Yorkshire Dales and Fells

by Gordon Home

It is a strange thing that Richmond Castle, despite its great pre-eminence, should have been allowed to become a ruin in the reign of Edward III.—a time when castles had obviously lost none of the advantages to the barons which they had possessed in Norman times. The only explanation must have been the divided interests of the owners, for, as Dukes of Brittany, as well as Earls of Richmond, their English possessions were frequently endangered when France and England were at war. And so it came about that when a Duke of Brittany gave his support to the King of France in a quarrel with the English, his possessions north of the Channel became Crown property. How such a condition of affairs could have continued for so long is difficult to understand, but the final severing came at last, when the unhappy Richard II. was on the throne of England. The honour of Richmond then passed to Ralph Neville, the first Earl of Westmoreland, but the title was given to Edmund Tudor, whose mother was Queen Catherine, the widow of Henry V. Edmund Tudor, as all know, married Margaret Beaufort, the heiress of John of Gaunt, and died about two months before his wife—then scarcely fourteen years old—gave birth to his only son, who succeeded to the throne of England as Henry VII. He was Earl of Richmond from his birth, and it was he who carried the name to the Thames by giving it to his splendid palace which he built at Shene. Even the ballad of ‘The Lass of Richmond Hill’ is said to come from Yorkshire, although it is commonly considered a possession of Surrey.

Protected by the great castle, there came into existence the town of Richmond, which grew and flourished. The houses must have been packed closely together to provide the numerous people with quarters inside the wall which was built to protect the place from the raiding Scots. The area of the town was scarcely larger than the castle, and although in this way the inhabitants gained security from one danger, they ran a greater risk from a far more insidious foe, which took the form of pestilences of a most virulent character. After one of these visitations the town of Richmond would be left in a pitiable plight. Many houses would be deserted, and fields became ‘overrun with briars, nettles, and other noxious weeds.’

There is a record of the desolation and misery that was found to exist in Richmond during the reign of Edward III. A plague had carried off about 2,000 people; the Scots, presumably before the building of the wall, had by their inroads added to the distress in the town, and the castle was in such a state of dilapidation as to be worth nothing a year. In the thirteenth century Richmond had been the mart of a very large district. It was a great centre for the distribution of corn, and goods were brought from Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland to be sold in the market on Saturdays. Such an extensive trade produced a large class of burgesses, merchants, and craftsmen, who were sufficiently numerous to form themselves into no less than thirteen separate guilds. There were the mercers, grocers, and haberdashers united into one company; the glovers and skinners, who combined under the name of fellmongers. There were the butchers, tailors, tanners, blacksmiths, and cappers, who kept themselves apart as distinct companies; and the remaining nineteen trades were massed together in six guilds, such ill-assorted people as drapers, vintners, and surgeons going together. With various charters, giving all sorts of rights and immunities, these companies survived the disasters which befell the place, although the growth of other market towns, such as Bedale, Masham, and Middleham, undermined their position, and sometimes gave rise to loud complaints and petitions to be eased of the payments by which the citizens held their charter. With keen competition to contend against, the poor Richmond folk must have thought their lot a miserable one when a fresh pestilential scourge was inflicted upon them.

The first death took place on August 17, 1597, when Roger Sharp succumbed to a disease which spread with such rapidity that by December 15 in the following year 1,050 had died within the parish, and altogether there were 2,200 deaths in the rural deanery of Richmond. This plague was by no means confined to Richmond, and so great was the mortality that the assizes at Durham were not held, and business generally in the northern parts of England was paralyzed.

In the Civil War the town was spared the disaster of a siege, perhaps because the castle was not in a proper state for defence. If fighting had occurred, there is little doubt that the keep would have been partially wrecked, as at Scarborough, and Richmond would have lost the distinction of possessing such an imposing feature.

