The principal street of Galway is called Shop Street—a name so singularly lacking in imagination that it would prove the English origin of the town at once, were any proof needed—and about midway of this stands a beautiful four-storied building, known as Lynch's Castle, once a fine mansion but now a chandler's shop. The walls are ornamented with carved medallions, and there is a row of sculptured supports for a vanished balcony sticking out like gargoyles all around the top; and over the door there is the stone figure of a monkey holding a child, commemorating the saving of one of the Lynch children from a fire, by a favourite monkey, some centuries ago.
The Lynches were great people in old Galway, and another memorial of them exists just around the corner—a fragment of wall, with a doorway below and a mullioned window above, and it was from this window, so legend says, that James Lynch Fitzstephen, sometime mayor of Galway, hanged his son with his own hands. The principal inscription reads:
This memorial of the stern and unbending justice of the chief magistrate of this city, James Lynch Fitzstephen, elected mayor A. D. 1493, who condemned and executed his own guilty son, Walter, on this spot, has been restored to its ancient site A. D. 1854, with the approval of the Town Commissioners, by their Chairman, Very Rev. Peter Daly, P. P., and Vicar of St. Nicholas.
Below the window is a skull and crossbones, with a much more interesting inscription:
1524
REMEMBER DEATHE VANITI OF VANITI
AND AL IS BUT VANITI
The story of the very upright Fitzstephen runs in this wise: He was a merchant, prominent in the Spanish trade, and fortunate in everything except in his only son, Walter, who was as bad a nut as was to be found anywhere. But he had shown some fondness for a Galway lady of good family, and it was hoped she might reform him; when, unhappily, she looked, or was thought to look, too favourably upon a handsome young hidalgo, who had come from Spain as the guest of the elder Fitzstephen. So young Walter waited for him one night at a dark corner, thrust a knife into his heart, and then gave himself up to his father, as the town's chief magistrate.
Walter, as is often the way with rake-hellies, was a great favourite in the town, and everybody interceded for his pardon, but his father condemned him to death. Whereupon a number of young bloods organised a rescue party, but just as they were breaking into the house, the inexorable parent put a noose about his son's neck, and hanged him from the window mullion above the crowd's head—the same mullion, I suppose, which you can see in the picture opposite the preceding page.
Just behind the reminder of this fifteenth-century Brutus, stands the fourteenth-century church of St. Nicholas, a venerable and beautiful structure, with good windows and splendid doorways, and containing some interesting tombs—one of them in honour of Mayor Lynch, the hero of the tragedy I have just related. On the south wall is a large tablet to "Jane Eyre, relict of Edward Eyre," (I wonder if Charlotte Brontë ever heard of her), who died in 1760, aged 88. At the bottom of the slab the fact is commemorated that "The sum of 300L was given by the Widow Jane Eyre to the Corporation of Galway for the yearly sum of 24L to be distributed in bread to 36 poor objects, on every Sunday forever." The sexton told us that the yearly income from this bequest was now thirty-six pounds, but that the weekly distribution of bread had occasioned so much disturbance that it had been discontinued, and the income of the bequest was now divided equally among twelve deserving families.
As we stood there, the peal of bells in the tower began to ring for service, but their musical invitation went quite unheeded by the crowd in the market-place outside, all of whom, of course, were Catholics. One woman, clad in black, slipped into a pew just before the curate began to read the lesson. We waited a while to see if any one else would come, but no one did, and at last we quietly took ourselves off.