XXXII
Leaving Retford by Bridgegate, the road rises at once to the long five-miles’ stretch of Barnby Moor, home of howling winds and whirling snow-wreaths in winter, and equally unprotected from the fierce glare of the midsummer sun. At the further end of this trying place, just past a huddled group of cottages at the bend of the road, stands the famous old “Blue Bell” inn. But no one was ever heard to talk of this old coaching hostelry as the “Blue Bell.” The “Bell,” Barnby Moor, was the title by which it was always known.
For the beginning of the well-earned fame of the “Bell” we must go back a long way. Not, indeed, to ancient times, for there was never a mediæval hostel here, but to very old coaching days. Already, in 1776, when the Rev. Thomas Twining was ambling about the country on “Poppet,” making picturesque notes, it was a “gentlemanlike, comfortable house,” and Sterne knew it well. “I am worn out,” says he in one of his letters, “but press on to Barnby Moor to-night.” Even the “worn-out” would make an effort, you see, to reach this hospitable roof-tree.
But a greater fame was earned by the “Bell” in its later days, when it was kept by George Clark, at once innkeeper, sportsman, and breeder of racehorses. He was famed for his anecdotal and conversational powers, and when free from gout was reputed “a tough customer over the mahogany,” in which testimony we may read, in the manner of that time, a crowning virtue. Something—nay, a great deal—more than the “red-nosed innkeepers” of whom Sir Walter Scott speaks, he was also a landed proprietor, and supplied his extensive establishment from his own farm. Peculiarly the man for this road, and especially for this portion of the road, his personality made the “Bell” inn—the word “hotel” was in those days an abomination and an offence—the especial resort of the sporting fraternity, and racing men generally contrived to make his house their halting-place.
Clark reigned at the “Bell” for forty years, from 1800, dying of gout in 1842, shortly after he had sold the house to a Mr. Inett. His was that famous mare, Lollypop, who gave birth to the yet more famous Sweetmeat. But Clark did not live to learn the quality of that foal, and Sweetmeat was sold at the dispersal of his stable for ten guineas. Three years later, when he had won the Somersetshire Stakes at Bath, Lord George Bentinck in vain offered four thousand guineas for him, and later in that year, 1845, he won the Doncaster Cup.
Clark was chiefly instrumental in bringing to justice two incendiaries, disciples of “Captain Swing,” who had fired a hayrick not far from the “Bell.” At that period—the early “thirties”—when the Reform agitation was embittering the relations between the squires and the peasantry, rick-burnings were prevalent all over the country. They went by the name of the “Swing Riots,” from the circumstance of the threatening letters and notices received being signed in the name of that entirely pseudonymous or mythical person. One night Clark was roused from his bed with the information that the rioters were at work close at hand. Hastily rising and dressing by the glare of his neighbour’s burning ricks, he told off fifty from his numerous staff of postboys and stable helpers to mount and to thoroughly explore the country within a circuit of ten miles, offering a reward of £5 to the one who would discover the miscreants, together with five shillings a head to all who took part in the chase. It was a successful foray; for, before morning dawned, two shivering “rioters” were brought to him. They had been found hiding in a ditch. Matches and other incriminating things were found on them, and, being committed to York Castle, they eventually were awarded fourteen years’ transportation.
The old “Bell” is still standing. A hundred and twenty horses for the road were kept here in those old times, but to-day, instead of horses, we have motor-cars.
Soon after railways had driven the coaches off the road, the “Bell” ceased to be an inn. Its circumstances were peculiar. Standing as it did, and still does, away from any town or village, its only trade was with coaching or posting travellers, and when they disappeared altogether there was nothing for it but to close down. And so for sixty years and more the “Bell” became a private residence, and it would have remained so had not a road-enthusiast taken it and re-opened the old house in 1906 as a hotel for touring motorists. The enthusiast took other hotels on this road. Took so many indeed that his resources as a private person were overstrained, and he went bankrupt. But the “Bell,” in this, its second time, flourishes exceedingly.
From hence the bleak hamlets of Torworth and Ranskill lead to Scrooby, set amidst the heathy vale of the winding Idle, which sends its silver threads in aimless fashion amidst the meadows. Here the road leaves Nottinghamshire and enters Yorkshire. Beside the road at the little rise called Scrooby Top, stands a farmhouse, once the old Scrooby Inn, kept by Thomas Fisher as a kind of half-way house between Bawtry and Barnby Moor, and calculated to intercept the posting business of the “Bell” and of the Bawtry inns. Competition was keen-edged on the roads in those times.
There seems to have once been a turnpike gate at Scrooby, for a murder was committed there in 1779, when John Spencer, a shepherd, calling up William Geadon, the turnpike man, one July night under the pretence of having some cattle to go through, knocked him down and killed him with a hedge-stake and then went upstairs and murdered the turnpike man’s mother. Spencer was hanged at Nottingham, and gibbeted on the scene of his crime. The stump of the gibbet was still visible in 1833.
This is the place whence came the chief among the “Pilgrim Fathers” who at last, in 1620, succeeded in leaving England in the Mayflower, for America. Scrooby is the place of origin of that Separatist Church which refused allegiance to the Church of England. Here lived William Brewster, son of the bailiff of Scrooby Manor, once a Palace of the Archbishops of York. In those times the Great North Road wandered, as a lane, down through Scrooby village, and all traffic went this way. William Brewster the elder, bailiff and postmaster, was a government servant who kept relays of horses primarily for the use of State messengers. His salary was “twenty pence a day”; the equivalent of about £300 per annum of our money. Although very definite regulations were laid down by the Board of Posts for the conduct of this service, they were not strictly observed, and a postmaster often traded for himself as well, keeping horses for hire and being an innkeeper as well.
