Jeanie Deans, on the other hand, was pleased to hear of Gonerby Hill. Not, mark you, that she was educated up to an appreciation of the picturesque. We know, in fact, that she was not, because when she and the Duke of Argyle stood looking down upon the lovely expanse of woods, meads, and waters seen from Richmond Hill, all she could find to say was that “It’s braw feeding for the cows.” No, when she learned with pleasure of the “mountain” she was to cross, it was only for association’s sake: “I’m glad to hear there’s a hill, for baith my sight and my very feet are weary o’ sic tracts o’ level ground—it looks a’ the way between this and York as if a’ the land had been trenched and levelled, whilk is very wearisome to my Scotch een. When I lost sight of a muckle blue hill they ca’ Ingleboro’, I thought I hadna a friend left in this strange land.”
“As for the matter of that, young woman,” said mine host, “an you be so fond o’ hill, I carena an thou couldst carry Gunnerby away with thee in thy lap, for it’s a murder to post-horses. But here’s to thy journey, and mayst thou win well through it, for thou is a bold and a canny lass.”
Gonerby Hill was reputed the steepest bit between London and Edinburgh. It was, at the time when Scott wrote, a great deal steeper than nowadays, now that the road has been cut deeply through it, instead of climbing painfully over the crest. Then also, as he remarks, the open ground at its foot was unenclosed and covered with copses and swampy pools. Also, as Jeanie discovered, there was “bad company” where the “bonny hill lifted its brow to the moon.” But surely never did such odd company as Sir Walter has invented lurk in these recesses. The Heart of Midlothian, indeed, is a fantastic novel quite unworthy of the Wizard of the North, and its wildly improbable characters and marvellous rencounters are on a par with Harrison Ainsworth at his worst. Syston, two miles away to the right, is, they say, the original of the Willingham village in the novel, and Barkston, close by, is doubtless the “Barkston town-end” where Mother Murdockson was put in the stocks; but the references to them are of the haziest.
It was not inadvisedly that Ainsworth was just mentioned, for Gonerby Hill is named in Turpin’s Ride. Ainsworth always resorted to the gibbet when he wanted to make a point in the gruesome. Accordingly, when Turpin mounts the rise, what does he find but “two scarecrow objects covered with rags and rusty links of chain,” depending from “the tree.” “Will this be my lot, I wonder?” asks the hero with a shudder. We need only to be slightly acquainted with Ainsworth’s methods to know that a melodramatic answer was immediately forthcoming. Springing from the briars and tussocks of rank grass between the foot of the gallows and the road, a gaunt figure exclaimed, “Ay, marry will it!” These “gaunt figures” never failed the novelist; but the plain man wants to know what they were doing on these inclement spots, and by what unfailing instinct they were always there at the precise moment demanded in the interests of fiction.
The descent of Gonerby Hill accomplished, and the level reached, a singularly featureless and flat twelve miles leads into Newark, past Marston cross-roads, where a turnpike gate used to trouble travellers, past Foston, a forlorn village on a knoll, Long Bennington, a larger and still more forlorn village on the flat, and thence, with the graceful spire of Claypole far on the right, over the Shire Dyke, into Nottinghamshire, and through Balderton.
XXIX
The approach to Newark is long and dull, by way of the suburban “London Road” and past the decaying Beaumond Cross, but this leads at length to the great open square of the Market-place, the most striking of all such centres of public resort to be found on the way to the North. Newark-“upon-Trent” is a misnomer, for neither the town nor the castle, which was once the “new work” that gave the place its name, are on that river, but only on a branch of it—the Devon—which falls into the Trent at Crankley Point, some miles below the town. The “new work” was only new some eight hundred years ago, when Edward the Confessor’s castle on the banks of the Devon was built, or when it was rebuilt or enlarged by Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, 1123–47. Bishops and other mighty castle-builders in those times not infrequently built their own prisons when piling up their grim fortresses, and so the Bishop of Lincoln found, when King Stephen seized him and kept him in durance within his own stronghold. A judiciously low diet of bread and water, and confinement in an unhealthy dungeon below the level of the river, soon broke the haughty Churchman’s spirit, and he transferred the castle to the Crown.
But Newark Castle has better claims to notice than as the dungeon of one of those old bloody-minded prelates. As the place where King John ended his evil life, we may well look upon its ruined walls with interest. His rebellious barons scattered on his approach in that year of 1216, and England seemed in danger of a long continuance of its troubles under the profligate king. But a surfeit of peaches brought that wicked life to a hasty conclusion, and here, on the banks of the sluggish Devon, one of the worst of English monarchs died. We need not regard peaches with apprehension because John is said to have died of them. We must consider whence they came; from the monks of Swineshead Abbey, where the king had stayed on his journey to Newark. Now, Holy Church had the very best of reasons for hating that monarch, and from hatred to murder was not a far cry in those days. So of peaches King John doubtless died; but of peaches subtly flavoured with poison, there is little doubt.
The castle was again seized by the barons, in the succeeding reign, but they surrendered, after a week’s siege, and by the gift of the king, the Bishops of Lincoln received their own again. Under Edward the Sixth it again became the property of the crown, and when James the First “progressed” through England to his throne, these walls sheltered him during a week of festivity.
A lawless and discourteous, as well as a weak-minded king, as we shall see. Crowds assembled during the festivities set apart by the corporation, and a fellow was caught in the act of pocket-picking. By order of the king, the unfortunate wretch was strung up, instanter, without the veriest semblance of a trial! There’s your lawlessness, and here follows the discourtesy.