. Entering or leaving the town, it is a most striking object: a pillar 85 feet in height with the Percy lion on its summit. What did the second Duke do to deserve this? Did he serve his country in war? Was he a statesman? Was he benevolent to the tenants who erected it? Not at all. Here is the story.
When the nineteenth century dawned we were at war with France, and wheat and all kinds of produce were at enormously enhanced prices. The farmers, therefore, began to do very well. Their banking-accounts swelled, and some of them were on the way to realise small fortunes. The Duke saw this and sorrowed because they found it possible to do more than exist, and accordingly he added to their rents, doubling in almost every instance—and in many others quadrupling—them. But when the country entered on the long peace that followed Waterloo, and prices fell enormously, the unfortunate farmers found it impossible to pay their way under these added burdens. Mark the ducal generosity! As they could not pay, he reduced the rents by twenty-five per cent.! Like a draper at his annual sale, he effected a “great reduction,” an “alarming sacrifice,” by taking off a percentage of what he had already imposed. Hownoble! Then the tenants, the grateful fellows, subscribed to build the column, which is inscribed: “To Hugh, Duke of Northumberland, by a grateful and united tenantry.” Having done this, they went into bankruptcy and the workhouse, or emigrated, or just gave up their farms because they could not carry on any longer. The money they had subscribed did not suffice to complete this testimonial to Duke Hugh’s benevolence, and so—a comic opera touch—he subscribed the rest, and finished it himself. What humorists these Smithsons are!
Alnwick Castle, from the Road to Belford
Theroad, leaving Alnwick, plunges down from the castle barbican to the black hollow in which the Aln flows, overhung with interlacing and over-arching trees. The river is crossed here by that bridge shown in Turner’s picture, the “Lion Bridge” as it is called, from the Percy lion, “with tail stretched out as straight as a broom-handle,” standing on the parapet and looking with steadfast gaze to the North. It is an addition since Turner’s picture was painted, and an effective one, too. Also, since that time, the trees have encroached and enshrouded the scene most completely; so that the only satisfactory view is that looking backwards when one has emerged from the black dell. And a most satisfactory view it is, with the i’s and t’s of romance dotted and crossed so emphatically that it looks like some theatrical scene, or the optically realised home of the wicked hero of one of Grimm’s fairy tales. If this were not the beginning of the twentieth century, one might well think twice before venturing down into the inky depths of that over-shaded road; but these are matter-of-fact times, and we know well that only the humdrum burgesses of Alnwick, in their shops, are beyond; with, instead of a mediæval duke in the castle, who would thinknothing of hanging a stray wayfarer or so from his battlements, only a very modern peer.
The road onwards is a weariness and an infliction to the cyclist, for it goes on in a heavy three miles’ continuous rise up to the summit of Heiferlaw Bank, whence there is a wide and windy view of uncomfortable looking moorlands to the north, with the craggy Cheviots, perhaps covered with snow, to the north-west. As a literary lady—Mrs. Montagu—wrote in 1789, when on a northern journey, “These moors are not totally uninhabited, but they look unblest.” How true!
The proper antidote to this is the looking back to where, deep down in the vale of Aln, lie town and castle, perhaps lapt in infrequent sunshine, more probably seen through rain, but, in any case, presenting a picture of sheltered content, and seeming to be protected from the rude buffets of the weather by the hill on which we are progressing and by the wooded flanks of Brislaw on the other side. “Seeming,” because those who know Alnwick well could tell a different tale of wintry blasts and inclement seasons that belie the hint of this hillside prospect for three whole quarters round the calendar and a good proportion of the fourth. In this lies a suggestion of why the Percies were so warlike. They and their northern foes fought to keep themselves warm! Nowadays such courses would lead to the police-court, and so football has become a highly-popular game in these latitudes. But the southward glimpse of Alnwick and its surroundings from the long rise of Heiferlaw Bank is, when sunshine prevails, of a quite incommunicable charm. The background of hills, covered with Duke Hugh’s woods and crowned with his tower, recalls in its rich masses of verdure the landscapes of De Wint, and if in the Duke’s inscription on that tower he seems to rank himself in fellowship with the Creator, certainly, now he has been dead and gone these hundred and twenty years, his saplings, grown into forest trees and clothing the formerly barren hillsides, have effected a wonderful change.