At any rate, the Brewsters were considerable people; and William the elder could afford to send his son to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and later had sufficient influence to secure him service with one of Queen Elizabeth’s Secretaries of State in Holland. But the Secretary fell into disgrace, and young William’s diplomatic career ended at an early age.
He returned home to Scrooby, where he found employment with his father, and eventually succeeded him, in 1594, holding the position of postmaster for seventeen years.
Let us see, from one surviving record, what kind of business was his, and how prosperous he must have been apart from his official emoluments. One of his guests, as virtually an innkeeper, was Sir Timothy Hutton, in 1605. Sir Timothy paid him, for guide and conveyance to Tuxford, 10s., and for candle, supper and breakfast 7s. 6d. On his return journey he paid 8s. for horses to Doncaster, and a threepenny tip to the ostler.
Meanwhile, Brewster, nourished in that old nest of Archbishops, had imbibed distinctly anti-episcopal ideas, probably in Holland. His activities in founding the Separatist Church led to his resignation of the postmaster’s office in 1607. In that old Manor House where he lived assembled others of his ways of thought: the Revd. Mr. Clifton, rector of Babworth, near Retford, William Bradford of Austerfield, John Smyth, and other shining lights and painful and austere persons. William Bradford records how the congregation “met ordinarily at William Brewster’s house on the Lord’s Day; and with great love he entertained them when they came, making provision for them, to his great charge.”
They would not attend services at the parish church; an offence then punishable by fine and imprisonment, and thus, persecuted, there was no ultimate course but to leave the country: itself not for some time permitted. “They were,” wrote William Bradford, “hunted and persecuted on every side. Some were taken and clapt up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched, night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to fly and leave their houses and habitations and the means of their livelihood.”
The Manor Farm, where these early developments of the Puritan movement took place, and where the Brewsters lived, remains in part, and bears an explanatory bronze tablet placed there by the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth, Massachusetts. And there, too, near the road, stands Scrooby church, rather dilapidated, with its stone spire, much the same as ever.
Yorkshire, upon which we have now entered, is the largest shire or county in England. In one way it seems almost incredibly large, for it has more acres than there are letters (not words) in the Bible. There are 3,882,851 acres in Yorkshire, and 3,566,482 letters in the Bible. Yorkshire does not reveal its full beauty to the traveller along this road. Its abbeys and waterfalls, its river-gorges and romantic valleys, belong rather to the by-ways. Picturesqueness and romance spelt discomfort, and the uneventful road was the one the travellers of old preferred. Thus it is that those who pursue this route to the North, and know nothing else of Yorkshire, might deny this huge county, more than twice the size of Lincolnshire, the next largest, that variety and beauty which, in fact, we know it to possess. For eighty miles the Great North Road goes through Yorkshire with scarce a hill worthy the name, although towards the north the Hambleton Hills, away to the east, give the views from the road a sullen grandeur.
But if the highway and the scenery bordering it are characterless, this is a region of strongly marked character, so far as its inhabitants are concerned. Many wits have been to work on the Yorkshireman’s peculiarities. While they all agree to disregard his hospitality and his frank heartiness, they unite to satirise his shrewdness, and his clannish ways. The old Yorkshire toast is famous:—
“Here’s tiv us, all on us, me an’ all.
May we niver want nowt, noan on us,
Nor me nawther.”
And this other:—
“Our Native County: t’biggest,
t’bonniest, and t’best.”
The character of John Browdie is a very accurate exemplar of the Yorkshire yeoman, and you could not wish to meet a better fellow, but you would rather not have any dealings with the Yorkshireman of popular imagination, whose native wit goes beyond shrewdness and does not halt on the hither side of sharp practice. The Yorkshireman’s armorial bearings are wickedly said to be a flea, a fly, and a flitch of bacon; because a flea will suck any one’s blood, like a Yorkshireman; a fly will drink out of any one’s cup, and so will a Yorkshireman; and a flitch of bacon is no good until it is hung, and no more is a Yorkshireman! No native of the county can be expected to subscribe to this, but no one ever heard of a Yorkshireman objecting to be called a “tyke.”
A “Yorkshire tyke” is a familiar phrase. By it we understand a native of this immense shire to be named. No one knows whence this nickname arose, or whether it is complimentary or the reverse. To be sure, we call a dog a “tyke,” and to describe any one as a dog is not complimentary, unless qualifications are made. Thus, the man who is insulted by being called a dog rather takes it as a compliment to be dubbed a “sad dog” or a “sly dog,” and, like Bob Acres, lets you know, with a twinkle of the eye, that on occasion he can be a “devil of a fellow.”
By common consent, whatever its origin may have been, “tyke,” applied to a Yorkshireman, is taken in the complimentary sense. Indeed, the Yorkshireman’s good conceit of himself does not allow him to think that any other sense could possibly be intended. He generally prides himself, like Major Bagstock, on being “sly, devilish sly.” That he is so, too, those who have tried to overreach him, either in his native wilds or elsewhere, have generally discovered. “He’s a deep ’un,” says a character in one of Charles Reade’s novels, “but we are Yorkshire too, as the saying is.” When tyke meets tyke, then, if ever, comes the tug of war. “That’s Yorkshire,” is a saying which implies much, as in the story of the ostler from the county who had long been in service at a London inn. “How is it,” asked a guest, “that such a clever fellow as you, and a Yorkshireman, remains so long without becoming master of the house?” “Measter’s Yorkshire too,” answered the servant.
It is a sporting—more especially a horsey—county. “Shake a bridle over a Yorkshireman’s grave, and he will rise and steal a horse,” is a proverb which bears a sort of testimony to the fact.