XV

Bramham Moor leads down into Bramham village, past the Park, where a ruined manor-house, destroyed by fire, stands amid formal gardens and looks tragical. The place wears the aspect of romance, and seems an ideal home for the ideal Wicked Squire of Early Victorian novels. Lord Bingley, who built it and laid out the grounds in the time of Queen Anne, was not more wicked than the generality of his contemporaries, but here are all the “properties” with which those novelists surrounded the cynical deceivers of innocence, who stalked in inky cloaks, curly hats, and tasselled riding-boots through their gory pages. Here is Lord Bingley’s Walk, an avenue of gigantic beeches where he did not meet the trustful village maiden, as he ought to have done, by all the rules; here also is the obelisk at the suggestively named Blackfen, whence twelve avenues diverge—where no tattered witch ever cursed him, so far as can be ascertained. Lord Bingley evidently did not live up to the possibilities of the place, or of his station, nor did those who came after him, for no horrid legend is narrated with bated breath in Bramham village, which lies huddled together in the hollow below the park, the world forgetting, and by the world forgot, ever since that leap year, 1408, when on the 29th of February the Earl of Northumberland, rebelling against Henry the Fourth, was defeated and slain by Sir Thomas Rokeby at the battle of Bramham Moor.

Rising steeply out of Bramham and coming to the crest at Moor End, where the road descends long and continuously to Wetherby and the river Wharfe, we come to what used to be regarded as the half-way town between London and Edinburgh. The exact spot, where a milestone told the same tale on either face, is, in fact, one mile north, where the “Old Fox” inn stands. This was, of course, the most noted landmark on the long road, and the drovers who journeyed past it never failed to look in at the “Old Fox” and “wet their whistles,” to celebrate the completion of half their task. At Wetherby itself the “Angel” arrogated the title of “half-way house,” and was the principal coaching inn. It still stands, like its rival, the “Swan and Talbot,” smaller than of yore, the larger portion of its stables now converted into cottages. At the “Angel” the down London and Glasgow mail dined, with an hour to spare; the up coach hurrying through to its change at Aberford. Wetherby was a change for the stage-coaches, which ran the whole seventeen miles to Ferrybridge with the same teams; a cruelly long and arduous stretch for the horses.

This is a hard-featured, stony town; still, as of old, chiefly concerned with cattle-raising and cattle-dealing, and crowded on market-days with farmers and drovers driving bargains or swearing at the terrified efforts of beasts and sheep to find their way into the shops and inns. Down on the southern side of the town runs the romantic Wharfe, between rocky banks, hurrying in swirling eddies towards its confluence with the Ouse, below Tadcaster; and on to the north goes the road, through the main street, on past the conspicuous spire of Kirk Deighton church, coming in three miles to Walshford, where a bridge crosses the rocky, tree-embowered Nidd, and that old posting-house, the comfortable-looking “Walshford Bridge Inn,” stands slightly back from the road, looking like a private mansion gone diffidently into business.

Beyond Walshford Bridge the road turns suddenly to the left, and, crossing the railway at lonely Allerton station, passes a substantial red-brick farmhouse which looks as if it has seen very different days. And indeed it has, for this was once the “New Inn,” a changing-place for the mails. Now on the right comes the long wall of Allerton Park, and presently there rises ahead that strange mound known by the equally strange name of Nineveh, a tree-crowned hill, partly artificial, girdled with prehistoric earthworks, and honeycombed with the graves of the forgotten tribes, to whom it was probably at once a castle, a temple, and a cemetery. The road onward to Boroughbridge is, indeed, carried over a Roman way, which itself probably superseded the tracks of those vanished people, and led to what is now the village of Aldborough near Boroughbridge, once that great Roman city of Isurium which rivalled York itself, and now yields inexhaustible building-stones for modern cottages, and relics that bring the life of those ancients in very close touch with that of our own time: oyster-shells and oyster knives, pomatum-pots, pins, and the hundred little articles in daily use now and fifteen hundred years ago.