Malcolm’s Cross
Beside the road are the few remaining stones of St. Leonard’s Chapel, and, a short distance beyond, on the right, in a grove of trees, Malcolm’s Cross, marking the spot where Malcolm Caenmore, king of Scotland, was slain in 1093. It replaces a more ancient cross, and was erected by the first Duchess of Northumberland in 1774. It was on his seventh foray into Northumberland, besieging Alnwick Castle, that Malcolm was killed, in an ambush carefully prepared for him. The legend, which tells how he was treacherously slain by athrust of a spear in the eye by one of the Percies, who was pretending to deliver up the castle keys on the spear’s point, is untrue, as of course is the popular derivation of the family name from “pierce eye.” Moreover, the Percies, as we have seen, did not own Alnwick until more than two hundred years afterwards.
Heiferlaw, as befits so commanding a hill-top so close to the Border, has its watch-tower, looking across the marches, whence the outlying defenders of Alnwick, ever watchful against Scottish raids, could give timely warning to the garrison. It stands to-day a picturesque ruin, in cultivated fields that in those fierce old times, when men had no leisure for peaceful arts and industries, formed a portion of the wild moorland. “Blawweary,” they call one of these fields, and the title is as descriptive of this exposed situation as anything in the whole range of nomenclature. Beyond this point the road descends to a level stretch of country leading to North Charlton, where a few farmsteads alone stand for a village, together with a prominent hillock covered with trees and looking as though it had, or ought to have, a story to it; a story which research fails to unearth. Opposite, meadows called locally “Comby Fields,” presumably from a series of ridges seen in them, seem to point to some forgotten history. Brownyside, adjoining, is an expanse of moorland, covered with bracken, followed by Warenford, a pretty hamlet in a hollow by a tiny stream, with Twizel Park on the left. At Belford, a large wide-streeted village with a nowadays all too roomy coaching inn, the “Blue Bell,” and an old cross with gas-lamps fitted to it by some vandal or other, the road draws near the coast; that storied Northumbrian sea-shore where Bambrough Castle on its islanded rock, many miles of yellow quicksands, and the Farne and Holy Islands are threaded out in succession before the gaze. Bambrough, the apex of its pyramidical form, just glimpsed above an intervening headland, looks in the distance like another St. Michael’s Mount, and Holy Island, ahead, is a miniature fellow to it. The ruined cathedral ofHoly Island, the ancient Lindisfarne, the spot whence the missionary Aidan from Iona began the conversion of Northumbria in 634, and where he was succeeded by that most famous of all northern bishops and saints, the woman-hating St. Cuthbert, is the mother-church of the north, and became possessed in later times of great areas of land through which the road now passes. Buckton, Goswick, Swinhoe, Fenwick, Cheswick, were all “possessions” of the monastery; and the old ecclesiastical parish of Holy Island, once including all these places on the mainland, and constituting then an outlying wedge of Durham in the county of Northumberland, although now a thing of the past, still goes by the local name of Islandshire. Buckton, now a few scattered cottages by the roadside, held a place in the old rhyme which incidentally shows that the monks of Lindisfarne adopted that comforting doctrine:
Who lives a good life is sure to live well.
Who lives a good life is sure to live well.
Their farms and granges yielded them all that the appreciative stomachs of these religious recluses could desire, save indeed when the Scots swooped over the Tweed and took their produce away. It is a rhyme of good living:—
From Goswick we’ve geese, from Cheswick we’ve cheese;From Buckton we’ve venison in store;From Swinhoe we’ve bacon, but the Scots it have taken,And the Prior is longing for more.
