Mr. Fawkes owns about 15,000 acres of land, including most of the valley of Otley, and extending back almost to Harrogate. He farms about 450 acres, but grows no wheat. Indeed, I did not see a field of it in a circle of five miles’ diameter.
I reached Harrogate in the dusk of the evening, and found the town alive with people mostly in the streets. It is a snug and cozy little Saratoga among the hills of Yorkshire, away from the smoke, soot and savor of the great manufacturing centres. It is a favorite resort for a mild class of invalids, and of persons who need the medicine of pure air and gentle exercise, blended with the quiet tonics of cheery mirth and recreation. Superadded to all these stimulants, there is a mineral spring at which the visitors, young and old, drink most voluminously. I went down to it in the morning before breakfast, and found it thronged by a multitude of men, women and children, who drank off great goblets of it with astonishing faith and facility. The rotunda was so filled with the fumes of sulphur that I found it more easy to inhale than to imbibe, and preferred to satisfy that sense as to the merits of the water.
The next day I reached the brave old city of Ripon. On the way I stopped an hour or two at Ripley and visited the castle. The building itself is a good specimen of the baronial hall of the olden time. But the gardens and grounds constitute its distinguishing feature. I never saw before such an exquisite arrangement of flowers, even at Chatsworth or the Kew Gardens. All forms imaginable were produced by them. The most extensive and elaborate combination was a row of flower sofas reaching around the garden. Each was from 20 to 30 feet in length. The seat was wrought in geraniums of every tint, all grown to an even, compact surface, presenting figures as diversified as the alternating hues could produce. The back was worked in taller flowers, presenting the same evenness of line and surface. On entering the garden gate and catching the first sight of these beautiful structures, you take them for veritable sofas, as perfectly wrought as anything was ever done in Berlin wool.
Ripon is an interesting little city, with a fact-roll of history reaching back into the dimmest centuries of the land. It has run the gauntlet of all the Saxon, Danish, Scotch and Norman raids and regimes. It was burnt once or twice by each of these races in the struggle for supremacy. But with a plucky tenacity of life, it arose successively out of its own ashes and spread its phœnix wings to a new and vigorous vitality. A venerable cathedral looks down upon it with a motherly face. Unique old buildings, with half their centuries unrecorded and lost in oblivion, stand to this day in good repair, as the homes of happy children, who play at marbles and the last sports of the day just as if they were born in houses only a year older than themselves. Institutions and customs older than the cathedral are kept up with a filial faith in their virtue. One of the most interesting of these, I believe, was established by the Saxon Edgar or Alfred—it matters not which; they were only a century or two apart, and that space is but a trifling circumstance in the history of this old country. One of these kings appointed an officer called a “wakeman” for the town. He must originally have been a kind of secular beadle of the community, or a curfew constable, to see the whole population well a-bed in good season. One of his duties consisted in blowing a horn every night at nine o’clock as a signal to turn in. But a remarkable consideration was attached to faithful compliance with this summons. If any house or shop was robbed before sunrise, a tax was levied upon every inhabitant, of 4d. if his house had one outer door, and of 8d. if it had two. This tax was to compensate the sufferer for his loss, and also to put the whole community under bonds to keep the peace and to feel responsible for the safety of each other’s property. Thus it not only acted as a great mutual insurance company of which every householder was a member, but it made him, as it were, a special constable against burglary. This old Saxon institution is in full life and vigor to-day. The wakeman is still the highest secular official of the town. For a thousand consecutive years the wakeman’s toot-horn has been blown at night over the successive generations of the little cathedral city. This is an interesting fact, full of promise. No American could fail to admire this conservatism who appreciates national individuality. No one, at heart, could more highly esteem these salient traits of a people’s character. And here I may as well put in a few thoughts on this subject as at any stage of my walk.
Good-natured reader, are you a man of sensitive perceptions as to the proprieties and dignities of dress and deportment which should characterise some great historical personage whose name you have held in profound veneration all your life long? Now, in the wayward drift of your imagination among the freaks of modern fashion, did it ever dare to present before your eyes St. Paul in strapped pantaloons, figured velvet vest, swallow-tailed coat, stove-pipe hat, and a cockney glass at his eye? Did your fancy, in its wildest fictions, ever pass such an image across the speculum of your mental vision?
Gentle reader, “in maiden meditation, fancy free,” did a dreamy thought of yours ever stray through the histories of your sex and its modes of dress and adornment, and so blend or transpose them as to present to you, in a sudden flash of the imagination, the Virgin Mary dressed like the Empress Eugenie? Readers both, did not that fancy trouble you, as if an unholy thought had fallen into the soul? Well, a thought like that must trouble the American when his fancy passes before his mind’s eye the image of Old England Americanised. And a faculty more serious and trusty than fancy will present this transformation to him, day by day, as he visits the great centres of the nation’s life and industry. In London, Manchester, Liverpool, and all the most busy and prosperous commercial and manufacturing towns, he will see that England is becoming Americanised shockingly fast. In all these populous places it is losing the old individuality that once distinguished the grandfatherland of fifty millions who now speak its language beyond the sea. Look at London! look at the miles of three and four story houses under the mason’s hands, now running out in every direction from the city. Will you see a single feature of the Old England of our common memories in them? No, not one! no more than in a modern English dress-coat, or in one of the iron rails of the British Great Western, or of the Illinois Central. It is doubtful if there will be anything of England left in London at the end of the next fifty years, unless it be the fog and the Lord Mayor’s Show. Already the radicals are crying out against both of these institutions, which are merely local, by the way. The tailor’s shears, the mason’s trowel, and the carpenter’s edge-tools are evening everything in Christendom to one dead level of uniformity. The railroads and telegraphs are all working to the same end. All these agencies of modern civilization at first lay their innovating hands upon large cities or commercial centres. Thence they work outward slowly and transform the appearance and habits of the country. The transformations I have noticed in England since 1846 are wonderful, utilitarian, and productive of absolute and rigid comfort to the people; still, I must confess, they inspire in me a sentiment akin to that which our village fathers experienced when the old church in which they worshipped from childhood was pulled down to make room for a better one.
