“ROBIN THE DEVIL”
There hangs, for example, in the once private chapel of the dead and gone Bellinghams a helmet with a story. Once, it seems, in the days when Cavalier and Roundhead fought out their dispute, there flourished a family of Philipsons in the Windermere district, with a notorious person, Major Robert Philipson, at their head: so wild and reckless that he was commonly known as “Robin the Devil.” It is hardly necessary to add that he was not a Puritan. This rumbustious character, greatly incensed that the Puritans should have established themselves in the town, under one Colonel Briggs, set out one Sunday with a number of horsemen, to kill the colonel in church. Happily for Briggs, he had not attended service that day, and Philipson, rampaging with drawn sword over the building, was baulked of his prey: although it does not seem quite certain that Robin would have been fortunate had Briggs been present, for even without their commander the people present made him run, and in his haste to go his helmet was knocked off against an archway. He did not stop to recover it, but made off as quick as he could go. So much for your daredevils. The helmet was hung up as a trophy. But Smelfungus, the antiquary, who must for always be spoiling the best stories with his dry facts, tells us that the helmet is really a portion of the funeral armour of Sir Roger Bellingham, suspended over his tomb.
Among the interesting items in Kendal Church are pieces of an ancient cross, dated about A.D. 850, and the monument to over one hundred and fifty officers and men of the 55th (Westmoreland) Regiment, who fell in that most stupid of blunders, the Crimean War, from which none, save the Army contractors, ever reaped any advantage. Here, too, is a Chinese “Dragon Flag,” captured at Chusan, and deposited in the church in 1874.
REPARTEE
Here, also, is a monument to the unfortunate Sir Augustine Nichols, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, poisoned when on circuit at Kendal in 1616. But the most curious object in Kendal Church is the epitaph upon a former vicar, the Reverend Ralph Tyrer, B.D., who died in June 1627. The curious rhymes of which it is composed are said to have been written by himself; but, however that may be, it is certain that whoever was the author of them was keenly desirous of puzzling posterity. He has done it effectually, too. He has set out, in his rugged and uncouth way, that—
| London bred me, | Westminster fed me, |
| Cambridge sped me, | My sister wed me, |
| Study taught me, | Living sought me, |
| Learning brought me, | Kendal caught me, |
| Labour pressed me, | Sickness distressed me, |
| Death oppressed me, | The grave possessed me, |
| God first gave me, | Christ did save me, |
| Earth did crave me, | Heaven would have me. |
“My sister wed me”: that is the crux of the matter; but it does not appear that this is to be taken seriously, in its ordinary meaning. As to the real interpretation, we are offered at least two stories: the one that his sister, finding him too busy or too diffident a man to do his own wooing, conducted his courtship for him and provided him with a wife of her own choosing. In that case, she dared much. The alternative theory is that the word “sister,” as used here, is intended to bear an academical meaning, and to indicate that he was educated at Cambridge but admitted ad eundem afterwards to the “sister University” of Oxford.
The people of Kendal were turbulent folk in the old days, and varied the humdrum existence of woollen manufacture and the printing of cottons by rioting: keeping up their reputation in this sort until the early years of the nineteenth century, when the first Parliamentary election was excuse sufficient for an outbreak. The making and the dyeing of the once famous “Kendal green” cloth is a thing of the past, and peace is now the characteristic of Kendal, but the reputation of the neighbourhood for incisive wit remains, in the ancient story of the horseman who asked a countryman the time o’ day. “Twelve o’clock,” said the man, looking at that rural chronometer, the sky.
“Twelve!” exclaimed the traveller. “I thought it was more.”