Boroughbridge was originally the settlement founded by the Saxons near the ruined and deserted city of Isurium. Afraid of the bogies and evil spirits with which their dark superstitions peopled the ruins, they dared not live there, but built their abiding-place by the river Ure, where the mediæval, but now modernised, village of Boroughbridge stood, and where the bridge built by Metcalf, the blind road- and bridge-maker, over a century ago spans the weedy stream in useful but highly unornamental manner. The battle of Boroughbridge, fought in 1322, is almost forgotten, and coaching times have left their impress upon the town instead. The two chief coaching inns, the “Crown” and the “Greyhounds,” still face one another in the dull street; the “Greyhounds” a mere ghost of its former self, the “Crown” larger, but its stables, where a hundred horses found a shelter, now echoing in their emptiness to the occasional footfall. Oddly enough a medical practitioner, a Dr. Hugh Stott, was landlord of the “Crown” for more than fifty years. Probably he and the landlord of the “Angel” at Ferrybridge were the only two inn-keeping doctors in the kingdom. The “Crown” was anciently the home of the Tancreds, a county family owning property in the neighbourhood: the “Greyhounds” obtains its curious plural from the heraldic shield of the Mauleverers, which displays three greyhounds, “courant.” Hotel accommodation was greatly in request at Boroughbridge in the old days; for from this point branched many roads. Here the Glasgow coaches turned off, and a number of coaches for Knaresborough, Ripon, Harrogate, and the many towns of south-west Yorkshire. The “Edinburgh Express,” which went by way of Glasgow, also passed through. Boroughbridge was a busy coaching town, so that ruin, stark, staring, and complete fell upon it when railways came.

The remaining nineteen miles to Northallerton scarce call for detailed description. Kirkby Hill, a mile out of Boroughbridge, lies to the left, its church-tower just within sight. This is followed by the unutterably dull, lifeless, and ugly village of Dishforth, leading to the hamlet of Asenby, where the road descends to the picturesque crossing of the Swale and the Cod Beck, with the village of Topcliffe crowning the ridge on the other side: a village better looking, but as lifeless as the others. Thence flat or gently undulating roads conduct in twelve miles to Northallerton, past Busby Stoop Inn, the villages of Sand Hutton, Newsham, and North and South Otterington.

South Otterington lives with a black mark in the memory of antiquaries as that benighted place where the parishioners thought so little of their church registers some years ago that they allowed the parish clerk to treat all the old ones, dating from before the eighteenth century, as so much waste-paper; some of them making an excellent bonfire to singe a goose with. They were not singular in this respect, for churchwardens of different places have been known to do the most extraordinary things with these valuable documents. Thoresby, the antiquary, writing of a particular register, remarks that “it has not been a plaything for young pointers. It has not occupied a bacon-cratch or a bread-and-cheese cupboard. It has not been scribbled on, within and without,” from which we infer that that was the common fate, and that others had been so treated.

The junction of the two main routes of the Great North Road at Northallerton takes place ignominiously outside the goods station at a level-crossing.

XVI

The alternative route now described and Northallerton regained by it, we may resume the long journey to Edinburgh. It is the completest kind of change from the wild ups and downs of the Boroughbridge and Wetherby route to the long featureless stretches that now lie before us. We will not linger in the town, but press onward to where the battle of the Standard, as the battle of Northallerton is often known, was fought, on the right-hand side of the road, near the still unenclosed fragments of Cowton Moor. It was not a great struggle, for the Scots fled after a short resistance, and the great numbers of their slain met their fate rather at the hands of the peasantry, while fleeing through a hostile country, than in combat with the English army.

Standing amid the heathy tussocks of Standard Hill, looking over the Moor, the wide-spreading hill and dale of the Yorkshire landscape fades into a blue or misty distance, and must in its solitude look much the same as it did in those far distant days. Nothing save the name of the hillock and that of the farm called Scot Pits, traditionally said to have been the place where the Scottish dead were buried, remains to tell of the struggle. “Baggamoor,” as old chroniclers call the battle-field, from the baggage thrown away by the Scots in their flight, is traversed by the road, which proceeds by way of Oak Tree and Lovesome Hills to Great Smeaton, where the mails changed horses on the short seven miles’ stage between it and Northallerton, or the nine miles to Darlington. The “Blacksmith’s Arms” was in those times the coaching inn here, but it has long since been converted into cottages. William Tweedie, the last of a succession of three Tweedies who kept the “Blacksmith’s Arms” and owed their prosperity to the mails changing at their house, was also the village postmaster. A God-fearing man and an absent-minded, it is recorded of him that during a sermon at the parish church he was surprised in the midst of one of his mental absences by hearing the preacher enlarge upon the text of “Render unto Cæsar.” “Ay,” he said, in a loud voice, when the duty of paying the king’s taxes and just demands was brought home to the congregation, “that puts me in mind o’t: there’s old Granny Metcalf’s bin owin’ the matter o’ eightpence on a letter these two months past.”