To every American, sympathising with these sentiments, it must be interesting to visit such a rural little city as Ripon, and find populations that cling with reverence and affection to the old Saxon institutions of Alfred. It will make him feel that he stands in the unbroken lineage of the centuries, to hear the wakeman’s horn, and to know that it has been blown, spring, summer, autumn and winter, in all weathers, in weal and in woe, for a thousand years. As Old England is driven farther and farther back from London, Manchester, Liverpool, and other great improving towns, she will find refuge and residence in these retired country villages. Here she will wear longest and last the features in which she was engraven on the minds of all the millions who call her mother beyond the sea.
The next day I visited the celebrated Fountain Abbey in Studley Park,—a grand relic of antiquity, framed with silver and emerald work of lakelets, lawns, shrubberies and trees as beautifully arranged as art, taste and wealth could set them. The old abbey is a majestic ruin which fills one with wonder as he looks up at its broken arches and towers and sees the dimensions marked by the pedestals or foot-prints of its templed columns. It stands rather in a narrow glen than in a valley, and was commenced, it is supposed, about 1130. The yew-trees under which the monks bivouacked while at work upon the magnificent edifice, are still standing, bearing leaves as large and green as those that covered the enthusiastic architects of that early time. In the height of its prosperity and power, the lands of the abbey embraced over 72,000 acres. The Park enclosing this great monument of an earlier age contains 250 acres, and is really an earthly elysium of beauty. It was comforting to learn that it was laid out so late as 1720, and that all the noble trees that filled it had grown to their present grandeur within the intervening period. Here I saw for the first time in England our hard-maple. It was a spindling thing, looking as if it had suffered much from fever and ague or rheumatism; but it was pleasant to see it admitted into a larger fellowship of trees than our New England soil ever bore. On a green, lawn-faced slope, at the turning of the principal walk, there was a little tree a few feet high enclosed in by a circular wire fence. It was planted by the Princess of Wales on a visit of the royal pair to Studley soon after their marriage. The fair Dane left her card in this way to the old Abbey, which began to rise upon its foundations soon after the stalwart Danish sovereign of England fell at the Battle of Hastings. Will any one of her posterity ever bear his name and sit upon the throne he vacated for that bloody grave? No! She will remember a better name at the font. The day and the name of the Harolds, Williams, Henrys, Charles’s, and Georges are over and gone forever. ALBERT THE GOOD has estopped that succession; and England, doubtless, for centuries to come, will wear that name and its memories in her crown.
After spending a few hours at Studley Park, I returned to Ripon and went on to Thirsk, where I spent the Sabbath with a Friend. The next day he drove me over to Rievaulx Abbey, which was the mother of Fountain Abbey. On the way to it we passed the ruins of another of these grand structures of that religious age, called Byland Abbey, where Robert Bruce came within an ace of capturing King Edward on his retreat from Scotland, after the Battle of Bannockburn.
One of the objects of this excursion was to visit the establishment of Lord Faversham, near Helmsley, who is one of the most scientific and successful stock-raisers, of the Shorthorn blood, in England, and to whom I had a note of introduction. But he, too, was not at home, which I much regretted, as I was desirous of seeing one of the peers of the realm who enter into this culture of animal life with so much personal interest and assiduity. His manager, however, was very affable and attentive, ready and pleased to give any information desired upon different points. He showed us a splendid set of animals. Indeed, I had never seen a herd to equal it. There were several bulls of different ages with a perfection of form truly admirable. Some of them had already drawn first prizes at different shows. Several noble specimens of this celebrated herd have been sold to stock-raisers in America, Australia and in continental countries. The most perfect of all the well-made animals on the establishment, according to my untrained perceptions of symmetry, was a milk-white cow, called “The Lady in White,” three years old. She and Mr. Fawkes’ “Lord Cobham” should be shown together. I doubt if a better mated pair could be found in England. There was a large number of cows feeding in the park which would command admiration at any exhibition of stock. Lord Faversham’s famous “Skyrocket” ended his days with much eclat. When getting into years, and into monstrous obesity, he was presented as a contribution to the Lancashire Relief Fund. Before passing into the butcher’s hands, he was exhibited in Leeds, and realised about £200 as a show. Thus as a curiosity first, and as a small mountain of fat beef afterward, he proved a generous gift to the suffering operatives in the manufacturing districts.