Friar Middleton, who with two lusty men was sent to fetch the sow from Rokeby, could scarcely have known that she was
‘The grisliest beast that ere might be,
Her head was great and gray:
She was bred in Rokeby Wood;
There were few that thither goed,
That came on live [= alive] away.
‘She was so grisley for to meete,
She rave the earth up with her feete,
And bark came fro the tree;
When fryer Middleton her saugh,
Weet ye well he might not laugh,
Full earnestly look’d hee.’
To calm the terrible beast when they found it almost impossible to hold her, the friar began to read ‘in St. John his Gospell,’ but
‘The sow she would not Latin heare,
But rudely rushed at the frear,’
who, turning very white, dodged to the shelter of a tree, whence he saw with horror that the sow had got clear of the other two men. At this their courage evaporated, and all three fled for their lives along the Watling Street. When they came to Richmond and told their tale of the ‘feind of hell’ in the garb of a sow, the warden decided to hire on the next day two of the ‘boldest men that ever were borne.’ These two, Gilbert Griffin and a ‘bastard son of Spaine,’ went to Rokeby clad in armour and carrying their shields and swords of war, and even then they only just overcame the grisly sow. They lifted the dead brute on to the back of a horse, so that it rested across the two panniers,
‘And to Richmond they did hay:
When they saw her come,
They sang merrily Te Deum,
The fryers on that day.’
If we go across the river by the modern bridge, we can see the humble remains of St. Martin’s Priory standing in a meadow by the railway. The ruins consist of part of a Perpendicular tower and a Norman doorway. Perhaps the tower was built in order that the Grey Friars might not eclipse the older foundation, for St. Martin’s was a cell belonging to St. Mary’s Abbey at York, and was founded by Wyman, steward or dapifer to the Earl of Richmond about the year 1100, whereas the Franciscans in the town owed their establishment to Radulph Fitz-Ranulph, a lord of Middleham in 1258. The doorway of St. Martin’s, with its zigzag mouldings, must be part of Wyman’s building, but no other traces of it remain. Having come back so rapidly to the Norman age, we may well stay there for a time while we make our way over the bridge again and up the steep ascent of Frenchgate to the castle.
On entering the small outer barbican, which is reached by a lane from the market-place, we come to the base of the Norman keep. Its great height of nearly 100 feet is quite unbroken from foundations to summit, and the flat buttresses are featureless. The recent pointing of the masonry has also taken away any pronounced weathering, and has left the tower with almost the same gaunt appearance that it had when Duke Conan saw it completed. Passing through the arch in the wall abutting the keep, we come into the grassy space of over two acres, that is enclosed by the ramparts. There are some modern quarters for soldiers on the western side which we had not noticed before, and the grass is levelled in places for lawn tennis, but we had not expected to discover imposing views inside the walls, where the advantage of the cliffs is lost. We do find, however, architectural details which are missing outside. The basement of the keep was vaulted in a massive fashion in the Decorated period, but the walls are probably those of the first Earl Alan, who was the first ‘Frenchman’ who owned the great part of Yorkshire which had formerly belonged to Edwin, the Saxon Earl. It is not definitely known by what stages the keep reached its present form, though there is every reason to believe that Conan, the fifth Earl of Richmond, left the tower externally as we see it to-day. This puts the date of the completion of the keep between 1146 and 1171. The floors are now a store for the uniforms and accoutrements of the soldiers quartered at Richmond, so that there is little to be seen as we climb a staircase in the walls, 11 feet thick, and reach the battlemented turrets. Looking downwards, we gaze right into the chimneys of the nearest houses, and we see the old roofs of the town packed closely together in the shelter of the mighty tower. A few tiny people are moving about in the market-place, and there is a thin web of drifting smoke between us and them. Everything is peaceful and remote; even the sound of the river is lost in the wind that blows freely upon us from the great moorland wastes stretching away to the western horizon. It is a romantic country that lays around us, and though the cultivated area must be infinitely greater than in the fighting days when these battlements were finished, yet I suppose the Vale