Down a Yorkshire River.
PART I.
HAD any one been able to sail down the River Calder, say a hundred years ago, long before the present little manufacturing towns had arisen on its banks, he would have passed through some of the most lovely scenery and through one of the loveliest mountain valleys in the county of York. Even to-day, when ugly mills and numberless prosaic tenements of trade disfigure, from an artistic point of view, the once grassy glades and the once gloriously wooded slopes, the prospect in many spots retains much of its virginal sweetness and romantic beauty. There are yet long tracts which commerce has not irremediably mutilated—pleasant meadowlands as fair with wilding flowers as of old; sylvan haunts of birch and elm whose dusky quietude is well-nigh as unbroken and solemn as of yore; bonnie tributary brooklets flashing and hurrying, like silver-footed naiads, through clough and dell and dene. As the eye takes a loftier and farther sweep the rugged contour and massive forms of forest-clad and moorland-capped mountains may be seen to wear much the same aspect they wore in the primal historic days of Roman and Celt. The conquests of commerce over both material and mental difficulties are apparent almost everywhere on the lowlands, for which all sensible and right-thinking minds are grateful, plain and anti-poetical as the outward signs may be in the jumble of viaduct and railway station, of factory and shop. But the old world of chivalry and romance is not altogether pushed aside: there are the ruins of stately and curiously carved gateways whence issued squire and yeoman to join the Pilgrimage of Grace, or later, gallant cavaliers, eager to mingle in the fray on the far-away field of Marston Moor; there are a few old Elizabethan halls with mullioned window and grey stone porch, in whose cool recesses the inmates waited anxiously and breathlessly for tidings about the great Armada; and here and there, built by pious hands that have been still for centuries, there are relics of quiet, quaint chapelle, where repose the ashes of Crusader knight, and of knights who fought so fiercely in the bloody wars of the Red and White Rose; and now and then we come across a grand antique church, crowded by worshippers where the ritual and the language of the worship have undergone many changes, and around whose hallowed precincts have gathered historic traditions and saintly legends, hoarier and older than the lichens that crust the mouldering towers. The tall chimneys are rising in the busy centres of trade, but occasionally we shelter under an oak or a yew-tree whose youth was fanned by less smutty winds; railway whistles have scared the nightingale, but the lark still carols anear human dwellings; graylings no longer leap the river-weir, but the waters sing and gleam as they glide seaward down the hushed moonlit glens.
The Calder, one of the most picturesque of northern rivers, rises near Cliviger Dene, in Lancashire, and enters the county of York through a wild gorge at Todmorden. As to the origin of the word there have been many conjectures, some plausible, but none to my mind satisfactory. An able writer in a provincial publication gives the derivation from two Celtic words, coll, the hazel-tree, and dur, water. The fatal objection to this is that hazel-trees never grew in such abundance in this valley as to be a distinguishing feature. Place-names with the Celtic coll and the Saxon hæsel are very rarely found. Had copses or shaws of the hazel flourished to such an extent as to give a name to the river, their former existence would still be traceable in the abiding nomenclature of the country through which the Calder runs its course. The Rev. Thomas Wright, who published a work on the antiquities of the parish of Halifax, where he was curate for more than seventeen years, noticing the Calder states that the spring is called Cal or Col, and is joined by the River Dar. This is a purely fanciful supposition, and, I believe, not borne out by facts. Dr. Whitaker urges a Danish derivation. The Danes unquestionably won and maintained a lasting hold on the hills overlooking the Calder. As soon as this mountain-born stream assumes the dignity and proportions of a river at Todmorden, it washes on the one hand Langfield, the Long Range of hills, and on the other Stansfield, the Stony Range, whilst a few miles lower down it flows at the foot of Norland, the North-land—all Danish, or more correctly Scandinavian, terms. Then, on the slopes rising from the south banks, we have Sowerby and Fixby, two ancient “by’s,” where families of predatory Danes took up their abode. Other nomenclature traces of the same nation, of the great Canute himself possibly, might be mentioned in favour of the argument on this side of the question; though (I write from memory) I believe Dr. Whitaker does not point out the surrounding Danish indications I have here advanced. Another historian surmised that the original Celtic name was Dur, and that the Saxons on settling in this neighbourhood added the adjective ceald or cold. But this is very improbable, the river in question being no cooler than any other.