From Goswick we’ve geese, from Cheswick we’ve cheese;From Buckton we’ve venison in store;From Swinhoe we’ve bacon, but the Scots it have taken,And the Prior is longing for more.
The yellow sands that occupy the levels and reach out at low tide to Holy Island are treacherous. With the exquisite colouring of sea and sky on a summer day blending with them, they look at this distance like the shores of fairyland; but the grim little churchyard of Holy Island has many memorials presenting another picture—a picture of winter storm and shipwreck, for which this wild coast has ever been memorable. Off Bambrough, where the Farne Islands are scattered in the sea, the scene is still recalled of the wreck of theForfarshireand Grace Darling’s heroism; and themonument of that famous girl stands in Bambrough churchyard to render the summer pilgrim mindful of the danger of this coast. Dangerous not only to those on the waters, but also to travellers who formerly took the short cut from Berwick across the sands, instead of going by the hilly road. The way, clearly marked in daylight by a line of poles, has often been mistaken at night; sudden storms, arising when travellers have reached midway, have swept them out to sea; or fogs have entangled the footsteps even of those who knew the uncharted flats best. Whatever the cause, to be lost here was death. The classic instance, still narrated, is that of the postboy carrying the mails from Edinburgh on the 20th of November, 1725. Neither he nor the mail-bags was ever heard of again after leaving Berwick, and it was naturally concluded that he was lost on the quicksands in a sea-fog.
Away on the west of the road rise the Kyloe hills, like ramparts, and on their tallest ridge the church tower of Kyloe, conspicuous for long distances, and greatly appreciated by sailors as a landmark. The village is not perhaps famous, but certainly notable for a former vicar, who apparently aspired to writing a personal history of his parish as well as keeping a merely formal set of registers. Scattered through his official records are some very curious notes, among them: “1696. Buried, Dec. 7, Henry, the son of Henry Watson of Fenwick, who lived to the age of 36 years, and was so great a fool that he could never put on his own close, nor never went a ¼ mile off ye house in all this space.”
The road at this point was the scene of Grizel Cochrane’s famous exploit, in 1685, when at night-fall, disguised as a man, and mounted on horseback, she waylaid the mail rider, and, holding a pistol to his head, robbed him of the warrant he was carrying for the execution of her father, Sir John Cochrane, taken in rebellion against James the Second. By this means she obtained a fortnight’s respite, a delay which was used by his friends to secure his pardon.Grizel Cochrane has, of course, been ever since the heroine of Border song. A clump of trees on a hillock, surrounded by a wall, to the right of the road, long bore the name of “Grizzy’s Clump,” but it has recently been felled and so much of the landmark destroyed. The country folk, possessed of the most invincible ignorance of the subject, know the place only as “Bambrough Hill,” a title they have given it because from the summit an excellent view of Bambrough Castle is gained.
Bambrough Castle
The plantations of Haggerston Castle now begin to cover the land sloping down toward the sea, and, after passing a deserted building on the left, once a coaching inn, the park surrounding the odd-looking modern castellated residence is reached. Here, by the entrance to the house, the road goes off at an acute angle to the left, and, continuing thus for a quarter of a mile, turns as sharply to the right. An old manorial pigeon-house, still with a vane bearing the initials C.L.H., stands by the way, and bears witness to the ownershipof the estate in other times by the old Haggerston family. It was to Sir Carnaby Haggerston that those initials belonged, the late eighteenth-century squire, who destroyed the old Border tower of Haggerston Castle, and built a new mansion in its stead, just as so many of his contemporaries did.
Sir Carnaby Haggerston does not appear—apart from this vandal act of his—to have been an especially Wicked Squire, although his devastating name launched him upon the world ear-marked for commission of all the crimes practised by the libertine landowners who made so brave a show in a certain class of literature and melodrama once popular. His name strikes the ear even more dramatically than that of Sir Rupert Murgatroyd, the accursed Baronet of Ruddigore in Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s comic opera, but he never lived up to its possibilities. The only things he seems to have had in common with the typical squire of old seem to have been a love of port and whist, and a passion for building houses too large for his needs or means.
