There was ‘an arris-mender’ who was hourly in the wardrobe for working upon ‘my Lordis Arres and Tapstry’; a groom of the chamber looked after the two sons, ‘brushing and dressing of their stuf’; my lord’s armourer was ‘hourely in th’ Armory for dressing of his harness’; a ‘Groim Sumpterman’ attended daily at the stable to dress the sumpter-horses and ‘my Laidis Palfraies,’ and these are, of course, merely instances taken from the different types of office. The clerk of my lord’s ‘foren Expensis,’ who attended to the ‘grossing up’ of the books relating to foreign expenses, was concerned with disbursements outside the household, and not with purchases or expenses abroad, ‘alien’ being the word then used for what is now termed ‘foreign.’
We have seen the astonishingly tall spire of Hemingbrough Church from the battlements of Wressle Castle, and when we have given a last look at the grey walls and the windows, filled with their enormously heavy tracery, we betake ourselves along a pleasant lane that brings us at length to the river. Here we find a curious wooden swing-bridge, guarded by a very high white gate, with a large motor-car in difficulties with a herd of cows at the very narrow opening. From this point the spire gives a picturesque finish to the perspective of road straight ahead, and grows more imposing as we approach the village. The cottages are scattered, and the atmosphere of the place is that of the deepest slumber. A bend of the Ouse is within half a mile, and the low-lying fields intervening were marshes before they were drained. The low wall surrounding the raised ground of the churchyard has, no doubt, been reached by the floods on many occasions. The spire is 120 feet in height, or twice that of the tower, and this hugeness is perhaps out of proportion with the rest of the building; yet I do not think for a moment that this great spire could have been different without robbing the church of its striking and pleasing individuality. There are Transitional Norman arches at the east end of the nave, but most of the work is Decorated or Perpendicular. The windows of the latter period in the south transept are singularly happy in the wonderful amount of light they allow to flood through their pale yellow glass.
The oak bench-ends in the nave, which are carved with many devices, and the carefully repaired stalls in the choir, are Perpendicular, and no doubt belong to the period when the church was a collegiate foundation of Durham.
THE DERWENT AND THE HOWARDIAN HILLS
CHAPTER V
THE DERWENT AND THE HOWARDIAN HILLS
Malton is the only town on the Derwent, and it is made up of three separate places—Old Malton, a picturesque village; New Malton, a pleasant and old-fashioned town; and Norton, a curiously extensive suburb. The last has a Norman font in its modern church, and there its attractions begin and end. New Malton has a fortunate position on a slope well above the lush grass by the river, and in this way arranges the backs of its houses with unconscious charm. The two churches, although both containing Norman pillars and arches, have been so extensively rebuilt that their antiquarian interest is slight. Nothing remains of the castle mentioned by Leland, and even Lord Eure’s great house which succeeded it was taken down before the end of the seventeenth century, before the building had had time to lose its newness. On the way to Old Malton, some huge gateways on the right are survivals of the imposing house.