I venture to urge a derivation different from any of the above, viz., from the Celtic caoill (wood) and dur (water). That Celts, the Brigantian clan, lived in this locality is an historic fact, the proofs of which need not be here adduced. The Calder beck as soon as it issues from the spring in Cliviger Dene flows by a long stretching sweep of woodland, and farther on among the hills of Yorkshire, a broader and a nobler stream, pursues its course for miles through dense primeval forests, among which may be mentioned the once famous forest of Hardwick. Its precipitous banks were clothed with no mere hazel coppice, but with vast masses of the more majestic oak and ash and birch, woodland in its wilder and more imposing form. Even to-day, though most of the primeval forest has been cut down, and manufacturing villages have sprung up on the ancient sylvan sites, the tourist starting above Todmorden would not, in a walk of thirty miles by the river side, be able to lose sight of the picturesque and far-stretching belts of woodland scenery. It is yet emphatically the Caoill-dur, the water winding through the woods. Of course, in this case the Saxons took up the word as they found it in use among the conquered Celts. Then, to strengthen this conjecture, the very first tributary brook on the north—of size and importance, at least, to give a name to the valley—joining the parent stream is the Colden or Caldene, which probably is the Caoill-dene, the woodland valley. The reader will judge how accurately the word describes this lonely mountain glen when he is told that at a distance the eye can scarcely catch a flash of the waters of this stream as they hurry down this wild sylvan region, so thickly is it overshadowed by a forest of ash and birch. A topographical word derived from two languages is rare in this part, and when we come across one it is generally a Saxon grafted on the more primitive Celtic name of mountain or river. Colden or Caldene is probably an instance to the point.
That caoill was contracted to, or commonly pronounced, cal may be pretty safely supposed, when we know that in the Latinised form or transformation it became cal, as in Caledonii, that is, Caoill-daoin, the people inhabiting the woods. The reader will perceive that caoill is closely akin to the Greek κᾶλον, also signifying a wood.
The Calder, which is a very sinuous stream, runs a most irregular but charmingly diversified course as it winds under scout and scar, now gliding smoothly past belts of woodland or by long stretches of fair pastoral field, or again in narrower channel foaming more rapidly through wild ravine or over rocky weir, only again to slip into more tranquil waters, pleasantly gladdening as with quiet familiarity village and thorpe. Leaving Todmorden the tourist passes on the right the precipitous woods of Erringden, the dene or valley of the Irringas, where of yore probably dwelt a branch of the family of the Aruns; and on the other hand, towering far away on the heights to the north may be seen the bleak, solitary, altar-like mass of rock known as Llads-Law, conjectured by some to be a Druidical ruin. The Celt lived here beyond all doubt, though but few are the traces he has left behind in cromlech or cairn, in speech or blood. The Roman, we know, cut his way through the primeval forests, and on these very mountains laid down his military roads, the long lines of which we can map out, and oft-times does the plough turn up fragments of rusted sword and broken spear which tell how the pierced hand had to drop them for ever. On and near these roads, after the iron legions had ceased to tramp them, sprung up many a Saxon “ton” or town and Danish “by.” There, on the one hand, upon the heights still difficult to scale except to born mountaineers, is perched Saxon Heptonstall, with its grand old tower of Saint Thomas à Becket and antique homesteads clustering around; and yonder, on the far opposite slope to the south-east, is Danish Sowerby, taking us back in thought to the times when the Vikings settled down and fortified their “by” in the forest fastnesses of the hill. Here, too, to this Sowerby came later the Earl of Warren and built himself a castle, and took to his own possession vast tracts of mountain slope and wooded glen, which long retained the name of the Forest of Hardwick, and therein he hunted in right baronial style the boar and the wild deer. Sowerby with its Danish and Norman memories has a not uninteresting story in later ages, and is not a little proud in having given birth to John Tillotson, one of England’s most illustrious primates. Haugh-End, the