Now Widow Metcalf had paid that eightpence. She was in church, too. The suddenness of the unjust accusation made her forget time and place, and she retorted with, “William Tweedie, y’re a liar!”

One has a distinct suspicion that by “Lowsey Hill, a small Village contiguous on the Left” (but a place so-named would more properly have been “contagious”) mentioned here by Ogilby, he must have meant what is now Lovesome Hill.

The old coach passengers, driving through, or changing at, Great Smeaton must have often wondered, seeing the smallness of the place, what size the neighbouring Little Smeaton, away off to the left, could have been. Their inquiries on that head were usually answered by the coachmen, who were wags of sorts, that Little Smeaton consisted of one dog-kennel and two hen-coops. It is a lonely road between Northallerton and Darlington, and quips of this kind probably tasted better when administered on the spot than they do to the armchair traveller. Particularly lonely is High Entercommon, where a turnpike-gate stood in the days that are done, together with an inn, the “Golden Lion,” where a few coaches which made a longer stage from Northallerton changed. Were it not that William Thompson, landlord at the best period in the history of coaching, was a highly reputable person, and had been coachman to Sir Bellingham Graham before he set up as innkeeper, we might point to the house and say how suitable a locality for the secret roadside crimes of old, of which novelists delight to tell! Roads, and travelling before railways, used to set the romancists busily engaged in spinning the most blood-curdling stories of villainous innkeepers who, like Bob Acres, kept “churchyards of their own,” and murderous trap-doors in their guest-rooms giving upon Golgothas filled with the bones of their many victims. If one might credit these astounding stories, the inns that were not murder-shops were few and far between; but happily those writers, anxious only to make your blood creep, were as a rule only exercising their particularly gory imaginations.

A story of this order is that of a lady who set out in her carriage to visit some friends in Yorkshire. She had come to within thirty miles of her destination, when a thunderstorm which had been threatening broke violently overhead. Struggling against the elements, the coachman was glad to espy an old-fashioned roadside inn presently visible ahead, and, his mistress expressing a wish to alight and rest until the storm should abate, he drove up to the door. It was a wild and solitary spot (they always are in these stories, and it is astonishing how solitary and wild they are, and how many such places appeared to exist). The rusty sign creaked dismally overhead, and the window-shutters flapped violently in the wind on their broken hinges; altogether it was not an inviting spot. But any port in a storm, and so the lady alighted. She was shown into a large old-fashioned apartment, and the horses and carriage were stabled until such time as it might be possible to resume the journey. But, instead of passing off, the storm grew momentarily worse. Calling her servant she asked him if it were possible to continue that night, and on his replying in the negative, reluctantly resigned herself to staying under a strange roof. She had her dinner in solitary state, and then found all the evening before her, with nothing to occupy the time. She went to the window and looked out upon the howling storm, and, tired of that uninviting prospect, gazed listlessly about the room. It was a large room, ill-furnished, and somewhat out of repair, for the inn had seen its best days. Evidences of a more prosperous time were left in the shape of some scattered articles of furniture of a superior kind and in the presence of a curious piece of ancient tapestry facing her on the opposite wall, bearing a design of a life-sized Roman warrior wielding a truncheon.

