Glimpses of Three Coasts

by Helen Hunt Jackson

When the Mystery Plays were finally forbidden, it seemed dull times for a while in Chester; but at last the people contrived an ingenious resuscitation of the old amusements under new names, and with new themes, to which nobody could object. They dramatized old stories, legends, histories of kings, and the like. The story of Æneas and Queen Dido was one of the first played. No doubt all the "gyauntes" and hobble-de-horses which had not been eaten up by rats and moths came in as effectively in the second dispensation as in the first. The only one of the later plays of which an account has been preserved was played in 1608, in honor of the oldest son of James I., by the sheriff of Chester, who himself wrote a flaming account of it. He says:—

"Zeal produced it, love devized it, boyes performed it, men beheld it, and none but fools dispraised it.... The chiefest part of this people-pleasing spectacle consisted in three Bees, that is, Boyes, Beastes, and Bels."

Allegory, mythology, music, fireworks, and ground and lofty tumbling were jumbled together in a fine way, in the sheriff's show. Envy was on horseback with a wreath of snakes around her head; Plenty, Peace, Fame, and Joy were personated; Mercury came down from heaven with wings, in a cloud; a "wheele of fire burning very cunningly, with other fireworks, mounted the Crosse by the assistance of ropes, in the midst of heavenly melody;" and, to top off with, a grotesque figure climbed up to the top of the "Crosse," and stood on his head, with his feet in the air, "very dangerously and wonderfully to the view of the beholders, and casting fireworks very delightfull." Truly, the sheriff's language seems hardly too strong, when he says that none but fools dispraised his spectacle.

These secular shows never attained the popularity of the old Mystery Plays. That mysterious halo of attraction which always invests the forbidden undoubtedly heightened the reputed charm of the never-more-to-be-seen sacred pageants, and led people to continually depreciate the value of all entertainments offered as substitutes for them. Probably in the midst of the heavenly melodies and "fireworks very delightfull," at the sheriff's grand show, old men went about shaking their heads regretfully, and saying, "Ah, but you should have seen the gyaunts we used to have forty years ago, and the way they played the Fall of Lucifer in 1574; there's never been anything like it since;" and immediately all the young people who had never seen a Miracle Play began to be full of dissatisfied wonder as to what they were like.

But what the shows and pageants lacked in the early days of the seventeenth century, grand processions went a long way towards making up. It is evident that Chester people never missed an occasion for turning out in fine array; and there being always somebody who took the trouble to write a full account of the parade, we of to-day know almost as much about it as if we had been on the spot. The old chronicles in the Chester public library are running over with quaint and gay stories of such doings as the following:

"Came to Chester, being Saturday, the Duchess of Tremoyle, from France, mother-in-law to the Lord Strange: and all the Gentry of Cheshier, Flintshier, and Denbighshier went to meet her at Hoole's Heath, with the Earl of Derby; being at least six hundred horse. All the Gentle Men of the artelery yard lately erected in Chester, met her in Cow Lane, in very stately manner, all with greate white and blew fethers, and went before her chariot, in march, to the Bishop's Pallas, and making a yard, let her thro the middest, and then gave her three volleys of shot, and so returned to their yard.... So many knights, esquires, and Gentle Men never were in Chester, no, not to meet King James when he went to Chester."

This Cow Lane is now called Frodsham Street; and on one of its corners is the building in which William Penn, in his day, preached more than once, setting forth doctrines which the Duchess of Tremoyle would have much disrelished in her day, as would also the "artelery Gentle Men" with their "greate white and blew fethers." King James himself is said to have once dropped in at this Quaker meeting-house when Penn was preaching, and to have sat, attentive, through the entire discourse.

And so we come down through the centuries, from the pasteboard "gyaunt" and glued dragon, winged Mercury with fire-wheel, Duchess of Tremoyle with her plumed horsemen, to the grim but gentle Quaker, holding feathers pernicious, plays deadly, and permitting to the people nothing but plain yea and nay. Of all this, and worlds more like it, and gayer and wilder,—sadder, too,—is the Chester air so brimful that, as I said in the beginning, it seems perpetually to go lilting about one's ears.

Leaving the library, with its quaint and fascinating old records, and turning aside at intervals from the more ancient landmarks of the streets to observe the ways and conditions of the Cestrians now, the traveller is no less repaid. Every rod of the sidewalk is a study for its present as well as for its past. The venders are a guild by themselves, as much to-day as they were in the sixteenth century. They build up their stuffs, their old chairs, chests, brooms, crockery and tinware, in stacks of confusion, in shelf-like balconies, on beams hanging overhead and in corners and nooks underfoot, all along the most ancient of the Rows. It is a piece of good luck to walk past half a dozen doors there without jostling something on the right or left, and bringing down a clattering pile on one's heels. From shadowy recesses, men and women eager for trade dart out, eying the stranger sharply. They are connoisseurs in customers, if in nothing else, the Cestrian dealers of to-day. They know at a glance who will give ten shillings and sixpence for a cream jug without any nose, and with a big crack in one side, on the bare chance of its being old Welsh. There is much excuse for their spreading out their goods over the highway, as they do, for the shops themselves are closets,—six by eight, eight by ten; ten by twelve is a spacious mart, in comparison with the average. Deprived of the outside nooks between the pillars of the arcade, the dealers would be sorely put to it for room. It is becoming, however, a disputed question whether the renting of these shops includes any right to the covered ways in front of them; and there is great anxiety among the inhabitants of the more dilapidated portions of the Rows in consequence.

"There's a deespute with the corporation, mem, as to whether we hown the stalls or not," said an energetic furniture-wife (if fish-wife, why not furniture-wife?) to me one day, as I was laughingly steering a cautious passage among her shaky pyramids of fourth or twentieth hand furniture. "It's lasted a while now, an' they've not forced us to give 'em hup as yet; but I'm afeard they may bring it about," she added, with the dogged humility of her class. "They've everything their own way,—the corporation."