quaint old house where he was born, is on the southern slope of the hill, and many the pilgrims who turn aside to have a look at the grey old roof sheltered behind the trees and the ivied high wall. Not a bow-shot from the riverside, and nearly opposite Sowerby, is Eawood Hall, the birthplace of Bishop Ferrar, the martyr. Eawood, snugly and picturesquely nestled under the greenwood scars of Midgley, has a conspicuous place in the ecclesiastical history of the county. Here John Wesley preached on several occasions, on one of which he remarked, “I preached to near an hour after sunset. The calmness of the evening agreed well with the seriousness of the people; every one of whom seemed to drink in the Word of God as a thirsty land the refreshing showers.” William Grimshaw, curate of Todmorden and afterwards incumbent of Haworth, a not unworthy coadjutor of Whitefield and the Wesleys, married his first wife from this place, and often preached and stayed here on his home-missionary tours. Not more than a couple of miles away is the birthplace of John Foster, whose Essays at one time had a considerable reputation. Close to Eawood there is many a neighbouring hall of more than local interest, one especially, Brearley Hall, beautifully embosomed in the trees on a gentle eminence on the north side of the river, and formerly the seat of a younger branch of the Lacy family. About half an hour’s walk down the valley brings the pedestrian to Daisy Bank Wood, and Chaucer’s favourite flower still grows on the daisied bank, and there stands yet the old-fashioned house below the wood where was born, in the reign of Elizabeth, Henry Briggs, of logarithm renown, and the first Savilian professor of geometry at the University of Oxford.
(To be continued.)
Archaeology a Confirmation of Historic and Religious Truth.[68]
By the Rev. George Huntington, M.A., Rector of Tenby.
JEREMIAH’S lot was cast in the darkest period of his country’s history. He was called on to declare the Divine will to the exiles in Babylon and the remnant in Palestine. In the context he is warning his countrymen against false prophets and false priests who were deceiving the people by proclaiming peace when there was no peace. He urges them to inquire after the ancient faith revealed to the patriarchs and prophets of old. Thus, and thus only, would they find “rest for their souls.”
The metaphor is a striking one; it is that of a traveller who comes to a place where several roads meet. He hesitates till he discerns the most beaten track, or till he hails another traveller from whom he can ask his way. Those were days of doubt and difficulty, when the royal counsellors were urging conformity to the idolatrous rites of the powerful nations around them as a policy of wisdom and conciliation. But Jeremiah regarded it as nothing less than apostasy. Those idolatries were abomination in the sight of Jehovah. Hence the people must return to the worship of the one true God—the God “who made heaven and earth,” to be true to the covenant which “He made with Abraham, the oath which He swore unto Isaac, and confirmed the same to Jacob for a law, and to Israel for an everlasting covenant.”
But the text applies to ourselves. The days in which our lot is cast are days of doubt and difficulty—days when ancient landmarks are being removed, and the beaten tracks so effaced as almost to be indiscernible. So that we may well stand, like the traveller in the metaphor, to see and ask for the old paths, for the good way, amid the clouds of scepticism and unbelief which gather athwart our pathways; amid the Babel of voices saying “Who will show us the good?” we may say, with the Psalmist, “Lord, lift Thou up the light of Thy countenance upon us.”
For what are those ways, those old paths, that good way, but the original revelation of God as our Father in heaven—subsequently manifested in the Person of His Incarnate Son as the Revealer of the Divine will, in the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, acting through the Church as His agent for making His “ways known to the sons of men.”
“The history of the race of Adam before the Advent,” says a great statesman,[69] “is the history of a long and varied, but incessant preparation for the Advent;” and the history of the human race since the Advent, it may be added, is but a record of the gradual but sure progress of that kingdom which Christ came to establish upon earth, an earnest of the time when the kingdoms of this world shall have become the kingdoms of God and of His Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever as King of kings and Lord of lords.
