THE “LION” YARD.
This portion of the house is seen to advantage at the end of the cobble-stoned yard, passing the old coach office remaining there, unchanged, and proceeding to the other end, where the yard passes out into a steep and narrow lane called Stony Bank. Looking back, the great red brick bulk of the ball room, with the stone effigy of a lion on the parapet is seen; the surrounding buildings giving a very powerful impression of the extensive business done here in days of old.
The “Lion” suffered severely when the railway was opened to Shrewsbury, and the more so because its position, from being the most favourable, was suddenly changed into the most unfavourable; the railway-station lying at the other end of the town, and travellers no longer passing as a matter of necessity by Wyle Cop.
For many years the “Lion” has therefore been all too large for present needs, and its upper floors unfurnished and given over to rats, mice and spiders. But it has had better fortune than befell the “Talbot.”
The “Talbot,” in Market street, was the great rival of the “Lion.” It was the house to which came John Jobson to set up the “Nimrod,” and be generally a thorn in the side of Isaac Taylor, of the “Lion” yard. Although much else is lost, fugitive memories still remain of Mrs. Jobson’s turban, hinting that she must have been a remarkable person. Why has not some diarist of that time left us an intimate account of all these things?
After the coaching age and Jobson were both simultaneously snuffed out, in 1842, the “Talbot” was taken by E. Wheeler and Son, followed shortly by one Peters, who had been a coachman on the “Nimrod.” It is to be feared he found it anything but a lucrative speculation, for the house was shortly closed. Some little while later, it was taken by the Post Office. The building still exists, little altered, although the lower part is a fancy warehouse, and the upper floors let out as offices, by the name of “Talbot Chambers.” It is a great square unbeautiful red-brick structure, with the sign, an effigy of that old English hound, the Talbot, still surmounting the entrance.
The “Raven and Bell,” frequently mentioned in the rivalries of the old coach-proprietors, is not to be confounded with the “Raven” in Castle Street, but was situated on Wyle Cop. The “Raven,”—a favourite sign in Shropshire and Staffordshire—and almost exclusively confined to these two counties, derives from the old heraldic coat of the Corbets, that ancient Shropshire family whose ancestral acres are situated at Moreton Corbet, and is an ancient play upon the family name, by way of corbeau, the French for raven. Indeed, not only the Corbets of Moreton, but most others of the same name, bear one or more ravens as their heraldic cognizance.
Wyle Cop is still a place of inns. There are the beautiful old “Unicorn,” half-timbered and gabled, and that oddly conjoined “Lion and Pheasant”; and many another to be found throughout the town.
XXVI
But if the inns be quaint, how shall justice be done to the quaintness of the mediæval timbered houses in the High Street, or Butcher Row? There is no town in England—no, not even Chester—that can show a greater number, or more beautiful examples of black and white; while for queer street names Shrewsbury certainly bears away the bell. There are Wyle Cop, and the houses at its foot, once known as “under the Wyle”; Pride Hill, which does not refer to the almost Spanish pride of Salopians, but to an old mansion of the Pride family that once stood there; Shoplatch; Murivance, on the old town walls; Mardol, or “Dairy Fold”; and Dog-pole, originally “Duck-pool.” In midst of all these is the Market-square, with the old red sandstone Market-house in the centre; a place notable in these days rather for a pleasant and aristocratic quiet than for anything connected with marketing. The old trading interest went in 1809, when the new Market buildings and Corn Exchange—a not altogether successful combination of red and yellow brick—were opened. A curious inscription on the front of the old building dates it back to Queen Elizabeth’s time, and above, in a recess, stands the effigy of that Richard, Duke of York, whose head graced one of York’s gates in 1460, after the Battle of Wakefield. The effigy was brought from the old gatehouse on the Welsh Bridge, demolished in 1791. Armoured from heel to crown, it reminds one vividly of those feudal Daimios of Japan whom it was imperative to sweep away before that country could emerge from barbarism and savagery. And let it not be forgotten that our “chivalry” of old was as savage and as barbarous as anything to be found in China or any other Asiatic country.