As soon as one digs down a little into the story of a town with so rich a history as this, it is tantalizing not to go deeper. One would like to study every record that throws light on the events that were associated with the growth of both the castle and the town, so that one might discard the mistakes of the earlier writers and build up such a picture of feudal times as few places in England could equal. Richmond of to-day is so silent, so lacking in pageantry, that one must needs go to some lonely spot, and there dream of all the semi-barbarous splendours that the old walls have looked down upon when the cement between the great stones still bore the marks of the masons’ trowels. One thinks of the days when the occupants of the castle were newly come from Brittany, when an alien tongue was heard on this cliff above the Swale, even as had happened when the riverside echoes had had to accustom themselves to an earlier change when Romans had laughed and talked on the same spot. The men one dreams of are wearing suits of chain mail, or are in the dress so quaintly drawn in the tapestry at Bayeux, and they have brought with them their wives, their servants, and even their dogs. Thus Richmond began as a foreign town, and the folks ate and drank and slept as they had always done before they left France. Much of this alien blood was no doubt absorbed by the already mixed Anglo-Saxon and Danish population of Yorkshire, and perhaps, if his descent could be traced, one would find that the passer-by who has just disturbed our dreaming has Breton blood in his veins.

Easby Abbey is so much a possession of Richmond that we cannot go towards the mountains until we have seen something of its charms. The ruins slumber in such unutterable peace by the riverside that the place is well suited to our mood to go a-dreaming of the centuries which have been so long dead that our imaginations are not cumbered with any of the dull times that may have often set the canons of St. Agatha’s yawning. The walk along the steep shady bank above the river is beautiful all the way, and the surroundings of the broken walls and traceried windows are singularly rich. There is nothing, however, at Easby that makes a striking picture, although there are many architectural fragments that are full of beauty. Fountains, Rievaulx and Tintern, all leave Easby far behind, but there are charms enough here with which to be content, and it is, perhaps, a pleasant thought to know that, although on this sunny afternoon these meadows by the Swale seem to reach perfection, yet in the neighbourhood of Ripon there is something still finer waiting for us. Of the abbey church scarcely more than enough has survived for the preparation of a ground-plan, and many of the evidences are now concealed by the grass. The range of domestic buildings that surrounded the cloister garth are, therefore, the chief interest, although these also are broken and roofless. We can wander among the ivy-grown walls which, in the refectory, retain some semblance of their original form, and we can see the picturesque remains of the common-room, the guest-hall, the chapter-house, and the sacristy. Beyond the ruins of the north transept, a corridor leads into the infirmary, which, besides having an unusual position, is remarkable as being one of the most complete groups of buildings set apart for this object. A noticeable feature of the cloister garth is a Norman arch belonging to a doorway that appears to be of later date. This is probably the only survival of the first monastery founded, it is said, by Roald, Constable of Richmond Castle in 1152. Building of an extensive character was, therefore, in progress at the same time in these sloping meadows, as on the castle heights, and St. Martin’s Priory, close to the town, had not long been completed. Whoever may have been the founder of the abbey, it is definitely known that the great family of Scrope obtained the privileges that had been possessed by the constable, and they added so much to the property of the monastery that in the reign of Henry VIII. the Scropes were considered the original founders. Easby thus became the stately burying-place of the family, and the splendid tombs that appeared in the choir of their church were a constant reminder to the canons of the greatness of the lords of Bolton. Sir Henry le Scrope was buried beneath a great stone effigy, bearing the arms—azure, a bend or—of his house. Near by lay Sir William le Scrope’s armed figure, and round about were many others of the family buried beneath flat stones. We know this from the statement of an Abbot of Easby in the fourteenth century; and but for the record of his words there would be nothing to tell us anything of these ponderous memorials, which have disappeared as completely as though they had had no more permanence than the yellow leaves that are just beginning to flutter from the trees. The splendid church, the tombs, and even the very family of Scrope, have disappeared; but across the hills, in the valley of the Ure, their castle still stands, and in the little church of Wensley there can still be seen the parclose screen of Perpendicular date that one of the Scropes must have rescued when the monastery was being stripped and plundered.

The fine gatehouse of Easby Abbey, which is in a good state of preservation, stands a little to the east of the parish church, and the granary is even now in use.

On the sides of the parvise over the porch of the parish church are the arms of Scrope, Conyers, and Aske; and in the chancel of this extremely interesting old building there can be seen a series of wall-paintings, some of which probably date from the reign of Henry III. This would make them earlier than those at Pickering.