And to this, as it seems to me, all historical research as well as scientific discovery points. There are those who to exalt Christianity would represent the world as in total darkness before the Advent. The truer estimate of the Gospels shows us that Christ was in fact the “true Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” The investigation of the records of the past assures us of this fact, confirms us in this belief, proves to us that God never “left Himself without witness,” teaches us that Christ drew as it were into a focus all the truths that men had previously held, only freeing them from error and bringing them into clearer light. “The words,” says a great scholar,[70] “by which God was known in the far-off ages are but mere words; but they bring before us with all the vividness of an event which we witnessed ourselves but yesterday, the ancestors of the whole Aryan race, thousands of years, it may be, before Homer and the Vedas, worshipping an unseen Being under the self-same name, the best, the most exalted name they could find in their vocabulary.” Plutarch wrote ages ago: “If you travel through the whole world, well, you may find cities without walls, without literature, without kings, moneyless, and such as desire no coin; which know not what theatres or public halls or bodily exercise mean; but never was there, nor ever shall be, any one city seen without temple, church, or chapel, without some God or other, which useth no prayers, nor oaths, no prophecies and divinations, no sacrifices either to obtain good blessings, or to avert heavy curses and calamities. Nay, methinks a man should sooner find a city built in the air without any plot of ground whereon it is seated than any commonwealth altogether void of religion.... This is that containeth and holdeth together all human society, this is the foundation prop and stay of all.”[71]
Brethren of the Archæological Association, I venture to think that you will not fail to see the application of these remarks to your own researches, and to the consequences which are happily arising from these researches. Of course I speak of archæology in its widest sense. Your investigations of the records of antiquity, your examination of ancient remains, your discovery of the sites and foundations of temples, tombs, altars, and cromlechs, confirm the testimony of philologists, historians, and philosophers, nay the witness of the human heart; they all speak with more or less clearness of a belief in the Supreme Being, of a longing for a clearer revelation of His will, of a hope of immortality, of a sense of sin and desire for reconciliation with Him, obscured it may be, often perverted, debased by superstitious, cruel, and unholy rites, sometimes feebly held, but never totally lost.
And the same observations apply to the attestation by archæology to the scriptural records. Nothing is more remarkable than the recovery of ancient monuments, unless it be the deductions of science which are marking the intellectual activity of the age. What a revelation was that finding of the famous Rosetta stone[72] which by its triple inscription in the Sacred, the popular Egyptian, and the Greek languages, gave the key to unlock the mysteries of figure writing, so that thanks to Egyptologists, who are but archæologists under a local name, we may picture to ourselves the Egypt of the Pyramids, of Abraham, of Joseph, and the Exodus, and see the Pharaohs in their colossal palaces, and learn something of that wisdom of the Egyptians in which we are told “Moses was learned.” Think, too, how the unshapely mounds on the banks of the Euphrates have given up their treasures, so that we may now know the history of those mighty empires which each in its day exercised its influence on the chosen people, and through that chosen people on the destinies of the Church. Think of the excavations of a Layard, the researches of a Rawlinson in Babylon and Assyria, and of the Palestine explorers, which bring before us not only the land of the Judges and the Kings, but the scenes of the earthly ministry of the Son of God Himself.
And what is it but archæology that led to the exhuming of those long-lost cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii which have thrown such a lurid glare on the morals of the Græco-Roman world, confirming as it does the keen satires not only of a Juvenal or a Persius, but the mournful testimony of a Paul, showing as nothing else could show the world’s need of a divine Saviour, and a newer and fuller revelation of the Divine will.
Or think of the identification of the sites of classic Troy and Mycenæ by Dr. Schliemann, and of the discoveries of Mr. Wood at Ephesus, and of Mr. Ramsay in Phrygia. These investigations might seem to have only an indirect reference to Christianity, but they may help to attest the accuracy of the Scripture record and of the history of the isapostolic Church. Asia Minor, be it remembered, was, next to Palestine, the theatre of the earliest apostolic labours; Ephesus was the city wherein St. Paul encountered the worshippers of the Temple of the world-renowned Artemis. To the Ephesians he addressed one of his most remarkable epistles, to Ephesus he sent his son in the faith, Timothy; over the Ephesian Church St. John presided as the survivor of the Twelve; in Ephesus was held the third of the Œcumenical Councils. Who knows, then, what the archæology of the future may not discover in these interesting regions? What treasures may not yet be buried under those shapeless masses, the accumulations of ages of neglect? Who knows what light they may not shed on the annals of a hoary antiquity in which we of this busy nineteenth century may be vitally interested?—interested as we “ask for the old paths.”