But one cannot spend all the evening in contemplating the old chairs and moth-eaten tapestry of a half-furnished room, and the storm-bound traveller soon wearied of those objects. With nothing else to do, she took out her purse and began to count her money and to calculate her travelling expenses. Having counted the guineas over several times and vainly tried to make the total balance properly with her expenditure and the amount she had set out with, she chanced involuntarily to glance across the room. Her gaze fell upon the stern visage of the helmeted Roman, and to her horror the lack-lustre tapestry eyes were now replaced by living ones, intently regarding her and her money. Ninety-nine of every hundred women would have screamed or fainted, or have done both; but our traveller was evidently the hundredth. She calmly allowed her gaze to wander absent-mindedly away to the ceiling, as if still speculating as to the disposition of the missing odd guineas; and then, exclaiming, “Ah! I have it,” made for the door, to call her servant, leaving her purse, apparently disregarded, on the table. In the passage outside she met the landlord, who desired to know what it might be she wanted. “To see my man, with orders for the morning,” said she. The landlord shuffled away, and her servant presently appeared. She told him what she had observed, and mounting upon the furniture, he examined the tapestry, with the result that he found the wall behind it sound enough in all places, with the exception of the eyes. On pressing the fabric at those points it gave way, disclosing a hole bored through the wall and communicating with some other room. This discovery of course aroused the worst suspicions; but the storm still raged, it was now late, and to countermand the accommodation already secured for the night would be to apprise the landlord of something having been discovered. There was nothing for it but to stay the night. To sleep was impossible, and so the lady, retiring to her bedroom, securely bolting the door, and assuring herself that no secret panel or trap-door existed, sat wakefully in a chair all night. Doubtless the servant did the same, although the story does not condescend to details where he is concerned. At length morning came, without anything happening, and, equally without incident, they set out after breakfast from this place of dread, the lady having previously ascertained that the room on the other side of the wall behind the tapestry was the landlord’s private apartment.

These adventures being afterwards recounted, it was called to mind that an undue proportion of highway robberies had for some time past been occurring in the immediate neighbourhood of the inn, and a queer story was remembered of a traveller who had stayed there overnight being robbed soon after leaving by a highwayman, who, without any preliminary parley, desired him to instantly take off his right boot—the boot in which, as a matter of fact, he had stowed away his money. The highwayman, who evidently had been informed of this secret hiding-place, extracted the coin, and, returning the boot, went on his way. It afterwards appeared that the traveller had stowed his money in his boot while under the impression that he was alone in the tapestry-room. He had reckoned without the Centurion.

The inn of course fell into evil repute, and the landlord was soon afterwards compelled to give up business. But the provoking part of it all, from the point of view of the historian, is that the story does not descend to topographical particulars, and that the description of the place as being in Yorkshire is necessarily of the vaguest, considering the vastness of the shire.

XVII

Dalton-upon-Tees, three miles onward from High and Low Entercommon, shows little to the passer-by on the Great North Road, who, a mile beyond its scattered cottages, looking as though they had lost themselves, comes to Croft, to the river Tees, and to the end of Yorkshire. It behoves one to speak respectfully of Croft and its Spa, for its waters are as nasty as those of Harrogate, with that flavour of rotten eggs so highly approved by the medical profession, and only the vagaries of fashion can be held accountable for the comparative neglect of the one and the favouring of the other. Sulphur renders both equally nauseous and healthful, but Croft finds few votaries compared with its great and successful rival, and a gentle melancholy marks the spot, where, on the Yorkshire bank, the mouldy-looking Croft Spa Hotel fronts the road, its closed assembly rooms, where once the merry crowds foregathered, given over to damp and mildew.

Croft is in the Hurworth Hunt, and it is claimed by local folk that the Hurworth Country was indicated by “Handley Cross,” where Jorrocks and his cronies chased the fox and enjoyed themselves so vigorously. The Spa Hotel was then a place of extremely high jinks. Every night there would be a dinner-party, with much competition as to who could drink the most port or champagne. The test of the sturdiest fellow was to see who could manage to place on his head a champagne or port bottle and lie down and stand up with it still in place. Few reputations, or bottles, survived that ordeal.

But Croft is a pretty place, straggling on both the Yorkshire and Durham banks of the Tees; with a fine old church commanding the approach from the south. It is worth seeing, alike for its architecture; for a huge and preposterous monument of one of the Milbankes of Halnaby; and especially for the extravagantly-arrogant manorial pew of that family, erected in the chancel, and elevated in the likeness of two canopied thrones approached by an elaborate staircase and over a crimson carpet. This pompous structure dates from about 1760. The thing would not be credible, did not we know to what extent the pride and presumption of the old squirearchy sometimes went.

