XXXIII
Yorkshire and Yorkshiremen, their virtues and vices, bring us to Bawtry, where the High Sheriff and those in authority used to welcome kingly and queenly visitors to Yorkshire, or escort them over the border, on leaving; performing the latter office with the better heart, there can be little doubt, for royal progresses often left a trail of blood and ruin behind them in those “good” old times. Happy Bawtry! for little or no history attaches to the little town, and it lives in the memory only as the home of that saddler who, although famous as a proverb, has come down to us a nameless martyr to the Temperance Cause.
“The saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving his ale,” runs the Yorkshire saying; one eminently characteristic of this county of stingo and plurality of acres. The history of this particular saddler, or the crime for which he was condemned, are unknown either here or at York, but his end is a terrible warning to all Blue Ribbonites. It was in this wise that the artificer in pigskin lost his life. Led forth to the fatal tree, the procession halted on the way to present the condemned with the customary parting bowl of ale, an institution on the way to the gallows both in York and London. But the saddler would take none of their farewell courtesies, and refused the drink; whereupon the enraged mob strung him up, double quick. A few minutes later a reprieve arrived, and they cut him down; but he was already dead, a melancholy warning to all future generations of non-convivial souls.
Coaching days made Bawtry a busy townlet, for although the coaches and the postmasters generally made a long stage of fourteen miles between Doncaster and Barnby Moor, or else a nine and a half mile stage between Doncaster and Scrooby Top, the by-roads gave a good proportion of business to the “Angel” and the “Crown.” The “Crown” is still a prominent feature of Bawtry’s now empty street, a street whose width is a revelation of the space once considered necessary and now altogether superfluous; just as the long pillared range of stableyards beyond the old coach archway of the inn itself has now become.
Bawtry to-day is a great emptiness. Four-square red-brick houses of a certain modishness, being indeed built on the model of town houses, look across the void roadway, with a kind of patronising air, upon the peaked, timbered, or lath-and-plaster gabled cottages that border the opposite side of the street. Much older they are, those old cottages, and more akin to the country. They were built long centuries before the coaching age came, bringing a greater prosperity and consequent expansion to Bawtry, and for a time they were quite put out of countenance by the new-fangled brick houses, with their classic porticoes and brass knockers and impudent red faces. But a period of eighty or ninety years, at the most, saw the beginning and the end of this expansion, and this once fashionable air has altered to an aspect of old-world dignity. Both the gabled cottages and these Georgian houses would feel greatly degraded if confronted with examples of the way in which the small country builder runs up his tasteless structures nowadays, but happily Bawtry has nothing of this type to show, and the white stuccoed elevation of the “Crown” alone hints at a later phase in building fashion, typifying the dawn of the nineteenth century and the course of taste in its earlier years. This white-painted frontage marks the close of Bawtry’s busy days. Soon afterwards the place ceased to live a pulsing everyday life of business and activity, and began to merely exist. There are shops here—old bow-windowed, many-paned shops—which have long seen their best days go by. They came into existence under the influence of the beatific Law of Demand and Supply, when all the inns were full of travellers who wanted the thousand and one necessities of civilisation. They did a brave trade in those times, and continued it until the railway snuffed it out in 1842. Since then no one has come to buy, and their stock must contain many curiosities. Probably the stationer has still some of that goffered and perfumed pink notepaper on which the young ladies of sensibility wrote their love-letters in the long-ago, together with a goodly supply of the wafers with which they were sealed; and, doubtless, those who seek could find flint and steel and tinder-boxes elsewhere. Bawtry, in fine, is a monument to the Has Been.
Austerfield, where William Bradford was born in 1580, is a grim and unlovely village to the left of Bawtry. Here yet stands his birthplace, in its time a manor-house, but now occupied as two cottage-dwellings, it is not a romantic-looking relic to be the place of origin of one who became the first Governor of the Pilgrim colony in New England.
There was once a pond beside the road near Bawtry (where is it now, alas!) to which a history belonged, for into it used to drive the villainous postboys of lang syne, who were in the pay of the highwaymen. They would, as though by accident, whip suddenly into it, and when the occupants of the chaise let down the windows and looked out, to see what was the matter, they were confronted with the grinning muzzle of a pistol, and the dread alternative demand for their money or their lives.
Past this dread spot, and over the rise and dip in the road on leaving the town, the galloping stage is reached, a dead level by the palings of Rossington Park and on to Rossington Bridge, where the tollgate was, and now is not. The inn too, has, like many another, taken down its sign, and retired into private occupation. Off to the left is Rossington village, and in the churchyard, the grave, for those who like to turn aside to see it, of Charles Bosvile, “King of the Gipsies.” Here we are four miles and a half from Doncaster, or, as a Yorkshireman would say, four miles “and a way-bit.”
Ask a Yorkshireman how far it is to any place along the road, and he will most likely answer you, so many miles “and a way-bit.” This is probably his pronunciation of “wee bit.” It is often said that the “way-bit” is generally as long as the rest put together. This expression compares with the Scottish so many miles “and a bittock.”