The Wicked Squire who unwillingly sat to the novelists who used to write in the pages ofReynolds’ Miscellanyand journals of that stamp fifty years ago, as the high-born villain of their gory romances, may be regretted, because without him the pages of the penny novelist are become extremely tame; but his disappearance need not be mourned for any other reasons.
It is to him we owe the many supposedly “classical” mansions that, huge and shapeless, like so many factories, reformatories, or workhouses, affront the green sward, the beautiful gardens, and the noble trees of many English parks. To build vast mansions of this “palatial” character, the squires often pulled down middle-Tudor or Elizabethan, or even earlier manor-houses of exquisite beauty, vying with one another in the size and extravagance of the new buildings, whose original cost and subsequent maintenance have during the past hundred and fifty years kept many county families in straitened circumstances, and do so still. There was a squire who pulled down awhole series of mediæval wayside crosses in his district, and used the materials as building-stones toward the great mansion he was erecting for the purpose of outshining a neighbour. Those transcendent squires, the noblemen of old, had larger opportunities and made the worst use of them. The Duke of Buckingham, for example, bought a property, demolished the Elizabethan hall that stood on it, and built Stowe there in its place; a building of vast range and classic elevation with colonnades and porticoes, and “windows that exclude the light and lead to nothing,” as some one has very happily remarked. Sir Francis Dashwood, that hero of the Hell Fire Club, pulled down West Wycombe church and built the existing building, that looks like a Lancashire cotton-mill, and every one built houses a great deal larger than were wanted or they could afford; which, like the Earl of Leicester’s seat at Holkham were so little like homes that they could neither live in their stately apartments nor sleep in their vast bedrooms. Like the Earl and Countess of Leicester, who were compelled for comfort’s sake to sleep in one of the servants’ bedrooms in the attics, they lived as settlers in corners of their cavernous and uncomfortable palaces.
Pity the poor descendant of the Squires! He cannot afford in these days to keep up his huge house; to pull it down would in itself cost a fortune; and its very size frightens the clients of the house-agent in whose hands he has had it for letting, these years past. All over England this is seen, and the old Yorkshire tale would stand true of any other county and of many other county magnates of that time. The Marquis of Rockingham, according to that story, built a mansion at Wentworth big enough for the Prince of Wales; Sir Rowland Winn built one at Nostel Priory fit for the Marquis of Rockingham; and Mr. Wrightson of Cusworth built a house fit for Sir Rowland Winn. No doubt the farmers carried on the tale of extravagance down to their stratum of society, and soad infinitum.
But to return to Haggerston Castle, which now belongs to the Leylands. Conspicuous for some distance is the tower built of recent years to at one and the same time resemble a mediæval keep and to serve a practical purpose as a water-tower, engine-room, and look-out. The place, however, is remarkable for quite other things than its mock castle, for in the beautiful park are kept in pens, or roaming about freely, herds of foreign animals which make of it a miniature Zoological Gardens. It is, in a sense, superior indeed to that well-known place, for if the collections do not cover so wide a range, the animals are in a state of nature. Emus, Indian cattle, kangaroos, and many varieties of wild buck roam this “paradise,” together with a thriving herd of American bison. The bison is almost extinct, even in his native country, but here he flourishes exceedingly and perpetuates his kind. A bison bull is a startling object, come upon unawares, and looks like the production of a lunatic artist chosen to illustrate, say, the Jabberwock inAlice in Wonderland. He is all out of drawing, with huge shaggy forelegs, and head and shoulders a size too large for the rest of his body; an eye like a live coal, tufted coat, like a worn-out door-mat, and uncomfortable-looking horns: the kind of creature that inhabits Nightmare Country, popularly supposed to be bred of indigestion and lobster mayonnaise.