Uppingham is a clean neat market town, to which a railroad has not as yet penetrated. It consists principally of one long street, nearly at the middle of which is a large square used for markets. There is a fine old grammar school here, founded by the Rev. Robert Johnson, archdeacon of Leicester, in 1584; he also founded one at Oakham, and became rector of North Luffenham in this county, where he died and was buried in 1616. The property with which he endowed it has increased in value enormously, and the funds are very large. The celebrated Jeremy Taylor was rector of Uppingham.
SARACEN’S HEAD, SOUTHWELL.
CHAPTER VII.
NOTTINGHAM—ROBIN HOOD—SOUTHWELL—NEWARK—NOTTINGHAM—WARWICKSHIRE—DUGDALE—COVENTRY—DERBY—STRATFORD—ROMAN ROADS—YORK—RIPON—WAKEFIELD—PONTREFRACT.
NOTTINGHAM is well supplied with all materials necessary for building. The best of stone, lime, and wood are found here, and its early dwelling-places have in consequence been substantial and numerous. Mansfield, at the western extremity of Sherwood Forest, is a fine old country town, and still bears many traces of its ancient importance, though it has been much modernised. Sherwood Forest is the most celebrated feature in Nottinghamshire, and one of the most romantic parts of England. It is estimated to have been some twenty-five miles in length, and nearly eight broad in the times of Robin Hood, who would thus have about two hundred square miles to roam about in and kill deer. This popular outlaw has found a warm advocate across the channel in the person of Mons. Thierry, who recognises in him a sort of embodyment of popular feeling that existed against the singular severity of the Norman forest laws. There were at one time, it is said, over sixty Royal forests in England, all protected by laws of great cruelty. The celebrated Greendale Oak in Welbeck Park was quite a venerable tree in Robin Hood’s time. There is a coach road now through its stem. The “Parliament Oak,” in Clipstone Park, is so called because tradition asserts that King Edward I. called a parliament beneath its boughs. “The ancient date,” says Mr. Major, “may be illustrated by the fact, that when some of these trees were cut down at the latter end of the last century, letters denoting the king’s reign in which they were thus marked, were found stamped on them. One of these, eighteen inches beneath the surface of the tree, when it was felled in 1791, and more than a foot from the centre of the tree, bore the letters showing it had been marked in the reign of John (A.D. 1199); and allowing that it was a hundred years old when it was thus marked, it must have weathered seven centuries. This is probably the age of the oldest yet standing in the numerous parks, which still attest the dimensions of the good old forest of Sherwood.”
Though it would be rather straining the point to allude to them as the homesteads which it is the object of this work to delineate, a passing mention may be made of the caves with which this part of England abounded, and which made such safe retreats for outlaws in those days. Many of these are of natural formation, either owing to the porous yielding limestone being eroded by water, or to the rock commonly called “pudding-stone” being disintegrated. Some are artificial, as the one called “Robin Hood’s Stable,” which is, however, more like a chapel, and probably has served as one. Sherwood Forest has for generations been yielding to the axe and the plough, though a goodly number of the old trees yet remain. The trunks, which are found bedded in the ground, induced a very intelligent writer to say that it had once before been levelled for cultivation, but this is probably not the case, for those who could fell a tree would know its value for domestic uses. Camden gives the clue to these relics. “It was anciently thick set with trees, whose entangled branches were so thickly twisted together that they hardly left room for a single person to pass,” and such a state of vegetation is soon fatal to the growth of large trees. Many American forests are similar to the Sherwood that Camden describes; the writer has not unfrequently heard the crash of some tall forest tree, whose roots were strangled and starved; indeed a traveller is often surprised, on entering some grand-looking wood, either in Canada or the States, to find it paved with huge trunks between which a more recent growth appeared. Such a place, with its caverns and its vast extent, might easily enable a freebooter and his bands to set authority at defiance, especially when his followers were desperate men, often flying from the mutilation or death they had subjected themselves to by breaking the forest laws; nor were the exploits of these bands confined to the limits of Sherwood. We find Robin Hood turning up in Derby and Yorkshire: a bay there yet bears his name. As an instance of the way in which a forest may disappear, might be mentioned the celebrated Wirral Forest in Cheshire, occupying at one time the dreary promontory between the Dee and the Mersey. Now hardly a bush can be induced to grow here, but at one time it was so thickly wooded that there was an old saying