LANCASTER CASTLE.
“HORSESHOE CORNER”
John o’ Gaunt is not to be avoided in Lancaster, castle or town. He is, indeed, to be found pretty well all over the country, for he was not merely Duke of Lancaster (although that was no small matter), but owned manors in almost every part of England. Moreover, from him sprang the House of Lancaster, the Red Rose, whose struggles with the Yorkist White Rose form so long and bloody a series of chapters in English history. Here, in Lancaster, from “John o’ Gaunt’s Chair,” the topmost turret of the castle keep, down to Horseshoe Corner, the great Duke is everywhere, and figures on picture-postcards, china, and silver spoons with a fine impartiality. Horseshoe Corner is an otherwise commonplace crossing of streets where, in the middle of the roadway, a horseshoe is inserted. It is the representative, at this long interval of time, of a shoe cast by John o’ Gaunt’s horse on the spot, and is renewed every seven years.
St. Mary’s Church, adjoining the castle, and separated from it only by that sad spot on the terrace where criminals were hanged in the times of public executions, is a fine bold structure of Perpendicular character, and possibly a good deal might be said of it in the architectural way; but it interests me chiefly as containing a memorial brass, now very much the worse for wear, to Thomas Covell, Governor of the castle forty-eight years, Coroner forty-six years, and six times Mayor of Lancaster. He died in 1639, aged seventy-eight, and is the subject of the following encomiastic verse:
Cease, cease to mourne, all teares are vaine to aide,
Hee’s fledd, not dead; dissolved, not destroy’d.
In Heaven his soule doth rest, his bodie heere
Sleepes in this dust, and his fame everie where
Triumphs; the towne, the country farther forth,
The land throughout proclaimes his noble worth.