The same may be said of the Catacombs of Rome, with their simple and unstudied testimony to the faith of the early Christian martyrs, so strangely contrasting with the sad records of the pagan world, so that, as has well been said, “if you cross the Appian Way, from the Columbaria to the Catacombs, and place side by side the heathen and the Christian epitaphs, you may read, in those authentic registers, how, without Christ, death meant despair; with Christ, peace.”
Think again of the recovery of MSS. I need name but one, the Codex Sinaiticus, found seemingly by a lucky accident, but one which has enabled New Testament scholars to establish the truest readings of the Gospels and the Epistles. Nor is the discovery of an authentic copy of that ancient treatise which goes by the name of the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” without its influence on Christian archæology. It confirms what the examination of the ancient liturgies of ancient altars and altar vessels—a distinct branch of your science—teaches us, the testimony of a Pliny and a Justin as to what primitive Christian worship really was; it assures the Churchman of the nineteenth century that in all essentials of faith and worship he is one with the Church of the first century, the Church of the Apostles, the Church of Pentecost, the Church of Christ from the beginning.
But you are British archæologists; if it pleases you to visit my native county of York, you will doubtless direct your steps to Goodmanham, or Godmundenham, as its ancient name betokened—the Protection of the Gods. There in that little East Riding village archæology verified the identity of the font in which Paulinus baptized the heathen priest Coifi, with a trough out of which for years farmers had fed their swine. What a commentary on the spread of Christianity, and the need of Christianity, so early as the seventh century in the northern parts of our island is the beautiful story told by the Venerable Bede.[73] “The present life of man,” said the aged counsellor Coifi to his sovereign, “O king, seems to me in comparison of that time which is unknown to us, like the swift flight of the sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter with your commanders and ministers, and a good fire in the midst, whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry storm, but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before or what is to follow we are utterly ignorant. If, therefore, the new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.” In contempt of his former superstition, the king and his counsellors assenting, we are told, the arch-priest mounted the royal war-horse, armed himself with a spear, things otherwise unlawful, and profaned the temple by casting at the idol his spear; and then both king and counsellor were baptized and professed the faith of Christ.[74]
Authorities have been divided as to the diffusion of Christianity in Britain, and as to the independence of the ancient British Church. Archæology, on the other hand, by its identification of sacred sites by the nomenclature of native saints, by the designation of parishes and churches, has done much to settle these questions. The science of archæology has discovered Christian symbols, traced British bishops to far-distant Councils;[75] as at Carleon, and Bangor, and elsewhere, it has unfolded the records of a community acting under its own prelates and arch-prelates, enjoying its own native customs, adhering to its own independent rites.
Archæology is, in its widest sense, no mere question of curious antiquities, it is a confirmation of historic and religious truth. It aids the devout in the inquiry after the old ways in which the saints of God have trod. It is a teaching and a walking in that good way in which patriarchs and prophets, apostles and martyrs, found rest to their souls. To the Jews of Jeremiah’s days God promised rest from their enemies in their own land of promise, rest in the assured favour of Jehovah. To us Christ promises rest, rest from disquieting doubts and fears, rest in the sense of sins forgiven, rest in communion and union with God and Christ, in the mystical fellowship of His Body, the Church, rest hereafter in our heavenly home.
Brethren, the appeal of Christ is to the individual heart, the witness to the Saviour is in the testimony of conscience, the heart and life, the presence of His Spirit within the soul. May I beg you, then, to ask for the old paths of repentance and faith, for the good way that leadeth to life, to walk therein; to consecrate your researches to the highest and noblest of purposes, the furtherance of truth and the glory of God; and so, to use again the words of the prophet in the text, “ye shall find rest for your souls.”