A sturdy old Gothic bridge here carries the road across the stream into the ancient Palatinate of Durham. It were here that each successive Prince-Bishop of that see was met and presented with the falchion that slew the Sockburn Worm, one of the three mythical monsters that are said to have infested Durham and Northumberland. Like the Lambton Worm, and the Laidly—that is to say, the Loathly—Worm of Spindleston Heugh, the Sockburn terror, according to mediæval chroniclers, was a “monstrous and poysonous vermine or wyverne, aske or werme which overthrew and devoured many people in fight, for yt ye sent of ye poyson was so strong yt noe p’son might abyde it.” The gallant knight who at some undetermined period slew this legendary pest was Sir John Conyers, descended from Roger de Conyers, Constable of Durham Castle in the time of William the Conqueror. The family held the manor of Sockburn by the curious tenure of presenting the newly appointed Bishop Palatine of Durham on his first entry into his diocese with the falchion that slew the Worm. The presentation was made on Croft Bridge, with the words:—“My Lord Bishop, I here present you with the falchion wherewith the champion Conyers slew the worm, dragon, or fiery flying serpent which destroyed man, woman and child; in memory of which the king then reigning gave him the manor of Sockburn, to hold by this tenure, that upon the first entrance of every bishop into the county the falchion should be presented.” Taking the falchion into his hand, the bishop immediately returned it, wishing the owner of Sockburn health, long life, and prosperity, and the ceremony was concluded. Sockburn, seven miles below Croft, on the Durham shore of the Tees, is no longer owned by that old heroic family, for the proud stock which in its time had mated with the noblest in England decayed, and the last Conyers, Sir Thomas, died a pauper in Chester-le-Street workhouse in 1810. The manor-house of Sockburn has long since been swept away, and the old church is a roofless ruin, the estate itself having long since passed to the Blackett family, in whose possession the wondrous falchion now remains. The bishops of Durham, no longer temporal princes, do not now receive it, the last presentation having been made to Bishop Van Mildert by the steward of Sir Edward Blackett in 1826.

Here we are in Durham, and three miles from Darlington. Looking backwards on crossing the bridge, the few scattered houses of the hither shore are seen beside the way; one of them, the “Cornet” hotel, with a weather-beaten picture-sign of the famous pedigree bull of that name, and the inscription, “‘Comet,’ sold in 1810 for one thousand guineas.” The Tees goes on its rippling way through the pointed arches of the historic bridge, with broad shingly beaches over against the rich meadows, the road pursuing its course to cross that rival stream, the Skerne, at Oxneyfield Bridge, a quarter of a mile ahead. Close by, in a grass meadow to the right of the road, are the four pools called by the terrific name of “Hell’s Kettles,” which testify by the sulphureous taste of their water to the quality of Croft Spa. Of course, they have their wonderful legends; Ogilby in 1676 noted that. “At Oxenhall,” he says, “are three Pits call’d Hell-kettles, whereof the vulgar tell you many fabulous stories.” They have long been current, then; the first telling how on Christmas Day 1179 the ground rose to the height of the highest hills, “higher than the spires and towers of the churches, and so remained at that height from nine of the morning until sunset. At the setting of the sun the earth fell in with so horrid a crash that all who saw that strange mound and heard its fall were so amazed that for very fear many died, for the earth swallowed up that mound, and where it stood was a deep pool.” This circumstantial story was told by an abbot of Jervaulx, but is not sufficiently marvellous for the peasantry, who account for the pool by a tale of supernatural intervention. According to this precious legend, the farmer owning the field being about to carry his hay on June 11, St. Barnabas’ Day, it was pointed out that he had much better attend to his religious duties than work on the anniversary of the blessed saint, whereupon he replied:—

Barnaby yea, Barnaby nay,
I’ll hae my hay, whether God will or nay:

and, the ground opening, he and his carts and horses were instantly swallowed up. The tale goes on to say that, given a fine day and clear water, the impious farmer and his carts and horses may yet be seen floating deep down in these supposedly fathomless pools! De Foe, however, travelling this way in 1724, is properly impatient of these tales. “’Tis evident,” says he, “they are nothing but old coal-pits, filled with water by the river Tees.”